Anarchists should rethink common vs private property
Anarchists should rethink common vs private property
Anarchists should rethink common vs private property
https://www.ellerman.org/rethinking-common-vs-private-property/
@anarchism
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Erm, this is something that has been discussed in Anarchist literature already more than 100 years ago. This article seems totally ignorant of the well established conceptual difference between "private property" and "personal property".
I am aware of the distinction between private vs personal property. Many anarchists criticism of private property rests on the idea that it is the root cause of the capitalist's legal right to appropriate the fruits of their employees' labor. The article shows that it is not. It is the employment contract that is to blame for this violation. We should focus our critique on that contract instead when supporting universal workers' self-management. We should consider other anticapitalist arguments
Many anarchists criticism of private property rests on the idea that it is the root cause of the capitalist’s legal right to appropriate the fruits of their employees’ labor. The article shows that it is not. It is the employment contract that is to blame for this violation.
Those are the same thing, though. The author is really putting a lot of stake into the separation of owning capital vs. renting it, and trying to make both of those things distinct from decision making. But ownership is fundamentally about decisions and control. Rent changes that very little. You rent a home, and perhaps get a tiny measure of control over the decisions regarding it, but the landlord retains ultimate decision-making power (buying, selling, renovations, kicking you out, etc.), and capitalism is 100% geared toward ensuring that stays true even in the most wild scenarios we can conceive of regarding tenants' rights under capitalism. And the same remains true of owning a "company"—and, of course, the means of production that are a part of it and keep you from just walking next door and creating a new one if you don't like how the capitalist runs things (yes: this is the part—the enforced scarcity—that makes "owning a company" actually worth something, so it is fundamental to the system).
if you don't think that ownership and control are intrinsically linked, think long and hard about what it would mean to "own" something but not be able to make any decisions regarding it (including where anything produced by it goes). WTF does that "ownership" mean? It's like donating to an infrastructure project to get your name put on a sign by some stretch of highway: it means absolutely fucking nothing.
Sounds just like NFTs!
LMAO. Yeah.
NFTs basically give nothing to the purchaser. Here, the workers get control rights over the firm and the right to appropriate the positive and negative fruits of their labor. The workers get to decide collectively what contracts the firm makes with input suppliers, who to sell the output to, what to produce, and how to produce it. If it really was worthless, tell the capitalists that it doesn't matter who hires what or whom in the marketplace
Not the same thing. If workers need a factory to produce trains, they can either (1) rent the factory or (2) the factory owner can hire them. In case 1, the workers retain ownership over the produced trains (fruits of their labor). In case 2, the employer owns the produced trains.
Private property in land is different, and should involve common ownership.
A distinction exists between positive and negative control rights. Property only confers the latter, which can be weakened
If the owner decides he doesn't wind up with enough of the value of producing the trains, he can kick out the train builders.
Same thing.
The train builders can go somewhere else collectively under this system.
Property norms can be set up so that the buyer can compel a sale. This would work by having a community digital ledger that keeps track of property claims. The owner would state the price at which they would be willing to part with the property, and they would pay a percentage fee on that price into a common fund. Anyone that paid that price would get the property even if the owner objected @anarchism
Sure, workers can always allegedly "go somewhere else". You realize that private property and capital accumulation and market distribution have, in actual practice, kept us from doing so very, very effectively, right? Like, there's one or two large enterprises that are worker-owned and allegedly democratically managed. And even on the local level, co-ops are incredibly difficult to establish. You sound like a fucking propertarian, telling people to "just go somewhere else/start one yourself if you don't like it." I'm not sure why you expect anyone to fall for that shit here.
Are you sure you're an anarchist and not a liberal? Because you're working awfully hard to propose market-based solutions in order to seemingly protect private property relations against anyone who might want radical, use-based community ownership.
The difference is that workers can take the entire company with them when they go somewhere else.
You are confusing the difficulty of establishing a co-op today with the difficulty of establishing a co-op under a system where co-ops are the only firm. The employment contract's pervasiveness has caused the former. Ellerman advocates abolishing the employment contract and private property in natural resources.
There have been anarchists that do not oppose markets such as Proudhon
There have been anarchists that do not oppose markets such as Proudhon
They didn't propose those markets as a way to preserve private property relations for the sake of capitalists, as you are doing.
And even those anarchists (and socialists more generally) who don't wholly oppose markets usually want to decrease their influence, especially regarding necessities like food, water, housing, health care, etc. "Here's how markets will fix that," is a galaxy-brained thing for any leftist to say at this point in history.
