A Question for Libertarians

[ChrisK]

Actually, this is a question for libertarians, objectivists, anarcho-capitalists and anyone else who supports the idea of "complete freedom so long as you do not harm others." I hear that a lot. I hear that a lot from libertarians who I know. They say "I don't care what you do so long as it isn't harming anyone else."

My question is, how do you reconcile that belief with a belief in the free market? I mean historically the free market has resulted in long hours in dangerous jobs that result in worker injuries and deaths, unsafe working conditions, covering up harmful side effects of pharmaceuticals, unsafe waste disposal that has poisoned drinking water, and numerous other things that harm people all in the name of increasing profit?

I am not asking this sarcastically (okay, maybe just a bit), but am seriously interested in what your reasoning is.

[Schumpeter]

Actually, this is a question for libertarians, objectivists, anarcho-capitalists and anyone else who supports the idea of "complete freedom so long as you do not harm others." I hear that a lot. I hear that a lot from libertarians who I know. They say "I don't care what you do so long as it isn't harming anyone else."

My question is, how do you reconcile that belief with a belief in the free market? I mean historically the free market has resulted in long hours in dangerous jobs that result in worker injuries and deaths, unsafe working conditions, covering up harmful side effects of pharmaceuticals, unsafe waste disposal that has poisoned drinking water, and numerous other things that harm people all in the name of increasing profit?

I am not asking this sarcastically (okay, maybe just a bit), but am seriously interested in what your reasoning is.

In regards to the workers it can be argued that they are self harming as they chose that profession.

You are right on the externalities point.

[Tenka]

For example, you have two choices: the black lung or your family starves. Select thy profession, O Worker.

[ChrisK]

In regards to the workers it can be argued that they are self harming as they chose that profession.

Really? What choice did they have? Workers don't choose dangerous work because they want to (I will make exceptions for extraordinary cases, but this is not the norm), they choose it because every other alternative is just as bad or worse.

[helot]

Really? What choice did they have? Workers don't choose dangerous work because they want to (I will make exceptions for extraordinary cases, but this is not the norm), they choose it because every other alternative is just as bad or worse.


The problem with this is that they tend to have an incredibly restrictive definition of coercion that only covers overt physical violence and then generally only if its contemporary.

In response to this specific post you made they'd just equate it to a naturally occuring restrictive choice through using some weird abstracted 'example' like the rugged individualist on their own in a forest whose choice is either potentially dangerous work (like hunting) or starvation.

[Axiomasher]

The problem with this is that they tend to have an incredibly restrictive definition of coercion that only covers overt physical violence and then generally only if its contemporary.

In response to this specific post you made they'd just equate it to a naturally occuring restrictive choice through using some weird abstracted 'example' like the rugged individualist on their own in a forest whose choice is either potentially dangerous work (like hunting) or starvation.

And the monopolisations of the owning class, in their ownership of land, resources the means of production and so on, is treated as axiomatically legitimate by such libertarians. It's instructive that when confronted with a hypothetical scenario in which a person seeking labour must provide their boss with a blowjob every morning to keep their employment or suffer starvation, they see no fault in such an arrangement - the worker is always 'free' to reject such arrangements, they argue, even if such rejection is starvation, it's not the employer's problem.

[Mrcapitalist]

In regards to the workers it can be argued that they are self harming as they chose that profession.

You are right on the externalities point.
To be honest somebody has to take that dangerous job.

[Baseball]

Really? What choice did they have? Workers don't choose dangerous work because they want to (I will make exceptions for extraordinary cases, but this is not the norm), they choose it because every other alternative is just as bad or worse.

But why would those choices in a socialist system be any better?
And please don't rely upon magic.

[Tattered]

I think society would be much more profoundly interesting and fulfilling if we chose jobs and career fields solely on what we wanted to do instead of how much income we would make.

[Ocean Seal]

And the monopolisations of the owning class, in their ownership of land, resources the means of production and so on, is treated as axiomatically legitimate by such libertarians. It's instructive that when confronted with a hypothetical scenario in which a person seeking labour must provide their boss with a blowjob every morning to keep their employment or suffer starvation, they see no fault in such an arrangement - the worker is always 'free' to reject such arrangements, they argue, even if such rejection is starvation, it's not the employer's problem.

This is quite bizarre is it is almost like stating that at a rigged casino those who have been given the worst cards have no right to demand a redraw.

Another thing I find bizarre is that they don't understand that there is very little difference between the coercive forces of physical violence and starvation.

[liberlict]

They see it as a choice between rule by bureaucracy or rule by capitalists. The worst that can happen in a laissez faire economy is you withdraw you labor and have nowhere to work. Communists economies historically result in dictatorships which are much less appealing.

I think if you could convince libertarians, or even liberals and conservatives, that socialism could produce an abundance of goods and universal access to produce there wouldn't be such objections.

[ChrisK]

But why would those choices in a socialist system be any better?
And please don't rely upon magic.

No magic. Since one of the key features of socialism is democracy in the workplace, the people who do the work would also be in control and would have a vested interest in making sure that all dangers are mitigated.

[ChrisK]

They see it as a choice between rule by bureaucracy or rule by capitalists. The worst that can happen in a laissez faire economy is you withdraw you labor and have nowhere to work. Communists economies historically result in dictatorships which are much less appealing.


You are right. The worst is starving to death because you have no place to work and no money to buy food. Not bad at all.
Communist economies? By definition communism is classless, stateless and global. When has that ever occured?



I think if you could convince libertarians, or even liberals and conservatives, that socialism could produce an abundance of goods and universal access to produce there wouldn't be such objections.

We already produce abundance. There is a reason for the term artificial scarcity. We have the technology to easily produce abundance no matter what system is in place.

[Axiomasher]

This is quite bizarre is it is almost like stating that at a rigged casino those who have been given the worst cards have no right to demand a redraw.

Another thing I find bizarre is that they don't understand that there is very little difference between the coercive forces of physical violence and starvation.

Your rigged casino analogy is excellent. The capitalist monopolisations of the earth, its resources and the productive forces built on them, is, of course, a supremely coercive force of itself, but they won't have it - they usually won't enter into any discussion which problematises private ownership.

[Jimmie Higgins]

But why would those choices in a socialist system be any better?
And please don't rely upon magic.The inexact, but snarky answer is: If mine CEOs were the ones who had to dig in the mines, don't you think the board would probably take safety equipment and safer methods more importantly? Wouldn't better respirators be considered a more important business expense than private jets and CEO bonuses?

In other words if the actual laborers organized the labor, then their own well-being would probably be more of a priority than it is under a system where labor is a replaceable commodity and the goal is to get as much output from labor with the least amount of cost.

Some individuals might just be hot-shots and take risks on the job, but I don't think that you'd see the kinds of regular problems of safety that have existed in industrial capitalism where safty violations, neglect etc are the norm even under "regulated" conditions - unregulated conditions just meas a lot more 10 year olds without fingers, a lot more factory workers with arms crushed in presses, etc.

[Jimmie Higgins]

It's instructive that when confronted with a hypothetical scenario in which a person seeking labour must provide their boss with a blowjob every morning to keep their employment or suffer starvation, they see no fault in such an arrangement - the worker is always 'free' to reject such arrangements, they argue, even if such rejection is starvation, it's not the employer's problem.Hypothetical..? Oh man, my job sure needs a union.

[ThatGuy]

Actually, this is a question for libertarians, objectivists, anarcho-capitalists and anyone else who supports the idea of "complete freedom so long as you do not harm others." I hear that a lot. I hear that a lot from libertarians who I know. They say "I don't care what you do so long as it isn't harming anyone else."

My question is, how do you reconcile that belief with a belief in the free market? I mean historically the free market has resulted in long hours in dangerous jobs that result in worker injuries and deaths, unsafe working conditions, covering up harmful side effects of pharmaceuticals, unsafe waste disposal that has poisoned drinking water, and numerous other things that harm people all in the name of increasing profit?

I am not asking this sarcastically (okay, maybe just a bit), but am seriously interested in what your reasoning is.

When a worker agrees to take a job voluntarily, he by definition must believe, that that job will improve his life conditions, or else he would never take it. Historically working in a factory was a pretty miserable life, but it was still a lot better than working on a filed, so the "capitalist" is in no way harming the worker by offering him the job, while prohibiting the worker from taking the job is indeed aggression. Fortunately this is a problem that solves itself, since capitalism brings economic growth and more capital goods, which make workers more scarce and hence more valuable. That means employers must compete between themselves for them and they do that by raising wages, improving working conditions etc.

On the topic of pollution and fraud, those are acts of aggression and are illegitimate by the standards of capitalism. They still occur, but saying that capitalism should be abolished because of that is like saying owning your body should be abolished, because rape still happens.

[Axiomasher]

When a worker agrees to take a job voluntarily, he by definition must believe, that that job will improve his life conditions, or else he would never take it...

The extent to which a worker takes a job 'voluntarily' under capitalism, however, is worthy of consideration. When the alternative to taking up work for the capitalist class is deeper impoverishment, homelessness and/or starvation, then accepting such work is 'voluntary' only in the weakest sense possible. In short, 'choosing' to do X or starve is hardly a meaningful choice.

[Domela Nieuwenhuis]

I mean historically the free market has resulted in long hours in dangerous jobs that result in worker injuries and deaths, unsafe working conditions, covering up harmful side effects of pharmaceuticals, unsafe waste disposal that has poisoned drinking water, and numerous other things that harm people all in the name of increasing profit?

Hey! Don't forget the historical "free market" slavetrade!

[ThatGuy]

The extent to which a worker takes a job 'voluntarily' under capitalism, however, is worthy of consideration. When the alternative to taking up work for the capitalist class is deeper impoverishment, homelessness and/or starvation, then accepting such work is 'voluntary' only in the weakest sense possible. In short, 'choosing' to do X or starve is hardly a meaningful choice.

But you could say that about everything. When you chose something voluntarily, everything else must suck more. It's not the job that made that worker poor, he was poor and starving to begin with. That job was the best means at his disposal to improve his life, even though it may still remain a pretty wretched life.

Now you could make the case that appropriating the resources of richer people through the abolition of private property would make workers even better off, but I think that would be immoral, and I never found any empirical evidence or convincing logical argument that demonstrated it would work.

[helot]

But you could say that about everything. When you chose something voluntarily, everything else must suck more. It's not the job that made that worker poor, he was poor and starving to begin with. That job was the best means at his disposal to improve his life, even though it may still remain a pretty wretched life.


and why is that? I'd posit to you that the worker was poor to begin with not because of some natural circumstance but because of a monopolisation of land and the means of production. The enclosures being a very obvious example of this.

[Axiomasher]

But you could say that about everything. When you chose something voluntarily, everything else must suck more. It's not the job that made that worker poor, he was poor and starving to begin with. That job was the best means at his disposal to improve his life, even though it may still remain a pretty wretched life.

Now you could make the case that appropriating the resources of richer people through the abolition of private property would make workers even better off, but I think that would be immoral, and I never found any empirical evidence or convincing logical argument that demonstrated it would work.

I can't agree, not all choices are of the same qualitative order. For example, the choice to take a well-paid job which requires working away from home or a less-well paid job which is local is qualitatively different, in my view, from choosing, say, to suffer at the hands of a torcherer for one hour of every day of the week or to suffer at the hands of a torcherer every other day of the week. There's 'choices' and there's 'choices'.

What is clearly immoral is the coercive monopolisation of the earth, its resources and the means of production built upon them, by the capitalist class and which thus allows them to force the remainder to labour for them.

[ThatGuy]

and why is that? I'd posit to you that the worker was poor to begin with not because of some natural circumstance but because of a monopolisation of land and the means of production. The enclosures being a very obvious example of this.

Isn't the term monopolisation wrong here, if you mean to say that land and factories/machines were private property? A monopoly is when somebody owns the whole market for some good and can bar entrance to competition, and land is held by many different people, as well as capital goods.

Anyway, I would say this is not the case. If you take a look at the industrial revolution period, property laws were upheld consistently, except for the taxation of the states and the lives of workers and farmers improved drastically. Not just that, but the period saw a great influx of people coming to cities from the countryside, hoping for a factory job, because even if they had land, working it was incredibly hard in those times and wage labor was seen by many as a better alternative. Scarcity is a natural circumstance that can only be overcome with higher productivity and that's what private property and free trade brought about.

[Axiomasher]

Isn't the term monopolisation wrong here, if you mean to say that land and factories/machines were private property? A monopoly is when somebody owns the whole market for some good and can bar entrance to competition, and land is held by many different people, as well as capital goods...

The monopoly we're identifying is that of owners collectively. If you own a thousand acres you are monopolising that 1000 acres, if you and your capitalist friends own a million acres then you, collectively, are monopolising that million acres. Moreover, as soon as a person makes and enforcable claim to a portion of the earth, no matter how modest, that portion is monopolised. If land and resources were unlimited and we all had equal access to land and resources of equal potential, then the argument for private ownership might be stronger, but that's simply not the case, not by a long shot.

[ThatGuy]

I can't agree, not all choices are of the same qualitative order. For example, the choice to take a well-paid job which requires working away from home or a less-well paid job which is local is qualitatively different, in my view, from choosing, say, to suffer at the hands of a torcherer for one hour of every day of the week or to suffer at the hands of a torcherer every other day of the week. There's 'choices' and there's 'choices'.

What is clearly immoral is the coercive monopolisation of the earth, its resources and the means of production built upon them, by the capitalist class and which thus allows them to force the remainder to labour for them.

Of course, some choices have better options than others, no argument there. But what I'm saying is that the factory owner merely adds another option to the workers choice of how to make a living and that can in no way be a bad thing ever.

Just as I replied to helot, monopolisation might be the wrong word here. The only case of monopolisation od the land that I see going on in my society is the state appropriating all owned and unowned land in a geographical area. I don't find private property immoral, because I believe people own the product of their labor, and that gives them the right to exclude others from using it.

[Axiomasher]

Of course, some choices have better options than others, no argument there. But what I'm saying is that the factory owner merely adds another option to the workers choice of how to make a living and that can in no way be a bad thing ever.

Just as I replied to helot, monopolisation might be the wrong word here. The only case of monopolisation od the land that I see going on in my society is the state appropriating all owned and unowned land in a geographical area. I don't find private property immoral, because I believe people own the product of their labor, and that gives them the right to exclude others from using it.

The factory owner exists as an owner because he is part of what might be called the 'matrix of ownership'. Without his coercive monopolisation, and that of his fellow class, he would not be in a position to exploit the non-owner's need to labour for survival.

Private ownership is about as clear a form of monopolisation I can imagine - when you put a fence around a piece of land and threaten to shoot me, or call the police to arrest me, should I ignore your claim, you are, for-damn-sure, a monopoliser. Land owners don't 'produce' the land, or the earth's resources, they monopolise them and then, in some instances, produce fruits from that land. This might seem like a subtle difference but land and the fruits of labour upon the land are two very different things.

[ThatGuy]

The factory owner exists as an owner because he is part of what might be called the 'matrix of ownership'. Without his coercive monopolisation, and that of his fellow class, he would not be in a position to exploit the non-owner's need to labour for survival.

The whole society is part of that matrix of ownership, actually, or else it wouldn't remain in place. However you're shifting the point of the discussion which was if it is ok to offer workers jobs that are dangerous and/or low pay. My answer will always be yes, regardless of private property being upheld by society or not.


