[p2p-research] 10 days to go...

[Peter Mazsa]

FYI:
http://theunitedpersons.org/blog/smari-mccarthy-my-agenda-and-emphasis-for-the-icelandic-constitutional-assembly
http://theunitedpersons.org/blog/our-friend-smari-mccarthy-is-campaigning
http://theunitedpersons.org/blog/tag/iceland

+ to your historical outline in your letter below: there is an
exceptional p2p tradition in Iceland. It would be too bad to miss this
link:

"PRIVATE LAW ENFORCEMENT, MEDIEVAL ICELAND, AND LIBERTARIANISM

"Iceland is known to men as a land of volcanoes, geysers and glaciers.
But it ought to be no less interesting to the student of history as
the birthplace of a brilliant literature in poetry and prose, and as
the home of a people who have maintained for many centuries a high
level of intellectual cultivation. It is an almost unique example of a
community whose culture and creative power flourished independently of
any favouring material conditions, and indeed under conditions in the
highest degree unfavourable. Nor ought it to be less interesting to
the student of politics and laws as having produced a Constitution
unlike any other whereof records remain, and a body of law so
elaborate and complex, that it is hard to believe that it existed
among men whose chief occupation was to kill one another."
JAMES BRYCE, STUDIES IN HISTORY AND JURISPRUDENCE (1901), P. 263.

The traditional history of many nations starts with a strong ruler who
put the country together—Arthur, Charlemagne, George Washington. The
history of Iceland also starts with a strong ruler. His name was
Harald, and he ruled over one of the small kingdoms making up what is
now Norway. After being rejected by the woman he wanted to marry on
the grounds that he was too small a king, Harald swore that he would
neither wash nor comb his hair until he had made himself king over all
of Norway; for some years they called him Shaggy Harald. When he had
completed his career of conquest he washed his hair; everyone was
impressed at how much better he looked. He went down in Norwegian
history as Haraldr inn hárfagri—Harald Fairhair.

What Harald established was not merely a single monarchy over all of
Norway, it was also a monarchy with considerably more power over the
Norwegian populace than its predecessors. The change was not uniformly
popular. Norwegians of the ninth century had two major
professions—farming and piracy. Many of those who disapproved of the
change voted with their feet—or rather, their oars. They loaded their
longships with their families, their retainers, and as much of their
stock as would fit and sailed west; by some estimates as much as ten
percent of the population left. Many of them went to Iceland, which
had recently been discovered. That is the beginning of the history of
Iceland, as the Icelanders tell it.

The settlement began, according to the Icelandic sources, about 870
ad. In 930 ad, the Icelanders held an assembly at which they agreed on
a common legal system for the whole island. It was based on Norwegian
legal traditions, with one major exception. The Icelanders decided
they could do very well without a king.

The central figure in the Icelandic system was the chieftain. The
Icelandic term was Goði, originally meaning a pagan priest; the first
chieftains were apparently entrepreneurs among the settlers who built
temples for the use of themselves and their neighbors and so became
local leaders. The bundle of rights that made up being a chieftain was
called a goðorð. A goðorð was private property; it could be sold,
lent, inherited. If you wanted to be a chieftain, you found one who
was willing to sell his goðorð, and bought it from him. The term
goðorð was also used for the group of men who followed a particular
chieftain.

What were the rights that made up the position of being a chieftain?
One, perhaps the most important, was the right to be the link by which
ordinary people were attached to the legal system. If you wanted to
sue someone, one of the first questions you had to ask was who his
chieftain was. That would determine what court you ended up suing him
in—just as, in the U.S. at present, the court you are sued in may be
determined by what state you are a citizen of. Everyone had to be
connected with a chieftain in order to be part of the legal system.
But the link between the chieftain and his thingmen was a voluntary
one—the chieftain, unlike a feudal lord, had no claim over his
thingman's land. The thingman was free to switch his allegiance to any
chieftain willing to have him.
Other rights included in the goðorð were a vote in the legislature and
a hand in picking the judges (by our standards jurymen— there were 36
on a court) who decided legal cases. The court system had several
levels, starting at the thing court and going up through the quarter
courts to the fifth court.

