Cal, spot-on.
BP, are you going to grapple with my economic argument at all, or are you going to keep daydreaming about some irrelevant Argentine anecdote?
I grapple with economic arguments as they reflect reality. When an example goes to show an inconsistency with an argument that’s put forward, I’d say that’s engaging the argument. The point being, that occ/use is not any more fatalist than ahything else.
But let’s address the idea that syndicalism can exist within capitalism, or the broader argument I hear all the time, that any system put forth by socialsts can exist within capitalism. The mode of how a certain enterprise works or aqcuires property is not necessarily representative of the system as a whole. That is, if workers aqcuired capital by means you deem justified and then started to operate by occ/use along with the rest of a small community, the system ceases to be capitalism. The parties involved are no longer operating by the conventions unique to capitalism at that point, and calling it capitalism for capitalism’s sake is rather silly.
But now let’s address whether it really is possible for coops to just spring up as easily as anything else, and that by implication the market has simply gone to show that proprietarianism out competes them. While theorhetically this might be true, it has yet to explain any observable phenonmenon in existence. When a theory lacks the ability to explain observations, I’d say it’s a lousy theory.
Every time syndicalism has been an active and viable alternative, private owners of industry do all they can to shut them down. Once an alternative that entirely negates the basis upon which those in power have maintained power, those with power wish to shut it down. First and foremost, there’s the concentration of capital into a few hands, that makes it incredibly hard for most people to acquire capital by any means. Secondly, a factory owner is highly unlikely to sell a factory to a group of workers that wish to completely reverse the power dynamic of the society that made the factory owner powerful. If someone has a de facto monopoly, which I think we would all agree the state allows numerous companies to have, my guess would be they don’t want to give it up. How exactly syndicalists can acquire capital without expropriation when their goals lie in direct opposition to the state and its benefactors is something I don’t understand.
I am not arguing that it’s entirely possible that workers would be able to acquire their own factories in a society without a state. I am arguing that for proprietarianism to outcompete syndicalism it seems to recquire a state.
Or how about not changing the subject? I’ve demonstrated how a mutualist legal order would obliterate the intemporal division of labor and reduce humanity to a hand-to-mouth existence. For 99% of your potential converts, that would make your philosophy a complete non-starter. If what I’ve argued is true, why should anyone listen to anything else mutualists have to say? If it is not true, how so?
As you’ve said: “The parties involved are no longer operating by the conventions unique to capitalism at that point, and calling it capitalism for capitalism’s sake is rather silly.”
Let’s start here:
“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.”
I’m unsure what this statement means, so I’m going to address all the possibilities I see. First, it could simply be saying that if worked-owned factories become the norm than there is no incentive for an individual to save up capital in hopes of being an employer. That is obviously true. How that leads to the destruction of all future capital-intensive projects is not so clear.
It could mean that individuals lack any incentive to save any capital. That is demonstratably false. It’s useful and consistent for individuals to save capital that they can put to use by themselves or in collaboration with others who own capital. Carpenters for example would still have plenty of incentive to acquire and save tools to either be self-employed or work in collaboration with other carpenters. Sure, there will be a lack of people saving so much capital that they themselves cannot use it, but it does not appear as though employers have inherent utility in a system supportive of work-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.”
I do not see why the insights or visions of an individual would necessarily be washed away in a syndicalist system, so I don’t understand how the would-be employer’s innovation necessarily goes unnoticed. True, they would probably not have the benefit of being a legal petty tyrant over their own workplace, but if their ideas truly are beneficial and innovative there is no reason why others would not listen and even obey commands in a system where this person’s rule is not legally backed by force.
“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.”
I do not necessarily state that. An innovative individual who is better at seeing and determining long term goals and management related things would not necessarily be pushed away. The only difference is that they would not have the legal backing of force over the workplace of others.
Occ/use does not destroy individual innovation, insights, or ideas. It simply takes away legally backed force against those who continually use the capital in question. Why the benefit of being a petty tyrant is necessary motivation for such individuals is not clear.
“if worked-owned factories become the norm”
It’s not about worker-owned factories becoming the norm. It’s about non-worker-owned factories becoming impossible because people with capital goods can’t hand them over to anybody without losing title to them.
“Sure, there will be a lack of people saving so much capital that they themselves cannot use it, but it does not appear as though employers have inherent utility in a system supportive of work-owned enterprises.”
Employers have utility by definition according to the demonstrated preference of any workers who choose to operate their capital in exchange for wages. A capitalist/worker arrangement is effectively an intertemporal exchange. Workers are advanced present money in exchange for enabling the capitalist to own a future good. Abolishing wages would therefore be injurious to both would-be consenting adults in the exact same way that abolishing interest would be.
