Jeffrey,

I look forward to the opportunity to read the book.

I would be interested to know to what extent Garret’s book portrays the local Wobblies as being directly involved in the Non-Partisan League’s activities. After all, it was the N.P.L., not the I.W.W. (which was not an electoral party) which won a majority in the legislature and pushed through the taxes, government-operated mills and banks, etc.

The articles that you cite don’t say much about active collaboration between the two on these kind of political measures, and neither does the (admittedly scattered) reading I’ve done on the topic elsewhere. The first article you link to describes an effort by I.W.W. members to rescue some of their comrades from a state jail, and has nothing in particular to do with the NPL, as far as I can see. The second article details some abortive plans for the agricultural department of the I.W.W. (A.I.W.U. 110) to make a private contract with farmers in the N.P.L., to the effect that the farmers in the N.P.L. would only hire A.I.W.U. workers, and the A.I.W.U. workers would only work for N.P.L. farmers. This is of course a perfectly legitimate labor contract between two independent parties, and disingenuously portrayed as “amalgamation” by government lawyers, who were in the process of prosecuting over a hundred Wobs for the political crime of organized opposition to St. Woodrow’s Holy War. In order to sex up their tyrannical prosecution, they had good reason for trying to portray the I.W.W. as more involved in political scheming than it actually was.

The N.P.L. has often been described as “sympathetic” to the I.W.W., compared with other state governments in the West, but that’s mainly used to mean that the N.P.L. was less aggressive than other state governments about punching their heads and locking them in cages for public speeches.

This isn’t to say that there wasn’t actual collaboration between some of the Wobblies in North Dakota and the state socialists in the N.P.L., beyond the issue of private labor contracts. There may have been; I haven’t read enough on the topic to say definitively. But the materials you cite here certainly don’t bolster my confidence that the North Dakota Wobblies are being fairly portrayed.

Jeffrey Tucker: For those who don’t know, the I.W.W. was the American movement of Reds – hardcore communists of the pure Stalin variety.

This contains several different misrepresentations of the Industrial Workers of the World.

The I.W.W., although much reduced in membership, still exists. You can find them on the web at iww.org. I am am a dues-paying member, as are several other libertarians I could name.

The I.W.W. neither were nor are “hardcore communists.” There were communists who became members of the I.W.W., most of whom left for Daniel De Leon’s Socialist Labor Party within a few years, or for the Communist Party of the U.S.A. some years later. But the economic ideas promoted by the union itself are decentralist and syndicalist, and disavow state confiscation of the means of production. (Incidentally, if you check up on von Mises’s exchanges with Polanyi et al. during the socialist calculation debate, you’ll find that he concedes that rational calculation, while not possible under state socialism, is possible under syndicalism.)

The I.W.W. certainly neither were nor are Stalinists. When the I.W.W. was founded in 1905, Koba was still snitching for the Okhrana back in Georgia. In part because of the many anarchists in their ranks, and in part because of the Stalinist CPUSA’s repeated attempts to take control of U.S. labor unions for its own purposes, the I.W.W. largely detested Stalinism and Stalinists. The Industrial Worker ran anti-CPUSA cartoons, including one from the 1940s in which Communist operatives were depicted as a rat studying a union rule-book.

eric lansing: sure sounds like communism to me, don’t ya think?

No, it doesn’t.

Communism is the belief that all forms of private property, at least in the so-called “means of production,” should be abolished in favor of collective ownership, either by the State or by some central organization putatively representing the workers.

Communists might agree with the selections from the Preamble that you quote, but so would many others, including many anarchists. The Preamble does not specify that the means of production should be owned collectively by the whole community, or revolutionary expropriation by a “workers’ state,” or anything of the sort. Not surprisingly; the I.W.W. rejected those approaches in favor of industrial organizing, direct action, the general strike, and “forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.”

Peter:

I don’t know how to handle the hypothetical case where no negotiated resolution is possible (both parties would be in the wrong), but it’s not a credible scenario.

Do you think that Ralph Horowitz is similarly obliged to work out a negotiated resolution with the urban farmers, rather than simply having them bodily removed from the property and bulldozing their gardens?

