It was in Le Guin's novel "The Dispossessed" that I first read a convincing account of such a society, and I only later read some of Kropotkin and Bakunin's work.
Edit: Other forms of society are based on a carrot and stick system; people believe that without threats or rewards, people won't bother to work; they don't believe in mutual aid as sufficient in itself.
Without knightly orders there is nobody stopping people from forming knightly orders.
Council mutualism is not only practical, it's practiced, but it's practiced by Hutterites.
Can it be done without Anabaptist convictions? I don't see any reason why not. Has it? Not with that level of success, no.
The you and what army problem being obvious, inescapable, and inherent, political anarchism will, insofar as it plays a role at all, continue to be a way that people more inherently l'Etat c'est moi about it seize power, often jailing and killing the anarchist leaders (the anarcharchs, if you will) in the process.
I find the general unwillingness to experiment with alternative models of society, whether they are libertarianism, or anarchism, or whatever, quite disappointing. A few "special economic zones" doesn't seem like too much to ask for.
Instead, we just replicate the same old model, which these days is a mixture of capitalism and government authority. The government authority supposedly either suppresses the worst outcomes of capitalism, or is a source of corruption and abuse in itself. Now we have well over 100 such governments around the world, with varying degrees of success for the majority of their populations, and I'm not sure we are really learning anything.
How does this work when one is a minority in a prejudiced society? This concern has always hindered me from thinking of anarchism as viable.
That seems to put it in "fun thought experiment" territory.
https://archive.org/details/BetrayalACriticalAnalysisOfRapeC...
IMO the prejudiced minority has the best chance when they can make it as painful as possible for the majority to harm them. That is, to disable the state's law as much as possible from being wielded against non-aggressor minorities.
>How does this work when one is a minority in a prejudiced society?
In practice in places like Northern Syria, which much of is essentially devoid of strong government, Syriac Christians banded together with machine guns and literally kill anyone who comes to aggress against them. Sure, Assad / the Kurds (who are their allies) / other majority around them could fuck them up if they like, but it's not worth the trouble.
The history of genocides and ethnic cleansing, plenty of which happened historically and recently outside democracies, disagrees.
It's been a minute, but _was_ The Dispossessed a convincing account of such a society? From what I remember, the protagonist encounters academic gate-keepers who effectively control who gets to do teaching and research or what gets communicated to the main planet, centralized systems choose things as personal as what you're named, resources (food) are distributed unequally and untransparently (Shivek is surprised when the big university cafeteria has more/better food?). Coercive hierarchies still develop, but they're cloaked in the dogma of anarchism.
I read this as showing that even if you can isolate to an extreme (by being on a resource-poor moon), and have a language and education system which tries to suppress concepts of ownership, and a population goes through the shared trauma of fighting to feed themselves, people will still find a way to limit each other's freedom, and exercise power, and accumulate or control resources.
The main problem is how a society can work without such restrictions...
It's a choice of economic system, not morality. There's nothing immoral about making all work voluntary and eliminating private property, it's just a different system with different expectations.
The rule about property in communist anarchism would be something like: it's yours for as long as you are using it, but once you no longer need it, somebody else can take it to use (or repurpose the materials).
I too classify all my physics problems as 'spherical cows in a vacuum', but unless you've ignored Twitter your entire life you should realize powerful forces of propaganda exist that ensure that this will never exist. Threats exist in the form of ruthless humans that will ally with the corruptible and greedy to consolidate power to the point of acting with wonton violence. These people use ideas of nationalism and shared identity (cooperation) along with propaganda that militarizes the group against common enemies, generally being other groups that have resources they can take.
In general having a 'stable' society with wealth can be an inoculation against this human behavior of falling for propaganda, but again, it requires stability against the environment, against disease, against economic swings, against competing ideas. Anarchist societies just seem to handwave these issues away.
IMO, this is not the actual problem with the practicality of anarchism.
The problem with anarchism is that the absence of government will recreate the problems which motivate the creation of government, just as excessive government creates the motivation for abolition of government.
Particularly, retaliatory (including lethal) violence—not merely proximate individual and mutual self-defense, but individual and mutual action aimed at preventing future threats from past malefactors, is the common anarchist solution to the problem of perceived-as-unjustified use of force (what, in the context of government, would be “crime”).
