Becoming an Anti-Capitalist (with History!)
Becoming anti-capitalist is not a possibility that occurs to many people because capitalism just seems like a name given by a bunch of blowhards to how the world works. Sure, it might be unfair and bad sometimes but it’s what we got and we have to make the best of it. Something so complicated, entrenched, and abstract as a social system can’t be fought anyway, so what’s the point of trying? Being anti-capitalist appears like being a fish fighting against the ocean.
But i’m here to show you that capitalism is not “just how the world works” and that there is worth in fighting against it. The appearance of capitalism as something natural, inevitable, and “the best of all possible worlds” is a result of something called reification. Reification is the process whereby transient, historically contingent (read: temporary) social relations take on the appearance of permanence and naturalness, and it is a major obstacle to many people becoming anti-capitalist. Depending on who you ask, capitalism has been around for 250–700 years, so in any case, it has been around long enough to have been an integral organizing force of all of our political and social institutions as well as our shared ideologies and belief systems. Since capitalism has shaped the entire social world that we inhabit, it becomes reified, appearing to be preordained, natural, and permanent. Other ways of organizing society become unthinkable and taboo. In this way the idea that capitalism is the only and for that matter, best, possibility becomes deeply embedded in people’s worldview. Some people react to criticisms of capitalism with anger and anxiety because we have been trained to see capitalism as good and inevitable, so questioning the “natural” order of things shakes the foundations of their understanding of the world. And this isn’t unique to capitalism, every social system in human history became reified and came to be seen as natural and inevitable by the people who lived it. There is simply a normal human tendency to view the social system that you live in as “the one”. This is in large part due to the simple fact that social systems exist on a longer time scale than human beings, and persist for much longer than a person’s life. So in order to see through the confusion of reification, a historical education is necessary. Thinking about capitalism historically allows us to overcome the deeply-ingrained feeling that capitalism is something special that shouldn’t be questioned, rather than one type of social organization among many.
I have been helped in my understanding of the history of capitalism through reading scholars such as Ellen Meiksins Woods, Jason W. Moore, Giovanni Arrighi, Karl Polyani, and of course, Marx. Learning about political economic history shows the long historical processes by which capitalism was built and imposed by those who it served to benefit. Capitalism didn’t grow organically from the natural human tendency to truck and barter, but was fought for by the burgeoning bourgeoisie over centuries. But we can’t talk about the rise of the capitalist class without also talking about the state. For most of human history, and particularly in the feudalist period, states followed the logic of territorialism. Territorialism says that to increase the power of the state, increase the amount of land and number of people under state control. With the advent of the capitalist mode of production, states discovered a new method of increasing their power: by accumulating wealth and building a capitalist economy. This created an alliance between the capitalist class and the state from the very beginning. States use capitalists to increase their power via wealth accumulation, and capitalists use the state’s authority and monopoly on violence for the coercion necessary to establish and maintain a capitalist system. While the capitalist class and the state are not reducible to each other and at times there are significant divergences of interests between them, this alliance between capitalism and the state has endured for hundreds of years and is still going strong today.
This abiding affinity between the state and capitalists has allowed them to use the juridical power of states to construct and then impose the legal and political prerequisites for a capitalist system around the world. These institutional ingredients of capitalism, like private property, the commodification of land and labor, and the organization of society by markets, were brought into existence to enrich and empower the elite that fought for them at the expense of everyone else. These capitalist institutions and social relations did not spread around the globe peacefully, they were more often than not violently imposed on an unwilling population by coalitions of capitalists and states, a process coined by Marx as “primitive accumulation”. Primitive accumulation simply refers to the creation of the necessary conditions for capital accumulation through the privatization of common land and the violent separation of communities from their land and traditional ways of life which results. This converts people into wage laborers, another necessary ingredient for a capitalist system. Western colonialism served to integrate large swathes of the world into capitalist production, trade, and financial circuits through the violent separation of millions from their traditional ways of life and the institutionalization of markets and private property. The power imbalance that allowed colonialism to exist in the first place never went away, and continues to facilitate the imposition of capitalism and extraction of wealth by the Western world to this day, in the neocolonial era. The “structural reforms” imposed on the global south by the IMF and the World Bank (controlled by the west, predominantly the US) are examples of the forceful penetration of markets into new parts of the globe. The overthrow of anti-capitalist regimes in Iran, Chile, and Guatemala (among many others) and support of right-wing death squads in much of Latin America also illustrate the imposition of capitalism against the democratic wishes of the people. The fact that the US, the most powerful country in the world, spent the better part of 40 years in the Cold War squashing left-wing movements and violently opposing any country that tried to work against the capitalist status quo tells us that capitalism wasn’t welcomed around the world with open arms but was foisted on millions who wanted a different system. The forced imposition of capitalism by entrenched powers comes in many forms, and can even be seen in the establishment’s harsh and relentless opposition to politicians who threaten capitalist dominance, such as Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn. It is through this long historical process of dispossesion and imposition of capitalist legal and political structures led by state violence that capitalism came to dominate the globe.
