Anti Capitalist Quotes

It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

If a white man wants to lynch me, that's his problem. If he's got the power to lynch me, that's my problem. Racism is not a question of attitude; it's a question of power. Racism gets its power from capitalism. Thus, if you're anti-racist, whether you know it or not, you must be anti-capitalist. The power for racism, the power for sexism, comes from capitalism, not an attitude.

A film like Wall-E exemplifies what Robert Pfaller has called ‘interpassivity’: the film performs our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with impunity.

Under capitalism the common man enjoys amenities which in ages gone by were unknown and therefore inaccessible even to the richest people. But, of course, these motorcars, television sets and refrigerators do not make a man happy. In the instant in which he acquires them, he may feel happier than he did before. But as soon as some of his wishes are satisfied, new wishes spring up. Such is human nature.

This is the permanent tension that lies at the heart of a capitalist democracy and is exacerbated in times of crisis. In order to ensure the survival of the richest, it is democracy that has to be heavily regulated rather than capitalism.

[I]f you think that American imperialism and its globalised, capitalist form is the most dangerous thing in the world, that means you don't think the Islamic Republic of Iran or North Korea or the Taliban is as bad.

Any attempt to solve the ecological crisis within a bourgeois framework must be dismissed as chimerical. Capitalism is inherently anti-ecological. Competition and accumulation constitute its very law of life, a law … summarised in the phrase, ‘production for the sake of production.’ Anything, however hallowed or rare, ‘has its price’ and is fair game for the marketplace. In a society of this kind, nature is necessarily treated as a mere resource to be plundered and exploited. The destruction of the natural world, far being the result of mere hubristic blunders, follows inexorably from the very logic of capitalist production.

I wanted to tell him a story, but I didn't. It's a story about a Jew riding in a streetcar, in Germany during the Third Reich, reading Goebbels' paper, the Volkische Beobachter. A non-Jewish acquaintance sits down next to him and says, "Why do you read the Beobachter?" "Look," says the Jew, "I work in a factory all day. When I get home, my wife nags me, the children are sick, and there's no money for food. What should I do on my way home, read the Jewish newspaper? Pogrom in Romania' 'Jews Murdered in Poland.' 'New Laws against Jews.' No, sir, a half-hour a day, on the streetcar, I read the Beobachter. 'Jews the World Capitalists,' 'Jews Control Russia,' 'Jews Rule in England.' That's me they're talking about. A half-hour a day I'm somebody. Leave me alone, friend.

The state, rather, is a parasitic institution that lives off the wealth of its subjects, concealing its anti-social, predatory nature beneath a public-interest veneer.

The people of the United States are more prosperous…because their government embarked later than other governments…upon the policy of obstructing business

Yes, I am a Communist. And I will not take the fifth amendment against self-incrimination, because my political beliefs do not incriminate me, they incriminate the Nixons, Agnews, and Reagans.

Between the Great Depression and the 1970s, private business was viewed with suspicion even in most capitalist economies. Businesses were, so the story goes, seen as anti-social agents whose profit-seeking needed to be restrained for other, supposedly loftier, goals, such as justice, social harmony, protection of the weak and even national glory.

We’re living in an acquisitive capitalist society that is fundamentally anti-family and fundamentally uncomfortable with just enjoying being human. We’d rather shop than live, acquire than love and stare into a screen than hold each other.

At this point I have no patience whatsoever with people who claim they want to help Africans or Black people but who are “anti-capitalists.

The assault on education began more than a century ago by industrialists and capitalists such as Andrew Carnegie. In 1891, Carnegie congratulated the graduates of the Pierce College of Business for being “fully occupied in obtaining a knowledge of shorthand and typewriting” rather than wasting time “upon dead languages.” The industrialist Richard Teller Crane was even more pointed in his 1911 dismissal of what humanists call the “life of the mind.” No one who has “a taste for literature has a right to be happy” because “the only men entitled to happiness… is those who are useful.” The arrival of industrialists on university boards of trustees began as early as the 1870s and the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business offered the first academic credential in business administration in 1881. The capitalists, from the start, complained that universities were unprofitable. These early twentieth century capitalists, like heads of investment houses and hedge-fund managers, were, as Donoghue writes “motivated by an ethically based anti-intellectualism that transcended interest in the financial bottom line. Their distrust of the ideal of intellectual inquiry for its own sake, led them to insist that if universities were to be preserved at all, they must operate on a different set of principles from those governing the liberal arts.

Today the apologists of socialism are forced to distort facts and to misrepresent the manifest meaning of words when they want to make people believe in the compatibility of socialism and freedom.

Society sharply and criminally limits human potential. There exists at present a gross underuse of talent. This probably means that the cure for cancer is trapped in a slum-dweller’s cortex somewhere in India.

the root of the opposition to liberalism cannot be reached by resort to the method of reason. This opposition does not stem from reason, but from a pathological mental attitude, from resentment and from a neurasthenic condition that one might call a Fourier complex, after the French socialist of that name

In the past, I used to think real love was anti-capitalistic. I believed love, as the modern world understood it, was an endless siege fueled by the impossibility of healthy co-dependence. One person always gave. One person always took. Selflessness and selfishness. I was wrong. Real love is unto itself. For every person, it’s different, and no one can presume to explain its complexity using mere words. For me, love comes down to the moments of pure, unadulterated happiness in your life.

The vain arrogance of the literati and the Bohemian artists dismisses the activities of the businessmen as unintellectual money-making. The truth is that the entrepreneurs and promoters display more intellectual faculties and intuition than the average writer and painter. The inferiority of many self-styled intellectuals manifests itself precisely in the fact that they fail to recognize what capacity and reasoning power are required to develop and to operate successfully a business enterprise.

Marx is only anti-capitalist in so far as capitalism is out of date. Another order must be established which will demand, in the name of history, a new conformity. As for the means, they are the same for Marx as for Maistre: political realism, discipline, force.

Man’s most characteristic mark is that he never ceases in endeavors to advance his well-being by purposive activity.

We do not get to vote on who owns what, or on relations in factory and so on, for all this is deemed beyond the sphere of the political, and it is illusory to expect that one can actually change things by "extending" democracy to ple's control. Radical changes in this domain should be made outside the sphere of legal "rights", etcetera: no matter how radical our anti-capitalism, unless this is understood, the solution sought will involve applying democratic mechanisms (which, of course, can have a positive role to play)- mechanisms, one should never forget, which are themselves part of the apparatus of the "bourgeois" state that guarantees the undisturbed functioning of capitalist reproduction. In this precise sense, Badiou hit the mark with his apparently wired claim that "Today, the enemy is not called Empire or Capital. It's called Democracy." it is the "democratic illusion" the acceptance of democratic procedures as the sole framework for any possible change, that blocks any radical transformation of capitalist relations.

In Nazi Germany, racism and anti-Semitism served to misdirect legitimate grievances toward convenient scapegoats. Anti-Semitic propaganda was cleverly tailored to appeal to different audiences. Superpatriots were told that the Jew was an alien internationalist. Unemployed workers were told that their nemesis was the Jewish capitalist and Jewish banker. For debtor farmers, it was the Jewish usurer. For the middle class, it was the Jewish union leader and Jewish communist. Here again we have a consciously rational use of irrational images. The Nazis might have been crazy but they were not stupid.

