Samizdata

I just got around to reading the PoliticalCompass.org FAQ in which they ‘answer’ the question of “You can’t be libertarian and left wing” by claiming otherwise. Well before we even start with the body of the FAQ that is, yet again, a false dichotomy. Why? Because libertarians are neither ‘left wing’ nor ‘right wing’. For my personal views on why ‘left’ and ‘right’ are just meta-contextual frames of reference which are really meaningless in actual ideological terms, read my Giving libertarianism a ‘left hook’. Allow me to casually dissect the FAQ:

This is almost exclusively an American response, overlooking the undoubtedly libertarian tradition of European anarcho-syndicalism. It was, after all, the important French anarchist thinker Proudhon who declared that property is theft.

For one, I am British. For another, PoliticalCompass.org was the subject of informal discussion at a well attended and very British Libertarian Alliance meeting a few months ago and it was treated with complete derision.

To describe anarcho-syndicalism as ‘libertarian’ is preposterous as there is no individual liberty to do anything or even exist beyond the collective’s needs. It is a system that refuses to recognize the existence, much less the possibility of ownership, of several property beyond that which you have immediate use of. Let me put it this way: if you claim you own something that you are not in actual use of, you are thereby depriving someone else of using it, the anarcho-syndicalists regard it as perfectly legitimate to use force to take your stored goods for the collective’s perceived good. None of this ‘freely entered contracts’ or ‘freely associated trading’ nonsense for them. Although claims are made to the contrary, you do not in reality even have the liberty of owning your own labour, as if you produce something, you cannot freely trade it with another individual and acquire several property with it. Anarcho-syndicalism is communal living that is enforced with violence against any who claim ownership of any means of production with sophistication beyond the level of the hunter-gatherer (i.e. nothing less that primitive tribal Communism implemented at a local, rather than national, level).

Yes, yes, I realise theorists will leap up and down to disagree with my characterisation of anarcho-syndicalism but when you boil away the inane verbiage, that is the truth. That the people at PoliticalCompass.org cannot grasp that individual liberty and anti-collectivism are the defining characteristic of libertarianism is just an indication of their lack of comprehension of the words they use.

On the other side of the Atlantic, the likes of Emma Goldman were identified as libertarians long before the term was adopted by some economic rightwingers. And what about the libertarian collectives of the mid-late 1800s and 1960s? Americans like Noam Chomsky can claim the label ‘libertarian socialist’ with the same validity that Milton Friedman can be considered a ‘libertarian capitalist’.

The concept of Chomsky, an apologist for the genocidal Khmer Rouge, as a libertarian is beyond parody. Presumably they regard a policy to slaughter class enemies by the million as a form of ‘liberty’ and hence libertarian? That they quote Chomsky is not surprising however. It is his linguistic theories that were to some extent responsible for the term ‘liberal’ changing meaning (in the USA) from an advocate of limited governance to a socialist. Chomsky is nothing less than an advocate of linguistic incoherence as the only non-oppressive way to use language. His views are best summed up as ‘Truth is Oppression’. Thus the name for Communist East Germany, the German Democratic Republic, was perfectly acceptable to him. Never mind that it was neither democratic nor a republic. Sure, Chomsky may have called himself a ‘libertarian’ but that does not make it true. PoliticalCompass.org use the word ‘libertarian’ in much the same way, stripping it of any meaning which inconveniently falls outside their own meta-context.

The assumption that Social Darwinism delivers more social freedom is questionable.

So here we are told that libertarians, by rejecting the welfare state, favour a system that will lead to less social freedom. That is of course the socialist (and fascist) view of the result of non-state centred society. But how does that change the fact that rejecting welfare states is indeed a view held by libertarians? All libertarians (and some conservatives) regard alternative ways of dealing with social problems as being better: ways that involve liberty rather than state imposed laws. If they do not think that, they are not libertarians.

Yet it is clear from the FAQ that PoliticalCompass.org think the alternative to a welfare state is people starving in the street rather than the growth of charitable institutions. Again, that is fine for socialists to think that…they are socialists after all. But for them to fail to understand that libertarians do not think that because a libertarian view of ‘social justice’ is based upon non-coercion is just proof that when they use the term ‘libertarian’ they do not actually know what they are talking about.

Which of these two views are correct is utterly irrelevant as all that matters within the context of what PoliticalCompass trying to do is to correctly characterise what the views associated with each label they bandy about actually is.

The welfare states of, for example, Denmark and The Netherlands, abolished capital punishment decades ago and are at the forefront of progressive legislation for women, gays and ethnic minorities – not to mention cannabis and anti-censorship. Such developments would presumably be envied by genuine libertarians in socially conservative countries – even if their taxes are lower.

It does not seem to occur to these people that genuine libertarians might not be any more at ease with ‘conservative’ statism that ‘socialist’ statism. So called ‘progressive’ legislation for women, gays and ethnic minorities are just more violence backed statist interposing between private social interactions: there is nothing ‘libertarian’ about that, regardless of how commendable or not the objective is.

