capitalism persuasive essay against

1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology

Philosophy, One Thousand Words at a Time

Arguments for Capitalism and Socialism

Author: Thomas Metcalf Category: Social and Political Philosophy Wordcount: 993

Editor’s Note: This essay is the second in a two-part series authored by Tom on the topic of capitalism and socialism. The first essay, on defining capitalism and socialism, is available here .

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Suppose I had a magic wand that allowed one to produce 500 donuts per hour. I say to you, “Let’s make a deal. You use this wand to produce donuts, and then sell those donuts for $500 and give me the proceeds. I’ll give you $10 for every hour you spend doing this. I’ll spend that time playing video games.”

My activity—playing video games—seems pretty easy. Your job requires much more effort. And I might end up with a lot more money than $10 for every hour you work. How is that fair?

In the story, the magic wand is analogous to capital goods : assets (typically machinery and buildings, such as robots, sewing machines, computers, and factories) that make labor, or providing goods and services, more productive. Standard definitions of ‘capitalism’ and ‘socialism’ indicate that, in general, capitalist systems permit people to privately own and control capital goods, whereas socialist systems do not. And capitalist systems tend to contain widespread wage labor, absentee ownership, and property income; socialist systems generally don’t. [1]

Capital goods are morally interesting. As in the case of the magic wand, ownership of capital goods can allow one to make lots of money without working. In contrast, other people have to work for a living. This might be unfair or harmful. This essay surveys and explains the main arguments in this debate. [2]

1. Capitalism

Arguments for capitalism tend to hold that it’s beneficial to society for there to be incentives to produce, own, and use capital goods like the magic wand, or that it’s wrong to forcibly prevent people from doing so. Here are four arguments for capitalism, stated briefly:

(1) Competition: ‘When individuals compete with each other for profits, this benefits the consumer.’ [3]

Critique : Competition also may encourage selfish and predatory behavior. Competition can also occur in some socialist systems. [4]

(2) Freedom: ‘Preventing people from owning capital restricts their freedom. Seizing their income in the form of taxes may constitute theft.’ [5]

Critiques : Maybe owning property, itself, restricts freedom, by excluding others from using it. [6] If I announce that I own something, I may be thereby announcing that I will force you not to use it. And maybe “freedom” requires the ability to pursue one’s own goals, which in turn requires some amount of wealth. [7] Further, if people must choose between work and starvation, then their choice to work may not be really “free” anyway. [8] And the general distribution of wealth is arguably the result of a morally arbitrary “natural lottery,” [9] which may not actually confer strict property-rights over one’s holdings. [10] I didn’t choose where I was born, nor my parents’ wealth, nor my natural talents, which allow me to acquire wealth. So perhaps it’s not a violation of my rights to take some of that property from me.

(3) Public Goods: [11] ‘When objects, including capital, must be shared with others, then no one is strongly motivated to produce them. In turn, society is poorer and labor is more difficult because production is inefficient.’ [12]

Critique : People might be motivated to produce capital for altruistic reasons, [13] or may be coerced in some socialist systems to do so. Some putatively socialist systems allow for profitable production of capital goods. [14]

  (4) Tragedy of the Commons: ‘When capital, natural resources, or the environment are publicly controlled, no one is strongly motivated to protect them.’ [15]

Critique : As before, people might be motivated by altruism. [16] Some systems with partially-private control of capital may nevertheless qualify as socialist. [17]

2. Socialism

Arguments for socialism tend to hold that it’s unfair or harmful to have a system like in the story of the magic wand, a system with widespread wage labor and property income. Here are four arguments for socialism, stated briefly:

(1) Fairness: ‘It’s unfair to make money just by owning capital, as is possible only in a capitalist system.’ [18]

Critique : Perhaps fairness isn’t as morally important as consent, freedom, property rights, or beneficial consequences. And perhaps wage laborers consent to work, and capital owners have property rights over their capital. [19]

(2) Inequality: ‘When people can privately own capital, they can use it to get even richer relative to the poor, and the wage laborers are left poorer and poorer relative to the rich, thereby worsening the inequality that already exists between capital-owners and wage-laborers.’ [20]

Critiques : This is a disputable empirical claim. [21] And perhaps the ability to privately own capital encourages people to invest in building capital goods, thereby making goods and services cheaper. Further, perhaps monopolies commonly granted by social control over capital are “captured” by wealthy special-interests, [22] which harm the poor by enacting regressive laws. [23]

(3) Labor: ‘Wage laborers are alienated from their labor, exploited, and unfree because they must obey their bosses’ orders.’ [24]

Critiques : If this alienation and exploitation are net-harmful to workers, then why do workers consent to work? If the answer is ‘because they’ll suffer severe hardship otherwise,’ then strictly speaking, this is a critique of allowing poverty, not a critique of allowing wage labor.

(4) Selfishness: ‘When people can privately own capital, they selfishly pursue profit above all else, which leads to further inequality, environmental degradation, non-productive industries, economic instability, colonialism, mass murder, and slavery.’

Critique : These are also disputable empirical claims. Maybe when people are given control over socially -owned capital, they selfishly extract personal wealth from it. [25] Maybe when the environment is socially controlled, everyone is individually motivated to over-harvest and pollute. [26] State intervention in the economy may be a major cause of the existence of non-productive industry, pollution, and economic instability. [27] Last, some of the worst perpetrators of historical evils are governments, not private corporations. [28]

  3. Conclusion

It is difficult to justifiably draw general conclusions about what a pure capitalism or socialism would be like in practice. [29] But an examination of the merits and demerits of each system gives us some guidance about whether we should move a society in either direction.

[1] See my Defining Capitalism and Socialism for an explanation of how to define these systems.

[2] For much-more-extensive surveys, see Gilabert and O’Neill n.d. and Arnold n.d.

[3] By analogy, different people might try to construct even better magic wands, or use them for better purposes. Typically the benefits are thought to include lower prices, increased equality, innovation, and more options. See Smith 2003 [1776]: bk. 1, ch. 2 and Friedman and Friedman 1979: ch. 1.

[4] Schweickart 2011 presents an outline of a market socialism comprising much competition.

[5] By analogy, if I legitimately own the magic wand, then what gives you the right to threaten violence against me if I don’t give it to you? Nozick 1974: ch. 7 presents a general discussion of how socialism might restrict freedom and how taxation may be akin to theft or forced labor.

[6] Spencer 1995 [1871]: 103-4 and Zwolinski 2015 discuss how property might require coercion. See also Scott 2011: 32-33. Indeed, property in general may essentially be theft (Proudhon 1994 [1840]).

[7] See Rawls (1999: 176-7) for this sort of argument. See John Rawls’ ‘A Theory of Justice’ by Ben Davies for an introduction.

[8] See e.g. Burawoy 1979 for a discussion of whether workers consent to work. See also Marx 2004 (1867): vol. IV, ch. VII.

[9] Rawls 1999: 62 ff.

[10] Relatedly, while one may currently hold capital, one may greatly owe the existence of that product to many other people or to society in general. See e.g. Kropotkin 2015 [1913]: chs. 1-3 and Murphy and Nagel 2002.

[11] A public good is a good that is non-excludable (roughly, it is expensive to prevent people from using it) and non-rivalrously consumed (roughly, preventing people from using it causes harm without benefiting anyone) (Cowen 2008).

[12] By analogy, why bother building magic wands at all if someone else is immediately going to take it from me and start using it? Standard economic theory holds that public goods (non-excludable and non-rivalrous goods) will, on the free market, be underproduced. This is normally taken to be an argument for government to produce public goods. See e.g. Gaus 2008: 84 ff.

[13] For example, according to Marxist communism, the ideal socialist society would comprise production for use, not for profit. See e.g. Marx 2004 [1867]: vol. 1 ch. 7. See also Kropotkin 1902, which is a defense of the general claim that humans will tend to be altruistic, at least in anarcho-communist systems.

[14] In a market-socialist system (cf. Schweickart 2011), it is possible to make capital goods and sell them at a profit that gets distributed to the laborers.

[15] By analogy, if I know that anyone in the neighborhood can use the magic wand, I might not invest my own time and money to maintain it. But if it’s mine alone, I care a lot more about maintaining it. This is the basis of the well-known ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ alleged problem. See, e.g., Hardin 1968.

