"The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians." -George Orwell, 1948
Because of the debasement of language, "libertarian" can now mean "creepy rightwingy person" or "antigovernment nutjob", depending on which flavor of Statism one prefers.
I believe by some sort of Rule of Discussions I am required to mention that Orwell was a socialist, to the point of picking up arms in Catalonia.
Makes me chuckle every time I see a Republican quote 1984.
First of all, capitalism is not a synonym for 'trade.' Trade between people has existed since forever, capitalism has only been around for a few hundred years.
Secondly, capitalism relies on more than two entities; it also relies on someone to actually enforce property relations. So your explanation is far too simple to actually describe the situation. Your simplification hides the authority: the final arbiter and enforcer of private property. This is generally a state. It's also quite authoritarian.
This is the kind of authority that socialists mean when they talk about authoritarian social relations. There's more to it than that, but that's the simplest introduction.
Sure, lets. It would be a waste of time to just spin definitions in a way that makes us inherently right about whatever it is we're talking about without reference to a common agreed set of terms.
When advocates for free markets or anarcho capitalists are talking about capitalism, they most decidedly are talking precisely about free trade. I am not sure where you're getting this other definition of capitalism that only exists as a subset of the westphalian nation state, that sounds a lot more like corporatism to me, where limited liability shells are set up with explicit protectionist policies and almost purchased legal protections supporting their manufactured business models from a nation state.
Just to be clear where are you getting this definition of capitalism as a creation of the state and something that cannot exist without it, completely divorced from the free market? How would you describe markets which exist outside the control and sanction of the state and without any participatory enforcement by the state, frequently enough actually even actively opposed by the state? The "means of production" and the control of that means is not necessarily within the hands of "the workers" in the marxist sense in those situations, so how is this not a direct example of capitalism without the state?
My description does not attempt to hide the authority, the seller is responsible for their security as is the buyer, they are both free to make whatever arrangements they choose with whatever other parties they choose in order to ensure the security of those products. Vendors might buy security cameras or other theft and violence deterrents. Buyers might buy insurance against defects or also be customers of third party organisations which have a vested interest in being trustworthy sources of information about the quality of products available at vendors a-z, and so on, and so forth. It is absolutely not implicitly necessary that security for both parties be provided by a nation state or its legislative, judicial and executive branches.
If socialist criticisms of capitalism entirely rely upon classifying capitalism as a sub branch of the nation state, it seems an awfully big hole to not acknowledge that trade and markets can exist entirely divorced from nation states?
Further on the subject of socialism; I don't see how it's actually possible for socialism to exist without states? Having a centralised body which exercises violent authority to which all parties must submit and participate in is pretty much the definition of a state, How can socialists criticise free market approaches for defacto use of state enforcement mechanisms because they are what is available rather than the only way free market participants may enforce their terms and conditions when the very nature of socialism is to rely on that exact same state but in a more direct way and with no alternative mechanism for enforcement at all? A political entity which dispenses edicts amongst a population which is entirely free to ignore them is little more than a church, of what consequence is a socialist platform without a monopoly on force to compel adherence to the edicts and forcibly finance the policies of the political entity through taxation?
Cool, this is not going to be productive, I will respectfully bow out. Thanks!
I linked a page in your sibling where both your and I's side in this argument gets played out, just continue on there. ;)
The concept of the arrangements between the strong and the weak which socialists paint as being oppressive in each system being entered into by mutual consent was often a feature of the justification of many implementations of both feudal and capitalist systems.
From Wikipedia:
Democrat: is a proponent of democracy
Republican: An advocate of a republic, a form of government that is not a monarchy or dictatorship
Libertarianism: a set of related political philosophies that uphold liberty as the highest political end.
All of them sound pretty great to me, to the point I could easily choose to be a republican libertarian democrat. Heck you could even probably be a republican libertarian democratic anarchist.
"Worker control of the means of production" sounds an awful lot like classical marxist communism and all the associated implications. And thus the off in the reeds tangential strangeness associated with private vs personal property, ad et al.
> How exactly does that work?
It depends on what kind of socialist you're talking about, and at what scale. For example, the Mondragon corporation is a form of socialism. It's a worker co-operative with 80,000 employees. Another example of socialism at a larger scale is revolutionary Catalonia, where Orwell fought. For three years, the entire region was run in a socialist manner. Most industries operated under trade federations, and the rural areas also collectivised. Unfortunately, due to some squabbling between communists and anarchists, when the fascists showed up they got steamrolled.
