Mutual Exchange is the Center’s goal in two senses—we favor a society rooted in peaceful, voluntary cooperation, and we seek to foster understanding through ongoing dialogue.
Mutual Exchange will provide opportunities for conversation about issues that matter to the Center’s various publics. A lead essay, deliberately provocative, will be followed by responses from inside and outside of C4SS. Contributions and comments from readers are enthusiastically encouraged.
Ross Kenyon’s essay, “Choice, Consent, and Voluntaryism After the Death of Neutrality,” raises some critical questions about what we consider a free choice, notes a few problems with voluntaryism, and points to some potential coping strategies for our condition’s quagmire. Responses from TBA.
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“The customs of different lands and the palaces of princes are good as long as they don’t cause any pain, but the custom of washing that they have here is worse than being flagellated.”
- Sancho Panza, Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes, trans. Grossman, 675.
I’d like to pose a few questions to our readers and my colleagues in the hopes of receiving some enlightening responses, ideally with more brevity than my own grappling with this problem.
Imagine you are raised in a household and community which teach that the highest good is something we would generally consider to be unjust, such as being totally submissive to your spouse and where your minute deviations are punished with physical violence.
You might choose it in some nominal sense, being honored at entering your society’s most honored institution, but to what extent can we really say you made a free choice? The temptation to say that you were brainwashed is almost overwhelming, and despite the obvious risk of existential bad faith, this charge regarding the influence of socialization still seems to hold quite a bit of weight and cause rightful concern in the hearts of outsiders.
However, could not the newlyweds cast the same charge against us? We’ve been brainwashed (or the less pejorative ‘socialized’) into thinking that some voluntary social combinations are acceptable and some are not, so how can we avoid seeing this dilemma through a prism of prejudice composed of our own habitus and facticity? There is no objective position of which I know where we can all step back and evaluate these claims neutrally, and our trying to do so may be a deceptive way of denying our epistemic limitations.
Before stating some of the options I think are available with regard to this problem, I’d like to take a few paragraphs to preempt some of the arguments that I expect from voluntaryists.
Thoughts such as those above are one of the major reasons that I have come to find voluntaryism to be inadequate at best and, as we’ll see later, propagandistic at its worst, at least as it is typically framed. The idea that we should respect whatever someone has chosen regardless of the cultural institutions they have been socialized into is a tenuous agnosticism that makes “non-violent” (we’ll address this later) social relations virtually unassailable. It is for this reason that people call the Hayekian obsession[1] with spontaneous order nihilistic, because if no one ever has the local knowledge necessary to effectively evaluate the choices of another, we are paralyzed in critiquing anything that is cultural, that is, outside of what voluntaryists consider physical acts of aggression. Outside of theoretical abstraction, this approach gives us no real guidance regarding social relations beyond “don’t hit, don’t steal,” which pretty much everyone on the planet seems to already agree with, but they really just disagree on who should hit who and when depending on what sort of political paradigm they support.
Furthermore, I entertain some serious doubts about the ability of social order to be completely voluntary even if we grant that the spouses’ choices were taken with full autonomy. While I enjoy how David Hume empathizes with but problematizes voluntaristic society for practical reasons in Of the Original Contract, on a more abstract level, I don’t think voluntaryism is as useful an idea as people try to make it.
Consent is an important political principle, dare I claim it’s one of the most important. Indeed, we want a social order that people can give authentic commitment to; I want people to respect what I believe I’ve earned not because of the social capital or physical force that I can muster against them, but because my possession is in accord with a principle of justice which they find acceptable. However, I do not think that consent can do all of the philosophical work necessary for organizing society nor for totally validating the choices of others as demonstrated above. If consent/all things being voluntary is our ultimate political principle, then a few primitivists could legitimately halt the civilizing of the whole world.
You want to build a house there on that “unused land?” Sorry, primitivists don’t consent. Property is not voluntary in the minds of voluntaryists: respect it or meet their gun in the room. They linguistically manage this turnabout because they use the word “coercion” not merely to denote the imposition of an external will as the word is commonly understood, but instead conflate it with aggression, which is the unjust imposition of an external will. Property is a coercive act which they don’t consider coercive via their linguistic schema, and thus a major involuntary institution gets smuggled in under the header of “voluntaryism” in a deceptive way.
If these questions were not already difficult enough with stable concepts, all of these terms come with plenty of semiotic baggage, are best understood when used in specific social contexts, and are often very indeterminate. “Productive/active/unused/abandoned/land/property,” “rationality,” and even coercion and voluntary are all domains for discourses of power with much (though possibly not all) of their meaning absent except for what ideology produces for them.
