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Have to chime in here, since I once studied the history of anarchism as a social/economic/political movement. Anarchism was overwhelmingly a socialist movement, contemporary with Marxism and communism. Many anarchists debated the ideal forms of socialism vigorously at congresses held by groups like the First International. Historically, Marxism and communism won the most mindshare, with rare exceptions like the Spanish Civil War. Leading 19th c. anarchist thinkers, like Bakunin and Kropotkin, would have laughed you out of the room if you had claimed anarchism was in any way not a leftist movement. This conception is from a much later argument of economist Murray Rothbard from the mid-20th c., and owes more to the Austrian school of economics then any strain of anarchist thinking. Rothbard drew upon some individualist anarchist writers, but tossed out all the economic parts he disagreed with, and called it anarcho-capitalism. Claiming anarcho-capitalism as a form of anarchism reveals a complete misreading of, or disdain for, the overwhelming majority of anarchist thought. Now for an interesting follow-up: the term "libertarian" underwent the same change in America, but even more thoroughly, to the point that only historians recall its leftist origins. (Outside America, "libertarian" is more synonymous with anarchism.) To quote Rothbard above: "One gratifying aspect of our rise to some prominence is that, for the first time in my memory, we, 'our side,' had captured a crucial word from the enemy... 'Libertarians'... had long been simply a polite word for left-wing anarchists, that is for anti-private property anarchists, either of the communist or syndicalist variety. But now we had taken it over..." |
Anarcho-capitalism is not a type of the former, but it is a type of the later.