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> Libertarian ones are more likely to say that abstract private property, on the contrary, is what requires state enforcement by violence (e.g. evicting squatt

by rsj_hn 5y ago

> Libertarian ones are more likely to say that abstract private property, on the contrary, is what requires state enforcement by violence (e.g. evicting squatters) - and thus, if you get rid of that enforcement, you get rid of private property as such, leaving only personal property / right-of-use in place. Right. That is basically how primitive societies (not meant as a value judgement) worked. You could own whatever you could physically defend, or convince your allies to help you defend. Unfortunately that means that political considerations will decide who owns what, at which point a hierarchical group will form, and it will be well organized, and it will conquer the decentralized society of individuals and small communities. So you are left with the eternal problems of decentralized societies, which is that they are just weaker than centralized societies. So then you say, we will have a strong hierarchy, but the sole purpose of the hierarchy is to guarantee our values, and now you are back in the authoritarian camp, and very quickly the party that runs the society will be more interested in domination than preserving whatever founding values they had before. There is just a big gap between what is intellectually appealing, and what is stable and defendable in a hostile world.

int_19h 5y ago
Not quite. We're not talking about a free-for-all here, in a sense that if you can forcibly take it, it's yours. We're talking about what kinds of property are recognized (and enforced) above that by society at large. Abstract property rights, where "X owns Y" is true if there's a central registry that says so, are one thing. Property rights based on use and occupation are another - but they still have to be enforced by the society to be effective. And this all is actually orthogonal to whether the society has centralized governance or not - you could have a strong central government that still refuses to recognize & enforce some property rights. As for defense against organized authoritarians in general - the middle ground is a decentralized federation, where (relatively) small communities run their own day-to-day affairs, but band up together for defense. Bookchin's libertarian municipalism is an example of that kind of framework, and Rojava is trying to build something like it. They seem to have fared quite well in combat against their more authoritarian opponents who are on a similar technological level (mostly ISIL and other Islamist groups, and very occasionally, Assad's forces). Not so much against Turkey, but the disparity in resources there is extreme.

by rsj_hn 5y ago

int_19h 5y ago

Not quite. We're not talking about a free-for-all here, in a sense that if you can forcibly take it, it's yours. We're talking about what kinds of property are recognized (and enforced) above that by society at large. Abstract property rights, where "X owns Y" is true if there's a central registry that says so, are one thing. Property rights based on use and occupation are another - but they still have to be enforced by the society to be effective. And this all is actually orthogonal to whether the society has centralized governance or not - you could have a strong central government that still refuses to recognize & enforce some property rights. As for defense against organized authoritarians in general - the middle ground is a decentralized federation, where (relatively) small communities run their own day-to-day affairs, but band up together for defense. Bookchin's libertarian municipalism is an example of that kind of framework, and Rojava is trying to build something like it. They seem to have fared quite well in combat against their more authoritarian opponents who are on a similar technological level (mostly ISIL and other Islamist groups, and very occasionally, Assad's forces). Not so much against Turkey, but the disparity in resources there is extreme.