I don’t care whether or not you know what environmental activism I have participated in, because it remains irrelevant to my point, which is that environmental law is sometimes a useful tool in environmental activism and to be disregarded when it is not. If I wanted to tell you about Mountaintop Removal coal mining I would tell you about any experiences I might have in that. If I wanted to tell you about ecosystems, the national forest timber sale program, megafauna, etc. I would tell you whether or not I have been involved in such activism. But I have no interest in this chest-puffing.

What I find as problematic is that this is a text that explicitly positions itself as leftist / socialist / anarchist that makes the intensely problematic assumptions I have stated in my panning and elaborated upon in the comments above.

What I find particularly amusing is how I said “Carson says capitalism is just government interference with market.” And immediately I was met with claims ranging from “he doesn’t speak for the rest of us” to “he would never say something like that, you must have misread him” to “yeah, he did, and he was right. So what?”

I am closing comments on this article now. I have stated my opinion, you have stated yours. Please go free-associate elsewhere.

That’s not what I mean by “uneducated” and if it did it’d be just as much an insult to myself (I dropped out of college after only a year of attendance for fear of being a debt-slave) then it is to you. I’m surprised you can misread something as simple as me saying that I don’t think your’e properly understanding what’s going on to actually insulting you and claiming you’re uneducated in some other sense.

“The piece was short by design. I don’t feel like its brevity or refusal to go on at length about any given point disqualifies the opinions within.”

Then I don’t see why other people should take your opinions or gripes too seriously if you’re going to try to dismiss 400+ pages with similar assertions throughout, few of which actually had any citations, quotes or backing for them. Just my 2 cents.

“I will not engage in a pissing context about my environmental activism and don’t feel the need to cite direct actions or campaigns I’ve participated in to lend weight to what ought to be a self-evident point: anarchist environmentalists are concerned with the environment and not the law.”

I’m not interested in a so-called “pissing contest’ and am against surprised you can derive such an interest from what I said. I’m only interested in you substantiating your claims. You seem (thus far) unwilling to do so.

It”’s possible that I have unfairly reduced Carson’s point of view, but I didn’t just make this idea up. You ask where I got the idea that he feels that capitalism is “government interference with market” and so I’ll cite him in the preface of Studies in Mutualist Political Economy: “It is state intervention that distinguishes capitalism from the free market.”

Instead of actually citing what’s wrong with this definition (or trying to debate my own definition) you act as if this “fact” of yours holds a lot more weight than it actually does. “Capitalism” is defined by an artificial concentration of wealth in the landed classes and historically (as Carson points out in his works) have always been done through state privilege. It’s of course also done through cultural privilege (most of these people are white males and use such ideas as classism, racism and so on to divide the ruled class). Why this definition or use of “capitalism” is wrong is still unclear to me. I would appreciate an elaboration.

“When I discovered this about one of the principal contributors to the book (having authored five of the essays within), I was nervous, to say the least. And then I realized he is cited extensively through this book in a way that led me to believe, right or wrong, that he is one of the main proponents of “free market anticapitalism” and his work is used as the basis of many of the other articles.”

Again, this says a lot less then what you’d like to think it does. You’re not *talking* to anarcho-primvitists or communists so you might want to try actually *explaining* to me why any of what you’re saying matters and why. If you don’t care to elaborate then I’m unsure how seriously this “panning” should be taken.

“I don’t know or give a shit about nitpicky differences between people who believe in capitalism and people who believe in capitalism but don’t want to call it capitalism because of all the baggage associated with it. And when I hear people talking about how “government interference with the market” is what they have against capitalism, it doesn’t make me want to like them.”

Actually that’s *not* what Carson and co. are saying is the only problem with capitalism and I’m (again) baffled that this is what you get out of it. Did you not see “The Many Monopolies” Charles responds to? How about Free Market Labor Struggle by Carson in which he details how unions are corrupted through big labor and big business in collusion with government?

“Or care whether or not they themselves identify as capitalists, when what they describe is a society based on capital.”

When has *anyone* said this?

