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The 'no government' movement.
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#14231920
that is a very narrow historical perspective if you are drawing only from 19th century socialism. Anyway you are missing Rothbardian's point. Private property its not the same as individual property, sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't. The property of a commune is private property to that commune. It may be that authority over that property is held collectively by the members but non-members have no authority over it. See? Your Owenites may have agreed with each other to pool all their property and to share authority over it through some achingly tedious democratic process but if the Russian mafia turned up with trucks and started loading up all their stuff they would object, effectively asserting that the property was exclusive to their group, which is to say their private property.


No I think Rothbardian--and you--are conflating terms. Private property has never been understood as something that is under public domain--as something that no private entity or person can appropriate, but as something that is shared, disclosed to all, and under the authority of all. The resources we use, the factories we work, etc. these should be democratically controlled, and we don't produce merely for our own private personal gain. We produce for the needs of us all, and this should extend beyond the localities into federated systems. There simply is no similarity of the kind of property relations that you have in mind. We are not talking about state capitalism or state socialism. There is no centralized authority from which we can declare "our property" and "not yours". There are simply the things that we work, that we endeavor together, and we make this work not through disconnected private organizations, but through federated and interlocking systems of equally democratically organized communities. We certainly have a right to what we produce and how we organize our production, but that does not mean that we have an exclusive right to the land and its resources to utilize for our own private gain. We may even have a certain amount of responsibility on those things that effect us the most and that we tend to, and we would certainly have priority over those things that effect us the most, but that does not mean it is property we have claimed for our own, that we will harvest for our own "private" use. Anarchism is not capitalism with collectives.
Last edited by anticlimacus on 10 May 2013 11:22, edited 1 time in total.
#14231922
Sure. That's why I mentioned, where needed, we would elect delegates. Delegates are assigned a particular task by a group, and only that task. The answer solely to the group and make no decisions without their consent.

Which means that the vast majority of decisions will be made by the delegates without consulting the group (as to do so would overload the group's available time).

I understand that the delegates are answerable to the group that sent them and, unlike today's "representatives" can be compelled by the group. In practice, however, this won't make much of a difference.

Today's US Representatives, for example, tend to enjoy overwhelming support within their respective districts. The vast majority of them get re-elected every two years. It seems implausible that they behave in ways that their electorate would find objectionable during their term, only to get re-elected time after time.

Rather, representatives tend to be experts at identifying and satisfying the most urgent preferences of their constituencies.

I see no reason to have either blind faith in profit driven corporations making quality and safe food (or other products for that matter) or that the market will simply handle that issue by itself. There is a place for public disclosure and public safety, and the public coming together to make sure those standards are met and disclosed.

I have more faith in people worrying and controlling what they themselves consume than I do in government bureaucrats. My "faith" isn't with profit-driven corporations but rather with their median customers.

Btw, without a state, who will regulate products in your society?

So what if no worker is required to take any particular job offer? Workers, more often than not--and particular under conditions of scarcity--will take what they can get, and what they can get is never secure.

Sure - workers will take the best offer available to them. With that in mind, it is in the interests of workers to have access to as many varied offers as possible, rather than having the field of offers restricted by labour regulations.

There is a reason workers across the country fought for minimum wage protection, and they will need to continue to fight for it, just like corporate business leaders will fight against it.

The reason workers fought (and still fight) for minimum wage is to eliminate competition from low-skilled competitors in the labour market. Why else would union members, none of which earn anything less than several times the minimum wage, care so much about it?

the very government you continue to critique is one that is a product of capitalism itself and one that embodies many of its contradictions: market failures/government response, antagonism between labor and capital/government protection of labor government protection of capital, global expansion of capital/military expansion, etc.

Government embodies all that is wrong with current implementation of capitalism. It corrupts it as well as being corrupted by it.

I know: Capitalism has never existed without government.

There is a first time for everything...

What? How so?

Anti-trust laws exempt labour unions (and only them), while so-called "pro-labour laws" give labour unions power to enforce their interests on their employers (private and public).

The problem today is much less severe than it used to be. But anybody who lived through the '70s and '80s in Britain can attest to the huge damage caused by labour unions.

In other words, as I suspected, the NAP exists solely to defend property rights amongst unequals.

No, the NAP applies to everybody. Institutions designed to enforce it, however, are much more important when some people have more power. But keep in mind - it is those without resources that need protection from those with. The NAP-protecting institutions, in other words, will protect the poor from the wealthy much more than the other way around.

The NAP is not some universal moral maxim--it's simply an ideological rationalization of the institution of private property relations.

Actually, you got this point exactly backwards.

The NAP is a universal moral maxim, namely that it is wrong to initiate force against other people or their (peaceful) projects.

Private property is merely a convenient tool for realising the NAP. A resource is considered a person's private property if it had been (peacefully) incorporated into that person's projects in such a way as to (reasonably) require the exclusion of others from that resource.

In other words it is private property precisely to the degree (and only because) others accessing it without the owner's permission would entail initiation of force by those others against some (peaceful) ongoing project of the owner.

Amongst equals, where we share the means of production, property relations cease to exist.

I'd be curious to understand how that would work. For example, can I step into a communal syndicate factory and use its machines as I see please? Or help myself to its inventory or raw materials?

If I could, society would break down in no time.

If I couldn't, that means that the factory and its inventory are private property, albeit the property of the workers rather than of one or more capitalists.

Further, as one of a few hundred workers in the factory, I am bound to obey the decisions of the majority. The only reason I have to is that the majority controls those means of production. The relationship between me and the syndicate, in other words, is precisely a property relation of the kind you decry.

Just because I have one vote in a few hundreds doesn't change that.

In fact, government, more often than not, is nothing more than an arm of the rich and powerful.

Excellent. In that case, surely you must logically see that the rich and powerful would be less rich and powerful if government stopped working for them, right? Further, what tools does government use in its work for the rich and powerful? In a few cases, it does so with outright property transfers (corporate welfare) such as the recent bail-outs of both banks and auto-makers, or subsidies for "green energy" and other fashionable corporate causes.

But usually, government works for corporations without declaring its intention to do so (that wouldn't work well in democratic politics). It does that by passing favourable regulations which favour existing firms at the expense of new or emerging ones.

Oh, that's swell! Just like the Native Americans never bothered using their resources--therefore it was all up for grabs...

Actually, no. Most libertarians view most interactions between European colonizers and Native Americans as criminal (to be clear, the behaviour of the former was criminal). While many tribes had no property rights in their hunting grounds, they certainly had use rights which couldn't legitimately be ignored, as they were in practice.

You ancaps seem to think that property liberates you, but it does nothing except enslave you and put in-between voluntary human interaction one person's right to X property and another's need of X property.

When a particular resource is required by more than one person, but can only be used by one, somebody needs to decide who will actually use it. That somebody is the owner of the property. Now it can be a single private person, a small group of people (say workers in a syndicate) or government. But make no mistakes - every (stable) society has to assign property titles to somebody.

We share the land and resources, but that does not mean that we can each have our space or personal belongings.

Does that mean that the community can, at any moment, decide to strip me of my shirt, throw me out of my home, because those aren't my personal belongings or personal space?

At communal tables, say in public parks, the tables are for all of us and yet we still all manage to get our very own personal spot. How in the world does that happen?

I still couldn't take the park table home with me, could I? The owner of the park (normally, government) permits people to use the tables under terms it stipulates. The tables are still somebody's property.

This vision where we all just come together and make free decisions and organizations etc. is great--but how do we get there?

Actually, we are much of the way there. We do make free decisions on a huge range of questions, from our faith to our dinner, from our occupation to our use of leisure time. All we need to do is expand that freedom deeper in the economic and personal-choice realms.

From what I see, your position is to dismantle government. OK--how does that result in anything but the greatest power grab history has ever seen from those who own most of the wealth?

Excellent question.

It is true that I am aiming at a society without government. But I don't think the way to get there is simply to "dismantle government". What we need to do, rather, is educate and persuade people to accept the NAP as the "constitutional" basis of societally-legitimised use of force.

As that is done, government will be organically dismantled (either through a democratic process or through civil disobedience). Only if government is dismantled in response to changes in public sentiment, rather than, for example, a successful revolution, will the institutions that replace it be better, rather than worse than what we have now.

It could be fund to toy with ideas as to the best way to dispense with government property. Many suggestions make sense, from repaying taxpayers to allowing property to go to the hands of government employees, to the repayment of government bond holders to equal distributions amongst the citizenry. Reasonable people can disagree.

But a gradual process (start with implementation of "moderate" libertarians like the Cato Institute, followed by privatisation of infrastructure, elimination of regulations, reduction of taxes, opening up immigration, culminating in privatising police forces and, ultimately, the armed forces) can be designed to eliminate or mitigate the risk of "power grabbing".

The means of production produce social wealth and they most certainly are social.

In a narrow sense, so is everything else. Labour, for example, produces social wealth. Does that mean that labour ought to be "social", i.e. communally owned? Should we all subjugate ourselves to the priorities set by are local communities?

And since means of production do indeed contribute to the production of social wealth, isn't it particularly important to encourage their creation and efficient utilization?

What we are talking about are major resources, land, factories, basic technology--all those things that all society needs and that requires society to produce--whether it be by employment of private capital, or communal. What do you think people are doing when they go to work every day? Just making petty sandwiches on their own free will? No they are making food for others in order to obtain that necessary income in order to subsist, that income which is a part of the social wealth we all produce and put into the economy. These are all very deeply social relations and they are defined precisely by property relations. We seek to overcome this outdated institution, even though it may be at such a high level of sophistication in advanced capitalist societies.

I am opposed to intellectual property. So "basic technology" would, essentially, be socially available. Land ownership tends to be broken up. There are still many family farms, showing that individuals can make it in this field. Historic attempts at communal cultivation have generally failed, though there is nothing wrong with trying again.

Factories aren't natural resources. They need to be built and equipped. That takes time and costs money. It means that somebody needs to first save and invest before a factory can be built. Whoever does the saving and investing rightly expects compensation for deferring consumption and taking risk. You cannot build an economy on the premise that people are simply entitled to use means of production without rewarding in any way those without whom those means of production wouldn't exist.

I also fail to understand why you assume that worker-owned syndicates won't easily out-compete capitalist-owned ones. Wouldn't workers, by your thinking, recognise the advantages of running their own workplace, and flock to syndicates scorning capitalists?

Discourse that always has as its goal an individual's private gain.

No!

Why does this idea keep coming back? We are advocating a society in which individuals control the fruits of their labour. That control doesn't mean that their goal is private gain. It could just as easily be expressed in terms of deciding which charitable/communal purposes to fund with those resources.

People will inevitably have shared concerns and interests. And since they could not longer expect government to impose their will on others, the only alternative open to them would be discourse. Persuasion. Negotiation. Social pressure. Joint efforts.

I mean the sheer fact that you and your capitalist friends own the rights to most of the resources that we need and the effect us is economic violence.

Well, setting myself apart, capitalists in aggregate might own most of the resources we need. But then farmers in aggregate also own all of the resources we need to survive - agricultural land. And workers in aggregate also own all the resources we need to survive - labour.

