Common Ground
(posted by Kevin Carson)
Libertarians and liberals probably aren’t going to persuade each other on their basic philosophical starting assumptions. Libertarians aren’t going to convert liberals to the non-aggression principle, and liberals aren’t going to convince libertarians that government intervention is ever desirable.
But we don’t have to agree on fundamental principles to cooperate in the areas where we agree. All our disagreements, as many as they are, leave a lot of room for common ground on areas where both sides agree that more liberty is desirable.
And in establishing this common ground, both sides may be a partial corrective to each other’s shortcomings.
Liberals, and those further to the left, are often better than libertarians when it comes to their understanding of desirable outcomes. Too many vulgar libertarians view even the expression of dislike for pollution, worsening income inequality, and the like, as prima facie evidence of statism. As I quoted Arthur Silber in an earlier post, liberals can provide some of the context for a contextual libertarianism.
But libertarians also have a context of their own to provide. Libertarians can point out the ways in which government has been a contributing factor to many of the evils that liberals object to. They can point out all the cases in which big business has been the prime mover behind the interventionist state, using “progressive” rhetoric to sell it to the public.
Liberals can correct for the moral color-blindness of the worst kind of libertarian, by pointing out that a world of chemical waste dumps and sweatshops, owned by a few hundred corporations, is a bad thing. Libertarians can correct for the economic illiteracy of the worst kind of liberal, who is utterly clueless about the ways the state has contributed to the problem and in which the market might improve things.
Out of the strong suits of both sides, we might just be able to develop a working synthesis: a common agenda on what aspects of state intervention to scale back, and in what order.
Such a common agenda would involve no compromise in the differing ultimate goals or fundamental principles of either side, and would be a win-win proposition for both. The basic principle behind all specific policy positions would be that all parties agree to first withdraw existing state policies that promote the polarization of wealth, the concentration of corporate power, pollution and excess consumption of resources, etc., before even considering further augmentation of the state.
For libertarians, this would mean that many would have to abandon their atomistic approach to dismantling the state and admit that some forms of statism are higher priority targets than others. It would mean acknowledging that there is something to liberal concerns on labor and social justice issues, the environment, etc. It would mean taking a serious look at the class interests served by government intervention, and taking such class issues into account in planning their attack strategy. As Charles Johnson put it,
It’s an odd form of libertarianism, and a damned foolish one, that operates by trying to pitch itself to the classes that control all the levers of power in both the market and the State, and to play off their fears and class resentment against those who have virtually no power, no access to legislators, are disproportionately likely not to even be able to vote, and who are trodden upon by the State at virtually every turn.
Such a common strategy would fall hardest on two subgroups. Among libertarians, it would fall hardest on the vulgar libertarians: those who identify on a visceral level with big business as the victimized party in modern society, and who equate “free market” policies with the defense of beleaguered, pitiful corporate interests against the looming tyranny of welfare mothers and “trial lawyers.”
Among liberals, it would fall hardest on the corresponding group of “vulgar liberals” (many of whom infest the comment threads at Daily Kos). Vulgar liberals are defined by their emotional affinity for state intervention in the market as an end in itself, and an aesthetic aversion to free markets in principle. They cling, despite all evidence, to an Arthur Schlesinger version of history in which corporate capitalism emerged spontaneously from a “laissez-faire market,” and the twentieth century interventionist state was motivated by the desire to restrain big business rather than to serve it.
On the libertarian side, such a common strategy would mean adopting a set of priorities (a revolutionary change for many) that recognizes some core constituency other than billionaires and giant corporations, and doesn’t dismiss the concerns of workers, consumers, tenants, racial minorities as the whining of lazy moochers. In practice, it would mean focusing on those aspects of the state that are fundamental to corporate power and class exploitation. Those secondary forms of state intervention, whose purpose is mainly to ameliorate the side-effects of corporate power and class exploitation, and to make life bearable for the rest of us, would be set aside for later.
