Much to my chagrin, a tweet that mostly got overlooked at first gained the attention of a cluster of conservative armchair pundits who reveled in the opportunity to make shallow criticisms of my point: that right libertarianism’s biggest flaw is that it overlooks that capitalism itself violates the non-aggression principle by coercing people into participating to survive. Ultimately, I decided to delete the tweet because it was causing more trouble than anything, but this point is important.
Of course, the easiest jab a few used was the fact that I, myself, am an executive of a startup that has benefitted a lot from venture capitalist investment, and thus there is an apparent absurdity or a hypocrisy to my statements. And my experience with the VC world goes even deeper than can be gleaned from my Twitter biography as well. However, this is merely just a beefed up version of the tired old “if you hate capitalism so much, why do you buy things?” By living in a capitalist society, we are inevitably compelled to participate in capitalism—the very point I was making with the tweet—and there is nothing hypocritical or ironic about trying to use capitalism to your advantage despite being a critic of it.
A couple of the responses insinuated that the implication was that this makes “the laws of nature” coercive, implying that this view is too reductivist to be valuable. This is a false equivalency. For starters, it is almost impossible to escape “the system.” You’re still under the jurisdiction of some authority—one that probably levies taxes—and, as many of the participants in the “sovereign citizen movement” have found, it is quite easy to find yourself on the wrong end of the law despite maintaining your non-participation in it. Libertarians love to talk about how taxes are collected via force since you face coercive action from the legal and justice system for non-compliance. However, an eviction or an arrest because you had to steal to even be able to eat is fundamentally the same thing. The condemnation and call out of folks—largely people of color, predictably and depressingly—searching for food in the wake of Harvey shows how deeply rooted this mindset is in our society.
Contrary to the perception of a lot of these AnCap fedora fashion models, nature itself operates in a fundamentally different way. The seminal Ishmael trilogy from Daniel Quinn makes a distinction between two types of societies: “Leavers” and “Takers.” Prehistoric societies are largely the former. All modern civilizations are the latter. In the more naturalistic, hunter-gather Leaver societies, there is no ownership of natural resources, and one does not hoard resources at the expense of others. Takers seek to put the control of resources under lock and key in order to—you guessed it—force participation in Taker society (i.e. capitalism). If a Leaver comes across a fruit tree in the wild, she plucks a piece of fruit to eat and moves on. If a Taker comes across a fruit tree in the wild, he claims it as his own, guards it, and sells the fruit to others.
A key point of Quinn’s philosophy is that Taker culture inevitably tends to conquer Leaver culture. The history of colonialism is a broken record version of this. The so-called “white man’s burden” is better seen as the greed of the Taker mentality that took root in Europe. That’s not to say Taker culture is wholly white, as arguably some medieval Asian societies such as Japan and China fall into that category as well. But the indigenous people of a substantial part of the world experienced subjugation under the destructive march of Taker culture.
The simplistic take here is that one should seek to be a Leaver. However, that not only simply is not practical in a capitalistic society due to the reasons described above but it also kneecaps one’s power to change the status quo. The ability to survive and thrive outside the system is limited, and thus people are strongly coerced into participation in violation of the nonaggression principle. This is unlikely to change in an Anarchist-Capitalist society given the fact that any system heavily based on capitalism is going to lead to people operating intensely as Takers.
Ultimately, the likely downfall of Taker culture will be the rise of automation and the development of a post-scarcity society. When everything you could ever need is readily and inexpensively available, then the need to keep it under lock and key plummets. The desire to hoard evaporates. This would lead to a more Leaver-like culture akin to the “laws of nature” that it is so easy for people with polisci majors from Wikipedia University to pretend mimics capitalism. The only difference is that nature often does have issues of scarcity, leading to problems such as famine, which is ultimately one of the initial drives towards participation in Taker culture in the first place.
This is also not to lift up some ideal of a “noble savage” or to say that Taker culture is wholly without merit. Leftist commentator Peter Coffin correctly points out in one of his YouTube documentaries that a lot of our technological innovations were fueled by socialist programs, though it is worth noting that those socialist programs still occurred in the context of a Taker society. The cost in human life and suffering is immense, but Taker culture led us to transcend ourselves. “Progressivism” as a broad political ideal likely would not exist without a framework for that progress to occur. However, is a modern human deeply happier than our prehistoric counterparts? Of course, it is impossible to say, but it is without question that we are far more stressed.
Regardless, the crucial thing to appreciate, at least for the near term, is that leveraging capitalism to your benefit is not only necessary to ensure survival but is the only way to gain the means to oppose its abuses. When most resources are allocated through capitalism, and resources are needed to fix the system, working to master the system in its current state beneficial. The startup world is one of the few comparatively accessible places to gain a lot of leverage. Therefore, it is fair to say that capitalism is coercive in a way that violates the non-aggression principle, and it is not ironic or hypocritical to do so while heavily leveraging capitalism to your benefit.