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May 2021[edit]

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Thank you. ClueBot NG (talk) 22:35, 7 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

User page rules[edit]

Hi The New Anarchist and welcome to Wikipedia. I understand that you are new to Wikipedia and may not be aware of all rules and recommendations, however currently your user page is breaking several rules. What's not allowed is content copied from mainspace, user pages that look like articles and excessive unrelated content (in your case, extensive personal opinions on matters unrelated to Wikipedia). Feel free to have a few statements describing your views - there are several user boxes that allow you to do that - but please try to address other issues when you have a moment, so it doesn't cause any trouble. Thanks! BeŻet (talk) 13:53, 8 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]


Hello, BeŻet. I am glad you reached out; as there is something I would like to talk to you about. Wikipedia is a platform designed to provide the closest thing possible to unbiased, objective fact, without the editor's personal opinion being involved. Currently, I see an issue with the pages anarcho-capitalism, anarchism, and a few others in that they claim that anarcho-capitalism is not a form of anarchism. This is a clear violation of this objective, as it is clearly allowing one's muddled personal beliefs to get in the way of objective fact. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, founder of individualist anarchism, supported identical private property rights to modern day capitalist anarchists. This you may have noticed in my user page. The quote is derived, I believe, from the pages of La Voix du Peuple, Proudhon's magazine, in his debate with Frederic Bastiat. And it is proof that he suppported the legal right to engage in usury - this can once again be verified with one of his final quotes before death, where he stated - “I protest that in criticising property, or rather the whole body of institutions of which property is the pivot, I never meant either to attack the individual rights recognized by previous laws, or to dispute the legitimacy of acquired possessions, or to instigate an arbitrary distribution of goods, or to put an obstacle in the way of the free and regular acquisition of properties by bargain and sale; or even to prohibit or suppress by sovereign decree land-rent and interest on capital. I think that all these manifestations of human activity should remain free and optional for all; I would admit no other modifications, restrictions, or suppressions of them than naturally and necessarily result from the universalization of the principle of reciprocity and of the law of synthesis which I propound. This is my last will and testament. I allow only him to suspect its sincerity, who could tell a lie in the moment of death.”. Additionally, in one of the early meetings of The League of Peace and Freedom, Proudhon's anarchist followers voted against the collectivization of private property, in contrast to Karl Marx's statist socialist faction and a small, new, obscure faction of anarcho-collectivists led by Bakunin. The evidence that the term "anarchism" was unjustly co-opted by collectivists later is overwhelming, and this history needs representation within the pages of Wikipedia in order to keep an unbiased record of the truth.

Additionally, I would like to keep the content on my page around for further editing. Where can I store it? As soon as I find a solution, I will remove it.

Thanks! The New Anarchist (talk) 16:31, 8 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your reply. You are correct that Wikipedia should be a source of unbiased, objective fact, and that's why we need to back everything up with reliable, verifiable sources. Your opinions about Proudhon would be counted more as original research as it's just your personal interpretation of something, so you would need a source which makes such claim that you are trying to present. For instance, you would need some reliable source stating clearly that Proudhon supported capitalist private property rights, or that anarcho-capitalists are anarchists. Since Proudhon rejected capitalist property, private property in land, inheritance of anything more than personal possessions, wage labour, profit etc., I don't see how you can find a source that would support your claim, but feel free to share it with other editors once you find one. I do think though that he made his case quite clear in Theory of Property, and as I understand, anarcho-capitalism support profit, wage labour, private ownership of land, private ownership of means of productions, property accumulation etc.. So while it seems extremely difficult to find a source that would suddenly dispute all this, please feel free to share it with others. In terms of storing content for further editing, you can put it on a subpage of your user page for the time being, for instance in your sandbox User:The New Anarchist/sandbox. Hope this helps! BeŻet (talk) 16:47, 8 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

BeŻet, do these following sources work?

https://springtimeofnations.org/2021/04/yes-ancaps-are-anarchists

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJb2-bsWP6Y (video form)

https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=6-sWAAAAYAAJ&rdid=book-6-sWAAAAYAAJ&rdot=1

https://www.google.com/books/edition/_/3BswDwAAQBAJ?hl=en

These reveal the following critical quotations:


