INTRODUCTION: CAPITALISM AND ITS ALTERNATIVES
Introduction
The collapse of sub-prime mortgage markets, which led to the failure of some financial institutions, the bailout of others, and the subsequent recession, has had profound implications. In Europe, both Greece and Spain have seen unemployment reach unprecedented heights of over 25 per cent. In May 2013, youth unemployment Europe-wide was 23.1 per cent; in Greece it was as high as 59.2 per cent and in Spain 56.5 per cent (Eurostat 2013). The focus on the sovereign debt positions of many states, especially Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain, has exacerbated these problems as public sector employment has been cut alongside welfare budgets. However, it is not just the peripheral European economies which have been affected, as unemployment in the United Kingdom and the United States has reached levels of 8 per cent and 7.5 per cent respectively (ibid.). Like Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States have both used austerity as one of the primary forms of crisis response, and a recent report estimated that austerity will have come at a cost of 2 million American jobs by 2019 (CAP 2013).
The consequences of the global financial crisis have therefore been felt acutely at a social level throughout Europe and the world. In light of the fact that the crisis originated with the imprudent behaviour of financial actors, and the fact that costs associated with the crisis have been socialized in the form of unemployment and welfare retrenchment, it is perhaps unsurprising that there has been an upsurge of discontent about the way in which the capitalist system operates. This has been clearly manifested in the form of the Occupy movement, which has been one of the primary modes of resistance to the prevailing form of capitalism through its occupations of public spaces in New York, London and elsewhere. Discontent about how the benefits of the capitalist system are distributed has been clearly manifested in the slogan that it has popularized: ‘we are the 99 per cent’.
The global financial crisis of the late 2000s, the distribution of the benefits of the way the system operated, and the distribution of the costs of the way it was saved, provide strong reasons to think about whether capitalism is a desirable form of social and economic organization. However, this reasoning is amplified by the fact that it is not the first time that the capitalist system has found itself in crisis. In the 1930s, the Great Depression led to widespread unemployment that provoked international economic competition and contributed to the onset of the Second World War. This represented the ultimate socialization of the costs of capitalist failure; as John Holloway (1995: 21) phrased it, after the Great Depression and the Second World War ‘capital could deal again and, over the bodies of twenty million people, a fresh game could start’. In the 1970s, the global economy once again found itself in crisis as many countries were faced with rises in unemployment occurring along with stagnant growth – the phenomenon of stagflation. While the crisis did not lead to war as it did in the interwar period, the 1970s stagflation nonetheless resulted in widespread cuts in welfare that meant people were exposed even further to the rigours of the marketplace. As such, if the market could not provide them with employment, people had increasingly less to fall back on for their well-being.
Although periods of vast economic growth, such as the years immediately following the Second World War and the 1990s and early 2000s, have suggested that ‘such episodes have finally been overcome, and the cycles of boom and bust banished, these hopes have always turned out in the end to be illusory’ (Gamble 2009: 6). As responses to previous crises have not appeared to generate greater or longer-lasting stability, the rationale for asking questions about the origins of crises in capitalism and potential solutions to them could not be stronger. In light of this rationale, this book asks four questions about capitalism. First, it asks how wealth is created and used in capitalism, and what role the state plays in facilitating the creation of wealth. Secondly, it asks how capitalism is related to crisis, and specifically, whether capitalism displays an inherent tendency towards crisis that ultimately means an alternative system of organization is required if stability is to be achieved. Thirdly, the book asks what kind of alternative systems of organization might be realized, and what their consequences could be. Finally, the book asks how individuals and groups of individuals could create such an alternative form of social organization.
