Firstly, Capitalism = Capitalism and Anarchism = Anarchism. The two are very distinct so please can we be clear about this. Capitalists can certainly say that Anarchism and Capitalism can co-exist in one feature of society and that would be the absence of an authoritative hierarchical state system…but that’s where the two pass like a – X. The two do not run parallel – ll – or co-exist in a single system – l. We live in a monetary system with two key features – a large authoritative Government public sector and a large influential Corporate private sector. The Corporate sector has evolved over many, many years (some would say 10,000 years) from neolithic to feudalism, mercantilism to modern capitalism or neo-liberalism. In order for Corporations to stay strong or gain in strength, they need the protection of the state to run parallel to it – ll – or some would even say that they exist in a single system – l – also known as the third way, to enforce the hierarchical structure of society.
The monetary system is the tool of the upper sections of the hierarchy of power. Money is created by the Central Banks – which are often privately owned, like the Federal Reserve Bank of America – and given to Private Banks. Private Banks can give this money out to the people in loans or mortgages, or they can gamble it – in Investment Banking. When the Banks take too many risks, they go bust, but instead of going under, as they would in Capitalism (which we don’t have, just to be clear), the Banks are bailed out by the Government who charge us – the people – to cover the cost of the broken financial powers of the Corporate sector. The Government is filled with Politicians whose election campaigns and opinions to pass and vote for Bills (New Laws) are lobbied and paid for by the Corporate sector, particularly Private Banks like Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase, but also agri-business like Monsanto and arms dealers like Lockheed Martin.
In order for us – the people – to survive in this monetary system we can either: Sell our labour for money, or get a Government hand out so we don’t starve to death. If we’re lucky we’ll be born rich or be one of the precious few who succeed in upward social mobility – going from poor to rich. The more money we have, the more freedom we have to do the things we want to do, but at the very least we have a Government in place who can keep us alive if we hit rock bottom, but only if we follow their instructions to the letter.
Now, you guys who call yourselves Anarcho-Capitalists: You’re Capitalists, plain and simple, and there’s no shame in admitting that, it’s your opinion, you’re entitled to it. But you aren’t Anarchists, because Anarchists are against Capitalism, the state and any kind of hierarchical structure. Capitalism is very pro-Corporation and Corporations depend on money and hierarchy, so you cannot be Capitalist AND Anarchist. Anarchism wishes to install freedom AND equality to each member of society. Capitalism has no regard for either because without freedom you can have no equality and without equality you can have no freedom. The only freedom you get in Capitalism is if you have enough money to do the things you want to do. The more money you have the more freedom you have and the less equal society is – meaning some are more equal than others! To survive you need a job. If you have no job you get no money, and without a Government to provide you with welfare, you’ll die! Therefore, without a Government, in Capitalism, you are not free or equal. There is no voluntarism! You have GOT to go to work, even if you hate your job and it depresses the heck out of you, if you don’t work you’ll starve to death – or you could just kill yourself – those are your options! Oh yes, or you could unionise, force out your owners and work for yourselves, like in Anarcho-Communism/Anarcho-Syndicalism.
Once you have Anarcho-Communism, you have no more need for money because everything that is needed will be produced and everyone is provided for. Supermarkets and shopping centres will become stores for our needs, based on a supply for demand basis. The horrible jobs that no one wants to do will be phased out by technology or done on a short-term basis by people who are good enough to volunteer. This is a society with a real team ethic. People can do what they want but when something needs to be done we will be looking for good samaritans and volunteers. Those who do the ‘shitty’ sewer jobs will get a lot of respect in their local communities and when they’ve done it for a short time and someone else takes over they will be free again to go wherever they want and do whatever they want, dependant upon the availability of resources.
While Capitalism gives you a level of freedom directly respective of the amount of money you have, Anarchism operates on a resource-based economy. We know that we have enough resources for everyone on Earth to live a middle class lifestyle, but what we must do is innovate the energy and food industries to ensure there is room for population growth. The freed up human capital, once all the bullshit jobs have been fazed out, can be utilised in university-style laboratories of innovation and invention. The better the outcome of this innovation and invention the better the lifestyle of all of the people of Earth. The harder each individual works, the better the outcome for everyone in society. This statement is true only of anarcho-communism and is wrongly used by Capitalists.
Without money there is less incentive to commit crimes. Crimes are almost always committed out of the necessity for money because money is the key to the locked cupboard of resources — food, water, clothing, electronics, energy, shelter, etc. With very little incentive to commit crime, crime levels will almost disappear. Courts and Prisons would become almost obsolete. Public harmony will be at it’s highest ever level in human history.
Imagine yourself in this society for a second. You live in a world of pure freedom AND equality. You wake up in the morning and you have all the things you need. You sit at the breakfast table with a clear slate of that to do with your day, having purposely not planned a single thing for today. You check the community bulletin webpage and see what duties need to be performed that day and you watch as other people volunteer for them and the spaces start to get filled. “Hmm,” you ponder as you look within yourself, “what do I want to do today?” You list some of the things you have always wanted to do: Go skydiving, go surfing, learn how to ski, travel to Macchu Picchu in Peru, see the great wall in China, party on Copacabana Beach in Rio, Brasil. You start a search for local skydiving centres. Most of them have all their spaces filled but you find one or two with late availability. “Hmm,” you ponder some more as you imagine the fear of going up in that plane and dangling your legs over the side ready to jump. “Fuck it!” You decide and reserve a place at the centre. Your stomach is in knots already. You read the recommendations on the webpage and act on them. You go upstairs to get ready. You call a cab which is at your door in minutes. It is an unmanned vehicle and it takes you to where you want to go while you play on your phone or tablet, telling your friends that you’ve finally built up the courage to take the plunge! A friend says he is free and reserves one of the last places on the plane. He joins you and you give each other moral support. That afternoon you go for lunch and a beer to soothe your still rushing adrenalin. You remember that the restaurant was on the community bulletin asking for waiting staff and you ask if the space was filled. It wasn’t and the remaining waiters seem a little rushed. You and your friend decide to help out for the rest of the afternoon. You are given dinner by the chef and that evening you go home to get ready and go out to a local bar to meet up with your friend and the waiting staff you met earlier that day. You have a great time and get a little tipsy. At the end of the night you head home. You decide that after helping out today you are going to plan that trip to Brasil. You ask if any of your friends on your social network want to come with you and they put in their availability. You look for available flights and accommodation and book the places for you and your available friends. You head to bed with the feeling that once you get back from Brasil you will dedicate more time to the Innovations Centre at your local University or help out with more of the shitty manual jobs that some people still have to do to make the world great for everyone. You go to sleep with the biggest, stupidest smile on your face, in love with life and the wonderful world you and your fellow humans have made for yourselves.
All of this can be accomplished if we team up and say, “This is what we want the world to be!” It really is as simple as that! Silence means complicity for the way the world currently is and all the wars and corruption and poverty and suffering and crime and misery and mental health issues and environmental destruction and animal extinctions and on and on and on.
All you have to do is talk about Anarchy and share this page. That is your way of advocating the resource-based economy and an anarcho-communist structure to society. What are you waiting for? Do you like being a wage slave? Imagine if we were to start society from scratch, would you make the world exactly like it is now, or exactly how I described in my example of the average day? We can choose to have anarcho-communism and the resource-based economy over this monetary system and it’s crony-capitalist, state-supported mess of a society that incentivises almost all of societies ills?
It’s up to you now. I’m doing my bit. It’s time for you to do yours!
13 years ago today, at approximately 2:00pm GMT, I was sweeping my kitchen with the radio playing in the background when a news story broke: “News just in from the United States. A plane has crashed into the World Trade Centre Building in New York. More on that breaking story when we have it.” I assumed it was an accident caused by a light aircraft whose pilot had flown too close to the New York skyline and lost control. I finished sweeping and went into the Living Room to put on the TV News. At first sight the plume of smoke rising from the North Tower chilled my blood and I realised that this was no light aircraft. Within a minute of putting on the TV, I watched live as the second aircraft crashed into the South Tower. I continued to watch the news as a third hijacked plane was reported to have crashed into the Pentagon and a fourth plane was reported to have crashed into a Pennsylvania field en route to Washington D.C..
