While many are undergoing a mass awakening of class politics, opposition to the coercive control of statism must remain the central focus of any successful revolution.
In recent days conversations about working class struggles and the state of the economy, particularly in regard to the affordability crisis, have been occurring with increasing regularity. This has largely been spurred by the viral reporting of a warehouse fire in Ontario, California in which an employee, identified as 29 year old Chamel Abdulkarim, filmed himself lighting pallets of toilet paper on fire, stating “if you’re not going to pay us enough to live at least pay us enough not to do this.”
In the days since, the phrase “All You Had To Do Was Pay Us Enough To Live”, uttered by Abdulkarim in the video, has gone viral as a working class rallying cry acknowledging the increasingly desperate financial circumstances of many average working Americans struggling to get by.
These sentiments are becoming more commonplace as the value and purchasing power of the US dollar continues to deteriorate as a result of debt based fiat currency and a lack of intrinsic value combined with skyrocketing debt and inflation. For many, the cost of living is becoming unbearable.
This, combined with the increasingly transparent despotic decadence and lack of accountability for the abhorrent crimes of the ultra wealthy political and financial “elite”, aptly referred to as the predator class (or more recently the Epstein class), has resulted in a growing class consciousness among everyday citizens.
Recently, I read an article from an author by the name of JP Hill discussing what he described as a wave of attacks against the ruling class, citing the Ontario warehouse fire, a molotov attack and shooting against the house of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and gunfire directed at the home of an Indianapolis City Council member, wherein Hill made several relevant points discussing class antagonisms and the growing discontentment among average Americans struggling to afford gas and groceries while corporations rake in record profits and politicians stay the course with reckless endless spending for wars abroad.
One sentence in particular stood out.
What’s happening right now is that a vague sense of dissatisfaction, a simmering anger at a declining quality of life, is morphing into class politics for millions of Americans.
Class consciousness, in the modern socio-political vernacular, is a concept that is more often than not relegated to socialist and Marxist-Leninist ideological leanings. Though upon a more critical analysis it becomes abundantly clear that this concept permeates throughout the entirety of political identity. The working class is comprised of the overwhelming vast majority of people from all walks of life, while the ruling class is comprised of a small minority who through hoarded wealth and centralized power attempt to exert their will to control the rest of society. No matter one’s political leanings nobody likes some ultra-rich jerk trying to dictate how everyone should live their lives. That’s just as true today as it was thousands of years ago.
The problem we typically face, particularly in the West, is that whenever there begins to be serious conversations about class consciousness it ultimately runs up against the age old clash between capitalism and socialism, thus diverting the entire conversation concerning real world present day struggles into an endless cyclical debate of 19th century ideological semantics.
And while this clash makes up a significant portion of the modern identity politics psyop and political divide and conquer of the last century, it appears that there has been a severe and deliberate misattribution of the actual fundamental issue attributed to either ideology that has been seized upon by the propagandists of the predator class to continue to perpetuate this divisive rhetoric.
Most people when discussing the concepts of either capitalism or socialism, do so within the context of statism, that is to say what they’re actually discussing are state-capitalism and state-socialism. And when taking an outside view of said debate it becomes clear that the critiques of the capitalists against the socialists, and the critiques of the socialists against the capitalists, are in actuality both critiques of statism and the impact with which centralized state power has had on morphing either ideology into a repressive corruption of its intended purpose.
Most people, it seems, view these concepts through this lens and as such have a profound misunderstanding of the definition of these terms and the historical context behind the development of such ideologies.
A good example of this was elaborated upon by esteemed libertarian economist Murray Rothbard in his 1971 essay Capitalism versus Statism, Rothbard stated thusly:
If we are to keep the term “capitalism” at all, then, we must distinguish between “free-market capitalism” on the one hand, and “state capitalism” on the other. The two are as different as day and night in their nature and consequences. Free-market capitalism is a network of free and voluntary exchanges in which producers work, produce, and exchange their products for the products of others through prices voluntarily arrived at. State capitalism consists of one or more groups making use of the coercive apparatus of the government — the State — to accumulate capital for themselves by expropriating the production of others by force and violence.
