Anarchism and anarcho-capitalism
Encyclopedia
This article discusses similarities and differences between anarcho-capitalism
and other types of anarchism
. Some social anarchists argue that anarcho-capitalism is not a form of anarchism due to their understanding of capitalism as inherently authoritarian. They argue that certain capitalist transactions are not voluntary, and that maintaining the class structure of a capitalist society requires coercion, which is incompatible with an anarchist society.
was "a student and disciple of the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises
, [who] combined the laissez-faire economics of his teacher with the absolutist views of human rights and rejection of the state he had absorbed from studying the individualist American anarchists of the nineteenth century such as Lysander Spooner
and Benjamin Tucker
." Rothbard said: Like the nineteenth century individualists, Rothbard believed that security should be provided by multiple competing businesses rather than by a tax-funded central agency. However, he rejected their labor theory of value
in favor of the modern neo-classical marginalist
view. Thus, like most modern economists, he did not believe that prices in a free market would, or should, be proportional to labor (nor that "usury" or "exploitation" necessarily occurs where they are disproportionate). Instead, he believed that different prices of goods and services in a market, whether completely free or not, are ultimately the result of goods and services having different marginal utilities rather than of their embodying differing amounts of labor – and that there is nothing unjust about this. Rothbard also disagreed with Tucker that interest would disappear with unregulated banking and money issuance. Rothbard believed that people in general do not wish to lend their money to others without compensation, so there is no reason why this would change where banking is unregulated. Nor, did he agree that unregulated banking would increase the supply of money because he believed the supply of money in a truly free market is self-regulating. And, he believed that it is good that it would not increase the supply or inflation would result. Few individualist anarchists still agree with the labor theory of value of the nineteenth century individualists or their theories on money, and as a result, according to mutualist Kevin Carson, "most people who call themselves 'individualist anarchists' today are followers of Murray Rothbard's Austrian economics."
Though Rothbard said "I am ... strongly tempted to call myself an 'individualist anarchist,' except for the fact that Spooner and Tucker have in a sense preempted that name for their doctrine and that from that doctrine I have certain differences," some scholars classify anarcho-capitalism
as a capitalist form of individualist anarchism. Anarcho-capitalist Wendy McElroy
does describe herself as a "Rothbardian and an individualist anarchist." Anti-capitalist anti-communist individualist anarchist Joe Peacott
concurs that there are significant economic differences: "The anarchist capitalists ... reject a key part of the thought of the [19th century] individualists ... that rent, interest, and profit are ways to steal this wealth from its rightful owners." However, most anarchists believe that support of free market capitalism disqualifies anarcho-capitalists from being anarchists, individualist or otherwise. Some individualist anarchists have continued to espouse the labor theory of value
, finding profit
to be unnatural and exploitative. In the mainstream, however, the popularity of the labor theory of value
of classical economics
was superseded by greater acceptance of the subjective theory of value
of neo-classical economics. Eventually, Murray Rothbard
coined the term "anarcho-capitalism
" to define his anti-statist, laissez-faire capitalist philosophy. Anarcho-capitalism has a theory of legitimacy
that supports private property, as long as it is not obtained by coercion. Its leading proponents are Murray Rothbard
and David Friedman
and it has been influenced by non-anarchist libertarians such as Frederic Bastiat
and Robert Nozick
, and also by Ayn Rand
(although she rejected libertarianism and anarchism).
Some of those who call themselves Anarcho-capitalists say that their views have no relation to what they call social anarchism
, other than opposition to the State. Nevertheless many anarchists who oppose capitalism also like to see themselves as individualist and argue that the social classes created by capitalism limit liberty by forcing some individuals to work and receive orders from others above them, and also limiting individual's use of their time and subjectivity. This is in many respects, in their views, as much destruction or more destruction of liberty as the existence of states. Some anarchists have even argued that individualism and communism are not only compatible but even necessary complements in order to protect individual liberty.
Many anarchists argue that capitalism runs contrary to an egalitarian power structure, which is necessary to anarchism. They also argue that the system of wage labour
, and hence capitalism, is authoritarian and coercive in nature, and oppose class distinction between labourers and employers. A major line of reasoning is that employees are subject to the authority of their employer with respect to the latter's property and, because such an hierarchy could not be tolerated within an egalitarian power structure, it is essential to anarchism for such practices to be abolished. The writers of An Anarchist FAQ
argue that "social relations between capitalists and employees can never be equal, because private ownership of the means of production
gives rise to social hierarchy and relations of coercive authority and subordination".
Individualist anarchists
, of which anarcho-capitalists are included, do not object to private ownership of the means of production. Even some anti-capitalist individualist anarchists of the nineteenth century did not reject employment as illegitimate "hierarchy." For example, the nineteenth century individualist anarchist Stephen Pearl Andrews
said, "The 'Wages System' is essentially proper and right. It is a right to that one man employ another, it is right that he pay him wages, and it is right that he direct him absolutely, arbitrarily, if you will, in the performance of his labor...It is not in any, nor in all of these features combined, that the wrong of our present system is to be sought and found. It is in the simply failure to do Equity. It is not that men are employed and paid, but that they are not paid justly..." Any that had opposition to employment by others, opposed it for monetary reasons rather than condemning it as "hierarchical." For example, Spooner argued that "each man should be his own employer, or work directly for himself, and not for another for wages; because, in the latter case, a part of the fruits of his labor go to his employer, instead of coming to himself." They did not object to wages being paid, but rather they believed that wages were not adequately compensating labor due to state interference in the economy. Benjamin Tucker
thought that the elimination of state intervention would increase competition in capital, which he thought would eliminate the possibility of an employer receiving an income without himself laboring so that "every man will be a labourer exchanging with fellow-labourers."
With that said, anarcho-capitalist David D. Friedman
says he prefers a society not based in wage labor but where "almost everyone is self employed. Instead of corporations there are large groups of entrepreneurs related by trade, not authority. Each sells, not his time, but what his time produces." Like all individualist anarchists, anarcho-capitalists support the liberty of individuals to be self-employed or to contract to be employed by others, whichever they prefer. Anarcho-capitalist Murray Rothbard
, however, explicitly stated that "wage-wage" was one of "a whole slew of institutions necessary to the triumph of liberty" (including "organization, hierarchy, wage-work, granting of funds by libertarian millionaires, and a libertarian political party"). In fact, "rejection of wage-labor" was "unlibertarian."
The writers of An Anarchist FAQ
argue that wage labour is not consistent with anarchist principles, including the stated principles of individualist anarchists like Tucker. Unlike anarcho-capitalism, though, it "can easily be made consistent anarchism by applying its own principles consistently."
Anarcho-communists do not, however, ban wage labor, but say that "'agreements' in which workers sign away their liberty would not be enforced."
Anarcho-capitalists do not defend all private property, but only that which has become private property by "homesteading." They do not see the creation of private property by mere claim, without homesteading, as legitimate and they do not defend private property that was by transferred from one person or business to another by force, whether by the state or private individuals. Rothbard says: "What we libertarians object to, then, is not government per se but crime, what we object to is unjust or criminal property titles; what we are for is not "private" property per se but just, innocent, non-criminal private property." Anarcho-capitalists do not defend the current distribution of property.
Many anarchists argue that anarcho-capitalism is contradictory, and say that the anarcho-capitalist definition of private property is uncomfortably similar to its definition of the state. For example, leading anarcho-capitalist Murray Rothbard argued that the state "arrogates to itself a monopoly of force . . . over a given area territorial area.", yet he also argued: "Obviously, in a free society, Smith has the ultimate decision-making power over his own just property, Jones over his, etc." However, the key word is "arrogates," as anarcho-capitalists only support property created by homesteading which they do not see as arrogation but as earning through one's labor. To arrogate a monopoly of force would be to exercise control over an area that one has not homesteaded, or to exercise control over an area by one who has not received the homesteaded property through voluntary means.
To anarcho-capitalists, any geographical holding as large as most current incarnations of the state would be impossible to achieve by any one proprietor without the tools of the state. Standard private holdings tend to be not only much smaller, but antithetical to coercive relationships - as any visitor, lessee, or employee, would be free to move elsewhere at will. Further, the state, being an artificial entity without a head of its own, has an entirely different set of motives regarding care of a property, resulting in proportionate carelessness for that property (i.e. pollution
).
Anarchists also note that once land and capital are monopolised by a minority, attempts by those subject to this economic and social power to end it automatically become "aggression." As Kropotkin noted, "modern Individualism... [is] a powerful indictment against the dangers and wrongs of government, but its practical solution of the social problem... lead[s] us to inquire if the talk of 'No force' be merely an excuse for supporting landlord and capitalist domination."
Many nineteenth-century individualist anarchists, including Benjamin Tucker, rejected the anarcho-capitalist Lockean position in favour of the anarchist position of "occupancy and use" (or "possession", to use Proudhon's term), particularly in land. One notable exception is Lysander Spooner, who does not require that land use be "continual" to retain ownership. Similarly, anarcho-capitalist Rothbard argued that one must "use the land, to cultivate it in some way, before he could be asserted to own it." and did not require continual use to retain ownership. Many individualist anarchists of the nineteenth century accepted Proudhon's position on land: "What I cannot accept, regarding land, is that the work put in gives a right to ownership of what has been worked on." If there was a shortage of land, he "accept[ed] equal division. Anything else... is an abuse." Anarchist critics of anarcho-capitalism also note that Proudhon's "What is Property?
" explicitly attacks the position on land ownership supported by Spooner and anarcho-capitalists. Benjamin Tucker, however, changed his mind on land and said in 1862: "In times past...it was my habit to talk glibly of the right of man to land. It was a bad habit, and I long ago sloughed it off. Man's only right to land is his might over it. If his neighbor is mightier than he and takes the land from him, then the land is his neighbor's, until the latter is dispossessed by one mightier still." Anarcho-capitalists, such as Murray Rothbard, disagree that might and theft grants a right over land.
Because of his belief in the labor theory of value, when the nineteenth century individualist Benjamin Tucker said that an employee should receive his "full produce," he took it to mean that the full produce was an amount of money fully commensurate with the amount of a labor performed. He believed individuals were receiving less than their "full produce" because of state intervention interfering with competitive market forces and thereby artificially lowering the price of labor—a view shared by anarcho-capitalists today. Tucker did not advocate interfering with individuals contracting as employee and employer if they desire, but believed that the price of labor would increase in a true laissez-faire economy. He thought that legal restrictions on banking caused the price of capital to be unnaturally expensive and that if these restrictions were removed that capital would become available "at cost." This, he believed, would cause new businesses to proliferate and raise the demand for labor and therefore the price as well. Individualist Lysander Spooner advocated that workers maximize their incomes through universal self-employment.
holds that capitalism is founded on "an act of robbery as massive as feudalism," and argues that capitalism could not exist in the absence of a state. Carson argues that if a truly free market were to have been put in effect it would have resulted in a system where the ability to extract a profit
from labor and capital would be negligible as "a system of power in which ownership and control are divorced from labor – could not survive in a free market.". Anarcho-capitalists disagree, with most stating that this economic system would be marked by hierarchy, inequalityas well as interest, rent and profit.