Private ownership is about as clear a form of monopolisation I can imagine - when you put a fence around a piece of land and threaten to shoot me, or call the police to arrest me, should I ignore your claim, you are, for-damn-sure, a monopoliser. Land owners don't 'produce' the land, or the earth's resources, they monopolise them and then, in some instances, produce fruits from that land. This might seem like a subtle difference but land and the fruits of labour upon the land are two very different things.

Land owners don't produce the land itself, of course, but they produce fields, orchards, vineyards, factories etc. They produce capital goods. Their labor is now forever mixed with the land, so you can't access the land they've homesteaded without infringing their right to own their labor.

Well I guess you could call that monopolisation, but by that definition, owning your body and your labor is also monopolisation. I'm not sure.. There's already a word for owning stuff, and it's property. Monopolisation can be exerted over more than your property, like fore example when a state gives the exclusive right to produce something to a certain individual or organization. Neither the state nor that entity owns your factory, but they still impose their monopoly on you. There are some resemblances, but to have property rights and to have a monopoly over something aren't really the same thing in my opinion.

[Future]

We socialist anarchists support moral freedom, not immoral freedom. We believe that liberty is not only the ability to have freedom, but also the inability to infringe upon the freedoms of others. That’s why we oppose the hierarchical state, capitalism, and any other unjustified authorities in favor of anti-authoritarian socialism. The historical and scientific analysis from Marxism mixed with the anti-authoritarian ethical analysis from anarchism just totally destroys the foundations of capitalism. The refutation of capitalism and Ayn Rand Objectivism is a long and detailed one, but there are two primary (and connected) arguments that I think puts the nail in the coffin very well. 1.) the producer is having what is rightfully his/hers stolen. Capitalism likes to tout that their system rewards the producer, but that is anything but the truth. Call me crazy, but the producer is the one who...well...produces. The worker has no access to what he creates and is given a demeening form of "compensation" that does nothing but reinforce his poverty and his subservient role as a slave. I found an amusing quote that says it well:



How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?

2.) The working class is forced into signing an immoral contract. The capitalist-proletarian relationship is no different from the slave master-slave relationship. I find it amusing when right-wing libertarians and Objectivists claim that the working contract is voluntary. Okay, sure, it's voluntary - but it's voluntary in the same sense as the slave master/slave contract. The slave doesn’t HAVE to work. He can choose to starve or be shot. It is no different under capitalism. Capitalism is inherently extremely authoritarian (it forces us to sign a slave contract, or if we become capitalists, it allows us to force others to be our slaves), and is therefore extremely immoral. That’s the ethical anarchistic/libertarian take. And then the Marxist historical/scientific take proves why capitalism just simply cannot last and will be overthrown. That classic equation of: class divisions ---> class conflicts ---> class warfare---> revolution, rinse and repeat - is an objective fact. The cycle of instability and alienation will always continue under classism and will do nothing but stunt humanity's progress (social and moral) as long as it exists.


America touts itself as the land of the free, but the number one freedom that you and I have is the freedom to enter into a subservient role in the workplace. Once you exercise this freedom you've lost all control over what you do, what is produced, and how it is produced. And in the end, the product doesn't belong to you. The only way you can avoid bosses and jobs is if you don't care about making a living. Which leads to the second freedom: the freedom to starve.

We socialists realize that the freedom of the one can only be achieved through freedom for all. Objectivism and its off-shoots are flawed from top to bottom - from the metaphysics, to the epistemology, to the ethics, to the politics and economics. It is an extremely incomplete philosophy with very poor justifications that high school students can refute. At its base, these philosophies are not wrong when they discuss the value of individualism…but what they say about it is what the Anarchists and Marxists understand better than anyone else already! The difference is that we socialists know how to liberate the individual without infringing on the individuality of others. Right-wing libertarianism, Objectivism, and any other ideas in support of free-market capitalism desire unbridled freedom no matter the cost - freedom for an individual at the expense of others. Not only can this be shown as objectively immoral, but it also ultimately ends up biting the capitalist in the ass when his dystopian system alienates the community he so depends on to make him rich. The capitalist creates his own grave diggers.

Capitalists are worms that feed on the hard work of the masses, and it must be stopped if we are to better ourselves as a people and truly liberate ourselves from injustice. It's as simple as that.

[Tenka]

Please don't make your font so big nobody will take you seriously.

[RedWaves]

The Free Market is their God.


Anarcho-Capitalists are the biggest frauds ever. Why do they feel the need to add Anarchy to the front of their name? It's the biggest contradiction ever, similar to how Libertariantards claim to love freedom and liberty but want a Confederacy and believe in this great divide of beliefs. Anarchism and Capitalism are the total opposite, hence meaning Anarcho-Capitalists and anyone to declare themselves that have to be incredibly stupid.

[Future]

Please don't make your font so big nobody will take you seriously.

I actually don't mean to. I often write my posts in MS Word and copy and paste them here. The result is larger font and I'm not sure how to fix it.

[Tenka]

I actually don't mean to. I often write my posts in MS Word and copy and paste them here. The result is larger font and I'm not sure how to fix it.

Did you try pasting as "plain text"? (right-click and the option should be there) Sorry if this discussion is better suited to PM's.

[A Psychological Symphony]

But you could say that about everything. When you chose something voluntarily, everything else must suck more. It's not the job that made that worker poor, he was poor and starving to begin with. That job was the best means at his disposal to improve his life, even though it may still remain a pretty wretched life.

But why was he poor to begin with? You can't just look at a poor person and say "They are poor and that's how it is." We are looking at the causes of the financial inequality and it all leads back to your free-market




Now you could make the case that appropriating the resources of richer people through the abolition of private property would make workers even better off, but I think that would be immoral, and I never found any empirical evidence or convincing logical argument that demonstrated it would work.

You haven't heard a convincing argument that sharing the resources of wealthy with the less wealthy would improve the living standards of the less wealthy? Have you been arguing against donkeys?

We also aren't judging our revolutionary beliefs off of what would be morally fair to the bourgeoisie.

[Future]

We also aren't judging our revolutionary beliefs off of what would be morally fair to the bourgeoisie.

We actually are, but I know what you mean to say. But really, we are (at least partially) definitely basing our beliefs on what is morally fair to the bourgeoisie. It's morally fair to eradicate their immoral monopoly on freedom. It's morally fair to destroy private property and take the fruits of our common labor back from our slave masters. It's perfectly fair that capitalists lose what they don't deserve to have.

[argeiphontes]

Land owners don't produce the land itself, of course, but they produce fields, orchards, vineyards, factories etc. They produce capital goods. Their labor is now forever mixed with the land, so you can't access the land they've homesteaded without infringing their right to own their labor.

It might be important to note in this discussion, that they don't. Capital is (by definition?) property that can't be worked by one person, its owner. The capitalist has to enter into some social relation with other people in order to have this capital utilized. Capitalism is the social relation of working this property, plant, and equipment by means of wage labor rather than cooperatively. It is enabled by the legal fiction of private property, which is a monopoly granted by the state. Otherwise, workers would have the option of working fallow, unused capital themselves, for example, and to claim the full value of their labor for themselves.

A right-libertarian might want to read some Benjamin Tucker (http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/benjamin-tucker-individual-liberty). The best argument against right-"libertarianism" is that if somebody wants to be a libertarian, they should apply their principles to the workplace as well. edit: Well, maybe the best argument is that right-libertarianism, without the elimination of private property, would result in absolute private tyranny over the individual, as private firms came to dominate all aspects of life, without even the meager protection of individual rights granted by government.

[ThatGuy]

It might be important to note in this discussion, that they don't. Capital is (by definition?) property that can't be worked by one person, its owner. The capitalist has to enter into some social relation with other people in order to have this capital utilized. Capitalism is the social relation of working this property, plant, and equipment by means of wage labor rather than cooperatively. It is enabled by the legal fiction of private property, which is a monopoly granted by the state. Otherwise, workers would have the option of working fallow, unused capital themselves, for example, and to claim the full value of their labor for themselves.

A right-libertarian might want to read some Benjamin Tucker (http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/benjamin-tucker-individual-liberty). The best argument against right-"libertarianism" is that if somebody wants to be a libertarian, they should apply their principles to the workplace as well. edit: Well, maybe the best argument is that right-libertarianism, without the elimination of private property, would result in absolute private tyranny over the individual, as private firms came to dominate all aspects of life, without even the meager protection of individual rights granted by government.

Actually I used the term "capital good", not "capital". I'm not sure what the correct definition of capital is, so I stick to what I know, and a field is indeed a capital good. Not just that, but it's a capital good, that can be worked on by a single person. Also, states are not required at all for private property to be upheld, as is shown by historical examples such as Ireland, Iceland, and more recently Somalia. However if society sticks to the belief that people have a right to the fruit of their labor, I don't see how anybody could use a capital good without it's owners consent. I guess I'll open a new discussion for this topic.

[Axiomasher]

The whole society is part of that matrix of ownership, actually, or else it wouldn't remain in place. However you're shifting the point of the discussion which was if it is ok to offer workers jobs that are dangerous and/or low pay. My answer will always be yes, regardless of private property being upheld by society or not.

Land owners don't produce the land itself, of course, but they produce fields, orchards, vineyards, factories etc. They produce capital goods. Their labor is now forever mixed with the land, so you can't access the land they've homesteaded without infringing their right to own their labor.

Well I guess you could call that monopolisation, but by that definition, owning your body and your labor is also monopolisation. I'm not sure.. There's already a word for owning stuff, and it's property. Monopolisation can be exerted over more than your property, like fore example when a state gives the exclusive right to produce something to a certain individual or organization. Neither the state nor that entity owns your factory, but they still impose their monopoly on you. There are some resemblances, but to have property rights and to have a monopoly over something aren't really the same thing in my opinion.

No, the owning class constitutes the matrix of ownership and it is this collective and coercive monopolisation of the earth, its resources and the means of production built on that monopolisation, which generates the exploitation and alienation of the remainder. I’m not shifting the point at all, if you want to understand why the relationship between workers and bosses is illegitimate you have to go to the roots of the issue.

Land owners don’t produce the land, agreed, I’m glad that you have finally recognised that. Instead, landowners, at least some of them, invest labour in that land to generate what Marxists like me call ‘productive needs’. Nevertheless, this investment and production does not post hoc, ergo proctor hoc legitimise a claim to ownership of the land itself, that’s a logical fallacy. You might as well have argued that because you threw some fish-food into the ocean and subsequently caught a fish that, you know, you now own the ocean!

Here’s a nice little snippet from John Morrow:



[The implications drawn from Marx’s arguments re private property]. These implications relate in the first instance to the necessarily oppressive nature of private property. Since production is a fundamental human activity, control of the process of labour and its product by property owners takes away what are really human and social attributes and bestows these on limited sections of the population. This process of ‘alienation’, as Marx called it, involves a loss of humanity and a consequent diminution of the capacity to exercise all human attributes...



John Morrow, A History of Political Thought (New York University press), pp.92-93

[The Feral Underclass]

When you chose something voluntarily

What is voluntary about taking a job in order to survive?

[ThatGuy]

No, the owning class constitutes the matrix of ownership and it is this collective and coercive monopolisation of the earth, its resources and the means of production built on that monopolisation, which generates the exploitation and alienation of the remainder. I’m not shifting the point at all, if you want to understand why the relationship between workers and bosses is illegitimate you have to go to the roots of the issue.

Well, technically this is shifting the point, since the original question was how can we, capitalists, support the free market, when there are jobs with unsafe working conditions. My reply was, that for the workers, it's better that those jobs exist, than if they didn't all other things equal. Private property is a topic worth of discussion, but it's a separate point.

Workers have property too. I speak from my own life, I'm a worker who never homesteaded anything, because of the monopoly on land by the state, and partly because of a lack of interest, and I still manage to own stuff. Farmers own a lot more land than industiral elites, and they are considered workers. The division of society into the owning class and workers is a deeply flawed concept. Saying that people who don't own anything don't have a vested interested in private property being upheld is kinda shortsighted, since they can always homestead property or earn enough to purchase some, and that might motivate them. Also rich people have an interest in keeping their property secure, but they don't have an interest in others' property being secure, because that means they can't take it, so automatically saying that rich people favor absolute private property is an oversimplification and historically untrue.


Land owners don’t produce the land, agreed, I’m glad that you have finally recognised that. Instead, landowners, at least some of them, invest labour in that land to generate what Marxists like me call ‘productive needs’. Nevertheless, this investment and production does not post hoc, ergo proctor hoc legitimise a claim to ownership of the land itself, that’s a logical fallacy. You might as well have argued that because you threw some fish-food into the ocean and subsequently caught a fish that, you know, you now own the ocean!

If people own the products of their labor and they irreversibly mix their labor with land, they own that land, since it cannot be taken without violating their right to their labor. I see no logical fallacy in that statement. Homesteading a whole ocean by throwing fish food in it is a bit of a strawman on the other hand. There are of course practical problems with homesteading, but there are practical problems with any abstract moral concept when you port it to the real world. If you believe pollution is a crime, which I do, the practical implications of trying to be consistent are crippling. Is driving your car pollution and therefore aggression towards people around you, because you emit toxic fumes? Is lighting a match pollution? Is breading pollution? I suggest we keep to the abstract, because we'll never get anywhere otherwise.

[Axiomasher]

Well, technically this is shifting the point, since the original question was how can we, capitalists, support the free market, when there are jobs with unsafe working conditions. My reply was, that for the workers, it's better that those jobs exist, than if they didn't all other things equal. Private property is a topic worth of discussion, but it's a separate point.

Workers have property too. I speak from my own life, I'm a worker who never homesteaded anything, because of the monopoly on land by the state, and partly because of a lack of interest, and I still manage to own stuff. Farmers own a lot more land than industiral elites, and they are considered workers. The division of society into the owning class and workers is a deeply flawed concept. Saying that people who don't own anything don't have a vested interested in private property being upheld is kinda shortsighted, since they can always homestead property or earn enough to purchase some, and that might motivate them. Also rich people have an interest in keeping their property secure, but they don't have an interest in others' property being secure, because that means they can't take it, so automatically saying that rich people favor absolute private property is an oversimplification and historically untrue.

[SIZE=3][SIZE=2]

If people own the products of their labor and they irreversibly mix their labor with land, they own that land, since it cannot be taken without violating their right to their labor. I see no logical fallacy in that statement. Homesteading a whole ocean by throwing fish food in it is a bit of a strawman on the other hand. There are of course practical problems with homesteading, but there are practical problems with any abstract moral concept when you port it to the real world. If you believe pollution is a crime, which I do, the practical implications of trying to be consistent are crippling. Is driving your car pollution and therefore aggression towards people around you, because you emit toxic fumes? Is lighting a match pollution? Is breading pollution? I suggest we keep to the abstract, because we'll never get anywhere otherwise.

But your reasoning presupposes the legitimacy of the capitalist system and I’m saying that it is not legitimate so everything else is moot. Private property is the bedrock on which capitalist alienation and exploitation is built and therefore on which labour relations are built, it’s all connected.

Sure workers can be property owners but usually only in the petty sense of owning the home they live in, the garden they tend or a small patch of land to grow supplementary crops. Nevertheless, the matrix of monopolisation I’ve been making reference to is dominated by private individuals (including farmers) and private organisations who own hundreds, thousands, no doubt in some instances millions, of acres. Capitalism is messy and there is a blurred line between owner and worker, but it’s not so blurred that we don’t know it’s there or how it alienates and exploits.

