Then why can't you choose to form cooperative relationships and communities on the basis of race without violating individualist principles?

I'm not sure what you're asking here, because I'm not sure what you mean by "can" or "can't" in this context. If you're asking why you don't have a right to organize or support or join deliberately racially segregated apartheid communities, then my answer is that you do have a right to do that: you have the right to be an idiot in many ways, and to do many brutally stupid things, including this one. I certainly wouldn't dream of using force to stop you.

If you're asking why you cannot organize or support or join apartheid communities that without facing severe social repercussions, ostracism, condemnation, etc., including from other people who are professed individualists, then the answer is that just as you have a right to organize or join a community based on something so brutalizing and idiotic as racial identity and ethnic segregation, other people have a right to call you an idiot, and possibly to sever social and economic ties with you, or to nonviolently protest you and your stupid racist community for doing so: they are exercising their rights to participate in consensual social cooperation, and dis-cooperation, just as you are.

If you're asking me why you should not organize or support or join apartheid communities then my answer is that you should not support them because if you do that, then you are deliberately and profoundly shaping your interpersonal interactions on a basis which is by definition brutally collectivist, judging people by the unchosen, completely worthless status of the ethnic group they were born into not by their individual qualities as unique human beings, their personal choices and actions, their chosen affiliations or their earned merits. This is stupid in obvious ways: I have much more in common in every way that is significant to my life as an intelligent and creative human being with fellow anarchists, philosophy students, former pizza-shop workers, Auburn alumnae, hackers, comic book nerds, Western swing fans, Trekkies and archivists than I have in common with some randomly selected jackass who just happens to share the same pigmentation level I do. But the reasons it is stupid are also intimately connected with the reasons it is anti-individualist: because it proposes to found individual identity and relations social solidarity on a set of unchosen, unchangeable, inherited and anonymizingly generic traits that have a great deal to do with historical systems of fairly brutal collectivist privilege, but nothing in particular to do with the individual personality. Now perhaps I am mistaken about the importance of individual personality; or perhaps I am wrong about the importance of chosen, idiosyncratic and personalizing social connections over unchosen, inherited and anonymizing social connections. But it should be relatively straightforward why as an individualist I am concerned about them. Perhaps I am wrong to attach so much importance to individualism; but then, what you asked is why an individualist would care about such things.

You may think racialism is idiotic, but I fail to see how it must be condemned on individualist grounds, seeing as it's just a way of organizing communities.

If you thought that the point of this article was to argue that any and every (non-invasive?) "way of organizing communities" is equally good, from an individualist standpoint, as every other (non-invasive?) "way of organizing communities," then I am afraid you have rather badly missed the point of the article. Certainly that claim was never made in it, and if you're now asking, I absolutely deny it.

My recent post On Being Pretty Much O.K. With That. (Factories, Corporate Secrecy, and Free-Market Anti-Capitalism Edition.)

Editor of M!C here. There are four selections in the book that involve major excerpting from a longer work. (Unless I'm forgetting something; forgive me if I am.) Two of them (Selection #23, Roy Childs's "Big Business and the Rise of American Statism," and #46, Mary Ruwart's "Aggression and the Environment") are 20th century texts from leftish-leaning anarcho-capitalists so presumably not what GhostOfImNotATroll had in mind. There are two "classic" (19th century) texts which are selections heavily excerpted from much longer books -- #25, "Industrial Economics" (an excerpted chapter from Dyer D. Lum's *The Economics of Anarchy: A Study of the Industrial Type*, which is in print a book of about 60pp or so) and #2 the selections from Proudhon's *General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century*, which is in print normally a book of about 250 - 300pp. The rest of the material is, to the best of my recollection, presented without significant excerpting. If it were up to me I would have loved to include far more of both Lum and Proudhon than we were able to include in the book, as well as a number of other 19th century texts that had to be cut entirely from our initial Table of Contents, but as it stands we were already pushing hard against the physical limits for our publisher in terms of length. (I spent several days going through about four or five different drafts of the Proudhon selections, each one gradually diminishing in word count from the last, in order to be able to fit it in under the length constraints.) Of course I would strongly encourage you to read the longer works rather than just counting on my say-so about them, but I will say that as tightly as we had to cut down the selections from *Lum*, there isn't I think any plausible way that Lum's book might have been presented that would make it seem "less" or "more" "pro-market" than it does in the collection. In the case of the selections from *Proudhon* the issue is a bit different, in part because the excerpting had to be even more severe and in part because Proudhon's style of developing ideas is very different from Lum's and in part because Proudhon's point in General Idea is not particularly to answer any questions about whether he's fer or agin' "markets" (or "commerce," which is closer to the terminology he actually uses), but rather to do something somewhat more complicated. Nevertheless, M!C is an attempt to (re)capture and record the strands of a conversation; and some of those strands were developing themes in Proudhon that emerge from passages like those in the selection, so we had to spend a fair amount of time thinking about our purposes in choosing the selections and presenting them in the book. So besides indicating the excerpting, we also explicitly noted all this in the book: > In selecting passages from Proudhon's nuanced and immensely challenging work, we must acknowledge--and indeed insist--that we have not presented anything like the whole of Proudhon's social and economic thought, or even the entirety of his thought about economic forces, contracts, and property. Rather, we have attempted to identify and present a particular *strand* within the tapestry of Proudhon's thought, and, in particular, to present the strand which was best understood by and most influential on the works of later market anarchists, such as Benjamin Tucker or Dyer Lum--with such themes as the mutuality of contract, the deformation of markets by privilege, and the transfiguration of property, competition, and exchange in markets liberated from hierarchy. In these passages Proudhon should, to an extent, be read as "Tucker's Proudhon" or "the mutualists' Proudhon;" there are other Proudhons to be found (the Communards' Proudhon, Kropotkin's Proudhon, the syndicalists' Proudhon ...), *and the real thinker himself must be recognized as someone quite as important as, and far more intricate than, any of these.* (p. 11, emphasis added) Hope this helps! Let me know if you have any other questions about how the book was edited.

I think . . . I think I just finished transcribing the “Property in Ideas” controversy from LIBERTY (1890-1891)? Unless something unexpected turns up in my due-diligence scans of the contents for the next few issues.

It's more or less a textbook example of confusing [necessary and sufficent conditions](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necessary_and_sufficient_conditions). You claimed that attacking racism and patriarchy is a necessary condition for undermining capitalism (without ARP, no UC); the reply treated this as if it were a claim that it is a *sufficient* condition for undermining capitalism (wherever ARP, also UC -- which is equivalent to claiming that without *UC*, no *ARP*, not equivalent to your actual claim), and then proceeded to attack that claim.