Libertaria Dispatch Chapter Zero — Frankfurt & Budapest
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Manifestos

We Are Not an Anthill

After state capitalism, let the economic systems compete.

Markus Maiwald
15 min read
We Are Not an Anthill
The argument, in brief

The economy defended as capitalism increasingly joins private wealth to political protection. Socialism appeals to young people who want security and a future, while business owners confront the costs that promises conceal. Replacing private oligarchs with a compulsory public investment monopoly leaves the problem of domination intact. Fractalism permits socialist Chapters, worker cooperatives, mutual finance and shared provision alongside private enterprise. Every model must respect personal rights, fair procedure and effective exit. The next step is competition between economic systems beneath a common constitutional protection floor.

A young person looks at the price of a home, the insecurity of work and the fortunes accumulated by people who already own everything worth buying. Someone tells them this is capitalism and that capitalism means freedom. They hear a defence of the door that has closed in their face.

A business owner looks at the next payroll, the invoice a customer still has not paid and the taxes due regardless of whether the month went well. Someone promises universal security through a much larger public apparatus. The owner wants to know who produces what the apparatus intends to distribute, and who absorbs the failure when its calculations are wrong.

Both are looking at something real. A political argument becomes dishonest when it treats either experience as a defect of character.

Jacobin’s panel, How Do We Make Socialism Work in the Real World?, deserves a serious answer because its participants attempt the difficult part. They discuss firms, investment, prices, democracy and the failures of previous socialist arrangements. Ben Burgis defends a role for markets and firms that can fail. Aaron Benanav insists that sustainability, security and the quality of work belong in economic decisions. Nicole Aschoff warns that domination can survive a change in formal institutions. These are substantial questions.

The related book, The Blueprint, by Bhaskar Sunkara, Ben Burgis and Mike Beggs, proposes worker control together with competitive markets and state planning. An argument against that proposal has to address those institutions. Repeating that Soviet planners could not supply the right consumer goods does not settle a debate with people who already acknowledge the problem. Verso, The Blueprint.

My disagreement concerns the political conclusion. Their answer to the present order is socialism. My answer is that no economic school receives authority to organize everybody’s life. After the order we currently call capitalism comes the competition between the isms, beneath the umbrella of Fractalism.

That includes socialism. It also includes the person who declines it.

The capitalism we are asked to defend

Private businesses, investment and markets plainly exist. Calling them imaginary would be nonsense. The fraud lies in presenting the dominant arrangement as a free competitive order in which the same rules apply to the small producer and the institution whose failure would embarrass a government.

The capitalism invoked in its defence promises voluntary exchange, open entry, responsibility for losses and the ability to challenge an incumbent by offering something better. State capitalism joins commercial ownership to political protection. The state need not own every factory. It can protect selected owners, allocate advantages, support financing and make access to political decisions part of the business model. I use the term here for that wider alliance between public power and private capital.

A company that must persuade its customers inhabits a different competitive world from one that can also persuade the people writing its competitors’ obligations. Both may issue shares. The similarity tells us very little about how their power works.

There is evidence for the mechanism. An IMF working paper examined how firms responded to the American federal procurement cuts of 2013. Companies heavily exposed to the cuts maintained or increased lobbying while less exposed companies reduced it. The authors found the evidence more consistent with rent seeking than with the benign explanation that lobbying merely supplies useful information. Securing a place at the public table is itself an economic strategy. Agca, Igan, Li and Mishra, 2019.

Emergency finance illustrates another boundary. In March 2023 the Federal Reserve announced bank loans against eligible securities valued at par, rather than their depressed market value. Protecting depositors and preventing a payments crisis were the stated purposes. Those purposes matter. So does the difference between an ordinary enterprise confronting the market value of its assets and a financial institution receiving an exceptional public financing mechanism. Defending a rescue does not turn it into an example of unaided market discipline. Federal Reserve, 12 March 2023.

