The word anarchocapitalism

It's ugly. To begin with, it is ugly, horrible: cocapí and all those things, anar, talista. To continue, it is the filthiest deception.

There are, sometimes, words that appear and impose themselves on logic and spread even though what they say is impossible and, then, each time, the person who pronounces them is laughed at. They have fun: words that look at each other and wink and say oh how stupid, he already told me again. Let's think about microgiants, barbilampiños, leatherettes: words that contain their own negation. Or implausible words, as if I defined myself as bald pitt: a Brad Pitt with a cakey face, wrinkled brown eyes, not a hair on his skull but yes, something on the lobes that resembles the American's ears. People, obviously, would laugh at me. That's why those disappointment words usually have a short career. But now there is one that too many people accept and launch and reproduce without laughing: anarcho-capitalism, they say, as if they were saying something. Calvopitt.

The word anarchocapitalism is an invention that remained in deserved shadows for decades. It was coined by Murray Rothbard, an American troglodyte. He was born in the Bronx in 1926, the son of European Jewish immigrants; Applied, hardworking, he became an economist, mathematician, political scientist, and began teaching classes and writing books. In one of them, around 1955, he tried to define “anarcho-capitalism”: a system where “anarcho” meant that the State had to disappear so that “the Market” could act without regulation, because the only inalienable right, he said, in addition to Life is private property, and the State violates it by collecting taxes, seizing everyone's property. “The State is a gang of thieves, composed of the most immoral, greedy and unscrupulous individuals in each society,” he wrote. And he appropriated the word anarchism and stripped it of all its meanings and kept only one: that of rejecting the State.

Without the State, he said, only “the Market” can define and validate the relationships between people: everyone has the right to sell their work and their property—including their body or parts of their body—if they feel like it or want to, and no one has the right to sell it. the option to prevent it: it is your freedom. Those who know how to do it well will live well; Those who don't, bad luck guys. Those who can sell or be sold will eat; the others, who knows, pedal or steal or die. It is the definition of a hyper-individualistic society, where only personal triumph counts and any form of solidarity is an affront. Nothing could be further from the idea of ​​anarchism, so much more complex than Rothbard's blot. Anarchism had its great moment in the 19th century, promoted by thinkers/militants such as Proudhon, Bakunin, Malatesta, Kropotkin and many others: in those days it was, along with socialism, the most common way to rebel against institutions and their economic basis. , the capitalism.

Anarchism was not defined against the State: it was defined against power. The unions and anarchist groups rejected all its forms: money, bosses, priests, weapons. Anarchism does not oppose the State just because it charges taxes or prevents doing business: it fights it because it is the tool of domination that allows the exercise of all other powers.

Anarchism was never thought of as every man for himself: on the contrary, it was defined as “order minus power”, societies self-regulated by the solidarity and collaboration of all its members to establish an egalitarian collective order and put an end, precisely, to the empire. of money. The most effective and widespread form of which is, in our societies, capitalism. That is why “anarcho-capitalism” is a flagrant contradiction, one of the greatest fallacies of this era of fallacious identities. It is obvious that you cannot be an anarchist and a capitalist at the same time. But so many repeat it, accept it as if it were even thinkable. We should avoid the shame of saying it as, for example, it would be better to avoid saying Catholic or pacibelicist. Or talking about “freedom” when you just want to have a beer—or be exploited. Or call “change” what the rich neoliberals did in the 90s, when they recovered old privileges. Not for nothing: just to maintain a certain self-respect, to not be spoken by the language of the cheap media, by the language of the masters. To know—or hide that one does not know—what he says when he speaks.

And I apologize for the outbursts: few things make me more nervous than listening to millions say what a few want them to repeat. That, exactly that, is what that form of education called anarchism always wanted to avoid.

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