And what is underlying this respect for human rights? Paul rightfully says it’s tolerance, “…liberty is liberty and it’s your life and you have a right to use it as you see fit.” In other words, the driving factor of a belief in non-aggression is being tolerant of others’ choices.

Writing in 1929, Mises understood this well, “…only tolerance can create and preserve the condition of social peace without which humanity must relapse into the barbarism and penury of centuries long past.”

Explaining why non-aggression necessarily involves other beliefs, Lew Rockwell writes, “…no political philosophy exists in a cultural vacuum, and for most people political identity is only an abstraction from a broader cultural view. The two are separate only at the theoretical level; in practice, they are inextricably linked.”

What Paul, Mises, and Rockwell understand is what Charles Johnson describes as “strategic thickness.” Strategic thickness is the view that certain ideas and values are useful for promoting, implementing, and maintaining the morality of non-aggression in the real world. After all, there are obviously going to be some ideas that are more complementary to non-aggression than others.

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Paul went on to point out that many want to embrace liberty up to the point of allowing something they disapprove of. But this obviously isn’t the libertarian attitude that affirms liberty is a fundamental human right not up to debate. Each person deserves the freedom to choose – just because you disapprove of their practices, be it doing drugs or practicing a different religion, doesn’t give you the right to use force against them.

However this doesn’t imply some sort of cultural or moral relativism. “Just because you allow somebody to have a lifestyle you disapprove of doesn’t mean you have to endorse it,” Paul explains. So while I may not agree with your choice to do heroin everyday, I should let you be. I can’t let my moral preferences morph into rights violations. If everyone understood this and didn’t let their own opinions and biases lead to creating systems of coercion, the world would be a much freer place.

And what is underlying this respect for human rights? Paul rightfully says it’s tolerance, “…liberty is liberty and it’s your life and you have a right to use it as you see fit.” In other words, the driving factor of a belief in non-aggression is being tolerant of others’ choices.

Writing in 1929, Mises understood this well, “…only tolerance can create and preserve the condition of social peace without which humanity must relapse into the barbarism and penury of centuries long past.”

Explaining why non-aggression necessarily involves other beliefs, Lew Rockwell writes, “…no political philosophy exists in a cultural vacuum, and for most people political identity is only an abstraction from a broader cultural view. The two are separate only at the theoretical level; in practice, they are inextricably linked.”

What Paul, Mises, and Rockwell understand is what Charles Johnson describes as “strategic thickness.” Strategic thickness is the view that certain ideas and values are useful for promoting, implementing, and maintaining the morality of non-aggression in the real world. After all, there are obviously going to be some ideas that are more complementary to non-aggression than others.

Sheldon Richman points out one of the values that complements non-aggression is anti-racism (Paul has done so as well), which is, after all, just a form of the tolerance that Paul and Mises refer to. I’ve gone even further and argued libertarians ought to be proponents of feminism, gay and trans liberation, and worker empowerment. Now even if these values, for one reason or another, turn out to not be complementary to non-aggression, the reason, if we are agreeing with Mises’ and Paul’s conception of liberty, it can’t be because the philosophy is only concerned with that single idea: for non-aggression is going to inevitably bring along other ideas with it.

For reasons that Paul, Mises, and Rockwell have shown, non-aggression can and does involve, even benefit from, complementary values. They have embraced “strategic thickness” and rightfully so.

This framing of the immigration issue is entirely wrong. It rests on the assumption that an inflow of “illegal” immigrants is a bad thing. The notion stems from a belief in the morality of nation-states and border control. If we abandon this idea, we can see that the real immigration problem pertains to border enforcement. It’s also related to miserable conditions in other countries. This horrific context is what leads many people to immigrate.

It’s definitely a problem when force is initiated against people simply crossing an imaginary line on a map. That’s one aspect of the real immigration problem. Another is the aforementioned miserable conditions. These consist of poverty and violence. Both of which contribute to people choosing to immigrate. If they lived in a better context, they may not feel the need to do so. This is not to say there is a moral issue with their choice to immigrate though.

This violence is partially the fault of U.S. foreign policy. The U.S. recognition of the coup government in Honduras is one example. Another is the past terrorist wars waged by Reagan in Central America. This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to violence unleashed by U.S. foreign policy. It’s the most relevant though.

