Motherhood, the Glaring Contradiction at the Center of Right-Libertarian Thought

Feminism, the Labor Theory of Property, and Self-Ownership: choose two

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Self-ownership is the idea that one’s body is one’s property — or, essentially, that one is a slave that happens to currently own itself. It’s origins lie largely in justifications for the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the state, according to David Graeber in his Debt:

…if freedom is basically our right to own things, or to treat things as if we own them, then what would it mean to “own” a freedom-wouldn’t it have to mean that our right to own property is itself a form of property ? That does seem unnecessarily convoluted. What possible reason would one have to want to define it this way? Historically, there is a simple — if somewhat disturbing-answer to this. Those who have argued that we are the natural owners of our rights and liberties have been mainly interested in asserting that we should be free to give them away, or even to sell them. Modern ideas of rights and liberties are derived from what, from the time when Jean Gerson, Rector of the University of Paris, began to lay them out around 1400, building on Roman law concepts, came to be known as “natural rights theory.” As Richard Tuck, the premier historian of such ideas, has long noted, it is one of the great ironies of history that this was always a body of theory embraced not by the progressives of that time, but by conservatives. “For a Gersonian, liberty was property and could be exchanged in the same way and in the same terms as any other property”-sold, swapped, loaned, or otherwise voluntarily surrendered. It followed that there could be nothing intrinsically wrong with, say, debt peonage, or even slavery. And this is exactly what natural-rights theorists came to assert. In fact, over the next centuries, these ideas came to be developed above all in Antwerp and Lisbon, cities at the very center of the emerging slave trade. After all, they argued, we don’t really know what’s going on in the lands behind places like Calabar, but there is no intrinsic reason to assume that the vast majority of the human cargo conveyed to European ships had not sold themselves, or been disposed of by their legal guardians, or lost their liberty in some other perfectly legitimate fashion. No doubt some had not, but abuses will exist in any system. The important thing was that there was nothing inherently unnatural or illegitimate about the idea that freedom could be sold. Before long, similar arguments came to be employed to justify the absolute power of the state. Thomas Hobbes was the first to really develop this argument in the seventeenth century, but it soon became commonplace. Government was essentially a contract, a kind of business arrangement, whereby citizens had voluntarily given up some of their natural liberties to the sovereign. Finally, similar ideas have become the basis of that most basic, dominant institution of our present economic life: wage labor, which is, effectively, the renting of our freedom in the same way that slavery can be conceived as its sale.

Thus, the unease that anyone on the left has with this idea can hardly be said to be mere superstition around the word “ownership”, or even merely down to association with the unsavory activities of modern-day right-libertarians.

However, an idea’s associations and origins do not damn the idea by itself — every idea has a history, after all. Proudhon was a misogynist and an anti-semite, and yet anarchists today consider themselves to be feminists and anti-fascists. Still, something originating as a justification for chattel slavery and the state does give one the feeling that it should be put to more scrutiny.

Right-libertarians also believe in ‘the labor theory of property’, which is their way of saying that they believe that that which you mix your labor with belongs to you. Weirdly, they tend to end up using this to justify a society in which most people don’t end up having any say over what happens to the things that they apply their labor to — though, in the interest of fairness, it should be noted that Marxists seem to also use a similar moral point to, in the end, advocate for a system in which most people have very little say over what happens to the things that they apply their labor to.

The issue is that these two ideas, self-ownership and the LTP, collide every time a child is born. If we believe that women are people, that women create their children's bodies through their reproductive labor, and that people own things that they mix their labor with, then it follows that children's bodies are the property of their mothers — which stands in direct opposition to the idea that children are also people, and own their bodies.

Of course, there’s an easy way to resolve this internal contradiction: just say that women aren’t really people. Of course, that’s exactly what most of the early classical liberals did. It’s horrific, but it’s also self-consistent. Modern right-libertarians usually aren’t so explicitly fascistic as to openly declare that they believe that women aren’t people, but that does leave the whole system of thought in something of a lurch.

Some right-libertarians have tried to come to grips with this. Murray Rothbard, in his The Ethics of Liberty:

We have now established each man’s property right in his own person and in the virgin land that he finds and transforms by his labor, and we have shown that from these two principles we can deduce the entire structure of property rights in all types of goods. These include the goods which he acquires in exchange or as a result of a voluntary gift or bequest. There remains, however, the difficult case of children. The right of self-ownership by each man has been established for adults, for natural self-owners who must use their minds to select and pursue their ends. On the other hand, it is clear that a newborn babe is in no natural sense an existing self-owner, but rather a potential self-owner. But this poses a difficult problem: for when, or in what way, does a growing child acquire his natural right to liberty and self-ownership? Gradually, or all at once? At what age? And what criteria do we set forth for this shift or transition? …we may say that the parents-or rather the mother, who is the only certain and visible parent-as the creators of the baby become its owners. A newborn baby cannot be an existent self-owner in any sense. Therefore, either the mother or some other party or parties may be the baby’s owner, but to assert that a third party can claim his “ownership” over the baby would give that person the right to seize the baby by force from its natural or “homesteading” owner, its mother. The mother, then, is the natural and rightful owner of the baby, and any attempt to seize the baby by force is an invasion of her property right. But surely the mother or parents may not receive the ownership of the child in absolute fee simple, because that would imply the bizarre state of affairs that a fifty-year old adult would be subject to the absolute and unquestioned jurisdiction of his seventy-year-old parent. So the parental property right must be limited in time. But it also must be limited in kind, for it surely would be grotesque for a libertarian who believes in the right of self-ownership to advocate the right of a parent to murder or torture his or her children.