[16] Kropotkin 1902.

[17] As before, in Schweickart’s (2011) system, firms will be motivated to protect capital if they must pay for capital’s deprecation, even though the capital is owned by society.

[18] By analogy, as noted, the wand-owner might make lots of money for basically doing no work. Sherman 1995: 130; Schweickart 2011: § 3.2.

[19] See e.g. Friedman 2002 for a collection of consequentialist arguments for capitalism, and Nozick 1974: chs. 3 and 7 for some arguments concerning freedom and capitalist systems.

[20] By analogy, the wand-owner might accumulate so much money as to start buying other magic wands and renting those out as well. See e.g. Piketty 2014.

[21] Taking the world as a whole, wealth in absolute terms has been increasing greatly, and global poverty has been decreasing steeply, including in countries that have moved in mostly capitalist directions. See e.g. World Bank Group 2016: 3. Friedman 1989: ch. 5 argues that capitalism is responsible for the improved position of the poor today compared to the past.

[22] See e.g. Friedman 1989: ch. 7 for a discussion of regulatory capture.

[23] Friedman 2002: chs. IV and IX; Friedman 1989: ch. 4.

[24] By analogy, the person I’ve hired to use the wand might need to obey my orders, because they don’t have a wand of their own to rent out, and they might starve without the job I’ve offered them. Marx 2009 [1932] introduces and develops this concept of alienation. See Dan Lowe’s 2015 Karl Marx’s Conception of Alienation for an overview. See also Anderson 2015 for an argument that private corporations coercively violate their workers’ freedom.

[25] See n. 21 above. This result is most-obvious in countries in which dictators enrich themselves, but there is nothing in principle preventing rulers of ostensibly democratic countries from doing so as well. Presumably this worry explains the presence of the Emoluments Clause in the U. S. Constitution.

[26] See n. 14.

[27] See e.g. Friedman 2002: chs. III and V and the example of compliance costs for regulations.

[28] See Huemer 2013: ch. 6 ff.

[29] All or nearly all large-scale economies have been mixed economies. In contrast, a pure capitalism would be an anarcho-capitalism (see e.g. Gaus 2010: 75 ff. and Huemer 2013), and a pure socialism wouldn’t permit people to privately own scissors. See also the entry “Defining Capitalism and Socialism.”

Anderson, Elizabeth. 2015. Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk about It) . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Arnold, Samuel. N. d. “Socialism.” In The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (ed.), The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy , URL = < https://www.iep.utm.edu/socialis/ >

Burawoy, Michael. 1979. Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process under Monopoly Capitalism . Chicago, IL and London, UK: The University of Chicago Press.

Cohen, G. A. 2009. Why Not Socialism? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Cowen, Tyler. 2008. “Public Goods.” In David R. Henderson (ed.), The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics . Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund.

Dagger, Richard and Terence Ball. 2019. “Socialism.” In Encyclopædia Britannica, inc. (ed.), E ncyclopædia Britannica . Retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/topic/socialism

Dahl, Robert A. 1993. “Why All Democratic Countries have Mixed Economies.” Nomos 35: 259-82.

Dictionary.com. N.d. “Capitalism.” URL = < https://www.dictionary.com/browse/capitalism >

Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica. 2019. “Henri de Saint-Simon.” In Encyclopædia Britannica , Retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/biography/Henri-de-Saint-Simon

Friedman, David D. 1989. The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism , Second Edition. La Salle, IL: Open Court Publishing Company.

Friedman, Milton. 2002. Capitalism and Freedom . Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Friedman, Milton and Rose Friedman. 1979. Free to Choose: A Personal Statement . New York, NY: Harcourt Brace.

Gaus, Gerald. 2010. “The Idea and Ideal of Capitalism.” In George G. Brenkert and Tom L. Beauchamp (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Business Ethics . New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Gaus, Gerald. 2008. On Philosophy, Politics, and Economics . Belmont, CA: Thomson Wadsworth.

Gilabert, Pablo and Martin O’Neill. 2019. “Socialism.” In E. N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy . Retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/socialism/ .

Hardin, Garrett. 1968. “The Tragedy of the Commons.” Science 162(3859): 1243-48.

Herzog, Lisa. 2019. “Markets.” In E. N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , Spring 2019 Edition, URL =https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2019/entries/markets/

Huemer, Michael. 2013. The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey . Houndmills, UK and New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Investopedia. 2019. “Mixed Economic System.” Retrieved from https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/mixed-economic-system.asp

Kropotkin, P. 1902. Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution . New York, NY: McClure Phillips & Co.

Kropotkin, Peter. 2015 [1913]. The Conquest of Bread. London, UK: Penguin Classics.

Lowe, Dan. 2015. “Karl Marx’s Conception of Alienation.” 1000-Word Philosophy . Retrieved from https://1000wordphilosophy.com/2015/05/13/karl-marxs-conception-of-alienation/.

Marx, Karl. 2009 [1932]. “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.” In Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and the Communist Manifesto , tr. Martin Milligan (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books), pp. 13-202.

Marx, Karl. 2004 [1867]. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One . New York, NY: Penguin Classics.

Merriam-Webster. N.d. “Capitalism.” URL = < https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/capitalism >

Mill, John Stuart. 1965 [1848]. Principles of Political Economy with Some of Their Applications to Social Philosophy, Volume I: The Principles of Political Economy I , ed. J. M. Robson. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press.

Murphy, Liam and Thomas Nagel. 2002. The Myth of Ownership: Taxes and Justice. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Nozick, Robert. 1974. Anarchy, State, and Utopia . New York, NY: Basic Books.

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Piketty, Thomas. 2014. Capital in the Twenty-First Century , tr. Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph. 1994 [1840]. What is Property? Ed. Donald R. Kelley and Bonnie G. Smith. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Rawls, John. 1999. A Theory of Justice, Revised Edition . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Schweickart, David. 2011. After Capitalism , Second Edition. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Scott, Bruce R. 2011. Capitalism: Its Origins and Evolution as a System of Governance . New York, NY: Springer Science+Business Media.

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About the Author

Tom Metcalf is an associate professor at Spring Hill College in Mobile, AL. He received his PhD in philosophy from the University of Colorado, Boulder. He specializes in ethics, metaethics, epistemology, and the philosophy of religion. Tom has two cats whose names are Hesperus and Phosphorus. shc.academia.edu/ThomasMetcalf

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What is capitalism.

Please answer ONE of the following essay questions. In doing so, please offer detailed discussion based on close analysis of the readings for the class. The essay should be 5 pages double-spaced.

• Choose any three of the following theorists and compare their viewpoints on capitalism. How did each understand the nature of capitalism and its implications for society? On what basis did they offer their views? How and in what ways did their perspectives parallel or differ from the other two? You might want to consider how particular historical influences came into play or whether they were in dialogue with or reacting against each other. Which arguments do you find most persuasive and why? You may choose three of any of the following theorists: Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Max Weber, Pierre Bourdieu, Sherry Ortner, Satnam Virdee, David Harvey, or Guy Standing.
• In the 1940s, the work of Austrian economist F. A. Hayek and Austrian economic historian Karl Polanyi emerged out of the maelstrom of two world wars and attempted to address the question of whether or not capitalism was beneficial to society overall. (For Hayek, this question was linked to questions of individualism.) In your paper, describe the viewpoints of these two theorists on capitalism. How and why did they see capitalism as either supportive or destructive of social relations? On what did they base their opposing viewpoints? In your view, who offers the more and less persuasive arguments about capitalism and why?

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Arguments Against Capitalism Essay

Introduction, critique of capitalism.

One of the distinct characteristics of the capitalistic economies is the price mechanism. This is in the sense that capitalistic economies are influenced by free markets where the effects of pull and push of the demand, versus the supply affects the prices that are in the market.

The advancements by Friedman in support of capitalistic economies as the best way by which economic decision can be made with regard to morality and efficiency that have been supported by various other scholars; however, a few economy experts have differed with this opinion, and critiqued capitalism as the best way that economies may be managed. Various arguments against capitalism have been raised in this paper. This paper would analyze this other thought and justify the argument that is found to be more convincing (Ingham 43).