Think it over and see if it is not the law itself, the government which really creates crime by compelling people to live in conditions that make them bad. See how law and government uphold and protect the biggest crime of all, the mother of all crimes, the capitalistic wage system, and then proceeds to punish the poor criminal.

The people of the United States are more prosperous than the inhabitants of all other countries because their government embarked later than the governments in other parts of the world upon the policy of obstructing business.

Denying the necessary role of the creative mind as expressed in capital and technology, Marx ended up vindicating the zero-sum vision of anti-Semitic envy, in which bankers, capitalists, arbitrageurs, shopkeepers, entrepreneurs, and traders are deemed to be parasitical shysters and dispensable middlemen.

I am an anti-capitalist because I believe we can improve on it. I believe that we can create the vision I have for a totalized system, a unified system, that can effectively do things. Stop global warming. Feed everybody. Settle disputes diplomatically, and when necessary, quash disputes militarily with proportional measure. This may sound unnecessarily harsh, but it needs to be said, because it is part and parcel of any type of system, if it is to be successful.    This is what I think can save us.

People who question these nefarious prevaricators are accused of being socialists, or anti-capitalist, in much the same manner that critics of Israel are dismissed as being anti-Semite, or anyone questioning the deeds of a person of color is accused of racism; simple, loaded, propagandistic labels used to silence opposition while evading the relevant issues.

This passivity mystifies clothes and lands us in a visual world that we did not make for ourselves.

The biological equipment of a man rigidly restricts the field in which he can serve.

too lazy for grind culture

the wealth of a society is going to be measured by how much disposable free time we all have to do what the hell we like without any constraints because our basic needs are met.

The first thing a genius needs is to breathe free air.

Although capitalism is the economic system of modern Western civilization, the policies of all Western nations are guided by utterly anti-capitalistic ideas. The aim of these interventionist policies is not to preserve capitalism, but to substitute a mixed economy for it. It is assumed that this mixed economy is neither capitalism nor socialism. It is described as a third system, as far from capitalism as it is from socialism. It is alleged that it stands midway between socialism and capitalism, retaining the advantages of both and avoiding the disadvantages inherent in each.

The poor are not poor by accident but are made poor by the conditions imposed upon them by the greed of the rich to hoard more than their share of God’s gift, the earth and its resources, which is common for all.

Nonetheless, many people, and especially intellectuals, passionately loathe capitalism. As they see it, this ghastly mode of society’s economic organization has brought about nothing but mischief and misery. Men were once happy and prosperous in the good old days preceding the Industrial Revolution. Now under capitalism the immense majority are starving paupers ruthlessly exploited by rugged individualists. For these scoundrels nothing counts but their moneyed interests. They do not produce good and really useful things, but only what will yield the highest profits. They poison bodies with alcoholic beverages and tobacco, and souls and minds with tabloids, lascivious books and silly moving pictures. The “ideological superstructure” of capitalism is a literature of decay and degradation, the burlesque show and the art of striptease, the Hollywood pictures and the detective stories.

The goal of society is not to guarantee absurd luxuries for the few but to provide essentials for all. Until that happens, the rich must be perpetually called to repentance, to give what they have to help the needy and poor.

And he very rightly said, ‘money of injustice,’ for all riches come from injustice. Unless one person has lost, another cannot find. Therefore I believe that the popular proverb is very true: ‘The rich person is either an unjust person or the heir of one.

A real reconciliation of East and West is impossible and inconceivable on the basis of a materialistic Communism, or of a materialistic Capitalism, or indeed of a materialistic Socialism. The third way will neither be "anti-Communist" nor 'anti-Capitalist'. It will recognize the truth in liberal democracy, and it will equally recognize the truth in Communism. A critique of Communism and Marxism does not entail an enmity towards Soviet Russia, just as a critique of liberal democracy is not entail enmity towards the west. . . . But the final and most important justification of a 'third way' is that there must be a place from which we may boldly testify to, and proclaim, truth, love and justice. No one today likes truth: utility and self interest have long ago been substituted for truth.

What we are witnessing from neoliberal-capitalist-corporatist governments and the corporations that ultimately govern them is 21st century eugenics, with austerity being a weapon in the armoury. Simple as. The “disposable poor” are not useful, therefore need to be socially eradicated.

While professional women and ‘middleclass’ women in general run the risk of becoming isolated from the needs, concerns, and consciousness of working-class and nonprofessional women, the latter run the risk of falling into an anti-intellectualism that contributes to their oppression because it stands in the way of their attaining a clear analysis of their situation. Pursuing endless theoretical refinements that are never translated into dialogue and practical action is as ineffective as engaging in endless talks about personal problems and feelings without ever looking at them as social problems. These problems are social, not only in the sense of being shared by many women, but more importantly because they are socially determined and are the product of concrete and historically specific class, legal, and political relations and forms of consciousness

Normally, the easiest way to [use money to get more money, i.e. capitalism] is by establishing some kind of formal or de facto monopoly. For this reason, capitalists, whether merchant princes, financiers, or industrialists, invariably try to ally themselves with political authorities to limit the freedom of the market, so as to make it easier for them to do so. From this perspective, China was for most of its history the ultimate anti-capitalist market state. Unlike later European princes, Chinese rulers systematically refused to team up with would-be Chinese capitalists (who always existed). Instead, like their officials, they saw them as destructive parasites--though, unlike the usurers, ones whose fundamental selfish and antisocial motivations could still be put to use in certain ways. In Confucian terms, merchants were like soldiers. Those drawn to a career in the military were assumed to be driven largely by a love of violence. As individuals, they were not good people, but they were also necessary to defend the frontiers. Similarly, merchants were driven by greed and basically immoral; yet if kept under careful administrative supervision, they could be made to serve the public good. Whatever one might think of the principles, the results are hard to deny. For most of its history, China maintained the highest standard of living in the world--even England only really overtook it in perhaps the 1820s, well past the time of the Industrial Revolution.

In a capitalist society a carefree life for the working people is inconceivable. In this society even those who are fairly well-to-do are always fearful of sudden bankruptcy, job-loss and poverty. Living a prosperous life in idleness without any thought for others cannot be regarded as a genuine human life.

the film performs our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with impunity. The role of capitalist ideology is not to make an explicit case for something in the way that propaganda does, but to conceal the fact that the operations of capital do not depend on any sort of subjectively assumed belief.

How do you make a profound and heartfelt anti-capitalist work of art, for example, if you've spent the previous evening at a swanky museum dinner sitting next to the head of some investment bank, who also happens to be one of your major collectors/clients? Or how do you make a work about the environment when your own carbon footprint is far larger than most? Can it be possible to produce a painting or sculpture that seeks to illuminate an unfairness in a society from which you are so obviously benefiting? And how do you go about criticizing the establishment, when you are a fully signed-up member of its inner circle? The answer is, you don't.

From the very beginning of its history, the manifold social evils of capitalism have given rise to oppositional movements. The one I am concerned with in this book is cooperativism, specifically worker cooperativism. There are many other kinds of cooperatives, including those in the credit, agriculture, housing, insurance, health, and retail sectors of the economy. But worker cooperativism is potentially the most “oppositional” form, the most anti-capitalist, since it organizes production in anti-capitalist ways. Indeed, the relations of production that constitute worker cooperativism also define socialism in its most general sense: workers’ democratic control over production and, in some varieties, ownership of the means of production (whether such ownership is organized individually, by owning shares of equity, or collectively). As one common formulation states, in the worker co-op, labor has power over capital, or “labor hires capital.” In the conventional business, by contrast, capital has power over labor, i.e., “capital hires labor.” None of the other kinds of cooperativism directly rejects these capitalist power-relations, although some may signify an implicit undermining of capitalism insofar as the co-op exists not primarily for the sake of maximizing profit but for satisfying some social need.

