Individualist Anarchists

The latest instalment in my tour round the libertarian/anarchist "classics" brings me to a work very appropriate for today's messed up world.  In "Mutual Banking" American Individualist Anarchist William Batchelder Greene explains clearly what is wrong with the current banking system (now, just as much as then) and proposes a non-profit mutual bank as a solution.

The bankers, he says, are the new aristocracy who, with state collusion through banking licensing and legal tender laws can buy up all the assets of a country and leave its people bankrupt and destitute.  They control access to money and credit and can pick and choose those industrious would be entrepreneurs who will win and lose by their actions.

He presents, at one point, an interesting argument for the repudiation of our current national debt - no real value would be destroyed by so doing, just an unwinding of the legal values that gives the elite few such an upper hand over the rest of us left paying for that debt.  If ever there was a time for revolution against the bankers it seems to me to be now.  

This will also be a good read/listen for those who do not understand the nature and inherent flexibility of money, such as a few of those at the "Speak Easy" last week.  Greene's solution, he says, would be inflation free, low cost, circulating currency backed by real assets that does not allow for a parasite class of bankers (or, indeed politicians) to take control.  If you ever wanted to know how a credit union worked, this will also provide much background information.

I am often finding that ideas that I develop for today's problems turn out to have been thought of many times before - Greene's model here describes with uncanny accuracy my proposal for an Oxfordshire local currency network for example.  This is not history - it is living proof that the problems we are facing now have been at the forefront of men's minds for decades and centuries - and that if we had only listened to the likes of Greene then we would be unlikely to be up this particular shit creek.  The Mutualists' message is, if anything, more important today for us having comprehensively ignored it for over a century and the problems getting a hundred times worse in the meantime.

You can get the text I have used (the 1870 publication) at the Libertarian Labyrinth website (.pdf), and attached you will find 12 files - an MP3 for each section, a .zip file of all the MP3s and an iTunes/iPod optimised .M4B file that has everything in one audiobook file with chapter bookmarks and so on.  

Enjoy.

Last week I ordered a copy of "Instead of a Book: by a man too busy to write one" by Benjamin Tucker, late 19th Century American proponent of Individualist Anarchism, and from which tradition much Mutualist thinking is derived.  I was intending to give it the Audiobook treatment.  But when it arrived today I found that it was a facsimile edition and therefore not ideally suited to easy reading into a microphone (small text, difficult fonts, awkward spacing and so on).

I had previously found just the one complete online copy of the work, (there is an incomplete one too) which is split into many html pages, one per article, which again kind of makes it difficult to read (and especially if I decide to do it when I am not online of course!), so I was scouring the web to see if there was a PDF or a single HTML page version of it, but to no avail.

I did come across this discussion at Reason about it being available in different formats, but the two different formats linked to in the comments show up as dead links, so I went about the compiler's suggestion of grabbing the DocBook format file and seeing if I could convert it.  After trying unsuccessfully with a number of tools (they all rejected the XML input for some reason) I eventually downloaded an evaluation copy of something called Oxygen XML Editor, which seemed to process it well enough.  And so for anyone interested attached you will find three zip files - one of a PDF version, one of a single page HTML version and one of a single page XHTML version.

Or you could wait till I have read it out loud and just listen!

Now lots of people baulk at a perceived notion that libertarianism is fixated on private property.  They feel that it is indicative of an incessant right wing-ish obsession with accumulation of wealth and devil take the hind-most (who will, obviously, they assume, have no such private property: wrongly of course - for we want everyone to be able to accumulate enough property to enable them to gain financial security and so on).

In fact of course the statement in the title, "property is freedom", comes from Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, with whom most people associate a. anarchism (which many seem to think of as somehow not "right wing-ish" - if libertarianism is "right wing-ish" - which it is not but never mind; I don't want to get into a left-right debate here), and b. the more famous dictum that "property is theft".

And it struck me the other day, while listening again to Murray Rothbard's "For a New Liberty" (of which you can listen to an excellent free audiobook version in individual chapters at the Mises Institute), that actually the really important thing about property and why it occupies such an important place in libertarian is little to do with material wealth accumulation.

