Libertarianism is on the left!

[BillKauffman]

Now, I know you're probably not fond of this... as you likely think right-anarchists are simply misguided (a.k.a. anarcho-capitalism, which you already critiqued), and so only left-anarchism is legitimate to you.... but.... that's the way I divide the scale up, anyway.   The two groups obviously have difference of opinion on the legitimacy of the theory of hiearchy, and that simply has to be reflected on the political spectrum.

Left-anarchism for the most part doesn't believe in markets and private ownership of capital and thus "fetishize" collectivism because they believe it (markets & private ownership) can only lead to capital commanding labor. Left-libertarians (mutualists in particular) do because they believe without privilege and the state, the market will squeeze out profits and labor will always get it's just due - thus labor will command capital.

[BillKauffman]

RE: equality

Well, while we are at it, no semantic nitpick debate would be complete without pointing out that the word equality is also subject to much debate, as there are numerous types of equality, and amongst those types, often several subtypes with even sub-sub types in some cases.

Substantive equality versus formal equality is the big division, and it typically comes down to libertarians of all varieties adopting formal equality.  The problem, however, are there are subtypes of it, and we don't necessarily agree on which one.

The "problem" (in a nutshell) is that right-libertarians believe equality HAS TO BE traded off against liberty and left-libertarians don't. Thus, equal liberty for all, special privileges for no one!

[John Edward Mercier]

How can capital command labor?
Does my shovel scream at me?

And if I borrow capital... did it command me to? Or did its owner simply expect reasonable return on risk of loss?

[BillKauffman]

How can capital command labor?
Does my shovel scream at me?

And if I borrow capital... did it command me to? Or did its owner simply expect reasonable return on risk of loss?

As usual, you miss the point.

[John Edward Mercier]

No, I don't.
Your equating capital with something it isn't...

[BillKauffman]

No, I don't.
Your equating capital with something it isn't...

As the mutualist Kevin Carson says:

"I think this highlights the problems of equating "capitalism" to "the free market." In neoliberal orthodoxy, supposedly, labor and capital are just coequal "factors of production." So why name an economic system after one of the factors of production, in particular? What we're seeing is that, beneath the ideological veneer of "free contract" and all the rest of it, some "factors of production" are more equal than others. That's why, when Costco pays its workers above-average wages for the retail industry, business analysts squirm with the same undisquised moral disapproval that some people reserve for diamond-studded dog collars. But when a Bob Nardelli or Carly Fiorina gets a retirement package worth tens or hundreds of millions, after gutting their companies to massage the quarterly numbers and game their own bonuses and stock options, that's just the way "our free enterprise system" rewards them for "the value they created."

What the politicians and journalists are for, behind all the "pro-market" rhetoric, isn't the market at all. It's the interests of capital.

What we need is the genuine article: a free market without special privileges or artificial scarcity, without subsidies and corporate welfare, and without market entry barriers and other protections against competition. Of course, if we had that kind of free market, there wouldn't even be a General Motors."

[dalebert]

What we need is the genuine article: a free market without special privileges or artificial scarcity, without subsidies and corporate welfare, and without market entry barriers and other protections against competition. Of course, if we had that kind of free market, there wouldn't even be a General Motors."

I think I actually agree with Bill on this one occasion. Mark the calendar.

[BillKauffman]

What we need is the genuine article: a free market without special privileges or artificial scarcity, without subsidies and corporate welfare, and without market entry barriers and other protections against competition. Of course, if we had that kind of free market, there wouldn't even be a General Motors."

I think I actually agree with Bill on this one occasion. Mark the calendar.

Woohoo!

Get me out off the negative karma...lol

[Caleb]

What we need is the genuine article: a free market without special privileges or artificial scarcity, without subsidies and corporate welfare, and without market entry barriers and other protections against competition. Of course, if we had that kind of free market, there wouldn't even be a General Motors."

I think I actually agree with Bill on this one occasion. Mark the calendar.

Not necessarily. If I'm reading it right, you are agreeing with Kevin Carson. Bill is just cutting and pasting. 

[jaqeboy]

...
You use the terms left and right to divide between liberty on the extreme left, and authoritarianism on the extreme right. 
...

Right! ... uh, I mean, correct.
This is the "original intent", which I think retains clarity over time.

Now for the muddlers and confusers - string 'em up!