On the liberal side, it would mean a policy of “first, do no harm.” It would mean agreeing to first eliminate the forms of state intervention that are contributing to the problem, and assess the results, before calling for additional state intervention to solve the problem. It would mean abandoning the traditional Rube Goldberg approach of liberalism, by which more and more layers of state interventionism have been added to correct the side-effects of previous layers of statism, instead of tearing out the statist roots of privilege.
The interesting thing is that, if they successfully pursue this common strategy, libertarians and liberals may find that many of the areas of disagreement that they’ve set aside for later wind up becoming moot. They may both find that, without the state’s thumb on the scale on behalf of the big guys, and with the market’s levelling effect on privilege and inequality, the social safety net may become so atrophied from disuse that it’s almost not worth the trouble of fighting over. As Charles Johnson argued, the destructive impact of a competitve market on corporate power and privilege, and the increased bargaining power of labor in a free market, would make the minimum wage “matter about as much as a law against selling pork-chops in Mecca— objectionable on principle, but mainly negligible as a strategic matter, due to a dearth of identifiable victims.”
April 10th, 2008 at 2:31 pm
One other potential area of policy agreement would be redistributive measures that could be simultaneously justified to liberals (and distributivists, by the way) in terms of some sort of patterned theory of justice (e.g. property should be widely distributed, rather than accumulated in a few hands), but justified to libertarians as a reallocation of property holdings as restitution for provable, antecedent aggressive acts by those being expropriated.
April 10th, 2008 at 2:33 pm
I wonder, Kevin, what about foreign policy? As you note, it can be shown that previous state efforts have propped up contemporary undesirable situations that are referred to as “free market”. But what of the vast portion of the globe where there’s been no successful development - state, market or otherwise?
The urge by both neo-conservatives and, as we know, progressives to uplift humanity via the state is a strong one. If it can be shown that withdrawing the state domestically, in a strategic and piecemeal fashion, would do wonders for the poor, what of the poor of the rest of the world, where there is really nothing to WITHDRAW to begin with?
Yes, colonialism contributed to many foreign ills, but often the places in the most dire need of help are so remote and impoverished that they scarcely served as any resource provider for colinialists, it at all. I’m thinking of places like Somalia and Sudan.
April 10th, 2008 at 3:12 pm
Araglin,
One thing that might fit the bill would be a tax policy that would suit the distributive justice views of at least a significant subset of libertarians, along with liberals. What I have in mind is shifting taxes off of labor and onto economic rents, resource extraction, and externalities. This would be the geolibs’ cup of tea, obviously. But in addition many mainstream libertarians, like the late Milton Friedman, accepted the Georgist argument to the extent that they considered a tax on land value to be the least harmful (i.e. least market distorting) form of tax. For left-leaning market anarchists like me, who at least consider the Georgist theory of common rights to land to be one plausible theory among many, it’s possible to treat the LVT as an intermediate step toward a stateless society with community collection of rent. And even if we aim at a Tuckerite system of property based on occupancy and use, there’s something to be said for Georgism as an intermediate stage in dismantling the state. Meanwhile, for liberals, such a collection of policies would promote the positive ends of conservation and efficient land use, compact urban development, and distributive land ownership.
Dain,
In much of the Third World, I think the state’s impact has been quite severe. To a considerable extent, the state has been quite active in stunting genuine development (e.g., by promoting an export- rather than consumption-based model of “development”). I’d dismantle the World Bank, IMF and WTO, and repeal the IP provisions of the Uruguay Round as a first step. Radically scaling back or eliminating international patent law would undercut the main weapon TNCs have for monopolizing the latest generation of production technology, preventing the emergence of native-owned competition, and permanently locking TW countries into the position of supplying raw materials and sweatshop labor. Also end Washington’s support for the collusive alliance between Third World landed oligarchies and Western corporate agribusiness. The U.S. has directly intervened, in more countries than you can count on both hands and feet, to stop or reverse land reforms and uphold the interests of landed oligarchs and latifundistas.