Right-libertarians, Carson argues, "take existing property relations and class power as a given." Carson, like previous individualist anarchists, thinks that the "modern worker, like the slave or the serf, is the victim of ongoing robbery; he works in an enterprise built from past stolen labor" so they are "justified in taking direct control of production, and keeping the entire product of his [or her] labor." At first glance, anarcho-capitalists may consider such expropriation as coercion, but at second glance, most anarcho-capitalists agree with Carson conception of appropriation. As Carson writes,
Since anarchists by definition favour voluntary interaction, anarcho-capitalists have argued from a different definition of "voluntary" than has been historically used by anarchists. This has led to disputes over whether anarcho-capitalists support a genuinely "free market." Anarcho-capitalists (and capitalists in general) understand a trade to be voluntary if there is no physical coercion or threat thereof. Opponents take into account other forms of coercion, such as economic coercion, arguing that an environment of property domination coerces individuals into accepting trades that are not optimal to them because their choices are being actively restricted by others. Anarcho-capitalists maintain that such restrictions tend not to be intrusive, but rather ensures order between visitors.
Some anarchists reject institutions such as interest, rent, and profit
as being intrusive and exploitative, and thus they believe that they should be abolished. They maintain that such institutions were made possible, in part, by state restrictions on banking and currency issuance as well as titles to land, and by vast accumulations of wealth which arise in capitalism and interfere with the free economy. Anarcho-capitalists do not believe that interest, rent, or profit are exploitative, arguing they are compatible with free markets, and claiming these institutions would prevail without government interference. However, like individualist anarchists, some anarcho-capitalists believe that in a free market, interest rates would substantially fall, but more due to falling time preference
.
Anarcho-capitalists and individualist anarchists both explicitly support the liberty of some individuals to be wealthier than others, in contrast to some collectivist philosophies that are based in economic egalitarianism
. However, while individualists believe that the vast concentrations of wealth created by government interference in the market cannot be remedied through abolition of government alone, they do believe it would be much more dispersed so that there would not be a significant chasm between the rich and the poor —and this they tend to see as beneficial. Some make a point of this while others explicitly object to any goal of equalizing wealth. In contrast, anarcho-capitalist philosophy does not evince general concern for wealth egalitarianism. In speculating about a possible anarchist society Benjamin Tucker held that defense associations could decide for themselves how much land they would protect; in an example, he postuled possession of no more than 10 acres (40,468.6 m²). (Property Under Anarchism)
and Lysander Spooner
based their individualism on natural law
, but many were "egoists," believing that no rights exist without contract that results out of individual self-interest. Benjamin Tucker
says: "I see no reason, as far as moral obligation is concerned, why one [man] should not sub-ordinate or destroy the other. But if each of these men can be made to see that the other's free life is helpful to him, then they will agree not to invade each other; in other words, they will equalize their existences, or rights to existence by contract. ... Before contract is the right of might. Contract is the voluntary suspension of the right to might. The power secured by such suspension we may call the right of contract. These two rights -the right of might and the right of contract -are the only rights that ever have been or ever can be. So-called moral rights have no existence." anarcho-capitalist David Friedman
also subscribes to a contractual view of rights, as opposed to anarcho-capitalist Murray Rothbard
's natural law basis.
, and in a sense require it due to their emphasis on private property, interest, rent and profit. Rothbard defines "anarchism as a system which provides no legal sanction for such aggression ['against person and property']" and said that "what anarchism proposes to do, then, is to abolish the State, i.e. to abolish the regularized institution of aggressive coercion." However, anarchists are unimpressed by this claim. They simply reply that this is privatising, not abolishing, the state; David Weick, for instance, argues that it would be better called "feudalism". Similarly, anarchists ask who defines what is and is not a "legal sanction" and what is and is not "aggressive coercion." Rothbard would assert that the violator of the property right of the victim would be the aggressor. This claim is justified using natural law theory.
While individualist anarchists expect that one would defend their own property through possession, some, such as Tucker and Spooner, support private defense to protect property. Tucker differentiates protection from rent or tax, because the primary form of protection would be possessive, saying that "defense is a service like any other service; that it is labor both useful and desired, and therefore an economic commodity subject to the law of supply and demand;" (Instead of a Book).
, rent and interest are exploitative
. Some anarchists, like Proudhon, Bakunin and Tucker, base this in the labour theory of value while others, like Kropotkin
and Malatesta
, did not. While classical economists such as Adam Smith
also accepted the labor theory of value, most modern economists, including most anarcho-capitalists and some other anarchists, espouse a subjective theory of value
and marginalism
- that value of commodities and labor is variable and based on factors outside the means of production, such as scarcity, and the subjective value to potential buyers.
In the eyes of anarchists who embrace a labor theory of value, profit is derived by paying labor less than what it is worth, with the employer retaining the difference, and is considered exploitative. For anarcho-capitalists, worth is subjective. And they believe that both employer and employee profit by giving what they value less (equipment and labor, respectively) for what they value more (labour and wages, respectively) or else they would not agree to trade, and therefore the agreement is not considered exploitative by anarcho-capitalists.
The nineteenth century individualists depart from anarcho-capitalists in arguing that all wages should be equal insofar as labor is commensurate, in accordance with the principle of "cost the limit of price
." Anarcho-capitalists, believing that the value of any particular labor is subjective, and should be ultimately decided by mutual agreement, have no opposition whatsoever to employers profiting from the labor of their employees. This has been a major point of contention between anarcho-capitalists and other anarchists, most of whom see this as a form of hierarchy, exploitation and privatized statism. Post-left anarchist Bob Black
adds "To my mind a right-wing anarchist is just a minarchist who'd abolish the state to his own satisfaction by calling it something else...They don't denounce what the state does, they just object to who's doing it."
Benjamin Tucker believed that more employment opportunities would be available if government did not enforce a credit monopoly and land monopoly, as he believed that low-interest or no-interest loans would be readily available to the general public due to competing lenders, and that profiting in wage labor would be nearly impossible due to increased competition on the part of businesses to attract labor.
, which has no opposition to profit
, is sometimes regarded as a form of individualist anarchism in recent times. For example, contemporary individualist anarchist Daniel Burton, who believes that most modern day individualist anarchists are class war anti-capitalists, nonetheless says that anarcho-capitalism
is a type of individualist anarchism Individualist anarchism vs. Anarcho-capitalism. Individualist Anarchist Laurance Labadie argued that Rothbard "upholds presumably in his courts the very economic evils which are at bottom the very reason for human contention and conflict." Wendy McElroy calls herself both an individualist anarchist and an anarcho-capitalist, and Italian anarcho-capitalist Guglielmo Piombini regards anarcho-capitalism
as a form of individualist anarchism (Per l'Anarco-Capitalismo). Historian Ralph Raico
regards it as "a form of individualist anarchism" (Authentic German Liberalism...). Simon Tormey, in his book Anti-Capitalism: A Beginner's Guide places no anti-capitalist restriction on being an individualist anarchist: "Pro-capitalist anarchism is, as one might expect, particularly prevalent in the US where it feeds on the strong individualist and libertarian currents that have always been a part of the American political imaginary. To return to the point, however, there are individualist anarchists who are most certainly not anti-capitalist and there are those who may well be."
Some anarcho-capitalists argue that their philosophy is related to individualist anarchism
. They believe a major difficulty in resolving the debate is due to the conflicting definitions of the words "anarchism
" and "capitalism
" as used by the two sides. The traditions that object to the term anarcho-capitalism tend to use the term "anarchism" to refer to political movements that are both anti-statist and anti-capitalist. Conversely, libertarians and anarcho-capitalists most commonly apply the term "anarchism" to any philosophy that opposes all forms of initiatory coercion (without specifications regarding economic systems). However, even this is disputed, as most anarchists argue that capitalism is inherently coercive.
Lysander Spooner's articles, such as No Treason and the Letter to Thomas Bayard, were widely reprinted in early anarcho-capitalist journals, and his ideas – especially his individualist critique of the state and his defense of the right to ignore or withdraw from it – were often cited by anarcho-capitalists. Spooner was staunchly opposed to government interference in economic matters, and supported a "right to acquire property [...] as one of the natural, inherent, inalienable rights of men [...] one which government has no power to infringe [...]". Like all anarchists, he opposed government regulation: "All legislative restraints upon the rate of interest are arbitrary and tyrannical restraints upon a man's natural capacity amid natural right to hire capital, upon which to bestow his labor." He was particularly vocal, however, in opposing any collusion between banks and government, and argued that the monopolistic privileges that the government granted to a few bankers were the source of many social and economic ills.
Benjamin Tucker supported private ownership of the product of labor, which he believed entailed a rejection of both collective and capitalist ownership. He was a staunch advocate of the mutualist
form of recompensing labor, which holds to "Cost the limit of price
". He also advocated a free market economy
, which he believed was prohibited by capitalist monopoly of credit and land backed by the state. He believed that anyone who wishes should be allowed to engage in the banking business and issue their private currency without needing special permission from government, and that unused land should not be restricted to those who wished to use it. He believed that if these and other coercive actions were eliminated that profit in economic transactions would be rendered nearly impossible because of increased availability of capital to all individuals and resulting increased competition in business. Accepting the labor theory of value
and the resulting "cost principle" as a premise marks one of mutualism's main conflicts with anarcho-capitalism. Although his self-identification as a socialist and sympathy for the labor movement led to hostility from some early anarcho-capitalists such as Robert LeFevre
, others, such as Murray Rothbard, embraced his critique of the state and claimed that he defined his "socialism" not in terms of opposition to a free market or private property, but in opposition to government privileges for business. However, individualists argue that capitalism cannot be maintained in the absence of the state. For example, Kevin Carson argues, "As a mutualist anarchist, I believe that expropriation of surplus value – i.e., capitalism – cannot occur without state coercion to maintain the privilege of usurer, landlord, and capitalist. It was for this reason that the free market mutualist Benjamin Tucker – from whom right-libertarians selectively borrow – regarded himself as a libertarian socialist." Tucker characterized the economic demands of Proudhon and Warren by saying, "though opposed to socializing the ownership of capital, they aimed nevertheless to socialize its effects by making its use beneficial to all instead of a means of impoverishing the many to enrich the few [...] Absolute Free Trade; free trade at home, as well as with foreign countries; the logical carrying out of the Manchester doctrine; laissez-faire the universal rule."
Anarcho-capitalism is sometimes viewed by those sympathetic to it as a form of individualist anarchism, despite the fact that the original individualist anarchists universally rejected capitalism (i.e., they opposed profit, which is seen as a fundamental characteristic of capitalism). Organizations such as mutualist.org remain dedicated to "free market anticapitalism," while individualists like Larry Gambone explicitly state that all capitalism is state capitalism. Nonetheless, anarcho-capitalist Wendy McElroy considers herself to be an individualist, while admitting that the original individualists were universally anticapitalist. In addition, historian Guglielmo Piombini considers anarcho-capitalism a form of individualist anarchism, though he offers no support for this statement. Collectivist anarchist author Iain McKay and historian Peter Sabatini both argue that anarcho-capitalism is fundamentally opposed to individualist anarchism.
