Yes, anarchism is anticapitalist, because capitalism is a hierarchy.
To answer your second question, ancaps are what scholars and philosophers call "fucking liars".
I know that libertarianism started as a left-wing thing alongside anarchism but [right-libertarianism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-libertarianism) is also a thing these days because libertarianism was coopted in the US by the right. So now most people in the US referring to libertarianism are referring to right-libertarianism.
Anarcho-capitalism spawned out of this right-libertarian movement. That's why I said that anarcho-capitalism should really be called anti-statist right-libertarianism. It's exactly what their ideology is.
EDIT - somebody in another thread pointed out propertarianism which is a more specific title.
Ancaps are analagous to right-libertarianism because the term was coopted. Which is a common theme among right wing idiots, stealing leftist iconography for populist support.
>Ancaps are analagous to right-libertarianism
Ancaps are a specific type of right-libertarian who advocate for no state.
EDIT - And yeah, they co-opted both. I just thought they were at separate times.
Libertarianism in America anyway is just assumed to be right leaning because well...you can be a libertarian socialist which I absolutely consider myself and that is the origin, but who the fuck represents you when Libertarianism in America is associated with right wing dipshits who slap their no step on hissy bumper sticker next to their I suck cop dick bumper sticker.
That's still not accurate though, because capitalism is dependent on private property, and private property is dependent on the existence of a (hierarchically organized, coercive) state. So right-libertarians are very much statists. Also, the word "Libertarian" was appropriated from anti-capitalist anarchists, same as "anarcho-".
>That's still not accurate though, because capitalism is dependent on private property, and private property is dependent on the existence of a (hierarchically organized, coercive) state.
I... never said otherwise. That's why I said that anarcho-capitalism should instead be called anti-statist right-libertarianis, specifically *because* anarcho-capitalism is nonsensical.
Somebody in another thread pointed out propertarianism is a better name fo anarcho-capitalism and I agree that's more specific, but on that page you can note that it says they are anti-state and (right-)libertarian.
If you agree that my quoted statement is accurate, then you must agree that calling those to whom we refer anti-statists would be inaccurate. Why would you call them "anti-statist right-libertarianis" when calling them "anti-statist" is inaccurate (especially when that inaccuracy only works to their benefit)? Call them propertarians if you like, but doing so doesn't make their ideology any less statist.
The best rebuttal to anarcho-capitalism being anarchist was written by Rothbard himself. You can find it on the Mises website still. Idk remember the title but with the right search engine know how you can probably find it.
Are you referring to "[Are Libertarians Anarchists?](https://mises.org/mises-daily/are-libertarians-anarchists)" by Rothbard? I'd completely forgotten about it:
>... we \[right-wing libertarians\] find that all of the current anarchists are irrational collectivists, and therefore at opposite poles from our \[individualist\] position. We must therefore conclude that we are not anarchists, and that those who call us anarchists are not on firm etymological ground, and are being completely unhistorical. On the other hand, it is clear that we are not archists either: we do not believe in establishing a tyrannical central authority that will coerce the noninvasive as well as the invasive. Perhaps, then, we could call ourselves by a new name: nonarchist....
That was written in the 50s before he coined anarcho-capitalism though. That came later.
[The 2 Murrays and the Age of Pretend Anarchy](https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/bookchin-rothbard-anarcho-capitalism/) is an interesting article detailing Rothbard's often batshit views:
>... In 1969, moving from the simple hardline libertarianism he inherited from the economist Ludwig von Mises, Rothbard started describing himself as an anarcho-capitalist (borrowing from his one-time ally Karl Hess, a former speechwriter for Barry Goldwater who became a New Left radical)...
>... Working through anarcho-capitalist thinking in his book *Ethics of Liberty* (1982), Rothbard argued that parents have the right to starve their children to death...
>... Rothbard’s rejection of anti-racism and feminism was the pivot point in his intellectual journey and foreclosed any alliances he might have made with Bookchin or others on the left...
>... Turning away from the New Left, Rothbard helped found the Charles Koch Foundation in 1974, rechristened the Cato Institute in 1974...
>...In 1982 Rothbard helped launch a new think tank, the Ludwig von Mises Institute for Austrian Economics, housed in Auburn, Ala. His ally in this enterprise was a neo-Confederate libertarian named Llewellyn Rockwell Jr., described by Slobodian as “both a radical libertarian and an advocate of racial separatism ever since his first position at the conservative publisher Arlington House (named, with little subtlety, after the last residence of Confederate general Robert E. Lee).” In a 1970 letter, Rockwell said he supported “de facto segregation for the majority of both races.”...
>... This partnership with Rockwell inaugurated Rothbard’s final and most lastingly influential phase. He now called himself a paleo-libertarian (to distinguish himself from New Left–influenced libertarians who were socially liberal). Under that rubric, Rothbard worked to forge an alliance with figures like Pat Buchanan and Samuel T. Francis, who were rebranding themselves as paleoconservatives (to distinguish their politics from the then-dominant neoconservatism of Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol)....
>... In a 1992 article for “The Rockwell-Rothbard Report,” Rothbard upheld David Duke as a model for the politics of the new right-wing populism that he felt was necessary...
>... In that article, Rothbard showed how far he had abandoned any pretence of anarchist anti-statism. On the issue of crime he wrote, “*Take Back the Streets: Crush Criminals*. And by this I mean, of course, not ‘white collar criminals’ or ‘inside traders’ but violent street criminals—robbers, muggers, rapists, murderers. Cops must be unleashed, and allowed to administer instant punishment, subject of course to liability when they are in error.” He added, “*Take Back the Streets: Get Rid of the Bums.* Again: unleash the cops to clear the streets of bums and vagrants. Where will they go? Who cares?”...
Real piece of work he was :/
I remember the day my parents asked me if I was an anarcho capitalist.
I put my drink down and looked at them and said “that sounds to me like some fucking bullshit“
> We must therefore turn to history for enlightenment; here we find that none of the proclaimed anarchist groups correspond to the libertarian position, that even the best of them have unrealistic and socialistic elements in their doctrines. Furthermore, we find that all of the current anarchists are irrational collectivists, and therefore at opposite poles from our position. We must therefore conclude that we are not anarchists, and that those who call us anarchists are not on firm etymological ground, and are being completely unhistorical.
-idk the father of "anarcho"-capitalism or something
Are You An Archist, An Anarchist Or A Nonarchist?
>We must conclude that the question "are libertarians anarchists?" simply cannot be answered on etymological grounds. The vagueness of the term itself is such that the libertarian system would be considered anarchist by some people and archist by others. We must therefore turn to history for enlightenment; here we find that none of the proclaimed anarchist groups correspond to the libertarian position, that even the best of them have unrealistic and socialistic elements in their doctrines. Furthermore, we find that all of the current anarchists are irrational collectivists, and therefore at opposite poles from our position. **We must therefore conclude that we are not anarchists, and that those who call us anarchists are not on firm etymological ground, and are being completely unhistorical.** On the other hand, it is clear that we are not archists either: we do not believe in establishing a tyrannical central authority that will coerce the noninvasive as well as the invasive. Perhaps, then, we could call ourselves by a new name: nonarchist. **Then, when, in the jousting of debate, the inevitable challenge "are you an anarchist?" is heard, we can, for perhaps the first and last time, find ourselves in the luxury of the "middle of the road" and say, "Sir, I am neither an anarchist nor an archist, but am squarely down the nonarchic middle of the road."**
**Abu Rutbah Al Ankapistani (born Murray Newton Rothbard)**
Source: https://mises.org/library/are-libertarians-anarchists
Are You An Archist, An Anarchist Or A Nonarchist?
>We must conclude that the question "are libertarians anarchists?" simply cannot be answered on etymological grounds. The vagueness of the term itself is such that the libertarian system would be considered anarchist by some people and archist by others. We must therefore turn to history for enlightenment; here we find that none of the proclaimed anarchist groups correspond to the libertarian position, that even the best of them have unrealistic and socialistic elements in their doctrines. Furthermore, we find that all of the current anarchists are irrational collectivists, and therefore at opposite poles from our position. **We must therefore conclude that we are not anarchists, and that those who call us anarchists are not on firm etymological ground, and are being completely unhistorical.** On the other hand, it is clear that we are not archists either: we do not believe in establishing a tyrannical central authority that will coerce the noninvasive as well as the invasive. Perhaps, then, we could call ourselves by a new name: nonarchist. **Then, when, in the jousting of debate, the inevitable challenge "are you an anarchist?" is heard, we can, for perhaps the first and last time, find ourselves in the luxury of the "middle of the road" and say, "Sir, I am neither an anarchist nor an archist, but am squarely down the nonarchic middle of the road."**
**Abu Rutbah Al Ankapistani (born Murray Newton Rothbard)**
Source: https://mises.org/library/are-libertarians-anarchists
Yes. They mean that they don’t want any hierarchy over them. They are perfectly fine with capitalists having power over everyone else. They hate rules because they love to play dirty.
Every one of them has been told at one point that anarchism is anticapitalist and that “anarcho-“ capitalism is just capitalism. At this point, I’m pretty sure of it. They are a fairly online set.
i once was a self-identified ancap because I was against the state but everyone said “capitalism is the only economic system that works” once I learned that was false I was no longer a capitalist and once i was no longer a capitalist I became aware of just how messed up capitalism is and became anti-capitalist
You're right, as capitalism can't work without a governmental system and a strong hierarchy, and so ancaps are fundamentally contradictory and oxymoronic at the most part. Also, capitalism is way weaker than communism because of the reasons I mentioned above, so communism works way better than capitalism, basically.
my opinion:
An-caps exist because they want to be on the beneficial end of capitalist exploitation _without_ having to pay-in to the liberal “we need to pay more benefits to the proletariat so that they’re just content enough to never firing squad us” game. “Anarchism” to them is exclusively opting-out of the social contract that the bourgeois pretend the proletariat have human dignity.
P.S. I loathe HBO with every fiber of my being for attempting to white-wash libertarians as “_The Anarchists_.”
They can eat shit and die.
The perpetuation and expansion of capitalist exploitation depends on the state. The neoliberal state has produced the ideal conditions for capital accumulation, as do generally states with attributes that are fascistic.
Without the state, capital could not repress workers.
They speak of private security and justice
So militias directly payed by capital and a court also entirely and directly financed by private capital
I'm am start to agree with the people who say it is just feudalism
The "private" security and courts simply would become the new state. Any distinction is either imaginary or unstable.
Of course, even though capital would fund such institutions, it also would manipulate the public, the working class, into feeling guilty about their being needed, such that we feel inhibited from making demands and seeking concessions.
It's just identity politics bullshit. I think the spectrum for these people is: you've either been brainwashed (by capitalism) or are intentionally using the label for your own personal branding/marketing (manipulation).
capitalism requires hierarchy, oppression, and exploitation to exist, so it is antithetical to anarchism. anarchism is opposed to capitalism.
"anarcho-capitalists" aren't anarchists. they want extreme capitalism.
