AHC: A more successful and early Anarcho-Capitalist movement?

Just how radical of an AnCap are we talking here? If there is some (at least nominally) unaffiliated policing body that protects claims to private property, you're probably gonna be able to have some traction wherever Classical Liberalism has taken root; it's basically just the logical extreme of Libertarianism. If there is absolutely no state but economic entities, then yeah, it pretty much is, as others have said, a form of feudalism. Not that it'd be necessarily evil mind you, the corporate entities could potentially care for its employees and clients, but to people of the period it'd just be a relapse into the arbitrary rule they'd try to escape through constitutionalism.

But I mean it's sort of the same problem as all Anarchist movements, how can you keep oppressive structures from forming.

Yeah, this is a slightly different question. I don't think you could actually have successful, total implementation of the ideology simply because I don't think the ideology is workable, for the reasons listed in this post and for other reasons.

But birthing anarcho-capitalism earlier as an ideology and having it pick up steam as a movement over the course of the 19th century? Totally doable. It's just that any attempt to go for full on implementation as a political system is not going to end up like its ATL proponents imagine, similar to the Bolsheviks and their Marxist-Leninism IOTL.
 
I really think something like anarcho-capitalism as a movement could only emerge as a movement through the complete triumph of liberal capitalism and the dissipation of class struggle as a political force, which is precisely how it emerged anyway.

Stuff like Misean Austrian School economics only had real-world people in positions of power under occasional clunky interwar parafascist governments like Dollfuss' Austria. In fact that's the only time I can think of. But generally speaking when capitalists in Europe were actually fearing for the existence of the system and their class interests at the time they went for Mussolini or shellshocked Freikorps veterans or drunken SA brutes that called for blud-and-boden mysticism. And those guys were nominally anti-capitalist. Ha.
 
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Like I honestly can't see why eccentric billionaires and later actually organized parts of the political right would turn guys like Rothbard into their patrons except when their worst enemy was technocratic government bureaucracy or the New Deal or whatever.
 
I really think something like anarcho-capitalism as a movement could only emerge as a movement through the complete triumph of liberal capitalism and the dissipation of class struggle as a political force, which is precisely how it emerged anyway.

Stuff like Misean Austrian School economics only had real-world people in positions of power under occasional clunky interwar parafascist governments like Dollfuss' Austria. In fact that's the only time I can think of. But generally speaking when capitalists in Europe were actually fearing for the existence of the system and their class interests at the time they went for Mussolini or shellshocked Freikorps veterans or drunken SA brutes that called for blud-and-boden mysticism. And those guys were nominally anti-capitalist. Ha.

Mises himself was not an anarcho-capitalist. None of the modern an-caps has ever been within even a few degrees of separation of real political power.

And Austrian school economists served widely in the Austrian bureaucracy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Both Carl Menger (the founder of the school) and Frederich von Weiser (one of the most important earlier Austrians -- also, interestingly enough, something of a socialist) were involved in Austrian state finance in this era, for example. Mises is just the most famous (and one of the last actually Austrian -- as in from Austria -- Austrian economists), so he might get more attention than his predecessors.

This is probably related to the general culture of liberality (rather than liberalism) that sometimes permeated Austrian civil service culture. Austria, for instance, had abolished capital punishment by the 18th century, when the UK was still hanging people for theft. Interesting dichotomy, considering the stark contrasts between the two when it came to the absoluteness of their monarchial systems.

Still, neither here nor there. Talking about Mises is all OTL, 20th century stuff. While born in the 19th century, Mises didn't become important as an ideologue until the 20th.
 
That's why I mentioned Mises and not the earlier Austrian School, while not an ancap, anarcho-capitalism as we know it would be altered without Mises or his "bulldogs" (Rothbard).

Honestly I really can't see anarcho-capitalism as we know it emerging before 1900. Earlier world wars maybe?
 
Well I mean the idea of the State existing merely to protect your stuff is intuitively appealing to a lot of people. What exactly is the ideological appeal or radical ancap stuff? Its basically that for profit entities are more efficient than ones concerned ostensibly with public welfare. I don't know if that idea will go over that well even intellectul circles.
 
