Five theses about libertarianism
This is a handy guide for those of you who encounter libertarians on the Internet. Refashion as you please.
1) Libertarians are typically grown-up white males whose minds never made it through the adolescent stage. There are no libertarian new mothers (with the exception perhaps of the self-hating ones), because libertarian ideology would oblige of them that they view their newborn infants as "sovereign individuals." Deadbeat baby-daddies, on the other hand, typically imagine that libertarianism is a useful tool to support their beliefs that they owe nothing to anybody.
2) Libertarianism might properly be called "propertarianism," although in reality nobody would want to use such an ungainly term. Libertarians like to portray the "state" as a coercive supervillain, whereas in reality the state protects their sacred, and villainously-coercive, property rights. (This is keeping in mind, of course, that the state defines their property rights, creates or at least facilitates their architectures and infrastructures, and issues judgments upon them based upon which versions of theft/ coerced "exchange" it allows.) This is the primary contradiction of libertarianism.
3) Libertarianism is perfect for unmarried white male petit-bourgeois small entrepreneurs, who spend their nights cuddling up with their feelings of ownership while completely ignoring the people above them in the capitalist hierarchy, who in fact own them.
4) The libertarian utopia is a world of well-off sovereign male property owners who stare down from above at those ignorant masses who think they "need the state." Civic-minded non-libertarians, however, imagine that the state is composed of active citizenry and that the libertarian utopia disqualifies libertarians as friends. For a contrast with libertarian ideology, consider if you will the anarchist/ communist complaint about the state, which is that it isn't made up of active citizenry because it is in actual practice a form of class rule or perhaps even rule by a specific cabal. An anarchist/ communist state, then, is made up entirely of active citizenry (see e.g. the Zapatista "juntas de buen gobierno" or the general assemblies at an Occupy demonstration).
5) The fact that much of the world, especially the United States, is shaped for the convenience of libertarians, is not a good thing by any measure the UN uses to gauge social health.
Comments
Can you please define
the term 'petite bourgeois'? The fact that it can't really be translated into English suggests to me that the particular social category, 'petite bourgeois', does not exist in the USA of today.
Might you also be able to explain, so as I can understand, how categories derived from European social realities of about 150 years ago apply to American society of today.
Mary Bennett
The term is generally used by political economists to catagorize
owners of small businesses and professional or semi-professional workers who feel secure in their economic situation and often take an attitude of superiority over blue collar or unemployed people without realizing the precariousness of their own situation. It's one of the many foreign words and terms the English language has taken as its own over the centuries.
"The justness of individual land right is not justifiable to those to whom the land by right of first claim collectively belonged"
"foreign words"
English is for the most part a combination of two languages: Anglo-Saxon, or "Old English" (we wouldn't understand it, trust me) as larded down with a good number of Old Norse words (Old Norse is like Danish), and Middle French of the dialect once spoken in Normandy. The combination of these two languages formed Middle English (the four dialects of which we might understand with a bit of work). Middle English itself underwent a vowel shift which transformed it into Modern English over the course of a few centuries.
Meanwhile the English language accumulated a number of words from other languages, for scientific words (Greek, Latin, Arabic) and for exotic objects not native to England. So, for instance, the words "tomato," "chocolate," "chile," "peyote," and "mesquite" are ultimately from Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs. "Shampoo" and "pajama" are also for instance from Hindi, courtesy of the English colonization of India.
All our words are foreign.
“When there's no fight over programme, the election becomes a casting exercise. Trump's win is the unstoppable consequence of this situation.” - Jean-Luc Melanchon
Sounds like the top 10%.
Upper-middle class.
"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha
"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver
Curious question
I can understand it from an academic or semantic standpoint. I can also imagine it as trying to separate fly shit from pepper but don't understand why that is important to the essay.
I find Cassiodorus' points spot on from my experience and interactions with Libertarians. I found the Libertarians very attractive for a few years in the early nineties. I had finally clawed my way out from under a very humble beginning to find no small amount of success and actually believed it was my fault. I had found others who truly believed their own merits to be the cause of all of their success. Paired to that belief is that everyone who has not enjoyed success is either fatally flawed in character and/or unwilling to do the necessary work. Most, myself included, rejected the certain proposition that we are all fence turtles in different degrees. I had found a home. Today, I know I couldn't have been more wrong. It is selfish political thinking. The only way I can accept their ideas is to ignore all of the effects of race, inherent gifts, society, government, family, and blind luck to name a few.
