Until 1976, using the word “capitalist” in a political conversation was as potent a sign of rebellion as getting a nose piercing. But then suddenly capitalism was back, and no one apologized. And if anti-capitalism were a solid wall of economic and philosophical thought, that would be the story of its builders. Unfortunately, it is a hastily constructed structure, and Cassidy’s self-professed task is to explain why critics of capitalism always fail.
By Paul MASON
“Can this still be called capitalism?” asked the Labour MP Anthony Crosland in 1956. Observing Britain’s very generous welfare system, the wide range of nationalised industries, the decline of unbridled individualism and the softening of class struggle achieved under post-war Labour governments, he answered with a resounding “No.” If there was still some exploitation, it was mainly by the state, through taxation. And while some private ownership of industry remained, it no longer played a decisive role in regulating economic life.
“Just as there was a point where feudal economics died,” Crosland wrote, “there must come a point where capitalism will disappear almost unnoticed.” And in Britain that point arrived around the time Bill Halley replaced Stan Kenton in the pop charts.
It may seem a strange view today, but my generation, born in the 1960s, grew up with it. Capitalism was dead, insisted right-wing social democrats like Crosland, marveling at the goodness of the welfare state. The only revolution left to be waged was for liberal social values. As a result, for the first two decades of my life, the only people I heard use the word “capitalism” were communists. When I was still a child, I played a part in a Noel Coward play in which a Welsh Bolshevik keeps saying the words “capitalist greed,” provoking wry laughter among the miners and cotton spinners who were our audience.
Until 1976, using the word “capitalist” in a political conversation was as powerful an indicator of rebellion as getting a nose piercing. But then suddenly capitalism was back, and no one apologized.
If you had lived through the vengeful decline that Margaret Thatcher inflicted on British industry, what you would have seen was not just mass unemployment and the destruction of social cohesion, but also the return of the idea that capitalism – in its pure 19th-century sense – was good and that all this had to happen to save it. Forty years after the British miners’ strike, memories of which come flooding back to me every time I smell coal, anyone suggesting that capitalism is over would want to undergo a psychiatric visit. Yet there are a growing number of people who think it is terrible. In the book “Capitalism and Its Critics: A Battle of Ideas in the Modern World,” the American journalist John Cassidy tells the story of the system through the eyes of those who despised it. He begins with William Bolts, the whistleblower who exposed human rights abuses and super-exploitation perpetrated by the East India Company in the 1770s, and passes the baton to Luddites, Owenites and romantic anti-capitalists such as Thomas Currill, before moving on to Marx and Engels, Rosa Luxemburg and Keynes.
If anti-capitalism were a solid wall of economic and philosophical thought, this would be the story of its builders. Unfortunately, it is a hastily constructed structure, and Cassidy’s self-professed task is to explain why critics of capitalism always fail.
Marx was so excited by the US financial crisis of 1857 that in a letter to Engels he called it “BEAUTIFUL” in capital letters. In his reply, Engels called it “brilliant,” adding: “We are waiting for the opportunity.”
But capitalism survived because central banks printed money, but also because the great growth of the Second Industrial Revolution had just begun. “Over the past two centuries, variations of this story have played out many times, demonstrating the power of capitalism to recover and the ability of governments to act as managers of its crises,” Cassidy writes. The journalist then turns to the ideas of renowned economists such as Kondratieff and Schumpeter, for whom capitalism – despite all its flaws – is a cyclical system, with self-correction in its DNA.
He also introduces us to critics from the Global South, for whom capitalism’s ability to exploit the less developed world has been essential to its survival. Cassidy also gives us a description of the early theorists of eco-socialism, who spoke of resource depletion long before we knew that carbon emissions – not soil fertility – would be the ultimate constraint on economic growth.
As a collection of failed critiques, however, the book is far from comprehensive. Cassidy makes the Anglosphere the central framework. As a result, Lenin gets little attention; nor does the great work of Soviet economists, except that of Kondratiev, who was executed in his cell in 1938 during Stalin’s Great Purge. Anti-globalist economists like Dani Rodrik and Joseph Stiglitz have their own chapters, but not Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, whose books inspired hundreds of thousands of people to take to the streets in the anti-globalization movement. On the other hand, there is a welcome chapter on the work of Silvia Federici, who was among those who launched the “Wages for Housework” movement in the 1970s, based on one of the most radical critiques of Marx ever made.
