As the capitalist crisis deepens and movements against capitalist globalisation build up across the world, many people are now talking about capitalism and describing themselves as anticapitalist. Great! But what do they mean? That capital’s international institutions are bad because they usurp the right of citizens to make democratic decisions? That financial speculation detracts from real, productive investment that creates real jobs? That the drive for profits on the part of transnational corporations has led them to ally with and strengthen authoritarian regimes that deny human rights? That neoliberal policies are producing a race to the bottom in terms of wages, working conditions, and environmental standards? These are all important to oppose—but in and by themselves these are objections to specific policies and practices of capitalism rather than to capitalism as such.
Don’t we need a vision of an alternative to capitalism? No one would deny that there are some examples of capitalism that are better than others—largely as the result of the struggles of workers and peoples’ movements. Whether those examples have been the result of unique historical circumstances, whether by their very nature they cannot be generalised to the whole world, or whether they are sustainable (especially in the context of global capitalism in a world of uneven development), is not the central question.
Rather, we need to ask—is that all there is? Is there no alternative to an economic system that relies upon the propertylessness of the masses of people to compel them to work to produce profits for those who own capital? Is there no alternative to a system in which the foundations of human wealth, human beings and nature, are treated as mere means for the generation of private monetary wealth, means often destroyed in the process? No alternative to a system whose very logic is to divide and separate people, to preclude the possibilities for human solidarity?
Many people say, simply, there is no alternative. And, because there is none, the best we can do is try to make improvements here and there in capitalism. The belief that the only real alternative is capitalism with a human face owes much to the two great failures of the twentieth century: (1) the experiences in those underdeveloped countries which strove for rapid industrialisation through a hierarchical system they called socialist (with which few people in the more developed world can identify); and (2) the failure of social democratic governments (some calling themselves socialist) in that developed part of the world to do any more than tinker with capitalism as an economic system.
Why should we accept, though, that these examples exhaust the potential for alternatives to capitalism? From the beginning of capitalism, people have seen it as system destructive of human values and have looked to alternatives that would make our common humanity the core of social and economic relations. Not only in the utopias and visions of the nineteenth century, but also in the experiments of the twentieth century, there are glimpses and real examples that point to an alternative logic to that of capital, a logic based upon human beings. But, that’s not all—in the daily struggles against the logic of capital, that alternative logic is present (even if only implicit). We need to begin to reclaim and build that alternative vision—and, to make what is implicit in those struggles explicit. Once we do that, the limitations of anticapitalism by itself become clear.
Early Visions
Think about utopia—about the island of Utopia, to be exact. Thomas More’s Utopia was written in sixteenth century England, when medieval peasants were losing their traditional access to the land as the result of land being enclosed for sheep pasture. The mythical alternative More sketches is a society where land is held in common, where all are expected to do their fair share of work and where the products of labor are distributed to all in accordance with their needs without money and without exchange. How can there be justice and prosperity, More asks, “when possessions are private, where money is the measure of all things?”
Such themes of common property, co-operation, equality and the rejection of exchange relations accompanied many criticisms of capitalism as it developed in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Western Europe. They were, in particular, part of the rejection of the changes that capitalism was bringing to rural society. Growing inequality and competition and the desire to profit at the expense of others were identified as the product of private property and the source of a disintegration of existing social links. The proposal of alternatives, though, was not simply seen as the attempt to restore a pre-capitalist (idealised) past. Capitalism, with its competition and rivalry, was seen as both irrational and inferior to a society based upon direct human cooperation.
Many of those who rejected capitalism, accordingly, argued for the importance of creating experiments that could demonstrate that a cooperative society based upon common ownership of the means of production would be superior to capitalism. The large amounts of land available in North America as the result of European conquest and settlement, in fact, permitted the establishment in the nineteenth century of a number of utopian communities embodying these principles and seen as a way of revealing to all that there were viable alternatives to capitalism. Similarly, the creation of cooperative workplaces in manufacturing also was advocated as a means of demonstrating the advantages of association and cooperation over the rivalry characteristic of capitalism. This latter development, though, reflected the further development of capitalism and a new and growing aspect of the opposition to capitalism—the rejection of its effects upon workers in industry, both those displaced by capitalist industry and those employed by it.
Increasingly in the nineteenth century (especially in England, where capitalism was most advanced), the opposition to capitalism became a workers’ opposition, focusing upon the exploitation of workers. Labour, it was argued, was the source of all wealth in society; so, how was it that workers grew poor on their wages while their masters grew rich? Clearly, part of the workers’ product was taken by those who employed them. While some argued, then, that workers instead should work for themselves in cooperative workshops (established either by themselves or by the state as social workshops) and should compete against capitalist firms, this was a position firmly rejected by the most important and influential socialist theorist of the nineteenth century, Karl Marx.
True, for Marx the cooperative factories that were established demonstrated that the subordination of workers to capital could be superseded by an association of free and equal producers. However, by themselves, those co-ops would remain “dwarfish” and would never transform capitalist society. What was necessary “to convert social production into one large and harmonious system of free and co-operative labour,” Marx argued, was to change society as a whole—to transfer the existing means of production from the capitalists and landlords to the producers themselves. In no sense, though, did Marx entirely reject the goals of his predecessors. The utopians had constructed (and propagandised around) “fantastic pictures and plans of a new society”; however, he argued that “only the means” of getting there are different: “the real conditions of the movement are no longer clouded in utopian fables.” So, what were those goals . . . and how were the means of getting there different?
