Emergence Anarcho-Capitalism

[bbnet]

While I think someone migt have beaten me to it earlier in this thread, I believe, based on her assertions here and on other forums the reason for Pony’s presence in this discussion is to convince the community here at mises.org to stop using/hijacking/debasing/disrespecting the term ‘anarchist’ since our use of it doesn’t fit into her/his historical perspective and definition, especially when associated with his/her understanding of ‘capitalism’.

Its sorta like speaking Swahili in Greece about ancient China?

[Fool_on_the_Hill]

I’m so confused. Why did Rothbard feel the need to tack on the word “capitalist” if Proudhon, Tucker, and Kropotkin were capitalists? If capitialism was a word invented by Marx to designate “mercantilism” (or whatever others here prefer to call actually existing capitalism), then why did Rothbard want to coopt it? Didn’t Rothbard use the term “anarcho-capitalism” because he didn’t want to be associated exclusively with either anarchism or capitialism but to take what he saw as the best of both worlds?

When people say “voluntary trade” are they assuming other things such as a natural rights theory of property? Can one have voluntary trade without a natural rights theory of property?

[TANSTAAFL]

Pony, I am interested in learning more about your position. I would like to discuss some things using your terms/definitions. To quote you:

"Proudhon was one of the first to use the term in it’s modern sense, and although he’s not the final word on the matter, since then capitalism has more or less been used to mean a system of property in which the means of production are owned privately such that the owner may charge rent, interest and employ others for a wage. Aside from Austrians, that is the common definition. Even wikipedia has a similar definition, although it’s by no means an authority on the matter: “Capitalism is an economic system in which the means of production are privately owned and operated for profit. Income in a capitalist system takes at least two forms, profit on the one hand and wages on the other. There is also a tradition that treats rent, income from the control of natural resources, as a third phenomenon distinct from either of those. In any case, profit is what is received, by virtue of control of the tools of production, by those who provide the capital.”

Do you understand why the Austrians draw distinctions that alter your definition of capitalism? Can you explain, starting with the action axiom, why rent, interest, and wage labor exist? Are you able to articulate the differences between a wage earner (wages) and a capitalist income (profit)? Do you understand what profit is, where it comes from, what information it conveys, its relation to interest and rent?

I would like to know more about your notion that ownership of property can be determined by use/occupancy. The first thing that pops into my head is how are disputes to be settled? The only thing I saw you offer on the topic of disputes is that they will just get worked out by those involved. This is a huge weakness in your position. You can offer any imaginable dispute and the capitalists here on this board can explain to you how it can be specifically resolved.

[Fool_on_the_Hill]

You can offer any imaginable dispute and the capitalists here on this board can explain to you how it can be specifically resolved.

Really? No one here has been able to explain to me how a preservation group can acquire a rainforest without “transforming” it and then tell a logging company that they don’t have a right to cut it down.

[CernelJoson]

@Phaedros

Property isn’t subjective as everyone expects the things that they own to be respected as theirs.

Of course, expectations are subjective as is ownership. You only “own” what you and others agree you do. It’s an intersubjective consensus, not a fact of reality.

[Birthday_Pony]

“Do you understand why the Austrians draw distinctions that alter your definition of capitalism?”

I can’t say I do. Could you explain why?

“Can you explain, starting with the action axiom, why rent, interest, and wage labor exist?”

I’m not sure what the action axiom is.

So, I just found a wikipedia entry on the action axion I think you’re referring to, and I can’t say I see a connection right away.

Basically, my argument would be that if and only if one can legitimately own (with legitimate in the sense of polisci, meaning others recognize and accept it for whatever reason) more property in land or capital than they can work, occupy, or defend, then they may charge rent for the occupation of land or pay wages for work with capital or land while determining the character of said work, and must rely on external force to defend their capital or land. My argument is not then, that capitalism creates wage labor, interest, or rent, but that it is dependent upon it. And one of the few ways it would be reasonable for someone, or a group of someones, to work in a low position in an employment hierarchy would be if their living conditions were subject to matters out of their hands such that it becomes reasonable for them to take a lower position in an employment hierarchy, given the alternatives.

