Through a referendum in January the southern region of Sudan resolved to separate and form its own, independent political entity. Already largely autonomous, nearly 99 percent of the region’s population favored secession, and the Republic of South Sudan is to ascend to full and distinct statehood in a matter of weeks.
With Sudan’s President Omar Hassan al-Bashir accepting the results of the referendum and the birth of the new state, the country seemed to be prepared for a smooth and peaceful transition. But, alas, when the nebulous border territory between the country’s stands on a plentiful oil well, a seamless transition is probably too much to ask for.
For decades, the areas now disputed by the north and south, in particular the small region of Abyei, have been seedbeds for violent conflict, putting them at the center of various peace deals devised to put an end to long-running wars. Now, BBC News reports, “The UN has accused the Sudanese government of carrying out an ‘intensive bombing campaign’ near the north-south border.”
In the unified Sudan, wealth and political power were concentrated almost exclusively in the Arab, Muslim north, and Bashir has insisted that Abyei “is northern and will remain northern,” adding that northern recognition of the new southern republic turns on Abyei’s status. For market anarchists, who urge an end to systematized violence within society, Sudan’s present state is a foreseeable repercussion of the state’s introduction of capricious, aggressive authority.
“[T]he present-day boundaries of nations,” wrote Murray Rothbard “are purely historical and arbitrary, and there is no more need for a monopoly government over the citizens of one country than there is for one between the citizens of two different nations.” The political system, one of borders and coercive rather than consensual bonds, is necessarily divisive, rooted in the idea that we need the rules of masters to delineate our relationships.
But all the time, every single day, we deal with our neighbors without oversight, in nonviolent, mutually beneficial relationships governed by nothing but our agreements. If you’ve ever so much as sold something at a yard sale, you’ve seen what market anarchists mean by “anarchy.”
To counsel a society without masters and their borders, then, is not to invite mayhem or injustice, but is simply to turn both the geographic and social cartography over to the aggregate of individual judgments. Over the centuries, political leaders have refined the oratorical wiles used to persuade us to fight their battles, to regard the perimeters they have drawn amongst themselves as a source of unity and pride in society.
So instead of looking on the “nationality” of the state as it really is — as something opposite true community — we have been trained to identify with our captors. Where language and culture have evolved freely and spontaneously without central, hierarchical direction, the state is an inorganic power structure manufactured by the ruling class out of a desire to loot and exploit.
The flags of governments should not motivate us toward the battlefield, but instead should fill us with a deep, moral indignation. Quite contrary to the prattle of the corporate media, the starting point of the conflict between Sudan and Southern Sudan is not ethnicity in and of itself.
Instead, the very existence of the state, as a mechanism for aggressively gaining control over valuable resources, inescapably pits neighbors against one other. Even if most are naturally inclined to trade peacefully, for some the opportunity to brandish the power to despoil society of its natural wealth proves alluring.
A small, warlike few has, under the aegis of the sacred state, been able to condemn the vast, productive majority to an unbroken civil war; that war is made conspicuous by inter-state armed conflicts and situations like that in Sudan, but it rages everywhere, even intra-state.
It is the war that the state wages on its own citizens, and it won’t — and can’t — draw to a close until the natural harmony of the marketplace succeeds the alienating aggression of government. No new borderlines can solve the underlying problem in Sudan because political solutions are the problem.
Only work and free, equal exchange, a stateless system of market anarchy, can decide who owns scarce resources. When the world realizes that fact and loses faith in the state, it won’t matter what we call it — we’ll have anarchy.
This post raises again my perennial question about the use-and-occupancy theory of property rights: Suppose a private individual is using and occupying a "plentiful oil well." So long as the oil well remains plentiful, he is unlikely to "abandon" it. Likely his sons will use and occupy the oil well as well, and will continue using it and occupying it long after their father is dead.
The problem is only slightly mitigated if the view is that the oil field and its proceeds actually "belongs" to those lucky few who are hired by the private individual to do the actual work of drilling, so long as they are "using" and "occupying" the oil field.
It seems to me that their "exploitation" of the oil well's scarce natural resources to the exclusion of everyone else who would like to reap the benefits of drilling for oil on the oil field would make their position closely analogous to what we find abhorrent in the state.
Reflections such as these have led me to favor a Georgist understanding of property rights over the "use and occupancy" theory.
My recent post “Goshen College has never been anti-American”
John, Thank you for a really great comment. In my own view, use and occupancy *as applied*, i.e., as a practical matter, doesn't give us results where one or a few would be able to dominate or monopolize the well to the exclusion of everyone else.
