Contract theory as an attack against human rights

(above: a contract of indentured servitude)

Contract theory is at the center of voluntaryism. This alone should be enough to make it suspect. Strangely, despite its centrality, voluntaryists talk very little about the nitty-gritty of contracts and how they are to be enforced. Molyneux fans blather on and on about defense contracts as a substitute for law, but the enforcement and limitations of such contracts, which raise numerous questions, remain unexamined.

As I’ve pointed out in the case of the child renter argument and Block’s corollary, voluntaryists who uphold contracts as absolute must therefore reject the concept of human rights. This is a very difficult dilemma for them: either they reject human rights or they reject contracts as absolute standard. Voluntaryists fail to give a satisfactory answer to this dilemma, because they know very well that giving up either is the death knell for their beliefs.

Consider the concept of self-ownership, which treats living, thinking bodies as pieces of property. If something is property, then it can be given away or exchanged at will. But this must be done by contract, since any person could otherwise retract their agreement at will, since the person is the body. The contract provides a written binding agreement that continues to exist beyond consent.

The most obvious example would be the constitution of any country. Constitutions bind people who are long dead, and yet they are still assumed to legally hold today, despite the lack of consent from people currently living. The only way to make sense of this contradiction is to assume that citizens are, to some degree, property of the State through the expired agreement of “their” constitution. But this only makes sense to us because we’ve been indoctrinated to believe in self-ownership and in absolute contracts. In no other context would the concept of a constitution make any sense: as Lysander Spooner points out, most contracts we enter into are not this absurd.

Suppose an agreement were entered into, in this form:

We, the people of Boston, agree to maintain a fort on Governor’s Island, to protect ourselves and our posterity against invasion.

This agreement, as an agreement, would clearly bind nobody but the people then existing. Secondly, it would assert no right, power, or disposition, on their part, to compel their “posterity” to maintain such a fort. It would only indicate that the supposed welfare of their posterity was one of the motives that induced the original parties to enter into the agreement.
…
[T]hese men who claim and exercise this absolute and irresponsible dominion over us, dare not be consistent, and claim either to be our masters, or to own us as property. They say they are only our servants, agents, attorneys, and representatives. But this declaration involves an absurdity, a contradiction. No man can be my servant, agent, attorney, or representative, and be, at the same time, uncontrollable by me, and irresponsible to me for his acts. It is of no importance that I appointed him, and put all power in his hands. If I made him uncontrollable by me, and irresponsible to me, he is no longer my servant, agent, attorney, or representative. If I gave him absolute, irresponsible power over my property, I gave him the property. If I gave him absolute, irresponsible power over myself, I made him my master, and gave myself to him as a slave. And it is of no importance whether I called him master or servant, agent or owner.

Lysander Spooner, The Constitution of No Authority

The notion of a contract, while not by far ideal, is not in itself absurd; the union of contracts and self-ownership is what leads to absurdities. It led to the belief, which has only recently been dispelled, that marriage contracts make uxorial rape logically impossible. It leads to the belief that work contracts make all sorts of attacks against human rights valid, and the belief that the social contract (as instantiated by the Constitution) makes assault and murder valid, although as time goes on, the range of possible attacks gets narrower.

If this reminds you of the way Christians approach the Bible, that’s no coincidence. The more that permissible contracts lag behind social mores, the more incentive there are for legal reforms, just like how religious doctrines get progressively left behind as social mores change. Sexual harassment used to be an accepted (implicit) part of a work contract: nowadays, not so much, because sexism is somewhat more toned down from where it was a hundred years ago. In the case of political crimes, it’s hard to say that there’s really been any progress, and that’s because people still have as much faith in the law and law enforcement as they did a hundred years ago, a faith which is not always extended to corporations.

So contracts-as-ethics is ultimately a subjective standard. The more self-ownership we grant people, the more human rights we imagine them being able to surrender, and the fewer human rights we will see as absolute. The less self-ownership we grant people, the less human rights we imagine them being able to surrender, and the more human rights we will see as absolute.

This may seem counter-intuitive because it goes counter to the capitalist way of thinking, with which we are indoctrinated and therefore seems intuitive. The standard reasoning is that self-ownership is the basis of rights, and that therefore both are proportional. But this is usually an ad hoc rationalization: the more we see people respecting each other, the more we arbitrarily assume that self-ownership is granted. Logically, this makes no sense. Slavery and other attacks on basic rights can only make sense if we first assume that bodies are a kind of thing that can be owned, a property which can be trespassed upon.

Likewise, the marriage contract have supported the enslavement of women for centuries. For more on the relation between marriage contracts and other hierarchical forms of contracts, see The Sexual Contract, by Carole Pateman (I haven’t yet read it, so I won’t comment further).

Voluntaryists sussed out a long time ago that full self-ownership should mean that people can sell themselves into slavery. This conclusion is distressing to most of them, so they have concocted various rationalizations to get around this. But this does not improve the situation, since virtually all attacks on human rights are not outright slavery, but rather degrees of slavery (if we use “slavery” in the more colloquial sense of one person having control over what another says and does). While rejecting slavery contracts, voluntaryists cannot get themselves to reject work contracts or social contracts, demonstrating their failure to grasp the commonality between all these contracts.

Can contracts be a valid means of formalizing agreement? Sure, but we have to introduce issues of consent. Consent cannot exist unless viable alternatives exist as well. Much like we shouldn’t evaluate individuals as if they lived in a social vacuum, or evaluate actions as if they took place in a causal vacuum, a contract can not, and should not, be judged in a vacuum, but rather must be contrasted with the institutions that sustain it. A contract may or may not be valid in itself, but if these institutions do not provide or allow any alternatives, then the contract cannot possibly be justified.

Suppose a group of equals come together and decide on how they are to live. They may decide upon something like a constitution, and this form is not necessarily problematic, as long as every person bound to it consents beforehand. But when such a constitution is applied to people who never consented to it, and provides no other choice, then it cannot be justified (the work contract, on the other hand, is in itself invalid because of its illogical nature).

