The Substance of Capitalism and Libertarianism

Friday, April 23, 2010

Capitalism is a particular economic model, an organizational mode or structure of production, which is not in and of itself the same thing as the comparably general meta-concept of a "free market". Further, the codification or standardization of this organizational mode at the legal level makes it a particular legal code (a legal code entrenching particular arrangements of ownership titles), which is not in and of itself the same thing as the comparably general meta-concept of "libertarian law". When certain left-libertarians say that they are opposed to capitalism in substance, they are opposing this particular organizational mode and legal code, not necessarily the meta-level of free markets and libertarian law. It is conceivable for one to oppose this without supporting proactive aggression.

This is part of the reason why Stephan Kinsella and others are not justified in dismissing substantive opponents of capitalism as necessarily being outside of the scope of libertarianism. The only way that this can be gotten away with is by conflating the general with the particular, I.E. putting forward something rather specific as if it was the essential component of a much more general concept. This presents people with a convoluted framing of the discourse in which there is a false set of choices between accepting the economic and legal organizational scheme that is "capitalism" and not being a libertarian. But that just begs the question as to whether or not these particular modes are necessarily logically implied by the meta-level concepts or even alone the one and only compatible implication of them.

Of course, the substance of the meta-level concepts and the relationship or ordering of such concepts could be in question as well. It is not exactly clear why the meta-concept of "liberty" necessarily has to be defined through the lens of ownership, rather than the other way around. It is not clear why there could not possibly be some tension between strong and absolutist notions of land ownership and the meta-concept of liberty. It isn't clear why non-aggression necessarily must be conceived of as an axoim or a categorical imperative that isn't a bit fuzzy. It isn't clear why a systematic application of non-proviso lockean property norms could not be called into question on consequentialist grounds, as not leading to the intended result of a genuinely free society. Nor is it clear why such political ideals are realizable in an inegalitarian cultural context.

These are the kind of begged questions that are glossed over or in which certain answers are taken for granted and treated as essential parts of the definition of meta-concepts. What sense does it make to act as if Murray Rothbard's particular formulation of property theory is essential to the general notion of political freedom? It isn't. It's a particular disambiguation that libertarians may or may not fully accept. If such a property theory represents "capitalism", and one has reason to be skeptical of such a property theory while also aiming at the general goal of political freedom and a stateless society, one could conceivably reject "capitalism" as a libertarian. One could believe that it devolves into a state in spite of the intentions of its proponents, or that it contains ambiguity that can be used to justify trampling on people's freedom in a certain context, and be a libertarian.

The substance of libertarianism, at a sort of meta-level, is more general than the substance of capitalism. Stephan Kinsella and his ilk will have none of this: he equates the substance of capitalism and libertarianism as constituting one and the same thing. But, once again, this is just begging the question. Why is libertarian capitalism the same thing as libertarianism in general? This seems somewhat analogous to claiming that a particular normative position is the same thing as a general meta-ethical position (such as moral realism). I don't claim that libertarian capitalism isn't libertarian, I would say that it's a form of libertarianism that I think gets it wrong. The same standard is not reciprocated, however: if I don't accept a particular form of libertarianism, I'm suddenly put outside of the general category of libertarianism.

On top of this, quite paradoxically, we are told (particularly by Walter Block and those mimicking his notion of "the plumbline") that libertarianism in general is neutral to preferences, I.E. it is sold as a sort of all-inclusive relativism. This is claimed by some of the very same people that insist on particular norms as essential to libertarianism, ruling out everything to "the left" of anarcho-capitalism in terms of property norms and economic organization. The begged question is where the line is drawn between necessary norms and open-ended preference neutrality. On one hand, one could skeptically ask, "Why aren't your property norms just preferences too?". On the other hand, one could wonder if this (at least superficially) relativist proclamation is ambiguous and misleading, and ask whether there may actually be stronger, additional, or even alternative norms necessary for a particularly workable form of libertarianism to be made (even if one simultaneously still grants the term "libertarian" to people that don't accept those norms).

As we can see, those who are trying to monopolize libertarianism on the behalf of capitalism beg a whole host of questions. It begs the questions of rights theory, property theory, the thick and thin libertarianism discussion, and so on. But what seems most fair to me, in terms of the question of "who is a libertarian?", is that it is fundamentally constituted by an attitude that seeks to obtain or maximize political freedom as a meta-concept (and yes, this is distinguishable from the umbrella of welfare-liberalism). Anything beyond that is working out the details inside of libertarianism, which inevitably leads to subdivisions. One may think that particular subdivisions have it wrong and yet still acknowledge their status as libertarians. It is hard to look at the opposite route and not see it as dogmatism.

In a sense, yes, I am openly what some might call a "left-sectarian" in the sense that I philosophically reject a notable portion of the ideas of what I consider to be the general paradigm of the libertarian right (such as the ideas of folks such as Hans Hoppe, Walter Block, Stephan Kinsella, and even Murray Rothbard) and I do not particularly buy into the claims made by some such people that they are really in a neutral zone with respect to "left" and "right" ideological trends (when the virulently anti-leftist fangs come out, "plumbline" claims are particularly misleading). At the same time, I view libertarianism in the most general sense to be an umbrella that includes these people and their ideas, and that in spite of some rather strong disagreements there still are internal libertarians relations of a sort. But the substance of ideas is more fundamental than general labels, so I'm content reciprocally considering them ideological enemies *inside of libertarianism* to the extent that we disagree on fundamental points and when I am systematically attacked on the basis of prejudice by the people in such a paradigm. Yes, I do oppose (at least part of) the substance of your position, and I oppose it precisely because I think libertarianism could be improved.
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Libertarian Disillusionment

Friday, January 23, 2009

Let's face it: the libertarian movement is in shambles. There is no commonly understood definition of what libertarianism is even among self-proclaimed libertarians, and to the extent that there is, this is only loosely based on a handful of principles which are nonetheless still interpreted and applied in many different ways. Self-proclaimed libertarians can't even agree with eachother on simple single issues like immigration and intellectual property. Hell, there isn't even a consensus on what anarchism and statism really is, and some people's favor for a government/state distinction sometimes adds to confusion.

Frankly, some of the positions taken by certain self-proclaimed libertarians are outright psychopathic. I've even debated with people who will actually defend the absurd implication of being allowed to arbitrarily shoot a child for being on your lawn, and to add insult to injury this is defended in the name of non-aggression and property rights! It seems like an alarming number of self-proclaimed libertarians defend aggression in the name of non-aggression. They have latched onto libertarianism only as a sugar-coating or legitimization for their own personal motivation to get away with psychopathy.

This is especially true in the case of explicitly right-wing libertarians, who appear to only nominally oppose the current secular state because they view it as competition to their own prefered forms of authoritarianism. Libertarian concepts are only useful to these people as a means of justifying racism, classism, parental authority, the church and feudal landlords. This extends well beyond the normal implications of a vulgar libertarianism, as it is vulgar in every sense possible. These right-wing libertarians only dislike the state because they mistakenly see it as standing in the way of "natural heirarchy" and "natural authority".

They then go on to essentially propose their authoritarian preferances as the new state, while sugar-coating it with libertarian concepts or terminology to give it legitimacy. Their views on the establishment of a libertarian society almost directly mirrors the artisocratic justifications for political systems. This can be blatantly seen in Hans Hoppe's concept of "natural elites", which is just a right-libertarian version of the exact same artistocratic justification for the state that traditional conservatives give, despite having a veneer of being opposed to the current statist intellectuals (who are mostly disliked for their socially liberal tendencies of all things).

