You’ve got half your anarchy tied behind your back: Hey, libertarians! Politics makes you stupid.

One of the problems with anarchist activism in electoral politics is that it deforms the perspective, attitudes and rhetoric of members of the movement generally — decreasing the effectiveness of their advocacy. Sometimes that’s the case with particular people even if they themselves aren’t active in electoral politics. The stupidity just kind of soaks into them osmotically from their social surroundings, but it can be analytically traced back to electoral politics. It’s rather easy to see that anarchists active in the Libertarian Party are pretty much operatively minarchists with regard to their electoral political activism. What I’m going to describe, though, is how an anarchist who may have escaped from the trap that is a political party may still wind up thinking like a minarchist.

Libertarianism can be understood as an ethical doctrine rather than a political ideology — the non-aggression principle. It’s consistent application has anarchism as its political consequence, but it can also be applied inconsistently by those who embrace Thomas Paine’s characterization of government as a “necessary evil” (often while neglecting that Paine said that was the case at best) — advocates of so-called “minimal government” or minarchists.

All that background aside, though, the key point to remember is that the non-aggression principle is simply the apex of a discourse on when violence is and isn’t legitimate.

Now, most people aren’t original thinkers. I would even venture to say that most original thinkers aren’t even thinking originally most of the time. Actual innovation is a rare and scattered phenomenon. That may sound terribly pedestrian, but it’s not at all a completely bad thing. Communication, for instance, would be impossible if we invented a completely new language every time we said something. We re-use patterns of behavior and thinking when we find them useful, re-applying them in new ways on an as-needed (and as capable of producing) basis. When we notice something works for someone else, we often but not always copy them, adopting it ourselves. That means we have the potential, at least, to rapidly adopt useful behavior and tjhinking while rapidly discarding less useful behavior and thinking. Unfortunately, it also means we can hang on to sub-optimal behavior and thinking if it’s merely “good enough”. Hairless monkey see, hairless monkey do. That’s the human race for you.

If that sounds a bit like object-oriented programming to you, give yourself a pat on the back.

What the above has to do with the non-aggression principle and electoral politics is that electoral politics ingrains a communications habit that’s subtly at odds with the advocacy of anarchy. More specifically, by applying the non-aggression principle on a piecemeal basis in an attempt to shape state policy as a libertarian reformist, one gets used to thinking of things only in terms of the non-aggression principle.

Now, don’t misunderstand me. I’m not soft-pedaling the non-aggression principle or attempting to water it down. I advocate the non-aggression principle as the fundamental basis of law in a stateless society. In terms of building up a body of rhetoric we can share and apply as a movement, though, the focus on criticizing only a particular statist issue at a time without also explicitly calling for the abolition of the state leads to thinking solely in terms of state violence or the lack of it. We don’t give ourselves the opportunity to advocate, talk about and think about the non-violent socially normative mechanisms that would arise in the spontaneous order of a stateless society. When we fail to understand the tendency toward mutually-reinforcing social structures that would develop in a free society, we can be said to (unfortunately) still be thinking like a minarchist.

Let’s take as our example, Francois Tremblay.

Franc’s not a bad guy, but he can be a bit limited at times. Recently he came to the decision that he’s now an anti-property anarchist. Well, if that makes him happy, good for him. As a result of this, he made a recent post that seems to illustrate my point — so at least some good will come of his change of stripes, anyway. Please remember, by the way, that I’m not calling Franc a minarchist. I’m saying his thinking is flawed in ways that ultimately go back to minarchism and the libertarian movement’s wrong turn into electoral politics.

In “‘Anarcho’-capitalists support sexual harassment: more on Block’s lunacy…“, Franc latched on to an article from thirty years ago by arch-controversialist Walter Block as an illustration of the flaws that Franc believes he sees in the propertarian position.

He begins:

I posted that quote from Walter Block about sexual harassment being AOKed by property theory… and I have been told of the publication it’s from, The Libertarian Forum. I thought, well, maybe in context it seems more rational. As it turns out, I was totally wrong. It is actually worse than the quote indicated.

But the sad thing is, it really shows the logical consequences of the belief in property. Once you accept that much degree of control over other people’s actions, then you can justify any degree of control. “Anarcho”-capitalists will complain that Block’s ravings are not indicative of their beliefs, but they will remain utterly unable to explain why he’s wrong without contradicting their own beliefs (in fact, some ancaps who have talked to Noor about this have said that they agree with Block, which shows how utterly bankrupt their ideology is). Please keep in mind that Walter Block is one of the foremost representants of the ancap ideology.

