The Dangerous Deification of Voting

From the time Americans begin school,they are taught that their civic duty is to vote. The message is reiterated in every public school social studies course, and amplified further once you take civics or government. Outside of school the same message continues to reverberate. At concerts you encounter Headcount, working to register others to vote. Tune into comedian Craig Ferguson, and you just might find him excoriating nonvoters as "morons." And when presidential elections happen, you would think that important events ceased to occur, as the media drops everything to focus on every word and scandal surrounding the leading candidates. The message is not that electoral politics is one way to influence the policies of your government, but that it is the way to influence the policies of your government.

Recently I have seen this attitude illustrated on both sides of the aisle. Paul Krugman wrote in his New York Times op-ed column: "Just to be clear, progressives would be foolish to sit out this election: Mr. Obama may not be the politician of their dreams, but his enemies are definitely the stuff of their nightmares." From an admittedly far less influential right wing figure, a friend of a friend on Facebook who claims to be a "freedom lover" wrote of neocon airhead Sarah Palin, "I would pick her over Romney in a heart-beat. Other than Ron Paul and maybe Christie, who is there for 2012?" And just yesterday I saw it on the left again, with an Obama supporter brushing aside my list of Obama's war crimes and civil liberties violations on the grounds that Republicans are worse.

These figures of the left and right strike me as obsessed with which flavor of corporatist warmonger holds power, and unfortunately, the attitude that this is all politics is leads most people to either embrace the partisan pursuit of power or become utterly apathetic and inactive.

But most of the great achievements in our country's history have been made through non-electoral means. The era of Jim Crow did not end because some Democrats were elected, it ended because of civil disobedience, boycotts, sit ins, and court cases such as Brown v. Board of Education. Women won the vote through the courageous civil disobedience and demonstrations of the suffragettes. Women have choice on abortion not because of Democratic lawmakers, but the Supreme Court's ruling in Roe v. Wade. And the relevant public opinion change that made that ruling possible was again not a result of elections, but the activism of the likes of Moses Harman and Margaret Sanger, who were often jailed for their "obscene" writings on birth control.

It's these non-electoral approaches which have the potential to solve the most pressing problems identified by the left and the right (Although I will ignore the cultural right's concerns with "moral values" and immigration, as I deem these non-issues).

Having just insulted the right, I suppose I should address their legitimate concerns first, and why I feel they can solve them through non-electoral methods. Let's talk free markets. Property rights are under assault in this country. Licensing laws, regulations, and other bureaucratic red tape make it difficult to run a business, particularly a small business. So, should we vote Republican? Certainly not if your goal is economic freedom. Even most conservatives today acknowledge the government expanding nature of the Bush Administration. But what about Ronald Reagan, the hero of the limited government right? The website of The Ludwig von Mises Institute, a free market think tank, has several articles documenting the protectionism, deficit spending, regulations, and other big government policies that belied Reagan's free market rhetoric. My two favorites are Murray Rothbard's The Myths of Reaganomics and Sheldon Richman's The Sad Legacy of Ronald Reagan. But Democrats don't even pretend to support free markets. So what can be done?

Some of the best advocacy of economic liberty is currently being done by The Institute for Justice, a libertarian public interest law firm. They file lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of superfluous licensing laws (Seriously, why the fuck should you need a license to be a florist, train yoga teachers, perform cosmetology [even if your type of cosmetic work is never dealt with in the licensing process], repair computers, or call yourself an interior designer, just to name a few). They fight for property rights in cases of eminent domain abuse, and while they lost the infamous case Kelo v. City of New London, the awareness they've brought to the issue through their Castle Coalition has led to meaningful reforms, as explained in this video. Other economic liberty cases fought by the Institute for Justice may be found here.

Another concern frequently brought up by the right wing is the threat campaign finance law poses to free speech. Contrary to the opinions of some of my fellow leftists, such laws do pose a very real problem, as left wing blogger Glenn Greenwald explained here. But the 2008 Republican candidate for president, John McCain, was a co-sponsor and has his name in the title of the most infamous campaign finance law. How were these laws changed on a national level? Through the masterful arguments of attorneys like Ted Olsen and Floyd Abrams before the Supreme Court in the case Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, as well as briefs by groups like the Institute for Justice, the ACLU, and the Cato Institute in that same case. And who challenged (And continue to challenge) local threats to free speech from campaign regulations? Again, public interest legal groups like the ACLU and the Institute for Justice.

Another very legitimate right wing concern (Which many on the left care about too) involves politically correct universities squelching the academic marketplace of ideas through unconstitutional speech codes. The only people solving this problem are the civil liberties activists at FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. In addition to litigation they draw awareness to these issues through a YouTube channel and a Speech Code of the Month award.

While right wingers do have other legitimate concerns, it's time to talk to my allies: The left. Comrades, we agree on a hell of a lot. Whether it's war, classism, corporatism, immigration, queer rights, misogyny, the prison system, racial privilege, or the Bush administration's abuses of power, I'm probably left of you.

So, let's talk the war crimes and power grabs that characterized the Bush administration. Have Barack Obama or the Democratic Congress reversed the tide on this? Hardly. The Democratic Congress has re-approved the PATRIOT Act, granted immunity to telecom companies for spying for the government without a warrant, continuously renewed funding for the futile wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and amended FISA to weaken privacy rights. Barack Obama now claims the authority to assassinate an American citizen with no legal due process, his Justice Department has won him the power to detain people without even minimal habeas corpus protection, and he has increased the use of drone bombing campaigns, even in countries on which we have not declared war.

What are the non-electoral methods for dealing with this dire despotism and senseless violence? The bravest among us may choose to follow in the footsteps of Henry David Thoreau, who refused to pay taxes in protest of the Mexican American War. But for those who prefer a route less guaranteed to lead to incarceration, there are still many solid options. The ACLU and the lesser known Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) have filed lawsuits addressing most of the worst civil liberties abuses started under Bush and expanded under Obama. Most of what we now know about the brutal Bush torture programs comes from documents released due to FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests filed by the ACLU. On the other hand, Barack Obama has sought to block the release of such information. The other major force against war crimes and related human rights abuses is Wikileaks, a website which analyzes and releases classified information from governments, corporations, and church hierarchies, and protects the whistleblowers who provide the documents. Two leaks which have catapulted the site into the public eye are the Collateral Murder video, and over 90,000 pages of documents known as the Afghan War Diary. Both leaks reveal the brutal, cruel, counterproductive, and often criminal nature of U.S. wars abroad. Both contradict a narrative of American Exceptionalism which has been propped up through secrecy, censorship, and propaganda. So, of course, the United States government wishes to destroy Wikileaks. A classified document detailing this desire and plans to bring it about on the part of U.S. intelligence was released by Wikileaks in March 2010. Bradley Manning is currently being prosecuted by the United States government for allegedly leaking the Collateral Murder video and other classified information to Wikileaks. Why does Wikileaks arouse such fear, loathing, and action on the part of the military industrial complex? Because, like the ACLU and CCR, they do more to counter the America's imperial hubris than any politician ever would. And unlike those civil liberties law firms, Wikileaks can't be stopped by courts.

Another key left wing issue, and one which hits me closest to home, concerns LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer [or Questioning]) rights and equality. While the Democratic Congress passed the Matthew Shepard Act, adding sexual orientation and gender identity to hate crimes law, some queer activists rightly ask whether hate crimes laws work and whether any principled leftist can respond to a problem by granting more power to our racist, classist criminal justice system. The two greatest queer victories on a national level have happened in, you guessed it, the courts. Both the Defense of Marriage Act and California's Proposition 8 have been found unconstitutional this year. And on a local level, positive change often comes from outside government entirely. In my own state of Utah, the moralistic Mormon majority has not stopped the Utah Pride Center from making this a better place for queers. The Center runs an LGBT youth center, where young adults whose identities are often reviled by their parents and communities can truly be themselves. Support groups abound, including for identities often misunderstood and feared even in the LGBT community, such as transgender individuals. One Pride Center group, TransAction, engages in activism for Utah's trans community. One event I found particularly inspiring was our pool party and barbecue. For obvious reasons, many transpeople are uncomfortable using pools and locker rooms. At this event, I saw one transwoman swim for her first time in about a decade. The importance of organizations like the Utah Pride Center is obvious: They allow often marginalized queer individuals to function among like minded people, and be treated as full fledged human beings rather than second class citizens and freaks. This certainly beats occasional pandering by politicians.

