Comments Elsewhere

Me: Incidentally, I like the part where JJ gets pissed about you being included in the collage, ‘coz you’re a left-libertarian, but apparently doesn’t notice or has no objection to the portraits of Kropotkin, Bakunin, Malatesta right at the top of the poster, or Emma Goldman right in the middle of it.

John James: You’re right…I’ve never even heard of those people.

O.K. So when you try to weigh in on who should or should not be on a poster about “ANARCHISTS,” if you have never even heard the names of Peter Kropotkin, Michael Bakunin, Errico Malatesta, or Emma Goldman (who are all quite famous; Kropotkin, Bakunin, and Goldman are probably three of the four most famous Anarchists in the history of the world), then let me try to suggest, as gently as possible, that you are talking outside of your area of expertise. And you probably ought to take some time to educate yourself a bit more about the history and the full range of Anarchist ideas before you weigh in on who ought, or ought not, to be on that poster.

**racistkramer:** From your comments it looks like you are an anarcho-capitalist. Is that correct? If so, why are you using the communist tendency icon? It defeats the purpose of the icons if you choose one which is misleading. Anyway, you state: > Indentured Slavery? It is only analogous to slavery if at any given time they change their mind and want to leave and their master does not let them ... This is what actually happened with indentures in, for example, the Americas. Servants often tried to leave, for various reasons, but governments generally held that masters had the legal power to hunt them down and force them back into servitude, as well as to beat or whip them as physical punishment. It was common throughout the 18th century for newspapers to run Wanted notices for "runaway" indentured servants, much like the ads that they ran for masters trying to recapture fugitive slaves. (You can read some examples here: <http://www.questia.com/library/book/eighteenth-century-white-slaves-fugitive-notices-vol-1-by-daniel-meaders.jsp>.) So, yes, in that respect the condition was directly analogous to slavery. (And was treated as such by the law.) **xsdc:** the answer to your question depends on the anarcho-capitalist's view of inalienability. Anarcho-capitalists who believe that self-ownership is inalienable (like Rothbard, say) would say that the servant has a right to leave at any time, including before the end of the term of the indenture, and also including if they still owe money on the debt. The employer holding the indenture may demand compensation for the part of the loan that hasn't been paid off; but if the debtor hasn't the means to pay there's nothing that the employer can really do about it except complain. Anarcho-capitalists who reject inalienability (like Walter Block) generally think that if the contract was initially voluntary then the employer can use force in order to make the indentured servant keep on working until the end of the indenture. For whatever it's worth the inalienabilists like Rothbard seem to be a pretty clear numerical majority of anarcho-capitalists, rather than the alienabilists like Block. Which view is more consistent or a truer interpretation of anarcho-capitalist ideas, I don't know; I guess someone who cares about the prospects for anarcho-capitalism would have to answer that one. But in any case the Rothbardian position is directly opposed to the way that indentured servitude was historically practiced and legally enforced.

Sure, no problem, and thanks. Certainly there's a lot to disagree with in the section (since at a minimum everybody in it disagrees with each other) and hopefully some things worth thinking through and chewing on. I'll look forward to hearing what you think.

John James: That being said, I actually still don’t know what exactly a “left-libartarian” is, so maybe it is somehow a synonym for anarchist…but I doubt it.

Evilsceptic: Dude… Roderick Long is the most anarchisty anarchist that has ever anarchisted!

John James: Then why does he take the “left-libertarian” position in a debate that I can’t seem to find right now?

O.K., this is already the funniest thing that I will read all day.

Incidentally, I like the part where JJ gets pissed about you being included in the collage, ‘coz you’re a left-libertarian, but apparently doesn’t notice or has no objection to the portraits of Kropotkin, Bakunin, Malatesta right at the top of the poster, or Emma Goldman right in the middle of it.

