I would therefore like to introduce a new proviso, which continues in the same vein of these first two: an expression of consent, where there is a credible alternative but said alternative is not viable due to pre-existing conditions, is as invalid as one given without credible alternatives.

There’s more stuff to unpack here, so let me use a simple example to illustrate it. A man (to follow the convention of the first proviso, let’s call him Twain) falls into a well. How this happens is not relevant: it could be distraction, carelessness, or maybe he was pushed in by some miscreant. Either way, he is stuck at the bottom of the well for a few hours, and then a guy (let’s call him Norton) comes by with a bullhorn and tells him something like this:

“Right, this well is kindof out of the way, so no one’s gonna know about it. I, however, intend to help you. No, I’m not actually gonna call for help or anything, in fact I won’t tell anyone else about this. But I will send you food down every day, I’ll send you a flashlight and some reading materials, and I’ll send you a bucket so you can, you know. In exchange, I want you to do a little gig for me for a few minutes. Sounds like a fair deal to me. If you refuse, I’ll just leave and never come back.”

Here we have a credible signal: if Twain refuses Norton’s offer, Norton will treat it as a signal to desist and leave forever. And yet we cannot say that consent is present, because if he refuses, Twain will basically die in horrible sufferings. Even if he resented Norton’s help, or the modalities of his help, he cannot refuse if he wishes to not suffer.

We can clearly attribute this to the pre-existing conditions, which in this case consist of Twain being stuck down a well with no means to get out. If Twain was not stuck in the well in the first place, the question would not arise at all. But given these conditions, his approval to Norton’s plan may very well be voluntary, but it is not consensual.

It would be blindingly obvious to anyone (putting the dumb “anarcho”-capitalists aside, who have zero ethics or compassion) that Norton’s actions are unethical. I may be wrong on this but I don’t think any sane human being would claim that Twain is beholden to the terms of his agreement with Norton. And it’s obviously because no consent exists in this scenario.

If Norton’s voluntary actions are immoral, then what would not be immoral? We must be clear that the only just thing for Norton to do is to help Twain get out of the well as soon as possible. It will do no good for people to complain and whine that Norton is not committing a crime if he doesn’t help Twain, that Norton is under no obligation to do anything at all, and so on. We should not tolerate such anti-social twaddle. It may or may not inherently be a crime for Norton to not help Twain, but that has little relevance to the issue that Norton’s refusal to help is unethical, regardless of whether it should be punished or not.

The analogy should, I hope, be at least somewhat obvious at this point. I am using this as an analogy to all hierarchical work contracts, and since we live under capitalism, the capitalist kind specifically. We exist under a society where a number of pre-existing conditions prevail, caused by the State and, more recently, capitalism. The commons has been appropriated for centuries, creating lower classes which were then attracted to the high demand for workers in the new capitalist order. This created an ever-growing mass of population which could not sustain its own existence, and thus was wholly dependent on selling its labour to the existing ownership class. This in turn accelerated the corporate accumulation of surplus (profits), accelerated inequality, and, coupled with the extermination of the natives and the freed slaves, created the pre-existing conditions that we know today.

The upshot of all this is that the capitalist system we know is an inherently classist system, with a class of rich business owners at the top, controlling the means of production and how they are used, and a class of wage workers at the bottom. The actors may trade places, but the conditions remain. To the person who did not have access to opportunities due to his starting conditions, the economic system is the equivalent of a well.

Sometimes the Nortons of this world do give some Twain a pull upwards. Indeed, without this possibility, there would be a great deal more rebellion against capitalism than there is today. It is the prospect (however tenuous) of one day being on top that keeps people playing. But that being said, there can be no doubt that there’s no other viable alternative for the vast majority of us but to play the game.

We have to distinguish between two kinds of consent in this case: consent to the capitalist system as a whole versus consent to a specific job within that system. Certainly one cannot presume any sort of consent to the capitalist system, as no viable alternative exists (“go live somewhere else” is no argument when moving on this scale is tremendously expensive, not to mention most often made impossible by immigration restrictions, and the fact that there’s no society with a good standard of living that offers the choice). Depending on one’s status, one may or may not be able to choose a specific job: most people can’t.

Likewise, we are all subject to the democratic system, and thus we can ask whether the individual consents to democracy as a whole, which we have already discussed. But when a person votes, we can also ask whether that voting represents some form of consent, for instance consent to a specific party ruling over them. Lysander Spooner famously argued against this notion (paragraph break mine):

The consent, therefore, that has been given, whether by individuals, or by the States, has been, at most, only a consent for the time being; not an engagement for the future. In truth, in the case of individuals, their actual voting is not to be taken as proof of consent, even for the time being. On the contrary, it is to be considered that, without his consent having ever been asked, a man finds himself environed by a government that he cannot resist; a government that forces him to pay money, render service, and forego the exercise of many of his natural rights, under peril of weighty punishments. He sees, too, that other men practise this tyranny over him by the use of the ballot. He sees further that, if he will but use the ballot himself, he has some chance of relieving himself from this tyranny of others, by subjecting them to his own. In short, be finds himself, without his consent, so situated that, if he use the ballot, he may become a master; if he does not use it, he must become a slave. And he has no other alternative than these two. In self-defence, he attempts the former.

