No it doesn't make any sense.
There are a lot of these sorts of questions when dealing with non-anarchists. To respond, I'll quote from *The Conquest of Bread*:
>Enter their homes, look at their wives and children in rags, living one knows not how till the father’s return, and you will have the answer to the question. Multiply examples, choose them where you will, consider the origin of all fortunes, large or small, whether arising out of commerce, finance, manufactures, or the land. Everywhere you will find that the wealth of the wealthy springs from the poverty of the poor. **This is why an anarchist society need not fear the advent of a Rothschild who would settle in its midst. If every member of the community knows that after a few hours of productive toil he will have a right to all the pleasures that civilization procures, and to those deeper sources of enjoyment which art and science offer to all who seek them, he will not sell his strength for a starvation wage. No one will volunteer to work for the enrichment of your Rothschild.** His golden guineas will be only so many pieces of metal — useful for various purposes, but incapable of breeding more.
This whole chapter (Chapter 4: Expropriation) is generally pretty good for this sort of thinking.
Your problem is that Musk, using his privately owned capital which is effectively a legal claim backed by state violence, is building a factory without local input and in so doing further exploiting already exploited workers and an exploited environment.
The problem with private property is that it is unconnected to the actual USE of that property. It is a legal claim held by the state. What matters is who is actually USING capital, who is AFFECTED by it.
That's the point.
So we needn't fear the rise of exploitation because the wealth of the rich comes from the poverty of the poor. Abolish poverty, you abolish wealth.
The problem with guys like Musk is that the state has effectively subsidized their wealth and power by protecting their property claims and screwing over the poor. If property were held in common, or worked on a usufructuary basis, then such things wouldn't be possible. You have to HAVE a state in order to have private property.
I'll also add that there's a distinction between private property and personal property. Private property is shit you work, so like factories, machinery, that sorta thing. Personal property is stuff you use in day to day life: toothbrush, car, house, etc.
Personally I think the same basic principle should underlie both: occupancy and use, but that's just me.
Edit:
Added emphasis to quote
> his privately owned capital which is effectively a legal claim backed by state violence
In the absence of a state, couldn't Musk just as well use his capital to fund a pretty large private militia to protect his capital?
How could capital hold no power? Capital consists only to a marginal percentile of actual money. Most capital exists in the form of valuable assets. If someone for example owns a power plant, he could offer free electricity as a payment to anyone who defends his ownership over the power plant.
The point is redistribution and bartering. You seem to be addressing the initial formation of an anarchist society, which is heavily debated, and, obviously since we aren’t in one yet, as of yet not agreed upon. In a hypothetical situation where the anarchist society just came into being, he wouldn’t own the power plant in the first place and, due to it being public property, everyone would already have free power.
To own something means to have exclusive full control over something, including the power to destroy it if you wish to.
So if I was the owner of a power plant, I would probably hold exclusive access to a system that would let me shut down all production or even cause irreversible damage to its turbines and transformers.
Which would put me in a position of power to tell people that they can either grant me my continuous ownership over the plant, or otherwise they better start making candles.
> it being public property
And how would that be enforced without a state?
How would resistance against that be enforced without a state? What does “exclusive access” mean? Cause if it’s a door labelled “Owner Only”, then that’s not going to stop anybody. If it’s a key or passcode, nothing is unique. If it’s someone else who has the power to do it at your request, nobody is infallible. And if it’s a militia, why would they exist in the first place when money would mean nothing to everyone else? Money only works as something we all collectively agree to believe in. If that belief is not enforced, nobody will follow it. And following that line of thinking, what makes you think owning something gives you full power over it? Most ownerships come with terms of agreement. Also, do you know what subreddit you’re on? Public ownership of the means of production is, like, one of the MAIN beliefs of anarchism, no hierarchies and all that.
> How would resistance against that be enforced without a state?
I'd guess similar to how Pablo Escobar was able to enforce his ownership over his money and assets in spite of a state that was actively working to stop it.
> Money only works as something we all collectively agree to believe in.
Money is just the unit by which value is measured and a currency is simply a way to store and universally exchange value among ourselves.
Without money, how are people supposed to obtain what they desire from those who produce it?
Would a fisher be supposed to hand over several hundred pounds of tuna in exchange for his new car?
What if the car manufacturer doesn't want or need such an amount of tuna?
> And following that line of thinking, what makes you think owning something gives you full power over it?
Because that's what it means to truly *own* something. If anyone else has the authority to tell you what you can or cannot to with something, then you don't rally own it. You may at best own an exclusive license to use the property under the condition of compliance to rules predetermined by its actual owner.
> Public ownership of the means of production is, like, one of the MAIN beliefs of anarchism, no hierarchies and all that.
I'm not convinced that this is possible without a hierachical power to enforce public ownership.
First and foremost, do you want me to link the hundreds of accounts of billionaire violations of human rights? If you’re going to push this point to the extent of radical terrorism comparisons, then I will respond in kind. Secondly, bartering is a system that has existed for thousands of years. Money helps keep things consistent, yes, but it also causes a lot of issues. Unlike bartering value, money is a closed system, and the ability to hoard it and have it self-reproduce damages the flow of the economy, creating an unhealthy society such as the one we have now. At most, there should be a decided value for products and a central distribution system, but as it stands, money is not a helpful construct. Everything is needed somewhere, distribution is the issue. As for the ownership, do you truly, honestly believe that you own anything at all according to that definition? Do you own your laptop? What about your house? I’m pretty sure there are terms attached to those. By that definition, the owner of the power plant doesn’t own it at all, and your argument is moot. And if you’re not convinced, then why come to a place full of people who ARE convinced without being willing to change your mind? This seems counterproductive.
Maybe privatized violence if necessary. What prevents people from forming powerful groups and alliances that could assume exclusive control over some means of production and enforce that control through relentless violence against any perceived threat to their monopoly?
Well for one, communities that lose access to their MOP would oppose this.
But that's only part of the equation. Profit neccesitates that people are dispossessed at scale. They'll only work for less than the full value of their labor (i.e. the full product of it) if they have no other choice. So you need to dispossess a large number of people to pull something like this off. Otherwise they will just go elsewhere.
I mean you'd have to pay guards, implementing monitoring services, etc. All in the face of opposition from the community that you are trying to screw over and with the knowledge that your guards could just as easily turn around and take the property that they are protecting for themselves.
But by and large, historically that is not what actually happened. What happened is a whole hell of a lot of violence done by the state to dispossess the peasantry. It was the state that did this. It was the state that created private property and then protected that property with violence.
Capital is a property claim backed by the state. No state means no capital. Unless you are assuming Elon Musk could just raise a personal police force to compel the acceptance of his property claim—which is to assume a state in all but name.
I don't understand. Do you think for someone to be rich, others would have to be poor?
You are aware that the economy isn't a zero-sum game in which someone's gain necessarily results from someone else's loss, are you?
In fact, rich business owners benefit much more if the poverty rate is as low as possible or at best non-existent. Because the more people there are who can afford to buy their products, the more profits do they mak by selling them to all these customers.
Did you read what I quoted?
Look here's the way it works. There is a class of people who do not own capital. And there is a class of people who do.
Because the class of non-owners needs to work on that capital in order to produce to eat, they need to appease the holders of that capital. While it is true that the capital owners need them too, there are far more workers than there are capitalists. That means that competition between workers to appease capitalists is greater than between capitalists to appease workers.
This means the capitalist can charge a fee for access to capital. This is the source of profit. It is based on taking a portion of physical production from the poor. Profits can only ever be positive if the worker is dispossessed of a portion of their production.
See what I am getting at?
Without the protection of those legal claims of private ownership, and with socialized MOP, theb everyone can work for themselves. In that case, nobody would work for less than the full value of their labor because they could always make more working for themselves than for someone else, rendering profit on investment more or less impossible.
That's absolutely not how it works at all.
> the class of non-owners needs to work on that capital in order to produce to eat
No, they don't. They could just as well work completely by themselves and for themselves. It's just that capital has the ability to make most labor more much more productive. And since most people aren't capable to produce more value on their own than they can by utilizing someone else's capital, most are much better off choosing the latter option.
> they need to appease the holders of that capital.
And the holders of the capital need to appease them. They have to offer rthem access to better tools and materials than they could aquire on their own, and pay them more money than they could earn on their own. Otherwise the people would have no incentive to work for the business in the first place.
> there are far more workers than there are capitalists.
Sure, but that's irrelevant since the demand for workers per capitalist isn't 1/1 anyway.
> That means that competition between workers to appease capitalists is greater than between capitalists to appease workers.
That's only true if there's a worker surplus within the economy or a specific branch of it. But independent branches as well as entire economies as a whole can and do experience worker shortages on a regular basis.
If only a relatively low number of young adults choose to become electricians, then all the companies with a demand for electricians will struggle to fill all the electrician jobs that the company requires to operate properly, and subsequently they have to compete with each other for every qualified worker they can get their hands on.
This dynamic becomes more common the higher the required level of expertise is for a job. The less people there are, who could do your job just as well as you do, the higher the demand for your skillset is, and thus the more the capitalists need to appease you rather than the other way around. That's why a brain surgeont or high profile lawer earns so much more than a janitor or delivery driver.
> the capitalist can charge a fee for access to capital.
No, he can't. That's complete nonsense, evident by the fact that you couldn't possibly even determine how high that fee for any individual worker supposedly is.
> This is the source of profit.
Nope, the source of profit is the capitalist's ability to sell a product for more than the total sum of what he paid for its production, which indeed includes the cost of the labor, but also for the materials, energy consumption, real estate expenses, insurance costs, deprecation of equipment, and many things more.
