Where do mutualists and "anarcho-"capitalists converge and diverge in theory and practice?

Question

Could someone describe a few situations where their views would overlap, and a few where they would come in conflict?

Comments

on wikipedia! lol :P

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Hey really? Link that shit!

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i think ALC is rejecting your joke, sab. ;)

Answer 1

(interesting question)
too bad i apparently chased away our one @cap representative...

mutualist wikiP page:
Mutualists reject Anarcho-Capitalist land ownership on the basis that it is merely re-arranging twigs.....if you make even a minor superficial improvement and can manage to convince yourself that it improves the value of the land, like planting a tree or making a pond, that its ridiculous to claim all of the surrounding area as your dominion by that alone....instead, use would define occupancy, and the capitalist class would lose their holdings to the underclass, which mutualists see as a positive step towards free market socialism.

another wikipedia page:
"Mutualism is an enemy of individual liberty and a free market, though not to degree that "anarcho"-communism is their enemy. This is because when it concerns land, houses, and buildings, it does not recognize a right of an individual to own the product of his labor and trade. If a person transforms fresh land through labor, and therefore justly appropriates it as his own, mutualists believe that if he does not continue to use it then he is acting criminally if he protects it from being taken by someone else to use. The same policy holds for houses and buildings. Thus, mutualism condones a person being deprived of the product of his labor. And, if that original appropriator sells the land or buildings instead and the purchaser chooses not to use them, he is seen as a criminal if he prevents others from using them. Mutualists believe it is fine for a person to come along, and take over that property by using it and therefore deprive the purchaser of what he purchased. Perversely, mutualists see these things that someone labored to produce or spent their hard-earned money on to purchase as being by fair game for anyone who wishes to take them for use, and he who defends his purchases from being expropriated as the criminal. Though mutualism recognizes a right to own product of labor and trade in other things, it denies private property in these and is therefore an enemy of liberty and not thoroughly anarchist." this quotation was attributed to "anarcho-capitalism" on wikipedia, so it seems to be the opinion of at least one person who calls themselves an @cap...

Comments

perhaps other people will have examples of where @caps/mutualists would and would not work well together. pretty far away from my experience...

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http://all-left.net/
http://libertarianleft.org/
http://agorism.info/

you might find some around there...not totes sure.

edited to make a comment

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I find that all interesting.  I used to read alot about mutualism and really loved much of the ideas.  I can see some of the points ancappers make though.  Wonder if there would be a way to take an in between view.  Maybe promote things like worker owned cooperatives and companies as well as everyone owning personal land but still allow for capitalist firms if a worker just wanted a pay check with no ownership or responsibility.  On the ownership of land question, we sort of have an in between with adverse possession law, you own your property whether you use it or not, but after a time if you don't use it and others start to use it you can lose it to them.  We are so far from any type of libertarian society of any flavor we should all work for the basics of decentralized power, free association, liberty, etc and worry about the differences down the road.

Answer 2

Both mutualism and capitalism involve a market form of distributing goods and services. There is little else that the two hold in common.

Mutualists and capitalists disagree fundamentally on what a legitimate property claim is. Capitalists believe in private ownership of land and the means of production, including as a method of profiting off the labor or needs of others. Mutualists believe in the individual's right to the product of their own labor, but not the labor of anyone else.

To use an example, in a mutualist system I might own the land on which I grow food to feed myself, but I could not own a massive estate on which I paid others to grow food for sale. Any form of rent is similarly precluded by mutualist economics, since no one could claim ownership of a house that they did not personally live in. Modes of production that required the labor of multiple individuals, such as industrial factory production, would be owned collectively by the workers involved. Financing new economic initiatives would be handled by zero-or-low interest loans issued by public banks.

Distribution of goods, in both mutualist and capitalist economies, would occur through market exchange, although the implications of market exchange are very different in the two systems. Mutualist economics notably lacks "profit," at least in a capitalist sense of the term, because workers directly control the product of their labor rather than being paid a wage which only reflects a portion of its value. This is something of what is meant by the phrase, "Cost [should be] the limit of price," credited to American individualist anarchist Josiah Warren.

(Let it be noted that my answer is based on a fairly surface-level understanding of mutualist thought. An actual mutualist could surely answer the question better than I can.)