His case is analogous to that of a man who has been forced into battle, where he must either kill others, or be killed himself. Because, to save his own life in battle, a man attempts to take the lives of his opponents, it is not to be inferred that the battle is one of his own choosing. Neither in contests with the ballot – which is a mere substitute for a bullet – because, as his only chance of self-preservation, a man uses a ballot, is it to be inferred that the contest is one into which he voluntarily entered; that he voluntarily set up all his own natural rights, as a stake against those of others, to be lost or won by the mere power of numbers. On the contrary, it is to be considered that, in an exigency, into which he had been forced by others, and in which no other means of self-defence offered, he, as a matter of necessity, used the only one that was left to him.

When discussing issues related to our actions within hierarchies, such as voting, working, being subject to laws and workplace rules, propertarian laws, and so on, our opponents inevitably bring up the concepts of “voluntary” and “consent.” In order to properly understand these issues, we must therefore consider the concepts of what is “voluntary” and what is “consent.”

It is often believed by the proponents of this or that hierarchy that they are based on consent, they are voluntary, and that this assumed fact wipes out any further objections. This, in their opinion, is the ultimate freedom, and therefore it does not matter what the results are; as long as we all consent to being exploited physically, mentally and financially, it’s not exploitation at all, just a different form of freedom.

There are two ways to answer this. One is to point out that the consensual or voluntary nature of a hierarchy does not justify its existence, that hierarchies are undesirable regardless of consent and that they are great barriers to general freedom and equality. The other is to point out that these hierarchies are not really consensual or voluntary at all in the first place, by showing how they fail to fulfill some fundamental property of a consensual system. I have done the former in a previous entry; now, I intend to discuss the latter.

In his excellent entry on the topic of consent (which I have linked in the past as one of the best blog entries I’ve ever read), Charles Johnson proposes something he calls the Opt-Out Principle:

If Norton wants to place Twain’s person or property under a condition C, then Twain’s performing an action A expresses consent to C only if there is some alternative action B, which Twain could have performed, which would have counted as refusing consent to C, and which Twain can reasonably expect Norton to accept as a decisive reason not to place Twain’s person or property under C.

This may be a little complicated, but basically says that in order for there to be consent, there must be not only an alternative, but the alternative must be recognized by the other party as a signal to desist.

One example that can illustrate this is consent to the State (and by extension, the laws, the justice system, taxation, wars, and so on and so forth). Statists may argue, as it has traditionally been argued, that the State is not immoral because its subjects give their consent, either by voting, paying taxes, obeying the laws, using the roads, or whatever other signal the statist believes is a valid form of consent.

But this is invalid, since there is no signal that the State recognizes as a signal to desist. Nothing you do will make the State stop imposing its power on you. Whether you vote or not, pay taxes or not, obey the laws or not, use the roads or not, the State will always try to punish you for disobeying it. Since there is no credible signal to desist, there therefore cannot be any consent. Consent can only exist in the presence of a choice between two possibilities, otherwise we’re not talking about choice at all, but rather about obedience, loyalty, or some such.

Rad Geek explains the situation very clearly:

Again, I take this principle to be a necessary condition for a performance to count as expressing consent; just as the lack of a possible refusal makes the issue one of obligation rather than consent, if Twain performs an expressive act without any expectation that there is some expression of refusal that Norton would consider himself bound to respect, then the issue is no longer one of consent, but rather of unilateral command. And again, it hardly matters what Twain’s personal feelings about the command may be. Maybe he’s into that kind of thing. But whatever he is doing, he is not succeeding at doing anything that would count as expressing consent. You can’t consent if you’re never asked, and if there really is nothing that Norton would count as a binding refusal, then Twain has never even been asked, in any meaningful way.

Before explaining this one, Charles Johnson give us another proviso, which can be stated this way: any seeming expression of consent, if given under a standing threat of force against refusers, is given under duress, and cannot be treated as a genuine expression of consent.

I think this is pretty self-explanatory. If someone’s holding a gun to your head and demanding that you agree to something, your agreement is not consent. You’re probably doing it because you don’t want to get shot, not because you actually consent to it, and there’s really no way for anyone to figure out if you’re saying “yes” out of fear or consent. The same applies to the State.

