Regarding the destructive societies however, why is it that you think that things came to be this way? Was it just human ignorance paired with basic survival instincts that we can only now overcome? Also, if it is this, how do you think we would be able to overcome these innate parts of ourselves to change society as time goes on?

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Alanis: Moving on beyond libertarians, which as we’ve pointed out encompasses a lot of different tendencies, let’s hone in on a particular group among them: anarcho-capitalists. These folks advocate for a stateless society based in private ownership, a free market, and individual sovereignty. The term was coined by an American economist named Murray Rothbard. He was part of the so-called Austrian School, which attempted to make economics into an axiomatic system like math or logic. His ideas trace their heritage to thinkers of the 19th century, including the classical liberals of the Enlightenment tradition who promoted laissez-faire capitalism and challenged the role of the state, as well as some American individualist anarchists, especially Lysander Spooner and Benjamin Tucker.

Clara: OK, so let’s just settle the question: are anarcho-capitalists anarchists?
Alanis: Well, obviously we don’t think so. But on some level it’s sort of pointless to quibble over definitions. A different way to approach it would be: does anarcho-capitalism fit into the historical trajectory of anarchism? Experts agree: the answer is pretty clearly no. The word anarchism first appeared with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who coined the phrase “property is theft.” He defines anarchy as the absence of a master or a sovereign, and since a proprietor is in essence a sovereign, “property engenders despotism,“ since ”each proprietor is sovereign lord within the sphere of his property." So from the very beginning, anarchism was directly opposed to private property, by definition.

Clara: In Demanding the Impossible, a history of anarchism, Peter Marshall writes:“Few anarchists would accept the ‘anarcho-capitalists’ into the anarchist camp since they do not share a concern for economic equality and social justice… [so] even if they do reject the State, [they] might therefore best be called right-wing libertarians rather than anarchists.”

Alanis: The Anarchist FAQ website points out, “To anarchists it seems bizarre that “anarcho”-capitalists want to get rid of the state but maintain the system it helped create and its function as a defender of the capitalist class’s property and property rights. In other words, to reduce the state purely to its function as (to use Malatesta’s apt word) the gendarme of the capitalist class is not an anarchist goal.”

Clara: And the British anarchist Albert Meltzer puts it this way: “Common sense shows that any capitalist society … could not dispense with organised Government, or a privatised form of it, if there were people amassing money and others working to amass it for them. The philosophy of “anarcho-capitalism” dreamed up by the “libertarian” New Right, has nothing to do with Anarchism as known by the Anarchist movement proper. Unbridled capitalism… needs some force at its disposal to maintain class privileges, either from the State itself or from private Armies. What they believe in is in fact a limited State — that is, one in which the State has one function, to protect the ruling class, does not interfere with exploitation, and comes as cheap as possible for the ruling class.
(He also adds that anarcho-capitalism offers a way for the bourgeois to justify not paying taxes without feeling guilty, which throws an intriguing light on the whole “fair tax” or tax resistance movements among libertarian sectors in the US.)

As these responses hint, there are a few major objections that indicate that anarcho-capitalism is not merely a quirky variation of anarchism, but something entirely different and in fact opposed to it. Let’s start with the central one, which goes to the heart of anarcho-capitalist philosophy and how anarchism negates it: the question of private property.

WHY ANARCHISTS ARE AGAINST PRIVATE PROPERTY
“The first man who, having fenced off a plot of land, thought of saying, ‘This is mine’ and found people simple enough to believe him was the real founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars, murders, how many miseries and horrors might the human race had been spared by the one who, upon pulling up the stakes or filling in the ditch, had shouted to his fellow men: ‘Beware of listening to this impostor; you are lost if you forget the fruits of the earth belong to all and that the earth belongs to no one.’” -Jean-Jacques Rousseau, "Discourse on Inequality”

Clara: Let’s break it down as simply as we can. Anarchists oppose all forms of hierarchy and domination; two of the primary systems of domination in this society are capitalism and the state. In terms of the state, it’s pretty obvious: there’s a small group of people who hold a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, and use that to exert control over you. They extort resources from you in the form of taxes, they tell you what you can and can’t do through laws and bureaucracy, and they compel you to do their bidding with soldiers and police. Anarchists think this is bad for all of us, and that we could organize our lives a lot better without it.

