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What Is Anti-Capitalism?

J.C. Myers

Every socially necessary task eventually gives birth to its own cadre of specialists. And surely, by now, the issuing of proclamations every twenty years or so declaring capitalism’s permanent victory over all conceivable opposition has become the work of dedicated professionals. Before Francis Fukuyama’s announcement of the End of History in 1989, a generation of aging European intellectuals had already danced on the grave of “modernity,” pronouncing dead all questions of inequality and exploitation and turning instead to probe the more marketable mysteries of “the gaze” and “the body.” The first years of the 1960s, some may recall, were supposed to have marked the End of Ideology, and we all know how that turned out. Fifty years earlier still, Max Weber was predicting the imminent demise of communist internationalism when it was only just getting started. To be sure, when the European uprisings of 1848 were turned back by bayonets and musket balls, some thoughtful representative of the Holy Alliance must have remarked that finally all this nonsense about a workers’ revolution was finished, once and for all.

But each time the Captains of Industry had been tucked safely into their beds, the words of the happy fairy tale still soothing them to sleep, the echoes of massed voices rose again in the streets and the sea of bodies and banners rolled back in like the tide. The demonstrations that have confronted every major meeting of world trade and finance officials in recent years are, if nothing else, yet another reminder that the grievances of millions upon millions of people against capitalism have not gone away. In December 1999, when protesters battled riot police outside the World Trade Organization’s ministerial talks in Seattle, the demonstration’s underlying sentiment was widely described as “anti-globalization.” But as a movement began to take shape, it became increasingly clear that its target was not the connection of all parts of the globe to one another, but the domination of that process—and of the world itself—by the forces and the logic of capitalism.

The results of capitalism’s successes in the 1980s could not be more patent. The total number of people around the world living on less than two dollars a day rose from 2.5 billion in 1987 to 2.8 billion in 1998.¹ And while the gap between rich and poor countries unquestionably expanded, it was not simply a matter of the West benefiting at the expense of the Rest, but of a global capitalist class benefiting at the expense of a global working class. Nothing about the world economy in the last two decades of the twentieth century can be understood without including in the picture the fact that material inequality grew not only between rich and poor countries, but within the rich countries themselves. In 1983 the top 1% of all households in the United States owned 33.8% of the country’s wealth, while the bottom 60% owned 6.1%. By 1998 the share of national wealth held by the top 1% had expanded to 38.1% while the portion owned by the bottom 60% had fallen to 4.7%. The worst losses were sustained by the bottom 40% of U.S. households who saw their share of the country’s assets drop from 0.9% in 1983 to just 0.2% in 1998.² When the workers of the rest of the world found themselves losing ground, American laborers found themselves caught in the same downward spiral. Market forces may respect many principles, but nationality is clearly not one of them.

Nor is rationality. Market decisions are the result of buyers and sellers pursuing their immediate interests, and while free markets have proven to be astoundingly effective at offering up a mind-boggling array of consumer goods, they have also proven to be singularly disastrous at ensuring social equity or planning for the future. To take just one example, the continued dependence of developed economies on fossil fuels, despite the looming threat of global warming, has nothing to do with the science available to us. We have—and have had for many years—cleaner, more sustainable methods of generating power for homes, industries, and vehicles. Why do we fail to use them? Because it would mean cutting into the profits enjoyed by the board members and shareholders of the oil industry, the electric power industry, and the auto industry. Shifting to a less profitable but more sustainable technology is a decision that market forces will never make. Only political power can force such a change.

The anti-capitalist movements have always known this. Unemployment, poverty, social deterioration, and environmental degradation have all been addressed, at one time or another, within capitalist societies. But they have never been remedied by the fundamental mechanisms of capitalism itself. This is the reason why anti-capitalist movements rose in the past and the reason why they will continue to rise, again and again, until a better way of life is won.

What Was Anti-Capitalism?

The precise origins of capitalism remain a subject of debate among historians. But whether shifts in trade patterns or legal structures gave rise to its basic dynamics, capitalism—as a way of life—first took shape during the Industrial Revolution. Tempting as it is to associate that hundred-year transformation first and foremost with the introduction of new technology, the innovations really responsible for making the Industrial Revolution what is was came in the organization of production. Through most of the eighteenth century, manufacturing was a small-scale affair, carried out by individual craftspeople in their homes or workshops, using hand tools they owned themselves. But if industries like cloth-weaving and iron-forging were going to make use of steam engines or water-powered looms, what was required was not only the technology itself, but a new way to use it: factories large enough to house the gigantic machines and accommodate the numbers of workers needed to operate them. Similarly, the whole factory system would have been impossible without urbanization: the growth of cities large enough to house, feed, and clothe this new industrial working class.

Yet, while the basic outlines of the Industrial Revolution—factory production and urbanization—were determined by the technique of production being employed, the character of social life in this brave new world was set by the way in which its resources were owned. There is nothing inherent in the nature of factory production that requires it to be nightmarishly grueling and dangerous, nor is there any immutable law demanding that city life be unhealthy, degrading, and cruel. There is, however, a direct trade-off between the conditions experienced by ordinary working people in factories and cities, and the profits to be made by factory-owners and urban landlords. In other words, the Industrial Revolution created poverty and misery not because it was an industrial revolution, but because it was a capitalist revolution: a mobilization of industrial technology in the interests of the few at the expense of the many.

