is in Lisbon.

is shipping out M@ and ACS booklets for June 2012 to subscribers to-day. Proudhon and Worker Ownership, delivered fresh and hot. This month, look for the special edition Maine postmark!

is printing up this month’s Anarchist Classics and Market Anarchy booklets. For June ’12: Proudhon’s “Epilogue” to the General Idea of the Revolution in the 19th Century, and a collection of conversations on economic aspects of worker ownership, self-management, technology, and distributed systems. Tonight, the printing, the folding, the stapling. The mailing, after the weekend, when we’re able to get to a post office in Maine.

Chomsky is a theoretical Anarchist who in actual practice functions as a partisan Social Democrat, because when you come down from the ideal society he’d like to see in the sweet by-and-by, or up from his radical critique of currently existing conditions, it turns out that he hasn’t really got much of anything to offer in terms of practical mechanisms other than a bunch of thoroughly conventional efforts at achieving social change by means of social control, social control by means of political power, and political power by means of electorating and politicking.

If anything Lin Ostrom was exactly the reverse — while in theory she was a fairly conventional liberal statist, in practice her contributions to the literature have been an immensely insightful set of radical alternatives to conventional understandings of politics and social life, and gives us some really critical insights into how immediate social problems might be solved without participating in or depending on conventional political mechanisms of social control. And thus, whether she intended to or not, has made a really important contribution to Anarchist understanding and practice.

Marja’s post is fantastic. Thank you for relinking it.

The quote from Adam Buick is wrongheaded and uncharitable to the economists. (As is the whole hand-waving passage that it is a part of.) The position that Buick is dismissing certainly is absurd, but it is not the position that economists are asserting when they describe people’s wants as “infinite.” For two reasons. First, because not all economic wants are a matter of “obtaining” or having or owning things in the first place. But even when what someone wants is a relationship or a human engagement or an experience or a state of being or an accomplishment or indeed giving something up or letting it go or passing it on, all those wants still involve a cost — you have to choose it over other options and this involves a certain amount of work and expense, either for yourself or for other people or for both. Which is potentially relevant for any distribution based on at-will demand. Second, because there is just a thudding mathematical error involved here. Infinite means without end; it doesn’t mean all-encompassing. If The Count wants to count all the natural numbers then his wants are infinite but there are also infinitely many numbers that he doesn’t care about counting at all. (And this is of course potentially relevant to the rationality of his desires — since just the real interval (0,1), let alone R as a whole, includes an uncountable infinity of numbers that he could not possibly ever reach no matter how much time he had to do it.) Now, maybe The Count’s desires are also absurd. But if so, not because he wants to count all the numbers; anymore than the textbook Homo economicus‘s infinite desires necessarily encompass “obtaining the whole universe.” And perhaps there is a good argument against the claim that people’s wants are infinite, given the specific meaning that economists attach to all of the terms in that phrase. But Buick is attacking a strawman, and so hasn’t given the argument yet.

Me:

I personally am happy enough to sign on for Tucker's (explicitly pro-market, anti-state) understanding of "socialism."

vive la insurrection:

The results of enforcing such a thing would lead to catastrophic conclusions.  I don't see what there is to be happy about, other than leftism for leftism sake.

Autolykos:

Thank you for the kind welcome.

If I may, I'd like to present a hypothetical situation to you. Suppose that there's a factory owned by a single individual. He then offers to pay some people from the surrounding area to use the machines in his factory to make things. Would you call the factory owner a "boss"?

I don't know, from the description you gave me. Probably? But it depends on what you have in mind. I think it matters a lot how the pay and the conditions of labor are determined, and that it matters at least as much, probably more, how much the people being paid to work with the machines in the factory are dependent on keeping up that specific relationship with the owner to make their living, i.e., how much they are able to, and how much they actually do, have viable alternative sources of support.