Galbraith says we have fetish economy. In other words, there are so many obsessions among the market players in today’s capitalistic markets. This is to say that the capitalists do not regard to the processes but the result. The business decisions and actions are not based on the common good of all the market but for the business stakeholders involved in the business.

Indeed, as Galbraith says we have fetish economy. Business people are obsessed with business and they would do everything at the expense of anything to ensure that they maximize their profit margins. The morality of maximizing returns at the expense of the masses leaves many questions unanswered. This is because previous studies of today’s MNC in large economies have revealed that they make large profits, while people suffer with regard to the costs by which they can purchase economies.

Perhaps, the greatest challenge of capitalism is the fact that the global market is controlled by a few large companies which dictate the decisions the intermediary companies may undertake in their local countries. This leaves the consumers of products at the mercies of a few and, thus, the basket for the rich keeps bulging, as the one for the poor gets empty each day that goes.

It is a fetish economy characterized by the rich, who control the factors of production being obsessed by money and, thus, can do anything to increase their profits as the poor consumers are left languishing and struggling to keep the changing times and costs.

Lindblom brought up the problem that advertising comes with regard to influence it has on people’s buying decisions. In most capitalistic economies, advertising plays a crucial role in influencing the consumers in making many decisions, and more so in making buying decisions. This is one of the follies of pure capitalistic economies. This has a negative implication to the consumers, since they will not be directed by their own informed decision but the decisions made by the manufacturers themselves (Pamuk 52).

It is absurd that consumers have to make buying decisions based on the exact advertisements provided by the producers of the products, though that is what happens in most capitalistic economies.

Lindblom critiques the capitalistic economies, claiming that the capitalistic enterprises are often involved in creating artificial wants by employing advertisements and, thus, they make business by exploiting the minds and the decisions of the consumers. In my view, capitalism is not an expert system that should be used to run economies due to the nature of the variables involved in its operation.

All in all, capitalism has various benefits though it cannot go without criticisms. Looking at the global markets we have today, capitalism has spread almost in every corner of the world. The consequence of this is the increased challenge that we experience today. The paper has pointed out the core flaws of capitalism as the controlled pricing system and use of advertisements to tune consumers buying decisions.

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1 What’s Wrong with Capitalism?

• Published: August 2015
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Capitalism as a system for economic organization and resource allocation is suffering a worldwide crisis of confidence, with growing inequality, financial crises, and a structural unemployment that affects youth disproportionally. Since the Cold War western capitalism has been treated as the only acceptable form of economic system, andthe public or political realm has itself come to be dominated by the money of special-interest groups. This has in turn led to mass protest movements across the developed and developing worlds, and a weakening of the political center in favor of more extreme political currents. Fissures have been widening between the investor class enjoying growing returns on capital and the wage-earning class suffering declining returns from their labor. And increased financialization of the economy means the traditional economic theories based on production in a classical sense are increasingly irrelevant to the modern economy. Above all a sense of unfairness and decades of growing inequality risk the stability and sustainability of the system and its acceptance, and an erosion in societal trust and the very institutions needed to sustain the system.

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US EDITION OF THE WORLD’S OLDEST MAGAZINE

A vigorous and persuasive defense of capitalism

Johan Norberg’s A Capitalist Manifesto has much to commend it

Written By:

Michael M. Rosen

“Under capitalism,” John Kenneth Galbraith once quipped, “man exploits man. Under communism, it’s just the opposite.” For a left-wing economist such as Galbraith, this was about as close as one might get to exalting capitalism — damning by faint praise. But in The Capitalist Manifesto, a lively, closely argued polemic by the Swedish historian Johan Norberg, we find a much more vigorous and persuasive defense of the most successful economic system the world has ever seen, a mechanism for sowing widespread abundance and lifting billions out of penury.

“The argument for capitalism,” Norberg boldly declares in his…

“Under capitalism,” John Kenneth Galbraith once quipped, “man exploits man. Under communism, it’s just the opposite.” For a left-wing economist such as Galbraith, this was about as close as one might get to exalting capitalism — damning by faint praise. But in  The Capitalist Manifesto , a lively, closely argued polemic by the Swedish historian Johan Norberg, we find a much more vigorous and persuasive defense of the most successful economic system the world has ever seen, a mechanism for sowing widespread abundance and lifting billions out of penury.

“The argument for capitalism,” Norberg boldly declares in his preface, “is not that capitalists always behave well… but that they often  do not  behave well unless they have to. And it is freedom of choice and competition that force their hands.” From there, Norberg, who wrote the 1999 bestseller  In Defense of Global Capitalism , is off to the races, documenting how dramatically extreme poverty has fallen over the past quarter-century — from 29 percent of the world’s population to 8.4 percent. Although population expanded by some 1.5 billion during that period, the number of poor people declined by more than 1.1 billion.

The same is true in what used to be called the “Second World”: contrary to revisionist historians’ flimsy contentions, the post-Soviet countries that liberalized their economies and political systems the most “have on average developed the fastest and established the strongest democracies.”

Norberg is particularly effective when inveighing against regnant pieties about inequality in market economies by observing how the most persistent gaps between rich and poor appear in controlled economies that abjure free trade. “Unequal distribution in the world,” he says, “is due to the uneven distribution of capitalism: people who have it become rich; those who do not have it stay poor.” He also puts material benefit into appropriate perspective: far beyond providing twenty different brands of shampoo, capitalism dramatically increases our health and lifespans. And “the difference between living to the age of sixty-five or to eighty,” he writes, “is get[ting] to know our grandkids.”

In addition, Norberg convincingly debunks the arguments by market skeptics that the pandemic gave the lie to capitalist systems. On the contrary, the government shutdowns prompted by Covid shuttered economies and crippled free trade, and only when we restored the global movement of goods and people did we return to economic and political normality.

“Free market capitalism is not really about capital,” he contends, “it is about handing control of the economy from the top to billions of independent consumers, entrepreneurs and workers, and allowing them to make their own decisions about what they think will improve their lives.” He successfully reframes the market economy in terms not of rivalry and competition but exchange and cooperation, and he shows how the middle class and even gig economy workers have prospered under its aegis.

Nowadays, Norberg finds his pro-market advocacy under greater attack less often from the traditional left than from the nationalist “new” right. “Twenty years ago,” he laments, “capitalism was wrong because supposedly it made the world’s poor poorer. Now it is wrong because it makes the poor richer.” He vigorously refutes the facile claims of industrial policy exponents on both left and right by showing just how often it results in spectacular failure, as in the case of Quaero, the search-engine alternative to Google launched in 2005 by the French and German governments.

Nor, he argues, should we emulate the restrictive trade and corporatist policies implemented over the past fifteen years by China, whose growth has stalled as authoritarianism has returned, following decades of economically successful liberalization. “It is not the free world that has to become like China to beat China,” he asserts. “If China wants to ‘beat’ the free world, then China has to become free.”

As for monopoly power, Norberg reminds us, with Schumpeter, that market-facilitated innovation guarantees creative destruction even among the most concentrated giants. Kodak, Nokia, AOL and Blockbuster bestrode the world like colossi in very recent memory; where are they now?

He also notes that we vote with our feet for the Big Tech companies that supposedly exploit us, voluntarily exchanging access to our data for the tremendous benefits furnished by free search engines, email services and digital maps. He persuasively shows how economically liberal countries fare better on almost every environmental metric and explains how a market-driven carbon tax would appropriately “internalize the externalities” of ecological damage.

Some of Norberg’s claims (for example that the three decades after 1990 saw greater improvements in living conditions than the three millennia before them) sound eminently plausible but lack supporting documentation. And while there’s no doubt he’s a sincere believer, it’s a little convenient that “more capitalism” seems to be the solution to his every problem—including those created by markets.

Overall, unlike most polemics,  The Capitalist Manifesto  is surprisingly generous to market opponents (even ones as obtuse as Thomas Piketty and Naomi Klein), steel-manning their arguments rather than straw-manning them. Indeed, Norberg and his adversaries share a virulent distaste for large corporations, albeit for slightly different reasons: Norberg disdains the regulatory capture and government bailouts that have insulated such massive firms from, respectively, competition and market risk. All told, Norberg’s elegant manifesto has much to commend it. He demonstrates that,  pace  Galbraith, markets breed not exploitation, stinginess and misery but freedom, generosity and fulfillment.

