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

Radical Alienability Scenarios

In response to Brainpolice's recent post on inalienability, I would like to offer the following scenario, which I think will illustrate why Brainpolice's contention that responsibility and rights are not commodifiable is mistaken.

Suppose that at some point in the future, medical technology advances to the point where it devises a medication or medical device that can alter how the brain processes information and functions. In the present world, the brain operates by responding to stimuli in its environment and it sends signals to other parts of the body, commanding them to perform certain actions in response to that stimuli. This new medical technology, however, supplants this normal operation brought about by millions of years of human evolution. Instead, the medical device reconfigures the brain such that it obeys on command the verbal recitations of those persons in control of the external device. No longer does the brain process information it receives from stimuli and make a series of choices to send signals to other parts of the body for action. Now, the choices the brain makes, as in what signals to send to the body in response to its environment, are in the control of an outside person or persons.

Entertaining that this scenario is plausible (and it certainly does not seem logically impossible), suppose someone wanted to purchase this medical technology and use it on a consenting adult. This technology, in effect, alienates the person's body from his "will." Conscious, volitional choices are no longer possible once the decision is made to use said device. The reason for the seller selling his control over his body is not important, but imagine it is to save the life of his daughter. The seller's daughter has a deadly disease and the operation to cure it is very expensive, in the range of $1 million. So, the seller decides to contract with Company X that wants to buy all the capitalized value of his rents (wages) at once. The company pays the seller $1 million, and the seller deposits the money in a trust that will use it for his daughter's expensive operation. The seller then submits himself to operation, having the medical device implanted, and becomes a life-long worker for Company X. In essence, the man has become a mindless automaton.

The next scenario is possible at present.

Sarah has suffered for years with a debilitating disease that brings her unimaginable pain. She has tried medication and surgery, but nothing seems to completely eliminate the around-the-clock pain she feels. Sarah decides that life is not worth living anymore under these circumstances and commits suicide.

My point with these two scenarios is that the exact same thing is happening in both of them: the "will" is being separated from the body. In the first scenario, the father is making a conscious, consensual decision to end his control over his body by having the medical device implanted to save his daughter. In the second scenario, Sarah is making a conscious decision to end her control over her body by committing suicide. After all, who would contend that the "will" remains with the body once an individual has died? Both of these decisions are voluntary, and both of them should be allowed in a truly free society. If one is going to argue that alienating rights, control over your body, the will, responsibility, etc., is not permissible in a free market society, then one will have to also argue that suicide is not permissible either.

I should also make a distinction between selling things that are practically impossible and those things that are logically impossible. I can conceivable sell control over my brain functions as a matter of logic. As a matter of practicality, current technology and medical knowledge may not be able to perform it. This is different than trying to sell a square circle. Ownership of such a thing as a square circle is not possible, because square circles cannot logically exist. Thus, no one can sell a square circle.

To the extent that you cannot sell those things which you own, it is to that same extent that you do not own them to begin with.

Friday, February 13, 2009

Inalienability

There recently has been a lot of discussion and debate among libertarians online about self-ownership, rights, responsibility, voluntary slavery and inalienability. I think that this has helped reveal some significant flaws in the way that certain libertarians approach such matters, especially as it relates to Walter Block's ideas. In essence, what the issue boils down to is wether or not rights and responsibilities are alienable or not, or if alienation is possible or consistant with libertarianism. By alienation I do not refer to the Marxist notion of alienation, but the separation of certain things from the self in a more literal sense. As I have said before, a dualistic concept of self-ownership is an incoherant concept because it tries to alienate the mind or will from the body, and this simply cannot be done, hence why Walter Block's notion of "voluntary slavery" is incoherant and contradictary. I have explained in quite a bit of detail why this is in past blog posts.

