Actually there are a lot of problems that anarchists wouldn't run into that the government does. Political corruption - collusion between state and corporations with welfare for the wealthy and prisons and environmental destruction for the poor. Overspending on the military and on wars. A bloated and inefficient healthcare system run more for the benefit of insurance companies than for those requiring medical attention. Etcetera etcetera.
There's also no good reason to believe that anarchists wouldn't follow standard engineering and construction practices. Look at open source software, there's no state in control of practices there yet engineers tend to do just fine. In fact, there are plenty of examples where people cut corners on safety procedures within a capitalist society in order that they can get a competitive advantage in the market. I'd say the incentives of capitalism are more detrimental to good bridges than those of anarchism.
Anarcho-capitalism is a political philosophy that advocates the elimination of the state in favor of individual sovereignty, private property, and free markets. Anarcho-capitalists believe that, in the absence of statute (law by decree or legislation), society would improve itself through the discipline of the free market (or what its proponents describe as a "voluntary society").[2][3]
One aspect that concerned me:
In an anarcho-capitalist society, law enforcement, courts, and all other security services would be operated by privately funded competitors rather than centrally through compulsory taxation. Money, along with all other goods and services, would be privately and competitively provided in an open market.
Sooooooooo private security firms for law enforcement? Pretty sure we saw how that worked out in Iraq with Blackwater. No thank you. There's a ton of flaws with this philosophy once you start thinking about it and following certain aspects to their logical conclusion.
Such as:
>>> I'm an anarchocapitalist and would love to see all of these costs unbundled, so that we each pay only for what we use.
So you only use 2.5 miles of a highway to get to and back from work - right? Should you pay for the entire highway or just the parts you use? So what if other people only use "parts" of that same highway? Does that mean we suddenly have huge gaps in our highways since people are only paying for the parts they use?
The anarchist position is totally self defeating. We live in a complex society so some systems are needed. You can't do without a functioning justice system, functioning infrastructure, a financial system you can trust not to steal your money and other things. The market can't provide these things without some rules.
I really wish people would start asking for government accountability instead of wanting to abolish things that don't work and thinking that there is some magic fairy that will jump in and make it work. Getting systems to work well is hard, never-ending work and there are no simple solutions. Most of us here build technology systems so we should know this first hand.
Well, despite what anarcho-capitalists may say, in an anarchist society you would find it very hard to maintain capitalism as is familair to us today. This is because the State, and by extension its threat of violence, enforces private property rights. In a truly anarchist system where no other protection force evolves to reinstitute the government's role in protecting private property, you would have a very hard time building large amounts of capital. You may be able to control some small amounts of relatively private property (in addition to some personal property), but you absolutely could not maintain the current breadth of our global supply chain without the credible threat of violence from a large organization bent on maintaining private property rights.[0]
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[0]: Merely the threat of violence from a large organization, but not one with a goal of maintaining private property rights, is insufficient to maintain capitalist supply chains, because such an organization would naturally try to increase its own power through force. It would look more like a warlord, cartel, or small-time dictatorship with all of the corruption that implies than a smoothly working system of trade.
It's things like this that make me an anarchist. I know that theoretically governments exist because protection services will be underprovided in the marketplace. But is this "protection"? Is this really for the good of society? Must we put up with such indignities? Is anarchic capitalism so much worse that we should never try it?
Also, I doubt that they can effectively enforce this.
Anarchists are, in general, a subset of socialists. You have wacky things like anarcho-capitalists, but it's difficult to take them seriously. There are some rigorous ancaps who truly believe that somehow the state is not needed to protect absentee ownership of property and that this arrangement will be a net benefit to humanity, but many of them simply think the government is the only thing stopping them from owning a zeppelin and wearing a top hat.
The difference is that in practice, most "pro-capitalism" individuals are actually okay with the state taking on a wide variety of tasks on some level: military, police, roads, public schools, environmental regulations, labor and health codes, zoning, etc. Sure, GOP-controlled (or your local right-wing equivalent) areas tend to have less of these things, but less isn't the same thing as none.
