Free-market anti-capitalism, the unknown ideal
By Sheldon Richman
Ron Paul’s 2008 presidential campaign introduced many people to the word “libertarian.” Since Paul is a Republican and Republicans, like libertarians, use the rhetoric of free markets and private enterprise, people naturally assume that libertarians are some kind of quirky offshoot of the American right wing. To be sure, some libertarian positions fit uneasily with mainstream conservatism—complete drug decriminalization, legal same-sex marriage, and the critique of the national-security state alienate many on the right from libertarianism.
But the dominant strain of libertarianism still seems at home on that side of the political spectrum. Paeans to property rights and free enterprise—the mainstream libertarian conviction that the American capitalist system, despite government intervention, fundamentally embodies those values—appear to justify that conclusion.
But then one runs across passages like this: “Capitalism, arising as a new class society directly from the old class society of the Middle Ages, was founded on an act of robbery as massive as the earlier feudal conquest of the land. It has been sustained to the present by continual state intervention to protect its system of privilege without which its survival is unimaginable.” And this: “build worker solidarity. On the one hand, this means formal organisation, including unionization—but I’m not talking about the prevailing model of ‘business unions’ … but real unions, the old-fashioned kind, committed to the working class and not just union members, and interested in worker autonomy, not government patronage.”
These passages—the first by independent scholar Kevin Carson, the second by Auburn University philosophy professor Roderick Long—read as though they come not from libertarians but from radical leftists, even Marxists. That conclusion would be only half wrong: these words were written by pro-free-market left-libertarians. (The preferred term for their economic ideal is “freed market,” coined by William Gillis.)
These authors—and a growing group of colleagues—see themselves as both libertarians and leftists. They are standard libertarians in that they believe in the moral legitimacy of private ownership and free exchange and oppose all government interference in personal and economic affairs—a groundless, pernicious dichotomy. Yet they are leftists in that they share traditional left-wing concerns, about exploitation and inequality for example, that are largely ignored, if not dismissed, by other libertarians. Left-libertarians favor worker solidarity vis-à-vis bosses, support poor people’s squatting on government or abandoned property, and prefer that corporate privileges be repealed before the regulatory restrictions on how those privileges may be exercised. They see Walmart as a symbol of corporate favoritism—supported by highway subsidies and eminent domain—view the fictive personhood of the limited-liability corporation with suspicion, and doubt that Third World sweatshops would be the “best alternative” in the absence of government manipulation.
Left-libertarians tend to eschew electoral politics, having little confidence in strategies that work through the government. They prefer to develop alternative institutions and methods of working around the state. The Alliance of the Libertarian Left encourages the formation of local activist and mutual-aid organizations, while its website promotes kindred groups and posts articles elaborating its philosophy. The new Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS) encourages left-libertarians to bring their analysis of current events to the general public through op-eds.
These laissez-faire left-libertarians are not to be confused with other varieties of left-wing libertarians, such as Noam Chomsky or Hillel Steiner, who each in his own way objects to individualistic appropriation of unowned natural resources and the economic inequality that freed markets can produce. The left-libertarians under consideration here have been called “market-oriented left-libertarians” or “market anarchists,” though not everyone in this camp is an anarchist.
There are historical grounds for placing pro-market libertarianism on the left. In the first half of the 19th century, the laissez-faire liberal economist Frederic Bastiat sat on the left side of the French National Assembly with other radical opponents of the ancien régime, including a variety of socialists. The right side was reserved for reactionary defenders of absolute monarchy and plutocracy. For a long time “left” signified radical, even revolutionary, opposition to political authority, fired by hope and optimism, while “right” signified sympathy for a status quo of privilege or a return to an authoritarian order. These terms applied even in the United States well into the 20th century and only began to change during the New Deal, which prompted regrettable alliances of convenience that carried over into the Cold War era and beyond.
At the risk of oversimplifying, there are two wellsprings of modern pro-market left-libertarianism: the theory of political economy formulated by Murray N. Rothbard and the philosophy known as “Mutualism” associated with the pro-market anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon—who sat with Bastiat on the left side of the assembly while arguing with him incessantly about economic theory—and the American individualist anarchist Benjamin R. Tucker.
Rothbard (1926-1995) was the leading theorist of radical Lockean libertarianism combined with Austrian economics, which demonstrates that free markets produce widespread prosperity, social cooperation, and economic coordination without monopoly, depression, or inflation—evils whose roots are to be found in government intervention. Rothbard, who called himself an “anarcho-capitalist,” first saw himself as a man of the “Old Right,” the loose collection of opponents of the New Deal and American Empire epitomized by Sen. Robert Taft, journalist John T. Flynn, and more radically, Albert Jay Nock. Yet Rothbard understood libertarianism’s left-wing roots.
In his 1965 classic and sweeping essay “Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty,” Rothbard identified “liberalism”—what is today called libertarianism—with the left as “the party of hope, of radicalism, of liberty, of the Industrial Revolution, of progress, of humanity.” The other great ideology to emerge after the French revolution “was conservatism, the party of reaction, the party that longed to restore the hierarchy, statism, theocracy, serfdom, and class exploitation of the Old Order.”
When the New Left arose in the 1960s to oppose the Vietnam War, the military-industrial complex, and bureaucratic centralization, Rothbard easily made common cause with it. “The Left has changed greatly, and it is incumbent upon everyone interested in ideology to understand the change… . [T]he change marks a striking and splendid infusion of libertarianism into the ranks of the Left,” he wrote in “Liberty and the New Left.” His left-radicalism was clear in his interest in decentralization and participatory democracy, pro-peasant land reform in the feudal Third World, “black power,” and worker “homesteading” of American corporations whose profits came mainly from government contracts.
But with the fading of New Left, Rothbard deemphasized these positions and moved strategically toward right-wing paleoconservatism. His left-libertarian colleague, the former Goldwater speechwriter Karl Hess (1923-1994), kept the torch burning. In Dear America Hess wrote, “On the far right, law and order means the law of the ruler and the order that serves the interest of that ruler, usually the orderliness of drone workers, submissive students, elders either totally cowed into loyalty or totally indoctrinated and trained into that loyalty,” while the left “has been the side of politics and economics that opposes the concentration of power and wealth and, instead, advocates and works toward the distribution of power into the maximum number of hands.”
Benjamin Tucker (1854-1939) was the editor of Liberty, the leading publication of American individualist anarchism. As a Mutualist, Tucker rigorously embraced free markets and voluntary exchange void of all government privilege and regulation. Indeed, he called himself a “consistent Manchester man,” a reference to the economic philosophy of the English free-traders Richard Cobden and John Bright. Tucker disdained defenders of the American status quo who, while favoring free competition among workers for jobs, supported capitalist suppression of competition among employers through government’s “four monopolies”: land, the tariff, patents, and money.
“What causes the inequitable distribution of wealth?” Tucker asked in 1892. “It is not competition, but monopoly, that deprives labor of its product. … Destroy the banking monopoly, establish freedom in finance, and down will go interest on money through the beneficent influence of competition. Capital will be set free, business will flourish, new enterprises will start, labor will be in demand, and gradually the wages of labor will rise to a level with its product.”
The Rothbardians and Mutualists have some disagreements over land ownership and theories of value, but their intellectual cross-pollination has brought the groups closer philosophically. What unites them, and distinguishes them from other market libertarians, is their embrace of traditional left-wing concerns, including the consequences of plutocratic corporate power for workers and other vulnerable groups. But left-libertarians differ from other leftists in identifying the culprit as the historical partnership between government and business—whether called the corporate state, state capitalism, or just plain capitalism—and in seeing the solution in radical laissez faire, the total separation of economy and state.
Thus behind the political-economic philosophy is a view of history that separates left-libertarians from both ordinary leftists and ordinary libertarians. The common varieties of both philosophies agree that essentially free markets reigned in England from the time of the Industrial Revolution, though they evaluate the outcome very differently. But left-libertarians are revisionists, insisting that the era of near laissez faire is a myth. Rather than a radical freeing of economic affairs, England saw the ruling elite rig the social system on behalf of propertied class interests. (Class analysis originated with French free-market economists predating Marx.)
Through enclosure, peasants were dispossessed of land they and their kin had worked for generations and were forcibly turned into rent-paying tenants or wage-earners in the new factories with their rights to organize and even to move restricted by laws of settlement, poor laws, combination laws, and more. In the American colonies and early republic, the system was similarly rigged through land grants and speculation (for and by railroads, for example), voting restrictions, tariffs, patents, and control of money and banking.
In other words, the twilight of feudalism and the dawn of capitalism did not find everyone poised at the starting line as equals—far from it. As the pro-market sociologist Franz Oppenheimer, who developed the conquest theory of the state, wrote in his book The State, it was not superior talent, ambition, thrift, or even luck that separated the property-holding minority from the propertyless proletarian majority—but legal plunder, to borrow Bastiat’s famous phrase.
Here is something Marx got right. Indeed, Kevin Carson seconds Marx’s “eloquent passage”: “these new freedmen became sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed of all their own means of production, and of all the guarantees afforded by the old feudal arrangements. And the history of this, their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.”
