Forums of the Libertarian Left

[Noor]

Mike Gogulski posted a link to this on Facebook - What about Voluntary Agreements?
And the comments--

Jason Seagraves
I think "capitalism," wage labor, and rent WOULD flourish in a free society. This author saying that "capitalists" are afraid of moves towards freedom misses the point -- anarcho-capitalists are not. Fascists aren't interested in preserving "capitalism," they're interested in preserving fascism. I'm becoming increasingly frustrated with the "libertarian left" -- which I originally thought I was a part of.

Jessop Breth
/cheer jason

Kyle Bennett
It comes down to one issue with the anarcho-socialists: if they are going to try to take my property by force, I will resist with force. Unless one or the other changes his mind, the result will be, eventually, blood and death. I won't be the one to change my mind.
Aside from that, this author holds the labor theory of value, and he explicitly dismisses the role of reason and capital as factors of production. So long as we can avoid conflict over the property issue, the latter questions would be answered in the marketplace.

Rob Steel
'If capitalism, wage labor, and rents would flourish in a society built upon voluntary agreements, one has to wonder why the capitalists tend to be so afraid of moves toward such a society, typically using... well, you know, to get the unruly populace back in line.'
How is this not a massive strawman? What ancap wants to use force in any way,to "keep people in line"?
'I guess the problem is that people often don’t go for the Officially Approved form of “freedom”, so they need to be punished. Eventually a New Capitalist Man will arise who will act according to the wisdom of Ayn Rand and Ludwig von Mises without the fear of…well, you can imagine.' I don't even understand what that means. Has anyone ever described how a voluntary society NOT based on a free market would function on a large scale? These mutualist or whatever -ist ideas are difficult for me to grasp.

Rob Steel
And Jason stated this well above, but the current collectivist, fascist system is NOT capitalism. Not even close. True capitalism cannot exist in a society ruled by a coercive group of thugs calling themselves "government".

Jason Seagraves
Wow, I thought I was going to be attacked for writing what I wrote. Glad to see I'm not the only one. I also was sickened by this article I read today: http://boredzhwazi.blogspot.com/2007/11 ... anism.html It seems some "libertarians" have gone off the deep end into Marxoid desire to recreate human nature in the perfect "libertarian" image.

Anton Lee
I'm a voluntaryist, and I don't really care if everyone else in the world wants to be a communist or socialist or democrat or republican. . doesn't matter. What matters is them leaving me alone if I decide not to partake.

Rob Steel
Anton - I agree completely. I just want to be left alone. The marketplace will decide what works and what doesn't...

Kyle Bennett
Jason, damn, I thought that your link indicated he had put up something new. I followed that guy from the time he started that particular blog, but he just up and disappeared a while ago.

Anyway, don't dismiss him out of hand. He's definitely hard left, borderline if not fully AnSoc, but he's a pretty sophisticated thinker. There's a lot more substance to his writing than a cursory read looking for hot-button terms would indicate. I recommend reading all the articles on his blog if you get the chance. There's not a very long history there, unfortunately.

Tennyson McCalla
Anarchism is an old tradition, with adherents spread worldwide. 99% of those adherents (perhaps more, perhaps less) are social anarchists, communists, syndicalists, and primitives. The smallest fraction of the anarchist are individualists, mutualists, "capitalists", or what have you. One of the tenets of anarchism has traditionally been opposition to capitalism.

But almost no "capitalist" I know of thinks of their "capitalism" in the way that they do, so there's a conflict over terms. It makes no sense to me to continue using the term while I claiming adherence to this old, widespread, tradition of anarchism. I have my disagreements with them, as they have with each other, but my agreements with them are greater and more important.

The best thing for all anarchists to do, if they want build and maintain alliances, is to find these agreements and focus on the disagreements through a lens of them.

Armando Doreste
"On the one hand, sure this may be true. But this is what needs to be emphasized: why is it that you have to take orders from someone in order to work?"

Straw men 'r us is having a clearance.

The funny thing is, arguments like the author's are almost completely demolished by the argumenter's own hand the moment he/she decides to voluntarily ignore the fact that no one HAS to take orders to work for anyone in a voluntaryist society.

Tennyson McCalla
As a libertarian, and a believer in voluntary action's superiority to violence, I have to struggle with questions of wages, rents, profits, interests, and other things that exist in today's society.

But I'm not sure that those who only focused on those activities and events through the "Robinson Crusoe" method of a tabula rasa world, can see their existence in this world for what they are or might be.

Rob Steel
The term capitalism has been bastardized more than libertarianism...

