Mutual Exchange is the Center’s goal in two senses — we favor a society rooted in peaceful, voluntary cooperation, and we seek to foster understanding through ongoing dialogue. Mutual Exchange will provide opportunities for conversation about issues that matter to the Center’s audience.

A lead essay, deliberately provocative, will be followed by responses from inside and outside of C4SS. Contributions and comments from readers are enthusiastically encouraged. The following Mutual Exchange will begin as a feature by Casey Given’s, “What’s the Point of Checking Your Privilege?”. Nathan Goodman, Kevin Carson, Casey Given and Cathy Reisenwitz have prepared a series of articles challenging, exploring and responding to the themes presented in Given’s original article. Over the next week, C4SS will publish all of their responses. The final series can be followed under the categories: Mutual Exchange or The Point of Privilege.

Casey Given, in “What’s the Point of Checking Your Privilege?”, questions the relevance or usefulness of the concept of privilege. Not that he questions the existence of racial and gender oppression — far from it. He simply argues that privilege theory is irrelevant to — or actually detracts from — fighting oppression. The “privilege framework” has the effect of

sweeping oppression under the rug by emphasizing white guilt over political action to end socioeconomic inequality. What, after all, is the point of checking one’s privilege if not followed by action? Libertarians should pay heed by ignoring the privilege framework to instead focus on addressing racial injustice through market-based policy reform….

If awareness of one’s privilege is not sufficient to end oppression, then the framework itself seems little more than an exercise to alleviate white guilt. But, what good can that do? White guilt will not stop cops from racially profiling black people. White guilt will not help a family escape the cycle of poverty their ancestors have been stuck in for centuries…

Here Given displays a failure to grasp what privilege theory is about. It’s not about feeling guilt. People are born into privileged groups through no fault of their own; no culpability is involved. Rather, privilege theory is simply about awareness — about an accurate perception of the reality we must work within — as Occupy activist and medic Oakland Elle (@OaklandElle) succinctly explained in a series of tweets on May 25:

“Why do we have to talk about gender? Why can’t we all just get along?” –Dudes….

We have to talk about it, have to address it, because society has created a gendered hierarchy (among others). That hierarchy needs to be dismantled, and you can’t properly dismantle something you don’t understand. In my opinion, it starts with listening to people who are talking about their experiences with marginalization, rather than silencing them.

Privilege is an important concept to understand because it has a useful explanatory function, and correctly perceiving the world we operate in is necessary for operating effectively. Those who say “I don’t see race” and “I’m color-blind” are hindered in their effective functioning in the world just as much as literally color-blind people who can’t tell a red traffic light from a green one. Race and gender are real-world phenomena with very real material effects; so failing to perceive them is not a state of affairs to celebrate.

“Guilt” is beside the point. If members of different groups receive differential structural benefits through no fault of their own, anyone who wants to navigate the real social world we live in had better be aware of that fact. Pretending not to be aware of it is just stupid.

Given also suggests it’s perverse to treat as “privilege” many of the items included in the standard checklists of white or male privilege — most of which simply involve a normally unexamined sense of feeling welcomed, normal or safe in most daily social situations. After all, these are things that social justice activists should consider the minimum acceptable standard for everyone.

[The] answer to fixing such inequalities is not to put down people who rightfully enjoy its privileges but to prop up those who do not enjoy them through political action.

But that’s just it. The point is not to treat feeling welcomed and normal, not “othered,” as anything less than what everyone should experience in a just world. It’s to recognize that there’s a cross-racial, cross-gender, cross-class differential in how fully or whether at all that entitlement is realized.

This is closely related to another common misconception about privilege: That it’s about who’s better off in absolute terms. It’s not uncommon, for example, for a white person to deny that they’re privileged because (say) they were severely abused as children, or grew up malnourished in a house without indoor plumbing. But “white privilege” doesn’t mean that all white people are quantitatively better off, in absolute terms, than all people of color. It means that being white, as such, confers a differential advantage, all other things being equal. Of course all other things are never equal. So some severely impoverished or maltreated whites may be worse off in absolute terms than some well-to-do upper-middle-class blacks. The point, rather, is that when a black and white person are alike in all other things except race, the white person is better off than a black person who faces the same situation in all particulars except for being black.

My comments on the relevance of privilege to understanding the world we operate in and fighting for social justice is not just some general theoretical observation. The concept of privilege has very real, concrete applications in fighting for justice.

You may have noticed Given’s repeated calls for “policy reform.” Here at the Center for a Stateless Society, needless to say, we’re not usually real big on policy reform. Not to put too fine a point on it, we generally view working within the state to make the world better through legislative action amounts to flushing effort down the toilet. The state in its very essence is oppressive. If it weakens one form of oppression, it will do so only to make other forms of oppression function more smoothly and efficiently. The state will always be executive committee of a ruling class.

So the state may very well pass legislation, under pressure from upper-middle-class CEO feminists like Sheryl Sandberg and Marissa Mayer and upper-middle class professional black civil rights activists, to “make the cabinets and board rooms look like the rest of America.” But it will do so in order to strengthen the system of class oppression by weakening the racial and gender divisions within the ruling class.

A few years back, on Black in America, Soledad O’Brien quoted Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s cry of “I have a dream,” and then said that as evidence of the realization of that dream today, “Some are Secretary of State. Some are CEO.” My dream is to see the last Secretary of State strangled with the entrails of the last CEO.

Rather than lobbying the state to initiate reforms, we at C4SS prefer to make the kind of world we want to live in ourselves. As the Wobblies say, “Direct Action Gets Satisfaction.”

And the practical use of privilege theory is within the activist groups that are engaged in just such direct action. For example the idea of “intersectionality” was originally developed, not to further some kind of “oppression olympics” or competition to see who is worse off, but to foster solidarity within each movement by being attentive to the needs of specific intersectional groups in that movement, in order to prevent this differential oppression being used by opportunistic outsiders to create divisions. The working class movement must acknowledge the special intersectional problems of women or minority workers in order to prevent enemies from playing up racial divisions in the movement (as they did, for example, in COINTELPRO-style efforts by the planter class to split the tenant farmers’ unions along racial lines back in the ’30s). The feminist movement must pay specific attention to the needs of women of color, working class women, sex workers and transgender women in order to prevent them from becoming disaffected from a movement dominated by upper-middle-class white professional types like (again) Mayer and Sandberg.

Thus, privilege and intersectionality theory are not “identity politics” that undermines the effectiveness of social justice activism. They’re the cure for it.

With the World Cup underway, the problem at hand is: How to fight state abuse during the World Cup?

We may harken back to Henry David Thoreau. He used to criticize the idea that we should expect the majority to change a law or an unfair government action, because man should live according to his conscience, not by the majority’s will.

Because of that, “when the friction comes to have its machine, and oppression and robbery are organized, I say, let us not have such a machine any longer.” He referred to slavery and the Mexican-American War, which led him to stop paying taxes.

Lysander Spooner, on the other hand, teaches us how to resist the state peacefully, in the market. As a jurist, he argued for the unconstitutionality of the United States Post Office monopoly. Like Thoreau, he didn’t stop at words and wait for the majority to take action.

Spooner, in 1844, opened up a competitor, the American Letter Mail Company, much more efficient and charging lower prices than the government monopoly. Despite the government’s determination to close it, which it was finally able to do in 1851 with the approval of a more stringent law that closed the legal loopholes that Spooner had been exploiting, the action was successful: Government was forced to lower its prices by pressure of competition of a civil resistant!

How can we do something similar during the World Cup?

We can trespass the zones of commercial exclusion created for FIFA’s benefit, giving their partners a selling and advertising monopoly in a given area. We can also record with our cell phones every instance of police abuse against free protests during the World Cup.

As Augusto de Franco said about the occupation and reconfiguration of public spaces by free commerce:

Each one of those activities reconfigures hierarchies dominated by autocracies toward more networking (more distribution, connectivity, interaction) and freedom. There is no other way of doing that besides civil and political disobedience.

If this “entrepreneurial civil disobedience” happened in a large scale, we would be making a large step toward liberty from the coercive institutions of the state. Because the occupation of public spaces by markets and free exchange, challenging the territorial monopoly gifted to FIFA, would reverse the mentality that allowed our freedoms to be taken away and weakened the liberating potential of voluntary cooperation networks.

Again, as Augusto de Franco said, social revolution “is not that taking of some Winter Palace nor electoral victory against ‘the elites!’ It is not just a change in the people who make up the state, but something that happens at the very core of society, altering the interaction flows of social life and changing people’s behaviors.”

Individual freedom and liberation from poverty and political exploitation will only be achieved through the widening of the social cooperation networks and markets. As Thoreau would say, that’s the counter-friction that should stop the machine and break its injustice.

If you follow the news, you regularly hear of various treaties — GATT’s Uruguay Round, NAFTA, CAFTA, TPP — described as “Free Trade Agreements” whose purposes are to “reduce trade barriers.” This is a lie. Without exception, such agreements actually strengthen the one form of protectionism most vital to safeguarding corporate interests against competition in our time: So-called “intellectual property.”

In a recent Facebook discussion David K. Levine,  coauthor (along with Michele Boldrin) of Against Intellectual Monopoly, explained what “copyright” actually confers a property right over. If you record a song and give me a copy of the MP3, Levine asks, and I duplicate my copy and email it as an attachment to a third party (Bill), what “loss” have I inflicted on you? Not loss of the song itself, because you still have it. “What you have lost is (possibly) a sale you might have made to Bill. In other words, the right that you are granted by copyright is the exclusive right to sell to Bill: in other words — the property right granted by copyright is not over the ‘idea’ but rather a right over customers.”

Exactly! “Intellectual property” is a protectionist monopoly just like the tariff. In both cases, what’s protected is a monopoly on the right to sell a particular thing to a particular set of customers. The difference is that the monopoly conferred by the tariff operates along territorial lines — the boundaries between nation-states — whereas the monopoly conferred by patents and copyrights operates along corporate boundaries.

Today’s “Free Trade Agreements,” falsely so-called, weaken or remove some outdated trade barriers like tariffs, while greatly strengthening other trade barriers like “intellectual property” protections — increasingly to the point of nullifying free speech rights and due process rights against search and seizure in signatory countries, and giving the corporate “owners” of proprietary content what amount to police state rights to enforce censorship on Internet publications and Internet Service Providers.

So why weaken one form of protectionist trade barrier, then strengthen another more than enough to make up for it, if this is really a “Free Trade Agreement?” Because it’s not. These agreements are about — and only about — serving the interests of the industries whose representatives write them. “Free trade” is just a slick advertising slogan they’re packaged with to sell them to the allegedly sovereign public “represented” by the governments that negotiate them. (Of course the only way the public ever gets to see the actual provisions of these secretly written and negotiated treaties is if they’re illegally leaked.)

The governments that negotiate these treaties, and the corporate lawyers that actually write them, don’t lower tariffs because of a principled opposition to trade barriers. They lower tariffs because they’re no longer useful. A hundred years ago, most industry in the industrialized world was national: It was physically located within, and owned by a corporation chartered in, a particular country. So a monopoly on the right to sell manufactured goods to the domestic population was useful.

Today, most corporations are global. The major forms of international “trade” in physical goods are trade in unfinished goods between local subsidiaries of the same global corporation, unfinished goods produced by nominally independent contractors in a global corporation’s supply chain, or finished goods produced on contract overseas and then marketed domestically in the United States. So a territorially-based restriction on the free flow of raw materials, finished and unfinished goods no longer suits the needs of global corporations, because they themselves are no longer territorial. On the other hand, it’s extremely useful for a corporation to hold a monopoly on the right to sell a product to consumers. Thanks to patents and trademarks, Nike, an “American” corporation, can delegate actual production of sneakers to nominally “independent” sweatshops in Asia, while using its monopoly on the sale of the finished product to pay the actual manufacturers a few bucks a pair and market them in American retailers with a “Swoosh” markup of several thousand percent. This is true, to a great extent, of every manufacturing supply chain in the world. And it’s even more true of things like software and entertainment.

