The Benjamin Netanyahu on display in the days before and after Tuesday’s Israeli election is the same one who has been in power all these years. Right along, he was there for all to see, so no one should have been surprised by his performance. I seriously doubt that anyone really is surprised. Americans who slavishly toe the Israeli and Israel Lobby line may act surprised, but that’s really just their embarrassment at having to answer for the prime minister of the “State of the Jewish People.” (If Israel is indeed the State of the Jewish People, it follows that the lobby may properly be called the Jewish Lobby, though that seems to offend some people. The term need not suggest that every person identifying as Jewish is pro-Israel or pro-Likud. I have known religious Jews who are severely anti-Israel and anti-Zionist.)

Democrats especially are in a bind. They can’t afford to distance themselves from Netanyahu and alienate Jewish sources of campaign donations, yet they are visibly uncomfortable with his so openly racist fear-mongering about Israeli Arab voters — “The right-wing government is in danger. Arab voters are heading to the polling stations in droves. Left-wing NGOs are bringing them in buses.” The Democrats’ defense of that ugly appeal as merely a way to get the vote out is disgraceful. (Imagine something equivalent happening in the United States.)

Democrats are also nervous about Netanyahu’s declaration that no Palestinian state will be established as long as he heads the Israeli government. (His post-election attempt to walk it back somewhat was not well-received.)

Life was so much simpler for people like Hillary Clinton when Netanyahu didn’t say things like that in public. Meanwhile, hawkish Republicans — that’s redundant — are unfazed.

For anyone paying close attention, Netanyahu’s racism and ruthless opportunism are not news at all. A few years ago a candid video from 2001 surfaced in which he cynically described Americans as “easily moved,” i.e., manipulated. The Israelis, he said, can do what they want with the Palestinians because the Americans “won’t get in their way.” These are the same Americans who are forced to send Israel $3 billion a year in military assistance so that it can regularly bomb and embargo Palestinians in the Gaza Strip prison camp and oppress Palestinians in a slightly more subtle manner in the shrinking West Bank and East Jerusalem.

With Netanyahu, you really do know what you get, which arguably makes him a better choice to run Israel than the left-of-center Zionist Union because the Laborites share most of Likud’s beliefs about the Palestinians; they’re just more circumspect and therefore more comforting to so-called Americans “liberals.” Saying you support negotiations toward a Palestinian state is not the same as actually being for a viable Palestinian state. Palestinians have little left of the walled-off West Bank and East Jerusalem because of Jewish-only towns built over the years by the two dominant parties, Likud and Labor. And Gaza is a bombed-out disaster area. (Even for many two-state advocates, justice is not the concern. Rather, demographic circumstances make one state untenable for these pragmatists because out-and-out apartheid, which the world would frown on, would be seen as the only alternative to a genuinely democratic state with a Jewish minority. The one-staters have their own solution to the Palestinian problem, the one used in 1948: transfer.)

The prime minister is a sophist extraordinaire; he says whatever he needs to say to gain his objective of the moment. When he ruled out a Palestinian state before the election, in a bid to shore up his right-wing base, he was interpreted as reversing a commitment he made in 2009, after he had returned to power, the same year that Barack Obama took office. The campaign reversal put Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry in a most uncomfortable position, since they had made the fraudulent “peace process” a top priority, until talks broke down last spring, a failure they pinned at least in part on Netanyahu. Once the election was over and some reconciliation with the U.S. government was required, Netanyahu “clarified” his remarks, saying his 2009 position had not really changed; only the environment has.

I don’t want a one-state solution. I want a sustainable, peaceful two-state solution, but for that, circumstances have to change. I was talking about what is achievable and what is not achievable. To make it achievable, then you have to have real negotiations with people who are committed to peace.

I never changed my speech in Bar Ilan University six years ago calling for a demilitarised Palestinian state that recognises the Jewish state. What has changed is the reality.

What has changed? Netanyahu probably has a few things in mind. The Palestinians reject a new demand that they formally recognize Israel as the state of the Jewish people (everywhere). Decades ago the Palestinian leadership accepted Israel’s existence within the pre-1967-war borders — that is, it relinquished claim to 78 percent of pre-1948 Palestine. (Even Hamas has said it was willing to defer to the secular Fatah and the Palestinian Authority). But in a goalpost-moving action, Netanyahu recently added the new demand, something he knows the Palestinian leadership cannot accept if it is to maintain legitimacy (or whatever legitimacy it still has). Such a concession would be prejudicial to Israel’s non-Jewish Arab citizens and would favor Jews who have never set foot in the country over native-born Palestinian Arabs who were driven out of their ancestral home and who are forbidden to return.

In other words, Netanyahu knowingly placed an impossible precondition on the negotiations. But it is he who has insisted there be no preconditions whatever. When the Palestinians demanded that Israel stop seizing Palestinian-owned land on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem to make room for Jewish-only neighborhoods, Netanyahu refused on the grounds that this was a precondition. (The Palestinians relented and gave talks a chance, no doubt under American pressure.) But it was not so much a precondition as a recognition that the land being seized was precisely the subject of the negotiation. In what universe is it reasonable for two parties to negotiate over territory while one is busy annexing it and building permanent settlements?

It is this sort of thing that exposes Netanyahu’s (and most Israelis’) bad faith regarding the Palestinians. He sabotages the “peace process,” then blames the Palestinians for failing to be an earnest partner for peace. (Now he’s trying to sabotage multilateral talks with Iran. See a pattern?)

Netanyahu may also be saying the timing is wrong for a Palestinian state — which would be a rump state completely at the Israeli government’s mercy — because ISIS is creating turmoil in nearby Iraq and Syria, and Iran is expanding its influence in the region. The sophistry here is that much trouble in the Middle East can be traced to Israel’s injustice against the Palestinians and belligerence toward its neighbors, especially the repeated devastating invasions of southern Lebanon. Ethnic-cleansing, massacres perpetrated by Zionist militias at the time of independence, unrelenting occupation of the West Bank since 1967, the repression and impoverishment of the Gazans, and the routine humiliation of Israel’s Arab second-class citizens have created deep grievances that are only made worse by Netanyahu and those who support him.

This of course has spilled over onto the United States, since Democratic and Republican regimes stand by Israel no matter what and no matter how many times its government humiliates American rulers. When former Gen. David Petraeus told a Senate Armed Services Committee in 2010 that the U.S.-Israeli relationship “foments anti-American sentiment,” he was merely repeating what many other officials had acknowledged before. “Meanwhile,” Petraeus added, “al-Qaeda and other militant groups exploit that anger to mobilize support. The conflict also gives Iran influence in the Arab world through its clients, Lebanese Hizballah and Hamas….” The attacks of 9/11 were in part motivated by anger over America’s relationship with Israel. Osama bin Laden’s 1996 declaration of war makes clear that this relationship was at the heart of his hostility toward the United States. Mohammed Atta, one of the 9/11 hijackers, joined the cause after Israel’s 1996 assault on Lebanon, James Bamford writes in The Shadow Factory. (Open discussion of these facts is discouraged by spurious charges of anti-Semitism against anyone who raises it.)

So, again, Netanyahu cites reasons for not making peace that he himself helped create or is now perpetuating. That he is taken seriously in American politics is a testament to the power of the Lobby.

Netanyahu’s apparent reelection and the egregious circumstances under which it was accomplished should prompt a reconsideration of the special relationship. Although it should have happened long ago, now would be a good time for the U.S. government to end the relationship and start seeing Israel as a rogue and aggressor nuclear power. (Of course the United States is hardly one to talk.) No more excuses. The Palestinians had nothing to do with the Holocaust. Let’s have one moral standard for all.

Not that I think it has a chance of happening, but the U.S. government should cease all taxpayer aid to the Israeli government, stop vetoing UN Security Council resolutions that condemn Israel for its daily violations of human rights, and stop impeding Palestinian efforts to set up an independent country (with membership in the International Criminal Court, etc.). The United States should withdraw from the Middle East and enter into a detente with Iran (which is not developing a nuclear weapon). This would have an immediate dividend: we would not be driven to war with Iran by Netanyahu, the Lobby, and its neoconservative Republican and Democratic stooges in Congress.

In an anti-libertarian rant titled “You’re Not the Boss of Me! Why Libertarianism Is a Childish Sham,” David Masciotra charges that libertarianism amounts to the petulant selfishness of a child who resents all restrictions on his or her behavior.

Masciotra conveniently focuses on libertarians’ saying “you have no right to impose stuff on us,” while ignoring its corollaries “we have no right to impose stuff on you” and “you have no right to impose stuff on them.” But then it’s a bit harder to spin the latter two as childish selfishness.

