On the theme of anarchist texts recently put online, I recently added an online edition of General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century (trans. by John Beverly Robinson) to the Fair Use Repository. I was pretty surprised to find that it wasn’t available anywhere else on the web, actually.

FreedomsAdvocate: Right this instant, we have an opportunity to grab a good portion of the small-government portion of the republican party.

Pull the other one. The Libertarian Party’s primary outreach for more than a decade has been directed at “small government conservative” types, particularly through targeting AM talk-radio audiences, readers of right-wing publications, and supporters of right-wing “free market” think tanks. This strategy was especially promoted by Harry Browne and his coterie from the mid-1990s until 2001 (cf. Operation Drumbeat, Project Archimedes, etc.), and continues to influence the LP’s outreach efforts in a lot of ways. Given how gleefully this constituency has alwaysdefected to march in formation with the G.O.P. in every election cycle, I can’t say that this strikes me as a strategy well-justified by its success.

FreedomsAdvocate: I am about a noninterventionist as you can get. But I also realize that sometimes the best defense it a good offense. Sometimes war is necessary to avoid worse possibilities. In WW2 we intervened. Was that wrong?

Yes, it was.

I say this not because I think the world would have been more free or less free as a result of U.S. neutrality (how would I know?) but rather because the U.S. government’s involvement in the war committed it to doing things that were absolutely immoral, including a gargantuan increase in the size and invasiveness of the State domestically, the summary imprisonment of political dissidents, the confinement of innocent Japanese-Americans to internment camps, the creation of a slave army through massive conscription, a policy of total warfare throughout Continental Europe and the Pacific, and terror-bombing using incendiary weapons and, for the first time in history, nuclear weapons.

Look, if you want to argue that war is sometimes necessary or justified, then you should feel free to make that argument. But you can’t sensibly call yourself “about [as] noninterventionist as you can get” while also endorsing the U.S.’s involvement in the biggest and most destructive military intervention in the history of the world. To be “as noninterventionist as you can get” means being an absolute pacifist. I am not an absolute pacifist, but I (and a number of other libertarians) are substantially closer to the position than you are; thus you are substantially more interventionist than we are. You can make whatever arguments you want on behalf of your interventionist position, but it serves no-one to pretend that your position is something other than what it is.

Anonymous,

Just out of curiosity, have you ever actually read anything by Nozick or by Rothbard from beginning to end?

Rothbard does not conclude that children are chattel of their parents. See The Ethics of Liberty, chapter 14: “We must therefore state that, even from birth, the parental ownership is not absolute but of a ‘trustee’ or guardianship kind. In short, every baby as soon as it is born and is therefore no longer contained within his [sic] mother’s body possesses the right of self-ownership by virtue of being a separate entity and a potential adult.” Rothbard concludes that children have enforceable rights not to be physically abused, or coerced by their parents in certain ways. He also holds that children and adolescents have an inalienable right to emancipate themselves from their parents at their pleasure, and either grant custody to any other adults who will take them in, or else assume self-ownership by making a living independently. (Since his position both rules out the use of physical coercion to force children to work, and demands that children be allowed to leave neglectful or callous parents at any time, the comments on his position on child labor are simply irrelevant; there is no way under Rothbard’s system that parents can legitimately enforce a demand that a child work for pay.)

On the inalienability of the will, see Ethics of Liberty, chapter 19. Rothbard does not claim that workers can alienate their liberty even in part, or for the number of hours on the schedule. He denies that enforceable labor contracts are based on alienation of liberty at all. He explicitly argues that anyone who signs a labor contract can legitimately stop working at any time — because a mere promise to work is not an enforceable contract; and no-one can transfer title over their body and will — and cannot be forced to pay damages for the lost services that their employer expected. They can only be required to pay back (1) any advance wages they received for services that they did not end up performing, and (2) any “performance bond” that the worker agreed to put up as a conditional substitute if they declined to perform the service. On Rothbard’s theory workers alienate labor power at the moment of actual labor (by using their body and will to transform goods), but not liberty; they retain the right at any time to refuse to do any work, even if they earlier promised that they would do the work, and the boss has no enforceable claims on them whatever beyond the recovery of any money that was conditional on performance of the undone work.