The route toward oligarchy is a feedback loop. Wealth buys political access. Access helps secure advantages. Advantages protect and enlarge wealth. The beneficiaries then have more resources with which to shape the next round of rules. Entry becomes expensive, failure becomes negotiable and the public is asked to regard the resulting hierarchy as the reward for competition.

Oligarchy is the point at which that loop becomes a durable governing arrangement: the people who benefit from the rules acquire disproportionate power over their revision. Its approach should be judged by how difficult it becomes to enter, challenge and leave the system. An historical countdown to capitalism’s final day adds nothing. The closure of actual alternatives is the danger already in front of us.

Private ownership alone does not establish liberty. A dominant private platform can hold a person’s livelihood, records or relationships hostage. Fractalism has to confront that power as well. A defence that excuses every form of private domination would simply give the oligarch a different vocabulary.

Why socialism is attractive

Socialism offers a morally intelligible promise: your access to care, housing and a tolerable life should survive bad luck, illness and the bargaining power of someone richer. For a young person without assets, that promise speaks directly to the future they fear losing.

Gallup’s September 2026 report found that American adults aged eighteen to thirty-four viewed socialism positively at 57 percent and capitalism at 43 percent. Among people fifty-five and older, the pattern reversed: capitalism received 65 percent and socialism 34 percent. These are impressions of labels, not votes for a fully specified economic constitution. The same survey found substantial affection for free enterprise and overwhelming approval of small business. Young people have not collectively signed an order abolishing markets. Gallup, 23 September 2026.

Gallup’s separate open-ended research is more revealing about the attraction. The principal benefits Americans associated with socialism were a social safety net and greater equality. Younger respondents were especially likely to mention equality and basic services. A word can become the container for everything people believe the existing arrangement has denied them. Affordable housing and reliable healthcare fit into that container much more easily than the minutes of an investment board. Gallup, 6 August 2026.

My reading is that socialism’s appeal often begins with security, belonging and the demand for a fair chance. It gains force when the people preaching competition defend privileged incumbents. The young listener sees political protection working beautifully for the already powerful and wonders why protection becomes an economic sin when requested by someone trying to get started.

Youth also makes the promise of reconstruction attractive. There is less reason to preserve an arrangement in which you have accumulated little. A doctrine offering a new beginning gives frustration an explanation, a community and a direction. Its account of the destination usually arrives before its account of the costs.

A business owner who is a net fiscal contributor encounters those costs from another direction. Wages have to be paid before the owner’s reward is known. Equipment wears out. Demand changes. A promise of provision must eventually become a claim on somebody’s output, time or accumulated capital. Having to make those calculations can produce a particular distrust of politics that announces the entitlement and postpones the arithmetic.

That is a difference in exposure, not a law dividing enlightened taxpayers from foolish youth. Young workers pay taxes. Entrepreneurs can be socialists. Workers can run successful cooperatives. A large company demanding subsidies while its owner condemns redistribution has no special standing to lecture anyone about self-reliance. Tax receipts do not certify wisdom, and an empty balance sheet does not invalidate a complaint about power.

The useful question is whether a proposed arrangement can provide the security it promises while preserving the freedom, incentives and productive capacity on which that security depends. Wanting a service does not establish that one particular ownership system is necessary to provide it.

The danger of a compulsory answer

The panel’s strongest participants recognize that people will continue to disagree after capitalism. Benanav explicitly defends liberal freedoms and warns that communities can dominate individuals. Burgis doubts that the state will simply disappear. They do not describe a future in which everybody miraculously wants the same thing.

Yet recognition of disagreement leaves an institutional question unanswered. What happens to the person whose preferred economic relationship has been prohibited?

