by Michael Parish

Roughly one week ago, a critique of mine entitled “Left Libertarians: A Dispassionate Assessment” appeared on the Attack The System blog manned by Keith Preston, a link to which I will provide here: http://attackthesystem.com/2010/12/left-libertarians-a-dispassionate-assessment Since then, the self-explanatory piece has evoked a number of replies from both its intended audience and others, so much so that a thorough response on my part would exceed the length appropriate for a comment on Keith’s site. Hence, I have prepared a follow-up post to answer my critics.

From MRDA:

“Michael, when you say things like this…“our first priority should not be the “individual liberation” but community organizing”…and dismiss individual preferences as “petulant”, are you really that surprised when the LL types cock an eyebrow of suspicion at what they perceive as “village fascism”?”

The first quote he used against me was plucked entirely from its proper context. When I mentioned community organizing, I was referring to the development of voluntarist institutions intended to perform services at present assumed by the state. When I declared it our first priority, I did so pragmatically. Because the population is highly dependent upon state programs in their daily lives, it is necessary they be weaned off the government teat prior to the institution’s abolition. Doing otherwise would have disastrous results, particularly on welfare and social security dependents.

Moreover, I was not attacking as petulant individual preferences per se. I’m but an armchair psychologist, but I realize that every individual has interests and desires they pursue, the satisfaction of which is necessary for them to function healthily. I do not exclude consideration of this in my political thought. What I was attacking was the tendency of many within this milieu to make preference satisfaction the basis of their philosophy, so that society is conceived of as nothing more than a machine programmed to deliver everyone their favorite goodies. The flipside to this is a de facto positive rights doctrine according to which every informal barrier to preference satisfaction is seen as a form of injustice. Individual preference is but one of many concerns to be taken into account here; elevating it to the highest good is petulant. As far as “village fascism” is concerned, I’ve grown quite weary of the latter epiphet. It is, to quote H.L. Mencken, but “a general term of abuse”, one rendered void of all meaning through careless overuse.

“What is it with the paleocon/RadTrad/social conservative tendency to conflate individualism with atomism and solipsism? The latter concepts seem to better befit a two year old or crackpot authoritarian dictator than any liberty-loving individualist (even the “deracine” and hermit types), yet you (and Yeoman) seem to take great relish in chokeslamming *all* these concepts as if they were one and the same.”

I am not a paleocon or a social conservative, at least not in the sense that North Americans are familiar with. I can’t speak for Yeoman, but the reason I do make such a conflation is because that is how self-described individualists invariably come across. When I use the term “atomism” I am referring to the social theory that society either is or is reducible to a sum of individuals, and in never more than the sum of its parts. Left-Libertarians usually do adhere to such a conception.

“Community organizing” could mean alternative institutions that fulfill the ostensible goals of current state programs; it could also mean rooting out and running roughshod over “undesirables” and their “petulant” preferences (as opposed to, say violent criminals). I’m not saying that the latter is necessarily what you’re aiming for, but such prioritizing *could* lead to (conservo-)managerialism-writ-small, rather than anything resembling spontaneous order.”

I agree with this statement, although I do take issue with his choice of words. I never used the term “undesirable” in my essay, and I never dismissed personal preferences as petulant. To restate the clarification made earlier, if a guy wants to receive a rimjob from one donkey while blowing another in a Catholic schoolgirl uniform, that is not petulant. However, sacralizing this as a human right is petulant. Voluntarist efforts for purposes of communal assistance, if well intentioned and guided by the right individuals, will not lead to micro-tyranny.

“I think emphasis on voluntarism, as Dennis V has pointed out, works as the great reconciler between individual and civil interests; after all, as is often pointed out here, very few folk could be described as “hermits” or “rootless”, even amongst the left-libs in your crosshairs.”

Precisely, but why are the left-libertarians not more vocal about this? This is the impression they give off, so observers such as myself will understandably attack it as such.

Dennis V

“A number of LL thinkers (who shall remain nameless) insist on a society of atom-like individuals held together solely by commercial exchange. This stands out to me as particularly unsustainable; that it would produce the sort of paper thin social relations incapable of handling qualitative issues (poverty, for instance), and, in turn, the ensuing decay would facilitate the rebirth of the state.”

“My problem with this critique is, that while left-libertarians correctly defend the market as an institution, there is also support for non-market alternative institutions as long as they are voluntary. I have not seen in LLs the kind of Block-ian “Market Fundamentalism”.

They do and of this I am aware; however, Dennis’s reply here ignores the core of my critique, which is of the movement’s economic reductionism. He mentions non-market forms of social organization, but says nothing to defend the assumption I was attacking, that the economy and relations within are the causal foundation of human society.

