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21st Century Anarchism - Beyond the Power of Money

category north america / mexico | anarchist movement | other libertarian press author Wednesday August 18, 2010 10:38author by James J. Martin - noneauthor email martin4601 at yahoo dot com Report this post to the editors

The world financial system is approaching complete collapse in the next few years. 21st century Anarchism is a paradigm for a money-free society. There are no transition stages from capitalism to communism. hen the world's money loses all of its value then civilization itself will begin to collapse. Unfettering capitalism from the money system ushers in the spontaneous emergence of unfettered society that transcends the ideals of capitalism and communism.

Beyond the Power of Money: 21st Century Anarchism
by James J. Martin

I do not own a home. I do not own a car. I catch a bus. I rent an apartment. I work part-time because I cannot buy into any institution. I can’t stand it. I am marginalized. I am not lazy though. I work two part-time jobs and I am damn good at what I do because what I do is my life’s bliss, or at least I think it is. I am a political economist and Africanist, which is a scholar who specializes in African Studies. Don’t be impressed. I’m not. It’s just what I do. Oh. I almost forgot. I am an Anarchist. I am a born Anarchist. I am a 21st century Anarchist. I might be the first of my kind – but certainly not the last. This is more than my Anarchism though, it is our Anarchism. One could accuse me of being a romantic, an eternal optimist, or a dreamer. I wouldn’t take any offense; better than being a liar, a thief or a company man. Indeed, I am none of the above. I am a cold and calculating realist who happens to also be a 58 year old dyed-in-the-wool, salt-of-the -earth black American Anarchist.

What is our Anarchism for the 21st century? It is a bold new and advanced democratic vista. Our Anarchism is about elimination of the economy. Our Anarchism unfetters capital from money. Its social effect will unfetter the nation-state from wealth. Our Anarchism replaces the centralized and concentrated political authority, and the class antagonisms entailed thereof, with nations that whither spontaneously and instantly into the administration of things. Our Anarchism unfetters people from the authority of wealth and power, both public and private. For the first time in our species existence we have the technical and production capacity to produce everything and anything we want. We know that money and wealth never built anything; people did. Our Anarchism rejects bourgeois myths including the mythology of scarcities. Our Anarchism liberates people to unlimited exploring, discovering, and building. Our aim is to free markets to genuinely free people. Our society will leap beyond costs of production and competitive pricing. By eliminating the money system, our Anarchism liberates workers, technicians, artists, scientists, social workers, and everyone, from all

What is 21st century Anarchism? It is a kiss instead of a kick. It is a smile instead of snarl. It is a spontaneous transcending of social walls instead of forcing their destruction. Anarchism back in the 19th and 20th centuries was a Western philosophy that attacked religion, property, and the state. It advocated the forced destruction of institutions through class war; but that was then and this is now. However, anarchists today only know of the old school’s orthodoxy; orthodox anarchism, there’s an oxymoron for you. Anarchists back in the day were driven by moral passions to liberate the individual from the state and the establishment of natural law. The former is doable; the latter, a quaint platitude. Enough of platitudes already; natural law does not exist; only stupidity and wisdom, fantasies and realities, idiots and non-idiots. Law is a human invention, only morality is immutable.

So-called natural law is just another word for some inexplicably unintelligible moral authority. The creepy nature of natural law seems to only crawl through the skulls of corny ideological grifters on the Left and on the Right who use it as silly divining rods to the fake discovery of mythical moral aquifers. On the one hand, the old school anarchist is against religion; on the other hand, she or he celebrates “natural law.” However, our Anarchism has moved on. That old discourse on natural law that asks all the wrong questions gets the hand from our Anarchism. Twenty-first century Anarchism demands the liberation of justice from all fantasies and myths.

Patience was a virtue lacking in old school Anarchism, but not in our Anarchism. We love people so we are patient with them. Our Anarchism is not out to change the people. Our Anarchism is about giving the people everything they need and anything they want so the people can change themselves. So think about it. After all the marching and combating, after all the sloganeering and jeering, after all the firebombs are thrown and barricades destroyed, when it is all over for the day and night has fallen, in the dark of your room, in the quiet still of the night, steal some time alone and think. Think about the future. What about the future?