Around the twenty-fifth minute, Burgis discusses barring large-scale wage labour while permitting competing worker-controlled firms. That is a consequential choice. A person may want a salary, limited responsibility and a predictable end to the working day. Another may want to build an enterprise and hire someone who freely prefers that arrangement. A universal prohibition would eliminate their option even when neither wants to join the cooperative model. Giving everyone a vote inside the prescribed institution does not restore the institution they were forbidden to choose.

Public control of investment creates a related risk. An investment board has to decide which uncertain projects receive resources. Its members will face incomplete knowledge, competing constituencies and pressure to protect yesterday’s decisions. Elections can change the personnel. They do not by themselves create an alternative source of finance for the dissenter whose project remains outside the approved priorities.

Hayek’s argument about dispersed knowledge belongs here. Relevant information is scattered among people who know a particular machine, customer, skill or local shortage. Firms of every ownership type must discover and use it. Retaining market prices acknowledges part of this problem. It does not establish that a political allocation system will handle investment better, or that its mistakes will be easier to challenge. Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” 1945.

Burgis himself raises the problem of soft budget constraints: an inefficient firm can persist because closing it would be politically painful. A public authority can protect a failing enterprise under the language of employment, community or strategic necessity. Today’s state capitalism already supplies reasons to distrust that practice. Social ownership does not make it disappear. When productive resources remain committed to failures, fewer are available for the people whose needs supplied the justification.

Nor does common ownership settle incentives. A cooperative must decide how to reward effort, accommodate illness, discipline misconduct, appoint managers, finance expansion and admit new members. Equal voting rights do not make those decisions easy. The costs of mistakes still have to fall somewhere. If the institution controls employment, housing and finance together, its internal disputes can reach into every part of a member’s life.

The masses bear the danger because the person without savings has the least room to escape an institution that fails or turns hostile. Replacing an owner with a committee does not give that person another employer, another lender or an independent appeal. A concentrated public economy can develop its own insiders, protected careers and mechanisms for excluding challengers. The title on the office door cannot tell us whether an oligarchy has been abolished.

We are not a termite hill or an ant colony. Human cooperation has to accommodate people with different ambitions, duties, beliefs and tolerances for risk. Some want shared ownership and extensive collective provision. Some want to work for themselves. Some would rather accept a salary than spend their evenings voting on a firm’s capital expenditure. A society that treats those differences as defects to be corrected will eventually require somebody to do the correcting.

The objection applies equally to compulsory market worship. Nobody should be forced to price every relationship, maximize income or abandon shared provision because an economist finds their arrangements inefficient. A community may value free time, care and continuity more than additional output. Its members must be able to choose that trade, and its leaders must remain answerable when members disagree.

Let the socialist Chapter build

Fractalism carries the protection of the person through every scale of association. People form Chapters; Chapters cooperate in larger federations. Each level inherits limits on power. The federation establishes a common protection floor while leaving communities considerable freedom to choose how they live and produce. “Fractalism,” 4 October 2026.

Within that floor, a socialist Chapter has room to build something substantial. Its members can own workshops together, pool agreed income, organize mutual finance, share housing and fund care through commitments they actually undertake. They can plan a common investment programme and operate enterprises whose customers pay market prices. They can decide that a shorter working week matters more than maximizing distributions to members.

The existence of customers does not require absentee shareholders. MONDRAGON’s cooperative movement reported more than eleven billion euros in sales for its industry and distribution cooperatives in 2025, and its industrial division earned 73 percent of sales in international markets. That is evidence that cooperative enterprise and market exchange can coexist at considerable scale. It proves neither that every employee is a cooperative member nor that an entire compulsory socialist economy would succeed. MONDRAGON results, reported by TU Lankide, 4 June 2026.

Imagine twenty people starting a workshop. They acquire the equipment through legitimate agreements, choose worker ownership, borrow from a mutual lender and establish a care fund. They publish how profits, losses, management and separation will work. Across the road, another person runs an individually owned business. A third community shares its internal production without money. All three can trade without acquiring jurisdiction over one another.