Judging from what he writes and where he writes it, I reckon Masciotra fancies himself a man of the left. There was a time when “Dump the Bosses Off Your Back” was a popular leftist slogan. But the idea of a society without bosses seems to carry no charm for Masciotra.

It’s also telling that Masciotra sees libertarian opposition to being bossed as in tension with “bonds of empathy and ties of solidarity.” Apparently, for Masciotra empathy and solidarity are impossible among equals, and can exist only between benevolent shepherds and their docile, subservient flocks. Libertarians, by contrast, see empathy and solidarity as realized in their fullest and healthiest form between free and equal persons in voluntary, uncoerced, unbossed association.

It seems a safe bet that anyone who ridicules resentment against bosses either is a boss, or aims to be a boss, or wants to curry favour with the bosses. But here at C4SS, our attitude toward bosses — be they politicians and bureaucrats, or corporate beneficiaries of state privilege — is: dump ’em. In a truly libertarian world, no one will be the boss of anyone else.

Andrew Bacevich discusses the national insecurity state.

Melvin A. Goodman discusses the CIA’s double standard.

Ahmad Barqawi discusses Libya, ISIS, and the luxury of hindsight.

Roger Annis discusses Ukraine’s extreme right.

Logan Albright discusses private enterprise vs free enterprise.

Laurence M. Vance discusses what conservatives get wrong about healthcare.

A. Barton Hinkle discusses ISIS, communism, and the lure of utopianism.

Lucy Steigerwald discusses for profit prisons and the War on Drugs.

Heather Gray discusses the militarization of American police forces and foreign policy.

Jim Lobe discusses the message behind the Senate GOP letter to Iran.

Jeff Mackler discusses Obama’s new “War on Terrorism”.

Sheldon Richman discusses the lust for war with Iran.

Andrew Cockburn discusses why Obama’s strategy against the Islamic State will fail.

Arun Gupta discusses how ISIS became the face of evil.

Kevin Carson discusses treason.

Sheldon Richman discusses a critique of libertarianism.

Glenn Greenwald discusses whether Obama’s sanctions on Venezuela are really motivated by human rights or not.

Justin Raimondo discusses whether Venezuela is a threat to U.S. national security.

Ryan McMaken discusses taxation and the draft.

Michael S. Rozeff discusses whether Russian aggression in the Ukraine occurred.

David Gordon discusses a book on Lincoln.

Richard M. Ebeling discusses business and corruption.

Peter Maass discusses atrocities committed by U.S. trained Iraqi forces.

Steve Horowitz discusses using constitutional protections for liberty friendly purposes.

Thomas L. Knapp discusses a potential war with Iran.

Daniel Larison discusses the case for an unnecessary war with Iran.

Conor Friedersdorf discusses the lack of conservative outrage over Ferguson.

Josh Harkinson discusses right-wing Israeli settlers and U.S. subsidies.

Scott Shackford discusses how Terry Pratchett made him a libertarian.

William Pfaff discusses the Ukraine as a foreign policy disaster

We must face the fact that criticism of the libertarian philosophy in the mass media will most likely misrepresent its target, making the commentary essentially worthless. That’s painfully clear from what critics publish almost weekly on self-styled left-wing and progressive websites. How refreshing it would be for someone to set forth the strongest case for libertarianism before attempting to eviscerate it. Is the failure to do so a sign of fear that the philosophy is potentially appealing to a great many people?

The latest cheap shot is David Masciotra’s piece at Alternet, “‘You’re Not The Boss of Me!’ Why Libertarianism Is a Childish Sham.” As the title indicates, the upshot of the piece is that only a child would wish not to be subject to the arbitrary will of others. Thus Masciotra has disguised a brief for authoritarianism as a plea for communitarianism.

Reading the article, I find it it hard to believe that Masciotra consulted anything more than an essay or two by a high-school senior or perhaps a college freshman with no grasp whatever of the long, rich liberal tradition from which the modern libertarian philosophy is derived. In other words, our author makes no attempt to take on the strongest case for libertarianism. Instead, he does what so many of his allies do: take the easy way out, counting on his readers’ confirmation bias to immunize him against skepticism. Masciotra quotes not one libertarian, though he gets in is the obligatory slam at the standard caricature of Ayn Rand — “the rebel queen of their icy kingdom, villifying [sic] empathy and solidarity” — as though she were the first and last word on libertarianism. He seems unaware that substantial libertarian critiques of Rand abound, not to mention that Rand’s thought is more complex than he indicates. (And no, Mr. Masciotra, Scott Walker and Gordon Gekko are not libertarians; their views have no relevance to this political philosophy.)

So what does Masciotra have to say? Let’s sample his “critique”:

• Libertarians believe they are real rebels, because they’ve politicized the protest of children who scream through tears, “You’re not the boss of me.” The rejection of all rules and regulations, and the belief that everyone should have the ability to do whatever they want, is not rebellion or dissent. It is infantile naïveté.

This is a typical misrepresentation: libertarians reject all rules and regulations; they demand the freedom to do “whatever they want.” I wonder if Masciotra’s failure to qualify “rules and regulations” with the word government is an innocent oversight. Or is he trying to sneak something by his uninitiated readers? Obviously, libertarians believe that each person’s life, liberty, and justly acquired property should be respected as essentially inviolable. (Emergencies may create exceptions with respect to property.) Libertarians also advocate freedom of contract. All of that amounts to a web of rules and regulations that constrain the individual’s conduct. When libertarians say the equivalent of “You’re not the boss of me,” they are saying that no one may properly threaten or use physical force to compel them do anything they have a demonstrable right to not do or compel them not to do anything that they have a demonstrable right to do.

• Opposition to any conception of the public interest and common good, and the consistent rejection of any opportunity to organize communities in the interest of solidarity, is not only a vicious form of anti-politics, it is affirmation of America’s most dominant and harmful dogmas.

If Masciotra had bothered to explore the multidisciplinary libertarian literature, he would have quickly learned how ridiculous this is. He seems ignorant of such luminaries in the history of (classical) liberalism as Adam Smith, Frédéric Bastiat, Thomas Hodgskin, Carl Menger, Herbert Spencer, Benjamin R. Tucker, Ludwig von Mises, and F. A. Hayek — not to mention contemporary left-libertarians such as Gary Chartier, Roderick Long, Kevin Carson, and Charles Johnson — because to read these thinkers is to realize that for serious liberals and libertarians, community and solidarity are indispensable to human flourishing. To conflate methodological and ethical individualism (specifically, eudaimonism) with atomistic individualism is to confess an unfamiliarity with the libertarianism. (For details, see my “Tackling Straw Men Is Easier than Critiquing Libertarianism.”)

Radical libertarianism, especially its left-market-anarchist variety, is not anti-politics, broadly speaking. As Long writes in “Market Anarchism as Constitutionalism” (PDF):

Anarchy thus represents the extension, not the negation, of constitutionalism. Instead of thinking of anarchy as a situation in which government has been squeezed down to nothingness, it might be more helpful – at least for minarchists – to think of anarchy as a situation in which government has been extended to include everybody. This is what Gustave de Molinari, the founder of market anarchism, meant when he wrote, in 1884: “The future thus belongs neither to the absorption of society by the State, as the communists and collectivists suppose, nor to the suppression of the State, as the [non-market] anarchists and nihilists dream, but to the diffusion of the State within society.”

…anarchy is the completion, not the negation, of the rule of law. Anarchy “comes not to destroy but to fulfil the law.”

Libertarians favor an environment in which the widest variety of communities may freely be organized — but they believe that only voluntary communities are legitimate communities.

Back to Masciotra:

• The disasters of reducing life, the governance of affairs, and the distribution of resources to such a shallow standard [viz., “how much money will it bring in?”] leaves wreckage where among the debris one can find human bodies.

I and the libertarians I know would agree. It’s another gross caricature to hold that libertarians reduce all of life to money. Certainly the libertarians influenced by the Austrian school of economics would laugh at this notion. Money is desired only because it facilitates the achievement of one’s objectives in life under conditions of scarcity, objectives that are necessarily embedded in social existence. That is, money is not an end but a means. It makes mutually beneficial exchange easier that it would be, and exchange is an important and desirable form of social cooperation.

Moreover, libertarians, and anyone else who appreciates how markets unimpeded by privilege work, understand that profit is a sign that producers have transformed scarce resources from a less useful form to a more useful form in the eyes of consumers. In other words, in freed markets, money returns signify and reward services rendered to others. (See my “Bastiat on the Socialization of Wealth” and “Monopoly and Aggression.”) To the extent this is not true, we find corporatist privileges dispensed by the state.

• Competitive individualism, and the perversion of personal responsibility to mean social irresponsibility, is what allows for America to limp behind the rest of the developed world in providing for the poor and creating social services for the general population.

