As China and Russia adopt their own variants, the reign of capitalism seems absolute. Yet there are many who wish for an alternative and some who claim a final crisis is in the making. Is there a radical alternative that we have not yet discovered? Or is the reality that capitalism is the only viable economic system?

Alex Callinicos is a Zimbabwean-born Marxist political theorist. He is Editor of International Socialism and Professor of European Studies at Kings College London, His books include Imperialism and the Global Economy. Here he speaks to the IAI about capitalism, the state of the left, and his proposals for a democratically planned economy.

Tobias Phibbs: Before we begin, how would you define capital and capitalism?

Marx said that the distinctive thing about capitalism is that it is self-expanding. In other words, capitalism represents a situation in which money its able to grow, to be more by the end of a cycle of investment than it was at the beginning. This seems like a mysterious process, but Marx argues that the solution to the problem of capital’s self-expanding quality is the way it is invested in employing workers who create more value than is represented by their wages. This is the key to exploitation under capitalism. Marx is therefore arguing that capitalism is necessarily an exploitative system.

From this perspective capitalism is a social and economic system where capital prevails. This involves exploitation of wage labour, the appropriation of what Marx calls surplus value in the form of profits by the owners of capital. The second feature is competitive accumulation. In other words, the capitalist class is not a unified homogenous collective; they compete with each other, each trying to maximise their share of the surplus value, and this competition puts constant pressure on individual firms to reduce their costs. It compels them to accumulate – in other words, to invest in improving their methods of production. This is the driving force behind both the expansion of human productive powers under capitalism, but also the crises that Marx sees as a necessary feature of capitalism.

TP: And the proposed solution is a democratically planned economy?