But we have plenty of experience with that approach ib areas with no accepted government, weak government, or disinterested government, and what tends to happen is that differences of opinion over whether the initial violence was unjustified (or even if it factually occurred) or the retaliation disproportional (and thus itself unjustified violence) devolve into cyclical violence, the relief for which is establishment of a mechanism for settling disputes about justification and thus either legitimizing or delegitimizing and authorizing corrective responses to force, creating the monopoly on legitimate use of force which, whether called a government or not, defines the state.
It's kind of akin to the paradox of tolerance. A tolerant society cannot remain so unless it remains vigilant against intolerance, and likewise a stateless society cannot remain so unless it remains vigilant against the state. Both sorts of vigilance are possible; the question is whether or not they're practical (and my hope is that the answer to both is "yes").
Growing up fully immersed in the capitalist world it’s easy to think that this is the natural state of things.
This book, among others, helped me change perspective and challenge my assumptions about the world.
Totally recommended.
...in your estimation. I and many others would call it such, and with good reason. In our estimation it is capitalism that allows for other models, as long as they are peaceful and respect property rights.
Nothing about capitalism hinders you to follow your social instincts. You are free to share your possessions with whomever you choose. You can jointly own whatever you want with whomever you want. That is capitalism.
The amount of loopholes I have to go through just to end capitalism from within are ridiculous and can hardly be described as voluntary.
To abolish capitalism you need to provide cost effective liquidity, this means you will have to start an alternative money or payment system with a demurrage fee. The challenge is using existing constructs in the law to create something that cannot be banned by the government or the central bank. How voluntary...
After you have done that you must now gather members and build the actual payment network because liquidity isn't provided by money, it is provided by the people trading with money. This is in fact the easiest problem because demurrage currencies are superior competitors to the capitalist system which is why they had to the banned before world war two or else people wouldn't become polarized enough to want Nazis in power.
Third you will have to bypass banking regulations and somehow offer most of the services banks offer without a banking license. I haven't found any, de facto illegal. There is nothing voluntary about this.
Finally, you have to somehow convince the government to adopt the non capitalist system for tax payments. If you cannot do so, you must wreck your brain trying to find an incentive structure that is competitive enough to make people who have freshly received money from the government put it into your money system faster than they pull it out by paying their taxes. Again, the fact that the government forces all economic activity to go through the capitalist system is not very voluntary. If anything, it is lipstick on a pig.
I believe the banking loophole and the tax incentive structure can be solved but that only shows how fragile and ridiculous capitalism is, if an obviously superior system has so much trouble establishing itself even though it is superior in almost every respect and it is highly competitive.
How is this society mutually beneficial by definition? If I own the fields and decide to destroy the produce (it's mine, I can do whatever I want?) while the locals starve, this is fine right?
I wrote "voluntary social interactions [...] are by definition mutually beneficial". A voluntary interaction implies that all participants in the interaction have chosen to do so by their own free will. That implies that they value going through with the interaction higher than to forego the interaction. Hence, it benefits all of them.
> If you and I both claim to own some land and we can't come to an agreement, isn't it going to be decided with superior force?
That's merely a technical problem. A land register might be a solution.
Yes. There is always going to be a superior force and it decides who owns what.
Practically, the point of anarchism is that the force should be limited (voluntarily, like how armies in a healthy democracy voluntarily subordinate themselves to the voters) to the absolute minimum role possible. For example, the popular configuration right now is that the group that controls the strongest army (ie, 'the government') is also seen as responsible for providing healthcare and welfare. The anarchists think this is stupid because there is no reason to think that there is an organization that is simultaneously good at so many things at once.
> How is this society mutually beneficial by definition?
Anyone using force to achieve their aims gets removed from society, so all that is left is people transacting mutually beneficially. It isn't so radical, that is close to what we have now. The vision is basically you go to the shops and buy stuff.
I think I see a fatal flaw in the logic here....
That is already a solved problem. The force chooses to exert itself in a limited way. The largest military in the world currently works like that - the US army does whatever the US Congress tells it to. They don't have to, the army has the guns and the US Congress only has annoying geriatrics and comfortable seats - not much of a contest if the army makes it one. The army chooses to limit itself because they understand it will lead to the best outcome for them.
The radical part of anarchism isn't the use of force, it is the argument that the people who exert force shouldn't be trying to solve social problems with force. The barrier to that isn't the behaviour of the army, it is the beliefs of the polity.
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Property/Property.htm...
This is what he meant by mutual aid.