People are harmed not by free competition, which benefits workers and consumers, but by competition-suppressing privileges bestowed on the ruling elite by the state. These include so-called intellectual property (patents and copyright), myriad burdens to self-employment and small-scale worker-owned enterprises (licensing, permitting, zoning, etc.), and more. Freed markets — void of all privilege — align personal and social responsibility though the libertarian nonaggression obligation. One would not be free to foul the air or water, for example, because other people’s rights would be violated. As for providing for the poor, not only would there be fewer poor in a world without ruling-classes and state impediments to personal advancement, but short-run difficulties could be overcome through mutual-aid societies and labor organizations unencumbered by special-interest regulation and red tape. Government welfare programs are at best efforts to ameliorate ills the government itself causes. (For how freed markets achieve what state socialists say they want, see my “Free-Market Socialism.”)

• Who then are the libertarians rebelling against? The most powerful sector of the society is corporate America, and it profits and benefits most from the deregulatory and anti-tax measures libertarians champion. That sector of society also happens to own the federal government.

I can’t disagree. But note that deregulation and (targeted) tax cutting are not the same as wholesale repeal of corporate privileges. Quite the contrary, deregulation often amounts to expanding previously granted privileges. The remedy here is not to maintain or increase regulation, but rather to eliminate the privileges. It is odd that this is lost on so-called progressives. Their reforms empower bureaucrats (further), when they should be liberating individuals. That’s another kind of trickle-down process to be rejected.

• Libertarians proclaim an anti-government position, but they are only opposing the last measures of protection that remain in place to prevent the government from full mutation into an aristocracy. By advocating for the removal of all social programs, libertarians are not rebelling, as much as they are reinforcing the prevailing ethos of “bootstrap” capitalism. The poor are responsible for their plight, and therefore deserve no sympathy or assistance.

The author’s ignorance, again, is glaring. Had he taken on the strongest case made by libertarians (in my view, that’s the left-libertarian case grounded in eudaimonism), he would know that 1) they oppose all aristocratic measures no matter how well established, 2) demand repeal of corporate privileges and subsidies before the repeal of programs for the least well-off, and 3) do not believe that poor people are generally responsible for their own plight. The least well-off deserve sympathy for being victims of the ruling class, but more than that, they deserve freedom from the ruling class and its executive committee, the state.

• When children yell “you’re not the boss of me” they believe they are launching a rebellion against the household establishment, but they are conforming to the codes of behavior visible among all children. Libertarians are attempting to practice the same political voodoo – transforming conformity into rebellion – without realizing that their cries for freedom coalesce with their childlike culture.

The essential matter is not conformity versus rebellion, but freedom versus aggression. If Masciotra sees the demand for freedom as childish, that says more about him than about libertarianism. Meek acceptance of authoritarianism is not a sign of maturity.

• [Philosopher Charles] Taylor complicates the picture [of self-actualization in The Ethics of Authenticity] by adding the elemental truth of individuality and community that personal freedom is empty and meaningless without connections to “horizons of significance.” That beautiful phrase captures the essentiality of developing bonds of empathy and ties of solidarity with people outside of one’s own individual pursuits, and within a larger social context. Neighborhoods, religious institutions, political parties, advocacy organizations, charities, and social justice groups all qualify as “horizons of significance”, and the connections that arise out of those horizons inevitably producs [sic] politics of communal ethics and public responsibility, in addition to private liberty.

The libertarians I have been citing would agree, except as anarchists we’d strike political parties off the list. Masciotra is still stuck on his caricature.

• Defending and championing selfish indifference to collective interest and need conforms not only to the mainstream American practice of social neglect, but also to the most basic and brutish impulse of humanity’s mammalian origins. The rebel searches for higher ground. The conformist crawls through the shallow end of the swamp.

By now, the reader can anticipate what I want to say, so I’ll leave it at this: if Masciotra is concerned about the American practice of social neglect, he might ask why the corporatist Leviathan discharges social responsibility so deplorably, and how in its absence such responsibility would to fall on us directly as members of communities. In other words, government crowds out mutual aid and social cooperation — and does a rotten job to boot.

When will such critics finally understand that serious libertarians want to abolish aggression — especially the systemic aggression that defines the state — precisely so that we all may flourish by living fully human lives in fully human communities? (As for the argument that all political philosophies, libertarianism included, entail the use of aggression, see this.) This libertarianism is about self-actualization, peaceful social cooperation, mutual aid, and respect. If critics want to debunk libertarianism, they will have to debunk that.

Robert Parry discusses risking nuclear war for the sake of Ukraine.

Thomas Harrington discusses the aftermath of the Kosovo intervention.

Eric Margolis discusses the Hitler path.

Ajamu Nangwaya discusses the struggle for liberation in Haiti.

Ron Jacobs discusses an assassination carried out by Pinochet’s forces.

Andrew Levine discusses Obama and potential war with Russia.

Gene Healy discusses a book on the national security state.

Patrick Cockburn discusses the coming attack on Mosul.

Dan Sanchez discusses war, terror, and the ethics of execution.

Gilbert Mercier discusses the U.S.military and NATO sustained empire.

Anthony Gregory reviews a libertarian book on the Civil War.

Jacob G. Hornberger discusses U.S. policy towards Venezuela.

Medea Benjamin discusses 10 reasons to cheer AIPAC’S demise.

Ivan Eland discusses how the U.S. government makes the problem of terrorism worse.

Tom Engelhardt discusses his war on terror.

Laurence M. Vance discusses Heritage Foundation conservative proposals.

Sheldon Richman discusses Netanyahu’s potential war on Iran.

Brian Wilson discusses the fallacy of limited government.

Jacob G. Hornberger discusses the drug war and a bigger police state.

Sheldon Richman discusses the War of 1812 and statism.

Uri Avnery discusses Bibi’s speech to Congress.

Connor Kilpatrick interviews Marie Gottschalk on the prison state.

Andrew Cockburn discusses a drone strike that murdered innocent civilians.

Wendy McElroy discusses rights, morality, and the state.

Gareth Porter discusses the alleged Iranian threat to Israel.

Arnold Oliver discusses the U.S. backed 1950’s coup in Iran.

Jack Perry discusses the logic behind U.S. wars.

Stanton Peele discusses drug addiction and its causes.

Lucy Steigerwald discusses ISIS, art, and barbarism.

Nelson Hultberg discusses Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard.

Center for a Stateless Society Senior Fellow and Molinari Institute President Roderick T. Long recently gave a presentation on Left Libertarianism for the Center of Ethics and Public Policy in Duluth, Minnesota.

You can follow along with Roderick T. Long and his PowerPoint slides (download): http://praxeology.net/radical-leftist-REV.pptx

<< Back to the Market Anarchism FAQ page

Sharon Presley discusses modern mutual aid.

David S. D’Amato discusses free love, Angela Heywood, and Ezra Heywood.

Jesse Walker discusses the politics of American Sniper.

Thomas L. Knapp discusses Rudy Giuliani and loving America.

Patrick Barron discusses political and economic freedom.

George H. Smith discusses how treason and heresy are related.

Jonathan Woodrow Martin discusses atrocities committed by the Iraqi government.

Paul Street discusses Hollywood’s service to empire.

Richard M. Ebeling discusses the sovereignty of consumers.

Laurence M. Vance discusses sniper theology.

Laurence M. Vance discusses the internet solution to solicitation.

Jeffrey Tucker discusses the new libertarian movement.

Gary Chartier discusses forced vaccination.

Dan Sanchez discusses how war is the birth of the state.

Binoy Kampmark discusses wet dreams about Winston Churchill.

Joseph Margulies discusses another week in the War on Terror.

Ivan Eland discusses the president’s excessive war power.

Nick Gillespie discusses ending the Department of Homeland Security.

Sheldon Richman discusses how domestic fear is the price of empire.

Ramzy Baroud discusses why the U.S. take on Middle East violence must change.

W. T. Whitney Jr. discusses U.S. interventionism in Colombia.

Margaret Kimberly discusses media silence on Libya.

Dylan Delikta discusses ideologies and idols.

Jacob G. Hornberger discusses ISIS and the national security state scam.

George H. Smith discusses free thought and Christian persecution of so called heretics.

John Pilger discusses the modern day rise of fascism.

Horace G. Campbell discusses the situation in Libya.

Robert Fantina discusses terrorism, Palestine, and the U.S.

Lucy Steigerwald discusses the black site in Chicago used by police.

Dear C4SS Supporters,

It’s been a great month at the Center!

In February, I made 37,311 submissions of op-eds by our authors to 2,588 media outlets worldwide. That’s a little off my current goal of 40,000 submissions, but not for lack of content. It’s just that most of our op-eds were “US-centric” rather than of global interest. I’ll be encouraging our authors to cast a wider net across those imaginary lines that politicians draw on the ground to look for commentary topics.

