Written by Andrew Parker   

My studies have been extensive and incredibly time consuming, but I feel that they have been conducted thoroughly and for a very good purpose. I feel that a person should spend as much time as possible learning about socio-economic factors in order to make more informed decisions in life.


As a student of Economics who has studied the works of Economists such as: Adam Smith, Marx, Keynes, Von Mises, Hayek, Friedman, Stiglitz and Keen, amongst many others, trust me when I say having looked at their theoretical arguments and the reality of how economics has evolved to the present day I have found that they have all been wrong in many different ways but that they have all been wrong on one key point, which I will come to in a moment.


I was at one time a Capitalist/Libertarian who worked for the Liberal Democrats in the UK and someone who truly wanted to believe that money, unregulated in a free market economy, could make the world a better place. The only thing was, two key aspects required for a peaceful society: Freedom (Liberty) and Equality, could not co-exist within this model and I was forced to choose one over the other. Like many Capitalists/Libertarians I chose Freedom, but I still had my doubts that absolute freedom could improve the terrible levels of inequality we see around the world. I was dissatisfied by its inability to integrate both freedom AND equality and how it seems to be directly contributing to the ecocide of the planet. And so, I kept searching for a socio-economic model that could facilitate both freedom AND equality, though I doubted that such a model could possibly exist.


I decided to dedicate my time to sheading light into the unenlightened areas of my socio-economic understanding. By chance, or mere inevitability, I started to look into societies with the most equality which, incidentally, were also societies without money. One example I found was that of the indigenous people of Australia. Australian Aborigines did not have any money and interestingly they also had no concept of ownership or greed. They traded goods with other tribes, and with visitors such as the Macassans, but they did not have money. Crime and disorder was at an absolute minimum. Murder was unheard of. This example, as well as many others I found, fascinated me, but I felt that since they were all very basic societies that this kind of moneyless society would be too basic for our complicated globalized modern world. Nonetheless, I noticed how peaceful these societies were, how at one they were with nature and how well they interacted with other moneyless societies. Each of these societies only started to fall apart when they were invaded and forced into the economic cycle we are familiar with – capitalism and the monetary system.


Making the world a better place has always been the driving force behind my studies and so I followed this anthropological study up with investigations into theoretical and practical moneyless societal examples of the present day.


One after the other all I was seeing was a parallel between peaceful societies and societies without money. I decided that next I was going to look into the Economy and its origins.


As mentioned earlier, I have studied Economics pretty extensively and what I have learned and will conclude in this article might surprise you, but also in a roundabout kind of way make perfect sense. So, what is the origination and the meaning of the word, 'Economy':


[Middle English yconomye, management of a household, from Latin oeconomia, from Greek oikonomi, from oikonomos, manager of a household: oikos, house; see weik-1 in Indo-European roots + nemein, to allot, manage; see nem- in Indo-European roots.]
Word History: Managing an economy has at least an etymological justification. The word economy can be traced back to the Greek word oikonomos, "one who manages a household," derived from oikos, "house," and nemein, "to manage."


e·con·o·my (-kn-m)
n. pl. e·con·o·mies
1.
a. Careful, thrifty management of resources, such as money, materials, or labour: learned to practice economy in making out the household budget.
b. An example or result of such management; a saving.


The Economy used to exist on the microeconomic level only. Looking at the rudimentary definition of the word Economy, we see the words Careful, Thrifty, Management of Household Resources.


The following inexorable conclusion, is backed by empirical evidence and a liberal, open and yet critical mind. Incidentally, I find that an unbiased, critical mind is crucial to the uncorrupted process of learning, which is why we should allow people to grow up without conservative traditional values thrust upon them, shaping and conditioning them to think within a very narrow frame of reference and to never question the existing structures of the world.


I can conclude that what we now call an Economy is actually not an Economy at all, not in the strictest sense of the word because it contains many opposites to what one would consider an Economy to be.


This 'Economy' is not well-managed at all, not for the benefit of the vast majority of us anyway. It is not thrifty as so much is wasted. Privately-owned central banks, like the Federal Reserve Bank of America, pump out money to global financial banks who invest this money, as well as the money we deposit, on risky gambles, like sub-prime mortgages and market derivatives. Every country is trillions of pounds in debt to these financial institutions. There exists extreme wealth, and as a result, widespread extreme poverty and levels of waste and induced scarcity that can only thrive under the current 'economic' model.


