Anonymous: I don't consider them to be an alliance -- or even an *attempted* alliance --

An alliance with whom? It's true that ALL is not an attempted alliance with anarcho-communists; the intent was not to create yet another group aimed at pan-Anarchist alliance. There are already a lot of those. ALL is an alliance of left-wing market anarchists (mutualists, individualists, agorists, et al.) That's not because we hate allying with anarcho-communists; it's because there are other forums and organizations (of which some of us are also members) better suited to that particular purpose.

Anonymous: due to their refusal to embrace anarcho-communists with open arms

I'm not sure what this means. A lot of us are very friendly with and have good working relationships with anarcho-communists (at least, I do). Those working relationships are not generally conducted under the banner of ALL. But so? Do you see a lot of ALLies sitting around complaining that we're not embraced with open arms on NEFAC's website? I figure people have lots of groups and networks they're part of, each of them with different focuses.

Lorraine: Their central premises are the same as those of the libertarian rightists; NAP etc.

I personally happen to believe in a very robust version of the Non-Aggression Principle (roughly, because I think that aggression is a form of hierarchy, and as an Anarchist I reject it absolutely).

But not everyone involved with ALL agrees with that. (William Gillis, for example, is very critical of the NAP, because he's very critical of natural-rights based approaches to ethics in general.) Nor, for that matter, do all libertarian rightists. (The right-wing Rothbardians and the Randians believe in it; a lot of other factions don't believe in it, and prefer other -- e.g. Hayekian, or utilitarian, or... -- approaches.)

TokyoTom,

I didn’t miss it. I’m familiar with that line of argument for condemning the corporate form per se. I agree with you that government-granted limited liability is a form of illegitimate privilege. I don’t know whether or not that’s enough to indict the corporate form per se as a creature of state privilege — that probably depends, in part, on which features of a business you take to be essential to making up “the corporate form.”

But my point above was simply that one sort of argument against the corporate form will not do — that the existence of “government-supported monopoly corporations or government-created captive markets for large corporations” does not, just by itself, demonstrate that the corporate form itself is illegitimate or that it would be unsustainable in a freed society. (The reason I pointed out that this sort of argument will not do is in order to illustrate, by means of analogy, what’s wrong with a parallel argument sometimes made against the legitimacy of workers’ unions.) Anyway, maybe the corporate form is illegitimate per se, or maybe it will be per se unsustainable in a freed society, but if so I think you need to give another kind of argument (like the argument you’ve alluded to, against government-imposed limited liability) in order to demonstrate that.

... I agree with you that Tucker's later rejection of natural rights was a mistake. In this I follow Spooner and the other natural lawyers in the Liberty

... Maybe not, but my position is certainly not that every possible normative aspect of the work is relevant to aesthetic evaluation. A book may be useful as a

... No doubt both. The tale grew in the telling beyond what I originally anticipated. But I still consider it to have been "brief and incomplete" in the sense

... I object to the hegemony of the Hunan Condition in literature. I insist on literature that represents the food Szechuan establishments! ... I don't either!

When I talk about unions, mutual aid associon, co-ops, or similar organizations, I think of them as a strategy for obtaining outcomes which are a negotiated compromise between the Reality of the Agora and the interests of flesh-and-blood human beings.

Well, O.K., I agree with you about that. I don’t think that it’s something special about unions, mutual aid associations, or co-ops: every freely-negotiated market transaction involves some means or another of trying to balance flesh-and-blood interests against the limitations of the social and natural world. These kind of grassroots organization are often the best way to do that, although they are not the only way. (There are lots of ways to accomplish that kind of thing through informal networks and relationships of love or solidarity, apart from formally organized institutions. On the other hand, sometimes there are also benefits to dealing with a situation impersonally. Etc.) In any case, I certainly think that unions, mutual aid associations, and co-ops are all vital institutions that are part of the process of discovering and negotiating humane outcomes in a free society.

I think Tucker agrees with you too. He was simply more interested in a different question — the question of ensuring the framework of freedom, without saying as much about the details of organization within the scope of that freedom (besides his singular interest in the technicalities of mutual banking and credit). Maybe he was wrong about that; I’m inclined to think that it made him miss some important points, but also freed him up to see some other important points.

