Political Theory

Re: Would you rather be a minarchist or an anarcho leftist?

Jargon — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 21:01:44 GMT

usufruct was the norm? so what about feudalism? and state control of land?

as for your first point, i dont think that usufruct abolishes profit or interest, but it would do away with rent. one could easily be the boss of a factory and work there, have employees, and make profts. i think much of the mutualist claims of abolishing profit come from their banking idea, which is entirely of no consequence. the banknotes mutualists propose could probably be circulated but always much less valuable than things like gold. unless they tried to somehow enforce a currency monopoly, which i find doubtful as much mutualist theory rails precisely against that. more than anything mutualist banking would just be a big disappointment to its proponents, which is not a problem for market anarchism. it just means the marking down of low quality money.

usufruct rights could be traded away, but the reciever would have to use the land otherwise the occupiers would take it. that said, its not necessarily an impediment to market of profit bearing shares. bonds would take over the role of equities.

in the ways in which mutualism in confused, in its propsals on what the glorious people shold do it is of no consequence for market anarchists. just bad business going down. and theres also the usufruct, which i dont really think would be such a bad thing.

Re: Would you rather be a minarchist or an anarcho leftist?

Autolykos — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 17:40:46 GMT

kelvin_silva:
What is usufruct?

The term "usufruct" comes from Roman law, which considered there to be three kinds of rights in ownership - rights to use (usus), rights to the products or "fruits" of use (fructus), and rights to alienate (abusus). Usufruct, then, entails only the first two kinds of rights. As a result, it's not the same as ownership. However, usufruct itself can be "commoditized" - that is, it can be considered alienable on its own.

Re: Would you rather be a minarchist or an anarcho leftist?

Autolykos — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 17:35:17 GMT

vive la insurrection:
Mutualism doesn't seem all thaaaaat evil

That's what I thought at first. But they seem to be hardcore money cranks. And when you start asking about intrest, rent, etc - they tend to get very very obscure and slippery; they pull a lot of tap dances with purposefully annoying terms (e.g."free markets" NOT "capitalism" - insist on being called "leftist" because of the French assembly or whatever other types of fashionable word Platonisms they wish to use)

We talk about elastic property rights and custom law, AND THEY STILL WISH TO USE different terminology. Something is fishy.

Mutualism is really, really confused IMO. For one thing, its support of usufruct over ownership seems like just a rationalization for its opposition to profit, interest, and rent - which means it opposed those things to begin with, and therefore for different reasons. For another, who's to say that usufruct rights can't themselves be alienated (i.e. given away or traded for other things)? And if they can, then doesn't that make them owned? Finally, usufruct in no way prevents the kind of substantial wealth disparities we've seen in history. Indeed, usufruct over land was apparently the norm in the ancient world.

Re: Would you rather be a minarchist or an anarcho leftist?

Autolykos — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 17:26:38 GMT

Wheylous:
Mutualism doesn't seem all thaaaaat evil, but with the loose definitions of "minarchy" some people like to have, I'll go with minarchy. (Some minarchists are essentially AnCaps but are afraid of the anarchist label - they want all government services to be paid for by voluntary fees, and although the government maintains a monopoly on the law they believe in infinite secession - essentially AnCap).

Not to derail the thread, but infinite secession doesn't seem compatible to government maintaining a monopoly on the law.

Re: Would you rather be a minarchist or an anarcho leftist?

Autolykos — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 17:25:03 GMT

I'd rather be minarchist, as "anarcho"-leftist (see what I did there?) actually tends to be much more statist than minarchism, if the anarcho-capitalist definition of "state" is used. A lot of the branches of leftist anarchism are confused - especially mutualism. They're also concerned a great deal with acquiring and maintaining power over freedom, but that's rather hidden by their use of the word "freedom" to refer to both positive physical ability and the absence of opposing coercion.

Re: Would you rather be a minarchist or an anarcho leftist?

Bert — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 16:36:54 GMT

riot folk, poison girl, etc

Riot folk = shitty and unrelated. Poison Girls = amazing 'obscure' Crass Records material.

Re: Would you rather be a minarchist or an anarcho leftist?

Merlin — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 09:45:43 GMT

Of course minarchism. I would find a world of city-states (my conception of minarchy) perfectly good for the time being , if not a necessary station toward anacapistan. If anarcho-capitalism can't work for some reason, a global web of competing mini-states is still an alluring vision by any standard.

I congratulate kelvin_silva: the thread is very intelligent, it allows one to differentiate left- form right- leaning libertarians.

