      G.7 Lysander Spooner: right-"libertarian" or libertarian socialist?

   Murray Rothbard and others on the "libertarian" right have argued that
   Lysander Spooner is another individualist anarchist whose ideas support
   "anarcho"-capitalism's claim to be part of the anarchist tradition. It
   is fair to say that Spooner's critique of the state, rooted in "natural
   rights" doctrine, was quoted favourably by Rothbard on many occasions,
   making Spooner the 19th century anarchist most likely to be referenced
   by him. This is understandable as Spooner was undoubtedly the closest
   to liberalism of the individualist anarchists, making him more amenable
   to appropriation than the others (particularly those, like Tucker, who
   called themselves socialists).

   As will be shown below, however, any claim that Spooner provides
   retroactive support for "anarcho"-capitalist claims of being a form of
   anarchism is untrue. This is because, regardless of his closeness to
   liberalism, Spooner's vision of a free society was fundamentally
   anti-capitalist. It is clear that Spooner was a left-libertarian who
   was firmly opposed to capitalism. The ignoring (at best) or outright
   dismissal (at worse) of Spooner's economic ideas and vision of a free
   society by right-"libertarians" should be more than enough to show that
   Spooner cannot be easily appropriated by the right regardless of his
   (from an anarchist position) unique, even idiosyncratic, perspective on
   property rights.

   That Spooner was against capitalism can be seen in his opposition to
   wage labour, which he wished to eliminate by turning capital over to
   those who work it. Like other anarchists, he wanted to create a society
   of associated producers -- self-employed farmers, artisans and
   co-operating workers -- rather than wage-slaves and capitalists. For
   example, Spooner writes:

     "every man, woman, and child. . . could . . . go into business for
     himself, or herself -- either singly, or in partnerships -- and be
     under no necessity to act as a servant, or sell his or her labour to
     others. All the great establishments, of every kind, now in the
     hands of a few proprietors, but employing a great number of wage
     labourers, would be broken up; for few, or no persons, who could
     hire capital, and do business for themselves, would consent to
     labour for wages for another." [A Letter to Grover Cleveland, p. 41]

   Wage-labour, Spooner argued, meant that workers did not labour for
   their own benefit "but only for the benefit of their employers." The
   workers are "mere tools and machines in the hands of their employers."
   [Op. Cit., p. 50] Thus he considered that "it was necessary that every
   man be his own employer or work for himself in a direct way, since
   working for another resulted in a portion being diverted to the
   employer. To be one's own employer, it was necessary for one to have
   access to one's own capital." [James J. Martin, Men Against the State,
   p. 172] This was because wage labour resulted in exploitation:

     "When a man knows that he is to have all the fruits of his labour,
     he labours with more zeal, skill, and physical energy, than when he
     knows -- as in the case of one labouring for wages -- that a portion
     of the fruits of his labour are going to another. . . In order that
     each man may have the fruits of his own labour, it is important, as
     a general rule, that each man should be his own employer, or work
     directly for himself, and not for another for wages; because, in the
     latter case, a part of the fruits of his labour go to his employer,
     instead of coming to himself . . . That each man may be his own
     employer, it is necessary that he have materials, or capital, upon
     which to bestow his labour." [Poverty: Its Illegal Causes and Legal
     Cure, p. 8]

   This preference for a system based on simple commodity production in
   which capitalists and wage slaves are replaced by self-employed and
   co-operating workers puts Spooner squarely in the anti-capitalist camp
   with other anarchists. And, we may add, the egalitarianism he expected
   to result from his system indicates the left-libertarian nature of his
   ideas, turning the present "wheel of fortune" into "an extended
   surface, varied somewhat by inequalities, but still exhibiting a
   general level, affording a safe position for all, and creating no
   necessity, for either force or fraud, on the part of anyone, to enable
   him to secure his standing." [quoted by Peter Marshall, Demanding the
   Impossible, pp. 388-9] Thus:

     "That the principle of allowing each man to have, (so far as it is
     consistent with the principles of natural law that he can have,) all
     the fruits of his own labour, would conduce to a more just and equal
     distribution of wealth than now exists, is a proposition too
     self-evident almost to need illustration. It is an obvious principle
     of natural justice, that each man should have the fruits of his own
     labour . . . It is also an obvious fact, that the property produced
     by society, is now distributed in very unequal proportions among
     those whose labour produced it, and with very little regard to the
     actual value of each ones labour in producing it." [Poverty: Its
     Illegal Causes and Legal Cure, p. 7]