Indeed, even the very word “capitalism” as being conflated with the practice of free enterprise and voluntary exchange is an inversion of its original definition and was an invention of industrial robber barons of the early 20th century.
Pioneer of early anarchist philosophy Pierre-Joseph Proudhon is largely credited with firmly establishing an understanding of the word “capitalism” in his 1846 work System of Economic Contradictions shortly after it came into common usage, using the term derisively and referring to it as “the theory of misfortune and the organization of misery” characterized by the appropriation of property and resources by the few to generate profit by the exploitation of the many.
Early American anarchists that played an influential role in the development of political theory, particularly libertarianism, define capitalism with a similar view. For instance, Benjamin Tucker described capitalism in his 1893 work Instead of a Book: A Realistic Picture of the Future as a “state-protected monopoly that enabled the exploitation of labor”.
Similarly, Lysander Spooner in his book Poverty: Its Illegal Causes and Legal Cure and other works would describe capitalism as a state enforced monopoly over land, money, and banking that enabled the exploitation of labor.
Likewise, Emma Goldman in Anarchism: What it Really Stands For would refer to capitalism as “man being robbed not merely of the products of his labor, but of the power of free initiative”.
This is what we today know as crony-capitalism or corporatism. But originally, they all meant the same thing. In actuality, the more realistic and accurate terminology to refer to genuine free market practicies and voluntary enterprise is what is known as agorism ― A concept popularized by anarchist philosopher and author Samuel Edward Konkin III in his 1980 work The New Libertarian Manifesto.
Many may find it shocking to learn that it was at the turn of the 20th century that the term capitalism underwent a metamorphosis from its original derisive deffinition describing wealth consolidation and labor exploitation to being conflated with the concepts of the free market under false pretenses.
Industrialist robber barons like the Rockefeller and DuPont families, when their monopolies of consolidated wealth were threatened by actual free market competition, would undertake an effort to rig the system in their favor and reshape the ideological framework, publicly espousing the rhetoric of “free market enterprise”, while privately advocating state interference of market economics to secure their financial interests. Through organizations such as the National Association of Manufacturers (est 1895), and the American Liberty League (est 1934), these industrial tycoons would position themselves as seemingly champions of free market principles, while behind the scenes lobbying heavily for anti-free market practices such as protectionist tariffs, government contracts, and regulations favorable to big business monopolies.
Thus, the term “capitalism” would come to be associated with free markets in concept, but state-corporate intervention in practice, leading to the discrepancy of its usage in the modern American economic rhetoric.
Due to this inversion, modern socialists and Marxist-Leninists have a similar misunderstanding of the word capitalism. Just as capitalists conflate the word in a positive sense with free market economics, socialists conflate the word in a negative sense with what they belive the free market to be. As such, when socialists blame the woes of the proletariat on “the free market of capitalism”, what they are in fact primarily criticizing in most cases without realizing it is the centralization of wealth and power against the free market, not for it.
Socialists themselves often advocate their own version of anti-state voluntary exchange and community building through what is known as mutual aid, wherein communities and individuals operating under a principle of solidarity voluntarily and reciprocally exchange resources, services, and support to meet community needs. This concept garnered popularity via the 1902 book Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution authored by prominent political theorist and anarcho-communist Peter Kropotkin, whose work and ideals influenced the development of anarchist, socialist, and partially even early libertarian ideology.
It must be understood that the state, acting in its belligerent capacity, is the primary driving force behind all class antagonisms. It exists exclusively as a monopoly on violence, with the centralization of power into a coercive bureaucratic hierarchy using force, oppression, and exploitation to impose the ideals of a plutocratic aristocracy among the unconsenting masses.