Unions are supposed to be anticompetitive. That is the whole point. Co-ops are supposed to be an alternative to competition.

Well, that depends on what you mean by “competition,” doesn’t it, and who you take to be competing? Unions and co-ops are aimed at redirecting energy away from one form of competition (the scramble for artificially scarce access to capital and wages). Not necessarily to eradicate all forms of competition from society. I imagine there will still be chess tournaments in a free and equal society; or if there won’t be, it won’t be because unions have any special concern with the matter. More seriously, there may also be open processes of discovery for people to determine who can make the best use of scarce natural resources, which come to consensus, not by means of ensuring conformity before-the-fact, but rather by means of letting a lot of people have at it and see whose projects work out to be the best and most sustainable But that is all Tucker means by economic competition: the opening up of production and social relationships to wide-ranging experimentation. The point actually is not cooperation-within-competition; it’s competition as a means of reconciling interests, coming to social consensus through experimentation and open debate, ultimately competition within, and as a means to, discovery and cooperation.

Anarcho:

Tucker, unlike Proudhon, was not particularly interested in co-operatives ….

Depends on what you mean by “co-operatives,” I suppose. Tucker’s central economic proposal was the creation of a Mutual Bank, which was supposed to be a credit cooperative owned and operated by the people using it Tucker was sympathetic to, but generally not much interested in, the cooperative movement outside of the realm of banking, but to describe this as a difference between American and European mutualism would make sense only if Tucker were the only American mutualist, or if most American mutualists shared his views. But Tucker’s studied disinterest was in part a reaction against the earlier American mutualists (e.g. Warren), who could hardly talk about anything other than forming co-ops and intentional communities. Tucker’s views on the matter were also different from those of, e.g., Ingalls, Lum, Labadie, and not to mention contemporary American mutualists like Shawn, Kevin, et al.

And I should also note that Proudhon, unlike Tucker, recognised the negative effects of competition ….

Well, he also considered competition to be among “the principal forms of activity” of the “organization, which is as essential to society as it is incompatible with the present system.” Of course, he recognizes that it’s potentially dangerous. (For Proudhon, just about everything is potentially dangerous.) I don’t know if that’s all you meant to say, or if you meant to portray his view as more resolutely negative than just that. If the former, I agree; if the latter, I don’t.

… and argued for socio-economic institutions (such as the agro-industrial federation) to stop mutualism descending back into capitalism.

Seems to me that the Mutual Bank, and defense associations limiting themselves to occupancy-and-use rules for land tenure, are both pretty clearly intended as social institutions to prevent a free market economy from being captured by usury.

Proudhon was in favour of markets he was not into free markets and stated there was a need to regulate them by mutualist institutions, unlike Tucker.

I honestly have no idea what you mean by this. If the suggestion is that the kind of mutualist institutions Proudhon suggested would “regulate” markets in such a way as to make them something other than “free markets,” then it seems to me you’re using “free markets” in a peculiar way that has nothing to do with how either Tucker or contemporary market Anarchists use the term. Tucker talks all the time about the reorganization of credit and commerce; like Proudhon, he wanted to accomplish this through economic means rather than by means of laws — although the two differed on the sorts of economic means that needed to be employed. The notion is certainly not that if you remove the monopolies, the problems of usury will simply vanish of their own accord; it’s that the elimination of the monopolies will free people up to devise specific institutions that Tucker recommended as ways of dissolving usury. When he talks about a laissez-faire being the universal rule, he certainly does not mean a market which is free of unions, mutual aid associations, co-ops, or other mutualist institutions! He means a market free of government and legal coercion. Tucker is less emphatic than Proudhon is about what specific institutions he’d like to see take the leading role in such a society — he tends to suggest that whatever institutions take the lead, it will be the ones that best realize equity for workers. But given everything that he says about the organization of markets through mutual credit, it’s hard for me to figure out how he would be proposing markets that are simply “unregulated,” if “regulation” is now being used in a sense that may include not only political coercion but also consensual economic coordination of the kind Proudhon advocates.

... Which was oversimplified, or simply misstated, by Juan's comments about libertarianism and classical liberalism. Anyway, under almost all of these

... Which standard usage is that? My point is that there have been several. I wasn't denying that yours (whatever it may be) is one such; I was pointing out