   For Spooner, as with other left-libertarians, equality was seen as the
   necessary basis for liberty. As he put it, the "practice of each man's
   labouring for himself, instead of labouring for another for wages"
   would "be greatly promoted by a greater equality of wealth." Not only
   that, it "would also contribute to the increase of labour-saving
   inventions -- because when a man is labouring for himself, and is to
   have all the proceeds of his labour, he applies his mind, with his
   hands, much more than when he is labouring for another." [Op. Cit., p.
   42] As he stressed equality will have many positive outcomes beyond the
   abolition of wage labour and increased productiveness:

     "Extremes of difference, in their pecuniary circumstances, divide
     society into castes; set up barriers to personal acquaintance;
     prevent or suppress sympathy; give to different individuals a widely
     different experience, and thus become the fertile source of
     alienation, contempt, envy, hatred, and wrong. But give to each man
     all the fruits of his own labour, and a comparative equality with
     others in his pecuniary condition, and caste is broken down;
     education is given more equally to all; and the object is promoted
     of placing each on a social level with all: of introducing each to
     the acquaintance of all; and of giving to each the greatest amount
     of that experience, wealth, being common to all, enables him to
     sympathise with all, and insures to himself the sympathy of all. And
     thus the social virtues of mankind would be greatly increased." [Op.
     Cit., pp. 46-7]

   Independence in producing would lead to independence in all aspects of
   life, for it was a case of the "higher self-respect also, which a man
   feels, and the higher social position he enjoys, when he is master of
   his own industry, than when he labours for another." [Op. Cit., p. 35]
   It is quite apparent, then, that Spooner was against wage labour and,
   therefore, was no supporter of capitalism. Perhaps unsurprisingly,
   Spooner (like William Greene) had been a member of the First
   International. [George Woodcock, Anarchism, p. 393]

   Whether Spooner's ideas are relevant now, given the vast amount of
   capital needed to start companies in established sectors of the
   economy, is another question. Equally, it seems unlikely that a
   reversion to pre-industrial forms of economy is feasible even if we
   assume that Spooner's claims about the virtues of a free market in
   credit are correct. But one thing is clear: Spooner was opposed to the
   way America was developing in the 19th century. He had no illusions
   about tariffs, for example, seeing them as a means of accumulating
   capital as they "enable[d] the home producers . . . to make fortunes by
   robbing everybody else in the prices of their goods." Such
   protectionism "originated with the employers" as the workers "could not
   have had no hope of carrying through such a scheme, if they alone were
   to profit; because they could have had no such influence with
   governments." [A Letter to Grover Cleveland p. 20 and p. 44] He had no
   illusions that the state was anything else than a machine run by and
   for the wealthy.

   Spooner viewed the rise of capitalism with disgust and suggested a way
   for non-exploitative and non-oppressive economic relationships to
   become the norm again in US society, a way based on eliminating a root
   feature of capitalism -- wage-labour -- through a system of easy
   credit, which he believed would enable artisans and farmers to obtain
   their own means of production and work for themselves. As we stressed
   in [1]section G.1.2 capitalism is based not on property as such but
   rather property which is not owned by those who use it (i.e.,
   Proudhon's distinction between property and possession which was echoed
   by, among others, Marx). Like more obvious socialists like Proudhon and
   Marx, Spooner was well aware that wage labour resulted in exploitation
   and, as a result, urged its abolition to secure the worker the full
   produce of their labour.

   As such, Spooner's analysis of capitalism was close to that of social
   anarchists and Marxists. This is confirmed by an analysis of his famous
   works Natural Law (unless otherwise indicated, all subsequent quotes
   are from this work).

