Arundel Lease: Fill & Download for Free

“Were”? They are still incredibly significant to the local economy. Their power over local residents is huge.Have a look at the quiet village of Cranborne, in rural Dorset. Reasonably prosperous in comparison to many declining villages; shop/Post Office, primary & middle school, couple of pubs, a vet, couple of restaurants…Can you spot the common factor in all these photos of the village?:The blue: if a property in the area has that colour blue on its gates, door, or signage, then it is owned by the Cecil family. They own half the village, including most of the local businesses. They even own the land used for telecommunications and power substations, leased to the utility companies. They own 7,000 acres of farm and woodland around the village.A significant proportion of the villagers live their lives dependent on the goodwill of the estate. They work on the farms, or in the shop and garden centre, living in houses rented from the estate. If you get on the wrong side of the estate’s representatives, your life can be made very uncomfortable. Knowing that you have fallen out of favour would also likely leave you ostracised by other residents (they’re keen to show their fealty, given the power of the estate over their lives too).The estate also has huge intangible power over their lives, granted only by tradition and deference; for example, before a vicar is appointed to the local church, they are interviewed and approved by the Cecils. When the Cecils are in residence, the church service time on a Sunday is moved for their convenience.When they’re in residence? Well yes, because the Cecils don’t live in Cranborne Manor (here’s a picture):No, Cranborne Manor is their second country house - the family home is actually Hatfield House, north of London and 120 miles away:Hatfield is their big estate, with many thousands more acres around it. There’s also the nearby town of Hatfield itself, and look what you find on a quick tour of its streets?Blue doors - on old property, new developments, commercial buildings…The Estates seem less powerful now, but they’re just more discreet (and indeed more subtle in their ownership, a lot of which has divested into trusts and offshore companies that protect the owners from taxation). You wouldn’t notice them if you came to visit, but if you live there (and especially if you work there) then you quickly come to realise the power the estates still hold over locals’ lives.The Cecils are just one family - within a few miles of Cranborne there are other vast estates: Shaftesbury, Arundel, WIlton, Charborough, Lulworth…Here are a couple of relevant articles:The ten landowners who own one-sixth of DorsetTelling an estate by its colours - Country Life

Three views of the Priory of St John of Jerusalem in Clerkenwell by Wenceslaus Hollar (1661):Clerkenwell Priory: “was a priory of the Monastic Order of the Knights Hospitallers of St John of Jerusalem, in Clerkenwell, London. Run according to the Augustinian rule, it was the residence of the Hospitallers' Grand Prior in England, and was thus their English headquarters.”But not a priory in the time of Bacon: “However, the order was once again sent back to Malta on the accession of Elizabeth. During her reign her Master of the Revels, Edmund Tylney, stayed in the Priory buildings, as did all his tailors, embroiderers, painters, carpenters, and the stage crews for court plays and masques - the great hall of the complex was used for rehearsals.”Francis Bacon was born “at York House near the Strand in London”. Later in life, he moved abroad and on return “he took up his residence in law at Gray's Inn in 1579,[11]” He “died of pneumonia while at Arundel mansion at Highgate outside London.[58]” York Water Gate and the Adelphi from the River by Moonlight, by Henry Pether, circa 1850:Occult theories about Francis Bacon: “Francis Bacon often gathered with the men at Gray's Inn to discuss politics and philosophy, and to try out various theatrical scenes that he admitted writing.[1]”i. In 1618 Francis Bacon decided to secure a lease for York House. This had been his boyhood home in London next to the Queen's York Place before the Bacon family had moved to Gorhambury in the countryside. After Lord Egerton (Lord Keeper of the Great Seal of England) died, it became available for Bacon to lease. During the next four years this mansion on the Strand (so large that it had 40 fireplaces) served as the home for Francis and Alice Bacon.ii.Over the next four years Bacon would host banquets at York House that were attended by the leading men of the time, including poets, scholars, authors, scientists, lawyers, diplomats, and foreign dignitaries. Within the banquet hall, Francis gathered the greatest leaders in literature, art, law, education, and social reform. On 22 January 1621 in honour of Sir Francis Bacon's sixtieth birthday, a select group of men assembled in the large banquet hall in York House without fanfare for what has been described as a Masonic banquet.[6] This banquet was to pay tribute to Sir Francis Bacon.So no need to place him in the Priory, which was no longer a Priory.

There’s a lot of difference between these two ideologies. Before we get started, I should note that I’m an anarchist and won’t even pretend to be neutral on this topic. Also, because I’m very bored and because I have too much time on my hands, we’re going the long way around.I. The Origins of LiberalismIf we’re going to ask what “neoliberalism” is, we have to back things up a bit and ask: what’s liberalism? Well, for that, we may as well go back to the seventeenth century and talk to this guy:This is John Locke. Locke lived from 1632 to 1704 in England. One of the big questions Locke had was “well, what’s government for, anyway?” This was an important question in Locke’s day, because the previous accepted answer was “well, we have a government because the king is the Divinely appointed representative on earth, so we follow orders because the Almighty clearly wants us to.” This seemed rather less satisfying in the seventeenth century than it had in centuries past, to the point where, in 1642, Parliament decided it had had quite enough off taking orders, and started fighting the English Civil War with the king. This was an on-and-off conflict lasting until 1651, at which point the concept of kingship was thrown out along with Christmas.Parliament very much meant business here, going so far as to execute King Charles I of England, exile his son (Charles II), and set up