What do you fight for? Notwithstanding that this is what we also fight for but our Anarchism is forward looking into the future. Is yours? We take our cues from Thomas Paine and refuse to be ruled from the grave. We do not prostrate ourselves at the ideological graveyard of old white dead men (and a few old white dead women). We refuse to look backwards into the darkness of white privilege for answers to the stubborn social problems of a diverse world. We are neither color blind or blinded by color. We celebrate the human race and towards that end we struggle on all levels but right here, right now, we are exploring the intellectual level of struggle.

We do not abide by Malcolm’s sloganeering of ‘by any means necessary’ or struggle according to the despised Machiavellian politics of ‘the means justifies the ends.’ We don’t have to. Our Anarchism, intellectually, does not distinguish its means from its ends. The collapse of globalization and world capitalism has already become an objective process that can be neither advanced nor prevented by human action. The struggle against capitalism and imperialism is a personal thing we do out of passion and commitment but the real struggle that will change the world and make it a better place is in your head not in the streets. The only question that really matters about the struggle is what comes after the day after tomorrow. That is the day when all the world’s money is made worthless by the mother of all financial crashes that crashes civilization itself into global pandemonium. What happens next? That is the right question because that is the day when the struggle actually begins, and our answers to that question are at the heart and soul of our 21st century Anarchism.

We understand that the questions regarding property and the state, both tackled historically by Anarchists, were the wrong questions, and therefore produced more sensational theater than concrete progress. Our Anarchism, on the other hand, deals with the question of property differently than our honorable predecessors. Ours is neither a capitalistic nor socialistic question. The objective of Our Anarchism alienates property from capital, instead of alienating working people from their labors; and our Anarchism enables contractual property rights and the right of private ownership of property instead of alienating people from their homes and businesses. Our Anarchism is not old, it is new and it is bold. Like sweet melody it soothes the savage breast of private property. Where old school Anarchism saw property as a voracious beast, our new school Anarchism sees ownership of property through the prism of democracy, which is only just, particularly when everything else in life will be free.

Think. What would you choose? Having full employment and only one obligation to pay, like rent, a lease, or mortgage for quality housing, and then being able to have for the taking everything and anything else you want, and as much as you want, for as long as you want, for free? Or would you rather be misemployed, underemployed, intermittently employed, or sadly, unemployed and obligated to pay for all your needs and wants in life, but are allowed rationed subsidies for a portion of your rent, lease or mortgage for the privilege of living in shabby substandard housing? If you chose the latter then you may be a socialist or even a capitalist! If you chose the former, then you chose wisely because you are now one of us. Twenty-first century Anarchism is in your interests as defined by 21st century terms and conditions, so why would anyone from any background choose differently?

Our Anarchism transcends old school ideas about the state. Our Anarchism neither trashes the state nor entrenches the state. Our Anarchism reorients the state to a new and positive relationship with the people. The nation-state’s mandate to administer things would facilitate the spontaneous and on-going emergence and maturation of capitalism unfettered from the money system and the spontaneous establishment of genuinely free markets – we pay for nothing – we call it unfettered communism. We see the passage from capitalism to complete communism as an instant and spontaneous post-historical phenomenon. Do not expect transition stages. We are not in the business of building transmissions.

The administration of things in 21st century Anarchism also means the end of the state as a political tool to support one group over another. Our Anarchism for the 21st century purges money from the political life of the people. Pluralism and interest group politics will have to compete based on the merits of their ideas and not the size of their war chests. Money will no longer buy elections, groups can no longer be bribed for their support, and the formal institutions of governance will no longer be the auction houses of the rich and the powerful. Our Anarchism is the purification of democracy into its most pristine state.

Our Anarchism rejects equal opportunities. Our Anarchism advocates unlimited opportunities for everyone. We are not about giving people a “fair” chance to succeed. We are all about supporting success among the people. When a person falls, we will pick them back up, and we will do this over and over again. This is not charity, it is reality. Unfettered capitalism allows people choices over chances by eliminating the burden of financing personal development and success. Individuals have personal lives whose realities are complicated by private anxieties and social barriers that challenge them in their quest for life’s bliss. However, the most difficult choice any of us will ever make in unfettered communism is, knowing what we really want. That means a person need time to make choices and learn from experience until he or she finds what moves his or her spirit and heart. A person does not need sympathy, charity, or a fair ration of chances. A real person needs choices and when a person has unlimited choices, then she or he will find their bliss eventually through contributing to society, thereby having a purposeful and meaningful life. Everybody benefits.

