The Leader of the Levellers
"If the world were emptied of all but John Lilburne, Lilburne would quarrel with John, and John with Lilburne." -- Harry Martin, fellow Leveller
In ancapistan, if you have no property, you have no rights
Ancaps often declare, "All rights are property rights." I was thinking about this the other day, in the context of running into libertarians online who insisted that libertarianism supports "the freedom of movement," and realized that this principle actually entails that people without property have no rights at all, let alone any right to "freedom of movement." Of course, immediately, any ancap readers still left here are going to say, "Wait a second! Everyone owns his own body! And so everyone at least has the right to not have his body interfered with." Well, that is true... except that in ancapistan, one has no right to any place to put that body, except if one owns property, or has the permission of at least one property owner to place that body on her land. So, if one is landless and penniless, one had sure better hope that there are kindly disposed property owners aligned in a corridor from wherever one happens to be to wherever the...
The radicalism of some factions of the English Civil War has been wrongly forgotten. The first nation to execute its king was not France but England. The Diggers and Levellers of 17th century England were the first ideological movements to make a systematic critique of the distribution of income and wealth.
ReplyDeleteThe Diggers and Levellers were important precursors of the populist radicalism that emerged in reaction to the Industrial Revolution. They were precursors of the hippies of the 1960s, of Michael Moore, and of the Occupy movement.
I think the Diggers and Levellers did a good job of distilling the discontents of their time, of the last century, and since 2008, of our time. Face it, people, just how many of our fellow humans, especially in the English speaking world, can get our heads around the intellectual edifice and sonorous prose of Karl Marx and his ilk? Many dutifully voted for Marxist and social democratic parties, not because they truly believed in their ideology, but because they were decently organised and well-funded. In their heart of hearts, such people thought like Lilburne and Winstanley, and saw Marxism or social democracy mainly as a pragmatic way of attaining Digger and Leveller objectives.