A theory, essentially localized in the USA and Anglo-Saxon countries, with terms such as “libertarian” (coming from French ‘libertaire’) or “anarcho” associated with the term “capitalist,” is spreading across the Internet. Such expropriation of the terms anarchist and libertarian by hierarchists may come as a surprise, given the obvious incompatibilities between them, but given the recurrence of these expressions on the net, a brief article summarizing these “theories” seems necessary to clarify what this manipulation is all about.
Combining contrary terms, such as “anarcho” with “capitalist,” to form an oxymoron is an art of confusion that the state-capitalists like to practice in order to sell their old junk in a new gilded wrapping. We’ve already seen this with the Bolshevik state-capitalists, who claimed to be communists while establishing state capitalism, ideologically and practically aided by the various bourgeoisies, in order to crush the workers’ movement’s self-emancipation in action.
For the sake of clarity, we won’t use the oxymoron of “state-capitalists,” which would give credence to the Newspeak of these merchants of misery. We could call them “private state capitalists” or “ultraliberals,” but for simplicity’s sake, we’ll call them “proprietarians”: a term used by some American anarchists to describe this new state-capitalist swindle.
Apart from the expansionist, voracious drive inherent in all dimensions of state-capitalism (and its opposite, capitalist-statism), there are many other reasons why proprietary state-capitalists usurp terms coined by anarchists.
Historically, this is one of the consequences of the Cold War, of US anti-communist policy (with its witch hunt organized by the McCarthyists), which led US “socialists” to call themselves “liberals”, in reference to political liberalism or liberal democrats, or in reference to economic liberalism or ultraliberals. They had to find another designation for their movements, so as not to be confused with “socialists”.
Ideologically, starting from Austrian economics and a very particular and erroneous definition of anti-statism, liberals1 have gradually come to call themselves “anarchists” (by broadly interpreting the “individualist anarchist” ideas from which they were supposedly inspired), despite an obvious contradiction. Defending capitalism implies minimal or maximal statism, social hierarchy, and a society divided into classes and wage-labour, all conceptions totally alien to anarchism. As we shall see, their anti-statism is narrow and false, and they are in fact statists (state-capitalists!) who voluntarily hide their truth.
Like many Manichean totalitarian theorists, they divide the world into two camps, capitalism and statism. They believe that you have to choose sides, that you can’t fight against capitalism and statism at the same time. This is hypocritical rhetoric, mirroring that of the Bolshevik social democrats (who did not reject state capitalism, just as property owners do not reject private statism, both sharing the same totalitarian contradiction with opposite starting points). In reality, capitalism and statism are inseparable, one existing through the other and vice versa. Everything else is a question of political-ideological balance—the struggle is between the state-capitalists (for whom the economy rules politics) and the capitalo-statists (who, conversely, want politics to rule the economy). To disguise the fraud that results from the incoherence between ends and means, the property owners use misleading words, just as the Bolsheviks did in their day. These are ideological maneuvers designed to create the illusion of newness or renewal.
In practice, proprietors declare that they can act in their private property (their “homeland”) as if it were a state2 and vice versa. For them, the owner, as sole master, has an absolute right over his property and over his subjects (tenants, wage-earners, slaves, citizens). He can defend his property according to his own criteria of “justice” and his own interests. For a broader organization, property owners propose protection agencies, with private police, private courts of justice, and private armies, according to general property owners’ codes of law.3 For them, freedom is property and the ability to choose one’s master, one’s slave, one’s ruler, one’s nation, one’s police, one’s justice…
With regard to the current state, a large proportion of property owners have chosen to use the intermediaries of various parties (“Libertarian party”, “UKIP”, in France they made an electoral trial with “Alternative Libérale”, AL) which take part in representative elections in order to justify this system. In the United States, one of their representatives, Ron Paul, who varies between the “Libertarian Party” and the “Republican Party”, has made a name for himself on numerous occasions for his links (funding or conferences) with extreme right-wing groups (JBS John Birch Society, the southerners of the League of the South, white supremacists, Fatima fundamentalists…), for recurring racist remarks, notably in his letters of the 90s about Blacks (who in Washington DC, according to him, are essentially criminals or semi-criminals), but also for his stance against the abolition of segregation laws in the southern states. Other proprietarian authors have defended more authoritarian positions, such as Hans Hermann Hoppe4, who clearly declares his homophobia, advocates censorship and even the physical elimination of his opponents, and defends monarchy, in addition to “private dictatorship,” which in his view is far more effective than democracy, since only the monarch will be able to defend his national borders as if they were his private property. It should be added that other positions within the framework of the “free” market, other than wage-earning, are put forward by proprietarians5, such as valuing prostitution (within the overall vision of a commodified society), selling/buying organs, selling/buying children, putting children to wage-earning work or into slavery. For them, morality lies in private property and hierarchy, not in egalitarian social relations.