You see, taking a group as an aggregate creates the impression of an oppressive monopoly when none exists.

Capitalists, in the broadest possible sense (i.e. including self-proprietorships and worker-owned syndicates) do indeed own most of the capital resources within society. But so what? They still compete with each other, and the system enables anybody to save or borrow and acquire capital.

I am forced to act as a response to your decisions about the things I need--I am always dependent upon the will of those who are owners.

And vice-versa. I (presumably a capitalist) am always dependent upon the will of those who are workers. A capitalist enterprise is a joint venture, a collaboration, a mutual effort at a common goal.

The fact that I cannot force you to work for me is incredibly consequential and not at all "abstract". It means that I have to offer you terms that are more tempting than any otherwise available to you (including, in many cases, self-employment). Capitalists compete with each other for recruiting labour and, in the process, drive up wages and terms. That is why the vast majority of people make well over minimum wage.

We each have our individual right to acquire, if available, any resources we can--and we therefore better do it before those people over there get it!

There is no competition to see who acquires resources first. At least not as a major part of the economy. Time and again you express yourself in a way that suggests a zero-sum, finite-pie situation. In fact, the value of economic resources available to society ever increases. New wealth is created, not wrestled from one person by another.
#14231953
Eran wrote: Which means that the vast majority of decisions will be made by the delegates without consulting the group (as to do so would overload the group's available time).

I understand that the delegates are answerable to the group that sent them and, unlike today's "representatives" can be compelled by the group. In practice, however, this won't make much of a difference.

Today's US Representatives, for example, tend to enjoy overwhelming support within their respective districts. The vast majority of them get re-elected every two years. It seems implausible that they behave in ways that their electorate would find objectionable during their term, only to get re-elected time after time.

Rather, representatives tend to be experts at identifying and satisfying the most urgent preferences of their constituencies.


No I disagree, Eran and I'll explain why. It seems to me that much of the political apparatus today is superfluous, and exists only to maintain power where power is the strongest. You may have a point if the aim is to create some standing government, that operates non-stop and is always making laws and trying to "run the country". But that is all contrary to anarchism--is it not? The way that I see it is that there are not always going to be issues that we need delegation on. Much can be resolved on a very local level and we can handle without having to have a top down plan of action. I think we've simply grown accustomed to the system of bureaucratic control and not only is that how the current structures of power operate, but that is what we tend to envision when we talk about "democratic control". I would rather say, instead of having an existing government and state apparatus, which always needs to be running, and is "democratically controlled" , that democratic action occurs on a need-to basis. And our delegates are also on a need-to basis, not full time employees of a some bureaucratic machine.

Btw, without a state, who will regulate products in your society?


We would do this. I think, in fact, workers in shops and factories would have a great deal of concern about the things they produce because--they will be consuming them, as well as the people they know and their families. The conflict of interest has been somewhat diffused here.
Government embodies all that is wrong with current implementation of capitalism. It corrupts it as well as being corrupted by it.


I agree, wholeheartedly. But, to be sure, this is only tells half of the story. The other side of the story is that capitalism embodies all that is wrong with the current implementation of government--and in fact this, it seems to me, has been the case for quite some time, and always the case in the US.
I mean is it realistic to really try an envision the current government, say, in the US, existing without capitalism? Or the current embodiment of capitalism existing without the government? In fact, when have we ever been able to say either of the two? It seems to me that both are quite interlocking systems of power and control that, in some form or another, require the other.

Excellent. In that case, surely you must logically see that the rich and powerful would be less rich and powerful if government stopped working for them, right? Further, what tools does government use in its work for the rich and powerful? In a few cases, it does so with outright property transfers (corporate welfare) such as the recent bail-outs of both banks and auto-makers, or subsidies for "green energy" and other fashionable corporate causes.

But usually, government works for corporations without declaring its intention to do so (that wouldn't work well in democratic politics). It does that by passing favourable regulations which favour existing firms at the expense of new or emerging ones.

I want to deal with this before the NAP stuff since this directly relates to the last point. I think you have a point here, Eran--and it ties into what I stated above. There is a part of me that really does not see the possibility of capitalism existing without government, and hence why it has never been a force for dismantling it. And often, the attempts at dismantling the state for the sake of "free markets" has only been the attempt to dismantle that part of the state that helps the poor, workers, the unemployed, i.e. that part of the state that does not open up markets for the free flow of capital that is convenient for capitalists at a particular time. So, on the other hand, I don't see that dismantling the state necessarily hurts the rich and powerful--in fact, it was Adam Smith who said that laissez- faire markets should never be implemented without taking the necessary precautions, i.e. ensuring that workers and the poor have enough and will be fed and housed, etc. Doing it all at once could be detrimental. So I find it not at all constructive to push for the deconstruction of the state, but not the deconstruction of private power. For one, it seems that the deconstruction of the state would be the end of capitalism--there would be no more force to put down labor and to keep the poor and the masses it in their place. So to some extent the question seems purely academic. But if it were at all to happen, I would think that some alternative for the major corporate empires or whatever existing power elite we have, would have to be taken up: some kind of collusive private force that not only keeps capital within the hands of a few, but can use coercive force against those who "break contracts" or those squatters in the factories or of the criminals and vagabounds who are unemployed, and of course the ability to find cheap labor and move capital wherever they please.

No, the NAP applies to everybody. Institutions designed to enforce it, however, are much more important when some people have more power. But keep in mind - it is those without resources that need protection from those with. The NAP-protecting institutions, in other words, will protect the poor from the wealthy much more than the other way around.

The NAP is a universal moral maxim, namely that it is wrong to initiate force against other people or their (peaceful) projects.

Private property is merely a convenient tool for realising the NAP. A resource is considered a person's private property if it had been (peacefully) incorporated into that person's projects in such a way as to (reasonably) require the exclusion of others from that resource.

In other words it is private property precisely to the degree (and only because) others accessing it without the owner's permission would entail initiation of force by those others against some (peaceful) ongoing project of the owner.



To me I think the most basic moral maxim an anarchist can take up--and I agree with Chomsky here--is that the burden of proof is always on authority, that coercive power always has the burden of proof to justify itself. The NAP seems to be nothing more than a moral principle that allows for private authority and control from private power, just so long as a contract can be made. It never asks the question, in fact never gives any moral reason to ask the question: is the contract made between equals? In other words is there a relation of authority, existing by virtue of social conditions between party X and party Y, that is unjustified? To me, it seems that relations of private property would, more often than not, fail to justify itself in this sense.



I'd be curious to understand how that would work. For example, can I step into a communal syndicate factory and use its machines as I see please? Or help myself to its inventory or raw materials?

If I could, society would break down in no time.

If I couldn't, that means that the factory and its inventory are private property, albeit the property of the workers rather than of one or more capitalists.

Further, as one of a few hundred workers in the factory, I am bound to obey the decisions of the majority. The only reason I have to is that the majority controls those means of production. The relationship between me and the syndicate, in other words, is precisely a property relation of the kind you decry.

Just because I have one vote in a few hundreds doesn't change that.


I think generally there would be no need to police factories. Nobody owns it. We share it. Why would there be such need for theft if there is a basis of equality? Why, also, do you assume that this anarchist system would break down in no time--again, I think we're possibly getting at a clear distinction between the kind of force required to maintain a capitalist order, and the absence of force needed to maintain a libertarian socialist order.

But make no mistakes - every (stable) society has to assign property titles to somebody.


No. This was, and has been, the mistake of the modern West. We have only tended to think in terms of property relations, and chiefly because Western societies have been so authoritarian and unequal. Take Native American societies. There were no deeds of property, like you are calling for, and in fact it was this lack of organized exclusive right to property that you are talking about that many of the Europeans used to justify their own acquisition of the land and resources. No, I entirely disagree with this statement and view it as a mere lack of imagination to see beyond the current system of power and control that has dominated Western social organization for centuries.
Does that mean that the community can, at any moment, decide to strip me of my shirt, throw me out of my home, because those aren't my personal belongings or personal space?


No, and why would you even think that--and why is your shirt not your personal belonging, and why would you not be entitled to a home any less than I would be?
t is true that I am aiming at a society without government. But I don't think the way to get there is simply to "dismantle government". What we need to do, rather, is educate and persuade people to accept the NAP as the "constitutional" basis of societally-legitimised use of force.

As that is done, government will be organically dismantled (either through a democratic process or through civil disobedience). Only if government is dismantled in response to changes in public sentiment, rather than, for example, a successful revolution, will the institutions that replace it be better, rather than worse than what we have now.

It could be fund to toy with ideas as to the best way to dispense with government property. Many suggestions make sense, from repaying taxpayers to allowing property to go to the hands of government employees, to the repayment of government bond holders to equal distributions amongst the citizenry. Reasonable people can disagree.

But a gradual process (start with implementation of "moderate" libertarians like the Cato Institute, followed by privatisation of infrastructure, elimination of regulations, reduction of taxes, opening up immigration, culminating in privatising police forces and, ultimately, the armed forces) can be designed to eliminate or mitigate the risk of "power grabbing".


What examples in history do you have to point to here? Without creating an atomized culture, where labor, the poor, and the marginalized are systematically disenfranchised and struggle to unite, how do you plan on getting people to accept all these doctrines that seem to blatantly go not only against their interests, but against their common sense? The fight of the poor, the mass of workers and peasants, and the marginalized have historically been opposite of what you seem to be calling for: it has been towards equality, towards shared power, not exclusive rights to this or that and individual wealth pursuit.
And vice-versa. I (presumably a capitalist) am always dependent upon the will of those who are workers. A capitalist enterprise is a joint venture, a collaboration, a mutual effort at a common goal.

The fact that I cannot force you to work for me is incredibly consequential and not at all "abstract". It means that I have to offer you terms that are more tempting than any otherwise available to you (including, in many cases, self-employment). Capitalists compete with each other for recruiting labour and, in the process, drive up wages and terms. That is why the vast majority of people make well over minimum wage.


This again is entirely ahistorical, unless you are actually suggesting that capital has always historically had an equal hand with labor. I think, historically, quite the opposite has almost always been true: the power of capital--i.e. the privately owned means of production for the production of profit--has been systematically more powerful than labor, and sometimes even the state.
#14232583
anticlimacus wrote:I think you've got it back asswords Rothbardian. I mean you take a look at history, from the early anarchist movements like Owen or the rural utopian movements like Tolstoy, or the serious movements like the Paris Commune or 1936 Spain and current worker coops etc., it becomes strikingly clear that the aim of social reform amongst working people and the poor and the masses has always been towards community and collective ownership. The "sepctor" has never been the ancap dream of a world of private property without state involvement. What is so striking is that this seems to make absolutely no sense to you ancaps--even the fact that, anarcho-capitalism is still just a contradiction, just as much as state socialism is.


Of course people form voluntary collectives when left to their own devices. Unfortunately that's not what you advocate. You advocate using guns to force the unwilling because you think the exclusive ownership is a greater crime than murdering people.
#14232739
You advocate using guns to force the unwilling because you think the exclusive ownership is a greater crime than murdering people.