I’ve already made the point that investing labour in the land so as to generate fruits only makes for an argument that you are entitled to those fruits. My fish-food in the ocean analogy is perfectly legitimate, the point being that investment in the earth (or ocean) in order to obtain fruits thereof, does not result in a monopolising claim of that earth (or ocean).

[Baseball]

My fish-food in the ocean analogy is perfectly legitimate, the point being that investment in the earth (or ocean) in order to obtain fruits thereof, does not result in a monopolising claim of that earth (or ocean).

Why not? If someone, or a group of someones, takes resources and deploys it in such a way which results in a benefit to the community, why should others have an equal claim? Others chose to deploy their resources elsewhere. There will have to be some sort of organization anyways.

[Axiomasher]

Why not? If someone, or a group of someones, takes resources and deploys it in such a way which results in a benefit to the community, why should others have an equal claim? Others chose to deploy their resources elsewhere. There will have to be some sort of organization anyways.

In principled terms because post hoc, ergo proctor hoc is a logical fallacy. In practical terms because coercive monopolisations of the earth and its resources are not undertaken by private interests for the 'benefit of the community' but to maximise the interests of those who monopolise. That everyone else is consequentially alienated is, of course, to the monopolisers' distinct advantage.

[helot]

Anyway, I would say this is not the case. If you take a look at the industrial revolution period, property laws were upheld consistently, except for the taxation of the states and the lives of workers and farmers improved drastically.

You're mixing up the effects of technological development and the results of particular social relationships. The introduction of irrigation in a slave society can potentially improve the conditions of slaves but that doesn't mean them being slaves is the cause of this improvement which is pretty what you're implying.

I do find it amusing that you ignore mass movements in this improvement of conditions. It was not the industrialist that voluntarily stopped children as young as 4 working in dangerous and often fatal conditions.



Not just that, but the period saw a great influx of people coming to cities from the countryside, hoping for a factory job which in turn drove down wages and working conditions.




Scarcity is a natural circumstance that can only be overcome with higher productivity and that's what private property and free trade brought about.

Scarcity is not just a natural circumstance but can be artificially created. Case in point as of 2002 more than enough food was produced to guarantee every single person on the planet 2700 calories a day (c.f. UN food and agricultural organisation) yet a bit less than a billion people go malnourished.

[ThatGuy]

But your reasoning presupposes the legitimacy of the capitalist system and I’m saying that it is not legitimate so everything else is moot. Private property is the bedrock on which capitalist alienation and exploitation is built and therefore on which labour relations are built, it’s all connected.

Private property is the root of out ideological divergences, true, but you can say "suppose it is a fair social convention" and then talk about sweatshops and the like.


Sure workers can be property owners but usually only in the petty sense of owning the home they live in, the garden they tend or a small patch of land to grow supplementary crops. Nevertheless, the matrix of monopolisation I’ve been making reference to is dominated by private individuals (including farmers) and private organisations who own hundreds, thousands, no doubt in some instances millions, of acres. Capitalism is messy and there is a blurred line between owner and worker, but it’s not so blurred that we don’t know it’s there or how it alienates and exploits.

Capitalism is pretty clear, it's people who want to explain it with marxism, that end up with messed up views. Anyway the real question here is if private property is legitimate or not, the rest is all derivative.


I’ve already made the point that investing labour in the land so as to generate fruits only makes for an argument that you are entitled to those fruits. My fish-food in the ocean analogy is perfectly legitimate, the point being that investment in the earth (or ocean) in order to obtain fruits thereof, does not result in a monopolising claim of that earth (or ocean).

I said it's a strawman, because nobody claims you can homestead an entire geographical area by only using a small part of it. Your choice of fishing in an ocean wasn't made by chance, you wanted to demnostrate how your fish food could spread through the whole thing, and how homesteading is thus absurd. As I said, if you get that technical with any abstract moral concept, absurdity will ensue, always. Working abstract concepts into practice is why we bother with courts and law and those aren't going to go away with or without private property.

[Axiomasher]

Private property is the root of out ideological divergences, true, but you can say "suppose it is a fair social convention" and then talk about sweatshops and the like.

[/SIZE]

Capitalism is pretty clear, it's people who want to explain it with marxism, that end up with messed up views. Anyway the real question here is if private property is legitimate or not, the rest is all derivative.

[SIZE=2]

I said it's a strawman, because nobody claims you can homestead an entire geographical area by only using a small part of it. Your choice of fishing in an ocean wasn't made by chance, you wanted to demnostrate how your fish food could spread through the whole thing, and how homesteading is thus absurd. As I said, if you get that technical with any abstract moral concept, absurdity will ensue, always. Working abstract concepts into practice is why we bother with courts and law and those aren't going to go away with or without private property.

I have no desire to enter into a normative discussion wherein the coercive monopolisations of private property generating alienation and exploitation is just ignored. You might as well ask me to participate in a discussion of what amounts to fair treatment of slaves on the basis that we’ll assume slavery is legitimate.

We could refer to each other’s views as ‘messed up’ all day long I suppose [sigh] but I agree that the question of whether private property is legitimate is worthy of consideration.

I used the fish-food in the ocean analogy to demonstrate the absurdity of claiming that because you invest your labour in the earth this magically means it is yours, and forever too! The strawman is your attempt to reduce private property issues to some romantic notion of ‘homesteading’ when there are in fact plenty of private individuals and organisations who own hundreds or thousands, maybe millions, of acres of land which is thus alienated from wider society.

[The Feral Underclass]

ThatGuy, I'll ask you again: On what basis is taking a job in order to survive 'voluntary'?


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[ThatGuy]

I have no desire to enter into a normative discussion wherein the coercive monopolisations of private property generating alienation and exploitation is just ignored. You might as well ask me to participate in a discussion of what amounts to fair treatment of slaves on the basis that we’ll assume slavery is legitimate.

We could refer to each other’s views as ‘messed up’ all day long I suppose [sigh] but I agree that the question of whether private property is legitimate is worthy of consideration.

I used the fish-food in the ocean analogy to demonstrate the absurdity of claiming that because you invest your labour in the earth this magically means it is yours, and forever too! The strawman is your attempt to reduce private property issues to some romantic notion of ‘homesteading’ when there are in fact plenty of private individuals and organisations who own hundreds or thousands, maybe millions, of acres of land which is thus alienated from wider society.

Alienating land from wider society is the whole point of private property, homesteading is merely the other legitimate way besides purchase to obtain it. I suggest we continue our discussion on private property in the other thread, since that's what the divergence in our views boils down to anyway.

[ThatGuy]

ThatGuy, I'll ask you again: On what basis is taking a job in order to survive 'voluntary'?

On the basis that you're not being forced into it by another person, but by your own circumstances. I consider taking heroine by an addict voluntary on the same basis. It's something you are basically forced to do, but by your own dependency, not by another person. I think capitalists in general differentiate between power and freedom, where power to act can be restricted by any number of circumstances, but freedom can only be restricted by other people.


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YOUR iPhone?!? :grin:

[Axiomasher]

Alienating land from wider society is the whole point of private property, homesteading is merely the other legitimate way besides purchase to obtain it. I suggest we continue our discussion on private property in the other thread, since that's what the divergence in our views boils down to anyway.

But these things are not legitimate.

[helot]

On the basis that you're not being forced into it by another person, but by your own circumstances. Those circumstances aren't naturally occuring, they're the result of human action.

I've already pointed out one of the most obvious examples of this (the enclosures) previously in this very thread.




I consider taking heroine by an addict voluntary on the same basis. It's something you are basically forced to do, but by your own dependency, not by another person. I think capitalists in general differentiate between power and freedom, where power to act can be restricted by any number of circumstances, but freedom can only be restricted by other people.


The true analogy using heroin addiction is instead someone else injecting you with it since before you could even comprehend what they're doing.

[The Feral Underclass]

On the basis that you're not being forced into it by another person

I don't see how this forms a basis for what 'voluntary' means. There are plenty of things people are forced to do without a 'person' doing the forcing.

When a person is presented with the options to work or die, that is not really a choice, is it? Non-existence isn't a reasonable alternative to working.


but by your own circumstances.

Working class people don't own their circumstances. We don't consciously choose our reality at birth, our circumstances already exist when we are born. They are then presented with the option to work or die.


I consider taking heroine by an addict voluntary on the same basis. It's something you are basically forced to do, but by your own dependency, not by another person

If there is 'basically' force then it is force and therefore not voluntary.


YOUR iPhone?!? :grin:


Yes, it's an electronic communication device, much like a personal computer, but smaller and more mobile.


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[ThatGuy]

Those circumstances aren't naturally occuring, they're the result of human action.

I've already pointed out one of the most obvious examples of this (the enclosures) previously in this very thread.

I'm sorry, I don't know what exactly you mean by 'the enclosures'. Could you elaborate? Otherwise this is another debate that boils down to private property. If people have the right to exclude you from their property, they aren't responsible for your poverty, just like nobody is responsible for irritating people not having friends, even though they could become their friends at any time.


The true analogy using heroin addiction is instead someone else injecting you with it since before you could even comprehend what they're doing.

Again, if people have the right to not give you stuff when you demand it, they're not responsible for you not having it.

[helot]

I'm sorry, I don't know what exactly you mean by 'the enclosures'. Could you elaborate? Otherwise this is another debate that boils down to private property. If people have the right to exclude you from their property, they aren't responsible for your poverty, just like nobody is responsible for irritating people not having friends, even though they could become their friends at any time.


The enclosures pertains to the forcible removal of the peasantry from common land in Britain. It resulted in a dispossessed class of workers that became the contemporary working class. Similar events have occured all over the world. This is part of the historic development of capitalism.

[liberlict]

[LIST=1]
You are right. The worst is starving to death because you have no place to work and no money to buy food. Not bad at all.


Sounds lovely doesn't it. :lol:


Communist economies? By definition communism is classless, stateless and global. When has that ever occured?

Ja, this definition of communism is only an abstraction though. Abstractions are disadvantaged by their incongruence with reality. Libertarians, and most anti-communists that I can think of, believe it's unattainable. I think that's the main point of contention. 20th century history with all it's pseudo-communist dictatorships doesn't make it very salable. I'm not saying it's wrong. I just think that's why it's so unpopular. Really it's surprising to me that communism isn't more popular. Given the eagerness of the mass population of idiots to absorb fantastical ideas (Organised religion...), it's surprising to me they're not more excitable about a promise to deliver higher wages, abundance, equal ownership, etc. etc.. My only reasoning for this is it might be too abstract for the idiots of the world to get a grip on. But then again religion is quite abstract, and palpably counterintuitive. Perhaps religion is just an especially recalcitrant delusion sustained by an inexorable wan't of eternal life.





We already produce abundance. There is a reason for the term artificial scarcity. We have the technology to easily produce abundance no matter what system is in place.

There can never be abundance. Take life itself as an example. Everybody wants to live forever. But it leads to a dead end because we all die. Where are you going to get cancer treatments and replacement organs for everybody who wants them? By making people more healthy this problem just gets worse, not better, because the average age increases. Health care is in crisis in most western countries because of this very problem (aging population).

[Queen Mab]

Land owners don't produce the land itself, of course, but they produce fields, orchards, vineyards, factories etc. They produce capital goods. Their labor is now forever mixed with the land, so you can't access the land they've homesteaded without infringing their right to own their labor.

Last time I checked, the Duke of Westminster didn't put his personal labour into all the tens of thousands of acres of land he owns.

His ownership comes from the state violently excluding everyone else from access to 'his property'.

[The Feral Underclass]

Well I for one think the Duke of Devonshire has worked really hard to get his inherited land ownership. He's had to do a lot of grafting to be entitled to those lands. Without his personal labour, being born into vast wealth and privilege may not have happened.


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[argeiphontes]

Private property is the root of out ideological divergences, true, but you can say "suppose it is a fair social convention" and then talk about sweatshops and the like.
It's usually libertarians that don't want to argue about the real consequences of things. They just assume some kind of fantasy libertarian society is going to exist. No regulatory capture, level playing field, no monopolies forming, etc.

Also, it's private property property in the means of production. Nobody wants your kitchen utensils. Personally I would say private property in means of production that require entering into a social relation, but that's just me because I'm a libertarian market socialist and don't give a shit about the guy on the corner selling hot dogs or something.


I said it's a strawman, because nobody claims you can homestead an entire geographical area by only using a small part of it.
Actually, it's a "thought experiment". I thought it was clever and cute. Homesteading is the *most* legitimate way I've seen of getting private land, since it presupposed being able to work it. Being able to work land is at least some basis, rather than government fiat and the threat of force, for owning something. Heh, maybe putting in fence posts is technically "adding your labor to the land" ;)



As I said, if you get that technical with any abstract moral concept, absurdity will ensue, always. Working abstract concepts into practice is why we bother with courts and law and those aren't going to go away with or without private property.That's the point of the thought experiment. To isolate the principle. After all, if something is a basic principle it should work in all cases, ESPECIALLY cases where it's the only operative principle.


Really it's surprising to me that communism isn't more popular. Given the eagerness of the mass population of idiots to absorb fantastical ideas (Organised religion...), it's surprising to me they're not more excitable about a promise to deliver higher wages, abundance, equal ownership, etc. etc..

Religion, according to Jung, is a projection of the human psyche and an irrational activity of the mind, so believing in it is easy. But this is why we all discuss 'class consciousness'. I happen to think that people choose from believable, readily-available alternatives. Which I guess is what you were trying to say. It's only an insurmountable problem for some people. That's why my system is the best, of course ;)

As for work, yeah, as RMS* said, "A choice of masters is not freedom." Rumor has it that there was one day a year, when serfs could move between masters too. I guess they were free then, too, huh.

*Richard Stallman, the GNU Project guy.

[ThatGuy]

Last time I checked, the Duke of Westminster didn't put his personal labour into all the tens of thousands of acres of land he owns.

His ownership comes from the state violently excluding everyone else from access to 'his property'.

Indeed, his ownership results from aggression and is therefore not legitimate according to private property laws. Believing in private property doesn't mean you must take every property claim as automatically true.

[ThatGuy]

That's the point of the thought experiment. To isolate the principle. After all, if something is a basic principle it should work in all cases, ESPECIALLY cases where it's the only operative principle.

In the abstract it does, however as I said, abstract concepts can't ever be perfectly translated to practical circumstances. If you believe in the right to self defense, that's an abstract concept, but when you have to judge whether a person truly acted in self defense or he aggressed somebody, you have to set up some form of arbitrary boundaries for what counts as legitimate self defense and what doesn't. If an abstract moral concept has to be perfectly translatable to practical rules, I'm afraid moral reasoning is completely useless to humans. If you believe that I have no arguments to prove that you're wrong, but it's just not how I function.

[Bourgeois]

ThatGuy, I'll ask you again: On what basis is taking a job in order to survive 'voluntary'?


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Libertarians do not believe in freedom from circumstance or freedom from nature.

[argeiphontes]

Libertarians do not believe in freedom from circumstance or freedom from nature.

Even if the circumstance is caused by other people? Slavery used to be a circumstance. Surely libertarians believe in freedom from slavery?

[helot]

Indeed, his ownership results from aggression and is therefore not legitimate according to private property laws. Believing in private property doesn't mean you must take every property claim as automatically true.

The question is how can any claim be legitimate considering the historic development of society? And yeah i'm going to keep pointing out the enclosures because you all just ignore it because your aim isn't even internal consistency but legitimising present conditions.





Surely libertarians believe in freedom from slavery?