My usual goal (for the last year or so) for pickups and mentions is 50. Last month we hit 60. This month, 70!

Of those, 68 were pickups of our material by “mainstream” or popular political media. The other two were mentions on Bloomberg — per Alexa, the 345th most popular web site in the world and ranked 135th most popular in the US — by David Weigel, who covered the 2015 International Students for Liberty Conference: “Edward Snowden and Ron Paul Kick Off Libertarian Student Conference With a Little Kerfuffle About Russia,” and “Bow Ties and Slam Poetry: This Is Libertarianism in 2015.”

Of course there’s been some controversy about the presence and actions of people associated (and in some cases not associated) with C4SS at that conference. If you haven’t read all about it yet and want to, Google is your friend.

I tend to focus my activities at C4SS on audiences outside the movement, so I’m not going to opine here on the details of the intra-movement arguments about this. But what strikes me about the whole thing is the old saying attributed to Gandhi: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

We just got name-checked in major media as libertarian thought leaders, at least among the student activist crowd, and the follow-up ruckus hasn’t been humorous. So to the extent that left market anarchism is competing with other schools of thought for mindshare both within the libertarian movement and outside it, it looks like we’re at the “fight” stage.  And to the extent that that second article reflects the views and interests of younger libertarians,  it looks like we’re winning the fight for the minds of the movement’s next generation (who will be the ones taking libertarian ideas out into the world at large for the next 50 years or so).

So, like I said, great month. With your support, we are shifting the debate both inside and outside the movement. And with your support, we’ll continue to do so.

Yours in liberty,
Tom Knapp
Media Coordinator
Center for a Stateless Society

Objectivist scholar Chris Sciabarra, in his brilliant book Total Freedom, called for a “dialectical libertarianism.” By dialectical analysis, Sciabarra means to “grasp the nature of a part by viewing it systemically — that is, as an extension of the system within which it is embedded.” Individual parts receive their character from the whole of which they are a part, and from their function within that whole.

This means it is a mistake to consider any particular form of state intervention in isolation, without regard to the role it plays in the overall system. (See Sciabarra’s “Dialectics and Liberty, The Freeman, September 2005.)

Another libertarian, blogger Arthur Silber, contrasts dialectical libertarianism with what he calls “atomistic libertarianism,” whose approach is to “focus on the basic principles involved, but with scant (or no) attention paid to the overall context in which the principles are being analyzed. In this manner, this approach treats principles like Plato’s Forms. . . .” Atomistic libertarians argue “as if the society in which one lives is completely irrelevant to an analysis of any problem at all.”

To determine the function a particular form of state intervention serves in the structure of state power, we must first ask what has been the historical objective of the state. This is where libertarian class analysis comes in.

The single greatest work I’m aware of on libertarian class theory is Roderick Long’s article, “Toward a Libertarian Theory of Class” (Social Philosophy & Policy, Summer 1998). Long categorizes ruling-class theories as either “statocratic” or “plutocratic,” based on the respective emphasis they place on the state apparatus and the plutocracy (the wealthy “private-sector” beneficiaries of government intervention) as components of the ruling class.

The default tendency in mainstream libertarianism is a high degree of statocracy, to the point not only of (quite properly) emphasizing the necessary role of state coercion in enabling “legal plunder” (Frédéric Bastiat’s term) by the plutocracy, but of downplaying the significance of the plutocracy even as beneficiaries of statism. This means treating the class interests associated with the state as ad hoc and fortuitous. Although statocratic theory treats the state (in Franz Oppenheimer’s phrase) as the organized political means to wealth, it still tends to view government as merely serving the exploitative interests of whatever assortment of political factions happens to control it at any given time. This picture of how the state works does not require any organic relation between the various interest groups controlling it at any time, or between them and the state. It might be controlled by a disparate array of interest groups, including licensed professionals, rent-seeking corporations, farmers, regulated utilities, and big labor; the only thing they have in common is that they happen to be currently the best at latching onto the state.

Murray Rothbard’s position was far different. Rothbard, Long argues, saw the state as controlled by “a primary group that has achieved a position of structural hegemony, a group central to class consolidation and crisis in contemporary political economy. Rothbard’s approach to this problem is, in fact, highly dialectical in its comprehension of the historical, political, economic, and social dynamics of class.”

I have argued in the past that the corporate economy is so closely bound up with the power of the state, that it makes more sense to think of the corporate ruling class as a component of the state, in the same way that landlords were a component of the state under the Old Regime. Blogger Brad Spangler used the analogy of a gunman and bagman to illustrate the relationship:

Let’s postulate two sorts of robbery scenarios.

In one, a lone robber points a gun at you and takes your cash. All libertarians would recognize this as a micro-example of any kind of government at work, resembling most closely State Socialism.

In the second, depicting State Capitalism, one robber (the literal apparatus of government) keeps you covered with a pistol while the second (representing State allied corporations) just holds the bag that you have to drop your wristwatch, wallet and car keys in. To say that your interaction with the bagman was a “voluntary transaction” is an absurdity. Such nonsense should be condemned by all libertarians. Both gunman and bagman together are the true State.

Given this perspective, it doesn’t make much sense to consider particular proposals for deregulating or cutting taxes without regard to the role the taxes and regulations play in the overall structure of state capitalism. That’s especially true considering that most mainstream proposals for “free market reform” are generated by the very class interests that benefit from the corporate state.

No politico-economic system has ever approximated total statism, in the sense that “everything not forbidden is compulsory.” In every system there is a mixture of compulsory and discretionary behavior. The ruling class allows some amount of voluntary market exchange within the interstices of a system whose overall structure is defined by coercive state intervention. The choice of what areas to leave to voluntary exchange, just as much as of what to subject to compulsory regulation, reflects the overall strategic picture of the ruling class. The total mixture of statism and market activity will be chosen as most likely, in the estimation of the ruling class, to maximize net exploitation by the political means.

Primary and Secondary Interventions

Some forms of state intervention are primary. They involve the privileges, subsidies, and other structural bases of economic exploitation through the political system. This has been the primary purpose of the state: the organized political means to wealth, exercised by and for a particular class of people. Some forms of intervention, however, are secondary. Their purpose is stabilizing, or ameliorative. They include welfare-state measures, Keynesian demand management, and the like, whose purpose is to limit the most destabilizing side-effects of privilege and to secure the long-term survival of the system.

Unfortunately, the typical “free market reform” issuing from corporate interests involves eliminating only the ameliorative or regulatory forms of intervention, while leaving intact the primary structure of privilege and exploitation.

The strategic priorities of principled libertarians should be just the opposite: first to dismantle the fundamental, structural forms of state intervention, whose primary effect is to enable exploitation, and only then to dismantle the secondary, ameliorative forms of intervention that serve to make life bearable for the average person living under a system of state-enabled exploitation. As blogger Jim Henley put it, remove the shackles before the crutches.

To welcome the typical “free market” proposals as “steps in the right direction,” without regard to their effect on the overall functioning of the system, is comparable to the Romans welcoming the withdrawal of the Punic center at Cannae as “a step in the right direction.” Hannibal’s battle formation was not the first step in a general Carthaginian withdrawal from Italy, and you can be sure the piecemeal “privatizations,” “deregulations,” and “tax cuts” proposed are not intended to reduce the amount of wealth extracted by the political means.

Regulations and Increasing Statism

Moreover, regulations that limit and constrain the exercise of privilege do not involve, properly speaking, a net increase in statism at all. They are simply the corporate state’s stabilizing restrictions on its own more fundamental forms of intervention.

Silber illustrated the dialectical nature of such restrictions with reference to the question of whether pharmacists ought to be able to refuse to sell items (such as “morning after” pills) that violate their conscience. The atomistic-libertarian response is, “Of course. The right to sell, or not sell, is a fundamental free-market liberty.” The implicit assumption here, as Silber pointed out, is “that this dispute arises in a society which is essentially free.” But pharmacists are in fact direct beneficiaries of compulsory occupational licensing, a statist racket whose central purpose is to restrict competition and enable them to charge a monopoly price for their services. Silber wrote:

The major point is a very simple one: the pharmacy profession is a state-enforced monopoly. In other words: the consumer and the pharmacist are not equal competitors on the playing field. The state has placed its thumb firmly on the scales — and on one side only. That is the crucial point, from which all further analysis must flow. . . .

. . . [T]he state has created a government-enforced monopoly for licensed pharmacists. Given that central fact, the least the state can do is ensure that everyone has access to the drugs they require — and whether a particular pill is of life and death importance is for the individual who wants it to decide, not the pharmacist and most certainly not the government.

