Anarchoblogs

While searching for hollow earth narratives (a curiously political genre, as it happens), I came across Hartmann the Anarchist, an 1893 science fiction/adventure novel, by Edward Douglas Fawcett (the brother of the "Lost City of Z" explorer.) Fawcett also wrote Swallowed by an Earthquake, which I haven't tracked down, but Hartmann is a lot of fun.

It's an anti-anarchist novel, but don't let that worry you too much. The plot is a tragedy, with a more-or-less byronic hero, whose motivation could be straight out of Emma Goldman's "The Psychology of Political Violence." The narrator is an "evolutionary" socialist, and the political debates will be old-hat to anyone who has been through any recent discussion on "diversity of tactics." Hartman is half Emile Henry and half Robur the Conqueror: it's not going to end well, but that's not the point. There's a lot in the novel that is predictable, particularly in retrospect, but there are a lot of interesting moments.

I like it enough that I'll be doing an edition for the Corvus "Responses to Anarchism" library.

Let’s say we gather the usual suspects, down by the river, in the State of Nature, or thereabouts, for some a bit of property theory and a few “good draughts.” John Locke says everybody can appropriate some river-water, as long as what they make their …

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It's long, and the translation is still a little rough, but I would encourage folks to take the time to read Joseph Déjacque's The Circulus in Universality and to look at the other texts by him: "To the Ci-Devant Dynastics," Down with the Bosses!,  "The Theory of Infinitesimal Humanities," and the excerpt from The Humanisphere published as "Authority and Idleness." Once you have some sense of the terrain, you may also want to take a look at the in-progress translation of The Humanisphere that Jesse Cohn has posted.

Déjacque is another of those figures who deserves to be more than just a genealogical footnote in the histories of anarchism, an anarchist-communist predecessor whose work remains largely unknown. He called out Proudhon for being a sexist jerk (although his defense of Jenny d’Héricourt was itself a bit masculinist) and invited him to become "frankly and completely an anarchist" by giving up all forms of property—and of contract—demonstrating that he was a much more astute reader of Proudhon than many, then and since. He wrote a wild utopia incorporating lots of elements borrowed from Fourier and Leroux—all pushed to their libertarian extremes. I don't think anyone can get very far into any of Déjacque's works without sensing that the waters are deep—and rather uncharted for most of us.

It helps to know a bit about Fourier's theory, according to which the motive force of everything is the action of "the passions," which inspire not only human behavior, but the movement of animals, stars and planets, etc. (For "passional zoology," for instance, check out these translations from Toussenel's writings.) Fourier was convinced that the "civilized" tendency to treat the passions as opposed to reason and progress was entirely wrong-headed, and instead aimed towards a society where all the passions—even, or perhaps especially, those considered propagators of vice—would find harmonious outlets. When Proudhon claimed that there are "as many special rights as humans can raise different claims," and insisted on seeking the progressive "aims" of presently-despotic institutions like property, he was working on Fourier's turf. Fourier sketched out much of what Déjacque presents as "the circulus in universality," and certainly paved the way for the account of "humanities" ranging from the "infinitesimal" to the "multiversal," but Déjacque also drew inspiration from Pierre Leroux, who generalized from Fourier's hints. Leroux understood the constant movement and complex interconnection of everything in terms of a kind of general "communion." (For a taste of his secularized, neo-christian "gospel of humanity," see "What If the Gospel was Right?" or the "Aphorisms" compiled by Luc Désages, Auguste Desmoulins. For William B. Greene's take on all of this, see The Doctrine of Life.) Déjacque's fierce anti-clerical feelings didn't prevent him from picking up the sense of communion from Leroux, any more than his related anti-property position prevented him from placing the egoistic individual at the heart of his anarchist utopia.

What follows is one more section from The Humanisphere, which immediately precedes the section sometimes labeled "Authority and Idleness." It's strong stuff, in many ways, particularly in its treatment of all forms of "constraint."

… Constraint is the mother of all vices. And it is banished by reason from the Humanisphere. Of course egoism, intelligent egoism, is too well developed there for anyone to think of assaulting their neighbor. And it is by egoism that they make fair exchanges.