In fact, this proviso is similar to the first one. In the first, we point out that consent can only exist where an alternative exists, and that the threat of force confirms the actual lack of alternatives. In this one, we’re addressing the existence of the threat itself as making it impossible to distinguish obedience from consent, which is more of an epistemic issue.

… is a new thing. Apparently Anarchism is only about fifty years old. Who’d have thought?

Domestic Terrorists

Anarchists

• believe every organization or government will eventually be corrupted by power
• evolved from left wing or communist groups of the 60s and 70s
• focus on specific issues that represent corruption of power
• are often responsible for violent protests against:
– military intervention
– world trade and banking
– globalization
– “hate” groups

Oh, and happy mass murderers day everyone! Where we celebrate those mass murderers that haven’t been caught yet because they wore the right uniform. And they say *we’re* the terrorists…

Man has powers, attributes, capacities; they are given him by Nature that he may live, learn, and love: he does not own them, but has only the use of them; and he can make no use of them that does not harmonize with Nature’s laws. If he had absolute mastery over his faculties, he could avoid hunger and cold; he could eat unstintedly, and walk through fire; he could move mountains, walk a hundred leagues in a minute, cure without medicines and by the sole force of his will, and could make himself immortal. He could say, “I wish to produce,” and his tasks would be finished with the words; he could say. “I wish to know,” and he would know; “I love,” and he would enjoy. What then? Man is not master of himself, but may be of his surroundings. Let him use the wealth of Nature, since he can live only by its use; but let him abandon his pretensions to the title of proprietor, and remember that he is called so only metaphorically.

What is Property?, chapter 2.

If people will voluntarily sign contracts which say you can’t sue the corporation for rape, then does that make the rape just?

In 2005, Jamie Leigh Jones was gang-raped by her Halliburton/KBR co-workers while working in Iraq and locked in a shipping container for over a day to prevent her from reporting her attack. The rape occurred outside of U.S. criminal jurisdiction, but to add serious insult to serious injury she was not allowed to sue KBR because her employment contract said that sexual assault allegations would only be heard in private arbitration–a process that overwhelmingly favors corporations.

Voluntaryists, it’s time for you to wake up. You’ve been indoctrinated and sold a false bill of goods. Stop being subjectivists and come back to reality, where good and evil do not depend on whether people sign on it or not.

Rape is unethical, regardless of what any piece of paper says. That is a fact. Stop believing pieces of paper trump facts.

From The Onion, in the issue where China took over the Onion:

WASHINGTON—In a display of weakness unbecoming a head of state, President Barack Obama concluded remarks to his nation Tuesday by asking a pretend man who lives in the clouds to watch over and guide the United States.

“Thank you, and may God bless America,” said the clearly insecure president, who, by seeking the aid of an imaginary being who is neither his ancestor nor someone with whom he shares a tangible harmonious relationship, freely admitted that he has little faith in himself and his inept team of jester advisers.

Even more incomprehensible, sources said, is that hundreds of millions of Americans openly worship the all-knowing invisible man—who apparently observes the world’s events from atop his perch in outer space—without fear of mockery, shame, or violent government reprisal.

According to sources, citizens of the U.S. depend on the fanciful grandfather of magic to take care of everything for them, from aiding their tiny overseas army, to curing their illnesses, to helping their sports teams achieve victory, to providing little Jimmy McDonalds with his silly toys.

Mindless spirituality reportedly inhibits progress and remains a bulwark against government rule.

I rarely talk about anything but moral principles and general systemic issues on this blog. However, I do get the occasional question that forces me to think about more pragmatic concerns, the kind of thing that an ordinary interested person might ask. One that I got recently is: “how would Anarchism be beneficial?”

There is an easy way to answer such a question, and that is to turn it around to the asker. What could YOU do in an egalitarian society that you can’t do today? If you were free from mores and laws, what sort of life would you want to lead, what sort of relationships would you want to have? If all jobs were paid relatively equally and you as a worker had decision-making power over your own working conditions, what sort of work would you want to do?

If one wants to know what effect Anarchism would have on society as a whole, the question becomes rather vast. For one, Anarchism prescribes processes, not outcomes, and as such describing an Anarchist society runs directly counter to our intents and purposes. One cannot describe the institutions that would inhabit it, or the kinds of work organizations that would exist, or the specific political entities that would emerge. One can, however, describe the goals of such a society.

Anarchists aim to eliminate hierarchies, that is to say, structures of domination and obedience. Anarchists aim to establish an egalitarian society, where every individual has total decision-making power over his own life, and as much decision-making power over society as everyone else in that society.

All other aims are corollaries of this basic principle. All benefits accrue from this basic principle. Any deviation from this principle is counter to the aims of Anarchism, and therefore counter to individual freedom and social equality.

