Property is Despotism!

Murray Rothbard and Propertarian Neo-Feudalism

The Tale of Ruritania

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, there was an island called Ruritania, which was ruled by King Charlie.

Ruritania was very isolated, which is true of most places “far, far away.” There were no nearby islands, nor did they have contact with anywhere else. As far as they knew (and for the purpose of our fable), they were entirely alone in the world.

By itself, this was not an issue. Ruritania was quite a large island, and abundant in resources. With a bit of work, it could easily sustain the entire population without needing to trade with other islands, and even allow them to live in leisurely prosperity. Everyone’s needs could be met and then some.

However, just because Ruritania could support such a system does not mean that it did.

For as long as anyone can remember, Ruritania was a kingdom and was currently ruled by King Charlie. Charlie claimed the entire island as his. He was king after all, so it’s only natural that he’d own his domain.

All the land, freshwater springs and wells, plants, animals, and any other natural resources of the island belonged to him, as did the resources of the immediately surrounding ocean they have explored with their boats. He even owned the airspace. The same was true for everything that made from these resources, including all the buildings, tools, equipment, machinery, boats, food, clothing, furniture, books, works of art, etc.

Everything belonged to King Charlie. Ruritania was his.

Just because Charlie owned everything did not mean he used it all personally, of course. Ruritania had a fairly large population, and to sustain itself these other people also needed to use the resources of the island to survive. They needed land to stand on, air to breath, water to drink, fire to stay warm, food to eat, wood to burn, and so on.

What Charlie’s ownership actually meant in practice wasn’t that he used everything himself, but that he controlled whether other people had permission to use it and could set conditions on it or revoke this permission at any time and for any reason.

For example, if they wanted to eat food, they needed his permission to access what King Charlie had stored away, or even if they wanted to pick it from his trees or hunt in his forest. On top of that, they also needed his permission on where they could eat, since he owned the land, and he could set conditions on when and how they were allowed to do this.

Quite literally, their continued survival depended on King Charlie continually granting them permission to do so. The same was true for any other part of life. King Charlie had the complete power to regulate all activity happening within his kingdom, including religious worship, speech, reporting, assembling, bearing arms, housing, etc. There was no expectation of privacy, nor was anyone entitled to any kind of trial or due process unless King Charlie set it up himself, and he could do away with it at any time and for any reason. He could impose any regulations he wanted to on production, education, healthcare, etc. All were subject to his whims.

Because of his complete control over their access to their means of life, King Charlie was also the ruler of the people of Ruritania. So long as they were in his kingdom, they must obey his laws, which he could dictate arbitrarily and at whim. In general, he demanded that they swear complete fealty to his rule, promising their absolute obedience. He could make them do anything, no matter how trivial, dangerous, or degrading.

In theory, his subjects could refuse to swear fealty themselves, or renounce their fealty after swearing it if they wanted. Just as King Charlie could retract his permission, they too could withdraw from their arrangement. But doing so would mean they’d also need to leave Ruritania, which would inevitably mean drowning in the ocean. Those who did pick this did not last long and might even see Charlie exile their loved ones too for good measure, making an example of them. Charlie even liked to make a joke of it, offering “free boat rides” to dissidents. This kingdom-sponsored system of suicide was the one freedom they were allowed.

For the most part, King Charlie demanded that his subjects work for him. While Ruritania had plenty of resources, labor was still needed to turn this into a form that was actually useful. Charlie did not particularly like to work himself, except occasionally as a form of play, and delegated all these tasks away from himself whenever he could. Instead, he would provide a list of demands for things he personally wanted to a committee of economic advisors, who, based on this list of demands, would centrally plan for their society if and how this could be accomplished. If Charlie approved of what they produced, they would then relay these orders to other managers throughout the island, who would directly oversee that the work done by everyone else, the vast majority of the population, was done according to their scheme.

While the entire system of production was fundamentally set up to satisfy King Charlie’s needs, it incidentally needed to fulfill the demands of others too. King Charlie needed food to live, of course, but so did his subjects. Agricultural workers needed to not only grow enough food for Charlie, but for themselves and everyone else in their society. This varied in quality, with the best going to Charlie himself, naturally. For everyone else, he would only have his workers make generally bland food of mediocre quality. Its purpose wasn’t to be enjoyed by them, but simply to keep them alive and healthy enough to work another day.

Sometimes enough was produced for everyone. Sometimes it wasn’t. Naturally, in the latter case, it was never the king who suffered the consequences. Sometimes they had an excess, which would be kept away in case of emergencies or destroyed. The food he extended their way was a privilege, not a right, and he did not want them to come to feel entitled.

Besides these necessities, much of the labor the workers of Ruritania were made to do was producing luxuries that were exclusively enjoyed by King Charlie himself and people he favored. This would include lavish parties he would have thrown for himself, statues and fine works of art, gigantic palaces filled with servants, entertainment from actors, dancers, performers, musicians, etc.

Generally speaking, these consumption goods of necessities and luxuries required certain production goods to be made. They needed raw materials, tools, equipment, machinery, and so on, which must be produced and repaired regularly. Many workers were therefore involved in producing the means of production itself for the island.

With all the menial work, mental work, and organizational work delegated away to others, King Charlie was able to enjoy his fabulous wealth without having to really do anything at all. When he did insert himself to be involved, his decisions were generally bad, having little understanding of how everything actually got done, but was isolated from any of the consequences of these decisions.

For almost everyone else, the situation was just the opposite. They lived in absolute misery, stuck in their poverty despite the abundance they produced with their long hours of labor in a land easily able to take care of them.