In contrast, anarchists are usually opposed to having any state whatsoever. The ideology tends towards being far more extreme and uncompromising.
I admit I have a hard time imagining how an advanced economy could work without a government. Can you clarify your opinions here - in your anarchist utopia,
- Does money exist? If not, how are workers compensated for the full value of their labor?
- Does a central bank exist? If not, how is inflation & deflation controlled? (A common criticism of Marxists is capitalisms boom / bust cycle - how does getting rid of the government solve this?)
- Without a government, how are market failures solved:
Who discourages negative externalities such as pollution, violence, theft, human trafficking, pushing dangerous drugs on minors? It's in no-one's individual self-interest to prevent these things - they require collective action.
Who funds actions with positive externalities such as trash collection, fundamental scientific research, maintaining and protecting national parks, etc
- Many modern industries are extremely capital intensive. I get the idea that a revolution will expropriate existing capital. But going forward, who will create new capital if owning & profiting from it is impossible? Who pays the laborer who produces capital? In my understanding, we either need to incentivize capital production by having the government pay for it and own it (state-owned industries), or by allowing people to buy it and profit off of the ownership. How does anarchism solve this?
I get vastly different, mostly non-answers to these questions from different leftists.
Capitalism is not anarchism, where there is no state to generate public goods, and libertarians are not unaware of collective action problems and the utility of government in solving them..
The anarchic aspect comes from the void in accountability that comes with large bureaucracies like states.
It is this dysfunctionionality that makes free market oriented societies that place greater limits on the power of the state generally more prosperous than societies with significant government intervention, despite the latter theoretically being better able to address a litany of collective action problems.
Anarcho-capitalists aren't anarchists. It is self contradictory to have a society that is controlled by capital owners (capitalism) and one that is controlled by no one (anarchism).
TLDR: Capitalism is a form of government historically and in the present. Even if it was not (as suggested by right-wing libertarians like Ayn Randt), anarchism stands against all power over others (read authority/domination/privilege/exploitation) not just government.
"Property is theft" is a famous quote by Proudhon [0], who was the first person to coin the term "anarchist" to describe a desire for Freedom & Equality as complementary goals which should never be opposed. By this, he means that profit is always derived from someone else's exploitation downstream: for example, as computer people, even by working "ethical" jobs, we still widely profit from the exploitation of miners and factory workers in the Global South who produce our devices, and from the pollution and climate change (that also mostly affects the Global South) derived from that. It's also worth noting, as we've seen at the height of the COVID lockdowns, that the people the most essential to society (food/health, logistics, maintenance/construction workers) are also those who get the smallest share of the pie.
Private property is the State religion that makes it possible to have homeless people yet millions of empty dwellings, and that core tenet of capitalism is enforced by the Nation State and its police/military forces [1]. This, despite the fact that many jurisdiction (including the law in France since the liberation in 1945) explicitly allows authorities to requisition empty dwellings to prevent civil disorder ("trouble à l'ordre public"). Capitalism relies on early indoctrination (via childhood education) and a great amount of physical force/threats in order to perpetuate itself. Why do we have to pay to live? Because if you don't pay rent, some psychopaths with guns are gonna knock down your door and kick you out.
Would there be equality without a centralized government? Sure, some influential person could employ a militia (as already happens despite our having a central police [2]), but:
- the scale of that would be fairly limited to crush popular unrest, compared to a Nation State's forces
- without a central State to indoctrinate since childhood (preparing us for competition in a cruel world) and ensure millions of people live in misery (and have to take the job) it would be harder to mount such schemes
- the incentives would be more balanced: if we can live decently and quietly (as most people desire), what interest would i have to attack someone else's community for a corrupt overlord?