the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland under the dictatorship of Oliver “Still Loathed with Good Reason in Ireland Today” Cromwell. So the Divine Right of Kings as an argument for the legitimacy of government took a bit of a hit here, because for over a decade, there wasn’t a king, let alone a king who was agreed to have any divine right to rule.In 1660, Cromwell snuffed it, and everyone decided that, considering he’d been very insistent that everyone follow his rather boring way of life, perhaps bringing back that whole kingship thing might be more exciting. And it was! This period of time is called “The Restoration,” because Charles II was restored to the throne he’d been unceremoniously booted off of, or at least, was booted off of being the heir to.But still, you had to wonder: this kinging thing people were doing. Why were they doing it? Why did their kinging about have any authority? Not everyone who tries to do some kinging has authority — Joshua Abraham Norton declared himself Emperor Norton I of the United States in 1859, and he was generally viewed as a joke. So, what of this kinging thing, anyway?John Locke was 17 years old when Parliament chopped off Charles I’s head, and made it to Oxford University three years later. Really, he couldn’t have been much better placed to think about these sorts of questions, to answer these sorts of questions, and also, to have people read whatever it was he was banging on about. But for our purposes, we’re going to skip ahead to 1689, when he published his Two Treatises on Government.The first of these treatises is essentially Locke doing the 1600’s equivalent of owning a rival political philosopher, Robert Filmer. Filmer was all about that divine right business, which he wrote about in a book called Patriarcha. The crux of Filmer’s argument was that Adam, the first man, had been given ownership over everything else, and therefore, this devolved to his heir. Locke argued that Filmer hadn’t done a very good job of reading Genesis, because Adam didn’t own other people, so there went that bit right out. Locke then went on to say that even if Filmer’s nonsense was a good reading of Genesis — and it super isn’t — then only Adam’s heir has any claim to what Adam had, and since we don’t know who Adam’s heir is, then obviously nobody has a legitimate claim and therefore, whoever is king clearly is getting listened to for other reasons.The second treatise is the one people today actually care about.So, in the second treatise, Locke starts talking about how things go when there isn’t a government. He calls this “the state of nature,” which is a bit of a reference to another philosopher, Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes was pretty sure that “the state of nature” was a pretty ugly state of affairs, where everyone does whatever the hell it is they feel is necessary to stay alive, which nobody does a particularly good job of, leading to a life that is, quoting Hobbes, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”Locke did not agree with this view, however. Locke noticed that there were, in fact, places where there wasn’t any real authority that didn’t break down into random fistfights and general lawlessness. For example, two children on a playdate are probably going to spend most of the time having fun together, and while there may be the occasional squabble, they’ll probably figure it out themselves.So then, why bother having governments at all? Well, there are those squabbles to consider. Wouldn’t it be very nice indeed if we all agreed to a set of rules and then also agreed to submit to some authority that would enforce those rules supposing one of us decided not to follow them? This is, in effect, what government is to Locke: the people what enforce the laws we’ve all agreed to (either directly through democracy or indirectly through agreeing to be ruled by the government in question), and the laws are to make sure that each of us hold onto our lives, our liberties, and our stuff, the last of which Locke used the word “estates” to describe. And if the government isn’t preserving our rights to life, liberty, and estate, boom, revolution time.This sounds familiar to you if you’re an American who paid any attention at all in history class from elementary school on, because it’s pretty much directly quoted in the US Declaration of Independence.So yeah, Thomas Jefferson and the rest of the drafting committee of the Declaration of Independence weren’t being particularly original, they were just ripping off texts from something like ninety years before. Also, yes, this means that all of the so-called Founding Fathers were liberal, as were their supporters in Parliament (which included Charles James Fox, leader of the Whigs, and to slightly more limited extent Edmund Burke, who is widely considered the philosophical founder of modern conservatism).II. The Right to EstateThis being said, having the rights to life, liberty, and estate protected and guaranteed means… well, it can mean a lot of different things. The American Revolution, for example, was indeed liberal in ideology, but it was also led by people who were very, very certain that there was no need to extend the rights of life, liberty, and estate to, for example, to black people. For that matter, we have to ask about what “estate” means, anyway.For example, when you think about the word “estate,” you might be thinking of something like this:This is Arundel Castle, located in the south of England, and the home of the Earls of Arundel (who, since the seventeenth century, have also been the Dukes of Norfolk). The castle has been kept in the family for over eight hundred years (supposing you count the d’Aubignys, the Fitzalans, and the Howards as one big happy family, which, that’s the point of marriage, ain’t it?) and it has its own Wikipedia page, which makes it a pretty friggin’ awesome estate. However, we might also discuss the landholdings of the Earls of Arundel as also being their estate.Those landholdings are significant. Arundel Castle is not their only castle, let alone their only home, and the Dukes of Norfolk own somewhere in the general vicinity of 46,000 acres (approximately 185 square kilometers) of land. The Earls of Arundel have pretty much always had significant landholdings, but what that has meant over the past millennium has changed dramatically.For example, in the early days of the Earldom, England was under a political and economic system called “feudalism.” Back in those days, English society lacked such