I recently had a revelation: free marketeers such as myself need a new word for the system we promote, because “capitalism” simply doesn’t do it anymore. We need a free market; we do not have one, we have a captured market. For that reason, I’ve been calling this system “corporatism” for some time now. The problem with the State is both that it is too big, and that it is bought. Some call it corruption, but I maintain that it is by design; the system isn’t corrupt, it’s functioning exactly as intended. Another way to put it is that things you think are bugs are actually features, and vice-versa to an extent.
In my article about anarchism, I posited that anarcho-agorism is a pysop meant to divide free market proponents, because I was unable to discern any real difference between anarcho-agorism and anarcho-capitalism, a.k.a. Voluntaryism. I have since changed my mind, and I’ll explain why. Rather, I think that anarcho-agorists are actually the more erudite of the two, largely based on their sources. Here’s a meme I got from @thepholosopher that illustrates this perfectly:
For the uninitiated, Ludwig von Mises is the namesake of the Mises Institute, otherwise known as the Austrian School of Economics. Austrian economics is a direct repudiation of German economics, by which I mean that both Marxism and National Socialism came out of Germany. This may come as a surprise, but despite the fact that Austrians and Germans both speak the same language (though the Austrian dialect sounds quite different), they have different cultures, and this is largely because of the Fate of Empires.
The Austrian Empire lasted from 1804 to 1867, when it was re-organised into the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which lasted until 1918. After a century of imperialism, the Austrian gentry largely accepted that their time had passed. Germany, on the other hand, had never been through a proper imperial period, and the German political class has always been rather bitter about it. Germany didn’t become a unified nation for the first time until 1848, but that first attempt lasted only a year. The country unified again in 1871 under Prussian control, though social status, particularly in the military, always favoured the Bavarians, for some weird reason. Anyway, because the German Empire was never as large or as influential as the Austrian Empire and Berlin never enjoyed the same cultural prestige as Vienna, Prague, or Paris, German leaders have been obsessed with creating a “German Future” since 1918, hence attempting multiple methods of imperialism, either military or economic. Give it up already, imperialism in its entirety is a complete failure.
Now then, I just grossly over-simplified the history of the German lands. I am aware that the actual philosophy behind German ideas dates back to way before the unification of Germany, but my point is that the German elites are ashamed of their history, and they teach their citizens subjects to be ashamed of that history as well. I’ll list all of the problems with Germany in another article, and why I blame Germans for the all the world’s ills, which is admittedly a way to take the piss out of all the white supremacists who blame everything on the Jews (just like Karl Marx did).
Anyway, Austrian economics is the system that most libertarians subscribe to, and by that I mean “lib-right,” because self-described “lib-lefties” are not actually libertarians; they are either socialists who hate wokery, or they have a self-contradictory world-view (“open borders and $15 minimum wage, hurr durr”). Murray Rothbard in particular is responsible for the idea that the state is inherently coercive, but this is a contested definition of the word “state.” For this reason, most Rothbardian libertarians choose to capitalise the word “state” to show that they are referring specifically to the Rothbardian definition. Just as they distinguish between a state and The State, I delineate between the country (страна) and the nation (государство) when referring to things like patriotism and nationalism. Yes, I am aware that those Russian words in parentheses are not what you will find if you look up the translations in a Russian-English dictionary. I don’t make direct translations, because otherwise too much meaning gets lost. I have mentioned this before, but when I write in English, I make specific delineations between “classical religions” and “secular ideologies,” but when I write in Russian, I will not hesitate to call something a religion and leave it at that. Not that I write on this topic much in Russian, I’d be preaching to the converted (любитель страны, враг государства).
Speaking of capitalisation, you will notice that I haven’t capitalised the word “libertarian” at any point, because that would imply an affiliation with a Libertarian Party (yes, “a” not “the,” because Russia and Scotland each have one too), and as any Rothbardian will tell you, the LPUSA isn’t libertarian, the party has been hijacked by the “lib-left,” otherwise known as progressives. I have noticed that progs think quite highly of the LPUSA, but most of them hate actual libertarians, at least if my interactions with them are anything to go by. Likewise, conservative pundits tend to have a very dim view of libertarians, claiming that they will always side with communists on certain issues, usually cultural, thus giving rise to this pattern:
The reality, of course, is that cultural issues shouldn’t really affect one’s political compass placement. Cultural issues, i.e. things like abortion, gay marriage, gun control, and corporate branding, are all things that belong at the children’s table of politics, and have no place being brought up in a political compass test. The reason that they are is simple: because it is possible to be economically left and socially “conservative,” as well as vice-versa, people who have completely opposite philosophies end up being lumped together in the centre, meanwhile those who believe in similar broad systems of governance but have vastly different cultural values end up getting placed in opposite corners. It’s a clever bit of divide-and-conquer that keeps the libertarians forever scattered, meanwhile lumping in people with conflicting views into the “centrist” camp and ensuring constant infighting, which the authoritarians exploit. In reality, the political compass should concern itself with exactly two things: economics (horizontal axis) and governance (vertical axis). Social/cultural issues shouldn’t even be a factor, and the reason that they are is purely as a divisive distraction, which is why, despite being culturally aware, I rarely bother to even mention the culture war, much less dive into it. As I tell people who concern themselves with this shit, “not once in my life has Bud Light ever touched my lips, I am too much of a beer snob for that, and being part frog, I’m more of wine drinker anyway. My go-to beer is Arrogant Bastard Ale (yes that is a real thing).” This is part of the problem with capitalism, and why I am starting to think that my fellow free marketeers need to embrace and ultimately popularise a new term… I just don’t know what that is yet, so we’re stuck calling ourselves “real capitalists” for the time being, and calling the neoliberal corporatists “fake capitalists.”