The similarity to anarcho-capitalism in regard to private defense of liberty and property is probably best seen in a quote by 19th-century individualist anarchist Victor Yarros
:
While the claim is controversial, some scholars regard anarcho-capitalism
as being a form of individualism anarchism. However, other scholars, and many individualist anarchists themselves, do not accept anarcho-capitalism as a form of individualist anarchism, individualist or not, as they assert that anarchism
is fundamentally opposed to capitalism
. As individualist anarchist Joe Peacott says:
Individualist anarchists have continued to espouse the labor theory of value
, finding profit
to be unnatural and exploitative. In the mainstream, however, the popularity of the labor theory of value
of classical economics
was superseded by greater acceptance of the subjective theory of value
of neo-classical economics. Eventually, in the 1950s, Murray Rothbard
coined the term "anarcho-capitalism
" to define his anti-statist, laissez-faire capitalist philosophy.
Rothbard noted that while "strongly tempted," he could not call his ideology "individualist anarchism" because "Spooner and Tucker have in a sense preempted that name for their doctrine and that from that doctrine I have certain differences." Rothbard also supported unregulated banking, as Tucker and other individualists did, but believed that Tucker and Spooner had a flawed understanding of economics to believe that unregulated banking would eliminate profit from interest. Tucker says interest rates are ultimately determined by the time value of money
, rather than the supply of money and that interest/profit would still exist in a free banking environment. He says: "it has been particularly distressing to me as an ardent admirer of Spooner and Tucker to find that their followers have emphasized and concentrated on their totally fallacious monetary views almost to the [exclusion of all else and even bring them forth as a panacea for all economic and social ills." Rothbard suggested that individualist anarchists drop the labor theory of value
which he believed to be erroneous and leading to a false conclusion that profit was exploitative or unnatural in laissez-faire. Rothbard sought to introduce Lockean property rights and marginalism
into individualist anarchism:
Rothbard also rejected Tucker and Spooner's support of a system where there is no written law. He says, Instead, he argues,
Individualist anarchist Laurance Labadie argued however:
However, this criticism is specific to Rothbard's suggested version of anarcho-capitalism rather than to anarcho-capitalism in general. There are anarcho-capitalists who oppose the existence of all statutory law, such as Morris and Linda Tannehill. Individualist anarchism is a broad philosophy with various theorists having their own suggested versions.
socialism
. "It is my contention," writes Spangler, "that Rothbardian anarcho-capitalism is misnamed because it is actually a variety of socialism, in that it offers an alternative understanding of existing capitalism (or any other variety of statism) as systematic theft from the lower classes and envisions a more just society without that oppression. Rather than depending upon the labor theory of value
to understand this systematic theft, Rothbardian market anarchism utilizes natural law theory and Lockean
principles of property and self-ownership
taken to their logical extreme as an alternative framework for understanding and combating oppression." He goes on to call Murray Rothbard
"a visionary socialist," admitting that it would likely cause Rothbard fits to be characterized as such.
popularized by Auberon Herbert
. Tucker criticized Herbert's support of profit, but believed that Herbert's anti-statism would nevertheless result in a profitless economy. Herbert refused to call himself an anarchist, arguing that "we are governmentalists". He strongly opposed the idea that initiation of force may somehow become legitimate merely by constituting a majority, reasoning that "If we are self-owners (and it is absurd, it is doing violence to reason, to suppose that we are not), neither an individual, nor a majority, nor a government can have rights of ownership in other men." He did, however, support government "formally constituted by the nation, employing in this matter of force the majority method." Moreover, he argued that the state would remain in his system, for while "the state should compel no services and exact no payments by force," it "should be free to conduct many useful undertakings... in competition with all voluntary agencies... in dependence on voluntary payments."
The 19th century French economist Gustave de Molinari, although he proposed the replacement of the state in a fashion quite similar to anarcho-capitalism, refused to call himself an anarchist, even though France had a significant anarchist movement and had produced the first self-proclaimed anarchist in Proudhon.
Though some scholars say that anarcho-capitalism is a form of anarchism, most anarchists disagree. Some writers on anarchism point out that anarcho-capitalism and most other forms of anarchism are very different, calling it "right-libertarianism
" rather than left-libertarianism
, but maintaining that it is still anarchism. Peter Marshall
simply concludes that "few anarchists would accept 'anarcho-capitalists' into the anarchist camp."
Some anarchists maintain strongly that anarcho-capitalism
is not a form of anarchism
due to their belief that anarchism is necessarily anti-capitalist as well as anti-statist. They note that, historically, those who called themselves "anarchist" have been opposed to what they called "capitalism," and that anarchists like Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin and Tucker all called themselves socialists, and they argue that anarcho-capitalism "is judged to be anarchism largely because anarcho-capitalists say they are 'anarchists' and because they criticise the State." However, virtually all dictionary definitions define "anarchism" as opposition to the state. Significantly, few anarchists who called themselves "socialist" defined "anarchism" as purely opposition to the state. For example, Errico Malatesta
argued that the oppressed "sought to overthrow both State and property – then it was that anarchism was born." More recent anarchist thinkers have also noted that anarchism has not been solely concerned with the state:
"Critics have sometimes contended that anarchist thought, and classical anarchist theory in particular, has emphasised opposition to the state to the point of neglecting the real hegemony of economic power. This interpretation arises, perhaps, from a simplistic and overdrawn distinction between the anarchist focus on political domination and the Marxist focus on economic exploitation . . . there is abundant evidence against such a thesis throughout the history of anarchist thought."
Both social anarchists and anarcho-capitalists refer to the etymological origins of the word "anarchy" as "without rulers". Conventionally, anarchists interpret this to mean anything fitting the definition of ruler. Anarcho-capitalists specifically interpret this to apply to any form of institutionalized coercion
, arguing that in a society free from coercion, no institution can exist to prevent a person from following another. Anarcho-capitalists further argue that the forced prevention of any voluntary action (save for those actions which infringe upon the equal rights of others) creates a coercive hierarchy
, a ruler class and a ruled class. They argue that this class structure exists everywhere and only where coercion prevails. Classical American individualist anarchists in the Josiah Warren
or Benjamin Tucker
tradition favoured small local market, also opposing the existence of social class
structure since it, they argue, cuts individual liberty by making some people work and receive orders from others above; however the classical American individualist anarchists opposed what they called capitalism, believing that profit would decrease approaching zero under free market anarchy.
Many scholars such as David Osterfeld and David Miller view anarcho-capitalism as a 20th-century modification of the type of individualist anarchism that was popular in America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Scholar of political philosophy, Ian Adam, says "it is not in fact the case (as is sometimes thought) that anarcho-capitalism came out of the blue, without past or pedigree. It has a good deal in common with the earlier American tradition of individualist anarchism." Anti-capitalist anarchists tend to reject such claims, noting that many of the individualist anarchists called themselves socialists, and that all had a vision of a free society at odds with what they called capitalism. However, the scholars making the assertion that anarcho-capitalism is a more recent form of individualist anarchism are aware that 19th century individualist anarchists were opposed to capitalism (and communism); the assertion is that anarcho-capitalism is a subjectivist
form of individualist anarchism. In other words, opposition to profit is not a necessary condition of being an individualist anarchist.
Nevertheless, one anti-capitalist individualist anarchist laments, "is time that anarchists recognise the valuable contributions of... individualist anarchist theory and take advantage of its ideas. It would be both futile and criminal to leave it to the capitalist libertarians..." Anarchist author Iain McKay argues that individualism is essentially anti-capitalist and that anarcho-capitalism
's claim to the tradition require reading individualist anarchists out of context (http://www.infoshop.org/faq/secG1.html). Individualist anarchist Joe Peacott
argues that individualism rejects capitalist economic arrangements.
One set of approaches concludes that capitalism, by necessity, requires a state, and therefore capitalism cannot exist without a state. For example, Larry Gambone states, "for anarchists, capitalism is the result of the development of the state and therefore, all capitalism is in one sense, state capitalism." He adds that when the anarchists use the term "capitalism," they are referring to those who have "gained wealth from the use of governmental power or from privileges granted by government." Anarcho-capitalist Wendy McElroy says that when 19th century individualist anarchists referred to "capitalism" they meant state capitalism
, the alliance of government and business. Using this understanding of the manifestation of capitalism, some have argued that anarcho-"capitalism" is not truly a form of capitalism to begin with, and that therefore anarcho-"capitalism" is just as anti-capitalist as Tucker and Spooner. Left-libertarian Brad Spangler, for example, has argued that anarcho-capitalism, properly understood, is a stigmergic form of socialism
.
For those that maintain that anarcho-capitalism is, in fact, a form of capitalism, the issue of contention then becomes whether or not capitalism can be created, or maintained, in the absence of a state that intervenes in private property claims. Anarcho-capitalist Murray Rothbard
noted a difference between two contradictory concepts of capitalism, "free-market
capitalism" characterized by voluntary exchange and "state capitalism" characterized by violent expropriation. He believed that only free-market capitalism is true capitalism and as such "the fullest expression of anarchism". However, most anarchists would agree with scholar Jeremy Jennings statement that it is "hard not to conclude that these ideas [anarcho-capitalism] – with roots deep in classical liberalism – are described as anarchist only on the basis of a misunderstanding of what anarchism is."
Anarcho-capitalism
Anarcho-capitalism is a libertarian and individualist anarchist political philosophy that advocates the elimination of the state in favour of individual sovereignty in a free market...
and other types of anarchism
Anarchism
Anarchism is generally defined as the political philosophy which holds the state to be undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful, or alternatively as opposing authority in the conduct of human relations...
. Some social anarchists argue that anarcho-capitalism is not a form of anarchism due to their understanding of capitalism as inherently authoritarian. They argue that certain capitalist transactions are not voluntary, and that maintaining the class structure of a capitalist society requires coercion, which is incompatible with an anarchist society.
Economics and individualist anarchism
Murray RothbardMurray Rothbard
Murray Newton Rothbard was an American author and economist of the Austrian School who helped define capitalist libertarianism and popularized a form of free-market anarchism he termed "anarcho-capitalism." Rothbard wrote over twenty books and is considered a centrally important figure in the...
was "a student and disciple of the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises
Ludwig von Mises
Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises was an Austrian economist, philosopher, and classical liberal who had a significant influence on the modern Libertarian movement and the "Austrian School" of economic thought.-Biography:-Early life:...
, [who] combined the laissez-faire economics of his teacher with the absolutist views of human rights and rejection of the state he had absorbed from studying the individualist American anarchists of the nineteenth century such as Lysander Spooner
Lysander Spooner
Lysander Spooner was an American individualist anarchist, political philosopher, Deist, abolitionist, supporter of the labor movement, legal theorist, and entrepreneur of the nineteenth century. He is also known for competing with the U.S...
and Benjamin Tucker
Benjamin Tucker
Benjamin Ricketson Tucker was a proponent of American individualist anarchism in the 19th century, and editor and publisher of the individualist anarchist periodical Liberty.-Summary:Tucker says that he became an anarchist at the age of 18...
