As much as “Smashing the State” may be appealing to some, we have arrived at a time where that is no longer enough. This is especially true today, as neoliberal policies and practices continue marching forward, and we find ourselves at a perpetual disadvantage, never really able to “smash” anything. And so it has become necessary for us to move toward building the world we want.

The following text, a slightly trimmed version of a chapter titled “Ways to Begin Gutting Capitalism” is from the book [1] Getting Free by James Herod. It is devoted to just that: practical things we can do to start building the world we want.

(If you have not already done so, you may want to also read “[2] Strategies that have failed“, which is an overview of conventional strategies that never really have, or ever will end capitalism/colonialism. )

to contact the author, jamesherod @gmail.com or go to [3] jamesherod.info

Ways to Begin Gutting Capitalism

1. Form a Neighborhood Association. Get together with some neighbors and form a Neighborhood Association. Hold regular meetings. These meetings will form the basis, later on, for Home Assemblies. This, together with Employee Associations and Household Associations (see items 2 and 3 following) are the three most important things anyone can do. It may seem pointless at first, since these associations will have no power or money. But they will begin to attract energy and will become focal points for siphoning power and wealth out of capitalism back into the communities from which they were originally stolen. (See also “What can neighborhood associations do?” below at #1 under Further Discussion.)

2. Form an Employee’s Association. Get together with some co-workers at your workplace and form an Employee’s Association. Bypass unions. You will have to meet on your own time. Hold regular meetings. These meetings will form the basis, later on, for the Peer Circles of self-managed Projects (and part of the basis for escaping wage-slavery). There may be several such groups in one shop. It is only through face-to-face associations like these that an autonomous opposition culture can once again be generated. Even if you start with only half-a-dozen people word will get around that there is a meeting where the problems of the workplace are being discussed. This will become the focal point of a consciousness that is opposed to corporate culture. Without this counter consciousness there is no possibility of effective opposition. (See also “What can employee associations do?” below at #2 under Further Discussion.)

3. Form a Cooperative Housing Association. This can be done right now. Several families can pool resources and buy a building to form an extended household. Groups of people, single and married, already rent houses together and live cooperatively. Where buying is clearly out of the question form a Tenants Association in your building. Try to begin sharing resources and living cooperatively. These cooperative housing associations will form the basis, later on, for Households, as in our initial sketch. (See also “What can household associations do?” below at #3 under Further Discussion.)

4. Build a Meeting Hall. Pool resources with neighbors and build a place to meet. The first neighborhood to do this will go down in history as having launched a new civilization. Most neighborhoods, no matter how poor, somehow find money to build churches. If they wanted to they could build Meeting Halls. Obviously, they must first perceive a need for them. They must want to associate, want to begin to exercise control over their lives in cooperation with their neighbors. They must see the meetings as the linchpin of a new way of life.

5. Organize worker-owned businesses. Worker-owned businesses, in and of themselves, cannot destroy capitalism. As long as they are operating in a capitalist market they will face bankruptcy unless they pay attention to the bottom line. Actually, they merely replace the traditional capitalist owner with a shop full of capitalist owners. Thus worker-owners are merely joining the petty bourgeoisie. Which is what the New Left did in a big way in the early seventies. We created a multitude of what we thought of as “alternative institutions” (we were actually just going into business for ourselves). There were food coops, bookstores, day care centers, clinics, publishing houses, auto repair shops, community newspapers, psychedelic shops (with clothing, leather goods, music), and so forth. But the capitalists were not hurt by this at all. On the contrary, they benefitted greatly. They simply took over all our new creations and mass marketed them, making billions in the process.

Nevertheless, there are at least two very important differences between regular businesses and worker-owned ones. The latter can abolish internal hierarchies and self-manage the shop in a democratic way, and they have greater flexibility about using any extra wealth created. Instead of paying dividends to stockholders they can use income to support opposition movements, or they can simply raise their own salaries, shorten their work hours, or lower their prices. Actually, in real life most worker-owners end up working longer hours for less pay than they would in a traditional enterprise. They also tend to start out democratic but end up managerial, due largely I think to the pressures and temptations of the surrounding capitalist market, and not I hope to inherent flaws in human nature.