Had I titled this article something like “capitalism is dead, long live agorism (or voluntaryism),” not only would it not get any attention (or perhaps attention from the wrong crowd), but I doubt anyone outside of my circle of online friends would even know what I’m talking about. Nonetheless, recall what James Lindsay said about the language of cults: they share your vocabulary, but not your dictionary. When politicians say “our democracy,” nine times out of ten, what they really mean is their democracy, or more precisely, their oligarchy. Likewise, when these same politicians say “I’m a capitalist, I believe in a free market,” they are making a self-contradictory statement. Very few politicians give a rodent’s posterior about small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs, not to be confused with the Society of Manufacturing Engineers), because SMEs don’t make up the donor class. Politicians care about corporations, and in English, a corporation is defined as the legal status of a business granted by the government. In other languages (e.g. Italian), a corporation may also be defined as a government department, which is why we know that the following quote:
Fascism should rightly be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power. – Benito Mussolini
Is fucking apocryphal. Mussolini never said that, and the reason we know he didn’t is because it is directly contradicted by everything we know he did say. For the record, I oppose fascism as well, along with all other forms of socialism. Leftist (German) economics may be popular, but such systems don’t work, and while I advocate for the decentralisation of the economy (we are currently seeing the exact opposite), I oppose its democratisation for a similar reason that I oppose the democratisation of science. Scientific truth is not determined by popular vote, and if science were ever democratised, I guaran-goddamn-tee that both the Theory of Evolution and Big Bang Cosmology would have been tossed in the bin fucking yesterday. While the majority of scientists accept those ideas, the majority of the general public does not, leftists very much included, because they either don’t understand those ideas, or those ideas conflict with their sacred world-view. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, but while leftists pretend to be pro-science, they will reject Darwinian Evolution if they know what it actually is. While I’ve referred to biodiversity as “leaves on a tree, rather than rungs on a ladder,” that is a refutation of the idea that evolution is a linear process that has some goal in mind, not some pie-in-the-sky “bioequality” nonsense. After all, some leaves are higher up the tree than others, some are farther out the branch than others, and the leaves themselves aren’t all completely identical. When biologists refer to some organisms as “primitive,” what they mean is that the organism is “less derived from its ancestor” than its relatives. Scorpions are considered primitive because they are relatively undifferentiated from their ancestral stock compared to other arachnids, whereas spiders are the “most advanced” arachnids because they are the most derived; this isn’t remotely subjective, it can be easily proven. Anyway, I’ll wrap this up (HAHA) before I go too far down the arachnology tangent.
I have mentioned that socialist ideologues have worked tirelessly to re-define socialism as “generosity” and capitalism as “greed,” but I never said for how long. In fact, it’s been going on pretty much since day one, as Karl Marx used the word “capitalism” not to refer to a free market, but to corporate neoliberalism and the central banking industry. In other words, in Marxian Newspeak, there is no word for a free market, ergo the concept cannot be expressed. Some ancaps argue that we shouldn’t abandon the word “capitalism” to refer to our economic system, because whatever term we adopt will be appropriated by corporatists and, eventually, socialists as well. Therefore, we should stick to our guns and wear the label proudly in order to trigger our ideological detractors:
I’m not convinced by this argument, because the term “socialism,” which is the negation of capitalism, was coined in France, which has always had extremely controlled markets. Socialism is a derivative of syndicalism, from “syndicate,” which means “trade union.” Trade unions began as private organisations to push back against state corporations on behalf of the workers, and in some countries, they still are. In an actual socialist system, the State takes the role of trade union, thus the worker representation and the management of the means of production are both controlled… by the State. Notice that nowhere in that rambling about unions did I mention the market. That is no accident; free market entrepreneurs must compete for workers, ergo they must provide greater incentive for people to work for them over their competitors in the form of higher wages, better working conditions, etc. State-backed corporations, which are either monopolies or oligopolies, have no such incentive, thus necessitating trade unions in order to lobby the government for basic worker protections, because the corporation is the only game in town. It is this predatory system that has been referred to as “capitalism” for nearly two centuries, whereas the terms “entrepreneurship,” “free market,” and “small business” among others, already exist for what people like me are advocating for. Bear in mind that no business can get too big if there is healthy competition; despite the claim (and the sleight of hand) from socialist ideologues that “unfettered capitalism leads to monopolies,” history does not support that claim, and many economists have since abandoned the idea that “natural monopolies” are even possible, save very temporarily. Every successful business is going to have copycats, and without some kind of aggression to prevent copycats from setting up shop (usually State-backed), the entrepreneur’s “monopoly” cannot be maintained. Anyway, before I end up accidentally plagiarising Economics in One Lesson, I’ll finally end this, but I want to know your thoughts: do we keep the word “capitalism,” or do we find another word, and if so, what is that word?
Sasha V's Sesquipedalian Soliloquies 