Anarchism is the vision of the world socialism can one day create, a libertarian society free of not just the ruling class and the exploitation of the common people, but the State itself.

Anarchism is not a philosophy of chaos and violence. True, in the same way some capitalists were violent, so were some anarchists, such as Leon Czolgosz, who took out his anger over the exploitation of the poor by assassinating President William McKinley in Buffalo in 1901. But many others, like musician Josiah Warren (called the first American anarchist), English author H.G. Wells (The War of the Worlds), or Russian writer Leo Tolstoy (War and Peace), were not terrorists.

Rather, anarchism is order in its most democratic form. It is the complete rejection of authoritarianism, the argument that the State, and other forms of authority, such as capitalism, will always abuse those with less power, the common people. It is the denunciation of force and oppression. Anarchists argue we can live in peace and prosperity without nonlocal government or capitalism. Instead, men and women could organize themselves, participating in local direct democracy (citizen’s assemblies) to determine what is best for their communities, and take on the responsibility of a worker-owner (in worker councils) to help determine what is best for any business or organization they choose to join (see “Worker Control of Businesses” in What is Socialism?). They envision a world with no congressmen, presidents, or CEOs to put innocent people at risk in the pursuit of profit or power. With an emphasis on free association between people, individual liberty, and a democratic sharing of wealth and power, this is hardly an image of destruction and madness. It is order without oppression, democracy without the State.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon wrote (see Anarchism, Guerin):

To be governed is to be watched over, inspected, spied on, directed, legislated, regimented, closed in, indoctrinated, preach at, controlled, assessed, evaluated, censored, commanded; all by creatures that have neither the right, nor wisdom, nor virtue… To be governed means that at every move, operation, or transaction one is noted, registered, entered in a census, taxed, stamped, priced, assessed, patented, licensed, authorized, recommended, admonished, prevented, reformed, set right, corrected. Government means to be subjected to tribute, trained, ransomed, exploited, monopolized, extorted, pressured, mystified, robbed; all in the name of public utility and the general good. Then, at the first sign of resistance or word of complaint, one is repressed, fined, despised, vexed, pursued, judged, sentenced, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed, and to cap it all, ridiculed, mocked, outraged, and dishonored. That is government, that is its justice and its morality!… O human personality! How can it be that you have cowered in such subjection for sixty centuries?

Anarchist thought is ancient. It is imagined to have arisen alongside the earliest civilizations, such as 6th century B.C. China (the philosopher Lao Tzu and Taoism have been embraced by many anarchists). Wherever there is authoritarianism, there is surely anti-authoritarian sentiment. Of course, one could say anarchism has been around for 100,000 years, as long as humanity itself. Is it simply a modern yearning to return to how humans lived for 95% of our existence, under primitive communism, when humans lived in kin-based groups free of government?

Socialists and anarchists disagree over whether class oppression, exploitation, poverty, and war can be abolished only after the State is dismantled, or if the State has a role to play in ending these things. H.G. Wells, among many, thought only socialism could make anarchism possible (see New Worlds For Old, Wells):

Socialism is the preparation for that higher Anarchism; painfully, laboriously we mean to destroy false ideas of property and self, eliminate unjust laws and poisonous and hateful suggestions and prejudices, create a system of social right-dealing and a tradition of right-feeling and action. Socialism is the schoolroom of true and noble Anarchism, wherein by training and restraint we shall make free men.

Frederick Engels wrote that socialism would cause the State to “wither away,” meaning that after political power was given to the people the State would disappear as we know it. Socialist George Orwell (whose 1984 and Animal Farm condemned the totalitarian socialism of the U.S.S.R.) wrote, “I worked out an anarchistic theory that all government is evil, that the punishment always does more harm than the crime and the people can be trusted to behave decently if you will only let them alone.” But he concluded, “It is always necessary to protect peaceful people from violence. In any state of society where crime can be profitable you have got to have a harsh criminal law and administer it ruthlessly” (Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell).

To this writer, the State is necessary to protect ordinary people from the worst ravages of capitalism, whether miserable wages or the poisoning of the biosphere. The State cannot be eliminated until capitalism is eliminated.

Anarchism may sound similar to American libertarianism. Libertarians in the United States emphasize individual liberty, voluntary associations, and diminished government, but are staunchly pro-capitalism. Modern anarchist Noam Chomsky summed up the difference:

What’s called libertarian in the United States, which is a special U.S. phenomenon, it doesn’t really exist anywhere else—a little bit in England—permits a very high level of authority and domination but in the hands of private power: so private power should be unleashed to do whatever it likes. The assumption is that by some kind of magic, concentrated private power will lead to a more free and just society.

Libertarians fail to address the authoritarianism, abuse, theft, and exploitation wrought on innocent people by capitalist owners, at times graver than anything government could concoct. “What’s called libertarian” today doesn’t extend much farther than the U.S. because elsewhere there is already a name for it: anarcho-capitalism. This “free market anarchism” is considered blasphemous and contradictory by many anarchists, since capitalism involves hierarchy and authoritarianism. The anarchism that socialists desire will be free of capitalism; the people will democratically own their workplaces, industries, and communities.

Anarchism, in its rejection of the State, rejects nationalism, the false divisions between people. Marx wrote, “The workingmen have no country.” When workers control the workplace and hold decision-making power in their communities, there will be no need for a State controlled by upper class rulers, and if the State does not exist, neither will nations, and neither will senseless wars between nations. Socialism and anarchism emphasize the brotherhood of all men. John Lennon, a self-described socialist (see the Playboy interviews of 1981), captured the anarchist philosophy in his song “Imagine”:

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace…

Thomas Paine said, “Independence is my happiness, and I view things as they are, without regard to place or person; my country is the world, and my religion is to do good” (Rights of Man). Jack London wrote that people should care “more for men and women and little children than for imaginary geographical lines” (How I Became a Socialist). Prominent American anarchist Emma Goldman, writing in 1908, had harsh words for “patriotism” (Declarations of Independence, Zinn):

Conceit, arrogance and egotism are the essentials of patriotism. Let me illustrate. Patriotism assumes that our globe is divided into little spots, each one surrounded by an iron gate. Those who have had the fortune of being born on some particular spot consider themselves nobler, better, grander, more intelligent than those living beings inhabiting any other spot. It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot to fight, kill and die in the attempt to impose his superiority upon all the others.

Indeed, patriotism and nationalism have killed more people than any force in human history, even more than religion. 60 million people died in two world wars alone, in just a quarter-century. The Central and Axis Powers used the glorification of the State to encourage soldiers and civilians to participate in war and unimaginable atrocities, or look the other way, and the Allied Powers did the same in response. Blind patriotism leads to moral blindness.

Goldman inspired Howard Zinn, who wrote in 2005 (Declarations):

There was something horrifying in the realization that, in this twenty-first century of what we call ‘civilization,’ we have carved up what we claim is one world into 200 artificially created entities we call ‘nations’ and armed to apprehend or kill anyone who crosses a boundary.

Is not nationalism–that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary so fierce it engenders mass murder–one of the great evils of our time, along with racism, along with religious hatred? These ways of thinking–cultivated, nurtured, indoctrinated from childhood on–have been useful to those in power, and deadly for those out of power.

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[A man] carrying a red flag…should be arrested [like a] dangerous man who is flourishing a deadly weapon.

So wrote the Kansas City Star in the waning years of the 19th century.

