Thanks to a Straussian reading of this photograph, I have discovered that Steve Horwitz’s remarks, which were read from the center of the table, were the most important remarks in the panel.

John: The constitution served a purpose, the it served it as best it could, and still failed miserably.

Well, if you imagine that the purpose it served was to limit the power of government, it clearly failed at that. But that seems more like the purpose that latter-day libertarians wish the Constitution was designed to serve, rather than the purposes it was actually designed to serve. It was, after all, adopted as an alternative to a preexisting constitution (the Articles of Confederation), and the main differences that were supposed to recommend the new U.S. Constitution were: (1) that it provided for a stronger central government, which would be able to (2) extract taxes and pay interest on war bonds, (3) pass fugitive slave laws and crush slave uprisings in the South, and (4) organize and facilitate government land-grants to politically-connected speculators in the Western territories. Did a pretty solid job at all of those things, far as I can see. Certainly, with the exception of the course-reversal on slavery (after decades of successfully upholding the slave system in spite of growing opposition), their posterity still enjoys all the blessings of a strong central government, a permanent tax apparatus, and effective government control over the allocation of land.

It’s not just a matter of what the Constitution ended up allowing; it’s what it was designed to do from the get-go.

Hey man, don’t get so tense. Live in the literary present.

AnarchoJesse: why on earth would you include material that is contentious in a 101 course

Because contention can be educationally useful.

Come on, man, back when I was taking Intro to Philosophy courses (to take one example), we spent the whole course reading a lot of very contentious articles that all contradicted each other, and then arguing about the points they raised in class.

You’re talking about this as if you thought that Gary’s approach to the text were to have students just read and recite the received wisdom, like some Maoist “study group” working through Quotations from Chairman Mao. I don’t know why you would think that, but I know Gary, and this has nothing to do with how he relates to any text. Especially not the Tannehills’ book.

AnarchoJesse: Are you suggesting that because I have not participated in the course I have no basis to be critical of it?

I’m suggesting that if you haven’t so much as listened to one of the lectures (which would be easy to remedy — they are available for free on YouTube), if you don’t know Gary, and if you’re just riffing on what you think has to be true about the course based solely on the selection of a particular text as reading material, then you probably don’t have enough information to make an intelligent judgment about what the course is like.

Of course, if you’re satisfied with making unintelligent judgments, you can criticize whatever you want, even in complete ignorance of what the object of your criticism is like.

AnarchoJesse: Because that is all they are getting– all of these discussions could have been had for free on Stickam, Skype, and any number of the plethora mediums available on the internet. Knowledge and the exchange thereof ought to be free– so as far as I can tell, these guys were robbed by profiteering intellectuals.

That sounds like a complaint against the notion of any course at all being taught for pay, not a complaint about this course in particular. If so, I’m not sure what the claim that the people who willingly paid for the course were “robbed” actually has to do with the Tannehills’ book. If Gary were taking fees in order to teach a course based around “The Coming Insurrection,” would that make him less of a “profiteering intellectual”?

Of course, I am all for free discussions and inquiring together in settings outside of classrooms or online courses. So do the folks at C4SS. In fact, if you want to do all this for free, you can do so — the book’s online; the lectures are all freely available on YouTube; etc. But the reason that some people have chosen to pay the fee of $25 (which is not a hell of a lot to pay for a class in anything), instead of just checking out all the free stuff, is because paying in for the class means that you’ll be participating in discussions with a particular group of people (who may not be able to assemble at other times just for the fun of it), and also it means that you’ll be getting quite a bit of labor and some detailed, hopefully useful feedback on a number of written essays. I don’t know if you’ve spent much time providing written feedback on student essays before, but I have, and it’s a lot of work. The better you hope to make the feedback, the more work it is. It’s work which, as a matter of fact, very few people on the Internet or anywhere else would commit to doing reliably and repeatedly and frequently for things you are writing every single week — unless you do offer them something in exchange to help them make the time and take the trouble that they are making and taking for your benefit.

That’s work which I think it’s perfectly reasonable to expect to be paid for, when you’ve got bills to pay and other shit to do. Maybe that makes me a “profiteering intellectual,” what with being unwilling to provide very labor-intensive help to just anybody who happens to ask for it, without any consideration of my own time or trouble. But if so, I’m not sure what’s supposed to be wrong with the “profiteering.” I don’t dig ditches for free, either.

Tremblay: Glad to know I’m a Stalinist for no particular reason except criticizing the choice of a book.

