this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2023
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Anarchy (as a political philosophy) is about an absence of coercion.
Capitalism is about the supremacy of property rights over all other rights, backed up by the threat of violence against anyone who doesn't play along.
How anyone can think those two concepts are compatible is beyond me.
Capitalism is primarily an economic system, not a political philosophy. And while it requires property rights in order to function, it is primarily concerned with solving problems in the absence of coercion, so it is absolutely compatible with anarchy.
You're making a fundamental error when you think that property rights would not or do not exist in anarchy. What doesn't exist in anarchy is the enforcement of such rights by a STATE. A property owner (or in this case, really anyone who lays claim to a property, since a state that could issue official deeds does not exist) still has the right to defend their property using violent means if necessary.
So yes, capitalism and anarchy are absolutely compatible.
Okay, but if there isn't a state, who is to say the workers don't have the right to protect their surplus labor value from theft by seizing the means of production, through violence if necessary?
This is one of the reasons why anarcho capitalism is an incoherent ideology. People who believe in it think that the right of private property is just something everyone agrees should be held sacred, when it only exists because of state violence.
Nobody. But conversely, if there isn't a state, what's to prevent property owners from banding together and protecting their property with violence?
Before you say "but there's more workers than property owners", keep in mind that given enough money or gold or whatever, they could also hire mercenaries to prevent workers from rebelling.
It really all comes down to who is better at organizing. So it's possible that in one scenario, workers would seize the means of production successfully, and if they are good enough at keeping it running, they'd operate as a commune, while in another scenario, there'd be a more hierarchical, capitalist structure of organization.
You're simply arguing from a standpoint of "but I like THIS approach better" when it's a question of "but can you make it WORK?"
That would literally be a capitalist state in every meaningful sense.
Sorta like a police force of some kind?
You know what is really fucking organized? A state. It is almost like at the beginning of the country all the large landowners and capitalists got together and made one of those to protect their interests.
Lol. I am literally asking how your hypothetical system would handle class antagonisms, the primary concern of politics. I am very directly asking "but can you make it work"
So you just want the violence you prefer meted out by the state.
Is this meant to be a gotcha? What I prefer has nothing to do with understanding how states function and why they coalesce.
Not really a gotcha. I just forget I'm pretty alone in my (particular) distaste for violence.
Edit: didn't really mean for that to sound so negative.
I guess I dont base my understanding of politics around morality, morality enters the field when determining what to do within that understanding
I'm certainly overly reductive of politics. When we're talking ideology, though, yeah I'm going back to my ethics. A government can't act on our behalf with more rights than us - we just end up creating our master. Pragmatic actions, in the real world, are different from ideological conversations, though.
I'm somewhat confused by your separation of ideology from practical actions. That sounds internally inconsistent.
I am willing to accept a state if it is necessary to suppress the bourgeoisie and their toadies, so long as that continues to be necessary. I would prefer we lived in a communist society but we can't get there overnight and socialism is how you transition to it.
It's similar to your position. I just have a different path to a stateless, voluntary society. I also don't really care what the economic system looks like, so long as human rights are recognized.
What about human economic rights? What use does a homeless starving person have for the freedom of press?
I consider freedom of the press to just be freedom of speech, which we all have.
As for the homeless chap, it depends on their situation. I'd live in a community that would try to help them. I think we're ethically obligated to help people in need as best we can, but I'm not comfortable using violence to force you to help them.
The thing is we don't. There is no such thing as free speech, any speech that meaningfully threatens the government will be cracked down on. See Fred Hampton. Free speech is a legal fiction in our country.
But my point is that the limited bourgeois privileges you get don't matter if you're starving on the street. You can't meaningfully have those privileges without economic security.
So it is more violent to take food from a grocery store because that hurts the owners bottom line than it is to prevent a starving man from taking bread from a grocery store by kicking his ass and throwing him in a box? Is that your perspective on this issue?
I meant that freedom of the press shouldn't be limited to just people that work for CNN or whatever. I don't think they're separate rights. I didn't mean to say they're appropriately implemented.
Theft of small amounts of food isn't really something I care about. I'm not a fan of police or jails/prisons. We can handle these sorts of crimes more ethically. Robberies are a bit different. If you're someone that visits San Francisco to bip cars then goes back home, you could prolly use a good kick or two if you're caught by your intended victim.
Regardless, I think we, as a society, should be there with the bread. It shouldn't be an issue we have to face.
But you don't think we should use violence to enforce the idea, so how do you enforce the idea in the transition when former small business tyrants chafe at the idea of sharing? What if they don't submit to nonviolent methods of control?
They don't have to submit? We do things the right way and don't deal with those cunts. As a gradualist, though, I think we can build up our communities while removing the regulations that enable corporations to operate the way they do while staying profitable.
Okay but they have the means of survival right now. Not seizing them means people will die while you develop your own.
Also, while developing your own, the movement is vulnerable to getting crushed by them. They historically haven't had any compunctions with killing millions to protect themselves from communism.
How though? Do you think the capitalist state is going to just let you mess with its bosses?
When I help my sister pay her rent a small business owner isn't being evicted. Economics aren't zero sum.
I think ideas like collective ownership and mutual aid have power without challenging the ruling class. Instead we beg daddy to give us more rations.
I don't really have all the answers. I know what I consider ethical and try to work within that, but I'm no genius. I know it's easy to say your answer is violence and we'll sort it out later, but there're a lot of missing steps there. I don't think there's a lot of difference between the class consciousness necessary to achieve a gradualist result vs revolution. Gradualism has time to show people the benefit without lining them up against the wall, tho.
We also live in a world that has a habit of fucking up collectivism. Trade is technology and in a free society we can test the tech and find what works instead of fucking shit up with bullets and famine.
Can you prevent a landlord from evicting a single mom, when that landlord is willing to use violence to do it, without using violence? Is the idea just "we will pay them all off, using money we definitely have in order to do it?
Then, bluntly, you are ignorant of history. I'm not calling you stupid, I'm just saying you need to actually learn about this stuff before trying to come up with a belief system about it.
I dont know what you mean here
You need to consider the impact of your actions in morality, which means understanding what the outcomes of actions have been historically.
That would be an easy and incorrect way of describing my beliefs, yes.
I think you haven't thought about the material implications of this. Giving white supremacists and landlords and capitalists time to come around isnt nonviolent, it is permitting violence to continue for a while because you don't want to commit violence on the people doing the violence. It is a statement that you dont want to help the oppressed if it is at the expense of the oppressor.
Honestly, I think you've bought into a capitalist framing on the history of transitional states. The USSR had famines during: a bloody Civil War, collectivization, and right after ww2. It notably did not have any periodic famines that the Russian empire previously had. Communist China had a famine after the Civil War before relations were normalized. They notably ended the periodic famines, especially along the yellow river.
In the same way that a collective of workers getting together to control the means of production would be a communist state in every meaningful sense.
Yes. The difference is I'm not claiming a proletarian democracy isn't a state.