Martin Elson
I don’t know if I’m wrong. What I can do is say how I would find out I’m wrong, what history has already tested, and the lines I won’t cross. The rest of this site hangs off those three things.
It also holds writing I don’t agree with, chosen on purpose. Some of it gets one or two points right out of ten; a wrong map can still have one coastline drawn right. Some of it is the strongest case against my own leanings — not a straw man, but the objection I find hardest to answer. Each borrowed piece carries a note at the top: why it’s here, and which parts I still reject and why.
How I’d find out
Start with a distinction that gets blurred constantly. An argument is valid when its conclusion follows from its premises. That is all. Garbage in, valid garbage out. Whether it is true is another question, and logic alone can’t answer it.
Ask for the proof of any claim, then the proof of that proof, and you end in one of three places: a regress that never stops, a circle, or an axiom taken on trust. Hans Albert called this the Münchhausen trilemma. Every system that claims to have proved liberty, or socialism, or God, or the market, has quietly picked one of the three and called it bedrock.
So “am I wrong?” becomes a sharper question: how would I find out? That one can be answered. A view earns trust by surviving criticism and matching what actually happens when it is tried. “More valid” really means better tested. Karl Popper thought that was how we creep toward the truth without ever getting a certificate saying we’ve arrived. I think he was right, and I hold that open too.
How many truths are there? Probably one world and many maps of it, some better than others. Values are harder. Isaiah Berlin argued that real goods — liberty and equality, security and freedom — can’t all be maxed out at once, and that the honest response is pluralism, not a master formula. That is a reason to keep more than one map on the table.
What has been tried
What has never been tried is a black box. What has been tried is not, and the record is older than human history, though it is mostly recent human history under examination here.
Elinor Ostrom spent a career documenting commons that people governed themselves for centuries, with neither a state nor a private owner in charge: alpine pastures in Törbel, Switzerland; irrigation courts in Valencia; fisheries and forests on several continents. The Rochdale Pioneers opened their co-op store in 1844, and the principles they wrote still run cooperatives worldwide. Mondragon has grown since 1956 into a federation of worker-owned firms. In Catalonia in 1936, workers ran factories, farms and transit for months and in places years, until they were crushed — first by their own side’s Stalinists, then by Franco.
The other column is just as clear. Soviet collectivization and the famine of 1932–33. The Great Leap Forward, 1958–62, which killed tens of millions. Final solutions, imposed from the top, with no way out.
The pattern is not market against socialism, or public against private. It is whether the people living under an arrangement wrote it, can change it, and can leave it if they choose. Where they could, things tended to hold. Where they couldn’t, the bodies piled up.
The lines
There are two lines I won’t bargain over, and one rule under both. The first line is a test: is a subject being used as an input, and can they leave? Slavery fails it. The camps fail it. Forced collectivization fails it. So does a good deal of what passes for free markets and for normal: the quiet watching and managing Foucault wrote about, and a state that assumes your consent and bars the door. Exit alone doesn’t settle it, though. A charter city run by appointed technocrats lets you leave, and its defenders think that is enough. So the test also asks who wrote the arrangement: if the people living under it had no hand in writing it, they are inputs, whatever the door says. That is the argument of The Unfinished Exclusions, and why I keep coming back to it.
Experiments that fail that test shouldn’t be allowed. The people inside never agreed to be the test, and if they can’t leave, their leaving can’t tell anyone it failed — the experiment loses its only way of finding out it’s wrong. Then comes the hard part: who stops them? Ostrom has the best answer I know. The commons that lasted all enforced their rules — people watched each other, the monitors answered to the users themselves, penalties started small and climbed, and disputes were settled cheaply and close to home. Enforcement was never optional. It just wasn’t a monopoly, the way police and armies are. The second line is about who enforces: the danger starts when the enforcer can’t be left, voted out, instantly recalled, or held to its own rules. Hired guns don’t fix this; they answer to whoever pays.
The rule under both is old. Robert Ingersoll put it in one sentence: “Give every other human being every right you claim for yourself.” That levels the playing field: everyone is ruler of themselves and no one else. I’d widen one phrase: “human being” is the list sneaking back in, and the rule should reach every being that can be wronged.
Order without a single beginning
Some history first. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was the first to call himself an anarchist, in What Is Property? (1840). In 1857 Joseph Déjacque, an anarchist taking Proudhon to task over the freedom of women, coined libertaire — libertarian — in an open letter to him. So the word libertarian was born inside anarchism, a century before the American right borrowed it. The full story is in The Origins of the Word “Libertarian.”
