Anticapitalism

The term anticapitalism refers to an extensive collection of ideologies, movements and attitudes that are totally or partially opposed to capitalism.

In general, some anti-capitalists may be in favor of some type of economic or social collectivism or communitarianism, but not all and not necessarily (there are anti-capitalists who defend different levels of private property). The following is a brief description of the most notable ideologies, points of view and tendencies of countercapitalism.

Socialism

Socialism, in its most common version, supports the idea of extensive state control of the economy, which must be associated with the democratic control of the people over the state.

Marxism

Marxism argues in favor of collective ownership of the means of production, and the eventual abolition of the State and social classes, with an intermediate stage called the dictatorship of the proletariat in which "the proletariat organized into a ruling class&# 3. 4; will eliminate the vestiges of capitalism. Original Marxism claims to be communist and criticizes other socialist currents for their limitations or their implementation. There are several types and currents within Marxism. However, essentially they all share their main ideas and central issues. Some of these are historical materialism and dialectics, as methods of analysis of historical and current circumstances; the frontal criticism of the roots of the capitalist system and its different social contradictions, its coercive devices (covered under different forms and political regimes) and vestigial elements of feudalism and the Old Regime such as monarchy, absolutism, or the clergy; scientific socialism, as a differentiated intellectual current within socialism; the tradition of the labor movement, analysis of its defeats and struggles and defense of its conquests, together with other social movements; defense of class consciousness, against alienation and false consciousness, and criticism of different forms of oppression and injustice, as a means to promote the fight for the abolition of social classes and all sources of oppression itself; defense of the social revolution and workers' control, as a way to end the capitalist system and reach irreversible stages of communist, egalitarian and advanced society, without classes and without the State, with a very strong development of the means of production, culture and the freedoms; rejection and criticism of imperialism and its policy, which sees war as a business, and a way out of cyclical crises, and entails the colonization, underdevelopment and subjugation of peoples. There are certain simplified or distorted versions of Marxism, a product in most cases of the dominant ideology of certain political regimes that emerged within an unfinished socialist revolution, as a result of their own weakening, with which they have historically sought to provide justification and support. ideological to state apparatuses of a bureaucratic nature, partly inherited from the old system, partly developed after times of crisis.

These periods of crisis arise due to the accumulation of successive defeats of the revolution in international dynamics, which generates a situation of isolation, of gradual recovery of foreign capitalism and its old powers, of harassment, blockade, famine, lack of aid and resources, and many other internal difficulties, not to mention the threat of civil war or foreign invasion, etc.; situation that causes stagnation and prevents progress towards the construction of socialism, and total overcoming of capitalism and its old bureaucracy, which persists for a time and, if it continues for too long, ends up being reimplanted by adopting new political forms of coercion, or giving rise to the reappearance of old forms of oppression and social relations, undermining the foundations of the new system and preventing it from being consolidated, until it collapses; This occurred historically in the Soviet Union from the middle of the interwar period, coinciding with the failure of the proletarian or socialist revolution in Germany and Hungary, in Central Europe, as well as in Eastern Europe, Persia, and later China, and with the rise of fascism, led by Mussolini, Hitler and Chiang Kai Shek.

The Marxist definition of the capitalist mode of production focuses on the establishment of production relations socially based on the existence of proletarians dispossessed of any type of relationship with the means of production, which belong to the capitalist, with whom they are forced to enter into an apparently free contract, by which they sell their labor power in exchange for a salary. It is the capitalist who organizes production, which in its technical aspect is determined by a level of economic development typical of the industrial era, in which capital has acquired predominance over the land, which was the dominant productive force in the modes of production. previous production (slavery and feudalism). The key to the Marxist conception of capitalism is in the concepts of alienation (the fact that the process and product of work become alien to the worker); and surplus value, that is, the part of the quantity of work incorporated by the salaried worker into the object of work that exceeds in value what is paid by salary. For Marx, the profit of the capitalist lies in this difference in value, since it is he who realizes the value of what is produced through sale in the market, which generates a price that must be higher than the cost of production if the activity economic has been successful.