Our Anarchism takes people as we find them and then leaves the neuroses caused by civilization behind. We do not change people. Our Anarchism begins by liberating the nation-state from civilization by freeing it of its economy; consequently, individuals are liberated to pursue personal bliss through unlimited opportunities to develop professionally. The nation-state in our Anarchism abruptly unfetters capitalism from money and the monetary system. It is not a gradual process, or transitional process, or a planned process. It is virtually an instantaneous event. Unfettering capitalism from money releases all the power and might of our labor, industry, and enterprise to free commercial markets that serve unlimited consumer consumption, thus materializing the ideals of socialism and capitalism in an unfettered communism.

But do not misread me. Unfettered communism is not capitalism; it transcends it. It is also not communism; it transcends the 19th century idea of communism to a post-historical, 21st century conceptualization of Anarchism. Unfettered communism transforms the entire nation-state into a collective singularity. Within this collective singularity there is a subsystem of property. There are no collectives, just ordinary neighborhoods filled with ordinary people, living extraordinary lives. The relationship between the collective nature of the Anarchist state (or Anarchist habitat) and the property subsystem is symbiotic. Each supports the other’s dynamism. On the one hand, the singularity of the collective rewards everyone unequally by according each person all of her and his needs and wants. On the other hand, property maintains its materialist incentives to inspire people to be productive. The biggest decision we will ever have to make in our lives will be deciding what we really want.

Our Anarchism employs an idea similar to an equilibrium model of economy using the absence of money as a market dynamic, but eliminating money also eliminates the equilibrium model’s anomalies, therein our Anarchism transcends the mathematical underpinnings of the economic model. One fatal error in the equilibrium model of economy, as in all economies, are moral hazards. Nevertheless, something analogous to the equilibrium model can work in a money-free market. The money-free market unfetters capitalism form money. The unfettering of capitalism establishes the national collective and the emergence of unfettered communism. It is one giant leap for mankind, the great leap for women, a new day for all gender alternatives thereof.

Our Anarchism advocates technological development to support hyper-growth and social development. Over production through hyper –growth is the national agenda of an unfettered society. Advanced IT technologies are the means to make the unfettering of markets possible. For example, real-time demand can be satisfied by real-time supply within an infrastructure of anti-machines that orchestrate the second-by second synergy of production and consumption on a national scale. The concept of anti-machines is not science fiction. It exists today in the most advanced commercial and industrial sectors of advanced nations. Our Anarchism creates a national architecture to support software platforms that accelerate information management to facilitate material growth and the diffusion of political and social equality throughout society.

We want to replace extreme poverty with extreme prosperity across the board. We want to produce more than we consume in domestic markets to keep full employment. Our international goal is reverse-engineering imperialism. We will promote a policy of reverse-dumping on world markets, using our surplus production to eradicate material poverty and cultural deprivations in and among immizerated world regions. Our international goal is to also wed unfettered communism across national boundaries to create trans-communion cultures and eventually a worldwide societal communion of peace, growth, development, and justice that displaces wars, poverty, inequality and social injustices.

Let us not slight those heroic Anarchists of yore (including the 20th century Anarchists still alive) who had to claw and knuckle their way through centuries of agenda failures; but for us and our Anarchism, we’re never to look back into prior history’s pestholes. We intend on transcending history and the civilization it memorialized. Nor shall we shed nary a tear for history’s toothless cracker slave masters or broke back slaves, alley street bums or bastard bankers, all the heroes and villains of yesterday, whatever -- they are all dead now. What purpose is gained by citing them, or reviling them? We spend our time on the living. If the archive fogies want Anarchist history then let them go to the Internet and read all about N. I. Buhkarin et al. Point, click and there they are, still dead, all the Anarchists of the 18th through 20th centuries. Point, click, delete, that’s 21st century Anarchism! We won’t be ruled from the grave; we would rather rule ourselves for the purposes of today. Let us smile, say peace out and let it go; this century, this world, this Anarchism, not for those dead; for the living, for the bold.