Does the unconditional right to strike or quit guarantee that work will be meaningful, humane, rewarding, etc.? No, of course not, and particularly not under the conditions imposed by State-backed monopolies and anti-worker labor controls. But a bad job that you’re better off not leaving is not the same thing as enforceable slavery, and even if you do think it amounts to something you could call “slavery,” Rothbard makes it quite clear that he’s referring to the latter and not to the former when he discusses slavery and inalienability. Rothbard is clear about his target and adduces reasons, coherent with his thoroughgoing revision of contract theory, for his position. The claim that he is being muddy, inconsistent, or dishonest here is simply not defensible in light of the text.

You may think that some of his positions are wrong (I, for one, certainly do think that some of them are). You may even think that they are crazy. But you do have an obligation to honestly represent what his positions are, not to distort them beyond recognition in order to score polemical points against the top-hatted and monocled cartoons of your ideological opponents. The chief reason I view the Anarchist FAQ negatively is precisely because it engages in this kind of polemical misrepresentation in the frankly pointless attempt to write anarcho-capitalism out of the extension of the word “anarchism.” They would be on much stronger ground if their criticisms were based on a careful attempt to delineate the position and a systematic understanding of the arguments, rather than on the attempt to provide a set of social anarchist talking points against anarcho-capitalists.

Anonymous,

You need to read Section F.2.2 more carefully. They explicitly state that “Libertarian-capitalists support slavery”; they then mention some minarchist libertarians who accepted the legitimacy of enforcing slavery contracts (Nozick and Locke), and then claim that even though Rothbard explicitly rejects their view he has no consistent grounds for doing so. The reasons they give are roughly those I outline above, along with some egregious misrepresentations of Rothbard’s view on children (he did not hold that parents owned them as chattel, but rather that parents “own” children only as trustees for the children’s own eventual self-ownership). The point that you emphasize here (“if there is a demand for enforceable slavery contracts then it would produce a supply for them”) is only a subsidiary response to a point attributed to an anonymous group of “Some of the ‘anarcho’-capitalist type,” to the effect that even if slavery contracts were made, they would be difficult to enforce. The main lines of argument concerning Rothbard are the ones that I mentioned, not the one that you have emphasized here.

Of course it’s true that if there were widespread demands for the enforcement of slavery contracts then there might very well arise agencies that would meet those demands in return for payment. If there were widespread demands for murdering political opponents, or kidnapping, or piracy, then there might very well arise hitmen or gangs to meet those demands for pay. So what? In any society where enough people with enough power want to coerce other people — including in societies with communist, mutualist, or other economic forms, they will find a way to get away with it. But all such agencies are clearly criminal under Rothbard’s theory. Since there is no such thing as the “market freedom” to violate other people’s rights, it is no limitation on freedom to resist such agencies, and it is no restriction of the freedom of contract to treat their “contracts” as completely null and void.

The efforts to show that Rothbard would be inconsistent to reject them show no understanding whatsoever of his contract theory (which does not allow any compulsion of specific performance, and which does not regard mere promises to serve as enforceable), or of his position on the inalienability of the will (which rules out the possibility of selling oneself into slavery by making all contracts for labor service contingent on the contractee’s ongoing consent). They are, frankly, uncharitable to the point of being dishonest. Perhaps Rothbard is wrong about any number of these topics, but the authors have nowhere shown that his theory is inconsistent, or that it is “It is of course [!] simply embarassment” that prevents Rothbard from saying he endorses enforceable slavery contracts.

This is only one of many substantive problems with the discussion of anarcho-capitalist and individualist-anarchist views (mostly in Sections F and G, but also scattered throughout the rest of the FAQ). The complete lack of understanding of Rothbard’s theory of class, or his view of the history of mercantile capitalism (hint: he’s not unaware of the role of State intervention in creating the plutocratic class system), is particularly galling, just to take one example.