This system of privilege and exploitation has had long-distorting effects that continue to afflict most people to this day, while benefiting the ruling elite; Carson calls it “the subsidy of history.” This is not to deny that living standards have generally risen in market-oriented mixed economies but rather to point out that living standards for average workers would be even higher—not to mention less debt-based—and wealth disparities less pronounced in a freed market.
The “free-market anti-capitalism” of left-libertarianism is no contradiction, nor is it a recent development. It permeated Tucker’s Liberty, and the identification of worker exploitation harked back at least to Thomas Hodgskin (1787-1869), a free-market radical who was one of the first to apply the term “capitalist” disparagingly to the beneficiaries of government favors bestowed on capital at the expense of labor. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, “socialism” did not exclusively mean collective or government ownership of the means or production but was an umbrella term for anyone who believed labor was cheated out of its natural product under historical capitalism.
Tucker sometimes called himself a socialist, but he denounced Marx as the representative of “the principle of authority which we live to combat.” He thought Proudhon the superior theorist and the real champion of freedom. “Marx would nationalize the productive and distributive forces; Proudhon would individualize and associate them.”
The term capitalism certainly suggests that capital is to be privileged over labor. As left-libertarian author Gary Chartier of La Sierra University writes, “[I]t makes sense for [left-libertarians] to name what they oppose ‘capitalism.’ Doing so … ensures that advocates of freedom aren’t confused with people who use market rhetoric to prop up an unjust status quo, and expresses solidarity between defenders of freed markets and workers—as well as ordinary people around the world who use ‘capitalism’ as a short-hand label for the world-system that constrains their freedom and stunts their lives.”
In contrast to nonleft-libertarians, who seem uninterested in, if not hostile to, labor concerns per se, left-libertarians naturally sympathize with workers’ efforts to improve their conditions. (Bastiat, like Tucker, supported worker associations.) However, there is little affinity for government-certified bureaucratic unions, which represent little more than a corporatist suppression of the pre-New Deal spontaneous and self-directed labor/mutual-aid movement, with its “unauthorized” sympathy strikes and boycotts. Before the New Deal Wagner Act, big business leaders like GE’s Gerard Swope had long supported labor legislation for this reason.
Moreover, left-libertarians tend to harbor a bias against wage employment and the often authoritarian corporate hierarchy to which it is subject. Workers today are handicapped by an array of regulations, taxes, intellectual-property laws, and business subsidies that on net impede entry to potential alternative employers and self-employment. As well, periodic economic crises set off by government borrowing and Federal Reserve management of money and banking threaten workers with unemployment, putting them further at the mercy of bosses.
Competition-inhibiting cartelization diminishes workers’ bargaining power, enabling employers to deprive them of a portion of the income they would receive in a freed and fully competitive economy, where employers would have to compete for workers—rather than vice versa—and self-employment free of licensing requirements would offer an escape from wage employment altogether. Of course, self-employment has its risks and wouldn’t be for everyone, but it would be more attractive to more people if government did not make the cost of living, and hence the cost of decent subsistence, artificially high in myriad ways—from building codes and land-use restrictions to product standards, highway subsidies, and government-managed medicine.
In a freed market left-libertarians expect to see less wage employment and more worker-owned enterprises, co-ops, partnerships, and single proprietorships. The low-cost desktop revolution, Internet, and inexpensive machine tools make this more feasible than ever. There would be no socialization of costs through transportation subsidies to favor nationwide over regional and local commerce. A spirit of independence can be expected to prompt a move toward these alternatives for the simple reason that employment to some extent entails subjecting oneself to someone else’s arbitrary will and the chance of abrupt dismissal. Because of the competition from self-employment, what wage employment remained would most likely take place in less-hierarchical, more-humane firms that, lacking political favors, could not socialize diseconomies of scale as large corporations do today.
Left-libertarians, drawing on the work of New Left historians, also dissent from the conservative and standard libertarian view that the economic regulations of the Progressive Era and New Deal were imposed by social democrats on an unwilling freedom-loving business community. On the contrary, as Gabriel Kolko and others have shown, the corporate elite—the House of Morgan, for example—turned to government intervention when it realized in the waning 19th century that competition was too unruly to guarantee market share.
Thus left-libertarians see post-Civil War America not as a golden era of laissez faire but rather as a largely corrupt business-ruled outgrowth of the war, which featured the usual military contracting and speculation in government-securities. As in all wars, government gained power and well-connected businessmen gained taxpayer-financed fortunes and hence unfair advantage in the allegedly free market of the Gilded Age. “War is the health of the state,” leftist intellectual Randolph Bourne wrote. Civil war too.
These conflicting historical views are well illustrated in the writings of the pro-capitalist novelist Ayn Rand (1905-1982) and Roy A. Childs Jr. (1949-1992), a libertarian writer-editor with definite leftist leanings. In the 1960s Rand wrote an essay with the self-explanatory title “America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business,” which Childs answered with “Big Business and the Rise of American Statism.” “To a large degree it has been and remains big businessmen who are the fountainheads of American statism,” Childs wrote.
One way to view the separation of left-libertarians from other market libertarians is this: the others look at the American economy and see an essentially free market coated with a thin layer of Progressive and New Deal intervention that need only to be scraped away to restore liberty. Left-libertarians see an economy that is corporatist to its core, although with limited competitive free enterprise. The programs constituting the welfare state are regarded as secondary and ameliorative, that is, intended to avert potentially dangerous social discontent by succoring—and controlling—the people harmed by the system.
Left-libertarians clash with regular libertarians most frequently when the latter display what Carson calls “vulgar libertarianism” and what Roderick Long calls “Right-conflationism.” This consists of judging American business in today’s statist environment as though it were taking place in the freed market. Thus while nonleft-libertarians theoretically recognize that big business enjoys monopolistic privileges, they also defend corporations when they come under attack from the left on grounds that if they were not serving consumers, the competitive market would punish them. “Vulgar libertarian apologists for capitalism use the term ‘free market’ in an equivocal sense,” Carson writes, “[T]hey seem to have trouble remembering, from one moment to the next, whether they’re defending actually existing capitalism or free market principles.”
Signs of Right-conflationism can be seen in the common mainstream libertarian defensiveness at leftist criticism of income inequality, America’s corporate structure, high oil prices, or the healthcare system. If there’s no free market, why be defensive? You can usually make a nonleft-libertarian mad by comparing Western Europe favorably with the United States. To this, Carson writes, “[I]f you call yourself a libertarian, don’t try to kid anybody that the American system is less statist than the German one just because more of the welfare queens wear three-piece suits… . [I]f we’re choosing between equal levels of statism, of course I’ll take the one that weighs less heavily on my own neck.”
True to their heritage, left-libertarians champion other historically oppressed groups: the poor, women, people of color, gays, and immigrants, documented or not. Left-libertarians see the poor not as lazy opportunists but rather as victims of the state’s myriad barriers to self-help, mutual aid, and decent education. Left-libertarians of course oppose government oppression of women and minorities, but they wish to combat nonviolent forms of social oppression such as racism and sexism as well. Since these are not carried out by force, the measures used to oppose them also may not entail force or the state. Thus, sex and racial discrimination are to be fought through boycotts, publicity, and demonstrations, not violence or antidiscrimination laws. For left-libertarians, southern lunch-counter racism was better battled through peaceful sit-ins than with legislation in Washington, which merely ratified what direct action had been accomplishing without help from the white elite.
Why do left-libertarians qua libertarians care about nonviolent, nonstate oppression? Because libertarianism is premised on the dignity and self-ownership of the individual, which sexism and racism deny. Thus all forms of collectivist hierarchy undermine the libertarian attitude and hence the prospects for a free society.
In a word, left-libertarians favor equality. Not material equality—that can’t be had without oppression and the stifling of initiative. Not mere equality under the law—for the law might be oppressive. And not just equal freedom—for an equal amount of a little freedom is intolerable. They favor what Roderick Long, drawing on John Locke, calls equality in authority: “Lockean equality involves not merely equality before legislators, judges, and police, but, far more crucially, equality with legislators, judges, and police.”
Finally, like most ordinary libertarians, left-libertarians adamantly oppose war and the American empire. They embrace an essentially economic analysis of imperialism: privileged firms seek access to resources, foreign markets for surplus goods, and ways to impose intellectual-property laws on emerging industrial societies to keep foreign manufacturers from driving down prices through competition. (This is not to say there aren’t additional, political factors behind the drive for empire.)
These days left-libertarians feel vindicated. American foreign policy has embroiled the country in endless overt and covert wars, with their high cost in blood and treasure, in the resource-rich Middle East and Central Asia—with torture, indefinite detention, and surveillance among other assaults on domestic civil liberties thrown in for good measure. Meanwhile, the historical Washington-Wall Street alliance—in which recklessness with other people’s money, fostered by guarantees, bailouts, and Federal Reserve liquidity masquerades as deregulation—has brought yet another financial crisis with its heavy toll for average Americans, additional job insecurity, and magnified Wall Street influence.
