Yes. It may come as a surprise to many people, but right-Libertarianism is one of the few political theories that justifies slavery. For example, Robert Nozick asks whether "a free system would allow [the individual] to sell himself into slavery" and he answers "I believe that it would." [Anarchy, State and Utopia, p. 371] While some right-Libertarians do not agree with Nozick, there is no logical basis in their ideology for such disagreement.

The logic is simple, you cannot really own something unless you can sell it. Self-ownership is one of the cornerstones of laissez-faire capitalist ideology. Therefore, since you own yourself you can sell yourself.

(For Murray Rothbard's claims of the "unenforceability, in libertarian theory, of voluntary slave contracts" see The Ethics of Liberty, pp. 134-135 — of course, other libertarian theorists claim the exact opposite so "libertarian theory" makes no such claims, but nevermind! Essentially, his point revolves around the assertion that a person "cannot, in nature, sell himself into slavery and have this sale enforced - for this would mean that his future will over his own body was being surrendered in advance" and that if a "labourer remains totally subservient to his master's will voluntarily, he is not yet a slave since his submission is voluntary." [p. 40] However, as we noted in section F.2, Rothbard emphasis on quitting fails to recognise that actual denial of will and control over ones own body that is explicit in wage labour. It is this failure that pro-slave contract "libertarians" stress — as we will see, they consider the slave contract as an extended wage contract. Moreover, a modern slave contract would likely take the form of a "performance bond" [p. 136] in which the slave agrees to perform X years labour or pay their master substantial damages. The threat of damages that enforces the contract and such a "contract" Rothbard does agree is enforceable — along with "conditional exchange" [p. 141] which could be another way of creating slave contracts.)

Nozick's defence of slavery should not come as a surprise to any one familiar with classical liberalism. An elitist ideology, its main rationale is to defend the liberty and power of property owners and justify unfree social relationships (such as government and wage labour) in terms of "consent." Nozick just takes it to its logical conclusion, a conclusion which Rothbard, while balking at the label used, does not actually disagree with.

This is because Nozick's argument is not new but, as with so many others, can be found in John Locke's work. The key difference is that Locke refused the term "slavery" and favoured "drudgery" as, for him, slavery mean a relationship "between a lawful conqueror and a captive" where the former has the power of life and death over the latter. Once a "compact" is agreed between them, "an agreement for a limited power on the one side, and obedience on the other . . . slavery ceases." As long as the master could not kill the slave, then it was "drudgery." Like Nozick, he acknowledges that "men did sell themselves; but, it is plain, this was only to drudgery, not to slavery: for, it is evident, the person sold was not under an absolute, arbitrary, despotical power: for the master could not have power to kill him, at any time, whom, at a certain time, he was obliged to let go free out of his service." [Locke, Second Treatise of Government, Section 24] In other words, like Rothbard, voluntary slavery was fine but just call it something else.

Not that Locke was bothered by involuntary slavery. He was heavily involved in the slave trade. He owned shares in the "Royal Africa Company" which carried on the slave trade for England, making a profit when he sold them. He also held a significant share in another slave company, the "Bahama Adventurers." In the "Second Treatise", Locke justified slavery in terms of "Captives taken in a just war." [Section 85] In other words, a war waged against aggressors. That, of course, had nothing to do with the actual slavery Locke profited from (slave raids were common, for example). Nor did his "liberal" principles stop him suggesting a constitution that would ensure that "every freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power and authority over his Negro slaves." The constitution itself was typically autocratic and hierarchical, designed explicitly to "avoid erecting a numerous democracy." [The Works of John Locke, vol. X, p. 196]

So the notion of contractual slavery has a long history within right-wing liberalism, although most refuse to call it by that name. It is of course simply embarrassment that stops Rothbard calling a spade a spade. He incorrectly assumes that slavery has to be involuntary. In fact, historically, voluntary slave contracts have been common (David Ellerman's Property and Contract in Economics has an excellent overview). Any new form of voluntary slavery would be a "civilised" form of slavery and could occur when an individual would "agree" to sell themselves to themselves to another (as when a starving worker would "agree" to become a slave in return for food). In addition, the contract would be able to be broken under certain conditions (perhaps in return for breaking the contract, the former slave would have pay damages to his or her master for the labour their master would lose - a sizeable amount no doubt and such a payment could result in debt slavery, which is the most common form of "civilised" slavery. Such damages may be agreed in the contract as a "performance bond" or "conditional exchange").

