I’ve given quick definitions of anarchy before, if only to guide people away form the “bomb-thrower” image the name conjures up, and toward a right definition and thus an appreciation for an idea one might otherwise miss..
Here is a website that does dismiss the bombthrower image, and explicates the views of very many writers on anarchy.
Although this site is generally very good, it seems to cover some aspect from different points of view, and they have Bakunin, Kropotkin, and Chomsky among many others. In some ways it gets some elements wrong, but maybe that is just being comprehensive in reporting. I’ll break this into several critiques.
What happens in capitalism is by means of usury always and rents sometimes is exploiters aggregate enough money and power to buy the commanding heights and establish patterns and practices in laws that ever aggregate more power unto themselves. Just so. Given this, the bugaboo for socialists is property, rents, profits (which I'll deal with later.)
I think there are some elements that must be in place when discussing an alternative in patterns and practices to what we have now, what generally call capitalism. If one is to suggest an alternative, it must be something working right now, or is well documented as to having worked at some point. It must not require a new man, or some men being eliminated. And it must no require force or fraud. With that in mind, let’s look at property under anarchy. Here is a definition:
This is also the case with individualist anarchists whose defence of certain forms of property did stop them criticising key aspects of capitalist property rights. As Jeremy Jennings notes, the "point to stress is that all anarchists, and not only those wedded to the predominant twentieth-century strain of anarchist communism have been critical of private property to the extent that it was a source of hierarchy and privilege." He goes on to state that anarchists like Tucker and Spooner "agreed with the proposition that property was legitimate only insofar as it embraced no more than the total product of individual labour." ["Anarchism", Contemporary Political Ideologies, Roger Eatwell and Anthony Wright (eds.), p. 132]
This definition is not so much prescriptive, as descriptive. It is the line at which the community will defend your ownership, because it is the line at which your ownership benefits the community. Your home, your workshop, what land and resources you have mixed with your labor, is defended by the community because it benefits them that you "own" them. Your restaurant makes a mean corned beef and cabbage. You are loved enough to where you are secure in your property.
Rents are an interesting problem. Say I develop a business renting sailboats on a sunny day. Most days people do not want a sailboat, on sunny days they do. Few people want to own a sailboat. So they are happy to rent one on a sunny day. In this way the community will back a sailboat owner of 200 boats who rents them out on a sunny day.
Now take a landlord with 1000 units. He is not renting to “frictional” homeless, people who are in transition and just want a place for a few months, or an inn, he is building long term housing, renting it and aggregating power slowly but surely.
Now some people stop paying rent. The begin to adversely possess his property. Since there is no state, there are no laws against people not paying rent, and this fellow cannot depend on you and I to pay for a sheriff to help this landlord with his problem.
So the landlord appeals directly to you and me: help me evict this person who has not paid rent. You and I consider the aggregate wealth of this landlord, and should we decide we are uninterested in his plight, the landlord will lose his excess ‘wealth” by adverse possession, a means we have alive and well in our law presently. Presto land reform, ongoing, incremental, constant. The build up of exceptional wealth and exploitative power is checked in natural law.
Well how will we ever get the economies of scale to get the mass purchasing power of “big biz” commodities? People will combine their private property to create co-ops. It will be impossible for one person to own 1000 coffee shops, because he cannot possibly mix his labor with 1000 stores, but it will be possible for there to be 1000 coffees shops, or a co-op with several hundred owners.
I am a life member of PCC and REI, both co-ops, and I would be a member of group health if it offered medical care, but since it has signed on to the capitalist definition of medicine, I don't thing there is anything within its walls that could benefit me more than the alternatives widely avaialble. Credit unions have been regulated into corruption. But in spite of the disease of capitalism that permeates our economy, we see clear working examples of businesses big enough, without exploitation, to serve our needs. All of the members of REI own REI, All of the members of PCC own PCC. both are voluntary organizations. A natural elite rises to lead the org, and the rest of us just ruminate on our organic groat cakes and wash it down wih kefir.
We see within capitalism anarchy is already in place. We just need to clear away the wreckage and let a more natural economy arise.
Feel free to forward this by email to three of your friends.
1 comments:
Interesting!
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