Here's something that ancaps and ancoms alike don't actually know. You can live without a job you just wont live luxuriously. Find a YouTube channel called primitive technology. Every single person who currently lives in poverty, semicolon, if they really tried Semicolon, could walk out into the wilderness and live in the Paleolithic era. Jesus please us... That's part of a real comment I got on my video about why ancaps are not anarchists and it contains, what I am forced to assume, is a real opinion that Richard Black actually Holds and is willing to admit out loud. I mean really this is just a poorly construed version of the most common rebuttal I get to any content I make that criticizes capitalism: Hey guy capitalism is voluntary I mean if you think about it That's the moral basis for free-market capitalism The market is made up of people making choices to trade things with one another. So don't complain about it because it's your choice you knucklehead you can just pack your bags and move away! Build a new non capitalist society like Richard Black suggests. Just walk into the woods and build yourself a mud hut and you know what? That'd that'd actually work If nobody on earth was disabled, infirm, needed medicine, or lived in an area with an inhospitable climate. Also everyone had access to the huge tracts of land needed to grow food without modern infrastructure. Also the capitalist societies that they currently live in just let them go, and also wave property taxes for this anti-capitalist experiment for some reason. Also the capitalists wouldn't just take all your stuff if you start making something profitable or useful to them. Even though they'd have the largest militaries in the world at their back, and you literally live in a mud hut. Also like, you don't care about leaving your friends, family, and home behind. But okay alright, but even granting all of those things. It's still a pretty raw deal. Would you accept living in a communist dictatorship under the proviso that you could if you so chose walk into the woods and start a new society? Would having that option make the actions of a communist dictator, just? No. Obviously not. Having the option to flee a system does not make that system voluntary. It just gives you the option of becoming a refugee. But let's face it, the idea that anyone can walk away from their current civilization into the woods and start a new society from scratch is a fantasy. It's not like Minecraft. You can't just walk into the woods punch a few trees and build a village. All of the land and resources you'd need are either owned privately Or assumed to be de-facto owned by whatever government lays claim to your particular location. The actual reality of the matter is you don't have a choice but to live within capitalism. As long as capitalism maintains hegemonic control over the place you live, you are forced to participate even if you don't want to. Capitalists are right to say that the choices they make within capitalism are usually voluntary. Nobody is able to compel you to buy one type of toothpaste over another. Or to buy toothpaste at all! Hey man, if you don't care about your teeth falling out that's your business! That's freedom! But let me ask you this: What does it truly mean for something to be voluntary? And I don't mean that in some wishy washy does free will exist type of way. Look at it this way: If you're mugged, is giving your money to the mugger oluntary? No? Why not? You chose to do it. In order for a choice to be voluntary you have to be free to NOT choose it without harm coming to you. It really doesn't matter if the cause of that harm is implicit in the choice or the result of human coercion, much to the chagrin of right libertarians who insist only the latter counts and twist themselves into knots trying to justify that position. My choice to eat or sleep is not voluntary. I have to do those things because I'll die if I don't and I don't want to die, I got too many cartoons to watch. I am however not forced by any other party to eat or sleep. I have the option to not sleep if I choose to but it's not a meaningful choice, because of the dying. Likewise I could in theory choose not to sell my labor to my boss... No, one is compelling me to do it by force but I wouldn't have access to all of the things that I need to live if I didn't. I could choose to work for someone else,
but I couldn't choose not to have a job at all. Even if I like my job, doing it is still not voluntary because I have to have a job or I'll be destitute. And that's fine but it presents a few... problems. Like, it ruins our ability to negotiate for better conditions, more control over our workplace, or better pay. You have to work to live, but the boss doesn't need you specifically for anything. They just need people like you. They can get rid of you if you're too difficult, because there are a lot more people like you than there are jobs available. Ah, but K.C. you say, "Just work somewhere else or start your own business!" Well this can be a relatively difficult concept for privileged people with lots of employment prospects to grasp, but changing jobs isn't always easy or possible for a lot of workers. Particularly where the bulk of scarce jobs being created are extremely precarious work for hire scams, with zero stability or benefits. And like, even if you could just hop to a new job it most likely wouldn't be very different. There's an incredible amount of lobbying power dedicated to