leftlibertarian.org

Check out the fun little rant over at Scottish Nous. A juicy tidbit:

Instead of the monkeys donkeys and elelphants honestly assessing themselves as the slaves they are, they take themselves to be indentured servants, happily worshipping the system while biding their time until they can seize power and force others to comply with their demands. Of course, almost all of them will die a slave after having spent a lifetime continually begging the government to allow them to fork over their money for almost anything whatsoever, no matter how much blood is shed, how many lies are told, or how much corruption, ineffeciency, double-dealing, backstabbing, and violation of basic human rights is involved in the process. Yet this doesn't stop them. They would rather die a slave to an unjust system for their children, who won't thank them, than fight for real justice.

Along with, or part of, the revival of interest in left-libertarianism lately has been a renewed call for a more adequate libertarian theory of class. Brad Spangler has written on this issue, for instance, and Wally Conger has provided the great service of collecting SEK3's thoughts on Agorism, Marxism, and class. What might be less well known is that our fellow ringmate Roderick Long has published an excellentt paper on just this topic. Sadly, it isn't available on-line, but it is well worth the effort to track down a hard copy. But until you can get to a library that has a decent collection of academic philosophy, I thought I'd highlight the basic concepts and distinctions.

Republican Theory of Class: A balance of power between classes must be maintained within society. The wealthy and powerful class must be held in check, but is not inherently exploitative. Likewise the rabble should be kept in line.

Rousseauvian Theory of Class: The Rousseauvian theory identifies "classes in economic terms; the defining characteristic of a class was its economic status (in Marxist terms, its control over the means of production, e.g. land and capital equipment.) But the Rousseauvian theory is pessimistic about the possibility of providing any reliable constitutional safeguard against the tendency of superior wealth to translate itself into superior power. Socioeconomic inequality inherently leads to oppression, and so must be eliminated in order to establish freedom; and since the ruling class is defined by its superior socioeconomic position, in abolishing inequality we abolish the ruling class as well."

The Smithian Theory of Class: "[T]he source of the ruling class's dominant position was not its economic status as such, but its differential access to state power; the ruling and ruled classes were defined not by their relative socioeconomic position, but by the extent to which they were beneficiaries or victims of state power."

Statocrats and Plutocrats:

Statocrats: the full-time apparatus--the kings, politicians, and bureaucrats who man and operate the State.

Plutocrats: the groups who have maneuvered to gain privileges, subsidies, and benefices from the State.

Five Salient Possibilities
Statocracy-Only
Plutocracy-Only
Statocracy-Dominant
Plutocracy-Dominant
Neither-Dominant

Statocracy-Mostly-Dominant view (Long's own view)

"The Statocracy-Dominant position underestimates, while the Neither-Dominant position overestimates, the ability of wealthy elites to maintain dominance in the absence of government favoritism."

A key problem that is mostly not addressed by libertarians is the issue of patronage. In the ancient city-state, the state was not particularly strong--no police, etc. Yet the ruling class could maintain its position through patronage.

Patronage: "the wealthy classes kept control not through organized violence but by buying off the poor. Each wealthy family would have a large following of commoners who served their patron's interests in exchange for the family's largesse."

However, with a weak or absent state, patronage is fairly difficult to maintain. The State is the great magnifier of the power of the wealthy. One way to look at it is that patronage requires you to buy off the poor with your own (family's) money, whereas with the state you buy people off with other people's money. Or, if you're really good, you buy them off with their own money!

So, what's your theory of class?

I was having a conversation with a friend of mine who is a pretty traditional leftie. We were discussing corporations and the state and which had more general power in society. He was taking the sort of "age of gloabalization" line, wherein sovereign states are rendered powerless by the evil multinationals and their Bretton Woods institutions. I won't bore you with the details. (One highlight, though. He asserted, "I don't trust the governement either, but I'd trust the government over a private insurance agency any day. At least the government is supposed to serve the public interest, whereas the private insurance agency is required to be greedy and self-serving.")

In any case, I took the tack that the state is the biggest, meanest, ugliest corporate monopoly around. And it occured to me to call the state "Ruling Class, Inc." "Ruling Class, Inc. serving the interests of elites since 3000 BCE." In any case, he liked the analogy. Maybe a meme worth spreading?

Fred Foldvary has a good post on Katrina, society, and the State over a The Progress Report. There are many good insights in the short piece, but I want to highlight the following.

But how can the market and private enterprise and voluntary human action handle such a catastrophe? The answer is that the spontaneous order coordinates in three ways. One is by the price system, for commercial exchanges, as enterprises respond to profit and loss. The second is with voluntary sympathetic action, private charity. The third is with association in equality.

The error people make about free markets is to believe that it consists of millions of atomistic individuals whose actions cannot be coordinated to respond to crises other than by central planning. But historically, human beings are always, already, in community. In a free society, they form voluntary local associations: land trusts, cooperatives, civic associations, condominiums, and proprietary communities. These neighborhoods then themselves associate, forming higher-level associations, when then league together to create a higher tier all the way up to a global network. The three ways of voluntary coordination join together in harmony.

