Anarchism and Capitalism

In the last post, I characterized anarchism as involving a radical rejection of coercion. More fully, "Anarchism, as I understand it, says that all our collective interactions, relations, and decision-making should be free of coercion. Or to state it positively, they should be co-operative and voluntary — and I believe by extension, personal and small-scale."

An ideal like this make capitalism... problematic. After all, capitalism — along with most other institutions in our society — is hierarchically-organized. People at the top dictate what people at the bottom do. Most fundamentally, workers sell themselves for 8 hours a day, doing what the owners and bosses want them to do. Not only is this coercive, it is also alienating. People are alienated from their work — they exercise no ownership over it, they are not invested in it, they put little into it because they get little out of it. Since they are alienated from that which they spend the biggest chunk of their lives, time, and energy on, they are alienated from themselves.

Everyone hates work, complains about it, and can't wait until the workday ends and the weekend comes... not because they are lazy, but because 'work' in our culture generally involves doing something you don't want to do, but that you nevertheless feel forced to do.

(And at the same time, strong cultural forces pressure us to be happy with our lot... unhappy people bog down the system... if you're not happy there must be something wrong with you... probably chemically... and we have drugs for that! ... but maybe you're just a failure. When it comes to depression or unhappiness, the collective is never at fault, only the individual. It couldn't possibly have anything to do with the alienating society we live in).

Because we can do different kinds of alienating work, there is the illusion of choice and freedom. But it is difficult to avoid the basic equation of 'work = boring, dissatisfying, alienating.' Even people who are lucky enough to end up 'doing what they love' or at least 'doing something worthwhile' (e.g. musicians, social workers, teachers...?) often end up hating their jobs because the institutions involved are coercively-organized. They get forced to do what they love in a way that they would never choose. And there are so many 'extra' things that they have to do, things they don't want to do, that it feels like they never get to the things that they love, the things which attracted them to the profession in the first place.

All this said, exchange need not be coercive. If I make something, or grow it, and you make something, or maybe are willing to offer a service, and we want to trade with one another... then, that's fine! If a group of me and my friends get together, make something, and are willing to exchange it (and if we formalize this, this is called a co-op, a nice alternative to the corporation) then that's fine. If we want to use money to mediate our exchanges... well, that can be fine.

The thing with money is that it is a numerical technology. Like all technology, it might be designed to help us and make our lives easier, but it can easily take control. All too often money subjects humans to the tyranny of numbers and their logic. Instead of humans making choices, numbers do, a mathematic operation does. "What is the lowest number (i.e. what is cheapest)?" The answer to that question determines so many of our decisions. 

But we don't have to be determined by the numbers. We can choose to consider more than just economics when we make decisions – we can consider things that can't be measured, things like the environment, social justice, and aesthetics. This is a human way to make choices: to consider multiple factors when making a decision, rather than just one, rather than just money. The problem is that our culture – unlike almost every other culture that has ever existed — tends to value the numbers above all else, and teaches and encourages us to be determined by them. We worship  efficiency, economic growth, and the free market. The thing is, in order for the market to be free, we must enslave ourselves.

So while exchange isn't inherently coercive, it nonetheless tends to be coercively-organized in our society. Capitalism, which involves workers selling themselves for part of the day, amounts to what I'm tempted to call 'semi-voluntary and somewhat-limited slavery.' Worse systems could be imagined — feudalism, and race-based slavery please stand up! — but better ones could be too.