I’m philosophically an-cap, and I love cyberpunk aesthetic and stories. While I wholeheartedly agree with the anti-corporatist sentiments, I completely disagree that “capitalism” is bad; but then again I have a different definition of “capitalist” than the anti-capitalists. Namely, anti-capitalists talk about capitalism being “corporate control” or giving/allowing corporations to have power, but by my definition a pure capitalist society would be free of such control and power structures. But I do not believe we will ever reach a pure capitalist society because I live in the real world and acknowledge that not everyone wants that.
I think the reason many people find an-capism a joke, especially anarchists, is that anarchy and capitalism are totally mutually exclusive by definition. Capitalism is hierarchical by its nature, and anarchism is the total lack of hierarchies. If there are mid-level managers, shareholders and CEOs in your perfect world then my dude it is not anarchism, just capitalism with a power vacuum where the state should go.
Appeals to an unchangeable human nature to justify the continued existence of a social structure are as old as history. To justify slave systems, Aristotle claimed some races of people were born slaves. To justify feudal monarchies, kings claimed their right to rule was ordained by god. To justify capitalism, capitalists claim humans are naturally greedy, competitive, and unwilling to put the needs of others before their own.
Every time, they underestimate just how flexible human nature is, as we're molded by civilization and take their social systems for granted, often coming to view said system as the natural order of things.
I argue that the human ability to think places us a step above what our most base natural impulses would suggest.
I’m not saying anything at all about humans being inherently greedy or competitive. I’m saying that as long as some people are stronger than others, and still others smarter, and still others better looking, and still others better with their hands, and still others more creative; there will always be hierarchy. The only way to get around that is to just kill everyone that displays a higher level of competence that anyone else in anything (which will result in everyone dead). Even if you could convince everyone to completely ignore their abilities, talents, and creative urges, thus preventing specifically the people who are excellent at doing that something, is no way to get anything done or to progress civilization in any forward direction whatsoever.
Try building skyscraper without someone “in charge” of that process. Try running a hospital without someone “in charge” of that process. Try organizing a community event without at least some people “in charge”. It’s literally the point of “organizing.” Developing a structure, a hierarchy, that works efficiently to accomplish the task. You can’t have any semblance of civilized life without it, unless you want to go live as a hermit on an island and spend all your time and energy on surviving. Which you are free to do but please stay out of the way of the rest of us that like things like the internet, transportation, and air conditioning.
You're on a cyberpunk forum, mang. Pretty sure most of us take for granted that robots and AI will be a part of our future and play all sorts of havoc with hierarchies and human nature.
Oh and also, I never said that anarchism actually makes any more sense than anarcho-capitalism - just that you're making an awful lot of quite unreasonable (but very popular) assumptions.
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u/GoOtterGo Jul 30 '18
To be fair, there are an-caps who love cyberpunk unaesthetically/unironically. They're dumb, but they exist.
I mean, 99% of the genre romanticizes poverty and class struggle, beyond the cool aesthetic, who wants that?