Capital takes away the autonomy of our time and makes it impossible for large segments of the population to leave the realm of necessity behind. In fact, the largest segment of the population is struggling hard to get access to basic necessities, which means that they have a very restricted capacity and time for freedom of expression.

Hitler was able to exploit with guile the gullibility of the 'best' people, and with the utmost sincerity the patriotism of the nationalists who wanted to see Versailles avenged... The anti-communist line got the capitalists, the anti-Versailles line got the army and the nationalists, the anti-Semitic line got the masses as well as the classes.

When the first news of the Nazi camps was published in 1945, there were those who thought the facts might be exaggerated either by Allied war propaganda or by the human tendency to relish 'atrocity stories.' In his column in the London magazine Tribune, George Orwell wrote that, though this might be so, the speculation was not exactly occurring in a vacuum. If you remember what the Nazis did to the Jews before the war, he said, it isn't that difficult to imagine what they might do to them during one. In one sense, the argument over 'Holocaust denial' ends right there. The National Socialist Party seized power in 1933, proclaiming as its theoretical and organising principle the proposition that the Jews were responsible for all the world's ills, from capitalist profiteering to subversive Bolshevism. By means of oppressive legislation, they began to make all of Germany Judenrein, or 'Jew-free.' Jewish businesses were first boycotted and then confiscated. Jewish places of worship were first vandalised and then closed. Wherever Nazi power could be extended—to the Rhineland, to Austria and to Sudeten Czechoslovakia—this pattern of cruelty and bigotry was repeated. (And, noticed by few, the state killing of the mentally and physically 'unfit,' whether Jewish or 'Aryan,' was tentatively inaugurated.) After the war broke out, Hitler was able to install puppet governments or occupation regimes in numerous countries, each of which was compelled to pass its own version of the anti-Semitic 'Nuremberg Laws.' Most ominous of all—and this in plain sight and on camera, and in full view of the neighbours—Jewish populations as distant as Salonika were rounded up and put on trains, to be deported to the eastern provinces of conquered Poland. None of this is, even in the remotest sense of the word, 'deniable.

Thus, in a situation in which so much wealth lies in the hands of a few, while so many are impoverished, the burden of proof of just acquisition lies with the wealthy.”11 It is more likely that the rich acquired their wealth unjustly than the poor became poor due to moral failure. We often blame the poor for their poverty and fail to condemn the rich for their unjust wealth.

This despite the fact that Confucian orthodoxy was overtly hostile to merchants and even the profit motive itself. Commercial profit was seen as legitimate only as compensation for the labor that merchants expended in transporting goods from one place to another, but never as fruits of speculation. What this meant in practice was that they were pro-market but anti-capitalist.

Insurrections, rioting, mass expropriations, occupations, and all sorts of unimaginable forms of class warfare are not only inevitable but also are taking place all over with more frequency and veraciousness as the crisis that is capitalism deepens. It is crystal clear that the deprived, exploited, and violated have organized, and will continue to do so, formally and informally, to the demise of their oppressors, those who remain neutral, or each other. The side of history on which we find ourselves is not determined by whether or not we share the experiences of one horror or another, or how we individually identify, but instead on our own resolution to see the end of each of these miseries that perpetuate this racist, capitalist, shit show called society. We Are All Oscar Grant(?): Attacking White Supremacy in the Rebellions and Beyond

The novel is... the anti-form proper to modernity itself (which is to say, of capitalism and its cultural and epistemological categories, its daily life). This means... that the novel is also a vehicle of creative destruction. Its function, in some properly capitalist ‘cultural revolution’, is the perpetual undoing of traditional narrative paradigms and their replacement, not by new paradigms, but by something radically different. To use Deleuzian language for a moment, modernity, capitalist modernity, is the moment of passage from codes to axioms, from meaningful sequences, or indeed, if you prefer, from meaning itself, to operational categories, to functions and rules; or, in yet another language, this time more historical and philosophical, it is the transition from metaphysics to epistemologies and pragmatisms, we might even say from content to form.

Anti-capitalist intellectuals, both in Africa and abroad, endlessly repeat a victimhood narrative about Africa being poor due to slavery, colonialism, and ongoing exploitation. Yes, Africa has been victimized. But until and unless these same intellectual forces articulate and endorse the positive capitalist path forward—which will let us leave that past behind—they are part of the problem, not part of the solution. They are the bad guys.

Individual happiness seems hollow unless all human beings are free of oppression, poverty, and violence — as well as free to speak and act in the public sphere. This doesn’t mean we have to be miserable in the meantime. We can’t help each other if we don’t help ourselves. But we have to go further than the smiley face rhetoric of commoditized mindfulness. Dissatisfaction and unhappiness are not impediments to revolution; they are its fuel.

Ambrose argues that God has arranged the world so that all things might be used to meet the needs of all. The earth is not a commodity but a gift. God gave it for the good of all. The divine order of creation prioritizes the needs of all above the greed of the few. Ambrose here directly names two things that must be common, food and the earth (land). Greed has made these common gifts the exclusive right of the few. Thus, the privatization of necessities is a sin.

I mean, contrary to the contemporary version of it, classical liberalism (which remember was pre-capitalist, and in fact, anti-capitalist) focused on the right of people to control their own work, and the need for free creative work under your own control—for human freedom and creativity. So to a classical liberal, wage labor under capitalism would have been considered totally immoral, because it frustrates the fundamental need of people to control their own work: you're a slave to someone else.

There were, however, major differences between the respective upsurges of cooperativism in the 1880s and the 1960s, centered around the fact that the earlier one was part of a broad-based labor movement, unlike the later. Thus, the skilled and semi-skilled cooperators during the 1870s and 1880s explicitly used cooperatives as a way to guarantee employment, and arguably they were more ambitious, with their revolutionary hopes for a cooperative commonwealth. Their ideology, of course, was not the educated middle-class countercultural and anti-authoritarian one of the 1960s’ youth movements but “laborist,” “producerist,” devoted to the Jeffersonian ideal of a republic of free laborers, mostly artisans and craftsmen. Some scholars have argued that this fact proves the Knights of Labor were “backward-looking” rather than truly revolutionary—that the future lay in mass production, not skilled labor or artisanry168—but this criticism seems partly off the mark. It is true that the Knights were hostile to mechanization, just as workers have been in the era of the AFL-CIO, because in both cases it threatened to put them out of a job or to result in the lowering of wages and the deskilling of work. If this aversion to the degradation and mechanization of work is reactionary, so be it. But it is also a source of such revolutionary demands as democratization of production relations, cooperative organization of the economy, public ownership of industry, destruction of the capitalist class and its frequent tool the state, and other hopes cherished by millions of workers in the late nineteenth century.

