Roberto
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He is certainly not a “new kid on the block,” and the recurring pattern you describe points to a deeper structural problem rather than individual political failure. When reformist governments promise improvements within capitalism, they inevitably collide with economic limits they cannot control — investment decisions, profitability, state budgets, and global competition. When reforms stall or are reversed, disappointment follows, and many workers understandably turn elsewhere, sometimes toward right-wing populists who appear to challenge the status quo more decisively.
Historical examples like the reforms under Lyndon B. Johnson, subsidized education, or public transportation systems in countries such as Brazil show that significant social concessions can exist within capitalism. Free or subsidized services, however, were never simply the result of goodwill; they emerged under specific economic and political conditions — periods of growth, social pressure, or geopolitical competition. When those conditions change, reforms become vulnerable to cuts or restructuring, regardless of which party governs.
This helps explain why debates framed as a struggle between “progressive” and “conservative” administrations often miss the underlying issue. Policies may differ, but governments operate within the same economic framework, which ultimately prioritizes accumulation and fiscal constraints over permanent social guarantees.
The recurring cycle — reform, limitation, frustration, and political backlash — suggests that the problem may not lie primarily in voter misunderstanding or conspiracies, but in the expectation that lasting social security can be achieved through reforms that leave the basic economic structure unchanged.
Understanding this dynamic may be more useful than attributing political shifts solely to ideology or manipulation, since it highlights why similar outcomes reappear across different countries and historical periods.Thank you! I’m glad you found it useful. I’m just trying to understand and discuss these ideas as clearly as I can.
Clara E. Mattei has discussed Escape from Capitalism extensively in lectures, interviews, and public forums, repeatedly emphasizing that economics is never neutral but deeply political. Across these discussions, she argues that austerity policies are not simply technical responses to crises but deliberate mechanisms used to discipline labour, weaken collective power, and stabilize capitalist social relations. Her historical analysis shows how states actively intervene in markets, not to restrain capitalism, but to preserve profitability and social order. In this sense, her work effectively challenges the popular myth of a “free market” operating independently of political power.
Where tensions emerge, however, is in the proposed horizon beyond capitalism. Mattei often points toward democratizing economic decision-making, expanding public control, or reshaping institutions so that markets serve social needs. Yet as long as production remains organized through wages, money, and exchange, the underlying social relations that generate crisis and inequality persist. A system based on buying and selling inevitably reproduces value relations, competition, and accumulation pressures, regardless of how democratic its management may appear.
From a more radical standpoint, the problem is not merely who governs the economy, but the continued existence of an economy structured around value production itself. Political reforms may soften outcomes, but they cannot abolish the impersonal economic laws that arise when human labour takes the form of commodities. The real break would require moving beyond production for exchange toward production directly for use, where social cooperation replaces market mediation.
Mattei’s work therefore plays an important educational role in exposing capitalism’s political foundations, even if its conclusions stop short of questioning the necessity of money, markets, and wage labour altogether.Your reflection raises a deep philosophical issue that has existed inside Marxist debates for more than a century: whether concepts like value, nature, and even science should be understood primarily as discoveries about an independent reality or as products of human social activity. A balanced comment could read something like this:
What this discussion reveals is less a disagreement about Marx than about the limits of social construction. It is correct to stress that Marx moves away from the crude opposition between “material” and “ideal.” His focus is indeed on social production: humans actively transform nature and, in doing so, produce concepts, institutions and forms of understanding. Value, law, morality and economic structures clearly belong to this historically produced sphere. They exist only because human beings reproduce them socially.
However, extending this argument to physical laws risks collapsing an important distinction. Scientific concepts are certainly historical and socially mediated — theories change, terminology evolves, and knowledge develops within social institutions shaped by power and class relations. Yet this does not mean that the underlying regularities of nature are themselves socially created. Gravity as a theory is socially produced; the tendency of bodies to fall is not dependent on collective agreement.