It appears that the problem with the world isn’t the lack of a free market, or that there isn’t enough money flowing freely around an unregulated economy, as I was once lead to believe and unfortunately many Capitalists and Libertarians still do, despite the clear social damage of such a belief in practice. It is clear to me that the problem with the world is that we have money at all!


Let's break this down a little more: The resources belong to the wealthy. The wealthy are given these resources by the wage labour. The wealthy then sell the resources back to the wage labour, but for a cost which continues to grow at a faster rate than the real wage. The access to these resources depends on the amount of money one possesses, because money is the key to the locked cupboard of resources. The more money one has the more freedom one has and the more access one has to resources the less equal society will be. Money is an impediment and not an asset to society. It is an unwanted middleman, but one that is used by the wealthy to keep resources separated from the people with threats of violence if we do not comply with this system of control.


Resources and NOT Money are at the core of the Economy, contrary to popular belief. The better the resources are managed and distributed to where they are needed the healthier society will be. When you add the aspects of money, debt and wage labour to society as well as the management of resources from central powers who command the exclusive use of force, suddenly, what one should have a natural right to is being hoarded by people who demand authority whilst taking the resources of the world under protection of the State. This hierarchical power structure is essential to the ordering of this kind of society, a society where none but the wealthy have access to the world's resources, access to which is desperately needed by billions of people. Without this access the rest of society is deprived of freedom AND equality and condemned to the structural violence of poverty and every other social ill.


Our rulers have managed to flip reality. They have managed to convince us that we are weak and they are strong. They have made us believe that we need them more than they need us. The wealthy and the Government are 'completely' dependant on the complicity of the people, without which they are nothing!


Capitalists and Government working together are always prepared to 'capitalise' on other people's misfortune, indeed it is suggested that at times of their choosing they create crises to capitalise on, as stated by Naomi Klein in her 2007 book, 'The Shock Doctrine'. "Some man-made crises, such as the Iraq War, may have been created with the intention of pushing through unpopular policies in their wake". War itself sees the changing hands of extreme quantities of money from the Government (that's our taxes we're talking about!) to the private defence companies. like Lockheed Martin.)


More and more throughout the course of history the Economy has become centrally controlled and this control of money and resources has fallen into fewer and fewer hands of wealthier and wealthier people. This hoarding of wealth and resources and drive for more and more has clearly had an effect upon equality and freedom for the rest of us, but it also has a subsequent detrimental effect on the environment in the rapacious breaking of the earth in search of fossil fuels, the burning of which has led to anthropogenic climate change.


A man ahead of his time, Marx stated that Capitalism could produce the common ruin of everyone and that the persistence of crises under Capitalism not only makes revolutionary change possible, but also an urgent necessity. The most fearful devastaions described by Marx, resulting in poverty, hunger, environmental destruction and war, have only increased since his time. The crisis-prone nature of capitalism creates the need for socialism, not just to abolish poverty and inequality, but to eliminate the recurrent socio-economic disasters that are endemic to the Capitalist System.


Suddenly, my eyes were open to the inherent flaws to Capitalism and the monetary system, as well as the hierarchical pyramid system of control. The things I had taken as gospel in my old Capitalist ideology now stood out as the enemies of progress. I looked back over ‘The Wealth of Nations’, the seminal book by Adam Smith, the founder of economics, and came across some criticisms of our current Capitalist model that I was either not aware of, or ignorant to the meaning of before:


“The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.” Smith is saying here that working on a factory line or any type of repetitive job makes us as stupid and ignorant as a human can be. This work is not for a progressive society of critical thinkers at all.


"Our merchants and masters complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price and lessening the sale of goods. They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people.” The hypocrisy of the rich!


“Wherever there is great property there is great inequality. For one very rich man there must be at least five hundred poor, and the affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many. The affluence of the rich excites the indignation of the poor, who are often both driven by want, and prompted by envy, to invade his possessions.” Great wealth creates great poverty and makes the poor covet the resources of the rich to satisfy their own needs. A society out of balance.


“Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.” The State and the hierarchical power structures are there to defend the rich from the poor.


