Open letter to libertarians
I disagree with you philosophically. We will not agree on many issues. But we (leftists and libertarians) find ourselves in a peculiar conjuncture in history where we might coordinate our actions toward a commonly agreed upon end. Here are some key points on which we might agree.
(1) We oppose the war; and we oppose using the military for anything except the direct self-defense of the territory of the US.
(2) We oppose setting up and maintaining military bases abroad.
(3) We oppose the huge subsidies that are routinely provided by tax revenues to corporations. Lleftists consider this the essence of capitalism, and libertarians consider it a betrayal of capitalistic “free market” principles… who cares… we oppose the subsidies to nuclear power plants, to transportation infrastructure — like interstate highways and airports, and in particular to Agribusiness, Pharmaceuticals, and Big Energy.
(4) We oppose the Security State apparatus that spies on its residents; and the outrageous “Drug War” that has resulted in phenomenal incarceration rates in this country.
(5) We oppose the enforced and continued monopoly on political power exercised by the two dominant parties (one party with two names).
The aforementioned conjuncture is the 2008 General Election. We are seeing crises emerge in the bellies of both parties — Republicans on immigration and reproductive choice, and Democrats on both “free trade” and the war.
Senators Obama and Clinton recently engaged in the cynical maneuver of voting against war funding after the vote count confirmed that the measure would pass. This was a clear indication that the antiwar movement’s threats to withhold votes for those who refuse to withhold war funding has made them very anxious. At the same time, the Republicans, who would have people believe they are the “free marketeers,” provide billions in subsidies (open and hidden); and their primary process has led, once again, to the hegemony within the party of its most theocratic and intolerant faction.
We on the left do not want to vote for Democrats who refuse to stop a hideous war or who run like frightened children away from simple common-sense ideas like marijuana decriminalization. You among the libertarians are surely weary of alliances with theocrats and with the autocrats of the neocon Security State.
The issues where we will find major agreement are not minor. Surely there is a way for us to agree upon a limited program of mutuality, roughly outlined above, and set aside our differences, long enough to break the Republicrat duopoly. Support for Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich in the primary season is a beginning; but after the existing apparatus spits them out, where do we go from here? Can we convince these two to stand together to talk about a basic five-point program? Can we threaten the parties with mass abstentions? Can we combine resources at the local level (I am in the relocalization wing of the left; and oppose Big Government every bit as much as you in many respects) to run fusion tickets on everything from medical marijuana to challenging eminent domain abuses (taking private property on behalf of WalMart, for example)?
There is no need for us to love each other, nor to hate each other. We can continue our debates on philosophy, epistemology, and so forth. But at this particular time, precisely because there are deep fissures emerging in both parties, we might be looking into a window of opportunity to begin the process of putting new debates on the table, and breaking the power of the political establishment.
Stan Goff
Don Bacon:
Yes, this is a winner, and Stan’s the guy to do it.
I read Libertarian blogs extensively, the two principal ones being Lew Rockwell and Jacob Hornberger:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/
http://fff.org/blog/index.asp
And also Justin Raimondo at http://antiwar.com/
We have a lot in common in the areas that Stan mentions. Libertarians strike a lot of the right chords. The US government was established to protect our natural rights, not limit and abolish them. We agree on that. We agree strongly on that, I hope. Protect, not limit and abolish. Our natural rights, not rights given by the government.
The Libertarians give lip service to the freedom of corporations, but they NEVER go near the corporate freedom to poison the environment and us. They sometimes decry corporate welfare. We have to give them a bye on those.
Jacob Hornberger has also railed against the abolition of habeus corpus, and the confinement and torture of an American citizen without due process–Jose Padilla.
We need to put a fright into knee-jerk Democrats who are Repub-lite. As The Nation has editorialized–The Honeymoon is Over. “Tom DeLay is gone, but the corporate lobbyists just reloaded with Democrats.” Trade, drug costs, oil-company subsidies, the social agenda–all delayed or killed.
Lew Rockwell, Jacob Hornberger and Justin Raimondo–bookmark them and read their stuff. You won’t be sorry.
8 June 2007, 11:02 pmChristopher I. Kachouroff:
Stan,
The question is, do you oppose a progressive income tax. If you can support a sales tax, then you’re not as red as as the babboon’s derrier as you claim to be.
That is the true hallmark of the libertarian–freedom from government stealing his property.
Chris
REPLY: Chris, I did not say I am a libertarian. Last time I claimed that was in my 20s. There can be no alliance between two disparate groups if either group demands acceptance of their full program by its counterpart. Politics 101. I said that there are at least 5 major points of general policy agreement between the sections of the left and real-deal libertarians. (Reagan was NOT a libertarian!) That was totally off the cuff. In North Carolina, where I live, the Libertarian Party, as well as the Green (the only other 3rd Party actor here), have jumped through hoops repeatedly to get ballot access. iirc, NC is beaten only by MS in restrictive ballot access. The LP actually did the grunt work, hiring a battalion of canvassers, to overcome the outrageous obstacles place befor them (meeting threshholds in every one of 100 counties, eg). They got on the ballot. Then, the next cycle the stte told them they had todo it all AGAIN. Rs and Ds are not required to conduct ballot access acrobatics at all!
On taxes, I am also among those counted in this state who supported efforts to dump the sales tax. Now, we have another one that libertarians will support, and that I think is nuts. Lottery. The tax on desperate people who can’t do math. I wouldn’t try to hook up with LP folk on taxes. I’d hook up with them on local control, on ballot access and straight-popular-voting. I’d hook up with them to oppose the war. I’d hook up with them on police abuses, drug decriminalization, , subsidies to corporations, and Panotpicon surveillance.
It is a confluence of developments (reffed above) that has loosened the mortar in the two big parties, the relentless obscenity in Iraq and Afghanistan, and I am only speculating that a particular constellation of policy proposals that fall within this contingent overlap between L&L might serve (in some way I haven’t thought through at all, ergo… throwing it into the collective) the libertarians in breaking off a piece of the Republicans (and perhaps a few Dems); and help the “left” likewise break off a piece of the Dems. We ain’t gotta go to the same church to perform the same services.
