We are against all forms of capitalist exploitation whether private, state or self-managed. We wish to live according to the ideals of solidarity, mutual aid and free association in a classless, stateless and wage-free society – From each according to their ability, to each according to their need!
Capitalism is an economic system of organised class oppression and exploitation. Although capitalism is the modern form of class society, it is not the first, others such as feudalism and slave societies have preceded it. While all class societies are oppressive and exploitative, capitalism has shown itself to be particularly destructive. We seek the abolition not just of capitalism but of class society as a whole.
Capitalism is primarily a social relationship between classes that must work, and the classes that direct and employ. It is a relationship that is reproduced at every level of society by workers, managers, and bosses, within the workplace and everywhere else.
A class of capitalists own and control the factories, shops, apartment buildings, land, and other vital resources. Through direct control of all of society’s resources and wealth, the capitalist class enforces its dictatorship upon us. Instead of free access to the resources of society, the vast majority of people are forced to bargain for them with our own bodies – we sell our time, labour, bodies and minds at a negotiated price, a wage, in exchange for a share of these resources. But the process of working for the capitalist is a process of value creation, thereby enhancing their wealth. We are only given a small portion of the value that we create for the capitalists in exchange the portions of our lives sacrificed. Often this is barely enough to access food, water, and housing, though even beyond the necessities the working class is robbed of the joys of life through the poverty of capitalism’s offerings filtered through the dizzying array of profit-driven amusements. Our lives and time are used up reluctantly in the ebb and flow of capital’s cycles.
Capitalism can only be sustained by increasing profit through increasing production and draining more wealth from the oppressed classes domestically and globally, as well as the Earth. This relentless drive for profits has caused capital to overlook human and environmental devastation in the pursuit of short term gains. This demand for ever-increasing profits even devastates capitalism itself, causing its unavoidable cycle of recessions and economic crisis, this is one of the many contradictions capitalism cannot overcome.
The capitalists’ efforts to increase control over work to extract greater wealth as well as expanding the power of the state has led to the creation of various layers within the economy of managers and elite professionals who staff the hierarchies of the corporations and the institutions of the state. Management is a tool of repression and policing in the workplace, speeding up our work and keeping the interests of the owners as the driving force on the job. Elite professionals who dominate social institutions are the agents of ruling class hegemony. The subordination of the working class to the capitalists and their bureaucratic layers of functionaries is a system of exploitation because it denies us control over our lives and subordinates life to the meaningless drive for profit.
In the process of building a class that can only survive through selling its time and labour, capitalism locked others from the workforce. Some, who are overwhelmingly dominated peoples, are held in near permanent unemployment or swallowed by the prison system, which in so called Australia see’s First Nations People grossly overrepresented, while others like housewives help contribute to society’s wealth and the reproduction of the labour force, but aren’t paid for it. Alongside the working class exist classes of people who either have been driven from the workplace, or pushed away from it by the misery of capitalism. We are now seeing a whole new subsection of the working class being formed in the gig economy, which is seeing vulnerable workers being forced to enter industries which have been stripped of protections won by struggle in the past. Whole towns and suburbs of Australia exist with generations of permanently unemployed workers, discarded by capitalism’s thirst for profit and domination. Even within the workforce some have managed to escape wage labour, but continue to experience exploitation of their labour without being employers. We call these classes the dominated and exploited classes. There is a natural unity of these classes in their struggles against capitalism and the state, however this does not mean that there are no contradictions, enmities, or real conflicts between the dominated class forces in society. Ultimately it is the working class who has the ability to create a freer society through its production of all the goods of society. The working class must struggle alongside and unite with the dominated classes, which have themselves been ravaged by alienation and capitalism, in order to strengthen the increasingly isolated and disjointed revolutionary capacity of both. Globalised production, attacks on the power of the working class, and anti-social elements of the working class itself have threatened a revolutionary movement. Our objective is to fight based on strategic assessments, social ruptures, and revolutionary potentials and not merely logical arguments based on structures, potentials, and aspirations.
Not everyone who is in a class is conscious of this. In fact the opposite is true.
There is a difference between the class you are in objectively, and how you perceive yourself and the way you behave. In practice, we see a world of infinite divisions, continuously blurred and reorganised by capitalists and the state, and oppressed classes divided for innumerable reasons. People of these classes often have contradictory ideas about themselves, their work, and their class. Ruling class ideas are reproduced and transmitted both through its institutions, and through the relationships and perpetuation of those ideas within families, communities, and between individuals. At the same time the struggles, organisations, and experiences of people as collectivities create and facilitate ideas which break from ruling class thinking. We recognise however that alongside progressive and even revolutionary thought in the dominated classes, other reactionary and repressive ideologies exist and can develop. The battle of ideas isn’t simply between working class and ruling class ideas, but an open and contested field of potential consciousness amongst which anarchist communists must intervene. It is our goal to help build a conscious united class acting in its interest out of a class divided.
We organise to build class unity through struggle, and build a united working class movement for the abolition of classes altogether. We recognise that only through the unity of the dominated and exploited classes against capital and the state will the abolition of exploitation and oppression for all be possible, it is only through building common struggle and class organisation that we will succeed.