SPGB London Meeting: “The Romantics’ Critique of Capitalism.” (2025)

An SPGB meeting next Saturday at their Head Office in South London. Cut and pasted below is a post from Johnny Mercer, who will be the speaker at the meeting:

"CALLING All ROMANTIC REVOLUTIONARIES: Mulled wine and a Christmas critique of capitalism, what’s not to love? In this talk I’ll be discussing the revolutionary ideas of people like Shelley, Turner, and Mary Wollstonecraft. I’ll be analysing how romantic concepts influenced socialists from Marx to Morris. And how these ideas continued in art/anti-art movements from Dada, to the Situationists, to a bit on my own arts practice. As ever plenty of time for questions and discussion! 3pm Sat 13th of December, 52 Clapham High Street. PLEASE SHARE LONDON ARTSY FOLKS!"

A Capitalist Criticises Capitalism (1999)

Book Review from the April 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

“The global capitalist system . . . is coming apart at the seams”. So declared arch-speculator George Soros before a US congressional enquiry on 19 September last year. He has since expanded on this in a book entitled The Crisis of Global Capitalism. What has he in mind?

By “global capitalist system” Soros doesn’t mean what we would understand by the term, i.e. capitalism as a world-wide system of production for profit, but the more restricted sense of present world financial arrangements which allow the more or less free movement of capital throughout the world:

“The global economy is characterized not only by free trade in goods and services but even more by the free movement of capital. Interest rates, exchange rates, and stock prices in various countries are intimately interrelated, and global financial markets exert tremendous influence on economic conditions. Given the decisive role that international financial capital plays in the fortunes of individual countries, it is not inappropriate to speak of a global capitalist system” (Introduction).

It is these arrangements—this single world financial market—that he is saying is in danger of disintegrating; which of course would not at all be the same thing as the collapse of capitalism that has sometimes been mistakenly predicted by some writers in the Marxist tradition.

Unstable system 

Soros, following, consciously or not, a distinction made by one school of anti-imperialist thinkers in the 1970s and 80s, divides the “global capitalist system” into a centre (US, Western Europe, Japan) and a periphery (Asia, Latin America, Russia, East Europe, Africa). Under this system capital flows from the centre to the periphery and back, supposedly to the mutual benefit of both. He sees the danger of disintegration coming from countries on the periphery taking steps to stop the free flow of capital in a bid to avoid the negative effects of the system’s instability on their economies and populations:

“To put it bluntly, the choice confronting us is whether we will regulate global financial markets internationally or leave it to each individual state to protect its own interests as best it can. The latter course will surely lead to the breakdown of the gigantic circulatory system, which goes under the name of global capitalism” (p. 176).

So what Soros means by the “breakdown” or “disintegration” of global capitalism is not the collapse of the world-wide system of production for profit based on the exploitation of wage labour, but only states coming to adopt measures that impede the free movement of finance capital.

Soros does not believe this to be an inevitable process. As the quote above makes clear, he thinks it can be stopped if appropriate measures are taken at international level; global institutions must be created to lay down some basic ground rules for the operation of global capitalism.

For Soros is no free marketeer. In fact part of his book is a devastating attack on those he calls the “market fundamentalists”, the followers of Von Mises, Von Hayek and others, who advocate that market forces be given complete free rein and who came into intellectual prominence in the time of Reagan and Thatcher. Soros levels two charges at them. First, that they think that markets have an in-built tendency towards creating a stable situation through supply and demand being in balance, while this is not the case. Second, that they preach that the market is the best way to regulate all human activities.

Writing from his own experience, admittedly not of the real economy but only of financial markets, Soros challenges the equilibrium theory:

“Market fundamentalists have a fundamentally flawed conception of how financial markets operate. They believe that financial markets tend towards equilibrium . . . Financial markets are characterized by booms and busts and it is quite amazing that economic theory continues to rely on the concept of equilibrium, which denies the possibility of these phenomena, in face of the evidence. The potential for disequilibrium is inherent in the financial system; it is not just the result of external shocks” (Introduction).

The external shocks which the market fundamentalists invoke are usually, of course, government interventions of one sort or another. According to them, if governments just stood aside and let the magic of the market operate, there would be no slumps just continuous, smooth growth. But there is no evidence for this. Throughout the 19th century British governments pursued a policy of laissez-faire yet slumps still occurred on a regular basis.

The fact is that the market system does have a built-in tendency towards creating booms and busts rather than stability and smooth growth. As Marx pointed out, this applies to the real world of market-oriented production and not just to financial markets. Soros is even prepared to give Marx some credit here:

" . . . the capitalist system by itself shows no tendency toward equilibrium. The owners of capital seek to maximise their profits. Left to their own devices, they would continue to accumulate capital until the situation became unbalanced. Marx and Engels gave a very good analysis of the capitalist system 150 years ago, better in some ways, I must say, than the equilibrium theory of classical economics” (Introduction).