Peter,

I’m not sure I understand your claim about Wal-Mart’s use of seized land. If, after negotiations, Wal-Mart refuses to clear off the land, do the homeowners (or whoever) then have a right to evict them by force, knock down the building, etc.? I.e., are you suggesting negotiations merely as a means to avoid disproportionate violence, or are you suggesting that Wal-Mart has some deeper claim not to simply be forced off the land at the pleasure of the people it was seized from?

Paul,

Do you think that occupancy and transformation of the land has no impact on the former possessor’s rights to recover it? What if (unlike Wal-Mart, in most cases) the person occupying and using the land is someone who simply came to it long after it had been taken, rather than having colluded with the city government in the process of getting it stolen?

Also, do you think that there is any amount of time that could pass or anything that either the current possessor or the former possessor could do, that would count against the former possessor’s right to recover the specific property that she lost (rather than just recovering compensation from the aggressors for the lost property)? E.g. could the homeowners forcibly recover the land 20, 30, 40 years later? From anybody who happened to be on it, if Wal-Mart later closed down and “sold” to someone else? Etc.?

I don’t think your position is crazy, but I’m inclined to doubt that it’s true, and I’m interested to know what limits, if any, there are on it.

Vince,

Here’s something that puzzles me about your position as stated. If Horowitz and the farmers BOTH have a rightful claim to the property, then by what right can Horowitz forcibly exclude them from it (bodily removing them from the land, bulldozing the gardens, etc.)? Horowitz has a right to evict trespassers from his property, but if the farmers have a moral claim to the land then they are not trespassers, and he does not have a right to evict rightful owners from their own property, does he?

anon e mouse,

They have been trying to pay off Horowitz for the land, who initially seemed receptive, but is now refusing to sell, apparently out of spite at the protestors.

(Of course, if the lot belonged to him he’d have a perfect right to refuse to sell to anyone he didn’t care to sell to, for any reason that he pleased. But I don’t think that the lot does belong to him, and so any money paid to him would morally count only as a ransom, not as a purchase. In which case he not only tried to ransom property that didn’t belong to him, but also decided to be petulant about it, too.)

Vince: If not for the illegitimate force of government, Horowitz, et al would not have had their homestead terminated. Anything that occurs as a result of the illegitimate action should be null and void. The property should revert to the original homesteader.

Anything at all? No matter how long the property has remained abandoned and no matter what Horowitz himself did with respect to it?

Horowitz abandoned his claim to his share of the plot for 15 years before he took the city to court — not claiming that the land had belonged to him all along (which would have justified only a share of the land being returned to him without compensation to the city government, NOT the piratical “sale” of the entire property in return for a pay-off), but rather that the city was the owner of the land for the last 15 years but was under a contractual obligation to sell it to him.

Whatever imaginary quasi-Rothbardian defense you might be able to put in Horowitz’s mouth for his claim over a parcel of the land, he IS NOT making that claim in fact. His public actions constitute a quitclaim of his claim on his share of the land to the city government from 1985-2003, and thus an abandonment of a direct claim to the property. The urban farmers were thus justified in treating the land as abandoned property, available for homsteading and transforming by personal occupancy and labor. If Horowitz changes his mind NOW, and starts demanding compensation for an illegitimate seizure in 1985 (rather than asserting the non-existent rights that derive from a piratical “sale”) then he has a right to demand restitution from government officials but no right to take even his share of the land, let alone the WHOLE LOT, out from under farmers who homesteaded it while it was left abandoned by him and the other former owners of the land.

Here are a couple of questions that may help us to break out of the circle into which the conversation has fallen.

1. As it happens, there are a number of people who lived or had businesses on land that was seized by their city government and then turned over to Wal-Mart, who then set up stores and parking lots on it. Are you claiming that the homeowners or business owners victimized by the land seizure have a right to come in 15 years after abandoning the land to the city government, forcibly seize control of the plot on which the Wal-Mart sits, blow up the store and tear up the parking lot, and then take over control of the plot, after more than a decade of continuous operation? I don’t think this is true even of cases where the store directly colluded with the city government in order to make the initial theft — let alone of cases where the new occupant played no role in the theft, and only came along years after the theft had been made.