By no means am I letting some of the crazier elements on "the left" off the hook here either though. Frankly, many of the anarcho-syndicalists and anarcho-communists are practically indistinguishable from Stalinists in my experience. Oh, sure, they might have some sensible egalitarian rhetoric sometimes, but they often fall back on explicitly marxist and authoritan socialist positions out of their zeal to oppose private tyranny. This is particularly true of the Chomskyites, who worshop whatever Chomsky says without any second thought, all the while advocating the practical universalization of state power in the name of egalitarianism! We're supposed to tolerate the increasing encrouchment of the state into our lives out of the false promise that it will rid us of economic exploitation and the state will then just wither away. Nonesense!

Just as I'm highly skeptical of the "private city" models of anarcho-capitalists, the idea of a global federation of unions terrifies me, and the "worker's council" models of anarcho-communists may very well give reason for suspicion that mirror the reasons for having suspicion about anarcho-capitalist models. Now, I know that ideally this federation of unions idea is supposed to be decentralized and leave an option for secession, but sometimes I get the sneaking suspicion that some of these people aren't really advocating them that way, they are normatively advocating them as a uniform or absolute system. I've even seen some anarcho-communists justify using violence to stop people from making or engaging in wage labor contracts, even against the consent of the worker in the scenario. This perplexes me, especially since the anarcho-communist is actually going against "the workers"!

So what do we see? We see an incredibly divisive and one-dimensional split between two completely wrong parties: anarcho-capitalists and right-wing libertarians who arbitrarily defend the status quo and tradition on one end, and anarcho-communists and anarcho-syndicalists who advocate arbitrary violence in the name of turning the world into a gigantic ant farm on the other end. As these two parties fight more and more, they are radicalized even more in their respective wrong directions. The anarcho-capitalist and right-libertarian's knee-jerk opposition to all things "left" leads them down the path of becoming arch-conservatives, and the anarcho-communist's knee-jerk opposition to all things "property" leads them down the path of becoming just another group of authoritarian socialists.

When I made the jump from being a minarchist to an anarchist, I had the impression that I had crossed a hurdle that leaves room for more clarity and consensus. I was wrong. The minarchist vs. anarchist debate is actually being mirrored within the anarchist movement in all sorts of different ways. Hence, you will find some market anarchists opposing the proposals of anarcho-capitalists on the grounds that such proposals are indistinguishable from a state or blatantly risk devolving into a state, and you will find social anarchists opposing the proposals of anarcho-communists on the grounds that such proposals are indistinguishable from a state or undermine basic principles. These are the more rational people in the bunch to the extent that they are genuinely being sure not to let authoritarianism be snuck in through the back door.

This gives good reason for disillusionment.

Posted by Brainpolice at 5:38 PM

On Amoralist Anarchism

Thursday, January 22, 2009

I've been a part of numerous online social networks or general social groups online that contains some amoralist anarchists, who either are former libertarian anarchists who have come to reject libertarianism or they are anarchists who rejected libertarianism from the get-go and reached the conclusion of anarchism from a completely different conceptual framework.

On the most personal level, the youtuber D4Shawn and the persona formerly known as Stodles (who now runs this website) are the two amoralist anarchists that I've interacted with most. D4Shawn used to be a libertarian anarchist, and made a separate channel one day trying to approach anarchism from a more utilitarian or relativistic perspective, which has recently devolved into an ethical nihilism. Stodles never was a libertarian, he jumped straight from white nationalism to anarchism, which created some confusion about his position along the way.

Both Stodles and D4Shawn philosophically reject libertarianism while still prefering anarchism. D4Shawn effectively claims that ethics is completely useless metaphysical mumbo-jumbo, and thinks that we should be speaking in purely preferential terms. Stodles even appears to go so far as to imply that any conception of ethics inherently leads to rulership. On the other hand, both of them practically take positions that may very well tend towards libertarian anarchism, but it is functionally a mere statement of preferance from their perspective. This starts to hint at the complications that leads me to see this approach as silly.

While these amoralists may philosophicaly reject libertarianism, they essentially practically support it and they cannot completely avoid value-laden terminology. So while they may loudly proclaim their opposition to ethical principles and rights-concepts until they are blue in the face, they ultimately would like to live their lives in a way consistant with certain ethical principles and rights-concepts. While, unlike Stefan Molyneux, I am not argueing that this by itself proves those ethical principles and rights-concepts, it certainly gives reason for pause when comparing one's behavior to one's philosophy and may hint at a need to reanalyze the moral-practical dichotomy.

Anarchism is indistinguishable from anomie if there is an ethical vacuum. There is no such thing as a society in an ethical vacuum. Even if one concedes to the existance of some kind of subjectivity, I don't think it logically follows that ethics is completely useless and irrelevant. An anarchist society either cannot conceptually be an anarchist society to begin with or will not last as an anarchist society for long if its philosophical and cultural norms deliberately undermine it. So it doesn't make sense to act like anarchism is compatible with any set of values or to act as if all values are equal.

Various ethical principles can undermine anarchism, help foster it and widen its scope. Furthermore, merely having an ethical principle, wether it's sensible or not, doesn't necessarily lead to the use of violence to enforce it. Questions of the use of violence inherently are ethical questions themselves, and the behavior of an individual doesn't always align with their philosophy. There really is no such thing as a person who has no ethical considerations, and this includes self-proclaimed ethical nihilists and various post-modernists. Noone can really divorce themselves from goals, reasons for goals and means towards goals.

Such things almost always have a reason. It makes no sense to proclaim that you favor a society in which rulership is normatively shunned, and then say you have no real reason for it other than preferance. To borrow Molyneuxian terminology, that reduces it to the level of "I like ice cream". Surely, a cause such as anarchism is not at the level of "I like ice cream". If one is putting foreward anarchism as a goal, surely one must explain why it is your goal beyond a mere appeal to the fact that your do favor the goal. It makes no sense to have a goal, and then proclaim neutrality as soon as the question of its foundation and application comes up.

So, by the very least, this ethical nihilism is highly impractical. If taken to its extremes, one is simply advocating anomie. If one is more practical about it, one is nonetheless sort of advocating both anarchy and anomie at once. On one hand, I think there's a sense in which this ethical nihilism is harmless, since the ethical nihilist may practically take a libertarian type of position anyways and most people aren't going to practically take ethical nihilism seriously. Sometimes they even bring up some interesting points. On the other hand, it poses a threat to libertarian anarchism to the extent that it encourages people to either think that anarchism is a pandora's box compatible with any set of values or to ultimately reject libertarian values in the name of putting on a facade of neutrality.

Posted by Brainpolice at 6:12 PM

On The Relationship Between Libertarianism, Anarchism and Values

Tuesday, January 20, 2009

While it is true that the derivation of the word libertarian is essentially as a code word for an anarchist after some of the more violent parts of the history of the labor movement, I think that there is a sense in which there is a distinction between libertarianism and anarchism. In my understanding, libertarianism is a social philosophy or set of social philosophies that logically leads to the conclusion of anarchism. Anarchism as a phenomenon is a state of interpersonal relations that is consistant with the ethical norms involved in libertarianism. Or, to put it another way, libertarianism is the philosophical framework out of which order is established in conditions of anarchism. Libertarianism is a like a meta-theory of justice.

Technically, there is such thing as a non-libertarian anarchist. There are both libertarian anarchists and non-libertarian anarchists. Non-libertarian anarchists generally lean towards some kind of ethical nihilism, and hence they tend to see libertarianism as kind of useless (although some may be mildly tolerant of libertarian anarchists), or they bundle libertarianisn with all sorts of values that blatantly undermine it, to the point where their philosophical framework actually justifies authoritarianism (this can be seen in some of the attempts at libertarian-conservative fusionism).

Also, it is possible for someone to be a libertarian at least nominally and not be an anarchist. So there are both libertarian anarchists and libertarians who are not anarchists, which generally describes the classic anarchist vs. minarchist split. The existance of libertarians who are not anarchists is a consequence of either too narrow or an interpretation of the principles or the superimposition of principles that create tension with libertarianism. Non-anarchist libertarians do not see the existance of a state or any fundamentals of a state as violating the libertarian principles, or they do see that but pragmatically endorse a minimal state anyways.

