Kapitalisme als gezwelziekte

Het kapitalisme als geestesziekte lijkt mij een juiste aanduiding, als ik het mij goed herinner heb ik deze hier al eens neergezet. Een eventueel collectieve waan waar niettemin met een stap uit het denkraam aan te ontkomen valt. Het archimedisch punt waarvandaan het kapitalsime gekritiseerd kan worden is zo in ieder geval gemakkelijk te vinden.

Je kunt ook zeggen dat men moet ophouden de Mammon te dienen. ZIch christen noemenden zullen altijd uitvluchten bedenlken waarmee ze zeggen dat ze dit toch eigenlijk niet doen als ze het doen.

Beeldspraken over de maatschappij als organisme dat ziek kan zijn, maken mij altijd enigszins argwanend. Maar de volgende passages uit The modern crisis van Murray Bookchin geven wel te denken:

The cultural barriers that precapitalist societies raised against incipient forms of capitalism impeded the latter's development for thousands of years. It was not until the eighteenth century and primarily in England that capitalist market relations finally broke through these barriers and proceeded to spread like an aggressive cancer throughout the world.

My use of the word cancer is deliberate and literal, not merely metaphorical. Capitalism, I would argue, is the cancer of society - not simply a social cancer, a concept that implies is is some form of human consociation. It is not a social phenomenon but rather an economic one; indeed it is the substitution of economy for society, the ascendancy of the buyer-seller relationship, mediated by things called commodities, over the richly articulated social ties that past civilizations at their best elaborated and developed for thousands of years in networks of mutual aid, reciprocity, complementarity, and other support systems which made social life meaningful and humanizing. Like all uncontrollable cancers, capitalism has shown that it can grow indefintely and spread ino every social domain that harbored ties of mutuality and collective concern.

If there are any "limits" to the growth of capitalism, they are to be found not in any of its so-called internal contradictions, such as economic breakdown or class wars between the workers and bourgeoisie as so many radical economists tell us, but in the destruction of that host we call "society," the host which this cancer parasitizes and threatens to annihilate. To respond properly to this kind of crisis, we must develop not only specific antibodies that will arrest the disease, and admittedly the valuablle palliatives that will slow up its growth, but also a new immunological system that will make society completely resistant to its recurrence.
Rethinking ethics, nature, and society, p.30-31.