This documentary breaks through the change rhetoric to the fact that behind the facade of change it is the same corprotocracy. However, being made by Alex Jones there is some things mentioned in this documentary on Obama that is a little far out and needs to be taken with great Critical Thinking. One needs to remember how much of a Fundementalist Alex Jones is and that he accuses the left of all the ills.  Yet, the corpotocracy he describes is very real, but it comes from a far-right Neo-Liberal/Neo-Con Corporate Elite and from the vileness of the Statist Capitalist system of Authoritariansim in general.

Posted by Anna Morgenstern on C4ss.org

In 1919 Frank Crane pointed out (in “Justice,” one of his Four Minute Essays) that charity was a poor substitute for justice. Charity, he said, is a palliative which leaves injustice — privilege — in place, while helping the most unfortunate. Charity makes it possible for the poor and unemployed to scrape by, thus enabling the system of privilege to continue. But justice makes charity unnecessary by removing the root causes of poverty and unemployment.

Today, we could say of the welfare state and Keynesian fiscal policy what Crane said of charity.

A whole host of statistics indicate that the current recession is unlike any other since the Great Depression. The number of long-term unemployed, and the number of people competing for each available job, are both more than double their levels in the recession of the early 1980s. While I think Obama’s stimulus package probably stopped the free-fall in job loss that occurred in First Quarter 2009 — just barely — we can see that as soon as the money stops being spent the economy stagnates again. So we’re probably headed either into the second leg of a W-shaped recession, or into a long-term period of stagnation and zero job growth.

Our old ideas on what it takes to overcome the state capitalist economy’s inherent tendencies toward excess capacity are becoming obsolete. And the causes go back to Frank Crane’s understanding of justice.

Injustice is at the heart of our economic problems.  By making capital and land artificially scarce and expensive, the state forces workers to sell their labor in a buyer’s market and thereby reduces the bargaining power of labor. The owners of land and capital are thereby enabled to collect scarcity rents.

The economic effects are destabilizing. Income shifts from workers, who work mainly to meet their consumption needs, to rentiers with a high propensity to save and invest.  The result is a chronic tendency toward overaccumulation and underconsumption.

At the same time, the state subsidizes the most centralized, capital-intensive forms of production, leading to mass-production industry with overbuilt plant and equipment that’s constantly plagued with idle capacity.

The problem was “solved” for a while by World War II, which blew up most of the plant and equipment outside the U.S. and created a permanent war economy to absorb a major part of the destabilizing economic surplus. But by 1970 the industrial capacity of Europe and Japan had been rebuilt, and the old tendencies toward chronic stagnation were resumed.

Since then the tendencies toward stagnating economic growth, excess capacity, and jobless recoveries have increased from one decade to the next. The economy has become increasingly dependent on speculative bubbles to soak up surplus capital, and on growing consumer debt to absorb excess industrial output.

Given state capitalism’s inherent tendencies toward stagnation, the welfare state and Keynesian demand management are absolutely necessary parts of it.

State intervention creates maldistribution of purchasing power and excess production capacity. Government attempts to remedy the resulting destabilizing tendencies by taxing a small fraction of what was originally shifted from the producing classes to the rentier classes, and giving it to the most destitute portion of the exploited classes, in order to prevent politically destabilizing levels of  unemployment and homelessness.  It runs a deficit during economic downturns in order to provide sufficient demand to compensate for the shortfall in purchasing power.

The problem is that the relative periods of downturn keep getting longer, and the deficit spending required to correct for the chronic demand shortfall keeps getting larger.

Once the state substitutes privilege for justice, it inevitably creates destabilizing tendencies that must be met by one of two possible courses of action. One is to remove the privileges and allow the natural operation of justice, so that the chronic instabilities don’t arise. The other is to add secondary interventions like the welfare state and Keynesian fiscal policy, so the destabilizing tendencies don’t get too bad — and to keep increasing the level of such intervention when it no longer works the way it should.

So to the “conservatives” who want to “cut spending” and “balance the budget,” I give this warning:  Understand the implications of what you demand. If you will  not have a welfare state and deficit spending, you must have a free market — a genuine free market, not the kind of fake “free market” the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, AEI and Heritage Foundation call for. You must cease to enforce monopoly rents to the owners of land, capital and “intellectual property.”

