Why I'm Not A Voluntaryist

(This is commentary of mine taken from Mike Gogulsk's recent post at NoState.com, but also more generally targeted towards his move towards a version of "anarchism without adjectives" and his post on "why I'm not a voluntaryist", which I think completely misses what the problem with "voluntaryism" is).

Part of the problem with the relativist “can’t we all just put aside philophical differences and unite against the state” meme is that it seems to reduce to fake solidarity. It is usually predicated on the ancap’s bargaining power, or to put the matter more directly, on the assumption that it’s the ancap’s property framework in which the “pluralism” towards the socialist is supposed to be manifested.

Another issue is that saying that we should unite against the common enemy may very well be misleading, in that the qualitative analysis of what that common enemy is may very well be quite different. How can people unite against “the state” when they don’t exactly agree on what “the state” is? If I think that your property norms logically entail, by consequence, the sufficient conditions for a “state”, then pluralistic “anti-statism” between us is illusory.

To take the matter even deeper, whether or not anti-statism is fundamental is in question. For those leftists with very “thick” inclinations, it isn’t. The goal being sought isn’t merely negating “the state” (and only in the fairly narrow sense of the modern democratic nation-state to boot), it’s the movement towards a more just social order in general, of which anti-statism is only one conclusion that is part of a bigger picture. Simply because someone nominally opposes the state doesn’t necessarily mean that we ultimately have compatible goals in the long-run; they could be in favor of virtually everything that one objects to. Sacrificing all of one’s values at the altar of anti-statism is a problem with most of libertarianism.

I used to be of an “anarchist without adjectives” mindset (and, keep in mind, the open-ended interpretation of an w/o adj. being promoted is not what was intended by the initial an w/o adj.es), in which I essentially was apathetic towards inter-libertarian conflict and concluded that the conflict was irrelevant. The problem, in retrospect, is that this was a simplistic reaction in which I was valueing conflict resolution for its own sake, and as a sort of rationalization for the intellectual laziness involved in not deeply thinking through the philosophical conflicts inside of libertarianism.

I came to the realization that if you put aside essentially all of your values simply because of a nominally shared opposition to a single institution, and that if you form a completely open-ended broad coalition of self-proclaimed “anti-statists”, what you end up with is an unstable hodge-podge of people with completely different social goals that will inherently fragment as it plays out. Not only that, it conceptually devolves into absurdity, with things like monarchy and nationalism being snuck into anti-authoritarian movements on the grounds of an illusory “pluralism”. This attitude opens itself up to “entryism”.

What this kind of “voluntaryism” ends up doing is stretching the meaning of freedom to the point of absurdity out of its desire to be all-inclusive. Everything about “the state” that one may have initially set out to oppose can be repacked in a new, relativized framework, and libertarianism ends up looking like a shallow and hypocritical doctrine to the extent that it does this. And it often entails a strange line drawn in which anti-statism and non-aggression is treated as an absolute categorical imperative, while beyond this dividing line all questions of value are left to relativity. I’ve never seen a libertarian sensibly rationalize this line.

There are real conceptual and practical tensions involved here that I don’t think can be simply swept under the rug in the name of “pluralism”. Problems aren’t solved by ignoring them. There is a fundamental structural level of analysis that most libertarians, as well as the open-ended interpretation of anarchism without adjectives, does not take into account. If you think that a vague commitment to opposing the modern democratic nation-state is sufficient to produce a free and flourishing society, you’re wrong.