Absent the state, with its many subsidies, its cost-shifting, &c., enterprises like oil drilling would be so expensive that they would per se require contributions of the voluntary sort from the entire community, giving everyone a stake. As you rightly note, there would be any number of workers actually operating the well too, undermining the use-and-occupancy claims of any few would-be monopolists.
That's a quick shot at it, but I'm sure that one Mr. Kevin Carson could answer the question far more thoroughly and with more specifics, so I'm going to try to put it to him through email. Thanks again, John, for the terrific question!
John, the following is a thorough treatment of this question I received in an email correspondence with Charles W. Johnson (of http://radgeek.com fame). I thought about shortening it, but everything was germane to your question, so here it is:
"Well, one thing to note is Tucker's distinction between socializing the *ownership* of capital and socializing the *effects* of capital (cf. "State Socialism and Anarchism," para. 22). Although Tucker believed that freed markets would tend to disperse actual ownership much more widely, he argued that in cases where there were concentrations of *ownership* in particular goods, this need not be a problem — so long as the concentrations of *wealth* tended to be dispersed, in the long run, by competition (both competition with other producers for customers, and competition over laborers and input factors).
Now, if your goal is to guarantee absolute equalization of land ownership (either in terms of mass or interms of value) then occupancy-and-use isn't going to do that. But it isn't intended to. Occupancy-and-use isn't a theory motivated primarily by concerns about equalizing of fortunes (though it may tend strongly to have that effect); it's a theory motivated primarily by the desire to efface economic mechanisms of *domination*. The desired outcome is not that nobody has more than anybody else; it's that each one has a decent shot at getting what she or he individually needs to live well and independently, which is no doubt going to mean quite different configurations of land ownership, capital ownership and labor power for different people.
The question is whether isolated inequalities — like pa & his boys occupying a rich oil well (or a particularly rich lode of silver, or whatever) are going to ripple out into an ability to dominate or monopolize in the rest of the market. Maybe it would, if they were sitting on the only oil well in the world and if there were no reasonable hope for substitute goods (solar, wind, whatever), but of course they aren't and there is.
In any case, if pa & his boys try to work the oil well all by themselves, then it's not going to afford them much margin for dominating others, simply because the amount of oil they can extract and thus profit from is going to be limited by their personal labor power. If, on the other hand, they have to hire out labor to work on the oil well, and the wages that they have to offer in order to get it are going to be wages conditioned by fully free, competitive, and massively more prosperous markets for land, labor, and capital. Provided that their workers have adequate access to land and capital to strike out on their own, outside of wage-labor, if they should so desire; and provided that their workers have decent access to a flourishing market for labor with lots of opportunities for worker ownership, worker self-management, independent contracting, etc., the wages they have to pay to attract laborers and investors away from other options are largely going to absorb, and diffuse, the locational rents throughout the rest of society, first to laborers, investors and contractors who work with the owners to work the oil well, and then downstream from there, so that the wealth coming out of the well is largely socialized rather than simply accumulating in the pockets of the owners. (The reason that this kind of motherlode accumulates wealth, and eventually dominating power, in the pockets of the owners now, rather than flowing outward throughout the market, is because competition and wage rates are held artificially low, through the action of government and monopoly.)
Of course this will still mean some ripples of inequality throughout the market; but Tucker argues (rightly I think) that in a fully free market this kind of locational advantage will be more or less always overwhelmed by competition, entrepreneurship, etc., and will not amount to any more of a problem than the inequalities of labor power due to natural differences of strength or talent. (Which will also no doubt produce inequalities of fortune; but not the sort of inequalities that lead to structural domination or forced dependence.)
(You might note also that the less and less pa & his boys are *directly* involved in maintaining and working the oil well, the harder and harder it will be for them to even notionally comply with an occupancy-and-use standard — and they may well be confronted with the need to extend offers of partial ownership to their associated workers in order to maintain a claim of continuing occupancy. If so, then the more profitable the oil well becomes, the more ownership will naturally diffuse through a larger and larger class of people. Etc. etc. Of course, whether this is true or not probably depends on how strict your occupancy standards are, and may even vary from community to community depending on local customs and legal norms.)"