It is here that Rothbard begins to run into serious issues. He has admitted that his logic leads to absurdities, monstrosities, and contradictions. His response, however, is not to re-examine his premises — it is, instead, to discard his conclusions as undesirable. He continues:

We must therefore state that, even from birth, the parental ownership is not absolute but of a “trustee” or guardianship kind. In short, every baby as soon as it is born and is therefore no longer contained within his mother’s body possesses the right of self-ownership by virtue of being a separate entity and a potential adult. It must therefore be illegal and a violation of the child’s rights for a parent to aggress against his person by mutilating, torturing, murdering him, etc. …The mother, then, becomes at the birth of her child its “trustee-owner,” legally obliged only not to aggress against the child’s person, since the child possesses the potential for self-ownership. …if a parent may own his child (within the framework of nonaggression and runaway-freedom), then he may also transfer that ownership to someone else. He may give the child out for adoption, or he may sell the rights to the child in a voluntary contract. In short, we must face the fact that the purely free society will have a flourishing free market in children. Superficially, this sounds monstrous and inhuman. But closer thought will reveal the superior humanism of such a market. For we must realize that there is a market for children now, but that since the government prohibits sale of children at a price, the parents may now only give their children away to a licensed adoption agency free of charge. …the mother would have… the trustee-ownership of her children, an ownership limited only by the illegality of aggressing against their persons and by their absolute right to run away or to leave home at any time. Parents would be able to sell their trustee-rights in children to anyone who wished to buy them at any mutually agreed price

In the end, it seems, Rothbard escapes the bind that his logic leads him into by inventing a new form of property and then saying that that is what children constitute. However, that still leaves him as inconsistent — unwilling to follow his logic, and unwilling to revise his principles. He makes many decent complaints in that chapter on the world as it exists today, but he ultimately leaves it as he entered — stumbling and trying to cover his uncertainty.

It’s somewhat fascinating to me that Rothbard invents a new form of property, still closer to slave ownership than any decent person would countenance, just for the product of the labor of people who have wombs. It is an endless fascination, how things like this appear as a repeated hole in liberal logic and sensibilities. When you ask a liberal what they think of wage labor, they defend it — when you ask a liberal what they think of women engaging in sex work, they denounce it. They will tell you that the women involved are not fully consenting, because they are doing it for a paycheck. They say that the women do it out of necessity, and must be “saved” from this fate by any (carceral) means necessary. They say that pimping is infinitely worse than prostitution — that it is an abhorrent crime against the prostitute to profit off of her labor. Essentially, they suddenly trot out a radically anti-work and anti-exploitation understanding of the morality of labor — but, bizarrely, they refuse to apply it to any other form of labor! A similar response, though, is not extended to male prostitutes — especially the largely mythical gigolos, catering to heterosexual women. One could dismiss this as a mere double-standard, though it’s an extremely strange and extreme one — except there is also the matter of the unwaged nature of much of other femme-coded labor. Housework and reproductive labor are seen as also being things that one is expected to do in a non-commodified manner, at least if one is female.

An at least possible conclusion from all these observations would be that the expectation around femme-coded labor is that it, morally, must exist outside the cash nexus — and the state and non-state violence (largely done by men) directed at (mostly female) prostitutes is an attempt at enforcing this expectation. If this were true, then it would mean that Rothbard’s attempt at dodging his own logic fits into a general civilizational trend of denying the value of femme-coded labor.

I should, of course, note how I escape from the right-libertarian contradiction. As I am a socialist, I could certainly be said to believe in something along the lines of the labor theory of property — I certainly believe that it is good and just for a worker to own the full product of their own labor, to do whatever they want with. But I do not believe in self-ownership. Instead, it would be more accurate to say that I believe in ‘individual sovereignty’ or perhaps in ‘bodily autonomy’ — by which I mean that I believe that individuals are entities capable of justly owning, but not capable of being justly owned by anyone, even themselves. I believe that it would be immoral to even attempt to sell oneself into slavery — that it is a transgression against own’s one freedom. As such, I manage to be self-consistent in the face of motherhood. Though it should be noted, I am perhaps also devaluing reproductive labor, in exactly the same way that Rothbard devalued it. But, I cannot say that this bothers me too much: at least I do it from a place of consistency, and this is certainly a better result than the seeming alternative.

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