At least, this is the conclusion of a study which found that common forests outperform government-controlled forests, and casts a shadow on a UN plan to empower governments to seize even more commons around the world.

One reason may be that locals protect forests best if they own them, because they have a long-term interest in ensuring the forests’ survival. While governments, whatever their intentions, usually license destructive logging, or preside over a free-for-all in which everyone grabs what they can because nobody believes the forest will last.

The authors suggest that locals would also make a better job of managing common pastures, coastal fisheries and water supplies. They argue that their findings contradict a long-standing environmental idea, called the “tragedy of the commons”, which says that natural resources left to communal control get trashed. In fact, says Agrawal, “communities are perfectly capable of managing their resources sustainably”.

An excellent review of The Dispossessed, basically says everything I want to say right now.
Another review

Please, please, please read this book… My anarchist friends, if you have even the slightest liking for sci-fi, I promise you personally that you won’t regret it.

It seems to me like there is a vast gap in knowledge regarding the LTV (labour theory of value) and STV (subjective theory of value) arguments. Many “ancaps” still argue at the most simplistic level, like “well, value is a combination of our subjective evaluations and that’s all it is” or “if LTV was right, then you could spend days making something useless and sell it at a high price.” On the other hand, many libsocs are disinclined to attack STV or don’t understand what is or is not STV.

This is why I have decided to write an entry about the arguments against STV, in order to try to heighten the level of discourse and force “ancaps” to defend at a more sophisticated level (I know, hope springs eternal).

First, I want to address the so-called “hybrids” of STV and LTV which have been proposed by some mutualists, including Kevin Carson. Carson’s own theory, which he describes as such in chapter 2 of Studies in Mutualist Political Economy:

A producer will continue to bring his goods to market only if he receives a price necessary, in his subjective evaluation, to compensate him for the disutility involved in producing them. And he will be unable to charge a price greater than this necessary amount, for a very long time, if market entry is free and supply is elastic, because competitors will enter the field until price equals the disutility of producing the final increment of the commodity.

Such statements require no verification beyond an a priori understanding of human nature.

Whether one agrees or not with Carson’s theory is not the point here. My problem is with people who jump to the conclusion that Carson, the main figure of modern mutualism, supports STV because his theory has the word “subjective” in it. There are plenty of philosophical theories that have the word “subjective” in them, but that doesn’t mean they all support STV! Likewise, the fact that Carson believes that only a freed market can calculate disutility does not make his theory a support of STV either.

If STV is valid, then it is valid regardless of the economic system it is applied within. Because mutualist thought, especially as exemplified by Kevin Carson, explicitly acknowledges the profound injustice in every individual’s starting conditions and the way in which our economic system sets them up, it is not compatible with STV.

At any rate, the word “subjective” is very clumsy and unnecessary, and I prefer to clarify my ideas by using the more specific word “personal.” That being said, the existence of personal preferences (the “subjective” realm) is a trivial truth and does not in itself prove the validity of something as abstract as a theory of value. It is true regardless of what theory of value one adopts.

As I’ve pointed out many times (including in the libsoc FAQ), the concept of personal preference is of no use when evaluating innate worth. The former is tied to the individual, while the latter is tied to the object. Personal preference can tell us nothing about anything outside of the individual’s preferences, and therefore cannot tell us the worth of any product or service, only what the individual thinks it is worth.

Bizarrely, when confronted with this fact, proponents of STV reply that their theory admits of no such distinction, as if any theory could make any sense at all when it fails to make the distinction between one’s preferences and how things really are!

All in all, proponents of STV have the unfortunate tendency to argue like madmen. First they claim that reality is whatever they desire, and that this fact is self-obvious. Then, when pushed, they claim that there is in fact no difference at all between reality and their desires, that they are one and the same thing. Then, when pushed further, they deny the existence of reality altogether. They are far away from sanity.

Since their only arguments are circular arguments (STV is correct because that’s the way things work now, therefore STV is correct), it’s no wonder that many of them don’t even try to argue. Here is a somewhat extreme case, from one of Kevin Carson’s blog posts:

The economic value of a good or service is what someone thinks it is (people often put different values on the the same object). This is true BY DEFINITION (it is not a matter that needs to be “proved”).

A strange statement. If it’s true “by definition,” then why has it not been true for centuries? A definition that doesn’t apply most of the time is not a very good definition. Once again, it’s merely a circular argument formulated as a fact: economic value is based on desires because that’s what actually happens in our world, which is based on the premise that economic value is based on desires. There is no conclusion to be reached from such pablum.