Such nefariousness can only hasten the day when people discover the left-libertarian alternative. Is that expectation realistic? Perhaps. Many Americans sense that something is deeply wrong with their country. They feel their lives are controlled by large government and corporate bureaucracies that consume their wealth and treat them like subjects. Yet they have little taste for European-style social democracy, much less full-blown state socialism. Left-libertarianism may be what they’re looking for. As the Mutualist Carson writes, “Because of our fondness for free markets, mutualists sometimes fall afoul of those who have an aesthetic affinity for collectivism, or those for whom ‘petty bourgeois’ is a swear word. But it is our petty bourgeois tendencies that put us in the mainstream of the American populist/radical tradition, and make us relevant to the needs of average working Americans.”
Carson believes ordinary citizens are coming to “distrust the bureaucratic organizations that control their communities and working lives, and want more control over the decisions that affect them. They are open to the possibility of decentralist, bottom-up alternatives to the present system.” Let’s hope he’s right.
Sheldon Richman blogs at Free Association.
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A tired reiteration of Rothbard’s left-right nonsense of the late 60s, which totally failed. Rothbard was down on Tucker for his ignorance of economics.
As far as the anti-white male rhetoric goes, who needs it ? It all amounts to special privileges for everyone but white heterosexual males. The black, women and homosexual movements are statist to the core and all eagerly use the state to forward their objectives. Spare us the agit-prop
“gay” term AND there is no libertarian position on same sex marriage, many like Justin Raimondo oppose it.
Rothbard was no Murray Bookchin and did not oppose hierarchy at all or private discrimination.
One can favor a non-interventionist foreign en toto without endorsing Richman’s package deal. Even Liggio, who joined SDS with that idiot Karl Hess, has repudiated the left-libertarian thesis long ago, as did Rothbard.
Richman writes like Jeff Riggenbach on speed.
There is nothing wrong with the term capitalism.
And the Rothbardians never convincingly rebutted Rand’s criticism of their competing governments theory.
The fact is that we can have more than one enemy and that very much includes the statist Right as well as the mindless
egalitarian, collectivist Left.
By the way, Chomsky is a hardcore Marxist statist cum New Dealer as Bookchin noted in his later years.
Kolko wrote to Reason in 1973 that he would work to destroy
any libertarian society if it arose.
You people have learned nothing in forty years ?
Thanks but no thanks for this unwelcome trip down memory lane a la 1969, a lousy year.
Left libertarianism is an oxymoron.
Yes the Libertarian Left is real, and some of us are here already. Left, right, center, whatever, we’ve got to stick together on the common issues we all agree on, or America is going to sink even further into the mud of empire.
Excellent read. It warms the cockles of my heart to see AmCon namechecking Gabriel Kolko, whose book I force on libertarians of every stripe.
Check out Karl Polanyi, too.
[...] editor Sheldon Richman has published a sympathetic overview of left-libertarianism in The American Conservative. (Yes, a magazine with the word [...]
Hillel Steiner doesn’t “object to individualistic appropriation of unowned natural resources”
First of all, he – like Locke – considers natural resources “owned in common” not “unowned”.
And he also believes Locke’s proviso can only be upheld by requiring an obligation – in exchange for exclusive use – to those wrongfully denied equal access.
So… a left-libertarian is someone who is libertarian ideologically on economics but is more like a Democrat in that he favors some degree of social justice and thus doesn’t want ANY government intervention to help his fellow man?? And a whole bunch of other theoretical anti-government nonsense like “mutualism.”
So, what the hell does that make ME?? I’m libertarian and anti-government intervention on most social issues where no legit human is being harmed, and everything is consensual. I’m fairly left-of-center on economics and more of a libertarian on foreign policy. Am I a liberaltarian?? I thought a left-libertarian was simply someone who’s liberal on economic issues and libertarian on social and foreign policy, not this added Kevin Carson-style BS mumbo-jumbo theoretical crap that is about as likely to be reality as Lincoln rising from the grave.
I don’t have time for bullcrap insane theories the likes of which people like Rothbard and the rest of the Austrian school or Kevin Carson push. I want EMPIRICALLY-SOUND economics! No one pays attention to libertarianism because it’s TOO THEORETICAL! You have very little proof that your utopia has ANY basis in reality or would work to any large degree. You write these stupid “logical” and ideological books about “how it might work”, but you’ve got no evidence or can point to a single functioning libertarian society, esp. in 2011.
Look, government is here whether we like it or not. Even the Founding Fathers admitted that government is a necessary evil. Just deal with it and quit fighting it. And stop with this nonsensical “anti-hierarchy” childish BS. Seriously? HIERARCHY IS NATURAL! That’s how human and animal civilizations have always operated. You can’t get rid of hierarchy. Why try? It’s dazzlingly absurd.
Libertarians and anarchists, esp. the right-leaning ones, are a bunch of children. They have such simplistic 1800s-style thinking.
Murray Rothbard was an IDIOT, not an economist. Real economists know economics, esp. by doing their own empirical studies and original research to prove or disprove certain theories. Show me a SINGLE empirical study that Rothbard did!
Aha! You can’t, because he was a f*cking moron who did nothing but write absurd books from the perspective of some ridiculous yet-to-be-proven school of economics that lost favor with REAL economists at least 5 or 6 decades ago. Henry Hazlitt published a book about economics that was “groundbreaking”, except for the fact that the book probably has hardly ANY reference to real facts and data, something which real economists must use to prove or disprove their boldest claims.
Let’s not forget that Hazlitt WASN’T EVEN AN ECONOMIST! He was a journalist by trade who somehow one day just stumbled upon Austrian econ and thought, “You know what? I should write a book about this!”
Austrian economics disputes the relevance of actual statistical analysis that helps real economists prove their theories. It spits in the face of economists everywhere who KNOW what works and what doesn’t through tireless research. They basically say, “Economics can only be measured by observation, not scientifically, because you can’t observe deep scientific patterns among humans.” BULL-CRAP. Of course you can!
One commenter above me says that certain movements, such as the gay rights one, are “statist to the core.” Right… Be that as it may, these movements actually GOT THINGS DONE OFR THEIR PEOPLE. What the hell have left-libertarians gotten accomplished by totally shunning the use of ANY state power or electoral politics?? You can’t get that freaking far by just saying, “We’re going to get our rights and ends achieved by everything BUT the state.” Eventually you’re going to face roadblocks, especially those set up by the government.
Who CARES if they were “statist” anyhow? Is getting your rights back from a tyrannical government “statist”? I’m pretty sure that’s INDIVIDUALIST. What is the gay rights movement supposed to do, just wait for all Americans to accept them, let them marry, privatize marriage, and all corporations just voluntarily give them domestic partner benefits? come on, dude… Get real. Get your head in the freedom game.
We don’t have time for petty squabbles about whether or not someone “used the power of the state” to achieve pro-freedom ends. IT DOESN’T MATTER! Freedom and liberty are freedom and liberty any way you slice it.
Anti-statists focus too much on the symbolism of a particular movement or action, rather than the actual goals or achievements. I don’t CARE if it’s “statist” or not or if some douchebag decades into the future will think so.
Hitler got a great deal done for his Aryan people, Brandon. What a pile of anti-intellectual nonsense you spout. Do you even know the meaning of philosophy ? Or a consistent political ideology ?
Economics is an area that Rothbard and the Austrians are totally right in.
There is nothing ‘pro-freedom” about a state that tells people whom they may sell to, rent to, employ or associate with.
The kind of group freedom you advocate is the freedom to enslave others. Any goal that violates individual rights via the use of force should NEVER be achieved.
“Gays” and blacks are not getting their rights back from the government, they are using the government to violate others’ rights.
All any theory does is make sense of and organize all the many disparate empirical facts.
It’s appalling that some savage like you rants on this site.
Read Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.
Mickey, Karl Polyani was a hardcore leftist anti-libertarian just like Gabriel Kolko. Readers should ignore your suggestions.
May I join the conversation between the non-interventionist leftist and the (I assume) Randist? I don’t seem to fit into any of the proffered categories, and I was curious about what I might be.
I am opposed to the state in principle, pro-free market and anti-war, but I also recognize that most of the string pulling is carried out by fabulously wealthy interests, particularly in banking but also other industries like agribusiness, pharmaceuticals, and so on. I am also a localist and advocate decentralization of political power, believe in strong, traditional extended families, and am anti-abortion. I also acknowledge that sex and race differences are real, and prefer, other things being equal, the company of others of my race, culture, religion, and values. Despite being culturally conservative, I am against legislated moralizing and vicitmless crimes.
So, what does that make me?
Who cares? Listen, I don’t really understand the need for all this categorization. I think it would be wonderful if everyone agreed with me in all particulars, but that’s not going to happen and I’m OK with that, as long as others are willing to let me live my life without being intimidated, robbed, and generally bossed. I am OK allying with left-libertarians, paleolibertarians, paleoconservaties, Tea Partiers, anti-war liberals, social democrats, anarcho-syndicalists and anyone else in order to advance the points of our agreement. If I thought it were possible to agree with them on anything, I’d even include neoconservatives into that mix. Where they differ with me, and want to intrude on human liberty and decency, then we must part company, but until time, I’m willing to call a ceasefire. It would be foolish not to.
Kolko’s Triumph of Conservatism has value to libertarians precisely because of the fact that it is a non-libertarian exposing the lie that is the regulatory state. If libertarians wish to pretend that they can tear down the State by themselves they are free to do so. Personally I would prefer to have as many allies as possible.