When and where have I advocated this? And no I don't think exclusive ownership is a greater crime than murdering people. I think exclusive ownership leads to murder, to death, to power and control.
#14234032
anticlimacus wrote:Actually what you are saying is incredibly difficult to understand. Who thinks of their body as private property?


I thought everybody did.

Why would I say somebody else owns my body?


Because, as Eran pointed out, your body is used as a means of production. Your intellect and your physical skills produce wealth. So I would think the question is, why don't the members of your collective own your body?

I mean this is my body, that is your body. This is what I have no choice but to live and act through--this is who I am. I will not control your body and you will not control my body without my consent.


You're asserting property rights.

Socialists don't look at benign one-to-one interactions existing in a vacuum. We look at social systems and their historical production and existence.


Right: it's all about groups, not individuals. Which causes me to wonder how you can possibly label your philosophy "anarchist" or "libertarian".

The possibility of society actually coming together to make sure basic needs are met is simply not entertained and can only be viewed as tyrannical ...


It's only tyrannical when aggression is applied. Of course individuals will come together and cooperate, it's quite difficult to survive in life without doing so; which means they'll cooperate voluntarily, out of their own enlightened self-interest. But that's different than forcing people to "come together", or subsuming one's individuality to become a cog in the Great Machine of "society".
#14234070
Joe Liberty wrote:I thought everybody did


No, I think it's only this insane legalism from the far right--but I would venture to even argue that in everyday discourse you do not refer to your body as your property, or even think of it as such. It is just your body, and a violation of it is not a violation of your property, but..wait for it...you.

When a woman is being raped, she does not accuse her raper of violating her property, she accuses him of violating her body. If a thief comes in and steals computer materials, the owner accuses the thief of stealing his property, not violating his body. Surely, the difference makes sense to you?

Because, as Eran pointed out, your body is used as a means of production. Your intellect and your physical skills produce wealth. So I would think the question is, why don't the members of your collective own your body?


Humans are productive. This does not make them machines or resources to be mined--except under capitalism. Under capitalism we become little more than an appendage to the machine, capital that goes into the productive process to create more capital. Then we become just as expendable as the next part to a machine that can be replaced with a certain amount of money. The means of production are only the means of production because of our ability to control them and to be put into creative purposes. Otherwise they are just things. And the point that you seem to be making beautifully for me is that this wacko right wing libertarian ideology does nothing except make us into things. To you, I am property. To me I am a human being.

You're asserting property rights.


The rights that I have as a person are, at least in theory, in virtue of my humanity. The fact that you cannot do harm to my body is not an argument that my body is my property--who am I in that case? It's an argument about my dignity and liberty as a human being. To violate my personal belongings is one thing, but to violate my body and seek to control it is quite another. I'm not just a thing to be owned, controlled, and manipulated. I am a creative being that can control, manipulate, and own things--as well as do many other creative things. The means of production, property, by itself has no creative power. It has no intellectual or social power. It has power by virtue of how human beings use it. If we want to turn ourselves into the means of production--which is what we do in the capitalist labor process--then I find that to be the most dehumanizing tendency in society. You right wingers, who are all for the individual, seem to unwittingly be supportive of making humans into mere things.

Right: it's all about groups, not individuals. Which causes me to wonder how you can possibly label your philosophy "anarchist" or "libertarian".


No. It's the rational insight that individuals and what they do only makes sense within a wider socio-economic context.

It's only tyrannical when aggression is applied. Of course individuals will come together and cooperate, it's quite difficult to survive in life without doing so; which means they'll cooperate voluntarily, out of their own enlightened self-interest. But that's different than forcing people to "come together", or subsuming one's individuality to become a cog in the Great Machine of "society".


After they have already successfully made each other into things to be controlled, they will come together in order to survive? This is the absurdy of your position. You first turn us all into property to be controlled--and I suppose those who buy labor are the real persons who do the controlling?--and you do this proudly. Then you call us to work together and cooperate. Thank you Joe Liberty--you bring out the absurdity of the far right better than I can even explain it. This is a quintessential rationalization of power and domination. It is "doublespeak": "You are all things! But you are free things!"
#14234106
The way that I see it is that there are not always going to be issues that we need delegation on.

Actually, with the abolition of the market, it seems like delegates are going to be expected to take on many more decision relative to the current arrangement.

Imagine that a steel-producing syndicate faces demand for steel from a car-maker, a tractor-maker, a refrigerator-maker and several other syndicates. Who will decide on the appropriate production allocation and how?

To make the decision, we need to bring in representatives (or delegates) of consumer communes who would represent anticipated demand for cars and refrigerators (as consumer end-products), as well as agricultural syndicates (representing demand for tractors) and food-retailing-syndicates (representing demand for industrial refrigerators) and countless others.

Perhaps it would be helpful, at this juncture, for you to clarify how you see these kinds of decisions being made.

We would do this. I think, in fact, workers in shops and factories would have a great deal of concern about the things they produce because--they will be consuming them, as well as the people they know and their families. The conflict of interest has been somewhat diffused here.

That's naive in the extreme. For one thing, many workers (and their families) may not consume the specific products they produce. For another, workers lack the scientific knowledge required to made such decisions.

Finally, you face the same problem as government regulators - safety comes on a continuum, and costs money. We never have perfectly-safe products. We could always make products safer (but more expensive). How would workers in a food-packing syndicate acquire the knowledge required to make this kind of decision?

I mean is it realistic to really try an envision the current government, say, in the US, existing without capitalism?

No. But we know of historic (and some current) examples of government without capitalism. To put it mildly, they give nothing to aspire to.

For one, it seems that the deconstruction of the state would be the end of capitalism--there would be no more force to put down labor and to keep the poor and the masses it in their place.

It will certainly be the end of capitalism as we know and hate it. However, it need not be the end of capitalism in the sense of a system that allows private ownership of the means of production.

To me I think the most basic moral maxim an anarchist can take up--and I agree with Chomsky here--is that the burden of proof is always on authority, that coercive power always has the burden of proof to justify itself.

Fair enough. The only authority I am suggesting is the authority of a person (or group of people) saying to others - "don't trample on the field I just worked hard to cultivate".

This kind of authority is required in any society. Even in your society, one presumes, a person cannot just enter anybody's dwelling and destroy their personal effects at leisure. Nor can a person just decide to play football with his friends on a freshly-sewn field. Or go on a joy-ride on the town's fire-engine.

Every society needs property, and the authority that goes with it, by which I mean rules pertaining to who can use what physical resources and under what conditions.

Further, in your society, the individual, more often than not, would be contracting with various communities (in his capacity as a consumer or as a worker), a relation which is inherently unequal, as a community, in your system, enjoys unqualified legal superiority over its individual members.

It never asks the question, in fact never gives any moral reason to ask the question: is the contract made between equals?

"Equals" in what sense? No two people are perfectly equal in every sense. Most trade, in fact, is beneficial precisely because it is done between unequal parties. I am better at hunting, you are better at pot-making. When it comes to deer-meat, I am your superior. When it comes to pottery, you are my superior. Does that cast a shadow over our contracts? Of course not.

No. This was, and has been, the mistake of the modern West. We have only tended to think in terms of property relations, and chiefly because Western societies have been so authoritarian and unequal.

Note that I used "property" rather than "private property".

Take Native American societies. There were no deeds of property, like you are calling for, and in fact it was this lack of organized exclusive right to property that you are talking about that many of the Europeans used to justify their own acquisition of the land and resources.


This is a misleading example. Native American societies can be divided into agricultural and hunter-gatherer tribes. In North America, we tend to think of the latter, though in America as a whole, the former predominated.

Every agricultural society has the concept of property in land. It might not be individual property. It might be the property of the tribe. But property it was. For hunter-gatherer societies, there was still the notion of property in physical objects (axes, wigwams, whatever).

No, and why would you even think that--and why is your shirt not your personal belonging, and why would you not be entitled to a home any less than I would be?

If the answer is no (for any reason), than the shirt and home are my property. I have the (authoritarian?) right to exclude others from my home.

How is that, in principle, different from my right to exclude others from my field?

What examples in history do you have to point to here?

I am advocating the exclusion of assignment and re-assignment of property rights from the legitimate domain of government action. This is analogous to the historic exclusion of government from other domains in which it was deemed to have legitimacy of action in the past, but not today.

The cleanest example is religion. Until a few hundred years ago it was taken for granted by virtually all thinkers that the regulation of religious practice was a legitimate aspect of government power.

Then came the enlightenment, the American Revolution and changing opinions (in the west) which brought us to today, a society in which only a tiny minority (in the west) still feels in the same way.

Without creating an atomized culture, where labor, the poor, and the marginalized are systematically disenfranchised and struggle to unite, how do you plan on getting people to accept all these doctrines that seem to blatantly go not only against their interests, but against their common sense?

We are getting back to the point we covered above, namely that you cannot at the same time claim that government is a tool in the hands of the wealthy, and that the poor are better off for having government.

Free markets are counter-intuitive. That is the hurdle that their proponents have to overcome. But freedom (of religion, for example) has overcome this kind of hurdle.

The fight of the poor, the mass of workers and peasants, and the marginalized have historically been opposite of what you seem to be calling for: it has been towards equality, towards shared power, not exclusive rights to this or that and individual wealth pursuit.

Indeed. This won't be easy. One potentially-useful avenue would be the creation of one or more free cities - small geographical enclaves within existing nations in which freedom is guaranteed.

Such free cities would flourish economically, and serve as a positive example for imitation, first by small nations, then by larger ones. The masses in the Soviet Union have realised that, government propaganda notwithstanding, they aren't better off than their brethren in the west for having a government that guaranteed employment and fixed food prices.

The masses throughout the world will realised, one day, government propaganda notwithstanding, that they aren't better off for having government regulation of economic activities, labour markets, etc.

I think, historically, quite the opposite has almost always been true: the power of capital--i.e. the privately owned means of production for the production of profit--has been systematically more powerful than labor, and sometimes even the state.

How do you quantify that? How can you tell? Individual workers tend to be less well-off than individual capitalists. But so what? How does that reflect the overall power of a class of people? What is even the meaning of that, when the members of each class have more in common (by way of goals and interests) with members of the other class than with members of their own class?
#14234155
anticlimacus wrote:No, I think it's only this insane legalism from the far right--but I would venture to even argue that in everyday discourse you do not refer to your body as your property, or even think of it as such. It is just your body, and a violation of it is not a violation of your property, but..wait for it...you.


You're arguing semantics at best, out of pure emotionalism at worse, because you're saying the same thing we are: your body is yours and nobody else has the right to violate nor control it. That's property rights, whether you're comfortable thinking in those terms or not is irrelevant.

Humans are productive. This does not make them machines or resources to be mined--except under capitalism.


And this one of the areas where your distinctions between "means of production" and "private property" break down. An example was made before of a sculptor: he uses his hands as the means of production. By your definition (coupled with your aversion to considering a person's body his property), why does this not mean his hands belong to the collective?