Re: Would you rather be a minarchist or an anarcho leftist?

vive la insurrection — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 06:13:34 GMT

Yeah,

I never really bought that narrative all too much. I really think Catholicism has been irrelevant in actual factual actions of relevant things since the Reformation / Printing Press at the earliest to the fall of the Louis XVI at the latest, since than it has been effectively "in the dustbin" so to speak. Moreover I think the narrative was made by "Catholic Pride Right Wing Types" as an ad hoc thing because they like Catholicism and they like capitalism - so it's just one ofthose things tomake themselves feel better, not really much of a social theory as it is a "rah rah" thing to me. As for social theory in relation to Weber, right or wrong, it has to show how people made use of it. I think British naturalism had far more of an effect on peoples minds and the way it dictated behavior than Scholastic thought, for better or worse.

More importantly,I think the point for Weber isn't so much "what really happened" in history which he may kind of giggle at, but how to do a genreal exagesis to understand what is going on in an intelligible way. That is to say, there is nothing inherent about "Protestantism" that leads it to capitalism - however real fashions and real actions happened to arise from it, than so be it. Furthermore nowhere does Weber claim that Protestantism is soley responsible for capitalism - he just uses it because it is useful to do so (he points out that Florence was capitalist, but never really exploited that fact to a degree of significance)

Re: Would you rather be a minarchist or an anarcho leftist?

Kelvin Silva — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 05:56:55 GMT

What:? not a republic??

i see what you did there ^^^

Re: Would you rather be a minarchist or an anarcho leftist?

Aristippus — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 05:48:23 GMT

vive: seen this? http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard56.html

OP - Minarchy, if you can keep it.

Re: Would you rather be a minarchist or an anarcho leftist?

Jargon — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 05:40:49 GMT

I haven't read Ostrom's work but it's basically a refutation of "The Tragedy of the Commons" and Hardin revised his title to the Tragedy of the Unmanaged Commons. If it's correct then I think it would indicate the feasibility of voluntary collective life. That said, usufruct doesn't depend on the feasibility of collective life in order to function. It would function very similarly, in my opinion, to an orthodox market setup, except that firm size would be smaller as the boss (if there was one) would have to be present at the factory at which he worked, and there would be no more people living solely off of rent. Probably more people owning their own businesses, lower profit rate, few employees per firm. As I said above I think there's also a possibility for the emergence of a stock-market equivalent.

I think the advantage in effect that private property would have is in inviting more investment, though a mutualist territory could become just as wealthy.

Re: Would you rather be a minarchist or an anarcho leftist?

vive la insurrection — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 05:29:20 GMT

You're sounding kind of historicist here

That wouldn't surprise me being that I have been reading far more Weber and Lachmann than Mises this past year. As you may have noticed from my past few posts in topics, there is a bit of a dissonance in how I am thinking about economics lately. I am probably a bit more confused in my thoughts than I was a year ago.

Anyway,

does this relate to Elinor Ostrom's work on the commons? If so, it is indeed very interesting stuff.

Furthermore, I am wondering if one could actually make a defence of what we have now (that is something that actually factually exists) vs a pie in the sky argument. Mercantilism, Keynesianism, Corprotism are "real" things to me as they are merely managment theories on real actions and real processes. This makes them less dangerous than abstract social structures to me, and more preferable.

If I heard people say "screw it we are reorganizing to this Platonic vision" - I would immediatley recoil and my mind wouldturn to the French,1848, and Russian Revolutions

Re: Would you rather be a minarchist or an anarcho leftist?

Jargon — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 05:25:43 GMT

Actually that's precisely what usufruct is. How is it labor when someone is just entitled to a plot of land and can charge rent on it when he lives a state away?

Re: Would you rather be a minarchist or an anarcho leftist?

Kelvin Silva — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 05:19:30 GMT

the respect for private property is when people respect the product of another man's labor.

Re: Would you rather be a minarchist or an anarcho leftist?

Jargon — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 05:13:08 GMT

vive la insurrection:

The main thrust is though, one can not base a theory out of it. This is a consequence of the market / institutional process and structure. One can not start with what instutions ought to be or look like, nor can one emphasize such things. That's where it gets very deadly (literally) and "top down" intellectual masturbation. This comes with part ofmy confusion with mutualism - it looks more at plausible ends and wishes to make that the focus.

Hmm. You're sounding kind of historicist here, in terms of assuming that private property is an outcome of what historical market process has existed, which suprises me. I don't see how one cannot base theory of the usufruct principle. Though I completely agree that much of mutualist (and worse, what's left of it) doctrine is about painting pictures and giving suggestions on what color to paint the cooperative-kitchen, that does not mean that there isn't room for the theoretical fleshing-out of usufruct.

There's kind of a tendency in this kind of literature to say: look how horrible this shit is right now, let's become free and then sort it out amongst ourselves. I agree that this could lead to mass starvation. But just because private property has been the reigning paradigm of the last few centuries does not mean that it and market process are inextricable, or have I misunderstood you?

The left needs more rightists writing their own literature for them. Treatises not flyers. Maybe then we could throw most of it in the trash once it reveals itself in plain english.