Charlie would try to keep some people especially important to him, such as his committee of economic advisors and other especially high-ranking managers, satisfied by letting them share in some of the luxuries they were in charge of making sure the lower-ranking workers produced. He did not want to risk them deciding they could do away with him.

For the vast majority though, this was not the case, and they were left in poverty. Because of this, some decided they would ignore at least some of Charlie’s laws and commands and steal some things for themselves, usually consumption goods they most immediately desired. Some even discussed overthrowing Charlie and putting themselves in charge, or even more radically doing away with this entire system all together. The island had enough for all, so surely there was a better way they could live.

To maintain his control over the island, King Charlie needed another section of his subjects to be assigned to the task of securing his rule with violent force. He would give these people weapons and the right to act with a certain degree of autonomous authority, imposing their rule and dispensing punishments as they saw fit.

While expulsion from the island was the ultimate threat supporting King Charlie’s rule, his absolute power over Ruritania allowed him to impose any and all other forms of punishment for breaking his laws. If he were feeling particularly sadistic, he would give them a particularly degrading task, have them locked away in a small cell for months or years on end, have them tortured, or even go after their friends and family. People didn’t even technically need to break Charlie’s law for him to do whatever he wanted to them. They had sworn this absolute submission to him.

Things had been this way for as long as anyone could remember. King Charlie had inherited his rule over Ruritania from his father, who inherited it from his father, and so on as far back as recorded history went. The system had stayed more or less the same the entire time too. The people lived in squalor while they created beautiful marvels, while the Kings and their friends lived lives of luxury and leisure, contributing nothing except to the added misery of their subjects. Each king had their own particular quirks, of course, but this fact remained constant.

Schrödinger's Dictatorship

Here is a question that might seem odd: Is Ruritania anarchist?

The obvious answer, from anarchists and non-anarchists alike, is “no.” Ruritania is about as far away from anarchy as anyone can imagine. It is an absolute dictatorship, with all power concentrated into the hands of a single individual who controls every aspect of life with no checks or balances, centrally plans the economy, and terrorizes his population with a police force. It is a place of complete totalitarianism unlike anything the world has ever seen.

But if one were to talk to propertarians, the so-called right-wing “libertarians” or “anarcho”-capitalists (both of which are misnomers) like Murray Rothbard and his followers, you would get a very different answer: “I don’t know.”

This may come as a surprise, even to many “ancaps” themselves. Certainly, Ruritania sounds like every kind of totalitarian hellhole they imagine socialism must be and claim to oppose. It is a centrally planned economy where a single will rules over everything else and controls everything. Not to mention that it appears to completely lack any kind of market. How then can we say he doesn’t know whether he’d oppose it?

The answer is simple. While everything above is consistent with how Rothbard describes a dictatorship it is also (and not coincidentally) how he describes a “free” society! No action King Charlie takes above is considered inherently dictatorial. They all make exceptions for it in some cases, and they lack the information here to tell whether that exception applies or not.

The real basis for Murray Rothbard’s theory is not his “non-aggression axiom,” as I demonstrated in my paper No One Believes in the Non-Aggression “Principle”, but his commitment to his particular theory of property rights. If someone passes his homesteading test for being a “legitimate” property owner, then someone would be entirely within their rights to act exactly as King Charlie does above. What is the defining feature of the state is not the kind of authority it wields, but that it has gained this power through illegitimate methods.

To demonstrate this, we could examine Rothbard’s entire theory of property rights (and I intend to), but we can actually show it much more directly because Rothbard stumbled across this conclusion himself too!

Consider this passage from his book The Ethics of Liberty (1982):

Thus, the State is a coercive criminal organization that subsists by a regularized large-scale system of taxation-theft, and which gets away with it by engineering the support of the majority (not, again, of everyone) through securing an alliance with a group of opinion-moulding intellectuals whom it rewards with a share in its power and pelf. But there is another vital aspect of the State that needs to be considered. There is one critical argument for the State that now comes into view: namely, the implicit argument that the State apparatus really and properly owns the territorial area over which it claims jurisdiction. The State, in short, arrogates to itself a monopoly of force, of ultimate decision-making power, over a given territorial area - larger or smaller depending on historical conditions, and on how much it has been able to wrest from other States. If the State may be said to properly own its territory, then it is proper for it to make rules for anyone who presumes to live in that area. It can legitimately seize or control private property because there is no private property in its area, because it really owns the entire land surface. So long as the State permits its subjects to leave its territory, then, it can be said to act as does any other owner who sets down rules for people living on his property. (This seems to be the only justification for the crude slogan, "America, love it or leave it!," as well as the enormous emphasis generally placed on an individual's right to emigrate from a country.) In short, this theory makes the State, as well as the King in the Middle Ages, a feudal overlord, who at least theoretically owned all the land in his domain. The fact that new and unowned resources - whether virgin land or lakes - are invariably claimed as owned by the State (its "public domain") is an expression of this implicit theory.

But our homesteading theory, outlined above, suffices to demolish any such pretensions by the State apparatus. For by what earthly right do the criminals of the State lay claim to the ownership of its land area? It is bad enough that they have seized control of ultimate decision-making for that area; what criterion can possibly give them the rightful ownership of the entire territory? [Emphasis added in bold.]¹

This is an extremely telling passage, and we can make sense of its reasoning breaking it down a bit.

Rothbard is making these three claims:

1. The defining feature of the state is that it is a “criminal” (i.e., rights-violating) organization.

2. Nearly all state activities (i.e., regulating, commanding, or taxing, although not preventing people from leaving) could be done legitimately (non-criminally) by land property owners, in theory justifying something functionally identical to a “feudal overlord.”