If you go only halfway, removing the palliative measures without removing the injustice — if you choose a fake corporatist version of the “free market” — you will only give us another Great Depression worse than the last one.

The choice is clear. If you will not have justice, you must have welfare and Keynesian stimulus spending. There is no third way.

In fact, the driving motivator of the capital system, second only to the search for ever increasing monopoly profit, is the search for someone, anyone, to buy the results of production. For if the worker who produces the product can’t buy the product, who will?

It has been suggested that the capitalist system is simply a re branded version of the Monarchial system, with the serfs toiling away in the third world while the noble Euros and Americans divvy up and devour the produce. While this is a decent observation, it misses a fundamental point. The physical product of monopoly capital is primarily infinite multiples of run of the mill consumer items. While the system copiously rewards its controllers with great wealth, the system cannot operate without the worker, not only to toil but to buy.

How can this be achieved when labor cost of the finished product can run as low as ten percent and seldom over thirty percent of the product’s selling price? How to do this when American corporate industry profits seldom run below fifty percent of selling price? How to do this when the bulk of profits are recapitalized, driven back into the process with the intent of increasing production efficiency, increasing profits and in the process further lowering the ability of the worker/consumer to purchase and consume?

The initial answer came unwittingly from Monopoly Capital itself in the form of price competition. While the wage was always suppressed below market value, the product pricing was initially subject to market competition. This had the effect of nullifying some of the wage loss and allowing the worker to at least purchase what was minimally necessary and alleviate inventory accumulation.

But by the twenties, price competition had been eliminated in many sectors through collusive industry cooperation and government intervention. Counteracting this trend was union progress which had increased purchasing ability for those protected by unions.

Still there was a great capital surplus, much of which was invested in stock paper Ponzi schemes. When the house called in the chips and the economy sank, the days of Monopoly Capital seemed numbered.

While infinite war spending was credited for pulling the nation out of the depression, two factors continued the expansion and fed the capital machine; the advent of large scale social spending and the long term decline of oil prices that lasted through the mid seventies. Social spending allowed many to purchase goods that were unaffordable left to their own devices. The sustained fall of the price of oil allowed industry to base profits on energy consumption and forego for a time dismantling the labor pool. The massive energy subsidies and incentives provided by the government helped push industry in this direction.

The reversal of oil prices in the mid seventies changed the game. Capital went on the warpath to raise profits by scaling down labor costs. Reaganomics, the revival of the robber baron mentality, exacerbated the perennial problem of monopoly capital, finding consumers who can afford to purchase the product, by concentrating ever increasing capital in the hands of the capitalists.

Debt became the “modern” solution; both government and personal debt. Debt enables the purchase of what is unaffordable now with the notion it will become affordable in the future. To the wage earner, it is similar to the pension, the promise that his inadequate wage will be made whole again at some future point. Debt is a justification of monopoly pricing.

But, the capital machine is always trying to consume itself. It strives to profit not only from the productive output of industry but also from the non productive output of its financial arm. Laws require debt to be repaid with interest, whether the result of investment is profit or loss.

And the flow of non productive interest is almost always from the capital poor class to the capital rich class, further undermining the balance. Even when the capital rich class stumbles and falls over one of their harebrained alchemy schemes to magically produce capital from capital, the state refuses to allow the inevitable capital losses to tip the scales back a bit and intervenes with socialized loss insurance known as “bailouts”.

Such is the “capital conundrum”: the continuing effort of Monopoly Capital to undermine its own stability by depriving the wage class of the ability to purchase its own product.

The interesting paradox is that while the primary inclination of the controlled system is to concentrate capital and ultimately starve itself by withdrawing too much from the labor side of the production mode, the solution, diverting capital back to the labor/consumer force, if left to its own natural course, eventually has the reverse effect but the same outcome: dispersion of capital and the disintegration of monopoly capital.

It seems the long term outlook for Monopoly Capital, no matter how you look at it, is not so good. What a shame!