He claims, however, that thanks to “countervailing political interventions in democratic countries” Marx’s “dire predictions did not come true”. This is based on a misunderstanding of Marx’s view. The “dire predictions” that Soros mentions were not, as he seems to assume, that the unregulated profit-seeking of capitalists would lead to the collapse of the capitalist system but simply that their competitive struggle for profits meant that steady, smooth growth was impossible and that growth proceeded by means of booms and slumps.

Capitalism has not collapsed because it was never going to, not because of government intervention Marx didn’t foresee. And government intervention has not been able to eliminate the boom/slump cycle which Marx saw was an unavoidable feature of capitalism.

Creeping marketisation

Soros sees himself as continuing the political philosophy of Karl Popper. As expounded in books such as The Open Society and Its Enemies Popper argued against the idea of trying to establish a “perfect” society in favour of accepting an “open” society as one subject to permanent improvement by piecemeal social engineering, by which he understood capitalism with a political structure involving elected institutions, the rule of law and pluralism, i.e. more or less what the West has had for years.

For Popper the main enemies of his “open society” were the totalitarian ideologies of fascism and “Marxism” (which, for him, was not just Marx’s own views but those mixed up with Lenin’s and Stalin’s). Soros adds a third which he says has come into prominence since the collapse of “communism”: uncontrolled capitalism. Hence the subtitle of his book “Open Society Endangered”, though he had already expressed this view in a famous article “The Capitalist Threat” that first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in February 1997 and which was widely reproduced.

Soros sees the danger coming from the penetration of market values into all aspects of life, leading to social disintegration. “Monetary values”, he writes, “have usurped the role of intrinsic values and markets have come to dominate areas of society where they do not properly belong” (p. 206). He is in fact quite forceful in his criticism of this aspect of global capitalism:

  “The functions that cannot and should not be governed purely by market forces include many of the most important things in human life, ranging from moral values to family relationships to aesthetic and intellectual achievements. Yet market fundamentalism is constantly attempting to extend its sway into these regions, in a form of ideological imperialism. According to market fundamentalism, all social activities and human interactions should be looked at as transactional, contract-based relationships and valued in terms of a single common denominator, money. Activities should be regulated, as far as possible, by nothing more intrusive than the invisible hand of profit-maximising competition. The incursions of market ideology into fields far outside business and economics are having destructive and demoralizing social effects” (Introduction).
   “A transactional society undermines social values and loosens moral constraints. Social values express a concern for others. They imply that the individual belongs to a community, be it a family, a tribe, a nation, or humankind, whose interests must take precedence over the individual’s self-interests. But a transactional market economy is anything but a community. Everybody must look out for his or her own interests and moral scruples can become an encumbrance in a dog-eat-dog world. In a purely transactional society, people who are not weighed down by any considerations for others can move around more easily and are likely to come out ahead” (p.75).

Soros does not realise just how fundamental a criticism of capitalism this is. Although he rightly says that “a purely transactional society”, in which the only links between people would be monetary, “could never exist”, the market fundamentalists are equally right to insist that the logic of capitalism is to work towards this—they are just crazy in thinking that this nightmare situation is the ideal form of society.

Soros’s mistake is to think that you can have capitalism and somehow keep its money-commodity relations from spreading everywhere. The history of capitalism is the history of the continuous spread of such transactional relationships—i.e., the market—into more and more fields of human activity. It is a process that cannot be stopped within capitalism as growing marketisation is just as much a feature of capitalism as capital accumulation; indeed the two go together.

Soros, however, is a supporter of capitalism:

  “I want to make it clear that I do not want to abolish capitalism. In spite of its shortcomings, it is better than the alternatives. Instead, I want to prevent the global capitalist system from destroying itself” (Introduction).

We doubt whether he has given serious consideration to the alternative of a global society based on the common ownership of the world’s resources and production directly to satisfy human needs. Not that we would really expect him to. Some of his fellow-capitalists already think he has gone too far in his criticism of their system.

Adam Buick

The Illusion of Choice (1993)

Book Review from the November 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Illusion of Choice by A. Schmookler, State University of New York, Albany. 1993.

Subtitled "How the market economy shapes our destiny", this book mounts a devastating attack on capitalism. Schmookler shows how the market is deaf to the voices of those without money with which to express their needs. Capitalist "justice" does not require that anyone in the marketplace invest capital or labour to cure the ills of people in the Third World who have nothing to give in exchange.

The market is sensitive to the needs we have as "social atoms" but it disregards the needs we have as a social community. Despite all the goods and services individuals can buy if they have the money, "there is no place you and I can go to buy a clean environment, a coherent landscape, an intact social community".