Jason Seagraves
My take is that anarcho-capitalists are not descendant of "historical" anarchists. This should not be a controversial take. Rothbard created something new with the fusion of Austrian economics and classical liberalism. Anarchistic thinkers make interesting points, especially the American individualist anarchists, but so does Marx, etc. I only use the term "capitalism" in quotes or proceeded by anarcho. But historical anarchists, as socialists, are utopian central planners at heart, wishing to redefine man's nature into something it's not, and ascribing values where value should be neutral. I do not count myself among these people, even if we may make common cause from time to time.

Tennyson McCalla
Sure Rothbard created something new when he put together the traditions of Mises and the Austrian subjectivists/marginalists with natural law anarchism, but that doesn't mean that he himself thought that he was outside of tradition. He continuously made reference to his libertarian forebears (levellers, civil liberties heroes, figures mentioned in Conceived in Liberty, School Men, old economists, French Revolutionaries, class warfare doctrinaires, Bastiat, Molinari, etc.) The point of the libertarian left isn't to reject or accept totally either side of the name, but to fill in where those two sides lack with the inputs of the other.

«But historical anarchists, as socialists, are utopian central planners at heart…»

This is something I've never seen proven, but I've heard asserted before. Having not read all of the relevant material I can't make a determination either way but I have reason to doubt the truth of the assertion: http://tinyurl.com/lqeff2

-------------

From me-- this was the Strong Libertarianism post I linked to, that was accused of being Marxist.

Comments on that:

John Dillaby
"It's about eating with your elbows on the table because it is convenient to do so." -excellent!

Jakub Stracina
Well, I think what he calls strong libertarianism is simply a nihilism. And also a little utopistic. It demands that people change in nature, not just removal of coercion. Is it so hard to imagine that there are people who choose to live by superstitons and traditions freely, because it makes them happy? Or that there are many people who would freely prefer wage labor (giving up a huge part of their potential success and personal liberties) because decision making and bearing all the risk bothers them, and they make all kinds of sacrifice to get some stability, albeit not very pleasant one?
I think people would do that even if they fully realized (most of them don't) what the alternatives are and If they were were able to look at status quo in a little socratic manner.

Jason Seagraves
"Strong libertarianism" sounds a lot like Marxism to me, in the sense that it seeks to rebuild man's nature; a New Socialist Man. Count me as the weakest, most feeble libertarian there is. The state does exist. Value is subjective. I'll choose my own values and let you choose yours. I think it's also a bit Orwellian how he stakes out the "strong" term to classify his own brand of "libertarianism" (if you can even call it that -- it seems to be a whole lot more), leaving people who simply oppose initiation of force to be "weak" in some way.

[Ceapmann]

That's the irritating thing about ancaps - they say they "just oppose the initiation of force," but they've defined "initiation of force" to include "going against their favored property system." So comments such as this:

It comes down to one issue with the anarcho-socialists: if they are going to try to take my property by force, I will resist with force. Unless one or the other changes his mind, the result will be, eventually, blood and death. I won't be the one to change my mind.

... translate into something very horrific when you realize that a peaceful sit-in or work-in would count as "taking my property by force."

[Zanthorus]

I really don't understand anarcho-capitalism. To me it brings to mind dystopic visions of corporations using private police forces to keep the workers down and paying them just enough for a slice of bread each a day. It might just have something to do with me being a commie pinko though

[Noor]

I used to be a full-blown hardcore absolutist-propertarian anarcho-capitalist who would totally have advocated blowing up anyone that disrespected my property rights. There was this reasoning that when you mess with my rights, you become a part of my past, which makes you my property, and therefore I'm perfectly justified in blowing you up.

Most ancaps are anti-corporation, but they often have the mindset that inequality is natural and tend to advocate the same pattern of corporatist capitalism for a stateless market.

[buddhadada]

The trespassing my property means I can kill you thing doesn't make much sense to me. Generally I've seen most libertarians (like Block or Long) add some kind of proportionality to the equation. That generally makes it more commonsensical. It being OK to blast some guy's head off because he fell over onto your lawn would generally strike most people as, uhm, excessive.

Of course, if you're "mighty" enough to get away with it, well.

[Stoub]

I'm still propertarian, and I'll still fuck you up if you step on my property and I don't want you there.

That is if I care enough to. I might be too lazy and just go "Fuck you..." or shoot you in the shin with a revolver... got I love revolvers.

[buddhadada]

I'm still propertarian, and I'll still fuck you up if you step on my property and I don't want you there.

That is if I care enough to. I might be too lazy and just go "Fuck you..." or shoot you in the shin with a revolver... got I love revolvers.

You've got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel mighty? Well, do ya, punk?

[Noor]

I'm still propertarian, and I'll still fuck you up if you step on my property and I don't want you there.

That is if I care enough to. I might be too lazy and just go "Fuck you..." or shoot you in the shin with a revolver... got I love revolvers.

