[ThePublicOpinions]

Code: Select allI don't understand what those two things have to do with each other. The point is that if you rely on employment for survival, then you realistically don't have very much choice in whether or not you can be employed, and therefore the employer wields control over you. This was the case much more in the past when there were not basic standards, regulations, and social services. This is why those regulations exist. You ideologues continually fail to realize this because many of you are ignorant of history.

This is the case in all socio economic systems. This is not a critique of capitalism it is a critique of the human race. Do you think there is any socio-economic system where you are not 'forced' by hunger to work? Do you think in a syndicalist or socialist society people would suffer layabouts gladly? Of course, since there would be so little wealth to go around everyone would have to work very hard, much harder than under capitalism. In fact, it is under capitalism that people are not forced to work. Everyone is so prosperous people can exist off charity or very minimal labour if they please.

[grassroots1]

Do you think there is any socio-economic system where you are not 'forced' by hunger to work?

Examine the difference between 19th century America and today's America and you'll know the answer to that question.

Do you think in a syndicalist or socialist society people would suffer layabouts gladly? Of course, since there would be so little wealth to go around everyone would have to work very hard, much harder than under capitalism. In fact, it is under capitalism that people are not forced to work. Everyone is so prosperous people can exist off charity or very minimal labour if they please.

This is so wrong it's almost quote-worthy. Again, history, my friend, history.

[ThePublicOpinions]

Code: Select allExamine the difference between 19th century America and today's America and you'll know the answer to that question.


Oh please, elaborate for me. I'm afraid my powers of telepathy are somewhat limited, so instead of me guessing what you want to say, why don't you just say it?

This is so wrong it's almost quote-worthy. Again, history, my friend, history.

Oh no sir, I am not wrong. You are wrong.

[grassroots1]

Fuck.

Production is bad for the environment in a sense but of course it's also necessary to sustain human life, the object is to find a balance between our growth and our environment, so that the one can sustain the other. We are playing a dangerous game right now, and I highly recommend that you do some research on the environmental issue or take an environmental science class if you believe that "recycling and greater resource extraction" are the solutions to our problems. Human influence on the environment extends far beyond what recycling can provide for us, and the problems are even more deeply rooted: the central cause of these externalities is, of course, the narrow self-interest of the corporation, which compels a company to cut corners on safety in the way that BP and Exxon did, leading to their respective oil spills, or which compels a company to dispose of waste in unsafe ways, or which compels a company to level whole forests without considering the effect that this has on our natural ecosystem. You need to wake up if you believe that the free market is the solution to these problems, because the free market is what caused them in the first place.

...products across the board have reduced in quality as a result of the type of consumerist, materialist, for-profit system that we are a part of. And that materialistic, consumerist path of incessant production and replacement is unsustainable from an environmental perspective, and is creating problems of waste that we will need to deal with in the future. Again, if you aren't aware of the extent of human effect on the environment (which includes eutrophication, pesticide contamination, depletion of aquifers, loss of forests which sustain natural cycles, damming of rivers which sustain natural cycles, expelling of gasses into the atmosphere which upset natural cycles, and more), you should take an environmental science class to learn more about the issue.

History:

The Gilded Age was a period of deflation and union activity which itself was borne from insufficient wages, living conditions, and excessively long hours among the industrial working class.

The free market unhindered led to the lowest standards of living that we have seen in the entire history of this country, and our country's experience at the beginning of the industrial revolution proves this. On a sidenote, I'm reading Dostoevsky's Demons right now, and one of the characters leaves a Russia in the era of serfdom to see America in order to see what it's like to live the hardest possible life of a member of the lower class. The character says he was beaten by his employer, and paid half of his promised wage. This was a book written in the 1860s, and this image already existed.

Give me a fucking break.

The Gilded Age was characterized by an active labor movement, by constant labor struggles and organizing, and some of the worst worker repression in American history. This is not a period of affluence and happy times for workers, as you make it out to be. It is no coincidence that the period of American history in which there were the fewest labor regulations was the period that had the most labor organizing in American history.

In 1865, 320,000 people marched for the 8-hour-workday and eventually they won it. Does that show a lack of success? And that is only in the very beginning of the Gilded Age.

Americans did have a significantly lower standard of living during the Gilded Age than they do now, and this was why there was such an active labor movement in the period.

in a free market with people's liberty protected, exploitation is impossible.

