“Anarcho-Capitalism”, which emerged from right-wing U.S. libertarianism, has little to do with anarchy and much to do with socialism. The ideology of Anarcho-Capitalism is the current culmination of Christian slave morality. It is based, as many ancaps use as a slogan, on “the only human right: the right to be left alone.” It is a kind of religion, a highly moral totalitarian sectarian movement… Anarcho-capitalism is a socialist state utopia. In the following article you will learn the most important arguments for this claim.
No rights – Just Mights vs. Rights against Mights
The lowest common denominator of all movements that can call themselves anarchist without committing label fraud is the rejection of rule. ( There is no English 1:1 translation for the German term “Herrschaft”. Rule or dominion come close.) To further understand anarchy, however, it is important to distinguish between might and rule (domination, „Herrschaft“). There is, in fact, first of all an essential difference between two forms of anarchy, which could hardly be set up in more opposite ways. Some call for “no power for no one”, others stand for empowerment of the individual against rule (“Herrschaft”). Followers of the oldest anarchist movements in the West, which go back to Heraclitus but found their first explicitly anarchist formulation with the Cynics who followed Socrates, belong with Jesus, the Romantics, with Nietzsche, Max Stirner, with Emerson, etc., to the representatives of empowerment.
Read more: Freedom is Belonging (But don’t confuse it with a right to belonging)
The anarchists of the “No Power for Nobody” faction go back to Liberalism, based on the right of the individual. Liberalism emerged from the English revolutions in the 17th century. Its most famous precursor is Thomas Hobbes, whose Leviathan is considered the founder of the absolute state. Important representatives of libertarianism, or anarcho-capitalism, are the US-Americans Robert Nozick and Murray Rothbard.
“Individuals have rights, and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights)”.
This is the first sentence of Nozick in his book “Anarchy, State, and Utopia”
And Rothbard sets as axiom the self-ownership and derived from it the right to property. The non-aggression principle (NAP) is then derived from the right to self-ownership. No one has the right to force you to do anything, to do any violence against you or your property. I have highlighted right in bold in each case to show that this new “anarchism,” which we better call libertarianism, prioritizes the right to be protected from evil forces.
The anarchists of empowerment do not know such a right. For good reasons.
Rights establishes rulership (Herrschaft)
Liberalism and even more so libertarianism or the only so-called “anarcho-capitalism” are, speaking with Nietzsche, spawns of slave morality. The slave longs for freedom from his master.
What if people who were violated, oppressed, suffering, unfree, exhausted, and unsure of themselves were to moralize: what type of moral valuations would they have? […] The slave’s gaze resents the virtues of the powerful. It is skeptical and distrustful. […]The desire for freedom, the instinct for happiness, and subtleties in the feeling of freedom necessarily belong to slave morals and morality.
Nietzsche, Beyond Good And Evil, § 260
So the slave demands a “right to freedom”. And he wants to be left alone, this is just his only human right.
I have not understood for a long time what libertarians mean when they distinguish between negative and positive freedom. The distinction has been common in philosophy for a long time. Leibniz, for example, understands negative freedom as (negative) freedom from coercion, while positive freedom is the ability of a healthy person to do what he wants. For Isaiah Berlin, too, negative freedom is freedom from something, while positive freedom is the ability to do something.
But the concept of freedom of the slave morality, i.e. of the libertarians, is quite different.
Here, freedom means a claim, a right. The claim to negative freedom means the right to be left alone, not to be forced to do anything. The claim to positive freedom, on the other hand, also means the right to get something this time: equal pay for equal work, the right to enough food, to a place to live, to education, and so on. Libertarians and anarcho-capitalists, when they speak of freedom, speak in reality of freedom rights! Yet it is precisely with this legal claim that they establish Herrschaft (rulership). And likewise, they demand legal recognition of their property.
From the Minimal State to the Voluntary Society
Libertarians thus demand institutional protection of their claim to freedom. Unlike conservative “liberals”, they are skeptical that the normal central state satisfies this claim to negative freedom at all, and if it does, it tends to serve positive freedom claims as well. Through taxes, they are thus forced to pay not only for the desired security against encroachments on their negative freedom, but also for the sheer endless demands of positive freedom from all sorts of individuals and groups. In this proliferation of state powers, even libertarians certainly recognize Herrschaft (rule), which they reject.