Marx’s strength lies precisely in maintaining this tension. Humans are active producers of their social world, but they do so within natural conditions they did not create. Social laws can be abolished through conscious collective action; natural constraints can only be understood and worked with. Confusing the two risks either scientism (rule by experts) or voluntarism (the belief reality bends to democratic will).
Where there is strong agreement is on value: it is neither eternal nor natural, but a historically specific social relation that persists only so long as commodity production persists — and therefore can disappear when society organizes production directly for human need.When LBird writes, “Where that leaves ‘value’, I’m not sure,” the uncertainty may arise from treating value as something that must either be objectively “out there” in the world or else merely subjective opinion. But Marx’s concept of value does not fit comfortably into that dichotomy.
I agree that Marx’s theories, including value, have an inescapable ethical dimension — though perhaps not in the sense of a moral prescription built into the concept itself. Rather, the critique of value exposes a historically specific form of social domination. That exposure has ethical implications because it reveals that what appears natural and inevitable is in fact a human product.
Many discussions of value go astray, in my view, when they attempt to prove its “objectivity” as if it were a physical substance, measurable like weight or temperature. Marx was not discovering a hidden natural property of commodities. He was analyzing a social relation that takes on an objective form in societies based on generalized commodity production. Value is “objective” only in the sense that it confronts individuals as a real social force — prices fluctuate, firms go bankrupt, workers lose jobs — but its objectivity is socially constituted, not natural.
In that sense, value is indeed human, social, historical, and changeable. It exists only because we collectively reproduce a system in which labor takes the form of abstract labor and products take the form of commodities. If we were to organize production directly for use rather than exchange, the value-form would cease to exist. We can choose not to reproduce it.
However, the claim that “we make our own laws, whether ethical or physical” needs some qualification. We certainly make our social laws — institutions, norms, economic structures — and therefore we can change them. But physical laws are not of the same order. Gravity does not disappear because we vote against it. What we can change is how we understand and apply physical laws through science and technology.
Marx’s value theory, then, sits at the intersection of structure and agency. It describes a social law that we ourselves produce but which, under capitalism, operates behind our backs and beyond our conscious control. The ethical impulse arises precisely from recognizing that this “law” is neither eternal nor natural, but a historically specific way of organizing social life — one that can, in principle, be superseded.
The real question is not whether value is objective or subjective, but whether we wish to continue reproducing the social relations that give rise to it.Perhaps “suggests” was indeed too strong; “doesn’t rule out” is more precise. In the case of G.A. Cohen’s reconstruction of historical materialism, there is no explicit defense of market socialism, but neither is it theoretically excluded. And that is where an important conceptual issue emerges.
By abandoning or sidelining Marx’s theory of value — which understands “value” as a category specific to societies based on generalized commodity production, that is, societies where buying and selling mediate social labor — a crucial distinction becomes blurred. For Marx, value is not simply a technical measure of labor time. It is a historically specific social form. It exists only where products take the commodity form and where human labor is expressed as “abstract labor” through exchange.
If this categorical foundation is removed, it becomes easier to imagine that the essence of socialism lies merely in who controls enterprises — for example, workers rather than private capitalists — without questioning the market framework itself. One can then envisage an economy of worker-managed firms competing with one another, a system in which workers “control” their workplaces while still operating within market exchange.
But here a structural tension arises. In a market economy, even if firms are formally owned and managed by their workers, they remain subject to the law of value. They must reduce costs, increase productivity, compete for market share, respond to price signals, and accumulate in order to survive. The market imposes systemic imperatives that do not disappear simply because ownership is collective. Competition reproduces pressures analogous to those of capitalism, even if the internal distribution of surplus is altered.
This is why many Marxists have regarded “market socialism” as a contradiction in terms. If value is inseparable from generalized commodity production, and if socialism implies the transcendence of that social form — meaning production oriented directly toward human need rather than mediated by exchange — then retaining the market means retaining the value-form.