Only in the world of a libertarian. This ignores the reality of the worker-employer conflict, which we can see many examples of in the period you tout as a libertarian paradise: the 'Gilded Age.' If exploitation didn't exist in the capitalist system, businessmen would not petition the government to suppress strikes and workers' struggles. If exploitation didn't exist in our system, it would have to be true that there is no conscious effort to prevent worker unity and decrease the cost of labor. This is disproven by the existence of market science and concepts like division and separation of workers along racial lines, which businessmen consciously took advantage of. If exploitation didn't exist in our system, owners of businesses would not have desired to own slaves, and used violence to protect the institution. This is undeniable, conscious exploitation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_plantations_in_Hawaii#Importing_labor:

In 1850, the first imported worker arrived from China.[6] Between 1852–1887, 26,000 Chinese arrived to work in Hawaii, while 38% of them returned to China.[6] To maintain a workforce unable to organize effectively against them, plantation managers diversified the ethnicities of their workforce, and in 1868 the first Japanese arrived to work on the plantations.[1] Between 1885–1924, 200,000 Japanese people arrived with 55% returning to Japan.[6] Between 1903–1910, 7,300 Koreans arrived and only 16% returned to Korea.[6] In 1906 Filipino people first arrived. Between 1909 and 1930, 112,800 Filipinos came to Hawaii with 36% returning to the Philippines.[6]

Plantation owners worked hard to keep in place a hierarchical caste system that prevented worker organization and divided the camps based on ethnic identity.[2] An interesting outcome of this multi-cultural workforce and globalization of plantation workers was the emergence of a common language. Known as Hawaiian Pidgin, this hybrid primarily of Hawaiian, English, Japanese, Chinese, and Portuguese allowed plantation workers to communicate effectively with one another and promoted a transfer of knowledge and traditions amongst the groups.[9] A comparison of 1959–2005 racial categories shows the ongoing shifts.

Let me get this straight... you need substantiation for the claim that the industrial revolution brought with it dismal working conditions? Why do you think the theory of communism exists? Why do you think the labor movement exists if not because of the conditions created by the system these people lived in? You think people struggled and were mowed down on numerous occasions for fun? 320,000 people marching for the 8-hour-day in the years immediately after the civil war does not indicate a pretty picture for working people. The accounts of immigrants in tenements in the latter part of the 19th century does not indicate a pretty picture for working people. Those massive lists of strikes and workers' struggles that both me and Red_Barn showed you in the thread about the Gilded Age do not indicate a pretty picture for working people. You are selectively picking out your evidence and saying, "see? High life expectancy means people were doing fine," when this ignores the vast amounts of evidence to the contrary from the period indicating an incredibly active labor movement and a fundamental conflict between the worker and the employer.

Yet again, the labor movement itself was a contributing factor in if not a central reason for the increase in wages in the period.

More history:

During the labor unrest of the late 19th century, businessmen hired Pinkerton agents to infiltrate unions, and as guards to keep strikers and suspected unionists out of factories. The best known such confrontation was the Homestead Strike of 1892, in which Pinkerton agents were called in to enforce the strikebreaking measures of Henry Clay Frick, acting on behalf of Andrew Carnegie, who was abroad; the ensuing conflicts between Pinkerton agents and striking workers led to several deaths on both sides. The Pinkertons were also used as guards in coal, iron, and lumber disputes in Illinois, Michigan, New York, and Pennsylvania, as well as the Great Railroad Strike of 1877.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinkerton_National_Detective_Agency

The Lowell System combined large-scale mechanization with an attempt to improve the stature of its female workforce and workers. A few girls who came with their mothers or older sisters were as young as ten years old, some were middle-aged, but the average age was about 24.[4] Usually hired for contracts of one year (the average stay was about four years), new employees were given assorted tasks as sparehands and paid a fixed daily wage while more experienced loom operators would be paid by the piece. They were paired with more experienced women, who trained them in the ways of the factory.[3]

Conditions in the Lowell mills were severe by modern American standards. Employees worked from five am until seven pm, for an average 73 hours per week.[3][4] Each room usually had 80 women working at machines, with two male overseers managing the operation. The noise of the machines was described by one worker as "something frightful and infernal", and although the rooms were hot, windows were often kept closed during the summer so that conditions for thread work remained optimal. The air, meanwhile, was filled with particles of thread and cloth.[7].