New publication announced for Alliance of the Libertarian Left followers:
ALLiance a journal of theory and strategy

[BillKauffman]

Another article:

http://www.nolanchart.com/article1598.html

Libertarianism: Right and Left

The libertarianism of the right has a view of power that does not keep to its own self-consistency. It views political power as potentially dangerous, having the great potential to be abused, and therefore needing to be kept in close check. But it does not recognize economic power as a power in society, which is an oversight that is hard to fathom, such power being so plainly obvious. Because libertarians of the right tend not to recognize economic power as a form of power in society, they are unconcerned with its concentrations even when concentrations of economic power become staggeringly large, as they have over the past twenty or thirty years. This is an oversight that is frankly dangerous, if not delusional.

Libertarians of the left share the skepticism of highly concentrated political power, but, naturally, recognize the potential for harm and abuse from excessive concentrations of economic power. Thus, in the present order of things, corporate power is to be addressed equally, along side state or governmental power. To do otherwise is to contradict oneself, and worse, to leave the door open to fascism, to serious and extreme abuse of power, due to the lack of fore-sight to correct and put in check all forms of great concentrations of power in society.

Right libertarianism questions, challenges, and repudiates high levels of concentration of political power in society - and rightfully so, I believe - yet it is, or at least has been until recently, unwilling to question the role and nature of high levels of concentrations of economic power.

This is frankly a gross oversight, and one that makes right libertarianism a contradiction in terms: you cannot advocate limitations on powers that unduly constrict human freedom and pose threats of tyranny in a self-consistent, coherent or even reasonable manner if you are only willing to look at one form of power in society. Economic power is every bit as real as political power, some would say more so.

The 500 biggest corporations on earth now have combined revenues that total three times the GDP of the world's biggest national economy - that of the United States. If this does not constitute power in society, I'm not sure what would.

OK, well, corporations have immense power, but that does not mean it translates into political power - does it? They are competing with one another. Yes, they are competing with one another, and they also share common interests: drive labour costs and wages down, eliminate or circumvent labour and environmental standards, find the cheapest source of labour and resources and move there, then dominate them, open borders to free flow of capital, but not to labour.....The commonalities are pretty clear.

And do they meet, discuss common interests, work together cooperatively? Of course. Wouldn't you if you were in their position?

Do teachers join together to pursue common interests, such as decent pay, pension plans, etc.? Do janitors get together to pursue common goals of better pay and working conditions?

It is, or should be, obvious that there are common group - or, heaven forbid we use the term - class interests, that bring otherwise competing parties together to pursue common goals. The corporate elite are no different. This is not a conspiracy, but simply common sense.

The world's corporate elite gather, among other places, at Davos Switzerland every year for the World Economic Forum, and there seek to push governments to their will, to advance common interests among the elite global investment class, to the extent that they are able - and that is a considerable length.

It is impossible to deny the very real power of corporations in society without digressing into ideological fundamentalism and willful blindness. Refusing to challenge economic concentrations of power while espousing a libertarian philosophy is self-contradictory: right libertarianism is an oxymoron.

Should a laissez-fair, free-market capitalist who supports only limited government - a libertarian as it is known on the right - be considered an oxymoron or a self-contradiction if he was also a slave owner? Of course.

It is not very different if a libertarian advocates checks and balances on political power, yet does not question the giant corporate monopolies and oligopolies that now wield more power than democratically elected governments.

Right libertarianism is truly a contradiction in terms, unless by that you mean a conservative libertarian who also questions and challenges excessive concentrations of corporate power, and not only state or governmental power. U.S. Congressman and 2008 Presidential candidate Ron Paul, for example, I would describe as a conservative libertarian in this sense. He has his head on his shoulders when it comes to corporate powers, as far as I can tell. He is not stuck in ideological dogmatisms.

The left is equated - wrongly - with heavy-handed, bureaucratic, if not totalitarian government: at least this is the view of the left we get from the right; however, there are broadly speaking two wings or schools of thought within what has been called the left, and only one of the two fits the above description.

In the socialist movement of the 1800's there was a definite rift and fierce debate between the two kinds of what is loosely described as left political views. Marx led the wing we are familiar with, Bakunin the other. Bakunin and the libertarian socialists were ousted, lost the battle, and were to some considerable degree eclipsed from history. Bakunin warned Marxist ideas would lead to a new form of tyranny, and of course he was right.

