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Originally Posted by !@#$%!
When have you ever had a society in which the powerful do not draw their power from the less powerful?
kings, emperors, warlords, aristocrats, apparatchiks-- draining the blood of slaves, indentured servants, vassals, commoners, citizens-- time and again societies organize themselves as pyramids.
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That's all perfectly true but then those who blindly attack capitalism as some all-evil political monster don't see it as a progression out of those earlier (with the exception of apparatchiks) modes. Marx, as you know, was a massive believer in the merits of Capitaliism, he just didn't see it as the historical end point that many of those on the Right seem to (Fukuyama's whole 'End of History' thing, for example). Whether Marx was right in suggesting that a full working through of capitalism was crucial to providing the conditions necessary to support a progression into socialism is, of course, massively debatable, and has indeed been debated not just within centrist politics or the Right but even factions within the Left itself.
The problem with things like the anti-capitalist movement seems to be that it has no real vision of anything that might replace capitalism beyond some half-digested anarchism or, more usually, some sort of 'friendlier' capitalism. It's as though the movement itself can't really envisage an end of capitalism so has had to reconcile itself merely with trying to restrain it - 'ye olde Keynesian liberalism', as PBradley mentions already.)