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.)
Greenwald invites us to consider a series of bills that enlist government in punishing corporations for views they express, money they donate to causes, etc. Some examples:
I agree with him that the above laws are unconstitutional. Government is prohibited from discriminating or giving unequal protection to the free speech rights of corporations as currently settled law stands (that was indeed one of the caveats he made). Indeed, Greenwald took pains to point out that even in the Citizens United case, not one Supreme Court justice questioned the legitimacy of corporate personhood at all (I addressed Greenwald’s commentary on this matter in more detail here). I also agree with him that The Nation’s Lee Fang takes an unprincipled, politically expedient position against corporate personhood – one cannot confine one’s critiques of the doctrine to only those cases where it acts against one’s sense of justice. Nobody wants to be allied with a hack like Fang less than I.
However, I do take issue with Greenwald’s notion that protecting corporate rights are constitutive to unbiased government. The imaginary laws he suggests are careful to target particularly contentious political issues that divide our nation. I assume his goal here is to show how Fang’s argument could be pressed into the service of a variety of illiberal ends. But why should we only consider narrowly moral issues in light of interventions by government? The examples ably illustrate the heaviness of the hand government uses to skew society to its political vision in general; no need to contain our outrage to only those narrow attempts at referreeing decorum and moral convention.
Indeed, the sole problem I have with Greenwald’s thesis is that it doesn’t go nearly far enough, constituting a blind spot for certain institutional arrangements he (and not simply the Supreme Court) considers beyond dispute. I would argue that the corporate form owes its very existence as a legitimate legal fiction to government intervention in the first place. Not only that, the intervention was designed to favor a certain view – in fact a political, even moral, opinion – of how business should be organized. This view is at least as arbitrary, moralistic and prejudicial as the imaginary laws he righly argues represent state overreach.
As far as I can tell (and I’d be happy to be corrected) Greenwald takes a thoroughly liberal view here that makes a distinction between rational, secular business matters and irrational, polemical moral and religious matters. I hold that this distinction is thoroughly false: government intervention to create and sustain corporate privilege is itself a moral intervention. For example, it has rigged our business environment to prefer capital over labor and business interests over civil interests. That is not just a technical legal matter for our society to work out rationally; rather, I’d argue it circumscribes a great deal of the inequality at the heart of our society’s decay.
I’d like to follow Greenwald’s lead by imagining the following laws:
In each of the above cases, I have not entirely made up the law as Greenwald did – these statements more or less describe the current legal environment. Corporations are created by government when people file paperwork and pay a fee. In return, the government grants them ownership over an entity they may govern. This entity confers on them limited liability for their actions, entity status that people are compelled to respect, and the privilege to abide by different standards than those applied to us flesh-and-blood humans. This is just the beginning of the story of how government intervenes through the corporate form to skew society towards an arrangement with moral and ethical consequences. Among other results, this artificially instituted and imbalanced playing field directly contributes to:
The idea that somehow the above situation is a technical, amoral, secular outcome that government is perfectly at liberty to pursue underlies Greenwald’s entire argument. It’s only when the issue at hand is abortion, or minority rights, or religion, or some other contentious topic on which the elite have not already reached consensus that government must look the other way.
The proper remedy to all of this (besides abolishing the state and privilege at large) is hold all people equal before the law – whether or not they are principals, managers, or shareholders in some contractually created, legally fictitious business entity. This must entail the end of all government favoritism, including that powerful subsidy embodied in corporate privilege. Nobody should be allowed to manipulate society through government force, neither for moral ends nor business advantage.
But more subtly and importantly, the line liberals draw between secular business matters and religious or moral matters is itself an arbitrary, self-serving reordering of society to their liking that underlies their statist politics. Every group with an agenda thinks theirs is different, but the liberal desire for technocratic, rational secularism is just as much a pre-rational value imposed on society as Christian fundamentalist theocracy would be. We could strike a blow for true equality – and accomplish a lot of “progressive” ends along the way – not by encouraging more government picking of winners and losers but by stopping the intervention that has already been going on for a century and a half.
]]>What gets me is that the site is called “Bleeding Heart Libertarians”. Ostensibly, the goal of the blog is to defend libertarianism as a compassionate philosophy. It adds insult to injury for libertarians to make the same tired arguments not only in a flashy new medium but also on a site intended to represent a compassionate, concerned variety of the philosophy whose label we both employ.
It’s not that his arguments are wrong per se. Yes, sweatshop jobs are the best of a crappy set of options for far too many people in the third world. Yes, shutting down those sweatshops without doing anything else would not improve anybody’s situation. And yes, I can’t contest the point that people should do things to help their situation, even if they don’t remedy it completely.