“I protest that in criticising property, or rather the whole body of institutions of which property is the pivot, I never meant either to attack the individual rights recognized by previous laws, or to dispute the legitimacy of acquired possessions, or to instigate an arbitrary distribution of goods, or to put an obstacle in the way of the free and regular acquisition of properties by bargain and sale; or even to prohibit or suppress by sovereign decree land-rent and interest on capital. I think that all these manifestations of human activity should remain free and optional for all; I would admit no other modifications, restrictions, or suppressions of them than naturally and necessarily result from the universalization of the principle of reciprocity and of the law of synthesis which I propound. This is my last will and testament. I allow only him to suspect its sincerity, who could tell a lie in the moment of death.” - Proudhon (Proudhon explicitly stating his support for sticky private property)


“Interest is neither a crime nor an offense” - Proudhon (Proudhon explicitly stating interest is not a violation of rights)


“this fundamental denial of Interest does not destroy, in our view, the principle – the right, if you will – which gives birth to Interest, and which has enabled it to continue to this day in spite of its condemnation by secular and ecclesiastical authority. So that the real problem before us is not to ascertain whether Usury, per se, is illegitimate (in this respect we are of the opinion of the Church), nor whether it has an excuse for its existence (on this point we agree with the economists). The problem is to devise a means of suppressing the abuse without violating the Right – a means, in a word, of reconciling this contradiction.” - Proudhon (Proudhon further stating he does not see interest as inconsistent with property rights, proving his support for sticky private property)


“Laissez Faire was very good sauce for the goose, labor, but was very poor sauce for the gander, capital.” - Tucker (Tucker affirming his support for an unregulated market)


“capitalism is at least tolerable, which cannot be said of state socialism or communism” - Tucker (Tucker affirming that capitalism as a system is tolerable and superior to state socialism)


“My Wichita Falls comrade, Mr. Warren, falls into error when he accuses me of “adopting the nomenclature of a class with whom no individualist could harmonize,” meaning, I suppose, by this class the Communists who call themselves Anarchists. Is Mr. Warren aware that the Chicago men never dreamed of adopting the name Anarchist until long after Liberty was started, and that the Communistic Anarchists of Europe did not so style themselves until nearly forty years after Proudhon used the name, for the first time in the world, to designate a social philosophy? Proudhon was an individualist, and to him and those who fundamentally agree with him belongs, by right of discovery and use, the employment of the word Anarchy in scientific terminology. We individualists hold the original title, and we do not propose to be evicted by the first upstart Communist who comes along with a fraudulent claim.” - Tucker (Tucker rejecting the notion that anarcho-communists were genuine anarchists)


“First, I must begin by affirming my conviction that Lysander Spooner and Benjamin R. Tucker were unsurpassed as political philosophers and that nothing is more needed today than a revival and development of the largely forgotten legacy that they left to political philosophy.” - Rothbard (Rothbard praising political philosophy of individualist anarchists)


“I am, therefore, strongly tempted to call myself an “individualist anarchist,” except for the fact that Spooner and Tucker have in a sense preempted that name for their doctrine and that from that doctrine I have certain differences. Politically, these differences are minor, and therefore the system that I advocate is very close to theirs; but economically, the differences are substantial, and this means that my view of the consequences of putting our more or less common system into practice is very far from theirs.” - Rothbard (Rothbard furthermore affirming his differences were almost entirely economic)


In addition to the fact that the individualists explicitly rejected collectivization of property: "In the organization’s second annual congress at Berne, Switzerland, members voted on what their official position should be on collectivizing privately owned land. Chaudey, along with most of the self described Anarchists voted against that, which made sense, since at the time Anarchist largely meant someone who held Proudhon’s views, more or less. However, Bakunin emerged as the leader of a new faction of self described anarchists who called themselves collectivists. They voted with the likes of Karl Marx and other state socialists to collectivize property. Fortunately though, despite this defection, the Proudhonists still won the vote."

