Sunday, August 28, 2011
This blog has recently been concentrated on criticism of the mainstream of "The Alliance of the Libertarian Left". I'm of the view that most of the people associated with this movement are still too closely tied to anarcho-capitalism and the general American libertarian movement in both the substance of their political theory and their alliances. Consequently, it has not been able to achieve a very meaningful synthesis because it is still largely working from a capitalist framework. An important premise underlying my criticism is that there is a very clear point at which the perspectives in the discourse on these matters are simply incommensurable. Allow me to explain what I mean.
I have the impression that many of the intellectuals associated with the ALL have the pretense of forming a kind of theoretical synthesis of libertarianism and "the left" that can provide the basis for a big tent alliance. As Roderick Long expresses in the concluding remarks of his speech "Rothbard's 'Left and Right': 40 Years Later", libertarians should both reach out to "the left" and become "the left" in some important sense. Earlier in the speech, Roderick attempts to show that, at least for libertarians, the oppositions between capitalism and socialism are basically semantic, with the American individualist anarchist Benjamin Tucker being used as the main example to bust up the dichotomy.
At this stage, there are a number of things I'd like to point out. As far as the practicalities of forming a real alliance between libertarians and "the left", it seems highly unrealistic that most libertarians will embrace "the left", because they are knee-jerk anti-leftists. Their ideology is built around a rejection of just about any kind of egalitarianism and contains bad leftovers from cold war politics. My personal experience in the past as a "left-libertarian" trying to engage the dominant culture in radical libertarian circles such as the Ludwig Von Mises Institute, and with libertarian discourse online in general, has largely been an encounter with hostility. I'm convinced that this is an impossible uphill battle.
On the flip side, to the vast majority of people "on the left", libertarianism is a laughing stock. Most people tend to view libertarians as simple-minded right-wing radicals that make pet peeves out of things like obcessing over the gold standard, defending institutional segregation, and engaging in civil war revisionism. And this perception is not entirely wrong. To one extent or another, your average libertarian actually is a tinfoil hat wearing ideologue who is detached from what most people would consider common sense and decency. "The left" will never meaningfully ally with libertarians outside the context of some single-issue stuff such as the war in Iraq or the legalization of drugs.
Of course, "left-libertarians" most likely are more interested in "the left" in the context of anarchism. At a minimum, it is probably assumed that "anti-statism" is a big point of convergence, if not the determining factor for an alliance. Many of those who call themselves "pluralists" express the sentiment that self-labeled anarchists should stop argueing and band together against their common enemy, the state, while the positive and normative content of their political theories is "just a personal preference" for what tribe they will separate themselves into "after the revolution". This kind of "pluralism" is something that one can find outside the ALL, but it also creeps its way into it.
There are problems with this view. For many anarchists, anarchism is much more than anti-statism (for social anarchists, social heirarchy and authoritarianism are the more fundamental problems), so this is an insufficient basis upon which to form a political movement. The downfall of a nation-state by itself doesn't indicate any particular kind of social relations (other than the obvious practical ones entailed in a former structure being gone), and anarchists advocate some kind of context for what "a free society" might mean. A "purely negative" position is practically useless for those that are really interested in norms of freedom and improving the condition of humanity in some way. Indeed, it doesn't count as a political position at all. It's a reset button that leaves us with a blank canvas that can be filled with anything, including everything that anarchists tend to oppose.
The tribalism involved in this kind of "pluralism" is objectionable on theoretical and practical grounds. Relative to norms of personal freedom, it is a green light to authoritarian systems existing on local scales. This will never be acceptable as "compatible" to a strong anti-authoritarian. Even if such systems do not affect people outside of them, they would have to be considered internally unfree and would be subject to problems of intergenerationality for people born into the tribe. But to take things one step further, there are good reasons for thinking that it would not be realistic to assume that such systems would not affect others. Human relations are such that in some ways it is practically impossible to keep something "purely personal" in the sense of just affecting an individual.
Putting this aside, I'm willing to grant that many "left-libertarians" have something more substantive than this in mind, that they do have some normative limitations to what they consider compatible with anarchism. I take issue with much of what the normative content of their political theories happens to be, particularly in terms of their fundamental principles. But instead of explaining why I think that the theories are wrong, my purpose here is to argue that such a body of theory can't be easily synthesized with that of "the left", especially the political theories within social anarchism. When push comes to shove, free market libertarianism and social anarchism are fundamentally irreconcilable.