The good news for voluntaryists is that there is no way around this for any political philosophy unless everyone agrees about politics. The primitivists might hurl a javelin into your gut for clearing some woodland for a sedentary home, and thus require their own brand of political carnage to prevent settling in accord with their vision of good and evil, same as we all do.[2] This is what humans do, and it may be time that we look social cooperation in the face and acknowledge that at its base, it’s less pleasant than our politics would like us to believe.
Realizations such as this have reinforced my sentiment that political philosophy is very difficult. I understand why Rousseau hated civilization (though he should have applied his suspicion equally to “primitive” social organization), and why Freud theorized that our having to suppress many of our desires just to get along in society takes a significant mental toll.
My statements so far are not arguing against the tenets of voluntaryism per se, but are meant to serve as an encouragement for voluntaryists to stare squarely at their particular application of political violence. If one disagrees with their deductive system of private property rights, then violators will be met by coercion, and one does not have the option to opt-out of that social contract regardless of consent.
In other words, social structures being absolutely voluntary is not actually what voluntaryism is about, and thus its proponents should probably refer to themselves as market anarchists, liberal anarchists, anarcho-capitalists, or if I may coin a neologism, “mostly-voluntaryists,” or at least communicate in a way that doesn’t obscure voluntaryism’s coercive nature.
Okay. Enough about voluntaryism. How do we treat choice?
I see a few options for where to go with the case of the spouses:
- Due to the alleged impossibility of intersubjective utility comparison (the inability to measure utility between persons in commensurable units), it ultimately comes down to preference, as it is epistemically impossible to know what is best for someone else. I think this principle broadly has a lot working in its favor, but believe a weaker version of the statement more closely hews to our perceptions. For people choosing an outcome like the spouses, it would probably be best to dangle better options in front of them in a pluralistic society, than to just “liberate” the dominated spouse by force of arms. I think defaulting to the problematic nature of free choice is better than the alternatives because it avoids the bad incentives of centralization, paternalism, and being a busy body, but if we don’t have our limits, this approach just becomes a validation of the status quo.
- We might say, like Sam Harris, that some forms of behavior generally provide for good results, such as basic norms of respect for different sexes, genders, races, etc., but I’m generally hesitant to endorse a one-size-fits-all cultural policy for the world, even though I seek that my cultural preferences be established as more desirable than the spouses, for example.
- I’d certainly like to hear from the Proudhonian mutualists on this case. I’m not sure how the principle of reciprocity would play out in the case of the spouses, though I am wary of such a principle because both spouses could conceivably be willing to trade places with one another and thus fulfill the Golden Rule. In addition, if every act should be striving toward reciprocity, I tend to think that those whose needs were most hard to meet on the level of mass society (like agoraphobia, social anxiety disorder, etc.) almost must be overridden in a non-reciprocal manner if we are to have effective social cooperation at all. This might just be a part of the tragedy entailed in social cooperation, and I’m not entirely sure what to do about it.
- I’m certain that other comments will come in not corresponding to one of these archetypes, and I would welcome those as well.
This problem has been a very difficult one for me to work my way through. If there are no objective criteria to judge what is an acceptable or “free” choice, and terms such as “freedom” and “coercion” are embedded in social contexts and are thus almost inevitably domains for discourses of power, then it seems that we ought to be very concerned with the empirical nature of social relations as they actually operate. As Elinor Ostrom has noted, no longer does it make sense to dichotomize and talk about “the state” and “the market” as monolithic trends, but far more important is it to discern the actual workings of social institutions which exist. I think this insight of new institutional economics should be applied to the concepts of “coercion” and “voluntary” before I perish from conceptangst and the loathing of language. Perhaps this regrounding of our floating concepts can lay the foundation for analysis more closely linked to the social worlds which we are continuously reproducing.
In any case, I’d love to hear responses regarding the choices of the spouses thought experiment relating how to evaluate similar cases, how/if we ought to do anything about them once evaluated, as well as anything else I’ve mentioned in this recent struggle to make sense of the world around me.
Vale.[3]
[1] F.A. Hayek was a sophisticated thinker, and hedged against this idea of pure spontaneous order through his conception of general rules, but I’m referring more to some of my contemporaries who are influenced by his work.
[2] For more on this idea, read the “The Thousand and One Goals” in Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche.
[3] Forgive my two Cervantine flourishes, wilt thou?
Voluntaryism is an ugly, ugly word.
Vale? You joinin Caesar's legion now? ;p
Ross, I greatly appreciate the insight here, both yours, and everyone else at C4ss.org working to move us forward toward the goal of a stateless society. As usual, I feel that certain philosophical considerations mentioned are very relevant especially with regard to the chance of seeking to see things that might have been overlooked before as we attempt to further clarify our path and achieve our goal of a free society.