   Spooner's support of "Natural Law" has also been taken as "evidence"
   that Spooner was a proto-right-"libertarian." Most obviously, this
   ignores the fact that support for "Natural Law" is not limited to
   right-"libertarians" and has been used to justify, among other things,
   feudalism, slavery, theocracy, liberty, fascism as well as communism.
   As such, "natural rights" justification for property need not imply a
   support for capitalism or suggest that those who hold similar views on
   them will subscribe to the same vision of a good society. Of course,
   most anarchists do not find theories of "natural law," be they those of
   right-"libertarians", fascists or whatever, to be particularly
   compelling. Certainly the ideas of "Natural Law" and "Natural Rights,"
   as existing independently of human beings in the sense of the ideal
   Platonic Forms, are difficult for most anarchists to accept per se,
   because such ideas are inherently authoritarian as they suggest a duty
   to perform certain actions for no other reason than obedience to some
   higher authority regardless of their impact on individuals and personal
   goals. Most anarchists would agree with Tucker when he called such
   concepts "religious" (Robert Anton Wilson's Natural Law: or don't put a
   rubber on your willy is an excellent discussion of the flaws of such
   concepts).

   Spooner, unfortunately, did subscribe to the cult of "immutable and
   universal" Natural Laws. If we look at his "defence" of Natural Law we
   can see how weak (and indeed silly) it is. Replacing the word "rights"
   with the word "clothes" in the following passage shows the inherent
   weakness of his argument:

     "if there be no such principle as justice, or natural law, then
     every human being came into the world utterly destitute of rights;
     and coming so into the world destitute of rights, he must forever
     remain so. For if no one brings any rights with him into the world,
     clearly no one can ever have any rights of his own, or give any to
     another. And the consequence would be that mankind could never have
     any rights; and for them to talk of any such things as their rights,
     would be to talk of things that had, never will, and never can have
     any existence."

   And, we add, unlike the "Natural Laws" of "gravitation, . . . of light,
   the principles of mathematics" to which Spooner compares them, he is
   perfectly aware that his "Natural Law" can be "trampled upon" by other
   humans. However, unlike gravity (which does not need enforcing) it is
   obvious that Spooner's "Natural Law" has to be enforced by human beings
   as it is within human nature to steal. In other words, it is a moral
   code, not a "Natural Law" like gravity. Appeals to make this specific
   moral code to be considered the universal one required by nature are
   unconvincing, particularly as such absolutist schemes generally end up
   treating the rights in question (usually property related ones) as more
   important than actual people. Hence we find, for example, supporters of
   "natural rights" to property (like Murray Rothbard) willing to deny
   economic power, the restrictions of liberty it creates and its
   similarity to the state in the social relations it creates simply
   because property is sacred (see [2]section F.1).

   Interestingly, Spooner did come close to a rational, non-metaphysical
   source for rights when he pointed out that "Men living in contact with
   each other, and having intercourse together, cannot avoid learning
   natural law." This indicates the social nature of rights, of our sense
   of right and wrong, and so rights and ethics can exist without
   believing in religious concepts as "Natural Law." In addition, we can
   say that his support for juries indicates an unconscious recognition of
   the social nature (and so evolution) of any concepts of human rights.
   In other words, by arguing strongly for juries to judge human conflict,
   he implicitly recognises that the concepts of right and wrong in
   society are not indelibly inscribed in law tomes as the "true law," but
   instead change and develop as society does (as reflected in the
   decisions of the juries). In addition, he states that "[h]onesty,
   justice, natural law, is usually a very plain and simple matter," which
   is "made up of a few simple elementary principles, of the truth and
   justice of which every ordinary mind has an almost intuitive
   perception," thus indicating that what is right and wrong exists in
   "ordinary people" and not in "prosperous judges" or any other small
   group claiming to speak on behalf of "truth."

   As can be seen, Spooner's account of how "natural law" will be
   administered is radically different from, say, Murray Rothbard's and
   indicates a strong egalitarian context foreign to right-libertarianism.
   As we noted in [3]section G.3, Rothbard explicitly rejected Spooner's
   ideas on the importance of jury driven law (for Spooner, "the jurors
   were to judge the law, and the justice of the law." [Trial by Jury, p.
   134]). As far as "anarcho"-capitalism goes, one wonders how Spooner
   would regard the "anarcho"-capitalist "protection firm," given his
   comment that "[a]ny number of scoundrels, having money enough to start
   with, can establish themselves as a 'government'; because, with money,
   they can hire soldiers, and with soldiers extort more money; and also
   compel general obedience to their will." [No Treason, p. 22] This is
   the use of private police to break strikes and unions in a nutshell.
   Compare this to Spooner's description of his voluntary justice
   associations:

     "it is evidently desirable that men should associate, so far as they
     freely and voluntarily can do so, for the maintenance of justice
     among themselves, and for mutual protection against other
     wrong-doers. It is also in the highest degree desirable that they
     should agree upon some plan or system of judicial proceedings"