So, I guess I don't understand what the choice of labels has to do with Cass' overall points or what it brings to the discussion. What am I missing?
"Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now..."
After Orange State, I'm not hating on Repubs or Libertarians
Not anymore. I was brainwashed over there. I'm no better than anyone in any group, and know that everyone in a group is different from everyone else. I don't care for these labels. For the first time in decades, I'll happily attend Thanksgiving festivities in an election year without worry of the fallout.
So, thanks Kos, you judgemental little shit bag, for selling out, and driving me away. And thanks Bernie, even though some will call you a sell out too. You both showed me where I don't want to be, and what a pigeon-holing, judgemental shit bag I was being for gulping up the divisive categorization of people based on what they call themselves politically.
That said, if you gulp up the Kos/DNC Koolaid, I'll question your cognitive abilities, and will pity you, believing you've been assimilated into the Borg.
I had the same insight awhile ago.
I got into a debate with some jerk over at Orange State who went by Chitown Kev. He wrote something to me (more like at me) that, had he said it to my face, I would have decked him. I realized at that point that I was being way too judgmental about how unenlightened our fellow citizens on the right are, especially given how "rah rah go team Democrat and fuck the facts" too many Democrats can be. So I stepped back from that ledge: no need to deck anyone, just be a decent and empathetic human being who accepts that other people may have divergent goals and ideas.
Sorry, meant as reply to essay, not you personally. n/t
Petit bourgeois:
Small-time capitalists who share an imagined ideological solidarity with the big-time capitalists.
NB: nearly ALL of our categories are from the 19th century if not earlier.
“When there's no fight over programme, the election becomes a casting exercise. Trump's win is the unstoppable consequence of this situation.” - Jean-Luc Melanchon
Ayn Rand & Karl Marx are thesis and anti-thesis (or vice versa)
Communism and libertarianism both lead to dystopias.
I dabbled in libertarianism 20 years ago but eventually I got the picture.
As a pragmatist progressive capitalist I know some things are better handled by the government, others by private industry and others as a cooperation of both. In dialectical terms, a synthesis.
Just saying.
The political revolution continues
I disagree to this extent. In addition to the political economy,
Marx studied and theorized on agronomy, anthropology, ecology(several sciences were not named yet) and his theories proved to be very productive avenues for future research. His analysis of the contribution, and exploitation thereof, of labor is still influential today.
Like other sciences with the passage of time, new discoveries must be added over the outlines and research areas left to us. Darwin was a thinker who produced profound insights but if one were to be a fundamentalist Darwinian, all of genetics would be out of bounds because the science was unknown to Darwin. Fundamentalist Marxism similarly would yield little of value. The theories that both these 19th century scientists created have been among the most important work anyone has done.
Libertarianism, as far as I can tell, creates few avenues for research and many of its principles have been proven false although they persist because there is money and power behind them: Not science, just coercion.
"The justness of individual land right is not justifiable to those to whom the land by right of first claim collectively belonged"
I wonder what
doesn't lead to dystopia. It's possible, though shudder-provoking to contemplate, that societies made up of humans become dystopias. Or at least humans perceive them as such.
Then again, even an anthill or a beehive seems dystopian to me. Orderly, yes. Busy yes. Good to be the queen, yes. But the life of the other ants and bees? Pass!
Marxism seems to me
one more excessively reductionist explanation of human history.
In my experience, it is the salaried small time soi dissant professionals, the social workers, coordinators of this or that, project managers, assistants to, various other office fauna, who look down on blue collar workers, not the small entrepreneurs.
I have seen libertarians described as conservatives who like to swap partners and do drugs.
I confess I do rather tend to resent the application of outdated (IMO) old world social categories to American social realities.
Mary Bennett
Depending upon which marxism you mean
Council communism? Gramscianism? Marxism-Leninism? Political economy a la Robert Brenner/ Ellen Meiksins Wood/ Perry Anderson? Critical theory a la Herbert Marcuse? World-ecology a la Jason W. Moore?