things as mass literacy and modern accounting techniques, so the formation of a bureaucracy was pretty much impossible. Without having bureaucrats reporting back to a central government, having a powerful central government was difficult, if not impossible. Yes, you could do a massive survey of the territory of the land in the kingdom for tax purposes, but it was hideously expensive to do so and took a fantastic amount of effort. This is why such surveys that were made back then are famous today, most notably the Domesday Book — which itself was used for centuries after its compilation for reckoning taxes.So you’d end up in a situation where, for example, William the Conqueror suddenly had this large new territory to govern, but no ability to govern it himself. So he’d split it up into “fiefs” and hand the fiefs out to his friends with the understanding that they’d do the governing on those bits of land, in exchange for which, they’d provide him with armies and money when he needed it. Of course, the fiefs that William handed out were frequently themselves a trifle large to be governed, so they’d be split up by the people doing the governing, and so on down the line.Now, the lord was the law (with some degree of appeal generally possible) in his fief. Some of the land in the fief, the “desmesne” (it’s from an Old French word, you pronounce it mostly the same way you’d pronounce the word “domain,” just with a short ‘i’ on the first syllable and the emphasis on the second) was his farmland, where all the people legally bound to stay in place would work and from which he’d take all the produce. Some of the land, however, was not really his, but was instead “the common” — land that didn’t really belong to anyone, per se, but which was organized by everyone to provide enough food to keep everyone except the lord fed. But then again, it’s not like the little people would have been able to do very much if the lord had insisted upon organizing the common in his own fashion.So this leads to a situation where, yes, the entire fief is kinda sorta the property of the lord, but also bits of it are mostly not, at least from our modern understanding of the term “property.” And to be clear, medieval England was far from the only place to have radically different concepts of land ownership than what we’re used to these days: the Bible’s system of land ownership mostly doesn’t allow for sales as we’d understand them, just leases that last less than a decade.What I’m getting at here is that, yes, Locke was banging on about the rights to life, liberty, and estate, but that last point really leaves quite a bit of wiggle room as to what it actually means. Most obviously, in a country with a lot of common land — and at the time Locke was living, England was such a country — what do those rights of estate actually look like? Like, what are the property rights of the common?Hold onto this, we’ll get back to it.III. Classical LiberalismSo you might have noticed in the previous section that feudal economy looks rather different from what we’re generally used to now in North America, Europe, and much of the rest of the world. The people bound to the land (serfs) work the lord’s land as well as their own, everyone ends up with agricultural goods as a result. If the lord wants money, he can sell his surplus.Which, yeah, that works, but what if you’re a lord who just wants the cash?In the thirteenth century, England’s population boomed, which led to a general lack of need for serfdom — you don’t need to tie people to the land if there’s enough people walking about. This actually led to a large number of “yeoman” — farmers who were not tied to the land, who did not have to work the desmesne, and who owned their own strips of land. (They also still had access to the common.) This, combined with the turmoil of the fourteenth century (the time of what was then called “the Pestilence” and what is now called “the Black Death”) and the fifteenth century (war with France in addition to a series of civil wars now called “the Wars of the Roses”) blew the feudal system away, and we started seeing the idea of rent.See, it’s all very well and good to have other people work your land, but then what do you do if the harvest is bad or the market for whatever crop it is collapses? Wouldn’t it be better to have the cash in hand? And with all these people not bound to the land floating about England, why not make an arrangement with them that they’ll pay in cash, and then they can do all the farming, keep all the produce (selling whatever surplus they wish to), and we all win? So the age of feudalism gave way to the age of tenant farmers.The old system didn’t really incentivize grabbing more land. Yes, it was nice to have large tracts of land, but you could only take so much into your desmesne before your serfs starved to death and you dropped dead of exertion trying to plow it all. And it’s not like you could resolve this by hitting up another lord for their land, because that’s not how fiefs worked. However, unless you jacked up the rents too high, the tenant farming system meant that the more land you personally owned, the more you could rent out, and you didn’t have to worry about the locals starving. Cash in pocket, too.And this is really where we get the birth of capitalism. In an era before factories, the main means of production were farms, and here we see the farms being privately owned and operated not for the subsistence of the worker, but for the profit of the owner.Capitalism was still in its early stages when Locke was writing — it would be more than ninety years after the publication of Two Treatises that Adam Smith’s seminal work An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth off Nations would be published in 1776 (Smith wasn’t much for snappy titles) — so it would be wrong to state that liberalism was always devised with capitalism (and its attendant notions of property) in mind. However, it’s also true that Locke published his work in a society that was certainly in the process of embracing capitalism, and the people most likely to embrace Locke’s work — people who had wealth but not much formal power under the older societal order — were also the people making their money because of the societal movement towards capitalism.People like, for example, yeoman farmers who’d made enough money to start renting out their own land. Or people who owned profitable workshops. Or people who were working in trade. In other words, New Money wanted a change in the social order, liberalism