   At first glance, one may be tempted to interpret Spooner's justice
   organisations as a subscription to "anarcho"-capitalist style
   protection firms. A more careful reading suggests that Spooner's actual
   conception is more based on the concept of mutual aid, whereby people
   provide such services for themselves and for others rather than buying
   them on a fee-per-service basis. A very different concept. As he put it
   elsewhere, "[a]ll legitimate government is a mutual insurance company"
   in which "insured persons are shareholders of a company." It is likely
   that this would be a co-operative as the "free administration of
   justice . . . must necessarily be a part of every system of government
   which is not designed to be an engine in the hands of the rich for the
   oppression of the poor." It seems unlikely that Spooner would have
   supported unequal voting rights based on wealth particularly as "all
   questions as to the rights of the corporation itself, must be
   determined by members of the corporation itself . . . by the unanimous
   verdict of a tribunal fairly representing the whole people" such as a
   jury [Trial by Jury, p. 223, p. 172 and p. 214]

   These comments are particularly important when we consider Spooner's
   criticisms of finance capitalists, like the Rothschilds. Here he
   departs even more strikingly from right-"libertarian" positions. For he
   believes that sheer wealth has intrinsic power, even to the extent of
   allowing the wealthy to coerce the government into behaving at their
   behest. For Spooner, governments are "the merest hangers on, the
   servile, obsequious, fawning dependants and tools of these blood-money
   loan-mongers, on whom they rely for the means to carry on their
   crimes." Thus the wealthy can "make [governments] and use them" as well
   as being able to "unmake them . . . the moment they refuse to commit
   any crime we require of them, or to pay over to us such share of the
   proceeds of their robberies as we see fit to demand." Indeed, Spooner
   considers "these soulless blood-money loan-mongers" as "the real
   rulers," not the government (who are simply their agents). Thus
   governments are "little or nothing else than mere tools, employed by
   the wealthy to rob, enslave, and (if need be) murder those who have
   less wealth, or none at all." [No Treason, p. 50, p. 51, p. 52 and p.
   47] This is an extremely class conscious analysis of the state, one
   which mirrors the standard socialist one closely.

   If one grants that highly concentrated wealth has intrinsic power and
   may be used in such a Machiavellian manner as Spooner claims, then
   simple opposition to the state is not sufficient. Logically, any
   political theory claiming to promote liberty should also seek to limit
   or abolish the institutions that facilitate large concentrations of
   wealth. As shown above, Spooner regarded wage labour under capitalism
   as one of these institutions, because without it "large fortunes could
   rarely be made at all by one individual." Hence for Spooner, as for
   social anarchists, to be anti-statist also necessitates being
   anti-capitalist.

   This can be clearly seen for his analysis of history, when he asks:
   "Why is it that [Natural Law] has not, ages ago, been established
   throughout the world as the one only law that any man, or all men,
   could rightfully be compelled to obey?" Spooner's answer is given in
   his interpretation of how the State evolved, where he postulates that
   it was formed through the initial ascendancy of a land-holding,
   slave-holding class by military conquest and oppressive enslavement of
   the peasantry:

     "These tyrants, living solely on plunder, and on the labour of their
     slaves, and applying all their energies to the seizure of still more
     plunder, and the enslavement of still other defenceless persons;
     increasing, too, their numbers, perfecting their organisations, and
     multiplying their weapons of war, they extend their conquests until,
     in order to hold what they have already got, it becomes necessary
     for them to act systematically, and co-operate with each other in
     holding their slaves in subjection.

     "But all this they can do only by establishing what they call a
     government, and making what they call laws . . . Thus substantially
     all the legislation of the world has had its origin in the desires
     of one class of persons to plunder and enslave others, and hold them
     as property."

   Nothing too provocative here, simply Spooner's view of government as a
   tool of the wealth-holding, slave-owning class. What is more
   interesting is Spooner's view of the subsequent development of
   (post-slavery) socio-economic systems:

     "In process of time, the robber, or slaveholding, class -- who had
     seized all the lands, and held all the means of creating wealth --
     began to discover that the easiest mode of managing their slaves,
     and making them profitable, was not for each slaveholder to hold his
     specified number of slaves, as he had done before, and as he would
     hold so many cattle, but to give them so much liberty as would throw
     upon themselves (the slaves) the responsibility of their own
     subsistence, and yet compel them to sell their labour to the
     land-holding class -- their former owners -- for just what the
     latter might choose to give them."

