On majorities and moving forward:

1. I agree that anti-statists are in the minority. But, perhaps unlike you, my primary goal isn’t to convince a majority of people to believe something like what I believe. Of course, it’d be nice if more people believed in some form of antistatism, but achieving anarchistic goals is not generally a matter of winning an election, and so does not necessarily depend on winning majority support.

2. What I am interested in doing is radicalizing and working together with a smaller, somewhat self-selected group of people and encouraging them to act on the beliefs that they mostly already have. As a matter of strategy, I am interested in equipping and organizing the minority so that we will become ungovernable by the majority, not in convincing the majority to stop supporting government. But in order to radicalize you need to be radical and consistent; dropping out the critique of monopoly policing or government war or government borders just as such, and redirecting my outreach towards praising smaller-government candidates, or talking about only the subset of issues where I can agree with an LP voter or an Oath Keeper or Ron Paul’s presidential platform, hobbles my ability to actually communicate what I’m trying to communicate to the folks I’m trying to communicate it to.

3. As a teacher, setting aside questions of political strategy, I would of course like to educate more people about the right views. But to the extent that I’m not talking about strategy anymore, and just talking about education, I think that the core principles are the most important for people to learn, and I’d rather someone who really understands what freedom is and rejects it, than have someone who thinks they believe in freedom, but only because they continue to be confused about what it entails, and to believe in myths like “limited government,” or to believe that police and taxation are compatible with individual liberty. My goal here is not to jump into the debate just as it is and try and nudge them towards some confused approximation of libertarian ideals; rather, it’s to change the terms of the debate, and reorient it towards the fundamental issues at stake.

Owen:

In order to avoid misunderstandings, maybe you could say a bit about what you mean by a free market practice when you say that a voluntary commune, even if genuinely consensual amongst all the parties, isn’t one? For reference, when I say free market, I mean any network of economic transactions between consenting actors which respects individual liberty and property. Voluntary communes count because, as I see it, one of the things you can do with property is own it in common. Is your understanding of what counts as a free market practice different from mine?

(As for details and worries: children would be in the same situation that they are in now with individualized ownership of property: they start out being born into the arrangements that their parents have made, and live according to those arrangements that are made by their caretakers. Once they are old enough they have to decide whether to take an adult role — in a commune, I suppose this would mean becoming full stakeholders in the commune and voluntarily taking up the rights and responsibilities that go with that — or else lighting out on their own. For people who want to move in but isn’t interested in the communal stuff — the question here is not whether they have a right to rent or buy land in the area (everyone does), but rather whether they can find anyone there to rent or sell the land to them. If the land is commonly owned, then they would have to secure consent from all the current owners, just as, if someone wanted to buy the car that my wife and I used to own together, BOTH my wife and I would have to consent to the transfer. The question, then, is whether folks within the commune are interested in keeping that land within the commune, or are fine with transferring it outside. Whatever decision they’d make, this would only imperil a voluntary commune to the extent that the people within it no longer wish to maintain it. If enough are still on board to block, they either won’t sell, or will only sell when enough members feel that it won’t cause problems for continued operations. Of course, the exact details will depend on the exact decision-making procedure they’ve adopted.)

@Owen,

Of course it’s true that “anarchocapitalists” will find that they have many differences with other Anarchists. That’s why they’re called “other Anarchists,” instead of “fellow anarchocapitalists.” But they also have many differences with minimal-statists. The question is one of alliances, not one of absolute ideological unity. But the question is where those differences lie, and whether or not they constitute deal-breakers. Since you are not an anarchist, you may not realize why many anarchists consider support for government policing, government militaries, government border enforcement, or the constant enforcement of tyrannical, rights-violating laws by government courts (in the name of “the rule of [government] law”) to be core issues for the form of libertarianism that they advocate. But the fact is that many anarchists do consider these to be core issues, and the fact is that they are all points on which “anarchocapitalists,” market anarchists, mutualists, syndicalists, communist Anarchists, anarcha-feminists, post-Left Anarchists, Green Anarchists, “Anarchists without adjectives,” etc. etc. etc. all routinely have more in common with one another than “anarchocapitalists” have with minimal-statists and Constitutionalists. Anarchism is about anarchy, after all, and sometimes that means a difference in positions and priorities from those held by governmentalists.

In any case, it’s mighty white of you to be so helpful with suggestions for anarcho-capitalists about how they can best achieve goals which frequently have nothing to do with the goals the goals that you, as a small-statist, want to achieve. However, may I suggest that if your notion of non-capitalist Anarchists is limited to communist Anarchism (ho, ho), or for that matter if your notion of communist Anarchism is limited to folks “who will murder you at the end of the line if you insist … that you have a right to keep the things you have earned,” you might try meeting some more Anarchists in general, including some more communist Anarchists in particular, and to try talking with them in a way which takes their views seriously enough to figure out where the actual points of agreement and disagreement between different Anarchist theories lie.

Let’s start with a simple one. If a group of people consent among themselves to establish communal ownership over land, shops, and large-scale capital goods, do you believe that that commune is a free market social arrangement? I.e., is that a legitimate exercise of private property rights to establish such an arrangement?

@Jennifer,

People enjoy all kinds of things, and different people enjoy different things. I think that in a free society there will be plenty of people who are interested in joining experiments or making arrangements that involve varying degrees of communal living or communal working arrangements. (Not because they disvalue freedom or individuality, but because that is how they want to exercise their freedom.)