Under capitalism we become little more than an appendage to the machine, capital that goes into the productive process to create more capital. Then we become just as expendable as the next part to a machine that can be replaced with a certain amount of money. The means of production are only the means of production because of our ability to control them and to be put into creative purposes. Otherwise they are just things. And the point that you seem to be making beautifully for me is that this wacko right wing libertarian ideology does nothing except make us into things. To you, I am property. To me I am a human being.


Again with the emotional semantics. You are a human being who owns his own body, his own intellect, and his own time. We are saying the exact same thing here, but I think your socialism has created a real stigma about the term "property".

You right wingers, who are all for the individual, seem to unwittingly be supportive of making humans into mere things.


Now this is an interesting accusation, since you socialists seem to deny individualism at almost every turn, instead valuing humans only in the context of a collective (a point from my last post you did not address).

I get the aversion to being controlled, but without property rights, the right to create and control what you create, there is no freedom. Property is nothing more than a physical manifestation of your creativity, time, and labor. It is an extension of you as a human being.

Joe Liberty wrote: Right: it's all about groups, not individuals. Which causes me to wonder how you can possibly label your philosophy "anarchist" or "libertarian".


anticlimacus wrote: No. It's the rational insight that individuals and what they do only makes sense within a wider socio-economic context.


I say po-tay-to, you say po-tah-to. You just restated what I said: individuals in and of themselves are without meaning. I reject that out of hand. I'll also repeat: how do you claim the mantle "libertarian" in any way if your philosophy concerns itself only with groups and not individuals?
#14234194
Eran wrote:Actually, with the abolition of the market, it seems like delegates are going to be expected to take on many more decision relative to the current arrangement.

Imagine that a steel-producing syndicate faces demand for steel from a car-maker, a tractor-maker, a refrigerator-maker and several other syndicates. Who will decide on the appropriate production allocation and how?

To make the decision, we need to bring in representatives (or delegates) of consumer communes who would represent anticipated demand for cars and refrigerators (as consumer end-products), as well as agricultural syndicates (representing demand for tractors) and food-retailing-syndicates (representing demand for industrial refrigerators) and countless others.

Perhaps it would be helpful, at this juncture, for you to clarify how you see these kinds of decisions being made.


As I've explained before, this goes through a federated system of anarchist communes and syndicates, where all skills are put together and actualized where needed. Labor cartels work together to determine their needs and what needs to be produced, they work in connection with other labor cartels and communal boards. Depending on the skill set that different people bring to their work, certain persons would be in charge of bookkeeping, others in charge of production and both accountable to each other. So at times, exchanges can be as easy as a simple phone call. At other times this might need to take great deliberation and sophisticated planning. There's simply absolutely no reason to assume that we need a profit driven market to keep this organized, sophisticated, and flexible.

That's naive in the extreme. For one thing, many workers (and their families) may not consume the specific products they produce. For another, workers lack the scientific knowledge required to made such decisions.

Finally, you face the same problem as government regulators - safety comes on a continuum, and costs money. We never have perfectly-safe products. We could always make products safer (but more expensive). How would workers in a food-packing syndicate acquire the knowledge required to make this kind of decision?

Why do you think we would have no scientists? Why do you think we would have no people qualified to make sure that our products are safe any more than having those qualified and eager to do the accounting and bookkeeping? Particularly if this is something we care about, this is something we would support communally. However not to the end of making profits, but to the end of making products that better serve our social and individual needs. After all, that is why we continue to use these resources and run these factories--because we need them. Otherwise it's just superfluous labor, the very thing we had hoped to overcome by controlling the means of production.

No. But we know of historic (and some current) examples of government without capitalism. To put it mildly, they give nothing to aspire to.


And all we know of capitalism is how it functions within state and state power. And it, certainly is nothing to aspire to. It seems as if domination and control is something that is quite integral to the functioning of capitalism and the system of private property. And why wouldn't it be? If my concern is centralized on my own profits, I will do whatever it takes to ensure that my profits and my ability to make them will continue. Thus, controlling markets, controlling labor and keeping it cheap, expanding markets wherever I can, trying to control as much property as I can, etc. All of the latter, and more, has been the history of capitalism and it has used totalitarian states and "democratic" states to achieve its ends. I don't see how it would be any different without a state--private armies would replace public ones. Private collusion of capital would replace the state, and those who have the power could basically do whatever they want: and what could we do about it? Yell at them for not abiding by the NAP when they use their well paid armies to take control of some poor far off land that has some resources they want? Maybe the'll just do what they do today--rationalize their violence and use propoganda to keep the population down. Who knows. All I knows is that there is absolutely no reason to trust that the beast of capitalism with government will be anything better without government.

Fair enough. The only authority I am suggesting is the authority of a person (or group of people) saying to others - "don't trample on the field I just worked hard to cultivate".


If only this was the simple statement you were making. Instead what you are saying quite the opposite: "Don't touch the field I own and hire labor to work! They could not afford to maintain this land, so I appropriated their debt to me and now I own all this land! You may not touch it or it's machinery--but you may sell yourself to me between the hours of 6 am and 6 pm and I will pay you X...and since you have nowhere to go you will gratefully accept my modest payment to you" This is exactly what happened to American farmers earlier in the 20th century and to countless others in other capitalist conditions. It was their land, they worked it, and they were forced to surrender it to those with the capital. I don't see this at all as a justifiable situation. It is a situation of authority and power, where one party becomes subordinate to another party for the other party's private gain. There is little to nothing that is voluntary in this situation. There are the very grim conditions on those who need to sell themselves, and the very wealthy situation of those ready to buy them out and control their working life.

Even in your society, one presumes, a person cannot just enter anybody's dwelling and destroy their personal effects at leisure. Nor can a person just decide to play football with his friends on a freshly-sewn field. Or go on a joy-ride on the town's fire-engine.


In my society we all control the means of production and there is no reason to enter into somebody's dwelling and destroy their personal effects at leisure. I have no ability to privately cease the machinery necessary for producing clothing or food or whatever for my own personal profit. We all share these things and work them together towards our common end and it is by virtue of shared means that we begin to actually differentiate ourselves according to our own individuality, and not our by our economic ability (which is just another means of social power and control) to actualize our self-determination. This is why I have always stated that freedom, true individual freedom, is contingent upon social cooperation at a very basic level. The social cooperation you call for is something that occurs as a consequence of social division between property owners. After we are divided accordingly, then we may cooperate. As I pointed out to Joe Liberty, this is just emblematic of the absurdity of the right wing positions: we first must become things (as property) that can potentially be controlled, and then we can cooperate and be free because we can now sell ourselves, as things, with "consent".

Every society needs property, and the authority that goes with it, by which I mean rules pertaining to who can use what physical resources and under what conditions.

Further, in your society, the individual, more often than not, would be contracting with various communities (in his capacity as a consumer or as a worker), a relation which is inherently unequal, as a community, in your system, enjoys unqualified legal superiority over its individual members.


But not every society is determined by property relations: between who owns and controls what and who serves and who has nothing at all, etc. A real radical transformation is moving beyond a society determined, intrinsically, by its property relations.

As to your last point I don't see how that is the case at all. Work is voluntary, and if you don't work it doesn't mean you starve. I'm not quite sure at all what you mean or are getting at, and why communities have the super power over individuals.
"Equals" in what sense? No two people are perfectly equal in every sense. Most trade, in fact, is beneficial precisely because it is done between unequal parties. I am better at hunting, you are better at pot-making. When it comes to deer-meat, I am your superior. When it comes to pottery, you are my superior. Does that cast a shadow over our contracts? Of course not.


Equals in means. Of course we all have differences, and what you suggest is most benign: me being able to offer my ability to hunt and you to offer your ability to make pots. Well, what if you own all the hunting land? Then I can only hunt by your permission, regardless of my ability or what you have to offer. You can only offer me subsistence and I can only labor at your approval. Clearly there is a difference in social power here that you are ignoring.

If the answer is no (for any reason), than the shirt and home are my property. I have the (authoritarian?) right to exclude others from my home.

How is that, in principle, different from my right to exclude others from my field?


Why should you have an exclusive right to the land from which we can produce food and other goods? Again, I say equality of means but that does not mean you don't have a right to what you produce or to personal consumption.

I am advocating the exclusion of assignment and re-assignment of property rights from the legitimate domain of government action. This is analogous to the historic exclusion of government from other domains in which it was deemed to have legitimacy of action in the past, but not today.


At it's core you are talking about taking everything and saying: first come first serve--and whoever get's there last will have to serve. Your example of religion is not at all the same thing as the property rights you have in mind. Freedom of association and freedom to express one's belief is entirely different from the freedom to claim whatever property one can for oneself.
We are getting back to the point we covered above, namely that you cannot at the same time claim that government is a tool in the hands of the wealthy, and that the poor are better off for having government.

Free markets are counter-intuitive. That is the hurdle that their proponents have to overcome. But freedom (of religion, for example) has overcome this kind of hurdle.


You see a contradiction only because I look at things in relation to short term and long term. The long term goal is to overcome both the government and capitalism. This at times means using the government in the short term--to raise living standards, to recognize unions and support labor laws, to protect public lands from private acquisition, to provide adequately schooling, etc. All this is necessary,
Under capitalism
. But this does not mean that we don't work, at the same time, for great workers solidarity and control over their production and communities. Reform becomes gradual, but gradual in the sense of working from the inside out. We are, of course, very aware that the state is nothing but an appendage to the capitalist system--and there is a danger, as often happens with labor unions, that we become lazy and simply blend in with the system and become complacent in our participation with the state. But I do believe we should always try to take advantage of it when and if we can--of course the long term goal must always be a priority.

Free markets are counter-intuitive. That is the hurdle that their proponents have to overcome. But freedom (of religion, for example) has overcome this kind of hurdle.


Freedom of ideas and freedom of private exchange of capital are two entirely different things.

Indeed. This won't be easy. One potentially-useful avenue would be the creation of one or more free cities - small geographical enclaves within existing nations in which freedom is guaranteed.

Such free cities would flourish economically, and serve as a positive example for imitation, first by small nations, then by larger ones. The masses in the Soviet Union have realised that, government propaganda notwithstanding, they aren't better off than their brethren in the west for having a government that guaranteed employment and fixed food prices.

The masses throughout the world will realised, one day, government propaganda notwithstanding, that they aren't better off for having government regulation of economic activities, labour markets, etc.


Well, the proof will just have to be in the pudding, and I think the one example you could point to were the early free chartered cities during the Feudal era. And what did the burghers ultimately push for? The capitalist state, a bourgeois society--which, incidentally, where the same powers that be in those early cities. This was never a social change for the masses--but always for those who owned property in the first place.

How do you quantify that? How can you tell? Individual workers tend to be less well-off than individual capitalists. But so what? How does that reflect the overall power of a class of people? What is even the meaning of that, when the members of each class have more in common (by way of goals and interests) with members of the other class than with members of their own class?


