Humanitarian

See Sharp Press has accepted my pamphlet on anarchist theory entitled "Humanity beyond control: anarchism and our future" for publication this fall.  The pamphlet begins with a brief critique of state-capitalism, in which I argue that the extreme poverty, violence, and unhappiness that exists at our present time is a direct product of the capitalist system, which encourages people to pursue unlimited individual accumulation, regardless of the human and environmental costs of this accumulation.  I argue that any person who believes in human equality has an obligation to destroy state-capitalism.  I purpose Anarchism as the best alternative to state-capitalism, after presenting a critique of authoritarian Socialism as intrinsically hierarchical, oppressive, and anti-egalitarian.  I present an argument for Anarchism, defend it against common criticisms, and then offer a few ideas on how to bring about revolutionary change in the United States.    

 

If you have found my articles on this website interesting and insightful, and you would be interested in receiving more news and information about this pamphlet, including the release date and purchasing information as that information is available, please send me an email at dbaake@sbcglobal.net .

 

I have included two excerpts from the text below:  

 

First Excerpt: Introduction

 

We live during an era of extreme oppression, despair, and anguish, but also an era of great opportunity for positive change.  Vast technological improvements have been made in recent years, making it technically possible for the human race to guarantee not only subsistence, but prosperity, for all members of its population.  The greatest impediment to universal prosperity is no longer nature; it comes from within our species, from hierarchical human institutions and social systems.  Humans have struggled for thousands of years to overcome natural threats to our existence, only to reach a point where our existence is threatened by our own social systems, specifically, at the current point in history, the capitalist system.

 Global capitalism is an overwhelming catastrophe, perhaps the most dangerous the human species has ever faced.  As a result of Social-Darwinist economic policies, billions live in abject poverty and desolation; slowly dying from the moment of their birth from malnutrition and curable diseases; never allowed a chance to experience life as anything but torture, never given a chance to manifest their own creative human potential.  Millions of others are massacred and annihilated by machine guns, tanks, and bombs; sacrifices to the ever-expanding, insatiable, hegemonic god that is capitalism.  From General Suharto’s killing fields in East Timor, to the napalmed jungles of Vietnam; from the ghettos of apartheid Palestine, to the cities of El Salvador where death squads roamed the streets searching out peasants on which to prey; the bloody effects of capitalism have reverberated throughout the world.

 In a world ruled by capitalism, 1 billion children live in abject poverty, 640 million do not have access to appropriate shelter, 140 million have never attended school, 400 million do not have access to clean uncontaminated water, 500 million do not have basic sanitation, 270 million have no access to health care, and 90 million are severely food deprived;^[i] while the world’s 225 richest people have combined assets of over 1 trillion dollars, equal to the annual income of the poorest 47% of the worlds population, or 2.5 billion people. Approximately 12.3 million people live in conditions of “modern slavery.”[ii]  The three richest people in the world have assets that exceed the combined GDP of the 48 least developed countries in the world.  It is estimated that it would cost only $40 billion dollars a year to provide universal access to basic education, health care, reproductive health care, adequate food, clean water, and safe sewers, less than 4% of the combined wealth of the 225 richest people in the world.^[iii]

This sort of astronomical inequality is an essential feature of the capitalist system. Capitalism encourages people to pursue infinite individual accumulation, regardless of the human and environmental costs of this accumulation. The cumulative costs of systemic capitalist accumulation are severe, and they have the potential to destroy the entire biosphere and the human race.  Moreover, the reckless competition that capitalism mandates necessarily creates a world of extreme material inequality; one in which billions of people fail to meet subsistence even when it is technically possible for every human in the world to live in prosperity. 

The capitalist economic system in practice is indeed a system of competition, but not between employers and corporations, as capitalist intellectuals suggest it is. Primarily, it is a system of competition between workers, peasants, and their third-world nations to work for the lowest wages and the least benefits in a desperate attempt to attract corporate employers who will offer them miniscule, sub-starvation payment for their services, while synergized transnational corporations and business elites make trillions of dollars in profit.  It is this competition that capital must unceasingly seek, which has forced it to move beyond the First World, with its social-democratic systems designed to combat the poverty necessary for capitalism to function, into the Third World, devastated beyond belief by centuries of imperialism.

Profits have drastically increased as the imperatives of capitalism have been imposed across the world by corporations, their financial institutions (such as the World Bank, IMF, WTO, and G8) and their state and military benefactors.  These groups force Third World countries to liberalize trade, reduce tariffs, privatize social services, and loosen environmental and labor restrictions in order to make them more hospitable to corporations.  When countries refuse to comply with the mandates of international capital, they are severely punished and face international sanctions, military assault, or simply a denial of life-saving aid.  The price for defying elite dictation is severe, but the price for complying with it can be even worse, as Third World countries that do comply must allow billions of dollars in debt and material resources to be extracted by corporate mercantilists.

