Anarcho-Capitalism?

[AnSyn Blackflag]

So of all the Schools of Thought I have read about under the anarchism umbrella this one has been the most confusing to me. Everything I know about anarchism and capitalism, make them very incompatible. I always figured that capitalism was the consequence of a free market which anarchism was opposed to. So I looked it up and it seems to be fairly popular.
Is allowing private companies to fund and run police forces even close to compatible with anarchist ideals. I just cant see it. Maybe there is something I am missing.
Can someone give me there perspective? I can already assume that I will get a fair amount of answers from people who don't agree with this mindset. Can I get some answers from someone who agrees with it?
Either way can someone help me clear this up?

[GPDP]

If you want a perspective from someone who agrees with it, you should ask in Opposing Ideologies. But if I had to summarize the mindset in two words, it would be "muh freedums".

[Blake's Baby]

My understanding, from spending some time arguing with 'anarcho-capitalists', is that it's based on a couple of fundamantal ideas.

The first is that what you 'make' is an extension of yourself. Therefore, if what you make is for example a ploughed field, then you 'own' that land. So property is 'natural'.

The second is that contracts are conducted between free and equal actors. Therefore it's fine to employ people because they have freely and equally agreed that their labour is exchanged for money. Some 'an-caps' even believe that the worker 'sells' his production to the capitalist (makes 80 widgets a day that he sells for a dollar each and makes $80; the capitalist then sells the widgets for $2 each and makes $80 profit).

The third is that profit is derived from risk-taking in the market. There is no such thing as the exploitation of surplus value. Therefore, there is no such thing as exploitation of the working class (indeed, there is no such thing as 'the working class', because anyone can chose to be a capitalist). The capitalist's profit is entirely due to superior knowledge of the market and the willingness to risk his $80 in the hope of evetually obtaining $160.

The connection between Anarchism and 'anarcho-capitalism' is that way back in the middle of the 19th century, there was a strain of individualism (particularly in America) that was related to the 'pioneer mentality', which also looked towards aspects of Anarchism. It's a petit-bourgeois kind of self-reliant '10 acres a cow and a gun' kind of homesteader ideology. It's utterly incoherent as a political ideology in the early 21st century and I'm not sure it even made sense in the 1860s, but this is what 'anarcho-capitalism' is based on.

I don't think I'm misrepresenting the situation here. But it's obviously a bit difficult to tell, as I think the whole thing is horseshit. I might not quite be describing the flavours (or even the smell) accurately. But it's as close as I can get.

[tuwix]

So of all the Schools of Thought I have read about under the anarchism umbrella this one has been the most confusing to me. Everything I know about anarchism and capitalism, make them very incompatible. I always figured that capitalism was the consequence of a free market which anarchism was opposed to. So I looked it up and it seems to be fairly popular.
Is allowing private companies to fund and run police forces even close to compatible with anarchist ideals. I just cant see it. Maybe there is something I am missing.
Can someone give me there perspective? I can already assume that I will get a fair amount of answers from people who don't agree with this mindset. Can I get some answers from someone who agrees with it?
Either way can someone help me clear this up?

Anarcho-capitalism is just an oxymorone. Capitalism can't exist without state because state's major objective is to protect a private property. If states is deteriorating, private property deteriors too. It was very apparent in period of the London riots a few years ago.
Besides all those anarcho-capitalist idea is just idiocy not worth to consider. Private courts would sentence for money and pivate police would just be new state living of raquets that should be taxes after some time.
And everything is base on assumption of free market which is imposible due to reasons contained in its definiction.

And so-called 'anarcho-capitalism" has nothind to do with anarchism. It's just myth for petit bourgeoisie to give them false hope of liberation from big corporations.

[Danielle Ni Dhighe]

They usually call themselves libertarians in the US, having stolen that term from the Left.

[Forward Union]

So of all the Schools of Thought I have read about under the anarchism umbrella this one has been the most confusing to me. Everything I know about anarchism and capitalism, make them very incompatible. I always figured that capitalism was the consequence of a free market which anarchism was opposed to. So I looked it up and it seems to be fairly popular.
Is allowing private companies to fund and run police forces even close to compatible with anarchist ideals. I just cant see it. Maybe there is something I am missing.
Can someone give me there perspective? I can already assume that I will get a fair amount of answers from people who don't agree with this mindset. Can I get some answers from someone who agrees with it?
Either way can someone help me clear this up?