As the 20th century dawned, American socialist and communist movements grew in popularity and became a political force to be reckoned with. As documented in Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, an estimated 1 million Americans read socialist newspapers. The Socialist Party had nearly 120,000 members. Socialist politicians served in 340 cities across the country, some 1,200 mayors, councilpersons, state congressmen, and other politicians. Victor Berger of Milwaukee, a city run by socialists off and on for 50 years, became the first socialist U.S. Congressman in 1911. Eugene V. Debs of Indiana was the presidential candidate for the Socialist Party in 1900, 1904, 1908, 1912, and 1920. In 1920, he garnered 6% of the national vote (nearly 1 million people), a percentage many modern third-party candidates would die for — and he did it from a prison cell, having been jailed for speaking against U.S. involvement in World War I.

This article will not explore the ideology of socialism in-depth, but generally speaking socialists believe workers should own and manage their workplaces democratically and share the wealth workers create, rather than allow one owner or a board to monopolize decision-making power and award themselves much while offering workers little. As Kansas City’s Midland Mechanic wrote on July 14, 1898, “Labor produces all wealth and provides the luxuries of the rich, but it clothes itself in rags, lives in hovels, is denied justice and ridiculed by plutocracy.”

Therefore, socialists were leaders of the labor movement, organizing and striking for higher wages, union rights, workplace safety, and the end to child labor and 12- and 16-hour workdays. Socialists further believe government, both local and national, should be controlled by the people (yes, some in the past believed the government should own the workplaces, with the people or their worker representatives owning the government). In short, in both the political and economic worlds, the many should rule, not the few — power to the people. Such ideas often encouraged solidarity and friendship between workers regardless of race, religion, national origin, or gender. Not always, by any means, but at times. Hence, socialists and communists (including many black socialists and women socialists) were often leaders and supporters of historic equal rights and anti-war movements.

Like other cities, Kansas City was home to socialist organizations and newspapers. In fact, what would become the largest socialist newspaper in the nation with 760,000 subscribers, the Appeal to Reason, began in Kansas City. Julius A. Wayland, after fleeing Indiana to avoid a lynching over his socialist ideology and helping found the utopian, communal Ruskin Colony in Tennessee, moved to Kansas City and started the paper in 1895. Its name was a nod to Thomas Paine. Wayland printed 50,000 copies of his first issue. To save on costs, Wayland moved his business to Girard, Kansas, in 1897.

From there it would grow into a national paper. Wayland included the writings of Thomas Paine and of course Karl Marx to popularize socialism. Further, to quote the Socialist Worker, a modern publication:

Among the paper’s correspondents were Upton Sinclair, Jack London, Mother Jones and Eugene V. Debs. The Appeal first made Upton Sinclair famous. In 1905, Warren approached the novelist with the idea of shedding light on the appalling working conditions in Chicago meatpacking plants. Sinclair was to work incognito, gathering information. The result was a series in the Appeal called “The Jungle,” which modern readers may know as one of the most widely read works of American literature.

The paper arrived during the depression of the 1890s, when the Kansas City Star was writing that there was “a tendency to speak of ‘the unemployed’ as of a permanent, recognized, and even organized class” and the Kansas City Mail wrote that “hard times is the cry of everyone nowadays.” The Socialist Labor Party in Kansas City declared in 1895, “Never before in the history of mankind has there been so much suffering from hunger and privations of all kinds alongside of luxury and abundance of nature’s gifts and the products of labor.”

The Star, however, was not pro-labor. It boasted that “the grievous oppression of labor is no longer possible in America” in 1891. It condemned Eugene Debs for the Pullman Strike, a nationwide strike of railroad workers in 1894. The Mail wasn’t particularly thrilled about radical leftists either, declaring in 1893, “Mormons and Socialists should be scattered to the four winds.”

The Kansas City branch of the Socialist Party published a weekly newspaper, the Workers’ World, “one of the few pro-Communist papers in the Midwest.” One can actually read copies from 1919 online. It was founded by socialists James Cannon and Earl Browder, prior creators of another labor paper, the Toiler. Published by Max Dezettel, the Toiler advocated syndicalism — transferring ownership of business to the workers and their unions. The Kansas City Syndicalist League, which historian Edward Johanningsmeier called “the strongest component of the national league,” had “practical control” over the local cooks, barbers, and office workers unions.

Browder was a member of the American Federation of Labor and worked in a bookstore and for the Johnson County Cooperative Association in Olathe, Kansas. Like Debs, he spoke out against World War I, the draft in particular, and was imprisoned from late 1917 to late 1918. Cannon was an International Workers of the World member and one of the founders of this country’s Communist Party (in 1919) — Browder became its General Secretary in 1930. Six years later, Browder was nominated as candidate for president of the United States. Cannon traveled multiple times to the Soviet Union to represent U.S. communists at the Comintern.

On Friday, April 4, 1919, in its first paper (selling for 5 cents), the Workers’ World laid out its raison d’être, its reason for being:

Capitalist society is destroying itself with the forces generated within its own body… Unemployment is growing in these United States weekly, daily, hourly. Sporadic strikes are occurring everywhere, and growing in power and scope with every strike. Wage and working standards are being demoralized. Prices are going up instead of down…

Our rulers, from the “schoolmaster” down to the smallest bank director, are exhibiting nothing but futile gestures, sonorous phrases, and a general incapacity for even an intelligent understanding that a fundamental change is necessary. From such a situation nothing can come but a great crash, and the crash will not be long in coming.

Socialism offers the only way out. But socialism, to be effective, must be organized and must become vocal. This is the “Why” of the Workers’ World, to demand the abolition of exploitation, to assert the necessity for the control of society by the workers…and to assist in developing the practical program by which the workers will take over industry for society as a whole…to foster and encourage, in season and out, that faith in the working class and its ability to control its own destiny…

The paper focused heavily on socialist theory and practice, prison reform, and labor struggles. It arrived during the fourth month of a great streetcar worker strike, which had two causes. Workers who organized into a union, the Carmen’s Union, were immediately fired by the streetcar company. Further, workers wanted a wage increase from 36 cents to 42 cents an hour. The men left their jobs and “met at Labor Temple and paraded, with bands and banners, through the main streets of the city, and under the windows of the Street Railway office at 15th and Grand.” Then “the case was taken before…Wm. Howard Taft,” the former president, at the National War Labor Board, which was designed to mediate worker-employer disputes.

The company hired scabs (or “finks”), who lived like a “herd in the barns at 16th and Garfield where they were being housed and fed by the company,” to replace the strikers. So thousands of “indignant and outraged workers gathered around the barns, overpowered the police, burned a few cars as a sign that they were in earnest, and escorted the ‘finks’ in a body to Union Station, where they saw them carefully out of town.”

Things only escalated from there. “Kansas City was given the strange spectacle of soldiers with fixed bayonets and machine guns, patrolling the streets of Kansas City night and day in motor cars. A campaign of terrorism was inaugurated against the men, strikers, and even suspected sympathisers [sic], being arrested upon the flimsiest pretext. To utter the word ‘scab’ publicly meant at the least a week or two in jail.” Four men were arrested after rumors that strikers were dynamiting streetcars arose — and were allegedly forced by the police to confess. Then “certain men, supposed to be in the pay of the railway company, were said to have been caught trying to place explosives in the Labor Temple.”