9 June 2007, 1:12 pmDeAnander:
[my buddy rootlesscosmo writes… what follows is rootless talking, not me]:
I’ve just read Stan’s latest post and I have some thoughts–gloomy ones, of course. He writes (in part):
First of all, I don’t know where he gets “surely” in the first quoted sentence; where’s the evidence that such a way to agreement can be found at all, much less “surely”?
Second: the existing apparatus has already spit Kucinich and Paul out, and washed them into the storm drain too. Jon Stewart on the Daily Show got a big laugh when he said, after the Dem debate, that Kucinich was in favor of the US having “an all-butterfly Army;” this is probably coded homophobia, but in any case it suggests that Dennis K. has been firmly and irreversibly cast as a nutcase. (Even four years ago, when his primary candidacy had more going for it, the Sunday Times Magazine piece included a photo of him from a low angle, standing on something, to make him look clownish, an insignificant shrimp who foolishly imagines himself to be a person of importance.) It’s early days, and we’ve seen front-runners stumble (Wesley Clark, Ed Muskie), but nobody ever recovers from marginalization.
Third: the difficulty with the five points of agreement Stan lists is what they leave out: health care (it’s hard to imagine libertarians supporting single-payer), labor law reform (which absolutely requires an expansion of the State’s role to redress the power imbalance between bosses and unions), climate change (which absolutely requires strong state intervention to punish and reward) and much besides. And beyond a shared opposition to subsidies for agribiz, big pharma et al., fiscal policy is much more than these things–what about the mortgage interest tax deduction? What about tax policy in general–is there any possible agreement between Left support for progressive taxation and Libertarian opposition to taxation of whatever kind?
I think that, despite points of coincidence, there’s no basis for a lib-Left joint political program that could attract enough voters to make a difference. The radical objection to liberal claims of universalism was succinctly stated by Blake: “One Law for the ox and the ass is Oppression.” The libertarians’ childish fantasy is of no law at all, which (if it were feasible) would deliver the same result, only more cheaply. No common ground here, I’m afraid…
[DeA again: I am not mentally alert enough today to jump into the middle of this, and my thoughts on the State are very muddled and always have been. imho feminists’ relationship with the State is a very difficult one, as the State and the Law have been both our recourse against abusive male power, and the enforcement of abusive male power, over women and children. w/in the confines of this present national/electoral struggle I think rootless makes valid points about the extent of passionate disagreement between libertarians and the Left: is “the enemy of my enemy” enough to cement any kind of alliance? I wonder though whether it is really true that no one ever recovers from marginalisation — after all, many ideas are now mainstream which were viciously marginalised 30 years ago, and vice versa (ideas which were ordinary 30 years ago are now marginalised and demonised, notably the relative harmlessness of marijuana…).]
9 June 2007, 8:19 pmDon Bacon:
We expect our representatives to vote their conscience–so why don’t we expect the same of ourselves? Why do we come up with excuses to vote the party line, a line that we know leads to more war and more misery? Why?
“Don’t look now, but neoconservatism is making a comeback—and not among the Republicans who have made it famous, but in the Democratic Party,†declared writer Jacob Heilbrunn in a May 28, 2006 op-ed for the Los Angeles Times. In “Neocons in the Democratic Party,†Heilbrunn argued that a new generation of Democratic “pundits and young national security experts†are trying to revive the Cold War precepts of President Harry S Truman and apply them to the war on terror. “The fledgling neocons of the left are based at places such as the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), whose president, Will Marshall, has just released a volume of doctrine called With All Our Might: A Progressive Strategy for Defeating Jihadism and Defending Liberty … Their political champions include Connecticut Sen. Joseph Lieberman and such likely presidential candidates as former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner and Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, who is chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC).â€
You’ve heard of the DLC. Think Clinton.
Concluded Heilbrunn: “It is amusing to see that at the very moment when hawkish realists are trying to extirpate the neocon credo in the Republican Party, it’s being revived in the Democratic Party that first brought it to life.â€
The one main issue is war–they want it and we don’t.
10 June 2007, 12:48 amRoll over on your back or stand up on your feet.
Stan:
“Left” is always as catchy a term as libertarian. I mean, theoretically, the state could enforce labor law to redress differences between capitalists and proletarians… but the opposite has been the trend ever since Taft-Hartley. The state could levy taxes equitably, and still spend them on war toys and invasions (which is exactly what they are doing). On that count, I’d rather pay no taxes. And if the left is to mount a valid self-criticism for its performance in the 20th C, then we have to question industrialism, technocracy, specialization. We fight for education and health care, but we ignore the critiques that people like Illich have made — very strong ones, imho — that these are themselves the noun-ification of verbs. Education, like health care, are now “products,” not processes, restricted in practice to credentialed professionals, bureaucratized, and part of an iatrogenic process that has been concealed by “the fetishization of the machine. In many cases, just because the powers that be (trying to protect the role of the state as guarantor of class-gender-national power — power with a territorial logic) promote self-help as an alternative to state action; the idea of self-help VERSUS state action is a false dichotomy.
The relocalization of most of human activity is now — quite apparently — the only way forward through this period of exterminism… not because it make ideological sense, but because we are daily confronting new material limits inhering in centralization-over-complexity… the inescapable outcome of industrialism (a Siamese twin of capitalism that was adopted contingently by 20C socialists).
I’m not an anarchist. I know the state isn’t disappearing any time soon. Fighting the state, because it is the state, is symptomatic treatment for cancer. Latin America has demonstrated that the state, placed under some semblance of popular control, can be a positive force… and even the runway for a soft landing from our runaway plane.
In the present, however, there are some major opportunities that have been created by emerging fault-lines in the system. Any time we analyze the RC’s strengths, we need to also note their weaknesses. Failing this, we become conservative or despondent. I don’t know if L-L coalition work is in the cards or not. I do know that what we do now (with the exception of permaculturists, et al) doesn’t seem to face up to the more inevitable realities of the future.
I just run this stuff up the flagpole and see if anyone salutes it. (-:
The state we have now is no friend. I’m for blasting holes in the edifice any way we can (a figurative statement, just so our NSA friends understand). We NEED political destabilization now. The form may not be as important as the fact. Somehow, we have to exploit the weaknesses in the two capitalist parties; rather than letting them bat us back and forth into perpetuity.