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lowell_Mill_Girls#Factory_conditions


http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=49&t=125266&

Go ahead and read the whole thread, it's got plenty of information.

Need I go on?


Man, I can't stop, this horrible experience produced some gems:

The problem here, RPA, is that discussions that I have with you are always side-tracked. I attempt to discuss what I see to be the real crux of the problem: that people in our society are crushed by the system of property that they are born into, that is set up around them, by no fault of their own... but then all that ends up happening is that we discuss the definition of what exploitation is. I'm trying to discuss the issue that brilliant minds are lost to poverty, desperation, etc. as a result of the system we live in, but all that we can discuss is whether this is the employer's responsibility. This is why I lazily defended the second definition of exploitation [the one that does not group all forms of labor under the category 'exploitation], because I don't particularly care what you call it, I just want to discuss this actual issue: by no fault of their own, and in defense of a system of property which is man-made, people are crushed by the natural fluctuations of the market, and by the concerted efforts of elites to maintain their status.

I'm not suggesting that the employer himself provide these necessities, but that workers are justified in demanding them, in that any starving or suffering person would do the same; it cannot be assumed that these workers are in their position by any fault of their own, and therefore their suffering is unjustified, not to mention unproductive. I don't believe that employers should provide these necessities, but that they should be provided on a society-wide basis through taxation, as a collective. I don't find this as any violation of any golden rule of property, because I don't hold property to be sacred to begin with. It is not my fault that I was born into a world where people believe that they can own the products of the Earth, even to the point that they believe they can hoard wealth while others are unjustifiedly starving. I have no qualms about wealth redistribution for the sake of righting a moral wrong and, on top of it, creating a more productive society.

Man, I like myself better back then.

Have fun with that thread, buddy. I've done this many times, at this point.

[ThePublicOpinions]

19th century America saw standards of living skyrocketing for the poor. You fall into the trap of thinking "things are better now, ergo the socioeconomic system then was to blame". Well no, we have had 100 years of production, economic growth and technological development between now and then. But North America is VERY rich, and it is rich because we used to have laissez-faire capitalism. When you argue against freedom, you argue against prosperity.


P.S. try not to aids up this thread by copy and pasting a bunch of stuff no one wants to read. If you aren't willing to take the time to write out your own thoughts, don't write out anything. I could copy and paste mises articles all day, but that is just going to lower the quality of a thread, because people will just skip past it. If you could actually delete that whole last post that would be awesome.

[lubbockjoe]

That is a hierarchy, to be sure, but not an authoritarian structure. No one is forced to participate, all of those individuals are free to leave that organization. It is voluntary and not coercive.

That no one is forced to participate, all individuals are free to leave an organization does not mean that capitalism is not an authoritarian structure.
Authority [power] can be expressed in degrees from extreme to minimal.

When I hear 'authoritarian' I imagine jack booted thugs, people being sent to slave labour camps, state control over everything, wealth redistribution on a massive scale

The authoritarianism you describe is late-stage authoritarianism.

Do you think there would be no power to enforce rules or exact obedience in a syndicalist society?

The subject of this thread is the anarcho-capitalist conundrum.

If I just ran around murdering people I would not be stopped? No one would judge me or determine my fate?

How does that relate to the thread topic?

Does an employer or an employee have authority?

Authority - the power to enforce rules, exact obedience, command, determine, or judge.

And your answer is?

[ThePublicOpinions]

How does that relate to the thread topic?

By your definition, every political ideology is 'authoritarian'. Thus the term is useless. No one seriously believes we can live in a world without rules.

[lubbockjoe]

By your definition, every political ideology is 'authoritarian'. Thus the term is useless.

This is the second time you've made that false statement. I have previously addressed your false claim.

No one seriously believes we can live in a world without rules.

If you've noticed, we're in the anarchism forum...

Anarchists are people who rebel against any authority, established order, or ruling power.

Capitalism is not opposed to the accumulation of obscene amounts of wealth [power] into the hands of the few.

Do you see the anarcho-capitalist contradiction?

The defacto authority would be the capitalist. Do you agree or disagree?

Does an employer or an employee have authority?

Authority - the power to enforce rules, exact obedience, command, determine, or judge.

Still waiting...

[ThePublicOpinions]

Authority - the power to enforce rules, exact obedience, command, determine, or judge.

So, in your proposed anarchistic society, no one would have the power to enforce rules? If I ran around killing people no one would have the power to enforce the 'no killing' rule? Would there be a no killing rule?

