Correct me if I’m wrong, but from my understanding ancaps want the world to be ruled by companies instead of governments, isn’t that already happening? Albeit in an indirect way?
Well what they want and what would happen if they implemented their proposals aren't necessarily the same.
As far as I'm aware, though I don't frequent many places where Anarcho-capitalists and/or Libertarians discuss stuff, they generally argue that many of the ills of capitalism come from corporat
ism and/or regulatory capture, and that diminishing the role of the state will weaken these things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatismhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_captureThe anarcho-capitalist idea naively believes that if you get rid of regulators then everything will, by 'natural law', become a level playing field of men trading with men (and it's almost always men who are advocates) as free equals. There are definite reasons for a lot of these ideologies where almost all of the proponents are men - they tend to focus on the individual and you sink or swim based on merit, starving to death if you're not worthy of competing. Women generally seem to value stability (risk adverse vs risk-taking), and they can see how unstable such a society would actually be: these individualist ideologies are at their weakest when explaining how we can ensure the next generation of children grow up to be good citizens: you either starve to death or thrive purely based on 'parent lotto' that you lucked out and had good parents, and with the social safety net being seen as an evil thing to be abolished. Women, who are more subject to unavoidable financial ups and downs (such as having a kid, single mother etc) generally don't find this "work or starve" philosophy quite so appealing. I think about half the total women into this stuff are employed as media pundits of various types.
You can argue against Anarcho-Capitalism from a Historical Materialism perspective: political power flows
from the economic status quo. What that suggests is that if you actually abolished the state and it's role in corporatism, then the corporations would form something else to fill the role of the state, which is itself just a reflection of the economic status quo. And we have a name for that "The Cartel".
So those are my major criticisms of Anarcho-Capitalism; the lack of any mechanism for preventing the formation of The Cartel, the lack of acknowledgement of differentials in economic bargaining power, and the lack of acknowledgement of the effect of forces beyond the individual's control on their own economic success: "I pulled myself up by my bootstraps, so if you won't do the same, why should we allow you to have shoes?"
Anarch-
Syndicalism on the other hand does have explicit mechanisms to prevent a cartel from forming: form your own cartel. From the Historical Materialism perspective, you can state that there will
always be a political "shadow" of whatever economic relations exist, you can't just have a vacuum there, so any proposed system must have proposed mechanisms to fill that void.
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