10 June 2007, 11:38 amCraig:
This post at Orcinus represents the flip-side argument against a left-libertarian coalition (or, if you’re more cynical, the liberal Democratic attempt to keep anti-war lefties in the fold). Whether Ron Paul is a racist or not doesn’t change the fact that his presence in the Republican debates gives a boost to the anti-war movement, in the same way that Kucinich is important because he makes it harder for the other candidates to obfuscate their positions on the war and on health care. The only issue then is the extent of your pragmatism.
Personally, I’ve wanted to see such a coalition for years, but I’m not hopeful, because it would take a combined ticket with limited scope. This is possible, because one issue libertarians want resolved is the increased power of the executive branch. As a compromise, issues like health care could be left to Congress to fight out.
This is probably not a stable position, but then again, who cares if it is? A successful left-libertarian protest ticket would inject enormous chaos into a political system that desperately needs it.
10 June 2007, 1:59 pmDeAnander:
Roll over on your back or stand up on your feet.
argh
Umm, Don B, could you try to remember that this forum is supposed to be women-friendly and feminist-friendly? to use “roll over on your back” (i.e. “assume the traditional female position in heterosexual intercourse”) as a synonym for “be spineless, cowardly, futile, ineffectual, weak” is a highly gendered metaphor — in other words, an insult to women and an endorsement of the idea that only men (and men who are sexual dominators at that) are real, complete, respectworthy human beings.
Female readers (not to mention gay men who enjoy being receptive, whether habitually or occasionally) don’t necessarily like being used as a metaphor for cowardice and spinelessness. As my Dad used to say, “Engage brain before opening mouth.”
10 June 2007, 2:44 pmStan:
Ron Paul’s careless racism is mirrored in much speech by mainline Democrats; particularly in the barely concealed Orientalism of their discourse on the war.
If politics is to be 51% instrumental and 49% expressive (a terrible way to phrase this that flirts with gender divisions), then we need to point out that one of th biggest crises for Black and Latino folk here in the US of A is prison… where more than half of new inmates are being incarcerated for drug crimes, many under mandatory minimum sentencing. Libertarians oppose drug criminalization. That they still harbor unacknowledged whiteboy thought-tendencies is relevant, but certainly not a show-stopper in the arena of policy, eh?
One of the most racist regime’s on the planet is the State of Israel, and it still enjoys massive support throughout almost all of Congress, parties irrespective.
No one will argue here (at least I won’t) for a left-libertarian marriage (no heterosexism implied). We have a few big stones to move right now, and if there are others who may want to move the same ones, then… as the saying goes, pragmatism is only opportunism when the hidden agenda is to aggrandize oneself.
10 June 2007, 3:36 pmDon Bacon:
Um, DeAnander, I’ll try to remember where your (not my) mind is. How about get off your knees? No, I can predict that you won’t like that. I’ve got it–if you don’t stand for something you’ll fall for anything. “Standing” and “falling” I think avoid any possible sexual meaning for anyone, even the most sex-obsessed, and maybe your dad even said it. I hope so. (It does however remind me of a joke concerning Baptists but I won’t go there.)
The point of course was that your whining about the difficulty of getting agreement, the ‘importance’ of a joke on a TV show and tax policy, resulting in your peremptory conclusion of “No common ground here, I’m afraid…” was defeatist and unhelpful, thus leading to my remark. Stan’s idea does not deserve to be dismissed so easily. The republic is in a deep crisis, if you’d notice, and needs shock treatment.
Actually I had a dog in mind . . .oops. A small dog, I mean.
Give it another shot, DeAnander. Please. We need your positive input.
[This is Don B’s last post here. BTW general notice to posters and lurkers: DeA co-moderates/co-owns this site, so it’s the “positive input” of folks like Don that is being solicited by the “we” that run this site — and in this case is not being received. (An aside: If Don would read other people’s posts with more care he would know that the reservations he dismisses as “whining” above were not written by DeA, but quoted by DeA from correspondence with a friend. DeA’s position has not yet been articulated.) The amusing irony (notes DeA) is that so-called libertarian guys who repeatedly call for everyone to “get up off your knees/back” and show some spine, i.e. be less ‘effeminate’, stand up for yourselves etc… get really hissy when a woman — as Rebecca West wryly notes — expresses sentiments that distinguish her from a doormat, by objecting to their dickheaded reflexive putdowns of women, gays, etc. Which sort of illustrates the point even more pointedly — these guys really do think that women=doormats, then get huffy whenever women!=doormats, and that is why they use these metaphors with such unthinking ease. Which is why this kind of phatic bigotry needs to be challenged if we are ever to have any kind of true libertarian future… liberty also means the liberty of women from petty male bullying.]
10 June 2007, 5:41 pmOZAWKIE:
I’m a Libertarian and a Viet vet. I will ally with you “leftists” to stop this war and impeach and jail Bush and Cheney and their Israeli handlers.
You feminazis have no sense of humor, but thats OK, you have other assetts that us men appreciate.
See, no sense of humor. You sweet thing.
STAN REPLIES: I may have erred terribly in posting this at all. I will no more tolerate this kind of hate-speech against women here than I would someone calling n****r. It’s the same thing. This “sense of humor” shit is well-known, well-rehearsed, and well-worn as a backdoor way to express your bigotry and attempt to disclaim it at the same time. OZAWKIE will not be back. Read the rules, people.
10 June 2007, 8:23 pmRandy Morris:
And good riddance to him.
If nothing else, Stan, this was a valuable experiment along the lines of what you did over on HuffPo. Lord help us, I never thought I’d see a time I’d have to seriously consider “The Enemy of my enemy…” just to survive my own government. I know some wonderful, caring people who consider themselves Libertarians, as well as some obviously sharp, self-educated Libertarian activist/businesspeople, but I also know many who would sell someone they considered the least bit “red” to the authorities at first blush.
How to align with the real people in the Lib party without letting the other, disguised vampires into your house at the same time? Well, I gave your open letter to the smart Libs I know…we’ll see how they feel.