Values are sacrifices.

All decisions have opportunity costs. Values, since they inform our decisions, therefore have opportunity costs through the decisions they inform. To take a simple example, the fact that I want to sleep when I am tired prevents me from staying up and doing other things. The fact that I value sleep, therefore, entails opportunity costs. Not sleeping would lead to a different outcome, but this outcome is lost because I judge it less desirable.

This may seem blindingly obvious but seems to be lost when we enter the realm of the abstract. Intellectual cowards refuse to confront the act of valuing and its consequences. They act as if values are essentially arbitrary and irrelevant to real life.

In that way, they act like religious people, who distinguish themselves from others by believing in this or that obscure theological principle. To the religious, values are arbitrary and irrelevant to real life. It really makes no difference when baptism should be performed or how much traditional interpretations of the Bible should be trusted. None of these things matter in real life. They just exist to maintain divisions between sects and to preserve a sense of identity within them.

Essentially they believe that professing a value is an issue of personal taste, and that our actions should be “pragmatic.” So they set up a dichotomy between valuing, which is purely in the realm of the imaginary or the personal, and actions to achieve those values, which must be “pragmatic” and be subject to no values, which in practice means that they should be subject to the standards of social success (whatever sells, whatever convinces, whatever can be said in public, no matter how false it is).

We observe this in organizations which supposedly pursue egalitarian ends but which do so in a hierarchical way. That is my main target here, and for good reason: a lot of arguments hinge around it, because practice is the best evidence we have of workability. And most of the time egalitarians don’t even try to prove their point by constructing egalitarian organizations, which shows their lack of commitment.

This also applies in economics. A capitalist organization is by definition one which is optimized for profit-seeking. By definition, a socialist organization cannot be optimized for profit-seeking. To claim that a socialist organization can compete, or should be able to compete, with capitalist organizations in a capitalist economy is to not understand what the terms mean. It is a deficit in understanding. By their very nature, socialist organization cannot outcompete capitalist organizations. To hold the value of equality means to reject the benefits of exploitation, and capitalism is predicated on exploitation. In order to win in capitalism, you must exploit the labor of others in many different forms.

The argument that socialism fails because socialist organizations cannot compete at the same level as capitalist organizations is a tautology: no organization can “succeed” within a given incentive system if it pursues a completely different standard of “success.” So what? That’s as trivial as telling us that a marathon runner will not win the 100m dash. Why should we expect otherwise? A capitalist organization would fail, too, if it had to meet the incentive systems of socialism. I can guarantee you as much.

Does that mean capitalism is inferior? Not in itself, no. All it means is that capitalism, like socialism, implies a certain set of values, and that an incentive system which does not reward those values will present a daunting obstacle. Capitalism is inferior because it operates on the basis of non-human values (like the profit motive and market forces) and causes widespread misery, not because it “works” or doesn’t “work.” Pragmatism is a piss-poor standard of truth. Systemic analysis is a much better standard.

I’ve talked about organizations, but the same thing applies to individuals. At the root of this fallacy is the belief that the “end justifies the means.” I discussed how this is part of the manichean worldview. Egalitarians who treat interpersonal relations as a struggle will tend to dissociate means with ends. They will preach cooperation but act competitively.

The opposite of “the end justifies the means” is “practice what you preach,” i.e. honesty instead of hypocrisy. Practicing what you preach is a great deal harder than dropping your principles whenever they become inconvenient, but it’s the only way to bring about what you want. We prefigure the new society, first in the imagination and then in reality, by representing its principles as closely as possible. Selling equality or peace by showing yet another example of hierarchy and competition in action gets us no closer to a peaceful world, because that’s what everyone else is already doing. If hierarchy and competition was the key to an egalitarian and peaceful world, the world would already be egalitarian and peaceful.

You can’t go half-way. If you believe in something, then cherish it and bring more of it into the world. If you don’t believe in something, then don’t bring more of it into the world. Bringing something into the world in the name of its opposite is just retarded.

Answering objections to Intellectual Ownership.

By Nina Paley.

Three years ago, I published an entry about a system of royalties based on socialism, which I called Intellectual Ownership, in contrast to Intellectual Property. In the IO system, content creators receive a small percentage of the sale price of whatever product uses their content (whether it’s a new factory process or a book). If there’s no sale price, there’s no royalty. So IO supports pirating, sharing of information, and so on.

I thought IO would be pretty uncontroversial. Stephen Kinsella published a completely content-less entry against IO, but I just saw this as more of his usual bluster. However, I recently checked his entry again and noticed something new: he told Nina Paley about it, and added her criticisms to his entry. I did not see this part the first time, so he must have added it later on.

Well, I was thrilled that Nina Paley knew about my entry (long-time readers may notice I’ve featured quite a bit of her artwork these past years). She is a known antinatalist and a strong advocate of the sharing of information. I support her completely. So I didn’t really expect her to criticize my position. However, she did, so I want to address this criticism, with all respect to Nina Paley and her tireless work, since unlike Kinsella (who is about as intellectual as a trout with a brain defect) she actually raised some important points.

Here is the relevant part:

As my C4SIF colleague Nina Paley noted to me:

Whaa? How exactly would the ”added cost of the innovation itself” (?) be controlled, enforced, etc.? Looks like it would require a ton of surveillance. … I definitely mind the implication that a surveillance state is a “solution.”

“The only limitation is that the cost-price must be raised by a certain percentage, reflecting the added cost of the innovation itself. In the case of artistic works, this percentage might be up to 1%, but in the case of innovations, it would be a range something like 0.1%-0.01%, the specific percentage in each case depending on how significant the improvement is.”

And who is going to decide “how significant the improvement is”?

The IO system is a system where using other people’s innovations is encouraged, not forbidden. Instead of locking it in with patents and copyrights, it is made available for a small percentage of the sale price. I gave the example of 1% for artistic works (such as the contents of a book) and 0.1% to 0.01% for technical improvements. I freely admit that these percentages were pulled out of my ass, and are only meant as examples. I don’t know what the actual percentages would be in reality.

