What Do We Do With the Rich People?

In the course of establishing a revolutionary society, we will eventually have to deal with an important problem: what do we do with the rich people? Being non-coercive, we don't want to just kill them. And having a respect for personal property (i.e. possession, c.f. private property or capital), we don't just want to dispossess them of all their wealth. But we also want to create an egalitarian society, so surely we can't just let them keep their yachts and mansions and golf courses! ...can we?

Well, let's think this through: is property the extent of wealth? No. Let's see why:

Wealth depends on public power to defend it both from roaming hordes of peasant criminals who might wish to take it by force and the pesky egalitarianism of real democracy — the Founding Fathers of the United States consciously established a state that would defend the rich against the poor. In a real democracy, the accumulation of wealth would be impossible since the poor could just vote to redistribute land and capital; this, in fact, has been the main cry of every peasant revolt in history — cancel the debt and redistribute the land.

Wealth just as crucially depends on something a little more subtle: the private power of the wealthy to command the resources needed to sustain and maintain their property. By this I mean the army of servants, groundskeepers, housekeepers, mechanics, drivers, sailors, caddies, security guards, technicians, etc, that are needed to keep a mansion, yacht, golf cart, kitchen, etc, stocked, operational and convenient. Without the economic power to hire and fire the said army, the lifestyle of the rich becomes impossible for any length of time. Machines break down, houses become decrepit, country clubs grow weeds.

With the rapid or eventual elimination of the State, the public power to defend the rich obviously disappears. But less obviously, with the rise of socialism (that is, the control by workers of their own labor) the private power disappears as well. When workers are not dependent on the workings of financial and labor markets to feed themselves but instead organize work and distribute goods based on principles of mutual aid and the needs of the many, there's no time to do upkeep on the toys of the rich.

The upshot of all this is, a libertarian socialist society doesn't need to do anything with or to rich people. It's almost certain that we'll never really need to commandeer the land that mansions sit on, or the harbors that yachts are docked at (not to mention the mansions and yachts themselves). The rich can keep them, for what they'll be worth with no workers willing to do maintenance on them, or provide them with fuel and food and service besides the basics that anyone would be entitled to. We can let the rich keep everything they can make a reasonable claim to using, and just wait for them to get sick of living in broken-down palaces, with rusting yachts in their rotting docks. No coercion, appropriation or, really, action necessary.

(This of course says nothing of what we do with those things that the rich cannot reasonably claim to use, such as huge tracts of empty land, factories, business places, etc, which can in no way be construed to be personal possessions as they fundamentally depend on the labor of others for their very existence.)

State vs. Government

When I talk about anarchism, I mean it as opposition to the State: that is, the institution which claims sole authority to violence in a geographic territory. Strictly speaking, I do not oppose government. Now, the terms "State" and "government" are generally interchangeable in English, and I usually follow that convention. But the word "government" to me evokes the sense of "maintaining function and control". And it's certainly true that humans want control over their environment, both physical and social (that they can rarely have it is beside the point). The confusion comes in the assumption that a State is required for government, and that any society without a State is without government. Two hundred years of libertarian political theory and a handful of historical examples put the lie to this. Humans are able to govern their affairs quite efficiently without the continual threat of violence. Violence is, of course, a possibility in many everyday situations, but that's certainly no less a fact in a Statist society than in a Stateless one. Simply put, State is not necessarily government, and government is not necessarily State.

Why Syndicalism

Everybody works. Or, at least, everybody works when artificial unemployment doesn't exist. And I say "everybody" because I always speak in hyperbole. In any case, the overwhelming majority of people seek work of some sort. Just recently, my mom lost her job, and instead of spending all day sitting on the couch watching Home & Garden television (which she could easily afford to do), she went and got a job that pays her barely anything. People want to be formally occupied by something they believe brings benefit to them and their family, or to society at large. This tendency takes various forms outside the capitalist structure of "employment". Artists create art regardless of whether they get paid for it. People who love cooking spend hours perfecting recipes for no one's enjoyment but their own. In a world that didn't care about "marketable skills" and didn't penalize risk-taking with destitution, people would be able to occupy themselves with whatever work they were naturally inclined to do.

In a capitalist society, where people must balance their desires against the demands of the market, many work jobs they do not enjoy, the most unpleasant of which are usually the lowest paying and most exploitative. Such people should, and historically often did, organize into guilds or unions to demand (and occasionally win) increases in wages, reduction in working hours, and improvements in working conditions. These unions are the perfect place to foment radicalism, since workers are the most exposed to the oppressive and exploitative nature of capitalism, and often suffer the most at the hands of the government once they organize. From a utopian perspective (by which I mean, from the point of view of an imagined future free society) such unions would constitute democratic worker councils in their respective industries, certifying members of professional groups and organizing allocation of work and resources. In the modern world, they are means of resisting capitalist exploitation and social oppression.

Not everyone, of course, is keen on resisting exploitation, because they do not see it as such. Particularly in America the myth (that is, the misunderstanding of economics and probability) that anyone can get rich tricks people into aligning their perceived interests with the capitalist class, and the illusion of democracy allows them to believe that the government exists to support them, rather than to support the capitalist system. They believe that fighting for their own, realistic, interests will jeopardize their chances of ascending the social or corporate ladder on the off chance they come up with the better mousetrap. The refusal to admit the existence of a sharp class division between workers on the one hand and owners and rulers on the other leads them to have disdain for anyone who recognizes, and fights against, it.