Alanis: So far, so good. Anarcho-capitalists and libertarians generally agree with this part of the analysis – though not necessarily for the same reasons, or based on the same values. The differences become most obvious when we move on to the next mode of domination that anarchists oppose: capitalism.

Clara: So what is capitalism? Well, for starters, it’s an economic system marked by two features: private property and wage labor. The latter is a result of the former; who would work for a wage, i.e., generate surplus value for a boss, if they had access the means of production themselves? Private property is the source of the inequality necessary for capitalism to function. And how is this inequality enforced and preserved? By means of a coercive structure at the disposal of the owners: that is, the state.

Alanis: Let’s get something squared away from the beginning: there’s no such thing as private property without a coercive structure to enforce it. There’s no mystical essence to property. It’s not a concept that exists in all cultures and time periods. Anarcho-capitalists revere private property with religious fervor, making it into a deity that they worship through entrepreneurship and competition. But as we do with all religions, anarchists ask: does that make sense to me? Who wants me to believe that? And whose interests does it serve?
Clara: Not mine, that’s who.

Alanis: But, you ask, what about my house, my toothbrush, my favorite shirt?

Clara: No, I don’t. I don’t ask that.

Alanis: OK, fine, but someone might ask: aren’t those reasons to value private property? Of course we all have the place where we live and the things that we use. This is different from an abstract, inalienable right to dispose of something however we please because of “owning” it, rather than using it. By private property, we’re not talking about the things we use every day; we don’t need some abstract notion of property rights to justify entitlement to those, because it doesn’t entail using them to make a profit. The notion that we can “own” something that we don’t use only makes sense in a system of private property, and capitalism couldn’t exist without a whole lot of people who don’t own the things we use.

Clara: Anarchism offers a pretty simple alternative: resources that we share in common aren’t subject to ownership, but belong to all of us to use and protect. To be clear, anarchists did not invent this idea; in fact, it’s been the centerpiece of most human societies for most of our existence. As for the individual items we use, which aren’t used to make a profit at the expense of anyone else’s time or labor, well, no problem. We can call this the difference between private property and personal property, or private ownership versus possession, or whatever you like. Without a state, there’s no coercive mechanism for redistributing the things we possess and produce away from us; and without private ownership, we have collective access to the resources we need to survive.

Alanis: So what’s the anarcho-capitalist argument for private property and the free market? Well, according to Murray Rothbard, the granddaddy of anarcho-capitalism:
“The basic axiom of libertarian political theory holds that every man is a self owner, having absolute jurisdiction over his own body. In effect, this means that no one else may justly invade, or aggress against, another’s person. It follows then that each person justly owns whatever previously unowned resources he appropriates or “mixes his labor with”. From these twin axioms– self-ownership and “homesteading”– stem the justification for the entire system of property rights titles in a free-market society.”

Clara: Umm… let’s see if we can take this apart. So the basis for why no one can mess with our person is because we own ourselves; so we start from property relationships as the foundation of everything, and build even our sense of bodily integrity up from that. And then we can “justly own” any previously unowned resources we can appropriate or add our labor to – so literally everything can be owned, and if someone else hasn’t claimed it in a private property system, it’s up for grabs.
Alanis: Wait… that sounds like colonialism!

Clara: Sure does! It’s no coincidence that one of the only historical examples anarcho-capitalists can cite of their theory in practice was the settlement of the American west by descendents of Europeans in the 19th century. The inconvenient fact that their experiment required the genocide and displacement of hundreds of human cultures and the desecration of the land base seems not to matter.
Alanis: In case you have any doubts about the explicitly white supremacist nature of this homesteading approach to property rights, take a look at Ayn Rand’s disgusting rant justifying the displacement of native peoples from the Americas. She argues, “Since the Indians did not have the concept of property or property rights…they didn’t have rights to the land, and there was no reason for anyone to grant them rights that they had not conceived of and were not using.” According to the logic of property rights, the only alternative to a life based on competition and domination is displacement and death.