In just about every other case of bigotry the non-electoral approach continues to prove its superiority. Feminism and African American civil rights were briefly discussed at the beginning of this post, but what about the rights of Latin Americans, and undocumented immigrants in particular. In spite of all the hullabaloo surrounding Obama's plan for immigration reform and opposition to Arizona's SB1070, deportations have increased under Obama. The real groups fighting for the rights of Latin Americans and immigrants are grassroots organizations like the Brown Berets, United Farm Workers' Union, Alta Arizona, and (Yes, I'm sure by now I sound like a broken record) the ACLU.

Another key issue for the left is corporate power. But the mainstream progressive reforms tend to support corporate interests. The corporatism of health care reform has been thoroughly documented by Glenn Greenwald in articles like this. Timothy Carney's column provides some of the best analysis of the corporatist nature of progressive legislation around today. In addition to fighting anti-competitive regulations as the Institute for Justice does, one can bring awareness to often secret corporate misconduct, as Wikileaks does, or lead workplace activism, as the radical union Industrial Workers of the World does.

The best ideas of the left are predicated upon the fight against violence and hierarchy, and thus cannot be achieved by voting particular leaders into an intrinsically hierarchic and violent organization. The best ideas of the right are built upon principles of individualism and emergent economic order, and thus cannot be realized by voting different leadership into a centrally planned collectivist institution. In order for the best ideas across the political spectrum to realize their true potential, they must realize electoral politics for the distraction it is and focus their energies in real, meaningful activism.

Kyriarchy All Up in This Bitch Good Movements

Many left libertarians, particularly of the feminist variety, use the term kyriarchy as an umbrella term denoting intersecting structures of domination and power. For instance, I spend a lot of my time critiquing the kyriarchy that results from an intersection of statism, militarism, nationalism, transphobia, ageism, ableism, homophobia, misogyny, puritanism, racism, corporatism, class divisions, and other such phenomena.

Well, lately I've been noticing that one of the main problems with kyriarchy is that specific liberation movements end up plagued with many structures of domination.

One great example is this article by Courtney Desiree Morris, describing gender violence in radical left and anti-racist movements, and how this enables state violence against such movements. The entire article is well worth reading, but I'll post a few key excerpts below.

To save our movements, we need to come to terms with the connections between gender violence, male privilege, and the strategies that informants (and people who just act like them) use to destabilize radical movements. Time and again heterosexual men in radical movements have been allowed to assert their privilege and subordinate others. Despite all that we say to the contrary, the fact is that radical social movements and organizations in the United States have refused to seriously address gender violence [1] as a threat to the survival of our struggles. We’ve treated misogyny, homophobia, and heterosexism as lesser evils—secondary issues—that will eventually take care of themselves or fade into the background once the “real” issues—racism, the police, class inequality, U.S. wars of aggression—are resolved. There are serious consequences for choosing ignorance. Misogyny and homophobia are central to the reproduction of violence in radical activist communities. Scratch a misogynist and you’ll find a homophobe. Scratch a little deeper and you might find the makings of a future informant (or someone who just destabilizes movements like informants do).

Then, she provides an insightful historical perspective in which to ground discussion of gender violence in leftist and anti-racist movements.

Reflecting on the radical organizations and social movements of the 1960s and 1970s provides an important historical context for this discussion. Memoirs by women who were actively involved in these struggles reveal the pervasiveness of tolerance (and in some cases advocacy) of gender violence. Angela Davis, Assata Shakur, and Elaine Brown, each at different points in their experiences organizing with the Black Panther Party (BPP), cited sexism and the exploitation of women (and their organizing labor) in the BPP as one of their primary reasons for either leaving the group (in the cases of Brown and Shakur) or refusing to ever formally join (in Davis’s case). Although women were often expected to make significant personal sacrifices to support the movement, when women found themselves victimized by male comrades there was no support for them or channels to seek redress. Whether it was BPP organizers ignoring the fact that Eldridge Cleaver beat his wife, noted activist Kathleen Cleaver, men coercing women into sex, or just men treating women organizers as subordinated sexual playthings, the BPP and similar organizations tended not to take seriously the corrosive effects of gender violence on liberation struggle. In many ways, Elaine Brown’s autobiography, A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story, has gone the furthest in laying bare the ugly realities of misogyny in the movement and the various ways in which both men and women reproduced and reinforced male privilege and gender violence in these organizations. Her experience as the only woman to ever lead the BPP did not exempt her from the brutal misogyny of the organization. She recounts being assaulted by various male comrades (including Huey Newton) as well as being beaten and terrorized by Eldridge Cleaver, who threatened to “bury her in Algeria” during a delegation to China. Her biography demonstrates more explicitly than either Davis’s or Shakur’s how the masculinist posturing of the BPP (and by extension many radical organizations at the time) created a culture of violence and misogyny that ultimately proved to be the organization’s undoing.

These narratives demystify the legacy of gender violence of the very organizations that many of us look up to. They demonstrate how misogyny was normalized in these spaces, dismissed as “personal” or not as important as the more serious struggles against racism or class inequality. Gender violence has historically been deeply entrenched in the political practices of the Left and constituted one of the greatest (if largely unacknowledged) threats to the survival of these organizations. However, if we pay attention to the work of Davis, Shakur, Brown, and others, we can avoid the mistakes of the past and create different kinds of political community.

And of course, on these matters racial privilege ends up plaguing even explicitly anti-racist movements.

Race further complicates the ways in which gender violence unfolds in our communities. In “Looking for Common Ground: Relief Work in Post-Katrina New Orleans as an American Parable of Race and Gender Violence,” Rachel Luft explores the disturbing pattern of sexual assault against white female volunteers by white male volunteers doing rebuilding work in the Upper Ninth Ward in 2006. She points out how Common Ground failed to address white men’s assaults on their co-organizers and instead shifted the blame to the surrounding Black community, warning white women activists that they needed to be careful because New Orleans was a dangerous place. Ultimately it proved easier to criminalize Black men from the neighborhood than to acknowledge that white women and transgender organizers were most likely to be assaulted by white men they worked with. In one case, a white male volunteer was turned over to the police only after he sexually assaulted at least three women in one week. The privilege that white men enjoyed in Common Ground, an organization ostensibly committed to racial justice, meant that they could be violent toward women and queer activists, enact destructive behaviors that undermined the organization’s work, and know that the movement would not hold them accountable in the same way that it did Black men in the community where they worked.

But then awareness of the racial privilege can end up turning into a form of rape apologism when the violence is committed by men of color.

We often worry about reproducing particular kinds of racist violence that disproportionately target men of color. We are understandably loath to call the police, involve the state in any way, or place men of color at the mercy of a historically racist criminal (in)justice system; yet our communities (political and otherwise) often do not step up to demand justice on our behalf. We don’t feel comfortable talking to therapists who just reaffirm stereotypes about how fucked-up and exceptionally violent our home communities are. The Left often offers even less support. Our victimization is unfortunate, problematic, but ultimately less important to “the work” than the men of all races who reproduce gender violence in our communities.

Of course, the problem isn't just in anti-racist movements. Sexual liberation movements have been plagued with problems of perpetuating kyriarchy for years. As a privileged white male, I'm relatively ignorant of racism in these movements, but here's the Wiki on racism in the LGBT community for your perusal and privilege checking. However, I have noted various sex and gender issues that plague our communities and movements.

Take, for instance, transphobia. Among lesbian feminists, particularly in the 1980's, transphobia has been rampant. Janice Raymond even published a book called The Transsexual Empire in which she argued that transwomen were infiltrating feminism, and even compared them to rapists. Transgender rights activist Patrick Califia writes in his book Sex Changes that back when he identified as a lesbian he participated in witch hunt style behaviors regarding transwomen. Even when not displaying this sort of outright hostility, the overall LGB(t?) movement has often pushed transgender concerns under the rug. We are often so interested in issues like marriage equality and convincing straight people that "we're just like you," that we push things deemed harder to normalize, such as deviations from gender norms, out of the spotlight. Well, maybe it's that I'm genderqueer and quite a few of my friends are outright trans, but these issues are just as important, if not more, than marriage. Sidestepping the rights of an entire segment of our community is not pragmatic, it's callous and simply entrenches transphobia.