- power would be more balanced: in many parts of the world (including France), the State has a legal monopoly on justified violence which makes community vulnerable by not having a right to arm and defend themselves
Both outcomes are possible if we abolish the State from one day to the next (anarcho-capitalism and anarcho-communism). However, given the history of capitalism and the sheer amount of national force it took to set that up (eg. armies colonizing foreign countries, public schools to teach the young to fuck other people before they fuck you and that "copying is cheating"), i would argue that tearing down such centralized structures may bring us closer to our tendencies for empathy and mutual aid which are common throughout animal societies. [3]
Overall, anarchism is focused on distribution of power, responsibilities, and resources: in society at large, in the family, in the workplace, in interpersonal relationships... It's not focused on "rights" as a legal construct but on the practical power you can yield as an individual. Sure, in a capitalist society we are all "free" to own a castle just like we are all "free" to get decent healthcare: but if we aren't given the practical means to achieve this "right", it's entirely meaningless.
Or, as Bakunin put it: "liberty without socialism is privilege, injustice; socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality.”
To finally answer your question, i'm not morally opposed to making a profit in this profit-driven society in order to survive. I'm also not morally opposed to cooperatives making a profit in order to build a parallel economy. What matters to me is the next step: how to build a society based on needs and desires, not profit. Or, as the old anarchist saying goes: "To each according to their needs, from each according to their capacity".
On a high-level, you need money because everybody else needs money: the carpenter needs to pay the peasant, who needs to pay the plumber, who needs to pay the baker... Workers cooperatives, when they have a sense of revolutionary purpose [4], can be a trojan horse that extracts money form our overlords in order to build material autonomy that can lead to the irrelevance of profit. Money is an abstract layer of indirection, and at each step leaks into the pockets of the owners.
Having lived for quite a while in communities where money is irrelevant [5], I personally feel that in order to achieve our goals, it's much more efficient to base the discussion on actual needs and how to build concrete autonomy [6] rather than center the talk about monetary goals in which we can loose sight of what we were trying to accomplish in the first place.
I hope to have answered your question.
[0] If you're interested in cooperative economy and don't read what he has to say about women and the jews, his writings are sound. Fortunately the more recent anarchist movement (since the last quarter of the 19th century) has evolved to be fundamentally incompatible with misogyny and racist sentiment and to be on the frontlines against such power structures (see for example the rise of anarcha-feminism since the 1930s).
[1] The military is not just a construct against foreign invasion, as seen throughout the history of the workers emancipation movement and the many times armies have been called to bloodily suppress strikes and other forms of popular uprising. Although since the second half of the 20th century, modern Nation States have developed "counter-insurgency" techniques in which the military becomes a last resort, and focus is placed on both propaganda and cooptation on one hand, and more vicious political repression on the other hand (targeted assassinations, legal proceedings, mutilation by police forces, etc).
[2] In the squatting scene, that's not unheard of. Bigger landlords often have ties to different strains of mafia. In other spheres of life, you could probably read about Pinkerton (the history as well as modern occurrences such as Amazon's anti-union campaign), about the Coca-Cola murders in South America, or about companies such as Ikea mounting their own intelligence agency.
[3] See also the recent HN threads about Kropotkin and his studies on mutual aid.
[4] Unlike recent straits of workers coops who have been coopted by capitalism (so-called social economy) which is only concerned about working conditions and not about broader social questions.
[5] We do use money to interface with some segments of society, but in a squat/Commune you can as an individual live without money if you don't have any, and still find purpose and access to resources. Also worth noting, some interactions with neighboring structures is not necessarily based on money: it's not uncommon for a local market/bakery to give away "dying" foods, for neighbors to help out one another on construction work, etc.
[6] Autonomy is not independence. Noone is truly independent, and autonomy accepts and accounts for inter-dependence relationships.
I would say that anarchy, rather than capitalism, is biased in that way. I would not expect anarcho-capitalism to do any better or any worse than anarcho-communism.
Reason being, some rules just don’t make sense unless you have a deep understanding of the part of the world they interact with; and if you are free to flout those rules, it can be very tempting when you have no salient examples of the consequences of breaking them.
Lead was added to gasoline for improved performance, not to cause systemic increases in violence after 30 years of widespread use; CFCs were chosen because of their low toxicity, reactivity and flammability, not to catalytically destroy the ozone layer; antibiotics are used by meat farmers to increase growth rate and allow more intensive farming, not to trigger the evolution of MRSA. There are almost certainly other things which I could not even describe accurately that follow the same pattern.
