If you’re not already familiar with the Antiwork subreddit, it is a massive and powerful community online. It has amassed 2.4 million members since its creation nearly a decade ago, and it provides a platform for “those who want to end work, are curious about ending work, want to get the most out of a work-free life, want more information on anti-work ideas and want personal help with their own jobs/work-related struggles.” But along with all of the passion the members of r/Antiwork have for dismantling capitalism, they also have a great sense of humor. After all, there’s a bit of truth in every joke, right?
If you are interested in why so many people are upset with the system, let’s discuss some of the reasons why capitalism might not be enhancing your life. Capitalism is touted as a great way to build wealth and have freedom over your own company, rather than having too much interference by the government. It’s the antithesis of communism, which has been shown to prove many issues in practice, so plenty of people have gotten on board with the idea of capitalism. But in practice, it is prone to showing flaws as well, such as massive wealth inequality. Yes, you have the chance to become exorbitantly rich, but it’s also possible, and much more likely, to have very little money at all.
To gain more insight on the topic of why we should be dismantling capitalism, we reached out to Bursts, co-host and producer of The Final Straw Radio, a weekly anarchist radio show. He was kind enough to have a chat with Bored Panda and break down the main issues he has with capitalism. “For ease, I’ll be speaking of Capitalism as a wide political and economic system, and maybe guilty of some generalizations for the sake of brevity,” he first noted. “Capitalism is based on the parceling up of the world and its inhabitants into resources that are owned or rented by individuals or conglomerates like companies and governments,” Bursts explained.
“Private property is the right to sole access to a place or a thing for nearly whatever purpose as protected by threat of the State’s violence. This must be differentiated from personal property (the house we live in, the implements we have made or traded for, the items we regularly use), or the commons that we share or cohabitate with others as we go through life,” he continued. “The State, as an institution, fosters the centralization of and privatization of property into the hands of powerful individuals who could be called a class to the exclusion of other classes of individuals. People are forced to rent their labor to employers to pay for a place to live because places to live are privatized as a source of profit for landlords.”
“The State requires access to the resources of the rich class for public projects, to get elected or to create employment opportunities in their districts. Similarly, the rich classes are literally represented in the state houses because the powerful heads of state and business and their lobbying groups often come from the same neighborhoods, schools, churches and jobs,” Bursts explained. “Starting as close associates in many cases, the relationship between government employees and the business class continues to be tied together through lobbying efforts, election fundraising, and public-private partnership, protecting the centralization of wealth and strengthening those bonds between state and capital.”
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“The capitalist productive process is spurred by a desire to maximize profits at all costs, meaning that without meaningful regulation by the State, jobs pay poorly and those doing the work tend to have no say in the safety or stability of their income,” Bursts told Bored Panda. “Capitalist production promotes ecological devastation and pollution, overproduction of commodities, often unsafe products and work environments.”
“Because of the undemocratic and violent nature of the capital/state formation (whether in so-called Communist China, social democratic Scandinavia, the USA or elsewhere), there is unnecessary death, immiseration, and catastrophic climate change,” he noted. “The other side of that coin is the lost opportunities, ideas, art and music, animal species, joy and love that could exist with the abolition of capitalism.”
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We also asked Bursts how he believes we can get on the right track in terms of dismantling capitalism. “Dismantling this ecocidal and homicidal system will be drastic by some measures as it means fundamental changes to the administering of the needs of people, the opening up of the possibility for those affected by the damages of capitalism and colonialism, the restoring of habitats, the re-purposing of the means of production and distribution, of education,” he explained.
“The longer that the system continues on its current trajectory, the harder it will be for human (and other) life to thrive, let alone survive, on this planet,” Bursts added. “And the sooner that we free ourselves from the bonds of an economy that holds us hostage eight or more hours a day so that we have a safe(ish) place to lay our heads, the more time we’ll have to enjoy the fruits of that freedom and undo centuries of damage.”
“The drastic-ness of the necessary shifts is increased by the fact that the classes that benefit most from the current state of affairs will never give up their power without a fight,” Bursts pointed out. “But currently, we don’t call the class war that is our daily life drastic, despite people dying for being denied medical treatment, thrown out into the streets for a break in their income flow, being locked in cages often for undiagnosed mental health issues like addiction or because they just cannot afford a good attorney, being born on the wrong side of a fence and unable to escape dire circumstances.”
“The world under capitalism is dire already and is everyday defended by security, police, prisons and armies and any attempt to change it will necessarily cause violent reaction from those forces and their backers.”
And when it comes to anyone who believes that capitalism has benefited their life, Bursts notes that it’s important not to confuse capitalism with society and sociality. “If you feel challenged and excited by the work that you do, ask yourself if that sort of work couldn’t exist in a system with different property relations,” he told Bored Panda. “If you enjoy the technologies you use in your daily life, the medicines you rely on, the house you sleep in: why couldn’t they, or their equivalents, exist in a society where people are motivated by curiosity, by care and responsibility, and likely produced in a more sustainable and ecologically balanced manner rather than in sweatshops or leaving sacrifice zones of extraction?”
“Imagine that the wealth that accumulates into the hands of fewer and fewer people each year was not actually skimmed off human need, if we didn’t have to work b.s. jobs (as Graeber put it) and if the people who do the work and live in the neighborhoods actually had direct say, collectively, in how our world worked?”
