The Capitalist Class
Images of Capitalism and Socialism
There are many images of capitalists as individuals but not as a class. The most famous picture of a capitalist was the one illustrated on the inside cover of books and pamphlets published by the old Soviet Progress Publishers printing press. The author had published works such as THE CONDITION OF THE WORKING CLASS, ANTI-DUHRING, SOCIALISM UTOPIAN AND SCIENTIFIC, THE ORIGIN OF THE FAMILY, PRIVATE PROPERTY AND THE STATE and DIALECTICS OF NATURE. His name was Frederick Engels.
Engels was a capitalist but he was also a revolutionary socialist. There was no contradiction. As Marx and Engels optimistically wrote:
Finally, in times when the class-struggle nears the decisive hour, (…) a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class, the class that has the future in its hands (COMMUNIST MANIFESTO).
No contradiction exists with someone who is simultaneously wealthy and is actively working for the abolition of capitalism and the establishment of socialism. To refer to someone as a “champagne socialist” on the grounds of their comfortable circumstances is to commit an ad hominem attack; a mere logical fallacy which attacks the person not the socialist ideas they hold. Circumstances do not dictate the soundness or otherwise of the socialist argument against capitalism. To take part in socialist politics does not require self-impoverishment and the wearing]of sack cloth and ashes.
Crude and Negative Propaganda
The crude cartoon images of the capitalist, used in today’s political propaganda by groups like the SWP and The Socialist Party, are not meant to enlighten but instead to cause outrage and hatred; a negative propaganda leading nowhere.
The politics of outrage and hate wants to eliminate political opponents not to argue a rational socialist case against capitalism. There is no intention by these groups to make socialists and build-up a socialist majority: the necessary prerequisite for the establishment of socialism. Today’s crass cartoons of the capitalist would have left Marx and Engels incredulous. Marx and Engels did not hate “the bosses”. The socialism of Marx and Engels was not a politics of outrage and hate.
In the COMMUNIST MANIFESTO Marx and Engels actually praised the capitalist class for what they had achieved in such a short space of time. They wrote: “The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part” in the development of the forces of production which included co-operative and social labour. And that “revolutionary part” was to lay the ground for socialism. Workers were also advised by Marx and Engels to approach revolutionary politics with “sober senses”.
Even in the preface to the first edition of the first volume of CAPITAL, Marx said he did not blame the capitalist class for being exploiters of the working class. Marx said he only dealt with capitalists as the “bearers of particular class-relations and interest”. CAPITAL is a work of science not ethics. In capitalism, capitalists have to behave as capitalists. Capitalist have to exploit the working class. They are what Marx called: “The personification of capital”.
This did not stop capitalists becoming cartoon caricatures. The capitalist is always shown as a fat white man sitting astride a pile of money. This cartoon figure is usually annotated with the word “capitalism” to denote his class, class power and class privilege. A variation on a theme is the “fat Tom cat” parodying the cartoon capitalist of the 1920’s and 1930’s, although little is said about the thin mean cats on the make.
Art as Propaganda
The images of the capitalist and worker degenerating into crude political representation within Communist Party journals was found most notably in the 1920’s and 1930’s during the Weimar Republic which had been established in Germany after the First World War. Not only was there the repetitious use of the cartoon figure of the top-hatted capitalist but also the idealised image of male industrial workers. The image of the capitalist produced by KPD cartoonists would be transformed by the National “socialists” into a more anti-Semitic caricature of the world Jewish financier
Representation of Classes Today
How are capitalists depicted today? They are never shown as a class but as individuals; usually as the “unacceptable face of capitalism” like the pantomime figure of Sir Philip Green (PANORAMA BBC 1 October 10th 2016). An individual capitalist is fair game in the media but not the capitalist class as a whole.