After World War II, the United States, triumphant abroad and undamaged at home, saw a door wide open for world supremacy. Only the thing called ‘communism’ stood in the way, politically, militarily, economically, and ideologically. Thus it was that the entire US foreign policy establishment was mobilized to confront this ‘enemy’, and the Marshall Plan was an integral part of this campaign. How could it be otherwise? Anti-communism had been the principal pillar of US foreign policy from the Russian Revolution up to World War II, pausing for the war until the closing months of the Pacific campaign when Washington put challenging communism ahead of fighting the Japanese. Even the dropping of the atom bomb on Japan – when the Japanese had already been defeated – can be seen as more a warning to the Soviets than a military action against the Japanese.19 After the war, anti-communism continued as the leitmotif of American foreign policy as naturally as if World War II and the alliance with the Soviet Union had not happened. Along with the CIA, the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, the Council on Foreign Relations, certain corporations, and a few other private institutions, the Marshall Plan was one more arrow in the quiver of those striving to remake Europe to suit Washington’s desires: 1.    Spreading the capitalist gospel – to counter strong postwar tendencies toward socialism. 2.    Opening markets to provide new customers for US corporations – a major reason for helping to rebuild the European economies; e.g. a billion dollars (at twenty-first-century prices) of tobacco, spurred by US tobacco interests. 3.    Pushing for the creation of the Common Market (the future European Union) and NATO as integral parts of the West European bulwark against the alleged Soviet threat. 4.    Suppressing the left all over Western Europe, most notably sabotaging the Communist parties in France and Italy in their bids for legal, non-violent, electoral victory. Marshall Plan funds were secretly siphoned off to finance this endeavor, and the promise of aid to a country, or the threat of its cutoff, was used as a bullying club; indeed, France and Italy would certainly have been exempted from receiving aid if they had not gone along with the plots to exclude the Communists from any kind of influential role.

Farmers in the South, West, and Midwest, however, were still building a major movement to escape from the control of banks and merchants lending them supplies at usurious rates; agricultural cooperatives—cooperative buying of supplies and machinery and marketing of produce—as well as cooperative stores, were the remedy to these conditions of virtual serfdom. While the movement was not dedicated to the formation of worker co-ops, in its own way it was at least as ambitious as the Knights of Labor had been. In the late 1880s and early 1890s it swept through southern and western states like a brushfire, even, in some places, bringing black and white farmers together in a unity of interest. Eventually this Farmers’ Alliance decided it had to enter politics in order to break the power of the banks; it formed a third party, the People’s Party, in 1892. The great depression of 1893 only spurred the movement on, and it won governorships in Kansas and Colorado. But in 1896 its leaders made a terrible strategic blunder in allying themselves with William Jennings Bryan of the Democratic party in his campaign for president. Bryan lost the election, and Populism lost its independent identity. The party fell apart; the Farmers’ Alliance collapsed; the movement died, and many of its cooperative associations disappeared. Thus, once again, the capitalists had managed to stomp out a threat to their rule.171 They were unable to get rid of all agricultural cooperatives, however, even with the help of the Sherman “Anti-Trust” Act of 1890.172 Nor, in fact, did big business desire to combat many of them, for instance the independent co-ops that coordinated buying and selling. Small farmers needed cooperatives in order to survive, whether their co-ops were independent or were affiliated with a movement like the Farmers’ Alliance or the Grange. The independent co-ops, moreover, were not necessarily opposed to the capitalist system, fitting into it quite well by cooperatively buying and selling, marketing, and reducing production costs. By 1921 there were 7374 agricultural co-ops, most of them in regional federations. According to the census of 1919, over 600,000 farmers were engaged in cooperative marketing or purchasing—and these figures did not include the many farmers who obtained insurance, irrigation, telephone, or other business services from cooperatives.173

Belief in blood and race is naturally associated with anti-Semitism. At the same time, the romantic outlook, partly because it is aristocratic, and partly because it prefers passion to calculation, has a vehement contempt for commerce and finance. It is thus led to proclaim an opposition to capitalism which is quite different from that of the socialist who represents the interest of the proletariat, since it is an opposition based on dislike of economic preoccupations, and strengthened by the suggestion that the capitalist world is governed by Jews. This point of view is expressed by Byron on the rare occasions when he condescends to notice anything so vulgar as economic power: Who hold the balance of the world? Who reign  O’er conquerors, whether royalist or liberal? Who rouse the shirtless patriots of Spain?  (That make old Europe’s journals squeak and gibber all.) Who keep the world, both Old and New, in pain  Or pleasure? Who make politics run glibber all? The shade of Buonaparte’s noble daring? Jew Rothschild, and his fellow Christian Baring. The verse is perhaps not very musical, but the sentiment is quite of our time, and has been re-echoed by all Byron’s followers.

Radical hope in the Kingdom of God is essential to Christianity.3 The forward-looking position of our hope causes us to reject the status quo as unchangeable or unchallengeable. Just because this is how it has been done, because we live in capitalism, does not make the systems of this world immovable realities we must accept without protest. On the contrary, because we hope in the coming reign of God, we contradict this world and its sinful systems of injustice and mammon worship. The Church of Jesus Christ cannot accept systems of oppression and exploitation without giving up its foundational hope.

The land is often considered a gift of grace in the Bible, especially in the Hebrew Scriptures. The land was the source of sustenance and thus reflected God’s will that all would have the necessities on this earth. Therefore, it is an image that often refers to natural grace. Those who take this natural, freely-given grace and turn it into a commodity, who privatize the land and sell it back to God’s creatures for profit, rob from the Lord. They are unfree. But the grace of God is not for sale. What God has given in common belongs to all; only by theft and violence does it become the exclusive property of the few.

A kind of unspoken grand bargain was forged between the anti-Establishment and the Establishment. Going forward, individuals would be permitted as never before to indulge their self-expressive and hedonistic impulses. But capitalists in return would be unshackled as well, free to indulge their own animal spirits with fewer and fewer fetters in the forms of regulation, taxes, or social opprobrium. “Do your own thing” has a lot in common with “Every man for himself.” If it feels good, do it: for some that will mean smoking weed and watching porn—and for others, opposing modest gun regulation and paying yourself four hundred times what you pay your employees.

When you see someone attacking Plato – and many people do – you should understand that these people are defenders of psychopathy (especially of unrestricted libertarianism, a psychopath’s dream). They hate Plato and accuse him of being a totalitarian and fascist. Why? Because he was prepared to use the awesome power of the State to ensure that undesirables did not prosper, and certainly didn’t get to the top of society. All the opponents of Plato are extremist anti-Statists, whether they are anarchists, libertarians, predatory capitalists, free marketeers, liberals, or whatever. They are terrified of a designed, engineered society where the benevolent, wise State seeks to create the optimized State, and where psychos don’t get to weave their webs.

The Capitalist Class knows that what brings on the increased supply is not immigration so much, but the improved and ever improving machinery, held as private property. For every immigrant by whom the labor market is overstocked, it is overstocked by ten workingmen in the country whom privately owned machinery displaces. The Capitalist Class is full well aware that if this fact be known the conclusion would leap to sight ; to wit, that the solution oi" the Labor Problem is simply the public ownership of the machine. If fifty men, working ten hours a day, can, with improved machinery, produce as much as one hundred did before without such improved machinery, the publicly owned machine would not, as the privately owned machine does, throw out fifty men; it would throw out five of the former ten hours of work. It is clear as day to the Capitalist Class that it must raise dust over this fact so as to conceal it; and no better means to this end is offered than the fomenting of the plausible delusion that the evil lies in immigration. Anti-immigration laws are the fruit of these two purpose. Such laws kill two flies with one slap ; they draw attention away from the nerve that aches, and simultaneously they help to set the workers of the land in racial and creed hostility against the newcomers, who, of course, the Capitalist Class itself sees to shall not be lacking. Obviously, it is in the interest of the Working Class that this brace of fatal delusions be dispelled from their minds. What does the Labor Leader do? He helps nurse both delusions.

