Authoritarians in Libertarian Clothing
Posted by Kevin Carson on Feb 6, 2009 in Commentary • 69 commentsSome time ago Charles Johnson, in “Liberty, Equality, Solidarity: Toward a Dialectical Anarchism,” argued for what he called “thick libertarianism.” That is, libertarians should–AS libertarians–promote values of equality and justice beyond the bare bones nonaggression principle on which “thin libertarianism” is grounded. Equality and justice, he argued, should appeal to libertarians for the same reason that (assuming they were sane) they were originally attracted to libertarianism itself. Most people do not come to libertarianism as a result of deductive reasoning from the nonaggression principle. They are first attracted to libertarianism because it appeals to broader cultural values of equality and fair play, or an aversion to seeing people treated badly and pushed around, and then they gradually come to accept the more philosophical arguments for it afterward.
So while it’s possible for a person to be libertarian in the sense of accepting the nonaggression principle, and without formal contradiction simultaneously favor such voluntary forms of authoritarianism as the patriarchal family, the hierarchical employment relationship, and various other forms of cultural domination, Johnson argued that it would be just plain weird. Why would the sort of person with an affinity for that sort of thing draw the line at state authoritarianism, in particular?
Unfortunately, there seems to be a great deal of such authoritarian weirdness among professed libertarians.
A good example is Lew Rockwell’s post of Jan. 28 at LewRockwell.com Blog, in which he appeals to the common understanding of most American workers–in contrast to “trade-union commie” dogma–that
their boss is their benefactor, and that they owe him gratitude as well as hard work.
If the employment contract is–ahem–a CONTRACT between two equal parties for mutual benefit, why should be workers be any more “grateful” to the boss than vice versa? Can you imagine Rockwell’s reaction if some “commie” commenting on a layoff story argued that the workers were the boss’s benefactor, and that he owed them gratitude as well as good pay?
Rockwell’s attitude reminds me of Paul Graham’s quip that the contractual employment relation, in practice, contains a lot of recycled master-servant DNA. It’s certainly odd that a libertarian, who professes to celebrate the supercession of status by contract, should such nostalgia for the baggage of the age of status. It’s almost Burkean: squires in powdered wigs sipping mint juleps on the verandah, and grateful laborers in the field singing old English spirituals.
No less a free market libertarian than Herbert Spencer remarked on the cultural holdovers, in the modern wage employment relationship, from the old “regime of status.”
So long as the worker remains a wage-earner, the marks of status do not wholly disappear. For so many hours daily he makes over his faculties to a master…, and is for the time owned by him…. He is temporarily in the position of a slave, and his overlooker stands in the position of a slave-driver.
Only, unlike many libertarians of the contemporary right, Spencer thought this was a BAD thing.
Another, even more appalling example is a collection of quotes from Mises.Org Community forums, compiled by the market anarchist blog Polycentric Order (“Why I Dislike the Hoppeans and Libertarian Conservatives”):
“Nonetheless we do favour individuals with authority, in the form of a natural elite.”
“If the parents wish to use force, then so be it. The child consents by continuing to live off his parents.”
“Libertarianism doesn’t support equal negative rights, a child does not have the same rights as an adult.”
“This doesn’t imply equal negative rights for adults. Some adults, such as primitives, are not capable of rational argumentation and cannot be brought peacefully into the division of labour. Moreover, they have no conception of property rights nor any enforcable claim.”
“These people (tribal or less developed cultures) simply aren’t capable of rational argumentation, and therefore have no rights, whether this is biological or cultural makes no differences.”
“The fact is they often cannot be brought within the division of labour and without any concept of property rights it’s impossible that they own anything. Moreover they have no legitimate claim to any of this territory and as such it’s free to be homesteaded.”
“People incapable of moral choice must either abide by the decisions of those who are or they must be removed from free society.”
“Against people who have no law, the initiation of force is fully justified.”
“It was not wrong for the spanish to overthrow an empire that literally fed on its slaves in religious rituals and replace it with its much milder form of serfdom.”
“Childish rejection of a natural order and authority isn’t the opposite to subservience. It’s a bad trait that needs to be kept down until the youth have matured sufficiently.”….
“Seeing as towns would be owned by single entrepreneurs…”
“Why wouldn’t people sell their land to a single entrepreneur? The have no interest in owning land, only in being able to lease it from some owner.”….
“Opposition to the family and church sounds somewhat Marxist to me, any libertarian society will be founded upon those two institutions so in a sense yes, one does need to be a cultural conservative to be a libertarian.”….
“Feudalism is actually an entirely appropriate model for anarchist society, and my prediction is it’s coming whether the anarchists like it or not.”
“A system of feudal holdings all competing with each other for human and fiscal capital stacks up pretty good against a system whereby the parasitic majority lives off the productive minority.”
You get the impression that capes and cigarette holders, and maybe pictures of Franz-Ferdinand, are popular in such circles?
The irony is that the remarks on division of labor come, in all probability, from people who pride themselves on their “methodological individualism.” And as I understand it, “division of labor” is just a fancy way of saying that people choose to trade with other people of their own free will when they find it beneficial, because they believe it saves effort to specialize in what they’re best at. So how do these people manage to transform the “division of labor” into an entity over and above individual human beings, that individuals are forced to serve (“brought into”) against their will–like Moloch?
The idea that Western colonizers are owed a debt of gratitude for bringing native peoples into the division of labor, and that land robbery is perfectly legitimate because the latter have no “legitimate” conception of property rights, is fairly common among the more vulgar Randroids.
Such views are fairly common in right-wing, paleolibertarian venues, as well. A good example is the argument, by Hans Hermann Hoppe and his followers, that immigration would be restricted in a free market anarchy by the universal appropriation of land. When every square foot of land, including the roads and sidewalks, is appropriated, there will be nowhere for anyone to stand without the permission of an owner. So it will be impossible to live or even exist anywhere without either being a property owner or having been invited by a property owner.
Never mind that it is impossible for land to be appropriated on a scale even approaching universality, given the present population density, on principles consistent with free market libertarianism. As Franz Oppenheimer pointed out, it is impossible for land to be universally appropriated, and for the landless to be excluded from vacant land, unless access to vacant land is preempted through political appropriation. Unless absentee titles are enforced to vacant and unimproved land, there will be vast tracts of unowned land open to homesteading in a free market society.
Never mind, as well, the vesting of traditional rights of common ownership over such things as public rights of way. In America, they generally date back to the time of first European settlement when townships were laid out, and in turn were frequently based on preexisting Indian trails. In Europe, such rights of way were common property from time out of mind, probably dating back to the neolithic era in some cases. Such common property rights, as argued by thinkers like Roderick Long and Carlton Hobbs, are entirely legitimate. There is no way that public rights of way can be individually appropriated, and the public deprived of access rights against its will, that can not be unequivocally condemned as robbery.
But again, never mind all that. What kind of libertarian, in his right mind, could ever find such a total lockdown society appealing? What kind of “libertarian” would want to live in the kind of “free market” utopia in which it is impossible to set foot on a road or sidewalk or public square, anywhere on God’s green earth, without being scanned for biometric data or having someone demand “Ihre Papiere, bitte!” All too many, I fear.
In my worst moments, I suspect such libertarians are drawn to libertarianism precisely BECAUSE they are authoritarians.
Here in Northwest Arkansas, Benton County is famous for the kind of bluenose Stepford Wife Republican for whom “God” is spelled B-O-S-S and “Christian businessman” is one word. Bob Jones University alumni, who look like the Hitlerjugend equivalent of Eagle Scouts, are heavily represented in the local GOP organization–which should tell you everything you need to know about the cultural atmosphere. I can generally identify a Republibaptist (a term coined by local newspaper columnist John Brummett) on TV even with the sound turned off, because he’s wearing a navy blue suit and power tie and looks like he’s got a stick up his ass.
The Hoppeans seem to come from the same gene pool. They seem to favor the free market because they believe it will eliminate the state as a constraint on the kinds of local authoritarianism they enjoy, and give them a free hand in playing with the powerless victims in their little killing jars without any outside interference. A “free society,” for them, is a society in which the local petty authority figure is free to brutalize those under his power without hindrance. It’s the freedom of the squire to enclose the land and rackrent his tenants, of the pointy-haired boss to make life hell for Dilbert. You know, the way things were in the good old days, when men were men and sheep were nervous, and people who didn’t look and act like us kept in their place and didn’t whine about their “rights.” I vaguely recall that the Book of the Subgenius included a listing for someone who called himself an anarcho-monarchist, or something of the sort; his slogan was “Every backyard a kingdom, every child and dog a serf.” I can imagine him fitting in well in certain paleolibertarian circles.
C4SS (c4ss.org) Research Associate Kevin Carson is a contemporary mutualist author and individualist anarchist whose written work includes Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective, and The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto, all of which are freely available online. Carson has also written for such print publications as The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty and a variety of internet-based journals and blogs, including Just Things, The Art of the Possible, the P2P Foundation and his own Mutualist Blog.
Kevin, a few comments. First, you imply that Lew Rockwell and Hans-Hermann Hoppe are "authoritarians"; that they only profess or pretend to be libertarian. Why? For Rockwell, he um, thinks employees are benefitted from their employe and ought to be grateful. Er, yeah, real "authoritarian."
As for Hoppe–well, although he's actually against state immigration restrictions as an anarchist, at worst, his second-best approach is to have some restrictions on immigration given that the existence of the state means that someone will lose, whether the state enforces some, or no, immigration rules. Yet, most libertarians support some immigration restrictions, if only the type that says keep out criminals or people who don't have means of support. I guess most libertarians are "authoritarian."
Or is it for some of the ways Hoppe suggests private owners could and might use their own property, e.g. various restrictive covenants? Apparently if you use your property in ways the Macy's haters disapprove of, you're "authoritarian".
You quote someone else quoting people on some forums–so what? What is this, guilt by association? I think if we are doing this I can show some interesting videos of your ilk "braking windowz" and acting like hooligans, wearing hammer and sickle and raising their fists in the air in hatred of corporate Amerika etc. The quotes selected are from extreme, non-rigorous, sensationalist members–not even right-libertarians really.
You say Rockwell et al. are "professed" libertarians–that he "professes" to celebrate contract's overtaking status. You say it's "ironic" Rockwell professes to be a methodogical individualist. I guess he's just lying. He's really a collectivist, Burkean authoritarian, a wannabe "squire[] in powdered wigs sipping mint juleps on the verandah, and grateful laborers in the field singing old English spirituals."
(Say, you haven't been taking your lessons from Tom Palmer, have you?)
As for all this yammer about "equality"–well I agree libertarians are in favor of justice–but "equality"? This is an awfully vague term and not in the same league as fair play or justice. In fact one not need think people are "equal" or believe in "equality" to be libertarian; far from it. We libertarians believe people have individual rights and ought to be treated fairly and justly despite inequality. Some people are clearly stupider, lazier, dirtier, less successful, less admirable than others. So what? Realizing this basic fact of reality makes one authoritarian?
Kinsella, that's an awful comment. "employees are benefitted from their employe (sic) and ought to be grateful." Grateful for what? For having to wait for future payment on present production, or for getting their freedom of labour taken away? As for defending the man who said that "-the advocates of alternative, non-family-centered lifestyles such as, for instance, individual hedonism, parasitism, nature-environment worship, homosexuality, or communism- will have to be physically removed from society, too, if one is to maintain a libertarian order", well that's just plain bullshit.
I used to respect you Kinsella, but the more I read about how you react to criticism, the more I realize you're a big phony.
Incidentally, you're known for attacking people who put Hoppe to the task, going to the extreme of getting them ostracised from the Mises Institute for it. MI and you deserve each other, really.
"This is an awfully vague term and not in the same league as fair play or justice."
Is it more vague than justice, a notoriously vague and controversial term itself? Do you believe that we should all equally enjoy justice and fair play?
"In fact one not need think people are “equal” or believe in “equality” to be libertarian; far from it."
That's true if by being libertarian you mean that you don't endorse it applying to everyone. But if you endorse libertarianism as an ideal that all people should endorse then you do: equality of political authority.
"We libertarians believe people have individual rights and ought to be treated fairly and justly despite inequality."
So equal treatment with regard to justice and fair play? Do we all equally have the same individual rights?
"Some people are clearly stupider, lazier, dirtier, less successful, less admirable than others. So what? Realizing this basic fact of reality makes one authoritarian?"
Indeed many people are as you describe them to be. And if by equality, Kevin meant economic or socio-cultural status equality, these would be relevant questions. It probably does make one authoritarian if they don't believe in the equality of political authority. Just going out on a limb on that one.
Stephan: The only comment I ascribed to Lew Rockwell was the one regarding grateful workers. It should be clear from the context that the discussion of methodological individualism refers to the comments on "division of labor" from the forums, not to anything Rockwell said.
It should also be obvious from what I wrote just what my actual objections are to the various comments quoted, and obvious as well that my objections are not your strawman caricatures of them.
Regarding Rockwell's comments on labor, in particular: I repeat, if the labor contract is an exchange of labor for money, between equals, then why does the worker owe the boss "hard work" any more than the boss owes the worker high pay? And I repeat, what do you think Rockwell's reaction would be to the mirror-image assertion that the boss owes the worker gratitude and high pay? He'd probably say the boss doesn't owe the worker a damned thing except what both sides voluntarily agreed to by contract. So why does the worker owe some kind of moral debt to the boss?