This is incredibly damning of Capitalism. The truth was here all along. Adam Smith knew of the dangers of Capitalism and warned us in his book, which by the way is the cornerstone of modern economics and he is the inspiration behind all of the phony neo-liberal economists like Von Mises, Hayek and Friedman. It shows that people like these Chicago School economists have omitted these criticisms from Economy lessons and their own modern economic texts simply to suit their own Capitalist agenda. Let’s face it, you won't find any Neo-liberals who'll admit that Adam Smith wrote this level of criticism about free-market capitalism.


So, I was shocked to discover that we call an Economy is in fact a monetary ponzi scheme and an hierarchical system of control. The solution is the resource-based economy. I now wanted to find a social model to facilitate the resource-based economy.


It was only when I found myself learning about Anarchy, ‘real’ Anarchy, not fake MSM Anarchy, which made me feel like I had finally found the destination to my intellectual journey.


Unabated, I looked for critiques of Anarchy but I always felt that the arguments for Anarchy outweighed and outmoraled (I know outmoraled isn’t a word, but neither was amazeballs until somebody started using it!) the arguments against. To my surprise all of my questions were coming back to the same conclusion. Anarchy! This was obviously startling at first. For the best part of 30 years I had been lead to believe that Anarchy meant disorder. Imagine my surprise to discover that Anarchy actually means the exact opposite. Anarchy = Order, as Proudhon, the original Anarchist, famously stated. I wanted to know more. There must be some catch, I thought. Surely the answer to all my questions wasn’t Anarchy, this leviathan, this lack of a society, law and rules I have avoided all my life whilst I looked in all the wrong places for the solution to my freedom AND equality equation.


Anarchy means order, laws and rules. A highly organized decentralized direct democratic system working in harmony with a natural law, resource-based, moneyless economy. This socio-economic model in theory, and when it has been put in practice, has been a perfect storm incorporating the two key aspects of a peaceful society, something lacking from our current system and in fact any other model apart from Anarchy. I knew that Anarchy was the answer to all my questions and the system we all need because it facilitates the two key necessities required for a peaceful, progressive society: Freedom AND Equality. These two necessities can co-exist, but only in a moneyless, resource-based economy. Anarchy states that we cannot have freedom without equality because of the structural violence subjected to those with little or no money by those with money and therefore more power. Economic inequality leads to political inequality and more economic inequality leads to more political inequality and as this machine turns the laws get changed by those in power and the rights of the people become ever more eroded. Introduce equity to society, particularly the sharing of resources and the products of our labour and suddenly this leads to freedom for all, no longer prisoners to the system and slaves to money and wage labour. Anarchy = Order and Equality = Freedom, but only in a natural law, resource-based economy with an Anarcho-Communist social model.


So I had my realisation: Capitalism creates social unrest and Anarchy creates social harmony. Life had tipped upside down. How have they managed to keep this quiet for so long? This realization would not have been possible if I had settled with Capitalism and refused to continue on my intellectual journey like so many others who seem to just accept whatever system works for them, despite the social damage it causes. Is this not sociopathic? If I had closed my mind up and forever stated despite better arguments to the contrary that Capitalism was the best model for society then I wouldn’t be here now telling you of something better and I owe all of that to my liberal mind-set. I believe I can thank my parents for that as they always taught me to keep an open mind.


The problem now is convincing people, especially the extremist Capitalists and Libertarians, that they advocate a system that will expedite the extinction of humanity. Debates with my former colleagues and fellow Libertarians have already begun. As Anarchy is anything but mainstream, without thinking critically about what I propose and its extinction preventing long-term effects, the biggest argument I find in defence of Capitalism and Free Markets is: "If you remove money from society how will you incentivise people to work?"


The question of incentive is a very interesting one and I will turn the tables on this question by the end of this article.


My answer to the question of incentive begins with the point that due to the accelerated rate of technological innovations over the last few decades we are living in an age where we could automate almost every job on Earth. This fact leaves Capitalists conflicted for two main reasons: One Microeconomic and the other Macroeconomic. At the Microeconomic level each corporation could save money by making redundant most of its staff and replacing them with automated processes (robots and other automated machines). But at the Macroeconomic level, if all corporations did this and nobody worked and nobody got paid, then nobody would buy anything, all corporations would go bust and the capitalist cycle of growth would grind to a halt. No capitalism, no profits, no wealthy people and no poor people. Total equality and people are free from wage slavery.