But the issue apparently is even more far reaching than this. Some people have been taking the viewpoint that rights and responsibilities are actually commodities to be bought and sold on a free market. I think this stems from taking metaphors (such as self-ownership) too literally and not fully understanding what inalienable rights means, which leads some people to take what amounts to ridiculous positions that blatantly violate basic notions of personal responsibility and individual sovereignty. Not only is it impossible to alienate the mind or will from the body, but as a consequence of this, you cannot alienate someone's responsibility as an individual as if it something that can be transfered to someone else through contract. Nor is someone's actual person a commodity to be bought and sold on a free market, as that is precisely what chattel slavery is. If libertarians really want to take such a position, they must realize that the ultimate consequence is the total elimination of any coherant meaning for rights and responsibilities in libertarianism.

One can concievably sign a contract that says that someone else is responsible for their actions, but this contract would not change the actual causal reality of responsibility, which remains in the metaphorical court of the actual people who are human actors in a given scenario. If someone murders someone else, for example, it doesn't matter if they have made a contract that delegates responsibility for their murder to someone else, they are still the murderer. Such a contract is fraudulent with regaurd to their actual behavior. The idea that criminals can be exempted for responsibility for their crimes through contract eliminates a good deal of the meaning of justice. While I myself do place a lot of emphasis on the restitution of victims, I do not accept the notion that the criminal actors in a given scenario can delegate their responsibility for restitution to someone else. This is because you cannot alienate responsibility from someone, as you cannot alienate their will and the causal reality of the scenario is that they are the ones who commited the given act in question.

I think that a lot of this also generally stems for improper concept formation or a lack of understanding of the proper order of concepts. The old saying goes "life, liberty and property", and it is in this order for a good reason. A problem I often run into is that some people appear to act as if property is primary or axoimatic at the expense of life and liberty. But a coherant theory of rights does not place property above life and liberty, property is contextual to respecting the right to life and liberty. Property rights does not grant one a legitimate right to violate someone else's right to life and liberty, and it is a grave error to conceptualize literally everything, such as personhood and responsibility, as a property right. The idea that personhood is a property right to be bought and sold is part of the very basis for slavery of all kinds, and you cannot argue for a notion of "voluntary slavery" without destroying the inalienability of rights. Trying to turn literally everything into a propertarian question is to nonsensically expand the concept of property to absurdity.

While freedom of contract is a vital component of libertarianism, it is does not supercede people's inalienable rights. There is such thing as a fraudulent or criminal contract, and a perpetual contract that is enforced onto someone against their explicit consent into the future or as a 3rd party not directly privy to the contract is fraudulent and the basis for gross rights violations, including the coercive social contract. All contracts must have a way to get out of them, even if there are conditions or consequences for opting out of a contract such as dealing with withstanding debts. A perpetual contract that you cannot possibly get out of regaurdless of your will is a significant part of the very basis for the coercive social contract, and there is a huge differance beween the delegation of the enforcement of rights to a 3rd party and the delegation of the rights themselves. If contracts are a method by which one can legitimately lose all of their rights, then rights essentially lose their meaning as something to consistantly apply to recognize in people.

Wether they realize it or not, those who advocate notions of justice that rely on an alienation of the mind, will, responsibility and rights from the self are undermining the entire basis for individual liberty. The very premises that they are using can be used against the entire libertarian notion of justice and as a way to legitimize political institutions or policies that libertarians normally would oppose. So it turns out that this is actually an extremely important issue to clarify. It is based on some fairly fundamental philosophical misnomers that threaten to undermine the entire libertarian project, despite the good intentions of some proponents of such misnomers. If this issue is not properly clarified, I fear that libertarianism can be used to push for abominable notions of justice that commodifies rights and responsibilities. But rights and responsibilities are not commodities in any rational theory of justice.

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

LaughingmanOX Pwns Stodles/ConfederalSocialist

"Internal Criticism" and "Anti-libertarian Libertarianism"

Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Those who have been paying attention to my commentary online for a while have probably noticed a tendency that may be percieved as rather peculiar: I actually spend a lot more time critisizing formulations and ideas within the libertarian movement, rather than engaging in engaging in the more usual libertarian criticism of non-libertarian movements and ideas. Somewhat undestandably, this may come off as being contrarian and conflict-seeking behavior. However, I'd like to explain why I think that this is precisely what is necessary, that there is actually fairly good reason for me to being doing such a thing.