Anyway, William Gillis is on reddit and I'm sure he can discuss the argument in his essay in more depth if he wants to (certainly better than I can, since I really enjoyed the essay but I disagree with it on a lot of points). But I will say two things. First, I suppose this kind of labeling quibble doesn't matter much either way, but Gillis is also a "leftist anarchist" and has been roughly since birth. (He is not a communist. But there are other kinds of leftists besides communists.) Second, on your last point, I think you've simply breezed past the entire point of that line and the passage in which it occurs. Of course we all need food, water, and shelter. But an owner's ability to lay claim to some particular collection of food, water and shelter only makes for a *problem of power* -- only grants capacity for social control -- *if* the claim involves *depriving* others of comparably reasonably good access to food, water and shelter, without any robust set of ready alternative or substitute sources. But of course exclusively owning a *quantity* of water is not the same as owning Water, as a resource. (Which is why the bit about "the ability to restrict another from accessing these resources" is a pretty gross misunderstanding of Gillis's point; he's *not* arguing for that in the first place.) Being able to deny me access to some quantity of water only gives you a lever of control over me if I don't have reasonably good access to water on my own, or from some other independent source. Under capitalism, this is the case for just about everything (for large numbers of working people there are no really reliable means of access to food, shelter, or other basic needs, *except* through landlords, capitalist firms and their financial gatekeepers. But the question is precisely whether this sort of capitalist logic is *inherent* to any kind of individualized ownership, or whether it's the product of a particular deformed *pattern* of ownership secured by means of state or social privilege to capitalists. If the latter, then the problem is not a problem of ownership per se, but a problem of tearing down the privilege that deforms and confines it, and so the issue is not the fact of wealth but rather the fact of *forced dependence on a relationship with wealthy bosses, landlords, etc.* And the paragraph that you're pulling that line out from is the second paragraph in a long argument which is specifically addressed to showing how in a free society people might go about *ensuring* that the ability to acquire property wouldn't allow for *concentration* of wealth to the point that it allows for any kind of totalizing monopolization of resources, or inflicts deprivation or dependence.

So, with my editor hat on for the moment... For general reference, you are talking about Chapter 16, William Gillis's "From Whence Do Property Titles Arise," yes? There are five different essays in the "Ownership" section (#16 is the second), and not only is there no one "author" of the section as a whole, but in fact all of the authors represented disagree with each other about the nature and justification of individual ownership. (And I as an editor disagreed with something in every one of those essays, too. But our criteria for selecting was not to pick only essays that we always agreed with.) So just so we're clear, there is no *one* thing that the section of the book is "really saying;" it's not a collective position paper, but a recording of (a part of) a conversation.

This weekend’s movies: “Paul Goodman Changed My Life,” “The Wavy Gravy Movie,” and “Land of the Dead.”

is scanning early issues of The Liberator today. (The Garrison one, not the follow-up to The Masses.) Inspiring moments include the famous “To the Public,” “Questions on War,” etc. Less inspiring moments: “drunken Scotchman” jokes on the “Literary, Miscellaneous, and Moral” page in the back.

Telling the non-libertarian left you are against “capitalism” when you mean you are against “a social condition caused by corporatism” is just as much a bait-and-switch …

But Danny, the FMAC usage of “capitalism” is certainly not a matter of using it to mean “a social condition caused by corporatism,” as if any old socio-economic condition would qualify, so long as, or insofar as, it is caused by corporatism.

When I say that I am opposed to capitalism, I am saying quite specifically that I oppose a certain set of social and economic conditions. In particular (1) the dependence of most workers on employer-employee relationships, (2) the concentration of ownership of the means of production primarily into the hands of professional capitalists and centralized corporations, and (3) the predominance of a fairly totalizing sort of commercialism and a fairly narrow sort of profit-motive in social relations. Not (only) because I think that (1)-(3) are effects of political corporatism, but because I think these conditions are fragged up in their own right.

You may of course disagree that (1), (2) or (3) is really a social problem; you may even deny that some or all of them are social realities at all. But neither FMAC’s dispute with non-libertarian leftists, nor our dispute with non-leftist libertarians, has any basic dependence on a dispute about the definitions of words. It has to do with questioning a specific causal claim about the relationship between private property and markets, on the one hand, and capitalistic social relationships, on the other.