In my experience they understand Anarchism in principal and (I think) honestly do believe in Anarchist values, the problem is that they fundamentally misunderstand Capitalism. In short, they argue that everyone should be free to stockpile, buy, sell, or trade their own apples (for example). But they don't make a difference between owning apples and owning apple trees. If I own an apple tree, then I own the very means you all have of surviving. I'm not just keeping my own apples which I worked for honestly, but have gone further forced myself into a position of power over all of you. Of course, there are other apple trees but if they are all owned by a few people, who then make the rest work to receive only a few apples back, we have a serious problem. Communists advocate that we democratically manage the apple tree and distribute the apples based on work input and need. Anarcho-Capitalists basically advocate the right of anyone to seize these trees by force.

In their mind everyone would have some sort of equal basis for acquiring capital, anyone could start a business and trade the goods they produce for any others, and no one would be coerced into giving anything to anyone else (be those goods or their time or whatever). Apart from the fact that this amazing fatasy scenario has never happened outside of Somalia, there are two major problems;

A bussiness is a power structure
Externally, ok, the company is a free independent competitor in a market place. Inside however, a corporation or bussiness, you have a tyranny. A small private dictatorship in which the leaders exploit the majority for their own personal benefit, at the expense of the well being of the majority and of the environment. The fact that the owner took a risk doesn't justify anything. If taking risks justified the result then we have no arguments against any dictators or warlords who took risks to take power. Secondly, the ability to leave one of these private dictatorships is not an appropriate response. By suggesting that they've admitted there is a problem, and suggested a personal fix. But the system of exploitation will continue to exist, so why not apply a social fix?

For now the state is at least sort of accountable. I mean it at least has to pretend that it's listening to the people because it bases it's legitimacy on the pretense that it is mandated by the people. If you get rid of that now you'd just have much more powerful tyrannies with absolutely no accountability to anyone. It would be the most brutal network of private dictatorships ever imagined.

It will never happen
The state sector is absolutely necessary for capitalism to exist. Not only does the state "legitimize" corporate power, but also ensure the market works. Computers and even the internet for example were produced in the state sector. And were FAR too expensive to be marketable, the state had to artificially cheapen the products and provide them to corporations at cheaper prices.

I mean the real Capitalists (actual business owners) would never advocate getting rid of the state. I don't mean this in a particularly offensive way, but there's a good reason why most libertarians are young, rich kids and not major business owners.

[AnSyn Blackflag]

Thanks for the info.


If you want a perspective from someone who agrees with it, you should ask in Opposing Ideologies. But if I had to summarize the mindset in two words, it would be "muh freedums".
I shall do this. thanks.

[Lord Hargreaves]

Anarcho-capitalism is based on two fundamental premises - self-ownership, and free contract.

As Blake's Baby put it, self-ownership is the idea that "what you make is an extension of yourself". If you think of your own relationship to yourself in terms of property - you "own" your body and what it can do: it is like the variable capital you advance to combine with the fixed capital of the natural world - then it must follow that what you work upon and improve (say, land) must become yours. It is your property.

Then once you own something, it can be alienated from you through free contract or free agreement alone. And then this new arrangement or distribution is just because it was freely consented to - the justice of the original property holding is "passed over" to the new holding without remainder. It is a strictly deontological and not consequentialist moral theory.

Thus if I have $10 million and there are ten of us in our group, I might decide to give someone I'm friends with half of it, so we each have $5 million. That then is a just distribution because it was freely chosen, and it doesn't matter that it means 8 of the 10 people in our group then have nothing and starve. They have no claim to the money aside to my free consent (assuming I have a just claim to the $10 million in the first place, I'm taking this as a given in this example).

These are the two principles. The state is opposed by an-caps because it is seen as operating on utilitarian principles - "the greatest happiness of the greatest number", distributing rights to the population in aggregation, rather than respecting them absolutely - and because it is seen as democratic, and thus nihilistic - what is morally correct is decided by majority vote, and not by looking at the individual's claim to this or that particular piece of property.

Also worth noting is that most anarcho-capitalists draw on Austrian economic theory. Thus there is no "objective" theory of value or theory of profit per se at all, as these things are entirely governed by the subjective judgements of individuals in the market place.

For instance, wage rates are explained by concepts like "opportunity cost" and "time preference": the worker freely decides to work for the wage at the point at which he feels like that particular price has become an adequate compensation for the next best alternative use of his time foregone (opportunity cost), and he freely decides to take a wage as a guaranteed income to live on now rather than wait for a cut of the profit which may be "more" objectively but which is actually worth less to him, because it may take a long time to materialize, as the product has to travel through the whole system of production and distribution and finally to market (time preference for payment now rather than later).