Rating: 3/5, average
This is a decent, accessible primer to anti-capitalist thought (with lots of pictures!). It’s main failing, which is common to a lot of anti-capitalist stuff, is that it goes into detail about the evils of capitalism and gives very little attention to solutions, improvements, or alternatives to capitalism.
It starts off with a section called “Mythology of Work” which debunks the old chestnuts usually deployed in defense of the capitalist system: Work is necessary (technology produces plenty), work is productive (but what is being produced?), work creates wealth (work creates poverty when the rich monopolize and commodify resources), work is a path to fulfillment (but it monopolizes our time and energy), work instills initiative (work forces us to think along the lines of the profit motive), work provides security (a compassionate community could provide better security), work teaches responsibility (employees have done terrible things on orders from superiors).
Over the course of the book, different aspects of the modern capitalist economy are explored from an anti-capitalist perspective. A couple of my favorite ideas were:
Globalization: everything you buy comes from someone who’s being exploited. Capitalism keeps passing the buck to the next poor country in order to provide goods at a low price to the richer countries.
Self-employment: you are both boss and exploited. You are your own product. This is the culmination of capitalism; you don’t need bosses because you police yourself. This takes the pressure off companies and puts it on the individual. “Production is extending deeper and deeper into the lives of workers… Today’s worker often has to focus on his duties mind, body, and soul, until he becomes indistinguishable from them.” We put ourselves into social media and creating free content for the web, and this gets us no money but adds value to the technology people use to access the web (laptops, internet), which lines the pockets of tech tycoons. “The ideal corporate product would be produced by the unpaid labor of the whole human race, yet only available through a single distributor.”
Education: “Despite the glut of college graduates on the market, some liberals still maintain that the solution to poverty and other problems is more education. But the further up the pyramid you go the fewer positions there are; no amount of public education can change this. At best, graduates from disadvantaged backgrounds might replace those in privileged positions, but for every person who climbs the social ladder someone else has to descend it. Usually, more education just means more debt.”
Entertainment: “Why do the lives of famous strangers seem so much more real than our own lives? Perhaps we’re drawn to them because they embody our creativity—the creative potential of all the exploited—purchased from us, concentrated, and sold back… they represent the only way to access our own displaced potential.”
Where Work falls flat on its face is in its attempt to come up with solutions to these problems. The best ideas they have seem to be forms of petty sabotage, such as stealing from employers, breaking work machines, striking, going to a grocery store en masse and walking out without paying, destroying your apartment so the landlord can’t raise the rent, and racking up a lot of credit before declaring bankruptcy. I think these actions are more likely to destroy your own life than destroy capitalism. They try to defend this by saying it’ll raise awareness and make people think, but I doubt it would actually do anything.
They also try to defend it by saying: “The wealth of a corporation is made up of profit made from workers who are not paid the full value of their labor and consumers who pay more than the production cost of their purchases. Redistributing this is not so much stealing as it is reversing the effects of thefts already in progress.”
They say capitalism is stealing from the people, but they also say that private property shouldn’t exist. This is a contradiction: how can you have the concept of stealing if you don’t believe in private property?
I really don’t think you could have a society without the concept of private property… especially now we have germ theory and we know that sharing things that come into contact with bodily fluids can spread disease. I think even children have an innate understanding of private property – they seem to learn the concept of “mine” before the concept of “sharing”. Sharing is good, but it is the thing we have to learn to do; ownership doesn’t need to be learned.
The more I read this book, the more it started to sound like the philosophy of a bad roommate. I can imagine some scenarios in my head:
Me: Who will do the dishes?
Bad Roommate: Whoever wants to!
Me: *waits for dishes to get done*
Me: … Fuuuck. *does dishes*
Bad Roommate: *walks by eating my chips*
Bad Roommate: No such thing as private property, bro!
Ugh. If there’s anything I learned from college, it’s that without a system, nothing gets done. Even if the system is just “take care of your own shit in a timely manner”, that’s still a system because it’s an arrangement between yourself and others. As you get older, or you enter different living situations, agreements vary (say you do the laundry and I take care of the dishes), but there still has to be an agreement.
Throughout Work, Crimethinc argues often that capitalism has destroyed our ability to live off the land, and if capitalism were gone or had never existed, we could have continued to do that happily and no one would need to work because the land provided everything. To that, I say, go ask someone who lives off the grid how much work it is. I guess if it were a society living off the grid (like a kibbutz), it would be a little easier because people could fill different roles and it wouldn’t be one person having to do everything, but it’s still a lot of work.
Crimethinc assumes that if everybody just did whatever they felt like doing, everything that needed to get done would get done. Crimethinc doesn’t explain how unpleasant, necessary work (ie, janitorial duty) would get accomplished, it just leaves it up to the “community” to decide who does this work and how regularly. I have a feeling that in this kind of situation, women would still end up doing the majority of this labor. Work does have a chapter on women’s labor and capitalism, but they still seem to think these tasks would disappear (be “voluntarily” taken care of?) in a post-capitalist world.
I do a lot of volunteer work cleaning up at a foster cat house and we’ve been trying to do some recruiting lately. I put up posters in coffeeshops and on the local community college campus, but so far I’ve only had one person call and come regularly to help out. I’ve also had a Craigslist ad up for six months and gotten like one response from someone who showed up once and never called back. I guess you could chalk that up to capitalism taking up most people’s time and energy, but it also shows that it is very difficult to get people to volunteer for necessary dirty work.
Depending on how you look at it, capitalism could be a system of positive rewards or negative punishments. Do you work hard to get cool stuff, or do you work hard to stay off the streets? For poor people it’s mostly the latter, but as you go up the social hierarchy, you get more and more of the former. Where it’s unfair is when people get trapped in poverty without the ability to ascend the ladder. The 1% hoarding all the world’s wealth is making it harder and harder for people to ascend beyond a basic subsistence level, and this is what we need to change, but I’m not sure how.
I’ll probably be reading a lot more books on capitalism and anti-capitalism in the future, like The Conquest of Bread, What is to be Done?, and a couple others that were recommended to me in a Facebook thread/argument. If you have any other reccs, leave them in the comments!
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