To address Proudhon's property is robbery quotation - " And yet, the very same collectivist anarchists who so fiercely denounce Rothbardianism tend to be much more willing to accept Proudhon as “The father of anarchism”. Why is that? Well, essentially it boils down to a statement Proudhon makes in that same essay in answer to the title of the work: “Property is robbery!”. On its surface, this sounds quite antithetical to the Rothbardian view, not to mention self contradictory. How can property be theft, when the concept of theft itself presupposes the idea of property? And it gets even more complicated when Proudhon, in a later work entitled “Systems of economical contradictions” declares “Property is Liberty!” while still maintaining the Property is theft line.

So what is going on here? Well, to answer that question, we have to understand that Proudhon is French. And there are two very important implications of that. Firstly, it means he’s part of the tradition of continental philosophy, so like Neitzche, Hegel and Foucualt he has a tendency to write somewhat poetically, even at the expense of clarity at times. And secondly, in 19th century France, and Europe as a whole, a large portion of land was still owned by aristocrats, who had acquired their land, and therefore their wealth, not by homesteading, and providing value through a series of voluntary transactions, but by being part of the state. So this property was indeed theft in the straightforward Rothbardian sense. That is, it was land stolen from the peasants who worked it by a hereditary class of nobles that formed the medieval state.

These landed titles were rightfully abolished in the French Revolution of 1789, but were later partially restored. By the time of the 1840s when Proudhon wrote “what is property”? French society was again becoming discontent with this state of affairs. So, the property that Proudhon identifies with Liberty is not in principle the same as the property he identifies with theft, but he believed that in practice the two had become entangled, and the essence of his political ideology, which he named “Anarchism” was an effort to disentangle the two. At one point in “What is Property” Proudhon makes this explicit, declaring his agreement with another philosopher Pierre Leroux in the statement “There is property and property, — the one good, the other bad. Now, as it is proper to call different things by different names, if we keep the name ‘property’ for the former, we must call the latter robbery, rapine, brigandage. If, on the contrary, we reserve the name ‘property’ for the latter, we must designate the former by the term possession, or some other equivalent; otherwise we should be troubled with an unpleasant synonymy.”

When a classical liberal economist, Jérôme-Adolphe Blanqui wrote to Proudhon saying that it was not really property he wanted to abolish, but the abuse of property, Proudhon basically agreed, saying: “M. Blanqui acknowledges that property is abused in many harmful ways; I call property the sum of these abuses exclusively. To each of us property seems a polygon whose angles need knocking off; but, the operation performed, M. Blanqui maintains that the figure will still be a polygon, while I consider that this figure will be a circle.” It is kind of strange that he would say this and then go on to say property is liberty, but this was quite a while before he wrote that in his essay “economical contradictions”, so he presumably changed his mind about whether the term “property” could be salvaged in the interim. "

To address Rothbard referring to right-libertarians "stealing" a word - " Modern collectivist anarchists often like to cite a certain couple out of context Rothbard quotes in order to claim that he and his followers are not anarchists. Firstly Rothbard wrote:

“One gratifying aspect of our rise to some prominence is that, for the first time in my memory, we, “our side,” had captured a crucial word from the enemy. Other words, such as “liberal,” had been originally identified with laissez-faire libertarians, but had been captured by left-wing statists, forcing us in the 1940s to call ourselves rather feebly “true” or “classical” liberals. “Libertarians,” in contrast, had long been simply a polite word for left-wing anarchists, that is for anti-private property anarchists, either of the communist or syndicalist variety. But now we had taken it over, and more properly from the view of etymology; since we were proponents of individual liberty and therefore of the individual’s right to his property”

As I noted earlier, the word Libertarian did come into consistent use by the communists to which Rothbard refers until around the turn of the 20th century, and before that it had been used on and off by both sides, although it was originally coined by the communist Joseph Dejacque. In the 20th century though, the term was actually first taken by “Our side” on the suggestion of Dean Russell, shortly followed by Frank Chodorov. Chodorov’s involvement makes me suspect that this was influenced by his days as an anarchist, but I can’t prove that. In any case, in this quote Rothbard is referring to the word “Libertarian” not the word “Anarchist”, and somewhat ironically, modern Rothbardians actually have a much better historical claim to the word “Anarchist” than the word Libertarian. "

To address Rothbard seemingly disavowing the word anarchism - " “Aha!” say the collectivists!, but what about the Rothbard quote where he says “We are not anarchists”? Well, let’s look at that one one in context.