To indirectly quote wartime President Franklin D. Roosevelt, September 11th 2001 is “a date which will live in infamy”, but the following 13 years and ‘The War on Terror’ that has followed has prompted me to write this article and call it, ‘The War OF Terror’.
It is a little known fact that the label, ‘The War on Terror’, actually pre-dates 9/11 by some 20 years and was first uttered by Ronald Reagan shortly after becoming US President. It is no coincidence that ‘The War on Terror’ coincides with the birth of neo-liberalism.
The Reagan Administration came into office announcing that a primary concern of US foreign policy would be a “war on terror,” particularly state-supported international terrorism, the most virulent form of the plague spread by “depraved opponents of civilization itself” in “a return to barbarism in the modern age,” in the words of the Administration moderate George Shultz. The war to eradicate the plague was to focus on two regions where it was raging with unusual virulence: Central America and West Asia/North Africa. This concern has continued to the present day and lead to the first Iraq War in 1991.
On September 11th 2001 Osama Bin Laden, a Saudi national, and his militant Islamic extremist group, Al-Qaeda, were quick to take responsibility for the attack. Many of the hijackers were also Saudi nationals. But it was not Saudi Arabia that the US set its wrath upon. The Saudis are long-time oil rich allies of the US and so the US went in search of Bin Laden, Al-Qaeda and another scapegoat; someone with whom they had unfinished business and less cordial oil relations.
In the days immediately following 9/11, the Bush Administration national security team actively debated an invasion of Iraq. A memo written by Sec. Rumsfeld dated 27 November 2001 considers a US-Iraq war. One section of the memo questions “How start?”, listing multiple possible justifications for a US-Iraq War.
In the lead up to the Iraq War, the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom claimed that Iraq’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) showed that Saddam Hussein’s regime posed a threat to their security and that of their allies.
In 2002, the United Nations Security Council – of which the US and UK are 2 of only 5 permanent members – passed Resolution 1441 which called for Iraq to completely cooperate with UN weapon inspectors to verify that Iraq was not in possession of WMD and cruise missiles.
In 2002, the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) found no evidence of WMD, but could not yet verify the accuracy of Iraq’s declarations regarding what weapons it possessed, as their work was still unfinished.
In accordance with UN Security Council Resolution 1441 Iraq reluctantly agreed to new inspections in late 2002. With the cooperation of the Iraqis, a third weapons inspection team in 2003 led by Dr David Kelly – who on 17th July 2003 was found dead near his home in Oxfordshire, England – viewed and photographed two alleged mobile weapons laboratories which were actually facilities for the production of hydrogen gas to fill balloons. The leader of the UN Weapons Inspectors, Hans Blix, advised the U.N Security Council that Iraq was cooperating with inspections and the confirmation of disarmament through inspections could be achieved in “months” if Iraq remained cooperative.
Back in the US, the Bush Administration – primarily President George Bush, son of former President George H.W. Bush; and Vice President Dick Cheney, former President George H.W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense during the first Iraq War – had been selling the invasion to Congress and the American people for 18 months. Fired up by mainstream media fervor and the oft-repeated label, ‘The War on Terror’, the public desire for reprisals had not diminished.
In October 2002, speaking at a Labour Party conference in the UK, former president Bill Clinton declared his opposition to a second Iraq War, stating, “A preemptive action today, however well-justified, may come back with unwelcome consequences in the future. I don’t care how precise your bombs and your weapons are, when you set them off, innocent people will die.”
Besides a few who protested against an invasion, Congress too was sold on a second Iraq War.
In an attempt to restore a sense of reason and justness to the widespread war-mongering, an anti-war mass movement had taken root and was seeking to stop the impending invasion, but their calls, as well as the calls of a few in Congress and those by the UN and their team of weapons inspectors, fell on deaf ears.
On 16th March 2003, the U.S. government advised the U.N. inspectors to leave their unfinished work and exit Iraq. On 20th March 2003 the American-led coalition conducted a surprise military invasion of Iraq without declaring war. This started with a sustained bombing campaign and lead to a ground invasion by US and allied forces, which lasted until December 2011.
So what is the outcome of this ‘War on Terror’?:
As is the case in times of war, there are too many atrocities and criticisms to name them all, but I have listed a significant few: The legality of the war, Insufficient post-invasion plans, Human casualties, Human displacement, Financial cost, Destabilisation of the region, Humanitarian crises like malnutrition and damaged infrastructure, Rise in extreme Islamist insurgents and subsequent ethnic cleansing, Four-fold rise in the cost of oil due to disruption of Iraqi oil production, Guantanamo Bay & Abu Ghraib torture abuses, Blackwater, and on and on and on! And what about at home? We’ve faced increased security and subsequent erosion of our freedom, namely in the form of the US Patriot Act and allied equivalents. The trauma of War has also left thousands of soldiers seeking medical help for PTSD and similar conditions.
Estimates of the casualties of the Iraq War vary: Average figures of total deaths are over 1 million. Average figures of Iraqi civilian deaths are over 100,000. US and allied military personnel deaths came to over 5,000.
Financial estimates put the total cost of the Iraq War at around $1.7 trillion (just over £1 trillion). Imagine the good that could’ve been done in this post-9/11 world with $1.7trillion?
There were serious legal questions surrounding the launching of the war against Iraq and the Bush Doctrine of Preemptive War in general. On 16 September 2004, Kofi Annan, the Secretary General of the United Nations, said of the invasion, “I have indicated it was not in conformity with the UN Charter. From our point of view, from the Charter point of view, it was illegal.” But to date no war crime charges have been brought upon the perpetrators.
And then there is the ongoing ‘9/11 Truth’ movement, which calls for a full, independent investigation into the events of that fateful day. 13 years on, there is still no sign of this ever becoming a reality.
The UK Prime Minister during the first six years of the Iraq War, Tony Blair, has since stated that he would’ve invaded Iraq simply to remove Saddam’s regime, which I find very revealing because it shows Blair thinks nothing of illegal invasions and breaching international law. Considering the damage that has been done, you would think he would have at least the tiniest shred of regret? But nothing of the sort! And instead of being charged with war crimes, he has been Middle East Peace Envoy (some sort of sick joke?!) since leaving Office. How’s peace in the Middle East going, Tony?
I’m not saying that Saddam’s regime was good, or that it didn’t need to be removed, but the way the illegal invasion was carried out with no clear plan of how to pick up the pieces in the aftermath and rebuild Iraq for the Iraqi people has lead to the level of deprivation and desolation that is unfolding in the region today. Saddam’s regime was cruel and murderous but at the very least it kept a pressurized lid on the melting pot of Islamic sectarian unrest that has been bubbling under the surface of the region for many, many years. This was in part due to the oppressive political repression of poor people in the Arab World. Removing Saddam’s regime removed the lid of this pressurised melting pot. The subsequent explosion of Jihadist extremism and the total disaster that was the illegal Iraq War has only added fuel to the fire. This fire could’ve been tamed to a significant extent if the US and its allies had demonstrably showed that the welfare of the Iraqi people was the top priority.
The crimes of 9/11 and ‘The War on Terror’ have accelerated tendencies that were already underway: the Bush doctrine on preemption is an illustration. As was predicted at once, governments throughout the world seized upon 9/11 as a window of opportunity to institute or escalate harsh and repressive programs, like The Patriot Act, for instance. The Bush Administration also exploited the new phase of the ‘war on terror’ to expand its overwhelming military advantages over the rest of the world, and to move on to other methods to ensure global dominance. This military expansion continues with the Obama Administration and though it may feature less ground troops, the use of drones and the recent bombings in Iraq show that the region will feel the US’s continued presence for the foreseeable future.
The destabilization of the Middle East is an ongoing problem for the people of the region. The rise of militant Islamic insurgents has lead to the formation of a group named the Islamic State, or IS, who has taken control of much of Iraq and Syria and begun ethnically cleansing the region. IS has seized the weapons that the US gave to the new Iraqi Army and used them to take control of the region. IS has killed thousands of Iraqi’s, particularly the Yazidi’s in the North of Iraq. It has also been beheading US journalists.
The UK Prime Minister, David Cameron, declared last week that the Home Secretary has confirmed that the Joint Terrorism Analysis group has raised the terror threat from substantial to severe and he will do whatever it takes to protect the British people.