Radical contemporary Anglo-American libertarians are mainly working within a framework inherited from classical liberalism. Indeed, anarcho-capitalism was thought of by Rothbard, its founder, as essentially being the logical conclusion of liberal ideas formed in the 18th and 19th centuries. Internal conflict exists because, from the radical perspective, various earlier thinkers and contemporary libertarians with positions along the lines of minarchism are "inconsistent" liberals. Especially in Rothbard's thought, there is a strong emphasis on linearly deducing positions from axioms and simply forming one's theory by building from a set-in-stone framework. That framework is propertarian and economistic in nature. It uses (arguably a simplified version of) John Locke for its ethical theory and aprioristic Austrian economics for its economic theory (I'm leaving aside David Friedman and utilitarian libertarians for the moment), and economic theory basically is its social theory. Rothbard was also goo-goo-gah-gah for anglo-american history.
There's a glaring problem for trying to synthesize such a framework with the anarchist tradition: the fact that anarchist and socialist theory was initially formed in part as a criticism of liberalism. I can anticipate that some people may be inclined to immediately object by saying that the early anarchists were influenced by liberalism. While this has some truth to it, it doesn't negate the fact that they went in a completely different direction and turned against it to a significant extent. There is a difference between being influenced by something and building one's ideas as nothing but an extension of its foundations. The classical anarchists all challenged the foundations of liberalism to one extent or another. Since the 19th century, anarchist theory has mostly only gone further away from liberalism.
The strongest historical linkage that contemporary libertarians can point to as evidence of anarchism being linked to liberalism is Benjamin Tucker and some of the individualist anarchists that were a part of his circle in the late 19th century. There are a number of things to point out that limits the weight of this. Firstly, it's notable that Tucker was American. It makes some sense that existing in an American context may have colored his views toward largely Anglo-influenced liberalism. Then there's the fact that Tucker's thought developed in an egoist direction that does not jibe with liberalism's ethico-political theories. And Tucker is not the best person to point to as a figure to use for synthesis, since he expressed a rather hostile attitude toward the rising social anarchist movement.
History is against the interpretation of anarchism-as-liberalism in other ways. Regaurdless of how one interprets Proudhon, his work on property sparked what quickly became property skepticism as an important part of anarchist theory. Liberalism tends to define freedom in terms of property rights. To the early anarchists, the property rights that liberalism was founded upon was creating serious social problems and had inherent tensions with personal freedom. Propertarian views function as a justification for authority and their implimentation enables social heirarchies. To the extent that property is seen as being placed above human wellbeing in liberal theory, anarchists reject it. This is not a conflict that can be defined away semantically.
Another area in which there is tension has to with how liberalism is very focused on economic theory. While I wouldn't necessarily say that "the left" does not dabble in economics (Marx was, afterall, an economic reductionist), I think that it's a pretty accurate generalization to say that "the left" is much more focused on things like sociology, ecology, and general cultural studies. Even as far back as Kropotkin, we have theories being built that have more to do with anthropology than economics. Liberalism relies heavily on a models of human behavior that come from economic theory. The contemporary "left" tends to reject this. It does not work very well to describe human relations in terms of "the market", and this is not merely an aesthetic dislike.
At best, liberalism could be seen as somewhat of a necessary step in terms of its own critique of its precedessors, the erosion of fuedalism and monarchy, and the establishment of "political freedom" within a certain narrow sphere. But for various radical thinkers in the 19th century, this sphere of freedom was insufficient, and political theory needed to do a lot more than just consistently apply or universalize liberal ideas. Anarchists have always aimed for some kind of social freedom, not the legal right to obtain/maintain property while doing what one pleases without respect to how it affects others. As long as libertarians are just radical liberals, they will struggle to find common ground with the anarchist movement as it actually exists.
If one takes the reasons outlined above into account, it seems tempting to state: to the extent that one substantively embraces "the left", they are effectively abandoning libertarianism. Libertarianism, in the sense that most people understand it today, is its own animal (although significantly tied to the American conservative movement) that is largely confined to the U.S. and U.K., and is met with skepticism and hostility by just about everyone in the anarchist movement and the broader radical left. Synthesis can only occur in ambiguous places on the edges of these opposing dispositions, not in any sense that can lead to reconciliation of ideologies. To the extent that synthesis is what the ALL seeks, I believe that it is unfortunately build on a pipe dream.
