Comments Elsewhere

**uppercrust:** > The idea of private property as being the foundation of freedom, liberty, rights, etc. is what makes it right wing. Well, O.K., but now it seems that you're mashing together the two quotes, whereas I was simply asking about the second of two distinct quotes. The second quote doesn't say anything about private property. I suppose you could take that as part of what "market society" means; whether you'd be right or not depends on how you're using the term "private property." In any case, when Proudhon writes about "the economic organism" keep in mind that *he* counts among "its principal forms of activity" "Division of labor," "Commerce, the concrete form of CONTRACT," "Competition," "Credit," and "The equilibrium of values and properties." If the reference to "market society" makes Long a right-winger, then it seems like all that business ought to make Proudhon a right-winger too. Do you think that he is? If not, then where's the difference? If so, then I wonder what "right-wing" means to you -- if not just a definitional claim that anyone for property or markets is *therefore* in some sense "right wing." > It is an individualist idea, Sure; Long is an individualist Anarchist. But are you claiming that individualism, just as such, is "right wing"? If so, why? (The Right-wingers I can think of -- royalists, fascists, nationalists, etc. -- are rarely much interested in individualism.) > a territorial one, Well, no. Long's notion of how government would be dissolved into the economic organism includes, among other things, an explicit *rejection* of claims of territorial sovereignty. On his view social order would be maintained by forms of social organization that are overlapping and associational, not based on geographical monopolies. > and it ignores the fact that we are social creatures that thrive and survive on sharing. What makes you think that markets and private property are incompatible with either sociality in general (!) or "sharing" in particular? Markets are a form of human social interaction, and in real-world situations they inevitably involve all kinds of gifting, sharing, and all kinds of other alternatives to strict cash-on-the-barrelhead exchanges. (In fact, the less government is involved in regulating, regimenting and formalizing them, the more they tend to involve these kind of messy, friendly, ad hoc, cashless, non-commercial, etc. arrangements.) > Anarchism is system based on sharing, Maybe Anarchism as you understand it is. I have no beef with "sharing," personally, but I don't know about systematizing it, and Anarchism as *I* understand it is based on freedom of association and the rejection of all forms of domination, coercion, and authoritarianism. Which may involve sharing, or may not. "A system based on sharing" sounds more like a (very) rough definition of communism to me than it does like a definition of Anarchism. Of course, you might think that Anarchism *requires* communism to be consistent; but not all Anarchists agree with you on that one (Proudhon disagreed, for starters; Tucker; de Cleyre, whether early or late; etc.), and it seems like a bit of a fast one to try and build it into the very definition of Anarchism.

Could you say something about why you think that when tools or factories (say) aren't privately owned they aren't "capital" anymore? Is this supposed to be a definitional claim (i.e., something has to be privately owned in order to count as "capital")? If so, what's the definition you have in mind and where did you get it from? In most of the economic literature that I'm familiar with (both anti-capitalist and pro-capitalist), "capital" is most often used to refer to goods that you make, not for their own sake, but in order to make a lot of other goods with them; things like hand-tools, machines, factories, long-term work spaces, etc. Which you can have in either an a mutualist, or a collectivist, or a communist, or a capitalist sort of arrangement, and any number of other arrangements; the differences have to do with who has access to capital and under what conditions, not with whether or not capital exists in such a society. Of course, if you don't have absentee ownership of the means of production, then you don't have capitalISM any more (at least in one common definition of that word). And maybe that is impossible, or unsustainable, without a state. Is that all you meant to say? -- But if it is, david_z's statement above just wasn't about *that*. It was about *capital* in the sense of *capital goods*.

MBH:

The police officer does not even implicitly claim property rights over the owners of the Cafe.

Really? Last I checked, police officers both claimed and actively practiced a prerogative to force their way into Anarchist spaces (breaking down doors, storming, etc. if necessary), rifling through and confiscating our shit, and hauling people out of the place in chains. You may be aware that 8 Anarchists in the Twin Cities are, still, facing an extended court trial and possibly years in prison based on exactly this pattern of police invasion and occupation. This is an actual widespread problem for real people in the real world, whereas the Klan busting into black-owned stores for purposes of abduction, vandalism or petty intimidation is (now-a-days) mainly a hypothetical, and where it does happen, is hardly ever carried out with the degree of violence or utter impunity that police “raids” routinely are.

In point of fact, while we’re here, it should be noted that, while Klan violence and harassment does certainly still exist, the average black American is also by far more likely to be harassed or attacked by uniformed police officers now-a-days than they are to be harassed or attacked by robed Klansmen. (For reasons which have, primarily, to do with dehumanizing and regimenting racially and socioeconomically-selected victims, in the interest of upholding police authority and the social control of the ruling class.)