The socialist workshop can require that its own members participate in its ownership arrangement. It cannot use Chapter authority to seize the neighbouring business or control all of a member’s outside economic relationships. Its communal institutions have authority over the resources and responsibilities legitimately entrusted to them. Forming a Chapter creates no title to someone else’s workshop.

An internal investment board can allocate a voluntarily assembled common fund. It receives no monopoly over every person’s savings or every lawful source of finance. Mutual banks, cooperative funds and other willing financiers can offer alternatives. The Chapter may persuade people that its allocation method is better. It must live with their freedom to make another agreement.

None of this makes access to capital effortless. Existing wealth, infrastructure and bargaining power affect who can start anything. A serious socialist Chapter would have to build financing, training, reserves and routes into membership. Fractalism permits those institutions and protects the ability to form them. It supplies no magical endowment and no automatic claim on an unrelated person’s assets.

The constitutional obligations also reach inside the cooperative. Criticism remains protected. An accusation requires evidence and an answerable procedure. Representatives have defined mandates. A member does not have to leave before being entitled to fair treatment. A vote cannot waive another person’s core protections, and calling the arrangement a private contract cannot waive them either. The Federation Axioms.

Exit must be designed when membership is designed. The workshop needs clear rules for legitimate shares and claims, valuation, repayment and dispute resolution. Leaving does not entitle a member to carry away a jointly owned machine or cancel an honest debt. It also does not entitle the remaining members to confiscate the departing person’s claims, retain their identity records or compel their labour until the majority feels satisfied.

Shared care creates serious obligations. A parent cannot declare independence and abandon a child. A Chapter cannot dissolve its promises to dependent members by announcing a new philosophy. Existing responsibilities need a workable, funded settlement or handover by those who undertook them. The federation and neighbouring Chapters do not automatically inherit the bill. Freedom has to survive separation together with responsibility.

An exit clause becomes credible through those arrangements: accessible records, fair settlement, practical transfer and independent challenge. A door that opens only after you forfeit everything you legitimately own is a mechanism of captivity. The socialist Chapter has to solve that problem. So does the capitalist employer, the religious community and the federation itself.

A future with more than one answer

This is where socialism could thrive under Fractalism. People who want cooperative ownership could build it without waiting to capture an entire country. They could improve their institutions through practice, attract members through the lives those institutions make possible and trade with neighbours who choose differently. Their achievements would belong to the people doing the work. Their mistakes would have to remain contestable.

Competition between economic systems need not reduce every decision to the largest income. A member might choose lower earnings in exchange for reliable care, more time or greater influence at work. Another might choose a demanding enterprise with more risk and more personal control. Fractalism protects the freedom to make those choices. It denies every arrangement the right to trap a person, impose its costs on unwilling outsiders or disguise injury as an internal cultural preference.

The federation’s own protection and dispute institutions must earn the same scrutiny. Financing, independence and enforcement are real design problems. Writing a constitution does not solve them by declaration. They have to be built and tested alongside productive institutions, with continuity for people who depend on existing services. A transition that destroys care before replacing it has failed its own stated purpose. “The Post-Liberal Path,” 3 October 2026.

I dispute socialism’s claim to be the mandatory destination of history. I have no quarrel with people proving that a socialist form can sustain a good life when those living it retain their standing and their freedom. A model strong enough to deserve loyalty should be strong enough to encounter refusal.

The same challenge belongs on the desk of the capitalist. Compete without political shelter. Respect the people whose labour and information your enterprise uses. Let them organize, challenge your terms and leave. If your business requires their captivity, its private ownership is no defence.

The future after state capitalism should be open to more than another victorious doctrine. Let socialism build its Chapters. Let private enterprise build its own. Let mutualists, communalists and people with ideas we have not named enter the same world beneath a constitution that protects the person from all of them.

Build a cooperative people choose to join and can afford to leave. The neighbour who chooses another life is not raw material for your revolution.

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