That's why I mentioned Mises and not the earlier Austrian School, while not an ancap, anarcho-capitalism as we know it would be altered without Mises or his "bulldogs" (Rothbard).

Honestly I really can't see anarcho-capitalism as we know it emerging before 1900. Earlier world wars maybe?

Of course, any ideology will be altered if you move it back far enough. The religious communism of the 17th century was very different from the Marxist communism of the 19th.

That doesn't mean it can't happen. I've typed thousands of words in this topic already demonstrating exactly that the tendency already existed. Fierce proponents of laissez faire existed all over the place in the 19th century and, in the first half of the century, actually led mass movements in favor of that policy ideal. You just need some way to push them into the even further extreme of anarcho-capitalism and, viola, there it is.
 
Well I mean the idea of the State existing merely to protect your stuff is intuitively appealing to a lot of people. What exactly is the ideological appeal or radical ancap stuff? Its basically that for profit entities are more efficient than ones concerned ostensibly with public welfare. I don't know if that idea will go over that well even intellectul circles.

I'd say there are a lot of places where that idea won't go over well.
 
Which is my point.

You need a change in how economic relations work to get anarcho-capitalism as we know it.

The only pre-1900 PoD I can think of would be a successful Paris Commune but that would be a major longshot and difficult to pull off plausibly. Every other possible PoD to get the anticapitalist revolution you need isn't going to happen before 1900 because the conditions and most of the necessary movements aren't in the right places to make it possible in a place significant enough in the capitalist world to matter.
How about instead of a more succesful Paris Commune, a more notable failure?

Say the Parisian commune dies out on track, but is for its duration more Jacobin, bloodthirsty and totalitarian? Shock enough individuals to bring about an earlier intellectual tract of pro-capital anti-state and I imagine the later an-cap movement would have more of a leg to stand on.
 
Well I mean the idea of the State existing merely to protect your stuff is intuitively appealing to a lot of people. What exactly is the ideological appeal or radical ancap stuff? Its basically that for profit entities are more efficient than ones concerned ostensibly with public welfare. I don't know if that idea will go over that well even intellectul circles.
Whils't not an ancap, there does seem to be a few ideas that tend to appeal.

Radical individualism is perhaps the most prominent one, along with a more socially acceptable idea for people who are fans of social darwinism without any of the race elements

Some are fans of Austrian or Chicago economics and view the an-cap dream as the natural conclusion of following ideas in these schools to their ultimate conclusions.

Most an-caps I have spoken too over the internet are generally fond of the idea from a moral principle seeing it as the only moral way to follow the non agression principle. Many others just view the state as by default a morally corrupt institution.

They also seem to exist on both romantic and enlightenment circles, with more randian pro-enlightenment ideas on one side and more unusual but notable groups such as self proclaimed anarcho-monarchist groups (look them up, I am not kidding XD).
 
Of course, any ideology will be altered if you move it back far enough. The religious communism of the 17th century was very different from the Marxist communism of the 19th.

That doesn't mean it can't happen. I've typed thousands of words in this topic already demonstrating exactly that the tendency already existed. Fierce proponents of laissez faire existed all over the place in the 19th century and, in the first half of the century, actually led mass movements in favor of that policy ideal. You just need some way to push them into the even further extreme of anarcho-capitalism and, viola, there it is.

Well fierce proponents of laissez faire in the 19th century didn't de-link the state and capitalism because they knew better. There were enough vestiges of the ancien regime in capitalist countries still, or institutional memory of such, that the state was seen and indeed useful as an instrument of its progression against feudal remnants. I think the sort of mystification that anarcho-capitalism implies has to emerge out of some sort of big break.
 
Well fierce proponents of laissez faire in the 19th century didn't de-link the state and capitalism because they knew better. There were enough vestiges of the ancien regime in capitalist countries still, or institutional memory of such, that the state was seen and indeed useful as an instrument of its progression against feudal remnants. I think the sort of mystification that anarcho-capitalism implies has to emerge out of some sort of big break.