Man is egoism. Without egoism, man would not exist. It is egoism which is the motive of all his actions, the motor of all his thoughts. It is what makes him think of his own preservation, and of his development, which is also his preservation. It is egoism which teaches him to produce in order to consume, to care for others because they are in agreement, to like others because they like him, to work for others because those other have worked for him. It is egoism which stimulates his ambition and excites him to distinguish himself in all the careers where man employs his strength, skill, and intelligence. It is egoism which elevates him to the height of genius; it is to improve himself, to enlarge the circle of his influence, that man carries his head high and sets his gaze on the distance. It is for his own gratification that he marches off to win collective satisfactions. It is for himself, individually, that he wants to participate in the lively effervescence of the general good fortune; it is for his own sake that he dreads the thought of the suffering of others. His egoism, constantly goaded by the instinct of his gradual development, and by the sentiment of solidarity which ties him to his fellows, demands perpetual expression of his existence in the existence of others. It is what ancient society improperly called devotion, but which is only speculation—more humanitarian as it is more intelligent, and more humanicidal as it is more idiotic. Man in society only reaps what he sows. If he reaps disease, he sows disease. He reaps health if he sows health. Man is the social cause of all the effects he suffers in society. If he is brotherly, he will create fraternity among those around him, if he is fratricidal, he will create fratricide. It is not humanly possible to make a move, to act with the arms, the heart or the brain, without the sensation reflecting back from one to the other like an electric shock. And that takes place in the state of anarchic community, in the state of free and intelligent nature, as in the state of civilization, the state of domesticated man, of nature enchained. Only, in civilization, man being institutionally at war with man, he can only envy the good fortune of his neighbor, and howl and gnash his teeth at his expense. He is a mastiff, tied, crouching in his kennel and gnawing his bone, growling in ferocious and constant menace. Under anarchy, man, being harmonically at peace with his fellows, will know that competition with them, in the pursuit of their passions, will bring universal good fortune. In the Humanisphere, a hive where liberty is the queen, man gathering from men only perfumes, will know how to produce only honey. So don’t curse egoism, for to curse egoism is to curse man. The suppression of our passions is the sole cause of their disastrous effects. Man, like society, is perfectible. General ignorance has been the inevitable cause of our misfortunes; universal science will be the remedy. Let us educate ourselves, therefore, and let us spread the knowledge around us. Let us analyze, compare, contemplate and thus arrive at the scientific knowledge of our natural mechanisms.

In the Humanisphere, there is no government. An attractive organization takes the place of legislation. The liberty of sovereign individuals presides over all collective decisions. The authority of anarchy, the absence of all dictatorship of number or strength, replaces arbitrary authority, the despotism of the sword and the law. Faith in ourselves is the religion of the Humanisphereans. Gods and priests, religious superstitions will rouse against themselves universal disapproval. It is by their own laws that each governs themselves, and it is on that government of each by himself that the social order is founded.

Consult history, and see if authority has ever been anything but universal suicide. The destruction of man by man—do you call that order? Is it order that reigns in Paris, in Warsaw, in St. Petersburg, in Vienna, in Rome, in Naples and Madrid, in aristocratic England and democratic America? I tell you that it is murder! Order with dagger or cannon, gallows or guillotine; order with Siberia or Cayenne, with the knout or the bayonet, with the watchman’s baton or the sword of the policeman; order personified in that homicidal trinity: iron, gold, and holy water; the order of gunshots, or shots from bibles or bank-bills; the order which sits enthroned on corpses and feeds on them, that can pass for order in moribund civilizations, but it will never be anything but disorder, a gangrene in societies lacking the sentiment of life. Authorities are vampires, and vampires are monsters who only live in cemeteries and only walk in darkness.

Consult your memories and you will see that the greatest absence of authority has always produced the greatest amount of harmony. See the people atop their barricades, and say if in these passing moments anarchy, they do not testify, by their conduct, in favor of natural order. Among these men who are there, arms bare and black with powder, there are certainly no lack of ignorant natures, men hardly smoothed by the plane of social education, and capable, in their private life and as heads of families, of many brutalities towards their wives and children. See them, then, in the midst of the public insurrection and in the role of men momentarily free. Their brutality has been transformed as by magic into sweet courtesy. Let a woman pass by, and they will have only decent and polite words for her.