C4SS Contributing Writer Gene DeNardo is a carpenter, woodwooker, jazz musician and writer living in the Pacific Northwest. He randomly selected a political theory class in college to fullfill a requirement and in the process kindled a life long passion. His writings can be found on the net at sites such as “The Nolan Chart”.

Conventional community economic development policy — this is equally true of Chambers of Commerce, state industrial development commissions, and World Bank technocrats — starts from the assumption that the path to economic development is colonization: Get a giant corporation to set up an outpost in your community and provide a lot of jobs (preferably with government seed money to lure them in).

The rationale was simple: For a couple of centuries, the propertied classes’ privileged access to big piles of capital and millions of acres of stolen land made them a chokepoint on economic development.

But technological developments in recent years — the desktop/Internet revolution in the information sphere, and the revolution in cheap digitally controlled machine tools in manufacturing — are freeing us from this dependence.

The main material reason for the factory system and predominance of wage labor was the technological shift a couple hundred years ago from relatively inexpensive, general-purpose artisan tools to expensive machinery.  Only the very rich could afford the machinery required for production, and they then hired wage laborers to operate it.

The computer revolution, and the revolution in cheap garage-scale machine tools, have reversed this shift.  The computer is a cheap, general-purpose artisan tool that destroys the quality gap between what a person can produce at work and what he can produce at home, in a whole range of industries:  Software, recording, and desktop publishing among them.

And now cheap digital machine tools mean the same thing for manufacturing.  Open-source hardware hackers have cooked up homebrew versions of CNC routers, cutting tables, milling machines, lathes, 3-D printers, etc., that cost one or two thousand dollars (or less) to build — compared to tens of thousands for commercial, proprietary digital tools, and millions for a factory equipped with old-style mass production machinery.

A garage “factory” with $10k worth of homebrew machinery can do most of what used to require a million-dollar factory.  And with a network of open-source hardware designers, it can design its own products, and produce “lean” style:  Producing in small batches and switching back and forth between lots of different products as the orders come in, and gearing production to a local/neighborhood market.  That means low overhead, no inventory, drastically reduced shipping costs, and no mass-marketing costs.

In a lot of manufactured products, a major portion of price is either brand-name markup or embedded rents on patent and copyright, rather than labor and material cost (Tom Peters crowed, in The Tom Peters Seminar, that 90% of his new Minolta’s price was “intellect”).  Competition will strip out that part of price (along with the portion of your work hours that go toward earning money to pay tribute to the owners of artificial property rights).

It helps that relocalizing manufacturing to “a hundred thousand garages” essentially makes proprietary designs unenforceable. The costs of industrial patents are such that they only pay for themselves if you produce in large batches, and enforcement costs are minimized by the fact that a handful of oligopoly firms distribute their products through a handful of corporate retail chains.  When thousands of garage factories are producing knockoffs or riffing off of proprietary designs, in small batches at the neighborhood level, the costs of enforcement will destroy the patent regime.

Patents are also the main legal support to planned obsolescence, as well as to the whole model of price-gouging on parts and accessories (e.g. cheap phones and expensive service plans, cheap printers and expensive toners, etc.).  With no patent restrictions on competition, there would be no legal barrier to competitors producing generic modular accessories and spare parts for other companies’ platforms.  So the competitive pressure would be toward developing products that were compatible with other companies’ stuff and easy to repair by simply replacing one modular component — instead of designing products that only work with your own marked-up accessories, and can’t be fixed without throwing the whole thing away.

And all this renders the conventional strategy for community economic development totally obsolete. A low-capital, low-overhead approach to development is an enormous force multiplier for the community’s own resources. When the capital outlay for building a factory to produce everything you need falls a hundredfold, the propertied classes’ longstanding advantage in access to land and capital is completely nullified — communities can bootstrap local economies, starting with almost nothing, without begging a Daddy Warbucks for help.

So maybe this is the beginning of a shift away from the idea of “jobs,” and back to work as something working people do for ourselves and for exchange with each other.

