Oh, OK. So Proudhon was a capitalist. Well, OK. Glad we cleared that one up.

> what is that supposed to mean, exactly? That actually existing capitalists (think: CitiBank, Bank of America, General Motors, General Dynamics, the Fortune 500 in general, Standard Oil, J.P. Morgan, the British East India Company, etc. etc. etc.) have largely depended on legalized violence (think: bail-outs, subsidies, government-granted monopolies, government land grants and natural resource monopolies, enclosure land-grabs, government suppression of bottom-up competition, government suppression of non-capitalistic alternatives, etc.; in some cases even the wholesale contracting out of government war and police powers) in order to establish and maintain their positions of incredible economic privilege. In an age of trillion-dollar bank bailouts and a trillion-dollar security-industrial complex, this ought not really to be very controversial. As for Communism, big government is certainly the opposite of Anarchism, but the point of Communist Anarchism is to develop stateless modes of community living based on community ownership of production and natural resources, rather than individual ownership, and based on free distribution rather than a monetary economy or quid-pro-quo exchange. The idea is, usually, that communities established along these lines will be so obviously preferable to market-based alternatives that anyone, given the option, would choose them freely; it is certainly not that a state or a committee will force people to join. I don't agree with them that it would be obviously preferable (that's why I'm not a Communist Anarchist). But it seems positively silly to me to describe it as "the opposite of anarchism." People can disagree over what the best sort of free community would be, and as long as they don't start shooting each other over it, it's likely that an Anarchist society would involve all kinds of different social and economic experiments growing up in different places, or within different social networks.

Oh, OK. So Proudhon was a capitalist. Well, OK. Glad we cleared that one up.

> This one word, "libertarian" (you might have heard of it), used to have a particular socialist meaning but it was quite successfully colonized by folks on the Right ... Yes, I'm familiar with that. I think it's a damn shame, because, like Tucker, I prefer the word in its original meaning and with its original associations, rather than its current Right-wing, pro-capitalist, pro-state (just as long as its a "small" state) meaning and associations. But far too many of us have treated that shift as if it were some kind of offense against our intellectual property (those capitalists! how dare they infringe our trademark on Libertarianism!), and responded by throwing out a bunch of lazy appeals to a supposedly monolithic "traditional anarchism" (as if the point of Anarchism were to reverently repeat a bunch of hidebound orthodoxies), which has largely had the function of brutalizing discourse and closing off conversations in our groups. Rather than trying to insist on some massively oversimplified accounts of what Real Libertarianism was, we generally would have been better off trying to understand the clashes and the debates and the cross-currents *within* the tradition that we try to invoke. Which may shed some light on the past, and also open up the possibility of new conversations and new ideas in the future. All of which is somewhat relevant to discussion about individualism and mutualism. The Right-wing abduction of "libertarianism" is of course not exactly the same deal as insisting that "libertarianism" or "anti-capitalism" be understood in such a way as not to retroactively erase Proudhon or Tucker from the tradition; if you think that the term "libertarian" originally meant being absolutely opposed to, say, decentralized individual ownership of land or means of production, then I know a few libertarians (Warren, Proudhon, Greene, Spooner, Tucker, de Cleyre, Swartz...) who would have disagreed with you about that. And if you want to read them out of the tradition, or simply to claim that they have nothing to contribute, you can do that, but, again, I don't see that you have much claim on the definitional high ground here, and it seems high handed to declare that they obviously must not, simply because they are in favor of ideas (like decentralized individual ownership, &c.) that the Libertarian Church has, supposedly, condemned as "capitalistic" beyond any hope of appeal.

> This one word, "libertarian" (you might have heard of it), used to have a particular socialist meaning but it was quite successfully colonized by folks on the Right ... Yes, I'm familiar with that. I think it's a damn shame, because, like Tucker, I prefer the word in its original meaning and with its original associations, rather than its current Right-wing, pro-capitalist, pro-state (just as long as its a "small" state) meaning and associations. But far too many of us have treated that shift as if it were some kind of offense against our intellectual property (those capitalists! how dare they infringe our trademark on Libertarianism!), and responded by throwing out a bunch of lazy appeals to a supposedly monolithic "traditional anarchism" (as if the point of Anarchism were to reverently repeat a bunch of hidebound orthodoxies), which has largely had the function of brutalizing discourse and closing off conversations in our groups. Rather than trying to insist on some massively oversimplified accounts of what Real Libertarianism was, we generally would have been better off trying to understand the clashes and the debates and the cross-currents *within* the tradition that we try to invoke. Which may shed some light on the past, and also open up the possibility of new conversations and new ideas in the future. All of which is somewhat relevant to discussion about individualism and mutualism. The Right-wing abduction of "libertarianism" is of course not exactly the same deal as insisting that "libertarianism" or "anti-capitalism" be understood in such a way as not to retroactively erase Proudhon or Tucker from the tradition; if you think that the term "libertarian" originally meant being absolutely opposed to, say, decentralized individual ownership of land or means of production, then I know a few libertarians (Warren, Proudhon, Greene, Spooner, Tucker, de Cleyre, Swartz...) who would have disagreed with you about that. And if you want to read them out of the tradition, or simply to claim that they have nothing to contribute, you can do that, but, again, I don't see that you have much claim on the definitional high ground here, and it seems high handed to declare that they obviously must not, simply because they are in favor of ideas (like decentralized individual ownership, &c.) that the Libertarian Church has, supposedly, condemned as "capitalistic" beyond any hope of appeal.