In an address to the nation (and the world) last night, President Barack Obama declared, “The United States will conduct a campaign against IS that includes targets in Syria.”
The President had been under pressure from both home and abroad to announce a comprehensive U.S. strategy against IS and his response is more bombings. That’s funny. Just a year ago, the US were pushing for a military strike against Assad’s Syrian regime, now they’re pushing for a miltary strike against his enemies!
I don’t argue that IS is a violent extremist group who has grown militarily and economically strong in Iraq and Syria or that they need to be contained. But are we really going to continue bombing and killing in order to do so? Is there not a better way? What single armed intervention in the Arab World has proved a success on its own terms? There hasn’t been a single one to mention! The war-mongering rhetoric by our ‘democratically-elected’, corporate-sponsored politicians is rebooting all over again as if the human tragedy of the last 13 years didn’t even happen. It’s insane! Or as Albert Einstein put it, “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”
Has nobody learned from the mistakes of the past? War begets war. As Martin Luther King Jr. said many times, “It’s either nonviolent co-existence or violent co-annihilation.” Why can’t/won’t these politicians and their masters understand what it is that causes ‘terrorism’ to begin with? IS in particular are the flowered seed of the illegal Iraq War. The only thing to have flourished in this ‘War on Terror’ is terror itself! ‘The War on Terror’ is actually ‘The War of Terror’ waged by imperialist powers against the poor. IS is a direct consequence of this flagrant war machine, not vice-versa, as our masters would have us believe. In a capitalist world, peace can only ever be a dream. If world peace was declared today a lot of wealthy people would lose a lot of money. In a capitalist world, war on tour, means money on tap for those at the top of the wealth pyramid.
What our politicians seem to fail to understand and what they can’t or won’t learn from past experience is if you want people to be less radical, less extreme and more peaceful, you don’t try to destroy extremists, you merely render them obsolete. If you bomb those who say they want to kill you and create collateral damage by killing large numbers of innocent civilians, you are going to create more extremists with more legitimate reasons to want to kill you in the future.
Instead of spending trillions suppressing extremists who are lashing out due to already intolerable poverty and oppression, spend the money on helping them to develop their own infrastructure, hospitals, schools, transport and sanitation, amongst other essentials. This all started because greedy people left the Middle Eastern people without these basic essentials to live an equitable life. So the disgruntled people of the Middle East organised and revolted, they were attacked and suppressed, they sought revenge and became more and more radical as the situation escalated further and further into more and more hateful, vengeful acts of violence.
As Gandhi said, “the old adage of an eye for an eye will leave everyone blind.” You can’t fix anger with hate. You can’t fix violence with revenge. You can’t fix terror with terror. If a radical puts out a video spewing vitriol and seeking to influence others with less of a gripe, don’t bomb his house and kill the rest of his family, chances are killing members of his family radicalized him in the first place and using further violence will rally others to his cause, legitimizing his words. Seek to delegitimise his hate with understanding, apathy and kindness.
To sum up, don’t bomb a school, build one. We should be building bridges between differing ideologies, not burning them down. To do that we need to show regret for our past indiscretions and a willingness to build a better world. The problem of how to deal with IS and other insurgent groups will not go away and it will only get worse if we continue to use violence against them. Making peace will be harder than ever before but if we don’t at least try to settle our differences peacefully we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past with escalating levels of violence and horror.
History tells us there were no terrorists to fight or WMD’s to seize before the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003. But there are now; the US and its allies put them there!
Anarchy is very much a hot button word, which has been propagandised to death by the Mainstream Media as something violent and disorderly, when in reality it is anything but.
Anarchy (no rulers) is a way of life where the people work for the people and organise to make sure everyone’s needs are met. It is a decentralised system where no one has power, but all work for the greater good. All we need is access and for that we need to get organised and make resources available. This requires that we work together.
The Internet, with sites like Wikipedia (minus the draconian Administrators), is an example of how people can use a decentralised system to voluntarily build a working anarchist model. With the dispersal of power and universal access to the necessary tools and resources, we have already proved we are a responsible, self-governing, cooperative bunch when we set our minds to it.
Anarchy is also the people announcing that they’ve had enough! Had enough of political parties, so they withdraw consent by not voting; had enough of irresponsible/unethical corporations so they no longer buy their products; had enough of being exploited at work so they join and strengthen workers unions; had enough of the monopoly game that is the monetary economy and so demand a resource-based economy to replace it and then everyone can share the goods and services of the world, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” a slogan made famous by Marx, but first published by Louis Blanc in 1851.
How’s this for a Catch-22 which sums up the current state of the world and why we can’t seem to progress: The closer you are to power, the more you have and the less reason you have to complain. The further you are from power, the less you have and the more reason you have to complain, but are less likely to be heard!
Sure, there is some trickle down from capitalism, but it simply does not go far enough and the sociopathic hoarders at the top of the wealth pyramid make it impossible for billions of people to acquire their basic needs.
Capitalism is money. Money is freedom. The more money you have the more freedom you have. Free markets = the free movement of money and capital around the globalised world. But the rich don’t want unfettered Capitalism, they want their wealth to be protected, so they have cheated. The rich are therefore socialists who have bought the political system (which is not a functioning democracy), the mainstream media, the Banks and the International Financial Institutions, the International governing bodies and the lawyers and courts which they use to protect their wealth and ensure they get increasingly wealthier. The capitalist poor have nobody to protect them (except themselves; united we stand, devided we are conquered). Claiming benefits may be classed as socialism, but the many poor claim a lot less from the Gov (£3billion per year) than the few rich (£30billion). Inequality is the worst it has ever been, so the Gov clearly isn’t working for us! For example, the average fast food worker earns £6.5 per hour. The average fast food CEO earns £15million per year! If inflation had risen parallel to wages since 1963 when the average fast food worker was on £0.20 per hour, today’s fast food workers would be on £15 per hour.
Anarchy is the key to freedom AND equality for everyone! If you don’t want Anarchy you seriously need to question your own morality because climate scientists say the path we are on will cause irreversible climate change, which may be the beginning of the end for humanity.
I want Anarchy because I just cannot morally justify living in a world of great resources, but under a system that results in uneven distribution, great wealth AND great poverty. Stop burying your head in the sand. Stop ignoring the news. Stop disengaging with politics. If you don’t speak up for yourself you give power to those who are prepared to speak for you. Ignorance is no longer an excuse when 99% of people know the situation is bad. There isn’t a single government or institution in the world that has a long term plan for stability and sustainability precisely because of the level of hostility the current system creates.
How can you sit idly by and let this continue? Ask yourself what world am I handing over to my children and grandchildren? Could I have learned more, said more and done more? You are complicit in this mess whether you like it or not! It’s time you took some responsibility.
Unlike you, I refuse to be party to this system and its ultimate wickedness. Not in my name! I am using my voice and I am acting directly to be the change we all need. Thankfully I am not alone, but the few of us getting organised need your complicity and we need to reclaim it from the ruling class with whom your complicity currently resides.
There are 5 steps to making the world a better place. We just have to:
Withdraw our consent for Government (no more pointless voting!)
Stop buying from irresponsible/unethical corporations (we vote with our pounds and not our ballots slips anyway!)
Give our time voluntarily to the betterment of our communities (direct action helps those who need it the most!)
Organise at work (over the last 35 years the workers of the world have been divided and conquered. Strength in numbers means together we can force out the money-grabbing bosses and take over our companies and run them ourselves!) And…
Abandon the monetary economy in favour of the resource-based economy and commit to sharing the resources of the world.
Steps 1, 2 & 3 are easy to implement, they simply require individual social responsibility and ethical decision-making, which is something we should be doing already. Steps 4 & 5 are trickier because they require collective decision-making. However, step 4 will be achieved if the majority of workers unite (please check out http://www.iww.org), take over their companies and create universal access to their products on a supply for demand basis. And step 5 will be accomplished as a direct outcome of the majority of people taking steps 1, 2, 3 & 4!