What the Third World needs isn’t a model based on hosting the export industry for Western markets, but a world in which people in both the West and Third World consume goods produced locally.
Leaving aside government policy, libertarians on an individual level can encourage the E.F. Schumacher/Village Earth model of development based on intermediate technology, and encourage independent labor unionism by Third World workers (along the lines of the Wobbly pamphlet “How to Fire Your Boss”).
April 10th, 2008 at 4:47 pm
Yea, there are a good number of even mainstream free market outfits discussing land rights for the poor, but too many of them rely on a Hernando de Soto form of top down, ex post individualized privatization.
I remember just such a case of this in South Africa (I think), wherein the state requested a single name attached to a parcel of land when in fact multiple people were considered owners by custom. In this case the very conflict property rights are supposed to overcome were in fact created by…allocating property rights. Even “spontaneous order” folks can be rather overly prescriptive.
April 10th, 2008 at 6:06 pm
Dain,
Your South African case reminds me of something I read somewhere about British colonial policy transforming people with very limited customary positions into full-blown landlords in the British sense. In some cases, a village headman was the closest thing available to a proxy for the village as communal owner of the land, and would up being transformed into a landlord. In other cases, like India, people who had simply been assigned responsibility for collecting taxes from the village communes under assorted native regimes were transformed into landlords. The authorities simply were unable to grasp the concept of communal ownership–pretty much the same thing that had prevailed in England itself, with the open-field system, into early modern times.
Although I’m not sure, I think Russian policy in collecting indemnity payments from the liberated serfs may have had a similar effect on communal ownership by the mir.
In any case, it’s interesting that this kind of village commune has been the almost universal pattern all around the world since the agricultural revolution, and has only ceased on most parts of the Old World and Third World when it was broken up by the state. In Israel under the Judges, it took the form of reversion of the land to the tribe, clan and family in the Jubilee year. In the early Roman Republic, plebians had customary rights of access to the public lands much like those associated with the commons in England. The Senate gave the nobles preferential access to these public lands and drove the peasantry into debt slavery, which was the root of most of the class wars recounted by Livy.
April 10th, 2008 at 9:01 pm
I couldn’t agree more with the comments here. Delightful. And I’m with Dain with respect to de Soto. As much as I love “land to the tillers”, I think his views could be disastrous. Japan’s land reform, for example, was one of the most successful on record–precisely because there were stern controls on the sale of land after the reform to make sure the situation didn’t simply revert to absentee landlordism.
April 10th, 2008 at 9:27 pm
Brutum,
Re the Japanese example, I’d like to see most federal and state land opened up to homesteading, but with covenants attached so that it’s governed by something like occupancy-and-use rules for all subsequent transfers.
De Soto gave a pretty skewed account of American land policy. The way he makes it sound, the government almost uniformly gave formal recognition to the property rights of squatters.
That leaves out a lot of inconvenient details like the many grants of tracts of hundreds of thousands of acres given out to favorites in colonial times (a governor of New York around the turn of the 18th century said such grants to thirty people accounted for around three-quarters of available land). Also the role of giant land companies like the Vandalia, controlled by influential figures like Washington, Franklin, etc., in preempting ownership of undeveloped land to the West. And the railroad land grants. Etc., etc., etc.
A lot closer to the truth is the backstory in one of my favorite movies, Matewan. It was the story of a mining town during the W.V. Coal Wars of the ’20s. The miners were evicted from the company town and set up tents outside the city limits. At one point an armed band of hill people came down and intervened when the mining companies’ goons tried to tear up the tent city. As one of the miners explained, the hill people had originally settled the fertile land in the area, but didn’t have lawyers for recording deeds. So when the mining company came in later with the lawyers, it claimed the land and drove the settlers into the hills. As a result, the hill people were well disposed toward the strikers. After the altercation with the deputies, one of the hill people told the miners: “You’uns are welcome to any rabbits or squirrels and suchlike. But any pigs you see is likely ourn, so we’ll take it kindly if you let ‘em be.”
