Santiago Zabala is ICREA Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of Barcelona. he wrote an opinion piece on Al Jazeera - in response to the Slovenian marxist critic Slavoc Zizek. Zizek is a mischievous iconoclast who still claims to be a communist even though allegedly he lives in Dubai.
This was my response to Zabala's piece and the comments below it:
As an 'anti-capitalist' by nature - gosh, I must be lazy preferring not to slave away for 50 hours a week for someone else! - I don't see the 4 points presented by the author as actually signifying fundamental obstacles to capitalist reproduction. The most important trends that can lead to capitalist breakdown in the longer term are:
1) the substitution of technology for human labour, leading to wage suppression, mass unemployment and a slowdown in economic growth. This is the most fundamental challenge to capitalism. When agriculture advanced through new capitalist techniques, the proportion of the labour force in agriculture fell from 70% to 2% in countries like the UK; the same will happen to industry. Industrial workers have fallen to 10% of the workforce in some countries; human services are the remaining sector where employment growth lies.
However technology is removing the need for skilled labour - and has been for some time. Once the reproduction of society is separated from productive employment, capitalism breaks down because capitalism is based on the labour-capitalist relationship. If the wage labour class - all those who live primarily through paid work - is diminished beyond a certain point, capitalist growth becomes impossible UNLESS an agency outside the market relationship - ie the state (or the people's collective will) steps in to revive the process of circulation by putting money into people's pockets. We have seen this recently with bank bailouts, quantitative easing etc BUT this is putting money into the hands of finance capitalists, rather than ordinary people.
Capitalism has to be reproduced artificially because wages are insufficient to consume the economy's new output. The state or some other non-market agency must step in to ensure the circulation of capital. Free marketeers believe that by cutting back the state and welfare the market will automatically right itself and everyone will make hay, but there is very little evidence for this now or in the past.
2) Uncontrolled fiat money growth, debt expansion and deflation caused by a decline in the rate of profit in advanced countries, combined with financial monopolisation of the economy. For 15 years western governments allowed debt - public and private - to replace income growth. This economic model is now bust and so we have austerity and government money creation. Austerity can exacerbate point (1) by further cutting wages and increasing unemployment. We now have a dictatorship of finance, which to my mind, is as totalitarian as any other kind of dictatorship.
I believe that a non-capitalist solution to these problems could be found that is far more sustainable and humanistic than the artificial reproduction of capitalism through state manipulation and taxpayer debt bailouts. This would require measures to restrict asset bubble growth, redistribute liabilities to bond holders, writing off debt, introducing such measures as citizen's income, and returning large parts of our social life - and land - to the commons - deprivatisation but via democratic means so that bureaucrats do not take charge of assets.
3) As a point of historical accuracy, the mythology of capitalism ignores the fundamental role of the state as handmaid of market development, expropriation of the commons, and the creation of a wage labour force. This false view of history as presented here by Dave Small is what prevents an understanding of how we got here and where we might go. Would the 'free market' exist in America if the US and colonial governments had not systematically expropriated native common land and handed it over to capitalists and private farmers? Of course not!
Future alternatives are possible, once we abandon the prison of neoliberal ideology. Crucially, we must develop new ways to revive the commons and revive democratic control of the economy. The internet means we can get rid of the monopoly of career politicians and put the decision making directly in the hands of the people through a real time permanent democracy - replacing the plutocratic 18th century model now dominant in the US, Europe and elsewhere. Parliaments should, in my view be made up of people's tribunes chosen at random like juries, with fixed paid terms to prevent capture by lobbyists. See Iceland banking and democratic reform as an example we should all follow.
