Comments Elsewhere

Me:

I personally am happy enough to sign on for Tucker's (explicitly pro-market, anti-state) understanding of "socialism."

vive la insurrection:

The results of enforcing such a thing would lead to catastrophic conclusions.  I don't see what there is to be happy about, other than leftism for leftism sake.

Autolykos:

Thank you for the kind welcome.

If I may, I'd like to present a hypothetical situation to you. Suppose that there's a factory owned by a single individual. He then offers to pay some people from the surrounding area to use the machines in his factory to make things. Would you call the factory owner a "boss"?

I don't know, from the description you gave me. Probably? But it depends on what you have in mind. I think it matters a lot how the pay and the conditions of labor are determined, and that it matters at least as much, probably more, how much the people being paid to work with the machines in the factory are dependent on keeping up that specific relationship with the owner to make their living, i.e., how much they are able to, and how much they actually do, have viable alternative sources of support.

So for example if people are dropping in to the factory without much of a binding obligation over time, are choosing it as just one among a broad range of options for their day-to-day livelihood, and take home some pay for their time or output while they are there, then sure, that sounds a lot more like some horizontal and really fairly casual trade or contract-labor relationships than like bosses and their employees. If they work mainly or only at the factory, over the long term and in an open-ended arrangement, but their "pay" for working their involves not just cash but for example gaining significant shares of ownership in or residual profits from the factory that they are working in then that is also hard to see as a simple boss-employee relationship, although for different reasons (in this case because the more the "employee" is employed in the factory, the more they become a partner rather than a hireling of the owner). Now if you are imagining that they will have a long-term, open-ended, binding arrangement with the owner, can be summoned to report more or less at the owner's will, are mostly or exclusively dependent on keeping that particular job in order to make a living rather than having significant alternative sources of support, etc., then that is starting to sound more like a boss-employee relationship.

Of course all of this is going to be really highly dependent on a lot of specific details. It's easy for something to be a causal contract labor arrangement in name while really being a pretty narrowly confined boss-employee relationship in fact; and it's possible for things that are formally set out as employer-employee relationships to really functionally work out more like a partnership than like employment. In that kind of case I'm more interested in the way the relationship works out de facto than I am in the name that it is called by.

 

Freedom4Me73986:

Bullshit. Employer-employee relationships exist VOLUNTARILY. Rich and poor have always existed and will always exist

Well, so now I know that you believe that. But I don't know what your argument for it is.

In any case, I do think that, in the current economic landscape, there are a number of important political privileges granted to large corporate employers, and a number of impoverishing and restricting political burdens inflicted on working-class folks. Do you disagree with that claim? If so, why? If not, then we've got to consider what might change if the privileges and the burdens were removed.

And if I think that workers are often forced into depending on an employment relationship in order to make a living, largely as the downstream social result of that set of subsidizing privileges and impoverishing burdens, then that does imply that, ceteris paribus, were the privileges and the burdens to be abolished, then you'd tend, on the margin, to see fewer workers entering into employer-employee relationships. Maybe you disagree with this. But even if so, that is obviously not exactly the same thing as some kind of utopian belief that everybody is equally smart or equally stupid, or that nobody would ever be poor in a freed market.

The real question here is (1) what survival strategies poor people have available to them and which are foreclosed as a result of political pressure; (2) how much the "rich" would be able to find poor workers willing to work for them on conventional wage-labor terms, when fixed costs of living are much lower and when a much richer set of alternative livelihoods are available outside of the corporate economy; and (3) how often ordinary people's flashes of insight or cleverness is frustrated by state-imposed barriers to entry, or how often rich people's stupidities are protected from market consequences by politically protected markets, bailouts, and the suppression of competition.

b/c of the division of labor

O.K. But I don't reject the division of labor, you know. What I think is that in freer markets labor would be divided along different lines from the way it is currently divided. (A co-op of course is a division of labor; the fact that the workers participate in management decisions hardly means that everybody in the shop is doing the same damned thing.)

Also are u going to take a crack at the questions ive asked?