Even more fundamentally, it would be disastrous for the general public as users of the final products (consumers’ goods) that production is for the sake of in the first place. On the market, through the instrumentality of profit and loss, consumers reward entrepreneurs who dedicate resources to production processes that are consistent with their desired consumption/savings ratio. If an entrepreneur would have been able to make a profit by allocating a huge inventory of capital goods to be operated by hired workers in a really long, but hugely productive production process, but he CAN’T because his capital goods would have been lost to him as soon as he handed them over to anybody, then that is a huge loss to those consumers (the majority of whom are also workers, by the way) who would have preferred the later, but greater comforts and security that the foregone highly productive process would have provided them.
“I do not see why the insights or visions of an individual would necessarily be washed away in a syndicalist system, so I don’t understand how the would-be employer’s innovation necessarily goes unnoticed”
It’s not about innovation going unnoticed, it’s about entrepreneurial judgment and capitalist providence going under- or un-utilized. The entrepreneurial judgment and capitalist providence of any and all would-be employers whose judgment and providence happen to not be best-suited for worker-owned enterprises would be under-utilized. And the entrepreneurial judgment and capitalist providence of any and all would-be employers whose judgment and providence happen to not be at all suited for worker-owned enterprises would be completely un-utilized. Because nature spreads her gifts un-uniformly, virtually all would-be employers would fit one of those two categories.
The general public as users of final goods (which production is for the sake of in the first place) are best served when people in their roles as producers are shareholders/capitalists insofar as they are good at being shareholders/capitalists and in the industry in which they are good at it, and are workers insofar as they are good at being workers and in the industry in which they are good at it. By rigidly yoking ownership with physical manipulation you would severely constrain the public’s horizons by making it so those who provide for them can only do so in a severely limited variety of ways. Under your system, not only do would shareholder/capitalists have to be workers and vice versa. But they would have to be shareholder/capitalists in the same industry that they are workers and vice versa. Again, that would preclude innumerable mutually-advantageous intertemporal exchanges, and plunge savings, capital accumulation, and future productivity to hand-to-mouth levels that are fathoms below what the public as consumers (users of final goods) would have preferred.
Oh, and spare the sloganeering for the “righteous indignation” libertarian crowd. It’ll get you nowhere with ancaps like me and Cal.
I’ve put my arguments from this thread into an essay.
Daniel, I still maintain that while you have laid out a fine and compelling argument for why occ/use would lead to less economic progress, I see absolutely no argument supporting an “exact level” of economic activity that would result. IOW: I see the argument for “worse”, but not for “hand to mouth squalor”. Stating the latter takes away from the strength of the former argument. And, again, is unnecessary: as a consumer of these definitions, I’m going to choose the better one, regardless of absolute level.
Employers have utility by definition according to the demonstrated preference of any workers who choose to operate their capital in exchange for wages. A capitalist/worker arrangement is effectively an intertemporal exchange. Workers are advanced present money in exchange for enabling the capitalist to own a future good. Abolishing wages would therefore be injurious to both would-be consenting adults in the exact same way that abolishing interest would be.
I challenge the notion that a worker’s choice for wages represents a desire for consumption and not savings. If a starving man chooses food over a plow, is he choosing consumption or savings? If a man chooses to buy a car to get to work vs. buying stock in the automotive company, is he choosing consumption or savings? In each case, the man is making the choice that best maximizes future consumption. Eating food is just as necessary for producing food as producing food is for eating it. Having a car contributes to producing a car just as producing a car contributes to having a car. Anyone who lives on subsistence necessary allocates a greater portion of their resources to savings than a rich person who buys caviar and multiple cars. Once you realize that a worker’s choice for wages represents a desire for future goods, your whole argument falls apart.
“But let’s address the idea that syndicalism can exist within capitalism, or the broader argument I hear all the time, that any system put forth by socialsts can exist within capitalism.”
I’m still fascinated by the LL vision of society and disappointed you can’t engage with me a bit more on now the free market under such a definition of property might emerge, but in your last couple of posts I think you’re starting to fall back to making an assumption that the people here will not agree with, and it makes further conversation come to a grinding halt… I think it’s important that you continue to focus on “a capitalist definition of property” rather than “capitalism”, because when you do the latter, you keep making the mistake of thinking of the current corporatist system as being what we want/advocate. To be clear: what we have today is not a capitalist definition of property, because the actions of the state consistently and continually violate such a definition. Remember that you and we are united in our opposition to the state, and make sure you’re not accidentally attributing to us a support for the state that we do not possess. We do not support the current instantiation of limited-liability corporations, their use of the force of the state for their own advantage, etc.
“But now let’s address whether it really is possible for coops to just spring up as easily as anything else, and that by implication the market has simply gone to show that proprietarianism out competes them. While theorhetically this might be true, it has yet to explain any observable phenonmenon in existence.”
Is someone saying that past history somehow shows a preference for a capitalist definiton of property instead of occ/use? Sheesh, I sure wouldn’t, because the question about preference is “what would people prefer in a world without the state”, and we’ve never had that. We haven’t had a chance to do that experiment yet. So I think we can only make predictive arguments from some other line(s) of logic.