The question for me largely comes down to who should bear the inevitable costs of defending such valuable natural resources, and whether a basis for allocating such costs can be found in principles of natural justice. (Like Henry George and unlike some of his followers, I'm deeply skeptical of the notion that, if a "single tax" on the unimproved value of land is collected, part of it should be paid out to members of the community in the form of a "citizen's dividend," because theoretically a person on the other side of the country, or the other side of the world, would be a potential rightful claimant to such a dividend.) Suppose a community in a stateless society occupying land a third of which is an oil field and the other two-thirds of which is used for far less lucrative purposes. A third of the members of the community work on the oil field and the other two-thirds do something else. Under a use-and-occupancy regime the one-third working on and reaping the benefits of the oil field would inevitably need to spend a substantial amount of resources on defending their holding, both from the other two-thirds of the community and from external threats. Under a Georgist regime the occupiers and beneficiaries of the oil field would contribute to, and probably pay the bulk of, the costs of the defense of the whole community. (And it seems likely that the costs of defense incurred by the occupiers of the oil field might actually be even less under a Georgist regime — even though they'd be paying for the bulk of the defense of the whole community rather than only the defense of the oil field — than under a use-and-occupancy regime, since they would be "buying off" the nearest threat to their holding, namely, the two-thirds of people in their immediate community who don't use and occupy the oil field.)
And this expectation by the other two-thirds of the community that the one-third who occupy the oil field pay a "disproportionate" (i.e., in one sense, but not another sense) share for the defense of the whole community would be justified on principles of natural justice — specifically, the principle that no person has any more natural right to the earth than any other person, and that those who exclude others from valuable natural resources (even for legitimate and necessary reasons) owe compensation to those excluded. (If those excluded have access to equally valuable natural resources, then the compensation owed is cancelled out.) And this principle seems to rest on firmer ground than the principle that those who happen to be using and occupying valuable natural resources get to exclude everyone else from those natural resources and to reap the full benefit of those natural resources. In the hypothetical community containing an oil field that I've described, for example, who gets to determine who uses and occupies the oil field, and why? The original discoverer and homesteader? His sons? Whomever they hire? The sons of whomever they hire? By what natural right may they exclude a less fortunate son of the community who just decides to hire himself and shows up for work on the oil field one day? In a stateless society, some such fairly arbitrary means of determining who gets to use and occupy valuable natural resources is probably necessary and inevitable. But its inevitability doesn't overcome its essential arbitrariness. Because it's arbitrary and not based on natural right, those fortunate enough to be using and occupying such valuable natural resources should "buy off" those not so fortunate, for the sake not only of justice but of peace.
And by "buying off" I basically only mean that the possessors of natural resources, such as valuable land, should pay for the defense not only of themselves and their possessions but for the defense of those not possessed of such property who happen to reside in the community. It seems to me that in a stateless society defense will still need to be connected to territory. A township, for example, will need to provide for the common defense of its inhabitants — either independently or as part of an alliance or confederation with other townships. A person who resides in but doesn't own land in such a township shouldn't have to pay a dime for its defense. Nevertheless, he both benefits from and (by virtue of his unrealized natural right to own land) in reality contributes "financially" to its defense.
My recent post “Goshen College has never been anti-American”
I should clarify that I don't view the Georgist account of property rights as incompatible with the use-and-occupancy account. Truly abandoned property should be available to others for "homesteading," but I would think this abandonment would normally manifest itself by failure to pay the "single tax," by which the nominal possessor theoretically compensates those who would like to use the property for the right to exclude them. I don't think there's anything wrong with absentee ownership per se, as in my example of the man who built a house in Indiana but now chooses to live in Florida and rent the house out, so long as the absentee owner continues to pay this "single tax." People have to retire sometime, and there's nothing wrong with living off the fruit of past labor, even if one is no longer "using" and "occupying" the capital one's created.
My recent post “Goshen College has never been anti-American”
Quick point.
If there were no intellectual property rights state back monopoly, and a currency scheme backed by state oil monopolies, would oil be the only and most likely form of energy generation in the 2000s?
One of the main points of the opening up of the government backed IP monopoly is the fact that it would allow free humanity to cast off the chains of technological monopolies to move towards more free market answers.
In light of this fact, if I can build my own geothermal, wave, nuclear, wind, solar or whatever power source without worrying about licensing and such that would quash my hopes of generating my own power, would oil be an issue as a "scarce" resource?
Are we using oil because it is the only possible answer or because we have no real alternatives because of government backed monopolies?
Personally I would prefer a Thorium fuel cell.
Of course this question can then be posed for Thorium as well, but the point of opening up a free market economy without state backed monopolies would be the many competing choices, wither imported or home brewed, that would reduce the scarcity of energy.
Basically I am just saying the question seems to be picking out a single tree in the forest, when we aren't even allowed to own a forest yet.