Paley argues that the implementation of a royalty system such as the one I envision would require a surveillance state. The use of the word “state” is unfortunate here, since I am an Anarchist and don’t believe any economic function should be in the hands of a state. As a libsoc, I believe that such function would, like most institutions in a libsoc society, be undertaken by federated groups of free individuals.

Even if we exclude the “state” issue, Paley also believes that such an institution would entail widespread surveillance. I don’t really understand why this would be the case. After all, we are talking about detecting something that is in mass production or used for mass production, unlike pirating which, in the West, takes place on a small scale. I don’t see how this would entail more surveillance than, say, keeping tabs on work conditions in workplaces or preventing fraud in production and distribution, which are things that we need in any large-scale (i.e. non-face-to-face) economic system.

Paley’s second objection is more potent, although her question is strangely constructed. Answering any question about “who” would ascertain innovation costs presumes a profound knowledge of a global libsoc economy society which does not currently exist; at least I am not aware of any past or present libsoc system where this issue has been raised. In a federated libsoc system, I think that workers’ councils would be interested in resolving these issues in a global manner, perhaps by appointing neutral arbiters who would make these decisions under a set of objective rules.

Presumably Paley is not here asking for names, but rather is asking “how” the innovation costs would be determined, what objective rules would be followed. The issue here is one of relative importance. To a book publisher, the writer is of prime importance: no writer, no book. To the worker on a factory line, the invention of a new robotic arm is important but not nearly as important as the writer is to the publisher. The publisher is very much dependent on the work of the writer, and the factory worker is not as dependent on a new robotic arm being installed in eir factory.

It would be equally silly to go in the opposite direction and argue that the writer should get all the money, since ey also depends utterly upon the publishers to translate eir work into tangible goods. Likewise, the machine innovator depends on the workers to make use of eir innovation.

There is always the danger of such a system becoming legalistic, so simple rules should be adopted as much as possible. In practice, a ladder of percentages would probably be the most handy solution, especially if it lets producers figure out immediately how much of the sale cost they must set aside to pay for IO purposes.

There would also be a time limit on royalties, as we have now, and a public domain like we have today. Anyone who wants their work to be part of the public domain would still be able to do that.

Finally, I want to point out that the IO system is an addition to my egalitarian economic ideas, not meant to be implemented in today’s society. It assumes that we already have a society where everyone receives an equal part of society’s production because every person’s labor is necessary for every other person’s labor. Innovation is necessary, and therefore should be rewarded, but it’s more than that. Everyone’s labor is usually a tiny margin on everyone else’s labor, but innovation is different from that: it often represents a huge addition to a wide range of productive activities.

In our current capitalist system, I would rather see no IP or IO, rather than IO. I also find that IP is always reprehensible, whatever the economic system. So I agree with Nina Paley on that issue. The rest, I think, is mostly details.

How an economy grows and how property arises…

Emma, Mikhail and Voltarine live on Socialism Island, a tropical island surrounded by clear blue waters. They survive by fishing with their bare hands. It’s very hard work and they can only catch one fish a day, just enough to not starve. They don’t have the time or energy to do more.

One day, Mikhail is washing his shirt made of animal skin and accidentally drops it into the water. Pulling it, he finds, to his great surprise, that a little fish was caught in his shirt as well! He runs back to his comrades and they all realize that some sort of net may be more efficient for fishing.

They choose Voltarine, who is most skilled at building the little tools they use, to make a net. As always, they pool their resources and each of them eats two-thirds of a fish for one day. This is not a lot of food, and they begin to feel sharp hunger.

But the next day Voltarine has finished the net. Instead of one fish a day, the net lets one person catch ten fish a day. That’s all the three of them need in order to eat to satiety. They decide to have one person fishing each day in rotating order, while the other two can make different sorts of tools. Soon they have made a primitive axe and are starting to use wood to build better shelter.

Because they cooperate and share freely, the people of Socialism Island experience little friction in their day-to-day lives. As they produce more and more, life gets easier and easier.

—

The situation was rather different on Capitalism Island. There, Able, Baker and Charlie did not share their food in common, so when Charlie thought of the idea for a net, he had to shoulder the entire risk. While making the net, he starved terribly, and if the net didn’t work, he could die. So it was much to his relief that his net worked just fine, capturing ten fish in a day.

Now Charlie had a lot of food. But when Able and Baker realized how great Charlie’s net was, they came to him and begged for him to let them use his net. Charlie thought, “I almost risked my life for this, why should I run the risk of them stealing it from me? At least I deserve a reward.”

So, using his surplus fish to feed himself, he made two more nets, and demanded that Able and Baker pay him eight fish a day for using them. He called these nets his “property.” When they complained, he told them, “why are you complaining? You’ll have twice as much fish as you did before, thanks to my nets. It’s only fair that I get a reward for making them for you.”

Charlie accumulated and dried a lot of fish, while Able and Baker still worked all day. They came to complain to him again about how unfair it was that he was hoarding so much dry fish. So Charlie paid them three fish a day to build a boat so they could go out to sea and capture even more fish for him. They gratefully accepted, as they never had so much fish to eat before. But now they had to do whatever Charlie ordered them to do.

Going out to sea, the two workers discovered Socialism Island and the shelter, tools and goodies that had been made there. They went back to Charlie to tell him about it. He decided that they should storm Socialism Island and steal their goodies.

At first, the war was easy. The people of Socialism Island were weaker, and they were able to steal quite a bit. But subsequent wars got harder. The people of Socialism Island started making wooden traps, and Able and Baker started getting seriously hurt. Charlie had another bright idea: “instead of constantly coming back, we’re going to take their island over, ask them for a tribute every week, leave one of you there to keep them in line.”