There are at least two ways to think about what is and what isn't part of the market. On the one hand, you have the Rothbardian idea that market is just the sum total of all voluntary human activity. That means hippie communes, charities, revolutionary workers collectives, and so on would count as market institutions. On a narrower conception of markets, the market is constituted by the total of commercial exchanges in a society.

When libertarians express an easy "let the market handle it" attitude, many non-libertarians will reasonably assume that this means "let for-profit commercial exchange handle it." And that might not be a very good or a very attractive idea. For instance, getting utilities out of the hands of government is a good idea, but should they be transferred to big utilities corporations (who are likely very well connected politically) or should they be turned into consumer co-ops? From a libertarian perspective these are both shifts from state to market. Indeed, as radical libertarians (left, right, or center) will be quick to point out, the consumer co-op solution is probably the more free market solution. And yet, the consumer co-op might be considered by some to be more of a "community-based" (read: grassroots and cooperative) rather than "market-based" (read: corporate, greedy, and competitive) solution. Foldvary helps to point out that the sphere of non-coercive, voluntary social activity includes commercial exchange, but also charities and "association in equality." Hence, it seems useful to think and talk in terms of voluntary coordination, rather that (always) "the market."

Indeed another problem, especially among mainstream right libertarians, is too much emphasis on the first two and not the third. "Government welfare sucks? Leave it to private charities, they'll be more humane and more efficient!" This is probably true. But what about mutual aid societies, neighborhood assemblies, land trusts, co-ops, tenant's unions, independent labor unions, neighborhood watch and cop-watch, alternative media, community gardens, LETS systems, barter networks, mutual banks, open-source information, etc.? It may be better to be dependent on a private charity than a government bureaucracy, but what about individual and community independence through the association of equals?

Finally, one of the biggest false dichotomies in arguments of over libertarian issues (individual freedom, markets, decentralism vs. centralism) is the "atomistic individual" vs. "the community." Human beings are social? Human beings depend on one another? We are in part constituted by our relations to others and our environment? Oh, well then coerce away! I had assumed we were completely separate atoms, but now that I know we're social and relational I realize that we should be able to coerce, threaten, and control others in the name of community! What a relief!

Of course, the point--as Foldvary captures well--is not whether we're fundamentally related to others, but what kind of relations will form the basis of our interactions. Consent or coercion? Freedom of choice or external control? Contract or status? Respect or objectification? Zero-sum or positive-sum?

Kevin Carson has a great post on Uncle Noam. As usual, he gets to the heart of the matter:

But what I've never been able to understand is Chomsky's failure to draw the logical conclusions from his own arguments. His books are packed with endless documentation of the ways in which big business externalizes its costs on the taxpayer, and is protected from competition by government. As Chomsky himself said somewhere (one of his by-the-numbers jobs with Barsamian, I think), most of the big corporations would be bankrupt in a few months without corporate welfare. But at the same time, he argues that eliminating government would leave us in the grip of private corporate tyrannies, and that it's necessary to strengthen the state to break up such "private concentrations of power."

Now, if big business can't survive without ongoing state intervention in the economy, why is further state intervention necessary to break corporate power? That makes absolutely no sense to me. If "concentrated private power strongly resists exposure to market forces," then why not rub their noses in it?

As Friedrich Engels put it over a century ago: anarchists say eliminate the state and capital will go to the devil; Marxists say the reverse. Exactly!

As some of my readers may know, for most of my political life I thought of myself as a libertarian socialist of the Chomsky school. Indeed, it was through reading Michael Albert's and Robin Hahnel's work on Parecon and their critiques of both markets and central planning (they advocate decentralized, participatory planning) that first got me thinking about markets in a serious way. I then read several works on market socialism (Alec Nove, David Schweickart, etc.) for an alternative picture. So I came at this libertarian thing from the debate of markets versus planning from within the socialist left. I was also interested in the question of whether anarchism was really feasible, or whether we had to settle for some form of radically democratic socialism.

In any case, Chomsky's work had an incredible impact on my life and thinking. In reading Chomsky, people begin to get a real sense of the exercise of power by states and state capitalists. Politics is no longer just about Democrats versus Republicans, but about mass murder versus resistance (Vietnam, Cambodia, Latin America, East Timor, and on and on). It was from Chomsky that I learned that there weren't "our guys" versus "their guys" in the state. Anyone in a high level position in government had blood on his hands. I also respected his defenses of free speech at a time when much of the left was engaging in PC authoritarian cultural politics. And as someone studying philosophy, I liked that he did excellent work in linguistics and respected people like Bertrand Russell.

Much of what Chomsky does these days is really just Chomskian boilerplate. And needless to say, I'm with Kevin in his criticisms of Chomsky's marxian social democracy masquerading as anarchism. (Hell, I think much of Chomsky's supposed anarchism comes not from his socialist side, but from the fact that part of him is still influenced by classical liberalism--but I digress.) In many ways, Chomsky has done more to expose the true nature of state power, especially in foreign policy, than a whole bevy of libertarians critiquing tax policy.