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Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism

To dissolve, submerge, and cause to disappear the political or governmental system in the economic system by reducing, simplifying, decentralizing and suppressing, one after another, all the wheels of this great machine, which is called the Government or the State. --Proudhon, General Idea of the Revolution

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Saturday, March 06, 2010

At C4SS--Capitalism: A Good Word for a Bad Thing

3 Comments:

Blogger John (Libertine) said...

Capitalism? It is corporatism. Rand and her merry gang of oligarch lovers hijacked true libertarianism for those who reside in the upper 1% of the wealth. Rothbard knew it and called her on it...

Our economy is described as a free market capitalist one. It is capitalist in the sense that it is dominated by the possessors of capital but there is nothing 'free' about it...

March 08, 2010 12:04 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Rand . . . hijacked true libertarianism . . . Rothbard knew it and called her on it..."

Actually, it was Rothbard and propertarians like him who hijacked the term "libertarian" -- from the left who had been using it since 1858 to describe anti-state socialism:

150 years of libertarian

Even worse, he knew that "libertarian" was used by the left:

Rothbard: "We must therefore conclude that we are not anarchists"

This was because both the “dominant anarchist doctrine . . . of ‘anarchist communism’” (“which has also been called ‘collectivist anarchism,’ ‘anarcho-syndicalism,’ and ‘libertarian communism’”) as well as the individualist anarchists (considered by Rothbard to be “the best of them”) had “socialistic elements in their doctrines.”

Rothbard suggested that there were thinkers “in that Golden Age of liberalism” who had ideas “similar” to his ideology, but these, significantly, “never referred to themselves as anarchists” while “all the anarchist groups . . . possessed socialistic economic doctrines in common.”

Ah, if only he had stuck to that (correct) analysis and, of course, leave the term "libertarian" alone at the same time...

Interesting, though, that people like Walter Block have called Kevin a "Marxist" for raising individualist anarchist ideas ("socialistic economic doctrines"!). Shame, though, that Proudhon had argued these "Marxist" ideas before Marx did...

Iain
An Anarchist FAQ

March 08, 2010 1:59 AM  
Blogger Steve said...

I've taken to using the word "capitalistism." That seems to lay the cards on the table.

March 08, 2010 12:16 PM  

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