Anarchist Sampler: Capitalism

New York garment sweatshop, 1910

Your foreman or supervisor gives you more or-else orders in a week than the police do in a decade.
Bob Black, "The Libertarian as Conservative"
It is reported that about 30% of the world's population is unemployed. That's worse than the Great Depression, but it's now an international phenomenon. You have 30% of the world unemployed, a huge amount of work that needs to be done just rebuilding the society alone. The people who are unemployed want to do the work, but the system is such a catastrophic failure that it cannot bring together idle hands and work. This is all hailed as a great success, and it is a great success -- for a very small sector of the population.
Noam Chomsky, "Globalization and Resistance"
American labor history is unusually violent, considerably more so than in other industrial societies. Noting that there is no serious study, Patricia Sexton reports an estimate of 700 strikers killed and thousands injured from 1877 to 1968, a figure that may "grossly understate the total casualties"; in comparison, one British striker was killed since 1911.
Noam Chomsky, "The Third World at Home," Z Magazine, Nov. 1992

So deeply rooted is the market economy in our minds that its grubby language has replaced our most hallowed moral and spiritual expressions. We now "invest" in our children, marriages, and personal relationships, a term that is equated with words like "love" and "care." We live in a world of "trade-offs" and we ask the for the "bottom line" of any emotional "transaction." We use the terminology of contracts rather than that of loyalities and spiritual affinities.
Murray Bookchin, The Modern Crisis, p. 79
The Reagan administration combined free-trade bombast with a highly protectionist record. Take control over imports. Various kinds of control over imports amount to duties. They practically doubled, from about twelve percent to about twenty-three percent, during the Reagan years, through what are sometimes called "voluntary arrangements," meaning "you do what we say or we'll close off your market."
Noam Chomsky, Keeping the Rabble in Line, ch. 1
Babylon hates it when anyone actually enjoys life, rather than merely spends money in a vain attempt to buy the illusion of enjoyment. Dissipation, gluttony, bulimic overconsumption -- these are not only legal but mandatory. If you don't waste yourself on the emptiness of commodities, you are obviously queer and must by definition be breaking some law. True pleasure in this society is more dangerous than bank robbery. At least bank robbers share Massa's respect for Massa's money.
Hakim Bey, Radio Sermonettes, "Immediatism vs. Capitalism"
People forgot that industry is not an end in itself, but should only be a means to ensure to man his material subsistence and to make accessible to him the blessings of a higher intellectual culture. Where industry is everything and man is nothing begins the realm of a ruthless economic despotism whose workings are no less disastrous than those of any political despotism. The two mutually augment one another, and they are fed from the same source.
Rudolph Rocker, Anarchosyndicalism, ch. 1
The division of economy into production and consumption as two opposite poles means that we are far from the conditions in which work could be a way of life. A way of life requires merging the means in the end, and work would have to be thought of as a continuous process of satisfying activity -- satisfying in itself and satisfying in its useful end.
Paul Goodman and Percival Goodman, Communitas: Means of Livelihood and Ways of Life
Oscar Wilde defines a perfect personality as "one who develops under perfect conditions, who is not wounded, maimed, or in danger." A perfect personality, then, is only possible in a state of society where man is free to choose the mode of work, the conditions of work, and the freedom to work. One to whom the making of a table, the building of a house, or the tilling of the soil, is what the painting is to the artist and the discovery to the scientist -- the result of inspiration, of intense longing, and deep interest in work as a creative force.
Emma Goldman, "Anarchism: What It Really Stands For"
... no matter how large a quantity of air or light any one appropriates, no one is damaged thereby; there always remains enough for all. With the soil, it is very different. Lay hold who will, or who can, of the sun's rays, the passing breeze, or the sea's billows; he has my consent, and my pardon for his bad intentions. But let any living man dare to change his right of territorial possession into the right of property, and I will declare war upon him, and wage it to the death!
Pierre Joseph Proudhon, What Is Property?, Memoir 1, ch. 3
This electronic book is now literary freeware. It now belongs to the emergent realm of alternative information economics. You have no right to make this electronic book part of the conventional flow of commerce. Let it be part of the flow of knowledge: there's a difference.
Bruce Sterling, Preface to the Electronic Release of The Hacker Crackdown
Digital technology is more flexible than the printing press: when information has digital form, you can easily copy it to share it with others. This very flexibility makes a bad fit with a system like copyright. That's the reason for the increasingly nasty and draconian measures now used to enforce software copyright. Consider these four practices of the Software Publishers Association (SPA):

Massive propaganda saying it is wrong to disobey the owners to help your friend.