You'll be surprised at the answer then ;)

[Bourgeois]

Even if the circumstance is caused by other people? Slavery used to be a circumstance. Surely libertarians believe in freedom from slavery?

Nope, as slavery infringes on the NAP it would not be allowed in a Libertarian society.

When I say circumstance I say that in conjunction with the libertarian rejection of positive liberty.

[argeiphontes]

Nope, as slavery infringes on the NAP it would not be allowed in a Libertarian society.


Well, then you don't believe in private property either. That's enforced at gunpoint, isn't it? It didn't exist until some people started using violence to take and keep it.



When I say circumstance I say that in conjunction with the libertarian rejection of positive liberty.Right, other people are causing the circumstances of wage labor by appropriating capital. Don't you have freedom FROM their unjust appropriation of stuff you could use to make a living?

[The Feral Underclass]

Libertarians do not believe in freedom from circumstance or freedom from nature.

That didn't answer my question.

[Jimmie Higgins]

When a worker agrees to take a job voluntarily, he by definition must believe, that that job will improve his life conditions, or else he would never take it. Historically working in a factory was a pretty miserable life, but it was still a lot better than working on a filed, so the "capitalist" is in no way harming the worker by offering him the job, while prohibiting the worker from taking the job is indeed aggression.
Historically, this is completely untrue.

Who were the mill workers in the uk? People forcibly pushed off common lands and under legal threat of arrest/forced labor due to vagabond laws preventing free movement of master-less people. So in fact people were compelled into a life of wage labor.

In the u.s., the first mill workers were young women from rural areas. Mill owners would go to farming areas and would recruit daughters from farmers who were not marrying age yet. The women were put into mill dorms and had their personal lives managed by the mill so that they could be returned to their fathers "pure". In the u.s. South, slaves were used in the light industry they had there.

So farmers preferred to farm (and only sent their non-farm laboring family to mills), ex peasant preferred to farm, be poachers, or try and find an apprenticeship, and slaves preferred not to be enslaved.

What do all these things have in common? Social relations of coercion. The mills signed contracts with the father (who "owned" the daughter) the slave was already contracted, the landless peasantry had legal repression to compel them to take wage labor.

This is how the option "work or starve" began. Saying it is a neutral choice, or we always have options is only possible right now because there is no apparent choice. It's like people in the hunger games seeing that competition as "natural". You always have a choice right? Maybe you'll win? You can also go into the arena and just hide until you starve. But then the odds never seem to be in our favor.

[Jimmie Higgins]

YOUR iPhone?!? :grin:lol, what are you using? A letter press laptop? A hand cranked internet server?

[liberlict]

It's usually libertarians that don't want to argue about the real consequences of things. They just assume some kind of fantasy libertarian society is going to exist. No regulatory capture, level playing field, no monopolies forming, etc.

Also, it's private property property in the means of production. Nobody wants your kitchen utensils. Personally I would say private property in means of production that require entering into a social relation, but that's just me because I'm a libertarian market socialist and don't give a shit about the guy on the corner selling hot dogs or something.

Actually, it's a "thought experiment". I thought it was clever and cute. Homesteading is the *most* legitimate way I've seen of getting private land, since it presupposed being able to work it. Being able to work land is at least some basis, rather than government fiat and the threat of force, for owning something. Heh, maybe putting in fence posts is technically "adding your labor to the land" ;)

That's the point of the thought experiment. To isolate the principle. After all, if something is a basic principle it should work in all cases, ESPECIALLY cases where it's the only operative principle.



Religion, according to Jung, is a projection of the human psyche and an irrational activity of the mind, so believing in it is easy. But this is why we all discuss 'class consciousness'. I happen to think that people choose from believable, readily-available alternatives. Which I guess is what you were trying to say. It's only an insurmountable problem for some people. That's why my system is the best, of course ;)

As for work, yeah, as RMS* said, "A choice of masters is not freedom." Rumor has it that there was one day a year, when serfs could move between masters too. I guess they were free then, too, huh.

*Richard Stallman, the GNU Project guy.

I'm not sure about all these master/slave dynamics. I think communists are trained to see things in that way because of Hegel's weltanschauung of self cancelling opposites. You could just as easy call the worker the 'master' since he can unionize and stop production anytime he wants. In the fifteenth century there was a huge labour shortage and workers really were the masters. In a free, civilised society I don't think there really are masters and slaves outside of weird BDSM clubs.

[Axiomasher]

...You could just as easy call the worker the 'master' since he can unionize and stop production anytime he wants...

But this is false. In many places the capitalist class have successfully regulated union participation and action so that in most sectors unions are either weak or non-existent. In other places unions are just illegal or activists are simply intimidated, sacked or murdered on behalf of the bosses.

[Jimmie Higgins]

I'm not sure about all these master/slave dynamics. I think communists are trained to see things in that way because of Hegel's weltanschauung of self cancelling opposites. You could just as easy call the worker the 'master' since he can unionize and stop production anytime he wants. In the fifteenth century there was a huge labour shortage and workers really were the masters. In a free, civilised society I don't think there really are masters and slaves outside of weird BDSM clubs.

Personally, I wouldn't say bosses are like "masters" - we are not tied to a feudal estate or a slave-owner -- it's more like Capital is the master of us all. In those earlier societies, the induvidual master or feudal estate controlled people's ability to support themselves; today it's not single bosses, but the whole of capitalist relations. Although I think you can argue that slave-caters and floggings still exist, but in different forms, generally fully developed capitalism doesn't need that sort of one-on-one repression (again it does happen and prisons are a pretty obvious example). It's like the whole world is one big plantation or estate and so they don't need to flog us to keep us in line because there's nowhere to run outside of capitalist relations: we need money to survive and the concentration of wealth, exploitation, etc keep us "choosing" to sell or labor rather than be beaten by police for squatting and/or starve/go homeless.

I'd say it's quite a stretch to say that workers are like "masters" at all though. First, feudal guilds are not like modern workers in terms of their economic relationships and the sorts of politics that tend to emerge from either group. Second, even well paid workers are still workers just as a slave or serf with more privileges than on average (house slaves, for example) is still a slave or serf! Capitalists buy our labor power (not the results of what we actually produce) so even better paid workers are not "masters" of their boss, their boss just isn't able to exploit quite as much from those workers.

[Jimmie Higgins]

I also have a sincere question for Libertarians:

What is the Libertarian explanation for the emergence of anti-trust laws, early progressive era reforms as well as Keynesianism? Do people just see it as a trick or graft by government (if so, what was in it for officials - why did they peruse this)? Or do people see it as a wrongheaded but sincere attempt to manage or ease some actual problems in society/the economy?

[argeiphontes]

I also have a sincere question for Libertarians:

What is the Libertarian explanation for the emergence of anti-trust laws

I'd like to hear about anti-trust laws especially. I thought Libertarians didn't like monopolies/oligopolies. Yet, this is precisely what develops under laissez-faire capitalism. Necessitating intervention by... *gulp*... government! ;)

[argeiphontes]

I'm not sure about all these master/slave dynamics. I think communists are trained to see things in that way because of Hegel's weltanschauung of self cancelling opposites.

Personally I try not to think in Hegelian terms if I can help it. Maybe there's still a trace, I suppose. I don't think Capital is the abstract subject of human development or anything like that. At least I don't think I do...

A master is just somebody who has the power to tell you what to do even if you don't want to do it. If there is no democracy, there is some kind of servitude. I suppose we could draw the line at corporeal punishment or something, but that's arbitrary. I think it's the power they have over your activity that makes them the 'master'. Clearly, in practice there is an unequal power relation.

I wouldn't say I take those terms so literally that I'm not using them partially for rhetorical effect, though. ;)

[ThatGuy]

The question is how can any claim be legitimate considering the historic development of society? And yeah i'm going to keep pointing out the enclosures because you all just ignore it because your aim isn't even internal consistency but legitimising present conditions.

I'm not really trying to legitimize what's currently going on in the world, or say that I'm ok with crimes committed by the early industrialists. This is the first time I've heard of enclosures, so I can't really comment on them, but I have no reason for disbelieving what you say happened. Violations of property rights were tragically common in the past, and they still go on today, saying that the belief in private property is to be blamed for people violating it is illogical though. Most of the land we now live on has been stolen from some people from others and it is pretty impossible to definitively show that some land you want to homestead doesn't really belong to someone else, who doesn't even know it. The only logical way to go about it is that property claims are valid, unless someone can show that they're not. Much like you're supposed to be innocent until proven guilty in a court.

[ThatGuy]

Nope, as slavery infringes on the NAP it would not be allowed in a Libertarian society.

When I say circumstance I say that in conjunction with the libertarian rejection of positive liberty.

Actually we were talking about people selling themselves into slavery voluntarily. I don't see how that violates the NAP.

[ThatGuy]

I also have a sincere question for Libertarians:

What is the Libertarian explanation for the emergence of anti-trust laws, early progressive era reforms as well as Keynesianism? Do people just see it as a trick or graft by government (if so, what was in it for officials - why did they peruse this)? Or do people see it as a wrongheaded but sincere attempt to manage or ease some actual problems in society/the economy?

I'd say grafts. People in power get there by campaign contributions, which means it's completely possible for a private interest to buy government officials and use them to further their goals. There are probably people who sincerely believe what they're doing is good, just like there are police officers who believe the war on drugs in in the public interest, but the lies and propaganda clearly point to people abusing their power knowingly.

[argeiphontes]

I'd say grafts. People in power get there by campaign contributions, which means it's completely possible for a private interest to buy government officials and use them to further their goals. There are probably people who sincerely believe what they're doing is good, just like there are police officers who believe the war on drugs in in the public interest, but the lies and propaganda clearly point to people abusing their power knowingly.

Antitrust laws were just the result of regulatory capture and misguided policies? So oligopoly and monopoly are A-OK with Libertarians?

[allixpeeke]

Actually, this is a question for libertarians, objectivists, anarcho-capitalists and anyone else who supports the idea of "complete freedom so long as you do not harm others." I hear that a lot. I hear that a lot from libertarians who I know. They say "I don't care what you do so long as it isn't harming anyone else."

My question is, how do you reconcile that belief with a belief in the free market? I mean historically the free market has resulted in long hours in dangerous jobs that result in worker injuries and deaths, unsafe working conditions, covering up harmful side effects of pharmaceuticals, unsafe waste disposal that has poisoned drinking water, and numerous other things that harm people all in the name of increasing profit?

I am not asking this sarcastically (okay, maybe just a bit), but am seriously interested in what your reasoning is.

The free market has not historically caused anything ever, since the free market has not historically existed. Insofar as the state exists, a free market cannot.

When a capitalist is privileged by the state with the power to aggress against the workers, that is not a free market, that is state capitalism, a.k.a. corporatism. Any time a capitalist can force workers to continue working against their will, that is not a free market in any rational sense of the term, since, when the capitalist is afforded that protection by the state, the capitalist is not engaging in voluntary exchange of labour for remuneration, but is instead relying on implicit state intervention.

In a purely free market, whenever a worker is forced by a capitalist to continue working against her or his will, whenever a worker is threatened with physical force or even death, the worker would be free to take her or his case to a private arbitration firm, and if the capitalist is found guilty, said capitalist would be required not only to pay restitution to her or his victim, but would also be required to pay for all court fees associated with the case (except in those situations where the worker and the capitalist have agreed, in advanced, contractually to divvy up costs in some way other than loser-pays). The fact that capitalists were permitted to use aggression and the state legally protected said capitalists from just punishment for these crimes proves that intervention, not a free market, was to blame.

I'd like to quote the abolitionist Salmon P. Chase:


For, what is slavery? It is the complete and absolute subjection of one person to the control and disposal of another person, by legalized force. We need not argue that no person can be, rightfully, compelled to submit to such control and disposal. All such subjection must originate in force; and, private force not being strong enough to accomplish the purpose, public force, in the form of law, must lend its aid. The Government comes to the help of the individual slaveholder, and punishes resistance to his will, and compels submission. THE GOVERNMENT, therefore, in the case of every individual slave, is THE REAL ENSLAVER, depriving each person enslaved of all liberty and all property, and all that makes life dear, without imputation of crime or any legal process whatsoever. This is precisely what the Government of the United States is forbidden to do by the Constitution. The Government of the United States, therefore, cannot create or continue the relation of master and slave. Nor can that relation be created or continued in any place, district, or territory, over which the jurisdiction of the National Government is exclusive; for slavery cannot subsist a moment after the support of the public force has been withdrawn.SOURCE: The Address of the Southern and Western Liberty Convention, Held at Cincinnati, June 11 and 12, 1845, To the People of the United States. (http://alexpeak.com/twr/constitution)

It should be further noted that unions can exist in a free market. Moreover, they would be freer than they are under statism. Without the state, unions could spontaneously form and dissolve as necessary. And, a union could exist in any size, even as small as two persons. Say you and I work for the same boss, and we decide, just the two of us, that if our boss should do anything treacherous, we would stand with one another. Perhaps the boss won't care, since we're just two; perhaps she or he will. Or, we could try to get a whole swath of fellow employees to join together in order to accomplish some cause we all agree is socially desirable. Since everyone has a natural right to freedom of association, it would not be considered a crime for us to go on strike or to quit, just as it would not be considered a crime for an employer to decide that she or he no longer wishes to keep us in her or his employ. In addition to the strike, there is also they boycott, which can also be effective.

Under statism, by contrast, corporations could get the state to compel workers to return, and in fact that has happened in American history.

But, I tend to also think that a lot of this is moot, since I greatly suspect that, in a truly free market, worker-owned firms would tend to be more productive and thus they would tend to displace capitalist-owned firms. Of course, we don't see that arising under statism because the state's interventions tend to favour big, well-established firms at the expense of small competitors. As Rothbard pointed out in his phenomenal essay Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty (http://alexpeak.com/twr/lar/1/1/2/), all of the so-called "progressive" legislation that was once thought to be anti-business was actually enacted at the behest of big business for the benefit of big business. Well-established firms have the resources requisite to get over the hurdles placed before them by the state, while their small competitors do not. Rockwell wrote an article called Wal-Mart Warms to the State (http://mises.org/daily/1950) wherein he demonstrated that even minimum wage laws have been used, and continue to be used, to help insulate big business. Minimum wage is at best but a band-aide that only temporarily provides any benefit and, in the long-run, makes conditions worse for workers. As Brad Spangler has pointed out, wage slavery is actually a product of statism, not of a supposedly-free market, because the state's interventions tend to oligopolise business and, thus, oligopsonise the purchase of labour, restricting choices for workers and thus driving wages down. I anticipate that, should we be successful in smashing the state, workers will have higher wages, more opportunity, and greater workplace safety than they do under even the best forms of government.

Regarding harmful waste in drinking water, under a purely free market where everything is privately run, whatever person or group owns a given water source would have every incentive to protect the quality of that water, lest it lose customers to competitors. And, should some other, less scrupulous company come along and, through intention or through accident, cause the first company's water supply to become polluted, the first company would have just cause to sue the second company for its violation of the first company's property right. Moreover, should any of the customers become harmed by the water, the harmed customers would have every right to sue the polluters.

One might ask, what about limited liability? But, limited liability could only exist where contracts have actually been signed to limit the liability. If your company pollutes my company's water supply, my customers have not signed any contract with your company to limit your company's liability to them, and as such, your company would be fully liable.

Finally, I don't believe there would be any intellectual "property" in a truly free market, which I believe is simply a form a statist protectionism. The only things that would be considered property are those resources that are physical and therefore scarce.

