Making Capitalism Obsolete: How & Why.

I’ve been thinking on this topic for a long time – close to ten years in fact – and done a lot of reading, a lot of thinking, and a lot of writing on and about it; but until now I’ve never actually laid out my ideas for the real nuts-and-bolts “how” of moving to a post-capitalist economy. This isn’t that complete article, but it’s a start; spurred by a couple posts I saw on Rethos about the nature of capitalism and inequality, alternatives to it, and how to make those alternatives a reality.

Lately it seems like it’s become popular for rich people to tell us how much they dislike inequality, just look at Bill Gates and his much-publicized efforts to support “development” around the world. Not that it’s a new phenomenon, really. Rockefeller, Carnegie, and other titans of the 1900′s-era “Robber Baron” capitalist class did much the same thing. Thing is, even as those men publicly demonstrated their desire to “give back” by building public libraries and such, they continued to violently abuse working-class people who dared to form unions and demand things like living wages, weekends, shorter workdays, and things of that sort. While the nature of the software industry means that Bill Gates hasn’t ever had to be as overtly murderous as Carnegie (whose empire was built on Coal and Steel), I find it a bit hard to believe that he’s really as dedicated to the cause as he claims to be; if only because any meaningful reduction in global poverty would directly undermine the capitalist system which he and others like him rely upon to supply them with such obscene wealth in the first place. Let me explain.

Capitalism requires poverty. Period. It requires poverty since it relies on economic coercion of the majority through the threat of poverty or starvation in order to force people to accept the low-paying jobs that form the basis of the capitalist pyramid. Rich people don’t need jobs making Nikes. And that’s before you even touch the fact that the profit system itself is based on systematic theft. For example:

Say I work in a shoe factory making shoes. In the course of a day the wealth I create is equal to the value of the number of shoes I produce minus the cost of materials and overhead (the value-added which my labor creates). Now that’s all wealth that *I* created and, by all rights, should own. In capitalism, however, the owner of the factory or workshop appropriates the vast majority of that added value and pays me some lesser amount, and it is that act of theft that creates profits for the owners since my labor becomes just another cost and they become free to appropriate (ie steal) all of the surplus value that my labor created. They do this by leveraging the fact that the means of production are owned by a minority to force the working majority to work for the owners instead of simply working for themselves. In other words, inequality – the fact that a minority owns most of the worlds wealth – is a vital and indispensable element of capitalism. Without that inequality the entire wage system would collapse.

Ordinary people, given free access to the means of producing wealth, could self-manage their own production without bosses or hierarchies, there are literally thousands of worker-owned businesses around the world that are doing it already. Existing inequalities in the distribution of wealth are the only thing standing in the way of the immediate and virtually instantaneous abolition of capitalism. All that is required is for us as a society to (1) recognize that humans do not own the earth because we did not create it and that therefore anyone who claims to own land is nothing more then a thief and (2) for us to realize that the accumulated wealth and technology of the planet – what Kropotkin termed the “common heritage of humanity” – also belongs to everyone. Not to capitalists, not to governments, but to all of us.

And no, that’s not a ‘communist’ argument. Notice that I’m not arguing that we should turn over control of the worlds wealth to the worlds governments and expect them to run things in the interest of the people. Anarchists denounced such plans as lunacy years before the Bolsheviks ever seized power in Russia and the massive failure of Marxism there just proved us right.

