Note: When I use the word “anarchist” here, I am referring to what some here call “anarcho-socialism”, a type of political ideology which demands the total elimination of government, private property and religion, propounded by theorists such as Emma Goldman and Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Someone I know is an anarchist. I, while being quite hard to fit into any single ideological category, am not. We have our disputes in all three areas (“social”, economic, foreign policy, though in my view the first is merely a subsection of the 2nd), but the main bone of contention here is on economics. He rejects the LTV, and accepts some aspects of Austrian economics (such as the subjectivity of value), but he also seems a fairly strong adherent of Marx’s exploitation theory, despite opposing Marxism himself.
Both of us believe current Western governments are far too large, too legislated and too bureaucratic. However, while my stance tends towards a government similar to the one promoted by Rand, his seems to advocate community-based anarchism with the abolition of capital. I am not very experienced with the precise methodology of Austrian economics.
This has come from our previous discussion and my showing him Dr. Reisman’s excellent article on “The Myth That Laissez Faire Capitalism Is Responsible For Our Current Crisis” in response to his surprising lapping up of the MSM horse excrement that the Bush-era USA was a laissez faire cowboy capitalist society. He concurred with the first two sections of the article, regarding how the US is not a free market society and the causes of the crisis, but disputed the last one, regarding the adherence of the media to Marxist thinking on economics.
As aforementioned, he is an adherent of exploitation theory. While he agrees with individuals such as me and the LvMI on basic problems with current government, he favours the Labour Party (one of the two major parties here in New Zealand, and a social democratic party) in his voting choices and seems oddly sympathetic towards governmentalist socialists like social democrats, preferring them to mercantilists and crony capitalists like former President Bush and (I would assume) current New Zealand Prime Minister John Key. My own sympathies to New Zealand are undecided (I regard it as far more free than the US, which I consider it ridiculous to rank 4th in an economic freedom index), particularily my attitudes to the ACT New Zealand party, a party which has variously been described as neoconservative, crony capitalist, neoliberal and classical liberal.
I generally support decentralism for utilitarian reasons, and hence the party leader, Rodney Hide’s, recent move to merge all the city councils within the Auckland region into a single super council worry me, not least because Hide’s own worth is ambigious. Despite his anarchist views, this person I know works in the local council, and finds himself more and more convinced in his views by the day. We have had long discussions on the definition of capitalism, and ultimately came to an agreement that I would use “laissez faire capitalism” to describe an economy based around voluntary interaction, private property and trade of capital.
I have criticized the ridiculous “wage slavery” argument and argued it out with him. I hold the view it is fundamentally ridiculous to categorize “want” as a form of slavery, as since man always needs to eat and drink to survive, he is thus perpetually enslaved to want by the “wage slavery” definition, making the very use of the term “freedom” and the term “slavery” useless, as mankind is thus in perpetual enslavement.
I am looking for advice at debunking the anarchist/Marxist theory that capitalists “exploit” their workers, that the entire Earth is held in common (he seems to be quite Georgist in this regard), promotion of the barter system as superior to currency and the various Marxist assumptions outlined in Reisman’s article.