“Don’t get me wrong… I -want- to be wrong about you left-libertarians. (Or rather, I want you to actually -be- left-libertarians and not just the an-caps so many articles in this book make you come off as).”

Maybe we come off as an-caps because you’re not as well read on these subjects as you’d like to believe. I can only assume so because of the way your conversation with Charles (and others above) are going.

When the question is something like environmental protection or the extension of civil rights, I’m inclined to think our historical examples show that no particular strategy — whether it be legislation, market action, extra-legal direct action, or education — has achieved great strides alone. I’m also inclined to think that some of the standard left-libertarian critique of legislative means depends on emphasizing “legislative capture,” while de-emphasizing the fact that it is forces from “the market” (though, of course, not the desired “free/freed” market) that do the capturing. That observation doesn’t resolve anything clearly, but it does point to one of the places where I have to step away from the “market” approach.

I think, too, that one can agree that the “free/freed market” is not capitalism, either as we’ve seen it or as some an-caps desire it to be, and still wonder seriously if a market-centric approach does not still present circumstances in which various values that we all presumably take seriously have a hard to making their impact felt in the sort of daily, distributed calculations that will presumably make a market anarchism work.

And if it was, it is poorly written.

Well, you know, if Sheldon writes that he thinks something is “appropriate” as a tactic and you respond to him by concluding that he thinks it is “inappropriate,” or if he says that “a sit-in at a private lunch counter” categorically is “a trespass,” and then goes on to defend sit-ins at private lunch counters, and then you interpret him as “not allowing trespass against the private property operated by bigots,” then I’m not really sure how much better writing could possibly have helped you.

He also believes (this is the point of the closing paragraph that I assume you’re referring to when you inaccurately summarize Sheldon’s view as being motivated by “economic reasons”) that in the actual historical context of the Jim Crow South, white store owners — as the economic beneficiaries of massive racist violence, and the use of this violence to dispossess black workers and suppress competition from anti-racist alternatives — may not have had any really legitimate claims of ownership in the stores that they controlled. Now this is it seems to me an interesting view and in fact it is exactly the view that you claim to think an anti-capitalist Anarchist ought to hold — that the “private property” operated by bigots is (at least in that historical context) not in fact owed any respect, that their private property claims in that context have little or no ethical significance for the kinds of protest you can direct against them. Yet you interpret him as holding exactly the opposite.

He does not hold the opposite. But his defense of nonviolent trespass is in any case not based on that claim; it would hold up even if he rejected it. It is in that sense a broader defense of the legitimacy of sit-in protests and similar forms of trespass than the one that you offer. He spends the entire article up to that very paragraph arguing that even when a sit-in at a private lunch counter does count as a trespass against the legitimate owner of the counter, that’s still perfectly compatible with the kind of nonviolent confrontation that Sheldon (following SNCC) is defending. If it turns out that there wasn’t even a trespass worth discussing — because the “owner” did not really have legitimate proprietary rights over the counter — then that’s just gravy.

Perhaps you think that this is not clear from what Sheldon wrote, and if it’s what he meant, he should have said so more clearly. No doubt we could all be clearer. But it seems to me that when he explicitly tells you that he’s OK with trespass as a protest tactic, when he phrases this in the form of a simple question-answer (“Isn’t a sit-in at a private lunch counter a trespass? — It is.”), when he states that his argument there is not dependent on, but is only “buttressed” by, the paragraph that follows, etc., and you come away from this with the conclusion that you did, that sounds to me more like motivated misreading than it does like bad writing.

Isn’t a sit-in at a private lunch counter a trespass?
It is – and the students who staged the sit-ins did not resist when they were removed by police. (Sometimes they were beaten by thugs who themselves were not subjected to police action.) The students never forced their way into any establishment. They simply entered, sat well behaved at the counter, and waited to be served. When told they would not be served, they said through their actions, “You can remove me, but I will not help you.”

you immediately disclaim that the action was non-violent and as peaceful as possible, as though this disclaimer is why the action is justifiable.

For the record, I’d like to say that Magpie’s interpretation of my words is wrong.