I will use the words left libertarian and anarchist interchangeably. Anarchism usually gets dismissed by equivocation: anarchy means no rulers, chaos means disorder, and the argument slides from one to the other — chaos is bad, anarchy is chaos, so anarchism is bad. Bellegarrigue answered that in 1850: anarchy is order, whereas government is civil war. In Greek, archē means both “beginning” and “rule.” The ruler is the one who claims to be the only beginning, the source all order must flow from — a mon-archy, literally. Anarchy keeps beginnings plural. Everyone a beginning.
That is why this is a process and an ethic, not a blueprint. David Graeber said the problem with utopias isn’t having them; it’s having only one. We need as many as we can test — inside the lines above. Slavery, the lash and cruelty are not experiments. Even if there is no final right or wrong, we can choose to put respect for human beings at the center. That is humanism. It is open to argument like everything else here, but no utopia that treats people as test subjects, or as anyone’s subjects at all, is worth pursuing.
How order shows up when nobody designs it — chaos, feedback, and why movements need fuzzy coordinates — is the subject of Order Without a Master Plan.
Neither progress nor collapse
History looks less like a staircase than like punctuated equilibrium, the idea Eldredge and Gould brought to evolution in 1972: long stretches of drift, then sudden breaks. Devolution is real, as Devo kept telling us in the seventies. Herbert Spencer watched Britain slide back toward militarism and command and called it re-barbarization. I see the same slide now, in the US and abroad — the things the United States spent decades shaming other governments for, done at home and in its name. Daniel Ellsberg showed in 1971 how far a government will lie to its own people to keep a war going, and he paid to show it.
Popper’s warning cuts both ways: history has no built-in direction. Progress isn’t guaranteed. Neither is collapse. It is made or unmade by what people build. The old Wobbly line says it best — form the structure of the new society within the shell of the old — so that when the break comes, the alternatives are already standing.
The site’s first purpose hasn’t changed: reverse the panopticon. Watch power the way it watches us.
How to read this site
Entry points: Start Here: Am I Wrong? | The Unfinished Exclusions | Labor and Property: A Module in Political Economy (forthcoming)
Sections:
- Libertarianism — where the word came from, and why it belongs on the left.
- Stateless — consent, legitimacy, and the limits of democracy.
- Law — natural law, positive law, and how law works without a state.
- Propertarianism — the strongest case for self-ownership, the non-aggression principle and private property, and where each goes wrong.
- Economics — markets versus capitalism, labor, property, and who the rules are written for.
- Order — spontaneous order, exit, method.
- Post-Anarchism — what Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze and the rest add to anarchism, and where they fall short.
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Read anything here the way it was written: open to being wrong. If you find where it is, tell me.
Sources (for Start Here)
- Hans Albert, Treatise on Critical Reason (1968; English translation, Princeton University Press, 1985). The Münchhausen trilemma.
- Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations (Routledge, 1963). Truth approached by criticism, never certified. Also The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), against history with a built-in direction.
- Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty” (lecture, Oxford, 1958). Value pluralism: real goods that collide.
- Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons (Cambridge University Press, 1990). Törbel, the Valencia huertas, and the design principles of commons that last. See also “Elinor Ostrom’s Legacy” on this site (currently private; link once published).
- Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers, founding principles (1844). International Co-operative Alliance
- Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould, “Punctuated Equilibria: An Alternative to Phyletic Gradualism” (in Models in Paleobiology, 1972).
- Herbert Spencer, “Re-barbarization” (in Facts and Comments, 1902).
- Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers (Viking, 2002).
- Anselme Bellegarrigue, L’Anarchie, journal de l’ordre (1850). “Anarchy is order, whereas government is civil war.”
- Peterson Roberto da Silva and David Graeber, “Freedom and Anarchy: An Interview with David Graeber” (Anarchist Studies blog, 2020; recorded in London, 10 March 2020). Source of the utopias point: the criticisms of utopianism assume there is only one; many are not a problem, though integrating them is the work of deliberation. original · Anarchist Library copy. See also Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (Prickly Paradigm, 2004), “against anti-utopianism”: original.
- Robert G. Ingersoll, “The Liberty of Man, Woman and Child” (lecture, 1877).
- Industrial Workers of the World, Preamble (1905). “The structure of the new society within the shell of the old.”
- Martin Elson, “The Unfinished Exclusions: How the First Exclusion Foreclosed the Other Two.” here