Clara: Anarcho-capitalism is a political and economic theory to justify the frontier mentality at the heart of the American colonial psyche; freedom and liberty are possible if we can just move past the boundaries of government control into uncharted territory where private individuals can make contracts with each other like men should. But beneath this fantasy we can see the reality of indigenous genocide and environmental destruction, a world in which every square inch is carved up and owned to the detriment of all life – a reality, we might add, that could never have come to pass without the backing of state power. Private property is the ideology that makes it possible. It cannot and will not ever be the basis for any kind of freedom that anarchists long to see.
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Please...please...please don't lump anarcho-capitalists into anarchists. The concept is a contradiction in terms.

I'm not interested in a "non-authoritarian state" as I feel that liberation requires the abolition of both state and capital. You can't have the abolition of one without the other...or rather...the abolition of one without the other will always be incomplete, because both concepts are ultimately inseparable.

Forgive the block quotes, friends said it more eloquently than I would be able to at the moment (audio link at the top of the transcript):

Regardless, is your view of "the ideal state" or at least one we should converge to based on the elimination of state and capital? You said you're not interested in the non-authoritarian state but I couldn't tell if you actually wanted the no-state-no-capital solution. Also, wouldn't a state like this require a degree of mutual cooperation that if we had in today's society, we could live in a perfect world?

Also, wouldn't a state like this require a degree of mutual cooperation that if we had in today's society, we could live in a perfect world?

What I'm getting at is that to live in a functioning anarchic society there would still have to be mutual cooperation at a level that allows for communal functioning and a renewed valuation of humanity. But if we simply had this, I don't think the overarching governing system would particularly matter. So should we pursue goals such as these (it may be overused, but ones like "love thy neighbor" ) on a small-level before worrying about societal level changes? It might be more effective.

Determine your own meaning and do whatever you think is right and/or beneficial with your given circumstances, while keeping in mind that other choices, lifestyles, and meanings are always possible.

SnozzleBerry, what does a truly green economy look like? Doing away with the three-sector hypothesis? Doing away with the division of labor? Deindustrialization?

Economy - As an adjective, "cheap"; as a noun, that which compels us to render ourselves thus

As long as [natural resources are] being used to sustain the systems of mass-production and consumption that dictate policy today, it can hardly be called sustainable. After all, all industrial production requires raw materials of some sort and generates some degree of waste. Consumerism is not Necessity; consumer choices are not Freedom; industrial technologies are not Progress. They are simply the means to the ends for a small group of corporate shareholders to generate wealth and perpetuate a system in which they exercise disproportionate control.

The tendency of division of labor has always been the forced labor of the interchangeable cog in an increasingly autonomous, impervious-to-desire apparatus. The barbarism of modern times is still the enslavement to technology, that is to say, to division of labor. "Specialization," wrote Giedion, "goes on without respite," and today more than ever can we see and feel the barren, de-eroticized world it has brought us to. Robinson Jeffers decided, "I don't think industrial civilization is worth the distortion of human nature, and the meanness and loss of contact with the earth, that it entails.

However, I don't understand how most technology (and by extension, medicinal products) could not be abandoned in an eco-friendly, sustainable system, since it is grounded in industrial production after all.

Modern medical treatment as it currently exists is available to those who are privileged enough to pay for it.

I, too, am interested in what a health care system would look like in an eco-friendly, sustainable economy.




Not entirely true. There is Medicaid for low-income families, which greatly expanded eligibility earlier this year as a result of the Affordable Care Act.

do you know what a joke that is? it's like affordable insurance. they never want to pay out when there is an accident, and have a ton of clauses to avoid paying out under high-risk circumstances. let's be realistic..

I don't have faith in medicaid, even though every check has a deduction for it. I don't even have faith in social security.
What makes you think you'll be totally covered by something you contribute little to?


you know the age-old saying.... you get what you pay for.

that's kind of like comparing a homeless person getting a handout, to a republican candidate getting campain gift, courtesy of the Koch bros.