Under the legal system set up in 930, the 'government' of Iceland had
one part-time employee. He was called the lawspeaker and was elected
(by the inhabitants of one quarter, chosen by lot) for a three-year
term. His job was to preside over the legislature, memorize the law,
give legal advice, and, during the course of his three years, recite
the entire law code aloud once. The recitation took place at the
Allthing—an annual assembly, lasting two weeks, of people from all
over Iceland. The Allthing was also where the legislature met and
where cases in the four quarter courts and the fifth court were tried.
At each Allthing the lawspeaker recited a third of the law. If he
omitted something and nobody objected, that part of the law was out.
Think of it as an early form of sunset legislation.

I have described the legislative and judicial branch of the government
established by the Icelandic settlers but have omitted the executive.
So did they. Aside from the lawspeaker there were no government
employees.

You and I are Icelanders; the year is 1050 ad. You cut wood in my
forest. I sue you. The court decides in my favor, and instructs you to
pay ten ounces of silver as damages. You ignore the verdict. I go back
to the court and present evidence that you have refused to abide by
the verdict. The court declares you an outlaw. You have a few weeks to
get out of Iceland. When that time is over, I can kill you with no
legal consequences. If your friends try to defend you, they are
violating the law and can in turn be sued.

One obvious objection to such a system is that someone sufficiently
powerful—where power is measured by how many friends and relatives you
have, how loyal they are, and how good they are at fighting—can defy
the law with impunity, at least when dealing with less powerful
individuals. The Icelandic system had a simple and elegant solution to
that problem. A claim for damages was a piece of transferable
property. If you had injured me and I was too weak to enforce my
claim, I could sell or give it to someone stronger. It was then in his
interest to enforce the claim in order both to collect the damages and
to establish his own reputation for use in future conflicts.

The victim, in such a situation, gives up part or all of the damages,
but he gets something more important in exchange —a demonstration that
anyone who injures him will pay for it. The point is made in a more
permanent sense if it is clear that the same person who enforced this
claim would do so under similar circumstances again. The powerful
individual who took over such claims and enforced them might be a
chieftain acting for one of his thingmen or he might be merely a local
farmer with a lot of friends; both patterns appear in the Icelandic
sagas.

It may help to understand the legal institutions of medieval Iceland
if we look at them as an extreme case of something familiar. Our own
legal system has two kinds of law—civil and criminal. There is a sense
in which civil law is enforced privately and criminal law publicly. If
someone breaks your arm, you call a policeman; if someone breaks a
window—or a contract—you call a lawyer. The lawyer in a civil case
does, as an employee of the plaintiff, the same things that the
district attorney would do as an employee of the state.

In medieval Iceland all law was civil. The victim was responsible for
enforcing his claim, individually or with the assistance of others.
The victim who transferred his claim to some more powerful individual
in exchange for half what he was owed was like a plaintiff who agrees
to split the damages with his lawyer instead of paying him a fee.

It could be argued that even if this provides a workable way of
enforcing the law, it is unfair. Why should the victim of an aggressor
have to give up part or all of the damages owed him in order to win
his case? Perhaps it is unfair—but less so than the system under which
we now live. Under our system, the victim of a civil offense, like the
injured Icelander, must pay the cost of proving his case, while the
victim of a criminal offense gets no damages at all unless he files,
and pays for, a parallel civil suit.

Because the Icelandic system relied entirely on private enforcement,
it can be seen as a system of civil law expanded to include what we
think of as criminal offenses. It is similar to our civil law in
another sense as well. Under our system, the loser of a civil case
typically, although not inevitably, ends up paying money damages to
the winner; the loser of a criminal case typically ends up with a
non-monetary payment, such as a jail term or, in extreme cases,
execution. Under the Icelandic system the typical settlement was a
cash payment to the victim or his heirs. The alternative, if you lost
your case, was outlawry. The payment for killing someone was called
wergeld—man gold.

