Within ten minutes I regretted my decision to walk to Creedon Street in the outback town of Broken Hill. At first, I thought it was the shoes. Stupid things I’d bought on the internet, they were little more than plastic-coated cardboard soles strapped to my ankles with nylon laces. The desert sand scratched between my feet and the sole, painfully reminding me I also had no arch support. There were spiky bindis the size of small tarantulas that I knew from experience to step around. They would pierce those stupid shoes – and my feet.
My destination, Creedon Street, was a site for public housing. There, families were crowded into an environment that one woman told me had been ‘set up to fail’ in the 1990s when authorities sought to move Aboriginal people out of the Sydney suburb of Redfern in time for the 2000 Olympics. As well as uncomfortable on my feet, the walk there was also boring. Broken Hill has fascinating architecture, extraordinary cultural heritage, a buzzing art scene and plentiful pubs (though fewer than the 70 it once boasted). Whether it was the day or the route I am not sure, but none of this seemed evident as I trudged. My allegorical ambitions dissipated with every boring block. I’d imagined myself like philosopher Michel de Certeau, for whom ‘walking in the city’ helped understand the relationship between our agency in everyday life, set against big structures like capitalism, which I was in Broken Hill to think about.[i] But as the dry, hot sun seemed to suck the life from me, walking in the desert seemed more like a parody of de Certeau’s agency. I soon feared it might also be making a mockery of my own intellectual pretensions.
Like others in this age of polycrisis, I wanted to think about the historical entanglements of race, labour and environment. Historically these have often seemed at odds. We see it where workers oppose the end of coal or logging, and when environmentalists fail to acknowledge that such people have a legitimate need for a job – and when the ‘true’ working class is imagined to be white and male. By walking I hoped to think about, perhaps even to feel with my body, how race, class and environment might be brought together in everyday life, via a shared history and politics.
Broken Hill seemed a good place to do it. The town, like many outback cliches, is like one big allegory for Australia, especially for our history with capitalism. I started my walk at the Trades Hall, the pride of Broken Hill and a historical touchstone for Australia’s union movement. Like sentries guarding against the labour rabble, however, directly across the road stand seven carved white busts depicting the ‘syndicate of seven’ who founded Broken Hill Proprietary, BHP. They were visible from the front door of the Trades Hall. On this street, the main symbol of labour literally opposes seven key founders of Australian capital.
Other representations of working-class politics in Broken Hill are nearly as ubiquitous as the dust, which is perhaps not quite as red as the town’s political history. Capital too looms, as present as the massive heap of slag (the by-product of mining and smelting) towering over town. These great black piles of the debris of industrial mining are known as the ‘line of lode’. It is spectacular in a Tolkienesque kind of way, though where we might expect the Eye of Sauron there is instead a memorial to miners killed extracting lead, zinc and silver from the hill. Next to the miners’ memorial there is the empty shell of what was once a world class restaurant.
Not everyone survives capitalism.
When I finally arrived at Creedon Street, hot and irritable, there was nothing to see. It was just another street, not noticeably different to the thousands that I felt I had stumbled through.
I chided my subconsciously racist self. What did I expect, non-stop corroboree? Perhaps I was guilty of ‘poverty porn’, taking my excessively educated arse where it did not belong, seeking to exploit First Nations suffering for intellectual gain.
Face-palming, I took stock. I noticed that the street was right on the edge of town. Behind that row of public houses was nothing. Stony desert littered (charmingly, in fact) with rusting junk.
This seemed important. I’d been talking to teachers’ aids, employment centres and the local high school careers advisor, himself an Aboriginal man, who all told me that young Aboriginal people often experienced racism, particularly when they seek employment. The geography of town seemed to bear this out: the town centre celebrates labour on every corner, but when a place was built purposely for Aboriginal people to live, it was far from the town’s working-class centre.
I took this to be a symptom of what settler-colonial studies historian Patrick Wolfe called the ‘logic of elimination’.[ii] Of course, some Aboriginal people did and do work for big capital and small capital, and some were and are members of Broken Hill’s famous union movement. But any sense of the centrality of First Nations claims to land and sovereignty posed – at least in recent decades – a threat to the Broken Hill establishment, and by extension to the rest of us.
First Nations sovereignty is by definition hard for a settler colonial society to acknowledge. But it is the truth. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples were here first. Sovereignty was never ceded. This is First Nations land. Acknowledging this beyond the words we use at meetings, extending it to our hearts and practice demands something like turning the still-colonial world upside down. And from the centre of the battle between labour and capital, it seems easier to push the question, and the people connected to it, to the margins.
Creedon Street, by this logic, was certainly not aligned with those founders of BHP, whose profit relied on supplanting First Nations economies and claims to land. But why was Aboriginal sovereignty not, on the whole, protected by the Trades Hall?
Feeling stupid, I turned right and walked along the street, soon arriving somewhere familiar. The closest famous landmark to Creedon Street was the cemetery.
Broken Hill cemetery might be one of the most important in Australia. The burial site of revered members of the Australian union movement, the cemetery is an important monument to colonial and working-class history. Black crosses of the religious orders who sent teenagers from Ireland to serve in the outback offer a poignant memorial to what must have been an utterly dislocating experience. Artist Pro Hart’s grave is there, a massive, crazy expensive, marble thing engraved with his signature golden dragonfly – recently defaced by vandals. But the cemetery is mainly a memorial to labour. A pamphlet guides visitors to graves of historical significance to Australian unionism. Headstones list labour leaders’ CVs, while others honour the Red Flag Forever.