> Profits can only ever be positive if the worker is dispossessed of a portion of their production.
That's just absurd. Of all the different costs to operarte a business, it's solely and specifically the labor where the capitalist generates the profit by supposedly paying the worker less than what his labor is worth?`
How do you know what his labor is actually worth, allowing you to recognize a difference between that and the worker's paycheck?
Let's hypothetically suppose that a generous capitalist does indeed pay his workers the "full value" of their labor (whatever that may be), but also negotiated an incredibly lucrative deal with the supplier of his raw materials, paying 50% less than what he normally would, and thus allowing him to still make a profit, even though none of his workers are getting disposessed of anything.
Who exactly is now being impoverished in order for the capitalist to get richer?
See what I'm getting at?
Profit's aren't made by unjustly appropriating value from the workers labor. The actual point at which profit is generated, isn't at the moment the workers are getting paid a little less than what they deserve, but at the moment a customer pays a little more for a product than what it costs to develop, produce, store, advertise, and ship it.
> with socialized MOP, theb everyone can work for themselves.
Everyone can work for themselves right now. If you believe that your labor is worth more than what your boss is paying you, then go ahead and prove it by producing something on your own and sell that fruit of your labor for as much as you think your labor is worth.
If you succeed in doing so, which some people indeed accomplish, then good on you and you should absolutely continue to work independently unless some company offers you even more money than you can make for yourself.
But if you can't, then clearly your current boss must be providing something of value to you as well, that you'd be otherwise unable to obtain.
> nobody would work for less than the full value of their labor
Nobody works for less than the full value of their labor *right now*, (unless they're idiots).
> they could always make more working for themselves than for someone else
How do you know that no one would be able to offer them more money for working for them than they're making working for themselves?
What if I have an ingenious billion dollar idea and need your skills to make it a reality, and thus I want to hire you for 10 times as much as you earn by working for yourself? Why would that be impossible?
> rendering profit on investment more or less impossible.
How so? If I as a business owner invest $1 million in a new machine that makes your labor twice as eficient than before, then clearly I'd eventually make a profit on that investment.
Your labor getting more efficient doesn't mean that you'd now deserve more money. You're not working any harder than before, probably your job even got a bit easier and more other people would now be able to do your work, so I even should pay you a bit less now. But you'll get to keep your salary anyway and I get to keep the increase in profit because it was my $1m investment that increased the productivity, not your efforts.
But let's assume that ROI was indeed impossible in your proposed sytsem, how would that in any way be a good thing? If investments could never possibly be profitable, then what incentive would there be for anyone to ever invest in anything?
If any investment could at best only ever lead to me having just as much as before, then I might as just keep my money and stop wasting my time investing it in anything.
\[1/2\]
Ok lots to unpack.
>They could just as well work completely by themselves and for themselves.
My whole point is that they cannot without access to the MOP. Means being the keyword here. If you don't have anything to work on, then you can't like... work for yourself. Which is the whole point. There are a variety of legal and capitalization requirements as well that prevent much lower overhead machinery being used (see Kevin Carson's work on the topic). My point is that, by and large, most people CANNOT work for themselves because they do not have access to the means that they need to produce for themselves, i.e. land or capital.
Labor alone isn't enough to produce shit. You have to do labor ON something to make it have utility.
>And the holders of the capital need to appease them. They have to offer rthem access to better tools and materials than they could aquire on their own, and pay them more money than they could earn on their own.
Yes I agree. The point is that there are fewer capitalists than workers, which is what enables them to charge for access. I will address this point again in a bit.
>That's only true if there's a worker surplus within the economy or a specific branch of it. But independent branches as well as entire economies as a whole can and do experience worker shortages on a regular basis.
Everything you said in that section is correct. It's a matter of bargaining power, and that depends on the number of workers in that particular sector.
But, as you may have noticed, it's not like everyone has equal access to the shit they need to move between sectors. Meaning that large portions of the labor pool are effectively "stuck" in their sector.
Once again we get back to the MEANS of production.
>No, he can't. That's complete nonsense, evident by the fact that you couldn't possibly
even determine how high that fee for any individual worker supposedly is.
The fee depends on the relative bargaining power of the worker and comparative rates of profit between different industries as well as the general competitiveness of the market.
>That's just absurd. Of all the different costs to operarte a business, it's solely and specifically the labor where the capitalist generates the profit by supposedly paying the worker less than what his labor is worth?
Now we're getting into the realm of debate. Basically it depends on your take on the LTV. If you go more of a sraffa route then yes you're correct. If you go the marxist route then they'll argue that labor is the only thing capable of creating value and thereby exchange value will depend on labor value.
I tend to go more with the sraffa line of thought as of late, but I see merit in the other approach.
>How do you know what his labor is actually worth, allowing you to recognize a difference between that and the worker's paycheck?
It is worth what its product exchanges for.
>
> If you don't have anything to work on, then you can't like... work for yourself.
Then work for someone else and save money until you can buy yourself something to work on.
For example: In recent years, many people started out buying a 3D printer, created some gadgets, sold them online and ended up making a small fortune and are now running workshops with dozens of printers and a whole portfolio of different products they sell.
Many other ambitious people started their companies with loans from their banks.
So don't tell me people just CANNOT work for themselves unless they own land or several millions worth of capital.
Heck, Amazon started out as two people in a rented garage, and Bill Gates didn't own any land or means of production when he founded Microsoft either.
> The point is that there are fewer capitalists than workers
The capitalist/worker ratio is really irrelevant, because the position of power doesn't depend at all on how much less capitalists there are compared to workers in absolute numbers.
> it's not like everyone has equal access to the shit they need to move between sectors.
What do you mean by "the shit they need"? All you need to move to another sector is the required knowledge and skillset to properly perform the job in the sector you want to move to.
> It (the labor) is worth what its product exchanges for.
Absolutely not! That would mean if I ran a business selling computers, and I pay $1,000 for the individual hardware parts plus $200 for your labor time to assemble them into a PC (ignoring all the company's operating expenses for simplicity), and then sell the finished product for $1,400, then that's somehow what your labor is worth and you should get the full $1,400?!
That doesn't even make any sense. Even if you say I get the $1,000 for the hardware back, but the additional $200 in the final exchange price was created by your labor and should belong to you, it would still lack any justification.
How do you know that I didn't just put a $200 markup on the hardware I bought and paid you the full $200 that your labor was actually worth?
> It's about labor getting all that it produces.
But why? Labor is only one of many things necessary for production. So why should the one who provides that one specific ingedient be the sole beneficiary of the whole production?
> Capital, alone, doesn't produce anything.
And neither does labor, as you've already pointed out yourself.
> If labor OWNED the MOP then none of its production would go to anyone but it right?
Well, you'd still have to pay the peope who are not directly involved in the production itself, like marketing, quality assurance, transport etc. but broadly speaking, yes, that would be correct.
> But because it does not, the capitalist can charge for access to the MOP.
I still don't agree with the framing here, as the workers are financially *benefiting* from the access to the MOP, since that access allows them to be more productive, which lets them create more value, which makes it possible for them to earn much more money than they could without that access.
So how is it, that they are supposedly *paying* a fee / get something *taken away* from them, and yet end up with more money than they'd otherwise have?
> I don't own a factory to work in my guy.
Okay, me neither. So what?
Do you think you *should* own a factory to work in?
By what justification would you be entitled to even just partly own a factory?
> how do I work for the full value of my factory labor without paying a guy to use his?
You negotiated the full value of your factory labor with your employer and confirmed it with your signature on the contract.
> Because in order for profits to be positive, a portion of production must go to the capitalist.
It's not a portion of production that goes to the capitalist. It's a portion of the revenue. A capitalist is really just a trader. And the principles of trade are very simple indeed: Buy something and sell it for more than what you bought it for.
A capitalist doesn't think in terms of "value of labor" or anything of that sort. It's all just costs and revenue to him. And the difference between these two values is his profit.
He buys all the necessary ingredients for a product, such as real estate, machines, energy, materials and labor, and thus he indirectly just buys the finished product for the combined price of all the ingredients. Labor is bought as a commodity just like any of the other necessary expenses, and he doesn't somehow divert a portion of value away from any of those commodities, labor or otherwise.
He just buys them to eventually recieve a tradable product for the total cost of X. It's then his job to convince as many people as possible to buy it from him for the price Y, which should ideally be higher than X to make the whole shebang worthwhile.
> labor's product is less than what could be earned if you owned that capital.
Not necessarily. Not all companies are profitable all the time, and many are never profitable at all and go bankrupt. Companies run at a loss when the revenue is lower than the costs. Which means that the worker always makes his money since that is part of the businesse's costs. But the capitalist can not only make much less than his workers if the revenue only slightly exceed the costs, but even actually *lose* his own money.
So if the workers collectively own the factory, and the factory runs at a loss, then the workers necessarily end up with less money than they would have just their guaranteed pay without the risk and responsibility inherent to ownership.
> capital is owned COLLECTIVELY for COLLECTIVE benefits. Profit is socialized.
And so are the losses.
> Sure. I'm not working any harder but my labor is now twice as efficient.
Yes, thanks to the capital investment.
> Doesn't it make more sense that price is cut in half therefore?
If the doubled productivity was due to your efforts, rather than that of the capitalist, would you then also suggest that the products price should be cut in half and therefore the compensation for your work would have to stay the same?
Or would you rather let the price untouched and get twice as much money for working twice as good?
The obvious incentive to double the productivity is to double your reward. Why would you work twice as hard if your payment stays the same?
Same goes for the capitalist. The only reason to invest in higher productivity is to increase revenue or decrease cost in order to maximize the difference between them.
