I can get along with a lot of people. I get along with Anarcho-Capitalists. I get along with Anarcho-Communists. I get along with Paleo-Anarchists. I think they are all wrong in some way, but I think they are right much more often than they are wrong. I get along splendidly with Left Libertarians, agorists, mutualists, voluntaryists, and all that nomenclature. There are, however, three kinds of Anarchists I refuse to get along with:
1. Anarcho-Syndicalists.
Here’s an idea: let’s eliminate the State and replace it with millions of little corporate democracies. Everyone loves “office politics” so much that we should turn them into real politics, with voting and rulers that decide how the company is run. Like unions, except bigger! Woot!
Does anyone really believe this shit, or is it just the kind of things teens pretend to believe so they can get girls in the sack?
2. Wannabe Anarchists.
People, like Noam Chomsky, who call themselves Anarchists but hide behind the skirt of the ruling class every time something happens that they don’t like. People who hate their fellow workers more than they hate the State, but who pretend to be Anarchists because they’re black flaggers so they can get girls in the sack.
3. Culture fetishists.
Those are the most insidious and pedantic of the bunch, Anarchists who are anti-globalization and pro-culture, not realizing that culture is a tool of oppression and globalization is the natural consequence of the opening of borders. Granted, capitalism does warp globalization to an extent, but that’s not a reason to reject it wholesale. The opening of borders gives the individual the freedom to choose to live beyond the cultural boundaries imposed on him by the majority.
It hardly behooves Anarchists to believe that there is only one good kind of music, one good kind of art, one good religion, one good way to live: cultural supremacism should be our enemy, not something to be supported. As Anarchists, we should value freedom above all. The obsession with culture is anti-freedom.
It always astonishes me to see the kind of complaints that these culture fetishists level at capitalism. I am not a capitalist, but surely there are better complaints to level at it than the fact that it erodes culture and makes people like fruit bombs instead of Old World wines. They confuse the erosion of culture with the attendent evils of capitalism. As Seanbaby once said when answering to someone who wrote about Fight Club, and I always remembered this quote:
You should hate The Man for oppressing your freedom or legislating stupidity. You shouldn’t hate the Establishment for offering delicious gourmet coffee or building you safe reliable automobiles. And while you’re typing from your fuck-The-Man PC on your underground-rebellion microsoft hotmail account, keep in mind that you were excited enough you had something in common with a fictional hobo anarchist that you had to write a stranger to tell them.
The Prime Directive 
Can you write (or point to) a post giving the specifics of how your position differs from anarcho-capitalism? I always viewed “market anarchist” and “anarcho-capitalist” as synonyms.
When you say “capitalism”, do you mean “state capitalism”? i.e., corporatism or mercantilism?
When I say “capitalism,” I just mean “voluntary human action, including cooperation and trade.” I can certainly see how “capitalism” has some pretty negative connotations, though, and doesn’t mean exactly that to most people.
I’ll not presume to speak for Francois, but when I say myself that I’m not a Capitalist, but am a market anarchist, I’m saying two things with that statement:
1.) That Capitalism (I use the big ‘C’ to represent it) is intrinsically tied to the State, as a concept and as an idea. While strictly speaking, capitalism (lower case ‘c’ here), is just the exchange of goods and services for other goods and services (currency is lumped in with goods in my opinion, others may differ on that), Capitalism (notice the change back to big ‘C’) is dependent upon state subsidies and externalities to survive.
2.) The second statement I’m making is that “free market” has to do with human interaction in general, while “capitalism” has to do with the above exchange of goods/services/etc. I personally make the distinction of calling myself a free market anarchist, because I would say that free market has to do with intellectual, cultural, societal, AND capital exchange. Not to plug my own site here, but I titled my site “without hyphens” as a means to demonstrate the idea that true freedom doesn’t include restrictions on interaction in any way, shape, or form (as long as it’s non-coercive).
Anarcho-Capitalists, as a group, tend to be very much focused on economic interaction as the basis for everything we do. While they are anti-State, certainly, I find that many are less interested in talking about non-capital interactions (interaction that have nothing to do with goods, services, etc) that are infringed upon by the State — it’s not that they don’t reject the State infringement, it’s just that it’s of less importance to them to discuss then economic infringement.
I personally find that while economic infringement by the State (i.e. taxes) is a huge issue for me, of even more importance (to me personally) is the idea that the State infringes upon every aspects of our interactions with others, thus lowering our net quality of life significantly.