Please reread what I read about Hoppe. His argument about owners doing what they will with their property assumed, I repeat, universal appropriation of all land–something that is simply impossible using any rules of appropriation that are not repugnant to libertarian principle. The argument's not about whether immigration restrictions would exist; it's about whether the land could be so universally and totally appropriated, to the extent that not a square foot of common land or public right of way remained, so that the immigration debate would be moot. And I repeat, that's an odd vision of the good society for someone who values liberty.
Neverfox:
““This is an awfully vague term and not in the same league as fair play or justice.”
“Is it more vague than justice, a notoriously vague and controversial term itself?”
Yes. Justice means giving someone his due. What his due is depends on what his rights are. According to libertarians, the primary right is the right to be free from aggression. Compare this to paens to “equality”–it’s malleable and amorphous, and it is for this reason that it is adopted by its proponents: it seems innocuous so they get it in the front door, and then later twist and contort it toward their socialistic and anti-human ends.
“Do you believe that we should all equally enjoy justice and fair play?”
I have no idea what “equally” here adds to this sentence’s meaning. As far as I undersatnd it, the answer is no, since justice is not free, and people do not have equal means. So for example, if I have millions and use some of it for a safer car and neighborhood, “shouldn’t” I naturally have more justice (have my rights respected more) than someone who does not or cannot afford such measures. In another sense, I suppose it’s true–even someone who lives in a dangerous neighborhood should not be violated. So the term is amorphous and useless.
“But if you endorse libertarianism as an ideal that all people should endorse then you do: equality of political authority.”
equality of political authority? What exactly does this mean?
““We libertarians believe people have individual rights and ought to be treated fairly and justly despite inequality.”
“So equal treatment with regard to justice and fair play?”
why do you insert “equally” where I did not, where it’s not needed, and adds nothing but potential for deception? No, I don’t know what “equal treatment with regard to justice” means.
“Do we all equally have the same individual rights?”
I have no idea what this means. Luckily for me, I don’t have a liberal arts degree.
“It probably does make one authoritarian if they don’t believe in the equality of political authority. Just going out on a limb on that one.”
Well most so-called “vulgar” and “paleo” types I know, including Hoppe, are anarcho-libertarians, and so do not believe in states or governments having the political authority they do. So I don’t know what there is to whine about here.
Kevin Carson:
“Stephan: The only comment I ascribed to Lew Rockwell was the one regarding grateful workers.”
Good to know. This is even worse, in a way–one comment about gratitude in mutually beneficial relations makes one authoritarian. I see.
“It should be clear from the context that the discussion of methodological individualism refers to the comments on “division of labor” from the forums, not to anything Rockwell said.
“It should also be obvious from what I wrote just what my actual objections are to the various comments quoted, and obvious as well that my objections are not your strawman caricatures of them.”
Then there should be no problem.
“Regarding Rockwell’s comments on labor, in particular: I repeat, if the labor contract is an exchange of labor for money, between equals,”
Who said it’s “between equals”? Why is this relevant? What does it mean?
Consider Christ Daughtry, who gained stardom after American Idol, and formed the band Daughtry. Yeah, he needs his bandmates to play music. But do yo uthink they are paid equally? Do you think they are grateful to him? Sure. Why? After all, they are equal, are they not? Yeah, in one sense, they are; in some other relevant senses, apparently not. Which is why this weasel-word “equal” is used insidiously. It adds nothing but potential to distort and trick.
“then why does the worker owe the boss “hard work” any more than the boss owes the worker high pay?”
You can’t compare, by saying “more”–and it’s not “equal” either. It is what it is. Sure the capitalist should be grateful to productive employees. So what?
” And I repeat, what do you think Rockwell’s reaction would be to the mirror-image assertion that the boss owes the worker gratitude and high pay?”
Who cares? Mirror image? I doubt it. The relations are not the same.
” He’d probably say the boss doesn’t owe the worker a damned thing except what both sides voluntarily agreed to by contract. So why does the worker owe some kind of moral debt to the boss?”
Even if he said this, it’s not “authoritarian.” But of course I don’t think he would think this; I do not. I do not think the relations are “equal”, but that does not mean that it’s all one-way. It’s often the same in a marriage, even successful ones–the sides are not always “equal”. In some cases some woman marries a successful, rich man, so lives a nice life. She is grateful to him for his success and providing them a nice life. He is grateful to her for being a devoted mother to his kids and a good wife. Etc. It’s not equal, but it’s bilateral. So what. There is nothing authoritarian about living in the real world, about not wanting to “transform” human nature, about not hating reality per se.
“Please reread what I read about Hoppe. His argument about owners doing what they will with their property assumed, I repeat, universal appropriation of all land–something that is simply impossible using any rules of appropriation that are not repugnant to libertarian principle. The argument’s not about whether immigration restrictions would exist; it’s about whether the land could be so universally and totally appropriated, to the extent that not a square foot of common land or public right of way remained, so that the immigration debate would be moot. And I repeat, that’s an odd vision of the good society for someone who values liberty.”
I don’t know how to analyze a comment that something is an “odd vision” for someone who values liberty. Uhh, okay, so you find it odd. Except it seems you are implying it’s not libertarian, that he’s not libertarian.
I find it interesting that you selected for attack probably the two single greatest libertarians in the world–and I mean this quite literally: Rockwell, probably the greatest single force for liberty on the entire planet, given his founding of the Mises Institute alone and all they do to promote understanding and spread of the message of sound economics and liberty; and Hoppe, arguably the greatest living libertarian and Austrian theorist. I, myself, would pause before questioning the libertarian bona fides of such men as these; but, then, if I saw everyone as “equal,” perhaps I wouldn’t.
As for the commentor above who whined about workers waiting “for future payment on present production, or for getting their freedom of labour taken away”–I’d be worried if minds that mushy did respect me.
http://obamiconme.pastemagazine.com/entries/image…
What I mean by the labor contract being a contract between equals is that both parties are free to accept or decline, that both parties enter it entirely for the sake of their own individual utility-maximization, and that they both enter it only because it is beneficial for them, and not out of some Burkean social pattern of deference and noblesse oblige. I suppose if Lew Rockwell were explicitly confronted with the challenge in the terms stated here, he would feel constrained to tip his hat to the idea that the boss owes gratitude to his workers if only for the sake of maintaining consistency. But I strongly suspect that his reaction would have been viscerally negative, had he seen the bare assertion that a boss owes gratitude and high pay to his workers, earlier and outside the context of this argument.
Good post, Kevin. As much as I admire Mises, I cringe whenever I think of a line he wrote to Rand in praising Atlas Shrugged:
"You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them: you are inferior and all the improvements in your conditions which you simply take for granted you owe to the effort of men who are better than you."
There is definitely an odious strain of status in some wings of libertarianism. Thanks for helping to expose it.
Thanks, Sheldon. I wish I'd thought to include that Mises quote. Also the one from Reisman about all progress being made by Randian supermen in the face of the "uncomprehending dullness of their fellows." As I commented at the time, "'Austrian economics' indeed!" Perhaps he should have written a treatise on capitalism called "My Struggle."
Someone might defend Rockwell's line this way: The employee should be grateful that the employer has taken the entrepreneurial risk involved in setting up a business. He makes an investment, and if his prediction about future consumer demand is wrong, he stands to lose it, while the employee just loses a job.
But this argument is wrong. As Mises points out, all action is entrepreneurial. Every decision entails risks and opportunity costs. When a worker takes job A, it entails forgoing job B or self-employment opportunity C. So he does take a risk. If the business he goes to work for fails, he may not be able to exploit one of the opportunities that were available at the earlier time.
If risk is the proffered reason to distinguish the status of the employer from that of the employee, then that distinction is illusory. Economically (and morally) they are equal parties engaged in an exchange for mutual benefit.
Yes. The employee is also an entrepreneur in that he invests human capital, developing firm-specific skills and relationships that may not be of any, or as much, value in a different firm. And he contributes idiosyncratic knowledge of the production process.
Kevin,
Nice explanation @8.
Resort to Webster's is always worthwhile:
gratitude: The state of being grateful; warm and friendly feeling toward a benefactor; kindness awakened by a favor received; thankfulness. [emphasis mine]
favor: A kind act or office; kindness done or granted; benevolence shown by word or deed; an act of grace or good will, as distinct from justice or remuneration [emphasis mine]
The only context in which "gratitude" is warranted in an employer/worker relationship is if one party is doing something for the other apart from or above and beyond what the contract demands (i.e. apart from or above and beyond "justice or renumeration").
While I can think of specific cases in which this happens or has happened in both directions, I don't see a general case ("their boss is their benefactor … they owe him gratitude as well as hard work" or vice versa) for it.
"Yes. Justice means giving someone his due. What his due is depends on what his rights are. According to libertarians, the primary right is the right to be free from aggression. Compare this to paens to “equality”–it’s malleable and amorphous, and it is for this reason that it is adopted by its proponents: it seems innocuous so they get it in the front door, and then later twist and contort it toward their socialistic and anti-human ends."
Who cares? My advise: just don't get it twisted. Your reason behind justice not being susceptible to distortion is that there is a clear libertarian definition for it. Yet there are non-libertarian definitions of justice also. Why don't these cause you any trouble? Because you've chosen to endorse the libertarian one, for good reason. However, when you turn to equality, you don't conceive of the same possibility: a libertarian definition that can stand up to non-libertarian paeans.
"I have no idea what “equally” here adds to this sentence’s meaning. As far as I undersatnd it, the answer is no, since justice is not free, and people do not have equal means. So for example, if I have millions and use some of it for a safer car and neighborhood, “shouldn’t” I naturally have more justice (have my rights respected more) than someone who does not or cannot afford such measures. In another sense, I suppose it’s true–even someone who lives in a dangerous neighborhood should not be violated. So the term is amorphous and useless."
"Have my rights respected more"? You seem to be mixing two definitions of justice here. The first part of your response seems to equate justice with security. Yet that's not what justice is, by your own definition. We all have the same equal right to be free of aggression.
"equality of political authority? What exactly does this mean?"
[T]he prohibition of any "subordination or subjection" of one person to another.
"I have no idea what this means"
I would invest in a dictionary perhaps. This is one of you favorite phrases it seems. Either equality doesn't add anything, in which case you've undermined your argument that it's not innocuous or it does and you are still left without a reason why the existence of deceptive conceptions should scare us any more than alternative conceptions of justice. Is it harmful or simply irrelevant? If the later, why worry?
“They are first attracted to libertarianism because it appeals to broader cultural values of equality and fair play, or an aversion to seeing people treated badly and pushed around, and then they gradually come to accept the more philosophical arguments for it afterward”.
That may be one path to it, but another one is the individualist anarchist one that first resonated with me. It does not start from “people” generally, but contrasts received wisdom with known concrete cases – and always, the best known is oneself. There is no philosophical or instinctive need to to go very much beyond that, and whether it does will depend on other cultural values that have been transmitted to the individual, and on the individual concerned himself or herself. (Note the “self” in all that.) Someone coming by that path may simply never be taken to any of the other issues or seek them out.
“[T]heir boss is their benefactor, and that they owe him gratitude as well as hard work” is a narrow formulation, and incorrect as it stands in the way Kevin Carson has shown. However, there is a similar but wider sentiment that is accurate, although of limited application: any “boss” is spilling over benefits. Just as we should be grateful that there is rain, in a broad sense, we should be grateful that there are employers out there (for otherwise, we should have to go to all the trouble of setting up for ourselves). As against that, of course, we should deplore the extent to which they crowd out the opportunity of setting up for ourselves and the extent to which they organise their affairs so as not to offer a sufficiency of employment (though in that, I believe they are but responding to an externality that falls on them, encouraging downsizing even in the best of times). A very limited part of any net gratitude for the fact that there are employers should also go to the employers themselves. Realistically, Ford workers of the prewar years owed some of that sort of gratitude to Henry Ford – and also to Otto and others who paved his way. Little if any belongs to current automotive industry employers, though.
Some four of the quotations raise deeper issues:-
- “The fact is they [tribal or less developed cultures] often cannot be brought within the division of labour and without any concept of property rights it’s impossible that they own anything. Moreover they have no legitimate claim to any of this territory and as such it’s free to be homesteaded.” The logic is sound but the premises are false: just about everybody has some sense of property, even children (I knew just what “my little brother” meant: nobody else was allowed to hit him). But that does mean that a subtler variant of that argument is correct, since not everybody and every culture recognises property in the same things. For instance, here in Australia, there has been a strong movement to recognise Aboriginal title to land, superseding the earlier Terra Nullius idea that the land was not owned and could therefore be taken. However, apart from a few tribes (e.g. in the Torres Strait area), they really did not recognise property in land. The modern movement is actually cultural imperialism, imposing that concept, and open to the same sort of poor outcome as the US “allotment movement” for Indians for much the same reasons although these days the beneficiaries are more likely to be some sort of bureaucracy claiming to represent and act on behalf of Aborigines. That does not mean that the squatters and free selectors had a complete moral right to do as they did any more than the enclosers of the English commons had, for by doing so they infringed on something that was tribal property – hunting and gathering rights. The correct action at the time, though one that would be difficult if not quite impossible to retrofit today, would have been to buy off those rights, perhaps with a quitrent.
- “It was not wrong for the spanish to overthrow an empire that literally fed on its slaves in religious rituals and replace it with its much milder form of serfdom.” If that is merely referring to that transition in isolation, and knowing what we do of the Aztecs and Incas, it is perfectly correct. If, however, people want to treat it as a justification for continuing that milder oppression afterwards, of course it does not provide that.
