unknought asked: I suspect that your anon is taking Promethea's views (which they've described as trying to bridge the gap between ancoms and ancaps, among other things) as more representative of rationalism as a whole than they actually are. Anon, I think most of us are boring liberal statists, when it comes down to it.
What she said, anon.
actually, you probably shouldn’t assume any object-level belief strongly advocated by a rationalist is representative of the community without asking around.
Oh no you made me geek out on the history of libertarianism
Because anon was actually more correct than the explanation that it would be just about me
“Libertarian” in the 19th century meant just as laissez-faire as it means now, but the political alliances were reversed; they used to call us “voluntary socialists” because we considered ourselves allies of the labor movement and free enterprise against the state-supported capitalists and thought that a free society would be less inequal and oppressive.
(And that’s totally 100% true; without the Inclosure Acts and other such shit the dark satanic mills couldn’t have happened and the 18-19th century industrial capitalists were amazingly honest about how the entire point was to use the state to create a proletariat stripped of property so they could be forced into the mines and factories for a miserable living enriching others. (Every sin begins from treating people as product and so on…) Sometimes child labor was effectively legally mandated as parents weren’t allowed to work in the neighboring parish (or whatever they were called) so they had to send children instead even though there were unemployed adults who would’ve been willing to accept the jobs. And even during the Napoleonic wars the British army had more men keeping order in the industrial communities than fighting the French (anyone who’s played Civilization knows that thing where you put soldiers in a city so it stops rioting and that’s exactly what Britain did).)
Then Lenin happened, and everyone who was not a statist soon concluded that it was a terrible thing and the libertarian movement kind of split into two.
One part allied with right-wing statist capitalism against statist communism and the New Deal as it saw it as the lesser of two evils and over time mostly forgot that it was evil at all. That’s where the “points out every single law that favors the poor, and ignores every single law that props up the rich” type of “libertarian” comes from, or the type that triumphantly touts the $50B workers steal from bosses and disregards the $50B bosses steal from workers. Laissez-faire is not “pro-business”, laissez-faire is not “anti-business”, laissez-faire is “none of our business”.
(And real freedom in employment contracts inevitably implies at least a bare minimum of pro-union stance, and the absence of state intrusion in bargaining the details would make labor struggles meaningful as employers would need to give workers a deal worth taking but it would also simultaneously prevent redwashed rentiers from looting others. All in all I’d expect a freer market with fewer distortions to deliver everyone a money which is closer to the value they create than currently, and if workers are getting less than their true worth then they obviously would get more. Even if capital isn’t redistributed, one would expect its accumulation to lower its value over time as labor would become more of the limiting factor (there are some issues around automation and the control of human-displacing capital but “everyone who is not a robot loses their job and gets fired (upon)” is a very massive market failure). This line of thinking seems to be utterly alien to many non-libertarians, although I must say that those right-libertarians who are very R first with a really small l aren’t helping at all.)
Another part decided to go against both of them and usually got stomped every time (Ukraine, Kronstadt, Catalonia, etc.) and also lost its free-market laissez-faire ideals because those were now right-wing in the Big Ideology Fuckup of the 20th Century.
There were a few attempts at reconciliation eg. in the 60s when Vietnam made right-libertarians notice that the capitalist state was an oppressive piece of shit as well (eg. Barry Goldwater’s speechwriter Karl Hess switched sides to Emma Goldman because her writings were like Ayn Rand’s but with the boring parts stripped out; something that might appear completely incomprehensible to someone who doesn’t understand libertarianism), but Murray Rothbard decided that he wanted to appeal to “tight-assed conformists, who
want to stamp out drugs in their vicinity, kick out people with strange
dress habits, etc.” instead of the weirdos and founded “paleolibertarianism”. (As a weirdo, I decided that Rothbard was a total asshole.) And during the previous half-century the left got way too enarmored with social democracy and statism and when dissolving that system in the late 70s began opposing anything smelling of laissez-faire turned into a tribal symbol and an Important Hill To Die On. (You wouldn’t believe how frustrating it is to be surrounded by 5 million socdems who make Bernie Sanders look like Ron Paul in comparison. (By that I mean that he isn’t that socially liberal but he does propose low taxes. Yes, that’s Finland for you; where Bernie would be the low-tax candidate.))
