Anarchism > Statism
Capitalism > Socialism
Private Property > "Public property"
Competition > Monopoly
Voluntarism > Involuntarism
Individualism > Collectivism
Non-aggression > Aggression
Libertarianism > Authoritarianism
Self-Ownership > Slavery
I believe that all of the above are necessarily mutually exclusive; that you're either/or, and there is no in-between. You're an anarchist – and a non-aggressionist, individualist for private property rights, etc. – or you're a statist – and a socialist, monopolist, aggressionist, collectivist, etc.
You cannot be a capitalist-monopolist, contrary to what is taught in the government-schools where the standard narrative is that monopolies took over without government to suppress them, when it was precisely that they used government privilege to obtain the monopolies or business cartels impossible with market competition. Nor can one be a voluntary-statist, for if the services offered by "the State" were truly voluntary, and non-coercive, then it wouldn't be a State but a market institution. As well, and more obviously, you cannot be any of the other respective things: a "socialist-capitalist", or a "voluntary-involuntarist."
It's fair in my mind to substitute any of the words on the left for another one. Anarcho-capitalism then makes sense when you see that you can't have statist-capitalism; or, to see that "anarcho-socialism" makes less sense when you see that you can't have "anarcho-statism." All moves away from anarchism necessarily entail, as a result: statism, socialism, monopoly, aggression, and so forth. The ending of the State necessarily entails the restoration of private property rights and individualism, as government is nothing less than a massive organization, or gang, meant to steal property by coercing its subjects into giving in, which is thereby considered to be "consensual" by democratic theorists of the "social contract."
While capitalism is the recognition of property rights, and the act of voluntarily contracting and freely associating and exchanging these property titles, socialism on the other hand aims specifically at abolishing private property. While not as revolutionary and ambitious as they used to be, "democratic socialists" of today nonetheless which to achieve this, leaving "private property" in name only—opting instead to tax the outputs, regulating its use, and otherwise keeping the same ends as the Communists, only adopting different political means of achieving it. It's for this reason that they don't identify fascism or Nazism as socialist, even calling it "capitalist", since it appeared to maintain the facade of private ownership though its use was dictated ultimately by the State and not the quasi-private owners, as is the system today in America and around the world.
In our view, then, the State is the great violator of property rights, thus must be seen as socialist and anti-capitalist. The State is not the protector of private property, as the anarcho-socialists see it, but is the means of having socialism, i.e., public property, collectivism, etc.
Funny enough, the statist-socialists (the only kind of socialists there are in my mind) know this to be true, hence their clamoring for more statism in their despise of capitalism (although often claiming to be for capitalism, just thinking the market requires various interventions by government to correct it and make sure it isn't just entirely "unchecked capitalism", i.e., anarchism). They know, or think as egalitarians, that we can't have anarchism; they get it that this would mean there would be capitalism, i.e., no government to invade private property.
Ironically, "conservatives", or "limited-government" types, who are quite socialist in many respects, also see this as the role of the State when it has empirically done otherwise, i.e., has not existed solely to protect property rights and enforce contracts, but indeed to expand and expropriate and ever-growing amount of property into its realm. But to say we need monopolies to have a free market is a contradiction. No, "we [don't} need socialism to have capitalism." This is why anarcho-capitalists would assert that the best way to achieve this capitalism (private property) is without any government whatever. Legalized theft in a State is the opposite of what capitalism is about.
As for voluntary socialism, if it's true that this "anarcho-socialism", "mutualism", "syndicalism", or whatever, is actually voluntary, and does not call for abolishing private property, prohibiting ownership of capital goods by individuals, or direct-democracy, etc., but just holds a psychological preference and desire to use this property to form voluntary collectives/communes, then I don't find this good enough to consider oneself a "socialist", albeit of the anarchist variety. Deciding what to do, among many shareholders of voluntarily acquired property, such as forming a commune and all contractually agreeing to the terms of the community, neighborhood, covenant, company, or whatever., is just capitalism. Surely, anyway, a commune would regard its property as private, not welcoming in anyone who wishes to come and "free ride" on their production, and not living up to their motto of "each according to his need, each according to his ability." I submit that whatever is voluntary, even if you call it "socialist", is private property capitalism. Without a State, you can't collectivize all the property; and if you do, then you're the State.