“I would like to know more about your notion that ownership of property can be determined by use/occupancy. The first thing that pops into my head is how are disputes to be settled?”

From a personal standpoint, I take an egoist view on the matter. If you hold more property than you yourself could reasonably defend then there’s no reason to believe it’s yours. One can defend their house, their workplace. Bands of people working together could reasonably defend their neighborhood.

“This is a huge weakness in your position. You can offer any imaginable dispute and the capitalists here on this board can explain to you how it can be specifically resolved.”

I take it as a benefit actually. If there are disputes, they can get worked out in public forums by actual neighbors and community members who have a vested interest in the wellbeing of themselves as a community, instead of politicians and business people who have a vested interest in themselves as people with power over communities.

If I really can name any dispute and the pro-capitalist folks here can explain how it will be specifically resolved, I take that as a weakness in theory. It’s sounds like the platforms capitalist cousin. Plus, things tend to be in a constant state of change rather than static. I don’t think anyone here really believes that if a society with their desired theory in practice that politics, disputes, or some sort of power dynamic will just end with a quick and easy solution.

---

z1235, I am very sorry to hear you’re bowing out of this discussion, not because I felt as though you had much to add in the way of informative, thought provoking posts, but only because of your wonderful way of working things. With posts such as,

“Why would you do anything against voluntary interactions between parties that are not, and frankly should not be, any of your business? What would you do against me if I had people voluntarily trading their labor/expertise/advice/service in exchange for my money/capital/property/labor/advice? At the same time, if you prefer to exclusively work in collectively owned outfits, or neon pink barns, be my guest. As a capitalist, I don’t give a rat’s ass about how you arrange your affairs on your own property. Means of production, means of procreation, means of digestion, means of defecation, means of pretty much anything make no difference to me and you and your comrades can do whatever you want with whomever you want as long as it’s all voluntary and with/on your property. If you agree to this, how are you not a capitalist, i.e. a proponent of voluntary trade?”

Full of questions directed at me personally and what I would do specifically to you, and when I reply with my personal response, you then have this to say:

"Pony, you seem to be confusing your aesthetic preferences about the universe (hate this, love that, support this, have no sympathy for that, etc.) for a philosophical/property theory with even a smidgen of logical consistency. Like all socialists/marxists, emotions (hate/love) and random personal hang-ups are your driving force. I may hate pink Ferraris but my property theory allows anyone who adores them to collect as many of them as they want. You probably just need to make some personal changes so that you relax, lose the palpable bitterness, stop blaming others (such as the “capitalists”, the “rich”, the “bossy”) for creating a universe not to your liking, start taking responsibility for your own life/actions/satisfaction/predicament, and hopefully learn to live and let others live.

My profit from this debate was minimal and I feel that it’s quickly converging to zero, so I’ll quietly bow myself out. Pleasure chatting with you and I wish you good luck."

Don’t you see the beauty in it? Your response not only places you in a philosophically superior place by proclaiming your ability to stick to theory and objectivity, it simultaneously puts me in the position of the emotional ranting poster who is just too helpless to even try to reach. But you don’t take it out in frustration. Oh no, not a smart, clever man like you. You feel sorry for me, because I am so worthy of your pity. And still, despite my thick reliance on emotions like all Marxists, which everyone knows I am despite my insistence that I’m not, you still have the ounce of humanity left in you to offer me advice, so I can cool down. So I can take it easy. Start looking at things the logical way.