provided a justification for it, and capitalism was embraced because, well, that’s how New Money had come to be in the first place.There started being even more New Money from capitalism in the mid-eighteenth century, when certain industries, such as textile production, started being mechanized. This was the First Industrial Revolution, where industrialists owned factories and paid people to work them. This was fantastically profitable, and people made vast fortunes doing it. The owning. Not the working, that wasn’t really profitable at all.The period from the mid eighteenth century to the early mid-nineteenth century is frequently called the First Industrial Revolution, and it’s when so-called “classical liberalism” really took form. The basic idea was “we need to have the government protect our rights to say what we like, the government has to represent us, and the government has to keep out of how we conduct our business.” So, for example, in the early nineteenth century, British landowners rammed through Parliament the “Corn Laws.” These put a high tariff on wheat which raised the price of wheat in the country, which made farms more profitable, allowing for higher rents.(OK, so if you’re an American, you’re probably confused as to why the “Corn Laws” were a tariff on wheat. The definition of “corn” is “the principal cereal crop of a given region.” The principal cereal crop of the US is maize, but the principle cereal crop of England is wheat or barley.)The factory owners of the time, however, hated this. A high price for wheat meant a high price for bread, and a high price for bread meant paying higher wages in factories, decreasing the profitability there. As we’ve pointed out, the factory owners at the time were themselves liberal — they had to be if they wanted to start gaining any formal power in society beyond factory ownership — and so we end up with the liberals of the time being wildly anti-tariff. They were also generally “laissez faire” in their approach to the economy as well, since government intervention in the form of, for example, factory regulations, would only decrease profits. There were, of course, exceptions. Liberals of the time often thought it only right and proper that labor syndicates and strikes be illegal — legislation that is rather more hands-on with the economy than is implied with the term “laissez faire.”This is classical liberalism. It’s a fusion of the idea that we should have more people (not all people, there was a property requirement for quite a while) voting, that we need trade to be as free as possible, that as little regulation of business should be done as possible unless that regulation curtails labor organization, at which point, full steam ahead.Classical liberalism then lost a lot of steam in Europe in the back half of the nineteenth century, and in the US shortly after the 1920’s. We’ll get into why later (the short explanation is that classical liberalism produced hell on earth for the vast majority of the population stuck with it), but in the 1970’s, after several decades of increasing consolidation of economic power in governmental hands, recessions in several countries (not to mention several scandals in those states that made the consolidation of power, economic or otherwise, in governmental hands seem a bit undesirable) made people receptive to the idea that maybe we needed a bold new ideology.We did not get a bold new ideology. What we got was neoliberalism, which is just classical liberalism with a new name and different people puffing it up. On the theoretical side of things, you had a bunch of economists from Austria and their acolytes as well as the economists of the University of Chicago and their acolytes. On the practical side of things, you had PM Margaret “The Blood of the Poor is Delicious” Thatcher and President Ronald “Not Removing My Criminal Ass From Office Was A Gross Miscarriage of Justice” Reagan.(I was going to paint horns and forked tails onto both of them in this image, but I decided that this would be too immature. Just kidding, I was too lazy to figure out GIMP Image Editor’s tooling.)The US and the UK have been staunchly neoliberal since, and they’ve spread this all over the place. They’ve been particularly diligent in spreading the economic part of neoliberalism, which has been a resounding disaster for most of the countries shafted with it.But why? Why is neoliberalism such absolute piss?IV. Why Neoliberalism is Such Absolute PissIn 1987, during an interview with Women’s Own, previously mentioned neoliberal Margaret Thatcher had the following to say:They are casting their problems at society. And, you know, there's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbours.Thatcher’s basic point was that, when you call for “society” to pay for something, you are asking that some group of individuals pay for that thing. To me, the most interesting part of the statement is “there are individual men and women and there are families.” First off, this doesn’t actually cover all people — nonbinary people are real — but considering that nonbinary identity has only recently started being openly discussed publicly, I’m not going to tear Thatcher a new one over that point. (Although let’s be honest, we all know based on Section 28 alone that Thatcher would have been absolute dogshit on this point, and let’s not give her any unearned credit, either).The aspect of the statement I am going to focus on, however, is that “there are families.” It does not sound controversial to say that there are families, but… families are a social construct. How families look varies wildly all over the world — the modal family in the UK will look different from a modal Pashtun family in Afghanistan, and neither will look at all similar to a modal Mosuo family in China. The family is a social construct that exists to, among other things, effect transfer of wealth.In other words, if there is such a thing as a family, there’s no reason to state that there’s no such thing as society. And so, we get to the neoliberal ethos: there is you, there are the people we’ve spent thousands of years making you feel obligated to, and then there are the people who we have not spent thousands of years making you feel obligated to. In short: involuntary wealth transfer is immoral unless the institutions that facilitate it pre-date capitalism.This leaves us with the question: what happens when we refuse to acknowledge that society exists and all we have are interactions between atomized individuals who are theoretically and