Randy
11 June 2007, 1:03 pmStan:
Counterpunch has been pushing this line for years; so it’s not original. I never saw the point, really, until this particular period… with virtually the whole country pissed off at both parties, and the Dem front-runner (Clinton) basically saying she’ll keep a military occupation in Iraq through two terms and leave office with the occupation in place.
“I told you so” is unbecoming, I know. But dammit, the war in Iraq is not a “Bush War,” it is a ruling class war that takes on a powerful aspect of inevitability when the big picture is taken into account.
And I won’t generalize from one dickhead that all libertarians go out of their way to be obnoxiously misogynistic (or intentionally offensive to anyone, for whatever reason).
I am one of those perennial optimists, even with all the qualifications I have for that, who believes that people can change, and that people the way they are mostly want to be decent to other people.
There is something about the anonymity of the internet that lets a lot of people adopt these hyper-male, aggressive caricatures… like they disappear into the theater of their own tv-intoxicated minds.
Not sure if every libertarian is a member of the LP… but heads-up to LP candidates. Lefty candidates, too.
There’s no point on insisting on the Whole Program, for you or us. Running for anything, from school board to county commission to congress, is applying for a 2-4 year job. People want to know what you are going to do for that 2 years. That’s a pretty tight time limit. A candidate that runs on two or three key issues, issues that will bring enough people out to vote them (and you).
I told De once that I think marijuana is an excellent issue; and there is a whole army of dedicated stoners out there, in addition to everyone else that thinks this is an expensive, cruel, and idiotic prohibition.
Here where I live, we’re in the shadow of a rickety nuke plant. When I was writing about this, one of the best background pieces available on how heavily subsidized nuke energy is was a paper from the libertarian Cato Institute.
11 June 2007, 4:33 pmRequired:
I’d just like to ad my support to the swift dismissal of OZAWKIE from this site. Even if “jokingly,” he implied a general male support for his patriarchal gibberish, and I would just like to ad to the men who have distanced themselves from and condemned this bullshit.
11 June 2007, 4:46 pmpeggy:
Stan, correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t libertarians radical individualists? And aren’t leftists collectivist/socialist/progressives? The fundamental principles of these two groups of believers in their respective total philosophies are polar opposites. That being the case, I don’t think a tactical alliance would be wise, even if it were, in the short term, practicable. Anyway, libertarians do not constitute a bloc, almost by definition, and so they cannot be mobilized to collective action.
Again, please correct me if I’m wrong on any or all of these points.
STAN: Hey Peggy, long time-no hear. There is actually a Libertarian Party here, so Ls do work collectively. Voluntary membership in collectives is not inconsistent with their beliefs. Even self-sacrifice is consistent, if it is what someone chooses because they value something that highly. For myself, I’m a socialist, but I vehemently reject the term “progressive” for a whole host of reasons. And I’ve come to reject developmental socialism for its technophilia and masculinism in the face of obvious ecocide (people still refer to making more gadgets as “progress”, thus the term “progressives” — who once advocated eugenics and other obscenities).
12 June 2007, 3:45 amRick:
I do not condone impoliteness.
However I note that dogs typically roll over as a sign of submission to other dogs and to humans, and that the linguistic derivation of “to roll over” indicating submissiveness is probably modelled on canine nonsexual behavior rather than on human behavior of any kind.
[Ed note: yeah, the canine aspect had occurred to us. But OTOH, in a culture where men routinely refer to women as “bitches” and then routinely use “he’s my bitch” or “I’m his bitch” to express relationships of dominance, can we really disentangle dog metaphors and gendered metaphors? Anything that ain’t white, male, straight and dominant seems to be fair game as a colloquial synonym for Lesser and Loser.]
12 June 2007, 9:20 amRick:
Stan wrote:
[quote]
Ron Paul’s careless racism is mirrored in much speech by mainline Democrats; particularly in the barely concealed Orientalism of their discourse on the war.
[/quote]
And yet Stan endorses the Asia Times!
From Insurgent American:
[quote]
I have found that one place that presents unusually-good, in-depth journalism on the regions where most of the planet’s inhabitants live… is Asia Times.
[/quote]
I think the Asia Times is generally anti-labor, but if one can stomach the Orientalism of their columnist “Spengler” one ought to have no problems with any amount of Orientalism.
If Stan hews to a pro-”Spengler” line, he will face determined opposition from within the political Left.
STAN REPLIES: Spengler is a complete and offensive moron. But AT also has Henry Liu, Pepe Escobar, Michael Schwartz, Sami Moubayed, and M K Bhadrakumar… among others. Here’s today’s from Beverly Darling.
12 June 2007, 9:30 amc sommer:
Let me mention another political subset that can be allied with on many of these issues, although lacking any political party to work through. That is the so-called paleoconservative tendency, a line of thinking most easily represented and accessed through ‘The American Conservative’ magazine.
TAC is a very heterodox publication, publishing authors ranging from Glenn Greenwald to Pat Buchanan (founding, inactive editor I believe), so it’s difficult to pin the lines down, but vital,definite and common areas of agreement would include stopping the war, saying no to empire, a rejection of so-called free trade, and maybe even localisation under the guise of ’states rights’
You will get nowhere with most of that crew re issues such as immigration, and women’s reproductive freedom, but allies can agree to disagree, even on important issues. Like Roosevelt and Stalin, say.
Pat Buchanan is, deep down, a probable racist and anti Semite, but this certainly does not apply to many who share some of his viewpoints, and write for the magazine.
I believe, regarding racism, it is so much a part of everyone’s background noise and mindset that I find it hard to get overly exercised about it except in it’s most blatant and odious forms. (Being ‘white’ helps)
It’s kind of like the weather. or greed. In one form or another, it seems to be a universal human denominator - we are a racist society, but compared to Japan?
I got off track a little there, basically what I am saying is don’t dismiss these people just because Crazy Pat Buchanan is one of their standard bearers. When it comes to stopping the war, and the march towards empire, I can work with anyone this side of the creeps who post on StormFront, most of whom don’t like the war either, but that line has to be drawn.