It is an outback cemetery, so small cages cover many graves, protecting burials from animals. Protecting the dead this way seems some sort of perversion of what sociologist Max Weber described as the ‘iron cage’ of capitalism.[iii] Capitalism failed to protect workers from the lead dust or the work that maimed, killed and riddled many with diseases, often deadly. But now, iron cages protect the dead.
The cemetery reminds us that capitalism kills.
Up on the line of lode, the miner’s memorial documents the tragedy. In 1887, capitalism killed 21-year-old Samuel Spears, who tumbled down a ladderway in the pursuit of ore that would profit BHP shareholders. Spears was already not the youngest to die since the discovery of ore on the broken hill in 1883. Just a year earlier, John Vaugh, aged 14, fell down BHP’s ore heap, to his death. The following year, 25-year-old Charles Apple died in a rock fall, 36-year-old Alfred Neiring died in an explosion of shot and Alfred Polgreen, 21, was killed by a rock drill.
Mine safety improved, largely by union agitation, supported by local medical practitioners who helped alert the public beyond Broken Hill, to the dangers of industrial mining. The resulting public pressure drove engineering innovation and safety procedures. Many safety measures were hard won by strike action, like the number of minutes workers were to wait between blasting and heading back into mine shafts newly polluted with lead-laden dust.
Such improvements were far too slow for 16-year-old Charles Shannon, who was electrocuted in the BHP mine in 1910. It did not help Ronald James who at 18 years old was also electrocuted in 1979, as was 22-year-old John Collison in 1988. Mining in the 2000s slowed to such an extent that homes in Broken Hill could be purchased on a fairly modest credit card – and meant there were no deaths to record. When mining resumed, so did death. Capitalism killed again in 2007, when 30-year-old James Symonds was crushed by machinery. So was Andrew Bray, aged 47, as recently as 2019.
Capitalism kills, and the working class unites against it.
The graves of union leaders at the cemetery not only remind us of this, but they also act as a kind of mirror image to the mock graves that union members made of ‘scabs’, who refused to join strike action, in 1909. A photograph of one of those graves reads “Here Lies Peter Corney 1909 Scab”. Imagine Peter Corney’s trepidation, seeing his own name on the tomb. His death, however, was fictional. It was a tough strategy, but one that highlighted the value of solidarity as the only path to improved working conditions, and perhaps more broadly to liberation itself. For those listed in the miners’ memorial, death was not a ploy, but a central logic of the operation. Human lives – their lungs, their broken bones, their hopes, even just their time, so precious and short as it is for us all – was exchanged for profit.
This profit was not only the foundation of big mining in Australia, but it also underpinned the fledgling stock exchanges, and large finance enterprises like Collins House in Melbourne. Added up, exploitation pays – but only for a few.
Since colonisation, a significant portion of the middle class has considered education to be the answer. In the 1990s it became economic doctrine, systematically shifting the population to ‘better’ jobs. And yet for those of us in white collar work it is little different. Capitalism colonises every moment of our lives in the name of a rewarding, and often well-meaning, career. While industrial accidents are less common for professionals, ever-increasing productivity demands and decreasing autonomy under a managerial class is also killing us slowly – if perhaps mainly spiritually – as it converts our very selfhood into profit-making stuff. Even when the surface seems cleaner, the logic on display at Broken Hill applies to us all.
[i] De Certeau, Michel (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life Berkely: University of California Press.
[ii] Wolfe, Patrick (2006) ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’ Journal of Genocide Research Volume 8, No.4, pp.387-409.
[iii] Weber, Max (1904) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism Vintage Edition, 2002. The ‘iron cage’ was not what Talcott Parsons’ famous translation of weber’s ‘shell as hard as steel’. Like others I have used it here as it more evocative of what I mean, and possibly what Weber meant too.
{ 41 comments }
Gareth Richard Samuel Wilson 10.19.25 at 1:56 am
I believe lead mining has taken place under economic systems other than capitalism. Do you happen to know what worker safety was like under those systems?
some lurker 10.19.25 at 4:30 pm
Thank you for the link to Michel de Certeau…I am in violent agreement that walking a city forces one to see up close the true economics of a place. Too many in government are whisked from place to place by car, being briefed on the way to their next thing, that they never look out at what they are supposed to be making better.
Tm 10.21.25 at 5:41 pm
„Capitalism failed to protect workers from the lead dust“
Not just the workers:
„Protein Powders and Shakes Contain High Levels of Lead“
https://www.consumerreports.org/lead/protein-powders-and-shakes-contain-high-levels-of-lead-a4206364640/
Matt 10.22.25 at 11:16 am
I believe lead mining has taken place under economic systems other than capitalism. Do you happen to know what worker safety was like under those systems?
For one example, Michael Finlay and Claude Mosse both talk a fair bit about mining in the ancient world in, respectively, The Ancient Economy and The Ancient World at Work. It was… a pretty harrowing experience for the (mostly, but not only) slaves doing it. I can’t cite statistics to you, but I’m pretty sure that mine safety wasn’t great in the Soviet Union, either. What should we draw from these instances, and the ones in the main post? I’m not sure we should draw very many general conclusions at all (except that mining is dangerous, those owning or running mines often don’t care much about safety, and that this seems to apply no matter how we characterize the economic system in question.)
EB 10.22.25 at 7:39 pm
All of the extractive industries (mining and quarrying, logging/pulp cutting, fishing, even many forms of agriculture) are inherently dangerous for the fact that they are done in dangerous environments over which humans have little to no control. This is true under every economic system, but with varying ability to temper the danger through legislation and regulation, plus the existence of trade unions to demand same. The type of government matters too — partly because trade unions are weak to nonexistent in autocratic polities, and partly because news of accidents is suppressed.