I am not a libertarian in large part because there is no serious libertarian critique of the marketing industry, and modern libertarianism seems to have disavowed many of the ideas advocated by early American individualist anarchists like Josiah Warren and to a lesser degree Lysander Spooner. The left-libertarians ALMOST make me feel comfortable enough to reconsider.
Rant much, Brandon? I don’t care if you prefer the devil you know over the devil you don’t, but to claim that there is some sort of empirical foundation for mainstream economic theories is hilarious, and to assert by implication that what you have is a “functioning society” is pure insanity. I’m happy to sit back and watch yet another empire (and hopefully several) burn in our lifetimes while your kind rant and rave about how statelessness could never work. I have all of human history to point to whenever you ask for proof of failure of statist society, so that sits well with me.
Mike, if you believe in criminalizing abortion then those of us who do agree with you on many of your other points will have to be in opposition. There wasn’t any alliance during the Vietnam with those opposed to the intervention with those
who advocated a Communist victory. All of the groups you list do advocate statism to one degree or another, so what’s the purpose of any alliance except to spread confusion ?
There’s no ceasefire with statist-collectivists and why would you want one ?
All categorization does is to correctly label ideologies for what they are. Truth in advertising.
Dylan, Kolko is NOT an ally, he’s an oldtime Marxist. He
specifically repudiates the libertarian interpretation of the
one work of his you cite. So one can only recommend the work with appropriate reservations if you claim to be an individualist.
Warren and Spooner knew nothing of economics as Rothbard was the first to point out.
What is your problem with marketing per se ? We all do it when we apply for jobs, etc.
[...] Sheldon Richman has written a great essay on left-libertarianism, the political philosophy with which I have come to associate myself most closely. Interestingly, it has been published by a self-described “conservative” magazine. [...]
So, the difference between Voluntaryism and Mutualism….? Agorism?
As a Voluntaryist, I will defend the right of corporations to exist. A corporation is a group of individuals bound by private contract to pursue common interests. It is merely a business model. One of many. All corporations today evolve from some type of entrepreneurship. In mercantile Europe, from the 16th to 19th centuries, corporations were formed only by special charter from government. It is important to distinguish between the difference. I agree with Joseph Schumpeter that eventually, corporations formed in the “free market” will eventually become inefficient, over-bloated bureaucracies that can only continue to exist with help from the government. So, in a free market economy, the corporate business model would be flawed, and “creative destruction” would prevent any corporation from becoming a monopolistic giant. In my world, the entrepreneur is “king”. Does that make me a “vulgar libertarian” or an “apologist”? I believe it makes me an “individualist anarchist”.
The difference, I see, between Voluntaryists and Mutualists, is Voluntaryism is based on entrepreneurship, and Mutualism is based on organized labor where the workers own the means of production. Then there’s the issue of “participatory economics” and “participatory democracy”. You may say Mutualists differ form Chomsky and the anarco-syndicalists, but I don’t see it. Perhaps I need to read more of Carson’s work.
IMHO, the very term, “Mutualism” implies Collectivism. That somehow, the society mutually benefits, as opposed to two individuals (or groups of individuals) who mutually benefit from entering into a voluntary, private contract.
Steve, I wish to criminalize abortion in the same way I would want any other form of murder criminalized. Like more conventional murders (or drug use), I also have no illusions about it some laws magically making the problem go away, either. Since I oppose the state, and think it is about as effectual as it is moral, I do not put much stake in criminalizing it in the way you probably envision.
Be that as it may, why should that make a difference in your decision to pool your efforts with me in order to, say, abolish the TSA or the IRS, bring an end to the War on Drugs, or rendition and torture, or oppose socialized medicine or gun control? There is no good reason, unless you like being continually outmaneuvered by your opponents. If a Stalinist wanted to end ethanol subsidies, I’d work with him up to the point he started to demand the collectivization of farms. The idea that we should agree with everyone else on absolutely everything before we recognize that we have ANY common interests that could be served by temporary and principled cooperation is insane. That is an important reason that the supporters of the managerial, therapeutic state, who are probably not of one mind much more than we are, are constantly winning an we are constantly losing. I’m not just talking about in terms of voting and legislation, either.
This categorizing is useful only when you remember that they’re painting a picture in broad strokes. They are necessarily generalities, which are important for quick assessments and rules of thumb, but cannot and should not replace our individual assessments. There was a never a time where people’s beliefs on such a wide and complex range of topics could reliably be broken down into so narrow a range of categories as are generally accepted today.
Mr Whipple, on February 3rd, 2011 at 10:25 pm Said:
IMHO, the very term, “Mutualism” implies Collectivism.//
Well, you certainly have a right to your opinion, but you might consider reading up more on it before deciding what it implies. Check out the wikipedia entry on mutualism & pay special attention to the criticism section where collectivists kropotkin & bakunin are quoted.
“Show me a SINGLE empirical study that Rothbard did!”
The Panic of 1819
America’s Great Depression.
Brandon….you are a most confused individual. It is “modern” economics that seeks to force theoretic models on reality, hence the continued false signals, misallocation of resources, credit induced boom/bust cycles, etc.
“…the relevance of actual statistical analysis that helps real economists…’ Do you actually believe highly selective “statistics” can give an honest conclusion? Such as CPI #s that EXCLUDE food and fuel giving an accurate inflation rate? Or BLS data that excludes long term unemployed giving accurate rates of unemployment? And what are you calling “real” economists? Examples please(Krugman maybe?).
All you have done, besides showing how confused you are, is engage in personal attacks without presenting any evidence to back up your name calling. You don’t seem to understand that economics will never be the “science” of simple mathematics because it is ultimately human action and different humans will react differently to incentives.
As to Hazlett…Napoleon wasn’t a lawyer but his rewriting of the legal code in France was good enough to stand the test of time and is still with us after 200 years. Archimedes wasn’t an engineer but many of his inventions make modern engineering what it is today. Have you even read any of what Hazlett wrote? Obviously not or you would have at least a rudimentary understanding of what economics is. “Credentials” are often more a sign of the ability to play an insider game than intellectual capacity.
Also your acceptance of the State has the mark of a good little conformist thinking exactly what you are supposed to. Its like saying corruption is a given so learn to work with it to your advantage. This is the very best way to explain why you get more and more corruption.
I also disagree with Sheldon’s assessment of Bastiat as “leftist”. How this conclusion could be reached after reading “The Law” escapes me. It is one of the earliest attacks against socialism written. And how can Rothbard be “left”libertarian? The State is the invention and the tool of the left. Nothing the left wants is achievable without the State, yet Rothbard was supremely anti-State. While Rothbard looked closely into the “new” left, as he did with conservatism, and almost every other political ideology, he rejected it as anti-liberty. However, I follow Sheldon’s writing much at the Freeman and quite admire his points, so would not dismiss his conclusions lightly.
Steve: Yes, you’re correct that Kolko and Polanyi were leftists. I wasn’t aware that we were restricting our reading here to those thinkers who reinforce our prejudices. I read Hayek and Burke, Rothbard and Friedman, Polanyi and Kolko. I seek to understand the nature of man and political economy.
Dylan said:
“….Kolko’s Triumph of Conservatism has value to libertarians precisely because of the fact that it is a non-libertarian exposing the lie that is the regulatory state. If libertarians wish to pretend that they can tear down the State by themselves they are free to do so. Personally I would prefer to have as many allies as possible. …”
Exactly. I try to get people to read this book because it creates a potential meeting ground for agreement between leftists like myself and the “tea party” types.
Mike, abortion has never been legally regarded as murder, which is why there were separate abortion laws. If abortion was murder then it would be justifiable homicide. To compare a one inch fetus with a fully grown human is absurd, you can’t compare with a baby outside the womb, which is incomparably more developed. The least arbitrary form of recognition is birth, the separation from the woman and living outside the womb. All people celebrate their birthdays, not their day of conception even though that would be possible to figure out or closely guess. The beauty of Rothbard’s argument is that it cuts through all the trimester nonsense
and states why no one has a right to be born. That choice is exclusively the woman’s, who alone carries the zygote, embroyo, fetus. Roe v. Wade and even Ayn Rand were too hung up on the first trimester where 90% of abortions take place. The great news now is the great majority of abortions
are now being done by other than middle class white women.
As a result the live being saved may be your own.
I wouldn’t work with an avowed collectivist on anything.
I wouldn’t give him the moral sanction of pretending that he’s a proper human being. He’s not. Anymore than I worked with avowed Communists to end the Vietnam war. I will work with
decent people or apolitical people or people with some mixed premises, not with avowedly evil people.
I don’t understand your last sentence at all.
Richard, thanks. Aware, double thanks.
Mr. Whipple,
“A corporation is a group of individuals bound by private contract to pursue common interests.”
FALSE. That would be called a “partnership,” which is a truly free market entity where all actors are fully liable for their individual actions – unlike a corporation, a legal status with the government that protects the liability of individuals who act in the name of the entity. This causes a moral hazard where actors make decisions to violate the right of others for profit at little personal risk and stockholders/owners are only liable as much as they have invested. The risk is socialized and growth becomes disconnected from caution. Only the most obvious and destructive corporate criminals are brought to justice, when the government “pierces the corporate veil.”