Actually it's two big reasons, the first of which I don't really want to get into here - that private property, as opposed to communal property in particular, creates the right sort of economic incentives for individuals to want to work to support themselves and keep their property in good order - if they get to keep the product of their efforts, the property which results, they are incentivised to do well. 

But it is the second big reason that I want to highlight now in the context of "property is freedom":  respect for private property rights and the voluntary contracts that give rise to them is key to eradicating the state's (often contradictory) interference through legislation.

Take, for example, the right to free speech.  A right in theory at least at the very root of liberalism - for if you cannot be free with your thoughts, and with expressing them in speech or publication, is not the state constraining your very being?  But we've all heard, and many accept, the idea that there must be some kind of "limit" on free speech, such as not being allowed to yell "Fire!" in a crowded theatre because of the harm that may cause to panicking patrons.  Well, libertarians do not need such a contradictory limitation; because of our respect for property and contract.

To yell "Fire!" in that crowded theatre is a breach of contract of the basis and conditions on which you and the other patrons are permitted in that theatre by the owner - to watch a performance.  Any harm caused by your actions will either be breaches of their contracts, or damage to their property, and properly actionable through private actions on their behalf.

By the way, you can hear more about the "Person who yells "Fire!" in a crowded theatre" from Walter Block's book, "Defending the Undefendable", also at the Mises Institute.

Many think that anarchy means a complete lack of order, or a lawless world in which the vulnerable for whatever reason will be preyed upon by all those vicious racists, homophobes or whomever that we have created many dubious restrictions on free speech to curtail.  But let's say I own a particular street, I charge my customers for using the street, and they, in turn expect me to provide a safe environment for them to traverse.  So I get to set the rules; the protection agency contracted by my insurance firm makes sure everyone feels safe, ,is not intimidated by racist thugs or whatever.  After all, I may be liable to my customers if they are hurt while in my care, on my property.

Proudhon called all these associations developing civil society "spontaneous order", driven not by what a few people who solicit your votes every so often want, but by you and everyone else going about the myriad of transactions of your every day lives.

Oh, and while I'm at it, I'd probably want to make sure my street was gritted and safe for my customers in the snow too, maybe even get a few more customers if other street owners didn't bother so much.  I can't say my local authority is a "customer focused street owner" at the moment, can you?  It is because of respect for property and contract that all this can happen and, just as important when compared with the state's way of doing things, that the money flows to the services that people actually need, because, well, they're paying for it and can demand what they've paid for.

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"State intervention distinguishes capitalism from the free market." So writes Kevin Carson in the preface to his "Studies in Mutualist Political Economy" (2004).

In the rather broad and straggly family tree of the children of liberty, I have come to describe myself as being on the "Mutualist" branch. In fact I really married, or perhaps was adopted, into the Mutualists somehow, having started out as one of its first cousins, a "Georgist". Hence my use of that slightly affected double barreled description on this blog - a "Geo-Mutualist". But, apart from the vague notion that this denotes a position somewhere on the spectrum of views variously described as "classical liberal", "radical liberal", "libertarian" or "anarchist" - or simply "liberal" by those brave enough to face down the howls of derision from some people in certain modern soi-dissant liberal political parties not so far from here - most people react somewhat quizzically to the term "Geo-Mutualist", if at all.

So it's about time I think I tried to explain it a little. Indeed, the name having been suggested to me a couple of years ago following a previous attempt on here to put a label on my political position, it is probably only now anyway that I capable of beginning to tell you what it all means. And even now my thoughts are continually developing and changing: which is, of course, a jolly good reason for insisting on the freest of free markets in which we can express our millions of daily changes of mind every time we need to trade with someone, rather than the once every four years or so we might get to change our minds about our elected dictators.

Mutualism is, most simply, a form of anarchism. We want no political state. Not a small state, a minimal state, a night-watchman state. Just no state. It is no exaggeration to say that we believe that the state is the root cause of all inequity in the world and all coercion in an unfree market. We believe that the truly free market - all the voluntary, non-coercive, co-operative, mutually beneficial transactions between free individuals - delivers the maximum and most just distribution of economic benefits to all its participants. We believe that it is the state that by its interventions (often, admittedly, with the best of intentions but always inept at best and downright, deliberately and inhumanely destructive at worst) makes markets unfree and unable to deliver a just outcome for all its participants. That in the language of the factors of economic production "capital" and "land" can only exploit "labour" by "harnessing the power of the state in their interests" (Carson, ibid., Preface).

