"As a free marketeer, the impotant qualifier I would add right now is that everything is waaaaay to centralized in this world to start to even begin to contemplate how any of this would shape out in the long run in a more decentralized society. "
AnCaps aren’t against centralization; they are against force. Some AnCaps are very pro “centralization” in the sense of “globalization” and large volunary collective action (me).
To be honest, I’m both a little surprised and disappointed in the AnCaps’ response here. We have responded to Pony as if there was a single “right” answer that can be deduced by logic, completely missing the point that as AnCaps, we think the market should decide everything, including what’s “right” and “wrong”, what definitions we give words, social conventions and institutions, etc… and most importanty, what “property” is.
“Property” is a social convention. You may have the most rock-solid, philosophically “correct” definition, but that’s still just your definition, one of many in the market. What we want to tell Pony is not why our definition of “property” is “correct” or the one definition that everyone should use, but rather why it’s the definition that we would choose in free market of contractual relationships.
“Property” in an AnCap society is just a clause in the contract between you and your protection agency - the one that says that the PA will protect what the two of you have agreed to is your “property” - and like every other contractual clause, the question isn’t whether it’s right or wrong, it’s “how prevalent will it be in the free market?” We as AnCaps should be explaining to Pony why we would choose to contract with a protection agency that agreed to protect their clients’ property according to a “capitalist” definition of property.
And really, that’s what makes us anarcho-capitalists: the anarcho means “no state” or really “no force”, but the capitalist gives us our preferred definition of “property”. Other anarchists clearly are not anarcho-capitalists because they prefer a different definition of “property”.
In that sense, Pony, an anarcho-capitalist accepts that communitarians may choose a protection agency that will defend a communitarian definition of property (if I’m not using the right term, that is just ignorance on my part; I don’t mean anything by it. I’m just trying to use a consistent term for the definition of property that you advocate), and the good news is: for any interaction that is strictly between other clients of that same definition, you will get exactly what you want: people will be living by a communitarian definition of property. At the same time, AnCaps can live by a capitalist definition whenever they are interacting with each other. Inevitably, the question will be shouted out “what happens when there is an interaction between a communitarian and an AnCap?” It’s an important question, not one to gloss over, but I think the rush to ask those questions often misses the really important point: in a lot of cases, both sides will get exactly what they want. In contrast, if we insist on one definition of property - either capitalist or communitarian! - at best only one group will get what they want. So it’s important to even ask the question of “how often will this happen?” All we can do is try to predict what will play out in the free market, but it isn’t hard to predict that the two groups will tend to interact more internally than externally - representing their own preference in laws/justice - and thus reduce the number of intra-group conflicts. Ultimately, you get kind of a surface to volume effect, where the “surface” is the interactions between the two groups, but the volume is internal.
Specifically, some of the things that seem likely to play out might be: factory owners - whom I interpret from these discussions are perhaps at the greatest of risks (from their point of view of what constitutes property!) of a communitarian community causing him a loss - will be very defensive about their capital outlays, and will tend to locate factories in areas known to be much more AnCap than communitarian (in terms of the density of clients of the two different types of protection agency), and may also be careful in screening employees to not get many lefties. This will tend to cluster factories in largely AnCap industrial areas. This in turn frees up more of the countryside for lefties to do agricultural/community things. Lefties will have a harder time getting work in factories, but IIUC, they don’t actually like factories all that much anyway, so again, things are emerging correctly in the market.
AnCap landlords would also feel threatened by communitarians, so again, these kinds of landlords would tend to buy land mostly in capitalist strongholds, so that kind of ownership would tend to cluster, AnCaps would tend to cluster near that land, which would in turn make it more attractive to AnCaps. The cycle would be self-reinforcing and would produce a natural, but not in any way total, clustering.
One advantage to the communitarian definition is that the protection agencies can charge less: they are actually protecting less. AnCaps will treat all communitarian-owned property by their own definition of “property”, which means we will not ever try to take it. From our perspective, none of us owns that property, and if you guys want to have some goofy use-rule about which of you owns the property, it doesn’t change the fact that we know we don’t own it and thus we cannot in any way claim it. So your protection agency does not have to protect you from capitalists, because our definition of property is “stronger” than yours. On the flipside, since communitarians may invoke their own rules against an absent AnCap landlord or factory owner, capitalists are at higher risk for losing their “property”. Their protection agencies will have to charge more to cover the higher likelihood that communitarians will make a property claim against property that capitalists thinks is theirs by their definition. So score one for the communitarian market position.