Any serious investigation of Marx takes us back to the 19th-century era of the expansion of the universities, and the consequent invention of the social sciences. The picky details of this invention are discussed in the first chapter of Kees van der Pijl's Survey of Global Pollitical Economy.
Once upon a time, as van der Pijl notes, there were no academic disciplines to speak of, and social thought was vaguely focused upon what he calls "political economy" although I don't think that was the only name for it. At any rate, as capitalist business became bigger, more organized, and more bureaucratic, the universities started to discover the need for academic disciplines so as to make careers out of the sorts of understanding of the social world that would be good for business. At some point in the 19th-century growth of academic institutions a discipline called "economics" was parsed out of political economy, and a subdiscipline called "marginalism" was parsed out of economics, so as to define people as "maximizers of utility" and to put the study of human beings into the positivist realm of mathematical calculation while at the same time institutionalizing the social philosophy of Jeremy Bentham as an academic orthodoxy. Much of this story is told in Dorothy Ross' Origins of American Social Science.
To a certain extent, as van der Pijl points out, the development of marginalist economics was a reaction to Marx and to Marxism. The communist revolution is not going to be instigated by maximizers of utility, and so the nice conservatives and liberals in the academy looked upon marginalism as an academic tool with which the communist revolution could be defined out of existence. Marx, on the other hand, depicted an economy in which exploitation was the norm and in which the human race was divided politically into economic classes: workers and owners were the two important ones, although later in the discussion a managerial class was theorized. (See e.g. James Burnham's The Managerial Revolution and Milovan Djilas' The New Class for more detail.)
In this regard Marxism isn't an oversimplification of anything -- it's a vital tool with which we form a counter-tradition to the economic orthodoxy of marginalism, and a basis for really understanding society instead of merely generating academic production about it.
“When there's no fight over programme, the election becomes a casting exercise. Trump's win is the unstoppable consequence of this situation.” - Jean-Luc Melanchon
Yes!!
"I’m a human being, first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.” —Malcolm X
Thank you for that explanation. I do appreciate it.
However:
1. The USA is not England, fantasies of New England patricians and some conservatives to the contrary. We did not have enclosure of commons here, or not yet.
2. If I am going to devote time to study of political economy, I think I had rather it be of Americans like Thorsten Veblen and Henry George whose theories have at least the merit of being grounded in American experience and history.
Academic Marxism has given birth to such intellectual abominations as, for example, structure functionalism, a neo-Marxist, neo-Aristotelian mish mash perpetrated by an unindicted pedophile named Talcott Parsons in a series of unreadable tomes which constitute the best argument I know of for making crimes against the English language a capital offense. By their fruits you shall know them, and from where I am standing, I am not seeing where Marxism has had any good fruits.
3. I think a good counter tradition, and one grounded in American experience, can be found in the successes of what Henry Clay called the American System of economic development--public works, universal education and protective tariffs. To which I would add, as being appropriate for the present emergency, a non-aligned, non-interventionist foreign policy and a moratorium on further immigration.
Mary Bennett
Um...
Structural functionalism has its origins in Comte and Durkheim, two basically French architects of sociology. They're discussed in Chapter 3 of van der Pijl's book (which I mentioned above), whereas the marxists are covered in chapters 7, 8, and 9 (and please note that van der Pijl does justice to the diversity of marxist thought, which is why the topic needed three chapters. Braudel and Wallerstein are not like Lenin and the Russians, and neither of those are like Poulantzas and Cox. Of the three groupings, I prefer Braudel and Wallerstein and especially my friend Jason W. Moore though I can see the merits of Poulantzas and Cox.) As for Parsons, if you want to read theories of Parsons and of Marx in conflict, check out the second volume of Jurgen Habermas' Theory of Communicative Action (a German book, to be sure, but one very popular with American thinkers, e.g. Thomas McCarthy). Habermas sides with Parsons against Marx.
As for Veblen and George (the subject of Chapter 5 of van der Pijl's book), there's a lot of good stuff there but I like thinkers who can imagine another reality than the capitalist one. In that regard Marx was a start.
“When there's no fight over programme, the election becomes a casting exercise. Trump's win is the unstoppable consequence of this situation.” - Jean-Luc Melanchon
most of what might have been "the commons"
was in fact carved up and distributed as private property before it ever had a chance to become "the commons".
