Will Capitalism Last Forever?

Will capitalism last forever as its supporters claim? Is the world we currently live in, with its squalor, poverty, pollution, human degradation, war and destruction, the final pinnacle of social evolution?

No social system has lasted forever so why should capitalism be any different? Primitive Communism, the slave societies of Greece and Rome and the agrarian serfdom of Feudalism have all come and gone. Even the most entrenched of totalitarian regimes were vulnerable to change. There was no “Thousand Year Reich”. Empires have arisen, flourished, decayed and disappeared. And who would have imagined state capitalism in Eastern Europe vanishing within a few years following the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989?

What is so special about capitalism that its adherents believe it will last forever? Capitalism is not natural but social, with a historical beginning in class struggle and a potential end in class struggle. It took a revolutionary capitalist class over three centuries of violence to free itself from the constraints of Feudalism; first in 17th century Britain, then in the American colonies, then in late 18th century France, mid – 19th century Europe and early 20th century Russia until there was a world-wide capitalist system made-up of competing nation states all containing a diametrically opposed employing class and an exploited working class.

Why will the profit system buck the historical trend and not end with the class struggle between capital and labour pushed to its final limit with the establishment of Socialism? Why the pessimism? Are the ideas and beliefs held by defenders of capitalism similar to the thinking of theologians? For partisan theologians all rival religions are social constructs except their own religion which has the metaphysical attributes of divine legitimacy. For economists, and politicians and other defenders of capitalism all class societies prior to capitalism are said to be socially formed. Only capitalism is deemed natural and immune from social change.

However, just as the development of natural science drives out theology as an explanation of the world in which we live, so the historical process of social evolution expressed in the materialist conception of history shatters pretensions of social permanency. “All that is solid melts into air”: wrote Marx in the Communist Manifesto (Socialist Party of Great Britain, The Communist Manifesto – and the Last One Hundred Years, Centenary Edition 1948 loc cit p. 63). Nothing is permanent. Nothing stands still forever.

For class exploitation is bound up with the class struggle. And the class struggle derives from the extent and intensity of exploitation at the heart of commodity production and exchange for profit. Workers produce more social wealth than they receive in wages and salaries. A portion of the social wealth workers produce goes to the capitalist class as unearned income in the form of rent, interest and profit. Workers work necessary time for themselves and surplus time for their employers with one class trying to shorten the working day, the other trying to lengthen it; with one class trying to reduce the intensity of work, the other trying to intensify it as much as possible.

Nevertheless the class struggle is not just about economic conditions of class exploitation. Politically, the class struggle has far wider consequences for the continued existence of capitalism. Marx stated in the opening sentence to section I of THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO:

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”

(loc cit p. 60).

The class struggle, for Marx, is a political struggle; the motor force of history. The resolution of the class struggle changes society in a revolutionary way. In the past, the replacement of one class with another still generated the class struggle as a new class tried to free itself from the constraints placed upon it by an incumbent ruling class. The same is not the case with capitalism where the working class is the last class in social evolution to free itself from class coercion and exploitation. Unlike capitalism, Socialism will be a classless society.

To believe, as the former Conservative Prime Minister, Harold MacMillan did in his 1959 election victory address, that “The class struggle is over” (TIMES, October 9th 1959), to believe as the former Prime Minister, John Major, did, when he announced in 1990 his intention to create a “classless society” (TODAY, 24 November, 1990) and to believe as the former TGWU leader Lord Morris did when he announced to the TUC in September 1997 that the class struggle was “an invention of the Russians during the cold war”, shows an ignorant misunderstanding of class, class relations and the class struggle on the one hand and the reasons why class conflict occurs on the other. No political power can end the class struggle taking place in capitalism except through a Socialist revolution by a Socialist majority no matter how long the revolutionary process takes.