Hopefully that makes some sense… it’s not JUST about the fact that “Capitalism” tends to be State sponsored, but also about the fact that anarcho-capitalists see ending the State’s interaction with commerce as the means to a free society — whereas I, as a market anarchist, see opening the “market of humanity” as much more than commerce/economics.
-olly
Francois some questions:
1) Mises himself thought that the only form of socialism that could “work” was anarcho-syndicalism, as it was still based on a free market for trading and economics. Perhaps we have a different understanding of what ‘anarcho- syndicalist’ means
2) “People, like Noam Chomsky, who call themselves Anarchists but hide behind the skirt of the ruling class every time something happens that they don’t like.” Huh? You are going to have to give some concrete examples of this, I have no idea where this one comes from. Of course, Chomsky calls himself and anarch-syndicalist, so perhaps it has something to do with my first question.
3) Totally agree on that one.
And as for the ‘poseurs’ I agree with that too and it pisses me off because I am an anarchist. I own a house, am married, have 3 kids and a wife and a very good job. But people expect me to have numerous body piercings and to hurl trash cans through store windows and listen to bad punk music. All because some nilhist rebel thinks that is what anarchism is.
Me, I have no problem with anarcho-syndicalists and Chomsky. I get along with them better than the anarcho commies actually.
I’m a bit surprised you don’t mention Primitivists and other “Green Anarchy” hangers-on. Any thoughts? I for one would certainly hang out with even the worst anarcho-syndicalists long before the back-to-the-paleolithic crowd.
I am not aware of what Von Mises said about anarcho-syndicalism, so I’ll have to trust you on that.
Well, yes, admittedly those are worse, but very rare.
Thanks for the explanation, Matt, but it looks like semantic disagreements, then. If we take your big-C and small-c distinctions for “capitalism,” you wind up with anarcho-Capitalists and anarcho-capitalists, and you seem to be conflating the two. Furthermore, as I said I personally take capitalism to be about all of the free exchanges you mention, not just economics, and like you I value those freedoms as much as or more than financial freedom. i.e., for me anarcho-capitalism is not just about economics, but about all of “praxeology,” human action. And that seems to be the case for most of the anarcho-capitalists I am involved with.
RE:Mises
http://www.econlib.org/library/Mises/msS6.html
I’m not saying Mises liked socialism – clearly he does not, but relative to other forms of “socialism” (Marxism and other state socialist ideas), it could at least be self-sustaining:
“Even granting that Socialism is at all practicable, the development of a unitary world socialism would encounter grave difficulties. It is quite possible that the workers in particular districts, or particular concerns, or particular factories, would take the view that the instruments of production which happened to lie within their area were their own property, and that no outsider was entitled to profit by them. In such a case World Socialism would split up into numerous self-independent socialist communities—if, indeed, it did not become completely syndicalized. For Syndicalism is nothing less than the principle of decentralization consistently applied.”
He, of course, doesn’t go for the Syndicalists ideas of property, but admits that their organization may be workable, though not better than a true free market with private property (which is why I said “work” in quotes like that). He admits that Syndicalism can at least “work” and that Socialism can’t, and that any attempt at Socialism would fail or degenerate to Syndicalism anyway:
“As everywhere else, so here too, what appears to be the road to Socialism can in fact easily prove to be really the path to Syndicalism.”
and
“Individual profit-sharing must lead straight to Syndicalism, even if it is a Syndicalism where the entrepreneur still keeps part of the entrepreneur’s profit.”
Just to let you know what I meant by that.
Well said.
This is all opinion, but market anarchists like agorists tend to view the “market” as the sum of all voluntary interaction, including co-ops, unions, mutual aid orgs, etc. They also are more likely to believe that a truly free market would look radically different than what we have now – that our very way of life would be differently structured.
Anarcho-capitalists tend to envision a stateless society that looks more or less like what we currently have. They are more likely to view centralization as a result of purely economic interest rather than government intervention, for instance, instead of viewing the corporation, for instance, as a quasi-state in itself. They also tend to except institutions like co-ops and unions from the set of “voluntary” organizations, usually without any cause save personal distaste.
[…] Posted August 22 2008 Filed under: Uncategorized | Last year, I published an entry called “Three kinds of Anarchists I refuse to get along with.” The three kinds were anarcho-syndicalists, wannabe Anarchists, and culture fetishists. I now […]