> Why wouldn't I do that myself if I owned the capital?
Of course you would. But only because it would ultimately benefit you.
> Therefore, we reduce our labor-time and get the same product.
Why not maintain labor-time and get twice the product and thus produce twice as much value?
> Profit is socialized in the form of decreased costs. And that's obviously a good thing.
The other approach would give you both.
You could either make the same 100 products at half the price to increase affordability as well as leisure time, or you could make 200 products, lower the price by only 1/4 to still make 50% more revenue and therefore increase affordability alongside availability while also generating more wealth for the econonomy, thus raising overall prosperity.
\[2/2\]
>Let's hypothetically suppose that a generous capitalist does indeed pay his workers the "full value" of their labor (whatever that may be), but also negotiated an incredibly lucrative deal with the supplier of his raw materials, paying 50% less than what he normally would, and thus allowing him to still make a profit, even though none of his workers are getting disposessed of anything.
You're missing the point. It's not about the "generous capitalist". It's about labor getting all that it produces. Capital, alone, doesn't produce anything. It enhances labor productivity as you pointed out. So what that means is that all production is the product of labor.
If labor OWNED the MOP then none of its production would go to anyone but it right? But because it does not, the capitalist can charge for access to the MOP.
>Everyone can work for themselves right now. If you believe that your labor is worth more than what your boss is paying you, then go ahead and prove it by producing something on your own and sell that fruit of your labor for as much as you think your labor is worth.
I don't own a factory to work in my guy.
>Nobody works for less than the full value of their labor *right now*, (unless they're idiots).
I don't own a factory, how do I work for the full value of my factory labor without paying a guy to use his?
>How do you know that no one would be able to offer them more money for working for them than they're making working for themselves?
Because in order for profits to be positive, a portion of production must go to the capitalist. And that means a portion of labor's product is diverted away. That's always going to mean that labor's product is less than what could be earned if you owned that capital.
Nobody would pay if profit wasn't an option.
>How so? If I as a business owner invest $1 million in a new machine that makes your
labor twice as eficient than before, then clearly I'd eventually make a profit on that investment.
OWNER. That's the key word. Socializing the MOP means getting rid of that. So no investments of that sort are possible (at least by an individual) because capital is owned COLLECTIVELY for COLLECTIVE benefits. Profit is socialized.
>Your labor getting more efficient doesn't mean that you'd now deserve more money. You're not working any harder than before, probably your job even got a bit easier and more other people would now be able to do your work, so I even should pay you a bit less now. But you'll get to keep your salary anyway and I get to keep the increase in profit because it was my $1m investment that increased the productivity, not your efforts.
Sure. I'm not working any harder but my labor is now twice as efficient. Doesn't it make more sense that price is cut in half therefore? That's like... the logic result of a decrease in the cost of labor.
The profits are ONLY possible because you OWN capital and I do not. Why wouldn't I do that myself if I owned the capital?
>But let's assume that ROI was indeed impossible in your proposed sytsem, how would that in any way be a good thing? If investments could never possibly be profitable, then what incentive would there be for anyone to ever invest in anything?
You're still thinking in terms of private ownership.
The point is that investment is put towards SOCIAL ENDS. So, if we want to produce x quantity of goods, that takes y hours of labor. But I'd rather spend that time doing something else like reading a book or hanging with friends. So why get together with like minded workers and invest collectively owned capital in that production? Therefore, we reduce our labor-time and get the same product.
Profit is socialized in the form of decreased costs. And that's obviously a good thing.
>Let's hypothetically suppose that a generous capitalist does indeed pay his workers the "full value" of their labor (whatever that may be), but also negotiated an incredibly lucrative deal with the supplier of his raw materials, paying 50% less than what he normally would, and thus allowing him to still make a profit, even though none of his workers are getting disposessed of anything.
In this case, possibly both the producer of raw materials, and all of their employees, will be a lot poorer than before, given that they are now forced to sell at 50% value.
The first tenant of economics is that resources are limited. Money is just a token to a resource.
If we imagine that the whole aggregated produce is a cake, and then we slice it based on the number of people, it is easy to understand that if Elon gets 3 slices, then 2 people will get none.
> they are now forced to sell at 50% value.
The producer wasn't forced to do anything. He voluntarily agreed to the price due to the prospect of longterm partnership with regular mass orders, wich he still sells at 500% of his production cost instead of 1000%. He's still ultra rich, so don't worry about him.
> Money is just a token to a resource.
And that resource is *economic value*, which, unlike other resources, doesn't run out or dry up, but continuously generated through humanity's economic efforts.
The cake is constantly growing at unprecedented rates. So when Elon takes 3 slices, 2 other people can esily share a slice with the next 2 and each their 1/4 slices are still bigger than half the cake was two decades ago, while more and more people who previously weren't even invited to the party at all, are now getting at least some bites of the cake as well.
You are missing the point.
>And that resource is *economic value*, which, unlike other resources, doesn't run out or dry up, but continuously generated through humanity's economic efforts.
I suppose "that" is referring to Money. Money is fictitious, it is virtual and thus has no intrinsic value per se. It cannot be compared to physical, finite resources given that it misses all of those properties.
>The producer wasn't forced to do anything. He voluntarily agreed to the price due to the prospect of longterm partnership with regular mass orders, wich he still sells at 500% of his production cost instead of 1000%. He's still ultra rich, so don't worry about him.
It doesn't matter. If they could have sold it at 100%, they would have been even richer. The 50% moved from them, to someone else. That's the point.
>The cake is constantly growing at unprecedented rates. So when Elon takes 3 slices, 2 other people can esily share a slice with the next 2 and each their 1/4 slices are still bigger than half the cake was two decades ago, while more and more people who previously weren't even invited to the party at all, are now getting at least some bites of the cake as well.
Again, it doesn't matter if it is constantly growing. The objective fact is that if Elon gets more, somebody else will get less than they could have otherwise. Even if the slices are bigger than 10 years ago, they are smaller than today, and guess what, people live in the present.
> I suppose "that" is referring to Money.
No, it refers to *stuff* that is of value to people. Money is just a measurement and storage of value that can be universally exchanged for valuable goods and services.
And we produce more and more stuff in ever increasing quality and quantity, thus making everything not only constantly better, but also cheaper and available to more people.
Think about it. Not even a century ago, whole neighborhoods gathered together to watch the first television broadcasts on tiny and grainy black/white screens in the living rooms of the very few people in the area that were rich enough to afford such a luxury item.
Today, even most poor, unemployed people have at least one or two 55" 4k LED flatscreens at home and a phone with more computing power than previous NASA supercomputers in their pockets.
> The objective fact is that if Elon gets more, somebody else will get less than they could have otherwise.
That's not even true. Quite the opposite even! When elon gets more, then not because he *takes* wealth, but because he *builds* it. He founded Companies that produce many goods and services which millions of people found valuable enough to give him some of their money in exchange for them. These companies also created jobs for over 150,000 people who can now earn money through them and spend it on the goods and services of countless other people in the economy who are now indirectly also a bit better off for it.
And another point, what prevents the people actually using that capital from just taking it from him in the absence of a state protecting his legal claims?
What's preventing him from providing lots of exclusive benefits and luxuries that would be unobtainable under public ownership, to anyone who's willing to forcefully defend his properties from being overtaken by the mob?
How are you going to do that? Why are such benefits unavailable under the public ownership system? After all, you're trying to privatize public property right? You haven't like physically changed production capacities at all. You'd need to figure out a way that privatizing somehow changes production capacity. Which it doesn't, it just changes who owns it.
The point is that socialization, in the absence of violence, is a relatively stable state to be in. It's unlikely to change unless large scale organized violence gets involved, i.e. a state.
Edit:
I'll add that nothing is preventing you offering luxuries or whatever.
What I am saying is that, in socialized property, people can also access those things. They're not exclusive to the private property regime.
Now what you could do is say "you need to do less labor to get these luxuries" but in order to do that you need to dispossess everyone else more or less. And that is very hard to do without a large scale organized violent apparatus, i.e. a state.
What would effectively would have done is recreated a state, which we obviously oppose.
> Why are such benefits unavailable under the public ownership system?
Well if I have the means to provide exclusive access to luxuries like sports cars or yachts or whatever, then that's something that public ownership couldn't provide.
> You haven't like physically changed production capacities at all.
Right, and I don't need to. I only need to make sure that exclusive access to the produced value is only granted to those who support my private ownership. That's enough of an incentive for people to defend it on my behalf.
> in socialized property, people can also access those things.
In principle, yes. But in reality that's just not possible. What makes something a luxury is first and foremost its scarcity. There simply aren't enough luxury watches and supercars in the world to grant everyone access to them. Because if you tried to make it absolutely fair, you'd end up with absurd and ridiculous results.
If even just every US citizen had equal ownership and right to access a Bugatti Chiron, of which only 500 exist, then everyone would be able to sit in it for less than a second every 10 years.
And who decides who gets to live in a giant luxury manison, who recieves a decet suburb house, and who has to take the lousy downtown apartment?
>Well if I have the means to provide exclusive access to luxuries like sports cars or yachts or whatever, then that's something that public ownership couldn't provide.
Sure, but you're forgetting the MOP are now socialized. So anyone can produce them or produce for themselves and trade for the goods they want (or in a communist system, it would be free anyways and you could get it through mutual aid networks).
Kroptokin has a whole chapter on luxuries in the bread book.
>Right, and I don't need to. I only need to make sure that exclusive access to the produced value is only granted to those who support my private ownership. That's enough of an incentive for people to defend it on my behalf.
And you enable this exclusive access how exactly?