That said, I am really scratching my head here as to how these thoughts apply to the fundamental concept and ideology of voluntarism. To be honest, I must say that, as a critique of the voluntarism I have become acquainted with and persuaded by I can't see how the whole jist of this criticism is more than a big straw man.
First of all, I understand the term voluntarism to simply be the advocation of free markets, i.e. consensual, non-coercive interactive behaviour, over that of the alternative, the use of aggression, and I understand the specific term "voluntarism" to simply be a catch all term for these things, minus the "commerce" baggage inherent in the phrase "free markets". With this understanding, I think the heart of the issue comes down to a fundamental disagreement about the definition of voluntarism as seen here:
"The idea that we should respect whatever someone has chosen regardless of the cultural institutions they have been socialized into is a tenuous agnosticism that makes “non-violent” (we’ll address this later) social relations virtually unassailable. "
This makes no sense to me. Even when I personally have in the past held misconceptions about what might constitute a voluntary interaction, I have never thought of voluntarism, and particularly the NAP, to be anything more than a set of *prohibitions*, or constraints against certain behaviour and interactions, particularly as a forbidding of specific acts of force, and never as prescriptive of the appropriate plans, morality, attitudes, worldview or behavior with which one should or should not act upon. In other words, this clearly seems to be the common mistake of conflate the libertarian approbations against certain acts of violence with regard to others as if such constitutes an endorsement. But this is simply not the case, the only amount of "respect" toward the voluntary actions of individuals that voluntarism requires is certainly not that they must agree with another individual's choices, but that they must not utilize aggression to forcibly prevent them from acting.
"However, I do not think that consent can do all of the philosophical work necessary for organizing society nor for totally validating the choices of others as demonstrated above."
This is obvious. Consent is merely given as a prerequisite for humans themselves acting and interacting in order to organize society, according to their interests, conscience, and opinions. In other words it's *people* themselves, with their differing experiences, values, and understanding that organize society, not simply the concept of "consent", on the contrary, it is the principle of consent that simply allows people to act, and to exercise their moral principles and conscience. To claim that voluntarism prescribes a preset understanding of morality and attitudes (such as that one "should respect whatever someone has chosen"), even one specific set of morality and attitudes to the exclusion of all others (such as the idea that consent should be the only moral norm that one should hold or judge things by) is just false and in my humble opinion, is completely missing the point of voluntarism, which again is simply the concept that no person should violate the principles of consent in order to force their own vision for society upon their neighbors.
Admittedly there can be misunderstanding and disagreement of that which actually constitutes consensual interaction, let's always attempt to keep open the *dialogue* to hash such things out, naturally . But if voluntary is simply another word for consent why should we abandon the word and concept of voluntary any more than we should abandon the word and concept of consent? I understand complaints of inconsistency, but an outright complaint against the whole concept of voluntary interaction makes no sense to me. Again, in addition to being consistent here, one most also certainly can and *should* hold additional beliefs about morality in addition to the question of the consent principle. So I fear that, in lieu of pointing out where one has possibly strayed from voluntarism or maybe engaging in a discussion about some additional important moral principles other than the concept of consent, instead attacking the fundamental moral concept of voluntarism seems quite problematic, if at least for communication's sake. After all, if the definition I have given above is indeed accurate of the ideology of such, it would seem logical that someone who is quite opposed to voluntarism must by definition be arguing in favor of the use of aggressive force, the violating of the principle of consent in order to impose one's morality or vision upon society. Surely there is a misunderstanding here.
Rothbard: "The fact is that libertarianism is not and does not pretend to be a complete moral, or aesthetic theory; it is only a political theory, that is, the important subset of moral theory that deals with the proper role of violence in social life. Political theory deals with what is proper or improper for government to do, and government is distinguished from every other group in society as being the institution of organized violence. "
I'm not sure which voluntarists you've talked to but your statement of:
You want to build a house there on that “unused land?” Sorry, primitivists don’t consent. Property is not voluntary in the minds of voluntaryists: respect it or meet their gun in the room. Property is a coercive act which they view as just, but it all gets smuggled in under the header of “voluntaryism” in a disingenuous way.
Is so very wrong. While I would say that the situation is a bit more nuanced and subjective than simply stating "unused land", I'll work with it for now. For the sake of this argument, I'm assuming that the land is owned but unused and has been unused for a long time (not just unused for a few months because it's owner couldn't grow crops on it or some other silly reason why it wouldn't be used for a bit).