If there were dozens of worker-owned businesses in a community, providing needed services and making useful products, in addition to supporting anti-capitalist struggles, they could accumulate a wealth of experience and become the initial core, later on, for the self-managed Projects of democratic autonomous neighborhoods. They could become the basis for socially conscious, cooperative labor, democratically agreed upon labor, as opposed to labor that is bought and sold.

Worker-owned businesses are a growing movement in the United States (around 1500 majority-owned businesses so far I think). Some of them in the same trade are forming networks for mutual support and to share information. They can become revolutionary however only by becoming part of a movement to destroy capitalism and build something else, as sketched in this book, for example.

6. Try to convert local business families to the democratic autonomous way of life. That is, try to convince them to give up private ownership and switch to worker-managed projects controlled by the neighborhood Home Assembly. This may not be as hard as we at first imagine. The petty bourgeoisie (i.e., small business families) is one of the most desperate and miserable classes in capitalism. They work unbelievably long hours. Very few of them are getting rich. They go bankrupt by the thousands, losing everything they have, all their money and all their long years of labor. Those who do survive may still be on the verge of going under. They are constantly being gobbled up by chain stores and I doubt that the buyouts are all that wonderful. These people are on the fringe of the corporate world. They have been a shrinking class for over a hundred years. Maybe some of them are ready to throw in the towel. They have sought not only to get rich, but “to be their own boss.” That is, they have striven to escape wage-slavery by going into business for themselves. But there is another way to escape wage-slavery and be your own boss — participate in a worker-managed project. If we could convince even 10% of them to convert their properties to cooperatively owned and operated projects, this would provide a starting financial base for neighborhood autonomy. If we could convince 20, 30, or 40 percent, we would have a very substantial material base for transforming our neighborhoods.

7. Change jobs and move to worker-managed projects as opportunities emerge. We should shift our employment from the giant corporate world to worker-managed, neighborhood-controlled projects. The wealth that we produce in the former is siphoned off into the coffers of global capitalism. The wealth we produce in the latter can be retained in the neighborhood. There is a very big danger here though, namely that we will end up doing poverty level work. So we must never let up on our overall attack on capitalism, as described herein. We must not be content to live in the backwaters, barely subsisting in our impoverished neighborhoods, however autonomous they may be, while capitalism goes rolling on.

8. Set up local currencies. Most people don’t even know that we don’t have to use ruling class money (government or bank money) or that we can issue our own. Local currencies, of which there are many types, help us to get free from the world market, strengthen local markets, and thus build self-sufficiency and autonomy. They enable us to stop circulating the money of our oppressors, and thus escape, partially, the system of control based on that money. Local currencies also provide a way to stop wealth from being drained out of the community. Although local currencies are possible now (and many experiments are under way) they will probably be outlawed if the practice spreads.

9. Organize a Community Land Trust. These are not-for-profit corporations which acquire and hold land in the public interest. They are an existing legal form in the United States which autonomists should be using more than we are. They are a way of fighting the real estate industry, and of resisting the continuing concentration of land ownership. Like Community Development Corporations, they can easily become regressive, but if used properly they could become, later on, the basis for neighborhood control of all the lands upon which the neighborhood lives and works. Getting control of the land is always the first step capitalists take when beginning an attack on the autonomy of any people. With us, in the core capitalist countries, the land is long gone. But in many parts of the world the enclosure (expropriation of the land by the masters) is just now happening, and on a massive scale. Peasants and native peoples everywhere are being forced to register their holdings, which have traditionally been communally defined, thus turning the land into a commodity which can be bought and sold, under state and market rules. Another way of emptying the land is to make peasant farming unviable, by flooding the country with cheap, subsidized farm products from the rich countries. Sometimes peasants are simply driven off the land by force. Contemporary Colombia is a prime example, where the combination of death squads and toxic spraying have made millions landless, to become dwellers in the vast urban slums.

Community Land Trusts do not overcome the problem of land being treated like a commodity of course, since the land still has a title registered with the state. They are thus only a stop gap measure, but one which might be used now to start the process of re-appropriating the land.

