is folding / stapling / bundling booklets for May’s Market Anarchy / Anarchist Classics shipment. This month: Darian Worden’s column on Distributed Social Power, and Proudhon’s 1849 essay on The State: Its Nature, Object, and Destiny (as translated by Benj. R. Tucker and serialized in Liberty).

John James:

I would feel like I had all the information about them I needed...and go talk to someone else.

I don't doubt that you would, bro. Fortunately not everyone is as incurious as you are, or as willing to press on with invincible ignorance before making the minimal effort it would take to try to understand others on their own terms. In any case, while I'm happy to explain the reasons why I pick the names I pick, you may want to keep in mind that convincing you personally of the feasibility of anticapitalism on libetarian terms is not actually very high on my list of reasons. I'm largely concerned with convincing a rather different group of people of a rather different conclusion.

As for "dictionary definitions," they don't actually say what you seem to think that they say, and if they did, I would hardly take that as the end of the story (any more than I take their usually idiotic definitions of e.g. "anarchy" as the end of the story about whether or not I should call myself an Anarchist). Perhaps this here and this also  will help, and perhaps this and that will. Or perhaps not.

 

Freedom4Me73986:

So how does a "bossless" factory work if there's over 100 workers? How can that many people all make decisions w/o a boss?

Well, I dunno. I guess if you really want to know the answer to this question, and don't just intend it as an apriori "Gotcha!" about what you are already sure must be unworkable, then probably the best thing to do is to ask some of the people who already work in bossless factories with over 100 workers. There are a number of interviews in books like this one: <http://www.amazon.com/Sin-Patr%C3%B3n-Argentinas-Worker-Run-Factories/dp/1931859434>. My impression is that it is typically done with a combination of temporary, constantly-rotating responsibilities, a lot of local initiative on the shop floor, and regular big group meetings for making decisions as a group. Maybe this is an inefficient way to do things. On the other hand it seems to be working for the people who are doing it. In any case, I am quite sure that the claim that "Without [a boss] nothing would get done" is empirically falsifiable, and has in fact been falsified. Spontaneous orders are of course possible without central direction.

But in any case suppose that it turned out to be true -- I'm not committed to this claim, but I don't reject it out of hand either -- that on the whole, in a maximally freed market, the complexity and the costs of keeping everyone communicating with everyone else would tend to hobble the workability of big factories without bosses. That might be a reason to think that there will be more bosses in a freed market than I think there will be. But it might just as well be a reason to think: Well, then there will be smaller factories. And if we turn out to have smaller factories, with their activities largely coordinated by trade and contract rather than by bureaucratic management, I don't see how that would be a problem. Certainly there is no reason apriori why libertarian economics would have to be concerned with figuring out a way to run giant factories with hundreds of workers. If that turns out to be economically and socially sustainable under conditions of free-market competition, then people will do it. But I don't take it for granted that it will be, and if it isn't, then people won't sustain it, and will find other market means of meeting their needs.

In fact I would say there are some strong reasons to think that that kind of business model -- at least, nearly every example of that business model that we have available to us for inspection, from General Motors to Lockheed-Martin to GlaxoSmithKline to Foxconn -- is not a product of freed market labor agreements, but rather of a pretty heavy-handed structure of government-financed lines of credit, government privileges, government subsidies, and government contracts to the employers, on the one hand, and on the other hand, political impoverishment, political dispossession, and political constraints on the employee's options for alternative modes of making a living. My reasons for thinking that bossing will be unsustainable in fact have a lot to do with factors that will apply whether or not big factories tend to need bosses (e.g., they have to do with the changes which are more likely, ceteris paribus, to occur within labor markets when people's fixed costs of living are radically lower, and their options for making a living outside of formalized employment relationships have radically expanded, as discussed briefly e.g. in "The Many Monopolies" and in "Scratching By" -- all of which are changes that, if they are likely to come about, are likely to come about regardless of the organizational economics of trying to run a large factory.)