In the grand scheme of things, I genuinely consider modern libertarianism to be a superior paradigm in comparison to the bulk of contemporary political discourse. I engage in "internal criticism" precisely because I value libertarianism, precisely because I want to see it improve and suceed in the long-run. One of the things that I find attractive about libertarianism in the first place is that it seems to deal with fundamental questions in a way that I think has largely gone by the way-side in mainstream political discourse. For the most part, political philosophy is dead and has been largely supplanted by a mere analysis of party politics, poll numbers of "wedge issues" and a repetition of the memes of ideologies that no longer are particularly relevant to modern times.

Once one has become a libertarian, it could be said that there is a sense in which one has transcended a good deal of modern politics. The failure of the contemporary political paradigm could not possibly be more obvious, and is something we simply take for granted, and it is for precisely this reason that I do not particularly focus on critiqueing it. From my perspective, the basic problems with the liberal/conservative and democrat/republican paradigm are simply old news, and therefore common libertarian criticism of it ends up coming off a bit like an echo chamber, or at least rather repetitive and somewhat unecessary. Of course, it may have a use insofar as it functions to bring people over to libertarianism, but it does not really do anything to strengthen or refine libertarianism internally.

This is why I view the libertarian movement as a bit stagnant, in that the external things to critisize have long since been bludgeoned to death and we can only pat eachother on the back for seeing what's wrong with everything else for so long. Potential progress does not end once one becomes a libertarian, and I dare say that "radicalization" does not even end when one becomes an anarchist. While libertarians may tend to have a certain "heads up" that is lacking in other political movements, it has its own matters to work out. It is not as if various libertarians do not have their own baggage that merits criticism. There comes a time to turn "the pruning knife" inward, to aknowledge your own movement's failures and degenerations, to potentially slay your own sacred cows and steer the ship away from the solidification of a new dogmatism.

I think that it must be aknowledged that libertarianism, to one extent or another, has reached a point in which it is confused about its own identity and it is splintered into many factions that do not necessarily want to move society in anywhere close to the same direction. Some of its main institutions have formed their own party lines and sometimes seem to be foolishly resistant to new ideas, while various libertarian sub-cultures have formed that are not exactly pleased with the current state of "the movement" (in the broadest sense of the term). Some examples of these subcultures are (1) anti-political libertarianism and agorism, which tends to reject reformism, electoral politics and the LP (2) the alliance of the libertarian left, which tends to reject libertarian-conservative fusionism and (3) post-left anarchism, which tends to reject some of the baggage that the "libertarian socialist" paradigm takes for granted.

It's important to note that while such groups are definitely "libertarian" in a radical sense, they are simultaneously "anti-libertarian" in a more "mainstream" sense of the term. Some of what has been popularized as "libertarian" is actually vehemently rejected by certain libertarians and the identity of such sub-groups is at least partially formed on the basis of a rejection of certain elements within libertarianism. Frank Zappa was on to something when he said that "progress is not possible without deviation from the norm". On one hand, libertarianism in a general sense could be said to be a deviation from the norm. But, on the other hand, progress internal to libertarianism is inherently a deviation from its own norms, which starts "on the margin".

What some may percieve as negative "antagonism" and petty "infighting" may in fact be an important step towards progress. For example, when a figure such as Kevin Carson critisizes what he calls "vulgar libertarianism", this isn't merely some sort of baseless contrarianism, it is necessary "internal criticism". Carson is resented by certain people at the Ludwig Von Mises Institute precisely because he is challenging their norms, their sacred cows, their assumptions, their "party line". Libertarians may resist "internal criticism" only at their own peril, towards the end of cocooning themselves in. A movement kills itself if it does not yield the ground necessary to grow, and maturation can only occur with a certain willingness to destroy as a pretext towards creation.

