Cracks in left strategy: Interstitial revolution in E. O. Wright and John Holloway

Over the past two decades, anti-capitalist social and political theorists have increasingly embraced the transformative potential of solidaristic organisations that exist within the ‘cracks’ (the ‘interstices’) of the capitalist system. The argument goes that by growing and expanding progressive organisations within capitalism’s ‘cracks’, activists can peacefully usher in a post-capitalist future. Such an approach is referred to as an interstitial strategy. Yet, despite the growth of the related literature, which increasingly extends far beyond social and political thought, the foundational ideas of such an interstitial strategy have not been sufficiently interrogated. We demonstrate that two of the key texts that explicitly endorse such an interstitial transformative strategy, Erik Olin Wright’s Envisioning Real Utopias and John Holloway’s Crack Capitalism, use the term in significantly different ways, pointing towards qualitatively distinct and potentially incompatible theories of social change. In this article, we sympathetically reconstruct both accounts, identify their fundamental disconnects and stress the need for a coherent revolutionary strategy to undergird anti-capitalist activism.