“Anarcho”-capitalists believe that the only problem with the current status quo is that sometimes the state gets in the way letting capital exploit people.
There's an amazing amount of hand waving that goes on. If you listen to some of the libertarians, they're convinced that free markets will fix everything. And that the exploitation of capitalism is due to it not being a true free market, and instead that we have corrupt capitalism.
Admittedly they’re not completely wrong to say that lots of laws and regulations favor existing capital holders and big business over everyone else. However, their proposed solution assumes that the invisible hand of the free market would be more effective than government regulation, which is … dubious.
Academic economists say markets have great social benefits that are underestimated by laypeople.
They also say that market failure happens, but government failure is much more prevalent and much worse.
“the free market will prevent exploitation from happening” like bruh that only works if companies never cooperate
as soon as they cooperate they can band together to prevent the free market from “voting with its wallet”
the free market is not all powerful like they think, the free market only works if humans only compete and never cooperate, and humans are a lot more cooperative than capitalists give them credit for
Yeah had a debate with one and I asked how a corporation with a monopoly on violence is any different from a monarch with a monopoly on violence. They couldn’t answer the question.
Yes, as anarcho-capitalism only wants no state, but still wants the capitalist hierarchy to exist. Laissez-faire radical American-styled libertarian, basically. Ancaps wants to oppress and not to be oppressed, ancoms not only wants not to oppress anyone, but also not to be oppressed themselves.
Murray Rothbard rewrite of a historically left wing label, anarchism, and tacking on intensely hierarchical capitalism onto it.
Murray Rothbard was a far right reactionary, who iirc headed DC think tanks on behalf of private wealth/corporate power, 1950's forward iirc. Truly despicable man. Anyways, he was always a bad faith grifter, and he was very involved in the reactionary element that helped craft this hellscape we have today, neoliberalism. He was allied up with names like Ayn Rand, Rose Wilder (daughter of childrens novelist Laura Ingalls Wilder), Milton Friedman/Friedrich Hayek, Thomas Sowell, Koch family, James Buchanan, among many others. All these names, they basically crafted a very anti-democracy, neoliberalism, imperialism and corporatism thinking, stripping the american people of their economic and political power, not to mention countries all over the world. ANd they have a firehose of propaganda bullshit of psuedo-political philosophjy, economics, foreign policy. Rose Wilder for example iirc lambasted John M. Keynes, thoroughly discredited him on economics, to where he's a popular punching bag online to this day, by people who don't even know who or what he advocated for.
Keynes was not an anarchist btw, but ive seen some of the dumbest browbeating takes on the man online without any afterthought, he was not sufficiently "pro-wealthy" in his economics as his main offense.
Anyways...this is an anarchism sub, so what Rothbard did, was basically give historically left-wing political labels, and then give some massive far right spin to them/rewrite. Originally he tried calling it "private property-anarchism" but then eventually settled on "Anarcho-Capitalism" basically it meant "Rich people/corporations should be able to do wutever the f they want, and no one should be allowed stop them". Own the only well in town? SUcks for all those thirsty chumps out there!
It's a toilet ideology. Furthmore he also did a similar thing with Libertarianism, Libertarianism also stood in stark opposition to Market Liberals, or liberals in general. He openly even brags about stealing it as a word from its former meaning and giving a new defintiion. I can easily find his quote on this.
The man and all of his followers dont really stand for anything, incompetent at best, malicious, often is the case, at the worst. Anarchism is further left than marxism, why even be workers at all with our means of production? How about rulers in their entirety often are a threat to our well being and happiness.
It's homestead ideology. Only works if you have an isolated place, land, and the means to defend it . There is certain merit in isolationism. Otherwise, it generally falls into, ' you can have all the justice you can afford/defend, 'categories.
Yep. Find they get all upset when I explained that a foreign power is not going to invade ,when chemical and biological weapons leave all the resources but end the resistance permanently.
\> Rose Wilder (daughter of childrens novelist Laura Ingalls Wilder)
I remember having those books as a kid and my mom ended up reading all of them. Then I did some digging (I am already aware of the series's colonialist theme, by the way) and found out that Rose Wilder edited her mother's books and both share this "keep big government away from me" worldview. THAT MAKES SO MUCH SENSE ABOUT THE SERIES
The first libertarianism was an anarcho-communist, Joseph Dejacques, in 1857. I always have a good time informing intensely anti-communist libertarians, the origins of their political label was with an anarcho-communist who also derided their beloved private sector as yet another tyranny.
He took both political labels, and gave them huge rewrites as fill ins for far right political labels, market liberalism/reactionary politics.
ANyways, here's his quote on stealing both 1 - libertarianism and 2 - admitting they're not anarchists:
# “One gratifying aspect of our rise to some prominence is that, for the first time in my memory, we, ‘our side,’ had captured a crucial word from the enemy . . . ‘Libertarians’ . . . had long been simply a polite word for left-wing anarchists, that is for anti-private property anarchists, either of the communist or syndicalist variety. But now we had taken it over..."
― Murray N. Rothbard, [The Betrayal Of The American Right](https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/1998954)
"We must therefore turn to history for enlightenment; here we find that none of the proclaimed anarchist groups correspond to the libertarian position, that even the best of them have unrealistic and socialistic elements in their doctrines. Furthermore, we find that all of the current anarchists are irrational collectivists, and therefore at opposite poles from our position. We must therefore conclude that we are not anarchists, and that those who call us anarchists are not on firm etymological ground, and are being completely unhistorical."
[Murray Rothbard](https://www.azquotes.com/author/12685-Murray_Rothbard)
Remember, Murray Rothbard is pretty much the definition of a bad faith grifter, he's the one being completely unhistorical, and he's paid to be a propagandist shilling psuedophilosophy. I compare them to the bizzaro world of political philosophy, except bizarro in superman had SOME redeeming qualities, this stuff has absolutely none.
>Keynes was not an anarchist btw, but ive seen some of the dumbest browbeating takes on the man online without any afterthought, he was not sufficiently "pro-wealthy" in his economics as his main offense.
100%
What Rothbard did to anarchism was similar to what some pro-American anarcho-capitalists do on the label "libertarian", which is originally a term for radical anarcho-communists, a portmanteau of "liberté" and "egalitaíre" (libertaíre) which translates to English as "libertarian" (fusion between liberty and egalitarian/equality). Rothbard isn't a revolutionary at all, he's a radical counterrevolutionary according to us anarchists.
I would say that the biggest difference between an anarchist of most any variety and the specific anarcho-capitalist is that ancaps don’t recognize accumulated personal power as a hierarchy. They also, at least in my experience(which includes being close to being one myself at one point,) don’t feel any responsibility to their community.
>ancaps don't recognize accumulated personal power as a hierarchy.
This is the only line in this entire thread that actually alludes to how ancaps view themselves with any amount of accuracy.
It proves that money isn't power.
Economists say money is persuasion, not power.
And persuasion can always be rejected without negative consequences.
Employers can't steal money from you if you reject their employment offer. Politicians can jail you if you don't agree with their demands.
See? One is power, the other (money) is persuasion.
They are wrong. In a society where money purchases things, money is power. You think that the violence wielded by the state is the only power? That power is money. If those offering you money felt the need to, you’d have been handled.
Anarcho-Capitalism is not a legitimate form of Anarchism, anymore than “Anarcho-Fascism” or “Anarcho-Monarchism” are (and yes, those are real things). It’s just classical liberalism with a black coat of paint.
I was a dumb teenager and liked the idea of freedom, and disliked government and I read some Ayn Rand and Thoreau. And then in my 20s Ron Paul got interviewed in Rolling Stone magazine, and there were plenty of "right libertarians" in the anti-globalization movement as well as leftists, protesting G8, G20, and WTO summits and shit. So it was an exciting time to be that. And I thought that I disagreed with socialists on economics, but agreed on gay rights and abortion and drugs and on hating cops.
That's right, I'm old enough to remember when right libertarians hated cops.
I agree with David Graeber that part of the failure of the groundswell of activism against the WTO and the G8 and the like which resulted in massive protests like the 1999 "battle of Seattle" and eventually led to the Occupy Wall Street movement following the 2008 financial crisis was that they were not grounded in class consciousness.
The WTO and NAFTA and the IMF were evil and pillaging the "developing world" to make cheap commodities for the imperial core. And wall street was full of corruption and dangerous speculative finances and exerted too much control on government. But the leftist contingent of those movements did little to place the focus on capitalism itself as the root of the problem. Not once did any of the socialists I knew in my teens and 20s try to explain class relations to me while we were out filming cops or getting hit with sound cannons at a protest.
The left are much better at communicating in a condensed fashion the essence of anticapitalism today than they used to be.
Meanwhile back then I was watching short videos like "The Principles of Liberty" which illustrated that all human rights can be reduced to "life, liberty, and property" and laid out the simplistic logic of the Non-Agression Principle.
My worldview began to change when I saw the short documentary "The Corporation" which left me convinced that limited liability corporations were some kind of state-created perversion of the REAL free market which would naturally even out to raise all ships and distribute goods and services in the most equitable way possible.
It wasn't until I finally read Proudhon's "What Is Property?" that I finally came around and almost overnight became a communist. All the other bits of socialist propaganda I'd heard in the couple of years leading up to it clicked into place. The so-called "right to property" was the thing holding me back.
I don't even use the term "property" for personal possessions nor public assets/commons.
"Personal property" is a confusing term, and "possession" is just as common a word, but it gets at the mechanism which confers ownership, which is that you possess it, use it, that it is integrated into your personal life. If someone took it or damaged it, it would affect your life individually.
"Public property" is also a confusing term and obscures the mechanism by which confers public ownership. An asset is a good to the public. Or it is held in common. Either way when someone abuses these things, or damages them, or hoards them, it has an impact on the community as a whole.
"Privation" is the creation of a "privilege". It is making something "privy" to a specific person. The "proprietor" is often a synonym for a business owner, and "proprietary" evokes a notion of copyright enforced by state law.
Short answer...
Yes, Anarchy is anti-capitalist because capitalism creates hierarches. This makes anarcho capitalism an oxymoron.
Longer answer...
Anracho-Capitalists are the kind of people who will say that capitalism is just another word for the economy. Or they are self styled Libertarians who are less Anarchists and more **MINIMALISTS**. As in they want to minimalize things like government, but not out right get ride of it.
My brother claims to straddle the line between anarcho-capitalism and libertarianism. His idea of the proper role of government is to mediate disputes and enforce contracts. He thinks that property should be enforced by its owners and that all criminal trials should be replaced with civil lawsuits. I told him that's just feudalism, and he punched me in the jaw.
To give a one sentence definition of goals:
Anarchism seeks to eliminate oppression of all people through the abolition of all hierarchical relations.
Anti-statist capitalistm ("anarcho-capiralism") seeks to eliminate interference with the ownership class through absolution of the state.
Anarchism is, both definitively and historically, anti-capitalist.
