My name is Kevin Carson. I’ve been invited to blog here, and I look forward to it, because I’ve been a regular reader of both Battlepanda and Unqualified Offerings for some time. One of my earliest contacts with Angelica was this post of hers: “Two Flavors of Libertarianism.” If you look in the comment thread, just about everybody in the left-libertarian blogosphere stopped by at some point.
My main gig is Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism. Things have slowed down there quite a bit, though, because I’m working on a book on anarchist organization theory that takes up most of my time. And Mutualist Blog’s turned into mainly an org theory blog when I do update it.
The general theme of this blog is the affinity, or even a possible coalition, of libertarian elements on the left and right. That’s very much my kind of thing. My background is in individualist anarchism, which is sort of a left-wing version of market anarchism (or a free market spin on libertarian socialism). So I’m sort of on the outer fringes of both free market libertarianism and socialism.
My path to libertarianism was pretty convoluted. I started out about twenty years ago as a sort of stuffy paleocon (Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver–you know the drill). I drifted into the agrarian-decentralist wing of paleoconservatism, what Clyde Wilson called “the Jeffersonian conservative tradition,” and got heavily into the Levellers and commonwealthmen, the antifederalists, the agrarians and distributists, and so forth (you know, all the Crunchy Con stuff). From there I stumbled across Kirkpatrick Sale’s Human Scale, discovered an affinity for libertarians and decentralists of the Left, and went on to Benjamin Tucker, Ralph Borsodi, Lewis Mumford, and Ivan Illich. Today I consider myself a Leftist and carry a red card from the Wobblies, but I still feel considerable affection for the homeschoolers and gun rights people on the Right. If there’s any hope for this country, it probably lies in a coalition of the libertarian Left and Right against the Corporate Center that currently dominates American politics.
Anyway, I know I’ll enjoy blogging here, and I hope you enjoy reading it at least some of the time.
This entry was posted on Thursday, March 6th, 2008 at 2:37 pm.
I like reading this. And not just because it will help illuminate part of the process by which left-libertarianism emerged.
It is also an echo to an earlier, freer period of the internet. It was much more spontaneous back then, people making websites and blogs all over the place; online role-playing; MMOs; writing (yes, writing) for Wikipedia. All in one experience.
Nowadays, just after reading a bit about the Situationists, it feels as if it has become a spectacle.
However, it is just as likely that it is me who is not participating.
Hi, I was a libertarian before the term became associated with the far right too. I'm in favor of a widely inclusive coalition of opposition groups with the first priority of restoring the Bill of Rights. I also favor ending interventionist foreign wars, ending the ridiculous war on drugs, and generally removing all governmental authority over what one does with ones own body. I do believe that employee ownership, worker self-management and a spirit of voluntary cooperation and egalitarianism can compete with, undermine, and render obsolete the totalitarian institutions of Global Corporatism and authoritarian capitalism. I hope to be a regular visitor here, and when I feel I have something to contribute I will. The role of the libertarian and anarchist left in the history of class struggle in America is a rich one, and is all too often neglected, by the history books and the ideologues of the right and the left.