That is why I’ve been a big supporter of the Center for a Stateless Society ever since Brad Spangler founded it in 2006. Both left libertarianism and market anarchism (a label I try to hold at arm’s length) deserve an outlet focused on getting their unique points of view in front of as many eyes as possible. The goal from the very beginning has been outreach and advocacy, to embark upon a coordinated, funded effort to get left libertarian polemics into mainstream outlets to influence policy and public opinion. The emergence of C4SS was a sign that left libetarianism had grown up and wanted to be a player on the political stage, not simply a loose ring of blogs (though those were heady, fun days indeed).

I’ve written several essays for the Center. The first two pieces I wrote for them were among the hardest writing I’ve ever done in my life. It turns out that writing for the general public outside the normal cliches of politics has very, very little in common with writing for an expressly radical audience. Couple that with the rules that guide newspaper publication, such as word counts, an emphasis on very accessible diction, and conforming to certain reading levels, and suddenly writing from the heart transforms into a kind of eristic crossword puzzle. However, the finished product was not only something of which I could be proud, but something that felt like an important, unique contribution to the conversation precisely because it was disciplined.

It’s been a long time since I’ve regarded the Center as a disciplined outlet for left libertarian politics. It seems they try to get anything and everything mildly related to left libertarianism published. This would be fine for a left libertarian blog that sought to serve a readership that already agrees with left libertarian views (my leftlibertarian.org project was just such an unfocused survey). But it’s important to remember that the Center raises money not simply to publish writing–anybody can do that these days–but to publish the best, most focused, most accessible writing that can subvert mainstream media outlets and turn non-anarchists into anarchists. That’s not easy, which is why I was always in favor of paying writers for the burden of writing pieces that are not necessarily straightforward, enjoyable to work on, or directly from the heart like most of us enjoy writing.

Consider this essay by Aster Alice Raizel. Despite my rejection of the thesis, this is a really interesting piece, as a twitter friend reminded me, because it recalls the intensity of 19th century, luciferian-tinged anarchism. I’ve been a fan of her voice and writing for many years. The question is not whether this is a good essay, but whether it is an essay that promotes left libertarianism to a mainstream audience. After all, that mission is what brought me an others to the Center; it’s no failure to expand beyond that, but does an essay like this marginalize the Center among mainstream outlets more than necessary? I think it does, and so it is incompatible with the Center’s whole reason for existing.

Now, I won’t pretend this isn’t personal: Alice has been an extremely divisive figure in the left libertarian milieu. She was central to one of the first rifts that found me on a different side than many of my C4SS comrades. Based on my private and public interactions with her, I believe she is a seriously disturbed individual (it sucks this has to be said, but for the record, I am not referring to her gender identity). Based on observing her angry, vitriolic, unhinged behavior on public forums and blogs, I further believe she is an atrocious ambassador for any cause, let alone one that promotes the just and peaceful resolution of conflicts. So the fact that the Center would use donor funds to publish a wildly troubled person working out their daddy issues in public is just the latest and best example of its loss of purpose.

I was also struck by the sloppy and grating takedown of Greenwald by Arthur Silber that caught the Center’s interest for some reason. Indeed, I wrote my own piece criticizing Greenwald’s journalistic practices and principles not because I thought I was making an original contribution. Largely I wanted to salvage the ongoing, important conversation about journalism from such an overwrought and hysterical temper tantrum. There is simply no point in lecturing on integrity with a voice of petulent self-righteousness and caustic hate. I feel sorry for radicals like Raizel and Silber who have no other voice with which to discuss these matters, but it’s simply a mistake for the Center to support such bile.

To give voice to concerns about an institution’s direction inevitably risks offending those who see their interests aligned with the institution. This is even more true when people get their pay from that institution. So as desperate and sad as this seems for such an accomplished thinker, it just makes me grateful for the privilege to pursue politics on my own terms and eschew the constant performance that comprises politically correct leftism. And that’s the position I’ve always strived to occupy on the libertarian left: an independent, anti-ideological, common sense position that can reflect on our faults as well as our virtues. I have no interest in the “me too” rah-rahing of movement clicktavists motivated more by publicly distinguishing their moral value from the fallen masses than by engaging with those folks to find ways forward for us all. Let me know when that kind of cultivated sanctimony actually effects changes in the world, Kevin, and I’ll gladly eat my hat.

Any movement trying to find its own political identity, priorities, and values as well as maintain ideological integrity will make philosophical independence difficult. To their credit, left libertarians and C4SS adherents are if anything more honest than most ideologues. But if ideology requires any kind of balancing force, only the individual conscience can reliably provide it. Sometimes that means standing on the outside looking in, but that’s immensely more satisfying to me than drowning myself in the echo chamber of self-congratulating, progressive puritanism. It’s not true that the Center does no good work, but its supporters deserve to know the real motivation for its work. Presently the Center functions more as a thin veneer of institutional professionalism over of an insular clique of ideologues; I’m certain my comrades are capable of better.

