Counter-economics, bootstrapping a system of stateless law and the revolutionary redistribution of property
On the LeftLibertarian2 email list, I’ve recently corresponded with user Steohawk in response to his question about differences (and common ground) between mutualism and so-called “anarcho-capitalism”. I plan to try to provide a recap of my responses in a later post, which will hopefully be better edited and more extensive than my emails. For right now, though, here are the essential links:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LeftLibertarian2/message/12836
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LeftLibertarian2/message/12848
…followed by this additional blog commentary response to a comment of his. I’m responding on the blog in this case because this leads off on a tangent from the main thread, and one that I’ve been meaning to write about anyway.
Wrote Steohawk:
“My personal theory is that counter-economics will naturally lead to true property rights.”
While I can’t outline with certainty exactly what Steohawk meant by that, I can explain why I agree with his statement as formulated, with some qualifications.
Counter-economics is the essential agorist revolutionary praxis. As I wrote a while back:
Agorism is revolutionary market anarchism.
In a market anarchist society, law and security will be provided by market institutions, not political institutions. Agorists recognize, therefore, that those institutions can not develop through political reform. Instead, they will come about as a result of market processes.
As government is banditry, revolution culminates in the suppression of government by market providers of security and law. Market demand for such service providers is what will lead to their emergence. Development of that demand will come from economic growth in the sector of the economy that explicitly shuns state involvement (and therefore can not turn to the state in its role as monopoly provider of security and law). That sector of the economy is the counter-economy – black and grey markets.
Reading up on agorist revolutionary theory, we come to understand that the anarchist project of revolution is one of bootstrapping a system of Stateless law, one fully capable of suppressing the State (as the criminal gang we rightly recognize it as) while not becoming a de facto State itself. Anarchist theorists thus can be seen as prefigurative of the community of legal scholars that will forever be constantly refining the intellectual basis for the future enterprise of production of law (and security) in a stateless society, much as law professors constantly debate law amongst themselves right now and influence the broader law profession accordingly. If that sounds to hierarchical for some, I should point out that it would be a “hierarchy” built not on force but in specialized expertise and the persuasiveness of the various scholars arguments — a ruthless meritocracy in the study of logic and ethics, rather than rulership.
While thinkers such as Rothbard have emphasized the market’s tendency to weed out bad products and apply this to “law” as a product, tending to narrow “the law” down towards Rothbard’s natural law ideals, it’s also equally valid from that same perspective to note that markets tend to produce an efficient pluralism of consumer choices. Thus, I noted:
“Mutualists advocate a usufruct approach to property law, Rothbardian an-caps advocate Rothbardian property theory (a radically anti-state version of Lockean property theory — call it Lockeanism 2.0) and non-Rothbardian an-caps tend to have no theory of justice in property beyond existing property titles. Then there’s the geoists, but I’m not going there right now…
Mutualists and those Rothbardians that get along well with them tend to look at the two property theories as two seperate legal doctrines that could amicably compete in a stateless free market for arbitration services (i.e. “law” and “courts”). It may be a bit more involved than “metric vs. English”, but you hopefully get the drift.”
Which is not to say that all Rothbardians get along well with Mutualists, unfortunately. As I noted, a lot of the panarchistic attempted reconciliation of anarchist schools of thought that I advocate is in some ways attributable to moving beyond Rothbard’s so-called “anarcho-capitalism” to Konkin’s agorism and the resulting “anti-political” approach. As I noted in a blog comment:
“The slash mark you added between agorism and “anarcho-capitalism” is kind of at odds with the point I make over and over again, which is that they’re not the same thing. The addition of Konkin’s theory of revolution, better developed class theory and anti-political approach allows the incipient anti-capitalist implications of the Rothbardian strain of market anarchism (that agorism is built on and extends) to be more fully realized… I feel comfortable saying that I’m anti-capitalist because if we take Carson’s mutualist exposition “The Iron Fist Behind The Invisible Hand” as an acceptable [libertarian socialist] description of “capitalism”, then that is something I am 100% against and have been all along. I don’t have to agree with Carson about usufruct or the labor theory of value in order to agree with that particular Carson article…”
As I pointed out in the email discussion, Carson actually has done a lot of the intellectual “heavy lifting” for Rothbardians in his article “Libertarian Property and Privatization: An Alternative Paradigm”. It’s not “anarcho-capitalist” ideology per se that’s so messed up, but the existing movement’s culture and the pseudo-Randian tendency toward right-wing class sympathies that aren’t actually justified in the context of awareness of the current state-subsidized capitalist economic order. That doesn’t mean all “libertarian socialist” knee-jerk criticism of Rothbardians is unjustified (or justified), but that we’ve done a really crappy job of educating them about where we’re coming from because we haven’t had our own shit together. Without Konkin’s theory of revolution, refinement of libertarian class theory (agorist class theory), and anti-political approach; the default reformist libertarian electoral approach sabotages the effort to educate people about the important theoretical insights we actually do have to offer. They see you as pot-smoking Republicans because that’s what they see on the outside of the “black box” of your ideology. They see no reason to open the box and discover the treasures within. As Chuck Munson noted, all a cursory glance reveals is an effort to…
“…sell some sexed up crap being concocted at the Cato Institute.”