Look at almost every single labor conflict and it has been the struggle of the masses attempting to come together to fight big capital--which, with the help of the state, often brutally put down these struggles. Look at who has been running the major capitalistic countries--not labor, but big capital. Look at who benefits primarily from state law--not labor, but big capital. Look at who benefits most from social wealth--not labor, but big capital. This is really easy to observe, you just open your eyes and look around. It is, in fact, why most will find your ideas simply appalling and insulting and why ancapism never has and most likely never will take a foothold among the masses of the working, the poor, and the marginalized. It appeals primarily to the rich, the well off or some random disillusioned petite bourgeoisie.
#14234200
Joe, can you really not make a distinction between a human being and property? Property is something that human beings create or control, and as such, is something human beings can gain or lose--it is not what they are. If we cannot even begin to make this distinction, between being a human being and being property, then I think all is lost. The fact that you think it a mere semantic distinction is really quite telling and gives reason for pause.

Joe Liberty wrote:Property is nothing more than a physical manifestation of your creativity, time, and labor. It is an extension of you as a human being.


So if property is an extension of you as a human being, then why are you referring to your body (or your mind) as your property? Isn't that what makes you a human being?

And this one of the areas where your distinctions between "means of production" and "private property" break down. An example was made before of a sculptor: he uses his hands as the means of production. By your definition (coupled with your aversion to considering a person's body his property), why does this not mean his hands belong to the collective?


Well, granted the fact that means of production refers to objects humans control, I might, incidentally, add that our bodies are something we all have in common! We each have our own bodies. The same is not true with the private ownership of the means of production. More importantly, with the private ownership of the means of production our bodies become something that we must sell out for somebody else to tell us how to use it productively. This is a condition that we traditional anarchist have referred to as "wage slavery"--and you, in your tradition of double speak, refer to as "freedom". And, once again Joe, I must thank you for making this point beautifully.
#14234831
anticlimacus wrote:There's simply absolutely no reason to assume that we need a profit driven market to keep this organized, sophisticated, and flexible.

Yes, there is every reason to assume that.

This is Mises's famous Socialist Calculation Problem. In a nutshell, his argument is that it is impossible to prioritise the production of producer's goods (means of production and raw materials) for which multiple end-uses exist without a competitive market through which reliable prices emerge.

I tried to give a flavour for the problem by considering just one such product, namely raw steel. Steel can be used in a wide variety of products. How will your society determine how to allocate finite steel production between those uses (not to mention how much steel to produce in the first place)?

The problem appears manageable because we live within a society in which prices for such resources are readily available and, based on those prices, production procedures are well-known.

But without a market in steel, how can you prioritise its use for cars vs. refrigerators, tractors vs. bridges? Your steel-production syndicate gets more orders than it can deliver. How will it decide how to allocate? What tools do decision-makers have to decide? Should the next shipment go towards building more tractors (demanded by the tractor-manufacturing syndicate which brings with it the needs of various agricultural syndicates) or a new bridge (demanded by... who exactly?)

Both make good cases. How do you decide?


Another angle is determining the best way to produce a given product. Should cars be made of steel or carbon fiber advanced materials? This is not purely an engineering problem. It is also an economic problem. Solving it requires weighing not just the material qualities of the different production techniques, but also their alternative uses. Titanium, for example, is extremely strong, lightweight and resistant to corrosion from chemical weathering and saltwater. From an engineering point of view, it is superior to steel.

Should we make cars out of titanium, steel, aluminium, iron or some combination? Without prices, how can you tell?

And all we know of capitalism is how it functions within state and state power. And it, certainly is nothing to aspire to.

I beg to differ. With its many shortcomings, state-capitalism is still (by far!) the best form of societal organisation ever attempted by humans.

To be clear, I agree with you that it can be improved-upon. But let's not condemn it for what it isn't.

It seems as if domination and control is something that is quite integral to the functioning of capitalism and the system of private property. And why wouldn't it be? If my concern is centralized on my own profits, I will do whatever it takes to ensure that my profits and my ability to make them will continue.

Of course. But your ability to make profit is conditional upon the cooperation of countless other people over whom you have no power. You can tempt them to help you, but you cannot force them to do so.

You can use carrots, but not sticks (other than the "stick" of withdrawing a carrot...)

That fact drastically limits your ability to cause harm, and channels any efforts at profit-making into productive, socially-desired avenues.

Thus, controlling markets, controlling labor and keeping it cheap, expanding markets wherever I can, trying to control as much property as I can, etc.

Markets cannot be controlled. "Markets" are nothing but the expressed consumption choices of millions of people. Since you have no power over those people, you can't control them, or the markets that their collective action generates.

I don't see how it would be any different without a state--private armies would replace public ones.

The key isn't who controls the army, but what norms animate society. The US might have a highly-centralised control structure over its armed forces, while feudal societies had a highly decentralised control structure. Yet in the US, the internal harm caused by the armed forces is much less than what was experienced in feudal societies.

The key is that American society is imbued with the norm that the Constitution provides the single ultimate source of legitimacy for the use of force, together with the USSC as the ultimate arbitrator of how that norm is to be applied to specific situations. Despite a wide range of opinions on virtually every topic, the agreement on these two related principles is virtually unanimous.

In the society I am advocating, the core difference isn't in the absence of government - that is a derived difference. The core difference is in replacing the Constitution with the NAP as the single ultimate source of legitimacy for the of force, together with an evolving set of individuals and organisations deemed authorised to resolve disputes over its specific application.

Whether the armies or police forces are private, communal, not-for-profit or otherwise is completely beside the point.

Private collusion of capital would replace the state, and those who have the power could basically do whatever they want: and what could we do about it? Yell at them for not abiding by the NAP when they use their well paid armies to take control of some poor far off land that has some resources they want?

Once the NAP is accepted as the fundamental principle, outright violations of the NAP (e.g. by ignoring the opinion issued by mainstream, legitimate arbitrators) would become unthinkable, just as a Presidential order to storm Congress or blatantly ignore a USSC decision is unthinkable today.

We can go through analysing the parallels between the two scenarios - a rogue President and a rogue CEO. IT is easy to see that while the former is unthinkable (given today's norms), the latter is even less likely (under the norms stated above).

If only this was the simple statement you were making.

The principle is simple. Its application, in the context of a complex society, is indeed complex.

It was their land, they worked it, and they were forced to surrender it to those with the capital.

No, they weren't. They only did so to repay debts they took. Why did they take on those debts? Primarily, I believe, because they resisted economic pressure associated with the move from agriculture to industry.

In other words, their ownership of the land as family-farmers was no longer economically viable. Sure - they could stay as self-sufficient farmers in the style of their ancestors. But they wanted better - better living conditions which their own labour could no longer purchase.

In my society we all control the means of production and there is no reason to enter into somebody's dwelling and destroy their personal effects at leisure.

What do you know about the reasons that animate humans? Whatever the reason might be (spite, revenge, greed, curiosity), your society would still recognise a dwelling as being somebody's property, not equally accessing to all members of society.

But not every society is determined by property relations: between who owns and controls what and who serves and who has nothing at all, etc. A real radical transformation is moving beyond a society determined, intrinsically, by its property relations.

The extent to which property is important to people and the role it places is a function of culture. You are welcome to advocate and work towards a less materialistic culture - one in which possessions aren't greatly valued. One in which, for example, prestige is associated with artistic, athletic or rhetoric accomplishments rather than the pure accumulation of property. Nothing in the right-libertarian principles rules out such culture.

I believe it is naive in the extreme to expect complete obliteration of the universal human drive towards distinction, prestige and social status. I know of no historic society in which that drive was ever abolished. The means for obtaining social status may vary - from old age (in certain hunter-gatherer societies) to physical power, to courtly status, to wealth, to status within a government bureaucracy.

What are going to be the means towards achieving social status within your society? If I had to guess, I would say that not all members of a community / syndicate would be equally capable of influencing the opinions of others. Some people would emerge as natural leaders, those towards which other come for guidance. In a highly-democratic society, such people wield much power. If you want the syndicate to approve your application for X, you could try and speak yourself in the next general meeting. But you would have much greater chances of success if you first solicit the aid of Smith. Smith would gladly agree, hinting that he would expect your vote on question Y.

Soon enough, the community recognizes that X's talents are much better utilised as a production-coordinator rather than a line-worker. Smith's friends become his aids, travelling with him to regional conferences. His enemies find themselves assigned to the dirtiest jobs and worst hours. All, of course, democratically supported...

Well, what if you own all the hunting land?

You have not presented a single argument supporting your repeated (implicit) assumption that monopolization of the "means" is in any way a realistic concern.

Why should you have an exclusive right to the land from which we can produce food and other goods?

The simplest reason is that the land couldn't have been used to produce food and other goods before I worked it. The land in question, for the purpose of this argument, was not considered good enough (for being too remote, too wet, too dry, too covered by forest, whatever) for others to bother with. I worked hard, risked my time and savings, and finally made something productive out of this previously-unproductive land.

That is why I should have an exclusive right to it. Not all the land, mind you. Just the little bit that I spent years improving.

Again, I say equality of means but that does not mean you don't have a right to what you produce or to personal consumption.

But it does say that if I choose to use my production to create new means, or, more directly, if I choose to produce "means", I no longer have any right to them, correct?

At it's core you are talking about taking everything and saying: first come first serve--and whoever get's there last will have to serve. Your example of religion is not at all the same thing as the property rights you have in mind. Freedom of association and freedom to express one's belief is entirely different from the freedom to claim whatever property one can for oneself.

The analogy starts and ends with the point that a domain once considered legitimate for government action has since ceased to be so considered.

As for your "first come first serve", it is misleading. Sure - the first person to make use of previously-unused resources has the first claim to those resources. Who else? The second person? The third? A group made out of the 5th through 105th person who came even later? Why?

But the implication is, once again, misleading. You are implicitly assuming monopolization of resources without ever demonstrating it as a credible concern.

Freedom of ideas and freedom of private exchange of capital are two entirely different things.

Of course. But both were once considered heretical. We have come to accept the former. One day, we'll come to accept the latter too.

Well, the proof will just have to be in the pudding, and I think the one example you could point to were the early free chartered cities during the Feudal era. And what did the burghers ultimately push for? The capitalist state, a bourgeois society--which, incidentally, where the same powers that be in those early cities. This was never a social change for the masses--but always for those who owned property in the first place.

Sure, in the first place. But everybody else soon followed. Thanks to those bourgeoisie and their greedy (but also frugal, prudential and creative conduct), the poorest worker in the west today enjoys a standard of living undreamed of by the wealthiest people of the past.

And hundreds of millions of people are lifted, thanks to that very same bourgeois spirit from the crushing poverty of subsistence farming, through an intermediate phase of sweat-shop labour, towards western-level middle-classdom.

Look at almost every single labor conflict and it has been the struggle of the masses attempting to come together to fight big capital--which, with the help of the state, often brutally put down these struggles.

What conflicts? Labour conflicts, today, are a rare exception. The vast majority of employees get along very well with their employers.

It is, in fact, why most will find your ideas simply appalling and insulting and why ancapism never has and most likely never will take a foothold among the masses of the working, the poor, and the marginalized. It appeals primarily to the rich, the well off or some random disillusioned petite bourgeoisie.