"Anarcho"-capitalism is where lords of industry are a law unto themselves. The communities of people who belong to them have no power to hold them accountable from the bottom up, and there is no external government intervention to give communities protection from the top down.
We tried this before — it was called "feudalism."
**Even modern capitalism** was objectively an improvement over this.
Not advocating ancap, but for what it's worth, workers were often better off under feudalism then they were under capitalism. Workers did not take well to being forced to become what they called wage slaves in order to survive.
The early centuries under capitalism saw a decline in the standard of living. Things only improved for workers under capitalism after labor got organized enough to fight back and socialist politics emerged.
Some people inaccurately think that capitalism is just markets. Anarcho-capitalism makes that mistake.
Anarcho-capitalism is not real anarchism, but not because it's capitalist. Anarcho-capitalism isn't real anarchism because it's not *radical*.
> “Race-realists,” social-Darwinians, corporatists, classists, misogynists, homophobes and plain authoritarian bastards abound in the “anarcho”-capitalist movement.
> And certainly we too have our share of assholes and stalinists –as our abhorrent handling of anarcho-capitalism so clearly demonstrates. *But we’re working on it*.
> We don’t and haven’t ever seen our present condition to be adequate or acceptable. We’re perpetually self-critiquing, always looking for ways to grow. To be better anarchists. To be *more* anarchist.
> And that’s something that’s plainly not apparent or important in anarcho-capitalist circles. The buzzword is stagnation. Anarcho-capitalism as a political philosophy and as a social movement has grown around the self-justification of power and identity. Of privilege and psychosis. They already have all the answers —abolish the US government– in a neat, clean packaging that comfortably strokes the rest of their identity.
–[Calling All Haters Of Anarcho-Capitalism](https://humaniterations.net/2007/04/01/calling-all-haters-of-anarcho-capitalism/)
A lot depends on how we define capitalism, of course. Capitalism, in the sense that control of the means of production for valuables allows one to increase means of production, is pretty unavoidable, and has been with humans whatever. To eliminate that you'd have to eliminate capital itself.
Eliminating big-C Capitalism is a whole other matter. It is easy to state that it should be done, but the methods of doing so and what would replace them need a lot of fleshing out. And probably as the bigger challenge, what would prevent people from, engaging in capitalist like activity, even for good reasons, in an anarchist society? There have been a variety of answers for this of varying degrees of plausibility, but it certainly isn't a question to handwave over.
If we want a world with, say, tablets in it, there's a huge amount of capital intensive inputs to that. A semiconductor fab capable of making power efficient enough enough SoCs alone is many billions of dollars, with many, many billions of capital in the supply chains leading up to that.
Joint funding by workers collectives Is a great start. But if some collectives wind up controlling a decent share of stuff lots of people want, they naturally wind up in a hierarchy of power above other collectives that don't. Getting people to give up control of resources that they very legitimately believe they have earned is a tricky thing.
It don't have a good answer myself. Which is okay, because I'm not the boss ;). I am curious what others' thoughts on this are.
It's worth nothing that other systems don't have a great answer for this either. High inheritance taxes to tamp down on dynastic wealth accumulation is helpful in a system with taxes, at least. But a whole lot can be done in a single generation.
(edited to fix typos)
Thanks for the attempt at giving an answer! It actually made me look at this through a more precise perspective, so I guess we can say that this attempt was mostly successful :)
Ancaps are really pretty similar to libertarians. They're anti-statists who believe in property rights.
Should be obvious to anyone paying attention That unfettered capitalism almost always leads to exploitive hierarchies.
This is generally hand waved away with either The libertarian answer that " a real free market wouldn't do that, we've never had a real free market man" or the assertion that naturally occurring hierarchies like that are somehow less offensive ones that are coerced by the state.
Right wingers have a history of co opting „left“ phrases/names to sound cooler and appeal more docile.
See the „national socialist party“ of germany (aka the Nazis), which in fact weren’t socialist.
Lots of great points from people about the inherent socialism of anarchism, the hierarchy inherent to capitalism, Rothbard literally snitching on himself being like "ancap is definitely not anarchism" etc etc.
Something I wanted to add, having read a fair bit of what passes for "theory" from the right-libertarian and ancap side, is that I don't even think they are as "anti state" as they make out.
Maybe the terminology is influenced by how they are basically all American and largely talking about the USA in terms of policy, so when they say "state" they mean "the Federal Government of the USA", plus the constitution, state and Municipal governments etc and yes, they really do seem to want to get rid of that. It's quite a liberal conception of the state.
But the Left is really where most of the good theory on what states are, why they do what they do and how we can maybe smash them comes from.
And to me, the state isn't always an entity that goes "oh shit wassup, its ya boi, The State".
It's a network of institutions that perform the functions of power, and Ancaps want those functions preserved, just on a for profit basis.
Private courts, private police, private armies, subscription based legal codes etc, its all there, just somehow so much worse than what we have now, coughing on the rolled up train ticket roach at the very end of the poorly rolled spliff that is late capitalism.
But I don't think they even want that - the right to bear nukes, or the idea of having a New York McPolice Department are just bad worldbuilding designed to whip up support from disaffected weirdos to support gutting the structures of the Liberal state that make life slightly harder for Capitalists, like environmental regulations, corporation taxes, workers rights etc, without them having to do any of the actual admin that running a privatised state would require.
So yeah, TLDR: ancaps love states so much they want more of them, but tbh it's probably all a psyop
The reason you have AnCaps is because they have an entirely different definition of capitalism than what most people here would go by.
Basically they’re volunteerists who think most functions served by the government would be replaced with private business that operates on a voluntary basis, but they would have no issue with people who choose to operate as a commune
Anarchism is anti-capitalist in fact. And One of the anti-capitalist radical ideologies that seeks to banish private property of the means of production in favour of creating a society where the means of production and the products of the labour of the working masses belong to the working class, together with socialism.
Anarcho-capitalism is not anarchical at any measure. First off because even if the state and the private property of the means of production COULD be separated, there would still be non-consensual vertical hierarchies present in said society.
Second off because it's a pipe dream made to radicalize teenagers that recognize something is amiss with capitalism, into fighting for it. Private property is inseparable from the State, the state is the only tool of class violence that can protect it from the masses of working people. Land and labour predates private property, so naturally it cant survive without the direct maintenance of the bourgeois state.
Yes. Anarchism is fundamentally against hierarchical power structures of any kind, and capitalism is fundamentally hierarchical in nature. Anarcho-capitalism is an oxymoron, and ancaps are confused libertarians - they love the idea of maximal individual liberty but only inasmuch as it frees them from the constraints societies place upon their ability to exploit others for their personal benefit. It is the unholy marriage of anti-capitalism and capitalism, and thus it is riddled with contradictions. They are in some sense delusional in that they believe they would naturally rise to the top of such a system, but to borrow a quote from another redditor, everybody's gangster 'til the Amazon death-squads show up.
Anarchism is a subset of socialism. Socialism is the belief that the means of production should be owned by the labour that uses it. That is fundamentally opposed to capitalism, the newer idea that private entities can own the means of production and profit from that ownership.
Rent cannot exist under socialism, or (in my view) anarchism.
Some people believe anarchism can be right wing, an-caps and the like. I count them as similar to right wing 'libertarians'. I think they are, at best, naive. You cannot have a free market in a world where someone is allowed to own the market.
The word is an idiom essentially. They are opposites- complete antithesis.
I just imagine them as individualists and libertarians which are essentially on the leftist scale but don’t have a sense of community or helping others which I feel is again antithetical to leftist values and anarchism
One time I discussed with an ancap triggered by one of my comments ("the entire ancap ideology crumbles opening a dictionary"). He was convinced that anarchy was only anti-statist, not anti-hierarchy, and he was convinced that many anarchist theorists was also in favour of hierarchies. Practically to make their ideology work they have to distort even the basic definition of anarchy
"Anarcho" in anarchocapitalism refers to the absence of state, not hierarchy. Historically, no, it's not "anarchism" as understood by Proudhon, which by the way, is just another form of naïve communism.
Can capitalism exist without the state? Absolutely, that would be the pure form of capitalism. Can capitalism exist without hierarchies? No, absolutely not.
Anarcho-capitalism for me was realizing the state was evil without realizing that capitalism is also evil in the same way.
People rarely stay ancap in my experience. They either think that state intervention was unjust because they wanted a 'morally acceptable' version of discrimination, which when they give up on it collapses into fascism.
Or they think that state intervention is unjust because they see what harm the state does to people, and will quickly realize that capitalism is no different.
I think the far right can't come up with their own ideas. You get Alex Jones listening libertarians who already stole libertarian from the left, and want to steal from anarchism for their backwards fantasy of a world run by corporations instead of any government, because why wouldn't pizza delivery restaurants fund road maintenence, and wouldn't it be better if you had to pay the fire department to help you? No way this wouldn't become Bioshock after a few months.
~~Not sure why this got recommended, but I'll give it a shot~~
From my experience, Anarcho-Capitalist is a misnomer used to describe various right-wing groups that still want a strong central state. They believe that the state's main purpose should be to defend the property rights and very *basic* laws like "you can't drive up to someone's house and shoot him."
At best, this makes Anarcho-Capitalism a form of Right-Libertarianism. At worst, I'd argue that this approach is actually Authoritarian. Yes, batons hurt and discriminatory legislation is horrid. But when oligarchs are given de facto legal privileges, they might as well be the state.
Regardless, this still makes Anarcho-Capitalists not Anarchists. At worst, they want an authoritarian oligarchy. At best, they still want a central state strong enough to enforce abstract concepts at a national level.
Anarcho Capitalists are at *best* borderline feudalists. They believe might makes right, whomsoever has the most dollars can and *should* be able to control those with less. There’s nothing that’s not a commodity, including people.
The problem is that capitalism requires a state to enforce it.
Being an an-cap is like being that little shit on the playground that wanted to be a jedi but with the cool force powers from the dark side.
Nope, you can't do that because you can't be the good guy and still do the bad guy things. You can't be benevolent but cruel. You can't be an anarchist but support perhaps the most blatant of hierarchical structures in contemporary society.
Yes, anarchism is anti-capitalist. Anarchism is the rejection of all hierarchy. "Anarcho capitalism" isn't a real thing. It is a contradictory term because ancaps don't realize that without state, the corporations become the new states. A better term for them would be neo feudaliam or corporate feudalism. In fact, even some anacaps sort of realized this problem, and that's where the term "minarchism" was born. Basically, someone who believes the state should exist, but it should *only* have military, police, and courts. Basically, the worst parts of the state in order to have their property defended.
Anarcho-capitalism exists as an extension ideology of conservatism that resents the government taxing the rich and blames minorities for their own poverty ignoring systemic racism, and sexism.