3. His homesteading theory prevents (modern) states from arguing for legitimacy this way.

Rothbard is trying to pull off a slight-of-hand trick here. He is essentially saying, in brief, “The state today is a criminal organization because it is not the legitimate owner of its territory. But what if it were? Then everything it did would be fine. But it is not, so that’s enough of that.”

It is simply Rothbard refusing to engage with his hypothetical, a scenario where the state really is the legitimate owner of its territory. And to the extent Rothbard does engage that, he actually reaffirms that he would happily accept a tyranny far more extreme than anything we see today. His only escape is to insist that the modern states we see today do not fulfill this criterion.

The tale of Ruritania is here to confront Rothbardians with what he tried to obfuscate here.

In the story I gave above, this system of government has been the norm for all of recorded history. We do not see who homesteaded the island originally, but we do know that King Charlie owns it because the title was transferred to him by his father, who inherited it from his father, and so on back through recorded history.

In such a scenario, by Rothbard’s reasoning, we would have no idea whether his title is legitimate or not. If it is, then everything he is doing is entirely allowed within Rothbard’s theory of “anarchism.” If it is not, then he is certainly the most totalitarian tyrant the world has ever seen. Devoid of this knowledge, we are stuck in Schrödinger's dictatorship. No matter how closely Rothbard examines Ruritania, he would never be able to determine whether it is a dictatorship or not because he is missing that key bit of information about the past.

If anything, Rothbard would, if he were consistent, default to reaffirming the legitimacy of King Charlie’s title over the island until evidence can be provided to the contrary. In cases of land theft, just like any other case of theft, the accuser has the responsibility of proving their case.

A particularly important application of our theory of property titles is the case of landed property. For one thing, land is a fixed quotal portion of the earth, and therefore the ground land endures virtually permanently. Historical investigation of land titles therefore would have to go back much further than for other more perishable goods. However, this is by no means a critical problem, for, as we have seen, where criminals the victims are lost in antiquity, the land properly belongs to any non-criminals who are in current possession. Suppose, for example, that Henry Jones I stole a piece of land from its legitimate owner, James Smith. What is the current status of the title of current possessor Henry Jones X? Or of the man who might be the current possessor by purchasing the land from Henry Jones X? If Smith and his descendants are lost to antiquity, then title to the land properly and legitimately belongs to the current Jones (or the man who has purchased it from him), in direct application of our theory of property titles.²

Since King Charlie can show he inherited the land from his father, and none of his actions would be considered criminal unless we are already assuming his claim to the land is illegitimate, then there is no case to be made against him here. We have the exact scenario here described with Henry Jones I and Henry Jones X.

Rothbard apparently sets the bar of proof very high and narrow too. The mass theft of land from the Indigenous peoples of North America, for example, is very well documented, and Rothbard acknowledges this, but he apparently did not think their case was strong enough to advocate for a generalized policy of Land Back. Instead, if individual Native Americans are going to get any land back at all, they would need to prove their case for each plot of land, and that they individually are the rightful inheritors, piece by piece. As this colonization process has been going on for centuries, and only the initial theft counts in his book given the kind of horrific things justified by “legitimate” property owners, anyone would frequently have a prohibitively difficult time doing anything about this today.³

We could also easily change this hypothetical so that King Charlie clearly does pass the homesteading test as well. Suppose, for example, in the ancient past, a ship was caught in a storm, sending it far off course. After days of being blown around, blindly wandering the open ocean, they crashed upon the island of Ruritania. By a stroke of luck, one of these individuals after crashing was able to find the singular source of fresh water available on the island, which he promptly used, making him its homesteader.

“Do not, my friends, become addicted to water. It will take hold of you, and you will resent its absence.” - Immortan Joe giving sage Rothbardian wisdom

Everyone on this boat were strict Rothbardians and would never dare violate the non-aggression axiom. Knowing this, the man who found the source of fresh water offered them a market transaction: “Work for me, and transfer to me all the fruit of your labors for the rest of your lives, and I will let you drink.” Taking out this massive debt, but needing to live and finding no other source, they reluctantly agreed. All work done by the shipwreck victims, everything they homesteaded, was from here on transferred to the first King of Ruritania, and this continued until the entire island was homesteaded.

We therefore have a way, entirely compliant with Rothbard’s homesteading theory, for how the kingdom of Ruritania was established.

A fuller analysis of Rothbard’s “homesteading theory” is needed, demonstrating in detail how he handles these situations and fully demonstrating how every single point brought up here really is in compliance with his overall theory.

For now, it is sufficient to point out that, for Rothbard, all rights are property rights. While he claimed that our “self-ownership,” our property over our own person, was the most fundamental form of this right, it could not be so in practice precisely because he denied that such self-ownership meant we were entitled to things like free speech if we are not standing on our own property. As he put in Power and Market (1970):

[N]ot only are property rights also human rights, but in the most profound sense there are no rights but property rights. The only human rights, in short, are property rights. There are several senses in which this is true. In the first place, each individual, as a natural fact, is the owner of himself, the ruler of his own person. The “human” rights of the person that are defended in the purely free-market society are, in effect, each man’s property right in his own being, and from this property right stems his right to the material goods that he has produced.

In the second place, alleged “human rights” can be boiled down to property rights, although in many cases this fact is obscured. Take, for example, the “human right” of free speech. Freedom of speech is supposed to mean the right of everyone to say whatever he likes. But the neglected question is: Where? Where does a man have this right? He certainly does not have it on property on which he is trespassing. In short, he has this right only either on his own property or on the property of someone who has agreed, as a gift or in a rental contract, to allow him on the premises. In fact, then, there is no such thing as a separate “right to free speech”; there is only a man’s property right: the right to do as he wills with his own or to make voluntary agreements with other property owners.⁴

Where indeed! And when King Charlie owns all the “wheres,” no one else may have any rights at all! Despite how much Rothbard claimed to champion “self-ownership,” the concept is meaningless unless you own the land too. Otherwise, using your body to speak violates their property right, since they did not give you permission to speak on their land, and their claim on the land trumps your claim on your body. The same is true for any other freedom we might name.

