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Friday, 04 April 2014 / TRUTH-OUT.ORG
Declaring Victory Wherever We Can: An Interview With
Cynthia Kaufman on Getting Past Capitalism
Sunday, 09 February 2014 16:12 By Robert Jensen, Dissident Voice | Interview
I’m fond of books that don’t claim to have The Answer but instead are useful guides in our
search for answers.
Such a volume is Cynthia Kaufman’s Getting Past Capitalism: History, Vision, Hope, which
expresses in clear, concise language thoughts that likely have been bumping around in the minds
of many of us who reject capitalism. The book is particularly powerful because of its modesty;
Kaufman promises no new grand theory and instead offers insights that we all can use in our
daily lives.
The only thing I didn’t like about the book when I first read it was its hefty hardcover price tag.
Now the book has been released in a more affordable paperback, which sparked me to ask
Kaufman to elaborate on her ideas.
A philosopher who draws on work from many disciplines, Kaufman is the director of the
Institute of Community and Civic Engagement at De Anza College in Cupertino, CA, and also
has experience as a union organizer and activist in the Central American solidarity movement
and other struggles. She also is the author of the 2003 book, Ideas for Action: Relevant Theory
for Radical Change.
Robert Jensen: Critiques of capitalism have been around since the beginning of capitalism. Is
there anything distinctive about this moment? Mainstream society continues to operate as if
“there is no alternative” to capitalism, but at the same time, the failures of capitalism are more
evident than ever.
Cynthia Kaufman: Indeed, those failures are clear. The issue of inequality in this country, and
the ways that money has captured our political system, are serious indicators of that. And climate
change is a game-changer. We really are in serious trouble as a species if we stick with business
as usual. We desperately need to find alternatives, and in fact we are surrounded by them.
Partially because these things have gotten so bad—but also because of the spectacular disaster
caused by deregulation and the neoliberal model of capitalism on steroids that caused the world
economic crash of 2008—people are beginning to see that the current system is not
sustainable. That has opened up, for example, the space for the surprisingly positive response to
the Occupy movement when it sprang up in response to the crash.
RJ: How would you characterize the struggle against capitalism? You point out there is no
“command center” to target. How should we think about this struggle?
CK: The main argument of the book is that capitalism is constituted by a varied of different
practices, and so challenging capitalism needs to be about a variety of struggles. I draw on the
important work of J.K. Gibson-Graham, who argues that we should model anti-capitalist struggle
on feminist struggles. Second-wave feminists didn’t look for an overthrow of patriarchy. Instead,
they analyzed what they were up against and fought it in all of its varied manifestations.
One of the problems with traditional anti-capitalist thought is that it defines capitalism as a
totality, which encourages us to imagine another totality, socialism, which we can try to replace
it with. This totalizing perspective has colonized the imagination of anti-capitalism and left us
waiting for a revolution we can never have.
In the book I argue that we see ourselves as inhabiting a complex social world that has some
capitalist things going on in it as well as some socialist ones, some communist ones, and many
where economics are not separated out of the broader fabric of life (such as sharing and gift
giving, and mutual support). The way we get past capitalism is by building on the healthy noncapitalist aspects of our world while we also do pitched battle with the capitalist ones that we
have a fair chance of winning against. In that way we build a better world and shrink the
destructive capitalist practices that are part of the social fabric.
RJ: Although almost no one likes labels, in many situations we do have to apply labels to our
politics. How do you describe yourself in the context of this critique of capitalism?
CK: That really depends on who I am talking to. I tend to not use the word “socialist,” because
even though more young adults in the United States in a poll say they support socialism than do
capitalism, the word socialism doesn’t have a lot of meaning in this country. Also, when I talk
about alternatives to capitalism, socialism is one thing we need to build among many. I often
refer to myself as a radical, reminding people that the word radical comes from the Latin word
radix, meaning root. I think we need to get to the roots of problems as we try to solve them. I
also like the word anti-capitalist.
I think a lot of people use the word progressive as a code for “left,” because it is a bold statement
to call oneself a leftist in this country. I’m OK using whatever words communicate and get
people with the program of building a socially just world.
RJ: How did you become a leftist?
CK: I grew up in a fairly non-political family. I come from a mixed Jewish and Catholic family
with strong family memories of persecution, poverty, and class resentment. I grew up quite
alienated from my surroundings in suburban San Diego, where white people were expected to be
happy and content with the social world. I was always looking for ways to make life less flat and
meaningless than it seemed to be. When I was 20, I read an article about U.S. support for the
dictatorship in El Salvador. That moved me, and I contacted the organization mentioned in the
article and asked if I could volunteer. I was quickly asked to do much more than that, and have
been active in social justice politics ever since then. I now inhabit a social world full of meaning,
inspiration, purpose, and interesting loving people.
RJ: Back to terms and labels. Help us understand the pros and cons of the terms we can use to
describe a critique of capitalism. Let’s start with the three traditional terms from the left:
socialist, communist, and anarchist.