legally-speaking equal?Before we get going, let’s acknowledge that classical liberalism (and its hasty paint-job equivalent, neoliberalism) has traditionally failed to even be that. This picture of a brutalized slave named Gordon?Taken in 1863 in the United States, a country that was philosophically liberal at the time. (Specifically, classical liberalism, which is neoliberalism without the fresh coat of paint.) The US had legalized slavery in the first 90 years of its existence, and also every other year of its existence (look at the Thirteenth Amendment, it does not entirely ban slavery, the exceptions are massive). But okay, fine, we’re going to skip right past the whole “free interactions between free people” has never described any liberal society and just go for the theory. And that theory of equality of treatment has somewhat less weight than one might hope.Let’s take a related, but exaggerated, example. From the perspective of the rules of basketball, Shaquille O’Neal and I are equals. We are both bound to follow the same rules of the game, we suffer the same penalties for breaking them. However, even if Shaq trained like I do — which is to say, eating pints of Ben & Jerry’s and not stepping foot on a basketball court for years at a time — or if I trained like he did, there’s no getting around the fact that Shaq is a 7′1″ beast of a man who I’m pretty sure can dunk without jumping, and the only way I crack 6′ is if I lie about my height. We may be equal from the perspective of the laws of basketball, but by any reasonable accounting, we’re not equal. The rules are fair insofar as they are commonly applied, and they treat us as though we’re equal, but that equality is a legal fiction — yeah, Shaq and I are both allowed to dunk, but he can do it if he steps on the court and wants to dunk, and I can do it if someone has set up a pretty strong trampoline on court and Shaq is fine with me dunking.Some people will argue that this is a system that has equally of opportunity without having equality of outcome, but… nah. Just because I am not prohibited from dunking does not mean I have the same opportunities as Shaq to dunk. But this is just a game of basketball. The consequences of sticking me and Shaq on a court for a game of one-on-one are minimal. The consequences, however, of capitalism are not.(I’m aware this is a jump shot and not a dunk, but Shaq still has the advantage there.)So, now let’s say I’m negotiating terms of employment with a factory owner. Now, I need this job because I need money so that I can eat. The factory owner, on the other hand, can always sell the factory if they desperately need the money and then join the workforce as a non-factory owner. My situation is therefore more tenuous than the factory owner’s, which means my negotiating position probably isn’t that great. Also, because this is a factory job we’re talking about, there are almost certainly going to be more applicants than me, which means my bargaining position is actually kind of terrible.Is this equal? Well, legally, there’s nothing to stop me from owning starting my own factory and being in the factory owner’s position in this situation. So we do have equal rights. And yet, most people don’t do this — because it turns out that starting a factory (or any business) takes money, and not everyone has access to money. You could have some genius business plan for a factory, but if you were born into poverty and you don’t have dime one to your name, you’re never going to be able to implement that business plan.So you being a fairly easily replaceable employee are forced to negotiate terms of employment from a position of weakness, which means that you’re probably going to end up being underpaid, which means you’re probably going to stay put in terms of social class. Yes, Andrew Carnegie started without a pot to piss in and became the wealthiest man in the US for a time, but most people don’t pull that off, not because they’re lazy, but because they are not astonishingly lucky.(And hoo boy was Andrew Carnegie lucky. Yes, he was a hard worker, but in an age without much in the way of workplace protections or a social safety net, that wasn’t optional. He never would have made it big had he not managed to attract the patronage of Thomas A. Scott and John Edgar Thompson, who helped Carnegie get involved in insider trading and various other blatantly corrupt schemes, which allowed Carnegie to build up a cash cushion to buy his way into the iron business. Carnegie’s fortune was not honestly made, nor was it made by the fruit of his own labor — had he not had Scott and Thompson helping him graft his way to a fortune, he’d have stayed at a pretty low position in the Pennsylvania Railroad Company.)The obvious means of improving one’s bargaining position in a situation like this is, of course, coordination. If all potential workers in a factory agree to coordinate and not work except for wages at a given rate and under certain safety conditions, then the bargaining position of the workers is much, much improved. However, this coordination — which is what unions and syndicates are — is loathed by neoliberalism because it “distorts the market.” Again, neoliberalism’s view of the market is that it’s a bunch of individual actors acting specifically and independently in their own best interests, so coordination between actors is considered a distortion, and therefore bad. This leads to a lot of anti-union legislation from neoliberal governments.It also generally leads to laws against anti-competitive behavior, such as price-fixing. However, these laws are almost invariably enforced only by fines. This means that anti-price-fixing legislation becomes a cost a factory owner can factor into the business model — ADM probably still came out ahead despite its prosecution for its role in the fixing of the price of lysine, and the actors in the LIBOR fixing scandal made (and do please pardon the pun here) bank. On the other hand, slapping fines for “anticompetitive behavior” on unions tends to do far worse to said unions because, well, if labor had power in the first place, it wouldn’t need to unionize.Again: nominally equal rights lead to wildly different outcomes because starting circumstances are not brought into account. This isn’t theoretical — books like The Condition of the Working Class in England and How the Other Half Lives document in detail how classical liberalism created squalid urban hellscapes for much of the population in the nineteenth century. The result was a pretty noticeable