Work – CrimethInc

Great analysis of capitalism. It dissects it piece by piece. Easy to read and understand.
A little bit lighter on the solutions than I hoped though.
3/23/17
  • Capitalism
    • If more people go hungry during a recession, it’s not because there has been any material change in our productive capacities, but simply one more example of how irrationally our society always distributes resources.
    • Capitalism exists because we invest everything in it: all our energy and ingenuity in the marketplace, all our resources at the supermarket and in the stock market, all our attention in the media. To be more precise, capitalism exists because our daily activities are it.
    • In a sense, it really is capital that calls the shots, ruling through interchangeable human hosts.
      That doesn’t mean the solution is to use political structures to “tame” capital, making it more rational, more “democratic.” Weath is more concentrated today than ever before in history, despite all the experiments that have taken place in socialism and social democracy. Political power can impose control over human beings, but it can’t make capitalism function differently — that would take a fundamental social transformation. As long as the foundation of our economic system is ownership, capitalism will tend to accumulate into higher and higher concentrations, and the resulting inequalities will determine the dynamics of our society regardless of checks and balances.
    • You could say capitalism puts power in the worst hands, but that misses the point. It’s not that the ones rewarded by the economy tend to be the worst people, but that — however selfish or generous they are — their positions are contingent on certain kinds of behavior. The moment an executive deprioritizes profit-making, he or his company is instantly replaced with a more ruthless contender.
    • further up the pyramid you go the fewer positions there are
    • The service industry is the thin layer of living flesh stretched over the iron machinery of the economy, stoking the engines of desire that drive it.
    • If capitalism were simply a way to meet material needs, it would make no sense that people work harder now that less labor is required for production. But capitalism isn’t just a way to meet material needs; it’s a social system based in alienated relationships. As long as the economy distributes access to resources according to wealth, advances in manufacturing technology will simply force workers to seek other livelihoods. The machine no longer needs us, but it still needs us to keep working.
    • Capitalism is not the oldest system that generates imbalances in power, nor the most fundamental; it developed on the foundations laid by patriarchy and other hierarchies. It’s impossible to fight these in isolation: a sexist anticpitalism would still create imbalances in access to capitalism, just as a capitalist feminism would only impose the burdens of exploitation on poorer women.
    • Today, the frontiers have been pushed to the very edges of the earth. Those who wish to escape capitalism have to fight where they stand.
    • There’s nothing inevitable about the capitalist economy; it’s simply one way of organizing resources and relationships so that power concentrates in the hands of the few. Its a much more complicated way of doing this than feudalism, but also more flexible and effective. Yet a different set of criteria for how to relate to our surroundings and each other would produce a totally different world.
    • Has there every been an autocrat as tyrannical and destructive as the market?
    • Already, the capitalist economy is barely able to offer people decent jobs, let alone meaningful lives; even measured by its own materialistic criteria, it isn’t working.
  • System adaptation
    • As people find new ways to fight or escape the roles imposed on them, the economy changes to suppress, incorporate, or outmode their resistance.
    • This means we can’t just make incremental reforms over time. If employees win wage increases, landlords just raise their rent; if laws are passed to protect the environment, corporations take their business elsewhere.
    • All of this free content adds value to the internet itself, filling the pockets of technology magnates like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs who sell the means of accessing it. So long as capitalists control the means of producing material good, free distribution of information can actually exacerbate social divisions in their favor, eroding the middle class in the information and entertainment industries.
    • Ironically, free production and distribution would seem to be the hallmark of any anticapitalist practice. But for these to be able to bring about new power relations, we have to do away with private ownership of capital.
    • Every form of resistance that doesn’t address the root problem is reabsorbed into the functioning of the market. Outrage against specific symptoms of capitalism has generated ethical consumerism, which only serves to stimulate the capitalist economy.
