Did you bother to read the text underneath? It explains exactly the inspiration for this comic. Josh was arguing with a not very deep-thinking or well-read socialist, not a left-libertarian by any far stretch of the imagination, who said he didn’t believe in property. Josh made an empty threat to make a point, that he was going to take a shit on his bed, which he didn’t actually do, but it was funny as Hell.

People have been analyzing the crap out of fucking comic strips. It’s not a doctoral thesis. Grow a sense of humor for fuck’s sake. I don’t choose a label for my own anarchism but I have quite a few local friends who call themselves left-libertarians and it would be quite a struggle to find anything we disagree about, except maybe movie preferences and which gender is sexually attractive. Did you see the video below? The guy I’m interviewing is now a close personal friend.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MrMkez1tIY

Josh (Vesuvius) also elaborated on this in a comment above. I never studied Proudhon and the expression which I’ve only heard in passing was never meant as a critique of him. And the guy Josh was debating was certainly no follower of him either. He’s a moron with an extremist notion of property that had nothing to do with Proudhon’s philosophy.

I think a blog post expounding on my personal views on property in a stateless society is called for. I’ve been giving thought to it for some time.

Proudhon’s (and the other traditional anarchist thinkers’) stance is that individual property ought to be protected to the extent where it guarantees your freedom and independence (i.e. you should be in control of your your bed, house, car, sofa, PlayStation, individual tools and means of production etc), but not to extent where it allows you to exploit the labor of others or to place yourself in a position of domination, forcing other human beings to degrade themselves by having to crawl in front of you if they want to access the means of life necessary for their survival (i.e. unused land and resources belong to no one – or to everyone -, factories, large workplaces etc ought to be handled in cooperative way by the organized producers who will thus be in control of their productive lives and retain control over the fruits of their labor- and should not be under the exclusive control of a private tyrant; and so on.). (Anarchists often reject the word ‘property’ and talk of the abolition of ‘property’ and use ‘possession’ instead to refer to their restricted conception of property – but that’s just semantics)

Note that the extended conception of private property that’s now in force pretty much everywhere, and that rigth-wing libertarians want to extend even a bit more, is one that requires the existence of a state, whether a national state or privatized states, as anarcho-capitalists advocate, to protect property- unlike the traditional anarchists’limited conception of private property. (i.e. to enforce your exclusive control over a piece of land that you do not use, or over a workplace that you do not use, etc, you need to use the threat of violence to bar people from using it. That’s got to be done either with propretarian national state, or with a private army at your service.)

In anti-propretarian anarchism, we would then have an economy of boss-less democratic cooperatives either trading goods on the market (mutualism) or federating themselves on a large scale and supplying each other directly according to their needs (which implies a massively decentralized kind of rational management of production and distribution within these mega-coops, through a system of producers’ and consumers’ assemblies and councils), which would be anarchist-collectivism if the worker is remunerated proportionally to his work, or anarchist-communism if the material gain motive is eliminated (i.e. in this theory, people would work just for social recognition and for every human’s fondness for doing a creative activity — while trade wouldn’t be used and everything would provided for free).

I’m all for a vigorous debate between the traditional libertarians and the right-wing libertarians, there’s much common ground between us that we could build upon, but to start that it would be good if you at least aquainted yourselves with the basic positions of left-libertarianism instead of just smearing us by misrepresenting our views to a ridiculous extent (I mean, does the guy who drafted this cartoon really believe that traditional anarchists advocate anybody should be allowed to use your bed?? Is he just being knowingly dishonest, or is he plainly retarded?)