10. Start switching to solar/wind energy. This will be easiest for people living in small towns and villages. There are already solar and wind units that can supply all the electrical needs of a small community. It will be hardest for people living in dense urban or suburban neighborhoods. Solar and wind power has gotten cheaper and cheaper. It is about ready to takeoff, so to speak, but under corporate control — vast solar and wind installations feeding electricity into the corporate-controlled grids. What communities, and even private households, must do is use the new technology to get free from the grid and thus achieve a measure of self-sufficiency and autonomy. There may come a time when this will make the difference between survival or death. For now though it is an essential step toward taking power, in both senses, back from capitalists and returning it to democratic communities where it belongs.

11. Start growing some of our own food. This will make sense only in the context of struggles to re-empower local communities and destroy capitalism. The objective is to regain a degree of self-sufficiency and autonomy in order to be able to abandon and hence gut and destroy the profit-system. Otherwise we play right into their hands. Capitalists no longer need vast millions of people. They couldn’t care less if we scurry around in our little vegetable gardens, garage workshops, and utility rooms trying to scrape together the bare necessities of life. As long as they control the major technologies, the governments, and markets sufficient for the continued accumulation of capital, they are happy, and can control the world. They would be happy to see millions of us simply die off. In fact they are talking about this already, all the time, and looking forward to it.

So the tactic of ’starting to grow some of our own food’ stems not from any romantic illusion about mother earth or about working with our hands, but from our dire need to establish independence in order to survive. Today’s urban populations are unimaginably vulnerable to the disruption of food supplies. And don’t think for one minute that governments and corporations won’t block food shipments, if they have to, to protect themselves and the system they are devoted to. In fact, structurally induced famines have already reached epidemic levels in the contemporary world. So ‘growing some of our own food’ applies not just to first world neighborhoods, but also, and especially, to the poorer countries which have been forced into importing basic food stuffs while their own lands are given over to cash crops for export (e.g., coffee, sugar, bananas, beef).

We don’t need farms to start growing food. We can do it in the backyard, or in roof top gardens. We can build solar powered greenhouses, and try aqua culture and hydroponics. There are many ways to start getting free from agribusiness.

12. Set up a neighborhood storehouse to facilitate mutual aid. At first this will simply be a depository where persons can put in things they don’t need and take out things they do need. This could include food, for example, as people in the neighborhood start growing more and more of their own food. A person or family who has grown more food than they need will put it in the storehouse, where it can be taken out by persons and families who need food. It will be a way of facilitating mutual aid and sharing. It could also include clothing, especially children’s clothing. As children outgrow clothes, these clothes could be put in (or returned to) the storehouse to be available to other children who need them. Same with toys, and many other items, like books, dishes, furniture, appliances, extra plants, scrap lumber, and tools. As the neighborhood gets more and more free from the market, more and more of the necessities of life (and even non-necessities) will be channeled through the storehouse. Eventually, all production – industrial, agricultural, etcetera – will be funneled into the storehouse. After the needs of the neighborhood have been met, excess production will be exchanged with other neighborhoods. There might be inter-neighborhood, or even regional, storehouses for some items. It will be by means of arrangements like this that we will eventually be able to abolish money. Setting up such a storehouse is something that could be done right now, in every neighborhood. In some communities, there already exists a similar organization, in the form of thrift stores of various kinds (Salvation Army, Goodwill, Veterans). In these stores, although their goods have usually been donated, the items are nevertheless sold for money. But in a voluntarily organized and run storehouse, the money could be eliminated.

13. Support orthomolecular medicine and the preventive health care movement. Medicine as currently practiced is a ruling institution that seeks to control us just like schools do, and corporations, and the government itself. It also wants to sell us drugs, cut us up (for a high fee), and keep us coming back again and again. We must start breaking free from it, start reducing its influence over our lives, start gutting it of power. The best way to do this is not to get sick. We must take charge of our own health and learn how to take care of ourselves. A step in this direction is to become advocates and adherents of orthomolecular medicine — a new philosophy of health and sickness founded in the 1970s by Linus Pauling and his colleagues, which was actually mostly a crystallization of long-standing alternative health practices, although they certainly gave them a new twist and a firmer scientific foundation.

