Against the Non-Aggression Principle
The circular logic of anarcho-capitalism
Property is always nothing but a system of violence.
Capitalism is enforced by the violence of the state.
Socialism would be enforced, ultimately, by the promise that violence will be used against anyone who attempted to enclose the commons and charge others for access to it.
Pretending otherwise — as though property could be founded ultimately on something beyond violence — is nothing but the most ridiculous sort of anti-materialism.
Anarcho-Capitalists (and even some AnCap-influenced Mutualists) like to frame their politics as ultimately being a politics of non-aggression. They call this “the non-aggression principle” or “the NAP” — they’re not really for private property, they say. They are simply for non-aggression. And non-aggression implies private property. Supposedly.
Of course, non-aggression only implies private property relations if you assume that private property is the ground-state of human economic affairs, and that it takes active and sustained expenditures of effort to enforce anything else.