...

Now then the absence of orders is the true order. The law and the sword is only the order of bandits, the code of theft and murder that presides at the division of the spoils, at the massacre of the victims. It is on that bloody pivot that the civilized world turns. Anarchy is its antipode, and that antipode is the axis of the humanispherean world.

— Liberty is all their government.
— Liberty is all their constitution.
— Liberty is all their legislation.
— Liberty is all their regulation.
— Liberty is all their contracts.
— Everything that is not liberty is outside of morals.
— Liberty, all liberty, nothing but liberty — such is the formula engraved on the tablets of their conscience, the criterion of all their relations with one another.

  If I were presenting all of this in a classroom, I suspect my questions to students would be about what kind of "anarchist communism" is implied by Déjacque's work....

The Circulus in Universality (1858)Joseph Déjacque IThe circulus in universality is the destruction of every religion, of all arbitrariness, be it elysian or tartarean, heavenly or infernal. The movement in the infinite is infinite progress. This bein…

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We’re getting closer to the river’s edge, but we’re not quite prepared to “take our draught” yet.  It has always seemed to me that libertarian property theory is prone to leaping straight to property’s defense—the occasions for legitimate use of…

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In my initial thoughts on Locke's proviso, I wasn't doing much more than testing the waters, so to speak, or getting some new cards on the table. I had been wrestling, semi-unsuccessfully, with a follow-up post to my recent piece on markets, government and the environment, and decided it would make as much sense to tackle some key property issues head-on, as to wade any deeper, right now, into a debate that doesn't seem to be going anywhere very useful. The responses so far suggest that maybe this stuff isn't going anywhere either — at least without some real care in the exposition. David Ellerman suggests I read his book, and Iain McKay points me to Ellerman, Rothbard, and the importance of freedom, which I have presumably slighted in some way. James is concerned that a property theory that applies only to non-rivalrous goods doesn't accomplish the things (autonomy, conflict resolution, stability, stewardship, etc.) that we expect a property system to accomplish, and says we "need a way of universalising property rights without destroying the grounds for them."

In case it wasn't clear, I agree that Locke was inconsistent. I also agree that the points raised by Ellerman about how Locke defines "the individual's labor" are important, particularly as they open the door to exploitation. When Ellerman criticizes property theory for neglecting acquisition, I'm right there. It seems to me, indeed, that it may well be the non-proviso propertarians who are most vulnerable to the charge of having destroyed the grounds for property rights, by that neglect of the question of legitimate acquisition. Locke muddied the waters considerably, as I have noted, by positing an initial property-in-common. It essentially places the private-propertarian in the position of having to solve the resource-apportionment problem faced by communism, while also presenting a coherent theory of "property" which accounts for transformations from common to private property, as well as from private property appropriated by mixing to "unmixed" commodity-property susceptible to transmission by exchange. That's a fairly tall order, and one which I am not sure any of the competing property theories actually fill. But, as I have noted before, my interest in Locke's theory comes from the fact that he appears to have at least made a solid, relatively elegant start at covering the required ground. Allow me to repeat my earlier summary:

It seems to me that the strength of the model is that it gives us a clear mechanism for appropriation (labor mixing), a rationale for that appropriation (extension of the self), and a rule for avoiding the monopolization of property (the provisos.) That’s pretty elegant. Add an active, “unmixing” nature to the picture, and apply some attention and ingenuity to how expropriation will adjust property claims to fit the demands of the provisos, and you have some pretty simple, and fairly sustainable, guidelines. The provisos make the whole apparatus explicitly social in nature; changes of various sorts will require adjustments, expropriations and reappropriations (all of a voluntary sort, if folks are following the “rules.”) What puzzles me is that non-proviso Lockeans don’t seem to admire any of that except the fact that the rule of labor-mixing seems simple. It’s precisely all the dynamic potential, and the elegance of the rationale (the fact that self-ownership and the ownership of chattel or real property don’t have to be treated as separate) that they seem to oppose. What non-proviso Lockeans draw from Locke seems to be a ritual of appropriation with little or no logical connection to even the principles — like self-ownership — that they appeal to. Occupancy and use is certainly a lot less cut-and-dried, but compared to the “correct position” it certainly seems a lot more robust and complete.