The philosophy of voluntaryism – of anarcho-capitalism, or, private property and non-aggression based on the premise of self-ownership – allows for this "anarcho-socialism" of people voluntarily deciding to live communally. If they're voluntarists, then, I believe they're capitalists. Their only problem is with the negative connotations of the word, believing that the "crony capitalism" the State has created is actual [anarcho] capitalism. If the ideology of the anarcho-socialists prevailed, however, which was how everyone must live, then, besides requiring a state to achieve these functions – of redistributing property, collectivizing it, arbitrarily deciding what is "personal property" and what is private, or their other claims of how society should work in so far as they're willing to describe this – there would be no freedom for individuals to live "capitalist", or market-based, lifestyles where they keep what they earn, where there is an extensive division of labor and trade, and where whatever physical scarce-resources anyone freely contracts (through trade, homesteading, etc.) is exclusively theirs to keep. Thus, to them, voluntaryist-anarchism (based on private property) is not actually voluntary or anarchism at all, but identical to statism.
I'll admit, through the lingo, vagueness, and inability to clearly paint their conception of a stateless society for anyone, I can never pin these guys down. Some of them seem to think ending the State would also end capitalism in one fell swoop; others seem to think that after the State is ended then capitalism will need to be ended too; that the anarchist's fight isn't quite yet over after freeing society from the statism once and for all.
Where we see taxation as theft, they apparently see selling your labor for physical resources (money) as theft. They appear to get around this view by saying that it's actually capitalism where one does not get to keep the what he voluntarily acquires, by stating that voluntary exchange is not mutually-profitable (the employee profits in goods in the present and the consumer in goods, too, which the employer benefits in labor or money, respectively) but one party (the worker) was exploited.
It would appear the whole problem with the anarcho-socialist worldview stems from their lack of economic understanding, namely in their adopting of the incorrect Labor Theory of Value, used from Adam Smith to Karl Marx, as opposed to the correct, subjective-value approach most-developed by the Austrians since the Marginal Revolution; and as so continue on in a wrongheaded theory of attributing these voluntary arrangements, such as that of employer-employee, as the extraction, or "exploitation", of the worker of his "surplus value", which is to say that the employer made some sort of unjust profit off the employee since what he produced must have had some sort of objective value that he was ripped off of in relation to the spread of the price the employer sold the good at versus what they were paid for the work. They can't see that prices and wages form subjectively as the result of human interaction, or that the labor isn't what made the product valuable, but, exactly the opposite, that the labor has value only because the product does. It isn't that a shirt is worth $10 because X unit of labor was imputed into it, but that the labor is worth anything at all only in so far as anyone values the shirt. Things do not fetch an automatic price because someone labored over them. What's produced must have value on the market. This is why consumers necessarily run the market economy, as opposed to these evil "capitalists" that are supposed to produce whatever they want, divorcing production and profit. It's true that the consumers decide what capital goods ("means of production") have value, not the other way around.
Moreover, they seem to think that they should own title in the capital goods they work on, rather than just receive a wage. Why someone can't buy a grill and hire an employee, or when this grill becomes a capital good as opposed to the "personal property" of its owner, I do not know. Surely, this would decrease the amount of investment in capital goods that are used to produce even more consumer goods if one could use their property for personal uses, like consuming it rather than saving it, but couldn't invest it and keep the profits for themselves if it is to be deemed "private property", and now under the ownership of the collective. Where they are good on criticizing the State, they're bad on the economics of statelessness; to the point that they may derive statist tendencies from these fallacies.