Marxist writers are generally either indifferent or mildly hostile to the anti-capitalist movement, which they see as no good substitute for the great projects of communism and social democracy. Now, in one sense this is quite justified[…] However, there seems very little reason to believe that a return to the tactics of the twentieth-century labour movement is going to achieve anything in the future… [W]hat is wrong with commodification is not commodification per se… Marxist tradition goes much further than simply recommending that the excessive power of capital be challenged and curbed. Historically, this tradition tends to assert that such a challenge can only be made by virtue of a direct challenge to the existing relations of production, conceived of as the basis for a social totality, and, crucially, that it can only be made by the proletariat, politically mobilizes as a ‘Class of Itself’. In concrete terms, this means that only the labour movement, being organized and mobilized on the basis of its class identity and demanding the socialization of the means of production, can mount such a challenge… This is where I, and the anti-capitalist movement, part company with classical Marxism… [A]nti-capitalist movement is characterized by a certain pluralism, an unwillingness to impose any one model of social organization, and a refusal of neoliberal hegemony not on the basis of a single class identity or even a single universal human identity, but precisely n the basis of a defence of such pluralism against neoliberalism’s tyrannical monomania.

The Church today still thinks of the poor as objects rather than subjects of their own liberation. That is due to focusing more on hand-outs and band-aid solutions rather than substantial systematic change, which will arise only by empowering the poor and oppressed in their struggle for liberation. Thus, the Church does not properly help the poor by standing above them, offering occasional top-down help. Instead, the Church serves Christ in the poor by joining their plight directly, and by taking up solidarity with the oppressed. Accordingly, the Church is not merely the Church for the poor but of the poor. This radical solidarity empowers the poor and oppressed, who have been so often subject to the brutalization of powerlessness, to organize and struggle for their rights to life, dignity, and humanity.

An attack on the rich is not a disruption of peace but a step towards it. The rich oppress the poor daily by exploiting their misery and poverty. The poor are kept poor and beaten down continually by the greed of the rich and the systems of capitalist exploitation. Poverty is violence against the poor. Tax cuts for the rich, leading to budget cuts in social spending, are an act of class warfare. It is a mistake to call for “peace” when there is no peace for the poor, homeless, or disadvantaged under capitalism. One might argue that even Christ was crucified in the name of “peace” by the Roman Empire.20 But Pax Romana—or today’s Pax Americana—is never true peace. It is peace by oppression. The rich must be brought low, the powerful must be humbled, the lowly must be exalted, and good news must be proclaimed to the poor.

learn how to “challenge racist, bigoted, discriminatory, imperialist/colonial beliefs” and critique “white supremacy, racism and other forms of power and oppression.” Teachers are then encouraged to drive their pupils to participate in “social movements that struggle for social justice” and “build new possibilities for a post-racist, post-systemic racism society.”28 R. Tolteka Cuauhtin, the original cochair of the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, developed much of the material regarding early American history. In his book Rethinking Ethnic Studies, cited in the state’s official reference guide, Cuauhtin argues that the United States was founded on a “Eurocentric, white supremacist (racist, anti-Black, anti-Indigenous), capitalist (classist), patriarchal (sexist and misogynistic), heteropatriarchal (homophobic), and anthropocentric paradigm brought from Europe.

Today it is considered bad manners to point to any Soviet source of American anti-Americanism. But throughout their history, Americans had never before been anti-American. They voluntarily came to the US. They were always a proud and independent people who loved their country. Ares is the Greek god of war. He was usually accompanied in battle by his sister Eris ( goddess of discord ) and by his 2 sons, Deimos ( fear ) and Phobos ( terror ). Khrushchev and Ceausescu. Both men rose to lead their countries without ever having earned a single penny in any productive job. Neither man had the slightest idea about what made an economy work and each passionately believed that stealing from the rich was the magic wand that would cure all his country's economic ills. Both were leading formerly free countries, transformed into Marxist dictatorships through massive wealth redistribution, which eventually made the government the mother and father of everything. Disinformation has become the bubonic plague of our contemporary life. Marx used disinformation to depict money as an odious instrument of capitalist exploitation. Lenin's disinformation brought Marx's utopian communism to life. Hitler resorted to disinformation to portray the Jews as an inferior and loathsome race so as to rationalize his Holocaust. Disinformation was the tool used by Stalin to dispossess a third of the world and to transform it into a string of gulags. Khrushchev's disinformation widened the gap between Christianity and Judaism. Andropov's disinformation turned the Islamic world against the US and ignited the international terrorism that threatens us today. Disinformation has also generated worldwide disrespect and even contempt for the US and its leaders.

...The gulag—with its millions of victims, if you listen to Solzehnitsyn and Sakharov—supposedly existed in the Soviet Union right down to the very last days of communism. If so—as I've asked before—where did it disappear to? That is, when the communist states were overthrown, where were the millions of stricken victims pouring out of the internment camps with their tales of torment? I'm not saying they don't exist; I'm just asking, where are they? One of the last remaining camps, Perm-35—visited in 1989 and again in '90 by Western observers—held only a few dozen prisoners, some of whom were outright spies, as reported in the Washington Post. Others were refuseniks who tried to flee the country. The inmates complained about poor-quality food, the bitter cold, occasional mistreatment by guards. I should point out that these labor camps were that: they were work camps. They weren't death camps that you had under Nazism where there was a systematic extermination of the people in the camps. So there was a relatively high survival rate. The visitors also noted that throughout the 1980s, hundreds of political prisoners had been released from the various camps, but hundreds are not millions. Even with the great fall that took place after Stalin, under Khrushchev, when most of the camps were closed down...there was no sign of millions pouring back into Soviet life—the numbers released were in the thousands. Why—where are the victims? Why no uncovering of mass graves? No Nuremburg-style public trials of communist leaders, documenting the widespread atrocities against these millions—or hundreds of millions, if we want to believe our friend at the Claremont Institute. Surely the new...anti-communist rulers in eastern Europe and Russia would have leaped at the opportunity to put these people on trial. And the best that the West Germans could do was to charge East German leader Erich Honecker and seven of his border guards with shooting persons who tried to escape over the Berlin Wall. It's a serious enough crime, that is, but it's hardly a gulag. In 1955[sic], the former secretary of the Prague communist party was sentenced to two and a half years in prison. 'Ah, a gulag criminal!' No, it was for ordering police to use tear gas and water cannons against demonstrators in 1988. Is this the best example of bloodthirsty communist repression that the capitalist restorationists could find in Czechoslovakia? An action that doesn't even qualify as a crime in most Western nations—water cannons and tear gas! Are they kidding? No one should deny that crimes were committed, but perhaps most of the gulag millions existed less in reality and more in the buckets of anti-communist propaganda that were poured over our heads for decades.