A just resolution of the problems surrounding immigration would involve ending imperialist U.S. violence around the world. It would also involve opening the borders. These are the positions consistent with radical libertarianism and anarchism. In contrast, the present framing of the issues by politicians is non-libertarian or non-anarchist. The latter statist take is morally grotesque.

One way to go about helping this solution along is to pressure politicians to declare safe havens in areas under their control. Another related approach is to have non-governmental institutions harbor or help refugees from other countries. One could also donate to organizations that push for illegal immigrants to receive legal defense in court like the ACLU.

All of these options are important for furthering freedom of immigration. This principle of freedom of movement follows naturally from the non-aggression principle. Let’s work to implement the above solutions! All we have to lose is our chains. The time to act is now.

Kevin Carson discusses how the makers and takers aren’t who you think.

Jacob G. Hornberger discusses the War on Drugs, intervention, and immigrant children.

Patrick Cockburn discusses the Saudi complicity in the rise of ISIS.

Gina Luttrell discusses bootleggers, baptists, and birth control.

Justin Raimondo discusses how neocons are going undercover.

Ivan Eland discusses resolving conflict in artificial states.

Bionic Mosquito discusses the criteria for a just war.

Eric Peters discusses the non-aggression principle.

Patrick Cockburn discusses ISIS in Syria.

Norman Solomon discusses the god complex of Uncle Sam.

Wendy McElroy discusses voluntaryist anthropology.

Sheldon Richman discusses the smear of isolationism.

Lucy Steigerwald discusses how government power is about having power rather than catching terrorists.

Nick Gillespie discusses a libertarian foreign policy.

Jeffrey Miron discusses libertarianism.

Andrew Bacevich discusses the lessons from America’s war for the Greater Middle East.

Justin Raimondo discusses the new meaning of isolationism.

Patrick Cockburn discusses Christians in Iraq.

Sheldon Richman discusses Jane Cobden.

Jacob G. Hornberger discusses the practicality of libertarianism.

Sheldon Richman discusses the politics of the border.

Sheldon Richman discusses why he can’t help being a libertarian.

John LaForge discusses censorship and myth-making surrounding the atomic bomb.

Ron Jacobs discusses Tonkin and Watergate.

Patrick Cockburn discusses how ISIS is winning on two fronts.

James Rothenberg discusses the American flags and its followers.

Empty Wheel discusses whether civil libertarians are falling for faux NSA reform.

Alexey Shirov beats Boris Gelfand.

Yifan Hou beats Li Chao.

John Grant discusses Losing Tim: A Memoir.

Troy Camplin reviews Literature and the Economics of Liberty: Spontaneous Order in Culture.

Michael S. Rozeff discusses why libertarians should still embrace the non-aggression principle

William L. Anderson discusses Republican governors who are against the Bill of Rights.

Joe Scarry discusses U.S. military advisers in Southeast Asia.

Patrick Cockburn discusses Tony Blair’s ignoring of Saudi Arabia as prime source of terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism.

Paul Rosenberg discusses the truth about war heroes.

Justin Raimondo discusses Obama’s pivot to Asia.

W. James Antle III discusses the libertarian right’s issue with plagiarism and conspiracy theories.

Cathy Reisenwitz discusses why Republicans should get to know their enemy on income inequality.

Steve Chapman discusses the hawkishness of Hilary Clinton.

Brian Doherty reviews The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor.

Jacob G. Hornberger discusses U.S. intervention in Venezuela and Egypt.

John Glaser discusses how the U.S. supports regimes that support terrorism.

Justin Raimondo discusses the lamentation of a neocon.

David R. Henderson discusses an economist’s case for a non-interventionist foreign policy.

Kevin Gosztola discusses transparency on drone strikes.

Bill discusses how a slave society is a polite society for the government.

Thomas L. Knapp discusses Israel and apartheid.

Laurence M. Vance discusses he phony conservative war.

Gene Healy dicusses why Obama is right on pardoning non-violent drug offenders.

Jason Brennan discusses the three types of democratic citizens.

Ed Krayewski discusses why it’s not World War 3.

John R. Graham discusses whether the Canadian middle class is doing better than the American one.

