I heard a thinker named Kahmali Rose being dismissive of the term “anarcho-capitalism” in a way that was clarifying for me. In broad paraphrase, he* said:

What’s unique about capitalism is the employer/employee relationship–just as the uniqueness of feudalism was that a whole lot of serfs were ruled over by a couple of Lords and Ladies at the top. In capitalism the hierarchy is taken for granted, and is almost a part of the natural order. If you’re good enough and smart enough and work hard enough, you get to become a capitalist and have employees and make a whole lot more than they do–your wealth is created from the labor of others. If you’re dumb or bad or lazy, those character flaws doom you to wage slavery for life, and that’s the best-case scenario.

An-Archy, conversely, is living with Rulers and therefore without Hierarchy.

So ‘anarcho-capitalism’ is internally contradictory and ultimately nonsensical.

In the abstract sense, I have no trouble at all imagining and warmly embracing a world without hierarchy. I think life would be better for everyone, even the deposed rulers, eventually.

I also have no problem acknowledging that some people really are smarter, or work harder, or are better at warfare or pole-vaulting or accounting.

But I reject the implicit assumption that these god-given talents, or man-made bootstrapping characteristics, mean that anyone should be able to pile up a billion dollars while others go hungry or homeless.

I reject ‘meritocracy’ because no one is entitled to define merit.

A child is useless as an employee or a worker, to start at least. A cat will always be.

In the case of the poor meritless cat, I’m willing to concede that sterilizing it is the right thing.

The logic of capitalism says the same should be true of the child, unless the child can prove that it will have some level of ‘merit’, someday–which means that it should be able to be Employable, pulling its own weight, and having the ability to put its excess labor value into the hands of its betters.

In the practical sense, living under the very blueprint of a capitalist system, I know that I can never shake completely free of hierarchy.

When I went down to register my new freedom machine at Jacob’s DMV office, I did so only to lessen the chances that all of my freedom, as well as my machine, will be taken away from me completely at the end of some cop’s gun, for failing to acknowledge the state’s hierarchical demand that I cough up cash for the privilege of owning some limited and contingent slice of an attenuated freedom.

Probably it will work out better this way, but that doesn’t mean it’s Right.

Philando Castile paid for his registration, and pulled over when the lights came on behind him. He did everything right. A cop killed him anyway–in political terms he was deprived of both life and liberty. In these kinds of graphic ways, and a thousand subtler ones that are harder to see, the hierarchy routinely sins and murders.

Jeronimo Yanez was the officer who shot Castile, and he was acquitted of all charges, because according to the logic of capitalism, he did absolutely nothing sinful. He had merit, as a useful tool of the people who own and rule everything. He carried out the logic of their will, like any good serf should.

Do I even have to mention the capitalist logic of the last 80 years of the Empire’s wars?

The only way to solve these manifold intractable existential problems is to abolish hierarchies that inevitably result in domination, subjugation, oppression, colonialism, and enslavement.

It won’t happen in my lifetime, and it may not ever.

But that doesn’t make fighting back toward that noble end anyway Wrong, either.

• Kahmali was sitting next to a sign that read “Black Trans Lives Matter”, so I may have the pronouns wrong here. No disrespect, but I’m not running around the nets trying to track down the correct ones, especially since he wasn’t making a point of it anyway in the context of this conversation.

In the future you will see a formulation from me that says:

Alex Vairtere (pronouns: ve/ver/vis)

You should be as lax as I’m being here, about applying that.

Which is to say that I like these constructs to the extent that they subvert the assumptions around binary gender, but if you detect any religious fervor around pronouns from me, it will be the same kind of religious fervor that I put forward when I talk about worshiping the Flying Spaghetti Monster.