> "Worker control of the means of production" sounds an awful lot like classical marxist communism and all the associated implications
You're close but wrong. There are two main forms of socialism: utopian and scientific. Marxism is the 'scientific' form, but communism is a classless, stateless, moneyless (maybe) society. In the Marxist framework, socialism is a step on the path to communism, not the same thing.
But regardless of which kind you're talking about, workers run things rather than capitalists.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_corporation
At the smaller scale; Intriguing stuff, but from reading this it sounds a whole lot like just another company with an interesting incentive scheme for employees and shareholders? From reading through that it seems to be just another market participant rather than some top down re-organisation of the entire market system itself.
On the subject of revolutionary catalonia, it sure does sound more like what my initial perception of socialism really is, people being forcibly compelled to toe the communist party line with threats of death, ad et al. Against that backdrop I suppose it is unsurprising that the anarchists and communists were squabbling, and this is what I was aiming at with my initial criticism of socialism as a necessarily "political" entity rather than just another voluntary participant subject to the same market forces as all the other voluntary participants. And thus vulnerable to both poor market performance relative to the competition and also the negative externalities of being focused on politics rather than actual material results.
> workers run things rather than capitalists.
Doesn't that once again reduce to "workers control the means of production" and then you're left with workers councils figuring out what's personal vs private property and all the political nonsense that goes along with that, munging the entire thing once again at scale into a necessarily authoritarian and political entity?
This is absolutely true. It's a socialist entity acting within a broader capitalist economy. That's how it starts.
By the way, with your focus on markets, you might enjoy Kevin Carson and mutualism.
> And thus vulnerable to both poor market performance relative to the competition
Ehhh, the USSR went from a backwards farm country to being the first country to putting someone in space in the span of 80 years. Don't forget that imperialism played a huge factor, and has in other cases as well.
> with workers councils figuring out what's personal vs private property
There isn't really a need for anyone to 'figure out' what's personal vs. private property. It's not as if you must stand before a worker's council to defend your right to keep your toothbrush. It's simply that without an organization (the police) upholding private property law, absentee ownership is impossible.
If we build a server farm and use it for staging and then push that environment to production and we're not actively using staging for the next month, is it OK to appropriate that? If you spend many years of labour constructing your own home and all associated facilities, is it acceptable that when you go on holiday to some remote location, it should instantly be up for grabs?
If it's just a case of being unable to enforce absentee ownership for any given interval, I think this is both a terrible failure of imagination on the part of mutualists as well as an undeserved tip of the hat to that old "might makes right" chestnut. We can take your property, therefore it is not yours anymore.
I'll admit there are problems with the concept of ancap homesteading also; the mutualist criticism of "rearranging a few twigs on a parcel of land not entitling the arranger to title in perpetuity" is not without basis, natural resources and real property are quite thorny and difficult to disentangle concepts by nature. This is why the original suggestion of a thousand competing political systems flourishing is even more appealing to me then just every space on earth appropriating the ancap model as laid out in "the machinery of freedom".
Through competition and the market, we can see how things play out in the real world and what people end up preferring. I have no problem with any political philosophy insofar as they keep to themselves and do not attempt to enforce their ideas on those that are unable to choose an alternative, which unfortunately as the status quo stands is almost no place on the planet.
Marxism is form of socialism (as are its descendants Leninism, et al.), so, yes, they include at least reference to "worker control of the means of production". The difference between authoritarian socialisms like Leninism (I'm going to leave out "Marxism" because there are problems with categorizing it -- libertarian socialist often see the roots of libertarian socialism in Marx and see Lenin, et al., as diverging from Marx in important ways -- which make it non-helpful in this context) and libertarian socialism is that authoritarian socialism uses the state as the vehicle for worker control of the means of production in a top down manner, and libertarian socialism prefers more direct, decentralized worker control (different strands of libertarian socialism have different particular programs, but one form is worker control by "worker's councils" or labor cooperatives controlling the particular factories or firms.)
Libertarian socialists often criticize authoritarian "socialist" regimes, particularly Leninist-style Communist ones, as creating state capitalism, because you end up with a party elite that controls the means of production which ends up with the same kind of oppressive power relationship with the powerless common worker that socialist critics of traditional capitalism criticized in capital, stemming from the same source (narrow control of power over the means of production.)