drop in popularity of classical liberalism, with most of the power brokers at the time realizing that either they started adding a safety net or else risk losing their heads in a revolution. Thus, there was a shift from classical liberalism to social liberalism, a move that saved liberalism in a bunch of countries, the UK and the US included. However, paying for those safety nets cut into the profits of business owners, and were therefore unpopular with those people, who agitated against them and eventually brought classical liberalism and the dogma of the free market back.And, um, yeah, let’s talk about the idea of markets for a bit. Neoliberalism puts great faith in the market, and I do not use the word “faith” lightly. To neoliberals, the market and private enterprise are sources of efficiency, because business that do not serve the public efficiently and well are going to get pushed out by businesses that do. This isn’t entirely without truth, but it is a massive oversimplification.For example, in 1993, the British parliament under Thatcher’s successor John “Maybe Talking About Traditional Values While the Economy Tanks and Your Own Party is Filled with Sleaze is a Bad Idea” Major enacted legislation to privatize British Rail, a process that was finalized in 1997. Now, again, the essence of privatization is that it forces a given company to compete in an open market. The problem with this for British Rail is, um, how do you get competing railway service between London and Manchester? Build another track? Why? There’s a perfectly good track already there! Why spend billions of pounds sterling to make another one? And if the “competing” services have to coordinate with one another to share the track, that’s not really competition, is it?(By Grabthar’s Hammer, you will be avenged)Now, this should have been readily obvious to anyone, but again, faith in the market even when there wasn’t a proper market to be set up overrode any logical considerations, and British Rail was privatized. In 2002, Railtrack, a group of companies and a successor to British Rail that owned the track, signalling, tunnels, bridge crossings, level crossings and stations ended up going so massively into debt that many of British Rail’s assets had to be renationalized after less than a decade just to keep the trains running.Now, from the perspective of society, the privatization of British Rail was not a success. But, as we well know from Thatcher, there’s no such thing as society — there are men, there are women, and there are families. And because it is somewhat difficult to calculate the net losses of British Rail for individuals while it is very, very easy to calculate the net gains for the people who own the rail companies for whom losses are socialized and gains are privatized, it was a rousing success.Neoliberalism, classical liberalism, and to be frank, liberalism generally all assert that people are equal under the law and are therefore equal. However, as we’ve seen:Liberalism often fails to live up to that promise andEven were the promise of equality under the law kept, the massive inequalities pervasive under capitalism would render this legal fiction rather less valuable than one might hope.As a political philosophy, liberalism assumes that economic hierarchies are just and can be divorced from other hierarchies, such that equality under the law actually means something. But if I can afford a dream team of lawyers, I stand a far better chance of beating a murder rap than if I have to rely on a single overworked public defender, who will almost certainly advise me to take whatever deal the prosecutor offers. More concretely, if OJ Simpson had been poor, he’d have been locked up for the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman.So… where do we go from here?V. What is Property?So, let’s head back to Locke and the idea of the state. Locke argued that we have a state to enforce certain rights, specifically, the rights to life, liberty, and property. As we discussed in the previous section, the right to property can trivially be brought into conflict with the right to liberty. That’s a bit of a problem. Neoliberalism’s solution to this is to not care, but other solutions to the problem exist.For example, what if there existed no right to private property?Now, on the surface, this probably seems a bit ridiculous — people like stuff, people like having stuff, there’s a lot of stuff people don’t want to lose access to for various reasons, how dare you try and take my hat, it looks so good on me, I’m never giving it up, you get the idea. But let’s say we don’t talk about stuff like your toothbrush or your guitar, and we’re just talking about farmland, a factory, and other stuff like that. This is where we get into the distinction between personal property (toothbrush) and private property (factory), so what happens if we erase the right to private property?Remember how back in Section II, I said we’d return to the discussion of the common? We’ve returned to it.The lord might have called all the shots on the land that made up his desmesne, but he didn’t really have to care about how the common was managed because, well, he didn’t profit from the common, the common was just how everyone else in the manor kept themselves from starving. This left a tract of land within the manor that was effectively owned by nobody in the manor. Had property rights been necessary to avoid a chaotic state of affairs, the common would have been fantastically unprofitable and the manor system would have collapsed due to the inability of peasants to feed themselves. However, manorial systems persisted in Europe for centuries, and continued in Russia until the early twentieth century.My point here isn’t that feudalism was good, because it wasn’t. There were numerous problems with the manorial system, and it was abandoned for good reason. However, the institution of the common, which was part of European feudalism, ably demonstrates that the means of production — farmland, factories, you get the idea — don’t have to be privately owned to run. The people who work the means of production can, in fact, manage them without needing some owner to answer to, and we have literally centuries of data backing that up.This, of course, raises an important question: if the common was capable of feeding a population, why don’t we have them all over the place? Bluntly, theft.Let’s say you’re a lord who’s realized that the desmesne concept has flaws and you’d rather do the renting thing. At this point, the