All that the right of “self-ownership” amounts to is a right to leave. Even then, it in no way also implies the ability or opportunity to leave. Propertarians may not prevent you from doing so, but neither do they need to facilitate it, or provide support for you once you have left.

It is also worth acknowledging that, of course, Ruritania is not a capitalist society, even if it is fully in compliance with Rothbard’s theory of property. While they might make a show of the oath of fealties which might qualify as kinds of market transactions to Rothbard, there is no meaningful capital to speak of. The product of the workers’ labor is not appearing as a commodity, but all as the property of King Charlie, and it never ceases to be this at any point in the story.

What we have instead is the naked reality of exploitation and domination inherent to capitalist property. If we take King Charlie to be an individual representing the entire class of proprietors, we can see that this more or less directly. Using this example to explore the nuances of capitalism would require us to divide up Ruritania a bit more into competing kingdoms. Doing so would, of course, no remove the exploitation of this system in the slightest. What matters is not the number of kings, but their existence, that they have monopolized the means of life and used it to subdue the rest of humanity.⁵

Propertarian Neo-Feudalism

The name “Ruritania” should be familiar to anyone familiar with Rothbard’s work, as he would frequently use it in his own critiques of other positions. He appears to have picked it up directly from his teacher, Ludwig von Mises, while also disagreeing with his utilitarianism.

To use Ludwig von Mises's excellent device for abstracting from emotionalism, let us take a hypothetical country, "Ruritania." Let us say that Ruritania is ruled by a king who has grievously invaded the rights of persons and the legitimate property of individuals, and has regulated and finally seized their property. A libertarian movement develops in Ruritania, and comes to persuade the bulk of the populace that this criminal system should be replaced by a truly libertarian society, where the rights of each man to his person and his found and created property are fully respected. The king, seeing the revolt to be imminently successful, now employs a cunning stratagem. He proclaims his government to be dissolved, but just before doing so he arbitrarily parcels out the entire land area of his kingdom to the "ownership" of himself and his relatives. He then goes to the libertarian rebels and says: "all right, I have granted your wish, and have dissolved my rule; there is now no more violent intervention in private property. However, myself and my eleven relatives now each own one-twelfth of Ruritania, and if you disturb us in this ownership in any way, you shall be infringing upon the sanctity of the very fundamental principle that you profess: the inviolability of private property. Therefore, while we shall no longer be imposing 'taxes,' you must grant each of us he right to impose any 'rents' that we may wish upon our 'tenants,' or to regulate the lives of all the people who presume to live on 'our' property as we see fit. In this way, taxes shall be fully replaced by 'private rents'!"

Now what should be the reply of the libertarian rebels to this pert challenge? If they are consistent utilitarians, they must bow to this subterfuge, and resign themselves to living under a regime no less despotic than the one they had been battling for so long. Perhaps, indeed, more despotic, for now the king and his relatives can claim for themselves the libertarians' very principle of the absolute right of private property, an absoluteness which they might not have dared to claim before.⁶

Rothbard uses this imaginary construction of Ruritania to abstract from particular issues we see in society today in the hopes of revealing an absurdity at the core of utilitarianism. The clever King of Ruritania is, through a mere trick of paperwork, able to turn his enemies into allies. (Why “consistent utilitarians” care more about paperwork instead of the principle of utility is anyone’s guess.) Rothbard even notes that the King of Ruritania can be even more despotic than before, not in spite of, but because he now follows “the libertarians’ [sic] very principle of the absolute right of private property, an absoluteness which they might not have dared to claim before.”

How strange that a “libertarian” principle could result in an increase in despotism!

With my own example of Ruritania I have, of course, simply used Rothbard’s own tactic against him, except I have much more accurately described his own position than he has described utilitarians, even showing where he directly comes to this conclusion himself. Including in his own example of Ruritania!

As before, Rothbard thinks his homesteading test rescues him from this kind of conclusion, but it clearly does not. If the King of Ruritania in his example, instead of doing this trick of paperwork, was able to demonstrate that his ancestor was the original homesteader of this entire territory, Rothbard would likewise need to begin to support the monarch.

We have seen that Rothbard defaulted to accepting King Charlie’s claim until proof is presented to the contrary. Granted, if the King were the one personally conquering the land himself, which seems to be implied in Rothbard’s example, this case becomes harder to make. But if this other King of Ruritania could prove their case that they are the rightful inheritors of the land, then they too would be justified.

Given the rest of Rothbard’s argument, we would expect him to try the same trick. He would affirm that the King of Ruritania, if he really were the rightful inheritor of the land, would be entirely justified in what he is doing. Rothbard has conceded that again and again, so he certainly would here too. But, he would argue, that would entirely change the scenario, since in that case the King would not be an aggressor or a despot at all, as his claim would be legitimate!

But that would obviously miss the entire point. The utilitarian could have responded the same way to Rothbard’s example, accepting that the King’s paperwork trick really did legitimize things as well. If Rothbard is laughing off that answer as absurd, precisely because this scenario obviously is describing a dictatorship no matter how legitimate they claim it to be, then we can do the same for his excuse. The King’s paperwork trick really did legitimize things, and he would laugh it off as absurd. If Rothbard considers his argument to be debunking utilitarianism, then he too has been debunked.

