Conglomerate of Iron wrote:So why all the infighting? We are friends are we not? Our common enemy is the state. Without it, we are free.
First I would like to admit that I have a rather lacking knowledge of "anarcho-capitalism", I have only ever come across this strain of thought on the internet, and when I first came across it I assumed that it was a "clever" satire of anarchism. I have no interest in reading into an "ideology" that makes a mockery of the way I view and live life.
I feel that this is the sad but expected consequence of the degradation of anarchism into an ideology as a result of thought being separated from action. It is at this point of separation, and the reification of revolutionary theory, that anarchism loses its liberatory revolutionary potential and becomes a mere political theory to be intellectualised, identified with, commodified and vulgarised by such a swindle as "anarcho-capitalism" that can only even be
considered in the realm of abstract thought absolutely separated from accompanying praxis. That is not to say that all of anarchism has degraded in such a way, there are still hundreds of thousands of people among the exploited and oppressed who are creating there own insurrectional life projects to claim back their own lives while destroying the social order that chains them. Then there are millions and millions more, who, while not knowing anarchist theory or even knowing the word anarchism, live a life of revolt.
That Ancaps understand anarchism as simply meaning 'anti-state' or some such principle is enough to dismiss it. If anarchists fight against all that dominates and exploits us, if we fight against the commodity-economy in which we sell our lives through wage-slavery only to buy back small, commodified portions of our own product in order to survive (along with the spectacles that sooth our resignation to survival sickness), if we fight against the lie of private property that has denied us our own world and transformed it into the realm of borders, limits, prices, and laws that has imprisoned us, if we fight against a "social peace" based on violent coercion and organised exploitation, if it is all this and more, that tension towards anarchy, then to say "we both want to destroy the state, we are friends", from the mouth of a capitalist, is the most absurd statement and one that I despise.
The idea of sticking the word "voluntary" on any-and-everything and therefore determining that it must be freedom is simply inane.
The notion that an anti-capitalist movement will hold hands with its bourgeois misappropriation is nonsensical.
I don't want to say that "anarcho-capitalism" isn't anarchism, since it is not my desire to claim ownership over the word or develop any sort of "ideological purity", but I will say: I recognise Ancaps as my enemy.
Since it is a purely ideological aberration it is enough simply to ignore it and perhaps call it out when it raises its head.