“Every time syndicalism has been an active and viable alternative, private owners of industry do all they can to shut them down.”
Well, you’re doing exactly the same thing: you’re using examples from a stateful society to project what would happen in a stateless society. What you say above happens, but it’s just an example of the corporatist system whereby powerful corporations use the concentrated force of the state for their own advantage. IOW: the “doing all they can” includes and mostly consists of the use of force, via the state. What does that have to do with predicting how things would play out in a stateless, relatively force-less society? If I’m capitalist industry owner and a syndicate arises in my industry to compete with me, I can either try to outcompete them in the market by producing better products/services at better prices, or I can pour my limited free resources into somehow trying to stomp out that syndicate directly, without force. How effective can I possibly be in the latter? It’s an economically deathly decision for me, and a very unlikely one for me to be able to push past my board of directors etc. If I managed to do that, what stops the next syndicate from doing the exact same thing? My only lasting solution is to attempt to out compete them in the free market by being the best, because that’s a solution that doesn’t just work against one competitor, it works against all of them.
“How exactly syndicalists can acquire capital without expropriation when their goals lie in direct opposition to the state and its benefactors is something I don’t understand.”
Again: what are you talking about? Who here is advocating the state?
I said this before: your definition of property can coexist with a capitalist definition of property, as long as you use that definition amongst yourselves. If 50% of the people are mutualists, then the mutualists could buy 50% of the property in a way that capitalists would respect (in the sense of knowing “it’s not ours, so we have no claim on it”), and then turn around and allocate that property amongst yourselves by an owner/use rule. You keep starting from the current lousy. corrupted state of things, but the discussion here is about what people would use in a stateless society, with AnCaps claiming that over time, most people would choose a capitalist definition of property. Mutualists would be able to implement an occ/use definition of property without any forceful attack on them from people with a capitalist definition of property.
However, the reverse is not true: it is the mutualists that will not let people freely choose to live under a “capitalist” definition of property. You said it yourself: anyone who wants to use a capitalist definition of property had better hired armed guards, because your folks are prepared to forcefully take that property away if it doesn’t match your definition of property. I know you’re not going to agree with me, but it seems as if you and yours are the aggressors, at least to the extent that instead of being content to practice a mutualist definition of property amongst yourselves, you insist that everyone else must also use the same defintion of property.
“I am arguing that for proprietarianism to outcompete syndicalism it seems to recquire a state.”
The argument I see is mostly this: us mutualists not only do not want to practice proprietarianism amongst ourselves, we will not allow anyone else to practice it amongst themselves, and so we will forcefully keep you from practicing that by physically appropriating whatever property we deem to be not property by our definition. So if you want to practice proprietarianism, be prepared to defend yourselves with heavy firepower (“armed guards” was your ever-so-peaceful suggestion, not mine).
Do you see how and why that can make us defensive? We are perfectly happy to let you practice occ/use property amongst yourselves, but you are not willing to do the same. As soon as a capitalist definition of property no longer fits your own definition, you will use what you know we consider force against us.
Since the one uniting thing amongst LLs and AnCaps is a desire for a peaceful, force-less (and thus stateless) society, the only thing that makes sense amongst LLs and AnCaps is to allow each of us is to respect each other’s definition of property. Anything else necessarily leads to armed conflict.
“The proprietarian system of ownership, (the one that lead to the consuption of capital goods in the first place, let’s not forget),”
NO: whatever there was in Argentina, it was not the definition of property that AnCaps advocate, not when the state was so large and powerful. You are again confusing corporatism - the current hellish mix of big business and government force - for what we are actually advocating. The market competition that we’re interested in here isn’t between LLs and the current system, it’s between the LL definition of property and the capitalist definition of property. That definition is not in use anywhere on earth today, not when the state considers all property its own except they deign to let us keep some of it temporarily.
“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.”
As long as you mean this as a consumer preference, how could anyone here have an argument with you? It’s when you leave the realm of “this is the definition of property that I would choose to consume” to “everyone must have this definition of property” where we get defensive. Statements like “I’m confused by that” should be market choices: if you’re confused, simply don’t choose it, but don’t then try to forcefully stop others who aren’t confused choose it. For my part, in my mental model, the vast amount of wealth (I prefer the term “wealth” to the term “resources” because I think the latter is a term that is used poorly) is created, not simply “found”. In that sense, a claim to more wealth than one could use is justified when one creates it. Jeff Bezos has an enormous amount of wealth because he created it. What I find much more confusing is the flipside: why and how a claim to wealth that one didn’t create over the person that did create it is confusing to me. And because of that, I want to consume the capitalist definition of property that recognizes that wealth is owned by its creator (though of course is is transferrable etc).
“Carpenters for example would still have plenty of incentive to acquire and save tools to either be self-employed or work in collaboration with other carpenters.”
