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Title: Anarcho-Capitalism? Date: 2018 Source: https://raddle.me/wiki/anarcho_capitalism Authors: ziq Topics: anarchy, anarcho-capitalism Published: 2022-03-03 16:19:44Z
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In one of his unpublished pieces, Rothbard admitted: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.