Against Capitalists but for Capitalism

Are today’s anti-capitalist movements against capitalist and globalisation moving towards a common vision of a new social system? For sure, they are against the many negative aspects of capitalism – excessive inequality, un/underemployment, alienated working conditions, sweated labour, poverty, misery, disappearing democracy and environmental degradation – all necessary results of capitalism. They view social justice as something that will not require a thorough social restructuring but which can be carried out on a national scale by way of a few palliative reforms implemented by electing a radical-inclined government. The anti-capitalist protesters present a litany of demands, consisting mostly of government legislation and regulations. Some support and encourage cooperatives and worker participation in a firms’ decision-making, that they describe as economic democracy. They argue that eliminating extreme disparities in wealth and reducing the sizes of giant corporations would be to democratise capitalism. These “radicals” aspire to an economy of locally-based small businesses whose ethos would be concerned with the general public welfare. Such a society is considered as a non-capitalist system.  

To members of the Socialist Party, this seems a very strange perspective. Capitalism it as an economic system consisting of three basic components: private ownership of the means of production, a system of exchange in which prices are primarily market-determined, and the condition that most people in the society are wage labourers. How can one be anti-capitalist if you do not confront the concept of private property (sectional ownership) exchange value (the prices system) and the wages system (wage slavery.)

Instead, these anti-capitalists believes that certain features (democratic management, social control of investment) can be tacked on to an existing market economy and the result called non-capitalism. And what is to prevent a small mom and pop store growing into what became Walmart? They will have to resort to the power of the State to impose limitations on enterprises.

Socialism represents the best hope for a human future. In essence, socialism means replacing a capitalist economy of production for profit by production for need. The labour theory of value, which we hold to, refutes the notion that capitalists have “contributed” something other than workers’ labour to the social product, and therefore have earned their profit. Socialism guarantees that associated workers will produce what society needs without squandering or misallocating available labour time from the commercial pressure among competing enterprises to undersell one another. It is socialism which resolve the contradiction between production for exchange and production for use, to satisfy humanity’s needs and wants. Workplace decision-making and/or elected managers will continually strive to lower labour costs and cut corners in the manufacturing process as a survival strategy. Those activists against capitalism have failed to examine the reasons why profits are important under capitalism or explain the imperative of capitalism’s growth tendency to accumulate capital. These profits, or the further capital they acquire in search of future profits, may be used to apply new technology, enter new markets, or encroach on the competitors’ market share. Levels of profits and liquidity are weapons in a war between rivals. This activity is a matter of survival; if one firm does not undertake it, the competition will. Instead many critics of “capitalism” seek to attribute its faults to the flawed nature of the individual fat-cat capitalist’s or CEO’s search for profit simply to their psycho-pathic desire for ever-increasing wealth, a very moralistic biblical answer that it is their love of money which is the root of all evil, while ignoring the economic function of the role they perform.

Today, the anti-capitalist struggle requires an alternative vision to hankering back to the days of the ‘Little House on the Prairie’ and romantic nostalgia of some sort of supposedly self-sustaining small communities. What they are aspiring towards in reality is to repeat the whole process of capitalist development again, and because they cannot comprehend the dynamics of capitalism, they are fated to repeat all the same mistakes and errors committed throughout history.

For the world’s working class, there’s but one solution - socialist revolution.