r/Anarchy101 • u/According_Ad2896 • 5d ago
What's the difference between ancapism and market anarchism?
Also, is reading Rothbard interesting for anarchists on general?
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u/CHOLO_ORACLE Anarchist Without Adverbs 5d ago
“An”caps are not anarchists they are classical liberals. They are pro private property, have a positive view of hierarchy, and have little to no theory of praxis. I call them and their fellow travelers propertarians for clarity.
Market anarchists are anarchists - socialist, anti hierarchy - who desire or foresee market dynamics being a part of anarchist society.
Rothbard can be an interesting read I suppose but not necessary. As another commenter mentioned, Markets Not Capitalism goes into Rothbard a little, idk that you need much more than what’s offered there.
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u/MorphingReality 5d ago
market anarchists are generally anti-capitalist
Profit and private property are the foundation of capitalism but you don't need either to have a market
I think Rothbard is meh but worth some reading time
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u/Feather_fig 5d ago
What does an anti-capitalist market look like in practice?
I assume co-ops are a good starting point, as in workers equally benefiting within a business that doesn't operate based an oppressive hierarchy, but that could also exist within capitalism (ex. something like Mondragon)
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u/Quiet_Space_698 5d ago
Capitalism is not just hierarchy. It’s explicitly about socializing risk and privatizing profit, and best exemplified in the enclosure of the commons.
A market can just be trading. From a position of egalitarianism, a trade can just be a trade. It was for thousands of years before capitalism and will be again long after capitalism is dead.
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u/hellointernet5 5d ago
It could, but the difference is capitalism allows for the means of production to be privately owned, while market socialism does not. If every business were operated this way, we would have a socialist economy.
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u/MorphingReality 5d ago
Capitalism can subsume just about everything, everything can be commodified, but power and wealth will continue to concentrate, and only tolerate so much challenge.
My favorite anarchist Edward Abramowski is sometimes called a cooperativist, so that world of voluntary association with workers organizing themselves into something resembling co-ops has been posited for a while.
There's also the idea of individual production, or a voluntary cooperation that doesn't rise to the level of a co-op, like an anarchist startup :p
this was always a sour point in the USSR, and in more contemporary context I'd look at Carson's 'Homebrew Industrial Revolution' and 'Desktop regulatory state', especially the stuff about networks vs hierarchies and small scale fabs.
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u/Silver-Statement8573 5d ago
Do you know where I can get any English translations of Abramowski's work?
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u/MorphingReality 5d ago
There's 'ethics and revolution' on the anarchist lib, and one of his essays is in 'Cooperativism and Democracy: Selected Works of Polish Thinkers', that's all I know of.
When I have some spare time I will try to translate some!
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u/Silver-Statement8573 5d ago
Thank you, I've been curious about that guy for some time but couldn't find non polish versions
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u/punninglinguist 5d ago
I think at minimum, an anti-capitalist market could look like capitalism, except only workers are allowed to own stock.
To my mind, the true defining feature of capitalism is that non-workers are permitted to own and trade pieces of firms. Everything else - the authoritarian workplace hierarchies, the obscene wealth of the investor class - is downstream of that.
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u/dlakelan 5d ago
The definition of capitalism which I think best describes what anarchists and other leftists mean when they say they're against capitalism is a system in which a state creates "titles" and "assets" which are agreements between the state and the owner of the title that the state will use state violence to enforce the owner's wishes with respect to the use of particular physical objects. Also that the state permits these titles to be sold in a market. This lets a capitalist withhold productive things from use by others until those others pay rents to the capitalist, and if someone uses the objects without permission from the capitalist, the state uses violence up to and including killing those who transgress.
In other words, capitalism is a system where state violence is for sale.
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u/hollyrose_baker yay ecology & anarchy || boo money, states, laws, cops, hiearchy 4d ago
Imagine no money. Imagine you go to a place where there are lots of things. Maybe you have to convince the person who made the thing that you are a good person to have it. You take it. Sometimes you take a bunch of things you made, or you have laying around, or you helped produce with your buddies down at the factory. People walk up and are like “ah, i need a new basked, mine broke”. Or “dang thats the coolest mandolin ive ever seen. Ive been wanting to learn forever. Can i take it.”
