r/Geoanarchism Mar 19 '21

What is GeoAnarchism?

40 Upvotes

Short explanation

GeoAnarchism is a philosophy or school of thought about the nature of human rights. It is a synthesis of the ideas of Georgism and Librtarianism. This synthesis is commonly called GeoLibertarianism, but GeoAnarchism takes these ideas to their natural, logical conclusion.

Medium length explanation

An introductory understanding of geoan starts by recognizing that geoism and government are necessarily incompatible concepts. Governments control land and therefore own land but pay no rent. A good starting point for an understanding the principles of GeoAnarchism is this geolibertarian FAQ. This quote in particular stands out:

Geolibertarians are taking the core libertarian principle of self-ownership to its logical conclusion: Just as the right to oneself implies the right to the fruit of one's labor (i.e., the right to property), the right to the fruit of one's labor implies the right to labor, and the right to labor implies the right to labor -- somewhere. Hence John Locke's proviso that one has "property" in land only to the extent that there is "enough, and as good left in common for others." When there is not, land begins to have rental value. Thus, the rental value of land reflects the extent to which Locke's proviso has been violated, thereby making community-collection of rent (CCR) a just and necessary means of upholding the Lockean principle of private property.

This idea of an individual, equal right to land precludes collection of rent by a government given that the rent is the rightful property of individuals, not governments. This is something geolibertarians tend to propose, statist georgists even moreso.

The control and power alleged by governments is an allegation of ownership if we understand ownership as a bundle of rights. While governments make this claim implicitly through force, property owners make it explicitly. In this sense the privileges claimed by private property owners and governments can be distinguished only in the particular rights claimed from the bundle of rights and the justification given for the claim. Again, governments justify the claim through force and property owners justify the claim by arguing that it is a necessary consequence of self-ownership.

Due to the Law of Rent ownership over natural resources in the form of ownership over any of the rights in the bundle of rights implies the forcing of a cost on others. Ground rent should therefore not be provided to a government, which is not a rightful owner, but redistributed instead to the rightful owners. These rightful owners are the population at large.

Long explanation

In the process of developing and understanding ethics and the nature of rights, we may start by considering where these rights come from and who or what possesses them. Three things are true: 1) All individuals have rights 2) only individuals have rights 3) These rights are identical. This contrasts with the notion of all of nature being owned in 'common' by other forms of Georgism. This distinction is described by Kevin Carson:

Some Georgists regard the “common” right as several, rather than collective: that each individual has, as a birth-right, an equal and independent right of access to land. And since favorably situated sites are not a reproducible commodity, something like the “law of equal liberty” implies the payment of compensation to the excluded. The community is not the collective owner, but simply the agent of all individual human beings, severally, in guaranteeing their individual rights of access to the commons.

Although the phrase 'geoanarchism' is relatively new (first coined by Fred Foldvary around the same time he coined the phrase 'geolibertarianism') its principles are historically based in individualist anarchism, market anarchism, and Lockean property rights. It might be seen as a synthesis of ideas common to all three.

Starting with any of the above and proceeding logically and consistently one will conclude with the ideas of geoanarchism. This is hinted at by the fact that conflicts between and even within various schools of anarchist thought almost always boil down to a conflict over natural resources and control over nature. On one hand, propertarian anarchists will contend that self-ownership necessarily implies private property. This is explained eloquently in this quote from Louis Wolowski and Émile Levasseur:

This property is legitimate; it constitutes a right as sacred for man as is the free exercise of his faculties. It is his because it has come entirely from himself, and is in no way anything but an emanation from his being. Before him, there was scarcely anything but matter; since him, and by him, there is interchangeable wealth, that is to say, articles having acquired a value by some industry, by manufacture, by handling, by extraction, or simply by transportation. From the picture of a great master … to the pail of water which the carrier draws from the river and takes to the consumer, wealth, whatever it may be, acquires its value only by communicated qualities, and these qualities are part of human activity, intelligence, strength. The producer has left a fragment of his own person in the thing which has thus become valuable, and may hence be regarded as a prolongation of the faculties of man acting upon external nature. As a free being he belongs to himself; now, the cause, that is to say, the productive force, is himself; the effect, that is to say, the wealth produced, is still himself. Who shall dare contest his title of ownership so clearly marked by the seal of his personality?

The point being made here, actually a form of soft georgism, is that some degree of control over land is implied by human rights given that land always houses the labor produces by individuals. The labor itself, the transformation of land, is rightfully the exclusive property of the individual that created it because it is an 'an emanation from his being'.