“The government acts only to uphold the company,” Workers’ World wrote. “All forces are arrayed against the men, who are still standing together in magnificent solidarity with nothing on their side but the justice of their demands. Will cynical and arrogant forces win? It will be a black day for the Kansas City capitalists when ALL the workers realize as fully as do the streetcar men that justice can only be obtained by taking the government into their own hands.”

Socialism was discussed in public forums in Kansas City. For example, the American Federation of Labor held a convention in Kansas City in December 1898, where, according to the New York Times, “socialism was the absorbing topic.” Indeed,

The Socialist delegates made a determined effort to infuse Socialistic doctrine into the law of the Federation, by the introduction of a resolution the gist of which was that the constitution of the federation be changed so as to admit indorsement [sic] of no political party except that “bearing on the class-conscious propaganda for abolition of the wage system.”

Probably they will not succeed, for there is a majority against them, but the Socialist orators held the floor nearly all the afternoon, and will continue their argument to-morrow.

Kansas City was gripped by the typical hysteria over socialism — the Red Scare.

Take for example 1913, which saw a “Free Speech Fight in Kansas City” (International Socialist Review). 85 members of the Industrial Workers of the World were thrown “in jail for speaking on the streets. The number is increasing daily with men who come from different parts of the country, some of them from as far as Great Fall, Mont., beating their way, braving the cold and snow, to fight and suffer for the right to agitate and educate the workers for the overthrow of capitalism.”

The mass protests and mass arrests began when “the police broke up a street meeting on behalf of the Wheatland prisoners. Five men were sentenced to 200 days in the workhouse. The others have been sentenced to similar and even longer terms.”

The police “clubbed the speakers off the streets.” Some were “clubbed and so badly injured that they had to be taken to the hospital,” the punishment for those “brave men who dare to speak against capitalism.” Yet the “resolute rebels have determined to have free speech at any cost.”

Like elsewhere, some socialists (white and black) helped push forward black rights. People like Herb March of the Young Communist League and socialist Charles Fischer united blacks and whites at places like the Armour packing house, where blacks were fired first and underrepresented in better positions. They formed a union that became the largest racially diverse organization in the city, with leaders from both races. In September 1938, after a pay dispute involving unpaid blacks, 400 black and 600 white workers occupied Armour together for days. “It left a unity of friendship that couldn’t have been created in any other way,” Fischer recalled. Further, he remembered:

There was, of course, that religious difference and that racial difference, which were obstacles at first but which were all overcome. All of them — simply by showing the people that we all had a common goal to make a decent living, to have a decent standard of living, and this was the way to go, and the only way to go, because without a union, we’re all lost.

The strikers won their demands.

Further, black and white members of the Kansas City branch of the Communist Party marched through the city together to protest unemployment in 1931. Black communists like Abner Berry gave speeches around the city to help unite workers (see Racism in Kansas City: A Short History).

Many socialists understood the relationship between race and class: racist doctrines justified economic oppression by capitalists, employers. Just like emancipation of yesteryear would mean the end of free labor for slave owners, human equality would force business owners to pay blacks the same wages as whites. Racism served to prevent this, just as sexism and xenophobia prevented the same for women, undocumented immigrants, and others. Further, racism discouraged diverse workers from uniting (and was often stoked by corporations as thoroughly as possibly to weaken labor organizations). In 1931, James Cannon, former editor of Workers’ World, wrote for a New York paper:

In its struggle against the workers’ emancipation movement capitalism plays upon all the dark sentiments of ignorance, prejudice and superstition. This is seen daily and hourly in its endeavors to divide the workers and oppressed people along national, racial and religious lines…. [White workers are] inflamed against the foreigner, the Jew and the Negro. Communism cannot be other than the mortal enemy of these devastating prejudices…. Communists must be the heralds of a genuine solidarity between the exploited workers of the white race and the doubly exploited Negroes.

Kansas City was home to a branch of a black socialist organization called the Black Panther Party. The local chapter started in 1969 and was headed by Pete O’Neal. The Panthers aimed to promote self-defense and use of Second Amendment rights, to unify workers against capitalist exploitation, to embrace black pride, to make African Americans politically powerful and economically self-sufficient, to end illiteracy, hunger, and poverty in black communities, and to fight and die at any time for freedom. Marxist ideas of giving power to the common people attracted many, as did the idea of revolution in an America where blacks were stripped of their human rights and white vigilantes and police could attack and kill peaceful marchers with total impunity.

The local chapter created social programs to lift Kansas City blacks out of poverty. Its “three major survival programs included a free breakfast program, black history classes, and free health screening for sickle cell and hypertension.” Food donations from local businesses fed 700 children each day (Racism in Kansas City). The Kansas City Panthers had female members and leaders, like Charlotte Hill O’Neal.

Indeed, men were not the only socialists (though socialist women were usually made subordinate to men). Take Kate Richards O’Hare, who, while being a racist segregationist, was a vocal Socialist Party organizer, an anti-war and anti-militarism advocate who was also imprisoned under the Espionage Act (freedom of speech was not particularly popular in America during the Great War). She later made an unsuccessful run for Congress on a Socialist Party ticket. O’Hare lived on a farm in rural Kansas and then moved to Kansas City as a youth. She remembered in an article for the Socialist Woman:

Then came the day when we left the ranch and went to the city to take up the life of a wage-worker’s family in the poverty-cursed section of the town. For, of course, no other was possible for us for father’s wages were only nine dollars a week and nine dollars is not much to support a family of five. Of that long, wretched winter following the panic of 1887 the memory can never be erased, never grow less bitter. The poverty, the misery, the want, the wan-faced women and hunger pinched children, men trampling the streets by day and begging for a place in the police stations or turning footpads by night, the sordid, grinding, pinching poverty of the workless workers and the frightful, stinging, piercing cold of that winter in Kansas City will always stay with me as a picture of inferno such as Dante never painted…

I, child-woman that I was, seeing so much poverty and want and suffering, threw my whole soul into church and religious work. I felt somehow that the great, good God who had made us could not have [wanted to abandon] his children to such hopeless misery and sordid suffering. There was nothing uplifting in it, nothing to draw the heart nearer to him, only forces that clutched and dragged men and women down into the abyss of drunkenness and vice. Perhaps he had only overlooked those miserable children of the poor in the slums of Kansas City, and if we prayed long and earnestly and had enough of religious zeal he might hear and heed and pity.

O’Hare was a machinist with her father and a trade unionist, until she heard Mother Jones speak at the Cigar Maker’s Ball in Kansas City. She “hastily sought out ‘Mother’ and asked her to tell what Socialism was.” O’Hare then became a socialist, reading the Appeal to Reason, gaining Wayland as a mentor, and joining the Socialist Labor Party of Kansas City in 1899. She joined with Caroline Lowe (a teacher) and Winnie Shirley, other Kansas City socialist women, to push for socialism throughout the southwestern U.S. O’Hare soon rivaled Eugene Deb’s popularity in the Southwest, gaining a national and even international reputation, according to historian James Green.

Another famous socialist woman was Ella Reeve Bloor, who helped establish the Communist Labor Party in Kansas City and was later a national organizer. She wrote for the Workers’ World as well.

Socialism in Kansas City found a home in the 1970s in the form of the Kansas City Marxist-Leninist Cell and the Kansas City Revolutionary Workers Collective, a black Marxist organization with “roots in the Afro-American student and community struggles” that reached out to national communist groups and local groups like the Wichita Communist Cell. The KCRWC declared, “We will struggle to unite the working class movement with the movement of oppressed national minorities, women, students, and all who will struggle for the socialist revolution. We will lead the U.S. working class to its greatest victory yet — the [establishment] of the People’s Socialist Republic of the United States!”

