The Last Alternative

 

Introduction

Here are a few summary views and opinions, along with some attempts to come up with working definitions of some of the abstract concepts which I’ll be referring to throughout. The main reason that these things have been put at the start of the work is to avoid misunderstandings and contradictions about the meaning of words like “Freedom” or my understanding of complex systems like the power-structures of the state, which could otherwise be left open to misinterpretation or construed as being intentionally vague. If some of my statements come across as being sweeping or unsubstantiated, a more in depth explanation of each point will be dealt with later.  

Part 1

The state, Government, Capitalism and law

 In developed nations, corruption is still tolerated at the highest levels. In poor nations, millions starve. Our political and economic systems have been developed over centuries to allow this to happen. Elections are not carried out in a way which is proportional or fair. Government is now largely answerable to corporate and business interests, and was never designed to serve the public to begin with. The governments of most of the world’s developed nations are manipulated by plutocratic elites for and in the interests of the plutocracy, and not “the people.” Whether or not governments think they do this or not is not important, because they do nothing to stop the economic theft of capitalism, and therefore at least passively support it. The governmental system laughably described as liberal democracy, is a sham. The rule of law imposed by these corrupt and deeply compromised states, in the interests of the perpetuation of these same systems and the protection of capitalist wealth, is a crime against humanity, and is a mockery of justice and morality. The perceived virtues of our political system and the laws set up to protect it are purely incidental; the external authority of government is nothing more than an attempt to validate the subjugation of the majority by the minority.

Democracies    

 If government is designed to serve, then why is it called government and not service?  Why are representatives being elected into office by statistical minorities in national elections? If politicians are public servants, then why are they allowed to dictate the lives of those who elect them? There are never more masters than there are servants, and one of the main lies of liberal democracy-and hierarchical government generally- is to claim that there is.  The idea of any kind of hierarchy of government is antithetical to the ideal of a “free and equal” society that so many “liberal democracies” claim to uphold.

The effectiveness of both liberal democracy and capitalism is reliant on the replacement of the potential for individual free will and personal responsibility of the majority with absolute dependence on and obedience to, the system. In order for state system to be successful, people need to look to their government for answers and receive placating and believable lies in return, and so does government itself. There are some good people in government, and more bad people, but all politicians are characterised by degrees of self delusion, and the most deluded people in government are often the best public speakers. The self- appointed role of the most successful kind of politicians is to postpone making decisions for as long as possible, whilst maintaining the illusion of activity; correspondingly a lot of voters  vote politicians into office because they want some one else to postpone making decisions for them-this is the foundation of any political culture.  Essentially, the role of politicians is to look busy while the forces of the market “do their thing” in the background. Representative government is not democratic- it does not matter if a dictator is elected for a four year term or not. The very worst kind of politicians, are the optimists, the “true believers”- people who go into politics thinking that they can change the system for the better from the inside- they can’t. Government is held together by the concept of the direct oppression, through force, of human beings by others, and this power is always morally wrong, no matter how it is used.

The rule of Law, the Judiciary and Government.

In Liberal Democracies, the definition and role of the judiciary is a deceptive one. The Judiciary operates on a different level to the political and civil service parts of the governmental system. The law is seen as being both part of the government as the Judiciary and as setting the regulatory standard by which government business is conducted. The court system is supposed to exists outside of party politics, to the extent that it is seen as a neutral arbiter in cases of high level corruption, yet it would not exist without a political system to support and validate it. Law does not exist as a perfect and objective standard of conduct in any real sense, despite what legalists would have you believe; it is co-dependant with politics, because law as a codified authority could not exist without political lawmakers in a Senate or House of Commons. In order for law to be an objective standard it would literally have to be “A law unto itself;” this is impossible, law is only given validity by political systems. The judiciary is not tyrannical on its own; both the political and judiciary systems are necessary in the overall institution of government. Because of this, from now on my definition of government includes both the judiciary and executive branches, unless it is necessary to differentiate between the two for the purpose of argument.

Anarchism

Anarchism, as far as I’m concerned, is a philosophy and practice which eschews traditional hierarchical and authoritarian systems with the aim of extending individual liberty. Traditional institutions are replaced with cooperative or voluntary alternatives. Nearly all my arguments favour anarchist alternatives to the current system and are based on an anarchist critique of it. However, it has to be said that anarchism is a difficult, stark, and often inflexible philosophy which cannot stand in isolation without being accompanied by ethical and practical considerations and should be questioned when necessary. My ideas about how anarchist philosophy can be applied individuals in society, along with the details of my criticisms of current systems are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of other people calling themselves anarchists, although all anarchists share a common ideology which is basically anti-authoritarian and libertarian in its outlook.  

A working definition of freedom

 A good working definition of freedom is that Freedom is the ability to exercise one’s will within the limits of nature and rationality. Whether this is similar or even comparable to the dictionary definition is not important for the purposes of this essay. Most people would argue that this definition of freedom is positive and desirable, and from now on this is what I mean when I write about the concept of freedom in an anarchist context.

A working definition of personal responsibility

Here by personal responsibility I mean the idea that people should act rationally, and with compassion with regard to others and the environment, as well as being capable of literally looking out for their own interests. It is compatible with the idea of the “golden rule” of reciprocal ethics, best recognised in the west in the line from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount: “Do to others as you would have others do to you,” This statement of intent is useful to everyone, does not have to be taken in any kind of religious context and is more than mere idealism, as we shall see later. Personal responsibility can also be seen to be connected to the practical application of ideas like self reliance and sustainability in everyday life.

Some problems

The main objections related to the care of people who are criminal, incapable of looking after themselves or exercising free will, people in other words, who infirm, mentally deranged, or victims of socioeconomic disadvantages, are often overemphasised because of most people’s socialised and ingrained fear of taking personal responsibility (which includes taking responsibility for those who can’t look after themselves) This is arguably compounded by people’s misplaced belief that care for these people has to be incorporated or provisioned by a monetary system to fund care, or a prison or asylum system to marginalise such people. I, as well as many others do not think that this is true. These people are a manageable minority and would be most effectively cared with or dealt with by their families and people in their communities on a local level, as long as those members of the community acted rationally and with compassion.

Human Rights and freedoms in liberal Democracies

 There can be no human rights other than those we give ourselves as individuals-If human rights were truly inalienable in liberal democracies then they would not need to be set down on paper in the form of a human rights charter or bill of rights. Why would something supposedly innate in human beings like “inalienable rights” need to be contractually recognised? Would they cease to exist were it not for the contract? Do human rights laws have any practical benefits in a supposedly “liberal” and “Humane” system anyway?  A contract is a document of law, and to make human rights a matter of law is to make them the property of law, the willing subject of law and therefore the subsidiary of the state itself. Law has stolen people’s rights and trapped them on a piece of paper, and it won’t let you have them unless you do exactly as it says. Law bribes the citizenry with lies about human rights and civilisation when it needs their support and then abandons them when they cease to be useful to it. The lie that the law uses is the claim that by some mystical process it and it alone is able to take the idea of rights, as a purely abstract concept, and then make these rights manifest. Not only the idea is encouraged that law and rights are part of the same thing, that law is as much a part of rights as an aspect of the trinity is to the Christian god. The third part of this trinity is power through violent force-the state maintains it is possible to enforce rights, and claims that your rights are more tangible when incorporated into the institution of the state. This is a lie. Your rights are only ever tangible when you take responsibility of them and seize them for yourself. The truth is that any rational person can realise their rights without the involvement of the state, but not by the phony dogma of law-by individual action.

In other words, in order to have true Rights, people need to be able to exercise personal responsibility and freedom without restraint.

  In order to have rights, people have to take on personal responsibility and seize them for themselves by exercising freedom. Personal responsibility is as important as freedom, and neither can last for long without the other. Personal responsibility is the only true way to prevent the erosion of freedom, and to have personal responsibility it is necessary to be free.  This is not possible in a liberal democracy, where personal responsibility is delegated to a codified legal system. “Giving” inalienable or constitutional rights to human beings is like some irresponsible person giving swimming certificates to people to “Prove” that they have an inalienable (i.e. inherent) ability to swim.[1] The catch is that these certificates are only “valid” on dry land. People walk around on dry land complacently talking about their certified swimming skills, but when a flood comes they are completely helpless and perish, because having a certificate is not the same as acquiring the ability to swim. On another level, attempting to bestow rights on people who expect to be ruled by others is an absurd idea, like giving a typewriter to a dog; the “gift” is neither understood or appreciated.

Consumerism

The current economic system and the society that has developed to support it are dependant on the idea of consumerism. On one level consumerism is based on the idea that people (“Consumers”) should work harder than they want to in order to buy things they don’t need. On another level, consumers also often have to work harder than they need to, just to buy things that they do need. Consumerism is based on a belief that people should naturally desire constantly “more” of something rather than simply enough and it is because of this that Consumerism has been shown to be such a greedy and unsustainable idea.

The Majority and the Minority

When I use the words “Minority” and "majority” It is not because not necessarily due to a politically collectivist bias, but rather because it is an easy way to describe the relationships and attributes of a large groups of individuals, although when I use a Minority/majority relationship, like the “eighty/twenty” rule in argument it is usually assuming that freedom, happiness and productivity (for example) for a majority of individuals is generally preferable to the greed or anti social tendencies of a minority. These kinds of statistical devices can only illustrate arguments in broad terms, but it is sometimes necessary to use them. 

Authority and Power

Because the arguments presented here are so dependant on a critique of the concept of state authority, a definition of the word needs to be outlined. By the definition used in this work, authority does not mean the ability to be persuasive, or decisive, but specifically the ability to persuade and make decisions by forcing people to comply with them with the threat of violence or imprisonment, which is how state authority works. State authority is always backed by real power in the form of the real or implied violent force.   

 

Religion

I have never been given a good reason to believe in a god, and I don’t care whether other people believe in one (or more) or not, and my views on the subject are not important to this work. Personally, I distrust organised religion, and I think that religion is an irrational idea, but I will not go into an in depth criticism because an adequate contextual understanding of the subject can be gained outside of these pages. This essay is unbiased by any particular religious favour, and religion is not a part of any of my arguments. When I use Jesus’ version of the “Golden Rule” it is used in a purely secular philosophical way, because reciprocal ethics is such an important tenet of anarchism and the “Golden Rule” is probably the most cogent and well known expression of the concept that exists in western thought. However, it should be made it clear that I by no means indorse any of the other things he supposedly said.

The Media and Advertising

With the possible exception of the internet, the vast majority of media outlets are now owned by corporations, which means that the media is inescapably linked to corporate interests. This means that the news is often editorialised in favour of these corporate interests, even if this only manifests itself by the news media ignoring stories which could be potentially embarrassing for these selective capitalist interests. As well as this, every aspect of the corporate owned media is saturated by advertising and product placement and most media content is obviously designed to be entertaining and distracting rather than educational.[2][3]      

Do people want freedom?

This is only speculation, but going on the majority of people’s acceptance, or at least tolerance of the current system it would not seem inaccurate to say that most people in liberal democracies would prefer to be told that they are free by others than to actually be free, or don’t understand this distinction in the first place. Either this or the majority of people are not bothered with such philosophical and intangible concepts as freedom.[4]  Then there is the problem caused by the differing and sometimes contradictory definitions of freedom that exist. Personally, I don’t care how supporters of liberal democracy or capitalism define freedom. People are taught by the current system to love their own slavery. It matters very little whether slaves believe they are free or not to someone who is genuinely free, or knows they are still a slave and has no interest in enslaving others. Some, maybe most people would be perfectly happy to have lived under the Roman empire, Stalinist Russia or the Nazis, or to have been a medieval serf or a member of a servile caste in ancient India. Does the fact that these societies flourished indicate that people don’t care about their own liberty? It doesn’t really matter. Anarchists hold those people who fear their own freedom   with nothing more than pity, and the people who actively disseminate these views rarely believe them themselves. Anarchism is, after all, about changing actions and behaviours and persuading people from these false beliefs is one of the main goals of anarchists.

There are even worse systems than Liberal democracy and capitalism

Anarchists are aware that there are worse systems than liberal democracy and capitalism. Fascism and north-Korean style personality cults are both worse, as are countries run by regional warlords, crime syndicates or absolute monarchies, which still exist today. Anarchists recognise that the task of overthrowing despotic leaders in these countries is a worthwhile aim in itself. Anarchism is not a fat, complacent or exclusively western philosophy; anarchist ideas can and should be implemented in the process of overthrowing despotic leaders everywhere, and establishing new, better societies.

1.       Capitalism and capitalists

 Government is the only “legitimate” tool of capitalism, and is only given its legitimacy by the states that it creates and the people who work within them. As I will show, governments are created by capitalists wherever theft, coercion, fraud, warfare or terrorism are deemed to be ineffective. At the same time, government is the ultimate example and justification of theft, coercion, fraud and terrorism. The ideology of the nation state has become the ideology of capitalism. In the same way that rival companies compete in the market place, nation states compete in the new “Global Marketplace” through various forms of warfare. Warfare, although though invariably and  disingenuously explained by nation states in overtly moralistic or ideological language is, in fact, the ultimate example of competition.

