INSIDE CAPITALISM

Alejandro Teitelbaum

Alejandro Teitelbaum’s assessment of capitalism is the result of decades of previous works, studying it carefully as a researcher as well as a social representative committed to protecting the human rights of citizens through a binding regulatory framework of capital‘s activity. A regulation never achieved due to the concerted and systematic opposition of global business lobbies with the enthusiastic backing of the governments of the major powers. In this work Teitelbaum elaborates on the core aspects of capitalism and updates the wealth of evidence on its falsehoods and contradictions. Based on Marx's theory of the appropriation labour’s value, Teitelbaum shells out the main features of the capitalist system to display its contradictions and arrive at a well articulated conclusion. This is that capitalism is incompatible with true democracy from the moment that its supreme value is to protect the private ownership of the means of production, by which it appropriates the surplus value of labour, rather than seek the welfare of society, as it is in true democracy. Therefore, he argues, it is not possible to reform capitalism to make it compatible with democracy, but, rather that, it needs to be replaced by radically changing the essence of human labour as it exists in the capitalist system, in which the worker stands in the production cycle both at the beginning, alienated as a producer, and at the end, alienated as a consumer; from which it is inferred that a move towards true socialism is required. Yet, Teitelbaum asserts that, contrary to what happened in the Soviet Union and other societies, the transition towards socialism must take place in an environment of genuine and fully participatory democracy. That is, in an environment where the only purpose of the societies is the welfare of each and every one of the ranks of society to create social wealth to meet the material and spiritual needs of citizens, according to a social and democratic planning of production and distribution for the full realisation of the human being.

This implies that to live in a truly democratic ethos –and not in the mockery known as representative democracy– a hitherto unknown model must be built –in a superior stage of humanity– in which the citizens hold the initiative and are permanently involved in the public matter, in such a way that the public agenda is set by the fully acquainted citizens so that decision making becomes the result of a direct and informed participation. This is so, says Teitelbaum, for “capitalism has reached a level of development and is such a cumulous of contradictions that it has in fact become on the verge of socialism, as a way of resolving those contradictions in a humanly superior stage”.

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