Part I
We are anti-capitalists not only because capitalism is an absurd and cruel system.
Marx: “There must be something rotten in the very core of a social system which increases its wealth without diminishing its misery.”
But we also are anti-capitalists because we are sure that human beings have the potential to be better and happier humans than capitalism permits them to be. Capitalism rejects ideals such as sharing, mutuality, respect and compassion.
Stephen Hessel & Edgar Morin, The Path to Hope: “Humanity is unable to attain humanity.”
On the absurdity of capitalist relations of production
From John (Fire) Lame Deer, Sioux Lakota, 1903—1976:
“Before our white brothers arrived to make us civilized men, we didn’t have any kind of prison. Because of this, we had no delinquents. Without a prison, there can be no delinquents. We had no locks nor keys and therefore among us there were no thieves. When someone was so poor that he couldn’t afford a horse, a tent or a blanket, he would, in that case, receive it as a gift.
We were too uncivilized to give importance to private property. We didn’t know any kind of money and consequently, the value of a human being was not determined by his wealth.
We had no written laws laid down, no lawyers, no politicians, therefore we were not able to cheat and swindle one another. We were really in bad shape before the white men arrived and I don’t know how to explain how we were able to manage without these fundamental things (so they tell us) are so necessary for a civilized society.”
This is hard to see because there is a natural tendency for people to think that what they do now represents what they are, that what they do now is human nature. They/we do not realize that we are acting on asset of values dictated by the political economic system that we inhabit. As John McMurtry, Unequal Freedoms: global markets as an ethical system, wrote:
“Presupposing and identifying with the value system in which one has been indoctrinated day in and day out as a native member of a society form a mental block against recognizing it as a value system, just as a fish cannot recognize the sea… it is not ‘human nature’ that is the problem. The problem is not how we are constructed, but in the inert repetition of the mind, a condition that does not question socially conditioned value programs.”
Victor Hugo:
“Men become accustomed to poison by degrees.”
There is a task. It is not only to identify and reject the values which capitalism spawns and pretends to be uncontroversial, but also to formulate values which will make us better human beings. As Erik Olin Wright, How to be an Anti-capitalist in the 21st Century, 2019, wrote:
“While… it is vital to identify the specific ways in which capitalism harms the material interests of certain categories of people, it is also necessary to classify the values that would like an economy to foster.”
How capitalist relations of production destroy human relationships
From the play by Wallace Shawn, The Fever, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1991, explaining what Karl Marx meant when he wrote that, in capitalism, commodity fetishism reigns.
“[The] explanation was very elusive. He used the example that people say, “Twenty yards of linen are worth two pounds.” People say that about every thing that it has a certain value. This is worth that. This coat, this sweater, this cup of coffee: each thing worth some quantity of money, or some number of other things – one coat, worth three sweaters, or so much money – as if that coat, suddenly appearing on the earth, contained inside somewhere itself an amount of value, like an inner soul, as if the coat were a fetish, a physical object that contains a living spirit. But what really determines the value of the coat? The coat’s price comes from its history, the history of all the people involved in making it and selling it and all the particular relationships they had. And we buy the coat, we, too, form relationships with all those people, and yet we hide those relationships from our awareness by pretending we live in a world where coats have no history but fall down from heaven with prices marked inside. “I like this coat,” we say, “It’s not expensive,” as if that were a fact about the coat and not the end of a story about all the people who made it and sold it. ”I like the pictures in this magazine.” A naked woman leans over a fence. A man buys a magazine and stares at her picture. The destinies of these two are linked. The man has paid the woman to take off her clothes, to lean over the fence. The photograph contains its history – the moment the woman unbuttoned her shirt, how she felt, what the photographer said. The price of the magazine is a code that describes the relationships between all these people – the woman, the man, the publisher, the photographer – who commanded, who obeyed. The cup of coffee contains the history of the peasants who picked the beans, how some of them fainted in the sun, some were beaten, some were kicked.”
We should begin with thinking of ourselves as ‘living among others who also have desires and needs’. We should start off from the proposition that we live in a community where all are equally precious and valuable. The logic of this beginning point is that the production of material welfare is a communal responsibility. Each of us is to produce to serve the other ’s needs. This is our responsibility as community members. None of us is to be motivated to produce because this will satisfy our own needs. We are not to produce a good or render a service because this means we get something in return. We are to do it to meet the needs of others.
Michael Lebowitz, The Socialist Alternative:
“The solidarian society is precisely a ‘gift economy’—one in which those who give are rewarded not by the anticipation of what they may receive at some point in return but rather because not to give violates one’s own sense of virtue and honour.”
Peter Singer, How are we to Live?, Melbourne Text, 1993:
“To live ethically is to think about things beyond one’s own interest. When I think ethically I become just one being, with needs and desires of my own, certainly, but living among others who also have needs and desires. When we are acting ethically, we should be able to justify what we are doing, and this justification must be of a kind that could in principle, convince any reasonable being.”
Kate Soper, “The humanism in post-humanism” Comparative Critical Studies 9, 2012:377:
“Neo-humanism… in which human beings acknowledge our collective responsibility to each other, to the planet and to other species.”
Albert Einstein, Living Philosophies, New York: Simon & Shuster, 1931:
“From the standpoint of daily life…there is one thing we do know: that man is here for the sake of other men.”
“A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life depend on the labour of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving.”
C.B. McPherson, Democratic Theory: essays in retrieval, on what a better society, a more democratic society would be like:
“A person would not primarily be an owner and accumulator of goods but ‘a doer, a creator, an enjoyer of his human attributes… the capacity for rational understanding, for moral judgment and action, for aesthetic creation or contemplation, for the emotional activities of friendship and love and, sometimes, for religious experiences.”
#Ubantu is a Zulu word. It means “I am, because you are.” Popularized by Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu. Embodies the ideal of community.
This ideal is also found in the last component of the famous slogan from the French revolution: “Liberty. Equality, Fraternity.”
It is an aspiration which has been shared by human beings over the millenia, even if it rarely has been permitted full rein. Anti-capitalists must engage in a politics that makes this vision of more humanity, of a better world possible. It is, then, a set of goals which should guide anti-capitalists as they fight against the daily injustices of capitalism.