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2 Beyond Capitalism and Communism
To move forward toward coöperation, the first and most important step will be to leave behind the misleading debate between capitalism on the one hand and communism, socialism, and anarchism on the other. That centuries-old debate is pure ideology—nothing more than illusions masquerading as economic and political science.
American capitalism may look and feel like it is all about “free commerce” and “private enterprise,” but in fact the entire system rests wholly on the government’s promise—and track record—of rescuing private corporations in case of economic and financial collapse. Without the federal government backstop, without the promise and reality of bailing out private corporations during depressions and recessions, the fragile and deeply indebted structure of American capitalism would collapse in a split second—among other things, foreign investors would withdraw their capital and the American markets would implode. The full ideology of American capitalism serves simply to mask the fact that the entire system is a house of cards that serves to funnel wealth to the richest and most privileged Americans. American capitalism must be understood, in truth, as a statist form of economic redistribution.
Really-existing communism is also purely ideological. It claims to place everything in common, when in fact it monopolizes ownership in the hands of a centralized state apparatus or political party or faction. Any and all allocations and distributions of goods and wealth are the magnanimous (more often self-serving) decisions of a centralized bureaucracy or autocracy. By the same token, socialism is really nothing more than the state ownership of the means of production, which produces the same self-serving elitism, and anarchism is, well, an imaginary.
The centuries-old debate between capitalism, communism, and socialism is utterly useless today because it masks the actual allocation of proprietary interests and the resulting real distributions of material possessions. It rests on imagined ideal types that are misleading and pure illusions. They need to be unmasked and relegated to the twentieth century.