    • Every time people mount a formidable challenge to some aspect of the capitalist system, a version of the same script plays out. The defenders of the status quo placate some of their adversaries, then sop at nothing to crush the ones who won’t compromise. Thus the opposition is divided in two by a mixture of seduction and violence, and the ruling order is reconstituted to include a portion of the previous dissidents while the rest are suppressed.
  • Democracy
    • Democracy is the best way to maximize popular investment in the coercive institutions of the state because it gives the greatest possible number of people the feeling that why could have some influence over them.
    • The marketplace of ideas metaphor is apt enough: like human beings, ideas have to compete on the uneven terrain of capitalism. Some are backed by chancellors and media moguls, dollars by the million or billion, entire military-industrial complexes; others are literally born in prison. Despite this, the ones that rise to the top are bound to be the best – just as the most successful businessmen must be superior to everyone else. According to this school of through, capitalism persists because everyone from billionaire to bellboy agrees that it is the best idea.
    • One justification for government is that it is a means of pooling resources to serve the greater good. But monarchies weren’t invented as a way to provide for the needs of the general public! Historically, governments have only provided for the needs of the public incidentally, in order to pacify restless subjects; for the most part, they’ve focused on accumulating wealth for themselves.
  • Misc
    • the youth… were revolting against something concrete and familiar: their parents’ truce with exploitation.
    • It takes a lot to beat this natural curiosity out of children. You have to take them away from their families, isolate them in sterile environments with only a few overworked adults, and teach them that learning is a discipline. You have to send them to school.
    • Some activists focus on “classism” rather than capitalism, as if the poor were simply a social group and bias against them is a bigger problem than the structures that produce property.
    • The ruling order will seem unshakeable until the day before it collapses.
    • the tragedy of property
  • Police and military
    • The point is not to prevent violence so much as to monopolize control: so long as it doesn’t pose a threat to the balance of power, violence isn’t a priority for the police.
    • Without the employment opportunities the military offers the poor and restless, many of them might seek their fortune in another army.
    • Welfare programs and social services are being steadily cut, and this will continue until popular outcry becomes too fierce to be controlled by state repression. In this light, we can see why capitalists consider military power a better investment than social programs.
  • Migrant labor
    • Commodities, jobs, and profits flow effortlessly across borders that are enforced chiefly upon human beings, the better to exploit them. Not only borders but the nations themselves are arbitrary constructions that serve to legitimize the segregation of the workforce into castes.
    • So it is that those whose homelands were pillaged by colonizers must deliver themselves to the colonizers doorsteps again for further pillaging.
  • Prisons
    • What is the function of prisons? above all, to keep people docile in other prisons. Prisons are necessary not to preserve order so much as to protect and enforce the inequalities produced by the market. The coercion and control they represent isn’t an aberration in an otherwise free society, but the essential precondition for capitalism.
    • Prisons are fundamentally a way to deal with the structural challenges inherent in capitalism. As capitalists accumulate more and more wealth, the exploited and exculded have less and less reason to obey property laws.
    • Once this criminal class is divided from the rest of the population and set at odds with it, all crime is experienced as antisocial, and workers consider their enemies to be the criminals who might steal from them rather than the capitalists who do so constantly. .
  • Environment
    • Neither glaciers nor the mountaintops they rest on are safe from the demands of the market. The earth itself is being systematically transformed into the waste products of profit. This is the ultimate result of the institution of private property and the motives it produces: living creatures are reduced to objects and the material world is subordinated to self-fulfilling superstitions.
  • Technology
    • The point is that technology is not neutral: technology is always shaped by the structures of the society in which it is developed and applied. Most of the technologies familiar to us were shaped by imperatives of profit, but a society based on other values would surely produce other technologies. As digital technology becomes increasingly enmeshed in the fabric of this society, the most important question is not whether to use it, but how to undermine the structures that produced it.
    • In a society headed for disaster, better technology will just get us there faster.
  • Credit
    • Credit enables capitalists to colonize the future as well as the present.