We have no choice but to learn to share the resources of the world in order to survive in harmony. Fortunately for us there are enough resources to go around, if we start to share what we have with a plan of how to implement social order. If we continue to innovate new cleaner more efficient technologies with all this freed up human capital we will evolve at an incredibly accelerated rate not seen before in human history. A very exciting time awaits us, but only if we can end the economics of extinction that is Capitalism in favour of a natural law Resource-based Economy and an Anarcho-Communist social model.


As most jobs are meaningless and should already have been phased out or automated, I return the question back on Libertarians/Capitalists. "If you have money in society how do you incentivise people to work?"


Firstly, you have to enslave people's minds with the mass media bs machine about how great being a consumer is and make people believe that it is part of human nature to go out to work to earn money to buy this crap. Only then you can enslave their bodies in workplaces so they can make rich people richer whilst making just enough for themselves to survive. We can thank Edward Bernays for this by the way! The corporate head will say Capitalism is great because he can make loads of money and make a great life for himself, but what of everyone else? The Capitalist will screw his workers every chance he gets in the name of profits by threatening workers with the sack if they don't reach high targets whilst paying as little as he can get away with. As inequality grows and more people fight for less and less jobs in a technologically evolving world of automated jobs, the corporate head can get away with paying less and less wages whilst people need a job more and more just to survive and provide the bare necessities for their families. Meanwhile, the Capitalist will be driving other corporations out of the market with economies of scale until he becomes the market monopolist, at which point he really can pay his workers what he wants and charge the customers what he chooses, all in the name of the maximum profit level. The corporation will buy elections and lobby to have laws passed that mean it can do whatever it wants, and slowly but surely the cost-cutting practices of corporations of all industries will wreak havoc on the ecosystems of the world, leading towards the extinction of the species. Capitalists think Capitalism is great and will defend it despite everything I have said because at the moment it's benefiting them at the expense of almost everyone else. If you defend Libertarianism/Capitalism simply because it is benefitting you then you are what is referred to as a Sociopath!


Money ‘doesn't’ incentivise people to work. Feeling like you're working for the progress of the wider world does! Selfishness only works for you if you're a sociopath, which means you have a mental deficiency, which explains why working in this crazy world causes so much stress and depression and a number of other mental health issues to 'normal, non-sociopathic' (in other words, empathic) people. Good people are being mentally scarred by this sociopathic world in which we are forced to live as wage slaves or exploit others for profit.


I'm glad the capitalist sociopaths are happy with their accumulation of meaningless stuff at the expense of everyone else's physical and mental health, as well as the health of the planet. Just what will it take to make you stop? How much money is enough? How much stuff is enough? How many dead babies and young children is enough? How many people have to suffer and die needlessly until you stop playing your insane game of empire at the expense of everyone and everything?


Capitalism with state protection truly does represent the worst of both worlds – a two headed monster hell bent on destroying humanity. Truly, I can't think of a single thing that Capitalism and the monetary system doesn't make worse which a resource-based economy under Anarcho-Communism wouldn't make better and I challenge anyone to prove me wrong.


Let's start to look at some examples of how Libertarianism/Capitalism makes the world worse whereas Anarcho-Communism (also known as Libertarian-Socialism) would make the world better:


Crime:


Petty Crime


Capitalism - Without a job and without money people will engage in petty crime to steal food and water or something of value to sell in order to buy food and water to feed themselves and their loved ones.


Anarcho-Communism - They would never need to commit this crime if the resource-based economy and Anarcho-communism's providence of basic human needs was the core focus of humanity. Capitalism creates petty crime, Anarcho-Communism will cure it.


Organised crime


Capitalism - People living in poor countries see hope in wealthier countries and want to move to the wealthier country but they cannot afford the airfare. They search for alternatives and human traffickers provide that alternative. The person will sell everything they have to the value of say £50-100 and pay trafficker to put them in a cargo container and be shipped to the country of their choice. The conditions in the container will be terrible and for a week or two the person will suffer and many die in transit. Upon arrival, the person will be put into slave labour by traffickers on the other side until they repay their debt, and some!