keeping wages depressed even as productivity and profits skyrocket. Good luck trying to change that or demanding more money, they have you over the barrel because if you don't accept the meager amount they can legally get away with paying you You'll just have to starve. Sorry, that's freedom. As for starting your own business? Well, that's expensive, and risky, and the resources that some people used to do it or not equitably distributed. Well-off people can afford to go a few years without their company turning a profit, and have better access to loans and startup capital. Oh, and here's a wake-up call! There aren't enough jobs to go around! Which is gonna get worse as automation keeps replacing more and more of the workforce. If the only way to survive is by having a job, and there aren't enough jobs, that means that a lot of people don't get to survive. Not because we don't have enough resources, we have more than enough resources... It's because distributing them more fairly hurts the bottom line of a few rich perverts. It's more profitable to have a few people work a lot of hours than lots of people working a few hours. So the more desperate people get for work the more extra labor you can extract from them, and the less you have to compensate them in return. That's not how I want it to be! I don't.. I didn't volunteer for that! But it's not just how we work that's defined by these asymmetrical power relations and capitalism, It's the things that we consume to live! Hey! Do you need insulin? Well it could be produced and distributed as cheaply as beer, but that's not profitable enough ao you'll just have to pay whatever exorbitant price we decide to charge you. I don't know like... Fifteen hundred dollars a year that ought to do it! But don't worry It's voluntary! You always have the option to go into diabetic shock and die. That's freedom. That's what... That's what freedom is. In capitalism, you don't just get exploited You're also forced to become an exploiter of others. Do you like child labour? I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that no, you don't, because you're not an ooze monster Who should be banished to ooze Island. Do you buy products from companies like nestle, walmart, h&m, gap or apple? Well all of those companies have been busted using child labor. Oops! Okay fine. That's fine. I'll just choose to not buy things made using exploitative labor because I'm a good good socialist boy. I'm gonna vote with my wallet! All I have to do is check on all the companies involved in selling, manufacturing, and distributing all of the products I use and all of their suppliers and all of their suppliers all the way the supply chain... And I'm gonna have to double-check all the data personally to ensure it hasn't been given by corrupt officials or whitewashed by corporate flunkies. That's all perfectly reasonable. That's something you'd expect a person to do when they want to buy a t-shirt. Okay, let me just crunch the numbers here... uh... Wait a minute this data can't be right... according to this ALL production is exploitative under capitalism! Oh, no! Bosses are extracting surplus value from their employees! What are we going to do?! So why do wieners believe that capitalism is voluntary? Well because they personally would volunteer for it. They like it. People who don't like it? They have to have the option to walk away or the whole thing is imposed on them and that's tyranny. It really doesn't matter how tenuous and farcical the terms of walking away are, what matters is that the option technically sort of exists... if you squint hard enough, and look at it sideways. They don't interrogate this assumption with anything approaching good faith because they're scared of what they might find out if they did. That they like capitalism because they believe, rightly or wrongly, that it benefits them. Not because it's fair. That capitalism is fundamentally unjust and always was. Worst of all, that their successes and failures are largely outside of their personal control because every aspect of their lives is dictated by an unfeeling uncaring death cult, of rich perverts born into astronomical wealth in a world that is getting poorer and working harder every day I'd love to retreat from those hard truths into a childish fantasy of living in the woods too, but I'm an adult and I live on planet earth, and we have to face facts. Capitalism is evil. It's killing us. It was forced on us and it must be dismantled. and Elon Musk must be brought to justice for his sins!!! Hey Charlie I got a thousand subscribers coming up. No big deal. You don't have to get me a present or anything but I was hoping to do a Q&A video to celebrate So I opened up a curious cat account for people to ask questions or they can ask questions in the comments of this video, but I figured you'd want to know because... You're a curious cat!! You're curious cat!!
Hope it's okay that I keep posting these here.
Subscribed!
oh yeah remember ancap stalinism?
All hail King Cuck, Lord of the Anarchist hierarchy! /s
Jk jk. Real talk though: that channel is fire
Capitalism is as voluntary as each and every one of us being born upon his earth. As in, involuntary to the fucking core. It's absurd that they think otherwise as if there's a viable alternative and we're all just foolish for not realising we can just live in the woods as if that's the utopia we want. -_-
Also dude has really confused an-coms for anarcho-primitivists there as well, tbqh.