It is this centralization of power into a hierarchical coercive bureaucracy that leads to the inevitable downfall of any and all class revolutions. A prime historical example of this being the Bolshevik revolution.
Vladimir Lenin espoused in his 1917 book State and Revolution that the uprising of the Bolsheviks was intended to establish what Lenin referred to as a “Dictatorship of the Proletariat”, the purpose of which was to seize control of the state apparatus from the oppressive bourgeoisie and, utilizing the machinery of the state, suppress any potential anti-proletarian uprisings of the ruling class while implementing equitable socialist reforms. The “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” was, in theory, according to Lenin, a transitional phase in which the state itself would wither away gradualy with the implementation of these ideals into a classsless, stateless egalitarian society.
This, of course, did not happen, and was always destined to fail. Not only because, as revealed by historian and economics professor Antony C Sutton, the Bolshevik Revolution was secretly financially backed by Western capitalists ― but as observed by Russian revolutionary anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, a contemporary and staunch critic of Karl Marx, the state is inherently oppressive, and by its very nature of power centralization, expansionist and militaristic. Bakunin accurately predicted decades before the Bolshevik Revolution that even a state comprised of the working class would concentrate authority into a “Red Bureaucracy” simply resulting in the creation of a new ruling elite just as oppressive as the previous.
Indeed, toward the end of his life even Vladimir Lenin himself, while not disavowing Marxism in its entirety, began to see the cracks in the Soviet system. In his Final Testament dictated between 1922 and 1923, Lenin heavily criticized what he saw as the bureaucratization of Soviet leadership under Joseph Stalin as general secretary, becoming increasingly concerned with Stalin’s ambition and authoritarian tactics undermining what was intended to be a voluntary union of Soviet republics.
Vladimir Lenin would die in January of 1924 at the age of 53, due to a combination of genetic predispositions, and likely an added dose of poison provided by Joseph Stalin.
With the rise of state backed communism came countless atrocities. Regimes such as those of Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot resulted in the deaths of millions and the suffering of countless more. Yet, rather than being unique to the communist system, these mass abuses, just as with those of other contemporary governments, capitalist or otherwise, can squarely be seen as a result of the innately violent nature of the state and forced collectivization.
Ultimately, it is clear, as Bakunin outlined, that any successful revolution must prioritize the abolition of the state. It is likewise demonstrable that any successful economic system must be rooted in voluntary exchange and non-coercion. It can be observed then, that it is the corruption of the state, not inherently the ideologies of either capitalism in the free market sense or socialism that is the biggest contributing factor to the failure of such ideals, and, with the subtraction of the state, either are capable of producing effective and prosperous forms of social organization.
Free Thought Project colleague and contributor and co-founder of The Conscious Resistance Network Neil ‘Liberty’ Radimaker expanded in depth upon this very concept in his article titled Voluntary Systems vs. Authoritarian Control: Rethinking The Clash Between Socialism and Capitalism.
In it, he concludes:
The debate between socialism and capitalism is often reduced to a false binary, where proponents of each ideology accuse the other of immorality. However, the real divide is not between left and right but between authoritarianism and liberty—between coercion and voluntarism. Both socialism and capitalism can be moral systems, as long as they operate voluntarily and respect the Non-Aggression Principle.
R.J. Rummel’s concept of democide reminds us that state power, regardless of ideology, leads to mass murder and oppression when unrestrained by moral principles. The lesson is clear: no system, whether socialist or capitalist, should rely on force or coercion to achieve its goals.
And so, as class consciousness in America rises with the recognition of living under the yoke of a plutocratic oligarchy, and the urge for revolution and liberation from this oppressive exploitative system continues to fester, it is not enough to simply advocate for working class solidarity or the implementation of more equitable systems. For as we can see, regardless of the reform, should it be affixed to the apparatus of the state it will inevitably mutate into a ravenous beast that devours the rights and liberties of everyone.
Any class revolution must embrace the abolition of statism, lest it be doomed from the start to repeat the mistakes of history.