Anarcho-Capitalists (and even some AnCap-influenced Mutualists) like to frame their politics as ultimately being a politics of non-aggression. They call this “the non-aggression principle” or “the NAP” — they’re not really for private property, they say. They are simply for non-aggression. And non-aggression implies private property. Supposedly.

Of course, non-aggression only implies private property relations if you assume that private property is the ground-state of human economic affairs, and that it takes active and sustained expenditures of effort to enforce anything else.

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This is, of course, untrue. It actually requires a vast amount of effort (on the part of the state) to prevent people from abolishing private property. Landlords force their tenants to pay rent through the ability of the landlord to call the police and have the tenant evicted if they do not pay. Business-owners prevent their employees from seizing their workplaces through similar methods.

All private property is a way of using state violence to extract economic rents. The great hilarity of anarcho-capitalism is that, if the owning classes could better extract revenue through the use of private guard companies rather than the state, they would. Private guard companies cost more than the state does — the state benefits from economies of scale and from their ability to compel potentially free-riding owners to pay for their share of the class-wide protection of property. Capitalism absolutely needs the state.

Still, there is something of interest in the concept of the NAP — it shows how everyone, regardless of their specific idea of what property is or should be, interprets their own idea of property as non-aggression.

There’s a story that I like to tell, to illustrate this point:

An anarcho-communist, a mutualist, and an anarcho-capitalist go out into the wilderness together. All are armed, of course. The capitalist goes and he claims everything in a field, by mixing his labor with the land. He touches all the rocks, or whatever. Puts up a fence, if you like. The point is that it’s a huge field, and there’s no way he can use all of it — but he does mix his labor with it. Still, there’s a lot of land, and the communist and the mutualist shrug it off. The communist then goes and he builds himself a house, and works the land around it — as does the mutualist. One day, the communist is out hunting, and his quarry blunders onto the land of the capitalist. The communist follows after — the capitalist claims all sorts of strange things everyday, and the communist has largely forgotten what the capitalist said about it being his land. The capitalist, though, sees the communist running onto his land, armed.

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So, he figures that the communist is trespassing and goes to shoot him — the capitalist, after all, has a right to defend his property. The mutualist happens by, and sees this. He panics, and shoots the capitalist before he can shoot the communist — after all, the defense of others from unjustified aggression is a right and a duty. The capitalist dies, and the communist runs and hides. Eventually, the mutualist finds the communist and explains. They bury the capitalist on the land that he claimed. The harvest is bad for the communist that year, but good for the mutualist. The mutualist considers the land that he works to be his, and his crop to be his as well — after all, he worked for it, didn’t he? The communist goes and demands that the mutualist give him some of his food. The communist knows that the mutualist has all sorts of odd ideas, but really: the mutualist is hoarding and the communist is hungry, this is no time for foolishness. The mutualist, though, doesn’t feel like sharing — he worked hard for that crop, after all. Things happen, and the mutualist needs to look after himself. The world is a hard place, and not one for foolishness — the communist will have to look after himself. Tempers flare, and the communist simply stomps over and takes some of what’s his by right — the mutualist doesn’t need all that food, certainly. It is enough for two, the communist thinks — though, of course, the mutualist thinks otherwise. The mutualist draws his gun and tells the communist to back off, the communist does the same, and BANG! Dead communist. A week later, the park rangers come in and arrest the mutualist for homocide, vandalism, tax evasion, and squatting in Yellowstone National Park

All four parties in that story — the communist, the mutualist, the capitalist, and the agents of the state — thought of themselves as defending themselves from aggression.