I sincerely think that libertarianism and anarchism represent the transcendance of politics as it has formally been generally understood, and in turn it is the basis for a new paradigm of politics. However, it must continue to transcend itself, or to put the matter another way, it must be aknowledged that it has not yet fully transcended the old paradigm. Foundational figures, while they may function as an important referance point and a source of inspiration, should not be turned into sacred idols. There may even come a time to smash idols with the hammer of reason. But the goal is not destruction for the sake of destruction, but for the sake of construction. And this is precisely why I critisize, not out of the will to destroy libertarianism, but out of the will to watch it grow and succeed.

Onward, libertarian soldiers!

Sunday, July 26, 2009

Non-aggression Is Not An Axiom

The non-aggression principle is not an axiom. By the term "axiom" I more or less mean something that is self-evident and irreducible, a stand-alone principle that functions as an obvious starting point from which everything else springs. This is not to say that I don't advocate the non-aggression principle or do not think that it is important, but it is to say that I think that its treatment in this way, as an "axiom", is a serious mistake that has had the consequence of oversimplifying libertarianism and providing no basis out of which to stop it from fragmenting into a multitude of contradicting social philosophies.

The first issue that strikes me is that, based on a plain statement of the non-aggression principle by itself, it is unclear how "aggression" and "defense" are distinguished from eachother, let alone what sort of view on violent "punishment" is supposed to jibe with it, and hence it seems like that would have to be clearly defined ahead of time. In short, the non-aggression principle will fragment into anything ranging from pacifism to a gung-ho cowboy doctrine without a much more elaborate philosophical investigation of the question. The moment that one does engage in a more elaborate investigation of this, the non-aggression principle quite clearly ceases to be irreducible and self-evident.

Another issue that inevitably rears its ugly head is that the non-aggression principle will potentially have completely different implications with respect to the question of property depending on what theory of property one assumes to begin with. Afterall, what constitutes "theft" is vitally dependant on what one would consider to be the basis for "justly owning" something in the first place, and how violence "in defense of property" is concieved of is unclear from a statement of the non-aggression principle alone. Once again, just like the question of a theory of "defense" and "punishment", the moment that we delve into a theory of property, the non-aggression principle is no longer functioning as if it is irreducible and self-evident, since its meaning is dependant on other theories and principles.

But the reasons for the non-aggression principle not being axoimatic runs much deeper than this. For one thing, it seems quite simplistic to act as if the entirety of moral and social philosophy can be completely reduced to the question "when is physical violence justified or unjustified?". This is simply out of touch with the entire history of moral philosophy, and the treatment of non-aggression as the only relevant principle actually functionally designates everything else to an "amoral" realm. This completely skips over any attempt to make an evaluation of different values, customs, and moral systems on their own merits, and it's quite clear that the non-aggression principle alone is, while perhaps necessary, not really sufficient as a basis to evaluate such things.

Perhaps more importantly, it doesn't make any sense for someone to simply accept the non-aggression principle at face value, without any underlying grounds for doing so. One would think that people accept the non-aggression principle because they have some sort of basic respect for people, not that they have some sort of basic respect for people because of the non-aggression principle. The very idea of accepting a principle for its own sake might be called into question: does anyone really do this? It would seem to make a lot more sense to propose that the non-aggression principle is a conclusion drawn from more fundamental premises, rather than as an ungrounded starting point from which all other premises are drawn.

This is what I mean when I insist, despite many libertarians' claims to the contrary, that the non-aggression principle is not an axiom. It does not mean that it is false or irrelevant, but that, if we want to be frank about it: it is literally completely meaningless and tootheless without a grounding and without its terms being clearly established ahead of time, and consequentially just about everything that libertarians may tend to oppose, as well as just about any concievable social system, can theoretically be compatibalized with it in the absence of a coherant grounding. And it is in this sense that Ayn Rand, while her blanket dismissals of libertarians may be too harsh and somewhat of a strawman, had a valid point when she noted a certain incoherancy to the libertarian movement, in that it comes off very much like a mish-mash of contradicting social philosophies.