Franc then quotes the Block piece. I’ve preserved Franc’s bolding of certain parts of Block’s piece because I want to be conscientious about allowing his arguments to come through:

Another type of pinching or sexual harassment is that between a secretary and her boss. Although to many people, and especially to many people in the women’s liberation movement, there is no real difference between this pinching and the pinching that occurs on the street, the fact is that the pinching that takes place between a secretary and her boss, while objectionable to many women, is not a coercive action. It is not a coercive action like the pinching that takes place in the public sphere because it is part of a package deal: the secretary agrees to all aspects of the job when she agrees to accept the job and especially when she agrees to keep the job. A woman walking along a public sidewalk, on the other hand. can by no means be considered to have given her permission, or tacitly agreed to begin pinched. The street is not the complete private property of the pincher, as is the office. On the contrary, if the myths of democracy are to be given any credence at all, the streets belong to the people. All the people. Even including women.

There is a serious problem with considering pinching or sexual molestation in a privately owned office or store to be coercive. If an action is really and truly coercive, it ought to be outlawed. But if pinching and sexual molestation are outlawed in private places, this violates the rights of those who voluntarily wish to engage in such practices. And there is certainly nothing coercive about any voluntary sex practices between consenting adults. The proof of the voluntary nature of an act in a private place is that the person endangered (the woman, in the cases we have been considering) has no claim whatsoever to the private place in question, the office or the store. If she continues to patronize or work at a place where she is molested, it can only be voluntary. But in a public place, no such presumption exists. As we have seen, according to accepted theory at least, the public domain is owned by all, women included. It would be just as illegitimate to assume that a woman gave tacit agreement to being molested on the public street because she was walking there as it would be to assume that she gave tacit agreement to an assault in her own house, because she happened to be there.

There are many other cases of actions taken against women that are not strictly speaking, coercive. Or more exactly, there are many other instances where many women feel put upon, but where there is no coercion at all involved such as referring to women with sex organ-linked expletives. the sexual double standard mores; many rules of etiquette such as the ones concern who proceeds whom out of the elevator. the encouragement of the mental capacity of boys and discouragement of girls, the societal opprobrium of women participating in “men’s” athletic activities; the pedestals that women are placed upon. There are two important points to be made with regard to these insults and other exacerbations which do not constitute coercion. 1) Although considered reprehensible by many, none of these actions actually constitute coercion, therefore it would be illegitimate to outlaw them. Any attempt to outlaw them would involve the mass violation of rights of other individuals in the society. After all, it is the right of free speech that gives us the right not to utter things that everyone agrees with – which do not need free speech protection in any case, but the right to utter reprehensible things, things in poor taste, boorish things. 2) To a much greater degree than realized by many, certainly to a much greater degree than realized by many who consider themselves advocates of women’s liberation, these reprehensible but non-coercive actions are engendered by reprehensible coercive activities. Were these coercive activites to cease, the free market would tend to rid us of many of these reprehensible but non-coercive acts.

Let us consider the case of bosses pinching secretaries and see how the market would tend to eliminate such unwanted activity, were the coercive and reprehensible activity of taxation to support government bureaucracy eliminated. In order to see this, we must first understand what the labor economist calls “compensating differentials”. A compensating differential is an amount of money just necessary to compensate an employee for the psychic losses that go with a job. For instance, consider two job opportunities. One is in an air-conditioned office, with a good view, with pleasant surroundings and pleasant companions: The other is in a damp, dank basement, surrounded by evil smelling fellow workers. Now there is some wage differential large enough to attract most people into accepting the less pleasant job. This will vary for different people, depending upon their relative tastes for the working conditions in the two places. There might even be a negative compensating differential for those who prefer the basement job. They would be willing to take a salary cut rather than move to the office job.