CK: The terms socialist and communist are mostly about describing the world we want after
capitalism, and I think they are both important. In my chapter on alternatives to capitalism I talk
about the importance of pursuing multiple alternatives. I follow Richard Wolff and Steven
Resnick in defining socialism as a mode of production in which the state is an important vector
in taking and providing resources. States can be more or less democratic, and so can socialism. I
think any ideal society that exists on a large scale, which is what we most likely have in store for
us as a human race, will involve some aspects of socialism. Things like water and sewage
systems require states in a large-scale society, but states are also a good mechanism for dealing
with health care, education, public transportation, and infrastructure.
Communism then defines a society in which there are communal forms for dealing with
resources. Many communal forms exist where there are not communist governments. The
Mondragon cooperatives in Spain and the thousands of worker-owned cooperatives in the United
States, are viable alternatives to capitalism.
For as long as I have been a leftist, I have been very sympathetic to anarchism, which I see as
most importantly a critique of authoritarianism, and a caution against the accumulation of unjust
forms of power. I think any healthy social movement needs some anarchist impulses to keep it
honest. Anarchism as the name for an ideal total social form is a really complicated question. I
have never found satisfying answers from anarchists about the definition of the state they are
opposed to. Most are opposed to coercive forms of state power. Questions about large scale
systems of organization and how they will be funded—those are questions it’s hard to get
anarchists to give good answers to.
RJ: What about the seemingly endless debates about reform versus revolution?
CK: That is one of the most unproductive binaries in anti-capitalist thought. Most of the time,
those terms function as frozen relics from debates within the German Social Democratic Party at
the turn of the last century. In Marxism there are some very unhelpful ideas about the need to
push for a revolution that will overturn all of society. Marx gets that from Hegel, and it leads to
some very bad politics, such as the hope that things must get worse because that will then turn
into the antithesis and get better from there. A kind of wishful thinking then grows out of not
seeing a realistic path forward.
I think there is a legitimate critique of reformism, as a politics that is content with making small
changes in society without asking for bigger and deeper changes. So in the book I talk about
revolutionary reforms, meaning actions that we take in small ways to make the world a better
place and disrupt some of the ways that capitalism is reproduced.
RJ: Is there an important distinction to be made between liberal and left?
CK: When I first came to political consciousness in the 1980s, it seemed important for people
who shared my politics to call ourselves leftists and not liberals. Liberals were those who wanted
a tolerant society but who weren’t willing to look at issues of power. Now after 30 years of the
Reagan revolution with the liberal social welfare state under increasing attack, I think
liberalism—meaning support for a welfare state and for public goods—needs to be defended. At
this point in this country, it actually takes some courage to be liberal, and liberals are fighting for
things I want them to be fighting for. So I’m all for liberalism, as well as leftism.
RJ: Based on your reading of the state of the world and what is possible through organizing and
education, react to these pairs of words: optimism/pessimism.
CK: I am one who often quotes the Italian Marxist and anti-fascist philosopher Gramsci’s
dictum that we should have pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will. This means that
we should have the courage to look our social problems fully in the face and understand just how
huge are the problems that we are up against. And yet, the second part of that means that we
need to look for the places where a difference can be made, and put our hearts into those cracks
and fissures. We need to hold in our hearts the possibility of a better world, not because we have
candy-coated the problems or lied about what we can accomplish, but because we know that we
do often win and make a difference, and that all the good things we have in the world are the
results of those who have had the courage and commitment to have done this work before us.
RJ: Another pair: success/failure.
CK: There is a cultural norm on the left of being afraid to declare victory, which is related to the
binary of reform/revolution. Whereas reformists are winning small gains, revolutionaries don’t
want people to be satisfied with those small victories because they worry this will lead to
acceptance of the bigger picture of capitalism domination, and so they find a way to turn every
victory into a defeat. In the book, I call for a culture of declaring victory wherever we can. You
build movements and keep people in a struggle when it feels productive. Anti-capitalists have
typically been the people in movements who have declared every gain to be a trick of the
capitalist class to buy us off. That line isn’t very inspiring, and it shows no sensitivity to how
social movements actually succeed.
RJ: Finally, hope/despair.
CK: I put hope into the title of the book, and my first reviewer said it was both startling and
refreshing to see the words hope and capitalism in the same title. I think one of the reasons anticapitalists tend to not have much hope is related to the ways we conceptualize what we are up
against. Yes it is true that pro-capitalist forces have a lot of power. But so did slave-holding
racists. We give ourselves hope when we conceptualize capitalism as a set of practices that can
be challenged by fighting the piece of the puzzle we feel most compelled to fight.
This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any
form without permission or license from the source.
Robert Jensen
Robert Jensen is a professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin and
board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center in Austin. He is the author of
Arguing for Our Lives: A User's Guide to Constructive Dialogue (City Lights, 2013); and We
Are All Apocalyptic Now: On the Responsibilities of Teaching, Preaching, Reporting, Writing,
and Speaking Out. His many other books can be found here. Jensen is also coproducer of the
documentary film Abe Osheroff: One Foot in the Grave, the Other Still Dancing (Media
Education Foundation, 2009), which chronicles the life and philosophy of the longtime radical
activist. An extended interview Jensen conducted with Osheroff is online here. Jensen can be
reached at rjensen@austin.utexas.edu, and his articles can be found online here.
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