Rothbard is perfectly capable of recognizing the obvious tyranny of the King of Ruritania when he needs to. But he tries to protect his worldview by carving out exceptions for himself in how he defines his terms. Thus, when it comes to analyzing feudalism, Rothbard bakes violations of his homesteading theory straight into the definition. He is able to recognize that there is a functional identity between rent and taxes, but claims they are different because the landlord is “legitimate” while the feudal lord of the land is “illegitimate” by definition.

In this case of what we might call "feudalism" or "land monopoly," the feudal or monopolist landlords have no legitimate claim to the property. The current "tenants," or peasants, should be the absolute owners of their property, and, as in the case of slavery, the land titles should be transferred to the peasants, without compensation to the monopoly landlords.[5]

[5. The term "feudalism," as used here, is not intended to apply to any specific landed or other relation during the Middle Ages; it is used here to cover a single kind of action: the seizure of land by conquest and the continuing assertion and enforcement of ownership over that land and the extraction of rent from the peasants continuing to till the soil. For a defense of such a broader use of the term "feudalism," see Robert A. Nisbet, The Social Impact of the Revolution (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1974), pp. 4-7.]

Note that "feudalism," as we have defined it, is not restricted to the case where the peasant is also coerced by violence to remain on the lord's land to keep cultivating it (roughly, the institution of serfdom). Nor is it restricted to cases where additional measures of violence are used to bolster and maintain feudal landholdings (such as the State's prevention by violence of any landlord's sale or bequest of his land into smaller subdivisions). All that "feudalism," in our sense, requires is the seizure by violence of landed property from its true owners, the transformers of land, and the continuation of that kind of relationship over the years. Feudal land rent, then, is the precise equivalent of paying a continuing annual tribute by producers to their predatory conquerors. Feudal land rent is therefore a form of permanent tribute. Note also that the peasants in question need not be the descendants of the original victims. For since the aggression is continuing so long as this relation of feudal aggression remains in force, the current peasants are the contemporary victims and the currently legitimate property owners. In short, in the case of feudal land, or land monopoly, both of our conditions obtain for invalidating current property titles: For not only the original but also the current land title is criminal, and the current victims can very easily be identified.⁷

Feudalism for Rothbard reduces entirely to a question of anyone having an illegitimate land title, i.e., one that does not pass his theory of legitimacy. The actual social relations, like serfdom, are seen as irrelevant!

We can note that Rothbard claims to get this definition from Robert Nisbet, but this is false. If we look at the source Rothbard is actually citing. Nisbet did argue that feudalism was not merely a matter of kings and knights, which is perhaps why Rothbard was attracted to it as a “broader” meaning of the term, but nowhere does he propose it is simply a matter of the legitimacy of land titles. Instead, Nisbet is focused on other features like this society having a group of people largely disconnected in terms of administration, but who are nevertheless tied together by “great consciousness” and tradition, strong social classes, and making “little distinction between the authority of property and the authority of law.” In other words, Nisbet looks at the actual existing social relations of living people living within feudal society, not the ancient history of the dead.

Nisbet’s definition strikes me as decent, if perhaps lacking in analysis of the underlying economic relation, but it is far better than Rothbard’s definition of “seizure by violence of landed property from its true owners… and the continuation of that kind of relationship over the years.” If anything, Nisbet’s definition would seem to itself affirm that Rothbard, by collapsing all law into matters of property, is in fact preaching feudalism. To be sure, it would be a very different feudalism from that of the past, preaching the divine right of kings and noblesse oblige, but would instead be what I am calling Propertarian Neo-Feudalism.

This connection between “anarcho”-capitalism and feudalism would only become more obvious after Rothbard as his follower Hans-Hermann Hoppe, who we somehow haven’t mentioned up to this point, explicitly argued in favor of absolute monarchism as a steppingstone to “anarchy.” This can be seen especially in his book Democracy: The God That Failed (2001). One might think this is an innovation from Hoppe, given how Rothbard associated himself with the American anti-monarchical laissez-faire liberal tradition, praising the United States as “Conceived in Liberty.” But as we have seen above, Hoppe hasn’t pulled his ideas from nothing.

This all, of course, stands in stark contrast to actual anarchism who, having realized that property is despotism, decided to expand the republican oath of swearing “hatred to royalty” to “hatred to property.”⁸

Property is Despotism

For Rothbard, the answer to whether a society is anarchist lies entirely within its history, and not in its present social relations. If proprietors can trace the source of their ownership back through history through a series of voluntary exchanges to the original homesteader (or, in practice, others fail to prove that their title isn’t derived from such a source), then they have “the absolute right of property.” This grants them every authoritarian power imaginable over people in this territory except the power to prevent them from leaving. So long as they remain, they are considered as having consented to everything done to them.

We can contrast this “anarcho”-capitalist answer to the position of the anarchists, who oppose despotism regardless of how it was established (at least in principle and imperfectly in practice). For example, consider this passage from Mikhail Bakunin in “The Capitalist System”:

Is it necessary to repeat here the irrefutable arguments of Socialism which no bourgeois economist has yet succeeded in disproving? What is property, what is capital in their present form? For the capitalist and the property owner they mean the power and the right, guaranteed by the State, to live without working. And since neither property nor capital produces anything when not fertilized by labor — that means the power and the right to live by exploiting the work of someone else, the right to exploit the work of those who possess neither property nor capital and who thus are forced to sell their productive power to the lucky owners of both. Note that I have left out of account altogether the following question: In what way did property and capital ever fall into the hands of their present owners? This is a question which, when envisaged from the points of view of history, logic, and justice, cannot be answered in any other way but one which would serve as an indictment against the present owners. I shall therefore confine myself here to the statement that property owners and capitalists, inasmuch as they live not by their own productive labor but by getting land rent, house rent, interest upon their capital, or by speculation on land, buildings, and capital, or by the commercial and industrial exploitation of the manual labor of the proletariat, all live at the expense of the proletariat.