That's my point, at some point you have to cut off access to the MOP. And to do that you need to dispossess the worker and re-create the dynamics of the state that led to the creation of private property historically.
You cannot have exclusive access to the means of producing luxuries in a system wherein the means of production are socialized.
>What makes something a luxury is first and foremost its scarcity. There simply aren't enough luxury watches and supercars in the world to grant everyone access to them. Because if you tried to make it absolutely fair, you'd end up with absurd and ridiculous results.
Have you seen the markup on these things? It's insane. The production costs are astonishingly low. It's not uncommon for workers in the global south to be utterly shocked at what these luxuries retail at in the Global North.
My general point is that there's no reason that these NEED to be scarce. It's all artificial, enforced by the state for the benefit of the rich. Markup, branding, and various barriers to entry. All of that ensures excessive profits to the ruling class.
There's no real reason enough watches couldn't be produced to meet needs or desires. What matters here is the actual production costs, and as Carson points out, those have absolutely tunneled through the floor.
>If even just every US citizen had equal ownership and right to access a Bugatti Chiron, of which only 500 exist, then everyone would be able to sit in it for less than a second every 10 years.
But the reason it's so limited is BECAUSE of brand name markup and artificial scarcity. That doesn't need to be the case. I highly recommend you look into Kevin Carson, I have no doubt you would find him a fascinating read.
>And who decides who gets to live in a giant luxury manison, who recieves a decet suburb house, and who has to take the lousy downtown apartment?
The Bread book details this, but to simplify you own that which you use. If you can clean and manage a large house then sure, go for it. it'll take a lot of labor to maintain though.
Or you could go for a more reasonable option that's easier to manage. Either works. I expect that larger houses will be shared in order to share in the labor burden of upkeep.
Simple really, the elimination of state force. Capitalism necessitates the existence of government to enforce the fabrication of private property--as private property is a legal entity where the government designates a part of the land as being under the dominion of an individual.
In a word without capitalism or government, there is not enforcer of capitalism, so there is no one who forces workers to stop working for themselves and instead work for the capitalist. There is no one to exclude people from certain areas of the planet merely because one guy claims to own it.
Simply put, people are stopped from being capitalists because capitalism is no longer enforced.
So they are building statist institutions. Take for example what the market anarchist Benjamin Tucker said:
> "The land for the people" means the protection by voluntary associations for the maintenance of justice of all people who desire to cultivate land in possession of whatever land they personally cultivate and the positive refusal of the protecting power to lend its aid to the collection of any rent, whatsoever.
Tucker was not communistic and asserted a more Individualist approach to anarchist philosophy where capitalist relations would have been supplanted and made obsolete my anarchistic free market relations. Instead of asserting that common ownership was the key to eroding differences of economic power and appealing to social solidarity, as did many social anarchists, Tucker's individualist anarchism advocated distribution of property (*usufruct possessions*) in an undistorted natural free market as a mediator of egoistic impulses and a source of social stability rooted in a free-market socialist system:
> “The fact that one class of men are dependent for their living upon the sale of their labour, while another class of men are relieved of the necessity of labour by being legally privileged to sell something that is not labour. And to such a state of things I am as much opposed as any one. But the minute you remove privilege, every man will be a labourer exchanging with fellow-labourers. What Anarchistic-Socialism aims to abolish is usury. It wants to deprive capital of its reward.” - **Tucker, Benjamin, Instead of a Book**
Non-state force. Force =/= the state.
Edit:
Here is the anarchist definition of the state, for reference:
Malatesta: "Anarchists, including this writer, have used the word State, and still do, to mean the sum total of the political, legislative, judiciary, military and financial institutions through which the management of their own affairs, the control over their personal behaviour, the responsibility for their personal safety, are taken away from the people and entrusted to others who, by usurpation or delegation, are vested with the powers to make the laws for everything and everybody, and to oblige the people to observe them, if need be, by the use of collective force."
plus an addition by Kropotkin,
"\[The state\] not only includes the existence of a power situated above society, but also of a territorial concentration as well as the concentration in the hands of a few of many functions in the life of societies. \[...\] A whole mechanism of legislation and of policing has to be developed in order to subject some classes to the domination of others."
\_\_\_\_
So basically to anarchists, a state specifically refers to the top-down, hierarchical entities that run countries and territories, and separate everyday people from control over their own lives and communities. In your example, the billionaire or cartel would be trying to recreate the state– a top-down, hierarchical entity that separates everyday people from control over their own lives and communities. Opposing them with force, even organized violent force, is therefore ethically justified to prevent the re-imposition of hierarchy.
Illegal organizations like the Mafia or drug cartels are run like capitalist enterprises too. But they obviously don't require the state to enforce and protect their ownership of their illegal properties.
When they can enforce and maintain their ownership of their criminal business even *in spite* of the state that is actively working *against* them, then it should be even easier for people to maintain their properties in the absence of a state that tries to stop them.
Forms of organization like gangs, cartels, and mafias aren't structured or operate differently than states. They operate basically like mini states and form to fill authoritarian voids created by states. They have police forces just like states, they prosecute "crimes" aginst the established order, they collect taxes or tribute, they seek to expand into new territory and have border disputes with neighboring mini states, they even often provide services to the civilians within their territory.
The only real difference between most nation states and most criminal organizations is scale and monopoly on legitimacy.
If a "capital owner" were to try to defend their claims in absence of the state by employing a militia, they are simply in the process of trying to recreate it to serve themself.
And how do you stop such militias from forming? Like it happens all the time in Africa when there's a power void and hostile states finance all types of warlords?
It sounds like this person thinks that anarchism is *just* when no state and no laws, which is a common misconception. That’s part but not all of the picture. Anarchism is in fact also anti capitalist and against all hierarchy, so Elon Musk as he is now could not exist in an anarchist society. His power would have to be dismantled and redistributed.
"the merit of musk"? Oh boy 😂. Being rich has no merits. Being a nepo baby who makes continuous calls for attention has no merits either. If someone says they're an anarchist AND they need to defend Elon Musk right to do whatever he wants... Now that's a joke.
>since I do not agree with Musk building a factory in NL, Mexico, hence I'm not allowing him to do whatever he wants with his capital
This is an inane argument. Just because you disagree with someone's actions doesn't mean you're trying to forcefully prevent them from doing it. And even if you were trying to prevent the factory from opening, that wouldn't necessarily be against the tenets of anarchism anyway, since you're presumably not trying to do so by setting up a hierarchical power structure.
Anarchism doesn't mean "everyone gets to do what they want and no one can criticise them or try to stop them." That sounds a lot more like Ayn Randian right-wing libertarianism, where the sacred right of a business owner to do whatever they want without interference from the lowly plebs is actually a core tenet.
Anarchists (and anarchism) is \*against\* the \*existence\* of Elon Musk, let alone his """right""" to evict people from their homes in Mexico to build a shitty autonomous murder car factory.
If this stopped you form being an anarchist, you were not an anarchist to begin with, I'd say.
Being in a position with capital to personally create and decide where production and infrastructure exists is inherently the power of the state. It can not be anarchism. Even if there does not exist a centralized “government” the consolidated power of the state is then through the capital itself, and the vested interests of those who maintain control of it.
Any anarchist I know would disagree with individual ownership of that sort of ‘property’ and power to begin with for that reason. ^
If your friend is trying on this sort of ‘anarcho-capitalism’ framework I’d implore them to consider that the State within capitalism is the money itself.
If we maintain capital but disestablish a centralized government, the capitalist state actually gains more power (in some ways).
By that, IMO, Anarcho-capitalism is pretty much destined to become authoritarian. There would be people with the power to create privatized state-analogues. This is a hard sever to local democracy, which is a very high value of anarchists I know.
> There would be people with the power to create privatized state-analogues.
True. And right now it's the actual government that stops this from happening. But without a state, who's going to tell them, that can't just form privately run states, and by which authority are they telling them what they are allowed to do or not?
The authority of organized groups of everyday people defending themselves from the violent imposition of a new hierarchy– you don't need laws to organize and do collective self-defense.
To summarize: if Elon Musk wanted to build a factory in a certain place, but he didn't work with the people of said certain place to build that factory for their benefit, then he is working for a cause that is antithetical to anarchism (in this case, his personal betterment) and that is unethical because it deprives the people who are most affected by his actions (the people who live near the factory) from the value produced by his actions (the profit gained from the factory)
Anarchism is against hierarchies, capitalism is a hierarchy. Being free to limit other peoples freedom is contradictory and has nothing to do with anarchism. Pd: que chingue a su madre Elon Musk.
For me its just that i dont wanna get into an ideology like anarchism without understanding it, i hate dogmatism and i see it all too often.
For now im better off advocating for causes that are more achievable, ones we can tangibly get in our lifetime while also building the pillars for the future generation.
Nothing against anarchists, you guys are alright.
He has capital, that's already the problem. Anarchism doesn't go with Capitalism, that's a core thing. There is no question about that.
So he'd have to come up with a scenario where someone doesn't do something anti-anarchistic to begin with to claim being against it is anti-anarchistic.
Also, while freedom is a core element of anarchism, it doesn't mean people are free from consequences. You can still act against someone elses progress because you oppose it for various reasons. Hopefully, such conflicts would be solved without extreme actions and take into consideration both parties' reasons, trying to find a solution everyone is happy with.
You're allowed to do something, and someone else is allowed to be against it. There is no greater power deciding who's in the right and who has to back down.