Another open question is how many of these paleos are there, actually? There is definite overlap between them and the Libertarians. Ron Paul’s appearance in the most recent Republican debates was the cover story of the last issue of TAC. Personally, I track too far to the traditional left to be close to either tendency, but there are definite affinities.
The paleos were against the war in Iraq long before it started, unlike most of the Democratic Party. And they genuinely despise the current crew of neocon pigs. They can be worked with, issue by issue, although they are not currently represented by either party or the Libertarians.
I close with an old joke - “a Libertarian is a Republican who smokes dope” . it’s at least half true, but you got to look at the other half of the picture.
12 June 2007, 12:59 pmDeAnander:
@c sommer : would you place Paul Craig Roberts among the paleos? I notice he has been published (weblished) regularly at Counterpunch, which struck me as a case of “strange bedfellows” and possibly of an alliance of desperation against the neocons.
12 June 2007, 4:30 pmJohn Brown:
Hey Stan,
Interesting discussion - I’ve not been here much of late, but I always appreciate it when I do.
An alliance with libs may be fruitful, but I think that we’d spend our time far more productively by trying to forging political unity among immigrants, Blacks, and anti-Zionist progressives.
While libertarians should oppose the death penalty, the destruction of Black New Orleans, or Uncle Sam’s elaborate network of Concentration Camps, etc., most are silent.
I’ve got another idea, Stan, about which I’d really like your feedback. Mumia 08.
Solidarity,
12 June 2007, 7:14 pmJB
Nil:
The real barrier to this kind of alliance is the white and male supremacy exhibited by large swaths of the ‘Libertarian’ constituency. As evidenced in the comments here, although Stan is right that we perhaps shouldn’t make conclusions from these internet anecdotes, most of us have other reasons to make conclusions.
Even more than the overt pro-capitalist stuff, it’s the
15 June 2007, 5:20 pm(usually) less overt racist and sexist stuff, that makes me wonder how there’s any way we could cooperate.
Required:
I agree with Nil. It’s weird, but it seems any attempt would result in “OK us white male radicals/revolutionaries are going to go and make a pact with the libertarians. If any women or POC wanna come you can, but don’t say anything that’ll embarrass us.”
That wasn’t Stan’s proposal but it seems like that’s how it would have to play out practically if it were to be successful at all. Unless we were able to get them to to agree to not promote those ideas when organising with us, but I believe you’d have a fucking hard time trying to convince a libertarian not to say something because it will conflict with feminism, whatever the context. Maybe there’ll be a few that can see the tactical advantage, but I thought the point of an alliance was to gain lots of people, not just a few.
I certainly can’t see any libertarian figure head reporting back to base saying “I’ve struck an alliance with the POC and women’s liberationists” and not being met with laughter and/or gun fire.
15 June 2007, 10:12 pmAudrey:
Required - I’m still waiting for the left to strike an alliance with the POC and women’s liberationists.
I have the idea in my head that libertarians want to do away with personal accountability to the community – if it’s your land, you can do whatever you like with it as though nobody else feels the impact. The assumed only opposing position is that communities should be allowed to make rules that homeowners abide by, for the good of the community.
There are instances though where neither one of those things is happening. Instead, local laws are enacted that both take away personal liberty and run counter to what’s beneficial for the common good – or rather, the common good is interpreted as keeping up (straight white male capitalist) appearances, rather than supporting communities in meaningful ways.
We end up with laws that prevent us from growing our own food, prevent us from hanging our clothes outside to dry, prevent us from growing meadows, and require us to plant lawns and keep them mowed to 6 inches or less.
And we have laws that prevent us from sharing housing unless we are blood relatives or married, and that bar single people/single parents from forming communal living arrangements. Laws like that have the effect of excluding lower income people, gays and lesbians, and single parents from certain communities.
While I’m in favor supporting the common good, I’d prefer no laws to this business of enacting laws that require us to use more energy, buy more things, participate in destructive land practices, and live independently if we aren’t properly married off.
16 June 2007, 10:22 amLWM:
DeAnander,
Paul Craig Roberts is definitely a paleocon, and probably borders on the proto-fascist nationalist. His articles get posted at VDARE. PRA has an excellent chart of the sectors of the American political right:
Sectors of the US Right
David Friedman (Milton’s kid) is famous for observing that, “There may be two libertarians somewhere who agree with each other about everything, but I am not one of them.”
There are many flavors of libertarianism. On the left there is the Henry George school. WFB, JR, is a Georgist, like Churchill, and complains that he gets lots of grief from his friends on the right about it being “socialism” (it isn’t), to the Benjamin Tuckerites, Mutualist, free-market, anti-capitalists, to what mutualists like the Tuckerites call the vulgar libertarianism of the right. This is what most Americans think of when you mention “libertarian”.
You might enjoy this site:
Critiques of Libertarianism
20 June 2007, 4:41 pmLWM:
You’ll find the Georgists here:
School of Cooperative Individualism
Why anyone considers these schools “leftist” is a matter for debate (and rather obvious). Neither is socialist or Marxist and both are as American as apple pie.
20 June 2007, 4:51 pmDeAnander:
@LWM thanks for the links. I have recently been trying to wrap my head around Bookchin, a “left anarchist” with a strident (and imho trenchant) critique of Marx-Leninism, Maoism, Trotskyism etc. His polemical essay “Listen, Marxist!” has been keeping me busy the last few mornings over breakfast. It would not surprise me if the mass-market US brand of libertarianism were about as subtle (and nutritious) as mass-market televangelical corporatised xtianity or McDs meals. A reduction to cartoon and soundbite format and a warping to fit into the market-cult paradigm afflicts all human endeavour in a totalising mercantilist/financier regime… I wonder if the Cooperative Individualists would be near or far from the anarcho-syndicalists of Spain…? looking forward to exploring a new body of literature.
VDARE?
20 June 2007, 5:17 pmRequired:
“I’m still waiting for the left to strike an alliance with the POC and women’s liberationists.”
Good point. I guess at least with the left you’ve got some conceptual tools that you can use to make an argument for such an alliance. With the libertarians it’s seems like converting Mac to Windows.