Bisexuals and pansexuals often face a similar stigma within the queer community. For people who experience attraction pretty much exclusively to one gender, those of us who can lust and love across the gender spectrum seem like an anomaly. So, many people brand self proclaimed bisexuals and pansexuals "closet cases" who refuse to admit that they're gay. Bisexual females are often suspected of simply being straight girls claiming bisexuality for experimentation and to appear sexy (the sad part is that many straight girls do this, breaking lesbian hearts and giving honest bisexuals a bad name). Bisexual males are often deemed suspicious for STD's, and have even been suspected not to exist. Elena of Women's Glib wrote a great post on these issues, albeit not specifically as they apply within the queer community, fairly recently.

Another problem that I've seen in our community is the pervasive nature of slut shaming. Now, my thoughts regarding the slut/stud dichotomy and judgmental attitudes towards sex in general are made clear in this video and in my founding of the Facebook page Rational people against puritanical and misogynistic "slut" shaming. I have never encountered a community completely free of this sort of sexual prescriptivism, however. Even when I'm with far left, or godless, or queer, or feminist, or even blatantly sex positive friends, I occasionally encounter some variant upon this sexual taboo, this dichotomous judgment.

Now of course, this post is far from an exhaustive discussion of how bigotry pervades movements that seek to fight it, how kyriarchy's branches entangle themselves in groups that seek to kill aspects of it. Hell, I haven't even mentioned how reformist wings of most movements seek to simply moderate the police and prison system's attitudes towards groups, while I think police power, and indeed the power of the state itself, is oppressive regardless of inequities. But one post cataloging every example of such unfortunate kyriarchal structures in movements is both impossible and unnecessary.

Because the real task belongs to each of us involved in such movements and communities. As we work together to fight oppression in society as a whole, we need to take a serious look at oppression that happens in the corners that are already "ours." And then, as Gandhi said, "we must be the change we want to see in the world."

Striking the Roots of Racism

Several days ago I had a fascinating conversation with a good friend regarding the origins of racism and the optimal methods for ameliorating its impact. The following post is largely based on that conversation, but also draws heavily from my study of such anti-racist thinkers as Tim Wise, Arthur Silber, and Cornel West.

Due to the human tendency towards "in group" and "out group" thinking, just about every human is to an extent racist. This does not mean they hate people based upon race, or that they harbor any ideological racism. But they do hold some emotional bias. This unconscious, unintentional racism has been confirmed by studies. As they say on Avenue Q, "everyone's a little bit racist," even far left, anti-racist bloggers like me.

And so, if we're all racists, whites make up the majority of our population, and whites are conferred with greater power than blacks thanks to years of slavery and Jim Crow, economic inequities between races should not be surprising. It should disturb you that a study by economists at MIT and the University of Chicago found that resumes with "white" sounding names were 50% more likely than the same resumes with "black" sounding names to lead to call backs for interviews. But it should not surprise you. It likewise should not be surprising that when minimum wage laws decrease the amount of people businesses can profitably employ, blacks are the ones hurt most (And in fact whites are often helped). But it should certainly give you pause.

Power of course only exacerbates the problem, particularly power involving authorization to use legal force, break the law with nearly guaranteed impunity, and imprison individuals. Yes, breaking news from the department of "Fucking obvious, but unremarked upon by respectable politicians": The criminal justice system is really racist. Michelle Jones thoroughly documents this in The New Jim Crow, specifically focusing on the war on drugs and the mass incarceration state to which it contributes. A few damning facts she points out include:

*There are more African Americans under correctional control today—in prison or jail, on probation or parole—than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.

*As of 2004, more African American men were disenfranchised (due to felon disenfranchisement laws) than in 1870, the year the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, prohibiting laws that explicitly deny the right to vote on the basis of race.

* A black child born today is less likely to be raised by both parents than a black child born during slavery. The recent disintegration of the African American family is due in large part to the mass imprisonment of black fathers.

*If you take into account prisoners, a large majority of African American men in some urban areas have been labeled felons for life. (In the Chicago area, the figure is nearly 80%.) These men are part of a growing undercaste—not class, caste—permanently relegated, by law, to a second-class status. They can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits, much as their grandparents and great-grandparents were during the Jim Crow era.

But there's a problem with all these facts: Humans want to consider ourselves and the things we love good and moral, and in our society, racism is deemed the height of evil. So we resort to denial. Admit to racism? It's hard to save face with that confession. Unpack the invisible knapsack of privilege? We might no longer feel we earned all we have.

And so, the white establishment must smear those who challenge their delusional vision of a fair and equitable America. Why, accusing white people of racism? These "civil rights activists" must be racist! Conservative firebrand David Horowitz wrote an entire book based on this premise titled hating whitey.

Similarly, employment difficulties of blacks must be denied. The truly skilled white privilege denialist will here play the victim, noting affirmative action programs as a form of "reverse racism."

The most illustrative example of the vehemence of our racial denial is the debacle surrounding Jeremiah Wright. Many politicians on both sides of the aisle are connected to preachers who compare my LGBTQ friends and I to pedophiles or who wish death upon us. Billy Graham had connections to multiple presidential administrations and had a repeated record of explicit racism against blacks. Yet when Reverend Wright told the reality, albeit in an incendiary manner, of American imperialism, war crimes, and racial oppression, that was too much.

And so the denial permeates our political spectrum. Even that radical socialist Barack Obama, known for his "deep seated hatred for white people", operates on the factually dubious assumption of a post-racial America. His most famous line of oratory hinges upon this PC delusion: "There's not a black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America." As Arthur Silber wrote yesterday on this matter:

Second, and of equal significance, is the fact -- acknowledged by almost no one, and certainly not by good liberals and progressives -- that Obama himself is a notably vicious racist: "All this means that it is Obama himself who has adopted the white racist framework. Yes, I repeat that: Obama has adopted the white racist framework with regard to every issue of importance."

This is true because Obama denies the truth of American history in some of its most essential aspects and fully embraces the myth of American exceptionalism -- which is a myth of white American exceptionalism. It is also true because Obama has intentionally adopted more particular racist tropes, such as the myth of "irresponsible" black fathers. (And follow some of the many links provided near the beginning of this article for much more on this topic.)

Please don't say Obama can't be a racist because he's black, or half-black, or however the hell you want to describe it. Just don't. I know you can be smarter than that, if you'll only try. In America today, the fastest path to power is via the white, male ruling class. Obama wanted and wants power, period. So in every way that matters, he identifies with the white, male ruling class. Now he's the leader of that class. See how that works?

So, how do we deal with all this racism? Certainly addressing symptoms such as the drug war and poverty would help. However, with deep seated problems, we must strike the root. This requires that we view racism not as an epithet to hurl at political opponents, but instead as an idea and structure of domination to seek out and ameliorate. For how else can we honestly find the racism lying latent in our psyches and our favored institutions? And if we can't even admit to the problem, it will be damn hard to solve.

Connor Boyack on Immigration

Over at Connor's Conundrums, Connor Boyack presents his views on immigration. Boyack is one of my fellow Utah residents, and is a libertarian, Constitutionalist, and Mormon writer. While I disagree with him on religion and overall have more radical views than he does, he is easily one of the most thorough and rational bloggers I've encountered. It shows in this piece. Boyack first presents a detailed history of immigration law in America, offering a persuasive case that originalist and libertarian interpretations of the Constitution would make our current restrictive immigration laws unconstitutional. He also offers well sourced rebuttals to the economic and crime based anti-immigrant arguments.

Free Market Socialism: An Introduction

My good friend Ciaran, who introduced me to the insights of free market libertarianism (Particularly the works of Frederic Bastiat and Ludwig von Mises), expressed his confusion at the notion of free market socialism. As the concepts are typically considered polar opposites, I figured I would offer some glimpses at various strains of free market socialist thought. To avoid the obvious contradiction, let me make clear to all readers that socialism does not here refer to the nationalization of industry, or other forms of government takeover. This is typically what such great free market economists as F.A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and even Frederic Bastiat meant when they said socialism. However, throughout history socialism has had a broader meaning, which basically boils down to the abolition of the existing capitalist order in favor of a more equitable system without such hallmarks of capitalism as strong class distinctions, boss/employee hierarchies in the workplace, and oligarchic control of the means of production. Throughout the rest of this post, I will give examples of how radical left wing free marketeers have sought to abolish these facets of capitalism while still maintaining libertarian notions of private property rights. Specifically, I will be drawing on the works of the modern individualist anarchists and self proclaimed free market anti-capitalists such as Kevin Carson, Charles Johnson (Often known on the internet as Radgeek), Roderick Long, Sheldon Richman (Editor of the free market periodical The Freeman), and Brad Spangler (Director of the market anarchist Center for a Stateless Society).