This article was originally published in  The Spectator ’s January 2024 World edition.

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How to Be an Anticapitalist Today

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Anticapitalism isn't simply a moral stance against injustice — it's about building an alternative.

Street art in Boston by the artist Banksy. Chris Devers / Flickr

For many people the idea of anticapitalism seems ridiculous. After all, capitalist firms have brought us fantastic technological innovations in recent years: smartphones and streaming movies; driverless cars and social media; Jumbotron screens at football games and video games connecting thousands of players around the world; every conceivable consumer product available on the Internet for rapid home delivery; astounding increases in the productivity of labor through novel automation technologies; and more.

And while it’s true that income is unequally distributed in capitalist economies, it is also true that the array of consumption goods available and affordable for the average person, and even for the poor, has increased dramatically almost everywhere. Just compare the United States in the half century between 1965 and 2015: the percentage of Americans with air conditioners, cars, washing machines, dishwashers, televisions, and indoor plumbing increased dramatically. Life expectancy is longer; infant mortality lower.

In the twenty-first century, this improvement in basic standards of living has also occurred in poorer regions of the world as well: the material standards of millions of people living in China since it embraced the free market have improved dramatically.

What’s more, look what happened when Russia and China tried an alternative to capitalism. Aside from the political oppression and brutality of those regimes, they were economic failures. So, if you care about improving the lives of people, how can you be anticapitalist? That is one story, the standard story.

Here is another story: the hallmark of capitalism is poverty in the midst of plenty.

This is not the only thing wrong with capitalism, but it is its gravest failing. Widespread poverty — especially amongst children, who clearly bear no responsibility for their plight — is morally reprehensible in rich societies where it could be easily eliminated.

Yes, there is economic growth, technological innovation, increasing productivity, and a downward diffusion of consumer goods, but along with capitalist economic growth comes destitution for many whose livelihoods have been destroyed by the advance of capitalism, precariousness for those at the bottom of the labor market, and alienating and tedious work for most.

Capitalism has generated massive increases in productivity and extravagant wealth for some, yet many people still struggle to make ends meet. Capitalism is an inequality-enhancing machine as well as a growth machine. Not to mention that it is becoming clearer that capitalism, driven by the relentless search for profits, is destroying the environment.

Both of these accounts are anchored in the realities of capitalism. It is not an illusion that capitalism has transformed the material conditions of life in the world and enormously increased human productivity; many people have benefited from this. But equally, it is not an illusion that capitalism generates great harms and perpetuates unnecessary forms of human suffering.

The pivotal issue is not whether material conditions on average have improved in the long run within capitalist economies, but rather whether, looking forward from this point in history, things would be better for most people in an alternative kind of economy. It is true that the centralized, authoritarian, state-run economies of twentieth-century Russia and China were in many ways economic failures, but these are not the only possibilities.

Where the real disagreement lies — a disagreement that is fundamental — is over whether it is possible to have the productivity, innovation, and dynamism that we see in capitalism without the harms. Margaret Thatcher famously announced in the early 1980s, “There is No Alternative,” but two decades later the World Social Forum declared “Another World is Possible.”

I argue that another world — one that would improve the conditions for human flourishing for most people — is indeed possible. In fact, elements of this new world are already being created today, and concrete ways to move from here to there exist.

Anticapitalism is possible, not simply as a moral stance toward the harms and injustices of global capitalism , but as a practical stance towards building an alternative for greater human flourishing.

The Four Types of Anticapitalism

Capitalism breeds anticapitalists.

Sometimes resistance to capitalism is crystallized in coherent ideologies that offer both systematic diagnoses of the source of harms and clear prescriptions about how to eliminate them. In other circumstances anticapitalism is submerged within motivations that on the surface have little to do with capitalism, such as religious beliefs that lead people to reject modernity and seek refuge in isolated communities. But always, wherever capitalism exists, there is discontent and resistance in one form or other.

Historically, anticapitalism has been animated by four different logics of resistance: smashing capitalism, taming capitalism, escaping capitalism, and eroding capitalism.

These logics often coexist and intermingle, but they each constitute a distinct way of responding to the harms of capitalism. These four forms of anticapitalism can be thought of as varying along two dimensions.

One concerns the goal of anticapitalist strategies — transcending the structures of capitalism or simply neutralizing the worst harms of capitalism — while the other dimension concerns the primary target of the strategies — whether the target is the state and other institutions at the macro-level of the system, or the economic activities of individuals, organizations, and communities at the micro-level.

Taking these two dimensions together gives us the typology below.

1. Smashing Capitalism

Given the way capitalism devastates the lives of so many people and given the power of its dominant classes to protect their interests and defend the status quo, it is easy to understand the attractiveness of the idea of smashing capitalism.

The argument goes something like this: the system is rotten. All efforts to make life tolerable within it will eventually fail. From time to time small reforms that improve the lives of people may be possible when popular forces are strong, but such improvements will always be fragile, vulnerable to attack and reversible.

The idea that capitalism can be rendered a benign social order in which ordinary people can live flourishing, meaningful lives is ultimately an illusion because, at its core, capitalism is unreformable. The only hope is to destroy it, sweep away the rubble, and then build an alternative. As the closing words of the labor tune “ Solidarity Forever ” proclaim, “We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old.”

But how to do this? How is it possible for anticapitalist forces to amass enough power to destroy capitalism and replace it with a better alternative? This is indeed a daunting task, for the power of dominant classes that makes reform an illusion also blocks the revolutionary goal of a rupture in the system. Anticapitalist revolutionary theory, informed by the writings of Marx and extended by Lenin, Gramsci, and others, offered an attractive argument about how this could take place.

While it is true that much of the time capitalism seems unassailable, it is also a deeply contradictory system, prone to disruptions and crises. Sometimes those crises reach an intensity which makes the system as a whole fragile, vulnerable to challenge.

In the strongest versions of the theory, there are even underlying tendencies in the “laws of motion” of capitalism for the intensity of such system-weakening crises to increase over time, so that in the long-term capitalism becomes unsustainable; it destroys its own conditions of existence.

But even if there is no systematic tendency for crises to become ever-worse, what can be predicted is that periodically there will be intense capitalist economic crises in which the system becomes vulnerable and ruptures become possible.

This provides the context in which a revolutionary party can lead a mass mobilization to seize state power, either through elections or through a violent overthrow of the existing regime. Once in control of the state, the first task is to refashion the state itself to make it a suitable weapon of socialist transformation, and then use that power to repress the opposition of the dominant classes and their allies, dismantle the pivotal structures of capitalism, and build the necessary institutions for an alternative economic system.

In the twentieth century, various versions of this general line of reasoning animated the imagination of revolutionaries around the world. Revolutionary Marxism infused struggles with hope and optimism, for it not only provided a potent indictment of the world as it existed, but also provided a plausible scenario for how an emancipatory alternative could be realized.

This gave people courage, sustaining the belief that they were on the side of history and that the enormous commitment and sacrifices they were called on to make in their struggles against capitalism had real prospects of eventually succeeding. And sometimes, rarely, such struggles did culminate in the revolutionary seizure of state power.

The results of such revolutions, however, were never the creation of a democratic, egalitarian, emancipatory alternative to capitalism. While revolutions in the name of socialism and communism did demonstrate that it was possible “to build a new world on the ashes of the old,” and in certain specific ways improved the material conditions of life of most people for a period of time, the evidence of the heroic attempts at rupture in the twentieth century is that they do not produce the kind of new world envisioned in revolutionary ideology.

It is one thing to burn down old institutions; it is quite another to build emancipatory new institutions from the ashes.

Why the revolutions of the twentieth century never resulted in robust, sustainable human emancipation is, of course, a hotly debated matter.

Some people argue that the failure of revolutionary movements was due to the historically specific, unfavorable circumstances of the attempts at system-wide ruptures —revolutions occurred in economically backward societies, surrounded by powerful enemies. Some argue that revolutionary leaders made strategic errors, while others indict the motives of leadership: the leaders that triumphed in the course of revolutions were motivated by desires for status and power rather than the empowerment and wellbeing of the masses.