I was in the midst of typing answers to them at apparently the same time as you were firing off this response. Patience, please.

1. and 2. Yes and yes. See here. I happen to be a natural-rightser, and in fact one of a rather fanatical and absolutist kind. Roderick Long is also, for whatever that is worth. (There are left-libertarians who are not natural-rightsers, but of course there are also right-libertarians -- David Friedman, for example -- who are not. The issue is more or less orthogonal to the left-lib/right-lib divide.)

3. I don't know exactly what you mean by that. I wouldn't call myself a "voluntaryist" as that term was used e.g. by Wendy McElroy or Carl Watner, and I wouldn't call myself a "voluntaryist" as that term seems mostly to be used today within the movement. Not because I am in favor of involuntary social relationships, but rather because when I've encountered the term it usually seems to come along with a pretty hefty package of additional beliefs about ideal libertarian social and political strategy (for example a fairly "thin," anything-that's-peaceful specification of what social or cultural goals libertarians might care or might not care about advancing through non-coercive means). And while I'm happy to get as fire-breathing and radical as they are about defending the principle of consensuality in all social relationships, there is a lot in the package of additional beliefs that I am not necessarily interested in signing on for.

4. Sure; given that everyone involved consents to the arrangement, in my view you should be "allowed" to do whatever you want without de jure restriction. However, I have some reasons for thinking that you might have more trouble than you expect to finding a market for your wares -- workers may not be interested in buying the kind of arrangement that you are selling.

5. Yes. Again, no de jure restrictions. However, I think that both natural and social factors would tend to produce some quite stringent de facto restrictions on the kinds of scale that you're likely to be able to maintain without aggression, privilege, state subsidy, or insulation from competition.

6. Well, that's not really a question I can pot the answer to in a short forum post or even a long one. I could say that I think it both more efficiently satisfies consumer preferences and also that there are independent ethical reasons to favor it, but my reasons for that have to do with a lot of threads of argument about a number of related, but importantly distinct, topics. Anyway, if you want a broad overview of some of the reasons I have for taking the approach that I do, the Liberty, Equality, Solidarity essay that I linked above may help as a starting point. And so might Bits & Pieces on Free-Market Anti-Capitalism.

7. Not as I understand it. I am an individualist Anarchist.

I do defend (and other left-wing market Anarchists also do defend) some economic or social arrangements that other libertarians have denounced as "collectivist" -- for example, the occupation and reclamation of abandoned faciltiies by squatters and urban homesteaders; voluntary unionism; cooperatively-managed worker-owned shops; and consensual communal ownership of open commons, without the involvement or management of the state. But the reason that I defend these things is because I think the charges of "collectivism" are in fact false, and the way I defend them is generally by trying to show, if I can, how they are really quite compatible with a radical interpretation of individual sovereignty and equal liberty. Maybe I'm wrong about that, of course, but if so, it is in the way that anyone can be wrong about the downstream applications of their fundamental principles.

 

Freedom4Me73986:

Left-libertarians are mostly socialists.

Maybe. Or maybe not. As I've said, I personally am happy enough to sign on for Tucker's (explicitly pro-market, anti-state) understanding of "socialism." Provided that in context it's understood that that's what I mean, or the conversation will easily turn to explaining that that's what I mean. But I know a lot of left-libertarians and, anecdotally speaking, I know a number of left-libertarians (such as Kevin Carson) who agree with me on that; and a number of left-libertarians (such as Roderick Long, Tom Knapp, or I think also Sheldon Richman) who do not agree with me on that, and do not want to use the term -- for reasons that I find understandable, even if I disagree with them. Beyond anecdotes, I really have no idea which group is in the numerical majority; I haven't made any attempt at polling active left-libertarians about this (and I expect you haven't either).

Charles even admitted to being ... anti-capitalist/anti-boss/anti-property rights.

I "admitted," or rather, happily agreed to, two of these things. Not to three of them. You may of course think that being anti-capitalist, anti-boss, and anti-property rights all naturally go along with each other as a matter of course. (That's a common enough belief, both for people who are anti- and for people who are pro-.) But if you're going to take a look at what I've admitted or agreed to, you should keep in mind that I don't agree that they do.

