Comments Elsewhere

@Owen,

Of course it’s true that “anarchocapitalists” will find that they have many differences with other Anarchists. That’s why they’re called “other Anarchists,” instead of “fellow anarchocapitalists.” But they also have many differences with minimal-statists. The question is one of alliances, not one of absolute ideological unity. But the question is where those differences lie, and whether or not they constitute deal-breakers. Since you are not an anarchist, you may not realize why many anarchists consider support for government policing, government militaries, government border enforcement, or the constant enforcement of tyrannical, rights-violating laws by government courts (in the name of “the rule of [government] law”) to be core issues for the form of libertarianism that they advocate. But the fact is that many anarchists do consider these to be core issues, and the fact is that they are all points on which “anarchocapitalists,” market anarchists, mutualists, syndicalists, communist Anarchists, anarcha-feminists, post-Left Anarchists, Green Anarchists, “Anarchists without adjectives,” etc. etc. etc. all routinely have more in common with one another than “anarchocapitalists” have with minimal-statists and Constitutionalists. Anarchism is about anarchy, after all, and sometimes that means a difference in positions and priorities from those held by governmentalists.

In any case, it’s mighty white of you to be so helpful with suggestions for anarcho-capitalists about how they can best achieve goals which frequently have nothing to do with the goals the goals that you, as a small-statist, want to achieve. However, may I suggest that if your notion of non-capitalist Anarchists is limited to communist Anarchism (ho, ho), or for that matter if your notion of communist Anarchism is limited to folks “who will murder you at the end of the line if you insist … that you have a right to keep the things you have earned,” you might try meeting some more Anarchists in general, including some more communist Anarchists in particular, and to try talking with them in a way which takes their views seriously enough to figure out where the actual points of agreement and disagreement between different Anarchist theories lie.

Let’s start with a simple one. If a group of people consent among themselves to establish communal ownership over land, shops, and large-scale capital goods, do you believe that that commune is a free market social arrangement? I.e., is that a legitimate exercise of private property rights to establish such an arrangement?

@Jennifer,

People enjoy all kinds of things, and different people enjoy different things. I think that in a free society there will be plenty of people who are interested in joining experiments or making arrangements that involve varying degrees of communal living or communal working arrangements. (Not because they disvalue freedom or individuality, but because that is how they want to exercise their freedom.)

I’m not interested in joining any such arrangement. But the nice thing about Anarchism is that I’m free to choose what sort of arrangement I want to live under. As long as anarcho-communists believe (as most anarcho-communists currently do) that people who don’t want in should be left in peace to opt out, they’re going to be a far sight better to work with than minimal-statists, who insist on the legitimacy of all the most oppressive institutions in the political statist quo, and offer no such option for opting out of their political schemes.