Why not an "endarkenment" movement then? An advocacy of the movement from romantic and anti-enlightenment angles instead. Remember that "rationality" was not required for these movements.
 
Well fierce proponents of laissez faire in the 19th century didn't de-link the state and capitalism because they knew better. There were enough vestiges of the ancien regime in capitalist countries still, or institutional memory of such, that the state was seen and indeed useful as an instrument of its progression against feudal remnants. I think the sort of mystification that anarcho-capitalism implies has to emerge out of some sort of big break.

I'm not sure what 'they knew better' means.

However, in countries where the monarchy and the aristocracy had been very tied up in the state and the state bureaucracy, you got very strong anti-government movements. In the 18th century especially, and continuing into the 19th century, people saw inequality and social oppression as the result of state favors and largess. This led to the rise of radical movements in the first place.

Ia lso don't know what 'mystification that anarcho-capitalism implies' means.
 
Yeah, this is a slightly different question. I don't think you could actually have successful, total implementation of the ideology simply because I don't think the ideology is workable, for the reasons listed in this post and for other reasons.

But birthing anarcho-capitalism earlier as an ideology and having it pick up steam as a movement over the course of the 19th century? Totally doable. It's just that any attempt to go for full on implementation as a political system is not going to end up like its ATL proponents imagine, similar to the Bolsheviks and their Marxist-Leninism IOTL.

Fortunately I'm not looking for implementation, just greater ideological success or in other terms what you described as "totally doable".

Whilst something like a Leninist dictatorship to bring around true laissez-faire would be awesome (from a narrative perspective), I'm just looking for more success.
 
I'm not sure what 'they knew better' means.

However, in countries where the monarchy and the aristocracy had been very tied up in the state and the state bureaucracy, you got very strong anti-government movements. In the 18th century especially, and continuing into the 19th century, people saw inequality and social oppression as the result of state favors and largess. This led to the rise of radical movements in the first place.

Ia lso don't know what 'mystification that anarcho-capitalism implies' means.

Basically the idea that modernity, i.e. a liberal capitalism, could be cultivated without state policy. This never occurred to liberal revolutionaries in the European continent, and indeed the only way it really took off there was because of deliberate 19th century state policy. They weren't against the concept of state but the existing social form the state was part of.

Anarcho-capitalism gaining ground primarily in the Anglosphere actually makes sense because most of the tasks of liberal/bourgeois revolution actually occurred organically well before industrial capitalism really took off.
 
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Basically the idea that modernity, i.e. a liberal capitalism, could be cultivated without state policy. This never occurred to liberal revolutionaries in the European continent, and indeed the only way it really took off there was because of deliberate 19th century state policy. They weren't against the concept of state but the existing social form the state was part of.

Anarcho-capitalism gaining ground primarily in the Anglosphere actually makes sense because most of the tasks of liberal/bourgeois revolution actually occurred organically well before industrial capitalism really took off.

Well, I don't know incredibly much about liberalization in Europe in the 19th century so I'll have to take your word for it, but thankfully the Anglosphere (specifically the United States) is exactly what I've been talking about for the last page and a half. Having some way for the radicals that existed IOTL to despair of ever being able to keep the state out of the control of national liberal elite in the Whig party is a relatively easy step that could lead to them formulating an even more radical anarchist ideology that still includes their commitment to property rights. Since anti-statism and a commitment to property rights are essentially what define anarcho-capitalism, you can quite easily have this ATL movement morph into something resembling the modern one, ideologically.
 