Not a market fundamentalist. Common ownership applies to housing (land) and water.
Capital rental benefits workers. Renting is buying the services of a thing for a period rather than buying the whole thing. Sometimes workers will prefer to buy only the services for a period thus paying less. In value terms, there is no difference between renting and owning because
capital's price = future rentals' discounted present valueSuch transactions would be with worker coops on both ends
Capital rental benefits workers.
Wrong. Capital rental benefits the capitalist (e.g. the landlord).
Renting is buying....
Wrong. Weird, dumb misunderstanding that you are really irrationally obsessed with right now, and already explained. Rent is an exploitative property relation, that leaves the owner with ultimate power. If the dictator doesn't like you for any reason including that you don't follow his every edict (easily the equivalent of that "employment contract" you're so worried about), he terminates (e.g. evicts you). And I'm not sure why you keep putting
@anarchismat the end of your comments, because you aren't advocating for it. You're just advocating for a property-based hierarchy with a different flavor.Okay. Done with this exchange, and won't be replying further. Take care.
Many anarchists criticism of private property rests on the idea that it is the root cause of the capitalist’s legal right to appropriate the fruits of their employees’ labor.
This is the Marxist analysis (as also pointed out in the article), not one commonly shared by Anarchists.
I don't think the argument in the article is particularly new or enlightening, and in fact the proposed democratic company is apparently modelled after Mondragon, which was founded on Anarchist ideas nearly 70 years ago.
Believing the statement I made there is not limited to Marxists. I have found many anarchists believe the statement when challenged on private property (in products of labor) from an individualist anarchist perspective.
In a sense, Proudhon has made a similar argument to Ellerman, but he did not fully draw the connection to principles of responsibility to ethically justify inalienability of that right. That connection is valuable because it makes it much harder to deny the conclusion
Just because some people have known about something for more than a hundred years, doesn't mean all people have known something for more than a hundred years. I am a fan of Henry George's work, but I wouldn't be all "ho hum" if someone who was ignorant of George's work (and derivatives) nevertheless managed to figure it out independently and present it to new people. I would be thrilled to see the idea spreading.
Sure, but (contrary to the article linked) the headline here is "Anarchists should..." when Anarchists are actually the ones that have probably thought about this the most already and the article (without mentioning Anarchy even once) basically just re-invents 100 year old anarchist ideas.
Don't forget that the anarcho-capitalists have been muddying branding. Some folks may not realize that anarchism is not the same thing as absolute landlordism.
Anarcho-capitalists do not even correctly apply their own principles. They accept the principle that people have the right to appropriate the fruits of their labor. However, they do not recognize the routine violation of that principle embodied in the capitalist firm. They, in fact, defend the right of the employer to appropriate the positive and negative fruits of the workers' joint labor in the firm on the basis of consent missing the point about inalienability
I'm not sure Anarcho-capitalism is intended to be applied consistently. I'd be willing to bet it was originally crafted with the deliberate intent of fooling some would-be anarchists into allying themselves with authoritarians.
EDIT: Ha! It appears I am not alone in this. From the article:
Classical liberal thought has done its job well to get much of the Left to use the consent/coercion framing and to quibble about what is “really” voluntary (or whether the payment is big enough to compensate for all the “alienated labor-time”)—as if the whole institution for renting people would be acceptable if only people had other choices (like a guaranteed basic income) or were paid higher human rentals.[11]
Yeah. A couple of "timeless" quotes by the propertarian Murray Rothbard:
One gratifying aspect of our rise to some prominence is that, for the first time in my memory, we, “our side,” had captured a crucial word from the enemy...“Libertarians”...had long been simply a polite word for left-wing anarchists, that is for anti-private property anarchists, either of the communist or syndicalist variety.
We must therefore turn to history for enlightenment; here we find that none of the proclaimed anarchist groups correspond to the libertarian position, that even the best of them have unrealistic and socialistic elements in their doctrines...we find that all of the current anarchists are irrational collectivists...We must therefore conclude that we are not anarchists, and that those who call us anarchists are not on firm etymological ground, and are being completely unhistorical.
They knew damned well what they were doing. At least Rothbard didn't fully accept the appropriation of the latter term, even if others from his shitty movement have since then.
"This is my proposition: the laborer retains, even after he has received his wages, a natural right of property in the thing which he has produced."
-- Pierre-Joseph ProudhonEllerman's modern version of this analysis was first stated in 1984. Rothbard in 1950 saw the employment contract as vital to private property and swallowed the fundamental myth of capitalism that Ellerman mentions. He would include Ellerman's position on this matter as collectivist and anti-private-property.