There are counterarguments that can and have been made, but I don’t want to focus on that. Zwolinski’s arguments don’t fail to convince because they are wrong; they fail but because they betray such a narrow vision. Instead of demonstrating the creative, liberatory aspects of our philosophy, such arguments encourage disadvantaged people to accept a crappy situation while telling ourselves that letting people be exploited is somehow good for them.
For example, I can vaguely imagine my situation becoming so desperate that I might agree to sell my organs, or prostitute myself for drugs, or any number of wretched things. Those activities might be my best available options if I’m sufficiently depressed or constrained by circumstances. And I would want a libertarian to defend me against a state that would throw me in jail over some of that behavior.
However, that would not be the kind of help I’d be most urgently seeking. I would not want somebody to justify those options as “good” for me – I’d be looking for somebody to help expand my available options to include better ones, so I don’t have to make such utterly shitty choices in the first place. A libertarian who extolled my “freedom to sleep under bridges” wouldn’t seem like much of an advocate to me – he would seem like somebody trying to alleviate his own conscience.
This is the myopia that plagues our movement; we have too often become apologists for the system instead of its opponents. Perhaps sweatshops are the best in a set of bad options. But if that’s the case, why are talented, “bleeding heart” academics like Zwolinski expending so much precious time, energy, and money on justifying that situation? Why not invest that time, energy, and money into advocating for an improvement in the set of choices they have, so that they have better options that are not demeaning, dangerous, and unjust? Why is libertarianism being construed in a manner that props up what Zwolinski admits is unjust, rather than taking the revolutionary step of abolishing the system of injustice?
People often ask why we add the “left” qualifier to our political label. Why not just identify as “libertarian” and be done with it? Now you know: because while the principles might be the same, the vision of flourishing is of a totally different scope and scale. Without a concept of mutual aid, solidarity, and common struggle against an oppressive system, libertarianism is no more than a way to whitewash privilege and sweep injustice under the rug of “free choice”. It’s not enough to defend a hollow freedom, because people need more than that. We can help each other achieve more than just freely choosing the best in a set of options the powerful and wealthy provide us.
I can accept all of Zwolinski’s arguments as correct insofar as they go. It’s just that they don’t go very far, because they betray a set of priorities that are not very compassionate, concerned, or worthwhile.
]]>I just discovered the RAW Illumination blog that carries on and promotes the philosophy, attitude, and perspective of one of my very favorite authors and thinkers, Robert Anton Wilson. There’s a great interview with Douglas Rushkoff on his book “Program or Be Programmed” which I reviewed here. However, this transcription of Robert Shea’s speech upon accepting the Hall of Fame award from the Libertarian Futurist Society for the book he co-wrote with Wilson, The Illuminatus! Trilogy, is quite gratifying to me. It provides comfort for the long, hard slog of being intellectually free and curious, not so much as some demonstration of autonomy as a will to self-definition and self-discovery. The final paragraph is powerful:
We say in the novel that the original Illuminati were dedicated to religious and political freedom and that this secret organization somehow became perverted so that in recent centuries the Illuminati had become a vehicle for a monstrous authoritarianism. Thus the myth of the Illuminati is an archetype for every political movement, from Lenin’s Bolshevism to Reagan’s Republicanism, that has promised people greater freedom while loading them down with more government. People can be fooled in this way because they are not sure what freedom is. Freedom is a word whose meaning has been worn away by overuse, like a coin that has passed through too many hands. We need to be clear about what it means to us when we use it and maybe not use it quite so much, but use other, more precise words instead.
In ILLUMINATUS! we suggest that freedom begins in your right to define yourself and to insist on the validity of your own perceptions and your own thoughts. To change to a new point of view because you find it convincing is, of course, merely an exercise of that freedom. But freedom is lost when you are coerced or frightened into denying your own way of seeing reality and into accepting a point of view you cannot really believe in, be it that of a family, a teacher, a boss, a party, a church, a state. And an amazing thing is that when each of us insists on his or her own vision, it does not divide us. It unites us as no externally imposed unity ever could. It unites us in reverence for that inner light which we can only find by knowing ourselves, never by denying ourselves, that light by which each one of us can truly be said to be illuminated - the true Illuminati.
Read the whole thing. He also mentions that Wilson stopped calling himself an anarchist, but more out of a rejection of loaded labels than a rejection of the ideas. I feel myself pulled that way at times.
]]>It is true that there existed among us “social study groups”, but we know how ephemeral and precarious they were: born out of individual caprice, these groups were destined to disappear with it; those who made them up did not feel united enough, and the first difficulty they encountered caused them to split up. Furthermore, these groups do not seem to have ever had a clear notion of their goal. Now, the goal of an organization is at one and the same time thought and action. In my experience, however, those groups did not act at all: they disputed. And many reproached them for building all those little chapels, those talking shops.
This is Amedee Dunois at the 1907 International Anarchist Congress in Amsterdam. Read the full speech here. We can learn a lot from the example of those who have gone before.
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