In The Great Transformation Karl Polyani described the constant tug of war between the forces of capital accumulation which seek for all human relationships to be mediated by competitive, impersonal markets, and local communities of normal people fighting back for social provision and higher standards of living. This resistance consistently erupts because the commodification of labor (human beings), land (the natural world), housing, healthcare, and education — things necessarily commodified under capitalism — inherently degrades access to and quality of these essential aspects of life, and thereby serves to undermine the social foundations of society. The constant presence of anti-capitalist forces as defenses against capitalist predation goes to show that the selfish, competitive, utility-maximizing people that capitalism encourages us to be is in deep contradiction with the humane, generous, and communal basis of human society. This tendency has been evidenced in a multitude of left-wing movements around the world who fight for rights to their land, healthcare, education, and a more equal society. We’ll never know what these movements could have achieved were they to gain power because they are consistently violently pushed back by reactionary forces aided by the state and capitalists. This constant pro-capitalist violence serves to maintain a system which otherwise would face serious threats to its existence.
Why have some people spent hundreds of years imposing capitalism against the will of the majority and at the risk of ripping apart the fabric of society? Because they were aware that it is a system that inevitably empowers the few (them) at the expense of the many (us). By thinking more about the historical process of capitalism we can see it as the flawed product of a relatively small group of human beings, not the inherently good and inevitable system its proponents claim. Since capitalism is the product of human activity (as all social structures are), there’s no need for it to be sacrosanct; if you can critique a car or a tv show, you can critique capitalism. As human beings, it is within our power, and our rights, to change the society we inherited and move towards something better.
By thinking about the history of capitalism, we are taking a jab at its defenses, since history necessarily implies a beginning and an end. From our current vantage point it is easy to forget that capitalism didn’t exist for thousands of years of human civilization, and that each of those other modes of social organization seemed just as permanent and inevitable as capitalism does now. Moreover, the legal and social prerequisites for capitalism — private ownership of the means of production, commodified labor and land, distribution of resources via markets — also didn’t exist for thousands of years. Instead, a historically contingent combination of technology, politics, and class power created the conditions for them to be brought into existence. Students of history know that the only constant in this world is change. The conditions that allow capitalism to thrive came into being and have persisted for several centuries. But the political, social, and economic structures that support capitalism will one day change to the degree that it will no longer be feasible. This isn’t an insane attempt at clairvoyance, simply an observation of the one law of history. When and how the end of capitalism comes about is impossible to predict. We do know, however, that how it plays out will be directly related to the interests and relative power of the social groups and classes that exist at that time. This is why building a socialist movement right now is so vital, so that when the time comes, the left has the power to oppose competing groups and direct the post-capitalist transition to the future we want.
By analyzing the history of capitalism, we can see that capitalism’s penetration of societies around the world isn’t a result of human nature, or a benign process of diffusion, but was all along a class project intended to guarantee the dominance of an elite class and their ability to exploit everyone else. When we see that capitalism was actively constructed by human beings for their own benefit, we can see that there’s no need to put capitalism on a pedestal and treat it like a perfect system or the best that we can hope for. Just like the systems that came before it, capitalism is based on domination and exploitation, and this in and of itself obligates us to fight for something better. That something will come after capitalism is certain, but what it is depends on us.