If we action these 5 steps and maintain our integrity in the face of violent resistance from the dying powers of the ruling class as they fight to preserve their power over us, the new system will grow out of the shell of this current defunct one. There is another way and we have the power to make change happen. Besides, we’re already Anarchists, but some of us just don’t know it yet. Our friend, David Graeber, explains this in detail with some compelling examples!: http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-are-you%C2%AD-an-anarchist-the-answer-may-surprise-you
And please watch our friend, Noam Chomsky, describe workers’ self-management:
It’s your life and though you have made peace with your position in the world you are basically surrendering power for relative comfort, like a sheep protected by his or her shepherd. But your comfort and your complicity means that someone else is suffering. Are you really okay with that? If the answer is no, then we agree on everything. If your answer is yes, doesn’t this suggest an underlying psychopathy that needs to be addressed? We may feel far from the apocalypse we see in places like Sudan or the Middle East, but this apocalypse will eventually come to people like us if we allow our freedom and equality to be further eroded by the ruling class. Social injustice anywhere is social injustice everywhere and its only a matter of time before the apocalypse reaches us. But that needn’t be the case. We all have at least one thing in common; we all share the world, but a few people are ruining it for the rest of us. Now, just what are you prepared to do about it? I suggest you take back power of your own life and take the 5 steps, if not for yourself then for your children and for the children of those worse off than you. “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” Mohandas K Gandhi
My studies have been extensive and incredibly time consuming, but I feel that they have been conducted thoroughly and for a very good purpose. I feel that a person should spend as much time as possible learning about socio-economic factors in order to make more informed decisions in life.
As a student of Economics who has studied the works of Economists such as: Adam Smith, Marx, Keynes, Von Mises, Hayek, Friedman, Stiglitz and Keen, amongst many others, trust me when I say having looked at their theoretical arguments and the reality of how economics has evolved to the present day I have found that they have all been wrong in many different ways but that they have all been wrong on one key point, which I will come to in a moment.
I was at one time a Capitalist/Libertarian who worked for the Liberal Democrats in the UK and someone who truly wanted to believe that money, unregulated in a free market economy, could make the world a better place. The only thing was, two key aspects required for a peaceful society: Freedom (Liberty) and Equality, could not co-exist within this model and I was forced to choose one over the other. Like many Capitalists/Libertarians I chose Freedom, but I still had my doubts that absolute freedom could improve the terrible levels of inequality we see around the world. I was dissatisfied by its inability to integrate both freedom AND equality and how it seems to be directly contributing to the ecocide of the planet. And so, I kept searching for a socio-economic model that could facilitate both freedom AND equality, though I doubted that such a model could possibly exist.
I decided to dedicate my time to sheading light into the unenlightened areas of my socio-economic understanding. By chance, or mere inevitability, I started to look into societies with the most equality which, incidentally, were also societies without money. One example I found was that of the indigenous people of Australia. Australian Aborigines did not have any money and interestingly they also had no concept of ownership or greed. They traded goods with other tribes, and with visitors such as the Macassans, but they did not have money. Crime and disorder was at an absolute minimum. Murder was unheard of. This example, as well as many others I found, fascinated me, but I felt that since they were all very basic societies that this kind of moneyless society would be too basic for our complicated globalized modern world. Nonetheless, I noticed how peaceful these societies were, how at one they were with nature and how well they interacted with other moneyless societies. Each of these societies only started to fall apart when they were invaded and forced into the economic cycle we are familiar with – capitalism and the monetary system.
Making the world a better place has always been the driving force behind my studies and so I followed this anthropological study up with investigations into theoretical and practical moneyless societal examples of the present day.
One after the other all I was seeing was a parallel between peaceful societies and societies without money. I decided that next I was going to look into the Economy and its origins.
As mentioned earlier, I have studied Economics pretty extensively and what I have learned and will conclude in this article might surprise you, but also in a roundabout kind of way make perfect sense. So, what is the origination and the meaning of the word, ‘Economy’:
[Middle English yconomye, management of a household, from Latin oeconomia, from Greek oikonomi, from oikonomos, manager of a household: oikos, house; see weik-1 in Indo-European roots + nemein, to allot, manage; see nem- in Indo-European roots.]
Word History: Managing an economy has at least an etymological justification. The word economy can be traced back to the Greek word oikonomos, “one who manages a household,” derived from oikos, “house,” and nemein, “to manage.”
e·con·o·my (-kn-m)
n. pl. e·con·o·mies
1.
a. Careful, thrifty management of resources, such as money, materials, or labour: learned to practice economy in making out the household budget.
b. An example or result of such management; a saving.
The Economy used to exist on the microeconomic level only. Looking at the rudimentary definition of the word Economy, we see the words Careful, Thrifty, Management of Household Resources.
The following inexorable conclusion, is backed by empirical evidence and a liberal, open and yet critical mind. Incidentally, I find that an unbiased, critical mind is crucial to the uncorrupted process of learning, which is why we should allow people to grow up without conservative traditional values thrust upon them, shaping and conditioning them to think within a very narrow frame of reference and to never question the existing structures of the world.
I can conclude that what we now call an Economy is actually not an Economy at all, not in the strictest sense of the word because it contains many opposites to what one would consider an Economy to be.
This ‘Economy’ is not well-managed at all, not for the benefit of the vast majority of us anyway. It is not thrifty as so much is wasted. Privately-owned central banks, like the Federal Reserve Bank of America, pump out money to global financial banks who invest this money, as well as the money we deposit, on risky gambles, like sub-prime mortgages and market derivatives. Every country is trillions of pounds in debt to these financial institutions. There exists extreme wealth, and as a result, widespread extreme poverty and levels of waste and induced scarcity that can only thrive under the current ‘economic’ model.
It appears that the problem with the world isn’t the lack of a free market, or that there isn’t enough money flowing freely around an unregulated economy, as I was once lead to believe and unfortunately many Capitalists and Libertarians still do, despite the clear social damage of such a belief in practice. It is clear to me that the problem with the world is that we have money at all!
Let’s break this down a little more: The resources belong to the wealthy. The wealthy are given these resources by the wage labour. The wealthy then sell the resources back to the wage labour, but for a cost which continues to grow at a faster rate than the real wage. The access to these resources depends on the amount of money one possesses, because money is the key to the locked cupboard of resources. The more money one has the more freedom one has and the more access one has to resources the less equal society will be. Money is an impediment and not an asset to society. It is an unwanted middleman, but one that is used by the wealthy to keep resources separated from the people with threats of violence if we do not comply with this system of control.
Resources and NOT Money are at the core of the Economy, contrary to popular belief. The better the resources are managed and distributed to where they are needed the healthier society will be. When you add the aspects of money, debt and wage labour to society as well as the management of resources from central powers who command the exclusive use of force, suddenly, what one should have a natural right to is being hoarded by people who demand authority whilst taking the resources of the world under protection of the State. This hierarchical power structure is essential to the ordering of this kind of society, a society where none but the wealthy have access to the world’s resources, access to which is desperately needed by billions of people. Without this access the rest of society is deprived of freedom AND equality and condemned to the structural violence of poverty and every other social ill.
Our rulers have managed to flip reality. They have managed to convince us that we are weak and they are strong. They have made us believe that we need them more than they need us. The wealthy and the Government are ‘completely’ dependant on the complicity of the people, without which they are nothing!
Capitalists and Government working together are always prepared to ‘capitalise’ on other people’s misfortune, indeed it is suggested that at times of their choosing they create crises to capitalise on, as stated by Naomi Klein in her 2007 book, ‘The Shock Doctrine’. “Some man-made crises, such as the Iraq War, may have been created with the intention of pushing through unpopular policies in their wake”. War itself sees the changing hands of extreme quantities of money from the Government (that’s our taxes we’re talking about!) to the private defence companies. like Lockheed Martin.)
More and more throughout the course of history the Economy has become centrally controlled and this control of money and resources has fallen into fewer and fewer hands of wealthier and wealthier people. This hoarding of wealth and resources and drive for more and more has clearly had an effect upon equality and freedom for the rest of us, but it also has a subsequent detrimental effect on the environment in the rapacious breaking of the earth in search of fossil fuels, the burning of which has led to anthropogenic climate change.
A man ahead of his time, Marx stated that Capitalism could produce the common ruin of everyone and that the persistence of crises under Capitalism not only makes revolutionary change possible, but also an urgent necessity. The most fearful devastaions described by Marx, resulting in poverty, hunger, environmental destruction and war, have only increased since his time. The crisis-prone nature of capitalism creates the need for socialism, not just to abolish poverty and inequality, but to eliminate the recurrent socio-economic disasters that are endemic to the Capitalist System.