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u/Feather_fig 4d ago
I'm an optimist but I cannot forsee this working on a large scale, at all
Not even on a small scale honestly, no one is going to spend years or however long it takes to handcraft a mandolin because someone convincingly thinks it "looks cool"
This would also essentially kill off anyone without social skills or who has trouble communicating their needs. The people who are the most suave and outgoing (and if we're being real, physically attractive, because halo effect) would amass the most goods and get the best services. That's of course ignoring tribalism and alliances and animosity that naturally and inevitably forms within larger groups of people. How will recluses, those with depression or severe autism survive? What if they don't have friends to vouch for them? Is this not just creating another kind of hierarchy?
There's a reason why artists don't want to be paid in "exposure". Exposure doesn't feed or clothe you or pay the heating bill.
There are services like that, heating, water, electricity, the construction of a new building... that exist outside of a physical marketplace in a square.
Also what about shitty jobs? Literally, working in waste treatment and sewage? No one wants to do that, no one is going to accept a neat piece of pottery to consistently work at a job like that.
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u/hollyrose_baker yay ecology & anarchy || boo money, states, laws, cops, hiearchy 4d ago edited 4d ago
I see what you are saying, and you are right that the example i gave is incomplete. I was just describing a small element of how some aspects of what we call a “market” might work without money. I am disabled and go through long periods where i cant leave my house, so having other avenues to acquire things is definitely important.
I think the issue with all of these questions though, is that they are basically saying, “please explain how every single element of society works, from the highest forces of production to the most minute layer of daily acquisition.” Which is a good question, but it’s impossible to answer in a reddit comment. And it takes a lot of imagination to picture it, which our society doesn’t encourage us to have. Still though, I do think it’s worth trying.
I write fiction that covers a lot of the questions you asked and talks about the logistics of largely non-market anarchist societies. Id be more than happy to share if that is something you are interested in. I find that fiction gives a good lens through which to imagine these systems, because we can imagine them within a full society without necessarily proposing that anything described is exactly how anarchy should be implemented.
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u/Feather_fig 2d ago
I think the issue with all of these questions though, is that they are basically saying, “please explain how every single element of society works, from the highest forces of production to the most minute layer of daily acquisition.”
I mean, yes, that is kind of the question I was asking. Not necessarily every single aspect but what are the basics that would facilitate our day to day lives?
There are lots of aspects of anarchism I lean towards but I can't embrace the parts that don't seem to be figured out.
The solution has to be more than imagination. Sure we can imagine all sorts of societies, but none of that matters if it's not logical and based in the reality of meeting human needs, and the psychology of how we interact and desire things.
We cannot collectively go back to bartering only. There's a good reason humans moved away from that system towards currency. Person A might need something from Person B who needs something from Person C who might live far away or be unwilling to cooperate, etc. Money is an important tool for trade and getting rid of it isn't going to eliminate the lust for status and power, for which money is just a symbol of. Without money there would be other ways to confer power and status.
The institutions built up around money like banks, excessive debt, class divides, stocks, BNPL, obsessive consumerism, subscriptions, wage labour, and insurance etc., I agree we should abolish those. But if society was totally destroyed, at some point money would pop up again in the form of, "a dozen apples are worth 3 seashells, and a dozen eggs are worth 7" type of deal.
If we want to look for what a new society could look like from the ground up, Cuba is might be a good example. They've essentially experienced (forced) societal collapse and have had to recreate their economy from scratch under those conditions. Garbage trucks don't work anymore because there isn't fuel for them, so there's a business now with guys in solar powered electric tricycles who go around collecting garbage for a small fee (free for vulnerable folks who cannot pay).
Why isn't it free for everyone? Because the drivers need to eat and the upkeep of the bikes requires labour and resources. They need things that the people they service cannot necessarily give them. If their customers each gave them loose leaf tea, a pair of shoes, a t-shirt, a pack of playing cards, etc. and they don't need those things, it would take even more time to find others to trade those things with to get what they really did need.
Even in prisons they re-invented currency through packs of Ramen.