When the state confers a special privilege on an occupation, a business firm, or an industry, and then sets regulatory limits on the use of that privilege, the regulation is not a new intrusion of statism into a free market. It is, rather, the state’s limitation and qualification of its own underlying statism. The secondary regulation is not a net increase, but a net reduction in statism.

On the other hand, repeal of the secondary regulation, without an accompanying repeal of the primary privilege, would be a net increase in statism. Since the beneficiaries of privilege are a de facto branch of the state, the elimination of regulatory constraints on their abuse of privilege has the same practical effect as repealing a constitutional restriction on the state’s exercise of its own powers.

To expand Spangler’s bagman analogy, a great deal of alleged statism amounts to the gunman telling the bagman, after the victim has handed his wallet over at gunpoint, to give the victim back enough money for cab fare so he can get safely back home and keep on earning money to be robbed of.

When the state is controlled by “legal plunderers” and every decision for or against state intervention in a particular circumstance reflects their strategic assessment of the ideal mixture of intervention and non-intervention, it’s a mistake for a genuine anti-state movement to allow the priorities for “free market reform” to be set by the plunderers’ estimation of what forms of intervention no longer serve their purpose. If the corporate representatives in government are proposing a particular “free market reform,” you can bet your bottom dollar it’s because they believe it will increase the net political extraction of wealth.

The corporate ruling class’s approach to “free market reform” is a sort of mirror-image of “lemon socialism.” Under lemon socialism, the political capitalists (acting through the state) choose to nationalize those industries that corporate capital will most benefit from having taken off its hands, and to socialize those functions the cost of which capital would most prefer the state to bear. They shift functions from the private to the state sector when they are perceived as necessary for the functioning of the system, but not sufficiently profitable to justify the bother of running them under “private sector” auspices. Under “lemon market reform,” on the other hand, the political capitalists liquidate interventionist policies after they have squeezed all the benefit out of state action.

A good example: British industrialists felt it was safe to adopt “free trade” in the mid-nineteenth century, after mercantilism had served its purpose. Half the world had been hammered into a unified market by British force of arms and was held together by a British merchant fleet. Britain had stamped out competing industry in the colonial world. It had reenacted the Enclosures on a global scale, stealing enormous amounts of land from native populations and converting it to cash crops for the imperial market. The commanding position of British capital was the direct result of past mercantilism; having established this commanding position, it could afford “free trade.”

The so-called “free trade” movement in the contemporary United States follows the same pattern. A century ago, high tariff barriers served the interests of American political capitalists. Today, when the dominant corporate interests in America are transnational, tariffs are no longer useful to them. They actually impede the transfer of goods and partially finished products between the national subdivisions of a single global corporation.

On the other hand, so-called “intellectual property” today serves exactly the same protectionist function for transnational corporations that tariffs used to serve for the old national corporations a century ago. So the political capitalists promote a version of “free trade” that involves doing away with outmoded tariff barriers while greatly strengthening the new protectionism of “intellectual property” law.

We must remember that the measure of statism inheres in the functioning of the overall system, not in the formal statism of its separate parts. A reduction in the formal statism of some separate parts, chosen in accordance with the strategic priorities of the statists, may actually result in a net increase in the overall level of statism. Our strategic agenda as libertarians, in dismantling the state, must reflect our understanding of the overall nature of the system.

The Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS) has had a bumpy start to 2015, tragedy in January and controversy (of sorts) in February. But not all of those bumps were bad or stressful, most of them were just our crew, shoulder to the wheel, cranking out thousands of words of content. The past couple of months has been very busy and extremely successful for us — we have already cleared 2,400 commentary pick-ups and are on track to easily break 3,000 by 2016.

To reach these goals and more, we need your help. C4SS has steadily built itself on a micro-donation model. We prefer the sustainability, resiliency and information found in swarms of micro-donations, instead of relying on two or three primary mega-donors or institutions. This keeps us lean, but it keeps us independent and robust. We are in love with these ideas and committed to getting them out to a wider audience and you can participate in this project by sharing, debating, contributing or donating. It all helps and we appreciate the support.

If C4SS, as an organization and an idea, is something you like having around or would like to see do more things (like funding more studies, publishing more books, helping with travel expenses for writers to speak at events, updating the youtube graphics, etc), then, please, donate $5 today.

What will $5 a month get you from C4SS? Well let’s see,

For the month of January, C4SS published:

21 Commentaries,
6 Features,
5 Weekly Libertarian Leftist Reviews,
1 Life, Love and Liberty,
3 Reviews, and
17 C4SS Media uploads to the C4SS youtube channel.

And, thanks to the dedication of our Media Coordinators and translators, C4SS translated and published:

6 Italian translations,
4 Spanish translations,
12 Portuguese translations.

For the month of February, C4SS published:

31 Commentaries (10 more than January; more Op-eds than days in the month),
13 Features (7 more than January),
4 Weekly Libertarian Leftist Reviews,
2 Blog posts,
7 Reviews (4 more than January), and
18 C4SS Media uploads to the C4SS youtube channel.

And, again, thanks to the dedication of our Media Coordinators and translators, C4SS translated and published:

1 Italian translations,
4 Spanish translations,
10 Portuguese translations.

Our totals, so far, for 2015:

52 Commentaries,
19 Features,
10 Reviews, and
35 C4SS Media uploads.
8 Spanish translations,
22 Portuguese translations.

New Interns for a New Year!

A new year brings new opportunities to challenge and test new writers for a life as an anarchist writing op-eds for mainstream media audiences. This is the primary mission of C4SS: “to explain and defend the idea of vibrant social cooperation without aggression, oppression, or centralized authority” and “enlarge public understanding and transform public perceptions of anarchism”. So far we have identified and cataloged over 2,400 successes. This brings us to our internship program, for C4SS to continue to bare fruit we must tend to our root systems. C4SS would like to introduce you to our two latest rhizomes:

John C. Wilson is a blogger, activist, anti-authoritarian, anti-establishment and feminist with pro-labor leanings. After exploring a wide range of ideologies he has found individualist anarchism to be the philosophy that best combines his dislike of coercive authority with a concern for the well being of marginalized people as well as the desire to see a more prosperous world.

***

Dylan Delikta is a Philosophy major at Eastern Michigan University. He is a mutualist anarchist and involved with many campus organizations such as Students for Liberty, Students for an Ethical and Participatory Education, and Feminists for Change.

Help C4SS Promote Prison Abolition

The Association of Private Enterprise Education (APEE) holds a prominent annual interdisciplinary academic conference featuring free-market-oriented research.

C4SS has had a panel at every APEE program since 2010. This year’s meeting will be in Cancún, April 12-14, and C4SS is sending Nathan Goodman (C4SS’s Lysander Spooner Research Scholar in Abolitionist Studies), Jason Lee Byas (C4SS Fellow), and Roderick T. Long (C4SS Senior Fellow) to speak at a C4SS-organised panel on the topic “Prisons: Reform or Abolition?”

If you’d like to help us bring the radical libertarian message of prison abolition to the APEE, any contribution would be appreciated; check out our GoFundMe page “Send C4SS to the 2015 APEE.”

The New Brazil

C4SS’s Portuguese Media Coordinator, Erick Vasconcelos, reviewed Raúl Zibechi’s The New Brazil: Regional Integration and the New Democracy from AK Press and brought to us, finally, a new history of social and economic development beyond the stale stories from Europe and North America. With access to new stories and the improved sensitivities that comes from the increased number of data points, we are presented with novel opportunities to stress-test our models and discover the technical-debt hidden within our theories. The eventual pay-off of all this work will be better tactics for routing around the social damage know as authority and greater ability to identify and preempt that institutional apex predator know as the state.

The New Brazil is not the only, but it’s certainly one of the most important, recent books that overviews Brazil’s new state capitalism. And in talking about the history of power in the country, Zibechi is certainly much better than most because he sees continuity instead of disruptions. However, despite having the right instincts, and knowing how to identify the key points of contemporary politics in Brazil and in Latin America, doesn’t present a theoretical apparatus capable of challenging the ideological hegemony of corporate capitalism.

The structural weaknesses of the current model can only be challenged by the idea of a radical and descentralized free market. The logical consequence of the horizontalization of our political culture is anarchy.