    • In the “company towns” of the old days, workers bought the tools and goods they needed on credit, then were trapped indefinitely working to pay off their debts. Today this story outrages people – but what if the same scam were perpetrated by a class rather than a single corporation? Student loans ensnare young workers more effectively than any general store could have. Likewise, the only difference between debt and old-fashioned indentured servitude is that now the servitude is owed to the economy in general rather than a particular individual or institution.
    • There’s no shame in bankruptcy in a bankrupt system.
    • Just as the Church invented the soul to establish its power and kings propagated the notion of duty, one might say that money is generated in order to create debt. All of these are ways to structure a social system based on obligation.
  • Crisis
    • On 2008 financial crisis: All of them were acting rationally within the capitalist framework. The problem was that the framework itself is senseless.
    • Now almost everyone has to go through the market to get the things they need to survive — making economic recessions as dangerous as earthquakes and tsunamis, even through they’re entirely artificial. And while natural disasters pass, capitalism persists: families are temporary, but poverty is enduring.
  • Systems
    • We already possess the means to eliminate most of the hardships facing humanity, but the forces that structure our society prevent us from doing so.
    • This system isn’t the most effective way to produce knowledge, but it is the most efficient means of turning it into capital.
    • There is very little incentive for research into preventive medicine beyond what it takes to prevent epidemics and keep people fit for work. The medical industry makes up such a large part of the economy that if people stopped getting injured and ill it would precipitate a major crisis.
  • Race
    • “People from Africa were not enslaved because they were black; they were defined as black because they were enslaved” – Noel Ignatiev
    • Race is a biological fiction but a social fact.
  • Justice
    • Economic inequalities are behind most hostilities, however much they seem a byproduct of “human nature”.
    • The apparatus that is supposed to guarantee equal rights is so Byzantine that only a specially-trained elite has any idea how it works- or any legal right to operate in it.
    • One need only count all the treaties with Native Americans that have been broken or scrutinize the conduct of a single police department to see how little weight the law carries with those who frame and enforce it. The law offers one means of protecting the interests of those who control capital, but they bypass it quickly enough when other means are more effective.
    • Living under this system, we forget what it means to be responsible for ourselves. We forget how to work out conflicts according to the needs of those involved, without recourse to armed gangs of “disinterested” outsiders — we forget that such a thing is even possible. Worse of all, we forget how to stand up for ourselves when we get a raw deal, how to do as our hearts dictate regardless of the rules.
  • Unions
    • labor organizing tends to prioritize bureaucracy over initiative, representation over autonomy, appeasement over confrontation, legitimacy in capitalists’ eyes over effectiveness.
    • What would it look like to approach labor organizing the way people go about stealing from their bosses? It would mean focusing on resistance tactics that meet individual needs, starting from what we can do ourselves with each other’s assistance. It would mean adopting strategies that provide immediate material or emotional benefit on our own terms. It would mean building connections through the process of attempting to seize back the environments we work and live in, rather than within organizations that endlessly defer struggle.
  • Gentrification
    • Capitalists drain resources from an area, seal it off, then reappear when values have dropped enough that a small investment can easily turn a profit.
    • Gentrification is the process of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer embodied in real estate, as workers pay proportionately more and more of their income for space to live.
    • Can we combat gentrification simply by pitting moral imperatives against economic pressures? Or is it unrealistic to think we could put a stop to it without abolishing capitalism itself?
  • Relationships
    • When everyone is constantly moving, it makes more sense to try to build up capital than to develop long-term relationships and commitments. Capitalism is universally exchangeable, while personal relationships are unique and non-transferable. And the more atomized we become, the more we feel compelled to uproot ourselves yet agin to look elsewhere for everything we’ve lost.
    • If there is to be any hope of life after capitalism, we have to find each other and build new connections.