." Rothbard said: Like the nineteenth century individualists, Rothbard believed that security should be provided by multiple competing businesses rather than by a tax-funded central agency. However, he rejected their labor theory of value
Labor theory of value
The labor theories of value are heterodox economic theories of value which argue that the value of a commodity is related to the labor needed to produce or obtain that commodity. The concept is most often associated with Marxian economics...
in favor of the modern neo-classical marginalist
Marginalism
Marginalism refers to the use of marginal concepts in economic theory. Marginalism is associated with arguments concerning changes in the quantity used of a good or service, as opposed to some notion of the over-all significance of that class of good or service, or of some total quantity...
view. Thus, like most modern economists, he did not believe that prices in a free market would, or should, be proportional to labor (nor that "usury" or "exploitation" necessarily occurs where they are disproportionate). Instead, he believed that different prices of goods and services in a market, whether completely free or not, are ultimately the result of goods and services having different marginal utilities rather than of their embodying differing amounts of labor – and that there is nothing unjust about this. Rothbard also disagreed with Tucker that interest would disappear with unregulated banking and money issuance. Rothbard believed that people in general do not wish to lend their money to others without compensation, so there is no reason why this would change where banking is unregulated. Nor, did he agree that unregulated banking would increase the supply of money because he believed the supply of money in a truly free market is self-regulating. And, he believed that it is good that it would not increase the supply or inflation would result. Few individualist anarchists still agree with the labor theory of value of the nineteenth century individualists or their theories on money, and as a result, according to mutualist Kevin Carson, "most people who call themselves 'individualist anarchists' today are followers of Murray Rothbard's Austrian economics."
Though Rothbard said "I am ... strongly tempted to call myself an 'individualist anarchist,' except for the fact that Spooner and Tucker have in a sense preempted that name for their doctrine and that from that doctrine I have certain differences," some scholars classify anarcho-capitalism
Anarcho-capitalism
Anarcho-capitalism is a libertarian and individualist anarchist political philosophy that advocates the elimination of the state in favour of individual sovereignty in a free market...
as a capitalist form of individualist anarchism. Anarcho-capitalist Wendy McElroy
Wendy McElroy
Wendy McElroy is a Canadian individualist anarchist and individualist feminist. She was a co-founder along with Carl Watner and George H. Smith of The Voluntaryist in 1982.-Sex-positive:...
does describe herself as a "Rothbardian and an individualist anarchist." Anti-capitalist anti-communist individualist anarchist Joe Peacott
Joe Peacott
Joe Peacott is an individualist anarchist writer based in the United States. He is a leading figure at BAD Press, a publishing outlet for individualist anarchist philosophy. His work on economics and sociology has been published by the Libertarian Alliance and referenced favourably by leading...
concurs that there are significant economic differences: "The anarchist capitalists ... reject a key part of the thought of the [19th century] individualists ... that rent, interest, and profit are ways to steal this wealth from its rightful owners." However, most anarchists believe that support of free market capitalism disqualifies anarcho-capitalists from being anarchists, individualist or otherwise. Some individualist anarchists have continued to espouse the labor theory of value
Labor theory of value
The labor theories of value are heterodox economic theories of value which argue that the value of a commodity is related to the labor needed to produce or obtain that commodity. The concept is most often associated with Marxian economics...
, finding profit
Profit (economics)
In economics, the term profit has two related but distinct meanings. Normal profit represents the total opportunity costs of a venture to an entrepreneur or investor, whilst economic profit In economics, the term profit has two related but distinct meanings. Normal profit represents the total...
to be unnatural and exploitative. In the mainstream, however, the popularity of the labor theory of value
Labor theory of value
The labor theories of value are heterodox economic theories of value which argue that the value of a commodity is related to the labor needed to produce or obtain that commodity. The concept is most often associated with Marxian economics...
of classical economics
Classical economics
Classical economics is widely regarded as the first modern school of economic thought. Its major developers include Adam Smith, Jean-Baptiste Say, David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus and John Stuart Mill....
was superseded by greater acceptance of the subjective theory of value
Subjective theory of value
The subjective theory of value is an economic theory of value that identifies worth as being based on the wants and needs of the members of a society, as opposed to value being inherent to an object....
of neo-classical economics. Eventually, Murray Rothbard
Murray Rothbard
Murray Newton Rothbard was an American author and economist of the Austrian School who helped define capitalist libertarianism and popularized a form of free-market anarchism he termed "anarcho-capitalism." Rothbard wrote over twenty books and is considered a centrally important figure in the...
coined the term "anarcho-capitalism
Anarcho-capitalism
Anarcho-capitalism is a libertarian and individualist anarchist political philosophy that advocates the elimination of the state in favour of individual sovereignty in a free market...
" to define his anti-statist, laissez-faire capitalist philosophy. Anarcho-capitalism has a theory of legitimacy
Legitimacy (law)
At common law, legitimacy is the status of a child who is born to parents who are legally married to one another; and of a child who is born shortly after the parents' divorce. In canon and in civil law, the offspring of putative marriages have been considered legitimate children...
that supports private property, as long as it is not obtained by coercion. Its leading proponents are Murray Rothbard
Murray Rothbard
Murray Newton Rothbard was an American author and economist of the Austrian School who helped define capitalist libertarianism and popularized a form of free-market anarchism he termed "anarcho-capitalism." Rothbard wrote over twenty books and is considered a centrally important figure in the...
and David Friedman
David D. Friedman
David Director Friedman is an American economist, author, and Right-libertarian theorist. He is known as a leader in anarcho-capitalist political theory, which is the subject of his most popular book, The Machinery of Freedom...
and it has been influenced by non-anarchist libertarians such as Frederic Bastiat
Frédéric Bastiat
Claude Frédéric Bastiat was a French classical liberal theorist, political economist, and member of the French assembly. He was notable for developing the important economic concept of opportunity cost.-Biography:...
and Robert Nozick
Robert Nozick
Robert Nozick was an American political philosopher, most prominent in the 1970s and 1980s. He was a professor at Harvard University. He is best known for his book Anarchy, State, and Utopia , a right-libertarian answer to John Rawls's A Theory of Justice...
, and also by Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand was a Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter. She is known for her two best-selling novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged and for developing a philosophical system she called Objectivism....
(although she rejected libertarianism and anarchism).
Some of those who call themselves Anarcho-capitalists say that their views have no relation to what they call social anarchism
Social anarchism
Social anarchism is a term originally used in 1971 by Giovanni Baldelli as the title of his book where he discusses the organization of an ethical society from an anarchist point of view...
, other than opposition to the State. Nevertheless many anarchists who oppose capitalism also like to see themselves as individualist and argue that the social classes created by capitalism limit liberty by forcing some individuals to work and receive orders from others above them, and also limiting individual's use of their time and subjectivity. This is in many respects, in their views, as much destruction or more destruction of liberty as the existence of states. Some anarchists have even argued that individualism and communism are not only compatible but even necessary complements in order to protect individual liberty.
Hierarchy, class and employment
Wage labour
Wage labour is the socioeconomic relationship between a worker and an employer, where the worker sells their labour under a formal or informal employment contract. These transactions usually occur in a labour market where wages are market determined...
, and hence capitalism, is authoritarian and coercive in nature, and oppose class distinction between labourers and employers. A major line of reasoning is that employees are subject to the authority of their employer with respect to the latter's property and, because such an hierarchy could not be tolerated within an egalitarian power structure, it is essential to anarchism for such practices to be abolished. The writers of An Anarchist FAQ
An Anarchist FAQ
"An Anarchist FAQ" is an FAQ written by an international work group of social anarchists connected through the internet. It documents anarchist theory and ideas while arguing that social anarchism is a better form of anarchism than individualist anarchism, which it critiques. It also explores other...
argue that "social relations between capitalists and employees can never be equal, because private ownership of the means of production
Means of production
Means of production refers to physical, non-human inputs used in production—the factories, machines, and tools used to produce wealth — along with both infrastructural capital and natural capital. This includes the classical factors of production minus financial capital and minus human capital...
gives rise to social hierarchy and relations of coercive authority and subordination".
Individualist anarchists
Individualist anarchism
Individualist anarchism refers to several traditions of thought within the anarchist movement that emphasize the individual and his or her will over external determinants such as groups, society, traditions, and ideological systems. Individualist anarchism is not a single philosophy but refers to a...
, of which anarcho-capitalists are included, do not object to private ownership of the means of production. Even some anti-capitalist individualist anarchists of the nineteenth century did not reject employment as illegitimate "hierarchy." For example, the nineteenth century individualist anarchist Stephen Pearl Andrews
Stephen Pearl Andrews
Stephen Pearl Andrews was an American individualist anarchist and author of several books on Individualist anarchism.-Early life and work:...
said, "The 'Wages System' is essentially proper and right. It is a right to that one man employ another, it is right that he pay him wages, and it is right that he direct him absolutely, arbitrarily, if you will, in the performance of his labor...It is not in any, nor in all of these features combined, that the wrong of our present system is to be sought and found. It is in the simply failure to do Equity. It is not that men are employed and paid, but that they are not paid justly..." Any that had opposition to employment by others, opposed it for monetary reasons rather than condemning it as "hierarchical." For example, Spooner argued that "each man should be his own employer, or work directly for himself, and not for another for wages; because, in the latter case, a part of the fruits of his labor go to his employer, instead of coming to himself." They did not object to wages being paid, but rather they believed that wages were not adequately compensating labor due to state interference in the economy. Benjamin Tucker
Benjamin Tucker
Benjamin Ricketson Tucker was a proponent of American individualist anarchism in the 19th century, and editor and publisher of the individualist anarchist periodical Liberty.-Summary:Tucker says that he became an anarchist at the age of 18...
thought that the elimination of state intervention would increase competition in capital, which he thought would eliminate the possibility of an employer receiving an income without himself laboring so that "every man will be a labourer exchanging with fellow-labourers."
With that said, anarcho-capitalist David D. Friedman
David D. Friedman
David Director Friedman is an American economist, author, and Right-libertarian theorist. He is known as a leader in anarcho-capitalist political theory, which is the subject of his most popular book, The Machinery of Freedom...
says he prefers a society not based in wage labor but where "almost everyone is self employed. Instead of corporations there are large groups of entrepreneurs related by trade, not authority. Each sells, not his time, but what his time produces." Like all individualist anarchists, anarcho-capitalists support the liberty of individuals to be self-employed or to contract to be employed by others, whichever they prefer. Anarcho-capitalist Murray Rothbard
Murray Rothbard
Murray Newton Rothbard was an American author and economist of the Austrian School who helped define capitalist libertarianism and popularized a form of free-market anarchism he termed "anarcho-capitalism." Rothbard wrote over twenty books and is considered a centrally important figure in the...