Suddenly, my eyes were open to the inherent flaws to Capitalism and the monetary system, as well as the hierarchical pyramid system of control. The things I had taken as gospel in my old Capitalist ideology now stood out as the enemies of progress. I looked back over ‘The Wealth of Nations’, the seminal book by Adam Smith, the founder of economics, and came across some criticisms of our current Capitalist model that I was either not aware of, or ignorant to the meaning of before:
“The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.” Smith is saying here that working on a factory line or any type of repetitive job makes us as stupid and ignorant as a human can be. This work is not for a progressive society of critical thinkers at all.
“Our merchants and masters complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price and lessening the sale of goods. They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people.” The hypocrisy of the rich!
“Wherever there is great property there is great inequality. For one very rich man there must be at least five hundred poor, and the affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many. The affluence of the rich excites the indignation of the poor, who are often both driven by want, and prompted by envy, to invade his possessions.” Great wealth creates great poverty and makes the poor covet the resources of the rich to satisfy their own needs. A society out of balance.
“Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.” The State and the hierarchical power structures are there to defend the rich from the poor.
This is incredibly damning of Capitalism. The truth was here all along. Adam Smith knew of the dangers of Capitalism and warned us in his book, which by the way is the cornerstone of modern economics and he is the inspiration behind all of the phony neo-liberal economists like Von Mises, Hayek and Friedman. It shows that people like these Chicago School economists have omitted these criticisms from Economy lessons and their own modern economic texts simply to suit their own Capitalist agenda. Let’s face it, you won’t find any Neo-liberals who’ll admit that Adam Smith wrote this level of criticism about free-market capitalism.
So, I was shocked to discover that we call an Economy is in fact a monetary ponzi scheme and an hierarchical system of control. The solution is the resource-based economy. I now wanted to find a social model to facilitate the resource-based economy.
It was only when I found myself learning about Anarchy, ‘real’ Anarchy, not fake MSM Anarchy, which made me feel like I had finally found the destination to my intellectual journey.
Unabated, I looked for critiques of Anarchy but I always felt that the arguments for Anarchy outweighed and outmoraled (I know outmoraled isn’t a word, but neither was amazeballs until somebody started using it!) the arguments against. To my surprise all of my questions were coming back to the same conclusion. Anarchy! This was obviously startling at first. For the best part of 30 years I had been lead to believe that Anarchy meant disorder. Imagine my surprise to discover that Anarchy actually means the exact opposite. Anarchy = Order, as Proudhon, the original Anarchist, famously stated. I wanted to know more. There must be some catch, I thought. Surely the answer to all my questions wasn’t Anarchy, this leviathan, this lack of a society, law and rules I have avoided all my life whilst I looked in all the wrong places for the solution to my freedom AND equality equation.
Anarchy means order, laws and rules. A highly organized decentralized direct democratic system working in harmony with a natural law, resource-based, moneyless economy. This socio-economic model in theory, and when it has been put in practice, has been a perfect storm incorporating the two key aspects of a peaceful society, something lacking from our current system and in fact any other model apart from Anarchy. I knew that Anarchy was the answer to all my questions and the system we all need because it facilitates the two key necessities required for a peaceful, progressive society: Freedom AND Equality. These two necessities can co-exist, but only in a moneyless, resource-based economy. Anarchy states that we cannot have freedom without equality because of the structural violence subjected to those with little or no money by those with money and therefore more power. Economic inequality leads to political inequality and more economic inequality leads to more political inequality and as this machine turns the laws get changed by those in power and the rights of the people become ever more eroded. Introduce equity to society, particularly the sharing of resources and the products of our labour and suddenly this leads to freedom for all, no longer prisoners to the system and slaves to money and wage labour. Anarchy = Order and Equality = Freedom, but only in a natural law, resource-based economy with an Anarcho-Communist social model.
So I had my realisation: Capitalism creates social unrest and Anarchy creates social harmony. Life had tipped upside down. How have they managed to keep this quiet for so long? This realization would not have been possible if I had settled with Capitalism and refused to continue on my intellectual journey like so many others who seem to just accept whatever system works for them, despite the social damage it causes. Is this not sociopathic? If I had closed my mind up and forever stated despite better arguments to the contrary that Capitalism was the best model for society then I wouldn’t be here now telling you of something better and I owe all of that to my liberal mind-set. I believe I can thank my parents for that as they always taught me to keep an open mind.
The problem now is convincing people, especially the extremist Capitalists and Libertarians, that they advocate a system that will expedite the extinction of humanity. Debates with my former colleagues and fellow Libertarians have already begun. As Anarchy is anything but mainstream, without thinking critically about what I propose and its extinction preventing long-term effects, the biggest argument I find in defence of Capitalism and Free Markets is: “If you remove money from society how will you incentivise people to work?”
The question of incentive is a very interesting one and I will turn the tables on this question by the end of this article.
My answer to the question of incentive begins with the point that due to the accelerated rate of technological innovations over the last few decades we are living in an age where we could automate almost every job on Earth. This fact leaves Capitalists conflicted for two main reasons: One Microeconomic and the other Macroeconomic. At the Microeconomic level each corporation could save money by making redundant most of its staff and replacing them with automated processes (robots and other automated machines). But at the Macroeconomic level, if all corporations did this and nobody worked and nobody got paid, then nobody would buy anything, all corporations would go bust and the capitalist cycle of growth would grind to a halt. No capitalism, no profits, no wealthy people and no poor people. Total equality and people are free from wage slavery.
We have no choice but to learn to share the resources of the world in order to survive in harmony. Fortunately for us there are enough resources to go around, if we start to share what we have with a plan of how to implement social order. If we continue to innovate new cleaner more efficient technologies with all this freed up human capital we will evolve at an incredibly accelerated rate not seen before in human history. A very exciting time awaits us, but only if we can end the economics of extinction that is Capitalism in favour of a natural law Resource-based Economy and an Anarcho-Communist social model.
As most jobs are meaningless and should already have been phased out or automated, I return the question back on Libertarians/Capitalists. “If you have money in society how do you incentivise people to work?”
Firstly, you have to enslave people’s minds with the mass media bs machine about how great being a consumer is and make people believe that it is part of human nature to go out to work to earn money to buy this crap. Only then you can enslave their bodies in workplaces so they can make rich people richer whilst making just enough for themselves to survive. We can thank Edward Bernays for this by the way! The corporate head will say Capitalism is great because he can make loads of money and make a great life for himself, but what of everyone else? The Capitalist will screw his workers every chance he gets in the name of profits by threatening workers with the sack if they don’t reach high targets whilst paying as little as he can get away with. As inequality grows and more people fight for less and less jobs in a technologically evolving world of automated jobs, the corporate head can get away with paying less and less wages whilst people need a job more and more just to survive and provide the bare necessities for their families. Meanwhile, the Capitalist will be driving other corporations out of the market with economies of scale until he becomes the market monopolist, at which point he really can pay his workers what he wants and charge the customers what he chooses, all in the name of the maximum profit level. The corporation will buy elections and lobby to have laws passed that mean it can do whatever it wants, and slowly but surely the cost-cutting practices of corporations of all industries will wreak havoc on the ecosystems of the world, leading towards the extinction of the species. Capitalists think Capitalism is great and will defend it despite everything I have said because at the moment it’s benefiting them at the expense of almost everyone else. If you defend Libertarianism/Capitalism simply because it is benefitting you then you are what is referred to as a Sociopath!
To back up what I’ve said I refer to empirical evidence on the matter of human incentive to work in meaningless jobs as presented by Dan Pink:
Money ‘doesn’t’ incentivise people to work. Feeling like you’re working for the progress of the wider world does! Selfishness only works for you if you’re a sociopath, which means you have a mental deficiency, which explains why working in this crazy world causes so much stress and depression and a number of other mental health issues to ‘normal, non-sociopathic’ (in other words, empathic) people. Good people are being mentally scarred by this sociopathic world in which we are forced to live as wage slaves or exploit others for profit.