  • Pollution
    • If people took the scientific reports about global warming seriously, the engines of every fire department would sound their sirens and race to the nearest factory to extinguish its furnaces. Every high school student would run to the thermostat, turn it off, and tear it from the classroom wall, then hit the parking lot to slash tires. Every responsible suburban parent would don safety gloves and walk around the block pulling the electrical meters out of the utility boxes behind houses and condominiums. Every gas station attendant would press the emergency button to shut off the pumps, cut the hoses, and glue the locks on the doors; every coal and petroleum corporation would immediately set about burying their unused product where it came from – using only the muscles of their own arms, of course.
    • When profit margins are more real than living things, when weather patterns are more real than refugees fleeing hurricanes, when emissions cap agreements are more real than new developments going up down the street, the world has already been signed over for destruction.
    • Capitalism is not sustainable. It demands constant expansion; it can reward nothing else. Beware of supposed environmentalists whose first priority is to sustain the economy.
    • We’ll get out of the apocalypse what we put into it: we can’t expect it to produce a more liberated society unless we put the foundations in place now. Forget about individualistic survival schemes that cast you as the Last Person on Earth — Hurricane Katrina showed that when the storm hits, the most important thing is to be part of a community that can defend itself. The coming upheavals may indeed offer a chance for social change, but only if we start implementing it right now.
  • inefficiencies
    • When the International Monetary Fund forces austerity measures on a country, it’s not like there’s less food, housing, or education to go around than before — the problem is that the current economic system can’t distribute access to these according to human need. The same goes for famines that plague one nation while another pays farmers subsidies not to grow crops: the means exist to eradicate famine once and for all, but they will never be used for this so long as resources flow according to the laws of profit.
  • Welfare and charity
    • Welfare and charity only redistribute wealth on the terms of the wealthy – that is, as a means of maintaining the unequal balance of power…The only real cure for poverty is for the poor to seize resources back on their own terms.
    • Their [Carnegie and Rockefeller] goal was to place the poor and restless while reshaping society according to their interests; philanthropy has a long history as a symptomatic treatment for systemic ills.
    • Shifting from seeking social change to providing social services means you can put in a lifetime of work treating the symptoms without ever making progress against the cause.
  • Alternative Models
    • For production, think of barn-raising events, in which communities come together for a day to build structures that would otherwise take months, or open-source software, in which programs are created and refined cooperatively by all who use them. For distribution, think of libraries, which can stock a lot more than books, or file-sharing, in which those who need a file self-organize its circulation. For relationships, think of health friendships and family ties, in which everyone is invested in everyone else’s welfare, or parties and festivals in which even strangers enjoy each others’ participation.
    • None of these models promotes selfishness or discourages effort. All of them undermine the notion of scarcity: the more people participate, the more everyone benefits. There must be ways to extend such formats into other spheres of life.
  • Action
    • Think ahead to the upheavals on the horizon: when they arrive, what will you wish you had done to prepare? How can you maximize the likelihood that they will turn out for the best?
    • There’s no way around it— if we want fundamental change, we have to abolish private ownership of capital.
    • You’re most likely to be effective when you confront the outrages you experience personally on the terrain you know best.
    • There’s no moral high ground in capitalism: it’s not more ethical to be further down the pyramid. Trying to appease your conscience isn’t likely to do anyone else a lot of good. Likewise, let others play their positions— don’t waste energy judging them. Even lawyers and professors can play an important role if they can get over themselves. We don’t gain anything from moralistic one-upmanship; the point isn’t to be right, but to be dangerous. When we split into rival factions we save capitalists the trouble of dividing and distracting us.
    • It isn’t movements themselves that make social change, but rather contagious examples of transformation.
    • There are no shortcuts to freedom; political parties and leaders can’t obtain it for us, but only take it from us.
    • This makes it more important to focus on the content of resistance than on its immediate efficacy. Does it create new relationships between people, new ways of relating to material goods? Does it demonstrate values that point beyond capitalism? Forget about whether it achieves its ostensible demands—does it give rise to new struggles, to new unruliness?
    • There’s no reason to believe the downfall of capitalism will automatically bring about a free world. That part is up to us.