Nerd grouching for the day: if you’re comparing two fixed quantities X and Y, X cannot be “exponentially larger” than Y. Even if X is overwhelmingly larger than Y is. “Exponentially” refers to the rate of growth of a function over a range of fixed values, and does not apply to a pairwise comparison of two fixed values. It doesn’t just mean “lots bigger.”

No point for you, or no point you can see, maybe. But philosophers (libertarian or otherwise) do have reasons to try to theorize, and to analyze concepts, and to try to get clear on arguments, other than whatever short-term political gains they think that they might be able to get out of it.

Hector: Can someone explain me what is happening the photograph please?

During the SNCC sit-in protests, the nonviolent protesters were very often surrounded by angry crowds of white neighbors who were trying to intimidate or humiliate the protesters. Most of the people in the crowd verbally taunted them; some, mainly young white men, physically attacked them. The SNCC protesters wouldn’t fight back (they had adopted a code of nonviolence and spent days role-playing and training themselves not to retaliate), so most often the assaults amounted to extended efforts to humiliate them. In the photograph, the white man extending his arm from the left-hand side of the frame is about to dump a glass of water on the head of a black woman who is protesting the segregated lunch-cuonter. All three of the protesters in the photograph have already been smeared with food by the vigilantes in the crowd.

For the same reason that someone who you hire, and can fire at any time, isn’t your boss.*

* Even if, say, you hire her as a personal manager or coach, and her job is to tell you what to do from day to day, and even if (as a matter of fact it turns out that) you consistently do whatever she tells you to do.

A political arrangement that nobody can be forced to participate in, which any individual, as an individual, can withdraw from at will and without lasting obligation, may be desirable or undesirable, depending on the breaks, but it just doesn’t count as successfully claiming the kind of sovereignty over individuals, or imposing the kind of enforceable positive obligations on them, that rights-based anarchist arguments objects to when they object to states as necessarily rights-violating.

Now, you could of course say something like, “Well, but if everyone agrees to participate, as long as they agree, that is at least a territorial monopoly on the authorization of force, isn’t it?” But the distinction between de facto monopolies and de jure monopolies is important to bear in mind here. Most anarchist arguments pushing a conclusion to the effect that government necessarily practice an illegitimate or unjust form of domination (e.g. Roy Childs’s argument, or Murray Rothbard’s, or Spooner’s various later arguments) are specifically concerned with, and arguing against governments not just as de facto, but as de jure monopolies on the authorization of force.**

And you might want to challenge the claim that sovereignty over individuals, or enforceable duties of obedience, or de jure monopolies on the authorization of force (call these “ruling,” perhaps, for short), really are essential features of the state as such; or whether you could instead have a hypothetical at-will arrangement without these features that might still, in virtue of other features, count as an actual, full-bodied state, even if it only operates by universal, sustained consent. But I’d need to hear some argument in order to be convinced that it could count as such, and I’d need to hear something about what features are supposed to be essential features of states, if it’s not the sovereignty or the obedience or the de jure monopoly; otherwise, my view is that no matter what forms you adopt, if it stays safe, sane and consensual, then it’s not really ruling; at most it is some pretty elaborate role-playing.*** And if there’s no ruling going on, that’s a pretty strong reason to say that there is nothing you could call a state.

** Of course there may be other reasons why a de facto monopoly would be undesirable, or wouldn’t be a stable equilibrium under conditions of equal freedom, or whatever.

*** There may of course be other reasons to object to it. Maybe you’re just not into that kind of thing.

is awaiting an Inter-Library Loan request for Fred Schulder’s “The Relation of Anarchism to Organization” (1899). Fingers crossed….

Re: "anarchists/libertarian socialists" and "classical liberals" or "radical liberals." Figures like Molinari, Auberon Herbert and Herbert Spencer were not, as AFAQ claims, treated as radicalized "right-wing liberals" instead of anarchists by Tucker, or Dyer Lum, or de Cleyre, or by Goldman, or by Berkman. This is an invention of contemporary anarchist sectarianism, and is a distinction intended to push an argument that first-wave anarchists were more or less wholly unconcerned with. Molinari and Herbert are explicitly called Anarchist writers in the pages of Liberty; Spencer's earlier work, e.g. the chapter on "The Right to Ignore the State" in Social Statics, is explicitly described as Anarchist, and when he is later taken out of the ranks of the Anarchists (e.g. in Voluntary Co-Operation), it is because of his acceptance of state principles. Spencer's earlier, anarchistic work was recognized as a massive influence, and not only on or by Tucker (see Dyer Lum's <cite>Economics of Anarchy</cite>, or Bailie's <cite>Problems of Anarchism</cite>, or for that matter at copies of <cite>The Blast</cite>, where he is repeatedly quoted.) In "The Child and Its Enemies," Goldman, in a funny passage about the efforts of radical parents to mold their red-diaper babies into images of themselves, puts Spencer in the company of Bakunin and Moses Harman: "… the Anarchistic mother can make it known that her daughter's name is Louise Michel, Sophia Perovskaya … and that she will point out the faces of Spencer, Bakunin, or Moses Harman almost anywhere;" in Living My Life she lists Spencer alongside Tolstoy, Kropotkin and Edward Carpenter as men who would be excluded from entering the U.S. under the Anarchist Exclusion Act).

