Hi there!

I’m relatively new to anarchism, so I’d like to ask a few questions. I was very inspired by the book by F. Hayek (The Road to Serfdom) which changed my mind and convinced me why regulation doesn’t work. Before this book I believed in the world trend towards regulation for the common good. Now I’m looking for a more general book on why government doesn’t work at all. What can you recommend? I’m an engineer and prefer more economic and less philosophical books (like one by F. Hayek). Is there anything like that?

And more generally, what is the general opinion on private property in the anarchist community? I tried to google it but found controversial views. I know there are left-wing (Geoism/Georgism?) and right-wing (anarcho-capitalism?), but I think there should be something common about the property question…

Thanks in advance!

  • underscores@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 year ago

    Anarchists are anticapitalist and oppose private property. Georgism and “anarcho-capitalism” are mostly unrelated schools of thought. Capitalism is a hierarchical system with employers having power over employees. Owning private property can only really happen if it’s enforced though some form of police.

    Georgism is more about the way that land is controlled and taxed, and doesn’t really go into how the government is structured. It’s sort of a stepping stone toward socialism, where they think land fundamentally belongs to everyone, so all taxation should be based on the value of land and distributed as needed. Its not that common anymore, because if you extend that concept to stuff besides land like factories and apartment complexes, you wind up with one of the various forms of socialism. I feel like it can be a good stepping stone for people who have been conditioned to hate socialism, but it still has oppressive capitalist systems built into it.

    Ancaps just appropriated the name despite more than a century of anarchist theory and history saying it is fundamentally anticapitalist. Anarchists tend to view ancapism as a sort of a neofeudalism. It basically turns landlords into actual lords, with contracts acting as laws for anyone who lives there. It takes the power the government has and moves it to private companies, who can control what they own with private police, at which point they’re basically mini nations with the government terms relabled to corporate speak.

    Regarding regulations, it’s not as straightforward as that. Different parts of a government can be at odds with with each other, or with companies. Often regulations prevent something obviously worse. The police upholding private property so a company can pollute their own land is much more oppressive than regulations against it. Other times regulations exist to increase bureaucracy so only a huge company with a team of specialists can navigate it. There’s plenty of examples of regulatory capture out there, where companies influence what regulations they have to follow.

  • Mambabasa@slrpnk.net
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    1 year ago

    Generally, anarchists dislike Hayek, though some anarchists like those with the Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS) actually have a lot of writing subverting the right-wing libertarians for an authentic or classical libertarian perspective. See C4SS’s section on Hayek. They also have a dedicated section on anarchist economics, so that’s helpful. Samuel Edward Konkin III’s New Libertarian Manifesto also brings back a lot of right-libertarian theory back towards classical libertarianism.

    If you’re looking for specific books, you could try the anthology The Accumulation of Freedom: Writings on Anarchist Economics. Kevin Carson is a big economics brain in anarchist thought, so checking his section on the Anarchist Library might be helpful. He wrote Studies in Mutualist Political Economy and Exodus: General Idea of the Revolution in the XXI Century which might be of interest to you.

    For other anarchists in this thread, I know we don’t like Hayek and the right-wingers, but the work of C4SS proves there’s a lot of opportunity for those who do read right-wing libertarians to become real anarchists. So let’s not just ban this person or remove the post.