It is clear that anyone who believes in human equality or simply a level playing field for all has an obligation to overthrow the capitalist system.

The worldwide anticapitalist movement at the present moment is still only embryonic, but it is growing larger, and rapidly becoming more powerful.  This movement will have the responsibility of confronting the capitalist beast, and therefore is responsible for presenting a critique of the capitalist system to the world and developing theoretical and actual alternatives to capitalism. Anticapitalists must answer fundamentally important questions: what ideals do we value that have not been realized under the current system, and can never be realized within a capitalist system? How can a society be created in which these ideals will be realized, and what tactics should we employ to help create such a society?  

 

Second Excerpt: Anarchism and Human Nature

 

Throughout the history of political philosophy, many people have rejected Anarchism on sociological grounds; that is to say, their understanding of human nature suggested that humanity could not function without oppression, suffering, and hierarchy.  These critics of Anarchist thought argued that no society could ever achieve both positive and negative freedom for all its citizens because of an intrinsically “evil” nature of humans; or, if it could achieve universal freedom, it would come at such a terrible cost that it would not be worth it.  First off, it is absolutely absurd to argue about whether the essential nature of the human species is “good” or “evil.”  It is inappropriate to discuss something’s essence in moral terms, because morality is a standard of judging freely taken choices.  No one chooses their intrinsic nature, any more than they choose to be born male or female, homosexual or heterosexual, Iraqi or American.

Instead of discussing human nature in terms of morality, we should discuss it in terms of potential.  Is every human being born with the potential to be peaceful, loving, creative, and unique?  I believe that the answer is yes.  Geneticists have not located a gene that makes an individual a criminal or a murder.  Every person is born with a physical and genetic foundation on which to build his life.  Each person has, at the beginning of his or her life, the potential to be a murder, a criminal, or a truly ethical being.   While every individual has freedom to shape his or her life, and thus to choose which potentiality becomes reality, the choices a person is presented with to an enormous extent depend on the social environment a person lives in.  The famous psychologist Abraham Maslow pointed out, all humans experience a hierarchy of needs. From most basic to most advanced, these needs include: physiological needs, safety needs, belongingness and love needs, esteem needs, intellectual needs, and aesthetic needs. Every person must fulfill his or her most basic needs before he or she can attempt to fulfill more advanced needs.  Only when a person fulfills all of his or her needs does he or she become a “self actualizing person”—a person who lives life to the fullest extent.

In a hierarchical society, very few people ever reach self-actualization; indeed, billions of people never fulfill their most basic biological needs.  It is necessarily this way under a hierarchical system.  A person who has fulfilled all his or her needs will never submit to another person, will never allow him or herself to be turned into a soldier or a wage-slave. One individual only wields authority over other people if he has the power to obstruct the fulfillment of their fundamental human needs.  An employer has power over his employs because he has the power to deny them their subsistence if they act insubordinately. A government has power over its citizens because it has the power to murder them, to deny them of their right to life. 

In an Anarchistic society, however, every person would have the opportunity to become a self actualizing person, to realize his or her full potential, and in all likelihood, almost everyone would. 

 

With this understanding of human nature in mind, we can now address specific arguments against Anarchism that deal with human nature.  First off, what is human nature, according to critics of Anarchism?  In his essay Goals and Visions, Noam Chomsky quotes Nobel Prize winning economist James Buchanan making a prototypical establishmentarian statement about human nature:

 

“Any person’s ideal situation is one that allows him full freedom of action and inhibits the behavior of others so as to force adherence to his own desires.  That is to say, each person seeks mastery over a world of slaves.”^[iv]

           

Chomsky notes that this opinion would have been considered “pathological” by any classical liberal thinker.  I don’t know anyone who would admit to daydreaming about being a slaveholder, although it’s not entirely surprising to hear such talk from neoliberal economists or Wall Street brokers, who are of course the ideological heirs of America’s slaveholders.  We should always remember which people are trying to discredit Anarchism: it’s no coincidence that the people who argue that humans can’t exist without coercion are the people at the top of the social hierarchy, whose privilege would be threatened if coercive institutions were abolished.  Regardless of the fact that people attempting to discredit Anarchism have an economic stake in the perpetuation of the current system, their various arguments need to be responded to.  I’ll try to do that quickly.

