@[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?
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.
Again, not the topic. My only point is “Don’t misrepresent the topics you’re debating”
I don’t think communism is presently viable. I do think communism might be viable in coming generations, maybe.
My political acumen is negligible. My semantic acumen, however…
Even if communism will never work, characterizing it by a central state is categorically false. Your words are wrong. If you want to talk about authoritarian states masquerading as communism to engender public appeal, say that. That’s not communism though. If you want to argue against such a state, do that. Still not communism.
If you want to argue against the merits of a non-hierarchic, moneyless, classless, stateless, anarchic system, feel free to do so while you call it communism. But don’t call something that isn’t communism “communism” and then say that communism doesn’t work for the reasons your strawman non-communistic “communism” doesn’t work. Use the right words.
I’m not here to fix your politics, I’m here to fix your words.
I’m not so sure your political acumen is negligible, but your semantic acumen is certainly impressive.
This is absolutely worthless. I shall cherish it always.
Ok, now I get where you are coming from.
I still disagree. While there is a single “pure” form of capitalism (which is basically “let the market run wild without any kind of intervention”), “pure” communism is much less easy to put in a bucket, since it derived mainly from the concept of “not capitalism”. But in what way it is “not capitalism” is not so simple.
You are talking about social anarchism or anarcho-communism, which are both forms of anarchism or communism, but neither are “the” anarchism or communism. There is also e.g. individualist anarchism, which is totally anarchism as well, but puts a very non-communist spin on it.
In the communism category, there are multiple other different schools of thought, e.g. various forms of Marxism, which think that a strong state is necessary to balance the capitalistic tendencies of an unregulated economy, other forms of Marxism which think that that would be just state-capitalism, Leninism, which totally thinks that a string state is necessary, Pre-Marxism which had no plan about anything and religious communism which essentially trades a strong state with a strong church.
Argueing “This is the only theoretically pure kind of communism” or even of anarchism is mostly besides the point.
And yes, I am also guilty of that in my first post, where I summarized all of communism into the versions that are even remotely viable to be stable, and they all require a strong state (or whatever you want to call a central power that is strong enough to keep an inherently instable system stable).
What gave you the idea that capitalism is a singular pure concept and communism is not? Either your definition of capitalism is so simplified that there’s an singular communistic counterpart, or your definition of communism is so specific that there are dozens of capitalistic counterparts. Be consistent. You haven’t been talking about communism at all.
Your “communism category” is compromised solely of decidedly not-communistic transitory states, some with the stated goal of eventually facilitating communism. They are by definition not communism by virtue of being states. You call them communism because they have been called such by several non-communists: authoritarians leaders trying to sway their population, terrified capitalists trying to deceive the proletariat, ‘temporarily-embarassed-millionaires’ parroting pundit talking points.
Read the literature: communism, real communism, is by nature anarchic. It is definitely free of hierarchies, coersion, profit extraction. Anarchy, real anarchy, is by nature communistic. There can be no money in anarchy, because money creates class and class creates hierarchy.
Anarcho-capitalism is a fake idea. Private property is inevitably leveraged into power, and the power vacuum doesn’t stay empty long. The only true anarchism is spontaneous cooperation in a purely horizonal democracy. Any deviation from anarcho-communism is no longer anarchy, and no longer communism.
Again, is communism sustainable? Probably not right now, definitely not at any point in the past, probably not for quite some time, if ever. Doesn’t legitimize fake masquerade communism wrapped around the decidedly non-communistic authoritarian government as an example of the ideology.
It’s all fake ideas. You sound exactly like a member of some religious sect claiming that all the other religious sects “don’t believe in the true God”, because they don’t fit into your neat little box.
How is anarchocapaitalism (which is unsustainable and hasn’t ever really existed) more or less a “fake idea” than anarchocommunism (which is unsustainable and hasn’t ever existed)?
How can an idea even be fake?
Not sectarian, mathematical.
It’s an oxymoron, like vegan milk or square circle. It is a contradiction, logically impossible. Implicit to capitalism is the employer-employee hierarchy, and hierarchy is by definition antithetical to anarchism.
Same as anarcho-communism then.
Anarcho-capitalism is based on the idea that there is no state or other entity that prohibits what you are allowed to do, so you are free to make any kinds of contracts that you like, which then leads to a form of unregulated capitalism. That’s a logical progression that sounds very plausible. They define anarchism here as having no government and allowing everyone total freedom in their interaction with other people.