21st century Anarchism is realism. We take people as we find them. You either love people or hate them because there is no middle ground between love and hate, only an amoral void worse than hate. Once world capitalism passes, all the cultural and class vendettas hard-boiled in historical conflict can finally be laid to rest, along with the nation-state. Meanwhile, the people’s thirst for revenge over all the horrors of capitalism, imperialism, and civilization will become meaningless by the unfettering of all cultural institutions from the money system. The societal dynamic unleashed by unfettering capitalism will compel them to let go of the past and get their first sweet taste of the future that is communism.

Ten thousand years of purposeless ignorance and mindless hatreds will not dissipate overnight with the elimination of fettered capitalism. Unfettered Anarchist communism will eventually break the back of group identities. Our Anarchism will subvert groups, undermine groups, eradicate groups, and not with state power, with people power. When people are finally liberated from the mystic power of destiny we placed in money, they will lose their quickly shed their dependencies on social groups and classes, and even lose their reverence for the ex-bread winners and ex-heads-of-house, and all the other defeated institutional authorities. If not groups then what? Our Anarchy claims the common aggregate as our nation. We will be a true aggregate of common interests in the likeness of Walt Whitman’s 19th century musings. We’re not muses though. We are Anarchists who mean business and we will be open for business very soon, just as soon as the world imperialism’s house of cards collapses.

Where 20th century Anarchists sought inclusion of all individuals in a just society, our 21st century Anarchism seeks to end the personal marginalization of individuals by social institutions. In other words, we advocate going even further forwards than our predecessors. We seek to transcend the muck of social life by allowing the spontaneous emergence of a culture that objectively places each person in communion with the other. People do not change but their environments do, and due to the fact that the central drive of the human condition is to adapt, people will voluntarily adapt to a new social paradigm if it is spontaneous, in their interests, and all other alternatives are dead-ends. Prior to such a catharsis, we must continue the struggle against inequality and injustice, and attack racism and all cultural and gender oppressions where we find them: in reactionary theocracies, marginalized neocolonial regions or overdeveloped bourgeois states. It is all tutorial for when the day comes when everything will change. It is about building trust among and between people and trusting in ourselves as a political force for progressive social change.

What is 21st century Anarchism? It is the material expression of human rights and social justice unbounded from an economy of moral hazards. It is the liberation of the person from individual role-playing. Our Anarchism is above all else, liberation from the scourge of civilization. But, it was civilization that left unabated societal impairments like parochialism, racism, ethnocentrism, intolerance, prejudice, bigotry, inequality, injustice, and other social stupidities, including that most profound thinking error, the marginalization of the person in society. So civilization, as we know it today, must go the way of the dinosaurs in a mass extinction event; however, instead of an asteroid to do the deed, we have the momentum and immensity of capitalism’s own weight crashing down on its head.

What is 21st Century Anarchism? It is feeling free of fear, regardless of whether such fears originate in laws of the state or is the making of private dementias or spiritually sick majorities. Of course, I fear not the anarchist: I fear the jackbooted jackass. I fear not the blessed; I fear the damned. I fear not authority and order if it is just; I fear the absence of personal rights under the boot of any excuse, even the excuse of exercising social justice. What are we about? We are about constitutionalism, limited government, and the rule of law. We are about a new freedom; a new freedom of unrationed, unportioned, unconditional and unlimited opportunities; a new freedom from inequality of education; a new freedom from joblessness and underemployment; a new freedom from thirst, hunger, tainted foods, and polluted communities; a new freedom from homelessness and the misery of poverty, disease and poor health; a new freedom from prejudice, bigotry, intolerance, and hate. We are about a new freedom from all social inequalities and injustices and personal indignities! We demand a new freedom of choice. Twenty-first century Anarchism is therefore freedom from the political economy of civilization, or put another way, a new freedom from history.