Of course, the reason I gave for describing your attitude as “intellectual Stalinism” has nothing to do with the mere fact of “criticizing the choice of a book.” I’d elaborate, but I already said why I did describe it as that: what I really object to is the intellectual Stalinism on display from Tremblay when he condemns a course based solely on their use of a disapproved textbook — which, in turn, is based on the (bizarre, but revealing) tacit premise that someone teaching a course would obviously only pick a textbook that she agrees with. In a non-totalitarian intellectual climate, teachers aren’t expected to offer up a defense of the texts they choose or prove their ideological correctness to avoid being called “a traitor” to The Movement.

AnarchoJesse: philosophically questionable concepts such as self-ownership are embedded in the text.

Well, heavens, if it contains philosophically controversial concepts, then obviously there’s no point in reading it.

AnarchoJesse: They don’t explain the underpinnings of anarchism, they barely touch on the history of the movement, and it is specfically a book against anti-Statism– not Anarchism.

If the purpose of selecting a reading for a course were to ensure that you have a book that details every single thing you might possibly want to cover in that course, without any need of lectures or discussions from the teacher or independent research from the participants, then I agree that all this might be a problem.

But it’s not.

AnarchoJesse: Perhaps what has me so opposed to this course is that it claims to be an introduction, but the material used in the course is pretty incomplete and hardly touches on the concept of anarchism itself.

The fact that a text doesn’t cover topic X doesn’t mean that a course using the text won’t cover topic X. All texts are “incomplete;” fortunately, classes also have teachers.

Of course, even with the teacher, the course will also be incomplete. All courses are incomplete, and introductory courses especially. That’s OK: the purpose of an introductory course is to introduce you to a topic, not to exhaust it. Or even necessarily to outline it. A “survey” course, which does attempt to touch on most everything very briefly, is one way of introducing a subject. But it’s not the only way. (I doubt it’s even a particularly good way, most of the time.)

AnarchoJesse: Roman and all of you folks who are in this course: you were robbed.

Jesus, man, you’re talking to adults, not to children. And generally to adults who already know quite a bit about Anarchism, actually, but are interested in the course because they’re interested in Gary’s take on things. They’re capable of deciding for themselves whether or not the course is worth taking. On which subject, have you actually listened to any of the lectures in the course? Or are you just guessing on what’s covered, based on a glance at the reading list?

Well, I agree that if you endorse an explicitly totalitarian theory of government authority, then that theory would usually allow for government immigration restrictions, as a special application of its totalitarianism.

... Oh, I agree with you about all that. I'm not agreeing with Bookchin on this; just trying to get clear on where the argument is. Speaking for myself, I do

... Well, not that he isn't conflating like crazy, but a fair number of the post-Left types who Bookchin is fighting with in the later work do have a direct

Kinsella: If Gendron or you mean something else by “capitalist” as an adjective you’ll have to spell it out.

As you already know, Stephan, I’ve already spelled out several different things that “capitalism” can mean, depending on context, on several different occasions. I don’t know precisely what David Gendron means by it. But I do know that he doesn’t mean “an advanced free market of a libertarian, property-rights respecting society” by it. How do I know? Because David Gendron already said that that’s not what he’s complaining about when he complains about “capitalism.” Presumably you know this too, because you already made a one-line reply in that thread, just below where he says that that’s not what he has a problem with.

Of course, knowing what he does not mean only goes so far. But if I needed to know just what he meant to answer his question, then I think I might consider asking him what he means, instead of ignoring context entirely and offering a non-responsive “answer” based on a question you know he wasn’t asking.

Kinsella: Otherwise, all this meta-talk and confusion is in my view exactly what you get when you start focusing on semantics …

Don’t be disingenuous. You keep trying to tell me that I’m “focusing on semantics” here, Stephan, but, again, you’re the one who began your answer with ‘if by “capitalist” you mean ….’ My complaint in this thread has nothing to do with an argument about the right meaning of the word “capitalism.” It has to do with your treatment of your interlocutor.

Kinsella: and trying to change accepted terminology

The discussion has nothing to do with trying to “change accepted terminology.” It has to do with responding to the question that was asked, not a different question that you find easier to discuss. That sort of thing may be a nice lawyer’s trick, but it doesn’t help much if the aim to actually get closer to truth, or even mutual comprehension.

martin: So the point was that he *doesn’t* mean “Carsonian property rights” [by "capitalist property rights"]?

Obviously not, because he already said he has no problem with Carsonian property rights, whereas he does apparently have a problem with capitalist property rights.

