Is there such a thing as natural law? (General)

by Labyrinth, Tuesday, January 19, 2010, 17:10 @ clarity

If you ask me why cooperation is natural, I'd say that MAKING has to precede TAKING. Also, and even more important is that MAKING ensures survival and creating life. It affirms life. Taking does not GENERALLY affirm life. Taking cannot be a general rule, but making can. Life cannot go on indefinitely if everyone TAKES. People have to MAKE (CREATE.) Thus MAKING is natural, and TAKING is attuned to DISORDER, not ORDER.

Well, this is a nice little sermon, but it is still unclear that you prefer making to taking in actual relations. You have, after all, defended the lawful extraction of surplus value and collective force by landlords and employers.

This is not a sermon. It's a theory. It's my own theory of what has to be natural in order for human survival to occur, which is MAKING. Theft (TAKING) cannot possibly be a general rule.

Ahem. I don't disagree, but I do have some pretty serious questions about the consistency of your position.

I prefer making to taking in actual relations, without any qualification. Any so-called "laws" that aid TAKING are just legalities, that is, edicts backed by force.

Well, that's all I've been saying, Clarity. In the absence of a just foundation, laws protecting currently accumulated capital from the expropriative processes that could render society more just are simply expressions of force.

Where we differ is that I do not view employers and landlords as the focal points for TAKING in America. I do not view them as clear targets. I do not view them as the #1 targets. I think there are clearer and more important targets. If I understood the theory by which rent is interpreted as extraction of surplus value, I might change my mind. If I understood the theory by which employment is interpreted as extraction of surplus value, I might change my mind. I'd have to see them also as IMPORTANT sources of problems.

Well, theories of exploitation have been the heart of anarchist theory from its beginnings. They continued to be so, alongside the propertarian theories of the individualist anarchists. Only with the so-called anarcho-capitalists has the thread been lost -- and an-caps dodge the question of exploitation precisely by side-stepping the question of who does the making and who does the taking. "Making" in anarchist terms has always referred to useful labor, but capitalism treats all labor as mud-pie making unless it is validated by an exchange. The "making" of the worker -- which is, of course, almost always a social making, producing an excess of product that is also precisely social in its origins -- has no status of its own, unless market conditions force a recognition of that making, and its value, on a consumer (a class which, in this case, includes employers. If you have any doubt that employers "consume" labor like raw material, as they "employ" it as an effectively agency-less tool, I suggest you go get a job in one of those nice McDonald's and get a little taste of what things are like.) The State is a convenient target, although most radicals understand that the State is not an adversary of capitalism, but rather its support system. But even if the State was, as an-caps like to claim, the sole source of our social ills, a consistent anti-statist can hardly claim that the results of the state's persistent meddling in human affairs can be anything but a disastrous parody of liberty and justice.

Here's an example of a clear target. Black men in great numbers are imprisoned because of drug laws and because they are made into felons by planting guns on them, or even not planting guns on them. This is a major crime. It's visible. It's clear who is doing the damage to whom.

Is it? And is it clear that "the State" is the problem? Would black men have a clear field in a non-state society dominated by capitalists, rather than politicians?

A second example is all the bailouts of big banks and big businesses. It used to be that big farmers were the main beneficiaries.

Right. Capitalism is propped up by a dual bail-out. Government gives money, and the workers give enormous increases in productivity in return for fewer hours, depressed wages and benefits, increased precarity -- for a chance not to be homeless and hungry. When labor is more productive and earns less -- particularly while capital is being propped up by the State -- we have a clear and simple instance of exploitation. Capital uses the labor market, its grip on accumulated capital, privileged access to raw materials in the public trust, and new tax exactions, to force labor down to a bare subsistence. When labor rises to the occasion with increased productivity -- being, after all, the only factor of production that is truly elastic in this way -- and the increase goes someplace other than to the workers -- voila! -- we have extraction of surplus value.

Would things be different without a State? Sure. There would be nothing to restrain the takings of the capitalists, who still insist that labor is worth nothing unless they are forced to pay for it.