Those who run capitalism — ironically, unless they own considerable wealth, they are workers — do not actually seek to discover what consumers need. They offer consumers what they can be persuaded to want from among commercially viable choices. A good illustration of this is Nestle’s campaign to persuade Third World mothers to buy infant food. Breastfeeding was a better choice for women and their infants. "But this superior and naturally available option involves no sale and makes no companies rich. The market system is adept at blunting all threats to its continued dominion. Schmookler recalls seeing, in the midst of the youth rebellion of the early 1970s, an advertisement in San Francisco for a new style of clothing which was recommended for "the revolutionary look". The author is oddly split-minded about the possibility of abolishing capitalism. In one mode "I more or less accept the world as it is and feel comfortable in it. In the other, I feel an acute awareness of how out of joint the world is". Like so many radical critics of capitalism he pushes the needed revolutionary change into the future:

  "Ultimately, it is probably necessary to change our entire concept of property and the rights that adhere to property where the resources of the earth are concerned . . . The market system . . . is not the end of history. The systems failure to align with the forces of life makes its eventual transformation inevitable, for those forces will continue to seek fulfilment."

Why not be really revolutionary and join those forces now?

Stan Parker

No revolution? (2013)

Pamphlet Review from the June 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

No Revolution Anywhere. By Robert Kurz. Chronos Publications.

According to Robert Kurz we are in the final days of the capitalist system. The ‘third industrial revolution’, the rise of microelectronics, has led to an irreversible restructuring of the production process, invested capital will soon no longer be able to reproduce itself since the human labour-power that is the source of surplus value and profit no longer plays a central role in the manufacturing process. For the past twenty years growth has been sustained not through real accumulation but through debt and financial speculation, but as the crisis is no longer confined to certain regions or sectors we are now witnessing the bubble bursting on a global scale. Unlike previous worldwide economic crisis this one cannot be overcome because capital has now reached its pinnacle. Crises of the 19th century where overcome because industrial development was able to spread into new areas.

The great depression of the 1930s occurred at a higher level of technological  development but was overcome through the development of Taylorist production methods and Keynesian state regulation. However this time there is no get out for the system, there are no further avenues for the expansion of value extraction. So what validity is there to these claims and was Kurz (who passed away in mid-2012) really ‘the most advanced political and political economic thinker in the capitalist world in this age’ as the publishers of this pamphlet would have us believe?

Whilst we would agree that the ultimate source of all profit is the productive surplus labour of the worker – wage labourers produce a value greater than that they receive back as wages or salaries – and that if production processes reached such a level that the part played by labour was close to zero there would be no source for the further accumulation of value and the era of capitalism would be over. The question remains, have we really reached this point or are we likely to in the not too astronomically distant future? The answer to both these questions is a firm ‘no’. Whilst technology is used in more and more situations (and sometimes pulled back once labour becomes cheaper to use – think hand car washes) we are still a long way from the total elimination of labour from production.

A crisis has the effect of scorching the earth ready for a fresh round of capital growth. Many enterprises fall by the wayside but those that do survive are able to purchase the productive capital assets of their former competitors at knock down prices thus helping fuel a recovery in the rate of profit. This devaluing of capital, one of the factors that Marx saw as counteracting the fall in the general rate of profit, seems to be disregarded by Kurz.

Robotic automation and information technology decrease the dependency of production on labour, as has the introduction of any new technology throughout the history of capitalism, whilst also cheapening the production of both capital and consumer goods. In other words, it takes less time to produce the stuff that is needed for the subsistence of the worker and also less time to manufacture the machinery that makes the stuff. A fall in the total mass of labour therefore does not necessarily lead to a fall in the general rate of  profit. This weakens Kurz’s claims regarding the irreversibility of the present crisis.

The rest of the pamphlet is concerned with criticising various types of reformist activism, much of which we would agree with. What we would not agree with is Kurz’s apparent rejection of the class struggle. For him the working class cannot be an agent for revolutionary change because ‘labour’ is a category of capitalist social relations, labour struggles are just a part of the development of capitalism. For us this is a half-truth, so long as the working class only struggles for petty changes to the terms of exploitation the system as a whole will continue to function. That is why it is necessary to organise politically for the sole purpose of transforming capitalism into socialism. The working class, which comprises of the vast majority of people, will be the agent for this change since it is this class alone that produces and reproduces the material conditions of society.

DJP

Spectacle out of focus (1975)

Book Review from the April 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

Leaving the 20th Century : The Incomplete Work of the Situationist International. Translated and edited by Christopher Gray. Free Fall Publications, 80p.

Of the 167 pages in this book, 148 are extracts from Situationist pamphlets and articles. Christopher Gray adds only short linkages: the Situationists’ history and antecedents, their breaking-up, and some brief final comments. Was there more, or is that all?

From inside an exclusive, fanatical group the view is inevitably distorted. Gray was himself a Situationist, and attributes a far greater resonance to the members and activities than they actually had. He uses the word “famous” repeatedly, and in no instance is it applicable. There are unsupported presumptions of a wide influence, and a claim that: “The censorship of the Situationist International has probably been the most blatant case of cultural repression since before the war.” Really?