C4SS Research Associate Kevin Carson is a contemporary mutualist author and individualist anarchist whose written work includes Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, Organization Theory: An Individualist Anarchist Perspective, and The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto, all of which are freely available online. Carson has also written for such print publications as The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty and a variety of internet-based journals and blogs, including Just Things, The Art of the Possible, the P2P Foundation and his own Mutualist Blog.

If that was as far as it went, political government would pretty much be a wash. We’d all get back about what we put into it, less the “friction” of transaction costs and such. Eventually we’d presumably notice that the state is a hamster wheel and get off it.

Unfortunately, that’s not as far as it goes. Any state — even (or perhaps especially!) the most putatively egalitarian or democratic one — eventually metastasizes under the pressures created by the competition of “everyone to live at the expense of everyone else.”

Even if first intended as a mere abstract transactional crossroads across which mutual aid assets or reciprocal rights protections pass on their way to and fro, the state is quickly reified by its more clever admirers. It becomes a concrete entity with its own interests. A new class of keepers, tenders and purpose-evolved parasites — the political class — emerges to make those interests its own.

Eventually the state drowns in the waste generated by its parasitical classes. The French monarchy collapsed beneath the weight of the Bourbon dynasty’s wars and palaces and intrigues. The Soviet Union’s apparatchik class drained its blood until that reddest of red states became a pale, lifeless husk — whiter than Kolchak’s armies! — ready to be blown away by the slightest gust of popular discontent.

It is for this reason that I’m very much encouraged by the American situation. After more than 200 years, the United States seems to be reaching the end of the same rope.

Its politicians have racked up more than $13 trillion in direct debt, at least $100 trillion in “unfunded liabilities” (i.e. promises of future payments), and at present are borrowing and spending $150-$200 billion more per month than they can figure out how to forcibly extract from the populace through taxation.

Where’s all that money going?

“At a time when workers’ pay and benefits have stagnated, federal employees’ average compensation has grown to more than double what private sector workers earn …” (“Federal workers earning double their private counterparts,” by Dennis Cauchon, USA Today, 08/10/10)

“We have already spent close to $1 trillion in Iraq …. When all is said and done, the combined cost of caring for veterans, continued Iraqi operations, replenishing and transporting equipment and paying interest on the debt will bring the final tally to well over $2 trillion. Including the economic costs — both to individuals and to the economy as whole — the bill easily tops $3 trillion.” (“Iraq war winds down, but costs soar,” by Linda J. Bilmes, San Francisco Chronicle, 08/15/10)

“We spend $7 billion a month on the war in Afghanistan and every day it becomes more and more clear that we are pursuing a failed strategy that doesn’t make America any safer …” (US Rep. Chellie Pingree [D-ME], quoted in “Mitchell meets, greets,” by Susan M. Cover and Rebekah Metzler, Kennebec Joural, 08/02/10)

This, my friends, is what we call “not a tenable situation.” But the state keeps doubling down, as with last week’s $26 billion payout to save 300,000 government employees from falling off the teat.

America’s politicians, by habit, frequently call upon the populace to eschew “class warfare,” by which they are generally understood to mean war between the rich and the poor.

Left unsaid, but becoming increasingly clear even to those who generally take little interest in matters political, is the fact that every operation of government is, by definition, an exercise in “class warfare” — a raid by a political class whose very survival depends on its continued ability to loot your wallet, your wealth, your work.

Like everyone else, the political class has to eat.

Unlike everyone else, the political class proposes to eat us.

Now that the pesky mosquitoes have mutated into gnawing rats and threaten to grow into rabid wolves, more and more Americans are finally starting to take notice.

It’s class war, to the death, like it or not — a war for survival, the political class or us. Personally, I’m for us.

C4SS News Analyst Thomas L. Knapp is a long-time libertarian activist and the author of Writing the Libertarian Op-Ed, an e-booklet which shares the methods underlying his more than 100 published op-ed pieces in mainstream print media. Knapp publishes Rational Review News Digest, a daily news and commentary roundup for the freedom movement.

Despite making a combined $18 billion in profits last quarter alone, major banks are still doing all that they can avoid new consumer protection legislation – and, we might add, new legislation hasn’t made it too difficult for them.