April 10th, 2008 at 10:29 pm
I suspected as much of de Soto’s account of the US experience. Authors content to culpably misdescribe one nation’s economic history are rarely content to stop there. I’d been meaning to learn more about the US experience, and your comment gives me a lead to someday pursue. Thanks.
I greatly agree with your view on homesteading policy. Abstentee landlordism must be done away with.
The primary justification for restriction on land alienability immediately following the land reform in Japan was strong pressure under prevailing social norms in the rural areas for former tenants to give into demands of former landlords to return the land transfered via the land reform. There was great (and I think, quite reasonable) fear on the part of the government that the new tenants would be taken advantage of in a “market” right after the storm (land reform).
One wonders how the Chinese experience will go, where you have RDI ( http://www.rdiland.org/ ) and de Soto-types pushing for privatization of land, privatization of land, privatization of land. At present there are use rights of relatively long tenure, which, where there’s no local governmental corruption, people seem pretty happy with. Those in the rural areas who do want privatization seem to want it mostly as a way of counteracting local government corrupt land-grabs. They don’t necessarily want alienability, they want security in tenure. But then the de Soto-types and RDI etc. jump in to push ideological agenda that I’m not sure fits what the rural Chinese want or would be best off with.
April 10th, 2008 at 11:01 pm
liberals aren’t going to convince libertarians that government intervention is ever desirable
Aren’t you conflating libertarians with anarchists, when the majority are minarchists?
As for the rest of the world, I don’t consider it any of my business. I once had the kind of neo-liberal/neo-conservative idealism criticized by Greg Clark, believing that capitalism & liberal democracy would cure the world’s ails, but now I simply consider poverty to be the default and look for the least bad option (ending I.P laws and WTO/IMF along with the War on Drugs/Terror and agriculture subsidies are good ideas). If Bangladesh and Equatorial Guinea remain poor long after The Revolution I won’t fret about where we went wrong.
April 11th, 2008 at 12:59 am
TGGP,
You’re right, I spend so much time with market anarchists I forget that the libertarian movement as a whole doesn’t necessarily adhere to the nonagression principle (even though it’s still in the LP membership oath).
April 11th, 2008 at 10:52 am
Daniel Klein just calls the NAP a “maxim” not some crazy suicide pack or something. I call him wishy-washy.
April 11th, 2008 at 10:54 am
Whoops, %s/pack/pact/g
April 11th, 2008 at 6:42 pm
Kevin,
I wanted to respond to this when it first went up but I had to wait until I had the time to type a thoughtful reply. I think the problem of finding common ground between liberals and libertarians involves some issues that are more problematical than simply the question of what role, if any, state intervention should play in the economy. That’s obviously a big deal, given that both sides, not to mention the public at large, tends to think of economic matters through the paradigm of big business vs big government, lassez faire vs social democracy, left vs right and so on. In fact, you’ve done more than anyone else I know of to debunk that bit of cultural mythology concerning political economy (and I at least like to think I have a pretty good command of the literature on the subject).
But there’s some other issues as well that may have to do with the specific intellectual cultures of the two sides as much as their specific beliefs about economics. On the libertarian end, a real problem I see is that libertarians tend to function to a large degree as “ideology pushers”. There was some minor league Arizona politician some years ago who said: “You libertarians have a 24 carat gold idea-freedom-but you can’t give it away. Ever ask yourselves why?”
I think the answer is this “ideology pusher” characterization that I’m describing. For as long as I’ve been around libertarians (about 20 years and I’ve always been more a fellow traveler than a true believer), they’ve always presented themselves as “we have this philosophy, we have this body of theory we find impressive, and you should believe in it as strongly as we do.” The problem with that is that most people are not intellectuals nor are they that interested in ideology. People choose their political affilitations on the basis of their perceived self-interest in the short term rather than on the basis of ideas of “abstract liberty” (as Russell Kirk accused libertarians of holding).