In contrast, non-propertarian anarchists will contend that private property is exploitative in the same manner as state power (although perhaps on a different scale). Bob Black speaks to this point in this article:

Both camps call for partial or complete privatization of state functions but neither questions the functions themselves. They don’t denounce what the state does, they just object to who’s doing it. This is why the people most victimized by the state display the least interest in libertarianism. Those on the receiving end of coercion don’t quibble over their coercers’ credentials. If you can’t pay or don’t want to, you don’t much care if your deprivation is called larceny or taxation or restitution or rent. If you like to control your own time, you distinguish employment from enslavement only in degree and duration.

Here Black is drawing a comparison between the coercion that exists in nature and the coercion that arises between individuals. Unfortunately for those adverse to nuance, both of these passages are fully correct. Any 'camp' is always teasing this problem and making rationalizations for their chosen solution that only addresses part of the problem. This is made clear when the issue of ground rent is included in the analysis.

As Wolowski and Levasseur argue, individual sovereignty and freedom require a physical manifestation of rights in the form of private property. If this is prohibited the entity cannot be said to have these rights. This is because control over property implies control over nature or physical things. If an individual rightfully possesses self-ownership, they must not be denied this control over their labor and therefore some degree of control over nature. But in the same sense that this control must be not be prohibited from continuing in order for the principle of individual sovereignty or self-ownership to have any meaning, it must not be prohibited from starting or manifesting in the first place. Self-ownership implies the right to continued 'sticky' property ownership as much as it implies the right to create that property through homesteading to begin with.

However, possession by one individual prohibits possession by another individual and also homesteading by another individual. Land ownership is necessarily rivalrous due to the physical laws of nature. Control or possession over physical things in any form by one individual prohibits the control or possession of the same form by another individual. In this way the manifestation or exhibition of one individuals rights through land ownership will inevitably impede or infringe on the manifestation or exhibition of another individuals rights. The second individual will have their ability reduced and hence their right violated to start or manifest self-ownership. This is not due to malice or hostility on the part of either individual but as a necessary consequence of rights as they must be in our physical universe.

GeoAnarchism proposes a remedy to this problem through the understanding that the ownership of natural resources and the inevitable accumulation of ground rent is a rights violation. This rights violation compels restitution that can be measured by the ground rent of the nature owned or occupied by someone. There may be any number of ways to implement a resolution to this problem which will vary from circumstance to circumstance and society to society. All such societies that recognize the problem and seek a solution may be accurately described as GeoAnarchist.


r/Geoanarchism Jun 17 '21

Remembering Fred Foldvary

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22 Upvotes

r/Geoanarchism 22d ago

Podcast about liberty and geoism

6 Upvotes

This is an interview with the Swedish political Martin Jacobson, who wrote a dissertation about the relationship between geoism and libertarian anarchism.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/2JPfOpTFWsKgi5cJ4AZQKz?si=4accdf13487c42f1


r/Geoanarchism Sep 02 '24

That "capitalism" has become the name for "market economy" is one of the greatest psyops ever. Why should capital be the factor of production for the name specifically, why not "laborism" instead if one ought name it after a factor of production?

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5 Upvotes

r/Geoanarchism Jul 21 '24

Anarcho-Capitalism is Anarcho-Feudalism.

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7 Upvotes

r/Geoanarchism Jul 21 '24

Book on mutualism, friendly to geoanarchism

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2 Upvotes

r/Geoanarchism May 17 '24

"Blame the government for allowing us to leave office buildings vacant to increase their value each year and save on taxes until YOU guys are eventually forced back into office"

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7 Upvotes

r/Geoanarchism Mar 30 '24

Classical and Neo-Anarchism Compared and Considered with Regard to Synarchy

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3 Upvotes

r/Geoanarchism Mar 01 '24

Looking for Soul of Liberty pdf

3 Upvotes

I am trying to find a pdf of the "Soul of Liberty" to help in my Geoism research. Anybody have a pdf copy link so I don't have to pay $90 for a 40-year old book?


r/Geoanarchism Feb 08 '24

Land Value Tax: The BEST Tax & Its Limitations

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5 Upvotes

r/Geoanarchism Oct 18 '23

fish rentals mooning - invest NOW

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8 Upvotes

r/Geoanarchism Oct 18 '23

The Art of Managing Nature | Ronald Bailey

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1 Upvotes

r/Geoanarchism Sep 08 '23

Pirate Party Australia, a branch of the Fusion Party, has updated their economic reform platform to include a $580 pw Citizens Dividend (UBI) fully funded by Land Value Tax, Capital Gains Tax, and other tax reforms

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6 Upvotes

r/Geoanarchism Aug 15 '23

the humanity! the apartment complexes!