A note on terminology The book will draw on four core concepts. The first of these is capitalism. The term capitalism is used throughout the book to refer to the prevailing form of social organization. While acknowledging that the ways in which capitalism operates and the implications of these operations are contested, this book defines capitalism in terms of one commonly accepted distinguishing feature: that capitalism is a system that organizes the production, distribution and exchange of goods, on the basis of private property, with a view to realizing profit and therefore increasing wealth. The second term is alternative capitalism, which is used to describe a system where the capitalistic relationship between state and market is re-regulated, but not fundamentally reformed, in order to try to produce optimal social and economic outcomes. The aim of an alternative capitalism is to maximize wealth and profit by introducing a different structure of rules to govern capitalism. The third concept is that of an alternative to capitalism. An alternative to capitalism is distinct from capitalism because it places an emphasis on social and civic goals, rather than purely focusing on pecuniary gain. In contrast to capitalism, an alternative to capitalism is founded on collective or community property rights, rather than individual property rights, although the form and extent of collective or community property rights may vary. Where the book is referring to either an alternative capitalism or an alternative to capitalism, it uses the form ‘alternative (to) capitalism’. The final concept the book uses is anti-capitalism. It uses the term anti-capitalism to refer to the act of resisting capitalism, whether this occurs by attempting to influence the state, taking control of the state, or actions taken independently or outside of the state. An individual who pursues or wishes to pursue an alternative to capitalism can therefore be described as an anti-capitalist.
In its consideration of capitalism and its alternatives, this book accepts that it is possible to perceive capitalism and its consequences in different ways. Furthermore, it acknowledges that the way in which capitalism and its consequences are perceived will have a fundamental impact on whether people deem capitalism to be desirable, whether they would prefer an alternative capitalism or an alternative to capitalism, and therefore whether they believe that it is important and worthwhile engaging in resistance to capitalism through the social act of anti-capitalism. However, the central argument of this book is that capitalism displays intrinsic tendencies towards crisis that make an alternative to capitalism desirable, and so justifies anti-capitalist action. In doing so, it argues that capitalism is a product of social interaction between people, and that it is remade or resisted through our social action. This emphasis on social constitution challenges common assertions about the inevitability of capitalist logic, and in the process shows that the prospect of realizing an alternative to capitalism is more than wishful thinking.
In its discussions of alternatives to capitalism, however, this book guards against thinking of alternative forms of social organization as outcomes or utopias. Rather, it shows how various forms of alternative social and economic organization have shown a tendency to degenerate over time, or to reproduce injustices of capitalist social relations. It therefore suggests that alternatives to capitalism should be thought of as processes that need to be continually made and remade if they are not to degenerate or reproduce the injustices of capitalist social relations, and if desirable outcomes are to be realized. Reflecting the book’s emphasis on the social constitution of economy and society, it rejects ‘top-down’ attempts to impose an alternative to capitalism by political means, and argues that anti-capitalist action should take a ‘bottom-up’ form, which requires democratic and pluralistic experimentation with different models of social and economic organization to expand the space in which non-capitalist activity takes place.
The arguments of the book therefore fit with a long tradition of anti-capitalist resistance. One of the most well-known instances of this kind of resistance was the insurrections of 1968, typified by the student revolts in Paris in May of that year. However, as Michael Watts (2001: 167) noted, the events of 1968 were far more than a local phenomenon; over seventy countries ‘had major student actions during that year [and between] October 1967 and July 1968 there were over 2000 incidents world wide of student protest alone’. Furthermore, it was not just students engaged in the act of protest, the act of anti-capitalism. According to Watts’ (ibid.: 167) study, ‘if one were to add the related worker and other nonstudent demonstrations each country in the world would, on average, have had over 20 “incidents” over the nine-month period’. Nor was the substance of the protest uniform; 1968 had what Watts (ibid.: 171–2) has described as its Eastern, Western and Southern moments. In the first, typified by the Prague Spring and the Cultural Revolution in China, the focus of protests was anti-bureaucratic, and directed against the ‘Old Left’ and the corruption people perceived in it. In the second, typified by student protests in Paris and Berkeley, the focus of protests was opposition to consumerism and the pursuit of civil and social rights. In the third, the focus was the rejection of authority in the first generation of independent states in Africa and Latin America, where military dictatorship had displaced democratic rule.