The KCRWC had harsh words for both the United States and the U.S.S.R. regarding imperialism, calling the two superpowers the “most dangerous exploiters… These two bloodsuckers are the biggest threat to world peace… The competition for world domination by these two superpowers, which is particularly acute in Southern Africa, the Mideast, and Europe, exposes their true aims.” Further,

The U.S. has long been regarded as a reactionary imperialist power, and has long ago won the bitter hatred of the world’s working people — from Puerto Rico to Chile, from southern Africa to Vietnam… The Soviet Union is now a fascist police state internally, and a vicious exploiter internationally. We say that the Soviet Union is social-imperialist — socialist in words, imperialist in deeds.

During the great Kansas City, Missouri, School District teacher strikes of the 1970s, the KCRWC stood with the teachers, calling the strike a “just struggle.”

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The march toward the obsolescence of human labor is an inevitability of capitalism.

In a capitalist society, a business is structured like a dictatorship: an owner or small group of owners, board members, and investors hold all the power and make all the decisions, including how company profits are used — to increase production, to open new plants or stores, invest in new technology, increase advertising, hire more workers, increase worker pay, increase owner pay, and so on. They also decide, when times are rough, when to close the stores or factories, when to lay off workers, when to sell the business, etc.

As a business owner, investing in technology can make your workplace(s) more automated, allowing you to reduce your workforce. While technology costs money to create, install, and maintain, it can save huge sums compared to human labor, and is much more efficient. Ford, for example, needs only one-third of the workers it needed in the 1970s for the same production levels (Imagine, Goldwin and Smith). Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance recently replaced dozens of employees with A.I., expecting a 30% increase in productivity. This leads to greater profits.

(There is little evidence, by the way, that higher minimum wages exacerbate this process; studies overwhelmingly show that raising the minimum wage does not cause unemployment, as more money in people’s pockets leads to more spending at businesses, creating equilibrium.)

The owners benefit immensely, massively increasing their wealth, but the workers are sent packing, forced to find work elsewhere (this has contributed to severe inequality in the U.S., where the bottom 80% of Americans now own just 7% of the national wealth and the top 1% owns 40%; recent income growth has gone almost exclusively to the rich; CEO pay has skyrocketed, worker wages have stagnated).

New technology and broader divisions of labor (think of the assembly line) constantly make specialized labor obsolete. The pursuit of profit tends to make a worker “an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack that is required of him,” to quote The Communist Manifesto. When a task that originally required advanced training or higher education can be accomplished by low-skill labor, a capitalist has no need for someone with a college degree and needs not pay the higher salary. Then competition among workers for that job is broadened, driving the wage down further. If a task can be totally replaced by a machine, the job opportunity vanishes completely (“technological unemployment”).

Supporters of capitalism will protest, saying the advent of new technology often creates new high-skill, high-wage jobs, which is true. New technologies, from computers to jets, require trained personnel to build, maintain, upgrade, and operate them. However, the people who can take advantage of these new opportunities are not usually the ones who are displaced by the new technology. The losers (usually older folks) find their once-valuable skills irrelevant and their jobs eliminated. As Erik Olin Wright (Envisioning Real Utopias) points out, firms do not wish to spend the money to retrain older workers, and the new opportunities may be in far away cities, requiring obsolete workers to move even if they got new training. Perhaps they would have to stop working and go back to school, something most adults with families can’t do. And even the winners may not be safe for long, as the cycle continues: firms divide labor, automate tasks, and turn high-skill work into low-skill work. The winners’ jobs are eventually obsolete, and then they are fired and must find new work, sometimes a low-skilled, low-wage job.

Now, it is also true that new technology can create low-skill work. Uber lets more people be personal drivers, Postmates creates delivery jobs, the relative ease of launching, running, and monetizing a website and social media creates work for many. A cheerful analysis by economists in 2015 declared technology, because it builds a more advanced, prosperous society, created more jobs than it destroyed in the U.K. in the last 140 years; so while jobs for farmers, secretaries, washers, and launderers vanished, jobs for teachers, caretakers, social workers, and nurses increased. They also noted how increased personal wealth in a more advanced society leads to more spending on luxuries, hence a rise in the demand for bartending and hairdressing jobs. In other words, as a separate analysis put it, it is often the case that “growth of jobs at low risk of automation outpaces loss of jobs at high risk” (in the case of the U.K., from 2001 to 2015, 3.5 million low-risk jobs were added to the economy, 800,000 high-risk jobs lost).

Yet this does not mean there will always and for all time be enough jobs free of automation for every citizen that needs work (even today during economic boom times, there are not always enough jobs for everyone, low- or high-risk).

Most unskilled labor, if we think of 50, 100, 500, or 1,000 years from now, will surely be abolished by automation and robotics. Machines can already operate a warehouse, pick and inspect fruit, build cars, and lay bricks. Google and Uber are already working on driverless cars, Amazon on drone delivery systems. U.S. restaurants are installing tablets at tables or counters that take orders and payments, China perfecting a weaponized police robot (Anbot), Toshiba placing a temporary robot employee (ChihiraAico) in a Japanese department store, Nanyang Technical University unveiling a robotic secretary (Nadine), the PR2 robot at MIT can bake, and even sex robots are under construction, perhaps one day threatening prostitution! Amazon Go is a cashier-less grocery store.

High-skilled work is not free of risk either (who wouldn’t want a robotic lawyer with advanced knowledge of every legal case ever argued, able to easily out-think a human attorney?). Radiologists and journalists are threatened by technology able to do parts of their jobs faster, cheaper, with fewer errors.

A 2013 study by Oxford economists estimated 47% of jobs in the U.S. are currently at high risk of automation, perhaps fully automated “over the next decade or two” (including service, sales, office and administrative, production, and transportation jobs), 19% of jobs at medium risk of automation, and 33% at low risk (including other service jobs, plus education, media, legal, healthcare, business management, and engineering jobs).

via Oxford Martin

Other analysts declared in 2015, “Our research suggests that as many as 45 percent of the activities individuals are paid to perform can be automated by adapting currently demonstrated technologies. In the United States, these activities represent about $2 trillion in annual wages.”

Wren Handman writes, “Boston Consulting Group predicts that by 2025, up to a quarter of jobs will be replaced by either smart software or robots. Gartner, a technology research firm, ramps that estimate up and predicts that one third of all jobs will be eliminated by 2025…” The number of factory robots in manufacturing centers like Detroit, Toledo, Grand Rapids, Louisville, and Nashville tripled between 2010 and 2015 alone. Capitalist owners will increasingly be able to do away with human labor, increasing profits—and the wealth gap between them and everyone else. The workers will have to compete for fewer and fewer non-automated jobs.

Albert Einstein wrote that under capitalism, “Technological progress frequently results in more unemployment rather than in an easing of the burden of work for all” (“Why Socialism?,” Einstein). Advances in technology and productivity (and thus profits) could allow for higher wages and shorter work weeks for workers at their workplaces — if workers owned their workplaces and called the shots. Yet over the past four decades—a time of skyrocketing productivity—wages barely budged, and while human beings are working fewer hours than centuries past, particularly in Europe, four in ten Americans are still working over 50 hours a week and full-time employees average 47 hours per week. Some of our neighbors work 60, 70 hours a week to make ends meet. Technological progress for each capitalist firm, instead of changing work for the better for each worker, exiles more people from the firm and from that type of work, creating a larger pool of laborers needing to compete for jobs elsewhere — usually low-skill and low-wage jobs.