The aim of the Situationists is said to have been “a new revolutionary critique of society”. More accurately, they tried to make artistic-cum-political doctrines from a collection of phenomena—new technology, the spread of dropping-out, the vogue for condemning “consumer-orientated society”. They added one phrase to the vocabulary of social criticism: “the society of the spectacle” for the mass culture of alienation.

In art and politics, Situationist practice was simply the making of rude or violent gestures against the rest of society. Their centre remained in Paris, and according to Gray they faded out after the student revolts of 1968. One version is that they went underground. However, their name remains as a synonym for intellectualized subversion, and small groups of people in that frame of mind have tried—and no doubt will try again—to revive it. It has been considered, and Gray hints, that Situationists either assisted or egged-on the Angry Brigade; certainly the Angry Brigade communiques incorporated the Situationist language.

Christopher Gray thinks the Situationists “made the same mistake as all left-wing intellectuals: they thought that everyone else was plain thick.” The book has, despite its perfunctoriness, a good deal of interest. The message which comes through clearly is that to try to stand outside society, and try to justify it from a rag-bag of political and sociological half-ideas, means being pernicious or futile or both.

The ending tells it all: the author feels in a mess, divided between the needs for social analysis and for self-analysis. So it was not society at all that the Situationists viewed, but a model made of matchboxes on somebody’s shelf.

Robert Barltrop

Early critics of capitalism (1999)

Book Review from the February 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Real Rights of Man: Political Economies for the Working Class, 1775-1850 by Noel Thompson, Pluto Press, 1998.

Between 1775 and 1850 Britain was transformed from a country of largely rural communities into a nation built on industrial capitalism. In 1791 Tom Paine's Rights of Man argued for universal political rights. But as early as 1793 Thomas Spence's The Real Rights of Man countered with the claim that political rights were grounded in economic power. For Spence, the question was no longer about "what form of government is most favourable to liberty" but:

"which system of society is most favourable to existence and capable of delivering us from the deadly mischief of great accumulation of wealth which enables a few unfeeling monsters to starve whole nations."

This is a history of the struggle for an anti-capitalist, but not necessarily pro-socialist, political economy. Anti-capitalist writers such as Spence, William Ogilvie, William Cobbett and Thomas Hodgskin were reactionaries who wanted to retreat from urban squalor to the rural idyll. They were not opposed in principle to class society but to the way "unequal exchange" drove the newly created working class into poverty. Their political economy (not pseudo-scientific "economics") explained working class poverty as the result of a failure of workers to get the full value of what they produced. The "unequal exchange" meant employers paid wages less than the value of the product and so were cheating workers.

Robert Owen attempted to rectify "unequal exchange" by establishing a number of producer and consumer co-operatives around the country, linked by labour exchanges. The guiding principle of these labour exchanges was that goods were exchanged according to their value as measured by labour time, with non-circulating labour notes used to facilitate the exchange of goods. In this way, it was believed, there would be equal exchange and no exploitation. However, these co-operatives were short-lived and had difficulty in providing even basic provisions for exchange against labour notes.

According to Noel Thompson:

"the problems of valuing goods in terms of labour time meant that errors were made and, inevitably, there were goods undervalued in relation to their market equivalents that were quickly purchased, while there were others that were overvalued and just as rapidly accumulated in the exchanges. Only where the labour exchanges replicated the market valuation were there no such problems. In effect, therefore, market price rapidly exerted its hegemony over labour values."

A distinctively socialist political economy did not emerge until the Chartist movement. Ernest Jones, for example, dismissed the demand for "a fair day's wage for a fair day's work", which was to ask for:

"a golden slavery instead of an iron one. But that golden chain would soon be turned to iron again, for if you still allow the system of wages slavery to exist, labour must be still subject to capital, and if so, capital being its master, will possess the power and never lack the will to reduce the slave from his fat diet down to fast-day fare!"

Even though Jones was a friend of Marx and Engels, he and other Chartist leaders still saw exploitation originating in the sphere of exchange, as "unequal exchange." It was not until after the period under review that Marx provided a proper explanation of exploitation: exploitation takes place in the sphere of production. Workers generally get the full value of what they have to sell, their "labour power" or capacity to work sold as a commodity, which the employers buy and put to work. But the employers can extract labour greater than the equivalent of that wage or salary. This is the source of profit that is realised when the commodities are sold. A wage or salary is the market-determined price of the commodity labour power. Generally no cheating is involved: exploitation is the normal function of the capitalist economy.

Lew Higgins

Seventeen and Counting (2015)

Book Review from the July 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

David Harvey: 'Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism'. Profile £9.99.

We’ll not state all the proposed contradictions here, just list the three kinds that David Harvey identifies. Foundational contradictions (such as those between use value and exchange value, and private appropriation and common wealth) are at the very heart of capitalism, essential aspects of it. Moving contradictions are continually changing (for instance, between competition and monopoly, and inequalities of wealth and income) and dangerous ones threaten capitalism’s existence. This last category includes the relation to the natural world and, because of the ubiquity of alienation, to human nature: capitalism will simply become unacceptable to the majority of the population. 