- “Feudalism is actually an entirely appropriate model for anarchist society, and my prediction is it’s coming whether the anarchists like it or not.” It is an appropriate model, and actually one I favour. However, I do not mean by that what many people now understand by feudalism, possibly even including the author: all the values and stratifications that were allowed into the system and then grew and worked through it, and which many people were still calling feudalism even after those things had been bought out by absolutism and were working within that. Precisely because feudalism is as open to that sort of infection and co-option as today’s “democracy”, I would want to take great care not to put such things into a revived feudalism in the first place, and also to put in elements that would work within it as a sort of immune system to stop internal and external threats without themselves throwing that degree of burden on the people living and moving and having their being within the system – a sort of cultural endoskeleton where a state is an exoskeleton.
- “A system of feudal holdings all competing with each other for human and fiscal capital stacks up pretty good against a system whereby the parasitic majority lives off the productive minority.” So it does – but see the reservations I expressed against the previous two points.
Thomaslknapp, you are wrong about “[r]esort to Webster’s is always worthwhile”. Webster was prescriptive rather than descriptive, i.e. he put in things that he thought ought to be rather than as they are. He was into social engineering and cannot be trusted.
By the way, does anybody know why there was a break in the weekly cycle of these articles?
I was originally hired for a January gig doing weekly commentary pieces. This was the last one, posted a week late because an ice storm cut me off from the Internet the previous week.
Excellent piece, Kevin. The weird thing about these "anarcho-feudalist" folks is that they simultaneously claim to be such devout Rothbardians. Yet Rothbard considered libertarianism to be a branch of the radical Left, historically to the left of Socialism. To my mind, at least, the whole purpose of anarchism is to prevent concentrations of power into the hands of anyone-states, bosses, feudal overlords. In fact, I'd say the present day corporate system is more or less the modern equivalent of manorialism. I can only guess that such sentiments originate from a cultural bias towards the right-wing of the bourgeoisie, which is where many of these folks originate from.
Kevin, I replied to much of this on Chartier's blog.
As to some of the other comments here I didn't address there:
Kevin Carson:
I agree with this.
You are free to suspect what you like, but in my view you have no evidence of this and it is an incorrect and uncharitable characterization.
Sheldonrichman:
I cringe a bit as such comments to, though of course they were more understandable back then as a reaction to the prevailing hostiltiy to individualism. In any event, these "odious strains of status" do not in my view apply to Rockwell and Hoppe.
Sheldonrichman:
Exactly right. But the argument that is wrong is just one you are using here as a whipping horse. It's not Rockwell's view. all you are saying here is that "if Rockwell argues this then he's wrong." Well, okay. IF.
This is all true, and elementary and uncontroversial among Austrians, such as Rockwell. Of cousre, recognizing this does not require or imply any kind of vague assertion of "equality," nor does it imply the relation between employer and employee is symmetrical or the same, though of course, it's bilateral. You guys seem to be assuming Rockwell thinks it's unilateral. This would imply a failure to understand basic economics, which is of course absurd in Rockwell's case. And the imputation of the mint-julep sipping, Burkean noblesse oblige crap is also way out of bounds. Might as well bring in accusations of pining for the good ole days of slavery and Jim Crow. I mean come on.
I don't see what "equal" adds here, except to recognize that they are both free, and both benefit each other by the trade–so they are similar in this respect. But "equal"?
Kevin Carson:
Of course. We all know this.
Keith Preston:
It's a false and disgustingly unfair and — dare I say it here, "ungrateful" — calumny to imply that Rockwell or Hoppe are "feudalists." They are radical champions of Austrian free market ideas, individualism, and respect for property rights, and anarcho-libertarianism.
If anything is weird it is the too-sympathetic alliance with economically illiterate property-hating pinkos and Georgist cranks and bending wayy over backward to give them the benefit of the doubt, associating with pro-agrarian, industrialism-, modernism-, and capitalism-hating punks who see nothing wrong with vandalizing private property of companies like Macy's and Wal-Mart…. because, um, they use public roads. yeah.
We must face facts: we libertarians are not right or left. The right and left are all fascist-socialists. That's just the way it is.
Yes, partly due to its involvement with the state. BUt absent the state, any corporate size that results is earned and fully compatible with libertarianism.
LEt's drop the ad hominem and realize that we are neither left nor right.
Incidentally, for those attacking Rockwell, they should listen to his podcast today, "98. The Left, the Right, and the State"–absolutely heroic, bashing the state, the cops, parking tickets, etc. And see his heroic interview with Naomi Wolf, "58. America's Slow-Motion Fascist Coup". These denigrating this utter hero of liberty as weird, authoritarian, feudalist, etc. ought to be ashamed.
Just FYI, yes the icons next to MP3 links are actual play/stop buttons.
Kevin: Spot-on. The basic fallacy of such paleos is that they take the outcomes of statist intervention and dress them up with libertarian rhetoric, pretending that the social patterns resulting from authoritarianism are the result of voluntary interaction and defending them as such. In fact, of course, they are merely in favor of a different sort of authoritarianism, one that is currently so unfashionable as to have little chance of implementation. What makes them worse than the purveyors of the currently-fashionable authoritarianism is that they cling to that which has already been thoroughly discredited, instead of that which has not yet achieved that status.
By doing so, they give free ammo to the critics of capitalism on the Left. The Left likes to argue that libertarianism is nothing but a rhetorical fig-leaf for the rationalization of white patriarchy; by using free-market rhetoric to defend white patriarchy, the paleos make this come true.
Nskinsella,
You're overreacting to my comments.
"It’s a false and disgustingly unfair and — dare I say it here, “ungrateful” — calumny to imply that Rockwell or Hoppe are “feudalists.” They are radical champions of Austrian free market ideas, individualism, and respect for property rights, and anarcho-libertarianism."
I've read Hoppe's "Democracy: The God That Failed" several times, and I think it comes through fairly clearly in that work that Hoppe regards feudalism as a prototypical libertarian system. And he certainly espouses a kind of traditionalist cultural conservatism that is reminiscient of thinkers like De Maistre. That said, I think DTGTF is an absolutely brilliant work that I praised to the heavens in a review when it was published. The kind of dissection of democratist ideology that he provided is sorely needed. Hoppe even linked to my review on his site, and I wrote a letter to the Las Vegas paper on his behalf when he came under fire from the PC police.
"If anything is weird it is the too-sympathetic alliance with economically illiterate property-hating pinkos and Georgist cranks and bending wayy over backward to give them the benefit of the doubt, associating with pro-agrarian, industrialism-, modernism-, and capitalism-hating punks who see nothing wrong with vandalizing private property of companies like Macy’s and Wal-Mart…. because, um, they use public roads. yeah."
I think Kevin's critique of the relationship between conventional "capitalism" and the state has more substance to it than what you're describing. He just has different views than yours concerning what sort of economic arrangements a genuine libertarian, free-market system would produce, that's all.
"We must face facts: we libertarians are not right or left. The right and left are all fascist-socialists. That’s just the way it is."
I agree.
"BUt absent the state, any corporate size that results is earned and fully compatible with libertarianism."
Fine by me. If Wal-Mart, Microsoft and GM can survive on their own without any aid from the state whatsoever, including transportation subsidies, protective tariffs, patent monopolies, etc., then I'm okay with that. Let the chips fall where they may.
"Incidentally, for those attacking Rockwell, they should listen to his podcast today, “98. The Left, the Right, and the State“–absolutely heroic, bashing the state, the cops, parking tickets, etc. And see his heroic interview with Naomi Wolf, “58. America’s Slow-Motion Fascist Coup“. These denigrating this utter hero of liberty as weird, authoritarian, feudalist, etc. ought to be ashamed."
I just spent over an hour last night listening to Lew's excellent interview with Scott, and his exchange with Wolf is fantasitic. I agree that Lew is a "hero of liberty" and he's even been gracious enough to solicit and publish contributions from yours truly on his site, in spite of some ideological differences. I regularly link to articles from LRC on my own site. And, actually, I'm somewhat sympathetic to Hoppe and Lew's arguments concerning benefits of a limited monarchy over a mass democracy. It's more or less the same argument Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn made.
So I agree we should avoid ad hominem. That said, as a classical Proudhonian-Bakuninist-Kropotkinist anarchist I do think the circle around Mises holds to an economically conservative and culturally conservative line that reflects residual feudal-conservative and bourgeoisie-liberal influences that would indeed be to the right of my own outlook. I simply disagree that capitalism exists independently of the state. I'm not a Marxist, as I consider the state to be a class unto itself with its own class interests, over and above those of capitalism, as opposed to a mere instrument of class power. The state pre-dates capitalism. In fact, it could be argued that the modern state is itself divided into classes. Yet I do regard capitalism as a system of artificial economic privilege imposed by the state, and, in the case of things like central banking, as the economic arm of the state. For instance, I'm very much in agreement with the attacks the Austrians have levied against central banking.
See my recent essay for the Libertarian Alliance:
http://attackthesystem.com/free-enterprise-the-an…
Never was poor Ayn Rand more vindicated with her round-house swing against the incoherence of libertarians than in this blog article. The reader is stopped dead in his tracks in the first paragraph. "Equality and justice"? — Has no one here read Hayek, for starters? Political equality can't be defined, and the very attempt to put it into practice stamps that person as a statist. As for the catalog of supposedly authoritarian quotes: Supposing I can reconstitute a context to my liking just as much as you can strip them of context to _your_ liking, none of them seems offensive. The "lockdown society" as you term it completely ignores the scholarship on radical property rights, and seems to fume against the idea of ownership in and of itself. Indeed, the article's brooding over the rights of children is a concinnity with its whole tone of petulance that speaks in the voice of a child having problems at home. Like so many young libertarians, they seem to believe that all reasoning on this subject began with them, and rather than "stand on the shoulders of giants," are fatuously content to squat alone in the mud.
Preston: "So I agree we should avoid ad hominem. That said, as a classical Proudhonian-Bakuninist-Kropotkinist anarchist I do think the circle around Mises holds to an economically conservative and culturally conservative line that reflects residual feudal-conservative and bourgeoisie-liberal influences that would indeed be to the right of my own outlook."
That is fine, but I am not sure why you say this. There is no party line there, and plenty of people who hold views very compatible with much of what you guys insist on calling "left" anarchism.
"I simply disagree that capitalism exists independently of the state."
This may be just semantics.
If it's not, then probably we just disagree on our *prediction* of what a private order would look like. But who cares, as long as we all agree that let the chips fall where they may. I think you guys are off your rockers a bit in thinking we'd all be a bunch of self-sufficieint localist vegans, but whaetver. My main beef is when you use your analysis to conclude with scant and inconclusive evidence that a company like Macy's is not "realy" free marekt and "therefore" doesn't "realy" own it's proeprty, and therefore the workers are justifeid in seizing it, or vandarchists in breaking its windows. This is nihilism and violence.
"I’m not a Marxist, as I consider the state to be a class unto itself with its own class interests, over and above those of capitalism, as opposed to a mere instrument of class power. The state pre-dates capitalism. In fact, it could be argued that the modern state is itself divided into classes. Yet I do regard capitalism as a system of artificial economic privilege imposed by the state, and, in the case of things like central banking, as the economic arm of the state."
Of course, this is true, to some extent, depending on how you define "capitalims."
"For instance, I’m very much in agreement with the attacks the Austrians have levied against central banking."
Wonderful.
"That is fine, but I am not sure why you say this. There is no party line there, and plenty of people who hold views very compatible with much of what you guys insist on calling “left” anarchism."
Well, that's just the impression I get from the flavor of the commentary at Mises and LRC. Of course, I do know that Roderick Long is associated with Mises on some level, and formerly Joe Stromberg. Their views on political economy are fairly compatible with mine.
"“I simply disagree that capitalism exists independently of the state.”
This may be just semantics."
Probably so. Orthodox libertarians seem to use the term "capitalism" as a synonym for "free market." I tend to use it in a more narrow sense of a system where capital commands labor rather than vice versa. I discuss that a bit here in the context of a review of one of Kevin's works:
http://attackthesystem.com/capitalism-versus-free…
"I think you guys are off your rockers a bit in thinking we’d all be a bunch of self-sufficieint localist vegans, but whaetver.My main beef is when you use your analysis to conclude with scant and inconclusive evidence that a company like Macy’s is not “realy” free marekt and “therefore” doesn’t “realy” own it’s proeprty, and therefore the workers are justifeid in seizing it, or vandarchists in breaking its windows. This is nihilism and violence."
I think you've got me pegged a bit wrong. I'm a proud meat-eater, for one thing, and have little time for the PETA crowd. I'm also something of a skeptic with regards to global warming, and I agree with the critique of cultural Marxism advanced by some paleolibertarians and paleocons, though I don't share some of their other cultural biases. I think a free market would produce economic arrangements closer to Spain's Mondragon cooperative federation, Brazil's Semco, or the farming cooperatives in Italy's Emilia-Romagna province, rather than the kind of anti-industrial fanaticism envisioned by someone like John Zerzan. I'm agnostic concerning a lot of the details of privatization, but I generally share Kevin's broader outlook on the subject. I suppose I'd start by cutting taxes and regulation from the bottom up and welfare from the top down (beginning with the military-industrial complex and central banking). Kevin and Larry Gambone have some very good ideas on mutualizing social services.
http://www.anti-state.com/article.php?article_id=…
Keith: Part of the explanation, I think, is the extent to which "actually existing capitalism"–capitalism in the sense of the historical construct that succeeded the Old Regime–is a continuation of the Old Regime. I believe that Immanuel Wallerstein was right: a segment of the old landed ruling class survived the disintegration of the feudal regime, transformed itself into agrarian capitalists working in the cash nexus, and negotiated the transition to a new system of political economy with themselves as the ruling class. Or as both Oppenheimer and Spooner put it, historical capitalism allows a market price system to operate within the limits of an overall structure characterized by privilege.