Luc Boltanski (2002: 6) also highlights the diversity of the 1968 movement by distinguishing between its social and artistic critiques, where the former focused on inequality and poverty stemming from capitalism, and the latter on liberation, individual autonomy and authenticity. Michael Löwy (2002: 95) links this distinction between the social and artistic critique of capitalism to romanticism, which he defines as ‘rebellion against modern capitalist society, in the name of past or premodern social and cultural values, as a protest against the modern disenchantment of the world’. Therefore the significance of 1968 can be seen not just across space, but also as a reflection of long-established traditions of resistance to prevailing social, political and economic forms or organization. On such readings, the events of 1968 can be interpreted as a demonstration of long-standing anti-capitalist feeling that rested on a critique of the world we live in and the injustices it creates, and in turn motivated action in order to try to address them.
Nonetheless, on other readings, the impact of 1968 has been vastly overstated. As Watts (2001: 163–4) has noted, history has not been kind to the 1960s. Critics on the left have viewed the anti-capitalist actions of that decade as a failed political project, a political project that did not realize its ambitions to move towards a more just form of social and economic organization. Critics on the right, on the other hand, have viewed the anti-capitalist actions of the 1960s as a successful cultural revolution, which was indicative of the decay of commonly accepted social values. On this basis, rather than producing radical outcomes, it has been argued that the anti-capitalism of the 1960s justified conservatism:
Whether the voices emanate from London or Paris or New York or Mexico City, the death narrative reigns supreme […] Sunil Khilani […] sees the events of 1968 in France as a gesture of pure ‘nothingness’, ‘made by and for intellectuals’ […] The Year 1968 was, in sum, nothing at all […] It was a sort of grand fiesta of bullshit. (Ibid.: 166)
Even where the anti-capitalism of the late 1960s has been seen as more coherent than this, as more than ‘a grand fiesta of bullshit’, it has been criticized for its eventual conservatism. Luc Boltanski (2002: 10), for instance, has argued that the social critique of 1968 was muted because the leaders of workers’ movements were eventually satisfied by small changes to the way that work and social life were organized. In particular, he notes how some members of the movement were ‘even integrated themselves into the new mechanisms of power, in support of the Socialist government in France’ (ibid.: 10). Thus, the significance of anti-capitalist action in the 1960s was capitalism’s ‘ability to turn around and render obsolete the constraints once relevant in the framework of the second spirit of capitalism’, which laid the foundations for the ‘redeployment of capitalism in the 1980s’ (ibid.: 10).
In the longer term, then, it has been suggested that the legacy of 1968 was the creation of two political ‘lefts’, both of them modest. On the one hand, it created an anti-capitalist left that continued to engage in a social critique of economic relations by demanding new rights for those impoverished by capitalism, but seeks little more than a compromise between capitalism’s need for flexibility and labourers’ demands for job security. On the other, it created a left that seeks reform of interpersonal relations in terms of ‘the generation and reproduction of human beings and of kinship relations’, but is not anti-capitalist (ibid.: 13–15). Neither appears to represent a substantial or meaningful challenge to the prevailing form of social and economic organization. However, the events of the late 1960s were significant in at least two senses. First, they showed that people are willing and able to ask important questions about society and to express their discontent by taking action (Watts 2001: 160). Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, the events occurred during the pinnacle of the expansion of post-war liberal capitalism, and were not the product of a capitalist crisis as such (ibid.: 162; Löwy 2002: 96). This suggests that resistance to capitalism is constantly simmering beneath the surface as an expression of a generalized discontent with the implications of the prevailing form of social and economic organization, and that anti-capitalism is more than a fleeting moment associated with undesirable yet historically specific circumstances such as unemployment or rising inflation.