Then there are some libertarians who label themselves as anarchists but functionally take a minarchist position, or even a rabidly authoritarian position. This is often a consequence of bundling libertarianism with values that create tension, and the alien values win out. It probably is a great disservice to libertarianism to even grace such people with the term libertarian, but it is part of the baggage of the modern libertarian movement. At least some of the anarcho-capitalists functionally take minarchist or authoritarian positions, and likewise some of the libertarian socialists fall back on authoritarian socialist positions.

There's also a distinction between political libertarians and apolitical libertarians, and this distinction actually crosses over into the territory of both minarchists and anarchists. The side of apolitical libertarianism is best represented by the agorists, who make opposition to the political process and the use of direct action and civil disobedience as an alternative a key issue. The side of political libertarianism is best represented by the Libertarian Party and the Ron Paul movement. This distinction may also lead to the problem of anarchists falling back into functional minarchism or authoritarianism.

Philosophical approaches to libertarianism is fairly fragmented into numerous different sub-categories. Utilitarians vs. natural righters, egoists vs. universalists, left-libertarians vs. right-libertarians, thin libertarians vs. thick libertarians, libertarian socialists vs. free market libertarians, anarcho-capitalists vs. individualist anarchists, and so on and so forth. The logical implications of libertarianism and wether or not certain values or compatible or incompatible with libertarianism is hotly debated. Most of the people involved generally agree on the same principles but interpret and apply them in different ways.

This creates a degree of vagueness that undermines any clear definition for libertarianism. In some cases, a false dichotomy or semantic ambiguity is involved and a reconciliation is to be made, and in other cases incompatible values are smuggled in by one side or the principles are not being properly defined, interpreted or applied by one side. The plumbline and/or thin approach to libertarianism also creates a lot of vagueness in terms of clearly defining libertarianism or putting it into its proper context. On one hand, libertarianism is portrayed as a "big tent" that is open to any set of values, while on the other hand certain incompatible or tension-creating values are smuggled in.

Suppose I went around calling myself an "anarcho-monarchist" and advocated a monarchy model as if it was compatible with libertarian anarchism. Would anyone really take such a thing seriously? While perhaps such a model would be on a smaller scale than the current state, would it be compatible with libertarianism? Does literally any value become legitimate so long as it's implemented on a smaller scale? It is clear to me that the answer to all of these questions is a great big "no". While decentralization is generally preferable to centralization, decentralization only has to do with size and scope rather than content. It has nothing to do with content. A mini-theocracy is still a theocracy, a mini-monarchy is still a monarchy, and a mini-state is still a state.

In some sense, the problem is that there is not enough decentralization in such examples. That some people actually advocate such things under the banner of libertarian anarchism perplexes me. The very principle of the values in question are authoritarian in nature, so it makes no sense to expect them to mix well with libertarian values. Such values very overtly undermine libertarianism and anarchism. So it should be clear that libertarianism cannot be combined with any old set of values without risking undermining itself. Authoritarian libertarianism and conservative anarchism are simply contradictions in terms.

This is not to say that pluralism does not have its place in the context of libertarian anarchism. But that's precisely where the pluralism is: in the context of libertarian anarchism. It is not a completely arbitrary pluralism, it has qualifications. It is absolutely true that many different forms of voluntary association can co-exist peacefully in a libertarian anarchist society, but this is conditional upon a clear understanding of what it means for something to be voluntary or coercive and what constitutes the proportional and just use of force given various different circumstances, or by the very least, a generally live and let live attitude. This means that questions of philosophy and culture are not completely irrelevant to libertarianism. Anarchism without adjectives definitely has it's context though, and its main limitation is that it cannot be compatible with values or systems that inherently undermine the overall anarchist principle involved.

Posted by Brainpolice at 9:18 PM 3 comments

Labels: Agorism, Anarcho-Capitalism, Ideology, Justice, Left-Libertarianism, libertarian, Libertarianism, Liberty, Monarchy, Philosophy, Pluralism,Political Theory, Polycentrism, Thick Libertarianism

Liberty and Equality

Saturday, January 31, 2009

The Mises Institute recently started selling editions of the book "Liberty or Equality: The Challenge of Our Times".

Here is the description of the book: "Sometime in the 18th century, the word equality gained ground as a political ideal, but the idea was always vague. In this treatise, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn argues that it reduced to one simple and very dangerous idea: equality of political power as embodied in democracy. He marshals the strongest possible case that democratic equality is the very basis not of liberty, as is commonly believed, but the total state. He uses national socialism as his prime example. He further argues the old notion of government by law is upheld in old monarchies, restrained by a noble elite. Aristocracy, not democracy, gave us liberty. On his side in this argument, he includes the whole of the old liberal tradition, and offers overwhelming evidence for his case. In our times, war and totalitarianism do indeed sail under the democratic flag. This book, capable of overturning most of what you thought you knew about political systems, was first published in 1952. 403 pages."

A number of objections can be made against this description alone. For one thing, it seems erroneous to propose that liberty and equality are absolutely dichotomous, and it hardly is the case that the state-democratic notion of equality in political power is the only possible interpretation or definition of equality in political philosophy. So this description asserts some false assumptions. Furthermore, the idea that monarchies were based on liberty and were meaningfully "restrained by law", or that "artistocracy gave us liberty" is of course nonsense. This is simply romanticist historical revisionism. Why couldn't one oppose both aristocracy and contemporary democracy? Wouldn't the view that both artisocratic government and democratic government violate liberty make more sense and be consistent? It seems like the tendency of the Hoppeans is to act as if old order artistocracies and liberty go hand in hand, which makes no sense at all and doesn't seem to be consistent with libertarianism. So much focus is narrowly put into opposing modern democracy and socialism that aristocratic and monarchal states end up being conflated with libertarianism.

Posted by Brainpolice at 10:37 PM

Labels: Liberty; Equality

Limited Liability and Corporations

Wednesday, February 4, 2009

I so happened to be reading through old posts on this blog that slipped under my radar when they were initially posted. I came across one by Brainpolice entitled "Limited Liability and the Social Contract." While I understand where Brainpolice is coming from in his approach, I disagree with the overall claim of his article.

Instead of focusing on the article itself, I'd rather elaborate on the reasons that I think notions such as limiting liability are not in conflict with market anarchist philosophy.

It is claimed that limiting liability via a contractual arrangement suffers from the same problem as the social contract. Intellectuals like Lysander Spooner long ago swept the idea of a social contract into the dustbin of history. Spooner and others posited, quite rightly, that no one can bind a man to a contract in which he is not a party. Brainpolice alleges that limiting liability in corporations does the exact same thing that causes the social contract to fail: it attempts to bind third parties.

I dispute this claim. I do not agree that limited liability and the social contract are similar concepts which suffer from the same flaw. To the contrary, limiting liability is a product of free association and alienability in the free market.

My claim is that individuals can contract individually or form an entity to transfer responsibility for their actions, even their crimes. I base this on the idea that one can delegate his rights to another, i.e. he can alienate his rights. That is, a person can contract or sell away his legal responsibility to another in the same way that one can transfer any other kind of legitimately owned property. For instance, John buys the legal responsibility of Sam, so that when Sam goes out and commits a crime, like theft, the victim's right to restitution would not be viable against Sam, since John owns the legal responsibility of Sam. The victim's right to restitution would be directed against John, the rightful owner of Sam's legal responsibility.

It may be objected that the victim clearly has a right to have his restitution come directly from Sam. But does said victim? No. Restitution from Sam is no different than restitution from John in and of itself. To elaborate, if Sam is truly the owner of his legal responsibility, he can contract (or sell or alienate) it away. To the extent that Sam cannot alienate his legal responsibility, it is to that same extent that he does not truly own his own legal responsibility in the first place. If one does not truly own his legal responsibility such that he cannot alienate it, how can it be seriously maintained that restitution should be rightly directed against him for any of his crimes in the first place?