Along the way some interesting points are made. One is that, despite the supposed emphasis on competition, monopoly is in fact central to capitalism, since the capitalist class exercise a collective monopoly over the means of production. Yet potentially monopolisable skills, such as computer programming, are countered by increased avenues to acquire them, thus undermining the chances of relatively high wages for workers who possess these skills.

Other claims are less convincing, though. There are frequent references to the existence of a class of rentiers, who own the land, mineral rights, and so on. However, it is not clear whether these are claimed to constitute a separate class of owners, or just a sectional interest within the capitalist class. The landlord class are described as unproductive, in contrast to ‘productive capital’.

But it is particularly in regard to what he means by the end of capitalism that Harvey is unclear and inconsistent. There is an early reference to ‘the utopian aim of a social order without exchange value and therefore moneyless’, but this is quickly dropped, apparently in favour of Silvio Gesell’s bizarre idea of money that goes out of date and so cannot be accumulated as happens now. Harvey also advocates what he calls ‘revolutionary reform’, which involves reducing the inequalities of wealth and income to the extent that the reproduction of capital is threatened. But he hardly makes any case for this, and capitalism can after all operate with far less inequality than currently exists. 

The final chapter lists seventeen ‘ideas for political praxis’, one for each contradiction. These are something of a hotch-potch, though: abolish all inequalities except those implied in ‘to each according to their need’, and introduce equal entitlements to health care, housing, food security and some others. In place of the class division of capitalism there would be associated producers freely deciding what to produce and how. Yet there would still be some means of exchange (Gesell-style money, perhaps, but why?). Maybe the proposals here are not intended to form a consistent whole, but they do not equate to socialism. After all, it would be easy enough to advocate a moneyless society without exchange if the author shared our conception of future society. 

Paul Bennett

Capitalism’s diminishing returns (2013)

Book Review from the March 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Bleakonomics by Rob Larson. Pluto Press. 2012.

Larson has written an engaging polemic against free-market capitalism and its proponents, focusing on the role of ‘externalities’ such as environmental destruction and the inadequate consideration of these by conventional economics.

Indeed, the chapters on capitalism and the environment are amongst the strongest, making very clear –with some well-chosen examples –how the market is unable to allocate resources in an environmentally-friendly and sustainable way. The Deepwater Horizon oil well explosion and spill, and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (‘a Texas-sized ocean eddy saturated with minute plastic particles’) are just a couple of the externalities of capitalism that Larson highlights to useful effect.

Larson discusses class division intelligently for the most part, along with the excesses of a system that rewards the top one percent merely for their ownership of wealth, though there is a sense that he thinks a regulated capitalism wouldn’t create nearly as many problems as the private enterprise version that exists in America and has spread across much of the world.

He is more consistently effective when he discusses some of the fundamental flaws of conventional bourgeois economics, such as the theories of marginal utility and marginal productivity. An excellent chapter on ‘Economics as a Failed Science’ recounts practical research into how businesses make their decisions and illustrates that diminishing returns on the growth in productive capacity doesn’t typically happen in practice. This is important, because one of the contentions of conventional economics is that these diminishing returns limit the production of individual firms and keep these enterprises small relative to the total market. This is a key factor underpinning the notion that capitalism is based on competitive markets that respond to subtle price signals influencing the ebb and flow of new entrants to an industry.

But the research shows this doesn’t happen in practice –economies of scale are a far more important factor for companies, leading them to expand their production to secure cheaper costs per unit produced. This in turn helps create two of the most significant features of capitalism: first, the drive by companies to expand production as if there is no limit to the market for their products, which leads to overproduction and economic crisis. Then the same phenomenon also leads to the concentration of capital into fewer hands, with a resulting tendency towards oligopoly. This was illustrated in the 2007 US Economic Census, which showed that 97 per cent of cigarettes in America are produced by the four largest manufacturers, the four biggest brewers produced 90 per cent of the beer and the top four oil refining firms produced almost half the petrol and diesel.

So, on this front Marx was right again, even though Larson doesn’t mention his analysis directly. Larson does quote, tellingly, from Einstein and his analysis of the anarchy of capitalist production and focuses on the calls for ‘economic democracy’ made by the Occupy movement among others as the remedy to the problem. But what he doesn’t say is that this remedy can only take effect when the anarchy of the market and the tyranny of money and prices have been destroyed, to be replaced by common ownership and production directly for use, rather than under a ‘regulated’ capitalism.

DAP

Things about capitalism (2010)

Book Review from the November 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism. Ha-Joon Chang (Allen Lane)

Three things Ha-Joon Chang doesn’t tell you about capitalism. As a form of society it’s only a few hundred years old. It won’t last forever. And it will be replaced when a majority of the world’s people stop supporting it and organise a better alternative.

