Why the Alliance of the Libertarian Left is "Centrist"

I was recently cited as claiming that the Alliance of the Libertarian Left is a "centrist" organization. This can be portrayed as either a good or bad thing depending on the context. I don't recall any particular writing in which I explicitly said this, but I have made statements to this effect before. Well, I stand by such a statement and would like to explain what I mean by it. This requires me to unpack what the term "centrist" brings to mind for me.

The term "centrist" has the following possible connotations for me:

1. Fusionism. By fusionism I refer to eclectic philosophies that engage in a synthesis of a variety of elements, some of which may be commonly thought of as being in opposition to each other. Fusionism is ideological integration. Various people within the Alliance of the Libertarian Left definitely have certain fusionist tendencies, which involves attempts at reconciling advocacy for free markets with the concerns often associated with social anarchism. In short, the fusionism within the Alliance of the Libertarian Left is a matter of reconciliation between the ideas of "market anarchism" and "libertarian socialism". Relative to hardcore adherants of either side of that divide, such reconciliation is "somewhere in between".

2. Pluralism. By pluralism I refer to a certain sense of tolerance or inclusiveness towards a wide scope of different flavors and models. While fusionism is a deliberate mixing of different elements into one thing, pluralism is simply an open attitude towards the co-existence of different elements. Pluralism may be thought of as anti-monistic, I.E. opposed to the idea of a singular system. Certain people within the Alliance of the Libertarian Left seem to have pluralist tendencies. This may involve envisioning different libertarian ideologies on a spectrum of preferences that are all capable of co-existing in a broad framework of freedom.

3. Opportunism. Centrism also can have certain associations with opportunism. In the cliche context of electoral politics, this may be manifested as politicians who "blow in the wind" with no real consistency, changing positions whenever it benefits them the most or happens to be what is popular at the moment. It can also take the form of the exploitation of semantic ambiguity for the purpose of selling certain ideas in a more favorable way to people. While I definitely would not attack the Alliance of the Libertarian Left as being dishonest, there are certain people or at least some things that certain people have written that come off as oppurtunistic to me. This may involve trying to sell anarcho-capitalism with leftist rhetoric.

When the matter is put in these terms, I definitely think that the Alliance of the Libertarian Left tends to be "centrist", although this means that it is diverse precisely because of the more pluralist and fusionist tendencies. It cannot be pinned down to any particular libertarian or anarchist philosophy. It contains people who have positions that could be considered ambiguous or eclectic relative to the "partisan" options usually presented and people who are open to a fairly wide variety of views. Other than a website with a statement that lists off a variety of sub-categories and amounts to the advocacy of opposition to cultural authoritarianism, it really has no official platform.

Relative to the standards of your typical social anarchist, especially anarcho-communists, many of the people in the Alliance of the Libertarian Left are not likely to be viewed as "hard left", and this is probably because of its overlap with free market libertarian philosophy. And when it comes to contentions over things like property, it seems to be split or at least have a multitude of positions on the matter. There are some people in the Alliance of the Libertarian Left who, in my view, are largely still clinging to the ideas of the libertarian right or at least are still in what could be considered a transitory stage in which they are exploring the anarchist left. Hence, by certain standards, at least certain elements within the ALLiance could be considered kind of "soft" or lacking much leftist substance.

On the other hand, it could be said that many of the members of the Alliance of the Libertarian Left are heretics from the anarcho-capitalist movement, ex-anarcho-capitalists or post-anarcho-capitalists who have moved "leftward" in some way. Also, the emphasis on "thick libertarianism" with a left-wing flavor, particularly as introduced by Charles Johnson, definitely strengthens its leftist credentials. The Alliance of the Libertarian Left is not only reconciliationist in character, but also deviationist. Many of its members are deviants from standard American libertarianism, some of whom have substantive objections to anarcho-capitalism.

I hope that this justifies my claim that the Alliance of the Libertarian Left is "centrist", both in positive and negative terms. I think that synthesis views can be a good thing and consider myself to have one, and pluralism is something that I think is a good thing when in its proper context. At the same time, I reject the attempt to obfuscate fundamental irreconcilable differences through the use of rhetoric and I have some trouble with ideilogies that may be too eclectic in some ways. In either case, this is my honest accessment of the group as one who considers myself to be a member of it.

Does Freedom Have A Social Context?

Is it really the case that freedom is a separable factor from the kind of social atmosphere in which people exist? I think not. The particular conditions within a society is linked with people's capacity to independently make decisions about their own lives. This includes the possibility of mobility and the structural landscape of power. A social context in which there is a significant disparity of power, including the kind of power that comes with ownership and wealth, functions as a limit on freedom in that it is more susceptible to certain consequences.