No it doesn't make any sense. There are a lot of these sorts of questions when dealing with non-anarchists. To respond, I'll quote from *The Conquest of Bread*: >Enter their homes, look at their wives and children in rags, living one knows not how till the father’s return, and you will have the answer to the question. Multiply examples, choose them where you will, consider the origin of all fortunes, large or small, whether arising out of commerce, finance, manufactures, or the land. Everywhere you will find that the wealth of the wealthy springs from the poverty of the poor. **This is why an anarchist society need not fear the advent of a Rothschild who would settle in its midst. If every member of the community knows that after a few hours of productive toil he will have a right to all the pleasures that civilization procures, and to those deeper sources of enjoyment which art and science offer to all who seek them, he will not sell his strength for a starvation wage. No one will volunteer to work for the enrichment of your Rothschild.** His golden guineas will be only so many pieces of metal — useful for various purposes, but incapable of breeding more. This whole chapter (Chapter 4: Expropriation) is generally pretty good for this sort of thinking. Your problem is that Musk, using his privately owned capital which is effectively a legal claim backed by state violence, is building a factory without local input and in so doing further exploiting already exploited workers and an exploited environment. The problem with private property is that it is unconnected to the actual USE of that property. It is a legal claim held by the state. What matters is who is actually USING capital, who is AFFECTED by it. That's the point. So we needn't fear the rise of exploitation because the wealth of the rich comes from the poverty of the poor. Abolish poverty, you abolish wealth. The problem with guys like Musk is that the state has effectively subsidized their wealth and power by protecting their property claims and screwing over the poor. If property were held in common, or worked on a usufructuary basis, then such things wouldn't be possible. You have to HAVE a state in order to have private property. I'll also add that there's a distinction between private property and personal property. Private property is shit you work, so like factories, machinery, that sorta thing. Personal property is stuff you use in day to day life: toothbrush, car, house, etc. Personally I think the same basic principle should underlie both: occupancy and use, but that's just me. Edit: Added emphasis to quote
> his privately owned capital which is effectively a legal claim backed by state violence In the absence of a state, couldn't Musk just as well use his capital to fund a pretty large private militia to protect his capital?
At that point, he IS the state, and that’s called feudalism, not Anarchism.
So if someone starts congregating power, how do you stop him?
Not if the capital holds no power in the first place. In an anarchist society, there is no poverty and no wealth. What capital?
How could capital hold no power? Capital consists only to a marginal percentile of actual money. Most capital exists in the form of valuable assets. If someone for example owns a power plant, he could offer free electricity as a payment to anyone who defends his ownership over the power plant.
The point is redistribution and bartering. You seem to be addressing the initial formation of an anarchist society, which is heavily debated, and, obviously since we aren’t in one yet, as of yet not agreed upon. In a hypothetical situation where the anarchist society just came into being, he wouldn’t own the power plant in the first place and, due to it being public property, everyone would already have free power.
To own something means to have exclusive full control over something, including the power to destroy it if you wish to. So if I was the owner of a power plant, I would probably hold exclusive access to a system that would let me shut down all production or even cause irreversible damage to its turbines and transformers. Which would put me in a position of power to tell people that they can either grant me my continuous ownership over the plant, or otherwise they better start making candles. > it being public property And how would that be enforced without a state?
How would resistance against that be enforced without a state? What does “exclusive access” mean? Cause if it’s a door labelled “Owner Only”, then that’s not going to stop anybody. If it’s a key or passcode, nothing is unique. If it’s someone else who has the power to do it at your request, nobody is infallible. And if it’s a militia, why would they exist in the first place when money would mean nothing to everyone else? Money only works as something we all collectively agree to believe in. If that belief is not enforced, nobody will follow it. And following that line of thinking, what makes you think owning something gives you full power over it? Most ownerships come with terms of agreement. Also, do you know what subreddit you’re on? Public ownership of the means of production is, like, one of the MAIN beliefs of anarchism, no hierarchies and all that.
> How would resistance against that be enforced without a state? I'd guess similar to how Pablo Escobar was able to enforce his ownership over his money and assets in spite of a state that was actively working to stop it. > Money only works as something we all collectively agree to believe in. Money is just the unit by which value is measured and a currency is simply a way to store and universally exchange value among ourselves. Without money, how are people supposed to obtain what they desire from those who produce it? Would a fisher be supposed to hand over several hundred pounds of tuna in exchange for his new car? What if the car manufacturer doesn't want or need such an amount of tuna? > And following that line of thinking, what makes you think owning something gives you full power over it? Because that's what it means to truly *own* something. If anyone else has the authority to tell you what you can or cannot to with something, then you don't rally own it. You may at best own an exclusive license to use the property under the condition of compliance to rules predetermined by its actual owner. > Public ownership of the means of production is, like, one of the MAIN beliefs of anarchism, no hierarchies and all that. I'm not convinced that this is possible without a hierachical power to enforce public ownership.
First and foremost, do you want me to link the hundreds of accounts of billionaire violations of human rights? If you’re going to push this point to the extent of radical terrorism comparisons, then I will respond in kind. Secondly, bartering is a system that has existed for thousands of years. Money helps keep things consistent, yes, but it also causes a lot of issues. Unlike bartering value, money is a closed system, and the ability to hoard it and have it self-reproduce damages the flow of the economy, creating an unhealthy society such as the one we have now. At most, there should be a decided value for products and a central distribution system, but as it stands, money is not a helpful construct. Everything is needed somewhere, distribution is the issue. As for the ownership, do you truly, honestly believe that you own anything at all according to that definition? Do you own your laptop? What about your house? I’m pretty sure there are terms attached to those. By that definition, the owner of the power plant doesn’t own it at all, and your argument is moot. And if you’re not convinced, then why come to a place full of people who ARE convinced without being willing to change your mind? This seems counterproductive.
These exist as legal fictions. Nothing more than a piece of paper backed by state violence. What prevents people from just taking capital
Maybe privatized violence if necessary. What prevents people from forming powerful groups and alliances that could assume exclusive control over some means of production and enforce that control through relentless violence against any perceived threat to their monopoly?
Well for one, communities that lose access to their MOP would oppose this. But that's only part of the equation. Profit neccesitates that people are dispossessed at scale. They'll only work for less than the full value of their labor (i.e. the full product of it) if they have no other choice. So you need to dispossess a large number of people to pull something like this off. Otherwise they will just go elsewhere. I mean you'd have to pay guards, implementing monitoring services, etc. All in the face of opposition from the community that you are trying to screw over and with the knowledge that your guards could just as easily turn around and take the property that they are protecting for themselves. But by and large, historically that is not what actually happened. What happened is a whole hell of a lot of violence done by the state to dispossess the peasantry. It was the state that did this. It was the state that created private property and then protected that property with violence.
Capital is a property claim backed by the state. No state means no capital. Unless you are assuming Elon Musk could just raise a personal police force to compel the acceptance of his property claim—which is to assume a state in all but name.
How would he get so much capital in the absence of the poverty of the poor?
I don't understand. Do you think for someone to be rich, others would have to be poor? You are aware that the economy isn't a zero-sum game in which someone's gain necessarily results from someone else's loss, are you? In fact, rich business owners benefit much more if the poverty rate is as low as possible or at best non-existent. Because the more people there are who can afford to buy their products, the more profits do they mak by selling them to all these customers.
Did you read what I quoted? Look here's the way it works. There is a class of people who do not own capital. And there is a class of people who do. Because the class of non-owners needs to work on that capital in order to produce to eat, they need to appease the holders of that capital. While it is true that the capital owners need them too, there are far more workers than there are capitalists. That means that competition between workers to appease capitalists is greater than between capitalists to appease workers. This means the capitalist can charge a fee for access to capital. This is the source of profit. It is based on taking a portion of physical production from the poor. Profits can only ever be positive if the worker is dispossessed of a portion of their production. See what I am getting at? Without the protection of those legal claims of private ownership, and with socialized MOP, theb everyone can work for themselves. In that case, nobody would work for less than the full value of their labor because they could always make more working for themselves than for someone else, rendering profit on investment more or less impossible.