J-D 10.23.25 at 12:12 am
‘Capitalism kills’ doesn’t stop being true just because other things also kill. For that matter, it’s possible for both ‘capitalism kills’ and ‘capitalism saves lives’ to be true. Capitalism is large; it contains multitudes.
I would hazard a guess that if the people who actually worked in the mines were in charge of making the decisions about how the mines would be run, then they would be run more safely. This is, I hope obviously, part of the point of the miners’ unions; unionisation doesn’t automatically give the miners control of the mines, but it aims to give them more say in the decisions than they have without it.
Gareth Richard Samuel Wilson 10.23.25 at 1:11 am
Of course, if you want examples of capitalism being worse at worker safety, East Germany would be the place to look. Vast industries went from capitalism to non-capitalism and back to capitalism, so obviously there should be a pattern of worker safety getting better, then worse, if capitalism really is worse.
Matt 10.23.25 at 11:43 am
‘Capitalism kills’ doesn’t stop being true just because other things also kill.
My thought here is that it’s not particularly informative to say that it’s “capitalism” that is doing the killing here. I don’t see anything in the comment, or the original post, that makes me think otherwise.
notGoodenough 10.23.25 at 12:22 pm
It might be interesting to compare the rates of accidents in mines with and without strong worker representation (for example, seeing if there is a strong correlation between unionisation and improved safety [1]), and then considering the implications (for example, if mines with strong worker representation are able to decrease accidents, wouldn’t that suggest adopting this in all mines would decrease accidents – and if so, what systems would best give rise to such conditions?).
(I would also recommend googling “false dichotomy” too…)
[1] e.g. “Overall, unionization is associated with a 14 to 32% drop in traumatic injuries and a 29 to 83% drop in fatalities. Yet unionization also predicts higher total and nontraumatic injuries, suggesting that injury reporting practices differ between union and nonunion mines.” Morantz, A. D. (2013). Coal Mine Safety: Do Unions Make a Difference? ILR Review, 66(1), 88-116. https://doi.org/10.1177/001979391306600104 (Original work published 2013)
MisterMr 10.23.25 at 12:41 pm
Acording to the AI blurb generated by Google (the informations could be wrong) when I search for lead mining conditions in the soviet union, conditions became substantially worse in the 90s with the collapse of the USSR.
But, these countries were already poor for western standards and became poorer because of the collapse, so it is difficult to compare that to american or western european “capitalism”. I have no idea for East Germany, but I would assume condition to become better due to following the laws of West Germany, that is a pretty rich western capitalist state and also with a big welfare state.
There is also the question if we count welfare states and other similar “leftish” interventions as part of “capitalism” or not: clearly regulations and redistribution can ameliorate capitalism, but this doesn’t really negate the anticapitalist point of view.
Gareth Richard Samuel Wilson 10.23.25 at 10:46 pm
For what it’s worth, four of the deaths she mentions happened when Australia had a welfare state.
J-D 10.24.25 at 12:14 am
How informative it is depends on what kind of information you’re looking for and what kind of questions you’re asking. It’s possible that it’s telling you nothing about what you want to know but telling Hannah Forsyth a lot about what Hannah Forsyth wants to know.
roger_f 10.24.25 at 9:47 am
On your walk you may have come across Riddiford Arboretum, a fascinating collection of arid zone plants and trees. Their significance becomes apparent when reading about the work of Albert Morris, who helped restore the landscape, degraded by mining, surrounding Broken Hill.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Morris
Concerned Citizen 10.25.25 at 9:33 am
A very clear example of how capitalism kills people is the people who die of starvation every day even though we produce more than enough food for the whole planet. According to the UN, 25.000 people, 10.000 of them children, die of starvation every day despite the fact that the world food supply is enough to feed everyone. An alternative system of distribution would enable almost 10 million people to live every year. Nathan J Robinson has a great article in Current Affairs discussing this in greater detail (linked below)
https://www.un.org/en/chronicle/article/losing-25000-hunger-every-day
https://online.ucpress.edu/elementa/article/doi/10.1525/elementa.310/112838/Current-global-food-production-is-sufficient-to
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2023/10/techno-optimism-is-not-something-you-should-believe-in
Gareth Richard Samuel Wilson 10.26.25 at 1:03 am
What alternative systems of distribution have been shown, in practice, to reduce starvation deaths?
roger_f 10.26.25 at 6:16 am
William Dalrymple’s book on the East India Company is a compelling and comprehensive expose of corporate malfeasance, a company supported by business, government and monarchy of Britain, a company which ruthlessly expropriated, extracted and exported every resource of value from India and Asia leaving behind a landscape devastated by famine and poverty.
engels 10.27.25 at 12:07 am
My thought here is that it’s not particularly informative to say that it’s “capitalism” that is doing the killing here.
Do you mean “informative” or “accurate”? If it’s not informative it must be both true and (which implies its truth) already known to you, I think.
I think it’s true and worth saying, because people frequently make similar statements about competing economic systems.
J-D 10.27.25 at 8:17 am
We’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas.
Matt 10.27.25 at 10:02 am
I think it’s true and worth saying, because people frequently make similar statements about competing economic systems.
I’d probably say the opposite – that for cases like these, thinking about them in terms of economic systems doesn’t help us understand what has happend very well, and the economic system doesn’t determine what has happened. There might well be tendencies one way or another in different economic systems, but examples like this don’t seem to be to be good ways to get at those. (The same goes for other economic systems. I don’t mean this to be something special about “capitalisms”.)
