Anti-capitalism - what is it?

Hundreds of  different organisations are not a movement. They are not even anti-capitalist, in the sense that they haven't yet agreed on a definition of capitalism.  'Anti-capitalist' groups supposedly advocate the abolition of the capitalist system altogether but fail to specify what should replace it and how this change should come about.

Capitalism is an economic system where productive resources are used as "capital", i.e. they are used to produce more wealth with a view to profit; this sets in motion an impersonal and uncontrollable economic mechanism which leads to the accumulation, in fits and starts, of more and more capital, of more and more wealth used to produce further wealth with a view to profit. Capitalism is, then, a system of capital accumulation. Hence, of course, its name.  Many talk instead about a "market economy". Capitalism is indeed a market economy, but not a simple market economy. A key difference of course is that under capitalism production is not carried out by self-employed producers but wage and salary workers employed by business enterprises. In other words, under capitalism, the producers have become separated from the means of production. This makes all the difference. The producers are now not bringing to market what they have produced (that belongs to their employer, the owner of the means of production) but only their working skills, so they receive the value not of their product but only of their ability to work, which is less. The product is still under normal circumstances sold at its full labour-time value but the proceeds go not to the direct producers but are pocketed by the owners of the means of production. Profit is the difference between this and what they pay, as wages and salaries, for the working skills they purchase on the labour market.  Capitalism cannot be described as an economy geared to satisfying consumer demands. The products of capitalist production have to find a buyer of course but this is only incidental to the main aim of making a profit, of ending up with more money than was originally invested. Production is initiated not by what consumers are prepared to pay for to satisfy their needs but by what the owners of the means of production calculate can be sold at a profit. This is what makes the wheels of capitalism grind—or not grind, or not grind so quickly, as the case may be—depending on the level of the rate of profit. Capitalism is not a "steady state economy". On the contrary, it is an ever-expanding economy of capital accumulation. In other words, most of the profits are capitalised, i.e. reinvested in production, so that production, the stock of means of production, and the amount of capital, all tend to increase over time, not in a smooth straight line, but only in fits and starts.

Unless these anti-capitalist protesters take the time to study what exactly capitalism is and how it operates they risk not advocating a viable alternative. Some who consider themselves anti-capitalist campaign to try to put the clock back by returning to the simple market economy that may have existed in early colonial North America. The farmers, butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers would be producing their particular products which would sell at a price reflecting the average amount of time required to produce it. There would be no profit and no exploitation because everybody would be receiving the full value of what their labour had produced. They would just be exchanging so much labour in one form for the same amount in a different form.
Marx called such an economy "simple commodity production" (a commodity being, for him, an item of wealth produced for sale), but it is doubtful whether it has ever existed in a pure form. The nearest that may have come to it would have been in some of the early colonial America. This is an important strand in the Green movement’s thinking as exemplified by the slogan "small is beautiful". It is an  idyllic picture of an economy of self-employed small scale producers producing for a local market. This wouldn't be capitalism but it wouldn't be possible either, if only because enough to feed, clothe and house the world's population would not be able to be produced on this basis. If it were possible to go back to the sort of economy that the likes of the mutualist  Benjamin Tucker envisaged, the tendency with laissez-faire would be for capitalism to develop again. competition would result in those firms which employed the most productive machinery winning out against those employing out of date and so less productive machinery. So, there would be a tendency towards a yet greater concentration of industry into the hands of the big firms, which would get bigger even if still at this stage worker-controlled co-operatives.

But what about the displaced independent artisans and the members of bankrupt workers' co-operatives? How would they get a living? Would they not be obliged to sell their skills to the worker-controlled firms that had won out in the battle of competition? But if wage labour appeared then so would profits and exploitation even if these profits would accrue to the members of the worker-controlled firms. Some might be prepared to share these with their new employees, but the continuing competitive pressures would oblige them to give priority to investing them in new, more productive machinery so as to be able to stay in business and not go bankrupt themselves. In fact, this has been the long-run tendency with such firms under capitalism today, as with the kibbutzim in Israel and the various Mennonite enterprises in North and South America. They have begun to employ wage labour and orient their production towards making profits and accumulating these as new capital.

Other Green thinkers advocate a steady-state market economy, a variant of Marx's "simple reproduction". The idea is that the surplus would be used not to reinvest in expanding production, nor in maintaining a privileged class in luxury but in improving public services while maintaining a sustainable balance with the natural environment. It's the old reformist dream of a tamed capitalism, minus the controlled expansion of the means of production an earlier generation of reformists used to envisage. But it is still a dream because it assumes that a profit-motivated market economy can be tamed, and made to serve human and/or environmental needs. History has proved that it can't be; capitalism has shown itself to be an uncontrollable economic mechanism which operates to force economic actors to make profits and accumulate them as more and more capital irrespective of the consequences. Capitalism today can be described as the profit-motivated, capital-accumulating world market economy.