The many responded to this brutal transformation of the world with apathy, alcoholism, and religious revivals, but also with political struggles. At one end of the continuum, workers destroyed machines and organized unions within individual firms; at the other end, they began to envision and to fight for a social transformation as sweeping as the one they were already living through. What sort of transformation was this to be? If the poverty and misery of the Industrial Revolution were caused by the fact that the bulk of productive resources was owned and operated by private individuals for their own benefit, then the key to transforming society in a more positive direction would be to bring those resources under public control for the benefit of the society as a whole.

Precisely how that reorganization was to be accomplished drew the dividing line between two camps of social revolutionaries. Socialism, communism, and social democracy (essentially interchangeable terms in the nineteenth century) built their political vision around three pillars: a critique of private property as the central principle of economic life; a corresponding critique of market-commodity exchange as the dominant force in social life; and a belief in the capacity of a democratic state to step in and improve things where private property and the market had created chaos and misery.³ Anarchism largely agreed with the first two ideas, but disagreed strongly with the last. For nineteenth-century anarchists, all forms of political authority were to be rejected in favor of voluntary and spontaneous forms of social organization.

Yet, in this respect, the anarchists shared a core belief with the apostles of capitalism: Both argued that the best form of society would arise from the spontaneous interaction of individuals freed from government interference. For both camps, the question of the proper relationship between state and society proved to be a haunting one throughout the twentieth century. If for socialists, communists, and social democrats the problem was one of insuring that a strong state with control over the economy remained meaningfully democratic, for anarchists the problem was exactly the reverse: maintaining effective control over private property without any form of state at all.

One further difficulty confronted the forces of social revolution: While capitalism did in fact give birth to its gravediggers, it fought with every weapon at its disposal to keep them at bay. Karl Marx, the single greatest analyst and critic of early capitalism, has often been ridiculed for predicting a future marked by the rise of anti-capitalist workers’ revolutions, yet this is precisely what actually happened. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, every corner of the globe was touched by social revolution, from Central Europe in 1848 to Central America in 1979. What did not occur frequently, easily, or unproblematically was the victory of those revolutions over their adversaries. In the highly developed capitalist countries, the ability of ruling classes to offer temporary compromises—institutionalized collective bargaining and social welfare benefits—often derailed the drive for more sweeping transformations. In the lesser-developed countries, the sheer lack of resources and the constant pressure exerted by the capitalist world (in both military and economic forms) damaged and deformed the revolutions that did come to power. It is worth remembering, though, that Marx had predicted two possible outcomes to the era of class struggle: a revolutionary transformation of society or the collective ruin of all those involved.

What Isn’t Anti-Capitalism?

So large did anti-capitalism loom on the horizon of the twentieth century that virtually every opposition movement seemed in one way or another to become associated with it. While for a time this helped to foster a sense of momentum—even inevitability—in anti-capitalist politics, it also had the gradual effect of confusing anti-capitalism with other, decidedly different, political agendas.

This occurred perhaps most often with the various expressions of anti-colonial nationalism. Even prior to the turn of the century, some social revolutionary thinkers had begun to develop a critique of colonialism, and by the end of WWI, opposition to imperialism had become an accepted element of anti-capitalist politics. More importantly, though, as independence movements arose in the colonized world (largely after WWII), they readily adopted for themselves the imagery and discourse of social revolution. On the one hand, this earned them practical benefits: a ready-made political theory and, in many cases, material assistance from the Soviet Union. On the other hand, however, the commitment of anti-colonial movements to anti-capitalist politics was not always a deep or lasting one. Once in power, anti-colonial leaders often jettisoned their critique of capitalism in favor of a more economically flexible vision of national strength and unity.

Why was this transformation such a seemingly effortless one? Although many anti-colonial movements expressed an opposition to capitalism for its exploitation of people as workers, the primary purpose of any anti-colonial effort is the expulsion of outsiders from what is to be an independent nation-state. This is to say that what is most central to an expression of anti-colonial nationalism (like any other kind of nationalism) is a claim about identity: the existence of a unique, exclusive people and that people’s right to political self-determination. In the context of colonial domination this may represent an important form of emancipation, but nothing about it suggests a critique of capitalism as such. If foreign exploiters are bad because they are foreign, indigenous exploiters may be perfectly acceptable. Thus, for many anti-colonial nationalists, a national capitalist class is something to be promoted rather than overthrown.