Even the cinema stories of fabulous Hollywood are loaded. One has only to listen to the cheers of an African audience as Hollywood’s heroes slaughter red Indians or Asiatics to understand the effectiveness of this weapon. For, in the developing continents, where the colonialist heritage has left a vast majority still illiterate, even the smallest child gets the message contained in the blood and thunder stories emanating from California. And along with murder and the Wild West goes an incessant barrage of anti-socialist propaganda, in which the trade union man, the revolutionary, or the man of dark skin is generally cast as the villain, while the policeman, the gum-shoe, the Federal agent — in a word, the CIA — type spy is ever the hero. Here, truly, is the ideological under-belly of those political murders which so often use local people as their instruments. While Hollywood takes care of fiction, the enormous monopoly press, together with the outflow of slick, clever, expensive magazines, attends to what it chooses to call ‘news. Within separate countries, one or two news agencies control the news handouts, so that a deadly uniformity is achieved, regardless of the number of separate newspapers or magazines; while internationally, the financial preponderance of the United States is felt more and more through its foreign correspondents and offices abroad, as well as through its influence over inter-national capitalist journalism. Under this guise, a flood of anti-liberation propaganda emanates from the capital cities of the West, directed against China, Vietnam, Indonesia, Algeria, Ghana and all countries which hack out their own independent path to freedom. Prejudice is rife. For example, wherever there is armed struggle against the forces of reaction, the nationalists are referred to as rebels, terrorists, or frequently ‘communist terrorists'!

Lenin's political strength was produced to a great extent by the sincerity of his anti-war attitude and by his oratorical ability in making his sincerity felt. It was evident'.....'when he spoke to soldiers of the Izmailovsky regiment. The Provisional Government, he stated, was continuing the war in the interests of the capitalists, whereas a government of the Soviets of Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' Deputies would redistribute the land and remove the incentive for war. He went on: 'Do not allow the police to be re-established, do not let the state power or the administration of the state pass into the hands of the bureaucracy, who are non-elective, undisplaceable, and paid on a bourgeois scale; get together, unite yourselves, trusting no one, depending only on your own intelligence and experience - and Russia will be able to move with a firm, measured, unerring trend toward the liberation of both our own country and of all humanity from the yoke of capital as well as from the horrors of war.

When I hear such arguments, I find my sympathies moving toward Obama; we should at least credit him with being smarter than this. I think his critics sometimes forget how much of his domestic and foreign agenda he has realized in a single term. The anti-colonial theory gives Obama the benefit of presuming him to be at least modestly intelligent. Of course Obama understands the consequences of his actions—that’s why he is doing them. He’s doing what he does because he has objectives quite different than fostering economic growth; he intends to use the rod of government control to tame exploitative capitalists and severely regulate the private sector; he wants to strengthen Iran and Syria’s roles in the Middle East while diminishing that of the United States; and he cares more about reducing America’s nuclear arsenal than about preventing Iran from getting a nuclear bomb. I admit it is scary that a president might actually be seeking these objectives. But if my contentions are right, then we should be scared.

Time after time, the villain in Hollywood films will turn out to be the 'evil corporation'. Far from undermining capitalist realism, this gestural anti-capitalism actually reinforces it. Take Disney/ Pixar's Wall-E (2008). The film shows an earth so despoiled that human beings are no longer capable of inhabiting it. We're left in no doubt that consumer capitalism and corporations - or rather one mega-corporation, Buy n Large - is responsible for this depredation; and when we see eventually see the human beings in offworld exile, they are infantile and obese, interacting via screen interfaces, carried around in large motorized chairs, and supping indeterminate slop from cups. What we have here is a vision of control and communication much as Jean Baudrillard understood it, in which subjugation no longer takes the form of a subordination to an extrinsic spectacle, but rather invites us to interact and participate … But this kind of irony feeds rather than challenges capitalist realism. A film like Wall-E exemplifies what Robert Pfaller has called 'interpassivity': the film performs our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with impunity.

First, as I showed in Chapter 5, the term “cultural Marxism” refers to a particular Marxist theory and strategy inaugurated by Antonio Gramsci – working to establish “cultural hegemony” in order to effect socialist revolution. Second, the substitution of special identity groups advocated for by social justice activists for the working class championed by Marxists does not lead to an identical or nearly identical politics. With the working class as a lever, Marxism proposes to overcome its nemesis – the capitalist class, which maintains the class system, including a class-based system of production and resource allocation. Social justice, on the other hand, aims at little more than debunking particular identity groups from atop a putative social hierarchy, knocking them from their supposed positions of totemic privilege, and replacing them with members of supposedly subordinated groups. Third, in Chapter 5, I told why Marxism and postmodernism can’t be equated. I’ll restate it here. While postmodern theory is anti-capitalist, it not only rejects capitalism but also other “totalizing” systems, or “meta-narratives,” including even the major system proposed to counter capitalism – Marxism itself.

The VCs were prolific. They talked like nobody I knew. Sometimes they talked their own book, but most days, they talked Ideas: how to foment enlightenment, how to apply microeconomic theories to complex social problems. The future of media and the decline of higher ed; cultural stagnation and the builder’s mind-set. They talked about how to find a good heuristic for generating more ideas, presumably to have more things to talk about. Despite their feverish advocacy of open markets, deregulation, and continuous innovation, the venture class could not be relied upon for nuanced defenses of capitalism. They sniped about the structural hypocrisy of criticizing capitalism from a smartphone, as if defending capitalism from a smartphone were not grotesque. They saw the world through a kaleidoscope of startups: If you want to eliminate economic inequality, the most effective way to do it would be to outlaw starting your own company, wrote the founder of the seed accelerator. Every vocal anti-capitalist person I’ve met is a failed entrepreneur, opined an angel investor. The SF Bay Area is like Rome or Athens in antiquity, posted a VC. Send your best scholars, learn from the masters and meet the other most eminent people in your generation, and then return home with the knowledge and networks you need. Did they know people could see them?

The state, too, is in decline, though perhaps less obviously than the idea of the national community. The reason is simply that the global community of capitalists will not let the Western state reverse its post-1970s policies of retrenchment, which is the only way for it to adequately address all the crises that are currently ripping society apart. If any state—unimaginably—made truly substantive moves to restore and expand programs of social welfare, or to vastly expand and improve public education, or to initiate programs like Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration or Tennessee Valley Authority (but on a necessarily broader scale than in the 1930s), or to restore organized labor to its power in the 1960s and thereby raise effective demand, or to promulgate any other such anti-capitalist measure, investors would flee it and its sources of funds would dry up. It couldn’t carry out such policies anyway, given the massive resistance they would provoke among all sectors and levels of the business community. Fiscal austerity is, on the whole, good for profits (in the short term), since it squeezes the population and diverts money to the ruling class. In large part because of capital’s high mobility and consequent wealth and power over both states and populations, the West’s contemporary political paradigm of austerity and government retrenchment is effectively irreversible for the foreseeable future.

