Becoming an Anarchist ?

There is different views on capitalism depending on which anarchist will speak about it. The most common idea would be that an anarchist would be against capitalism and therefore tending more toward communism. But after reading some articles, I see that you might be able to conciliate both.

Therefore we can see that some anarchist advocate free market and laissez-faire. What are those ? Let’s see wikipedia :

A free market is a market in which property rights are voluntarily exchanged at a price arranged completely by the mutual consent of sellers and buyers.

Laissez-faire : From the French dictum first used by the eighteenth century physiocrats as an injunction against government interference with trade, it became used as an economic ideology which advocates minimal state intervention on the economy.

In that case, it would basically be “as long as people want to exchange, let them be”. No government intervention, no tariff, no taxes. This would lead to free global exchange and extreme capitalism, I guess.

The problem with that is that it create a new form of exploitation (the boss versus the employees) and we go back to Marx’s theory of surplus value, or something like that. The main problem is centered around profit : if there is profit, it means that the wages are not high enough. If a company is able to gain more than it needs, why not giving this to the employees ? If all the profits is not splitted, then we get into some kind of exploitation of the workers, meaning that they don’t get paid fully for what they accumplished. It also means that the owner of the company keeps the product of the employees’ work for himself.

To me this can be kind of right, but in the end in a free market everyone is free to choose to work for a specific company or even free to create one ! So is there really exploitation when someone is willing to work ?

And to me, I always have this problem with “everyone is 100% equal”. It is just not possible. We can (we should) get the same rights, the same duties, but in the end two person will be different, even if only by their choices. Someone may want to get a nice quiet job and the other may want to create a huge company to take over the world.

So why not letting people do what they want? If I want to create a company and if people are willing to join me by working for me or partnering up, why not let all that be? I want to have total liberty over what I do of my time and what I own.

And of course, if I want to create a company, I will have to put a lot of time and work into that process. I will have to find investors, find partners… why can’t I be rewarded for that ? And if I’m not, why should I do it ? What I’m trying to say is that if people don’t see a point into creating a business, creating wealth, creating jobs, why would they do it ? Let’s be realistics here, humans are not that nice, a large majority will not kill themselves at work just to end up with the same thing as the next guy who stayed home watching TV. Some will. Most won’t.

So what to do with capitalism in all that ? Should one be able to live without doing nothing because people are working for him ? I’ll quote Bakunin :

“What is property, what is capital in their present form? For the capitalist and the property owner they mean the power and the right, guaranteed by the State, to live without working…[and so] the power and right to live by exploiting the work of someone else…those…[who are] forced to sell their productive power to the lucky owners of both.” The Political Philosophy of Bakunin

Hum. Good point… but it looks like something is missing. He’s not talking about self-made men and so on. So is that way of thinking really valid ?