Anarcho-Communism - There are no richer and poorer countries or richer or poorer people so there is no need for human trafficking to exist. Capitalism creates all kinds of organised crime. Anarcho-Communism will cure them.


Prostitution


Capitalism - Prostitution exists because in a monetary system the last thing an unskilled female can use to get money for her or her children's survival if she so chooses is by selling her body for sex.


Anarcho-Communism - Without a monetary system there is no incentive to degrade oneself for money. It empowers women and women would only give themselves to men if there was genuine chemistry between them. Capitalism makes the intimacy of sex a business transaction. Sex sells, as they say. In Anarcho-Communism prostitution would only occur if women wanted to give their bodies to men and they would never need to sell their bodies again.


Swapping Capitalism for Anarcho-Communism would eradicate most crime from society. Indeed it would remove the monetary incentive to commit crime, which many 'criminals' do just to survive in this sociopathic world. So rather than ask what incentive people would have to work, I say let's remove the monetary incentive to perpetuate social ills like crime, which comes at great human cost.


Capitalism harms humanity with:


Planned obsolescence


Capitalism - Planned obsolescence or built-in obsolescence in industrial design is a policy of planning or designing a product with an artificially limited useful life, so it will break down after a brief period at unnecessary cost of repair or upgrade to the customer and at great profit to the corporation.


In Anarcho-Communism machines would be built to last as long as possible as within a resource-based economy efficiency and non-wastefulness is paramount. As long as resources are available everyone can have the highest spec possible.


Cost Cutting


Capitalism also sees cost cutting by corporations when greener more expensive policies would be far more beneficial. Damage to the environment due to the relentless search for and burning of fossil fuels and not investing in greener alternatives.


Union Carbide, Exxon Valdez and other corporate disasters have occurred that that would not have happened under Anarcho-Communism, which seeks to implement greener, more efficient technologies and processes for the good of the planet and humanity.


Infinite Growth


Capitalists are so ignorant to reality that they believe we can have infinite growth on a world with finite resources. If we continue to consume at the present rate, without innovating as fast as we could under Anarcho-Communism, we will soon run out of Capitalists favourite resource, oil, and the people of the world will tear the planet and each other to shreds in order to survive. The richest will be in the best position to buy resources at higher costs and will ultimately survive the longest whilst the rest of humanity edges towards extinction.


This is completely avoidable if we adopt Anarcho-Communism and the Resource-based Economy and share the world's resources, whilst we innovate newer, cleaner, more efficient technologies that result in a sustainable world, post-capitalism, having survived our own extinction. The choice is ours.


There are a million examples but here are just a broad few to illustrate my point. The key themes under Libertarianism/Capitalism are money, profit and control of people and resources. Some Capitalists say they are being kind by exploiting workers and a rising tide lifts all ships, but in light of the massive amount of data on how Capitalism causes the majority of social ills and directly impedes human progress, I’d say Capitalists' arguments are based on greed rather than altruism. If money wasn't always the obstacle to progress we could right the world's wrongs and fix almost all of the world's social ills.


It is my assessment that the monetary economy is a false economy and the only true economy is the resource-based economy. The best possible outcome for society and to avoid further erosion of freedom, equality and the health of the planet and its many ecosystems would be a social revolution with a staged process of systematic change. Eventually we will remove Capitalism and the monetary system and install Anarcho-Communism and a well-organised, efficiently managed, access-orientated resource-based economy. Once the revolution is complete the world would see progress and investment in innovation and infrastructure at an unprecedented level, contrary to the Capitalists who still say that Capitalism is the best possible system for humanity, "so shut up and get back to work!". Capitalism is very clearly not the best possible system and if we can only give Anarcho-Communism the chance to succeed, like we have Capitalism - which has failed catastrophically on many, many occasions - we really could give humanity a chance at a bright, progressive future.


I read an article that stated we are approaching levels of social destitution last seen in 1938. If so, then we must also be approaching levels of social unrest that lead to the social revolution of 1945-50 where the people forced change which included the building of the NHS and the welfare state. I feel that the welfare state which has been eroded over the last 30 years needs to be rebuilt and it must go much further than last time.


We cannot allow a few to control the lives of the rest of us. We must take back control and keep hold of it. Once we do this, we will finally have an Economy, which will finally be a careful, thrifty management of resources.