[p2p-research] against human rentals

Mon Aug 9 14:54:59 CEST 2010

thanks alex,

it seems to me that at least in europe, the history of a non-collectivist
left has been mostly forgotten and deleted from the labour movement's
history,

Michel

On Mon, Aug 9, 2010 at 7:32 PM, Alex Rollin <alex.rollin at gmail.com> wrote:

> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Hodgskin
> Breakthrough from the early 1800s!
>
> Thomas Hodgskin (b. 12 December 1787 Chatham, Kent, d. - 21 August
> 1869 Feltham, Middlesex) was an English socialist writer on political
> economy, critic of capitalism, free-market anarchist[1] and defender
> of free trade and early trade unions.
> Born of a father who worked in the Chatham Naval Dockyard, Hodgskin
> joined the navy at the age of 12. He rose rapidly through the ranks in
> the years of naval struggle with the French to the rank of first
> lieutenant. Following the naval defeat of the French the opportunities
> for advancement closed and Hodgskin increasingly ran into disciplinary
> trouble with his superiors, eventually leading to his court martial
> and dismissal in 1812. This prompted his first book An Essay on Naval
> Discipline (1813) a scathing critique of the brutal authoritarian
> regime then current in the navy.
> Entering Edinburgh University for study he later came to London in
> 1815 and entered the utilitarian circle around Francis Place, Jeremy
> Bentham and James Mill. With their support he spent the next five
> years in a programme of travel and study around Europe which resulted,
> inter alia, in a second book "Travels in North Germany" (1820).
> After 3 years in Edinburgh, Hodgskin returned to London in 1823 as a
> journalist. Influenced by, amongst others, Jean Baptiste Say, his
> views on political economy had diverged from the utilitarian orthodoxy
> of David Ricardo and James Mill. During the controversy around the
> parliamentary acts to first legalise and then ban worker's
> "combinations" Mill and Ricardo had been in favour of the ban whereas
> Hodgskin supported the right to organise. Taking Ricardo's labour
> theory of value he used it to denounce the appropriation of the most
> part of value produced by the labour of industrial workers as
> illegitimate. He propounded these views in a series of lectures at the
> London Mechanics Institute where he debated with William Thompson with
> whom he shared the critique of capitalist expropriation but not the
> proposed remedy. The results of these lectures and debates he
> published as "Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital" (1825),
> "Popular Political Economy" (1827) and "Natural and Artificial Right
> of Property Contrasted" (1832). The title of "Labour Defended" was a
> jibe at James Mill's earlier "Commerce Defended" and signalled his
> opposition to the latters taking sides with the capitalists against
> their employees.
> Though his criticism of Employers appropriation of the lion's share of
> the value produced by their employees went on to influence subsequent
> generations of socialists, including Karl Marx, Hodgskin's fundamental
> Deist beliefs identified production and exchange based on the labour
> theory of value (freed from the supposedly illegitimate expropriations
> of rent, interest and owner's profits) as part of "natural right", the
> divinely ordained proper relations of society contrasted to
> "artificial" contrivances — the source of disharmonies and conflicts.
> He rejected the proto-communism of William Thompson and Robert Owen by
> the same appeal to "natural right".
> In 1823 Hodgskin joined forces with Joseph Clinton Robinson in
> founding the "Mechanics Magazine". In the October 1823 edition
> Hodgskin and Francis Place wrote a manifesto for a Mechanics
> Institute. This would be more than a technical school but a place
> where practical studies could be combined with practical reflection
> about the condition of society. The inaugural meeting to found the
> Institute took place in 1823 but the idea was taken over by people of
> less radical views concerned about Hodgskin's unorthodox economic
> views including George Birkbeck a well known educator from Glasgow.
> Despite his high profile in the agitated revolutionary times of the
> 1820s, he retreated into the realm of Whig journalism after the Reform
> Act 1832. He became an advocate of free trade and spent 15 years
> writing for The Economist. He worked on the paper with its founder
> James Wilson and with the young Herbert Spencer. Hodgskin viewed the
> demise of the Corn Laws as the first step to the downfall of
> government and his libertarian anarchism was regarded as too radical
> by many of the liberals of the Anti-Corn Law League. He left the
> Economist in 1857. He continued working as a journalist for the rest
> of his life.
>
> On Mon, Aug 9, 2010 at 2:26 PM, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > hi kevin,
> >
> > i think your notion here of severable agreements is a breakthrough
> concept,
> > and really hope you can elaborate, eventually for a blog entry,
> >
> > this may be the analogical concept to forking in the domain of physical
> > resources,
> >
> > Michel
> >
> > On Mon, Aug 9, 2010 at 12:05 AM, Kevin Carson
> > <free.market.anticapitalist at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> On 8/6/10, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> > yes, that sounds like a good transitional approach,
> >> >
> >> > by the way, I think that generally speaking, peer to peer differs and
> >> >  moves
> >> > away from the classic socialist approach by insisting on the maximum
> >> > amount
> >> > of personal sovereignty and control of the means of production ...
> i.e.
> >> > it
> >> > distrusts collective ownership that can be appropriated by
> institutions
> >> > and
> >> > the state, in favour of both individual and collectivist formst that
> are
> >> > under maximum control of the individual who can freely invest or
> >> > withdraw
> >> > his productive resources,
> >>
> >> The individualist anarchists in America (and Hodgskin in England, who
> >> was something of a kindred spirit) were socialists who also took the
> >> ultra-individualist stance you describe.  Their position was that the
> >> important thing was to remove monopoly rents on land and capital, and
> >> then let free individuals cooperate (or not) as they saw fit.  Josiah
> >> Warren, in particular, the ancestor of the American individualist
> >> movement, had a temperamental aversion to all forms of cooperation
> >> that didn't involve completely severable interests (e.g., he thought
> >> that in cooperative production each separate piece of machinery should
> >> be owned by one and only one person, with no joint shares in
> >> anything).
> >>
> >> --
> >> Kevin Carson
> >> Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
> >> Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
> >> http://mutualist.blogspot.com
> >> The Homebrew Industrial Revolution:  A Low-Overhead Manifesto
> >> http://homebrewindustrialrevolution.wordpress.com
> >> Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
> >>
> http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html
> >>
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