The author makes no bones about supporting capitalism: 

“This book is not an anti-capitalist manifesto…my criticism is of a particular version of capitalism that has dominated the world in the last three decades, that is, free-market capitalism…there are ways in which capitalism should, and can, be made better.”

It takes two pages to list the headings of the 23 ‘things’, in no particular order. Four are on the market: no such thing as a free market; free-market policies rarely make poor countries rich; we are not smart enough to leave things to the market and financial markets need to become less efficient. Three are on economics: greater macroeconomic stability has not made the world economy more stable; we are living in planned economies and good economic policy does not require good economists. Three are on the US: it does not have the highest living standard in the world; its managers are overpriced and what is good for GM is not necessarily good for the US. The 13 remaining ‘things’ can be filed under miscellaneous’.

Ha-Joon Chang knows a thing or two about Marx and Marxism. He understands that Marx “argued that the fundamental problem with capitalism was the contradiction between the social nature of the production process and the private nature of ownership of the means of production”. Unfortunately he equates Marxism with central planning, which he says led to the unravelling of ‘communism’ in the late 1980s.
In his concluding chapter the author offers eight mostly disputable points:

1. “The profit motive is still the most powerful and effective fuel to power our economy and we should exploit it to the full.” No – the profit motive applies to and benefits only the tiny capitalist class at the expense of exploiting workers.

2. We should build our new economic system on the recognition that human rationality is severely limited.” No – this is too pessimistic an assessment of human rationality.

3. “We should build a system that brings out the best, rather than the worse, in people.” Yes – capitalism certainly doesn’t.

4. “We should stop believing that people are always paid what they ‘deserve’.” Yes – socialists never started believing that.

5. “We need to take ‘making things’ more seriously.” Yes – a system based on making things is better than one based on making money for the minority.

6. “We need to strike a better balance between finance and ‘real’ activities.” No – we need to get rid of finance as an impediment to real activities.

7. “Government needs to become bigger and more active.” No – government of persons needs to give way to administration of things.

8. “The world economic system needs to ‘unfairly’ favour developing countries.” Yes – but not in the way the author means it. The world socialist system may at first need to favour populations which have the greatest deprivations.

Stan Parker

Capitalism is not superior to socialism (2007)

From the November 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist Party speaker’s contribution to a recent debate at University College Dublin on the motion “That Capitalism is Superior to Socialism in the Modern World”.

I should state at the outset, to avoid confusion, that my party has no connection to the party associated with Joe Higgins the former deputy for Dublin West. The Socialist Party of which I am a member has been existence for over 100 years offering a critique of capitalism.

I think most people can broadly agree on what capitalism or the market system is. As against that, there are many definitions or opinions on what Socialism is. So while other speakers in tonight’s debate will line up on my side of the motion, I think that the socialism I will talk about has no relationship to what other people will put forward. I can illustrate the confusion by noting throughout the years various people from Oscar Wilde, James Connolly, Joseph Stalin, George Bernard Shaw, Muammer Gadaffi, Gerry Adams to more recently even Bertie Aherne have described themselves in one form or another as socialists!

So what is socialism? Socialism is a worldwide system of society based on common ownership and democratic control over the means of producing and distributing wealth. The means of producing and distributing wealth include all the manufacturing and service industries, agriculture, transport infrastructure, communications, the internet etc.

Common ownership does not mean state ownership or what is sometimes referred to as ‘public’ ownership. State ownership as was tried in Russia and now in places like Cuba is just another method of running capitalism. Common ownership means we all own the productive assets which is the same as ownership by no one in particular.

Democratic control will ensure that these means of production and distribution are operated in the interests of everyone. So what that means is that we decide on how the economy is run rather than, as is the case now, the prevailing economic circumstances, being outside our control.

By system of society we mean that human society as a whole must be changed on a world wide basis and we are not interested in establishing and do not support co-operative living schemes as were associated with Quaker colonies or the early days of the kibbutz movement.

A whole spread of consequences follows from these basic changes. When everybody owns and controls the production of goods and services, there will be no point in charging themselves for taking or using them. There will be no buying or selling and hence no money system. So if we consider shopping in a supermarket, you will as now move your trolley through the aisles, go to the checkout to get your goods scanned but you won’t pay for them. The scanning is just for stock control.

Some people may object that this is unrealistic but we should remember that it is possible to produce enough for everybody but capitalism can only operate by creating artificial scarcity. A good example of this is housing. Although house prices are falling now, the cost of a home is still prohibitive for many people because demand exceeds supply. But the limit in supply is artificial; builders only build the houses when they expect a certain rate of return. In Ireland, there’s plenty of land, building materials and labour to actually construct enough houses for everybody.

Furthermore socialism will be a co-operative world wide system. Nations and frontiers and governments and armed forces will disappear. Groups of people may well preserve their languages and customs but this will have nothing to do with claiming territorial rights or military dominances over pieces of the world surface. So there will still be an Ireland though we won’t have ‘our’ Government and any other person, from anywhere, will be quite free to come and work here.

