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Before justifying why I believe capitalism is the problem I want to define the terms being used. This may help raise the level of discussion and dialogue.
When I use the term capitalism I am referring to a specific historically evolved socio-economic system driven by a specific social organization of productive activity, a specific mode of labour exploitation, and a specific relationship of power. In general a mode of social organization is defined and delineated by the manner in which each evolves its own particular way of organizing productive human activity, exploiting human labour and distributing political power. Capitalism separated itself from past forms of social organization by developing a bunch of unique controlling mechanisms that appear to mask the underlying unity of capitalism with the underlying class nature of past systems. They include: the production of things needed to satisfy human needs in the form of commodities for sale, the private ownership of the tools and the materials of production, the separation of actual producers from the tools and products of their labour, the establishment of “free labour” via the creation of a market where the power of human labour is transformed into a commodity and sold for a wage, the appropriation of the surplus value produced by that wage labour, the reduction of concrete human labour to a complex of abstract relations in which individual work counts only insofar as it represents an average of necessary homogeneous labour-time.
When I say capitalism is the problem, I mean by the problem the ever increasing spectacle of social conflict and degeneration engulfing humanity on the planet; i.e., massive and growing inequities in the distribution of the social wealth produced by human labour, neo-liberal globalization with its imperialist wars, ecological crises, repetitious cycles of economic crises, the proliferation of corrupt political systems, privatization and comodification of human needs, a tidal wave of marketing aimed at stimulating artificial consumer demand, growing attacks on the rights of workers, the alienation of work, the love of money and accumulation for the sake of accumulation.
So saying capitalism is the problem is the same as saying the underlying controlling mechanisms driving the capitalist mode of production are the same forces responsible for the failing social conditions we experience around us. This is the premise I shall attempt to defend in future postings using a deeper analysis of those underlying mechanisms and the links between them and the crumbling worldwide social phenomena surrounding us.