In summary, right-Libertarians are talking about "civilised" slavery (or, in other words, civil slavery) and not forced slavery. While some may have reservations about calling it slavery, they agree with the basic concept that since people own themselves they can sell themselves as well as selling their labour for a lifetime.

We must stress that this is no academic debate. "Voluntary" slavery has been a problem in many societies and still exists in many countries today (particularly third world ones where bonded labour — i.e. where debt is used to enslave people — is the most common form). With the rise of sweat shops and child labour in many "developed" countries such as the USA, "voluntary" slavery (perhaps via debt and bonded labour) may become common in all parts of the world — an ironic (if not surprising) result of "freeing" the market and being indifferent to the actual freedom of those within it.

And it is interesting to note that even Murray Rothbard is not against the selling of humans. He argued that children are the property of their parents. They can (bar actually murdering them by violence) do whatever they please with them, even sell them on a "flourishing free child market." [The Ethics of Liberty, p. 102] Combined with a whole hearted support for child labour (after all, the child can leave its parents if it objects to working for them) such a "free child market" could easily become a "child slave market" — with entrepreneurs making a healthy profit selling infants to other entrepreneurs who could make profits from the toil of "their" children (and such a process did occur in 19th century Britain). Unsurprisingly, Rothbard ignores the possible nasty aspects of such a market in human flesh (such as children being sold to work in factories, homes and brothels). And, of course, such a market could see women "specialising" in producing children for it (the use of child labour during the Industrial Revolution actually made it economically sensible for families to have more children) and, perhaps, gluts and scarcities of babies due to changing market conditions. But this is besides the point.

Of course, this theoretical justification for slavery at the heart of an ideology calling itself "libertarianism" is hard for many right-Libertarians to accept. Some of the "anarcho"-capitalist type argue that such contracts would be very hard to enforce in their system of capitalism. This attempt to get out of the contradiction fails simply because it ignores the nature of the capitalist market. If there is a demand for slave contracts to be enforced, then companies will develop to provide that "service" (and it would be interesting to see how two "protection" firms, one defending slave contracts and another not, could compromise and reach a peaceful agreement over whether slave contracts were valid). Thus we could see a so-called "anarchist" or "free" society producing companies whose specific purpose was to hunt down escaped slaves (i.e. individuals in slave contracts who have not paid damages to their owners for freedom). Of course, perhaps Rothbard would claim that such slave contracts would be "outlawed" under his "general libertarian law code" but this is a denial of market "freedom". If slave contracts are "banned" then surely this is paternalism, stopping individuals from contracting out their "labour services" to whom and however long they "desire". You cannot have it both ways.

So, ironically, an ideology proclaiming itself to support "liberty" ends up justifying and defending slavery. Indeed, for the right-libertarian the slave contract is an exemplification, not the denial, of the individual's liberty! How is this possible? How can slavery be supported as an expression of liberty? Simple, right-Libertarian support for slavery is a symptom of a deeper authoritarianism, namely their uncritical acceptance of contract theory. The central claim of contract theory is that contract is the means to secure and enhance individual freedom. Slavery is the antithesis to freedom and so, in theory, contract and slavery must be mutually exclusive. However, as indicated above, some contract theorists (past and present) have included slave contracts among legitimate contracts. This suggests that contract theory cannot provide the theoretical support needed to secure and enhance individual freedom. Why is this?