Before assuming that such a punishment is obviously insufficient to
deter crime, it is worth asking how large the payment was. My estimate
is that the payment for killing an ordinary man was the equivalent of
something between 12.5 and 50 years of an ordinary man's wages; the
analysis leading to that number is in an article of mine listed in
Appendix 2. That is a considerably higher punishment than the average
killer receives today, allowing for uncertain conviction and probable
parole. The comparison is even more favorable to the Icelandic system
if one allows for the distinction made under that system between
killing and murder. If you were a law-abiding Icelander and happened
to kill someone, the first thing you did after putting down your sword
or your axe was to go to the nearest neighbor, stick your head in the
door and announce 'I am Gunnar. I have just killed Helgi. His body is
lying out by the road. I name you as witness.' One of the early
Norwegian law codes specifies that "The slayer shall not ride past any
three houses, on the day he committed the deed, without avowing the
deed, unless the kinsmen of the slain man, or enemies of the slayer
lived there, who would put his life in danger." By reporting the
killing you established yourself as a killer, not a murderer. A
murderer was a secret killer, someone who killed and tried to conceal
the deed. The wergeld paid for a killing corresponds to the punishment
imposed on a murderer in our system who turns himself in immediately
after the deed.

The distinction between killing and murder was important in two ways.
Murder was regarded as shameful; killing, in a society where many
people were armed and where going viking was a common activity for
young men out to see the world, was not. The two acts also had
different legal consequences; by committing murder you forfeited all
justifications, such as self-defense, that might make your action
legal.

One question which naturally arises in reading a description of the
Icelandic system—or anything else very different from our own
society—is how well it worked in practice. Did powerful chieftains
routinely succeed in defying the law with impunity? Did the system
result in widespread violence? How long did it last? What was the
society which developed under that legal system like?

A powerful chieftain who wished to defy the law, as some certainly
did, faced two problems. The first has already been discussed; his
victim could transfer his claim to someone who was also a powerful
chieftain. The second was that, under the Icelandic system, the party
who lost a court case and ignored the verdict was in an inherently
weak position. Many of his friends might refuse to support him. Even
if he had supporters, every fight would create a new set of law
cases—which his side would lose. If someone on the other side was
killed, his kinsmen would expect to collect wergeld; if it was not
paid, they would join the coalition against the outlaw. Thus the
coalition against someone who defied the law would tend to expand. As
long as power was reasonably well distributed, so that no single
faction had anything approaching half the fighters in Iceland on its
side, the system was, in essence, self-enforcing.

There is a scene in Njal's Saga that provides striking evidence of
this stability. Conflict between two groups has become so intense that
open fighting threatens to break out in the middle of the court. A
leader of one faction asks a benevolent neutral what he will do for
them in case of a fight. He replies that if they start losing he will
help them, and if they are winning he will break up the fight before
they kill more men than they can afford. Even when the system appears
to be breaking down, it is still assumed that every enemy killed must
eventually be paid for. The reason is obvious enough; each man killed
will have friends and relations who are still neutral— and will remain
neutral if and only if the killing is made up for by an appropriate
wergeld.

Our main sources of information on the Icelandic system are the sagas,
a group of histories and historical novels written in Iceland, mostly
in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. On first
reading, they seem to describe quite a violent society. That is hardly
surprising. At least since Homer, the spectacle of people killing each
other has been one of the principal ways in which writers entertain
their audience. The chief innovation of the saga writers was to spend
as much time on law suits as on the violent conflicts that generated
them. The one error in the quotation from Bryce with which I started
this chapter is the claim that the chief occupation of Icelanders was
killing each other. The chief occupation of the characters of the
sagas appears to be suing each other; the killings merely provide
something to litigate about.

A more careful reading of the sagas tells a different story. The
violence, unlike that in contemporary accounts elsewhere in Europe, is
on a very small scale. The typical encounter in a saga feud involves
only a handful of people on each side; everyone killed or injured is
named. When two such encounters occur in consecutive chapters of a
saga it seems as though the feuding is continual—until you notice that
a character not yet born at the time of the first encounter is
participating in the second as an adult. The saga writers telescope
the action, skipping over the years that separate the interesting
parts.

The Icelandic system finally collapsed in the thirteenth century, more
than three hundred years after it was established. The collapse was
preceded by a period of about fifty years characterized by a
relatively high level of violence. According to an estimate by one
scholar, deaths from violence during the final period of collapse
(calculated by going through the relevant historical sagas and adding
up the bodies) totalled about 350. That comes to 7 deaths a year in a
population of about 70,000, or about one death per ten thousand per
year.

