But, insofar as they embody emancipatory ideals of equality, democracy, and community, libraries are a real utopia.A final example of an actually existing real utopia is the new forms of peer-to-peer collaborative production that have emerged in the digital era. This is the critical role of real utopias in long-term political strategies for social justice and human emancipation. Truly taming capitalism would require a level of sustained collective action that is unrealistic, and anyway, the system as a whole is too large and complex to control effectively.
Here are a few examples.Worker cooperatives are a real utopia that emerged alongside the development of capitalism.
Libraries are, after all, a durable institution found in all capitalist societies. Three important emancipatory ideals are equality, democracy, and solidarity. The word “utopia” was first coined by How then can it be “real”? While revolutions in the name of socialism and communism did demonstrate that it was possible “to build It is one thing to burn down old institutions; it is quite another to build emancipatory new institutions from the ashes.Why the revolutions of the twentieth century never resulted in robust, sustainable human emancipation is, of course, a hotly debated matter.Some people argue that the failure of revolutionary movements was due to the historically specific, unfavorable circumstances of the attempts at system-wide ruptures —revolutions occurred in economically backward societies, surrounded by powerful enemies. Anti-capitalism is a political ideology and movement encompassing a variety of attitudes and ideas that oppose capitalism.In this sense, anti-capitalists are those who wish to replace capitalism with another type of economic system, usually some form of socialism. Within a decade of its founding, Wikipedia destroyed a three-hundred-year-old market in encyclopedias; it is now impossible to produce a commercially viable, general purpose encyclopedia.Wikipedia is produced in a completely noncapitalist way by a few hundred thousand unpaid editors around the world contributing to the global commons and making it freely available to everybody. Anticapitalist revolutionary theory, informed by the writings of Marx and extended by Lenin, Gramsci, and others, offered an attractive argument about how this could take place.While it is true that much of the time capitalism seems unassailable, it is also a deeply contradictory system, prone to disruptions and crises. Our questions are simple: what did Bernie accomplish, why did he fail, what is his legacy, and how should we continue the struggle for democratic socialism? Life expectancy is longer; infant mortality lower.In the twenty-first century, this improvement in basic standards of living has also occurred in poorer regions of the world as well: the material standards of millions of people living in China since it embraced the free market have improved dramatically.What’s more, look what happened when Russia and China tried an alternative to capitalism. But it also expands the potential for a long-term erosion of the dominance of capitalism by channeling resources towards noncapitalist forms of economic activity. Anticapitalist revolutionary theory, informed by the writings of Marx and extended by Lenin, Gramsci, and others, offered an attractive argument about how this could take place.While it is true that much of the time capitalism seems unassailable, it is also a deeply contradictory system, prone to disruptions and crises.
From time to time small reforms that improve the lives of people may be possible when popular forces are strong, but such improvements will always be fragile, vulnerable to attack and reversible.The idea that capitalism can be rendered a benign social order in which ordinary people can live flourishing, meaningful lives is ultimately an illusion because, at its core, capitalism is unreformable. In the United States, the vast public library system was to a significant extent founded by Andrew Carnegie, one of the ruthless robber barons of the Gilded Age. It provides for a modest, but culturally respectable, no-frills standard of living. Cooperatives, therefore, often embody quite contradictory values.Nevertheless, they have the potential to contribute to eroding the dominance of capitalism when they expand the economic space within which anticapitalist emancipatory ideals can operate. Capitalism is an inequality-enhancing machine as well as a growth machine. Anticapitalism isn’t simply a moral stance against injustice — it’s about building an alternative. Think of a lake. After all, capitalist firms have brought us fantastic technological innovations in recent years: smartphones and streaming movies; driverless cars and social media; Jumbotron screens at football games and video games connecting thousands of players around the world; every conceivable consumer product available on the Internet for […]For many people the idea of anticapitalism seems ridiculous.
Actual libraries may thus reflect quite contradictory values. Capitalism, when left to its own devices, creates great harms.