Competition is celebrated by capitalists because it provides a convenient excuse to wipe out or assimilate rivals or threats, and is seen as being an effective and attractively ruthless system. Paradoxically, competition is at the same time hated by capitalists because all capitalists are afraid of being defeated by their rivals.  The real goal of capitalism is monopoly; ultimate control over every kind of product, commodity (including ideas) and service in the hands of a tiny minority of autonomous business people working only to maximise their own personal gain. Capitalism represents the ultimate triumph of human greed and selfishness. When capitalist ideology is drawn to its logical conclusion the majority cease to be merely oppressed and exploited consumers and become literally dependant on the capitalist system to provide for all their basic human needs, as they have no choice but to buy back the products of there own labour, at a huge profit to the capitalists. (The “labours” of capitalists are always limited almost exclusively to the acquisition and trading of the products of the labour of others). This is the most classic form of economic slavery within capitalist systems. Capitalists maintain that there can never be an absolute monopoly over all products, commodities or industries by any one group or individual, because of the strength of competition in the marketplace. This idea is deceptive. In capitalist systems the majority of wealth is still controlled by the minority. The wealthy capitalist minority might have separate personal interests, or come from different backgrounds, but they are united by a common ideology of greed and are universally ignorant or uncaring of the suffering of those they exploit. It does not matter whether the people who make up the wealthy minority come from an equally moneyed background (although they usually do) or whether they occupy their position as a result of skill, providence or luck. Nor does it matter how strong the competition they faced was to reach the position they now hold. They are still parasites, indicative of the worst aspects of humanity.

A metaphor for capitalism

“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”-Edward abbey

Involvement in any form of capitalism at any level is undeniably comparable to being an accessory to theft, coercion, fraud, terrorism, and ultimately murder; that citizens are presented with no other alternatives but to aid in these crimes is the fault of our leaders.

 It is helpful to use biological metaphors to explain capitalism and capitalists. The ideology of capitalism can be compared to a lethal form of cancer. Capitalists are human beings, products of nature, in the same way that cancerous cells within the body are products of the body itself. The cancerous cells within the body spread, corrupting still more ordinary cells. Soon the body is so riddled with cancerous cells that it is unable to function productively for any purpose other than to provide a complex for the production of more cancerous cells. Because the cancerous cells ore only able to perpetuate themselves and are dependant on acquiring still more of the recourses of the healthy body cells to live, and are not productive to the cells of the healthy body in any way, this relationship can only inevitably result in the death of the body along with the cancer. Having control over the resources of the body is not the same as having power over the body as a whole organism. Absolute control over the body as a whole organism is impossible. However pervasive the cancer is, it will always be dependant on the body. The so called ideology of Capitalism could be compared to the viruses which have been found to cause the cancer; capitalism itself barley deserves to have an ideology ascribed to it, as it is nothing more in reality than a virulent lie.

 However, at the moment capitalists are not even close to destroying “The body” of the natural world, on which all life on earth is dependant. They could claim that their relationship with nature, whilst not necessarily beneficial to nature as a whole, is at least sustainable (despite increasing evidence to the contrary). In this sense the capitalist understanding of the relationship based on the human exploitation of nature is that it is similar to that of fleas, feeding comfortably on the blood of a large animal; not doing anything to aid the health or well being of the victim, but causing only slight annoyance to the animal. The fleas prosper, the animal goes on living in more or less the same fashion; everyone is tolerably happy. However, in the context of the real relationship between humanity and nature this idea does not make sense. Capitalists make money by buying and selling the products of the labour of human beings, as well as dealing in the raw materials that are used to make these products. Human beings are the result of natural processes, and are dependant on the natural world. In this sense human beings could be described as literal assets, although their sentience makes them more difficult for capitalists to control. The fact that workforces can be bought, exploited and discarded when they cease to be useful in capitalist systems, and that it is still possible even in developed modern countries to literally buy and sell people as slaves at a profit, and hold people under conditions of economic slavery in manufacturing and services, indicates that capitalists too see people as being both natural recourses and products of nature as well as literal commodities. However, this would also indicate that capitalists consider it acceptable to deny the potential of other human beings to act independently and exercise free will by upholding a system which unfairly exploits human beings and places them in conditions of both literal and economic slavery. This is because the ideology of capitalism is one which emphasises the freedom of a select group of individuals, but does not place any value on the majority having personal responsibility. Capitalists also recognise that individuals have no rights other than those that they claim for themselves. Capitalists see humans as being inescapably linked to the natural world. But, critically, capitalists differentiate between the freedom of those in power and those who are answerable to governments and employers, and believe that it is possible to have complete power by having complete ownership of the natural world. They believe that the erosion of the freedom and responsibility of others increases there own freedom and power. They believe that they alone should and can have the monopoly on freedom, which is a concept that they define as being dictated by property ownership.[5] The stability of capitalism is reliant on the replacement of the potential for free will and personal responsibility of the majority with absolute dependence on the system. Capitalists have replaced the idea of personal responsibility with that of personal power and are unable to reconcile concepts they use to justify and defend themselves- the idea that in the “free market” it is possible for anyone to achieve success-with the methods which they use to cheat the majority of their freedom in order to exploit their labour and steal their wealth. Capitalism is ultimately both a destructive and self-destructive idea. Success for the cancer is the death of the organism, and a parasite is still just a parasite.

2.       The glorification of the military

(When I make reference to “the army” I mean the whole armed forces, although this should be fairly obvious, and the criticism of the military although universally applicable, is specifically in relation to recent wars like Iraq and Afghanistan, the way soldiers are portrayed by the media, and the involvement of business interests in warfare.)

An understanding of the role of the military and the way that it is represented in society is perhaps most important in times of war, however it is also at these times when it is most difficult to have an objective view.[6] The main job of the military as an institution is to serve the interests of the state whenever any form of armed conflict is necessary, and make money for the military-industrial complex. The organisation of the army is a hierarchical one, and so the interests of the state are here defined by the leaders of the armed forces. Soldiers carry out their duty by following orders. Personal ideology and independent thought in the ranks are not necessary or encouraged except in some specialised units, and are ostensibly replaced by a doctrine of obedience to “Queen and Country” (or whatever the nationally specific version of this is) and a structure of routine. Soldiers can be ordered to fight against overwhelming force and under conditions where there is only a very small chance of survival, and have been forced to fight in situations resulting in certain death. Soldiers are expected to kill when ordered to, because in the hierarchical military system, orders are always justifiable as being in the interests of the state, according to the leaders. However, there are some soldiers who do not think it is likely that they will have to do this, who join up in peacetime. Modern soldiers in the UK and USA volunteer, and from their viewpoint, soldiering is in some ways the same as any other job, in that they are paid and have hours, except that it could potentially involve killing people, and that some soldiers consider themselves to be serving the higher goals of peace and freedom for the elect, as sanctified in the institution of the state, or even for genuine humanitarian reasons. However, some (although by no means all) soldiers join up because they want to kill others, for various different reasons, or because they are weapons fetishists, or at the polar extremes of dominant/submissive or “thrill seeking” personalities, which they are obviously drawn to because of the authoritarian nature of the armed forces and the potential risk involved. Others join the army because they consider it to be a good career choice, whether they take into account the clear risk of death in combat, or any of the ethical dimensions of soldiering or not. Still more soldiers are recruited from poor areas out of economic necessity, or because of a sense of tradition, as members of “Military families.” There are guidelines and conventions distinguishing between the killing of combatants and non combatants in war, as well as distinguishing between which kinds of physical and psychological torture are considered acceptable when dealing with prisoners. These conventions are ignored or enforced to varying degrees by nation states, and do not usually affect the role of the soldier; When soldiers kill the people who they are ordered to, the ethical dimensions of their actions are legally absolved in the eyes of the state. The dead on both sides are seen as “casualties of war.” Members of the armed forces who kill in battle are not legally murderers, because their actions are recognised by and have the de facto approval of the state. Hence the people who dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki committed no crime, because they were following orders. The generals who ordered the bombings committed no crime, because they were following orders from the president. The people who elected the president committed no crime, because there was no civil or military court that would try them. “Real” war crimes are only generally legally recognised as taking place on the loosing sides of conflicts, where the winners are able to preside over the defeated, and therefore guilty parties. The only rare exceptions to this status quo would be situations where public opinion is against the actions of the soldiers themselves, in which case the individual soldiers become scapegoats for the military court system.

Because in real terms soldiers have different (although more narrowly defined) powers than civilians, in that they can kill with impunity and use weapons which would be illegal for ordinary civilians to even carry, soldiers are in a sense separate from and more powerful than most people. This informs the public perception of the military and therefore also the reasons why members of the public choose to enlist. Perhaps most importantly, soldiers are seen as embodiments of virtues such as bravery and sacrifice, because we so often hear reports on the news of fierce battles, and the deaths of courageous soldiers who were killed defending their post. At the same time and of equal importance, they are ordinary people, members of the public themselves. This distorted view of soldiers is used by the media to distract the public from the important work of killing in the name of defence for corrupt governments which the armed forces exist to carry out.

“Good Works”

 Another deceptive argument used by the media and the armed forces is that they are primarily involved in countries like Iraq or Afghanistan to “improve local relations”, “rebuild communities” or “restore trust,” “winning over hearts and minds” as if they were armed diplomats. Presumably the guns that the soldiers carry are merely to show their strength of conviction that they “really mean business” when it comes to insuring a lasting peace. The fact that the weapons that the soldiers carry were used previously to so effectively to destabilise (or further destabilise) the occupied country is seen almost as if it were coincidental, now that the army is using them to enforce the peace. The occupying army’s role might be to enforce order, but this does not necessarily qualify as “Good Works.” Invading and occupying countries and then suppressing their civilians with lethal force is not a form of philanthropy.[7]

The death cult and hero worship

Because the state often finds it necessary, not to mention profitable, to use the armed forces, it obviously prefers to downplay the negative aspects of soldiers and emphasise the perceived positive ones. When the positive aspects of soldiers are emphasised, it creates the public’s ideal image of the ordinary soldier. According to this ideal, soldiers are ordinary people, endowed with extraordinary powers and placed in extraordinary situations, who at the same time embody the virtues of sacrifice and bravery whilst using those powers only for good. The soldier is perceived as being humble, dutiful and yet potent. Because no soldier would choose to describe themselves in this way, modesty is also another one of the soldier’s virtues. This is the heroic ideal of the soldier celebrated in times of war. This ideal is especially emphasised during war, and people are always encouraged to support soldiers as individuals. Even most pacifists would not say that they would not support the individual soldiers posted to Afghanistan or Iraq. An example of how soldiers (and warfare itself) are celebrated by society in war time would be Remembrance Day. Remembrance Day was originally conceived as a way of recognising the loss of life caused by warfare, and a way of remembering the dead on both sides. It was mainly a show of respect for the dead. Now Remembrance Day has been turned into a celebration of the soldier as a heroic figure and the sacrificial element has become almost comparable to that of a pagan death-cult the blood sacrifice now replaced with crimson poppies. The idea that the loss of life on all sides in all wars should be remembered has been replaced by monuments, which are in reality altars, dedicated to the mass sacrifice of those on the winning side to the god of the nation state, and the veneration, hero worship and mythologisation of the soldiers, whilst the living ones parade around as objects of veneration as the living representation of the sacrifice. Soldiers are not heroes, they are not heroic, no one deserves a medal for being one, and being a dead soldier does not make you a martyr. As individuals, they might be brave, dutiful, friendly, modest and personable, but they only ever choose to be soldiers in wars like Afghanistan or Iraq because they are ignorant, reckless, or deluded. A great many ex-soldiers regret ever being in the armed forces, and these are the ones who were once ignorant, reckless or deluded. The other much rarer and more dangerous kind of soldier not yet mentioned is the one whose only potential regret is being injured or caught involved in torture or killing which is not approved of by the armed forces and sent to prison. Violent conflict is only ever understandable, let alone justifiable, when it is made truly necessary as an act of self-preservation, in defence of individual freedom and the lives of non-combatants. As for the perceived virtues of sacrifice and bravery, self preservation and self defence are concepts far removed from self-sacrifice, and bravery is always secondary to efficiency in modern warfare. The romanticising of warfare and members of the armed forces is arguably sick, and the real responsibility that soldiers have for their own actions is not even lessened by the fact that so many soldiers are effectively economically press-ganged into the services from deprived areas. The responsibility for deaths in warfare should fall to every individual in the armed forces, be they a regular soldier or a high-powered general. The perceived difference between warfare and soldiers and mass murder and murderers is largely an artificial one; the act of killing is not changed or diminished by any emotive or contextual emphasis, or even by the intervention of legal systems. In reality, everyone who kills in a war should be considered a war criminal, but the scale of their crimes can only truly be judged by history and the victims themselves.        

