Understanding Capitalism: A Comprehensive Overview
What is Capitalism?
Capitalism is a social system, a way of organizing social life, and a set of answers to fundamental economic questions. It is often characterized as an oppressive regime of class, as there is a ruling class (the bourgeoisie) that holds power over others. This power stems from economic distinctions between people and is reinforced by institutions, norms, habits, and ideas.
The Ruling Class and Class Struggle
The bourgeoisie directly or indirectly controls economic resources and, through this control, manages to obtain power over others. Under capitalism, the boundaries between social classes are fluid, and separations may not seem abrupt. However, this system inherently involves class struggle, a constant tension between oppression and the will to break free from it. Capitalism leads to economic exploitation and deprives people of their agency, freedom of movement, and the ability to decide how they want to live. This fuels the ongoing struggle between the ruling class and those they exploit.
Capitalism’s Inherent Crisis and Expansion
The class struggle forces capitalism to constantly create new ways to oppress, exploit, and divide people. This makes the power of the ruling class unstable and fragile, requiring constant reinforcement. Therefore, capitalism is often described as a system in perpetual crisis. To resolve this inherent crisis, capitalism expands. This expansion has taken various forms throughout history.
Privatization and the Commodity
Under capitalism, the ruling class derives its power from beliefs, institutions, and the concept of private property. Resources are privatized, meaning that individuals can be deprived of access to them, and those who control them can use them for their own enrichment. Capitalism is, in essence, a machine for privatization. A fundamental institution of capitalism is the commodity – anything produced to be sold for profit. While buying and selling existed in markets before capitalism, under this system, nearly everything becomes a marketable commodity. Today, access to essential resources is often privatized, and even people’s time is commodified. Entrepreneurs buy workers’ time in exchange for wages, and the difference between the value of what a worker produces and their wage is known as surplus value. The ruling class appropriates this surplus value, allowing for the accumulation of capital.
Capitalism can be defined as a set of habits, laws, political and economic institutions, and a culture that guarantees and legitimizes the fact that some people can deprive others of access to resources and use others for their enrichment. The ruling class appropriates the work of others, produces goods to sell in the market, and accumulates wealth to maintain and increase its power.
Primitive Accumulation and the Expansion of Capitalism
Before capitalism, the majority of people controlled their own means of production, and time and work were not yet commodified. The advent of capitalism involved a process of primitive accumulation, where the means of production were expropriated from the hands of direct producers, along with their resources and autonomy. This process paved the way for capitalism’s expansion.
Imperialism and Colonialism
, the new capitalist nations appropriated regions and forced its inhabitants to be at your service. Commercial companies and nation states led this expansion. Imperialism was a uniform world. But also divided people by nationality, religion or skin color.
The third phase of expansion, is globalization. Globalization means, every part of the same product is manufactured in different places and businesses are organized in a crime. Investment and transnational corporations need to move freely without being affected by any national borders and therefore need uniform rules are economical and cultural patterns. For this emerging public and private transnational institutions that regulate and organize life on a global scale.
Capitalism is also expanding into the regions, invades spaces and natural products and replaced by private and artificial. It also penetrates more and more our minds and privacy. Certain public spaces are increasingly commodified by advertising and by the sponsor. These are becoming less, what makes people opt for private spaces and commodified.
One of the issues of capitalism, is to understand what the state and how it works. The anti-capitalists argue that the state is not neutral, that is on the side of the ruling class. While workers perceived that the state could enact important legislation for their benefit. But the state is an integral part of capitalist society is a function of the social.
The state function, ensures economic accumulation and ensures legitimacy. Without the state, the capitalists, they could not ensure the accumulation of profit. So there is the regulation of the economy, which is a feature that makes the capitalist state to ensure long-term accumulation.
As capitalism is threatened by the class struggle, the State has the task of dealing with that capitalist society is seen as legitimate. When standing fails, the state is responsible for repression. But no system works if it is based on repression: The state must always ensure the legitimacy of capitalist society.
So the state needs an appearance of neutrality. Need to appear as independent of the powerful. That’s why sometimes the state makes laws that may harm the interests of those short-term.
The state is a function of the social, can not separate state and society. The state takes the form of capitalist society to which he belongs. Changes in society are changes in the state and vice versa.
The state has no degree of autonomy from society. But it is an instrument that capitalists use as they wish, as the class struggle, major changes affect the state.
This stems from the society and the way the class struggle has been shaped.
The capitalist state is a machine to separate and rank people the rights they have. Separates humans in countries under different states, separated by borders, which means that only citizens have political rights within our own nation-state.
Nationalist ideology, suggests that society’s space coincides with that of a State. But if society is all the relationships we build people, they do not stop at the borders. We are all interconnected, either to the operation of the production, trade, fashion etc.
The society we live in is global and interdependent. The fragmented, split and divided global society, creating geographic areas and privileged and oppressed groups of people. The state holds our rights within the borders, so that we can not change the functioning of society as a whole
The State also makes a separation between private and public. The constitutional and legal system provides that there is a whole area of social life that society can not “play” because it is private. Under capitalism there is a problem, some kind of privilege obtained rights to be private.
Long, people struggling to bring private privileges, back to the public, for society to democratically decide if you want to keep them or not.
Capitalism is based on an ideology itself, in a more or less orderly ideas.
Liberalism holds that society is made up of individuals who possess natural rights. These have priority, no decision of the company can go against them. Society and the State should be involved as little as possible and cook without disturbing individuals. The state should only intervene when it violates a law or to provide basic services.
Today the ruling class hegemony achieved if it gets its ideology becomes general knowledge. The individualism of liberal ideology is manifested in selfishness and isolation of men and women, each enclosed in their own affairs.
The fact that one can enjoy rights only if it has economic resources is reflected in patterns of our culture: Productivism, the cult of economic success, efficiency and competition, and consumerism.
The liberal idea of a natural order, is reflected in the conformism, passivity, and the valuation of obedience.
To survive, the capitalist system, you need to convey this kind of selfish values, discriminatory and conformist (as done by mass media, education, etc..).
The culture of capitalism, extends in a spontaneous and unconscious, because all of us that culture in our minds.
We are shaped by capitalism, not to say that there is no way out of this. No oppressive system can be total, because this is always accompanied by resistance. Capitalism needs to strengthen all the time its cultural messages and adapt their forms of organization, because every time we create new values and ways of life that escape the domination.