Still others argue that failure is intrinsic to any attempt at radical rupture in a social system because there are too many moving parts, too much complexity, and too many unintended consequences. As a result, attempts at system rupture will inevitably tend to unravel into such chaos that revolutionary elites, regardless of their motives, will be compelled to resort to pervasive violence and repression to sustain social order. Such violence, in turn, destroys the possibility for a genuinely democratic, participatory process of building a new society.

Regardless of which (if any) of these explanations are correct, the evidence from the revolutionary tragedies of the twentieth century shows that smashing capitalism alone doesn’t work as a strategy for social emancipation.

Nevertheless, the idea of a revolutionary rupture with capitalism has not completely disappeared. Even if it no longer constitutes a coherent strategy of any significant political force, it speaks to the frustration and anger of living in a world of such sharp inequalities and unrealized potentials for human flourishing, and in a political system that seems increasingly undemocratic and unresponsive.

To actually transform capitalism, visions that resonate with anger are not enough; instead, a strategic logic that has some chance of actually accomplishing its goals is needed.

2. Taming Capitalism

The major alternative to the idea of smashing capitalism in the twentieth century was taming capitalism . This is the central idea behind the anticapitalist currents within the left of social-democratic parties .

Here is the basic argument. Capitalism, when left to its own devices, creates great harms. It generates levels of inequality that are destructive to social cohesion; it destroys traditional jobs and leaves people to fend for themselves; it creates uncertainty and risk for individuals and whole communities; it harms the environment. These are all consequences of the inherent dynamics of a capitalist economy.

Nevertheless, it is possible to build counteracting institutions capable of significantly neutralizing these harms. Capitalism does not need to be left to its own devices; it can be tamed by well-crafted state policies.

To be sure, this may involve sharp struggles since it involves reducing the autonomy and power of the capitalist class, and there are no guarantees of success in such struggles. The capitalist class and its political allies will claim that the regulations and redistribution designed to neutralize these alleged harms of capitalism will destroy its dynamism, cripple competitiveness, and undermine incentives. Such arguments, however, are simply self-serving rationalizations for privilege and power.

Capitalism can be subjected to significant regulation and redistribution to counteract its harms and still provide adequate profits for it to function. To accomplish this requires popular mobilization and political will; one can never rely on the enlightened benevolence of elites. But in the right circumstances, it is possible to win these battles and impose the constraints needed for a more benign form of capitalism.

The idea of taming capitalism does not eliminate the underlying tendency for capitalism to generate harms; it simply counteracts their effects. This is like a medicine which effectively deals with symptoms rather than with the underlying causes of a health problem.

Sometimes that is good enough. Parents of newborn babies are often sleep-deprived and prone to headaches. One solution is to take an aspirin and cope; another is to get rid of the baby. Sometimes neutralizing the symptom is better than trying to get rid of the underlying cause.

In what is sometimes called the “Golden Age of Capitalism” — roughly the three decades following World War II — social-democratic policies, especially in those places where they were most thoroughly implemented , did a fairly good job at moving in the direction of a more humane economic system .

Three clusters of state policies in particular significantly counteracted the harms of capitalism: serious risks — especially around health, employment, and income — were reduced through a fairly comprehensive system of publicly mandated and funded social insurance.

The state provided an expansive set of public goods (funded by a robust tax system) that included basic and higher education, vocational skill formation, public transportation, cultural activities, recreational facilities, research and development, and macro-economic stability.

And finally, the state created a regulatory regime to curb the most serious negative externalities of the behavior of investors and firms in capitalist markets — pollution, product and workplace hazards, predatory market behavior, and so on.

These policies did not mean that the economy ceased to be capitalist: capitalists were still basically left free to allocate capital on the basis of profit-making opportunities in the market, and aside from taxes, they appropriated the profits generated by those investments to use as they wished.

What had changed was that the state took responsibility for correcting the three principle failures of capitalist markets: individual vulnerability to risks, under-provision of public goods, and negative externalities of private profit–maximizing economic activity. The result was a reasonably well-functioning form of capitalism with muted inequalities and muted conflicts. Capitalists may not have preferred this, but it worked well enough. Capitalism had, at least partially, been tamed.

That was the Golden Age — a faint memory in the harsh first decades of the twenty-first century. Everywhere today, even in the strongholds of Northern European social democracy, there have been calls to roll back the “entitlements” connected to social insurance, reduce taxes and public goods, deregulate capitalist production and markets, and privatize state services. Taken as a whole, these transformations go under the name of “neoliberalism.”

A variety of forces have contributed to the diminished willingness and apparent capacity of the state to neutralize the harms of capitalism.

Globalization has made it much easier for capitalist firms to move investments to places in the world with less regulation and cheaper labor, while the threat of capital flight, along with a variety of technological changes, has fragmented and weakened the labor movement, making it less capable of resistance and political mobilization. Combined with globalization, the increasing financialization of capital has led to massive increases in wealth and income inequality, which in turn has increased the political leverage of opponents of the social-democratic state.

Instead of being tamed, capitalism has been unleashed.

Perhaps the three decades or so of the Golden Age were just an historical anomaly, a brief period in which favorable structural conditions and robust popular power opened up the possibility for the relatively egalitarian model.

Before that time capitalism was a rapacious system, and under neoliberalism it has become rapacious once again, returning to the normal state of affairs for capitalist systems. Perhaps in the long run capitalism is not tamable. Defenders of the idea of revolutionary ruptures with capitalism have always claimed that taming capitalism was an illusion, a diversion from the task of building a political movement to overthrow capitalism.

But perhaps things are not so dire. The claim that globalization imposes powerful constraints on the capacity of states to raise taxes, regulate capitalism, and redistribute income is a politically effective claim because people believe it, not because the constraints are actually that narrow. In politics, the limits of possibility are always in part created by beliefs in the limits of possibility.

Neoliberalism is an ideology, backed by powerful political forces, rather than a scientifically accurate account of the actual limits we face in making the world a better place. While it may be the case that the specific policies that constituted the menu of social democracy in the Golden Age have become less effective and need rethinking, taming capitalism remains a viable expression of anticapitalism.

3. Escaping Capitalism

One of the oldest responses to the onslaught of capitalism has been to escape.

Escaping capitalism may not have been crystallized into systematic anticapitalist ideologies, but nevertheless it has a coherent logic: capitalism is too powerful a system to destroy. Truly taming capitalism would require a level of sustained collective action that is unrealistic, and anyway, the system as a whole is too large and complex to control effectively. The powers-that-be are too strong to dislodge, and they will always coopt opposition and defend their privileges. You can’t fight city hall. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

The best we can do is to try to insulate ourselves from the damaging effects of capitalism, and perhaps escape altogether its ravages in some sheltered environment. We may not be able to change the world at large, but we can remove ourselves from its web of domination and create our own micro-alternative in which to live and flourish.

This impulse to escape is reflected in many familiar responses to the harms of capitalism.

The movement of farmers to the Western frontier in nineteenth-century United States was, for many, an aspiration for stable, self-sufficient subsistence farming rather than production for the market. Escaping capitalism is implicit in the hippie motto of the 1960s, “turn on, tune in, drop out.” The efforts by certain religious communities, such as the Amish, to create strong barriers between themselves and the rest of society involved removing themselves as much as possible from the pressures of the market.

The characterization of the family as a “haven in a heartless world” expresses the ideal of family as a noncompetitive social space of reciprocity and caring in which one can find refuge from the heartless, competitive world of capitalism. And, in time-limited ways, escaping capitalism is even embodied in long distance hikes in the wilderness.

Escaping capitalism typically involves avoiding political engagement and certainly of collectively organized efforts at changing the world. Especially in the world today, escape is mostly an individualistic lifestyle strategy. And sometimes it is an individualistic strategy dependent on capitalist wealth, as in the stereotype of the successful Wall Street banker who decides to “give up the rat race” and move to Vermont to embrace a life of voluntary simplicity while living off of a trust fund amassed from capitalist investments.

Because of the absence of politics, it is easy to dismiss the escaping capitalism strategy, especially when it reflects privileges achieved within capitalism itself. It is hard to treat the wilderness hiker who flies into a remote region with expensive hiking gear in order to “get away from it all,” as a meaningful expression of opposition to capitalism. Still, there are examples of escaping capitalism that do bear on the broader problem of anticapitalism.

