In recent years, anti-capitalist politics have become more and more popular. As the crises of capitalism worsen, and our conditions deteriorate, the US empire tries desperately to bolster its facade of world dominance. More people are beginning to understand the failing of the capitalist system.
People grow more and more dissatisfied with the few crumbs capitalism offers. Workers set fire to products which represent the wealth they produce but do not own. New York City has an explicitly socialist mayor for the first time in decades. Capitalism’s stock continues to plummet.
Those of us who want to do more than merely critique the status quo — we who want to transform society for the better — cannot be satisfied with surface-level hate. To achieve victory, we must not only know that capitalism is our enemy but also know why it’s our enemy.
There are, broadly speaking, two reasons to oppose capitalism: 1) its internal contradictions and 2) it deeply anti-human characteristics. Capitalism, at its most fundamental level, is a self-destructive system. The basic logic of capitalism as an economic system is perpetual expansion in pursuit of the accumulation of ever-increasing wealth; there is no endpoint, no exit ramp, no state of satisfaction for capitalists and the system they reproduce. This capitalist greed, this hunger for more wealth, cannot help but consume and deplete the very resources (land, labor, etc.) we rely on for our continued existence.
Data centers suck up water, oil refineries pollute the air, and industry bulldozes the trees. But these resources, the materials necessary to the continuation of our very existence, are not infinite, and the damage caused by their exploitation reverberates across the whole of our societies. Capitalism is the enemy of the people not simply because it makes us miserable, though that reality cannot be ignored; it is our enemy because its continued dominance of the world spells the very end of the world as we know it. Industrialists and Tech moguls will try to sell the pipe dream of a world that can sustain endless environmental extraction, but the reality is bare to see.
In addition to its own logical contradictions, the capitalism is a system which is antithetical to life. Our daily lives and the basic necessities we need to exist are transformed into commodities to be bought and sold. Whether its Nestle buying up local water sources and selling it back to the people as “spring water,” or landlords collecting houses to rent back to tenants, daily life under capitalism is a constant grind to claw back enough in wages to pay for the most fundamental needs of human existence.
We sell our time and labor to make back a tiny fraction of the wealth we generate, all the while sacrificing our health, relationships, and happiness at the capitalist altar like a tithe; only its no god but rather the decrepit ruling class of the wealthy who reap what we sow. As the internal crises of capitalism sharpen, and the amount of wealth the capitalists can wring out of workers dwindles, the highest form of capitalism’s logic of death and destruction emerges in the form of imperialist wars, brutal state violence, and genocide. These last gasps of capitalism bring with them immense suffering and environmental devastation all for the sake of lining the pockets of the ruling class with a few more dollars. We fight capitalism because it is the enemy of the people and is the greatest threat to our happiness and well-being; nothing less than total victory will suffice.
In knowing our enemy, we must not confuse the trees for the forest. A standard response to criticisms of capitalism is to focus on individual “bad apples” and leave the system that gives such individuals power completely untouched. But we will not save ourselves and the world we inhabit by swapping out the Elon Musks and Sam Altmans for nicer, kinder exploiters. The individual capitalist does not determine the overall logic of capitalism as much as the individual police officer determines how violent policing as a system is; Musk and his class merely represent the most naked vices of capitalist exaltation of profit over life.
The fundamental problem of capitalism is not that the capitalist class is greedy; the primary issue is that the means by which we produce the necessary goods for our lives is concentrated in the hands of a few rather than shared by the people. Even if every capitalist were a saint, the masses of people would still be forced to buy back the products they produce to sustain themselves. My landlord might be a nice guy and never cause me any problems, but he stills controls whether I get to stay in my house. The CEO of my company may be “one of the team,” but she still has the power to cut my job at any point to increase shareholder profit by a few percent. At the end of the day, whether I can meet my needs or waste away miserably is out of my hands; greed is not the problem, lack of self-determination is.
In simple terms, capitalism is the enemy of the people because under capitalism the people do not own what we need to live. It is stolen from the people to enrich the capitalist ruling class.
Though we may know capitalism as our enemy, a question remains: how to defeat it? The propaganda of the ruling class tells us one of two things: either we “win” by picking ourselves up by our bootstraps and striving to become the capitalist ourselves, or we accept our place under the boot of capitalism as a natural byproduct of history. This choice, comrades, is a false one meant to distract us from the power we might wield when we understand our enemy as a common one and act collectively. We, the vast majority of people who labor to produce the wealth that the capitalist class enjoy, are the true makers of history, and with our collective might we can burn the capitalist system to the ground so a better world for us all might rise from the ashes.
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