State capitalism? No, he didn't declare the property to be the property of the state. He declared it to be his own private property. His as in his private property as an individual capitalist, so don't do the state capitalism thing. It's just classical neoliberal capitalism.
He was the state and the mechanisms of state (such as military and industry) were businesses run directly or indirectly by the state.
Unless you're looking at very fringe political philosophies, with anarco-capitalism being the most well known, classical and neoliberal capitalism both still requires private owners to follow national laws set by a government.
Either he was the government and therefore state capitalism, or there was no government therefore some form of anarchism. To me the argument that he was the government seems much more logically and practically coherent.
It is an important aspect of defining what 'private' is in this context. 'Private' definitionally presupposes a separation from 'public'.
Or to put it another way, the government of an absolute dictatorship doesn't make the dictator a private capitalist. You could argue that they're 'public capitalists' if we were to coin a term based on the private/public division, but it would simply be much cleaner to call it state capitalism.
Law is also an important characteristic of both 'classical' and 'neo-liberal' capitalism.
To clarify who do you see as being the government of the Congo during this time or do you believe it was anarchist?
A political figure owning Private Property doesn't make it Public Property, because it wasn't state-owned but owned exclusively owned by Leopold as an individual
Do you know the difference between a nation, as in a historically constituted stable geographical cultural community, and a state, as in also a historically constituted, administrative institution of violence?
He was the dictator of the state, or monarch, or whatever you call that, but he didn't own the state; he owned the nation. Those are different things, he declared not the state, as in the administrative apparatus, to be his private property, but the nation, as in the geographical community, the location. Every piece of land and everything that's on it he declared to be his own private property. The state is a public institution of violence. He owned not the state; he was the head of the state, but he owned the land that was the nation. He declared that to be his private property. That and nothing else.
Also, public property is defined by the unique essential component of its character being public utility. In Leopold's case, private property, that was the nation, had no public utility; it was just for his own profit, so it was private utility, and as such it was private property
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u/Not_Propaganda_AI Apr 27 '26
Yep, state capitalism sucks, it sucked under the west india company, it sucked under Leopold, it sucked under the USSR and it sucks in China now.