   Here Spooner echoes the standard anarchist critique of capitalism. Note
   that he is no longer talking about slavery but rather about economic
   relations between a wealth-holding class and a 'freed' class of workers
   and tenant farmers. Clearly he does not view this relation --wage
   labour -- as a voluntary association, because the former slaves have
   little option but to be employed by members of the wealth-owning class.
   As he put it elsewhere, their wealth ensures that they have "control of
   those great armies of servants -- the wage labourers -- from whom all
   their wealth is derived, and whom they can now coerce by the
   alternative of starvation, to labour for them." [A Letter to Grover
   Cleveland, p. 48] Thus we have the standard socialist analysis that
   economic power, wealth itself, is a source of coercion.

   Spooner points out that by monopolising the means of wealth creation
   while at the same time requiring the newly 'liberated' slaves to
   provide for themselves, the robber class thus continues to receive the
   benefits of the labour of the former slaves while accepting none of the
   responsibility for their welfare. "Of course," Spooner continued "these
   liberated slaves, as some have erroneously called them, having no
   lands, or other property, and no means of obtaining an independent
   subsistence, had no alternative -- to save themselves from starvation
   -- but to sell their labour to the landholders, in exchange only for
   the coarsest necessaries of life; not always for so much even as that."
   Thus while technically "free," the apparently liberated working class
   lack the ability to provide for their own needs and hence remain
   dependent on the wealth-owning class. This echoes not
   right-"libertarian" analysis of capitalism, but left-libertarian and
   other socialist viewpoints:

     "These liberated slaves, as they were called, were now scarcely less
     slaves than they were before. Their means of subsistence were
     perhaps even more precarious than when each had his own owner, who
     had an interest to preserve his life."

   This is an interesting comment. Spooner suggests that the liberated
   slave class were perhaps better off as slaves. Most anarchists would
   not go so far, although we would agree that employees are subject to
   the power of those who employ them and so are no long self-governing
   individuals -- in other words, that capitalist social relationships
   deny self-ownership and freedom. Spooner denounced the power of the
   economically dominant class, noting that the workers "were liable, at
   the caprice or interest of the landholders, to be thrown out of home,
   employment, and the opportunity of even earning a subsistence by their
   labour." Lest the reader doubt that Spooner is actually discussing
   employment here (and not slavery), he explicitly includes being made
   unemployed as an example of the arbitrary nature of wage labour and
   indicates that this is a source of class conflict and danger for the
   ruling class: "They were, therefore, in large numbers, driven to the
   necessity of begging, stealing, or starving; and became, of course,
   dangerous to the property and quiet of their late masters." And so the
   "consequence was, that these late owners found it necessary, for their
   own safety and the safety of their property, to organise themselves
   more perfectly as a government and make laws for keeping these
   dangerous people in subjection."

   In other words, the robber class creates legislation which will protect
   its power, namely its property, against the dispossessed. Hence we see
   the creation of "law code" by the wealthy which serves to protect their
   interests while effectively making attempts to change the status quo
   illegal. This process is in effect similar to the right-"libertarian"
   concept of a judge interpreted and developed "general libertarian law
   code" which exercises a monopoly over a given area and which exists to
   defend the "rights" of property against "initiation of force," i.e.
   attempts to change the system into a new one. Spooner goes on:

     "The purpose and effect of these laws have been to maintain, in the
     hands of robber, or slave holding class, a monopoly of all lands,
     and, as far as possible, of all other means of creating wealth; and
     thus to keep the great body of labourers in such a state of poverty
     and dependence, as would compel them to sell their labour to their
     tyrants for the lowest prices at which life could be sustained."

   Thus Spooner identified the underlying basis for legislation (as well
   as the source of much misery, exploitation and oppression throughout
   history) as the result of the monopolisation of the means of wealth
   creation by an elite class. We doubt he would have considered that
   calling these laws "libertarian" would in any change their oppressive
   and class-based nature. The state was an instrument of the wealthy few,
   not some neutral machine which furthered its own interests, and so "the
   whole business of legislation, which has now grown to such gigantic
   proportions, had its origin in the conspiracies, which have always
   existed among the few, for the purpose of holding the many in
   subjection, and extorting from them their labour, and all the profits
   of their labour." Characterising employment as extortion may seem
   rather extreme, but it makes sense given the exploitative nature of
   profit under capitalism, as left libertarians have long recognised (see
   [4]section C.2).