“We must conclude that the question “are libertarians anarchists?” simply cannot be answered on etymological grounds. The vagueness of the term itself is such that the libertarian system would be considered anarchist by some people and archist by others. We must therefore turn to history for enlightenment; here we find that none of the proclaimed anarchist groups correspond to the libertarian position, that even the best of them have unrealistic and socialistic elements in their doctrines. Furthermore, we find that all of the current anarchists are irrational collectivists, and therefore at opposite poles from our position. We must therefore conclude that we are not anarchists, and that those who call us anarchists are not on firm etymological ground, and are being completely unhistorical. On the other hand, it is clear that we are not archists either: we do not believe in establishing a tyrannical central authority that will coerce the noninvasive as well as the invasive. Perhaps, then, we could call ourselves by a new name: nonarchist.”

The first thing to note about this quote is that its from an article that Rothbard never had published, and it contradicts the angle Rothbard states multiple times in other sources both before and after this was written in the mid 1950s. Rothbard was calling himself a “private property anarchist” in private correspondence by 1950, and In Betrayal of The American Right, Rothbard specifically says “I became an anarchist”, and he says the same thing in a talk he gave on his ideological development in 1981, just as a couple of quick examples.

Secondly, if you carefully compare this quote to what he wrote in “The Spooner Tucker Doctrine”, the only difference is that in that text, he emphasizes that his disagreements with Spooner and Tucker about actual political prescriptions are only minor. "

Joseph Dejacque even appeared to concede the word "anarchism" to Proudhon - " In fact the only person who was calling himself a Libertarian in Proudhon’s day was the first person to do so, Joseph Dejacque. Somewhat ironically, Dejacque was a bitter rival of Proudhon’s, and denounced his individualism. First identifying with Proudhon’s term “Anarchist”, Dejacque soon began to use the term “Libertarian” more frequently, calling Proudhon a “center right anarchist, liberal and not libertarian”. Unlike many other self described socialists of the time, Dejacque was not at all interested in workers keeping the product of their labor. Instead, he maintained that one’s economic contributions were irrelevant, and anytime anyone produced anything of value they were obligated to give it to whoever needed it for free. "

The original anarchists agreed with Proudhon - " Indeed, as long as Proudhon lived the Anarchist movement as a whole would remain relatively close to his views. Even of those self described anarchists who he had some disagreements with often did not disagree with him in a direction that modern anarcho-communists would like. "

Does this evidence hold up? I really don't see how this isn't clear and obvious proof of individualist anarchism's roots in the exact same political philosophy as capitalist anarchism, the only difference being their economic predictions of a laissez-faire market. In fact I would go as far as to say that Tucker explicitly stated that anarcho-communists were attempting to co-opt the term and pretty much rejected the idea that they were anarchists; this was far before anyone rejected the validity of capitalist anarchism. I also provided a fairly comprehensive post explaining everything, in both article and video form, and I provided links to ebooks containing some of these major quotations. NOTE: all non quotes from a political thinker came from the first linked article, they were not self-research The New Anarchist (talk) 06:31, 11 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Hi. I'm afraid this still counts as original research. Let me explain why: you are using primary sources and providing your own personal interpretation of them in order to present your own conclusion. On Wikipedia we prefer secondary sources, so that any interpretation can be attributed, and so it's possible to establish whether the view is WP:DUE or just WP:FRINGE. For example, many people would disagree with your interpretation of the first quote you bring up, or many of the other quotes - your interpretations are very far reaching. Is your opinion more valuable than that of an other editor? The answer is: none of our opinions matter here, what matters here is what reliable sources about the topic are saying. But, as a sidenote, Proudhon literally states: "We deny, in the first place – and this you already know – we deny, with Christianity and the Bible, the legitimacy, per se, of Lending at Interest." and "(...) we persist in our negation, and say: We will not pay you Interest, because Interest, in social economy, is a premium on idleness, the primary cause of misery and the inequality of wealth.". This is why using secondary sources is important: instead of cherry-picking some fragments and adding your own interpretation to them we use verifiable, reliable secondary sources, so that things are not affected by the editor's opinions. Like I said, trying to prove that an anti-capitalist socialist like Proudhon was in fact a supporter of capitalism is, frankly, quite strange. BeŻet (talk) 10:36, 11 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

BeŻet, do the article and the video not count as *not* original research, as well as secondary sources?