3.       Police Forces

To paraphrase the old saying, the police force acts as “The long arm of the law.” The police function in two ways; They enforce “order” by criminalising,  arresting, incarcerating and sometimes killing what are seen to be “disruptive elements” in society, and act to maintain order by both generating paranoia and fear of crime, and providing reassurance by creating comparative safety in heavily policed areas. The police do both of these things simultaneously just by being there and providing a “Police Presence.” The police rely on the irrationality of others, law abiding or not, to justify their existence, and because of this their main weapon is fear. The maintenance aspect of the police force is dependant on the idea that the police should automatically be both feared and respected. But fear and respect should not negate the value of freedom and responsibility and respect is never “due,”- it is earned.

Police and Criminal Justice,

Criminals are often people who have done despicable things, sometimes they are despicable people and sometimes they are victims of circumstance or government persecution.[8] Condemning the external authority of law is not the same as celebrating or abetting the evil acts of some criminals. However, one of the most unjust aspects of the criminal justice system is that it fails to adequately differentiate between people and the circumstances which led them to criminal acts, once those people have been branded as criminals. For the purposes of argument, this section attempts to differentiate between some different types of criminal act, along with the corresponding behavioural tendencies and mental traits, in order to point out the flaws of the way justice systems deal with them. The motivations have not been separated from the crimes themselves categorically, because think that the motivation leads to the act, and is therefore just as significant as the act itself. As you will see, some of the traits which define criminal behaviour exist outside criminality, and are even encouraged in the current liberal democratic/capitalist system:

Greed: Criminals are often imprisoned for committing crimes which were the result of greed. They often put others in danger because of the desire to possess things without working for them. Often theft is a result of greed. Unchecked greed is often an impulse which leads to harmful actions and can be dangerous to society. White collar crime is also often the result of greed.

Negligence: Negligence is the result of failing to act responsibly in relation to others. It can be caused by taking short-cuts with work which is essential for the well being of others, or being un-able to carry out the work entrusted to the negligent person by others because of ill-health or fatigue. Negligent actions always involve failing to take into account the safety and well-being of others, and usually involve ignoring or taking advantage of others who are ill or powerless and violating a duty of care.

Drug Crime: Crime which is caused by drug addicts trying to make enough money to support an addiction and the criminal gangs who supply the market.

Petty Crime: Petty crime is often motivated by spite, desperation or is an irrational expression of anger. It can be caused by minor mental problems like attention-seeking behaviour or problems managing anger, or just as a result of boredom. Because of the low-level triviality of this kind of crime, it is more of an irritation than a danger to society

Violent Crime: Violent crime is usually the result of personal arguments, although it can be associated with organised crime, or the actions of people who are insane.

Insanity: Psychopaths would be the classic example. Insane people are consistently irrational and irresponsible, and are therefore incapable of exercising free will in any productive or meaningful way, because there actions are invariably limited to acting out obsessive/compulsive behaviour. The criminally insane can be defined as insane people who have committed criminal acts.

Organised Crime: Organised crime is capitalism with a public relations problem.[9]

White Collar Crime: White collar criminals are unsuccessful capitalists.[10]

The reason why greed is the motivating factor behind so much crime is that it is celebrated and encouraged in modern society; it is at the heart of the capitalist ethos, and it is the driving force of consumerism. Unfortunately, because socio-economic depravation is influential in a lot of criminal behaviour, and legal systems do not adequately take the motivations behind crimes into account, starvation is often confused with greed. Generally, motivation is only considered in police investigations to help secure convictions. The worst kind of negligence is caused by people who try to profit from their own position of trust, and the abuse of trust is one of the most evil forms of human behaviour. However, this can be remedied by insisting that people earn trust and responsibility, and start by taking responsibility for themselves. This is not a platitude; it is the only way other people can be reasonably trusted by anyone. The best punishment for negligence is not to trust negligent people and to constantly test the responsibility of those in power. Petty crime is the result of people who are petty-minded, or whose lives have led them to steal in order to live. With the exception of the latter, Instead of changing their environment in some small way for the better, they use the same amount of effort to make it slightly worse for other people. This is contemptible, but not dangerous, and locking people up for it is as pointless as the crime itself. Most people have committed a petty crime at some point, and most people regret it and can be persuaded to do something productive to make up for it or given suitable alternatives to reoffending, without the need for a court. Drug addiction, on the other hand, is an illness, and once people have been helped to cure themselves of it, they can make up for their crimes by helping others. Recognising and treating the illness without stigmatising drug addicts is the first step to preventing the crime. Organised crime is a great evil, and can only truly be fought by boycotting the products sold by criminals, and the stopping of the widespread glamorising of organised crime. The problem of crimes committed by the insane can only be solved by taking preventative action. Insane people are not capable of acting freely and responsibility. They should be treated with compassion, but the criminally insane are people who have been proven incapable of consistently rational thought. They should be kept in a controlled environment and most importantly stopped from harming others. However there is no reason why any of these people should not be cared for in their own communities, with the appropriate response being made considering all the situations of the bad deed. This would be a more effective way of turning people who have committed criminal acts into productive members of society. Crime is allowed to continue by people, because people fail to accept their own personal responsibility for their actions and their responsibility to others and allow themselves to be ruled by fear, and subjugated by their own selfishness. People allow others to take their own freedom and responsibility from them in exchange for the illusion of order and justice. When it comes to the evil acts of others, we deserve what we tolerate, and being wilfully ignorant of the problem or apathetic of it will only make the problem worse. The police force act as society’s way of securing this illusion of justice and order, and the criminal justice system largely fails at rehabilitating criminals, but this is not the true aim of the criminal justice system anyway. Instead of trying to rehabilitate people who are considered disruptive to society, it tries to hide them away, and claim this as a cure; it’s like trying to “cure” an unsightly blemish on the face by covering it up with a plaster. This is proven by the number of criminals who re-offend after being released from prison: The criminal justice system is both dishonest and ineffective.     

The police force is in many ways more like the army than any of the genuinely useful institutions with which it shares the umbrella term “Emergency Services;” so much so that in many countries the police force is the army. Assuming your police force is not a paramilitary throw-back from some sort of junta like regime, and assuming that your police force is not even corrupt in the slightest, there are still a number of well founded arguments against its very existence. Firstly, the police force does nothing to assuage the reality of crime, and in fact the existence of a healthy police force is dependant on the presence of a relatively healthy criminal under-class, because without crime, the police force would cease to be necessary. To illustrate this seemingly contradictory but very real relationship, you only need look at the police force’s view on detected crime rates. As crime detection is one of the main jobs of the police, increased crime detection is understandably a police priority. A clear indication of the success of crime detection would show itself as an increase in detected crime.  So the police would actually conclude that an increased detected crime rate, even if it was caused by an overall increase in actual crime, was a sign of success. Even though the police also take into account crime prevention when analyzing crime detection rates this is still a bizarre idea, because the police could feasibly use a falling overall crime rate to justify more departmental funding, because of a decrease in the effectiveness of crime detection methods, and therefore an increase in the number of crimes going un-detected (and therefore un-prevented). Of course most people would be worried by the idea of an increase in the amount of un-detected, un-prevented (Or, as Donald Rumsfeld might have called it “Known-unknown”)  crime, and would support more police funding, as well as still more invasions of privacy and personal freedom in public spaces, by way of cctv cameras, anti social behaviour orders, isometric id cards ect. Another way the police could remedy a falling crime rate to justify more funding would be to request that new laws be made, and therefore new crimes, new criminals, and new expensive forms of crime detection and prevention. As a big state institution, the main aims of the police-force are self perpetuation, Self- justification, and acquisition of ever more funding. Crime rates are in reality dictated largely by economic conditions, big fluxuations in the population, or even things as mundane as the time of year, and the police are not able to change the real mean amount of crime or crime prevention in any meaningful way in the current system, although they can manipulate the statistics. The police also do nothing to prevent the fear of crime, because it further necessitates there existence in the eyes of the public. If they did they would set up an emergency hotline for people who have lost their sense of perspective because of an irrational fear of crime. Police forces can always rely on the sensationalism of the media to provide a climate of panic and they do all that they can to take advantage of this. The police occupy a very divisive position in the machinery of the state, and they are invariably willing to exploit that position. 

Police as individuals

There is a positive view about police as individuals, which states that police are honourable, morally grounded people who work with the sole aim of protecting and serving communities. This is probably true to an extent, and there are people who owe their lives to members of the police force. However, whilst these people would still be honourable and moral outside of work, the police force is unfortunately, but not unintentionally attractive to another sort of person whose main pursuit is the exercising of personal power over others, and that the police force is itself an immoral institution because of its authoritarian nature. The reader is left to decide which type of police officer is generally more common, although it can be convincingly argued that one of the main features of the police force is that police officers often, for one reason or another feel that they are unable to work in a way which is as productive to society outside of the police force, which is demonstrably untrue.

Psychologically, the police force could be said to attract many similar people in terms of personality as the army, although at the extreme end it is probably the more dominant/submissive traits rather than the outright violent ones which are prevalent, because of the authoritarian nature of the police. The majority of police would however be, or at least appear to be “decent” people. There are also, as in the case of the army those who join the police force to observe and experience rather than because of some weak ideology, “sense of duty” or psychological problem, although these people generally leave later on. There also could be said to be a strong element of fetishism in the police force, as it is slightly less threatening in some ways than the army, but still includes the idea of vested authority and comes with a uniform and batons, handcuffs and even in some cases mirror sunglasses and motorcycle boots.

The basic ideology of the police is a simplistic and arrogant one. The police do not respect or recognise the ability of others to exercise personal responsibility or freedom, or come to any conclusion other than the “answers” already provided by the law. They slavishly consider the law, which was devised historically mainly to protect the money and property of the wealthy, as the highest order of authority, and the only exemplar and definition of right and wrong. As well as this, the police think it is their right and duty to force this opinion on others, by physical force if necessary, and without any consideration of rational arguments, and label all those who do not comply with these opinions, good and bad alike, as criminals. Like members of the armed forces, they are fettered by the idea of duty. They would be willing and happy to throw a shop-lifter or drug user into an overcrowded prison with a rapist or a serial killer, because it would be “their duty.” They think that it is their right alone to dictate rules according to the bogus moral absolute which they claim as their own, although they are by no means any more intelligent or worthy of authority or merit than a club bouncer or night-watchman, because it is “Their duty,” and they expect to be thanked and paid for it. They would have to consider themselves to be something akin to zoo keepers, keeping irrational animals in cages for their own protection, doing it not out of officiousness, or zealousness, but because of some twisted sense of affection for the “Savage” beasts within to explain the narrow-mindedness of their views. There are good people within the police force, as surely as there are bad people in prison, but the idea of the police force itself, or prisons, and the mentality of some of its members is completely detestable.  

4.       Socialisation and Institutionalisation

Individuals in every authoritarian system are to an extent controlled by social institutions. Social control can be seen in two ways- socialisation of individuals and institutionalisation of individuals. Socialisation can be seen in the way people’s attitudes and patterns of behaviour are altered from childhood to reflect social values. These social values can be learned from parents, peers or wider society through the media. Socialisation is an unavoidable, indeed natural process, but there are negative forms of socialisation which can occur when people’s social lives are overly dominated and influenced by institutions. One of the clear examples of the negative effects of institutionalisation in authoritarian societies is reflected by high rate of criminal re-offending and imprisonment caused by our prison service.

5.       State Ideology

The lofty ideals which people associate with the liberal democratic/capitalist system (probably because of the fake pragmatism and anti-philosophic nature of this system) are generally deliberately contradictory and superficial. Here are some examples, central specifically to Jeffersonian constitutional political philosophies, but also present at least as platitudes in most state systems.  

The Ideal of Equality

The state maintains that all people should be treated equally according to an external standard. People have “equal rights.”

The Lie of Equality

Equality is a mathematical idea which can only really work with numbers. To put it simply, 1+1+2 can equal 4, but Tom will never equal Gary, and Tom and Gary will never equal Augustus or Barbara. As apposed to the convoluted idea of human equality, people are demonstrably different from each other, and there is no reason why this should be considered a bad thing. Difference is, after all, unavoidable, so people might as well embrace it. However, when society starts insisting that all people are equal, the most important thing to consider is on whose standard that equality is judged. Equality when applied to people is a lazy and sometimes dangerous idea. The idea of equality under law is downright disturbing. Saying that all people are given equality under a man-made institution is a contradictory idea, because it gives supremacy to the law-makers. This is little more than a trick, and an obvious one at that. Real, complete equality between human beings is not necessarily an immoral idea, but it is physically impossible. The lie of equality is much worse and is nearly always used in the self-justifying ideology of government. Conceptually similar to this idea is the ideal of egalitarianism, which could be defined as an attempt at applied equality, the idea that it is possible to make people equal. The only problem is that when equality for the sake of equality is turned into a social policy, it usually vests itself in an attempt to isolate members of society who are “un-eqaul” and because each person is demonstrably different from another, in some way, the state ends up choosing one specific group who are deemed to be “most un-equal.” the attempt to enforce equality by destroying difference can end in the persecution and demonization of minority groups, and in extreme cases, genocide.   

