Anarcho-capitalism? No thanks!

The Alfredo López Libertarian Workshop is a collectivity whose purpose is to promote the libertarian self-organisation of society on the basis of autonomy, equity, and the elimination of economic exploitation.

We consider that full social freedom can only be founded on common work, explicit agreement, and mutual aid, and is not compatible with any variant of monopoly over social decision-making or over the sources of collective welfare. This of course includes the incompatibility of social freedom with the private appropriation of the labour of others in the form of wages, whether in its variant of private business, or that of corporations, or even that of any kind of “welfare state”.

This means our explicit rejection of capitalism in all its forms, of the wage system, and of surplus value.

In the same way, we reject and will reject the defencelessness of those who work in the private companies currently existing in Cuba — which emerges in the heart of the current transition to private capitalism, promoted by the officialdom -, the explicitness of the various discriminations harmful to human dignity, and the absence of socio-political guarantees for the exercise of protest and strike action by those who work in any sector of the economy.

Private capitalism is not the remedy for Cuba’s problems and those of the world today, nor is any other variant of capitalism.

These positions have been made explicit by our Workshop on numerous occasions, in the most diverse media and spaces.

Furthermore, our Alfredo López Libertarian Workshop prides itself on having been one of the founding collectives of the Anarchist Federation of Central America and the Caribbean, to which we are honoured to belong and within which we act together with other free collectives and individuals, equally anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian, from many corners of our continent.

Our concepts of anarchism and anti-authoritarianism include respect for all philosophical, political and economic opinions, and we firmly defend the right to freedom of expression.

But the exercise of that right implies the duty of transparency, and it is incumbent upon us to clarify that those of us who make up this Workshop have a consensus on the above, which makes us completely alien to any anarcho-capitalist proposals, that is, those that presume the compatibility between the possibility of a society without a state and the permanence of the economic regime of the private appropriation of collective labour, in the form of surplus value. We do not believe in the feasibility of such an “enterprise”, and we make very clear our distance from anarcho-capitalism in any of its forms, especially those promoted by the Ludwig von Mises Institutes and — in Cuba — by the self-styled Cuban Libertarian Party José Martí, of which we do not form part.

The most radical anti-capitalism is and will be one of the critical and constructive pillars of our collective and its proposals for Cuba, the Americas and the planet.

FOR A FREE AND LIBERTARIAN CUBA,