What’s the problem with capitalism? Anti-capitalism is the first in my exploration of third sector worldviews.
Where Marx Was Wrong
Marx is perhaps the origin of anti-capitalism. His is certainly the most prominent name. Whilst there was always criticism of capitalist thinking, see Isaac Watts, “When I survey the wondrous cross” for example, opposition to capitalism coalesced around Marx. Other socialist movements were more positive about the capitalist economy, eg the co-operative movement.
Marx identified capitalism’s internal contradictions. Much of what he wrote proved to be correct but he was wrong on two counts.
Totalitarianism
First, the experiments to build economies based on socialism became totalitarian. There are a number of reasons why this happened. When a country prevents people from trading, they must centralise the entirety of the economy. Instead of allowing government to regulate the economy, to keep businesses small and local, the state attempted to run everything. Getting the balance right between what the state runs and what the people run is not easy. The Soviet Union did not abolish capitalism but developed something called state capitalism.
Concentrations of wealth and power is bad news when it belongs to the state just as much as when it belongs to individuals. Tendencies in western capitalism to concentrate wealth in the hands of the 1% are just as likely to lead to totalitarianism as state capitalism. The issue is democratic accountability and it is absent from totalitarian economic models.
Capitalism Survived!
Marx was also wrong that capitalism could not survive. He believed it would succumb to its internal contradictions. It has survived in a mutated form. Power concentrates in the hands of huge corporations. Governments have sold off state assets to corporations and as a result government is no longer able to govern. The people understand this to some degree but few political parties offer an alternative.
Anti-Capitalism in the Third Sector
In the third sector there is sometimes an anti-capitalist worldview that sees the market as something to be resisted. This is not always expressed as revolutionary communism; more often it is a quiet moral superiority to the grubby realities of the marketplace. Their critics tar all business owners with the same corporatist brush. This suits the corporations of course. This all-encompassing anti-capitalism doesn’t touch them but incapacitates small businesses.
Worse it means third sector organisations do not think about small businesses to rebuild the local economy. Indeed they don’t think about the local economy. So, throughout my working life community organisations have either ignored the local economy, focusing upon the needs of disadvantaged sections of the community, or else they have set up alternatives to the local economy, such as social enterprises.
Do Social Enterprises Undermine Local Business?
I suppose the idea is the people who run social enterprises do not subscribe to capitalism. Too often as a result they are not a permanent part of the economy and become dependent on grant aid.
Meanwhile, this marginalises the people who might affect lasting change in their neighbourhoods, the local business people. Their skills and values are not accepted and so they are side-lined. The organisational failures that plague so much community work are familiar to business people. They know they don’t work and so keep their distance. They’ve seen it all before and know how destructive it can be.
The frustrating thing is the most creative period in recent UK history for development of local economies was the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century. The retail co-operative movement, is part of the capitalist economy, even though it owns capital collectively. This demonstrates the creative potential of capital when democratically owned.
I’ll explore some of these issues in more detail in future posts. Find them by following this link and scrolling down to Third Sector Worldviews.
