@[email protected] asked “why are folks so anti-capitalist?” not long ago. It got quite a few comments. But I noticed a trend: a lot of people there didn’t agree on the definition of “capitalism”.
And the lack of common definition was hobbling the entire discussion. So I wanted to ask a precursor question. One that needs to be asked before anybody can even start talking about whether capitalism is helpful or good or necessary.
Main Question
- What is capitalism?
- Since your answer above likely included the word “capital”, what is capital?
- And either,
- A) How does capitalism empower people to own what they produce? or, (if you believe the opposite,)
- B) How does capitalism strip people of their control over what they produce?
Bonus Questions (mix and match or take them all or ignore them altogether)
- Say you are an individual who sells something you create. Are you a capitalist?
- If you are the above person, can you exist in both capitalist society and one in which private property has been abolished?
- Say you create and sell some product regularly (as above), but have more orders than you can fulfill alone. Is there any way to expand your operation and meet demand without using capitalist methods (such as hiring wage workers or selling your recipes / process to local franchisees for a cut of their proceeds, etc)?
- Is the distinction between a worker cooperative and a more traditional business important? Why is the distinction important?
I might have simplified, but the points remain exactly the same.
If the system (Question, who is the system?) precludes (Question, who precludes?) from renting property (Question, who determines what what renting is?), there needs to be a system in place that needs to enforce all that.
Otherwise you aren’t talking about communism, you are talking about anarchism. Anarchism has no inherent link to communism, so if communism is supposed to exist at all, it needs a government. There is no way around it.
If we go by your distinction between personal and private property, what is to stop anyone from renting out their personal property? If I have the coolest movie projector in the community, what is stopping me from charging for access in an anarchist society? If I have more, I can make more and then I’m a capitalist again.
But explaining one impossible construct (pure communism) with another impossible construct (anarchism) doesn’t make the first one more probable.
Anarchism is inherently a non-stable system. You have natural power imbalances and anarchism has no mechanisms to balance them out. An anarchist society where no democratic processes are used leads directly to mafia-like organisations taking control.
Anarchism is based on the idea that a power vacuum is sustainable.
Where did you get that idea? Anarchism is explicitly a left-wing political ideology that emerged from general socialist thought. The two are intimately linked in their development, and heavily influenced one another with the “purest” form of either by their own principles independently culminating in anarcho-communism. You can debate the viability of this system all you like, but the definition of the term is what it is.
It is defined as implicitly free of hierarchies, including the state. If you want to talk about a system with a state, you’re no longer taking about communism. We can talk about pragmatic incarnations of socialist policy, we can talk about the conditions necessary to foster a communist society, we can talk about the consequences of either. But if the subject is the definition of communism, none of that is relevant.
A lack of money for one. The existence of other cool projectors, if you didn’t build the cool projector by yourself, that can be communally held. If you built it yourself, and decide to hoarde it yourself, presumably other members of the community would hesitate to share their cool stuff with you. Patents and IP are private property, so anyone with skill in projector-making can try to copy it.
If you recognize the benefit of sharing your cool stuff in exchange for others sharing their cool stuff with you, everyone gets to use lots of cool stuff. If you hoarde the cool stuff you personally invented, no one will let you use the cool stuff they personally invented, and you’ll only get to use the cool things you personally invented.
Have you never heard of anarchocapitalism?
I believe they might have the etymology in common - probably because the word anarchism became sort of a synonym for any type of “chaos”, but anarchism as a political movement is widely known as an extreme left-winged ideology! Which is explicitly against all forms of institution, specially corporations
Anarchocapitalism is the direct result of anarchism if you put any little bit of realistic thought into that matter.
You always have an imbalance of power between people. There’s always someone who is stronger, more intelligent, more charismatic and/or who has more stuff. Because people aren’t exact replicas of each other.
Communist anarchism thinks that everyone is going to play nice, and even those with more power will just yield that and be nice.
Anarchocapitalism is the more realistic view on the same situation: Whoever has a bit more power will use that power to gain an advantage. That advantage will increase that person’s power and that person will come to dominate the society, and will eventually take the role of the government.
This situation is essentially the mafia in any society where the government leaves enough of a power vacuum that somebody else can snatch some power.
I recommend reading up on real-world anarchism experiments, e.g. Kowloon Walled City, which directly turned into an anarchocapitalist nightmare town, or Freetown Christiania in Copenhagen, Denmark, which basically reinvented democracy but still calls it Anarchism.
Christiania is actually a really fun story. It starts with the government giving up on some military barracks. Squatters moved in to form an anarchist society. So they get together, everyone starts making their home there. But then there are things that need to be organized together, so they make up small councils that they call Områdemøde. These councils discuss local issues and decide who to send to the higher level council, the Fællesmøde, which decides stuff for all of Christiania. It’s of course not democracy here, and the people who are sent to the Fællesmøde to represent the different Områdemøde, they are of course not elected politicians.