, however, explicitly stated that "wage-wage" was one of "a whole slew of institutions necessary to the triumph of liberty" (including "organization, hierarchy, wage-work, granting of funds by libertarian millionaires, and a libertarian political party"). In fact, "rejection of wage-labor" was "unlibertarian."
The writers of An Anarchist FAQ
An Anarchist FAQ
"An Anarchist FAQ" is an FAQ written by an international work group of social anarchists connected through the internet. It documents anarchist theory and ideas while arguing that social anarchism is a better form of anarchism than individualist anarchism, which it critiques. It also explores other...
argue that wage labour is not consistent with anarchist principles, including the stated principles of individualist anarchists like Tucker. Unlike anarcho-capitalism, though, it "can easily be made consistent anarchism by applying its own principles consistently."
Anarcho-communists do not, however, ban wage labor, but say that "'agreements' in which workers sign away their liberty would not be enforced."
Property
Social and individualist anarchists, including anarcho-capitalists, note that current distributions of property have not been created by legitimate means and that the current system of property rights is the result of state intervention.Anarcho-capitalists do not defend all private property, but only that which has become private property by "homesteading." They do not see the creation of private property by mere claim, without homesteading, as legitimate and they do not defend private property that was by transferred from one person or business to another by force, whether by the state or private individuals. Rothbard says: "What we libertarians object to, then, is not government per se but crime, what we object to is unjust or criminal property titles; what we are for is not "private" property per se but just, innocent, non-criminal private property." Anarcho-capitalists do not defend the current distribution of property.
Many anarchists argue that anarcho-capitalism is contradictory, and say that the anarcho-capitalist definition of private property is uncomfortably similar to its definition of the state. For example, leading anarcho-capitalist Murray Rothbard argued that the state "arrogates to itself a monopoly of force . . . over a given area territorial area.", yet he also argued: "Obviously, in a free society, Smith has the ultimate decision-making power over his own just property, Jones over his, etc." However, the key word is "arrogates," as anarcho-capitalists only support property created by homesteading which they do not see as arrogation but as earning through one's labor. To arrogate a monopoly of force would be to exercise control over an area that one has not homesteaded, or to exercise control over an area by one who has not received the homesteaded property through voluntary means.
To anarcho-capitalists, any geographical holding as large as most current incarnations of the state would be impossible to achieve by any one proprietor without the tools of the state. Standard private holdings tend to be not only much smaller, but antithetical to coercive relationships - as any visitor, lessee, or employee, would be free to move elsewhere at will. Further, the state, being an artificial entity without a head of its own, has an entirely different set of motives regarding care of a property, resulting in proportionate carelessness for that property (i.e. pollution
Pollution
Pollution is the introduction of contaminants into a natural environment that causes instability, disorder, harm or discomfort to the ecosystem i.e. physical systems or living organisms. Pollution can take the form of chemical substances or energy, such as noise, heat or light...
).
Anarchists also note that once land and capital are monopolised by a minority, attempts by those subject to this economic and social power to end it automatically become "aggression." As Kropotkin noted, "modern Individualism... [is] a powerful indictment against the dangers and wrongs of government, but its practical solution of the social problem... lead[s] us to inquire if the talk of 'No force' be merely an excuse for supporting landlord and capitalist domination."
Many nineteenth-century individualist anarchists, including Benjamin Tucker, rejected the anarcho-capitalist Lockean position in favour of the anarchist position of "occupancy and use" (or "possession", to use Proudhon's term), particularly in land. One notable exception is Lysander Spooner, who does not require that land use be "continual" to retain ownership. Similarly, anarcho-capitalist Rothbard argued that one must "use the land, to cultivate it in some way, before he could be asserted to own it." and did not require continual use to retain ownership. Many individualist anarchists of the nineteenth century accepted Proudhon's position on land: "What I cannot accept, regarding land, is that the work put in gives a right to ownership of what has been worked on." If there was a shortage of land, he "accept[ed] equal division. Anything else... is an abuse." Anarchist critics of anarcho-capitalism also note that Proudhon's "What is Property?
What Is Property?
What Is Property?: or, An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government is an influential work of nonfiction on the concept of property and its relation to anarchist philosophy by the French anarchist and mutualist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, first published in 1840.In the book, Proudhon most...
" explicitly attacks the position on land ownership supported by Spooner and anarcho-capitalists. Benjamin Tucker, however, changed his mind on land and said in 1862: "In times past...it was my habit to talk glibly of the right of man to land. It was a bad habit, and I long ago sloughed it off. Man's only right to land is his might over it. If his neighbor is mightier than he and takes the land from him, then the land is his neighbor's, until the latter is dispossessed by one mightier still." Anarcho-capitalists, such as Murray Rothbard, disagree that might and theft grants a right over land.
Because of his belief in the labor theory of value, when the nineteenth century individualist Benjamin Tucker said that an employee should receive his "full produce," he took it to mean that the full produce was an amount of money fully commensurate with the amount of a labor performed. He believed individuals were receiving less than their "full produce" because of state intervention interfering with competitive market forces and thereby artificially lowering the price of labor—a view shared by anarcho-capitalists today. Tucker did not advocate interfering with individuals contracting as employee and employer if they desire, but believed that the price of labor would increase in a true laissez-faire economy. He thought that legal restrictions on banking caused the price of capital to be unnaturally expensive and that if these restrictions were removed that capital would become available "at cost." This, he believed, would cause new businesses to proliferate and raise the demand for labor and therefore the price as well. Individualist Lysander Spooner advocated that workers maximize their incomes through universal self-employment.
Markets
Many individualist anarchists argue that a truly free market would result in a non-capitalist anarchism, without social or economic hierarchy. The contemporary individualist Kevin A. CarsonKevin A. Carson
Kevin Amos Carson is a American social and political theorist and scholar of political economy writing in the mutualist and individualist anarchist traditions....
holds that capitalism is founded on "an act of robbery as massive as feudalism," and argues that capitalism could not exist in the absence of a state. Carson argues that if a truly free market were to have been put in effect it would have resulted in a system where the ability to extract a profit
Profit (economics)
In economics, the term profit has two related but distinct meanings. Normal profit represents the total opportunity costs of a venture to an entrepreneur or investor, whilst economic profit In economics, the term profit has two related but distinct meanings. Normal profit represents the total...
from labor and capital would be negligible as "a system of power in which ownership and control are divorced from labor – could not survive in a free market.". Anarcho-capitalists disagree, with most stating that this economic system would be marked by hierarchy, inequalityas well as interest, rent and profit.
Right-libertarians, Carson argues, "take existing property relations and class power as a given." Carson, like previous individualist anarchists, thinks that the "modern worker, like the slave or the serf, is the victim of ongoing robbery; he works in an enterprise built from past stolen labor" so they are "justified in taking direct control of production, and keeping the entire product of his [or her] labor." At first glance, anarcho-capitalists may consider such expropriation as coercion, but at second glance, most anarcho-capitalists agree with Carson conception of appropriation. As Carson writes,
The only cases in which I have advocated seizure of the means of production by workers are those in which that notorious "socialist" Murray Rothbard advocated it (in "Confiscation and the Homestead Principle"): that is, in the case of enterprises which get the majority of their profits from state intervention, and can therefore justly be treated as branches of the state. And even in those cases I advocated, not nationalization, but the direct homesteadingHomesteadingBroadly defined, homesteading is a lifestyle of simple self-sufficiency.-Current practice:The term may apply to anyone who follows the back-to-the-land movement by adopting a sustainable, self-sufficient lifestyle. While land is no longer freely available in most areas of the world, homesteading...
of plants by the labor force, and their conversion to producer cooperatives competing in an unregulated market.
Since anarchists by definition favour voluntary interaction, anarcho-capitalists have argued from a different definition of "voluntary" than has been historically used by anarchists. This has led to disputes over whether anarcho-capitalists support a genuinely "free market." Anarcho-capitalists (and capitalists in general) understand a trade to be voluntary if there is no physical coercion or threat thereof. Opponents take into account other forms of coercion, such as economic coercion, arguing that an environment of property domination coerces individuals into accepting trades that are not optimal to them because their choices are being actively restricted by others. Anarcho-capitalists maintain that such restrictions tend not to be intrusive, but rather ensures order between visitors.
Some anarchists reject institutions such as interest, rent, and profit
Profit (economics)
In economics, the term profit has two related but distinct meanings. Normal profit represents the total opportunity costs of a venture to an entrepreneur or investor, whilst economic profit In economics, the term profit has two related but distinct meanings. Normal profit represents the total...
as being intrusive and exploitative, and thus they believe that they should be abolished. They maintain that such institutions were made possible, in part, by state restrictions on banking and currency issuance as well as titles to land, and by vast accumulations of wealth which arise in capitalism and interfere with the free economy. Anarcho-capitalists do not believe that interest, rent, or profit are exploitative, arguing they are compatible with free markets, and claiming these institutions would prevail without government interference. However, like individualist anarchists, some anarcho-capitalists believe that in a free market, interest rates would substantially fall, but more due to falling time preference
Time preference
In economics, time preference pertains to how large a premium a consumer places on enjoyment nearer in time over more remote enjoyment....
.
Egalitarianism
Social anarchists are opposed to concentrations of wealth as this, they argue, results in economic power and limits the individual freedom of others. They argue that inequalities in wealth results in a situation where the many have little choice but to sell their liberty.Anarcho-capitalists and individualist anarchists both explicitly support the liberty of some individuals to be wealthier than others, in contrast to some collectivist philosophies that are based in economic egalitarianism
Economic egalitarianism
Economic egalitarianism is a state of economic affairs in which equality of outcome has been manufactured for all the participants of a society...
. However, while individualists believe that the vast concentrations of wealth created by government interference in the market cannot be remedied through abolition of government alone, they do believe it would be much more dispersed so that there would not be a significant chasm between the rich and the poor —and this they tend to see as beneficial. Some make a point of this while others explicitly object to any goal of equalizing wealth. In contrast, anarcho-capitalist philosophy does not evince general concern for wealth egalitarianism. In speculating about a possible anarchist society Benjamin Tucker held that defense associations could decide for themselves how much land they would protect; in an example, he postuled possession of no more than 10 acres (40,468.6 m²). (Property Under Anarchism)
Use of force
All anarchists subscribe to the general rule that physical force should not be initiated, but reserved for defense. Some of the 19th century individualist anarchists, such Josiah WarrenJosiah Warren
Josiah Warren was an individualist anarchist, inventor, musician, and author in the United States. He is widely regarded as the first American anarchist, and the four-page weekly paper he edited during 1833, The Peaceful Revolutionist, was the first anarchist periodical published, an enterprise...
and Lysander Spooner
Lysander Spooner
Lysander Spooner was an American individualist anarchist, political philosopher, Deist, abolitionist, supporter of the labor movement, legal theorist, and entrepreneur of the nineteenth century. He is also known for competing with the U.S...
based their individualism on natural law
Natural law
Natural law, or the law of nature , is any system of law which is purportedly determined by nature, and thus universal. Classically, natural law refers to the use of reason to analyze human nature and deduce binding rules of moral behavior. Natural law is contrasted with the positive law Natural...