Solicitation for stool pigeons to inform on their coworkers and colleagues.

Raids (with police help) on offices and schools, in which people are told they must prove they are innocent of illegal copying.

Prosecution (by the US government, at the SPA's request) of people such as MIT's David LaMacchia, not for copying software (he is not accused of copying any), but merely for leaving copying facilities unguarded and failing to censor their use.

All four practices resemble those used in the former Soviet Union, where every copying machine had a guard to prevent forbidden copying, and where individuals had to copy information secretly and pass it from hand to hand as "samizdat." There is of course a difference: the motive for information control in the Soviet Union was political; in the US the motive is profit. But it is the actions that affect us, not the motive. Any attempt to block the sharing of information, no matter why, leads to the same methods and the same harshness.
Richard Stallman (Free Software Foundation), "Why Software Should Not Have Owners"
According to the libertarian litany, if an industry or an institution is making a profit, it is satisfying "wants" whose origins and content are deliberately disregarded. But what we want, what we are capable of wanting is relative to the forms of social organization. People "want" fast food because they have to hurry back to work, because processed supermarket food doesn't taste much better anyway, because the nuclear family (for the dwindling minority who have even that to go home to) is too small and too stressed to sustain much festivity in cooking and eating -- and so forth. It is only people who can't get what they want who resign themselves to want more of what they can get. Since we cannot be friends and lovers, we wail for more candy.
Bob Black, "Smokestack Lightning"
The official line is that we all have rights and live in a democracy. Other unfortunates who aren't free like we are have to live in police states. These victims obey orders or else, no matter how arbitrary. The authorities keep them under regular surveillance. State bureaucrats control even the smaller details of everyday life. The officials who push them around are answerable only to higher-ups, public or private. Either way, dissent and disobedience are punished. Informers report regularly to the authorities. All this is supposed to be a very bad thing.
And so it is, although it is nothing but a description of the modern workplace. The liberals and conservatives and Libertarians who lament totalitarianism are phonies and hypocrites. There is more freedom in any moderately de-Stalinized dictatorship than there is in the ordinary American workplace. You find the same sort of hierarchy and discipline in an office or factory as you do in a prison or a monastery. In fact, as Foucault and others have shown, prisons and factories came in at about the same time, and their operators consciously borrowed from each other's control techniques. A worker is a part-time slave. The boss says when to show up, when to leave, and what to do in the meantime. He tells you how much work to do and how fast. He is free to carry his control to humiliating extremes, regulating, if he feels like it, the clothes you wear or how often you go to the bathroom. With a few exceptions he can fire you for any reason, or no reason. He has you spied on by snitches and supervisors, he amasses a dossier on every employee. Talking back is called "insubordination," just as if a worker is a naughty child, and it not only gets you fired, it disqualifies you for unemployment compensation. Without necessarily endorsing it for them either, it is noteworthy that children at home and in school receive much the same treatment, justified in their case by their supposed immaturity. What does this say about their parents and teachers who work?
Bob Black, "The Abolition of Work"
We, in civilized societies, are rich. Why then are the many poor? Why this painful drudgery for the masses? Why, even to the best paid workman, this uncertainty for the morrow, in the midst of all the wealth inherited from the past, and in spite of the powerful means of production, which could ensure comfort to all in return for a few hours of daily toil?
The Socialists have said it and repeated it unwearyingly. Daily they reiterate it, demonstrating it by arguments taken from all the sciences. It is because all that is necessary for production -- the land, the mines, the highways, machinery, food, shelter, education, knowledge -- all have been seized by the few in the course of that long story of robbery, enforced migration and wars, of ignorance and oppression, which has been the life of the human race before it had learned to subdue the forces of Nature. It is because, taking advantage of alleged rights acquired in the past, these few appropriate today two-thirds of the products of human labor, and then squander them in the most stupid and shameful way. It is because, having reduced the masses to a point at which they have not the means of subsistence for a month, or even a week in advance, the few only allow the many to work on condition of themselves receiving the lion's share. It is because these few prevent the remainder of men from producing the things they need, and force them to produce, not the necessaries of life for all, but whatever offers the greatest profits to the monopolists. In this is the substance of all Socialism.
Peter Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread, ch. 1

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