[grassroots1]

19th century America saw standards of living skyrocketing for the poor. You fall into the trap of thinking "things are better now, ergo the socioeconomic system then was to blame". Well no, we have had 100 years of production, economic growth and technological development between now and then. But North America is VERY rich, and it is rich because we used to have laissez-faire capitalism. When you argue against freedom, you argue against prosperity.

The reason people on the lower rungs of the economic ladder even have the opportunities they do today is BECAUSE of taxation, because of social services, because of regulation. There can be all the economic growth in the world but if wealth is not distributed in a way where everyone benefits, then you see massive disparities, and you see an underclass and an upperclass. This is essentially what existed in the late 19th century. There was an active labor movement in the United States because of the lack of power of the worker and because of dismal conditions, and this movement resulted in the creation of certain standards like occupational safety, the 8-hour-day, the weekend, the minimum wage, etc. In that sense, standard of living did increase. Workers united and fought against their employers because they could only "negotiate" with their employer as a united working population. But don't think this is some friendly little contractual game. Employers would bring in Pinkerton guards and infiltrate and sabotage these unions, they would brike up meetings and strikes by force, and ultimately sometimes it resulted in events like the Ludlow Massacre.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre

Colliers had little opportunity to air their grievances. Many colliers resided in company towns, in which all land, real estate, and amenities were owned by the mine operator, and which were expressly designed to inculcate loyalty and squelch dissent.[16] Welfare Capitalists believed that anger and unrest among the workers could be placated by raising colliers' standard of living, while subsuming it under company management. Company towns indeed brought tangible improvements to the lives of many colliers and their families, including larger houses, better medical care, and broader access to education.[17] However, ownership of the towns provided companies considerable control over all aspects of workers' lives, and this power was not always used to augment public welfare. Historian Philip S. Foner has described company towns as "feudal domain[s], with the company acting as lord and master. ... The 'law' consisted of the company rules. Curfews were imposed. Company guards - brutal thugs armed with machine guns and rifles loaded with soft-point bullets - would not admit any 'suspicious' stranger into the camp and would not permit any miner to leave." Furthermore, miners who raised the ire of the company were liable to find themselves and their families summarily evicted from their homes.[18]

Frustrated by working conditions which they felt were unsafe and unjust, colliers increasingly turned to unionism. Nationwide, organized mines boasted 40 percent fewer fatalities than nonunion mines.[19] Colorado miners had repeatedly attempted to unionize since the state's first strike in 1883. The Western Federation of Miners organized primarily hard rock miners in the gold and silver camps during the 1890s. Beginning in 1900, the UMWA began organizing coal miners in the western states, including southern Colorado. The UMWA decided to focus on the CF&I because of the company's harsh management tactics under the conservative and distant Rockefellers and other investors. To break or prevent strikes, the coal companies hired strike breakers, mainly from Mexico and southern and eastern Europe. CF&I's management mixed immigrants of different nationalities in the mines, a practice which discouraged communication that might lead to organization.

...

On the morning of April 20, the day after Easter was celebrated by the many Greek immigrants at Ludlow, three Guardsmen appeared at the camp ordering the release of a man they claimed was being held against his will. This request prompted the camp leader, Louis Tikas, to meet with a local militia commander at the train station in Ludlow village, a half mile (0.8 km) from the colony. While this meeting was progressing, two companies of militia installed a machine gun on a ridge near the camp and took a position along a rail route about half a mile south of Ludlow. Anticipating trouble, Tikas ran back to the camp. The miners, fearing for the safety of their families, set out to flank the militia positions. A firefight soon broke out.
Karl Linderfelt, center. Photo caption reads: "OFFICERS OF THE COLORADO NATIONAL GUARD From left to right: Captain R. J. Linderfelt, Lieut. T. C. Linderfelt, Lieut. K. E. Linderfelt, (who faced the charge of assault upon Louis Tikas, the dead strike leader), Lieut. G.S. Lawrence and Major Patrick Hamrock. The last three were in the Ludlow battle of April 20, 1914."

