platform for coalition of left- and right-libertarians

[latefordinner]

from Kevin Tuckers work at "Free-Market Anti-Capitalism" (mutualist.blogspot.com) synthesizing what both Rothbard and Hess suggested in what Tucker terms their "leftist" phase.** Discuss.

** such as Hess's interview with Mother Earth News; Rothbard's writing in Left and Right, A New History of Leviathan, etc

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*Syndicalist seizure of large enterprises (the Fortune 500 might be a useful proxy) by radical industrial unions.

*The devolution of government services, as quickly as possible, to local, cooperative ownership.

*The elimination of all corporate welfare and government subsidies, and the provision of roads and utilities on a cost-basis to those who use them (which would of course mean a radical decentralization of the economy, an end to suburban sprawl, and the growth of small-scale production for local markets).

*The nullification of all property titles based on government grants of large tracts of land, never actually appropriated by the grantee's direct occupancy and use; and the homesteading of all such unowned land on the basis of "the land to the tiller."

*The elimination of all legal barriers to the formation of mutual banks, by which working people can mobilize their own low-interest credit for cooperative enterprises, self-employment, etc.

*The elimination of all patent laws, which enable large corporations to cartelize their industries by controlling modern production technology among themselves.

*The treatment of scarce resources like aquifers, fisheries, mines, and old-growth forests as a socially-owned commons, with access regulated by the local community.

*The replacement of environmental and other regulatory laws with cost-based fees for access to natural resources, and common law tort damages for pollution and other impositions of cost.

*A totally free and unregulated market between the worker-controlled large enterprises, consumer and producer co-ops, social service mutuals, family farms and small businesses, and the self-employed.

The final goal would be a society in which (in Benjamin Tucker's words) "the natural wage of labor in a free market is its product," and all transactions--whether trade or gift--are voluntary exchanges of labor-product between producers.

[AlexM]

Your focus is way too much on details. Simply worry about decentralizing the federal government and it's easier to find allies. For example:

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*Syndicalist seizure of large enterprises (the Fortune 500 might be a useful proxy) by radical industrial unions.

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Inconceivable that you might get libertarians to agree with this, but if we decentralize, ASists can do this in their states (and even ban corporations from "outside" that haven't done this for all I care) while libertarians don't do this in their states. Win, win. When you try to focus on anything more than "we do our thing over here and you do your thing over there," you just scare away good and useful allies.

[Borodog]

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Syndicalist seizure of large enterprises (the Fortune 500 might be a useful proxy) by radical industrial unions.

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Sounds awful. What, exactly, are the thousands of workers employeed be a large company going to do with it? Vote on what it should produce? Vote on who has what jobs? Vote on how long the work day and week are? What happens when consumers don't want what they've voted on and the company goes broke and the workers must suffer those losses, and they can't buy their way into another firm because they have no capital to acquire a share?

Entrepreneurs make business decisions, and they personally suffer the losses if those decisions are poor. The employees get paid either way from the savings, the accumulated capital of the entrepreneur. The worst that can happen to them is that they may have to find another job if their employer goes busto, which they will not have to have a pile of capital to buy their way into.

[latefordinner]

like i said man, not my ideas, a synthesis of some of your team's work of what such a united platform for revolutionary action might look like. what the hell does it mean to seize a "state's worth" of a corporation when corporations are now bigger than countries?

methinks from starting to read some of Rothbard's work from this time that if I posted direct quotes (se Canis's capitalism is dead thread) without telling you who they were from a whole host of ACers would decry it as tyranny. Not saying you're not allowed to have disagreement amongst yourselves, but if you want to claim an "entirely new vision" of capitalism, i'd like to ask how we are going to move in that direction, and certainly the re-appropriation of corporate capitalist firms has to be part of that somewhere.

[latefordinner]

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Sounds awful.

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so you would disagree with this assertion from Rothbard which I posted elsewhere?

"But if Columbia University, what of General Dynamics? What of the myriad of corporations which are integral parts of the military-industrial complex, which not only get over half or sometimes virtually all their revenue from the government but also participate in mass murder? What are their credentials to "private" property? Surely less than zero. As eager lobbyists for these contracts and subsidies, as co-founders of the garrison stare, they deserve confiscation and reversion of their property to the genuine private sector as rapidly as possible. To say that their "private" property must be respected is to say that the property stolen by the horsethief and the murderer must be "respected."