20 June 2007, 8:06 pmLWM:
DeAnander,
VDARE: http://www.vdare.com/
SPLC article: Keeping America White
Georgists tend to focus more on land’s key role in the economy. All land is owned in common and ground rents are collected to support the community. There are two thriving, long time Georgist communities in the U.S. Fairhope, Alabama and The Ardens in Delaware. I would trace this back to Thomas Paine’s Agrarian Justice, 1797, but Henry George was the original single taxer. We call it the Land Value Tax today. Tax wealth, not income from labor, so they focus less on the means of production.
20 June 2007, 9:11 pmDeAnander:
sorry, part of my post was dropped — I had posted VDARE <shudder> and I guess it looked like an undefined html tag to the parser. I did know who they are — hence the “shudder”. but does PCR have any affinity for them or do they just post his essays in an attempt to gain credibility? I mean, John Adams (Transport Planning Policy and Practise?) gets published by Cato Institute, and yet he is not the kind of hardline neocon that one associates with Cato Institute, they just cherrypick his work for the bits that suit their agenda; in fact he wrote one of the wickedest deconstructions of CBA I’ve ever read, called “And How Much for your Grandmother?”
21 June 2007, 12:11 amKevin Carson:
How about a shared anti-government agenda of cutting taxes from the bottom up, and cutting welfare from the top down? Eliminate corporate welfare and the federal drug war, and radically scale back military spending, and translate all the savings into raising the personal income tax exemption to $30-40,000 a year.
BTW, some libertarians might be a lot more anti-corporate than you think. For example, there’s a pretty strong anti-copyright sentiment in a large segment of that community, for instance. And doing away with “intellectual property” would bankrupt most of the leading corporate sectors of the global economy: software, entertainment, pharma, agribusiness and biotech. Starving the military-industrial complex would kill off the rest.
Many libertarians, especially the Rothbard crowd, are radical Lockeans when it comes to land: that means political titles of landed oligarchs and latifundistas are null and void because they don’t result from labor-homesteading. By Rothbardian standards, the land belongs to the peasants.
And while libertarians don’t support single-payer healthcare (I certainly don’t), a good many of us would like to eliminate drug patents and the “professional” licensing cartels, along with the FDA’s power to suppress alternative medicine. Do all those things, and the cost of basic care would probably decline to 1960s levels in real terms–well within the means of cooperative clinics and mutual insurance and other forms of working class self-organization to deliver.
I don’t support strengthening the state to help unions, but I’d sure as hell like to repeal Taft-Hartley’s restrictions on sympathy and boycott strikes. The whole purpose of the “progressive” New Deal labor agenda was to turn bureaucratic union establishments into enforcers of contracts against their own rank and file, and then Taft-Hartley outlawed all the tactics that were winning victories for the CIO even before Wagner passed. If sympathy and boycott strikes up and down the production chain were a legal way of backing local strikes, and the threat of federal arbitration and cooling off periods couldn’t be used to stop transport workers from expanding them into general strikes, I expect labor would wipe the floor with the bosses’ pasty asses.
A good many libertarians also see the regulatory state as preempting the much harsher remedies of traditional tort law against polluters and other malfeasors. I’d like to restore the common law of tort liability as it existed before the judges weakened it to suit commercial interests in the 19th century.
Free markets–real free markets–are the absolute worst nightmare of big business.
21 June 2007, 2:19 amLWM:
It’s a fair question. Glenn Greenwald articles are reprinted by Lew Rockwell as are Paul Craig Roberts but Glenn has no affinity for that milieu. As bad as the Democratic party is, this was a bit over the top even for 2000 and look where PCR is today.
The Democratic Nazi Party
http://www.lewrockwell.com/roberts/roberts2.html
Go through his archives. I think you’ll find he and David Duke have a lot in common.
Not too sharp if you ask me.
John Stuart Mill, letter to the Conservative MP, Sir John Pakington (March, 1866)
I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it.
I would not be exaggerating to tell you that even Cato scholars think the Austrian school and Lew Rockwell in particular is a fringe economic view and populated by some total cranks and oddballs.
For Mises’ Sake
by Tom G. Palmer (of Cato)
Is the Ludwig von Mises Institute worthy of its namesake? The continuing saga . . .
(…)
I was moved to ridicule Rockwell’s articles, letters, and essays by his truly ridiculous claims about the Emperor Franz Joseph’s being a patron of classical liberalism and of the Austrian school of economics. Ennobling the father of a future Austrian economist and decorating that economist (along with thousands of other human cannon fodder) for battlefield bravery are, well, utterly risible when offered as evidence of a commitment to either classical liberalism or Austrian economics.
And why was I moved to spend twenty minutes writing about something that is merely absurd and risible? Perhaps it has something to do with a lecture I gave some years ago at Washington State University, after which I was introduced by the chairman of the department of economics to some graduate students whom he termed “our former Austrians.” One might ask why the graduate students there called themselves “former Austrians.” One name suffices to answer the question: Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Dr. Hoppe, leading light of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, had presented such a loopy, absurd and utterly unhinged picture of Austrian economics at a public lecture there, under the sponsorship of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, that those graduate students felt obliged to distinguish themselves publicly from such a strange and incomprehensible set of views. And I can certainly understand why they would feel compelled to do that. If Hoppe is the leading light of Austrian economics as the Mises Institute presents him, then Austrian economics should prepare for a long dark age. At George Mason University I saw Hoppe present a lecture in which he claimed that Ludwig von Mises had set the intellectual foundation for not only economics, but for ethics, geometry, and optics, as well. This bizarre claim turned a serious scholar and profound thinker into a comical cult figure, a sort of Euro Kim Il Sung.
