VC

Two ways to look at this. You’re right that the code word for everything now has become neoliberalism. It’s become the stand-in for anything that counts as a genuine analysis of modern society.

That’s partly because much of left discourse is overwhelmingly dominated by nonprofits and academics, and capitalism is still a no-no — you can’t bring up capitalism. So you need something else, and it’s very useful to say, “Well it’s not capitalism as such that we worry about — it’s Reaganism, it’s Thatcherism.”

There’s no doubt that the current variant of capitalism is truly inhumane, certainly more so that the one that proceeded it. That’s one reason why you don’t see the word capitalism very much. But first, it’s important to understand that if you compare today’s version to capitalism with its place in history, it’s actually not the exception. We’re reverting back to capitalism’s pure form. It’s a system in which everybody is thrown out onto the market, and they’re told “Sink or swim, man. It’s up to you.”

The era of getting social supports, some kind of social insurance, of basic guarantees, the welfare state — that was an era that dated to about the 1930s and 1940s. But it was a departure from the norm in capitalism. We’re going back— neoliberalism is actually just capitalism in its pure phase.

There’s two ways you can look at this. One is on an absolute scale: does capitalism on an absolute level actually deny people what they need on an everyday level? The answer is that for most of the world, it does — it fails. It fails because most of the world now is in a very unalloyed, barbaric form of a market society. In India, in China, in Africa, in the Middle East, the vast majority of people still live barely at a subsistence level. And that’s not an accident; it’s because they have to work for employers that simply don’t care about them. So on an absolute scale, for most of the world, capitalism is failing.

The other way to look at it is on a relative scale. In a country like the United States or in Western Europe, it’s of course true that poor people and working people have gotten a lot for themselves, and their lives are actually quite decent. But when we bring up a relative scale — not just relative to the rest of the world as is, but relative to how they could be living given the state of productivity, given the state of technology, given the state of the country’s infrastructure — could their lives be better than they are now? The answer is: absolutely.

Finally, to the extent that workers in the West have achieved better lives for themselves, this has come about because they aggregated their power. The reason the welfare state arose in the West in the time that it did was because of enormous and violent class struggle, in which labor unions managed to extract these kinds of concessions from employers in a way that had not been possible previously.

As long as you have capitalism, not only are you going to have to fight for everything you have, but those things that you have are constantly going to be under threat from the employers who never wanted to give them to you in the first place.

That fight that I talked about, that antagonism between employers and employees, therefore, is written into the system. You’re not going to get rid of it. This is why socialists have said that you can have a more civilized capitalism, and you should fight for that more civilized capitalism, but understand that it’s like a cancer: you can keep giving it chemo, you can fight back the growth of the cancer cells, but they always keep coming back.