A social hierarchy is what occurs when disparities of power are institutionalized and used to limit the freedom of certain people. What this entails, in effect, is that those in positions of power have the most freedom, while those who are in a subordinate or dependant position relative to such power structures have the least freedom. While freedom might not be something that is quantifiable in the sense of mathematical exactitude, it is relative to the particular circumstances that would allow an individual to exercise their faculties and live without appeal to a command structure. When power is centralized or densely concentrated, a breeding ground for authoritarianism is in place.

When the alternative to subordination to authority requires a mobile maneuver and a sacrifice of well-being, to the point where there really is no viable alternative at all or the only alternatives are just subordination to another authority, people aren't really free in the social context. They are systematically prevented from being free by the circumstances of the environment. The possibility of full consent is precluded. At best, they acquiesce for practical reasons. And it is most definitely not simply "nature", some sort of inherent necessity at the level of a law of physics, that causes them to be unfree. The kind of environment in question is a social one having to do with the particular distribution of power.

It is true that a position of power is not absolutely or inherently authoritarian, in the sense that someone can refrain from exercising it or using it to impose an institutional monopoly. But it is also true that the circumstance opens up the possibility of this and that authoritarian consequences are ultimately more likely to occur when power is concentrated. For example, a society in which the economic structure of power is plutocratic or one in which the distribution of land is feudal, is logically compatible with and an apt atmosphere for authoritarianism. The people who exclusively hold such massive amounts of power are in a better-suited position to control other people.

This is part of why I really don't understand certain proclamations that some people make to the effect of saying that particular socio-economic and cultural circumstances are effectively irrelevant "so long as everyone is free", or worse, "so long as I'm free". This has also been expressed in the form of a "consequences be damned" mentality. But the problem is that this presumes the two to be absolutely separable. To be sure, perhaps it is possible for a society to at least nominally be free and yet have a sick culture or be stricken with poverty. But aside from the fact that there would still be a reason for opposing a sick culture and mass-poverty in and of themselves, the idea that such an atmosphere can last without internal tensions causing it to be unfree strikes me as ridiculous.

I would say that this kind of "freedom" doesn't amount to much if it ultimately just means that most people live in a horrible socio-economic atmosphere or that society ghettoizes itself into fiefdoms. Such conditions are undesirable regardless of any nominal "freedom" that comes along with them. To have no real concern about the actual condition of people's lives in the name of "freedom" seems to turn freedom into a fairly useless abstraction, while reflecting what could frankly be called psychological bankruptcy and a low moral character. I would question the character of anyone that just said "screw society, as long as I'm left alone" and meant that plainly. It seems like more of an anti-social streak than a well thought out philosophy of freedom.

Healthy social atmospheres are desirable both for their own sake and in the sense that they integrate with freedom. It could be said that freedom is a prerequisite for a healthy social atmosphere and it could also be said that a healthy social atmosphere is a prerequisite for freedom. They are not mutually exclusive. Rather, they are robbed of substance without each other. This is a more holistic view. It is also a more society-based view, because I'm insisting on freedom and society as being reconcilable and mutually dependant. A philosophy that openly (although sometimes not-so-openly) says "down with society" in its one-eyed zeal to respect some narrow set of principles such as property rights is doomed from the start.

Libertarianism and Segregation

Recently there has been some uproar over some statements from Ron Paul's son Rand Paul (who, IMO, is a fairly wishy-washy conservative Republican that isn't as radical as his father) to the effect of a defense of segregation. This has sparked a little bit of resurging talk among libertarians about the question. I'd like to share some of my thoughts about this in general rather than specifically in reference to Rand Paul and his controversy.

For libertarians, to the extent that there is something that can be called a defense of segregation, it is generally argued for on the more "impartial" grounds of property rights. The arguement generally goes something like this: despite the fact that we may be personally opposed to segregation, it is justified insofar as it is a manifestation of the right of property owners to exclude who they want from their property. Thus, in principle, it is legally permissible for both home owners and buisiness owners to adopt a policy of segregation (whether it be racial, religious, or whatever). The alternative is "forced association", which is unlibertarian.

At least at the surface level, it appears impossible for any libertarian to disagree with this. By the very least, a libertarian qua libertarian cannot condone politically institutionalized integration in the sense of a universalized legal obligation to be inclusive towards certain groups. But I think that once one gets more specific about what we are really talking about, complications emerge. For one thing, the libertarian qua libertarian must at a minimum be equally opposed to politically institutionalized segregation, and the kind of segregation that existed en mass before the civil rights movement most certainly wasn't simply a matter of the property rights of citizens. It was a matter of state law and land.