Put more simply it is because of state favours on their behalf that capitalists and landowners get disproportionately rich and workers remain disproportionately poor. We note that this has been the case throughout the history of the state and in all types of state, notwithstanding that some of them, such as contemporary "liberal democracies" profess to act, because elected by them, in the interests of all "the people". And, partly at least, precisely because it has this observably inevitable tendency, whichever type of state or epoch of state one looks at, we believe the state has, ultimately, no possibility of rehabilitation - and because those who set themselves up for positions of power in those states, so obviously also personally benefit from their ineptness and downright criminality.

Now most of this creed could be cut and pasted into that of most libertarians and anarchists I have come across. Hell, even Kevin himself said that he thought the major strands of the anarchist-libertarian family were often quite "porous". I have spent more time reading and listening to Austrian school thinkers over the last year and othre than emphasis, there's little, at least in the "ends" of what I have written here that they could not subscribe to, even if they differ in approach and emphasis. Mutualism's pedigree, for sure, would be described as the "left" wing of the family tree:

In the mid-nineteenth century, a vibrant native American school of anarchism, known as individualist anarchism, existed alongside the other varieties. Like most other contemporary socialist thought, it was based on a radical interpretation of Ricardian economics. The classical individualist anarchism of Josiah Warren, Benjamin Tucker and Lysander Spooner was both a socialist movement and a subcurrent of classical liberalism. It agreed with the rest of the socialist movement that labor was the source of exchange-value, and that labor was entitled to its full product. Unlike the rest of the socialist movement, the individualist anarchists believed that the natural wage of labor in a free market was its product, and that economic exploitation could only take place when capitalists and landlords harnessed the power of the state in their interests. Thus, individualist anarchism was an alternative both to the increasing statism of the mainstream socialist movement, and to a classical liberal movement that was moving toward a mere apologetic for the power of big business. (Carson, ibid., Preface)

But Mutualism is also a mechanism by which we hope to reach our ideal society. Like the nineteenth century radicals - both liberal and later in the labour movement - we want to do something about it. We want to build alternative, voluntary, non-coercive, institutions which can then be shown to produce the sort of "public goods" people currently seem to believe only the state can provide. We also want to build and encourage alternatives to the corporate hierarchical system to show that a multitude of different types of economic actors can compete in that ultimate free market - after all, there must also be a free market in the types of organization that operate in the free market!

So in my case, this may be grand objectives, such as Oxfordshire Community Land Trusts, aiming to develop affordable housing without state subsidy, controlled by the communities they are part of and the occupants who will be buying a stake in them. Or Community Finance Partnerships attempting to reduce the relaince of local businesses and households on the mainstream state-capitalist banking sector. It may also mean things like the recently reported idea of an estate in Portsmouth (a copy of which I cannot now find) to hire its own private security force, exasperated by the lack of performance of the state police. But it is certainly also applicable to small initiatives such as the Braziers Park community in Oxfordshire. And obviously this goes hand in hand with campaigning for the state to stop doing things that simply do not need doing too - pursuing the war on drugs, erecting artificial borders and so on.

So that is my quick and dirty introduction to Mutualism. I can hardly do better though than Kevin Carson's own introduction at the Mutualist website:

INTRODUCTION

   Mutualism, as a variety of anarchism, goes back to P.J. Proudhon in France and Josiah Warren in the U.S. It favors, to the extent possible, an evolutionary approach to creating a new society. It emphasizes the importance of peaceful activity in building alternative social institutions within the existing society, and strengthening those institutions until they finally replace the existing statist system. As Paul Goodman put it, "A free society cannot be the substitution of a 'new order' for the old order; it is the extension of spheres of free action until they make up most of the social life."