So for example if people are dropping in to the factory without much of a binding obligation over time, are choosing it as just one among a broad range of options for their day-to-day livelihood, and take home some pay for their time or output while they are there, then sure, that sounds a lot more like some horizontal and really fairly casual trade or contract-labor relationships than like bosses and their employees. If they work mainly or only at the factory, over the long term and in an open-ended arrangement, but their "pay" for working their involves not just cash but for example gaining significant shares of ownership in or residual profits from the factory that they are working in then that is also hard to see as a simple boss-employee relationship, although for different reasons (in this case because the more the "employee" is employed in the factory, the more they become a partner rather than a hireling of the owner). Now if you are imagining that they will have a long-term, open-ended, binding arrangement with the owner, can be summoned to report more or less at the owner's will, are mostly or exclusively dependent on keeping that particular job in order to make a living rather than having significant alternative sources of support, etc., then that is starting to sound more like a boss-employee relationship.

Of course all of this is going to be really highly dependent on a lot of specific details. It's easy for something to be a causal contract labor arrangement in name while really being a pretty narrowly confined boss-employee relationship in fact; and it's possible for things that are formally set out as employer-employee relationships to really functionally work out more like a partnership than like employment. In that kind of case I'm more interested in the way the relationship works out de facto than I am in the name that it is called by.

 

Freedom4Me73986:

Bullshit. Employer-employee relationships exist VOLUNTARILY. Rich and poor have always existed and will always exist

Well, so now I know that you believe that. But I don't know what your argument for it is.

In any case, I do think that, in the current economic landscape, there are a number of important political privileges granted to large corporate employers, and a number of impoverishing and restricting political burdens inflicted on working-class folks. Do you disagree with that claim? If so, why? If not, then we've got to consider what might change if the privileges and the burdens were removed.

And if I think that workers are often forced into depending on an employment relationship in order to make a living, largely as the downstream social result of that set of subsidizing privileges and impoverishing burdens, then that does imply that, ceteris paribus, were the privileges and the burdens to be abolished, then you'd tend, on the margin, to see fewer workers entering into employer-employee relationships. Maybe you disagree with this. But even if so, that is obviously not exactly the same thing as some kind of utopian belief that everybody is equally smart or equally stupid, or that nobody would ever be poor in a freed market.

The real question here is (1) what survival strategies poor people have available to them and which are foreclosed as a result of political pressure; (2) how much the "rich" would be able to find poor workers willing to work for them on conventional wage-labor terms, when fixed costs of living are much lower and when a much richer set of alternative livelihoods are available outside of the corporate economy; and (3) how often ordinary people's flashes of insight or cleverness is frustrated by state-imposed barriers to entry, or how often rich people's stupidities are protected from market consequences by politically protected markets, bailouts, and the suppression of competition.

b/c of the division of labor

O.K. But I don't reject the division of labor, you know. What I think is that in freer markets labor would be divided along different lines from the way it is currently divided. (A co-op of course is a division of labor; the fact that the workers participate in management decisions hardly means that everybody in the shop is doing the same damned thing.)

Also are u going to take a crack at the questions ive asked?

I was in the midst of typing answers to them at apparently the same time as you were firing off this response. Patience, please.

1. and 2. Yes and yes. See here. I happen to be a natural-rightser, and in fact one of a rather fanatical and absolutist kind. Roderick Long is also, for whatever that is worth. (There are left-libertarians who are not natural-rightsers, but of course there are also right-libertarians -- David Friedman, for example -- who are not. The issue is more or less orthogonal to the left-lib/right-lib divide.)

3. I don't know exactly what you mean by that. I wouldn't call myself a "voluntaryist" as that term was used e.g. by Wendy McElroy or Carl Watner, and I wouldn't call myself a "voluntaryist" as that term seems mostly to be used today within the movement. Not because I am in favor of involuntary social relationships, but rather because when I've encountered the term it usually seems to come along with a pretty hefty package of additional beliefs about ideal libertarian social and political strategy (for example a fairly "thin," anything-that's-peaceful specification of what social or cultural goals libertarians might care or might not care about advancing through non-coercive means). And while I'm happy to get as fire-breathing and radical as they are about defending the principle of consensuality in all social relationships, there is a lot in the package of additional beliefs that I am not necessarily interested in signing on for.