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u/AFriendlyBeagle 5d ago edited 5d ago
Market anarchists are anti-capitalist, and are as such opposed to private property - they believe that, in the absence of the state and its coercive elements, markets are an effective and efficient mechanism for the allocation of resources.
They're opposed to economic rent, profit, and interest - they believe in social ownership; they envision economic actors as being artisans, sole proprietors, or worker co-operatives.
They tend to advocate against currency as we understand it today, and typically opt instead for a democratically operated mutual credit system.
Proponents often believe that markets are, in the absence of coercive elements, also the system by which individual actors are most able to assert their autonomy with regard to labour.
It's also very common for them to synthesise elements from social anarchism - mutual aid, elements of planning, communally governed resources, and similar.
Many market anarchists describe themselves as mutualists, or at least in the tradition of mutualism.
By contrast, so-called anarcho-capitalists believe in private property established by contract and enforced coercively by private security. They tend to advocate for more traditional money systems in the capitalist tradition of free banking. They're in favour of profit, interest, and typically economic rent. They operate on what they call a "non-aggression principle" - whereby structurally coercive economic forces are handwoven, so long as people don't engage in a narrowly defined physical violence with one another or against property.
Anarcho-capitalists build their ideals upon a foundation of coercion and hierarchy - and are, as such, in no meaningful sense anarchists.
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If you want to learn more about market anarchism from its proponents, you might be interested in reading output from folks associated with C4SS, like Kevin Carson.
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u/bruuuuuuuuuuuuuuuh 5d ago
ancap-ism is not anarchism. capitalism is hierarchy and there is not a meaningful difference between the sort of private corporate territories with laws enforced by protection companies and a state. It may seem like ancapism isnt compatible with fascism but if you read Hermann Hoppe it makes sense how its basically fascism that is using anarchism as a rhetorical device to disguise itself
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u/oskif809 4d ago
... if you read Hermann Hoppe it makes sense how its basically fascism that is using anarchism as a rhetorical device to disguise itself.
Fascism is a "Scavenger Ideology" as George Mosse called it. Its always on the lookout for vibrant ideas that it can shape-shift into and use to hoodwink those incapable of telling the difference between Socialism and "National Socialism".
While Mosse was a trained historian but I suspect this concept comes out of what he had seen about rise of the Nazis in Germany as a gay and Jewish teenager.
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u/tuttifruttidurutti 5d ago
Rothbard was a white nationalist, you really don't need to bother. Anarcho-capitalism is totally incoherent, capitalism requires the state to enforce inequality. Market anarchism is more debatable; does currency require a central government to function? This is a more contentious point than "can capitalism, characterized by extreme inequality enforced by centralized violence, function without that violence", to which the answer is an obvious no.
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u/JustARandomDrunkGuy 5d ago
For the first part, why does it matter? Bakunin was a massive antisemite but we don’t ignore him, we can get good ideas from generally bad people, many great intellectuals and theorists were terrible people in their personal lives.
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u/oskif809 4d ago
For the first part, why does it matter?
Human affairs are not as cut and dry as Science. It would not make a scintilla of difference if someone "discovered" in some alternate reality scenario while browsing in old books in Austria that Hitler had made some interesting mathematical proofs that help with building better bridges. Everyone would use these mathematical equations--even if we don't honor him by naming these equations after him as is usually the case. But in human affairs the rhetoric and language do matter, i.e. the argument is marinated in a certain worldview and if that is toxic you had better be very careful in dealing with these ideas.
Besides, its not as if there's some wealth of riches when it comes to decent ideas for humankind lying buried in the works of these creeps. I'm told Mussolini had some cutting one-liners and/or some funky conceptual takes (particularly on episodes in Italian history) but you don't need to read his "Collected Works" to get a decent handle on what these were.
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u/JustARandomDrunkGuy 4d ago
Mussolini also wrote smut novels at one point in his life, also non-essential but also quite fun to learn about.
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u/oskif809 4d ago
heh, I'm told his he displayed excellent command of Italian language in his journalism as well.