It is on this basis that the contrast between the social contract and the limited liability of corporations becomes evident. The social contract, from the outset, does not contract legal responsibility away from those that fall under a particular government, for the vital ingredient of consent is lacking. On the other hand, limited liability is a concept in which those that agree to it fully consent at the outset. This agreement does not bind third parties like the social contract, since it merely transfers a commodity from one person to another; it no more binds third parties than the fact that Yamaha purchases the tires for its motorcycles from Dunlop. Yamaha, in this market exchange, hardly "binds" consumers of its products in any meaningful sense. The rights of third parties remain completely intact. With one, the social contract, it imposes without consent a certain type of legal order; with the other, limited liability, it simply transfers a commodity, with no impact on the rights of third parties.

It is another matter to consider whether such an arrangement in a free market is a smart or good idea. It is also another matter whether or not such an arrangement under a government is legitimate, since the state's law is not consented to, and it does, in fact, change the legal rights of those seeking redress against a corporation. My point is to claim that limited liability of persons under a business contract merely transfers owned commodities and that this is compatible with market anarchy.
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On The Psychology and Language of Power

The language of contemporary politics, and of politics in general, is fascinating to me. Mainstream politics, particularly in the media, seems to be filled with deceptive and meaningless verbiage. There are a lot of buzzwords meant to spark an emotional reaction in people, and the meaning of certain terms has flip-flopped to almost their polar opposite over the course of the decades and centuries (for example, the term liberalism used to signify a dedication to individual liberty, while in contemporary politics it is almost completely detached from its original meaning, and simply means someone associated with the Democratic party or someone with a vague set of ideas associated with "the left"). There are also a lot of false dichotomies that try to force us to choose between two irrational positions (liberal/conservative, republican/democrat, capitalist/socialist, and so on).

Political power, particularly in our modern sham democracies, seems to be dependant on such an abuse of language in order to control the ideological atmosphere. Political identity is largely constructed on the basis of preconcieved and ill-defined terms. Political philosophy is not discussed in any significant manner, everything is more or less reduced to a matter of petty identity politics. It's all about appealing to cultural preferances. The appeal to emotion and short-term or more petty personal interests is common. And words that typically have a positive connotation are used to get people to support politicians and win them over to certain specific ideologies. Even a perfectly good word like "freedom" can be used as a weapon to justify tyranny.

George Bush and Dick Cheney are perfect examples of this, with their justification of mass-violence in the name of freedom. I favor freedom, but it doesn't follow that I should favor them and their policies. Barack Obama is another example of this, with his justification for his authority by appealing to "hope" and "change". I have hope and want change, but it doesn't follow that I should favor Obama and his policies. These are perfect examples of the abuse of language as a weapon. I can have totally irrational premises, and bully someone with phrases such as "the truth", "morality", "the good", "the people", "the workers", "personal responsibility", and so on, as my authority to get them to agree or comply with me.

Consequentially, modern politics seems to have devolved into a confusing haze of words and signs that don't have much of a context or any significant content to them. Power elites can justify just about anything they want in the name of good-sounding things. And even then, sometimes the assumption that these good-sounding things are so good in the grand scheme of things isn't quite accurate. Appeals to things like national entity and altruism are essentially meaningless to me. So I come to reject even many of the phrases and concepts that are relied on. I reject the implicit assumptions of mainstream politics, and am unfortunately lead into a cynical attitude when I see the masses hooray for such things.

Being somewhat of an adherant of analytical philosophy, clarity is an important thing to me, and it seems like most political language completely undermines clarity. Everything breaks down into vast overgeneralizations and arbitrary categories that noone could possibly fit into as an absolute. Assumptions are made about people's beliefs based on a few terms they use, which ends up being a strawman. For example, if I talk about "free markets", some might assume I'm just some sort of Republican or conservative. I'm actually very hostile to conservatism. Or if I express concerns about corporate power and racism, some might assume I'm some kind of Marxist and politically correct. I'm actually very hostile to Marx. In a sense, mainstream politics has stolen perfectly good words and taken them out of context. In another sense, it has invented new words that we are forced to accept as a way to categorize ourselves. This confusion has to stop. Clarity is called for.

Posted by Brainpolice at 4:58 AM

Labels: Democracy, Language, Politics, Psychology

Why Do I Call Myself a Left-Libertarian?

Thursday, February 19, 2009

I thought this might be of interest to you guys, so I'm cross-posting it from Back to the Drawing Board.

I received a very fair comment on a previous post, "On Distributive Justice and the Indeterminacy of the Market Process," from an anonymous reader, asking:

Reading this post, I am quite baffled why you name your blogspot libertarian-left.blogspot.com. How can you say that you work in the Left Libertarian tradition, when in this post you completely reject the ideas of all the most famous Left-Libertarians including Henry George and Steiner and Otsuka and Vallentyne? How can you say that you "attempt to incorporate concepts such as equality, opportunity, and need into my framework", when this post seems to be arguing that they cannot be incorporated to your libertarian framework? I cannot find aything leftist about your ideas. Exactly what distinguishes your beliefs from Right-Libertarianism pure and simple?

I thought it might be worthwhile to give that question a thorough answer, since I anticipate that it may come up again, and others might find this answer interesting.

There is definitely a tension within the world of libertarian thought regarding the meaning of the term, "left-libertarianism." One school of thought identifying itself as left-libertarian describes its ideas as upholding the libertarian conception of self-ownership while insisting that a just society would distribute worldly resources according to some egalitarian principle. This is the tradition into which writers like George, Steiner, Otsuka, and Vallentyne fall. As you rightly notice, I am clearly not a part of this camp [Update: I discuss this position in this post].

The other interpretation of the term "left-libertarian" has been offered by Roderick Long, building on Rothbard's (and later Samuel Konkin's) idea that libertarianism is more naturally allied with the political left than with the right. Dr. Long gives a really good explanation of his views in this interview. And as you might have gleaned from my description of this site on the sidebar, I basically agree with his approach.

I've been very conflicted about using the term "left-libertarian" to describe myself, as it's unquestionably true that the first meaning is more widely acknowledged and used today, and I'm not a big fan of inherently confusing terminology. But I'll offer two points in my defense. The first is simply that I chose the name for my website before realizing how deeply I disagreed with the folks in the Steiner camp, and the status quo has thus become somewhat entrenched.

But secondly, and more substantively, I don't think that left-libertarianism of the Steiner mold has much to do with leftism, except to the extent that it has something to do with egalitarianism and, in some sense, it views a non-egalitarian property regime as oppressive. The bread and butter of the left, I think, has always been to root out oppression and mistreatment in society and demand its rectification. And that has been my concern as well, as I search for different ways to think about the respect to which people are due and build ideas about living together that try to embody that respect.

Now, an important part of the commenter's question was this:

How can you say that you "attempt to incorporate concepts such as equality, opportunity, and need into my framework", when this post seems to be arguing that they cannot be incorporated to your libertarian framework?

This, I think, is a somewhat unfair reading of my earlier post. In the last section of that post, I wrote:

Perhaps it is the case that, as individuals who appreciate each other's value and moral worth, we owe it to each other to lend a helping hand in times of need. And if we did not lift a finger when others were facing crisis, that we would be failing to uphold our duties as morally responsible people. To say this implies no injustice in the market system which brings about unfortunate outcomes, nor does it imply that somehow we need to find some point in the past to serve as a "source" of injustice. Rather, we can think of distributive injustice as a recognition that in a community or society where so many live free of need, there are individuals among us who struggle to survive, without so much as a helping hand from their neighbors.