The internet is a wonderful nursery for anti-system radicals, but eventually one needs to leave that noumenal realm of relative safety, put aside childish Twitter grandstanding and forum feuds, and apply one’s values to the real world. There is an outlet that takes these kinds of politics seriously, which makes it both dangerous and promising. I believe Attack the System, for all its flaws, has usurped the position that C4SS could have thrived in, and I hope you will give that site and its writers a chance to show you what the application of genuine anti-state politics through a pluralist framework means for leftist aspirations and the egalitarianism we all believe is possible. (I no longer associate or support Attack the System and disavow them completely.)

So the revelation that C4SS staff member Stacy Litz served as a police informant for months comes as quite a shock to all of us. She is responsible for snitching on several of her fellow libertarians to escape jail time. The extent to which she attempted to mitigate the harm of her actions is unclear. None of us know for certain what we would do in her situation, and we can all have compassion for the horrible dilemna in which this person was placed – even as we regret and condemn what she chose to do.

The Center released a statement reflecting the decision to non-judgmentally but resolutely remove Stacy from her position. The debate that brought about that decision was very contentious. Some members pushed to keep her, arguing that cutting anybody the state flips sends two messages: (A) if you make a mistake, you cannot rehabilitate yourself, and (B) the state has only to flip people to break our movement. Theories were advanced that we somehow throw this back in the government’s face and turn it into some kind of PR coup. We’re not going to let the state tell us who we can and can’t work with!

Several members, including me, felt that this position did not incorporate our interests as local activists. We work with radical left organizations that have very material experiences with informants and police harrassment. Seeing friends from these groups go to jail is not unheard of. William Gillis’s friend is getting railroaded. Here in Richmond we have a guy who was framed by the police because they got sick of his work with CopWatch. Occupy Richmond has been surrendering cell phones before entering planning meetings because local activists have been raided under suspicious conditions lately that imply surveillance is occurring. Security culture is on everybody’s lips – especially with Occupy raising stakes.

While I don’t want to speculate too obscenely, I’d say there are also people in C4SS who come from more of an LP or philosophical libertarian background (I’m one of them). While many of them understand the above concerns, others refused to take them seriously. I think that’s because this fight isn’t on the ground, shoulder to shoulder, in the streets for them. Instead, it’s abstract; it’s theoretical. For some of them, debating the libertarian ethics of this – was she really coerced? OK, let’s have a pedantic debate about coercion! – is the most material concern. That’s because they’re not wondering whether their activism will send the cops knocking down their door. This is all on the internet and is therefore inescapably ephemeral, as is the vaguely articulated strategy to turn this scenario around and use it against the government.

What people in the latter group need to realize is that the people in the former group have a lot at stake. When we are asked to abide a snitch in an organization that we promote to our activist friends – many of whom are skeptical of us, not because of who we are so much as the label we attach to ourselves in solidarity with other left libertarians – we can’t help but wonder if, at the end of the day, the Center for a Stateless Society is another bourgeoisie, privileged libertarian group that only uses the rhetoric of the Left to appeal to it, not to join forces with it in common cause.

If the Center wants to incorporate itself into the larger leftist activist movement resisting corporate capitalism, the police state, etc. then it must consider the gravity of the struggle that’s local and on the ground. It can’t ask members who are working in their local communities to compromise themselves. What I found really troubling was not that people disagreed with me on how to handle Stacy, but that those local interests that matter to activists like me were so easily dismissed. It implies that this disconnect I’ve experienced for years between my politics online and my life offline has not been resolved. It implies that this is still abstract and theoretical for some of my friends at the Center.

If we can’t reconcile our polemics with our actions then we cannot be effective and credible. I know my life has become much richer by working in my community and testing those ideas I have been exposed to by many of my online comrades. Let’s ensure that the Center does not make itself irrelevant to our struggles and allies at home while it continues to do very fine work in the media.

At the time, Allies were debating the proper reaction to an inflammatory essay that had been written by a non-left libertarian. This debate turned into a crisis: one left libertarian denouncing the other as out of bounds and beyond the pale. As all parties stood their ground, things digressed into nasty insults and accusations that mainly exhausted us. It got to be surprisingly ridiculous, but what surprised me the most was the fact that, of all people, Wilbur - the one who likely understands the historic trajectory of this movement more than anybody else, and therefore would have the most to say about where all this is headed - was the one to leave.