The fundamental sustenance of hierarchies is indoctrination. It should therefore be obvious why Anarchists attack the mass media, schooling, government propaganda, and other sources of indoctrination. The role of indoctrination is to divorce the individual from his own innate values, compassion and happiness, in order to channel his energies towards devotion (or at least grudging obedience) to some hierarchy. Reclaiming those energies is the first benefit of becoming an Anarchist; reclaiming one’s true self takes a lot more time, but is also far more profoundly beneficial.

The alternative to hierarchical institutions is the concept of institutions based on mutual aid. Such institutions, which have existed for centuries, no longer exist in our societies. Voluntary institutions have all but disintegrated, and communities ceased to exist long before that. What we can call society in the strict sense, therefore, does not exist, and the individual is railroaded into either accepting a form of subservience to the existing power-based institutions or to find that his life is without social meaning.

While the individual is born good, he necessarily molds his sense of self into the framework provided by his community or society. One of the roles of society is to provide meaning and purpose to the individual’s life. A society which, in its very organization, prevents or hinders the formation of meaning and purpose will engender dysfunctional relationships, general vulnerability to ideologues and tyrants, high levels of suicide, high levels of fanatic religiosity, and so on. At a psychological level, it will produce atomism, constant self-doubt, and an anxiety about the freedom that one does possess.

Anarchists aim to eliminate hierarchies, which dictate their subjects’ way of life and destroys that of others. Our objective is to open the door to freed individuals to express their creativity fully in deciding how they want to live and cooperate with others to achieve that goal.

Being as we live in a capital-democratic system, it is the deconstruction of democracy and the deconstruction of capitalism that provide this door-opening. Starting from the premise that representative democracy claims to provide the means for people to govern themselves, but blatantly doesn’t, we want to destroy hierarchies of power and actually put the power in the individual’s hands to decide his destiny. Starting from the premise that capitalism lures people with the possibility of being prosperous, but is in fact a system of domination, we want to give everyone the possibility of being prosperous through an egalitarian labor-driven economy.

There are many other areas which we could look at, such as justice, schools, jails, the media, and so on. But the same general principle applies: hierarchies can be destroyed, and their principles deconstructed and reconstructed, for the benefit of all. The framework of capital-democracy, which railroads people into submission, can be abolished and replaced with mutual aid, cooperation of people as equals, as associates, leading to the kind of society where the individual’s desire to improve his own condition is fully aligned with the good of the society as a whole.

The comic strip slash photography experiment A Softer World is one of the cartoons I read every day. Here are a few Anarchist-related strips from A Softer World (click image for bigger version).

Those of you who don’t know about Kinsella’s crusade against libsocs may not know who he is. Stephen Kinsella is a lawyer, proponent of Austrian economics, member of the board of the Center For a Stateless Society, cheerleader for capitalistic greed, and a ridiculous little man. Here is a recent quote he bleated on Block’s Corollary:

People often talk about “the employment contract,” without knowing what they are talking about. There usually is no “employment contract” other than the obligation to pay money (salary) for services rendered/time put in. They often speak in a confused way about how it’s “fraud” if the boss starts harassing someone hired for a different purpose. This is all the result of confusion about the nature of fraud, property rights, the non-aggression principle, and contract.

…

The point for our purposes is that there is nothing wrong with the boss in effect offering a hybrid job to a woman: since employment is at will, and she can be fired at any time for any reason, he can fire her and one second later, offer her a job back, but only if she agrees to the occasionally leer or fanny pat or even sex. If she refuses then, or later, to the sexual stuff, then he can terminate her, and this does not violate her rights. But if he gropers her after she has withdrawn consent, it’s battery, aggression.

…

In sum: no one is entitled to a job; employment is at-will: you can quit any time, or be fired any time. So you are not entitled to a job offer, so a conditional one does not violate your rights: I offer you a job IF you will consent to my lechery, fondling, whatever. The candidate can accept or turn it down. Note that this is true even AFTER they start work for you, usually–since employment is at-will. So you can just fire her one second, and re-offer the job, with strings, the next second. Etc.

Kinsella has always been, and remains, a ridiculous little man. He probably has sexual issues as well.

This series of fiction novels by Ursula Le Coin is another interesting exploration of a truly alien society and way of thinking, based on the writings of obscure economist Ludwig Von Miser. The Misers exist in the anarchist Permanent Free Zone universe.

1. The Misers Claim Planet Argela-4

In this first novel of the series, we see the Misers establish themselves on a planet called Argela-4, then making a property claim on the whole planet and renaming it Ancapistan. Sociologists and diplomats from the Permanent Free Zone visit the planet, and are puzzled at the ideology of the Misers, who believe that they can own a whole planet of which they can only use or occupy a tiny fraction at a time.

