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Let me first start by directing your attention to a piece by Jack Ross I only discovered this evening. Ross explores potential common ground between Austrian economics and syndicalism in “A Syndicalist Paradigm For Our Age“.

Excerpt:

So what of Austrian syndicalism as a paradigm for our time? As a completion of the libertarian framework that emerged in the time of the new left, it is highly relevant to our time.

This is important stuff on the very forefront of libertarian political theory, in my opinion. Please read and digest.

Additionally, I’d like to direct your attention to Kevin Carson’s important “Libertarian Property and Privatization: An Alternative Paradigm” from back in 2003 on Anti-State.com as well as Wally Conger’s concise and to the point excerpt from a more recent longer piece by Carson on Uncapitalist Journal.

Of a particularly controversial nature, for libertarians anyway, is the first point of Carson’s proposed radical left libertarian agenda:

“Syndicalist seizure of large enterprises (the Fortune 500 might be a useful proxy) by radical industrial unions.”

This may seem a distinctly non-libertarian point at first glance, but Carson didn’t just pull that out of his ass. He instead arrives at it by examining aspects of the thought of libertarian greats such as Rothbard (”Mr. Libertarian” himself) and Karl Hess. This particular quote from Hess that Carson chose may say it best:

The truth, of course, is that libertarianism wants to advance principles of property but that it in no way wishes to defend, willy nilly, all property which now is called private.

Much of that property is stolen. Much is of dubious title. All of it is deeply intertwined with an immoral, coercive state system which has condoned, built on, and profited from slavery; has expanded through and exploited a brutal and aggressive imperial and colonial foreign policy, and continues to hold the people in a roughly serf-master relationship to political-economic power concentrations.

I’ve approached this matter myself before and found it convenient to cite this explanation by fictional character Hagbard Celine of why Proudhon was not contradicting himself when he said both that “Property is Theft” and that “Property is Liberty“.

Proudhon, by piling up his contradictions this way, was not merely being French; he was trying to indicate that the abstraction “property” covers a variety of phenomena, some pernicious and some beneficial. Let us borrow a device from the semanticists…

“Property[1] is theft” means that property[1] created by the artificial laws of feudal, capitalist, and other authoritarian societies, is based on armed robbery. Land titles, for instance, are clear examples of property1; swords and shot were the original coins of transaction.

“Property[2] is liberty” means that property[2], that which will be voluntarily honored in a voluntary (anarchist) society, is the foundation of the liberty in that society. The more people’s interests are co-mingled and confused, as in collectivism, the more they will be stepping on each other’s toes; only when the rules of the game declare clearly “This is mine and this is thine,” and the game is voluntarily accepted as worthwhile by the parties to it, can true independence be achieved.

Although I personally believe that legitimate land title can arise in an anti-state context, that’s an incidental matter in this context. The larger point that R.A. WIlson, through the mouthpiece of his character Celine, alludes to remains valid — that state awards of title to its allies in plunder are fraudulent and that this does not contradict the classical liberal supposition that strong property rights are the bulwark of liberty.

Rather, it is the inconsistency in liberal/libertarian application of that supposed allegiance to property rights that obscure statist, anti-market injustice — which conventional socialists then rightly seize upon to indict hypocritical regimes. It is where the institution of property has been perverted by the State that the word “property” comes into disrepute — for who could be more bitter than a victim of theft who hears that the possession by thieves of that which has been stolen from him must be farcically protected by the State for sake of “property rights”? I’ve taken to summarizing this line of thinking lately as “the defense of stolen property is no defense of property rights“.

In other words, irrespective of the murderous folly state socialism has been, libertarians as a movement have yet to come to grips with the essential correctness of Marx’s indictment of primitive accumulation, despite the marvelous potential of radical libertarian ideas to address it.. Theft is theft and the very existence of a libertarian movement ought to remind libertarians that we do not live in a truly free market society. Libertarian moderates ignore that at peril of their own credibility.

• As property title arises independently of the state through the Lockean/Rothbardian concept of “homesteading” based on natural rights…
• And as nothing can be legitimately owned by a bandit gang, such as the State…
• The rightful owners of state property upon the fall of the state become those who are already using that property.

In the case of state-owned enterprises, that means the rank and file workers of the enterprise become the rightful owners. This circumvents the corruption inherent in minarchist libertarian “privatization” schemes — mere transfer of stolen wealth from one arm of the political class to another.

Furthermore, a proper understanding of Libertarian Class Theory, or the more highly developed form of it — Agorist Class Theory (as explained in Agorism Contra Marxism [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, postscript]), results in an understanding that the true “state” consists of not merely just the literal apparatus of government, but those of its ostensibly “private” allies who have profited not through peaceful and honest market means, but through sharing in state expropriation and benefiting unfairly from suppression of market competition by the state on their behalf.

This results in a dawning realization that quasi-Bolshevist seizure of state-allied corporations by their own non-managerial workers, such as Carson suggests, is entirely justified on libertarian grounds and that there is nothing in such actions incompatible with respect for genuine property rights and dedication to the free market ideal. Indeed, it would be the highest expression of that ideal.

If this interests you, then you might also like to read J. Neil Schulman’s novel of agorist revolution, “Alongside Night“.

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