Jacob Sullum discusses Obama’s plan to grant clemency to non-violent drug offenders.

Daniel J. D’Amico discusses four things you should know about mass imprisonment.

George C. Leef reviews Go Directly to Jail: The Criminalization of Almost Everything.

Judit Polgar wins against Anatoly Karpov.

Judit Polgar defeats Garry Kasparov.

Mr. Bruenig’s article, which will satisfy only those of his readers who know nothing firsthand about libertarianism, charges libertarians with failing to understand that the concept “initiation of force” must be defined in terms of a theory of entitlement. It is that theory which reveals who, in any particular violent interaction, is the aggressor and who is the defender. Thus, he says, an act that a libertarian would call aggression would look different to someone working from a different theory of entitlement. (Strangely, he believes he can validate taxation by this reasoning.)

That Mr. Bruenig thinks this is news to libertarians indicates how much research he did before writing his article. I know of no libertarian who would be surprised by his statement. But Mr. Bruenig goes further and accuses libertarians of circular reasoning in defining entitlement and the initiation of force, or aggression. Is he right? Let’s see.

To be fair, I will quote him at length.

Suppose I walk on to some piece of ground that a libertarian claims ownership over. Suppose I contend that people cannot own pieces of ground because nobody makes them. In my walking on the ground, I do not touch the libertarian or threaten to touch him in any way. Nonetheless, the libertarian proceeds to initiate force against me or calls the police to get them to initiate force against me. Libertarians are fine doing this and therefore libertarians are huge fans of initiating force. The initiation of force or the threat to initiate force is the mechanism that underlies all private property claims.

Now a libertarian will see this and object. They will say that, in fact, violently attacking me for wandering on to some piece of ground is not the initiation of force. It is defensive force. Aimlessly wandering on to ground is actually the initiation of force. I am the force initator because, despite touching and threatening nobody, I set foot on some piece of the world that the libertarian believes belongs to him.

I must stop here. As I understand libertarianism, a property owner has no right to violently attack someone merely for aimlessly wandering on his land. The means of defending oneself and one’s property must be morally proportionate to the rights violation. Aggression and its synonyms are terms of art that apply to a large range of actions, from the trivial to the lethal, and these terms do not imply that violence or deadly force may be used in response to any and all violations. Any uninvited crossing into another person’s moral sphere counts as an invasion, no matter how slight or nonviolent. But since the sole permissible objective of defense is to terminate the invasion and obtain compensation for damages (if any occur), one may use only the minimum force required to accomplish those goals. Any greater use constitutes aggression in itself.

As Roderick Long formulates the Principle of Proportion: “If S violates O’s boundary, O (or O’s agent) has the right to invade S’s boundary in whatever way is necessary to end S’s violation of O’s boundary, so long as O’s (or O’ agent’s) invasion of S’s boundary is not disproportionate to the seriousness of S’s violation of O’s boundary.” (Also see Long’s “The Irrelevance ofResponsibility” [PDF].)

Mr. Bruenig shamefully tries to inflame his readers with images of libertarians beating up or shooting — with impunity — free spirits who harmlessly stroll onto private property.

He continues,

But at this point, it’s clear that when the libertarians talk about not initiating force, they are using the word “initiation” in a very idiosyncratic way. They have packed into the word “initiation” their entire theory of who is entitled to what. What they actually mean by “initiation of force” is not some neutral notion of hauling off and physically attacking someone. Instead, the phrase “initiation of force” simply means “acting in a way that isinconsistent with the libertarian theory of entitlement, whether using force or not.” And then “defensive force” simply means “violently attacking people in a way that is consistent with the libertarian theory of entitlement.”

This definitional move is transparently silly and ultimately reveals a blatant and undeniable circularity in libertarian procedural reasoning. Libertarians like Richman claim that they think we can determine who is entitled to what by looking towards the principle of non-aggression (i.e. the principle of non-initiation of force). But then they define “non-aggression” by referring to their theory of who is entitled to what. [Emphasis added.]

So in the case of the libertarian in the hypothetical who attacks me, here is how the libertarian line goes. The reason the libertarian is entitled to that piece of land is because they are being non-aggressive. The reason the libertarian’s attack on me is non-aggressive is because he is entitled to that piece of land.So their claims of entitlement are justified by appealing to non-aggression and their claims of non-aggression are justified by appealing to their claims of entitlement. It is truly and seriously as vacuously circular as that. [Emphasis added.]