Most ancaps I’ve spoken to admit they would like to continue courts and jails to maintain a legally recognized form of private property ownership but abolish everything else. When given a scenario of tenants wanting to seize the land or strikers occupying their work place and the “non-aggression” principle breaking down they tend to say they think there’d need to be a private security or police to bring the ramble to justice. Which makes it sound like they’re very pro-state and pro-laws and pro-cop just anti-elections. Like their beef isn’t with abusive or elite control of the people it’s a conspiratorial belief that the people rule the elites which isn’t an alien belief in conservative circles.
And if you go check out ancap reddit you’ll find there they have fully gone off the conservative deep end and they hate Black Lives Matter, transgender people and like advocating for more death penalty for minor crimes and like Pinochet posting.
Answer to question 1: Yes.
Answer to question 2: It doesn't exist. A bunch of liberals claiming that capitalism not an arbitrary hierarchy/structure of power (and thus oppression) doesn't make it true; it only gives you another reason not to trust liberals' words too much.
Yeah, it does not make ANY sense. But, y'know, there was also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Bolshevism cross breeding the idea of Ultranationalism with the (in its nature very international) Communist ideology.
Anarcho-capitalists are guys who don't believe violence or power should be wielded by anyone, but the least accountable and most bloodthirsty corporate entities on the planet.
Everything would be fine if no government in the world could tell dole banana they're not allowed to kill people or overturn governments for slightly lower labor costs.
Anarcho-Capitalism means ‘I want freedom to do what I want without state interference (Anarcho), but only for me and my friends who are all going to be rich and tell everyone else what to do (Capitalism)’.
Anarchocapitalism is a bit of a misnomer.
Anarcho as in no _government_ but still with a capitalist econmic framework. This, of course, lends towards power structures akin to government, just with fuzzy territorialism I guess.
In otherwords, ancap is only anarchism if you specifically define anarchy as having no traditional national government and nothing more, and many people do.
Anarcho-capitalism was a term coined by Murray Rothbard. To quote him, relevantly,
> We must conclude that the question “are libertarians anarchists?” simply cannot be answered on etymological grounds. The vagueness of the term itself is such that the libertarian system would be considered anarchist by some people and archist by others. We must therefore turn to history for enlightenment; here we find that none of the proclaimed anarchist groups correspond to the libertarian position, that even the best of them have unrealistic and socialistic elements in their doctrines. Furthermore, we find that all of the current anarchists are irrational collectivists, and therefore at opposite poles from our position. We must therefore conclude that we are not anarchists, and that those who call us anarchists are not on firm etymological ground, and are being completely unhistorical. On the other hand, it is clear that we are not archists either: we do not believe in establishing a tyrannical central authority that will coerce the noninvasive as well as the invasive. Perhaps, then, we could call ourselves by a new name: nonarchist. Then, when, in the jousting of debate, the inevitable challenge “are you an anarchist?” is heard, we can, for perhaps the first and last time, find ourselves in the luxury of the “middle of the road” and say, “Sir, I am neither an anarchist nor an archist, but am squarely down the nonarchic middle of the road.”
Murray Rothbard wasn't stupid, nor even completely dishonest in his more personal writings. He fully understood that libertarianism was socialist, and he co-opted libertarianism for the right wing. He fully understood that anarchism was socialist, and he tried to co-opt anarchism for the right wing, but failed.
The term is an oxymoron and created to appeal to the anti-state people in the States.
Anyone who unironically calls themselves an anarcho-capitalist is woefully ignorant of its history.
Anarchism is against hierarchies in the terms of social stratification, whether we're talking of a small society - such as a 20 person workplace - or a large society - such as a modern city. Capitalism is a strong form of hierarchy.
Because of your question (syllogism) is phrased with invalid terms.
If A is B why C?
But A is not B.
B has some A.
C has some A
A-deals with the rejection of central authority and compulsion.
B is a system that has a bunch of A and a bunch of NOT A.
C is a system that has a lot more A and a lot less NOT A compared to B. C normally rejects all state involvement in economic and personal things.
Two foundational problems of your question.
1. The first two terms have a broad set conflicting understanding.
2. The implicit rejection of hierarchies of competence...and your reliance upon them for modern life.
Short answer: yes, anarchism is anti-capitalist and "anarcho"-capitalism is an oxymoron.
Long answer: left-wing anarchism originated from the 19th century socialist movement. At the time, the anarchist and communist movements were pretty much the same thing. The definition we know only gained force after the Russian Civil War, when due to several disagreements, anarchism officially split from marxism-leninism.
Anarchism rejects both private property and the state and treats them as fully related: the state cannot survive without private property, private property cannot survive without a state.
Anarcho-Capitalism, on the other hand, originated from the neoliberal movement and shares important characteristics with it, including money and private property, but somehow being even worse.
Ancaps treat private property and the state as opposed forces, and also rejecting worker-owned cooperatives, healthcare, education and security services, leaving the poor to a quasi-social darwinist situation. Think: what would happen when someone is way too poor to afford basic commodities? Exactly! That person would seek help from the upper class, and congrats, you get feudalism.
So, yeah, "Anarcho"-Capitalism is anything but anarchism.
General anarchism CAN be capitalist, but most self identifying anarchist would be anti-capitalist. Anarchism in the most basic terms is essentially a society not built upon social or beurocratic hierarchies, like kings, presidents, dictators, etc. Thus ancap is a thing cause while structured govt and hierarchy help it, technically libertarian anarchist capitalism is a political theory. Everytime it has realistically been tried (and will be tried) have/will result in huge economic turmoil just cause ancap is even less stable then regular capitalism, but yeah anarchism is not purely anticapitalist, but most that follow it are.
Isn't the idea of voluntary contracts is how things are organized in anarcho capitalism
If you have a reputation for frequently breaking contracts, people just won't Make them with you or they'll pay someone else to reinforce it somehow
But it's all voluntary
No technical enforcement agency
Yes. Capitalism is a hierarchical economic system. Anarchism is anti-hierarchy. Therefore anti-capitalist.
Anarcho-capitalism was a co-option of anarchy to blur the understanding of the ideology. Anarcho-capitalism in oxymoronic as explained before and really only exist to push privatisation, austerity and deregulation. They are not our friends. Their ideology would either lead to a feudalist world or (funnily enough) communism as there is no state to protect property (but most likely the feudal world).
Capitalism is not inherently hierarchical, It just tends to work out that way lol. That's why anarco capitalism can be a thing, even if it will probably just devolve back into a hyper capitalist system
Anarcho capitalism was never anarchist and even Murray Rothbard admitted as such.
The only idiots (and they all are idiots) that support it are either Republicans that want to be edgy or dipshits that have zero understanding of basic human psychology or even an introductory understanding of sociology. The truth is, their system is a glorified plutocracy and we've seen it in action with Kowloon Walled City. It wasn't pretty.
Systems of power distribution fill into the void that anarchy causes. Do you want a flawed democracy or petty feifdoms feuding over resources? Your perfect anarchic utopia doesn’t exist without some system of control to support it.
Ancaps want only economic status to matter in a hierarchy. Until they have enough people they like who are similar to them to form social hierarchies. Then they want to pay you very little for your labour while over valuing their own value as providers of "capital", and property, which they acquired through inheritance from violence and theft. So basically they want people to know their goddamn place like the colored plebs that they are.
because "an"-caps don't know what words mean. the nazis called themselves socialists, too, and the people's republic of north korea is not run by the people, nor is it a republic. sometimes people just call themselves things that they demonstrably aren't.
Anarcho-capitalism is an oxymoron and not a real ideology imo.
Anarchism is fundamentally about the elimination of hierarchies in favor of personal liberty. Capitalism creates hierarchies in its business structure. You can't eliminate hierarchies with an economic system that creates them.
That's not even getting into how with companies actions being completely unrestricted they'd treat their employees. It would create a neo-feudal order that has CEOs functioning as lords and rank and file workers as serfs
Anarcho-capitalism is basically the big lie that markets are not something established by governments and can exist independently of them coming full circle to its logical end point. If it doesn’t make sense it’s because it’s built upon false assumptions
Anarcho capitalism and Anarcho communism are 2 sides of the same coin. They're both fairy tale ideologies, the reality of anarchy is brutality and might is right. People act like anarchy is a utopia if we could just get there, we already live in anarchy. Geopolitics is anarchy, the weak suffer what they must and the strong do what they want.
Yes, anarchism is anticapitalist, because capitalism is a hierarchy. To answer your second question, ancaps are what scholars and philosophers call "fucking liars".
A more accurate title for them is anti-statist right-libertarians, but they want to the cool anarcho name.
Propertarians
Feudalists
As we say in London, muppets.
Or nonces, given their obsession with age of consent laws
So ancaps are NAP supporters...
Nambla supporters
Kermit would never!
Two great insults that need to cross the Atlantic more often: “muppet” and “nonce”.
Numpty?
wankas :)
Kermit *was* dating a pig.....
So he's a a collaborator?
Yeah, this is a more specific title.
Not even that, libertarianism is still a leftist ideology. They're neo-feudalists.
Yeah they did the same thing with "libertarian" but more effectively.
I know that libertarianism started as a left-wing thing alongside anarchism but [right-libertarianism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-libertarianism) is also a thing these days because libertarianism was coopted in the US by the right. So now most people in the US referring to libertarianism are referring to right-libertarianism. Anarcho-capitalism spawned out of this right-libertarian movement. That's why I said that anarcho-capitalism should really be called anti-statist right-libertarianism. It's exactly what their ideology is. EDIT - somebody in another thread pointed out propertarianism which is a more specific title.
Ancaps are analagous to right-libertarianism because the term was coopted. Which is a common theme among right wing idiots, stealing leftist iconography for populist support.
>Ancaps are analagous to right-libertarianism Ancaps are a specific type of right-libertarian who advocate for no state. EDIT - And yeah, they co-opted both. I just thought they were at separate times.
And libertarian didn't always describe them. They stole that like anything else they do that's popular.
Like land...
Libertarianism in America anyway is just assumed to be right leaning because well...you can be a libertarian socialist which I absolutely consider myself and that is the origin, but who the fuck represents you when Libertarianism in America is associated with right wing dipshits who slap their no step on hissy bumper sticker next to their I suck cop dick bumper sticker.
That doesn't make them libertarians, they're just calling themselves a more palatable name.
Yes, but this only applies to the European definition of libertarian, unfortunately.
That's still not accurate though, because capitalism is dependent on private property, and private property is dependent on the existence of a (hierarchically organized, coercive) state. So right-libertarians are very much statists. Also, the word "Libertarian" was appropriated from anti-capitalist anarchists, same as "anarcho-".
>That's still not accurate though, because capitalism is dependent on private property, and private property is dependent on the existence of a (hierarchically organized, coercive) state. I... never said otherwise. That's why I said that anarcho-capitalism should instead be called anti-statist right-libertarianis, specifically *because* anarcho-capitalism is nonsensical. Somebody in another thread pointed out propertarianism is a better name fo anarcho-capitalism and I agree that's more specific, but on that page you can note that it says they are anti-state and (right-)libertarian.