In a laissez faire free market, individuals would be fully liable for the violation of the rights of others and could not hide behind organizational conformity. Partnerships and proprietorships assume full liability and purchase insurance to protect their assets. If a market were truly free (thus implicitly not having artificial corporate legal protections) private insurance companies and cooperatives would replace the regulatory state and would set liability insurance rates based upon business practices, risk, size and past performance. Thus there would be few oligarchical/monopolistic markets and more competition.
Hobo, your wrong. A corporation does not have to have special privileges from the state nor be created by the state’s permission. All they have to do is state that they are not personally liable for debts and that you do business with them at your own risk. Without corporations we would be living in the dark ages. They are absolutely necessary to raise the funds to create and sustain an industrial civilization. That is why there are corporations. Small is not necessarily beautiful. The partnership model does not work on a large scale. We should live in poverty because a few leftist nuts are hung up on a false Naderite collectivist misconception of corporations ? Get a real life !
[...] overview of the libertarian left (strangely enough, titled Libertarian Left) appears in The American Conservative, and is already attracting notice at Reason and [...]
Thanks for publishing this at The American Conservative. The desire for peace, freedom of exchange, and civil liberty transcends labels like liberal or conservative, left or right.
Those of you with an academic library at your doorstep might seek out the essay from April 5, 1991 by Richard Cornuelle, published in The Times Literary Supplement and entitled “New Work For Invisible Hands”. It is probably the most potent prefiguring of the present discussion published in the last twenty years:
“Libertarian thought is wonderfully sound as far as it goes, but there are two gaping holes in it that now gravely threaten its relevance. For one thing, there is no very distinct libertarian vision of community — of social as opposed to economic process — outside the state: The alluring libertarian contention that society would probably work better if the state could somehow be limited to keeping the peace and enforcing contracts has to be taken largely on faith. Nor have libertarians confronted the disabling hypocrisy of the capitalist rationale which insists that while the capitalists themselves must have extensive freedom of action, their employees may have much less. Their explanation of how an invisible hand arranges economic resources rationally without authoritarian direction stops short at the factory gate. Inside factories and offices, the heavy, visible hand of management continues to rule with only token opposition.”
“When freemen went to work in factories, their status was not unlike that of the iron-collared serfs who had preceded them. Their employment was a kind of voluntary indenture, tacitly renewed each day, in which the worker agreed to submit to supervision for a certain number of hours for an agreed-to amount of pay. Workers were free in one sense, but painfully unfree in another. Feudalism had only moved indoors. The movement to civilize this relationship has been more or less continuous. Workplaces have been made safer, lighter, warmer and more agreeable. Wages are higher, hours shorter, and an accumulation of law and custom has elaborated the rights of employees and put limits on the prerogatives of employers. But the system has yet to be altered elementally. Working people are far, far freer than slaves or indentured servants, but they are not as free as their bosses and not nearly as free as they might be.”
“Employed people can scarcely be expected to revere qualities they have been carefully instructed to repress. Instead, they tend to become what the way they work requires: politicized, unimaginative, unenterprising, petty, security-obsessed, and passive.”
“Now there is a movement toward more elemental reform which would de-politicize workplaces entirely, make each worker self-supervising, and base compensation on some credible estimate of the value each person adds to whatever product or service the firm produces, in effect bringing the principle of the free market into the plant. But without a legitimatizing rationale, something the libertarians are best equipped to provide, this is bound to be a confused and halting process.”
http://biglizards.net/blog/archives/2009/04/on_feudalism_ca.html
What is the intellectual crap? Some pile from the post-paleo site: Alternative Right?
Stay paleoconservative or don’t stay at all.
Game, set, match: Hans Hermann-Hoppe.
Cornuelle inherited his wealth and is another foundation flunky who never spent a day in a real business.
Murray Rothbard exposed him almost half a century ago, Cornuelle never understood Von Mises and Austrian Economics or Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism.
Cornuelle simply reiterates the tired old leftist worker as slave garbage.
Most people do not want to be entrepreneurs and most people could not make it as capitalists. They prefer to rent their labor, get paid now and let the risk-takers put out the capital. Of course the worker is not going to have the same amount of frredom that goes with lots of money as the capitalist does but then the worker is not going to be bankrupted in his business investment, if his employer goes under, he goes elsewhere.
Either the government regulates all business property or the entrepreneur does. Capitalism is totally self-regulating if it is let free. If an employer is too restrictive in a free market a worker can always go elsewhere and if too many workers go elsewhere the employer goes out of business and becomes a worker himself. Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in third generations was a well known saying at the end of the 19th century when there was a much freer market and business was not shielded from possible competition by government taxes and regulations that struggling businesses could not afford.
I’m sick of all these anti-capitalist screeds from David Korten to Richard Cornuelle, the ideal system has already been discovered, laissez-faire capitalism, a total separation of state and economics.
Read Man, Economy and State by Murray Rothbard, Human
Action by Ludwig Von Mises, Capitalism by George Reisman
and Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.
Left-libertarians seem to me to be against the glib individualism of mainstream libertarianism (Ron Paul newsletter fiasco reaction: “Libertarians can’t be racist, they only see individuals,” to paraphrase). By emphasizing the disenfranchisement of groups – race and gender – they too are involved in collectivist thinking. But if they can engage in collectivist thinking to combat even worse forms of collectivism (“negative racism,” say, vs. their “positive racism”), then so too can less strongly anti-state libertarians utilize the state to combat even worse forms of statism.
Left-libertarians believe private discrimination to be a form of coercion too (because it has real, liberty inhibiting results). So if the cat’s out of the bag on the question of coercion – it is omnipresent – why the absolute prohibition on statism in all its forms?
If Left-libertarians believe private racism or private anything, except real actual crime, is a form of coercion, then they are not libertarians at all but simply leftists.
If you even have to ask why statism in all its forms should be prohibited then you don’t understand the first thing about libertarianism.
If someone doesn’t want to associate with you FOR ANY REASON you have to respect that and leave them alone.
Otherwise you are a criminal who’s initiating force.
DM, just read the books I recommended above and educate yourself.
Don’t waste our time with your collectivist-statist nonsense.
@Steve,
Could you please quote a left-libertarian that racism is a form of coercion?
If it comes to the State, left libertarians will be the first who oppose this immoral machine. So where did you get the idea that left-libertarian don’t reject statism in all its forms?
Most right-wing libertarian statements (or so called “just” libertarian) against left-libertarians are straw man attacks.
LMND, take a close look at Dain’s comments to which I responded, HE IS RATHER SPECIFIC THAT PRIVATE DISCRIMINATION IS COERCION.
Can’t you read ? Nothing “strawman” about it.
My opinion of so-called “left libertarians” gets lower with each response from them.
This essay is very well done.
I find that the people who rant on and on about a “libertarian utopia” often have a large part of their income come from the state, either from the military, Social Security, or somewhere else.
As the state continues to implode, many of the arguments against left-libertarianism (or whatever one wants to call it) will fall away. As the Fed continues to destroy the dollar and extending our military to all corners of the earth becomes prohibitively expensive, these arguments will make more sense to people currently so dismissive.
The future lay in freed markets. The Net is moving this along quickly. The state will seek (and has sought) to put up barriers against the onslaught of the market, but in the end it will fail. The more the state fights the worse it will be for the public at large.
I’m a subscriber of AmConMag and a longtime left libertarian. While I know other subscribers will find something in the left libertarian milieu of which to disapprove, it warms my heart to see such a dead-on accurate and passionate exposition on this movement. Sheldon Richman, what a magnificent article! This just reaffirms my long held belief that this magazine, whether or not I agree with any given article, exemplifies the highest quality of scholarship and writing available today. I echo Mike’s sentiments:
“I am OK allying with left-libertarians, paleolibertarians, paleoconservaties, Tea Partiers, anti-war liberals, social democrats, anarcho-syndicalists and anyone else in order to advance the points of our agreement.”
Amen, brother.
The left-”libertarians” seem to me to be distorting the ideas of Rothbard. If they would read Rothbard’s book on Egalitarianism (which was originally published in 1974, during a period when left-”libertarians” claim Rothbard was still one of them), they would know that he refuted all of this New Left PC nonsense. I have found the chapter from that book on “Women’s Liberation” to be especially valuable in helping me (a young libertarian in my early 20s brought into the movement by Ron Paul) see through the PC myth that women were oppressed until 40 years ago. Rothbard was NOT a left-”libertarian,” regardless of what those within that movement may claim.
Thanks for a very stimulating article, Sheldon. I have long felt that Americans are enslaved as much by big corporations as by the federal government (and it is often hard to distinguish the two slave-drivers in our corporatist economy).
Why is Ralph Nader seemingly the only person to recognize that free trade does not consist of agreements with thousands of pages of regulations that only corporate and government lawyers will read or can understand?
Yes, hundreds of millions (mostly in China) have escaped total poverty in recent decades. But that is not so much a result of “the triumph of free markets” as the abject failure of communism. The new order in the world is fascism (corporatism). Communism is totally unworkable; fascism allows for some economic advancement because of the business half of the arrangement, but it still results in exploitation, military-industrial empire, and war, none of which are friends of the non-politically-connected individual.