Your two quotes do not disprove my evidence - Proudhon absolutely did oppose interest on the grounds that he thought it to be undesirable and expected an unfettered market with no state interference to abolish interest as unprofitable. However, as established in both an explicit debate with Bastiat where he argued against interest and a quote on his deathbed, Proudhon did not support the abolition of interest; he explicitly stated it should remain "free and optional for all". There is a difference between opposing interest in that one finds it undesirable and thinking that interest itself is an inherently evil activity that should be stopped with force. He clearly stated it was not a crime; not an offense; he supported allowing interest to exist voluntarily.

The point of proving Proudhon and thus individualist anarchism's belief in the same political philosophy and system as Murray Rothbard, just with different economic predictions regarding how a freed market would turn out; is to prove that communists were the ones to co-opt the term "anarchism". The New Anarchist (talk) 16:16, 11 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@The New Anarchist: I'm afraid YouTube vlogs and personal blogs are not reliable sources on Wikipedia (see WP:USERGENERATED) - they're simply an expression of one's opinion. Proudhon had vastly different views from Rothbard, however what you seem to be trying to prove that Proudhon simply didn't want to enfore his views upon other people through a state apparatus, which is similar to Rothbard's view who didn't want to enfore things through a state apparatus but through a private police force. BeŻet (talk) 16:33, 11 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

BeŻet, OK, if those do not count as secondary sources then what does? All sources are either direct quotation of data or evidence or someone's interpretation of said data or evidence.

Proudhon did not want to enforce his views at all. If interest was not a crime nor an offense then one had the right to engage in such activities without violence being used to stop them. This is the exact same as the Rothbardian view of property rights. Rothbard did not want a private police agency to "enforce" anything which wasn't a direct right, which in regards to, he agreed with Proudhon. Both were propertarian voluntaryists. The New Anarchist (talk) 17:09, 11 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Have a look at WP:YOUTUBE, WP:BLOG, WP:SECONDARY, WP:FRINGE and Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Perennial sources. Any random person can publish a YouTube video or a blog post. Hell, I can go to YouTube right now and upload a video claiming Milton Friedman was a socialist and believed in worker democracy and worker-run enterprises; I can go write a blog post that the Earth is flat; but that doesn't make it true. What we need is quality, reliable secondary sources: material such as an article, book, monograph, or research paper that has been vetted by the scholarly community is regarded as reliable. Random thoughts of a YouTuber are not. Out of interest, what is the source for the "Interest is neither a crime nor an offense" quote? Because Google just returns 3 results, all from no longer than a month ago, one of the three is possible the place you copied and pasted this from. BeŻet (talk) 08:32, 12 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Hi BeŻet, it was actually the first two links. It is true, I am having trouble finding the exact citation beyond that article - however, I know the authors of the article outside of YouTube and their website, so I can ask and get back to you. I suppose given what you have revealed, I will not attempt further edits until I can find more reliable backing.

As for the Reddit post - I was the one who made it. I actually copied and pasted the text from here, deciding that it was well-written enough to post beyond this talk page. I'm not sure if you can view the exact timestamp of reddit posts, but if you can, you would see I posted here before the reddit post ever existed. At the very least, you can still currently verify these posts were at about the same time. This is fairly unimportant, but I would feel dishonorable if you thought I had copied and pasted my aforementioned explanation.

(I'm also surprised Anarchism101 took notice) The New Anarchist (talk) 22:17, 13 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@The New Anarchist: thank you for understanding. I think it will be easier for us to make changes to the article once we have reliable sources. BeŻet (talk) 15:22, 15 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

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