Socialism can only come about when the majority, and a significant majority, of the world’s population understand what it means, are ready to accept and take part in it. That’s the reason I’m here.

In socialism, there will be no government or leaders. Decisions that concern society and the allocation of resources will be taken on a local, regional, super-regional (‘national’) or global basis as appropriate. Socialism will be a democratic and participatory society; in fact it will be democracy in its truest form.
People when they first hear about the socialist type of society usually comment that it sounds like a good idea in principle but that it’s just not realistic or practical. They list objections along the lines of the operation of human nature and the scarcity of resources etc. However, humans are inherently adaptable and co-operative; that is our hallmark compared to other species.

When we consider fundamental political change, people can be conservative and afraid to throw away what they have for what may appear to be uncertain benefits. They don’t realise how much we can change. Consider that up to 300 years ago, the vast majority of humanity were governed by unelected rulers. If someone in 1700 said that in 300 years time we would be electing our leaders, rather than being given them, and that each person would have one vote, no matter what their position in life is, you can imagine that the listeners would have been extremely sceptical. But that’s what we have now thanks to the combined efforts of all those people who struggled for basic democratic changes.

A long time ago parties that now call themselves Labour Party or Social Democratic Party used to subscribe to different versions of what I describe as Socialism but they have abandoned this over the last 100 years. They have accepted capitalism and now concern themselves with putting forward various ideas for modifying the system, to promote fairness - most of them completely impracticable.

Nationalisation is not socialism; in many countries parties of the right have nationalised certain industries and services. These are not owned by ‘the people’ but by the nation’s whole capitalist class together.
At the moment we should realise that society is divided into two classes; those who own or control the means of production (capital) and those who have to work for a living.

Well over 90 percent of people are in the working class, whether they’re relatively high-paid workers or on the dole. So the vast majority of middle class people are essentially working people; they must work to obtain a living. If you have to work for a living, irrespective of your occupation or salary level, you are a worker.

Currently under capitalism although we can vote for parties in elections, huge chunks of our lives are beyond our influence. The politicians have no control over the economy and so neither have we. We can’t decide on our standard of living or our level of prosperity. Democratic control means all the resources of the world will be used to meet the needs of everyone rather than being controlled by the few.

More specifically, what are the drawbacks of capitalism? If I had been asked to speak here, 20 years ago the manifest problems in Ireland would have been an unemployment rate of near 20 percent, heavy forced emigration of our young people and widespread poverty, at least by developed world standards. Nowadays people’s concerns are the long days of commuting and working, stresses associated with work and the need to maintain a family life, the unavailability of affordable housing and good services, the widespread fear of crime, etc. On a world scale there are still huge amounts of malnutrition in many parts of the globe, terrible poverty, wars and ethnic struggles, forced migrations, dangerous levels of environmental damage, etc.

Consider the waste of capitalism. There is an enormous amount of people involved in doing jobs that are essential to capitalism but that don’t add anything useful to humanity as a whole. All the armed forces of the world (maybe 100 million people). Then add to that all the workers in the defence and associated industries. That is pure waste as no wealth is being created by this. And add to this the massive financial sector; banking, insurance, tax affairs, accountants. You can throw in marketing and advertising. Also the vast majority of the legal system; guards, security people, prison officers, criminals, solicitors etc. These are all existing occupations, necessary because we have a system of exchange, i.e. money, but fundamentally not adding anything to society.

A simple illustration of what’s wrong with capitalism: if someone is hungry and needs food but has no money and if someone else has a field, will the owner of the field grow crops to feed the hungry person? No, they won’t or can’t, because it would not be profitable for them to do so. It’s not that they are a good or bad person; it’s just that the system doesn’t work that way.

I should finish by saying that our appeal to people to become socialist is not based on ethical considerations or compassionate feelings for people who are less well off than them. You should become a socialist for your own self interest, for a better life for yourself.

Check our website at www.worldsocialism.org

Kevin Cronin

Poverty (2007)

The following text is part of a series of leaflets/flyers written by a member of the World Socialist Party of the United States.

Poverty, starvation, and want do not exist because of scarcity, as the central teachings of capitalist economics would lead you to believe.

It has been shown many times over that present agricultural and manufacturing technology can produce enough food and goods for a human population actually larger than the one that exists right now. Stores in western nations are constantly fully stocked, and food is thrown away because it spoils before it is sold. Houses sit empty and cars fill sales lots. However, the fruits of the planet and human labor are only available to those who have the money to buy them. Since the capitalism tends to deny access to far more people than it allows, it is therefore the restriction of access to the means of survival, such as food, water clothing and shelter that creates poverty!

It would be nice if everyone could obtain or produce the things they need to live a comfortable and healthy life from their nearby environment. However, the wide range of planetary conditions prevent it. Due to property law and the money system, the two most important features of capitalism, people living in areas of the world where the essentials of life cannot be produced as needed are forced to buy it from those who can. Most often, if they cannot buy what they need, they go without it. The existence of national borders and other political divisions also provide barriers to the flow of food and goods to where they are needed, further preventing millions from enjoying a healthy living standard both inside and outside these borders.