As Carole Pateman argues, "contract theory is primarily about a way of creating social relations constituted by subordination, not about exchange." Rather than undermining subordination, contract theorists justify modern subjection — "contract doctrine has proclaimed that subjection to a master — a boss, a husband — is freedom." [The Sexual Contract, p. 40 and p. 146] The question central to contract theory (and so right-Libertarianism) is not "are people free" (as one would expect) but "are people free to subordinate themselves in any manner they please." A radically different question and one only fitting to someone who does not know what liberty means.

Anarchists argue that not all contracts are legitimate and no free individual can make a contract that denies his or her own freedom. If an individual is able to express themselves by making free agreements then those free agreements must also be based upon freedom internally as well. Any agreement that creates domination or hierarchy negates the assumptions underlying the agreement and makes itself null and void. In other words, voluntary government is still government and the defining chararacteristic of an anarchy must be, surely, "no government" and "no rulers."

This is most easily seen in the extreme case of the slave contract. John Stuart Mill stated that such a contract would be "null and void." He argued that an individual may voluntarily choose to enter such a contract but in so doing "he abdicates his liberty; he foregoes any future use of it beyond that single act. He therefore defeats, in his own case, the very purpose which is the justification of allowing him to dispose of himself. . .The principle of freedom cannot require that he should be free not to be free. It is not freedom, to be allowed to alienate his freedom." He adds that "these reasons, the force of which is so conspicuous in this particular case, are evidently of far wider application." [quoted by Pateman, Op. Cit., pp. 171-2]

And it is such an application that defenders of capitalism fear (Mill did in fact apply these reasons wider and unsurprisingly became a supporter of a market syndicalist form of socialism). If we reject slave contracts as illegitimate then, logically, we must also reject all contracts that express qualities similar to slavery (i.e. deny freedom) including wage slavery. Given that, as David Ellerman points out, "the voluntary slave . . . and the employee cannot in fact take their will out of their intentional actions so that they could be 'employed' by the master or employer" we are left with "the rather implausible assertion that a person can vacate his or her will for eight or so hours a day for weeks, months, or years on end but cannot do so for a working lifetime." [Property and Contract in Economics, p. 58]

The implications of supporting voluntary slavery is quite devastating for all forms of right-wing "libertarianism." This was proven by Ellerman when he wrote an extremely robust defence of it under the pseudonym "J. Philmore" called The Libertarian Case for Slavery (first published in The Philosophical Forum, xiv, 1982). This classic rebuttal takes the form of "proof by contradiction" (or reductio ad absurdum) whereby he takes the arguments of right-libertarianism to their logical end and shows how they reach the memorably conclusion that the "time has come for liberal economic and political thinkers to stop dodging this issue and to critically re-examine their shared prejudices about certain voluntary social institutions . . . this critical process will inexorably drive liberalism to its only logical conclusion: libertarianism that finally lays the true moral foundation for economic and political slavery."

Ellerman shows how, from a right-"libertarian" perspective there is a "fundamental contradiction" in a modern liberal society for the state to prohibit slave contracts. He notes that there "seems to be a basic shared prejudice of liberalism that slavery is inherently involuntary, so the issue of genuinely voluntary slavery has received little scrutiny. The perfectly valid liberal argument that involuntary slavery is inherently unjust is thus taken to include voluntary slavery (in which case, the argument, by definition, does not apply). This has resulted in an abridgment of the freedom of contract in modern liberal society." Thus it is possible to argue for a "civilised form of contractual slavery." ["J. Philmore,", Op. Cit.]

So accurate and logical was Ellerman's article that many of its readers were convinced it was written by a right-libertarian (including, we have to say, us!). One such writer was Carole Pateman, who correctly noted that "[t]here is a nice historical irony here. In the American South, slaves were emancipated and turned into wage labourers, and now American contractarians argue that all workers should have the opportunity to turn themselves into civil slaves." [Op. Cit., p. 63]).