Anarcho-capitalists know that even minimal states, as the USA was once supposed to be, tend to pacify negative claims to freedom ever more unreliably and to build up positive claims to freedom ever further. They therefore dream that in a voluntary society, which would be organized purely under private law, only “negative freedom” claims would be secured1That is simply nonsense anyway. For an appropriate fee, private companies naturally offer positive freedoms. A landlord grants me the positive freedom to use his property, eg. . The compulsory satisfaction of “positive freedom” claims would be morally criminalized as robbery and would be warded off by private security services.
Well, that’s the dream.
What they do not realize at first is that even the establishment of a “constitutional state” that only safeguards negative liberties is a form of Herrschaft (rule), regardless of whether you call it state or voluntary society. At this point, convinced Ancaps will emphasize the contractual nature of the Voluntary Society. Well, this was already done by the representatives of totalitarian states, Hobbes or Locke. But their contract theories were a pure construct of their representatives. They assumed that people in the state of nature were afraid of encroachments by borrowed powers on their negative freedom and of the theft of their property. Therefore, they established states and entered into a treaty to protect them from such encroachments. Um. Well.
As long as you live under my roof…
You are a 14-year-old boy in the year 2040. The dream of the ancaps has come true. For decades, there have been only private companies everywhere. These are provided by large corporations. In order to be allowed to live on the territory of such a supernational2In the Middle Ages, the rule was that “city air makes you free“. Similarly, it is conceivable and even probable that soon the law of supernational corporations will override the respective national law corporation, you first have to sign a kind of framework contract, which generally contains the terms of use under which you are allowed to settle within the corporation’s territory. If you do not like them in detail, you have the choice to move to the settlement of another corporation. For example, there may be one settlement where all drug use is allowed, another where even smoking cigarettes in public is prohibited.
So you live in some “Voluntary” Society.
And you have fallen in love with a neighbor girl. You would like to meet her, have sex with her. But your father forbids you to do so. You ask him:
“But Dad, we live in a voluntary society. And you explained to me that no one is allowed to restrict my negative freedom here. Isn’t that a contradiction?”
Your father will answer with a smile on his face, “Well, son. As long as you live under my roof and at my expense, my rules apply. But, of course, you are free to move out of here and rent an apartment somewhere else for you and that neighbor girl, or buy a house. Just as you wish.”
But now you have no money. You don’t have a job yet either. You attend school, you want to study one day. And who should give you the money for that, if not your parents.3We have not even mentioned that there is also the possibility that “community standards” apply in the voluntary society in question, such as on Facebook, and that you will be excluded from this community if, for example, you have sex without being married. As much as your father raves about the voluntary society, you can hardly imagine that boys and girls who grew up in the state had it worse than you. They, too, had no choice but to obey their parents if they did not want to face the painful consequences of their disobedience.
You think this example is far-fetched? then you have not understood the libertarian system of property and obedience:
In the preface to Walter Block’s “Defending the Undefensable, II,” repeated Libertarian presidential candidate Ron Paul writes:
Some may also wonder how a pro-life, Christian, culturally conservative libertarian like me can endorse this book. […] In a free society, property owners could decide whether or not to allow smoking on their property, and what constitutes a valid marriage”
Walter Block 2013: “Defending the Undefendable II — Freedom in All Realms”. Foreword by Ron Paul
So the freedom in all realms means you might not find a place to live because you are black , gay or not married Catholic.
When I was a student looking for an apartment with my girlfriend, in the 70s, we lied to the landlords that we were engaged. We had bought extra engagement rings, although we never planned to get married. In the voluntary society, people might expect something similar or worse.
UPDATE: Peter Thiel dreams exactly of the dyspotia I point out
Peter Thiel, less well-known than Musk, Gates or Zuckerberg, but is involved everywhere in a big way. He was one of the first investors and founders of Facebook, Paypal and Tesla. He supported the election campaign of Ron Paul, later of Trump. He sits in all sorts of think tanks. And he almost makes me delete the word utopia in the title of this text: “Anarcho-capitalism is a socialist state utopia” and replace it with dystopia. His dream is what I came up with in a dystopian play almost 30 years ago4The manuscript is lost. We had performed it in excerpts in an amateur acting group in Cologne.
What he calls libertarian is not only the overcoming of states, since corporations could provide state services more effectively and efficiently, but also a rejection of the free market. He stands for capitalism without competition, because competition only harms progress. He himself wants to live forever and has already signed up for freezing. ( By the way, some of my libertarian acquaintances dream of immortality.) I would be willing to enter into a war against his vision, willing to die to ensure that it never becomes reality.