Perhaps the most interesting prediction to make is the longterm relative distribution of the two types of protection agencies. I think what AnCaps are ultimately trying to argue, Pony, is that they think that in the longrun, you’d see a lot more clients flocking to the capitalist-definition of property. There are lots of reasons, but mostly it comes down to the hypothesis that people will generally find themselves happier in a society with the capitalist definition of property. They offer insight into their reasons for this hypothesis in terms of economic arguments, philosophical arguments, historic arguments, etc., but in the end, what AnCaps will admit is: they don’t know. They don’t have to know. All they want is to let the market decide.
Maybe your definition of “property” is awesome and much better. What’s the best way to find out? For a whole bunch of people to try it out amongst themselves, and a whole 'nother group to try out the capitalist definition amongst themselves, and to then sit back and watch the experiment play out. People will vote with their decision of which protection agency to use, making their decision by whatever criteria they want: their own economic situation, their morality, their sense of the social justice that they see in the two groups, etc.
I just want to reiterate one point again: the people here are for any voluntary arrangement, including one in which people have agreed to a different definition of property. But I think where AnCaps get particularly defensive or even accusatory is when they suspect that using a communitarian definition of property amongst yourselves does not end up being sufficient, and instead you insist that it should be used even by people who do not agree to that definition, e.g. AnCaps. To the extent that you would insist that we must use the same definition, we see that as an initiation of force. What I don’t think we’ve been so good at is realizing that the same applies in reverse: if we insist that others must use the same definition of property that we use, then we are initiating force against them. The market has to decide.
“To be honest, I’m both a little surprised and disappointed in the AnCaps’ response here. We have responded to Pony as if there was a single “right” answer that can be deduced by logic, completely missing the point that as AnCaps, we think the market should decide everything, including what’s “right” and “wrong”, what definitions we give words, social conventions and institutions, etc… and most importanty, what “property” is.”
Good post Alternatives Considered !!
I think I get it… The Anarchists say that their form of society will have less conflict and violence compared to private property capitalism. If every single person was to only use physical property in their immediate location for personal needs, then there would be a limited possiblility of conflict and violence with others.
Compared to that, capitalist property rights as we currently have them involves aggression and force, unjustly used in their eyes, against individuals who just happen to occupy or be using such property.
The weakness I see is the starting point. The theory is not based on current human nature, but on a utopian human that can let go of the need to aquire more property than what he has immediate access to. I think this violates human nature, ownership of ‘property’ and the wanting to aquire more, is intrinsic to human experience.
Personally I think OCC/USE as decribed will work best for disembodied beings who have left behind the physical world. So when the Anarchists claim that in the ‘Future’ man will evolve to this Utopia and leave the ‘Capitalist’ way of property rights behind, I actually totally agree with them, but not for this life.
Here we are dealing with the real world, dealing with current human nature, and trying to find a ‘practical’ way of resolving conflict over scarce physical resources.
So the debate seems to take place on different spheres.
I thank Birthday Pony, Fool on Hill and the others for the postings, as it is a very interesting viewpoint.
This kind of legal order would obliterate the intertemporal division of labor and thus plunge humanity into squalor.
Could you elaborate? I have a vague sense of what you mean but I’d like to have it more explicitly spelled out.
Basically, if people start providing for themselves then society will fall apart is what that sounded like.
“This kind of legal order would obliterate the intertemporal division of labor and thus plunge humanity into squalor.”
Yep, from the economic point of view, there would be vastly reduced production and capital accumulation, complex goods involving long chains of production would become scarce and expensive, and the end result would be a subsistance type lifestyle.
But that would only occur as man is and acts today. Not in the Anarchist vision of evolved humanity.
I’m failing to see the connection between occ/use and production falling apart.
High productivity depends on capital goods, which depend on delayed consumption. If people with capital goods beyond what they can physically use themselves cannot hire labor to work with those goods without thereby losing ownership, they will consume their capital and stop saving. Capital investment and the savings rate will plummet to primitive levels, and mankind will be reduced once more to a hand-to-mouth existence.
DJS’ contention that man will “plummet to primitive levels” seems stronger than it needs to be, but I do see the causal mechanism he is describing and it does concern me. Again, in a free market of definitions of “property”, it isn’t necessary to make dire statements like this; it’s only necessary to say “I think thta things will end up better with the capitalist definition, and so that’s the one I’d choose”. In that sense, I think he’s got a point: it seems very unlikely that many of the advantages that we currently enjoy would have emerged in a communitarian definition of property, and likewise, that many of the future advantages that are likely to come in a capitalist definition of property are likely to be matched by a similar society under a communitarian property definition.
