Anti-Capitalists still need food and rent money.

Technically, it is still very possible to survive as a squatter living off the margins of society. You don’t HAVE to have much money to survive, if you are healthy and don’t need to see doctors or dentists and don’t have any special dietary needs or children to take care of. This condition of self imposed poverty, while it can be a fun adventure and give people time for self discovery and exploration, it leaves people dependent on the assistance of others who do work or have resources for simple things like rides and anything that cannot be picked up for free or cheap.

The current condition also leaves us with limited infrastructure at a time in our society when our domestic means of production are very limited and where we would not be able to maintain our own production needs without imports being delivered to our stores. We benefit from cheap prices on goods, but not from the economic implications of lacking local and domestic production, and not from the consequences of siphoning off money to sweat shop employers (including governments) when that money could have gone to our own workers who would then spend it improving our economy from the bottom up. The system is rigged in such a way that you cannot compete without exporting production to poorer countries who treat their workers badly, even as doing so is a slow death with diminishing returns as the working class has fewer and fewer production jobs available and we becoming increasingly limited to our service economy.

Over on the other side of the anti-capitalist left, opposite from train hopping Crimethinc squatter crowd, we have a Marxist Leninist analysis. In this perspective, capitalism is even more fiercely hated and the critique of capital is more thoroughly defined ; but the conditions of wage oppression under a boss are ironically encouraged with the idea that a Marxist Leninist revolution is more probable as more people are organized workers running the means of production, and then also with the idea that with people being used to working under a boss they will already be working for the state and be part of the states workforce as opposed to being autonomous self employed wild cards who may not fit well into the new governments plan.

The Anarcho-Syndicalists and Anarcho-Communists and the more modern ‘Municipalists’ inspired by Bookchin are sometimes more flexible about this, depending on who you ask. There is less emphasis on central planning of the means of production and more emphasis on grassroots egalitarianism from the bottom up....there are many similarities but some strong differences too. During the Spanish Revolution there were people who ran very small independent business who were not forced to collectivize and this was tolerated while all of the factories and essential means of production were taken over by the workers unions. Anarcho-Syndicalsits tend to support transition economies and many if not most Anarcho-Syndicalsits see Anarcho-Communism as the goal. Some* Anarcho-Communists reject the idea of a transition economy towards a Post-Scarcity economy and also share a rejection of self employed work and independent business along with Marxist Leninists.

Working for a boss who siphons off the product of your labor for their own profit sucks though. Living under the terms of oppressive bosses sucks in general. Being productive and not just living off the margins of society is a good thing too, but people suffer under the conditions of the employment offered today. Also, we are not exactly on the verge of a state Communist revolution anyway. Production has moved overseas and unemployment and under employment is high. People are working too many hours and getting back too little in return.

If the plan is to depend on capitalists to create the means of production for us, then take it over.....It probably won’t happen this time around in the USA. It might have been possible last century at the peak of the IWW and radical unionism, but it is less likely today with just enough of the New Deal to keep people ‘alive’ and pacified and with the means of production broken up and distributed by a global network ensuring that no one local group could usurp it by claiming control of a single region.

So this leaves a question for socialism in our modern time.....How are we going to create the infrastructure to support ourselves and our society and the movement unless we (not our bosses) start creating a means of production that we already control from the bottom up?