I've very sympathetic to the concerns of both Iain and James. On the one hand, private property in rivalrous goods seems as much like a privilege as a self-evident and universal right. And the supposed ability of such a right to reduce conflict is really primarily a matter of reducing recourse. And when that reduced recourse is attached to the right to defensive or retaliatory force, it would be nice to have a better elaborated notion of justice that "first come, first served." If the things that we expect private property systems to do can't actually be done consistently by them, there's no reason to keep flogging that dead horse; and if the things presented as universal, self-evident rights appear to be privileges granted in an arbitrary and unequal manner, then we should probably look elsewhere. On the other hand, the sorts of things that we would like private property systems to fix are certainly often worth fixing, and much of the progress toward the fixes has come out of the struggle over what should constitute socially-recognized, individual or private property.

Unfortunately, I frequently feel that, despite the importance attributed to questions of property, we seldom approach them with the sort of seriousness that critically important questions really deserve. In particular, I'm afraid that anarchist discussions of property seldom escape mild variations on either a communism which does not want to wrestle with the problem of property (although common property presumably needs a coherent theory just as much as private property), and a propertarianism that does not want to think of property as a problem. The dichotomy has even been read back onto Proudhon, via the famous Hagbard Celine "property-1/property-2/property-3" distinction. While Wilson/Celine acknowledges Proudhon's three characterizations of property ("theft," "impossible," "liberty"), he reduces them down to two, and treats those two as separate concepts sharing a name. But Proudhon, critically, did not treat "property as theft" and "property as liberty" as different things. He never explicitly worked through the permutations of the connections he set up, but his work makes it clear that if property manages to accomplish its "aim" of liberty, it is not by ceasing to be "theft" (an exclusive form of appropriation rooted in individual absolutism, an over-reaching that denies the basic interconnectedness of individuals), but (as he said in 1842) by balancing and universalizing that over-reaching, which is necessary for the development of the individual. The three aspects of property exist simultaneously, and the key to understanding Proudhon's theory probably comes from working out the details of their general equivalence, as a step towards firmly establishing the grounds on which they might be universalized. There is a sense in which "liberty is theft" or "liberty is impossible," but also perhaps that "theft is impossible" (or even that "impossibility is theft.") This undoubtedly isn't the place to attempt to sketch out all the permutations, but I think that such a sketch is possible, without straying too many steps from Proudhon's explicit statements on property. Some of this is already laid out in my posts on the "gift economy of property." The one thing I would add or emphasize here is that the aspect of property which contributes most importantly to the continued, progressive liberty of the individual is not that of "use" (though that is necessary), but rather the aspect of "abuse" (by which Proudhon meant a certain socially-sanctioned leeway to experiment — and sometimes err — in the application of resources.)

It is in order to clarify that point, which probably needs a lot of clarification for many readers, that I want to focus on the details of some simple acts of appropriation, starting with a drink of water from a river, and explore the ways in which "property," in its various aspects, might or might not enter into the question. I'll probably take it pretty slowly, emphasizing the somewhat-neglected question of property's "im/possibility."

[to be continued...]

Nor was this appropriation of any parcel of land, by improving it, any prejudice to any other man, since there was still enough, and as good left; and more than the yet unprovided could use. So that, in effect, there was never the less left for others because of his enclosure for himself: for he that leaves as much as another can make use of, does as good as take nothing at all. No body could think himself injured by the drinking of another man, though he took a good draught, who had a whole river of the same water left him to quench his thirst: and the case of land and water, where there is enough of both, is perfectly the same.—John Locke, Second Treatise on Government.

Locke's "enough and as good" proviso is, of course, rejected by most propertarians who call themselves "Lockeans." It's not hard to imagine why, given how high it may set the bar for legitimate appropriation. If the individual appropriation of private property really was the equivalent of taking "nothing at all," if it was a "good draught," by individual standards, which still left "a whole river," then we would obviously have a whole lot less to fight about.