A similar set of circumstances and dynamics might also be said to have connected anti-capitalism to the politics of cultural identity. As with the struggles against imperialism, anti-capitalists have often been counted among the strongest allies of the movements opposed to racial, ethnic, and sexual oppression. When Marx and Engels drafted the Communist Manifesto in 1848, they felt compelled to respond within the text to one set of critics who had already identified the anti-capitalist movement with early feminist thought. In the U.S., for most of the twentieth century, the only political organization with a majority “white” membership to take an uncompromising, active stand against racism was the Communist Party. But while anti-capitalists have regularly filled the ranks of the movements for civil rights and gender equality, there has never been any good reason to assume that the relationship was a reciprocal one. As historian Eric Hobsbawm has argued, however just their struggles, identity groups are ultimately motivated by particularistic interests and exclusive claims. At the end of the day, they are for themselves and no one else.⁴

Like nationalism and identity politics, both fascism and religious fundamentalism have at times found capitalism to be an occasional inconvenience—challenging its tendency to trade moral fiber for consumer hedonism—yet both have always made their peace with it in the end. Hitler railed against “Jewish bankers” at the same time that he depended upon corporate giants like Krups to build his short-lived empire. Christian fundamentalists in the United States and Islamic fundamentalists in the Middle East often bemoan the commodification of sex while offering no similar critique of the commodification of labor-power. Anti-capitalism, by contrast, is a universalistic movement. It is not a complaint about who owns the banks and the factories, but about the way in which banks and factories are owned. It is not a criticism of the fact that women or Hispanics end up in the lower ranks of the working-class, but of the fact that any person should end up spending his or her life as little more than a worker. Anti-capitalists are opposed not only to the exploitation of racialized groups or religious minorities, but to the exploitation of all human beings.

Curiously enough, this is also the reason why anti-capitalism must be distinguished from environmentalism. The latter is, to be sure, a universalistic belief: environmentalists are for the preservation of the Amazon rainforest and the California redwoods alike. But environmentalism, particularly in its more radical forms, is ultimately uninterested in human beings. Thus, at one end of the spectrum, the Sierra Club bourgeoisie can comfortably accommodate a love for both endangered species and expanding markets, while at the other end, Earth First! activists can accept a thoroughgoing critique of capitalism without giving any substantial consideration to what sort of economic arrangements should replace it.

Of course, environmentalists might have good reason to be suspicious of anti-capitalist intentions. “Industrializing socialism” in Eastern Europe and the Third World was notoriously unconcerned with environmental protection and sustainable development. Yet, one fact we can note about defense of the environment in capitalist countries is that it has always and everywhere been an initiative of the state against the market. No firm in private industry would willingly incur the costs required to reduce their output of pollutants without government regulations forcing them to do so. So-called “green products” (i.e., unbleached toilet paper, non-aerosol sprays) have found small niche markets among enlightened consumers, but for most shoppers, price will win out over extra-economic appeal. Thus, while anti-capitalism does not in and of itself guarantee that the natural environment will be protected, it does offer the only set of tools with which we might realistically do so, while simultaneously looking after the needs and aspirations of humanity as a whole.

What Is Anti-Capitalism?

Anti-capitalism, then, begins with a commitment to the idea that capitalism cannot produce societies fit for all or even most of the people who live in them, and follows with a commitment to a realistic, achievable alternative. That alternative would necessarily mean the planned use of major economic resources to achieve a society in which all human beings could live more fully human lives. What would such a society look like? Some might suggest that what is most important about human beings is their radical individuality, and that any planned effort to provide for their needs and desires would only result in a massive hubristic fiasco. Others might argue, in a similar vein, that if a post-capitalist future is to be a democratic one, little if anything could be said in advance about how such a society would be organized. What such criticisms ignore, however, is that the ability to pursue individual desires and to participate in democratic institutions is rooted in a set of basic needs all people share. Someone dying of hunger has little use for the freedom to choose from thirty-seven varieties of soda in order to select the one most expressive of his or her unique personality. Likewise, someone able to meet their basic needs and still have time left over in the day for other activities might be better able to develop and express their individuality than someone barely able to make ends meet with a full-time job. Further still, the quality of some individual rights and freedoms might be meaningfully improved by the provision of certain fundamental goods. Freedom of speech might be more useful to someone who was also provided with a decent level of health care, just as the right to vote might be more useful to someone who was also provided with a high-quality education.

In its history, capitalism has done an outstanding job of providing a relatively small number of people with both the foundational goods (food, shelter, health care, education) and the time away from work to experience something we might call freedom. Anti-capitalism seeks to take that freedom away from no one. Rather, anti-capitalism, first and foremost, is a call for society to be reorganized in such a way as to provide the greatest amount of freedom for all; to use our resources and our technology to provide people with their needs so as to allow them to pursue their desires. For all but a handful, capitalism has failed. For the rest of us, anti-capitalism remains our only hope.

Endnotes:

1. Source: Global Economic Prospects and the Developing Countries, World Bank, 2001.

2. Source: “Recent Trends in Wealth Ownership 1983–1998,” Edward N. Wolff, Jerome Levy Economics Institute, 2000.

3. Two caveats apply here: (1) Private property, in this sense, refers to productive resources rather than personal property, i.e., factories and farms rather than shirts and shoes. (2) Socialists, communists, and social democrats did not necessarily reject all market mechanisms, but were critical of the increasing dominance of markets and market principles in all aspects of life.

4. Hobsbawm, Eric, “Identity Politics and the Left,” New Left Review, May/June, 1996.