The Anarchism of Despair

C4SS’s Benjamin R. Tucker Distinguished Research Scholar in Anarchist Economic Theory, David S. D’Amato, has reviewed Ardent Press’ Anarcho-Pessimism: The Collected Writings of Laurence [sic] Labadie. Labadie’s pessimism helps us deal with some dominate tropes within Leftist (not just the left) notions of action and organization, the preoccupation with mass: mass-movements and mass-meetings. It is certainly true that the goal of freedom is not fully realized until everyone has access to its full expression (a good reason for the mass-movement proposal), and collective decision making — the opportunity to give input or debate — are important counters to and a key experience absent from capitalist life (an important insight of any mass-meeting proposal). But both of these are strategies — means to an end, not the end or a good-enough substitution for the end of anarchism. “Mass” lacks the ability to scale indefinitely and, even within micro- to meso- size examples, restricts or streamlines the number and ways individuals can communicate to each other and to the group. They are in our tool kit, for sure, but if they are all we can expect or hope for from anarchism, then count me, with Labadie, pessimistic.

Anarcho-Pessimism will come as an astounding revelation to anyone interested in an anarchism that, rather than offering another recital of workerist bromides, presents a caustic indictment of modern politics and society. With a contempt and audacity all his own, this one of a kind autodidact savaged the status quo like no one before or since, and in doing so gave us what is one of the last links in the chain that is American individualist anarchism.

The Right Didn’t Steal Our Future — We Gave It Away

Kevin Carson deals some of the mistaken narratives for and against technology. Technology allows for incalculable prosperity, individuation and power distribution; this is why it is, at every turn, bottle-necked, enclosed, outlawed, overpriced or even destroyed — to keep power concentrated and centralized where it is and out of our radical hands.

The implication is that any technology that increases the efficiency of production at the margin, in terms of land-intensiveness or capital-intensiveness (that is, anything that makes more production possible from smaller quantities of land and capital), will reduce the rents on land and capital accruing to incumbent producers with large stockpiles of accumulated land and capital. From this it follows that the profits of rich capitalists depend on things like patent law that criminalize the diffusion of new technologies for cheaper, more efficient production. Technological diffusion is the friend of workers and consumers, and the enemy of capitalists.

The End of Libertarians

Kevin Carson draws parallels between the Gaming Industry and Libertarianism, in his “The End of Libertarianism”. Demographics will shift and change as new groups of people are understandably drawn in and to those technologies and ideologies that promise more agency. Increased agency is good description for liberty — to have more ways to act and more opportunities to act. Interactive media and libertarianism both promise open-ended levels of agency for more and more people. Fighting for greater, meaningful and active access to both should be regarded as clear and glowing evidence that liberty is magnetic and our desire for more of it is wonderfully insatiable. We live in an abundance hidden or broken by artificial scarcity and power bottle-necks, but not for long. We want maximal agency and you can’t stop us.

Stop and think about this for a minute: These are people who actually call themselves libertarians — advocates of human liberty — and who presumably want to spread these ideas in society at large and attract new adherents to them. Hoppe’s prerequisite for a “libertarian society,” if you want to call it that, is for the minority of rich property-owning paterfamiliases who have appropriated all the land in a society to round up all the people with beliefs or lifestyles they disagree with, and forcibly evict them.

Fellows on Patreon

Kevin Carson and Thomas Knapp have both popped up on the creator supporting site: Patreon. Patreon allows individual to directly support their favorite creators, or in this case, left-libertarian writers. You can pledge any amount that fits your budget or enjoyment of their work, and, for certain pledged amounts, they offer bonuses.

Please Support Today!

All of this work is only sustainable through your support. If you think the various political and economic debates around the world are enhanced by the addition of left libertarian market anarchist, freed market anti-capitalist or laissez faire socialist solutions, challenges, provocations or participation, please, donate $5 today. Keep C4SS going and growing.

ALL the best!

Justin Raimondo discusses the proposed AUMF to wage war on ISIS.

Michael Uhl discusses a documentary on the Vietnam War and Bobby Kennedy.

George H. Smith discusses persecution of freethinkers.

Nick Alexandrov discusses Obama’s legacy in Honduras.

Shane Smith discusses Tom Cotton.

Doug Bandow discusses six allies worth divorcing.

Jan Jarboe Russell discusses five surprises about WW2 internment.

Andy Piascik discusses Vietnam and unpleasant truth.

Gareth Porter discusses U.S. – Iranian negotiations.

Sheldon Richman discusses the humble libertarian.

Matt Peppe discusses Israeli abuse of children from Palestine and U.S. complicity.

Teun van Dongen discusses drone strikes and the sanitization of violence.

Elizabeth R. Beavers discusses curbing Obama’s endless war power.

Richard M. Ebeling discusses whether America is on the road to serfdom.

Marjorie Cohn discusses Obama’s request for a Congressional rubber stamp for his perpetual war on ISIS.

Andrew Bacevich discusses how Congress can use Obama’s AUMF request to debate the premises behind the War on Terror.

Michael Horton discusses setting the stage for a new proxy war in Yemen.

Patrick Cockburn discusses the potential fight for Mosul.

Abby Martin discusses word games.

Ajamu Baraka discusses Obama’s legacy of war and liberal accommodation.

Trevor Timm discusses Obama, the media, and the GOP concurring on war against ISIS.

Jacob G. Hornberger discusses conservative blindness to principle.

Jacob G. Hornberger discusses whether the U.S. invasion of Iraq brought freedom to Iraqis.

Sheldon Richman discusses healthcare and the economic way of thinking.

Lucy Steigerwald discusses the case for optimism in the realm of foreign policy.

W. James Antle the Third discusses Jeb Bush’s foreign policy.

Michael Welton discusses the propagandists of empire.

Uri Avnery discusses the fallacy of rising anti-semitism.

Luciana Bohne discusses the logic of the imperial security state.

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (a book of great virtues and great flaws, but I’m not going to get into either right now), Thomas Kuhn describes an experiment that I think is of tremendous importance to libertarians, particularly left-libertarians:

In a psychological experiment that deserves to be far better known outside the trade, Bruner and Postman [1949] asked experimental subjects to identify on short and controlled exposure a series of playing cards. Many of the cards were normal, but some were made anomalous, e.g., a red six of spades and a black four of hearts. Each experimental run was constituted by the display of a single card to a single subject in a series of gradually increased exposures. After each exposure the subject was asked what he had seen, and the run was terminated by two successive correct identifications.

Even on the shortest exposures many subjects identified most of the cards, and after a small increase all the subjects identified them all. For the normal cards these identifications were usually correct, but the anomalous cards were almost always identified, without apparent hesitation or puzzlement, as normal. The black four of hearts might, for example, be identified as the four of either spades or hearts. Without any awareness of trouble, it was immediately fitted to one of the conceptual categories prepared by prior experience. One would not even like to say that the subjects had seen something different from what they had identified.

With a further increase of exposure to the anomalous cards, subjects did begin to hesitate and to display awareness of anomaly. Exposed, for example to the red six of spades, some would say: That’s the six of spades, but there’s something wrong with it – the black has a red border. Further increase of exposure resulted in still more hesitation and confusion until finally, and sometimes quite suddenly, most subjects would produce the correct identification without hesitation. Moreover, after doing this with two or three of the anomalous cards, they would have little further difficulty with the others.

A few subjects, however, were never able to make the requisite adjustment of their categories. Even at forty times the average exposure required to recognize normal cards for what they were, more than 10% of the anomalous cards were not correctly identified. And the subjects who then failed often experienced acute personal distress. One of them exclaimed: ‘I can’t make the suit out, whatever it is. It didn’t even look like a card that time. I don’t know what color it is now or whether it’s a spade or a heart. I’m not even sure now what a spade looks like. My God!’ … My colleague Postman tells me that, though knowing all about the apparatus and display in advance, he nevertheless found looking at the incongruous cards acutely uncomfortable.

In short, people have enormous difficulty with, and often a strong aversion to, recognising something that doesn’t fit their established categories. And this helps, I think, to explain why as libertarians, and in particular as left-libertarians, we have so much trouble getting our message across; for in the mainstream political realm we are black hearts and red spades. Most people’s first impulse is to assimilate us to some familiar category – and since we talk so much about the virtues of free markets and the evils of government, we tend to get lumped with conservatives, since they make similar noises. When more prolonged exposure persuades people that we’re not quite conservatives after all, they then tend to become convinced that we’re black spades with red borders — conventionally conservative on some issues, conventionally liberal on others (a tendency we ourselves encourage with our in part useful, in part misleading Nolan Charts) — as opposed to representing a radical alternative to existing ideologies.

The moral, I think, is that libertarians, and especially left-libertarians, need to focus more on simply getting our position recognised. Getting it recognised is of course not enough — one then has to argue that the position is correct – but I think such argument and defense are to a large extent pointless if people can’t see what the position being defended even is.