What will happen to the vast majority of human beings when machines can outperform them at any job? When business owners can automate any task imaginable, increasing efficiency and profits?

There will surely always be demand for some human workers — perhaps citizens won’t want a robot teacher for their child or robot caretaker for their ailing parents. Perhaps business owners will always want to provide a human face to consumers, and will always preserve a partially human staff. Perhaps we’ll want human writers and human preachers. But can we all be teachers, childcare providers, business reps, and clergymen?

Surely for the vast majority of us, when all the freight trucks no longer need drivers, when machines can take an order, prepare your meal, and accept a credit card, when robotic clerks serve you at retail stores and police the streets — whether this happens in 100 years or 1,000 — we will need a new form of social organization to avoid extreme poverty, unemployment, homelessness, and hunger.

There are essentially two solutions.

One is a guaranteed basic income: the State simply provides each citizen with a monthly stipend, citizens spend the money where they will, taxes are collected on the businesses and organizations where people spent their money, and the cycle continues. Switzerland is already moving closer to adopting a guaranteed income. In this way, those who own the technology that made work a thing of the past make survival possible for the masses.

The other solution is worker ownership: businesses will have to be owned by all their workers, so that no worker will be fired as technology improves. In an authoritarian capitalist firm, robotic labor means fewer human workers. In a worker-owned firm, it means participants in the firm can switch to more fulfilling and enjoyable tasks, and work fewer hours each week for the same income, if not more. In this way, the technology would be owned by the masses, and the profits would be shared, making survival possible.

Worker ownership is already a reality in the U.S. and around the world, as explored in “What is Socialism?” This solution is a bit more complex than a guaranteed income (if there are more people looking for work than worker cooperatives need, it may be necessary for the State — or local governments — to launch New Deal-style public work projects, using tax dollars to pay people to improve their communities, even if machines could do it better). But it may be a better option than paying citizens who don’t work, as there may be work that could improve society but is unaddressed because worker cooperatives can’t profit from it (i.e., cleaning up streets and rivers, or tutoring struggling students).

Either solution, of course, is socialism.

Oscar Wilde contrasts in The Soul of Man Under Socialism how machinery operates under capitalism and how it should operate under socialism:

Up to the present, man has been, to a certain extent, the slave of machinery, and there is something tragic in the fact that as soon as man had invented a machine to do his work he began to starve. This, however, is, of course, the result of our property system and our system of competition. One man owns a machine which does the work of five hundred men. Five hundred men are, in consequence, thrown out of employment, and, having no work to do, become hungry and take to thieving. The one man secures the produce of the machine and keeps it, and has five hundred times as much as he should have, and probably, which is of much more importance, a great deal more than he really wants.

Were that machine the property of all, every one would benefit by it. It would be an immense advantage to the community. All unintellectual labour, all monotonous, dull labour, all labour that deals with dreadful things, and involves unpleasant conditions, must be done by machinery. Machinery must work for us in coal mines, and do all sanitary services, and be the stoker of steamers, and clean the streets, and run messages on wet days, and do anything that is tedious or distressing. At present machinery competes against man. Under proper conditions machinery will serve man.

Jack London said something similar:

Let us not destroy those wonderful machines that produce efficiently and cheaply. Let us control them. Let us profit by their efficiency and cheapness. Let us run them for ourselves. That, gentlemen, is socialism… (A People’s History of the United States, Zinn)

As technology approaches a point where human labor will be all but obsolete, these ideas become increasingly relevant. When physicist Stephen Hawking was asked in 2015 whether technology would lead to mass unemployment, he replied:

If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.

With so many jobs under threat of extinction in the next few decades alone, we know what option humanity must choose.

via Vice

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“If we are to achieve a real equality, the U.S. will have to adopt a modified form of socialism.”

– Martin Luther King, Jr.

What is socialism? Socialism aims to eradicate forever authoritarianism, bureaucracy, poverty, and war; not by increasing government power, but by increasing democracy, the power of ordinary people, in politics and the workplace.

This is not authoritarian socialism, State Socialism, or Communism. This is democratic socialism, libertarian socialism. It is a vision of a better world.

Citizen Control of the State

Socialists seek the “socialization” of political power through direct democracy, a form of government that already exists in Switzerland. As Polish socialist Rosa Luxemburg said, “There is no democracy without socialism and no socialism without democracy.”

How would you like to have a say — a direct say — in public policy? How would you like decision-making power? Under direct democracy, all public policy would be decided by national vote, from abortion rights to whether the nation should wage war. Instead of only voting once every four or eight years, concerned citizens will vote many times a year, on national policy. They will vote on education standards, whether to grant amnesty to illegal immigrants, the federal budget, everything.

Socialism is the simple belief that the people should govern the politicians, not the other way around.

Citizens would have initiative rights for municipal, state, and national policy; that is, the ability to have a law or law change put before the people for a vote.

This is common at the local and state levels in the U.S. How did Colorado legalize marijuana in 2012? People gathered enough citizens on a petition, it was put on the ballot, the people voted, and it was done. No corrupt politicians in the way, swayed this way and that by lobbyists and their bribes. No bureaucracy, no unelected officials making decisions for the common people. Just socialized power.

Proposed laws would be available for reading online, under guidelines ensuring their readability and brevity (no more 1,000-page laws). There would be a required time for public debate before the vote, allowing people who choose to be active in politics to study the legislation, listen to media pundits scream at each other, sway others to their side, and finally make an informed, educated vote. Change will come through the battle of ideas, not the whims of corporations or power-hungry politicians.

Under socialism, the Supreme Court and the president would preserve a system of checks and balances. The people would essentially take the place of Congress, being able to overrule the president’s veto with a supermajority but not the Court’s.

Short term limits, the threat of veto, and the threat of immediate recall vote (perhaps even of the president) would keep officials in line with the desires of voters. If, say, two-thirds of Americans felt the president wrongly vetoed a measure passed by the people, he or she could be overruled by national vote, just as Congress can do today. If the president (or any politician) refused to enforce laws, a two-thirds majority vote could remove him or her from office immediately. Politicians must be terrified of the people.

To quote The Communist Manifesto, “The first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat [common people] to the position of the ruling class, to win the battle of democracy.” Power to the people, as the radical leftist saying goes.

A Simpler Government

Clearly, when the people become the lawmakers government will be simpler and smaller, in that bureaucracy will be all but eradicated and corruption (such as corporations pouring vast sums of money into politicians’ campaign coffers to influence legislation) will be extraordinarily difficult (how does one bribe the entire citizenry?).

But to enact the laws the people demand, there will still need to be various federal departments, like that of education, labor, energy, and so on (the members of which would be elected and at risk of immediate recall by popular vote, much different than unaccountable cabinet members appointed by the president). Fortunately, having been stripped of much of their power through direct democracy, their main task would be simple: writing checks.