Stephan: What Lew Rockwell said in the quote in question struck me as displaying an authoritarian view of the labor relationship. Any general attitude toward the overall import of his career, including "ingratitude," is something you're reading into that: IOW, "an incorrect and uncharitable characterization."
It's odd that someone who rejects so much terminology and argumentation on an "Ick! I don't like it!" basis, because of who else it "sounds like," should react so strongly to my own impressionistic view of Rockwell.
In fact, I do recognize a great deal of good that LR has contributed, and regard him very much as a mixed bag. Likewise even Hoppe, although I agree with Keith Preston about the overall right-wing authoritarian flavor of his idealized anarchist society. Dear God, I even find a lot of value in the work of Gary North, despite his Calvinist anarcho-theocratic leanings.
When I use the term "equal," I do not mean either that people have equal abilities, or are entitled to equal positive goods of any particular sort. I simply mean that they are morally equal in the sense that each has an equal property in his own individual rights, and that any affront to them is equally wrong. Or as Lincoln (I know I'll smoke a turd in hell for quoting him) put it, each individual has an equal right to eat the bread produced by his own hand.
I don't really believe that free market libertarianism is "neither right nor left." IMO it was clearly left-leaning in its early days, when classical liberalism and classical socialism (the socialism of Hodgskin and the Rochedale Cooperators) showed their common origins. And it clearly moved to the right in the period of what Marx called "vulgar political economy," when industrial capital had for the most part won its struggles with the landed classes and old-style mercantilists, and shifted from a revolutionary to an apologetic stance. I'd like to help move it back to the left, and uncover some of its leftist roots that are buried in history.
Kevin: “What Lew Rockwell said in the quote in question struck me as displaying an authoritarian view of the labor relationship.”
Yes. I realize this. It’s clear that it struck you this way. It’s not clear that you have demonstrated you have a good reason for this.
“It’s odd that someone who rejects so much terminology and argumentation on an “Ick! I don’t like it!” basis, because of who else it “sounds like,” should react so strongly to my own impressionistic view of Rockwell.”
I don’t believe this is my approach, but in any event, I don’t think your characteriztion of R & H as authoritarian is well founded or true.
In fact, I do recognize a great deal of good that LR has contributed, and regard him very much as a mixed bag. Likewise even Hoppe, although I agree with Keith Preston about the overall right-wing authoritarian flavor of his idealized anarchist society. Dear God, I even find a lot of value in the work of Gary North, despite his Calvinist anarcho-theocratic leanings.
“When I use the term “equal,” I do not mean either that people have equal abilities, or are entitled to equal positive goods of any particular sort. I simply mean that they are morally equal in the sense that each has an equal property in his own individual rights, and that any affront to them is equally wrong. Or as Lincoln (I know I’ll smoke a turd in hell for quoting him) put it, each individual has an equal right to eat the bread produced by his own hand.”
IF you take “equal” out what do you los? If you add it, what do you gain? nohting. Eveyrone has a right to use his property. Whether it’s “equal” or not I cnanot say.
“I don’t really believe that free market libertarianism is “neither right nor left.””
Yes, I know.
” IMO it was clearly left-leaning in its early days, when classical liberalism and classical socialism (the socialism of Hodgskin and the Rochedale Cooperators) showed their common origins. And it clearly moved to the right in the period of what Marx called “vulgar political economy,” when industrial capital had for the most part won its struggles with the landed classes and old-style mercantilists, and shifted from a revolutionary to an apologetic stance. I’d like to help move it back to the left, and uncover some of its leftist roots that are buried in history.”
Yes, that is clear. to the extent this means condoning violence against companies you think are not “legitimate” because they use the –gasp–corporate form or, er, buy stuff shipped to them on, er, roads, then I think this attempt to bring back leftism is one to be opposed.
"…capitalism-hating punks who see nothing wrong with vandalizing private property of companies like Macy's and Wal-Mart… because, um, they use public roads…".
Er, most of those see nothing wrong with that because they see "private property of companies like Macy's and Wal-Mart" as a contradiction in terms, not because "they use public roads". For them, "they use public roads" isn't a justification, it's what makes dealing with those companies a higher priority.
"…absent the state, any corporate size that results is earned and fully compatible with libertarianism" is a hypothetical, and if one were to assume that there would be such it would be begging an underlying question.
It's about time we had a talk about the "A" word in libertarian circles. I read Hoppe's Democracy: The God that Failed, and have to say I had very mixed feelings. On the one hand, it presented a great challenge to the notion of "democracy" (the notion that "we are the government"), which definitely needed to be knocked down a peg or two. On the other hand, Hoppe thinks that not only is it allowable to discriminate against groups you dislike on your own property, but that there should be a lot more of it. And not any old hooligan either, but gays, environmentalists, liberals, and so on. The vision of a landlocked society was none too appealing either. Reading the book really confirmed me in my left-libertarianism.
Perhaps it was not fair for Kevin to quote from the community forum, where one generally finds the worst "two legs bad, four legs good" bleating, but really a lot of the comments are not much different from what you find in Hoppe.
Proudhon famously wrote:
“To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be place[d] under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.”
That is precisely the anti-authoritarian spirit that Kevin accurately says brings many of us to libertarianism in the first place. We have to admit many of these opressions come from the private sphere as well. Regardless of whether we agree with the other things Proudhon wrote, we should look at that list and ask ourselves whether we want that to be our justice, our morality.
Another thing about Hoppe is that I think his comparison of democracy and monarchy, to the detriment of the former, is more than just rhetorical. He seems to be sneaking in a monarchical conception of society into anarcho-capitalism by the back door of private property. I agree with Kevin that this is not feasible, not just economically but socially, since few people want to live in such an authoritarian world.
Note that this is a departure from libertarian tradition. Hoppe approvingly quotes ultra-conservative (in the European sense) Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, a whose book "Leftism" was savaged by Ralph Raico- a man with impeccable Austro-libertarian bona fides- in a Libertarian Forum review back in the seventies as mendacious and intellectually shallow.
I think one factor is the rise of a hysterical PC faction of the left in the late eighties and nineties, that caused many libertarians to move to the right. I quoted Proudhon before, but I think even more relevant is this denunciation of conservatism, again by Raico, from a 1980 Libertarian Review article (on the foul eve of the rise of Reagan):
"It’s an unfortunate fact that we Libertarians are still sometimes viewed by the press and the public as a 'right-wing' party. The Washington Post, for instance, recently referred to us as an "extreme right-wing" organization. This is a pity, and it can do us nothing but harm. Among perceptive people, conservatives are known for their blind nationalism, their readiness to engage in military adventure throughout the world, their envious Puritanism. This is why I have said that one of our most pressing tasks is to draw the line between us and the conservatives, and to etch that line into the public consciousness. One good way to do this would be to emphasize our principled concern for the people the conservatives habitually treat with neglect or with contempt: women, blacks and other racial minorities, gay people. The conservative movement is intellectually bankrupt and morally moribund. Any identification with it would be the kiss of death."
Amen.
P.S.- Despite some disagreements, I think Lew Rockwell, like Ron Paul, really ought to be praised as a tireless campaigner for liberty and against empire. Lew has also made an effort to reach out to the left in the era of Bush II and "Red State Fascism".
You & Charles Johnson say it is "weird" that so many libertarians don't behave the way you expect them to, such people are weirdos. It seems to me that right-libertarians outnumber left-libertarians. For the sake of argument we can grant it ought to be the other way around, but the fact is that among libertarians rightism is normal. What's weird is not them, but your expectations. Think like reality.
TGGP,
One just of the justifications Hoppe gives for his free-market libertarian/cultural conservatism synthesis is that this is more popular publically than the stereotype of libertarianism as free-market cultural leftism, or Pat Buchanan's socially conservative economic populism. On one hand I agree, as polls show the free-market/cultural conservative faction is the largest ideological group in the U.S. (about one third), with left-libertarianism (broadly defined) and Buchananism near the bottom. However, where I think Hoppe goes wrong with this argument is that most adherents of the free-market/cultural conservatism paradigm also espouse vigorous nationalism and military interventionism, and regard Hoppe and Rockwell as un-American traitors. Of course, that could change in the age of Obama. Conservatives are usually a lot better as an oppostion party.
P.M.Lawrence:
"'…capitalism-hating punks who see nothing wrong with vandalizing private property of companies like Macy’s and Wal-Mart… because, um, they use public roads…'.
"Er, most of those see nothing wrong with that because they see “private property of companies like Macy’s and Wal-Mart” as a contradiction in terms, not because “they use public roads”. For them, “they use public roads” isn’t a justification, it’s what makes dealing with those companies a higher priority."
Yes, yes, I know that the vandarchists have some reasons for their support of violence, just as other criminals do. Motivations are primarily of interest to the crime-fighting specialties, when such atavistic action is treated as merely a technical problem.
rmangum: "Another thing about Hoppe is that I think his comparison of democracy and monarchy, to the detriment of the former, is more than just rhetorical. He seems to be sneaking in a monarchical conception of society into anarcho-capitalism by the back door of private property."
Yes. Even though he over and over explicitly says he is not in favor of monarchy, and that it too is illegitimate just like democracy is. I guess 1000 times is not enough. IF he said it 1001 maybe that would be just the ticket.
Kevin-
Thank you for this article. I think that you are are doing extremely important work with your integration of class justice and libertarianism, and this helps answer some of my personal uncertainties and reservations I’ve had with regards to your ideas. And I very appreciate the emphasis on children’s rights, as most of us first learn to obey and repress first from parents, then from schools and churches, and only later from boss and state.
Left-libertarianism currently teeters between a choice of two models. The first demands conjoins radical libertarian analysis with an across-the-board opposition to authority and domination, and thereby offers a vision of social justice which is also economically rigorous and which clearly defends the independent individual. The second also radically opposes class injustice, but identifies class injustice with feminism, cultural diversity, and social and sexual openness of ‘liberal elites’ and seeks to rally the downtrodden against scapegoat targets. I think that left-libertarianism will in the end take one of these two directions, and the course it has chosen when it starts breaking into wider intellectual visibility and influence could matter a great deal. I hope you will continue to speak as you have here.
Tim-
Well said, altho’ I’m not so sure that the ‘discredited systems’ promoted by paleos are as dead and defeated as you suggest. Most of the world is, after all, still substantially in the grip of heirarchical social relations. Even in the best places to live the society of status remains deeply buried in our moral and religious teachings, and those who wish to return to such a society are hardly neglibible political forces- think of Le Pen, Haider, or the American Christian right. I’ve become somewhat more optimistic since Obama’s election, but I think the paleos are more dangerous in themselves than they are in terms of what aid and comfort they might give to the worst elements of the Left. Racism and patriarchy are, unfortunately, still very real. The heirs to the old social orders still control enough cultural spaces to stunt and maim human lives trapped within them and haven’t given up trying to retake power. Their persistence isn’t a reason to mindlessly tear down contemporary institutions (as much of the Left does, misidentifying a tribal problem as essentially modern). But reactionaries do bear watching; the old prejudices have thousands of years of unconscious language and culture behind them and in the right conditions can rise quickly at any moment.
It is nice to see you. I just wished to say that you were right, and i was wrong, on the dispute on the salon years ago- I took he wrong side. I don’t agree with all of your judgment calls, specifically regarding the nature of the modern United States, but as I mature I’ve found myself in more agreement with your broader perspective. I’ve seen both real barbarism and real civilisation (and one which includes me) more closely and clearly since moving to New Zealand, and I have no further doubts that civilisation is a principle to be cherished and supported. I was simply far too angry at the time at what called itself civilisation around me to think straight.
Kinsella-
Heroism is pursuit of an applauded goal in the face of opposition and pain. And while I agree that courage and daring are attractive virtues, they are terrible measures as to whom one should trust in politics. Gangsters have courage. Barbarians have courage. ‘Street-fighting man’ has courage. Fascists, militias, and guerrillas have courage. ‘Courage’ is an analogue to the physical, military prowess which is probably the oldest and worst source of political legitimacy. Lew Rockwell might or might not be heroic- I don’t know, altho’ he certainly does it well on the radio. But I think that heroism is a terrible criteria for admiration in politics, where we desperately need reason. A person who displays heroism can have good ideas, but a politics dominated by appeals to the heroic is a disaster.
I’m glad if you can feel such admiration for Lew Rockwell- people don’t feel enough in this world. But I think a liberal society- in the broadest possible sense of any social order justified by its value to individual human beings- depends upon a continual vigilance against heroic appeals. Heroism is a story about fighting and war, most archetypically in defense of kin and community. It’s about strength, or the appearance of strength- and leadership in service to the group. But a liberal society is one where not strength but thinking counts. If martial virtues are transcribed directly into political legitimacy the result is an atmosphere hostile to both peace and freedom, but favorable to war and collectivism.