So your only standard for the power of capital is its ability to capture the very government I am calling to abolish.

How is that relevant to the question of balance of power in a government-less society?
#14235264
Eran wrote: This is Mises's famous Socialist Calculation Problem.


Which is fallacious. First of all capitalist markets produce gross inefficiencies, for instance the fact that what a business does not sell it might throw out, or the inefficiency of unemployment where the willing and ready labor is there, but the capital is not or the inefficiency in advertising and bookkeeping for profits, the production of wants for the sake of profit etc. Second, there's no reason to assume that capitalist efficiency should be the measure of all things. We might want to take into account, in our measuring the value of any good, the quality and kind of work we put into it and its environmental effects as well as its relative scarcity and the urgency of need. Measuring by mere profit margins depersonalizes as the bottom line is what matters. Third, Von Mises has simply no understanding of anarchism, or what real socialism is all about (and remember that even Marx aimed towards a stateless society, not state socialism). Libertarian socialism does not operate from a centrally planned economy. In fact, it's quite the opposite of either a command economy or a corporate capitalist economy or the state capitalism of either the 19th or 20th centuries. As in anarchist Spain we would have a network of federated labor cartels who would organize production and mix and match needs. As I mentioned before we would make sure to have bookkeepers who would keep track of production and send data back and forth concerning the amount labor that goes into production, the environmental costs, the relative scarcity, the need, etc. and this would allow us to come to an understanding of a cost-benefit analysis.

I beg to differ. With its many shortcomings, state-capitalism is still (by far!) the best form of societal organisation ever attempted by humans.

Well I don't think that state capitalism is something that has been attempted by humans as a whole. State capitalism is something that has been attempted and enforced by some humans until it became the dominant socio-economic condition. And neither do I think the advantages it has brought in some instances justifies it being "the best form of societal organisation ever"--I mean how does one quantify that? Do Native Americans think this? Do Africans think this? Do poor Americans or poor Russians think this? Do those who produce our cheap goods in China think this? We can certainly look at the magnificent productive capacity of capitalism, but we can also look at its magnificent dehumanizing tendencies: propelling humanity into world wars, global ecological crises, rampant global poverty and inequality within the production of abundance, the degradation of labor, etc.

What socialists seek to do is to actually take the good of capitalism, the productive capacity, and to put it towards human ends towards our service--not have us serve production for its own sake, for continual, irrational, growth!

Of course. But your ability to make profit is conditional upon the cooperation of countless other people over whom you have no power. You can tempt them to help you, but you cannot force them to do so.

If markets were perfect, then you might have a point. But when are they ever perfect? Though we cannot entirely control markets, those who are in power do their best to do so, this means creating barriers to entry and to leaving markets, controlling production and trade, etc. and it involves both private and state collusion. I mean we can talk about how you are free to consume whatever you want--but we also have to be willing to talk about the interests of capitalists to create a profit, which can mean making cheaper goods, buying cheaper labor, restricting choices, etc. And all of this does happen. This is not to mention the sheer irrationality of the system: goods can sit ready to be consumed on a shelf, but if they are not purchased cannot be used. So, as in the Great Depression, those goods all go to waste. None sense like this happens all the time in capitalist economies, so I think it's healthy and reasonable to have a great deal of skepticism towards claims of "rationality" and the "power of choice" etc. that the free market system would offer, if only given the chance...

Why not take a much more rational approach and base production on real needs, as opposed to trying to make profits and fabricate needs and control and limit production for the sake of private profit? Why not take profit out of the picture and put production into the power of producers to make a fruitful living for all so that we can all express our individuality without the grind of worrying about how we are going to make ends meet all day so that somebody can rake in a handsome profit? This just seems like common sense.

The core difference is in replacing the Constitution with the NAP as the single ultimate source of legitimacy for the of force, together with an evolving set of individuals and organisations deemed authorised to resolve disputes over its specific application.

Whether the armies or police forces are private, communal, not-for-profit or otherwise is completely beside the point.


I don't see how this makes a shred of difference. Who is the arbiter of this NAP in your society? Answer: Those with power! And that is what makes all the difference. You may think--quite (extremely!) speculatively--that your "free" society will result in such a diffuse system of power that we will all be able to call the shots and hold each other accountable. However, that is a ridiculous gamble to take, I think, particularly if we are saying that the means of production, what has historically been one of the most powerful social forces, can be privately controlled. It's much like the gamble of giving political power over to our elected few who will do as they wish, but are always "checked" by our vote. We can all be extremely "moral" people--just like Americans are, we are all for "freedom". But how is that going to stop the greatest atrocities from those who have the power to call all of the shots--such as doing all the interpreting of "our" constitution? This, it seems to me, to be a grave problem in your theory.

Once the NAP is accepted as the fundamental principle, outright violations of the NAP (e.g. by ignoring the opinion issued by mainstream, legitimate arbitrators) would become unthinkable, just as a Presidential order to storm Congress or blatantly ignore a USSC decision is unthinkable today.

We can go through analysing the parallels between the two scenarios - a rogue President and a rogue CEO. IT is easy to see that while the former is unthinkable (given today's norms), the latter is even less likely (under the norms stated above).


Just like it is unthinkable for the US to have working conditions where children work for 16 hours in mine shafts--but we are more than fine with allowing children in other countries (or poor undocumented immigrants in our own with farm labor) to do it and we'll buy their cheap goods? Moral principles are meaningless unless we all actually control our lives in a substantive way, and what is essential to that is our ability to control our own production and not be controlled in that regard. The NAP certainly protects my body from you whipping me or shooting me (of course, that is unless you can prove that I was violating your property, and that may very well be open to interpretation). But it's most basic achievement is to protect property rights, and therefore those who control the means of production and have the most social power. This is not to mention the fact that the NAP, as has been often noted, says nothing about economic violence--which can be the most severe kind of violence there is resulting in starvation, disease, and wars as a result of poverty and (artificially) scarce resources. It's not what the NAP prohibits, but what it allows as a moral principle that is astonishing--and of particular interest for anarchists, is that it allows those in positions of authority (property owners) to not have the burden of proof for their authority. They are simply justified in their power without question.

As far as rogue presidents are concerned that doesn't matter--it's the state, the American system which the president serves almost in a mere symbolic fashion. What I was describing with collusion among big capital would probably be much the same: they might play nice to the press, but totally contradict all the niceness in practice. Doesn't matter if they have all the power.
Its application, in the context of a complex society, is indeed complex.


The fundamental problem withe the NAP is that it has nothing to do with community. It's something for each individual to work out on their own--and, in most cases, to simply be left on their own. Power and authority should require justification, and the power to control labor also requires the same justification, which, more often than not, cannot meet the challenge. Wage labor is a result not of voluntary relationships of free association, but relations of necessity by those who have, standing in authority against those who do not have.
No, they weren't. They only did so to repay debts they took. Why did they take on those debts? Primarily, I believe, because they resisted economic pressure associated with the move from agriculture to industry.

They took those debts due to economic necessity and the means of production being privately controlled. If they would have owned the means of production to produce--just like me and you--they would have no reason to go into "voluntary" servitude--which is also what wage slavery is.
What do you know about the reasons that animate humans? Whatever the reason might be (spite, revenge, greed, curiosity), your society would still recognise a dwelling as being somebody's property, not equally accessing to all members of society.


I don't think an anarchist society would be utopia, by any means. But certainly much of the crime we experience today--due to poverty, lack and want, poor education, etc.--all has to do with the socio-economic organization we seek to overcome. There simply would be no reason to steal your wealth if wealth is something we all share. Individuality suddenly becomes something to be respected in an anarchist society because it depends on us all first working together and provide for each other so that we will be able to express ourselves individually.

believe it is naive in the extreme to expect complete obliteration of the universal human drive towards distinction, prestige and social status.


I don't--and why would you think I do? And, as I have said before, the quest for distinction is not necessarily a bad thing. It can become bad, but it is not necessarily bad. We hope to foster that in a healthy way, but the threat of social control and domination never evaporates. It can only be lessened.
You have not presented a single argument supporting your repeated (implicit) assumption that monopolization of the "means" is in any way a realistic concern.

When has this not been the case in capitalism? In fact, the period of the freest markets (the 19th century) created situations of vast inequalities and consolidation of power, which eventually led to the corporate monopoly and finance capital we have today. I am not the one with the burden of proof here--we have been living under the influence of capitalism for hundreds of years, and we know what it's about. You are the one who needs to provide the hard concrete evidence that your society will be fundamentally different--and more free--than the one we have experienced.
The simplest reason is that the land couldn't have been used to produce food and other goods before I worked it.


If only you worked it! The reality is that you own it--I (and my fellow comrades) work it! That is why you should not have the exclusive right to it.
But it does say that if I choose to use my production to create new means, or, more directly, if I choose to produce "means", I no longer have any right to them, correct?

How does this happen? How, in a society where we all work together in syndicates and coops to produce resources for us all, do you all by yourself suddenly acquire the ability to create the means of production, and to the extent that you will be able to control labor? If you need help with a project, most likely you are going to need to cede some control to your helpers, and they too will have to do the same with the help they enlist. Our venture may start up another syndicate but in a true anarchist society this becomes a social endeavor that is socially realized and socially beneficial, not a social endeavor that is socially realized and privately beneficial.

As for your "first come first serve", it is misleading. Sure - the first person to make use of previously-unused resources has the first claim to those resources. Who else? The second person? The third? A group made out of the 5th through 105th person who came even later? Why?

But the implication is, once again, misleading. You are implicitly assuming monopolization of resources without ever demonstrating it as a credible concern.

Again I see no reason not to assume monopolization. Capitalism has always been riddled with the attempt to control the means of production--whether through private collusion or through collusion with the state. And the only thing misleading here is your claim that you will work all the land and resources. You will own them, but not necessarily work them.

the poorest worker in the west today enjoys a standard of living undreamed of by the wealthiest people of the past.


This is simply not true. Now, I'm not contesting that certain standards of living in certain places have gone up (just as they did in Soviet Russia)--of course this, we must also admit does not have everything to do with capitalism. But that is not, by any reason, a moral justification for a system of oppression and domination. I mean the same argument was made about African slaves or the Native Americans: they are being taken into a civilized society, away from their prior brutish ways, and, of course, with the help of slave labor production and standards of living went up.

What we have is the capacity to create mass production. What we do not have is the social capacity for all to share in the benefits of production. Instead what we have is continued, and often irrational, competition which has the potential threat of taking us to the global economic collapse at its lesser evil, and the end of civilization at its worst evil. Both are very real and constant threats in the modern era and are relatively felt all over the world in a variety of ways. Surely we can do better--surely we must do better!

Labour conflicts, today, are a rare exception. The vast majority of employees get along very well with their employers.

Ya..tell that to the 1200 who just died in Bangladesh, or the Chinese factory producers of American toys, or the undocumented American immigrant who lives in fear of being deported and so does whatever he/she is told. Labor may be more fragmented than it was and labor conflicts may not be all over the news, but it is certainly there. And this happy medium you say exists is no more a fabrication than when the American elite claimed the had overcome poverty in the 1920s.

