**dbzer0:** > the first is that I do not expect that in a society where valid alternatives exist outside of rent and wage-slavery, anyone would willingly choose to lose his freedom under them Come on, man, this is obviously stacking the deck. My point was that hiring out the use of capital that somebody else owns is not the same thing as "wage slavery." You then come back and tell me that nobody would choose to be a wage slave without her options being artificially constrained. Well, O.K., but how is that a reply to what I said? > you are not an equal to your boss, no matter how much you stretch this I didn't say that you were "an equal to your boss." What I said is that the fact that, under present conditions, capitalists can act as *bosses*, and demand that people who labor on capital must act as *employees*, is an artefact of the coercive social context in which those exchanges occur. In a context where people don't generally rely on these kind of relationships, and aren't forced into depending on them for survival, things may be different in the occasional circumstances where it *does* seem likely to be useful. Of course, much as I expected, your reply is that there are *no* conditions under which it would be useful. This strikes me as a failure of imagination, not a failure of the theories. Can't you think of any case in which, in a free and happy republic of labor, you might still need to use land or capital *temporarily*, without wanting to take on the costs and responsibilities involved in full ownership? You can't think of a case in which you might want to, say, rent out a room in a town that you're only going to be in for a couple months (even though you could, presumably, buy the room, or erect your own lean-to on a vacant lot just down the street, or ask for a room down at the local communal worker's dormitory, or whatever)? Or think of any way to enter into that sort of relationship without being dominated? Really? > the relations of a market are never between equals. Someone always needs something more than the other and therefore is in a more subservient position Has it occurred to you that *two* things change hands in a quid-pro-quo market exchange? When the exchange between Jones and Smith is a free one, it happens because Jones needs what Smith has more than she needs what she already has, and because Smith needs what Jones has more than she needs what *she* already has. So I have all these tomatoes I just picked from my garden, and I can't use them all (in any case, the marginal tomato is a lot less valuable to me than the first 20 tomatoes that were already sitting in my fruit bowl). On the other hand, my neighbor has some cilantro and I need cilantro in order to make salsa. She needs the cilantro a lot less than she needs tomatoes. So each of is is in a position of needing something more than the other, and each of us in a position of needing something less than the other; which allows us to enter into a mutual exchange where we each get something out of the relationship. Are the actual exchanges that occur in marketplaces today very much like this happy, simple story? No, they're not. The answer has nothing to do with the act of market exchange per se, and everything to do with the political economy of capitalism. As for the the linked post is insulting, uncharitable to the people you are supposedly replying to in it, and, as far as I can tell, irrelevant to this conversation, except insofar as it's another example of your repeated efforts to interpret Market Anarchist views as uncharitably as possible. Certainly, I don't know what a series of complaints about people who reply to anticapitalist arguments with "It's libertarian if no fraud or violence is involved" is supposed to have to do with this conversation (neither William nor I said anything of the sort). Nor grousing about how people who aren't convinced by dbzer0's declaratory judgment that, say, "crypto-feudalism" or "widespread wage-slavery" *are* "very possible authoritarian results of propertarian markets" must be dishonestly playing both sides of the fence. Really? Perhaps the real counterparts of your unnamed, unquoted interlocutors value *both* free markets and anti-capitalism, for independent reasons, and are trying to work out the best ways to interconnect those commitments with each other rather than subordinating one goal to the other. In any case, if somebody says "It is *possible* for market exchanges to be a libertarian social relationship under the right conditions" and your reply to them is, first, to say that under those conditions market exchanges *maybe might* turn out to be authoritarian, then you've misunderstood the meaning of the word "possible." (The claim isn't that any set of conditions *guarantee* libertarian relationships in a marketplace, it's that they make them *possible*.) If somebody says "It is *possible* for market exchanges to be a libertarian social relationship under the right conditions" and your reply to them is, second, to act as if they are now just unwilling or unable to bring themselves to considering alternative, non-market-mediated forms of social relationships, then that's walloping on an obvious strawman. Saying that commercial exchanges can be O.K. is not the same thing as saying that they are universally desirable in every field of life, let alone that they are rationally mandatory, or just identical with libertarianism, or what have you. And neither William nor I has said anything like the latter. If you got complaints with the voluntaryists or the less critical agorists, fine, whatever, but what do they have to do with this discussion? I'm not on that tip.