I do not expect the socialists at PoliticalCompass.org to agree with libertarian views. But if they cannot even understand that the essence of the libertarian position is that state legislation (i.e. violence based government action) to mediate the nature of voluntary interpersonal civil relationships is the antithesis of social liberty, then they are so uninformed, so ignorant of the political spectra they are purporting to describe with their ‘compass’ as to be completely incoherent and worthless as a measure of anything. It is not a matter of whose world view is correct, just a matter of knowing what other people actually think.

or how to make the traditions of the left our own

Libertarians come in many hyphenated flavours, but very few genuine libertarians see themselves as being on the political left. So called ‘Socialist’ libertarians are not libertarians at all. They are as oxymoronic as meat eating vegetarians: any value set that would deny economic free association and true several property, denies personal liberty, and you are not a libertarian unless you advocate personal liberty as first amongst civil virtues.

Thus from this fairly self-evident proposition, most libertarians see themselves as either being on the ‘right’ or at least they do not see themselves as being on the ‘left’. However just what does left and right really mean in this post-cold war era? I would contend that within the context of libertarianism, left and right are actually meaningless ideologically speaking. Conservatives and socialists ascribe various meanings to these terms based on their respective statist perspectives. However as we do not share those views, we can safely look beyond their definitions and see rather different essential differences and similarities for ourselves. Whilst conservatives and socialists see what differentiates them, as libertarians our perspectives allow us to see the shared statist axioms that in fact make them so similar in modern western societies. This sort of observation is hardly ground breaking. In the 1940’s Hayek pointed out in ‘The Road to Serfdom’ the truism (to us) that far from being the antithesis of the left, the Nazis were just another form of socialism. Similarly early 21st Century libertarians can see that there is actually little to choose between Tory ‘Conservatism’ and Blairite Labour ‘Socialism’ circa 2001 in real terms of policy and underpinning assumptions as to the role of the state.

What libertarians need to understand is that there are indeed important differences between the ‘left’ and ‘right’, but they are meta-contextual rather than ideological now that we no longer live in a simpler bipolar world. That is to say, the left and right come from very different traditions that strongly colour their respective views of how the world really works and thus how they interpret any ideological issue presented to them.

Bearing this in mind, libertarians need to realise that by mentally allying themselves to the ‘right’, they are actually not making a useful ideological distinction at all. In fact, by doing so, they run the risk of clothing themselves in cultural meta-contextual baggage that is often profoundly unhelpful. What is needed is a more dispassionate analysis as to what other people understand by ‘left’ and ‘right’ and a more pragmatic, or dare I say, even cynical use of that meta-contextual baggage for our own purposes.

For example, a key ‘vibe’ of the ‘left’ tradition is the view of the world as a struggle from the bottom against forces of hierarchy. Thus an anti-business proposition that portrays the corporate boardroom as an essentially hostile power centre to the ‘common man’ employee is an ‘easy sell’ when presented to someone who views the world from within that meta-context.

However, a meta-context is just a tradition of thought, not a philosophy per se. Let us take the fact that as the airline industries across the world are said to be in dire troubles, various interventionist governments are pouring tax monies into flag carriers to prop them up. This is not really the sort of issue to greatly exercise people on the traditional ‘left’, who view economic intervention as perfectly normal or the ‘right’, who view ‘helping’ companies as perfectly normal, provided they are big companies. However, this issue can indeed be made to resonate with the ‘left’ by framing it precisely in the terms that fit their traditions of thought:

“Yet again the boardroom is using its corrupting influence with politicians to screw the common man and take our tax money to reward poor management by the board and bale out some fat cat shareholders. It is hard to say who is worse, the incompetent directors who did not plan for unforeseen problems, the greedy shareholders or the money-for-the-boys politicians doling out our tax money.”

What have we just done? We have just made a seemingly “anti-business” argument designed to fit within the meta-contextual world view of the left. We have also just made an argument in favour of laissez-faire.

Many on the ‘left’ are actually natural allies of the libertarian view on civil liberties, yet they cannot extend the same logic to economic liberties. Part of the problem is the fact that libertarians, largely speaking from the meta-context of the ‘right’, frame economic issues in such a manner as to predispose opposition from the ‘left’. If we are to rescue the ‘left’ from collectivism, we must learn to speak the language of the left and tap into deep traditions of resistance and non-deferential social values that could serve us well. It is not just a case of picking the issues to attract people from the left but how we present them.

Hostility to business regulation is almost invariably presented as a ‘right’ issue and framed in the language and meta-contextual frames of reference of the ‘right’. Yet why not pitch this very issue to the left in terms that resonate for them as well?

“See how entrenched businesses work with their political stooges in government to keep under capitalised common people from competing with them? They raise regulatory barriers to keep the working class would-be entrepreneurs out by raising the cost of establishing a new business, thereby keeping the market safe for the forces of oligopoly and faceless chain stores.”

Rather than the usual ‘right’ arguments involving imposed costs to the established business being regulated, we take an equally true consequence of regulatory imposition and serve it up with a left spin. Whilst the use of language may be cynical, no ideological compromise is required and there is nothing dishonest about the argument being made. Once we realise that ‘left’ and ‘right’ are just traditional meta-contextual frames of reference and do not have any real objective political content in and of themselves, we can effectively inject our libertarian memes into both the ‘left’ and ‘right’ world views. By doing this, we broaden our ability to communicate with people who might otherwise see us as being ‘one of them’ rather than ‘one of us’. When in the ring and fighting the good fight, do not deny yourself a good left hook.

[This article is also available in slightly expanded form as Libertarian Alliance Tactical Note pamphlet no.29 in pdf format. Requires Adobe Acrobat Reader or similar]