After the last war, Able was left to live in one of the shelters that were built by the people of Socialism Island. He said this was the “property” of the invaders and could not be used by anyone else, no matter the need. Then he implemented the first “law”: instead of living and eating in common, every single person was to have their own “property” as well, from which each would pay their tribute.

Emma, Mikhail and Voltarine now had to work for themselves, instead of working for each other as they always had. They became like the people of Capitalism Island, and never shared anything ever again.

The mania of extension.

From Nina Paley.

Most of us want to extend ourselves into the world around us. We want to be more loved, more recognized, more admired, get more money, more knowledge, more status, more sex, or whatever else. We have a desire to grasp the world and extend ourselves in it, accomplish ourselves, and find our place in society. This is what I mean by extension.

This is fine as long as it serves a personal purpose and does not become an overriding impulse, for example by causing us to emotionally hurt or physically hurt others. Then we say a person has gone “too far” or that they are “too competitive” (never mind that competition is innately harmful, since that’s not really the topic of my entry).

Unfortunately, we live in an economic system where there is no “too far.” Capitalism is predicated on constant, unchecked, unending growth. There is an end point to any singular act of production (the purchase of the object or service, thus providing a profit to the owners of the means of production), but there is no end point to the economy itself, no value being served, no inherent limit, only profit-seeking.

I know the capitalists would readily retort that the economy serves the purpose of meeting people’s needs. But this doesn’t reflect reality. The driving force of our economic units, the corporation, is profit, not human needs. If a corporation can make money fulfilling human needs, then it will do so. If it can make money by killing people or stealing their land, then it will do so. The only thing you can predict about any corporation is that, like any other runaway structure such as organized religion or government, even the “good” it does is intended to reinforce its control over society and the appearance of its necessity to social order.

The runaway train is a great metaphor for capitalism. Central planners are in charge of each car but not of the train as a whole, which is out of anyone’s control. Instead, we’re constantly concerned with some useless metric of how fast we’re going (compare with the GDP or consumer spending), and we start panicking when the train starts going slower, despite the fact that going slower is the only thing that can save us!

Sadly, unlike most people, corporations go “too far” with amazing regularity. They defraud their customers and routinely lie to them (so much that now we expect it), they steal land and wealth, they slave-drive people in sweatshops (sometimes to the point of suicide), and a few of them even assassinate people and hire their own private armies. Why? Because a corporation is not a person (legal bullshit notwithstanding) and has no moral compass. It is composed of people who have moral principles, but those principles have been co-opted to serve profit, because they are sociopaths, are trying to extend themselves as best they can, or because they’re “just doing their job.”

Another metaphor is very helpful when understanding capitalism, and that is the metaphor of rape. We already speak metaphorically about “raping the environment” and “raping foreign cultures,” so this is pretty intuitive. Why do we call them metaphorical rapes? Not to downplay the terror of actual rape, but because they are violent acts (mostly psychologically, but also physically) which violate that which is intimate to natural beings or human beings.

In neo-liberalism, the first world countries are the masculine and the third world countries (at least, those being raped at the moment) are the feminine. Corporations penetrate new labor markets and manipulate capital flows within themselves to engender new profits (while engaging in “market penetration”). Workers are exactly as expendable as spermatozoa or ova, mere biological machines designed to fulfill a task and die.

Using this metaphor, we can make sense of some otherwise strange dynamics. Take foreign aid, for example. Liberals of all countries laud foreign aid as a wonderful thing even though it’s well known that the money goes to dictatorial governments and that foreign aid often hampers development and the well-being of the poor. But it makes a lot more sense if we translate it into gender terms: the male has the obligation to provide resources to the female in exchange for her submission, and in that case there is no concern of hampering or dictatorial intent. Sex tourism also seems to mimic the rape dynamic, insofar as sex tourism destinations are all third world countries.

The way we compulsively seek to pave over nature and imprison it within enclosed areas or cages is also part of the rape dynamic. Women, after all, are said to psychologically represent Mother Nature and her “virgin” beauty, as well as the animal world. We treat the environment like our own fucktoy because we treat women like fucktoys, we try to contain and exert total control over nature in the same way that men have tried to contain and exert total control over women.

Whether metaphorical or real, sex and rape are ways by which humans try to extend themselves. Procreation is a big part of that. Having children is the most potent way people know to not only extend themselves but ensure their own (imagined) immortality. Sadly, like the other forms of extension I’ve talked about, it implies exploiting the suffering of innocent human beings.

Procreation goes hand to hand with capitalism, and is likewise unchecked. There is no meme in the culture on how life is an imposition, on how we should think on whether any new lives are really needed or not, on how we should think on whether we can give those children a life that is as best as can be expected, or on the incredible risks we impose on those new lives. These points of reflection simply do not exist. For the most part, people have as many children as they want, without thought to consequences. Children are a form of property and therefore worthy of being accumulated.

This form of extension can take many forms in the mind of the parents. Some parents believe that simply having a “bloodline,” their DNA or family name perpetuated, is enough to count as an extension of themselves. Others believe that in order to be an extension of themselves, the children must have their values, or must accomplish what they wanted to accomplish when they were younger, or must have children themselves. The former are bound to be satisfied by sheer procreation; the latter are bound to be disappointed, because they are rooting their happiness in the actions of another person.

In the end, extension is all very subjective, no matter what kind you’re looking at. It is not, after all, the body or the mind themselves that are being physically expanded, but forms of power, and power is contingent upon the rules of the game it’s used in. We want to ground our lives into something eternal, something absolute, but all we have are uncertainties.

This seems to be the intellectual paradox that all true believers run into: they become true believers in the hopes that they’ve found the absolute truth, but they end up both having to constantly deal in relativism and having to constantly deny that they are dealing in relativism in order to maintain their delusion. True believers are exposed to more and more information which refutes their beliefs, so they have to defend their position at a more and more fundamental level, which has the inadvertent side-effect of revealing the relativism at the core of their doctrine (that everything is contingent on God, that social order is contingent on the intent of the power elite, that the life-system is produced by an unintelligent process, that men are superior to women based on ever-changing social roles, etc).