“The real problem is that libertarians define all kind of voluntary human actions as part of the free market. However it a little confusing to label voluntary charity as a market action, since there is no material exchange, even if the state does not intervene. I do think that the equation market equals stateless, is a libertarian fallacy (but certainly not just a left-libertarian one). “

Precisely. Not only is “market equals statelessness” a fallacy, so is the view that all human action and interaction can be defined in economic terms. As I mentioned in my essay, social relations predate economic ones; i.e. man works to live rather than living to work, and is a friend, lover, and family member before he is a worker and consumer. These relations developed on their own long before the emergence of the market, and cannot possibly be viewed commercially. That Left-Libertarians (and Libertarians in general) adhere to an economic determinism that inverses this is the view I was attacking, which Dennis apparently fails to notice.

“This is the second issue I raise-the LL apparently conflates the concrete condition of stateless with the abstract principle of individualism. They contrast this binary-like with collectivism and statism.”

Well individualism is a term which has many different meanings. It can include the atomization that you condemn, but it is not simply that. As I am against “atomization” I am against the concepts of “roots”/”identity”. I have nothing against cultural traditions, but these concepts look really fishy to me. Statists of all stripes allways try to pidgeonhole people into categories that make no sense except in the political arena. You condemn libertarians as believers in an universal humanity, but nationalists seem to do the same thing to smaller subdivisions of humanity. They don’t believe in a human identity, but in a German identity, an American identity, a Greek identity, and the “right” of a ethno-cultural group in their own government . It’s ridiculous to believe in a one-size-fits-all government for all Greeks, just because they have the same language, culture and heritage. There are great differences between Muslim Greeks in Thrace and Orthodoc Christian Greeks, left-wing Greeks and right-wing Greeks, culturally liberal Greeks and culturally conservative Greeks. The only difference between ” universalist humanism” (or “humanist nationalism”) and “nationalism”, is that totalitarian humanism is ridiculous in a much larger scale, rather than a local one, and the cracks are way more visible and dangerous due to the huge cultural differences. Also like egalitiarianism, identity means sameness. It is impossible to be against egalitarianism and for identity, for they are PRACTICALLY the same concept. The main problem for an anti-state radical is not to defend the concept of identity, but to defend the right for everyone to CHOOSE his own culture. This is going to be the real end of the cultural wars, and will bring the results close to what you, radical traditionalists want to see…”

The point of mine he was replying to here had nothing to do with ethno-cultural identity, but with the stability of society through the functioning of civic institutions. He read my writing, transposed onto it his own (mis) interpretation of it, and used that as a springboard for a tangent completely unrelated to what he was responding to.

Jeremy (a thinker I happen to admire, by the way)

“Michael:

“The view has been presented in Left-Libertarian circles that the individual’s involvement in such institutions limits his individuality and constrains his desire. This mistakes preference satisfaction for social justice, and carries with it a by de facto positive rights doctrine according to which the individual is entitled to freedom from all social barriers to the satisfaction of his subjective desires. I find this to be a petulant view consistent more with managerial liberalism than with any kind of anti-statism.

I don’t think that’s an accurate portrayal, honestly. The concern is that these institutions (such as patriarchal families) are authoritarian, not that they are illegitimate. I think your argument that a certain kind of individualism requires the liberal state is not only valid, it’s transformational. It certainly gave me a lot to think about. Such an approach would require libertarians to be not just blind extremists for individual liberty but rather to also think dialectically about the kind of balance between individual and society, and the kinds of institutions likely to maintain an appropriate balance. Funnily enough, it’s a place where brainpolice lands in his above quoted passage, too.”

Yes! I enjoyed reading this response, as it indicates the emergence of a crucial dialectic. Incidentally, I don’t view the “patriarchal” (i.e. nuclear) enclave as “authoritarian.” While it does require the individual to commit to concerns of a supra-individual nature, which limits the satisfaction of his own desires, this is the kind of natural structure that is required if a society is to preserve balance in the absence of formal coercion. To equate the kind of structure found in a civic institution with the functioning of the state is fallacious.

Overall, I have a rather mixed reaction to the discursive flurry my piece evoked. On the one hand, it appeared that two of my responders ignored all the points I was making, focusing only very selectively on minor excerpts and attacking them with strawmen. (In the case of MRDA, this meant taking me entirely out of context.) On the other hand, the response from Mr. Weiland seems to indicate that my words have not fallen entirely on deaf ears. My main gripe with the anti-state milieu is that their thought is still largely in the theoretical and speculative stage, and my main goal is to translate this to the realm of the practical; if this dialogue continues, that may indeed happen.