**dbzer0:** > the first is that I do not expect that in a society where valid alternatives exist outside of rent and wage-slavery, anyone would willingly choose to lose his freedom under them Come on, man, this is obviously stacking the deck. My point was that hiring out the use of capital that somebody else owns is not the same thing as "wage slavery." You then come back and tell me that nobody would choose to be a wage slave without her options being artificially constrained. Well, O.K., but how is that a reply to what I said? > you are not an equal to your boss, no matter how much you stretch this I didn't say that you were "an equal to your boss." What I said is that the fact that, under present conditions, capitalists can act as *bosses*, and demand that people who labor on capital must act as *employees*, is an artefact of the coercive social context in which those exchanges occur. In a context where people don't generally rely on these kind of relationships, and aren't forced into depending on them for survival, things may be different in the occasional circumstances where it *does* seem likely to be useful. Of course, much as I expected, your reply is that there are *no* conditions under which it would be useful. This strikes me as a failure of imagination, not a failure of the theories. Can't you think of any case in which, in a free and happy republic of labor, you might still need to use land or capital *temporarily*, without wanting to take on the costs and responsibilities involved in full ownership? You can't think of a case in which you might want to, say, rent out a room in a town that you're only going to be in for a couple months (even though you could, presumably, buy the room, or erect your own lean-to on a vacant lot just down the street, or ask for a room down at the local communal worker's dormitory, or whatever)? Or think of any way to enter into that sort of relationship without being dominated? Really? > the relations of a market are never between equals. Someone always needs something more than the other and therefore is in a more subservient position Has it occurred to you that *two* things change hands in a quid-pro-quo market exchange? When the exchange between Jones and Smith is a free one, it happens because Jones needs what Smith has more than she needs what she already has, and because Smith needs what Jones has more than she needs what *she* already has. So I have all these tomatoes I just picked from my garden, and I can't use them all (in any case, the marginal tomato is a lot less valuable to me than the first 20 tomatoes that were already sitting in my fruit bowl). On the other hand, my neighbor has some cilantro and I need cilantro in order to make salsa. She needs the cilantro a lot less than she needs tomatoes. So each of is is in a position of needing something more than the other, and each of us in a position of needing something less than the other; which allows us to enter into a mutual exchange where we each get something out of the relationship. Are the actual exchanges that occur in marketplaces today very much like this happy, simple story? No, they're not. The answer has nothing to do with the act of market exchange per se, and everything to do with the political economy of capitalism. As for the the linked post is insulting, uncharitable to the people you are supposedly replying to in it, and, as far as I can tell, irrelevant to this conversation, except insofar as it's another example of your repeated efforts to interpret Market Anarchist views as uncharitably as possible. Certainly, I don't know what a series of complaints about people who reply to anticapitalist arguments with "It's libertarian if no fraud or violence is involved" is supposed to have to do with this conversation (neither William nor I said anything of the sort). Nor grousing about how people who aren't convinced by dbzer0's declaratory judgment that, say, "crypto-feudalism" or "widespread wage-slavery" *are* "very possible authoritarian results of propertarian markets" must be dishonestly playing both sides of the fence. Really? Perhaps the real counterparts of your unnamed, unquoted interlocutors value *both* free markets and anti-capitalism, for independent reasons, and are trying to work out the best ways to interconnect those commitments with each other rather than subordinating one goal to the other. In any case, if somebody says "It is *possible* for market exchanges to be a libertarian social relationship under the right conditions" and your reply to them is, first, to say that under those conditions market exchanges *maybe might* turn out to be authoritarian, then you've misunderstood the meaning of the word "possible." (The claim isn't that any set of conditions *guarantee* libertarian relationships in a marketplace, it's that they make them *possible*.) If somebody says "It is *possible* for market exchanges to be a libertarian social relationship under the right conditions" and your reply to them is, second, to act as if they are now just unwilling or unable to bring themselves to considering alternative, non-market-mediated forms of social relationships, then that's walloping on an obvious strawman. Saying that commercial exchanges can be O.K. is not the same thing as saying that they are universally desirable in every field of life, let alone that they are rationally mandatory, or just identical with libertarianism, or what have you. And neither William nor I has said anything like the latter. If you got complaints with the voluntaryists or the less critical agorists, fine, whatever, but what do they have to do with this discussion? I'm not on that tip.