There are kinds of anti-capitalism (take Marx's--please!) which are of course anti-property rights (generally because they believe that if you have property rights you are always therefore naturally going to get bosses and concentrations of ownership in the hands of capitalists). But there have also been kinds of anti-capitalism, older and (I would argue) more radical than Marx's which do not think that (see for example Proudhon, Tucker, Dyer Lum, Voltairine DeCleyre, or many of the other historical writers who appear in Markets Not Capitalism) -- who argue, quite on the contrary, that bosses and corporate ownership persist largely because of systematic governmentalist assaults on free competition and on the property rights of workers. (So that the best way to get an economy without bossing and with diffuse rather than concentrated ownership is to get rid of all government barriers to competition and all government restrictions on poor people's property rights.) You may of course disagree with this approach, but it is mine, and it pretty directly affects the issue of whether the positions on the left side of the forward slashes are really the same as the positions on the right side.

.500NE:

Or system here in the U.S. is certainly free enough that a large groups can get together and do the co-op thing.

Well, I see that you are asserting this. But I do not see your argument for it. And my main response is simply to deny that the claim is true -- political economy in the U.S. is not really free enough that you can get any kind of useful competitive test to tell you what might become of co-op business models in a truly freed market.

Now if you mean that the system in the U.S. "free enough" in the sense that there are not any laws which forbid co-ops from existing, then sure, that is true, but I hardly think that's the only thing that you need to keep track of. Often the effects that government has on the economy have little to do with what it bans outright or what it mandates outright, but rather with what it subsidizes, what it taxes, and the ripple effects of the ways in which it reshapes certain key markets, e.g. for money, credit, land, insurance, etc. Actually-existing co-ops tend to face a lot of consistent practical problems that are related to a few key issues -- well-entrenched, often subsidized competition from big incumbents; the difficulty of getting access to capital, either for initial capitalization or for later expansion, relative to their conventionally capitalist-owned competitors; the large scale and volume that are necessary to cover the initial costs of starting up and the fixed costs of staying in business. There's a lot of stuff to talk about here, some of which we could dig into and some of which we could probably only get at in outline without some pretty serious digging into empirical research and number-crunching. But briefly what I'd want to say is that none of these common pain points is really innocent of, or independent of, government privileges or industrial policy. Governments have many policies which systematically favor large incumbents over small startups of any kind; which artificially juice credit to big businesses and artificially stabilize the operation of the kinds of financial markets that most favor corporate-owned over worker-owned businesses; which massively increase the fixed costs of starting or maintaining a business, in ways that most hurt small community-dependent operations like co-ops; etc.

There is of course a lot of fine-grained points to argue about here, and I'm mostly outlining my view rather than giving you the defense of it, but for the defense I would largely point you to the essays in, e.g., Markets Not Capitalism.

 

.500NE:

There is no doubt that at least in Argentina that the workers can run a factory once they have one to run. The real question is where did they get the factory?

That is a worthwhile question to ask. I think that there is an answer to the question, which we can discuss if you want. (*) And an interesting conversation to be had around it. But that question is not the question I was answering by pointing to that book. The question I was answering was Freedom4Me73986's question, "So how does a 'bossless' factory work if there's over 100 workers?" And if that's intended to be a question about day-to-day operations, as it seems to be, then I think obviously one way to answer it is to take a look at some of the actually existing working factors that have over 100 workers and no boss. Even if there are other questions to answer about, say, the justice or the wisdom of the process that led to them getting the factory in the first place.

If you want to change the subject from that question to an interesting, but distinct question, I'm happy to talk about that too, but I hope you'll allow that it's fair for me to try to answer first the question that was originally put to me.