Apart from the capital/savings argument that DJS gives above (which is pretty compelling to me), I also wonder about the fate of specialization/division of labor in a communitarian society, and I have concerns about the economic coordination problem which the price system helps solve in a society with a capitalist definition of property.
For the first: as I understand it, left libertarians see things being very “local”, because only the state enables the more “global” market actors. Am I getting that right? If so, doesn’t that greatly retard specialization and division of labor? You said “if people start providing for themselves…”: if this means that they become generalists, providing their own farming and home building and repair etc etc., then isn’t that explicitly a great reduction in specialization and division of labor? If so, then I think in this free market of “property definitions”, I want to go for the one that allows the most specialization and division of labor, because it’s through that mechansim that production and innovation really seem to flourish. After all, in a society of one, there is no specialization. In a society of two, each person has to learn to do at least half of all things that need/want to get done, so still not much specialization. In a society of 6 billion interconnected people, we get incredible specialization: we have people who can spend their whole lives learning to master and invent certain musical instruments and styles, certain specializations in science, medicine, and technology, the raising and growing of speciality crops and foods, etc., etc.
For the second point, it seems like with this “weak” (I mean this as a technical term, not a pejorative one: it is “weak” because it applies in less cases) definition of property, it is very difficult for a functioning price system to emerge. Onen of the harder things to follow in Pony’s discussions is her statements that there will still be buying/selling/trading in a communitarian system, even though property and ownership is defined by occupation/use. If I’m done using my rake, in a capitalist definition of property, most likely I sell that rake, and then I use that money to buy something else that I need more. In Pony’s system, if I’m done with the rake, then whoever currently needs to use it just takes it. So in both cases, the rake gets redistributed to someone who is going to use it. That’s good. But what about the coordination problem? What if many people want rakes, and there are many people giving up rakes, and the rakes are all of different quality, and the people who want the rakes want them in differing amounts: one person wants to use a rake because if they don’t rake their garden soon they are going to lose their crop, while another person wants the rake because they are building a giant rake-sculpture. But what if the latter gets to me first and “owns” the rake by virtue of using it first? I’m not an expert on price theory etc, but I can “see” and understand how prices help here: the person whose crop is about to die will be willing to pay more for the rake than the artist, and so I’ll sell it to them. The rake goes to where it is most “societally needed”, with price being the signal and mechanism by which many, many distributed actors can coordinate the problem of “where can this resource do the most good?”. (Of course it’s not going to solve this problem exaclty, but let’s agree ahead of time that nothing can solve it exactly; we’re just comparing imperfect score to imperfect score). In the communitarian system, there doesn’t seem to be a mechanism that is as effective at solving these coordination problems. I mean, take the case of this artist: their entire lives may be centered around their art. In a communitarian sense, they may have a vast need for all of these rakes to complete their art. And once complete, doesn’t the very existence of this piece of art represent a “use” of all of the materials that went into it that lasts into perpetuity (or at least as long as one person enjoys gazing upon this art)? Doesn’t that take all of the rakes out of society’s hands? In short, as a consumer in a free market of definitions of property, I’d have grave concerns about consuming the communitarian definition, because I’d be concerned that without strong property definitions, the price system that emerges - if any - will not solve the coordination problem nearly as well, and the overall economic health of the communitarians will be considerably less than the capitalists.
I kind of infer from all of what Pony has written here that LL/communitarians generally have an aesthetic preference for living a more agrarian, less technological lifestyle. I wonder if I’m right about that, and if so, if that colors their thinking in defining property the way they do. In either case, I’ll stress again: AnCaps support any voluntary arrangement between people. AnCaps fully support the choice of a people to live an agrarian lifestyle, and if adopting a communitarian definition of property (amongst themselves) works better to achieve and work within that kind of lifestyle, then no AnCap is going to force you to adopt a different definition. But speaking from the perspective of a consumer in the market of “property definitions”: I think I’m going to take my business elsewhere. I like the advances of technology and I evaluate that I am part of the population of people who has lived the best life in the history of humanity so far (and that the people that come after me will surpass that claim). I like the medical advances, I like the advances in information technology (that allow me to have this conversation!), I like being part of a global society that exchanges cultural and technological innovations across a huge panoply of different people, and I think that the capitalist definition of property is much more likely to result in those things.