What we see, in the negotiation of these “Free Trade Agreements,” is really an updated version of Adam Smith’s observation: When representatives of a single industry meet in secret, they do so only to work against the public interest. What these corporations actually do in their secret meetings is terrorism of greater destructive impact than al Qaeda could ever have dreamed of. And their main weapon of terror is the state.

Translations for this article:

• Italian, Il Protezionismo È Morto. Lunga Vita al Protezionismo!

Qualche giorno fa mi è capitato di leggere l’articolo di Christopher Dickey “What the D-Day Veteran Told Obama at the 70th Anniversary Commemoration” (The Daily Beast, 6 giugno). Tra i presenti alla giornata dei veterani, assieme ad Obama, c’era il presidente francese Hollande e quello russo Putin. Per lo più, l’articolo parlava dei discorsi dei tre e del fatto che fosse strano vedere assieme Obama e Putin nonostante i piccoli “contrasti” sull’Ucraina.

Prima di parlare dei discorsi, l’articolo descrive Obama e Hollande che passeggiano assieme e stringono le mani con la folla. Un uomo, in particolare, ha trattenuto Obama un po’ più a lungo degli altri e gli ha detto qualcosa all’orecchio. Verso la fine, l’articolo rivela che si trattava di un veterano americano del D-Day. Dickey gli ha chiesto cosa aveva detto al presidente e lui ha risposto: “L’ho ringraziato per averci tenuto fuori dalla guerra.”

Tranne: Gli attacchi continui con i droni che uccidono innocenti in tutto il Medio Oriente e in Africa da quando Obama è stato eletto. L’invio di ulteriori 30.000 soldati in Afganistan (ai tempi del premio Nobel per la pace). L’azione Nato in Libia presumibilmente per aiutare la popolazione a liberarsi di un dittatore (mentre il governo americano ha appoggiato e continua ad appoggiare dittature per conto proprio). La presenza in tutto il pianeta di basi militari e truppe americane che hanno come unico scopo la difesa degli intrighi e dello sfruttamento delle risorse economiche a vantaggio della plutocrazia corporativa. La quasi invasione della Siria per, ancora una volta, presumibilmente aiutare la popolazione a liberarsi di un dittatore. E poi: l’intensificazione della presenza militare nel Golfo Persico attorno all’Iran, un aumento delle forze nel tentativo di stringere la Cina, e finalmente la promessa di un miliardo di dollari per rafforzare la presenza Nato attorno all’Ucraina.

Se qualcuno fa caso a tutto il fervore militarista dell’amministrazione Obama, le parole del veterano gli appariranno fuorvianti. Eppure questo genere di ignoranza è tutto intorno a noi, soprattutto tra i liberal del partito democratico (non che i repubblicani siano perdonati). Per molti di loro, Obama è un presidente che ama la pace e sta facendo tutto il possibile per far cessare le guerre e mettere a posto l’economia, non l’imbroglione guerrafondaio che fa una politica a favore delle élite monopolistiche rigurgitanti avidità. Ci sono liberal, come Michael Moore, che hanno criticato Obama ma poi l’hanno votato nel 2012 perché era il “migliore tra due mali”; come se in questa tirannia a due partiti potesse esserci un migliore.

Il semplice fatto che qualcuno del potere dica che stanno aiutando gli altri, non significa che quello che fanno si tramuti in un aiuto vero e proprio. Quelli che credono a tutto quello che dice una persona semplicemente perché l’hanno votata sono vittime di quegli avversari narcisistici che dicono qualunque cosa pur di aumentare il consenso e poi fare il contrario di quello che hanno fatto credere ai loro elettori.

Come disse Hitler, il dittatore totalitario e assassino di massa, “Fabbricate una grossa bugia, semplificatela, ripetetela continuamente, e alla fine ci crederanno.”

Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

Desde o caso da Katiele e sua filha, a polêmica em torno da legalização da maconha medicinal no Brasil está em foco. Katiele luta para tratar a epilepsia de sua filha de 5 anos com CBD (canabidiol), substância derivada da maconha e proibida no país.

Você poderia se perguntar qual é o lado da Anvisa, agência governamental que poderia liberar este medicamento. Quais as suas justificativas para continuar impedindo o uso medicinal da maconha?

O pesquisador André Kiepper encaminhou algumas dúvidas à Anvisa e recebeu respostas, no mínimo, peculiares da coordenadora substituta de produtos controlados.

Perguntou: “Por que não posso cultivar o Cannabis exclusivamente para uso medicinal para a minha filha (…) [para] que todas as famílias tenham acesso? ”. A resposta foi que “a planta Cannabis sativa L. encontra-se relacionada na Lista – E (Lista de plantas proscritas que podem originar substâncias entorpecentes e/ou psicotrópicas do anexo I da Portaria SVS/MS n°. 344/98. Sendo assim, é proibido realizar o seu plantio em território nacional”.

Isto significa que, se você deseja plantar maconha para uso medicinal, sua terra pode ser expropriada sem indenização, uma vez que a Constituição assim penaliza o plantio de psicotrópicos. A resposta da Anvisa mostra o sério risco que corre o desobediente civil que plantasse maconha para ajudar crianças doentes sofreria em nosso país. Minimizar o sofrimento de crianças doentes é proibido.

Foi também questionado que a Anvisa teria competência para autorizar o plantio, a cultura e a colheita dos vegetais da tal Lista E. A resposta: “Toda finalidade medicinal deve ser comprovada perante a Anvisa por meio de estudos pré-clínicos e clínicos de segurança e eficácia, em dossiês para registro de medicamentos, que são protocolizados na Anvisa por empresas farmacêuticas interessadas no registro e comercialização de medicamentos.”

Perceba a burocracia para a aprovação do uso medicinal da maconha. Na contramão da lentidão do estado, Katiele importou ilegalmente o CBD, com resultados ótimos para a saúde de sua filha.

Contudo, outro aspecto curioso destaca-se nesta resposta. A autorização depende do protocolo de empresas farmacêuticas. Responde a agência inclusive que o “o uso destes produtos deve ser restrito a estabelecimentos médicos ou científicos”, o que impede “ a plantação por pessoa física”. Apenas pessoas jurídicas podem solicitar autorização e fazer o plantio! O usuário deve ficar restrito às iniciativas das corporações!

Diante dessa restrição, Kiepper pergunta então como proceder à autorização para importação junto à Agência. A resposta desumanizada é impressionante: “Informamos que não dispomos [de] norma para autorização deste tipo de procedimento.”

Kiepper então indagou o motivo da ausência desta norma regulamentar. A Anvisa respondeu: “Até o momento, nenhuma empresa apresentou nenhum dossiê solicitando registro de nenhum tipo de medicamento à base de substâncias extraídas da planta Cannabis.” Ou seja, as pessoas que necessitam do uso medicinal da maconha precisam esperar a iniciativa de corporações para que haja uma regulamentação a respeito.

Existe, de fato, um requerimento para uso próprio disponível. Mas ele não é feito para facilitar a vida dos pacientes: “A autorização excepcional para a importação de medicamentos controlados sem registro no Brasil e à base de substância proscrita (proibida) necessita ser solicitada caso a caso, pois se trata de uma excepcionalidade concedida pela falta de alternativas terapêuticas existentes no país. (…) [É] imprescindível que reavaliações periódicas sejam feitas para acompanhamento de eventuais mudanças na prescrição/formas de tratamento que impactem nas quantidades previamente autorizadas.” Essa resposta foi dada para negar a possibilidade ser liberada uma renovação anual ou um registro de autorização para compra de remédio no exterior.

Além disso, não há norma para autorizar a importação do CDB de uma Instituição sem fins lucrativos e “cada autorização emitida será específica para um determinado produto (nome comercial, se existir, apresentação, formulação, etc) e para um determinado fabricante, paciente e exportador, não podendo ser utilizada para a importação de quaisquer outros produtos”.

Indagada se a “Anvisa pretende facilitar esse processo pra evitar a morte desnecessária de crianças”, a agência informa que não tem qualquer informação acerca da modificação de procedimentos para importação, mas garantem que “todos os esforços e discussões relacionadas à importação de produtos contendo canabidiol, estão sendo conduzidas pela Anvisa, tanto em nível nacional quanto internacional, para que o direito à saúde das pessoas seja garantido, não esquecendo, no entanto, de continuar evitando o risco de uso indevido, abusivo e recreativo de qualquer substância ou planta”.

Enquanto os burocratas discutiam, Gustavo Guedes, de um ano e quatro meses, que sofria da Síndrome de Dravet, e estava aguardando a liberação do CDB pela ANVISA, morreu.

The following is the recently accepted abstract/proposal for a paper I’ll be presenting at the MANCEPT 2014 workshop on “The Current State of Libertarian Philosophy,” 8-10 September 2014, in Manchester UK — appropriately enough, since left-libertarianism of the C4SS variety has been described as consistent Manchesterism.

*     *     *

Over the past decade a form of thought generally called “left-libertarianism” has become increasingly prominent and debated in libertarian circles, indeed attracting vigorous criticism. [1] This form of left-libertarianism should not be confused with the position of the same name associated with Peter Vallentyne, Hillel Steiner, and Michael Otsuka, combining self-ownership (the libertarian part) with some sort of common ownership of natural resources (the “left” part). Within the broader libertarian movement “left-libertarianism” ordinarily refers not to the Vallentyne-Steiner-Otsuka position but to a movement combining a) a radical — in most cases actually anarchistic — commitment to freed markets, private property, and laissez-faire; b) an orientation toward class analysis and a rejection of hierarchical workplaces, corporate dominance, and gross economic inequality as evils both akin to and largely enabled by statism (especially by regulations that allow favoured corporations to reap the benefits of economies of scale while socialising the costs of diseconomies of scale), in favour of horizontal organisation and worker self-management; and c) a concern with combating forms of social privilege such as patriarchy and misogyny, white supremacy, heteronormativity and homophobia, cissexism, and ableism, again as evils both akin to statism and standing in relationships of mutual support with it. Opposition to militarism and nationalism, and support for environmentalism and open borders, are also part of the mix.

This movement takes its left-libertarian label not from the comparatively recent usage by Vallentyne et al. but from the “libertarian left” that emerged out of the all-too-brief rapprochement between free-market libertarianism and the New Left that occurred in the 1960s and 1970s through the work of such figures such as Roy Childs, Karl Hess, Murray Rothbard, Carl Oglesby, and Samuel Konkin. But while its roots lie in the left-libertarianism of the 1960s and 70s, left-libertarianism in its current form has taken its present distinctive shape through the contributions of such writers as Kevin A. Carson, [2] Gary Chartier, [3] and Charles W. Johnson, [4] and is represented by such organisations as the Alliance of the Libertarian Left and the Center for a Stateless Society, as well as by such websites as Rad Geek People’s Daily and Invisible Molotov.

Today’s left-libertarians draw ideas from social anarchists on one side and anarcho-capitalists on the other (though each of these two sources of inspiration tends to dismiss left-libertarianism as a front for the other one). But left-libertarians are closest to the pro-free-market, anti-capitalist, anti-privilege position of such 19th-century individualist anarchists as Stephen Pearl Andrews, Voltairine de Cleyre, William B. Greene, Ezra Heywood, Thomas Hodgskin, Lysander Spooner, Benjamin Tucker, and Josiah Warren. (Many of these thinkers, despite their devotion to free markets, regarded themselves as “socialists” owing to their opposition to capitalist privilege. Andrews, Greene, Spooner, and Warren were even members of the American branch of the First International before the Marxists booted out all such refractory individualists.) Additional inspiration comes from Chris Matthew Sciabarra, [5] whose work traces affinities among the unlikely trio of Karl Marx, Friedrich Hayek, and Ayn Rand, and emphasises the importance of systematic dialectical connections among political, economic, and cultural phenomena – though both Sciabarra’s leftism and his libertarianism tend to be more moderate than the versions espoused by left-libertarians.