We stand charged with circular reasoning. How do we plead? Not guilty.

First, note that Mr. Bruenig presents no evidence for his charge; he quotes no libertarian at all, let alone me. (I’m not claiming that no libertarian ever argued the way Mr. Bruenig describes, only that such an argument does not inherently underlie the libertarian philosophy.)

Next, what’s idiosyncratic about the libertarian idea? It’s the way most people think about these issues, which was the point of my article. To use an old example from Murray Rothbard, if you see a person seizing a watch from someone, in judging who is the aggressor and who the victim, it makes a world of difference who owns the watch. Likewise if someone peacefully walks onto private property or into a home uninvited. Most people would agree with the libertarian view.

As for the charge of circularity, I (and the libertarians I know) do not justify entitlement in terms of the noninitiation of force. We justify entitlement in terms of the conditions under which human beings, in light of their nature, may flourish in a social setting. Justice and rights theory are aspects of morality. “Morality as I conceive of it has both personal and interpersonal dimensions (which are … inextricably linked): it is concerned with personal flourishing and with what we can reasonably be said to owe others,” Gary Chartier writes in Anarchy and Legal Order: Law and Politics in a Stateless Society.

To be sure, it is a marker of entitlement that no initiation of force occured in the acquisition of goods, but that simply means that no one else had previously satisfied the conditions bestowing entitlement and hence the acquisition violated no other person’s rights. Fundamentally, one is entitled to a parcel of land as the initial appropriator, not because force was not used in its acquisition, but because the land was unowned when one mixed one’s labor with (transformed) it and brought it into one’s sphere. (James Sadowsky’s classic essay, “Private Property and Collective Ownership,” is relevant here.)

Where’s the circularity, Mr. Bruenig? There is indeed a close relationship between the conceptsentitlement and aggression, but as Roderick Long wrote in private correspondence, “Master and slave are interdefined; so are parent and child. It’s not circular because we can define the whole relationship.”

Let’s go at Mr. Bruenig’s argument in another way. In a follow-up post, “The Libertarian Bizarro World,” he writes,

If you are a libertarian who believes justice requires the following of a certain liberty-respecting process, you have to explain how anything can come to be owned in the first place. That initial move is, by any coherent account, the most violent extinction of personal liberty that there ever can be.

On a fairly traditional account (e.g. Hobbes’ account), liberty and freedom are defined as: being free of bodily restraint. Being able to walk about the world freely and without people stopping you and saying you can’t go here or there is a fairly appealing notion of liberty. This is what things are like (analytically speaking) prior to ownership. Prior to anyone owning things, you should presumably be free to move about the world however you see fit. And if someone were to come up to you and physically restrain you from moving about the world, you would rightly understand that as a restriction on your liberty.

But physically restraining you from moving about the world is exactly what property ownership does. Whereas before ownership you have full liberty to walk about the earth as you’d like, after ownership, you don’t. Should you try, someone (the person claiming ownership of, for instance, a piece of land) will physically restrain your body.

It is true that in the libertarian (and in most people’s) view, the lives and property of each person represent restraints on the physical freedom of everyone else. That’s what it means to respect other people, to treat them as ends and not merely as means. But Mr. Bruenig’s conception of freedom entails the freedom to disregard the lives and interests of others. Observe this exchange from the comments section of the blog:

Me: So a valid account of freedom would entail everyone’s being able to walk through anyone’s home at any time.

Matt Bruenig: Yes. Now maybe you have some good reasons for why we should violently destroy that freedom. But that’s what they are: reasons for violently restricting people’s liberty.

Apparently the homeowner’s status as an end in himself does not count as a good reason to restrict (not necessarily violently) the intruder’s “liberty” to use the homeowner as a means to his own ends.