Intentional communities may be motivated by the desire to escape the pressures of capitalism, but sometimes they can also serve as models for more collective, egalitarian, and democratic ways of living. Certainly cooperatives, which may be motivated mainly by a desire to escape the authoritarian workplaces and exploitation of capitalist firms, can also become elements of a broader challenge to capitalism.

The Do It Yourself movement and the “ sharing economy ” may be motivated by stagnant individual incomes during a period of economic austerity, but they can also point to ways of organizing economic activity that are less dependent on market exchange. And more generally, the lifestyle of voluntary simplicity can contribute to broader rejection of consumerism and the preoccupation with economic growth in capitalism.

4. Eroding Capitalism

The fourth form of anticapitalism is the least familiar.

It is grounded in the following idea: all socioeconomic systems are complex mixes of many different kinds of economic structures, relations, and activities. No economy has ever been — or ever could be — purely capitalist. Capitalism as a way of organizing economic activity has three critical components: private ownership of capital; production for the market for the purpose of making profits; and employment of workers who do not own the means of production.

Existing economic systems combine capitalism with a whole host of other ways of organizing the production and distribution of goods and services: directly by states; within the intimate relations of families to meet the needs of its members; through community-based networks and organizations; by cooperatives owned and governed democratically by their members; though nonprofit market-oriented organizations; through peer-to-peer networks engaged in collaborative production processes; and many other possibilities.

Some of these ways of organizing economic activities can be thought of as hybrids, combining capitalist and noncapitalist elements; some are entirely noncapitalist; and some are anticapitalist. We call such a complex economic system “capitalist” when capitalist drives are dominant in determining the economic conditions of life and access to livelihood for most people. That dominance is immensely destructive.

One way to challenge capitalism is to build more democratic, egalitarian, participatory economic relations in the spaces and cracks within this complex system wherever possible, and to struggle to expand and defend those spaces.

The idea of eroding capitalism imagines that these alternatives have the potential, in the long run, of expanding to the point where capitalism is displaced from this dominant role.

An analogy with an ecosystem in nature might help clarify this idea. Think of a lake. A lake consists of water in a landscape, with particular kinds of soil, terrain, water sources, and climate. An array of fish and other creatures live in its water, and various kinds of plants grow in and around it.

Collectively, all of these elements constitute the natural ecosystem of the lake. (This is a “system” in that everything affects everything else within it, but it is not like the system of a single organism in which all of the parts are functionally connected in a coherent, tightly integrated whole.)

In such an ecosystem, it is possible to introduce an alien species of fish not “naturally” found in the lake. Some alien species will instantly get gobbled up. Others may survive in some small niche in the lake, but not change much about daily life in the ecosystem. But occasionally an alien species may thrive and eventually displace the dominant species.

The strategic vision of eroding capitalism imagines introducing the most vigorous varieties of emancipatory species of noncapitalist economic activity into the ecosystem of capitalism, nurturing their development by protecting their niches, and figuring out ways of expanding their habitats. The ultimate hope is that eventually these alien species can spill out of their narrow niches and transform the character of the ecosystem as a whole.

This way of thinking about the process of transcending capitalism is similar to the popular, stylized story told about the transition from pre-capitalist feudal societies in Europe to capitalism. Within feudal economies in the late Medieval period, proto-capitalist relations and practices emerged, especially in the cities. Initially this involved commercial activity, artisanal production under the regulation of guilds, and banking.

These forms of economic activity filled niches and were often quite useful for feudal elites. As the scope of these market activities expanded, they gradually became more capitalist in character and, in some places, more corrosive of the established feudal domination of the economy as a whole. Through a long, meandering process over several centuries, feudal structures ceased to dominate the economic life of some corners of Europe; feudalism had eroded.

This process may have been punctuated by political upheavals and even revolutions, but rather than constituting a rupture in economic structures, these political events served more to ratify and rationalize changes that had already taken place within the socioeconomic structure.

The strategic vision of eroding capitalism sees the process of displacing capitalism from its dominant role in the economy in a similar way: alternative, noncapitalist economic activities emerge in the niches where this is possible within an economy dominated by capitalism; these activities grow over time, both spontaneously and, crucially, as a result of deliberate strategy; struggles involving the state take place, sometimes to protect these spaces, other times to facilitate new possibilities; and eventually, these noncapitalist relations and activities become sufficiently prominent in the lives of individuals and communities that capitalism can no longer be said to dominate the system as a whole.

This strategic vision is implicit in some currents of contemporary anarchism. If revolutionary socialism proposes that state power should be seized so that capitalism can be smashed, and social democracy argues that the capitalist state should be used to tame capitalism, anarchists have generally argued that the state should be avoided — perhaps even ignored — because in the end it can only serve as a machine of domination, not liberation.

The only hope for an emancipatory alternative to capitalism — an alternative that embodies ideals of equality, democracy, and solidarity — is to build it on the ground and work to expand its scope.

As a strategic vision, eroding capitalism is both enticing and far-fetched.

It is enticing because it suggests that even when the state seems quite uncongenial for advances in social justice and emancipatory social change, there is still much that can be done. We can get on with the business of building a new world, not from the ashes of the old, but within the interstices of the old.

It is far-fetched because it seems wildly implausible that the accumulation of emancipatory economic spaces within an economy dominated by capitalism could ever really displace capitalism, given the immense power and wealth of large capitalist corporations and the dependency of most people’s livelihoods on the well-functioning of the capitalist market. Surely if noncapitalist emancipatory forms of economic activities and relations ever grew to the point of threatening the dominance of capitalism, they would simply be crushed.

Eroding capitalism is not a fantasy. But it is only plausible if it is combined with the social-democratic idea of taming capitalism.

We need a way of linking the bottom-up, society-centered strategic vision of anarchism with the top-down, state-centered strategic logic of social democracy. We need to tame capitalism in ways that make it more erodible, and erode capitalism in ways that make it more tamable. One concept that will help us to link these two currents of anticapitalist thinking is real utopias.

Real Utopias

Real Utopia is a self-contradictory expression. The word “utopia” was first coined by Thomas More in 1516, combining two Greek prefixes —  eu , which means good, and ou , which means no — into “u” and placing this before the Greek word for place, topos. U-topia is thus the good place that exists in no place. It is a fantasy of perfection.

How then can it be “real”? It may be realistic to seek improvements in the world, but not perfection. Indeed, the search for perfection can undermine the practical task of making the world a better place. As the saying goes, “the best is the enemy of the good.”

There is thus an inherent tension between the real and the utopian. It is precisely this tension which the idea of a “real utopia” is meant to capture. The point is to sustain our deepest aspirations for a just and humane world that does not exist while also engaging in the practical task of building real-world alternatives that can be constructed in the world as it is that also prefigure the world as it could be and which help move us in that direction.

Real utopias thus transform the no-where of utopia into the now-here of creating emancipatory alternatives of the world as it could be in the world as it is.

Real utopias can be found wherever emancipatory ideals are embodied in existing institutions and proposals for new institutional designs. They are both constitutive elements of a destination and a strategy. Here are a few examples.

Worker cooperatives are a real utopia that emerged alongside the development of capitalism. Three important emancipatory ideals are equality, democracy, and solidarity. All of these are obstructed in capitalist firms, where power is concentrated in the hands of owners and their surrogates, internal resources and opportunities are distributed in a grossly unequal manner, and competition continually undermines solidarity.

In a worker-owned cooperative, all of the assets of the firms are jointly owned by the employees themselves, who also govern the firm in a one-person-one-vote, democratic manner. In a small cooperative, this democratic governance can be organized in the form of general assemblies of all members; in larger cooperatives the workers elect boards of directors to oversee the firm.

Worker cooperatives may also embody more capitalistic features: they may, for example, hire temporary workers or be inhospitable to potential members of particular ethnic or racial groups. Cooperatives, therefore, often embody quite contradictory values.

Nevertheless, they have the potential to contribute to eroding the dominance of capitalism when they expand the economic space within which anticapitalist emancipatory ideals can operate. Clusters of worker cooperatives could form networks; with appropriate forms of public support, those networks could extend and deepen to constitute a cooperative market sector; that sector could — under possible circumstances — expand to rival the dominance of capitalism.