The aim of Ellerman's article was to show the problems that employment (wage labour) presents for the concept of self-government and how contract need not result in social relationships based on freedom. As "Philmore" put it, "[a]ny thorough and decisive critique of voluntary slavery or constitutional nondemocratic government would carry over to the employment contract — which is the voluntary contractual basis for the free-market free-enterprise system. Such a critique would thus be a reductio ad absurdum." As "contractual slavery" is an "extension of the employer-employee contract," he shows that the difference between wage labour and slavery is the time scale rather than the principle or social relationships involved. [Op. Cit.] This explains, firstly, the early workers' movement called capitalism "wage slavery" (anarchists still do) and, secondly, why capitalists like Rothbard support the concept but balk at the name. It exposes the unfree nature of the system they support! While it is possible to present wage labour as "freedom" due to its "consensual" nature, it becomes much harder to do so when talking about slavery or dictatorship. Then the contradictions are exposed for all to see and be horrified by.

All this does not mean that we must reject free agreement. Far from it! Free agreement is essential for a society based upon individual dignity and liberty. There are a variety of forms of free agreement and anarchists support those based upon co-operation and self-management (i.e. individuals working together as equals). Anarchists desire to create relationships which reflect (and so express) the liberty that is the basis of free agreement. Capitalism creates relationships that deny liberty. The opposition between autonomy and subjection can only be maintained by modifying or rejecting contract theory, something that capitalism cannot do and so the right-wing Libertarian rejects autonomy in favour of subjection (and so rejects socialism in favour of capitalism).

The real contrast between anarchism and right-Libertarianism is best expressed in their respective opinions on slavery. Anarchism is based upon the individual whose individuality depends upon the maintenance of free relationships with other individuals. If individuals deny their capacities for self-government from themselves through a contract the individuals bring about a qualitative change in their relationship to others - freedom is turned into mastery and subordination. For the anarchist, slavery is thus the paradigm of what freedom is not, instead of an exemplification of what it is (as right-Libertarians state). As Proudhon argued:

"If I were asked to answer the following question: What is slavery? and I should answer in one word, It is murder, my meaning would be understood at once. No extended argument would be required to show that the power to take from a man his thought, his will, his personality, is a power of life and death; and that to enslave a man is to kill him." [What is Property?, p. 37]

In contrast, the right-Libertarian effectively argues that "I support slavery because I believe in liberty." It is a sad reflection of the ethical and intellectual bankruptcy of our society that such an "argument" is actually taken seriously by (some) people. The concept of "slavery as freedom" is far too Orwellian to warrant a critique - we will leave it up to right Libertarians to corrupt our language and ethical standards with an attempt to prove it.

From the basic insight that slavery is the opposite of freedom, the anarchist rejection of authoritarian social relations quickly follows (the right-wing Libertarians fear):

"Liberty is inviolable. I can neither sell nor alienate my liberty; every contract, every condition of a contract, which has in view the alienation or suspension of liberty, is null: the slave, when he plants his foot upon the soil of liberty, at that moment becomes a free man. . . Liberty is the original condition of man; to renounce liberty is to renounce the nature of man: after that, how could we perform the acts of man?" [P.J. Proudhon, Op. Cit., p. 67]

The employment contract (i.e. wage slavery) abrogates liberty. It is based upon inequality of power and "exploitation is a consequence of the fact that the sale of labour power entails the worker's subordination." [Carole Pateman, Op. Cit., P. 149] Hence Proudhon's (and Mill's) support of self-management and opposition to capitalism - any relationship that resembles slavery is illegitimate and no contract that creates a relationship of subordination is valid. Thus in a truly anarchistic society, slave contracts would be unenforceable — people in a truly free (i.e. non-capitalist) society would never tolerate such a horrible institution or consider it a valid agreement. If someone was silly enough to sign such a contract, they would simply have to say they now rejected it in order to be free — such contracts are made to be broken and without the force of a law system (and private defence firms) to back it up, such contracts will stay broken.

The right-Libertarian support for slave contracts (and wage slavery) indicates that their ideology has little to do with liberty and far more to do with justifying property and the oppression and exploitation it produces. Their support and theoretical support for slavery indicates a deeper authoritarianism which negates their claims to be libertarians.