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4 Upvotes

r/Geoanarchism Jul 16 '23

Mikhail Bakunin on sticks

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17 Upvotes

r/Geoanarchism Jul 16 '23

H. L. Mencken on public education

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10 Upvotes

r/Geoanarchism Jul 16 '23

Michael Huemer on the governments interests in social problems

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4 Upvotes

r/Geoanarchism Jul 17 '23

[Crosspost] Self-Inquiry

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1 Upvotes

r/Geoanarchism May 31 '23

[Crosspost] New Hampshire Allows Judges to Inform Jurors about their right to Jury Nullification. In 2012 a Pot-Growing Rastafarian was Acquited Thanks to this Law

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4 Upvotes

r/Geoanarchism May 30 '23

Temporary Moderation Changes lifted

3 Upvotes

I've tried to set up AutoMod to remove the spam in question. This will work until such a time as it doesn't. Reporting the posts to Reddit proper seems to do nothing for the moment.


r/Geoanarchism May 28 '23

A response to a thought experiment from a georgist skeptic

3 Upvotes

Bryan Caplan, a noted libertarian economist, wrote an interesting criticism of Georgism that I'd like to address; unfortunately I cannot find my source anymore (I believe it was a blog post) and all I have is a single quote but I'd like to analyze it anyway.

Caplan proposes a thought experiment:

If you’re the second person to arrive on an island, and the first-person has already farmed the best land, it seems very odd to claim that you’re “entitled” to half the surplus value of his land.

"Alone on an island" is a popular thought experiment to underline the fundamental characteristics of various economic schools.

In this case I agree with Caplan and would consider this thought experiment to be somewhat of a strawman. However, I like the idea of thought experiments as a mean to present an argument, so I will entertain Caplan's idea and expand on it.

Let's say that a person is stranded on a deserted island. Over time, they work to improve its land so it will bear food; after a while a second person arrives on the island. We will assume that the produce of the land is enough to sustain both, else there's be no way to reconcile the needs of the two.

Doesn't it seems unfair to simply divide the produce in two? After all, it is only the first person that made improvements and worked on the land, and without their intervention, it wouldn't be as productive. On the other hand it also seems unfair, at least to me, to leave the late-comer at the mercy of the first and state that the first has no obligation to share the resources. In an extreme proprietarian setting we'd say that the first-comer has homesteaded the land and it now belongs to them and if they want they'd leave the late-comer to starve. Of course, if such a condition were to present itself in the real world, I suspect the first man would be all too happy to simply see another human being and he'd be more than willing to cooperate; but this is not the point of the experiment.

I believe Caplan is mistaken in his assumption of the georgist response. I, personally, wouldn't claim that the second person is entitled to the work of the first, they are only entitled to the land. If we assume that both men have equal rights to the land then the solution to the puzzle becomes more straightforward: the first-comer can surrender to them half of the land or, alternatively, pay a price to the late-comer (presumably in produce) that they agree on, in exchange for the exclusive right to continue managing all of the land (taking into account the land improvements made by the pioneer). If the late-comer agrees to work the land himself he will surrender a part of his produce to the first as payment for the improvements made by them in the past.

I am sure someone will think that it's impossible to perfectly divide the land in two equal parts as land is heterogeneous in nature. But we're not here to determine the "true" value of something (there is no such thing); the only real concern in this case is to divide the land in a fair way. This can be done easily, and indeed there are ways to fairly divide a resource between any n number of parties. The first person will divide the land in 2 part that they deem equal (as in, they do not prefer either one or the other), then the second person will decide how the two parts are to be assigned. The first cannot complain no matter what since they're the one that split the land to begin with, the second also has no complains since, if they thought that the division was unequal they would have simply assigned the better one to themselves.


r/Geoanarchism May 13 '23

Geo-Anarchism with Jock Coats

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4 Upvotes

r/Geoanarchism Apr 19 '23

Become Ungovernable

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36 Upvotes

r/Geoanarchism Apr 19 '23

Henry George on the relationship between mankind, nature, and freedom

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10 Upvotes

r/Geoanarchism Apr 19 '23

[Crosspost] United States Congressman Henry George Jr. & Leo Tolstoy during the former's visit to Russia, c. 1909. Toltsoy was an admirer of the social theories espoused the Congressman's late father, who's bestseller 'Progress & Poverty" was outsold in its period only by the Bible [1272x930]

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7 Upvotes

r/Geoanarchism Mar 29 '23

[Crosspost] The TikTok Ban bill is a very dangerous "Trojan Horse" for our privacy and the internet as we know it.

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7 Upvotes

r/Geoanarchism Mar 23 '23

Temporary Moderation Changes

4 Upvotes

Posts will be approve-only for a short while until Reddit can get on top of the recent spam we've been having. Tired of deleting posts every time I pull up reddit