**dbzer0:** > I call all money that is earned by labour (i.e. all money you earn by selling the surplus value you create) "wage" and all money earned by the fact that you are the owner of capital, "profit". You can call it whatever you want, but since you were responding it to William, isn't it also important to figure out what *he* means when *he* says "profit"? However you may use the words, he may be including social relationships that exist outside the context of current, actually existing, state regimented, plutocratically sustained boss/wage-laborer hierarchies. (Indeed, you might be able to glean the fact that he is including these by the fact that he mentions them in the comment you were replying to.) I don't think that the issue here is *purely* definitional. There is no doubt something that you and William disagree on. But the question is what it is and why. If you're imagining that the argument here is over something like "wage-slavery and rent" as it is in this modern world, you're probably mistaken about where the ball lies. If there's an argument here, it's an argument about what to say about renting out the use of land or capital in a society where people are not *artificially forced into being dependent* on it by political violence or other forms of interpersonal domination. To act as if the use of the word "profit" instantly transports us out of that social context, and into the context of a world in which these kind of exchanges happen only in the context of politically-enforced wage-slavery and land monopoly, strikes me decidedly uncharitable to your conversation partner here. > You're in fact telling me that in a free society, there would by necessity be no bosses or landlords. Well, no, the "by necessity" is something you added, not something I said. I don't think there are a lot of "by necessities" in a free society -- that's what it means for the society to be free. What I'm saying is that the rigid social context, in which all life-sustaining work *has* to be paying work, and all paying work *has* to be work for a capitalist, and your home *has* to be either rented from a landlord or mortgaged to a banker, etc., is the result of political coercion. A free society would have little of that; it might even have none of that; but if we're talking about rent or wage-labor, there are three separate questions: (1) whether or not it would be categorically eliminated; (2) whether or not the *predominance* of those forms of exchange would be undermined and overwhelmed by more autonomous alternatives; and (3) whether or not *dependence* on that kind of exchange would be undermined and dissolved. What I was saying had to do with (2) and (3); it didn't have much to do with (1). (My interest is not to burn out rent or profits from capital concentration wherever they might possibly occur; it's to change the social and economic context in which exchanges are occurring, from a context of supplication and command, to a context of exchanges of value among equals.) > I think that trying to use the LTV as a normative proposition is unworkable. I agree with you that normative versions of the LTV are not especially workable, either as theories about the ethics of exchange, or as practical guidance about how people should conduct themselves. Insofar as I have any interest in the LTV, it's in suitably qualified Tuckerite versions of it. (Which is an explanatory theory, but a rather different kind from the Marxian kind of theory that you seem to be advocating.) > If the issue is again one of definitions, then shouldn't it be up to the one offering the criticism (in this case William) to make sure he's arguing against the concepts as I'm using them? If you're the only one that he's arguing with, sure, but you're not, so the question of whose usage he needs to track gets rather more complicated. In any case, the reason I mention it is to raise an alert, not to try to offer an answer to the question. If you're going to be arguing about "whether the LTV applies at all," you're going to need to take some account of the amount of disagreement historically over what the LTV even means, or what it's supposed to do. (What it would mean for Marx's LTV to "apply" is very different from what it would mean for Tucker's. And Tucker's own views about what the LTV meant changed and developed over time.) Simply insisting that you have the real meaning of the thing in hand, that it's not a goddamned X and it is Y instead, is probably going to be a lot less helpful than trying to figure out what your conversation partner means when *he* says that it doesn't work. Particularly when part of his point may have something to do with the general haziness of the concepts involved, and people's tendency to mix up different notions of labor value, some more useful and others much less, when they try to apply the LTV to real world problems of life.