I hope this answers any questions, but feel free to let me know if you believe I have not adequately addressed them.

Best,
Alex

[liberlict]

I also have a sincere question for Libertarians:

What is the Libertarian explanation for the emergence of anti-trust laws, early progressive era reforms as well as Keynesianism? Do people just see it as a trick or graft by government (if so, what was in it for officials - why did they peruse this)? Or do people see it as a wrongheaded but sincere attempt to manage or ease some actual problems in society/the economy?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMvVmlDN0nY

[liberlict]

Personally I try not to think in Hegelian terms if I can help it. Maybe there's still a trace, I suppose. I don't think Capital is the abstract subject of human development or anything like that. At least I don't think I do...

A master is just somebody who has the power to tell you what to do even if you don't want to do it. If there is no democracy, there is some kind of servitude. I suppose we could draw the line at corporeal punishment or something, but that's arbitrary. I think it's the power they have over your activity that makes them the 'master'. Clearly, in practice there is an unequal power relation.

I wouldn't say I take those terms so literally that I'm not using them partially for rhetorical effect, though. ;)

It's really hard for me to talk generally about capitalism and communism, because neither of them are in practice constants; they are variables. Capitalism is not the same in Canada as it is in Rwanda (if you like to call that capitalism). So I'll just speak about my own surroundings. I have a job that I like as a sole trader. And if I ever get bored of it, I can enjoy a comfortable life on welfare. So yeah, I'm not exactly pestered with masters. If I was I'd say i'd be one of you.

[argeiphontes]

the worker would be free to take her or his case to a private arbitration firm

Wolves guarding the sheep. Sounds completely free to me. What could possibly go wrong?

[argeiphontes]

I have a job that I like as a sole trader.

Equities? I used to be an IT guy at an equities firm. So unfortunately I didn't make bank while I was there.

Unless you mean sole-proprietor of a firm that sells things, in which case, more power to you. The sad reality is that the only person free in capitalism is the self-employed. And even then, there are levels of freedom.

"Money is the root of all freedom." -- argeiphontes ;)

[liberlict]

Equities? I used to be an IT guy at an equities firm. So unfortunately I didn't make bank while I was there.

Unless you mean sole-proprietor of a firm that sells things, in which case, more power to you. The sad reality is that the only person free in capitalism is the self-employed. And even then, there are levels of freedom.

"Money is the root of all freedom." -- argeiphontes ;)

I'm a freelance software developer as well as a database engineer with a major IT firm. Starts with an "I" and is a three letter acronym.

Differences aside, I think political freedom only comes with an absence of government. We all seem to agree on that. Personal freedom is a fun subject to get into though. I have friends who I believe are enslaved to their wives. I call them 'purse holders'. The fact that they don't get offended just shows how decimated their self esteem really is.

[allixpeeke]

Apologies to all. It appears that I included the wrong URL in a link I provided above, and it further appears that I don't have the power to edit the post in order to correct the URL for some reason. The correct URL can be found here:

The Address of the Southern and Western Liberty Convention, Held at Cincinnati, June 11 and 12, 1845, To the People of the United States. (http://alexpeak.com/twr/libertyparty/saw/)

[allixpeeke]

Wolves guarding the sheep. Sounds completely free to me. What could possibly go wrong?

Thank you for your question. I'm glad you brought this up, because, when I was transitioning from minarchist to anarchist back in 2007, arbitration was one of the few areas where I had real concern. I maintained these concerns until I recognised that statist adjudication is never going to be better than stateless adjudication. At absolute worst, stateless adjudication would only ever be as bad a statist adjudication; at best, it would be infinitely fairer.

Under the existence of government, we have the wolves and sheep problem, since governments monopolise power. One way in which they do this is to create their own systems of adjudication that invariably tend to favour the state and its interests over the interests of justice, social welfare, liberty, &c.

This reminds me of a quote from page 41 of Linda & Morris Tannehill's The Market for Liberty (http://alexpeak.com/twr/tmfl/ch4.html#ex6):


The majority of people firmly believe that we must have a government to protect us from domestic and foreign aggression. But government is a coercive monopoly which must demand sacrifices from its citizens. It is a repository of power without external check and cannot be permanently restrained. It attracts the worst kind of men to its ranks, shackles progress, forces its citizens to act against their own judgment, and causes recurring internal and external strife by its coercive existence. In view of all this, the question becomes not, “Who will protect us from aggression?” but “Who will protect us from the governmental ‘protectors’?” The contradiction of hiring an agency of institutionalized violence to protect us from violence is even more foolhardy than buying a cat to protect one’s parakeet.

By contrast, if you and your neighbour hire me to arbitrate a dispute between you and her, I will have every incentive to ensure that I provide the fairest ruling possible, wishing as I do not to be eschewed by future customers (or ostracised by society).

Let's say I give a blatantly unfair ruling, and you bring this fact to public awareness. Would people generally want to hire me after that? If I gain a reputation for handing out unfair rulings in the settling of disputes, not only will just people not want to hire me to arbitrate (knowing that I have a tendency to hand out unfair rulings), but even unjust people will want to avoid hiring me, since it would shine a public light on their shadiness.

To put it another way, if I gain a bad reputation, even shady customers would avoid hiring me for fear of it getting out that said potential customer was shady enough to wish to hire my services; and obviously those potential customers who are in the right would have no desire to hire me since they, above all, want the fairest rulings possible.

If my livelihood is dependent upon giving fair rulings, then providing unfair rulings would be completely foolish.

Let's contrast that once again with the state. When the state provides unfair rulings, which it does regularly, judges are insulated. They don't face much competition because government courts are provided, by the state, a status over private arbitration firms. In other words, statist adjudication is a monopoly. This, alone, provides too much job security to government judges. But, the matter is far worse, because government judges, when placed in power, tend to stay in power for quite a long time. In these united states, it varies from state to state; I think, if I recall correctly, that it's fourteen years between elections for judges here in Maryland--far too long for the voting public to remember or care.

When I first read about stateless arbitration back in 2006, I immediately feared that bribery might be its undoing, until I remembered that bribery happens under statism. It would be foolhardy to assume that bribery would only be an issue for anarchists and not for statists, or that the problem of bribery lends itself to the state instead of to anarchy. (Even in an Orwellian world, where all property belongs to the state, and the members of the Outer Party and the Proles have but few possessions, bribery could still take place--in the form of sexual favours. No imaginable system is free from the problem of bribery; the only question is: which imaginable system can handle the problem most effectively.)

In either a liberal democracy or an anarchy, should it be publicly discovered that bribery has influenced the ruling of an arbitrator, the repercussions would be quick--probably immediate in the case of the private, stateless arbitrator. But, what about those situations where the bribery is only suspected, and not proved? The government judge will experience no loss of employment, no decrease in pay, since there is no evidence that the government judge has betrayed his social function. Contrariwise, even if there is a hint of suspicion that a private arbitrator is handing out unfair rulings, that can have a pretty strong impact upon the arbitrator's livelihood, since no one, neither the just nor the unjust, will be inclined to hire her services. This would be the case, not only in the event that consumers/society suspect bribery to be afoot, but even in those situations where consumers/society believe that no bribery is afoot, and that the cause of the unfair rulings is merely incompetence on the part of the arbitrator. Either way, a private arbitrator's livelihood in a stateless society is dependent upon public perception that her or his rulings are fair, unbiased, and just. And that is why I believe arbitration in an anarchy will always outperform government-monopoly courts, regardless of what form of government we are discussing.

Thanks again for the question. I appreciate having the opportunity to respond.

Respectfully yours,
Alex

P.S. This actually doesn't even scratch the surface, when one considers that the vast majority of statist laws infringe upon individual sovereignty and are, therefore, intrinsically unfair. One obvious example that jumps to mind is drug laws. Another is heterosexist marriage laws. This also only scratches the surface when one considers that the U. S. government has an arbitrarily (no pun intended) defined Supreme Court, from which no further appeals can be made--a problem that would not exist in an anarchy.

[helot]

I'm not really trying to legitimize what's currently going on in the world, or say that I'm ok with crimes committed by the early industrialists. This is the first time I've heard of enclosures, so I can't really comment on them, but I have no reason for disbelieving what you say happened. Violations of property rights were tragically common in the past, and they still go on today, saying that the belief in private property is to be blamed for people violating it is illogical though. Most of the land we now live on has been stolen from some people from others and it is pretty impossible to definitively show that some land you want to homestead doesn't really belong to someone else, who doesn't even know it. The only logical way to go about it is that property claims are valid, unless someone can show that they're not. Much like you're supposed to be innocent until proven guilty in a court.

None of its valid under your own NAP because it can all be traced back to violence and coercion. Every incidence of a capitalist appropriating the product of the workers' labour because the worker lacks what's necessary to produce occured only because the workers were forced into such a position of servitude.

Under your own NAP every employer i've had has wrongfully stolen my product from me because the only reason i submitted was because of a condition that was a result of past violence. This would be the case for all workers as well. I'd proclaim that such injustice is so extreme and holistic that it cannot be measured in a nominal value and thus considering present conditions have occured due to the destruction of the commons the only recourse to correct this injustice is the establishment of the commons in everything, in other words the complete overthrow of private property and thus capitalism.


Ofc i don't abide by the NAP or anything. I don't subscribe to notions of legitimacy because it's little more than an ideological talking point.

[argeiphontes]

@allixpeeke: I'll respond later when I'm in more of a thinking mood. Thanks for the detailed response. Just off the top of my head, though: 1) you assume that private power is somehow more amenable to influence than government, I would say that's market fetishism that ignores systemic effects and inbalance of power between corporations and individuals. 2) arbitration goes on now. corporations force you to choose it when you sign certain contracts. in left-rothbardianism, corporations would just force you to accept the jurisdiction of certain firms that catered to their interests. If you think the market would prevent it in L-R, then why doesn't it prevent it now? Find a credit card that doesn't force you to accept arbitration or change jurisdictions to their home territory? How would consumers go about creating that change thru free market means? A single customer means nothing to them, they will not negotiate and that's that.

Sorry if I'm off base, I'll read the text in a bit :)

[Jimmie Higgins]

Why is it in the interest of the government to promote "corporatism"? What are the interests of a government?

How does arbitration work, how do legal contracts work, without laws? If there are laws and contrast, what's to keep people from just wiping their ass with it? (On a side note about this, why would arbitration firms care to be as fair to people with no money than people who have lots, can hire expensive negotiators, etc? They might get a bad reputation... But only among those who don't have money anyway. So wouldn't it just break down negotiations because the company would want to go to the arbitrator who favors the rich and the workers would want an arbitrator who had a more even-handed? What happens if workers consider the arbitration decision to be illegitimate? Then would the bosses hire enforcers... If so, why go to arbitration... Cut out the middleman and just use enforcers without arbitration?)

What happens in a true free market when 3,000 people march to mass-occupy and squat an unused building like occupy protesters tried? What happens if homeless people just begin squatting property? If private companies just hire private forces, could they just massacre all the squatters or protesters? Why not... If a security firm did this it would be a selling point for them and their effectiveness to other companies that needed to compel people to do something... The security firm would keep the firm that hired them confidential of course.

And if private companies have the ability to enforce contracts they created with hired force, then isn't the firm or head of the company just taking on the role of a government? So isn't it just a mini state ruling over their chunk of private property like a feudal princedom?

[tooAlive]

Why is it in the interest of the government to promote "corporatism"? What are the interests of a government?

Power. Power and money.


How does arbitration work, how do legal contracts work, without laws? If there are laws and contrast, what's to keep people from just wiping their ass with it? (On a side note about this, why would arbitration firms care to be as fair to people with no money than people who have lots, can hire expensive negotiators, etc? They might get a bad reputation... But only among those who don't have money anyway. So wouldn't it just break down negotiations because the company would want to go to the arbitrator who favors the rich and the workers would want an arbitrator who had a more even-handed? What happens if workers consider the arbitration decision to be illegitimate? Then would the bosses hire enforcers... If so, why go to arbitration... Cut out the middleman and just use enforcers without arbitration?)

No laws? Hmm.. I can't imagine that would be a good thing.


What happens in a true free market when 3,000 people march to mass-occupy and squat an unused building like occupy protesters tried? What happens if homeless people just begin squatting property? If private companies just hire private forces, could they just massacre all the squatters or protesters? Why not... If a security firm did this it would be a selling point for them and their effectiveness to other companies that needed to compel people to do something... The security firm would keep the firm that hired them confidential of course.

Well, those unused buildings belong to someone or a corporation. So by law, the occupiers were trespassing and breaking the law that enforces private property rights. Same way it stops 3000 occupiers from occupying your house.


And if private companies have the ability to enforce contracts they created with hired force, then isn't the firm or head of the company just taking on the role of a government? So isn't it just a mini state ruling over their chunk of private property like a feudal princedom?

No. You may enter an employment contract with a business, but you have the ability to quit and go work somewhere else or start your own company/sole proprietorship. You can't opt out of a government.

I'm not quite a libertarian or anarcho-anything. so those answers may not resonate with others.

[Sinister Intents]

Power. Power and money.

Money can be burned easily, and it'd be good to keep warm with. Power? I don't like people treating me like there inferior because of a lower economic position. Let's get rid of money, it leads to a shitty hierarchy that causes more problems than it attempts to fix.


No laws? Hmm.. I can't imagine that would be a good thing.

The commune doesn't need laws, but there will be rules. Laws are used by a state to legalize their actions and to maintain organized oppression and organized crime and to maintain class rule. The commune's rules will be decided in a democratic fashion like everything else in the commune. No laws to restrict people is fine because the idea of private property is eliminated and the whole idea of property is the root of a lot of property related crimes.


Well, those unused buildings belong to someone or a corporation. So by law, the occupiers were trespassing and breaking the law that enforces private property rights. Same way it stops 3000 occupiers from occupying your house.

Those unused buildings will be put to good use after the revolution, and they'll get fixed up before being used for a better purpose. They'll be owned and used collectively and that will benefit all. Plus I don't think anyone wants your home because that is your personal property, and not private property like a factory or a machine, your home isn't capital to the capitalists. Property is theft, and slavery is murder.


No. You may enter an employment contract with a business, but you have the ability to quit and go work somewhere else or start your own company/sole proprietorship. You can't opt out of a government.

Tell me how easy that is for you, it was a fucking pain to start up this concrete business, and I've been denied jobs because of my Gothic appearance. I opt out of government. I don't need a government to decide what is right and wrong, what is east and west. Fuck governments, people don't need them. The whole idea of government and states are logical fallacies, they're unnecessary and counterintuitive to liberty and freedom.


I'm not quite a libertarian or anarcho-anything. so those answers may not resonate with others.

I think you're a capitalist, and yeah doesn't resonate well sorry.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Power. Power and money.Power to do what?


No laws? Hmm.. I can't imagine that would be a good thing.If you have laws, then you have a government; you need armed men to then also ensure the laws are actually meaningful. Contracts and laws are just pieces of paper without an actual material force to back them up.


Well, those unused buildings belong to someone or a corporation. So by law, the occupiers were trespassing and breaking the law that enforces private property rights. Same way it stops 3000 occupiers from occupying your house.But law doesn't enforce property rights, armed men do. If all force is privatized, then if I can hire 5 armed people and someone else can hire 100 armed people, then no matter what any law says, the 100 people get their way.

Might makes right - it may not be "just" or "fair" but it's how all societies function. So the capitalist economic might is utilized to monopolize might of "force" and then to codify their rules as "laws".