Of course, the mere existence of need and want surely cannot entail the presence of injustice. The same respect for the value of life which commands us to care about our neighbors also commands us to recognize the importance of living our own lives according to our own goals and desires. Earlier, we noted an idea from F.A. Hayek that coercion is evil because it "eliminates an individual as a thinking and valuing person and makes him a bare tool in the achievement of the ends of another." We suggested that the tragic need which drives individuals into exploitative labor relationships is evil for this reason as well. But we must now acknowledge that the attitude which places on the successful individual the burden of caring after the world's needy is evil for exactly the same reason (I discussed this in a previous post). Addressing one evil through the introduction of another seems like a questionable way to proceed. But it does not seem that either extreme -- ignoring the suffering of others or sacrificing oneself for the good of those in need -- is the correct one. What is needed is a balance between the two.

In saying this, I had hoped to address what I felt to be some of the important and relevant concerns that people on the left might have had in response to my argument. And I certainly didn't mean to suggest that other leftist concerns (e.g., about the proper social response to inequality, oppression, lack of opportunity, etc.) "cannot be incorporated into my libertarian framework."

My point was that these concerns cannot coherently be levelled as a moral objection to the market process itself. It was my hope to convey that a just society would not simply accept the often arbitrary, sometimes lamentable, and always sub-utopian products of the market process, insensitively brushing the unpleasant bits under the rug. The market process, I think, is just, and cannot be condemned wholesale because of its inherent potential to generate undesirable outcomes for some people. But I think that there is more to living together than the market process, and that the concerns of the left are valid reasons for searching for solutions outside of the typical consumeristic market paradigm. That, I think, is where the "left" in my "left-libertarianism" comes through.Posted by Danny at 10:42 PM

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Possible Book?

I'm thinking of writting a short book or long pamphlet/essay, with a purpose and theme that may be controversial to some and constructive to others. That purpose is internal criticism of the general libertarian and/or anarchist movement, in both philosophical and strategic terms, something which I think is very much needed. This isn't to say that it may be purely negative in nature, because part of the process of such internal criticism is fleshing out libertarianism as a social philosophy. The purpose is not merely to negate things, it also is an expression of my viewpoint on the complexities of libertarianism and anarchism in terms of social philosophy.

Some of the main and fairly well-known libertarian thinkers who have certain ideas that I have varying degrees of criticism of are: Hans Herman Hoppe, Walter Block, Stephan Kinsella, Stefan Molyneux and Noam Chomsky. The material on this blog alone contains some criticisms of the ideas of these people already. I have varying degrees of both sympathy and disagreement for their ideas. But my criticism most certainly isn't restricted to the ideas of specific people, it also applies to certain ideas that are generally held by certain libertarians, wether they are under the influence of these thinkers or not.

There are quite a few areas of contention and controversy internal to the libertarian and anarchist movements that I think are in great need of being clarified or resolved. Such concerns include things such as: the validity of an axoimatic approach to libertarianism, thin vs. thick libertarianism, the idea of alienable rights and voluntary slavery, the legitimacy of corporate status and limited liability, questions about monarchy and democracy, the issue of individually owned cities, the issue of children's rights, questions of immigration restriction and/or border enforcement, the degree to which violence is justified or unjustified in the context of property theory, neo-lockean property rights vs. proudhonian or usufrunct property rights, methods of privatization, self-ownership as a dualism vs. a monist approach, the validity and practicality of participating in political processes, the relationship (if any) between libertarianism and conservatism and the general concern of vulgar libertarianism and vulgar collectivism.

To be sure, a lot of my criticism is generally conductive toward a fairly thick left-libertarian perspective. But it's also conductive toward a tempered or contextual anarchism without adjectives, and my criticism is not restricted to the libertarian right. In particular, I have just as much criticism for guys like Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn for somewhat different reasons. In either case, I certainly have a lot of ground to cover and am not entirely sure where to start. I'm open to suggestions and minor help from anyone who's willing to contribute.

Posted by Brainpolice at 9:11 PM

Labels: Hans Hoppe, Immigration, Libertarianism, Noam Chomsky, Stefan Molyneux, Walter Block

Individualism, Abstraction and Authority

Friday, February 20, 2009

As I understand it, individualism is not merely political in any narrow sense of the term. It is philosophical in a broader sense, relating to fundamental questions of personal identity and responsibility. A thorough-going individualism, in epistemic terms, denies that one's identity and responsibility as an individual is absolutely predetermined for them by collective forces and abstract concepts. An individual is a separate entity from other people and things, with their own will and body. It could also be said, from a nominalist perspective, that an individual should not be directly conflated with a concept or abstraction.

To be sure, this isn't necessarily to be confused with atomism, I.E. the denial of the fact that one lives in a given environment or society. While it might be possible for individualism to overlap with atomism, pretty much no serious or thorough-going individualist denies interrelations or pretends that people exist in a vacuum; this isn't solipsism. But individualism could be viewed as a denial of both nature and nurture being used in a fatalistic or hard detereministic way as it relates to personal identity. In terms of epistemology, individualism recognizes some sort of uniqueness in each individual (more of an analytic approach) or leaves it to the individual to discover and create their own uniqueness (more of an existentialist approach). In either case, people clearly are not identical or uniform or absolutely unanimous in every way.

It is important to note that the implications of this overlaps with pluralism. Approached as an analytic description of people, individualism attempts to identify the unique characteristics of an individual in terms of their physical composition and behavior, and since each individual's characteristics vary, this analysis will have a pluralistic result when we start to deal with multiple people. Human behavior can be incredibly diverse and unpredictable. Praxeology, employing methodological individualism, describes human behavior in terms of the values that people hold and their purposeful action in the pursuit of their values, rather than being based on the criteria of a particular value (since it isn't working in the field of ethics).

Individualism can also be seen as pluralistic in a more overtly existentialist sense, which is to say that in some sense individuals create their own meaning and value (especially in the realm of aesthetics). To be sure, there is culture, and a culture is essentially a collectivity of memes that come from people. But at the same time, it could be said that each individual has their own unique culture, as they do not all have the exact same ideas and behaviors, and individualism would encourage the individual to develope a unique personal identity that is not to be conflated with highly abstract and collective cultural memes such as the nation, class, race, gender, family, political party, and so on. The individual has no inherent obligation to these memes, and they are free to create their own identity and their own ideas on the ruins of the old. Introspection is also an important element to this.

Consequentially, this may lead the thorough-going individualist to reject a good deal of tradition when it comes to ethics, since a lot of these memes are often normatively treated as something that one has a duty to and has no choice but to identify with. Why should the individualist value something like "the nation"? They clearly never chose to be a part of any "nation", and they clearly are not identical with the other people whom "the nation" is said to represent. There is no "nation", as an entity in and of itself with its own conciousness and values. The individualist strongly feels that this "nation" is alien to them, for good reason. They soon find that many other cultural memes are alien to them (especially those relating to "the state"), and from the perspective of tradition or the norm, their deviations must be considered "immoral" by default.

Hence why the individualist is so despised by authoritarian institutions and ideologies of all kinds. The individualist who dares to rebel against the norm must be treated as a sinner against the good, because the good is superficially understood only in terms of what's already the norm. The greatest threat to tradition and the norm is the individual who innovates, who thinks for themself and slips away from the psychological trappings of the society that they were born into. Independance of judgement is the ultimate enemy of arbitrary authority, and arbitrary authority tends to be rooted in floating abstractions that are turned into ethical and legal obligations. Once one rejects the abstractions upon which the authorities are founded (such "god", "state", "humanity", "family", "nation", "race", and so on), if one follows things consistantly through one ends up rejecting the authorities. And since ethics is so often defined in terms of those authorities, the individualist must superficially be classified as immoral by either the elites or the masses (or both).