The point is that he already explicitly stated that he doesn’t have a problem with “an economic system that features Carsonian property rights and voluntary exchanges of goods and services,” whereas he does have a problem with Chartier’s capitalism-2 and capitalism-3. So when Gendron makes it clear that he has a problem with “capitalist property rights and profits,” it’s pretty clear that he is probably referring to institutions connected with capitalism-2 or capitalism-3, not with capitalism-1. Yet when he asks Kinsella a question about it, Kinsella proceeds to try and answer a question about capitalism-1, “an advanced free market of a libertarian, property-rights respecting society.” That makes it pretty clear that Kinsella is choosing to interpret “capitalism” to mean what he customarily uses it to mean, rather than what Gendron might be using it to mean.

What does Gendron mean by it? Capitalism-2? Capitalism-3? Something else in the neighborhood? I dunno. If it mattered to me to find out what he meant by his question, then the thing to do would be for me to ask him what he means. Rather than shoving ahead with a completely non-responsive “answer” based on something that he’s already told you he doesn’t mean by the term.

Unfortunately, this cheap rhetorical trick (as well as related cheap tricks, such as constantly changing the subject to his preferred hobby horses, or pissing and moaning about people “changing the accepted meanings of terms,” and then pissing and moaning, if they should take the bait and try to respond to this claim, about how they are “focusing on semantics” (!) rather than substance) is all too indicative of how Stephan chooses to approach this particular issue. I don’t know what he thinks it accomplishes, but I guess he gets to throw around the word “obfuscate” a lot.

Martin: That surprises me, because I thought that in Kevin’s view on property rights you can not – for instance – own a factory while others work in it.

That’s absolutely not Kevin’s view. (Or Tucker’s, from whom Kevin draws a lot of his analysis and critique.)

His view is that workplace hierarchy will be much less common absent the state, because it’s currently supported by state invasions against the property rights of poor people, and state subsidies to the employing class. This is of course a very different claim from the claim that you simply have no right to hire on labor at a factory.

Martin: assuming David is a mutualist

I can’t speak for Gendron, but I don’t think it’s safe to assume that he’s a mutualist. Lots of non-mutualist Anarchists have no basic problem with mutualist economic arrangements (that is, they don’t consider them anti-Anarchistic), but do personally prefer some other kind of arrangement (communistic, collectivistic, social ecology, whatever) over mutualism.

martin: do you support the property rights of a capitalist with respect to the capital and the profits that come from it?

That’s an interesting interpretation of the question. I don’t know whether it’s the right interpretation of the question. I do know that it wasn’t Kinsella’s interpretation of the question — since Kinsella already said that he was taking “capitalist” to refer to “an advanced free market of a libertarian, property-rights respecting society.” Not to the particular occupation of somebody in the business of renting out capital.

"that being said, the idea was acted upon on 4 july 1776. and the founders fought a little something called the revolutionary war so that we could have these things"

Don't be absurd. The Revolutionary War was fought to get the several states out from under the British Crown. It was not fought to create the U.S. Constitution. That was not conceived of until years later, after both the provisional governments of the war and another, different arrangement (state sovereignty with a loose confederacy under the Articles of Confederation). Many of the people involved in the Revolutionary War (e.g. Patrick Henry, Samuel Adams, George Mason) were actively opposed to the U.S. Constitution when it was proposed, and would have been disgusted to be told that that was what they were fighting for during the war years.

"when and if you do, you will see that those two documents cover only AMERICAN citizens"

You're asserting, but what's the argument? How do you figure the Declaration could cover "AMERICAN citizens" in 1776 when there were no American citizens? If you read actual legal writing from the time, what it says is that people were citizens of their states (Massachusetts, New York, Virginia, etc.), not citizens of "America" (which, again, didn't yet exist except as a purely geographical entity). Anyway, the Declaration doesn't talk about "all citizens," whether of the several states or of the United States or of anywhere else. It talks about "all men."

"these things are ours by birthright, because good men and women have gone to their deaths"

If that's what you want to believe man, then go for it, but that's not what the Declaration of Independence says about rights. The Declaration says that all men are "endowed" with rights by God. Not that their rights are won for them by soldiers.

Of course, if you want to believe something different, you should feel free to. The Declaration of Independence is a legal argument, not holy scripture. Maybe it is wrong. But you should stop trying to pretend like your view is the same as the view of the Declaration of Independence. If you want a document that says "all citizens are created equal," then you'll have to write it for yourself.