MisterMr 10.27.25 at 10:22 am
@Gareth Richard Samuel Wilson 15
Alternative to what? For example, do you count say, the roman empire as reducing starvation relative to hunter gatherers? Or to the celts?
Do you see industrial capitalism as different from the soviet system or are the two the same with only superficial differences? After all, they were both industrial systems which takes them apart from all other economic systems in the past.
Do you count the Chinese system as capitalism or as socialism? It did increase the level of life of the Chinese a lot in the recent decades, but it is a sort of socialism/capitalism hybrid (if we see capitalism and socialism as two names for the same system, this makes sense).
My point is that the way you pose the question doesn’t make sense. I assume that the point you are trying to make is that capitalism rocks because it has an overall better track record than other system (by which I suppose you mean the soviet system), but you didn’t say it explicitly so how am I supposed to answer?
If we speak of “capitalism” (that is an ultra-wide term that might refer to a lot of stuff starting from the early renaissance/late middle ages, depending on how one uses the term), we are speaking of an economic system where a few people own much of the capital goods (something that happened also in the earlier agricultural system) and the mayority of the people is quite poor so has to get a job for the few owners, who are then pushed by the system to increase profits (the difference between productivity and wages).
Because there is an umbalance of power between owners and workers, this often did lead to a situation were workers were pushed in situations where their income are extremely low, or they are forced to work in unpleasant or dangerous conditions.
This isn’t exactly rocket science.
The problem can be ameliorated by giving workers more contractual power, but this isn’t easy because the system pushes towards low wages/poor workers (hence the welfare state).
Ideally one could think of a system where these power unbalances disappear, but the latest attempt, soviet capitalism, just shifted the problem from workers VS owners to workers VS government bureaucrats, hence the results weren’t great. This doesn’t mean that the poroblem doesn’t exist under capitalism.
Other systems of the past, like the agricultural system, had the same problem (few people owning most of the land) and we only get egalitarian system if we go back to hunter gatheres, who however suck in terms of productivity. So what? This still doesn’t mean that power unbalances under capitalism are not a problem.
engels 10.27.25 at 10:58 am
25.000 people, 10.000 of them children, die of starvation every day despite the fact that the world food supply is enough to feed everyone. An alternative system of distribution would enable almost 10 million people to live every year.
A really simple way to see this is to ponder the fact that global GDP per capita is about $13 000 USD.
Tm 10.27.25 at 12:30 pm
roger_f 16 and perhaps engels: Blaming the crimes of the East India Company on “capitalism” instead of on the specific people who ran the company as well as those in British government complicit with them seems ambivalent. On the one hand you want to direct attention to structural factors, not the misdeeds of individual people. On the other hand, there were individual people who made these decision and could have done differently and it seems wrong and misleading to just say “capitalism did this”.
Also, if you want to discuss the structural causes of these crimes, it’s not enough to point to capitalism because the East India Company was much more and in many ways different than an ordinary capitalist corporation.
Is it uninformative or inaccurate to say “capitalism did this”? engels is asking a good question but it may be the answer is both. “Things are shit because of capitalism” is often inaccurate because there are after all different versions of capitalism with different levels of shittiness. But it’s also uninformative. If everything nowadays is capitalism – and it’s hard to argue that China for example is not capitalist – then what insight do we gain from saying “this too is capitalism”? What follows from it? I know engels will say something like “we need to revolutionize the system”. But what really follows from it? Nobody has an answer.
Nobody really has an idea how a different system would look like that would absolutely not be capitalism and would make sure that nobody has to work under unsafe working conditions in lead mines etc. We do know that the existing non-capitalist systems of the past 100 years did not meet that requirement. We also know that working conditions can be and have been improved under capitalism. So?
Tm 10.27.25 at 5:24 pm
MisterMr: “Because there is an umbalance of power between owners and workers, this often did lead to a situation were workers were pushed in situations where their income are extremely low, or they are forced to work in unpleasant or dangerous conditions. This isn’t exactly rocket science.”
That is quite correct, and also kind of begging the question: An imbalance of power between those who do the work and those who control the means of production is a common feature of several economic systems, including state socialism. So you’re not addressing the question whether and how capitalism is different, and for the better or worse, than others.
The main characteristic of the industrial economy of the last few hundred years, whether capitalist or nominally socialist, is the fact that it exploits technical energy – up to now mainly fossil energy – at large scale, thereby enabling the large scale expansion of agriculture, mining, extraction, and manufacturing. This feature makes it categorically different from preindustrial economic activity. It is what enables mass proletarization and mass affluence and causes the climate crisis and the ecologic collapse. And imho it doesn’t depend on the specific ways in which markets and property are organized.
notGoodenough 10.27.25 at 8:41 pm
I don’t really have the time to organise this into a coherent thought, but hopefully (with a degree of generosity on the part of the reader) this will mostly give the general gist:
AFAICT, we have good evidence for things which improve things (e.g. stronger worker representation through unions correlates strongly with improved safety; ensuring people have adequate food through welfare programs such as meals-on-wheels, free school meals, etc. correlates strongly with increased food security; improved public services and infrastructure correlates strongly with improved wellbeing; etc.). Consequently, even in cases where we don’t necessarily have conclusive evidence directly, we can still extrapolate from these (e.g. while counterfactuals are difficult without alternate realities on hand, we can reasonably conclude that concentrating power and resources in the hands of the few with no accountability is unlikely to lead to a positive outcome for everyone else).