The thorough-going individualist is an anti-authoritarian, through and through. The highly abstract concepts that are used to justify the norm of authority claims hold no instrinsic authority in the eyes of the thorough-going individualist. Not only is "the state" conceptually used as a spook, so are a laundry list of cultural memes, some of which may relate to the state directly and others of which do not directly relate or even precede the state. Some of these cultural memes are used to justify the state and some others are consequences of the state, and in turn the rejection of any intrinsic authority to such cultural memes strengthens the reasons for opposing the state. In some sense this is a question of "thickness", specifically in terms of individualism. It's also a question of the epistemological roots of individualism.

Posted by Brainpolice at 5:25 PM

Labels: Abstraction, Anarchism, Authority, Duty, Epistemology, Ethics, Existentialism, Individualism, Personal Identity, Personal Responsibility,Philosophy, Praxeology

Libertarianism and Segregation

Sunday, May 23, 2010

Recently there has been some uproar over some statements from Ron Paul's son Rand Paul (who, IMO, is a fairly wishy-washy conservative Republican that isn't as radical as his father) to the effect of a defense of segregation. This has sparked a little bit of resurging talk among libertarians about the question. I'd like to share some of my thoughts about this in general rather than specifically in reference to Rand Paul and his controversy.

For libertarians, to the extent that there is something that can be called a defense of segregation, it is generally argued for on the more "impartial" grounds of property rights. The arguement generally goes something like this: despite the fact that we may be personally opposed to segregation, it is justified insofar as it is a manifestation of the right of property owners to exclude who they want from their property. Thus, in principle, it is legally permissible for both home owners and buisiness owners to adopt a policy of segregation (whether it be racial, religious, or whatever). The alternative is "forced association", which is unlibertarian.

At least at the surface level, it appears impossible for any libertarian to disagree with this. By the very least, a libertarian qua libertarian cannot condone politically institutionalized integration in the sense of a universalized legal obligation to be inclusive towards certain groups. But I think that once one gets more specific about what we are really talking about, complications emerge. For one thing, the libertarian qua libertarian must at a minimum be equally opposed to politically institutionalized segregation, and the kind of segregation that existed en mass before the civil rights movement most certainly wasn't simply a matter of the property rights of citizens. It was a matter of state law and land.

One route in which certain claims to legitimate segregation can be questioned is from the perspective of justified property titles in the first place. We could start with the most obvious case. If one doesn't recognize the state itself as having a legitimate title, then the state can not have a right to discriminate. This delegitimizes all segregation relative to state-controlled land. We could go further than this too. To the extent that the state upholds "private" titles that aren't legitimate, then a right to discriminate is delegitimized in those cases as well. This level of analysis (justified title) by itself already begins to whittle away at the tenability of certain property-based justifications for segregation, although it does not cover all bases.

There is also some ambiguity more generally in the position supporting property rights. The home is often used as an analogy to demonstrate the normalcy of such levels of exclusion, but this feels like a false analogy when we are talking about something much more systematic or at larger scales such as an entire community. The larger the land mass that is being talked about is, and the more disconnected the property claim in question is from use, the more that this defense seems ridiculous and devolves into institutional segregation anyways. It becomes a defense of "covenants" (which, in this case, is little more than a code word for community-wide laws) that require every owner in a community to be exclusive in a particular way. In short, we end up with something rather state-like.

We could go further than this. Why is "free association" necessarily relative to something territorial? Indeed, there seems to be some tension here between the restrictions of absolutely respecting territorial boundaries and upholding people's personal freedom. In theory, territorialist notions of property rights (coupled with the expansion of territorial claims in a scarce world) can amount to a defense of excluding someone from the possibility of having any rights at all, since you effectively have to either own land or be invited on to someone else's land in order to occupy a given space and associate freely. This gets us into much more general questions, but it does relate to segregation: there is good reason for believing that a rigidly territorially segregated society is inherently unfree.

One of the last ditch efforts that some libertarians make to defend segregation is essentially to proclaim that it is the natural order for people to separate, as something that will inherently happen to a significant degree due to the innate tendencies of groups. I believe this position to be philosophically indefensible. Not only does it begin to cross over into the positive beliefs of certain types of racists, but it is based on bankrupt notion of "human nature" and a tunnel-visioned level of analysis that is only capable of seeing the matter through the lens of things like biology and biological metaphors. It is essentially "innatism" applied to a particular segment of human experience and then extrapolated to the level of a general natural law.

There is more that I can say about this, but this functions as a rough outline of some of the reasons I have for thinking that libertarians should be anti-segregation, not just as an optional personal preference on the side but as a logically connected part of a libertarian social philosophy.

Posted by Brainpolice at 5:11 PM

Labels: Discrimination, Human Nature, Libertarianism, Political Theory, Propertarianism, Property Rights, racism, Segregation

Does Freedom have a Social Context?

May 24, 2010

Is it really the case that freedom is a separable factor from the kind of social atmosphere in which people exist? I think not. The particular conditions within a society is linked with people's capacity to independently make decisions about their own lives. This includes the possibility of mobility and the structural landscape of power. A social context in which there is a significant disparity of power, including the kind of power that comes with ownership and wealth, functions as a limit on freedom in that it is more susceptible to certain consequences.

A social hierarchy is what occurs when disparities of power are institutionalized and used to limit the freedom of certain people. What this entails, in effect, is that those in positions of power have the most freedom, while those who are in a subordinate or dependant position relative to such power structures have the least freedom. While freedom might not be something that is quantifiable in the sense of mathematical exactitude, it is relative to the particular circumstances that would allow an individual to exercise their faculties and live without appeal to a command structure. When power is centralized or densely concentrated, a breeding ground for authoritarianism is in place.

When the alternative to subordination to authority requires a mobile maneuver and a sacrifice of well-being, to the point where there really is no viable alternative at all or the only alternatives are just subordination to another authority, people aren't really free in the social context. They are systematically prevented from being free by the circumstances of the environment. The possibility of full consent is precluded. At best, they acquiesce for practical reasons. And it is most definitely not simply "nature", some sort of inherent necessity at the level of a law of physics, that causes them to be unfree. The kind of environment in question is a social one having to do with the particular distribution of power.

It is true that a position of power is not absolutely or inherently authoritarian, in the sense that someone can refrain from exercising it or using it to impose an institutional monopoly. But it is also true that the circumstance opens up the possibility of this and that authoritarian consequences are ultimately more likely to occur when power is concentrated. For example, a society in which the economic structure of power is plutocratic or one in which the distribution of land is feudal, is logically compatiblewith and an apt atmosphere for authoritarianism. The people who exclusively hold such massive amounts of power are in a better-suited position to control other people.

This is part of why I really don't understand certain proclamations that some people make to the effect of saying that particular socio-economic and cultural circumstances are effectively irrelevant "so long as everyone is free", or worse, "so long as I'm free". This has also been expressed in the form of a "consequences be damned" mentality. But the problem is that this presumes the two to be absolutely separable. To be sure, perhaps it is possible for a society to at least nominally be free and yet have a sick culture or be stricken with poverty. But aside from the fact that there would still be a reason for opposing a sick culture and mass-poverty in and of themselves, the idea that such an atmosphere can last without internal tensions causing it to be unfree strikes me as ridiculous.

I would say that this kind of "freedom" doesn't amount to much if it ultimately just means that most people live in a horrible socio-economic atmosphere or that society ghettoizes itself into fiefdoms. Such conditions are undesirable regardless of any nominal "freedom" that comes along with them. To have no real concern about the actual condition of people's lives in the name of "freedom" seems to turn freedom into a fairly useless abstraction, while reflecting what could frankly be called psychological bankruptcy and a low moral character. I would question the character of anyone that just said "screw society, as long as I'm left alone" and meant that plainly. It seems like more of an anti-social streak than a well thought out philosophy of freedom.

