Unless I am very mistaken the photo shows him holding "Monopoly Capital" By Paul Sweezy and Paul Baran. A very fine book, which I read 4 or more decades ago.
>He doesn’t say there are good and bad things about capitalism, or that it is possible to reform it … he just says we have to get rid of the entire system.
Classic deadend Marxism. The reason why capitalism hasn't ended is actually because of the socialists whose job it is to end it...
Because of their wholly incomplete understanding of capitalism they are unable to strike at its heart, just at the henchmen. The moment anyone suggests a working solution (and they are out there) the Marxists obsessed with their hate driven revolution are going to shut them down. Keynes suggested artificial liquidity costs (the thing we call negative interest rates today) on money and land to solve capitalism. He wanted to introduce the Bancor system to capitalism between countries.
Implementing liquidity costs on cash is difficult politically, meanwhile raising inflation until full employment doesn't have as many political barriers.
It is particularly perplexing when you read some chapters from the third volume where Marx effectively says the same things as Keynes, that capitalism originates from money than physical capital. "Das Kapital" should have been titled "Das Geld" but here we are.
It is not only possible to do political reforms inside capitalism to end it, in fact it is even possible to build an internal system that ends capitalism without changing any law just through competition alone. Such a system would require peaceful cooperation however. Sardex is a successful barter club on Sardinia. A similar system could be offered by a banking network that spans the entire eurozone. The only critical aspect is that you need to be able to pay taxes in this system and that wouldn't require a violent revolution, just the governments opening a new type of euro bank account. Whenever capitalism fails due to a recession or depression people will join the new system on their own because the new system is centered on serving human needs rather than money accumulation.
I got another one, make cooperatives tax free and raise taxes once they reach 80% of all the companies. Also, you have to heavily regulate what is a cooperative so it doesn't get used for tax evasion by normal companies.
He doesn’t say there are good and bad things about capitalism because he (wrongly) assumes his readers have read theory previously.
In a nutshell, capitalism is interpreted as workplace and economic dictatorship
, and communism is seen as workplace and economic democracy, for workers get democratic rights within their workplace and get to decide important economic matters, such as housing etc.
So ofc the system, which Saito and radicals see, is nothing else than glorified theft and lazyness, and thus cannot be "reformed", it has to be abolished. And replaced by what? A mix of workers coops, state enterprises and local workers parliements, depending on the flavour of "communism" you adhere to.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1152516