These notions that the anti-capitalism of 1968 either represented ‘pure nothingness’ or resulted in a compromised and co-opted political left can clearly be challenged by the persistence of anti-capitalist activity throughout the world. There are many such examples, which include action by indigenous movements seeking to protect their land from appropriation by the state. This is typified by the Zapatista resistance to the North American Free Trade Agreement in Mexico (Cuninghame 2008), which has gathered support far beyond the Zapatista communities themselves, as they have been able to use communications technologies in order to ‘get their message out despite governmental spin and censorship’ (Cleaver 2008: 130). Alongside other organized activities, the ability of the Zapatista movement to raise awareness of its struggle has ‘facilitated discussions and debate among concerned observers that led to the organization of protest and support activities in over forty countries around the world’ (ibid.: 130). Despite claims that the anti-capitalism of the 1960s was a failure, such movements show that people are still willing to question the capitalist system and to try to create an alternative. On a smaller scale, organizations like the Starbucks Workers Campaign have shown a similar willingness to question the prevailing form of social and economic organization, by challenging the notion of progressive capitalism (Shukaitis 2008: 104). Some of the anti-capitalist actions featuring prominently in the media have included the Battle of Seattle against the World Trade Organization, and the 2009 protests against the G20 in London, but there have been many more besides (see Tormey 2004: 177–9 for a timeline). All of these varying forms of ongoing struggle indicate people’s continued willingness to question capitalism, ponder alternatives, and consider how they might be realized.
One of the most enduring forums in which this tradition of resistance can be seen is the World Social Forum, which has brought together civil society organizations every year since 2001 in order to discuss and debate the possibilities for an alternative future. According to its charter,
The World Social Forum is an open meeting place for reflective thinking, democratic debate of ideas, formulation of proposals, free exchange of experiences and interlinking for effective action, by groups and movements of civil society that are opposed to neo-liberalism and to domination of the world by capital and any form of imperialism, and are committed to building a planetary society directed towards fruitful relationships among Humankind and between it and the Earth. (World Social Forum 2013)
Rather than operating as a body, the World Social Form emerged in a decentralized fashion to join organizations that share its common aims. According to Isabelle Biagiotti (2004: 533), the important thing about the World Social Forum is that the diverse range of participants have the opportunity to meet each other: ‘In the words of Chico Whitaker, one of the founders of the Forum, the aspiration is to create “a space” and not “a movement”.’
However, this form of action by anti-capitalists has not always been easy for people to understand. For instance, the 2004 World Social Forum in Mumbai was criticized by some media outlets on the grounds that its breadth of coverage meant that it did not have a message (Becker 2007: 209); ‘All WSF observers, especially the media, have remarked on the heterogeneous and “illegible” character of the Forum’ (Biagiotti 2004: 537). However, as Whitaker noted, this is also precisely the point of the World Social Forum (see ibid.: 533; also Becker 2007: 209). According to Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2008: 252), the perceived weaknesses of the World Social Forum, which lie in its ‘inability to discriminate among alternatives’, are not something that can be ‘separated from its strength – the celebration of diversity as value in itself’. As such, the idealism of the World Social Forum manifests itself in a negative sense as a critique of the world in which we live, rather than through the imagination of a world that may be, asserting only that ‘another world is possible’ (ibid.: 253). While it is the case that politicians have tried to take advantage of the World Social Forum, for instance in 2006, when Hugo Chávez argued that ‘the forum should take advantage of its platform to build a political struggle’ by supporting socialist governments (Becker 2007: 214), the Forum has eschewed the political on the grounds that the ‘twentieth century proved with immense cruelty that to take power is not enough, that rather than taking power it is necessary to transform power’ (De Sousa Santos 2008: 256).
The most recent manifestation of resistance in this form has come through the Occupy movement. As Fabian Balardini (2012: 35) has noted, 2011 saw a wave of protests throughout the Middle East and Africa, before being followed on ‘October 15 by one of the largest global protests against economic and social injustice in history, throughout 951 cities in 82 countries. This worldwide protest was part of a growing global uprising known as the Occupy movement that had begun less than a month earlier in New York City.’
The Occupy movement is a diverse, democratic and non-hierarchical movement that came together ‘in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice’ derived from the fact that ‘the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights and those of their neighbours’ (Occupy Wall Street 2011: 1).