Residents have to pay money that goes into a pot to finance upkeep of community resources and areas. These payments are mandatory, but of course they are not taxes.
When 10 residents died in 1979 from overdoses, the Fællesmøde started to decide hard rules for the community. One such rule was that hard drugs were not allowed to be sold, owned or consumed in Christiania. Of course, these rules weren’t laws, just mandatory rules. To enforce these rules, some strong men were enlisted to patrol Christiania, and remove offenders from the commune. They’d call Copenhagen’s police to the entrance of Christiania and hand those offenders over to be dealt with by the official police. Of course, these strong men weren’t Christiania’s police.
In the 80s, the Bullshit Motorcycle Club basically invaded Christiania and made a center of their drug operation. Residents of Christiania, the police and the Hells Angels united to get rid of the Bulllshitters and since then biker jackets are banned in Christiania. Again, not to be confused with a law, this is just a mandatory rule.
TLDR:
This anarchist community is a straight-up democracy with councils, representative democracy, laws, taxes and an informal police force.
Anarchism, by definition, cannot exist. It either turns into democracy if people work together, or into a dictatorship if someone manages to play the masses.
thanks for sharing the stories. I’m not myself an anarchist, as I also agree with that reasoning.
however, not being practical doesn’t prevent people from defending it from an idealistic point of view. and to be fair, I think we always have to be open-minded about the limitations imposed by our contemporary mindset - remember that some people can’t even conceive a world without capitalism because of them, where it could be perfectly possible (and we should probably do it hehe)
I’ve also heard of vegan milk.
As others have pointed out, it’s an oxymoronic misnomer used by right-wing “libertarian” neo-feudalists. The hierarchy inherent to capitalism is fundamentally incompatible with anarchism.
Same as anarchism is inherently incompatible with humans.
Over the last few thousand years there hasn’t been a single documented case where an anarchist society stayed anarchist if more than a handful of people participated for more than a handful of weeks.
And yes, extremists on all sides of the spectrum dream of a world where no government tells them what to do. That’s not unique to communists.
But regardless, it’s a fever dream, and discussing it as if it was a real thing is a lot like saying that midi-clorians are fundamentally incompatible with Jedis and lightsabers.
You’re further deviating from the initial point.
If you want to opine about the finer points of the implementation of a system, be my guest. I won’t pretend that human civilization, at present, is compatible with the tenets of communism. One day, maybe.
But if you’re going to talk about a system, talk about the system. Don’t strawman a McCarthyist Frankenstein of right-wing propaganda to make your point. Engage the concepts as they are defined, and speak to the deficiencies in the actual system as they exist.
Are there problems with communism? Maybe, probably, sure. None of them come from authoritarian states, because communism has no authoritarian states. We’re there lots of regimes who claimed to be communist for the PR? Totally, definitely. There were lots of shitty attempts at ornithopters and DaVinci helicopters before the Wright Brothers too, doesn’t invalidate the thence unrealized principles of aerodynamics.
No, not really. My point was that communism in reality cannot exist with a strong government. You said that pure communism depends on anarchism.
Anarchism is strictly impossible. And if the dependency is impossible, communism in that style is as well.
The fundamental issue is that any group of people that interact with eachother will at some point have disagreements/conflicts where an agreement cannot be reached. At that point, one group of people will get their wish and the others won’t. And depending on the circumstances, either the most powerfull will decide (=>dictatorship, monarchy, mafia pseudogovernment) or the majority decides (=>some form of democracy).
So with anarchism being impossible on the most basic level, anarchistic communism is also ruled out.
And yes, anarchocapitalism is about equally as realistic as it instantly devolves into a corporate dictatorship.
I repeat, if you want to talk about the viability of various schemas, go ahead. I’m sure you think you’re much smarter than every communist theorist to ever live (unironically, I really do believe you think that). I’m sure you are doubtlessly certain of what is and isn’t possible, and I’m sure you can’t derive any additional nuance from reading those who have dedicated extensive thought and analysis to the topic
Nonetheless, I think even you can understand that strawmanning is the refuge of idiots with no actual merit, and whether or not you think communism is “possible”, it is best to actually talk about the topic instead of some silly oxymoron (like “authoritarian state communism”)
As futile as it sounds, I do think you might benefit from anarcho-communist research. I’ll leave it at that.
Ok, show me a single example of a community of at least 1000 people who managed to keep an anarcho-communist stable for at least a year.
I think, that’s a super low bar. Any remotely viable social system should have been able to clear that bar in hundreds or thousands of instances.
So it should be easy to give just a single one.
Tbh, being a theorist doesn’t mean you produce viable stuff. There are more than enough examples of larger schools of theorists who never produced anything remotely viable across many different fields.