[p2p-research] The difference between anarchism and libertarianism (Was: Re: Why Post-Capitalism is Rubbish)

[Andy Robinson]

A great little article by Smári I think.  Thanks a lot for that.  It has
clarified for me especially, how right-libertarianism and anarcho-capitalism
go wrong.  I had intuited that their mistakes are along these lines, but I
had not thought so clearly about what makes them fall back into
authoritarian practices: that they value property above freedom.



A few additions:



The reason there is resistance to ending property is that property has
become connected to existential territory.  This is also what is meant by
“owning” something in Stirner.  I suspect that people will always have
existential territories, though they may be more mobile and open-ended that
they are today.  In mass societies, people use the “private” sphere as a way
to construct existential territories outside/against or niched out from the
mainstream – the way in which sentimental possessions or personally arranged
homes become focuses of attachment for example (this is not restricted to
the rich either – homeless people have their “turf” and their few items in a
bag or their personal box or blanket, shanty-town dwellers have lovingly
constructed shacks, and so on).  Taking away someone’s existential territory
is experienced by the recipient as extremely violent – indeed, it is a
central aspect of practices of psychological torture (depriving of, or
violently relocating, familiar meanings).



But the mapping of property rights with existential territory is incomplete
at best, absurd at worst.  Property is by definition alienable, whereas
existential territory is inalienable.  The risk of losing one’s home,
treasured possessions, the ability to keep up a standard of living, and the
broader existential context (community, public space, etc) is essential to
the regime of statist capitalism.  Sometimes it is mapped in
anti-proprietary ways which right-libertarians can make sense of – eminent
domain, land grabs and suchlike.  At other times though, it is built into
property relations – foreclosures, accumulation-by-dispossession,
unemployment, “creative destruction” of “failing” businesses and
life-models, taking property to meet debts, not to mention punitive regimes.
The spectre of libertarianism is a kind of authoritarian collectivism in
which personal or small-group existential territories are radically denied
in the interests of overall justice or of common ownership.  This is
certainly a frightening prospect, but far closer to the capitalist model
than is admitted.  There are ways to posit a right to existential territory,
or a maximising-equalising of existential territory, without linking it to
alienable property.  These can be found for instance in urban practices such
as squatting and tagging, in theorists such as Stirner, Proudhon and
Guattari, and in customary and indigenous distributive systems.



Also, a lot of what is deemed “property” in property-systems is only
pseudo-private, and is in fact used collectively, as a public service or
good – and in fact could not exist without public use (stores, clubs,
cinemas, malls, pubs, etc; and more abstractly, sites such as factories,
schools, etc).  These kinds of sites are imagined to be equivalent in legal
terms to private homes.  Often, freedom would be enhanced and existential
territory rendered safer by treating these as public rather than private
spaces (for instance, against arbitrary exclusions).



I would extend the idea of scarcity in viewing it as a
psychological-existential aspect of a dominant regime, not simply a fact
which is wrongly stated.  Property is connected to the ideology of scarcity.
If something is seen as scarce then individuals or groups will seek to
control or exclusively “own” it.  Systems of property often create
“materially” the kind of scarcity they posit ideologically – for instance,
by making things scarce by hoarding or overusing them or by restricting
their use.  Indigenous epistemologies are already “beyond” scarcity, in the
idea of “primitive abundance” (Sahlins).  Scarcity is an invention of
systems of control.  I suspect that abundance as an existential condition is
possible at virtually any technological level (in the sense of what types of
tools exist); it has to do with the ways in which spaces and ecologies are
arranged.  In a situation of ‘absolute deterritorialisation’ or expanded
indigenous epistemology, complexity is constructed by addition – the new is
embraced by being articulated onto the already-existing, by bricolage, and
in this way the network or web of connections is expanded, intensified and
enriched.  This contrasts with capitalist accumulation in which something
has to be represented (reduced) to be added, and in which addition is in
tension with subtraction – destroying what is unproductive or stands in the
way.


bw

Andy
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