A further discussion on consent, courtesy of femonade.

It is commonly understood that consent consists merely of saying “yes” or signing a contract. This superficial belief underlies much of the strand of political thought that I call voluntaryism (in radfem issues, sexual libertarianism). These little signals of consent represent the validation of the whole structure of exploitation. Such validation is not always necessary: for instance, no signal at all is necessary to enslave someone to a government. But in most areas we still like to pretend that we believe in consent.

I often refer to this entry because it shatters the myth of consent under capitalism; without any viable alternative to consent and a credible signal of non-consent, or under conditions of systemic inequality, consent is impossible (regarding inequality: it is not the mere fact of inequality which makes consent impossible, but the fact that we live in a system where some people are endowed with privilege and some are not).

The difference is that consent is superficially used as a tool to perpetuate “business as usual,” but a form of consent that is even the least bit meaningful shows “business as usual” to be a big lie, a scam of gargantuan proportions.

An old entry from femonade sheds some new light on this problem. FCM uses the example of a man and a woman having sex to illustrate the fact that consent, at least in the case of sex, cannot just mean to agree beforehand to do something: if the woman refuses to do that something at the moment it’s happening, the man has to stop or he is obviously guilty of rape. Based on this, she says:

[I]f legal and moral consent cannot be given prospectively, then [pornographic work] cannot be contracted for, period.

And boom goes the dynamite. If we start from the premise that consent must be constantly renewed in some form (not that both parties need to constantly say “I agree to this” every second), that it cannot be fixed, then a contract for pornographic work logically cannot be consensual.

Furthermore, even if any given pornographic work is consensual, it is impossible for any viewer to know that it is indeed consensual, because, as FCM points out, every porn movie is a performance and it’s impossible for us to know whether anything anyone says in them is part of the performance. Therefore anyone who watches porn is in essence fixating on something that may be rape, and has no problem with that fact.

One can make the same argument about non-pornographic movies, that actresses may be acting against their will. The difference is that most serious movie production companies don’t have a track record of forcing actresses to act against their will (although there are instances of actresses being hurt without their consent). The more profound difference is that there is much less inequality, on the whole, between an actress and a production company than between a porn actress and porn producers.

But of course we live in a rape-culture, so the fact that one may be viewing an instance of rape doesn’t really rankle anyone. Even viewing actual rape is pretty popular, porn-wise.

If we extend the argument to all forms of cooperation and start from the premise that consent cannot be given prospectively, period, then what does this imply for the structure of society? Well, it implies that the very concept of contracts is by definition invalid. This may seem like a bizarre statement, insofar as it may be hard to imagine a society that runs without contracts. But to say that an organization is not run by contract is not to say that roles cannot be formally described. What it does mean is that you cannot hold people responsible for those roles if they refuse to act on them in some way.

On the other hand, I believe that pharmacists who refuse to serve medications to people they find objectionable, or doctors who mendaciously refuse to grant sterilizations, are acting unethically. But aren’t those pharmacists just refusing to perform their job in ways they find objectionable?

The difference, I think, is that the pharmacist’s refusal to sell medications, or the doctors’ refusal to sterilize, is deliberately putting a patient in harm’s way. A porn actress who decides not to do anal, or a worker who refuses to dump toxic waste or to foster some financial scam on poor people, is hurting the bottom line, not a customer. The pharmacist and the doctor are being prejudiced, the porn actress or worker are not.

I know there is this belief that we have the right to be prejudiced. Obviously we have the right to think whatever we want, but there is no such thing as a “right to discriminate” (unless one uses the word “discriminate” in the sense of “noting differences,” which is trivial).

Of course the people who invoke this “right” are always white Christian men using their prejudice as a weapon against women, non-Christians, or non-whites, especially women. It’s a privilege, not a “right.” The premise of equality is not only individualistic but also collective, a fact that eludes us because we are indoctrinated to believe individualism is the only possible starting point.

There is one point on which I disagree with FCM. She says that contracting for sex is different from any other contract, but I see no reason to start from that premise. For one thing, other contracts also entail the risk of rape, as plenty of sweatshop working girls (some who are child slaves) can testify. Other contracts also entail the risk of disease, as plenty of workers who have suffered from, or died from, workplace-related diseases can testify. I understand that women in pornography are far more at risk of both these things than most women, but there is no qualitative difference.

But beyond that, I don’t see that there is a way in which a woman’s refusal to perform anal should be accepted but a woman’s refusal to dump toxic waste or scam poor people should not. The basic issue here is one of ethics: one should not be forced to do something that one does not want to do, whether the reason is personal or whether it is because it hurts others. This, it seems to me, is the basis of real consent.

All capitalist work is degrading by definition, since it severs the connection between the person’s mind and the person’s body. Contracting for sex, even in the best case scenario, is an extreme case of this degradation. From the theoretical standpoint, if prostitution is a form of human sale, work is a form of human rental.

Here is one example of labor slavery that is very similar to prostitution slavery. The difference is that because it happened to men, it is recognized as slavery, while prostitution, because it happens to women, is not recognized as slavery.

It occurs to me that a voluntaryist could simply decide to bite the bullet and declare that consent for sex can be given prospectively. I really don’t think that they would follow through with this in their personal lives, however. Heck, I don’t think they would do this in any area of their lives, let alone sex. It would be a logically consistent position, but it don’t see how it could be an ethical position.

The Voluntaryist Reader tries to rescue voluntaryism.

The Voluntaryist Reader has published a response against my latest entry on voluntaryism, “Voluntaryism: it’s not just about capitalism…“, where I discuss the ramifications of voluntaryism beyond the economic realm.

There is a lot to unpack here, so let me now get into each of the points in turn.

This is puzzling since – as voluntaryists – we not only see voluntaryism as precisely the opposite, we actually define it as such. Voluntaryism is the opposition to aggression in any form, whether institutionalized or not. The only possibilities are that either a) we are terribly confused or b) we are devious liars.