So your only standard for the power of capital is its ability to capture the very government I am calling to abolish.

How is that relevant to the question of balance of power in a government-less society?


You should know by now. The idea that we simply try to curb the only public power we have and let finance capital and corporate power do even more of what they want just sound absurd. You may paint rosy pictures all you want, but that won't change the fact that the burden of proof is on you to show how this would end in the well being of us all. Reality shows a different story--and the masses are smart enough to not fall for it, I think.
#14235555
First of all capitalist markets produce gross inefficiencies, for instance the fact that what a business does not sell it might throw out, or the inefficiency of unemployment where the willing and ready labor is there, but the capital is not or the inefficiency in advertising and bookkeeping for profits, the production of wants for the sake of profit etc.

I disagree. There is nothing inherently inefficient about throwing out goods that aren't sold.

Nor is there any indication that "willing and ready labour" is hampered from employment by "capitalist markets" rather than various forms of government intervention, both direct (minimum wage) and indirect (generous unemployment "insurance")

Second, there's no reason to assume that capitalist efficiency should be the measure of all things.

There is not such thing as "capitalist" efficiency. I was discussing economic efficiency. The key challenge is to satisfy consumer demands as effectively as possible given finite resources available to society. There is nothing "capitalist" about that challenge.

What is special about capitalism is that, unlike any other system, it encompasses the effective means to address this challenge. The means are effective when they combine the information, capacity and motivation to act in the appropriate way to resolve the challenge.

Under capitalism, people have the information (through price signals), capacity (through guaranteed control over their own property) and motivation (through the prospect of profiting from correct choices) to act in ways that better and better meet consumer preferences.

We might want to take into account, in our measuring the value of any good, the quality and kind of work we put into it and its environmental effects as well as its relative scarcity and the urgency of need. Measuring by mere profit margins depersonalizes as the bottom line is what matters.

Perhaps. All you are doing is demonstrating that the problem may be even more complicated than I presented. But even ignoring environmental effects, the problem of optimising production is insoluble without price signals from a market in means of production and other producer goods.

Finally, profit is available as a metric of economic efficiency, but need not predominate as a motivator for action. That is always left to individuals and their moral choices.

Third, Von Mises has simply no understanding of anarchism, or what real socialism is all about (and remember that even Marx aimed towards a stateless society, not state socialism). Libertarian socialism does not operate from a centrally planned economy. In fact, it's quite the opposite of either a command economy or a corporate capitalist economy or the state capitalism of either the 19th or 20th centuries.

Mises's argument was indeed directed at proponents of central planning. However, his argument is equally valid for a scenario in which planning is decentralised, as long as those producer good price signals are absent.

As I mentioned before we would make sure to have bookkeepers who would keep track of production and send data back and forth concerning the amount labor that goes into production, the environmental costs, the relative scarcity, the need, etc. and this would allow us to come to an understanding of a cost-benefit analysis.

Sure. But how would those bookkeepers be in a position to compare the relative merit of uncountable permutation of production possibilities? How do you weigh the relative value of using steel to produce cars vs. tractors? Of using manpower to produce steel vs. aluminium?

How is your decentralised network of bookkeepers going to be able to do what Mises proved couldn't be done by a central planning bureau?

I mean how does one quantify that? Do Native Americans think this?

Today they do, sure. Native Americans could live in the primitive conditions available to their ancestors. Yet they prefer to enjoy the benefits of technology and wealth provided by state capitalism.

Do poor Americans or poor Russians think this?

Without a doubt, seeing how they live in a standard their ancestors couldn't even dream of. Do you know what poor Russians lived like under communism or pre-communist feudalism? How did poor Americans live 200 years ago, either in America or in their homelands?

Do those who produce our cheap goods in China think this?

Even more so. Sure. Because before they had an opportunity to produce your cheap goods, they were stuck as subsistence rice farmers under either communism or pre-communist imperial order. In fact, millions upon millions of Chinese leave the lives of subsistence poverty in search of precisely those jobs producing cheap goods.

propelling humanity into world wars, global ecological crises, rampant global poverty and inequality within the production of abundance, the degradation of labor, etc.

With all the world wars (which, of course, had little to do with capitalism) and ecological crises, the status of the world's poor (not to mention the world's middle-classes) has never been better.

Global poverty isn't rampant by historic standards - it is on the decline thanks to capitalism.
Inequality may or may not be worse than that experienced under other systems (I believe it is MUCH less of an issue, btw), but I dispute that inequality (as opposed to poverty) as a topic of concern.

What socialists seek to do is to actually take the good of capitalism, the productive capacity, and to put it towards human ends towards our service--not have us serve production for its own sake, for continual, irrational, growth!

That's a fair goal. After all, I would like to take the good of state-capitalism (i.e. capitalism) while discarding the bad (state).

Unfortunately, I think you fail to understand what it is about capitalism that creates that productive capacity. Why is it, do you think, that capitalism has been the only road to prosperity ever invented?

Finally, where did you get the idea that we serve production for its own sake? What we do is try and meet human desires. Growth is not the goal, it is the means to this goal. If humans decided that spending more leisure time with their families is of higher value than making more money, nothing in capitalism would stop them from doing so. Evidently, humans (at least in today's culture) prefer working 40-60 hours per week and making more money (thereby being able to satisfy more of their material wants) over working less but enjoying a lower standard of living. Go figure!

If markets were perfect, then you might have a point. But when are they ever perfect?

Nothing is perfect, nor does the truth of my statement depend in any way on that illusory perfection of markets.

Though we cannot entirely control markets, those who are in power do their best to do so, this means creating barriers to entry and to leaving markets, controlling production and trade, etc. and it involves both private and state collusion.

What tools, in your mind, would be available to the greedy capitalist of an ancap society, to create barriers to entry and to leaving markets, controlling production and trade, etc.?

we also have to be willing to talk about the interests of capitalists to create a profit, which can mean making cheaper goods, buying cheaper labor, restricting choices, etc.

Other things being equal, capitalists prefer making cheaper goods. But other things aren't equal. Those same capitalists face competition for consumers, and consumers prefer high-quality goods. Therefore, some capitalists will produce cheaper goods for those customers who prefer them, while others will produce higher-quality (though more expensive goods).

Other things being equal, capitalists prefer hiring cheaper labour. But those same capitalists face both competition from other capitalists wishing to make use of that very same cheap labour (thereby driving its price up) and the necessity to use productive labour (which may not be cheap).

As for "restricting choices", a capitalist can restrict the range of products he offers the public, but, in an ancap society, has no mechanism for restricting the ability of consumers to choose the products of his competitor.

This is not to mention the sheer irrationality of the system: goods can sit ready to be consumed on a shelf, but if they are not purchased cannot be used. So, as in the Great Depression, those goods all go to waste.

The only goods that went to waste during the Great Depression were those over which government imposed minimum prices. Remember those? In an unregulated market, the producers (or retailers, if they have already purchased the goods) are motivated to sell them at a lower price rather than throw them away. And they routinely do. That's what sales are about.

Why not take a much more rational approach and base production on real needs, as opposed to trying to make profits and fabricate needs and control and limit production for the sake of private profit?

Let's discuss that. How would your society determine what my needs are? Do I need an iPad? How about an SUV? Do I need a house in the country? How about a vacation to Thailand? How many pairs of jeans do I need? Do I need to keep pets? How many channels of movies do I need?

I don't need any of the above to survive. But then surely you don't propose that we do away with all of them (or their equivalents), right? So the question isn't one of "needs", but of "wants". I want all of the above, and much more. Obviously, I cannot have everything I want. Nobody can. So the relevant question isn't satisfying "needs", nor "wants", but only "preferences".

And how would your society determine what my preferences are? Ask me? Allow me to vote as one member in a hundred in the monthly meeting of my consumer syndicate?

And again, how do you see capitalists in an ancap society able to "fabricate needs", when their profit depend on consumer voluntarily parting with their money to purchase what they (the consumers) choose to buy? Or, for that matter, limit production of their competitors?

Who is the arbiter of this NAP in your society? Answer: Those with power!

Not at all. The arbiters are those people considered trustworthy by ordinary people. Let's assume, for a moment, a model in which virtually everybody is insured by a "crime insurance" corporation. When you are a victim of a crime (a violation of your property rights), you are immediately compensated by your insurance company. In exchange, the company acquires the right to obtain restitution from whoever violated your rights.

If you are accused of a crime, your insurance company defends you and pays for any arbitration assessment against you, but retains the right to extract compensation from you based on legal procedures stipulated in your agreement with them.

In such a society, who has the power? Millionaires might have pampering personal service, but the companies representing them would not be any more powerful than the corporations representing the masses. Rich people might shop in Saks Fifth Avenue and poor people in Wal-Mart. Which of those two (Saks or Wal-Mart) do you think is more powerful? Rich people might eat at Per Se (the highest-rated restaurant in New York) and poor people at McDonald's. Sure, the food at Per Se is both expensive and refined. But which of those two (Per Se or McDonald's) do you think is more powerful?

Those insurance companies would negotiate and agree on mutually-acceptable arbiters. Those companies serving the masses (middle and lower classes) would easily hold their own vs. those companies representing wealthier (but also fewer) clients.

You may think--quite (extremely!) speculatively--that your "free" society will result in such a diffuse system of power that we will all be able to call the shots and hold each other accountable. However, that is a ridiculous gamble to take, I think, particularly if we are saying that the means of production, what has historically been one of the most powerful social forces, can be privately controlled.

Means of production are privately controlled, but in a diffused, not monopolistic way. That ownership coveys very little power unless political force is "for sale". As for the "gamble", I am not suggesting a sudden transition to "my" society. Rather, I envision a gradual process. The ultimate force would, until the very end, still be in the hands of democratically-elected state officials. Their powers to influence the economy would gradually be taken away, but their means for ensuring fair arbitration of disputes wouldn't, at least until the very end of the process.

It's much like the gamble of giving political power over to our elected few who will do as they wish, but are always "checked" by our vote.

Except that you could choose any insurance company you want (rather than the one chosen by the majority of your fellow voters), and change your choice at any time (as opposed to being stuck with the same politicians for four years).

The NAP certainly protects my body from you whipping me or shooting me (of course, that is unless you can prove that I was not violating your property, and that may very well be open to interpretation). But it's most basic achievement is to protect property rights, and therefore those who control the means of production and have the most social power.

Control over means of production is diffused. Entry into that "control" is open to all. Please leave the 19th century and do join me in the 21st. There are thousands of major corporations, millions of small businesses, tens of millions of self-employed people. The means of production aren't controlled by a single, coordinated "class".

It's not what the NAP prohibits, but what it allows as a moral principle that is astonishing--and of particular interest for anarchists, is that it allows those in positions of authority (property owners) to not have the burden of proof for their authority. They are simply justified in their power without question.

The NAP only allows people to peacefully use their property as they see fit. The NAP isn't a complete moral theory. It is merely a principle governing the use of force in society.