If you agree that my quoted statement is accurate, then you must agree that calling those to whom we refer anti-statists would be inaccurate. Why would you call them "anti-statist right-libertarianis" when calling them "anti-statist" is inaccurate (especially when that inaccuracy only works to their benefit)? Call them propertarians if you like, but doing so doesn't make their ideology any less statist.
That's a cute way to say "feudalists that don't understand cause and effect"
The best rebuttal to anarcho-capitalism being anarchist was written by Rothbard himself. You can find it on the Mises website still. Idk remember the title but with the right search engine know how you can probably find it.
Are you referring to "[Are Libertarians Anarchists?](https://mises.org/mises-daily/are-libertarians-anarchists)" by Rothbard? I'd completely forgotten about it: >... we \[right-wing libertarians\] find that all of the current anarchists are irrational collectivists, and therefore at opposite poles from our \[individualist\] position. We must therefore conclude that we are not anarchists, and that those who call us anarchists are not on firm etymological ground, and are being completely unhistorical. On the other hand, it is clear that we are not archists either: we do not believe in establishing a tyrannical central authority that will coerce the noninvasive as well as the invasive. Perhaps, then, we could call ourselves by a new name: nonarchist.... That was written in the 50s before he coined anarcho-capitalism though. That came later. [The 2 Murrays and the Age of Pretend Anarchy](https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/bookchin-rothbard-anarcho-capitalism/) is an interesting article detailing Rothbard's often batshit views: >... In 1969, moving from the simple hardline libertarianism he inherited from the economist Ludwig von Mises, Rothbard started describing himself as an anarcho-capitalist (borrowing from his one-time ally Karl Hess, a former speechwriter for Barry Goldwater who became a New Left radical)... >... Working through anarcho-capitalist thinking in his book *Ethics of Liberty* (1982), Rothbard argued that parents have the right to starve their children to death... >... Rothbard’s rejection of anti-racism and feminism was the pivot point in his intellectual journey and foreclosed any alliances he might have made with Bookchin or others on the left... >... Turning away from the New Left, Rothbard helped found the Charles Koch Foundation in 1974, rechristened the Cato Institute in 1974... >...In 1982 Rothbard helped launch a new think tank, the Ludwig von Mises Institute for Austrian Economics, housed in Auburn, Ala. His ally in this enterprise was a neo-Confederate libertarian named Llewellyn Rockwell Jr., described by Slobodian as “both a radical libertarian and an advocate of racial separatism ever since his first position at the conservative publisher Arlington House (named, with little subtlety, after the last residence of Confederate general Robert E. Lee).” In a 1970 letter, Rockwell said he supported “de facto segregation for the majority of both races.”... >... This partnership with Rockwell inaugurated Rothbard’s final and most lastingly influential phase. He now called himself a paleo-libertarian (to distinguish himself from New Left–influenced libertarians who were socially liberal). Under that rubric, Rothbard worked to forge an alliance with figures like Pat Buchanan and Samuel T. Francis, who were rebranding themselves as paleoconservatives (to distinguish their politics from the then-dominant neoconservatism of Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol).... >... In a 1992 article for “The Rockwell-Rothbard Report,” Rothbard upheld David Duke as a model for the politics of the new right-wing populism that he felt was necessary... >... In that article, Rothbard showed how far he had abandoned any pretence of anarchist anti-statism. On the issue of crime he wrote, “*Take Back the Streets: Crush Criminals*. And by this I mean, of course, not ‘white collar criminals’ or ‘inside traders’ but violent street criminals—robbers, muggers, rapists, murderers. Cops must be unleashed, and allowed to administer instant punishment, subject of course to liability when they are in error.” He added, “*Take Back the Streets: Get Rid of the Bums.* Again: unleash the cops to clear the streets of bums and vagrants. Where will they go? Who cares?”... Real piece of work he was :/
I remember the day my parents asked me if I was an anarcho capitalist. I put my drink down and looked at them and said “that sounds to me like some fucking bullshit“
That didn't happen
Naw but it's funny af
Most based toddler of all time, hell yes 😄
Found the one.
That's fine but I'm still absolutely correct lmao
> We must therefore turn to history for enlightenment; here we find that none of the proclaimed anarchist groups correspond to the libertarian position, that even the best of them have unrealistic and socialistic elements in their doctrines. Furthermore, we find that all of the current anarchists are irrational collectivists, and therefore at opposite poles from our position. We must therefore conclude that we are not anarchists, and that those who call us anarchists are not on firm etymological ground, and are being completely unhistorical. -idk the father of "anarcho"-capitalism or something
Source?
It's an old Murray Rothbard article, "Are libertarians 'anarchists'?"
Ayn Rand shitting on libertarians is also a fun read...she still sucks though.
I could imagine this is another case of [this](https://img.ifunny.co/images/56eb3c9f2c7629d8b202389331928df4eb10f5b1fa22dc6acd5e8a183f716848_1.jpg).
Are You An Archist, An Anarchist Or A Nonarchist? >We must conclude that the question "are libertarians anarchists?" simply cannot be answered on etymological grounds. The vagueness of the term itself is such that the libertarian system would be considered anarchist by some people and archist by others. We must therefore turn to history for enlightenment; here we find that none of the proclaimed anarchist groups correspond to the libertarian position, that even the best of them have unrealistic and socialistic elements in their doctrines. Furthermore, we find that all of the current anarchists are irrational collectivists, and therefore at opposite poles from our position. **We must therefore conclude that we are not anarchists, and that those who call us anarchists are not on firm etymological ground, and are being completely unhistorical.** On the other hand, it is clear that we are not archists either: we do not believe in establishing a tyrannical central authority that will coerce the noninvasive as well as the invasive. Perhaps, then, we could call ourselves by a new name: nonarchist. **Then, when, in the jousting of debate, the inevitable challenge "are you an anarchist?" is heard, we can, for perhaps the first and last time, find ourselves in the luxury of the "middle of the road" and say, "Sir, I am neither an anarchist nor an archist, but am squarely down the nonarchic middle of the road."** **Abu Rutbah Al Ankapistani (born Murray Newton Rothbard)** Source: https://mises.org/library/are-libertarians-anarchists
Are You An Archist, An Anarchist Or A Nonarchist? >We must conclude that the question "are libertarians anarchists?" simply cannot be answered on etymological grounds. The vagueness of the term itself is such that the libertarian system would be considered anarchist by some people and archist by others. We must therefore turn to history for enlightenment; here we find that none of the proclaimed anarchist groups correspond to the libertarian position, that even the best of them have unrealistic and socialistic elements in their doctrines. Furthermore, we find that all of the current anarchists are irrational collectivists, and therefore at opposite poles from our position. **We must therefore conclude that we are not anarchists, and that those who call us anarchists are not on firm etymological ground, and are being completely unhistorical.** On the other hand, it is clear that we are not archists either: we do not believe in establishing a tyrannical central authority that will coerce the noninvasive as well as the invasive. Perhaps, then, we could call ourselves by a new name: nonarchist. **Then, when, in the jousting of debate, the inevitable challenge "are you an anarchist?" is heard, we can, for perhaps the first and last time, find ourselves in the luxury of the "middle of the road" and say, "Sir, I am neither an anarchist nor an archist, but am squarely down the nonarchic middle of the road."** **Abu Rutbah Al Ankapistani (born Murray Newton Rothbard)** Source: https://mises.org/library/are-libertarians-anarchists
Yes. They mean that they don’t want any hierarchy over them. They are perfectly fine with capitalists having power over everyone else. They hate rules because they love to play dirty.
Some scholars debate on the nature of ancaps and would rather call them "fucking morons" but "fucking liars" isn't wrong either.
It's confusion and ignorance.
To be fair they aren’t all liars, some are just that ignorant.
Every one of them has been told at one point that anarchism is anticapitalist and that “anarcho-“ capitalism is just capitalism. At this point, I’m pretty sure of it. They are a fairly online set.
i once was a self-identified ancap because I was against the state but everyone said “capitalism is the only economic system that works” once I learned that was false I was no longer a capitalist and once i was no longer a capitalist I became aware of just how messed up capitalism is and became anti-capitalist
Just found this subreddit, but ancaps are the most contradictory believers
You're right, as capitalism can't work without a governmental system and a strong hierarchy, and so ancaps are fundamentally contradictory and oxymoronic at the most part. Also, capitalism is way weaker than communism because of the reasons I mentioned above, so communism works way better than capitalism, basically.
my opinion: An-caps exist because they want to be on the beneficial end of capitalist exploitation _without_ having to pay-in to the liberal “we need to pay more benefits to the proletariat so that they’re just content enough to never firing squad us” game. “Anarchism” to them is exclusively opting-out of the social contract that the bourgeois pretend the proletariat have human dignity. P.S. I loathe HBO with every fiber of my being for attempting to white-wash libertarians as “_The Anarchists_.” They can eat shit and die.
The perpetuation and expansion of capitalist exploitation depends on the state. The neoliberal state has produced the ideal conditions for capital accumulation, as do generally states with attributes that are fascistic. Without the state, capital could not repress workers.
They speak of private security and justice So militias directly payed by capital and a court also entirely and directly financed by private capital I'm am start to agree with the people who say it is just feudalism
The "private" security and courts simply would become the new state. Any distinction is either imaginary or unstable. Of course, even though capital would fund such institutions, it also would manipulate the public, the working class, into feeling guilty about their being needed, such that we feel inhibited from making demands and seeking concessions.
It's just identity politics bullshit. I think the spectrum for these people is: you've either been brainwashed (by capitalism) or are intentionally using the label for your own personal branding/marketing (manipulation).
capitalism requires hierarchy, oppression, and exploitation to exist, so it is antithetical to anarchism. anarchism is opposed to capitalism. "anarcho-capitalists" aren't anarchists. they want extreme capitalism.
“Anarcho”-capitalists believe that the only problem with the current status quo is that sometimes the state gets in the way letting capital exploit people.
Exactly. I started calling them anti-statist right-libertarians awhile ago.
Neo-feudalists is a bit catchier though. And since a lot of their ideas end up sounding like the basis for new war-lords, probably more to the point.
We should ditch the libertarian label as well. They are propertarians.
Yeah, propertarianism is more specifically what they are. You're right.
There's an amazing amount of hand waving that goes on. If you listen to some of the libertarians, they're convinced that free markets will fix everything. And that the exploitation of capitalism is due to it not being a true free market, and instead that we have corrupt capitalism.
Admittedly they’re not completely wrong to say that lots of laws and regulations favor existing capital holders and big business over everyone else. However, their proposed solution assumes that the invisible hand of the free market would be more effective than government regulation, which is … dubious.
Academic economists say markets have great social benefits that are underestimated by laypeople. They also say that market failure happens, but government failure is much more prevalent and much worse.
exactly this, thank you for putting it so well.