4. Sure; given that everyone involved consents to the arrangement, in my view you should be "allowed" to do whatever you want without de jure restriction. However, I have some reasons for thinking that you might have more trouble than you expect to finding a market for your wares -- workers may not be interested in buying the kind of arrangement that you are selling.

5. Yes. Again, no de jure restrictions. However, I think that both natural and social factors would tend to produce some quite stringent de facto restrictions on the kinds of scale that you're likely to be able to maintain without aggression, privilege, state subsidy, or insulation from competition.

6. Well, that's not really a question I can pot the answer to in a short forum post or even a long one. I could say that I think it both more efficiently satisfies consumer preferences and also that there are independent ethical reasons to favor it, but my reasons for that have to do with a lot of threads of argument about a number of related, but importantly distinct, topics. Anyway, if you want a broad overview of some of the reasons I have for taking the approach that I do, the Liberty, Equality, Solidarity essay that I linked above may help as a starting point. And so might Bits & Pieces on Free-Market Anti-Capitalism.

7. Not as I understand it. I am an individualist Anarchist.

I do defend (and other left-wing market Anarchists also do defend) some economic or social arrangements that other libertarians have denounced as "collectivist" -- for example, the occupation and reclamation of abandoned faciltiies by squatters and urban homesteaders; voluntary unionism; cooperatively-managed worker-owned shops; and consensual communal ownership of open commons, without the involvement or management of the state. But the reason that I defend these things is because I think the charges of "collectivism" are in fact false, and the way I defend them is generally by trying to show, if I can, how they are really quite compatible with a radical interpretation of individual sovereignty and equal liberty. Maybe I'm wrong about that, of course, but if so, it is in the way that anyone can be wrong about the downstream applications of their fundamental principles.

 

Freedom4Me73986:

Left-libertarians are mostly socialists.

Maybe. Or maybe not. As I've said, I personally am happy enough to sign on for Tucker's (explicitly pro-market, anti-state) understanding of "socialism." Provided that in context it's understood that that's what I mean, or the conversation will easily turn to explaining that that's what I mean. But I know a lot of left-libertarians and, anecdotally speaking, I know a number of left-libertarians (such as Kevin Carson) who agree with me on that; and a number of left-libertarians (such as Roderick Long, Tom Knapp, or I think also Sheldon Richman) who do not agree with me on that, and do not want to use the term -- for reasons that I find understandable, even if I disagree with them. Beyond anecdotes, I really have no idea which group is in the numerical majority; I haven't made any attempt at polling active left-libertarians about this (and I expect you haven't either).

Charles even admitted to being ... anti-capitalist/anti-boss/anti-property rights.

I "admitted," or rather, happily agreed to, two of these things. Not to three of them. You may of course think that being anti-capitalist, anti-boss, and anti-property rights all naturally go along with each other as a matter of course. (That's a common enough belief, both for people who are anti- and for people who are pro-.) But if you're going to take a look at what I've admitted or agreed to, you should keep in mind that I don't agree that they do.

There are kinds of anti-capitalism (take Marx's--please!) which are of course anti-property rights (generally because they believe that if you have property rights you are always therefore naturally going to get bosses and concentrations of ownership in the hands of capitalists). But there have also been kinds of anti-capitalism, older and (I would argue) more radical than Marx's which do not think that (see for example Proudhon, Tucker, Dyer Lum, Voltairine DeCleyre, or many of the other historical writers who appear in Markets Not Capitalism) -- who argue, quite on the contrary, that bosses and corporate ownership persist largely because of systematic governmentalist assaults on free competition and on the property rights of workers. (So that the best way to get an economy without bossing and with diffuse rather than concentrated ownership is to get rid of all government barriers to competition and all government restrictions on poor people's property rights.) You may of course disagree with this approach, but it is mine, and it pretty directly affects the issue of whether the positions on the left side of the forward slashes are really the same as the positions on the right side.