We should go to doctors and hospitals only as a last resort, and when we do go we must question everything they do. Never let them treat us like pieces of meat. Never let them do a single thing to us without forcing them to explain it, and to wait until we decide whether we want the treatment.

Some of us should also try to begin establishing neighborhood health clinics. This will be difficult because medicine is tightly controlled by the state, together with the drug companies, insurance companies, and doctors themselves in their professional organizations. Nevertheless, some progress can surely be made toward neighborhood-controlled clinics even if it is only education at first to spread the preventive health care movement. These clinics will become, later on, the means whereby we take back control of health care in our democratic autonomous neighborhoods.

Naturally, people who presently work in hospitals should be forming employee associations, with an eye to eventually taking over the hospitals. But the seizure of hospitals will probably take place at about the time that it becomes feasible to seize factories, farms, offices, and stores. In the meantime, we should be getting free from mainstream medicine by practicing preventive health care and by establishing independent neighborhood clinics.

15. Organize locally to stop ruling class offensives in the community. There are numerous examples of this already. A town has mobilized to stop a Wal-Mart from moving in and destroying all the local small businesses. Communities have mobilized to force the clean up of toxic waste dumps. Neighborhoods have organized to stop expressways from being built right through the middle of their homes. Some suburban sprawl (damn little though) has been blocked. Proposed dams have been stopped. Forests, wetlands, and seashores have been saved. And so forth. This is where capitalists have to be stopped – locally, in our communities. Why? Because this is where our strength is.

Even if one hundred thousand militants converged periodically in cities and capitals around the world to protest at the summit meetings of the world’s ruling classes, this is nothing compared to the tens of millions, hundred of millions worldwide, who could become engaged in struggles at the local level. Most people cannot go to regional, national, or continental demonstrations. They have to work and cannot leave their jobs. Plus travel is expensive and beyond the means of many people. Plus they have family responsibilities. Hence protests at summit meetings is perforce limited mostly to more affluent students and other movement celebrities who can afford to operate on a national or global level. Quite a few less well off persons do manage nevertheless to go to these events, by taking vacation time, using up savings, and the like. But they are not the majority. Moreover, in order really to be able to defeat capitalists on the global level, we would have to get control of national governments, and that is simply not in the picture. So however useful national and global protests are for highlighting issues, articulating demands, and putting pressure on our rulers, it is at the local level that the real battles must be fought.

16. Start applying criminal laws to capitalists and government officials. This has started to happen. It’s quite surprising that it hasn’t happened long before now. Not long ago a couple of corporate executives were convicted of murder, because they knowingly allowed an employee to be poisoned to death at the workplace. This was the first case of its kind in the United States. Pinochet has been arrested and may be placed on trial in Chile. Kissinger may well be brought to trial as a war criminal. All this is an excellent development. If we could only bring the criminal laws to bear on capitalists themselves, and their functionaries in government, this by itself would almost be enough to destroy capitalism, because capitalism cannot exist (that is, capitalists, as a world class, cannot make profits) without violence, brutality, oppression, theft, lies, and murder. It requires all that to keep the system going, speaking in global terms. If we could hold them to the same laws that all the rest of us must obey, their scam would be exposed, and the system would collapse.