 

 

Freedom4Me73986:

@Charles Johnson: Do you call yourself a socialist?

Yes, in Tucker's sense. Some reasons for doing so discussed here, and here, and also here.

And are you anti-boss like many others in the ALL seem to be?

Sure.

I think bossing and conventional employment are both (1) likely to be unstable, and economically unsustainable, in a fully freed market; and (2) kind of shitty ways to treat your fellow human beings.

John James:

You think that being pro-free market, and simultaneously against- private ownership of capital goods, . . . isn't paradoxical?

I don't know, man. I'm not against what you seem to think I'm against, so I don't feel like I'm under much of an obligation to figure out whether that combination is paradoxical or not. My concerns have to do with the (politically-enabled) concentration and monopolization of control over capital goods, not with individual ownership of capital goods, much less with prices or production governed by market competition. Perhaps this will help; and perhaps this will.

But part of the reason that "free-market anti-capitalism" sounds paradoxical is because most people (both people who consider themselves anti-capitalists, and people who consider themselves pro-) tend to operate on a tacit or explicit assumption that, if an economic system allows for private investment in capital goods or individual ownership of capital goods, then to the extent it allows for that, it is naturally going to drive towards an equilibrium characterized by gigantic concentrations of capital ownership, mediated through top-down corporations on the one hand; and large masses of people with little or no ownership of the capital needed to sustain their own livelihoods, on the other. Part of the point of the whole FMAC gig is to highlight that assumption, and to challenge it -- to provoke a conversation about whether capital ownership really tends towards top-down capital concentration, or whether (and this is what I believe) a freed market would tend to have a centrifugal effect on wealth, with more capital ownership much more widely dispersed, and much more often managed through small-scale, decentralized, informal, cooperative or purely individualized arrangements.

John James:

So...what's wrong with using a term people in general better understand

I don't know exactly who are the "people in general" that you have in mind. And I don't know what "term" you think would be obviously better for their understanding. Maybe you could give me some examples of each.

Certainly, when I leave out the bit about "leftism" or about "markets" or about "anti-capitalism" and I just call myself a "libertarian" or an "Anarchist" (both of which I often do), most people that I talk to don't really have much of an immediate idea what that means, either. If they think they do, they are usually pretty confident that I must believe in things that I definitely do not believe in -- for example, most people who hear me call myself a "libertarian" tend to interpret that as meaning that I vote for Ron Paul, or that I think that Fortune 500 corporations should be given free reign to dominate social and economic life even more than they currently do; or that I spend my time publishing justifications for corporate health insurance, third-world sweatshops and right-to-work laws. (Now, let's set aside, for the moment, the question of whether or not I ought to do any of these things. Because in any case I certainly do not, and when people conclude that I do, they are mistaken.) If I were to call myself a "laissez-faire capitalist" (which I do not), I am pretty confident that these kind of mistaken conclusions, and belligerent misunderstandings, would be even more firmly entrenched by that terminological choice. Now on the other hand when I call myself an Anarchist quite a few people think that means that I believe in abolishing society, or that I want mob rule, or that I am opposed to any sort of social organization, or a society without money, commerce or formal education. A person once asked me (I was living in Las Vegas at the time) how people in Las Vegas would survive without a government to pipe water to the city; as if being an Anarchist obviously meant being opposed to piping water from one point to another. People have all kinds of weird ideas about what all of these terms means (as they always will, when it comes to terms that describe views that are radically different from anything in the political or social mainstream). Now I could complain that people are misunderstanding what I mean when I call myself a libertarian, or an Anarchist. And no doubt they are. But it seems to me that the best way to deal with a situation like this is to be self-conscious about the fact that my positions are by and large positions that I've come to outside of most people's horizons of political understanding. And any terms that I choose to describe them are necessarily terms that are going to need some significant further explanation, clarification, and engaging with the initial misunderstandings that people have. If anything, there is some positive use in choosing terms that provoke people to question their assumptions, and to realize that they can't understand quite what's going on just by pulling out the set of thoroughly conventional political categories that they have in their cookie-cutter drawer.

