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frozear
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Freedom Absolutist

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Replying to Avatar Jeff Swann

Yes there are basic aspects of life & human connection that give people all sorts of meaning & fulfillment, without involving money. But all cooperative voluntary interactions do generally produce a surplus or a profit of some kind. If you cook with another person the profit is probably in the enjoyment you get from the interaction beyond just the food you might have produced on your own. Every voluntary human interaction takes place because both sides believe there is some benefit or value in the interaction, whether material, emotional, spiritual, now or in the future, people generally do things because they think those things will improve life in some way.

Many of those things you listed are valuable because they are rare, or because they require someone's time & effort & energy which are the scarce values that a sound money is supposed to represent. Trade is cooperative & mutually beneficial. In a free market, people get rich to your benefit, not at your expense. If a man has earned a billion sats it's because he created much more than a billion sats worth of value for others & did not consume for himself. You can't eat money. He created real valuable goods & services, & decided to hold only an abstraction which is a promise that he can consume something at some point in the future, in exchange for the real wealth he produced.

People are unable to live the way they want today & unable to plan for the future or have families because their tool for economic coordination (money) is being corrupted & has been increasingly so for the last 100+ years. Money is half of every trade. It touches everything. When money becomes corrupt, society becomes corrupt.

Look dude I hear you and I understand your point of view. However, I would prefer you use 'AnCap' or 'Anarcho-Capitalist'. If you say 'Anarchist' it confuses the normies into thinking I believe something that I don't. An 'Anarchist' has been portrayed as a 'bomb thrower' and 'Anarchy' has been portrayed as 'chaos' (intentionally) for too long. Now we are having our name stolen. I'm starting to think there's a non-zero chance that AnCaps stealing the word 'Anarchy' is a pysop. True Anarchism has many sets of powerful enemies.

There is plenty of value that isn't exchanged for money.

There's child bearing, cooking, cleaning, friendship, neighbors sharing tools, neighbors watching for thieves, neighbors watering your garden while you're away, wise old people giving wisdom, extended family members babysitting children on date night, friendship, love letters, singing Christmas carols, helping someone in an emergency, someone playing with you on a sports team, someone playing against you on a sports team, helping a friend when they fail, helping someone study for a test, defending your little brother from a bully and much much much much more.

I feel sorry for you if you think the world and society should be reduced to being only transactional. That's not a world I want to live in. Not all work can be scaled and commodified to create surplus (see the above list). Productivity and surplus increases through improved efficiency can only be applied to a portion of the real economy. Those sectors are what capitalists prefer to talk about and spend their energy developing. There are people, particularly women, who are busy doing the important work in a society and are less able to participate in your aggressive and adversarial economic fight to the death.

The lowering birth rates in our society is likely caused by your putting a money price on everything. The work that women prefer to do has been devalued under capitalism even though nothing else could be more important.

Maybe Anarchists (left) and Capitalists (right) can coexist successfully in a free and stateless society. Thank you for forcing me to think about this more.

Replying to Avatar Jeff Swann

Capitalism is just free trade with respect for indiviual rights. It is entirely possible for voluntary communes to exist within an honest capitalist system. Mutual aid societies, & cooperatives were far more common when the US govt was far smaller, suggesting that libertarian ideals (smaller or no govts) are very friendly to voluntary communes, mutual aid, & cooperatives.

The key is that individuals cannot be forced to contribute to a commune if they decide they'd rather not, which basically means the existence of the group must benefit all participants. If it doesn't then it is likely to naturally dissolve. Slavery is not acceptable in an honest capitalist system.

In contrast, capitalists are not free to exist or to trade within socialist & communist systems. One is freedom, while the others are different forms of slavery which can only exist by destroying freedom. If you desire some form of communism that doesn't involve enslaving anyone, then an honest capitalist system is no threat to you.

You can object to my definition of capitalism, but I haven't seen you provide any meaningful definition for the word. All of the anarcho capitalists & agorists I know believe that capitalism is free trade with respect for individual rights. There is no public school teaching that, so I fail to see how that is propaganda. It's just respect for private ownership (individual ownership) of capital (tools, money, etc).

I am trying to describe to you what I (and others like me) believe, & you seem unusually hung up on the words I am using rather than trying to actually understand me

I agree basically with what you're saying here. Its just the manipulation of the word "Anarchism" is what pisses me off.

Very interesting criticism of left anarchists but its a little dated since it was written in the 1950s. The success of Rojava might prove Rothbards assertions in this essay wrong. Time will tell.

Most important to our topic, however, is the fact that Rothbard concluded this article asserting his political movement should be named nonarchist, not anarchist.

Below is a quote from Peter Marshall who said it well:

"Anarcho-capitalists are against the State simply because they are capitalists first and foremost. ... They are not concerned with the social consequences of capitalism for the weak, powerless and ignorant. ... As such, anarcho-capitalism overlooks the egalitarian implications of traditional individualist anarchists like Spooner and Tucker. In fact, few anarchists would accept the 'anarcho-capitalists' into the anarchist camp since they do not share a concern for economic equality and social justice. Their self-interested, calculating market men would be incapable of practising voluntary co-operation and mutual aid. Anarcho-capitalists, even if they do reject the state, might therefore best be called right-wing libertarians rather than anarchists."

You should start calling what you believe Capitalism and our status-quo State Capitalism. You shouldn't try to change the fundamentals of anarchism because it's been around hundreds of years. You can read volumes upon volumes of the literature anarchists have made over the years.

Finally, I don't care to get into the merits of Capitalism and Anarchism with you. I'm saying it's disingenuous for you to call yourself Anarchist because stealing away it's name is an attempt to nullify it in a dishonest way.

My real hope is Bitcoin will make the Communism vs Capitalism narrative go away. It's a ruling class propaganda fuelled False Choice fallacy.

True Free Market Capitalism isn't bad in theory. It just can't last more that a generation or two. It can never sustain; it is always temporary. It's winner take all over time. The ruling class and ruled class always separate out.

Don't misunderstand me. I hate Capitalism and Communism equally. The Authoritarians present a false choice through their propaganda. They want you to think Authoritarian-Left and Authoritarian-Right are the only valid choices. It's bullshit.

Have you ever played slither io? That's exactly the game theory. Once one party gets an advantage thanks to the Pareto Distribution they use their previous success as an advantage to themselves and their descendants. Capitalism would be fair if everyone started from the same start line. The issue is when the descendants of the rich and powerful get help from family and friends from within their own class.

Rightists and Capitalists don't like talking about class.