Power of capitalism

From Ercan Gundogan, A Theory of Capitalist Society and Social Dialectics, (2011 December, Lap Lambert): pp: 425-9

Capitalism is the only social system which is based on individual property, individual freedoms and problems and solutions which are recognized individually. Its atomism precludes collective consciousness and solutions. Even if problems and solutions should be social and collective, capitalism is capable of reducing them all into individual cases. When property and some problems become the subjects of public decision-making process, they still remain the problems of individuals. It is controversial that whether there is any collectivity or public sphere under capitalism. Public property just means public reserves of the private property; public space just means the gatherings of individuals; public life is nothing but the participation of individuals in the lives of other individuals. Capitalism rejects collectivity by its nature since everything in social life is defined in the individual contexts. Responsibilities, freedoms, property, life and death are seen only private, individual matters.

If when capitalism created collectivities, its life span would not be so long since collectivity always contradicts its individualist and atomist character. Capitalism can exploit all ideologies and cultural forms; however, it is by its nature based on the totality of individuals. It concentrates and centralizes power and capital, but never collectivities them. Civil society is full of organizations; however, those gatherings are not collectivities. Political sphere creates seemingly a public, collective sphere; however, it is just real or virtual gatherings of the individuals, their interests and personal strategies. Therefore, capitalism considers only the mean values of the individual distributions. Votes are used by individuals and cast as a mean value of their isolated decisions. Public space, public organizations and the state as a public authority at the central and local levels are not really public and collective since they are based on the mean values of the isolated individuals.

Capitalism concentrates and centralizes economic and political power only as the concentrated and centralized power of the capitalists and rulers. Publicness just becomes the mediums through which individuals are connected to the whole.

Capitalist social relations are seen as society which is composed of the civil society of individuals and the state which is seen as the public authority established by it. Individuals are the constitutive units of civil society as their citizen identities are seen as the constitutive units of the state. Besides individualism with its connotations, citizenship is another power base of the capitalist system. Citizen is too an individual, but only his/her political form. Political participation and all legal rights and liberties consider the citizen as the basic unit of politics and exclude other forms of political organizations. When their organized forms are recognized as legal personalities, these are just for the organizations rather than collective existence of groups or classes.

Class parties, clubs, cooperatives and actions are domesticated in the form of political party, trade union or workplace cooperative. Cooperatives are granted the company status as political parties are reduced to representative bodies of the individual citizens for electoral politics. Trade unions are similarly reduced to bargaining mediums between workers and employers. Political parties and trade unions are forced to represent all members and hence they are precluded to represent classes. Collectivity they organize are not necessarily classes but generally all members or adherents of their common purpose. Class unions and parties are marginalized through “collective” attacks of the capitalists and rulers. Therefore, collectivity and publicness may be only the characteristics of the capitalists and the rulers. They can easily form their collective and public identity due to their limited numbers and close connections and self-consciousness regarding their roles, functions and interests.

As the capitalism reduces all politics to representation politics with its political parties, electorate, interest and pressure groups, it does the same thing for economy by reducing all production to the requirements of capital accumulation and distribution to the welfare and taxation problems. It also reduces all ideological debates to plurality, individual liberties such as freedom of speech and expression of ideas. All collective politics, economy and ideology, which must be based class identities and interests, are rejected as the evils of authoritarianism, totalitarianism and domination of all people by a class. Capitalist system never recognizes the capitalists as a class but present them the real forces of development, welfare, employment and technological change. Capitalists are the unwinnable gifts to society since they are the real dynamics of welfare and progress.

Power of capitalism underlies its power of capital concentration and centralization when it divides and atomizes classes and all kind of collective gatherings.  It centralizes itself while it decentralizes its rivals. It concentrates its economic and political power when it de-concentrates and divides the power in politics and economy of their rivals. Capitalists act as a class despite their internal conflicts while they do not allow workers to think and act in a similar way. Therefore, capitalist society becomes a society of their class before the divided and atomized members of the workers.

Power of capitalism also underlies the fact that it can transfer its own problems to other spheres in space and time and hide them from the mass of workers and citizens as well as transforming or reproducing them in new institutional contexts. Capitalism is still a dynamic, changeable, unpredictable and instable system by creating ever more diverse, uncertain and complex social relations. Nonetheless, we observe that it centralizes and concentrates more than it localizes and divides. As Marx and Engels observed well, it continuously polarizes economic, political and ideological power. Productivity which is its main foundation is uncertain, inadequate and interrupted by more frequent crises by creating more polarization and inequality between the capitalists and workers. Nevertheless, capitalist system is still capable of preventing the social polarization and inequality to be seen as a class problem.