I don’t think that Rockwell is attempting to make this transmutation, but many others have and are- it is certainly is one of the standard appeals of right-wing populism, romantic nationalism, and- ultimately- of patriarchal relations. I think plenty of people in the circle hovering about Rockwell know this very well, and hate a society which has somewhat prioritised reasoning against these passions. That is the real road to Hell. The few halfway decent societies in human history have been those where martial appeals have to some (sadly small) degree been eclipsed by appeals to reason. Individualists- and those libertarians who still are individualists- have an incalculable stake in the separation of heroism and politics. So does anyone who thinks. So does anyone oppressed or marginalised. Heroism just doesn’t favour the best within us unless it is reconstituted in awareness of our conscious, reasoning nature- and that approach just doesn’t work as a popular appeal and influence. If you look for a hero in politics, you will get a warlord. People who can pull off the heroic who are not (wannabe) warlords are as rare as enlightened despots and for the same reasons, and they tend to lose against people who are martial all the way down. If the political situation is bad enough that heroic appeal is the only shot against an immovably corrupt establishment then we are all in serious trouble.
That’s one of the things which worries me most about Obama- he’s a smart man who appeals to the highest common denominator in the American sense of life, but he speaks to a longing for a communal saviour. That’s not quite the same game, but it is close enough, and given the state of American democracy I hope this approach is more his rhetoric than his program. The American public right now does not know how to reason; reason presenting itself as something else is probably the best that can be realistically hoped for. But If Obama really does see himself as a saviour- as a hero-, then any chance of reclaiming a free society is probably dead for a generation.
Stephan: "Equality" in the sense of equal entitlement to one's own life, liberty and property, equal right to be governed only by one's own consent, equal right to the product of one's own labor–all of this is precisely what classical liberals meant by the term "equality." And IMO equality is a damned fine word for it. I don't see what's to be gained by throwing it away, unless it's just to avoid squeamishness over the icky leftist types who like to use the word as well. But I think the significance the leftists attach to it is pretty much the same–they just mistakenly apply the concept in areas like positive rights as well as negative, and see private (voluntary) authoritarianism as something to be remedied by some sort of constitutional due process framework, rather than understanding that non-coercive authoritarianism should be remedied by non-coercive moral opposition.
rmangum: It strikes me as natural that people would be initially attracted to libertarianism out of an aversion to seeing other people "watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated," etc., under any circumstances. So once again, I have to say it's odd to find someone who favors political libertarianism because it makes it more feasible for people to be "watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated," etc., in a multitude of petty fiefdoms of the lockdown society, without any outside interference.
Tim and aster: Thanks for the comments. It's interesting that aster addressed her past differences with Tim on this thread. I agree with Tim that much of the "natural" society the paleos idealize is the product of past domination with the state at its core, and involves authoritarian social relations that the state has played a big part in reinforcing, amplifying and perpetuating. I also agree with aster on the genuine value of civilization as opposed to barbarism. I don't, however, agree with Tim on the principle of "libertarian centralism" advanced through the vehicle of a hegemonic superpower. On the actual practice of the United States over the past century, as opposed to its idealistic rhetoric, I think Noam Chomsky is pretty much on the mark.
Kevin,
Well, no. I have no aversion to using words even in the face of the popular misuse of or potential therefor (this is why I always tell people presently does not mean currently, even though usage shapes meaning… it’s why I use libertarian, and even capitalist, despite their being tarnished by the left–and in the case of capitalism, even by left-libertarians). I do not even mind saying we are really socialists–properly understood (as Chartier does on his site–”I take anarchism to be the project of doing without the state. I’d prefer a stateless society in which people enjoyed property rights and were free to structure relationships through exchange. But, under anarchy, different communities could reasonably implement different property rules and a community’s courts could rightly enforce rights some market anarchists might want upheld in other ways. Privation could be significantly reduced in stateless societies, but I believe such societies could and should organize income security and poverty relief systems. I’m pro-peace, and I support inclusion and oppose subordination and deprivation. I’m happy to identify as both a libertarian (and, depending on how the NAP is read, a Libertarian) and, in the sense suggested by Benjamin Tucker, a socialist (but not a state-socialist or an opponent of individual property).” — I agree with all of this, by the way. I suspect rockwell and Hoppe would too, though you wouldn’t know it from the distortions of their views one sees from supposed allies.)
But what I do try to avoid is using words that add nothing to a proposition except perhaps confusion. A case in point is the word spontaneous, and also ontological. These are often sprinkled into sentences and their removal would not change the meaning. So why are they there? Other than to sound sophisticated or bully readers, or to subtly push one’s agenda or something. I also object to words that are misleading or used incorrectly, such as when libertarians object to “coercion”, as if it’s a synonym for aggression (it’s not); or when they carelessly say we are opposed to violence and force–we’re not, only its initiation. Etc.
In the case of “equal” as you used it here, I fail to see what it adds and to be honest, I am not sure what exactly it means in this usage. I have a right ot my life. You have a right to your life. Are these rights “equal”? I don’t know. Suppose I love my wife, and you love yours. Or, you love your home state, and I love mine. Is our love “equal”? Or suppose we both buy the latest Cory Doctorow novel. Does that mean we value it “equally”? These kinds of formulations veer on violating Austrian insights on the impermissibiltiy of interpersonal utility comparisons, not to mention the fact that they are not even cardinal in the first place. If I buy the book, and you do, we both demonstrate that we prefer it to the money we handed over for it, and to other things we could have spent our money on. That’s all you can say. It doesn’t show that we valued it equally. It is not even meaningful to state that we do value it equally. Same, IMO, with saying A and B have “equal” rights to their lives etc.
Consider what you said above: “equal entitlement to one’s own life, liberty and property, equal right to be governed only by one’s own consent, equal right to the product of one’s own labor”
Take out equal: everyone has a right “to his own life, liberty and property, a right to be governed only by one’s own consent, a right to the product of one’s own labor”.
Now, what does removing equal take away here? Nothing that I can see. So it’s introductin is superfluous, and probably insidious or subject to misuse and twisting.
(BTW, there is no right to the product of one’s own labor.)
“But I think the significance the leftists attach to it is pretty much the same–they just mistakenly apply the concept in areas like positive rights as well as negative, and see private (voluntary) authoritarianism as something to be remedied by some sort of constitutional due process framework, rather than understanding that non-coercive authoritarianism should be remedied by non-coercive moral opposition.”
Uh, I think mean you mean non-aggressive?
I think you overexaggerate the former (that this is a reason to be libertarian) and aslo Hoppe’s “vision”. I think not all libertarians are against “regulation” per se–but against unjust regulation by those who have no right to do it. That’s one reason perhaps some libertarians in a thickish way do not object to *all* authority but only to (monopolistic) political authority.
I recently saw were enlightened, liberal New Zealand, the supposed hallmark of civilization, is seeking to ban or regulate to death foods containing levels of salt, sugar and fat unacceptable to the therapeutic statists, health Nazis, and PC food police.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/health/news/article.cfm…
"Was the government to prescribe to us our medicine and diet, our bodies would be in such keeping as our souls are now." –Thomas Jefferson: Notes on Virginia Q.XVII, 1782. ME 2:222
Of course, this is what passes for the "reason" and "thinking" of liberals. By all means, ban smoking and mayonnaise, as these endanger public health, but allow public gay sex orgies like San Francisco's Folsom Street Fair (hey, no potential health hazards there). In Holland, you can now smoke marijuana in bars, but not tobacco, and alcohol and marijuana cannot be sold in the same bar simultaneously.
Conservatives who want a total ban on marijuana but want the state to sell alcoholic beverages and subsidize tobacco cultivation are no different. Both liberals and conservatives are tribes and sects, with their own sets of irrational taboos and pieties, which in turn reflect the collective and individual self-interests, prejudices and preferences of their members. Liberals, for all their professed enlightenment and universalism, are really just another tribal sect, no different from Islam or Christianity or Marxism in their claims of superior enlightenment or universal values.
Of course, some would say a place like New Zealand represents superior enlightenment because prostitution is legal and the gay rights movement is influential there (which is all fine by me). In other words, New Zealand upholds the interests of their tribe. As Hobbes observed, humans are creatures of passion, not reason.
What's interesting is to observe how many differences exist among libertarians. What's more, libertarians are a rather small group among the rest of humanity, and probably always will be. That's why I concluded years ago that the only alternative to the Leviathan state (whether in its overtly totalitarian form, or its incipient totalitarian form) is some kind of cultural separatism and tribal anarchism.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Z5SwLjujfU
Aster: I humbly accept your most gracious apology. I always knew you were just too angry at the time, and that your thinking would eventually resume its usual clarity. I took no real offense.
I'd like to address some more clarifications of my own views to both yourself and Kevin on a couple of points, the first being the status of martial virtues. I find them excessively demonized by libertarians when it comes to some particular exemplars, and uncritically accepted when it comes to others. The crucial question about them in my mind is the cause they serve. While at one level it is possible to admire the technical excellence of various feats of martial prowess regardless of the cause it serves, including the morality of the cause greatly changes our overall moral judgement. For instance, the Spartans are portrayed in the movie "300" as serving the cause of reason and freedom, and opposing mysticism and tyranny. In reality, of course, the Spartans enslaved the helots. So, when they defended themselves against enslavement by Xerxes, they were defending their own slaveholding. As portrayed in the movie, the Spartans are completely heroic and noble. In reality, they were a far more mixed bag. Sparta was better than Persia, but both were highly imperfect.
What I object to in a great many otherwise clear-thinking libertarians is that they object to martial prowess in defense of freer societies far more than they do to those same things when applied to the defense of less free societies. (I also object equally to the uncritical acceptance of any military action by freer societies, simply because the society is freer.) For instance, neo-Confederates criticize the "militarism" of the Union, depite the fact that the Confederacy was far more militaristic (e.g., there were state-level military academies all through the Confederacy well before the Civil War, and hardly any in the Union).
As for the continued prevalence of authoritarianism, you are quite right. However, the point I was trying to make is that the paleos defend the most-discredited forms of it, such as Lew Rockwell calling segregation more "humane" than the post-Civil Rights era of discrimination prohibition and affirmative action. Bad as things are now, they were vastly worse back in the time period between the end of Reconstruction and the start of WWII (see the recent book "Slavery by Another Name" on this). More humane for blacks to be convicted en masse of trivial and often false charges, forced to plea-bargain their way into de facto slavery, so they could be worked to death in the mines of the South? What suffering is there today from discrimination prohibition and affirmative action that could possibly be worse than that?
Finally, for paleos like Hoppe to prefer monarchy to democracy on allegedly decentralist grounds is the ultimate in hypocrisy, as monarchy is as a rule far more centralized than democracy, unless you play Humpty-Dumpty with words like Hoppe does to redefine totalitarian dictatorships like Maoist China as democracies. The slave oligarchy of the antebellum South was _not_ more decentralized than the North, and the slavers were all in favor of centralization so long as they controlled the center, as proven by the Fugitive Slave Act and the gag rule prohibiting debate of slavery on Congress.
So, Kevin, I do not support libertarian centralism spread by military power in the abstract. It depends upon the situation and the relevant alternatives. If a free society can survive in the world without having to conquer others, then I'm all for it. However, if it is threatened by less free societies, then we are under no moral obligation to respect their "sovereignty," which is nothing more than their "right" to keep their slaves.
As for whether Chomsky is right about the 20th/21st century, all I can say is that he uncritically accepted and/or praised the worst examples of centralized, militarist, aggressive tyranny in the 20th century (Maoist China & Democratic Kampuchea, most specifically), and opposed the USA primarily because it resisted the regimes he favored. Furthermore, he does so by stretching the truth beyond all recognition, and as both a professional linguist and the leading intellectual of the Left in the world today he knows better.
nskinsella writes, "most libertarians support some immigration restrictions."
No, they don't. Words have meanings, and "libertarian" has had an accepted definition for a long time: it is one who accepts and supports the non-aggression principle. Immigration restrictions — initiating force to restrict where other people can live or for whom they can work — is a clear violation of the non-aggression principle. Any person is non-libertarian to the extent that they advocate any immigration restriction beyond the right of a private property owner to choose whom to allow on his own property. (And trying to justify immigration restrictions as an exercise of that right makes sense only if you're a committed statist who believes that the state is the ultimate rightful owner of every scrap of land in the country.)
Having said that, I do have some objections to what Kevin Carson has said. It's not legitimate to judge an organization (the Mises Institute) on the basis of quotes selected from an open forum. First of all, are these quotes at all representative of what is said in those forums? I suspect the compiler had an axe to grind. Secondly, IT'S AN OPEN FORUM, FOR GOD'S SAKE! Anybody can register and post whatever nonsense they desire.
ksvanhorn: My reference to the compilation of comments from Mises community forums was not intended as a generalization about Mises.Org, or anything beyond using those specific quotes as examples of a way of thinking. If I gave any impression to the contrary, it was unintentional.
Tim Starr wrote "…monarchy is as a rule far more centralized than democracy".
Actually, no, absolute monarchy often is more centralised (although even Danish absolute rule was distant for Norway), but neither the mediaeval nor the constitutional versions usually were. Monarchy versus democracy is pretty much orthogonal to the degree of centralisation.
Kieth: "Both liberals and conservatives are tribes and sects, with their own sets of irrational taboos and pieties, which in turn reflect the collective and individual self-interests, prejudices and preferences of their members. Liberals, for all their professed enlightenment and universalism, are really just another tribal sect, no different from Islam or Christianity or Marxism in their claims of superior enlightenment or universal values."
I think this is an excellent point, and its worth pointing out also- for both left and right anarchists and anti-statists- that if there is one tribal ideal which fits the cultural Marxist notion of ideological hegemony, it's contemporary liberalism. Seemingly any argument for anything not status quo must attempt to justify itself in terms of the values and prejudices of liberalism.