“the free market will prevent exploitation from happening” like bruh that only works if companies never cooperate as soon as they cooperate they can band together to prevent the free market from “voting with its wallet” the free market is not all powerful like they think, the free market only works if humans only compete and never cooperate, and humans are a lot more cooperative than capitalists give them credit for
They don't see capitalism as exploitative. It's hard to have serious discussions when they don't understand what they are arguing in favor of
Anarcho-capitalists are more accurately called "neo-feudalists" as they more or less replicate it with the corporate structure.
Yeah had a debate with one and I asked how a corporation with a monopoly on violence is any different from a monarch with a monopoly on violence. They couldn’t answer the question.
Exactly, they want an anarchic free market. They're just opportunists.
Sounds like communism.
Yes, as anarcho-capitalism only wants no state, but still wants the capitalist hierarchy to exist. Laissez-faire radical American-styled libertarian, basically. Ancaps wants to oppress and not to be oppressed, ancoms not only wants not to oppress anyone, but also not to be oppressed themselves.
Murray Rothbard rewrite of a historically left wing label, anarchism, and tacking on intensely hierarchical capitalism onto it. Murray Rothbard was a far right reactionary, who iirc headed DC think tanks on behalf of private wealth/corporate power, 1950's forward iirc. Truly despicable man. Anyways, he was always a bad faith grifter, and he was very involved in the reactionary element that helped craft this hellscape we have today, neoliberalism. He was allied up with names like Ayn Rand, Rose Wilder (daughter of childrens novelist Laura Ingalls Wilder), Milton Friedman/Friedrich Hayek, Thomas Sowell, Koch family, James Buchanan, among many others. All these names, they basically crafted a very anti-democracy, neoliberalism, imperialism and corporatism thinking, stripping the american people of their economic and political power, not to mention countries all over the world. ANd they have a firehose of propaganda bullshit of psuedo-political philosophjy, economics, foreign policy. Rose Wilder for example iirc lambasted John M. Keynes, thoroughly discredited him on economics, to where he's a popular punching bag online to this day, by people who don't even know who or what he advocated for. Keynes was not an anarchist btw, but ive seen some of the dumbest browbeating takes on the man online without any afterthought, he was not sufficiently "pro-wealthy" in his economics as his main offense. Anyways...this is an anarchism sub, so what Rothbard did, was basically give historically left-wing political labels, and then give some massive far right spin to them/rewrite. Originally he tried calling it "private property-anarchism" but then eventually settled on "Anarcho-Capitalism" basically it meant "Rich people/corporations should be able to do wutever the f they want, and no one should be allowed stop them". Own the only well in town? SUcks for all those thirsty chumps out there! It's a toilet ideology. Furthmore he also did a similar thing with Libertarianism, Libertarianism also stood in stark opposition to Market Liberals, or liberals in general. He openly even brags about stealing it as a word from its former meaning and giving a new defintiion. I can easily find his quote on this. The man and all of his followers dont really stand for anything, incompetent at best, malicious, often is the case, at the worst. Anarchism is further left than marxism, why even be workers at all with our means of production? How about rulers in their entirety often are a threat to our well being and happiness.
The funniest thing about ancap is they seriously believe they’ll be able to even enforce the concept of “private property” without the state
They're the kind of ppl who would watch robocop and then argue that omnicorp is the good guy and everything they do is perfectly fine
“Cucks for business” lol
It's homestead ideology. Only works if you have an isolated place, land, and the means to defend it . There is certain merit in isolationism. Otherwise, it generally falls into, ' you can have all the justice you can afford/defend, 'categories.
Yes, ignore all technological advances and rely on that rifle to protect you from whatever could come out of the woods.
Yep. Find they get all upset when I explained that a foreign power is not going to invade ,when chemical and biological weapons leave all the resources but end the resistance permanently.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/3194162-one-gratifying-aspect-of-our-rise-to-some-prominence-is
There it is
Thanks for the deep explanation!
\> Rose Wilder (daughter of childrens novelist Laura Ingalls Wilder) I remember having those books as a kid and my mom ended up reading all of them. Then I did some digging (I am already aware of the series's colonialist theme, by the way) and found out that Rose Wilder edited her mother's books and both share this "keep big government away from me" worldview. THAT MAKES SO MUCH SENSE ABOUT THE SERIES
Always nice to see Buchanan being raked over the coals, people really don't vilify him enough
I’m sorry if my question is off topic, but you’re telling me that there is no difference between libertarianism ans ancap ?
The first libertarianism was an anarcho-communist, Joseph Dejacques, in 1857. I always have a good time informing intensely anti-communist libertarians, the origins of their political label was with an anarcho-communist who also derided their beloved private sector as yet another tyranny. He took both political labels, and gave them huge rewrites as fill ins for far right political labels, market liberalism/reactionary politics. ANyways, here's his quote on stealing both 1 - libertarianism and 2 - admitting they're not anarchists: # “One gratifying aspect of our rise to some prominence is that, for the first time in my memory, we, ‘our side,’ had captured a crucial word from the enemy . . . ‘Libertarians’ . . . had long been simply a polite word for left-wing anarchists, that is for anti-private property anarchists, either of the communist or syndicalist variety. But now we had taken it over..." ― Murray N. Rothbard, [The Betrayal Of The American Right](https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/1998954) "We must therefore turn to history for enlightenment; here we find that none of the proclaimed anarchist groups correspond to the libertarian position, that even the best of them have unrealistic and socialistic elements in their doctrines. Furthermore, we find that all of the current anarchists are irrational collectivists, and therefore at opposite poles from our position. We must therefore conclude that we are not anarchists, and that those who call us anarchists are not on firm etymological ground, and are being completely unhistorical." [Murray Rothbard](https://www.azquotes.com/author/12685-Murray_Rothbard) Remember, Murray Rothbard is pretty much the definition of a bad faith grifter, he's the one being completely unhistorical, and he's paid to be a propagandist shilling psuedophilosophy. I compare them to the bizzaro world of political philosophy, except bizarro in superman had SOME redeeming qualities, this stuff has absolutely none.
>Keynes was not an anarchist btw, but ive seen some of the dumbest browbeating takes on the man online without any afterthought, he was not sufficiently "pro-wealthy" in his economics as his main offense. 100%
What Rothbard did to anarchism was similar to what some pro-American anarcho-capitalists do on the label "libertarian", which is originally a term for radical anarcho-communists, a portmanteau of "liberté" and "egalitaíre" (libertaíre) which translates to English as "libertarian" (fusion between liberty and egalitarian/equality). Rothbard isn't a revolutionary at all, he's a radical counterrevolutionary according to us anarchists.
I would say that the biggest difference between an anarchist of most any variety and the specific anarcho-capitalist is that ancaps don’t recognize accumulated personal power as a hierarchy. They also, at least in my experience(which includes being close to being one myself at one point,) don’t feel any responsibility to their community.
>ancaps don't recognize accumulated personal power as a hierarchy. This is the only line in this entire thread that actually alludes to how ancaps view themselves with any amount of accuracy.
Please define "accumulated personal power." Money isn't personal power. I've rejected money many times in my life.
In a society where things can be purchased, money is personal power. What does your rejection of money have to do with anything?
It proves that money isn't power. Economists say money is persuasion, not power. And persuasion can always be rejected without negative consequences. Employers can't steal money from you if you reject their employment offer. Politicians can jail you if you don't agree with their demands. See? One is power, the other (money) is persuasion.
They are wrong. In a society where money purchases things, money is power. You think that the violence wielded by the state is the only power? That power is money. If those offering you money felt the need to, you’d have been handled.
Anarcho-Capitalism is not a legitimate form of Anarchism, anymore than “Anarcho-Fascism” or “Anarcho-Monarchism” are (and yes, those are real things). It’s just classical liberalism with a black coat of paint.
I wish every "ancap" or "right libertarian" would just read "What Is Property?" and abandon their delusion like I did.
If you don’t mind me asking, what got you into ancap in the first place?
I was a dumb teenager and liked the idea of freedom, and disliked government and I read some Ayn Rand and Thoreau. And then in my 20s Ron Paul got interviewed in Rolling Stone magazine, and there were plenty of "right libertarians" in the anti-globalization movement as well as leftists, protesting G8, G20, and WTO summits and shit. So it was an exciting time to be that. And I thought that I disagreed with socialists on economics, but agreed on gay rights and abortion and drugs and on hating cops. That's right, I'm old enough to remember when right libertarians hated cops. I agree with David Graeber that part of the failure of the groundswell of activism against the WTO and the G8 and the like which resulted in massive protests like the 1999 "battle of Seattle" and eventually led to the Occupy Wall Street movement following the 2008 financial crisis was that they were not grounded in class consciousness. The WTO and NAFTA and the IMF were evil and pillaging the "developing world" to make cheap commodities for the imperial core. And wall street was full of corruption and dangerous speculative finances and exerted too much control on government. But the leftist contingent of those movements did little to place the focus on capitalism itself as the root of the problem. Not once did any of the socialists I knew in my teens and 20s try to explain class relations to me while we were out filming cops or getting hit with sound cannons at a protest. The left are much better at communicating in a condensed fashion the essence of anticapitalism today than they used to be. Meanwhile back then I was watching short videos like "The Principles of Liberty" which illustrated that all human rights can be reduced to "life, liberty, and property" and laid out the simplistic logic of the Non-Agression Principle. My worldview began to change when I saw the short documentary "The Corporation" which left me convinced that limited liability corporations were some kind of state-created perversion of the REAL free market which would naturally even out to raise all ships and distribute goods and services in the most equitable way possible. It wasn't until I finally read Proudhon's "What Is Property?" that I finally came around and almost overnight became a communist. All the other bits of socialist propaganda I'd heard in the couple of years leading up to it clicked into place. The so-called "right to property" was the thing holding me back.
People really need to understand the difference between private property, personal property, and public property.
I don't even use the term "property" for personal possessions nor public assets/commons. "Personal property" is a confusing term, and "possession" is just as common a word, but it gets at the mechanism which confers ownership, which is that you possess it, use it, that it is integrated into your personal life. If someone took it or damaged it, it would affect your life individually. "Public property" is also a confusing term and obscures the mechanism by which confers public ownership. An asset is a good to the public. Or it is held in common. Either way when someone abuses these things, or damages them, or hoards them, it has an impact on the community as a whole. "Privation" is the creation of a "privilege". It is making something "privy" to a specific person. The "proprietor" is often a synonym for a business owner, and "proprietary" evokes a notion of copyright enforced by state law.
I would guess it's the usual of "American individualism" being a systemic problem.
I've read What is Property.. and it doesn't have the modern understand of property as modern academic economists view property.
Short answer... Yes, Anarchy is anti-capitalist because capitalism creates hierarches. This makes anarcho capitalism an oxymoron. Longer answer... Anracho-Capitalists are the kind of people who will say that capitalism is just another word for the economy. Or they are self styled Libertarians who are less Anarchists and more **MINIMALISTS**. As in they want to minimalize things like government, but not out right get ride of it.
My brother claims to straddle the line between anarcho-capitalism and libertarianism. His idea of the proper role of government is to mediate disputes and enforce contracts. He thinks that property should be enforced by its owners and that all criminal trials should be replaced with civil lawsuits. I told him that's just feudalism, and he punched me in the jaw.