Altogether, the anarcho-socialist is not well versed in economic theory, often claiming things like "capitalism works only on confidence" (again, in thinking what we have now is capitalism), and so therefore recessions are endemic of the market when the business cycle (the "recession") is absolutely caused by the central bank creating credit and inflating to artificially lower interest rates. Furthermore, not seeing that the State has corrupted "money", forcing us to use "paper-money", or, fiat currency, they call for ridding society of money, which is properly defined as the most marketable commodity used as a medium of exchange; and what is necessary for any economy to advance beyond primitive levels of production. As well, not seeing a need for banking as a warehouse for money or an intermediary between savers and investors, and not seeing that their fractional-reserve banking system is inherently insolvent, and of course considering all this to be a "capitalist" thing although it's a statist thing, they're against banking too. While the modern day so-called "left libertarians", or "market anarchists", are more sophisticated, just wishing to include "social justice" issues into their political philosophy when its scope should be non-aggression only, the typical anarcho-socialist is awful on economics; and it's for this reason that they build bad political theory on top of it.
The "anarcho-socialist" believes that the State is not socialist, which libertarians (those who understand the private property ethic is what underlies the non-aggression principle) would contend it most certainly is socialist, and therefore they are able to rationalize the term "state-capitalism"; a contradiction that the anarcho-capitalists would assert cannot exist. The only genuine capitalism is anarchism, and vice versa. They consider this anarcho-capitalism – of individuals privately contracting – to be no different, or worse than, the State. It's "hierarchical", it's "wage slavery", it's "racist", etc. We private property anarchists oppose the State for its aggression; not because it's racist or hierarchical. We contend, too, to reiterate, that being the ultimate invader of property rights it is socialist.
I'd say, if they think that they will abolish private property simultaneously with the removal of the State, again, the great violator of property rights, then they're in for a big surprise. If the anarcho-socialists see the abolishing of the State as the end to capitalism, we anarcho-capitalists would see it as the beginning: that's when there is no longer the monopolistic, inherently socialist institution of legalized property theft infringing upon our right to own ourselves and the physical property that we originally appropriate to ourselves. If it is so, then, that capitalism couldn't exist anyway without the State, then we can "agree to disagree" on the terminology, and us libertarians are still anti-statists. Call it something else if it makes you happy.
It is, I believe, the absurd view of many "anarcho-socialists" that voluntary human interaction, which should be the noblest of all goals for humanity, is actually involuntary capitalism and cannot be had in society, or the equivalent of statism; that, instead, I suppose, there must be some group of central planners to preside over the collective's resources that act as if they are not the State itself. To the contrary, having the services on the market which the State (defined by it's monopolistic character on a given good or service in a given territory) now provides, which statist-socialists say cannot be left to the market, is not the State; it's the private provision of these services, done so voluntarily.
It is a criticism by anarcho-socialists and statists alike that anarcho-capitalism is "sneaking back in the State", but that's only because they've conflated the essential services the State has monopolized, or socialized, as the same things as statism, just because those are things the State does. Indeed, it's our belief that we do need these things (defense, justice, law, education, roads, etc), but just that they could be privatized, offered voluntarily in the market; that there's no such thing as "public goods" requiring coercive government ownership to deal with these "externalities" as economists might call them; that they can be "internalized", so to speak.
I conclude that anarcho-capitalism is not an oxymoron. but indeed an inextricable concept; you can't have one without the other. Anarchism, i.e., no state-monopoly on the provision of a good or service, is the idea of capitalism, where there is a lack of political order; or, A Spontaneous Order.
There is, on one end of the spectrum, anarchism, and the aforementioned things that are essentially synonymous with anarchism; and statism, which is the antithesis of liberty and the enactment of socialism. Call me crazy, but if there's something "voluntary" about the statism, or the people who extract their incomes involuntarily (the State) care about us while those who voluntarily offer us goods and services (businesses) don't, then i'm just not seeing it.