**dbzer0:** > I call all money that is earned by labour (i.e. all money you earn by selling the surplus value you create) "wage" and all money earned by the fact that you are the owner of capital, "profit". You can call it whatever you want, but since you were responding it to William, isn't it also important to figure out what *he* means when *he* says "profit"? However you may use the words, he may be including social relationships that exist outside the context of current, actually existing, state regimented, plutocratically sustained boss/wage-laborer hierarchies. (Indeed, you might be able to glean the fact that he is including these by the fact that he mentions them in the comment you were replying to.) I don't think that the issue here is *purely* definitional. There is no doubt something that you and William disagree on. But the question is what it is and why. If you're imagining that the argument here is over something like "wage-slavery and rent" as it is in this modern world, you're probably mistaken about where the ball lies. If there's an argument here, it's an argument about what to say about renting out the use of land or capital in a society where people are not *artificially forced into being dependent* on it by political violence or other forms of interpersonal domination. To act as if the use of the word "profit" instantly transports us out of that social context, and into the context of a world in which these kind of exchanges happen only in the context of politically-enforced wage-slavery and land monopoly, strikes me decidedly uncharitable to your conversation partner here. > You're in fact telling me that in a free society, there would by necessity be no bosses or landlords. Well, no, the "by necessity" is something you added, not something I said. I don't think there are a lot of "by necessities" in a free society -- that's what it means for the society to be free. What I'm saying is that the rigid social context, in which all life-sustaining work *has* to be paying work, and all paying work *has* to be work for a capitalist, and your home *has* to be either rented from a landlord or mortgaged to a banker, etc., is the result of political coercion. A free society would have little of that; it might even have none of that; but if we're talking about rent or wage-labor, there are three separate questions: (1) whether or not it would be categorically eliminated; (2) whether or not the *predominance* of those forms of exchange would be undermined and overwhelmed by more autonomous alternatives; and (3) whether or not *dependence* on that kind of exchange would be undermined and dissolved. What I was saying had to do with (2) and (3); it didn't have much to do with (1). (My interest is not to burn out rent or profits from capital concentration wherever they might possibly occur; it's to change the social and economic context in which exchanges are occurring, from a context of supplication and command, to a context of exchanges of value among equals.) > I think that trying to use the LTV as a normative proposition is unworkable. I agree with you that normative versions of the LTV are not especially workable, either as theories about the ethics of exchange, or as practical guidance about how people should conduct themselves. Insofar as I have any interest in the LTV, it's in suitably qualified Tuckerite versions of it. (Which is an explanatory theory, but a rather different kind from the Marxian kind of theory that you seem to be advocating.) > If the issue is again one of definitions, then shouldn't it be up to the one offering the criticism (in this case William) to make sure he's arguing against the concepts as I'm using them? If you're the only one that he's arguing with, sure, but you're not, so the question of whose usage he needs to track gets rather more complicated. In any case, the reason I mention it is to raise an alert, not to try to offer an answer to the question. If you're going to be arguing about "whether the LTV applies at all," you're going to need to take some account of the amount of disagreement historically over what the LTV even means, or what it's supposed to do. (What it would mean for Marx's LTV to "apply" is very different from what it would mean for Tucker's. And Tucker's own views about what the LTV meant changed and developed over time.) Simply insisting that you have the real meaning of the thing in hand, that it's not a goddamned X and it is Y instead, is probably going to be a lot less helpful than trying to figure out what your conversation partner means when *he* says that it doesn't work. Particularly when part of his point may have something to do with the general haziness of the concepts involved, and people's tendency to mix up different notions of labor value, some more useful and others much less, when they try to apply the LTV to real world problems of life.

Organism,

I reach, man, but isn't that going to be a problem with any set of terms that you use to describe yourself? Part of the reason a lot of us stick the "left" on the front there because if I just go by "libertarian" a lot of people will think that I'm going in for some kind of Ron Paul, or (worse!) Bob Barr bullshit. When I go by "Anarchist" (what I usually go by), people think all kinds of crazy things -- the label tends to be like a kind of political Rorschach test. Usually driven by whatever political outcome they fear the most. Of course, you can argue them out of these sorts of reactions to the terms "libertarian" or "Anarchist." But presumably you could also argue them out of the same sort of reaction to "Left." (I just start talking about the divergence between state socialism and the anti-authoritarian Left -- Proudhon, Tucker, Bakunin, various strands in the anti-war, black liberation, and feminist movements, etc. etc. -- which may convince them or may not, but at least will get them to start thinking about the premises that they started off with.)