In the Rothbardian sense of homesteading (Rothbard is a source of many voluntarist ideas, at least the voluntarists that I talk to), the unused land is unowned. Because it is unowned, if a person wants to mix their labor with it, so be it.
You can homestead unused land or houses because I suppose at some level Rothbard felt that non-use implied release of ownership (please take what I say with a grain of salt, I'm no Rothbard expert). I certainly do. For example, I think that on some level people are justified "Occupying Homes" that people are foreclosed on.
I was a big follower of homesteading until I realized that this would mean that basically anyone could go about homesteading any land. This conflicted with my Coasian/property rights ideas on environmental protection – that is, if, say, the Sierra Club wanted to buy all of Yosemite park and protect it through property rights, the "unused land" could be homesteaded which defeats the purpose of owning land to protect it for environmental reasons.
This means, then, that protecting a certain area (say, the Amazon) through some sort of ownership is coercive. I suppose if I took the idea of property from a Marxist perspective, property is the action of not allowing others to use the property. So essentially, any kind of protection of land is a coercive action in your mind. In mine, it is not – if the stated goal of ownership is preservation for environmental reasons, I don't see the problem with private ownership.
Property is not a coercive action, I don't think, in the Rothbardian sense. I draw from many libertarian thinkers as a voluntarist, so I cannot say exactly what I am, but I can say without a doubt that if there is unused land "owned" by someone and its obviously not being used, it should be allowed to be used by someone else. I don't think there's any grounds for violating property rights there.
" If one disagrees with their deductive system of private property rights, then violators will be met by coercion, and one does not have the option to opt-out of that social contract regardless of consent."
You already said not hitting or stealing is something "pretty much everyone on the planet seems to already agree with". With this statement in place, you're assertion of violators of these private property rights (which all basically revolve around the right of self-ownership and *can* indeed be summed up by "don't hit" – force – and "don't steal" – fraud ) will be met by coercion (actually, its met by force, as in meeting force with force, not coercion) and they can't opt-out of it.
My recent post anticapitalist:
imachainsaw replied to your post: so what are your thoughts on market…
If a voluntarist met someone who didn't know about their property and their ideas on property rights, I have no doubt in my mind that they would explain it to the trespasser. Voluntarists aren't gun-toting private-property maniacs. We would gladly explain to people our beliefs. You seem to think that voluntarists are going to shoot first, ask questions later. This is a ridiculous fallacy and one employed by aggressive leftists often (at least, that I've seen in my experience).
"In other words, social structures being absolutely voluntary is not actually what voluntaryism is about, and thus its proponents should probably refer to themselves as market anarchists, liberal anarchists, anarcho-capitalists, or if I may coin a neologism, “mostly-voluntaryists,” or at least communicate in a way that doesn’t misconvey voluntaryism’s coercive nature"
Lastly, I think you're misunderstanding voluntarism a bit. It's not just property rights. It's voluntary association, voluntary interaction. It means an absence of authority telling you what to do. It revolves around the right of self ownership.
Yes, that means private property rights are involved. However, if we flip the tables, a left-wing market anarchist who believes that capital should not be privately owned comes in and points a gun to a business owner's head and demands he relinquish his private property and give it to his workers, the business owner has no choice to opt out of it either.
The difference is, voluntarism allows for the different economic ideas to flourish through the idea of voluntary interaction centered on the right of self-ownership and the NAP. What is coercive is a breach of the NAP. What I see in this post is really you having a beef with private property rights and the ideas of the NAP and the voluntary nature of voluntarism.
tl;dr You simply don't believe that private property is voluntary. That's its coercive, and thus, not voluntary (even by or own logic, if something is coercive, it's not voluntary). This is simply a fundamental difference between voluntarism and left-market anarchism. So for the sake of brevity, that's all you really had to say. And all you really need to do is read the tl;dr for the sake of brevity >_<
My recent post anticapitalist:
imachainsaw replied to your post: so what are your thoughts on market…
The key thing I wanted to communicate was that the name "voluntaryism" is deceptive.
Voluntaryists favor a private property regime and ethical system. These positions are both social in nature, but noncontractual: break them and face our coercion. The root of voluntaryism is as involuntary as any other social system.
In this way, I think the coercion/voluntary distinction becomes problematized and needs refitting. Disagree with me everywhere else, okay, that's fine, but I really want that idea to be driven home.
In any case, thank you for the kind words and the respectable way that you went about your disagreement, Nathan.
The voluntarist/an-cap/Rothbardian views property as an extension of oneself… You couldn't squat on the house I built without stealing the labor that went into the house's construction. That's the idea of "mixing your labor" with resources to homestead them. There were no prior claimants, and so I used those resources for a project… now, you can't disentangle the resources from my labor. So, to take them would be to take my time & effort as well.