Noam Chomsky (2012: 33) has noted how, through Alan Greenspan, the American establishment had acknowledged that the success of the neoliberal economy relied on the insecurity of workers, suggesting that Greenspan’s view of the economy rested on the recognition that ‘If working people are insecure, if they’re part of what we now call the “precariat”, living precarious existences, they’re not going to make demands, they’re not going to try to get wages, they won’t get benefits’. As a result, it would be possible for the economic elite to ‘kick ’em out if we don’t need ’em’. Ultimately, it was through irony that Chomsky revealed his exasperation at the situation: ‘And that’s what’s called a “healthy” economy, technically. And [Greenspan] was very highly praised for this, greatly admired.’
Rather than meandering towards irrelevance, the critique of capitalism, consideration of alternatives, and the means through which they might be realized have remained important, and have arguably become more important over time. As Naomi Klein (2011: 1–2) noted, Occupy appears stronger than the protests of the late 1990s that targeted various summits throughout the world because those protests were necessarily transient, and because they occurred at the peak of an economic boom. In contrast, she illustrates how the permanent physical presence of occupations allowed the movement to ‘grow roots’, and how the crisis that began in 2007 and 2008 made ‘taking on an economic system based on greed’ less of a ‘tough sell’.
Like the anti-capitalist movements of the 1960s and the World Social Forum, the Occupy movement has not been without detractors seeking to highlight flaws that create an appearance of irrelevance. It has been suggested that knowing precisely what the ‘Occupy movement is about is difficult to discern because of its internationally anarchic and leaderless composition’, which makes it appear ‘less like orchestrated change and more like “rebel without a cause”’ (Boydston 2010: 20). As a result, critics have asked how far Occupy represents more than ‘the politics of spectacle’, and how it can be a sustainable movement over the medium to long term (Gamson and Sifry 2013: 159–63). Such commentators effectively question, in the same way as critics questioned 1968, how Occupy’s anti-capitalist action can ever be more than another ‘grand fiesta of bullshit’.
For some, the answer to this question is ‘a little leadership’ (Boydston 2010: 23). However, for others, the decentralized nature of the Occupy movement is not a fundamental flaw. Marianne Malinov (2013: 207), for instance, has suggested that the decentralized nature of the movement allows it to act as ‘a low-risk social change laboratory, birthing exciting new innovations in the form of organizing tools, strategies, and hubs of Occupy-led or inspired alliances that are building towards structural change’. For instance, she notes how programmes like Occupy Our Homes in Minnesota have served to institutionalize resistance to foreclosure by providing best-practice advice to those threatened with repossession (ibid.: 208–9). Likewise, she notes how Drop the Swap in Oakland, California, has been able to unite the local council, unions and community groups, in order to lobby Goldman Sachs to drop predatory financial contracts after it received relief from the federal government, and failed to pass the benefits on to cities (ibid.: 211). Globally then, it can be argued that the decentralized actions of the Occupy movement ‘are greater than the sum of their parts [and] are components of what is emerging in Occupy into a longer-term effort aimed at systemic change’ (ibid.: 213).
At various stages throughout the post-war period there have been clearly defined anti-capitalist movements that have formed on the basis of dissatisfaction with the prevailing form of social and economic relations, and sought to realize change by taking action. At each of these stages, anti-capitalist action has prompted detractors to try to highlight the ineffective nature of their resistance or their irrelevance to ‘big picture’ questions on the grounds that they have often been on a small scale. Nonetheless, the persistence of anti-capitalist action from 1968 through to Occupy clearly suggests that the critique of capitalism, considerations of alternative forms of organization, and the ways in which they might be realized remain pressing issues in contemporary society. It is the purpose of this book to introduce and engage with various approaches to these endeavours. In doing so, it argues that capitalism is an inherently crisis-prone form of social organization, which provides a clear rationale for an alternative to capitalism; it argues that alternative forms of social organization exist and the space in which they exist can be expanded; and it argues that because the world in which we live is socially constituted, such alternatives can be realized through democratic and pluralistic ‘bottom-up’ social action.
