Anarchy Against Capitalism
September 8, 2000
Both market capitalism and Marxism are deeply flawed systems. There is an alternative to both: anarchism. Anarchism is the belief that capitalism, the state and all other forms of hierarchy should be abolished; it has nothing to do with chaos. Instead, we should have a society in which everyone has control over their own life and an equal say in all decisions that involve them. Unlike capitalists and Marxists, anarchists have never imposed dictatorship and mass murder on anyone.
Most authoritarians will automatically claim that anarchism “won’t work” because of some “human nature.” The same thing was said about representative government several centuries ago. This claim has been disproven by real-life experiments with Anarchist ideas. In 1918, Anarchists in the Ukraine revolted against their capitalist masters and set up a successful anarchist society, which lasted for several years before the Marxist regime in Russia used its superior resources to conquer the Ukraine. In the 1930s, Anarchists in Spain did the same thing. There have also been many agrarian and hunter-gatherer societies that were Anarchist or quasi-Anarchist and lasted for thousands of years.
There is more freedom in any moderately de-Stalinized dictatorship than there is in the average workplace. Most companies have a basically totalitarian power structure. Those on the top tell those on the bottom what to do, and they have to obey. There are no elections, no consensus, no voting. You don’t get to elect your boss. You just do what he (or she) tells you to do. While there may be some consultation between top and bottom, the same can be said of any slave society. If the government were run like a business, it would be called totalitarian. This economic totalitarianism is blatantly anti-freedom; workplaces should be run in a non-hierarchical, democratic manner by the people working in them. The bosses have no right to control our lives.
The capitalist idea that the best way to defend freedom is to defend private property is laughable. Private property, owning things that you personally don’t use (like factories & large tracts of land), is a restriction on freedom. If I try to build a house on some land which no one else is going to use but is owned by someone other than me, then the owner can call the cops and have them coerce me into stopping. If someone isn’t going to use something then someone who wants to use it should be able to do so free of charge. When property is used to control others, it has nothing to do with freedom; it is the very opposite of freedom.
The claim that capitalism provides everyone with an equal opportunity to become rich is a myth. Does anyone really believe that the 200 million children under five currently suffering from malnutrition because its not profitable enough for the capitalists to feed them have an equal shot at becoming a billionaire as someone whose parents are billionaires? It is extremely difficult for someone born into poverty to rise all the way to the top. It is easy for someone born at the top to stay at the top. The nature of any class system is that a tiny elite is at the top and the rest are below them. Even if this myth were true, it still would not justify the economic tyranny that is capitalism. If it was possible for someone in a totalitarian Marxist state to go from a position with little or no power to being chief dictator, that still wouldn’t make totalitarianism acceptable. Similarly, even if it was possible for someone to rise from the bottom to the top in capitalism, it is still a totalitarian system and should be condemned for that.
Another myth is that capitalism rewards people on the basis of invention, innovation and hard work. This is bunk. Famous actors earn millions more than farmers despite the fact that what farmers do is way more important. Without food we’d all die. In a capitalist economy, a billionaire can put his money in the stock market or a bank account and earn money off the interest without doing any work at all. The people who already have a lot get more without having to do any work, yet those who have little must work for it. We are always paid less than the value of the goods we produce; that’s how companies make their profit. That profit then goes to the owners of the business who make money without having to actually produce anything. If you believe people should be rewarded for hard work, then you can’t support capitalism because it’s based on this parasitic class of owners who make money off of our labor.
Capitalism produces misery all over the world. Billions live in poverty despite the huge amount of wealth that has been created. This system is simply unacceptable; it must be overthrown. You don’t need to believe in Marxist pseudo-science to know that capitalism is wrong.