The Coercive Nature of Left-Libertarianism?

[RadioRaheem84]

http://mises.org/daily/1132

Filled with presuppositions! Lets give it a crack...


Let's say the workers had the privilege of owning Enron. Giddy syndicalists seem to view ownership of business concerns as always and everywhere a good thing. But ownership also implies riskand liability, liability for debts and lawsuits. After Enron collapsed into a pile of incomprehensible derivatives, how many workers there wished they co-owned Enron? Under current law, employers are responsible for the torts and contract breaches of employees. How many workers would want to bear that risk?



[T]hat factory was only there in the first place because some greedy capitalist thought he could make a profit selling widgets, and he invested capital he derived from prior savings. How about starting new businesses? How many workers have the capital to contribute? How many would risk that capital even if they had it, on a business "run democratically by the workers"?

On against Division of Labor:

We won't have accountants, doctors, carpenters, etc. Rather, (former) carpenters will take their turn at brain surgery; (former) lawyers will build skyscrapers; airplanes will be driven by (former) dental hygienists and so on. Everyone will take turns. There will be plenty of opportunities to work at a mortuary as well.

Labor Theory of Value:

According to this theory, all the value of a business is contributed by the "workers". That worker we call the owner, apparently contributes nothing. Only someone who never owned a business could believe this preposterous theory. Since the owner contributed nothing to the business, why did the workers show up there in the first place?


Mass production:


....each worker should spend an inordinate amount of time placing his or her own personal and artistic stamp on those widgets? (How do you do that with a hammer?) ....such workers would then live in miserable poverty because of their drastically reduced productivity.

[Robocommie]

"Hah, you know Gaius Lucius, I hear those Christians call everyone brother or sister!"
"Germanicus is that true? Even their wives and husbands? That's INCEST!"
"It's true! And they also claim to eat the body of a man at every ceremony!"
"Cannibalism AND incest. We must put down this cult!"

Etc, etc. Easier to distort ideas to support your own bullshit inclinations than actually try and understand. For shame, asshole Austrian Schoolers.

However, if any of you comrades could take the time to answer these things individually with a counter-argument, I know it would be enlightening, both for myself and for all others who visit this forum who are still working on fully understanding Marxism.

[syndicat]

The coercion that the author objects to is the worker seizure of industries with the backing of armed force in the Spanish revolution. What he fails to mention is that capitalists every day depend on the readiness of the police and military to use armed force to defend their control over the world's productive property. The 4,000 fascists killed in Catalonia in the revolution can be compared to the 3,000 murdered in Chile to prevent a working class revolution by the fascsit military coup.

He mistakenly claims that syndicalism stands for a market socialism of cooperatives. He also mistakenly thinks syndicalism advocates simply what exists but run by workers. He says that Enron's problems wouldn't have gone away if it were owned by workers. But a libertarian socialist economy wouldn't have the capitalist scams that allowed an Enron to exist anyway.

He then claims that they will find themselves forced to do many of the things capitalists would due to market competition. On that point, he is right. But he is mistaken in supposing that the syndicalists advocate market socialism. There are other was for the population to arrange how to allocate resources in production than the market. Syndicalists advocate that the means of production should be owned in common by everyone, and that in regard to a large realm of collective goods and services, the community itself should decide what it wants and work this out with the workers organization. In other words, he doesn't understand what libertarian socialism is. (There isn't just one answer to how libertarian socialists would arrange the relationship between "demand" or desire by the population, or "consumers", and productive work by worker organizations.)

[mikelepore]

According to this theory, all the value of a business is contributed by the "workers". That worker we call the owner, apparently contributes nothing. Only someone who never owned a business could believe this preposterous theory. Since the owner contributed nothing to the business, why did the workers show up there in the first place?

This old question of whether the capitalist contributes productive work is an important question to discuss, because most people get this wrong.

Here's how I would explain it.

Consider several activities, and judge whether each activity contributes, either directly or indirectly, to producing goods or services.

How about building a ship? Yes. How about manufacturing the cargo that gets loaded onto the ship. Yes. How about loading and unloading the ship? Yes. Navigating and steering the ship? Yes. Repairing the ship? Yes.

But how about this -- suppose I were to claim that I'M THE LEGAL OWNER OF THE OCEAN, and suppose that I have an armed force to back up my assertion. Under certain conditions, I would be willing to give others permission to put their ships on "my" ocean. Therefore, according to me and my friends, my granting of permission "makes all shipping possible." In doing this, am I performing a task that contribute either directly or indirectly to production? No! Since it's not genuinely necessary to have that restrictive ownership in the first place, therefore my conditional willingness to grant others permission isn't a productive act or a contribution of useful labor. Even if I were to put in thousands of hours at the office, my role would still be socially unnecessary.

That is exactly the role of capitalists. We seem to "need" their capital investments only because it's already a given, an institutional form, that nothing may be produced without their capital investments. That fact of private ownership is itself artificial, and therefore the owner's "long day at the office" is not productive.

Socialists have said it in a concise way since the mid-1800s, and I'll say it here again:

(1) Labor produces all social wealth.
(2) The workers are entitled to have all that they produce.

[Robocommie]

Interesting, and nicely explained Mike.

[Ovi]

We won't have accountants, doctors, carpenters, etc. Rather, (former) carpenters will take their turn at brain surgery; (former) lawyers will build skyscrapers; airplanes will be driven by (former) dental hygienists and so on. Everyone will take turns. There will be plenty of opportunities to work at a mortuary as well.This is a (very) dumb argument. I am against the division of labor as in each one doing a single thing for 8 hours every day of his life. It's boring and it breeds apathy. And it only exists because of coercion.
If right now I want to work on some theory I should be able to do it. If tomorrow I wish to help with building a house or harvesting corn, as long as my skills are sufficient and this work is necessary, there shouldn't be any reason why I couldn't do that.