By all means - work to disseminate your moral principles. I will gladly help you. The moral principles of helping the poor and cooperation amongst workers, for example, are perfectly consistent with the NAP.

Don't think of the NAP operating in a moral vacuum. Think of it in conjunction with other principles. Think of it is a wall defending people from abuse.

In a level playing field, why do you assume that capitalists will have a better chance at tempting workers than worker-controlled syndicates? By your logic, people would much rather work for the latter than for the former. If you are right, then, the NAP virtually guarantees the dominance of your production model. With the NAP in place, who could possibly stop you?

The fundamental problem with the NAP is that it has nothing to do with community. It's something for each individual to work out on their own--and, in most cases, to simply be left on their own.

How on Earth did you reach that conclusion? What is it about the NAP that precludes or discourages people from joining together as communities, working together, pooling their property, resources, energy towards common goals?

Wage labor is a result not of voluntary relationships of free association, but relations of necessity by those who have standing in authority against those who do not have.

Maybe. Or maybe not. How can you conclude that categorically? And, as stated above, assuming people prefer to work in an environment in which they have a say, how do you suppose a capitalist will ever be able to recruit workers away from a syndicate? Conversely, in a level playing field, and assuming a capitalist does manage to recruit a worker away, how can you determine that the worker didn't make a voluntary choice?

Do you seriously believe that every single person working for a wage (such as me) is doing so because they lack any alternative? If so, (1) you would be obviously wrong, and (2) you would have nothing to fear from a world that allows wage labour and gives people adequate alternative choices.

They took those debts due to economic necessity and the means of production being privately controlled.

They owned their own land and tools. They already owned their means of production. What gave rise to that economic necessity?

When has this not been the case in capitalism? In fact, the period of the freest markets (the 19th century) created situations of vast inequalities and consolidation of power, which eventually led to the corporate monopoly and finance capital we have today.

I was referring to the effective monopolization of the means of production. That has never been the case under capitalism. Not in the 19th century, and certainly not today. It was only an issue under centrally-controlled socialist (and fascist) governments.

The 19th century indeed saw vast accumulation of wealth in private hands, but never to the point where more than a tiny fraction of society's wealth was in any pair of hands. Even then, of course, political power was "for sale", aiding the wealthiest to increase their own wealth at other's expense.

You are the one who needs to provide the hard concrete evidence that your society will be fundamentally different--and more free--than the one we have experienced.

I am confused. You agreed with me that the wealthy are able to largely control government and bend it to serve their interests. Doesn't that imply that without government, the wealthy's interests will be less well served?

If only you worked it! The reality is that you own it--I (and my fellow comrades) work it! That is why you should not have the exclusive right to it.

Hold on. I started with a simple scenario - one in which I personally travelled to a remote location, cleared and prepared a field, and then cultivated it. My argument is that under those circumstances, I am morally entitled to exclude you (or all others) from trampling on my field.

If we agree on that, we can gradually consider more complex circumstances, such as how I may dispose of the property I did acquire using my own two hands.

How does this happen? How, in a society where we all work together in syndicates and coops to produce resources for us all, do you all by yourself suddenly acquire the ability to create the means of production all by yourself, and to the extent that you will be able to control all the labour?

Whoever said anything about controlling "all the labour"? In fact, no single person (outside government) as ever controlled "all the labour", nor even a tiny fraction of "all the labour".

I am talking about a society in which, while many people may choose to work in syndicates and coops, I am still free to acquire property of my own, either from people who willingly give me their property (say in exchange for services, or property I previously acquired) or by putting into use natural resources that nobody before me bothered using.

If I am allowed to do that, I might, over time, accumulate more and more property. But note - at no point ever do I acquire property at somebody else's expense. Every little step is based on either being awarded property from others voluntarily, or adding to the store of useful resources available to humanity by putting into use previously-unused resources.

At some point in this process, I may be able to tempt away workers who have the option of working for a syndicate to work for me. Since those workers have an alternative (working for a syndicate), their choice to work for me cannot be viewed in any way shape or form as anything other than voluntary. Will you try and stop them?

Our venture may start up another syndicate but in a true anarchist society this becomes a social endeavor that is socially realized and socially beneficial, not a social endeavor that is socially realized and privately beneficial.

Maybe it will, and maybe it won't. If you are right, you have nothing to worry about, since nobody will agree to help me without sharing in the control of our enterprise. But what if you are wrong? What if people do agree to help me (despite having viable alternatives!) without demanding such control? Will you try and stop them?

As for the nature of the benefit, unless what I am building is a self-sufficient ranch, I am probably aiming at an enterprise that produces stuff to sell to others. The enterprise, to be viable, is socially beneficial. Whether or not I end up making a profit (a big if, btw), my enterprise will benefit my workers (for if it doesn't, they won't work for me), my suppliers (for if it doesn't, they won't sell to me) and my customers (for if it doesn't, they won't work for me).

Whatever profit I end up with is only the residual value left after my enterprise has been socially beneficial.

Now, I'm not contesting that certain standards of living in certain places have gone up (just as they did in Soviet Russia)--of course this, we must also admit does not have everything to do with capitalism. But that is not, by any reason, a moral justification for a system of oppression and domination. I mean the same argument was made about African slaves or the Native Americans: they are being taken into a civilized society, away from their prior brutish ways, and, of course, with the help of slave labor production and standards of living went up.

The big difference, of course, is that African slaves and Native Americans have been forced to abandon their prior way of life. The peasants of the third world (and, 150 years ago, of Europe) have chosen to abandon their prior way of life because capitalist countries offered them a better alternative.

What we have is the capacity to create mass production.

That capacity didn't materialise out of thin air, or was dreamed of in a university or government bureau. No, this capacity was created, exclusively, by profit-seeking entrepreneurs (which you would call "capitalists").

You now wish to kill the goose that lay the golden eggs.

Ya..tell that to the 1200 who just died in Bangladesh, or the Chinese factory producers of American toys, or the undocumented American immigrant who lives in fear of being deported and so does whatever he/she is told.

All of these people either (1) live in fear of government oppression, in which case their plight has no bearing on the kind of capitalism I am advocating, or (2) live under explicit slavery, in which case their plight has no bearing on the kind of capitalism I am advocating, or (3) have chosen to work in those conditions, because those conditions, while poor by our standards, are still a vast improvement over their prior lives.

Those Bangladeshi and Chinese factory workers work under hard conditions. But those conditions are sill much better than those experienced by their parents, back in the village.

The idea that we simply try to curb the only public power we have and let finance capital and corporate power do even more of what they want just sound absurd. You may paint rosy pictures all you want, but that won't change the fact that the burden of proof is on you to show how this would end in the well being of us all. Reality shows a different story--and the masses are smart enough to not fall for it, I think.

Financial capital and corporate power can only "do what they want" because of the control they exert over government.

It is very easy to demonstrate. Pick your favourite corporate abuse of power (Wall Street excess, BP oil spill, difficult working conditions in China, you name it) and it is readily evident that either (1) that abuse is strictly conditioned on favoured government regulations, or (2) it isn't really an abuse.

Conversely, you are yet to point out a single example of how, in a society governed, ultimately, by the NAP, those possessing economic wealth are in a position to abuse it. Pray tell, how will they do that, in a society in which consumers and workers can always opt for their competitors, in which pollution is actionable by the owners (or users) of the polluted resources, in which competition is wide open to all, in which ownership of resources is widely distributed amongst millions of different people?
#14237122
anticlimacus wrote:Joe, can you really not make a distinction between a human being and property? Property is something that human beings create or control, and as such, is something human beings can gain or lose--it is not what they are.


Perhaps I'm being unclear (but I don't think so). Your property does not define you, but it is an extension of you: I'll repeat, property is the physical manifestation of the time, energy, creativity, and labor that you expended to create or acquire it.

If we cannot even begin to make this distinction, between being a human being and being property, then I think all is lost. The fact that you think it a mere semantic distinction is really quite telling and gives reason for pause.


The semantic distinction is my saying, "you own your body," and your saying, " your body isn't property, but it's yours and nobody else's and you can do with it what you want." That's the same thing, you just have a hang-up with the word "property". I come right out and call lit property, you have to dance around it.

So if property is an extension of you as a human being, then why are you referring to your body (or your mind) as your property? Isn't that what makes you a human being?


Not at all, your body is a vessel for the 'real you'. That's why when a person dies the body is called "their body", it's not considered that person anymore. The person has fled, leaving an empty shell.

Well, granted the fact that means of production refers to objects humans control, I might, incidentally, add that our bodies are something we all have in common! We each have our own bodies. The same is not true with the private ownership of the means of production.


Just so I understand this: you're saying that your hands are not considered a means of production because everybody has hands? What about amputees? So if everybody had a hammer then hammers would no longer be means of production? If everybody owned a kiln then kilns would no longer be means of production?

You seem to view individualism as tyranny, but you don't acknowledge the tyranny of the majority. You abuse terms like 'slavery' to describe trading my skills for a paycheck, when slavery entails bondage, aggression, and (ironically) no right to own property, not even your own body. You seem to assume that a person in limiting circumstances can never improve himself, can never learn new skills, can never strike out on his own ... I think these are all faulty, and ultimately fatal, assumptions.

Personal liberty = economic liberty = property rights. These things are inseparable. Now, I realize that's just a statement of opinion. I can post a bevy of links to illustrate this point from a myriad of sources, but I'm thinking that would be a waste of time.
#14237141
Just so I understand this: you're saying that your hands are not considered a means of production because everybody has hands? What about amputees? So if everybody had a hammer then hammers would no longer be means of production? If everybody owned a kiln then kilns would no longer be means of production?


No, and you know that is not what I am saying. If having something in common meant that it is no longer the means of production then what would socializing the means of production mean? What I said was that the means of production typically refers to things, objects of control, not our bodies which do the producing. Now in capitalism and other kinds of slavery our bodies are treated like things. But right now that is beside the point. What I suggested was that even if we treat our bodies like the means of production, your argument simply doesn't fly: we all have bodies in common. A body is something that every human being shares by virtue of being human.

In fact, the irony is that socialists actually want to liberate our bodies from having to be sold to others. It is under capitalism that our bodies become something we must sell for others to control. So the absurd notion you were suggesting would happen in a socialist world (that our bodies would be up for public control), is actually something that happens under capitalism!--only instead of it being under public control, bodies are sold to private entities.

Personal liberty = economic liberty = property rights. These things are inseparable.


You do not need to make a whole bunch of references etc. You just need to make a rational reason for accept this dogma. And that is all this is Joe Liberty, DOGMA. Why should I, or anybody, accept such an absurd definition of liberty?
#14237343
Red Barn wrote:You'll never get an answer to this most rational of questions, esteemed comrade.


Yes, you are most likely right Red Barn. However, it's hard not to point out how dogmatic and ideological comment's like Joe's are. I mean "personal liberty=economic liberty=private property"!? How the fuck does one just throw that out there like it's common sense (or that it even makes sense)? I know this would be for a different thread, but we should just chalk this up as yet another reason why right wing libertarians are not well liked--they are simply entirely unaware of their own illogical dogmatic assumptions
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