2. Are you claiming that Horowitz has a just claim to seize the ENTIRE farm, as he did, or only that he has a claim to seize a parcel of it equivalent to his share of the land?

2a. If the latter, what basis could he have for seizing the land that never belonged to him before the seizure, which would not provide just as good a basis for the farmers claiming rightful ownership of ALL the land, including Horowitz’s share?

2b. If the former, then which parcel of the land has he got a right to claim? And do you think that there is ANY length of time that Horowitz could have left the land unused, or ANY public actions he could have taken, which would constitute abandonment of the property for the purposes of future homesteaders? If so, how long and what are they?

M. E. Hoffer,

They do not want the land to be “undeveloped.” They want their own development of it (viz., productive gardens that they’d been raising for 14 years, and which fed about 350 families) not to be bulldozed. As it happens, they have been trying to raise money to pay off Horowitz for the land. It remains to be seen whether they’ll be able to meet his asking price (which he jacked up at the last minute after they managed to meet his initial price through some foundation grants).

However, since Horowitz has no moral claim to the land, this money should at the most be considered a ransom, not a payment for something that Horowitz owns.

Jim,

As I mentioned in my article, Horowitz did not own all of the land that the city “sold” him. The real estate investment firm in which he was a partner owned about 80% of the lot. So even if he had a right to demand the land itself back, he would at the most have a claim to a fraction of that 80%, not to the entire lot. Sources such as the L.A. Times which portray Horowitz as the original owner of the land prior to the 1985 government theft of it are either ignorant of the details or else lying.

Vince,

I’m not disputing that the government recognizes Horowitz and not the farmers as entitled to the land. I just don’t care.

The details of government law in this matter are irrelevant as anything other than historical trivia; from the standpoint of justice they are no different from the details of a case under pirates’ codes or highwaymen’s compacts.

Horowitz has a right to demand restitution for the land theft in 1985 but at this point he does not have any right to demand even his share of the land back, let alone land that he never owned in the first place. He has a moral right to demand restitution from the city officials who stole the land from him, but no right to recover the specific land now that it has been homesteaded and transformed by other people (the farmers, not the city gov’t) for over a decade. It is as if I had discovered a cache of pirates’ loot, and then used it to buy myself a car; and then you, rather than seeking restitution from the pirates who stole it from you, called in the police to repossess my car.

Jim,

(1) Horowitz doesn’t have any claim to the entire lot, but rather only to a share of it, as mentioned before.

(2) Whatever Horowitz’s “intentions” were, he had abandoned the property for sixteen years before taking the city to court in order to force them to “sell” it to him in 2001. Whatever justifications he could, in theory, have given for his demands, his actual public actions indicate that he had no effective intentions to use the land for anything from 1985-2003 because he did not consider himself the owner of the land. His argument is not that he rightfully owned the land all along, but rather that he now owns it because the city “sold” it to him as (he holds) they were obligated to do under terms set down during the eminent domain seizure.

The land was abandoned property in 1994 when the farmers homesteaded it. The city never had any rights to it, of course, and at the time Horowitz and the other owners had at that point effectively quitclaimed their ownership of it for nine years. If the farmers had never showed up and transformed the land, Horowitz would have a perfect right to take his share of the land back as the restitution for the theft from him. But since they did, and since it was abandoned at the time, it now rightly belongs to them, and his only legitimate claim is against the city officials who took it from him twenty years ago.

jj:

Want to know another ‘war’ that cannot be won, Mr Potts? The war against crime. Murders will always happen. Robberies will always occur. But we fight against them as much as we are able.

… and it’s precisely for that reason that those sorts of martial metaphors are as inappropriate for ordinary violent crime as they are for efforts to stop terrorism.

What you’re talking about is the system of institutions and policies that we have tried to develop to provide a system of criminal justice. Not a military machine. Comparing police work to war is a sure recipe for overbearing, careless, invasive police work that’s dangerous to “civilians” (that is, you and me).