It also highlights the fantasy nature of STV. Reality is not “what someone thinks it is.” In fact, economic value is not even determined by “what someone thinks it is” even in our own system. It’s determined by what corporations think they are, and what corporations indoctrinate us to believe that they are. There is both an asymmetry of power which prevents “fair subjectivity” (i.e. the economic value is not actually the equal confluence of desires) and an indoctrination process (marketing) which prevents “true subjectivity” (i.e. the economic value is not actually about what people desire, but what other agents condition them to desire).

The natural consequence of this belief in fantasy is that our economic reality is full of contradictions and absurdities: the exact same product varying wildly in price from one location to the next (and even in the same location, as in “brand name” products compared to “store brand” products), “luxury” items that cost ten times more than their counterparts despite being made of the same materials and requiring roughly as much labor, one hour’s work being worth 100 times someone else’s hour of work… we intuitively know that all these things are absurd, and it requires a lot of schooling and indoctrination to defeat such common sense.

Economics is not a “science,” it’s “man-as-push-button” writ large under the cloak of science. In its models, a rational person is a person who seeks to make money with disregard to how his actions affect his own principles or society as a whole. The great blog The Sexist gives a beat-down to two economists, writers of the famous pop economics (as if economics itself wasn’t bad enough) book Freakonomics, who claimed that more women should be prostitutes because that’s what makes money.

so these economists are stumped—stumped, i tell you!—as to why more women don’t spend their entire lives pleasing men and receiving no pleasure in return. they can’t understand why this is, because outside of prostitution, women are lining up in droves to have sex! but instead of working through their obvious miscalculations here, they decide to tell imply that women are probably just kind of dumb. the kicker is when, at the end of the piece, this is how the researchers leave Allie, the “high-class” prostitute who ended up becoming an economist: “Several students said this was the best lecture they had in all their years at the university, which is both a firm testament to Allie’s insights and a brutal indictment of Levitt and the other professors.” As if it’s some kind of joke! when, in reality, these guys actually don’t understand wtf they’re talking about, and they’re actually seemingly amused that a prostitute could not be a dumbass.

…

the only appropriate response to the ridiculous question posed in the article would be, “I don’t know, why don’t you suck cock for a living?” Why don’t you suck cock, out of your fancy house, instead of being a famous economist? I’m sure that will be the pertinent question in “SuperDuperFreakonomics: The Freakiestonomics Yet”

Howard Zinn is dead, but the fight against war continues. Here is Howard Zinn on the “war on terror”…

Terrorism and war have something in common. They both involve the killing of innocent people to achieve what the killers believe is a good end. I can see an immediate objection to this equation: They (the terrorists) deliberately kill innocent people; we (the war makers) aim at “military targets,” and civilians are killed by accident, as “collateral damage.”

Is it really an accident when civilians die under our bombs? Even if you grant that the intention is not to kill civilians, if they nevertheless become victims, again and again and again, can that be called an accident? If the deaths of civilians are inevitable in bombing, it may not be deliberate, but it is not an accident, and the bombers cannot be considered innocent. They are committing murder as surely as are the terrorists.

The absurdity of claiming innocence in such cases becomes apparent when the death tolls from “collateral damage” reach figures far greater than the lists of the dead from even the most awful act of terrorism. Thus, the “collateral damage” in the Gulf War caused more people to die–hundreds of thousands, if you include the victims of our sanctions policy–than the very deliberate terrorist attack of September 11. The total of those who have died in Israel from Palestinian terrorist bombs is somewhere under 1,000. The number of dead from “collateral damage” in the bombing of Beirut during Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 was roughly 6,000.

We must not match the death lists–it is an ugly exercise–as if one atrocity is worse than another. No killing of innocents, whether deliberate or “accidental,” can be justified. My argument is that when children die at the hands of terrorists, or–whether intended or not–as a result of bombs dropped from airplanes, terrorism and war become equally unpardonable.

In a climate where rational discussion about health care is absolutely impossible, some people are rolling up their sleeves and doing something about it…

The price for use of the co-op’s services ranges from as little as $50 a month for an establishment with a couple of employees to $400 a month for a larger restaurant.

Dr. Dave, who works as a general practitioner and sees other patients, is able to support himself because both his office and apartment are located in rent-stabilized buildings operated by the Lower East Side People’s Mutual Housing Association, a not-for-profit housing group that charges him only $800 a month for rent.

With health care currently a hot-button political issue, Dr. Dave sees this local, not-for-profit health system as a model for how national health care in America could work.