The Ideal of Difference

The state maintains the importance of difference, vested mainly in the idea of individual choice and the maintenance of hierarchical and elitist social institutions.

The Lie of Difference

Unfortunately, the idea that all people are irreconcilably different, as well as the prevalence of the form of selfish, individualist social Darwinism genuinely present in the ideology of capitalism, visible at least as far back as Adam Smith’s “The wealth of nations,” Has been used to justify at least as many evil acts as the lie of equality. When difference is emphasised and encouraged for the sake of difference, it results in ideas of individual superiority, and therefore inferiority of others, because it is no longer considered necessary to treat others with respect, as if they were equals. It is then seen as being desirable to weed out “inferior” individuals, or in the case of elitism, to separate the superior from the average. These ideas are the foundation of the idea of capitalism and fascism. Interestingly, the attempts to emphasise difference and enforce equality have both resulted in similar social outcomes when applied to human beings-demonization, turning minorities into scapegoats and genocide. It is not the concepts themselves that are harmful, but the value judgements which humans have inexplicably tagged on to the concepts in order to give them practical meaning. Neither difference or equality are preferable to one another, they just are. No one has a “right” to be equal, or different. Equality and Difference exist without bias, and without awareness, as ideas. As well as this, from a practical viewpoint, people also can actually be seen to have demonstrably equal characteristics, as well as clear differences, in hair colour, height, age, size, IQ, and a million other definable criteria.  The truth is difficult to express as it has neither the simplicity of a one-sided argument or the elegance of a duality. All people are different in some ways and equal in others. People are both equal and different, at the same time, in different ways. Unfortunately the ideas of equality and difference seem more exiting to the human imagination when they are separate from each other and made more obviously meaningful by adding value judgements. Because of this human beings have wasted a great deal of time and energy trying to come up with futile philosophies incorporating only one of these theories in isolation, and we have the collectivist and individualist trends in politics, the ongoing warfare between the two and the supposed justification for any number of corrupt and evil regimes. It could therefore easily be argued that the attempts to apply the concepts of difference and individualism and equality and collectivism to human society have caused more harm than good.

6.       Competition or Co-operation?

As has already been said, the idea of competition is an important aspect of capitalist theory. But competition itself has existed for millennia, and can clearly be seen in some aspects of nature, for example evolution by natural selection. Correspondingly, the ideas of co-operation which are so important to left wing ideologies have been around equally as long, and can be seen from the grouping of different cells in all organisms to the behaviour of ants in a colony. Since the evolution of man one of the most common questions asked by human builders and thinkers has been “Is it better to compete, or co-operate?”

 There are two models of competition that have been used in the past; In one model, two forces, thesis and antithesis, collide and form a new, improved combination, a synthesis, and in the other model one animal kills the other and eats it. Left-wingers prefer the former, and right-wingers the latter.   

7.       The Utopian Ideal

For the purposes of argument I will define Utopia as a perfect or ideal state of society, reflected by a perfect state of being and assert that this is a definition that most people would associate with their understanding of the word.  The actual translation of “Utopia” is a combination of the Greek words for “No Place.” Societies which are founded on Utopian principles are often described as being “Eutopian,” the difference between the two is indicated by the different spelling.

This idea is again central mainly to post revolutionary-governments like France, Russia and the US, although it exists in most liberal democracies as an influential and powerful ideal. The Utopian ideal is generally taken as a belief that it is possible to create a perfect society. This is rightfully understood to be unrealistic and impossible by most members of society, with the exception of a few political and social idealists. The basis of Utopian society can in theory be either individualist or collectivist, although as I have explained, the concepts of individualism and collectivism are both misleading when applied to human beings and should be treated as such. Generally, Utopia is promised or implied by politicians and philosophers as the reward for following a particular party, system or theory. Utopia represents the perfection of human society. However, like the idea of equality, perfection of human beings is dependant on an external standard, and so again the most important thing to consider is on whose standard that “perfection” is based. No one person, or group of people can define what perfection is, because no one person is themselves perfect. When politicians and philosophers try and explain how perfection in society can be achieved, what they are really interested in is their idea of how they think perfection can be attained through a methodology which is based on either radical individualism or collectivism, or some sort of religious salvation, or a cynical attempt to profit by promising people a perfection which they don’t even believe in themselves. Perfection is an irrelevancy. It doesn’t exist as the result of some sort of winning argument justifying its own existence. Perfection is just an idea which cannot be satisfactorily defined by or applied to human beings. If people aim for perfection they will only ever be met with disappointment and disillusionment. As for the Utopian society, most people think that Utopia is “A nice idea, which wouldn’t work in real life.” Utopia is more insidious than that. It’s a meaningless concept which can distract people from achievable goals and tangible things in the real world. Utopia is evil. It doesn’t matter how perfect, even or “Nice” Utopia is, and it is pointless either to try and make it, or find it, because you can never live there.

8.       Achievable Goals

There are achievable goals for human beings as individuals, and society as a whole and I want to identify some ones which can be used positively, and point out when these goals conflict with the interests of the state. The first of these is individual self improvement. By this I mean improvement of quality of life, the improvement of personal knowledge and education and improvement in individual relationships between human beings, which is instrumental to individuals reclaiming their freedom and personal responsibility. As well as this I think that minimising the harmful effects of one’s actions with regard to the natural world could be seen as a form of self improvement. Next is the recognition that other people have a natural desire for self improvement in the same sense, and that this is a positive thing. Thirdly, the generation of compassion for others, and a desire to relieve the suffering of others is important, and this is a natural human impulse and should be encouraged. These ideas are as instrumental to reclaiming and exercising freedom and personal responsibility  so and people can be persuaded rationally that these things are positive and desirable, and change their lives in order to realise them in the form of practical action. In short, the vast majority of people are capable of exercising freedom and personal responsibility in positive and productive ways, and ought to assert their ability to do so.

 Although there are people who are compassionate and responsible within state systems, and it could be argued that the majority of people acting relatively responsibly (or at least sanely) within the system is the one thing preventing state systems from descending into chaos, any form of authoritarian state, including liberal democracy, is limiting to the full realisation of any of these goals. This is because of the idea necessary to state systems, of dominance of human beings by others in the form of the governmental institution and the rule of law which, although not diametrically in opposition, is incompatible with the goals already highlighted. As well as this the idea of domination of rational human beings with the potential to fully realise these goals is immoral, and is limiting to the overall potential of human beings for self improvement and development as a species. This can be shown intuitively when we apply “The golden rule” to the act of domination of one human by another which is central to the concept of authority backed by state power. Would you, as a rational human being, with the potential for true freedom, want to be forced to accept the dominance of other human beings, for the profit of others? Would you want to subjugated or oppressed? Would you want other people in the same situation to be dominated, subjugated or oppressed? If not, then why aren’t you doing something about it? “Do to others as you would have others do to you.”

The state system fails the test.

 The main goal of anarchism is not an attempt to create a perfect society. This would be a waste of time. Anarchism can be characterised as the struggle caused by the conflict between rational individuals and the state, economical systems and the rule of law which denies them the ability to be truly free or exercise personal responsibility, and therefore limits the societal development of the entire human race. This struggle is worthwhile in itself, because the only alternative is oppression.

9.       Economies

Economics is rarely encumbered by philosophical issues. In economics, Utopia is an economy free from market failure, and good people are good consumers. The main problem with economics, however, is that it is unable to recognise anything outside economics. It is fundamentally a reductionist system. Another mistake that some people make when they think about economics is that economies exist only because of money. They don’t; economies exist because of people; they are a human construct and so is money. According to the old adage “Money is just a way of keeping score-” if money is a way of keeping score then the rules of this economic “game” are both arbitrary and unfair, and the “winners” are therefore in no position to be celebrated or congratulated. Another falsehood is that currency based economic systems are sensible and rational, and that they are essentially a pragmatic system. Currency systems are neither rational or pragmatic. Bank notes are pieces of paper. Credit exists as a series of binary values stored in a computer. Money is, in material terms, nothing more than an abstraction, which does not accurately represent the value of either goods or labour; when people use money, they are making a leap of faith, confirmed only by a system of mass delusion and mass coercion. 

The Two Gardens.

This is an allegory which attempts to show the basic ideal of an anarchist society, in comparison with a much simplified (In that corporations, stock exchanges ect, which will be covered more fully elsewhere have been left out) version of a basic, currency based economic system.[11]

The First Garden

There is a small group of people living in a garden. They were born there, and they will die there. It has high hedges all around so that they are not only unable to see, but are completely Isolated from the outside world to the extent that they are not even able to envisage the landscape outside. The soil in the garden is fertile, and with some effort, the garden dwellers are able to produce more than enough food for everyone. Sometimes there will be too much rain or sun, and one of the crops will not produce a good yield, but no one goes hungry, because the surplus from another part of the garden is used in places where not as many crops are produced. This is not that difficult, and the gardeners don’t resent doing it, because they know that the others would do the same for them. Nearly all of the people are peaceful. They are able to hunt some of the animals who live there for food, but have no real use for weapons for anything other than spearing the occasional rabbit. Because there is hardly ever any conflict over food, people are able to spend more time thinking about things. Some people devote their time to coming up with new, better ways of farming which can be used by everyone. Some people take the herbs which grow in the garden and turn them into medicines. Others write and paint, and produce beautiful things which everyone can appreciate, but at the same time everyone who is capable of working is happy to do so, because they know they are helping everyone. People still get headaches and have arguments, there are still sick people to be looked after, people still feel tired when they get out of bed in the morning and everyone still dies eventually, but people are united by a common aim and this makes the gardeners both productive and happy.  

The Second Garden

 Thousands of miles away, hundreds of years apart, there is another garden, just as isolated, potentially just as fertile as the other one. However, in this garden, the people behave very differently. The garden is split between a fertile and beautiful half, full of delicious fruits and vegetables, and even big ornamental flower beds, and a patch of brown, dead waste ground which has been uncared for, for as long as anyone can remember. The people are also divided. There are those who work in the fertile half and live on the waste ground next to it, and the small number of people who live on the fertile land and consume most of the food. The way the people on the fertile side maintain their position is very clever. In the garden, there are naturally occurring red pebbles, not useful in any way, but distinctive. The people who live on the fertile land have collected every red pebble in the garden, and keep them in a big pile which is jealously guarded day and night. The people who own the fertile land claim that, since they live there and most of them were born on the fertile side of the garden, it is rightfully their property, and that they therefore own everything produced on “their side.” Unfortunately, for one reason or another, the people on the fertile side don’t want to work the land, so they have come up with a scheme to get the people on the other side of the garden to work for them.

“If you work the land, and produce food,” they say, “We’ll give you one of these shiny red pebbles for every day you work, and you can use those pebbles to buy food from us.” The people on the fertile land know that a person can usually produce a marrow, four carrots and an apple a day in the garden.

“Just think, with just one pebble, you’ll be able to buy a two carrots and half an apple a day![12]” they say, “Think what a useful system it is, you’ll be able to really earn a living, from us, and if you work harder, and produce more (four times more) we’ll pay you two pebbles a day. It’s like a foolproof way of “keeping score,” and you can trust us to be completely fair.”

 “Of course, because we own the land, and everything grown on it, we’ll be able to keep the excess food for ourselves, and make a profit, see? Everybody wins!” 

Because people living on the waste ground have no choice, they work the fertile land, work as hard as they can to support their families during the day, and then stagger over to the waste ground to sleep at night. The waste ground, although it could be as fertile as the other land with some hard work, remains unkempt and barren, because the people who live on it are too tired to try and do anything about it. Meanwhile, because the people on the fertile side of the land like stuffing themselves so much, they are constantly trying to come up with ways of maximising their profits:

“We won’t improve any of the worker’s conditions unless were sure it’ll lose us profit not to. We’ll work it out by comparing the cost of giving the workers better pay with the amount of money we’ll lose if we starve too many of the workers to death, and then that way, we’ll be able to work them as hard as we possibly can. After all, it’s okay to make them miserable and hungry, as long as we don’t actually kill too many of them. And the best thing is, if we accidentally get a bit greedy and some of them go and work themselves to death, according to this equation, we can take fifteen or twenty minutes off their work day, at a minimal cost to us, and they’ll forget all about it; in fact, they’ll thank us!”