Friday, July 24, 2009

"Thin" Libertarianism is a "Vulgar" Libertarianism

To begin with, let me define my terms here. By "thin" libertarianism I refer to the treatment of the non-aggression principle as a groundless axoim, and as the only value that is relevant to libertarianism, beyond which point all other values are treated as either irrelevant or equal in a relativistic manner. That is, "thin" libertarianism is essentially the notion that so long as the non-aggression principle is respected, all social arrangements (whether they be based on racial separatism, fundamentalist religion, patriarchy, sexism, etc.) are equally valid starting points for a free society and that one is effectively bound to be neutral towards them. From this perspective, the non-aggression principle is basically the sole value. This attitude is actually fairly common in libertarian circles.

"Vulgar" libertarianism was a term put into practise by Kevin Carson, primarily refering to the use (or misuse) of free market economics and various libertarian concepts to defend or promote corporatism, classism and bossism. However, while the concept was initially put foreward in the context of economics, I think that it applies to culture and the "social" sphere as well, which is to say that free market economics and various libertarian concepts can be and have been used to defend or promote all of the things that "thin" libertarianism tends to sanction or be neutral towards. Hence, what I am proposing is that "vulgarity" be recognized beyond the economic realm, and more as a general matter. Left-libertarians generally "get it" with respect to economics, but don't always "get it" as much with respect to culture.

A confused reaction to the rejection of "thin" and "vulgar" libertarianism is to assume that it implies abandoning the non-aggression principle and free market economics, but this misses what the point is completely. "Thick" libertarians are not saying that the non-aggression principle is a problem, but that its treatment in a vacuum, detached from any sort of fundamental grounding and without any sort of broader social context, is a problem. And non-"vulgar" libertarians (in the strictly economic sense of "vulgarism") are not objecting to free market economics, but to using it out of context to defend things that either do not necessarily follow from it or which can be objected to for independant reasons. Part of the point is that questions of physical violence do not constitute the entirety of social philosophy and free market economics does not inherently imply the normative premises and institutions of currently existing and traditional economic arrangements.

The fact of the matter is that "thin" libertarianism functions as a defacto sanction for every questionable ideology and social arrangement under the sun, and the more explicit it is in this sanction the more "vulgar" that it is. On one hand, there are those who do not explicitly favor such things, but nonetheless express neutrality towards them. On the other hand, there are those who do explicitly favor such things, and only use the non-aggression principle and free market economics as a tool to legitimize their own prefered forms of authoritarianism. With the former group, part of the problem is an inability or unwillingness to recognize social problems outside of explicit physical violence, and hence a dismissal of all concerns about "oppression" in a more general sense and negative social conditions. With the latter group, the problem is even uglier, in that they are deliberately using libertarianism as a tool to sugar-coat their authoritarian ideology.

It is in this sense that appeals to non-aggression and free market economics can be rather superficial and hollow sometimes, in the sense that they are used in a way that is divorced from consequences, context and a broader understanding of society. In fact, sometimes these appeals are self-detonating, in that the consequences of the positive beliefs and social arrangements that some people promote under the banner of libertarianism ultimately do reduce to some kind of aggression in practise, or they may be dependant on a degree of state intervention in a way that makes appeals to "the free market" rather hypocritical. One way in which this is manifested is as a tendency of some people to treat anti-statism in a purely negativistic sense to be the only goal, while the content and consequences of certain positive beliefs end up devolving into a defacto state in implemenation, or when certain ideological premises end up being an apt pretext for people who believe in them being lead to endorse authoritarianism.

For example, consider a society that largely accepts a communitarian and traditionalist ideology in which obedience to tradition and majoritarianism is stressed as the most important value. Not only are the masses of people who believe in this ideology easy pickins to be exploited by people with power, that their belief is an easy means for others obtaining power over them, but those who are marginal within such a society are effectively mince meat. While such a society could theoretically be nominally free, it is not likely to be free and even if it is initially free it is not likely to remain free for long. The structure and outcome of a society cannot reasonably be divorced from the values of the people within it, and it is in this sense that "thin" libertarianism is unstable as an ideology, in that it does not take a stand on values beyond a vague commitment to non-aggression (which splinters into multiple interpretations as it is), and this is precisely why it could be said to inherently lead to "vulgarity".