Of course, libertarians don’t define freedom in merely physical terms, as Mr. Bruenig does. Libertarians don’t talk about freedom in a vacuum, focusing on one isolated person’s ability to move anyway he chooses. Rather, they advocate the freedom of all persons in society. If everyone is to be free, freedoms cannot conflict; they must be compossible. Smith’s freedom cannot morally include the freedom to enter Jones’s house uninvited, or the freedom to thrust his fist against Jones’s head. It doesn’t much matter if you call these prohibitions limitations on freedom or exclusions from the concept freedom. In the end, Mr. Bruenig is making a trivial point.

Even when pressed, Mr. Bruenig stuck to his physical, amoral, and relativist notion of freedom. When he wrote that a purported trespasser is an aggressor only if you think the “victim” owns the property, I commented, “And a rapist is aggressive only if you think the woman owns her body.” I received no reply.

Why should persons be free of bodily restraint, able to walk about the world freely? The likely answer is that each owns himself or herself, body and mind, and thus has a right to autonomy. But if that is so, they may not ignore the equal freedom of others — otherwise all are not free — and they should not do so because a fully human life consists in a life of reason, not force.

But how do we get from the right to one’s body to the right to one’s (justly acquired) possessions, including land? A person’s possessions are extensions of his life and labor. (Mr. Bruenig says no one made the land, but labor can make it productive.) Flourishing requires the use of physical objects, including shelter and other uses of land, in an environment of respect for and from others. Thus to violate a person’s property is to violate that person. (Again, violations can be de minimis, and the response must be proportionate.) Nothing in libertarian theory, however, rules out nonstate public property or common-law easements. (Elinor Ostrom’s work on nonstate management of common-pool resources is relevant here.)

The details of a property system will surely be determined by custom and could well differ from place to place. But the centrality of property in a proper human community cannot be denied. InA Treatise on Human Nature (Book III, Part II, Section VI), David Hume referred to “the three fundamental laws of nature, that of the stability of possession, of its transference by consent,and of the performance of promises,” noting that

’Tis on the strict observance of those three laws, that the peace and security of human society entirely depend; nor is there any possibility of establishing a good correspondence among men, where these are neglected. Society is absolutely necessary for the well-being of men; and these are as necessary to the support of society.

Finally, I must point out that defending property rights in theory does not obligate libertarians to defend all particular property holdings in a given society. Land and other forms of wealth are often obtained through government privilege, that is, through theft from their rightful owners. A sound libertarian theory of property does not regard such property as justly held. As Karl Hess wrote in “What Are the Specifics?”: “The truth, of course, is that libertarianism wants to advanceprinciples of property but that it in no way wishes to defend, willy nilly, all property which now is called private.”

What am I talking about? It’s quite simple. Libertarians believe that the initiation of force is wrong. So do the overwhelming majority of nonlibertarians. They, too, think it is wrong to commit offenses against person and property. I don’t believe they abstain merely because they fear the consequences (retaliation, prosecution, fines, jail, lack of economic growth). They abstain because they sense deep down that it is wrong, unjust, improper. In other words, even if they never articulate it, they believe that other individuals are ends in themselves and not merely means to other people’s the ends. They believe in the dignity of individuals. As a result, they perceive and respect the moral space around others. (This doesn’t mean they are consistent, but when they are not, at least they feel compelled to rationalize.)

That’s the starting point of the libertarian philosophy, at least as I see it. (I am not a calculating consequentialist, or utilitarian, but neither am I a rule-worshiping deontologist. Rather, I am comfortable with the Greek approach to morality, eudaimonism, which, as Roderick Longwrites, “means that virtues like prudence and benevolence play a role in determining the content of justice, but also — via a process of mutual adjustment — that justice plays a role in determining the content of virtues like prudence and benevolence.” In this view, justice, or respect for rights, like the other virtues, is a constitutive, or internal, means (rather than an instrumental means) to the ultimate end of all action, flourishing, or the good life.)

Libertarians differ from others in that they apply the same moral standard to all people’s conduct. Others have a double standard, the live-and-let-live standard for “private” individuals and another, conflicting one for government personnel. All we have to do is get people to see this and all will be well.

Okay, I’m oversimplifying a bit. But if I’m close to right, you’ll have to admit that the libertarian’s job now looks much more manageable. Socrates would walk through the agora in Athens pointing out to people that they unwittingly held contradictory moral positions. By asking them probing questions, he nudged them into adjusting their views until they were brought into harmony, with the nobler of their views holding sway. (Does this mean that agoraphobia began as a fear of being accosted by a Greek philosopher in a public place?) This harmonization is known as reflective equilibrium, though Long emphasizes the activity, reflective equilibration, rather than the end state.

