I recently decided to read Noam Chomsky’s “On Anarchism”. Throughout the book, he makes a case for a society in which every person can freely create and inquire, unconstrained by working to meet their necessities. By necessities, Chomsky is referring to work which the laborer is uninterested in, but pursues to aquire the “necessary” commodities in a capitolist economy such as food and shelter.

The following are my thoughts on the topic.

The ability for man to engage in creation and inquiry is only possible in an environment which presupposes his necessities, an asumption which by proxy requires man to face the harsh suffering of his existence.

One can view the quantity of this suffering in a framework similar to information theory or the conservation of momentum. Namely, that the default harsh conditions of life must be distributed somewhere. The integration of necessity in our capitalist economy today provides this conservation by distributing this suffering to the lower rungs of the economic ladder, unto individuals left with no other option but to labor uninteresting jobs to survive.

My main argument is that, to remove necessity from an economical system would be to remove the conditions required for creation and inquiry.

Of course, these “bits” or “kg m/s” of suffering may be offloaded to technology, but whose to say that the creation of this technology aligns with the free will of man? While the role of pondering new technological designs sounds appealing to some, does mining Cobalt under the hot African sun sound appealing to others? Shall we build technology to automate that as well? And so the process repeats until man comes to the realization that a dichotomy between necessity and freedom, the fortunate and the unfortunate, is required to foster conditions for the advancement of humanity, a field which by itself serves no function to necessity.

It is through this balance that our current economical system has nearly abolished world hunger and eliminated the harsh historical conditions which the soft-bellied men of today, castrated and unappreciative of this hidden effect, would be unbearable for.

I am not stating that capatilism is a fantastic and unsymptomatic economical system, merely that this book is loaded with false presuppositions, this topic being one of them.