I repeat what i said above. After reading Dain (Mupetblast)’s comment: I wanted to state that what the libertarian socialists are–is a fictitious dichotomy. Do not waste your time with this foreign subterfuge.
Wesley, you are right. It is wrong to keep trying to reason with these folks. Now they quote Communist-Socialist Ralph Nader in acceptance of his bogus premise that only government can create corporations.
Further comment is superfluous.
I want to clarify that I myself am not a left-libertarian on social issues (though the argument that what is often called “capitalism” is really interventionism, etc. I’m in agreement with left-libs). In my previous comment I was trying to elucidate their position, and why it’s in tension with so much of the rest of libertarianism, i.e the kind that focuses on the state to the exclusion of anything else arguably shitty about the world.
I prefer to keep libertarianism “thin,” not “thick” as some have marked the distinction between left-libs and the rest. When you concede that racism, sexism et al. is to be fought, you’ve given ground to the left, that rightly wonders why the hell you bar state action given the admitted coercion of a panoply of ills that exist in the world. I too admit coercion exists apart from the state, but my primary interest is in political philosophy, in which the state is bar none the biggest transgressor and its actions obvious (other forms of coercion are subtle and in dispute, an important reason why I put less weight on them). There’s a place for combating coercions in all their forms, but that would be less the place for political philosophy and more, say, therapy or something.
I know I’m stretching the use of the word “coercion” for many libertarians, but at least you know now how I’m using it (which btw is the typical usage, different from that minority called libertarians who wed their views of the social world to Lockean notions of property).
I support generally “left-libertarian” policy, (except for the abolition of corporate personhood; I studied Company Law at University, and many critics of CP just seem to be ignorant about what it entails and base their opposition on their ignorance). However, I don’t really support the label of left-libertarianism generally. I think people who identify as L-Ls spend too much time explaining what they want to see in a voluntary society (rather than admitting ignorance, which is all any of us can really do), and that their beliefs in this regard owe too much to a desire to be “politically correct” in supporting an emotionally fulfilling worldview, rather than entertaining the possibility that voluntary interaction might produce a society that none of us could forsee, or would even support if we could. Unfortunately I have to believe that someone who spends so much time explaining the kind of society he wants to live in cares more about the result than the process of freedom, so I can’t trust L-Ls not to “go over to the other side” in an attempt to assuage their consciences.
I see the amount of time L-Ls spend attacking and insulting so-called “vulgar libertarians” to be indicative of this problem. Why would you belittle and repudiate someone who advocates exactly the same policies as yourself (yes, really), but simply has a different opinion of the way things will turn out, unless it really was the outcome than the process that mattered? Moreover, I think often these kind of attacks are directed at nothing more than straw-men, all boiling down to “They say they’re against coercion but they’re not really.” It’s a general slander that cannot be defended against because it attacks no-one directly, just a mythical group of people who supposedly defend the status quo while advocating radical restructuring of society (go figure).
I quote Max Stirner so often it’s creepy, and today is no exception [with possible modernising edits]:
“The web of the hypocrisy of today hangs on the frontiers of two domains, between which our time swings back and forth, attaching its fine threads of deception and self-deception. No longer vigorous enough to serve morality [social justice?] without doubt or weakening, not yet reckless enough to live wholly to egoism, it trembles now toward the one and now toward the other in the spider-web of hypocrisy, and, crippled by the curse of halfness, catches only miserable, stupid flies. If one has once dared to make a “free” motion, immediately one waters it again with assurances of love, and – shams resignation; if, on the other side, they have had the face to reject the free motion with moral appeals to confidence, immediately the moral courage also sinks,and they assure one how they hear the free words with special pleasure; they – sham approval. In short, people would like to have the one, but not go without the other; they would like to have a free will, but not for their lives lack the moral will. Just come in contact with a servile loyalist [leftist?] , you Liberals [Rightists?]. You will sweeten every word of freedom with a look of the most loyal confidence [compassion?], and he will clothe his servilism [socialism?] in the most flattering phrases of freedom. Then you go apart, and he, like you, thinks “I know you, fox!” He scents the devil [exploitation] in you as much as you do the dark old Lord God [State, usurpation of property] in him.”
David is exactly right. True libertarians don’t want ANYONE or any group of people to have power immense enough to de facto enslave individuals. I see not a dime’s worth of difference between USG and Walmart. That’s MY libertarianism and historically that was MOST people’s libertariansim. The new American anarcho-capitalist capture of the term is a travesty.
[...] on anarchism have been quietly blundering on. Of particular interest is Sheldon Richman’s article on left-libertarianism in The American Conservative. (Boy, left-libertarianism – [...]
Richard, you say:
“I see the amount of time L-Ls spend attacking and insulting so-called “vulgar libertarians” to be indicative of this problem. Why would you belittle and repudiate someone who advocates exactly the same policies as yourself (yes, really), but simply has a different opinion of the way things will turn out, unless it really was the outcome than the process that mattered.”
The problem is that left libertarians do not repudiate “vulgar libertarians” for “advocating the same policies that they do. They repudiate “vulgar libertarians” cause they describe many social and economical aspects of society as they actually work as a result of free markets, when in fact is not the case. So when “vulgar libertarians” say that monopolies in the hands of a few corporations are product of “free markets” when those coorporations recieve goverment favor, they are lying. It may be the case that in a trully free market enviroment those aspects will develop equally as they exist today (yet left libertarians have offered very good arguments showing that it will not be the case), but that is another story and it has yet to be seen.
Hi Sergio, thanks for your response. I don’t think that any libertarians really defend the status quo as such in the way that I think you’re implying. Certainly people might believe that a free market is closer to what we have now than it really is, and so they’re really advocating more drastic changes to the status quo than they think. But if you asked all libertarians of any persuasion “Do big companies get aid and comfort from the State?” 95% would say yes. So why do I hear all these complaints about the tiny minority who may believe otherwise? Firstly it seems like a waste of time, just to allow L-Ls to feel holier-than-thou for a while. Secondly it creates divisions in a movement where none need to exist as long as there is agreement on policy. People should be called out if they advocate non-libertarian policy, not if they have a different opinion about an unknowable future. For my part I think the L-Ls are being naive.
Unfortunately the debate is destined to be fruitless because we’re making generalisations about the opinions of large, amorphous groups of people, which is an extraordinarily difficult undertaking at the best of times.
The only legal enslavement is by government, if private people tried it it would be a crime. Left libertarians are an oxymoron and nonthinkers to the core. They fallaciously equate economic power that is produced with political power that is stolen. Laissez-faire is a complete separation of state and economics, it has nothing to do with the corporate state of today.
Steve Hansen, on February 4th, 2011 at 12:49 pm Said:
Hobo, your wrong. A corporation does not have to have special privileges from the state nor be created by the state’s permission. All they have to do is state that they are not personally liable for debts and that you do business with them at your own risk.
This is flat out ignorant and probably disingenuous on your part.
No one can opt out of liability by merely stating that they are doing so.
I’d like to see you try that argument in a court of law someday.
Steve Hansen, on February 4th, 2011 at 12:49 pm Said:
Without corporations we would be living in the dark ages. They are absolutely necessary to raise the funds to create and sustain an industrial civilization.
Of course you have no evidence to back up this assertion.
What is the maximum size entity that could exist as a partnership?
Did the “dark ages” extend into the 1990s before GS incorporated?
You’ve inspired me to blog about liberaltarians in my own blog, http://ecocuriosity.blogspot.com/2011/02/liberaltarian-not-oxymoron.html, where you’ve been quoted, linked, etc. Thanks for a great historical piece.
Richard, you say:
“I don’t think that any libertarians really defend the status quo as such in the way that I think you’re implying. ”
But the problem is that they do, and people like Kevin Carson has reunited a large number of examples proving it. Go to his blog and see it by yourself:
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2006/09/vulgar-libertarianism-neoliberalism.html
Hansen.
Roderick Long is an Austrian and Carson is virtually an Austrian as well. They both use Austrian economics and Rothbard’s Man Economy and State to argue for their ideas.
They do not disagree with the idea that the state is the source of ultimate political power, as far as I can tell. They are in favour of laissez faire.
What they are trying to dissuade libertarians and conservatives from thinking is that the present economic system is one in which individuals have legal equality (they do NOT favour material or economic equality). They oppose the privileges that corporations receive from the state and seek to point out the privileges that big business has received from the state in the past.
In “Human Action,” von Mises makes the point that what he calls the “unhampered” market will result in the optimal allocation of productive resources. Yet it happens, time and again, that individuals across the socioeconomic divide oppose the workings of the unhampered market in favor of government intervention. In doing so, those who favor intervention are behaving like entrepreneurs: how can I/we maximize my/our profits? If I can join with others who share my values or my class affiliation or race or gender identity or some similar characteristic, and if we can exert sufficient power to manipulate the rules under which we and others are compelled to live so that there’s more for me than would have been the case if my/our intervention were to have proven unsuccessful, what care I/we whether the gross output of goods and services is x – y, x being the volume of goods and services that would have been the output had the market been unhampered, y being the diminution in that output so long as my/our share of the output would be a + b, a being what my/our share would have been as allocated by the unhampered market and b being the result (the premium) of my/our successful intervention? In other words, if self-interested intervention in the market seems to offer me/us greater benefit, at the margin, than the workings of the unhampered market would, why shouldn’t I/we attempt to intervene in the market, I/we being no less “selfish,” i.e. entrepreneurial than the so-called entrepreneurs? Thus we consume our capital and the capital of those who’ve gone before. Apres nous, le deluge perhaps, but that’s the unintended consequence of profit maximization, is it not?
