In the 100 year old ongoing argument among the various left ideologies, the most pervasive and divisive wedge has always been on the subject of reform of capitalist systems into systems that serve the worker. Most notably in contemporary times, this has centered on two reformist camps. One group wishes to reform capitalism into a social democratic economic model while retaining the existing bourgeois liberal democracy as a political system (this group has been debunked enough I think, and will not be a focus). The other, much more pervasive camp are those who have embraced so-called “pragmatism” by rejecting new, radical, and imaginative approaches to building a new world to embrace a retention of some of the most damaging pieces of the current socio-economic system. These are the “market socialists” who, with the power of despair, have decided that massive change is not possible, or worse yet that shifting to a worker’s co-op market system is in itself massive change.
I have designated them as reformists because despite any revolutionary rhetoric, what this faction seeks to do is instate a somewhat reformed form of capitalist relations in their markets and co-ops. This goal is openly to preserve the worst elements of capitalism with a socialist aesthetic slapped on top with some fancy rhetoric and big talk about how they believe decommodification within markets is necessary. In the words of Bordiga;
The hell of capitalism is the firm, not the fact that the firm has a boss.
This market ideology stinks of capitalist realism in its limited vision and supposed “pragmatism”, displaying that not only have its followers accepted that we must conform to capitalist relations in a post-revolutionary world, but that they have fully integrated this as a legitimate goal for post-revolutionary society. What the various market ideologues will answer to this of course is that markets are not exclusive to capitalism, that they existed pre-capitalism. This is true of course, but deeply misleading. What these ideologues leave out is economic systems do not spring whole cloth into existence, that feudalism had markets is an indication not that they should be replicated once again in a “socialist” manner, but that part of what built capitalism was the markets of feudalism. This blindness to the way economic systems evolve and exist is typical of those who have refused to confront capitalist realism head on.
Some market socialists, however, are also laboring under the delusion that they can simply use markets as a “transitional phase”, though they seem self-aware enough to place this transition as an extremely long process and then never really define what they wish to transition to other than broadly “socialism”. This will in practice, of course, result in incapability to do anything but retain the present system, while those crushed beneath the invisible hand are simply told they have a vote in how they get crushed now, a reassuring thought for no one. It will also create a sense in many that the goals of the revolution have been accomplished, and that those goals were enough, a mindset that would dramatically reinforce capitalist realism in the minds of the wage slaves toiling away for their more “democratic” masters.
All this culminates in the sheer, mind-numbing inability of the market socialists to present, to the working class or themselves, a coherent alternative to capitalism. These self branded “radicals” have taken it upon themselves to avoid hard realities and market their aesthetic of socialism as truly anti-capitalist without even daring to imagine a new world, let alone begin to build it. This complacent reformism must be fought by the left by the offering of new, radical understandings of capitalism and power, and creative visions of a society to be built; ideas outside and fundamentally opposed to the pervasive attitudes of capitalist realism that infest the modern left. If these pervasive attitudes cannot be recognized and rooted up all left projects are doomed to failure.
