By Cake Boy
My perception of anarchism is Benjamin Tucker’s anarchism. Preston and I discussed pluralist anarchism here based on this core sentence.
Anarchism is the idea that:
All social relations should be voluntary.
The Rothbardian/libertarian anarchists would agree with this statement, but their definition of voluntary is different from mine.
They say rent is voluntary. If you pay rent to a landlord, then you choose this. This is not the case, in my opinion. Because, for example. In my country it’s not allowed to be homeless, homeless people get harassed by the police and have to pay fines. You can’t homestead in this country. You can’t build a house in the woods, and you can’t live on your boat. So, you then have to rent or buy a house. But this is not chosen, you are pushed in the system. You are forced to be a ‘civilian’ in the system world. You are forced to be a neoliberal consumer, in a so called ‘market’. A ‘market’ that mainly consists of a few politically connected landlords and corporations
For example, the so-called ‘housing market’ isn’t even a market, not even in the broadest sense of what we call a market. The state selects a view capitalist that can ask monopoly prices for land and housing. You can’t easily rent out a room, you can’t buy land, because they sell the land to some well-connected speculators. If a piece of land is empty, the state sells it to a landlord the bureaucrats personally know for a cheap price, and so there is no market dynamic going on. For example, the people in the neighborhood can’t buy that land. You can only start a business on some streets, which leads to monopoly prices. You can’t live with a lot of people in a house. The state can force you to sell land or forbid you from selling land. This system is more like communism than like a market.
But even if it were a market, it would still not be voluntary. If there are no fields, no commons to homestead, then individuals are forced to participate in a system. Even if the market of that system were more just, it would still be force.
I might be okay with playing games with which I can win or lose money. I’m okay with, for example, playing poker, but not when I’m forced to. Capitalism forces me to play its game, so to say. The same would go for anarcho-capitalism/libertarianism.
Suppose you want your anarchist society (note that we talk about the constructive version of anarchism here) to be about individual agency. In that case, capitalism isn’t the right system to choose as its fundament.
The core question to ask every anarcho-capitalist is: will there still be land to homestead in your capitalist reality? Or did BlackRock buy everything? After the state disappeared, the bankers and landlords just bought all the land. And now everyone has to ‘voluntarily’ rent from them?
The thing with land, is that it’s not a good that can be produced. We treat it like a market, but goods can have competitors in actual markets. If you can’t have competitors, it’s not a market but a monopoly. And we know that monopoly is bad news for individualism. Classical liberals were aware of this, but somehow, the people forgot this aspect of classical liberal theory. If someone sells bad bread, there comes a competitor who sells better bread. With land, after a while, there are no competitors anymore. A handful of landlords can own a whole nation and can charge monopoly prices.
The step from feudalism to classical liberalism was a step in the direction of more individual freedom. The step from classical liberalism to pluralist/Tuckerite anarchism would be a step further, a step towards even more individual freedom. At least, that’s the idea behind the theory.
Anarchocapitalists/libertarians always forget that the state made the system of landlords. The state gave away the commons in the time of upcoming industrialization. The commons were, in a way, the anarchic situation. Proudhon had them as his basis for anarchism. He thought people should be able to homestead commons if they want to be autonomous. The land monopoly, on the other hand, was the statist system. The state wanted to give the land to some private speculators because it made taxation easier. This also created a class of people that could easily be exploited in the factories. The enclosure of the commons was not a voluntary process. The beginnings of capitalism were already based on force. And through the times, capitalism always used force and violence to maintain itself. If anarcho-capitalists read some basic history books, they could have known this.
Capitalism is productive, modernity is productive, industrialism is productive, the capitalist could say. Ok, this might be. Communist modernity is also productive. But anarchism was/is about individualism, not about productivity. It’s not a utilitarian theory. It doesn’t want people to be forced to work for ‘the greater good’. No matter if this greater good is an American greater good or a red greater good. To anarchists, you are the greater good.