 

John James:

...aren't you the guy who calls himself a "free market anti-capitalist"?

. . . Well, yes, that's me. Although I can hardly claim originality on that point. I owe the rhetorical flourish to Kevin Carson's good old  Mutualist Blog.

Anyway, as a matter of fact I rather prefer that kind of terminology to "left-libertarian," all things considered. Because while "free market anti-capitalist" is a (deliberately) paradoxical-sounding label, (*) it's a label that, paradoxical or not, has more or less one well-defined meaning. Whereas "left-libertarian" has a number of more or less well-defined meanings that have been attached to it in the past few decades. Each of which is relatively well defined, but all of which mean something rather different from the other meanings that have been attached to it. (**)

Anyway, was there a further point you meant to make by your question? Or just asking out of curiosity?

* * *

(* I think that it sounds paradoxical, not that it actually is; my explanation for why it's not is part of the point of adopting the term.)

 

(** In particular: that stuff that Murray Rothbard's complaining about when he writes about "left-libertarianism," meaning, more or less Cato and Reason, has exactly nothing at all to do with the way that the term is being used when folks like Roderick Long or others in ALL are explaining the position that they advocate. Not surprisingly, Rothbard hasn't got much to say about that, since Rothbard had no way of writing about a position that would largely hashed out about a decade or so after his death. You might then ask: well, why use the term to mean something different than what Rothbard meant by it? And there are a lot of answers to that question, but one important thing to note is that Rothbard was hardly the first to use it, and his own usage was really pretty peculiar.)

 

AdrianHealy:

Yes, I have very frequently and openly described myself as a "left-libertarian," if asked, in the sense of that term under discussion. I usually prefer other terms, if I am describing myself on my own terms rather than answering questions about myself, simply because "left-libertarian" has been used to describe many different positions in intra-libertarian debates, as well as outside debates about libertarianism -- and a number of them are mutually exclusive of each other.

A lot of your comments seem to be based on a misunderstanding that I think a substantive difference between left-libertarians and non-left-libertarians would make one of them a libertarian and the other not a libertarian. That's not my position. My position is that left-libertarians are advancing one sort of libertarian analysis and politics (as I happen to think, the most radical, coherent, and correct sort) as distinct from a number of other possible sorts of libertarian analysis and politics. I do not think that the differences involved are differences that make one party count as libertarians, and the other fail to count as libertarians.

I do think that the differences involved are nevertheless substantive and important differences that are not just over issues of "signaling" or "style" (or for that matter over their empirical predictions about the overall net effects of abolition -- left-libertarians do have differences from non-left libertarians over that, but that's not the only substantive difference that they have). Whether or not these substantive differences are differences that are important, or worth noting, or in some sense "affect the core of libertarianism," does of course depend on what conception you have of what the "core of libertarianism" is, and of what the relationship is supposed to be between the "core" and non-"core" commitments. Thus:

 

AdrianHealy:

Those 'substantive' positions do not affect the core of libertarianism. Let's take Rothbard's example definition. A libertarian is someone who wants the world based on the NAP principle. . . .

That may be your understanding of "the core of libertarianism" and what does or does not affect it. It is not necessarily my understanding of it, or the understanding of most self-described left-libertarians. Most left-libertarians tend to insist on (5) a "thick" conception and comparatively inclusive picture of libertarian commitments, as opposed to a "thin" conception of libertarianism or a picture of "core" libertarian commitments that is more or less exclusively limited to the Non-Aggression Principle and its direct logical entailments. (As a result, we reject Rothbard's and Block's position that libertarian theory is purely and simply a matter of the Non-Aggression Axiom, its corollaries and applications.) So for somebody who rejects (5), it may seem that (1)-(4) are not really matters that substantively "affect the core of libertarianism." But for somebody who accepts it, they may well be. Perhaps we are wrong to think about libertarianism this way; perhaps we ought to have a thinner conception of libertarian politics or libertarian theory. But if that's so, we'd need an argument to be convinced that that's so. And whether it's so or not, then the disagreement over (5) seems like it's going to be a substantive disagreement that left-libertarians have with some other, non-left libertarians. (*)

