Confronting Capitalism. How the World Works and How to Change It, By Vivek Chibber. Verso. 2022. 164pp.
A significant part of this short book presents a clear and accessible explanation of how capitalism works, its relationship with the state and the struggle it inevitably generates between the two classes in society – capitalists and workers. It explains how and why the organisation of the capitalist system determines that, despite the vast resources and wealth it makes available, ‘a thin layer of the population’ is able to live in luxury while millions struggle to keep their heads above water and ‘experience life as a daily grind’. It goes on to explain how capitalists, regardless of an individual’s character or personal values, are compelled by the nature of the system they operate in to minimise costs and seek profit, wherever possible and whatever the consequences.
The book also takes down the widely held idea that governments are somehow neutral in the conflict between the vast majority who have to seek employment to survive and the tiny minority who offer and control that employment. It demonstrates how and why, far from mediating between workers and capitalists, the role of governments, whatever their stated ideology, is to govern on behalf of the capitalist class and in their collective profit-making interest. The state, in other words, has the role of a class organ, and governments of whatever colour are its administrators. As the author writes, ‘the state in capitalism is not and cannot be politically neutral’.
Following this lucid explanation of how capitalism works are recommendations on, as per the book’s title, ‘how to change it’. But from here on in it goes very much downhill. After telling us quite reasonably and correctly that ‘to truly enable full participation in the decisions that affect us all, it will be necessary to go beyond capitalism’, what it then gives us is a mish-mash of prescriptions not on how capitalism can be replaced by a non-capitalist, non-market system but about how it can be reformed so as to be more palatable. Alarm bells start to ring in particular when it refers in a relatively positive way to the Bolshevik revolution (‘the most successful model of the past hundred years’), to Nordic ‘social democracy’ and to ‘workers’ control in some Soviet satellites’ and informs us that ‘even while the Russian experience can’t serve as a model, there are aspects of it that still have a lot to offer’. The author clearly doesn’t see the Soviet Union as the state-capitalist society that it was and as a system that was as far away as can be imagined from the free-access, moneyless, stateless society that socialism has to be. And in fact, as a way forward, he advocates ‘the Leninist party model’, described as ‘a mass cadre-based party with a centralised leadership and internal coherence’, which must adopt ‘a combination of electoral and mobilizational politics’ and ‘a gradualist approach’. One of the names he gives to this approach is ‘non-reformist reforms’.
But is the author here doing what many other opponents of capitalists do and advocating ‘in the meantime’ stages to a real socialist society, one without the markets, buying and selling and class antagonisms which this book has outlined so admirably? Apparently not, since his ambition which he reveals to us on the last page of his book is to ‘start down the road of social democracy and then to market socialism’. The enormity of the contradiction in terms represented by the idea of ‘market socialism’ is nothing short of mind-boggling.
Howard Moss
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