Ok, let's talk about alternatives.
I for one think it's obvious that the world is in dire need of repair. Global inequality is indeed staggeringly high:(still think you're poor? Check this out www.globalrichlist.com) Thousands of children die every day from ailments which could be treated for pennies. Most of humanity lives under highly corrupt or repressive governments. I honestly don’t comprehend why people shed tears over whether or not relatively poor Americans will get health insurance but don’t similarly weep for absolutely poor inhabitants of the rest of the world for whom our problems would be the least of their worries.
There's a large hostility on part of the left (yes, I mean the real left) towards the market. No, I don't necessarily mean "capitalism" as Professor Wolff defined it, but rather private property qua private property, prices and wages qua prices and wages, management qua management and other things considered market functions. Indeed author Michael Albert has written an entire book arguing for what he calls "market abolitionism".
Feel free to disagree, but attacking the market itself strikes me as absurd. Since the days of Aristotle, it's been well understood that people appreciate things more when they own them. Any decent economist will tell you that in a complex economy a price system is the most accurate way to convey information. And furthermore, anyone with minimal understanding of commerce (something that most people, myself included, have little direct experience with) know that good management is essential to run an enterprise. Lest you write this off as rightwing drivel I suggest you read socialist David Schweickart's rejoinder to Albert's defense of market abolition in which he agrees with me: http://www.zcommunications.org/i-still-think-its-nonsense-by-david-schweickart
Furthermore, I'm convinced that the entrepreneurial spirit is an inherently human trait to be found across cultures and classes. The Grameen Bank and other such organizations have found tons of entrepreneurs in the poorest most desolate parts of the world.
These sentiments underlie the alternative which most Marxists have traditionally proposed. It's the market itself that is the cause of all the suffering in the world and it's the market itself that must be replaced by something superior. They correctly recognized that only thing powerful enough to get rid of the market is the state and it’s the state that must first be controlled. While Bakunin presciently pointed out that this would lead to tyranny on an unforeseen scale, the Marxists maintained their statist convictions and proceeded to take control of state apparatuses. Well, I think we can agree that state socialist alternatives to capitalism have, despite providing some benefits to be fair, largely been disastrous, tyrannical, authoritarian and in some cases genocidal. And it is precisely because they tried to do away with market mechanisms that the horrors of 20th century communism occurred. Mao’s Great Leap Forward is probably the most gruesome example.
These well-documented and well-understood failings of Marxist economics in the 20th century should make one pretty skeptical to say the least to expect Marxism to provide a beneficial alternative to the status quo.
There are other alternatives to capitalism which incorporate market mechanisms that Marxism tried to abolish. Benjamin Tucker and Kevin Carson’s mutualism is one example. Agorism, a system in which corporations and wage labor all but vanish due to nearly all agents in the economy being self-employed, is another. Economic Democracy, a system in which prices are set by and competition is carried out between democratically-run firms is another. Organizations like the Seasteading Institute, correctly recognizing that we don’t really know much about human society are helping people finance and build their own communities on the sea and experiment with all kinds of things that statist constraints prohibit on the land.
To me, this is where an alternative to capitalism will come from, not from any “dictatorship of the proletariat” or anything like the horrors that 20th century Marxist states inflicted upon humanity.
Anarchists in particular, imho, should spend less time focusing on critics of the status quo who neither offered nor tried to offer any detailed alternative (i.e. Marx) and more time learning about and discussing proposed alternatives already in motion.