So it remains only for libertarians to engage in a series of thought experiments to win others over to their position. For example, if I would properly be recognized as an armed robber were I to threaten my neighbors into giving me a percentage of their incomes so that I might feed the hungry, house the homeless, and provide pensions for the retired, why aren’t government officials similarly recognized? If I can’t legally impose mandates on people, as the Affordable Care Act does, why can Barack Obama and members of Congress do so? If I can’t forcibly forbid you to use marijuana or heroin or cocaine, why can DEA agents do it?

Those officials are human beings. You are a human being. I am a human being. So we must have the same basic rights. Therefore, what you and I may not do, they may not do. The burden of rebuttal is now on those who reject the libertarian position.

Undoubtedly the nonlibertarian will respond that government officials were duly elected by the people according to the Constitution, or hired by those so elected. Thus they may do what is prohibited to you and me. This reply is inadequate. If you and I admittedly have no right to tax and regulate others, how could we delegate a nonexistent right to someone else through an election? Obviously, we can’t. (Frédéric Bastiat pointed this out in The Law.)

That’s the nub of the libertarian philosophy right there. No one has the right to treat people merely as means — no matter how noble the end. No one. The implication is that if you want someone’s cooperation, you must use persuasion (such as offering to engage in a mutually beneficial exchange), not force. That principle must be applicable to all human beings on pain of contradiction.

This argument should have particular appeal for advocates of equality — for what better embodies their ideal than the libertarian principle, which establishes the most fundamental equality of all persons? I don’t mean equality of outcome, equality of income, equality of opportunity, equality under the law, or equality of freedom. I mean something more basic: what Long calls equality of authority. You can find it in John Locke (Second Treatise of Government, chapter 2, §6):

Being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions.… And, being furnished with like faculties, sharing all in one community of nature, there cannot be supposed any such subordination among us that may authorise us to destroy one another, as if we were made for one another’s uses.

“Unless it be to do justice on an offender,” Locke continued, no one may “take away, or impair the life, or what tends to the preservation of the life, the liberty, health, limb, or goods of another.”

Long traces out a key implication of this idea: “Lockean equality involves not merely equalitybefore legislators, judges, and police, but, far more crucially, equality with legislators, judges, and police.”

One moral standard for all, no exceptions, no privileges. That’s a fitting summation of the libertarian philosophy. The good news is that most people are more than halfway there.

***

Para mí, la agresión es la iniciación de violencia hacia una persona o su propiedad. Iniciar una pelea a los puños, robar, cometer un fraude o lanzar una guerra de conquista son casos obvios de agresión, y obviamente distintos de otras formas de influencia negativa sobre los demás. Puede que a uno le moleste que su vecino escuche música a todo volumen durante la noche, que le repugnen los modales en la mesa de la persona con la que uno esté cenando, o que le horrorice la adicción a la pornografía del prógimo. Pero difícilmente podría argumentarse que uno se siente agredido en ninguno de éstos casos. Esa ha sido siempre mi opinión sobre estos temas, por lo que fue una sorpresa agradable encontrar que coincide con la posición anarquista al respecto.

La difinición de lo que constituye una agresión se ve influenciada por cuestiones culturales. Supongamos que los miembros de una nación hipotética consideran de manera unánime, y por razones religiosas, que el adulterio es una aresión, y que por lo tanto condonan la acción violenta que cualquier persona pueda cometer contra un cónyugue adúltero, entendiéndola como legítma autodefensa.

Esta práctica es claramente inaceptable desde una perspectiva anarquista. Pero además, el anarquista nos instaría a estudiar cuidadosamente a esa nación para determinar si en realidad sus ciudadanos condonan unánimemente la agresión contra el adulterio, o si se trata de que un subgrupo de ellos controla al estado y lo usa para imponer agresivamente ésta idea a los demás.