Left-libertarianism should not be confused with Bleeding Heart Libertarianism (BHL). Insofar as BHL represents a fusion of the free-market commitments of libertarianism with the social-justice concerns of the left, left-libertarianism may be counted as a subset of BHL; but left-libertarians tend to be more radical, in both their leftism and their libertarianism, than the majority of those self-identifying as BHL proponents. (Of the fifteen principal contributors to the prominent BHL blog, only two are left-libertarians in the sense under discussion.) Most BHL proponents appear to see their libertarian commitments and their left-wing commitments as at least to some extent moderating each other; left-libertarians, by contrast, tend to see their libertarian and leftist commitments as mainly reinforcing each other.

For example, many BHLs moderate their libertarianism by endorsing a guaranteed minimum income law, whereas left-libertarians tend to regard such laws as tools whereby the ruling class imposes discipline on the poor. [6] Many BHLs likewise moderate their leftism by defending sweatshops as the “least bad option” for impoverished workers; left-libertarians would agree with BHLs that banning sweatshops would harm workers, but rather than praising sweatshops would favour striving to undermine the social and political structures that systematically deprive impoverished workers of better options than sweatshops. Left-libertarians tend to see existing economic institutions as far more deformed in the direction of inequality and privilege by government intervention than the majority of BHL proponents do. Relatedly, left-libertarians tend to look with greater favour on the labour movement and on unions. Most BHLs also support reforming institutions via the political process, whereas left-libertarians tend to deemphasise lobbying and electoral politics in favour of grassroots organising. One might say that if the dominant BHL aim is to fuse Hayek with Rawls, the dominant left-libertarian aim is to fuse Murray Rothbard with David Graeber.

One concept often associated with left-libertarianism is that of “thick libertarianism” [7] — the idea that there are certain value commitments which, while not logically entailed by libertarian principles, are nevertheless bound up either conceptually or causally with those principles in such a way as to make them part of reasonable libertarian advocacy. For example, some of these additional commitments may be part of, or implied by, the most reasonable defense of libertarianism, or may be needed in order to choose between alternative ways of applying libertarian principles, or in order to make a libertarian social order achievable or sustainable. For most thick-libertarian advocates, this does not mean that those who reject such commitments do not count as libertarians; but it does mean that their libertarianism is less than fully realised.

Thick libertarianism is not interchangeable with left-libertarianism, since those who see libertarianism as requiring for its implementation, say, a social order of deference to class superiors (yes, there are such libertarians!) would be thick but not left. But most left-libertarians do see such “left-wing” values as feminism, antiracism, and labour radicalism as thickly bound up with libertarian principle, on both conceptual and causal grounds.

In this paper I will trace the origins of left-libertarianism, describe its current place within the movement, and defend its approach as superior (on thickness grounds) both to non-left versions of libertarianism and non-libertarian versions of leftism.

Full disclosure: I am myself a participant in the movement I’m describing. I’m a co-founder of the Alliance of the Libertarian Left, a Senior Fellow at the Center for a Stateless Society, and one of the aforementioned two left-libertarian contributors to the Bleeding Heart Libertarian blog. So, deduct points for objectivity but add even more points for informed familiarity with the topic!

<< Back to the Market Anarchism FAQ page

Notes:

1. For some examples of criticism of left-libertarianism within the broader libertarian movement – some civil and thoughtful, some passionately hostile – see:
http://mises.org/journals/jls/20_1/20_1_5.pdf
http://mises.org/journals/jls/22_1/22_1_8.pdf
http://www.lewrockwell.com/2014/05/dan-sanchez/the-perils-of-thick-thinking
http://therightstuff.biz/2013/09/09/exercises-in-degeneration-the-c4ss-experience
http://www.christophercantwell.com/2014/03/18/left-libertarians-worse-racists

2. Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, 2nd ed. (BookSurge, 2007); Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective (BookSurge, 2008); The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto (BookSurge, 2010).

3. The Conscience of an Anarchist: Why It’s Time to Say Good-Bye to the State and Build a Free Society (Cobden Press, 2011); Anarchy and Legal Order: Law and Politics for a Stateless Society (Cambridge, 2012); Radicalizing Rawls: Global Justice and the Foundations of International Law (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); ed., with Charles W. Johnson, Markets Not Capitalism: Individualist Anarchism Against Bosses, Inequality, Corporate Power, and Structural Poverty (Minor Compositions, 2011).

4. “Liberty, Equality, Solidarity: Toward a Dialectical Anarchism,” in Roderick T. Long and Tibor R. Machan, eds., Anarchism/Minarchism: Is a Government Part of a Free Country? (Ashgate, 2008), pp 155-288; cf. his co-edited volume Markets Not Capitalism in the previous note.

5. Marx, Hayek, and Utopia (State University of New York Press, 1995); Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism (Penn State University Press, 2000); Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical, 2nd ed. (Penn State University Press, 2013).

6. See, e.g., http://c4ss.org/content/25618

7. For the locus classicus, see: http://radgeek.com/gt/2008/10/03/libertarianism_through

Mutual Exchange is the Center’s goal in two senses — we favor a society rooted in peaceful, voluntary cooperation, and we seek to foster understanding through ongoing dialogue. Mutual Exchange will provide opportunities for conversation about issues that matter to the Center’s audience.

A lead essay, deliberately provocative, will be followed by responses from inside and outside of C4SS. Contributions and comments from readers are enthusiastically encouraged. The following Mutual Exchange will begin as a feature by Casey Given’s, “What’s the Point of Checking Your Privilege?”. Nathan Goodman, Kevin Carson, Casey Given and Cathy Reisenwitz have prepared a series of articles challenging, exploring and responding to the themes presented in Given’s original article. Over the next week, C4SS will publish all of their responses. The final series can be followed under the categories: Mutual Exchange or The Point of Privilege.

With the stroke of a keyboard, Princeton freshman Tal Fortgang has singlehandedly brought the topic of privilege roaring back into the national discussion. “Behind every success, large or small, there is a story, and it isn’t always told by sex or skin color,” Fortgang penned in an article for the conservative Princeton Tory, “to assume that it does and that I should apologize for it is insulting.” Republished in Time, Fortgang’s article has ignited crossfire of cheers and jeers from all sides of the political spectrum.

However, what the media has largely failed to recognize is that this circus is nothing new. The concept of privilege has been lingering in academic circles for over a half-century now, somehow surviving despite seemingly being debated to death. While bursts of conservative outrage such as Fortgang’s float to surface every so often rallying around American meritocracy, what’s more damning is the criticism the concept has received from the same social justice scene that it sprung from. Some left-leaning academics have condemned the privilege framework for sweeping oppression under the rug by emphasizing white guilt over political action to end socioeconomic inequality.

Though rarely mentioned in the media firestorm over Fortgang’s article, the privilege concept traces its roots to Wellesley Professor Peggy McIntosh’s seminal 1988 essay “White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences through Work in Women’s Studies.” In it, McIntosh provides a list of 46 “daily effects of white privilege,” ranging from the abstract (e.g. “I will feel welcomed and ‘normal’ in the usual walks of public life, institutional and social”) to the concrete (e.g. “I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed”). While most of the social advantages enumerated in McIntosh’s list are undeniably true, the essay ultimately leaves the reader uncertain of what exactly to do with the newfound knowledge of their societal advantages.

Indeed, McIntosh admits near her essay’s conclusion that simple awareness of one’s privilege is not enough to combat it. “I was taught to think that racism could end if white individuals changed their attitude,” she recalls. “Individual acts can palliate but cannot end, these problems.” How, then, can the privilege framework help end structural inequality? McIntosh seems to hint at some sort of government policy reform without providing any answers. At the second-to-last sentence of the essay, she is left asking, “What will we do with such knowledge?”

If awareness of one’s privilege is not sufficient to end oppression, then the framework itself seems little more than an exercise to alleviate white guilt. But, what good can that do? White guilt will not stop cops from racially profiling black people. White guilt will not help a family escape the cycle of poverty their ancestors have been stuck in for centuries. As the Midwest Critical Whiteness Collective explained in a fall 2013 Harvard Educational Review article, “while reading and working with McIntosh’s piece might be a consciousness-raising exercise for individual white people, her text provides limited help with understanding and undermining systemic white supremacy.”

The privilege concept not only ignores action, it ignores oppression as well. McIntosh makes it clear that the two are separate concepts in the very first sentence altogether by highlighting how she has “often noticed men’s unwillingness to grant that they are overprivileged, even though they may grant that women are disadvantaged.” Privilege in McIntosh’s mind is more than just the absence of oppression; it’s special advantages that society bestows upon selective classes of people.

Looking back at her list, however, it seems puzzling to apply the “overpriviledged” label to daily experiences like not being harassed at a grocery store. After all, shouldn’t everyone feel safe shopping regardless of their race in an ideal world? Isn’t the very goal of anti-racist activism to help minorities “feel welcomed and ‘normal’ in the usual walks of public life, institutional and social?” In this sense, McIntosh seems to conflate privilege with human rights, as Africana philosopher Lewis Gordon explains in the critical race compilation What White Looks Like:

A privilege is something that not everyone needs, but a right is the opposite. Given this distinction, an insidious dimension of the white-privilege argument emerges. It requires condemning whites for possessing, in the concrete, features of contemporary life that should be available to all, and if this is correct, how can whites be expected to give up such things?

McIntosh’s preoccupation with criticizing the privileges that everyone should enjoy is perversely prioritized over fighting against the oppression that nobody should be subjected to. Make no mistake about it, there are great differences in how various socioeconomic classes of people experience daily life. However, answer to fixing such inequalities is not to put down people who rightfully enjoy its privileges but to prop up those who do not enjoy them through political action.

C4SS Feed 44 presents Benjamin Blowe‘s “No Loyalty on May 1st” read by Stephen Ledger and edited by Nick Ford.

On May 1st, 1961, under President Eisenhower’s backing, Congress’ passed a joint resolution that established that day as Law Day – a day the American Bar Association describes as “a national day set aside to celebrate the [United States’] rule of law.” Also called “Loyalty Day” or “Law and Order Day,” Law Day is an offense to not just the global working class, but those who take laws and government accountability most earnestly – anarchists.

Feed 44:

• http://www.c4ss.org/
• http://www.youtube.com/user/c4ssvideos
• https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/c4ss-media/id872405202?mt=2
• http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/smash-walls-radio/c4ss-media?refid=stpr
• https://twitter.com/C4SSmedia

Bitcoin tips welcome:

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Eric Blattberg, writing for VenturBeat, reports (“Tesla Motors: Please infringe on our patents for the greater good,” June 12) that electric car manufacturer Tesla will henceforth permit all comers to exploit its innovations. “Tesla will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use our technology,” says Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

I think the importance of patents in enclosing the motor industry is overstated. Legal precedent around the issue has consistently favoured openness regarding component replacement for a very long time. Anyone is free to manufacture a component designed to replace a part of a patented system without thereby being guilty of infringement. With few exceptions, moreover, automotive patents pertain to details competitors easily design around. Yet the motor industry as it stands today is a supremely enclosed industry, due to product standard, safety and emissions regimes.

Musk understates the mainstream industry’s interest in electric propulsion. All the major manufacturing groups have programmes ready and waiting, complete but for the regulatory framework needed to protect them from entry en masse by a profusion of new start-ups. It is in a sense choreographed, as it usually is: As I said before (apparently somewhat controversially), the mainstream industry’s agenda is an agenda of change, but a specific single programme of specific changes at specific times. If it’s not in the script, it must be killed — but I believe electric cars are very much in the script. They have too much going for them from a corporate capitalist viewpoint — far more to my mind than they have going for them from an ecological viewpoint.

For starters, they eliminate all that finicky skilled labour required to put together an internal combustion engine properly. They eliminate all that variability of parts that constantly tempts the customer to get above herself technologically. The electric car has too much potential at last to become the one-part, disposable car not to be a hugely important part of established manufacturers’ long-term plans. Not least, increasing the digital-electronic content of the car makes it much more permeable to the established software “intellectual property” legal tradition, which is much more onerous than that around IP in automotive hardware.