Equity financing, on the other hand, is unappealing to cooperators because it may mean relinquishing control to outside investors, which is a distinctly capitalist practice. Investors are not likely to buy non-voting shares; they will probably require representation on the board of directors because otherwise their money could potentially be expropriated. “For example, if the directors of the firm were workers, they might embezzle equity funds, refrain from paying dividends in order to raise wages, or dissipate resources on projects of dubious value.”105 In any case, the very idea of even partial outside ownership is contrary to the cooperative ethos. A general reason for traditional institutions’ reluctance to lend to cooperatives, and indeed for the rarity of cooperatives whether related to the difficulty of securing capital or not, is simply that a society’s history, culture, and ideologies might be hostile to the “co-op” idea. Needless to say, this is the case in most industrialized countries, especially the United States. The very notion of a workers’ cooperative might be viscerally unappealing and mysterious to bank officials, as it is to people of many walks of life. Stereotypes about inefficiency, unprofitability, inexperience, incompetence, and anti-capitalism might dispose officials to reject out of hand appeals for financial assistance from co-ops. Similarly, such cultural preconceptions may be an element in the widespread reluctance on the part of working people to try to start a cooperative. They simply have a “visceral aversion” to, and unfamiliarity with, the idea—which is also surely a function of the rarity of co-ops itself. Their rarity reinforces itself, in that it fosters a general ignorance of co-ops and the perception that they’re risky endeavors. Additionally, insofar as an anti-democratic passivity, a civic fragmentedness, a half-conscious sense of collective disempowerment, and a diffuse interpersonal alienation saturate society, this militates against initiating cooperative projects. It is simply taken for granted among many people that such things cannot be done. And they are assumed to require sophisticated entrepreneurial instincts. In most places, the cooperative idea is not even in the public consciousness; it has barely been heard of. Business propaganda has done its job well.106 But propaganda can be fought with propaganda. In fact, this is one of the most important things that activists can do, this elevation of cooperativism into the public consciousness. The more that people hear about it, know about it, learn of its successes and potentials, the more they’ll be open to it rather than instinctively thinking it’s “foreign,” “socialist,” “idealistic,” or “hippyish.” If successful cooperatives advertise their business form, that in itself performs a useful service for the movement. It cannot be overemphasized that the most important thing is to create a climate in which it is considered normal to try to form a co-op, in which that is seen as a perfectly legitimate and predictable option for a group of intelligent and capable unemployed workers. Lenders themselves will become less skeptical of the business form as it seeps into the culture’s consciousness.

The strategies used in Indonesia were replicated in socialist states all over the world, with the active or passive support of the United States. From Brazil to Chile, anti-communists began talking openly about their own 'Jakarta plans.' Bevins is clear about what this meant: 'the state-organized extermination of civilians who opposed the construction of capitalist authoritarian regimes loyal to the United States.' The next testing ground for the Jakarta Method would be Latin America, where hundreds of thousands of people would be killed or 'disappeared' in the name of anti-communism over the subsequent decades. At home, the US government justified these actions -where they were revealed to the public- by claiming that it was acting to protect 'freedom' by ridding the world of the communist threat. The actions taken to promote this 'freedom' often involved literally exterminating communists and socialists who dared resist the power of the world's foremost empire. One historian found that the number of victims of US-backed violence in Latin America 'vastly exceeded' the number of people killed in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc over the same period. Why did the world's foremost imperial power find it necessary to unleash such extreme violence on some of the poorest people on the planet? To protect the structure of the capitalist world system. had states in the Global South been allowed to band together, resist the power of the rich world, and forge their own development paths, these countries would have been far harder to exploit. The rich world needed the poor countries to remain scattered and underdeveloped global capitalism could not function were they to unite.

In their ongoing war against evil capitalists, some vengeful Democrats have their eyes on banks, which they blame for making millions of loans that resulted in foreclosures and the 2008 financial crisis. Never mind that it was progressives who forced the government to make these loans to low-income borrowers with poor credit ratings through the Community Reinvestment Act and anti-discrimination laws. They promoted minority home ownership without regard to the owners’ ability to repay, and the result was catastrophic. But being a leftist means never having to say you’re sorry—just pass a misguided policy and blame everyone else when it predictably fails. Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters, emboldened by Democrats recapturing control of the House, issued a stern warning to bankers before the 2019 session began. “I have not forgotten” that “you foreclosed on our houses,” she said, and “had us sign on the line for junk and for mess that we could not afford. I’m going to do to you what you did to us.”62 How’s that for good governance—using her newfound power as incoming chairwoman of the House Financial Services Committee to punish bank executives for the disaster she and her fellow Democrats caused? Waters is also targeting corporations for allegedly excluding minorities and women from executive positions. Forming a new subcommittee on diversity and inclusion, she immediately held a hearing to discuss the importance of examining the systematic exclusion of women, people of color, persons with disabilities, gays, veterans, and other disadvantaged groups.63 Why concentrate on policies to stimulate economic growth and improve people’s standards of living when you can employ identity politics to demonize your opponents?

YouTube: Dr. Samuel T. Francis — “Equality Unmasked" (American Renaissance Conference, 1996) 19:40 Egalitarianism has become an ideology that that protects, serves and rationalizes the interests of the elites that hold power in Western society, just as doctrines like the divine right of kings served the interests of monarchies and aristocracies before the French Revolution. ... I think that understanding egalitarianism as the ideology of an elite is important for several reasons. In the first place it puts the Marxists and radicals of the Left in an entirely different light from the one in which they like to present themselves--that of rebels against the system. Invariably, when Marxist groups protest against racism, they argue that racism is the tool of capitalism, that a capitalist ruling class promotes racism in order to justify the exploitation of non-whites and to keep white and non-white proletariats divided. But in reality, there is no truth whatsoever in this theory. If it were true, we would expect academics like Rushton and Levin, Arthur Jensen and Richard Herrnstein to have received millions in grants from large corporations and foundations. In fact, they receive little or nothing. The truth is that when Marxists and self-described radicals denounce what they call "racism," they are in fact performing as the ideological vanguard of the real elites that hold power and possess enormous vested interests in egalitarianism and environmentalism. It is the radical egalitarians and anti-hereditarians who are the real running dogs of the system, and not those who challenge egalitarianism and environmentalism. And it is the hereditarians like Rushton and Levin who are the real radicals, or even revolutionaries who challenge the lies and mythologies with which entrenched powers always mask themselves.

Despite its reputation for individualism and unbridled capitalism, the United States has a history rich in cooperation and communalism. From the colonial era to the present—and among the indigenous population for millennia—local communities have engaged in self-help, democracy, and cooperation. Indeed, the “individualistic” tradition might more accurately be called the “self-help” tradition, where “self” is defined not only in terms of the individual but in terms of the community (be it family, township, religious community, etc.). Americans are traditionally hostile to overarching authorities separate from the community with which they identify, a hostility expressed in the age-old resentment towards both government and big business. The stereotype, based on fact, is that Americans would rather solve problems on their own than rely on political and economic power-structures to do so. The following brief survey of the history substantiates this claim. While my focus is on worker cooperatives, I will not ignore the many and varied experiments in other forms of cooperation and communalism. Certain themes and lessons can be gleaned from the history. The most obvious is that a profound tension has existed, constantly erupting into conflict, between the democratic, anti-authoritarian impulses of ordinary Americans and the tendency of economic and political power-structures to grow extensively and intensively, to concentrate themselves in ever-larger and more centralized units that reach as far down into society as possible. Power inherently tries to control as much as it can: it has an intrinsic tendency toward totalitarianism, ideally letting nothing, even the most trivial social interactions, escape its oversight. Bentham’s Panopticon is the perfect emblem of the logic of power. Other social forces, notably people’s strivings for freedom and democracy, typically keep this totalitarian tendency in check. In fact, the history of cooperation and communalism is a case-study in the profound truth that people are instinctively averse to the modes of cutthroat competition, crass greed, authoritarianism, hierarchy, and dehumanization that characterize modern capitalism. Far from capitalism’s being a straightforward expression of human nature, as apologists proclaim, it is more like the very antithesis of human nature, which is evidently drawn to such things as free self-expression, spontaneous “play,”131 cooperation and friendly competition, compassion, love. The work of Marxist historians like E. P. Thompson shows how people have had to be disciplined, their desires repressed, in order for the capitalist system to seem even remotely natural: centuries of indoctrination, state violence, incarceration of “undesirables,” the bureaucratization of everyday life, have been necessary to partially accustom people to the mechanical rhythms of industrial capitalism and the commodification of the human personality.132 And of course resistance continues constantly, from the early nineteenth century to the present day. “Wage-slavery,” as workers in the nineteenth century called it, is a monstrous assault on human dignity, which is why even today, after so much indoctrination, people still hate being subordinated to a “boss” and rebel against it whenever they can.