First, we'll discuss a favorite in socialist thought: unions. Unions are typically seen as opponents of the free market by libertarians, and many progressives and supporters of labor see statism as a friend of workers' rights. There are many objections to these ideas raised by free market anti-capitalists.

The first is that a variety of government restrictions on free association and contract (i.e. free market activity) explicitly restrict the power of labor unions. In his post Free the Unions (and all political prisoners), Radgeek explains:

Too many of my comrades on the Left fall into the trap of taking the Labor Day version of history for granted: modern unions are trumpeted as the main channel for the voice of workers; the institutionalization of the system through the Wagner Act and the National Labor Relations Board in 1935, and the ensuing spike in union membership during the New Deal period, are regarded as one of the great triumphs for workers of the past century.

You may not be surprised to find out that I don’t find this picture of history entirely persuasive. The Wagner Act was the capstone of years of government promotion of conservative, AFL-line unions in order to subvert the organizing efforts of decentralized, uncompromising, radical unions such as the IWW and to avoid the previous year’s tumultuous general strikes in San Francisco, Toledo, and Minneapolis. The labor movement as we know it today was created by government bureaucrats who effectively created a massive subsidy program for conservative unions which followed the AFL and CIO models of organizing—which emphatically did not include general strikes or demands for worker ownership of firms. Once the NRLB-recognized unions had swept over the workforce and co-opted most of the movement for organized labor, the second blow of the one-two punch fell: government benefits always mean government strings attached, and in this case it was the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which pulled the activities of the recognized unions firmly into the regulatory grip of the federal government. Both the internal culture of post-Wagner mainstream unions, and the external controls of the federal labor regulatory apparatus, have dramatically hamstrung the labor movement for the past half-century. Union methods are legally restricted to collective bargaining and limited strikes (which cannot legally be expanded to secondary strikes, and which can be, and have been, broken by arbitrary fiat of the President). Union hiring halls are banned. Union resources have been systematically sapped by banning closed shop contracts, and encouraging states to ban union shop contracts—thus forcing unions to represent free-riding employees who do not join them and do not contribute dues. Union demands are effectively constrained to modest (and easily revoked) improvements in wages and conditions. And, since modern unions can do so little to achieve their professed goals, and since their professed goals have been substantially lowered anyway, unionization of the workforce continues its decades-long slide.

Explicit regulation and statist neutering of unions is one thing, but it is also notable that government restricts business competition. This produces what Roderick Long terms an "oligopsonistic labour market," meaning a market in which there are few employers compared to laborers, and thus bosses have more bargaining power than workers. Sheldon Richman expanded on this point in his article Workers of the World Unite for a Free Market.

In general, any government intervention that makes it harder to start businesses pushes people into the labor market with less bargaining power than they would have in a free market. Less bargaining power for workers means more bargaining power for bosses. So it stands to reason that some percentage of the workforce must put up with lousy job conditions they would reject in a minute if there were a wider array of better opportunities, including self-employment. But there isn’t because the State, with the backing of established businesses, has kept those opportunities from coming into existence—sometimes by outright prohibition, sometimes by “progressive” measures to “protect” consumers and workers. Technology now makes it more feasible for people to work independently, but statutes and ordinances still stand in the way.

It all comes down to the same thing: squelching competition and creating dependence on thusly protected big hierarchical and often authoritarian firms. (Yes, small business gets some State benefits too, but see Roderick Long’s response here. Also see C. L. Dickenson’s “Free Men for Better Job Performance” here and here.)

Concerns about working conditions sound “left wing” but that’s only because libertarians have neglected the issue, without good reason in my view. (It was not always so. Nineteenth-century liberals explicitly appealed to working people and condemned the State-derived power of “capital.”) Too many contemporary libertarians mistakenly think that since sound economic theory tells us that poor working conditions can’t endure in an advanced competitive market, workers have nothing to worry about in a “capitalist” country like the United States. The problem with the argument is that “capitalism” doesn’t equal “free market,” and we haven’t had a free market—not even close. In fact, the economy we live in is far more the product of government-business collusion—going back to the beginning—than economic freedom.

Where the progressives and state socialists go wrong is in thinking that weak worker bargaining power is inherent in the market itself. It is not. It is the result of State privilege. Therefore the solution is not further government intervention, as the progressives want, but repeal of privileges, subsidies, licenses and the rest of the sources of political advantage that protect the well-connected at the expense of the rest of us.

While these state interventions demonstrate that labor interests and genuinely free markets are not enemies, they still leave open the question of whether a free marketeer can in good conscience support labor unions. Some certainly do. For instance, Brad Spangler, after making a point similar to the one above on how the state reduces labor's bargaining power, wrote on his blog "I urge, and challenge, free-market libertarians to show their solidarity with labor by supporting radical unions such as the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)." So what's so great about these radical unions? And can free market libertarians reasonably support unions at all? In his essay The Ethics of Labor Struggle: A Free Market Perspective, Kevin Carson discusses how well various labor tactics fit into libertarian ethics. He begins by responding the common libertarian objection that union effectiveness is based upon forcing worker compliance with strikes.

Vulgar libertarian critiques of organized labor commonly assert that unions depend entirely on force (or the implicit threat of force), backed by the state, against non-union laborers; they assume, in so arguing, that the strike as it is known today has always been the primary method of labor struggle. Any of Thomas DiLorenzo's articles on the subject at Mises. Org can be taken as a proxy for this ideological tendency. I quote the following as an example:

Historically, the main "weapon" that unions have employed to try to push wages above the levels that employees could get by bargaining for themselves on the free market without a union has been the strike. But in order for the strike to work, and for unions to have any significance at all, some form of coercion or violence must be used to keep competing workers out of the labor market.(9)

This betrays a profound ignorance of the history of the labor movement outside the sterile bubble of the Wagner Act.

First of all, when the strike was chosen as a weapon, it relied more on the threat of imposing costs on the employer than on the forcible exclusion of scabs. You wouldn't think it so hard for the Misoids to understand that the replacement of a major portion of the workforce, especially when the supply of replacement workers is limited by moral sympathy with the strike, might entail considerable transaction costs and disruption of production. The idiosyncratic knowledge of the existing workforce, the time and cost of bringing replacement workers to an equivalent level of productivity, and the damage short-term disruption of production may do to customer relations, together constitute a rent that invests the threat of walking out with a considerable deterrent value. And the cost and disruption is greatly intensified when the strike is backed by sympathy strikes at other stages of production. Wagner and Taft-Hartley greatly reduced the effectiveness of strikes at individual plants by transforming them into declared wars fought by Queensbury rules, and likewise reduced their effectiveness by prohibiting the coordination of actions across multiple plants or industries. Taft-Hartley's cooling off periods, in addition, gave employers time to prepare ahead of time for such disruptions and greatly reduced the informational rents embodied in the training of the existing workforce. Were not such restrictions in place, today's "just-in-time" economy would likely be far more vulnerable to such disruption than that of the 1930s.

Carson continues, discussing the previously noted restrictions on organized labor, and noting free market labor organizing tactics which have been banned.

More importantly, though, unionism was historically less about strikes or excluding non-union workers from the workplace than about what workers did inside the workplace to strengthen their bargaining power against the boss.

The Wagner Act, along with the rest of the corporate liberal legal regime, had as its central goal the redirection of labor resistance away from the successful asymmetric warfare model, toward a formalized, bureaucratic system centered on labor contracts enforced by the state and the union hierarchies. As Karl Hess suggested in a 1976 Playboy interview,

one crucial similarity between those two fascists [Hitler and FDR] is that both successfully destroyed the trade unions. Roosevelt did it by passing exactly the reforms that would ensure the creation of a trade-union bureaucracy. Since F.D.R., the unions have become the protectors of contracts rather than the spearhead of worker demands. And the Roosevelt era brought the "no strike" clause, the notion that your rights are limited by the needs of the state.(10)

The federal labor law regime criminalizes many forms of resistance, like sympathy and boycott strikes up and down the production chain from raw materials to retail, that made the mass and general strikes of the early 1930s so formidable. The Railway Labor Relations Act, which has since been applied to airlines, was specifically designed to prevent transport workers from turning local strikes into general strikes. Taft-Hartley's cooling off period can be used for similar purposes in other strategic sectors, as demonstrated by Bush's invocation of it against the longshoremen's union.