I don't really know anyone who truly rejects property. People might reject it for certain people in certain circumstances, but they always defend their own. To do otherwise is deadly. We need to be able to claim resources to survive, and its not clear how you can even claim to own your body if you can't own other possessions. What's special about the flesh to which you were born attached?
I see where you're coming from, but I do think it's a resolvable problem when viewed as described herein.
Also, I hope we can all agree that market anarchism would be preferable to the present nation-state of affairs.
I'll toss my $0.02 in here.
When I was in high school, we read "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley. One of the key points of discussion in the class after the society is introduced was how dystopian it was.
I voiced my dissent. My teacher asked why I considered the society so good, and I said "I don't. But that's me. These people, they've been brainwashed. Indoctrinated. This is all they know. How I FEEL doesn't matter because they don't feel what I feel [as per 1984, another book we read. Good class], they FEEL that this is right. They may have been programmed to feel it, but to them IT'S REAL, and that's what matters."
And, at the end of the day, it is. If we're all brains in jars, how could we know? Do voluntarists and anarchists rebel against the glass walls of their formaldehyde prisons? No. That would be abject nonsense, because the only reality that matters is the one we deal with. Defending liberty means giving people the freedom to choose… The idea that you can invalidate a choice because it was made from a worldview you don't share is, frankly, ridiculous.
The point of maximizing liberty for others is that freedom will make them happiest. Undoing their choice may bring their lifestyle more in line with your own but it doesn't make THEM happier, so it misses the point. This is similar to the classic question of "but are people free to voluntarily choose a STATE?" and my response is an unwavering and absolute "you're goddamned right they can."
As to your point about primitivists, if we go from Per Bylund's Use-Rights theory of property (a theory I personally consider the most consistent with liberty) then claiming an unused patch of forest for repeated use as hunting and foraging grounds seems perfectly legitimate to me. I'm far more concerned about claims to property for intentional DISUSE (as nature preserves, for instance) than a clear, objective use.
My recent post Black bloc getting more and more popular:
Wow, this essay is a great example of the intellectual masturbation that much of the anarchist and liberty movement is charged with. I mean come on. What are we talking about here? I am a free individual. That is a fact. You can disagree, but that would be your opinion. As a free individual you are allowed to disagree but not to the point of using violence against me to get me to agree. Simple enough I think. Everyone seems to want to drag the whole idea of real estate into the argument because that is immobile property and the most problematic to resolve in a world without a state. The thing that is easy to forget is that without a State forcing uniformity on society, all these questions would be resolved, one conflict at a time. One person at a time. Would there be violence? Maybe. Would there be coercion? Probably at some points and in some disputes. We are not talking about perfection here. We are talking about getting along in a world in which we are ALL sovereigns. No one in such a situation would have any more right to tell you what to do or coerce you then anyone else. Many believe that in such a world, might would equal right and we would just have lawlessness and chaos. But in a world without a state, might would not equal right. Because people are not just individuals. We naturally gravitate to groups. We have friends, families, extended families, business partners, etc. We form communities because we can, not because we must. Such communities would have community standards that all would voluntarily adhere to. And if someone didn't like the standards, they wouldn't have to live there or do business there. Sounds simple enough to me. Why do we always want to complicate principals that are simple. If you are looking for a perfect system that will protect everyone's rights then you will be sorely disappointed. None such system exists nor could it. Freedom is messy, sometimes its dirty, sometimes its even violent. But not nearly as dirty, messy or violent as the slavery mankind has suffered for the last few thousand years. I think I will take the uncertainty of freedom.
Ok, but I understand voluntarism as a system that recognizes that there will *unavoidably* be people making decisions, and therefore disputing about the proper use of property and scarce resources, and that various decentralized courts or whatever should be used for arbitration in order to seek to determine as best as possible what is the truth of the matter with regard to who is the most legitimate decision maker(s) with regard to such property. There will naturally be differences of opinion here, but the concept of discussion and seeking the truth of the matter (through voluntary courts, etc) is what is fundamental. But isn't it true that as soon as *anyone* attempted to enforce an opinion about property, whether based upon *any* system, mutualism, whatever, that use of force with regard to property would be the "favoring", and the use of "coercion" with regard to "a private property regime"? As long as force is used with regard to property (which I understand to be just about anything, should we not include our bodies here?), than are we not in the predicament you have described? At best this might lead one to pacifism (which I seriously consider) as being the only truly ethical system. Because after all, nearly no one believes they are acting with aggression when they set out to utilize violence.
I am still waiting for someone to explain to me how "ownership" of land is any different than ownership of any other good, and what is a "proper" way for people to settle their disputes without having to resort to baseball bats and grenade launchers.