There is a much larger potential movement of the Upper Left than fringe groups such as C4SS. One can love liberty and consider the current level of inequality to be unacceptable without being an anarchist.
Capitalism may well suffer from some unfortunate feedback loops which make need to be actively kept in check. To what degree would we have near monopolies and massive trusts with a true free market? The question is open, even if the answer proves inconvenient.
Moreover, land ownership does have positive feedback effects, effects which have ossified many civilizations. If you have extra land, you can rent the surplus and use the rent to buy more. Freedom gives way to oligarchy. Oligarchy gives way to dictatorship should the people respond. The pattern runs from Julius Caesar to Hugo Chavez. (The ancient Israelites had the Jubilee laws to foil this feedback loop.)
A more moderate libertarian left (as represented by my site) would tax rent-seeking activities and take other measures to spread out land and capital while at the same time downsizing the bureaucracy and scrapping thousands of nitpicking regulations.
Sergio, thanks for the link.
Obviously I can’t read the whole thing, but grabbing a few examples a see a pattern of the same disingenuous arguments coming forth. I think the crux of it is that you get this situation:
1) Someone starts a libertarian blog advocating a total free market or very close to one.
2) He makes a post defending people’s right to engage in voluntary transactions in the now.
3) KC jumps down his throat saying, in effect ‘Well if you really believed in the policies you claim to, this situation wouldn’t happen (according to my baseless assertions concerning the effects of land enclosures), so by defending people’s right to engage in this transaction, you must be defending the terms of the transaction as just, therefore you must be defending the negation of the policies you were previously defending in order to lead to the current situation.’
Even though, if you transported the “vulgar libertarian” in question back to the mythical time before these injustices took place, it would almost certainly be the case that he would advocate the same policies he does now. The concept of “vulgar libertarianism” in itself seems to be an attempt to shame people into supporting Carson’s agenda by laying at their feet responsibility for acts they would not have advocated or permitted if given the chance.
People can’t go back in time and change history so that there was always a free market. The best we can do is get a free market now. To expect anything otherwise is to hold a laughably unrealistic standard, and to add onto that an attempt to shame people into feeling guilt for actions they would oppose is itself shameful, petty, disingenuous and slanderous behaviour. It makes just as little sense as my saying ‘KC advocates collectivisation of State-owned resources, but the State only got them by committing mass murder against dissidents, therefore KC supports mass murder’. In fact I think my argument is a little better than KC’s! Arguably the (relative, not absolute) beneficiaries of State power aren’t responsible for the State’s actions merely because they asked for them. A man should take responsibility for his own actions.
Any transgression against morality should be corrected by an open court, but only if the transgressors and victims can be readily identified, and the victims made whole by the payment of reasonable damages. For the transgressions KC is talking about, none of these is possible, so we have no choice but to accept the situation as we face it now and abolish all restraints on the free market that we can as soon as possible. If you demand otherwise you’re living in a dreamworld.
sheldon, you make a mistake when you call someone a “left”, or a “right” libertarian. they are not “libertarians”; they are simply people with strong libertarian leanings in certain areas but who hold that it is ok to use force in other areas.
Richard:
First Kevin is not saying “Well if you really believed in the policies you claim to, this situation wouldn’t happen…”. What he is saying is that “You cannot say this situation is a product of a free market, BECAUSE THERE WAS NO FREE MARKET”. That is very different.
Second, the point Kevin is trying to make has nothing to do about correcting past injustices, traveling to a ” mythical time before these injustices took place” as you claim. What he is trying to say (when he uses examples of the past) is that historiography many libertarians use to prove the “virtues” of what is supposedly the “free market” (yeah, like the industrial revolution and the “baseless claims” about enclousures – that aren´t so baseless after all, since Kevin uses historical evidence to back them uo) is deeply flawed. Thus the appelative of “vulgar libertarians”.
If a Libertarian business model…a practice of capitalism engaged in by partnerships competing against corporations within the same market space, for example…would be a game-changer, a better, faster and cheaper method to create wealth then it should be deployed in order to prove concept. If there really is such an oppportunity to evolve the US economy, our society and human civilization toward a measurably superior paradigm then we need not wait for the government to fundamentally shift…if it is compelling then we should be able to do it right now. Talk is cheap and no one really cares very much about your philosophy in the absence of action. Show them such an example, show them that it is sustainable and competitive…and they will believe. If you can’t do that then you are only speaking the same pretty words all these characters have been saying since before the Industrial Revolution. We’re living in the Post Industrial Society, our mature economies are profoundly post-Keynsian and our practice of capitalism is post-sovereign. So let’s evolve this business already…we’re ready.
Left Libertarians hoping to woo the main of the left to their side by campaigning against capitalism but for free markets will be sorely disappointed, generally speaking. Progressives already think we have a free market, and that the tendency of a free market is toward monopoly (see The New Monopoly Capitalism for a recent take). To the extent you convince them that a free market is not what we have now, they would probably be of the mind that a truly free market would be immensely worse than the status quo.
It’s not free/freed market, it’s the fleece market. Free/freed markets don’t exist, they are buzz words of propaganda meant to instill the American public with mindlessness which has been institutionalized by government, business, pretend christians[biblical harlots] which gives it legitimacy. TV has been valuable instrument in instilling mindlessness, the inability and/or not knowing to discern thoughts from fiction.Reagan, with his skills honed on TV, with with his happy talk sociopathic-psychopathic-optimism psychobabble was the great communicator for mindlessness. Mindlessness is the result of the strategy created in the 1920′s,” Manufacturing Consent” explained by Noam Chomsky in his book. Walter Lippmann a writer created the manufacturing consent strategy of how to manipulate the general public into not knowing what their best interest is but to go against their best interest.
dann, how nice of you to tell us how to be libertarians, even though it very un-libertarian of you. I’m more libertarian than thou which makes me think you have concocted libertarian into a religion, more christian than thou……..etc!
Hi Sergio,
First, I can only re-iterate that I don’t think these people are claiming that sweatshops are “a product of the free market” in the sense that KC is using the phrase. They’re a product of a free market as applied to the current distribution of resources. The disagreement as I see it is that KC thinks there are three options, whereas there are only two.
1) Free market from now on – sweatshops are permitted.
2) No free market from now on – sweatshops not permitted
3) Free market always existed – there would be no sweatshops.
But the third “alternative” is meaningless because it only applies to the forgotten past (except insofar as any injusticies can be remedied in open court as I’ve explained above). If people reject the third alternative it’s not because they wouldn’t prefer to have had free markets, and the distribution of resources thereby – they would. It’s just that they realise that it’s a waste of time to dwell on past mistakes, unless they can be remedied etc.
And let me clarify what I meant by that comment about land enclosures. I’m not disputing that they happened, and that they were bad. I’m simply taking issue with the implicit assumption that, without land enclosures, we would be living in some kind of co-operative utopia. Instead I have to believe that the distribution of resources would be broadly similar, and that sweatshops would still exist.
Richard:
“First, I can only re-iterate that I don’t think these people are claiming that sweatshops are “a product of the free market” in the sense that KC is using the phrase. They’re a product of a free market as applied to the current distribution of resources. ”
I fail to see the difference between the first and second sentence. You are just saying that due to the current distrobution of resoursces, free markets produces sewatshops. So the problem is just a question of a distribution of resources not if we have actually a free market or not. Kevin and most left libertarians sustain, with good reason, it has little to do with free markets.
“f people reject the third alternative it’s not because they wouldn’t prefer to have had free markets, and the distribution of resources thereby – they would. It’s just that they realise that it’s a waste of time to dwell on past mistakes, unless they can be remedied etc.”
But again you are missing the point. This has nothing to do with can´t or can “dwell with pass mistakes”, it is q question of what lessons we are drwing from history. If an historiographical current insists our actuall state of economic affairs is product of a free market, they are lying, and thus will certainly going to give us wrong advice toward the future based on a bad reading of the past. THAT is the problem, not trying to remediate past injustices.
Finally, you should consider that Kevin actually presents examples (past and contemporary) of cooperatives and all sort of mutualist arrangements that actually work or have worked. So how do you know if the actuall existing capitalist system is replaced by one true free market we couldn´t be closer to the “co.-operative utopia”?
I didn’t read all of the comments made before mine; I have a job and family and stuff like that. However, it seems to me that the main issue is whether one believes that the truly left libertarian society that once existed, i.e. the Native Americans of the Great Plains, should have triumphed over the organized and industrialized European immigrants. While many romanticize (sic?) the former, we all are the beneficiaries of the latter.
[...] Chodorov’s statements with those of Sheldon Richman in his recent article on left-libertarianism in the American Conservative. (I also, very much, recommend this article.) [...]
@Steve
“LMND, take a close look at Dain’s comments to which I responded, HE IS RATHER SPECIFIC THAT PRIVATE DISCRIMINATION IS COERCION.
