by
Geoff Mann
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[...] however "radical" we might imagine our politics, we must recognize ourselves in it. If we cannot see in it the actual material and social constraints experienced by real living individuals and groups in their everyday attempts to make and remake a way to be in the world, then we will never find a way out of it. If we cannot understand that capitalism, and the agency of the billions of people who have little "choice" but to embrace it, is a product of far more than the trickery and ill-will of a few, an effective mass-based anticapitalist politics is in my mind a pipe-dream.
[...] Capitalism so saturates everyday life, particularly in the global North, that even many who actively oppose its power reproduce its hegemony in many of the acts necessary for merely being in the world. It determines the ways and means through which we live, and consequently, we live it into being. [...]
Of course the will to change will be a key component of the tools for change, but there are also structural, historical, and contingent forces at work that militate against a naive plan to "build a dream" that does not emerge from and build upon the world in which we live. We cannot start with an idealized Utopia at the end of history and work backward to figure out how we get there. History is filled with evidence of the failures of utopianism, whether it takes the macro-form of the Bolshevik revolution, or the micro-form of escapist "international communities." Mark and Engels' critique of utopian socialists, those who believe history can be readily broken or dismissed, still stands. We must begin from where we are.
[...] If all we want is noncapitalism, then it seems to me the surest way to get there is to leave it to the capitalists--the terrible knowledge of this truth is in fact the fundamental premise of Keynesianism. [...]
[...] I think that strategy would be disastrous. Capitalism may be undone this way, but the costs will be borne disproportionately by those who benefit least from the existing system. [...]
[...] 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.