Means and Ends

Why are libertarian anarchists so hell bent on proving precisely what form a voluntary society would take?

Let's imagine that the great libertarian revolution has come to pass. The state is dismantled, all its coercive apparatus smashed, and a free society of independent men and women is formed. And let us pretend that they decide to form themselves into an syndicalist commune. So what?

I understand why Mises wrote Human Action: he wasn't an anarchist; he wanted to shove the market order down your throat, so to speak, and so had the decency to try to convince everyone it was for the best. I do not understand why Rothbard wrote Man, Economy, and State, in his words a "value-free" explanation of the workings of the market order, with an eye towards persuading everyone a market order is for the best. If we take his ethical writings seriously and as foundational, then the only conceivable target audience for Man, Economy, and State is some future society of free, independent property-owners who are deciding what sort of society to endorse.

Of course Murray Rothbard was foremost an economist, and the reason he wrote Man, Economy, and State is biographical rather than necessarily ideological or strategic. But my larger strategic point is this: are we needlessly alienating potential allies by vociferously insisting on what form our imagined future society will take? The divide between the "right" anarchists and "left" anarchists boils down to one issue that won't even come up until the bulk of both our programs has been achieved. They think private property is unjust coercion, we think it's either the antithesis of coercion or (and this is my position) justifiable coercion.

And this divide is nearly unbridgeable, for some reason I cannot fathom. For reasons beyond me, partisans on both sides look past all the good we both hope to accomplish- the abolition of war, of taxation, of corporatism, of trade barriers, of "moral" legislation- and see only the day, far into the future, after we have accomplished all these things and must decide whether or not factories are to be privately owned. Why?

It's true that the two sides' conceptions of property and its role in society are diametrically opposite. Without getting too prolix, the left anarchists see private property as the root of all evil while the right anarchists see it as a panacea. Such disparate analyses would naturally cause conflict, but both sides, in terms of their immediate, practical programs, are largely in agreement- anti-war, anti-corporatism, anti-police state. They may come to these conclusions from diametrically opposite starting points, but surely a little practical cooperation is in order?