I think the british royal navy became one of the more successful pirate gangs if that helps the analysis. They were part state subsidised, but became rapidly self sustaining. If your British made galleon is shit, don’t worry, it only needs to last long enough to steal a French made one!
Just a point of information though I think ‘capitalists’ normally (nominally) support property rights. I think you’re talking libertarian / anarchist who are more literally smash and grab. But it is a blurry line. At the end of the day they’re all just humans. Striving to label them, or their behaviour, and then second guessing the meaning of the labels, or expecting consistency will probably drive you insane.
It should just be that the government doesn’t patrol the high seas, of course! Every ship should enter into personal 1-on-1 contracts with each pirate for a market appropriate rate to ensure they don’t get attacked. The Libertrian way won’t cause any issues of scale, rampant loss of merchant ships, and an eventual ending of all oceangoing shipping outside of the handful of ships that can afford their own navies to escort them… /s
Because they were usually run democratically and that made it too easy to recruit crew from other ships.
Because they didn’t pay taxes. You’re looking for buccaneers aka licensed and registered pirates.
Privateers?
Edit. All buccaneers privateers but not all privateers buccaneers?
Edit edit: How much did you pay tor the gauges? A buck an ear.
Except megacorporations barely pay taxes, in fact, they get subsidies
They pay bribes, though!
They pay bribes to politicians, then the politicians write a law giving corporate more subsidies from your tax dollars, so in the end, corporate always wins.
I swear officer, I have my letter of marque here somewhere, just give me a sec…
Is the assumption here that the navies, of the various countries that have one, capture commerce ships to bring back to the home country? If so, I have some bad news for you. Hell, even in war they don’t capture said ships.
One set works within a system that they have set up to benefit only themselves.
The other works outside that system either for themselves or a separate collective. Working outside the measured control system is a direct threat to the profits the beneficiaries of that system.
Except that piracy has always been explicitly endorsed by the beneficiaries of the system, they simply change the name, structure the conditions such that their piracy is considered part of the system even if it isn’t and then proceed to be pirates.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privateer
Things get even more muddled when you consider that selfish agents may believe they are structuring a system for selfish gain when they are in fact destroying the system for everybody including themselves.
This is all notwithstanding the fact that most of where we get our modern day depiction of pirates as evil ne’er-do-wells is from Robert Newton films.
No greater crime in capitalism than to hurt your fellow capitalists. You’re supposed to squeeze the proles
Look how they did that little weasel Martin Shkreli. Insurance companies can steal from the people, but that little shit stole from them so they nailed him to the fucking wall.
I have a hypothesis that the Nassau pirates were a successful socialist economy. The Flying Gang/Republic of Pirates was founded mostly from former privateers (legally sanctioned and “licensed” marauders). The democratic and socialist nature of the republic was a growing threat to royalty and the American ruling class, especially given that Africans could be full crew members and even captains with all the rights afforded those roles. Furthermore, European royalty and American capitalists were the only ones “allowed” to pillage native lands. The pirates were in turn sacking European and American ships of their ill-gotten and exploitative gains.
Having a socialist, comparatively egalitarian and equitable society amidst the Carribean sugar plantations was too much of a threat to the ruling classes. The pirates were ruthlessly pursued and purged from history. Sure, King George I (and some others? don’t recall) first tried to bring the Nassau pirates (back) into the fold with offers of amnesty. This is analogous to offering modern engineers well-paying jobs; most terrorists whose names you know start out as engineers*. The ruling classes first wanted to put the pirates’ skills to use for their own gain. Benjamin Hornigold was one who returned, hunting down his former peers.
*think about that the next time you run across a bored, disgruntled engineer
I find it very odd that books on the golden age of piracy all remark how the pirates supposedly kept no records, yet discuss at length how the pirates had healthcare, disability, pensions, equitable wealth distribution… these things all require assiduous record-keeping. And so my bullshitspiration is that there were records. But the campaign to wipe out the pirates was so thorough that we are now led to believe that the pirates were just brigands and chaotic anarchists.
Nothing to add except to say that was a thought provoking read.
Just to say, they were still semi-anarchist in nature, but not in the modern sense where it means “chaos” rather the political sense where it means “absence of hierarchy and horizontally-structured self-governance”, which is representative of the confederated nature of the Flying Gang where the different crews were considered equal and all had a say in their governance, based in a mutually agreed upon code of conduct. Within the crews themselves, captains were more like delegates who were chosen to take on leadership responsibilities but were at the whims of the crew. Power came from the bottom up, not the top down. If a crew was displeased with how their captain led the ship they were well within their right to depose him and appointed a new one.
Anarchism is not the bad “chaos and disorder” that the ruling class would have you believe.
The age of piracy existed before anyone had uttered the word “capitalism”. It was an age of mercantilism and agrarianism, not capitalism.
I’d assume that capitalists aren’t happy about getting their ships nabbed by hostile navies, either. Generally, the only ones who get rich off this kind of violence and usually get away with it are the capitalists who build weapons, and only if their country never gets occupied.
Because they lost to us which makes us the victors thus we get to write history and since we get to write history we are in fact always the good guys.
Legalities aside, pirates are stealing from people with more resources, which is why they’re pursued by these naval forces. The logic of capitalism dictates that the biggest fish eats all the smaller fish and the wealthy are the big fish while the pirates are not.
I’m not sure what you mean by “worse” but you don’t see the US Navy attacking and looting UK ships for example, which is why most people would consider pirates to be “worse.”
yaRrr
Join our (digital) navy, sail the high seas, Hoist the Colors High! 🏴☠️
They just tended to kill a little faster.
Pirates are actually Communists