Libertarians seem to me to be less interested in effective real world activism and more in functioning as a kind of philosophical society. That’s not “wrong” by itself, but it doesn’t really translate into a successful political force. Unfortunately, I have found this “ideology pusher” phenomenon to be even more common among radical or “left libertarians” than among the vulgar kind. For instance, on one of the left-libertarian lists some months back, I raised the pragmatic question of whether a libertarian should have defended the Weimar Republic against an imminent threat of seizure of power by the KPD or the NSDAP. For me, it’s quite obvious a liberal republic should be defended against vicious totalitarians. But some of my sparring partners insisted rather vehemently that, “hey, a state is a state”, meaning Weimar is just as good as National Socialism or vice versa. This kind of thinking strikes me as irrational and foolish, if not outright cultic. Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon in libertarian circles.
As for liberals, a real problem with the “left” (broadly defined) is they seem to be incapable of focusing on actual issues that can win people to their side. For instance, there’s an unpopular war going on right now. One would think this would be the Left’s issue. But the left is nowhere to be seen. The antiwar rallies that have taken place have been pathetic and clearly held for ulterior motives (with some exceptions perhaps). I’ve never seen a leftist action (well, not many) that could just focus on opposing a war, or supporting a strike, or something similar. Instead, every action had to become an all purposes action involving every left of center trendy cause of the day. It’s not enough for an antiwar group to oppose a war, it also has to been a feminist group, a gay rights groups, an ecology group, an anti-racist group, pro-gun control, anti-death penalty, factory farming, genetic engineering, pro-choice, and a living wage all rolled into one.
I know non-political people who’ve told me when they see a leftist demo it looks like a lot of confused nonsense, with people marching off in all sorts of different directions, carrying signs not related to the issue at hand, and generally making themselves look like fools.
The way successful politics is done in America is coalitions form around single issues that motivate lots of people, and then coalitions of single issue groups (”special interests”) that aren’t even necessarily related to one another form organized political fronts, either as parties or pressure groups.
The New Deal coalition that dominated US politics from the 30s to the 60s was an odd mix of business, labor, northern blacks and southern segregationists. That was no longer viable after the 60s, and then the Reagan Revolution (not all that revolutionary, IMO) came as a coalition of hawks, country clubbers, bible bangers, populists and libertarians. That seems to be losing its sustainability as well, probably because a combination of cultural populism and plutocracy is a scam that can only be run around the block so many times.
One thing I thought was instructive was the way Ron Paul was received by liberals and libertarians alike. There were certainly honest reasons why someone could oppose Ron Paul, but I thought it was interesting that so many libertarians attacked him for not being pure enough on 3 percent of the issues, while at the same time antiwar liberals wouldn’t endorse him because of his social conservatism (hey, who cares about killing half a million people when two gay guys can’t file a joint tax return). Interestingly some have observed that a new movement has come out of the Paul thing, a “post-paleo” movement that is more libertarian than conservative but still strongly rightward in content. Dan McCarthy describes it here:
http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/three_strategies_for_the_right/
And here’s the most relevant passage:
““Paleos”—by which I loosely mean individuals who are antiwar, believe in reasonable immigration restrictions, and have a strong preference for political and economic decentralization—”
In some ways, this perspective may be more compatible with good old fashioned class warfare than anything coming out of the orthodox camp of either liberals or libertarians. As I see it, there are lots of “class struggle” related issues that should probably be handled as a single issue and outside the mainstream of any of the political camps. Some things I’d like to see are:
1. A movement to call a nationwide strike among employees of fast food and superstore chains. Let America see what happens when Wal Mart and McDonald’s are shut down nationwide. The real power of the working class might be demonstrated.
2. A revolutionary tenants movement to take over tenant housing controlled by the state or by state protected landlords of the kind you outlined in your essay on slavery reparations.
3. A prisoners’ union of the kind some were agitating for in the 60s.
4. Opening federal and state land to homesteading the way you’ve written about in the past.
I suspect the majority of both liberals and libertarians might oppose such actions for various reasons. I tend to think such movements would have to develop from the bottom up out of the ranks of the lumpenproletariat, probably with the opposition of mainstream liberals, libertarians and conservatives alike.