One route in which certain claims to legitimate segregation can be questioned is from the perspective of justified property titles in the first place. We could start with the most obvious case. If one doesn't recognize the state itself as having a legitimate title, then the state can not have a right to discriminate. This delegitimizes all segregation relative to state-controlled land. We could go further than this too. To the extent that the state upholds "private" titles that aren't legitimate, then a right to discriminate is delegitimized in those cases as well. This level of analysis (justified title) by itself already begins to whittle away at the tenability of certain property-based justifications for segregation, although it does not cover all bases.

There is also some ambiguity more generally in the position supporting property rights. The home is often used as an analogy to demonstrate the normalcy of such levels of exclusion, but this feels like a false analogy when we are talking about something much more systematic or at larger scales such as an entire community. The larger the land mass that is being talked about is, and the more disconnected the property claim in question is from use, the more that this defense seems ridiculous and devolves into institutional segregation anyways. It becomes a defense of "covenants" (which, in this case, is little more than a code word for community-wide laws) that require every owner in a community to be exclusive in a particular way. In short, we end up with something rather state-like.

We could go further than this. Why is "free association" necessarily relative to something territorial? Indeed, there seems to be some tension here between the restrictions of absolutely respecting territorial boundaries and upholding people's personal freedom. In theory, territorialist notions of property rights (coupled with the expansion of territorial claims in a scarce world) can amount to a defense of excluding someone from the possibility of having any rights at all, since you effectively have to either own land or be invited on to someone else's land in order to occupy a given space and associate freely. This gets us into much more general questions, but it does relate to segregation: there is good reason for believing that a rigidly territorially segregated society is inherently unfree.

One of the last ditch efforts that some libertarians make to defend segregation is essentially to proclaim that it is the natural order for people to separate, as something that will inherently happen to a significant degree due to the innate tendencies of groups. I believe this position to be philosophically indefensible. Not only does it begin to cross over into the positive beliefs of certain types of racists, but it is based on bankrupt notion of "human nature" and a tunnel-visioned level of analysis that is only capable of seeing the matter through the lens of things like biology and biological metaphors. It is essentially "innatism" applied to a particular segment of human experience and then extrapolated to the level of a general natural law.

There is more that I can say about this, but this functions as a rough outline of some of the reasons I have for thinking that libertarians should be anti-segregation, not just as an optional personal preference on the side but as a logically connected part of a libertarian social philosophy.

The Usefulness of a Left/Right Distinction

I'd like to defend the proposition that a left/right distinction is useful even for libertarians, although the proposition does have some qualifications.

There is a sense in which it may make sense to say that libertarians transcend the left/right dichotomy at least in the more mainstream and common way that it is presented, in terms of the over simplistic choice between contemporary liberalism and conservatism. Libertarians do not fall neatly into such boxes. Libertarianism could be presented as either synthesizing elements that are typically associated with both or as falling outside of the paradigm because it represents two sides of the same statist coin that libertarians oppose. When the dichotomy is presented in such terms, then perhaps libertarians can claim to be unique.

But it may also be the case that reducing everything to a new dichotomy of statist vs. non-statist or anti-statist can obfuscate the details of political ideologies. One reason for this is that precisely what counts as statist and non-statist may be defined in a way that is contingent on certain norms that are in dispute. Precisely what norms are sufficient for a stateless society to arise and sustainably function is debatable at least on consequentialist grounds. Libertarians sometimes draw different conclusions about what common principles imply. Simply saying that it's about aggression, while doing this in a way that presumes ones own particular take on things, doesn't seem to take the multitude of positions at play into account.

It also isn't clear by any means that all libertarians have completely done away with baggage that can be traced back to the more common left/right dichotomy. People come into libertarianism from different angles, and this may influence what libertarianism means to them. Libertarians do not exist in a vacuum with respect to historical context and contemporary political ideologies. There are distinctions as to how various libertarians align themselves relative to other political groups and what they distinguish as being compatible and incompatible with the core philosophy. This alone is part of precisely why there is inter-libertarian factionalism.

Once one digs into the meat of political philosophy at a broader level, a vast multitude of particular positions on multiple spectrums can emerge. This includes views on social authority, property, the distribution of resources, organizational structure, cultural norms, and so on. In light of more detailed questions such as this, the simple and perhaps vague reduction of political philosophy to "aggression" and "government" doesn't seem to tell us very much by itself, especially when one takes into account the ways in which these different spectrums may overlap or be integrated by people. I suspect that a "plumbline", in the sense of a political philosophy that is genuinely consistently "thin", simply doesn't exist.

A left/right distinction, although things obviously get much more specific than these two terms, is useful insofar as the integrated social philosophies of particular libertarians are inevitably colored by different values or norms in a way that forms distinct views that simply cannot be reduced to a vaguely defined opposition to aggression or the state. Once one begins to disambiguate that, "thickness" of some sort is already at least implicitly entering the picture. The moment that one forms a libertarian philosophy that excludes certain norms from compatibility or defines freedom in specific terms, the alleged "neutrality" of libertarianism begins to dissolve. No libertarian sincerely maintains a neutral standpoint in practise. At best, this is a self-deception.