But I’m still really fascinated in how the LLs predict that things would play out in a society with an occ/use definition of property. Pony, if you’re still here: where can I read about that specific kind of thing? Or can you carry on such a converstaion? I’ll give full disclosure: I’m attempting to write a fictional book set in an AnCap setting, and my goal is to try to be existential: to show how existence might actually play out. As such, I would really like to show how different societies can all live side by side (not without problems and conflicts of course: utopia is not an option ;-), and I’ve become kind of fascinated with the idea of including a sub society of LLs/communitarians. But I would want to do it as realistically as possible: to show the tradeoffs, the pluses and minuses, and to capture why the people who chose to live that way made (and stayed with) that choice. I would love some help with that from real LLs. To be clear: I’m not interested in philsophic or historical “arguments”; I’m not interested in “argument” at all. There is no one right answer. I’m interested in predictions and subjective valuations: in a free market of “definitions of property”, what would draw you (and other LLs) to consume a communitarian definition? I’m hapy to take that discussion to email or another venue if you think that would work better.
I am happy to see the posts by Alternatives Considered and agisthos. They seem like very reasonable posters. I think AC raises some good objections, which I think need to be addressed. I am thinking of starting a big thread analyzing the conditions in which the homesteading principle would be selected verses occupancy and use (essentially a market analysis), so I think I will refrain from addressing them here.
I will say that I think our present world is in some ways over specialized. I see this at my work where everyone is segregated into different departments. Since no one understands what other people do, one must blindly follow the orders of a manager. Personally, I think that such specialization is used to justify management, rather than the other way around. It’s not specialization of skill that I have issues with so much as it is specialization of access and understanding. I didn’t go to school as a child, and yet many seem to consider me a smart person. So I also must question what good the specialization of teaching does for society. I recommend Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society (http://ournature.org/~novembre/illich/1970_deschooling.html) and Tools for Conviviality (http://www.opencollector.org/history/homebrew/tools.html) if you’re interested in exploring these issues. I believe Jacques Ellul offers a similar critique of capitalist technology, but I have not read any of his books yet.
But I’m still really fascinated in how the LLs predict that things would play out in a society with an occ/use definition of property. Pony, if you’re still here: where can I read about that specific kind of thing? Or can you carry on such a converstaion? I’ll give full disclosure: I’m attempting to write a fictional book set in an AnCap setting, and my goal is to try to be existential: to show how existence might actually play out. As such, I would really like to show how different societies can all live side by side (not without problems and conflicts of course: utopia is not an option ;-), and I’ve become kind of fascinated with the idea of including a sub society of LLs/communitarians.
That’s very interesting. I am actually thinking of writing a “libertarian” future scenario myself. I think it’s a good exercise.
I’ve found An Anarchist FAQ (http://anarchism.pageabode.com/afaq/index.html) to be a great source of info on socialist anarchism. For your purposes, I’d recommend Section G, which deals with Individualist Anarchism, as well as Section I, which explains what an anarchist society would look like. However, I think Section I is more from an anarcho-communist perspective (the writers of the FAQ are anarcho-communists). I haven’t gotten to the latter section yet myself.
How does one embed links into words on this site?
I’m not sure DJS’s conclusion is necessarily true. The chain reaction put forward needs a whole lot more explaining that just a ‘this depends on that depends on that,’ sort of thing.
There are a number of things to consider when speaking of “capital goods,” because not all capital functions the same way. Those who have more capital than they can use will probably just lose it in many cases. The cliché of the factory occupation comes to mind. I’m not sure how a factory could be “consumed,” but I can see how workers could occupy and continue to produce goods and capital for other worker-owned businesses. In the case of things like tools, occ/use doesn’t really oppose having things you don’t use every day. I might not use my hammer for months, but it’s in my house, and I live in my house.
Basically all I am saying is that it’d be pretty damn hard to defend more than you can occupy or use on a regular basis without something very close to a state, although perhaps not exactly like a state. A privately owned factory that is surrounded by guards standing right next to a cooperatively owned factory is likely to be a little demoralizing to work at. My bet would be that if the alternatives exist, folks would rather have collegues than bosses.
I’m not quite sure what an Anarchist community would look like post-authoritarianism. Anything I can give you is just a projection of my own feelings, which no matter how inclusive I try to be, would not really take into account all the other variables that I can’t imagine. I don’t have a platform. I’m just interested in seeing how people work post-authoritarianism, not thinking it.
