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Commentaryism - AynCrap


This is a continuation of a comment thread I shared here a while ago.

Where I annotate the two comments I will highlight the text in yellow.

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eyeseethroughyou 15:59



"Icelandic Althingi Commonwealth"

Iceland, nearly 1,000 years ago, was not a capitalistic system. In fact, like most cultures claimed by "anarcho"-capitalists as examples of their "utopia," it was a communal, not individualistic, society, based on artisan production, with extensive communal institutions as well as individual "ownership" (i.e. occupancy/use) and a form of social self-administration, the thing -- both local and Iceland-wide -- which can be considered a "primitive" form of the anarchist communal assembly. The same goes for the Republic of Cospaia. As William Ian Miller points out "[p]eople of a communitarian nature. . . have reason to be attracted [to Medieval Iceland]. . . the limited role of lordship, the active participation of large numbers of free people . . . in decision making within and without the homestead. The economy barely  knew the existence of markets. Social relations preceded economic  relations. The nexus of household, kin, Thing, even enmity, more than the nexus of cash, bound people to each other. The lack of extensive economic  differentiation supported a weakly differentiated class system . . . [and material] deprivations were more evenly distributed than they would be once state institutions also had to be maintained."  [Bloodtaking and  Peacemaking: Feud, Law and Society in Saga Iceland, p.

The argument that Medieval Iceland was "anarcho"capitalist was erroneously put forth by David Friedman.

Erroneously my sweet? No such argument was ever made in the first place. Gotta learn to listen.

Concerning the supposed correction by the Narchist FAQers of Friedman's work, why did Friedman take them to task on the little matter of, oh, sources? And why did they never satisfactorily respond on the matter?

http://daviddfriedman.com/Libertarian/My_Posts/Iceland_Anarch_FAQ1_reply.html

http://daviddfriedman.com/Libertarian/My_Posts/Iceland_Anarch_FAQ2_reply.html

http://daviddfriedman.com/Libertarian/My_Posts/iceland_round_two.htm

This guy(ette) doesn't even begin to reason out their objection to my use of Cospaia as an example so there's literally nothing to respond to.

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"Tuath system in Ireland"

Again I fail to see how a Tuath is an example of "Anarcho" capitalism. Neither of your links demonstrate this.

Never said it was ancapism.
a. Presence of private property.
b. Absence of state enforcement of the same.
That's all I need to say it demonstrates that ancapism might actually work.

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"Harrappa / Indus Valley Civ"

According to your wiki link, Harappa society contained  "centralized administration for each city, though not the whole civilization, has been inferred from the revealed cultural uniformity; however, it remains uncertain whether authority lay with a commercial oligarchy" .

And this commenter inferred a centralised admin from a source that declares that culture was uniform across multiple cities. What does that decisively tell anyone about a centralised administration? What about the complete absence of palaces and temples in every single attested city?

Another angle is that using eyeseethroughyou's logic ancient Greece has one government because all the poleis shared a common Hellenic culture. Whoops.

Doesn't sound very "anarcho"capitalist or even particularly anarchist to me, since decentralization of power is foundational to anarchist philosophy. Also, if you knew anything about proper citation then you would know that it is improper to cite yourself. Now as for your third link, I don't know why you think I have all this time to sit down and read a book, when you could have paraphrased or quoted exerts from the source to demonstrate that Harappa society was "anarcho"capitalist, (instead of just stateless). In fact from what I have gleaned from your sources, ancient Harappan society was very similar to ancient Iceland.

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"by definition a private law society is always characterised by the ownership of and trade in title to private property in land and everything else"

But who defines the laws that govern property relations? as per the ancient societies that you erroneously claim as examples of "anarcho"capitalism, their laws were governed by customary and common law, not any sort of privatized edifice dictated by a market system.

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"what modernity has given us in terms of technology, comfort, and knowledge of human nature"

But it wasn't technology, comfort or knowledge of human nature that ended things like slavery, it was specific social groups (ie abolitionist) and political mechanisms (emancipation proclamation) that saw an end to the institution of slavery.

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"polycentric private law system based around weregilds, or "man prices""

The thing is, weregilds eventually proved insufficient at providing a stable and dynamic legal and penal system in ancient Germanic societies (hence they were replaced by Roman law in the 12th century). Also, most of polycentric law systems were built on traditional, customary law and not directly through a private, profit driven legal edifice (which would be the case in an "Anarcho"capitalist society, where laws are not a product of custom or tradition but market driven forces). Furthermore, polycentric law is not solely a capitalistic endeavor, seeing as socialist, anarchists like scholar Gary Chartier have argued for such a system as well.