I’m glad the capitalist sociopaths are happy with their accumulation of meaningless stuff at the expense of everyone else’s physical and mental health, as well as the health of the planet. Just what will it take to make you stop? How much money is enough? How much stuff is enough? How many dead babies and young children is enough? How many people have to suffer and die needlessly until you stop playing your insane game of empire at the expense of everyone and everything?
Capitalism with state protection truly does represent the worst of both worlds – a two headed monster hell bent on destroying humanity. Truly, I can’t think of a single thing that Capitalism and the monetary system doesn’t make worse which a resource-based economy under Anarcho-Communism wouldn’t make better and I challenge anyone to prove me wrong.
Let’s start to look at some examples of how Libertarianism/Capitalism makes the world worse whereas Anarcho-Communism (also known as Libertarian-Socialism) would make the world better:
Crime:
Petty Crime
Capitalism – Without a job and without money people will engage in petty crime to steal food and water or something of value to sell in order to buy food and water to feed themselves and their loved ones.
Anarcho-Communism – They would never need to commit this crime if the resource-based economy and Anarcho-communism’s providence of basic human needs was the core focus of humanity. Capitalism creates petty crime, Anarcho-Communism will cure it.
Organised crime
Capitalism – People living in poor countries see hope in wealthier countries and want to move to the wealthier country but they cannot afford the airfare. They search for alternatives and human traffickers provide that alternative. The person will sell everything they have to the value of say £50-100 and pay trafficker to put them in a cargo container and be shipped to the country of their choice. The conditions in the container will be terrible and for a week or two the person will suffer and many die in transit. Upon arrival, the person will be put into slave labour by traffickers on the other side until they repay their debt, and some!
Anarcho-Communism – There are no richer and poorer countries or richer or poorer people so there is no need for human trafficking to exist. Capitalism creates all kinds of organised crime. Anarcho-Communism will cure them.
Prostitution
Capitalism – Prostitution exists because in a monetary system the last thing an unskilled female can use to get money for her or her children’s survival if she so chooses is by selling her body for sex.
Anarcho-Communism – Without a monetary system there is no incentive to degrade oneself for money. It empowers women and women would only give themselves to men if there was genuine chemistry between them. Capitalism makes the intimacy of sex a business transaction. Sex sells, as they say. In Anarcho-Communism prostitution would cease to exist. Women would never need to sell their bodies ever again.
Swapping Capitalism for Anarcho-Communism would eradicate most crime from society. Indeed it would remove the monetary incentive to commit crime, which many ‘criminals’ do just to survive in this sociopathic world. So rather than ask what incentive people would have to work, I say let’s remove the monetary incentive to perpetuate social ills like crime, which comes at great human cost.
Capitalism harms humanity with:
Planned obsolescence
Capitalism – Planned obsolescence or built-in obsolescence in industrial design is a policy of planning or designing a product with an artificially limited useful life, so it will break down after a brief period at unnecessary cost of repair or upgrade to the customer and at great profit to the corporation.
In Anarcho-Communism machines would be built to last as long as possible as within a resource-based economy efficiency and non-wastefulness is paramount. As long as resources are available everyone can have the highest spec possible.
Cost Cutting
Capitalism also sees cost cutting by corporations when greener more expensive policies would be far more beneficial. Damage to the environment due to the relentless search for and burning of fossil fuels and not investing in greener alternatives.
Union Carbide, Exxon Valdez and other corporate disasters have occurred that that would not have happened under Anarcho-Communism, which seeks to implement greener, more efficient technology and processes for the good of the planet and humanity.
Infinite Growth
Capitalists are so ignorant to reality that they believe we can have infinite growth on a world with finite resources. If we continue to consume at the present rate, without innovating as fast as we could under Anarcho-Communism, we will soon run out of Capitalists favourite resource, oil, and the people of the world will tear the planet and each other to shreds in order to survive. The richest will be in the best position to buy resources at higher costs and will ultimately survive the longest whilst the rest of humanity edges towards extinction.
This is completely avoidable if we adopt Anarcho-Communism and the Resource-based Economy and share the world’s resources, whilst we innovate newer, cleaner, more efficient technologies that result in a sustainable world, post-capitalism, having survived our own extinction. The choice is ours.
There are a million examples but here are just a broad few to illustrate my point. The key themes under Libertarianism/Capitalism are money, profit and control of people and resources. Some Capitalists say they are being kind by exploiting workers and a rising tide lifts all ships, but in light of the massive amount of data on how Capitalism causes the majority of social ills and directly impedes human progress, I’d say Capitalists’ arguments are based on greed rather than altruism. If money wasn’t always the obstacle to progress we could right the world’s wrongs and fix almost all of the world’s social ills.
It is my assessment that the monetary economy is a lfalse economy and the only true economy is the resource-based economy. The best possible outcome for society and to avoid further erosion of freedom, equality and the health of the planet and its many ecosystems would be a social revolution with a staged process of systematic change. Eventually we will remove Capitalism and the monetary system and install Anarcho-Communism and a well-organised, efficiently managed, access-orientated resource-based economy. Once the revolution is complete the world would see progress and investment in innovation and infrastructure at an unprecedented level, contrary to the Capitalists who still say that Capitalism is the best possible system for humanity, “so shut up and get back to work!”. Capitalism is very clearly not the best possible system and if we can only give Anarcho-Communism the chance to succeed, like we have Capitalism – which has failed catastrophically on many, many occasions – we really could give humanity a chance at a bright, progressive future.
I read an article that stated we are approaching levels of social destitution last seen in 1938. If so, then we must also be approaching levels of social unrest that lead to the social revolution of 1945-50 where the people forced change which included the building of the NHS and the welfare state. I feel that the welfare state which has been eroded over the last 30 years needs to be rebuilt and it must go much further than last time.
We cannot allow a few to control the lives of the rest of us. We must take back control and keep hold of it. Once we do this, we will finally have an Economy, which will finally be a careful, thrifty management of resources.
‘The Information Age’, as the current era is termed, carries a degree of irony, as you’ll discover by the end of this article. Historically, the spread of information was once carried on the breath of those who sought to share it; on the waft of a piece of paper as we turned the page of a book, letter, telegram or newspaper. Information used to spread slowly and its power was never more than a delicate breeze. In the modern technological world information has become mechanised and it hits us like a hurricane. Through the radio, television, and Internet and all it’s devices: mobile phones, laptops, desktops and tablets, we are battered from all sides by a ferocious storm of information.
Truth is a precious commodity, for how can we truly know anything unless we know the truth? Truth used to be far more accessible, as information used to be far more condensed. In stark contrast, most information today is trivial, designed to influence our thoughts to think a certain way or to buy a certain product. It has become harder than ever before to find truth. In the blare of information the voice of truth is almost completely drowned out and we have to listen very, very hard to hear it. In reading this you will have navigated your way through the information storm to my quiet corner of the Internet. Thank you for your perseverance. You will find that there are no ads here. No viral marketing and no distractions. Here you will find yourself in the eye of the storm; you can rest and read what information I have found to be true.
It is true that we live in a world dominated by capitalism. The beneficiaries of this capitalist system preach and propagandise a consumer culture. We are constantly being told what to buy and how buying that product will improve our lives and make us happy. When I was a child I, like everyone else, was very much a product of my environment. Having something bought for me, or when I was old enough to work, buying something for myself used to make me happy, for a while, but very soon I would need something else, something new, to quench the addiction to consume. We are after all consumer addicts churned out by this capitalist machine. But at the end of the day having lots of ‘stuff’ is just needless clutter. It is money spent on items we don’t really need and the only benefactors are the wealthy capitalists who perpetuate this consumer capitalist world. These wealthy capitalists constantly ply us with misinformation to misinform the truth seekers and to drown out the truth speakers. It has become increasingly difficult to get people’s attention in this world when being a consumer takes up so much of people’s time and attention.
Another example of misinformation is when we are told that growth is good and the more growth we have the better for all of us. Just the other day I was watching the news and heard a well-known head of state declaring the need to free people from oppressive forces so that the oppressed may also facilitate growth. But this begs the question, why are people being oppressed in the first place? Is it because people are fighting for the planet’s finite resources – like oil and water? Is it not so that a resource-rich aggressor will oppress a group of people so that they may steal the resources from that group of people and ultimately share the planet’s finite resources with less people? Surely this is the whole point of the game of empire the resource-rich wage around the world? Correct me if I’m wrong, but if we have this ever-increasing (infinite) growth and we consume more and more, with an ever-increasing population becoming ‘consumers’, won’t we run out of our planet’s finite resources at an alarming rate?