In that sense, “workers’ control of value” becomes an ambiguous formulation. Does it mean abolishing the impersonal domination of value as a social form, or merely redistributing its outcomes? The distinction is decisive. The first implies a structural transformation of economic logic; the second leaves the fundamental mechanism intact.
The debate, therefore, is not merely normative (what is more just), but categorical: is the market a neutral tool that can simply be democratized, or is it a social form that structures behavior and relations independently of who formally owns productive units?
That is where the core disagreement lies.In the past, domination was more overt and vertical: the foreman, the headmaster, the patriarch. Power was clearly located “above.” Today, many institutions present themselves as flatter, more participatory, even informal. But the pressures of competition, insecurity, and performance haven’t gone away. In many cases, they’ve intensified.
When work is precarious, promotions scarce, grades competitive, and social status tied to visibility and approval, people are subtly pushed into policing one another. Colleagues compete for contracts. Students compete for rankings. Even leisure spaces become arenas for recognition and influence. The system externalizes pressure, and that pressure circulates horizontally.
So instead of the obvious authoritarian boss, you may get peer surveillance, social exclusion, reputational attacks, or informal cliques that discipline behaviour just as effectively. It can feel less official but no less coercive.
This isn’t because people have suddenly become worse. It’s because when survival and advancement depend on outperforming others, cooperation becomes fragile. A competitive structure breeds competitive behaviour — whether imposed from above or reproduced among peers.
The deeper issue, then, isn’t simply replacing one set of bullies with another. It’s questioning why our workplaces, schools and even hobbies are organized around rivalry, scarcity and status in the first place. As long as insecurity and competition remain built into the structure of society, the forms of bullying may evolve — but the underlying pressures that generate them will persistWhen older people say, “Youngsters don’t know how lucky they are,” what often lies underneath is not objective comparison, but a lifetime of normalized hardship. If you endured low wages, strict discipline, corporal punishment, rigid authority at work and at home, you can either conclude, “That shouldn’t have happened,” or, “It did me good.” The second option is psychologically easier. It turns suffering into virtue.
“In my day they’d have got what was coming” and “Bring back hanging” reflect something deeper: a belief that social problems are caused by moral decline rather than material conditions. But crime, alienation, and frustration don’t arise from a lack of punishment; they arise from insecurity, inequality, and a system that constantly generates stress and competition. More repression doesn’t solve those causes — it just expresses anger.
The nostalgia for belts and beatings is especially revealing. Violence is reframed as discipline; fear is reframed as respect. When authority dominated workplaces, schools, and homes, harshness was normal. To question it now feels, to some, like questioning their entire upbringing.
What’s rarely acknowledged is that younger generations face different but equally real pressures: precarious work, housing crises, debt, climate anxiety. Every generation under capitalism struggles — just in different forms.
Instead of competing over who had it worse, the more useful question is: why do these hardships keep reproducing themselves at all? The answer isn’t generational decline. It’s a social system that continually produces insecurity and then encourages people to defend the very discipline that kept them in line.
The problem was never that people were “too soft.” It’s that they were made to endure too much — and taught to call it character.This kind of scene is sadly familiar, and from a socialist critique of the system the issue isn’t “old age” itself, but how capitalism makes people grow old.
The racism and reactionary attitudes that surface among many elderly people don’t appear out of nowhere. They are the product of a lifetime of frustration redirected toward convenient scapegoats. The system promised security, dignity and stability in exchange for obedience, hard work and national loyalty. What many end up with instead are inadequate pensions, cut-back services and the bitter feeling of having been discarded. Rather than turning their anger against the system that exploited them for decades, they are offered an easier emotional outlet: blaming immigrants or the young.
Nationalism and nostalgia play a key ideological role here. World War II, often experienced only through films, becomes a myth of order, sacrifice and belonging. It’s not really history; it’s a psychological refuge from a present they feel powerless over. To accept that capitalism robbed them throughout their lives would mean admitting that much of their suffering was for nothing. That’s a painful conclusion, so it feels easier to demand that others endure the same hardships.