The same analysis can be applied to the case of the office pincher. On the assumption that all women would prefer not to be pinched, and that bosses vary in their desires to so indulge, there will be a whole range of wage rates paid to otherwise equally productive secretaries, depending on the proclivity of their bosses to engage in sexual harassment. There will be a positive relationship between the amount of sexual harassment and the wage rate that the bosses find thay must pay. But now contrast the boss of a private business with the boss in a government bureaucracy. Even on the assumption that both bosses on the average have the same proclivity to engage in sexual harassment, it is clear that the private boss will have to pay for his little gambols, while the public one will not. The secretaries of both private and public pinchers will have to earn more than the secretaries of the non-pinchers. The compensating differential. The main difference between the private and the public pincher is that the extra money comes out of tax monies for the latter and out of his own money for the former. Even in the case of a private boss-pincher who is not the ultimate owner of the business, the same applies, only now slightly more indirectly. The ultimate owner of the business, in addition to losing money if he himself is a pincher, also loses money if any of his executives are pinchers. So in addition to having a monetary incentive to cut down on his own pinching, he also has a monetary incentive to try to stop all the bosses in his company from so doing.

This might not seem like much of an incentive to stop pinching. But it is an improvement over the public case where these disincentives are completely lacking. This way of looking at the problem, however, has more merit than might be readily apparent. One reason pinching does not come to an abrupt end even in the private market is because many women are by no means unalterably opposed to being pinched, as we have been assuming. But the analysis can be applied to the more realistic cases where women are being harassed and mistreated and do object.

We then get to the core of what Franc has to say on this matter:

NOTE to all the ancaps who are itching to reply that “sexual harassment is a form of aggression and is simply wrong”: that’s exactly our point. Capitalist property theory allows any form of injustice as long as it’s done “on one’s property.” Insofar as property theory entails that sexual harassment, and other such aggression, is validated, it necessarily contradicts justice. In order for you propertarians to refute us, therefore, you can’t just say “sexual harassment is just wrong”: you need to show that property theory does not entail that sexual harassment is validated. The fact that sexual harassment is not acceptable is a problem for the propertarians, not for us.

Ill leave aside for now the point that market anarchism, including so-called “anarcho-capitalism”, is anti-capitalist.

What’s most essential to this discussion is that above Franc conflates “allows” with what would be more precisely understood (in terms of libertarian theory) as “does not necessarily justify use of violence to compel restition for in all cases“. This perfectly illustrates my point. One’s conception and advocacy of a stateless society is distorted by looking at it solely in terms of just violence, as proceeds from criticizing particular statist political issues as entailing illegitimate use of force (without actually calling for abolition of the state entirely). You don’t get to talk about the holistic integrity of a stateless society arising from non-violent mechanisms of social normatization that cross the arbitrary topical boundaries one imposes on one’s self when analyzing and advocating various potential state policies. Electoral politics truly makes you stupid. By focusing solely on use of force alone, one ends up continuing to think like a minarchist.

First of all, if we’re discussing a hired manager in an enterprise, the property of the enterprise is NOT his property. He is the owners agent and contractually obligated to act accordingly, with repercussions to follow if he doesn’t.

Does the enterprise have a sexual harassment policy? If so, he is (presumably) in violation of it. If the enterprise does not have a sexual harassment polcy, that is something they would have to answer for in the agora. The reputational damage alone in the hyper-competitive marketplace agorists seek to create might alone put them out of business and put a life long black cloud over the head of the manager responsible for the damage. It is ironic that the concept that sounds scariest to the reactionary anti-market mindset, competition, is precisely that which makes pushes market interactions in the direction of the humane, so long as people are free to demand it and do not have to focus on more immediate personal needs because of statist expropriation.

More so than just the informal impact on the bottom line of the enterprise that would result from looking bad when people have plenty of other alternatives besides you to do business with, the possibility of organized pressure campaigns, boycotts and strikes (all market activity) really drives the point home. Proudhon distinguished between political revolution and social revolution. If we take the political revolution as the abolition of the state, the social revolution has the capacity to continue indefinitely as members of society seek ever greater progressive social change through free speech, free association and other forms of market activity in a society increasingly able to afford it because of an exponential boom in prosperity. Gender issues. Animal rights. Child welfare. Poverty relief. Education. Culture and the arts. Building utopia is a serious project, and abolishing the state is only the first serious step in it.

But what of the sole proprietor? Perhaps there is no larger firm the boss is embedded in. Well, so much the better for holding him to account. It’s not that there is no enterprise, but that he is the enterprise and will personally be impacted by everything that would be brought to bear against the firm as a whole in the case of larger businesses.