Property as Theft: The Libertarian Socialist Critique of Property (Part 4)

Due to the ways in which my own views have developed over the half year since the original Property as Theft series was published, I have decided to revisit the topic. This is a revision of my original concluding post.

Personally, I am not a dogmatist or ideologue. When it comes to the questions of property and how various things ought to be organized and managed in order to maximize human happiness and well-being, I don’t think that there is any one right way or single perfect solution. I believe that we ought to always consider the “particular circumstances of time and place.” What is the best arrangement under these particular circumstances is not necessarily the best arrangement under other circumstances.

I tend to think that modern America, and most other wealthy industrialized societies, would thrive and prosper most with a system that blends georgism, mutualism, social democracy, and Lange-Lerner socialism—and this blend is what I have called libertarian social democracy. However, I think that the Federation of Northern Syria-Rojava has made the right choice by embracing communalism and trying to achieve a more communistic society—because full communism does seem to be the best option for Rojava, given the circumstances. The people of Rojava have wisely chosen communist anarchism as their model. Likewise, the libertarian communistic arrangements of the old Russian obshchina/mirs under the volost system were the best option given the necessity of collective collaboration in agriculture in medieval Russia. The sad truth of Russia is that they had a decent communistic arrangement until the rise of the Soviet Union and the introduction of Marxist-Leninism! They would have been much better off if they had preserved the agrarian communist aspects of their social order and scrapped the statist aspects. Yet under Western European mercantilism with its individualistic mode of production, usufructuary private property arrangements would probably have been quite tolerable in my estimation. A system of private property based on occupancy and use would have prevented the emergency of landlords and capitalists, since such a usufructuary arrangement would have made the tenants the owners of the land and the workers the owners of the factories. Modern America and the Nordic countries, in my opinion, would be better off under some sort of synthesis of social democracy and Lange-Lerner socialism. The particular model that I propose is what I call libertarian social democracy. Granted that I live in a country where libertarian social democracy is probably the most desirable option, I focus most of my attention on developing ideas related to this approach.

My own views are influenced heavily by a few different schools of thought. Firstly, I am influenced by Murray Bookchin and Abdullah Öcalan and their model of participatory assembly democracy and bottom-up confederation. Nevertheless, I have doubts about the practicality and efficiency of such an approach in highly industrialized and populous societies like America. I think we may very well find that some eclectic mix of delegative democracy and digital democracy with ranked-choice voting and the possibility of veto through popular vote might be much more liberatory in America than the more formally anarchistic approaches.

Furthermore, I have been influenced by the revisionist marxist Eduard Bernstein, as well as by Anthony Crosland and Anthony Giddens and the broader movement of social democracy and Fabian socialism. While I generally accept anarchist ethics and the anarchist critique of the State, I also recognize that the State has become somewhat of a historical necessity in modern times. I do oppose and wish to abolish the State as a “territorial monopoly on the use of legitimate force,” but I also recognize that there are other aspects of the State that are not objectionable―and I have no desire to abolish the desirable aspects of the State. The State has an administrative function in regard to distribution of wealth, as well as a regulatory function. Quite frankly, I support the EPA, OSHA, and would like to see single-payer healthcare and universal basic income or a social dividend. Although my vision is quite libertarian, I’m not quite an anarchist in the conventional sense, but then neither was the founder of modern anarchism, Proudhon himself!

I have also been influenced by Oskar Lange, Abba Lerner, Fred M. Taylor, and the Lange-Lerner model of socialism, which entails government ownership of land and industry, where the profits therefrom are divided up in an egalitarian fashion and distributed out to all members of society in the form of a social dividend. I find such an approach to be superior to full communism. Nevertheless, I reject the idea of government-management of industry. Instead, I follow the libertarian socialists and distributists in demanding that the workers in each industry ought to manage and control production. So, I envision something like a synthesis of Lange-Lerner socialism and mutualism. The State would take over ownership of industry and distribute the profits to all members of society in an egalitarian fashion, but the workers would receive wages, and the workers would autonomously manage and control the industries in which they work. We would then have participatory industrial democracy. The Mondragon Corporation is a good example of what socialized industry might look like, only the wealth would go to all members of society rather than exclusively to the members of the particular co-operative company.

I also advocate adopting a blockchain-based cryptocurrency as legal tender and creating a property registry on the blockchain in order to integrate land-value tax and progressive taxation into the monetary system itself, thereby automating taxation and redistribution and eliminating the need for a vast bureaucracy. I also support anarchist proposals for reforming/abolishing the military and the police, although I have made some improvements upon the standard proposals.