Capital System

= expanded notion of capitalism, which can also included the former Soviet system

Description

"The critical framework underlying Mészáros’s system of thought is complex, extending the dialectical method of Hegel, Marx, and Lukács to our own age of “epochal transition.” It thus defies easy explanation. But three crucial elements in his dialectic stand out. First, it is necessary to focus on what he termed the capital system rather than capitalism, as a way of deepening the critique of capital, in line with Marx’s early formulation, while also extending this criticism to Soviet-type societies—where the capital system, in Mészáros’s interpretation, remained in many ways intact.

Second, the capital system is to be understood as a historically specific mode of social metabolic reproduction, whose various organic elements all serve to reinforce the power of capital as a whole, and thus cannot be approached piecemeal. The transition to socialism therefore requires the creation of an alternative, communal form of social metabolic reproduction, one that challenges the capital system at every point, and that is rooted in the struggle for substantive equality. (It was Mészáros’s analysis of communal production that inspired Chávez’s introduction of the communal councils and communes in Venezuela, while Mészáros’s treatment of social metabolic reproduction gave rise to Chávez’s notion of “the elementary triangle of socialism.”)" (https://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/Remembering-Istvan-Meszaros-19302017-20171115-0024.html)