Support for parties like Reform, even when those parties openly attack the material interests of their own voters, shows how far consciousness can drift from economic reality. Hatred of “the other” outweighs concern for one’s own welfare because that hatred has been carefully cultivated for years.
None of this is unique to older people, but capitalism sharpens it with age. Once you can no longer sell your labour, the system leaves you with fear, resentment and nostalgia. The problem isn’t immigrants, or the young, or even “the elderly”: the problem is a system that pits workers against each other so they never confront their common cause.It is true—almost trivially so—that no socially valuable thing exists without human labor applied to nature. In that limited sense, the intuition attributed to rank-and-file socialists is not wrong: without labor, there are no socially useful goods. But this obvious truth is not Marx’s Labor Theory of Value, nor is it what the theory is trying to explain.
Marx was not simply saying that “labor creates valuable things.” That was already known long before him. The Labor Theory of Value is an attempt to explain why, in a capitalist society, the products of labor take the social form of values that can be compared, exchanged, and expressed in money. The issue is not the physical origin of things, but the social form labor takes under capitalism.
When Cohen suggests that what really moves socialists is a vague “labor theory of things that have value,” he shifts the discussion away from the core problem. Marx’s analysis is neither moral (“workers deserve everything”) nor a technical accounting exercise. It is historical and social:
– labor becomes abstract,
– products become commodities,
– and relations between people appear as relations between things.
From this perspective, the Labor Theory of Value does not need to be ‘obvious’ or intuitive for socialism to make sense. What matters is not proving that labor “creates everything,” but understanding that value exists only in a society based on production for exchange, and that it would disappear once that social relation is abolished.
Socialism, therefore, does not rest on a moral theory of labor. It rests on the recognition that value itself is a historically specific social form, inseparable from capitalism. When that form is overcome, the very question of “what creates value” ceases to be central.What the Epstein revelations really expose is not simply the depravity of particular individuals, but the nature of the social system that protects and reproduces such behaviour. Moral outrage is understandable, even necessary, but when the focus remains fixed on individual villains it easily becomes a diversion. Capitalism then slips quietly into the background, untouched and unquestioned.
This mirrors the familiar pattern in politics: reduce systemic problems to bad leaders, corrupt personalities, or pathological individuals. Remove Trump, jail Epstein, shame a few elites—and we are told the problem is solved. But the conditions that generate exploitation, abuse of power, secrecy, and impunity remain intact. The power structure that enabled Epstein is not an aberration; it is a product of a class system where wealth and influence buy protection.
The Left’s tendency to weaponize the scandal against right-wing opponents also says a lot. It turns a symptom into a partisan tool, rather than a starting point for questioning the wage system, class power, and the state machinery that serves ruling-class interests regardless of which faction is in office.
If there is any emancipatory potential here, it lies not in moral crusades but in radicalizing people against the system itself—understanding that exploitation and abuse are not moral accidents but structural features. Without that shift, outrage will be absorbed, managed, and forgotten, while workers’ lives continue to be shaped by the same economic realities as before.I agree. Whatever personal experiences or grievances someone may carry, this forum is not the place to air them in this way—especially when they are used to indict an entire membership or reduce a body of ideas to personal attacks. That kind of approach sheds far more heat than light.
If there are political disagreements, they should be addressed politically: by engaging with arguments, principles, and analysis, not by slinging accusations or attempting guilt by association. No organisation is defined by the worst behaviour of individuals, and serious claims require appropriate channels, not public mud-slinging.
At this point, the discussion risks drifting away from its stated purpose altogether. Some moderation to bring things back to a constructive and relevant exchange would seem entirely appropriate.What you describe involves real harm, and that has to be acknowledged first. Abuse, violence, intimidation and narcissistic domination are not “political disagreements”; they are serious crimes and betrayals of basic human decency. No political organisation, tradition or set of ideas can excuse or relativise that. Anger toward those experiences is entirely justified.