“I’m not against profit,” he says. “I just don’t think you can have a for-profit health system that provides everyone with proper health care. It’s just never going to work.”

You may have heard this line of reasoning used against anarchists from people who are mired into the mainstream capitalist doctrine. Greed will always be with us, so the argument goes, therefore establishing a society that goes against greed is utopian. People will always want to compete and accumulate power. Any attempt at an egalitarian society is doomed to failure.

In fact, this argument is so widespread that it has led the libcoms to reject any concept of human nature outright, preferring to dump the theory of evolution and its powerful ramifications rather than even leave open the possibility that greed is natural.

But rejecting human nature altogether is not a viable answer. It demands that we follow magical thinking: that man’s personality and character somehow magically spring from his upbringing, without any mediation of the brain. Libcoms will counter this by saying that they really do believe in biological needs, instincts, and other evolutionary traits, but that they don’t believe in man’s nature being innate anyway.

This is why it is important to define exactly what we mean by “human nature.” We are not talking about people’s tastes in clothes or their choice of a job. We are talking about nothing less than that which is fundamental to being human, that which is always at the core of everything we do, starting with our basic drives (nourishment, sexuality, security, play, etc), our biological needs and our cognitive biases. While we humans express these drives in all sorts of complex ways, they exist in most social species.

There is nothing that can compel an individual to do anything without the need, drive or bias already being present within himself. This is why human nature is so important and why people seek to understand it. It’s what advertisers, movie editors and politicians’ speech writers use to “press our buttons.” Anyone who rejects the notion makes himself vulnerable to such manipulations, and they are everywhere.

At any rate, the idea of rejecting the concept of human nature itself because of misunderstandings or misrepresentations is as silly as rejecting the concept of atoms because some people (especially Christian presuppositionalists) misrepresent it. It is obviously not true that man is infinitely malleable. All throughout history, we return to the same concepts, the same drives, the same conflicts, no matter how much our societies change. The study of these constants must be part of the education of any serious student of politics.

What about greed? Greed is the desire to have more than one’s equal share, to be more than associates of each other. Greed is ultimately the desire for domination. It is therefore very much related to my previous entry on atomistic individualism, as a greedy person (within his pursuit, anyway) sees others as means to an end, not as fellow human beings.

I think this is the crux of the misconception. Capitalists believe greed is natural because they believe it is individualist. Communists cannot object because they already agree with this premise. But there’s nothing individualist about greed. Greed is the natural result of people seeking security and material possessions in a system which indoctrinates them to do so and makes the competition of all against all the precondition to that security and those material possessions. The current system is full of games conditions. The faster we eliminate them, the faster sanity will be restored to society.

Some libcoms, on the other hand, propose that greed should be seen in its entirety, as the struggle for a richer life, and that the pursuit of material wealth is only one small part of it. In that perspective, greed is not only good, but vitally necessary for the accomplishment of communist aims.

We have no doubt that people are corruptible, but we know for ourselves that there are things more tempting, more seductive, than money, capital, and Power – so much so that no genuinely greedy human being could possibly resist their allure – and it is upon this corruptibility of man that we found our hopes for revolution. Revolution is nothing other than the self-accelerating spread throughout society of this more profound corruption, of this deeper seduction. Currently, greed is always pursued and associated with isolation and privatism simply because everyone under the reign of capital is condemned to pursue greed in this narrow way. Greed doesn’t yet know its own potentiality.
We say once again: the present forms of greed lose out in the end because they turn out to be not greedy enough.

Soon, the Wii Fit may be used as a tool to get people under arrest at airports… (and here you thought they couldn’t come up with someone more retarded than “truth detectors”)

Popular Science reports that some passengers may be required to stand on a Nintendo Wii Fit balance board so that those who are nervous and fidgety can be identified. The idea is being tested as part of a $20-million Homeland Security project called Future Attribute Screening Technology (FAST) that is studying how to monitor people’s physical states, like heart rate, breathing and eye movement.
…
Researchers have modified the Wii balance board to show how someone’s weight shifts and are now determining what kind of results from the balance board would warrant secondary screening.

But many argue that screening people’s physical states might not be accurate. “I haven’t seen any research that shows that those measures from the autonomic nervous system … measuring blood pressure, measuring breathing, measuring heat on the face, are at all related to intent,” Stephen Fienberg, professor of statistics and social sciences at Carnegie Mellon University, told CNN.

It’s Lysander Spooner’s 202nd birthday. Happy Spooner day everyone! In honour of this great thinker, here is an extract from the beginning of No Treason.