> Kropotkin was fascinated by how ant cheaters (those who refuse to dispense aid) are dealt with: “If an ant which has its crop full has been selfish enough to refuse feeding a comrade, it will be treated as an enemy, or even worse. If the refusal has been made while its kinsfolk were fighting with some other species, they will fall back upon the greedy individual with greater vehemence than even upon the enemies themselves.”
A 19th century Russian prince that became a socialist perhaps thinks of something different when he thinks of "beaurocracy" or "government" than a 21st century HN reader does.
What is your point regarding my answer to gp post? I didn't even mention the words "bureaucracy" or "government". Rest assured though, that I despise them both.
Your comment seemed to echo that, talking about some Anarcho-capitalist libertarian ideal buzzword society, linking that to his anarchism and then further attaching the generic word 'capitalist' to it.
This felt like a stretch.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-capitalism
> Anarcho-capitalism is also distinguished from anarchism, an anti-capitalist movement that opposes unnecessary coercion and hierarchy, and social anarchism, a branch of anarchism that sees individual freedom as interrelated with mutual aid. Unlike anarchists, anarcho-capitalists support private property and private institutions. Anarcho-capitalists also reject the libertarian socialist economic theories of anarchism, arguing that they are inherently authoritarian or require authoritarianism to achieve, while believing that there is no coercion under capitalism. Despite its name, anarcho-capitalism lies outside the tradition of anarchism and is more closely affiliated with capitalism, right-libertarianism, and liberalism
[1] https://springtimeofnations.org/2021/04/yes-ancaps-are-anarc...
I was mostly trying to point out that there are disagreements about what "anarchist" means and avoid confusion.
I've got a feeling you hit the nail squarely on the head there! =)
I didn't quite catch your meaning.
Even if one is okay with punishing those who refuse to work for the good of all, when does it get invoked? Who decides? What if there is a mistake in that notion?
And this is in the context in which work is generally simple to observe and equate. In a modern society, work is very unequal. How do you figure out appropriate levels of working across nursing, serving coffee, working in a sewage treatment plant, mining, farming, teaching, walking dogs, long-distance hauling, programming, managing, etc. Who would make those decisions? Do you have agreed upon shifts? If someone shows up late or doesn't show up, is there some consequence meted out by someone?
In an economic system, one has the price system where all of that gets figured out. If you think you are underpaid in such a system, you can seek to get paid more by doing something else. If you think someone is overpaid, you can undercut their prices. If you don't show up for work, you don't get paid. This creates the changing conditions that lead to better allocation of resources, including labor. It is unclear how this could work in a society where everyone just works for the betterment of society and the fruits of all labor are distributed "equally" (things are not equal, so someone has to decide some kind of price-equivalent system for this, I presume)?
> Do you have agreed upon shifts? Yes. These are established by vote of the workers.
> If someone shows up late or doesn't show up, is there some consequence meted out by someone? Yes.
Rather than using prices to set which work is desirable people vote on it. Some anarchist societies today distribute undesirable work across the entire community. Everyone takes one cleaning shift a week for example.
If you're curious, you should read The Dispossessed. I especially recommend that book because it does not paint a utopian picture of an anarchist society. And most anarchists will be honest that you will loose benefits moving from a capitalist-statist political economy to an anarchist one. The goal in moving to an anarchist society is not to create a society where individual access to material wealth is the same as in a capitalist society. The goal is to create a society in which the unstated forms of domination that exist in "free" societies today are weakend.
It's very lazy to claim that any society doesn't have this requirement.
Also, anarchism (or socialism) and markets are not necessarily mutually exclusive, there's many different types, though some of those may claim they are exclusive and only theirs is the true anarchism/socialism.
> an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state.
It doesn't imply voluntary social interactions, it doesn't imply some sort of protection against the "superior force" you mention.
The values you enounce belong to any healthy society as voluntary social interactions happen in socialism too, where the majority (the proletariat) is protected against the use of superior force by the rich.
Now, would you please explain how can social interactions be voluntary in a system where property-less people have no other choice to survive but to accept the least bad offer from those who own the means of production?
Interactions can really be voluntary once neither of the parts depend on the interaction to survive. Once we free exchanges from such power play, then we can talk about will.
This is why the only just and free system can be one where nobody has to struggle for the material needs necessary for their survival.
Would you rather take what you desire by force, under the pretense that you somehow deserve to own what others have peacefully acquired? That would be the mentality of a street thug.
