Stateless Social Democracy

The Theory of Liberal-Anarchism

Liberal-Anarchism (generated using AI)

My philosophy of liberal-anarchism (or libertarian social democracy) consists of three insights: (1) communalist market-anarchism, the insight that social-anarchism and market-anarchism together are better than either of them are on their own — and this is particularly so with regard to the provision of law and law enforcement, (2) social-democratic anarchism, the insight that real-world anarchist municipalities (communes) are likely to develop liberal or social-democratic type institutions rather than communistic or capitalistic ones, and (3) dialectical libertarianism, the insight that what matters most in analyzing any policy is not whether or not it is formally libertarian but whether, within the context of the existing system, it tends to increase or decrease liberty — and, following from that insight, that policies that create within the existing system certain desirable features that resemble those that would arise naturally in a free society are to be preferred to “formally libertarian” policies that effectively take us further away from the ideal free (anarchist) society of our dreams.

Communalist Market-Anarchism

As I argued in Policing in a Stateless Society, the communalist (social-anarchist) and market-anarchist solutions to security in a stateless society ought not to be regarded as mutually exclusive. By combining these two philosophies, we can arrive at a more feasible and robust solution to the problem of maintaining peace and order in a stateless society.

The communalist’s or social anarchist’s “long-term goal is to replace the State by a federation of self-managing communes.”(Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism, Ch. 40) The communalist wants to pursue what Murray Bookchin called “libertarian municipalism,” and establish face-to-face democracy at the local level, and then federate libertarian municipalities into a democratic confederation.

“And in the Athenian polis, Bookchin finds a radiant example of direct, face-to-face democracy, especially in the ecclesia of the Periclean period where all the citizens met as a whole to make policy and chose administrators by lot and disputes were solved by popular juries….
“In practical terms, Bookchin suggests that his ‘ecotopia’ would be made up of a confederation of self-governing communes. Each commune would govern itself through a form of direct democracy. Like the Greek polis, it would be a face-to-face democracy without representation or delegated authority. Administrative tasks might be rotated but fundamental policies would be made in popular assemblies open to all.”(Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism, Ch. 39)

The local community would create “a civic guard, composed of rotating patrols for police purposes.”(Murray Bookchin, Libertarian Municipalism: The New Municipal Agenda) Through the confederation, local municipalities could cooperate with other municipalities on matters relating to police investigations and the apprehension of criminals. The community could then establish courts and a process of trial by jury.

The market-anarchist, on the other hand, is insistent that no one organization ought to have a monopoly on security in a stateless society. Instead, people should be free to purchase, on the free market, security services and to insure their persons and property against theft and aggression. What emerges is a system of competing private police services. People insure their persons and property against theft and aggression, then, if they are robbed or harmed, the private police company will pay out on a claim for damages. The company then has an incentive to investigate and solve the crime so that they can apprehend the criminal and force him to pay reparations for the damage he has caused.

The beauty of this market-anarchist system is that its focus is restorative justice rather than retributive justice. The private police have no incentive to punish criminals for punishment’s sake. Their incentive is to protect their customers from crime and, when they fail to do this, find and force the criminal to make restitution for their crimes. No one would be sent to prison simply for the sake of punishment. The police would, instead, make the criminal pay for his crimes by having him pay for his crimes! The criminal must monetarily compensate the victim of the crime. (Or, more often, the criminal must compensate the private police company that has already paid the victim by way of an insurance claim.) In most cases, after adjudication through communal courts or private arbitration services, the company would force the criminal to pay reparations for his crimes and, if necessary, set up a payment plan so that he could continue to engage in productive labor and work off his debt. Only in the most extreme cases, where the criminal is expected to run or refuse to cooperate, would the market-anarchist system resort to confinement. And those in confinement would be literally working off their debt, not being imprisoned as punishment for being bad.

