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Title: Anarcho-Capitalism? Author: ziq Date: 2018 Language: en Topics: anarcho-capitalism, anarchy Source: https://raddle.me/wiki/anarcho_capitalism
From Wikipedia:
“Doublespeak is language that deliberately obscures, disguises,
distorts, or reverses the meaning of words. Doublespeak may take the
form of euphemisms (e.g. ”downsizing” for layoffs, "servicing the
target" for bombing, in which case it is primarily meant to make the
truth sound more palatable. It may also refer to intentional ambiguity
in language or to actual inversions of meaning. In such cases,
doublespeak disguises the nature of the truth.”
The phrase ”anarcho-capitalism” was coined by far-right
white-nationalist Murray Rothbard as a way to demean and dispirit
anarchists. By appropriating and warping anarchist terminology, he hoped
to dilute our objectives and deal a fatal blow to our propaganda. He
worked for years to associate anarchy with all the things anarchists
stand against, thus minimizing the effect of anarchy in the public
consciousness.
If anarchy is stripped of all its meaning, if anarchists are presented
as extra-devoted capitalists, as wannabe slumlords and oligarchs, then
the threat anarchy presents to capitalism is greatly minimized. Anarchy
stops being a viable alternative to the system of authority and simply
becomes part and parcel of it.
In one of his unpublished pieces, Rothbard admitted:
”We are not anarchists, and those who call us anarchists are not on firm
etymological ground, and are being completely unhistorical because all
anarchists have socialistic elements in their doctrines and possess
socialistic economic doctrines in common.”
Rothbard's acolytes claim to support capitalism but not the state,
proposing that all the functions of government, from military, police,
courts and prisons to water sanitation, waste disposal and road
construction be privately owned.
They wish to replace the state with wholly unregulated corporations;
making the corporations that currently share power with the state into
what are effectively private states that don't have to share power or
answer to anyone. These corporations would of course use their private
armies to do war with each other as is their custom, until one
corporation has monopolized everything, becoming what would inevitably
be an all-powerful worldwide monarchy.
So the only logical end goal of this unfettered and unchallenged
capitalism is a Disney-Pepsi-Bayer conglomeration printing all the
money, making all the laws, publishing all the media, growing and
distributing all the food, managing all the hospitals, workplaces,
prisons and schools, ruling the entire world as one colossal government.
Capitalism is a perverse authority that devours everything it touches.
Wherever capitalism rises, a multitude of oppressive hierarchies
immediately spring from it: Class systems, homelessness, imperialism,
environmental destruction, slavery, human trafficking, climate change,
racism, misogyny, ableism, genocide, the list is endless.
There is no way to make a system that revolves around exploitation,
inequality, hierarchy and domination compatible with anarchy. There is
simply no way for capitalism to ever be anarchic.
These oligarchy-fetishists insist that capitalism is voluntary when in
reality private property rights can only be enforced violently; by an
authority that is powerful enough to rule a society. There's no way to
prop up a hierarchy as immense as capitalism without coercion,
domination, suppression of autonomy, tyranny. All things that are
anathema to anarchy.
For all intents and purposes, these so called ”anarcho-capitalists”,
”propertarians” or ”voluntaryists” wish to revert the world to feudalism
and take full control of society, without the inconvenience of health,
safety and environmental regulations or any other controls on their
business activities or accountability for their shareholders and CEOs.
Some of them will simply call themselves an “anarchist“ without further
elaboration, so it's important to pay attention to the context and
content of their messaging and call them out if they're full of shit and
just trying to do some entryism.
These social and economic conservatives wish to replace the state's
police forces and military with private police and armies that would
work directly for the corporations, with zero transparency and with
their sole mission being to safeguard the profits and personal safety of
the owners of capital. Mind you, this isn't too much different from the
current system where capitalists have to share some of their power with
the state and its functionaries, but it sure as hell won't be any better
for us peasants.
They have similarly hijacked the word “libertarian” which was
historically synonymous with “anarchist” (Kropotkin used both words
interchangeably) and maintains its original meaning outside the USA.
Within the USA, “libertarian”, “voluntaryist”, “propertarian”,
“deontological liberal”, “autarchist”, “paleocon”, “minarchist”,
“neocon”, “rights-theorist”, “libertarian moralist” and “social
conservative” are all words that just mean "capitalist that doesn't like
public accountability or paying taxes" with very minor differences;
usually relating to how private property “rights” will be enforced. Some
of them will simply call themselves “anarchist“ without further
elaboration, so it's important to pay attention to context and content.
Capitalism is just as brutal a hierarchy as the state, and anyone
claiming capitalists are capable of being anarchists is using malicious
doublespeak to attack the anarchist movement by watering down and
obfuscating our most basic terms and principles.
By creating far-right capitalist perversions of every anti-capitalist
movement, the wealthy largely succeed in erasing the original
revolutionary goals of a movement and replace them with more of the same
capitalism, imperialism, poverty, genocide and ecocide.
Without a state to uphold property rights, to legalize wealth hoarding
and to normalize labor exploitation, without police and courts to
imprison anyone who refuses to play by capitalism's rules, capitalism
simply has no way to function. It would be, in a word, anarchy.
"Anarcho"-capitalism is an oxymoron and has nothing to do with Anarchy.