It's interesting to see property limited to what are essentially non-rivalrous goods. That's certainly not the picture we get from those latter-day "Lockean" propertarians who consider the proviso either unimportant, meaningless outside of "the state of nature," or necessarily fulfilled by pretty much any kind of free exchange. Indeed, in those circles the norm seems to be to most closely associate private property with rivalrous goods. The market solution is inevitably to put key resources under private control.

I think there are pretty good reasons to suspect that propertarians have pretty well abandoned Locke's principles, at least with regard to appropriation. The language of the original proviso seems to say: "Sure, you can have private property, as long as it doesn't matter." Private property is fine, as long as it does not diminish the store of original resources/common property. I'm sure most of us would be happy to concede an individual right which has neither social costs nor costs to other individuals. That seems like a pretty good selling point for a universal and self-evident right. For those appropriable resources, there is no question of forced "equality:" everyone can take "a good draught" that suits them, as long of the definition of a "draught" and the means of taking it remain roughly "human scale."

Of course, we don't need to insist on resources being "common property" prior to appropriation, and there are probably good reasons not to. Very little about this original "common property" and "individual property" seems to indicate a common character, and Locke's scheme is probably strengthened by not confusing the issue unnecessarily. We have a relatively clear mechanism for individual appropriation in labor-mixing. Nothing is made clearer by assuming an "original mixing" by some collective person (society, humanity, etc.) and much is potentially obscured, since individual appropriation would then appear to be a form of unilateral expropriation, and the claims of the individual to property would be a violation of that previous property in a pretty literal manner: at best we would have a differend between competing property regimes; at worst, (individual) "property is theft," in a pretty straightforward way. There are certainly potential uses of the notion of "common property" that would not simply involved positing a completely different system under a similar name, but, again, there's not much about the way Locke poses the issue that helps us think them through, so I'm content to treat resources as initially unowned. This helps salvage the consistency of Locke's system, and gives the derivative systems at least a fighting chance.

Most contemporary propertarians will probably have already pretty well written off this sort of analysis, since we are, presumably, no longer "in the state of nature," and all this stuff about appropriation is old news anyway. Labor-mixing and all that stuff are just an origin story. The exchange of properties is justified by the very act of exchange. And, face it, nobody in their right mind is going to drink water from a river anyway.

I'm honestly pretty unimpressed with the tendency of propertarians to assert the supreme importance of a principled belief in property rights, while playing, it seems to me, pretty fast and loose with the details. A proviso is, after all, a condition or restriction--and in the case of Lockean property theory, it seems to be the condition or restriction which makes the right of property self-evident and capable of being universalized. That's no little thing. The difference between a system of property that seems to apply only to essentially non-rivalrous goods, and one which associates property with rivalry is no little thing. To go from a system which leaves "the whole river" after each appropriation to one which can hardly imagine anything unowned is a pretty remarkable journey. Perhaps I can be forgiven for wishing to linger awhile at the proverbial river's edge, particularly as it seems to me that this deceptively simple business of taking a drink of water is perhaps not as simple as all that.

Three years ago, almost to the day, I wrote this bit about individualist anarchism and ecology, asking:

"how, given the involvement of the individual in complex, far-flung economic and social networks, is it possible to act as an individual in an ecological sense? What would than entail? Individualists who wish to act only at their own cost can't stop exploring the costs when they find their "footprint" extends, in however dispersed a fashion, over the horizon."

I ended the post with a hope of returning to the questions soon. Better late, I suppose, than never.  Over the next week or so, I hope to pick up those threads again, in the context of Locke's proviso, Leroux's circulus, Proudhon's claim that "property is impossible," and the questions raised by the Gulf oil spill. I want to look closely at the individual taking a drink from a river, and explore some hard questions about ecological footprints, the nature of "individual" action in western societies, and the possibility of a proviso-Lockean property within mutualism.

[to be continued...]