In a market-anarchist society, private arbitration services would function as the primary mechanism for resolving disputes, replacing the role of state courts. These services would be offered by private firms — akin to how mediation or international arbitration works today — contracted voluntarily by parties in conflict. Individuals, businesses, and communities would subscribe to arbitration agencies or legal networks that align with their values and offer fair, efficient, and enforceable rulings. When disputes arise, the parties would either agree on a common arbitrator or rely on their respective police agencies to negotiate a mutually recognized third-party arbitrator. Crucially, these agencies would have a strong market incentive to maintain impartiality, competence, and procedural transparency to remain reputable and competitive. Over time, as arbitrators build up case law, precedents would begin to form, and customary legal principles would coalesce — much like the evolution of common law. Since arbitration rulings depend on the consent and expectations of the governed, so legal norms would reflect the lived preferences of the society rather than the decrees of a central authority. Networks of arbitration firms would likely form mutual recognition pacts — similar to how insurance or telecom providers establish roaming agreements — creating interoperability and predictability across different regions and jurisdictions. In this way, law becomes a bottom-up phenomenon: an emergent, evolving product of voluntary association and practical dispute resolution.

The social-anarchist and market-anarchist solutions are usually regarded as separate and incompatible solutions to the problem of security in a stateless society. I think the philosophy of voluntaryism can bring these two ideals together. The voluntaryists propose voluntary government, but this means that the government is restricted to getting all of its revenue through voluntary contributions, either in the form of donations or of payments for goods and services offered. Furthermore, the voluntaryists would not grant this government any legal monopoly. In other words, private companies would be free to compete against any services it offered. The “government” may offer any number of goods and services — postal services, identity verification, policing — but it would not be allowed to prohibit competition. It would be permitted for private companies to compete against the “government” in the provision of any goods and services it might provide.

If we conceive of this voluntaryist “government” as a face-to-face democracy in the libertarian municipalist sense, then it becomes apparent that the social-anarchist and market-anarchist visions are not mutually exclusive. The community could organize democratically at the local level and provide some basic amount of policing and arbitration services, while the citizens would also reserve the right to purchase supplemental insurance/security from private companies. The municipal police would not be granted a legal monopoly — private competitors would emerge. But why would anyone purchase supplemental insurance/security? Because it offers more than the alternative. The private police insure your person and property against crime, paying for damages via insurance claims — the emphasis is on restitution. If you become victim to a crime, the communal police may go after the criminal but they won’t pay you restitution in the meantime — i.e. they don’t replace your stolen TV unless/until they catch the criminal. At the same time, the communal police and courts offer vital services free of charge. The private police would only assist paying customers, whereas the communal services are free to all — even someone who does not pay for private police (due to poverty or personal preferences) will be protected by the communal police. And so the combination of these two systems creates a far more robust, just, and desirable system.

Bernie Sanders Shaking Hands With An Anarchist (generated using AI)

Social-Democratic Anarchism

The second central insight of liberal-anarchism is the recognition that real-world anarchist communities would likely develop more liberal and social-democratic institutions rather than communistic and capitalistic ones. The areas controlled by the anarchists during the Spanish Civil War abandoned the government money system but they did not abolish money — the collectives issued their own alternative currencies in the form of labor notes, coupons, and credits. They also created a system of universal healthcare, on a social insurance basis, with wages as remuneration for doctors’ labor. At least in some cases, the collectives collected rent. In the intentional communities of Arden, Ardentown, and Ardencroft, the community collects ground-rent and uses the revenue for public purposes. It’s conceivable that many anarchist communities, viewing land as collective property, would charge rent for exclusive access to pieces of land. It is also conceivable that said communities would share the revenue (from rent) as a social dividend, in which case they would effectively have a land value tax and universal basic income. The guilds of medieval times can also be looked at as examples of what free workers’ organizations might do. The guilds provided job training, education, and unemployment insurance to their members. In more recent times, fraternal societies (the last remnant of the ancient guilds) provided healthcare to their members via lodge practices. Taken together, these examples suggest that real-world anarchist communities will tend to develop institutions that are liberal and social-democratic in nature, often featuring market systems and social insurance schemes.

Dialectical Libertarianism

Dialectical libertarianism proposes a method of dialectical context-keeping. To determine whether a particular policy is libertarian or not, we must look at the context in which it is to be implemented. Suppose that a government engages in price fixing. In the abstract, this is an anti-libertarian policy. But suppose, however, that the government has previously granted some company a legal monopoly and that the price fixing is simply setting a limit to monopoly pricing. In this case, the policy is actually relatively libertarian. Another instance might be anti-trust laws. Trust busting is formally anti-libertarian, as it is a government intervention into the free market. However, if monopolies exist because of government privilege (e.g. intellectual property, regulatory capture), then antitrust action to break up those monopolies may actually restore market competition to something more comparable to what might be expected under free-market conditions. In this case, the anti-trust law might be functionally libertarian. Or, suppose that the government makes it difficult (or impossible) for individuals to sue corporations for polluting the air. In this case, an emissions tax that charges corporations for polluting might actually be functionally libertarian, simply imposing the same costs on the company as would be imposed on them by lawsuits in a truly free society.