Healthy social atmospheres are desirable both for their own sake and in the sense that they integrate with freedom. It could be said that freedom is a prerequisite for a healthy social atmosphere and it could also be said that a healthy social atmosphere is a prerequisite for freedom. They are not mutually exclusive. Rather, they are robbed of substance without each other. This is a more holistic view. It is also a more society-based view, because I'm insisting on freedom and society as being reconcilable and mutually dependant. A philosophy that openly (although sometimes not-so-openly) says "down with society" in its one-eyed zeal to respect some narrow set of principles such as property rights is doomed from the start.

Posted by Brainpolice at 7:57 AM

The Usefulness of a Left/Right Distinction

Monday, May 17, 2010

I'd like to defend the proposition that a left/right distinction is useful even for libertarians, although the proposition does have some qualifications.

There is a sense in which it may make sense to say that libertarians transcend the left/right dichotomy at least in the more mainstream and common way that it is presented, in terms of the over simplistic choice between contemporary liberalism and conservatism. Libertarians do not fall neatly into such boxes. Libertarianism could be presented as either synthesizing elements that are typically associated with both or as falling outside of the paradigm because it represents two sides of the same statist coin that libertarians oppose. When the dichotomy is presented in such terms, then perhaps libertarians can claim to be unique.

But it may also be the case that reducing everything to a new dichotomy of statist vs. non-statist or anti-statist can obfuscate the details of political ideologies. One reason for this is that precisely what counts as statist and non-statist may be defined in a way that is contingent on certain norms that are in dispute. Precisely what norms are sufficient for a stateless society to arise and sustainably function is debatable at least on consequentialist grounds. Libertarians sometimes draw different conclusions about what common principles imply. Simply saying that it's about aggression, while doing this in a way that presumes ones own particular take on things, doesn't seem to take the multitude of positions at play into account.

It also isn't clear by any means that all libertarians have completely done away with baggage that can be traced back to the more common left/right dichotomy. People come into libertarianism from different angles, and this may influence what libertarianism means to them. Libertarians do not exist in a vacuum with respect to historical context and contemporary political ideologies. There are distinctions as to how various libertarians align themselves relative to other political groups and what they distinguish as being compatible and incompatible with the core philosophy. This alone is part of precisely why there is inter-libertarian factionalism.

Once one digs into the meat of political philosophy at a broader level, a vast multitude of particular positions on multiple spectrums can emerge. This includes views on social authority, property, the distribution of resources, organizational structure, cultural norms, and so on. In light of more detailed questions such as this, the simple and perhaps vague reduction of political philosophy to "aggression" and "government" doesn't seem to tell us very much by itself, especially when one takes into account the ways in which these different spectrums may overlap or be integrated by people. I suspect that a "plumbline", in the sense of a political philosophy that is genuinely consistently "thin", simply doesn't exist.

A left/right distinction, although things obviously get much more specific than these two terms, is useful insofar as the integrated social philosophies of particular libertarians are inevitably colored by different values or norms in a way that forms distinct views that simply cannot be reduced to a vaguely defined opposition to aggression or the state. Once one begins to disambiguate that, "thickness" of some sort is already at least implicitly entering the picture. The moment that one forms a libertarian philosophy that excludes certain norms from compatibility or defines freedom in specific terms, the alleged "neutrality" of libertarianism begins to dissolve. No libertarian sincerely maintains a neutral standpoint in practise. At best, this is a self-deception.

What a left/right distinction in a libertarian context may signify are varieties of gradiation in terms of how things like more general social views, property norms, and economic goals interlock in an overall ideological system. On a property spectrum, for example, hardcore propertarians are on the far right and communists are on the far left. On an economics spectrum, people who explicitly favor hierarchical and oligarchic structures are to the right of people who put an emphasis on a more equitable distribution of resources and flatter organizational structures. On a social spectrum, people who strongly question traditional social authority could be said to be to the left of those that are indifferent or supportive of it. These are real tendencies, and "left" and "right" are the most convenient and most-likely-to-be-understood terms for them.

The claim that these views are irrelevant seems to obfuscate the way in which "libertarianism" is effected by them. It is necessary to take such things into account if one wants to accurately consider the various ideas that float in and out of "libertarian" circles. While the desire for libertarianism to be unique is understandable at a certain level, it is not unique in a sense that is completely detached from relations with "other" ideas. Once such ideas are considered, this is the context in which a left/right distinction understandably continues to be a question for libertarians, even if some people want to avoid the terminology.

Posted by Brainpolice at 11:48 PM

Labels: Libertarianism

What is Mutualism?

Saturday, May 15, 2010

To be honest, while mutualism is a term that I've come to adopt for myself, it isn't entirely clear to me what mutualism is. What I mean by this is that it seems hard to identify an essential feature that all of the people who call themselves mutualists share in common. The positions currently being advocated under the title of mutualism seem to run the gamut from modified or modernized individualist anarchism (Kevin Carson) to a subtle neo-Proudhonian notion and "the anarchism of approximations" (Shawn Wilbur) to a more hardcore kind of libertarian socialism that thinks the other mutualists largely sound like anarcho-capitalists or make too many concessions to property (Francios Tremblay).

There certainly is a history of mutualism going back to classic thinkers such as P.J. Proudhon and W.B. Greene, but no self-proclaimed mutualist that I know of really is a strict adherent to the ideas of such people (and I don't mean to imply that one necessarily should be). The meaning attached to mutualism seems to be at least somewhat different for many people in a contemporary context, in contrast with its 19th century roots. This may partially be due to changes in economic theory. It also may be a matter of the ideological background or history of the people that have become interested in mutualism, which causes there to be market and social anarchist spins on mutualism and interpretations of Proudhon.

It is true that there are certain reoccurring themes that tend to be associated with mutualism, such as an occupation and use standard of ownership, the cost principle, reciprocity, a focus on synthesizing equality and liberty, the antinomy of the individual and society, and so on. Yet some of these themes seem to fall under the general umbrella of the libertarian left, and one would think that mutualism is more specific than that. Is mutualism "free market anti-capitalism"? Well, there seems to be a spectrum of positions among the people adopting that kind of rhetoric, some of which are more substantive than others. Is mutualism a form of libertarian socialism? Well, some of the libertarian socialists I've encountered would scoff at the more market-oriented ideas that are called mutualism.

One thing that does seem to at least vaguely be common to people that consider themselves mutualists is that they have a sort of nuanced position or even a synthesis that has the feeling of being neither anarcho-capitalism or something that would be acceptable in the more hardcore platforms of social anarchism, as a sort of middle ground that doesn't fit neatly into the boxes of various party lines or dogmas. There does appear to be certain themes of irreducible complexity and plays of apparent opposites that resolve or dissolve at some point in the play of concepts. The term mutualism itself seems to suggest synthesis, although this may be a superficial mental association on my part.

I suppose part of the confusion revolves around conflict between different interpretations. Mutualism has been portrayed as anything from fairly standard free market libertarianism with somewhat softened property norms and a different take on the implications of Austrian economics to an explicitly libertarian socialist creed with a prescriptive labor theory of value that calls for the absolute abolition of all profit, rent, and interest. This gets into tensions between descriptive and prescriptive formulations, different ideas on property, and varying degrees of emphasis on markets. With such considerations in mind, it should be no wonder that mutualism doesn't necessarily have a completely clear identity.

When I advocate my own ideas, I generally do not express them as being "the mutualist creed". They are the ideas of me as an individual, and they may or may not have anything explicitly to do with mutualism qua mutualism. But what does tend to bind me to the term, to the extent that could be said to be bound by it, is simply the extent to which I have ideas in common with other people who are called mutualists. I also adopt the term in the context of resonations with P.J. Proudhon. I have no particular problem using the term for myself, despite what seems to be the somewhat fragmented and approximate meanings that it conjures. I would just avoid reducing myself to it, which meshes with my opposition to reductionism in general.

