Image: the cover of the book is a navy blue background with a graphic of a red fish being swallowed by a much larger white fish that is actually made of a large group of tiny white fish swimming together. The title, Overcoming Capitalism is in large white letters at the top, below that in smaller yellow letters is, "Strategy for the working class in the 21st Century," and at the bottom in white letters is the author's name- Tom Wetzel.
Overcoming Capitalism is a book that offers information about working class struggle without expecting the reader to come away from it with a bunch of theory without any praxis. I don't have any issue with theory alone, but it can often leave the reader thinking, "ok, I agree with you totally/partly/a little, but how?" This is something I appreciate about Wetzel's effort here. I cannot say this book was really "for me" though. Part of it is purely that I am not incredibly interested in reading more about working class struggle, but part of it is that I didn't really see myself in this book. I also believe that it could have achieved its goal in about 1/2-2/3 of its over 400 page size.
It's clear that this book was a labor of love for Wetzel and as a result, it seems he put everything he had into it a couple of times. There is a lot of repetition. Sometimes repetition can make sense if the ideas are new, but most of these aren't. Did I need to read Wetzel's version of this Berkman quote repeated more than once when someone probably said some version of it even before Berkman did? Did I need multiple other examples repeated to me throughout the book? That said, this book could be good to hand to someone who had never read anything about working class struggle for this reason. Repetition like this can keep a reader engaged and referring back to the rest of the text if the information is new to them.
When I say I did not see myself in this book, it's because I felt like an outlier. Wetzel does indeed make an effort to include women and marginalized people throughout the text. He has examples of the ways syndicalist struggle and tactics can be used to combat sexism, racism, etc in workplaces. But, it didn't feel to me like these things were properly centered. It was not for lack of trying. I do believe the effort was there, but this has always sort of been why a lot of worker ideology doesn't appeal to me. It seems like everyone is a worker first (if they can work,) and everything else second. That's just not the way my life has been.
The things that I really liked that Wetzel touched upon were the issues with all of the hot button words that end up tied into working class struggle. Medicare for all when medicare sucks. Unions, when they've become corrupt corporate tools of control in many places. Communism as owning the means of production when authoritarian communism is nothing but and is a total shitshow. (I can't really blame ignorant USA reactionaries for hating auth-comm and thinking capitalism is their only other option.) These are all my versions, not his words, but you get the point. This isn't a vapid repetition of buzz words without context and I want to make sure that my critiques of the length and repetitiveness in other places are separate from this.
Wetzel also does well to describe- in detail and in accessible ways- the various environmental, social, health, human, and other costs of capitalism. He shows how these effects are far reaching and extinction-level problematic. There is a lot of analysis of how to gauge what work is, how much one should need to work, what constitutes "skilled" and "hard" labor, and so on. There is discussion about unpaid labor such as stereotypically feminized labor and discussions of various conflicts that will arise when trying to balance environmental preservation with working class needs and struggles. I did feel like he went further than many workers struggle ideologies go regarding environmental topics (if they go there at all,) but it still wasn't enough for me.
There is a very brief inclusion of elder and disabled people, but the little time given to these topics. This was another reason I didn't really see myself fitting into this. I appreciate that he thinks that disabled people who cannot work in stereotypical ways should still receiving livable income and so on, but this felt like a marginalizing afterthought where it would be the same thing as now with a little more money.
The last chunk of the book was probably the most interesting, even if I didn't agree with it all. Reading Wetzel's ideas for what a large scale anti-capitalist, less authoritarian society could look like to him was a good thought exercise. I do think there were too many things that resembled or would quickly lean right back into capitalism. He also admits that a lot of it is basically a form of government but with less authoritarianism, which I can also appreciate, but still don't find to be ideal. As a person who lives in the real world of 8 billion-ish humans hurtling toward extinction, I can appreciate imperfect but practical solutions for the meantime. I think that any form of anti-authoritarianism will need to cover more of the big-tent than this did. But, for someone new to these ideas or someone looking for practical examples of working class anticapitalism in practice, this book offers some valuable contributions.
This was also posted to my goodreads.
No comments:
Post a Comment