This gets back to what is really valuable in Hoppe: his idea of insurance companies as protection agencies can be employed to serve a wide variety of ideological "tribes", from fundamentalist Christians to radical feminists (both groups having expressed separatist ideas at times). Any group not seeking extermination of all other groups, that is (and Hoppe is also wonderful at describing how peaceful and free communities will deal with their agressive neighbors).
By the way, has anybody noted that Hoppe himself complains about government roads facilitating massive immigration (in Democracy: the God that Failed on pgs. 141 & 147) in much the same way that left-libertarians like Kevin Carson lament that they have subsidized massive corporations like Wal-Mart?
Some in the paleocon milieu, like Paul Gottfried, have argued that liberalism is essentially the secularization of the Social Gospel that emerged among left-wing Christians during the Progressive era and earlier. Rothbard traced it to the pietism of early 19th century American evangelicalism. Bill Lind has traced the PC Left to the Frankfurt School's critical cultural analysis. Rothbard also considered Marxism to be a kind of secularization of Christian apocalyptism. Thinkers from the European New Right like Alain De Benoist and Tomislav Sunic have argue that liberalism and Marxism alike are simply outgrowths of the universalism of the monotheistic, Abrahamic religions, in contrast to the polytheistic paganism of the indigenous Europeans and, by extension, classical Greco-Roman civilization. I suspect all of these critiques have some merit.
As I see it, modern liberalism is rapidly metamorphing into a new form of totalitarianism that I call "totalitarian humanism". I produced a few articles for LRC on this matter:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig8/preston1.html http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig8/preston2.html
What I trace this to is that as the older pieties like "God, Family, and Country" or "Faith, Flag and Fatherland" are breaking down, the usual suspects (the state, the ruling class, the overlords of the empire) can no longer use these to justify their own hegemony. So they need new pieties as part of their ideological superstructure. Hence, the U.S. does not attempt to conquer Iraq or Afghanistan in the name of martial glory or the glory of the fatherland, but in the name of "democracy," "human rights," secularism or feminism. Of course, this has its prototypes in American history with Wilson and to some degree Lincoln. I'd recommend Chomsky's work "The New Military Humanism" for a good look at how this played out during the Clinton era, though Chomsky's own liberal influences weaken his analysis a bit.
The liberal ideological superstructure is also used for the purposes of domestic subjugation by the ruling class. For instance, attacks on the culture of the poor and working class, such as smoking bans and food regulation, are justified in the name of health rather than religion or morality. Disarmament of the poor and working class is justified in the name of "safety" rather than law and order. The class oppression inherent in things like zoning, housing and land use regulation, occupational licensing,etc. is justified in the name of "consumer protection", environmentalism, aesthetics, etc. as opposed to a professed belief in mere class superiority in the sense of an old European conservative.
Ever greater state centralization is also justified on such grounds. All competing centers of power-families, religions, businesses, unions, voluntary associations, communities and local and regional governments have to be subjugated to the central government, which will then be controlled by enlightened elites who will make sure "no child is left behind", and that no one is ever being discriminated against, or practicing backward ideas like religion or racism, or abusing animals, or practicing polygamy (gay marriage is fine, however), or smoking or taking drugs, or eating fatty foods, or failing to send their kids to public school to be inculcated with ideology of the state.
Immigration policy really is a win-win situation for the ruling class. Illegal immigration is used as pretense for expanding the police state and creating more fodder for the prison-industrial complex, while legal immigration (which is encouraged by all sorts of direct and indirect subsidies of the kind you mention) is used as a justification for expanding the state, creates constituencies for the state, undermines the economic position of the indigenous poor and working class, and plays into the divide and conquer strategy of the elites.
mangum: "By the way, has anybody noted that Hoppe himself complains about government roads facilitating massive immigration (in Democracy: the God that Failed on pgs. 141 & 147) in much the same way that left-libertarians like Kevin Carson lament that they have subsidized massive corporations like Wal-Mart?"
I beat you to it 2 days earlier:
nskinsella wrote:
"Hoppe’s argument, as I understand it, is that first and foremost there should be no state, and all property should have private owners."
If all lands are private owned and the fundamental tenet of libertarianism is the absolute right of self-ownership, then where exactly does someone get to stand that he doesn't have to purchase or be gifted his right of self-ownership. How can "self" be separated from existing in a specific location within a point in time.
I don't get it!
Stephan: Do you think that every road and every square foot of land and water COULD be owned by somebody? There wouldn't be any common areas or passage ways at all in a stateless world? Perhaps everyone could be a property owner, but it doesn't necessarily follow from that that every inch of land, road and water could be owned property.
As a follow up to this discussion, here's a 3-way discussion of paleo vs cosmopolitan libertarianism between Austin Bramwell, Richard Spencer, and Jack Hunter.
http://tinyurl.com/b3up34
i'm a newbie to libertarianism (not to anarchism) and i like a lot of what kevin carson says.
some of this subsequent discussion resonates with me, other posts are totally foreign and make no sense whatsoever.
i know this probably isn't the best place for these questions, but i don't think i'll find a better answer elsewhere. i'm looking for real answers, not dismissive attacks about how i'm marxist or something.
1. how can private property be considered libertarian?
maintaining a small piece of private property seems to be a reaction to encroachments of the state. in other words, if a state exists, then only under those circumstances would private property be necessary to secure a bare minimum of the means to achieving that which you need to survive. absent the state (or any institutionalized system of expropriation), from who would you need to utilize the protection of private property against.
1a. isn't private property, just like any other monopoly, but of land resources and thus not libertarian? doesn't private derive from the same latin roots as deprive?
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/privare#Latin
2. existentially speaking, what's the point of business and enterprise anyway? seriously? in a stateless society, everyone–person, family, tribe, community, whatever–would be able to provide the necessities of life because there would be no entity to prevent them, or take it away.
3. isn't any kind of profit based on some kind of coercion; either by force or deceit? if an exchange of goods, services, money, etc. is an even exchange, where does profit come from? is it even possible to make a profit on an even exchange?
3a. if that exchange does produce a profit, where does it come from if not from coercion?
4. another existential question. that's it? all we have to look forward to after the end of the state is seemingly paranoid homesteaders with guns (for protection only, of course) who only relate within their communities insofar as they can out-manoeuvre each other for the profit of their enterprise.
what would entice an anarchist to break ranks and consider libertarianism that is more than bare-bones (as carson puts it)?
@xveganx
I've posted a set of replies to your questions here:
http://bradspangler.com/blog/archives/1175
xveganx: As Brad says in his post, a lot of the trouble is just semantic. Property is libertarian because it's a place you can exist and do what you like without permission or interference, and a set of moveable objects that you require to support your life or express yourself likewise without permission or interference.
There is a limited number of plots of land capable of supporting an individual within easy access distance of any community, and moveable objects are scarce because they take labor to create. People need dependable use-rights for the land and tools they use to support their lives, and confidence that nobody else will take their labor product without their permission. To obtain this state of affairs, we need a set of rules governing who has priority access to a given piece of land or moveable object, which is all that "property" is, strictly speaking.
I believe that most of the current return on land and capital, as such, is a rent on artificial scarcity created by state restrictions on competition in the supply of those factors. But entrepreneurial profit is non-coercive; it is a scarcity rent that results from anticipating shifts in demand and being one of the first suppliers when demand outstrips supply. The natural state of affairs is for entrepreneurial profit to gravitate toward zero, when market entry is free. And as Brad says, psychic "profit" in the sense of trading effort or objects in possession for something else you prefer is the whole point of production for trade.
I suppose a fair number of libertarians are paranoid and own guns, but I don't think most of them are anywhere near as sociopathic or uncooperative as you seem to think. If anything, they tend to be more genuinely warm-hearted on average than non-libertarians, because they understand cooperation as something that is achieved by agreement between equals, and not simply organized through a state that can force people at gunpoint to cooperate whether they want to or not. IOW, they recognize the integrity of people as individuals, rather than regarding them as means to ends (an assumption I think lurks, however unconsciously, behind all the touchy-feely soccer mom rhetoric of liberals).
I understand your (Kevin & Brad) positions.
i would like to clarify that there are more kinds of property besides private and state-owned
for example, property that is owned by no-one.
i would also like to clarify, that i'm not an anarcho-communist, (as one commenter on brad's thread assumed). not all anarchists who are skeptical of private property are anarcho-communists; furthermore, there are as many kinds of anarchisms as there are socialisms, libertarianisms, etc.
a few questions and comments remain..
1. when kevin says: "The natural state of affairs is for entrepreneurial profit to gravitate toward zero, when market entry is free.", does this mean that market-entry freedom and non-psychic profit (i.e. money) are inversely proportional? does this imply that profit is contingent upon the lack of market-entry freedom?
2. in my understanding, the scarcity you speak of is a result of the expropriation of the state (and other historical expropriators like empires, warlords, etc that rely on force) rather than existing as a natural state of affairs. and, even the stricktest anarcho-communist goes by the slogan "the watch factory belongs to the workers who use it, but the watch belongs to you."
this, i believe, is analogous to your concept of "labor-requiring moveable objects."
2a. doesn't a non-private, non-state "ownership" of the factory (or whatever), ensure that market-entry freedom we're looking for? what if some dude picks the land with all the apple trees and no one near-by can "compete" because there is no other access to apples. however, if the land was owned by no-one, anyone who wanted to make apple sauce, juice, or cidar could use that land with apple trees and thus have more market-entry freedom.
2b. if some guy plants 20,000 apple trees, and forbids the use of them to others because he "mixed his labor" with the land, doesn't that violate some lockean sense of fair use because he couldn't possibly use all the apples from the 20,000 trees by himself?
3. One commenter on brad's thread said the following: "If we have acquired the use of it by purely voluntary, non-aggressive means–either by voluntary exchange of property titles, gift, or having been granted the temporary use of it by the rightful holder of title–then we do have the right to use it and exclude others from using it at our discretion." in reference to a privately owned printing press.
what makes it so that under certain circumstances, (as described above by the commenter, and apparently many libertarians) we can reserve the right to exclude others from access?
isn't this a monopoly? and just because he says so? isn't the problem with a monopoly is that it's a monopoly and NOT whether or not the monopolizer acquired his monopoly justifiably? what (psychological or other) motivation would there be to exclude others from using the printing press?
i'm not talking about a scenario where it's 3am and a neighbor wants to use the loud machine and wake up the neighborhood at the expense of everyone's sleep, when they could easily use it in the morning.
4. absent a state, by what means is private property garunteed? do we all just agree? (not a bad thing)
4a. if that's so, it seems equally as plausible that we could agree to live without it. or at least agree not fuck with each other and each other's stuff, and means of survival and living. doesn't this render private property superfluous?
5. doesn't private property limit the amount of places you can go? aside from property you own and property you have permission to be on, near, or use, where else can you go?
5a. why should we be limited to only certain areas; isn't that what we have now?
6. i know that gift economics are not excluded by libertarianism, but it seems de-emphasized (gift economics are important to me).
while i'm glad to see that brad said this: "I’m not saying that production and exchange are all there is to life, but only that the production and exchange that does occur ought to be voluntary." because i don't think any anarchist would disagree.
are there many left-libertarians who advocate for what kevin mentioned as "thick libertarianism"?
7. what is the distinction between an agorist and a mutualist?
one last thing:
i feel that Kevin Carson’s arguments against intellectual property should apply to private property; such as land and factories and apples trees (not watches, apples, and personal use-space). i don’t see a distinction in the protection afforded by copyrights, etc versus someone owning the land with all the apple trees.
“One commenter on brad’s thread said the following: ‘If we have acquired the use of it by purely voluntary, non-aggressive means–either by voluntary exchange of property titles, gift, or having been granted the temporary use of it by the rightful holder of title–then we do have the right to use it and exclude others from using it at our discretion.’ in reference to a privately owned printing press.”
I made the comment being referred to in the above paragraph.
“what makes it so that under certain circumstances, (as described above by the commenter, and apparently many libertarians) we can reserve the right to exclude others from access?”
Scarcity makes it so. Thus, as I mentioned elsewhere in the post from where you cited my comment above, “Everyone in the community cannot use the same printing press at the same time.” (Scarcity implies finite time available to people, as well as finite resources.) As I then went on to say, “If we do not have such rules that delineate who is and is not the exclusive user and controller of property, then confusion ensues, and then chaos, and that’s where your ‘war of all against all’ threatens to materialize, to use the Hobbesian phrase.”
There has to be some kind of ethical system in place that entitles somebody to be the exclusive authority over the use of property at a given time. I advocate the one I explained because it best conforms with principles of justice, rather than one in which the ethos states that everything is sort of up for grabs, and you’re supposed to invest your labor energy into the production of something and be content with someone else just taking control of it without your consent, or without compensation to you, and yet you would still be expected to keep on producing.
As for your conflation of legitimate ownership of property (as I described it) with “monopoly,” if that’s the case, then can it be said that you’re “monopolizing” the clothes on your back?
Kevin and Brad: Disagreements over theories of property are not always “just semantics.” Sure, they can be and sometimes are, depending on the context, but there’s no reason to assume that they always are. There are people who simply have a problem with the exclusive use of things as a concept, regardless of whether or not exclusive uses are acquired peacefully. It’s a contradictory and self-abnegating view for the opponent of property to take, but there you have it.
xveganx:
“i would like to clarify that there are more kinds of property besides private and state-owned
for example, property that is owned by no-one.”