Hoppe’s scholarship is so pitiful that one of his own colleagues — who is still involved in the Mises Institute — once remarked to me that Hoppe’s book on ethics was a truly remarkable achievement; it was the only book he had ever read in which every step of the argument was a logical fallacy. And Mark Skousen, in his introduction to Dissent on Keynes: A Critical Appraisal of Keynesian Economics (New York; Praeger Publishers, 1992), felt obliged to single out and strongly disavow Hoppe’s cranky economic views. Skousen made subtle reference to the unreadability of Hoppe’s screed, which required extensive rewriting by Hoppe’s friends at the Mises Institute, as well as to Hoppe’s failure to understand fundamental Austrian economic principles, such as the role of time in economic adjustment. “As the editor of this volume, I have to admit that I do not agree with everything Professor Hoppe presents as Misesian economics, even in this significantly revised chapter. For example, I have serious doubts about his claim that market unemployment is ‘always voluntary.’ Certainly, permanent unemployment is always voluntary in the unhampered market, but a dynamic market is constantly generating temporary unemployment that requires time to correct.” Skousen included the chapter by Hoppe only because he was threatened with legal action by Llewellyn Rockwell if he did not. One could go on with examples of how Hoppe and the Mises Institute have proven embarrassing to the Austrian economists by whom they claim to be inspired but what would be the point? Those who have had contact with him know that Hoppe is an intellectual bully and an academic disgrace.
I was cautioned by a friend not to criticize Hoppe, on the grounds that one should never wrestle with a pig. I have not followed that advice. That may turn out to be unwise especially considering Hoppe’s record for heaping abuse on those with whom he disagrees. I recall with great distaste witnessing Hoppe quite savagely attack Professor Don Lavoie of George Mason University at a meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society; in Hoppe’s sustained rant, he said “I don’t know what the world looks like when you’re on LSD, but it doesn’t look that way to me,” with the clear insinuation that Don was a drug fiend, and that his paper was the result of a drug trip. My own little note in Liberty was described as follows in the Mises Institute newsletter: “Few writers today can match the anti-Habsburg rantings of Lenin, Wilson, and Hitler, but just by renewing the ties between the Austrian School and the Habsburgs we drew a hysterical attack from a D.C. partisan.” The implicit comparison with Lenin, Wilson, and Hitler was bad enough, but what is a “D.C. partisan”? Does that mean that I lunch regularly with Hillary Clinton, or that I spend my time at the World Bank, plotting the world’s financial ruin? I can only guess at the vituperation and slander that Hoppe and Rockwell must be preparing for me, as well as for anyone else who might voice doubts about their bizarre cult.
Poor Ludwig von Mises. He was a great man and a profound thinker. To have the likes of Hoppe and Rockwell as disciples is a sad fate.
Liberty, January 1998, © Copyright 1997, Liberty Foundation
http://critiquesoflibertarianism.blogspot.com/2005/11/for-mises-sake.html
21 June 2007, 5:56 amLWM:
I see Kevin Carson dropped by. Excellent.
DeAnander,
We all want to end American imperialism and warmongering. In this area, we on the left have some pretty “strange bedfellows”. There is a fair difference between Justin Raimondo at antiwar.com and some of the columnists at LewRockwell.com, just as there is a fair difference between we here on the left and Mr. Raimondo. I have never met Mr. Raimondo but he seems like a reasonable enough fellow. I can’t say I agree with his economics but I consider myself a left-libertarian (anti-authoritarian) and probably agree with him on some issues. The problem for me arises when someone like Ron Paul enters the picture. I know he makes all the right noises when it comes to those who oppose war and imperialism but one has to consider the company he keeps. Dave Neiwert at Orcinus:
http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2007/06/man-of-hour.html
http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2007/06/six-impossible-things-before-breakfast.html
http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2007/06/trouble-with-ron.html
http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2007/06/ron-paul-vs-new-world-order.html
As Chip Berlet might say, Ron Paul is probably best defined as a proto or quasi-fascist, regressive populist/nationalist. It’s a free country and he has the right to hold those opinions but should he ever come to power, we might not like where he takes us.
21 June 2007, 4:36 pmDeAnander:
I have often joked that I am a “libertarian socialist” but am now grappling with a more accurate map of the spectrum of political theory. I note that the dualism of right/left, like the gender dualism on which it’s based, leaves out a helluva lot of taxonomic space; and even cartesian plots like the famous “political position grid” (in which e.g. individual freedom vs state authority is one axis and redistribution vs the right to hoard is the other axis) don’t really capture the nuances.
one can “believe in taxation for the public good” (a Left position according to cartoon Randians such as, er, Maggie Thatcher :-)) and yet differ wildly on what should be taxed or even what “the public good” means. meanwhile the US is so far into the neocon lalaland (”the libertarianism of fools”?) that everything looks Left from here and the distinction between forcible oligarchy and Something Else seems the only relevant one at times…
and then there are near-universal fault lines like race and gender, or the militarism that is a product of racism and male supremacy interacting with wealth and power… which can make all the “boys clubs” of political faction look the same if you are female, or all the whitefolks clubs look the same if you are a PoC… how to divorce various populisms from racism is a big issue; how to divorce various libertarianisms from masculinist swagger another…
I’m just rambling here… political taxonomy is something of a new hobby (I’ve spent some tine deconstructing the shared misogyny and masculinism of Left and Right partisans, but am still learning about the many flavours of libertarianism, populism, etc). thanks for opening windows onto new and confusing vistas
21 June 2007, 7:50 pmAlan:
Understand the distinctions. There are libertarians,
and then there are libertarians. The ones we want are
the populist/anti-elite libertarians, as opposed to
the corporate libertarians (shills, and apologists for
capitalism’s worst excesses). Another distinction (same
one, actually, but expressed in different words) that
is critical is between geolibertarians and royal
libertarians. Google for those words and the name
Dan Sullivan (”Are you a real libertarian, or a
royal libertarian?” — if memory serves).
PS: If Chip Berlet, the stalinist, says that Paul is
23 June 2007, 12:08 pmno good, then that is in itself a good argument in
favor of Paul. Berlet’s purpose (one of them) is to
keep us split up in little ineffectual factions, and
to violently oppose any orthogonal/synthetic formations
of the sort Stan has just suggested — the sorts of
formations that stand a real chance (if anything does!)
of upsetting the established order. Berlet participates
with other left gatekeepers (Michael Moore, Amy
Goodman, etc.) to keep everyone in the doomed
duopoly game. “Keep votin’ Democratic! Lesser of two
evils! Only game in town! Anybody But Bush!” etc., etc
ad nauseum.