thing you want is as much land as possible, and you want to get it as cheaply as possible. So what you do is quite simple: you fence in the common, declare it your own land, and then go about renting the land out. What’s anyone going to do to stop you? The peasants are, um, peasants, so nobody in power is going to back up their rights, so unless they band together and use force to stop you from doing it, you’re putting up that fence. And if they do band together and use force to do it, then other groups of peasants might get ideas and do the same thing, at which point everyone on the top of the social hierarchy has to fear for their position there… which means that everyone on the top of the hierarchy is going to crack down as hard as possible on any attempts to resist the fencing in.This process is called “enclosure,” and it’s why there’s virtually no common land in the UK today. Now, you’ll notice, this process requires a lot of force being applied, or at least credibly threatened. It does not require legality, it’s just straight theft. And if you think this is an exceptional case of how private property came to be, well, it isn’t. The maintenance of the institution of private property obviously requires force — otherwise how do you get rid of trespassers? — but the creation of private property requires either the consent of the population to divvy up land claimed by nobody else into parcels… or else expropriation that requires either violence or the threat thereof. The consent route is not the more common of the two. Maintenance of the system has similar requirements of violence.But back to the common. As previously mentioned, the common is a (limited) example of worker self-management and demonstrates that such a thing is indeed possible. It obviously isn’t a perfect example — this was work that had to be done in between the hierarchically-managed work on the lord’s desmesne — but again, it fed people. Starting in the late eighteenth century, people really started asking why the common couldn’t be the general model for production in general.This is the birth of socialism as a formal political ideology. There were forerunners to it, but socialism really only started getting theoretical grounding in the late eighteenth century. You’ll notice, however, that the only thing we’ve discussed so far is “what if the people who worked on the farmland made all the decisions about how to do that work?” There’s no concept of “let’s get the government to nationalize land” or anything like that. It’s just: “wouldn’t it be great if people managed themselves and didn’t have to pay out to some schmuck in a castle somewhere doing no work at all?” In other words, the birth of socialism in European political philosophy was also the birth of anarchism.The term “anarchy” had been in use for some time by this point, but it referred to a lawless and chaotic state of affairs. But starting in the nineteenth century, political philosophers started using it to describe an orderly system of societal organization, just one that existed without hierarchy. Anarchism refers to a political philosophy where you are not ruled economically, you are not ruled politically, you are free to make your decisions, and on decisions that affect the community you’re part of, you get a voice — whether that’s how the factory you’re working at makes gadgets or what the garbage disposal system in your neighborhood should be. The first person to use the word in this sense was Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, a highly influential anarchist. Modern-day anarchists have generally taken the good bits of his philosophy and have left the virulent misogyny and antisemitism behind.This section opened with a question, that being “what is property?” Proudhon coined the classic slogan: “property is theft.” Again, we’re talking about private property, the means of production, here. As we’ve seen, the creation of property requires an individual enclosing the factors of production away from the community in perpetuity. Thus, even if the original move was consented to, reversing it is not, and therefore the community has lost the factors of production — and a generation later, that’s a loss they did not consent to. Hence, property is theft.(If the slogan “property is theft” seems a bit wooly to you, you’re not alone, since theft presupposes the existence of property. It’s a slogan, not rigorous political philosophy.)VI. A Brief Note on What Anarchism Is NotRemember: anarchism is skeptical of hierarchy at best, and if a hierarchy is not voluntary, then anarchists don’t want it. This also includes economic hierarchies, which means that capitalism is fundamentally incompatible with anarchism. Similarly, racial hierarchies are also fundamentally incompatible with anarchism.The reason I bring this up is because there are two ideologies which stick “anarchism” in their name, but aren’t actually anarchist at all: anarcho-capitalism and national-anarchism. The former advocates a capitalist economy without the existence of a state, a system that is guaranteed to collapse into feudalism within a week, and the latter is Nazism with the serial numbers filed off. Neither of these are actually anarchist ideologies, and their names are about as representative of their ideology as the name “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea” (i.e. North Korea) is representative of its governing totalitarian state.VII. Anarchism in a Modern ContextSo to this point, we’ve noted that property-less (or effectively property-less) societies can work in practice. The examples I’ve given have all been of pre-industrial societies, but it’s not as though there aren’t industrial worker co-operatives. For example, in 2013, a bog-standard Greek company filed for bankruptcy and laid off all the workers at its cleaning products factory in Thessaloniki. They then shuttered the factory and left it abandoned. However, rather than allow the machinery to degrade and the facilities crumble, the workers simply brought bolt cutters, re-opened the factory, and started making cleaning products themselves. The factory is now democratically organized by the people who choose to work there, and they’ve been profitably making cleaning products for the past seven years. In other words, just as you don’t need bosses in the field, you don’t need bosses in the factory, either.But that’s not really what we’re talking about when we ask if anarchism can succeed in an industrialized context. Getting one cooperative to work is all very well