“Tell me what a man finds sexually attractive and I will tell you his entire philosophy of life.”
–Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
“He seized her shoulders, and she felt prepared to accept that he would now kill her or beat her into unconsciousness…
He did it as an act of scorn. Not as love, but as defilement…
‘I’ve been raped…I’ve been raped by some redheaded hoodlum from a stone quarry…’ Through the fierce sense of humiliation, the words gave her the same kind of pleasure she had felt in his arms.”
–Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead
Hmmm…interesting. Food for thought, don’t you think? Anyway…
Recently a quote has been unearthed by our favorite anarcho-capitalist contrarian Walter Block. The meat of it goes something like this:
“…the fact is that the pinching that takes place between a secretary and her boss, while objectionable to many women, is not a coercive action. It is not a coercive action like the pinching that takes place in the public sphere because it is part of a package deal: the secretary agrees to all aspects of the job when she agrees to accept the job and especially when she agrees to keep the job.”
Well, this is obviously insane, but I’m not going to focus on that per se. This guy is sort of the Ann Coulter of the ancap movement: he says a lot of things that are intentionally provocative and actually end up inadvertently demonstrating the bankruptcy of the entire ideology, by taking it to its logical conclusion. [update: apparently he has withdrawn this particular statement. well, that's irrelevant; this isn't intended to be a witch hunt, but an opportunity to examine some of the premises that led to this sort of statement, which are very much alive and well in this line of thinking.] I think I know on what basis this scenario is likely to be criticized, so what I want to do is to examine why the problems in this way of thinking go deeper than that, and why we are not going to be able to avoid this kind of nonsense until we uproot the authoritarian myths that constitute capitalist apologetics.
1. The “package-deal”
Let’s say I have a house. In a free society, would I be able to make some sort of demand such as: “everyone who comes in my house must take off all their clothes!” Well, the answer is yes, because you don’t have to allow people into your house in the first place. So by restricting the conditions on which one can come in your house, you’re not taking away from a right that already exists, but actually granting a right that did not previously exist. (Not because the space within which your house rests is your dominion, mind you, but because for people to intrude in your living space would violate your basic privacy. In this particular situation the difference becomes meaningless.) And of course there are certain exceptions, like if someone had to come in for an emergency, chances are the people around you would not much respect your ability to enforce this “rule”, and so it would have no authority.
OK. But now let’s say that I occasionally make this demand of people, but not always. And let’s say I invite you over to dinner, and in the middle of dinner I suddenly demand that you respect this rule of mine. Is it reasonable that you respect it?…No. In theory you would have to leave the house (since you were only in by invitation in the first place) but in practice it is more likely that, although you’d be likely to simply leave in disgust, you might on the other hand stay until the end of dinner as you would have originally, without obeying the command, and other people would not be willing to enforce my eviction of you if they knew the situation, so I would have no means of getting rid of you other than physically pushing you out. So it would just end up making me look rather silly. A more clear example of this situation is when a boat-owner takes people out into a lake. Can he throw them out if he decides he doesn’t want them on his property? Obviously not.
So the most basic critique of Walter Block’s statement is that sexual harassment can hardly be considered to be part of a “package-deal” to work somewhere — unless it was explicitly part of the work description — um, yay? No more than being thrown into the ocean is part of a “package-deal” of being invited onto somebody’s boat, or having to strip naked is part of a package-deal of being invited to someone’s house, or anything like that. As such, it would be aggression, plain and simple. This is probably the critique that most left-libertarians will make.
2. (yawn) Use-property vs. Exchange-property
But I want to go further than this. Implicit in the argument I have given above is that coming to work in an office is the same type of situation as coming to someone’s house for dinner. But the point of my last essay was to show that it is not. Let’s go over the reasons:
Dominion, such as one has over one’s own living-space, is always a secondary expression of property in one’s labor. In other words, it descends from the right to apply one’s labor, but is not the primary form of it, and is always (in an anarchy) construed such that nobody has dominion over another — thus, to the extent that anyone would have dominion over anything, it would be those who are using it. Now. Let’s be as generous as possible to our hypothetical boss and assume that the boss is one of a group of laborers who either built the office themselves or purchased it with labor-based income only–i.e. a mutualist setup. Let’s assume that they built it themselves, for the sake of simplicity — it doesn’t really matter in the final analysis. What does this entitle them to? Well, as I tried to establish before, having built it they can either go on to use it, or they can sell it. They can’t sell the right to dominion over the space where the office is because that isn’t theirs to give; what they are selling is their labor — that is, someone would pay them to get them to make the office.