Unfortunately, the lure of capitalism has always been the supposed ability for any given person to gain wealth beyond the value of their individual labor. We see rags-to-riches stories on television and are constantly updated on the lives and activities of the rich and powerful, many of whom got that way through hard work and sacrifice. What is never glorified, however, is the ability of capitalism to create poverty for billions of people.

Think about it, poor people did not invent capitalism. For every millionaire, dozens must necessarily be doomed to squalor and destitution. So why should anyone expect anything different than the continued existence of poverty when that was exactly what the capitalism is supposed to accomplish?

Strangely, many well-meaning individuals believe they can make governments force capitalism to take care of the poor, or that vast networks of charities can help to eliminate poverty. These folks engage in reform politics or join "humanitarian" organizations, hoping to somehow force the system to work exactly opposite of the way it is designed to work. Attempts to reform the present system (no matter how well intentioned) to eliminate poverty are doomed to fail because the core structure of capitalism creates the problem. Capitalism can never be reformed to work against it's own operating principles!

Our Movement thinks that providing for a world of billions requires a revolutionary change from the way things are done right now. That is why we demand nothing short of the complete replacement of the property and money systems - the "heart and soul" of capitalism. Socialism, a system based on free access and administered by the democratic action of the entire world's population, can accomplish the elimination of poverty, because that is what it is designed to do! Socialism does not exist to create rich or poor people, but to make available a sustainable and healthy standard of living for every human being. Future advances in technology and agriculture should be enjoyed by the entire world, not just a privileged minority. Given that, the ability of socialism to succeed in providing for every human being will lie in creating fair and efficient distribution and accounting methods to ensure that both the resources of the earth and human labor are applied when and where it is needed most.

Tony Pink

Capitalism and Other Kids Stuff (2005)

From the September 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Capitalism and Other Kids Stuff can be viewed here.

To describe a society of common ownership without mentioning the word socialism is undoubtedly difficult. But by no means impossible. For a short film produced by members of the Socialist Party, Capitalism and Other Kids' Stuff, does just that in a language that nevertheless consistently pulls no punches.

Socialists are well aware of the dual purpose on the part of the capitalist media in portraying the class of exploited producers as a mindless, selfish, non-caring mass of individual consumers: to promote profits and create disunity. The film destroys these caricatures right from the start and exposes them for the claptrap they are, by juxtaposing the individual differences of perception with the broad facts of social evolution, human behaviour, and the unique ability of humans to care and share in common despite our cultural differences and lifestyles.

When the producing class engage in widespread discrimination over issues of race, ethnicity, age, gender, sexuality, disability, etc; and take sides over who gets what share of the global market, this is clearly against their interests since they are thereby helping to create the conditions for a wealthy few to control the means of living.

Globally the results are all too familiar with the complexity of private property relationships concealed within a quagmire of disputes over territory and markets, followed by constant eruptions of violent conflict, and ending in misery and destitution on a massive scale. By skilfully crafting the reasons for this complexity of private property relationships to a novel 'kids stuff' analogy the script neatly underlines the importance of gaining a worldview of capitalism by analysing how the rules governing the minority ownership of the 'toys' determines the terms of oppression and the conditions of inequality for the 'toyless producers'.

Although there is an obvious danger such an analogy could be counter-productive, by unintentionally projecting an oversimplification of what constitutes the reality of capitalism, this hurdle is overcome by complementing the linkage to the "reality" of capitalism with a powerful backdrop of words and images, so the overall context underscores a revolutionary outlook on how we might live. These contrasts are further enhanced by comparing the divisions and horrors of capitalism with a society where production is geared to meeting human needs not profit plus the immense benefits to be gained when the world's resources are distributed through a system of production for use and free access so the necessity of social equality become conclusive.

This is maintained throughout the 50 minutes so the viewer is left in no doubt that before a world of common ownership is possible the majority have to gain a level of class consciousness and political understanding. In other words: engaging in a struggle to promote the class interest of the majority to attain and create a society where private property is replaced by common ownership involves acknowledging that the present unequal access to the means of living requires a political solution.

To get this solution across to an apolitical audience successfully in itself is no mean feat, but to also focus attention on the vast amount of social and individual freedom such a revolution will bring about will motivate many viewers to press the replay button over and over again, and so speaks volumes for the professional dedication and attention to detail. Although this is a first in terms of the socialist message being transposed into a film format no doubt it will not be the last. So watch this space, but in the meantime judge for yourself by watching Capitalism and Other Kids' Stuff at www.socialist-tv.com, or alternatively by purchasing a DVD from: Socialist Party, 52 Clapham High St, London SW4 7UN. Cost £5 (including post & packaging).

Brian Johnson