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How do we fight those who change the definition of capitalism
Recently, I was debating a libertarian/an-cap (he didn't really understand his own views quite well). And he was saying the typical, the US isn't really capitalist cause of the government. The only place that is still capitalist is Hong Kong which has the highest standard of living in the world. Also he says that India was a socialist dictatorship until 1997 (okay this one truly didn't make any sense).
So you do you debate with these types. I tried explaining that the basis for capitalist development is the nation state, and that the government interferes because the ruling class asks it to do so. And that you can't maintain a class society without a state. Being that the ruling class wishes to maintain a state to maintain their power. And thus it would require a level of voluntaryism for them to get rid of the state.
“How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?” Charles Bukowski, Factotum
"In our glorious fight for civil rights, we must guard against being fooled by false slogans, as 'right-to-work.' It provides no 'rights' and no 'works.' Its purpose is to destroy labor unions and the freedom of collective bargaining... We demand this fraud be stopped." MLK
-fka Redbrother
The means of production are privately owned therefore it is Capitalist, the level of authoritarianism does not effect the level of capitalism.
The fact that he is an ancap itself means he doesn't know what he's talking about, but this makes me 100% sure he doesn't have a clue at all.
Honestly, why bother with this debate? I mean unless it is a coworker or relative or someone you have to see every day and they aren't going to let it go, or you are doing this debate in a public way which might convince other people.
A lot of these tea-parties and libertarians don't have rational or coherent positions because they don't need to understand how the world works, they don't care how it works, and they are not interested in knowing how it works. When you strip away all the bullshit these faddish libertarian trends are only about apologizing for capitalism.
It's like nationalists who believe in some "golden age" that we could return to if liberals/immigrants/labor unions/insert scapegoat here wouldn't mess things up. They believe capitalism is perfect but gets mucked up by government/'entitled workers"/labor unions/etc.
I have an acquaintance, who is a libertarian Capitalist, who often does this. He won't accept that the definition of Capitalism is the private ownership of the MoP, yet when I ask him for a straight-forward definition sort of worms his way around the question.
Leave them be, they're not worth debating with because they are more utopian than any other ideology and, because they ally themselves with a Capitalist, great-man version of social history rather than a materialist economic version of history, they have not drawn the right conclusions and thus will never gain a power base in any part of society.
They are, to be frank, Ron Paul.
I'd just move on to a general analysis of the capitalist mode of production and how that in and of itself is exploitative. Regardless of State Intervention or not, wage slavery still exists. To me, the issue of state involvement doesn't really enter in, even if we had an anarcho-capitalist society exploitative practices would continue.
[FONT=Arial]“Whoever labours becomes a proprietor... And when I say proprietor, I do not mean simply (as do our hypocritical economists) proprietor of his allowance, his salary, his wages, – I mean proprietor of the value he creates, and by which the master alone profits... The labourer retains, even after he has received his wages, a natural right in the thing he has produced.”[/FONT]-Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What is Property?, pg. 123-4
[FONT=Palatino Linotype]---- when capitalism melts down ... make sure you have an AK 47 ---- [FONT=Palatino Linotype]when capitalism melts down ... make sure you have an AK 47 ---- [FONT=Palatino Linotype]when capitalism melts down ... make sure you have an AK 47 ---- [/FONT][/FONT][/FONT]
