Capitalism

[Sicks Bux]

I was at Brunswick Street today and the Socialist Alternative had set up a stand outside Adam Bandt's office. I asked them why progressive people should support them, instead of the Greens, when the Greens are better placed to have an influence. They told me that the Greens believe you can reform capitalism whereas Socialists believe it needs to be abolished.
How do you folks feel about capitalism? Can it be reformed? Should it be abolished? Or is it fine as it is?

[stui magpie]

Stuff is fine the way it is, change happens organically as people want it.

Socialism doesn't work, pure capitalism is probably not much better, capitalism with a social conscience in a democracy seems to work pretty well.

[David]

The problem with revolutionary socialism that has never been resolved for me is that they’ve failed to offer a plausible account of how a revolution occurs in a society such as ours, which sucks in many ways but nonetheless ensures that most people’s basic needs are met (plus enables us to have lots of shiny toys to keep us distracted). Revolutions are scary things by necessity, and people understand that. What will make ordinary people want to chuck the table over and risk their own safety and well-being for a completely different system?

It seems an elementary point to me that you have to have a large percentage of the population (if not a majority, then not far off it) on your side to even be able to consider the possibility of a successful uprising and future governing system that operates with popular support, in which case surely you’d be better off organising democratically and doing the hard work of door-knocking and getting the general public on board? But instead they sneer at people like Bernie Sanders and the Greens who actually do put that work in (and are relatively good at it, certainly more so than the socialist parties with their consistent 0.5% of the vote every election) as delusional "electoralists".

I’m not saying the Greens shouldn’t be criticised from the left. Of course they should. But if you care about dismantling capitalism, then actually taking on the things that make it so dysfunctional (obscene wealth disparities, deterioration of workers’ rights, political corruption and corporate donations, national security organisations, imperialist interference overseas, etc.) and seeking to rectify them should be the first order of the day. And it doesn’t have to be mere tinkering around the edges; it can be a popular democratic movement that promises to tear much of the current system down and install a socialist government, which is what I want. And it doesn’t have to be just that; we should work hard on building unions and organising public actions as well. But these things don’t need to be seen as mutually exclusive.

All of this would make sense, I would have thought, if one cared about the quality of people’s lives and not just a rarefied idea like "ending capitalism" – but if not, then sure, shit on the Greens and feel great about being more ideologically pure than they are while achieving, er, nothing whatsoever but five more decades of Judean People’s Front squabbles with other irrelevant left-wing groups.

[Sicks Bux]

I guess I'm pretty much in the reform capitalism camp.

But one thing I've heard about capitalism, that I don't understand, is that it must continually grow, otherwise it'd collapse. I'm not sure why that's the case and I'm not sure how infinite growth is possible on a finite planet.

[David]

I think its core problem is that it will eventually collapse in on itself if insufficiently regulated – we saw that with the GFC, and we're seeing it with climate change too, in which unchecked capitalism is basically threatening the future of the planet. I understand the position of the anti-reformist camp that reform will only ever be piecemeal and not address the central problem of capitalism, but maybe the problem is that the reforms offered by neoliberal politicians are just never sufficiently radical? Aren't all of the problems that we see specific and contextual rather than endemic?

I don't know – I honestly struggle to get my head around a lot of this stuff. Maybe someone can point me in the direction of some literature that explains this better. But I am ultimately one of those people who finds it difficult to understand what a fundamentally different (i.e. revolutionised rather than reformed) system actually looks like.

[Sicks Bux]

^I'm still doing my research the growth imperative.