Again. If advocating individual ownership of land and homes makes us capitalists, then Proudhon was also a "capitalist." If you're using the word "capitalism" so that it includes Proudhon, well, OK, you can do that, and then I'll be a "capitalist" like Proudhon is a "capitalist." But you should let us know that you are doing that, and you shouldn't be claiming the Anarchist high-ground in doing so. Incidentally, there is a defense of the legitimacy and productiveness of common ownership of land and means of production in the book (Ch. 15, "A Plea for Public Property" by Roderick Long). The difference is that we believe that that's healthy as an option among a rich set of social and economic options. We do not believe in making it the only way that people can interact with each other or make use of the world around them.

Thanks for the note! I'm glad to see this work coming to print, but I'd be remiss if I didn't mention my co-editor, Gary Chartier, who is certainly the real reason that this book exists, was successfully completed, and found such a wonderful publisher. Also, I should mention that those who want to get a taste of the book can also read as much as they can stand (to read PDFs on a computer screen) from Minor Compositions' website at http://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=230

> I didn't read the book. . . . The title of the book just seems crazy to me. Well. Anyway, as you may know Anarchists have often historically used titles and slogans that were designed to seem paradoxical at first glance. ("Anarchy: A Journal of Order," "Anarchy is Order / Government is Civil War," etc.) It is not because the slogan is really confusing, but because people's ideas about anarchy, government, order, war, markets, capitalism etc. etc. etc. have been systematically confused by ideological mystifications (such that people typically think that, for example, the constant, pervasive violence of the state counts as "order," not as civil war, because that violence is hidden under the cover of law). The purpose of the paradoxical slogan is to broach the subject of those mystifications, and to introduce the work of clearing them away. Whether that work is successful or not is of course a separate question, but it's one that you can only answer by reading the book, not by reading the title. > I agree, markets are not capitalism. But, isn't capitalism the ideology of markets? I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean. Certainly capitalists claim to be all for markets. And Barack Obama claims to be all for peace and democracy in the Middle East. But their endorsement is in practice more selective than they might care to let on; people in positions of incredible privilege often lie about what they want, and promote their ends selectively, only insofar as it benefits their privilege rather than endangering it. But part of the point of the book is that capitalists' economic privileges really have nothing to do with market forms, or with skill or efficiency in market exchange, and everything to do with the immediate effects and downstream ripple effects of political privilege. Freed exchange and competition would in fact be profoundly threatening to the interests of bail-out grifting, IP-holding, sweetheart deal-cutting corporations, and that is why capitalists so constantly work to reinforce the idea that "free markets" means stupid things like selective deregulation (relaxing government controls on formal businesses while keeping or escalating much more rigid controls on the poor), neoliberal "privatization" (really just the contracting out of political privilege), actually expanding government-protected monopolies through copyright and patent law, or permitting polluters to pollute more freely no matter how many people's health or homes they may ruin: in order to convince the rest of us to go along with the ridiculous lie that social and economic freedom would be more or less like what we've got, except with business being even bigger, and having a bit easier time of getting what they want. The point of the book is to try to introduce an alternative model, and to explore a kind of freedom that would be threatening to the entrenched interests of capitalists. > Private security forces in this world, at this time, sounds like Wackenhut and Blackwater. Government "security" contractors are horrible creatures, to be sure. That specific issue is discussed (albeit briefly -- the book isn't mainly about theories of defense or protection) in Ch. 4, "Markets Freed from Capitalism" (in the section on the "Security Monopoly") and Ch. 30, "Two Words on 'Privatization.'" Roughly, the message of the book is: frag those guys. > But how do we get to there, from here? The book doesn't have much on strategy in it, but speaking for myself, what I advocate is essentially building social counter-power, withdrawing from state-capitalistic economic relations wherever possible, getting together networks for personal and community mutual aid and self-defense at a grassroots level, and organizing militant antipolitical unions toward the General Strike against state and capital. Admittedly this makes me an odd duck even among left-wing market anarchists. But not as odd as you might think. The lefty agorists I know generally think of it as just one more form of counter-economics, and to the extent that they are doing similar things I'm happy to work with them on that score.

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.)

The link immediately above the read-it-online window goes to Scribd, which offers a download option, provided that you sign in. If you don’t want to go through the rigamarole with Scribd, then never mind the bollocks; here’s the PDF.

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.

Again. If advocating individual ownership of land and homes makes us capitalists, then Proudhon was also a "capitalist." If you're using the word "capitalism" so that it includes Proudhon, well, OK, you can do that, and then I'll be a "capitalist" like Proudhon is a "capitalist." But you should let us know that you are doing that, and you shouldn't be claiming the Anarchist high-ground in doing so. Incidentally, there is a defense of the legitimacy and productiveness of common ownership of land and means of production in the book (Ch. 15, "A Plea for Public Property" by Roderick Long). The difference is that we believe that that's healthy as an option among a rich set of social and economic options. We do not believe in making it the only way that people can interact with each other or make use of the world around them.