Concerning Gary Chartier, I concur, so why the hostility and disbelief re ancapism considering the similarity, nay identical-ness, of the two systems at the epistemic and functional level? .

Just a word of advice at this point, instead of posting countless links to websites, I think it would better serve your position if you just made your own arguments and provide citations and sources as you go along. It's very tedious for me to have to click on every link you provide.

Fair enough. Got me there. All this yellow annotation kinda proves his point. :(

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"because it minimises conflict"

Given that the state acts as a mediator between conflicting parties, provides a legal code and stable infrastructure for markets to flourish then yes, this minimizes conflict. I fail to see how this would be the case under "Anarcho" capitalism, however.

 Private courts versus public ones. This guy seems to think that either the public legal system will continue to exist in his form of anarchism or that no dispute resolution services are necessary. Private dispute resolution services / arbitrators / courts will sell their services likely on both a subscription and per-contract basis, with standardisation handled by an industry standards body. Why do I suggest this? Because that's how it works right now!

.

Dude, please. I don't have time to read  through all your links so either sum up the key points through citation or just put forth your own views and perspectives. And David Graeber is an anarchist, not a capitalist pretending to be an anarchist.

One reads the scholarship in the field in which one argues or one can never claim any authority in that field whatsoever. I am however sympathetic on this point. I did say too little about my examples, so let's assume that eyeseethroughyou is right on this point and I'm wrong.

"That means common property societies have no way to advance themselves from their present station"

Nonsense, successful examples of societies practicing common ownership is quite well known amongst anthropologists, including Graeber and has been greatly studied by scholars like Elinor Ostrom who won a Noble for her work on the success of common ownership societies.

While I love Ostrom, as do many Austrian economists, it turns out all the examples she studied are just partnerships of private property owners. Whoops, but at least it proves that private property promotes social harmony, so there's that.

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"I know nothing of history while offering barely a ghost of a lesson"

Your knowledge of history is skewed by your right wing, liberal sentiments and biases. And you are an ayncrap and we are not obsolete, you are just an aberration.

Then say something that doesn't sound like a kooky conspiracy theory, and stop reordering what I say. Whatever your intent, it makes you sound dishonest.

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"those who would cry foul at the mode of production called capitalism"

LOL the pathetic "look at the progress!" graph ayncraps like to toss out. Does the graph take into account ecology? does it take into account individual happiness and well being? does it take into account state intervention in the market? or how technology and science contribute to this "progress"?  no. It's just a lazy way of saying "SEE! capitalism is holy and great!" by isolating specific data, cherry picking the good parts and attributing it solely to "Fwee makhkats, you guyz!" I mean the logic is just terrible. It's like comparing a graph of the advancement between hunter gatherer, pastoral society to an agricultural, feudal society and upon seeing the upward progress during the feudal era claim "SEE! feudalism promotes progress, therefore it is the ideal system!"

 Already responded to this as much as it needs responding to.

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"it was also irrelevant to the discussion, as private property has been the norm of every single civilisation to exist with the exceptions of the later Byzantine Empire"

Yet ideas pertaining to private property have greatly changed and evolved since the Byzantine Empire; also, the claim that private property has been the "norm" for "every single civilization" contradicts with what we know about societies that practiced common ownership of property. I mean, you already established this fact yourself!

Nope. Private property means non-state ownership by an individual or group over land, buildings, portable objects et cetera with the portable things called personal property and the immovable things called real property. It meant this in Sumeria, in the Yangtze Valley, in the Indus Valley, in Ancient Greece, even that ancient exemplar of a state command economy, Egypt.

In this basic form private ownership that can be surrendered for ownership of something else through trade is older than civilisation itself and contemporary with the first intensive agriculture, making it a prerequisite for the emergence of every urban civilisation so far attested.

On private property predating and giving rise to civilisation, even Marx and Engels come close to conceding the point.

The only differenceis that abandonment of a plot of land for generational stretches of time was more common in days gone by there was often unclaimed land for somebody else to claim. Sorry, but as yet not a single counter-example has been attested in the literature.