   Perhaps unsurprisingly, given Spooner's rhetorical denunciation of the
   state as being a gang of murderers and thieves employed by the wealthy
   few to oppress and exploit the many, he was not shy in similarly
   extreme rhetoric in advocating revolution. In this (as in many other
   things) Spooner was a very atypical individualist anarchist and his
   language could be, at times, as extreme as Johann Most. Thus we find
   Spooner in 1880 "advocat[ing] that the Irish rise up and kill their
   British landlords since be believed that when a person's life, liberty,
   and property -- his natural rights -- are denied, that person has a
   natural right to kill those who would deny these rights. Spooner called
   for a class war." [Wm. Gary Kline, The Individualist Anarchists, p. 41]
   Elsewhere he thundered:

     "Who compose the real governing power in the country? . . . How
     shall we find these men? How shall we know them from others? . . .
     Who, of our neighbours, are members of this secret band of robbers
     and murderers? How can we know which are their houses, that we may
     burn or demolish them? Which their property, that we may destroy it?
     Which their persons, that we may kill them, and rid the world and
     ourselves of such tyrants and monsters?" [No Treason, p. 46]

   It should be noted that this fierce and militant rhetoric is never
   mentioned by those who seek to associate social anarchism with
   violence.

   Spooner's analysis of the root causes of social problems grew more
   radical and consistent over time. Initially, he argued that there was a
   "class of employers, who now stand between the capitalist and labourer,
   and, by means of usury laws, sponge money from the former, and labour
   from the latter, and put the plunder into their own pockets." These
   usury laws "are the contrivances, not of the retired rich men, who have
   capital to loan . . . but of those few 'enterprising' 'business men,'
   as they are called, who, in and out of legislatures, are more
   influential than either the rich or the poor; who control the
   legislation of the country, and who, by means of usury laws, can sponge
   money from those who are richer, and labour from those who are poorer
   than themselves -- and thus make fortunes. . . . And they are almost
   the only men who do make fortunes . . . large fortunes could rarely be
   made at all by one individual, except by his sponging capital and
   labour from others." If "free competition in banking were allowed, the
   rate of interest would be brought very low, and bank loans would be
   within the reach of everybody." [Poverty: Its Illegal Causes and Legal
   Cure, p. 35, p. 11 and p. 15]

   This is a wonderfully self-contradictory analysis, with Spooner
   suggesting that industrial capitalists are both the only wealthy people
   around and, at the same time, sponge money off the rich who have more
   money than them! Equally, he seemed to believe that allowing interest
   rates to rise without legal limit will, first, produce more people
   willing to take out loans and then, when it fell below the legal limit,
   would produce more rich people willing to loan their cash. And as the
   aim of these reforms was to promote equality, how would paying interest
   payments to the already very wealthy help achieve that goal? As can be
   seen, his early work was directed at industrial capital only and he
   sought "the establishment of a sort of partnership relation between the
   capitalist and labourer, or lender and borrower -- the former
   furnishing capital, the latter labour." However, he opposed the idea
   that debtors should pay their debts in case of failure, stating "the
   capitalist is made to risk his capital on the final success of the
   enterprise, without any claim upon the debtor in case of failure" and
   this "is the true relation between capital and labour, (or, what is the
   same thing, between the lender and borrower.)" [Op. Cit., pp. 29-30] It
   is doubtful that rich lenders would concur with Spooner on that!

   However, by the 1880s Spooner had lost his illusions that finance
   capital was fundamentally different from industrial capital. Now it was
   a case, like the wider individualist anarchist movement he had become
   aware of and joined, of attacking the money monopoly. His mature
   analysis recognised that "the employers of wage labour" were "also the
   monopolists of money" and so both wings of the capitalist class aimed
   to "reduce [the public] to the condition of servants; and to subject
   them to all the extortions as their employers -- the holders of
   privileged money -- may choose to practice upon them." "The holders of
   this monopoly now rule and rob this nation; and the government, in all
   its branches, is simply their tool." [A Letter to Grover Cleveland, p.
   48, p. 39, p. 48] Thus Spooner came to see, like other socialists that
   both finance and industrial capital share a common goal in oppressing
   and exploiting the working class and that the state is simply an organ
   of (minority) class rule. In this, his politics became more in line
   with other individualist anarchists. This analysis is, needless to say,
   a left-libertarian one rather than right-"libertarian."