Our heads of state are lying to us (so what else is new!) They want there to be an oppressor (preferably themselves) and an oppressed. Sure, in a free market capitalist world it would be a benefit in the short-term to have every single individual as a consumer, but under such an economic model we would run out of resources at the quickest possible rate, leading to devastating wars as we tear ourselves to shreds in a fight to the death for resources needed to prolong our own survival – and just so we are on the same page, we are slowly making our way towards this apocalyptic conclusion right now! So clearly it is not in anyone’s interests to have a free market capitalist world (anarcho-capitalism, libertarianism and plain old capitalism debunked!) Which is why the rulers of this world choose to hoard wealth and resources and oppress the vast majority of the human race with the central-planning powers of the state and international financial institutions, otherwise known as ‘the third way’. The rich prefer protectionism for them and free trade for unestablished international markets. The rich apply elaborate tax avoidance schemes while the rest of us have our ‘real wage’ eroded year after year, pushing us ever closer to the poverty trapdoor. Some call this free market capitalism for the poor and socialism for the rich. In light of this there is clearly no longer an argument here: THE RICH DO NOT WANT FREE MARKET CAPITALISM! When they say they do they are lying to us to perpetuate the lie that is Capitalism.
We in the more affluent western nations are distracted and nullified by our rulers through the mainstream media to maintain this consumption model of society. But our silence makes us complicit in our own zombie consumer lifestyle and the suffering of the 90% of the planet less fortunate than ourselves. I see the pain capitalism causes to people mentally and physically. I see the damage it causes to the ecosystem. I see how believing the wrong thing can cause us to act in the wrong way. There is a war on for our thoughts and beliefs and this is precisely why information is still so very precious, if not more precious than ever before.
Information is used to influence us to buy products to make the rich even richer. But information often comes to us from unknown sources with unknown interests and agendas. I would just like to add at this point that I have no agenda – no mean feat! I don’t write my thoughts for my own benefit, financial or otherwise. I feel that being part of the capitalist system makes me a part of the problem, which is why I am actively seeking solutions outside of this broken model, which I will share in greater detail in future articles. All I want is to feel that I have shared the truth with others and that we are using the truth to make the world a better place and in doing so helping us as one humanity to progress and evolve in harmony with the complex and precious ecosystems of the world.
Clearly I’m not a consumer capitalist like so many others. I called this site ‘The Voice of Anarchy’ because I wish to be heard and for my message to be that of ‘real’ Anarchy, not fake mainstream media Anarchy, which means the exact opposite. Anarchy doesn’t mean chaos. The word Anarchy arises from ancient Greek “An,” meaning without and “Archos” meaning rulers. In modern political philosophy anarchy, or anarchism (the ideology which aims to create anarchy) is traced back, often, to Proudhon, and in particular his work “What is property?” – the origin of the still used anarchist slogan “Property is theft!” Just to clarify, personal property, like your house, car, phone and toothbrush are yours to own and no one else can take that away from you. The wealth of the world – land and it’s resources like oil and water, belong to all the world’s people and should be shared to each according to their need. No private hoarding of public goods. It’s as simple as that really! Contrary to the belief that “Anarchy” is synonymous with “Disorder,” Anarchy = Order, not disorder. Anarchists generally advocate non-hierarchical, horizontal organization, typically through directly democratic structures. In 1936, anarchists in the Spanish provinces of Catalonia and Aragon collectivised industry and agriculture, and established a working example of Anarchy, which proved that anarchy can work in practice as well as in theory.
Few people know anything about Anarchy because it is a very real threat to the wealthy, those who depend upon this hierarchical structure of society to maintain control of wealth and resources. To this end the wealthy have distorted the true meaning of the word Anarchy and kept it’s virtues hidden in the whirlwind of misinformation we are subjected to on a daily basis. Indeed, the irony of our era being known as ‘The Information Age’ is that it would be far more accurate to call it, ‘The Misinformation Age’.
It is our job now to share truth wherever we find it. Please recognise that ‘The Voice of Anarchy’ is the voice of truth and share my Blog with as many people as you can. Andrew Parker – The Voice of Anarchy
I will always be passionately convinced that each person deserves access to all the necessary tools to make their life whatever they want it to be; that we don’t have to go knocking on some rich, educated person’s door, or tug on our representative’s coat to ask politely for some solutions; that everyone on earth deserves justice, and to experience the richness of human life, now, not later; and that people should be held accountable for the messes they’ve created. This is my Anarchism.
All my life I have been an observer of human behaviour. I’ve looked on in fascination at the action and inaction and the motivations that people have to behave, or misbehave, as they do. In my studies of politics, economics, philosophy, ethics, psychology and sociology I have slowly come to the realisation that people live their entire lives never knowing that they are living within a man-made system designed to harvest and condition them. Their thoughts and feelings are so regulated that they might not even be their own.
But who regulates us, you may ask? Those who benefit from our complicity, our nullification and our consent. Through the mass media industry, the educational institutions and marketing and advertising, our rulers – yes, we have rulers – tell us what to think, what to feel and what to believe.
There is a vast array of illusions that people take as reality because they are told such things are real.
There are no countries! Countries only exist on pieces of paper, passed ‘lawfully’ by our rulers, perpetuated as nationalism and patriotic fervour and protected by the state (in particular, the Police and Armed Forces).
There is no Queen or Royalty! Biologically at least, humans have no superiors, unlike in zoology, where the Queen Ant is the mother of the colony and rightfully regarded as the Worker Ant’s superior.
There is no Economy! An economy is supposed to be a thrifty, well-organised management of resources – akin to a natural law resource-based economy. What we have is a monetary ponzi scheme, monopolized by Banks who rather than protecting our money, gamble it in insider-trading to make more money for themselves. Only 3% of all money exists in physical form, the rest is theoretical (on balance sheets). The rich use this illusory tool to buy up the wealth of the world – the commonwealth – for their own ownership. Once they own the land and all factors of production they make us our slaves and through wage slavery we toil to make them richer and to make just enough for ourselves to survive. The economy we have was at least once backed up by precious metals, but since the eradication of the Gold Standard the economy, which is now based only on the purchasing power of fiat currency, is as volatile a system as we could have. To call it an economy is simply incorrect.
This system is insane and the monetary system is an insane game, like a global game of monopoly where the guys winning the game are also the Bankers. What hope have we got to turn it around? And to top it all off, the system is broken. Thirty years of deregulation since the Reagan and Thatcher era and the weakening of the labour unions has seen inequality reach never before seen levels. 99% of all individuals are indebted to the wealthiest 1%. Every nation-state on Earth is indebted to the global financial institutions. This system is global capitalism, a pattern of economic and political exploitation that reaches into every aspect of our lives. It uses sexism, racism, homophobia and many other hatreds and prejudices around us to protect itself. It creates hierarchies of power and wealth to divide all the people it exploits and turn us on ourselves. Poverty, war, racism, sexism and all the rest of the problems we face are not exceptions to the rule – they are the rule. Capitalism cannot exist without creating poverty, without fighting wars, without oppressing people.
The wealthy use the state and the military machine to spread their interests overseas. The poor are all too often the victims of this game of empire. The ecology of the world is under threat, in particular from the fossil fuel industries, who fund the ‘democratic’ electoral process of all of the world’s most powerful nations. Central control of all the world’s nations means that people have too little power over issues that directly concern them.
Democracy itself is suspect when so few people are aware that they are being brainwashed on a daily basis. How can they know what is right and wrong, who to vote for and who not to vote for in a world of mass illusion and misinformation? This fuels widespread apathy and the people fall silent. But in their silence they cede control of their lives to the wealthy. If you don’t speak for yourself, they will speak for you.
There are many who speak of what I have written here, but too few offer meaningful alternatives. So what can we do?
First, we must acknowledge that change is not a bad thing in and of itself. We have been allowed to change for millions of years and this freedom to change has lead us along the path of evolution to the present day, but that freedom is being eroded and our evolution – our future and our children’s future – is under threat.