Certainly Tesla is closer in nature to any established major manufacturer than to the loose networks of local component-makers and assemblers I’d like to see. Two factories on two continents and a three-digit weekly output would have made them distinctly plutocratic in the ’20s. Nor are they any exception to the state-enforced idiomatic requirement for the techniques of mass production, or they would not have been legally tolerated, especially in California. Electric propulsion frees them from the regulatory burdens pertaining to internal combustion engines — that was the loophole that allowed the company to operate at all — but their products remain subject to the entire edifice of supposed safety regulation, including expensive destructive testing in development and anti-tampering legislation in use.

I wonder about the motivation in forgoing these patents, given that many are relatively toothless. Tesla obviously wishes to play the heroic underdog, to imply solidarity with the open-source movement despite operating in an industry legally effectively prohibited from embracing open-source methods in any meaningful way. Open-source becomes trivial when subject to the sort of model conformity which a type-approval regime requires. The resulting lack of diversity of possibility and ad-hoc flexibility is analogous to the difference between representative democracy (let’s all vote on what same things all of us are going to be required to do) and anarchy (let’s all do different things, as and when we variously choose.) Hence, no technological change but only political change is capable of changing the motor industry. Tesla’s very existence counts against them.

The popular perception that anything that runs on electricity must be eco-friendly, contrary to the consensus in serious off-grid alternative-energy circles that electricity is a premium source which should be reserved for lighting and communications and little else, could not have come cheap. I’m seeing it more and more: People honestly believe that a toilet hard-wired into a house’s electrical system uses less energy than a toilet that has no electrical connection at all; who honestly believe that running an electrical resistance oven off a few PVs is only a matter of time. That didn’t grow by itself.

Tesla doesn’t have that kind of money, but someone has an interest in spending it. Tesla is not the only company with an interest in an analysis according to which the great problem is that 90 million of the 100 million cars made annually are not electric, instead of the more sensible view that the problem is that those 90 million cars are made at all, to satisfy the demands of a largely artificial mobility scenario. And outside that artificial situation, with its pressure of traffic, frequent stop-starts, and noise, not to mention intensive policing and huge infrastructural investment, I submit that the electric car as such has little or no benefit.

O libertarianismo de esquerda (ou left-libertarianism) tem sido bastante discutido dentro da comunidade libertária recentemente. O termo “libertário de esquerda” já foi utilizado de muitas maneiras dentro do discurso político e parece haver certa confusão dentro dos próprios grupos libertários a respeito de quem realmente são os libertários de esquerda.

As ideias básicas dos libertários de esquerda são mais amplas que as defendidas por nós, que fazemos parte da Alliance of the Libertarian Left (ALL) e do Centro por uma Sociedade Sem Estado (C4SS). Os anos 1990 foram um momento de crescimento das ideias libertárias orientadas à esquerda e do uso das ideias de livre mercado como armas contra os males do capitalismo corporativo. Vários pensadores desenvolveram, naquele momento, linhas de análise paralelas e independentes, passando a constituir uma grande e diversa tendência ideológica. Porém, quando consideramos o papel desproporcional que a ALL e o C4SS desempenharam no crescimento dessa tendência, devemos explicar o que queremos dizer quando falamos do libertarianismo de esquerda.

O uso mais amplo e antigo do termo “libertário de esquerda” (e, talvez, mais familiar àqueles do movimento anarquista como um todo) remonta ao século 19 e inclui praticamente toda a esquerda não-estatista, horizontalista ou descentralista — todos exceto os social-democratas e leninistas, basicamente. O termo originalmente era sinônimo a “socialista libertário” ou “anarquista” e incluía sindicalistas, comunistas de conselhos, seguidores de Rosa Luxemburgo e Daniel DeLeon, etc. Muitos dos que fazem parte do C4SS também se consideram parte desse grupo mais amplo de libertários de esquerda, embora nós tenhamos em mente uma posição mais específica ao usar esse rótulo.

Para o público geral, o rótulo “libertário de esquerda” é mais apropriado para descrever a escola de pensamento representada por Hillel Steiner e Peter Vallentyne, entre outros. A maior parte dos adeptos dessa filosofia defendem uma crença na auto-propriedade e no princípio da não-agressão e uma visão mais esquerdista a respeito dos limites que existem na apropriação de bens que fazem parte dos comuns e na aquisição de direitos pela simples mistura do trabalho. É um ponto de vista de forte interseção com o georgismo ou o geolibertarianismo. Embora essa versão das ideias libertárias de esquerda não seja a mesma que defendemos na ALL e no C4SS — e embora alguns de nossos membros provavelmente seriam contrários a alguns aspectos a ela —, é fácil imaginar que um partidário dessa filosofia se sentiria em casa entre nós.

Dentro da comunidade libertária anglosférica e entre aqueles que se descrevem como “liberais” no resto do mundo, o “libertarianismo de esquerda” pode ser associado com a aproximação de Murray Rothbard e Karl Hess aos anarquistas dentro do Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) por volta de 1970, que deu origem a movimentos rothbardianos de esquerda como o agorismo, de Samuel Edward Konkin III. Embora o rothbardismo de esquerda e o agorismo não sejam as posições oficiais da ALL ou do C4SS, é justo dizer que existe certa continuidade institucional com o Movement of the Libertarian Left de Konkin e, além disso, parte significativa de nossos membros vem da tradição rothbardiana e konkinista. Eu não fui desses movimentos. Somos uma coalizão de várias tendências que inclui rothbardianos de esquerda, anarquistas individualistas clássicos na linha do século 19, georgistas e muitas outras tradições.

Há também uma tendência entre os libertários americanos a nos confundir com os “Bleeding Heart Libertarians”, que, na verdade, é o nome de um blog em particular. Embora haja bons artigos publicados nele e apesar de terem veiculado alguns artigos nossos, nós não somos bleeding heart libertarians. Eles estão muito mais próximos do fusionismo “liberaltarian” (isto é, entre os social-democratas e os libertários americanos), com ideias que variam desde o “paternalismo libertário” de Cass Sunstein à defesa de sweatshops e dos assentamentos israelenses. Além disso, a maioria deles não são anarquistas e nós somos.

Assim, agora que consideramos aquilo que nós, da ALL e do C4SS, não somos e não queremos dizer quando falamos do “libertarianismo de esquerda”, o que realmente defendemos? Nós nos chamamos de libertários de esquerda, primeiramente, porque pretendemos recuperar as raízes de livre mercado do libertarianismo de livre mercado e, em segundo lugar, porque queremos mostrar a relevância e utilidade do pensamento de livre mercado para lidar com as preocupações da esquerda contemporânea.

O liberalismo clássico e o movimento socialista clássico do começo do século 19 tinham raízes comuns no Iluminismo. O liberalismo de Adam Smith, David Ricardo e outros economistas políticos clássicos era essencialmente um ataque esquerdista aos privilégios econômicos das oligarquias estabelecidas whig e ao mercantilismo dos detentores do dinheiro.

Com a derrota dos senhores de terras e dos mercantilistas whig no século 19 pelos industrialistas, que assumiram posições predominantes dentro do estado, o liberalismo clássico gradualmente tomou as feições de uma apologia aos interesses do capital industrial. Mesmo assim, as linhagens de esquerda — e até socialistas — do pensamento de livre mercado continuaram a sobreviver às margens do liberalismo.

Thomas Hodgskin, liberal clássico que escreveu dos anos 1820 até os anos 1860, também era um socialista que considerava rendas, lucros e juros como retornos monopolísticos sobre direitos de propriedade artificiais. Josiah Warren, Benjamin Tucker e outros individualistas americanos também defendiam um socialismo de livre mercado em que a competição sem restrições destruiria rendas, lucros e juros e garantiria que o “pagamento natural do trabalho” fosse seu produto. Muitos anarquistas individualistas associados com o jornal Liberty, de Benjamin Tucker, eram próximos a associações trabalhistas e socialistas radicais, como os Kinghts of Labor, a International Workingmen’s Association e a Western Federation of Miners.

Essa tendência dentro do libertarianismo também estava dentro da esquerda cultural, com laços fortes com movimentos pela abolição da escravidão e pela igualdade racial, pelo feminismo e pela liberdade sexual.

Com os conflitos de classe do final do século 19, a retórica de “livre mercado” e “livre empresa” dentro da política americana passou a ser associada cada vez mais à defesa militante do poder do capital corporativo contra os movimentos populistas trabalhistas e agrários radicais. Ao mesmo tempo, a divisão interna no movimento anarquista entre comunistas e individualistas deixou os individualistas suscetíveis à colonização pela direita. No século 20, o “libertarianismo de livre mercado” veio a ser associado a defesas direitistas do capitalismo por Ludwig von Mises e Ayn Rand. A tradição individualista sobrevivente foi perdendo o seu caráter esquerdista, pró-trabalhista e culturalmente socialista, adotando características da direita.

No entanto, sobreviveram algumas tradições da esquerda dentro do libertarianismo americano. Em particular, georgistas e semi-georgistas como Bolton Hall, Albert Jay Nock e Ralph Borsodi continuaram a atuar até meados do século 20.

Nós, na esquerda libertária, consideramos absolutamente perverso que as ideias libertárias de livre mercado, uma doutrina que se originou como ataque aos privilégios econômicos de latifundiários e grandes mercadores, tenha sido cooptado e transformado numa defesa do poder estabelecido da plutocracia. O uso do “livre mercado” como ideologia legitimizadora para o capitalismo corporativo e o crescimento dos propagandistas “libertários” é uma perversão tão grande dos princípios de livre mercado quanto os símbolos e a retórica dos regimes stalinistas foram uma perversão dos valores do movimento dos trabalhadores.

O sistema industrial capitalista que os libertários têm defendido desde o século 19 nunca se aproximou de um livre mercado. O capitalismo, enquanto sistema histórico que surgiu no começo da Idade Moderna, é, em vários aspectos, um desenvolvimento direto do feudalismo bastardo do final da Idade Média. Foi fundado na dissolução dos campos abertos, no cercamento dos comuns e em outras expropriações dos camponeses. Na Inglaterra, não só a população rural foi transformada em um proletariado destituído e empurrados para o trabalho assalariado, mas sua liberdade de associação e de ir e vir foram criminalizadas pelo estado policial durante as primeiras duas décadas do século 19.

A nível global, o capitalismo se tornou um sistema mundial através da ocupação colonial, da expropriação e da escravização de grande parte do Sul. Dezenas e centenas de milhões de camponeses foram expulsos de suas terras pelos poderes coloniais e levados ao mercado de trabalho assalariado. Suas propriedades prévias foram transformadas em plantações voltadas para o comércio, em uma reprise do que havia acontecido durante os cercamentos na Grã-Bretanha. Não só na época colonial, mas também nos períodos pós-coloniais, a terra e os recursos naturais do Terceiro Mundo foram cercados e saqueados pelos interesses empresariais do Ocidente. A concentração atual das terras no Terceiro Mundo nas mãos das elites latifundiárias e de petróleo e recursos minerais nas mãos de corporações ocidentais são legado direto de 400 anos de roubos coloniais e neocoloniais.

Nós, da esquerda libertária, como entendemos esse termo no C4SS, queremos retomar os princípios de livre mercado das mãos dos apologistas dos grandes negócios e da plutocracia e colocá-lo de volta a serviço de seu propósito original: um ataque radical aos interesses econômicos e às classes privilegiadas de nosso tempo. Se o liberalismo clássico de Smith e Ricardo era um ataque ao poder dos oligarcas whigs e dos interesses empresariais, nosso libertarianismo de esquerda é um ataque a seu correspondente contemporâneo: o capitalismo financeiro global e as corporações transnacionais. Nós repudiamos o papel do libertarianismo mainstream na defesa do capitalismo corporativo do século 20 e sua aliança com o conservadorismo.

Nós, da esquerda libertária, também queremos demonstrar a relevância dos princípios de livre mercado, da livre associação e da cooperação voluntária para lidar com as preocupações da esquerda atual: a injustiça econômica, a concentração e a polarização da riqueza, a exploração do trabalho, a poluição, o desperdício e a poluição, o poder corporativo e as formas estruturais de opressão, como o racismo, o sexismo, a homofobia e a transfobia.