The possibility of "someone" becoming wealthier than others has no value to me. I care much more about the possibility of people starving or living a terrible life due to lack of basic material needs.
> Would you rather take what you desire by force, under the pretense that you somehow deserve to own what others have peacefully acquired? That would be the mentality of a street thug.
Capitalism thrived during Nazism and Fascism. An entire economy was born out of the extermination of the Jews, and capitalists made tons of profits out of it. They also profited immensely from the now cheap and union free labor force, all thanks to the fascist police beating and arresting any unionist.
There were also wealthy people during periods where only birth right could give you wealth, and those aristocrats would not hesitate to abuse of the population with violence.
It is clear that the existence of wealthy people does not guarantee free and voluntary exchanges. If nothing, it usually pushes for the opposite.
In a system of voluntary exchange ("capitalism") they can only become wealthier if they are freely given their wealth by someone, even if that someone's not you.
> I care much more about the possibility of people starving or living a terrible life due to lack of basic material needs.
I hold with Kropotkin, we are a social species. As long as there is sufficient wealth, people will be cared for. The best way to make sure that is the case is to maximize that wealth. That's what free, voluntary exchange does. It's not a zero-sum game but it's always win-win. Only the economically illiterate would claim otherwise.
> Capitalists thrived during Nazism and Fascism. An entire economy was born out of the extermination of the Jews, and capitalism made tons of profits out of it.
Nazism and Fascism both were self-avowedly anti-capitalist Ideologies. Insofar as neither cared for peace nor for property rights, this self-assessment must be judged entirely correct.
> There were also wealthy people during periods where only birth right could give you wealth, and those aristocrats would not hesitate to abuse of the population with violence.
Hence not capitalist. I argue for voluntary exchange and your counter-argument is "thugs, murderers and slave drivers existed, therefore capitalism bad"?
> It is clear that the existence of wealthy people does not guarantee free and voluntary exchanges. If nothing, it usually pushes for the opposite.
That was not the argument. You got it exactly backwards.
This is just refuting historical truth without providing any evidence. It doesn't matter that Hitler used a kind of anticapitalis rethoric before getting in power. What happened once he did, is that the capitalist of the country got cheap and obedient labor force provided by the nazist police. They got rich out the war and the extermination of Jews as well.
> Hence not capitalist. I argue for voluntary exchange and your counter-argument is "thugs, murderers and slave drivers existed, therefore capitalism bad"?
No, not really. You argue for the possibility of becoming wealthy. I tell you that I don't think a right to become wealthier than others should exist, nor that people being wealthy is a guaranteed benefit for society, as shown in my examples.
You also keep mixing capitalism and voluntary exchange, and again as I've proven you those are not necessarily linked. I restate this, capitalists thrived during nazi germany due to the subjugation of the labor force.
> As long as there is sufficient wealth, people will be cared for.
This has been disproven time and time again, you're ignoring the matter of wealth inequality. The existence of wealth improves the general life conditions of the people only if such wealth is properly distributed. All the reductions in poverty we've seen in recent times are due to the conquests of the social movements, taking from the wealthy things like healthcare, retirement, decent working hours, safety on the job, unemployment benefits, public education, etc.
You can argue against your strawman-capitalism all you want, I do not care. If you insist that capitalism is not about protecting everyone's right to their property, I see no point in carrying on.
Also would you answer to my initial request to explain how transactions can be voluntary in a capitalist system where most people dont own property, the means of production.
Neither National Socialism nor Fascist corporatism had strong protection of
- competitive markets: markets where heavily regulated and great parts of national production and ressources where directed and allocated by the government, preventing competition and free exchange
- property rights: lots of property was outright stolen from their rightful owners, the means of production were ultimately controlled by the government
- voluntary exchange: lots of people where forced into slave labor, which is decidedly involuntary
So yes, these were state socialist societies, not capitalist ones.
> State capitalism is an economic system in which the state undertakes business and commercial (i.e. for-profit) economic activity and where the means of production are nationalized as state-owned enterprises (including the processes of capital accumulation, centralized management and wage labor). [...] Other examples include Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew and Turkey, as well as military dictatorships during the Cold War and fascist regimes such as Nazi Germany.
Excuse me, when I respectfully decline that definition. What makes or breaks capitalism is private property, including and specifically of the "means of production", also called "capital goods".