The smaller government of socialism doesn’t mean no more taxes, but nor does it mean outrageous taxes. It means refusing to spend trillions on bank bailouts, wars, and a global military machine. It means using tax wealth (garnered progressively, having the rich pay higher rates than the poor and richer companies pay higher rates than smaller ones, as most people support) to meet human needs, primarily in three areas: healthcare, education, and jobs. There is a need for other departments to handle other things, of course (national defense and Social Security payments spring to mind), but these are the big three:

Guaranteed Work and a Strong Minimum Wage. Socialists envision using tax dollars to fund local public work projects. Even in the economic boom times of capitalism, there are not always enough jobs for those who seek them, and tens of millions remain very poor through no fault of their own. (Today, 48% of Americans are poor or make low income, as 50% of U.S. jobs pay less than $34,000 a year, about $24,000 after taxes.) But with public work projects, taxes could cover a basic salary to otherwise unemployed workers to rebuild our inner cities and slums, clean streets or rivers, tutor struggling students, plant new trees, paint murals on buildings — any productive task that betters society in some way. This has been accomplished successfully in the past, such as during the Great Depression. Some American and Canadian cities are already paying homeless men and women to do similar work, helping them crawl out of extreme poverty.

Such work need not be permanent (though governments could theoretically help workers organize into new, self-sustaining worker co-ops if there existed a consumer base for their mission), nor organized by the federal government. Federal tax dollars can be distributed to city councils based on annual unemployment levels, and cities can decide what projects they need to focus on to improve their communities.

Local projects run by locals, coupled with a strong minimum wage for all Americans (which many studies show does not increase unemployment and only causes slight increases in prices), would mean food stamps, child tax credits, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and other forms of welfare (except those for the elderly, sick, and disabled) could be eliminated. Unemployment compensation will disappear — paying someone for 99 weeks without work in return is extremely wasteful. Under socialism, men and women will be paid to work (see What Conservatives Will Love About Socialism).

In this way, unemployment and poverty can be eradicated.

Guaranteed Healthcare. Likewise, the State will not own the hospitals (as it does in Britain today) — the doctors, nurses, and janitors would (see below). But the Department of Health would receive medical bills from hospitals and would cover the costs — at the very least covering the costs of expensive surgeries and prescriptions that today leave many bankrupt (in 2013, an estimated 645,000 bankruptcies were linked to massive medical bills; at the beginning of 2016, 20% of insured Americans were having difficulty paying their medical bills) or dead from preventable problems (45,000 a year in the late 2000s died as a direct result of not having health insurance).

Universal healthcare already exists in virtually every industrialized nation besides the United States, and much can be learned from their experience.

The French system is more efficient, more popular, and far less expensive per citizen and as a proportion of GDP than the American system. Sweden insures all citizens, but uses private doctors and competition to keep down costs. True, these systems are not perfect, for example often relying on heavier taxes. Yet they are popular, even taken for granted, and no one is dying from preventable illnesses. Healthcare is seen as a human right, not something you must have a good job or enough money to have. The U.S. is wealthier than any nation that has universal healthcare today — if they can manage, so can we (and notice these democracies have yet to mutate into horrific Communist dictatorships).

Guaranteed Education. Under socialism, the State will not own the schools. Teachers, paras, librarians, and janitors will own their schools; professors, students, and groundkeepers will own the colleges (see below). But schools and colleges can be funded similarly to today (though school funding will no longer be based on property taxes, which ensures poor inner-city neighborhoods have dismal schools and rich suburban neighborhoods have very fine schools — schools will be funded equally).

In the same way taxation today provides free K-12 education for all, this could be expanded to cover the cost of college, something many other democracies have already accomplished. College only being available to those who can afford it or those willing to take on massive debts is an enormous waste of human talent. Anyone ambitious and willing to work hard should be able to earn a degree, regardless of whether they come from a rich or poor family. (One might ask if everyone has a strong wage and a job, why should college or healthcare be paid for? The answer is obvious: Tens of thousands a year for tuition or tens of thousands in medical bills would still not be doable for many families making a guaranteed salary of even $40,000 or higher — particularly those with multiple children, more than one sick parent, etc.)   

The teachers and workers who run the schools must of course have as much independence from the State as possible, more than they have today. In reality, a society where each school had total control over its curriculum (and all else) wouldn’t necessarily be incompatible with a socialist society. Likewise, neither would families being able to choose between any school they wished. However, it seems likely this “privatization” would cause serious problems. Should public schools have the freedom to simply not teach a subject? To gut the study of black slavery, the Civil War, or all of social studies for instance? And wouldn’t families flock to schools that align with their preferences, quickly making public schools divided by religion, political persuasion, race, and class…even worse than today? This is why schools should not be businesses that compete for students and tuition fees. It’s why schools and teacher salaries should remain funded through the State. (People will of course still have the freedom to create private schools; we’re talking about public schools here.) 

It seems reasonable to maintain a system where your public school is based on where you live. Though this is not a perfect system (most blacks and whites, for example, do not live in integrated neighborhoods, meaning they don’t share schools), it seems to offer the best chance for students to befriend and learn from other students and teachers who are culturally and ideologically different. Further, it makes sense to have a national curriculum, to keep learning consistent enough between schools, to aid both students and teachers who move around the nation.

The curriculum, of course, would be designed by an elected Department of Education and approved by the majority of the people. Should evolution and climate change be taught in public schools? Let the majority decide. 

Worker Control of Businesses

Socialism would not only end authoritarianism and bureaucracy in the State, it would mean the same for the place American adults spend most of their lives: their jobs.

Workers would own their workplaces. In a capitalist society, a business is structured like a dictatorship: an owner or small group of owners, board members, and investors hold all the power and make all the decisions, including how company profits are used — to increase production, to open new plants or stores, invest in new technology, increase advertising, hire more workers, increase worker pay, increase owner pay, and so on.

Predictably, owners often award themselves huge sums of money and pay workers little, creating massive inequality. Predictably, in the U.S. today the 1% of wealthiest citizens own as much wealth as the bottom 95% of citizens. The bottom 80% of Americans own just 7% of the national wealth, while the top 1% owns 40%. Capitalism is the few growing rich off the labor of the many. After all, could Steve Jobs have built all these devices himself? He needed workers.

Adam Smith, an economist that inspired Karl Marx, wrote in The Wealth of Nations of a central conflict under capitalism: “The workmen desire to get as much as possible, the masters to give as little as possible.” (Conservatives worship Smith, but would squirm if they actually read some of his insights.)

Marx believed, as do modern socialists, that wealth is created by workers. It’s a very simple idea. Originally, it is the company founder creating the good or providing the service, but eventually the owner hires workers and takes a managerial role. Without workers, an owner cannot produce on a scale larger than him- or herself. Wealth is created by workers because workers directly provide the good or service that is sold by the owner.

That sale covers the cost of production, the cost of labor, and a little extra: profit the owner uses as he or she chooses. This means workers are not paid the full value of what they produce for the company. Socialists call it exploitation. It is a theft by someone who would not have that profit without the workers. So socialists say profit should be kept and controlled by the people directly responsible for generating it. Under a system where all workers are owners, there would be no owner-worker conflict; unions would thus be obsolete.

True, owners make decisions that can lead to more sales and more profits. Like investing in a new technology, for example. But to put it bluntly, owners are not needed. The top-down, authoritarian structure is not vital. The workers can wield that decision-making power and keep the profits of those decisions. Worker cooperatives — businesses that are owned and run by the workers — are more democratic than capitalist-structured firms. They are “socialist” because power and wealth are “socialized,” or shared equally, within a firm. They still compete with other businesses to provide the best products for the lowest prices (market socialism).