What I actually said, and which he quoted right on the previous paragraph, is that voluntaryism supports “the institutionalized evils around us.” I think that’s a clear phrase: I am not talking about some deliberately vague and fluid concept of “aggression” but rather about institutional evils, whether (to borrow Galbraith’s classification in The Anatomy of Power) they involve condign power (coercion, aggression), compensatory power (economic incentives such as wages, subsidies, welfare), or conditioned power (schooling, the mass media, and in general the organization of society and its non-economic incentives).

The voluntaryist view stops at condign power and states that all other forms of power are irrelevant to freedom. This is a false view which can only lead to paradox: it really does not matter whether we do what we do because we are coerced to do so, because it’s what we must do to have the money to continue to live, or because we are conditioned to do so, we are still not free in any sense of “freedom” that matters to us.

The correct answer to the false dilemma posed here is that voluntaryists are not confused or devious liars. They do oppose “aggression.” The problem is that by opposing “aggression,” they are thereby supporting all “non-aggressive” institutional evils.

Tremblay says, “Voluntaryism … [followed] to its logical conclusion, … would say that, for instance, slave contracts should be allowed.” This is either a misunderstanding or a lie. Please, Mr. Tremblay, quote the voluntaryist – Herbert, Spencer, Tucker, Thoreau, Spooner, Nock, Chodorov, Rothbard, LeFevre – that ever said anything about slavery but that it is an odious evil, a scourge of mankind and a marring of man’s beautiful nature?

I never made the claim that any voluntaryist thinker (which would not include Tucker, who was a socialist, by the way; Spooner, on the other hand, is more of a limit case) has stated that slavery was a good thing. But certainly many of these people accepted the primacy of contracts against the primacy of human rights. I don’t know if Clayton shares this position, but there is nothing in the concept of voluntaryism that argues against it. After all, signing a contract without having a gun pointed to your head is a voluntary act, isn’t it? And indeed in the comments Clayton answered that he does believe that all contracts are voluntary by their very nature.

I have an entry in the queue called “Contract theory as an attack against human rights” which attacks voluntaryism on that basis. But until this argument has been made, I will simply say that either Clayton admits that slavery can be accepted contractually (as it was in the past with indentured servants, who were considered property), in which case he defeats himself, or he admits that slavery cannot be accepted contractually, in which case he must explain to us what concrete limit he imposes on contracts (which, according to him, are all voluntary) and why this limit is not an ad hoc rationalization. My guess is that he will impose some limit and that he will not be able to prove that it is not pure ad hoc.

How does he confirm any of these wild claims?

I am not sure why he thinks that what I wrote includes “wild claims.” The association of capitalists, “anarcho-capitalism,” Libertarianism, and liberals with voluntaryist ideas is not novel or controversial.

Now, I’m open to hearing an argument from the radical feminists or from Tremblay explaining exactly how it is that, say, femininity involves the use of force or fraud.

I’d say that the performance of womanhood is mostly the product of conditioned power, not condign power. No one is holding guns to women’s heads to force them to wear high heels. Therefore the evils of these industries must necessarily elude the narrow analysis of voluntaryists, who are only concerned with condign power.

Nevertheless, we strongly distinguish between bad values and bad attitudes – so long as they exist solely within the mind and peacefully spoken words of an individual – and force or fraud because the former is only properly answered with other words, whereas force and fraud – and only force and fraud – may be properly answered with force itself.

Again we see here the clear dichotomy between condign power and other forms of power in voluntaryist thought, made by Clayton himself. Force and fraud are more important than “bad values” and “bad attitudes,” which should only be answered with “other words.” Clayton omits to tell us when “other words” have ever alone succeeded in freeing people from “bad values” and “bad attitudes” which permeate an entire society to its core. Capitalism would have been gone a long time ago if that was the case.

Now, I might get this wrong, but I guess what Tremblay is saying, here, is that he thinks that voluntaryists hold that past aggression doesn’t matter in assessing whether present actions are aggressive or not. I would again challenge Tremblay to substantiate this: which voluntaryist I have named would hold that the slaveholder laws did not play a role in huddling slaves on the plantations, on the sure knowledge they would be wantonly punished by the authorities and their masters for attempting to escape to freedom?

I’m not sure what point Clayton think he is making here, but it’s not the same point that I’m making. My point is that actions which are considered voluntary in the present are actually often the result of institutionalized coercion in the past (i.e. you broke my legs in the past, and now you’re selling me crutches at inflated prices). Clayton’s examples, on the other hand, do not involve two different timeframes, and therefore are not relevant to the principle.

Needless to say, this is not capitalist thought, but recycled Marxist rhetoric desperately trying to jam capitalism into the narrative of class structure, status society and legal privilege. Capitalism has nothing to do with asceticism, in fact, quite the opposite. Nor does it have anything to do with rewarding self-denial.

I’m not sure where the Marxist label is coming from, but I was referring to the Misesian concept of time preference. Some Misesians argue that poor people are poor because they have high time preference and that entrepreneurs are rich because they have low time preference. I have demolished such beliefs before. But given the general importance of the concept of savings in capitalism, I am not sure why Clayton makes such a statement as “Capitalism has nothing to do with asceticism, in fact, quite the opposite,” implying that capitalism favors high time preference and hedonism. Personally, I don’t think time preference, whether high or low, has much to do with it.

Perhaps Clayton is implying that capitalist economics are similar to Marxism in that both are based on central planning, in which case I would agree, but I’m sure that’s not what he meant.

Now, it’s not even clear what Tremblay is trying to assert beyond denying free choice. If there is no free choice, then there is no moral responsibility. In other words, Tremblay should not condemn voluntaryists – or his understanding thereof – because, after all, we have no free choice in being voluntaryists, anyway. It’s just our genetics.

Now Clayton is lowering himself to pretty simplistic anti-determinist arguments, although he seems to be using them wrongly. I am not “condemning voluntaryists,” I am condemning voluntaryism. Of course I agree that voluntaryists have no “choice” in the matter. So what? What is the relevance of this truism to a discussion on whether voluntaryism supports institutional evils?