Check out the Vagabond Theorist blog for a translation of the "Introduction" to the 2001 edition of the Italian version of Max Stirner's Der Einzige und sein Eigentum. The translation is obviously approximate in a couple of places, but Massimo Passamani's provocative reading of Stirner is sufficiently clear. Thanks to the Vagabond Theorist himself for making this available.

I stand by my previous observation that without some practical acknowledgment of ecological realities, no institution can properly address a problem like the Gulf oil spill. It seems clear that the freedom-to-function of a market is a separate issue from the various forces, ideologies and knowledge-sets that shape the activity and perceived interests of the economic actors involved. That means, of course, that a "market" can freely function towards quite a number of specific ends, depending on how the economic actors understand their interests.  It may also complicate the sorts of simple oppositions between free market function and governmental intervention that drive so much market anarchist thought.

In the left-libertarian responses, there is a lot of emphasis on regulatory capture—which amounts to the ability of certain economic actors to determine how "common goods" will be defined and protected—and the ways in which the intervention of the (captured) regulatory state have distorted the market incentives for everyone. When you compare a captured governmental apparatus to a free market, one would certainly expect the free contender to look pretty good—so I'm not sure how fair the comparisons really are. But there are, it seems to me, other and quite serious objections to the sort of claims being made for the free market's ability to deal with environmental concerns. The most troubling of these may be a sort of variation on the problem of "conflation"—its flip-side, perhaps—where the workings of the unfree market are presumed to be radically different, at least where it counts, from their free workings. To my progressive friends, regulatory capture looks like interference in the free functioning of a democratic government by "the market." You can say to them, "Well, it's not a free market," but the obvious comeback is, "Well, neither is it a free government."

Kevin Carson points to the obvious shortcomings of the existing regulatory state:

Think:  this is the most “progressive” president, with the largest Democratic majority, likely to be elected in a generation.  If this guy lacks the political will to make full use of the powers available to him in holding a dirtbag like Hayward accountable in a smoking gun case like this, what good’s a regulatory state?

A regulatory state that works properly only when completely staffed with Dudley Do-Rights, who never sleep on the job (especially with the people they’re supposed to be regulating) is a regulatory state that will never work.  In the real world, government is a lot more apt to protect the corporations against you than vice versa.

And maybe he's right that this is as good as it's likely to get for the progressives for awhile. But we don't have to look very far back to find presumably more conservative regimes that showed more willingness to act in the interests of the people. Obama and the Democrats would certainly be unable to pass legislation like the Endangered Species Act, let alone something like the National Park Service Act. But I'm not sure that tells us anything except that the most progressive government likely to be elected in a generation falls somewhere to the right of Richard Nixon or Teddy Roosevelt on some critical issues. The current regulatory state is what is left after decades of dismantling. In the realm of environmental protection, we've seen three decades of general retreat, with a few high-profile battles standing in for an environmental policy. Reagan-era agencies like the MMS were captured from the beginning.

What seems obvious is that the current government is "progressive" in the same way that our actually-existing market is "free"—that is, it's not progressive in any meaningful sense, and it is not at all what real progressives would think of as a functioning regulatory state. To the extent that we want to move from criticism of the current regime to comparison with market alternatives, I would want to know: 1) what is the free-est market we are likely to see in the next generation; and/or 2) what would a freely-functioning regulatory state look like. If we're going to talk tough about "the real world," there's no escaping some very hard questions about how much of the capture of the state has been in accord with market strategies that would make just as much sense in a free market as they presumably do under actually-existing capitalism.

In the battles over logging old-growth timber, for instance, short-term profits repeatedly trumped long-term industry sustainability, and there's not much reason to believe that a free market would have made much of a difference. As willing as some federal agencies were to put public land to private uses, and as blatantly political as the "science" of some of the most use-oriented agencies became, it's hard to imagine what private enterprise would have concerned itself with questions like biodiversity and endangered species or ecosystems in the first place.

There's clearly much more to say, but that's about all I have the energy to tackle at the moment...

Here is the final section of Proudhon’s study on property, from the Contradictions. The other sections I posted recently will appear, in full or part, in the forthcoming AK Press anthology, but this section didn’t make the cut for various reasons, not …

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