Our vital task, then, is to get the word out that there is a position out there that includes the following theses:

1. Big business and big government are (for the most part) natural allies.
2. Although conservative politicians pretend to hate big government, and liberal politicians pretend to hate big business, most mainstream policies — both liberal and conservative — involve (slightly different versions of) massive intervention on behalf of the big-business/big-government elite at the expense of ordinary people.
3. Liberal politicians cloak their intervention on behalf of the strong in the rhetoric of intervention on behalf of the weak; conservative politicians cloak their intervention on behalf of the strong in the rhetoric of non-intervention and free markets – but in both cases the rhetoric is belied by the reality.
4. A genuine policy of intervention on behalf of the weak, if liberals actually tried it, wouldn’t work either, since the nature of government power would automatically warp it toward the interests of the elite.
5. A genuine policy of non-intervention and free markets, if conservatives actually tried it, would work, since free competition would empower ordinary people at the expense of the elite.
6. Since conservative policies, despite their associated free-market rhetoric, are mostly the diametrical opposite of free-market policies, the failures of conservative policies do not constitute an objection to (but rather, if anything, a vindication of) free-market policies.

Of course we should be prepared to defend these theses through economic reasoning and historical evidence, but the main goal at this point, I think, should be not so much to defend them as simply to advertise their existence. We need to make our red spades and black hearts a sufficiently familiar feature of the intellectual landscape that people will be able to see them for what they are rather than misclassifying them – at which point we’ll be in a better position to defend them. (Though admittedly point 6 is already beginning to slide from description to defense; still, I think 6 is crucial to getting our position so much as a hearing.)

What I advocate, then, is to make the constant repetition of (some equivalent of) points 1 through 6 a constant feature of our propagandising. In conversation, in articles, in letters to the editor, we should hit points 1 through 6 over and over again. The cure for resistance to the unfamiliar is to make it familiar.

<< Back to the Market Anarchism FAQ page

A new pamphlet featuring two classic short essays is now available for download thanks to the efforts of the Tulsa Alliance of the Libertarian Left — [PDF] Anarchism Without Hyphens & The Left/Right Spectrum (by Karl Hess).

Please note that the format of the PDF file features a staggered page order layout intended to facilitate printing and folding booklets.

“The far left, as far as you can get away from the right, would logically represent the opposite tendency and, in fact, has done just that throughout history. The left has been the side of politics and economics that opposes the concentration of power and wealth and, instead, advocates and works toward the distribution of power into the maximum number of hands.” —Karl Hess

The Left/Right Spectrum

My own notion of politics is that it follows a straight line rather than a circle. The straight line stretches from the far right where (historically) we find monarchy, absolute dictatorships, and other forms of absolutely authoritarian rule. On the far right, law and order means the law of the ruler and the order that serves the interest of that ruler, usually the orderliness of drone workers, submissive students, elders either totally cowed into loyalty or totally indoctrinated and trained into that loyalty. Both Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler operated right-wing regimes, politically, despite the trappings of socialism with which both adorned their regimes. Huey Long, when governor-boss of Louisiana, was moving toward a truly right-wing regime, also adorned with many trappings of socialism (particularly public works and welfare) but held together not by social benefits but by a strong police force and a steady flow of money to subsidize and befriend businessmen.

An American President could be said to move toward the right to the extent that he tended to make absolutely unilateral political decisions, with no reference to Congress, for instance, or to the people generally, and when the legitimacy of the regime was supported or made real more by sheer force, say of police power, than by voluntary allegiance from the people generally. Such a regime, also, would be likely to suppress or to swallow up potentially competing centers of power such as trade unions. Major financial interests, however, if Adolf Hitler’s relations with industry, for example, can be considered instructive, would be bought off, rather than fought off, with fat contracts and a continuing opportunity to enrich their owners. Joseph Stalin, of course, had no problem with anything such as independent trade unions or business, since both had been killed off earlier.

The overall characteristic of a right-wing regime, no matter the details of difference between this one and that one, is that it reflects the concentration of power in the fewest practical hands.

Power, concentrated in few hands, is the dominant historic characteristic of what most people, in most times, have considered the political and economic right wing.

The far left, as far as you can get away from the right, would logically represent the opposite tendency and, in fact, has done just that throughout history. The left has been the side of politics and economics that opposes the concentration of power and wealth and, instead, advocates and works toward the distribution of power into the maximum number of hands.

Just as the scale along this line would show gradations of the right, so would it show gradations of the left.

Before getting to a far-right monarchy or dictatorship, there are many intermediate right-wing positions. Some are called conservative.

Somewhere along the line, for instance, a certain concentration of power, particularly economic power, would be acceptable in the name of tradition. The children of the rich, characteristically, are accorded very special places in the regimes of the right, or of conservatives. Also, there is a great deference to stability and a preference for it rather than change — all other things being equal. Caution might be the watchword toward the center of this right-wing scale, simply a go-slow attitude. That is, admittedly, a long way from the far right and dictatorship, but it is a way that can and should be measured on a straight line. The natural preference for law and order that seems such a worthwhile and innocent conservative preference is from a political tradition that came to us from kings and emperors, not from ancient democracy.

This hardly means that every conservative, if pressed, will go farther and farther right until embracing absolute dictatorship or monarchy. Far from it. It does mean to suggest only that the ghosts of royal power whisper in the conservative tradition.

The left shows similar gradations. The farthest left you can go, historically at any rate, is anarchism — the total opposition to any institutionalized power, a state of completely voluntary social organization in which people would establish their ways of life in small, consenting groups, and cooperate with others as they see fit.

The attitude on that farthest left toward law and order was summed up by an early French anarchist, Proudhon, who said that ‘order is the daughter of and not the mother of liberty.’ Let people be absolutely free, says this farthest of the far, far left (the left that Communism regularly denounces as too left; Lenin called it ‘infantile left’). If they are free they will be decent, but they never can be decent until they are free. Concentrated power, bureaucracy, et cetera, will doom that decency. A bit further along the left line there might be some agreement or at least sympathy with this left libertarianism but, it would be said, there are practical and immediate reasons for putting off that sort of liberty. People just aren’t quite ready for it. Roughly, that’s the position of the Communist Party today…

At any rate, at some point on the spectrum there is the great modern American liberal position. Through a series of unfortunate but certainly understandable distortions of political terminology, the liberal position has come to be known as a left-wing position. Actually, it lies right alongside the conservative tradition, down toward the middle of the line, but decidedly, I think, to the right of its center. Liberals believe in concentrated power — in the hands of liberals, the supposedly educated and genteel elite. They believe in concentrating that power as heavily and effectively as possible. They believe in great size of enterprise, whether corporate or political, and have a great and profound disdain for the homely and the local. They think nationally but they also think globally and now even intergalactically. Actually, because they believe in far more authoritarian rule than a lot of conservatives, it probably would be best to say that liberals lie next to but actually to the right of many conservatives. — Dear America (1975) by Karl Hess

<< Back to the Market Anarchism FAQ page

Jacob G. Hornberger discusses the marriage of government schooling and the national security state.

Jacob G. Hornberger discusses the fears surrounding ISIS.

Ivan Eland discusses oil, U.S. policy with respect to Saudi Arabia, and U.S. policy towards Israel.

George H. Smith discusses freethought and freedom.

David Boaz discusses the parasite economy in Washington.

Jacob Sullum discusses Bill Bennett’s take on pot.

Alex Henderson discusses seven fascist regimes the U.S. has supported.

Ivan Eland discusses how unauthorized government attacks are murder.

Thomas Knapp discusses Biden’s dangerous game.

Conor Friedersdorf discusses Scott Walker’s take on foreign policy.

Laurence M. Vance discusses the libertarian view on taxes.

James Bovard discusses the people driven out to make room for Shenandoah National Park.

Jeffrey Tucker discusses eugneics and the minimum wage.

Rebecca Gordon discusses 6 people who said no to torture.

Sheldon Richman discusses Brian Williams and war.

Richard M. Ebeling discusses the morality of capitalism.

Thomas Larson discusses Dick Cheney and torture.

Jacob G. Hornberger discusses whether Cuban embargo supporters and the Castro brothers are on the same page.

Glenn Greenwald discusses the death of a 13 year old Yemeni in a drone strike.

Gary Leupp discusses Hilary Clinton’s record as a warmongerer.

Mikayla Novak discusses gender hierarchy during the Progressive Era.

Laurence M. Vance discusses government maximums and minimums.

Jacob G. Hornberger discusses Oliver Stone and the hypocrisy of libertarian conservatives.

Jacob Sullum discusses the right to die.

Danny Postel discusses a book claiming that oil wasn’t the reason for the Iraq War.

Lucy Steigerwald discusses the vague suggestions of the War Powers Resolution.

Dan Sanchez discusses state approved mass killers.

David S D’Amato discusses a book on paranoia and conspiracy theories.

Charles Pierson discusses why U.S. war criminals walk free.