The extent to which state labor policy serves the interests of employers is suggested by the old (pre-Milsted) Libertarian Party Platform, a considerable deviation from the stereotypical libertarian position on organized labor. It expressly called for a repeal, not only of Wagner, but of Taft-Hartley's prohibitions on sympathy and boycott strikes and of state right-to-work prohibitions on union shop contracts. It also condemned any federal right to impose "cooling off" periods or issue back-to-work orders.(11)

Wagner was originally passed, as Alexis Buss suggests below, because the bosses were begging for a regime of enforceable contract, with the unions as enforcers. To quote Adam Smith, when the state regulates relations between workmen and masters, it usually has the masters for its counselors.

Far from being a labor charter that empowered unions for the first time, FDR's labor regime had the same practical effect as telling the irregulars of Lexington and Concord "Look, you guys come out from behind those rocks, put on these bright red uniforms, and march in parade ground formation like the Brits, and in return we'll set up a system of arbitration to guarantee you don't lose all the time." Unfortunately, the Wagner regime left organized labor massively vulnerable to liquidation in the event that ruling elites decided they wanted labor to lose all the time, after all. Since the late '60s, corporate America has moved to exploit the full union-busting potential of Taft-Hartley. And guess what? Labor is prevented by law, for the most part, from abandoning the limits of Wagner and Taft-Hartley and returning to the successful unilateral techniques of the early '30s.

Carson later notes some tactics which, if these regulations were not in place, could permit organized labor to have immense bargaining power over business, while never using force to stop "scabs" from continuing work.

[I]t certainly was easier to win a strike before Taft-Hartley outlawed secondary and boycott strikes up and down the production chain. The classic CIO strikes of the early '30s involved multiple steps in the chain--not only production plants, but their suppliers of raw materials, their retail outlets, and the teamsters who moved finished and unfinished goods. They were planned strategically, as a general staff might plan a campaign. Some strikes turned into what amounted to regional general strikes. Even a minority of workers striking, at each step in the chain, can be far more effective than a conventional strike limited to one plant. Even the AFL-CIO's Sweeney, at one point, half-heartedly suggested that things would be easier if Congress repealed all the labor legislation after Norris-LaGuardia (which took the feds out of the business of issuing injunctions and sending in troops), and let labor and management go at it "mano a mano."(18)

If nothing else, all of this should demonstrate the sheer nonsensicality of the Misoid idea that strikes are ineffectual unless they involve 100% of the workforce and are backed up by the threat of violence against scabs. Even a sizeable minority of workers walking off the job, if they're backed up by similar minorities at other stages of the production and distribution process on early CIO lines, could utterly paralyze a company.

Outside of the strike concept, radical unions such as the IWW have supported on the job direct action. Carson writes:

An alternative model of labor struggle, and one much closer to the overall spirit of organized labor before Wagner, would include the kinds of activity mentioned in the old Wobbly pamphlet "How to Fire Your Boss," and discussed by the I.W.W.'s Alexis Buss in her articles on "minority unionism" for Industrial Worker.

If labor is to return to a pre-Wagner way of doing things, what Buss calls "minority unionism" will be the new organizing principle.

If unionism is to become a movement again, we need to break out of the current model, one that has come to rely on a recipe increasingly difficult to prepare: a majority of workers vote a union in, a contract is bargained. We need to return to the sort of rank-and-file on-the-job agitating that won the 8-hour day and built unions as a vital force....

Minority unionism happens on our own terms, regardless of legal recognition....

U.S. & Canadian labor relations regimes are set up on the premise that you need a majority of workers to have a union, generally government-certified in a worldwide context[;] this is a relatively rare set-up. And even in North America, the notion that a union needs official recognition or majority status to have the right to represent its members is of relatively recent origin, thanks mostly to the choice of business unions to trade rank-and-file strength for legal maintenance of membership guarantees.

The labor movement was not built through majority unionism-it couldn't have been.(15)

How are we going to get off of this road? We must stop making gaining legal recognition and a contract the point of our organizing....

We have to bring about a situation where the bosses, not the union, want the contract. We need to create situations where bosses will offer us concessions to get our cooperation. Make them beg for it.(16)

As the Wobbly pamphlet "How to Fire Your Boss" argues, the strike in its current business union form, according to NLRB rules, is about the least effective form of action available to organized labor.

The bosses, with their large financial reserves, are better able to withstand a long drawn-out strike than the workers. In many cases, court injunctions will freeze or confiscate the union's strike funds. And worst of all, a long walk-out only gives the boss a chance to replace striking workers with a scab (replacement) workforce.

Workers are far more effective when they take direct action while still on the job. By deliberately reducing the boss' profits while continuing to collect wages, you can cripple the boss without giving some scab the opportunity to take your job. Direct action, by definition, means those tactics workers can undertake themselves, without the help of government agencies, union bureaucrats, or high-priced lawyers. Running to the National Labor Relations Board (N.L.R.B.) for help may be appropriate in some cases, but it is NOT a form of direct action.(17)

Thomas DiLorenzo, ironically, said almost the same thing in the article quoted earlier:

It took decades of dwindling union membership (currently 8.2% of the private-sector labor force in the U.S. according to the U.S. Dept. of Labor) to convince union leaders to scale back the strike as their major "weapon" and resort to other tactics. Despite all the efforts at violence and intimidation, the fact remains that striking union members are harmed by lower incomes during strikes, and in many cases have lost their jobs to replacement workers. To these workers, strikes have created heavy financial burdens for little or no gain. Consequently, some unions have now resorted to what they call "in-plant actions," a euphemism for sabotage.

Damaging the equipment in an oil refinery or slashing the tires of the trucks belonging to a trucking company, for example, is a way for unions to "send a message" to employers that they should give in to union demands, or else. Meanwhile, no unionized employees, including the ones engaged in the acts of sabotage, lose a day's work.

DiLorenzo is wrong, of course, in limiting on-the-job action solely to physical sabotage of the employer's property. As we shall see below, an on-the-job struggle over the pace and intensity of work is inherent in the incomplete nature of the employment contract, the impossibility of defining such particulars ahead of time, and the agency costs involved in monitoring performance after the fact. But what is truly comical is DiLorenzo's ignorance of the role employers and the employers' state played in establishment unions making the strike a "major 'weapon'" in the first place.

Instead of conventional strikes, "How to Fire Your Boss" recommends such forms of direct action as the slowdown, the "work to rule" strike, the "good work" strike, selective strikes (brief, unannounced strikes at random intervals), whisteblowing, and sick-ins. These are all ways of raising costs on the job, without giving the boss a chance to hire scabs.

Sabotage and other forms of direct action pose interesting property rights questions for libertarians. Carson's answer to these questions is as follows:

As I already mentioned, sitdowns and monkey-wrenching would appear at first glance to be obvious transgressions of libertarian principle. Regarding these, I can only say that the morality of trespassing and vandalism against someone else's property hinges on the just character of their property rights.

Murray Rothbard raised the question, at the height of his attempted alliance with the New Left, of what ought to be done with state property. His answer was quite different from that of today's vulgar libertarians ("Why, sell it to a giant corporation, of course, on terms most advantageous to the corporation!"). According to Rothbard, since state ownership of property is in principle illegitimate, all property currently "owned" by the government is really unowned. And since the rightful owner of any piece of unowned property is, in keeping with radical Lockean principles, the first person to occupy it and mix his or her labor with it, it follows that government property is rightfully the property of whoever is currently occupying and using it. That means, for example, that state universities are the rightful property of either the students or faculties, and should either be turned into student consumer co-ops, or placed under the control of scholars' guilds. More provocative still, Rothbard tentatively applied the same principle to the (theatrical gasp) private sector! First he raised the question of nominally "private" universities that got most of their funding from the state, like Columbia. Surely it was only a "private" college "in the most ironic sense." And therefore, it deserved "a similar fate of virtuous homesteading confiscation."