Everyone knows this isn’t the place for some emotional Marxist to go on raving about what they think. This is the place for emotional capitalists to go on raving about what they think, in a logical way of course! It is so obvious to you, and I god knows it should be to me, that capitalism is a logical way of looking at things, so when capitalists ask questions addressed to the second person it’s only for logical reasons. There is no personal animosity behind it. There is no emotional motive behind it. It’s all for logic’s sake. Even personal exceptions to theory would be logically consitent. “No, my friend and I didn’t both equally own the cost of gas on our trip here. Could you imagine managing that sort of thing? It would take a state! We wouldn’t want that, now would we?”

So althought I’ll miss all your wonderful posts, full of personal rage, questions addressed directly to me, and then subsequent accusations of relying on emotion and personal experience when I return an answer (all with hints of sexism about raving, emotional, Marxist women), I understand completely why you wouldn’t want to deal with someone as emotional as me, and can’t help but feel optimistic about the future without z1235 giving me gems of wisdom.

[agisthos]

No offence Birthday Pony, but your main problem communicating here is not the semantical definitions of Socialism and Capitalism, but your inability to differentiate between free-market capitalism and state-monopoly capitalism.

"Free-market capitalism is a network of free and voluntary exchanges in which producers work, produce, and exchange their products for the products of others through prices voluntarily arrived at.

State capitalism consists of one or more groups making use of the coercive apparatus of the government —the State— to accumulate capital for themselves by expropriating the production of others by force and violence."

Rothbard

You make a presumption that all the unfair things about current Capitalism, it’s exploitation, its monopolies, it’s violence and predation, you seem to presume all these things would still exists under a stateless system of free and volunatry exchange.

In all your posts, the afformentioned examples of ‘capitalism’ you show, are ALL the result of state-monopoly capitalism, not the capitalism of free and voluntary exchange we espouse.

I can see why you would not want to make this distinction. Because to accept the logic and fairness of property rights would then cast doubt on the co-op Anarchist society you envision.

If I was so steeped in Marxian class bias about the economics of how producers, laborers and capital interact, I too would subscribe to this occ/use theory of property rights to protect myself from being exploited by capitalists. But we reject it as being empirically and logically false.

Also be aware of this, the Anarchism you envision, with groups of individuals banding together to seize land and capital goods from others based on occ/use, will naturally lead to an institutionalized culture of even more seizure, violence and theft. In fact, the weak property rights theory of Anarchism will by it’s nature lead to the exploitive and totalitarian state which Anarchists want to avoid.

[TANSTAAFL]

“Really? No one here has been able to explain to me how a preservation group can acquire a rainforest without “transforming” it and then tell a logging company that they don’t have a right to cut it down.”

The preservation group raises money. They then use the funds to purchase the land the forest is on. They own the land and the trees. The trees are safe from the loggers.

[Fool_on_the_Hill]

Who are they going to buy the Amazon rain forest from? Who is the legitimate owner currently?

[Phaedros]

“Who are they going to buy the Amazon rain forest from? Who is the legitimate owner currently?”

Thus the real crux of the problem, huh?

[vive_la_insurrection]

“If I really can name any dispute and the pro-capitalist folks here can explain how it will be specifically resolved, I take that as a weakness in theory. It’s sounds like the platforms capitalist cousin. Plus, things tend to be in a constant state of change rather than static. I don’t think anyone here really believes that if a society with their desired theory in practice that politics, disputes, or some sort of power dynamic will just end with a quick and easy solution.”

This is correct, assuming I understand what the other guy was saying. It would mean we would actually support a command economy - or try to assert that law is an exact science (it’s not) rather than it being a practiced art (which it is). It makes 0 sense to speak of an unexistant legal theory in a void.
Honestly we can’t even say that decentralization is de facto better than centralization.

“Basically, my argument would be that if and only if one can legitimately own (with legitimate in the sense of polisci, meaning others recognize and accept it for whatever reason) more property in land or capital than they can work, occupy, or defend, then they may charge rent for the occupation of land or pay wages for work with capital or land while determining the character of said work, and must rely on external force to defend their capital or land. My argument is not then, that capitalism creates wage labor, interest, or rent, but that it is dependent upon it. And one of the few ways it would be reasonable for someone, or a group of someones, to work in a low position in an employment hierarchy would be if their living conditions were subject to matters out of their hands such that it becomes reasonable for them to take a lower position in an employment hierarchy, given the alternatives.”