Can’t you read ? Nothing “strawman” about it.
My opinion of so-called “left libertarians” gets lower with each response from them.”
Yes, surely Dain is a left-libertarian….
Private discrimination is immoral and oppressive, but not necessarily coercive although it can be. And Left-libertarians would never oppose racism through government policy. Still strawman.
JoshINHB, you are dead wrong. All sorts of businesses post Hold Harmless and Limited Liability notices, garages and parking lots being notable examples. This concept could work with every type of business including fractional reserve banking, which wouldn’t have to be outlawed per se contrary to Rothbard’s nonsense. The courts uphold this all the time.
JoshINHB, your history on corporations is wrong too. Since the 1880s, not the 1990s, corporations have been the main way most businesses are financed. If the partnership or any other model was better than they would have replaced corporations. The evidence is all around you.
Every time I think my opinion of the oxymorons known as “left libertarians” couldn’t go lower, I read remarks like yours and I realize the bottom hasn’t been reached.
As far as the rest of you folks proclaiming we don’t live in pure free market laissez-faire capitalism, well duh !
Mark, I don’t need to bother myself with Long and Carson when I can read Capitalism by George Reisman, the greatest
Austrian economist and acolyte of both Mises and Rand.
Liberty Mother, private discrimination is not oppressive at all and need not be immoral. A person due to repeated experiences might well have rational reasons to discriminate.
Obviously the left libertarian I quoted would oppose private discrimination with government coercion and your own absurd language that private discrimination might be coercive (!) strongly indicates that lean in that direction.
Not a “strawman” but a reasonable assumption.
There is a great difference between main street business and Wall Street money changing. It is more than rational to be pro the first and anti the other.
Current day Wall Street has taken the bland well establish business of home lending and turned it on its head. The Wall Street money machine sold millions of people the false promise of unending bobbling home prices. We know the result – millions of homes in foreclosure. And with the subsequent market crash – millions of 401k’s lost much of their value. The middleclass is being sucked clean by the greedy of Wall Street.
These avaricious gluttonous immoral money changing bastards control government! Clearly nothing has happened to Wall Street as a result of what they did – absolutely NOTHING — the money machine goes on and on – the bonuses just get bigger.
All the more reason to be a small government – no government – anti-money – libertarian.
Again on Rothbard being “left” libertarian, Here are his own words….”I grew up a right-winger, and became more intensely a libertarian rightist as I grew older. ”
This is mostly so of all true libertarians. To be a libertarian you have to renounce and eventually come to hate that mechanism of collective coercion(force) we call the State. Yet the State is at the very center of leftism. Not that a leftist couldn’t make the transition, but not by bringing his residual statism with him.
“Left” libertarianism is a contradiction, much like neo-conservatism. Both founder on the reefs of statism. And the State is nothing more but the enforcement arm of the claim on wealth by those who don’t own it.
Boy, liked the article, wanna slap the comments. As a Social Libertarian by self description for years, I have heard all the collectivist crap, and a good part of that collectivist statist crap was from self sedcribed anarchists! funny till you think about it.
“In order to form a more perfect union..” …”we the people” oh my diety- the founders were into sociaol contracts and collectivism! Hey idiots,(the rest, its not at you) its about the concepts and the implementations. It’s not about how you can easily put words in this or that camp. There is a common word and there is an insiders secret meaning, and their is the oponents red flag meaning. Some people think culture and occult are related by woerd-root. Others are not so dumb, but they can’t seem to get the general concept that the words are not the ideology.
Me? financially very conservative about the government yet opposed to the stupidity of letting the fox…run the bank, set and run the table in the casino known as “creative financial contracts…” We need laws, just not bazillions of details. Even , who was it this week from the fed system said show me one ounce of value from “creative financial paper..”???
I recognize you can’t legislate morality, but I think you would be wise to keep the repeat killers out of circulation, maybe kill them and be done. That is a concern for “we the people.”
As for marriage- that came from and should stay with religions. Contracts are what the government does, be they between a man and a woman, two men, or a group becoming a corporation…
Me! love free market capitalism. Wish we had it. I hate a fixed game of by and for the psychopaths, and I hate that corporations get bigger rights packages from government than people do. When did we ever execute one?
how words evolve: Said Carlysle: ” Liberalism- anarchy with a policeman.” he was upset that liberalism was , regretably, what we would call anarcho-capitalism…..
“Up with the village of we the people, down with the state what don’t respect us and may it stay out of the way when we don’t need it (interstate commerce, wars and a few defined needs better done by rules instead of chaotic democratic proceedures)…”….got a problem with that contradiction? step up !!!
Haven’t read the whole piece, but I know enough to know that these guys are no more libertarian than I am a professional football player. Calling yourself one does not make it so.
The idea is correct. The name is wrong. There are people here who need to get past from where some of the ideas of “left libertarianism” come and legitimately use their minds. Good ideas can come from anyplace, regardless of one’s overall political ideology.
The actual contrast here is between “corporatist” libertarians and “non-corporatist” libertarians. Corporatist libertarians are more the mainstream, and despite their alleged libertarian beliefs have bought into the flawed notion that big corporations exist in spite of “evil government intervention.” They believe large corporations are normal. The fact is, the “left libertarians” – or non-corporatist libertarians – realize that those large corporations couldn’t exist without government support. They could not exist without being subsidized by government infrastructure and being subsidized by societies they exploit.
[...] I reluctantly call myself a libertarian. I say reluctantly because I hate to be associated with those on the mainstream right who only opportunistically use the rhetoric of libertarianism when it suits them and also hate to be associated with the anti-authority for the sake of being anti-authoritarian anarchists. I’ve recently been finding solace in what some are calling left libertarianism (note that these aren’t the left libertarians referenced in the first part of the wikipedia article but rather what is described in this article). [...]
Bull Garbage.
Without the government to enforce protections no monopoly can abuse the consumer.
Libertarian-Left is a bait-and-switch to confuse people while they get to re-distribute the wealth and success of others.
If I am wrong; “Show Me”…
Create/buy a company and enter the marketplace. Compete. Provide goods and/or services of sufficient quality and price that the consumer will choose you.
American capitalism is focused on the consumer. Our European and even american wanna-be’s only wish to hide from competition and force the consumer to pay higher prices for lower quality goods/services -all- in the name of the nebulous abstract called “community.”
The whole concept ignores the basic human question, “What’s in it for me?” If the whole myth worked then the numerous “Buy American” and “Buy Union” campaigns would have worked long ago… The Consumer wants good value for those few hard won dollars. They do not care if it comes from America of China or santo Domingo or even Pakistan (WallMart or Target anyone-?) National tariffs hide and protect lower quality and higher priced goods… It’s all Bull Garbage-!
If I am wrong, show me. Don’t write scholarly papers or op-eds. Put your money and time at risk and show me how the business organization would work in a competitive environment…
[...] [...]
[...] Sale on Bakunin and Sheldon Richman on free-market anti-capitalism Posted in: The Alliance Between the Anarchists and the Right ← Exploit Turns Anti-Piracy [...]
[...] Sale on Bakunin and Sheldon Richman on free-market anti-capitalism « Exploit Turns Anti-Piracy Agency Site Into The Pirate Bay Oil and Gas [...]
3,643 words, and nothing about Henry George? Shameful.
Great article, Sheldon–superb how you patiently set the background framework and gradually build and elaborate your case. Too many articles from this side assume too much background knowledge, fail to explain or justify the left-lib jargon, and presuppose without justifying a lot of left-libertarian views–your article did not do that.
There is a good deal I disagree with (I don’t think regular libertarians say “the American capitalist system … fundamentally embodies” values of free markets; like you, we say that it’s a “market-oriented mixed economies”), but most of it I agree with. Meaning either I’m a quasi-left libertarian myself, to my surprise, or some of the insights and views you are attributing to the left are simply those of “regular” radical (and usually Rothbardian) libertarians.
Superb article, Sheldon Richman. This was the first time I have read about any kind of “left” individualist anarchism and found it very clear.
I myself am a market anarchist, but never considered myself as left or right (I never even considered adding such a spectrum to market anarchism). Judging by your description in the article, I would agree with Stephan Kinsella above in that I guess I am somewhat of a left-libertarian myself without knowing it, although I don’t plan to adopt the label just because it fits.
One thing I disagreed with: “In contrast to nonleft-libertarians, who seem uninterested in, if not hostile to, labor concerns per se, left-libertarians naturally sympathize with workers’ efforts to improve their conditions.”
I think many market anarchists who don’t label themselves as “left” are interested and concerned about such things as well.
Although I am not a libertarian in any sense, I have profited from the thorough scholarship of Kevin Carson, and cited him frequently in my books and articles. At a practical level, there is not much difference between his mutualism and distributism.
A very nice summary of left-libertarian thought and positions. Unlike the “conventional” left vs. right, libertarians on both sides of the spectrum find it easier to have more in common, even if in disagreement on various points. The article would have been more complete if it had mentioned some American facets of left-libertarian movements, such as Lysander Spooner or Agorism. I have traditionally opposed “the left” (even while insisting that voluntarily supporting the poor is important, but this is a “left” I can get behind! See also the article by Hans Hermann Hoppe on “Marxist and Austrian Class Analysis”.