Kevin,

I agree that there is a lot of useful stuff in the FAQ and that a lot of useful work has gone into many of the sections. However, it happens to present a picture of individualist anarchism that has been substantially distorted for polemical purposes, and a “discussion” of anarcho-capitalism that basically amounts to a useless rant stitched together with superficial selective quotation. Since individualist anarchism is the form of anarchism I’m most interested in and sympathetic to, and since I think that the polemical assault on anarcho-capitalism, besides being uncharitable and regrettable in its own right, also infects the discussion of individualist anarchism, that tends to give me a pretty negative view of the Gestalt. I do appreciate the work that went into many of the other sections, however.

Sudha: Historical materials are not plasticine to be moulded at will by philosophers.

Who claimed that they were?

I don’t see anywhere that quasibill denies that the political process of enclosure involved calculations of “value” that were done in the way that you describe. What he denied is that such calculations actually told anyone something useful about value or rightful ownership or legitimate rights to the land.

An historian has every right to expect that the understandings of these concepts by decision-makers at the time — and not a philosopher’s contemporary reflections on the true nature of the concepts — will be used in trying to understand the decisions that they made. But she has no right to expect that the understanding of whose claims were legitimate, or whether compensation was appropriate to the loss of value, or whether the resulting allocation of land respected the rights of the people who had used or laid claim to it it up until the enclosure. Whether enclosure violated or respected the property rights of the people working the land at the time is something that you need to know historical details to judge accurately. But it is not something that the historical details alone determine; it requires independent reflection on the categories, such as rights, ownership, value, compensation, law, claim, etc., that are used to describe the situation.

There are many examples throughout history of people who believed false things about philosophical concepts such as value, right, ownership, law, consent, justice, etc., and many examples of those false beliefs being encoded in the formal law or the political proceedings of the states that they lived under. To take an example from a very different time, under the statutory law in the Southern United States the overwhelming majority of black human beings were treated as “a species of property” and members of the white political class in those states equated respect for private property rights with deference to slavery by the free states and by the federal government. They were, however, mistaken: there is no such thing as rightful ownership over another person and respect for genuine private property rights demanded (then as much as now) the nullification of slavers’ claims, not deference to them. It would be a mistake for contemporary libertarians to bend or twist historical facts in such a way as to ignore the nature of the claims that slavers made on behalf of their so-called “private property rights” in fellow human beings. It is, however, no sin to point out that slavers did not actually own their slaves, and were no different, from the moral standpoint, than any other band of kidnappers and pirates.

Of course, you might claim that Carson’s or Stromberg’s or somebody else’s understanding of the historical details goes beyond making judgments about the legitimacy of the claims; that they gloss over, or ignore, important historical facts about what claims were made, and by whom they were made, and how the claims were responded to. Fine, but the problem then has to do with some universal human failings (oversimplification and confirmation bias) and nothing at all to do with the proper relationship between historians and philosophers.

And yet, for all that labor, their material on anarcho-capitalism and individualist anarchism remains garbage.

Did you know that Tucker was opposed to private ownership of capital goods, that all forms of anarchism oppose the right to homestead through personal occupancy and labor, that Rothbardian defense associations exercise a territorial monopoly on the use of force, that Spooner’s defense of secessionism in No Treason and his remarks on class domination of the political apparatus demonstrate his differences from Rothbardian anarcho-capitalism, and that Rothbard “completely overlooks the role of the state in building and maintaining a capitalist economy in the West”? It’s all true: I read it on the Internet.

My favorite part may be the part where they assert that anarcho-capitalism as such supports enforceable slavery contracts. Their main line of evidence for this is the fact that Nozick and Locke, who aren’t anarcho-capitalists, argued in favor of it. Then they claim that Rothbard really supports enforceable slavery contracts too, even though he explicitly argues against it on inalienabilist grounds, because after all he thinks you can be forced to pay damages for breach of a labor contract under certain conditions. They apparently haven’t even read enough of the literature to find an actual anarcho-capitalist who actually does defend the enforceability of slavery contracts (e.g. Walter Block).