And speaking of tribal symbols, the question of private property had alwas been divisive but I see that as kind of a ??? thing because there’s no way to enforce private property on a voluntary collectivist community without violence, nor is there a way to non-violently expropriate a community which maintains consensual private property, and neither side could destroy the other so making some kind of peace in the form of “agree to disagree, each side goes its own way and doesn’t fuck with the other’s stuff” is the only stable outcome anyway unless the entire world was instantaneously brainwashed into one or the other.
(And the division of that stuff would end up being such that ancoms would actually have some to begin with. For pragmatic reasons. By pragmatic reasons I mean that letting ancoms expropriate enough to have their ancommunities be actually economically viable is more economically efficient than dealing with a lot of disgruntled ancoms. Disgruntled ancoms with guns and a special interest in expropriating things, specifically. Even Murray Rothbard thought that capital owned by the state or businesses that receive enough tax money is a legitimate target for homesteading and thus there is a clear win-win solution in expropriating the state and its monopolist cronies for the ancommunities so ancoms can get a real job building their vision of a good society without bothering others or being bothered, while ancaps can run their own society instead of whining on reddit. And mutalists and other inbetweeners can inbetween freely.)
Ancaps usually recognize that there is nothing stopping ancoms from having ancommunities in ancapistan while ancoms tend to be vaguely uncomfortable around the opposite equivalent, usually evading the question with something like “but nobody would want it”; my opinion is that if a bunch of people want to live on a ship among themselves, bothering nobody, stopping them with violence makes one the bad guy. At that point I don’t care about lofty proclamations about how “that ship is made from materials that belong to everyone” or the other usual justifications some (but fortunately not all) ancoms give for why they would do violence to stop those people and take their ship; I’d be there, protecting their right to do whatever the fuck they want amongst themselves without bothering anyone else, with whatever amount of violence I need, and I’d probably go on the ship with them because if land is filled with people who won’t let people do some consensual thing among themselves because it would be immoral, I don’t want to live there. (this is totally going to end up misquoted in a call-out post some day as “promethea is an ancap” but do I look like I give a shit)
More abstractly, I can sidestep the issue of the morality of private property by looking at it with cynical pragmatism: in most of the possible outcomes, ancaps won’t, or more importantly can’t, prevent ancommunities; and ancoms can’t prevent ancapistan existing somewhere, so both could and should be happy with the deal of “let’s build a new society where we both can do our thing without bothering the other side”. What I think about the morality of property doesn’t matter for my anarchism because I wouldn’t impose my views on non-consenting people anyway, and I’m willing to ally with anyone who agrees with that.
(Intellectual property is an exception; when it comes to things like copyright and patents I’m 100% pirate and in favor of expropriating everything; people could obviously keep trade secrets and use DRM and make license contracts and that’s fair game, but breaking DRM and using cracked licensed software is totally fair game too.)
And about the word “libertarian”? I’ll let Murray Rothbard explain: “One gratifying aspect of our rise to some prominence is that, for the first time in my memory, we, ‘our side,’ had captured a crucial word from the enemy… 'Libertarians’… had long been simply a polite word for left-wing anarchists, that is for anti-private property anarchists, either of the communist or syndicalist variety. But now we had taken it over…”
And my response is that Rothbard is once again being a massive dickbag of an asshole and I’m not letting assholes monopolize that word.
But yeah, even right-libertarianism actually has its roots in the same soil as communism and the history is fascinating and people should learn it. (And Lenin and Stalin are assholes.)
1 week ago · tagged #i am worst capitalist #this is a social democracy hateblog #this is an emma goldman fanblog #still bitter for '36 #i _may_ have a special interest in this topic #at least based on the word count #bitching about the country of birth #laissez-faire used to mean _stop trying to help us_ · 14 notes · source: sigmaleph · .permalink