Por otro lado, el anarquista nos diría que a pesar de tratarse de una práctica moralmente inaceptable, la intervención de un estado extranjero en dicha nación, con el objetivo declarado de acabar con dicha práctica, generaría más problemas que los que puede resolver. Nos diría que la misión podría fácilmente ser capturada por los que controlan el estado en la nación invasora para convertirla en una agresiva aventura de conquista que los beneficiaría a elllos a expensas de los ciudadanos tanto de la nación invasora como de la invadida. En una situación extrema como el holocausto Nazi de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, el anarquista apoyaría la invasión aliada de Alemania por razones exclusivamente pragmáticas, ya que en un mundo en el que los estados han logrado monopolizar el poder militar, puede que un estado sea la única entidad capaz de parar las horrorosas masacres perpetradas por cualquier otra de ellas. Pero incluso en esa situación, el anarquista mantendría una postura vigilante ante la posibilidad de que el estado invasor terminase utilizando la situación para fines políticos innobles.

Los anarquistas están particularmente interesados en estudiar una manera aún más fundamental en la que se relacionan el concepto de agresión y la cultura de una nación: la maquinaria propagandística usada por los estados para manipular la manera en que la gente percibe ciertas acciones agresivas como autodefensivas. La actual invasión de Iraq y Afganistán liderada por los Estados Unidos fue agresivamente publicitada por los invasores como una defensa legítima ante una inminente ola de ataques terroristas que serían patrocinadas por los estados de las naciones invadidas. Y la gente fue especialmente receptiva a ese argumento debido al trauma producido por los ataques terroristas del 11 de septiembre de 2001 en la ciudad de Nueva York.

Grandes empresarios trabajan de la mano de políticos en el mundo entero para promover la versión neoliberal del “libre mercado”, cuando en realidad lo que buscan imponer es un agresivo sistema de subsidios, licencias, patentes y otras formas de privilegio estatista que concentra el poder económico en unas pocas empresas en cada industria para el detrimento de trabajadores, consumidores y contribuyentes. Para un ejemplo sumamente incisivo y actual que ilustra el abuso propagandístico del estado para ocultar simultáneamente sus prácticas imperialistas y de privilegio a empresarios domésticos bien conectados, ver este reciente artículo escrito por Glenn Greenwald sobre el rol de los Estados Unidos en la crisis egipcia.

***

My very first assignment in the Introduction to Anarchism course at C4SS is a reflection on the concept of aggression.

For me, aggression is the initiation of violent action against a person or their property. Initiating a fist fight, robbery, fraud, and wars of conquest are all obvious forms of aggression, and they are obviously different from other forms of undesirable influence on others. I might be annoyed by my neighbor’s playing loud music at night, disgusted by the bad table manners of a dinner companion, or dismayed by someone else’s addiction to porn. But I wouldn’t say any of these are aggressive actions against me. This is how I have always seen the issue, so I was pleasantly surprised to find that it matches the anarchist stance.

What constitutes an aggression is influenced by culture. Let’s suppose that the members of a hypothetical nation, for religious reasons, unanimously consider adultery an aggression, and therefore condone anyone’s violent action against his/her adulterer spouse.

This practice would be clearly unacceptable from an anarchist perspective. Moreover, the anarchist would urge us to take a closer look at that nation and determine whether aggression against adultery is truly embraced unanimously by its citizens, or is it a case of a group of them controlling the state and therefore aggressively imposing it on the rest.

Furthermore, an anarchist would say that despite adultery being a morally unacceptable practice, the intervention of a foreign state in such a nation with the stated objective of stopping the practice is bound to cause more problems than it can solve. In particular, the venture can easily be politically co-opted by those who control the state of the invading nation, turning it into an aggressive adventure of conquest bound to benefit them at the expense of the citizens of both the invaded and the invading nation.

Faced with an extreme case, like the Nazi holocaust during World War II, an anarchist might have found herself supporting the allied invasion of Hitler for purely pragmatic reasons: In a world where states have overwhelming military power, they might be the only entities that can stop the horrendous massacres perpetrated by any of them. But even then, the anarchist would tend to be particularly vigilant of the invading states’ use of the situation for less noble political ends.

There is an even more fundamental way in which the concept of aggression is related to a community’s culture in which anarchists are particularly interested — the propaganda machines that states use to shape the way in which people perceive certain aggressive actions as non-aggressive. The current US-led invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were aggressively publicized by the invaders as a legitimate defense against an imminent wave of terrorist attacks to be sponsored by the states of the invaded nations — a message that the public was particularly receptive to due to the shock produced by the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York city.