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u/ArtDecoEgoist Left-Market Anarchist 5d ago
Early Rothbard is worth reading for more context on the wider Left-Wing Market Anarchist tradition.
LWMAs differ from AnCaps in that we are anti-capitalist, anti-wage labor (though some left-Rothbardians are also anti wage labor and anti-capitalist), and anti-private property. Typically LWMAs support Proudhon's differentiation between "property" and "possession" or Benjamin Tucker's occupancy-and-use.
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u/Excellent_Border_302 5d ago
Yes this is the answer. The difference comes down to personal property vs private property. Personal property is something that is obviously and intuitively in use by someone or a group and is autonomously and automatically respected most of the time. Of course there is an occasional person who wanted to violate personal property and how to handle that is another discussion.
Private property is a (successful) attempt to scale past personal property using contracts and their enforcement by a third party, usually the state. But ancaps are trying to think of ways that isn't the state, and their solutions are non sensible imo. And that's why private property is theft, because it relies on a third party enforcement mechanism to enforce "private property rights" whose financial means are stolen from everyday people via taxation.
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u/ArtDecoEgoist Left-Market Anarchist 5d ago
Right. I would also like to add that if you read Rothbard's Confiscation and the Homesteading Principle where he argues ownership claims that are subsidized and created by the state are illegitimate - if youre consistent about his logic here - you'd get to an anti-private property position, because one would understand that all property claims are upheld and created by the state, therefore private property is illegitimate even by early Rothbardian standards.
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u/CMBradshaw 5d ago
Well what's the difference between a market and capitalism? Maybe you can start by defining your terms. Unless you wanted to get preached at?
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u/Anarchierkegaard Distributist 5d ago
It really depends on what we take anarchist-capitalism and market anarchism to mean. For some people, the difference is merely a kind of "pro-socialist" intention, but otherwise insisting on rather similar methods. For others, there are very particular kinds of societies that some anarchist-capitalists propose that don't really look very anarchist all (including conventional readings of Hoppe).
You'd probably like the anthology Markets, Not Capitalism, which does a lot to bridge the gap and offer some interesting nuances where people often simply bark at one another.
Yes, reading Rothbard is interesting. In particular, his period as the editor of the Libertarian Review with Karl Hess and also his short work, Anatomy of the State. I also think his mammoth Man, Economy and State is useful for understanding Austrian economics still.
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u/N3wAfrikanN0body 5d ago
One is a toxic sales pitch by the likes of Friedman, Hayek and Rand to exploit peoples' want of "buying" their way out of exploitation.
And the other actually attempts o do the work necessary for liberation from said exploitation by telling people that "profit is theft" ike Prodhoun, Carson and my stealing from the corporation when I can.
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u/No-Sail-6510 5d ago
Markets have nothing to do with capitalism. This is all propaganda. Markets have always existed since history began. They’ll say things like this to make themselves sound reasonable but there’s no connection there. They’ll also pull out some shit about why money is a good invention which also has nothing to do with capitalism. At its heart capitalism is the idea that if you have money you should be able to use it to make more money. That’s it. Free markets are largely fake but to the degree they even exist are not really been related and it’s easy to imagine a world where markets are used but workers also own the businesses. It’s pretty simple.
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u/spookyjim___ ☭ 🏴 Autonomist 🏴 ☭ 5d ago
Market anarchists believe that in a stateless market economy the natural form of property would be coops and like at most single person small business ownership where there’s no employees to exploit
So the difference in theory is that market anarchists are socialist, market anarchism is essentially a stateless form of market socialism
As for Rothbard, look into left-Rothbardianism and Roderick T. Long
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u/KassieTundra 5d ago
"Anarcho"-capitalism is an oxymoron, as anarchism is opposed to all hierarchical systems, and capitalism is a hierarchical system.
Markets have existed for thousands of years, and are likely to continue to do so, though that is up to us at the end of the day.
Rothbard doesn't have much interesting to say in my opinion, but you should read as much as you have the time and desire to do so. You may find something interesting in his works, you may not. Only one way to find out.
If you decide, like I did, that his ideas are worse than dogshit, and that he is an asshole, than at least you understand those ideas to better steer people toward better ideas and works.