re mutualism, of all the variants of leftist anarchism I am familiar with, this one does indeed appeal to me the most. The problem I have with it is only the id

re mutualism, of all the variants of leftist anarchism I am familiar with, this one does indeed appeal to me the most. The problem I have with it is only the idea that as soon as anyone who has invested labor into real estate vacates the property, it is supposed to be perfectly ethical / justifiable to simply appropriate it. This puts all kinds of peculiar incentives in play for owners of real estate to avoid losing their property by maintaining "occupancy" of it, which is in itself kind of a nebulous and strange definition. If we build a server farm and use it for staging and then push that environment to production and we're not actively using staging for the next month, is it OK to appropriate that? If you spend many years of labour constructing your own home and all associated facilities, is it acceptable that when you go on holiday to some remote location, it should instantly be up for grabs? If it's just a case of being unable to enforce absentee ownership for any given interval, I think this is both a terrible failure of imagination on the part of mutualists as well as an undeserved tip of the hat to that old "might makes right" chestnut. We can take your property, therefore it is not yours anymore. I'll admit there are problems with the concept of ancap homesteading also; the mutualist criticism of "rearranging a few twigs on a parcel of land not entitling the arranger to title in perpetuity" is not without basis, natural resources and real property are quite thorny and difficult to disentangle concepts by nature. This is why the original suggestion of a thousand competing political systems flourishing is even more appealing to me then just every space on earth appropriating the ancap model as laid out in "the machinery of freedom". Through competition and the market, we can see how things play out in the real world and what people end up preferring. I have no problem with any political philosophy insofar as they keep to themselves and do not attempt to enforce their ideas on those that are unable to choose an alternative, which unfortunately as the status quo stands is almost no place on the planet.