 

“A society based on universal freedom, cooperation, and voluntary association could never work.” This argument can be easily refuted. There already have been Anarchies that have worked, not only in revolutionary Spain, the Paris Commune, and the worker-run factories in Venezuela, to pick a few examples, but also in everyday interactions between people.  Any time a group of people voluntarily come together to engage in mutually beneficial activities together, they are proving that humans can indeed function without coercion and hierarchy. 

 

“People will not work unless they are constantly on the edge of subsistence, so, if a society were to insure that no one ever fell below subsistence, everyone would stop working.” While I personally think that a society where no one worked and everyone had access to basic necessities would be a vast improvement over the current system—which requires the vast majority of the world’s population spend the majority of its lifetime working or else starve—I do not believe that people would stop working entirely in a free, nonhierarchical society.  Why is it so hard to imagine a community dividing up necessary tasks among able-bodied workers and performing them?  Don’t communities work together to build communal playgrounds and parks at the present time, even though every member of the community is already spending the vast majority of their time working for private business?  Why can’t the same system also work for maintaining a community’s roads, or growing a community’s food?

There is reason to believe that if hierarchical systems were abolished, the amount of time each person would need to work to maintain a functioning society would drop drastically.  If a socio-political system were created that did not waste trillions of dollars of resources on protecting the privileges of a tiny minority from the rest of the populace, and that used technology not to wage class warfare, but to raise the collective standard of living, society could conceivably function with the average worker spending far less time laboring than they do under the current system.

I think that people would be willing to work for a few hours everyday in exchange for access to a communal store of resources: food, clothes, shelter, select luxury items, etc.  Most people have an intrinsic desire to be socially productive and creative, and if they were allowed complete control over their own working environment, I think that almost everyone would want to perform socially beneficial work, especially if every laborer were able to split time between different jobs—some requiring intellectual labor and others manual labor—so that every worker could have the most stimulating and interesting work experience possible.  It is hard to believe, anyway, that the billions of people who now do miserable work for starvation wages would not be willing to engage in enriching community work in exchange for a guaranteed prosperity. 

 

“All people really care about is material wealth; any system that is based on cooperation is doomed.  It will become extremely corrupt, and eventually, the system will devolve back into unrestrained Darwinistic struggle.” While utter selfishness is certainly a trait that capitalism tries to foster, it’s doubtful that the human race would have survived as long as it has as a group of anti-social, profit-maximizing egoists.  Humans are sociable beings who generally care for the needs of one another; during times of tribulation, they almost always cooperate and share to collectively survive.  In fact, even the enemies of egalitarianism are aware that humans are cooperative beings: in America for example, human compassion is so strong that corporate capitalists have had to spend billions of dollars on propaganda to convince people that the United States’ foreign policy is truly promoting democracy and freedom, that capitalism is lifting people out of poverty and creating a better world.  If the enemy regards compassion as so powerful that they need to spend billions of dollars to appeal to it, I don’t think it is wise for us to underestimate its power.

 

“An Anarchist society would become stagnate and fail to meet its full potential in areas of importance to the human race as a whole, such as in science and art.  Development in science and art can only occur within an economically competitive social framework, and such development will ultimately raise the cumulative quality of life more than universal freedom.” I think one would be hard pressed to find a truly gifted mind in science or art who was convinced to pursue his or her work solely by external rather than internal motivation.  In fact, many geniuses were so internally motivated that they allowed themselves to fall into poverty in order to continue their work..  There is every reason to believe that uniquely talented people would continue to make their contributions to society whether or not they received material reward for doing so.  If it is hard to imagine an artist or scientist motivated by external reward, it is nearly impossible to imagine that such a person would have anything worth contributing.  I don’t think that people really need the music of Britney Spears or other manufactured art anymore than they need the insights of a career intellectual who just wants to get tenure.

It’s hard to imagine a socio-political system more nurturing of art and science than an Anarchist society.  Throughout history, the number of people who could spend their time creating art or pondering science was extremely limited; as only the richest had the time and energy to devote to such endeavors.  In an Anarchist society, absolutely everyone would have the time and energy to devote to art and science; one would expect the number of scientific and artistic advances to increase exponentially.

 

“Biological evolution cannot occur unless the weakest humans die before they can reproduce, and universal freedom is less likely to raise quality of life as a whole than progressive human evolution.”  I think here Anarchists and some non-Anarchists just disagree; nothing is worth a future of perpetual genocide, no matter what wonderful characteristics the surviving humans could acquire in the end.  While these eugenicists dream of a future free of disease, of ultra-intelligent humans, etc, the sacrifice is far too immense and unceasing, and there’s no real reason to believe that the human race will survive long enough to undergo significant evolution anyway.