It seems to me that while it may well be possible to have a socialist system which ignores these beneficial correlations and leads to oppression, and it may well be possible to have a capitalist system which addresses these beneficial correlations through careful management (e.g. as discussed here on CT, through strong regulation, limitarianism, etc.), the point is that capitalist systems have an inbuilt tendency towards inequality due to the very nature of how capital functions within those systems – and it seems that the inherent contradictions which result from this intrinsic imbalance lead to inevitable transition (into socialism or barbarism, so to speak). After all, it isn’t as though “curated capitalism” hasn’t been given a fair chance – time and again elites have been given the opportunity to live lives of near-unimaginable luxury and freedom in return for exercising just the scintilla of judiciousness, and time and again they have demonstrated they would rather collapse society, civilisation, and even the environment itself rather than entertain even the slightest restraint. Consequently, in places like the UK, things which were taken more-or-less for granted even just a few decades ago (e.g. access to healthcare, food, clean water, heating, electricity, a place to live, etc.) are now being treated as inconceivable opulent luxuries that only the most deranged would contemplate as being even potentially possible. And so, the inevitable unrest, collapse, environmental degradation, decreasing wellbeing, etc. etc.
While a perfect alternative may well have yet to be implemented, and certainly I would never argue that socialist systems are magic wands that will fix all ills the second they are implemented, the lack of this specific imbalance does represent a significant advantage – so again, surely the important questions to address here are (a) what things correlate strongly with societal well-being and (b) what systems are most likely to encourage these?
somebody who remembers that people did all of this 10.28.25 at 7:56 am
@If everything nowadays is capitalism – and it’s hard to argue that China for example is not capitalist – then what insight do we gain from saying “this too is capitalism”?
That if we would say ‘Norway and Germany’ is Capitalism too – we would realise that there are ‘better and less better ways of Capitalism’ – or if we say ‘Italy is Capitalism too and a Italian once said ‘Communism is when everybody drives a Ferrari’ -(what you could call ‘Capitalism’) too – that our favourite form of Communism-Capitalism is the Italien one -(and nearly as creative as ‘Contemporary Italian Fascism’)
Concerned Citizen 10.28.25 at 8:58 am
I think we need to keep in mind that a lot of people do not believe the Soviet experiment is socialism but rather it’s a form of state capitalism. This includes Karl Kautsky, Trotsky, Alastair MacIntyre. So it’s disputed to say that the Soviet system isn’t capitalism. The social democratic welfare state is capitalism. Nor is it a good argument to say that not having thought of alternative forms of distribution means there is nothing better or that it justifies the particular form of distribution we have. I don’t think anybody here would swat aside the death of 10 million people annually if they or their loved ones were the people dying. Due to the anarchic and blind nature of the market, it very well may be that your great-grandchildren will be the unlucky 10 million to die of starvation. As a matter of fact, I think there is and have been many proposals to overcome capitalism since it came about, including the worker self-government that really hasn’t been tried yet. So I don’t understand why people think everything has been tried and there is no alternative. Almost nothing has been tried and there are many alternatives
Concerned Citizen 10.28.25 at 9:10 am
For the sake of accuracy I need to mention that Trotsky seems to have thought of the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers’ state with the dictatorship of the bureaucracy and not state capitalism. To quote from him
“ The attempt to represent the Soviet bureaucracy as a class of “state capitalists” will obviously not withstand criticism. The bureaucracy has neither stocks nor bonds. It is recruited, supplemented and renewed in the manner of an administrative hierarchy, independently of any special property relations of its own. The individual bureaucrat cannot transmit to his heirs his rights in the exploitation of the state apparatus. The bureaucracy enjoys its privileges under the form of an abuse of power It conceals its income; it pretends that as a special social group it does not even exist. Its appropriation of a vast share of the national income has the character of social parasitism. All this makes the position of the commanding Soviet stratum in the highest degree contradictory, equivocal and undignified, notwithstanding the completeness of its power and the smoke screen of flattery that conceals it.
Bourgeois society has in the course of its history displaced many political regimes and bureaucratic castes, without changing its social foundations. It has preserved itself against the restoration of feudal and guild relations by the superiority of its productive methods. The state power has been able either to co-operate with capitalist development, or put brakes on it. But in general the productive forces, upon a basis of private property and competition, have been working out their own destiny. In contrast to this, the property relations which issued from the socialist revolution are indivisibly bound up with the new state as their repository. The predominance of socialist over petty bourgeois tendencies is guaranteed, not by the automatism of the economy – we are still far from that – but by political measures taken by the dictatorship. The character of the economy as a whole thus depends upon the character of the state power.
A collapse of the Soviet regime would lead inevitably to the collapse of the planned economy, and thus to the abolition of state property. The bond of compulsion between the trusts and the factories within them would fall away. The more successful enterprises would succeed in coming out on the road of independence. They might convert or they might find some themselves into stock companies, other transitional form of property – one, for example, in which the workers should participate in the profits. The collective farms would disintegrate at the same time, and far more easily. The fall of the present bureaucratic dictatorship, if it were not replaced by a new socialist power, would thus mean a return to capitalist relations with a catastrophic decline of industry and culture.”
