MOVE's worldview extended beyond individual prejudice, viewing racism as structural, embedded in institutions. This same lens applied to capitalism, critiquing money, property, and the American dream. One house. West Philadelphia. No electricity. No private bank accounts. No one's name on the deed in the way the System would recognize. Everyone working. Everyone eating from the same supply. That was MOVE's answer to capitalism. Not a theory. A daily practice. John Africa's critique went beyond poverty or inequality, condemning the entire capitalist system. The Guidelines labeled companies and industries as 'wheels of disaster' for life and the environment. That's not a reform argument. That's a rejection of the whole project. Scholars place MOVE among the early pioneers of degrowth thinking — explicitly opposing economic growth, industrial technology, and the institutions of state and capital as destructive to life itself. For John Africa, progress was a false god. Faith in it trained people to trust the very systems that damaged them. In conventional households, ownership and bills are individual responsibilities. In MOVE's communal living, these were shared, reflecting their anti-capitalist values. Members shared housing, food, and daily responsibilities as a single family unit. Consumer luxuries — cosmetics, fashionable clothing, domestic appliances — were rejected in favor of simple, nature-aligned living. Raw fruits, vegetables, nuts. Composting instead of trash pickup. Scavenging and self-reliance instead of retail dependency. The communal care of stray animals extended this logic further. Dogs and other creatures were treated as members of the community, not property. MOVE's anti-capitalism was theological, rooted in the belief that all life is equal, making capitalism a moral violation. You cannot commodify what is sacred. That means factory farming, zoos, and animal agriculture weren't separate issues. They were the same system. MOVE explicitly described its work as stopping industry from poisoning air, water, and soil and ending what it called the enslavement of life. Materialism, in The Guidelines, is treated as a root cause of addiction, disease, crime, and war. Personal consumption patterns connected directly to systemic harm. Now, IZ, here's where it gets genuinely complicated. Despite rejecting capitalism, MOVE had to navigate its infrastructure, including rent, utilities, and legal systems. The group's choice to live without electricity in urban Philadelphia was a deliberate experiment in low-energy communal living inside a high-consumption city. But that city still surrounded them. Some households stored garbage in yards and used outhouses rather than municipal plumbing — a doctrinal refusal of services tied to capitalist infrastructure. That created friction with neighbors and city officials. The purity of the principle met the reality of the grid. Remember this, IZ. MOVE's communal living was not a lifestyle preference. It was a direct challenge to private property and capitalistic competition. Scholars connect it to revolutionary Black humanism — treating clean air, water, and soil as fundamental rights, not commodities. The takeaway is that when you collectivize housing, food, labor, and identity inside a disciplined community, you strip away the ego markers capitalism depends on. That is genuinely radical. It also concentrates enormous pressure on the people inside. Both things are true. And that pressure is exactly what the next chapter of this story examines.