"Engels argued that the tools for ending capitalism are found in state capitalism", that's like saying that eating your steak well done gives you the tools for slaughtering the cow.
OTOH, "It is not commonly realized that State Capitalism covers nothing more than what used to be called Planned Economy and State Socialism, and that State Capitalism, Planned Economy, and State Socialism diverge only in non-essentials from the classic ideal of egalitarian Socialism". At least one can find some sensible definitions in the article.
The more a society is capitalist, the more wealth gets created and that wealth is spread out to all. The less a society embraces capitalism, the more desperate the poor become. Inequality does increase with capitalism which is a problem for stability, but the government exacerbates that issue by imposing laws that prevent competition and take from the poor to give to the rich. In a freer society than we have in the US, it would be harder for the rich to become super-rich. They have to keep being useful in such a society.
The dust bowl in the US was hugely disruptive and at least partially caused by capitalism.
It's absurd to claim capitalism prevents starvation.
Ireland: Reading the description of Ireland, it sounded like aristocratic English landlords brutalizing tenants. I could not find a definitive claim about how the land was acquired, but it did not sound like capitalist acquirement of lands, but rather forceful appropriation. A significant factor was the inability of tenants to profit from improvements which could be taken away from them at anytime by the absentee landlords except in Ulster which then prospered more than the rest. It should be noted that the migration of the Irish to a much more capitalist society (US) is what helped minimize the deaths of the famines. This can certainly be a warning about potential dangers of massive land holdings and could arise from capitalist accumulation, but it is not clear that it actually was such a thing. Rather, it seems more akin to imperialist extraction.
Cuba: Not sure what you mean. Do you mean the various periods of famine under communist rule? Are you blaming the US statist policies of trade embargos? I found the following article to be a succinct and seemingly balanced history of Cuban farming in the past few decades: https://www.anywhere.com/cuba/travel-guide/agriculture Despite embargos, the US has supplied a lot of food to Cuba. Cuba got out of some of the worst famine by doing half measures towards privatized farming though they never let the markets really work as they should.
Dust bowl: I can't find any statistics about deaths. There was massive migration to more profitable areas which allowed these people to survive. It isn't pleasant, but it is better than starvation. This is how capitalism works when disaster strikes. It doesn't prevent the problems, but it does mitigate them by allowing people the agency to adjust their lives to maximize their chances for success. Is your blame on capitalism about the bad farming practices employed? I am not sure that any other governing ideology would have had different outcomes. But the farmers learned what needed to be done and have implemented it such that those conditions have not returned for almost a century. It should be noted that the 1930s time period coincided with strong federal government intervention in the economy as they implemented work restrictions, price controls, wage controls, and explicit governmental crop destruction policies. In fairness, they also implemented measures to deal with the underlying problems causing the Dust Bowl.
The dictionary says Democracy means: "Government by the people, exercised either directly or through elected representatives." - so there's already the question of decision by representative yes-or-no. Plus, there's the question of what the 'government' part means. Some Anarchists would say they oppose democracy because of it. Does it mean that decisions get enforced by a special social structure? Are decisions majoritarian? etc.
Any society will have to make decisions at some point which can't be left to individual preferences. E.g., we have a large natural forest, should it be preserved for nature, or cut down for timber and farmland? If left to individuals, the people who want to cut it down will win by default.
Perhaps the main question would be what happens when people disagree with the decision, regardless of how it was taken. Many Anarchists would be concerned more with that than with the question of how such a decision is taken.
In fact they observe it even in existing cultures where strong kin institutions prevent saving, both via "mutual aid" itself, but also cultural expectation of mutual aid creating an incentive to spend ASAP - cause if you don't, your family/friends/... are going to ask you for money. Meaning again everyone ends up poorer. Breaking kin institutions and "mutual aid" is one of the keys to actually improving QoL for most people [2]
[1] https://acoup.blog/2020/07/24/collections-bread-how-did-they... - Banqueting the Yields, and other parts
[2] The WEIRDest People in the World book
And clearly surplus extraction + capital accumulation (leading to productive investment) strongly enhance economic growth.
However, capitalism in its current form of all-consuming consumerism, a system that must eat everything including itself, I'm not so sold on.
Just finished reading the Laundry Files (Atrocity Archives/Charles Stross) thanks to a recommendation on HN. One of the terrible beasts mentioned in the book is a creature that eats all the information in its universe, rushing the universe to entropy death.