The fighting raged for the entire day. The militia was reinforced by non-uniformed mine guards later in the afternoon. At dusk, a passing freight train stopped on the tracks in front of the Guards' machine gun placements, allowing many of the miners and their families to escape to an outcrop of hills to the east called the "Black Hills." By 7:00 p.m., the camp was in flames, and the militia descended on it and began to search and loot the camp. Louis Tikas had remained in the camp the entire day and was still there when the fire started. Tikas and two other men were captured by the militia. Tikas and Lt. Karl Linderfelt, commander of one of two Guard companies, had confronted each other several times in the previous months. While two militiamen held Tikas, Linderfelt broke a rifle butt over his head. Tikas and the other two captured miners were later found shot dead. Tikas had been shot in the back.[20] Their bodies lay along the Colorado and Southern tracks for three days in full view of passing trains. The militia officers refused to allow them to be moved until a local of a railway union demanded the bodies be taken away for burial.

During the battle, four women and eleven children had been hiding in a pit beneath one tent, where they were trapped when the tent above them was set on fire. Two of the women and all of the children suffocated. These deaths became a rallying cry for the UMWA, who called the incident the "Ludlow Massacre."[21]

For some reason people see unions as a whole as evil little organizations but in reality originally there were extremely necessary, extremely noble acts that brought them into existence. And now you want to move back to a laissez-faire system so that workers can once again be exploited so that we can once again have a labor movement and win these regulations? I don't understand it... we've moved past this stage and history and people have been convinced to advocate the complete dismantling of everything that was won. We should have, as I said, universal systems of education and health care provided to every man, woman, and child, paid for through taxation by the collective and for the collective. This is basic shit, and we should have it already, or we should be fighting for it. Instead we're moving in the opposite direction.

More things for you to look at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1912_Lawrence_Textile_Strike#The_background_to_the_strike
Creation of the WFM: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Federation_of_Miners
And the IWW: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Workers_of_the_World

P.S. try not to aids up this thread by copy and pasting a bunch of stuff no one wants to read. If you aren't willing to take the time to write out your own thoughts, don't write out anything. I could copy and paste mises articles all day, but that is just going to lower the quality of a thread, because people will just skip past it. If you could actually delete that whole last post that would be awesome.

I posted things I've written about the history of the country, which is what you asked of me. It's all pertinent and on-topic.

By your definition, every political ideology is 'authoritarian'.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_socialism

[lubbockjoe]

So, in your proposed anarchistic society, no one would have the power to enforce rules?

You need to read the OP and read the thread title. I'm asking, not proposing.

If I ran around killing people no one would have the power to enforce the 'no killing' rule? Would there be a no killing rule?

You're asking as if I've taken positions on those things.

Do you see the anarcho-capitalist contradiction?

The defacto authority would be the capitalist. Do you agree or disagree?

Does an employer or an employee have authority?

Authority - the power to enforce rules, exact obedience, command, determine, or judge.

Still waiting...

[Daktoria]

As I understand it, anarchists are opposed to humans having too much power and authority. In this world, money equals power. More money equals more power. Capitalism is not opposed to the accumulation of obscene amounts of wealth into the hands of the few. This seems like an anarcho-capitalist conundrum to me. Why is this not a problem for anarcho-capitalists?

Would justice be limited to those who can afford it in an anarcho-capitalist society? Would justice be administered on a sliding scale according to the victim’s ability to pay? Would the poor receive justice assuming they had no money?

Since anarchists are opposed to authority, how would the enforcement of justice be carried out? Would prisons exist?

This is so relative it's almost impossible to know where to start.

How do you define too much power? Market anarchists aren't opposed to monopolies.

The issue at hand is quality, not quantity. You have to ask yourself, "Is the strategy I'm playing according to respectful of the game itself?"

If you cheat to win, then you've destroyed the definition of winning because the objective wasn't really there. On the other hand, if you play by the rules without exploiting how the rules are vague, it doesn't matter what happens because the objective was published for everyone to see.

For example, if we play rock, paper, scissors, but you say you're allowed to change your sign after I throw mine out, there isn't really a competition because you have access to my internal decision making. It'd be no different from masturbation. You're not actually engaging another independent actor.

On the other hand, you also have to make sure you're not designing games which defeat the purpose of playing. For example, if you design a game where a random element puts someone in an unbalanced position, then it begs the question why people would want to play. Again, you've destroyed the value of independent action because you've made people dependent upon an external force.

This is why I'm having trouble understanding what you mean by "obscene amounts of wealth". It doesn't matter how big you are. What matters is how you became so large.

Justice is something that fundamentally depends upon the mindsets of the mighty. It doesn't matter what system you put in place if the mighty don't care to play by the rules.