Public libraries are another kind of real utopia. This might at first glance seem like an odd example. Libraries are, after all, a durable institution found in all capitalist societies. In the United States, the vast public library system was to a significant extent founded by Andrew Carnegie, one of the ruthless robber barons of the Gilded Age. He was certainly no anticapitalist and, if anything, saw his philanthropic support of libraries as a way of strengthening capitalism as a system.

Nevertheless, libraries embody principles of access and distribution which are profoundly anticapitalist. Consider the sharp difference between the ways a person acquires access to a book in a bookstore and in a library.

In a bookstore, you look for the book you want on a shelf, check the price, and if you can afford it and you want it sufficiently, you go to the cashier, hand over the required amount of money, and then leave with the book. In a library you go to the shelf (or more likely these days, to a computer terminal) to see if the book is available, find your book, go to the check-out counter, show your library card, and leave with the book. If the book is already checked out, you get put on a waiting list.

In a bookstore the distribution principle is “to each according to ability to pay”; in a public library, the principle of distribution is “to each according to need.” What is more, in the library, if there is an imbalance between supply and demand, the amount of time one has to wait for the book increases; books in scarce supply are rationed by time, not by price.

A waiting list is a profoundly egalitarian device: a day in everyone’s life is treated as morally equivalent. A well-resourced library will treat the length of the waiting list as a signal that more copies of a particular book need to be ordered.

Libraries can also become multipurpose public amenities, not simply repositories of books. Good libraries provide public space for meetings, sometimes venues for concerts and other performances, and a congenial gathering place for people.

Of course, libraries can also be exclusionary zones that are made inhospitable to certain kinds of people. They can be elitist in their budget priorities and their rules. Actual libraries may thus reflect quite contradictory values. But, insofar as they embody emancipatory ideals of equality, democracy, and community, libraries are a real utopia.

A final example of an actually existing real utopia is the new forms of peer-to-peer collaborative production that have emerged in the digital era. Perhaps the most familiar example is Wikipedia. Within a decade of its founding, Wikipedia destroyed a three-hundred-year-old market in encyclopedias; it is now impossible to produce a commercially viable, general purpose encyclopedia.

Wikipedia is produced in a completely noncapitalist way by a few hundred thousand unpaid editors around the world contributing to the global commons and making it freely available to everybody. It is funded through a kind of gift economy that provides the necessary infrastructural resources.

Wikipedia is filled with problems — some entries are wonderful, others terrible — but it is an extraordinary example of cooperation and collaboration on a very large scale that is highly productive and organized on a noncapitalist basis.

There are many other examples in the digital world. If we imagine this model of collaboration being extended into the world of production of goods, not just information, then it is possible to imagine p2p collaborative production encroaching on the dominance of capitalism.

Real utopias can also be found in proposals for social change and state policies, not just in actually existing institutions. This is the critical role of real utopias in long-term political strategies for social justice and human emancipation. One example is an  unconditional basic income (UBI).

A UBI simply gives everyone, without conditions, a flow of income sufficient to cover basic needs. It provides for a modest, but culturally respectable, no-frills standard of living. In doing so it also solves the problem of hunger among the poor, but does so in ways that puts in place a building block of an emancipatory alternative.

UBI directly tames one of the harms of capitalism — poverty in the midst of plenty. But it also expands the potential for a long-term erosion of the dominance of capitalism by channeling resources towards noncapitalist forms of economic activity. Consider the effects of a basic income on worker cooperatives. One of the reasons worker cooperatives are often fragile is that they have to generate sufficient income not merely to cover the material costs of production but also to provide a basic income for their members.

If a basic income were guaranteed independently of the market success of the cooperative, worker cooperatives would become much more robust. This would also mean that they would be less risky for loans from banks.

Thus, somewhat ironically, an unconditional basic income would help solve a credit market problem for cooperatives. It would also underwrite a massive increase of participation in p2p collaborative production and many other productive activities that do not themselves generate market income for participants.

Taming and Eroding

So, how to be an anticapitalist in the twenty-first century?

Give up the fantasy of smashing capitalism. Capitalism is not smashable, at least if you really want to construct an emancipatory future. You may personally be able to escape capitalism by moving off the grid and minimizing your involvement with the money economy and the market, but this is hardly an attractive option for most people, especially those with children, and certainly has little potential to foster a broader process of social emancipation.

If you are concerned about the lives of others, in one way or another you have to deal with capitalist structures and institutions. Taming and eroding capitalism are the only viable options. You need to participate both in political movements for taming capitalism through public policies and in socioeconomic projects of eroding capitalism through the expansion of emancipatory forms of economic activity.

We must renew an energetic progressive social democracy that not only neutralizes the harms of capitalism but also facilitates initiatives to build real utopias with the potential to erode the dominance of capitalism.

Can Capitalism Be Conscious of Anything But Itself? Gnosticism, Attention, and Persuasive Technologies

• First Online: 21 October 2022

Cite this chapter

• Michael J. Thate 19  

Part of the book series: Ethical Economy ((SEEP,volume 63))

This essay attempts to provide a complementary value-add to the evolving system of conscious capitalism by considering the consciousness capitalism itself produces. It aims to provide a critical edge to the urgent task of ennobling exchange and theorizing responsibility in a world created by technological demiurges. By bringing these systems of intelligent persuasion into comparison with “Gnosticism,” the essay offers a framework for realities current theorists are terming “unprecedented.” The hope is that such a framework might inch closer toward simple awareness in fresh and freeing ways.

Life does not need to mutilate itself to be pure. Simone Weil ( 1970 , p. 10) We have not been primed, either by nature or habit, to notice, much less struggle against, these new persuasive forces that so deeply shape our attention, our actions, and our lives. James Williams ( 2018 , p. 29)

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Thate, M.J. (2022). Can Capitalism Be Conscious of Anything But Itself? Gnosticism, Attention, and Persuasive Technologies. In: Dion, M., Pava, M. (eds) The Spirit of Conscious Capitalism. Ethical Economy, vol 63. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10204-2_2

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15.10 Persuasive Essay

Learning objective.

• Read an example of the persuasive rhetorical mode.

Universal Health Care Coverage for the United States

The United States is the only modernized Western nation that does not offer publicly funded health care to all its citizens; the costs of health care for the uninsured in the United States are prohibitive, and the practices of insurance companies are often more interested in profit margins than providing health care. These conditions are incompatible with US ideals and standards, and it is time for the US government to provide universal health care coverage for all its citizens. Like education, health care should be considered a fundamental right of all US citizens, not simply a privilege for the upper and middle classes.

One of the most common arguments against providing universal health care coverage (UHC) is that it will cost too much money. In other words, UHC would raise taxes too much. While providing health care for all US citizens would cost a lot of money for every tax-paying citizen, citizens need to examine exactly how much money it would cost, and more important, how much money is “too much” when it comes to opening up health care for all. Those who have health insurance already pay too much money, and those without coverage are charged unfathomable amounts. The cost of publicly funded health care versus the cost of current insurance premiums is unclear. In fact, some Americans, especially those in lower income brackets, could stand to pay less than their current premiums.

However, even if UHC would cost Americans a bit more money each year, we ought to reflect on what type of country we would like to live in, and what types of morals we represent if we are more willing to deny health care to others on the basis of saving a couple hundred dollars per year. In a system that privileges capitalism and rugged individualism, little room remains for compassion and love. It is time that Americans realize the amorality of US hospitals forced to turn away the sick and poor. UHC is a health care system that aligns more closely with the core values that so many Americans espouse and respect, and it is time to realize its potential.

Another common argument against UHC in the United States is that other comparable national health care systems, like that of England, France, or Canada, are bankrupt or rife with problems. UHC opponents claim that sick patients in these countries often wait in long lines or long wait lists for basic health care. Opponents also commonly accuse these systems of being unable to pay for themselves, racking up huge deficits year after year. A fair amount of truth lies in these claims, but Americans must remember to put those problems in context with the problems of the current US system as well. It is true that people often wait to see a doctor in countries with UHC, but we in the United States wait as well, and we often schedule appointments weeks in advance, only to have onerous waits in the doctor’s “waiting rooms.”

