That analysis explained why libertarians could not look to capitalists for support, that only the petty bourgeoisie and the peasants would be interested in libertarian politics. This probably struck many of you as odd, so this article will expand on that point.
This was so weird and off I just had to share.
It must be understood what is meant by capitalism. The socialist understanding of capitalism is not free markets. To them, capitalism is not the “ism” of the capital market, but of the holders of that capital. It would be more accurate to call the socialist conception “Capitalistism” - rule by capitalists.
😶
The free market is toxic to capitalists because it‘s an equalizing force between people with unrealized economic potential and those who have already achieved theirs.
It goes on and on like this. WTF?
Don’t ever think that morality or ethics will stop big business.
:hahaha:
I was briefly a libertarian when I was much younger, mainly because it was the only anti-war party, before I was introduced to Chomsky and got educated.
I think this is basically a lot of words to miss a lot of points, but it’s probably pretty good for US libertarian types. I was never really able to get into their mode of thinking, that monopolies and corporate exploitation would be diminished with less state resources (because the current state puts those resources into the firms that bribe its members). It seemed like the natural solution was a more accountable, more democratic state… Not to get rid of the state, not anywhere near the short term at least.
I got into this with an anarcho-lib person online once, and I was really confused how this libertarian approach would deal with the concentration of power/wealth. They just kept saying something to the effect that the concentration wouldn’t happen without a state, which seemed like strange response. Like we have the concentration/hierarchy now, so how does removing the state deal with that? Never got a real answer to that. Socialism >> Communism seems much more plausible than Capitalism >> Anarcho-Libertarianism for dealing with the existing hierarchies. I’d love to hear some theory that might say otherwise that isn’t some form of esoteric Stirner slop though.
tbf it wouldn’t concentrate without a state because we would simply take the wealth and redistribute it.
If you only remove the modern state all you get is neo-feudal fiefs supported by PMC knights, with a side of organized criminal cartels. That’s how modern organized crime emerges in the first place: an area with a weak or absent state within a capitalist economy.
The capitalist system is fundamentally built on violence and the threat of violence: if someone tries to live in a landlord’s vacant property, take goods from a shop without paying, etc there are professional violence men ready and willing to threaten their lives and put them in cages for it. If the professional violence men stop being communally paid for by the state, then they’ll become private militias or cartel enforcers and will be even more directly under a particular authority. If anything, removing the state would only serve to accelerate capitalist accumulation in the feeding frenzy that would immediately follow (like, say, all the big local landlords banding together and hiring a mercenary unit formed from what was the local police force, and then just declaring that they own all the property and starting to demand rents from everyone within their self-declared fief).
After they develop further they just become new states fully under the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie or even a new aristocracy.
There’s this really weird phenomenon where if you ask someone in the West to define ‘Capitalism’ they’ll give roughly the definition of Free Enterprise as though that’s what the word means, but if you ask them to define ‘Free Enterprise’ they will define it correctly and then make a point of clarifying that ‘Capitalism’ actually means a different thing and define it correctly.
But, since the class analysis in Why the Bolsheviks Succeeded was non-Marxist, its definition of capitalism was “free-market capitalism” - unregulated, untaxed, and laissez-faire.
“We redefined ‘capitalism’ to be something that has not and can not ever actually exist.”
If you’re an ex libertarian, this makes total sense. Its just a whole, by-your-logic, of why american-libertarianism is self defeating.