Crony capitalists all over the world work hand in hand with politicians to promote the neo-liberal idea of “free markets”, when in reality what they impose is an aggressive system of subsidies, licenses, patents and other forms of statist privilege that concentrates economic power in a few firms in each industry at the expense of workers, consumers and tax-payers. For a particularly poignant example that illustrates the state’s use of propaganda to hide its aggressive imperial and crony-capitalist policies simultaneously, see this recent piece by Glenn Greenwald on the American role in the ongoing political crisis in Egypt.

Translations for this article:

• Spanish, Agresión.

In my opinion, a sweatshop is an antiquated form of wage slavery that does not belong in a free society any more than conscription or the Atlantic slave trade. Economists like Paul Krugman have provided an ideological foundation for sweatshops because they are an integral part of the globalist worldview, but that is a worldview that libertarians, anarcho-capitalists, and other likeminded individuals oppose. Therefore, it is in our interest to not only distance ourselves from this exploitive form of labor, but to repudiate it entirely.

The central tenant of my argument is that force and aggression do not always have to involve the threat of immediate physical harm. A person may be coerced into surrendering their property (or their labor) under a variety of conditions. For example, being tricked into signing a contract he or she cannot read or understand, having the welfare of his or her family threatened, or being required to rent equipment essential to the job while being paid barely enough to cover those expenses. All of these are common practices at sweatshops.

My purpose in attempting to apply the non-aggression principle to this issue was to provide a skeleton around which an effective, free-market argument against sweatshops could be formed. The reason the issue of sweatshops in particular needs to be addressed, as opposed to just force or fraud generally, is because there appears to be a significant number of people who claim to both support the free market (or anarcho-capitalism) and sweatshops. Not only is this position contradictory, in my opinion, but it hurts the free market cause by playing right into the hands of our opponents, who believe that a free(d) market would bring back the worst aspects of industrialization.

Gary Chartier suggests that there are two possible objections to sweatshops, one based on the Non-Aggression Principle and one based on moral grounds. In order to be both morally objectionable and inconsistent with the NAP, a sweatshop operation would have to be responsible for the dispossession that leaves potential workers with little alternative but to accept what they would otherwise regard as unacceptable workplace conditions. Even if the sweatshop operation was not responsible for this, however, the terms and conditions of employment may still be morally objectionable. This moral objection could justly lead to labor organizing, strikes, protests, etc.

There are pragmatic concerns as well. Namely, that any argument in which sweatshops are a legitimate alternative is a losing argument, especially in Western nations. It is one thing to run a thought experiment on the cost or benefits of cheap labor, but quite another to convince an assembly line worker at a factory in Pittsburg to give up his or her government-enforced minimum wage, break time, and overtime pay, not to mention his or her job security and benefits, in the name of capitalism and free competition. Even if for some reason you believe sweatshops are theoretically compatible with a free market or a stateless society, if you ever wanted to see progress toward those ends, it would be prudent to file that belief somewhere away from the court of public opinion.

The following is a short list of additional considerations:

• Opposition to sweatshops should, and can, be a position that unites everyone in the liberty movement, from libertarians to anarcho-capitalists and beyond.
• Many anarcho-capitalist and libertarian philosophers, including Murray Rothbard, have made extensive arguments against the type of unjust contracts that lead to sweatshops.
• Even if sweatshops were a byproduct of a free market, they should be opposed on pragmatic and moral grounds.
• This is not a “left or right” issue. The dignity and welfare of the working individual should be a concern to everyone.
• Just because the West industrialized in a certain way, doesn’t mean that others must industrialize in that same way. They can learn from our mistakes.

It is my hope that further discussion of this subject will yield a consensus that removes this persistent but antiquated obstacle to convincing working people that a free market is in their best interest. I am confident that most of the people reading this have always opposed sweatshops (as well as other excesses of industrial capitalism), but to those who still harbor doubts, I will say this: Think long and hard about what you are supporting and how that support appears to the average person. Do not make things easier for our intellectual opponents by defending this untenable position.