   Of course, it may be objected that Spooner was a right-Libertarian"
   because he supported the market and private property. However, as we
   argued in [5]section G.1.1 support for the market does not equate to
   support for capitalism (no matter how often the ideologues of
   capitalism proclaim it so). As noted, markets are not the defining
   feature of capitalism as there were markets long before capitalism
   existed. So the fact that Spooner retained the concept of markets does
   not necessarily make him a supporter of capitalism. As for "property",
   this question is more complex as Spooner is the only individualist
   anarchist to apparently reject the idea of "occupancy and use."
   Somewhat ironically, he termed the doctrine that "which holds that a
   man has a right to lay his hands on any thing, which has no other man's
   hands upon it, no matter who may have been the producer" as "absolute
   communism" and contrasted this with "individual property . . . which
   says that each man has an absolute dominion, as against all other men,
   over the products and acquisitions of his own labour, whether he
   retains them in his actual possession or not." This Spooner subscribed
   to Locke's theory and argued that the "natural wealth of the world
   belongs to those who first take possession of it . . . There is no
   limit, fixed by the law of nature, to the amount of property one may
   acquire, simply by taking possession of natural wealth, not already
   possessed, except the limit fixed by power or ability to take such
   possession, without doing violence to the person or property of
   others." [The Law of Intellectual Property, p. 88 and pp. 21-2] From
   this position he argued that the inventor should have intellectual
   property rights forever, a position in direct contradiction to the
   opinions of other anarchists (and even capitalist law and
   right-"libertarians" like Murray Rothbard).

   Unsurprisingly, Tucker called Spooner's work on Intellectual Property
   "positively foolish because it is fundamentally foolish, -- because,
   that is to say, its discussion of the acquisition of the right of
   property starts with a basic proposition that must be looked upon by
   all consistent Anarchists as obvious nonsense." This was because it
   "defines taking possession of a thing as the bestowing of valuable
   labour upon it, such, for instance, in the case of land, as cutting
   down the trees or building a fence around it. What follows from this?
   Evidently that a man may go to a piece of vacant land and fence it off;
   that he may then go to a second piece and fence that off; then to a
   third, and fence that off; then to a fourth, a fifth, a hundredth, a
   thousandth, fencing them all off; that, unable to fence off himself as
   many as he wishes, he may hire other men to do the fencing for him; and
   that then he may stand back and bar all other men from using these
   lands, or admit them as tenants at such rental as he may choose to
   extract. According to Tucker, Spooner "bases his opposition to . . .
   landlords on the sole ground that they or their ancestors took their
   lands by the sword from the original holders . . . I then asked him
   whether if" a landlord "had found unoccupied the very lands that he now
   holds, and had fenced them off, he would have any objection to raise
   against [his] title to and leasing of these lands. He declared
   emphatically that he would not. Whereupon I protested that his
   pamphlet, powerful as it was within its scope, did not go to the bottom
   of the land question." [Liberty, no. 182, p. 6] For Tucker, the
   implications of Spooner's argument were such that he stressed that it
   was not, in fact, anarchist at all (he called it "Archist") and, as a
   result, rejected them.

   Thus we have a contradiction. Spooner attacked the government for it
   "denies the natural right of human beings to live on this planet. This
   it does by denying their natural right to those things that are
   indispensable to the maintenance of life." [A Letter to Grover
   Cleveland, p. 33] Yet what happens if, by market forces, all the land
   and capital becomes owned by a few people? The socio-economic situation
   of the mass of the population is in exactly the same situation as under
   a system founded by stealing the land by the few. Equally, having to
   pay for access to the land results in just as much a deduction from the
   product of work as wage labour. If property is a "natural right" then
   they must be universal and so must be extended to everyone -- like all
   rights -- and this implies an end to absolute property rights ("Because
   the right to live and to develop oneself fully is equal for all,"
   Proudhon argued, "and because inequality of conditions is an obstacle
   to the exercise of this right." [quoted by John Enrenberg, Proudhon and
   his Age, pp. 48-9]). However, saying that it is fair to suggest, given
   his arguments in favour of universal self-employment, that Spooner did
   not think that his system of property rights would be abused to produce
   a landlord class and, as such, did not see the need to resolve the
   obvious contradictions in his ideology. Whether he was correct in that
   assumption is another matter.