17. Democratize all voluntary associations. By democratize, of course I mean direct democracy, whereby an association is operated cooperatively, through face-to-face assemblies. Unfortunately, the practice of direct democracy has almost disappeared from our culture. Instead, the first thing we do when we get together to establish an association, is to elect officers and hand over authority to them, thus disbanding our meetings, and forfeiting our power of self-government. That is, we establish a hierarchy, even though this is seen as democratic (whereby we choose leaders periodically through elections). But this practice could be abandoned and we could return to the practice of direct democracy. No one is stopping us from doing this right now, in all the many and various associations we establish, whether they be educational societies, chess clubs, baseball teams, parent-teacher associations, professional organizations, quilting bees, orchestras, health clinics, youth centers, food coops, or what have you. This could be done in all organizations that we establish which are not registered with the state. So-called not-for-profit corporations, which are registered with the state (that is, incorporated by the state), are usually required, by law, to have a board of directors and officers. Nevertheless, in many cases, it is possible to do the paper work to meet the official requirements (which demand the establishment of hierarchy, that is, an authoritarian structure for the enterprise), but to run the project internally, unofficially, with direct democracy. At present, it is an unfortunate fact that not-for-profit corporations and so-called non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are almost invariably authoritarian. But this is something that we might be able to change, long before it becomes feasible to seize, and thus democratize, corporations per se. The experience we could thus gain now with direct democracy in our voluntary associations, non-profits, and NGOs would help us later in our workplace, neighborhood, and household assemblies.

18. Reject mainstream divisions of social knowledge. About a hundred years ago, largely in response to a very powerful labor movement and a vigorous anti-capitalist culture, conservatives in Europe began parceling up social knowledge into fields or disciplines, which rapidly became institutionalized as departments in universities, and then as occupations in the labor market. The main ones were economics, political science, and sociology. But also, history was partitioned off more completely as a specialized and more limited discipline, as was philosophy. Psychology had already been separated out earlier. Anthropology was added in. There is not the slightest justification for any of this. There is no such thing as an economy, for example. But such a claim sounds idiotic to contemporary minds. What conservatives have succeeded in doing is thoroughly trouncing another way of looking at human life which uses a different set of categories entirely, namely the radical critique of capitalist civilization. These false divisions are now one of the greatest barriers to understanding the world we live in.

19. Don’t watch television or listen to the radio. I’m referring to corporate media of course. For most people it’s probably best not to even own televisions or radios. Every hour given up to corporate programming is one hour less available for face-to-face association with friends and neighbors, one hour less available for building independent lives, for creating an autonomous culture, and for assembling the social arrangements that will replace capitalism. Mainstream television and radio are unspeakable evils, with their endless hours of advertising, their biased newscasts, their destruction of conversation, their silence about everything important, their trivialization of knowledge, their distortion of history, and their endorsement of greed, vulgarity, and brutality. Television creates a false, mediated world, a cultural world that has been filtered through the prism of capitalist values. We come to act and talk as if the only things we have in common are what we have all seen in the movies or on television or heard on the radio. This comes to be the mediated linkage that binds us together. We no longer have direct cultural linkages emerging out of our own face to face interaction, but only these round-about, second hand, artificial, distorted ones.

I have known only a few persons who could watch television without being damaged. These are persons who are already deeply steeped in an alternative culture. They don’t so much watch television as they study it, like they would a species of insect never encountered before. They examine television, with a critical eye, bringing to the task already developed autonomous knowledge and values with which to judge it. They see it as data, to be analyzed, to discover what the ruling class is doing, and what spin it is putting on current events. They read between the lines to decipher what’s happening in the world. This is a very important thing to do, but it is not for everyone.

This presents a problem. We all need to be aware of what’s happening in the world. We can read the newspapers, but mainstream newspapers must be approached with the same ‘reading between the lines’ critical eye needed for television and radio. At present the best resource is the independent media, which can be consulted regularly to keep informed. Hopefully, a growing opposition culture will continue to invent ways to bypass corporate/government media.

A report was made about what happened in a remote village in northern India when the first transistor radio arrived. Within a short time villagers no longer danced around their fires singing songs. Instead they sat and listened to the canned music from New Delhi.

20. Support the Independent Media. What began in the 1960s as Underground Newspapers, and continued to flourish in the 1970s and 1980s as the Alternative Press, has come into its own in the 1990s as the Independent Media. This is a much better name. Why should our publications be considered alternative rather than mainstream, instead of the reverse? It is corporate media after all that is not authentic, being nothing but a propaganda machine, and is therefore out of line, dishonest, marginal, based on special interests (profit), inimical to human life, subterranean, and immoral. So why should this be considered mainstream? Well of course it is mainstream, for capitalism, and that is why the term mainstream is a dirty word for us. Still.