A good introduction to the Miser society and ideology, which is very selfish, underhanded (Misers are very cruel to each other, going so far as exploiting each other with price manipulations and charging interest on loans) and xenophobic. Their interactions are dominated by the desire for economic conquest, including the use of money and reputation to get laws passed in their favour by the king, and the routine bribing of courts. Despite their obvious flaws, the Misers are shown to have their good sides, such as an inordinate fondness for operas.

PFZ courts declare the Misers’ property claim to be incoherent and invalid, and the Misers respond by breaking off from PFZ jurisdiction and refusing to uphold Common Law, preferring their own arbitrary rules. Diplomacy winds down and a period of isolationism begins.

2. The Misers Blow Up a Fountain

A business owned by a Miser, Stephan Rothbard III, is contracted to build a fountain on planet Walden. After it has become clear that no one understands what the shape of the fountain is a metaphor for, Rothbard III becomes enraged, goes on a 20-page rant about the primacy of existence over consciousness, and then blows up the fountain.

Rothbard III is found guilty of unauthorized destruction of social assets and endangering people’s lives. His business is kicked out of Walden and he is ordered to pay a heavy fine to Walden society. Rothbard III refuses to pay and escapes Walden, swearing revenge in a 32-page speech against all socialists for refusing to admit his genius and not letting him boss over others. An extraordinary PFZ grand jury officially declares Rothbard III an outlaw.

3. The Misers Against the Space Hippies

A colony of nomadic Space Hippies settles on the opposite side of planet Ancapistan. The Misers are outraged and claim that their property is being infringed, but are unable to find the Hippies. When a lone trading party from the Inner Rim comes to barter with the Hippies, the Misers are hot on their heels with laser rifles. Fighting soon turns to disaster for the Space Hippies and their new allies, and they must escape nothing less than genocide.

4. The Misers Sell Themselves into Slavery

After the PFZ’s Land Distribution Bureau tightens the noose on the Misers for their invalid property claims by sending a strongly-worded memo, the Misers sell themselves as slaves to the Mendelians, a society where people believe in owning bodies. This is all part of a Miser plan to have themselves classified as non-sentient and thus protected by PFZ law as part of the Ancapistan ecosystem. As the PFZ bureaucracy is mainly composed of people too incompetent to do any other job but pushing paper, it charters two adventurers, diplomat Voltarine and lawyer Lysander, to convince the Mendelians that their policy is unwise before the Misers can do irreparable damage to Ancapistan’s natural resources as the Mendelians’ new slave-exploiters.

During this whole process, the Misers also deny the nature of the Space Hippie Genocide that they perpetrated in the last book, bizarrely calling it “self-defense.”

Although Voltarine and Lysander are familiar characters to Le Coin fans, this is their first adventure in the Miser series, and they are amongst the main characters in all subsequent books.

5. The Misers and the Doomsday Cult

Five years after the previous book, a new group has emerged on the isolated planet Zapata. Its members predict the imminent collapse of the PFZ due to internal divergence of interests and lack of economic information. They become a doomsday cult which uses what they call “counter-counter-economics”: claiming an area by force and barring anyone else from using it, by murder if necessary. Their doctrine of total control over nature and other people’s actions awakens the animal within and turns reasonable people into brutes. They also have a strange fetishism for using gold as currency.

Voltarine and Lysander are commissioned by the shadowy Septapartite Organization for the Valuation of Internal and External Threats (S.O.V.I.E.T.) to get to the bottom of this doomsday cult, and they find out that the Misers are behind it all, trying to stir up a propertarian revolution against the socialist iron rule of the PFZ and its monetary bureaucracy. In order to get the inside scoop about the cult, they have to befriend a young girl called Margaret, who is frightened to betray the cult because they made her sign a billion year contract.

6. The Misers Declare War

The king of the Misers dies in a suspicious industrial accident. Having greatly risen in reputation on the basis of his anti-socialist rhetoric, Stephan Rothbard III, the man who was declared an outlaw by the PFZ in “The Misers Blow Up a Fountain,” is crowned the new king. Hot on the heels of an official report by the S.O.V.I.E.T. which declared Miser society oppressive and a possible target for “liberation,” King Rothbard III pre-emptively declares war on the PFZ.

Still investigating Miser wrongdoings from the previous book, Voltarine and Lysander accidentally stumble upon the invasion force, but are captured by the battleship HMS Agora before they can report it. They are prisoners of an invasion fleet which aims to lay waste to the Outer Rim and strong-arm the PFZ into conceding their property claim. We learn that the Misers consider all prisoners to have “surrendered their rights,” and so Voltarine and Lysander become temporary slaves to Miserian commander Albert Bastiat and, after dodging an attempted rape, are put to work on the bilge deck. Can they escape and get to the communications room in time to warn Galactic Defense Command of the imminent threat?

Both this and the last book change the general tone of the series from a slower-paced sociological study to a nail-biting thriller, but the depth of ideas is still there.