Does capitalism have an acceptable face? No, of course it doesn’t. All capitalists exploit the working class otherwise they wouldn’t be capitalists. “entrepreneurs”, as capitalists are weasely called, appear in television game shows like THE APPRENTICE (Alan Sugar), The DRAGON'S DEN (an assortment of rich investors), or as philanthropists in cod documentaries like THE SECRET MILLIONAIRE. But they are never shown as a class. They are never questioned as a class. Their function in capitalism is never made known. They are, as a class, invisible to our senses; only to be understood as a mere statistic like “the one-percent”.
However, images of the capitalist class are not politically relevant. What is important is to understand the relationship between the capitalist class and the working class. It is the daily images of war, poverty and unemployment caused by capitalism as an exploitive and historically redundant social system that are important and useful for socialists to show the historical bankruptcy of the profit system and the economic and social problems it causes..
The images of the effects of capitalism are more to the point. Images of war, death and destruction are all around us on an almost daily basis. The images showing the plight of refugees imprisoned behind barbed wire at national frontiers; the images of militarised policemen with batons, water cannons, tasars, machine guns, mace spray and tear gas, the images of world poverty, starving children and homelessness; the images of the destruction by farmers of foodstuffs to maintain prices; the images of empty luxury houses when there is homelessness and the images of the grim reality of unemployment queues because it is unprofitable for capitalists to employ and to produce.
Perhaps the most accurate and chilling images of contemporary capitalism are shown in the film THE CHILDREN OF MEN (2008). The film co- written and directed by Alfonsa Cuaron, depicts the bleakness of the capitalist city spewing out advertisements for commodities no one can afford and where refugees are rounded up by the militarised police to be shipped off to internment camps. It is a city of violence, terrorism, decay and empty religious fundamentalism. The film is raw and visceral.
The similarities that do exist between the social problems in the film and ones found in today’s world are testimony to the film’s consistently visual critique of capitalism. The refugees which arrive at the boundary of fortress Europe have been bought there by the chaos, and violence of wars fought elsewhere in the world. There they face barbed wire, police brutality and tear gas. Housed in slums they are at prey to child abuse, pimps and sexual enslavement. And all the richest nations can say in the face of this extreme poverty is “go away”. In 2008 such imagery was a dystopian fiction in a film; today it is reality (for a useful commentary of the film see www.youtube.com/watch?v=-woNlmVcdjc).
Images of Socialism
What images can be conceived of Socialism; a social system that does not yet exist? We could consider John Lennon’s “imagine” but its imagery is abstract rather than concrete. It might be easy to imagine a world without war, possessions, countries, greed and hunger but to try to depict such a society in visual media is extemely difficult. Utopian plans of the future from architects like Le Corbusier (CONTEMPORARY CITY1922) to Leon Krier (LABRYNTH CITY, 1971) often become stale and age very quickly.
Pictorially, though, we could take a 1:1250 ordnance survey map of the City of London which defines the legal status of private property ownership, turn it into a three dimensional computer image, and then deconstruct all the socially useless buildings either as conversions to the needs of a socialist society or left as hollowed-out ruins.
Each individual property marked out on the ordnance survey map could then be turned into orchards and parks with trees and landscape architecture. The former bank of England, for example, could be gutted out and transformed into a children’s adventure playground. And with an electronic rubber we could begin to erase the contours of private property ownership delineated on the ordnance survey map into common ownership under democratic control. A city that remained would be devoid of capital and capitalists, a city melting gently into the countryside.
This is what William Morris had in mind in his book NEWS FROM NOWHERE. Morris gave us an image in which 19th London with its capital-labour relationship no longer existed and the countryside had been reinstated among the ruins of capitalist finance, commerce and industry.
If the film CHILDREN OF MEN shows us the world in which we live in all its poverty, hate, violence bitterness and destruction; Morris’s NEWS FROM NOWHERE has the positive attribute of showing us visually how we could live in architectural spaces if only the restraint of commodity production and exchange for profit was removed: “it’s Easy if you try”.