But they won’t have an incentive during a lull in business to buy a piece of land, build a spec house on it, and try to sell it (because he’s not occupying it so it is ripe for squatting), which is exactly what my friend - who is a carpenter - has been doing during the lull of the last couple of years. It’s the only way he’s been able to provide for his family, and yet at the same time is producing homes for other families that need them. It’s just a micro-example of a lose/lose situation caused by a mismatch in the incentive structure defined by your definition of property. Again, as a consumer, I want to live amongst people where I have more options for providing for my family than the ones that are available to me in a mutualist system.
“they would probably not have the benefit of being a legal petty tyrant over their own workplace”
You’ve said something to this effect several times, but yet again, I think you’re confusing the current system for the system that AnCaps advocate, and it really hurts your understanding. You said you came here for understanding, so you need to be prepared to suspend disbelief a little and understand what we are actually advocating. In an AnCap society, a worker/employer relationship is entirely consensual. An employer might be an asshole, but he can’t be a “tyrant”, and to the extent that he is an asshole, he’s going to pay a market price for that in terms of finding it harder to find good employees that want to work for him. You seem to have a view of how employer/employee relationships work that is… naive, I think. Not that it has never existed; just that it really isn’t the dominant way that it currently exists, and certainly isn’t the way it would exist in a stateless/forceless society. I’ve worked for employers for 25 years, and in no sense did any of them apply any force to me. At any time when I was uncomfortable with the relationship, I simply walked away. So much of what seems to lie behind your preference for the mutualist system is some sort of deep-seated aesthetic hate of “working for someone”, but surely you see that that is a personal choice, one to be made in the market, and not something to based a claim that everyone else should also hate it on?
Could I go into business for myself? Sure. Do I sometimes clash with my employers? Sure. Why don’t I go into business for myself? Because I’m far more productive - and thus create and own more wealth - concentraing on my narrow speciality. If I open my own business, either by myself or with some small “cooperative”, I’m necessarily going to have to do a bunch of things that I’m not very good at: business, finance, people management, etc. By working within a corporation that is large enough to support a higher level of specialization, I can concentrate only on that thing that I am very good at - at which I produce a lot of wealth - and achieve a win/win/win situation (more wealth for my family, more wealth for my employers, more wealth for the societal consumers of my production). I know that my relationship with my employers is one of consensual mutual advantage: they need me just as much as I need them. From my perspective as a consumer of property definitions - not as a philosopher trying to convince you or anyone else that you must agree with me, but just explaining my choice - the “leftist” tendency to view employer/employee relationships in some sort of exploitative way has never matched my personal experience or observation, and that’s after having been a participant in and observer of that system for 25 years. Left-leaning people see employers in a very negative light, which I suspect is very colored by the abuses of the *corporatist" system. “Capitalists” tend to put a lot of importance on the importance of entrepreneurs who, of course, become employers if they are successful. Having been part of quite a few small fledgling companies (I’m a software engineer who worked in Silicon Valley for a long time), I’ve seen both sides of this, and anyone who thinks that you just throw up a shingle and become a megapowerful corporation is using a mental model that doesn’t at all match mine. In reality, companies are under extreme economic pressure at all times, and the kind of dystopian fantasies that lefties seem to imagine - in which an employer or corporation can just squander any amount of resources or good will in generally socially destructive ways and continue to thrive - don’t match the reality that I’ve seen at all. Hell, I currently work for a “giant” corporation (amazon), and we still are under such intense competitive pressure that all we can do, day in and day out, is focus on how to give customers the best experience. There is no free energy to go squashing syndicates, to spend money to “support the status quo”, etc (there is, however, some money spent on lobbying and other attempts to work within the corporatist system for gain. I’m not saying amazon are saints, but that’s not the point I’m trying to make). In a system free of the state, the costs of destructive behavior are way, way too great to last long in the market. When you are competing against hundreds of competitors that would love to eat your lunch, you simply can’t afford to get into any sort of battle with one of them: sure, if you’re bigger, you can squash that one, but while you are doing that the other 99 will pass you by. The economic “survival of the fittest” competition does not leave much room for destructive behavior when you are internalizating all of the costs of that behavior (instead of externalizing them through the power of the state).
When you say that a free market without force should determine the type of property rights, you are already assuming capitalist property rights. When a factory “owner” prevents workers from using the factory, you say this is not force. But it is only not force if we assume a homesteading theory of property rights. If we assume occupancy and use, then it is force. If we look at a truly forceless situation, the choice of property rights would be quite different. If the factory owner could not use force to prevent someone from using his factory, then it seems unlikely that workers would choose a capitalist system of property rights. Force is just as decisive in selecting capitalism as it is in selecting statism.
Imagine you live in a totalitarian society where the state claims ownership over everything. One day the state says, “OK, we are going to let the market decide whether all property belongs to the state or whether it belongs to the homesteaders. But remember, if you try to take our stuff and we stop you, we’re not using force!” Miraculously, the “free” market chooses totalitarianism!
