Understanding Closet Anarcho-capitalism

Hogeye Bill (2023)


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Tribalism and jargon often make it difficult to discern who agrees with us anarcho-capitalists and who disagrees. On the one hand, we see rabid alt-righters claiming to be ancaps, even as they worship statist Constitutions, government mass murder, and recommend throwing people who disagree out of helicopters. We anarcho-capitalists are acutely aware of these sectarian right-wing statist poseurs; we have to deal with them every day on our social networks.

Then there is the duel case, the opposite of faux ancaps. I refer to all those closet anarcho-capitalists out there who - in concept, in the realm of ideas - are anarcho-capitalist, but are hardly recognizable as such because of their camouflage. They themselves may not realize that they have taken up the anarcho-capitalist ideology. How can this happen? Mainly through jargon - the language adopted to explain their positions. If their ideas are pure anarcho-capitalism, but they speak in (for example) Marxian jargon, then all but the most critical thinking readers are apt to miss that fact. One way to spot such closet anarcho-capitalism is to be aware of the most common differences in jargon, and then do a simple substitution from the Marxian term to the Rothbardian term in your head. Or if you have the text of an article, one can use the search and replace function in your word processor. Often, translating from Marxian to Rothbardian is just that simple.

Perhaps the most obvious examples of closet anarcho-capitalists are writers at Center for a Stateless Society, particularly Roderick Long, Gary Chartier, Charles Johnson, Sheldon Richman, Brad Spangler, and to a great extent Kevin Carson. (Carlson differs with anarcho-capitalists a bit regarding stickiness of private property. Cf: Are We All Mutualists?) One can generally transmogrify their “Marxist” articles to good solid anarcho-capitalism by just one global search-and-replace: “corporatism” for “capitalism.” That's right! They use “capitalism” to mean what we ancaps call “corporatism” or "fascism." (Or, alternatively, they blindly assume that capitalism inevitably leads to corporatism.) One proof of this is the introduction to the book “Markets, not Capitalism.” A simple substitution of “corporatism” for every usage of “capitalism” yields a wonderful anarcho-capitalist essay. See for yourself: Introduction to “Markets, not Corporatism”.

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Sectarian ancaps who ignore the libertarian socialists miss out on a lot of good analysis and information because of their bias. Without reading Kevin Carson's Exodus: General Idea of the Revolution in the XXI Century, you may not know that many (libertarian) socialists have come around to rejecting violent revolution and factory seizures in favor of agorism - building the world we wish to see - with evolutionary rather than revolutionary change. The Old Left revolution dogma is being replaced by what we anarcho-capitalists would call agorism. Kevin Carson puts it this way:

To the extent that the old mass-based, insurrectionist model had any valid basis in material conditions, it ended with the mass production age. We no longer need to storm the ramparts of those old state and industrial hierarchies because most of them no longer perform any socially necessary function. Cheap, small-scale physical production technologies and distributed, stigmergic coordination mechanisms have made it possible to build a society mostly outside the old institutional framework, and leave the old institutions to crumble. p.51 Exodus
Notice how he uses the term “stigmergic coordination mechanisms” as a euphemism for what we ancaps call “free market capitalism.” This is in line with Brad Spangler's tongue-in-cheek essay explaining how anarcho-capitalism should really be called “stigmergic socialism:”Market Anarchism as Stigmergic Socialism.

Anarcho-capitalists have long promoted individual entrepreneurship as an alternative to employment, and have pointed out per Mises that command economies and bureaucratic hierarchies are inefficient - not just when governments do it but also for corporations. Libertarian socialists have figured this out, too, but instead of calling the solution “individual entrepreneurship” they call it “commons-based peer production.” Yes, what a mouthful. By “commons” they mean what Bastiat would call “the gratuitous domain” - all those things that are free or cheap (compared to the past) and more or less available to all. This includes both intangibles such as information and knowledge and technology, and tangible goods such as cheap computers and 3D printers and electricity. By “peer” they mean entrepreneur.

Here is Kevin Carson describing commons-based peer production. Per plan, I substitute “individual entrepreneurship” for “commons-based peer production” to make it more readable to ancaps.

Individual entrepreneurship has emerged on a large scale primarily in fields associated with networked communications technology. It has done so because such technology overcomes the transaction costs that Coase identified with the need for hierarchical coordination. It has also tended to emerge in areas where human capital, rather than physical capital, is the main source of value creation, because its increased efficiency in motivating and coordinating human effort is a central advantage of individual entrepreneurship. The advantage of individual entrepreneurship is that all decisions are reserved to those best qualified to make them, and these agents are identified by self-selection. - Exodus p59

Here is Carson's apt comment about free market capitalism, what he calls “stigmergy.”

It is the ultimate realization of individualism because all actions are the free, permissionless actions of individuals; the “collective” is simply the sum total of individual actions. Every individual is free to formulate any innovation she sees fit, and every individual or voluntary association of individuals is likewise free to adopt the innovation, or not, as they see fit. The extent to which any innovation is adopted results entirely from the unanimous consent of every voluntary grouping that adopts it. - Exodus p62

Stigmergy is what occurs between free individuals or associations (firms) without government (or criminal) interference, in other words, laissez faire capitalism. “Stigmergic” can be translated as “free market” in passages like the following.

One of the benefits of stigmergic organization is that individual problems are tackled by the self-selected individuals and groups best suited to deal with them - and their solutions are then passed on, via the network, to everyone who can benefit from them. Individual innovations immediately become part of the common pool of intelligence, universally available to all. - Exodus p74

Is capitalism great or what! I recommend Kevin Carson's book Exodus, which these quotes come from. The book is mainly about the transition from corporatism to info-age capitalism. You need to be able to translate from Marxian jargon to Rothbardian to understand what he's saying. For example, instead of the transition from corporatism to free market (or info-age) capitalism, he refers to the transition from capitalism to post-capitalism. Carson's summary of the transition from today's statist corporatism to anarcho-capitalism (already translated into Rothbardian for your reading ease) is as follows.

The legacy system of bureaucratic crony corporations and their state, educational, and non-profit counterparts is like a Tyrannosaurus Rex dying in a swamp; the counter-economy we are constructing within the interstices of corporatism, using liberatory technologies, is like a swarm of piranha.

The practical implication of cheap production technologies suitable for direct, small-scale production for use in the social economy is that we can secede in place from corporatism with the means of production already in our possession rather than seizing the factories. The practical implication of network organization is that large hierarchical institutions like centralized political parties are no longer needed for coordinating the resistance to corporatism. Exodus p80

If that isn't good solid anarcho-capitalism, I don't know what is. I can get past the socialist jargon. Can you?



A collection of Kevin Carson's works.