Monday, July 20, 2009

Thoughts On "Post-Left" Anarchism and Left-libertarianism

What is "post-left" anarchism? From what I have gathered, "post-left" anarchism is particularly a reaction to the conceptualization of anarchism propogated by people such as Noam Chomsky and Murray Bookchin (after his change of positions around the time that he came out with "social anarchism or lifestyle anarchism?"). "Post-left" anarchism, as the very nature of the terminology indicates, seems to be a position that certain people move towards after being traditional "social anarchists", and hence to be precise it would seem to be the case that one can only be a "post-left" anarchist if one was previously a "social anarchist". So if someone's starting point or past was not "social anarchism", the term may not apply well to them.

To an extent, I think that the term "post-left anarchism" may be somewhat misleading, in that the ideas embraced by "post-left" anarchists are not necessarily a total rejection of literally everything that may be associated with "the left", and it certainly does not imply an embrace of "the right". To be more exact, I think that it would make more sense to say that it is "post-vulgar-left", and by "vulgar-left" I refer to certain tendencies in contemporary "social anarchist" circles such as (1) a reformist strategy that tends to embrace contemporary social democracy and pragmatically endorse state-socialism, at least as a "lesser evil" (2) a knee-jerk opposition to or fear of anything that smells of "individualism" and "markets" and (3) a view that largely confines the qualifications for one being an anarchist to communism, even taken to the point of opposing mutualists.

To the extent that "post-left" anarchism can be considered a rejection of such "vulgar" tendencies, I would consider my own views to potentially be compatible with it, and I would consider "left-liberarianism", at least in the sense that it is understood by various mutualists and agorists, to not necessarily be opposed to it either. There clearly are numerous understandings of "left-anarchism" and "left-libertarianism", ranging from anarcho-communism to "leftish" and "left-friendly" variants of individualist anarchism. The meaning of "post-left" anarchism would seem to be ambiguous in this sense, considering the begged question of precisely what understanding we have of "the left". If we define "the left" rigidly in terms of things like communism and Chomskyism, then "left-libertarians" of the more Roderick Long and Kevin Carson variety would have to be said to not really be "leftists".

Of course, such a narrow interpretation of "the left" is not really merited, as there are plenty of "left-libertarians" that are critical of the Chomsky/Zinn and later-period-Bookchin kind of interpretations of "leftism". It certainly doesn't seem to make much sense to classify individualist anarchists and mutualists as "right-wingers". On the other hand, mutualism and individualist anarchism in a more contemporary context certainly seems to have been updated in a way that distinguishes it from a more hardcore "libertarian socialist" and traditional "social anarchist" interpretation. This puts some contemporary "left-libertarians" in a somewhat ambiguous, perhaps even "centrist", sort of position. It seems to me that "post-left" anarchism is not necessarily incompatible with some of the more contemporary and individualistic interpreations of "left-libertarianism", and to the extent that some indeed do come from a more explicit "social anarchist" starting point or past, they may even qualify as "post-left" anarchists.

Those of us who do not particularly have a past history of involvement in "social anarchism" (particularly those who have a past associated more with anarcho-capitalism and the American libertarian "mainstream"), however, may be in a more ambiguous position that is not as easily categorizable as "post-left". The contemporary "left-libertarian" paradigm can be considered a fusionist tendency in which people come from both "social anarchist" and "market anarchist" backgrounds and have moved towards a consensus and alliance that could be considered "somewhere in between" in a sense. So there is an inverse phenomenon of "post-leftism" that may be generally classified as "post-ancap" or "post-right-libertarian". I myself generally fall into such a group of people who made a shift "leftward" away from a more rigid sense of "anarcho-capitalism". So it seems like the landscape is more complex than a "left-anarchism" vs "post-left anarchism" dichotomy can account for.

