“There shall be no buying and selling in a free Commonwealth” – Gerrard Winstanley, The Law of Freedom, England, 1652
The term “anti-business” is today generally deployed as a propaganda term by the capitalist system. It is used to try to disqualify any radical criticism of the system, by implying there is something absurd or taboo about being opposed to business.
The capitalist system, which is nothing other than the dictatorship of business, would like to make it literally impossible to propose or even imagine any other way of organising life.
It would like to limit the scope of any dissent which surfaces from time to time, so that it never goes further than criticising the excesses of capitalism, certain kinds of capitalism, the way capitalism is managed, rather than capitalism/business itself.
We are not prepared to be ideologically caged within the capitalist mindset and we think it is about time the label “anti-business” became a badge of honour among free people.
We are anti-business and proud of it because:
BUSINESS reduces human beings to units of production and consumption, to the means for its own enrichment.
BUSINESS, in other (familiar) words, puts profit before people.
BUSINESS is based on the ongoing and ever-increasing exploitation of the majority by a small wealthy elite.
BUSINESS is destroying the living substance of our world in its insatiable greed for expansion.
BUSINESS is a cult of quantity over quality, of price over value, of glitter over substance.
BUSINESS is a cult of artifice and ugliness and regards authenticity and beauty as, at best, irrelevant, and, at worst, obstacles to the total domination of its money-worshipping non-culture.
BUSINESS claims to champion the freedom and well-being of the individual, but in practice imposes uniformity and obedience, demanding that each one of us adapt and conform to its life-denying requirements.
BUSINESS is the triumph of centralised bureaucratic Gesellschaft over grassroots communal Gemeinschaft, as Ferdinand Tönnies recognised.
BUSINESS presents itself as some kind of entity separate from the state, but needs the state to impose its exploitation on the population.
BUSINESS therefore needs to control the state and can never allow genuine democracy to come in the way of its needs.
BUSINESS is nothing other than theft, but because business controls the state, this theft is regarded as legitimate.
BUSINESS sucks up everything around it and turns it into something to sell for profit.
BUSINESS destroys the inherent value of everything it touches.
BUSINESS celebrates and promotes all the worst aspects of human character and behaviour such as greed, ruthlessness, deceit and sociopathic lack of empathy.
BUSINESS has no place for ethics. Morality, solidarity and a sense of justice are replaced by the hard-hearted calculation of material advantage.
BUSINESS sees nothing beyond the end of its own nose. Its vision of the future can only ever be short-term, because the only thing it seeks to sustain is its own cancerous growth.
BUSINESS will, if allowed to continue its domination of our world, destroy absolutely everything.
BUSINESS must therefore not be allowed to continue its domination of our world. We want to see the end of business!
organic radicals 