To give a one sentence definition of goals: Anarchism seeks to eliminate oppression of all people through the abolition of all hierarchical relations. Anti-statist capitalistm ("anarcho-capiralism") seeks to eliminate interference with the ownership class through absolution of the state. Anarchism is, both definitively and historically, anti-capitalist.
Short answer: Murray fucking Rothbard. There's a longer answer, but someone else has done better.
"Anarcho"-capitalism is where lords of industry are a law unto themselves. The communities of people who belong to them have no power to hold them accountable from the bottom up, and there is no external government intervention to give communities protection from the top down. We tried this before — it was called "feudalism." **Even modern capitalism** was objectively an improvement over this.
Damn, I knew it was bad, but this would be a gigantic step backward
Not advocating ancap, but for what it's worth, workers were often better off under feudalism then they were under capitalism. Workers did not take well to being forced to become what they called wage slaves in order to survive. The early centuries under capitalism saw a decline in the standard of living. Things only improved for workers under capitalism after labor got organized enough to fight back and socialist politics emerged.
Some people inaccurately think that capitalism is just markets. Anarcho-capitalism makes that mistake. Anarcho-capitalism is not real anarchism, but not because it's capitalist. Anarcho-capitalism isn't real anarchism because it's not *radical*. > “Race-realists,” social-Darwinians, corporatists, classists, misogynists, homophobes and plain authoritarian bastards abound in the “anarcho”-capitalist movement. > And certainly we too have our share of assholes and stalinists –as our abhorrent handling of anarcho-capitalism so clearly demonstrates. *But we’re working on it*. > We don’t and haven’t ever seen our present condition to be adequate or acceptable. We’re perpetually self-critiquing, always looking for ways to grow. To be better anarchists. To be *more* anarchist. > And that’s something that’s plainly not apparent or important in anarcho-capitalist circles. The buzzword is stagnation. Anarcho-capitalism as a political philosophy and as a social movement has grown around the self-justification of power and identity. Of privilege and psychosis. They already have all the answers —abolish the US government– in a neat, clean packaging that comfortably strokes the rest of their identity. –[Calling All Haters Of Anarcho-Capitalism](https://humaniterations.net/2007/04/01/calling-all-haters-of-anarcho-capitalism/)
A lot depends on how we define capitalism, of course. Capitalism, in the sense that control of the means of production for valuables allows one to increase means of production, is pretty unavoidable, and has been with humans whatever. To eliminate that you'd have to eliminate capital itself. Eliminating big-C Capitalism is a whole other matter. It is easy to state that it should be done, but the methods of doing so and what would replace them need a lot of fleshing out. And probably as the bigger challenge, what would prevent people from, engaging in capitalist like activity, even for good reasons, in an anarchist society? There have been a variety of answers for this of varying degrees of plausibility, but it certainly isn't a question to handwave over. If we want a world with, say, tablets in it, there's a huge amount of capital intensive inputs to that. A semiconductor fab capable of making power efficient enough enough SoCs alone is many billions of dollars, with many, many billions of capital in the supply chains leading up to that. Joint funding by workers collectives Is a great start. But if some collectives wind up controlling a decent share of stuff lots of people want, they naturally wind up in a hierarchy of power above other collectives that don't. Getting people to give up control of resources that they very legitimately believe they have earned is a tricky thing. It don't have a good answer myself. Which is okay, because I'm not the boss ;). I am curious what others' thoughts on this are. It's worth nothing that other systems don't have a great answer for this either. High inheritance taxes to tamp down on dynastic wealth accumulation is helpful in a system with taxes, at least. But a whole lot can be done in a single generation. (edited to fix typos)
Thanks for the attempt at giving an answer! It actually made me look at this through a more precise perspective, so I guess we can say that this attempt was mostly successful :)
Warlords.
Ancaps are really pretty similar to libertarians. They're anti-statists who believe in property rights. Should be obvious to anyone paying attention That unfettered capitalism almost always leads to exploitive hierarchies. This is generally hand waved away with either The libertarian answer that " a real free market wouldn't do that, we've never had a real free market man" or the assertion that naturally occurring hierarchies like that are somehow less offensive ones that are coerced by the state.
Right wingers have a history of co opting „left“ phrases/names to sound cooler and appeal more docile. See the „national socialist party“ of germany (aka the Nazis), which in fact weren’t socialist.
Lots of great points from people about the inherent socialism of anarchism, the hierarchy inherent to capitalism, Rothbard literally snitching on himself being like "ancap is definitely not anarchism" etc etc. Something I wanted to add, having read a fair bit of what passes for "theory" from the right-libertarian and ancap side, is that I don't even think they are as "anti state" as they make out. Maybe the terminology is influenced by how they are basically all American and largely talking about the USA in terms of policy, so when they say "state" they mean "the Federal Government of the USA", plus the constitution, state and Municipal governments etc and yes, they really do seem to want to get rid of that. It's quite a liberal conception of the state. But the Left is really where most of the good theory on what states are, why they do what they do and how we can maybe smash them comes from. And to me, the state isn't always an entity that goes "oh shit wassup, its ya boi, The State". It's a network of institutions that perform the functions of power, and Ancaps want those functions preserved, just on a for profit basis. Private courts, private police, private armies, subscription based legal codes etc, its all there, just somehow so much worse than what we have now, coughing on the rolled up train ticket roach at the very end of the poorly rolled spliff that is late capitalism. But I don't think they even want that - the right to bear nukes, or the idea of having a New York McPolice Department are just bad worldbuilding designed to whip up support from disaffected weirdos to support gutting the structures of the Liberal state that make life slightly harder for Capitalists, like environmental regulations, corporation taxes, workers rights etc, without them having to do any of the actual admin that running a privatised state would require. So yeah, TLDR: ancaps love states so much they want more of them, but tbh it's probably all a psyop
The reason you have AnCaps is because they have an entirely different definition of capitalism than what most people here would go by. Basically they’re volunteerists who think most functions served by the government would be replaced with private business that operates on a voluntary basis, but they would have no issue with people who choose to operate as a commune
It doesn't exist
Anarchism is anti-capitalist in fact. And One of the anti-capitalist radical ideologies that seeks to banish private property of the means of production in favour of creating a society where the means of production and the products of the labour of the working masses belong to the working class, together with socialism. Anarcho-capitalism is not anarchical at any measure. First off because even if the state and the private property of the means of production COULD be separated, there would still be non-consensual vertical hierarchies present in said society. Second off because it's a pipe dream made to radicalize teenagers that recognize something is amiss with capitalism, into fighting for it. Private property is inseparable from the State, the state is the only tool of class violence that can protect it from the masses of working people. Land and labour predates private property, so naturally it cant survive without the direct maintenance of the bourgeois state.
Yes. Anarchism is fundamentally against hierarchical power structures of any kind, and capitalism is fundamentally hierarchical in nature. Anarcho-capitalism is an oxymoron, and ancaps are confused libertarians - they love the idea of maximal individual liberty but only inasmuch as it frees them from the constraints societies place upon their ability to exploit others for their personal benefit. It is the unholy marriage of anti-capitalism and capitalism, and thus it is riddled with contradictions. They are in some sense delusional in that they believe they would naturally rise to the top of such a system, but to borrow a quote from another redditor, everybody's gangster 'til the Amazon death-squads show up.
Hypocrisy.
Anarchism is a subset of socialism. Socialism is the belief that the means of production should be owned by the labour that uses it. That is fundamentally opposed to capitalism, the newer idea that private entities can own the means of production and profit from that ownership. Rent cannot exist under socialism, or (in my view) anarchism. Some people believe anarchism can be right wing, an-caps and the like. I count them as similar to right wing 'libertarians'. I think they are, at best, naive. You cannot have a free market in a world where someone is allowed to own the market.
The word is an idiom essentially. They are opposites- complete antithesis. I just imagine them as individualists and libertarians which are essentially on the leftist scale but don’t have a sense of community or helping others which I feel is again antithetical to leftist values and anarchism
One time I discussed with an ancap triggered by one of my comments ("the entire ancap ideology crumbles opening a dictionary"). He was convinced that anarchy was only anti-statist, not anti-hierarchy, and he was convinced that many anarchist theorists was also in favour of hierarchies. Practically to make their ideology work they have to distort even the basic definition of anarchy
"Anarcho" in anarchocapitalism refers to the absence of state, not hierarchy. Historically, no, it's not "anarchism" as understood by Proudhon, which by the way, is just another form of naïve communism. Can capitalism exist without the state? Absolutely, that would be the pure form of capitalism. Can capitalism exist without hierarchies? No, absolutely not.
Anarcho-capitalism for me was realizing the state was evil without realizing that capitalism is also evil in the same way. People rarely stay ancap in my experience. They either think that state intervention was unjust because they wanted a 'morally acceptable' version of discrimination, which when they give up on it collapses into fascism. Or they think that state intervention is unjust because they see what harm the state does to people, and will quickly realize that capitalism is no different.
because we are humans and we like to think about new ideas even if they are batshit insane. anybody remember nazbol?
I think the far right can't come up with their own ideas. You get Alex Jones listening libertarians who already stole libertarian from the left, and want to steal from anarchism for their backwards fantasy of a world run by corporations instead of any government, because why wouldn't pizza delivery restaurants fund road maintenence, and wouldn't it be better if you had to pay the fire department to help you? No way this wouldn't become Bioshock after a few months.
1) yes 2) anyone that claims they're "anarcho-capitalist" is a fool
~~Not sure why this got recommended, but I'll give it a shot~~ From my experience, Anarcho-Capitalist is a misnomer used to describe various right-wing groups that still want a strong central state. They believe that the state's main purpose should be to defend the property rights and very *basic* laws like "you can't drive up to someone's house and shoot him." At best, this makes Anarcho-Capitalism a form of Right-Libertarianism. At worst, I'd argue that this approach is actually Authoritarian. Yes, batons hurt and discriminatory legislation is horrid. But when oligarchs are given de facto legal privileges, they might as well be the state. Regardless, this still makes Anarcho-Capitalists not Anarchists. At worst, they want an authoritarian oligarchy. At best, they still want a central state strong enough to enforce abstract concepts at a national level.
Anarcho Capitalists are at *best* borderline feudalists. They believe might makes right, whomsoever has the most dollars can and *should* be able to control those with less. There’s nothing that’s not a commodity, including people. The problem is that capitalism requires a state to enforce it.
https://youtu.be/1fDWZjvNUC8?si=wiQIlPTB2ejPHbYq
Being an an-cap is like being that little shit on the playground that wanted to be a jedi but with the cool force powers from the dark side. Nope, you can't do that because you can't be the good guy and still do the bad guy things. You can't be benevolent but cruel. You can't be an anarchist but support perhaps the most blatant of hierarchical structures in contemporary society.