I’m not sure what you mean by “owned by no one,” but if you mean things like public rights of way, common pasture or forest, etc., I’m with you 100%. That’s one of my main issues with Hoppe’s universal appropriationism.
“1. when kevin says: ‘The natural state of affairs is for entrepreneurial profit to gravitate toward zero, when market entry is free.’, does this mean that market-entry freedom and non-psychic profit (i.e. money) are inversely proportional? does this imply that profit is contingent upon the lack of market-entry freedom?”
I believe the normal price trajectory for reproducible goods is toward production cost, and the normal rate of entrepreneurial profit is always tending toward zero. If market entry is free, any excess of demand over supply will be met by new entrants, and any new innovation will be adopted by competitors, until entrepreneurial profit vanishes. An astute entrepreneur may look for new opportunities to anticipate demand, but will have to keep doing so all the time–instead of living off one-hit wonders like so much of the existing rentier class.
“2. in my understanding, the scarcity you speak of is a result of the expropriation of the state (and other historical expropriators like empires, warlords, etc that rely on force) rather than existing as a natural state of affairs. and, even the stricktest anarcho-communist goes by the slogan ‘the watch factory belongs to the workers who use it, but the watch belongs to you.’
this, i believe, is analogous to your concept of ‘labor-requiring moveable objects.’”
Well, what the anarcho-communists and syndicalists talk about is IMO just another system of private property rights. I.e., a set of rules determing who has priority of access rights to a given tangible object or space at a given time. And they result from the laws of physics–the fact that the same tangible object cannot be in two pockets at the same time, and two people can’t occupy the same space at the same time. Regarding land in particular, artificial property rights and expropriation by landed oligarchies certainly increases land scarcity to artificial levels. But the scarity of sites favorably located to a particular community is a matter of physical reality, not economic systems. If I farm a piece of land, you can’t farm the same space I’m using without undoing or damaging my work and impairing my ability to live off the proceeds of my labor. Any local consensus on the rules for determing who has the primary access right at a given time is a set of property rights rules IMO, regardless of semantic disagreements over the terminology.
And re your question in a subsequent post, IP is fundamentally different because it creates artificial scarcity where none exists, as opposed to providing necessary rules for the game where scarcity is real.
“2a. doesn’t a non-private, non-state ‘ownership’ of the factory (or whatever), ensure that market-entry freedom we’re looking for? what if some dude picks the land with all the apple trees and no one near-by can ‘compete’ because there is no other access to apples. however, if the land was owned by no-one, anyone who wanted to make apple sauce, juice, or cidar could use that land with apple trees and thus have more market-entry freedom.”
In the past I’ve argued for common rights to land based on a history of such usage rooted in custom. I’ve also argued for a meta-system, or panarchy, in which local communities determine their own property rules. Lockean, Ingalls-Tucker, and Georgist communities could coexist peacefully on those terms. The “non-private, non-state ‘ownership’” you refer to is, IMO, indeed a genuine form of ownership. It is a set of rules making sure nobody off the street just walks into a factory worked by Machine Tool Syndicate No. 9 and starts messing with the machinery or carrying stuff off, or gets in the way during production hours. Even if the community is residual owner of all land and assigns possession rights based on public consensus, that’s a property system.
“2b. if some guy plants 20,000 apple trees, and forbids the use of them to others because he mixed his labor’ with the land, doesn’t that violate some lockean sense of fair use because he couldn’t possibly use all the apples from the 20,000 trees by himself?”
Never mind using them. How could one guy plant that many, unless he was somebody like Johnny Appleseed spending an entire lifetime at it? And even so, it would take an enormous amount of time, even if he worked at it 100 hrs. a week for years. In the meantime, the previously planted trees would be untended, and the fruit would rot unpicked, which would raise questions of constructive abandonment even among many Lockeans.
“3. One commenter on brad’s thread said the following: ‘If we have acquired the use of it by purely voluntary, non-aggressive means–either by voluntary exchange of property titles, gift, or having been granted the temporary use of it by the rightful holder of title–then we do have the right to use it and exclude others from using it at our discretion.’ in reference to a privately owned printing press.
“what makes it so that under certain circumstances, (as described above by the commenter, and apparently many libertarians) we can reserve the right to exclude others from access?
isn’t this a monopoly? and just because he says so? isn’t the problem with a monopoly is that it’s a monopoly and NOT whether or not the monopolizer acquired his monopoly justifiably? what (psychological or other) motivation would there be to exclude others from using the printing press?”
What Bob Kaercher said.
“i’m not talking about a scenario where it’s 3am and a neighbor wants to use the loud machine and wake up the neighborhood at the expense of everyone’s sleep, when they could easily use it in the morning.”
Regardless of when they want to use it, it’s the product of my labor. There’s no way I can have a secure right in the product of my own labor, consistent with somebody else’s right to use my stuff without my permission. And in practice, that means there’d be a lot of stuff totally wrecked or left in worse condition than it was before, as anyone who ever loaned a casette to a friend probably learned. As a moral matter, why should I bother working to build something, just so someone who never contributed to building it can have the same right to use it I do? Ever read “The Little Red Hen”?
“4. absent a state, by what means is private property garunteed? do we all just agree? (not a bad thing)”
Sure. It requires a majority consensus in a locality.
“4a. if that’s so, it seems equally as plausible that we could agree to live without it. or at least agree not fuck with each other and each other’s stuff, and means of survival and living. doesn’t this render private property superfluous?”
But your agreement is what I would call a set of property rules.
“5. doesn’t private property limit the amount of places you can go? aside from property you own and property you have permission to be on, near, or use, where else can you go?”
You can go on common property that everyone in the community shares, rights of way, etc. But let’s turn your question around. Absent property, where on the world can you have a RIGHT to privacy, and be able to count on being alone as a matter of right, without anyone walking in on you without permission?
“5a. why should we be limited to only certain areas; isn’t that what we have now?”
It’s certainly not what we have now in degree. What we have now is people being excluded from vast tracts of vacant and unimproved land by people with no legitimate title to it. In a market anarchist system, whether Tuckerite, Georgist, or even thoroughgoing Lockean, the vast majority of land would be unowned, and would likely remain.
“6. i know that gift economics are not excluded by libertarianism, but it seems de-emphasized (gift economics are important to me).”
That’s largely a cultural thing and differs from one person to another, I suspect. For the more left-leaning market anarchist, like Brad, Charles, Roderick et al, they’re a central part of the positive vision of how society would be organized. I’ve put a great deal of emphasis on P2P, which is a form of gift economy, in my views on stateless economic organization.
“while i’m glad to see that brad said this: ‘I’m not saying that production and exchange are all there is to life, but only that the production and exchange that does occur ought to be voluntary.’ because i don’t think any anarchist would disagree.”
Well, it seems to me that the practical import of what you said above works against this. If I build a printing press and can’t exclude you from using it without permission, IMO that would be a form of involuntary exchange. Voluntary exchange means my absolute right to give or exchange my labor product, or withhold it, as I see fit.
“are there many left-libertarians who advocate for what kevin mentioned as ‘thick libertarianism’?”
I’m aware, among leading exponents, of Chris Sciabarra, Roderick Long, Charles Johnson, Matt MacKenzie, Brad Spangler, and Arthur Silber. I’m sure I missed some. As for how many libertarians share the view, it’s probably a minority interest.
“7. what is the distinction between an agorist and a mutualist?”
Agorism is the baby of the late Samuel Edward Konkin III, a far-left Rothbardian working in the tradition of Rothbard’s attempted Old Right-New Left alliance ca. 1970. Check out “New Libertarian Manifesto” (Brad has a pdf up at Agorism.Info), and you’ll get the gist of it. The old LeftLibertarian yahoogroup was created by Konkin for fellow agorists, with Movement of the Libertarian Left as their main political organization. After an ugly squabble there’s no need getting into, some of us moved to the new LeftLibertarian2 yahoogroup, and Roderick et al organized the Alliance of the Libertarian Left as an alternative organization. The new groups differ from the old in not being explicitly Agorist, although Agorists and Rothbardist-Konkinists are clearly the core; the group includes a diversified range of Georgists and mutualists, and other assorted left-libertarian types.
Mutualism is a school of anarchism going back to Proudhon, that favors possessory ownershhip of land and an economy organized around mutual credit and cooperatives.
Bob Kaercher: I certainly agree differences in the specific rules aren’t just semantics. But IMO saying some sets of rules are property and some aren’t is semantics. Any community will have some set of rules setting priority of access rights to scarce goods, whether the rules are anarcho-communist, Bakuninist, syndicalist, or whatever.
Xveganx wrote "I understand your (Kevin & Brad) positions. i would like to clarify that there are more kinds of property besides private and state-owned
for example, property that is owned by no-one."
That doesn't sound as though you did read up what Brad Spangler (for one) wrote. He made it clear that state owned property only makes sense if you have previously accepted the position that the state is an entity, a "person", because property really has to do with connecting persons to things as owners and property – though there is room for disagreement about just what a person is and just what a thing is. It should be clear that things that are not owned by some sort of owner are not property, by definition, just things. That means that "property that is owned by no-one" is a contradiction in terms.
He also wrote "absent a state, by what means is private property garunteed? do we all just agree?"
Human concepts of property are generalisations of animal territoriality. They are enforced by the owners, which for people can include their associations with others. The key point is that property or territory is signalled, so others can see it would be so seriously defended that it would take an effort to take it away and so that yet others can see that defending it isn't aggression and are less likely to take sides against the owner. For example, a Japanese tourist once pushed into a queue in front of me. I was taken completely by surprise so without thinking I just grabbed him by the collar and threw him hopping on one leg across the floor. None of the other tourists in his group went to his assistance.
"if that's so, it seems equally as plausible that we could agree to live without it. or at least agree not fuck with each other and each other's stuff, and means of survival and living. doesn't this render private property superfluous?"
No – "each other's stuff" is what property is. Marking off separate ownership helps sort it out and makes it more convenient to work with, like returning to the same seat in a cinema after an intermission.
I would have said that mutualism was the "natural" (as mathematicians would say) extension of individualist anarchism that recognises that individuals can and do associate and admits the consequences and products of that sort of association so long as they don't undercut the individual starting point. I have sometimes wondered something rather Jesuitical, whether an anarchist would be true to his principles if he agreed to co-exist with statists on the basis that, since they wanted rule and he didn't want to be ruled, he should be their ruler (hey, he's not demanding that they accept his rule, just rejecting any rule over himself but his own – they're the ones insisting on a unified rule, and they're welcome to come over from the dark side instead). But I fear that, certainly over generations, that would corrupt the rulers (it was India that made the British Empire into an empire, while Britain only made it British, and likewise the free barbarians of the Dark Ages became a European aristocracy).
P.M.Lawrence :
“For example, a Japanese tourist once pushed into a queue in front of me. I was taken completely by surprise so without thinking I just grabbed him by the collar and threw him hopping on one leg across the floor. None of the other tourists in his group went to his assistance.”
Good for you. Reminds me of a time when some crackhead was hassling me on the street and I threw him into a slush puddle (there had just been a big snow that was starting to melt). I’ve had to deal with a good number of such incidents, actually.
Kevin:
“I certainly agree differences in the specific rules aren’t just semantics. But IMO saying some sets of rules are property and some aren’t is semantics. Any community will have some set of rules setting priority of access rights to scarce goods, whether the rules are anarcho-communist, Bakuninist, syndicalist, or whatever.”
Given the original topic of this thread, I’d say this principle is relevant to the non-economic, social or cultural realm as well. There are sincere libertarians on both sides of the abortion question, for instance. Any resolution more or less requires an arbitrary definition of when life begins, or when life is non-sentient to the point where the removal of legal protection is justifiable. Taken to extremes, “pro-life” and “pro-choice” arguments could be used to justify prohibition of contraception on end or infanticide on the other. We could apply the same analysis to animal rights, capital punishment, immigration, children’s rights against parental authority, and many other things. So customary rules with some degree of arbitrariness and subjectivity will naturally have a role to play in any real world society. Fortunately, there are a lot of good real world models available:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/charlottehigginsblog/2009/feb/17/classics-cambridgeuniversity
BobKaercher:
“I advocate the one I explained because it best conforms with principles of justice, rather than one in which the ethos states that everything is sort of up for grabs, and you’re supposed to invest your labor energy into the production of something and be content with someone else just taking control of it without your consent, or without compensation to you, and yet you would still be expected to keep on producing.”
are you suggesting that i think everything should be “up for grabs”; because i certainly do not suggest that or think that.
i am making a legitimate effort to get at the heart of the matter here.
to use the example of the press: who is this someone else who wants to CONTROL rather than just use your printing press when you’re not? are there hordes of people who are waiting for the absence of property rules in order to gobble up everyone else’s hard-earned efforts? doesn’t equal access/market-entry freedom decrease the likelihood of these people existing anyway?
and yes, i am monopolizing the shirt on my back. (again, i’m not an anarcho-communist, but to borrow a phrase) “the watch factory/machine belongs to everyone but the watch is yours) that is, in Kevin’s sense, a potential generally-agreed-to property rule. is it not?
and i am monopolizing my body, thus, creating privacy. but my body and privacy have never prevented others from achieving what they need in live to survive, whereas property has.
Kevin:
A. the more i think about this, the more i think it is just semantics.
B. common forest and public rights of way IS what i mean by “owned by no one”, but i feel that that could be extended to any non-personal items or space; such as machinery or land.