Again, of course, these folks may have been wrong about that. Perhaps they shouldn't have been counted as "Anarchists." Personally, I'm inclined to doubt that it matters very much whether you call them that or not, provided that you are clear on their views. But reading them out of The Anarchist Tradition has very little to do with what the people indisputably involved in making that tradition thought about them. Which may of course not be binding at all; but it ought to be acknowledged if we're going to wave our hands in the direction of how "anarchism as it has been understood throughout much of history."
My recent post The Red & Black is surviving. Help them flourish.

Coming from a libertarian socialist perspective, I share your opinion that self-described anarcho-capitalists are not calling for anarchism as it is has been understood throughout much of history.

Understood by whom?

Tucker was an Anarchistic Socialist, but he understood "Anarchism" explicitly in terms that would include capitalistic anarchists.

When it came to definitions, Berkman and Goldman specifically and repeatedly defined "Anarchism" in terms of anti-statism. (They had another term, "free communism," that they used to describe their economic commitments.) They had some formulaic definitions that they repeatedly used as filler text both in <cite>Mother Earth</cite> and in <cite>The Blast</cite> (cf. "Anarchism" at the bottom of this page and "Free Communism" at the bottom of this one.)

Voltairine de Cleyre and Rosa Slobodinsky, in the 1890s, were willing to accept the label "capitalistic anarchist" for their own views, even if tongue in cheek and for the sake of argument, in debates with communist anarchists. Of course this is not really a fair description of their views, as the "Individualist" in the dialogue goes on to make very clear, but their attitude toward this kind of division of the field into terminological camps is telling, and refreshing: "Capitalistic Anarchism? Oh, yes, if you choose to call it so. Names are indifferent to me; I am not afraid of bugaboos. Let it be so, then, capitalistic Anarchism."

I wish contemporary anarchist scholars, with their chanted invocations of The Anarchist Tradition (whether broadly or narrowly construed), had more of that kind of attitude.

Even if it were true that the Tradition had a well-defined and uniform set of views on these issues, I think that would have absolutely no normative value at all, because Anarchism is a living ideal in thought and action, which is perfectly capable of new developments, radical turnarounds, new innovations, and new errors that have nothing at all to do with "anarchism as it has been understood throughout much of history." And thank goodness.

But in any case if we are going to talk about an our predecessors in an anarchist tradition, or about the historical meaning of the term, I think it's important to exercise at least some minimal sensitivity to how messy and internally divided that tradition always already was, and how far they may have differed with us, and differed among themselves, in what they saw as most important, most essential, or necessary, and who they would or would not recognize as fellow anarchists. This ground has always been contested, and to a great extent if we hope ever to understand what past writers have had to say about it, we need a healthy dose of de Cleyre's and Slobodinsky's good-humored flexibility in recognizing the ambiguity and contestation, and taking terms provisionally or for the sake of argument or communication, rather than trying to plant a black flag on them. But instead most of the contemporary writing on this subject has tended to project the writers' own priorities, and their own ideas about what's essential, onto their predecessors, and has had a lot more to do with trying to defend turf. (N.B.: Tucker's as guilty of that as anyone, in his attempts to "defend" Proudhon, Warren, et al. from the claims of the Communists.) This kind of anarchist classicism, like most forms of classicism, lectures monotonously about the wisdom of the ancients, quite as if nobody in the past ever argued amongst themselves about what "anarchism" meant, and as if it were some kind of intellectual property that the capitalists or the communists or whoever were trying to pirate away from its "traditional" owners.

This has tended to obscure a hell of a lot more about Anarchism, and about the debates of the past, than it has clarified.

My recent post Shameless Self-promotion Sunday

is printing up Market Anarchy zines for a full-print-run order to ship out this morning. Still queued up: “A Plea for Public Property” and “Libertarian Anarchism: Responses to Ten Common Objections” by Roderick Tracy Long, “Where Are The Specifics?” by Karl Hess, “Woman Vs. The Nation-State” by Carol Moore, “The Attitude of Anarchism Towards Industrial Combinations” by Benjamin Tucker, and a couple essays on privatization and individualist anarchism by some dude named Charles Johnson.

“From the conservative position comes the position of libertarian reformism. It holds that, since there is a good base to build upon—the at least lip-service traditions of liberty in this country, for instance—that the way to avoid the dangers that might lurk on the other side of revolutionary change is to opt for evolutionary change. The repeal of certain laws is, in this position, held as crucial and, of course, it probably is true that if the withholding tax were repealed that the government would be bankrupted as millions of taxpayers simply found themselves unable to pay up.

“That is, this situation might be true if it were not for the amazing ingenuity of American state-monopoly-capitalism. Few if any corporation heads would stand idly by and see the source of their prosperity—a partnership with the state—seriously jeopardized. One can imagine a ‘voluntary’ tax withholding system going into effect which, if anything, might be more effective than the state system which, after all, is operated by businessmen anyway even though with a lot of wasteful bureaucratic interference. Same with the voluntary or even ‘corporate’ military concepts. A libertarian should be the first to recognize that such systems would, if anything, make imperialism more effective by making its military machine more efficient. Such reforms, in short, would not necessarily end injustices but might merely streamline them.

“More pertinent is the central error of reformism as a possible instrument of change. To reform a system you must, first of all, preserve it against attacks more precipitous than those called for in the reformist timetable. This position not only makes neutrality impossible, it makes siding with the system (the state) unavoidable in the long run.”

• Karl Hess, “Conservative Libertarianism” (Libertarian Forum, October 1, 1969, p. 2)

Ah, migrating computers: “Dropbox 1.4.12. Downloading 155,721 files. (40.5 kB/sec, 32 days left).”

Well, I hope it doesn’t really take quite that long. But probably at this point I should turn off the lights and leave it running overnight.