"Incorrect. I've already said I oppose these. Or maybe I'm not "anarcho-captitalist" accordin to the author's definition of such."

In a free-market, you are able to pick and choose whatever will make you happy. That goes for the people in a corporation and the people in a commune. Anarcho-socialism can't make that promise. It only promises that if you abide by their stringent ideas of what anarchism means then you are an anarchist.

'That's as large an amount of bullshit as I've ever heard. I might just as well say that "all Capitalists consider usury to be just and right and agree with the international banker Morgan." Utter shite. '

Actually, your statement, that you declare to be utter shite, is in fact true. Capitalism is based on the idea of using Capital to perpetuate itself, and that can only be accomplished via profit, usury and landlordism. If you are against these things, then you are not a Capitalist at all. Now, far be it for me to rely on a dictionary for my definitions, but I will now include a Webster definition merely to give us a starting point.

"Capitalism: an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market"

OK, fine and good. But what is meant by the key word "capital (goods)"?

"Capital: (1) : a stock of accumulated goods especially at a specified time and in contrast to income received during a specified period; also : the value of these accumulated goods (2) : accumulated goods devoted to the production of other goods (3) : accumulated possessions calculated to bring in income"

This tends to shed a bit more light on what we are actually discussing. Note the third definition. It fits rather neatly into what we might expect Capital to be, when used in the context of what Capitalism actually is.

Capitalism is not the theory of having a monetary system and trade, it is the ideology of using excess in order to produce more for an individual or a specific group, normally to the detriment of any not involved in receiving that excess. This is where naked greed enters the picture, and mere "mercantilism" or "free trade" are not accurate descriptions of the inner workings of true Capitalism.

If you have a house that you have built, and find that it is no longer of any use to you, and you produce enough from your own labors to live a full, comfortable life, what is the motivation to rent out the property in excess of any expenses incurred in it being occupied by other people? Can anyone supply an answer other than "greed"?

Oy! I'm so confused. I love this tribe, I learn and think so much here. Too bad I don't know very much about all this.

How *does* property work under an anarchist system?

I want a place to call home. How do I get that under either anarcho-capitalism or anarcho-syndicalism?

Thanks!

Marx's labor theory of value has been debunked -- but that wasn't the only labor theory of value, or even that of the individualist anarchists. Adam Smith had two labor theories of value. The individualist anarchists of the 1800's had several. I have a feeling that many of these labor theories of value were not theories of value in the same sense of the word "value" that you are thinking of -- probably the sense in which Marx used the word. Marx thought that there was some sort of "objective" collectively value, because to him the individual was molded by social forces, and individual preferences were essentially an illusion -- only the collective classes had reality, thus there would only be an objective value, determined by that collective reality....

Not so for the individualist anarchists. I'm sure there were some who adhered to something like Marx's labor theory of value (an objective one), but most modern individualist anarchists, even those who adhere to the ideas of those of the 1800's, admit that value is a subjective thing. That is, how much individuals value things is a subjective thing. That, however, does not negate the possibility of a labor theory of value, because the kind of value measured by many of such theories is different. Many individualist anarchists are not concerned with this subjective value, but with market value (price), which is indeed something objective and measurable, specific to place and time, yes, but subjective, no.

The keystone to a more robust labor theory of value is the idea that all or nearly all market value is determined in direct proportion to the amount of labor put into the product. This labor is not measured by the hour, which would be simplisticly erroneous, but by the productive impact of the labor, which is harder to measure, and probably impossible to break down to the individual level -- but still detectable in some larger, averaged way.

Basically, this is saying that nearly all value that products take on a (free) market is due to labor. From the point that raw materials leave the ground, it is the labor put into the extraction that gives them value. From there it is the labor put into construction work building a factory that adds to that value and makes the factory worth what it is, the labor of workers in that factory that gives its products value, etc. Basically, the idea is that you can measure the total labor put into each product sold on the market, and in some large-scale average sense, the price things are sold for on in a free market is very much correlated with how much labor went into them -- maybe not everyone's labor contributes the same amount, but things like raw materials that have almost no labor put into them at all will nearly always sell for less than finished goods, which have much labor put into them.

This version of the labor of theory of value I am explaining is essentially an Adam Smith labor theory of value, as opposed to a Marxian one.