As I commented elsewhere:

… when some of our fellow libertarians go around defending (for example) giant corporations or third-world sweatshops … it’s not clear that the difference between those libertarians’ defense of “capitalism,” and their critics’ opposition to “capitalism” is just a matter of differences in the use of words. It’s not just that sweatshop-defending libertarians are using the word “capitalism” to mean “free markets,” and defending that. Rather, what they have in mind seems to be a particular kind of causal claim. They think that they are for free markets. And they think that free markets will (among other things) inevitably tend to produce giant corporations and sweatshop labor conditions in very poor parts of the world. So they think that they need to defend that, in addition to defending free markets, on the principle that if you endorse a system you need to take what comes. But the thing to do here is not to back up and say, “Well, they should keep defending what they are defending, but they should stop calling it ‘capitalism,’ and call it something else instead.” Rather what they need to do is see that the central causal claim about free markets is false.

As for this:

Whereas the classical meaning of capitalism is unmistakable: “private ownership of the means of production.”

… I see your completely unsourced declaration that this is “the classical meaning of capitalism,” but I don’t see your argument, or any indication of what “classics” you have in mind. There are other uses of the term that go back to the 1840s, and sources today are not at all unanimous on what they mean by it either. In any case, though, if we are going to stick with “private ownership,” that doesn’t help settle the question, either.

And as for the vibes that these things give off, what non-libertarian leftists really do or really do not hate, etc., well, really, who cares? I’m not particularly interested in the emotional life of the non-libertarian left; I am interested in what they mean by what they say, what they can argue for themselves, what kind of arguments they might be given reasons to accept, and what those reasons might plausibly look like.

Telling the non-libertarian left you are against “capitalism” when you mean you are against “a social condition caused by corporatism” is just as much a bait-and-switch …

But Danny, the FMAC usage of “capitalism” is certainly not a matter of using it to mean “a social condition caused by corporatism,” as if any old socio-economic condition would qualify, so long as, or insofar as, it is caused by corporatism.

When I say that I am opposed to capitalism, I am saying quite specifically that I oppose a certain set of social and economic conditions. In particular (1) the dependence of most workers on employer-employee relationships, (2) the concentration of ownership of the means of production primarily into the hands of professional capitalists and centralized corporations, and (3) the predominance of a fairly totalizing sort of commercialism and a fairly narrow sort of profit-motive in social relations. Not (only) because I think that (1)-(3) are effects of political corporatism, but because I think these conditions are fragged up in their own right.

You may of course disagree that (1), (2) or (3) is really a social problem; you may even deny that some or all of them are social realities at all. But neither FMAC’s dispute with non-libertarian leftists, nor our dispute with non-leftist libertarians, has any basic dependence on a dispute about the definitions of words. It has to do with questioning a specific causal claim about the relationship between private property and markets, on the one hand, and capitalistic social relationships, on the other.

As I commented elsewhere:

… when some of our fellow libertarians go around defending (for example) giant corporations or third-world sweatshops … it’s not clear that the difference between those libertarians’ defense of “capitalism,” and their critics’ opposition to “capitalism” is just a matter of differences in the use of words. It’s not just that sweatshop-defending libertarians are using the word “capitalism” to mean “free markets,” and defending that. Rather, what they have in mind seems to be a particular kind of causal claim. They think that they are for free markets. And they think that free markets will (among other things) inevitably tend to produce giant corporations and sweatshop labor conditions in very poor parts of the world. So they think that they need to defend that, in addition to defending free markets, on the principle that if you endorse a system you need to take what comes. But the thing to do here is not to back up and say, “Well, they should keep defending what they are defending, but they should stop calling it ‘capitalism,’ and call it something else instead.” Rather what they need to do is see that the central causal claim about free markets is false.

As for this:

Whereas the classical meaning of capitalism is unmistakable: “private ownership of the means of production.”

… I see your completely unsourced declaration that this is “the classical meaning of capitalism,” but I don’t see your argument, or any indication of what “classics” you have in mind. There are other uses of the term that go back to the 1840s, and sources today are not at all unanimous on what they mean by it either. In any case, though, if we are going to stick with “private ownership,” that doesn’t help settle the question, either.

And as for the vibes that these things give off, what non-libertarian leftists really do or really do not hate, etc., well, really, who cares? I’m not particularly interested in the emotional life of the non-libertarian left; I am interested in what they mean by what they say, what they can argue for themselves, what kind of arguments they might be given reasons to accept, and what those reasons might plausibly look like.