The Constitution has no inherent authority or obligation. It has no authority or obligation at all, unless as a contract between man and man. And it does not so much as even purport to be a contract between persons now existing. It purports, at most, to be only a contract between persons living eighty years ago. And it can be supposed to have been a contract then only between persons who had already come to years of discretion, so as to be competent to make reasonable and obligatory contracts. Furthermore, we know, historically, that only a small portion even of the people then existing were consulted on the subject, or asked, or permitted to express either their consent or dissent in any formal manner. Those persons, if any, who did give their consent formally, are all dead now. Most of them have been dead forty, fifty, sixty, or seventy years. And the Constitution, so far as it was their contract, died with them. They had no natural power or right to make it obligatory upon their children. It is not only plainly impossible, in the nature of things, that they could bind their posterity, but they did not even attempt to bind them. That is to say, the instrument does not purport to be an agreement between any body but “the people” then existing; nor does it, either expressly or impliedly, assert any right, power, or disposition, on their part, to bind anybody but themselves.

…

It cannot be said that the Constitution formed “the people of the United States,” for all time, into a corporation. It does not speak of “the people” as a corporation, but as individuals. A corporation does not describe itself as “we,” nor as “people,” nor as “ourselves.” Nor does a corporation, in legal language, have any “posterity.” It supposes itself to have, and speaks of itself as having, perpetual existence, as a single individuality.

Moreover, no body of men, existing at any one time, have the power to create a perpetual corporation. A corporation can become practically perpetual only by the voluntary accession of new members, as the old ones die off. But for this voluntary accession of new members, the corporation necessarily dies with the death of those who originally composed it.

Legally speaking, therefore, there is, in the Constitution, nothing that professes or attempts to bind the “posterity” of those who established it.

Before I begin talking about atomism, I should mention that I am aware of the many definitions of atomism, even from the ethical perspective. I am referring specifically to the concept of “atomistic individualism,” which sees man not as part of society but rather as an isolated organism of which society is something wholly exterior, or as Rothbard defines it:

Individualists have always been accused by their enemies of being “atomistic” — of postulating that each individual lives in a kind of vacuum, thinking and choosing without relation to anyone else in society. This, however, is an authoritarian straw man; few, if any, individualists have ever been “atomists.”
Murray Rothbard

I believe that when other Anarchists berate individualism, they are mostly addressing atomistic individualism, not individualism in general. I don’t say this idly, but rather because what I observe in society, especially in the institutions which all Anarchists detest, is mostly individualism in its most base atomistic form, which results in a complete lack of personal and social responsibility.

Some people may argue that my definition is a straw man, and that no one actually holds such a position. It may be the case that few actually hold such a position explicitly, but many people act as if they do. It is certainly the case that our capital-democratist system strongly encourages such an implicit position (in fact, we can safely associate atomism with the belief in competition prevalent in our system, which creates the “dog eat dog” mentality).

It seems clear that atomism is a consequence of games conditions.
Concepts of solidarity and mutual concern are, in these ultra-capitalist times, considered outmoded in the face of individual and market competition. According to this reasoning, some workers getting fired over trivial offenses is no other worker’s business. All that should concern the individual worker is his own work: whether he is on time, whether he does his job, and whether he is recognized for his accomplishments, everything that will give him more chances for promotion and economic success. The result of this reasoning is that the workers are divided, and no mutual aid is possible.

To accept atomism, one must have a new standard by which some exterior authority can evaluate everyone’s actions. This is the law, the policies, the commandments, the rules and regulations, or whatever other list of orders exists. These laws, policies, commandments, rules and regulations act as a substitute for the individual’s moral responsibility and independent moral evaluation. Whatever the laws, policies, commandments, rules and regulations claim is unethical, is thereby made unethical.

The most critical problem with such a substitute is that the laws, policies, commandments, rules and regulations are written and enforced by those at the top of the hierarchy, and serves the protection and growth of that hierarchy, instead of being written and enforced to protect and help the growth of human beings. Such diktats only coincide with human values insofar as those values are incidentally beneficial to the hierarchy as a whole (e.g. safety from illness as being good both for the individual and for the profits of a corporation or the taxation capacities of a nation).