At the same time, those acts were not expressions of socialism, class consciousness, or the idea of working-class emancipation. They were abuses of power by individuals who happened to belong to an organisation — just as abusers exist in churches, families, unions, states and corporations. Their behaviour indicts them as individuals; it does not constitute an argument for capitalism, nor a refutation of socialism as a social system.
The claim that the SPGB is a “cult” also needs to be addressed seriously. Cults are defined by unquestionable leaders, enforced loyalty, emotional dependency, suppression of dissent, secrecy, and isolation from society. None of these are built into the structure or principles of the SPGB. There are no gurus, no charismatic leaders, no required rituals, no personal devotion demanded, no promises of salvation. Members are free to leave, disagree, criticise — and many have done so over more than a century.
What has existed, and this matters, is something far more common and far less mystical: the tendency of small political organisations to become insular, overly abstract, impatient, and sometimes dismissive toward workers who do not share their conclusions. That can slide from criticism of capitalism into contempt for people trapped within it. That is not cultism; it is political alienation reproduced inside a hostile class society.
It is also important to say this plainly: socialists are not morally superior beings. They are workers shaped by the same alienated society as everyone else. Capitalism produces damaged relationships, damaged personalities and damaged power dynamics, and those do not magically disappear when someone adopts socialist ideas. Political labels do not cleanse character.
Socialism does not depend on the moral quality of past members of any organisation. If it did, no emancipatory idea would survive history. Rejecting the goal of a classless, moneyless society because some individuals betrayed it would be like rejecting medicine because doctors committed crimes.
The working class does not need to be romanticised — but neither does it need to be despised. It needs clarity, honesty and conscious organisation. That includes being honest about failures, including internal ones.
Ego, authoritarianism and cruelty are poisons — but they are products of class society, not proofs that class society should continue. They are reasons to abolish the conditions that reproduce them, not excuses to defend the system that generates them.
To put it simply: socialism does not begin with better people; it exists because capitalism systematically produces broken people and broken relationships. The task is not to worship organisations or personalities, but to abolish the social conditions that keep reproducing abuse, hierarchy and alienationI think people are mixing up two very different things: collapse and decline.
I’m not saying capitalism will collapse by itself. History shows the opposite. It survives crises by adapting, restructuring, shifting power, and protecting property relations. The Great Depression didn’t end it. The 2008 crisis didn’t end it. Even world wars ended up stabilising capitalism rather than abolishing it.
What we are witnessing with the United States is not collapse but relative decline. US dominance is being challenged, alliances are shifting, trade relations are changing, and global competition is intensifying. But capitalism itself is still functioning: profits are being made, markets continue, and the state still defends the system.
That’s why changing political leaders does not change the fundamentals. The system remains intact.
Capitalism won’t disappear because it’s unjust or unstable. It will only be replaced when the majority consciously decide to replace it.I am not arguing that capitalism will collapse by itself. I am fully aware that only the conscious political action of the working class can bring about systemic change.
What I was referring to is something different: the decline of US global dominance and the reconfiguration of alliances among capitalist states. These are not signs of capitalism’s collapse, but normal features of a system based on competition between rival blocs of capital.
We are clearly witnessing shifts in power: • New trade agreements that bypass traditional US influence
• Greater autonomy among former allies
• Increasing rivalry between capitalist powers
• Realignment of geopolitical interests
This does not mean the system is ending. It means the terrain of capitalist competition is changing.
At the same time, changing political leaders within this framework does not alter the fundamentals. Whoever governs must manage the same economic imperatives: profitability, competitiveness, labour discipline, and state power. That is why swapping politicians does not equal real change.
Collapse theories fail because capitalism adapts. Reformist theories fail because adaptation is not emancipation.
The conclusion is simple: Capitalism will not fall on its own, and it will not be voted out by changing personalities. Only conscious, organised action by the working class can replace it.
