Why I really suck
Despite my best efforts, I often get misunderstood. I can only conclude, despairingly, that there is something about the way my brain is wired which causes me to unintentionally phrase things in ways that lack clarity. I’ll work on that. Meanwhile, here’s an example…
A while back, a new correspondent on the LeftLibertarian2 email list asked for clarification of some things and this, in turn, led to my attempt at explaining the small differences and similarities between the usufruct and Rothbardian approaches to property.
Isn’t a major distinction between left and right libertarians how left-libertarians treat the just appropriation of land?
- left Rothbardians - mixing one’s labor
- mutualists - occupancy and use
- geoists - sharing economic rent
And I responded:
Mixing one’s labor (with the unowned) and (personal) occupancy and use are mostly two ways of saying approximately the same thing. Rothbardian and usufruct approaches to property mostly differ in terms of nit-picky details of transfers, abandonment and the nature of property title.
As I understand it, usufruct says ongoing occupancy and use is necessary for a property claim to *remain* valid, whereas the Rothbardian approach says title has to *originate* in occupancy and use. Kevin has explained this before as two points on a spectrum of potential legal consensus [plural: consensi? consensuses?] in regards to what constitutes abandonment.
Even under usufruct, you wouldn’t be considered to have “abandoned” your house just because you go to visit relatives a few hundred miles away for the weekend. Under Rothbardian property law, a scholar could potentially leave their house boarded up for maybe five years while they go on a sabbatical and return to it with their property claim intact, provided their affairs were in order and neighbors had some way to contact an agent of hers [lawyer, property management company or whatever]. In between the two, we have intermediate cases — such as a farmer leaving a field fallow for a year. My guess is that if leaving a field fallow for a year was a common agricultural process, the resulting usufruct law would recognize that field as not necessarily being “abandoned” even though a residential house vacant for the same period of time might be considered abandoned.
Whereas usufruct says absentee landlords are always bad, the Rothbardian partially agrees and partially disagrees based on the legitimacy of the particular property claim — i.e. title having originated in occupancy and use and the property not being an example of stolen plunder. So, prior to the smashing of the state and nullification of illegitimate property titles, BOTH Rothbardians and usufruct adherents *might* defend a particular group of squatters but the Rothbardians might not defend some other group of squatters, depending on the particulars of each case. After the land monopoly is smashed and the only property titles are legit, Rothbardians would be more likely to defend absentee landlords if one takes the more widespread legitimacy of remaining property titles as an indication. But with a lot more widespread access to land, a Rothbardian might expect more widespread ownership to replace the bulk of leases anyway.
To my mind, this makes the Rothbardian approach the superior approach because it basically addresses the social justice concerns that lead to usufruct theory in the first place but makes for a smoother transition because the rules of property remain closest to the existing conventional understanding. Everything is bound up in the question of “who” owns what and we don’t have to get all squirrelly about “how” ownership is handled once established.
Apparently, I failed to make it clear that going over the finer-grained differences between “A” and “B” is not necessarily going to be conducive to providing a good, more or less complete, description of “A” or “B”. In this case, I got the insight from Kevin Carson about a year or two back, and which I related above, that usufruct and Rothbardian property theory could be related to each other as (approximately, but not entirely) two points on a spectrum of possible legal consensus about what constitutes “abandonment”.
I just feel it deep in my bones that Camelcase, the author of this (otherwise very good) piece was confused by what I had to say above and the way I said it. Why do I say that? Because the following mostly isn’t what I’m talking about at all when I’m referring to Rothbardian property ethics.
The radical Rothbardian view (Brad Spangler exemplifies this view) being a very radical interpretation of Lockean property minus the proviso, so that if you stop using land for some period of time (I’m not entirely clear on this) that you homesteaded, and then someone else starts homesteading it, they now own it. It’s radical because it’s so so so close to possession that the distinction between the two becomes negligible.
Well, yes and no — but not really. Yes, I believe that a legal consensus would evolve to answer the question of at what point property abandoned in fact should be legally considered to be abandoned. The thing is, that’s understood to be a common feature of almost any property system (including present property relations under statism) and therefore the above doesn’t really provide a good picture of what I’m talking about when I refer to Rothbardian property theory.
What I DO mean is that:
- Legitimate property title originates in homesteading. One can also legitimately hold title to property by reason of production or exchange, but these are derivative of homesteading.
- Stolen property is not really owned by the possessor.
- The State is a massive system of theft that uses its coercively-maintained monopoly of law to fraudulently award fake property title to its members and allies.
The above is simply the basic property theory of ordinary Rothbardian market anarchism. The moderate, reformist libertarian may not give much thought to the ramifications of those ideas because they aspire to more modest immediate goals (“Hey, gang, has anybody seen my habeus corpus lately? I know I left it laying around here somewhere…”) But when viewed in the context of Konkin’s agorist theory of revolution, Rothbardian property theory amounts to a program for the revolutionary redistribution of property.
Homesteading that isn’t state approved is counter-economic. The free market “courts” (arbitrators, really) that would uphold or reject property titles based on Rothbardian property theory would arise from underground, as would the security service providers who could liberate such property from statist political class control. The process by which that “arising from underground” would occur I’ve summarized before here in the following way:
Agorism is revolutionary market anarchism.
In a market anarchist society, law and security will be provided by market institutions, not political institutions. Agorists recognize, therefore, that those institutions can not develop through political reform. Instead, they will come about as a result of market processes.
As government is banditry, revolution culminates in the suppression of government by market providers of security and law. Market demand for such service providers is what will lead to their emergence. Development of that demand will come from economic growth in the sector of the economy that explicitly shuns state involvement (and therefore can not turn to the state in its role as monopoly provider of security and law). That sector of the economy is the counter-economy – black and grey markets.
We are not merely socialists in the sense that Benjamin Tucker considered a completely free market to be “socialism”. We’re fucking Reds! Propertarian Reds, but Reds none the less.
I’m going to keep explaining this over and over again until people get it.
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Thanks for the clarification!
The debate on property v ownership has always seemed to me of the greatest futility. Both sides basically agree but interpret each other’s terms in such a way as to obscure all possible agreement. It’s a boorish debate.
Brad, I can scarcely consider Agorists to be red - in an Agorist context* - but rather we are marked as black, we are blacks.
*”While some coercive acts are often lumped into the label “black market,” such as murder and theft, the vast majority of this “organized crime” is perfectly legitimate to a libertarian, though occasionally unsavory. The Mafia, for example, is not black market but acts as government over some of the black market which collects protection money (taxes) from its victims and enforces its control with executions and beatings (law enforcement), and even conducts wars when its monopoly is threatened. These acts will be considered red market to differentiate them from the moral acts of the black market which will be discussed below. In short, the “black market” is anything non-violent prohibited by the State and carried on anyways. The “grey market” is used here to mean dealing in goods and services not themselves illegal but obtained or distributed in ways legislated against by The State. Much of what is called “white-collar crime” falls under this and is smiled upon by most of society. Where one draws the line between black and grey market depends largely on the state of consciousness of the society one is in. The red market is clearly separable. Murder is red market; defending oneself against a criminal (when the State forbids self-defense) - including a police officer - is black in New York City and grey in Orange County.”
NLM
@ Niccolo — Of course, you are 100% correct. I was merely phrasing things metaphorically (for emphasis).