   Other anarchist subgroups, and the libertarian left generally, share these ideas to some extent. Whether known as "dual power" or "social counterpower," or "counter-economics," alternative social institutions are part of our common vision. But they are especially central to mutualists' evolutionary understanding.

   Mutualists belong to a non-collectivist segment of anarchists. Although we favor democratic control when collective action is required by the nature of production and other cooperative endeavors, we do not favor collectivism as an ideal in itself. We are not opposed to money or exchange. We believe in private property, so long as it is based on personal occupancy and use. We favor a society in which all relationships and transactions are non-coercive, and based on voluntary cooperation, free exchange, or mutual aid. The "market," in the sense of exchanges of labor between producers, is a profoundly humanizing and liberating concept. What we oppose is the conventional understanding of markets, as the idea has been coopted and corrupted by state capitalism.

   Our ultimate vision is of a society in which the economy is organized around free market exchange between producers, and production is carried out mainly by self-employed artisans and farmers, small producers' cooperatives, worker-controlled large enterprises, and consumers' cooperatives. To the extent that wage labor still exists (which is likely, if we do not coercively suppress it), the removal of statist privileges will result in the worker's natural wage, as Benjamin Tucker put it, being his full product.

   Because of our fondness for free markets, mutualists sometimes fall afoul of those who have an aesthetic affinity for collectivism, or those for whom "petty bourgeois" is a swear word. But it is our petty bourgeois tendencies that put us in the mainstream of the American populist/radical tradition, and make us relevant to the needs of average working Americans. Most people distrust the bureaucratic organizations that control their communities and working lives, and want more control over the decisions that affect them. They are open to the possibility of decentralist, bottom-up alternatives to the present system. But they do not want an America remade in the image of orthodox, CNT-style syndicalism.

   Mutualism is not "reformist," as that term is used pejoratively by more militant anarchists. Nor is it necessarily pacifistic, although many mutualists are indeed pacifists. The proper definition of reformism should hinge, not on the means we use to build a new society or on the speed with which we move, but on the nature of our final goal. A person who is satisfied with a kinder, gentler version of capitalism or statism, that is still recognizable as state capitalism, is a reformist. A person who seeks to eliminate state capitalism and replace it with something entirely different, no matter how gradually, is not a reformist.

   "Peaceful action" simply means not deliberately provoking the state to repression, but rather doing whatever is possible (in the words of the Wobbly slogan) to "build the structure of the new society within the shell of the old" before we try to break the shell. There is nothing wrong with resisting the state if it tries, through repression, to reverse our progress in building the institutions of the new society. But revolutionary action should meet two criteria: 1) it should have strong popular support; and 2) it should not take place until we have reached the point where peaceful construction of the new society has reached its limits within existing society.

And finally, a note on the "Georgist" side of my political family tree.  As I said, I came to Mutualism through Georgism.  I saw that Henry George's "Single Tax" was a way, not least for George himself, of significantly reducing the size and reach of the state.  Ultimately I got to the position where the state might only collect and redistribute land rent as a community dividend.

Obviously within the Mutualist ancestry with Proudhon and Tucker there are strident views also of the place of land in creating and perpetuating an inequitable society.  Tucker and George indeed had a long running correspondence and though they disagreed on George's remedy to the "land question" there can be no doubt that all the main stream branches of libertarianism put addressing this "land question" as a high priority until the second third of the twentieth century.

As I mentioned, I have been reading a lot more Austrian school stuff lately and am gaining an appreciation of their logic for a strong ethos of private property, and whilst I can see that some of the measures the Austrians would implement would reduce the inequities in land ownership substantially (different means and emphasis to similar ends again) I still think there will always be a "scarcity rent" to land that deserves a system such as Henry George's to mitigate it best.

It's a matter of emphasis really: if one day I am persuaded that the biggest economic hurdle we face is the fiat money system, perhaps my more strident Georgism would recede a little, but for the moment I certainly still believe that these problems are at least as important as each other, and because land is something over which we have ultimately less control - we have one planet after all, for now and we cannot base economic policy on the possibility that we will one day find another one suitable - I tend to say that the land issue is the more important one to solve.  So to that end, I still maintain the moniker "Geo-Mutualist".