**rechelon:** > "Profit" in the abstract can be perfectly egalitarian because of marginality **dbzer0:** > How the fuck is that even possible? How is the fact that your boss keeps part of the value you create based on the fact that he happens to "own" the capital, egalitarian (not to mention giving you orders during work). You do realize, don't you, that the "in the abstract" and the "can be" in that sentence were supposed to do some logical work? "Profit" is not the same thing, conceptually, as "the money your boss makes." All profit means is just making more from producing something than it cost to produce it. Sometimes when people talk about "profit" they mean, narrowly, monetary balances; other times it may include non-monetary gains as well. In the latter, more abstract sense, *any* successful productive activity at all will have some profit (the goal being to get something worthwhile out of what you do, without sacrificing more than it's worth). In *either* sense, the question is not whether or not there is profiting, but who is getting the profits. Of course, under current conditions, your boss usually claims the residual profits from the work you do. (Or, more likely, a bunch of investors claim it, with your boss getting a cut directly, through shareholding, and indirectly, through bonuses.) But there is no reason in the abstract why that has to be the case. In a free society, there's no reason why owners of capital have to be residual claimants on profits from working on that capital, and there's no reason either why the people who work on capital can't be the owners of that capital. The reason why both of these are the case in our notably unfree society is has a lot to do with the fact that it is unfree: because workers' bargaining position are coercively undermined, and ownership of the means of production is coercively constrained, by the usual array of plutocratic government supports for corporate privilege and monopoly. When workers own the factories, there will be profits from their labor; it's just that the profits will go to the laborers and the people who use the things that they make. Which is *fine* -- there's nothing wrong with the people who make computers and the people who use computers getting a mutual net benefit from associating with each other. The problem now is not profit, but rather the fact that profit is claimed by people whose claim to it rests not on providing benefits, but rather from maintaining a position of political and cultural privilege. **dbzer0:** > The LTV is not a goddamn normative proposition. . . . I'm glad that you're so sure about what the Labor Theory of Value is and is not, but historically the people who developed the theory weren't so sure, or at least weren't agreed amongst themselves. I can think of at least three major schools of thought about what the LTV is supposed to do and what role it's supposed to play in theory, and in one of those schools of thought (advocated by Josiah Warren, for example, as well as various "utopian socialists") it clearly was intended to be a normative proposition, about how people ought to act if they are dealing honestly and forthrightly with each other. (Today, you see similar notions among, e.g., the proponents of Ithaca Hours, or other forms of exchange or production that are based on calculating labor time.) For others (like Tucker the late 19th century, or Kevin Carson today), the labor theory is supposed to be an explanatory theory about how exchange *would* work for most goods, in *a free and equal society*. (Hence, its main role in discussing society now was as a heuristic for discovering the points at which society is not free and equal -- where politically-backed monopoly is deforming production and exchange; e.g., Tucker argued that access to capital, land ownership, and the dissemination and application of ideas don't operate on the cost principle in actually-existing capitalism, and that is how you could tell that they were being constrained by the political violence of the Money Monopoly, the Land Monopoly, and the Patent Monopoly.) The version of the LTV that you seem to be pushing here is more or less the Marxist version, in which the labor theory is taken to be part of an explanatory theory about how surplus value arises under actually-existing capitalism, in which it is claimed (in contrast with the Tuckerite view) that goods *do* generally trade at the value of their total embodied labor, but that workers are paid far below that value, with wages being driven down far below that value to subsistence levels. Of course, you're welcome to assign any meaning that you want to the terms that you use, but if you're going to reply to William you should probably try to find out what meaning *he* is assigning to those terms before you fire away at him.