“When you say that a free market without force should determine the type of property rights, you are already assuming capitalist property rights.”
I agree that that is a rhetorical risk, but I think I took fairly great pains to avoid it, so I think you’re mistaken… but it is pretty subtle and so maybe I’m wrong. But let me explain again in a mechanistic way how I think this plays out, and I think in doing so it supports what I am saying.
I start from what appears to be the common thread amongst LLs and AnCaps: an agrement to participate only in mutually voluntary/consensual interactions with other people, that is, “contracts” as the fundamental societal organizing principle (expanding ‘contract’ to include informal contracts etc). Where, then, is “property”? At this point, there is no such thing. “Property” can only have definition in terms of the contracts that define it. It has no existence in the ether, it is simply a concept defined in some bilateral contracts.
But: which contracts define property?
I project/predict that there are two types of “contracts” that will define something property-like (but that these eventually roll together in a way I will show). The first is kind of a mutual non-aggression pact: “you’ve worked hard to plow that field and I have worked hard to plow this field. Right now we both expend resources defending our field from each other [perhaps they have build fences around their crops say] because we are afraid the other may take the crops we’ve produced. It’s in our mutual advantage to agree to not take the crops in the fields that each other has planted, so that we don’t have to waste resources defending them from each other, on the assumption that you weren’t really planning on taking the crops I planted anyway (we’re both giving up nothing for something, a win/win).” Even if the term “property” isn’t used, it is basically emerging as a concept/institution.
While such bilateral contracts can have value when interactions are limited, they become more problematic when the web of interactions gets larger, and in either case, even in this local, bilateral agreement, there is a risk of default. So it follows that there is a market niche for “guarantors” of such contracts. This represents another contractual relationship in which a client contracts with a “protection agency” to help guarantee such contracts. This new contract would go something like “Here’s my contract with my neighbor. I want to pay you a small amount to help protect me from any possible fraud on my neighbor’s part, to recompense me in the case of such fraud, etc.” This second contract essentially amounts to having the protection agency defend the client’s “property”. Again, the term doesn’t actually have to be used, but exactly what the PA is “protecting” needs to be firmly defined, and it is here where different “definitions” of property start to emerge: these are merely different agreements between PAs and clients as to exactly what they are willing to protect/guarantee.
Like anything, these PAs will exist in a competitive environment, and different business models will emerge and gain different market shares. As this market grows, it will be natural for certain PAs to start to specialize in certain consistent definitions of what they will and won’t defend, and there will be market consequences to those choices. Let’s assume for simplicitly that two types of firms start to emerge: one that advertises that it will protect a “capitalist” type of property, and another that advertises it will protect a “mutualist” definition of property.
A fairly predictable likelihood amongst most is the following optimization: each company will seek agreement from any new prospective client that in return for their great service and great price, the client agrees that not only that the PA will protect the client’s “property”, but that the client will also respect the “property” of all of that PAs clients. It’s a natural thing, because no PA wants to be in the costly situation where they are fighting against their own client to protect one of their other client’s property.
So now, what you have emerging purely by bottom-up, mutually consensual choices, are sets of people who have chosen by market forces to respect each other’s “property” as mutually agreed to by all clients of a given PA in return for having those clients likewise respect their property. The PA has become a “hub” around which all of their clients are “spokes” who mutually gain the same advantage from these consensual relationships as I originally posited for the first two bilateral contract signers. We now have a multilateral version of the bilateral contract, basically.
There are now two different definitions of property being practiced peacefully and voluntarily within each of these two sets of people, with the sets defined by the respective PAs that they have chosen to contract with. Viola’: two different definitions of property coexist, with no “assumption” of any first definition. QED.
The key is to start with only mutually consensual arrangements, e.g. contracts. A contract is a statement about human actions: which ones will I choose (or forego) in which circumstances. They have nothing to do with an apriori definition of “property”; definitions of “property” emerge from such contracts.
Now, of course, you get questions like “which PAs will gain the larger market shares?”, “how do PAs handle interactions between their clients and non clients”, etc? These are super interesting questions, but they become questions of predicting a free market, not philosophical questions. I’ve taken some time to make some of these predictions already, but the most important is probably: can the two types of PAs coexist without continual armed conflict, and if so, how is that likely to play out and how are things to look afterwards?" if you have mutlple capitalist PAs and multiple mutualist PAs, it isn’t hard to predict that those that continually find themselves in armed conflict are going to fail miserably in competition, because when you have to internalize the costs of conflict, it is devastating for any business venture. Some may try it, but the ones that are able to work out working, non violent compromises with each other - or to otherwise make business decisions that will reduce such conflict - will gain larger market shares than their competitors.
So, for example, a capitalist PA that wisely chooses to take on clients that mostly only live near other clients of capitalist PAs is going to have a distinct business advantage over the capitalist PA that agrees to take on a client that wants to own lots of “property” in the middle of a lefty enclave. It’s just a terrible business decision by that PA, and they are likely to lose out in competition to the smarter ones.
