Jockstrap of Nessus

"I came into this world anxious to uncover the meaning of things, my soul desirous to be at origin of the world, and here I am an object among other objects."

Happy Birthday Frantz Fanon

When you say “stateless society” I’m not sure if you mean ‘anarchist communist society’ or just like today’s society minus the state… if we’re going to be speculating about a radically different future society we’d need to take into account the changes and new forms of organisation which will necessarily exist as a precondition of that radical change. If you mean just abolishing the state tomorrow, then it’s not even a case that capitalism would come back, capitalism would not go anywhere – it would be the other way round actually, the state would be the thing to come back, as capitalists would immediately take the functions of state power into private ownership and keep it going.

If we’re talking about markets in the transition to anarchist communism, then yes I’m sure a form of market would exist, particularly in the early stages – but I take issue with your assumption “free markets i.e capitalism”… capitalism does not arise naturally from market exchanges. This is a myth peddled by both right and left and it’s dangerous, because it completely misunderstands the basis, nature and history of capitalism. Capitalism is a mode of production, its nature is defined at the point of production, specifically in the property relations in which production is embedded. If people own the means of production and the full fruits of their labour, then what they produce isn’t capital. You can go exchange it with other producers for whatever you like, but it doesn’t make it capitalist. In capitalism, the labour power which creates a commodity has to be a commodity itself, as Marx says in capital chapter 1:

The historical conditions of [capital’s] existence are by no means given with the mere circulation of money and commodities. It can spring into life, only when the owner of the means of production and subsistence meets in the market with the free labourer selling his labour-power. And this one historical condition comprises a world’s history. Capital, therefore, announces from its first appearance a new epoch in the process of social production.

Capitalism depends on the exploitation of people with a) no way to live without selling something and b) nothing to sell but their labour. The history of capitalism is a history of proletarianisation, and this process was long and difficult, involving at every step the violent intervention of state power and forcible enclosure of common land and property. From the earliest days of capitalist development the state and capital were integrated and mutually sustaining; the absolutist state granting royal permissions to original capitalist enterprises like the East India Company and backing them up with armies etc etc. Capitalism is not a latent force hidden within our natures ready to spring into life naturally whenever we exchange goods in a market …It was a violent imposition dependent on armies, police forces, imperialist occupations and a whole bunch of legal and juridical measures which forcibly separated the people from the means of production and subsistence over a long period of time under historically specific circumstances.