   Which indicates why Spooner must be considered an anarchist regardless
   of his unique position on property rights within the movement. As we
   argued in [6]section A.3.1, only a system where the users of land or a
   workplace own it can it be consistent with anarchist principles.
   Otherwise, if there are bosses and landlords, then that society would
   be inherently hierarchical and so Archist. Spooner's vision of a free
   society, rooted as it is in self-employment, meets the criteria of
   being genuinely libertarian in spite of the property rights used to
   justify it. Certain "anarcho"-capitalists may subscribe to a similar
   theory of property but they use it to justify an economy rooted in wage
   labour and so hierarchy.

   Somewhat ironically, then, while certain of Spooner's ideas were closer
   to Rothbard's than other individualist anarchists (most notably, a
   "natural rights" defence of property) in terms of actual outcomes of
   applying his ideas, his vision is the exact opposition of that of the
   "anarcho"-capitalist guru. For Spooner, rather than being a revolt
   against nature, equality and liberty were seen to be mutually
   self-enforcing; rather than a necessary and essential aspect of a
   (so-called) free economy, wage labour was condemned as producing
   inequality, servitude and a servile mentality. Moreover, the argument
   that capitalists deny workers "all the fruits" of their labour is
   identical to the general socialist position that capitalism is
   exploitative. All of which undoubtedly explains why Rothbard only
   selectively quoted from Spooner's critique of the state rather and
   ignored the socio-economic principles which underlay his political
   analysis and hopes for a free society. Yet without those aspects of his
   ideas, Spooner's political analysis is pressed into service of an
   ideology it is doubtful he would have agreed with.

   As such, we must agree with Peter Marshall, who notes that Spooner
   "recommends that every man should be his own employer, and he depicts
   an ideal society of independent farmers and entrepreneurs who have
   access to easy credit. If every person received the fruits of his own
   labour, the just and equal distribution of wealth would result."
   Because of this, he classifies Spooner as a left libertarian as "his
   concern with equality as well as liberty makes him a left-wing
   individualist anarchist. Indeed, while his starting-point is the
   individual, Spooner goes beyond classical liberalism in his search for
   a form of rough equality and a community of interests. [Op. Cit., p.
   389] This is also noted by Stephan L. Newman, who writes that while
   right-"libertarians" are generally "sympathic to Spooner's
   individualist anarchism, they fail to notice or conveniently overlook
   its egalitarian implications . . . They accept inequality as the price
   of freedom" and "habour no reservations about the social consequences
   of capitalism." Spooner "insist[s] that inequality corrupts freedom.
   [His] anarchism is directed as much against inequality as against
   tyranny." Spooner "attempt[s] to realise th[e] promise of social
   harmony by recreating [a] rough equality of condition" and so joins the
   "critics of modern capitalism and champions of the Jeffersonian idea of
   the autonomous individual -- independent yeoman and the self-employed
   mechanic." Liberalism at Wit's End, p. 76, p. 74 and p. 91]

   In summary, as can be seen, as with other individualist anarchists,
   there is a great deal of commonality between Spooner's ideas and those
   of social anarchists. Spooner perceives the same sources of
   exploitation and oppression inherent in monopolistic control of the
   means of production by a wealth-owning class as do social anarchists.
   His solutions may differ, but he observes exactly the same problems. In
   other words, Spooner is a left libertarian, and his individualist
   anarchism is just as anti-capitalist as the ideas of, say, Bakunin,
   Kropotkin or Chomsky. Spooner, in spite of his closeness to classical
   liberalism, was no more a capitalist than Rothbard was an anarchist.

References

   1. file://localhost/home/mauro/baku/debianize/maint/anarchy/secG1.html#secg12
   2. file://localhost/home/mauro/baku/debianize/maint/anarchy/secF1.html
   3. file://localhost/home/mauro/baku/debianize/maint/anarchy/secG3.html
   4. file://localhost/home/mauro/baku/debianize/maint/anarchy/secC2.html
   5. file://localhost/home/mauro/baku/debianize/maint/anarchy/secG1.html#secg11
   6. file://localhost/home/mauro/baku/debianize/maint/anarchy/secA3.html#seca31