Don’t get me wrong, we cynics don’t aspire to a society in which people are forbidden to choose, to discriminate, however they want. The only difference is that we do not want to secure this freedom of choice by morally based rules. We take our liberty, our posessions, we put no claim, no right to it.
You can expect the total commodity character of human life
Let us return briefly to Murray Rothbard, the hero of the anarcho-capitalists.
Applying our theory to parents and children, this means that a parent does not have the right to aggress against his children5Not having a right, with Rothbard, means that it is a crime. The children can therefore threaten, in the case of the slightest misconduct on the part of their parents, to report them to the corporation in which they live, and to obtain their punishment, but also that the parent should not have a legal obligation to feed, clothe, or educate his children, since such obligations would entail positive acts coerced upon the parent and depriving the parent of his rights. The parent therefore may not murder or mutilate his child, and the law properly outlaws a parent from doing so. But the parent should have the legal right not to feed the child, i.e., to allow it to die. The law, therefore, may not properly compel the parent to feed a child or to keep it alive.
The Ethics of Liberty, Chapter 14
And again: we cynics do not condemn that parents may kill (“let die”) or sell their children, whether to rich gays or pedophiles, we just do not consider them entitled to do so. We trust in power and do not want to see it limited by Herrschaft (rule). Our trust in power includes, among other things, our trust in the power of love.
Read on: Virtues beyond Good and Evil
Anarcho-Capitalism is a Socialist State Concept
I have already shown above that anarcho-capitalism does not represent a radical rejection of states. It merely places the Herrschaft of the state on a different moral footing. In fact, as developments among the ancaps in recent years have repeatedly shown, the ancaps’ overriding principle is not the rejection of the state either, but the institutional safeguarding of their so called negative freedom.
When German Chancellor Merkel opened the borders to refugees from Syria, the majority among them cried out for the protection of state borders.
It quickly became apparent that between representatives of this majority, represented for example by Oliver Janich, and the few radical opponents of the state, a conversation was hardly possible, because they talked past each other. Janich could not understand at all that, in view of the threat of illegal refugees, state intervention was rejected. After all, “we” still had no alternative to the state. My insistence on the radical rejection of state borders, led him to cancel my Faccebook friendship and block me. No “we” with me anymore. Hans-Hermann Hoppe, too, held similar positions.
Another German Ancap, Sarah Klostermayr, praised the constitution of the German state in a podcast about anarcho-capitalism.
Radical in Ancaps is neither the rejection of Herrschaft (rule), nor of the state. Radical is only their slave morality: the longing to be optimally protected from interventions in what they call their “negative freedom”.
Stefan Blankertz, who clearly enjoys the attribution of being “Germany’s longest-serving anarcho-capitalist”wrote the other day in his Libertarian Manifesto:
The strong do not need property to secure what they want for themselves, because they are strong enough to defend it if necessary. Accordingly, property can only serve the weak, because it comes into being by the strong recognizing a right of disposal of the weak.
Stefan Blankertz. Das libertäre Manifest. Zur Neubestimmung des Klassentheorie. edition g. 104. Rothbard Institut. Digital version, without year. Translation by me
At the latest here we see: anarcho-capitalism is a socialist utopia. Admittedly, it is not based on the socialism of the modern times of Marx, etc.. But already Plato’s state was a socialist program. Plato wanted an ideal state, in which the conditions would be better than in the state models known until then. He wanted to create a better world by giving the people a better Herrschaft (rule). For Plato this was guaranteed e.g. with the destroying of the family. For the ancaps, the guarantee of their so-called negative freedom should improve the world.
All socialist models have in common: there are the theorists, who work out the program and the rabble, who should then live in such a state. The basis of socialist programs are always ethical considerations in the sense of the distinction between what is to be considered evil and what is to be considered good.
And this for everyone:
“The libertarian now, in short, insists on applying the moral law to everyone, and makes no exceptions for anyone.”6Stefan Blankertz in the preface to Rothbard, For a New Freedom, vol. 1 “Therefore the libertarian regards as his most important educational goal to promote […] among his unsuspecting citizens.” [op. cit. ] I have deliberately omitted the educational goal mentioned here. For the proof of my assertion, that anarcho-capitalism is a socialist program, it is enough that there are the experts on one side and the people on the other, who must be re-educated.
Anarchists are distinguished by the fact that they do not set up programs in which the people can be expected to conform. We anarchists are convinced that the world needs no rule, no law, no programs. And no matter which socialist world improvement program is hip at the moment:
We anarchists always stand on the other side: against Herrschaft: Just mights – no rights!