Likewise, amongst mutualist PAs, there will be some that advertise “we will support and protect your mutualist property claims against other mutualists but not against clients of capitalist PAs”, and there will be those that will advertise that they will support property claims against clients of capitalist PAs. I think it’s clear that the latter will have to charge a lot more because they will have much more conflict with the capitalist PAs. Of course, it’s a free market, so all sorts of inbetweens exist: perhaps the “sweet spot” for mutualist PAs is one where they only agree to pursue their client’s property claims against clients of capitalist PAs in certain really obnoxious cases that the capitalist PA isn’t particularly economically motivated to defend anyway (like some douchebag claims he’s homesteaded all of North america, or the moon, or somesuch). In fact, what is likely to emerge are norms and compromises: if a capitalist PA finds it is constantly losing money defending certain types of “property” from LLs, it may simply decide “you know what, this isn’t worth it to us, we’re not going to take on clients with this sort of ‘property’ any longer”.
Other business relationships are possible and thus likely if they are profitable. For example, clients of mutualist PAs cannot be sure from the contracts I’ve proposed so far that clients of capitalist PAs will not make claims against what they consider their property (their homes, farms, etc). Perhaps one way for their mutualist PA to give them safety from that is to actually arrange to become clients of the capitalist PAs, that is, to pay the capitalist PA to protect their clients’ property from claims from the capitalist PAs clients. I realize that’s confusing, so let me say it again. Mutualist PA A wants to give its clients A’ protection from clients B’ of capitalist protection agency B. So they simply “buy” that property from B using B’s definition of property. Since B has contracted with all of its clients B’ that they must respect all of B’s clients - of which A now has become - the clients B’ can no longer make any claims against any of A’. This costs A something, but if it gives them sufficient market advantage vs their competitors to have this arrangement, then it will gain market share.
What emerges is a world in which mutualists can practice a mutualist definition of property amongst themselves, capitalists can practice a capitalist definition of property amongst themselves, mutualists and capitalists will tend to form into clusters, and various - largely peaceful, since the internalized costs of conflict are devastating to a business - compromise arrangements will exist at the margins of the intersection of the two.
So to take your example: “When a factory “owner” prevents workers from using the factory, you say this is not force. If we assume occupancy and use, then it is force.” Let’s see what happens when we look at this situation strictly in terms of contracts and market forces.
First: how often would such a situation actually occur? Capitalist factory owners who consistently build factories in largely mutualist occupied areas and/or who hire clients of mutualist PAs to work in their factory simply aren’t going to last very long. Either their factories will get taken over, or they will have to pay huge amounts to their protection agency to fight off those workers, or their PA will have to pay them large amounts of restitution/insurance (it’s important to note that in a free market, it does not follow that the only way a PA can do business is with violence. It is entirely possible that some PAs will take a more actuarial approach, and provide insurance more than physical protection), in which case PAs that try to provide insurance for such clients are going to get priced out of the market. The self-organizing nature of free markets is such that these situations will become rare; factory owners will simply not put themselves in this position very often. It’s simple good business sense to reduce one’s risks. They may, for example, contractually agree that only clients of certain PAs can be employees at their factories to further reduce their risk, for example.
So now we see that it is unlikely and uncommon that such factories would even exist in communitarian enclaves and that they would voluntarily consent to hire clients of mutualist PAs. So mutualists don’t even work at these factories. But let’s imagine now some mutualists that are incensed at this capitalist offence, and still want to make a mutualist property claim with their own PA. How is that going to work? They are going to go to their mutualist PA and say “we’d like to contract with you to protect what we claim is our property, this factory. How much is that going to cost? Will you take our business?” A bad mutualist PA might say “yes”, but let’s assume that over time, competition weeds out the bad businesses. So assume now a pretty good one. Well, it’s not going to take on such a contract blindly: it’s going to do its homework. It’s going to go check out the situation. It’s going to ask itself “if we agree to defend this property claim, how hard is that going to be to defend? How much will it cost us in restitution if we fail to defend that property claim?” and what are they going to see? They are going to see a bunch of people who don’t even work at a particularl factory claiming that it is their factory, claiming it not only over the “capitalist” that “owns” it according to his relationship with is own capitalist PA, but also claiming ownership of the factory over the workers who actually work at the factory! That’s not even consistent with the basic principle of property that they have advertised! The capitalist workers in that factory could simply ask the mutualist PA in question to be their clients, and by the principle that the mutualist PA advertises and bases their business plan on, they would clearly prefer to take the contract for the workers that are already there. So, while the mutualist PA may not acknowledge the “capitlist owner”'s claim on the property, to them, the capitalist workers own the property according to their contract with the capitalist workers; meanwhile, between the capitalist workers and the capitalist owner, there is no conflict because they both recognize that the owner owns the factory. Everything remains peaceful in this relatively common case and things function to mutual advantage. Even if the capitalist workers don’t explicitly contract with the mutualist PA to defend their claim on the factory, it would be an exceedingly bad business decision for the mutualist PA to take on this contract. They will know from past experience the situations in which the capitalist PAs will fight hard against a claim (and which they won’t), and they will know that the capitalist PA is not going to roll over easily in a case where the factory is owned by one of their clients and all of its employees are likewise their clients. Over time, these PAs will establish working relationships and boundaries will emerge: “look, I’ll trade you this property claim which is a pretty weak one by our client for your property claim that is a weak one by your client.” Or “look, let’s agree that when your people want to make a property claim against one of our clients who is being an asshole (claiming the moon), we’re just going to go back and eat the cost of the claim rather than fight you, because we know that it is super important to your clients and they will be more motivated to spend resources chasing their claim. Likewise, when you have clients making an asshole claim like they own a factory that they don’t even work at, let’s understand that my client has got a lot more invested and will be a lot more motivated to defend that claim.”