, but many were "egoists," believing that no rights exist without contract that results out of individual self-interest. Benjamin Tucker
Benjamin Tucker
Benjamin Ricketson Tucker was a proponent of American individualist anarchism in the 19th century, and editor and publisher of the individualist anarchist periodical Liberty.-Summary:Tucker says that he became an anarchist at the age of 18...
says: "I see no reason, as far as moral obligation is concerned, why one [man] should not sub-ordinate or destroy the other. But if each of these men can be made to see that the other's free life is helpful to him, then they will agree not to invade each other; in other words, they will equalize their existences, or rights to existence by contract. ... Before contract is the right of might. Contract is the voluntary suspension of the right to might. The power secured by such suspension we may call the right of contract. These two rights -the right of might and the right of contract -are the only rights that ever have been or ever can be. So-called moral rights have no existence." anarcho-capitalist David Friedman
David D. Friedman
David Director Friedman is an American economist, author, and Right-libertarian theorist. He is known as a leader in anarcho-capitalist political theory, which is the subject of his most popular book, The Machinery of Freedom...
also subscribes to a contractual view of rights, as opposed to anarcho-capitalist Murray Rothbard
Murray Rothbard
Murray Newton Rothbard was an American author and economist of the Austrian School who helped define capitalist libertarianism and popularized a form of free-market anarchism he termed "anarcho-capitalism." Rothbard wrote over twenty books and is considered a centrally important figure in the...
's natural law basis.
Defense
Anarcho-capitalists advocate private competition in defensePrivate defense agency
A private defense agency is a conceptualized agency that provides personal protection and military defense services voluntarily through the free market. A PDA is not a private contractor of the state and is not subsidised in any way through taxation or immunities, nor does it rely on conscription...
, and in a sense require it due to their emphasis on private property, interest, rent and profit. Rothbard defines "anarchism as a system which provides no legal sanction for such aggression ['against person and property']" and said that "what anarchism proposes to do, then, is to abolish the State, i.e. to abolish the regularized institution of aggressive coercion." However, anarchists are unimpressed by this claim. They simply reply that this is privatising, not abolishing, the state; David Weick, for instance, argues that it would be better called "feudalism". Similarly, anarchists ask who defines what is and is not a "legal sanction" and what is and is not "aggressive coercion." Rothbard would assert that the violator of the property right of the victim would be the aggressor. This claim is justified using natural law theory.
While individualist anarchists expect that one would defend their own property through possession, some, such as Tucker and Spooner, support private defense to protect property. Tucker differentiates protection from rent or tax, because the primary form of protection would be possessive, saying that "defense is a service like any other service; that it is labor both useful and desired, and therefore an economic commodity subject to the law of supply and demand;" (Instead of a Book).
Profit and theory of value
Historically, most anarchists have argued that profitProfit (economics)
In economics, the term profit has two related but distinct meanings. Normal profit represents the total opportunity costs of a venture to an entrepreneur or investor, whilst economic profit In economics, the term profit has two related but distinct meanings. Normal profit represents the total...
, rent and interest are exploitative
Exploitation
This article discusses the term exploitation in the meaning of using something in an unjust or cruel manner.- As unjust benefit :In political economy, economics, and sociology, exploitation involves a persistent social relationship in which certain persons are being mistreated or unfairly used for...
. Some anarchists, like Proudhon, Bakunin and Tucker, base this in the labour theory of value while others, like Kropotkin
Kropotkin
Peter Kropotkin was a Russian prince and anarchist.Kropotkin may also refer to:*Pyotr Nikolayevich Kropotkin , Soviet/Russian geologist, tectonician, and geophysicist*Mount Kropotkin, a peak in Antarctica...
and Malatesta
Errico Malatesta
Errico Malatesta was an Italian anarcho-communist. He was an insurrectionary anarchist early in his life. He spent much of his life exiled from his homeland of Italy and in total spent more than ten years in prison. He wrote and edited a number of radical newspapers and was also a friend of...
, did not. While classical economists such as Adam Smith
Adam Smith
Adam Smith was a Scottish social philosopher and a pioneer of political economy. One of the key figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, Smith is the author of The Theory of Moral Sentiments and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations...
also accepted the labor theory of value, most modern economists, including most anarcho-capitalists and some other anarchists, espouse a subjective theory of value
Subjective theory of value
The subjective theory of value is an economic theory of value that identifies worth as being based on the wants and needs of the members of a society, as opposed to value being inherent to an object....
and marginalism
Marginalism
Marginalism refers to the use of marginal concepts in economic theory. Marginalism is associated with arguments concerning changes in the quantity used of a good or service, as opposed to some notion of the over-all significance of that class of good or service, or of some total quantity...
- that value of commodities and labor is variable and based on factors outside the means of production, such as scarcity, and the subjective value to potential buyers.
In the eyes of anarchists who embrace a labor theory of value, profit is derived by paying labor less than what it is worth, with the employer retaining the difference, and is considered exploitative. For anarcho-capitalists, worth is subjective. And they believe that both employer and employee profit by giving what they value less (equipment and labor, respectively) for what they value more (labour and wages, respectively) or else they would not agree to trade, and therefore the agreement is not considered exploitative by anarcho-capitalists.
The nineteenth century individualists depart from anarcho-capitalists in arguing that all wages should be equal insofar as labor is commensurate, in accordance with the principle of "cost the limit of price
Cost the limit of price
Cost the limit of price was a maxim coined by Josiah Warren, indicating a version of the labor theory of value. Warren maintained that the just compensation for labor could only be an equivalent amount of labor . Thus, profit, rent, and interest were considered unjust economic arrangements...
." Anarcho-capitalists, believing that the value of any particular labor is subjective, and should be ultimately decided by mutual agreement, have no opposition whatsoever to employers profiting from the labor of their employees. This has been a major point of contention between anarcho-capitalists and other anarchists, most of whom see this as a form of hierarchy, exploitation and privatized statism. Post-left anarchist Bob Black
Bob Black
Bob Black is an American anarchist. He is the author of The Abolition of Work and Other Essays, Beneath the Underground, Friendly Fire, Anarchy After Leftism, and numerous political essays.-Writing:Some of his work from the early 1980s includes...
adds "To my mind a right-wing anarchist is just a minarchist who'd abolish the state to his own satisfaction by calling it something else...They don't denounce what the state does, they just object to who's doing it."
Benjamin Tucker believed that more employment opportunities would be available if government did not enforce a credit monopoly and land monopoly, as he believed that low-interest or no-interest loans would be readily available to the general public due to competing lenders, and that profiting in wage labor would be nearly impossible due to increased competition on the part of businesses to attract labor.
Individualist anarchism
Anarcho-capitalism is seen as a form of individualist anarchism by several scholars. All of the classical individualist anarchists opposed profit-making and, hence, capitalism as it is commonly defined today. Nevertheless, anarcho-capitalismAnarcho-capitalism
Anarcho-capitalism is a libertarian and individualist anarchist political philosophy that advocates the elimination of the state in favour of individual sovereignty in a free market...
, which has no opposition to profit
Profit (economics)
In economics, the term profit has two related but distinct meanings. Normal profit represents the total opportunity costs of a venture to an entrepreneur or investor, whilst economic profit In economics, the term profit has two related but distinct meanings. Normal profit represents the total...
, is sometimes regarded as a form of individualist anarchism in recent times. For example, contemporary individualist anarchist Daniel Burton, who believes that most modern day individualist anarchists are class war anti-capitalists, nonetheless says that anarcho-capitalism
Anarcho-capitalism
Anarcho-capitalism is a libertarian and individualist anarchist political philosophy that advocates the elimination of the state in favour of individual sovereignty in a free market...
is a type of individualist anarchism Individualist anarchism vs. Anarcho-capitalism. Individualist Anarchist Laurance Labadie argued that Rothbard "upholds presumably in his courts the very economic evils which are at bottom the very reason for human contention and conflict." Wendy McElroy calls herself both an individualist anarchist and an anarcho-capitalist, and Italian anarcho-capitalist Guglielmo Piombini regards anarcho-capitalism
Anarcho-capitalism
Anarcho-capitalism is a libertarian and individualist anarchist political philosophy that advocates the elimination of the state in favour of individual sovereignty in a free market...
as a form of individualist anarchism (Per l'Anarco-Capitalismo). Historian Ralph Raico
Ralph Raico
Ralph Raico is an American historian, libertarian, and specialist in European classical liberalism and Austrian Economics. He is currently a professor of history at Buffalo State College and a senior faculty member at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. Raico was a student of Ludwig von Mises and...
regards it as "a form of individualist anarchism" (Authentic German Liberalism...). Simon Tormey, in his book Anti-Capitalism: A Beginner's Guide places no anti-capitalist restriction on being an individualist anarchist: "Pro-capitalist anarchism is, as one might expect, particularly prevalent in the US where it feeds on the strong individualist and libertarian currents that have always been a part of the American political imaginary. To return to the point, however, there are individualist anarchists who are most certainly not anti-capitalist and there are those who may well be."
Some anarcho-capitalists argue that their philosophy is related to individualist anarchism
Individualist anarchism
Individualist anarchism refers to several traditions of thought within the anarchist movement that emphasize the individual and his or her will over external determinants such as groups, society, traditions, and ideological systems. Individualist anarchism is not a single philosophy but refers to a...
. They believe a major difficulty in resolving the debate is due to the conflicting definitions of the words "anarchism
Anarchism
Anarchism is generally defined as the political philosophy which holds the state to be undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful, or alternatively as opposing authority in the conduct of human relations...
" and "capitalism
Capitalism
Capitalism is an economic system that became dominant in the Western world following the demise of feudalism. There is no consensus on the precise definition nor on how the term should be used as a historical category...
" as used by the two sides. The traditions that object to the term anarcho-capitalism tend to use the term "anarchism" to refer to political movements that are both anti-statist and anti-capitalist. Conversely, libertarians and anarcho-capitalists most commonly apply the term "anarchism" to any philosophy that opposes all forms of initiatory coercion (without specifications regarding economic systems). However, even this is disputed, as most anarchists argue that capitalism is inherently coercive.
Lysander Spooner's articles, such as No Treason and the Letter to Thomas Bayard, were widely reprinted in early anarcho-capitalist journals, and his ideas – especially his individualist critique of the state and his defense of the right to ignore or withdraw from it – were often cited by anarcho-capitalists. Spooner was staunchly opposed to government interference in economic matters, and supported a "right to acquire property [...] as one of the natural, inherent, inalienable rights of men [...] one which government has no power to infringe [...]". Like all anarchists, he opposed government regulation: "All legislative restraints upon the rate of interest are arbitrary and tyrannical restraints upon a man's natural capacity amid natural right to hire capital, upon which to bestow his labor." He was particularly vocal, however, in opposing any collusion between banks and government, and argued that the monopolistic privileges that the government granted to a few bankers were the source of many social and economic ills.