(…)
“ The Soviet Union is a contradictory society halfway between capitalism and socialism, in which: (a) the productive forces are still far from adequate to give the state property a socialist character; (b) the tendency toward primitive accumulation created by want breaks out through innumerable pores of the planned economy; (c) norms of distribution preserving a bourgeois character lie at the basis of a new differentiation of society; (d) the economic growth, while slowly bettering the situation of the toilers, promotes a swift formation of privileged strata; (e) exploiting the social antagonisms, a bureaucracy has converted itself into an uncontrolled caste alien to socialism; (f) the social revolution, betrayed by the ruling party, still exists in property relations and in the consciousness of the toiling masses; (g) a further development of the accumulating contradictions can as well lead to socialism as back to capitalism; (h) on the road to capitalism the counterrevolution would have to break the resistance of the workers; (i) on the road to socialism the workers would have to overthrow the bureaucracy. In the last analysis, the question will be decided by a struggle of living social forces, both on the national and the world arena.”
MisterMr 10.28.25 at 11:19 am
@TM 23
“So you’re not addressing the question whether and how capitalism is different, and for the better or worse, than others.”
If you compare modern industrial capitalism to, say, greek/roman system of slavery, or to Charlemagne’s feudalism, it is evident that modern capitalism is better, but nobody disputes this; it is in fact the othodox marxist position (where capitalism is the most advanced mode of production, but will evolve in even more advanced “socialism” and finally “communism”).
The question is, I suppose, how does capitalism compare to really existing “socialism”, that is to say a situation where most of the economy is controlled by the state; there are other theoric concepts of “socialism” but apparently they are not on the menu for the foreseeable future.
Also, if we think of capitalism->private ownership of the means of production, socialism -> the state runs the economy, it is possible to have various degrees of socialism if for example the percentage of the economy ran by the state changes (assuming that the stat is running it with the purpose of keeping worker’s incomes high, and not E.G. a war economy). In this sense, stuff like public education, the NHS etc. are a slice of socialism inside a capitalist system, and the postwar welfer state “new deal” economy a sort of compromise (though still more capitalist than socialist).
This kind of mixed economies are the ones that currently have the best record, but we are drifting away from that, for reasons that I’ll get into later.
“[industrial technology] is what enables mass proletarization and mass affluence and causes the climate crisis and the ecologic collapse”
It is also what enables mass unemployment, linked to mass proletarization, and what causes the capitalist boom/bust cycle; IMHO most of the political choices we have today come from different ideas on how to control this boom/bust cycle (e.g. one of Trump’s charms is that he blames USA unemployment on foreigners).
In an ideal world, a capitalist country would reach a level of overfull employment where workers would have a very strong negotiating position, and profits from capital would be low because of competition between capitals; in reality the system goes into crisis well before this “overfull employment” situation, thus keeping workers weak.
Not coincidentially the sort of “mixed” social domocracy/welfare state economies concentrated on keeping employment high.
But we are drifting away from that, because of various reasons: first of all, this kind of system needs a really big government (in economic terms), but in a globalized economy there is a race to the bottom between governments (this is what started in the 80s and is still going on); this is a very big problem for social democracies and even institutions that often pay lip service to this kind of model, like the EU, often seem to increase the race to the bottom between its members.
Another very important problem is that capitalism works as long as capitalists expect an increase in profits and the possibility of accumulation, so these welfare state economies worked in a situation where the government either has to go into more and more debt (thus causing inflation) or facilitate bubbles (what happened in the neoliberal period) or hope in exports, which however depend in someone else going into debt or financial bubbles; this is a situation where it looks as if a larger share of the economy ran by the government would actually work better (because it would be less pro-cyclical).
Finally, in reality people aren’t egalitarian in an absolute sense, people generally have a sort of vague “meritocracy” concept where if one works harder or better deserves a bit more; although most people realize that the huge differences in income and wealth we have today go well beyond what any realistic “meritocracy”, people strongly disagree on the parameters of merit, often in ways that are self-serving or simply represent the point of view of a certain class. For example a person with a degree is likely to think that it is normal that if you have a degree your job opportunities should be better, you “earned” it; a dude without a degree will be pissed at “the government” because it seems it only cares for white collars. This kind of thinking long term degenerates into the “culture wars”, often in indirect ways so it isn’t clear why the dude without a degree is also pissed by transwomen, but IMHO the reason is that.
This third problem is the one most evident today.
But all that said, it still seems to me that any economic solution we can see for the future goes in the direction of a “big government” economy, with the government that provides more and more services like education and healthcare, and therefore becomes a larger and larger share of the economy; in this sense we need to go in the direction of socialism, though probably still in the range of social democracies, and we need to solve the three above mentioned problems.
Thus, circling back to the OP, it makes a lot of sense to speak bad of “capitalism”, because this words points to the problems caused by an economy where most of the means of production are owned by a small group of people, and this is what we currently have to defend from.
Also sprach MisterMr.
engels 10.28.25 at 11:33 am
An imbalance of power between those who do the work and those who control the means of production is a common feature of several economic systems…
Yes: “all hitherto existing societies,” as somebody else once put it…
Tm 10.28.25 at 12:07 pm
somebody 25:“That if we would say ‘Norway and Germany’ is Capitalism too – we would realise that there are ‘better and less better ways of Capitalism’”
Yeah that’s kind of my point.
notgoodenough 24: ” it seems that the inherent contradictions which result from this intrinsic imbalance lead to inevitable transition (into socialism or barbarism, so to speak)”
Marx thought the transition to socialism and then communism was inevitable but that “seems” to have been an error. And I reject the idea that the transition to barbarism is “inevitable”. It wasn’t inevitable in the 20th cxentury and it’s not inevitable now. History is open and we are making it – not “as we please”, we have to make it under the existing circumstances, but we still make choices for the better or the worse. None of the bullshit we are enduring is inevitable although maybe it is true that history repeats, “first as tragedy and then as farce”. Our current version of barbarism is quite deadly but it’s also really a clownshow.