The key is to realize that "property’ is not a universal characteristic; it is a bilateral contractual arrangement. The same “piece of property” does not have to exist in only one definition of “property”. It can mean different things to different people via different contractual relationships.
DJS,
It seems as though a lot of your arguments rely on some people being inherently better at managerial positions and others being better at just working. While I think some people may prefer either over the other, I do not think that putting workers in charge of something necessarily leads to a lack of economic foresight or anything else. I’ve already said that yes, there would not be the incentive for would-be employers to save up more than they can use in order to employ people in a situation where force against their workers is legally backed. I do not think this means the employer/employee relationship would disappear, but it would not be as widespread. Even if we accept the implication that one kind of person is better at management and another better at being a worker, nothing you’ve said suggests that the kind of person who is better at management would not be included in a worker-owned scheme. I have not seen an argument as to why those who are better at management must have a legally backed position of authority.
The other point about how the majority of workers choose to work under an employer when they could just as easily start a coop seems like an extension of the “love it or leave it” argument, in that the same could be said that most people choose to live under a state when they could just as easily start an Anarchic society. It’s already quite clear to me that under a state workers cannot so easily choose to, so citing a trend like that does very little to support your argument. In several states in the 20th century in the US, it was illegal to even carry an IWW red card in your name.
Alternatives considered,
Your post is full of a lot of basic mistakes with regards to Mutualist ideas, and by page 6 I’m pretty tired of explaining myself. But here’s a few points:
If we’re simply defining capitalism as voluntary trade, then yes, syndicalism can exist within it. I don’t think that’s a useful definition, but who cares? shrug
“You keep starting from the current lousy. corrupted state of things,”
Well, aren’t we all starting there right now? That’s exactly why I start there, because that’s what I’m dealing with day-to-day.
“If 50% of the people are mutualists, then the mutualists could buy 50% of the property in a way that capitalists would respect…”
Buy it from whom?
“The argument I see is mostly this: us mutualists not only do not want to practice proprietarianism amongst ourselves, we will not allow anyone else to practice it amongst themselves, and so we will forcefully keep you from practicing that by physically appropriating whatever property we deem to be not property by our definition. So if you want to practice proprietarianism, be prepared to defend yourselves with heavy firepower (“armed guards” was your ever-so-peaceful suggestion, not mine).”
That is not my suggestion at all, any more that the capitalist suggestion is the same. I am not suggesting that syndicalists will break into factories full of uninterested workers to “liberate” them. What you are doing is continually arguing from the frame of capitalist property rights. Yes, exporpriation is agression in capitalist terms. However declaration private ownership over things that others are the ones using is agression in occ/use terms. Why is the hope of “peaceful coexistance” put onto Mutualists? What if I asked you why we can’t peacefully coesxist? Why can’t factory owners just give their factories to the workers peacefully, in accordance to occ/use instead of forcing them to recognize the proprietarian title? What is it that makes it so Mutualists must play by capitalist terms? Why do Mutualists have to just give up their possessions to their bosses in order to “peacefully coexist?”
Basically, you’re saying that Mutualists must give up their entire conception of property in order to coexist, otherwise we’ll have to face armed struggle. Why must an entire factory of workers recognize a property title that is not consistent with their beliefs? Why is the burden not on the owner?
Who initiates force?
Is it the factory OWNER, or the workers who want to TAKE the factory?
The key is to start with only mutually consensual arrangements, e.g. contracts. A contract is a statement about human actions: which ones will I choose (or forego) in which circumstances. They have nothing to do with an apriori definition of “property”; definitions of “property” emerge from such contracts.
