@o_o@programming.dev 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 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)