Justice, solidarity, freedom, equal rights—these are all ideas that come straight out of the Enlightenment. In fact, out of classical liberalism. Classical liberalism is very anti-capitalist, contrary to what everybody says. And classical liberal and Enlightenment ideals lead in a very direct path, I think, to what was called libertarian socialism, or anarchism, or something like that. The idea is that people have a fundamental core right and need to be free and creative, not under external constraints. Any form of authority requires legitimation. The burden of proof is always on an authoritarian structure, whatever it may be, whether it's owning people, sex-linked, or even child-parent relationships. Any form of authority has to be challenged. Sometimes they can be justified, and maybe in that case, okay, you live with them. But for the most part, not. That would then lead quite directly to what were kind of truisms about a century ago. I mean, now they sound really crazy because there's been such a deterioration of values. But if you look at the thinking of just ordinary people, like say the working-class press in the mid-19th century, which grew where the ideas just grew out of the same soil—Enlightenment, classical liberal soil—the ideas are clear. Obviously, people should not be machines. They shouldn't be tools of production. They shouldn't be ordered around. We don't want chattel slavery, you know, like black slaves in the South, but we also don't want what was called, since the 18th century, wage slavery, which is not very different. Namely, where you have to rent yourself to survive. In a way, it was argued with some plausibility that you're worse off than a slave in that scenario. Actually, slave owners argued that. When slave owners were defending slavery, there was a kind of a moral debate that went on. It had shared moral turf, as a lot of moral debate did. The slave owners made a plausible point. They said, "Look, we own our workers. You just rent your workers. When you own something, you take much better care of it than when you rent it." To put it a little anachronistically, if you rent a car, you're not going to pay as much attention to taking care of it as if you own the car, for obvious reasons. Similarly, if you own people, you're going to take more care of them than if you rent people. If you rent people and you don't want them anymore, you throw them out. If you own people, well, you've got a sort of an investment in them, so you make them healthier and so on. So, the slave owners, in fact, argued, "Look, we're a lot more moral than you guys with your capitalist, wage slave system." Ordinary working people understood that. After the Civil War, you find in the American working-class press bitter complaints over the fact that, "Look, we fought to end chattel slavery, and now you're driving us into wage slavery, which is the same sort of thing." This is one core institution in society where people are forced to become tools of others, to be cast out if they're not necessary. It's a grotesque arrangement, totally contrary to the ideals of classical liberalism or Enlightenment values or anything else. It's now become sort of standard doctrine, but that's just a victory of absolutism, and we should dismantle all that stuff. Culturally, it starts with changes. You've got to change your minds and your spirit, and recover what was a common understanding in a more civilized period, let's say a century ago, in the shop floors of Lowell, Massachusetts. Recover that understanding, and then we work to simply democratize all institutions, free them up, and eliminate authoritarian structures. As I say, you find them everywhere. From families up to corporations, there are all kinds of authoritarian structures in the world. They all ought to be challenged. Very few of them can resist that challenge. They survive mainly because they're not challenged.

The great Marxist historian of England, E. P. Thompson, writing in the Sunday Times in the run-up to the 1975 referendum, gave this disgust an explicitly anti-Common Market turn, brilliantly fusing English puritanism with anti-capitalist politics: ‘It is about the belly. A market is about consumption. The Common Market is conceived of as a distended stomach: a large organ with various traps, digestive chambers and fiscal acids, assimilating a rich diet of consumer goods… This Eurostomach is the logical extension of the existing eating-out habits of Oxford and North London.’8

The competing ideals of self-ownership and dispossession structured a wide range of polemics that erupted over matters of fundamental significance to the spiritual, cultural, and political orders of Enlightenment- era France, including the role of personal interest in Christian devotion, the nature of free will, the limits of moral agency, the dangers of luxury consumption, and the location and exercise of national sovereignty. These controversies and scandals ran the gamut of movements that captivated public opinion in the eighteenth century, from Quietism to Spinozism and materialism, from royal absolutism to democratic republicanism, and from proto-capitalist visions of political economy to the first modern articulations of socialism. The main antagonists in debates over the self did not respect the partisan lines that scholars have commonly associated with the Enlightenment. Orthodox theologians and mainstream philosophes could and did find common cause—in the defense of self-ownership—against the efforts of radical mystics and materialists to dispossess the individual of its prerogatives and status as an autonomous, thinking subject.

social dysfunction, of a generation of young people ‘continuously dispossessed in a society rich with possession’.3

People are brought to the boil through a combination of poverty on the one hand and the bombardment of images of things they will never have on the other. Expecting them not to boil over is foolish.

Without class there would be no fashion industry as we know it. Clothing is a key way for the rich to signal and reproduce their power.

Under capitalism people are locked into a mindset where having is more important than being. We learn to value things only when we directly possess them rather than looking for happiness in ourselves, in labour, in society or in nature.72

The 1833 Factory Act illustrates how bad things had become. It was considered highly controversial to ban children under the age of nine from working in textile factories and to restrict children aged between nine and 13 to working 12 hours a day. Those aged 13–18 could legally work a 69-hour week. As well as running sweatshops, industry owners also portioned out work to unregulated, starving homeworkers in order to undercut factory wages.

But what pro-sweatshop arguments tend to ignore is that the poverty that drives people into sweatshops is a recent phenomenon caused by colonial and neoliberal strategies.

Yet the argument that corporations might take flight obscures one vital fact – that the wages of garment workers could be doubled without there being a noticeable impact on the price of clothing.

Earth, air, animals, water and human health, all are subject to fashion’s bitter harvest.8

Where was the money in fashions that could not quickly be made unfashionable? How were the rich to be superior if egalitarianism eclipsed exclusivity?

The ultimate poverty or loss of being has been described as being left with nothing to work with except your body, like an animal. This was the original definition of the proletariat.44 It is the situation for the vast majority of women working as fashion models.

adult women tacitly told to strive for a pre-pubertal body is a goal that spawns a myriad of linked acts of slow violence: low self-esteem, anxiety, depression and for some, drug and alcohol abuse, self-harming and disordered eating behaviour.

In an ideal world it would be the people who made the commodities who would be valued and respected rather than just the commodities.