Thinking inside a box - a blog by John Mansfield

About a month ago I met an American anti-capitalist called Becky. She did not describe herself as an anti-capitalist, though I doubt she would dispute the description. Becky had been sleeping under a bush in Trinity College, and I knew she had no place to go by the particular way in which she asked me where the public library was and when it would open - so I invited her to stay at our house, since Dan was away at the time, and didn't mind.

That evening we had a long discussion about politics, and since Becky was a thoughtful and articulate person, I asked her to give some representation of how most 'anti-capitalists' might understand their cause.

We never really managed to get things very clear (though partially clear). Since then the ideas have been floating around in my head, and I think it is just about time to get them out of there.

Capital is any private property that the owner uses as a 'means of production', i.e. any private property that is used to produce goods or services of economic value. Some obvious things that can potentially be used as capital are sewing machines, diamond mines and factories - but there is also such thing as non-physical capital, in particular data or intellectual property that is privately 'owned' (which I still find to be a slightly weird concept).

If you own something that you use to make money, then you own some capital. However, I don't think this quite makes you a capitalist. I think a capitalist is someone who owns some means of production that other people work with to create economic value that is then the property of the capital-owner. So as a freelance editor I can own capital - my computer - but since I do all the work that is involved in producing economic value with the computer, then I am not a capitalist.

I think this is a nice, clear definition of basic capitalism: capitalism is when people work together to produce and exchange economic value, but the means of production which they work through are the private property of somebody (possibly somebody who doesn't do any of the work), and that somebody therefore also owns the goods produced.

So one person or group of persons controls the cash, pays a proportion of the profits to the workers, and keeps the rest for themselves. The person who owns the capital also gets to tell the workers what to do.

If the things that people work with are not privately owned, and therefore there is no-one telling them what to do by right of legal ownership, then that is not capitalism. It is probably some kind of socialism (like in the Soviet Union, where all means of production were 'publicly' owned, and controlled by the government), or perhaps a form of primitive economic interaction that relies on forms of agreement and authority not enshrined in the laws of private property.

Anti-capitalism, as the phrase seems be used, involves some or all of the following:

people wearing black, ragged clothes, and lots of piercings;
keen participation in political protests;
a general embrace of most of the traits that characterised the 1960s 'counter-culture', including: resistance to forms of work otherwise sought by the urban majority; questioning of popular ideology; vegetarianism; marijuana smoking; attempts to resist the love of money;
punk-rock music;
arguing that selective stealing is okay;
claiming to be 'against capitalism' ;
riding bicycles.

It normally appears as part of slightly longer phrases, such as 'the global anti-capitalist movement'. Its major public articulators include Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein.

Now, what has anti-capitalism got to do with capitalism? This is the question I have been trying to get to, and I want to get to it because 'the movement' (anothor of its aliases) needs to know what it is really against. I can't see anybody achieving much by just being against all the bad things in the world. Nominally, the movement has decided to be against 'capitalism', but I think that more of the movement's foot-soldiers need to think about what this means.

Anti-capitalist are protesting/complaining/fighting against some or all of the following:

poverty in Africa and elsewhere;
multi-national corporations exploiting third-world labour;
American imperialism (includes economic imperialism);
inequalities of wealth;
environmental destruction;
distorted or otherwise manipulative mass-media;
George Bush as a person;
George Bush as a political force;
other bad stuff that goes on.

Are these bad things all caused by the fact that modern economics is predominantly organised around private ownership of the means of production - i.e. capitalism?

Theoretically, the proposal here is this: in say, the year 1400, a man handed another man some tools and said 'if you make some valuable furniture using my tools, I will sell the furniture and give you half the money' ... and 600 years later, this same phenomenon has led to babies starving in Africa, and 'Sir' Bob Geldof on stage with a guy calling himself Bono.

Is this theory reasonable? It might be. Sometimes little things, like computer chips, have drastic historical consequences.