Libertarian socialists see themselves as dedicated to opposing all forms of authority, coercion and social hierarchy. In this they include not only coercion by the state, but also by businesses, schools, religous institutions and at times even the family as well.
Prominent libertarian socialists include (in no particular order) [William Godwin]?, [Pierre-Joseph Proudhon]?, [Piotr Kroptokin]?, [Mikhail Bakunin]?, Emma Goldman (1869-1940), [Alexander Berkman]?, [Buenaventura Durruti]?, [Enrico Malatesta]?, [Nestor Makhno]? and Noam Chomsky. The libertarian socialist tradition dates back to the 18th (someone please give a reference!?) and 19th centuries.
Libertarian socialists reject the claims of the property owner and the landlord; the right to property and the right to charge interest or rent. Having rejected private property, they reject the political machinery (the state) which defends and supports private property. In place of private property, anarchism is based on personal possessions and democratically controlled communal property.
A simple and common objection to libertarian socialism is that any notion of communal control implies something akin to a state. Libertarian socialists reply that there is only a superficial similarity between the power hierarchies of and supporting corporations, on the one hand, and the layered division of labour in cooperatives, on the other. The State is created when private property is legitimized. By contrast, cooperatives, credit unions, and mutual aid societies are the principal instances of communal control and libertarian socialists maintain that they do not involve the kind of authoritarianism found in corporations. They argue that co-operatives behave in a more humane and stable manner, while corporations use workers for their own ends.
Their opponents argue that communal control will lead inevitably to the development of a state; libertarian socialists, while they recognize this as a danger, reject it as being neither a practically nor logically necessary consequence.
The rejection of government is not essential to libertarian socialism, but derives from the desire to eliminate the political machinery which supports private property. Libertarian socialism is primarily a social and economic movement and only secondarily political. Libertarian socialists argue that it is a mistake to hold anarchism to be a purely political doctrine.
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