But Tremblay pushes on to exasperating extremes, “all personal problems are ultimately the result of institutional failures.” Yes, no one ever makes mistakes that they can and should learn from. No one can ever do with a little dose of sleeping in the bed they’ve made for themselves.

Again, in a reoccurring theme for this entry, Clayton seems to be confused or is not explaining the steps that lead from one proposition to the other. I agree that “all personal problems are ultimately the result of institutional failures” (and fail to see what’s “exasperating” about such a conclusion, unless one has a preexisting bias against naturalistic explanations). I disagree that “no one ever makes mistakes” or that no one should regret what they’ve done. How Clayton gets from one to the other is beyond me.

People have to deal with our institutions in the best way they can, and they can make mistakes in doing so (for example, one may mismanage money or attract the attention of cops). They may regret such mistakes. They may learn how to better deal with institutional evils. It is a skill like any other.

The confusion here may come from my use of “ultimately.” I am not saying that every personal problem is the direct and immediate result of some institutional failure. For example, social inequality does not directly and immediately break people’s legs or give them heart attacks. But it is understood that social inequality worsens health care outcomes as a whole, and thus that social inequality is ultimately one cause of bad health care outcomes.

But the difference between theodicy and subjective valuation should be obvious. God, in his role as the causer and determiner of all events, is not merely one who wishes or assays to alter the state of affairs – as a human being – but, rather, is one who brings about without fail this or that state of affairs. The individual person, on the other hand, may form whatever desires or wishes he pleases. And while we are free to answer and criticize these desires with reasons and arguments, we are not free to answer them with force. That is, not if we hope to have a society of flourishing individuals.

Again, I have no idea what this has to do with my initial point that divine subjectivism is similar to voluntaryist subjectivism. In fact, Clayton seems to be merely confirming the validity of my argument in proposing that divine intervention “brings about without fail this or that state of affairs,” which we assume includes ethical facts as well, making them entirely subjective.

Here, Tremblay has almost got the truth. To argue against freedom in the small is to argue against freedom in the large. And while coercion in the large (systematized coercion) does, in fact, result in actual coercion in the small that can appear to be voluntary (such as needing to get a driver’s license “in order to drive”), the reactionist view of denying freedom in the small is simply to shoot oneself in the foot.

I think that now Clayton has confused himself as well. He seems to be equivocating between “freedom” as in the freedom given to us by making “choices” and “freedom” as in political freedom. At least it’s the only way for me to understand the statement that I am “denying freedom [I assume, "choice"] in the small.” If Clayton did not mean to label me a “reactionist” (does he mean “reactionary”? and does he understand that what this actually means is the exact opposite of what he means?), then I have no idea at all what this paragraph is supposed to mean.

This entry is a big mess, and there is a lot of confused reasoning here, or at least reasoning that appears confused. Perhaps Clayton will clarify those for me.

I’ve already explained at length why I think voluntaryism’s insistence on only addressing condign power leads to the support of institutional evils. Because democracy is based heavily on other kinds of power (in Galbraith’s classification, compensatory and conditioned), voluntaryism is therefore less and less relevant as an ideology as the capital-democratic system keeps expanding its power and reach, and becomes more and more a support of those non-condign evils.

This is why voluntaryism today is a prominent enemy of freedom, not as an ideology (where it is mostly irrelevant) but as the vague, implicit support for various arguments coming from many different factions. Voluntaryism defends capitalism and democracy in their broad lines, although voluntaryists may object to some of their features or argue that we should fight them “with words,” which basically amounts to treating issues vital to freedom as mere differences of opinion. Quips like “it’s my body,” “it’s my property so I can do what I want,” “you agreed to a contract” and “that’s what people voted for” are used to quell dissent on a wide variety of subjects. By exposing voluntaryism itself, I hope to show people how to undo the premises which underlie these false arguments, and help bolster dissent against institutional evils.

In the end, I think Clayton has done little but bolstered my arguments by further exposing the coercive/non-coercive dichotomy at the core of voluntaryism. The more people see this kind of reasoning, the more they’ll understand that voluntaryism is a very blinkered worldview which does nothing to answer most of our present time problems. And that can only be a good thing, because it’ll accelerate the process of people talking about the systemic features of our societies which actually do sustain our present time problems, features (like private property, the free market, the Patriarchy, and hierarchies in general) which voluntaryists support with their self-righteous rhetoric.

“Property rights” as pseudo-rights.

Above: a fence in the middle of a field that separates part of a field from another part of a field. They are obviously completely different.

I’ve discussed in the past how property is a nonsense concept. In this entry, I want to concentrate on the notion of “property rights” as the economic foundation of capitalist theory. Property rights are taken as a given, but they really are not. The fact is that property rights as we understand them are designed to further the interests of the rich minority (especially business owners), and there’s no particular reason why they should. Many different ownership systems have existed throughout history, and new ones have been conceived and tried out with success.

[D]efinitions of ownership and theft tend to be thought of as straightforward, even natural. But they are not. They are, rather, the product of human decision. That decision operates to give special protection to just those types of ownership (or putative ownership) that are crucial to economic stratification… Indeed, this was the more or less explicit intent of the framers of the U.S. Constitution. As Noam Chomsky and others have discussed, James Madison viewed the property rights of the “opulent minority” as threatened by the masses, and thus as requiring particularly stringent protection.
The Culture of Conformism, p15

Now, what is the foundation of “property rights”? Where do they come from? Capitalists will give various answers to this question.

The most popular foundation is self-ownership (the bizarre circular belief that the body is a property of itself). I’ve already extensively debunked the concept of self-ownership. I’ve also pointed out that proving “property rights” with self-ownership is a circular argument, since the concept of self-ownership itself is based on the concept of property.