What is 21st century Anarchism? It is the first truly free society. It is the society where people do not have to pay for freedom in gold and blood. Twenty-first century Anarchism liberates our person to be her or himself, and frees our individualism to create a culture that embraces Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. The rich can stay rich (who would care) but they can’t get any richer, and if anyone can be called poor in this place, then at least they will never suffer for want of anything except for more from the best of all possible worlds. The crises in our lives will never again be about living hand to mouth, fearing the boss, or of losing the good life. Our biggest crisis in life will be discovering what we really want in life, and that is a private matter that once satisfied self-corrects social injustices and inequalities.

When each woman and every man can finally have everything she and he needs and can have anything she and he wants, and not according to their abilities (abilities be damned) but according to their unalienable rights of Life , Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness, then women and men will be free. Free to rediscover the truest value of life that gives it meaning, and there will be no time or place for haters to hate; or reason for historical vendettas, or a means of oppressing people, or material benefits from having group allegiances. We will be liberated from: him, her, them, each other, everyone, anyone, everybody, anybody, and thank God finally from one another. Twenty-first century Anarchism is the liberation of our persons. The central obstacle to this meaningful end is the unintelligible money system. The larger problem though has always been how to achieve a money-free society. Our 21st century Anarchism is the resolution to this dilemma. Our Anarchism solves the unsolvable and makes possible the impossible by ultimately transcending our crisis at the end of history for an entirely new paradigm of social organization.

We thank our honorable ancestors of antiquitous Africa for their wisdom. Karl Mark called their way of life primitive communism. Well, we may excuse Marx’s Eurocentrism and latent racism because he was definitely old school and by the way he is still dead. However, we are alive and we have learned much about so-called primitive peoples where we have now reached the point of understanding the backwards slide of social life in the human record rather than a so-called forward momentum (what chauvinism!). It is only our tool-making that has advanced forward, but the civilization paradigm that we used to create these marvelous tools has forced poverty and misery among us, along with fear and hatred. Civilization has shoved humanity backwards for 10,000 years and now like a crossbow’s tension we are ready to spring forwards.

We can use these 21st century tools as the crossbow we need to propel us forwards into the wisdom of our antiquitous African ancestors. Their wisdom was anything but dull. It held for 190,000 years! But, alas, pastoralists and sedentary cultivators usurped power from the original Anarchists of hunter-gatherer society to enforce the ferocious authority of male terrorists over newly created families, clans, and tribes. Before the beginning of that Dark Age, our ancestral African Anarchists lived as circles of friends. Their love of people was not conditioned by group identities, like families or tribes that ultimately created the fearful categories of “us” and “them.” We can reverse this distortion of the human condition, because now we have a means to make it all real. Just fifty years ago we could not pull it off. Now we can. All we need is the necessity, the will, and a heart large enough to embrace all of us.

Meanwhile, there is terrible adversity creeping towards us. The world financial system is quaking on the brink of total systemic collapse. The crisis manifests a social paradox created by money. Money; the fusion of mysticism and materialism; its paradox is now coming to a conclusion and civilization is going down. Policy solutions will remain elusive until it becomes obvious that we are at the end of history; then it won’t matter. In the next few years (or sooner) the institutional complexity of world capitalism’s financial infrastructure will completely implode. We are going to have to think outside the box to save ourselves from a long and violent dark age. We are going to need all the help we can get to achieve the democratic vista of 21st century Anarchism. The end of history is almost upon us. Our mission is to spread the word. Money must go! We can make do without money. We can do more without money.

Right now at this moment, the world has nothing to lead it forwards when globalization collapses. There is no Plan B among the economists. However; we, the people, have Agenda X. Our Agenda X will cross-out the old and unleash the new. All the “plans” go into the shredder. We intend to live life the way it should be lived, spontaneously -- not planned out. Planning is for suckers. A plan is another way of saying we are going to ration and portion our lives. Why should we return to that failed paradigm of civilization when we know any form or means of rationing and portioning the human condition will create winners and losers. Agenda X says we are all winners.

You may be thinking that the ideas in found here and in the book should be called something other than Anarchism. Well too bad. This is 21st century Anarchism and our flag is blacker than ever, so go ahead and shout, scream and yell it! Power to the People!
Black Flag Power!

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