I'm pretty sure I made obvious in the other comment tree that I'm not interested in your takes, and how defensively not-propertarian you insist you are while advocating for propertarian ideas.
When I say I'm done interacting with you and then start conversing with somebody else, that's not an invitation to jump in and continue with me. Fuck off.
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I replied to that comment for anyone reading to provide relevant context to place the ideas presented within the anarchism's intellectual history.
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Capitalist accusations for having a different analysis and critique of capitalism are not productive.
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It is a thread I started, so any reply could be interpreted as a reply to me. I was not sure of the etiquette here. I apologize if my commenting did not align with commenting etiquette here.
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Don’t forget that the anarcho-capitalists have been muddying branding.
I hope there aren't any in this particular forum where that the title was editorialized for, though. "Anarcho-capitalists" (propertarians) aren't anarchists, and this whole forum (plus its moderators) should be very clear about that, and become very clear about it if they aren't. I mean, the very first thing in the "sidebar" info is a link to an essay by David Graeber which should inform any propertarians that we most definitely are not talking about them (especially the last two sections on listening to your mother from your early childhood and believing in people's better natures).
Most anarchists are opposed to private property in the products of labor, so my re-contextualizing the article for this community was valid. Personal property does not cover all products of labor because it excludes the means of production, which can be a product of labor. The anarchist closest to Ellerman on this matter was Proudhon. Ellerman acknowledges him in his other work as a predecessor. Ellerman's critique applies even if wage labor is voluntary unlike many anarchic critiques @anarchism
Personal property does not cover all products of labor because it explicitly excludes the means of production, which can be a product of labor.
This isn't quite true. A means of production can become personal property if it is actively used by the person that produced it. It is just that no property right is thought to be absolute and actual usage usually trumps other means to derive personal property status.
Personally, I think Locke's provisio on occupancy and use applies: The use of land confers ownership if there is enough just as good left for others to do the same. If there is not, then those who acquire such a privilege should be required to compensate those excluded by this privilege.
Oh, you mean the occupancy and use sense of personal property. That does not allow one workers' collective to rent out means of production to another workers' collective and retain ownership. It is different from what Ellerman is arguing for. I also edited the comment to add another point
Not quite. Personal property can also be thought of as a group ownership. In fact often it has to be because it is difficult to manage in larger organizations otherwise.
Renting out the means of productions seems like a non-issue as when you are not using them why not give them to someone else to use? This is well established in Anarchist library economics texts.
The article also seems to be more concerned about investments into future returns from the means of production, but again this is basically just repeating the staking concept used in Mondragon for this, which is not uncontroversial, but benefits might out weight the risk that it creates a two class system within the company.
@poVoq Renting out means of production is another way for workers' collectives to exchange products of their labor, and receive something else that they value more. Giving away the means of production would mean forgoing compensation. It isn't clear whether the person you're giving away the means of production to will use it in a socially efficient manner. Prices provide a rough approximation of social cost especially in an economy with common ownership of natural resources @anarchism
No, sharing the means of production is ultimately to the benefit of all (see for example the open-source movement).
What you propose is akin to monopolizing or creating an artificial scarcity of them. Obviously in a library economy that prioritizes sharing of the means of production there would be a process so that people borrowing the means of production both contribute to the maintenance of them and not hog their use over other people's more productive use-cases, but the exact process would likely be sector specific and not based on an artificial abstraction like prices that gives an unjust advantage to the people that control the currency.
I think more interesting is anyway how to incentivize people to "invest" in the creation of additional/improved means of production, which is harder to solve when future returns from other peoples work are not possible to capture through private ownership of the means of production like in a capitalist society.
Software is something that can be freely duplicated without cost to its producers, so what applies to it cannot be applied to all capital. Open source is largely developed by a few dedicated contributors or employees of large corporations. Regardless, there needs to be an incentive for people to work on socially valuable projects even in open source rather than on their pet projects.
What could this process look like in a sector such that it wouldn't be basically prices?
It doesn't really matter that software can be freely replicated when talking about means of production that already exist. Withholding them from other people when you are not actually using them with the purpose of extracting some sort of personal benefit is a net negative to society.
Ultimately, money isn't a particularly good motivator (beyond preventing starvation and homelessness) for people to work on valuable projects for society. I think once you realize that and stop thinking about everything in terms of prices, it is easy to see how such a process could look like. But you need to take that first step to get rid of that capitalist brainworm yourself.