Today’s left boasts many brilliant students of capitalism, the state, culture, and geopolitics. But its strategic thinking is woefully underdeveloped. There are two obvious explanations for this: the chasm between the injustices of global capitalism and the sorts of social agents that could potentially transform it, and skepticism about the project of a scientifically informed radical politics.

Whatever the reason, the Left still awaits a figure who could plausibly claim the mantle of Gramsci, the early Kautsky, Lenin, Luxemburg, or Trotsky. Erik Olin Wright’s “How to Be an Anticapitalist Today,” which is a pithy summation of the main political message of his 2010 book Envisioning Real Utopias, focuses precisely on the questions of socialist strategy that were at the core of the revolutionary Marxist tradition. If only for this reason, his courageous and clearly stated position deserves close attention.

The specific problem of Envisioning and “How to be an Anticapitalist Today” is how to develop a radical politics in a context where”no existing social theory is sufficiently powerful to even begin to construct . . . a comprehensive representation of possible social destinations, possible futures.” This theoretical failing creates a “gap between the time-horizons of scientific theory and the time-horizons of transformative struggles.”