I have the impression that many of the intellectuals associated with the ALL have the pretense of forming a kind of theoretical synthesis of libertarianism and "the left" that can provide the basis for a big tent alliance. As Roderick Long expresses in the concluding remarks of his speech "Rothbard's 'Left and Right': 40 Years Later", libertarians should both reach out to "the left" and become "the left" in some important sense. Earlier in the speech, Roderick attempts to show that, at least for libertarians, the oppositions between capitalism and socialism are basically semantic, with the American individualist anarchist Benjamin Tucker being used as the main example to bust up the dichotomy.
At this stage, there are a number of things I'd like to point out. As far as the practicalities of forming a real alliance between libertarians and "the left", it seems highly unrealistic that most libertarians will embrace "the left", because they are knee-jerk anti-leftists. Their ideology is built around a rejection of just about any kind of egalitarianism and contains bad leftovers from cold war politics. My personal experience in the past as a "left-libertarian" trying to engage the dominant culture in radical libertarian circles such as the Ludwig Von Mises Institute, and with libertarian discourse online in general, has largely been an encounter with hostility. I'm convinced that this is an impossible uphill battle.
On the flip side, to the vast majority of people "on the left", libertarianism is a laughing stock. Most people tend to view libertarians as simple-minded right-wing radicals that make pet peeves out of things like obcessing over the gold standard, defending institutional segregation, and engaging in civil war revisionism. And this perception is not entirely wrong. To one extent or another, your average libertarian actually is a tinfoil hat wearing ideologue who is detached from what most people would consider common sense and decency. "The left" will never meaningfully ally with libertarians outside the context of some single-issue stuff such as the war in Iraq or the legalization of drugs.
Of course, "left-libertarians" most likely are more interested in "the left" in the context of anarchism. At a minimum, it is probably assumed that "anti-statism" is a big point of convergence, if not the determining factor for an alliance. Many of those who call themselves "pluralists" express the sentiment that self-labeled anarchists should stop argueing and band together against their common enemy, the state, while the positive and normative content of their political theories is "just a personal preference" for what tribe they will separate themselves into "after the revolution". This kind of "pluralism" is something that one can find outside the ALL, but it also creeps its way into it.
There are problems with this view. For many anarchists, anarchism is much more than anti-statism (for social anarchists, social heirarchy and authoritarianism are the more fundamental problems), so this is an insufficient basis upon which to form a political movement. The downfall of a nation-state by itself doesn't indicate any particular kind of social relations (other than the obvious practical ones entailed in a former structure being gone), and anarchists advocate some kind of context for what "a free society" might mean. A "purely negative" position is practically useless for those that are really interested in norms of freedom and improving the condition of humanity in some way. Indeed, it doesn't count as a political position at all. It's a reset button that leaves us with a blank canvas that can be filled with anything, including everything that anarchists tend to oppose.
The tribalism involved in this kind of "pluralism" is objectionable on theoretical and practical grounds. Relative to norms of personal freedom, it is a green light to authoritarian systems existing on local scales. This will never be acceptable as "compatible" to a strong anti-authoritarian. Even if such systems do not affect people outside of them, they would have to be considered internally unfree and would be subject to problems of intergenerationality for people born into the tribe. But to take things one step further, there are good reasons for thinking that it would not be realistic to assume that such systems would not affect others. Human relations are such that in some ways it is practically impossible to keep something "purely personal" in the sense of just affecting an individual.
Putting this aside, I'm willing to grant that many "left-libertarians" have something more substantive than this in mind, that they do have some normative limitations to what they consider compatible with anarchism. I take issue with much of what the normative content of their political theories happens to be, particularly in terms of their fundamental principles. But instead of explaining why I think that the theories are wrong, my purpose here is to argue that such a body of theory can't be easily synthesized with that of "the left", especially the political theories within social anarchism. When push comes to shove, free market libertarianism and social anarchism are fundamentally irreconcilable.