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"capitalism is just a mode of production and therefore agnostic to questions of the presence or absence of a state"

This is circular, because it assumes in the premises that capitalism as a mode of production is already separate from the state, when history shows that capitalism arose along side the state, starting with agrarian capitalism, then moving on to feudalism, mercantilism, then industrial capitalism then onto modern global capitalism. At no point did capitalism exist outside the perimeters of the state, independent of the state nor has there EVER been a stateless capitalist society. The claims that ancient societies like Irish, Icelandic and Harrappa etc were "Examples" is due to the conflation of statelessness and any forms of commerce and trade with our modern conception with capitalism. Its just plain ahistoricism on behalf of the ayncrap.

Not a circle, a chronology. Whoops.

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"Whether entrepreneurs will ask financiers for money to fund previously untried resource allocation plans for the production of existing or original goods and services ( motivated by profit and loss ) relies only on the existence of private property and money"

This is completely circular; it's like saying "private property exists because its private property." What this assertion doesn't include is how private property came to be in the first place.

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"The only attested cartels in history and today"

And what about drug cartels and organized crime syndicates that "govern" the black market?

The black market exists because certain goods are services are either entirely illegal, or illegal at certain price points or in certain forms. This is a non-issue in a free market where by definition the goods and services are legally available.

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"that a word from a root meaning 'no archon' in ancient Athens somehow HAS to mean anarcho-socialism"

Strawman. The word "anarchy" is from the Greek, prefix an (or a), meaning "not," "the want of," "the absence of," or "the lack of", plus archos, meaning "a ruler," "director", "chief," "person in charge," or "authority." Or, as Peter Kropotkin put it, Anarchy comes from the Greek words meaning "contrary to authority." [Kropotkin's Revolutionary Pamphlets, p. 284] Hence David Weick's excellent summary"Anarchism can be understood as the generic social and political idea that expresses negation of all power, sovereignty, domination, and hierarchical division, and a will to their dissolution. . .  Anarchism is therefore more than anti-statism . . . [even if]  government (the state) . . . is, appropriately, the central focus  of anarchist critique." [Reinventing Anarchy, p. 139] (emphasis mine).

Answered below.

Since not only does capitalism require a state but it also depends on a hierarchical system where you have owners (capitalists) and non-owners (workers)   for this reason, rather than being purely anti-government or anti-state, anarchism is primarily a movement against hierarchy.

Why? Because hierarchy is the organisational structure that embodies authority. While "Anarcho"capitalists are perfectly content with hierarchy and all the power imbalances that it entails, historical anarchists (ie real anarchists) have consistently and on principle rejected the illegitimate power relations and hierarchy embodied by capitalism, hence "Anarcho" capitalists cannot be anarchists.

 The optional hierarchy of senior doctor > junior doctor is justifiable. Wasn't it writ that hierarchies must justify themselves? Performance and the presence or absence of coercion are the only two meaningful real-world metrics for measuring the legitimacy or not of a given hierarchy.

In conclusion, you can either be a capitalist or an anarchist but you cannot be both.

Disproved below.



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Matthew John Hayden



I have learned three things;

1. You don't know what civilisation is. You conflate society and civilisation in your response. It's the project to live together in peace amid conditions of improved - preferably improving - access to goods and services that offer survival, safety, comfort and leisure.

2. You can't tell the difference between progress over time and a particular condition at a particular time. Dismissing hockey stick graphs the way you did is silly because you deny the significance of increasing access to the four things in point 1.

3. You assume Kropotkin can redefine anarchy at will and lock his definition in place permanently thereafter, which is a bizarre assertion of IP rights. He is realigning the meaning from the original Greek. Even your own wording confirms it. Not to mention "an-arkhos" is precisely what I meant. Why does that have to mean stateless socialism? Is it cos Kropotkin said so? That's like me saying capitalism = private property just because Rothbard says so. It doesn't.



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"Straw man."

You're straw manning me by saying I claimed any of those private law societies are literally anarcho-capitalist.

I gave you examples of private property sans a state apparatus which is what you asked for, and is all that is necessary for an ancap society to function, since capitalism is just a set of activities that require private property and money.

Capitalism is not the point of anarcho-capitalism; rather private property and private law are. I have made those cases and you haven't even started making a counter case, just rude platitudes to your own world-view.