Having invented the cost-benefit analysis, this becomes their mantra, and the people who live on the fertile side are happier and fatter than ever before, whilst the people who live on the waste-ground seem to get more and more frustrated and miserable. Now that business is booming, people on the fertile side are coming up with ever more ways of exploiting the workforce. Some people take the herbs which grow in the garden and turn them into drugs, which they sell at a huge profit to the overworked and unhappy people from the waste ground. Some people write escapist stories or articles about the ever “improving” working conditions, or paint advertisements full of sexy pictures to distract the workers and sell things, again all at a profit. All the people from the waste ground hate working, because they know deep down that they’re being exploited and overworked. On the fertile side, administration, research and specialisation have become more important. People need to keep accounts, come up with new farming methods and then teach them to people, and then insure those people work according to a schedule. To do these types of job, the people from the fertile side recruit more people from the waste ground, give them special training, and then pay them slightly more, because pure manual work is now universally looked down upon. These comparatively privileged waste ground dwellers can’t believe their luck! Soon they forget all about their former complaints, start affecting the mannerisms of their superiors and creating an illusionary wall between themselves and their neighbours on the waste-ground, creating a new, “Middle-ground,” that they pretend is better than the waste ground, which is exactly what the people on the fertile land want.

In the end, the main ambition of everyone on the middle ground and all the people on the waste-ground not too overworked and un-educated to have ambitions, is to kill the people from the fertile side and take their place, or come up with an idea which improves the profits of the people already there, so that they can sell it to them and buy their way in. There is ignorance, loathing and distrust between the three different patches, and one day they’ll probably all try and kill each other and a “new order” will be established, almost exactly in the form of the old one, only this time the garden (and all the red stones) will be owned “By everyone” but “Managed” by the people on the fertile side and administrated by the people in the middle while the people on the waste ground do all the work. Did this place ever exist?  Yes, it does exist, you were born here and the worst thing about it is that it works. However, the fact that it works doesn’t stop it from being madness.

The Philosophy of Action

Why is the second garden more recognisable than the first? What can we do to make the world more like the first garden and less like the second? The second garden exists because of the concepts of property and money supported by power, the things which are central to the current system. In order to make the world more like the first garden and less like the second, you first have to stop believing in the second garden, start questioning and persuade as many people as you possibly can to stop believing and start questioning as well. This can only be done by persuading people that it is wrong, and that the deceptive assumptions made by the people working within the second garden are wrong. This cannot be achieved by promising people lazy days, immortality or paradise, it has to be explained rationally and shown intuitively, and as human beings we have all the necessary equipment to do this. People can only live in a similar way to the people in the first garden if they are united by a common attitude to each other and the environment, reached by logical argument, but this is only the start. Individual philosophies are based on belief. Philosophy can be a good mental exercise, but even the assertions of the most logical philosophical arguments can only be proved by practical, productive action in the real world. It is vital that this is recognised by as many people as possible.

Corporations, Deregulation and “Corporate Social Responsibility”

Incorporated businesses are the most prevalent business model in the current capitalist system and so something should be said specifically about them. Corporations are seen by some economists to be an improvement on other business models, because the investment of shareholders in public corporations creates a public interest in the success of the economy, and can potentially create a direct link between the profits of successful business and an increase in the per-capita wealth of the consumer base on which those businesses depend, because of shareholding. It is seen as being a proof of the saying that “What’s good for General Motors is good for America” and, in the new “global economy,” the world. Because of the partial involvement in the agenda-setting of corporations by shareholders, corporations are also seen by some as an example of the “Democratization” of business, as well creating a more level playing field by having shares publically traded on the stock market. Also, with the increased public awareness of corporate misdeeds and interest in the environment, corporations are now talking about “Corporate social responsibility-” the philosophy that successful business should work in harmony with society in an ethical and environmentally conscious way.  However, this misses the point. Regardless of whether corporations ought to act in an environmentally conscious or ethical way, to do so, just for the sake of the environment or ethics themselves would be literally bad business. Corporations exist because of a government-given mandate to make profit. Private companies need government permission to “float” on the stock-market and become corporations, and are given that permission only when it is believed that they will be successful (i.e. profitable.) Also, the only aim of corporations themselves is obviously to generate as much profit as possible for shareholders. This comes into conflict with the idea of “corporate social responsibility” most clearly when corporate social responsibility is seen in the context of the main method by which all the major western corporations seek to maximise profits and minimise losses: the cost/benefit analysis. If corporations think it will be overall cheaper and more profitable to pump industrial waste into a river, or employ children in third-world sweatshops, then they will. If it is cheaper and more profitable to employ public relations companies to disguise these and similar misdeeds than to cease doing them, then they will. If they can ignore their own misdeeds by affecting a don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy and dodge accountability to shareholders, governments or ethics, then they will, as long as they are profiting as a result. Industrial spillage and deaths caused by shoddy products are regarded as “externalities,” as long as the profits exceed the predicted losses caused any potential media exposure or government intervention.  The CEO’s recognise this and are fabulously well paid for it, and because by law corporations are given legal ”personhood,” without in practice placing any value whatsoever on social responsibility, the corporate mandate for profit and irresponsibility is recognised and indulged by government. This is largely because government is, and always has been the slave of the “Invisible hand” of capitalism. The stock market itself is also no fairer than any other facet of capitalism; the vast majority of shares are owned by the same moneyed capitalist minority that is influential in every other aspect of the liberal economic system. Corporate deregulation, the idea that corporations should be trusted to regulate themselves, only makes corporations even more dangerous.

The Mixed Economy

Because I have been talking about “Pure,” Laissez-faire capitalism and “classic” economics, and as this is no longer the only form of capitalist system in the world, the structure of and some of the problems with “mixed economies” now have to be discussed. Mixed economies are defined by the mixing of the state with the private sector, and involvement of business in aspects of public services which are effectively sub-contracted to the private sector. In the Keynesian view, the benefits of the mixed economy are that it minimises the socially negative externalities of business, whilst at the same time allowing governments to an extent to artificially stimulate the economy during market downturn, by providing an “Inducement to invest.” As well as this, the mixed economy can open up the public service aspects of the public sector as a potential business opportunity. From the point of view of the public sector, government investment in the economy is supposedly beneficial because the stability of government is dependant on a stable economy, and the government can in theory achieve this through only relatively minor investment because of the “Multiplier Effect,” which dictates that any spending in business will result in an increase in aggregate demand for goods and services, an increase in consumption and a stronger economy.

 There are some problems with the mixed economy as a theory, especially when it is combined with economic neo-liberalism. Firstly, private sector involvement in state often results in what are effectively state sanctioned monopolies, for example when a business is given a ten year contract to operate a railway. Because there is only one track and therefore no possible competition for at least ten years, the railway has no incentive to improve services apart from when service becomes so poor that the government has to subsidize it. What the state would be in effect doing is subsidising and incentivising failure. Also, in some cases business involvement in state services can be downright dangerous. An example of this would be when a hospital sub-contracts cleaning services to a private business. Because the main goal of this company, like any other, is to make money, they cut corners and fail to give their under-paid workforce adequate hygiene training. Because the workforce is exploited, morale and quality of work suffers, and because they are not given the same recognition or training as nurses, the staff do not think of themselves as having a duty of care to the welfare of the patients. This results in a dirty hospital and a higher rate of infection, which are of course seen only as “externalities” by the cleaning company. When a government incentive to “save” badly performing hospitals comes in, the hospital is moved to a new building, but the cleaning company is the same and the cleaners are themselves still no better paid. As well as this, the profits which the company make are not significantly re-invested into the hospital, but go to instead mainly to the company owners or shareholders, so the government money is in effect sucked out of the hospital by sub-contracting the cleaning company to do a job which used to be done by the public sector with in theory far less wastage, a direct duty of care and better training. These arguments are however secondary to my main criticisms of the state as a tool of oppression, and capitalism as a form of economic parasitism, but it has to be stated that state and capitalist systems are no less repugnant when they are combined in this particular way.

10.   The Globalised Economy

 The benefits of the globalised economy are constantly being trumpeted by economists. The world is being ever more interconnected by communication, infrastructure and trade, which has led to the modern world being seen as an ever “Smaller” place. At the same time, the world is becoming increasingly homogenised in terms of the “sameness” of consumer products available in different countries. One of the most important aspects of globalisation is the outsourcing of industry and manufacturing from wealthy to developing countries as the developed nations of the world de-“industrialise” their domestic economies. This trend is largely due to the availability of cheap labour in the developing world, which provides businesses with a financial incentive to move production. As well as this there is an increasing trend in business which extols the benefits of sub-contracting workforces and production to external companies working in developing countries in the “export production zones” of places like the Philippines or Mexico. This makes for a leaner and more efficient business model, as well as delineating the responsibility of corporations to the people who make the products they sell. The practical upshot of all this is that large corporations are free to exploit workforces to the extent of treating workers as virtual slaves, whilst having a disproportionate impact on the economies of developing nations, which gives these corporations enough political influence to insure that any injustice or negligence continues basically unchallenged. At the same time, as long as cheap consumer goods continue being sold in the developed world, these problems are often ignored by the general public. Because of the “controlling stake” which corporate interests now have over governments, organisations which should take on a regulatory role, like the World Trade Organisation, are either co-opted by corporations or bypassed and therefore pose no real threat to exploitative capitalist interests in poor countries. This kind of economic globalisation is clearly wrong.

“Ethical” Consumerism

The last twenty years or so has seen the rise to prominence of a number of anti corporate movements focusing on the negative effects of globalised exploitation of workers and abuses of human rights, as well as environmentalist groups opposed to the destruction of the natural world by global corporations. Equally important in recent times has been the “consumer rights” movement which seeks to promote choice and transparency in the marketplace and has resulted in more stringent laws regarding, for example, the labelling and sourcing of product ingredients on packaging (although attempts to reform anti-monopoly and trust-laws have generally yet to prove as successful.) The capitalist answer to these movements has appeared in the form of “Ethical consumerism.” Ethical consumerism is based on the selling of “Ethically sound” products- “organic” food, “free trade” coffee, “Sweatshop free” clothes and “Cruelty Free” cosmetics are all examples. This is a reasonable idea, but one which has many serious limitations. The surest way to insure that products are ethical, it is assumed, is to create “ethical brands,” whether they are conventional companies selling “ethical” products or universally recognised “Branded” logos on packaging guaranteeing “ethical” practice. The universality and reliability of these ethical standards are often questionable, but the main obvious objection to ethical consumerism is that ethical consumers are themselves seen as a niche market by capitalists, the assumption being that the only truly ethical consumer is one that can afford to be ethical. Ethical behaviour is primarily an aspirational idea, and people with aspirations are invariably people with money, or who want to look like they have large amounts of disposable wealth. One of the main aims of ethical consumerism is to absolve the guilt of the consumer, after the consumer has first been made to feel guilty, by advertising, by culture, and by the very fact that the market exists in the first place, which indicates that the consumer has something to be guilty about. Without guilt, there is no market. The coffee bean farmers might be better paid, but the primary value of the product is based on the sense of self satisfaction in the person drinking their “fair-trade organic coffee.” Ethical products also appeal to the pretentions of the buyer, since ethical products are invariably more expensive and are therefore easily turned into status symbols not only of wealth but of righteousness. Also, people no longer feel bad about how they spend their money generally if they buy just a few ethical products although they might in reality still have plenty to feel genuinely guilty about. Someone with a bulging stock portfolio of Monsanto or BAE systems shares could quite feasibly sleep sound in their beds at night after a nice cup of “fair trade” coco-the “Ethical” label is as much a magical, guilt cleansing talisman as it is a guarantee of third-world worker rights or organic farming. The extra “Hit” of unjustified smugness or “Feel-good factor,” which comes as a result purely of marketing, is added to the conventional value as a sort of ethical mark-up, a “Conscience Levy”- an arbitrary value based on however much the ethical company thinks it can extract from it’s guilt ridden consumers. This is not to say that all ethical companies start out with these views, but that in a competitive market, the most cynical ideas often turn into the most successful marketing strategies. Ethical consumerism puts a luxury price on the ideas of choice and ethics, and as long as “Ethics” are seen as a niche market in the control of capitalists, any attempts to truly address and reform our economic or social problems will be impeded.           

11.   Work, Production and leadership

This is an attempt to compare production philosophy and group dynamics in work in both capitalist and anarchist systems. My ideas about how these things would operate in an anarchist system are basically speculative, and not a necessarily typical of an anarchist position, but I want to try and dispel the commonly held misconception that anarchists skip around the problems caused by a lack of a conventional authoritarian structure when talking about (and doing) group work. In fact, some of the ideas which I have modified and put into an anarchist context already exist in practice in the form of the Japanese production philosophy of continuous improvement, or Kaizen. Firstly, I will point out a few of the faults with current ideas about production philosophy and leadership in capitalist systems and authoritarian systems generally.