In this worldview, human values are only relevant insofar as they help fulfill stated objectives within the bounds of the laws, policies, commandments, rules and regulations. Anyone who disobeys these diktats is by definition unethical, and therefore an anti-social element, unless the worldview as a whole shifts as a result of the disobedience, which makes it righteous. The story repeats with every proponent of civil disobedience: at first they are unethical, and then, after their ideas are widely accepted, the ethical validity of what they proposed is seen as obvious beyond disagreement, and becomes part and parcel of diktats everywhere. The targets of official hatred are ever-shifting, because the norm is ever-shifting under social pressures.

The basic principle of the “divide and conquer” atomistic tactic in place in our society is this:

1. That the individual should never concern himself with other people’s misfortune, only with improving his own power. That the highest goal of any individual is to improve his power (status, money, popularity, etc).
2. That because we now (or so the propaganda goes) live in a society where there are no classes and everyone is equal, all their failures are their own fault.
3. That the laws, policies, commandments, rules and regulations put in place are fundamentally fair and necessary for order. That these diktats provide the standard by which our actions should be judged.

The concept of property only compounds the effects of this tactic, insofar as it further isolates the individual from his society. Where commons create a win-win situation (the more I have, the more everyone has), property creates win-lose situations (the more others have, the less I can have). There are only so many jobs, so much money, so many possible sexual partners, so many positions of status and decision-making posts, and so on, at any given time. The individual’s frantic scrambling for them makes him a competitor against his fellows.

In such a society, there cannot be any real freedom, since freedom depends on vigilance against the abuse and leverage of power. In such a society, there cannot be any real equality, since all the power is concentrated in the hierarchies themselves, as well as in their leaders. In such a society, there cannot be security, since security depends on solidarity. In such a society, people cannot understand each other at anything but the most basic level, share common goals (what would be the point when objectives are already imposed on them?), or fight against the ruling class for any sort of social progress (instead having to wait for the victimized groups to protest and stick in in their faces until they decide to just give in). Such a society will see a great deal of “economic progress” (as measured by how much stuff is made and how many services are delivered, no matter how unethical they are), but will see little social progress, and whatever creativity exists to push ideas forward will be extremely limited and contained.

I have mentioned the expression “atomistic individualism” and how atomism is merely a false, oversimplified version of individualism. Individualists hold that man’s standard should be his own values, not any exterior determinism. In this regard, “atomistic individualism” is the exact opposite of individualism. In holding that man’s standard should be his own power and his own power only, it thereby robs man of moral autonomy by surrendering it to the hierarchies providing this power.

If we look at politics, we certainly find this to be true. The only real difference between the collectivism of Marxism and the atomism of capitalism is in the identity of the superiors. The only real difference between the “dictatorship of the proletariat” and the “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie” is that the latter has been more successful at adapting and coping with crisis. The Marxist starves his own people; the bourgeois starves foreign people. Both take away people’s rights, although I grant that capitalism leaves its own people the right to complain, which sadly is vastly useless except for people like myself who are stupid enough as to think that talking accomplishes anything at all.

Certainly we believe that we care about other people, and that our individualism is not base. After all, there are charities, government programs, food banks, prisons, and more, all available to “relieve” the other fellow’s suffering. As Scrooge says: “Are there no prisons?… And the Union workhouses? Are they still in operation?”

The double irony (from our perspective) in this passage is that Scrooge is depicted as a miser for saying this to two active proponents of charity. The fact of the matter is what workhouses, in principle, exist to provide continued sustenance. Charities, on the other hand, are a temporary solution to a permanent problem. The same is true for most of the solutions currently in existence, which exist to make people feel good about themselves and their place in the world, not to end poverty. Ending poverty can only come through a fundamental restructuring of our economic system, something which is obviously wholly unacceptable to its leaders and their highly-paid lackeys.

Therefore, the fact that people still profess to care about others, despite being totally caught up in some games conditions, is more of an indication of their own desire to feel guiltless than any genuine concern. A genuine desire to fight against any widespread social problem must start with a steel-eyed examination of the system in place and how it controls behaviour, redirects resources, and redefines political discourse for its own advantage.

Remember when I posted videos from an ex-policeman and a lawyer telling you the number one best thing you could ever do when arrested was not talk to the cops under any circumstance? Here’s an article from Kevin Carson on the same subject. Cops lie, cops cheat, cops are all dirty assholes…

The cops created a deliberately misleading impression, confusing the Heenes with half-truths, to trick them into betraying themselves.

I wonder if the cops mentioned that polygraphs are inadmissible in most courts because of their unreliability. I wonder if they mentioned that it’s standard polygraph industry procedure to lie to subjects about how it works (namely, the real purpose of the baseline question).