Using a dialectical libertarian framework, we can examine what kinds of institutions and conditions would exist in an ideal libertarian (or anarchist) society and then use this as a reference point from which to analyze policies to be implemented in an actually existing society. If we look at our ideal free society, we see that healthcare would be free (or, at least, very affordable) to all. The current system restricts competition in several ways: it makes direct primary care difficult, limits the number of doctors, requires physicians to perform tasks that nurse practitioners could handle safely, and grants pharmaceutical companies monopolies on drugs that were developed using tax-payer money, etc. Within this context, a reform like Universal Catastrophic Coverage, which would prevent anyone from being deprived of access to healthcare, might actually be viewed as relatively libertarian. In a truly free society, healthcare would be affordable! Insofar as government grants privileges to certain groups that result in prices becoming excessively high, it has a moral obligation to do something to keep costs down. Additionally, a policy of government negotiating pharmaceutical prices and limiting what companies can charge may also be functionally libertarian. In the abstract, it is anti-libertarian for government to get involved. But, in the real world, limits on privileges granted by the state are relatively libertarian.

When you look at government interventions, you must distinguish primary interventions from secondary interventions. The granting of a legal monopoly to some corporation is a primary intervention, whereas the price fixing that limits the extent of monopoly pricing is a secondary intervention. As a general rule, a dialectical libertarian does not seek to abolish helpful secondary interventions without first undoing the primary intervention. And, insofar as we are not in a position to abolish some primary interventions, a dialectical libertarian would wish to preserve ameliorative secondary interventions. And, supposing that some intervention takes place that has negative consequences, a dialectical libertarian (assuming we cannot feasibly overturn said intervention) may even support the creation of some ameliorative secondary intervention.

P.S.

I think it’s worth noting that some of the historical examples cited in support of “private police” actually come closer to the mixed communal market-anarchist system I propose than to the pure private police system envisioned by market-anarchists. Often cited in defense of the market-anarchist vision are examples from early Medieval times in Anglo-Saxon England, Ireland, and Iceland, where the provision of law and law enforcement was not provided by government.

If you look at the Anglo-Saxon example, you find that the policing was done by the community in a more communalist fashion rather than by private corporations. There were also private police who were hired by merchants to patrol certain areas but most policing was done by voluntary groups from the local community — i.e. not done by for-profit corporations. And, it’s also worth noting, that these communal systems of policing focused on restitution rather than punishment. Thus, the Anglo-Saxon case is actually an example of a system that combined both market and communal solutions.

The case of Ireland under the Brehon Code is a very similar story. Law enforcement wasn’t strictly a private matter but relied on complex social arrangements. Like the Anglo-Saxon example, the emphasis was on restitution (making the criminal compensate his victim) rather than punishment. But the brehons were essentially private arbiters voluntarily chosen for neutral arbitration and they were paid for their services.

The case of law in the Free Commonwealth of Iceland also has a few notable features. First, the laws were created via consensus. The judges were freely chosen, as arbiters, by the disputing parties. Like in the case of Ireland, laws were generally enforced by kin groups rather than by public police. However, the wealthy sometimes did rely on hired enforcement. So, again, an example of a mixed system with elements of both private and communal law enforcement.

Another example of a private law system is the “Law Merchant” of Early Medieval times. This was a system of international law that governed commerce and trade but was not the product of any state. Disputes were resolved through voluntary arbitration in merchant courts, with judges chosen from among the trusted merchants of the community. The law was based on custom rather than legislation, with an emphasis on property rights and contract enforcement. Companies or merchants that refused to abide by a court’s ruling would be blacklisted by the guilds and other merchants, making it impossible for them to continue doing business. There were no police — public or private — to enforce the rules.

For more information about these historical cases, see Anarchy and the Law: The Political Economy of Choice, edited by Edward P. Stringham.