I’ve seen two situations approximating this in my lifetime. The first was the so-called “LA Riots”, which included plenty of opportunistic petty crime, inter-ethnic conflict, and settling personal rivalries to be sure, but also included plenty of acts of expropriation of the class enemy and acts of retribution towards the state enemy.
The other was the “rightwing” militia movement a few years later. Both movements arose from the same source: attacks on the culture of the insurgents by agents of the state, the Rodney King beating in the former case and Waco in the latter case. Of course, mainstream society from far left to far right shit in their pants over both insurgencies, which is how it should be. I’d like to see them all shit some more.
Anyway, I guess my point is that the usefulness of both liberals and libertarians alike to a genuine class struggle is predicated on significant changes in the culture of both happening first.
April 11th, 2008 at 7:42 pm
I’ll post our tendency’s platform here as a curiosity.
http://attackthesystem.com/american-revolutionary-vanguard-twenty-five-point-program/
LOL! Maybe some of you can have fun picking this apart.
April 12th, 2008 at 12:37 am
Keith,
I agree that for many libertarians, the tendency you describe means rejecting concrete opportunities to increase freedom. The Randroids are almost a parody of the tendency: even when they agree with others on concrete policy issues, they refuse to cooperate with anyone who doesn’t base their position on the right philosophical principles. “I agree with everything you say, but I’ll fight to the death to stop you from saying it.” That was kind of my point. Libertarians should be pushing for freedom any time they can build a coalition for concrete improvements that they consider a high priority, even if their partners in the coalition aren’t philosophical libertarians.
April 12th, 2008 at 12:45 am
Your principles seem pretty good to me but the more sensible voice in my brain advises the last approach mentioned by Dan McCarthy: quietism.
April 12th, 2008 at 7:37 am
Here’s a couple of recent posts from the Left-Conservative blog discussing some of this a little bit further:
http://leftconservativeblog.blogspot.com/2008/04/strategy-for-right-look-left.html
http://leftconservativeblog.blogspot.com/2008/04/democrats-paleo-option.html
April 12th, 2008 at 8:23 am
Keith:
If you were a left-libertarian in Weimar Republic Germany (where there was a fairly substantial anarcho-syndicalist movement), you either resisted, fled, or were herded off into the concentration camps. Passivity was not an option. Like all other left organizations, it was totally destroyed by the Nazis. Thus it would not be a question to fight to preserve a failed state imposed by the allied powers after WW I, but one of actual life or death. Therefore, the question you posed really has no pragmatic value, since there could only be one choice.
In terms of libertarianism being largely an exercise in ideological platitudes, that’s not necessarily accurate. Agorism, for example, is a left-libertarian market anarchism that emphasizes action over words or even belief systems. The entrepreneur on the black or grey market is an active libertarian, notwithstanding whatever actual political beliefs he/she may harbor. “By your fruits” shall ye be judged. Murray Rothbard, for example, could never accept Agorist Market Anarchism because he found it ludicrous that, for example, the urban drug dealer high school dropout could be a better “practicing” libertarian than a neoclassical economics professor at an elite state university.
The Paleos argue that you need a singular (conservative) culture for libertarianism to work. This is the “Common Folk Beliefs” assertion. Leftists, on the other hand, seemingly rely on a “permanent class consciousness” to trigger and sustain a revolutionary framework. Both are these approaches are flawed. Game Theory demonstrates why people will defect from the behavior otherwise predicted by a purely dialectical treatment of class theory. “Common Folk Beliefs” is a non-starter at our current level of communications technology. Paleo’s end up advocating statist enforcement and restrictions on matters like immigration and cultural morality that’s a complete dead end and hardly libertarian–and furthermore hardly scales going into the future.
As I have posted before, I believe Konkin got it right by emphasizing counter-economics over ideological epiphany.