Peter Certo discusses 5 reasons to reject Obama’s request for war against ISIS.

The Association of Private Enterprise Education (APEE) holds a prominent annual interdisciplinary academic conference featuring free-market-oriented research.

C4SS has had a panel at every APEE program since 2010. This year’s meeting will be in Cancún, April 12-14, and C4SS is sending Nathan Goodman (C4SS’s Lysander Spooner Research Scholar in Abolitionist Studies), Jason Lee Byas (C4SS Fellow), and Roderick T. Long (C4SS Senior Fellow) to speak at a C4SS-organised panel on the topic “Prisons: Reform or Abolition?”

If you’d like to help us bring the radical libertarian message of prison abolition to the APEE, any contribution would be appreciated; check out our GoFundMe page “Send C4SS to the 2015 APEE.”

Justin Raimondo discusses Hilary’s war in Libya.

William Astore discusses seven reasons why American war persists.

David Swanson discusses the exporting of Sherman’s march.

W. James Antle III discusses the last chance for peace with Iran.

Jacob G. Hornberger discusses aggression and the American Sniper movie.

B.K. Marcus discusses the history of African-American self-defense.

Laurence M. Vance discusses drug warriors.

Jacob G. Hornberger discusses why troops in Iraq and Vietnam were not defending our freedom.

Joshua Keating discusses whether Obama’s drone war helped cause Yemen’s collapse.

Chris Hedges discusses the American Sniper movie.

Paul Edwards discusses the sociopath as hero.

Sheldon Richman discusses the U.S. as James Bond.

Richard M. Ebeling discusses how Yalta still haunts us.

Mateo Pimentel discusses Washingtion’s war on Cuba.

Ramzy Baroud discusses how to lose a ‘War on Terror’.

Gerald Celente discusses Chris Kyle as model American.

Omar Kassem discusses the nightmare that is Egypt.

Ronald Bailey discusses abolishing the intelligence-industrial complex.

Sarah Lazare discuses how to end the ISIS war.

Arthur Silber discusses embalmed dissent.

Sheldon Richman discusses nationalism.

Glenn Greenwald discusses how the American military burns people alive.

William Norman Grigg discusses Chris Kyle.

Lucy Steigerwald discusses whether ISIS atrocity videos teach us anything.

Andy Piascik discusses Henry Kissinger and war crimes.

Kelly Vlahos discusses a Blackwater world order.

Brian Cloughley discusses uprooting peace in Palestine.

Justin Raimondo discusses the lies of Brian Williams.

Paul Von Blum discusses violent self-defense in the Civil Rights movement.

Noah Beriatsky discusses the root of the problem that sex workers face.

Dos 14 textos que publicamos em janeiro em português, 4 deles foram originais — dois escritos por mim e dois por Valdenor Júnior. Minha coluna falando da hipocrisia política após o ataque contra o jornal Charlie Hebdo foi a mais republicada durante o mês (10). Republicamos também a resenha de um livro muito interessante feita por Anthony Ling de Um país chamado favela, traduzindo-a também para o inglês.

Os números de janeiro foram os seguintes:

• 14 textos publicados em português
• 9114 envios para sites e jornais
• 43 republicações
• 3999 curtidas no Facebook (+381)
• 106 seguidores no Twitter (+4)
• 14 seguidores no Tumblr (+14)

Neste momento, precisamos muito de sua ajuda para continuar atuando no Brasil e em outros países de língua portuguesa. Sua doação é o que mantém o C4SS em funcionamento. Portanto, se puder, doe R$ 10 mensalmente e dê suporte ao nosso trabalho!

Erick Vasconcelos
Coordenador de mídias
Centro por uma Sociedade Sem Estado

Portuguese Media Coordinator Update: January 2015

Out of the 14 articles we published in January in Portuguese, 4 of them were originals — two mine, two written by Valdenor Júnior. The article that was picked up the most (10) was my own column on the political reactions to the Charlie Hebdo shooting. We also republished a very fine review by Anthony Ling of the book Um país chamado favela (“A Country Called Favela”), which I translated into English.

January numbers our Portuguese embassy were as follows:

• 14 articles published
• 9114 submissions
• 43 pick-ups
• 3999 likes on Facebook (+381)
• 106 followers on Twitter (+4)
• 14 followers on Tumblr (+14)

At this moment, we really need your help to continue our actions in Brazil and in other Portuguese-speaking countries. Your donation is what makes C4SS possible. So, please do make a recurring $5 donation and support our work!

Erick Vasconcelos
Portuguese Media Coordinator
Center for a Stateless Society

The Center for a Stateless Society would like to formally thank all of our supporters for their generous donations and staunch vocal backing over the last month or so. The Center has had a rough last few weeks but the future looks brighter than ever thanks to you.

The International Students For Liberty Conference is the world’s largest gathering of liberty minded people and for the first time in history the Center for a Stateless Society will be represented at the annual get together. Thanks to dozens of charitable and passionate donators, we were able to reach our Go Fund Me goal of $500 and afford a sponsorship at the ISFLC. This means there will be a C4SS table with all sorts of pamphlets, books, pins, and other goodies in the exhibit hall all weekend!

In addition, a C4SS social is being held on Saturday, to be determined, at Medaterra where over a 100 students are joining together for fun, friends, and free stuff! Every attendee will get a free pamphlet and free pin just for showing up. Furthermore, there will be a raffle to give away a copy of “Markets Not Capitalism” signed by one of its editors, Charles Johnson. Join the Facebook event for the social here! If you have any questions about the event, don’t hesitate to email cmassimino@studentsforliberty.org.

The left market anarchist presence at this year’s ISFLC will be bigger than ever and I can’t thank C4SS supporters enough. Y’all are truly the epitome of a community rooted in common understanding and mutual aid. The Center is unbelievably grateful for all your support, monetary or otherwise, and wants to give back! So join us at the International Students For Liberty Conference and make left libertarianism a force to be reckoned with! We already know the support is there – our existence and increased success is proof of it. Let’s show everyone else!

Sincerely and For Left Liberty,

Cory

Sheldon Richman discusses why Chris Kyle is not a hero.

Michael Brendan Dougherty discusses Hilary and Libya.

Michael Dickinson discusses Winston Churchill.

Arthur Silber discusses the American Sniper movie and Chris Kyle.

Elizabeth Nolan Brown discusses libertarian feminism as an alternative to carceral feminism.

Medea Benjamin discusses why Cuba should be taken off the terrorist list.

Lew Rockwell discusses the libertarian principle of secession.

Sheldon Richman discusses the consequences of liberty.

David Rosen discusses the changing role of the U.S. military.

George H. Smith discusses the relation between religious skepticism and libertarianism.

Michael S. Rozeff discusses the possibility of U.S.escalation in the Ukraine.

Jeff Deist discusses how secession begins at home.

Tom H. Hastings discusses the military’s honoring of the late Saudi king.

Hunter Hastings discusses how free markets increase freedom of choice.

Janet Weil discusses American Sniper

Katherine Hawkins discusses the torture report and memos.

Andrew J. Bacevich discusses Obama’s foreign policy.

Robert Parry discusses the propaganda surrounding Ukraine.

Graham Peebles discusses the danger of being a girl in India.

Mark Davis discusses libertarians, selfishness, and progressives.

Glen Allport discusses the coercive state.

Paul Bonneau discusses xenophobes.

Veselin Topalov defeats Francisco Vallejo Pons.

Veselin Topalov draws with Vishy Anand.

Jacob G. Hornberger discusses U.S. empire and blowback.

Philip A. Reboli discusses Robert Gates memoir.

Stephen Kinzer discusses the consequences of imperialism in the Middle East.

Benjmain Dangl discusses why the U.S. government is the world’s greatest threat to peace.

Jacob G. Hornberger discusses the film, American Sniper.

Ivan Eland discusses the media coverage of the Paris attacks.

Laurence M. Vance discusses the statism of the GOP.

David Boaz discusses Obama’s recent State of the Union address.

Sheldon Richman discusses two kinds of equality.

Jacob G. Hornberger discusses how the troops are destroying our country.

Wendy McElroy discusses America’s growth industry based on parole and probation.

James Bovard discusses America’s fading love of freedom.

William Blum discusses the murder of journalists.

Lucy Steigerwald discusses the U.S. military.

Ramzy Baroud discusses George W. Bush’s plunders.

Nick Turse discusses American shadow wars.

Murtaza Hussain discusses the recent death of the Saudi king.

Sheldon Richman discusses Nathaniel Branden’s advice to libertarians.

Neve Gordon discusses drone warfare.

Sam Husseini discusses Saudi myths.

John Chuckman discusses the origin of terror and crumbling Western values.

Jeffrey Roger Hummel discusses a new book on Lincoln’s critics.