You know, I'm really more interested in discussing whether or not something is desirable on its merits than I am in arguing endlessly about whether the word for it should be spelled c-a-p-i-t-a-l-i-s-m or a-n-t-i-c-a-p-i-t-a-l-i-s-m. But as you may be aware, the dictionaries are actually rather conflicted on this point. The OED for example tells us either that any capital goods whatever make for capitalism, or else that a system favoring the existence of absentee ownership does: "The condition of possessing capital; the position of a capitalist; a system which favours the existence of capitalists;" Encyclopedia Britannica, meanwhile, tells us that capitalism is the actually existing privilege-riddled clusterfrak of an economic system that we have -- adding to this the farcical claim that said system is a free market: "Capitalism, also called free market economy, or free enterprise economy: economic system, dominant in the Western world since the breakup of feudalism, in which most of the means of production are privately owned and production is guided and income distributed largely through the operation of markets." On definitional issues related to "private ownership" (of the means of production, etc.) cf. Roderick Long's article [Pootmop!](http://aaeblog.com/2008/06/27/pootmop/); in any case, I think the best we can conclude is simply that authoritative usage is confused, and perhaps we should pay closer attention to how people use the word in context than to trying to throw dictionary definitions at each other. > By anarchists, it's typically defined by the wage labor/capital relationship existing. I'm not sure if you meant to refer to "the systematic structure of the actually existing wage labor/capital relationship" here, i.e., the kind of wage-labor and capital relationships we've actually got; or to "some hypothetical wage labor/capital relationship existing anywhere in the world." If the former, then we are against that, not for it, for the reasons already discussed. If the latter, then that is not how Anarchists typically define "capitalism." Here for example is Proudhon, in La Guerre et la Paix: "Economic and social regime in which capital, the source of income, does not generally belong to those who make it work through their labour." Note that his interest is in the general features of an economic and social regime, not to the isolated existence of a practice without regard to the economic and social regime within which it is or is not embedded.

You're certainly right that the views advanced in the book are influenced by the American individualists (as you can see, essays by Tucker and de Cleyre are prominent in the table of contents, along with Proudhon himself). In what sense that makes it less than a "direct descendent" of Proudhon's Anarchism may be hard to spell out, though, without getting into a long argument about who had the best understanding of Proudhon, and also an argument over what parts of Proudhon were most worth understanding and preserving. But as I think I've shown above, whoever may or may not be in the family tree, and whether we are in the end right or wrong about such things, the specific comments about endorsement of individual ownership in land and capital goods only make for "straight up capitalism" in us if the same principles make for "straight up capitalism" in Proudhon. I don't think they do. > allow for wage labor to continue to exist or the private ownership of factories, land, etc. . . . That is, "capitalist employers ought to be rare..." ...is certainly a lower bar than "The abolition of the wages system." Well, it depends on whether you see "the wages system" as present in absolutely any isolated instance of work-for-hire anywhere, or whether you see it as, well, a social and economic system, which exists where it is to some extent pervasive or dominating in the lives of some noticeable class of people. (I am of the latter view. My interest is not in policing everyone's labor conditions, but rather in the social and economic backdrop that will make it easy for everyone to manage their own as they see fit, without being forced into shitty or precarious situations by political force or economic need.) And the bit about "allowing" also depends on whether "allow" is supposed to mean that there is no *de jure* limit or that there is no *de facto* limit. That bit about the *de facto* limits in the introduction is seriously intended: I think that grassroots counter-power and economic incentives -- a fighting union, a rich backdrop of alternatives and mutual aid networks, a culture of resistance and a norm of self-assertion, the unsubsidized costs of absentee management, etc. -- are a hell of a lot more effective as a means of getting rid of bosses and landlords than some attempt to formally rule out the possibility of individual property ownership in large categories of goods. If you have *both* the formal prohibition and the grassroots counter-power, then perhaps that will turn out alright. But if you have the grassroots counter-power and economic incentives, you don't really much need the formal prohibition to get bosses and landlords out of your life. And if you have the formal prohibition *without* the grassroots counter-power and economic incentives -- a formal universalization of worker ownership, but not accompanied by any culture of resistance, no rich set of alternatives to hop over to or mutual aid networks to fall back on, etc. etc. -- then what you're most likely to end up with are a lot of entrenched committees and councils, which profess to be acting for workers, but are actually just committees of bosses and committees of landlords under different names. So it seems to me that what's doing the real liberatory work here is the grassroots counter-power, not the formal prohibition.