A politically monopolized security industry works for the politically powerful. You’re not the customer. Since police lack competitors that could hold them accountable, you become a mostly defenseless means to responding to political incentives (in order to achieve the satisfaction of their own economic desires). Pending the dissolution of that monopoly, your best defense against predatory police is giving them as little to work with as possible.

Remember all this next time you deal with a cop. Any time a cop seems to be friendly and non-adversarial, to be “on your side” and just enabling you to “straighten things out” or “clear your name,” he’s probably trying to trick you into incriminating yourself. Don’t answer any questions, no matter how seemingly innocuous or trivial, and demand a lawyer immediately.

Looking back on the three and a half years I’ve been writing this blog, I have to say I’m very satisfied of where I am now. I have a wide range of entries on political theory and very stable concepts on which to build. I’ve made some entries that became popular (most notably my posting of the Pyramid of Capitalism images, for some bizarre reason) and got a lot of discussion. My readership is bigger than I even hoped for (I do wish there wasn’t so many capitalists, but to be fair I did start as a capitalist and disappointed a lot of readers when I converted).

I don’t really have any plans for change, I’m happy with everything. What do you guys think?

Kevin Carson has been fighting against the “vulgar libertarians” who keep pushing capitalism as the way to freedom. In an older column on the subject, he discusses the way things have always went…

The time-honored “free market” recipe, among the ruling classes, goes like this: 1) rob the producing classes of their traditional property rights in the land, and turn them into tenants at-will of the plutocracy; 2) through coercive controls on the population, like the Combination Laws and Law of Settlement, make it impossible for the producing classes to bargain effectively in the wage market; 3) when the process is complete, talk a lot about how great the free market works, and justify the existing concentration of capital ownership as a result of the superior efficiency of those who came out on top.

UPDATE: This entry was posted on reddit, attracting a lot of attention. To be honest, most of that attention seems to be negative, as it has been with my blog entries posted on reddit in the past. Thank you for posting my entries, whoever you are, but I rather wish you’d stop doing it. There are far too many capitalists on the anarchist reddit to make it worthwhile.

***

The so-called “anarcho-capitalist FAQ,” written by “Hogeye Bill” tries to usurp Anarchist ideas and positions in the name of economic exploitation, and promotes racist and sexist demagogues. Their section number nine, “What are the myths of socialism?”, should be of interest to all libertarian socialists (libsocs) who wish to argue their mental disease.

For the curious who may not know the libsoc counters to these rather simplistic points, I will examine them here one by one.

a. The just price doctrine and cost-price theories of value.
The medieval notion of just price permeates socialist thought. It holds that there is a God-given or intrinsic price of a good, regardless of people’s wants, needs, and desires, or supply and demand. In the industrial-era form of this doctrine, the value of a good is deemed to be equal to the cost of production, usually in terms of labor time expended (see labor theory of value below). This cost-price notion was refuted in the 1800s by the marginalist revolution in economics, but nevertheless many socialists remain mired in this creationism of the left.

There is no argument in any of this. Basically, this is a description followed by an insult. Only the last part of this point has any substance:

The marginalist economists, notably the Austrian School, consider value to be subjective. It depends on each person and his or her particular situation and values. In the desert, one may prefer a cup of water to a diamond.

As I’ve commented before on the FAQ By Libsocs For “An”caps in questions 4b and 4c, the idea of value being subjective is an equivocation on the term value, a confusion between moral values (i.e. what we desire) and economic value (i.e. how much something is worth). Obviously one may desire a cup of water more than a diamond in certain contexts, and vice-versa. But this has no relation whatsoever to the worth of the cup of water or the worth of the diamond.

The ironic thing is that the example doesn’t even apply to the capitalist’s subjective theory of value (STV). In our system (and probably not in the “an”cap system either), prices don’t fluctuate from person to person depending on how thirsty or hungry they are. We all pay the same price for the same goods from the same supplier. And that is because the supplier has far more power to set prices than the individual does, and thus does not have to take into account the desires of each individual, only aggregates.

b. The labor theory of value.
The labor theory of value (LTV) is the cost-price doctrine which holds that all value springs from labor. In other words, it purports that land, capital, and entrepreneurship are all non-productive, and can impute no value to a good (except insofar as they represent past labor.) The general invalidity of all just price doctrines has already noted. The modern (marginalist) thought is that value is not determined by cost at all, but by the subjective preferences of the buyers interacting with the available quantity of the good in question. This is known as the subjective theory of value.

Again, correct insofar as the descriptions go.