Authority, output and profit

Virtually everything we use in our everyday lives was bought and made in a factory. Because of this, many criticisms of capitalist and authoritarian production philosophies are based mainly on the factory, and “Work” in this case means jobs on a production line, although these criticisms can be applied more generally to any work involved directly in “making things” from a jet plane to a basket.

In most authoritarian systems, including capitalism and state communism, people work firstly because they are paid, and secondly because they are told to do it. Each worker, in for example a factory, is expected to perform a task or a series of tasks in a prescribed and uniform manner, and do these tasks as part of a production line. This is because the two most important objectives in capitalist manufacturing are the maximisation of output and the maximisation of profit. As many units as possible must be produced, the assumption being that the more units are produced, the more profit is made by the company, as long as there is a demand and the manufacturing process has been proved to work. Companies only innovate generally when they are faced with competition from outside, and competition is the only real incentive for change, in either the product or the manufacturing process. The people who design and make the products are only given an incentive to suggest change or improvement because they are paid, and their is no guarantee that these suggestions are likely to be listened to by the management. This inevitably means that when companies are slow to accept change, they are often replaced by other more innovative companies. Hence competition is seen as being the driving force behind change. This means unfortunately that change can often be slow and reluctant in big companies and when big companies collapse to be replaced by former competitors, large scale unemployment and even economic instability can result. This is, far from being an elegant system, a lumbering, destructive and basically blind process. It has been compared glowingly by right-wing economists to evolutionary theory in nature, which indicates that these economists see innovation in products to be the result of some sort of random and inexplicable mutation, rather than the result of skill, judgment or originality. Production methods in authoritarian and capitalist systems are monolithic and sluggish to respond to change; a lot of very profitable businesses have been run according to the adage “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” but it has to be noted that if this adage were applied universally, we would still be living the dark ages. Instead, businesses look to individuals to come up with original ideas, and then buy or steal them, mass produce the product of the ideas and only change them when they cease to be profitable. This is a limiting and stupid idea. As well as this, this narrow-minded production philosophy is fanatically enforced by the authoritarian hierarchy of manufacturing, from the shop floor-supervisor to the CEO. Success and prestige are defined by how far up the ladder a job is from the production line, and communication is generally one-way and in the form of orders.

Continuous improvement and “Growing” leaders

The views about different levels of technological development (or regression) in an anarchist society will not be dealt with yet, and unlike the above criticism of authoritarian capitalist production philosophy, this way of thinking is not limited to factories. It also works whether you are designing and building wooden chairs in a shed or computer chips in a factory.

An anarchist alternative to outside competition being the main incentive for innovation of products is a rigorous system of internal evaluation and re-evaluation of the product itself, as well as the production methods, with continuous improvement of the product as a main objective. This would work in practice as a sort of internalised competition. Maximising output and profit would no longer be a consideration. Output would be determined exclusively by demand, and the products would not be made at a profit. Efficiency, by which I mean the elimination of waste and all negative externalities, including environmental effects and the improvement of the product itself in terms of ease of use and the effectiveness of the product, would be the only considerations. The justification for continuous improvement is obvious; Improvement of the product would be to the benefit of everyone who uses it, and because the product would be freely available to everyone, the improvement of the product would also be in the best interest of everyone. The practical uses and benefits of products are clearly a more justifiable and powerful motivation for the improvement of products than the profit of capitalists. This simple idea is based on the positive view that improvement and change are good things, rather than just a reluctant acceptance that they are sometimes necessary. Also, the philosophy of continuous improvement lends itself to a re-thinking of established authoritarian structures in production. Because the overall aim of everyone involved in the production of goods is continuous improvement, the suggestions of everyone involved are valuable. People still perform standardised tasks in production, but the linier process of production is itself sublimated by an endless cycle of evaluation and re-evaluation, which leads to not only high levels of quality control, but actively encourages new ideas and individual thought. Any areas of the production that could be changed for the better would be reported, discussed and implemented after detailed planning and re-evaluation would itself be considered a standardised task. Ideas would be shared by groups in all levels of production, rather than being commoditised or made the exclusive domain of designers and managers, which would result in a more fluid exchange of information, and greater innovation of the product. In any group, more skilled individuals will assert themselves, and there is nothing wrong with this. People in positions of leadership would be both leaders, experts, and teachers and would at the same time be considered part of the production process itself; effective use of “human resources” are central to continuous improvement, and improvement of the product would go hand in hand with the improvement of personal skills. There would be no authority backed by power or money, only knowledge and understanding of the product; leaders would be “Grown” rather than born or bought.

12.    Other Economic Alternatives

Apart from doing away with the idea of money altogether and becoming self sufficient in small communities, anarchists have come up with economic alternatives which can work in any system, even an industrialised technological one. Labour exchanges, time banking, share systems and self-issue currency systems have all been designed as attempts to create practical alternatives to or improvements on the existing economic system. This is an example of an alternate economic model is a hybrid of those three systems, and is based on the labour theory of value, which states that the value of products and services should be based on the labour that goes into them. This model was created to show that anarchists are willing to think about what other economic systems might alleviate  the need for the current capitalist one, and some of the answers to the more obvious questions which people might ask about this and similar systems have also been included.

A provisional currency based on the labour theory of value

 Involvement in this system is voluntary, and completely self sufficient individuals could use a bartering system, which would probably remain the standard in small, isolated communities.

Labour/time credits

Each labour credit is worth one work-hour. (Although it could be sub-divided in minutes or converted to a metric value) The work hour itself has only nominal value which could be determined by dividing the average of the output from the labour in the form of net product by the net number of workers. The value c represents contingency costs, which is the number of credits lost by disruption of the production process because of, for example a fire. This is a variable value and would depend on the process.

Currency Value=V net Product=P Workforce (net number of workers)=W Variable Contingency=Vc  so:

For example

A group of people work in a workshop, making furniture.

The workers decide to work eight hours a day, and they can on average 1 finished chair per hour and a table every two hours. A chair is therefore worth 1 labour credit and a table is worth 2. If someone has worked 1 hour, then they can afford a chair. Let A equal the sum total of L divided by H.

Output of the chairs would be determined by demand.

Here’s the formula:

Time measured in hours=h labour=l Currency=c   

Productivity= p is determined by the value of  so the currency is tied to an average value of actual work. Output would be determined by demand and assuming the product was something in more or less consistent demand like furniture, demand could be estimated by the number of units “Bought” in a certain amount of time. An increase in aggregate product (or whatever the anarchist alternative of this would be) would increase the purchasing power of the labour credit, whilst at the same time keeping credit linked to a universalised value of A. Combined with a philosophy of continuous improvement in the workplace this would result in a net increase in economic growth.

“What if someone works for eight hours, buys eight chairs and then sells them for two credits each?”

There would be no mark-up of the product or materials. People would easily be able to spot profiteering and the people doing it would be seen as the con-artists they are.

“What about materials; how would they be distributed, and by who?”

Natural resources would be co-operatively used and distributed according to need, rather than being bought and sold in bulk using a similar system to the “Just in Time” inventories used in some businesses today. Some products would inevitably be made out of relatively inferior materials to others. This is unavoidable. After all, life isn’t fair. But this isn’t to say that economic systems can’t seek to make it fairer.

“But this system doesn’t place any value on how hard or well individual people work!”

This is correct. Although the currency itself would be strengthened by an overall increase in productivity, the measured output of individuals at work would not be taken into account. The currency could be based on the mean average of output on either a macroeconomic or microeconomic scale. The basic objection with this system is that it does not reward people for working harder than others, (although it does reward people for working longer hours) but it is possible to determine an average value for work productivity and monitor measured output externally.  No economic system can be perfectly accurate or perfectly fair, but this system does at least get around the stunning disparities in pay in our current system, and it does work. After all, what is so objectionable about presenting labour as an average value, when you consider a comparison of the “value” given to one hours work for a teacher, for example, with one hour’s work for a CEO of a major corporation in our current system? The real value of the CEO’s time could not possibly be so obscenely expensive in any sane system, and certainly not in any system based on the labour theory, which unlike capitalism, is not concerned with generating more cash for the super-rich.   

“What about the jobs which no-one wants to do? How would anarchists solve this problem?”

One solution is that people doing unpleasant jobs (menial jobs which no-one initially volunteers to do, like, for example toilet cleaning) could be disproportionately rewarded. The work would be decided locally according to a rota. People could buy out of their slot on the rota in advance by paying one labour credit, which would be included as a bonus in the pay for the slot. To use a pun, people would literally “pass the buck” Each time someone did this the value of the job-slot would accumulate. Eventually the job would be paid so many labour credits that people would do it for the disproportionate reward. This system would remain in place until work was thought of more for its social value and people could be found who wanted to do unpleasant jobs for ordinary pay.

Price of products would be determined by the average number of work hours involved in making a product from the input materials or components to the finished product. This wouldn’t include “down” time caused by the limitations of the production process, for example allowing time for paint to dry on a door. This way, the economies of scale could be exploited by making mass produced items incredibly cheap. In smaller, non industrialised communities, this would be effectively a self-issue currency, but in larger communities billions of accounts could be kept using a punch-card style time-keeping system which could be counted by local accounting systems, which would replace banks. Self employed artisans producing extremely high quality or ornate work on a small, local scale would most likely slightly overestimate the value of their work, but this would not cause any significant imbalance in the market, because these types of craftsmen are always a tiny minority. Similarly, artists would still work in the same way. However, the value of art or high quality items would never be more than slightly more than the value of the amount of work hours taken to produce it, so these items would never be astronomically priced, and there would not be enough of these types of product on the market to cause any significant drain on the economy or natural resources. A functioning welfare system could even be devised for the disabled or elderly by giving them a certain number of differently marked, free labour credits a day, although these people would most likely be able to do useful work anyway. The discrepancy caused by disabled people getting labour credits could be literally written off with little or no harm caused to the economy.

13.   A dilemma

This is another allegory, this time pointing out some of the inconsistencies and contradictions in anarchist theory.

A group of people live in an anarchist society which is technologically advanced. Their homes and towns look superficially pretty much the same as the ones you see today. The majority of people live on top of hills, surrounding a valley with a river running through it. The climate on top of the hills is quite dry and the people find themselves in a position where they need more water for drinking and the sewer system. The easiest and most logical way to do get enough water, it is decided, is to flood the bottom of the valley, turn it into a reservoir and then pump it up the hill to the towns.[13] Someone comes up with an idea, and volunteers and experts are found to carry out the project. They go down into bottom of the valley to have a look at land which is to be flooded. To their surprise, when they go down into the valley, they discover a man living in a log cabin. They had thought the valley was deserted and now they are faced with a problem. “Hello,” they say. “We’re anarchists. We have decided together that the best course of action for the benefit of everyone is to flood this valley, and we mean to do it. Could you move please?”

“Hello,” says the man in the log cabin. “I’m an anarchist too!” “I’ve lived here for years, I’m damned if I’ll ever move, and there’s nothing you can ever do to persuade me to leave.”

“Oh dear” say the anarchists.

Unfortunately, in an anarchist society as technologically advanced as our current system, this sort of dilemma would occur fairly often, which is perhaps why it is so hard to envisage such a society in the present day. People would need to be moved in order for factories and infrastructure to be built, and there would also be problems associated with the necessity of large-scale intensive farming which would be needed to support such a system. On the other hand, there is the problem that not everyone would choose to live out in the wilderness in a log cabin. This is also linked to the contrast between asocial and social elements in anarchism. However, anarchism is far from an isolationist or asocial idea, and anarchism is in fact it is most valuable and useful when it is seen in a societal context, for the simple reason that most people choose to live and work in a society, although anarchists do think that people should be able to choose which society. Can an anarchist solve the problem above? I know I can’t, but I don’t think that either the townspeople flooding the valley and drowning the man, or the obstinacy and stubbornness of the man in the cabin should be considered an adequate solution. In our current system, the man would be dragged from his home or drowned and the townspeople would have to pay for the water. You can almost hear the authoritarians and capitalists gloating over their hollow victory:  “What a great solution! Once again the current system proves that it has all the answers, whilst the idealistic anarchists are left behind to their navel-gazing. HAH!”

This is beside the point. Anarchists, regardless of their position on technology, have to accept that these kinds of conflicts are sometimes unavoidable. Their aim, therefore, should be to minimise these sorts of conflicts, learn to accept compromise, and be open to alternatives. Maybe anarchists could end up dragging the man from the house, or even killing him, but who would choose to do it? It would not be considered an acceptable solution. Anarchists would not claim that the benefits of conflict cancel out the expense of even one person’s liberty, because they don’t. As well as this, anarchists don’t absolve or delegate personal responsibility. There is no ideal or perfect solution to these sorts of dispute, and these sorts of disputes are inevitable. However, anarchists have never claimed otherwise, anarchism does not attempt to create a “perfect society,” and these sorts of conflict do not detract from the anarchist position itself.     