The history of property is one filled with blood and suffering, but Bakunin sets that aside to focus more on the actual existing social relations of living people. If someone wanted to critique modern states and proprietors from this historical perspective, we would find no difficulty. But the problem of authority does not resolve itself into this question since we must also examine social relations as they exist today.

Just like we can clearly recognize King Charlie as a dictator, who is entirely incompatible with anarchy, so too are the capitalists and landlords who have designed a system where they force others to submit to them based on their monopolized control over the means of life, and having used this power to force others into submission, laboring to enrich their masters.

We can also see this in the analysis of many other prominent anarchist theorists.

The Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta wrote this in Anarchy (1891):

There are two ways of oppressing men: either directly by brute force, by physical violence; or indirectly by denying them the means of life and thus reducing them to a state of surrender. The former is at the root of power, that is of political privilege; the latter was the origin of property, that is of economic privilege. Men can also be suppressed by working on their intelligence and their feelings, which constitutes religious or “universitarian” power; but just as the spirit does not exist except as the resultant of material forces, so a lie and the organisms set up to propagate it have no raison d’être except in so far as they are the result of political and economic privileges, and a means to defend and to consolidate them.

In sparsely populated primitive societies with uncomplicated social relations, in any situation which prevented the establishment of habits, customs of solidarity, or which destroyed existing ones and established the domination of man by man — the two powers, political and economic, were to be found in the same hands, which could even be those of a single man. Those who by force have defeated and intimidated others, dispose of the persons and the belongings of the defeated and oblige them to serve and to work for them and obey their will in all respects. They are at the same time the landowners, kings, judges and executioners.

Or we can see this in the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin’s Conquest of Bread (1892):

We, in civilized societies, are rich. Why then are the many poor? Why this painful drudgery for the masses? Why, even to the best paid workman, this uncertainty for the morrow, in the midst of all the wealth inherited from the past, and in spite of the powerful means of production, which could ensure comfort to all in return for a few hours of daily toil?

The Socialists have said it and repeated it unwearyingly. Daily they reiterate it, demonstrating it by arguments taken from all the sciences. It is because all that is necessary for production — the land, the mines, the highways, machinery, food, shelter, education, knowledge — all have been seized by the few in the course of that long story of robbery, enforced migration and wars, of ignorance and oppression, which has been the life of the human race before it had learned to subdue the forces of Nature. It is because, taking advantage of alleged rights acquired in the past, these few appropriate to-day two-thirds of the products of human labour, and then squander them in the most stupid and shameful way. It is because, having reduced the masses to a point at which they have not the means of subsistence for a month, or even for a week in advance, the few only allow the many to work on condition of themselves receiving the lion’s share. It is because these few prevent the remainder of men from producing the things they need, and force them to produce, not the necessaries of life for all, but whatever offers the greatest profits to the monopolists. In this is the substance of all Socialism.

[…]

In virtue of this monstrous system, the son of the worker, on entering life, finds no field which he may till, no machine which he may tend, no mine in which he may dig, without accepting to leave a great part of what he will produce to a master. He must sell his labour for a scant and uncertain wage. His father and his grandfather have toiled to drain this field, to build this mill, to perfect this machine. They gave to the work the full measure of their strength, and what more could they give? But their heir comes into the world poorer than the lowest savage. If he obtains leave to till the fields, it is on condition of surrendering a quarter of the produce to his master, and another quarter to the government and the middlemen. And this tax, levied upon him by the State, the capitalist, the lord of the manor, and the middleman, is always increasing; it rarely leaves him the power to improve his system of culture. If he turns to industry, he is allowed to work — though not always even that — only on condition that he yield a half or two-thirds of the product to him whom the land recognizes as the owner of the machine.

Likewise, the Russian-American anarchist Emma Goldman wrote this in “Anarchism: What It Really Stands For” (1910):

Anarchism is the great liberator of man from the phantoms that have held him captive; it is the arbiter and pacifier of the two forces for individual and social harmony. To accomplish that unity, Anarchism has declared war on the pernicious influences which have so far prevented the harmonious blending of individual and social instincts, the individual and society.

Religion, the dominion of the human mind; Property, the dominion of human needs; and Government, the dominion of human conduct, represent the stronghold of man’s enslavement and all the horrors it entails. […]

Property, the dominion of man’s needs, the denial of the right to satisfy his needs. Time was when property claimed a divine right, when it came to man with the same refrain, even as religion, “Sacrifice! Abnegate! Submit!” The spirit of Anarchism has lifted man from his prostrate position. He now stands erect, with his face toward the light. He has learned to see the insatiable, devouring, devastating nature of property, and he is preparing to strike the monster dead.

It is hard to look at these quotes and not immediately seeing how they provide a much more pointed look at the issues facing the people of Ruritania.

What alternative is possible if we are to do away with property?