Tm 10.28.25 at 12:14 pm
Also: “(a) what things correlate strongly with societal well-being and (b) what systems are most likely to encourage these”
To answer this question empirically, we’d have to be able to observe different systems, including non-capitalist ones. Now Concerned Citizen says that maybe state socialism was really another form of capitalism. So our data of industrial economies is what, just different forms of capitalism? Let’s observe and analyze them but that will only tell us how to reform, not how to revolutionize the system. And I think that’s a worthwhile enough goal but it won’t allow us to say: “capitalism kills”.
Tm 10.28.25 at 1:52 pm
MisterMr: “it is possible to have various degrees of socialism if for example the percentage of the economy ran by the state changes”
Sure you can define what you want. But at what point is it meaningful to speak of socialism? Capitalist economies also have a varying percentage of the economy run by the state. “Norway is X% capitalist and Y% socialist” is a completely nonsensical statement (and Marx would probably have found it appalling). We are not getting closer to addressing the question.
If state ownership does define socialism then we should call the Soviet Union and its satellites socialist, and then we’ll have to state that the record of socialist economies with respect to mining safety (which is supposed to be the topic here) is poor (e. g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wismut_(company)), and that forced labor was used in the mines of some socialist states (as it was in some capitalist states).
MisterMr 10.28.25 at 3:48 pm
@TM
“Sure you can define what you want” and “If state ownership does define socialism then we should call the Soviet Union and its satellites socialist”
In the usual sense of the word, yes, the USSR was socialist. Also we can use the term “really existing socialism” if we want to distinguish it from what Marx and others hoped for.
“then we’ll have to state that the record of socialist economies with respect to mining safety (which is supposed to be the topic here) is poor”
Indeed we should, I don’t know why you assume that I want to say that the record of socialist states is immaculate, it clearly isn’t. In case it wasn’t clear I don’t think the USSR was a good model; I do think that we should still have more government run economy, but we should avoid the errors of the USSR.
““Norway is X% capitalist and Y% socialist” is a completely nonsensical statement (and Marx would probably have found it appalling).”
I don’t know, Marx certainly believed that there were more and less advanced capitalist states, and that more advanced capitalist states would transition to socialism, but through a revolution.
What we got instead was revolution in arretrated and agricultural ones, and no revolution but transition to social democracy/welfare state/keynesianism in the davanced one (the USA, later exported to Europe).
That said, Marxism is not (supposed to be) a religion so I suppose one could actually accept the Idea that Marx could have been wrong on something (le shock).
notGoodenough 10.28.25 at 7:41 pm
@ TM
I’m not overly interested in arguing this point, but IIRC Marx’s position in The German Ideology was more that the downfall of capitalism was inevitable but whether communism actually happens would depend on the actions of the working class (and was not an automatic historical inevitability).
You are rejecting something I haven’t said (you may wish to read my previous comment ).
I am not Concerned Citizen, nor have I said state socialism was really a different form of capitalism. May I respectfully request that you do not ask me to defend positions I haven’t adopted, and in return I will grant you the same courtesy. Again, please read what I’ve actually written: “it may well be possible to have a socialist system which ignores these beneficial correlations and leads to oppression, and it may well be possible to have a capitalist system which addresses these beneficial correlations through careful management”.
Personally, however, I am not overly concerned with hypotheticals of whether a theoretically utopian UK under enlightened capitalists is better than a theoretically dystopian UK under some form of power-mad Stalinist dictator. What I am concerned with is the actual case, where actual socialists have fought for these beneficial things (unions, welfare, etc.) and actual capitalists have fought to oppose them (by wielding considerable influence and wealth), and the actual resulting catastrophic decline for UKians.
My more general point, though you seem rather disinterested in it, is merely that since the accumulation of capital is rather a defining feature of capitalism, this is an inherent driving force which creates tension with the notion of maximizing well-being for everyone in a way that isn’t inherent to socialism (which is not the same thing as saying that a similar tension may not exist under certain forms of socialism).
I haven’t said “capitalism kills” – I have pointed out several things which reduce harm (e.g. unions, welfare, etc.). I leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine the extent to which those things were achieved in the face of opposition by capital, and have since been eroded at its behest.
(I would also suggest that if you have a society in which socialists are calling for reform, and the capitalist orthodoxy preferring to reinforce right wing authoritarianism rather than concede even the slightest point, it may well be worth revisiting your preconceptions about who, precisely, is more responsible for developing the conditions necessitating revolution).
William Berry 10.28.25 at 10:16 pm
Engels @ 29: Yes: “all hitherto existing societies,” as somebody else once put it…
That’s the way to cut through the tedium!
Ownership of the means of production is what matters. All else is distraction; sunshine* neatly packaged so it can be pumped up people’s asses.
*AKA, an “ideology of legitimation”, as Mills described capitalist apologetics. He points out that it would be be literally fantastic that such an ideology should happen to even barely coincide with any set of actual facts concerning matters economic (or social, or political, or legal, or anything that means anything WTFsoever.
William Berry 10.28.25 at 10:20 pm
“See right” Mills, I should have said.
someone who remembers a time when capitalism didn't kill art 10.29.25 at 3:34 am
so mining safety has undoubtably improved – in capitalistic or so called socialistic societies because the private and public owners of mines can be sued and AI Overview says:
‘Miners and local communities have sued mine owners for various issues, including environmental damage from spills and dam collapses, safety negligence leading to accidents and fatalities, and human rights abuses such as forced labor. Examples include farmers suing a Chinese-linked firm in Zambia for a dam collapse that polluted waterways, and families of trapped miners suing a Chilean mine for safety lapses. Lawsuits have also been filed by local residents affected by noise pollution from Bitcoin mining facilities’ but when capitalism or better said ‘a free market controlled entirely by private owners for profit’ went completely over the so called cliff in the last 40 years only Tim Blum seemed to have complained and closed his gallery?
engels 10.29.25 at 10:29 pm
Capitalist economies also have a varying percentage of the economy run by the state. “Norway is X% capitalist and Y% socialist” is a completely nonsensical statement
Saying a shandy is 50% beer doesn’t dilute the meaning of beer or imply shandy is beer.
