Anti-Capitalism

anti-capitalism

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The key idea to which Wall returns again and again throughout the book is the concept of the commons. He argues that the critical activity of corporate globalization, just as with the first waves of privatization and industrialization about which Marx wrote, is the enclosure of the commons. By privatizing the land, food supply, and water, even the stories, cultures, and ideas of people are turned into saleable commodities. Capitalism forces people to participate in markets by depriving them of any alternatives.

Wall argues that the ideas of taking back the commons can bind together the disparate strands of anti-capitalist thought. While state provision can be humanized and markets tamed by the social, the more fundamental task requires that both the state and the market are rolled back.

The commons provides an important alternative to both.

Of course, the definition of the commons has changed somewhat since the time of Marx; it now includes not only land and physical resources, but also ideas, creative work, and of course the Internet, arguably where the greatest battle over the commons is now taking place. Wall enthusiastically endorses the principle of open source software as an engine for development, one that emphasizes use value over exchange value:.

Open source is an excellent example of how something that does not directly increase GNP can fuel real prosperity: for example, it provides citizens and governments in developing countries with free access to vital computer software… Open source encourages users to add their own touches, focusing attention on the quality of the product. It is a stunning example of how both the market and the state can be bypassed by cooperative creativity.

The case for free-market anticapitalism

The barrier between user and provider is eroded; a direct agreement between society members is maintained… Marx would have been a Firefox user. As free-market orthodoxy falters and the left moves into what may well become a long-overdue resurgence, his message is one of hope. Although the book was written before the current economic crisis burst into full view, it contributes to the discussion now opening up about the legitimacy of capitalist economics at a time when a growing number of people are searching for alternatives.

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There are alternatives to capitalism; there are new ideas that go beyond the sectarian divisions of the old left; and it is the creativity, ingenuity, and hope of ordinary people that will change the world. Dear Reader, we make this and other articles available for free online to serve those unable to afford or access the print edition of Monthly Review. If you read the magazine online and can afford a print subscription, we hope you will consider purchasing one.

Please visit the MR store for subscription options. Maybe the economy should be bottom-up, not top-down. Maybe order can be surprisingly spontaneous.

Media in category "Anti-capitalism"

Maybe society can evolve. This year sees two other significant anniversaries. The first is that in , years ago, Adam Ferguson published his essay on the history of civil society. Things like the English language, made by humankind, but not planned, ordered, constructed or ruled. There is no government, supreme court or police force of the English language yet we all obey its laws of vocabulary, grammar and syntax.

Likewise, the internet is something that evolves; it is not and was not designed, planned or managed. It is my contention that this concept of spontaneous order is the central idea of the enlightenment, brought to a pinnacle nine years later by Adam Smith with his invisible hand and applied to life itself by Charles Darwin some decades later. If the English language can get along without a government, why do we so quickly assume that English society cannot organise itself? To labour the point, today in London roughly 10 million people ate lunch.

Working out just how much of each type of food to have available in the right places at the right time to ensure that this happened was a problem of mind-boggling complexity, made all the harder by the fact people made up their mind what to eat mostly at the last minute. Who was in charge of this astonishing feat? Why is this system not subsidised? How can it be so lightly regulated?

The protesters who gather to criticise free enterprise from time to time use Facebook and iPhones to arrange their protest, drink Starbucks and eat Pret, wear shirts and shoes, in some cases even use toothpaste and shampoo before setting out. They swim where they wish to in a sea of possibilities provided by free enterprise. One more anniversary. But it also, in my view, explains prosperity — what it is and why it happens to us and not to rabbits or rocks.

What are our teachers up to? How come nobody seems to know that trade is not a zero sum game? How come both Brussels and Washington are entirely in thrall to the kind of mercantilism that was disproved years ago?

Socialist Party :: Anti-capitalism

Do they believe in phlogiston and blood-letting too? Ricardo proves that if you specialise, then it makes sense to exchange, and vice versa. Working for each other is the grand theme of human history, one that has waxed and waned, but mostly waxed, over tens of thousands of years, with an incredible acceleration in the last 50 years thanks to free trade. In that half century we have gone from 75 per cent of the world living in extreme poverty, to just 9 per cent. We have increased human productivity by some 3, per cent. Nobody seems to know this.

The late Hans Rosling conducted a poll in which he asked people if the proportion of the world living in extreme poverty had doubled, halved or stayed the same in the past 20 years. Just 5 per cent of people thought it had halved — which is the right answer. Rosling pointed out that if he wrote the three answers on three bananas and threw them into a cage full of monkeys, then measured which banana was picked up first, the monkeys would get the right answer 33 per cent of the time — nearly seven times better than people. The essence of free enterprise is that people become more prosperous by working for each other.

The more they abandon self sufficiency for interdependence, the better off they are. The more they specialise as producers, the more they can diversify as consumers. And what this means of course is that networks of exchange and specialisation create cooperation, collaboration and community on an epic scale. By collaborating through commerce we can do things that are far beyond the capacity of the human mind to comprehend. Human intelligence is a collective phenomenon, a distributed brain, a cloud.

As Leonard Reed famously pointed out, among the thousands of people who contribute to making a simple pencil, not one of them knows how to make a pencil. You can see where I am going here, can you not? That true communism, true collectivism, is created by the market, not the state. That the deepest cooperation is what we achieve by buying and selling. They will never have heard it. What is more common good than the collaboration of millions of people to make, sell and buy a pencil, or provide 10 million people with their preferred lunch? Free markets reject, demolish even, the cult of selfish individualism.

They make us pro-social.

Vegan Anti-Capitalism

The evidence for this proposition is overwhelming: from experiments, mathematical models, historical episodes, geographical patterns. Experiments support it. The ultimatum bargaining game, in which one player is asked to share a windfall with another player, at the risk of having it cancelled if the second player rejects the offer, finds that among non-state societies, the more commercial a society is the more generous people are in their offers. Machiguenga slash-and-burn farmers from Brazil and Hadza hunter-gatherers from Tanzania usually make very small offers and yet experience few rejections.

Players from societies that are most integrated into modern markets, such as the Orma nomads of Kenya or the Achuar subsistence gardeners of Ecuador, usually offer half the money. The whale-hunting Lamalera of the island of Lembata in Indonesia, who need to coordinate large teams of strangers on hunts, offer on average 58 per cent — as if investing the windfall in acquiring new obligations.

Mathematical models support the proposition that markets make us nice too. History supports the same conclusion. Commercial societies have always been the most peaceful and tolerant, from the Phoenicians to the Dutch to modern Hong Kong. Montesquieu called it doux commerce , sweet commerce. He said. There the Jew, the Mahometan, and the Christian deal with one another as if they were of the same religion, and reserve the name of infidel for those who go bankrupt. Here the Presbyterian trusts the Anabaptist and the Anglican accepts a promise from the Quaker.

On leaving these peaceful and free assemblies some go to the Synagogue and others for a drink. The geography of war and peace also supports the proposition that markets make us pro-social.

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