Anarcho-capitalism returns to the foreground: a Latin American critique takes aim at the market as moral order
On 9 June 2026, the international press agency Pressenza published a Spanish-language essay arguing that anarcho-capitalism does not liberate the human being from the state so much as reclassify them as a tradable asset, a unit of self-owning capital whose dignity is measured by the contracts they can carry. The piece, titled "Una crítica al anarco-capitalismo y su cosificación del ser humano," lands in a moment when libertarian thinking has returned to political prominence across the Americas — visible in the language of Argentine President Javier Milei's self-described "anarcho-capitalist" project, in the U.S. crypto lobby's deregulatory demands, and in the rise of small free-market parties from Chile to Mexico.
The Pressenza essay's central claim is straightforward: the market, treated as a moral order, does not abolish hierarchy. It translates political hierarchy into contractual hierarchy, and turns the person into what the author calls a "thing-like" subject — one whose rights are exhausted by the agreements they sign. The essay is short, and it does not pretend to settle the question. It does, however, foreground an objection that the libertarian mainstream has grown visibly uncomfortable with: that the person inside the model is interchangeable with the firm.
The argument, in plain terms
Pressenza's author begins from a familiar libertarian premise: that the state is a coercive monopoly, and that voluntary exchange is the only legitimate form of human coordination. From there, the essay pushes a different direction than the standard Rothbardian or Hayekian restatement. If the only test of a relationship is whether it was consented to, and if consent can be manufactured through need, indebtedness, or the absence of an outside option, then "voluntary" stops doing any work. The worker who accepts a one-sided contract is not exercising sovereignty; they are absorbing the asymmetry the state was supposed to correct. The essay is sharper than this: it argues that the anarcho-capitalist picture does not simply fail to abolish exploitation, it dignifies exploitation as freedom.
A second line of argument runs at the level of anthropology. The essay contends that treating the human being as a self-owning proprietor presupposes the very metaphysics of property it claims to derive from contract. To call a person a "self-owner" is already to have smuggled in an account of what a person is — a holder, an estate, a thing that can be transacted with. Pressenza's writer takes this to be the deeper scandal: the philosophy, on its own terms, makes the human being into a commodity. There is no neutral ground between "owner" and "owned."
The libertarian counter-read
The libertarian tradition has not been silent on these objections. Murray Rothbard, in For a New Liberty and The Ethics of Liberty, conceded that consent in a free society would still be unequal; he argued that this was preferable to state coercion, not equivalent to it. The standard reply to the asymmetry complaint is that exit is the discipline — that a worker who dislikes their contract can refuse it, accumulate capital, and become an employer in turn. The model is, in the libertarian telling, dynamic rather than static. Critics have long answered that the cost of exit is high, that the credit necessary to become a capital-holder is gated by the very property relations the model assumes, and that the worker's bargaining position is structurally weak at every wage.
A second reply, more common among contemporary minarchists than among self-described anarcho-capitalists, is to disclaim the label altogether. Milei himself has occasionally conceded in interviews that "anarcho-capitalist" is a useful provocation rather than a serious policy programme; his actual government has rebuilt several state functions it inherited, particularly in macroeconomic management. The Pressenza essay is not addressing Milei the policymaker; it is addressing the framework that Milei, in his more theatrical registers, has put back into circulation in Spanish. The framework is the target, not the cabinet.
Where the argument sits in the region
Latin America is, in 2026, the part of the world where the libertarian vocabulary is loudest in mainstream politics. Argentina's La Libertad Avanza holds the presidency and a workable bloc in the legislature; Chile's Partido Libertario runs a small but disciplined minority; the Movimiento Libertario tradition in Costa Rica and Panama continues to seed municipal candidacies. None of these movements are strictly anarcho-capitalist in the Rothbardian sense — most are minarchist in practice and culturally libertarian in style. But the theoretical scaffolding is reaching a Spanish-reading audience that did not have it fifteen years ago, and the Pressenza essay is part of a left-of-liberal response.
What is interesting about Pressenza's framing is that it does not attack libertarianism from a state-socialist platform. The agency's editorial line is pacifist, communitarian, and federalist; it is closer to the Christian libertarian tradition of Dorothy Day than to any Marxist tradition. The critique is therefore not "the market is unjust" but "the market, taken as a complete moral system, corrodes the category of the person." That is a narrower claim, and a more durable one. It does not require the writer to defend a planned economy; it requires them to defend the human being against absorption into the market's categories.
What remains contested
The essay does not adjudicate a question the libertarian tradition has not resolved: whether exit is real. If exit is real, then consent under asymmetric bargaining is meaningful, and the framework survives. If exit is fictional for the great majority, then the framework collapses into an apology for power. Pressenza's author treats the second horn as obviously true; this publication notes that it is the live question, and that the evidence on labour mobility, household debt, and small-business formation is mixed in ways the essay does not engage with. A serious engagement with the libertarian moment in the Americas will have to take that empirical work on.
There is also a question of scope. The essay treats anarcho-capitalism as if it were a coherent theoretical object. In the Spanish-speaking world it is, in practice, a coalition of provocateurs, classical liberals, minarchists, and a small orthodox Rothbardian wing. The Pressenza piece addresses the orthodoxy; the politics is conducted by the coalition. Critics who want to reach the coalition have to address the policy positions — dollarisation, deregulation, austerity, judicial reform — rather than the first principles.
The deeper question, on which the essay is honest and the libertarian tradition is defensive, is what a society owes the person who cannot exit. Every political philosophy has to answer it. The state-philosophy tradition answers with the welfare floor; the socialist tradition answers with the commons; the libertarian tradition has historically answered with charity, family, and voluntary association. Pressenza's essay argues, fairly, that none of these has ever been adequate to the scale of need, and that the philosophy has no plan for the person who falls through all three. The argument is not novel. It is, in the present moment, worth restating.
The Monexus desk note: the libertarian moment in the Americas is usually covered as a question of macroeconomic policy — dollarisation, deregulation, the IMF. Pressenza's essay is a reminder that the more interesting question is the one underneath: what kind of being does the market presuppose, and what happens to the people the market cannot reach.