The next chapter introduces four different theories of capitalism – those of Adam Smith, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich Hayek. These theorists have produced some of the most important ideas in the history of political economy, which have had significant influence on the form that capitalism’s institutional arrangements have taken. Smith was one of the fathers of political economy analysis, and his ideas played an important role in shaping the laissez-faire liberal state forms of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, while Karl Marx was his leading and most significant critic. In the post-war period, Keynes’ understanding of capitalism played a central role in informing the construction of the institutions of the embedded-liberal world order that lasted from 1945 to the 1970s, while the ideas of Hayek were significant in shaping the neoliberal transformation in the late 1970s and 1980s. In sum, therefore, the ideas of these political economists have had a profound impact in shaping the way in which capitalism is understood, which has in turn shaped the institutional arrangements that govern it.
The purpose of the chapter is to show that capitalism is a contested concept, and its core argument is that our ideas about what capitalism is and what consequences it has play a fundamental role in shaping our judgements about whether an alternative (to) capitalism is desirable. For instance, it shows how Smith’s conception of value suggests equality in the exchange relation, while Marx’s conception of value emphasizes exploitation and class conflict. Similarly, it shows how Keynes believed that tendencies towards depression in the economy could be offset through state intervention, while Hayek believed that the only institution capable of promoting stability was the market itself. Given the diversity of these views about the processes that produce and manage the production of wealth in capitalism, it is clear that each will produce different understandings about how state, economy and society should be organized. In short, our ideas about and understanding of capitalism will shape our beliefs about whether or not it should be remade or resisted.
Despite these differences, these political economists share in common a view of state, economy and society, as forms of the way in which people interact with one another. The state and the economy are not seen as separate and externally related ‘things’ that have an existence outside the social interactions between people, which come to constitute them. This is significant because if it is accepted that the institutional structures of politics and economics are the products of interactions between people, it is possible to negate claims that there is no alternative to a particular course of action. This, in turn, opens up the possibility of creating alternative forms of organization through social action. The chapter’s emphasis on the social constitution of state, economy and society provides the book with an analytical framework that informs but can also stand apart from the normative claims it develops later; because our understanding of capitalism (and/or its alternatives) informs our actions which serve to create and re-create capitalism (and/or its alternatives), it is fundamentally important to reflect on capitalism (and/or its alternatives) if we are ever to live in the kind of world that we want to live in.
Chapter 2 builds on this analytical framework and begins to develop the book’s normative argument by considering the relationship between capitalism and crisis. It shows how the institutional arrangements broadly advocated by the political economy of Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich Hayek have each been realized in the laissez-faire, embedded-liberal and neoliberal periods of the interwar period, the post-war period and the post-1979 period respectively. Through a historical examination of the interwar collapse and the Great Depression, the break-up of the Bretton Woods system and the 1970s stagflation, and the sub-prime mortgage crisis and the Great Recession, the chapter argues that these understandings of capitalism and the institutional arrangements they suggest fail to offer a convincing account of crises in capitalism or a basis for stability.
The implications of this analysis are extremely significant for developing a rationale for an alternative (to) capitalism. This is because if the institutional arrangements that logically flow from these understandings of capitalist social relations have been realized, and yet not served to create stability, these crises – in isolation – represent an important contribution to a critique of those particular understandings of capitalism. However, in combination these crises suggest something more profound about capitalism: that it is intrinsically unstable and crisis-prone. The chapter therefore returns to Marx, who believed that capitalism is fundamentally contradictory because it relies both on capitalists’ need to lower wages to maintain profits in the face of competition, and the need to reproduce living labour, on which the creation of value and the accumulation of wealth depend. Chapter 2 therefore argues that it is not the form that capitalism takes – the particular ways in which people amass stocks of monetary wealth by pursuing profit – but capitalism itself which is at the root of crises. In other words, the chapter argues that it is treating the accumulation of stocks of wealth through the pursuit of profit as an important end in itself which is the source of instability and crises in capitalism. The chapter therefore establishes an empirical critique of the varying forms that capitalism has taken, which contributes to a theoretical critique of capitalism itself and provides a strong normative case for an alternative (to) capitalism.