I find it ironic that the workers movement in the book you site is called 'The Take'

I don't know that this matters, particularly, but just for reference, I think you misunderstood the content on the page I was pointing to. The "workers movement" that coalesced from the reclaimed factories is not called "The Take." The Take is a documentary film that Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis made about Argentina, which is mostly about the worker-run factories but also about some other things. The movement that the film and the book help to document is usually called autogestión (meaning roughly "self-management") or more broadly as an aspect of autonomismo.

is folding / stapling / bundling booklets for May’s Market Anarchy / Anarchist Classics shipment. This month: Darian Worden’s column on Distributed Social Power, and Proudhon’s 1849 essay on The State: Its Nature, Object, and Destiny (as translated by Benj. R. Tucker and serialized in Liberty).

John James:

I would feel like I had all the information about them I needed...and go talk to someone else.

I don't doubt that you would, bro. Fortunately not everyone is as incurious as you are, or as willing to press on with invincible ignorance before making the minimal effort it would take to try to understand others on their own terms. In any case, while I'm happy to explain the reasons why I pick the names I pick, you may want to keep in mind that convincing you personally of the feasibility of anticapitalism on libetarian terms is not actually very high on my list of reasons. I'm largely concerned with convincing a rather different group of people of a rather different conclusion.

As for "dictionary definitions," they don't actually say what you seem to think that they say, and if they did, I would hardly take that as the end of the story (any more than I take their usually idiotic definitions of e.g. "anarchy" as the end of the story about whether or not I should call myself an Anarchist). Perhaps this here and this also  will help, and perhaps this and that will. Or perhaps not.

 

Freedom4Me73986:

So how does a "bossless" factory work if there's over 100 workers? How can that many people all make decisions w/o a boss?

Well, I dunno. I guess if you really want to know the answer to this question, and don't just intend it as an apriori "Gotcha!" about what you are already sure must be unworkable, then probably the best thing to do is to ask some of the people who already work in bossless factories with over 100 workers. There are a number of interviews in books like this one: <http://www.amazon.com/Sin-Patr%C3%B3n-Argentinas-Worker-Run-Factories/dp/1931859434>. My impression is that it is typically done with a combination of temporary, constantly-rotating responsibilities, a lot of local initiative on the shop floor, and regular big group meetings for making decisions as a group. Maybe this is an inefficient way to do things. On the other hand it seems to be working for the people who are doing it. In any case, I am quite sure that the claim that "Without [a boss] nothing would get done" is empirically falsifiable, and has in fact been falsified. Spontaneous orders are of course possible without central direction.

But in any case suppose that it turned out to be true -- I'm not committed to this claim, but I don't reject it out of hand either -- that on the whole, in a maximally freed market, the complexity and the costs of keeping everyone communicating with everyone else would tend to hobble the workability of big factories without bosses. That might be a reason to think that there will be more bosses in a freed market than I think there will be. But it might just as well be a reason to think: Well, then there will be smaller factories. And if we turn out to have smaller factories, with their activities largely coordinated by trade and contract rather than by bureaucratic management, I don't see how that would be a problem. Certainly there is no reason apriori why libertarian economics would have to be concerned with figuring out a way to run giant factories with hundreds of workers. If that turns out to be economically and socially sustainable under conditions of free-market competition, then people will do it. But I don't take it for granted that it will be, and if it isn't, then people won't sustain it, and will find other market means of meeting their needs.

In fact I would say there are some strong reasons to think that that kind of business model -- at least, nearly every example of that business model that we have available to us for inspection, from General Motors to Lockheed-Martin to GlaxoSmithKline to Foxconn -- is not a product of freed market labor agreements, but rather of a pretty heavy-handed structure of government-financed lines of credit, government privileges, government subsidies, and government contracts to the employers, on the one hand, and on the other hand, political impoverishment, political dispossession, and political constraints on the employee's options for alternative modes of making a living. My reasons for thinking that bossing will be unsustainable in fact have a lot to do with factors that will apply whether or not big factories tend to need bosses (e.g., they have to do with the changes which are more likely, ceteris paribus, to occur within labor markets when people's fixed costs of living are radically lower, and their options for making a living outside of formalized employment relationships have radically expanded, as discussed briefly e.g. in "The Many Monopolies" and in "Scratching By" -- all of which are changes that, if they are likely to come about, are likely to come about regardless of the organizational economics of trying to run a large factory.)