Onde ocorreram roubos ou injustiças, nós nos colocamos radicalmente pela restituição total. Onde persiste o poder das elites neofeudais, nós tratamos suas terras como legítimas propriedades daqueles cujos antepassados as usaram e cultivaram. Os camponeses despejados de terras para dar lugar às colheitas da Cargill e da ADM devem ter suas terras restauradas. As haciendas na América Latina devem ser abertas para apropriação imediata dos camponeses sem terras. Os direitos de propriedade a terras vagas e não utilizadas nos Estados Unidos e em outras sociedades colonizadoras devem ser anulados. Em casos em que as terras originalmente tomadas por esses títulos ilegítimos são cultivadas atualmente por arrendatários ou locatários, o título de propriedade deve ser transferido para eles. Direitos de propriedade de corporações a minas, florestas e campos petrolíferos obtidos através de roubos coloniais devem ser declarados nulos.

Uma lista mínima de demandas do libertarianismo de esquerda deve incluir a abolição de todos os direitos de propriedade artificiais, de toda a escassez artificial, todos os monopólios, barreiras de entrada, cartéis regulatórios e subsídios através dos quais toda a lista de corporações que compõe a Fortune 500 adquire seus lucros. Deve incluir o fim a todos os títulos de proprietários ausentes a terras vagas, de todos os monopólios de “propriedade intelectual” e todas as restrições à livre competição na emissão de moeda e crédito ou da adoção de todos os meios de troca escolhido pelas partes de uma transação. Por exemplo, a abolição de patentes e marcas registradas acabaria com todas as barreiras que impedem que as empresas terceirizadas pela Nike na Ásia produzam imediatamente tênis idênticos e os vendam à população local a uma pequena fração de seu preço tabelado. Seria um fim imediato a todas as restrições à produção e venda de versões concorrentes de medicamentos sob patentes, com frequência por até 5% do preço. Queremos que a fração dos preços dos bens e serviços que consista de rendas advindas de propriedades artificiais de ideias ou técnicas — que compõem a maior parte do preço total em muitos casos — suma face à competição.

Nosso programa também deve incluir um fim a todas as barreiras artificiais ao auto-emprego, aos negócios caseiros, à construção de casas por conta própria e a outros meios de subsistência de baixo custo — que incluem leis de licenciamento, zoneamento e regulamentações de segurança. Deve também incluir um fim a todas as restrições ao direito de o trabalho se organizar e a negar seus serviços sob qualquer circunstância e organizar boicotes. Também devemos defender um fim a todos os privilégios legais que dão aos sindicatos estabelecidos o direito de restringir greves sem aviso prévio e outras ações diretas empreendidas pelos trabalhadores.

No caso da poluição e do esgotamento dos recursos naturais, o programa libertário de esquerda deve incluir o fim de todo acesso à terra pelas indústrias extrativas (isto é, a união entre o Bureau of Land Management dos Estados Unidos e as empresas de exploração de petróleo, mineiras, madeireiras e pecuárias), o fim de todos os subsídios ao consumo de energia e ao transporte (incluindo um fim aos subsídios ao transporte aéreo e rodoviário e o fim das expropriações para dar lugar a aeroportos e estradas), o fim das expropriações para dar lugar a oleodutos e gasodutos, a eliminação de todos limites legais de responsabilização penal para corporações por derramamentos de óleo e outros tipos de poluição, o fim da doutrina que estipula que padrões regulatórios mínimos substituem padrões mais severos de responsabilização penal do direito comum e uma restauração da responsabilidade ilimitada(que existia sob o direito comum) para atividades poluidoras como a fraturação hidráulica e a mineração por remoção do topo da montanha. E deve incluir, obviamente, o papel do estado militar americano na garantia do acesso estratégico a bacias petrolíferas no exterior ou em manter as vias marítimas abertas para os navios petroleiros.

O capitalismo corporativo e a opressão de classes sobrevivem através da intervenção estatal em benefício dos privilegiados e poderosos. Os mercados livres verdadeiros, a cooperação voluntária e a associação livre agem como dinamite na base desse sistema de opressão.

Qualquer programa libertário de esquerda deve incluir uma preocupação com a justiça social e com o combate da opressão estrutural. Isso significa, obviamente, um fim a toda a discriminação estatal com base em raça, gênero ou orientação sexual. Mas significa também muito mais.

Como libertários, nós nos opomos a todas as restrições legais à liberdade de associação, inclusive a leis contra a discriminação por empresas privadas. Mas devemos apoiar com entusiasmo a ação direta para combater as injustiças na esfera social. Historicamente, as leis anti-discriminação estatais serviram apenas para codificar, relutantemente após mudanças sociais, os ganhos obtidos através de ações diretas como os boicotes a ônibus, os protestos passivos em lanchonetes e a rebelião em Stonewall. Nós devemos apoiar o uso da ação direta, da pressão social, dos boicotes e da solidariedade para combater formas estruturais de opressão como o racismo e a cultura do estupro, desafiando as normas internalizadas que perpetuam esses sistemas de coerção.

Ao lidar com todas as formas de injustiça, devemos usar uma abordagem interseccional. Isso inclui o repúdio a práticas da velha esquerda, que consideram preocupações com raça e gênero como questões “divisivas” ou como algo a ser discutido “mais tarde”, para que se mantenha a unidade de classe. Inclui também o repúdio de movimentos de justiça de raça e gênero ocupados por profissionais da alta classe média, que enfatizam somente a chegada de negros e mulheres em “espaços de poder” e em “gabinetes e salas de reunião mais parecidos com o nosso país”, deixando intocado o poder desfrutado por esses espaços, gabinetes e salas de reunião. O ataque a uma forma de privilégio não deve ser visto como prejudicial a outras lutas; ao contrário, todas as lutas são complementares e se reforçam mutuamente.

A preocupação especial às necessidades interseccionais dos nossos companheiros menos privilegiados em cada movimento pela justiça — mulheres e negros na classe trabalhadora; mulheres pobres e trabalhadoras, mulheres negras, mulheres transgênero e trabalhadoras do sexo dentro do feminismo; mulheres, pobres e trabalhadores dentro do movimento anti-racista; etc — não divide esses movimentos. Na verdade, os fortalece contra as tentativas da classe dominante de dividi-los e conquistá-los através da exploração de suas divisões internas. Por exemplo, os grandes donos de terras derrotaram os sindicatos de pequenos fazendeiros locatários do sul dos Estados Unidos nos anos 1930 ao estimular e explorar as tensões raciais dentro de seu movimento, que causaram sua divisão em sindicatos separados de brancos e negros. Qualquer movimento de justiça de classe, raça ou sexo que ignore a interseção de múltiplas formas de opressão entre seus membros e deixe de prestar atenção às necessidades especiais dos menos privilegiados está vulnerável ao mesmo tipo de oportunismo. Em última análise essa atenção a preocupações interseccionais deve incluir a abordagem de espaços de segurança que cria uma atmosfera de debate genuíno, sem perseguições e insultos deliberados.

Os libertários — com frequência, por sua própria culpa — são considerados por muitos somente como “conservadores que fumam maconha”, adeptos de uma ideologia insular de homens de classe média de startups de tecnologia. Muitas das maiores publicações e comunidades online libertárias na internet têm a tendência reflexiva a defender as grandes empresas contra ataques de trabalhadores e consumidores, os senhorios contra os locatários, o Walmart contra Main Street, rejeitando quaisquer críticos como inimigos do livre mercado e tratando as corporações como representantes legítimas dos princípios de mercado. Têm também uma tendência paralela a rejeitar todas as preocupações de justiça pessoal e sexual como “coletivistas”. O resultado é um movimento considerado pelos pobres, trabalhadores, mulheres e negros como irrelevante para suas preocupações. Enquanto isso, os homens brancos de 20 e poucos anos em empregos de classe média explicam a falta de mulheres e minorias nas fileiras de seus movimentos como referência a seu “coletivismo natural” e citam o ensaio Isaiah’s Job de Nock uns para os outros.

Nós, da esquerda libertária, não queremos ser relegados às catacumbas ou sermos os equivalentes modernos dos jacobinos, que se sentavam para tomar café e discutir sobre Bonnie Prince Charlie. Nós não queremos reclamar sobre como a sociedade está se acabando enquanto a maior parte das pessoas que luta para mudar a realidade para melhor nos ignora. Queremos que nossas ideias estejam no centro das lutas em todos os lugares pela justiça e por uma vida melhor. E só podemos fazer isso tratando as preocupações reais de pessoas reais como se dignas de respeito e mostrando como nossas ideias são relevantes. É isso que pretendemos fazer.

Traduzido para o português por Erick Vasconcelos.

America’s criminal code is massive, criminalizing a litany of seemingly harmless and ethical actions. In an excellent 2013 article in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, Paul Larkin explores this overcriminalization through the lens of public choice theory. Public choice theory uses the assumptions and methods of economics to study the behavior of politicians, bureaucrats, voters, and other political actors. Larkin uses public choice theory to expose the perverse political incentives that have brought us overcriminalization.

One harm caused by overcriminalization is obvious. As more innocuous behaviors are criminalized, we will see more people locked in cages for no good reason. Overcriminalization causes quite a few other problems as well. As Larkin writes:

If the penal code regulates too much conduct that is beyond the common law definitions of crimes or that is not inherently blameworthy, several problems arise. It becomes a formidable task for the average person to know what the law forbids, because the moral code offers no lodestar. It is difficult for the courts to curtail law enforcement excesses, because the police almost always will have probable cause to arrest someone for something. It is challenging for the criminal process to avoid being captured and corrupted by special interest groups, because every private party will vie for economic rents by making a criminal out of a rival. If new statutes are merely copies of existing laws with different labels, they are, at best, prescriptions for inefficiency (maybe even useless), or, at worst, fraudulent. If they outlaw the same conduct but multiply the penalties, the punishments become grossly disproportionate to the harm they seek to avoid and empower prosecutors to stack charges against a defendant to coerce a guilty plea. And, for those reasons, having too many criminal laws damages the respectability of the process that enforces them.

Ultimately, overcriminalization undermines the rule of law. It makes practically everyone vulnerable to searches and violence by the police. It enables prosecutors to coerce defendants into plea deals, thus undermining the rights to due process and trial by jury. It helps create harsh sentences completely at odds with proportionality. All of this means that individual liberty is incompatible with overcriminalization.

Paul Larkin attributes overcriminalization to “a latent design defect in the political process.” Perverse incentives of our political process guide political actors to pass more and more criminal laws each year. Larkin explains that passing bills to better fund or oversee existing law enforcement is politically costly. It involves direct budget costs in the case of funding, and in the case of oversight it requires legislatures to take time to acquire knowledge about the operation of law enforcement. Larkin contrasts this with the low costs to legislators of passing new criminal laws. In terms of financial costs, “making something a crime only costs whatever it takes to print the relevant pages in the Congressional Record and the United States Code.” And in terms of costs of acquiring information, “outlawing an activity does not require a legislator to learn anything  about  the  investigative  and  enforcement  agencies charged  with  implementing the  statute. In fact, the  agencies will draft the bill for him.” Supporting a new criminal law also makes you far fewer political enemies than making a funding decision, Larkin argues.

Deciding where public funds will go—guns  or  butter,  law  enforcement  or  education,  and  so forth—makes friends of some agencies and their supporters, in and out of government, but it also makes enemies out of the colleagues and citizens who do not receive funds for their own projects. By  contrast, making  something  a  crime makes enemies only from “the  criminal  element,” and those people do not count, largely because they cannot vote.

These are just a few of the incentives that entice legislators to support new criminal laws. While legislators discuss these laws in terms of the public interest, many criminal laws are better explained in terms of politicians’ self-interest.