But how then do we go about destatizing the entire mass of government property, as well as the "private property" of General Dynamics? All this needs detailed thought and inquiry on the part of libertarians. One method would be to turn over ownership to the homesteading workers in the particular plants; another to turn over pro-rata ownership to the individual taxpayers. But we must face the fact that it might prove the most practical route to first nationalize the property as a prelude to redistribution. Thus, how could the ownership of General Dynamics be transferred to the deserving taxpayers without first being nationalized enroute? And, further more, even if the government should decide to nationalize General Dynamics--without compensation, of course-- per se and not as a prelude to redistribution to the taxpayers, this is not immoral or something to be combatted. For it would only mean that one gang of thieves--the government--would be confiscating property from another previously cooperating gang, the corporation that has lived off the government. I do not often agree with John Kenneth Galbraith, but his recent suggestion to nationalize businesses which get more than 75% of their revenue from government, or from the military, has considerable merit. Certainly it does not mean aggression against private property, and, furthermore, we could expect a considerable diminution of zeal from the military-industrial complex if much of the profits were taken out of war and plunder. And besides, it would make the American military machine less efficient, being governmental, and that is surely all to the good. But why stop ar 75%? Fifty per cent seems to be a reasonable cutoff point on whether an organization is largely public or largely private."

and while Murray is talking about government contractors here, certainly we could expand the argument and argue that in the ogliopoly created by the State (remember it is you all who keep telling me that corporations are so big because of the State) that has allowed these corporations to get so frigging huge - I'm sure we could make the argument that the majority of the 500 largest corporations in the world are at least 50% bigger than they would have been without a State to externalize their costs for them.

[Borodog]

Why did you snip the entire body of my post and respond instead to something that had nothing to do with it? Why don't you address the points in my post?

[latefordinner]

Rothbard is clearly suggesting that he thinks that seizing the property of corporations that derive more than 50% of their revenue from government contracts and turning them over to the workers (or the taxpayers) is a good thing - an AC thing - I'm exapnding that a bit and suggesting that nearly all large corporations indirectly have received more than 50% of their wealth from the State, therefore they all deserve to be seized and turned over to the workers that currently work in them to do as they see fit.

Since the part of the original post you lambasted was worker seizure of the Fortune 500 firms, I was simply clarifying that you would then disagree with Rothbard when he makes this point - presumably because the workers being given an equal share of the means of production would be inefficient as they wouldn't know what to do with it, or too much concentrated risk (which is the problem of any co-op operating in a free market since it is generally the same as buying stock in one company and one company only)

who's to say they couldn't decide to sell off the company's assets to another group of entreprenuers and venture capitalists and use the money they have gained from that to start their own business.

again, you all seem to wat to talk about a totally new form of capitalism, but for me to take that assertion seriously you have to lay out a radical plan for redistribution of assets that have been illigitmately built through the unjust structures of corporate capitalism.

[AlexM]

I don't really disagree with you, but it's entirely irrelevant. Isn't the point of this thread a "platform for coalition of left- and right-libertarians"? You will never convince most "right" libertarians of this. End of story. You can, however, accomplish much the same by decentralizing. If the point of this thread is instead to point out that some guy ACers worship said things that ACers would hate, you should have probably given the thread a more representative title.

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methinks from starting to read some of Rothbard's work from this time that if I posted direct quotes (se Canis's capitalism is dead thread) without telling you who they were from a whole host of ACers would decry it as tyranny.

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So start doing it and asking ACers what they think about it. Personally, I came to my conclusions about politics independently, do I don't have even a smidgen of worship in me for the man, although I'm sure he has some interesting ideas I haven't heard. The idea that companies who derive most of their income from government should be "redistributed" is something that seems pretty clear though. OTOH, when you pass the line from directly drawing income from government to being enable by government, it gets a lot more fuzzy.

[latefordinner]

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What, exactly, are the thousands of workers employeed be a large company going to do with it? Vote on what it should produce? Vote on who has what jobs? Vote on how long the work day and week are?

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Why are you so scared of workers having control over the decisions that affect them? So they make the wrong decisions and go busto - isn't taking a shot and going busto one of the things that keeps the tables full of fish? I mean, makes capitalism so dynamic?

I'm accepting for the sake of argument that AC and corporate capitalism are very different things, however if I accept the AC argument that under corporate capitalism the ruling class has gotten most off their illegitimate windfalls from the combination of a legally enshrined coporate structure that deflects individual responsibility and the power of a coercive entity to externalize costs, create monopolies, subsidize sectors, etc then it begs the question - what do you do to return that wealth to its rightful owners and who are those rightful owners? If the extent of moving to AC world is simply whisking away the state and leavingthe illegitimate wealth distribution intact and hope that the now-free market somehow starts producing better outcomes for people then every assertion that ACers just want a for-profit ruling class of businesspeople holds true. So indulge me, what would a revolutionary plan of action look like for some sort of redistribution.

[pvn]

I'll pass.

But then again, I'm not sure I'm either a right or left libertarian.