Radical contemporary Anglo-American libertarians are mainly working within a framework inherited from classical liberalism. Indeed, anarcho-capitalism was thought of by Rothbard, its founder, as essentially being the logical conclusion of liberal ideas formed in the 18th and 19th centuries. Internal conflict exists because, from the radical perspective, various earlier thinkers and contemporary libertarians with positions along the lines of minarchism are "inconsistent" liberals. Especially in Rothbard's thought, there is a strong emphasis on linearly deducing positions from axioms and simply forming one's theory by building from a set-in-stone framework. That framework is propertarian and economistic in nature. It uses (arguably a simplified version of) John Locke for its ethical theory and aprioristic Austrian economics for its economic theory (I'm leaving aside David Friedman and utilitarian libertarians for the moment), and economic theory basically is its social theory. Rothbard was also goo-goo-gah-gah for anglo-american history.
There's a glaring problem for trying to synthesize such a framework with the anarchist tradition: the fact that anarchist and socialist theory was initially formed in part as a criticism of liberalism. I can anticipate that some people may be inclined to immediately object by saying that the early anarchists were influenced by liberalism. While this has some truth to it, it doesn't negate the fact that they went in a completely different direction and turned against it to a significant extent. There is a difference between being influenced by something and building one's ideas as nothing but an extension of its foundations. The classical anarchists all challenged the foundations of liberalism to one extent or another. Since the 19th century, anarchist theory has mostly only gone further away from liberalism.
The strongest historical linkage that contemporary libertarians can point to as evidence of anarchism being linked to liberalism is Benjamin Tucker and some of the individualist anarchists that were a part of his circle in the late 19th century. There are a number of things to point out that limits the weight of this. Firstly, it's notable that Tucker was American. It makes some sense that existing in an American context may have colored his views toward largely Anglo-influenced liberalism. Then there's the fact that Tucker's thought developed in an egoist direction that does not jibe with liberalism's ethico-political theories. And Tucker is not the best person to point to as a figure to use for synthesis, since he expressed a rather hostile attitude toward the rising social anarchist movement.
History is against the interpretation of anarchism-as-liberalism in other ways. Regaurdless of how one interprets Proudhon, his work on property sparked what quickly became property skepticism as an important part of anarchist theory. Liberalism tends to define freedom in terms of property rights. To the early anarchists, the property rights that liberalism was founded upon was creating serious social problems and had inherent tensions with personal freedom. Propertarian views function as a justification for authority and their implimentation enables social heirarchies. To the extent that property is seen as being placed above human wellbeing in liberal theory, anarchists reject it. This is not a conflict that can be defined away semantically.
Another area in which there is tension has to with how liberalism is very focused on economic theory. While I wouldn't necessarily say that "the left" does not dabble in economics (Marx was, afterall, an economic reductionist), I think that it's a pretty accurate generalization to say that "the left" is much more focused on things like sociology, ecology, and general cultural studies. Even as far back as Kropotkin, we have theories being built that have more to do with anthropology than economics. Liberalism relies heavily on a models of human behavior that come from economic theory. The contemporary "left" tends to reject this. It does not work very well to describe human relations in terms of "the market", and this is not merely an aesthetic dislike.
At best, liberalism could be seen as somewhat of a necessary step in terms of its own critique of its precedessors, the erosion of fuedalism and monarchy, and the establishment of "political freedom" within a certain narrow sphere. But for various radical thinkers in the 19th century, this sphere of freedom was insufficient, and political theory needed to do a lot more than just consistently apply or universalize liberal ideas. Anarchists have always aimed for some kind of social freedom, not the legal right to obtain/maintain property while doing what one pleases without respect to how it affects others. As long as libertarians are just radical liberals, they will struggle to find common ground with the anarchist movement as it actually exists.
If one takes the reasons outlined above into account, it seems tempting to state: to the extent that one substantively embraces "the left", they are effectively abandoning libertarianism. Libertarianism, in the sense that most people understand it today, is its own animal (although significantly tied to the American conservative movement) that is largely confined to the U.S. and U.K., and is met with skepticism and hostility by just about everyone in the anarchist movement and the broader radical left. Synthesis can only occur in ambiguous places on the edges of these opposing dispositions, not in any sense that can lead to reconciliation of ideologies. To the extent that synthesis is what the ALL seeks, I believe that it is unfortunately build on a pipe dream.
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