The disdain many people have for unions specifically is due to the essentially capitalist trades unions whose leaders often have more in common with the bosses than with the workers, and of course to the stain of Soviet Communism on the entire notion. (The Soviet Union was of course in no way communist, but is rather State Capitalist to the core.) When workers are divorced from the output of their labor, whether by capitalist profiteering or state mandates, the tendency to lose personal interest in their work is increased and reinforced, because the work is no longer theirs, either in methodology or results. To contrast, work done by democratically organized, voluntary worker collectives instills a sense of pride and ownership in the work which produces both better results and stronger communities. It is this aspect of union organizing which leads me to believe that syndicalism — that is, the organizing of the working class into unions based on industry or geography — is the most practicable way of achieving revolution.

Workers, who make up the vast majority of society, are shown the power of democratic organizing, the power of their numbers in the face of capitalist and government oppression, and the dignity and satisfaction to be found in controlling the product of their own labor. I will discuss in a future post why I think syndicalism is the best way of instilling revolutionary consciousness in the working class, but it is definitely not the simplest or most glamorous way. It involves working shitty jobs, taking large personal, financial and health risks, and seeing little progress or huge reversals in fortune. The main point is, though, that many workers do this every day without any political motivation anyway, and the addition of that motivation has been proven historically to be easier and more effective than the creation of entirely new, theory-motivated political organizations.

An Introduction to Interfaces, and Other Theories As Well

[This post assumes a reasonable familiarity with the political philosophy and history of anarchism. This will also be the first of probably many posts about problems I see in the general discourse of anarchy, as well as a particularly interesting consequence of a hypothetical anarchist society with I term "interfaces". In this and future essays, the words "free", "libertarian" and "non-coercive" are often used interchangeably.]

There is a serious problem which afflicts most political and intellectual movements. Sectarianism. The splintering of subgroups into ideologically warring factions, ready to heap unrestrained scorn on those whose views and opinions differ slightly from their own. Radicals are especially vulnerable to this trap, as they have so little practical experience on which to base their political theory. Hence "anarchists" come in every stripe, from capitalist to communist, "lifestyle" to syndicalist. I myself identify as a syndicalist — that being what seems to be the most practicable way to achieving a free society — and would like to live in a libertarian communist society. From each according to his etc. and all that.

However, this does not make me deaf either to the arguments for other systems of organizing a free society, nor to the validity of other people's views on how a free society should be organized. I believe, in fact, that there are many valid ways to organize society so as to minimize coercion while increasing prosperity. And, more importantly, I believe that in an anarchist future, many of these different systems will be implemented simultaneously. Different people will want to live in different ways. There will be primitivists who will continue agitating for the dismantling of technological civilization long after capitalism is abolished. There will be mutualists unhappy in communes, communists unhappy with local banks, market anarchist unhappy in gift economies.

This belief — that many different styles of free society are mutually compatible — leads me to two conclusions. The first is that sectarian squabbling between modern schools of anarchist thought are not only harmful and divisive, but entirely unnecessary. We all agree that State government has to be abolished, and (to consciously evoke the No True Scotsman fallacy here) every real anarchist agrees that capitalism as it exists now has to be abolished. As such, we ought to discuss not the ideological differences between us, but rather the strategic differences. And I think that many anarchists of otherwise widely divergent views would find themselves agreeing on methods for dismantling our current coercive society.

The second conclusion I have come upon is that anarchist theories of a hypothetical future lack several important features. The three most important ones are the lack of emphasis on an anarchist revolution as a necessarily world-wide phenomenon, the necessity of revolution to be a continuous process rather than a historic event, and the problem of interfaces between different types of libertarian society. This idea of interfaces is one which particularly interests me, although it is by far the most speculative and difficult to see clearly.

How would a communistic or gift-based community distribute goods across a world populated by mutualist banks and free markets? How do you determine the price of something produced in another community at your local bank when that community shares alike? I think it's obvious that questions like this become incredibly difficult to answer, given the actual lack of any such communities, but they are still worth at least positing. As vague and speculative as they are, they let us approach the different anarchist theories from different directions, let us compare and contrast the strengths and weaknesses of different theories, and help us work out the hypothetical consequences of different forms of anarchy.

Certainly, more mental energy could be devoted to figuring out how to dismantle the state in the first place. But the best way I personally know to do that is by spreading the idea of anarchy across as many people as possible. And in order to do this, you have to have both a concerted critique of modern society, and a clear view of an alternative society. It is simply not enough for the vast majority of people to have someone tell them, "Well, coercion is inherently bad, so we should remove all coercive institutions." That statement unpacks into hundreds of ideas. How is Capital coercive? How are institutions coercive? How is a representative democracy coercive? Isn't coercion sometimes necessary? Doesn't it sometimes lead to the greater good? Etc, etc, etc.

I will come back to many of the points and questions raised in this post later, to take closer looks at all of them. Most importantly I will discuss in greater detail the anarchism-without-adjectives view I discussed, as well as the question of interfaces between different types of anarchism. The devotion of so many to very particular views of anarchism confuse me, and the vitriol differences in these views evoke disturbs me. We anarchists are an unhappy few, toiling away, either in the workplace, the food shelf or the essay, to change to world for the better in the best way we know how, and we should be doing it together, regardless of what I hope to show to be trivial differences in our theoretical underpinnings.