By standing outside statist libertarian policy debates on how to control the State (beyond perhaps the most obvious, such as “end the war”) and instead concentrating on seeking the destruction of the State, agorists are able to adopt an attitude and style that can be recognized as authentically anarchist.
But, let’s get back to Steohawk…
“My personal theory is that counter-economics will naturally lead to true property rights.”
We agorists are seeking to, ultimately, bootstrap a system of non-state law and thereby destroy the State as a system of oppression. The reformist libertarian, including milquetoast and right-leaning Rothbardians, by contrast is quixotically seeking to reform the State into fitting anti-state ideals. Square peg, meet round hole.
So, yes, the counter-economic revolution is the way to build liberatory protection for authentic property rights — including the revolutionary redistribution of property in accordance with Rothbardian property ethics that can’t be fully applied outside of a revolutionary scenario. That revolutionary redistribution of property and support for a fully free market that can accomodate voluntary cooperatives as a business model makes agorists fully as much “libertarian socialists” in just as much sense as Benjamin Tucker ever had claim to the term, while remaining implacably opposed to “socialism” in the sense that Mises defined the term (which is the sense Konkin was referring to when he said in various places that agorism is not “socialist”).
Some “anarcho-capitalists” might disagree with my advocacy of legalistic pluralism with regard to the matter of usufruct property theory and Rothbardian property theory as:
“…two seperate legal doctrines that could amicably compete in a stateless free market for arbitration services…”
To them, my reply is that they need to grasp that we are attempting to bootstrap a system of stateless law, one provided by the only “free” market — black markets or the “counter-economy“. Do they have confidence in the full ramifications of their own ideology? I do.
- The market can provide arbitration services.
- The market can provide property claim registration/publication services.
- The market can provide peaceful economic means of managing uncertainty about property claims, which uncertainty is fundamentally just the economically familiar matter of risk. That means, which already exists in a basic form, is called title insurance.
Is this not a bit too much to expect of a theory? The ability to overcome and keep any bandits at bay is more of a question of strategy and tactics and the circumstances of the particular situation, no?
Not to sound like I’m nitpicking, but I just don’t know if, as an anarchist, I would want to guarantee any eventuality, including the re-emergence of states. I mean, I wouldn’t call a stateless society a failure simply because it features organized crime.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding you: are you rather more concerned with simply projecting a vision of a society where even well-organized, institutionally structured bands of armed criminals COULD be continually and successfully suppressed?
It’s a distillation of intent. To hit the bullseye, it is generally accepted that one ought to aim.
“My personal theory is that counter-economics will naturally lead to true property rights.â€
The answer is that, in the present, all property is stolen.
Due to property taxes, nobody in the present own any property at all. If you don’t pay property taxes, policemen will steal your property from you. You don’t “own” your house. You really have a perpetual transferable lease.
This is one of the key planks of the Communist Manifesto.
But should we be aiming there is my question! To me, it’s a similar goal to saying that the anarchist project is about making everybody happy. It’s utopian.
We need to think deeply about what we’re trying to achieve and how we’re going to judge our success, is all I’m saying. I could co-exist with certain types of states just as much as I could co-exist with criminal gangs. Moreover, I can and do co-exist with the *people* who support those types of organizations.
I guess I have a problem with a framework that strives towards an “end state”, short of which nothing is acceptable. It’s utopian. Anarchy is about whatever people freely choose, and yes, violence, or those darker natures which coalesce in what we call “statism”, all of that is part of what it means to be human, no? Why, then, should we assume that the struggle against the State is more finally achievable than any other long-running human goal?
In my opinion, we are strongest when we describe our project as propaganda. We are trying to change people’s minds about the State. We don’t want them to make exceptions for the state, but rather regard it in the same light they regard any organization. It is the State’s *legitimacy* that makes it powerful - take that away and it has no authority or metaphysical sway on the individual. And we’ll never, I believe, totally get rid of gullible people, any more than we’ll totally get rid of criminals.
[…] argument to the one I’m making here in a comment thread related to Brad Spangler’s post on the agorist theory of revolution. Brad argues that we need to be concerned with finding an […]