Introduction

In the twentieth century traditional alternative to capitalism—socialism—suffered a catastrophic defeat. However, although emancipatory movements developed many new practices to tackle domination, injustice and exploitation, they have not found a new societal alternative and therefore struggle to develop a consistent approach to make capitalism history. From a bird’s eye view, many movements try to reform capitalism, revive traditional socialist ideas or remain vague about an alternative. To investigate an alternative to capitalism and real socialism, this chapter begins with a critic of capitalism and state socialism. With Marx and other critical theorists, the authors develop capitalism as an exchange- and market-based society. Capitalism produces a logic of exploitation, destruction and exclusion that even left-wing, ecologically oriented governments can only marginally limit, because the state has only a relative autonomy vis-à-vis the dominant economy. But state socialism is no real alternative either, because—like the market economy—it is based on wage labour and money and thus acts much more like an inefficient, more egalitarian, authoritarian brother, subject to many similar logics and defects.