C. when i said: “does this imply that profit is contingent upon the lack of market-entry freedom?” to this, i believe you answered “yes”
D. ok, so both libertarians and anarchists have property rules.
E. what does IMO mean?
F. “In the meantime, the previously planted trees would be untended, and the fruit would rot unpicked, which would raise questions of constructive abandonment even among many Lockeans.” This is point that i was trying to make. however, i’m (obviously) not an articulate writer.
G. “And in practice, that means there’d be a lot of stuff totally wrecked or left in worse condition than it was before, as anyone who ever loaned a cassette to a friend probably learned.”
I feel that this common scenario is due to the fact that people take bad care of things not considered their own. After years of only worrying about your own possessions, people get used to devaluing the possessions of others, which is why our streets and hi-ways are littered with trash. “i don’t give a shit, it’s not MINE” It is true that it’s not theirs, because it’s the governments, (or private property). however, if streets (and other places) were commons (as Kevin describes) then people would feel a larger sense of ownership, and thus responsibility and i think we’d see less garbage everywhere.
H. Absent a state, where do people who “don’t contribute anything” who steal people’s shit come from (not location but mentally). Without a state, or other expropriating force, where do they get the power to steal your shit?
I. “Absent property, where on the world can you have a RIGHT to privacy, and be able to count on being alone as a matter of right, without anyone walking in on you without permission?”
Only in a society where systematic violation of privacy by the state (and corporate advertising)
is the norm would people be hell bent on violating your privacy. and wouldn’t those remaining post-state hell-bent people violate your privacy anyway, regardless of the rules agreed to.
J. Just as libertarians do not disallow from their theoretical framework, the gift economy, or collective work/action, anarchists would never disallow individual autonomy in work or anything else. Therefore, why are anarchists and left-libertarians not better friends?
K. “In a market anarchist system, whether Tuckerite, Georgist, or even thoroughgoing Lockean, the vast majority of land would be unowned” good!
L. “Well, it seems to me that the practical import of what you said above works against this. If I build a printing press and can’t exclude you from using it without permission, IMO that would be a form of involuntary exchange. Voluntary exchange means my absolute right to give or exchange my labor product, or withhold it, as I see fit.”
I guess i agree. however i want to create 4 scenarios to illustrate my point.
1. an individual knits herself a sweater.
here, i don’t think anyone disagrees that a good “rule” is that she gets to decide.
2. Machine Tool Syndicate No. 9 (haha) makes needles to knitting.
here, the syndicate can democratically decide where the needles go to. a good rule.
3. Machine Tool Syndicate No. 9 makes a printing press.
the syndicate gets to decide. hopefully they will decide that it becomes part of the commons so any individuals or syndicates 1 through 9 can use it. if they decide otherwise, they should at least provide the plans to other individuals or syndicates (or whoever).
4. an individual makes a printing press.
the individual gets to decide.
#3 and #4 is where it gets hairy for me.
my question for this individual would be the same for the syndicate: “what is your motivation for not ‘donating’ the USE of this machine to the commons? do you know that individuals and groups in this community could really use a printing press, and that by not giving it to the commons, it is to the detriment to everyone?” on the other hand, a witch hunt of angry syndicalists can’t just come and take it from him.
what do we do when we can’t come to an agreement?
what is more important, need or property rights?
as libertarians living in a state-less society, i’m sure the anarchists and libertarians could reach some kind of agreement. i just don’t think i know what it is.
M. i feel that because anarchists focus on concepts like mutual aid, solidarity, etc, that it renders most discussion on property superfluous. kind of the like the argument that criminality, and the need for police and prisons will mostly disappear without the state and capitalism, if everyone has the things they need, or at least the fair/equal ability to create them, what need would their be for robbery, deceit, and expropriation? and anarchists will just roll their eyes if you use the old “what about that one guy who messes everything up” and repy: “take him out and then there is no ‘one guy’ ” it’s just plain self defense.
in other words, anarchists are not just trying to equal the playing field, we’re trying to change and the maimed character structures of people. living in this fucked up world for so long, we’re miserable on the inside, so we do things to hurt each other. this is one major reason anarchists have specifically sought out all forms of authority and hierarchy, (like racism, sexism, or homophobia) not just the big 3 (state, capital, religion)
i feel that if one knows why these things need to go, that it’s easy to see that without them, people will automatically (yes, only gradually) become better people, thus eliminating the need for strong protections. our so-called “natures” will have been changed.
that to me is the difference between, anarchists and left-libertarians, aside from semantics.
P.M.Lawrence
i did read what brad wrote, that doesn’t mean i have to agree with what he wrote. i think YOU missed mine and Kevin’s point about commons, or as i put it, owned by no-one. i am an anarchist and in NO WAY think the state should own anything, or exist at all. there seems to be a false dichotomy between state-owned and private-owned. who owned things before civilization? NO ONE!
“For example, a Japanese tourist once pushed into a queue in front of me. I was taken completely by surprise so without thinking I just grabbed him by the collar and threw him hopping on one leg across the floor. None of the other tourists in his group went to his assistance.”
i agree with your generalization and your specific point here.
my point is that personal possessions (like books and apples), personal privacy etc are one thing and that land, and things like printing presses and apple trees are another.
the cinema example proves the point i’ve been making the whole time. the theater functions as a commons in regards to seating (some company obviously owns it). people sit all over the place. then, during intermission Jerry gets up and leaves his coat in seat 43. Jane gets up from seat 86 but leaves nothing there. Neither seat is owned by either person, however, i would not have any qualms sitting in seat 86 after returning. Yet i would refrain from sitting in 43 because jerry made an obvious temporary claim to that space. i would refrain Not because his “property” is there and thus should be respected (it should). but because it’s a useful demarcation. Jane declared no demarcation and since at least 1/2 the theater was empty, she could easily sit somewhere else. If, on the other hand, the theater was full (except Jane’s seat), i would not sit in it. If i sat in it and she came back and gave me the look, i’d happily get up and sit in the aisle or figure out something else to do.
i think i’ve just gotten into cinema semantics.
as to your point about statists and anarchists co-existing: statists NEVER co-exist. that is why they always need to expand. that is why there are few indigenous people left. “to be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed…..”
I am highly attracted to the libertarian-left perspective.
However, I think there is a need to carefully distinguish the difference between State and government. Can we have government without State? Can societies function without some leader or authority who decides on behalf of everyone?
Various satisfactory anarchist answers can be given to the above questions, I believe.
Recently I came accross a book in which the author was claiming that monarchy in its natural pre-modern constituent would be the best form of government. Especially if there were no feudal relations. When Henry seized the land from the monastaries and broke with the Roman Catholic Church had he held onto the land as Royal Property to be used by all the subjects, instead of giving it to certain rich families, the history of Britain would have been very different. The land always remains the property of the King, the King is constrained by Natural and Divine Law, the King could not force his people to join in armies to fight for him (like States do). The King has power already and has no need to pander to special interests, the other sections of the society also constrain the King.
@333 — There are differing opinions on this. Notable among those who share the view that the state and government are two different things is Albert Jay Nock in his book "Our Enemy, The State"
http://mises.org/etexts/ourenemy.pdf [Free PDF download]
You might also look into a current of libertarian thought referred to as "panarchism" describing governments (under "panarchy") as voluntary associations characterized by exterritoriality (lack of a coercively imposed geographic monopoly):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panarchism
Panarchism often gets criticized that it's "just anarcho-capitalism in disguise", but that is looking at it backwards, IMO. What I would say is that despite theoretical differences among anarchists, the point is that voluntaryism and free association result in "governments" or "dispute resolution organizations" or "private defense agencies" or "workers councils" or "workers federations" or "collectives" or "communes" whose behavior are necessarily better described by the economic understanding of how open competition works among enterprises rather than relations among "states" today in the criminal/monopolistic/tyrannical sense of the term.
The market doesn't care if your private law and private security dress up in funny clothes. People who want them can keep their flags and anthems as long as they stop pointing guns at people who would prefer to opt out or take their "business" elsewhere.
Common ownership is not "owned by no one".
Common ownership means an individual equal access opportunity right to use.
So there is:
1. individual exclusive use (private exclusive).
2. individual equal access opportunity right to use (in common).
3. joint exclusive use based on consensus (collective).
Common usage means that anyone can access and/or use so long as they are not infringing on any other individual's equal right to the same. Infringement is determined after the fact.
Collective usage means that one must get the permission of all the other owners (consensus) or their delegated authority prior to access and/or use.
@333: To respond narrowly to a single question, the distinction that Brad points to is apropos. A society without governance is anarchy in the negative sense of the word: chaos, rule by might alone, and widespread crime. Government, on the other hand, is effectively congruous with "the state": that is, a specific group of people who have more rights than others, by virtue of being part of the state, being its agents, or being privileged by it. I for one would not care to even live for a day in a society without governance, nor would I recommend doing so to anyone I cared for. It is opposition to the privilege entailed by government, though, that all anarchists give voice to, among other concerns.
The questions of organization and authority are interesting. I am what is called an “anarcho-syndicalist.” I value some form of organization as an antidote to government, but it must be democratic rather than authoritarian. There can certainly be a role for a coordinator, but that coordinator must be elected or must be the lowest bidder for the job – rather than use the job to establish a kleptocracy. I also value some system of redistribution to families, since this must occur anyway – if only to provide for and educate the young. The young become future partners and consumer of the voluntary syndicate – so such transfer is justified. How to do it is the crucial question. It can be done without the state eventually as a best practice.
The key point in all of this is how to get to there from here. Lew Rockwell and the Mises Institute has nary a clue. I like to think I have some idea on how to do this, of course most of my proposals are then labeled statist or socialist – or even Marxian. Those who do so ignore the fact that you can’t get to a stateless society by simple abolition or declaration. It is and must be an evolution.
“If they [Left-libertarians and multi- or countercultural lifestyle experimentalists] continue with their behavior or lifestyle, they would be barred? from civilized society and live physically separate from it in ghettos or on the fringes of society, and many positions or professions would be unattainable to them.” (Hans Hoppe, Democracy, the God that Failed, p. 212)
Is this attitude very Libertarian?
Kevin Carson,
Did you read end of http://polycentricorder.blogspot.com/2008/12/why-… ? Most of the quotes come from Giles Stratton (a.k.a. Hayekianxyz) who is no Hoppean and no anarcho-capitalist, contrary to what the author proclaims. By the way, the other people whom were quoted aren't Hoppeans. Also, I find it weird that you called them authoritarian libertarians when the author called them Hoppean, libertairan-conservatives, and anarcho-capitalist, which they aren't.
Kevin, this selection of quotes from the Mises board is also something i have seen floating around on Revleft.com and I've not been able to trace the quotes to their original source? Where did they come from?
Ok, Carson makes some good points, particularly in reference to the legitimacy of common property but he definitely overstates his case against Hoppe to the point of being vulgar and absurd:
"The Hoppeans seem to come from the same gene pool. They seem to favor the free market because they believe it will eliminate the state as a constraint on the kinds of local authoritarianism they enjoy, and give them a free hand in playing with the powerless victims in their little killing jars without any outside interference. A “free society,” for them, is a society in which the local petty authority figure is free to brutalize those under his power without hindrance."
That is utter nonsense. One can offer a charitable interpretation of Hoppe where all he is arguing is that people would naturally choose to live with those whom they share deep common interests. Hoppe is also making the claim that there exists a natural hierarchy of individuals that is necessary for the development of all members of a community. If you think a two year old possesses sufficient authority to manage his own affairs without the "domination" of a parent then you clearly have stopped thinking.
The same goes for other hierarchical relationships such as that between professor and student. To claim that there exists a hierarchy among individuals that we must preserve is not to suggest that those lower down in the hierarchy need to be abused in any way. In fact, the hierarchical system functions in such a way as to raise all members. For example, children must learn discipline through the authoritarian domination by their parents and only in that way can they lead truly self-determining lives. So it is through authentically submitting to genuine authority that one can develop into a rational agent.
Also, assuming away state privileges, it would appear that the worker and entrepreneur should be grateful to each other but the worker should be more grateful to the entrepreneur than he is to the worker. This is because the firm is the actualization of the entrepreneur's "imagined production plan". The entrepreneur creates opportunities, whereas workers merely exploit them. That is a very rough picture of the market economy but it is sufficient to demonstrate that Rockwell has a point.
My recent post A Violent Libertarian Revolution
"squires in powdered wigs sipping mint juleps on the verandah, and grateful laborers in the field singing old English spirituals."
Take it none of you will be attending any Cato/Rand Paul mixers?
Excellent comments, Stephan, especially on the Georgists.
Another point: when people criticise the relations between a would-be employee and a business owner as "unequal", they need to be clear what they mean. A worker has to work for as long as his savings don't run out, true; but then again, a firm has to hire people and get things made and delivered by a certain date or it loses money. The boss also has to put up funds upfront before any production can be done. That also needs to be taken into account.
Also, in a sense, all market relations are "unequal" in the sense that people only trade because they can get something they don't currently have with others, and vice versa. Disagreements over the valuation of something are what make markets possible. And some people will be good at correctly anticipating changes in demand for things and become successful, others less so. That does not mean that the more successful will therefore "coerce" the weak. The logical upshot of the "left-libertarian" critique of capitalism (ie, a system based on mutual consent and private property rights) is support for a redistributionist state and all that implies. That is why I regard the views of Kevin Carson and others as incoherent and seriously at odds with classical liberalism.