“What is capitalism?” Easy. Capitalism’s FREEDOM and DEMOCRACY! Unless we try to use that freedom
and democracy to vote in a people-centred government that challenges capitalism in any way,
like in Chile in 1973 when Salvador Allende, the democratically elected socialist president,
was ousted from office and replaced by the fascist Augusto Pinochet in a CIA-backed coup.
But don’t get me wrong, capitalism is freedom and democracy for some people - just not us.
“Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich--that is the
democracy of capitalist society.” (Lenin, State and Revolution, Ch.5)
Normal working people don’t get a say on how our workplaces are run – the places where we spend
most of our waking lives. We don’t get a say in what homes are built where and who gets to live
in them. In fact, we don’t get a meaningful say in the day-to-day running of our societies at all.
The only thing we do get is the opportunity to choose a representative of the ruling class
once every four or five years to administer capitalist rule – and if we attempt to venture
outside those narrow confines, then you’d better believe it’ll be time for the international
capitalist class to mount a CIA-backed coup to bring us even more FREEDOM and DEMOCRACY!
So – let’s be honest – capitalism? Not all it’s cracked up to be. Now what the feck is it?
Well, let’s find out. ---
Welcome to Socialism 101: a series designed to help educate people with no prior knowledge on
the basics of socialism and communism from an explicitly Marxist-Leninist
and Marxist-Leninist-Maoist perspective with short and easily-digestible videos.
If this sounds interesting to you, go ahead and hit subscribe and turn on the notification bell
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--- Now, so far in this series, we’ve
learnt that capitalism is a stage in historical development between feudalism and socialism.
We’ve also talked a bit about capitalism’s relations of production: workers sell their labour
power through wage-labour, and capitalists purchase this in order to make profits.
From this we can build a basic understanding of capitalism:
Capitalism is a system of private ownership of the means of production for the purpose
of extracting profits (or surplus value) produced by wage labourers.
How did we get here? Well, our old friend, Karl Marx, said that
this system “becomes inevitable from the moment there is a free sale, by the labourer himself,
of labour-power as a commodity. But it is also only from then onwards that commodity production
is generalised and becomes the typical form of production; it is only from then onwards that,
from the first, every product is produced for sale and all wealth produced goes through the sphere of
circulation.” (Marx, Capital Vol 1, Ch.24)
Now, under earlier systems, like feudalism, there was also a limited amount of simple
commodity production – like if you grew some food for yourself but weren’t able to eat it all so
you sold the left-overs – but this production under earlier systems was generally for Use.
Capitalism developed out of feudalism as commodity production started small but then
grew with the rise of the bourgeoisie and became generalised as the typical form of production.
“To the extent that commodity production, in accordance with its own inherent laws, develops
further, into capitalist production, the property laws of commodity production change into the laws
of capitalist appropriation.” (Marx, Capital Vol 1, Ch.24)
As we see this transition from feudalism to capitalism, we also see massive legal changes
in society that allow for the free trade of both the means of production and labour-power,
which itself now becomes a commodity. “The capitalist epoch is [...] characterized
by the fact that labour-power, in the eyes of the worker himself, takes on the form of a commodity
which is his property; his labour consequently takes on the form of wage-labour [...] it is
only from this moment that the commodity-form of the products of labour becomes universal.”
(Marx, Capital Vol 1, Ch.1) So, when you’ve got private ownership
of the means of production, when you’ve got generalised commodity production, and when you’ve
got capitalists making profits from workers through wage-labour… You’ve got capitalism.
And that can manifest in more of a free-market-oriented form like in the
United States, or a slightly more controlled, social-democratic form like in Norway.
Importantly, governments themselves can (and do) engage in capitalism; including commodity
production, the extraction of surplus value through wage-labour, etc. There’s a common
myth that “socialism is when big government does stuff”, making capitalism the opposite of that.
But, if that were the case, then Saudi Arabia would be socialist, with its nationalised oil
company and large public sector. But, as we know, Saudi Arabia is… well, an absolute
monarchy that in many ways embodies capitalism taken to many of its natural conclusions.
Now, it was mentioned earlier that there are various stages of historical development,
but within each stage there are also various sub-stages. Within capitalism, we can identify
three main stages: “Mercantile Capitalism” that emerged from feudalism and primarily focused on
controlling national and international trade; “Industrial Capitalism” which was dominant in
the time when Karl Marx himself was writing and was characterised by a much sharper division
of labour, heavy machinery, and so on; and “Imperialist Capitalism” where capitalism
has developed to such a point where capitalist monopolies rule the world – this is the sub-stage
that we still live under at the moment. We could go another level deeper again
and talk about neoliberal capitalism as a stage within imperialist capitalism,
a sub-stage of a sub-stage, but at that point we’re mostly just splitting hairs
as the underlying mechanisms of imperialist capitalism remain fundamentally unchanged.
And don’t worry, we’ll talk all about those underlying mechanisms in a later video
dedicated specifically to imperialist capitalism. You’re gonna be sick of hearing about imperialism
by the end of this series. ---
Today we’ve looked at the meaning of capitalism as a system predicated on private ownership of
the means of production, generalised commodity production, and wage labour, through which
capitalists make profits from workers. We’ve also looked at the three main stages of capitalism;
mercantile, industrial, and imperialist. Oh, and we also addressed the idea that
capitalism is when small government, freedom and democracy – which, eh… no. So much no.
Next up, “What Is Socialism?” ---
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condition, Jess, Ian McShea, Dan Hunter, soup, Pontus, Colm Walsh, Hagen Michels, Evan Crossland,
“..”, Boricua Guerilla, Roja and Daniel Hamilton. I wouldn’t be able to make these videos without
yous and I certainly wouldn’t be able to pay my bills. Cheers, everyone. Slán go Fóill.