Skallagrim

Banned
Let's see. As others have pointed out, there was the individual anarchist movement of the nineteenth century, involving such men as Lysander Spooner, Josiah Warren and Henry David Thoreau. These guys were in it for the individual freedom though. Ideas about sociulism and capitalism hadn't really crystallized yet, so we end up with a funny situation where Spooner can be claimed as a forerunner by both libertarians and socialists. :p

What's interesting s that individual anarchists tended to believe in the labor theory of value (essentially: how much effort/time is spent on making something should determine iys value), whereas AnCaps typically believe that value is purely subjectice (whatever price a buyer and seller voluntarily agree upon is the 'true' value of a thing... in that time and place).

that AnCap notion of the price system was pretty revolutionary. Even classical liberals like Adam Smith tended to believed that all things had a 'real' (absolute) value, which was not subjective. But there WAS a contemporary of the individual anarchits who already believed in subjective value: Frédéric Bastiat. That guy was pretty much the proto-libertarian. He died faitly young, however, in 1850.

Suppose an ATL where Bastiat lives longer, and his mostly economical ideas get merged with the more typically social/moral ideas of the (mostly) American individualist anarchists... you end up with that's essentially anarcho-capitalism.

What are we talking about, in that case? Essentially about a movement dedicated to as great a liberty as can be extended to all people. A movement that cpnsiders coersion (even for a theoretically noble purpose) to be the ultimate evil, and strives to make all interactions between human beings voluntary.

It would certainly be interesting to see such a movement becoming wide-spread. Some people are talking about neo-feudalism, but I'm sort of reminded of... hippies. Many anarchists had lots in common with typical socialists, but the difference was often that anarchists wanted the movement to be voluntary. Not state-oriented.

A movement developing in this way, in the second half of the 19th century, might well end up being considered extremely left wing. Despite its love of absolutely free markets. It would probably not end up being called anarcho-capitalism. (heck, 'capitalism' might end up being defined as 'an economy controlled by the big [state-supported] corporations', whereas 'free markets' might be considered a left wing notion).
 

Skallagrim

Banned
Another thought, on the success of such a movement: a fair number of workers during the nineteenth c. saw 'the state' as being in bed with big business. (not without cause!)

This 'earlier AnCap' movement might end up suggesting voluntary(!) mutual societies and cooperatives as "true solidarity": ("the people united in freedom against the elite! No more legalized theft via taxes that only benefit the established powers!")

A movement that espouses the typical AnCap pro-freedom anti-govenment message but is peceived as 'left wing' might pick up traction, especially if government is widely seen as being in bed with the big industrial monopolists. Socialists argueing for "state socialism" might even be branded as "buying into the corrupt system".
 
Interestingly Spooner was in the First International. Of course so was Proudhon...

Well, I don't know incredibly much about liberalization in Europe in the 19th century so I'll have to take your word for it, but thankfully the Anglosphere (specifically the United States) is exactly what I've been talking about for the last page and a half. Having some way for the radicals that existed IOTL to despair of ever being able to keep the state out of the control of national liberal elite in the Whig party is a relatively easy step that could lead to them formulating an even more radical anarchist ideology that still includes their commitment to property rights. Since anti-statism and a commitment to property rights are essentially what define anarcho-capitalism, you can quite easily have this ATL movement morph into something resembling the modern one, ideologically.

Well that's sort of an issue too: anarcho-capitalists tend to conflate "property rights" with "capitalism". It's a very dubious reading that really could only have emerged out of a reaction to a perfect storm of events: the world wars, the rise of both social democracy and the Soviet Union, the New Deal and the post-war society. That's why there's so many Confederate sympathizers among them, but who was the really capitalist power between the Union and the Confederacy? Can we really call a society dominated by a mortgaged-to-the-hilt, cash-poor pseudo-aristocratic, notoriously-bad-at-financial-planning-and-math ruling class capitalist? Did a plantation ever go bankrupt thanks to competition?

I mean in that sense ancaps before a Whiggish liberalism became obsolete thanks to class struggle and war ruin wouldn't call themselves ancaps. More like "propertarians", and the general composition of them would probably be downwardly mobile, small to medium sized property owners and artisans and planters reacting to the rise of monopolies and consolidating industry. It'd be kind of a funhouse-mirror patriarchal Proudhonist mutualism. Could that appeal to people who would be OTL farmer Populists? Maybe some.
 
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