No offense, but your 25-point program is 24-points too many. “Counter-Economics” is sufficient. Informing all of us to your opinions as to who shall be recruited, what organizations should be formed, what objectives are to be pursued is great and all… but such is not up to you. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pursue your revolutionary ideals as you see fit, but it does imply that the counter-economy may not exactly follow your 25-point plan.
In practice, Konkin’s ideas have largely been borne out in the anarchist computing cloud(or “cyberspace”), where the State is so hopelessly ineffectual as an enforcement mechanism. However, they haven’t been borne out in “physical space,” where the State still maintains relevance as an enforcement mechanism. Even, in Zimbabwe, where counter-economics has effectively replaced the “white market,” one expects that sufficient political reform would be able to re-establish statist control. What I’ve concluded that there likely needs to be a “technological singularity” of sorts in biotech and nanotech, that rivals the advancements being made in the “computing cloud.” That will then effectively end the State. Technology is the anarchist’s best friend.
April 12th, 2008 at 3:49 pm
“If you were a left-libertarian in Weimar Republic Germany (where there was a fairly substantial anarcho-syndicalist movement), you either resisted, fled, or were herded off into the concentration camps. Passivity was not an option. Like all other left organizations, it was totally destroyed by the Nazis. Thus it would not be a question to fight to preserve a failed state imposed by the allied powers after WW I, but one of actual life or death. Therefore, the question you posed really has no pragmatic value, since there could only be one choice.”
Agreed, but my point was that some left-libertarians have argued there was no difference between the Republic and the Reich. Not exactly a wise outlook.
“The entrepreneur on the black or grey market is an active libertarian, notwithstanding whatever actual political beliefs he/she may harbor. “By your fruits” shall ye be judged. Murray Rothbard, for example, could never accept Agorist Market Anarchism because he found it ludicrous that, for example, the urban drug dealer high school dropout could be a better “practicing” libertarian than a neoclassical economics professor at an elite state university.”
Amen!! And I’ll say it again, Amen!! I’ve said before that everyone who operates in direct defiance of the state is a soldier for the revolution, whether they consciously recognize it or even if they personally give a damn about politics or not. Inner-city people selling drugs illegally or vagrants squatting abandoned houses or state owned land are much closer to being true anarchists than leftist college students agitating for national health care.
You know, an interesting and, for me, very enlightening experience I had some years ago was when I started to encounter these “rightwing” militia/survivalist people that were around in the 90s. I’d look at the things they did and said and think, “These folks aren’t rightwing, they’re anarchists.” They may have draped what they were doing in the accoutrements and terminology of conventional American right-wing populism or “conservatism”, because that’s all they really knew, but unlike most of what I had previously encountered dissident circles (I had been a child of the religious right, then a Chomskyite leftist, then a libertarian), these were folks who genuinely rejected the values of mainstream society altogether.
“As I have posted before, I believe Konkin got it right by emphasizing counter-economics over ideological epiphany.
No offense, but your 25-point program is 24-points too many. “Counter-Economics” is sufficient. Informing all of us to your opinions as to who shall be recruited, what organizations should be formed, what objectives are to be pursued is great and all… but such is not up to you. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pursue your revolutionary ideals as you see fit, but it does imply that the counter-economy may not exactly follow your 25-point plan.”
No offense taken. I think Konkin had it half right. I agree with his general outlook of expanding the non-state sector, including not only above ground alternative infrastructure but also the gray and black markets. Drug dealing gang members and illegal weapons-toting, tax resisting militiamen are much closer to being true anarchists than the majority of official anarchists or official libertarians. But while direct defiance and the building of an underground economy is important, there’s the issue of combating the state itself. That’s where what I call an “inside-outside” strategy comes in. There needs to be mainstream “reform” oriented groups who purpose is to politically defend the underground sector. I would also argue there will ultimately need to be revolutionary groups who engage the state directly (think an American version of Hezbollah drawn from the ranks of the lumpenproletariat and practicing leaderless resistance and fourth generation warfare).