But if Columbia University, what of General Dynamics? What of the myriad of corporations which are integral parts of the military-industrial complex, which not only get over half or sometimes virtually all their revenue from the government but also participate in mass murder? What are their credentials to "private" property? Surely less than zero. As eager lobbyists for these contracts and subsidies, as co-founders of the garrison stare, they deserve confiscation and reversion of their property to the genuine private sector as rapidly as possible. To say that their "private" property must be respected is to say that the property stolen by the horsethief and the murderer must be "respected."

But how then do we go about destatizing the entire mass of government property, as well as the "private property" of General Dynamics? All this needs detailed thought and inquiry on the part of libertarians. One method would be to turn over ownership to the homesteading workers in the particular plants; another to turn over pro-rata ownership to the individual taxpayers. But we must face the fact that it might prove the most practical route to first nationalize the property as a prelude to redistribution. Thus, how could the ownership of General Dynamics be transferred to the deserving taxpayers without first being nationalized enroute? And, further more, even if the government should decide to nationalize General Dynamics--without compensation, of course-- per se and not as a prelude to redistribution to the taxpayers, this is not immoral or something to be combatted. For it would only mean that one gang of thieves--the government--would be confiscating property from another previously cooperating gang, the corporation that has lived off the government. I do not often agree with John Kenneth Galbraith, but his recent suggestion to nationalize businesses which get more than 75% of their revenue from government, or from the military, has considerable merit. Certainly it does not mean aggression against private property, and, furthermore, we could expect a considerable diminution of zeal from the military-industrial complex if much of the profits were taken out of war and plunder. And besides, it would make the American military machine less efficient, being governmental, and that is surely all to the good. But why stop at 75%? Fifty per cent seems to be a reasonable cutoff point on whether an organization is largely public or largely private.(19)

If corporations that get the bulk of their profits from state intervention are essentially parts of the state, rightfully subject to being treated as the property of the workers actually occupying them, then sitdowns and sabotage should certainly be legitimate means for bringing this about.

As for the other, less extreme tactics, those who object morally to such on-the-job direct action fail to consider the logical implications of a free contract in labor. As Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis describe it,

The classical theory of contract implicit in most of neo-classical economics holds that the enforcement of claims is performed by the judicial system at negligible cost to the exchanging parties. We refer to this classical third-party enforcement assumption as exogenous enforcement. Where, by contrast, enforcement of claims arising from an exchange by third parties is infeasible or excessively costly, the exchanging agents must themselves seek to enforce their claims. Endogenous enforcement in labour markets was analysed by Marx--he termed it the extraction of labour from labour power--and has recently become the more or less standard model among microeconomic theorists.

Exogenous enforcement is absent under a variety of quite common conditions: when there is no relevant third party..., when the contested attribute can be measured only imperfectly or at considerable cost (work effort, for example, or the degre of risk assumed by a firm's management), when the relevant evidence is not admissible in a court of law...[,] when there is no possible means of redress..., or when the nature of the contingencies concerning future states of the world relevant to the exchange precludes writing a fully specified contract.

In such cases the ex post terms of exchange are determined by the structure of the interaction between A and B, and in particular on the strategies A is able to adopt to induce B to provide the desired level of the contested attribute, and the counter strategies available to B....

Consider agent A who purchases a good or service from agent B. We call the exchange contested when B's good or service possesses an attribute which is valuable to A, is costly for B to provide, yet is not fully secified in an enforceable contract....

An employment relationship is established when, in return for a wage, the worker B agrees to submit to the authority of the employer A for a specified period of time in return for a wage w. While the employer's promise to pay the wage is legally enforceable, the worker's promise to bestow an adequate level of effort and care upon the tasks assigned, even if offered, is not. Work is subjectively costly for the worker to provide, valuable to the employer, and costly to measure. The manager-worker relationship is thus a contested exchange.(20)

The very term "adequate effort" is meaningless, aside from whatever way its definition is worked out in practice based on the comparative bargaining power of worker and employer. It's virtually impossible to design a contract that specifies ahead of time the exact levels of effort and standards of performance for a wage-laborer, and likewise impossible for employers to reliably monitor performance after the fact. Therefore, the workplace is contested terrain, and workers are justified entirely as much as employers in attempting to maximize their own interests within the leeway left by an incomplete contract. How much effort is "normal" to expend is determined by the informal outcome of the social contest within the workplace, given the de facto balance of power at any given time. And that includes slowdowns, "going canny," and the like. The "normal" effort that an employer is entitled to, when he buys labor-power, is entirely a matter of convention. It's directly analogous the local cultural standards that would determine the nature of "reasonable expectations," in a libertarian common law of implied contract. If libertarians like to think of "a fair day's wage" as an open-ended concept, subject to the employer's discretion and limited by what he can get away with, they should remember that "a fair day's work" is equally open-ended.

This may strike some libertarians as a convoluted rationalization of transgressions against property and contract, but it still presents a well thought out and thoroughly libertarian case for direct action by labor.

Interestingly, the previous Kevin Carson passage provides a perfect segue into another area of free market socialist thought. When he discusses how to deal with state property, which to a pure market anarchist is not legitimately owned by the government, he hits on a key element of free market socialism. The market anarchist, such as Murray Rothbard, believes that because governments obtain property either by force or fiat, it is not legitimately owned by them. Thus, privatization should occur. Unfortunately, the typical meaning of privatization in America involves a conservative practice. When the American government "privatizes" something this either means paying a corporation with tax dollars (Which a pure free marketeer considers ill gotten gain) to do something ordinarily done by government, giving government property to a corporation, or selling said property to a corporation. The first is irrelevant to our discussion of government property, and the second two are clearly illegitimate and distort the market, as they effectively amount to giving away or selling stolen goods. So how does one privatize government property? In his essay How and How Not to Desocialize, Rothbard writes:

It would be far better to enshrine the venerable homesteading principle at the base of the new desocialized property system. Or, to revive the old Marxist slogan: "all land to the peasants, all factories to the workers!" This would establish the basic Lockean principle that ownership of owned property is to be acquired by "mixing one's labor with the soil" or with other unowned resources.

Desocialization is a process of depriving the government of its existing "ownership" or control, and devolving it upon private individuals. In a sense, abolishing government ownership of assets puts them immediately and implicitly into an unowned status, out of which previous homesteading can quickly convert them into private ownership. The homestead principle asserts that these assets are to devolve, not upon the general abstract public as in the handout principle, but upon those who have actually worked upon these resources: that is, their respective workers, peasants, and managers. Of course, these rights are to be genuinely private; that is, land to individual peasants, while capital goods or factories go to workers in the form of private, negotiable shares. Ownership is not to be granted to collectives or cooperatives or workers or peasants holistically, which would only bring back the ills of socialism in a decentralized and chaotic syndicalist form.

There is a reasonable libertarian case to be made for not giving the property to a co-op or collective initially as the form of privatization. However, who is to say that if given control over a factory, the workers would not want to implement a cooperative themselves with their individual shares? As they homesteaded it, this would be their right within a genuinely free market. Radgeek advocates for this and related market socialist forms of privatization (Which he argues could be reasonably be termed "socialization") here and here.

Another issue which tends to separate advocates of pure free markets from socialists is the matter of public property. One common market anarchist view is that in a free market, all property would be privately rather than publicly owned, and thus tightly controlled by the owner. While this would deal with the tragedy of the commons quite nicely, it would also likely decrease options available to the poor, and freedom of movement for everyone. However, public does not imply government owned, and thus there is room in a free market society for public ownership. In 1996 Roderick Long wrote a piece titled In Defense of Public Property, which deals with the issue well. On the matter of whether public property fits libertarian theories of property rights, Long argues

On the libertarian view, we have a right to the fruit of our labor, and we also have a right to what people freely give us. Public property can arise in both these ways.

Consider a village near a lake. It is common for the villagers to walk down to the lake to go fishing. In the early days of the community it's hard to get to the lake because of all the bushes and fallen branches in the way. But over time, the way is cleared and a path forms — not through any centrally coordinated effort, but simply as a result of all the individuals walking that way day after day.

The cleared path is the product of labor — not any individual's labor, but all of them together. If one villager decided to take advantage of the now-created path by setting up a gate and charging tolls, he would be violating the collective property right that the villagers together have earned.

Public property can also be the product of gift. In 19th-century England, it was common for roads to be built privately and then donated to the public for free use. This was done not out of altruism but because the roadbuilders owned land and businesses alongside the site of the new road, and they knew that having a road there would increase the value of their land and attract more customers to their businesses. Thus, the unorganized public can legitimately come to own land, both through original acquisition (the mixing of labor) and through voluntary transfer.