For the Vountaryist, the answer is quite simple in theory, but probably more difficult in practice. The *acquisition* of property is based on the Homesteading Principle, and the resolution of disputes is based on a Polycentric legal system based on Customary Law.
First off, great article Ross. I should have commented on this sooner.
Now I want to explain a few things. First, all anarchists are "voluntaryists" as we support free association. However, for us (libertarian socialists) we are first and foremost anti-authortarians, so any prerequisite to any kind of voluntary association is that all parties must generally have an equal amount of power. The reason why we reject the typical right-libertarian notion of "voluntaryism" (the kind propagated by people who label themselves "voluntaryists") is that one party in this "voluntary" relationship has far more power than others, which creates authoritarianism in some form or another.
Ross is correct in asserting that most "voluntaryism" neglects things like context, situations, culture, etc. and tries to reduce everything down to people's consent without any background given. Pragmatically, this concept is highly problematic, especially in regards to social conditioning.
Let me give you an example: a friend of mine from school was telling me about her religious studies class which talked about women in (organized) religion. For her class she had to read a book about the status of women in Islamic theocracies in the Middle East (Saudi, Yemen, etc.), where the patriarchy is far worse than it is in most other regions of the world. It turns out, women in those countries *prefer* to wear the veils and live beneath the thumbs of men if given a choice to do otherwise. Why? Because they've been conditioned to believe they should.
Now let's take a look at society here. How many people do you know in your area who think taxation is justified for whatever reason and would continue feeding the state even if doing so became voluntary? Heck, if North America became a checkerboard of states and stateless territories, how many people do you think would prefer to live in (or, under the rule of) a state? I would bet that most would, simply because they've been conditioned to accept the state as a legitimate institution and probably can't imagine what life would be like without the state ruling over them. If Ron Paul became president by some miracle of Zeus and allowed gold and silver as competing currencies, how many people in your town do you think would continue to use "fed notes" regardless?
It's been said that the greatest weapon of authoritarian systems is not the proverbial "gun to the head" but simply the "myth" that the authority is legitimate. This fact puts a HUGE hole in voluntaryist ideology. Perhaps libertarians should quit insisting that literally *everything* can be reduced to "the state vs. the market" and look at culture instead? Libraries are usually full of anthropology books, folks.
My recent post Anarchist Slumber Party
So voluntaryists advocate rule by networks of landlords then? Wonderful…
My recent post Boston Has An Anti-Capitalist March
Heavy stuff, but it breaks down as I look closer.
The gist seems to be, & the remainder predicated on, the author thinking there is absolute objective "right" or "wrong," for every choice, or, more appropriately, "just" or "unjust" that should be strived for, and that cultural indoctrination detracts from the work towards such goals.
It seems to me this assumes much, and three of the assumptions that it seems to be built on particularly detract from the argument.
1) The author seems to imply their ideas of right, or justice, are higher goals than the goals of others. Perhaps the author is suffering under the same type of indoctrinated or preconceived ideas of right & wrong?
2) The author also appears to assume indoctrination is effective. There are effective, & ineffective ways of propagating ideas, but if there were a sure fire way of making all people believe or act in some particular way, all political discussion would be moot, someone would simply press gang everyone into their cause and there would be no more discussion.
3) There also looks to be an assumption that every action has to be agreed to by all members of a society, and that if there is any ambiguity or dispute, that everything necessarily breaks down & the entire system should therefore be scrapped.
My take is that voluntarism is not a be all end all solution to everything, and is not intended to be. What voluntarism does is lay out some simple rules that TEND to make interactions more peaceful & harmonious.
Disagreement will still arise, and in such cases some form of resolution will be sought. Without coercion in the choice of what method will be used to resolve disputes, the more violent & costly ways, and the people that choose to use them, are likely to die out & be replaced by ways that lead to all parties being happier.
As people are faced with having to live with their neighbors & come to harmonious solutions to arguments, people will tend to move towards others that think the way they do, leading to less disagreement. Communists will be able to live in communes & live as they wish, capitalists would be able to live with other capitalists & exchange privately held property with one another, and so on.
It's not a binary resolution of all problems, such a system can not exist in a chaotic & ever changing world. Voluntarism is a system that promotes harmony & well being.