Once those who have built it have gotten whatever they can for their labor, then it is use that determines “ownership” over this office. This could resolve into several different scenarios. Most likely the people who were building it would either continue to use it themselves or they would have been paid in advance, in which case they would then leave and the people who had paid them would then move in and use it, with the definition of abandonment to be determined by the specific situation at hand. Another possibility would be that they would continue to work there and sell “shares” (ugh) of ownership and this is how they would be paid for the work they had done, complementing the returns from the productivity of the office when they themselves are working in it. Buying a share would be paying them for the work they did in buying/building the equivalent parcel of capital; hence, to do so would mean that the new worker would keep the surplus value of her own labor henceforth.
This is the situation that the secretary would be presented with, in a free society. The office is not at all like someone’s house where they can set the rules — it is an association of laborers. So the “property” that the “boss” would have that the secretary wouldn’t have would be represented by the work previously done that he is trying to get compensated for (i.e. sell) — which is an abstraction. It’s physical only in that it means the secretary wouldn’t be able to smash the office (well, actually…see point #3) but would have zero bearing on whether the secretary (or anyone else, for that matter) could be there, and certainly on whether the “boss” would have dominion over the secretary. In other words, it is not property as dominion — it is not the same thing as owning a house. The extent of the “dominion” the workers would have over their office would be limited by the specific facts, most importantly the number of people working there. Since the right of workers to have control over their workplace is the daughter, not the mother, of the right to the fruit of their labor — which is universal — it doesn’t make any sense to say that this right could be construed such as to control one of the people who is also working there! So in that case, taking in new people to the office would work like this: there would be an “entrance fee” which would represent paying the people who had built the office for the work done in getting that parcel of capital ready to use — it would not represent permission to enter the office, which isn’t anyone’s to give. Then, the secretary having paid off the labor embedded in the capital (or having arranged to), use would determine ownership, so she would have total control over her own working conditions, all surplus value she creates would belong to her, and she would co-manage the place just as much as anyone else — and so it goes without saying that pinching her butt would be seen as aggression, just as much as pinching the “boss’s” butt would be.
Capitalist political economy, which has as its aim the mystification and preservation of authoritarian social relations, does so with a Robinson Crusoe-esque mythology that presents finding a job as the same type of thing as being invited into somebody’s home or backyard. If this assumption is preserved, then arguing against the authoritarian bullshit that inevitably follows will be a losing battle. It’s like trying to argue against the excesses of the U.S. government but insisting that it is essentially legitimate. So it is this very assumption that needs to be uprooted. The purpose of an office is not a place to have dominion over except insofar as that enables the workers to work unhindered; it is as an association of laborers who have come together to do some task, and each be rewarded for their work done. Why exactly should the laborers who “get there first” have any sort of dominion over later ones (assuming that were even a remotely accurate description of capitalism, when it’s really just part of the mythology)?
“But can they prevent the secretary from coming in?” is probably the question that will be used to rebut this. It’s like this: they can prevent the secretary from using the office without paying if they have chosen selling-to-users as the method by which they will be compensated for building the office; not because they can prevent her from entering it, but because they still need to find a buyer, and if she started working there without agreeing to pay for the capital, that would prevent them from doing that, and thus would constitute a sort of robbery. And if there is a different way they are being compensated (which I think is more likely) then the situation would either resolve into one very much like this or they wouldn’t be able to prevent the secretary from coming in and working there — if, say, the office had been funded by a community assembly of people who want it to exist.
As a final, and somewhat related note, it is circular reasoning to say that the “boss” owns the materials the secretary works with, because he buys them. Well, yes, because he steals the income of the secretary…which is what is being justified in the first place! Even if he owned them at first, how would he be able to prevent the secretary from buying the tools of production directly from the producers if they didn’t recognize her productivity as being bestowed by him in the first place?
3. The Real World
This whole sort of situation would only be happening anyway if a group of people build an office from scratch after an anarchistic revolution. Then it won’t matter much — probably a lot of offbeat things will be happening, somewhere or another. Getting back to the real world and to NOW, we have to understand civilization, not as a gift given to us by a handful of benevolent princelings nor by some well-placed groups of workers, but as the common inheritance of all humanity — not so much due to some divine communist mandate as to the specific social conditions which have brought us to this point (i.e. if for the last few thousand years we had had benevolent small-scale market socialism, it wouldn’t be necessary to make this claim). It’s unlikely there will be secretaries or bosses — just people. And the majority of offices that exist now — those that won’t be burned up, anyway — you won’t have to ask the permission of those already there to start working there. Period, end of story. So it’s all pretty much a moot point.