Anarcho capitalists always talk about the ‘fundamental rights’. Property is a fundamental right, and taking it away is ‘aggression’. So, suppose that a hundred families own all the land in the world while the rest of the population is suffering; they should still not take the land or homestead it because that would be ‘aggression’? They should just die from hunger. If you are a poor farmer, and I’m a landlord that has hundreds and hundreds of lands that I keep empty, that nobody uses, then you should let me keep that land, because that’s the ‘moral law’. Me, taking all that land is seemingly not ‘aggression’? Here, we see that the word ‘aggression’ in the libertarian/ancap sense is very narrow. Only when it’s outside of the pretty utopian libertarian theory, then it’s aggression. So, in their theory, a few feudalist families own everything and force people to pay them rent for the rest of their lives, which is not an act of aggression. You could then also say that slavery was not an act of aggression towards the slaves because the slaveholders legally bought the slaves. Something they would have said at the time slavery was legal. You create a legal theory around your practices, and then it’s OK. It’s like how the state tells us their wars are about ‘brining peace in the world’. There is a theoretical/idealist reality, and then the raw lived reality. Ancaps and libertarians often only look at this theoretical/idealist reality. I wrote it down on paper, in theory, so it works. It’s in a way a bit autistic.
Anarcho-capitalism and libertarianism differ very much from the old individual liberty-based ideologies. Classical liberalism saw products of labor and trade as legitimate, and it saw land as a common inherence, the same as, for example, the air. Mutualist anarchists had the same views but didn’t believe the state was a legitimate institution. And the 19th-century georgism school also based its fundament on this classical liberal principle. So, anarcho-capitalism and libertarianism are really a deviation from the Enlightenment tradition. We should also not forget that it came to the scene in the 90s/00s when neoliberalism also became significant. It’s an American/populist version of actual classical liberal hardware, the same as neoliberalism.
Rothbardians/libertarians will call all these objections I make ‘leftwing’ and ‘Marxist’. They are wrong. The left wants the state to own the land through communist or social democratic systems. Classical liberalism wanted, in a way, to socialize the land. Share it among the people as a basis on which an economy could develop. Classical liberalism and georgism don’t want the state or a feudal lord to own the land. It seems that libertarians are ok with feudal lords owning everything. A libertarian like Hans Herman Hoppe desires a sort of feudalist fantasy world.
Then, libertarians often say that people are just not equal! Therefore, do there need to be arbitrary feudal constructs? This then clashes with their ideas around voluntarism. A feudalist/class-based system, regardless of whether we agree or disagree with it, is not based on individualism/voluntarism. The individual is nothing; the social hierarchy is everything in such a system. The individual has to sacrifice his/her well-being for the ‘lords’ of that society. The individual liberty of the 18th-century French people was not important; the only thing seen as important was the well-being of a tiny aristocratic elite. To ancaps/libertarians, (political) individualism means when 1 percent of the population can do what they want at the expense of the 99 percent. This, then, is a bit of a strange definition of individualism.
The reason libertarian/ancap anarchism is relatively popular these days is that Antifa anarchism (its competitor) is such a joke. But that doesn’t mean the libertarian theory makes sense. Of course, libertarians look and are more professional than the Antifa kids, but we should still really think deeply about what their politics actually mean. You could say, in a way, leftist/Antifa anarchism gave libertarian/ancap anarchism a chance to flourish.
What would pluralist anarchism do with the land?
The pluralist system would divide the land among different social/political groups while also reviving some commons to keep the whole arrangement anarchic/voluntary (which part would be commons should be discussed among the people who run the system).
In this system, the land is not owned by a blue or red state or some feudalist. It’s owned by ‘the people, ’ so to speak. This aligns with classical liberal hardware, although it sounds very ‘leftist’ in this period.
Land is an important and taboo subject. People should think more critically about it. Here is a site that discusses the subject.
This is another important recent study on the subject.
https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/44609/chapter-abstract/386739353?redirectedFrom=fulltext