Anarchists have varied a bit more in their answer here, given that a free society might organize itself in many different ways so long as it excludes despotism and exploitation. But to generalize, anarchists argue that humanity as a whole should collectively own the land, raw materials, and means of production. This does not mean, as Rothbard so frequently supposed, that no action could be taken until every single person on Earth voted on every single use of a thing, which would obviously be impossible.⁹ Rather, control and distribution would be proportioned to use, occupancy, need, managed through a system of voluntary associations, workplace and community assemblies, which build up into a system of free federation aimed at the well-being of all.¹⁰

The anarchist Alexander Berkman describes it like this in Now and After: The ABC of Communist Anarchism (1929):

The revolution abolishes private ownership of the means of production and distribution, and with it goes capitalistic business. Personal possession remains only in the things you use. Thus, your watch is your own, but the watch factory belongs to the people. Land, machinery, and all other public utilities will be collective property, neither to be bought nor sold. Actual use will be considered the only title — not to ownership but to possession. The organization of the coal miners, for example, will be in charge of the coal mines, not as owners but as the operating agency. Similarly will the railroad brotherhoods run the railroads, and so on. Collective possession, coöperatively managed in the interests of the community, will take the place of personal ownership privately conducted for profit.

Because this system is designed in a way so that it is adjusting to the needs of the people actually living in anarchy, it is also able to adjust and put limits on the actual use of things to secure this harmony between the liberty of each with the liberty of all. Proudhon describes the status of a possessor in anarchy, in contrast to the proprietor who holds their eternal right to “use and abuse,” like this in What is Property (1840):

Not only does occupation lead to equality, it prevents property. For, since every man, from the fact of his existence, has the right of occupation, and, in order to live, must have material for cultivation on which he may labor; and since, on the other hand, the number of occupants varies continually with the births and deaths, — it follows that the quantity of material which each laborer may claim varies with the number of occupants; consequently, that occupation is always subordinate to population. Finally, that, inasmuch as possession, in right, can never remain fixed, it is impossible, in fact, that it can ever become property.

Every occupant is, then, necessarily a possessor or usufructuary, — a function which excludes proprietorship. Now, this is the right of the usufructuary: he is responsible for the thing entrusted to him; he must use it in conformity with general utility, with a view to its preservation and development; he has no power to transform it, to diminish it, or to change its nature; he cannot so divide the usufruct that another shall perform the labor while he receives the product. In a word, the usufructuary is under the supervision of society, submitted to the condition of labor and the law of equality.

Shared by all of these thinkers is the recognition that property, as an absolute right to use and abuse, is a basis of and major center of authoritarian power. While not all anarchists have been consistent in this jargon, as some anarchists will categorically denounce all property while others would say they are opposing “private property” in contrast to “personal property,”¹¹ the fundamental idea is more or less the same.

As illustrated by the case of King Charlie, the owner of these resources is able to dictate commands and laws to the people who “presume” to live in that territory, and is able to force them to labor for the proprietor’s enrichment. What is clearly true in the case of Charlie, who individually monopolizes all property, is no less true of the proprietor class considered as a whole in relation to the dispossessed. As Proudhon put it, property is both theft and despotism. To avoid this, and champion a real system of liberty, fighting for a system where the full and free development of every individual forms the ruling principle, it was necessary to reject property.

“Anarcho”-Capitalists Are Not Anarchists

Murray Rothbard, in trying to champion property to the furthest extent possible, came to the same conclusion, but decided he was actually fine with it. But whether it was out of cowardice or deceit, he ran from this conclusion.¹²

Rothbard believed that, according to his theory of rights, proprietors really are entitled to this kind of absolute authority, and, following the tradition of other far-right laissez-faire liberals, wanted to create this identity between property and liberty, the best expression of which being the “free” market.

Ultimately this forced him to rely on simply forcing categorical distinctions between “legitimate” owners, whose actions qualify as free, and the “illegitimate” ones, whose actions are tyrannical, even when they behave the exact same way and if the basis of that legitimacy is rooted in ancient history of people who have been dead for quite a long time.

Rothbard was certainly aware of what he was doing to some extent. Part of his campaign was to intentionally distort the meaning of terms to trap people in his way of thinking, developing his own version of Newspeak. Most notably he contributed to this happening to the word “libertarian” itself.

Historically, “libertarian” is a term referring to libertarian socialists, another name for the anarchist position. For example, one of the most influential anarchist texts is the 1926 “Organisational Platform of the Libertarian Communists.” It was only in the mid-20th century that the term was appropriated by the laissez-faire liberals.

Rothbard openly bragged about the success he had seen in taking over the word from his socialist enemies. As he put it in The Betrayal of the American Right:

One gratifying aspect of our rise to some prominence is that, for the first time in my memory, we, “our side,” had captured a crucial word from the enemy… [Libertarians] had long been simply a polite word for left-wing anarchists, that is for anti-private property anarchists, either of the communist or syndicalist variety. But now we had taken it over.¹³

He was aware of what he was doing then, and that he was specifically engaging with political philosophy and these terms in bad faith. He did the same thing when he started referring to himself as an anarchist. Early in his career, he directly admitted that, despite advocating the same basic position he would later, he was not an anarchist at all. In his article “Are Libertarians Anarchists” (he, of course, means his distorted definition of libertarian here), he settled on this answer:

We must conclude that the question "are libertarians anarchists?" simply cannot be answered on etymological grounds. The vagueness of the term itself is such that the libertarian system would be considered anarchist by some people and archist by others. We must therefore turn to history for enlightenment; here we find that none of the proclaimed anarchist groups correspond to the libertarian position, that even the best of them have unrealistic and socialistic elements in their doctrines. Furthermore, we find that all of the current anarchists are irrational collectivists, and therefore at opposite poles from our position. We must therefore conclude that we are not anarchists, and that those who call us anarchists are not on firm etymological ground, and are being completely unhistorical.

A decade and a half later, Rothbard gave up these concerns and gleefully appropriated the name “anarchy” from his anarchist enemies.