But at the end of his 518-page book, Cassidy still seems undecided about the central question: Is capitalism destroying itself, or will it survive anyway? And if the answer is the latter, and we want to change it, what forces exist in society that could meaningfully overthrow it?
If we abandon chronology and categorize the strategies of those mentioned by Cassidy, there are essentially three of them: revolt, reform, and survival. You can try, as the Peruvian feminist Flora Tristan argued in 1843, to destroy capitalism by creating a large union of workers whose collective actions paralyze the system. Or you can try to “live in spite of capitalism,” by forming small experimental communities, as the followers of Henri Saint-Simon did in Paris in the 1820s. Or you can try – as Crosland’s generation did – to eradicate the most chaotic features of the system by using the state, to the point of eliminating the “animal spirits” of the entrepreneur.
Since I first embraced anti-capitalism as an ideology during a steelworkers’ protest in Sheffield in 1980, I have gone through all three strategies myself. I was a Leninist in the Thatcher era, I supported the tent camps and fence protests of the 1990s, and I had high hopes for the government of Alexis Tsipras in Greece, whose defeat at the hands of the IMF and ECB marks its 10th anniversary this very day.
Although I am a fierce critic of Leninism today, I think it is worth acknowledging that the current global situation should remind us of its importance. To put it bluntly, the world is heading for destruction. Economic stagnation in the global north is eroding support for democracy. The manipulation of the infosphere by capitalists like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel is diminishing our ability to think and act independently; and the unwavering power of fossil fuel capitalists – on display during Donald Trump’s grand tour of servility in the Persian Gulf last week – shows that the threat of capitalist self-interest blocking progress towards a zero-emissions industry is real. For me, the most important thing that has changed since the 1980s is not that the proletariat has atomized and lost its coherence; or that identity politics has replaced class as an organizing force.
But the planet is burning and the rules-based global order – which both Crosland’s generation and mine believed to be permanent – is crumbling before our eyes. All of these phenomena are not the result of individual bad actors or “external shocks.”
They are at one time the product of capitalism, of a technological framework and of ecological reality. The shocks that ended the “Goldilocks Age” were, after all, produced in the “guts” of the capitalist system. The collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, the euro crisis, the sudden outbreak of Covid-19 from the capital of China’s weak industry, and Vladimir Putin’s ethno-nationalist attack on Ukraine: these are events that a resurrected Lenin would consider historically karmic, given the orgy of self-enrichment and greed that preceded them. Even though in the developed world, Leninism is essentially a group of leather-jacketed revivalists, you may have noticed that they can still bring half a million people onto the streets of London over issues like Gaza.
Meanwhile, in China, Leninism is the state doctrine of a ruthless class of billionaire state capitalists, who will be only too happy to pick up the broken pieces of the liberal democratic order if we in the West let it collapse.
Since 2015, I have argued that the left needs a “revolutionary reformism”: a politics that acknowledges that capitalism is an unstable, violent, and time-limited system, but that uses the state, democracy, and the self-activity of ordinary people to promote a coherent alternative.
Unlike any previous generation, we have a countdown timer in the corner of our screens. On the eve of her assassination in 1919, Rosa Luxemburg wrote that the proletariat marches to victory through a series of defeats. So she assumed that she had the luxury of time. We, by contrast, have a maximum of two decades to prevent climate catastrophe, a task that will only be made more difficult by the world’s immersion in Great Power rivalry. So, much as I admire Cassidy’s study of the great anti-capitalist thinkers of the past, I don’t think we have time to pick and choose. No protest movement in the past 20 years has achieved its goal. No tent camps, no “direct action” has changed the world. What we need is radical social democracy.
There is no time to abolish capitalism before climate chaos sets in. We must mitigate that chaos, and if not stop it, by reinventing capitalism in a radically new form, as different from today’s capitalism as Crosland’s was from Edwardian capitalism. And as there is no time and the ship is sinking, I am very happy to be sitting in the same lifeboat to which Crosland committed himself: the Labour Party – which, despite all the attacks currently being made on its leader by the media, is the only institution in Britain with the ambition and the capacity to achieve net zero emissions, to fight inequality and to stabilise geopolitics.
