Posted by “As the structure of human relations in the United States increasingly breaks down under the pressures of intensified crisis, we need to integrate a revolutionary consciousness into the struggle that is our daily lives. We need to experience capitalist life as a peculiar and contradictory mode of existence brought into being and maintained by a ruling class during a particular period of human development; to experience the present as an historical problem/opportunity that will be transcended, as it was created, by the thoughts and actions of men and women in interaction with their material surroundings. Then, as we become the conscious makers of history, we will truly know that capitalism is not the end of history.”
– Ric Pfeffer
Do we then maintain that societal/economic progress inevitably leads to an anarcho-communist state? It is a shining vision, if you think about it – the thought that humankind could evolve the point where we agree on what constitutes protection, that we could become egalitarian enough to share resources across regions of this planet without giving thought to getting something in exchange, living by the golden rule for real.
I think the opposite is happening though – we are heading towards an anarcho-capitalist state (first). In the future, nominally powerful governments’ (already lessened) responsibilities will be contracted out to various for-profit companies and agencies. Taxes will be negligible and a purely darwinian competition among companies will fill the general public’s needs for leisure/vice services, scientific research, news, education, transport, energy, protection, etc.
Such competition would affect an even greater concentration of power amongst an even fewer number of people than today but their burden will be increased. The good of the species still matters but only insofar as it relates to the bottomline.
The axiom of business is the increase of shareholder wealth. In an anarcho-capitalist state, we are all shareholders of a sort but the bigwigs hold our proxies and the more the species profits, the more the bigwigs profit. In the end, such a system is likely to break down into true anarchy (if the bigshots ignore their newly acquired societal responsibilities) or evolve into an anarcho-communist state.
I hold that the latter assertion is possible because if the bigwigs do their job properly, the public will continue to demand more services, more protection, more-more-more at an increasingly lessened-lessened-lessened price. In the end, societal profit becomes the true profit. In this theorized transition from an anarcho-capitalist state to an anarcho-communist state, the will of the people perpetuated thru the paradigm of supply/demand is the great architect of social change.