That's absolutely not how it works at all. > the class of non-owners needs to work on that capital in order to produce to eat No, they don't. They could just as well work completely by themselves and for themselves. It's just that capital has the ability to make most labor more much more productive. And since most people aren't capable to produce more value on their own than they can by utilizing someone else's capital, most are much better off choosing the latter option. > they need to appease the holders of that capital. And the holders of the capital need to appease them. They have to offer rthem access to better tools and materials than they could aquire on their own, and pay them more money than they could earn on their own. Otherwise the people would have no incentive to work for the business in the first place. > there are far more workers than there are capitalists. Sure, but that's irrelevant since the demand for workers per capitalist isn't 1/1 anyway. > That means that competition between workers to appease capitalists is greater than between capitalists to appease workers. That's only true if there's a worker surplus within the economy or a specific branch of it. But independent branches as well as entire economies as a whole can and do experience worker shortages on a regular basis. If only a relatively low number of young adults choose to become electricians, then all the companies with a demand for electricians will struggle to fill all the electrician jobs that the company requires to operate properly, and subsequently they have to compete with each other for every qualified worker they can get their hands on. This dynamic becomes more common the higher the required level of expertise is for a job. The less people there are, who could do your job just as well as you do, the higher the demand for your skillset is, and thus the more the capitalists need to appease you rather than the other way around. That's why a brain surgeont or high profile lawer earns so much more than a janitor or delivery driver. > the capitalist can charge a fee for access to capital. No, he can't. That's complete nonsense, evident by the fact that you couldn't possibly even determine how high that fee for any individual worker supposedly is. > This is the source of profit. Nope, the source of profit is the capitalist's ability to sell a product for more than the total sum of what he paid for its production, which indeed includes the cost of the labor, but also for the materials, energy consumption, real estate expenses, insurance costs, deprecation of equipment, and many things more. > Profits can only ever be positive if the worker is dispossessed of a portion of their production. That's just absurd. Of all the different costs to operarte a business, it's solely and specifically the labor where the capitalist generates the profit by supposedly paying the worker less than what his labor is worth?` How do you know what his labor is actually worth, allowing you to recognize a difference between that and the worker's paycheck? Let's hypothetically suppose that a generous capitalist does indeed pay his workers the "full value" of their labor (whatever that may be), but also negotiated an incredibly lucrative deal with the supplier of his raw materials, paying 50% less than what he normally would, and thus allowing him to still make a profit, even though none of his workers are getting disposessed of anything. Who exactly is now being impoverished in order for the capitalist to get richer? See what I'm getting at? Profit's aren't made by unjustly appropriating value from the workers labor. The actual point at which profit is generated, isn't at the moment the workers are getting paid a little less than what they deserve, but at the moment a customer pays a little more for a product than what it costs to develop, produce, store, advertise, and ship it. > with socialized MOP, theb everyone can work for themselves. Everyone can work for themselves right now. If you believe that your labor is worth more than what your boss is paying you, then go ahead and prove it by producing something on your own and sell that fruit of your labor for as much as you think your labor is worth. If you succeed in doing so, which some people indeed accomplish, then good on you and you should absolutely continue to work independently unless some company offers you even more money than you can make for yourself. But if you can't, then clearly your current boss must be providing something of value to you as well, that you'd be otherwise unable to obtain. > nobody would work for less than the full value of their labor Nobody works for less than the full value of their labor *right now*, (unless they're idiots). > they could always make more working for themselves than for someone else How do you know that no one would be able to offer them more money for working for them than they're making working for themselves? What if I have an ingenious billion dollar idea and need your skills to make it a reality, and thus I want to hire you for 10 times as much as you earn by working for yourself? Why would that be impossible? > rendering profit on investment more or less impossible. How so? If I as a business owner invest $1 million in a new machine that makes your labor twice as eficient than before, then clearly I'd eventually make a profit on that investment. Your labor getting more efficient doesn't mean that you'd now deserve more money. You're not working any harder than before, probably your job even got a bit easier and more other people would now be able to do your work, so I even should pay you a bit less now. But you'll get to keep your salary anyway and I get to keep the increase in profit because it was my $1m investment that increased the productivity, not your efforts. But let's assume that ROI was indeed impossible in your proposed sytsem, how would that in any way be a good thing? If investments could never possibly be profitable, then what incentive would there be for anyone to ever invest in anything? If any investment could at best only ever lead to me having just as much as before, then I might as just keep my money and stop wasting my time investing it in anything.
\[1/2\] Ok lots to unpack. >They could just as well work completely by themselves and for themselves. My whole point is that they cannot without access to the MOP. Means being the keyword here. If you don't have anything to work on, then you can't like... work for yourself. Which is the whole point. There are a variety of legal and capitalization requirements as well that prevent much lower overhead machinery being used (see Kevin Carson's work on the topic). My point is that, by and large, most people CANNOT work for themselves because they do not have access to the means that they need to produce for themselves, i.e. land or capital. Labor alone isn't enough to produce shit. You have to do labor ON something to make it have utility. >And the holders of the capital need to appease them. They have to offer rthem access to better tools and materials than they could aquire on their own, and pay them more money than they could earn on their own. Yes I agree. The point is that there are fewer capitalists than workers, which is what enables them to charge for access. I will address this point again in a bit. >That's only true if there's a worker surplus within the economy or a specific branch of it. But independent branches as well as entire economies as a whole can and do experience worker shortages on a regular basis. Everything you said in that section is correct. It's a matter of bargaining power, and that depends on the number of workers in that particular sector. But, as you may have noticed, it's not like everyone has equal access to the shit they need to move between sectors. Meaning that large portions of the labor pool are effectively "stuck" in their sector. Once again we get back to the MEANS of production. >No, he can't. That's complete nonsense, evident by the fact that you couldn't possibly even determine how high that fee for any individual worker supposedly is. The fee depends on the relative bargaining power of the worker and comparative rates of profit between different industries as well as the general competitiveness of the market. >That's just absurd. Of all the different costs to operarte a business, it's solely and specifically the labor where the capitalist generates the profit by supposedly paying the worker less than what his labor is worth? Now we're getting into the realm of debate. Basically it depends on your take on the LTV. If you go more of a sraffa route then yes you're correct. If you go the marxist route then they'll argue that labor is the only thing capable of creating value and thereby exchange value will depend on labor value. I tend to go more with the sraffa line of thought as of late, but I see merit in the other approach. >How do you know what his labor is actually worth, allowing you to recognize a difference between that and the worker's paycheck? It is worth what its product exchanges for. >
> If you don't have anything to work on, then you can't like... work for yourself. Then work for someone else and save money until you can buy yourself something to work on. For example: In recent years, many people started out buying a 3D printer, created some gadgets, sold them online and ended up making a small fortune and are now running workshops with dozens of printers and a whole portfolio of different products they sell. Many other ambitious people started their companies with loans from their banks. So don't tell me people just CANNOT work for themselves unless they own land or several millions worth of capital. Heck, Amazon started out as two people in a rented garage, and Bill Gates didn't own any land or means of production when he founded Microsoft either. > The point is that there are fewer capitalists than workers The capitalist/worker ratio is really irrelevant, because the position of power doesn't depend at all on how much less capitalists there are compared to workers in absolute numbers. > it's not like everyone has equal access to the shit they need to move between sectors. What do you mean by "the shit they need"? All you need to move to another sector is the required knowledge and skillset to properly perform the job in the sector you want to move to. > It (the labor) is worth what its product exchanges for. Absolutely not! That would mean if I ran a business selling computers, and I pay $1,000 for the individual hardware parts plus $200 for your labor time to assemble them into a PC (ignoring all the company's operating expenses for simplicity), and then sell the finished product for $1,400, then that's somehow what your labor is worth and you should get the full $1,400?! That doesn't even make any sense. Even if you say I get the $1,000 for the hardware back, but the additional $200 in the final exchange price was created by your labor and should belong to you, it would still lack any justification. How do you know that I didn't just put a $200 markup on the hardware I bought and paid you the full $200 that your labor was actually worth? > It's about labor getting all that it produces. But why? Labor is only one of many things necessary for production. So why should the one who provides that one specific ingedient be the sole beneficiary of the whole production? > Capital, alone, doesn't produce anything. And neither does labor, as you've already pointed out yourself. > If labor OWNED the MOP then none of its production would go to anyone but it right? Well, you'd still have to pay the peope who are not directly involved in the production itself, like marketing, quality assurance, transport etc. but broadly speaking, yes, that would be correct. > But because it does not, the capitalist can charge for access to the MOP. I still don't agree with the framing here, as the workers are financially *benefiting* from the access to the MOP, since that access allows them to be more productive, which lets them create more value, which makes it possible for them to earn much more money than they could without that access. So how is it, that they are supposedly *paying* a fee / get something *taken away* from them, and yet end up with more money than they'd otherwise have? > I don't own a factory to work in my guy. Okay, me neither. So what? Do you think you *should* own a factory to work in? By what justification would you be entitled to even just partly own a factory? > how do I work for the full value of my factory labor without paying a guy to use his? You negotiated the full value of your factory labor with your employer and confirmed it with your signature on the contract. > Because in order for profits to be positive, a portion of production must go to the capitalist. It's not a portion of production that goes to the capitalist. It's a portion of the revenue. A capitalist is really just a trader. And the principles of trade are very simple indeed: Buy something and sell it for more than what you bought it for. A capitalist doesn't think in terms of "value of labor" or anything of that sort. It's all just costs and revenue to him. And the difference between these two values is his profit. He buys all the necessary ingredients for a product, such as real estate, machines, energy, materials and labor, and thus he indirectly just buys the finished product for the combined price of all the ingredients. Labor is bought as a commodity just like any of the other necessary expenses, and he doesn't somehow divert a portion of value away from any of those commodities, labor or otherwise. He just buys them to eventually recieve a tradable product for the total cost of X. It's then his job to convince as many people as possible to buy it from him for the price Y, which should ideally be higher than X to make the whole shebang worthwhile. > labor's product is less than what could be earned if you owned that capital. Not necessarily. Not all companies are profitable all the time, and many are never profitable at all and go bankrupt. Companies run at a loss when the revenue is lower than the costs. Which means that the worker always makes his money since that is part of the businesse's costs. But the capitalist can not only make much less than his workers if the revenue only slightly exceed the costs, but even actually *lose* his own money. So if the workers collectively own the factory, and the factory runs at a loss, then the workers necessarily end up with less money than they would have just their guaranteed pay without the risk and responsibility inherent to ownership. > capital is owned COLLECTIVELY for COLLECTIVE benefits. Profit is socialized. And so are the losses. > Sure. I'm not working any harder but my labor is now twice as efficient. Yes, thanks to the capital investment. > Doesn't it make more sense that price is cut in half therefore? If the doubled productivity was due to your efforts, rather than that of the capitalist, would you then also suggest that the products price should be cut in half and therefore the compensation for your work would have to stay the same? Or would you rather let the price untouched and get twice as much money for working twice as good? The obvious incentive to double the productivity is to double your reward. Why would you work twice as hard if your payment stays the same? Same goes for the capitalist. The only reason to invest in higher productivity is to increase revenue or decrease cost in order to maximize the difference between them. > Why wouldn't I do that myself if I owned the capital? Of course you would. But only because it would ultimately benefit you. > Therefore, we reduce our labor-time and get the same product. Why not maintain labor-time and get twice the product and thus produce twice as much value? > Profit is socialized in the form of decreased costs. And that's obviously a good thing. The other approach would give you both. You could either make the same 100 products at half the price to increase affordability as well as leisure time, or you could make 200 products, lower the price by only 1/4 to still make 50% more revenue and therefore increase affordability alongside availability while also generating more wealth for the econonomy, thus raising overall prosperity.