Overall, labeling oneself in terms of what one has transcended doesn't seem particularly illuminating, other than as an indication of what one has put behind them. Of course, one's ideological history is certainly relevant to where one's head is at in the present, but taken by itself it does not necessarily indicate what one's ideology currently is with too much clarity. "Post-leftism" has certain issues of ambiguity, much like the term "post-modern" does. In either case, what ultimately matters is not a question of ever-shifting labels, but the specific ideas in question. My thoughts here are only intended to perhaps demonstrate the complexity of the ideological landscape, and to specifically ponder the relation that "left-libertarianism" and "post-left anarchism" may potentially have with eachother. I'm wondering what self-identified "post-left" anarchists think about this.

Sunday, July 19, 2009

Racism and Thick Libertarianism

Over at youtube, Xomniverse made an excellent video that demonstrates the problems with a "thin" approach to libertarianism as it pertains to the issue of racism.

Thursday, July 16, 2009

Buy (Or Steal?) This Book

Monday, July 13, 2009

Thoughts On Revolution

Something that I've thought about, and which has only been reinforced by a reading of Proudhon's "General Idea of The Revolution In The 19th Century", is that revolution could be thought of as a process or a tendency rather than an event or endpoint. In this sense, a social revolution could be thought of as being a perpetual tendency, and the moment that a revolution ceases to function as a process it risks becoming a stagnation and eventually a reaction to another revolution. All too often in history, various revolutionaries have culminated their project in a particular event, after which they have settled or established themselves and ceased to continue pushing foreward. They have contented themselves to revolt against a particular idea or system, only to stop there and take up the position of a conservative. This is the haunting paradox of traditional revolutions: that the old revolutionaries become the new reactionaries.

A more subtle concept of social revolution is not one in which a singular event reaches a particular absolute and stops there, but that of a perpetual process in which there is always progress to be made, in which the transcendance is on-going and the affirmations that follow from the negations nonetheless lead us toward new negations and affirmations. In this sense, we can say that "the revolution never dies" with a straight face and without fear of being misunderstood. The revolutionary destroys to create and creates to destroy. The social revolution cannot be summed up strictly as a mere negation, as there is always an implied affirmation that follows the negation. On the other hand, each new affirmation provides something new to potentially negate. In a sense, an absolute ultimate end state is never actually reached, and thank goodness that statis is neither possible or desirable. Social revolution is the perpetual dynamism of approximations.

Saturday, July 11, 2009

Children's Rights FTW

Radgeek made an excellent post about the issue of children's rights. I'm glad that more and more libertarians have been rushing in to make clear that they do not support the horrific notion that children are the defacto private property of their parents. This is one of my pet peeve issues, in that I think that children's rights is a relatively neglected issue for libertarians that is very important and I have gotten extremely alarmed whenever I have seen certain libertarians taking an authoritarian view on parenting.

To the extent that certain libertarians neglect supporting children's rights, this is a serious defect in the movement. If people can't even principally oppose child abuse, they are on shaky ground in any attempt to oppose adult abuse as well. Particular extreme social conservatives associated with libertarianism who do support child abuse should be called out for it, and libertarianism should be disassociated from such socially vulgar sentiments. Fortunately, it seems like only a minority of libertarians take such an authoritarian position. However, the fact that any libertarians at all take such a view on the matter in the first place should be alarming anyways, so I encourage such viewpoints being snuffed out of libertarianism.

Stefan Molyneux deserves some credit for making this a central issue (although I don't like the armchair psycho-analizing of people about their childhood, but let's put that aside for the moment). That credit shouldn't be one of particular originality, however, since such ideas come straight from Alice Miller. Traditional models of the family and traditional modes of parenting are far more authoritarian and negative in their consequences than most people (and psychologists, for that matter) seem to think. In either case, I'm glad that libertarians are making a key issue out of this and hope to see more work on it in the future.