7. The Misers: Spy and Counter-Spies

In the final work of the series, the PFZ’s military fleet, after defeating the Miser fleet, has been blockading Ancapistan for two years and is now preparing to deploy a Perpetual Winter Screen to drown the Misers in an eternal ten feet of snow and crash their burgeoning refrigerator industry. At the same time, Miser spy Dagny Reardon finishes a three-year mission to find the blueprint of a revolutionary new space missile, the Galt-X, which is virtually invulnerable to defensive lasers, said blueprint having been left behind during the massive emigration of the Misesian State Project. We follow her as she uncovers the blueprint and devises a way to break through the blockade. We then follow the adventures of Voltarine and Lysander as they play spy in turn and try to sabotage the Galt-X manufacturing attempts before they come to fruition and threaten the whole fleet.

Here we really get a full sense of the Misesian insanity in the head of spy Dagny Reardon. She believes in all sorts of outdated 21st century economics nonsense like offer and demand curves, man as “purely selfish being,” universal scarcity, and so on. It’s really quite fascinating. While we are not told what happens after the Galt-X plans are confounded, it is probable that the Misers were defeated and relegated to the dustbin of history. And that is as it should be, in the opinion of this reviewer.

It is common knowledge amongst Anarchists that most of the economic principles we hold as fundamental are worthless and dangerous myths (scarcity, offer and demand, man as homo economicus, the GDP as accurate measure of “the economy,” trade balances, the necessity of government, the “invisible hand,” usury- including profit- as reward, and so on). However, the Tragedy of the Commons argument is one myth that I have yet to see exploded, until now. Hot on the heels of our recent Nobel Prize winner, Ian Angus is the one who blows it all up.

Given the subsequent influence of Hardin’s essay, it’s shocking to realize that he provided no evidence at all to support his sweeping conclusions. He claimed that the “tragedy” was inevitable — but he didn’t show that it had happened even once.

Hardin simply ignored what actually happens in a real commons: self-regulation by the communities involved. One such process was described years earlier in Friedrich Engels’ account of the “mark,” the form taken by commons-based communities in parts of pre-capitalist Germany:

[T]he use of arable and meadowlands was under the supervision and direction of the community. . . .

Just as the share of each member in so much of the mark as was distributed was of equal size, so was his share also in the use of the “common mark.” The nature of this use was determined by the members of the community as a whole. . . .

At fixed times and, if necessary, more frequently, they met in the open air to discuss the affairs of the mark and to sit in judgment upon breaches of regulations and disputes concerning the mark. (Engels 1892)

Historians and other scholars have broadly confirmed Engels’ description of communal management of shared resources. A summary of recent research concludes:

[W]hat existed in fact was not a “tragedy of the commons” but rather a triumph: that for hundreds of years — and perhaps thousands, although written records do not exist to prove the longer era — land was managed successfully by communities. (Cox 1985: 60)

Goldman Sachs advisor Brian Griffiths says: “We have to tolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity and opportunity for all.”

Reference

The maxim “pride goes before the fall” (which is actually from the Bible, but says “pride goes before destruction”) illustrates that the idea that the arrogance of pride is easily seen as self-destructive. Yet nowadays this maxim doesn’t seem to be very much taken to heart. We talk of pride in one’s country, in one’s family, in one’s accomplishments, as being a healthy, laudable sort of expression.

And yet, it should be obvious, to anyone who has the least experience in the ways people trick each other, that the best known way for criminals and charlatans to escape punishment is to incite their followers to always be positive and never look at the negative, to always speak of nice things and never criticize. In that way, they indoctrinate people into accepting the value of non-confront.

This applies all the more to politics. We are constantly told “my country right or wrong,” that we cannot question war, that we cannot question the institutions we live under, that we depend on them for our national strength, that to dare to question our way of life is tantamount to wishing our own society’s destruction. All of these points are constantly hammered into us by the rhetoric of politicians, their media lackeys, and their combined marginalization of alternative viewpoints.

This swelling of willful ignorance, which is expressed as mindless pride, has two main consequences, the first being to provide codewords that divert attention from the injustice and exploitation which permeates the system being praised, and the second being to nullify any possible counter-power already existing in the targeted group or society.

The concept of counter-power is one that I’ve never heard discussed before, but it’s an interesting one. That is to say, if there is power, then there must also be counter-power. If hierarchical societies which survive have processes which concentrate power, then egalitarian societies which survive must have processes which go counter to the accumulation of power. If you think about it, it’s pretty obvious.

I think the main reason why we are not aware of this concept is because, in our modern capital-democratic societies, there is no counter-power. There is basically nothing that keeps hierarchies in check in our culture or religion or mores. In the United States, there persists a vaguely individualistic belief in natural rights, but this belief is not grounded in anything concrete except the nationalistic constructs, and therefore it is very easily wiped out by pride, which relies precisely on its manipulation of nationalistic constructs.