TF79 10.29.25 at 11:59 pm
This post and comments made me realize that, while I know a lot about US coal mining and some about UK and Australian coal mining, I didn’t know anything about coal mining in the USSR. In doing some digging, I quickly came across this charming place, Vorkutlag https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorkutlag where 200,000 out of 2,000,000 million workers died over a 30 year span while extracting from the Pechora coal basin in northern Russia.
notGoodenough 10.30.25 at 8:25 am
Note: apologies for the double post, but I’m not sure if my comment went through
@ TM
<
blockquote>Marx thought the transition to socialism and then communism was inevitable but that “seems” to have been an error.
<
blockquote>
I’m not overly interested in arguing this point, but IIRC Marx’s position in The German Ideology was more that the downfall of capitalism was inevitable but whether communism actually happens would depend on the actions of the working class (and was not an automatic historical inevitability).
You are rejecting something I haven’t said (you may wish to read my previous comment.).
<
blockquote>To answer this question empirically, we’d have to be able to observe different systems, including non-capitalist ones. Now Concerned Citizen says that maybe state socialism was really another form of capitalism. So our data of industrial economies is what, just different forms of capitalism?
<
blockquote>
I am not Concerned Citizen, nor have I said state socialism was really a different form of capitalism. May I respectfully request that you do not ask me to defend positions I haven’t adopted, and in return I will grant you the same courtesy. Again, please read what I’ve actually written: “it may well be possible to have a socialist system which ignores these beneficial correlations and leads to oppression, and it may well be possible to have a capitalist system which addresses these beneficial correlations through careful management”.
Personally, however, I am not overly concerned with hypotheticals of whether a theoretically utopian UK under enlightened capitalists is better than a theoretically dystopian UK under some form of power-mad Stalinist dictator. What I am concerned with is the actual case, where actual socialists have fought for these beneficial things (unions, welfare, etc.) and actual capitalists have fought to oppose them (by wielding considerable influence and wealth), and the actual resulting catastrophic decline for UKians as the latter have succeeded.
My more general point, though you seem rather disinterested in it, is merely that since the accumulation of capital is rather a defining feature of capitalism, this is an inherent driving force which creates tension with the notion of maximizing well-being for everyone in a way that isn’t inherent to socialism (which is not the same thing as saying that a similar tensions may not exist under certain forms of socialism).
<
blockquote>Let’s observe and analyze them but that will only tell us how to reform, not how to revolutionize the system. And I think that’s a worthwhile enough goal but it won’t allow us to say: “capitalism kills”.
<
blockquote>
I haven’t said “capitalism kills” – I have pointed out several things which reduce harm (e.g. unions, welfare, etc.). I leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine the extent to which those things were achieved in the face of opposition by capital, and have since been eroded at its behest.
(I would also suggest that if you have a society in which socialists are calling for reform, and the capitalist orthodoxy preferring to reinforce right wing authoritarianism rather than concede even the slightest point, it may well be worth revisiting your preconceptions about who, precisely, is more responsible for developing the conditions necessitating revolution).
notGoodenough 10.30.25 at 8:27 am
@ TM
I’m not overly interested in arguing this point, but IIRC Marx’s position in The German Ideology was more that the downfall of capitalism was inevitable but whether communism actually happens would depend on the actions of the working class (and was not an automatic historical inevitability).
You are rejecting something I haven’t said (you may wish to read my previous comment.).
I am not Concerned Citizen, nor have I said state socialism was really a different form of capitalism. May I respectfully request that you do not ask me to defend positions I haven’t adopted, and in return I will grant you the same courtesy. Again, please read what I’ve actually written: “it may well be possible to have a socialist system which ignores these beneficial correlations and leads to oppression, and it may well be possible to have a capitalist system which addresses these beneficial correlations through careful management”.
Personally, however, I am not overly concerned with hypotheticals of whether a theoretically utopian UK under enlightened capitalists is better than a theoretically dystopian UK under some form of power-mad Stalinist dictator. What I am concerned with is the actual case, where actual socialists have fought for these beneficial things (unions, welfare, etc.) and actual capitalists have fought to oppose them (by wielding considerable influence and wealth), and the actual resulting catastrophic decline for UKians as the latter have succeeded.
My more general point, though you seem rather disinterested in it, is merely that since the accumulation of capital is rather a defining feature of capitalism, this is an inherent driving force which creates tension with the notion of maximizing well-being for everyone in a way that isn’t inherent to socialism (which is not the same thing as saying that a similar tensions may not exist under certain forms of socialism).
I haven’t said “capitalism kills” – I have pointed out several things which reduce harm (e.g. unions, welfare, etc.). I leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine the extent to which those things were achieved in the face of opposition by capital, and have since been eroded at its behest.
(I would also suggest that if you have a society in which socialists are calling for reform, and the capitalist orthodoxy preferring to reinforce right wing authoritarianism rather than concede even the slightest point, it may well be worth revisiting your preconceptions about who, precisely, is more responsible for developing the conditions necessitating revolution).
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