That depends on what you mean by "use" and by "personal possession." As I see it, there are a couple of separate issues here. One is the issue of ownership and abandonment. The other is the issue of employment and rent. On the first issue, I certainly believe it's possible for land and means of production to be abandoned by their owners, and that when they are abandoned, people who can make use of them have a right to reclaim them. In fact I believe that a great deal of the nominal property titles held by existing capitalists are of this sort -- either because they have been abandoned by disuse or else because they were gotten through force to begin with, and hence are morally null and void, whatever their legal status. (This view is defended with regard to land in my essay "Scratching By," and also raised in Hess's "Where Are The Specifics?") In a free society, on my view, vacant lots could be reclaimed, abandoned buildings could be squatted and improved by new tenants, shuttered factories could be reoccupied by workers, etc. But my view on abandonment is not that you've "abandoned" something as soon as it passes out of your personal grasp. I think it ought to be perfectly possible (*de jure*) for people to own factories that they don't personally work at or land they don't personally live on, just as you ought to be able to keep on owning your spade even when if you leave it for months in the toolshed. Or even if you left it for months in somebody else's toolshed, provided you had their permission to leave it there. That said, thinking that something ought to be possible (*de jure*) is not the same thing as saying that it would be likely (*de facto*) or desirable for it to be a common arrangement. So I think that for the most part industrial production ought to be owned, substantively controlled, and (where there are profits) profited from by workers on the shopfloor, not by employers, financiers or other remote parties. That is to say that absentee landlords and capitalist employers ought to be rare to nonexistent, that tenant and worker ownership ought to be the norm. But the issue here is not actual abandonment of use, but rather the mediation of use by remote third parties. And my response here is not to say that those third parties should be treated as being excluded, ahead of time, from having any possible valid ownership claims in any rigidly-defined kind or any rigidly-defined use of property. Rather it's to argue that we as workers can and should organize to make any attempt to economically exploit that ownership position no longer profitable -- in part by knocking out the political privileges that artificially sustain that business model and forcibly suppress alternatives (there are a lot of them), and in part through grassroots community organizing in militant wildcat unions, strikes, boycotts, co-ops, worker-owned shops, mutual aid networks, etc. etc. etc. (Similarly, when Proudhon argued for mutual credit, the point was not to claim that capitalists had no right to lend money; rather, the point was that non-capitalists were capable of providing alternative channels that would make usury economically unsustainable. Usury would disappear not because it had been suppressed but because it would no longer be competitive if the political protections to the established banks were removed.)

I co-wrote the introduction with my co-editor, Gary Chartier. I don't know what justifies the "for Christ's sake," since you singled out land as one of the two things you were complaining about. (*) If you only meant to discuss our view on capital goods, you should have only mentioned our view on capital goods. But of course Proudhon, like many other mutualists, also has no essential problem with the individual ownership of capital goods (see for instance the passage on artisans' shops in General Idea). In fact he explicitly argues that there is no rigid or principled distinction to be made between capital goods and personal possessions -- that the one always becomes the other and the distinction is simply a matter of the different contexts in which a single class of goods can be viewed. What he does think is that joint worker ownership is preferable to absentee boss ownership in the case of very large enterprises (he mentions railroads as an example, but explicitly contrasts them with retail shops and artisans' workshops). But I see no reason to disagree with him about that. Certainly, nothing in believing in the de jure legitimacy of decentralized individual ownership of means of production requires me to believe that. As is repeatedly stressed throughout the book, both public commons and worker ownership are an essential part of the sort of "freed markets" that we are talking about. Proudhon also objects to structures of economic privilege that allow capital-owners to accumulate at the expense of workers and to extract what he calls "usury" (interest, rent, surplus value in production, etc.) from their accumulated ownership. But again, that's not something that we disagree with. That objection is of course the core of Tucker's "Four Monopolies" analysis of capitalism, and it's certainly a view that is repeatedly defended in the book. So, again, I repeat: if the description on "ownership" makes us "capitalists," then Proudhon is a "capitalist." Maybe he was, but you shouldn't look so shocked when anarchist presses publish that kind of thing. (* Not counting "and so on," which is a bit hard to say much about. Of course I had a list of my own, but in my list of items, ownership of "homes" and "natural resources" generally goes along with land -- certainly they do in Proudhon -- and "tools" either go along with "capital goods" or "personal possessions," depending on how big they are and how generous the writer is feeling towards small craft businesses.)

If by "straight up capitalism" you just mean that we believe in individual ownership of property, then OK, we believe in that, as did Proudhon, Spooner, Tucker, de Cleyre, et al. The book explains why. But if by "capitalism" you mean, e.g., absentee control by capitalists (rather than workers) of land and the means of production, or the wage-labor system, or monopolistic corporate commerce, or.... then no, we don't believe in that. Maybe you think that the former always causes the latter. If so, then you can think that, but we think have got an argument for why it does not, which is outlined in the introduction there (cf. "the centrifugal tendency of markets," "the radical possibilities of market social activism," "dispossession and rectification," etc.) and elaborated at length throughout the essays in the book. Maybe you think that the arguments we have are bad arguments. If so, then you might say something about why you think that; but it seems unfair to pretend as if we don't have them, or to talk as if we are simply doing propaganda for status-quo capitalism under a different set of nametags.