Except for particular cases like seed-corn, capital consumption is not generally the literal eating of capital goods. Capital consumption is the failure to direct enough materials away from consumption in order to maintain the capital goods. A factory is consumed when it is allowed to fall into complete disrepair, converted to less-productive processes that can be handled by the owner alone, or broken down and sold in parts or for scrap.
I recommend reading the draft of my upcoming Mises Daily, Crusoe Production Theory.
I’m not sure why workers who depend on a factory for their living would let it fall into disrepair. In fact, wasn’t it the capitalists in Argentina who were letting the factories go to waste and trying to sell it for scrap when the workers rebelled in order to maintain it? And as I said earlier in the thread, I don’t believe that the only desire of humans is to consume. Or else, how do you explain Wikipedia?
This strikes me as an authoritarian argument. You don’t know how to allocate resources yourself. Give us everything, and we’ll make the decisions for you!
I agree a lot with what Fool has said. I’m not sure that just because a single person has no use for a factory or cannot use the entire factory that it will fail, especially if proprietarianism as a whole falls out. Just like Fool said, it was the workers in Argentina doing things based in occupancy and use that saved production.
In fact, the owners of the factories consuming their capital instead of hiring people was the basis of anyone occupying in the first place.
“I’m not sure why workers who depend on a factory for their living would let it fall into disrepair.”
FotH,
Yes, workers could take control of the factory. But an “absentee-ownership” legal order doesn’t prevent cooperatives, so if they were so good at running their own factory enterprise, why couldn’t those same workers form a cooperative and pool their wages and/or borrow money to create or buy their own factory in the first place? If it’s because the “absentee-owned” factory was run more competently in light of ultimate consumer evaluation, and thus they wouldn’t have been able to compete, then this new turn of affairs will only be to the detriment of the general public.
And if hired workers taking over capital goods was known to be the new “way things are done”, there would be drastically less incentive for any individual to delay consumption enough to support future capital-intensive projects. The only such saving that would be done would be saving for worker-owned enterprises. But completely precluded would be any saving that might have been done by any would-be producer who has the providence to support and the sagacity to direct a project on his own with the help of hired workers.
Collaborative production is so bountiful, because it allows people to specialize. Sure, maybe sometimes the people who are best at supporting and directing an enterprise are the same people who are best at operating the equipment. But because of the diversity of nature, most of the time that won’t be the case. By confining human interraction such that the direction and support of an enterprise can ONLY ever be done by those operating the equipment, you would be precluding innumerable mutually advantageous exchanges between savers and workers, and thereby precluding a tremendous amount of saving from being done in the first place.
Alternatives Considered, I don’t see any point in soft-pedaling the necessary conclusion. Mutualism would obliterate the intertemporal division of labor and reduce humanity to squalor.
The workers in Argentina could not pool their wages because before most of the occupations they had no wages. The movement was largely made up of laid-off workers who then watched their factories titled move from owner to owner, state to business to business to bank, and then came in figuring that if they operated it, they owned it. The proprietarian system of ownership, (the one that lead to the consuption of capital goods in the first place, let’s not forget), is what was causing the economy to fail for most while the individual owners were banking loads and loads of money. Coops on the other hand need not run at a profit, therefore providing more stability in hard times, and are more generally made up of and run by people who are likely to be the consumers at the end of the day. So far, they have proven to be wildly more popular than individually owned shops (that is, if this were a popularity contest).
It’s obvious to me that occ/use is more generally what people go by in the absence of a state. Why and how a claim to more recources than one could use is justified is confusing to me, especially without a state to enforce such claims.
BP, anecdotes about an ideologically-driven factory takeover by a few unemployed workers in statist Argentina are clearly not relevant to the economic argument against your vague and unargued ideological claim that fulltime use-occupied mutualist coop factories will be “more generally [meaning >50% or what? and who cares about the macro ratios of internal organization among firms anyway?] what people go by in the absence of a state.”
Syndicalist coops can acquire property and raise capital just like absolutely any other organization in a stateless market, whether the mutualist entrepreneurs start with little money or a lot. If they are “wildly more popular” due to greater “stability” or whatever (none of your economic assertions follow from each other there btw), then they will indeed be very prevalent and you still don’t need the human nature-defying, ahistorical fantasy of some mutualist fulltime-use/occupancy ownership criterion.