Postcapitalism: Alternatives or Detours?

The main political reference points in opposition to neoliberalism today – the constituent organizations of the Party of the European Left, the platforms associated with the left coalitional Iberian governments, the policy proposals that emerged from the British Labour Party under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, and the Bernie Sanders candidacy in the Democratic Party presidential primaries – converge in a common rejection of social democracy's political cynicism and economic agenda seeking a return to one or another variant of competitive corporatism. The characteristic programme has been along the lines of the annual Euro-Memorandum: an anti-austerity, ‘Keynes-plus’ reversal of the economic policy regime of neoliberalism, recalling the alternative economic strategies of the 1970s, but now set within a far less ambitious transitional policy matrix. There is, however, deep-seated scepticism toward any of these agendas amongst many of the most militant opponents of neoliberalism, who have insisted on the importance of advancing a ‘postcapitalist’ future. For them, the necessary break from neoliberalism is too sharp, and the disintegration of the historical institutions of the left too severe, for a rehabilitation – at whatever scale of intervention – of a more egalitarian growth model that would recall the productivism and bureaucracy of postwar Fordism. Yet a more determined anti-capitalist seizure of power, occupation of the institutions of the state, and a programme of nationalization of the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy, is even less convincing for them. What is needed for renewing an emancipatory politic is thus quite different, and has been advanced in a variety of forms as projects for ‘postcapitalism’: in the construction of ‘real utopias’ offering new patterns of asset distribution and ownership ‘over work’; in the extension of practices of ‘commoning’ autonomous from the capitalist state and ‘apart from work’ as value production; and in the ‘acceleration’ of the pace of technological change toward ‘full automation’ to open up a ‘post-work’ social horizon. Such postcapitalist projects, it is argued, prefigure a more direct, participatory democratic order as well as a more direct, less state-dependent means of transcending value production. The question is, where exactly do these ‘real utopias’ of postcapitalism really take us? What openings do they suggest for the transformation of the economy and state necessary to sustain socialism as ‘the real movement which abolishes the present state of things’? That is, do they actually point beyond capitalism or rather offer a series of detours toward the renewal of a ‘mixed economy’ inside capitalism?