Having established a strong normative case for an alternative (to) capitalism, the book turns its attention to the form that such an alternative might take in Chapter 3. In light of the fact that the previous forms capitalism has taken – the laissez-faire liberal, Keynesian and neoliberal – do not exhaust the possibilities for organizing capitalism in different ways, the chapter begins by considering the prospects of a libertarian alternative capitalism. This would see the state prioritize the protection of freedom and private property, but refrain from intervention in other areas. However, the chapter argues that libertarian positions are reliant on questionable assumptions about the basis of private property, and that even if these assumptions could be justified theoretically, the inequalities likely to result from these arrangements would foster discontent and ultimately prove unsustainable as a form of social and economic organization.
The chapter then considers cooperative and socialist alternatives to capitalism. It argues that these alternative forms of social organization, which incorporate principles of communal ownership to greater or lesser degrees, appear to have the potential to address the crisis dynamics of capitalism identified in the preceding chapter because they do not treat the accumulation of wealth as a desirable end point in itself. However, it also notes that historical attempts to create cooperative communities have encountered a number of practical obstacles, while the notion that there is only one form of socialism that would be desired by and beneficial for all individuals is illusory. In particular, it highlights how workers’ movements have historically subordinated the role of women to those of men, which suggests that socialism is not intrinsically gender-neutral. The book therefore argues that alternatives to capitalism do not represent utopias in any recognized sense; they are not end-points to be realized but processes that must be continually made, reflected upon and remade, if we are to avoid reproducing particular structures of oppression found in old forms of social organization in our alternatives, and if new forms of social organization are not to degenerate into those that came before them.
The social constitution of state, economy and society means that creating an alternative to capitalism on this basis is possible, but it raises an all-important question; how do we go about creating this alternative to capitalism and guard against degeneration back into capitalism and the reproduction of capitalist injustice? This is the question addressed by Chapter 4. In contemporary societies, it is often thought that the democratic process is the most legitimate and appropriate means to pursue our social and economic objectives. However, given that throughout the world there has been a long history of governments led by putatively socialist parties, it is necessary to ask why we have not seen greater moves towards an alternative to capitalism through the democratic process and the institutions of the state; if we have had ‘socialist’ governments, why have we not had socialism?
Chapter 4 argues that the key reason that we have not seen socialism is because the state is a capitalist state. That is to say, the state is a form of prevailing social relationships, and because the prevailing form of social relationships is capitalist, the state reflects the imperatives of that system regardless of the political orientation of the parties in power. It therefore argues that the creation of an alternative to capitalism requires a challenge to the prevailing form of social relations, which includes a challenge to the authority of the state itself. This is not a call to seize state power; history demonstrates too clearly that revolutionary action of this kind quickly descends into despotism and dictatorship as a supposedly ‘enlightened’ leadership suppress the views of an ‘unenlightened mass’ in the name of ‘the general good’. Rather, it is a call, to use John Holloway’s (2005) phrase, to ‘change the world without taking power’. This must stem from pluralist and bottom-up social action that is willing to engage with economic and social experimentation.
On the surface, achieving a meaningful change in the world in this way might seem like an impossible task. However, these forms of experimentation have existed for many years, for instance in the cooperative movement and the Zapatista movement, and new forms are emerging with the creation of new commons – for instance, on the internet. Alternatives have in the past, currently are, and in the future can, continue to encroach on capitalist space and create a world that is different to the one with which we are so familiar, and by which we are so frustrated. We are frequently told there is no alternative. Yet the world is what we make of it, which means there is not an alternative to capitalism. There are many. All we need to do is make them.