Anticapitalism has become a catch-all label, empty or all-encompassing, claimed by politicians on the political spectrum from the far left to the far right, but also by a whole section of the trade union movement. It is also claimed by environmentalists, anti-industrialists, degrowth advocates, and other “alternative” movements.
But if we scratch beneath the surface of these various forms of anti-capitalism, we can only conclude that we are actually dealing with “alter-capitalisms.” Starting with a pseudo-critical left that juggles the concepts of anti-capitalism and anti-liberalism. This so-called anti-liberalism is all the more hypocritical and contradictory in that it sometimes claims to be critical of capitalism “tout court.” This “truncated anti-capitalism” is the bruised fruit offered by intellectuals of the “Left of Capital,” these “appalled economists.” Supporters of Harvey, “Friotists” or “Pikettists,” these Keynesian-style regulationists fulfill their emancipatory promises by vilifying evil “financial capital,” forgetting Marx himself: “the movement of capital has neither end nor measure.” They condemn this “parasite”—banks, finance, and tax havens—while defending the “good capital” that produces a supposedly real economy, providing jobs and wages for “honest workers.” This configuration of “good capitalism” from the Glorious Thirty to escape bad “casino capitalism” is already seen. But so is the imaginary pillorying of financialization and the market, at the opposite end of the political spectrum, as when Hitler pointed to “rapacious capital” to better naturalize capitalism.
From then on, political economy turned into national or global protectionism, claiming that this interventionist economic policy aimed to protect and favor domestic producers and workers in the face of foreign competition. Even before its actual implementation, it was already ideologically flawed, as it tended to make us believe that “sustainable” or “humane” capitalism was possible. This “truncated anti-capitalism” runs through the social-democratic nebula of Mélenchon, Syriza, Podemos, as well as the leftist fringe of the UCL, the NPA, LO, and Révolution Permanente. Whether it calls for popular insurrection to reach the “L point”—Lenin or Lordon—or for a vote for LFi, this strategy aims at state power in order to carry out “a global redefinition of the market in the direction of the welfare state.” This is like trying to square the circle, because there can be no economy against the Economy, just as there can be no state policy against the state, even if it is embellished with social rhetoric.
This raises the question of how the intrinsically capitalist social forms that are, work, value, money, commodities, modernized patriarchy, depending on the mindset “valeur dissociation”, the legal form of law,—protecting private ownership of the means of production, among other things—the oxymoron of representative democracy, the State crowning it all. A social synthesis that, all in all, has only been in existence for five centuries.
On the side of the struggles, despite often relentless militant dedication, the result of a lack of radical analysis ends up producing the opposite effect to that intended, going so far as to demand institutional recognition and even state subsidies. This is true of workers as well as racialized, gender, and sexual communities demanding a more equal distribution of the fruits of wealth. They end up exhausting themselves “within a legal framework that guarantees competition, that is, an inclusion in the market that is consubstantial with structural exclusion.” – Sandrine Aumercier.
Faced with this wall, alternatives that envisage the abolition of money through barter systems also end up coming up against socialization on a more general scale. These initiatives are often interesting in their self-managed educational variations, but because they do not target the essential categories of the economy in a broad emancipatory movement, they can sometimes present themselves as an alternative to the capitalist sphere of circulation when it collapses, as in Argentina in the 2000s. The same is true of local currencies, Scoops, expropriated and self-managed companies under workers’ control, LETS, short supply chains, the relocalized economy, voluntary simplicity, Amaps, etc., which, due to this lack of a common emancipatory project, each end up falling into a kind of harmless identity phenomenon. Also, under the influence of the state-guaranteed economy, the result can only be tamed protests, submissive resistance, and reactions subordinate to the tutelary fetishes they claim to contest.
Ernst Schmitter reminds us lucidly:
“What we call ‘the economy’ is not one area of social life among others, but a mode of destruction of the world that has imposed itself as a totality. The capitalist economy cannot be corrected or rebalanced: it must be overcome in its very foundations. The problem is not the mismanagement of the economy, but the fact that there is an economy as an autonomous, abstract sphere, separate from real life.“
Murray Bookchin also emphasized this essential critique, which allows us to go beyond simple criticism:
”It is not enough to criticize the effects of capitalism; we must dismantle the institutions and social relations that make it possible. Radical criticism is not only moral or circumstantial; it is structural, historical, and political. It invites us to deconstruct the social categories inherited from capitalism in order to bring forth new ones based on cooperation, autonomy, solidarity, and ethics. “
Unable to imagine and practice a new form of social life beyond this world, without a revolutionary movement based on ”categorical and ontological rupture” and the practical shift towards another form of social synthesis, that is, a revolution as humanity’s exit from the economy as such, insurrections and alternatives devoid of content will come up against the constraints imposed by the capitalist way of life, from which we still cannot escape. Our struggle against Capital, in addition to resistance, must address all aspects of our existence and carry within it another form of social life. That is, a negation as a clearly determined creation.
It is in this direction that the communalist perspective is oriented: to go beyond incantatory or adaptable anti-capitalism in order to build a concrete rupture through direct democracy. The Political then aims at communal reappropriation and collective organization of the means of life, an ethical relocation of productive activities on a human scale in order to provide for the needs of all without exception—irreducible minimum and equality of the unequal—outside the market sphere. This is not a utopia divorced from reality, but a process of social reconstruction rooted in the present, supported by popular actions and institutions capable of prefigurating a post-capitalist society that is emancipated and in close, mutually enriching relationship with its natural environment.
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