No. You may enter an employment contract with a business, but you have the ability to quit and go work somewhere else or start your own company/sole proprietorship. You can't opt out of a government.No, if you are not a capitalist, if you don't have vast sums of money at your disposal then you can not opt out of having to go to the rich to seek wage labor. And of course you can opt-out of a particular government just as you can opt out of a particular job... it's called migration and being an ex-pat.

[liberlict]

Personally, I wouldn't say bosses are like "masters" - we are not tied to a feudal estate or a slave-owner -- it's more like Capital is the master of us all. In those earlier societies, the induvidual master or feudal estate controlled people's ability to support themselves; today it's not single bosses, but the whole of capitalist relations. Although I think you can argue that slave-caters and floggings still exist, but in different forms, generally fully developed capitalism doesn't need that sort of one-on-one repression (again it does happen and prisons are a pretty obvious example). It's like the whole world is one big plantation or estate and so they don't need to flog us to keep us in line because there's nowhere to run outside of capitalist relations: we need money to survive and the concentration of wealth, exploitation, etc keep us "choosing" to sell or labor rather than be beaten by police for squatting and/or starve/go homeless.

I'd say it's quite a stretch to say that workers are like "masters" at all though. First, feudal guilds are not like modern workers in terms of their economic relationships and the sorts of politics that tend to emerge from either group. Second, even well paid workers are still workers just as a slave or serf with more privileges than on average (house slaves, for example) is still a slave or serf! Capitalists buy our labor power (not the results of what we actually produce) so even better paid workers are not "masters" of their boss, their boss just isn't able to exploit quite as much from those workers.

I still have a lot of trouble grasping this. It must be my myopia, because 'The Garbage Disposal Unit' has been patiently trying to explain this to me too. I just don't get it. You say 'capital is our master'. My approach to reckoning with this is to take capital out of the equation. A 'moneyless economy'. What would this solve? There would still be scarcity, all the same productive cut and thrust involved in distributing goods and services to an ever growing world of people. People still have to get up in the morning and do shit jobs. There's still going to be a natural inequality off abilities which freedom will only accentuate. To follow this hyperbolic 'master/slave' analogy, there's still going to be masters and slaves, in this abstract sense.

The wage slave terminology ignores some obvious freedom that workers have; like they can sell their labour somewhere else. They can start their own company. They can withdraw from capitalist relations and start a commune (like the Amish).

[argeiphontes]

The bolded part? You could say that Capital is the true subject of its own development. Rich and poor serve its development by virtue of its imposition of its logic of growth and expansion on all of us. Just like you could say that in a beehive, all the bees, even the queen, just serve the needs of the hive. The hive is what truly lives and develops.

Socialism will be a Copernican Revolution of sorts where humanity will be able to make its own economic decisions instead of serving the impersonal master. Individuals will truly be able to develop as well.

(IIRC see Meszaros)

[liberlict]

The bolded part? You could say that Capital is the true subject of its own development. Rich and poor serve its development by virtue of its imposition of its logic of growth and expansion on all of us. Just like you could say that in a beehive, all the bees, even the queen, just serve the needs of the hive. The hive is what truly lives and develops.

Socialism will be a Copernican Revolution of sorts where humanity will be able to make its own economic decisions instead of serving the impersonal master. Individuals will truly be able to develop as well.

(IIRC see Meszaros)

Which, ( I googled) :( (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%A9sz%C3%A1ros) ?

Sorry for the glib reply, I'm working.

[argeiphontes]

Which, ( I googled) :( (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%A9sz%C3%A1ros) ?

Sorry for the glib reply, I'm working.

Sorry, Istvan Meszaros. I thought this kind of idea of capital as its own subject came from Istvan Meszaros. I could be wrong since it's been a while since I've done any in-depth reading about this. Maybe he's just where I first heard mention of this subject/object inversion. Or maybe I just pulled it out of my ass.

Looks like this is related to Reification (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reification_%28Marxism%29) and Alienation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation).

For something truly incomprehensible, check out this article on Value as Subject in Capitalism:

http://canononline.org/archives/current-issue-2/value-as-subject-the-unilateral-capital-relation/

edit: So now you can have ideas like "socialism frees the rich as much as the poor" at the expense of some of the common-sense idea that evil is both systemic and individual. (My first question would be the status of the individual in all of this, but these are just vague notions right now... I might be doing a little reading ;) )

[Jimmie Higgins]

I still have a lot of trouble grasping this. It must be my myopia, because 'The Garbage Disposal Unit' has been patiently trying to explain this to me too. I just don't get it.Well GDU is more eloquent than I am, so I don't know if I'll be able to at least clarify this perspective any better, but I'll give it a shot.


You say 'capital is our master'. My approach to reckoning with this is to take capital out of the equation. A 'moneyless economy'. What would this solve? There would still be scarcity, all the same productive cut and thrust involved in distributing goods and services to an ever growing world of people. People still have to get up in the morning and do shit jobs. There's still going to be a natural inequality off abilities which freedom will only accentuate. To follow this hyperbolic 'master/slave' analogy, there's still going to be masters and slaves, in this abstract sense. Well part of the "all of capital is our master" analogy is historical because in many places, coming out of feudal relations where people had to belong to some kind of estate and under a Lord/Master, laws were passed as people were driven off the land requiring them to work for a master - this might be as an apprentice or it could be as a worker in a rural mill. So without land (and a Feudal master) people had to seek a capitalist master or else they could be rounded up as a vagabond, put into prison or servitude forcibly. This is what it was to be a proletarian at a time when capitalist relations existed, but were not dominant... so these relations had to be enforced in a way.

But in a general way what I mean by this analogy is that in feudalism people had to have an individual master in order to have access to land and hence the means of production - farming. In exchange for use of this land and protection from bandits, the Lords took payment in Labor or a portion of what you farmed - this is a direct form of exploitation. Under capitalism where these relations have been generalized, people without their own privite fortunes or investment capital don't have to seek out a specific Lord or Master to have access to the means of production and therefore a means for their own survival, instead, the need to pay rent, to get food, etc, means we MUST turn to some wage-labor (and exploration) in order to secure survival for ourselves.


The wage slave terminologyThere are some general parallels between wage-labor (wage-slavery) and chattle slavery in that it's an exploitative relationship, but chattle and wage work are different so I wasn't trying to draw a direct link between the two. I meant "master" in terms of a personal connection to a particular boss whereas in mature capitalism there isn't a "master" relationship to a single boss, but a general "master" relationship to needing money to get the necessities of life (have access to means of production).


ignores some obvious freedom that workers have; like they can sell their labour somewhere else. They can start their own company. They can withdraw from capitalist relations and start a commune (like the Amish).However is it "freedom" if a slave could choose which plantation they are sold to, is it freedom if pesants could pick one Estate or another? No, workers have the freedom to sell to one boss who wants to exploit them or another. Since all these firms and bosses compete on the basis of trying to extract more value for less cost than the other firms/bosses, since the ability of people to just go out to make their own living on some land has been eliminated (common lands fenced-in, sold off, enclosed), there is no "choice" in a general sense. This is what I mean by "capital" being like the master of us all.

And the existence of small communes (well first of all most require some start-up capital to purchase land, infrastructure, etc so it's not outside of capitalist relations any more than when you go home and do the dishes for free) are just small exceptions to the rule. The fact that some slaves were freed or some people purchased slaves in order to free them did not negate the fact of slavery as a whole.

The "freedom" to choose one boss or another does not negate the boss-worker relationship.

[liberlict]

Sorry, Istvan Meszaros. I thought this kind of idea of capital as its own subject came from Istvan Meszaros. I could be wrong since it's been a while since I've done any in-depth reading about this. Maybe he's just where I first heard mention of this subject/object inversion. Or maybe I just pulled it out of my ass.

Looks like this is related to Reification (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reification_%28Marxism%29) and Alienation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation).

For something truly incomprehensible, check out this article on Value as Subject in Capitalism:

http://canononline.org/archives/current-issue-2/value-as-subject-the-unilateral-capital-relation/

edit: So now you can have ideas like "socialism frees the rich as much as the poor" at the expense of some of the common-sense idea that evil is both systemic and individual. (My first question would be the status of the individual in all of this, but these are just vague notions right now... I might be doing a little reading ;) )

Yes, "free him" (the capitalist) from his contemptible self I presume. :grin: Actually I was reading something by Trotsky the other day where he talks about socialism, and how it will produce a generally superior type of human in just about every sense (morally, mentally, physically). Such was the thought behind my now signature.

I just don't know where Marx gets the starting point from? He starts with these two oppositions; the working class and the owning class(of the MOP). What's the reason to start with these two classes (in the Aristotelian sense, i.e., categories), and duel them together as they are the causa sui of all that goes down? You could begin these binary battles anywhere---men vs women, east/west, black/white. Then 'reality' becomes a 'superstructure' of whatever 'base' you have chosen.

I imagine reality as an innumerable multitude of interrelating forces that come together to produce the 'now'; Using the beehive analogy, it is not just a two-classes, master slave dynamic going on. It's a finely tuned evolutionary niche that could not have been consciously planned.

[argeiphontes]

I just don't know where Marx gets the starting point from? He starts with these two oppositions; the working class and the owning class(of the MOP). What's the reason to start with these two classes (in the Aristotelian sense, i.e., categories), and duel them together as they are the causa sui of all that goes down? You could begin these binary battles anywhere---men vs women, east/west, black/white. Then 'reality' becomes a 'superstructure' of whatever 'base' you have chosen.

Well, we are biological creatures of need and greed. So Marx begins with our productive activity, which takes place in the economy. Unlike gender, geography, and race, everybody has some role in the economy and these roles define our activity and cause conflict and conquest. The exact scope of all this is a subject of debate, but it seems pretty evident to me. Maybe it's just because I've had this general viewpoint for so long. And economic roles have always revolved around the relationship to the means of production.

Now, I would never say that the economic determines everything about society, like some historical materialists might. For example, I would never say that gender discrimination or racism are somehow functions of capitalist exploitation and will magically disappear along with capitalism. I would admit that there is probably some relationship, but it's not that clear cut and should be studied by sociologists or whoever is interested. So I don't think it's some totalizing universal analysis that can explain everything, but it does a good job of explaining economic relationships and much social conflict, since conflict tends to center around the economic.

(I would say that gender, race, sexuality, etc. all have their valid viewpoints of analysis and should be looked at on their own terms.)

[argeiphontes]

I imagine reality as an innumerable multitude of interrelating forces that come together to produce the 'now'; Using the beehive analogy, it is not just a two-classes, master slave dynamic going on. It's a finely tuned evolutionary niche that could not have been consciously planned.

The individual is embedded in a matrix of complex determinants. ;)

[AnaRchic]

What we as libertarian socialists really oppose is the private 'ownership' of capital. For the sake of clarity I will define capital as follows; the individual appropriation of an area of land or a productive resource requiring the socialization of labor to generate productive output. Outside of this we have nothing against whatever else you want to call "private property".

Even in an 'anarcho'-capitalist utopia, this private appropriation of capital would necessarily result in coercion on a massive scale; which is precisely why the capitalist state arose in the first place. The consequence of this private appropriation of capital would be the monopolization of the earth and the means of production into the hands of a very few, thereby creating a ruling class. This class of people are characterized by their control of capital; they are capitalists. The rest of us, without this capital, have no access to productive output aside from laboring for the owners, who in turn give us just enough to survive and be retained while we are considered of value. The monetary system creates a means of allocation that, in conjunction with the legal system and state coercion, effectively forces workers to earn these imaginary symbols of exchange.

My point being, in order to keep workers working for capitalists, to avoid workers ignoring their property titles and utilizing capital for themselves and defending it against the ass who claims himself 'owner', it is necessary to employ coercion on a societal level. Anarcho-capitalists do not consequently oppose the state, they just favor privatizing it.

So what you end up having is a society where all capital is centralized in the hands of a few and these few employ the most violent individuals in society to systematically repress anyone who interferes with their capital. Instead of a state you'd have mercenary corporations who are bound by no law whatsoever. Oh wait I forgot, ancaps favor privatizing law too. So real, none of you 'anarcho'-capitalists in any way oppose the state.

All I ask of you is to go back to calling yourselves what you are; extreme liberals. You are the very opposite of an Anarchist. We oppose all forms of social hierarchy and, as I have demonstrated, capitalism is inherently hierarchical as a consequence of necessarily emergent class divisions and the need of systematic societal coercion.

To this we counter-pose possession, characterized by occupancy and use. So if you build a house and farm 10 acres yourself and with your family, that can be considered yours. Until land or a productive resource is utilized, it is recognized as part of the commons. Any individual or group is welcome to utilize it. If some farmers wanted to pool their resources and effort and farm 40 acres of land, that land that they farm belongs to them, until such a time comes as they cease to occupy or use it, then it reverts once again to the commons. Anything you occupy or use is considered legitimate possession, not to be interfered with. So we propose the communalisation of capital and the individual sovereignty of possession. Within such a policy, all socialized labor must of necessity be truly voluntary, with individuals who wish to utilize it coming together to accomplish a common task, rather than subordinating themselves to someone in consequence of a forcible denial of access to capital.

[argeiphontes]

The individual is embedded in a matrix of complex determinants. ;)



I imagine reality as an innumerable multitude of interrelating forces that come together to produce the 'now'; Using the beehive analogy, it is not just a two-classes, master slave dynamic going on. It's a finely tuned evolutionary niche that could not have been consciously planned.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Bourdieu

Yeah so do I :)

[liberlict]

Well part of the "all of capital is our master" analogy is historical because in many places, coming out of feudal relations where people had to belong to some kind of estate and under a Lord/Master, laws were passed as people were driven off the land requiring them to work for a master - this might be as an apprentice or it could be as a worker in a rural mill. So without land (and a Feudal master) people had to seek a capitalist master or else they could be rounded up as a vagabond, put into prison or servitude forcibly. This is what it was to be a proletarian at a time when capitalist relations existed, but were not dominant... so these relations had to be enforced in a way.

But in a general way what I mean by this analogy is that in feudalism people had to have an individual master in order to have access to land and hence the means of production - farming. In exchange for use of this land and protection from bandits, the Lords took payment in Labor or a portion of what you farmed - this is a direct form of exploitation. Under capitalism where these relations have been generalized, people without their own privite fortunes or investment capital don't have to seek out a specific Lord or Master to have access to the means of production and therefore a means for their own survival, instead, the need to pay rent, to get food, etc, means we MUST turn to some wage-labor (and exploration) in order to secure survival for ourselves.

There are some general parallels between wage-labor (wage-slavery) and chattle slavery in that it's an exploitative relationship, but chattle and wage work are different so I wasn't trying to draw a direct link between the two. I meant "master" in terms of a personal connection to a particular boss whereas in mature capitalism there isn't a "master" relationship to a single boss, but a general "master" relationship to needing money to get the necessities of life (have access to means of production).



Even to accept this analysis, I don't see how communism is going to lift us out of these servile relations. Production and distribution without money or markets is going to have to utilize a degree of planning, and this planning will have to be delegated to some kind of planning agency. There can never be complete 'economic democracy', where every person gets to vote on economic decisions--- think of the paralyzing bureaucracy involved in achieving that. So what you end up with is economic power concentrated into a relatively small unit of people. Much like communists critique of capitalism. Here I'm merely restating Hayek's argument in 'The Road to Serfdom'.