I’d call your attempted comparative analysis insane; but “insane” would suggest the conclusion is arbitrary, whereas what you’re saying is actually the exact opposite of the real-world situation.

If it's pretty clear to you, then maybe you could make it more clear to us, too, by telling us what you have in mind by "right wing" when you say "right wing libertarianism." If, instead of writing "the legislative, adjudicative, and protective functions unjustly and inefficiently monopolised by the coercive State should be entirely turned over to the voluntary, consensual forces of market society," Long had written that he favors "the dissolution of government into the economic organism," would that strike you as "falling within the realm of right wing libertarianism in general"? Because as I see it, that's basically just a Frenchier way of writing what he wrote there. Or, if not, then what's the specific right-wing difference that places the former phrasing "within the realm of right wing libertarianism" and the latter phrasing outside of it?

uppercrust, I've been involved in the Anarchist social movement for 9 years now and attended my share of meetings. I've been a decided market Anarchist for about 7 of those years. (The latter 7. I settled on the free-market individualist and mutualist economic ideas *because* of my increasing commitment to social Anarchism, not in spite of it.) Has it occurred to you that if folks like me or Gillis are at "these meetings," perhaps it's because we've thought about it and decided that it's not actually "the opposite of what [we] market anarchists want in society"? Perhaps we have a clearer notion of what we want in society than you do? Maybe it's true that everything *you've* been involved with has been anti-markets. But perhaps also you might notice that however involved you may have been, "Everything I've been involved in" is not coextensive with the Anarchist social movement as a whole?

... Do you really think that the neoconservative agenda is particularly hidden? Virtually all of the prominent neoconservatives are professional writers

... Dan, While I enjoy reading aesthetics, and certainly don't have any objection to people articulating and defending the aesthetic criteria they intend to

... If people have property, they're welcome to build fences. Around their own property. They have no business building fences around *other people's*

... I suppose they should. Let me know when you hit on a complicated issue. Immigration is not a complicated issue. It's a simple issue. If you believe in

Lorraine: OK, dismissing the notions of left and right, which is probably a good idea anyway, the implication seems to be that egalitarianism implies authoritarianism. Actually, I'm agnostic as to whether there's a tradeoff between freedom and equality

Well, O.K., but that wasn't the issue that I was raising. The claim that the individualists were advancing wasn't that egalitarianism implies authoritarianism. Rather, they denied that equality required communistic or collectivistic economic arrangements.

Their usual suggestion was that equal liberty would tend to produce equal access to resources, especially with the destruction of the government land monopoly and the construction of mutual aid networks and a Mutual Bank. They typically held that insisting on communistic and collectivistic economic formulae, with little or no space for individual labor-based property in land and capital, were unnecessary to achieve equality, and undesirable because they would tend towards conformity, rigidity, or outright tyranny.

Square brackets to one side, I also never did describe this argument as an argument between "left libertarians" and "libertarian socialists." I described it as an argument between "most individualist anarchists" (by which I was referring to folks like Benjamin Tucker, the early Victor Yarros, the early Voltairine de Cleyre, et al.) and "communists or collectivists" (by which I was referring to Johann Most, Tucker's frequent sparring partner, as well as to Kropotkin, Bakunin, et al.). It wasn't a debate by left-libs against lib-socs; it was a debate amongst two different kinds of libertarian socialists about just what socialism entailed.

Lorraine: I am very curious if you know of any who come to LL from anagorist or agoraphobic positions such as mine, and if so, what do they claim to have gained or lost in the process?

I don't know about positions specifically like yours, although I do have some friends who came to this left-lib thing after engagements with libertarian communism and, before that, Marxism, if that helps. You can see a lot of different stories, many but not all of them from LLs, at my Reader Question post from a month ago.

But I mentioned it specifically in order to offer myself as an example -- I never was an anarcho-capitalist, and I came to left-libertarianism by way of social anarchism and the counter-globalization movement, which in turn I had come to through radical feminism and the anti-authoritarian Left. (This would have been around 1999-2001; it was hard to go into activista circles without hearing something about Anarchism.)

For what it's worth, although I've certainly changed my mind about some things, I don't think that I've left behind any of the basic commitments that I had back then; just come to a different understanding of how those commitments can and should be brought about. If anything much has changed, it's been that, in thinking through my Anarchism, I've progressively shed more and more of my old attachments to attempts at working through reformist politics, and become more convinced of the need to concentrate on grassroots organizing and direct action. If I've gained anything from my reorientation towards market anarchist economics and individualist notions about social action, it's that it's helped me learn something about how direct action alternatives to statist political economy might work, and about what it means for revolution to really well up from below, through radical experimentation rather than from a formula or vanguard. Of course, whether I've lost something in the process is probably better for someone other than me to judge.