This provides a fairly clear route for a socialistic manner for eliminating government ownership of places like parks, which have been homesteaded by the public at large.

Ultimately, it's important to remember that even if you don't think that roughly socialist economic relations are beneficial, in a libertarian society they may coexist with capitalist relations. Wendy McElroy, no anti-capitalist, explained this quite eloquently in her blog post Capitalism v. The Free Market.

At the risk of being misunderstood, I am not a capitalist. Instead, I advocate the free market. Capitalism is a specific economic arrangement with reference to the ownership of property and capital. It happens to be the arrangement I prefer because I believe it is more just, a far better reflection of reality and produces more prosperity than the alternatives. But I wouldn’t crusade for capitalism the way I would crusade for freedom of speech. What I would crusade for is a free market in which individuals exchange or co-operate with each other according to their own choices.

What’s the difference? Consider: I live near an old-fashioned Mennonite community that organizes its economic life along socialist ideals rather than capitalist ones. The community is absolutely voluntary – that is, it results from the free choices of individuals. In a free market, my neighbors can peacefully disagree with my assessment of capitalism and set up whatever voluntary alternative appeals to them…for whatever reason it appeals to them (e.g. religion). My approval of their non-capitalist lifestyle is not necessary until or unless they attempt to make me adopt their preference. That’s the free market: everyone peacefully pursues whichever economic goals they wish by whatever means is voluntary. If your chosen means is not capitalism and you don’t want my advice…then I wish you well… even though I doubt you will succeed in the way I define ‘success.’ Nevertheless I feel no urge to knock on your door as an evangelist for capitalism who is determined to demonstrate the error of your ways.

I think it would be fitting to close with a video series of Gary Chartier explaining why "advocates of freed markets should oppose capitalism." A written version of the same general arguments is available here.







I have tagged in the Facebook note for this post many advocates of free market anti-capitalist thought, as well as some of my best free market capitalist and non-market socialist leaning friends. I would be interested to read debate on these topics.

The Homosexual Experience is a Gift

My friend Richard Matthews recently posted as a Facebook note a reflection he wrote titled "The Homosexual Experience is a Gift." I think it presents a really beautiful perspective on homosexuality, and the queer experience in general.

Written January 2009... shortly after coming out.

I just came from my weekly get-together with The Village where we had possibly the most fascinating discussion about the homosexual experience that I have ever had. We dedicated a good portion of our hour-long interaction to the tremendous similarities between the X-Men and the real-life feelings and experiences that LGBT teens and adults have in being closeted, coming out, and living life as outsiders.

For those of you who don't know very much about the X-Men, they're not your average comic book heroes. The biggest names in the world of comics are Superman, Batman, and Spiderman. These are good 'ol boy superheroes. They're invincible, mysterious, and most of all: loved and adored by the respective cities that they protect. Not so with the mutants of the X-Men. While they do have incredible super powers and abilities, their story is one of struggle, rejection, and ultimately redemption.

Mutants in the world of X-Men are born with a genetic mutation that usually doesn't manifest itself until they begin to come of age as teenagers. When these characters begin to realize that they're “freaks”, there is a cataclysmic internal struggle that erupts within each one of them. Desperate to be normal, they struggle with self-loathing, depression, and often rejection by their families.

The tragic beauty of the story is that each one of them has a unique and amazing gift. At first, these mutant teens are consumed with hate for the abnormality that is part of them, but over time, many of them awaken to the stunning exquisiteness of their individuality. When they begin to find each other, they grow in strength and purpose. As this community of misfits grows and begins to take shape, the normal population reacts with cruel and shocking brutality. Laws are passed against them, they are attacked and beaten on the streets, and lies and misinformation flood the airwaves to spread fear and hate.

I hope that by now you've begun to see some similarities to the struggles that real-life gay adolescents and adults face. Our discussion group, The Village, unanimously agreed that our homosexuality is, in fact, a gift. Let's look beyond the fact that many homosexuals have tremendous talent in art, music, writing, etc. Being gay in and of itself is a gift... a magnificent gift. One of our villagers said it very well when he said that the day he accepted his sexuality, he was overcome with the incredible sense that this was special. That this made him forever distinct from average. But what is the gift? The gift... is that at a very critical and formative time in our lives, we have to look deep within ourselves to accept that we're different... and good. We have to learn... that we are good people. Our straight friends will just give us blank stares if asked, “When did you realize that you were a heterosexual?” “When did you accept that being straight was okay?”

These questions (substitute gay for straight) often evoke tremendous meaning and passion from a gay person. The gift of homosexuality is not only our individuality, but is a mirror to the soul. How many times have you had to look into this mirror and try to figure out who you really are? How many prayers have been choked out through bitter tears while wrestling with the most fundamental questions of our very existence? There is something profound to be said for the personal insight gained through struggle and doubt. I would venture to guess that we look into this mirror often as we continue our lifelong struggle for equality, acceptance, self-acceptance, and peace. It's a gift not exclusive to the gay community, but I would say all gays have it to some degree.

In the X-Men saga, a cure is introduced to rid the world of the scourge of mutants. It is made available to any mutant who wants it. This “cure” introduces a whole new level of personal conflict for the special race of mutants. Each one of them has desperately yearned for normalcy at some point in their lives. Even those who have long accepted themselves are shaken to the core by the prospect and supposed simplicity of being “normal.” Ultimately, some of them take the cure, others do not.

Most of us have been through, or are in, a time of our lives when we would have given ANYTHING to be rid of our gift, to be loved and accepted by default by our families, friends, and by society as a whole. There are people who despise their gift. If a “gay cure” were controversially offered today, would you take it?

There was a long period of my life when I would have gladly given up everything to live the boring poorly-dressed life of a straight man. As a 13 year-old boy, the prospect of living my entire life hiding in the closet or being ridiculed as an openly gay man racked my young body with terror and despair. Fourteen years later... fourteen years of anguish, self introspection and soul-searching, I can confidently say that I would not change if given the chance. Hell no. Scarcity creates value; that's why diamonds are so precious. I do not doubt the wisdom of my creator; each one of us is invaluably precious. We were all raised as heterosexuals in a society that HIGHLY values heterosexuality. Yet here we are. “Ordinary riches can be stolen, real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you.” - Oscar Wilde

Ethics, Empiricism, and Emergent Order: My Path to Left Libertarianism

Disclaimer: The following post reflects the views I held at the time of writing.  Some of my views may have changed, though many are the same.

From my roots as a civil liberties loving Democrat, to my Noam Chomsky and Bertrand Russell inspired move to libertarian socialism, to my current independent left libertarian radicalism, my political views have always been left of center. Initially I thought I had a place firmly within the Democratic Party, but gradually I have moved radically beyond the parameters of their policy platform. My views run the gamut of political philosophy, typically being based upon liberal, progressive, classically liberal, libertarian, socialist, and anarchist works. Fundamentally, however, they always have been, and I posit always will be, characterized by the attitude Bertrand Russell ascribed to liberalism in his essay Philosophy and Politics. Wrote Russell, "The essence of the Liberal outlook lies not in what opinions are held, but in how they are held: instead of being held dogmatically, they are held tentatively, and with a consciousness that new evidence may lead at any moment to their abandonment. This is the way in which opinions are held in science, as opposed to the way they are held in theology." With this openness to new data, my political views have undergone many evolutions.

The story of my political evolution begins, as so many do, with devotion to atheism and scientific naturalism. In fifth grade, while seeking quotes from my favorite historical figure, Thomas Paine, I stumbled across the website Positive Atheism, and their "Big List of Quotations." As I read through this list, containing both brilliant quotes from champions of science and liberalism and disturbing quotes from religious and socially conservative leaders, several opinions solidified. I became firmly convinced that free speech, feminism, reproductive choice, science (Particularly big bang cosmology and evolutionary biology), gay rights, and the separation of church and state were all immensely important and must be defended and advanced. Furthermore, I realized that these goals were under attack by religious fundamentalists and social conservatives, including the administration of George W. Bush. I still stand by these ideas. I remain a secular humanist to my core, diametrically opposed to the asinine assaults on reason which continue to emanate from the religious right and their army of bronze-age-dogma-worshiping bigots and philistines.

