What would a transition to anarcho-capitalism look like?
Posted by Rural_Dictionary939@reddit | Libertarian | View on Reddit | 4 comments
[removed]
Posted by Rural_Dictionary939@reddit | Libertarian | View on Reddit | 4 comments
[removed]
InSane_We_Trust@reddit
Didn't you just describe an oligarchy? Like, I get the premise is ideal, but why would the leaders of those industries act in everyone's best interest over their own personal best interest?
Wise_Ad_1026@reddit
All you need to do is legalize individual secession. Doing so would make the government voluntary, meaning that it would meet the criteria for ancapistan.
natermer@reddit
I don't know about "electoral means". That seems to presume that the only alternative to elections is violence. Which is nonsense.
The thing to always remember is that the modern centralized sovereign state is the problem.
Sovereign states the way they are now didn't always exist. When we look at historical maps of countries and empires and such things from ancient times it is often presumed that those countries more or less worked the the way they work now. Like you had some group of people that were some sort of central authority that decided what those borders were and people living on one side were ruled differently then what was on the other.
That isn't how things worked.
Modern States developed during the "Age of Absolutism". That is when Europe went from a late Feudal stage were rulers were based on land ownership to one where you had supreme centralized executive power. It was this centralization of political authority that lead directly up to the "European Age of Empires" with colonization and such things.
Before that "rulers" had to contend with rival political authorities. Town councils, other families, Church, guilds, and other groups had political power. Princes and Kings couldn't just create new laws. They had to get permission and buy-in from other groups to tax people.
This is fundamentally different from modern sovereign states that have arbitrary power to do pretty much whatever they please.
There was various "revolutions" after that that added Legislative bodies and parliamentarian/democratic structures, but the fundamental structure of the sovereign state didn't change.
The "Age of Empires" ended in WW1 with the collapse of almost all the European Empires. The remaining ones (ie England and France) effectively melted away in terms of influence after WW2 and during the cold war.
What replaced them is what we have now. Which is massive administrative states. Gigantic all-powerful bureaucracies that dominate most aspects of our lives.
In fact that was what WW2 was about, mostly. And the cold war. It was battle between different types of administrative structure. They were all "Democracies" in the sense that the government was derived from the people... from the general population. There was no royal dynasties, no theocratic state or oligarchies. The people in charge were, most often, born into the middle classes and rose up through party politics.
This is the Nazi regime, Italian Fascism, United States New Deal, and Soviet Union.
And after decades of conflict the USA Corporatist model is the one that ended up becoming dominate and being adopted by most of the world. Even China has adopted it to a large extent.
I am saying this because it is important to understand that the way things are are not the way things always have been. Change does happen and it doesn't always progress in one direction. In fact there is no real direction at all.
Anarcho-Capitalism is against the Sovereign state, fundamentally. This centralized bureaucratic sovereign monopoly.
Violent Revolution is fruitless and counter productive.
The reason for this is multifold.
First off:
Anarcho-capitalism is pro-civilization and pro-liberty. We want to find solutions to make the world a more peaceful and prosperous place. To minimize violence.
Unlike Marxist types (and by extension anarcho-syndicalists, etc etc) that want to tear down society and replace it with their own vision by leveraging the violent dominance of the state... Libertarians want to take what works in society and make it work better. We want to have a better version of what exists now. Not a new society restructured around some utopian vision.
So if your goal is to increase peace and prosperity going around blowing shit up and killing people probably is a bad idea.
Secondly:
The State is a parasitic organization. It doesn't really produce wealth. It can't really produce much of anything.
How it works is, through threats of violence, taking the wealth of other people and then applying it to various goals it has. Goals it is trying to achieve and the manner it is trying to achieve it is decided through politics and bureaucracy.
That means everything it "accomplishes" whether it is some social good or some innovation or whatever... relies on denying that capability from the working people first.
All the important "civilizing" aspects of government are done locally. Law enforcement, road building, social services. Water, garbage collection, electricity,... whatever you think is important is done locally. If you think about it really can't be done any other way. It is, ultimately, individuals that are responsible for everything that happens in society.
Which means that if the centralized sovereign state magically evaporated overnight daily life would continue mostly unimpeded.
The role of the centralized sovereign state is more like a puppet master with deep pockets. "Do what I want and I will give you money, don't do what I want and I'll jerk you around".
Except the money in those deep pockets are stolen from the people first. One way or the other.
And it also it means that the State is ultimately dependent on the people. Not the other way around.
The way people tend to think society works is much more of a "tail that wags the dog" situation. Were the state is the tail and the dog is society.
If people were really animalistic, violent, and selfish, and stupid and need some sort of centralized all-powerful authority to force society to work... it wouldn't work. Because the state is only people themselves. Because there isn't enough police or force or authority to make society work if it didn't want to work.
Because all of this it is the state that is dependent on a working society, not the other way around. Saying that the centralized sovereign state is necessary for society is getting cause and effect reversed.
The central sovereign state is a artifact of having a uncivilized history. It is born from a legacy of violent domination and slavery. Progress happens despite it, not because of it.
For any violent revolution to work would require guerrilla warfare.
For guerrilla warfare to work you need to have at least 30% of the population supporting you. "Insurgents" for them to function need to have popular support. You can't fight a war and feed and supply yourself at the same time. You need other people to do that. They rely on the population for food, for weapons, for intelligence.
And, ultimately, the point is to grind down the economic resources of the opposing side. Standing militaries are amazingly expensive. Food, material, the bureaucracy, etc. It consumes vast amount of resources. Guerrilla warfare works not by defeating the enemy's armies, but by causing them to waste so much resources that they can't sustain the effort.
But in the case of social change internal to a country.... It is the people that are ultimately in charge of the purse strings. They can deny the state the economic resources necessary to dominate them militarily.
Which means that for meaningful social change a violent revolution both isn't necessary and won't accomplish what you want.
That is if you NEED a violent revolution it is because you don't have enough popular support. However for a violent revolution to work you absolutely need enough popular support.
That means: In situations were violent revolution would work it is unnecessary. In situations were violent revolution is necessary it wouldn't work.
This sort of thing is why there never was any sort of Marxist revolution in any industrialized capitalist society. The very idea of Marxist-style revolution is inherently contradictory.
Which means that the only real path forward is peaceful social change. And peaceful social change tends to be gradual.
That doesn't mean that the state won't resist with violence. But ultimately it isn't violence that is going to determine whether or not some important social change is going to happen.
Because of the necessary nature of peaceful social change and because of the dependence of the state on the people.... Meaningful change doesn't rely on electoral forces.
That is... a better future isn't something you can vote in. Voting is fine, as long as you don't place all your hope and energy into it, but it is ancillary. It isn't the prime mover.
Decentralization is important. You don't need to split up the country, though. You just need to the people to take autonomy locally.
One of the way state grows its power is through seizing control of important social institutions. For example it seems indispensable for law enforcement because it has tried to make it illegal for people other then itself to do law enforcement roles. For most of USA history there wasn't any such thing as municipal police. Most law enforcement was (and to a large extent still is) private.
So to counter that you need to have social structures, locally, that people depend on and can fall back on when struggling against state power. Churches, local governments, local organizations, unions, etc. Social institutions that can have the ability to say "no".
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