However is it "freedom" if a slave could choose which plantation they are sold to, is it freedom if pesants could pick one Estate or another? No, workers have the freedom to sell to one boss who wants to exploit them or another. Since all these firms and bosses compete on the basis of trying to extract more value for less cost than the other firms/bosses, since the ability of people to just go out to make their own living on some land has been eliminated (common lands fenced-in, sold off, enclosed), there is no "choice" in a general sense. This is what I mean by "capital" being like the master of us all.

The "freedom" to choose one boss or another does not negate the boss-worker relationship.



Some people undoubtedly have more freedom than others. I won't quibble on that at all. This doesn't seem like such a massive problem to me, though, in the context of the world we live in. Solving all the social and health problems in Africa, fascism in the Middle East, and mafia economics in Russia, South America, etc., these are the immediately moral problems around us.

These places need to be properly integrated into the world economy (which is I think the defining characteristic of our times). Once we get to that point it will be a good time to talk about political and economic arrangements that maximize human freedom to it's practicable limit.

[liberlict]

Well, we are biological creatures of need and greed. So Marx begins with our productive activity, which takes place in the economy.

and these roles define our activity and cause conflict and conquest. The exact scope of all this is a subject of debate, but it seems pretty evident to me. Maybe it's just because I've had this general viewpoint for so long. And economic roles have always revolved around the relationship to the means of production.



Interestingly, Mises starts from a similar axiom. He uses 'human action' as the deductive starting point for sociological analysis. I,e., humans 'act', to produce no doubt, but also in whatever other un-guessable ways that make economics so hard to reason about. You can kind of hazard guesses based on observed patterns of behavior based on past events, but we can never, for example, recreate the same conditions that caused the 2007 stock market crash. Mises doesn't even venture into a qualitative theory of human nature or philosophical questions about the role money to the human psyche, like Marx did.

[liberlict]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Bourdieu

Yeah so do I :)

Very interesting. I've said around here a bunch of times that you need social capital before you can even think about economic systems. I think considering various 'types' of capital is a very good way of reasoning about our surroundings. Max Weber's work on the subject is interesting too.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Even to accept this analysis, I don't see how communism is going to lift us out of these servile relations.The example is an attempt to illustrate the difference in the kinds of exploitative arrangements - they are exploitative, but it's easier for people to pinpoint the immediate source of their exploitation when it's someone coming and taking a portion of your labor product or your labor directly. But I don't see how abolishing and replacing the present arrangement wouldn't change "servile relations". If slaves took over a plantation and then collectively prioritized what to grow and how to deal with the necessary work to do it, I doubt anyone would say that the relationships of people growing food for themselves under their own management is the same thing as a slave plantation.


Production and distribution without money or markets is going to have to utilize a degree of planning, and this planning will have to be delegated to some kind of planning agency. There can never be complete 'economic democracy', where every person gets to vote on economic decisions--- think of the paralyzing bureaucracy involved in achieving that.I'd disagree and I think the idea of bureaucracy or delegation always being a relationship of a detached unelected group is abstract. Democracy, proletarian democracy, would be how any delegates, representatives, or "bureaucracy" is kept subbordinate to the working class. People would not need to vote on every specific thing, but I think it would be necessary in the early stages (i.e. when specialized bureaucrats might still be necessary for practical reasons) for there to be priorities set democratically and for any delegates or bureaucrats to be immediately accountable and recallable. It's actually a big concern on the radical left - particularly since it was the bureaucracy which was able to push for counter-revolution in the 1920s in Russia. But in my view, we can't answer the question of bureaucracy without looking at the question of working class power - the bureaucracy in Russia was only able to act as they did because of a vacuum due to the working class being pretty weak after years of war and instability and famine. Anyway, this is just to say that it's a concern, but I don't think it's inevitable and the point would be that any beurocracy is subbordinated to working class power just as today beurocracy is subbordinated to capitalist power - i.e. they either work for private organizations, or they work in government and whatnot but they are still under capitalist pressures for "fiscal responsibility" (i.e. lowering wages), or attracting investments from capitalists. Capitalist bureaucracies can develop their own logic and goals to a limited extent, but these are not "outside" the relations of the system that they mange - capitalism. So they might protect themselves to a certain extent, but at the end of the day, if they do not provide some use to capitalism, then they can not function.


So what you end up with is economic power concentrated into a relatively small unit of people. Much like communists critique of capitalism. Here I'm merely restating Hayek's argument in 'The Road to Serfdom'. I think this is a staw-man. Hayek was talking about these things in the context of capitalist countries like the UK and countries (i'd argue state-capitalist, but let's just say, non-free market) like the USSR. Their concern was how to ensure "prosperity" but really this means ensure economic growth in competition with eachother, not the well being of people generally let alone the self-rule of the working class. So "beurocratic logic" is not something on top of society, but part of it and in these examples, their logic was how to ensure growth in national economies.

Generally what's missing from the whole discussion (at least Hayek as handed down to me from debates with supporters of those ideas) is the question of class power and class interests. If a working class is not organizing things democratically -- who is and what are their interests? Socialism can not be made by unaccountable national bureaucrats appealing to the "common good". I believe it can be made by revolutionary workers who organize their own defense and their own collective management and goals of production.


Some people undoubtedly have more freedom than others. I won't quibble on that at all. This doesn't seem like such a massive problem to me, though, in the context of the world we live in. Solving all the social and health problems in Africa, fascism in the Middle East, and mafia economics in Russia, South America, etc., these are the immediately moral problems around us. I don't think these are moral problems at all because what people see as moral or not depends on their perspective, personal and in terms of class. For our present rulers, it's "immoral" if cartels kill economic rivals, but drone bombings or world wars - also based on competition between rivals - are moral crusades to "protect our way of life".

I also think it's sort of like putting a daisy on top of a turd pile for people to worry about cronyism or corruption in a system based on getting money at the expense of others. It's like wanting to fish for tuna with mile-wide nets but then complaining when dolphins get caught up in it... well the problem isn't that the fishermen are too lax, it's a problem with the whole method.


These places need to be properly integrated into the world economy (which is I think the defining characteristic of our times). Once we get to that point it will be a good time to talk about political and economic arrangements that maximize human freedom to it's practicable limit.I think this is a strange condition to make. First I don't think it's possible because I think capitalism is a system that requires certain limits on freedom and also, politically, needs various kinds of oppressions to keep people in line, divided, self-disciplining, and so on. Second, I don't think that being "integrated into the world system" doesn't already describe the world by and large aside from a tiny few regions. Africa is integrated into the world economy, China is the engine of contemporary capitalism, etc. Most of the newly emerging conflicts and social problems in Africa are due to a massive urbanization/prolitarization process ("development") over the last few generations which have severed people from agricultural life, caused massive demographic changes, created inequality in places where it hadn't really been known before.

In short: the battle for democracy in society and the battle for worker's democracy are two sides of the same thing. African capitalism can not solve African problems because most contemporary problems there are due to changes created by capitalism. African rulers want to attract investment so they have to boost their selling points (such as cheap labor) and this means shooting miners if they strike, maintaining camps for Zimbabwean migrants in South Africa, maintaining inequality, etc. When investments from China or the US require putting down strikers and rebels or making structural adjustments that are unpopular, then police states or dictatorships are always waiting in the wings if other methods are too ineffective in creating space for "development".

[Libertarian Punk]

My question is, how do you reconcile that belief with a belief in the free market? I mean historically the free market has resulted in long hours in dangerous jobs that result in worker injuries and deaths, unsafe working conditions, covering up harmful side effects of pharmaceuticals, unsafe waste disposal that has poisoned drinking water, and numerous other things that harm people all in the name of increasing profit?

The answer to that is extremely simple. The thing Communists/Socialists/Any left winger really doesn't separate the idea of Capitalism and Corporatism. in a Capitalist society you work you way up and fight to be the best. You work to earn, you work to provide, you work to be someone. In a Corporatist society (something currently in the U.S., also used in Nazi Germany) The market is restricted and held down by Governments and Corporations to hurt the small businesses as well as the working man. This also happened in the Soviet Union as well as China. In a Corporatist society, Capitalism is turned into a Corrupt little shell of itself, as the country inches more and more to the left. This is also the result of Socialist countries as well. But the way we live in a Capitalist or free market society is the fact that Capitalist societies are all about success. As is the idea of libertarianism and Freedom.

[argeiphontes]

My question is, how do you reconcile that belief with a belief in the free market? I mean historically the free market has resulted in long hours in dangerous jobs that result in worker injuries and deaths, unsafe working conditions, covering up harmful side effects of pharmaceuticals, unsafe waste disposal that has poisoned drinking water, and numerous other things that harm people all in the name of increasing profit?

The answer to that is extremely simple. The thing Communists/Socialists/Any left winger really doesn't separate the idea of Capitalism and Corporatism. in a Capitalist society you work you way up and fight to be the best. You work to earn, you work to provide, you work to be someone. In a Corporatist society (something currently in the U.S., also used in Nazi Germany) The market is restricted and held down by Governments and Corporations to hurt the small businesses as well as the working man. This also happened in the Soviet Union as well as China. In a Corporatist society, Capitalism is turned into a Corrupt little shell of itself, as the country inches more and more to the left. This is also the result of Socialist countries as well. But the way we live in a Capitalist or free market society is the fact that Capitalist societies are all about success. As is the idea of libertarianism and Freedom.

You're close but you don't win the cigar. It's not the *market* that causes harsh labor conditions, it's the social relations of capitalism. Private ownership of the means of production causes the extraction of surplus labor by capitalists, who naturally, because of the market, want to extract as much possible.

People will love this analogy, so I'm going to go with it ;) Saying that "the market" is the source of exploitation is like saying that guns kill people. But guns don't kill people, people kill people, and people exploit people.

Marx thought that looking at something in abstraction of the web of its social relations, and assuming that those powers are found in the object itself, is "fetishism." Well, both communists and right-libertarians fetishize the market. One thinks the market is all good, the other thinks it's all bad. However, if you stripped society of the relations of capitalism, i.e. wage labor, private property in the means of production, and distribution of the surplus by the capitalist class, "the market" is not the monster it's made out to be.

What we need is an "inverse Soviet Union", i.e. the opposite of state capitalism: libertarian socialism. Mutualism.

[Kill all the fetuses!]

Marx thought that looking at something in abstraction of the web of its social relations, and assuming that those powers are found in the object itself, is "fetishism." Well, both communists and right-libertarians fetishize the market. One thinks the market is all good, the other thinks it's all bad. However, if you stripped society of the relations of capitalism, i.e. wage labor, private property in the means of production, and distribution of the surplus by the capitalist class, "the market" is not the monster it's made out to be.

I think that's a strawman. The left doesn't say, at least as far as I understand, that markets in a capitalist society and in a mutualist one is absolutely the same. There are differences, but not qualitative ones, not major ones.

The social relations of capitalist society is qualitatively similar to ones in a mutualist society. You still have to compete everyone, you still have to work, you still have to drag costs of productions down in order to be able to sell your produce etc. etc. Mutualism to capitalism is qualitatively similar to social democracy to capitalism - both mitigate the biggest harms, but the underlying social relations remain the same.

In industrial regions in Catalonia during the 1936 Social Revolution, some of the enterprises were initially ran on mutualist principles, but exactly for the reasons I mentioned above they said "fuck it, it doesn't work" and went for collectivization.

I wonder why you think that markets are neutral in a sense that they can be good in a mutualist society?

[argeiphontes]

I think that's a strawman. The left doesn't say, at least as far as I understand, that markets in a capitalist society and in a mutualist one is absolutely the same. There are differences, but not qualitative ones, not major ones.


I don't understand. Eliminating the social relations of capitalism is not a qualitative change, compared to eliminating the market? Then maybe the Soviet Union was communist after all?



The social relations of capitalist society is qualitatively similar to ones in a mutualist society. You still have to compete everyone, you still have to work, you still have to drag costs of productions down in order to be able to sell your produce etc. etc.


Of those, only competition is part of capitalism, the rest are qualities of any economic system. You always have to work, and reduce costs if you want to be efficient. In communism, you would want to reduce "costs" so you wouldn't have to work as much (wasted effort). I don't think there's anything wrong with competition per se. Enterprises that are more efficient should be rewarded for their efforts. I don't see anything wrong with that. Should a wasteful enterprise just be allowed to continue producing, in any economic system?



I wonder why you think that markets are neutral in a sense that they can be good in a mutualist society?

Because I don't see markets as essential to capitalism, or any other economic system. What distinguishes economic systems are the social relations. Those are the determining factors of life in different economic systems. YMMV of course.

[Baseball]

You're close but you don't win the cigar. It's not the *market* that causes harsh labor conditions, it's the social relations of capitalism. Private ownership of the means of production causes the extraction of surplus labor by capitalists, who naturally, because of the market, want to extract as much possible.

But why would a socialist community NOT be interested in extracting as much as possible from labor?

[argeiphontes]

But why would a socialist community NOT be interested in extracting as much as possible from labor?

They are, but they can also decide otherwise because it is their workplace. If they want to work harder, the increased profits are distributed to the workers. It's not somebody else extracting the labor is what I mean. Worker-owners can choose to work harder and extract more labor whenever they feel like it. (As usual, I'm only speaking for market socialism.) However, it is their choice and not managers or capitalists, since they are worker-owners of their firms.

They have the option to extract less than possible because of concerns that are not financial--leisure, health, safety, laziness, etc. That is a decision that every democratic workplace must make on its own. There is no coercion by people who are only interested in using workers as a means to get surplus labor.

Of course, competition encourages more efficient and harder work. However, the balance is more in the favor of workers than it is in capitalism. Workers have no choice in capitalism--they must work as much as the boss says or get fired. A firm could choose to be lazy compared to other firms in market socialism if that's what the worker-owners wanted, i.e. if they were fine with making less profit.

[Baseball]

They are, but they can also decide otherwise because it is their workplace. If they want to work harder, the increased profits are distributed to the workers. It's not somebody else extracting the labor is what I mean. Worker-owners can choose to work harder and extract more labor whenever they feel like it. (As usual, I'm only speaking for market socialism.) However, it is their choice and not managers or capitalists, since they are worker-owners of their firms.

They have the option to extract less than possible because of concerns that are not financial--leisure, health, safety, laziness, etc. That is a decision that every democratic workplace must make on its own. There is no coercion by people who are only interested in using workers as a means to get surplus labor.

Of course, competition encourages more efficient and harder work. However, the balance is more in the favor of workers than it is in capitalism. Workers have no choice in capitalism--they must work as much as the boss says or get fired. A firm could choose to be lazy compared to other firms in market socialism if that's what the worker-owners wanted, i.e. if they were fine with making less profit.

How is the balance more in favor of the workers? It has already been said the workers must produce a profit, else their industry could eventually face liquidation. It seems that they are still operating under the principles of capitalism, and thus must make their choices as per the same logic. Any control they have is a mirage.

[argeiphontes]

How is the balance more in favor of the workers? It has already been said the workers must produce a profit, else their industry could eventually face liquidation. It seems that they are still operating under the principles of capitalism, and thus must make their choices as per the same logic. Any control they have is a mirage.

Is the control capitalists have a mirage? If you control your own working conditions, like capitalists do today, it is only a mirage, huh? Then what would you say are the benefits of being self-employed? Lots of people want to do that in capitalism, including me.

What is wrong with producing a profit? Does that mean that there is no control over working conditions or how that profit is produced?