That is comparable to our highway death rate, or to our combined rates
for murder and non-negligent manslaughter. If the calculation is
correct, it suggests that even during what the Icelanders regarded as
the final period of catastrophic breakdown their society was not
substantially more violent than ours. To put the comparison in terms
of contemporary societies, one may note that in three weeks of the
year 1066 Norway, Normandy, and England probably lost as large a
fraction of their combined population to violence (in the battles of
Fulford, Stamford Bridge, and Hastings) as Iceland did in fifty years
of feuds.

It is not clear what the reason for the breakdown was. One possibility
is that increasing concentration of wealth and power made the system
less stable. Another is that Iceland was subverted by an alien
ideology—monarchy. Traditionally, conflicts involved limited
objectives; each party was trying to enforce what he viewed as his
legal rights. Once the conflict was settled, today's enemy might well
become tomorrow's ally. During the final period of breakdown, it
begins to look more and more as though the fighting is no longer over
who owes what to whom but over who is going to rule Iceland.

A third possible cause is external pressure. From Harald Fairhair on,
the kings of Norway took a special interest in Iceland. In the
thirteenth century, after the end of a long period of civil war,
Norway had a strong and wealthy monarchy. The Norwegian king involved
himself in Icelandic politics, supporting one side and then another
with money and prestige. Presumably, his objective was to get one or
another of the chieftains to take over Iceland on his behalf. That
never happened. But in the year 1262, after more than fifty years of
conflict, the Icelanders gave up; three of the four quarters voted to
ask the king of Norway to take over the country. In 1263, the north
quarter agreed as well. That was the end of the Icelandic
commonwealth.

This is not a book on history, even history as interesting as that of
Iceland. The reason for including this chapter is that the medieval
Icelandic legal system comes closer than any other well-recorded
historical society that I know of to being a real-world example of the
sort of anarcho-capitalist system described in Part III. One might
almost describe anarcho-capitalism as the Icelandic legal system
applied to a much larger and more complicated society.

In both systems, enforcement of law is entirely private; neither
depends on enforcement by an organization with special rights beyond
those possessed by all individuals. Private enforcement agencies are a
more formalized version of the arrangements by which individuals and
coalitions in Iceland used force to protect their rights. The major
difference between the two systems is that in Iceland there was a
single system of courts and legislature, whereas under the
institutions I described in Part III of this book there could be many
independent courts, each using whatever set of laws it thought would
sell.

One more thing should be said about the Icelandic Commonwealth. If we
judge societies by how much they produced that is still of interest to
us, Iceland must rank, along with such better-known societies as
Periclean Athens and Elizabethan England, as one of the great
successes. It had a population of about 70,000—a large suburb by
current standards. Of the sagas that it produced, there are probably
half a dozen or more currently in print in English paperback
translations, some seven hundred years after they were written. The
best of them—I would recommend Egil's Saga and Njal's Saga to start
with—are better stories better written than the great bulk of what is
published today.

I once tried to construct a crude measure of the importance of Iceland
to our civilization, in part as a response to friends who wondered how
I could be interested in such an obscure place and time. I did it by
counting trays in the card catalogs of two major university libraries,
in order to estimate what fraction of the cards were for books filed
under Iceland or the Icelandic language. It came to about a tenth of a
percent—one book in a thousand. That is a very small fraction of a
library, but it is a very large influence for seventy thousand people
seven hundred years ago."
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Machinery-Freedom-Guide-Radical-Capitalism/dp/0812690699
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/The_Machinery_of_Freedom_.pdf

On 17 November 2010 15:19, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2010/11/17 Smári McCarthy <smari at immi.is>
>>  Here's some initial background [sharable]:
>>
>> ----------------------
>>
>>  In 1874 Iceland received its first constitution from the Danish king
>> as a result of popular demand for increased home-rule. In 1918 the
>> country became sovereign under the Danish crown, and in 1920 a new
>> constitution to this effect was enacted.
>>
>>  In 1944, after being disconnected with Denmark for over a year,
>> Iceland proclaimed independence. A temporary constitution, mostly based
>> on the constitution of 1920, was accepted, with an article stating that
>> it should be renewed within the year.
>>
>>  Now 66 years have passed without the constitution being reevaluated.