Overthrowing capitalism for beginners: reply to Janet Daley

Posted on Tuesday 31 March, 2009
Filed Under Theory

 

EXCITEMENT mounts in my City fringes-based workplace over tomorrow’s anti-G20 demonstrations, with police claims that crusty hoards have commandeered the pub over the road as an operational headquarters.

Our HR department this morning emailed all staff, positively instructing us to ditch the normal dress code – suit and tie if you’ve got an external meeting, smart casual acceptable if not – and camouflage ourselves to merge with the expected anti-capitalist throng.

That presumably gives me licence to turn up in a leather jacket and one of the Che Guevara T-shirts I picked up during my month in Cuba in 2006, which will make a welcome change from my usual attire.

Meanwhile, rightwing commentators are doing their best to convince potential protestors that they are entirely misguided in their ire. I don’t suppose that the readership of the Daily Telegraph includes anarchists and Trots in any real numbers, but yesterday’s column from Janet Daley seems squarely addressed to just such an audience.

Maybe she should get the screed printed up as a leaflet, perhaps under a catchy title such as ‘Why we are not marching’, and pay pro-free market activists to dish it out in the Square Mile on Wednesday and Thursday? Just a thought.

Ms Daley’s primary contention is that capitalism cannot actually be overthrown, presumably because what Adam Smith described as the ‘natural propensity to truck and barter’ is an innate feature of human existence:

Some of the demonstrators in this week’s G20 protest jamboree are demanding the “overthrow” of capitalism. Well, there are lots of things than can be done to “capitalism” – it can be undermined, suppressed, sabotaged, even outlawed – but it cannot be “overthrown” because in itself, it has no power.

It is the very opposite, in fact, of a tyranny. It is simply the conglomeration of all the transactions made between individual and corporate players in an open market. Some people may gain power through those transactions but that power is transient and contingent on their own financial success: they are not installed in immutable positions from which they can be forcibly removed in a coup d’etat.

Ms Daley is right in her insistence that capitalism is not a tangible object, in the same sense as a building. Indeed, Marx was explicit that capital should be seen as a social relation.

Social relations, in and of themselves, have no concrete existence. They become manifest not in the relation between individual human beings, but rather in the relations between distinct social classes.

In political terms, this translates as the dominance of the bourgeoisie, as a class, over the proletariat, which in turn entails the subjection of individual workers as members of that class to exploitation.

When G20 protestors demand the ‘overthrow of capitalism’, this really shorthand for the overthrow of the social relations necessarily embodied in generalised commodity production. And as the saying goes, another world is possible.

Again, Ms Daley is formally correct to point out that the power of individual members of the ruling class can in some circumstances be ‘transient and contingent on financial success’. Given the prevalence of mechanisms for the transmission and continuance of class privilege, such instances are rare. But they do occur.

Sometimes the likes of Conrad Black – and surely Janet must know the guy personally – do end up in the slammer. Yet such one-off falls from grace have no impact on the power of the ruling class overall, which is in no way dependent on the fortune of any one of its given constituents.

Those who talk of “overthrowing” capitalism are determined to depict it as a system of government in a precise parallel with socialism, when in reality, capitalism is not a system in the ideological sense. It is, if anything, an anti-system: the aggregation of human behaviour as it goes about fulfilling particular wants and needs.

Here Ms Daley descends into tautology. ‘The aggregation of human behaviour as it goes about fulfilling particular wants and needs’ is a description that applies with equal rigour to any number of modes of production. North Koreans undertake behaviour that fulfils particular wants and needs; I doubt that Janet would herald them as exemplars of capitalism simply on that score.

In political terms, the demands of those on the street will range from the immediate abolition of the state – now there really is an ‘anti-system’, Janet! – or workers’ power as a prelude to the withering away of the state or simply greater consideration for the lot of the losers inevitably generated by the brand of economics Ms Daley propagates so virulently. And there’s more:

It can be described in anthropomorphic terms, such as “ruthless” or “benign” but of itself has no motives and no objectives.

A mode of production may not have motives or objectives in the human sense, but capitalists – as the carriers of capitalist social relations – certainly do. Marx encapsulates this process nicely when he remarks: ‘Accumulate, accumulate; that is Moses and the prophets!’

In their pursuit of accumulation, they are certainly capable of ruthlessness, as the greed of recent decades has fully underlined. Check out a third world sweatshop and you will see what I mean. That is why so many people want to see it replaced with something nicer.

Oh, and if anyone reading this is planning to riot tomorrow, please be considerate and don’t kick anything off too near my workplace. I need to get home in time for tea, so I can look after the kids. Thanks.

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