Our Independent Media now consists of hundreds of newspapers, magazines, newsletters, journals, and zines, as well as independent radio and television. The most spectacular development in this area, in just the past few years since the Battle of Seattle in November 1999, has been the rapid creation, on a world scale, of IndyMedia Centers, using the Internet. These centers collect written, audio, and visual reports about current events and make them available to anyone with access to the Internet. This is a critically important strategic initiative. The new generation of activists seems to be very media savvy, far surpassing the media skills of earlier generations of militants. They seem to be focusing more on how central media are, and therefore on how crucial it is to fight in this arena.

23. Recover our own language. We no longer speak our own freely created language. We speak the language of our rulers and their hacks. It’s no wonder, considering the bombardment from schools and mass media we have been under. Also, we don’t really talk much with each other any more, which of course is the only way a language can be created. Instead we listen, to them. We walk around with earphones on our heads. We listen to teachers, sometimes for twenty years. We listen to the news, to talk shows, to weather forecasters, to advertisements by the thousands, and to the stock market report, even though few of us own stocks (and those who do, don’t own many). We listen to the President. We listen to bosses, ministers, doctors, and psychiatrists. Some people can’t even sleep unless the radio or television is on. There are radios in every car, in every workplace, in every kitchen. Millions of people wake up every morning to clock radios. There are radios on the beach and in camp. We listen to the MTA, over their loudspeakers in every station and train, telling us not to step over the yellow line, not to smoke, not to litter, to report vandals (222-1212), and to have a nice day, with nary a grimace of protest from a single passenger. We are constantly listening, to language not of our own making.

We even allow them to start piping their language right into our children’s brains before they can even talk. It is a language filled with euphemisms, double-speak, psycho-babble, and befuddlement. It is an ugly language. Compared with only a hundred years ago our language now is impoverished, polluted, and degraded, with greatly weakened expressive powers. We cannot think straight using this language. Although it sounds strange to say so, words are very concrete things, and we can pay attention to them. We don’t have to say “industrial society” instead of “capitalism”, to cite only one example. Whole books are now being written on Double-Speak by oppositionists. We should study them. We should also study the words, whenever we can find them, of the very first victims of capitalism, in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. They had a clearer perception of what they were being hit with. Even in the 19th century, opposition language was still rich and powerful. Study the speeches of William Morris or Voltairine de Cleyre, for example, if you want to see how pitiful our language has become compared to theirs.

26. Start Negotiating Global Agreements. Critics of a decentered world claim that many of our problems are worldwide in scope and therefore require world institutions to deal with them. It’s true that we face many global crises that can only be solved on the global level, but it is not true that we need a world government, or some such, to solve them. Local communities could start negotiating global agreements on their own initiative, bypassing governments. If existing treaties, negotiated by governments, are worth supporting, they could simply endorse these (and there are many such treaties, dealing with weapons in space, the oceans, nuclear weapons, land mines, torture, and so forth). Or they could revise these where necessary to improve them and make them compatible with anarchy. Or they could start writing their own treaties. Naturally, this assumes that we have local communities that are trying to take back control of their lives. The recent phenomenon in the United States wherein over two hundred city councils have passed resolutions against the USA Patriot Act, and in defense of the Bill of Rights, indicates the direction we should be moving in. The experience gained in the Sister Cities movement might be relevant. The international networks of NGOs might be relevant also.

The idea that we need national governments (or even worse, a world government) to reach global agreements to deal with our problems is ridiculous. National governments, more often than not, are the causes of these crises.

27. Abolish War. Abolish war? I’ve got to be kidding, right? This is a fantasy if there ever was one. The thing is, modern war has become horrible almost beyond human comprehension. Two atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed 210,000 people. One hydrogen bomb dropped on any major world city would kill millions of people instantly. So far this has never happened, but hundreds of nuclear missiles are still on hair trigger alert in both the United States and Russia. It is a miracle they’ve never been fired (and there have been some very close calls). The government officials who keep these missiles aimed and ready to fire at a moment’s notice, with grossly inadequate safeguards against false alarms, are truly criminally insane. They should be arrested immediately and locked up. But they won’t be, will they?