Second, we must acknowledge that we don’t have to find a perfect system or else hang on to the current broken one. This system is far from perfect and a new system need only be more flexible to necessary change, something this system fails to be. How often have you felt the need for something in life but been prevented due to a lack of money? Only the wealthy are truly free in this system.
So what is this system I offer? It is called Anarcho-Communism. I know it sounds scary and prompts thoughts of molotov cocktails and hooded mobs, but that is not what anarcho-communists advocate. Anarcho-communism proposes a decentralised, highly organised system of inclusive consensus-based decision-making. Anarchists believe that people are quite capable of looking after themselves. No leader can know what you need better than you do. No government can represent the interests of a community better than the community itself. We believe that everyone should take part in decisions that affect them, whether at work, in the community or at home. Only in this way can we have a fair and just society, in which everyone has the chance to fulfil themselves.
Everything in anarchist ways of thinking follows from this basic principle. Obviously, this is not how society works now. At work we do what we’re told or we get the sack. At home, the police, the tax man and other arms of the state snoop into our business and tell us what we can and can’t do. We do not take decisions about how we work, about how our taxes are spent, what laws are passed and on and on and on.
The slogan ‘from each according to their ability, to each according to their need’ sums up the idea. Nobody on Earth should be short of anything that they need, especially when you consider that there is enough on Earth to provide for everyone, plus another 4 or 5 billion people. It is this broken capitalist system that introduces scarcity, waste and poverty. In Anarcho-Communism individuals receive goods and services because of how much they need them, not because of how much they can pay or how much they deserve them. People give back to society, through the work they do, according to what they want and are able to do. Everyone will have the chance to do interesting and creative work, instead of just a minority while everyone else are stuck with boring drudge work.
This society would be organised through local collectives and councils, organising themselves to make the decisions that need making and to do the work that needs doing. Everyone gets a say in decisions that concern them. We believe that in fighting for this kind of future we are fighting for the full freedom and equality of all. Only this will give everyone the chance to be whatever they can be.
Anarcho-communism is more than an abstract vision of the future and it is more than a nostalgia for the revolutionary movements of the past. It is a living working class tradition that lays the foundations for the future society in the here and now. Everything we will be after capitalism we must learn under it and through the fight against it. Spread the word of Anarcho-Communism and organise groups to discuss taking direct action to improve the lives of the people in your local area. Once we take back control of our local areas, we will be able to render the central powers obsolete. If you have any questions on anarchism please do get in touch – Andrew Parker, The Voice of Anarchy
After four weeks of intense fighting the death toll in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict stands at: 1,650 Gazan Palestinians dead – over half of whom were civilians, including 400 children, and lets not forget the tens of thousands of Gazans injured and the 440,000 Gazans displaced. The Israeli death toll stands at 60 – 57 soldiers and 3 civilians.
The disparity of the figures shows the incomparable strength of each side’s defence and security forces. Israel has the Iron Dome missile defence system – though it is reported to only be effective 3% of the time. It has a vastly superior military force, both in terms of resources and organisation. The Israeli people also benefit from an early warning system which sends mobile phone alerts of incoming missiles and to head to the nearest bunker immediately.
Hamas is alleged to have fired more than 3000 rockets into heavily-populated Israeli areas, but with only 3 Israeli civilians having been killed since this recent conflict began on 8th July, one could question whether Hamas has any real ability to hurt Israel – and Israelis – whatsoever. In stark contrast, Hamas, or far more pertinently the people of Gaza, have no Iron Dome. They have no bunkers. They have no early warning system. Instead, the Israeli Defence Force will call the occupier of a home, telling them effectively that they are about to be made homeless, before it drops a small bomb – a warning shot if you will – followed by a much, much bigger bomb, capable of levelling a Gazan apartment building.
An unexploded Israeli missile in Gaza – 1st August 2014
Let’s take a look at who’s behind this conflict?
At the last round of elections, the people of Israel and the people of Gaza elected far-right Fascist regimes intent on the destruction of their opponent’s entire populace. (We won’t go into all the historical religious and political reasons why such extreme parties were elected but clearly both populations felt their chosen party was the best party to achieve the desired result.) The present situation then, is the outcome of the hatred and bloodlust displayed at the ballot box by both sides.
Both parties – Likud of Israel and Hamas of Gaza – have shown clearly that they are totally, completely irresponsible for the power bestowed upon them by their own people. (Not a good advert for democracy but that’s for another time.) If any given authority must legitimize itself, clearly both sides have failed to do so. Especially when each party’s main policy appears to be to wipe out the other guys at any cost! Speaking of costs, let’s look at the monetary costs of this conflict:
Courtesy of Shin Bet, Israel’s intelligence services (from WikiLeaks), Israel provides the IDF with an annual budget of around $18 billion. Hamas spends around $40 million on defence and security. So if you compare the two opponents there really is no contest. But how did Israel come to have such an almighty military force?
Over the last 20 years, the U.S. has been slowly phasing out economic aid to Israel and gradually replacing it with increased military aid. Israel is by far the largest recipient of U.S. foreign military aid. According to the CRS report, the President’s aid request for Israel for FY 2015 will encompass approximately 55% of total U.S. foreign military financing worldwide. According to the CRS report, “annual FMF grants to Israel represent 23% to 25% of the overall Israeli defence budget.”
Of the $18 Billion Israel spends on defence, $3 Billion is supplied by the US. Journalist Ken Klippenstein said: “Official US military aid to Israel stands at about $3 billion per year due to a 10-year, $30 billion military aid package (or an average of $8.5 million a day) originally signed by former President George W. Bush and upheld under President Obama. This figure doesn’t, however, include the $504 million in funding dedicated to missile defence.”
Klippensein criticised the US administration’s position on “negotiating a ceasefire”, saying: “Even as the US government claims to want to broker a ceasefire, it continues facilitating weapons exports to Israel.”
He added: “Israel is the only country allowed to use its US military aid to build its domestic military industry, a privilege that includes developing indigenous weapons systems based on US designs and using US grants to purchase materials, as well as research and development, from Israeli firms. Additional US funds are spent on joint military research and production.”
Israel also “enjoys ‘fast-track’ status for weapons sales”, which allows the Israeli army to deal directly with US arms manufacturers without the need for approval from the US Department of Defence, Klippenstein explained.
In contrast, US aid to Palestine is $400million per annum, but it provides no military aid – $0! US aid to Palestine is only authorized once Congress has received proof that it will be used for “non-lethal assistance”. Congress requested $440 million in aid for FY 2014. When compared with Israeli aid, it becomes clear that the US is complicit in funding one side against the other. Some might call this a bias due to some vested interests bubbling beneath the surface of US-Israeli foreign relations – judge for yourself, I won’t go through the minutiae of ‘that’ in this article!
In all reality the US should sanction both sides, not increase arms spending to Israel, as it announced this week. This can be deemed as war-mongering. Funding one side against the other is as irresponsible as each side has proved themselves to be with their reckless abandon of moral decency in favour of sheer hatred and bloodlust!
To add insult to injury, in a recent UN vote to decide whether to hold a UN investigation into the carnage in Gaza, the US was the only country to vote No! The US bias in favour of Israel is clear. Since the US is clearly complicit in this conflict – and shows no sign of remorse for its complicity – the US can be disregarded as an arbitrator to peace in the region. And so it falls to the UN to follow its mandate and intervene.
Neither side appears willing to broker a permanent ceasefire, despite the best efforts of the UN. Hamas has repeatedly broken past ceasefires by continuing to fire rockets into heavily-populated Israeli areas, and Netanyahu’s Likud Party are determined to continue their relentless bombing of heavily populated areas of Gaza, as well as ground operations, until “the threat from Hamas is extinguished”.
Shuja’iyya, Gaza – before and after an Israeli air assault – July 2014
Who knows how many must die until a lasting ceasefire is brokered? One thing is for sure, a third-party must intervene, negotiate and disarm both sides. A clear action plan for peace must be implemented and regulated through to completion, and who better to implement such a truce than the UN? But whether or not the UN will commit to such an intervention remains to be seen. It is far more likely that the unnecessary bloodshed will continue for the foreseeable future.
The Voice of Anarchy 