There is one particular line that bothered me as fallacious. "Outside of theoretical abstraction, this approach gives us no real guidance regarding social relations beyond “don’t hit, don’t steal,” which pretty much everyone on the planet seems to already agree with, but they really just disagree on who should hit who and when depending on what sort of political paradigm they support." If they "they really just disagree on who should hit who and when" then they do not agree on “don’t hit, don’t steal.” The voluntaryist line is not to initiate aggression, not to not practice aggression, although it is always at the practitioners discretion whether to use force to defend against aggression. Every other "political paradigm" I am familiar with, endorses the initiation of force, and so does not "agree with" “don’t hit, don’t steal” in the least and at most pay lip service only to it.
Sorry if I am reiterating anything anyone has commented already, I haven't had a chance to get to the comments yet.
That's no less ridiculous than saying mutualists would advocate someone else being able to take my house & everything in it when I went to the store to get groceries because I left the house vacant & therefore un-owned.
Most voluntaryists want a system in which labor must be mixed with land in order to claim it. You can't draw lines on a map or even walk the perimeter of an area & then claim everything inside, so there is a very real limitation on what an individual can own.
“I do not deny that what happened to us is a thing worth laughing at. But it is not worth telling, for not everyone is sufficiently intelligent to be able to see things from the right point of view.”
-Don Quixote
I think you have some great insights here, Ross, and I like what Julia said above.
I think perhaps voluntarism demands too much from people. I am doubtful that humans could ever truly consent to anything outside the realm of simple, mutally-beneficial marketplace exchanges. That is, I do not think that people could ever fully consent to customs or governments. Even people who object to this and say that even women who live in what I think are oppressive societies, when given the choice, would still choose to live under oppression, are vastly underestimating the power of habit and tradition. They "choose" oppression because they are used to it; not because they are actually free to choose it.
Someone made a comment above that said this was just a bunch of intellectual masturbation (but, I mean, that's the best kind, right?) and that it was all really simple: man, he said, was free. Bold words. As Hayek noted in the Fatal Conceit, I think I am free because a long time ago some people thought that it would be more beneficial to them to believe that they were free than it would be to believe that they were ruled by fate. On the one hand, societal norms such as this are things freely established. On the other hand, they are determined by experience and expediency and cannot exceed the scope of man's imagination. Tolstoy says it best in War and Peace: I can move my arm freely but only within the limits of its motion.
As for judging other people's cultures and making interpersonal utility comparisons, I judge others based on a number of criteria. I assess how their habits and behaviors could benefit me if I employed them and how effective their customs are at achieving the free society that I desire. I judge what they think is true based on whether I think it's true (Adam Smith), and I'm all he time trying to convince people that I'm right and they're wrong. One thing that can sometimes transcend so much subjectivity is reason. If I can show people that there are better means to achieve the ends that they desire than those that they have employed which have been handed down to them by their culture, then sometimes they will forgo the norms of their society to employ these more effective methods. However, if, for them, the cost of rejecting their culture is higher than the benefits that my means can procure for them, no amount of reasoning even will be able to break down cultural differences. This is all just further support for Julia's argument that many, when given the option, would choose to live under a government than in a free society.
Just because we might get rid of the state does not mean that men will magically become free in some way that transcends their pre-determined human nature or even in a way that transcends culture. This is the Center for a Stateless Society. We still want a society, right? Society demands cohesion, and such cohesion demands established customs that I doubt people could expressly consent to all the time over the course of multiple generations. Herodotus said "Custom is king." The point is, even without a man with a crown on his head, there's still a king, and it may be a lot harder to depose this type of king than many would want to believe. You've given me a lot to think about, more questions than answers, and I thank you for that.
"The idea that we should respect whatever someone has chosen regardless of the cultural institutions they have been socialized into"
This is free choice though, it does not make it the right choice, or better choice than other choices available, but no we do not need to accept these false notions as true. So, how do you know what the right choice is? Unlearn what you have learned, learn the deceptions and lies, see what is, let go of these illusions, and align yourself with truth, not what you want to be true, but what actually IS.
"Outside of theoretical abstraction, this approach gives us no real guidance regarding social relations beyond “don’t hit, don’t steal,” which pretty much everyone on the planet seems to already agree with, but they really just disagree on who should hit who and when depending on what sort of political paradigm they support."
Yes, its confusing when you are unaware of Natural Law and what is true, good and right. People want to believe that whatever they believe is right, they think they know, and they don't need to know or learn anymore. Those who have problems with who should hit who are failing to grasp the principle understanding. Do no harm? Where do you go wrong with this? Force is an application of energy. Violence is unrightful, undo use of force. When someone uses force as violence against you, you have the right to use force to defend yourself, which is not violence. Violence stems from the initiator of force.
"I don’t think voluntaryism is as useful an idea as people try to make it."
