To the extent that Socialism has not yet replaced capitalism, “anti-capitalism” means criticising its reality against the fiction and idealisation of something that does not exist, and is, therefore, idealist not materialist. It is romanticism and utopian. In its effect, it can only posit current reality with some past reality, which becomes idealised and romanticised, or else it simply tries to hold on to the present in fear of the future. Either way, it is reactionary.
It talks about some idealised socialist future, but itself denies the Marxist, materialist analysis of how the present becomes transformed into the future via the continued development of the productive forces and capital it creates. The socialist future itself then becomes a function of idealism not materialism. For reformists, it is a question of society slowly experiencing an unfolding of The Idea, as it comes to understand the rationality of a socialist organisation of society, which is then brought about by a class neutral state. For the revolutionaries it is often viewed in catastrophic terms, as some economic catastrophe leading workers to make a sudden break in their consciousness that leads them to overturn the existing society.
But, both of these conceptions are idealist and not materialist. They are not Marxist. Marxism does not believe that dominant ideas are separated from material conditions, and primarily dominant property forms, which is why Marx and Engels argued that it is always the property question that must be brought to the fore. The reason it sees capitalism as progressive is precisely because it develops and continues to develop, the productive forces, and the property forms that coincide with them, including the contradictions inherent within them. The fundamental basis of that contradiction is that the new property forms and the social relations arising from them contain the elements of the new society.
They involve the creation of huge monopolies, of a world market, and international social division of labour, cooperative labour on a global scale, and so creation of a single, global working-class in itself, if not yet for itself. Concentration and centralisation of capital meant that the old monopoly of private capital became a fetter on the further development of capital itself, as Marx described in Capital I, Chapter 32.
By the latter half of the 19th century, this fetter was “burst asunder”, the expropriators were expropriated, by the development of socialised capital, in the form of cooperatives and joint stock companies. In place of the monopoly of private capital there now arose socialised capital as the collective property of “the associated producers” in each enterprise.
As Marx described, it was part reflection of the present, part harbinger of the future. It was still capital, and subject to its laws, but capital that was now the collective property of the associated producers, and, therefore, a process leading to their inevitable assertion of collective control over it. Marx never made predictions, and when he says that Socialism was inevitable, it was not a prediction, but simply a description of this existing reality. From it necessarily unfolds its reconversion from capital to being merely means of production used by the workers, to meet their needs, rather than them being employed by it to meet its needs.
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