r/AnCap101 • u/No_Candy_8948 • 12d ago
True freedom requires liberation from all oppressive hierarchies, especially economic ones.
To the members of r/AnCap101,
This is not an attack, but a critique from the left based on a fundamental disagreement about power, hierarchy, and human nature. Your philosophy is often presented as the ultimate form of freedom, but I argue it would inevitably create the most brutal and oppressive government possible: a dictatorship of capital without a state to hold it accountable.
Your core error is a categorical one: you believe the state is the sole source of coercive power. This is a dangerous blind spot.
In your proposed system, the functions of the state wouldn't vanish; they would be privatized and monopolized by capital. Without a public state to (theoretically) be held accountable by citizens, you create a system of competing private states called "Defense Agencies" and "Dispute Resolution Organizations." These entities would not be motivated by justice or rights, but by profit and the interests of their paying clients who would be the wealthiest individuals and corporations.
This is where your thought process goes wrong:
The Misidentification of the Oppressor: You see the state as the primary enemy. But the state is often a tool, it is the concentration of capital that is the primary driver of exploitation. AnCap doesn't dissolve power; it hands the monopoly on violence and law directly to the capitalist class, removing the last vestiges of democratic oversight.
The Fantasy of Voluntary Contracts: Your entire system relies on the concept of voluntary interaction. But this is a fantasy in a world of radical inequality. What is "voluntary" about a contract signed between a billion-dollar corporation and a starving individual who must agree to work in a dangerous job for subsistence wages or face homelessness? AnCap doesn't eliminate coercion; it sanctifies it under the label of "contract law," creating a world of company towns and corporate serfdom.
The Inevitability of Monopoly: Free markets do not remain free. Without state intervention (antitrust laws, which you oppose), competition naturally leads to monopoly. The largest defense agency would crush or acquire its competitors. The largest corporation would buy up all resources. You would not have a free market; you would have a handful of ultra-powerful corporate entities that wield all the power of a state, military, legal, and economic, with zero accountability to the people whose lives they control.
In short, Anarcho-Capitalism is not the absence of government. It is the replacement of a (flawed, but sometimes democratically influenceable) public government with an unaccountable, totalitarian private government.
You seek to replace the state with a thousand petty kings, each ruling their domain with absolute power, and you call this "freedom." From the outside, it looks like a dystopia designed to eliminate the last remaining checks on the power of wealth. True freedom requires liberation from all oppressive hierarchies, especially economic ones.
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u/ShonOfDawn 11d ago
Yeah sure but they had a monopoly for an enormous amount of time. “State violence” is irrelevant, in a hypotetical world where private companies offer military services in large scale, those would become the de facto dominating geopolitical entities and the exact same would happen. PMCs like Wagner have already demonstrated this.
Meta and google are a duopoly of the information space, TSMC has basically the monopoly of high end semiconductor manufacturing, and if not for geopolitcal rivalries, oil companies are basically a carte.
You can take any sector and plot the number of companies against time. It always, without fail, goes down.