Hundreds of successful worker cooperatives exist in the U.S., with many more around the world, some with a few employees, others with tens of thousands. Decisions are made democratically, by the vote of each employee, or by elected managers. Decisions on hours, pay, schedule, new hires, investments in new technology, opening new stores, and everything else is made by discussion and vote. Profits are distributed more equitably, enriching everyone, not just the few. More workers means profits are further divided, but just like in capitalist firms, more workers also mean higher profits. These cooperatives were organized by ordinary people, not the government.

When workers own their workplaces, there is little chance they will decide to fire themselves and outsource their own jobs to poorer nations. Capitalists do this so they can pay workers pennies and follow fewer worker safety and environmental regulations. Worker-owners are less likely to poison the soil, water, and air of their own communities, or ignore workplace safety guidelines. New technologies no longer lead to mass firings — they allow everyone to work fewer hours while making more money! Both worker ownership and people’s control of government will work in tandem to prevent oil companies and weapons manufacturers (the military-industrial complex Eisenhower warned of) from influencing the decision to wage war, as has occurred countless times in American history.

Unsurprisingly, workers-owners are happier, wealthier, more productive, and their businesses less likely to fold than capitalist firms. There are challenges, such as the ability to get credit from banks suspicious of co-ops, but they are in no way insurmountable. There is nothing to say in 200 years America will not be a nation of worker cooperatives, if that’s what people choose.

Marx saw worker cooperatives by 1864 as a

…victory of the political economy of labor over the political economy of property. We speak of the co-operative movement, especially the co-operative factories raised by the unassisted efforts of a few bold “hands”. The value of these great social experiments cannot be overrated. By deed instead of by argument, they have shown that production on a large scale, and in accord with the behests of modern science, may be carried on without the existence of a class of masters employing a class of hands; that to bear fruit, the means of labor need not be monopolized as a means of dominion over, and of extortion against, the laboring man himself; and that, like slave labor, like serf labor, hired labor is but a transitory and inferior form, destined to disappear before associated labor plying its toil with a willing hand, a ready mind, and a joyous heart.

To save the industrious masses, co-operative labor ought to be developed to national dimensions…

There are even some 60 American schools that have done away with authoritarianism, in their buildings at least, if not their districts.

Most private and public schools have top-down control, with the principal being the dictator at the top who makes all decisions on school policy and receives the biggest paycheck. So these experimental schools have simply done away with principals; teachers make all decisions, like hiring, curriculum, and school scheduling, democratically.

The Denver Green School in Colorado has a 4 day week for students, and on Fridays teachers, office personnel, social workers, and all other employees meet to discuss, debate, and vote on school policy. The Hughes STEM High School in Cincinnati has a principal, but he or she has equal power with teachers and cannot veto a democratic decision. Employees feel empowered, and in a profession with colossal turnover, the Avalon School in St. Paul has a teacher retention rate of 95-100%. Most teacher-led schools have on average fewer than 200 students, but larger schools are joining the trend, some with over 600. 

The Path to Communism?

Let it never be said that trying to accomplish these things will only lead to Communism. As you move toward democracy in politics and the workplace, you move away from Communism and State Socialism.

The goal of both democratic socialism and authoritarian socialism is the eradication of capitalism, but each has a different manner of going about it. Democratic (and guild, libertarian, etc.) socialism does so from the bottom-up, simply by workers (and even consumers or local communities) owning their workplaces. The government has no role except perhaps granting the lawful right of ownership. Communism destroys capitalism from the top-down, wherein the government owns all workplaces and organizes the economy and the workers according to a central plan. The people are supposed to own the government and thus the plan (this type of democratic nationalization is what Marx favored), but of course it doesn’t always work out that way.

Soviet Russia, for instance, was a command economy: top-down administration, an economy structured, ironically, like a single capitalist business. The iron fists of capitalists were replaced by the iron fists of dictators and unelected economic planners. This system is therefore called both state socialism and state capitalism in historical literature!

Opponents of socialism insist that these reforms — the government paying medical or tuition bills, expanded public sector work for the unemployed, worker ownership, and pure democracy — are a slippery slope to tyranny. Of course, Americans also insisted racial integration, Medicare, and social security would lead to authoritarianism! They were wrong. These types of arguments are often simply unfounded. Switzerland has direct democracy; a multitude of peaceful democracies in Europe and elsewhere have free college and healthcare; Germany requires large companies to have half their boards of directors elected by the workers (“codetermination”). Are these nations going to end up Communist dictatorships? When do we expect the gulags? Did New Deal programs destroy our right to start a business, work in a particular field, or vote for representatives? Did taxpayer-funded public schooling, small checks for the elderly, and covered healthcare bills for the disabled, very poor, and seniors?

It cannot be emphasized enough that direct democracy takes power away from the State and gives it to the people. True, the government has a role to play in footing bills, guaranteeing rights, and organizing and funding local work projects. (The right to workplace ownership would be in the same vein as minimum wage, workplace safety, anti-child labor, and anti-discrimination rights. You may see this as an evil government eradication of the right to be a capitalist owner, but rights are typically crushed by more ethical ones. The right of a worker to a minimum wage abolishes the right of the employer to pay him or her $2 per hour; the right of a person of color to be served at a restaurant ends the right of a white supremacist to deny him or her service; the right to workplace ownership makes history the right of capitalist exploitation and authoritarianism.) But direct democracy is the key to creating a government of, by, and for the people.

If you read the history of Marxism, the libertarian, democratic, and anarchistic socialists stood opposed to State Socialists like the Bolsheviks. There was a deep division between Marxists on bottom-up versus top-down control, which roughly determined who would go on to call themselves communists and who would call themselves socialists. In the Soviet Union, Communism crushed socialism through violence (read Anarchism, by Guerin, for a detailed and captivating study). The workers who took over their workplaces and their towns lost that power to the State at the end of a gun.

Perhaps nothing could better explain this dichotomy than an 1887 poem by Ernest Lesigne, a Frenchman. This was several decades after Marx and several before the Russian Revolution and the rise of the Soviet Union. It is called “Two Socialisms”:

There are two Socialisms.

One is communistic, the other solidaritarian.

One is dictatorial, the other libertarian.

One is metaphysical, the other positive.

One is dogmatic, the other scientific.

One is emotional, the other reflective.

One is destructive, the other constructive.

Both are in pursuit of the greatest possible welfare for all.

One aims to establish happiness for all, the other to enable each to be happy in his own way.

The first regards the State as a society sui generis, of an especial essence, the product of a sort of divine right outside of and above all society, with special rights and able to exact special obediences; the second considers the State as an association like any other, generally managed worse than others.

The first proclaims the sovereignty of the State, the second recognizes no sort of sovereign.

One wishes all monopolies to be held by the State; the other wishes the abolition of all monopolies.

One wishes the governed class to become the governing class; the other wishes the disappearance of classes.

Both declare that the existing state of things cannot last.

The first considers revolutions as the indispensable agent of evolutions; the second teaches that repression alone turns evolutions into revolution.

The first has faith in a cataclysm.

The second knows that social progress will result from the free play of individual efforts.

Both understand that we are entering upon a new historic phase.

One wishes that there should be none but proletaires.

The other wishes that there should be no more proletaires.

The first wishes to take everything away from everybody.

The second wishes to leave each in possession of its own.

The one wishes to expropriate everybody.

The other wishes everybody to be a proprietor.

The first says: ‘Do as the government wishes.’

The second says: ‘Do as you wish yourself.’

The former threatens with despotism.

The latter promises liberty.

The former makes the citizen the subject of the State.

The latter makes the State the employee of the citizen.

One proclaims that labor pains will be necessary to the birth of a new world.