It’s not just politicians that have incentives to support an ever expanding scope for criminal law. Prosecutors, regulators, and law enforcement agents all play a role. Larkin describes the relationship between prosecutors and legislators in this process as follows:

Prosecutors must actually use these new statutes for a legislator to receive credit for fighting crime on an ongoing basis. Prosecutors who make that choice thereby make an ally in the halls of the legislature—an ally who can help pass more laws that benefit prosecutors. The consequence, as Professor Stuntz termed it, is a symbiotic relationship between prosecutors and members of Congress. “Legislators gain when they write statutes in ways that benefit prosecutors. Prosecutors gain from statutes that more easily allow them to induce guilty pleas.” It is a “beautiful friendship.”

This symbiotic relationship between prosecutors and legislators means that criminal law not only expands on the books, but is concretely used to put people in prison.

The regulatory state plays a similar role, in what Larkin calls “the criminal-regulatory partnership.” Regulators benefit from this partnership by being able to call respected and feared law enforcement agents to enforce their regulations. Legislators also benefit, because “Adding criminal statutes to an otherwise entirely civil regulatory scheme allows Congress to cash in on the leverage that  a  criminal investigation  enjoys  with the public and the media.”

America has the largest prison population on earth. We have a voluminous criminal law, to the point where the Congressional Research Service told Congress they could not determine with certainty how many crimes are on the books. According to Larkin, “Today, there are approximately 3,300 federal criminal statutes.”
And unless we challenge the incentive structure that political actors act within, we are likely to see criminalization expand even more.

C4SS Feed 44 presents “State Socialism and Anarchism: How Far They Agree, and Wherein They Differ” from the book Markets Not Capitalism, written by Benjamin Tucker, read by Stephanie Murphy and edited by Nick Ford.

The two principles referred to are Authority and Liberty, and the names of the two schools of Socialistic thought which fully and unreservedly represent one or the other of them are, respectively, State Socialism and Anarchism. Whoso knows what these two schools want and how they propose to get it understands the Socialistic movement. For, just as it has been said that there is no half-way house between Rome and Reason, so it may be said that there is no half-way house between State Socialism and Anarchism.

There are, in fact, two currents steadily flowing from the center of the Socialistic forces which are concentrating them on the left and on the right; and, if Socialism is to prevail, it is among the possibilities that, after this movement of separation has been completed and the existing order have been crushed out between the two camps, the ultimate and bitterer conflict will be still to come. In that case all the eight-hour men, all the trades-unionists, all the Knights of Labor, all the land nationalizationists, all the greenbackers, and, in short, all the members of the thousand and one different battalions belonging to the great army of Labor, will have deserted their old posts, and, these being arrayed on the one side and the other, the great battle will begin.

What a final victory for the State Socialists will mean, and what a final victory for the Anarchists will mean, it is the purpose of this paper to briefly state.

Feed 44:

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Max Borders (“The Big Box Effect,” The Freeman, May 14), in one of the most perverse exercises in framing ever, portrays Big Box stores and sprawl as examples of spontaneous order, and the older style of mixed-use development as the domain of statist control freaks. He even misappropriates phraseology from James Scott — of all people — in the process.

Borders’s foil is the widespread belief that Big Box stores “negatively impact the social, economic and environmental fabric of communities.” In his attempt to counter that belief, he goes off the rails repeatedly from the very beginning. He begins, in response to critics of the low density inherent in the suburban sprawl model, with an abstract discussion of whether high density, as such, is really any better than low density. And — a pattern that will recur throughout his article — he portrays low density as a spontaneously arising phenomenon, as opposed to high density (which results from “pro-density policies”).

I referred above to Borders’s misappropriation of James Scott’s language. He uses Scott’s phrase “seeing like a state,” in fairness, in reference to urban planners’ obsession with a “best and highest use” that maximizes tax revenues per acre. But it’s still tone deaf beyond belief, considering the car-centric monoculture development model Borders celebrates was almost entirely the creation of mid-20th century urban planners in the tradition of Le Corbusier — who was actually one of Scott’s paradigmatic examples of “authoritarian high modernism” in Seeing Like a State. And Jane Jacobs, who genuinely understood Hayekian principles of distributed knowledge and spontaneous order, devoted her career to defending the organic development of older, traditional urban centers against the kind of monoculture central planning associated with Corbusier and car culture.

Borders at least tips his hat to the possibility that there is some local government aid to Big Boxes. But he does so in the manner of Lincoln’s anecdotal Jesuit who, accused of murdering ten men and a dog, triumphantly produced the dog in court. He portrays the benefits at issue as merely a few local tax advantages of middling scale, even then attempting to shift the entire blame onto local government with Big Box retailers as passive beneficiaries.

To take the second point first, one might as well attempt to portray giant landlords as passive beneficiaries of feudalism. Chambers of Commerce and real estate developers aren’t passive beneficiaries of local government; they ARE local government. As libertarians like Franz Oppenheimer and Albert Jay Nock recognized, government is the political means to wealth. It was created by economic ruling classes as a means for extracting rents from society. Government is a tool. Economic elites are the hands that wield it.

As for the sheer scale of government intervention in favor of monoculture and sprawl, it’s a bit like the blind men and the elephant. Each separate component of intervention is gargantuan. The whole is almost beyond comprehension. Outlying Big Box and monoculture housing developments get subsidized road and utility infrastructures, with utility ratepayers in older, in-lying areas paying way above cost for their sewer, water and electricity in order to subsidize extending hookups to new outlying developments. Threatening to charge hookup fees equivalent to the cost new fringe development actually imposes on the system is guaranteed to spur capital flight by real estate developers. Local governments criminalize mixed-use development through zoning laws that both prohibit neighborhood commercial enterprises like corner grocers, and affordable housing in downtown areas like walkup apartments over Main Street businesses. Design plats mandate golf course-sized front lawns and setbacks straight out of the Brady Bunch.

Cities, through gentrification policies like improvement districts and mandated downtown parking minimums, drive rents and property taxes out of the range of previous ordinary residents and small business owners, in order to make them more hospitable for suburban yuppies who come in to visit the fern bars and watch Andrew Lloyd Webber at the Arts Center. Cities bulldoze entire neighborhoods of poor people of color in order to build freeways, and close down old neighborhood schools in order to build new ones near the subdivisions springing up out on the cloverleafs.

And it’s not all local, either. The “warehouses on wheels” wholesale distribution model pioneered by Walmart depends entirely on the heavily subsidized Interstate Highway System.

The Big Box and sprawl monocultures Borders celebrates are a virtual creation of the centralized state, based on a “vision of the annointed” among urban planners and politically connected capitalists. So if you want to defend Big Box retailers, Mr. Borders, by all means do so. But leave James Scott and spontaneous order out of it.

Matthew Harwood reviews, Radley Balko’s, Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces

Conor Friedersdorf discusses why it shouldn’t be criminal to report government secrets. His view on charging leakers of classified information is not mine, but the piece is good overall.

Kurt Wallace interviews Sheldon Richman.

Gary Leupp discusses the lie surrounding the Afghan War.

Jacob G. Hornberger discusses POWS in Afghanistan and the ethics/legality of the war there.

Tom Engelhardt discusses the failure of the U.S. empire.

Dan Sanchez discusses resistance to the state.

William Norman Grigg discusses the recent murder of two cops and one civilian in Las Vegas.

Chandra Muzaffar discuses the Syrian vote. It’s a bit too pro-Assad but contains some good material.

Paul Atwood discusses the scapegoating of Bowe Bergdahl

Sheldon Richman discusses the Bowe Bergdahl deal.

Patrick Cockburn discusses the battle to establish an Islamic state in Syria and Iraq.

Doug Bandow discusses Obama’s foreign policy

Gene Healy discusses Hilary Clinton’s hawkishness.

Lucy Steigerwald discusses cops, gun control, and the myth of the U.S. as a bloody war zone.

Majorie Cohn discusses how the U.S. nearly used nukes during the Vietnam War.

Patrick Cockburn discusses Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

Brian Cloughley discusses Obama’s insult and injury.

Chase Madar discusses the little meaning of left and right for foreign policy.

Greg Shupak discusses how Progressives got Afghanistan wrong.

James Kilgore discusses the repackaging of mass imprisonment.

Norman Pollack discusses Obama’s global warmongering.

James P. Jordan discusses how the U.S. is exporting its model of prisons.

Kevin Carson discusses the fraud of the “consent of the governed”.

Majorie Cohn discusses the legality of the bombing of Afghanistan.

Mike Whitney discusses the debacle in Mosul.

Kevin Carson surveys anarchist, David Graeber’s, thought in a study.

Cathy Reisenwitz discusses political ignorance and libertarianism.

World champion, Magnus Carlsen, defeats Ivan Sokolov.

Vishy Anand beats Fabiano Caurana.

C4SS Senior Fellow and Chair, Sheldon Richman, interviewed on the Rare show “Swapped Taliban detainees: Terrorists or prisoners of war?” hosted by contributor Kurt Wallace.

https://soundcloud.com/rare-us/interview-with-sheldon-richman

Left-libertarianism has been getting a lot of buzz recently in the broader American libertarian community. The term “left-libertarian” has been used many ways in American politics, and there seems to be some confusion within the libertarian community itself as to who left-libertarians actually are.

The basic ideas of left-libertarianism, as we at the Alliance of the Libertarian Left (ALL) and Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS) identify with that label, are broader than our organizations alone. The 1990s were a sort of Steam Engine Time for the general idea of libertarianism with a left-wing orientation, and the use of free market ideas as a weapon against the evils of corporate capitalism; a number of thinkers have developed parallel lines of analysis independently of one another, and it has grown into a large and loose-knit ideological tendency. But considering the disproportionate role ALL and C4SS have played in the growing prominence of this tendency, it’s only appropriate to explain where we’re coming from and what we mean by left-libertarianism.

The oldest and broadest usage of “left-libertarian,” and perhaps most familiar to those in the anarchist movement at large, dates back to the late nineteenth century, and includes pretty much the whole non-statist, horizontalist or decentralist Left — everybody but Social Democrats and Leninists, basically. It was originally used as a synonym for “libertarian socialist” or “anarchist,” and also commonly included syndicalists, council communists, followers of Rosa Luxemburg and Daniel DeLeon, etc. Many of us at C4SS would consider ourselves part of this broader left-libertarian community, although what we mean when we call our position “left-libertarian” is more specific.

To the general public these days, “left-libertarian” is more apt to call to mind a school of thought exemplified within the past twenty years by Hillel Steiner and Peter Vallentyne, among others. Most adherents of this philosophy combine a belief in self-ownership and the non-aggression principle with left-wing views on the limited extent to which individuals can remove property from the common and acquire unlimited rights of disposal over it simply by mixing their labor with it. It overlaps heavily with Georgism and Geolibertarianism. Although this version of left-libertarianism is not coextensive with what we promote at ALL/C4SS, and some of our members would object to aspects of it, it’s easy to imagine an adherent of this philosophy being at home among us.

Within the Anglospheric libertarian community, and those who describe themselves as “liberal” elsewhere in the world, “left-libertarianism” might be associated with Murray Rothbard’s and Karl Hess’s attempt at an alliance with anarchists in the SDS around 1970, and left-Rothbardian movements like Sam Konkin’s Agorism that grew out of it. Although left-Rothbardianism and Konkin’s Agorism are not the official position of the ALL/C4SS, it’s fair to say that we have some organizational continuity with Konkin’s Movement of the Libertarian Left, and a significant part of our oldest core membership come from the left-Rothbardian and Konkinite tradition. I myself do not. We are a multi-tendency coalition that includes left-Rothbardians, classic 19th century individualist anarchists, Georgists, and many other traditions.

There is also a tendency among American libertarians to confuse us with “Bleeding Heart Libertarians,” which is actually the name of a specific blog. Although there is some good writing there and they’ve published some of our stuff, we are not bleeding heart libertarians as such. Bleeding Heart Libertarians are a lot closer to “liberaltarian” fusionism, with deviations ranging from Cass Sunstein’s “libertarian paternalism” to the defense of sweatshops and Israeli settlements. Not to mention most of them aren’t anarchists, and we are.