The Goals and Means of Early Socialists
At the core of the goals of socialists was the creation of a society that would allow for the full development of human potential and capacity. The goal, as Henri Saint-Simon argued, is “to afford to all members of society the greatest possible opportunity for the development of their faculties.” Similarly, real freedom, Louis Blanc proposed, is “the POWER given men to develop and exercise their faculties.” And, given that everyone “must have the power to develop and exercise his faculties in order to really be free, . . . society owes every one of its members both instruction, without which the human mind cannot grow, and the instruments of labour, without which human activitycannot achieve its fullest development.” This same theme was set out clearly by Friedrich Engels in the question and answer format of an early draft of the Communist Manifesto. Engels asks, “What is the aim of the Communists?” He answers, “To organise society in such a way that every member of it can develop and use all his capabilities and powers in complete freedom and without thereby infringing the basic conditions of this society.” In the final version of the Manifesto (written by Marx), this goal was represented as “an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”
A less explicit statement, but there can be no question that the full development of human potential was at the very heart of Marx’s conception of an alternative society—just as the stunting of that potential and the tendency to reduce human beings to beasts of burden and things was at the core of his rejection of capitalism. From his earliest writings, Marx stressed the potential for the development of rich human beings with rich human needs, the potential for producing human beings as rich as possible in needs and capabilities. What, indeed, is wealth, he asked, “other than the universality of individual needs, capacities, pleasures, productive forces . . . ?” The prize was the “development of the rich individuality which is as all-sided in its production as in its consumption.” Thus, the growth of human wealth is “the absolute working-out of his creative potentialities,” the “development of all human powers as such the end in itself.” Within capitalism, however, the goal of capital is definitely not the development of that potential. Rather, as Marx wrote in Capital, the worker exists to satisfy the capitalist’s need to increase the value of his capital “as opposed to the inverse situation in which objective wealth is there to satisfy the worker’s own need for development.”
In the society of associated producers that Marx envisioned, the all-sided development of people would be based upon “the sub-ordination of their communal, social productivity as their social wealth.” Here, increased productivity would not come at the expense of workers but would translate both into the satisfaction of needs and also the possibility of free time—which “corresponds to the artistic, scientific, etc. development of the individuals in the time set free, and with the means created, for all of them.” It would be “time for the full development of the individual, which in tum reacts back on the productive power of labour as itself the greatest productive power.” All the springs of co-operative wealth would flow more abundantly, and the products of this society of freely associated producers would be human beings able to develop their full potential in a human society.
So, how did Marx’s conception of the means of going beyond capitalism differ from those of his predecessors? As we have seen, for so many socialists of the nineteenth century, the way to create the new society was to extract people from capitalism and to demonstrate that a non-capitalist alternative was a superior form of social and economic arrangement; and, those who argued this often looked to philanthropists or the state to provide the funds for these new demonstration projects. For Marx, such proposals reflected a time when the horrors of capitalism were apparent but when capitalism had not yet developed sufficiently to reveal “the real conditions of the movement.”
Look to what working people are doing, Marx argued. Through their own struggles to satisfy their needs (which, for Marx, reflect all aspects of their existence as human beings within society and nature), they reveal that the battle for a new society is conducted by struggling from within capitalism rather than by looking outside. In those struggles workers come to recognise their common interests, they come to understand the necessity to join together against capital. It was not simply, though, the formation of a bloc opposed to capital which emerges out of these struggles. Marx consistently stressed that the very process of struggle was a process of producing people in an altered way; in struggling for their needs, “they acquire a new need—the need for society—and what appears as a means becomes an end.” They transform themselves into subjects capable of altering their world.
This is what Marx identified as “revolutionary practice”—”the coincidence of the changing of circumstances and human activity or self-change.” Marx’s message to workers, he noted at one point, was that you have to go through years of struggle “not only in order to bring about a change in society but also to change yourselves.” Over twenty years later, too, he wrote that workers know that “they will have to pass through long struggles, through a series of historic processes, transforming circumstances and men.” In short, the means of achieving that new society was inseparable from the process of struggling for it—only in motion could people rid themselves of “all the muck of ages.”
Socialism, for this reason, could never be delivered to people from above. It is the work of the working class itself, Marx argued. And, that applied as well to the kind of democratic institutions that workers need to bring about the new society. No state standing over and above society (and, indeed, crushing it like a boa constrictor—the way Marx described the French state) could be the basis for that simultaneous changing of circumstances and self-change. Only by rejecting hierarchy and converting the state “from an organ standing above society into one completely subordinate to it,” could the state be that of “the popular masses themselves, forming their own force instead of the organised force of their suppression.” Only that “self-government of the producers” could be the form of state by which people emancipate themselves and create the basis for a socialist society.
Reclaiming and Renewing a Socialist Vision
Certainly, the process of reclaiming a socialist vision involves the necessity to come to terms with the experiences of the twentieth century—with the two great failures of the twentieth century. But that process needs to begin someplace. And, where better than by recognising, as Marx clearly did, that people develop through their activity and that a new society is inseparable from the new sides they take on in the struggle to satisfy their needs? How better than to return to a conception of socialism as a society in which the full development of human potential is paramount?
If we proceed explicitly from such a vision, then anticapitalism is obviously part of that struggle. Who could imagine that the development of those rich human beings (rich because they are all-sided in their capacities and needs) is compatible with a society in which human beings and nature are mere means for the expansion of capital? At the same time, though, this vision of socialism clearly goes well beyond anticapitalism as such and points to the limitations of a focus upon anticapitalist struggle alone. Who these days could possibly think that the full development of human potential is compatible with patriarchy, racism, imperialism, or hierarchy (to name just a few sources of oppression)? In the various struggles of people for human dignity and social justice, a vision of an alternative, socialist society has always been latent. Let us reclaim and renew that vision.
(Michael A. Lebowitz is professor emeritus of economics at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada.)