Critical and urgent care abroad is always treated urgently, much the same as it is treated in the United States. The main difference there, however, is cost. Even health insurance policy holders are not safe from the costs of health care in the United States. Each day an American acquires a form of cancer, and the only effective treatment might be considered “experimental” by an insurance company and thus is not covered. Without medical coverage, the patient must pay for the treatment out of pocket. But these costs may be so prohibitive that the patient will either opt for a less effective, but covered, treatment; opt for no treatment at all; or attempt to pay the costs of treatment and experience unimaginable financial consequences. Medical bills in these cases can easily rise into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, which is enough to force even wealthy families out of their homes and into perpetual debt. Even though each American could someday face this unfortunate situation, many still choose to take the financial risk. Instead of gambling with health and financial welfare, US citizens should press their representatives to set up UHC, where their coverage will be guaranteed and affordable.

Despite the opponents’ claims against UHC, a universal system will save lives and encourage the health of all Americans. Why has public education been so easily accepted, but not public health care? It is time for Americans to start thinking socially about health in the same ways they think about education and police services: as rights of US citizens.

Online Persuasive Essay Alternatives

Martin Luther King Jr. writes persuasively about civil disobedience in Letter from Birmingham Jail :

• http://www.stanford.edu/group/King/frequentdocs/birmingham.pdf
• http://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/documents/Letter_Birmingham_Jail.pdf
• http://www.oak-tree.us/stuff/King-Birmingham.pdf

Michael Levin argues The Case for Torture :

• http://people.brandeis.edu/~teuber/torture.html

Alan Dershowitz argues The Case for Torture Warrants :

• http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2011/09/07/the-case-for-torture-warrants/

Alisa Solomon argues The Case against Torture :

• http://www.villagevoice.com/2001-11-27/news/the-case-against-torture/1

Writing for Success Copyright © 2015 by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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13.7: Writing a Persuasive Essay

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• Amber Kinonen, Jennifer McCann, Todd McCann, & Erica Mead
• Bay College Library

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Choose a topic that you feel passionate about. If your instructor requires you to write about a specific topic, approach the subject from an angle that interests you. Begin your essay with an engaging introduction. Your thesis should typically appear near the end of your introduction.

Make your appeals in support of your thesis by using sound, credible evidence. Use a balance of facts and opinions from a wide range of sources, such as scientific studies, expert testimony, statistics, and personal anecdotes. Each piece of evidence should be fully explained and clearly stated.

Acknowledge and explain points of view that may conflict with your own to build credibility and trust with your audience. Also state the limits of your argument. This, too, helps you sound more reasonable and honest to those who may naturally be inclined to disagree with your view. By respectfully acknowledging opposing arguments and conceding limitations to your own view, you set a measured and responsible tone for the essay.

Make sure that your style and tone are appropriate for your subject and audience. Tailor your language and word choice to these two factors, while still being true to your own voice.

Finally, write a conclusion that effectively summarizes the main argument and reinforces your thesis.

key takeaways

• The purpose of persuasion in writing is to convince or move readers toward a certain point of view, or opinion.
• An argument is a reasoned opinion supported and explained by evidence. To argue, in writing, is to advance knowledge and ideas in a positive way.
• A thesis that expresses the opinion of the writer in more specific terms is better than one that is vague.
• It is essential that you not only address counterarguments but also do so respectfully.
• It is also helpful to establish the limits of your argument and what you are trying to accomplish through a concession statement.
• To persuade a skeptical audience, you will need to use a wide range of evidence from credible sources. Scientific studies, opinions from experts, historical precedent, statistics, personal anecdotes, and current events are all types of evidence that you might use in explaining your point.
• Make sure that your word choice and writing style is appropriate for both your subject and your audience.
• You should let your reader know your bias, but do not let that bias blind you to the primary components of good argumentation: sound, thoughtful evidence and respectfully and reasonably addressing opposing ideas.
• You should be mindful of the use of I in your writing because it can make your argument sound more biased than it needs to.
• Facts are statements that can be proven using objective data.
• Opinions are personal views, or judgments, that cannot be proven.
• In writing, you want to strike a balance between credible facts and authoritative opinions.
• Quantitative visuals present data graphically. The purpose of using quantitative visuals is to make logical appeals to the audience.
• Qualitative visuals present images that appeal to the audience’s emotions.

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By Mark Napier

With a plethora of scientific and technological developments such as sustainable energy, interstellar mining operations, in vitro (laboratory grown) meat, synthetic biology (from genetic modification to artificial wombs), 3D printing, and extensions such as the chemputer, we are steadily advancing towards a different kind of world. Towards a world in which energy, food, medicine, and resource conflicts could become redundant—a world with no need for the dichotomies of rich and poor, haves and have nots, a world with few limits and Ferraris for all.

Many would see these utopian imaginings as a naive idealism, a mere quixotic fantasy, or even a negative, dystopian drive for ‘progress’, but it seems clear that where once these developments were plain fantasy, we are now facing the prospect of a world without need, a world in which suffering can become a thing of the past and some stronger semblance of equality can be easily realised. We can help forge a world in which the current paradigm of capitalism, based on individualism and conspicuous consumption, can fall by the wayside without necessitating a reduction in our living standards or a restriction on our freedoms, be it through authoritarian government or sheer redistribution; these radical technologies can engender unprecedented changes and fantastic realities for the future.

Yet defenders of privilege and conservative fear-mongers will no doubt remain; these thoughts of utopia, free of want, and a realisation of equality are by no means new. Technological developments have been quick to enliven the minds of idealists throughout the ages. Economists at the beginning of Europe’s industrial revolution dreamt of and foresaw the end of want and desire, yet the goal posts consistently changed whilst Malthusian fears remained, continuing to do so to this day as the rich and powerful further their expectations, desires, and demands. Early 20th century economists such as Thorstein Veblen helped to develop the Technocratic movement, a utopian dream not dissimilar to Plato’s Republic, the theorising of an egalitarian system of abundance based on constant technological advances, alongside stable socio-political positions, enabling the provision of leisure, education, and equality for those nations with adequate natural resources. Veblen dreamt of four-hour working days with a focus on the pursuit of education, sport, and design; a fulfillment of Enlightenment ideals, yet greed got the better of us and equality is increasingly a state of reverie.

Of course alarm bells may justly ring at the thought of this technocratic fantasy; devoid of democracy, with the risk of sidelining humanity in a ceaseless pursuit of progress. Yet at least in theory these dreams offer much appeal against the unrestrained and immoral capitalism which sees the rich get richer whilst the poor stagnate as we offer lip service to the virtues of egalitarianism.

Although powerful and dominant groups will always seek to stifle the revolutionary potentials of new technologies, as they have in the past, these impending developments look set to see the democratisation of production. Specifically with technologies such as the 3D printer, as resources are gathered from the stars or created ex nihilo (out of nothing), we must question our desires and expectations of the future in earnest. As we have seen from the technological revolutions within the music industry through peer-to-peer sharing applications such as Napster or BitTorrent, 3D printers will only exacerbate issues around intellectual copyright and the sharing of information, attempts at protectionism are already fighting a losing battle against an internet that cannot be reined in by futile laws and restrictions. Intellectual copyrights, protection, and internet regulation will increasingly become the fundamental battlegrounds for an equitable society whereby mine and future generation’s openness to sharing will struggle against corporate interests and the established hierarchy.

We need to ask ourselves what kind of world we want to leave for future generations and what values we are content to raise our children with. For a start, we must move away from insidious individualism and thoughts of personal protectionism. Whilst there is no doubt that these are issues for the future, we must begin shifting the paradigm in order to prepare the ground for the changes that will be seen, if not in our lifetimes, but in our children’s. Already we are struggling to reframe the narrative from one of constant employment with lengthy and oppressive working lives to one of employment for all, an end to retirement, shared workloads and a stronger emphasis on leisure, community work, sport, and education.

As the developments outlined earlier move towards reality, we must ensure that we do not repeat the failings of the industrial revolution, that we ensure a lifetime of education to the highest standard for all, not simply those who can afford it. Genuine equality must not be viewed as supererogation as these technologies and scientific pursuits are making its actualisation possible. It is therefore up to us to ensure that entire future generations are encouraged to live meaningful lives, and to do so we need to look beyond capitalism.

————

Written under a Creative Commons License, with edits: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/1.0/

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