I have plenty of problems with what’s identified as “anarcho-capitalism,” and think that the points of difference between 19th century individualists and 20th century anarcho-capitalists are points worthy of emphasis and exploration. But this kind of hatchet job doesn’t do that. Their reading of the individualist anarchists is consistently selective and opportunistic. Their reading of the anarcho-capitalists is consistently uncharitable, superficial, and incomplete.

Kevin,

Thanks for the round-up, and for the analysis.

A couple of points, in reverse order.

First, I don’t think it’s safe to infer from what’s been posted that the lot was never developed by Horowitz and the other real estate investors who held it prior to the 1985 seizure. Maybe it was, but maybe it wasn’t. It was a vacant lot in 1994, when the farmers got to it, due to the city government’s decision to mothball the trash incinerator project that they’d intended to put up on the land. But there may very well have been something there prior to the mothballing of the project, which was bulldozed after the city seized the property. From what I can gather the formal method by which the city seized the land involved a condemnation order, which indicates that there might have been some structures on the land. I just don’t know yet; Dain and Brad are trying to find out what the property looked like before the city government sank its claws into it.

Second, I actually don’t see how the money that the city government gave Horowitz in the forced “sale” matters on the question of whether Horowitz has a claim to the land. Since the transfer was made under duress, throwing some money at Horowitz doesn’t invalidate whatever claims he has to recovery of the land itself, if he would prefer that to the money. It’s true that if you rob me of $1,000 in gold and then give me $400 back in silver, I’d only be entitled to recover $600 more back from you, not the full $1,000 in gold. But that’s because the value of the metals is monetary, and the money is fungible, so by giving me back $400 in silver you’ve effectively given me back part of what you stole from me in the first place. If you forced me at gunpoint to sell my car to you for $1,000, then I’m still fully entitled to recover the car itself, not just enough money to make up the difference between the forced sale price and whatever price I would have freely agreed to sell the car at. I’m entitled to recover the whole thing, because it never stopped being my property; it just stopped being in my immediate possession. Maybe I should return the money that you gave me for the car once I’ve recovered it, but I doubt that that’s true, either.

Third, I didn’t state my position clearly enough in the post and had to clarify it in the following comment thread. I don’t think that anything that the the government seizes automatically counts as unowned and suitable for homesteading. My position is that governments don’t have any property rights in anything, so if the city government claims title to the lot it is morally either unowned, or else owned by someone else. However, if the property was seized directly from one or more identifiable victims, then those victim have a legitimately enforceable claim to recovery of the property that was stolen from them.

That would tend to count in favor of Horowitz’s moral right to reclaim his former share of the land, as the right-Rothbardians have been arguing. (It would, of course, do nothing at all to justify his forcible seizure of the entire lot; there’s no excuse for treating that as anything but an act of privateering under the State’s colors.) But I think that other factors undermine the claim that he has to his former share of the land.

Specifically, while Horowitz may have a claim to recover compensation for the lost property from the city officials who stole it from him, he lost his claim to recover the property itself when the farmers began to cultivate it. That’s because the property had been abandoned for years when they came to it. Now, the abandonment resulted from the city’s seizure of the property and its enforcement of a piratical property title on it; since Horowitz et al. only “abandoned” their former property under duress, that does not affect his right to come back later and demand compensation for the lost property. But it does affect innocent third parties’ right to treat the land as open for homesteading. And once the farmers have established a claim on the abandoned property through years of transformational labor, Horowitz can no longer recover his property out from under them. Since he made no public effort to recover the land until nearly a decade after the farmers had begun to cultivate the land, his only legitimate claim, if he has any, is against the city officials. The farmers don’t owe him anything.

While I disagee with the position that Horowitz has a right to recover a share of the land by dint of rightful ownership, I don’t think it’s beyond the pale. I can’t say the same thing for the sorts of arguments advanced by the anti-farmers commenters at Hit and Run. The entire argument boils down to the claim that we are morally obligated to defend every arbitrary entitlement to a share of the loot that’s handed out by the State, because that’s how the pirates’ code says the booty should be divvied up. I guess that if people want to interpret “private property rights” as nothing more than that, they can; the piratical view of property rights has a well-established pedigree. But they ought to at least have the decency to stop calling themselves “libertarians” if they are going to advance that sort of argument, and come up with a new, more descriptive name for themselves, such as “Constitutionalists,” or “entitlementarians,” or perhaps “liberal Mussolinists.”

