But can we really know what capitalism is?
Many people throughout the world have a negative view of "capitalism". But if one asks them what they mean by this word, one gets very different answers. This is not, however, merely a semantic question! To escape capitalism, one must first know what it consists of. Other generations have paid dearly for the lack of clarity on this matter.
One can distinguish, very schematically, three essential answers:
The first holds that capitalism consists of neoliberalism, unregulated globalisation, the worldwide domination of finance, banks, speculation, or a few large multinationals, which seize all the wealth produced by those who work. These phenomena are certainly very real, and they are scandalous. But they constitute only the most visible level, the surface. When one sets the "profiteers" of the financial sphere against the honest working people and savers, one is objectively close — even without knowing it — to that false anti-capitalism which had characterised historical fascism and a certain strand of the contemporary far-right: capitalism would consist solely of the domination of a small group of parasites who profit from the production system, whilst that system itself is considered something positive or natural. This conception slides easily towards conspiracism and antisemitism. It excludes any reflection on the way in which all people (the 99% !) who live in a capitalist society contribute to it, and often adhere to that way of life through consumption. Capitalism is reduced to a simple question of distributing a wealth whose content is not called into question. No structural category of capitalism — such as wages and profits — is called into question, and even less so the categories of labour and money, commodity and value.
Very often capitalism is then identified with the free "market" alone, dominated by private interests, whilst the State and its institutions are considered expressions of a public and tendentially democratic sphere, which must be used to put a brake on capitalism. In this vision, the Keynesian era — roughly the years 1945 to 1980 (at least in the "developed" Western countries) — appears as a partial overcoming of capitalism, and the subsequent neoliberalism as the return of a capitalism no longer "tamed". However, the triumph of an increasingly deregulated capitalism is not the fruit of a conspiracy between the most rapacious faction of capital and corrupt, reactionary politicians, nor the result of the collapse of the Soviet Union, which would have eliminated capital's need to make concessions to a tendentially rebellious working class. This conception of capitalism therefore does not aim to overcome it — because it implicitly regards it as insurmountable — but seeks to mitigate it. In the final analysis, it resolves into a question of "purchasing power". On the other hand, it feeds resentments towards "those at the top", resentments which, however understandable, tend in truth to stabilise the system, directing discontent towards a restricted group from which it would suffice to strip excessive power (and even then, generally without lasting consequences). This approach is very widespread, not only on the left, though often poorly articulated.
A somewhat more radical version is that essentially linked to traditional Marxism and the labour movement, which associates capitalism above all with the domination of the bourgeoisie and class struggle. A social class holds the means of production — such as factories and land — where it puts to work those who do not possess these means, in exchange for a wage that is lower than the value obtained through this labour: and this constitutes exploitation. In this perspective, the evil lies principally in the private ownership of the means of production. Evidently, this approach comes somewhat closer to the deep structure of capitalism, beyond its individual historical phases, and recognises that finance is a sphere dependent on production. However, the excessive emphasis placed on the question of ownership creates the illusion that a change of ownership — above all by "socialising" production, in the form of state management or workers' self-management — would bring about the end of exploitation and alienation in labour. This approach also has difficulty explaining the fact that today, in many countries, (pseudo-)independent workers outnumber wage-earners, and that they do not confront a single capitalist, but an anonymous market, still governed by the logic of labour that produces value represented in money.
One must also recall that exploitation and the domination of an owning class existed equally — sometimes in extreme forms — in previous societies, and do not constitute a specific difference of capitalism; just as colonialism, permanent wars, racism, and patriarchy did not come into the world with capitalism in the eighteenth century. This specific difference — by which capitalism (definitively established in the eighteenth century in some countries, after centuries of preparation) constitutes a radical break with all previous forms of society — resides in its tautological and abstract character: wealth no longer consists of objects and services useful for life, but of a value, which is given by the pure quantity of productive labour performed, measured in time, without regard for its content. Marx called this aspect of labour the abstract side of labour (of any labour within capitalism), also referred to as abstract labour (which does not mean immaterial). Value takes on a visible form in money.
The plainly visible fact that production takes place for the sole purpose of increasing a sum of money — of transforming one hundred dollars into one hundred and ten, then into one hundred and twenty, and so on — is not due (solely) to the uncontrollable "greed" of a social class, but to the fact that labour serves only to produce value, and not real wealth. This process advances blindly, in an automatic and autonomous fashion: the capitalists themselves, though evidently profiting from it, are merely the executors of a process upon which they depend.
Unlike previous societies, capitalism cannot remain static, but must continually expand — both geographically (imperialism) and within societies — satisfying ever more needs through the consumption of commodities, the purchase of which presupposes having worked. Producing bombs is "labour" within capitalism; caring for one's children or tending a kitchen garden is not "labour" within it. Capitalism draws its strength, from the very outset, from its union with the industrial applications of science; industrial society and capitalist society coincide. It has a totalitarian tendency on the social and everyday plane, and has colonised the imagination as well. There are evidently enormous disparities in the distribution of the "fruits" of capitalist production; but the answer cannot consist solely in a more just distribution. It is the fruits themselves that are poisoned — literally and metaphorically.
And beyond the problem of exploitation, superfluous humanity appears: the continuous replacement of human labour power by technologies means that growing portions of humanity are no longer even exploitable, but become simply useless from the standpoint of capital. The decline of labour also means, however, a decline in the value produced — a fact concealed by the gigantic expansion of financial markets, but one which undermines the reproduction of capitalism from within. If one adds that the fierce competition between capitalist actors — States and enterprises — drives an absolutely disastrous use of the natural environment, one sees that the specific difference of capitalism also consists in its dynamic, directional, destructive, and self-destructive character. In order to maintain its foundation — the transformation of labour into value and into money, and thus the accumulation of capital — capitalism is prepared to consume the entire world.
Anselm Jappe