[lubbockjoe]

How do you define too much power?

That would be for the anarchist living in the ancap society to decide.

Market anarchists aren't opposed to monopolies.

Of course they aren’t. Capitalists are not opposed to the accumulation of obscene amounts of wealth into the hands of the few.

The issue at hand is quality, not quantity. You have to ask yourself, "Is the strategy I'm playing according to respectful of the game itself?"

If you cheat to win, then you've destroyed the definition of winning because the objective wasn't really there. On the other hand, if you play by the rules without exploiting how the rules are vague, it doesn't matter what happens because the objective was published for everyone to see.

For example, if we play rock, paper, scissors, but you say you're allowed to change your sign after I throw mine out, there isn't really a competition because you have access to my internal decision making. It'd be no different from masturbation. You're not actually engaging another independent actor.

On the other hand, you also have to make sure you're not designing games which defeat the purpose of playing. For example, if you design a game where a random element puts someone in an unbalanced position, then it begs the question why people would want to play. Again, you've destroyed the value of independent action because you've made people dependent upon an external force.

Which OP question does that answer?

This is why I'm having trouble understanding what you mean by "obscene amounts of wealth".

Evenly distributed wealth would indicate a fair economic system. As wealth becomes less evenly distributed the economic system increases in unfairness. The wealth distribution in the capitalistic United States of America today is obscene.

It doesn't matter how big you are. What matters is how you became so large.

Why does that matter?

[ThePublicOpinions]

The reason people on the lower rungs of the economic ladder even have the opportunities they do today is BECAUSE of taxation, because of social services, because of regulation.

Every nation has had taxation and regulation, they aint all prosperous.

[ThePublicOpinions]

Of course they aren’t. Capitalists are not opposed to the accumulation of obscene amounts of wealth into the hands of the few.

Capitalists are not opposed to those who create wealth retaining ownership over it. Every other ideology wishes to steal wealth. There are only two ways you can gain wealth, through creation, or theft. If you do not support the right of someone who creates wealth to own it, you must defacto support theft.

[lubbockjoe]

ThePublicOpinions,
It is appropriate for you to answer the questions you have been avoiding in this thread:

Do you see the anarcho-capitalist contradiction?

The defacto authority would be the capitalist. Do you agree or disagree?

Does an employer or an employee have authority?

Authority - the power to enforce rules, exact obedience, command, determine, or judge.

[ThePublicOpinions]

It is extremely hypocritical for you to accuse me of dodging the point when you have failed to address this central problem with your criticism.

Authority - the power to enforce rules, exact obedience, command, determine, or judge.

By this overly broad definition of 'authoritarian' EVERY society, every imagined society or socio-economic system is 'authoritarian'. Thus it is useless to label capitalism as 'authoritarian' when the same is true of every other system.

[Daktoria]

Evenly distributed wealth would indicate a fair economic system. As wealth becomes less evenly distributed the economic system increases in unfairness. The wealth distribution in the capitalistic United States of America today is obscene.

Social democracy is nice until you realize that people are not created evenly in the first place.

If you're looking for something to blame for unfair inequality, don't blame capitalists. Blame nature.

The best we can do is align our talents with our decision making abilities, and unfortunately, as human beings, we can't create psychic links, so we have to trust individualist judgment. Even in a social democratic society, our political decisions would boil down to individual initiative in deciding how to communicate and otherwise behave.

Why does that matter?

The very concept of "mattering" is qualitative, not quantitative.

[lubbockjoe]

By this overly broad definition of 'authoritarian' EVERY society, every imagined society or socio-economic system is 'authoritarian'.
Thus it is useless to label capitalism as 'authoritarian' when the same is true of every other system.

Is capitalism authoritarian? That is the question.

I have not taken a position on every imagined society or socio-economic system being or not being authoritarian. That is not the subject of this thread.

Anarchists are opposed to authoritarianism.

Capitalism is authoritarian.

Do you see the anarcho-capitalist contradiction?

The defacto authority would be the capitalist. Do you agree or disagree?

Does an employer or an employee have authority?

Authority - the power to enforce rules, exact obedience, command, determine, or judge.

[myrmeleo]

lubbockjoe, there is no such thing as a society without authority, anarchist or otherwise. Your definition, being as broad as it is, implicates any ideology. Your inclusion of an-cap isn't that significant.