Once again Blankertz: In the preface to the second part of the aforementioned book by Rothbard he criticizes all! anarchists before Rothbard, including Paul Goodman, whom he once translated, for their alleged naiveté.
They lacked a program, how exactly the anarchist society should function, how the roads should be built, who should be punished for what, etc.
Blankertz has not understood that this is exactly what distinguishes us anarchists from socialists: we do not set up programs according to which all others must then follow.
Anarcho-capitalists are storytellers and not warriors
Libertarians, as I said, want above all to secure their claim to be left alone. Like Kant, they dream of eternal peace. They tell utopian stories about how everything could be. But they risk nothing, even consider resistance to be crazy.
Well, Blankertz also wrote books against compulsory education. But he did not help his son, for example, to get rid of it. That the children went to school, he said several times, also in conversations with me, was a matter of course, because after all there was compulsory education.
In Portugal, I met quite a few families who did not write books against compulsory schooling, but who had fled Germany with their children so that they would not be deprived of their custody because they did not comply with compulsory schooling. My grandfather was a shift worker. Whenever he had a day off during the week, he also gave his daughter, my mother, time off from school so that the family could go hiking together. And that, although it was even a criminal offense under Hitler to exempt children from compulsory schooling on one’s own authority. And that was exactly what my grandfather, simple factory worker possessed: his own authority.
Read on: The most dangerous religion in the world
In the current Germany, by the way, the airports are monitored by the police on the days before the school vacations begin, in order to be able to find and punish such truants who arbitrarily extend the vacations by a few days.
Such resistance to the state is not to be expected from ancaps. Blankertz, for example, was once amused by the fact that his son did not actively participate in lessons throughout the year. Only shortly before he received his school certificate would he have feigned interest. He had warned his son again and again that the teachers were not stupid and would eventually see through this deception. And then the father, “Germany’s longest-serving anarcho-capitalist”, grinned: One day his son was busted and got the receipt in the form of bad grades. “I had warned him, but he wouldn’t listen to his old father,” Blankertz triumphed. Resistance is not worth it. Resistance is dangerous. Let’s rather tell beautiful fairy tales of a utopian world in which there are no more restrictions on negative freedom.
Anarcho-capitalism is a socialist state utopia with no trust in the Invisible Hand
Libertarians are all market radicals. Anarcho-capitalists are explicit supporters of capitalism. They trust — rightly — that there is no need for central planning to provide for all people in the best possible way. Moral intervention in the free market, such as demanding fair prices or even fair pay, ends up being harmful to everyone. The Invisible Hand (of God), which became famous after Adam Smith, provides for an optimal organization.
We cynical anarchists do not disagree with this at all.
But I ask: where is the trust in this invisible hand when it comes to freedom outside the market? Why should Herrschaft (rule) be helpful here against the evil desires for power of people? The capitalist ideology even includes — beyond the promotion of the free market — that the capitalist must not act as a do gooder under any circumstances. This is harmful. The bee fable of the bees is always cited as an example. Anarchists assume — without being naive — that man is good by nature, that he is a trustworthy organism. We don’t want to educate other people, we don’t want to improve them, we encourage them and ourselves to self-realization. We need no further program. And not a formulated utopia.
People who realize themselves will already use their power in such a way that in the end, just also through the invisible hand, the best possible result is achieved. In a free world, as in a free market. And we already live in this free world. We don’t want to improve the world.
We fight only for our interests, that is: for our property. Property, however, understood with the individual anarchist Max Stirner, as that over which we have power, not as that to which we believe we have a legal claim..
Read on: Beeing a dissident
- 1That is simply nonsense anyway. For an appropriate fee, private companies naturally offer positive freedoms. A landlord grants me the positive freedom to use his property, eg.
- 2In the Middle Ages, the rule was that “city air makes you free“. Similarly, it is conceivable and even probable that soon the law of supernational corporations will override the respective national law
- 3We have not even mentioned that there is also the possibility that “community standards” apply in the voluntary society in question, such as on Facebook, and that you will be excluded from this community if, for example, you have sex without being married.
- 4The manuscript is lost. We had performed it in excerpts in an amateur acting group in Cologne.
- 5Not having a right, with Rothbard, means that it is a crime. The children can therefore threaten, in the case of the slightest misconduct on the part of their parents, to report them to the corporation in which they live, and to obtain their punishment
- 6Stefan Blankertz in the preface to Rothbard, For a New Freedom, vol. 1