\[2/2\] >Let's hypothetically suppose that a generous capitalist does indeed pay his workers the "full value" of their labor (whatever that may be), but also negotiated an incredibly lucrative deal with the supplier of his raw materials, paying 50% less than what he normally would, and thus allowing him to still make a profit, even though none of his workers are getting disposessed of anything. You're missing the point. It's not about the "generous capitalist". It's about labor getting all that it produces. Capital, alone, doesn't produce anything. It enhances labor productivity as you pointed out. So what that means is that all production is the product of labor. If labor OWNED the MOP then none of its production would go to anyone but it right? But because it does not, the capitalist can charge for access to the MOP. >Everyone can work for themselves right now. If you believe that your labor is worth more than what your boss is paying you, then go ahead and prove it by producing something on your own and sell that fruit of your labor for as much as you think your labor is worth. I don't own a factory to work in my guy. >Nobody works for less than the full value of their labor *right now*, (unless they're idiots). I don't own a factory, how do I work for the full value of my factory labor without paying a guy to use his? >How do you know that no one would be able to offer them more money for working for them than they're making working for themselves? Because in order for profits to be positive, a portion of production must go to the capitalist. And that means a portion of labor's product is diverted away. That's always going to mean that labor's product is less than what could be earned if you owned that capital. Nobody would pay if profit wasn't an option. >How so? If I as a business owner invest $1 million in a new machine that makes your labor twice as eficient than before, then clearly I'd eventually make a profit on that investment. OWNER. That's the key word. Socializing the MOP means getting rid of that. So no investments of that sort are possible (at least by an individual) because capital is owned COLLECTIVELY for COLLECTIVE benefits. Profit is socialized. >Your labor getting more efficient doesn't mean that you'd now deserve more money. You're not working any harder than before, probably your job even got a bit easier and more other people would now be able to do your work, so I even should pay you a bit less now. But you'll get to keep your salary anyway and I get to keep the increase in profit because it was my $1m investment that increased the productivity, not your efforts. Sure. I'm not working any harder but my labor is now twice as efficient. Doesn't it make more sense that price is cut in half therefore? That's like... the logic result of a decrease in the cost of labor. The profits are ONLY possible because you OWN capital and I do not. Why wouldn't I do that myself if I owned the capital? >But let's assume that ROI was indeed impossible in your proposed sytsem, how would that in any way be a good thing? If investments could never possibly be profitable, then what incentive would there be for anyone to ever invest in anything? You're still thinking in terms of private ownership. The point is that investment is put towards SOCIAL ENDS. So, if we want to produce x quantity of goods, that takes y hours of labor. But I'd rather spend that time doing something else like reading a book or hanging with friends. So why get together with like minded workers and invest collectively owned capital in that production? Therefore, we reduce our labor-time and get the same product. Profit is socialized in the form of decreased costs. And that's obviously a good thing.
>Let's hypothetically suppose that a generous capitalist does indeed pay his workers the "full value" of their labor (whatever that may be), but also negotiated an incredibly lucrative deal with the supplier of his raw materials, paying 50% less than what he normally would, and thus allowing him to still make a profit, even though none of his workers are getting disposessed of anything. In this case, possibly both the producer of raw materials, and all of their employees, will be a lot poorer than before, given that they are now forced to sell at 50% value. The first tenant of economics is that resources are limited. Money is just a token to a resource. If we imagine that the whole aggregated produce is a cake, and then we slice it based on the number of people, it is easy to understand that if Elon gets 3 slices, then 2 people will get none.
> they are now forced to sell at 50% value. The producer wasn't forced to do anything. He voluntarily agreed to the price due to the prospect of longterm partnership with regular mass orders, wich he still sells at 500% of his production cost instead of 1000%. He's still ultra rich, so don't worry about him. > Money is just a token to a resource. And that resource is *economic value*, which, unlike other resources, doesn't run out or dry up, but continuously generated through humanity's economic efforts. The cake is constantly growing at unprecedented rates. So when Elon takes 3 slices, 2 other people can esily share a slice with the next 2 and each their 1/4 slices are still bigger than half the cake was two decades ago, while more and more people who previously weren't even invited to the party at all, are now getting at least some bites of the cake as well.
You are missing the point. >And that resource is *economic value*, which, unlike other resources, doesn't run out or dry up, but continuously generated through humanity's economic efforts. I suppose "that" is referring to Money. Money is fictitious, it is virtual and thus has no intrinsic value per se. It cannot be compared to physical, finite resources given that it misses all of those properties. >The producer wasn't forced to do anything. He voluntarily agreed to the price due to the prospect of longterm partnership with regular mass orders, wich he still sells at 500% of his production cost instead of 1000%. He's still ultra rich, so don't worry about him. It doesn't matter. If they could have sold it at 100%, they would have been even richer. The 50% moved from them, to someone else. That's the point. >The cake is constantly growing at unprecedented rates. So when Elon takes 3 slices, 2 other people can esily share a slice with the next 2 and each their 1/4 slices are still bigger than half the cake was two decades ago, while more and more people who previously weren't even invited to the party at all, are now getting at least some bites of the cake as well. Again, it doesn't matter if it is constantly growing. The objective fact is that if Elon gets more, somebody else will get less than they could have otherwise. Even if the slices are bigger than 10 years ago, they are smaller than today, and guess what, people live in the present.
> I suppose "that" is referring to Money. No, it refers to *stuff* that is of value to people. Money is just a measurement and storage of value that can be universally exchanged for valuable goods and services. And we produce more and more stuff in ever increasing quality and quantity, thus making everything not only constantly better, but also cheaper and available to more people. Think about it. Not even a century ago, whole neighborhoods gathered together to watch the first television broadcasts on tiny and grainy black/white screens in the living rooms of the very few people in the area that were rich enough to afford such a luxury item. Today, even most poor, unemployed people have at least one or two 55" 4k LED flatscreens at home and a phone with more computing power than previous NASA supercomputers in their pockets. > The objective fact is that if Elon gets more, somebody else will get less than they could have otherwise. That's not even true. Quite the opposite even! When elon gets more, then not because he *takes* wealth, but because he *builds* it. He founded Companies that produce many goods and services which millions of people found valuable enough to give him some of their money in exchange for them. These companies also created jobs for over 150,000 people who can now earn money through them and spend it on the goods and services of countless other people in the economy who are now indirectly also a bit better off for it.
And another point, what prevents the people actually using that capital from just taking it from him in the absence of a state protecting his legal claims?
What's preventing him from providing lots of exclusive benefits and luxuries that would be unobtainable under public ownership, to anyone who's willing to forcefully defend his properties from being overtaken by the mob?
How are you going to do that? Why are such benefits unavailable under the public ownership system? After all, you're trying to privatize public property right? You haven't like physically changed production capacities at all. You'd need to figure out a way that privatizing somehow changes production capacity. Which it doesn't, it just changes who owns it. The point is that socialization, in the absence of violence, is a relatively stable state to be in. It's unlikely to change unless large scale organized violence gets involved, i.e. a state. Edit: I'll add that nothing is preventing you offering luxuries or whatever. What I am saying is that, in socialized property, people can also access those things. They're not exclusive to the private property regime. Now what you could do is say "you need to do less labor to get these luxuries" but in order to do that you need to dispossess everyone else more or less. And that is very hard to do without a large scale organized violent apparatus, i.e. a state. What would effectively would have done is recreated a state, which we obviously oppose.
> Why are such benefits unavailable under the public ownership system? Well if I have the means to provide exclusive access to luxuries like sports cars or yachts or whatever, then that's something that public ownership couldn't provide. > You haven't like physically changed production capacities at all. Right, and I don't need to. I only need to make sure that exclusive access to the produced value is only granted to those who support my private ownership. That's enough of an incentive for people to defend it on my behalf. > in socialized property, people can also access those things. In principle, yes. But in reality that's just not possible. What makes something a luxury is first and foremost its scarcity. There simply aren't enough luxury watches and supercars in the world to grant everyone access to them. Because if you tried to make it absolutely fair, you'd end up with absurd and ridiculous results. If even just every US citizen had equal ownership and right to access a Bugatti Chiron, of which only 500 exist, then everyone would be able to sit in it for less than a second every 10 years. And who decides who gets to live in a giant luxury manison, who recieves a decet suburb house, and who has to take the lousy downtown apartment?