Even on it’s own intrinsic price terms, the LTV fails to account for factors of production other than labor. Standard counter-examples abound, e.g. No matter how much time you spend producing mud-pies, they are still worthless; A fresh bottle of wine gains value simply by aging; and so on. It is possible to formulate a purely descriptive LTV, which uses labor time as the measure of the productivity of land and capital, as Kevin Carson does in part 1 of his book Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, however the usefulness of this is dubious, and the temptation to slide into the prescriptive interpretation is enormous, as Carson does without justification in part 2 of the same book.

It is very interesting to see that the FAQ writer has both a nuanced grasp of both theories and such a simplistic idea of their flaws. The “if LTV is right, then useless things like holes or mud-pies would be very valuable if we spend a lot of time making them” argument is always the very, very first argument used by capitalists against LTV, and the most simplistic.

The actual answer, of course, is simple: as Proudhon himself has pointed out, an object which no one wants is not a product! If no one wants the mud-pies and considers them useless, then they cannot be a product, and therefore don’t have a price according to LTV. As an old blog entry from Anarchist Without Objectives points out:

It’s funny because it’s fairly basic Misesian premise that human action is purposeful action… It would seem to refute the Misesian premise of purposeful action to have people spend an afternoon making mudpies, not to mention it’s a strawman in the first place.

As for the wine example, it is circular, like all arguments or objections for STV. The fact that the bottle of wine “gains value simply by aging” in the capitalist system does not actually indicate that it has gained actual worth and is not an indication of its just price.

Basically, all counter-objections given by the proponents of STV are of the form “according to LTV, value is solely determined by labour, but [in our capitalist STV system] product X gains value/loses value in a given context, therefore LTV is invalid.” The “in our capitalist STV system” always remains implicit, because otherwise they would realize that their own argument is circular.

c. The exploitation theory.
An ”exploitation theory” is any theory which purports to justify the claim that one “class” exploits another. In socialist theory, the claim is that a capitalist class exploits a proletarian class. Most exploitation theories are based on the antiquated LTV notion described above. Other socialists realize the weakness of this argument, and base their exploitation theory on unequal negotiating positions. While this latter approach may explain outcomes of bargaining, it evades the relevant issue – whether the trade was voluntary. Thus this approach also fails to support the claim that (so-called) “exploitation” is undesirable or unethical.

There is no word that capitalists hate more than “exploitation,” and they will use all their energies to sweep it under the carpet, no matter how many atrocities and attacks against people’s rights are contained within. It’s all swept up by the broom of “voluntaryism.” All kinds of human rights abuses, from the smallest to the largest, can be rationalized with the excuse of “voluntaryism.” In this view, anything that people agree to, no matter what the context was, is ethical, and the contract or agreement is the absolute barometer of ethics, in the same way that law is the absolute barometer of ethics in the statist view.

The voluntary nature of an action or system is a necessary but not sufficient ethical condition. I have shown in a past entry that what the author glibly labels “unequal negotiating positions” (read: widespread poverty and gargantuan concentrations of wealth owned by hierarchies which we have no choice but to bargain with on a daily basis) necessarily nullifies the very possibility of consent, no matter how “voluntary” it might be.

Surely the crucial question is most definitely not whether exploitation is unethical or not, since by definition exploitation is unethical. The important question is rather whether the instances of alleged exploitation are really exploitation or merely “so-called.” But this must be done on a case-by-case basis: one cannot merely dismiss ALL cases of alleged exploitation against the workers and leave it at that, unless one has a universal argument against its existence. No such universal argument is presented here.

Note that even stipulating the “creationist” LTV, the socialist argument is insufficient for proving exploitation. It lacks an explanation of why workers voluntarily exchanging labor time for wages is exploitative. Bohm-Bawerk of the Austrian school of economics showed long ago (1884 in “Exploitation Theories”) that profit from wages could be explained by interest on advanced pay, i.e. workers getting paid prior to their produce being sold.

I don’t understand why the author thinks this is a good argument. Now, I don’t know the details of this theory of profit, but it sounds very much like an ad hoc rationalization. For one thing, there is no way to equate an employer taking away three-quarters or more of one’s pay with any reasonable percentage of interest over a period of hours or days. However you calculate it, it simply cannot accumulate that much. And for another thing, wage workers don’t generally get paid prior to their product being sold, but rather afterward (although it may have been otherwise in 1884, but that’s no excuse to use an outdated argument).

d. Denial of scarcity (property, money).
This is a favorite of utopian socialists. The purpose of property is to solve the scarcity problem – that man’s desires exceed available goods. This myth simply assumes away scarcity, as if this human condition was merely an effect of a particular property system rather than a fact of reality and human nature.