The analogy to bottomless consumerism is too obvious in my mind for me not to draw it.
It's kinda like, most major cultures wanted to, let's say, (among other things) study the stars and enslave other people. Primitive technology and economy produced a lot of cultures with calendars and simple systems of slavery. Stable empire like e.g. Caliphate was able to leverage their economy and better technology to do better at astronomy, and to do some real large-scale enslaving. Western countries eventually used even better technology and economic system to do things like send people to other planets and do some truly industrial-scale slavery. Everything just works better with technology - what you choose to do and how to change values to want astronomy and not want slavery is a separate question. Ditto capitalism vs consumerism.
Short lived products create a greater increase in GDP than longer lives products. For GDP growth to continue the additional output must be consumed or otherwise less and less people who insist on full time jobs will be needed to provide for the needs of everyone. Unemployment is the result of an inefficient allocation of entire 40 hour work weeks. We are unable to trade an increase in productivity into more free time.
I am not sure why you are claiming that in particular, that's why I'm asking.
Also planned obsolescence doesn't have anything to do with a goal to increase GDP, it is an example of a somewhat perverse incentive, not a systemic issue. I mean people wouldn't buy a phone that breaks in a week, but they are indifferent between the one that breaks in 2 years or 10 years - there's a balance. It again has to do more with material success - my grandma used to constantly tell us to not throw away any glass jars - not out of high moral impulse to reuse/reduce/recycle, because she lived in the USSR where they apparently were hard to come by for pickling and making jams. I on the other hand just yesterday couldn't find my paint brushes, so to touch up a wall, instead of reorganizing the shed I ordered new ones on Amazon for $15. I can afford the waste. The way to make me care about preserving my paint brush instead of obsoleting it, or jars for jam, is to make me poor. Same is apparently true for most people.
Disagree. I'm a big fan of capitalism, and recognize that it can take different forms.
https://muslimheritage.com/capitalist-early-arab-islamic-civ... argues that "the capitalistic system indeed was the prevailing mode of economic activities in the early Islamic civilization."
Arab capitalism in this era did not depend on perpetual GDP growth.
Western capitalism, like so much of Western thought from around the Renaissance, draws deeply on the Arab tradition.
To go back to definitions, "capitalism" was defined by Max Webber. He saw it as part of the Reformation, individuals finding their own connection to God not mediated by the church. Not much GDP growth in that.
“the duty of delight”, which is the collected diaries of dorothy day.
“rerum novarum” and “laborem execrens”, papal encyclicals on labor and capital.
The idea is to envision a society which is stable, but has no government and yet not perfect people. There can still be theft, violence, laziness, polarizing differences of opinion, etc. but the society thrives despite the absence of a government and nimbly handles these problems. He presents a vision of how it could work. It is not a prescription since it is impossible to prescribe an anarchic society as there is nothing to prescribe to. The criminal justice system becomes a bunch of competing rights organizations, similar to competing insurance companies. It allows for economic evolution of laws as everyone can choose what kind of system they want to be governed by and conflicts of competing legal systems get negotiated and arbitrated. One can choose not to be governed by any laws, but if that individual comes into conflict with others, then there is no one to defend them. They are not automatically cast out for not being part of anything.
Most other anarchic systems seem to assume unity of purpose, a good work ethic, a lack of criminality, and an inability to fundamentally dissent from what the larger group wants. They often get presented as more of a direct democratic government that everyone belongs to while Friedman's approach is literally a lack of any coercive government. There is no governing body that all must yield to, including the collective. The fundamental transactions between people are voluntary and coercion to produce societal needs is both unnecessary and rejected. I find it to be a believable society with the people we have.
Government in the Future by Noam Chomsky (essay/lecture)
The Anarchist FAQ (Online)
What sense does a fixed positive profitability constraint make? It makes no sense. It discourages people from economic activity. People talk about the profit motive but when you really think about it, profit is a demotivator.
The more borrowed capital you use the more profit you have to make. But in principle any economic activity that breaks even is worth doing even at no profit. So in theory the return on capital should represent that competitors know how to use the capital better than you, but at the same time this would imply that unemployment and recessions are impossible. It's entirely possible for the interest rate to be so high and money to be so tight to cause mass unemployment throughout the entire economy as we have seen in the great depression.
Marx treated money as a simple "medium of exchange" and therefore sought for an answer in the sphere of production. In reality it is money that has the power to cripple capital and land.