I don’t think anyone here disagrees with your 1st sentence, or probably the second. But these are all issues of time preference which are inherent in human action. It is people’s valuation of future goods vs present goods that determine such actions.

[Johnny_Doe]

@Consultant

Anarcho-capitalists don’t have a problem with natural hierarchy, only the artificial political one.

Does a “natural hierarchy” = voluntaryism/non-aggression principle?

[Johnny_Doe]

@Fool on the Hill

Hi,

I’m new here. I too am more familiar with the socialist anarchist tradition than with the capitalist one. So I’m finding this thread interesting.

Maybe I can clear up a few definitional differences. Socialist anarchists do not consider state owned property to be “commonly owned.” While such property is nominally owned and managed “in the interests of the public,” it may in fact be that only a few individuals exert any control over it. Thus, anarchists often refer to countries such as the USSR as state capitialist. Such countries are run like a giant corporation for the profit of those who actually own the country (i.e. the state bureaucrats).

Ergo capitalism = someone gets a profit?

@Fool on the Hill

Ivan Illich classified institutions by their placement on a left-right continuum. On the right, he put what he called “manipulative institutions.” These include the military, schools, and automobile manufacturers. The clients of such institutions must operate within them according to the dictates of the owner, and the institutions are organized as hierarchical bureaucracies. On the left, he place what he called “convivial instutions.” At the left extreme are sidewalks, parks, and telephone lines. The clients of such institutions have freedom to use these as they see fit.

Anarchists generally equate these left institutions with their view of socialism. A modern institution close to socialism would be Wikipedia. It’s an institution run collectively by its users. The users actually participate in regulating and creating content for it. And they all stand on a roughly equal plane. Their influence is determined by how much time they put into it. By contrast, a “public” school is run much more in the manner of serving private interests. The teachers and administrators have near total control over how the institution is to be used. They teach children to be submissive to authority, competitive with their peers, and to see reality as something which they must conform to–basically all the features that a profit-oriented culture would demand from its people.

But if anarcho-capitalism, laissez-faire capitalism, anarchism, anarchist socialism etc = non-aggression principle/voluntaryism, what`s the difference between them?

[haymor]

From my modest point of view, the most important factor that distinguishes the anarcho-capitalists from any other movement/ideology is that it finds its roots in austrian economics. Austrians see (after Mises) praxeology as the starting point to apodictically deduce all their social theories regarding economics (Human Action), ethics (Rothbard’s “Ethics of Liberty”) or epystemology itself (that is all possible knowledge including the mere possibility of experimentation). Phylosophically is very keen both to Kantian rationalism and Tomistic realism for it pretends to reach truth from reflection. Therefore anarcho-capitalism does not tend to see interest in such “hermeneutic” exercicis like analyzing its relation to other schools of thought or “share” knowledge among them. Given an statement then it is true or false, we are not relativists, we don’t see any dialogue in history nor we see history as a narration, we are not materialistic but humanistic, we don’t extract any new knowledge from history but mere examples to illustrate our theories, and we are certain about our starting points, at least until someone refutes them finding some contradiction.

[Johnny_Doe]

@Birthday Pony

“Socialism’s idea of voluntary is; we will take the money whether you make use of the goods and services or not. To me that is not voluntary, voluntary to me means voluntary payment.”
Which socialist anarchist advocated that? I defy you to find one who did.