Alan:
left gatekeepers:
23 June 2007, 12:11 pmhttp://www.leftgatekeepers.com
LWM:
I have often joked that I am a “libertarian socialist†but am now grappling with a more accurate map of the spectrum of political theory.
No joke. That puts you in the same camp as Noam Chomsky, DeAnander. Good company, I’d say and that’s precisely his description of his political views. I like to simplify it this way. Left and right are plots on the continuum of economic dimensions and policy, libertarian and authoritarian are plots of the continuum of liberty and freedom vs. totalitarianism and control. These guys have done that rather nicely.
http://www.politicalcompass.org/
It appears that, according to Altemeyer, leftist authoritarians are as rare as “hens teeth”. Stalin was not really an economic leftist and he was certainly no libertarian.
Now if you want to delve into integral politics, you can explain that one to me. According to Ken Wilber, Buddha was the Ultimate Republican.
24 June 2007, 7:37 amLWM:
Altemeyer:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Altemeyer
My friend Paul Rosenberg has summarized Altemeyer’s work here:
http://patternsthatconnect.blogspot.com/2006/03/rightwing-authoritarianism-and.html
24 June 2007, 7:39 amLWM:
“which can make all the “boys clubs†of political faction look the same if you are female”
And I hope you’ve been reading Glenn Greenwald over at Salon.com. He has been critically examining this phenomenon lately. Between Glenn and Digby it is becoming quite a topic of discussion among those who were not even conscious of participating in it. Consciousness has more to do with it than politics, I think.
24 June 2007, 7:47 amyeranalyst:
It’s funny, when Don Bacon used the idiom roll over on your back or stand up, my immediate perception of it was submit or resist. dogs,wolves and other mammals in times of contention will roll over on their backs as a signal of submission. DeAnander felt it was a metaphor for the missionary sexual position and chastised Don for being sexist. Stan jumps in and states that being on ones knees is symbolic of fellatio or feminization. Originally it was a sign of fealty or submission in front of royalty or nobility and symbolically a measure of stature or power based on relative height.
I am a leftist and this reminded me of a political discussion group I was involved with in 1970 when feminism was just beginning to resurge after a long dormancy. I made some political point to the group and a woman sitting beside me commented on what I said. She then asked me “What are you doing about your sexism?” In my mind it was as presumptive as “Have you stopped beating your wife yet?” My response was “not a damn thing” there was a collective gasp from the group. At that point I smiled and left. It was apparent to me that these people were far more into self righteous contention for dominance in the group than they were in formulating a cohesive plan of action to confront the problems of the day.
Political correctness is not about righting bigoted, or sexist attitudes or behaviors it is about positioning ones self and others in a power relationship every bit as much as bigotry and sexism tries to accomplish that end.
I find all of Freudian sexual innuendo imparted to harmless idiomatic phraseology is over the top and alienating. If I used the phrase “bend to their will” I would be conceptualizing it as a tree bent by the force of the wind or metal bending by the force of hammer blows, I would not immediately think of bend over and take it up the ass.
I was also somewhat amused by the irony Stan, that you would show such “chivalry” in coming to the defense of DeAnander’s precipitous conclusions. As though being a co- owner of the site didn’t provide her with enough to do her own censoring.
I must smile and go now. Good luck with those libertarians;^)
STAN: Eh? Where is my reference to “knees” here, or any chivilrous defense of anyone? That damn Stan… he’s gone over to the other side… captured body and soul by those crazed PC feminist harpies.
I see that the shit-house lawyering is still a preferred solution (along with hi-bye, hit-and-run point-scoring attempts…). Since seeking to understand and deconstruct the subjugation of women in society is such an amusing distraction (ever since the 70s, when those bad feminazis were also put in their places by this intrepid Leftyboy), we are left with nothing more than (sigh, once again) (1) misrepresentation of what was said in paragraph 1, (2) claim to reverse victimhood in paragraph 2, (3) the “sticks and stones” defense in paragraph 3, and (4) a good ol’ boy-2-boy thrust (couldn’t resist) at Stan’s gender treachery. Do y’all keep a playbook for this stuff?
The subordinate position of women (52% of the population), it seems, still doesn’t qualify for inclusion “in formulating a cohesive plan of action to confront the problems of the day.” What clearer statement can we get that on the orthodox left the position of women is not a problem.
27 June 2007, 4:01 amxenia:
I cannot stand most (99%) of liberarians for two reasons:
1. Insistance on the sanctity of property, which strikes me as especially cheeky coming from people who have not been on American lands for more than 200-300 hundred years. If they truly respect property, they should give it back to those who were here long before them and who certainly administered it better than most of them ever did.
2. Lack of compassion toward the handicapped, the old, the poor, all of which is manifest in their refusal of universal health care. Along the lines: “As a capable, hard working male, a superman in spe, I should never be held responsible for someone else’s problems. Why should I pay taxes for your child if I do not intend to procreate?”
I view those who would refuse healthcare to children as murderous, full stop.
In short, it is sometime benevolent or opportune to work with libertarians, but they remain attached to a heavily racist and supremacist practical form of social darwinism (at best, they’re indifferent). Once they stop gazing at their navel, and realize that the suffering of other people may have something to do with them, then, and only then, perhaps…
[moderator: hear ya loud and clear, but noting that this describes right-libertarians, not left-libertarians/anarchists such as Bookchin who wholly support “the irreducible minimum” and our responsibility to care for each other… unf the right-libertarians have claimed — practically copyrighted — the word “libertarian” in much the same way that pimps and pornographers (also propertarians) have copyrighted “sex”…]
28 June 2007, 6:30 pmMelissa:
The only people running that I feel I could vote for in clear conscience are Ron Paul, Mike Gravel and Dennis Kucinich. They all have some drawbacks, but the mainstream Democrats might as well be Republicans. I really wonder if we will have an election in 2008 though. I don’t think that Bush signed that emergency bill in May for nothing. It says he can assume complete power if he decides there is an emergency that calls for it. I am pretty sure there will be such an emergency.
29 June 2007, 3:55 amNil:
Alan, I’m curious, who is the “us” that you think Chip Berlet’s purpose is to keep split up?
1 July 2007, 9:15 pm