[Baseball]

If you control your own working conditions, like capitalists do today,

The capitalists do not control their working conditions. Their working conditions are based upon satisfying the needs of consumers of the products they produce.
This would also need to be true in the socialist community.


it is only a mirage, huh? Then what would you say are the benefits of being self-employed? Lots of people want to do that in capitalism, including me.

There are great benefits.
But you are still not dictating to the community the terms of your production, they are dictating to you.


What is wrong with producing a profit?

Absolutely nothing.


Does that mean that there is no control over working conditions or how that profit is produced?

If your conception of market socialism is worker owned industry, and nothing else, then nothing has changed. There is nothing uncapitalist about worker ownership.

[liberlict]

There is nothing uncapitalist about worker ownership.

Exactly. Many communist goals can be achieved within the framework of capitalism.

[Jimmie Higgins]

The capitalists do not control their working conditions. Their working conditions are based upon satisfying the needs of consumers of the products they produce.
This would also need to be true in the socialist community.This would be true in a socialist society, but it's not true in capitalism. Private healthcare does not satisfy the needs of consumers... it does satisfy the needs of their investors to deliver a return. I agree that capitalists as people are not free to control things in the abstract - they must play the game by the rules of capital and profit and accumulation... they just benefit from this arrangement and so they have little interest in changing that.

But they do have a lot more room to choose the specific conditions of their work relative to workers (who really have little choice in these matters unless they have won concessions) - CEOs just don't have the ability to do whatever they want in terms of production or investments and remain a viable capitalist.


If your conception of market socialism is worker owned industry, and nothing else, then nothing has changed. There is nothing uncapitalist about worker ownership.Agreed. It's more like collectively-run family business... they "exploit themselves" in a way by putting in more labor effort and then putting the surplus back into the business. Many people in that situation don't "feel exploited" because it's a less alienated situation relatively (they can make more decisions about basic conditions and if expanding or speeding up is worth it) and the trade-off of "being your own boss" is worth working harder than you would if you were employed by someone else.

Working in a bookstore cooperative is probably more fulfilling than working in an independant bookstore which is probably more pleasant than working in a corporate bookstore. But it's all capitalism based in the generalized capitalist relations.

[liberlict]

.. they "exploit themselves" in a way by putting in more labor effort and then putting the surplus back into the business

That's an interesting idea. :huh:

[Jimmie Higgins]

That's an interesting idea. :huh:Most people probably don't mind though because an increase in autonomy or more ability to choose what to do makes the work less of an alienating experience. People don't see it as exploitation because its seen as a choice (they don't usually see wage-work as exploitation either because it's "hidden"... they just feel frustrated by it), but professionals and shop-owners who say things like, "why are these people striking... I work 12 hours a day and you don't hear me complaining" are indicating the way their "self-exploitation" looks like... in order to compete with large firms whose advanced production and labor-saving techniques set the general "value" of a commodity, small self-owning shop-owners, in order to compete with Walmart or whatnot have to put in a lot more of their own labor to make up for the difference.

[argeiphontes]

If your conception of market socialism is worker owned industry, and nothing else, then nothing has changed. There is nothing uncapitalist about worker ownership.

There's no point in arguing about definitions. I'm glad we agree. Welcome to worker-owned capitalism, AKA market socialism! :grin:

[argeiphontes]

small self-owning shop-owners, in order to compete with Walmart or whatnot have to put in a lot more of their own labor to make up for the difference.

But that's competition, not self-exploitation. According to Marx, exploitation means harvesting surplus value by paying workers less than the value of their labor. When a capitalist makes you work harder, they are indeed getting more surplus value out of you. But if you own the firm, this isn't true. Any extra profits are yours to keep. You cannot "exploit yourself" in a Marxian sense.

[liberlict]

Most people probably don't mind though because an increase in autonomy or more ability to choose what to do makes the work less of an alienating experience. People don't see it as exploitation because its seen as a choice (they don't usually see wage-work as exploitation either because it's "hidden"... they just feel frustrated by it), but professionals and shop-owners who say things like, "why are these people striking... I work 12 hours a day and you don't hear me complaining" are indicating the way their "self-exploitation" looks like... in order to compete with large firms whose advanced production and labor-saving techniques set the general "value" of a commodity, small self-owning shop-owners, in order to compete with Walmart or whatnot have to put in a lot more of their own labor to make up for the difference.

Very interesting thinking. Now I'm pondering all the ways I might be exploiting myself. :ohmy:

[liberlict]

But that's competition, not self-exploitation. According to Marx, exploitation means harvesting surplus value by paying workers less than the value of their labor. When a capitalist makes you work harder, they are indeed getting more surplus value out of you. But if you own the firm, this isn't true. Any extra profits are yours to keep. You cannot "exploit yourself" in a Marxian sense.


Yeah. That's why this 'self exploitation' notion is so intriguing. It means that even if you work for nobody, you're still being exploited by wider economy.

[Jimmie Higgins]

But that's competition, not self-exploitation. According to Marx, exploitation means harvesting surplus value by paying workers less than the value of their labor. When a capitalist makes you work harder, they are indeed getting more surplus value out of you. But if you own the firm, this isn't true. Any extra profits are yours to keep. You cannot "exploit yourself" in a Marxian sense.You're probably right in terms of theory:lol:. But in terms of a sort of metaphor I think this makes some sense because an owner/worker isn't paying/paid wages, but they have to make up for properly exploited labor by putting in more than what is "socially necessary" labor themselves. So if I have a watch-making shop which I work myself, I can not charge more than a shop which has lots of employees and can create more due to competition, so instead of exploiting proletarian labor, I would lengthen the amount of artisan work I put in myself in order to increase a surplus. Presumably I wouldn't train myself in watchmaking or risk starting such a low-return venture unless I enjoyed some aspect; either the work or the personal autonomy it gave me in "being my own boss".

[Thirsty Crow]

On the question of self-exploitation, I'd like to bring up a manufacturing company here where I live which currently operates under workers' control (shareholding).

The executive body is comprised of these who are responsible for business decisions and oversight over managers (one of those, the hired executive director got canned recently). Now, in specific circumstances the whole situation might look like this: the pressure of competition and the business conjuncture making it necessary to lower wages across the board, for all shareholders (who are the de facto capitalist, but who also work themselves; this situation is described with the term petite bourgeoisie) to the minimum wage.

Now, it is obvious that these people both work, but also that they functionally operate with capital and perform functions that are the functions of the capitalist class in general.

Does this situation enable us to speak of the abolition of exploitation in one enterprise? Sure, if what interests us is only a personal relationship of antagonism and difference in function in one enterprise. This, however, is myopic and disregard a whole host of other issues.

The ultimate point being that the two are basically impersonal social functions - it is far from obvious that a single person cannot perform both functions. And if you wish to claim self-exploitation here, I'd say that it is a matter of rhetoric and taste above all. Though, to take up the defining characteristics laid out by argeiphontes:


exploitation means harvesting surplus value by paying workers less than the value of their labor.Check, in the above example (although there is no separate person here in the function of the capitalist)


When a capitalist makes you work harderAgain, check.


But if you own the firm, this isn't true. Any extra profits are yours to keepAnd this is definitely not true, that somehow "extra" profits make that substantial portion of "regular" profits - which are forwarded not into wages/renumeration, but into accumulation - something other than part and parcel of the ordinary mechanism of value production. I can't see if you here actually do mean that ownership makes it impossible for you to make yourself work harder, to impose speed ups and severe wage slashes, acting as the responsible agent of the enterprise's capital in subjecting yourself to all the same phenomena other workers experience - but with the difference that this is a self-imposition, a decision reached by yourself or more precisely collectively with other owners-workers in the enterprise - then I'd say you're not at all aware how workers' ownership of capital functions.


Yeah. That's why this 'self exploitation' notion is so intriguing. It means that even if you work for nobody, you're still being exploited by wider economy.
It could mean something simple. That you're managing the process of your own exploitation (that the conditions of this are forced upon you by wider social-economic relations; but that you yourself participate in deciding concrete terms of the arrangement; for instance, by such ownership you may get to redistribute part of the income in the form of profits into income in the form of wages, or in other words, lowering the rate of exploitation of labor power)

[argeiphontes]

an owner/worker isn't paying/paid wages, but they have to make up for properly exploited labor by putting in more than what is "socially necessary" labor themselves. So if I have a watch-making shop which I work myself, I can not charge more than a shop which has lots of employees and can create more due to competition, so instead of exploiting proletarian labor, I would lengthen the amount of artisan work I put in myself in order to increase a surplus.

But that's only if you wanted to increase your profits. A sole proprietorship doesn't have any labor costs, so that first person is highly profitable compared to a hired employee that has to be paid a fee to perform labor. An owner gets the full value of their contribution, but only gets a part of the surplus labor from each additional employee.

Adding an employee will reduce your profit margin but (hopefully) increase the absolute amount of profit, so you have to perform a trade-off calculation to see if its worth it. Additional employees can require more facilities or management. It makes no sense to just add employees on which you are breaking even. However, if business is able to expand for each employee added, the capitalist can "harvest" some of the surplus value for themselves. That's why the Waltons are ridiculously rich even though Walmart operates on razor-thin margins (~3-3.5%). But your mom-and-pop store can be more profitable in terms of rate of return than Walmart, you'll just have to sell different goods that aren't competing with Walmart in terms of pricing.

The reason Walmart can operate on those razor thin margins is because the owners are happy with the quantity of profits they are getting despite the low profit margins. A small store might not make enough profit to satisfy its owners, and they might seek more profit elsewhere. Check out some of these REIT fund (http://money.usnews.com/funds/mutual-funds/rankings/real-estate) for example.

These choices aren't so black and white as to say that you have to intensify your level of work ("self-exploit") no matter what. You can choose to remain at the small business level you're at as long as you're able to support yourself and are happy where you are. There are plenty of small businesses that stay in business but do not grow. One of the benefits of market socialism (just to put in another plug for my pet system) is that there are no capitalists, so there is only benefit to growth if true economies of scale are possible (if rate of return will grow for each owner). This tends to keep firm size smaller resulting in a more diversified economy. This is an important outcome for people who think that homogenization (Starbucks, Walmart) is one of the downsides of capitalism.

[argeiphontes]

And this is definitely not true, that somehow "extra" profits make that substantial portion of "regular" profits - which are forwarded not into wages/renumeration, but into accumulation - something other than part and parcel of the ordinary mechanism of value production.

No, I misspoke or wasn't clear. I didn't mean that this is somehow different than regular profit making.

[argeiphontes]

by such ownership you may get to redistribute part of the income in the form of profits into income in the form of wages, or in other words, lowering the rate of exploitation of labor power)

If profits are the same as wages, then dividend payments are wages and capitalists are exploiting themselves too, which is absurd. Getting pay outs on a time schedule is not the same as being subject to wage labor.

[Thirsty Crow]

If profits are the same as wages, then dividend payments are wages and capitalists are exploiting themselves too, which is absurd. Getting pay outs on a time schedule is not the same as being subject to wage labor.
Where did I say that profits are the same as wages?

What I said was that money sums in the form of profits are transformed into that of wages by the collective decision of the shareholders who both fulfill the function of labor and that of the capitalist.

[argeiphontes]

Where did I say that profits are the same as wages?

What I said was that money sums in the form of profits are transformed into that of wages by the collective decision of the shareholders who both fulfill the function of labor and that of the capitalist.

Just now. ;) Profits do not become wages just because they are paid on a time interval. Workers in a worker cooperative are not hired labor who earn wages, they are owners who get a share of the firm's profits. Unlike wage laborers, they are working means of production (capital) that they themselves own.

[liberlict]

It could mean something simple. That you're managing the process of your own exploitation (that the conditions of this are forced upon you by wider social-economic relations; but that you yourself participate in deciding concrete terms of the arrangement; for instance, by such ownership you may get to redistribute part of the income in the form of profits into income in the form of wages, or in other words, lowering the rate of exploitation of labor power)

Yeah there's probably no way for us scumbag reactionaries to escape the 'exploitation-hypothesis (to coin a term)'. I mean, I could go and cultivate some land in the Alaskan wilderness, build a hut, and live from my own garden. But since land belongs to everybody, I'd still be exploiting others by not sharing it.

[Baseball]

I agree that capitalists as people are not free to control things in the abstract - they must play the game by the rules of capital and profit and accumulation... they just benefit from this arrangement and so they have little interest in changing that.

It is not a question of the extent of their interest in changing that.
They c't, no matter how much they may wish to.


But they do have a lot more room to choose the specific conditions of their work relative to workers (who really have little choice in these matters unless they have won concessions) - CEOs just don't have the ability to do whatever they want in terms of production or investments and remain a viable capitalist.

That is the entirety of their working environment.

[Baseball]

There's no point in arguing about definitions. I'm glad we agree. Welcome to worker-owned capitalism, AKA market socialism! :grin:

Nothin wrong with a worker owned industry hiring and firing other workers and paying a wage.
I suspect this is not quite what you mean.

[argeiphontes]

Nothin wrong with a worker owned industry hiring and firing other workers and paying a wage.
I suspect this is not quite what you mean.

Well, owners do not make a wage, they distribute profits. They don't hire and fire, they join and leave the cooperative. (Yes, other members can still force them to leave.) There is no wage labor in market socialism, or outside stockholders that could make a claim on the worker-owned enterprise. The firm is democratically managed.

That's what I mean.

[Baseball]

Well, owners do not make a wage, they distribute profits. They don't hire and fire, they join and leave the cooperative. (Yes, other members can still force them to leave.) There is no wage labor in market socialism, or outside stockholders that could make a claim on the worker-owned enterprise. The firm is democratically managed.

That's what I mean.

How can people be "forced" to give up their property?

[Sinister Intents]

How can people be "forced" to give up their property?

Well I could use a rifle to force you to give up your possessions and your home, so that's force. Force is a very multi faceted thing, economic conditions force people into shitty circumstances.

[argeiphontes]

How can people be "forced" to give up their property?

Through a contractual obligation to abide by democratic process, agreed to when joining the firm.

[Ares1214]

Actually, this is a question for libertarians, objectivists, anarcho-capitalists and anyone else who supports the idea of "complete freedom so long as you do not harm others." I hear that a lot. I hear that a lot from libertarians who I know. They say "I don't care what you do so long as it isn't harming anyone else."

My question is, how do you reconcile that belief with a belief in the free market? I mean historically the free market has resulted in long hours in dangerous jobs that result in worker injuries and deaths, unsafe working conditions, covering up harmful side effects of pharmaceuticals, unsafe waste disposal that has poisoned drinking water, and numerous other things that harm people all in the name of increasing profit?

I am not asking this sarcastically (okay, maybe just a bit), but am seriously interested in what your reasoning is.

You are confusing the concept. A business owner who owns a coal mine is not voluntarily and intentionally infringing on the rights of others to harm them. That doesn't mean that those workers won't get hurt in the coal mine. But they are, unless they are slaves, voluntarily working at the coal mine. Even if they don't really have much of an alternative, they are still working there voluntarily, perhaps because they value their family eating more than their safety, or they value having a job more than the risks of working there.

How would it be any different in communism? People would still work in dangerous jobs, they could still get hurt, risks don't just disappear. Millions of people have died in "communist" and "capitalist" systems, both are in quotes because there have never really been true versions of either.

Personally I don't believe in an unrestricted free market, I simply believe that the government should be like a referee, they make the rules, know the rules, and enforce the rules. They shouldn't take points from the winning team and give them to the losing team, they should just focus on making rules that make the game as fair and seamless as possible.