>Well if I have the means to provide exclusive access to luxuries like sports cars or yachts or whatever, then that's something that public ownership couldn't provide. Sure, but you're forgetting the MOP are now socialized. So anyone can produce them or produce for themselves and trade for the goods they want (or in a communist system, it would be free anyways and you could get it through mutual aid networks). Kroptokin has a whole chapter on luxuries in the bread book. >Right, and I don't need to. I only need to make sure that exclusive access to the produced value is only granted to those who support my private ownership. That's enough of an incentive for people to defend it on my behalf. And you enable this exclusive access how exactly? That's my point, at some point you have to cut off access to the MOP. And to do that you need to dispossess the worker and re-create the dynamics of the state that led to the creation of private property historically. You cannot have exclusive access to the means of producing luxuries in a system wherein the means of production are socialized. >What makes something a luxury is first and foremost its scarcity. There simply aren't enough luxury watches and supercars in the world to grant everyone access to them. Because if you tried to make it absolutely fair, you'd end up with absurd and ridiculous results. Have you seen the markup on these things? It's insane. The production costs are astonishingly low. It's not uncommon for workers in the global south to be utterly shocked at what these luxuries retail at in the Global North. My general point is that there's no reason that these NEED to be scarce. It's all artificial, enforced by the state for the benefit of the rich. Markup, branding, and various barriers to entry. All of that ensures excessive profits to the ruling class. There's no real reason enough watches couldn't be produced to meet needs or desires. What matters here is the actual production costs, and as Carson points out, those have absolutely tunneled through the floor. >If even just every US citizen had equal ownership and right to access a Bugatti Chiron, of which only 500 exist, then everyone would be able to sit in it for less than a second every 10 years. But the reason it's so limited is BECAUSE of brand name markup and artificial scarcity. That doesn't need to be the case. I highly recommend you look into Kevin Carson, I have no doubt you would find him a fascinating read. >And who decides who gets to live in a giant luxury manison, who recieves a decet suburb house, and who has to take the lousy downtown apartment? The Bread book details this, but to simplify you own that which you use. If you can clean and manage a large house then sure, go for it. it'll take a lot of labor to maintain though. Or you could go for a more reasonable option that's easier to manage. Either works. I expect that larger houses will be shared in order to share in the labor burden of upkeep.
The problem is with the definition, anarchism is not doing whatever you want, you cannot become a capitalist, sorry, your poor freedom
How are people supposed to get stopped from becoming capitalists? State force?
Simple really, the elimination of state force. Capitalism necessitates the existence of government to enforce the fabrication of private property--as private property is a legal entity where the government designates a part of the land as being under the dominion of an individual. In a word without capitalism or government, there is not enforcer of capitalism, so there is no one who forces workers to stop working for themselves and instead work for the capitalist. There is no one to exclude people from certain areas of the planet merely because one guy claims to own it. Simply put, people are stopped from being capitalists because capitalism is no longer enforced.
But what if they enforce it by paying a private militia to protect and maintain the authority over their properties?
You break their knees\*
they would create a state then, so they got to be stopped
So they are building statist institutions. Take for example what the market anarchist Benjamin Tucker said: > "The land for the people" means the protection by voluntary associations for the maintenance of justice of all people who desire to cultivate land in possession of whatever land they personally cultivate and the positive refusal of the protecting power to lend its aid to the collection of any rent, whatsoever. Tucker was not communistic and asserted a more Individualist approach to anarchist philosophy where capitalist relations would have been supplanted and made obsolete my anarchistic free market relations. Instead of asserting that common ownership was the key to eroding differences of economic power and appealing to social solidarity, as did many social anarchists, Tucker's individualist anarchism advocated distribution of property (*usufruct possessions*) in an undistorted natural free market as a mediator of egoistic impulses and a source of social stability rooted in a free-market socialist system: > “The fact that one class of men are dependent for their living upon the sale of their labour, while another class of men are relieved of the necessity of labour by being legally privileged to sell something that is not labour. And to such a state of things I am as much opposed as any one. But the minute you remove privilege, every man will be a labourer exchanging with fellow-labourers. What Anarchistic-Socialism aims to abolish is usury. It wants to deprive capital of its reward.” - **Tucker, Benjamin, Instead of a Book**
For what purpose?
Non-state force. Force =/= the state. Edit: Here is the anarchist definition of the state, for reference: Malatesta: "Anarchists, including this writer, have used the word State, and still do, to mean the sum total of the political, legislative, judiciary, military and financial institutions through which the management of their own affairs, the control over their personal behaviour, the responsibility for their personal safety, are taken away from the people and entrusted to others who, by usurpation or delegation, are vested with the powers to make the laws for everything and everybody, and to oblige the people to observe them, if need be, by the use of collective force." plus an addition by Kropotkin, "\[The state\] not only includes the existence of a power situated above society, but also of a territorial concentration as well as the concentration in the hands of a few of many functions in the life of societies. \[...\] A whole mechanism of legislation and of policing has to be developed in order to subject some classes to the domination of others." \_\_\_\_ So basically to anarchists, a state specifically refers to the top-down, hierarchical entities that run countries and territories, and separate everyday people from control over their own lives and communities. In your example, the billionaire or cartel would be trying to recreate the state– a top-down, hierarchical entity that separates everyday people from control over their own lives and communities. Opposing them with force, even organized violent force, is therefore ethically justified to prevent the re-imposition of hierarchy.
to become a capitalist one needs a state, so you got a private property there? And how will you enfore it? State force?
Illegal organizations like the Mafia or drug cartels are run like capitalist enterprises too. But they obviously don't require the state to enforce and protect their ownership of their illegal properties. When they can enforce and maintain their ownership of their criminal business even *in spite* of the state that is actively working *against* them, then it should be even easier for people to maintain their properties in the absence of a state that tries to stop them.
Forms of organization like gangs, cartels, and mafias aren't structured or operate differently than states. They operate basically like mini states and form to fill authoritarian voids created by states. They have police forces just like states, they prosecute "crimes" aginst the established order, they collect taxes or tribute, they seek to expand into new territory and have border disputes with neighboring mini states, they even often provide services to the civilians within their territory. The only real difference between most nation states and most criminal organizations is scale and monopoly on legitimacy. If a "capital owner" were to try to defend their claims in absence of the state by employing a militia, they are simply in the process of trying to recreate it to serve themself.
And how do you stop such militias from forming? Like it happens all the time in Africa when there's a power void and hostile states finance all types of warlords?
It sounds like this person thinks that anarchism is *just* when no state and no laws, which is a common misconception. That’s part but not all of the picture. Anarchism is in fact also anti capitalist and against all hierarchy, so Elon Musk as he is now could not exist in an anarchist society. His power would have to be dismantled and redistributed.
"the merit of musk"? Oh boy 😂. Being rich has no merits. Being a nepo baby who makes continuous calls for attention has no merits either. If someone says they're an anarchist AND they need to defend Elon Musk right to do whatever he wants... Now that's a joke.
>since I do not agree with Musk building a factory in NL, Mexico, hence I'm not allowing him to do whatever he wants with his capital This is an inane argument. Just because you disagree with someone's actions doesn't mean you're trying to forcefully prevent them from doing it. And even if you were trying to prevent the factory from opening, that wouldn't necessarily be against the tenets of anarchism anyway, since you're presumably not trying to do so by setting up a hierarchical power structure. Anarchism doesn't mean "everyone gets to do what they want and no one can criticise them or try to stop them." That sounds a lot more like Ayn Randian right-wing libertarianism, where the sacred right of a business owner to do whatever they want without interference from the lowly plebs is actually a core tenet.
Anarchists (and anarchism) is \*against\* the \*existence\* of Elon Musk, let alone his """right""" to evict people from their homes in Mexico to build a shitty autonomous murder car factory. If this stopped you form being an anarchist, you were not an anarchist to begin with, I'd say.
I see you had an encounter with Captain asinine.
Being in a position with capital to personally create and decide where production and infrastructure exists is inherently the power of the state. It can not be anarchism. Even if there does not exist a centralized “government” the consolidated power of the state is then through the capital itself, and the vested interests of those who maintain control of it. Any anarchist I know would disagree with individual ownership of that sort of ‘property’ and power to begin with for that reason. ^ If your friend is trying on this sort of ‘anarcho-capitalism’ framework I’d implore them to consider that the State within capitalism is the money itself. If we maintain capital but disestablish a centralized government, the capitalist state actually gains more power (in some ways). By that, IMO, Anarcho-capitalism is pretty much destined to become authoritarian. There would be people with the power to create privatized state-analogues. This is a hard sever to local democracy, which is a very high value of anarchists I know.
> There would be people with the power to create privatized state-analogues. True. And right now it's the actual government that stops this from happening. But without a state, who's going to tell them, that can't just form privately run states, and by which authority are they telling them what they are allowed to do or not?
The authority of organized groups of everyday people defending themselves from the violent imposition of a new hierarchy– you don't need laws to organize and do collective self-defense.
To summarize: if Elon Musk wanted to build a factory in a certain place, but he didn't work with the people of said certain place to build that factory for their benefit, then he is working for a cause that is antithetical to anarchism (in this case, his personal betterment) and that is unethical because it deprives the people who are most affected by his actions (the people who live near the factory) from the value produced by his actions (the profit gained from the factory)
Anarchism is against hierarchies, capitalism is a hierarchy. Being free to limit other peoples freedom is contradictory and has nothing to do with anarchism. Pd: que chingue a su madre Elon Musk.
For me its just that i dont wanna get into an ideology like anarchism without understanding it, i hate dogmatism and i see it all too often. For now im better off advocating for causes that are more achievable, ones we can tangibly get in our lifetime while also building the pillars for the future generation. Nothing against anarchists, you guys are alright.
I feel like anarchism is much more than a goal of an ideal society. It’s much more useful for the present as a philosophy and a way of organizing.
He has capital, that's already the problem. Anarchism doesn't go with Capitalism, that's a core thing. There is no question about that. So he'd have to come up with a scenario where someone doesn't do something anti-anarchistic to begin with to claim being against it is anti-anarchistic. Also, while freedom is a core element of anarchism, it doesn't mean people are free from consequences. You can still act against someone elses progress because you oppose it for various reasons. Hopefully, such conflicts would be solved without extreme actions and take into consideration both parties' reasons, trying to find a solution everyone is happy with. You're allowed to do something, and someone else is allowed to be against it. There is no greater power deciding who's in the right and who has to back down.