Pffft... we all know that I just have to walk by and your revolver falls out of your hand.

[Brainpolice]

There was a lot of strawmanning and non-sequitoring in those comments. It illustrates part of the problem I have with many hardline "ancaps": a total inability to see anything other than their boner for "capitalism" as "marxist", a knee-jerk defense of all social heirarchy (with any quasi-egalitarian view inherently being mischaracterized as an attempt to radically transform human nature) and a very narrow conception of libertarianism in which anything other than their absolutist property conventions inherently are equated with Stalinist gulags, lacking any capacity to distinguish state-socialism from any other sense of socialism. I think part of it is that they've inherited the assumptions of the American right.

It seems like there is a good deal of misunderstanding. On one hand, many "ancaps" seem to dismiss more or less the entirety of anarchist tradition (outside of their own, relatively new one) without always being particularly familiar with the ideas, figures and texts and by conflating it with the negative definition of "socialism" that they've already assumed ahead of time. On the other hand, the more vulgar "social anarchists" tend to take things too far to the point of dismissing individualist and mutualist traditions of anarchism, often acting as if anarcho-communism (or something very close to it) is the only legitimate school of anarchism. The extremes of "both sides" talk past eachother, make conflations and ignore subtlety. It's basically the extremes of mainstream politics playing itself out again within anarchism.

When the "ancaps" are red-baiting you and the "social anarchists" are right-baiting you at the same time, you know that there is confusion - and some significant false dichotomies.

[Stoub]

Well the fact of the matter is property is relative, objective property is that held sufficiently by force, if you disagree with me try to take my pencil sharpener. I dare ya... punk.

[manbear2pig]

Wow, this is, um, awkward... (steps forward)

I'm not really sure what to say, other than that I think those commentators, on the first essay (mine) at least (and the other as well) were mostly completely missing the point. You would think from the comments that what I had written was just, "anarcho-capitalists are icky!", when that, aside from a bit of semi-gratuitous snark (hey, I was drunk ), was not even close to the point I was trying to make. The essay wasn't as polished as I might have liked, but I think the basic point, which actually is intended to dovetail with the conclusions in a series of related essays I had attempted, went more or less undealt with.

Aside from that, this author holds the labor theory of value, and he explicitly dismisses the role of reason and capital as factors of production.

Hah - NOT! I'm pretty sure I "explicitly" discuss that, yo. All Right There In The Manual.

What ancap wants to use force in any way,to "keep people in line"?

OK, then you're good to go! Anyway, I by "capitalists" I didn't mean "anarcho-capitalists", I meant actual Capitalists. I think I even mention how most "anarcho-capitalists" aren't all that bad, despite my problems with the set of assumptions it tends to have. Sheesh...

Straw men 'r us is having a clearance.

The funny thing is, arguments like the author's are almost completely demolished by the argumenter's own hand the moment he/she decides to voluntarily ignore the fact that no one HAS to take orders to work for anyone in a voluntaryist society.

No, I explicitly state that my problem is not with voluntaryism, for pretty much that reason. My problem was with that statement insofar as it is used to justify the current system(seen more from YouTube trolls than from sincere political activists), not to describe some future pananarchy. And separately, that really wasn't the point of the statement at all. But uh, ok...

The irony is that the conclusion I came to is perhaps not one they would expect from a raving, lunatic, anti-reason, stinky marxoid. If they had just done the research there might have been fodder for constructive discussion -- but like usual, the cappies smelled blood and immediately went for the kill. Or something. On the one hand I think there exists the chance for dialogue between the two "camps" now as never before -- this forum is proof of that, with a stronger middle ground. But otherwise -- those comments are pretty much what I'd expect.

[Noor]

It's this kind of attitude that repulses me from my past ancap more and more everyday. (I have much worse posts from those days, but I'm not posting links. xD) I can get along with the more open ancaps but most of them strawman without bothering to attempt any understanding of the other anarchies, and seem fine and dandy with racism, sexism, etc as long as "they're all voluntary", and anyone else is instantly labelled a utopian.

Just this evening I talked with Aaron for two and a half hours on the topic of wages/profits/business. 'Twas a good chat.

[manbear2pig]

Yeah, I'm glad I wasn't writing anything on the internet until a year ago...

