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.