But even if we ignore these fatal problems, how do we pass from self-ownership to property rights? It is argued that if we own our body, then we also own what that body produces. But surely this is grossly inadequate as a justification of “property rights” as they exist today; for one thing, “property rights” are routinely applied and enforced on natural resources, which are not the product of any body. But also, this does not address all “property rights.”

“Property rights” are divided in three category: usus, fructus and abusus. Usus contains the rights regarding usage, such as inhabiting a house or an apartment. Fructus contains the right regarding the products of that property, such as the fruits of a tree or the crops gathered from a piece of land. Abusus contains the right to dispose of a property, such as selling, modifying, destroying, etc.

If we accept the reasoning from self-ownership, then we can make sense of usus and fructus, but not of abusus. After all, most capitalists do not believe that we have a right to sell our own body into slavery, for example. Many also do not recognize a right to suicide, especially conservatives. But if self-ownership excludes abusus rights, then how can abusus rights be derived from self-ownership? There is a logical problem here.

One may sidestep the issue by stating that the kind of ownership in self-ownership differs from the kind of ownership we establish with “property rights.” That’s fine, but then in what meaningful way are “property rights” derived from self-ownership? Logically, the fact that one owns one thing does not imply that one owns, or even can own, anything else. So self-ownership in itself doesn’t logically imply the concept of property.

One may then reply that self-ownership does imply property because we need property in order to survive. We need food, lodging, cleaning, and so on. We must, or so goes the argument, hold things as our property in order to use them in these ways. We have a right to life and, in order to maintain that life, we need “property rights.”

But again, this does not prove all “property rights.” You can hold and use an apple without selling it or destroying it (that is to say, making it unusable). You can live in a house without selling it, modifying it significantly, or destroying it. So again, abusus is not proven here, and it is a necessary part of “property rights.”

Not only are “property rights” not needed to affirm any right to life, but “property rights” are at tension with the right to life. Nowhere is this shown more clearly than in the contradiction between the “property rights” of Big Pharma and the “right to life” of people in the Second and Third World. Let’s look at the root cause of this tension.

Consider that “property rights,” by their very definition, are an absolute limit over the implementation of all other, real rights. I’ve made the point before that the right to life is meaningless without the right to health care and other life necessities, that the right to assemble is meaningless without a place to assemble in, that the right to free expression is meaningless without the tools of that expression, that the right to justice is meaningless without the means to be treated as an equal, and so on. All “negative rights” necessitate “positive rights” to be meaningful at all, including material ownership. And “property rights” make it so that this material ownership is contingent, contingent upon a multitude of factors: who you were raised by, the kind of education and work you were able to get, and so on.

Not only that, but “property rights” also dictate how this material ownership becomes concentrated into a small number of hands. The two biggest influence on this are the lack of limits on the amount of land or property one can acquire (so that one person can buy more than his equal share) and, most importantly, the private ownership of the means of production, by which the owner can extract surplus value from his workers with the help of the extensive structural crippling executed by the State. But this is not new; for centuries, “property rights” have explicitly been used to protect the moneyed minority against the anger of the destitute majority (when they talked about the “rights of minorities,” they were talking about the rich, not black people or natives, who were considered subhuman).

If a small percentage of people have most of the wealth (in the US, the top 1% controls 35% of the wealth and receive 20% of the income, while the bottom 80% controls 15% of the wealth and receives less than 40% of the income; the picture is less dramatic but similar in other Western countries), and we live in a society where wealth determines material ownership, and by extension rights expression, then we should expect such a society to be stratified, and for some to have more rights than others. Furthermore, we should expect many in the bottom strata to have very little to no rights at all.

Note that it does not matter what the power elite claims is the case. We are told that all citizens have equal rights (never mind so-called “immigrants” and children, because they still aren’t considered fully human). Yet in practice we know this is false, to a large extent because of material inequality within countries and around the world. Many people don’t have access to adequate food (six million children die annually of starvation), housing (homeless persons die 22 years younger), or health care (ten million children die annually of treatable diseases), or are forced into substandard food (junk food), substandard housing (“ghettos”) or substandard health care (so-called “alternative” medicine). All children are deprived of education, but some have access to better schooling than others, pushing them towards success or failure. The judiciary system in most Western countries, unlike other judiciaries, is explicitly set up so that rich people and majorities have a clear advantage, both in the structure of the police and courts, as well as in the laws themselves (looking at the kind of crimes that are punished, as well as the kind of crimes that are given much lower punishments or no punishments at all). Workers who have to sign work contracts in order to make a living must agree to have some of their most basic rights violated, in some cases to a point where they are made basically slaves (people from Second and Third World countries are “imported,” then their means of leaving are taken away from them). Religious fanaticism, bigotry, homophobia, racism and sexism can make many people’s lives a living Hell and deprive them of their right to liberty, freedom of thought, and the pursuit of happiness, partially through refusing them access to good-paying jobs, inheritances, the ownership of property, and other ways to access wealth. This is just a very short list, obviously, as the number of ways in which people are deprived of rights or given inferior status are pretty much limitless.

Since people must fight against “property rights” to maintain their livelihood and their dignity (as the Zapatista and other indigenous people have clearly demonstated), there cannot be such a thing as “property rights.” A “right” which supports aggression against other people’s rights is not a right at all.

The legitimacy of “property rights” is only maintained by the pretense that because anyone can, in theory, own property, therefore “property rights” are egalitarian. But this is incredibly flimsy grounds on which to exploit and oppress people. Anyone can, in theory, become a CEO- does that mean corporations are egalitarian? Anyone can, in theory, win a fistfight or a duel- does that mean “punching rights” and “shooting rights” are egalitarian? Anyone can, in theory, write a novel or produce a song- does that mean “IP rights” are egalitarian? Anyone can, in theory, follow “the right god”- does that make religion egalitarian? Anyone can, in theory, be a perfect parent- does that make the child-parent relation egalitarian?

“Property rights” are not only not egalitarian, but they are the primary source of inequality, and therefore of unfreedom. As I’ve argued before, all hierarchies are property.