Of all the points, this is the weakest, because no justification is offered at all. This may be an improvement, since the justifications for their previous points are rather easy to knock down, but hardly the level of discourse that one expects from a FAQ. Nowhere is the only relevant question addressed: is it true that man’s desires exceed available goods? The only reply given is: “it’s a fact of reality.” But nay-saying is not an answer. One can merely play the same childish game and state that “it’s a fact of reality” that the available goods in the world exceed people’s desires. This leads us nowhere at all.

The socialist denial of the validity of property involves an internal contradiction and much resulting “double-think.” E.g. Proudhon writes that he’s against contract property, but for possession property; yet he refuses to acknowledge that his “possession” is a type of property.

This is a strange slander of Proudhon’s position (which was in itself rather fluid, and thus not easy to classify in such a glib way), especially since Proudhon, in What is Property?, is very clear in his definitions of property and possession. Property, for him, is the absolute control that a proprietor in our capitalist societies exerts on objects. Possession is the relationship between any individual in a society and his equal part of the resources produced by that society. Possession relates an individual to the society he depends on, property separates them.

[P]roperty, in its derivative sense, and by the definitions of law, is a right outside of society; for it is clear that, if the wealth of each was social wealth, the conditions would be equal for all, and it would be a contradiction to say: Property is a man’s right to dispose at will of social property. Then if we are associated for the sake of liberty, equality, and security, we are not associated for the sake of property; then if property is a natural right, this natural right is not social, but anti-social. Property and society are utterly irreconcilable institutions. It is as impossible to associate two proprietors as to join two magnets by their opposite poles. Either society must perish, or it must destroy property.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What is Property?

And now, finishing this point:

Another naive denial of scarcity is the claim of some socialists that a modern society can get along without money. Hayek made a living by refuting that view: in short, an economy needs the informational function of money to balance supply and demand. Without the amalgamation of the desires and preferences of the producers and consumers into price, chaos results. Shortages and surpluses abound when the communication of preferences is prevented or co-opted by rulers. Money is simply and ultimately the most liquid commodity in a market. There will always be a most liquid commodity in any market; ergo, there will be something used as money.

I think the author here is trying to hint at what is called the calculation problem by Austrian economists. As Kevin Carson points out, corporations are equally guilty of bringing about calculation problems, for the exact same reasons. So it seems rather disingenuous to use this as an argument against socialism specifically.

I will not address the claim that it’s “naive” to think that modern society can get along with money, apart from saying that it manifests the same lack of justification that we saw earlier. Money is more than “the most liquid commodity”: it has to be a medium of exchange, otherwise it’s not money as we understand it.

e. Human action and production can be planned or engineered.
Many statist socialists have plans and programs to transform society into their vision of community and the good life. Unfortunately, the nature of man is not infinitely elastic. These socialists tend to overestimate their ability to “mold the clay” of mankind, and underestimate his natural proclivities and the evolutionary nature any major advance in his moral faculties. In fact, as quasi-anarcho-capitalist Herbert Spencer pointed out, many of the statist schemes are counter-productive to human progress, and have results perverse even by the social engineers’ standards.

Before I address the main point, I want to point out the irony in the title of the position he’s refuting. Surely he realizes how much human production is planned and engineered in our capitalist system? Only the most staunch of primitivists believe that human production shouldn’t be planned or engineered in any way.

Anyway, and this seems to be the running theme here, the author completely fails to address the main issue, which is: is capitalism or socialism closer to the necessities and needs of human nature? The fact that capitalism is a very recent invention on the timeline of humanity seems to argue against capitalism. And as I’ve argued recently, all the evidence seems to show that hierarchies are not natural.

Since the point is addressed to statist socialists specifically, one may say that I shouldn’t answer it. Fair enough, but once again it demonstrates the mindset of the kind of people who wrote and reference this FAQ: they are not interested in “answering questions” as much as they are interested in “pushing a party line.” It’s one thing to have a position, but it’s another to simply ignore anything the opposition has to say.

In writing a FAQ on controversial topics, one should at least address basic controversies and objections. If “Hogeye Bill” really intended this section as more than a throw-away poo-pooing of socialism, he should have made himself familiar with the basic arguments in favour of LTV, for instance. “Hogeye Bill” has not even demonstrated that much knowledge. Then why include this topic at all? All it does is foster very basic misrepresentations about socialism, which seems to be the goal here.

Thanks to the Idiocracy Index.