The other declares that real progress will not cause suffering to any one.

The first has confidence in social war.

The other believes only in the works of peace.

One aspires to command, to regulate, to legislate.

The other wishes to attain the minimum of command, of regulation, of legislation.

One would be followed by the most atrocious of reactions.

The other opens unlimited horizons to progress.

The first will fail; the other will succeed.

Both desire equality.

One by lowering heads that are too high.

The other by raising heads that are too low.

One sees equality under a common yoke.

The other will secure equality in complete liberty.

One is intolerant, the other tolerant.

One frightens, the other reassures.

The first wishes to instruct everybody.

The second wishes to enable everybody to instruct himself.

The first wishes to support everybody.

The second wishes to enable everybody to support himself.

One says:

The land to the State.

The mine to the State.

The tool to the State.

The product to the State.

The other says:

The land to the cultivator.

The mine to the miner.

The tool to the laborer.

The product to the producer.

There are only these two Socialisms.

One is the infancy of Socialism; the other is its manhood.

One is already the past; the other is the future.

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In April 2016, oil giant Halliburton announced it would fight Department of Justice efforts to stop its merger with fellow oil giant Baker Hughes.

These are two of the largest corporations in the industry. The merger is valued at $35 billion, and would leave Halliburton-Baker Hughes in control of a huge percentage of the market share. As U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch said, “The proposed deal between Halliburton and Baker Hughes would eliminate vital competition.”

The march toward monopolization (the ownership of an industry by one company) is a self-destructive inevitability of capitalism. The unregulated pursuit of profit destroys competition itself. This is the natural trend of capitalism throughout its history, of larger firms taking over smaller firms to increase their share of a market.

To quote French politician and economist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the first self-described anarchist: “Competition kills competition” (see Guerin, Anarchism). 

And once the competition is devoured or driven out of business, prices can be raised and even more profit can be made. Further, innovation and quality can decline, and workers won’t be able to find higher wages for the same positions at competitors because there are none.

Howard Zinn wrote in A People’s History of the United States of the monopolization of the Industrial era:

And so it went, in industry after industry—shrewd, efficient businessmen building empires, choking out competition, maintaining high prices, keeping wages low, using government subsidies. These industries were the first beneficiaries of the “welfare state.” By the turn of the century, American Telephone and Telegraph had a monopoly of the nation’s telephone system, International Harvester made 85 percent of all farm machinery, and in every other industry resources became concentrated, controlled. The banks had interests in so many of these monopolies as to create an interlocking network of powerful corporation directors, each of whom sat on the boards of many other corporations… [J.P.] Morgan at his peak sat on the board of forty-eight corporations; [John D.] Rockefeller, thirty-seven corporations.

Even Woodrow Wilson—no anti-capitalist—lamented in his time that his country was “a very different America from the old…no longer a scene of individual enterprise…individual opportunity and individual achievement.” But rather, “small groups of men wield a power and control over the wealth and the business operations of the country” (Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects).

A 2011 Monthly Review article, “Monopoly and Competition in Twenty-First Century Capitalism,” points out, “Wherever one looks, it seems that nearly every industry is concentrated into fewer and fewer hands. Formerly competitive sectors like retail are now the province of enormous monopolistic chains; massive economic fortunes are being assembled into the hands of a few mega-billionaires sitting atop vast empires.” Economic recessions, we must note, provide an even easier opportunity for the largest, richest firms to swallow up smaller ones in dire financial straits. Fewer and fewer companies control all sectors of production.

By the 1970s, 100 companies owned nearly 50% of industrial assets in the U.S., and 100 companies controlled the same in Britain (Harman, Economic of the Madhouse).

In 2000 the Global Policy Forum found that the largest 200 international corporations accounted for more than a quarter of humanity’s economic output, greater than the economies of 182 nations combined. The top five auto manufacturers had a 60% global market share; the top five oil companies 40%; the top five steel companies 50%.

No one argues this trend isn’t dangerous. The elimination of competition prompts governments to pass legislation, such as the U.S. Sherman Anti-Trust Act, to ban monopolies. But regulations are not nearly strict enough. Just ask the six banks that now control 74% of banking resources in the U.S. Or the four major airlines in this country, down from 10 in 2000, which see 83% of air traffic. Or ask Disney, GE, CBS, Time Warner, Viacom, or Newscorp. These six corporations own and control 90% of what we read, listen to, and watch. Newscorp, chaired by conservative billionaire Rupert Murdoch, owns Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, Harper-Collins books, Zondervan (look at your Bible), The Times (London), and many more. Murdoch also owns 21st Century Fox. Six percent of U.S. companies make 50% of U.S. profit.

The existence of global corporations, which have no borders, make the problem of regulation even more difficult.

The crisis of monopoly is worsened through private industry-driven economic planning. Michael Harrington wrote in Socialism: Past and Future, “By the end of the nineteenth century, laisser-faire—where entrepreneurs obeyed the ‘invisible hand’ of the market—turned into corporate capitalism, where the ‘visible hand’ of professional executives sought, with assistance from the government, to dictate to markets rather than to follow them.”

In pursuit of profit, corporations lobby to undercut the free market. Economist Garrett Baldwin writes, “While traditional lobbying once centered on altering tax rates and encouraging legislation to liberalize and deregulate the economy, it has now evolved into a competitive weapon for companies trying to box out competitors and raise barriers to entry in their markets.” People often complain (rightly) that the government makes it excessively difficult for new businesses to get off the ground, and this is largely due to bigger, established corporations influencing government policy. 

Monopolization makes economic crises (recessions) worse. Competition over time eradicates small businesses in a given market. A few corporate giants increasingly dominate each sector of the economy. Harman writes:

If any one of these giant firms goes bust, there is enormous damage to the rest of the economy. Banks that have lent it money are very badly hit. So too are other industrial firms which expected to sell it machinery and raw materials or to sell consumer goods to its workers. Suddenly their profits are turned into loses. Such is the scale of the damage that the ability of other firms to buy up machinery and raw materials on the cheap does not nearly begin to compensate for it. Instead of the destruction of some firms benefiting others, what threatens to develop is an economic black hole that sucks into it profitable and non-profitable firms alike…each giant that collapses knocks over others in a domino effect.        

We saw this very recently with the 2008 housing market crash. Banking giants saw huge loses as borrowers couldn’t repay their subprime loans, which meant banks couldn’t repay their debts, and thus began to fall by the hundreds: Lehman Brothers, Wachovia, Washington Mutual, all bankrupt. Other banks bought up some failed banks, but this did not ease the crisis. The stock market crashed, and trillions upon trillions of dollars disappeared as company stocks became worthless. Banks could no longer offer loans to consumers, and thus industrial powers such as the auto manufacturers no longer had a credit bubble on which to reap profits. General Motors and Chrysler went bankrupt, and their collapse would have cost the nation millions of jobs. The government spent trillions in taxpayer funds to prop up both the big banks and the auto industry, in hope of avoiding economic collapse.

The concentration of production into monopolistic entities indeed created a black hole, a situation that severely damaged nearly every economic sector of American society and dragged the economies of the world down with it, leading everywhere to spikes in unemployment and poverty, and at the same time slashes to vital social welfare programs.

Surely even free market conservatives can support the role the State must play if monopolies (and their predecessors, oligopolies) are to be avoided. Without strong anti-trust laws, capitalism can reach a point where competition dies and the free market becomes the market of corporate kings.

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