ABSTRACT
Authority dresses itself in two principal forms: the political form, that is the State; and the economic form, that is private property. While anarchists stand uniformly opposed to the state, opinions diverge when it comes to what form the economy should take. This chapter argues that even when socialists and social anarchists affirm the same conclusions, the latter arrive at those conclusions in a distinctively anarchist way. Specifically, it presents an argument against private property that begins from premises that all varieties of anarchists should be tempted to embrace, namely, those advanced by Michael Huemer in his recent argument for anarchism (or, more precisely, anarcho-capitalism). The chapter then uses these premises—coupled with Huemer’s intuition-driven approach to ethical reasoning—to demonstrate that the non-consensual appropriation of unowned resources is theoretically unacceptable. In doing so, it provides a novel path to anti-capitalist conclusions that both expresses and defends the social anarchist philosophical position.