Anarcho-communism is based on the idea that there is no hirarchy and that it is prohibited to enter any contracts that would implicitly form a hirarchy. But to ensure any kind of prohibition, you need somebody tasked with making sure it doesn’t happen. And that in it self is a hirarchy and thus a contradiction.
You’d even need some body that is able to discern between the edge cases between regular cooperation (which anarcho-COMMUNism requires) and employee-employer relationships. And then you’d need some organisation that enforces this kind of judgement. And you need a system of penalizing the parties.
That is a very strong contradiction to me.
No actually, very different.
With a state or any other entity, who enforces the contracts?
That aside, capitalism specifically (distinct from market economies which I reiterate are not in and of themselves capitalistic) is defined by profit, which is defined as the difference between the sale price of an item and the cost (including labor). If there is no capatal-owning employer and wage-earning employee, it’s not capitalism. If there is, it cannot be anarchy.
Musings about contracts (which, again, require some authority to enforce anyway) are not relevant to capitalism. The existence of contracts is neither necessary not sufficient for capitalism; certainly they can and do exist in capitalism, but they are not a defining feature. The employer-employee hierarchy isthe defining feature.
Communism (actual communism) depends on spontaneous, voluntary cooperation. Every “communist state” was not communist, but rather some individual or group’s conception of a suitable transitory government to establish the conditions necessary for communism to emerge. I will not argue that their conceptions were indeed suitable, because I don’t believe they were. Personally, I think we are at least several generations and a great deal of technological advancement away from the conditions necessary for communism.
We could probably do pretty decent co-op-based market socialism, which I would actually personally advocate, but this isn’t a conversation about presently practical socio-economic ideologies. This is a conversation about the definition of communism. And the definition of communism (not of socialism, or transitory-states-with-the-eventual-end-goal-of-communism) is a moneyless, classless, stateless, non-hierarchic (and, consequentially, anarchic) society based on spontaneous, voluntary cooperation.
If it involves a hierarchic state, it ain’t communism. Simple as.
Whatever that hierarchic-state-claiming-to-be-communism is, you can certainly argue against for its many flaws. I’ll happily join you. But that thing ain’t communism, and the second a state pops out of actual communism, it by definition stops being communism.
Words matter.
Purpously forking the discussion here, since it’s two separate points and I don’t want one to overshadow the other.
Capitalism theory is ex-post, while communism theory is ex-ante.
Or to put it differenlty: Capitalism just happens while communism is a design.
Every single society that has ever existed spontaneously forms hirarchies.
So capitalism theory is about how to mitigate or exploit (depending on what side of the discussion the theorist is on) these hirarchies.
Communist theory instead is like a what-if-fanfiction to capitalism. What if nobody wants power? What if nobody wants an advantage?
There are essentially two ways communist theorists go. Either they split the world into bourgeoisie vs proletariat, believing that they are two separate species of humans and only the bourgeuisie wants hirarchy, so if they kill them everyone else has no wish to ever have an advantage over others, which is obviously flawed thinking. The proletariat is not in power because they can’t, not because they wouldn’t want to.
The other option is to proclaim the “dictatorship of the proletariat” (a term coined by Marx and Engels, which I guess, according to your definition aren’t real communists either then), embrace hirarchies and have a central instance that governs and enforces their view of communism.
There’s a simple reason why hirarchies emerge. People aren’t identical. There’s always someone who is more intelligent, has more knowledge/experience, is more charismatic, speaks/writes better, can naturally get people to follow them. Boom, there’s a hirarchy.
And if that person is consistently the person others turn to, this hirarchy becomes solidified.
That’s exactly my point though: Anarchism in any form is a contradiction. Communist anarchism is not less of a contradiction than capitalist anarchism.
Capitalist anarchism is, as you say, lacking an authority that enforces contracts and that authority will spontaneously appear due to the (translated from German) “right of the stronger”, meaning whoever is stronger will enforce contracts and the other party is out of luck. That’s what could be observed in real-life examples like the Kowloon Walled City, where the Triads became the de-facto government.
Communist anarchism depends on the stronger playing nice and not forcing their will on the other people and it also depends on people not banding together to form a democracy to oppose the stronger people/stop them from forming the de-facto government.
Capitalist anarchism is instable since it directly drops into an Oligarchy.
Communist anarchism is a direct contradiction.