So now that we’ve considered all the things that we of ALL/C4SS are not, and do not mean by “left-libertarianism,” what do we actually stand for? We call ourselves left-libertarians, first, because we want to recuperate the left-wing roots of free market libertarianism, and second because we want to demonstrate the relevance and usefulness of free market thought for addressing the concerns of today’s Left.

Classical liberalism and the classical socialist movement of the early 19th century had very close common roots in the Enlightenment. The liberalism of Adam Smith, David Ricardo and the other classical political economists was very much a left-wing assault on the entrenched economic privilege of the great Whig landed oligarchy and the mercantilism of the moneyed classes.

As the rising industrialists defeated the Whig landlords and mercantilists in the 19th century and gained a predominant position in the state, classical liberalism gradually took on the character of an apologetic doctrine in defense of the entrenched interests of industrial capital. Even so, the left-wing — even socialistic — strands of free market thought continued to survive on the margins of establishment liberalism.

Thomas Hodgskin, a classical liberal who wrote in the 1820s through 1860s, was also a socialist who saw rent, profit and interest as monopoly returns on artificial property rights and privilege. Josiah Warren, Benjamin Tucker and the other American individualists also favored a free market form of socialism in which unfettered competition would destroy rent, profit and interest and guarantee that “the natural wage of labor in a free market is its product.” Many individualist anarchists associated with Tucker’s Liberty group had close ties to radical labor and socialist groups like the Knights of Labor, the International Workingmen’s Association and the Western Federation of Miners.

This strand of libertarianism was also on the cultural Left, closely associated with movements for the abolition of slavery, and for racial equality, feminism and sexual freedom.

As the class wars of the late 19th century raged on, “free market” and “free enterprise” rhetoric in mainstream American politics came to be associated more and more with the militant defense of corporate capital against radical challenges from the labor and farm populist movement. At the same time the internal split within the anarchist movement between communists and individualists left the latter isolated and vulnerable to colonization by the Right. In the early 20th century, “free market libertarianism” came to be closely associated with right-wing defenses of capitalism by Mises and Rand. The surviving individualist tradition was stripped of its older left-wing, pro-labor and socialistic cultural traditions, and took on an increasingly right-wing apologetic character.

Nevertheless, even then some remnant of the older left-wing tradition survived in American libertarianism. In particular Georgists and quasi-Georgists like Bolton Hall, Albert Nock and Ralph Borsodi straggled along through the mid-20th century.

We on the Libertarian Left consider it utterly perverse that free market libertarianism, a doctrine which had its origins as an attack on the economic privilege of landlords and merchants, should ever have been coopted in defense of the entrenched power of the plutocracy and big business. The use of the “free market” as a legitimizing ideology for triumphant corporate capitalism, and the growth of a community of “libertarian” propagandists, is as much a perversion of free market principles as Stalinist regimes’ cooptation of rhetoric and symbols from the historic socialist movement was a perversion of the working class movement.

The industrial capitalist system that the libertarian mainstream has been defending since the mid-19th century has never even remotely approximated a free market. Capitalism, as the historic system that emerged in early modern times, is in many ways a direct outgrowth of the bastard feudalism of the late Middle Ages. It was founded on the dissolution of the open fields, enclosure of the commons and other massive expropriations of the peasantry. In Britain not only was the rural population transformed into a propertyless proletariat and driven into wage labor, but its freedom of association and movement were criminalized by a draconian police state for the first two decades of the 19th century.

On a global level, capitalism expanded into a world system through the colonial occupation, expropriation and enslavement of much of the global South. Tens and hundreds of millions of peasants were dispossessed from their land by the colonial powers and driven into the wage labor market, and their former holdings consolidated for cash crop agriculture, in a global reenactment of the Enclosures of Great Britain. In not only colonial but post-colonial times, the land and natural resources of the Third World have been enclosed, stolen and plundered by Western business interests. The current concentration of Third World land in the hands of landed elites producing in collusion with Western agribusiness interests, and of oil and mineral resources in the hands of Western corporations, is a direct legacy of four hundred years of colonial and neo-colonial robbery.

We of the Libertarian Left, as we understand it at C4SS, want to take back free market principles from the hirelings of big business and the plutocracy, and put them back to their original use: an all-out assault on the entrenched economic interests and privileged classes of our day. If the classical liberalism of Smith and Ricardo was an attack on the power of the Whig landed oligarchs and the moneyed interests, our left-libertarianism is an attack on the closest thing in our own time: global finance capital and the transnational corporations. We repudiate mainstream libertarianism’s role in defense of corporate capitalism in the 20th century, and its alliance with conservatism.

We of the Libertarian Left also want to demonstrate the relevance of free market principles, free association and voluntary cooperation in addressing the concerns of today’s Left: Economic injustice, the concentration and polarization of wealth, the exploitation of labor, pollution and waste, corporate power, and structural forms of oppression like racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia.

Where robbery or injustice have been done, we take an unflinching stand for full rectification. Wherever ownership of land by neo-feudal elites persists, it should be treated as the rightful property of those whose ancestors have worked and used it. Peasants evicted from land to raise cash crops for Cargill and ADM should be restored to them. Haciendas in Latin America should be opened up for immediate homesteading by landless peasants. The title to vacant and unimproved land in the United States and other settler societies that has been enclosed and held out of use by absentee landlords should be voided. In cases where land originally claimed under such an illegitimate title is currently worked or inhabited by tenants or mortgage-payers, full title should be immediately transferred to them. Corporate title to mines, forests and oilfields obtained through colonial robbery should be voided out.

The minimum list of demands of left-libertarianism should include abolition of all artificial property rights, artificial scarcities, monopolies, entry barriers, regulatory cartels and subsidies, by which virtually the entire Fortune 500 gets the bulk of its profits. It should include an end to all absentee title to vacant and unimproved land, all “intellectual property” monopolies, and all restrictions on free competition in the issue of money and credit or on the free adoption of any and all media of exchange chosen by the parties to a transaction. For example, the abolition of patents and trademarks would mean an end to all legal barriers that prevent Nike’s contractors in Asia from immediately producing identical knockoff sneakers and marketing them to the local population at a tiny fraction of the price, without the Swoosh markup. It would mean an immediate end to all restrictions on the production and sale of competing versions of medications under patent, often for as little as 5% of the price. We want the portion of the price of all goods and services that consists of embedded rents on “property” in ideas or techniques — often the majority of their price — to vanish in the face of immediate competition.

Our agenda should include, also, an end to all artificial barriers to self employment, home-based enterprise, and vernacular or self-built housing and other means of low-cost subsistence — that includes licensing and zoning laws or safety codes. And it should include an end to all legal restrictions on the right of labor to organize and to withhold its services under any and all circumstances or to engage in boycotts, and an end to all legal privileges that give certified union establishments the right to restrict wildcatting and other direct action by their rank-and-file.

In the case of pollution and resource depletion, the left-libertarian agenda must include an end to all privileged access to land by extractive industries (i.e. the collusion of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management with oil, mining, logging and ranching companies), all subsidies to energy and transportation consumption (including an end to airport and highway subsidies, including the use of eminent domain for those purposes), an end to the use of eminent domain for oil and gas pipelines, the elimination of all regulatory caps on corporate liability for oil spills and other pollution, an end to the doctrine by which minimal regulatory standards preempt more stringent preexisting common law standards of liability, and a full restoration of unlimited liability (as it existed under the original common law of torts) for polluting activity like fracking and mountaintop removal. And it must include, obviously, the role of the U.S. warfare state in securing strategic access to foreign oil basins or keeping sea lanes open for oil tankers.

Corporate capitalism and class oppression live, move and have their being in state intervention on behalf of the privileged and powerful. Genuine free markets, voluntary cooperation and free association will act like dynamite at the foundations of this system of oppression.

Any left-libertarian agenda worthy of the name must also include a concern for social justice and combating structural oppression. That means, obviously, an end to all state-enforced discrimination on the basis of race, gender, or sexual orientation. But it means much more.

True, as libertarians we oppose all legal restrictions on freedom of association, including laws against discrimination by private businesses. But we should enthusiastically support direct action to combat injustice in the social realm. And historically, state non-discrimination laws have served only to codify, grudgingly and after the fact, gains won on the ground through direct action like bus boycotts, lunch counter sit-ins and the Stonewall riots. We should support the use of direct action, social pressure, boycotts and social solidarity to combat structural forms of oppression like racism and rape culture, and challenging internalized norms that perpetuate such systems of coercion.

In addressing all forms of injustice, we should take an intersectional approach. That includes a repudiation of the Old Left practices of dismissing race and gender concerns as “divisive” or something to be postponed “until later” in the interest of class unity. It also includes a repudiation of racial and gender justice movements dominated by upper-middle-class professionals, that focus solely on black or female “faces in high places” and “cabinets/boardrooms that look like the rest of America” while leaving the power of those high places, cabinets and boardrooms untouched. The assault on one form of entrenched privilege must not be seen coming at the expense of other struggles; rather, the struggles are all complementary and mutually reinforcing.

Paying special concern to the intersectional needs of the least privileged comrades in each justice movement — women and people of color in the working class; poor and working women, women of color, transgender women and sex workers within feminism; women and poor and working people within the racial justice movement; etc. — does not divide these movements. It actually strengthens them against attempts by the ruling class to divide and conquer by exploiting internal fracture lines as a source of weakness. For example, the big land-owners defeated the tenant farmer unions in the American South of the 1930s by encouraging and exploiting racial discord and causing the movement to split into separate black and white unions. Any class, racial or sexual justice movement that ignores the intersection of multiple forms of oppression among its own members, instead of paying special attention to the special needs of the least privileged, leaves itself open to the same kind of opportunism. Ultimately, any such attention to intersectional concerns must include a safe spaces approach that creates a welcome atmosphere of genuine debate for all, without the chilling effect of deliberate harassment and slurs.

Libertarians — often by our own fault — have been dismissed by many as “pot-smoking Republicans,” adhering to an insular ideology mainly of white middle-class males in Silicon Valley startups. In all too many establishment libertarian publications and online communities, the reflexive tendency is to defend big business against attacks by workers and consumers, landlords against tenants, and Walmart against Main Street, dismissing any critics as enemies of the free market and treating corporations as if they were proxies for market principles. It’s paralleled by a similar tendency to dismiss all concerns for racial and sexual justice as “collectivist.” The result is a movement seen by poor and working people, women and people of color as utterly irrelevant to their concerns. Meanwhile, white male 20-something tech workers explain the lack of women and minorities by reference to their “natural collectivism,” and morosely quote Nock from “Isaiah’s Job” to each other.

We on the Libertarian Left don’t want to be relegated to the catacombs, or be the modern-day equivalent of Jacobites sitting in the coffee houses and reminiscing about Bonnie Prince Charlie and the ’15. We don’t want to moan about how society is going to hell in a handbasket, while the majority of people fighting to change things for the better ignore us. We want our ideas to be at the center of struggles everywhere for justice and a better life. And we can only do this by treating the real concerns of actual people as if they’re worthy of respect, and showing how our ideas are relevant. This is what we aim to do.

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Translations for this article:

• Dutch, Wat is links-libertarisme?

“Government is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together.” This blithe, sunny-sounding phrase, attributed to former Massachusetts congressman Barney Frank, is frequently called up in the service of the advancing march of the American state. It sounds very nice. Certainly government is one of the things people do together. The phrase, though, seems to attempt to describe the fundamental quality that makes government what it is. The words would lack much meaning or import if they simply meant that government is made up of people doing things together; this is too obvious. Frank was trying to tell us something about the character of government, its true nature, as it were. So let us think about this and tease out what lessons we might.

If government was just people grouping together voluntarily to undertake some desired social end, who could object? What even would form the basis of an objection? Free association and decision by consensus hardly seem the sort of things actually underlying our incensed debates about politics, the emotional nature of which seems to hint that the stakes are high (or at least that we honestly believe them to be). I think rather that some people suspect the truth — that government is something more or something other than simply “the things we choose to do together.” I think these people suspect that government presents legitimate dangers, imposing the preferences of some special, limited group on all of society, regardless of what we choose. And the choosing, or lack thereof, is the essential principle that is the heart of the libertarian critique.

