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“What will happen under anarchy? EVERYTHING.”
This booklet collects three Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS) feature articles by left-libertarian writer Anna O. Morgenstern, examining the relationship between anarchism, capitalism and pro-capitalist “libertarianism,” including: “Anarcho-Capitalism is Impossible,” “Anarchism & Capitalism: A Revisitation,” and “Market Anarchism vs. Market Statism.”
“Goals sometimes lead people toward certain means, but it is the means that determine results, not the goals. And if the anarcho-capitalists follow anarchist means, the results will be anarchy, not some impossible ‘anarcho-capitalism.’ . . .
“Anarchy does not mean social utopia, it means a society where there is no privileged authority. There will still be social evils to be dealt with under anarchy. But anarchy is an important step toward fighting those evils without giving birth to all new ones. My take on the impossibility of anarcho-capitalism is simply as follows:
- Under anarchism, mass accumulation and concentration of capital is impossible.
- Without concentration of capital, wage slavery is impossible.
- Without wage slavery, there’s nothing most people would recognize as ‘capitalism.’
“Even assuming an ‘anarcho-capitalist’ property regime, anything recognizable as ‘capitalism’ to anyone else could not exist. In fact the society would look a lot like what ‘anarcho-socialists’ think of as ‘socialism.’ Not exactly like it, but much closer than anything they’d imagine as capitalism. . . .”
The essays in this collection first appeared in 2010 and 2014, as Featured Articles at the Center for a Stateless Society, a left-wing market anarchist think tank and media center. They appear here in print for the first time.
Anna O. Morgenstern, a Contributing Writer at the Center for a Stateless Society, has been an anarchist of one stripe or another for almost 30 years. Her intellectual interests include economic history, social psychology and voluntary organization theory. She writes frequent commentaries for the Center for a Stateless Society (c4ss.org).