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
All generalizations, including this one, are false.
Meanwhile, libertarians seem to me to be the ultimate in me-ism.
An American Libertarian Par Excellence
Well David Koch, for example, was Libertarian Party V.P. candidate:
And:
Nuff said.
"They'll say we're disturbing the peace, but there is no peace. What really bothers them is that we are disturbing the war." Howard Zinn
I agree with libertarians half of the time
I think government intrusion into areas of personal life like religion, speech, who you sleep with (consenting adults that is) are unwarranted and generally a bad thing. People need to be able to work these things out for themselves without having to worry about one group using violence to coerce them. I am also against the emerging surveillance and police state that the libertarians oppose. These are good things, and we need to be able to work in coalitions with libertarians on these issues.
That said, we need a social safety net, environmental regulations, building codes, public infrastructure, no-militarized public services and the like. So count me out for the other half of libertarianism.
That said, I prefer libertarians to religious right wingers so there is that. That's why I am encouraging my conservative friends to vote Johnson in the upcoming election. (No, they aren't going to vote for Stein so I am not going to bother.)
I agree with your list of what we need,
and I would add that these things can be afforded if we reduce the military budget, close overseas bases on a sensible schedule and bring our young men and women back home.
Mary Bennett
Mon, 10/24/2016 - 9:32am —
Mon, 10/24/2016 - 9:32am — Crimson Buddha
Unfortunately, Johnson supports the TPP corporate coup mechanism offshoring domestic law/government into corporate/billionaire hands and therefore resulting in the same corporate/military planetary destruction of life as would a Clinton or Trump/VP Presidency, even if likely not as eagerly conducted and expanded upon by Johnson as this would be by the Clintons.
This is a traitorously Bush-initiated, Clinton-promoted, Obama-pushed global hostile corporate takeover, not merely the first of a number of very bad 'trade deals' which would anyway finish off what remains of the life-supporting life on the planet within decades even without the nukes intended to take out countries able to stand up for themselves against this attempt but instead creating a nuclear winter in shrouding the sun for a decade or more, (also seriously damaging the protective ozone layer) bringing increased drought as well as wildly excessive radioactivity and killing off crops and oxygen-producing plant life around the world along with those dependent upon them for food as well as for oxygen and the sequestering of fossil fuel and other industrial pollution.
How long will Joe/sophine Average of the poors around the world survive global famine, even before the oxygen runs low?
The Clintons believe that limited nuclear war-crimes are possible and survivable for them and anyone believing this should not be in any area of (ir)responsibility involving the military.
Personal freedoms, including those involving religion, freedom of speech, (excepting, of course, such things as libel and government/industry - large-scale organized against the facts and public interest-type - propaganda,) personal choices such as who you sleep with/marry are basic to an actual democracy.
But who, in a Libertarian society, acts to protect the public against the more powerful preying upon the weaker and enforcing their own limits also on other people's freedoms of religion, speech and personal choices, including those of whomever you may be permitted to have a sexual relationship with? The more powerful, perhaps, those with better weapons most likely to fill the power vacuum and exert power over others according to what suits themselves best?
A real democratic government exists to maximize the freedoms of all, equally, while acting as the united power of the people to prevent the more powerful at any level from predating upon those more vulnerable.
Americans just haven't yet had this properly attempted yet, despite having a Constitution which protects against all of this, even including the guaranteed right of the individual pursuit of happiness for every citizen.
Take out all of the unconstitutional 'laws' contravening the principles (under a modern, civilized, democratic socialist interpretation) and that's pretty much what you'd have - a real democracy, with government of by and for the people, (rather than the top fraction of the 1%,) with the public welfare the main concern, (rather than milking the last drop of blood from the people and planet for the gain of the relative few and terming this 'responsible domestic and foreign policy') with - finally - equal rights, treatment and opportunity for all.
Never vote for evil.
Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.
A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.
when i point out to libertarians that the single greatest
limitation on individual liberty is the state's granting and enforcement of private real estate, i get dumbfounded incomprehension.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
[deleted]
[deleted]
To libertarians: Wishing does not make it so.
"The justness of individual land right is not justifiable to those to whom the land by right of first claim collectively belonged"