I have no idea how to protect against disasters that only experts can comprehend without also allowing obsolete ideologies and standards organisations to crystallise against progress. But then, I’m only superficially familiar with political philosophy — I was about 30 when I learned of Chesterton’s Fence.
They never were TBH, capitalism is inherently hierarchical and a system of entirely private enterprise would resemble corporate feudalism, not an anarchist society.
The thing that amuses me about anarcho-capitalism is that the state seems vitally necessary for capitalism to work. Without a powerful government institutionalizing and enforcing property rights, markets don't work (cf. Hernando de Soto).
In anarchy, you might have one voluntary "enforcement agency" trying to enforce anarcho-capitalist property rights, but an entirely separate voluntary "enforcement agency" trying to enforce a socialist conception of property rights, and various other gangs just mucking shit up.
The only sustainable form of capitalism-in-the-large requires government. At this stage, it probably requires fiat currency, vast amounts of land, urbanization, and serious attention to environmental concerns as well. (By "sustainable" I mean in every sense: in terms of resources, ecology, economics, and technology.)
I used to be a libertarian. I'm still in favor of small governments and market economics, but I'm far more pragmatic about it. And I have no interest in trying to build some aquatic libertopia.
EDIT: Heh, some good parts.
"tight communal living can be stressful, but residents of places such as Antarctica stations already find a way to muddle through"
Tight communal living is a little collectivist for the target market here, eh?
"Why not just do it: build a version of the world you want to live in. Then you get to live in it, regardless of whether anyone else is convinced it’s proper or makes sense."
For most people, the world we want to live in has a lot more to do with weather, landscape, profession, and community than it has to do with politics. California's politics are pretty crap, but it's still a popular place to live because everything else is pretty nice.
Anarchism is inherently capitalist, because without the state, there would be nobody to stop capitalists from deploying capital to do startups. There would be nobody ot impose your socialist values to make everyone act the way you dictate.
The counterpoints in [0] are outdated. It shows the author has not read any of the anarchist literature. If you are interested in debating this, let me know. I'm working on a YouTube channel to bring these points to light, and having someone that is curious about it and knows these counterpoints as well as you do would be great help.
> Things like basic research, things like exploiting a limited pool of shared resources, things like schools and prisons - they all go to hell when you try to run them on free-market rules.
Research is done with money from profits; if companies weren't taxed so much they'd have more profits left to invest in R&D.
Public schools are a vehicle for government propaganda and the brainwashing of children. There, they are conditioned to obey, not to question, and not to trust their own thinking. Public education as it is is as much child abuse as growing up religious is; it teaches kids the truth is in others, and that they couldn't have arrived at true conclusions by themselves.
There are better ways to deal with crime than prisons. It's a strawman to counter anarchist views with "but what of the roads? and prisons?" as if those are the only ways to travel and to curb crime. Go back in history, there are several alternatives to these that do not necessitate the government. Of particular interest is Iceland in the 10th century, but that's really just one example. I wonder how much research you've done to conclude with so much certainty that those things "all go to hell when you try to run them on free-market rules".
Advertising is not money spent trying to one-up competitors (though it can be). It is broadcasting the existence of a service or product. It's not about converting others to drop their favorite brands (though it can be), but about letting others know you exist. How do you get people to know you exist without advertisement?
I'd also like to point out that although I usually enjoy your comments here, you're being extremely condescending to me in your tone. Examples: "pretty much [...] debunks your points", "a lot of dogmas that sound nice", "trivially easy to be shown false", etc. The reason I point this out is because I'm routinely downvoted for defending my side of the argument, when in fact we should be using downvotes for people like you that address others with contempt and trivialize their points.
There's also no good reason to believe that anarchists wouldn't follow standard engineering and construction practices. Look at open source software, there's no state in control of practices there yet engineers tend to do just fine. In fact, there are plenty of examples where people cut corners on safety procedures within a capitalist society in order that they can get a competitive advantage in the market. I'd say the incentives of capitalism are more detrimental to good bridges than those of anarchism.
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