[Zanthorus]

My favourite part of the linke that Noor gave was

Actually 1984 would be the best book when it comes to the subject of Socalism

Old george would probably have a huge laugh at this one considering he himself was a socialist (A fact often overlooked by right-wing libertarian types who read that book taking it out of context and missing some of its key points, for example the fact that the party is said to go against all the tenets of socialism in order to preserve socialism)

[Stoub]

My favourite part of the linke that Noor gave was

Actually 1984 would be the best book when it comes to the subject of Socalism

Old george would probably have a huge laugh at this one considering he himself was a socialist (A fact often overlooked by right-wing libertarian types who read that book taking it out of context and missing some of its key points, for example the fact that the party is said to go against all the tenets of socialism in order to preserve socialism)

Even as an AnCap, I knew he was a socialist, I never disrespected him for it. Just because someone has a particular ideology one cannot discount his intelligence as a writer and even as a thinker to some degree. (Although he and I are fairly at odds.)

Hell some Agorists are AnCaps still. I know I was both.

[Noor]

@Manbear2pig - I didn't realize you were the author of the original blog post that Mike linked to. That's a pretty cool coincidence.

Oh, and I really like your older one "Further Thoughts on Property." I might have to post a link to that on Facebook, but I know the cappies will go all into a frenzy.

[Juan]

I used to be a full-blown hardcore absolutist-propertarian anarcho-capitalist who would totally have advocated blowing up anyone that disrespected my property rights.

Well, that's not necessarily in line with libertarianism and 'anarcho-capitalism' - in other words you are misrepresenting the system and rejecting a caricature of it.

Yes, there are people who consider themselves libertarians and think are justified in shooting trespassers on first sight. I think they are nuts.

But the fact that some self-described ancaps fail to understand 'anarcho capitalism' doesn't mean that anarcho capitalism is what they say it is.

[Stoub]

I used to be a full-blown hardcore absolutist-propertarian anarcho-capitalist who would totally have advocated blowing up anyone that disrespected my property rights.

Well, that's not necessarily in line with libertarianism and 'anarcho-capitalism' - in other words you are misrepresenting the system and rejecting a caricature of it.

Yes, there are people who consider themselves libertarians and think are justified in shooting trespassers on first sight. I think they are nuts.

But the fact that some self-described ancaps fail to understand 'anarcho capitalism' doesn't mean that anarcho capitalism is what they say it is.

Another point well taken. Concepts, ideas, words, all too malleable and personable.

[manbear2pig]

@Manbear2pig - I didn't realize you were the author of the original blog post that Mike linked to. That's a pretty cool coincidence.

Oh, and I really like your older one "Further Thoughts on Property." I might have to post a link to that on Facebook, but I know the cappies will go all into a frenzy.

Thank you! You're right, though: somehow I get the feeling the comments would be all the same (while ironically I could imagine both posts being criticized by a hardcore communist for leaving too wide of a door open for the restoration of capitalism...). I've been thinking of writing a short primer on the libertarian socialist view for anarcho-capitalists, since I feel like I understand both views well enough to maybe pave over some of the misconceptions.

[Noor]

I'll post that link soon then-- it'll cause a huge uproar from my ancap friends on Facebook. Someone commented on Mike's link that all socialists are that way because of an envy for capitalists. xD

And a primer on libsoc would be awesome.

[Brainpolice]

I used to be a full-blown hardcore absolutist-propertarian anarcho-capitalist who would totally have advocated blowing up anyone that disrespected my property rights.

Well, that's not necessarily in line with libertarianism and 'anarcho-capitalism' - in other words you are misrepresenting the system and rejecting a caricature of it.

Yes, there are people who consider themselves libertarians and think are justified in shooting trespassers on first sight. I think they are nuts.

But the fact that some self-described ancaps fail to understand 'anarcho capitalism' doesn't mean that anarcho capitalism is what they say it is.

Juan, you're right that this isn't something that ancaps believe merely *by definition* or unanimously. But you also very well know, from personal experience, about the numerous self-proclaimed ancaps at the Mises Institute's forums that in fact do take such a position. So by the very least it is a position that "floats around in ancap circles" on and off. And I think that's more to the point, because in other circles such an idea doesn't even remotely float around. I think it's fair to distinguish "ancaps qua ancaps believe X" from "some ancaps believe X", but the latter still is an issue to take into account.

[Juan]

Brainpolice, yes, it is as you say. I still think their reasoning is flawed, but it can't be denied that some people at the Mises' forums have some weird ideas.

Oh well...

[Olaf]

Brainpolice, yes, it is as you say. I still think their reasoning is flawed, but it can't be denied that some people at the Mises' forums have some weird ideas.

Oh well...

You mean like Natural Law Ethics? Haha couldn't resist.

But anyways, I agree with you some people at the Mises forums have weird ideas...but so do people at practically every other political forum.

[Noor]

@Ceapmann I posted a link to your Voluntary Property blog, and what do you know, the cappies are again all over it.

Link to the Facebook thread.

[Ceapmann]

Well, I haven't updated the blog in a thousand years, and I can't see the discussion you posted.