We remonstrate with government not because it is government; we are not interested in the word itself or with random opposition to institutions that are called a certain thing. It is the lack of choice — the fact of coercive imposition or aggression — which we call attention to, a certain way of behaving which we see as inhumane, as contrary to human nature, or morality, or some other rubric against which we as sentient human beings grade observed conduct. Libertarians demur to the idea of government on historical, theoretical and empirical grounds. Historically, we see that government was never really about what “we choose to do together,” but was instead first about conquest and domination of a ruled group by a ruling group. As Frank Chodorov teaches, “the premise of the state is the exploitation of producers by the use of power,” “this master-slave economy” being “the earliest manifestation of the state.” No idea as lofty or as virtuous as togetherness or social contract motivated or crossed the minds of the first states, which were nothing more than bastard progeny of vanquishment, of rape, plunder and spoliation.

Theoretically, we oppose government as one specific example of the improper use of force, a discrete, identifiable form of aggression. To the extent that a monopoly on the use of force within a given area is built into the very definition of government, we oppose government on philosophical grounds. Empirically, observing the practical effects of government authority in human society, its failures to even mitigate the problems it was supposedly inaugurated to solve, we surmise that there must be better ways to go about unraveling those problems. Experience teaches us that government has, in point of fact, aggravated, even created, most of what sane, ordinary people regard as problems. Having thus torn aside the the most popular veils of falsehood that cover the state, its historical origin and function and its consequences, the libertarian gets down to the important business of talking about what actually would constitute that which “we choose to do together.”

It should be clear enough that genuinely voluntary, cooperative forms of organization, big and small, for profit or not, are malleable and versatile enough to set about doing the many things we might want to do together. Without the state, always an illiberal force of domination, orthodoxy and conformity, our many experiments would compete perfectly nonviolently with one another. A world of coercive government “solutions” in grayscale would be transformed into a full color panoply of potential answers, none with the power to force compliance or acceptance. It is the lack of such a power that is the source of a free society’s robustness and resilience. We should desire deeply to do things together. Human beings are social and community-oriented by nature. Given freedom from the state and external coercion generally, we are unlikely to simply split off and wander solitarily for the rest of our time on earth. But true togetherness does not and cannot result from defeat and subjugation, which can only alienate us from one another and obstruct any worthwhile goal we might have as fellow humans. Libertarians raise a toast to “the things we choose to do together” — and that’s why we stand in opposition to the state.

If you look at the official unemployment numbers without questioning the data, unemployment seems to be sinking. In May employers added 288,000 jobs and the unemployment rate fell 0.4 percentage points to 6.3 percent. It looks like the country is finally recovering from the recession. But taking those numbers at face value is a mistake.

A deeper look into the unemployment statistics reveals not only that the “official” numbers are misleading, but also that the state’s attempt at controlling and managing the economy is an abject failure. In April 800,000 people left the work force. Almost a million people simply stopped looking for work. Additionally, the number of jobs added is too little to keep up with the nearly 7 percent increase in population growth.

Now, to a normal person, these statistics seem like a bad sign — a sign that job growth is not occurring and the economy is still in the gutter. But, in a crusade against common sense, government and media emphasize a statistic that makes everything look much less gloomy than it actually it is. This statistic that everyone refers to improves when the labor force drops.

The most popularly used unemployment statistic only accounts for the labor force and how many people in the labor force are jobless. When someone stops looking for work, they leave the labor force. This makes unemployment go “down,” despite no one getting a job. The person is still unemployed, but the statistic shows their joblessness as an improvement. This leads to the national conversation about economic growth running completely backwards. Pundits and politicians talk about how low the unemployment rate is and the amount of people who left the labor force is conveniently forgotten.

When the labor force dropped to a mere 62.8 percent of the population in April, tied for the lowest rate since the 1970s, the official unemployment statistic also dropped. More people left the labor force so less people were considered unemployed. The increasingly smaller percentage of people considered in the labor force, not economic growth is driving the increasingly lower unemployment rate. But the state doesn’t want you to notice.

This bizarre construction of unemployment statistics could be construed as the mere stupidity of the state. After all, it’s portraying an illusion. The truth is buried deep below the official statistic. But it’s actually genius. States would fall if the truth about their existence came out. While states are terribly pathetic at running economies, they are supremely good at creating propaganda. Especially when that propaganda conceals the true effects of state intervention. The state created the recession through an inflation-driven housing bubble. Then it worsened and prolonged the recession with bailouts and new regulations. Now the state has convinced people it has fixed the recession using, among other things, a misleading unemployment measure.

The state demands unquestioning obedience. That’s why the administration touts this statistic and ignores other, less generous (but more accurate), unemployment measures. If people learned unemployment numbers were just propaganda, they would lose confidence in the state: Specifically in its success at fixing the economy. This would be a huge constraint on the kinds of policies the state could pursue. If people were intellectually radical and questioned the state, the state would lose all its power.

Translations for this article:

• Italian, Le Statistiche sulla Disoccupazione Sono Propaganda di Stato.

Jiminykrix recently commented on my last post about how we left-libertarian market anarchists aren’t socially liberal capitalists. He had a point to make about private property that’s worth mentioning. The inspiration for his commentary on it was my defining capitalism as the separation of labor from ownership rather than markets or private property per se. This is admittedly a work in progress definition I tentatively endorse. That doesn’t mean his commentary is not worth further exploration. Let’s dive in!

He writes in reference to my defining of capitalism:

Pretty good, but.. to my mind, private property is a danger in itself because it creates disparities in economic power that could provide opportunities to demand rent, creating a feedback loop between power and wealth and power, allowing the private property owner to recreate capitalist-like structures.

Legitimate points, Jiminykrix. A way of approaching this particular analysis is to invoke the tried and true left-anarchist distinction between possession and property. If my memory serves me correctly, this demarcation pertains to what one personally uses as opposed to what one owns absentee under capitalist norms of legal ownership. A reliance on possession in the form of occupation and use would go a long ways towards remedying the problems raised by the commentator above.

Without absentee control or ownership, a massive disparity in wealth and power wouldn’t exist because they couldn’t exercise external control over you and extract rent. It was perhaps careless of me not to use the term, private possession, as opposed to private property. Lockean property rights wouldn’t of necessity lead to the conditions described above either. If there were widespread ownership due to more egalitarian freed market forces, the recreation of capitalist structures would be difficult to impossible. The difficulty would leave only a small minority of ardent seekers to push for it. Not exactly a powerful political, economic, and cultural force.

His final commentary relevant to this post is below:

It could be that the understanding of “ownership” in play in this definition is intended to be sufficiently strong to ward off this possibility, but I think it’s worth bearing in mind that legal ownership of something isn’t the only way someone ever extracts rent from someone else.

E.g., in politics under bourgeois democracy, if my fortune allows me to merely *threaten* to fund the opponent of a political candidate, I have power over politics even without spending money. It seems unlikely to me that someone with a hoard of gold (or bitcoin?) in, say, a mutualist society wouldn’t be able to extract rent from someone, somewhere.

The definition used was not intended to be strong enough to ward off this possibility, but it certainly is worth understanding in that manner. Not sure how a person extracts rent from someone else without legal ownership of something, so the commentator is kindly asked to provide further examples or explain the one given beter. The example provided is not understandable as one to me.

The author is correct to note that hoarding wealth in a mutualist society most likely wouldn’t allow one to extract rent. This is possibly due to the lack of absentee control over others, and what they actually use, but you happen to legally own under capitalism. Let’s work to put an end to said exploitation.

As a society, it is in our best interest to create a just peace. This is something, however, that goes unfulfilled throughout the world. Many would think that inheriting this tranquil state might be a simple endeavor, if only certain barriers did not keep it from happening. Just imagining how to create peace is the easy part; it is overcoming those barriers that challenge one’s ability to put forth their implementations. Peace is not something we wait for, but an objective that must be won through direct action and cooperation. By direct action I mean people should unflinchingly take on a problem by the use of their skills and openness to put an end to that problem; and by cooperation I mean people should take on that problem together. Earlier this year, I volunteered at the Western Maryland Food Bank; while there, I witnessed cooperation like I had never seen before. People donate money and food, while the food bank gives it away to organizations in need at a very low cost. I strongly believe we have it in our power to create more organizations of this sort, without the threat of scarcity or coercion.

Upon arriving at the food bank, I did not know what to expect since I had never volunteered in this manner before. There are two large garage doors on the front of the building; I entered through a side door that led to the office. There I shook hands with Wes, who runs the warehouse. He led me to the warehouse which has an upper-deck where customers look at assorted items and choose what they want – there are no limits. The lower-deck consisted of many large shelves full of food items. The first thing Wes had me do was put packages of cans in a pile below shelves of other food. The work I performed was mainly heavy-lifting, including moving boxes of food around the facility and helping customers load their vehicles. I would also help sort items and put them in their proper places. The operation of the food bank runs very smoothly. Customers would come in and pick out which items they need, running at nineteen cents per pound, and place them on a skid. After they were finished, the skid was transported to a ledge and taken off of the skid. The customers would back in through one of the garage doors and pull up to the ledge. From the ledge, other volunteers and I would help load these items into the backs of their vehicles.

After helping a few customers, Wes came up to me and explained exactly what the food bank does; it sells food items to organizations and charities, such as food pantries (including church-based), the Women’s shelter, Teen Challenge and even day care centers. The food bank takes in food donated by food-drives and the general good will of people. While volunteering I noticed that a few times the staff was preparing to have a food-drive at certain places. They also take in items from grocery and convenience stores that are some-what damaged (such as a few cracked eggs) or close to expiring. Their official mission statement reads,

The Western Maryland Food Bank, Inc. is committed to reducing hunger by acquiring and distributing food and non-food items to local and regional organizations assisting those in need.

Now that I have described the operations of a food bank, let us see some statistics on worldwide hunger and poverty. In the world today, a recorded 842 million people do not have enough food to eat. About 827 million of those people live in developing countries and poor nutrition causes about forty-five percent of deaths in children under age five. In 2012, about 46.5 million U.S. citizens lived in poverty; 49 million lived in food insecure households, 15.9 million of them children. With a world population of about seven billion, 842 million people may not seem like a lot. But roughly imagine the combined populations of the United States, Indonesia, Russia, France, the United Kingdom, and Sweden without enough food to eat, while the rest of the world is living the good life. It always sounds much more shocking when describing statistics according to entire populations because, although more prevalent in developing countries, hunger occurs all over the world. It is much more camouflaged by the well-off when in developed countries because, if that is not the reality of the majority, then why show what only a minority go through?

I chose to volunteer at a food bank because I wanted to work within a place that deals with the issue of hunger, one of the most common and profound forms of violence. Hunger is an issue that is largely neglected by those in charge because they feel as though they have far more important priorities than making sure people, especially children, are not going hungry. Although most food banks receive government funding, they provide a good model of voluntary cooperation in order to help the needy. We cannot and must not wait for the state to “help” us. We must take care of ourselves and each other. Mutual aid is a simple way to help people overcome poverty in a peaceful manner. We must build our own facilities, such as food banks, and resources so that this may be possible and not let anyone tell us that it cannot be done.

Many conformists may see this as idealistic, and me an ideologue, but I see it as absolutely natural and desirable. Hunger is something that can lead people to commit acts of criminality out of desperation, such as theft or physical violence. A lot of people damn those who commit these acts, but many of them are put into a situation, such as poverty, where they are out of options. Poverty is, without a doubt, a cause of crime. Some may see certain people as inherently ugly, while I see them as beautiful individuals who are begging to be set free from whatever coercive powers are keeping them bound. I sincerely believe that peace is an absolute kept from truly coming into existence. No matter who I am speaking to, a brother, sister, friend, comrade, it is intrinsic that we knock down those barriers that keep peace from emerging and a free society from flourishing.