The website launched today makes traditional public relations a relatively insignificant part of our business. Yes, we still do media relations and we have an excellent side line in press office management for the HNWI clients of our sister company TPPR. However, the vast bulk of our work is now strategic reputation-based marketing that makes full use of the new media that are rapidly replacing the old print newspapers that seem to be hovering between breakdown and hiding behind exclusive online paywalls.

Him losing the 1964 election was probably the biggest disaster to strike the US since the depression. Instead of a new libertarian way forward, they got increased socialism and the Vietnam War.

An economic and political system “monopolization of the means of production” is the traditional meaning of the word “capitalism”, with real-life examples including the systems of Britain, Germany, France, and the US in the nineteenth-century (when the term became widely used). In other words, a system that features and promotes the existence of a class of capitalists in the sense of owners of the means of production used by others.

Sometime in the early twentieth-century some individuals re-defined the term in your sense. Unfortunately, more often than really supporting the ideals they claimed, they defined the term with the new sense but still referred to the same sort of real-life examples as the old meaning. This is not a fault that all commit (notably not those who call themselves left-libertarians), but it becomes cryingly obvious when some of them turn around and offer their support to a dictator like Pinochet, who implemented his economic policies by doing things like massacre union organizers, but somehow supposedly still created a free market.

Again, the problem with your assertion that capitalists support only voluntary behavior is that it assumes what you need to prove: that the behavior they support is truly voluntary. We probably can’t really argue this without getting into specific cases, but one should note that here the anarcho-individualists like Tucker and Spooner firmly agreed with the anarcho-communists, so it isn’t a market vs non-market issue.

Finally, my main point here is that you need to read political philosophers for yourself to know what they advocate, not take the word of their opponents.

The fact that many capitalists have supported government security in the past does not prove that capitalism requires government.

Properly understood, there is no way to understand capitalism (as proposed by capitalists) as involving violence or theft. I understand that some people don’t like the consequences (or what they think the consequences will be) but that doesn’t constitute violence.

But perhaps there is a semantics breakdown here. You suggest that capitalism is the “monopolization of the means of production”. That is not the system that advocates of the free market have in mind. The free market approach is simply to allow humans to voluntarily interact — whether for their own benefit (the market) or for the good of society (civil society, 3rd sector).

The idea of “self-organized direct action” hasn’t been explained. Of course libertarians support the right of anybody to boycott whatever they want, argue against types of behaviour or to form their own communities which exclude certain activities. But if the communist idea is based on the hope that community activism will create enough social pressure to abolish the profit-motive, then they are clearly not advocating a realistic system.

And if they want to institutionalise a body which has the right to prevent the “wrong” sort of voluntary behaviour, then they are supporting a government by another name. Which is exactly what ended up happening in some Spanish “anarchist” (sic) societies.

1. ‘lead’ – pronounced leed, means to guide, to precede, to take leadership – “I will lead you to victory.”

2. ‘lead’ – pronounced led, means the heavy metal – “He substituted lead for gold.”

3. ‘led’ – pronounced led, means the past tense of 1 – “She led them to victory.”

Thank you and goodnight.

I do not believe that it is true that anarcho-communists ever said that they were “against voluntary for-profit human interaction”. They did not believe that capitalism (the monopolization of the means of production) was truly voluntary. And to prevent it, they advocated self-organized direct action, not government.

The anarcho-individualists agreed with the anarcho-communists on all of this. They differed with the communists on their preferred forms of organization and some other issues.

One should also consider their arguments to the effect that capitalism is not possible without government to enforce it. (Traditional anarchists throughout the spectrum from communist to individualist agreed on this.) Communists and capitalists are both in the same boat on this issue.

I tend to agree the most with the anarcho-individualists, but one should be fair to those on all sides of the spectrum. The sad fact is that you cannot rely on people to represent their ideological foes accurately — you have to read all of them for yourself to find out what they really believe and advocate.

It’s also somewhat lame to make these arguments against traditional anarchists when most of the “libertarians” you mention above were statists.

The anarcho-communists said they were against government, but they also said they were against voluntary for-profit human interaction and they didn’t explain how they would prevent such human behaviour without resorting to institutionalised force.

It was concern about this issue which led the “individual anarchists” to identify as a different group.