**rechelon:** > "Profit" in the abstract can be perfectly egalitarian because of marginality **dbzer0:** > How the fuck is that even possible? How is the fact that your boss keeps part of the value you create based on the fact that he happens to "own" the capital, egalitarian (not to mention giving you orders during work). You do realize, don't you, that the "in the abstract" and the "can be" in that sentence were supposed to do some logical work? "Profit" is not the same thing, conceptually, as "the money your boss makes." All profit means is just making more from producing something than it cost to produce it. Sometimes when people talk about "profit" they mean, narrowly, monetary balances; other times it may include non-monetary gains as well. In the latter, more abstract sense, *any* successful productive activity at all will have some profit (the goal being to get something worthwhile out of what you do, without sacrificing more than it's worth). In *either* sense, the question is not whether or not there is profiting, but who is getting the profits. Of course, under current conditions, your boss usually claims the residual profits from the work you do. (Or, more likely, a bunch of investors claim it, with your boss getting a cut directly, through shareholding, and indirectly, through bonuses.) But there is no reason in the abstract why that has to be the case. In a free society, there's no reason why owners of capital have to be residual claimants on profits from working on that capital, and there's no reason either why the people who work on capital can't be the owners of that capital. The reason why both of these are the case in our notably unfree society is has a lot to do with the fact that it is unfree: because workers' bargaining position are coercively undermined, and ownership of the means of production is coercively constrained, by the usual array of plutocratic government supports for corporate privilege and monopoly. When workers own the factories, there will be profits from their labor; it's just that the profits will go to the laborers and the people who use the things that they make. Which is *fine* -- there's nothing wrong with the people who make computers and the people who use computers getting a mutual net benefit from associating with each other. The problem now is not profit, but rather the fact that profit is claimed by people whose claim to it rests not on providing benefits, but rather from maintaining a position of political and cultural privilege. **dbzer0:** > The LTV is not a goddamn normative proposition. . . . I'm glad that you're so sure about what the Labor Theory of Value is and is not, but historically the people who developed the theory weren't so sure, or at least weren't agreed amongst themselves. I can think of at least three major schools of thought about what the LTV is supposed to do and what role it's supposed to play in theory, and in one of those schools of thought (advocated by Josiah Warren, for example, as well as various "utopian socialists") it clearly was intended to be a normative proposition, about how people ought to act if they are dealing honestly and forthrightly with each other. (Today, you see similar notions among, e.g., the proponents of Ithaca Hours, or other forms of exchange or production that are based on calculating labor time.) For others (like Tucker the late 19th century, or Kevin Carson today), the labor theory is supposed to be an explanatory theory about how exchange *would* work for most goods, in *a free and equal society*. (Hence, its main role in discussing society now was as a heuristic for discovering the points at which society is not free and equal -- where politically-backed monopoly is deforming production and exchange; e.g., Tucker argued that access to capital, land ownership, and the dissemination and application of ideas don't operate on the cost principle in actually-existing capitalism, and that is how you could tell that they were being constrained by the political violence of the Money Monopoly, the Land Monopoly, and the Patent Monopoly.) The version of the LTV that you seem to be pushing here is more or less the Marxist version, in which the labor theory is taken to be part of an explanatory theory about how surplus value arises under actually-existing capitalism, in which it is claimed (in contrast with the Tuckerite view) that goods *do* generally trade at the value of their total embodied labor, but that workers are paid far below that value, with wages being driven down far below that value to subsistence levels. Of course, you're welcome to assign any meaning that you want to the terms that you use, but if you're going to reply to William you should probably try to find out what meaning *he* is assigning to those terms before you fire away at him.

... Donald, You may not be familiar with the work that folks have been doing on this, but you're mistaken if you think that left-libertarians never point to

... Huh? Your post about orthodox Marxist economics was putatively a reply to *what Kevin had just said about Marx* (the original *point* of the post was

AntiGermanTranslation: However, C4SS, where the essay was published, is an explicitly market anarchist or anarcho-capitalist site

C4SS is definitely a market anarchist site but it’s not an anarcho-capitalist site. I think most of the writers there would consider themselves free-market anti-capitalists. Some (e.g. Kevin Carson) are mutualists; others (e.g. Brad Spangler) are agorists. Mutualists and agorists have their disagreements, but they tend to agree with each other on class and other economic issues than either of them agrees with anarcho-capitalists.

AntiGermanTranslation: right-wing in the very basic sense of being interested in liberty and the pursuit of profit, but not so interested in social justice or overcoming non-state forms of exploitation

Many people who call themselves anarcho-capitalists are right wing in that way. But a lot of pro-market, pro-property individualists (like Darian or Kevin or me or Sheldon Richman Roderick Long) have specifically written about the need for individualists to see individual liberty as one part of many interconnected struggles, and to develop ways to combat non-state forms of exploitation throughgrassroots, antiauthoritarian, non-state means.

AntiGermanTranslation: I think the paleo-libertarian milieu which overlaps a little with the anarcho-capitalist one does skate close to some dodgy territory.

I definitely agree with you about that. The paleo-libertarian approach is really toxic, and I think “anarcho”-capitalists who inhabit it are generally worth less than nothing to Anarchism, unless and until they start to break out of it. (Which, to be fair, a few have.)