Anti Capitalism

Any young person who enters the world of progressive politics has had this experience. You meet an arch-conservative and you decide to convince him to join your side. You argue passionately against the powers that be, bringing up labor abuses, unnecessary wars, political corruption, simple commonsense injustice at every level of society. Your conservative interlocutor agrees with you: these are all problems. But, he asserts: exactly what do you intend to replace capitalism with? Capitalism is, after all, the best system we have.

In Anticapitalism, activist and scholar Ezequiel Adamovsky gives the lie to the assertion, telling the story of the long-standing effort to build a better world, one without an abusive system at its heart. Backed up by arresting, lucid images from the radical artist group United Illustrators, Adamovsky details the struggle against rising corporate power, as that struggle unfolds in the halls of academia, in the pages of radical newspapers, and in the jungles and the streets. From Marx through the Battle of Seattle and beyond, Adamovsky traces the beliefs and politics of the major figures in the anticapitalist tradition and explores modern experiments in building different ways of living, in the process providing an indispensible primer for anyone interested in finding alternatives to the so-called "best system we have"—and anyone interested in joining the fight.