We can therefore understand why the ideological and economic references of the property owners are Hayek, Friedman, Ludwig Von Mises authors who have defended or worked for dictatorships…6
This totalitarian theory of defending capitalism at all costs leads its advocates to make logical use of the current state means they claim to reject. In other cases, they defend the application of regal state functions within their private property (individually or through private agencies). Changing the word “State” to “agency” doesn’t change the substance of the statist practices of any propertarian, just as their use of the term “anarcho” to the detriment of their own credibility doesn’t change the fraudulent nature of their theories.
Footnotes and Citations
[1] Despite their initial rejection of the term (deemed too “socialist”), notably by Rothbard, who preferred the neologism “nonarchist” (i.e. “neither anarchist nor archist”) while advocating a voluntary hierarchy.
[2] «Moreover, the anti-discriminatory immigration policy of the United States and other Western countries over the past few decades has made it easy for people who are foreign to or even hostile to Western values to settle in and infiltrate these countries.” “What should we hope for and advocate as a correct immigration policy (…)? The best we can hope for (…): that democratic leaders behave “as if” they personally owned the country, as if they had to decide who to admit and exclude from their own private property. This means practicing a policy of extreme discrimination» Democracy : The God That Failed, 2001, Hans Hermann Hoppe.
[3] cf. Rothbard, “Ethics of freedom” on the universality of proprietarian natural rights.
[4] « There can be no tolerance for democrats and communists in a libertarian social order. They must be separated and physically expelled from society. Similarly, in a commitment founded on protecting family and loved ones, there can be no tolerance for those who habitually defend lifestyles incompatible with this goal. These advocates of alternative lifestyles not centered on family and loved ones, such as individual hedonism, parasitism, reverence for nature and the environment, homosexuality or communism, will have to be physically eliminated from society too, if a libertarian order is to be maintained.» Democracy : The God That Failed, 2001, Hans Hermann Hoppe.
[5] Walter Block dans « Libertarianism vs Objectivism ; A Response to Peter Schwartz »
[6] « It cannot be denied that fascism and similar movements seeking to establish dictatorships are filled with the best of intentions, and that their intervention has, for the moment, saved European civilization. Fascism will forever be remembered for this. Ludwig Von Mises “Liberalism” (1927); Friedrich Von Hayek – on the subject of Pinochet’s Chile, in the newspaper “El Mercurio” says he prefers a “liberal dictatorship to an absence of liberalism in a democratic government”. The same applies to other countries, such as Pinochet’s Chile, Dollfuss’s Austria, Salazar’s Portugal and Mussolini’s Fascist Italy. More recent “experiments” such as Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore are often cited as references[[Hans-Hermann Hoppe: “We must promote the conception of a world composed of tens of thousands of distinct districts, regions and cantons, and hundreds of thousands of independent free cities such as the contemporary curiosities of Monaco, Andorra, San Marino, Liechtenstein, Hong Kong and Singapore.” “The world would then be made up of small states economically integrated through free trade and the sharing of a commodity currency like gold.».