14.   Problems in Revolutionary Thought

Revolution, in the form of social upheaval and the emergence of new economic models and attitudes in society, is not at odds with the form of anarchism that this work attempts to outline. However, the methods which revolutionaries use to incite the majority to action are often suspect and exploitative, as are the motives of the revolutionaries themselves. Revolutionaries in mass-movements often work not by using rational argument, but by exploiting the anger and fears of the working classes, hence “The masses” are seen as being valuable as a force only when they act violently to overthrow their oppressors because of an emotional reaction. The revolutionary potential of the working classes is used as a blunt instrument, and the destruction and replacement of one class by another through violent means is seen as being a valuable aim in itself. This is a misguided idea; it is the class system itself which ought to be destroyed, and this cannot be achieved just by killing people of one class, or the replacement of one class with another. Revolutionaries who want to seize power and authority invariably prove to be as bad as the people who used to occupy the same position, because they are nearly always corrupted by the absolute power which they were trying to take and protect for everyone. Of course, some revolutionaries are corrupt from the beginning. The main goal of many revolutionaries, particularly state communists and national socialists/fascists, is to bring about a revolution or generate support for a coup d’état by inciting hatred of the ruling classes and specific minorities. This would seem to indicate that these revolutionary groups do not see rationality as a necessary requirement in the working classes. Irrationality combined with anger is always dangerous, and that the exploitation of the working classes in this way by revolutionary movements leads to other forms of exploitation in post-revolutionary governments. The alternative to this kind of revolutionary structure is to first persuade others through argument and example, and then organise non-violent direct action where necessary. An example of this would be withholding taxes, or seizing unused land for communal uses as well as things like pamphleteering or setting up public debates. When anarchists ignore people of supposedly different classes or people like police or soldiers, because they consider them to be “beyond persuasion” and involve themselves in random violent actions without even bothering to adequately explain their own position, they make themselves their own worst enemies. It is possible to persuade virtually anyone[14] that the anarchist position is both rational and practical, and that this being the case, attempting to deceive or exploit anyone is both unnecessary and wrong, and can never result in a system significantly better or different than the present one.

 Another fault with revolutionary philosophies, present particularly in anarchism, is the idea of “spontaneous order,” which states with unrealistic optimism that a “fair and free society” naturally would emerge out of the chaotic rioting and civil war of a revolution. The anarchist concept of natural order or spontaneous order has been proved wrong time and time again, in the oppressive authoritarian states which invariably form following revolutions. Spontaneous order is also present as an idea in some laissez-fare liberal capitalist economic theories, which claim that the capitalist economic system is the result of spontaneous order. This claim, although impossible to prove, is harder to disprove. If it were the case that the capitalist economy exists as the result of spontaneous order, then anarchists would naturally have to conclude that their view of spontaneous order is wrong, and that the results of “spontaneous order” are themselves undesirable and incompatible with anarchist theory. Spontaneous order is a difficult idea to ascribe as the cause of any system, because it is a fundamentally prescriptive idea; a concept which is applied to events after they have happened. Spontaneous order is therefore a largely irrelevant idea because it does not change the present reality of either an anarchist or capitalist system, and it hence logically should be disregarded by anarchists and replaced a more tangible and progressive revolutionary theory. 

Because of these reasons, a strong argument exists that anarchists will remain a minority in existing societies until anarchism has been proven to work on a small scale. Correspondingly, attempting to create a mass movement through the violent actions of a few individuals will inevitably result in a counter-revolutionary backlash. Because of this, it makes sense that anarchists should be involved in violent revolutionary action only if they are in a system even worse than capitalism or liberal democracy as part of a genuine mass movement with the intention of the overthrowing the state. It is possible for anarchists to work around the current system as well as against it. This would involve coming up with alternative societies which would function outside, around and above the rule of law and the state. These communities would be self-governing and refuse to accept the laws, property, monetary system, taxes or sovereignty of nations. They would resist the attempts of the state to weaken or destroy them using non-violent direct action, sabotage and most importantly argumentative persuasion. On another level, people within the current system can take a philosophical understanding of anarchism and use it in their daily lives. People who have been persuaded to accept anarchism make the best anarchists in the same way that converts make the best religionists, except that the opinions and beliefs of anarchists are based on rational argument rather than blind faith.[15] 

15.   Technology

 Technology is considered by some to be, along with opposable thumbs, one of the things separating humans from animals. Human beings are characterised partly by their ability to make things, for both good and bad. However, human beings are clearly nowhere near as advanced socially as they are technologically, as is evident by wars and genocide that have marred human progress since pre-history, and this imbalance is dangerous. A perfect example of the consequences of this imbalance would be the discovery of nuclear fission. Nuclear energy was first developed, not for its tremendous uses for good, but because of its uses as a weapon. It does not matter whether you think that the first use of the atomic bomb by the Americans in 1946 was justified or not, the knowledge of nuclear power is impossible to un-discover.  Ever since 1946, humanity has been haunted by the fear of nuclear holocaust. It is not the technology itself which is harmful, but the people who control it. At its best, technology provides the tools for human beings to improve their own quality of life and at its worse, technology can be used at the detriment of human life, as a tool of oppression and death. The real question which people should ask themselves when they think about which technologies would survive in an anarchist system is “Is it worth it?”The answer is often “no.” I am writing this on a laptop computer right now, and smashing it up to sit in the woods and write the rest on pieces of bark using ink made out of squirrel-juice would be un-productive. The real test, therefore, of technology is whether that technology is useful, and whether it can be used in a way which is not limiting or damaging to other’s welfare or freedom. Damaging technologies, like weapons, should be disposed of in an anarchist society. Mass-production as well as consumption, should be scaled down as much as possible, in any society. This means thinking seriously about whether absolutely every item of technology we have works in a useful, efficient and beneficial way, and whether it really justifies the manufacturing process used to make it.

Mass Production, infrastructure and Industrialisation

The ability to produce things in massive amounts has only really been possible since the industrial revolution. The industrial revolution and the infrastructure needed to support it are responsible for the leaps in technological advancement of the last two hundred years, as well as the fact that most of the people in the world now live in cities. Industrialisation has also resulted human beings being more dependant on technology than ever before.

A power cut

This story might seem melodramatic, but it does it serve a purpose, which is to point out the degree to which human beings are dependant on technology and the negative effects on society as a whole which result when this dependence is taken for granted.

A capital city in a developed nation has a power cut during December. The power cut causes a complete blackout, and people have no choice but to sit it out. They light their houses with candles, and sit around talking, waiting for the power to come back on. For a while, people think it’s a novelty, a minor inconvenience at worst. Bars and clubs even have impromptu “Blackout parties,” and there is a general feeling of fun and goodwill. They wait a night and a day, and listening to their portable radios, they hear a public announcement saying that power won’t be on for at least a few days. On the second night, people start to panic. Old people die alone in their flats because of the cold. People are afraid to go out. The emergency generators in hospitals start to fail, and most of the shops and pubs close. Food in fridges stars to go bad, and people run out of candles. People start panic-buying in the shops which are open, and the shops which are closed are looted. The police patrol the streets trying to stop the looters, and rioting breaks out in poor areas. In some places some young men’s first reaction is to grab a stick or a crowbar and walk the streets looking for fights and shouting “Every man for himself!” People start arriving in torch-lit church halls and Salvation Army centres, and volunteers try their best to help, but struggle under the conditions. Meanwhile, the economists are tearing their hair out, and most of the major companies are loosing hundreds of thousands of dollars every minute. During the third night, the situation gets worse. Most people are cold, hungry and scared and cower in their homes listening to the noises of smashing and shouting outside, whilst news helicopters fly around outside filming everything. Eventually, the morning comes and the power is restored. Despite the best efforts of the volunteers, at least one hundred elderly people are eventually found dead in their homes. Some of them are only found because neighbours notice the smell, days or weeks later. The national economy is in a bad way, but it is expected to recover. There are widespread reports of rapes and murders during the lawlessness of the power-cut, and it takes them the first part of the day to put out some of the fires caused by vandalism and accidents with candles. The rolling news carries two, seemingly contradictory themes. The first is “The amazing ability of ordinary human beings to pull together in times of crisis and triumph over adversity.” The other is based around areal shots lit by burning shop-fronts and the amateur video footage of the rioting and fighting with the police taken by people on their mobile phones.“Barbarism!” the reporters say, “Chaos!” “Anarchy!”

 “This is what happens when human beings are denied the creature comforts which we have grown used to in the modern world and is also a telling reminder of the dark side of human nature.”

People quickly start pointing fingers, trying to find someone to blame for such a disaster. Politicians and the media demand an independent report. Is it the police, for being too harsh suppressing the rioting? The rioters, for fighting the police? The electricity board? The government, for mismanaging the problem? “Where were they?” The reporters and the public ask.”Who’s responsible for this?”

A more apt question would be “Who isn’t responsible?” No healthy, rational human being can be considered as not responsible for their own welfare, or the welfare people too infirm to look after themselves; no elderly person should be left to die alone. But of equal importance, if people are so dependant on modern technology that society starts to collapse without it, then isn’t that a sign of complacency? Isn’t this a weakness rather than a strength?

So, how much of a role should technology have in our lives? It would be impossible for human beings to revert completely to a pre-industrial level immediately, and dangerous and counterproductive to “demand the impossible” by saying otherwise. Also, it would be cruel for people in developed countries to deny the “third world” the right to industrialise their economies because of some philosophical (or even purely ecological) objection. One alternative then, is for individuals to use simple, existing technologies as efficiently as possible and Trying to improve truly useful technologies. In practice, I think that this would involve most individuals living in small communities and developing a way of life which is not dependant in any considerable way on mass produced products not readily available or industrial scale processes that are difficult to implement: Self sufficiency.

The Justification for self sufficiency is that it is a way of life which has to be developed by anarchists out of necessity, as an alternative to the current system. I would also argue that because anarchists cannot at present maintain a level of technological advancement or mass production rivalling authoritarian or capitalist systems without limiting personal freedom, complex technology and mass production would have to be abandoned initially, unless individual workers are able to take control of industrial workplaces using some sort of syndicalist platform.

16.   Some questions about self sufficiency

 Self sufficiency in an anarchist context is about more than a sociopathic backlash, rustic ludditeism or romanticised hippy nonsense. Existing technologies would be used, recycled or modified if their use was opportune and feasible, and new technologies would be developed if it was thought that they would meet the same criteria, but not otherwise. However, at first, mass production would most likely not exist in these communities, including intensive farming and mass produced pharmaceuticals. If this idea was introduced and enforced in the wider world, it would be disastrous. Millions of people would starve, and epidemic diseases would spiral out of control. The only way to make self-sufficiency work at present is on a small community level, because self-sufficiency cannot work without personal responsibility. The only way to popularise the practice of self-sufficiency is to do it on a small scale and to do it effectively enough that other people see it as a good and desirable way to live. However, serious concessions would have to be made. A perfect example would be medicine.  How advanced could medical science and techniques stay in the early stages of a truly self-sufficient community? Hopefully, from the fairly early stages, a decent level of health-care could be maintained, but this would be limited by a steep learning curve. What about comfort-would people in self-sustaining communities be more comfortable? Not necessarily, especially not in the informative stages of trail and error. Would an anarchist, self-sufficient community be “good” in a utilitarian sense; maximising pleasure for the greatest number of people? Not initially, possibly not at all. Would people be happier? What about life expectancy, would it improve? Again, these questions are extremely difficult to answer concretely, and in fact arguably if anyone claims to have definite answers to any of these questions regarding specific individuals in any context, then they are lying or making generalisations and should not be trusted. It is not the job of anarchism to ease people’s fear of discomfort, pain, illness or death-these things are unavoidable in life anyway. Human beings allow themselves to be enslaved by convenience. Perhaps this is a cavalier attitude. Anarchists can only hope that it isn’t.  What anarchism does do say definitely is that society should be based on the individual needs and wishes of individual people, and based on compassion not law, not that society should change people to meet the wishes of it’s rulers, or that laws should overrule compassion. Involvement of individuals in such a society should be voluntary and not compulsory. However, in order to create and work within such a society, individuals need to make voluntary sacrifices and it is impossible to say in the current system just how far-reaching the consequences of those sacrifices might be.

