Postcapitalism: The Return of Radical Critique

In the early twenty-first century, the dominance of “identity politics” has been eclipsed by the intellectual critique and social criticism of capitalism, which has generated blueprints for alternative futures. Rather than an inventory of post-capitalist imaginaries, this chapter reviews recent analyses of capitalism in order to assess their valence as radical critique able to chart a path beyond capitalism. The inquiry applies a matrix of emancipatory social critique that runs along three dimensions of domination: (1) relational domination, rooted in power asymmetries, (2) structural domination, rooted in the institutions that structure social relations, and (3) systemic domination rooted in capital accumulation – the constitutive dynamic of capitalism as a system of social relations.