Post-WW2, one important counter-power was the desire to prevent future nazi-like uses of political power. But this proved to be relatively ineffective, since it is easily evaded by not using what people recognize as nazi trappings (like emotional speeches, grandiose parades or sterile, cold architecture). As long as you can escape being labeled a nazi by people’s stereotypical ideas of what the word means, you are free to use political power in a nazi-like way.

Pride makes us lose the desire to confront, and this willful ignorance makes us retreat into self-congratulation. Making ourselves believe that we, or our group, are great prevents us from confronting anything bad about ourselves, or our group.

This impulse towards self-congratulation extends itself all the way through our worldview, into some of our most profound beliefs about reality. For instance, look at the popular view of evolution. We believe that man is the pinnacle, the end point of evolution, the superior being that transcends animal nature, and that “the animals” represent some kind of linear progression towards man, that they are all flawed versions of the ideal that is man. Man, in this view, dominates “the animals” by virtue of his superior faculties, intellect, strength, and so on. The truth (that man’s cruelty is not limited by his instincts, and thus let to run wild) is too inconvenient to examine.

Our view of social organization is no less arrogant. We believe that our Western brand of capital-democracy, with its strict hierarchies and built-in inequality, is the pinnacle of organization in the history of the world. All other forms of organization are grunting, primitive “tribalism” or sketchy versions of capital-democracy that need to be corrected and prodded along the linear progression from the base anarchy of the state of nature to the glorious order we enjoy in the West. All must be “liberated” so they can enjoy the benefits of our glorious order.

Ironically, the modern nation-state is no less “tribalist” than the tribes of the “primitives” that we exterminate or disdain, merely on a larger scale. The belief in the superiority of “citizens,” and the belief in “immigration policy,” is predicated mainly on the basis of a national reproductive group, which is tribalist. The foreign policy belief that other “races” are inferior and therefore can be murdered with impunity is a tribalist belief.

We are kept in ignorance of the world and its history by our stultifying schooling system and corporate mass media. One therefore is necessarily content with what one has to live with, and accepts the empty rhetoric of politicians. There’s no framework for people to evaluate how the rhetoric measures up to the existing knowledge about what has existed and what is possible in this world.

Placing claims about what is possible and what is desirable within a larger context should, in a rational society, be the role of anthropologists, but anthropologists are too concerned with keeping their little fiefdom protected from attacks by the dominant hierarchies to speak up against the lies. This role is therefore reserved to intellectual rebels like David Graeber, who run extra risks because of it (Graeber was fired from his associate professor post in a controversy in 2007).

Kept in an intellectual vacuum, it should therefore be no surprise that people have no perspective on any issue. There is no past or future, only the perpetual present.

Unlike Barrack Obama, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for being a warmonger (like most winners of the Nobel Peace Prize), there’s one winner who actually won for a good cause. Infoshop reports that Elinor Ostrom, co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics, won for her work in the analysis of commons and how they flourish… something which, until recently, was considered an ironclad impossibility by the capitalist Establishment (as anyone who knows about the very badly named “tragedy of the commons” can testify).

Central to anarchist theory is the idea that parties with disputes will agree to third party mediation or arbitration of those disputes. One of the inanities of government is that any dispute between the government and private persons is adjudicated by the government itself. The evolution of common law went far beyond the ad hoc choice of an arbiter to arrangements that let parties know in advance how disagreements would be resolved. Disputes are inevitable: dispute resolution methods are necessary, and do evolve.

On the Anarchist Writers blog, Iain McKay reflects on the fact that the term “Marxo-capitalists” might be a better term for the “anarcho”-capitalists than anything else, since they follow the same political tactics than the Marxists did…

Finally, I must note that Rothbard was at pains to argue for a Libertarian political party. So perhaps his ideology would be better termed “Marxo-capitalism”? After all, Rothbard urged its followers to organise into a political party and utilise “political action” to seize the state which would, in turn, dissolve into “anarchy”. As he put it: “I see no other conceivable strategy for the achievement of liberty than political action.” (Konkin on Libertarian Strategy)

Where have we heard that before? Who mocked anarchists like Proudhon and Bakunin for refusing to take part in “political action” and who suggested that by this action the state could be seized, reformed and finally disappear? Why, Marx and Engels! Given this, it would be false to state that “anarcho”-capitalism keeps the politics of individualist anarchism but rejects its economics. Rather, it keeps the politics of Marxism but rejects its economics.

Now, will “Marxo-capitalism” take off as the correct name for “anarcho”-capitalism? Or should we stick with anarcho-statism?