Now, with the Marxist-Leninist school of thought being in full disgrace within the left as well as the broader community world-wide, the alternative is becoming clear to many. I would say it deserves attention, and merits respectful consideration. That alternative is libertarian socialism, a libertarianism of the left. And, I would add, it is much closer to the ideals of Jeffersonian democracy than anything currently present or offered in any of the capitals of the Western world. It should be, in Thomas Paine's words, "common sense." Perhaps soon it will be so.

The War on Democracy: Unchecked Power Out of Control

Under what we should more honestly call monopoly capitalism, the era of the small shop owner being the primary economic player having long ago vanished, corporate power has become so concentrated that is, economic power has become enormously concentrated that it now threatens to engulf and eviscerate all remaining democratic power of societies world wide. We should be concerned. Jefferson warned of this 200 years ago. We did not listen. We are now facing the results of our lack of foresight.

Those on the right and left with a libertarian perspective would do well to communicate. There is a natural allegiance here, if we can learn to speak in ways that are mutually understandable. There is too little time for bickering or ideological warfare. We need to get together to protect the basics: decent, although flawed, human, imperfect limited government, within the framework of constitutional democracy and basic human rights and freedom.

If we do not come together, and not just right and left libertarians, but traditional liberals, conservatives, social democrats, and all who oppose the by now undeniable drift into fascism, and stand together for constitutional democracy and freedom, all other considerations will become merely abstract."

J. Todd Ring

[John Edward Mercier]

No, I don't.
Your equating capital with something it isn't...

As the mutualist Kevin Carson says:

"I think this highlights the problems of equating "capitalism" to "the free market." In neoliberal orthodoxy, supposedly, labor and capital are just coequal "factors of production." So why name an economic system after one of the factors of production, in particular? What we're seeing is that, beneath the ideological veneer of "free contract" and all the rest of it, some "factors of production" are more equal than others. That's why, when Costco pays its workers above-average wages for the retail industry, business analysts squirm with the same undisquised moral disapproval that some people reserve for diamond-studded dog collars. But when a Bob Nardelli or Carly Fiorina gets a retirement package worth tens or hundreds of millions, after gutting their companies to massage the quarterly numbers and game their own bonuses and stock options, that's just the way "our free enterprise system" rewards them for "the value they created."

What the politicians and journalists are for, behind all the "pro-market" rhetoric, isn't the market at all. It's the interests of capital.

What we need is the genuine article: a free market without special privileges or artificial scarcity, without subsidies and corporate welfare, and without market entry barriers and other protections against competition. Of course, if we had that kind of free market, there wouldn't even be a General Motors."

The name of a system and the actual article are different. Your also equating corportism and elitism with capital. Its like equating mutualism with socialism; they are far from the same thing.
In mutualism, capital (the article) would still exist. Mutualism doesn't threaten capital... it removes the layers of corporatism and elitism.

[BillKauffman]

Its like equating mutualism with socialism; they are far from the same thing.

The mutualist Benjamin Tucker called himself a socialist.
http://flag.blackened.net/daver/anarchism/tucker/an_or_cap.html

from wiki on Tucker:

Tucker said socialism was the claim that "labor should be put in possession of its own," holding that what "state socialism" and "anarchistic socialism" had in common was the labor theory of value. However, "Instead of asserting, as did socialist anarchists, that common ownership was the key to eroding differences of economic power," and appealing to social solidarity, Tucker's individualist anarchism advocated distribution of property in an undistorted natural market as a mediator of egoistic impulses and a source of social stability. Tucker said, "the fact that one class of men are dependent for their living upon the sale of their labour, while another class of men are relieved of the necessity of labour by being legally privileged to sell something that is not labour. . . . And to such a state of things I am as much opposed as any one. But the minute you remove privilege. . . every man will be a labourer exchanging with fellow-labourers . . . What Anarchistic-Socialism aims to abolish is usury . . . it wants to deprive capital of its reward."

[John Edward Mercier]

Labor Theory of Value holds that Capital is Stored Labor.

Thus in both cases labor is being sold. Whether I sell you an apple growing on a tree that I have nutured, or one from my root cellar... its neither nor.

My capital is derived from being an Ant, rather than a Grasshopper... as Aesop would say.

It was most probably not within the means of these men to mentally establish a world that was not part and parcel to the monarchy, with its feudalist notions of strict class structure.
Many of the institutions, and the trappings of such, that society now deems permanent will fall within the next few decades.

[jaqeboy]

...
New publication announced for Alliance of the Libertarian Left followers:
ALLiance a journal of theory and strategy

By the way, this new journal kicks off its first issue with the Sheldon Richman article that kicks off this thread, but with pictures!