Ultimately, I guess I would like to highlight the ambiguity that sometimes lurks behind rather obscure political labels such as "mutualism". From a certain perspective, this could be portrayed as a good thing in the sense that it stops it from hardening into a dogma. At the same time, the desire for clarity is understandable and perhaps contemporary mutualists should do a better job of hashing out exactly what it is that makes mutualism unique. Mutualism certainly seems to be unique, and that's part of the value I see in it. I'd be interested to see what various self-proclaimed mutualists have to say about this.

Posted by Brainpolice at 5:36 PM

Labels: Anarchism, Mutualism, Political Theory

The Public Face of Libertariarism

Monday, May 3, 2010

The public face of libertarianism, particularly in America, is essentially paleoconservatism or something along those lines. The recent phenomenon of the Tea Party Movement has apparently reinforced this, with libertarian symbolism and rhetoric being mixed and associated with what seems to dominantly be angry reactionary conservatism that occurs whenever a Democrat becomes the president, with very little libertarian sentiment beyond a rather superficial desire for less taxes and an opposition to social welfare programs.

Radical libertarians, especially libertarian anarchists, have long since noted that the libertarian movement in America has been co-opted by the conservative establishment in various ways. But at another level it could be argued that this association isn't reducible to a co-option, that it was there all along when libertarianism was given a new meaning in the 1960's and formed by people who were originally fleeing from the conservative establishment while taking some of its ideological baggage along with them. In other words, it's partly the fault of at least a notable segment of libertarians themselves, who romantisized and aligned themselves with the political right from the beginning.

Libertarianism is put foreward by many libertarians as being "neither left or right", but it is often hard for them to maintain this claim when the ideological baggage comes out. Sometimes the ideological baggage that comes out is basically American conservatism as it was during the 1st half of the 20th century, repackaged for a new generation. And due to the pet peeve issues that standard libertarians often emphasize, which largely are anti-leftist sentiments, it is no surprise that the public often percieves libertarianism as a sort of frankenstein of the right. Being "anti-government" is framed in superficial, narrow terms.

This is partially a matter of rhetoric. American libertarians have inherited the rhetoric of the old right, rhetoric that stems from a cold war mentality and a romantic conception of early America. But I do not mean to suggest that standard and mainstream libertarians should change their rhetoric in order to better sell themselves to the left while keeping their positions substantively identical. This is because some substance was also inherited along with the rhetoric, and that substance is questionable. The substantance is a ridiculous narrative of American capitalism as a glorious bastion of freedom that is being eroded by the alien forces of communism, multiculturalism, and assorted bugaboos.

It is sometimes rather revealing and disillusioning to see the kinds of issues that some libertarians choose to prioritize: complaining about the civil rights act, doing Lincoln and civil war revisionism, attacking minimum wage laws, argueing that monarchy is better than democracy, and things of this nature. This isn't to say that they are necessarily wrong about these issues (although I beg to differ with Hoppe about monarchy), but their motivations may be wrong. They give the impression that they are mainly anti-state because of its egalitarian face, out of a desire to defend some past tradition or circumstance, or because they favor some special interest or power structure. This is precisely what gives libertarians the reputation of being "wingnuts".

As a result of this, libertarians are largely the laughingstock of most political discourse, and that's unfortunate. But in spite of this libertarianism has internally spawned a revival of more coherant radicalism at its own margins, which is slowly growing and gaining a voice in opposition to the bastardized libertarianism that gets the most press and is marginalizing itself out of existence. This has the potential to change the public face of libertarianism, and I think it's important for libertarian radicals to emphasize the difference between themselves and the right-wing frankenstein that mainstream libertarianism seems to be.

Posted by Brainpolice at 1:49 PM

Labels: Conservatism, Libertarianism, Tea Party Movement

Social individualism or Nihilist Orgies?

Friday, April 30, 2010

I recently read "Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgable Chasm" by Murray Bookchin. I have to say that I have mixed feelings about the position carved out in it. On one hand, Bookchin critisizes nihilistic and irrationalist elements that have popped up in contemporary anarchist thought that I think are definitely problematic. On the other hand, he seems to want to paint the entirety of individualist anarchism with this brush, even going so far as to attack Proudhon, while digging in to a sectarian position in favor of syndicalism and communism. He mocks the idea of personal autonomy as the subjective lashing out of blind rebellion, contrasting it with "social freedom".

To be sure, part of what Bookchin attacks is the sort of raw atomistic and nihilistic sense of individualism associated with Max Stirner, which is all about the individual ego in an asocial and amoral sense. I do think that this is not a particularly sensible view, especially if one wants to favor interpersonal goals and advance a workable strategy that requires people to meaningfully cooperate. But it seems as if Bookchin makes a non-sequitor and an overgeneralization by condemning individualist anarchism as such. He lambasts individualism in the most perjorative sense of the term without taking the social and moral elements that are at play at least within elements of individualist anarchism.

In essence, I think that Bookchin presents us with a false choice between being atomists and absolute communalists. The "unbridgable chasm" that he talks about, if anything, is precisely what most anarchists have attempted to do from the beginning, I.E. there is a conceptual balance between individualism and sociality or an attempt to make some sort of synthesis between personal freedom and society. I basically see no reason why one could not be a "social individualist" or an "individualist socialist". It also seems as if, in his zeal to oppose short-sighted whimsicality, Bookchin overlooks the particular dangers of the subordination of people to community pressures that is part of what may cause people to be attracted to individualism in the first place.

Part of what Bookchin is reacting against is the influence of existentialist and postmodern thought on contemporary anarchism. I can sympathize with this concern to a certain extent, insofar as it may function to negate any sense of unity or genuine solidary that goes along with social revolution, while celebrating contradiction or ambiguity in a way that at least appears to erode rational underpinnings of libertarian ideas. On the other hand, Bookchin may have been acting naively about the problems with enlightenment universalism. He seems to take some sort of rationalism for granted, without much of an explaination for it. While talking about philosophical positions, he mostly appears to be engaging in heated polemics.

Another target of Bookchin's criticism, which he associates with individualism, are the primitivists and the anti-civilization crowd. I must admit that I cannot particularly think of anything to say in defense of these ideas, since I essentially find them to be ridiculous. There is one perjorative sense of individualism that does accurately describe such views, which is the notion of pure individual (or extremely small-scale) "self-sufficiency" taken to the point of opposing any meaningful social structure that we could comprehend in a modern context. But it hardly seems as if primitivists particularly pose a significant threat to anyone. They are minority within a minority within a minority. Their voice within the anarchist movement is rather marginal.

It seems as if part of what Bookchin means by "lifestyle anarchism" is the fragmented proliferation of a multitude of personal causes, a cambrian explosition of identity politics inside of anarchism. This bothers him in that it rubs up against his notion of a large-scale cohesive or participatory movement that is unified towards certain universal goals. I suppose Bookchin's concern is understandable at a certain level, in terms of maintaining at least some ground norms that unify anarchism and provide a framework for something strategically significant. On the other hand, if this is taken too far it could be seen as the total elimination of pluralism or an overly narrow view that opposes the particular ways in which people want to express their freedom.

Ultimately, while I sympathize with some of the concerns that Bookchin brings up, it seems like he was being too much of a partisan in "Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism". I feel like he frames the question in a way that is designed to force us to choose between blind individual self-expression and lockstep dedication to a particular universalist creed, with him trying to persuade us to "get with the program" through his polemics against certain groups. Still, some of the issues that he touches on resonate with me in terms of the problems that I see with too nihilistic of a philosophy being embraced by anarchists. The problem is that he doesn't do the best job of showing why this is a problem, and I don't fully buy into the alternative that he presents.

Posted by Brainpolice at 7:46 PM

Labels: Anarchism, Anarcho-collectivism, Egoism, Ideology, Individualism, Individualist Anarchism, Libertarianism, Max Stirner, Murray Bookchin,Nihilism, Post-left Anarchism, Postmodernism, Primitivism