and good, but any given society is going to be larger and far more complicated than a single factory. If everything is run by voluntary association and democracy, then isn’t everything going to cock up?Well, no. At some point, you’ve probably heard the false propaganda line that “Mussolini made the trains run on time.” He didn’t. In fact, the trains kept running late on Mussolini’s watch, because it turns out that fascism and the imposition of dictatorship in both the political arena and the workplace doesn’t make things more efficient. But you know where they did start running on time in Europe after a massive change in ruling ideology?In response to an attempted far right coup by the military in Spain in 1936, the Second Spanish Republic only had one chance of saving itself: it had to arm the labor unions to fight back. The labor unions in Spain at the time had a distinctly revolutionary flavor to them, with the UGT being Marxist and the CNT-FAI being anarcho-syndicalist.(Anarcho-syndicalism says that the way we should get to an anarchist society is by forming democratic, non-hierarchical, labor unions, which will agitate for control over the means of production and eventually take them over from their current owners.)The result of this was that, in large chunks of the country, the unions were running the show. These weren’t top-down unions where elected officials gave marching orders to the rank-and-file, these democratically-run affairs where local unions worked together in federation, and then the local federations themselves federated. If you have a tough time thinking about how this would work, think about how association football is organized globally: local clubs form leagues (like the Premier League in England), leagues form national associations (like the Football Association in England), national associations form regional organizations (like the Union of European Football Associations, or UEFA, in Europe), and the regional organizations all band together to form FIFA. FIFA can make a rule, but it doesn’t have the power to actually force a national association to adopt said rule — the most it can do is expel the national association in question, and that’s not going to dissolve a national association or even cause it any particular hardship.By the way, yes, I’m aware that FIFA sucks. FIFA is also not remotely democratically-run, and we’re using it as an example of federation, not of anarchism.Going back to Spain, arming the CNT-FAI meant putting Catalonia, which was one of the more industrialized parts of the country, into the hands of the CNT-FAI, which was a federation of labor unions. This turned out to significantly boost the region’s productivity, and yes, made the trains run on time. In other words, giving people more input into how how their lives go is a good thing, and no, it doesn’t mean everything collapses into a state of horrific chaos. The same foundational assumptions that undergird liberalism — namely, that disruptive conflict “in a state of nature” tends to be exceptional rather than the norm — apply even when you ditch the concept of the private ownership of property.However, to quote the great philosopher Homer Simpson, “if he’s so smart, how come he’s dead?” Or, to adapt the quotation to our actual circumstances, if anarchism is so great, then why isn’t Catalonia still anarchist? And why did anarchist experiments in Manchuria and Ukraine also end?All three can be explained pretty easily: invasion. It turns out the pitch “let’s get rid of property and hierarchy” is not very popular with people who believe in either of those things, which includes pretty much any non-anarchist society. So, in the case of Spain, obviously the right wing fascist-aligned rebels were trying to kill Revolutionary Catalonia, but it’s not as though liberals liked what was going on, either. Even the Soviet Union, a state that theoretically called for worldwide revolution that would lead to the end of capitalist and bring about a worker-led state of affairs, wanted the anarchists gone in Catalonia — Soviet strategy was to back the capitalists on the Republican side as a means of trying to get better trade agreements out of France and the UK. The anarchists had no friends but themselves, and in the end, that was never going to be enough.Similar things happened in Manchuria — the Japanese invaded and destroyed an anarchist province there — and Ukraine, where the Bolsheviks destroyed the Free Territory. Even so, there are parts of the world where anarchist principles have made strong inroads in how societies are organized: Chiapas in Mexico and the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, for example. The obvious rejoinder to this is that neither of the examples given are prosperous — but actually, they’re doing better than their immediate neighbors and/or predecessors. Neither example is free of forms of involuntary hierarchy, but the anarchist skepticism towards such hierarchies is very much alive in them.In other words, when left alone, anarchism works — but in place where it might conceivably pose a threat to the capitalist order at large, it will not be left alone. Chiapas is the poorest state in Mexico and chunks of it going anarchist isn’t going to get the people at the top of the social hierarchy in Mexico worried. Catalonia, on the other hand, is a highly industrialized region and quite wealthy — it going anarchist cannot be countenanced by capitalists.IX. Summarizing Everything UntidilyNeoliberalism is a highly hierarchical ideology. It claims that this is justifiable on grounds that it is a meritocratic system, but the rules of neoliberal societies are so thoroughly easily gamed that, not only have neoliberal societies never started with everyone on a level playing field, the supposed equality present in neoliberal societies is primarily a legal fiction. There are people who do very well in neoliberal societies, but they are not in the majority, and their doing well is largely predicated on other people doing quite badly. It is a weirdly dog-eat-dog ideology for one that is predicated on the idea that conflict is the exception, not the norm, in human interactions.Anarchism rejects hierarchy. Anarchist societies still tend to have some forms of it in place, but these are tolerated begrudgingly and the tendency is to seek their dismantling as soon as practical. Part of this rejection of hierarchy includes the rejection of the institutions that create it, and private ownership of the means of production is one of those institutions.