by
Geoff Mann
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[...] capitalist money, as a social relation or institution, militated against all meaningful political change. Because it must carry and stabilize value across time and space, and because all or virtually all exchange takes place via money, money is at root a promise that the future, here or elsewhere, will be basically the same as today. If it were not, no one would trust money as the expression of value, and then it would not be money. [...]
[...] That basically nobody willingly immigrates from the capitalist to the noncapitalist parts of the world is not merely a function of ideology. The fact that in many cases it is the power of capital, via neocolonial imperialism or environmental destruction, that makes noncapitalist life so hard does nothing to diminish immediate need. It is one more reason to be anticapitalist, but we must recognize that for many in the global North (though not all), it is in fact relative privilege that provides the security to seek something beyond capitalism, and much of that security is provided by the power of capital.
[...] This is what Gramsci and Poulantzas, in their own ways, said too. At present, the state, within its territory and in its participation in multilaterial institutions and contracts, is the essential means by which capital's hegemony is legitimized and protected. Consequently, it is the principal institutional means by which to influence the distribution of the material means for human well-being. At least in the near term, the state's legitimacy as the mechanism of distribution is axiomatic: it is the legitimate mechanism of distribution within its territory because it is the state. Via a suite of widely accepted domains of responsibility--taxes, fiscal spending, monetary governance, social programs, labour regulation, market oversight, etc--the state is the distributional centre of gravity. If mass anticapitalist movements are to emerge in the global North, at least, then anticapitalists must work to gain control of this hegemonic distributional mechanism. [...]
[...] most of these movements, through no fault or lack of imagination of their own, are embedded in an overwhelmingly capitalist matrix. They are islands in an ocean. More islands are always a welcome sight, but the ocean remains.
on local anticapitalist movements for specific things
inspo for framing my analysis of potential solutions
[...] Some, of course, hedge their bets, saying capitalism is "the best we can do," or the "least bad" way of organizing our political economic lives. That, it seems to me, is horseshit, and not a shred of evidence supports it. At my most generous, I might grant that capitalism, relative to what came before, is among the better ways developed thus far, but [...] why would we accept something because it is the best "so far"? Imagine if we had stopped at leeching or slavery because they were the best methods for medicine and agriculture we had developed "so far".
[...] The most fundamental problem with capitalism, and the reason it must be rejected, is that it is structured, in its very operation, to make it impossible for millions and even billions to be free in any meaningful sense. The critique of capitalism has little to do with how well it provides for the people of the world relative to what came before (feudalism, slave-plantations, etc.), or with a need to defend the disastrous attempts to resist it (Stalinist "communism", faux-socialist kleptocracy, etc.). Anticapitalism has to do, rather, with the fact that capitalism is not good enough. It is unacceptable.
connects with my thoughts on capitalism as this adolescent stage
[...] it is different from titles like An Introduction to Capitalism" or "Economics for Beginners" [...] they can lay out the "how it works" of capitalism as clearly as any Lego instruction manual. But they almost always substitute an account of how capital says the economy works, or ought to work, for an account of how it actually works. They introduce a whole set of mainstream, "business pages" concepts as if they are unquestionable, the only way to understand capitalism. Those of us driven by a sense that what capitalism offers is nowhere near good enough, and that we can and must create something better, will find little if anything to work with.
[...] It is not another shrill denunciation of capitalism. Those books often leave one feeling that capitalism is simply a massive class conspiracy, a monolithic force of evil for which only really nasty, cruel people could be responsible. It is as if capitalism happens to us, imposed by external trickery. But that is not true. Most of us actively participate in keeping capitalism going every day, and not always unwillingly. [...]
Perhaps the CEOs of Shell Oil or Citibank are indeed cruel profiteers and super-rich megalomaniacs. Perhaps they really are bad guys. That is not, and cannot be, the basis of a critique of capitalism. Capitalism is neither made nor defended by profiteers and super-rich megalomaniacs alone, nor did they produce the system that requires the structural position they fill. In reality, capitalism is produced and reproduced by elaborate, historically embedded, and powerful social and material relationships in which most us participate. In fact, many of us struggle to maintain those relationships, sometimes with all our might, because we feel like we have little choice. [...]
inspo for diss: cant just blame individual execs and investors etc but rather look at system
"We're good, you're evil" strategies can easily undermine mass solidarity, precisely because of those tricky everyday decisions people have to make. Barring a "clean slate" political solution, such as the revolutionary elimination of the "bad guys" (which history suggests is a risky route), I am convinced that the only basis for solidaristic anticapitalist politics is an analysis that makes sense of "complicity." We need an approach that comprehends the various positions and political dilemmas in which people find themselves, and helps them see that these dilemmas are neither inevitable nor necessary--that they can find what they need in different, better ways, through other ways of living and thinking.