The next step in the evolution of my political ideology came from a somewhat less intellectual source: Liberal comedian Al Franken. His books Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot and Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them gave me some great laughs, and instilled in me some knowledge of the dishonesty and demagoguery that characterizes the American right. While I remain revolted at the right, I fear that in this period (Around sixth and seventh grade) I grew dogmatic and embraced many aspects of the Democratic Party platform on an emotional rather than rational basis.

But after consuming the pleasant partisan political junk food of Franken's hilarity, I moved onto some real philosophical red meat. My mind was blown by the articulate and principled works of the 19th century classical liberal utilitarian philosopher John Stuart Mill. I will confess for the sake of intellectual honesty that I have yet to read the entirety of his concise treatise On Liberty, but the excerpts I did read have since defined my political ideology. Most influential was Mill's enunciation of the harm principle: "That principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinion of others, to do so would be wise, or even right... The only part of the conduct of anyone, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign." From this principle I realized the moral vacuity of drug control, bans on prostitution, and other symptoms of America's meddlesome, paternalistic tendency towards moralistic overcriminalization. Later I would learn of police brutality, the economics of prohibition, and many civil liberties issues entangled in these matters, and my opinions would grow stronger still. But fundamentally it was the words of Mill that triggered this libertarian spark in my thinking.

After the classical liberalism of John Stuart Mill solidified my devotion to personal liberty, my skepticism of the state was enhanced, ironically enough, by the insightful writings of three great socialists. Of course, these were socialists of a decisively libertarian persuasion, and I believe their work has much to offer for all reasonable people regardless of their place on the political spectrum. I refer, of course, to Bertrand Russell, Noam Chomsky, and George Orwell. The influence of Russell and Orwell upon my ideas is fairly self explanatory. Russell's skepticism and empiricism remain pervasive in my ideals and color my every thought. Orwell taught me how to see through political demagoguery, and particularly how all ideologies, even those which are on the surface devoted to humanity's liberation, can become the instigators of the most brutal and insidious authoritarianism. And of course, the entirety of this socialist trinity loved free speech with an absolutist fervor, while despising and distrusting blind loyalty to any party.

But the influence of Professor Noam Chomsky extends farther than that of his two comrades, brilliant and eloquent as both are. For it was Chomsky who sparked my outrage at America's undemocratic two party system, morally bankrupt and ever bungling CIA, and murderous military-industrial empire. With clear logic, scrupulously documented facts, and moral clarity, Professor Chomsky demonstrated the hypocrisy of our foreign policy, which condemns terrorism and tyranny while terrorizing civilians and installing and maintaining tyrannical regimes. Until I read Failed States, I had never fully comprehended the horrors our government was hypocritically unleashing in the Middle East, or the human cost of our previous unethical and illegal misadventures in Latin America and around the globe. Realizing that presidential administrations from both the Democratic and Republican parties were complicit in what amounted to war crimes toppled my partisan loyalty to the Democrats, which had already been shaken by the admonitions of Russell and Orwell. Professor Chomsky's analysis of how few substantive policy differences exist between the parties, about how the media in America serve as lapdogs for the state corporate apparatus, and of the many other systemic flaws in our political system, awakened me to the need for radicalism. Beyond the folly of the Iraq War, I saw the folly of an entire empire. Beyond the cynical demagoguery of the Republicans, I saw a narrow political spectrum in which Democrats and Republicans alike accepted the same morally repugnant premises. And beyond the lies of O'Reilly and Limbaugh, I noted that even real journalists sacrificed moral and intellectual integrity so as to retain their coveted seat in Washington's royal court.

Chomsky's writings may have saved me from the sick stagnation of the political mainstream, but I was still hampered with delusions. I was a social democrat who believed that the optimal solution to our problems was a truly democratic government that provided services to the people and limited corporate power through regulation. I also thought that, while Barack Obama was going to be a politician within the center right authoritarian spectrum party, he would substantially roll back the damage Bush did. It is now my opinion that I was wrong on both counts. On the first point, I now see that particularly in America, but also elsewhere, the state has an intractable tendency to become a tool of inequity and privation. Orwell and Chomsky taught me this, but it didn't really sink in until now, particularly as both remained to some extent state socialists. It didn't really sink in until I read detailed policy analysis from the Cato Institute and other sources on corporate welfare. It didn't sink in until Timothy Carney on the right and the Center for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) on the left started reporting on Obama's corporatism. And it didn't truly sink in entirely until I re-exposed myself to the philosophy of individualist anarchism. I was first introduced to individualist anarchism when I read Wendy McElroy's brilliant book XXX: A Woman's Right to Pornography. In this truly stellar defense of sexual liberation and free expression, Wendy McElroy eviscerated the ideas of anti-pornography feminism, expounding on her philosophy of individualist feminism, which has at its roots such 19th Century individualist anarchists as Moses Harman, who was frequently jailed for his publication of "obscene" articles advocating birth control and condemning marital rape. But this time I encountered a farther left brand of individualist anarchism, an ideology promoted by the likes of Professor Roderick Long, a philosopher at Auburn University. The "free market anti-capitalism" of Roderick Long and his comrades such as Kevin Carson, Brad Spangler, and Sheldon Richman combined the consistent anti-statism I had loved from Wendy McElroy and Murray Rothbard with the compassion for victims of non-governmental hierarchies that I so admired from the likes of Noam Chomsky. This should not be too surprising, for as Roderick Long explained in his lecture "Rothbard's Left and Right: 40 Years Later," leftism and libertarianism were not originally considered opposed, but in fact "what we now call free market libertarianism was originally a left wing position. The great liberal economist Frédéric Bastiat sat on the left side of the French national assembly, with the anarcho-socialist Proudhon. Many of the causes we now think of as paradigmatically left-wing — feminism, antiracism, antimilitarism, the defense of laborers and consumers against big business — were traditionally embraced and promoted specifically by free-market radicals." Roderick Long has also written a variety of very persuasive papers, such as Corporations versus the Market, explaining how the state creates oligopolies, and thus an oligoponistic labor market unfriendly both to workers and consumers. Corporate power is largely a product of state intervention, and it has a tendency to then incur ever more favors from the government, resulting in our current corporatist plutocracy. At the same time, the writings of many great economists taught me how undirected emergent order, a phenomena I had long defended in the natural sciences against the teleology of creationists, can lead to great things in human action. For these reasons, I abandoned social democracy in favor of free market anti-capitalism. So what caused the other change, what led to my disillusionment with Obama? Well, in accepting the despotic assumptions of the Bush Administration when it comes to civil liberties, in arguing for indefinite detention, in claiming the authority to order the assassination of US citizens, in using the state secrets privilege to cover for the Bush Administration's crimes, Obama has shifted the debate in a dangerously authoritarian direction. Liberals who would have once condemned such policies as "Constitution shredding" now defend them as pragmatic, while the right hysterically screams that Obama will kill us all by allowing some terror suspects their Miranda Rights, and clamors to avert this non-threat by annihilating the Bill of Rights with their "Enemy Belligerent Act." Only principled "civil liberties absolutists" like Glenn Greenwald are left, as a small minority in our political discourse, to argue for Thomas Paine's ideal that "in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other." As long as Obama stands explicitly against the Bill of Rights, I cannot consider myself his supporter.

These are not the only changes that have happened recently in my political consciousness. The writings of several commentators, most notably Radley Balko, have alerted me to the true nature of the modern American criminal justice system. It is an unjust system, in which police and prosecutors are above the law, law enforcement agents become ever more militarized to prosecute a failed "war on drugs," and innocent people are jailed, even executed. Similarly, I have gone from an advocate for mainstream LGBT rights causes such as gay marriage, to a radical seeking to abolish all forms of prescribed gender roles, and the gender dichotomy that excludes transsexuals, intersex individuals, and so many others.

While all my opinions, as Russell wrote, "are held tentatively, and with a consciousness that new evidence may lead at any moment to their abandonment," I hold my current views with passion and a willingness to act. And so, for now, I proudly proclaim the following:

I stand in solidarity with the queers, the immigrants, the workers, the prisoners, and every civilian casualty in foreign wars and the domestic drug war.
I stand against bigotry of every stripe, violent aggression in all its manifestations (Including the state itself), dogmatism and all the ignorance it begets, corporatist cronyism, and state secrecy and dishonesty.
I stand for justice, reason, and liberty, wherever these values may lead.