The capitalist wannabe-Block Corollary-killers just keep lining up. This time it’s Alex Peak, from Last Free Voice, who argues that I am a “vulgar socialist” and argues that the property of the body trumps other forms of property… somehow.

The first technical point he makes is also the only point I really need to quote:

If I have a right to justly-acquired scarce property that I have either homesteaded myself or that I have acquired through voluntary trade from someone else who has justly-acquired it, it can only be the case that I have this right if and because I justly own my own body and the fruits of my labour.

And herein lies the problem: this claim is logically impossible to validate. In order to validate it, Peak would have to prove that all other means to justly-acquire property (or in my case, possession, since I do not believe in property at all) are invalid. Otherwise he could not make the claim that self-ownership (which is a meaningless and incoherent concept) is the only possible justification.

His argument is the same as the Creationists who claim that, by disproving Neo-Darwinism, they have proven that Christian Creationism is the sole valid position on the origins and/or diversity of life. The Creationist still has to disprove the multitude of other ideologies regarding the origins and/or diversity of life. In fact, Peak believes that proving or disproving anything is impossible, as testifies this quote from one of his subsequent comments:

I can neither “prove” nor “disprove” anything, for I do not believe that “proof” exists.

Therefore he has no means whatsoever to disprove all the alternatives to his position, and his most vital and fundamental argument crumbles, making his whole attack incoherent. There are so many theories of what it means to justly-acquire something that we’d be here until we both die, anyway.

I’d say he has proven nothing at all, but that would be redundant.

The reason my property ownership cannot justify my murder of you is that our mutual self-ownership is a natural prerequisite to either of us owning any external property in the first place. To murder you, even if the murder takes place on my property, I must believe that self-ownership is some sort of fiction, and if I do believe it is some sort of fiction, it stands to reason that I cannot accurately be described as someone who believes in any property rights whatsoever.

This is the sort of muddled account that capitalists give to try to prove (or not prove, in this case) that the kind of property in “self-ownership” somehow has primacy over other kinds of property. In order for their argument to make sense, they have to cleave property into two different concepts. It’s their only way to escape the moral consequences of property.

Not only does the distinction make absolutely no sense, since in both cases property rules are applied in the same way, but it also leads to conclusions that go counter to the capitalist worldview. For instance, a trespasser’s body must be a superior form of property to that of the land, therefore the land owner should not be allowed to do anything to a trespasser’s body. This is not capitalist property any more: we’re gone into never-never land. And if trespassers cannot be stopped, then there is no such thing as property (that is to say, if anyone can exert control over one’s property, then it is no longer one’s property), and the argument self-destructs.

Rather, I am of the hope that this deviation will be short-lived. For clarity, I do not encourage that anyone treat Mr. Tremblay too hostilely, for such reactionary tendencies are just as likely to lead a libertarian to vulgar libertarianism as they have lead Mr. Tremblay toward vulgar socialism.

So he has no qualms resorting to childish insults against me on his very own entry, for all to see. Unlike him, I will not resort to such low-handed tactics.

Besides, all they do is highlight his necessary lack of arguments.

It appears to me that reason indicates that a business owner cannot justly claim ownership over her firm if she does not respect the property rights of the self-owners with whom she interacts. But likewise, it appears to me that reason indicates that if a person has a right to not be pinched, she must naturally have a property right in the scarce matter that constitutes her physical body. If this is the case, then it would stand to reason that she also owns the product of her labour, for one’s labour is naturally and indubitably an extension of one’s self.

This is a bizarre set of deductions, since Peak seems to assume people own the products of their own labour, which is a very anti-propertarian premise to make. In the capitalist system of property, the worker does not own the products of his labour, since the owner has full right of usury, including on profits. To take the right of usury away is to talk about something less than property: at least, something which does not exist today, and has no connection to what we call property.

That being said, what we observe here is nothing more but the extension of the dichotomy Peak set up earlier. There is no reason at all to believe that the body (or its conceptual extensions) has any sort of primacy over the business owner’s property, and that said owner must “respect the property rights of the self-owners [to their own bodies],” unless we posit the dichotomy in question. But, as I said before, not only is this a pure ad hoc rationalization, but it is also self-contradictory.

Let all libertarians, left and “right,” unite, rather than allowing our vulgar variants divide us.

More insults painting me as the bad guy, and him as the good guy (so much for “unity,” if you’re the wrong kind of libertarian according to Peak). How quaint. I am not trying to “divide” anyone, but merely to call a spade a spade (that private claims of property are as tyrannical as public claims of property). For someone so intent on respecting logic, one should expect Peak to approve of this goal. Yet he persists in denying the logical consequences of capitalist property theory, on a rather flimsy basis.

I’d rather keep telling the truth and perhaps dividing some people (by make them aware of the true nature of other people’s ideology) than to “unite” people by feeding them lies.