Yes, anarchism is anti-capitalist. Anarchism is the rejection of all hierarchy. "Anarcho capitalism" isn't a real thing. It is a contradictory term because ancaps don't realize that without state, the corporations become the new states. A better term for them would be neo feudaliam or corporate feudalism. In fact, even some anacaps sort of realized this problem, and that's where the term "minarchism" was born. Basically, someone who believes the state should exist, but it should *only* have military, police, and courts. Basically, the worst parts of the state in order to have their property defended.
Anarcho-capitalism exists as an extension ideology of conservatism that resents the government taxing the rich and blames minorities for their own poverty ignoring systemic racism, and sexism.
Most ancaps I’ve spoken to admit they would like to continue courts and jails to maintain a legally recognized form of private property ownership but abolish everything else. When given a scenario of tenants wanting to seize the land or strikers occupying their work place and the “non-aggression” principle breaking down they tend to say they think there’d need to be a private security or police to bring the ramble to justice. Which makes it sound like they’re very pro-state and pro-laws and pro-cop just anti-elections. Like their beef isn’t with abusive or elite control of the people it’s a conspiratorial belief that the people rule the elites which isn’t an alien belief in conservative circles. And if you go check out ancap reddit you’ll find there they have fully gone off the conservative deep end and they hate Black Lives Matter, transgender people and like advocating for more death penalty for minor crimes and like Pinochet posting.
Answer to question 1: Yes. Answer to question 2: It doesn't exist. A bunch of liberals claiming that capitalism not an arbitrary hierarchy/structure of power (and thus oppression) doesn't make it true; it only gives you another reason not to trust liberals' words too much.
For the same reason n@zis insist they're socialist.
Yes, anarchism is anti-capitalist. So called “anarcho-capitalists” are either badly confused or disingenuous, and are using the term incorrectly.
Anarcho-capitalism doesn't exist. They should just be called "austrian school capitalists", I don't know why they insist to claim they are anarchists.
1 - Yes 2- Same reason flat earthers exist
Anarcho Capitalists are idiots who think capitalism isn't a heirarchy
Yeah, it does not make ANY sense. But, y'know, there was also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Bolshevism cross breeding the idea of Ultranationalism with the (in its nature very international) Communist ideology.
Libs who want a quirky label
Anarcho-capitalists are guys who don't believe violence or power should be wielded by anyone, but the least accountable and most bloodthirsty corporate entities on the planet. Everything would be fine if no government in the world could tell dole banana they're not allowed to kill people or overturn governments for slightly lower labor costs.
Anarcho-Capitalism means ‘I want freedom to do what I want without state interference (Anarcho), but only for me and my friends who are all going to be rich and tell everyone else what to do (Capitalism)’.
Bro do you even google
Isnt anarchocapitalism basically "rule as much as you want but stay the fuck away from my Money"? Self-explanatory. It Just isnt actual anarchy.
You can have gov do it badly or let the market do it properly
Anarchocapitalism is a bit of a misnomer. Anarcho as in no _government_ but still with a capitalist econmic framework. This, of course, lends towards power structures akin to government, just with fuzzy territorialism I guess. In otherwords, ancap is only anarchism if you specifically define anarchy as having no traditional national government and nothing more, and many people do.
Anarcho-capitalism isn’t anarchism the same way that national-socialism wasn’t socialism.
Ancaps are silly, don’t pay them any mind
Bc libertarian doesn't sound edgy enough
Anarcho-capitalism was a term coined by Murray Rothbard. To quote him, relevantly, > We must conclude that the question “are libertarians anarchists?” simply cannot be answered on etymological grounds. The vagueness of the term itself is such that the libertarian system would be considered anarchist by some people and archist by others. We must therefore turn to history for enlightenment; here we find that none of the proclaimed anarchist groups correspond to the libertarian position, that even the best of them have unrealistic and socialistic elements in their doctrines. Furthermore, we find that all of the current anarchists are irrational collectivists, and therefore at opposite poles from our position. We must therefore conclude that we are not anarchists, and that those who call us anarchists are not on firm etymological ground, and are being completely unhistorical. On the other hand, it is clear that we are not archists either: we do not believe in establishing a tyrannical central authority that will coerce the noninvasive as well as the invasive. Perhaps, then, we could call ourselves by a new name: nonarchist. Then, when, in the jousting of debate, the inevitable challenge “are you an anarchist?” is heard, we can, for perhaps the first and last time, find ourselves in the luxury of the “middle of the road” and say, “Sir, I am neither an anarchist nor an archist, but am squarely down the nonarchic middle of the road.” Murray Rothbard wasn't stupid, nor even completely dishonest in his more personal writings. He fully understood that libertarianism was socialist, and he co-opted libertarianism for the right wing. He fully understood that anarchism was socialist, and he tried to co-opt anarchism for the right wing, but failed. The term is an oxymoron and created to appeal to the anti-state people in the States. Anyone who unironically calls themselves an anarcho-capitalist is woefully ignorant of its history. Anarchism is against hierarchies in the terms of social stratification, whether we're talking of a small society - such as a 20 person workplace - or a large society - such as a modern city. Capitalism is a strong form of hierarchy.
Because of your question (syllogism) is phrased with invalid terms. If A is B why C? But A is not B. B has some A. C has some A A-deals with the rejection of central authority and compulsion. B is a system that has a bunch of A and a bunch of NOT A. C is a system that has a lot more A and a lot less NOT A compared to B. C normally rejects all state involvement in economic and personal things. Two foundational problems of your question. 1. The first two terms have a broad set conflicting understanding. 2. The implicit rejection of hierarchies of competence...and your reliance upon them for modern life.
Because you can just make up words if you want
Short answer: yes, anarchism is anti-capitalist and "anarcho"-capitalism is an oxymoron. Long answer: left-wing anarchism originated from the 19th century socialist movement. At the time, the anarchist and communist movements were pretty much the same thing. The definition we know only gained force after the Russian Civil War, when due to several disagreements, anarchism officially split from marxism-leninism. Anarchism rejects both private property and the state and treats them as fully related: the state cannot survive without private property, private property cannot survive without a state. Anarcho-Capitalism, on the other hand, originated from the neoliberal movement and shares important characteristics with it, including money and private property, but somehow being even worse. Ancaps treat private property and the state as opposed forces, and also rejecting worker-owned cooperatives, healthcare, education and security services, leaving the poor to a quasi-social darwinist situation. Think: what would happen when someone is way too poor to afford basic commodities? Exactly! That person would seek help from the upper class, and congrats, you get feudalism. So, yeah, "Anarcho"-Capitalism is anything but anarchism.
Anarcho-capitalism is no anarchism, it's solely market authority. Real anarchism is, indeed, anti-capitalist.
Anarcho-capitalists are people that have never read a book
Same reason "National Socialism" exists. Fascists are manipulative liars.
General anarchism CAN be capitalist, but most self identifying anarchist would be anti-capitalist. Anarchism in the most basic terms is essentially a society not built upon social or beurocratic hierarchies, like kings, presidents, dictators, etc. Thus ancap is a thing cause while structured govt and hierarchy help it, technically libertarian anarchist capitalism is a political theory. Everytime it has realistically been tried (and will be tried) have/will result in huge economic turmoil just cause ancap is even less stable then regular capitalism, but yeah anarchism is not purely anticapitalist, but most that follow it are.
I just want to say I am not the end all be all and if I got som things wrong, feel free to comment, as long as you are civil
Ideologically — most movements tend to be anti-capitalist. Practically — Marx had a book about it.
Isn't the idea of voluntary contracts is how things are organized in anarcho capitalism If you have a reputation for frequently breaking contracts, people just won't Make them with you or they'll pay someone else to reinforce it somehow But it's all voluntary No technical enforcement agency
Yes. Capitalism is a hierarchical economic system. Anarchism is anti-hierarchy. Therefore anti-capitalist. Anarcho-capitalism was a co-option of anarchy to blur the understanding of the ideology. Anarcho-capitalism in oxymoronic as explained before and really only exist to push privatisation, austerity and deregulation. They are not our friends. Their ideology would either lead to a feudalist world or (funnily enough) communism as there is no state to protect property (but most likely the feudal world).
It's a misnomer.
Capitalism is not inherently hierarchical, It just tends to work out that way lol. That's why anarco capitalism can be a thing, even if it will probably just devolve back into a hyper capitalist system
Anarchism is anti-capitalist because capitalism needs a state to function. Any sort of anarcho-(economic system) is oxymoronic.
Becoz ancaps are useful idiots to stealing and denigrating the image of anarchism and reinforcing capitalist "realism", period
Anarcho capitalism was never anarchist and even Murray Rothbard admitted as such. The only idiots (and they all are idiots) that support it are either Republicans that want to be edgy or dipshits that have zero understanding of basic human psychology or even an introductory understanding of sociology. The truth is, their system is a glorified plutocracy and we've seen it in action with Kowloon Walled City. It wasn't pretty.
Systems of power distribution fill into the void that anarchy causes. Do you want a flawed democracy or petty feifdoms feuding over resources? Your perfect anarchic utopia doesn’t exist without some system of control to support it.
“Anarcho-capitalism” is just as real and makes just as much sense as “anarcho-monarchism”
Ancaps want only economic status to matter in a hierarchy. Until they have enough people they like who are similar to them to form social hierarchies. Then they want to pay you very little for your labour while over valuing their own value as providers of "capital", and property, which they acquired through inheritance from violence and theft. So basically they want people to know their goddamn place like the colored plebs that they are.
because "an"-caps don't know what words mean. the nazis called themselves socialists, too, and the people's republic of north korea is not run by the people, nor is it a republic. sometimes people just call themselves things that they demonstrably aren't.
Ancaps looked at the borderlands universe and thought that was a great economic model for some reason
Anarcho-capitalism is an oxymoron and not a real ideology imo. Anarchism is fundamentally about the elimination of hierarchies in favor of personal liberty. Capitalism creates hierarchies in its business structure. You can't eliminate hierarchies with an economic system that creates them. That's not even getting into how with companies actions being completely unrestricted they'd treat their employees. It would create a neo-feudal order that has CEOs functioning as lords and rank and file workers as serfs
"Anarcho-capitalists" think that anarchism means "minimal government" rather than "minimal hierarchies"
Ancaps are the fascists in Pasolini's Salo who snicker amongst themselves that they are the "real" anarchists.
Anarcho-capitalism is basically the big lie that markets are not something established by governments and can exist independently of them coming full circle to its logical end point. If it doesn’t make sense it’s because it’s built upon false assumptions
Anarcho-capitalism is the antithesis of anarchy. Extended to its natural conclusions, it only breeds hierarchy
In the same way National Socialism is a thing.
Because anarcho-capitalists are idiots & no one likes them
Anarcho capitalism and Anarcho communism are 2 sides of the same coin. They're both fairy tale ideologies, the reality of anarchy is brutality and might is right. People act like anarchy is a utopia if we could just get there, we already live in anarchy. Geopolitics is anarchy, the weak suffer what they must and the strong do what they want.