I’m not interested in joining any such arrangement. But the nice thing about Anarchism is that I’m free to choose what sort of arrangement I want to live under. As long as anarcho-communists believe (as most anarcho-communists currently do) that people who don’t want in should be left in peace to opt out, they’re going to be a far sight better to work with than minimal-statists, who insist on the legitimacy of all the most oppressive institutions in the political statist quo, and offer no such option for opting out of their political schemes.

@Jason: The contradiction is “anti-federal statist.” In for a penny, in for a pound.

Any argument that could justify a nonconsensual state the size of a mid-sized European country can just as easily justify a nonconsensual federation of states the size of a continent. Any argument that could justify state secession from the federation is just as good an argument, if carried through logically, for justifying community secession from the state, or individual secession from any and all levels of government everywhere.

You have a Constitution? Sorry to hear it. But you must’ve known that this is the kind of shit you end up with when you have Constitutions. That’s why I got rid of all mine years ago. Liberty is a social relationship, not a paper document.

(For what it’s worth, the official party line is that it’s authorized under the Interstate Commerce Clause. Is it really? Who cares? Either the Interstate Commerce Clause does authorize this massive corporatist screwjob, or else it has proven that it can do nothing effectual to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist.)

@Ethan,

There are many definitions of socialism on offer. (Some common definitions get little beyond a kindergarden-level praise of “sharing”; others include everything from “opposition to monopolistic corporatism,” to “centralized state planning for its own sake,” from “the abolition of private property in the means of production” to “all-encompassing gift economies for most or all goods and services” to “systems of production which ensure that a worker receives the equivalent of the full marginal productivity of her labor” (with this last goal usually to be achieved by abolishing of government-backed monopolies over land and capital), etc. Some are for global-scale top-down “rational” planning and “expert” management in all things; some are for abolishing all forms of coercive planning and relying on the spontaneous harmonization of interests. If you’re curious as to what this wealth of conceptions all have in common, I’d say that the concept they are all riffing on is the concept of opposition to actually-existing monopolistic big business, because of a sense that it rigs the system in favor of a class of idlers who live off of a skim from the work of common workers, and a desire to adopt new forms of living which better serve the material and social needs of those common workers. The vast differences amongst conceptions of socialism have to do with the analysis of how the rigging and skimming happen, and what ought to be done about it.

Those who couch their understanding in terms of ownership of the means of production generally do not have in mind “public” (if that means “governmental”) ownership of the means of production; rather, the proposal is typically either for worker ownership of the means of production (among mutualists, syndicalists, and autonomists), or else for common ownership of the means of production (among communists). “Common ownership” may mean ownership managed by a political apparatus, supposedly at the direction of “the people” or “the proletariat” — ha, ha, ha. But it may also mean, as in Bakunin or Kropotkin — genuine common ownership by everyone within the community, with some sort of agreed-on joint decision-making process and backed by common consent, rather than a professionalized political body with coercive powers.

In the worker-ownership and the anarcho-common-ownership versions, I think it ought to be easy to see how these things can come about without coercion. These are just different ways of arranging what laissez-faire economics would call a “firm.” Firms can be owned jointly among many shareholders, and there’s no requirement that those shareholders be absentee investors; as with existing co-ops, the joint owners might be the workers in the firm; or they might be the regular consumers of the firm’s goods and services, or might be a very broad class of community “stakeholders,” etc. Firms can also be run more or less directly by their owners; although most very large firms have a significant separation of ownership from management (that is, the shareholders hire on an agent or a handful of agents to make executive decisions on their behalf), worker-owned or community-owned co-ops are different sorts of beasts, and might well opt for more participatory, hands-on management by the worker or community owners themselves. Hence, worker-ownership or common-ownership of the means of production within a freed market and without coercion.

@Gary Chartier:

I agree that Rothbard gets Tucker’s stance on land wrong here. I think the stuff on money is even worse, though. Apparently he imagines that Tucker and Spooner want the universal use of personal fiat currencies backed by nothing (?!) and the Mutual Bank as a credit vouchsafing clearing-house, and an issuer of secured credit, doesn’t so much as make an appearance. As far as I can tell, he seems to have gotten to the suggestion that interest rates would be radically lower, stopped reading there before he could get to any of the details about how that might actually work in the absence of government money monopoly, and gone on a tear instead about how he doesn’t like 20th century inflationist economics. Which he’s right not to like; but heaven only knows what it has to do with Tucker. Or Spooner.

@Dave Martin:

“Rothbard was referring specifically to undeveloped nations, where the state essentially owns everything and doles out some of it to the politically connected.”

You mean “undeveloped nations” like the city of Las Vegas? (http://radgeek.com/gt/2009/04/04/the_state/)

Rothbard asserts in a couple of places, without any real argument, that land is not politically allocated in the U.S. the way it was in, e.g., the formation of Latin American latifundias. But I think a quick glimpse at reality (whether the way that land titles and “real estate development” constantly work in the West, or the slavery-and-politics land grant jobbery of the Old South, or the mass displacement, ethnic cleansing, and government “Development” giveaways of “Urban Renewal” [sic]) should show that this is, to put it mildly, a lapse in his application of principles.