The free appearance of the contract between capitalist and worker (which according to liberal theory should be individual and without interference from collective bargaining of unions or protective legislation of the State) barely masks the pressure to which the worker is subjected due to the existence of an industrial reserve army, which is what Marx calls the unemployed who are willing to replace him. It is not original from Marx, but from Ricardo and other liberal thinkers (Ferdinand Lassalle), the idea that the free functioning of the market subjects wages to a brazen law that prevents them from rising beyond the subsistence limit. The proletarians must take care of the reproduction of the labor force themselves.

The Marxist critique of capitalism maintains that this mode of production contains inherent contradictions that cause cyclical crises. Karl Marx, in his work Capital , bases this opinion by arguing that it is increasingly difficult for the capitalist to value his capital. The competitive relations to which the capitalist is subject force him to constantly and increasingly implement new and better machinery to increase labor productivity and, in this way, sell his goods at a lower price than his direct competitors. In this way, the "living work" (the hiring of workers) giving rise to what Marx calls "industrial reserve army" That is, a considerable part of the working class that is waiting for a job. This forced wait that capitalism imposes on the working class makes this "industrial reserve army" becomes, on the one hand, a significant mass of poor and indigent, and, on the other hand, due to the impossibility of wages rising quickly (due to the surplus supply of labor force).

Social Democracy

Social democracy has been a reformist socialist current developed in Europe between the last quarter of the 19th century and the first decades of the century XX. Social Democrats do not propose to revolutionaryly abolish capitalism, but rather wish to mitigate the supposed negative effects of capitalism through social reforms. Originally, social democracy proposed the replacement of the market economy with a state-planned economy, which would centralize the main industries in its hands. Currently, social democracy advocates the creation of a mixed economy and a welfare state.

Anarchism

The classical anarchists of the mid-century 19th and 20th centuries only opposed the alliance between government and business like classical liberals, "alliance" which could currently be called state capitalism. However, during the second half of the 19th century little or more, what would be the most popular trend of the so-called & #34;historical anarchism" what some authors call socialist or anti-capitalist anarchism - which maintained that all private wealth is illegitimate and therefore promoted moving towards a form of decentralized collectivization - which formed important theoretical and historical ties with communist and union anti-capitalism.

In general terms, anarchists, classical and modern, have not had a single economic proposal throughout their conceptual development, and today open defenders of private property and capitalism can be found in modern anarcho-capitalism—which maintains that private wealth is only illegitimate when it is the product of theft, fraud or political power—or staunch critics in traditional anarcho-communism, probably their only common point being that the abolition of the State is desirable but for very different reasons.

Fascism and National Socialism

According to the third-positionist doctrine, fascism is neither left nor right, neither capitalist nor communist, since fascism would be a totally original idea; However, in practice, more than an original idea, it would be a syncretic fusion of various political ideas—projects, speeches, etc.—always brought together under unitary nationalism and centralist authoritarianism.

One of the reasons for usually considering fascism as a political right-wing movement is usually the strategic alliance of fascism with the interests of the most powerful economic classes, together with its defense of traditional values such as patriotism or religiosity, to preserve the status quo. Once it achieved power, the plutocracy decisively cooperated with fascism in its various versions.

Fascists advocate a mixed economy, with the main objective of achieving autarky through protectionist and interventionist economic policies. Fascist regimes in practice did not profoundly modify the capitalist economic system, as in some cases they even practiced privatization policies and systematically persecuted the ideologies of the rising traditional labor movement – anarchism and Marxism.

Traditionalist Catholicism

The papal encyclicals "Rerum novarum" of Pope Leo XIII and "Quadragesimo anno" of Pius XI contain harsh criticisms of capitalism. Traditionalist Catholic authors such as G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc and Juan Manuel de Prada declared themselves anti-capitalists, defending distributism.

Luddism

Luddism consisted at the beginning of the 19th century in the destruction of new industrial machines on the part of the many guild artisans bankrupt due to the Industrial Revolution, unlike the rich factory owners, who earned a considerable fortune based on worker exploitation. This movement was mainly focused on Great Britain, which is the cradle of that revolution, where anyone who destroyed one of these machines on purpose was grounds for being tried with the death penalty. There is a modern update of the term called neoludism, mainly reflected in the hatred of new information technologies.