Socialism and Capitalism
As crazy as it might sound, a crucial task for today’s socialism would be to recreate capitalism.
The World of Today and Tomorrow, Diego Rivera, 1929-1935, Palacio Nacional, Mexico City.
In the modern era, knowledge is a function of practice. Reflective practice (theory) is no longer sufficient to completely ‘know’ something. Transformative practice (action) is also required. The extent to which we can practically intervene in reality conditions our ability to know it.
This is because we are now empowered to own and sell our labor. In order to earn a wage to survive, we must practically intervene in reality every day. This means we acquire on-the-job knowledge about ourselves, our coworkers, our object of work, and even, with the prodding of the left, reality itself. ‘On-the-job’ can be extended to other relationships outside of the workplace because all other human relationships are refracted through that one. Labor sets the pace of modern life.
It used to be that we knew we were living in capitalism because socialists agitated for something different. It was the socialists of the early 1800s who told society it was living in capitalism. Before them, no one could conceptualize what that word might have meant. This led scientific observers of the phenomenon, such as Marx and Engels, to conclude that socialism was like a symptom of capitalism. Just like a symptom of the body reveals the presence of an illness, the activity and pamphlets and strikes and barricades of the socialists revealed the presence of a terrible, but ultimately productive, crisis of human freedom.
Socialism can be said to have constituted capitalism. Millions of workers, intellectuals, and even big business people knew they lived in capitalism because they were actively engaged in figuring out how to overcome it. They made capitalism true by struggling to make it false. The height of understanding of capitalism was also, therefore, the height of socialism’s power: the period of the Second Internationale.
As socialism eventually flattened itself out into an acceptance of the status quo, a grassroots lobby for the Democratic Party and its world allies, the recognition of capitalism as a crisis that could be overcome also faded. It is no coincidence that nowadays, capitalism simply means the unfair rule of the rich or, for the more ‘sophisticated,’ a system of oppression as discrete as white supremacy, patriarchy, etc. We today literally cannot understand Lenin, for all our misplaced quoting of him. We have an easier time understanding Aristotle or the Bible than the accumulated tradition of revolutionary socialism.
And so, in order to be successful, perhaps as successful as it once was, today’s socialism will have to make manifest the underlying disease of which it is but a symptom. It will have to reconstitute capitalism only in order to fully destroy it. It will have to match capitalism at its own game in order to surpass it. Indeed, it was always this way, but at least there used to be widespread recognition of this fact. Now we have to fight hard just to reawaken the appreciation of what is truly progressive and revolutionary about capitalism.
The world has grown weary of class struggle. But its very fatigue may be what kills it, just like “sleep to the freezing.”