By mutually consensual, I assume you mean an agreement made in the absence of force. But you say that people make such agreements to avoid force. An agreement made to stop someone from using force against you is an agreement made under coercion. Suppose you built a bicycle and I built a pair of roller skates. You use the bicycle 50% of the time but don’t use the roller skates at all. I use the roller skates 50% of the time and the bicycle 50% of the time (the time you’re not using it). I have no incentive to agree to a homesteading principle because I am getting what I want. However, one day you say that you’ll beat me up if I ride the bicycle again. You say that you’ll let me ride it if I build a skateboard and give it to you. I really want to ride the bicycle, so I agree to a homesteading view of property and build the skateboard for you. I sign the agreement because of your threat, and it is thus not a mutually consensual arrangement. Suppose you threaten to beat me up if I used the roller skates that I made. I would still agree to the deal just the same. You might also try to force me from using both the bicycle and the roller skates. Whether I agreed or not depends upon whether you have enough force to deter me. Thus any agreement made to avoid conflict benefits one in proportion to his/her capacity for violence.
Who initiates force?
Is it the factory OWNER, or the workers who want to TAKE the factory?
This is why I often put “owner” in quotes. According to occ/use, it’s the workers who own the factory and the capitialist who is trying to take it. In statism, its the state that owns the factory and the homesteaders/capitalists who are trying to take it.
"Alternatives considered,
Your post is full of a lot of basic mistakes with regards to Mutualist ideas, and by page 6 I’m pretty tired of explaining myself."
As am I, Pony, but I’ve offered you the respect of reading every single one of your posts here from end to end in an attempt to fully internalize the ideas that you are describing. Successful communication is a partnership involving my ability to understand what you are saying and your ability to convey it clearly. I’m not the smartest person in the world, so perhaps it is my failure, but after I’ve read the huge body of writing that you’ve done, if I’m still not understanding your ideas, perhaps it’s worth considering the possibility that the way you are explaining yourself - over and over you seem to feel - isn’t particularly effective? Or are you suggested that I’m not sincere in trying to understand your ideas (a suggestion that I will take umbrage at)?
"“If 50% of the people are mutualists, then the mutualists could buy 50% of the property in a way that capitalists would respect…”
Buy it from whom?"
Sloppy wording. They could own 50% of the property in a way that capitalists would respect.
It makes me sad that you focus on something like this and miss the more important points. You keep ignoring the claim that if mutualists would stick to a mutualist definition of property amongst themselves- and capitalists did the same - we would largely both get our way.
“Basically, you’re saying that Mutualists must give up their entire conception of property in order to coexist, otherwise we’ll have to face armed struggle. Why must an entire factory of workers recognize a property title that is not consistent with their beliefs? Why is the burden not on the owner?”
Sigh. No, that’s not what I’m saying. To be explicit: the burden is on the owner. He absolutely should give up his property claim to that factory if the entire factory full of workers claim to a mutualist protection agency that the factory is theirs if the factory owner is also a client of mutuallist protection agencies.
No capitalist is going to come in and tell you that even though the mutualist factory owner and the mutualist factor workers have agreed to a definition of property in which that factory now becomes the workers, because that isn’t consistent with capitalist property definitions, that ownership transfer cannot happen. One side does not care what happens internally to the other side.
Where there is case for conflict is either A) when a capitalist factory owner - a client of a capitalist PA - owns the factory, or B) when one side or the other insists that their definition of property must be applied in all cases.
But you have said that you’re not going to rush in and “liberate” a bunch of capitalist workers who are happy working for a capitalist “owner”, so it sounds like you are willing to let capitalists deal with other capitalists via their own definition of property. I have shown several times that capitalists don’t care how mutualists interact with each other. So we have that at least, right? And that leaves basically two questions: 1) what happens when capitalists and mutualists interact; 2) what will the relative market share of capitalists vs mutualists be over a longer term?
I’ve already gone to great lengths to show that the occasions in which 1 will even occur will dwindle over time and that competition amongst the various PAs will tend to create relatively peaceful and mutually agreeable compromises when it does occur. For two, well, all I can do is say that so far, with what I know, I’m going to choose a capitalist PA, and I see that you will choose a mutualist one, and that the best part is that we don’t have to keep shrieking at each other, but we can sit back and see what actually happens to the clients of the two. In broad strokes, I think that the clients of the capitalist PA will start to pull away from the mutualists in terms of economic and technological advance, and I think you would say that the clients of the mutualist PAs will enjoy a more communal and socially engaged life [which, btw, would be selling points for me; I just don’t think that they would outweight the selling points to me of the capitalist PAs].
“What you are doing is continually arguing from the frame of capitalist property rights.”
Not true, Look at my previous post. All I am “arguing for” (I prefer the term “advocating”) is a society in which only mutual consensual relationships exist (i.e. contracts). From there, I am merely trying to predict what will emerge. I am not trying to convince you to adopt capitalist property rights. I am however predicting that over time, more people will be clients of protection agencies that adopt a relatively capitalist definition of “property” in their contracts with their clients.
Obviously, a super important question is: do left libertarians more or less start from the concept of mutually consensual relationships? Or do they start from their definition of property? Again, I, as an AnCap, do not start from as assumption of capitalist property; I start from an assumption of contracts, and then state my consumer preference to enter into contracts with a capitalist definition of “property”.