It is the achievement of progressive politics (i.e., liberals and leftists, broadly defined) that issues of race, sex, and gender, as they challenge an unjust status quo, remain paramount in the public eye. But what of an actual alternative to capitalism? A defining difference between leftists and liberals is that the former criticize capitalism as such, and advocate for a different way of running the world, whereas the unquestioned liberal assumption is that only capitalism is possible or desirable. According to the liberal, capitalism may have very serious problems, but they can be fixed: capitalism is and must be here to stay.
The essence of capitalism is that a certain class—the bourgeoisie, or in particular the big bourgeoisie or large corporations—own and/or control most of the means of production: land, machinery, patents, natural resources, etc. They do this through their use of capital. Whether the capitalists work hard or are as lazy as a sack of oats, the real source of their wealth is the wealth they already own, wealth created mostly from other people’s labour. Even those very few capitalists who started out poor, no matter how hard they work, rise to the top mostly on the backs of the working class. Even the most well-intentioned capitalists pay this class less than its labour is worth; if they didn’t, they would perish as capitalists. The lie capitalism spreads is that the capitalists’ phenomenal wealth is the just desserts owed to the hardest working members of the global community, and that somehow, the 1% that owns between 30% and 50% of the world’s assets really does 30% to 50% of the world’s work.
If you believe it is humanly possible to work anything close to that hard, I have wasted enough of your time already and you may as well go elsewhere.
Liberals need to question capitalism: not just its excesses or abuses, or its favouring of white males, but capitalism as such, where exploitation is built-in regardless of anybody’s intentions. An international rainbow coalition of the exploiting class, where all racial, gender, and sexual groups were proportionately represented within the palaces of privilege, would only rearrange the various identities of who are the rich thieves and who are their poor victims. The amount of robbery and injustice would not decrease significantly.
The critique of capitalism, however, should not be done in competition with the usual liberal concerns over sex, race, and gender. Rather, a critique of and opposition to capitalism has a great deal to do with these other forms of oppression and is a tremendous boon to the understanding of them. When you think about it, anti-capitalism has a great deal to say about these other issues of oppression.
Consider these examples, which only scratch the surface:
Traditionally, women in many times and places have not been allowed to own land: the most fundamental means of production. They have been forced to rely for sustenance on fathers or husbands. They often have not been allowed to have the same jobs as men, and where they have made progress and acquired some access to the same jobs, they have often been paid less.
Indigenous people have been oppressed when their means of production–the land–was stolen from them. Because they were pushed onto reserves, where the economic potential of that land tends to be minimal, the oppression continues.
Africans, in being turned into slaves and taken to foreign lands, not only lost their means of production, but became the means of production: the fruits of which belonged to others.
A perennial problem with LGBTQS people is on-the-job harassment, or even the loss of their jobs if they are open about who they are.
Also, the exploitation of all workers, regardless of dis/ability, race, gender, or sexual orientation is inherent in capitalism. The Marxist labour theory of value shows clearly that capitalism is founded on the theft of labour. And even without familiarity with the ins and outs of that theory, we can see the bourgeoisie does not get rich in proportion to its labour.