 

(* Not all -- there are non-left libertarians who also have a thick conception of libertarianism. Let's oversimplify and say for the sake of argument that all left-libertarians have a thick conception of libertarianism; but while all thin conceptions are -- therefore -- non-left-libertarian views, not all non-left-libertarian views involve thin conceptions. Some people think that there should be a "thick" package of libertarian commitments intertwined with the NAP; but they want a package with right-wing, or otherwise non-left, contents.)

AdrianHealey:

"Left-libertarianism" - in the Roderik Long meaning of the word - is just an 'in crowd' signaling mechanism.

Well, there's the part where you say it....

It means that you think [1] that libertarianism is more likely to 'achieve' certain goals typically associated with the left, think [2] that libertarianism has better answers to certain beefs 'the left' has, [3a] that leftwing concerns are legitimate and [3b] caused by the state, [4] thaat 'as a libertarian' you focus more on typical 'left wing' issues ... Stuff like that.

... and then there's the part where you take it back.

I'm happy to agree that self-identified "left-libertarians" typically believe in something more or less like claims (1), (2), (3a), (3b) and (4), more or less as you've described them. But if they do, then it seems that (1)-(4) just are four or five characteristic substantive positions that left-libertarians tend to hold, and that non-left libertarians tend to neglect, ignore, or consciously reject. So for example let's grant that it's true (as per 3a/3b) that left-libertarians tend to believe that the concerns of labor radicals or the environmental movement are in large part legitimate concerns about real social evils, but that those evils are in large part the product of state privilege to large corporations, and that (as per 1) the best way to deal with those evils is to undermine and abolish those state privileges, together with grassroots activism which aims to address them through nonviolent social sanctions rather than through legal maneuvering. Well, then, it seems that believing in "left-libertarianism" means believing in some specific things, and it's hard for me to see how these specific things that left-libertarians believe in are something other than substantive differences over issues of social and political analysis. But if so, that seems to undermine the claim that the self-id is "merely" an internal signaling device.

 

 

Dear The Nation magazine: Just received your e-mail of 5/24, asking “Why Is Obama Funding A Murderous Regime?” Seriously?

I am glad that you have discovered U.S. foreign aid to the Honduran government, and that you have realized that this is a problem. But I have no idea why you act so surprised. Mr. Obama’s administration has killed thousands of people every year in by perpetuating wars, escalating wars, and starting new wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, etc. And the Obama administration’s military and police aid policies in Honduras are in no significant respect different from U.S. military and monetary support to generation after generation of repressive regimes in Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Colombia, Argentina, Venezuela, Chile, etc. etc. etc. by literally every President of the U.S.A. for more than 100 years now. Does it really take much wondering to figure out why the primary alliances of one murderous regime, are to other murderous regimes?

Sincerely, Charles W. Johnson

is scanning the second year of The Liberator (1832) this afternoon.

It is a photograph of George Monbiot, but for a few years it was being widely circulated on the Internet misidentified as a photograph of Kevin Carson. (For example here.) Probably because of a Google Image search mishap, related to one of Kevin’s frequent responses to Monbiot’s columns. (For example here and in about a half-dozen other posts.) Given the other folks listed as post-WWII anarchists (the person making the poster includes left-wing market anarchists as well as anarcho-capitalists, but no other lefties), and given that Monbiot certainly hasn’t ever claimed to be an anarchist, my guess is that the makers of the poster probably intended it as a portrait of Carson, not of Monbiot.