Among Wilbur’s arguments, as I understand them, was the absence of any way to resolve the dispute to everybody’s satisfaction. The Alliance had always been a vague and inarticulable one, grounded in shared tendencies but no shared principles that had ever been made clear, let alone binding. Add to that the concept of ALL being a place where “we all agree to disagree” and you have the basis for neither ideological commitment nor ideological boundaries. Personal attacks were all anybody had, because there was no shared premise of alliance, and I imagine Wilbur couldn’t see the point of continuing to associate with such a meaningless brand. If all we were going to do was be an online club of likeminded malcontents, why bother winning this fight?

Fast forward to earlier this year: the Center for a Stateless Society had been building momentum with a new funding model and a solid record of publishing op-eds for a year or so. However, Wilbur left the advisory board because he was increasingly uncomfortable with the term “market anarchist” as a description of his beliefs. Read his blog and you’ll feel a yearning expressed over and over: to get beyond the ideological factions and locate the common principle that impels us to use fancy terms like “individualism” and “market”. Where C4SS offered a brand, Wilbur sought substance.

It appears the same concerns that led to Wilbur’s departure from the Alliance contributed to his departure from the Center. In the comments for a recent C4SS op-ed that caused many of us discomfort, Wilbur persistently argued not just against the article but against the nebulous constellation of ideas and tendencies that comprise the Center’s mission:

I’ve gradually distanced myself from left-libertarianism, market anarchism, the ALLiance and the Center, largely because the sorts of “agreement” that seem most common look more like disagreement to me – and because they seem to open the door more often to those who elevate “private property” over individual liberty (despite their rhetoric) much more often than they admit those whose concern for individual liberty makes them resistant to “private property.” I’m not being stubborn about disagreement. The ALLiance was initially built around a certain amount of active disagreement. The notion that we “really agree” really just seems dismissive to me, given the obvious gulf between our positions.

Now, I’ve been an enthusiastic supporter of the Center for a year or so. It is not everyday that you get a chance to push op-eds promoting anarchism to mainstream media sources. Given the people involved in the project - Brad Spangler, Gary Chartier, Kevin Carson, Darian Worden - I felt like the left libertarian credentials of this organization needed no vetting whatsoever. The biggest motivator for me was being able to support those writers whom I appreciate and whom I think are as potentially convincing to others as one was to me. Kevin Carson is probably the reason I ever considered anarchism in the first place.

However, I do have reservations. For one, I do not consider myself a “market anarchist”, for many of the reasons Wilbur articulates. For another thing, the Center has a tendency to extend its language beyond what I would consider the left libertarian consensus into narrow agorist or market fundamentalist language, where all we seek to advocate is expressed in pure economic terms. I don’t want to single out specific articles or authors; it suffices to say that these misgivings are shared by more than a couple of supporters, so it’s not just me.

In fact I don’t think it’s the authors’ fault - they do what they can to further the work of the Center as they understand it, and none of them understand it any worse than the rest of us. Without a clear consensus on the Center’s mission, why shouldn’t they just write about whatever they feel like? The problem is not their understanding of the C4SS consensus so much as ours.

What vision and principles do we share? When we support the Center, what are we saying with that support? How do we judge the efficacy of the Center when there’s no clear statement of the advocated “stateless society”? Why stop at “market anarchism” as the only articulation of statelessness - why not be more ecumenical towards the variety in the anarchist movement?

All of the articles that bother me are perfectly consonant with market anarchism, broadly constructed. We can say, “So what? We disagree on certain points. Big deal.” But I don’t consider that a sustainable situation, any more than it was in the Alliance. It’s even more urgent because the Center is not merely a debate club, affinity group, or online brand; it’s an outreach organization designed to generate real results: new anarchists. What is at stake here is bigger than competing visions and ideological formulations of market anarchism; this agitprop will influence future left libertarians and market anarchists who will expand upon our work for years to come. Little in our corner of the universe could demand more accountability.

Until we take the difficult leap towards defining the positive goals, values, and dreams that unite us, as well as the outcomes we mutually reject as unacceptable even in a stateless society, it will be difficult for people to feel they understand exactly what they are funding. Every time a member reads an article that strays from their personal vision, they will question the Center’s mission. The Center’s success cannot be judged by its supporters if there is no sense of our common approach and aspirations, or at least an understanding of the contested areas that are likely to divide us. Remember: this is not about all of us agreeing so much as all of us deciding how to package and sell this “market anarchism” to which we all supposedly adhere (and yes, that alone gives me pause).

I don’t know how to go about organizing the discussion that would articulate or ratify such a consensus. But if this Center for a Stateless Society is going to advocate for us, especially when capably and admirably run by such steadfast organizers and generous writers on a shoestring budget, the least we can do is give them guidance and not just criticism. Wilbur’s departure was an indication that we cannot simply rally around a black flag; revolutionary consensus requires us to be honest about the change we seek, and to ally on the basis of that honesty. It might be painful, but if we could find such a consensus that all sides of the market anarchist / left libertarian milieu could get behind, we would have the basis for a powerful advocacy and outreach group, indeed.