There are a few obvious exceptions to this -- it only applies to commodities (goods sold on the market), not amenities like land or natural resources. If there is a market for land or natural resources, typically their value does not need to be created by human effort. But individualist anarchists do not think of a market for land as part of a larger "free market" any more than they would think of a market for slaves as part of it. To individualist anarchists, mixing ones labor with land does not give one an unconditional claim to hold it when land is scarce and there is not enough to go around. Land was not created by humans, thus most individualist anarchists consider it the equal province of all, and seek various ways to divide up the use of physical space and natural resources without absentee owners profiting from rent or resource extraction, and without inequalities in access. The solution to this is not communal ownership and planning of land use; it is a different, more equal system of individual rights. This runs from things like use-occupancy only, to rents being paid equally to all individuals, to even less propertarian approaches like those of Max Stirner (which reject all property public or private, and are not exactly economic in motivation).

So the individualist anarchist approach, you see, is not one of determining this labor value through some scientific process, but in having the market discover its value itself (through the decentralized process of price) -- by changing the social environment that this market operates in such that the value is distributed more equally to those who create the value.

This is typically through a *different* system of individual rights, one that deviates from modern capitalism in key ways, and eliminates what the individualist anarchists of the 1800's called key "monopolies." But essentially this means that property rights that exist today would be replaced with different individual liberties, ones that do not respect certain forms of property.

I already mentioned land ownership, which is one of these key "monopolies" (really concentrations of wealth) that individualist anarchists seek to abolish. Another one is the "money monopoly," something that is in common with anarcho-capitalists: Individualist anarchists draw on the work of mutualists and argue that ending a state monopoly on currency will allow working class people to issue their own currencies, through mutual banks (worker's banks backed by their own property), thus evening the amount of money available to worker's and allowing them to compete more equally with the capitalists.

Another key difference is that many individualist anarchists oppose intellectual property rights, which they see as merely another monopoly for wealthy individuals, which interferes with the free excercise of commerce and full access to the product of ones labor.

Basically, with full access to land, natural resources, production methodologies (which are no longer protected by patents), and money (through alternate currencies), working class people will have everything they need to build their own alternate economic institutions, in which workers own the capital they work with. Then they will no longer be required to pay for the use of capital through interest, or through the profit associated with wage labor. In the situation where access to capital is more equal, individualist anarchists argue, price not only will reflect the labor put into a product (which it already does), but also those who created that value will be able to retain it (which does not happen today).

There is no idea of "surplus value" in this line of thought. The reason capitalists retain some of the value has nothing to do with surplus, and everything to do with the fact that there is an unequal distribution of economic resources that allows some to charge rents, interest, and take profits from others, as a fee for them to gain from their labor.

Some individualist anarchists, like myself would go significantly farther in questioning certain rights that exist in a capitalist system that just those few basic ones I mentioned. For example, I belive that the "right to contract" is essentially an intrusion on individual liberty that can place an individual in a future state of serfdom for his past actions. For me, liberty has to be an always present, continual state of existence, in order to have meaning, and ones past actions cannot give someone else a present claim to all the present products of ones labor. For me, the most a contract should be able to enforce is a distribution of property that already existed at the time of the contract -- for example, I can take a loan against my car, and you can repossess that, or even everything I owned at the time of the loan (if that was specified), but not 25% of my earnings for the rest of my life, or even anything new I acquired since the loan agreement.

I see contracts that result from past unequal economic situations as a threat to present economic liberty and equality. I don't think people are truly free to form voluntary associations, taking advantage of the Earth and its resources, if there are claims to their labor, due to their previous agreements.

So basically, I would replace the right to enforce a contract with the liberty to claim the full product of ones labor -- and this is not the only such example. I think in many ways that the individualist anarchists of the 1800's did not go far enough, but rather than replace private property rights with collective decision-making, it is preferable to replace it with individual liberties that do not respect such property. Some individualist anarchists, like Max Stirner go way farther than me. (He believed that all property rights were "spooks," and that there was nothing more important than the interest of the individual, who should choose to respect or not respect such property rights as the situation fits.)

Sorry about the identical posts.... The server seems to be freaking out, and it kept giving me a "CGI error" when I hit the submit button.