Instead I’m arguing for an entirely different approach to property and ownership, a model where no one owns the land but local communities take stewardship responsibility and have oversight powers over all businesses that operate within their borders. where factories, firms, stores, etc are all self-managed by the employees without a managerial class and decisions are made on the shop floor, democratically, by the people who work there. where the market actually becomes a meaningfully free market – one that is not constrained by the massive barriers to entry that accompany an economy based on private ownership of the means of production. An economy where how much you make in a year directly depends on how much wealth your labor creates – not on how much wealth you can extract from the labor of others or how little is left after the boss steals all the profits from your work. A society, in short, without significant institutionalized inequality – something that can never be achieved in a capitalist system.

the next big step forward is not armchair philosophy but to actually develop working alternatives. For me, the growing movement towards worker-owned non-hierarchical and self-managed businesses is a massive step in the right direction because it provides a glimpse of a better way to organize our production. What I’d really like to see is that movement growing and taking things to the next level – setting up credit unions that would provide bridge loans to workers seeking to purchase the businesses where they work and convert them into collectives, providing legal support and know-how to one another, really build it into a movement. Why is it that all over america skilled workers are being put out of work and factories left empty as manufacturing jobs get exported? Why not have the unions and the workers simply buy the factories from the corporations that are abandoning them in favor of cheap labor elsewhere, convert them into non-hierarchal self-managed worker-run collectives, and let the people who work there continue to work there but without the bosses?

In Argentina this is actually happening – after the massive economic collapse in 2001 thousands of factories all over the country were shut down as capital fled abroad and millions were pushed into unemployment, but instead of sitting on their asses and moaning about it the workers there broke back into their old workplaces, started the machinery back up, and kept right on working – only for themselves instead of their former bosses. Now, six years in, many of those new collectives have turned around and used the profits from their businesses to actually buy the factories and infrastructure from the bosses and are 100% legal.

My questions are

(1) why was it illegal in the first place? The fact that private property laws would force skilled workers into unemployment while the means of production sit vacant is such an incredible indictment of capitalism it’s almost beyond words. Far from being criminals, those workers are heroes and through their labor they helped prevent one of the worst economic crisis in south american history from spiraling out of control and wiping out the economies of the entire region. They are heroes in every sense of the word.

2) Why aren’t we doing this here? How many factories and businesses have been closed since the passing of NAFTA and the creation of the WTO as “american” corporations have fled abroad looking for easy access to slave labor maquiadoras? Why in the world are we letting all of that infrastructure – which was often built at public expense through massive corporate welfare – simply rot while workers starve? It’s insane.

The revolution is here, right now, we’ve just got to get off our asses and actually make it happen. Capitalist Globalization is a massive threat to working people, but it’s also an opportunity. old-school radicals used to dream of the day they’d seize the means of production from the capitalist class and envisioned it happening through a massive global revolution. That revolution never materialized, but today we have an opportunity to make their vision a reality without ever even having to kill anyone. The capitalists are literally throwing away those same means of production, abandoning them in favor of cheaper labor elsewhere. There’s nothing in the world to stop local communities from using their powers of eminent domain to turn those factories over to the workers who’ve always worked in them and letting those people convert them into collectives. It’d be better for local economies – just think of all the countless communities across America that are slowly dying as the factories that powered their local economies are shut down. It’d be better for the workers – fuck getting “retrained” and taking lower-paying jobs in the service sector! And, frankly, it’d even be better for America as a whole because it would revitalize our economy and reverse current economic trends that show millions of working-class people sliding deeper and deeper into poverty every year.

It’s not a cure-all solution, the State would still exist and the existing land-ownership structures would still be in place, but it would be a major blow against the power of corporate capitalism. It’d be a hell of a lot harder for top-down corporations to attract talented recruits if young people looking for jobs could instead sign on with a worker-owned business where they would be treated with dignity and respect as an equal among equals instead of being a mere “human resource”. And as that movement grew it would re-shape other aspects of our society too – the experience of living and working without hierarchy is incredibly empowering, and a healthy, empowered, secure public is a lot less likely to accept authoritarian bullshit from the government. Authoritarianism requires fear, after all, and it thrives in times and places where the economy is in shambles and people are scared. So no, it’s not the end cure. But then old-school radical ideals of a single massive revolution that would fix everything all at once were never particularly realistic to begin with. Revolution is a process, change is constant. We can’t make all the changes we’d like to see at once. But we can at least make a start. So why not start now?

Posted: November 15th, 2007 under culture war, economics, politrix.
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