Much like the recent CARD Act, banks are quickly finding loopholes in the new legislation to recoup any of their potential losses. A new Bank of America program in Georgia, for example, is now charging customers to simply receive bank statements in the mail.

Amongst other plans in the works, banks may begin raising arbitrary “minimum balance requirements” for consumers, charging people for simply not having enough money in their accounts.

New Oversight:

Amongst the bills more popular attributes is its creation of a new Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection. And here is where the liberal rallying cry “more regulation!” falls apart.

The idea that government regulators are any better suited to watch out for our best interests than corporations are is baseless.

It is, in fact, not an issue of good or bad regulation, but the philosophy of government regulation itself which is absurd.

These days, we are extremely hard pressed to find where the line between politician and CEO lies; the place where being a regulator ends, and being a lobbyist starts. The fact of the matter is, no government agency in the United States today is immune from the insidious influences of the wealthy.

The newly created Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection (BCFP), for example, is already set to change from a regulatory agency to yet another revolving door for wall street insiders – and, I might add, it hasn’t even officially been established yet!

Just a casual glance at the news reveals what a heated political battle is already being waged over the appointment of a new director.

But of the dozens of people recommended to take up the new position, one in particular stands out to Democratic party leaders: the current chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel for TARP, Elizabeth Warren.

But Democrats, looking to appoint Warren, are stuck between a rock and a hard place. As political analyst Ezra Klein correctly points out, Obama’s administration needs to demonstrate to his disillusioned base that he and his party can deliver on promises like more consumer protection. But doing so will anger our Wall Street masters of the universe, who may react to the appointment of Warren by slowing our already stagnate credit supply.

Republicans, with a different strategy but for similar reasons, are gearing up to possibly filibuster the nomination of Warren, a woman too whole-heartedly skeptical of the financial sector for their liking.

Both parties, you’ll note, are still fundamentally trying to please Wall Street, who after all does pay their bills – and even regularly writes their legislation.

“…the special interests opposing us contributed to the failure of the financial system. They’re trying to preserve the system that failed, and Congress is listening to them in some respects,” observed Ed Mierzwinski, consumer advocate for US PIRG.

It only makes sense that politicians listen to their Wall Street backers – they are not only their financial benefactors, but often their close colleagues and business partners.

Take for example the case of Micheal Paese, Goldman Sach’s top lobbyist in Washington D.C. who managed to become head staff member to House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank – the man who Time magazine pointed out “presided over the negotiations on financial reform.”

Similarly, former Goldman lobbyist Mark Patterson has weaseled his way into the Treasury Department, and is now currently serving as its chief of staff.

The revolving door, of course, goes both ways: a former adviser to Senator Chris Dodd (both the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee and author of many financial regulatory reforms), Janice O’Connell, has recently been hired onto Goldman’s lobbying firm.

These close relationships prompt the Christian Science Monitor to recall that “[In] all, the finance, insurance, and real estate industries spent a record $475 million on campaign contributions to congressional candidates in the 2008 cycle and are ramping up for 2010 midterm elections.”

What, given the recent history of our country’s government, could possibly make anyone believe the BCFP will be any less subject to the pressures of Wall Street than any other office in government? Wasn’t also Wall Street able to tear down the post-depression era Glass-Steagel Act, and if so, what in these reforms will stop them from doing the same to the Dodd-Frank Bill?

New derivatives and mortgage regulations:

Perhaps just as important as, although less popular than, the creation of a new consumer protection bureau, are the new regulations governing derivatives and mortgages.

Both new sets of regulation offer positive steps forward. Derivatives, for example, will now be traded publicly, in much the same way stocks are, and new mortgage regulation prohibiting NINA sales (selling mortgages without proof of income) will offset the likelihood of another massive housing bubble.

But in regard to these regulations’ original purpose – to fix the underlying problems that led to our current economic crisis – at most we can only call these reforms band-aids.

To begin with, the housing bubble and the derivatives which helped create it were only the trigger for a much larger underlying problem.

As we discussed in a previous article, the real problem with the American economy, the real reason we were hit so hard by the recession, is that we have had to rely so heavily on consumer credit.