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"The argument that Medieval Iceland was "anarcho"capitalist was erroneously put forth by David Friedman."

Erm, the argument that it was an AnCap society was never put forward by Friedman, or by me, at all. You really are determined to railroad the use of words in this conversation, aren't you?

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PRIVATE VERSUS COMMON

This section speaks to point 2. at the start of this comment;

To date no society without private property has transitioned from primitive tribalism to large-scale agriculture and civilisation.

To date no society without private property & money has transitioned from agricultural civilisation to urban industrial civilisation.

You have conflated correlation and causation by saying that the rise of modern capitalism in lands with states = the state making it possible.

You also haven't bothered to even begin to build a case for why anyone should like this public / social / common regime you desire to live in. Why won't it be a return to pre-civilisation primitivism?

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"the claim that private property has been the "norm" for "every single civilization" contradicts what we know about societies that practiced common ownership of property."

Were they civilisations? You haven't bothered to provide any evidence so I'll assume you made this point up for now. Maybe Elinor Ostrom can save you later...

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"Nonsense, successful examples of societies practising common ownership are quite well known amongst anthropologists, including Graeber and has been greatly studied by scholars like Elinor Ostrom who won a Noble for her work on the success of common ownership societies. "

Prove it and I might bother responding after this comment. I'll have to read Elinor Ostrom thoroughly then cos I can't find anything to challenge the points I made above in her work - isn't her focus bottom-up organisation and common-pool resources?

Pretty sure she's said nothing that will contradict my statements two sections up from here about the lack of progress in common / social property societies.

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"their laws were governed by customary and common law, not any sort of privatized edifice dictated by a market system."

Discovery in a marketplace is how basically every freely discovered new idea, social norm, fashion, or law has ever arisen over time. Perhaps you are unsure as to what a marketplace is. It's just a conventional term for any setting in which people exchange with each other, whether commercially or not.

Therefore customary law and 'market law' are basically the same, hence the absence of the term 'market law' in anarchist or minarchist jurisprudence.

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"
"Whether entrepreneurs will ask financiers for money to fund previously untried resource allocation plans for the production of existing or original goods and services ( motivated by profit and loss ) relies only on the existence of private property and money"

This is completely circular; it's like saying "private property exists because its private property." What this assertion doesn't include is how private property came to be in the first place.
"

I said capitalism relies on private property and money, both of which already existed before capitalism did. That is not a circle, it is a chronology. Private property predates money, of course, as people had to be already trading things before discovering over time that they could keep some things principally for exchange.

Therefore whenever we find the earliest attested money - 4th Millenium BC Akkad perhaps? - we must look prior to find the origin of private property. And this is assuming that evidence from even earlier hadn't already been uncovered, which according to one of those links above it has.

I'm not saying my case is watertight, but you claimed it was non-existent, and I have roundly demonstrated that that was a false accusation.



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"anarchy"

My claim only counts as a straw man if non-socialists are allowed to call themselves anarchists. Since you insist that liberal anti-statists are not allowed to call themselves anarchists - citing two modern* writers in the process - then my claim is not a straw man.

* Modern as in the modern period of history, 1600ish to the present day.



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"you can either be a capitalist or an anarchist but you cannot be both."

Erm. I'm neither. Remember, words have meanings, which you seem to be determined to demonstrate at length re anarchy.

Therefore please employ the slightest dash of rigour and refer to me as an anti-statist liberal or as a voluntarist / voluntaryist. All this use of the word capitalism is clearly confusing the discussion.



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"LOL the pathetic "look at the progress!" graph ayncraps like to toss out."

So increasing access over time to food, clothes, shelter, security, furniture, electronics, automobiles, leisure time, hobbies & entertainment doesn't improve people's lives and doesn't matter?

And access to those things over time isn't increased by their being produced more cheaply?

And to produce them more cheaply, teams of financiers and entrepreneurs don't allocate labour and capital in previously untried ways?

And this isn't AT ALL facilitated by stock markets?

That'll explain all those affluent common property gift economies then... got one to show me? Just one?



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" It's like comparing a graph of the advancement between hunter gatherer, pastoral society to an agricultural, feudal society and upon seeing the upward progress during the feudal era claim "SEE! feudalism promotes progress, therefore it is the ideal system!""

Except that, per the diagram, you can see the flatline throughout the feudal period. You have a brilliant alternative answer as to how to measure well-being, though, right?

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