The bombardment of Baghdad in the spring of 2003 was done from far up (supersonic bombers at 15,000 feet) or far away (cruise missiles launched from ships hundreds of miles away). None of the bombardiers or missile launchers were killed from enemy fire when making their attacks. It’s not really war. It’s slaughter. And now we have radioactive uranium munitions. Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Iraq are polluted with them. They will go on killing (cancer) and maiming (deformed babies) until the end of time. We have cluster bombs which continue to kill, mostly children, for decades after the “war” is over. We have land mines, millions of them, scattered over dozens of countries, which kill and kill and kill. We have 50mm bullets, one round of which will tear a body to shreds or blow a child’s head off. We have fire bombs, concussion bombs, bunker buster bombs, and smart bombs.

The first modern war, the American Civil War, the first war to mobilize the entire society on both sides for the war effort, produced 562,130 casualties, and this was a war fought with primitive rifles and canons. The First World War, the war of the machine gun, killed an estimated ten million people. The Second World War, the war of airplanes, tanks, submarines, bombs, torpedoes, artillery, mortars, and grenades, killed roughly 40 million. The Korean War killed four million. Two million were killed in Vietnam, 600,000 more in the secret bombing of Cambodia. Two hundred and fifty thousand, one third of the population, were killed in East Timor. Isn’t it time to put a stop to this madness?

There has always been a vocal minority which opposed war. But for the most part war protesters have mis-diagnosed the problem, seeing war merely as a moral issue. It is a moral issue of course, but it is not only that, for modern war has a structural basis, namely the state itself, with its national government, with its participation in the nation-state system (and in the mechanics of capital accumulation embedded in it). Every government arms itself, as much as it can afford, and claims a monopoly of violence within its territory.

“War is the health of the state,” said Randolph Bourne. “War is a racket,” said Smedley Butler. Both were right. The state (and its war machine) is needed by capitalists. War is a necessary and inevitable feature of profit-taking. War is needed not only to maintain empire, and to control domestic unrest, but as a source of profit. All this is always done in the name of the ‘national interest’ of course, but most people realize now that this phrase is just a euphemism, a code word, for the interests of the national and international ruling class, not the interests of the general populations of nations.

Capitalism would probably collapse without the military-industrial complex. The US economy is now heavily dependent on the arms industry, as are the economies of several other industrialized nations. These countries spend billions from general tax revenues making weapons which they sell (or more often, give away) to tin pot dictators the world over. The Pentagon itself is the most enormous war machine in the history of the world, and is tightly integrated with the arms industry. The more wars there are, the more money they make. Every time a cruise missile is fired, they get to build another one, at a million dollars a shot. Every time some country’s infrastructure is destroyed, transnational corporations get to go in and rebuild it, making billions. Of course, they never put it back like it was.

Abolish war? How? Dismantle the state, and the profit system, which is what this book is all about. This is the only way. As far as I know there has never been a mass movement, especially an international mass movement, to abolish war. But we could build one. Perhaps the demonstration against the impending US invasion of Iraq, by ten million people, in thirty countries, on five continents, on February 15, 2003, signaled the beginning of such a movement. It will have to be a grassroots initiative. Obviously governments are not going to dismantle themselves or their war machines. But local communities could start to take a stand, declaring their opposition to war, all war. They could begin negotiating a global treaty to abolish war. They could encourage everyone to refuse to fight. What if millions of people the world over simply refused to go to war, and resisted the draft, going to prison instead if they had to? Unlikely? Well, are we just going to sit back and wait for the cruise missiles to start raining down on us, or to be obliterated in a flash by a nuclear blast, or to watch our sons and daughters, husbands and wives murdered and maimed in imperialist wars?

A campaign to abolish war would be a direct threat to the profit-mongers, and is therefore a good tactic to use in getting out of capitalism, and into a world full of democratic autonomous communities, a world without states or war.

© Copyright 2004 by James Herod and
placed in the public domain. Please reproduce freely.
to contact the author, jamesherod@gmail.com