Since the early 1970?s, American workers have been forced to take on more and more debt as their wages have stagnated and declined. Slowly, this debt had been building up into an unwieldy and destabilizing force in our economy.

Banks and employers were willing to ignore the dangerous nature of this increasing debt problem, however, because it meant that 1. employers could continue to lower their workers’ wages and 2. banks could find new ways of making money off of desperate workers – such as making payday or NINA loans.

This arrangement, however, could only last so long.

It was convenient for banks to make more and more ridiculous loans to increasingly poor workers as the years went on, in order to keep up consumer spending in the economy – but eventually, you can guess, those absurd loans are going to catch up with us.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out (or an economist, for that matter) that if you’re loaning more and more money to people whose wages are dropping lower and lower, eventually they won’t be able to pay anything back at all. This is exactly what happened to us when we were hit with a wave of mortgage defaults and bankruptcies.

The massive amount of debt U.S. households had been forced to take on in this country over the past 40 years was a ticking time bomb. A massively overinflated housing bubble, powered by new financial innovations like collateralized debt obligations, wasn’t the problem at all. They were just the straw that broke the camels back.

Nothing, to date, has been done to remedy this issue – certainly nothing in the current financial regulation.

Conclusions:

These supposed “fixes” to the American financial system, of course, are anything but.

It fails to address systemic problems in our economy, fails to address the inevitable Wall Street fight back against the bill itself, and fails to adequately address some of the biggest concerns citizens have about the last bailout.

Many outraged workers are rightly asking whether or not the new legislation will prevent another massive bailout. The answer is a resounding “theoretically!”

As New York Times author Steven Davidoff notes,

“The bill will still allow the government to fashion ad hoc remedies in the case of a failing financial institution. It also erects a financial insolvency regime that will allow the government to punish failing financial institutions and their creditors.

“However, it appears there is enough wiggle room in the bill and elsewhere in the laws that the government will still be able to structure unique one-off solutions in any financial crisis. We just won’t know until the law is tested.”

I’m not holding my breath.

For the original article, and more like it, feel free to visit the Trial by Fire.

Supporters of capitalist democracy generally claim that it is the best—if not the only—way of organising a free society. Capitalist democracy provides the conditions, they claim, under which each of us can determine the course of our own destiny and enjoy all the benefits in terms of creative autonomy and individual self-development that accrue to a truly free people.

They say that freedom is something we enjoy as a result of choosing those political representatives whose policies best reflect the dictates of our own conscience to make laws on our behalf. We achieve the common good, they say, by compelling all to respect the laws, which are applied equally to all without fear or favour.

These claims are myths. The fact that many of us commonly confuse these myths with facts changes nothing, since the truth of an idea is not determined by the number of people who believe it.

While capitalist democracy appears to offer us choice—choice being the cornerstone of our freedom—the fact is that the choices it offers are not meaningful ones. Since capitalist democracy provides us with meaningless choices, it also provides us with the illusion of choice, and thus the illusion of freedom.

Consider the following facts:

1. Capitalist society is class society. Despite the claims made by the most powerful people in our society—who, we might add, have vested interests in doing so—the unity of the nation-state is an illusory one, because capitalist society is divided into economic classes. On the one hand we have those who own and control social resources, and who enjoy the economic and social privileges that accompanies such ownership and control, and on the other those who lack such ownership and control and are obliged by the circumstances of their birth to sell their labour for a wage, which is generally most of us.

2. Exploitation is inherent to class society. The foundation of meaningful freedom is economic independence, and economic independence on a social level derives from the ability of each of us to control the fruits of our labour. This is a basic human right. In capitalist society the propertied classes own and control the tools of production, the places where we work and the things we work with, which means that those of us who don’t own and control the tools of production are forced to work for those who do. Needless to say, this situation deprives us of our economic independence and forces us into a position of submission and subservience.

But it gets worse. The capitalist class generates profits from the wage system by paying workers less in wages than the value of the product of our labour, which they take for themselves. This is exploitation, period, and any sort of exploitation is inconceivable in a free society, because as long as one person can be exploited none of us are free. The only difference between chattel slaves and wage workers is that the former were owned, whereas the latter are rented. Seen in the cold hard light of day, wage labour is really wage-slavery.