17.   The Environment

There is an environmental justification for the anarchist alternative to the current system, as an anarchist society would most likely impact on the environment much less if it was of the self-sufficient sort. Protecting wild nature is obviously important, as human beings have a unique power over the natural world that can and should be used for good. However, there is a potential danger in adopting a purely environment-centred perspective, because Anarchism is basically a humanist philosophy, mainly relating to the freedom and potential of humans and being overly concerned with the welfare of small furry animals could distract from this. Anarchists are also often obsessed with ideas like “Animal Rights,” which, if measured against the earlier arguments about the notion of “human rights,” seems like an equally ridiculous concept. Animals don’t need rights, and they wouldn’t know what to do with them if they had them. Codified or constitutional rights are not real and there is even less point in environmentalist anarchists trying to secure codified rights for animals by humouring the delusions of the current system. Human beings are inseparably linked to the natural world and it is in the best interests of everyone to interact with nature in a way which is sustainable and respectful. The most effective way to insure that the environment is protected is to first solve the wider human problems which cause the exploitation and damage to the environment. The negative externalities of Industrialisation and irresponsible profiteering are the main cause of environmental damage, and these problems can obviously only be solved on a human level. Even if animals are given rights, large numbers of them will still be killed and whole ecosystems will still be destroyed as long as businesses still profit from their destruction. Similarly, vegetarianism and veganism, which have become almost dietary fetishes in the current system, do not need to be as fanatically encouraged as they are now by some anarchists. Vegans have been saying for years that the most efficient farming method for food energy is one based on cereals, fungi, fruits and vegetables and not meat, which is undeniably true. In an anarchist society, people would therefore naturally change to a diet with less meat and more vegetables for absolutely rational, rather than emotive or theoretical reasons because it is more efficient to do so, not necessarily as a personal moral choice or statement.[16] In fact, here is no practical reason why wild animals couldn’t be hunted for food, as long as it was completely sustainable, and gathering meat in this way would automatically make meat much scarcer in the human diet, compared to the artificially sustained high-density meat farming which exists today. That being stated, the ethical arguments against meat eating are also perfectly understandable, and are clearly a matter of personal belief. Environmental problems caused by human beings tend to solve themselves when the human causes are examined and changed to a sustainable alternative. As for the emotive methods which activists use to try and combat animal testing, throwing fake blood at people or, for example, “Liberating” a few monkeys which couldn’t possibly look after themselves anyway doesn’t solve the overall problem, and neither does threatening or killing researchers involved in biotechnology.[17]

18.   The consequences of “progress”

Human progress can be measured in a number of different ways. Two of the most obvious are technological advancement and social advancement. Technological advancement can be measured by benchmarks of achievement; new inventions which change the way people live, like the mechanical clock or the telegram. The effects of technological advancement can be positive or negative. The invention of the AK-47 changed undeniably changed the way people live, and was put together in a more effective and efficient way than the rifles that came before it, so it could be seen as an example of a linier technological progression. But how could the invention of a gun which has killed millions of people be seen as an indicator of the overall progress of the human race? This seems a bizarre way of measuring progress, and is hard to see in any kind of positive light, although some would claim otherwise. They would claim that it is impossible to predict what the potential benefits caused by even an invention designed to cause harm. An example of this argument would be an improvement in the manufacturing of cannons. The ability of cannon barrels to withstand explosive pressure becomes vitally useful when the same technology is used to make the pistons for steam engines, so without cannons, there would have been no pistons, no steam engines, no industrial revolution and none of the perceived benefits to humanity caused by it. This is a reasonable argument, although there are some glairing flaws. Firstly, people could feasibly come up with the idea for the steam engine and the techniques required to build them without putting those same techniques to work making weapons first. The same goes for similar examples of techniques applied to harmful technologies being put to “good” uses later. Secondly, the people who invented cluster bombs or napalm would seem like cynical liars or self-deluded if they said that they even hoped that any of the specific, specialised techniques used in making such brutal weapons could ever be put to good uses. This proves satisfactorily that the “other uses” argument is not universally applicable. Thirdly, if they did use the “other uses” argument, would it affect the number of deaths caused by the weapon, or make them any less responsible? Anyone can have ideas; sometimes they seem to come out of nowhere, but once we put those ideas into action, we have to take responsibility for the consequences. The people who bear the real burden of history are those who use progress as an excuse. Technological development should never be to the detriment of society.

19.   Property

Property is based on the idea that it is possible possess things. This is such a widely supported and seemingly obvious view that it is hard to even imagine a society not based on property ownership. Acquisition of property is probably one of the main motivating ambitions of most people, and the more property someone has, the more successful they are considered to be. You could well be sitting in a room full of things which you think of as being your own and if anyone came and took “Your things” you would be understandably upset. But like any human idea which is applied to material things, property is only real as long as it is thought of as being real. If the idea of property ownership was abandoned, and material products were freely available to everyone, based on relationships of trust, then there would be no more theft, no more deprivation and no more poverty. Nothing would be “owned” by anyone, but everything could be used and enjoyed by everyone. If thieves came and took your things from your room now, you would doubtless still be angry, but this is because there is no relationship of trust between you and the masked man with the swag-bag. This idea sounds initially unrealistic, but when the concepts of property or ownership are compared to it in any depth, it begins to seem both sensible and appealing. After all, most people aren’t even in “Possession” of themselves. Your daily movements are largely dictated by your employer, your parents, your spouse, the police, the government, and the laws of physics. The acquisition of property only seems really tangible when it is used to distract people from the realities of their day to day lives. Property gives people a sense of control, but it doesn’t make them free. Similarly, no one has ownership of their own mortality. No matter how healthy you are now, you will die and before you die, your washing machine will most likely become obsolete. Clichéd as it sounds, the undeniable truth is that “You can’t take it with you.” Then there is the idea of inherited property, which is most noticeable in the context of the inheritance of land. Inheritance of property is an idea which assumes that heirs have a right or claim to the property which they have inherited. When this assumption is applied to the ownership of land it becomes extremely questionable.

 In order to own land, like any other property, the person or people who own the land have to control who can live, farm or mine on it. To do physically do this, these people have to be backed by individual or government power in the form of treaties, affiliation with other land owners or violent force, which is generally used when the claim of land ownership is disputed by people already living on the land. A good example of this would be the population of the west of America by white settlers who used every one of those techniques (but mainly violent force) to destroy the Indian nations. Similarly, in feudal Europe, the claim to the land owned by the barons and land-lords was enforced using violence. Any peasant rebellion was quickly suppressed and the ring-leaders were usually beheaded, hung or tortured. In many European countries the descendants of these aristocratic land owners still possess huge estates, and their claim is based purely on the ancestral ownership of the same land. This is allowed to continue because no-one can remember exactly how the landowners ended up owning the land and the memories of past executions and atrocities have faded in the public consciousness. Next, there is land which has been bought by capitalists, who defend their property with the mandate of the laws set up to protect it. Their power is the power to have trespassers forcibly removed or imprisoned by the police, beaten up by private security or mauled by attack dogs. What about the property of ordinary people? What about the houses, cars or televisions of people who aren’t millionaires? Property rights for the majority of people are less concrete or “inalienable” than they seem in state systems. For example, if the government decides it wants to build a road over your house, then it can, by compulsorily purchasing it off of you for a non-negotiable sum. If the government decides that your car is no longer road-worthy and you persist in using it, it can be seized and scrapped. Your television and computer, along with virtually every other piece of technology you own is almost certainly designed with a deliberate in-built limited obsolescence in order to force you to buy another one in, for example, ten years, so it seems in many ways more like a lease than true ownership. Even the books on your shelves can be destroyed if their contents are made illegal by law. The government can, if it wants to, seize or destroy virtually any item of what you naively think of as your property, so even if you advocate the idea of property, it is still really little more than an abstraction. Property is, in the current system, considered by the government as a privilege and incorrectly thought of as a right by most citizens. The problem with property is that it is only made a meaningful idea if it is backed up with power, influence, money, or some other form of “clout” and is defined and limited by government. The illusionary nature of property rights in modern societies is a direct result of the dominance of consumerist forms of capitalism. In an anarchist society there is simply no need for this idea. If the word “property” was used at all, it would be exclusively as a useful shorthand for something that was being used or was needed by an individual, with the possible exception of small personal items like books, clothes, cutlery or children’s toys. This is not to say that everything would be “pooled” or that everything would be unconditionally “owned by everyone,” but that, for practical reasons, an anarchist system would necessitate far more sharing of goods and commodities between individuals, and that land would be used on a co-operative basis.[18]

Intellectual Property: Intellectual property is a more complicated idea. It’s only fair that writers or designers are credited and rewarded for coming up with good ideas, but It does not make sense that intellectual property rights should continue after the person who came up with those ideas is dead, and the more media which is freely available in the public domain the better. As well as this, It is hard to see why professional creatives should be considered as any sort of elite group, as in virtually all areas of achievement, the work of a dedicated amateur can be as good as that of a professional.   

20.   “Bad Press for anarchism is cheap copy for capitalism”

Anarchists are considered to` be villains, thugs, bomb throwers, thieves, lunatics, disorganised bloodthirsty sociopaths, hooligans, nihilists, bogey-men and perhaps worst of all in the eyes of most people, idealists. They are exploited and then betrayed by mass movements of every kind. They have no unified “Plan.” People who object to the police are assumed to be criminals. People who don’t pay their taxes are locked up. People who don’t believe in property are hippies. People who live where they like and do what they like are thought of as freeloading scum. People who want to live away from society are social deviants. People who support such ideas or hold such opinions are dreamers. People who claim to have their own morals are in fact immoral. People who aspire to do any of these things only do so because they are failures in mainstream society. People who want representation at work are communists. People who rebel in any way are comparable to angry children throwing their toys out of the pram and should grow up. “They act out their rage towards the parent or carer by externalising that anger and directing it against other forms of authority, most notably the government.” Most of them need to see a psychologist. Anarchist societies don’t work because the ideas are impossible and their communities are populated by deficient people. If they only act as individuals, they are locked up. They are irrational and dangerous and if the state considers them as any kind of threat as a group, they are brutally, bloodily, mercilessly killed. What’s more, they deserve it; after all, they’re the bad guys.    

How can anarchism be used as a productive philosophy for social and economic change? Can capitalism be destroyed for good? What could the anarchist alternatives to our current economic and social institutions look like, and would they really work? 

Part 2: What Comes Next; Some Suggestions

21.   Incentives

When trying to consider how more people can be persuaded around to an anarchist position, It is important to consider what incentives they are given to work within the current capitalist system and how anarchism can offer people better incentives. What causes people to work harder than they theoretically need to, or to ignore the injustices and inequities of the current system? To assume that it is mere thoughtlessness, lack of education, lack of interest in the issues or the absence of any serious alternatives would not only be an insult to the vast majority of people, but it would be a lazy view to take. No, what really drives people is incentives. An incentive can be positively defined as the possibility of some sort of pay-off gained in exchange for doing something. The term incentive is not just a monetary one, however. Incentives can take a number of different forms, some obvious and with easily obtainable pay-offs, and some not so obvious and far less tangible.

 Incentives Further Defined and the Difference Between Drives and Incentives

On a far more basic and universal level than that of incentives, human motivations can be said to be the result of drives. Drives are caused by the basic needs which all people strive to satisfy in their everyday lives. For example, there is the need to reproduce, in order to perpetuate the species, the need to create intimate bonds with other people in order to feel included and validated, and the need to experience physical pleasure. These needs are encapsulated in what is commonly known as “The sex drive,” and in science, the desire for intimacy and validation is usually put down to the body’s recognition of the need for reproduction, although on an emotional level the other factors are considered at least as important. Then there is the need to survive, to eat and breathe and be able to react to dangerous situations with self preservation in mind, something which could be loosely defined as a “Survival drive.” Whilst Drives can be consciously recognised, they are rooted in the unconscious mind. Drives are many and nebulous, each one overlapping the other and forming the basic element of what we consider to be “Human nature.”

On one level, on the other hand, incentives invariably offer not only to meet these needs, and therefore satisfy the basic drives, but to do so on a conscious instead of unconscious level.  Incentives also offer to exceed the limits not just of those things which are strictly needed, but to give people what they want as well. Perhaps one of the most important defining factors of Incentives is that they are a social construct. Because an individual adult human being in isolation is only generally capable of addressing their own survival, but does not have the specialised skills needed to get more of the things they want, incentives can only exist on a social level. For example, if a man lives alone in the wilderness, he may be able to satisfy his need for food and shelter with relative ease, but he would almost certainly be unable to make a silk suit or a car, two things which could be considered incentives to work in a organised, advanced society. Because society contains people with specialised skills a huge number of incentives are offered to people who live such a society.

Different types of incentive

In established economics, there are three different kinds of incentive, but in this work another, more narrowly refined one has been added.

Remunerative incentives

Remunerative incentives are the most obvious and easily recognised kind of incentive. Simply put, Remunerative incentives are a material reward offered for doing something.

Moral incentives

Moral incentives can be described both in positive and negative terms. A moral incentive exists when there is a paercieved moral reward for acting in a certain way because such an action would be thought of as being good. A negative moral incentive exists when a action is widely condemned and punished. Generally moral incentives are based in acting for or against social or religious moral codes.

The Universalised Incentive

Because people do not work directly in exchange for goods or services, something has to be said the other type of incentive offered by society, which is in itself the most important aspect of any society, regardless of what form it takes-here defined as a universalised incentive. In capitalism, the form which the universalised incentive takes is money.