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You confuse capitalism as it has existed since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution with "free markets". When anarchists like Graeber talk about Capitalism, they mean "really existing Capitalism", just like when most people criticize Communism, they criticize "really existing communism" in the Socialist states of the 20th century, not the concept of a "classless, stateless society with the common ownership of the means of production". If you spend even the smallest amount of time studying the history of Capitalism, it is quickly apparent that the state has been vital in its formation. Indeed to form "capitalist" markets, you need the state and its apparatus to divide up the world and apportion it out. For example, Enclosure[0] in England was the process of dividing up the land and handing it over to private interests in order to create markets, and it was absolutely vital to the development of Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution. More recently, you have the dividing up of the ethereal with Intellectual "Property", the very idea of which must seem like a joke to most theorists of property. The very concept of non-exclusionary, indefensible property is a contradiction in terms. Yet, Capitalism in the 21st Century is deeply dependent on this legal fiction, from pharma-giants and agricultural companies like Pfizer and Monsanto, tech giants like Apple, Microsoft and Google, entertainment and media conglomerates like Time Warner and Disney, to restaurant franchises like McDonald's. Then there is Graeber's central thesis in Debt, that taxes in themselves are vital to the very creation of money and markets. Once you have divided up the world according to your concepts of "property", you still need to enforce it. And what better way to do that than use the state. So you use the state and its massive military strength to destroy labor movements[1][2], police international waters to make sure your oil tankers cargoships arrive at their destinations, and bully other nations into signing "free-trade" "agreements" to enforce your bullshit notions of property all around the world. And in the end, if all this still fails, you do it the old fashioned way and get the state to stage a coup[3][4]. [0]- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure
[1]- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre
[2]- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbine_Mine_massacre
[3]- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatemalan_coup_d%27%C3%A...
[4]- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_Chilean_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta... |