Voluntaryism and whatever definition is appropriated is not something we should accept at a personal level and adhere to(I mention problem with conformity to labels below). However, voluntary action, not coerced, not forced against your choice, is the only way to progress in freedom. Otherwise, if you are forced to do something against your will, you are not free. Period. That is where it begins. This is largely a psychological issue where people think they have a right to control/force others who do no harm to begin with. This includes harm to the environment, water, air, etc. As long as we pollute, we are not doing no harm. We are all culpable in harming.
"However, I do not think that consent can do all of the philosophical work necessary for organizing society… If consent/all things being voluntary is our ultimate political principle, then a few primitivists could legitimately halt the civilizing of the whole world."
This demonstrates barriers in the worldview conception and creative/imaginative conceptions about what is possible and better. Organizing society? Why do we need to? Why are we so attached to the things we currently have that we think we "need" them to continue into a better way of living? Why is "civilizing" so important? How about living, without having more than we need? Shatter the illusions of civilization. It is not "needed" nor does it need to be maintained. It's like the currently delusional concept of progress…. build more, expand, grow… Reality check, this is not progress. Continued technological advancement isn't progress for humanity either. We need to progress as human beings, as consciousness in harmony with truth, love and freedom. This includes harmony with nature, not exploitation.
Primitivist, interesting you use such a word. It demonstrates the barriers you have on maintaining unnecessary things. Those who do not recognize the excess, useless, things we live with, the things we do, the jobs, transportation, travels, luxury, etc, are still holding on tight to their illusions and desires of prefabricated distractions. Once you unlearn what you have learned, start over with truth in mind, not belief in maintaining existing indoctrinated illusions, and seek out truth, unabashedly, you will come to realize nature is our home. We are currently so dissociated with nature that most cannot recognize this connection between nature and man.
Also, no one owns land as property. The land was never anyone's. The land belongs to no one. If you are using land, then you are using it, someone may not come in and take over your home, or your forest garden, etc, as you are already there. You can only use what you can use. There are not thousand acre lots for dingbats like Lucas and Oprah or whoever thinks they can own a load of land. You don't need all this excess, it is not yours, it belongs to the planet, to nature. You use what you need to, and the rest is nature's which is used by the non-human natural cycle. Excessive use, excessive building, is a path towards where we are now, harm to ourselves and nature. The only owning you have is on your work/labor, so if you build a bunch of stuff trying to subtly control the land by having your work all over the place so that no one can take it. This is not right. We live in excess, with desires and attachments to false ideals. We need to let go of our illusions.
I don't view any of this as politics, its information on how to live. Except if you were to say the politics of self-government
if that could exist as a term, but generally politics is about governing outside of the individual on a large scale, which is force against ones will, i.e. violence. Politics are not needed for a free mind.
As for Freud the Fraud, you don't suppress your desires, you work past them and let them go. This is how you create a happy psychological mindset, rather than a diseased one we have self-created.
Voluntaryist, anarchist, blahblah-ist/ism/acy, all are labels of confinement. Do not live in these labels, but allow the aspects of truth within to become part of who you are. Just as with religious truths. When you conform to labels, you are not a free mind.
"voluntaryism’s coercive nature."
Sorry I missed where this was demonstrated in the article. I didn't pick it up on reading if it was there. I do not understand this point. I suspect, as the article indicates, it stems from a lack of understanding on your part. You cannot use force on anyone unless they are causing harm. If they do not know they are doing harm, they still are. Anyone who truly understands do no harm Natural Law, will never coerce someone, unless — like some who view the term violence — coercion would apply in any act of force regardless of harm being done, which is not the case. Coercion is when you are the initiator or force, violence. If someone is wrong, but did no harm, you cannot coerce them into accepting the truth. So I fail to see how voluntaryism (voluntary actions, not coerced) is coercive…
I see many references to culture. Culture is another illusion, a confinement of behavior to the groups socialized acceptance. Traditions, customs are the same thing. If an aspect of culture/tradition/customs are right and good, then they are, just as an ism/acy can have good/right/true aspects to it. Conformity to the construct (society, civilization, 'acy/'isms, etc) is fallacious upon the premise that it is de facto good. It isn't all good. You accept it as good because that's what you think it is because that's what you were taught. It was setup up, constructed, implemented and maintained by men, who usually desire control/"false-order" to set it up in the first place. We lack the imagination/creativity to see the better choices, are attached to the constructed way of living because that is all we know, and have falsely identified ourselves with different aspects. It is hard to let go.
Change starts from within each of us and manifests externally. Psychology, consciousness, fear, desire, illusions, suffering, love, truth, good; these are some pivotal stepping stones of understanding. We all have the same underlying psychological framework to experience, with differing personalities. We are all capable of recognizing truth when we shatter our illusions.
Peace and love.