By refusing to refer to these propertarian neo-feudalists as “anarchists” or “libertarians,” we are not merely gatekeeping. It is more than that as a matter of simple honesty and accuracy. Rothbard himself has conceded the history of anarchism as anti-property and anti-capitalism. Every political ideology believes their system is legitimate. If “anarchy” merely refers to this self-recognized legitimacy, then all political philosophies become different forms of anarchism.

We can also see that intuitively, the position Rothbard advocated for, as seen with Charlie the King of Ruritania, is not even remotely anarchist. We have seen several times Rothbard even admits this himself, showing this is true even for his own intuitions. Even people who are not anarchists then should recognize the utility in denying that “anarcho”-capitalists are anarchists at all. It is not merely a matter of historical accuracy and not allowing his bad faith distortions to stand, but simply a more clear and accurate way of speaking.

Likewise, to say Rothbard is not an anarchist is not to disprove his argument either, since being an anarchist is not merely a test of legitimacy. Rothbard’s “homesteading theory” would need to be addressed elsewhere, although I have already shown show weak its foundation is. Rothbard believed his theory was rooted in his “non-aggression axiom,” but as I demonstrate elsewhere, no one really believes that.

For now, I will simply say that, if the example of Ruritania horrifies you, if you have any love of freedom within you, we have a clear sign that something is deeply wrong and poisonous at the heart of Rothbard’s propertarian neo-feudalist theory. To fight for a better world, we need a better foundation which upholds the principles of liberty, equality, and solidarity, realizing that an injury to each is an injury to all.

I will end with another quote from Errico Malatesta’s Anarchy:

The methods from which the different non-anarchist parties expect, or say they do, the greatest good of one and all can be reduced to two, the authoritarian and the so-called liberal. The former entrusts to a few the management of social life and leads to the exploitation and oppression of the masses by the few. The latter relies on free individual enterprise and proclaims, if not the abolition, at least the reduction of governmental functions to an absolute minimum; but because it respects private property and is entirely based on the principle of each for himself and therefore of competition between men, the liberty it espouses is for the strong and for the property owners to oppress and exploit the weak, those who have nothing; and far from producing harmony, tends to increase even more the gap between rich and poor and it too leads to exploitation and domination, in other words, to authority. This second method, that is liberalism, is in theory a kind of anarchy without socialism, and therefore is simply a lie, for freedom is not possible without equality, and real anarchy cannot exist without solidarity, without socialism. The criticism liberals direct at government consists only of wanting to deprive it of some of its functions and to call on the capitalists to fight it out among themselves, but it cannot attack the repressive functions which are of its essence: for without the gendarme the property owner could not exist, indeed the government’s powers of repression must perforce increase as free competition results in more discord and inequality.

Anarchists offer a new method: that is free initiative of all and free compact when, private property having been abolished by revolutionary action, everybody has been put in a situation of equality to dispose of social wealth. This method, by not allowing access to the reconstitution of private property, must lead, via free association, to the complete victory of the principle of solidarity.

1. Murray Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty, p. 172

2. Murray Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty, p. 63

3. See Bryan Caplan’s “Do Indians Rightfully Own America?”, an “anarcho”-capitalist himself who notices this same implication. How convenient for white men!

4. Murray Rothbard, Power and Market, p. 292. Also see Murray Rothbard, For a New Liberty, p. 52 for the same basic argument reaffirmed at length.

5. To quote Karl Marx’s Capital, “Capital has not invented surplus-labour. Wherever a part of society possesses the monopoly of the means of production, the labourer, free or not free, must add to the working-time necessary for his own maintenance an extra working-time in order to produce the means of subsistence for the owners of the means of production, whether this proprietor be the Athenian caloς cagaqoς [well-to-do man], Etruscan theocrat, civis Romanus [Roman citizen], Norman baron, American slave-owner, Wallachian Boyard, modern landlord or capitalist.”

6. Murray Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty, p. 54-55

7. Murray Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty, p. 66-67

8. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What is Property (1840): “Since property is the grand cause of privilege and despotism, the form of the republican oath should be changed. Instead of, ‘Je jure haine à la royauté [I swear hatred to royalty],’ henceforth the new member of a secret society should say, ‘Je jure haine à la propriété [I swear hatred to property].’”

9. In Rothbard’s “proof” of his natural law theory, he argues there are only three alternative forms of ownership: (1) his homesteading theory, (2) some class of non-homesteaders can freely take from the homesteaders, or (3) a “communist” solution where everyone has a proportionate claim on everything, and therefore must vote on every use of that things. This, he imagines, is an exhaustive list of alternatives. A more complete refutation of Rothbard’s argument here would be needed elsewhere, but it is sufficient to simply name or list counterexamples, mixed examples, or conditional examples he does not consider. See For a New Liberty, p. 34-35

10. See Zoe Baker’s Means and Ends, p. 83-84. Also see my paper Socialism as a Realm of Equality.

11. See The Anarchist FAQ B.3.1: What is the difference between private property and possession?

12. You often see a similar cowardice with Rothbardians today, who try to avoid thinking about this scenario by becoming preoccupied with large portions of federal land which has apparently never been used and is ripe for the taking (Rothbard’s theory is terrible for anyone who believes in nature conservation or wants to address environmental issues), or comes up with fantasies about “seasteading” or going to Mars. If the only freedom they are guaranteed is the freedom to leave, they need to believe there is an infinite amount of arable land out there, ready to be homesteaded, or that property would somehow remain so diffused among such a large number of people within their unregulated competition that the most obvious evils their system enables can be ignored. But reality isn’t Minecraft.

13. Murray Rothbard, The Betrayal of the American Right, p. 83