Other anti-capitalists recognise capitalism as a world system and as such is the problem. It cannot be denied that capitalism has entered a particularly pernicious phase in its development – euphemistically called 'globalisation' – in undeveloped countries as large corporations viciously compete globally to secure markets and relentlessly exploit labour in countries where they reputedly earn 75 percent of their profits. But exploitation is not just confined to undeveloped countries. Working people everywhere are on the defensive against the class whose imperative is to maximise its profits and perpetuate their mastery over all working people. There can be little doubt that the wages and salaries of the majority of people in industrialised countries have stagnated or declined, working hours and job insecurity have increased and conditions of life have deteriorated. The correlation between economic growth and improving social welfare has been cut as corporations seek to introduce 'Third World' standards into the established industrialised countries. We share a common interest. The solution as being to break it up into separate capitalisms operating within national frontiers behind protective tariffs walls. This hardly justifies the description "anti-capitalist" of course, and parallels a nasty strand of nationalist thinking which has always associated capitalism with a sinister "cosmopolitan" conspiracy. Indeed, the danger is that, in the absence of being presented with a credible alternative, it is here that the "anti-capitalist" protests will find the loudest popular echo.

Finally may social activists believe that the creation and expansion of co-operatives is anti-capitalism. Many socialists have sympathised with co-ops as a valid method of coping and surviving within capitalism. Co-operatives are popular with radical workers. An initial reaction to the view that co-ops really represent an alternative to capitalism might be that they involve wage labour and the production of commodities, just as any capitalist business does, so they can hardly constitute an alternative. They also necessarily involve profit-making but not, some would claim, profit maximisation.
 In Marx’s day some such as Proudhon saw them as a way of eventually out-competing and replacing private capitalist enterprises. Others such as Lassalle wanted them to be financed by loans from the state. The theorists of the original co-operative movement saw it as a movement that would eventually out-compete and replace ordinary capitalist businesses, leading to the coming of “the Co-operative Commonwealth” which was an alternative name for socialism. What happened, instead was that rather than  transforming capitalism, it was the other way round: capitalism transformed the co-ops. This was because they had to compete with ordinary capitalist businesses on the same terms as them and so were subject to the same competitive pressures, to keep costs down and to to maximise the difference between sales revenue and costs (called “profits” in ordinary businesses, but “surplus” by the co-op).
Cooperatives operate within the context of the capitalist economy and that if they are to survive they have to play by its rules, in particular to make a profit. And, again in response to market forces, most of this profit has to be reinvested in cost-saving machinery and methods of production. In other words, they cannot be used to improve the wages of those working for them or to benefit their customers by reducing prices. That would be the road to ruin. Workers in cooperatives have in effect to organise their own exploitation for profit to be accumulated as more capital. They are not the way-out. As Marx pointed out, co-operatives ‘must reproduce everywhere in their actual organisation all the shortcomings of the prevailing system.’ And they do.

 Many claim that it is only one particular model of capitalism that we should jettison. But, in the end, there is only one model of capitalism: the one we’ve got, where production is in the hands of competing enterprises which are forced to reduce costs so as to maximise profits in order to have the resources to invest in further cost-cutting. An economic system has locked us into this one particular road so we need to talk about that system. Making a profit, not satisfying needs, is the aim of production, and as measures to protect the planet add to costs they are not taken. The political and legal framework within which this economic system operates does vary, but in all of those, profits can never take third place to people and the planet. They must always come first, with the luxury consumption of the rich second, and the planet and the needs of the rest of the people third.  Re-investing money to make ever-more profit is the core feature of capitalism and this relentless pursuit of profit is one of the main reasons why capitalist economies are predicated on the need for continual expansion and economic growth – all of which is facilitated by access to cheap energy and natural resources, and inevitably results in the mass production of mostly unnecessary and highly wasteful consumer goods. To avoid the negative effects the whole profit system itself must go. It means moving beyond the idea that individual actions—like changing the type of our light bulbs and riding bikes—can save us and our planet. It also goes beyond just a change in government. That scale of change is neither suffice nor aimed at the right target which is an economic model based on resource extraction. It's going to take a grassroots movement that is already rising from the bottom up.

The Socialist Party proposes making the Earth “a common treasury for all", as Gerrard Winstanley of the Diggers put it right at the beginning of capitalism—so that they can be used, not to produce for sale on a market, not to make a profit, but purely and simply to satisfy human wants and needs in accordance with the principle of, to adapt a phrase, "from each region on the basis of its resources, to each region on the basis of its needs".