Kevin, thanks for this post; I think you’re right and that the lesson generalizes to a lot of other revolutions ruined by the later efforts of the self-styled “vanguard.”

On the other hand, it should be recognized that a lot of the acts of “economic warfare” that the Marxoids are using to explain Castro’s power grabs were actually perfectly legitimate. The U.S. government’s withdrawal of state-to-state foreign aid transfers, for example, ought to have been celebrated — the last thing that a revolution needs is the colonial patronage of the U.S. government. Similarly, the big oil companies’ refusal to refine Soviet oil in the refineries they built was (prima facie, at least; I don’t know how they came by those refineries) something they had a perfect right to do. It was stupid of them, to be sure, but that’s a separate issue. The embargo and sustained threats of open war were, of course, completely unjustified, and clearly count as warlike. But these came after, not before, the implementation of state capitalism and the opening wave of nationalization. Castro was baring his fangs of his own initiative, well before the U.S. government was doing anything other than withdrawing from patronage into neutrality (a move which ought to have been welcomed, not retaliated against).

Wild Pegasus: “#3 is going to cause problems with federal highways. It’s going to increase prices on a lot of basic goods.”

Since #3 entails the elimination of federal and state gas taxes, you need to balance whatever effects you think the tolls will have with the effects of correspondingly lower prices at the pump. In any case, though, “raising prices on basic goods” isn’t an argument against ending subsidies. If you can’t make the basic case that subsidies are economically destructive then no platform that’s libertarian at all is going to work well for you.

Wild Pegasus: “#5 is a sure-fire loser. People will rightly claim that the loss of patents and drug protections will lead to less research and slower advancement in healthcare. People want free healthcare, not bad healthcare.”

Then you point out that #5 will decimate drug prices (which is rather a hot issue these days), and you contest the idiot notion that gigantic pharmaceutial companies are the only or even the best way to do drug research.

Wild Pegasus: “#7 will lead to screams for tort reform. Juries are, generally, grossly incompetent at complex litigation. Finding norms will be difficult without the guidance of legislatures. And you’re right back to regulation.”

I don’t understand this argument. Are you claiming that legislatures or appointed bureaucrats are better at fairly settling complicated cases than juries? Using ex ante regulation rather than case-by-case judgment, no less? Or are you just claiming that people blame juries while not holding regulators to the same standards?

If it’s the former, why are you claiming that? If it’s the latter, why isn’t the solution to educate people about the failings of bureaucrats and legislators?

Kevin,

How about something on the prison-industrial complex? Or, for that matter, the good old military-industrial complex?

Also, broadly speaking, do you think that the sort of alliance you envision should only focus on undermining state capitalism, or do you think that you’re just fleshing out the point on state capitalism that would be part of a broader set of principles for action? After all, I can think of a number of other common points (abortion on demand, abolishing the death penalty, decriminalizing prostitution, a principled anti-war/anti-imperial stance, etc.) that would seem like obvious candidates for a shared platform between left Libertarians, anti-statist Greens, and anti-statist Democrats.

Josh: For open heart surgery, I lean more toward the licencing side.

Licensing by whom?

If you just mean that you favor surgeons being credentialed by medical experts, there’s already a system for that (the MD) without the further intervention of a licensing bureaucracy.

If you mean that you favor surgeons being licensed by the government over and above the community standards existing already in the medical field, then I don’t know where the government (or for that matter privatized defense agencies) would get the knowledge, the virtue, or the right to impose licensing schemes above and beyond the voluntary forms of credentialing that exist within the medical community.

In either case, I think the case under question isn’t even anywhere near a gray area. Ms. Wightman is a working counselor who does talk therapy for willing patients (not surgery or even the prescription of drugs). I don’t think that there’s even a prima facie plausible case for demanding a formalized licensing system here (certainly not imposing byzantine regulations about whether you can call your business “psychological” or merely “psychotherapeutic”!)