Monday, April 29, 2019
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Wednesday, April 17, 2019
From 2013 to 2019 I shifted from anarcho-capitalist to libertarian-socialist
I support freedom, and capitalism just doesn't promote freedom. Communism promotes freedom. Anyone who identifies as an anarcho-capitalist is not going to understand what I mean, so I guess I will have to explain it.
Adult humans need to be free to survive, but our liberty is limited by nature. We are limited by predators and pathogens, esspecally in the tropics. We need to eat, but most plants are too toxic or thorny for us, and we are slow runners. Outside of the tropics we often freeze without shelter fire and clothing. Sometimes we need someone to take care of our health. We can't even touch our own backs. Sometimes we become mentally ill being alone. In order to be free we should not build an economic system that puts us in competition with each other. Under capitalism, not only are we limited by nature, but also by humans.
It is not wrong to have limits with other people, but we have a way of creating systems where those who have been born lucky have more than they will use well those who have worked hard don't have enough while there is more than enough to go around. In my country there are families that are rich because they dislocated hunter-gatherer tribes from the land and forced enslaved families to work the land for no pay. Many of the descendants of the tribes and slaves are still poor while many of the descendants of the landholders have moved on in corporations and politics. The rich now govern with the ideology that their wealth "creates jobs," leading us to believe that they are our leaders. Ah, so we are supposed to work for them and make them richer, to get back wages taken out of what their ancestors stole from Natives and Africans and peasants. If we challenge their property claims they will accuse us of seeking to kill jobs, turning the working class against us.
After the United States Civil War laws were passed in Southern states that limited the rights and freedoms of Black people to the advantage of White people. Most of these laws have been removed, but no significant redistribution has occurred. What should have happened right after the Civil War was to turn all the plantations into worker owned cooperatives that former slaves and Native Americans as well as poor Whites, and to banish the Southern bourgeoisie. The conditions of the South in the 1800s might not have been ripe for this left wing suggestion, but we could try today.
You may have noticed that capitalist apologist often assert that capitalism is a system that uses our selfishness to do good for others. Well if your ancestors had their property stolen and were forced to work for no pay then how are you going to deal with a sudden medical expense? Capitalism is not about helping people who have a lot of need. Capitalism favors serving the needs of people... who have a lot of capital. The capitalist class has forced us to service them. We are not free.
Dear readers, I hope you can now see what I see. For millions of years our ancestors survived and thrived in social groups where we took care of eachother, particularly helping the most vulnerable as needed. Instead of working for eight hours a day five days a week on wage jobs that take us away from the things we care about, we should be working for our friends and families as they work for us. My dear comrades, take a walk through your homes, perhaps there are some things that need fixing or cleaning that you don't have the time or money to get to even if you have a job. Take a walk through your neighbourhood, you might see rundown homes and littered streets and homeless people, and most of us are too poor or lonely to do anything about it. If you travel the World you will find floating garbage patches, governments and corporations stealing land from Natives, governments locking up the people capitalist don't want to work with, ecosystems being destroyed, polar ice melting and starting to flood poor communities, and countless other problems. You can't do much about any of this because you work for someone who needs you to make them richer.
Dear comrades, just maybe a new economic system is needed. Maybe we could have the best of the prehistoric social bonds with modern production and technology and global connectivity. What if we get our best friends together to buy large houses, or small villages, or abandon mills, malls, schools, churches, or summer camps so that we can start employee owned businesses and housing cooperatives? If we have a growing network of communes trading and united with each other then we could sway governments and schools to work with us, protect tribes, release those charged with victimless crimes, fund environmental restoration, help LGBT youth, and so on. We would be freer to work on what we and our comrades think makes the world better, not on the simple selfish dreams our bosses have.
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