LET’S imagine that you are driving along in a motor car. It’s a Rolls Royce, perhaps, something that you spent years saving-up for and consider to be one step-up from the old banger that you had in the past. Things are great, in fact you’ve never had it so good. Despite a few dangerous potholes in the road, you have reached the absolute pinnacle and the car becomes a symbol of your success.

Over time, you notice several other people driving along in a Rolls Royce motor car and you begin to resent it. In fact you become so annoyed you no longer have a monopoly on that particular model of automobile that you take it upon yourself to travel around the world and buy-up as many Rolls Royce cars as you possibly can. The only problem is, your competitors have already had the same idea and the Rolls Royce is becoming extremely scarce.

Before long, you find yourself fighting on the forecourt of a car showroom and beating the hell out of one of your rivals in a vain attempt to revive your flagging status. The potholes that you once dismissed as mere anomalies have now been transformed into fully-fledged ditches that interfere with your progress along the highway and a bunch of utter spoilsports have even taken it upon themselves to install a set of traffic lights along your favourite route. This setback seems very temporary, however, and you continue on your way at top speed until you are racing across the brow of an enormous hill.

The wind is in your hair, you’re wearing your expensive leather driving gloves, there is a beautiful woman sitting in the passenger seat and you are once again at the top of your game. At least until you discover that somebody has cut the brake-cable and you are now coursing down the other side of the hill at more than 200 kilometres per hour and likely to collide with a tree at any moment. At this point, some of your friends begin erecting the odd safety barrier to ensure that you don’t swerve off the road altogether. As if by magic, the brakes start working again and the Rolls Royce has even been fitted with a reliable air bag. “I’m going to make it,” you exclaim. “I’m really going to make it.”

Now, imagine using this little adventure as a metaphor for the progress of the West. Although there are fascists and communists who would point to the erection of the safety barrier or the sudden appearance of the damaged brake-cable as an example of their own chosen proclivities, it is clear that when the Rolls Royce passed over the summit of the hill it had already begun to move away from the peak of capitalist success and, as the descent hastened, enter into an irreversible state of decline. In other words, given that the summit of capitalism was attained back in the nineteenth century one must question why those actions designed to either undermine or soften the progress of the Rolls Royce have become so important in their own right. Surely, if one intends to overcome capitalism, it is necessary to go back to a time when the parts of the motor car had not even been assembled.

The political petrolhead-ism that one finds testing the speed limit of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, therefore, has more to do with appointing a new driver or ensuring that a new model comes rolling off the factory conveyor belt. Indeed, how can an ideology that is designed to react to capitalism at such an advanced stage ever become a worthy ideal in its own right? At least we Anarchists have the good sense to tear up the tarmac.