Benjamin Tucker supported private ownership of the product of labor, which he believed entailed a rejection of both collective and capitalist ownership. He was a staunch advocate of the mutualist
Mutualism (economic theory)
Mutualism is an anarchist school of thought that originates in the writings of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who envisioned a society where each person might possess a means of production, either individually or collectively, with trade representing equivalent amounts of labor in the free market...
form of recompensing labor, which holds to "Cost the limit of price
Cost the limit of price
Cost the limit of price was a maxim coined by Josiah Warren, indicating a version of the labor theory of value. Warren maintained that the just compensation for labor could only be an equivalent amount of labor . Thus, profit, rent, and interest were considered unjust economic arrangements...
". He also advocated a free market economy
Market economy
A market economy is an economy in which the prices of goods and services are determined in a free price system. This is often contrasted with a state-directed or planned economy. Market economies can range from hypothetically pure laissez-faire variants to an assortment of real-world mixed...
, which he believed was prohibited by capitalist monopoly of credit and land backed by the state. He believed that anyone who wishes should be allowed to engage in the banking business and issue their private currency without needing special permission from government, and that unused land should not be restricted to those who wished to use it. He believed that if these and other coercive actions were eliminated that profit in economic transactions would be rendered nearly impossible because of increased availability of capital to all individuals and resulting increased competition in business. Accepting the labor theory of value
Labor theory of value
The labor theories of value are heterodox economic theories of value which argue that the value of a commodity is related to the labor needed to produce or obtain that commodity. The concept is most often associated with Marxian economics...
and the resulting "cost principle" as a premise marks one of mutualism's main conflicts with anarcho-capitalism. Although his self-identification as a socialist and sympathy for the labor movement led to hostility from some early anarcho-capitalists such as Robert LeFevre
Robert LeFevre
Robert LeFevre was an American libertarian businessman, radio personality, and primary theorist of autarchism.-Early life:...
, others, such as Murray Rothbard, embraced his critique of the state and claimed that he defined his "socialism" not in terms of opposition to a free market or private property, but in opposition to government privileges for business. However, individualists argue that capitalism cannot be maintained in the absence of the state. For example, Kevin Carson argues, "As a mutualist anarchist, I believe that expropriation of surplus value – i.e., capitalism – cannot occur without state coercion to maintain the privilege of usurer, landlord, and capitalist. It was for this reason that the free market mutualist Benjamin Tucker – from whom right-libertarians selectively borrow – regarded himself as a libertarian socialist." Tucker characterized the economic demands of Proudhon and Warren by saying, "though opposed to socializing the ownership of capital, they aimed nevertheless to socialize its effects by making its use beneficial to all instead of a means of impoverishing the many to enrich the few [...] Absolute Free Trade; free trade at home, as well as with foreign countries; the logical carrying out of the Manchester doctrine; laissez-faire the universal rule."
Anarcho-capitalism is sometimes viewed by those sympathetic to it as a form of individualist anarchism, despite the fact that the original individualist anarchists universally rejected capitalism (i.e., they opposed profit, which is seen as a fundamental characteristic of capitalism). Organizations such as mutualist.org remain dedicated to "free market anticapitalism," while individualists like Larry Gambone explicitly state that all capitalism is state capitalism. Nonetheless, anarcho-capitalist Wendy McElroy considers herself to be an individualist, while admitting that the original individualists were universally anticapitalist. In addition, historian Guglielmo Piombini considers anarcho-capitalism a form of individualist anarchism, though he offers no support for this statement. Collectivist anarchist author Iain McKay and historian Peter Sabatini both argue that anarcho-capitalism is fundamentally opposed to individualist anarchism.
The similarity to anarcho-capitalism in regard to private defense of liberty and property is probably best seen in a quote by 19th-century individualist anarchist Victor Yarros
Victor Yarros
Victor Yarros was an American anarchist and author. He was a prolific contributor to the individualist anarchist periodical in the United States called Liberty....
:
Anarchism means no government, but it does not mean no laws and no coercion. This may seem paradoxical, but the paradox vanishes when the Anarchist definition of government is kept in view. Anarchists oppose government, not because they disbelieve in punishment of crime and resistance to aggression, but because they disbelieve in compulsory protection. Protection and taxation without consent is itself invasion; hence Anarchism favors a system of voluntary taxation and protection.
While the claim is controversial, some scholars regard anarcho-capitalism
Anarcho-capitalism
Anarcho-capitalism is a libertarian and individualist anarchist political philosophy that advocates the elimination of the state in favour of individual sovereignty in a free market...
as being a form of individualism anarchism. However, other scholars, and many individualist anarchists themselves, do not accept anarcho-capitalism as a form of individualist anarchism, individualist or not, as they assert that anarchism
Anarchism
Anarchism is generally defined as the political philosophy which holds the state to be undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful, or alternatively as opposing authority in the conduct of human relations...
is fundamentally opposed to capitalism
Capitalism
Capitalism is an economic system that became dominant in the Western world following the demise of feudalism. There is no consensus on the precise definition nor on how the term should be used as a historical category...
. As individualist anarchist Joe Peacott says:
Individualist anarchists have continued to espouse the labor theory of value
Labor theory of value
The labor theories of value are heterodox economic theories of value which argue that the value of a commodity is related to the labor needed to produce or obtain that commodity. The concept is most often associated with Marxian economics...
, finding profit
Profit (economics)
In economics, the term profit has two related but distinct meanings. Normal profit represents the total opportunity costs of a venture to an entrepreneur or investor, whilst economic profit In economics, the term profit has two related but distinct meanings. Normal profit represents the total...
to be unnatural and exploitative. In the mainstream, however, the popularity of the labor theory of value
Labor theory of value
The labor theories of value are heterodox economic theories of value which argue that the value of a commodity is related to the labor needed to produce or obtain that commodity. The concept is most often associated with Marxian economics...
of classical economics
Classical economics
Classical economics is widely regarded as the first modern school of economic thought. Its major developers include Adam Smith, Jean-Baptiste Say, David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus and John Stuart Mill....
was superseded by greater acceptance of the subjective theory of value
Subjective theory of value
The subjective theory of value is an economic theory of value that identifies worth as being based on the wants and needs of the members of a society, as opposed to value being inherent to an object....
of neo-classical economics. Eventually, in the 1950s, Murray Rothbard
Murray Rothbard
Murray Newton Rothbard was an American author and economist of the Austrian School who helped define capitalist libertarianism and popularized a form of free-market anarchism he termed "anarcho-capitalism." Rothbard wrote over twenty books and is considered a centrally important figure in the...
coined the term "anarcho-capitalism
Anarcho-capitalism
Anarcho-capitalism is a libertarian and individualist anarchist political philosophy that advocates the elimination of the state in favour of individual sovereignty in a free market...
" to define his anti-statist, laissez-faire capitalist philosophy.
Rothbard noted that while "strongly tempted," he could not call his ideology "individualist anarchism" because "Spooner and Tucker have in a sense preempted that name for their doctrine and that from that doctrine I have certain differences." Rothbard also supported unregulated banking, as Tucker and other individualists did, but believed that Tucker and Spooner had a flawed understanding of economics to believe that unregulated banking would eliminate profit from interest. Tucker says interest rates are ultimately determined by the time value of money
Time value of money
The time value of money is the value of money figuring in a given amount of interest earned over a given amount of time. The time value of money is the central concept in finance theory....
, rather than the supply of money and that interest/profit would still exist in a free banking environment. He says: "it has been particularly distressing to me as an ardent admirer of Spooner and Tucker to find that their followers have emphasized and concentrated on their totally fallacious monetary views almost to the [exclusion of all else and even bring them forth as a panacea for all economic and social ills." Rothbard suggested that individualist anarchists drop the labor theory of value
Labor theory of value
The labor theories of value are heterodox economic theories of value which argue that the value of a commodity is related to the labor needed to produce or obtain that commodity. The concept is most often associated with Marxian economics...
which he believed to be erroneous and leading to a false conclusion that profit was exploitative or unnatural in laissez-faire. Rothbard sought to introduce Lockean property rights and marginalism
Marginalism
Marginalism refers to the use of marginal concepts in economic theory. Marginalism is associated with arguments concerning changes in the quantity used of a good or service, as opposed to some notion of the over-all significance of that class of good or service, or of some total quantity...
into individualist anarchism:
Rothbard also rejected Tucker and Spooner's support of a system where there is no written law. He says, Instead, he argues,
Individualist anarchist Laurance Labadie argued however:
Mere common sense would suggest that any court would be influenced by experience; and any free-market court or judge would in the very nature of things have some precedents guiding them in their instructions to a jury. But since no case is exactly the same, a jury would have considerable say about the heinousness of the offence in each case, realising that circumstances alter cases, and prescribing penalty accordingly. This appeared to Spooner and Tucker to be a more flexible and equitable administration of justice possible or feasible, human beings being what they are...
But when Mr. Rothbard quibbles about the jurisprudential ideas of Spooner and Tucker, and at the same time upholds presumably in his courts the very economic evils which are at bottom the very reason for human contention and conflict, he would seem to be a man who chokes at a gnat while swallowing a camel.
However, this criticism is specific to Rothbard's suggested version of anarcho-capitalism rather than to anarcho-capitalism in general. There are anarcho-capitalists who oppose the existence of all statutory law, such as Morris and Linda Tannehill. Individualist anarchism is a broad philosophy with various theorists having their own suggested versions.
Social anarchism
Left-libertarian Brad Spangler also finds fault in the understanding of Rothbard's political philosophy held by self-described left-anarchists. Spangler makes the argument that what we typically call "anarcho-capitalism" is in fact a stigmergicStigmergy
Stigmergy is a mechanism of indirect coordination between agents or actions. The principle is that the trace left in the environment by an action stimulates the performance of a next action, by the same or a different agent...
socialism
Socialism
Socialism is an economic system characterized by social ownership of the means of production and cooperative management of the economy; or a political philosophy advocating such a system. "Social ownership" may refer to any one of, or a combination of, the following: cooperative enterprises,...
. "It is my contention," writes Spangler, "that Rothbardian anarcho-capitalism is misnamed because it is actually a variety of socialism, in that it offers an alternative understanding of existing capitalism (or any other variety of statism) as systematic theft from the lower classes and envisions a more just society without that oppression. Rather than depending upon the labor theory of value
Labor theory of value
The labor theories of value are heterodox economic theories of value which argue that the value of a commodity is related to the labor needed to produce or obtain that commodity. The concept is most often associated with Marxian economics...
to understand this systematic theft, Rothbardian market anarchism utilizes natural law theory and Lockean
John Locke
John Locke FRS , widely known as the Father of Liberalism, was an English philosopher and physician regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers. Considered one of the first of the British empiricists, following the tradition of Francis Bacon, he is equally important to social...
principles of property and self-ownership
Self-ownership
Self-ownership is the concept of property in one's own person, expressed as the moral or natural right of a person to be the exclusive controller of his own body and life. According to G...
taken to their logical extreme as an alternative framework for understanding and combating oppression." He goes on to call Murray Rothbard
Murray Rothbard
Murray Newton Rothbard was an American author and economist of the Austrian School who helped define capitalist libertarianism and popularized a form of free-market anarchism he termed "anarcho-capitalism." Rothbard wrote over twenty books and is considered a centrally important figure in the...