“I never technically said that hunter/gatherers lived in a capitalist society. That might give people the idea that primitive people were making profits with money. But at some point they would have traded some meat for some berries and thought that they had made a profit. But other times they might have shared their produce with other people, but that was not communism. Sharing your produce with other people and communism are different things.”
That’s very reasonable. I wouldn’t call a hunter/gatherer society an example of socialism either. My point is that it’s not just capitalism or socialism, and the fact that capitalists here have claimed hunter/gatherers to be capitalistic and socialists elsewhere have claimed that they were socialistic just goes to show that both are having some trouble defining their systems.

“Property is not that complex”
Oh, but it is. It may surprise you to know that the advocacy of factory occupations follows very similar logic to capitalist advocacy of private ownership. The main difference is in regard to what kind of property is deemed legitimate. If occupancy and use are the qualities of legitimate property, the rest simply follows pretty simply:
Workers own the factory (by virtue of occ/use)
The so-called factory owner has made aggression upon their property
The workers are in their rights to expel him or her from the property

But what if the workers have entered a contract/agreed with the factory owner that they shall only receive wages, and that the factory owner should own the means of production, i.e. make all decisions regarding the use of the means of production?

[TANSTAAFL]

My point on conflict resolution is that because we believe in private property and contracts we have a built in mechanism to settle disputes.

All Pony has offered as a solution to conflict over property is that whoever is involved in the conflict will just get together and somehow work things out.

[magnetic]

Really? No one here has been able to explain to me how a preservation group can acquire a rainforest without “transforming” it and then tell a logging company that they don’t have a right to cut it down.

They can acquire a rainforest, like any other land, through homesteading or purchase. Any owner can tell a logging company to stay off of their land. Whether the government will uphold the property right of the owner is another matter.

[Epicurus_Ibn_Kalhoun]

Or the Dispute Settlement Agency, i.e. the courts.
(They probably wouldn’t)

[Fool_on_the_Hill]

How do you homestead a rainforest? Put a fence around it?

[Birthday_Pony]

"All Pony has offered as a solution to conflict over property is that whoever is involved in the conflict will just get together and somehow work things out."

Really?

Me: “From a personal standpoint, I take an egoist view on the matter. If you hold more property than you yourself could reasonably defend then there’s no reason to believe it’s yours. One can defend their house, their workplace. Bands of people working together could reasonably defend their neighborhood.”

“No offence Birthday Pony, but your main problem communicating here is not the semantical definitions of Socialism and Capitalism, but your inability to differentiate between free-market capitalism and state-monopoly capitalism.”

Once again, my argument is not that wage labor in and of itself is necessarily bad, but that capitalism as I have defined it before is dependent on it, and the only way to maintain a large group of laborers willing to work in hierarchical positions as opposed to relatively equal positions is to control the means of production in such a way that it is their only reasonable option.

“If I was so steeped in Marxian class bias…”

Who here is the Marxist?

“Also be aware of this, the Anarchism you envision, with groups of individuals banding together to seize land and capital goods from others based on occ/use, will naturally lead to an institutionalized culture of even more seizure, violence and theft. In fact, the weak property rights theory of Anarchism will by it’s nature lead to the exploitive and totalitarian state which Anarchists want to avoid.”

History, I’m afraid, is not on your side of that statement.

“But what if the workers have entered a contract/agreed with the factory owner that they shall only receive wages, and that the factory owner should own the means of production, i.e. make all decisions regarding the use of the means of production?”

Then I have absolutely no problem. My point is that the factory owner only maintains their control by the consent of the workers and/or the threat and use of force. There is absolutely no reason to believe you own something if you yourself cannot reasonably defend it.

“They can acquire a rainforest, like any other land, through homesteading or purchase. Any owner can tell a logging company to stay off of their land. Whether the government will uphold the property right of the owner is another matter.”

Not to jump into another discussion, but that’s a rather lame argument. I believe the point of preservation is to preserve. Homesteading a rainforest is not exactly perservation. If there’s anything modern day monopoly capitalism can teach us, it’s that preservation tends to be marginally profitable solely for PR reasons compared to ludicrous endeavors such as the tar sands or fracking.