Suffice it to say that the economic and social privileges that the propertied classes enjoy in our society depends for their existence on the denial of elementary human rights to the vast majority of society.

3. The exploitation inherent to capitalist society is protected by the state. The denial of the basic human right of economic independence to the working class is protected by the institutionalied violence of the state, by the police, military and judiciary. The primary function of the state is to protect and defend the social and economic privileges of the propertied classes. It is an institution of class domination which lords over the whole of society and imposes economic dependence and servitude on the great mass of humanity in the service of an opulent minority.

(Some will argue in the defense of the state that it 1) maintains order and 2) protects us from violent crime. To this we pose the counter-arguments as follows: 1) what sort of order and in whose interests, and 2) that being ‘protected’ against ‘crime’ by the state is like being ‘protected’ against ‘crime’ by the mafia, and that as the state bequeaths its ‘protection’ to the working classes, facilitating the theft of the wealth it produces, so too does it perpetuate crime in the name of stopping it. Since the system of deterrence has failed to stop violent crime, we suggest alternative strategies such as addressing the causes).

4. The primary function of the state as a defender of privilege and injustice is reflected in capitalist law. The character of the state as an institution of class domination and the nature of its basic function (to protect the privileges of the propertied classes from the rest of us) forms the basis of capitalist law. The golden rule is that those with the gold make the rules. The basic fraud behind the doctrine of equality before the law, the foundation for capitalist democracy, derives then from the fact that the laws are made by and for the rich.

The fact then that, in applying the same law to all, capitalist law has overcome the arbitrariness of kingly despotism is ultimately irrelevant for those of us in a state of economic servitude, since the law itself is unjust; being grounded as it is in the protection of elite privilege and the perpetuation of the master-slave relationship at the core of the wage system, it perpetuates the arbitrary rule—the despotism—of a class.

5. Capitalist democracy operates within the paradigm of capitalist law and underwrites its injustices. When we go to the voting booth at election time we choose between candidates from within an ideological spectrum that takes the legitimacy of class rule and wage-slavery as a given. No discussion may be entered into on the subject—all sides, whether left or right, agree that the propertied class may exploit the working class and that the master-slave relationship that characterises the wage system is proper and just.

Thus we can’t vote out wage-slavery. We can’t vote out the extraordinary extremes of wealth and poverty that the capitalist system produces. We can’t vote out the sacrifice of every ethical, moral, social, environmental and humanitarian consideration to the holy gospel of profit. We can’t vote out the system that fulfills human needs only as long as the human beings involved have enough money to pay. We can’t vote out patriarchy and institutionalised racism. We can’t vote out the imperialist wars that the West is waging in Iraq and Afghanistan to control the flow of oil in the name of fighting the sort of terrorism that it perpetuates. We can’t vote out corporations, private tyrannies with internally autocratic decision-making structures whose global reach renders the governments of individual nation-states obsolete as well as illegitimate. We can only vote for the carrot from the left or the stick from the right—either way, wage-slavery continues.

Considering all of the above facts, it is impossible to make any conclusion other than that in providing us with candidates who are essentially the same insofar as they share a consensus regarding the legitimacy of wage-slavery, capitalist democracy provides us with false choices, and thus the illusion of choice, and thus the illusion of freedom. It is only possible to conclude that the regime of capitalist democracy and its two-party circus act where we vote for Tweedledum’s stick when we get sick of voting for Tweedledee’s carrot and vice versa, signifies the permanent deferral of meaningful freedom for anyone who isn’t a beneficiary of exploited labour.

Capitalist democracy will always disappoint because it is of, by and for the ruling class. We must learn to take responsibility for our own freedom and let go of our childish faith in leaders and in being told how to think and act. We must learn to think and act for ourselves individually as well as socially. We must create the facts of a better future in the here and now through community and workplace organising on a cooperative and non-heirarchical basis, in such a way that connects our goal of meaningful freedom with the means that we use to achieve it. Only in this way do we have any hope of overcoming the injustices of capitalist democracy and creating a brighter future for everyone.