"a visionary socialist," admitting that it would likely cause Rothbard fits to be characterized as such.
Related philosophies
Though the modern form of anarcho-capitalism did not exist in Tucker's day, there was a similar philosophy called voluntaryismVoluntaryism
Voluntarism, or voluntaryism, is a philosophy according to which all forms of human association should be voluntary. This moral principle is called the non-aggression principle, which prohibits the initiation of aggressive force or coercion...
popularized by Auberon Herbert
Auberon Herbert
Auberon Edward William Molyneux Herbert was a writer, theorist, philosopher, and "19th-century individualist anarchist." A member of the Parliament of the United Kingdom, Herbert was the son of the 3rd Earl of Carnarvon, brother of Henry Herbert, the 4th Earl, and father of the 9th Baron Lucas...
. Tucker criticized Herbert's support of profit, but believed that Herbert's anti-statism would nevertheless result in a profitless economy. Herbert refused to call himself an anarchist, arguing that "we are governmentalists". He strongly opposed the idea that initiation of force may somehow become legitimate merely by constituting a majority, reasoning that "If we are self-owners (and it is absurd, it is doing violence to reason, to suppose that we are not), neither an individual, nor a majority, nor a government can have rights of ownership in other men." He did, however, support government "formally constituted by the nation, employing in this matter of force the majority method." Moreover, he argued that the state would remain in his system, for while "the state should compel no services and exact no payments by force," it "should be free to conduct many useful undertakings... in competition with all voluntary agencies... in dependence on voluntary payments."
The 19th century French economist Gustave de Molinari, although he proposed the replacement of the state in a fashion quite similar to anarcho-capitalism, refused to call himself an anarchist, even though France had a significant anarchist movement and had produced the first self-proclaimed anarchist in Proudhon.
Dispute over legitimacy
Right-libertarianism
Right-libertarianism names several related libertarian political philosophies which support capitalism. The term is typically used to differentiate privatist based forms of libertarianism from Left-libertarianism; which generally supports forms of economic democracy and...
" rather than left-libertarianism
Left-libertarianism
Left-libertarianism names several related but distinct approaches to politics, society, culture, and political and social theory, which stress equally both individual freedom and social justice.-Schools of thought:...
, but maintaining that it is still anarchism. Peter Marshall
Peter Marshall (author)
Peter Marshall is an English philosopher, historian, biographer, travel writer and poet. He has written fifteen books which are being translated into fourteen different languages. He wrote, presented and partly filmed the 6-part HTV series 'Voyage Around Africa', first shown in 1994...
simply concludes that "few anarchists would accept 'anarcho-capitalists' into the anarchist camp."
Some anarchists maintain strongly that anarcho-capitalism
Anarcho-capitalism
Anarcho-capitalism is a libertarian and individualist anarchist political philosophy that advocates the elimination of the state in favour of individual sovereignty in a free market...
is not a form of anarchism
Anarchism
Anarchism is generally defined as the political philosophy which holds the state to be undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful, or alternatively as opposing authority in the conduct of human relations...
due to their belief that anarchism is necessarily anti-capitalist as well as anti-statist. They note that, historically, those who called themselves "anarchist" have been opposed to what they called "capitalism," and that anarchists like Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin and Tucker all called themselves socialists, and they argue that anarcho-capitalism "is judged to be anarchism largely because anarcho-capitalists say they are 'anarchists' and because they criticise the State." However, virtually all dictionary definitions define "anarchism" as opposition to the state. Significantly, few anarchists who called themselves "socialist" defined "anarchism" as purely opposition to the state. For example, Errico Malatesta
Errico Malatesta
Errico Malatesta was an Italian anarcho-communist. He was an insurrectionary anarchist early in his life. He spent much of his life exiled from his homeland of Italy and in total spent more than ten years in prison. He wrote and edited a number of radical newspapers and was also a friend of...
argued that the oppressed "sought to overthrow both State and property – then it was that anarchism was born." More recent anarchist thinkers have also noted that anarchism has not been solely concerned with the state:
"Critics have sometimes contended that anarchist thought, and classical anarchist theory in particular, has emphasised opposition to the state to the point of neglecting the real hegemony of economic power. This interpretation arises, perhaps, from a simplistic and overdrawn distinction between the anarchist focus on political domination and the Marxist focus on economic exploitation . . . there is abundant evidence against such a thesis throughout the history of anarchist thought."
Both social anarchists and anarcho-capitalists refer to the etymological origins of the word "anarchy" as "without rulers". Conventionally, anarchists interpret this to mean anything fitting the definition of ruler. Anarcho-capitalists specifically interpret this to apply to any form of institutionalized coercion
Coercion
Coercion is the practice of forcing another party to behave in an involuntary manner by use of threats or intimidation or some other form of pressure or force. In law, coercion is codified as the duress crime. Such actions are used as leverage, to force the victim to act in the desired way...
, arguing that in a society free from coercion, no institution can exist to prevent a person from following another. Anarcho-capitalists further argue that the forced prevention of any voluntary action (save for those actions which infringe upon the equal rights of others) creates a coercive hierarchy
Hierarchy
A hierarchy is an arrangement of items in which the items are represented as being "above," "below," or "at the same level as" one another...
, a ruler class and a ruled class. They argue that this class structure exists everywhere and only where coercion prevails. Classical American individualist anarchists in the Josiah Warren
Josiah Warren
Josiah Warren was an individualist anarchist, inventor, musician, and author in the United States. He is widely regarded as the first American anarchist, and the four-page weekly paper he edited during 1833, The Peaceful Revolutionist, was the first anarchist periodical published, an enterprise...
or Benjamin Tucker
Benjamin Tucker
Benjamin Ricketson Tucker was a proponent of American individualist anarchism in the 19th century, and editor and publisher of the individualist anarchist periodical Liberty.-Summary:Tucker says that he became an anarchist at the age of 18...
tradition favoured small local market, also opposing the existence of social class
Social class
Social classes are economic or cultural arrangements of groups in society. Class is an essential object of analysis for sociologists, political scientists, economists, anthropologists and social historians. In the social sciences, social class is often discussed in terms of 'social stratification'...
structure since it, they argue, cuts individual liberty by making some people work and receive orders from others above; however the classical American individualist anarchists opposed what they called capitalism, believing that profit would decrease approaching zero under free market anarchy.
Many scholars such as David Osterfeld and David Miller view anarcho-capitalism as a 20th-century modification of the type of individualist anarchism that was popular in America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Scholar of political philosophy, Ian Adam, says "it is not in fact the case (as is sometimes thought) that anarcho-capitalism came out of the blue, without past or pedigree. It has a good deal in common with the earlier American tradition of individualist anarchism." Anti-capitalist anarchists tend to reject such claims, noting that many of the individualist anarchists called themselves socialists, and that all had a vision of a free society at odds with what they called capitalism. However, the scholars making the assertion that anarcho-capitalism is a more recent form of individualist anarchism are aware that 19th century individualist anarchists were opposed to capitalism (and communism); the assertion is that anarcho-capitalism is a subjectivist
Subjective theory of value
The subjective theory of value is an economic theory of value that identifies worth as being based on the wants and needs of the members of a society, as opposed to value being inherent to an object....
form of individualist anarchism. In other words, opposition to profit is not a necessary condition of being an individualist anarchist.
Nevertheless, one anti-capitalist individualist anarchist laments, "is time that anarchists recognise the valuable contributions of... individualist anarchist theory and take advantage of its ideas. It would be both futile and criminal to leave it to the capitalist libertarians..." Anarchist author Iain McKay argues that individualism is essentially anti-capitalist and that anarcho-capitalism
Anarcho-capitalism
Anarcho-capitalism is a libertarian and individualist anarchist political philosophy that advocates the elimination of the state in favour of individual sovereignty in a free market...
's claim to the tradition require reading individualist anarchists out of context (http://www.infoshop.org/faq/secG1.html). Individualist anarchist Joe Peacott
Joe Peacott
Joe Peacott is an individualist anarchist writer based in the United States. He is a leading figure at BAD Press, a publishing outlet for individualist anarchist philosophy. His work on economics and sociology has been published by the Libertarian Alliance and referenced favourably by leading...
argues that individualism rejects capitalist economic arrangements.
One set of approaches concludes that capitalism, by necessity, requires a state, and therefore capitalism cannot exist without a state. For example, Larry Gambone states, "for anarchists, capitalism is the result of the development of the state and therefore, all capitalism is in one sense, state capitalism." He adds that when the anarchists use the term "capitalism," they are referring to those who have "gained wealth from the use of governmental power or from privileges granted by government." Anarcho-capitalist Wendy McElroy says that when 19th century individualist anarchists referred to "capitalism" they meant state capitalism
State capitalism
The term State capitalism has various meanings, but is usually described as commercial economic activity undertaken by the state with management of the productive forces in a capitalist manner, even if the state is nominally socialist. State capitalism is usually characterized by the dominance or...
, the alliance of government and business. Using this understanding of the manifestation of capitalism, some have argued that anarcho-"capitalism" is not truly a form of capitalism to begin with, and that therefore anarcho-"capitalism" is just as anti-capitalist as Tucker and Spooner. Left-libertarian Brad Spangler, for example, has argued that anarcho-capitalism, properly understood, is a stigmergic form of socialism
Socialism
Socialism is an economic system characterized by social ownership of the means of production and cooperative management of the economy; or a political philosophy advocating such a system. "Social ownership" may refer to any one of, or a combination of, the following: cooperative enterprises,...
.
For those that maintain that anarcho-capitalism is, in fact, a form of capitalism, the issue of contention then becomes whether or not capitalism can be created, or maintained, in the absence of a state that intervenes in private property claims. Anarcho-capitalist Murray Rothbard
Murray Rothbard
Murray Newton Rothbard was an American author and economist of the Austrian School who helped define capitalist libertarianism and popularized a form of free-market anarchism he termed "anarcho-capitalism." Rothbard wrote over twenty books and is considered a centrally important figure in the...
noted a difference between two contradictory concepts of capitalism, "free-market
Free market
A free market is a competitive market where prices are determined by supply and demand. However, the term is also commonly used for markets in which economic intervention and regulation by the state is limited to tax collection, and enforcement of private ownership and contracts...
capitalism" characterized by voluntary exchange and "state capitalism" characterized by violent expropriation. He believed that only free-market capitalism is true capitalism and as such "the fullest expression of anarchism". However, most anarchists would agree with scholar Jeremy Jennings statement that it is "hard not to conclude that these ideas [anarcho-capitalism] – with roots deep in classical liberalism – are described as anarchist only on the basis of a misunderstanding of what anarchism is."