autonomous alternatives to the statist quo | a collection of Anarchist blogs
Capitalism
So, someone just said that to me with a straight face after a long and fairly ridiculous argument. The image you see on the side pretty much describes my reaction before I decided there’s definitely no reason to waste any more time on this.
Sometimes I have to wonder in which reality some people are living in…
A lot of liberals try to separate the good from the bad corporations. What is a good corporation? A good corporation is a corporation where the workers are self-determined and have complete democratic control of the means of production and their wages. A good corporation is a corporation that doesn’t make a profit or have […]
By Cody Lestelle [NOTE: this article is an adaptation of an email I originally sent to the CHID program at the University of Washington, Seattle of which I am (sorta) an alumni. I am sharing it now in hopes of provoking wider discussion and appropriate actions on these themes] Dear whoever is reading this, I […]
I have a new piece up over at The New Inquiry in which I argue that there is nothing wrong with stealing from thieves (i.e., capitalists). Please copy and paste it broadly.
In my latest piece for Al Jazeera, I explore how militarism and the profit motive are holding back science -- and what steps scientists can take to undermine capitalism. Read, share, love.
I decided over the weekend to quit a particularly lively Lib Dem Facebook group because I was getting a little tired of the Dutt-Parkers (thanks Paul!) of this world so totally misunderstanding my point of view. Yes, it's a two way street - them not understanding means me not explaining well enough, but a number of times it has turned into the sort of semi-abuse which it is not worth the time dealing with. You know the sort of thing: "I think you might probably mean well but you sound to me as if you are just a libertarian who couldn't give a stuff about anyone else" and such like.
Anyway, so instead of arguing on Facebook tonight I picked up my copy of "Markets Not Capitalism: Individualist Anarchism Against Bosses, Inequality, Corporate Power, and Structural Poverty" (Chartier & Johnson, 2011) for a bit of a more productive evening reading. And straight away, at the very start of the introduction, is a passage that explains my point of view quite well, and probably better and more succinctly than I do, so I wanted to share it...
Market anarchists believe in market exchange, not in economic privilege. They believe in free markets, not in capitalism. What makes them anarchists is their belief in a fully free and consensual society - a society in which order is achieved not through legal force or political government, but through free agreements and voluntary cooperation on a basis of equality. What makes them market anarchists is their recognition of free market exchange as a vital medium for peacefully anarchic social order. But the markets they envision are not like the privilege-riddled "markets" we see around us today. Markets labouring under government and capitalism are pervaded by persistent poverty, ecological destruction, radical inequalities of wealth, and concentrated power in the hands of corporations, bosses, and landlords.
The consensus view is that exploitation - whether of human beings or of nature - is simply the natural result of markets left unleashed. The consensus view holds that private property, competitive pressure, and the profit motive must - for good or for ill - inevitably lead to capitalistic wage labour, to the concentration of wealth and social power in the hands of a select class, or to business practices based on growth at all costs and the devil take the hindmost.
Market anarchists dissent. They argue that economic privilege is a real and pervasive social problem, but that the problem is not a problem of private property, competition, or profits per se. It is not a problem of the market form but of markets deformed - deformed by the long shadow of historical injustices and the ongoing, continuous exercise of legal privilege on behalf of capital. The market anarchist tradition is radically pro-market and anti-capitlaist - reflecting its consistent concern with the deeply political character of corporate power, the dependence of economic elites on the tolerance or active support of the state, the permeable barriers between political and economic elites, and the cultural embeddedness of hierarchies established and maintained by state-perpetrated and state-sanctioned violence.
Now, I may yet have some quibbles about calling the thing we are against "capitalism" but will no doubt discover later in the book their definition of that term, but this pretty much sums up what I believe. And I think you can probably see in that some of the reasons why I grow increasingly intolerant of politically active people, especially those who call themselves liberals (in the European sense) and ought to understand privilege and the role of the state in supporting the worst sorts of capitalism, always apparently wanting more state solutions, or claiming that the state is necessary to achieve social order.
It is not. The state is inimical to a peaceful and voluntary social order, and to a just distribution of economic welfare. Just because it has over centuries morphed from being the estate of an absolute monarch, through various stages of aristocratic and economic elite participation, to modern day "democracy" in which in theory, for the last century or so in Britain, if it actually worked, it ought to have been able to rebalance the ledger in favour of the many not the few by now, does not mean is has or can ever succeed in creating distributional justice.
So, when I argue with such people for less state, less political control and interference, this is the background to that desire. And I would urge them, if they are at all interested in finding such a voluntary social order instead of the corrupt, bloated, privilege granting state system they currently support, even if only as a "necessary evil" (they are only half right!), to get a copy of the book and have a read of the many great essays from across what has become known, in the US at least, as the "libertarian left".
From Being Liberal‘s page on Facebook. I’ve written before about why I do not consider myself a liberal. I rejected the label many years ago. I want free healthcare; Healthcare is a basic human right and free healthcare is entirely attainable. I don’t want money for nothing; But fundamental human needs like food and shelter […]
My response to my friend on Facebook’s post: Do you avoid walking down the street at night for fear of being raped? Do you see pictures of people of the beauty ideal of your gender plastered on billboards, TV, and magazines, to an extent that you cannot escape from them? Do you get tired of [...]