What a left/right distinction in a libertarian context may signify are varieties of gradiation in terms of how things like more general social views, property norms, and economic goals interlock in an overall ideological system. On a property spectrum, for example, hardcore propertarians are on the far right and communists are on the far left. On an economics spectrum, people who explicitly favor hierarchical and oligarchic structures are to the right of people who put an emphasis on a more equitable distribution of resources and flatter organizational structures. On a social spectrum, people who strongly question traditional social authority could be said to be to the left of those that are indifferent or supportive of it. These are real tendencies, and "left" and "right" are the most convenient and most-likely-to-be-understood terms for them.

The claim that these views are irrelevant seems to obfuscate the way in which "libertarianism" is effected by them. It is necessary to take such things into account if one wants to accurately consider the various ideas that float in and out of "libertarian" circles. While the desire for libertarianism to be unique is understandable at a certain level, it is not unique in a sense that is completely detached from relations with "other" ideas. Once such ideas are considered, this is the context in which a left/right distinction understandably continues to be a question for libertarians, even if some people want to avoid the terminology.

What Is Mutualism?

To be honest, while mutualism is a term that I've come to adopt for myself, it isn't entirely clear to me what mutualism is. What I mean by this is that it seems hard to identify an essential feature that all of the people who call themselves mutualists share in common. The positions currently being advocated under the title of mutualism seem to run the gamut from modified or modernized individualist anarchism (Kevin Carson) to a subtle neo-Proudhonian notion and "the anarchism of approximations" (Shawn Wilbur) to a more hardcore kind of libertarian socialism that thinks the other mutualists largely sound like anarcho-capitalists or make too many concessions to property (Francios Tremblay).

There certainly is a history of mutualism going back to classic thinkers such as P.J. Proudhon and W.B. Greene, but no self-proclaimed mutualist that I know of really is a strict adherent to the ideas of such people (and I don't mean to imply that one necessarily should be). The meaning attached to mutualism seems to be at least somewhat different for many people in a contemporary context, in contrast with its 19th century roots. This may partially be due to changes in economic theory. It also may be a matter of the ideological background or history of the people that have become interested in mutualism, which causes there to be market and social anarchist spins on mutualism and interpretations of Proudhon.

It is true that there are certain reoccurring themes that tend to be associated with mutualism, such as an occupation and use standard of ownership, the cost principle, reciprocity, a focus on synthesizing equality and liberty, the antinomy of the individual and society, and so on. Yet some of these themes seem to fall under the general umbrella of the libertarian left, and one would think that mutualism is more specific than that. Is mutualism "free market anti-capitalism"? Well, there seems to be a spectrum of positions among the people adopting that kind of rhetoric, some of which are more substantive than others. Is mutualism a form of libertarian socialism? Well, some of the libertarian socialists I've encountered would scoff at the more market-oriented ideas that are called mutualism.

One thing that does seem to at least vaguely be common to people that consider themselves mutualists is that they have a sort of nuanced position or even a synthesis that has the feeling of being neither anarcho-capitalism or something that would be acceptable in the more hardcore platforms of social anarchism, as a sort of middle ground that doesn't fit neatly into the boxes of various party lines or dogmas. There does appear to be certain themes of irreducible complexity and plays of apparent opposites that resolve or dissolve at some point in the play of concepts. The term mutualism itself seems to suggest synthesis, although this may be a superficial mental association on my part.

I suppose part of the confusion revolves around conflict between different interpretations. Mutualism has been portrayed as anything from fairly standard free market libertarianism with somewhat softened property norms and a different take on the implications of Austrian economics to an explicitly libertarian socialist creed with a prescriptive labor theory of value that calls for the absolute abolition of all profit, rent, and interest. This gets into tensions between descriptive and prescriptive formulations, different ideas on property, and varying degrees of emphasis on markets. With such considerations in mind, it should be no wonder that mutualism doesn't necessarily have a completely clear identity.

When I advocate my own ideas, I generally do not express them as being "the mutualist creed". They are the ideas of me as an individual, and they may or may not have anything explicitly to do with mutualism qua mutualism. But what does tend to bind me to the term, to the extent that could be said to be bound by it, is simply the extent to which I have ideas in common with other people who are called mutualists. I also adopt the term in the context of resonations with P.J. Proudhon. I have no particular problem using the term for myself, despite what seems to be the somewhat fragmented and approximate meanings that it conjures. I would just avoid reducing myself to it, which meshes with my opposition to reductionism in general.

Ultimately, I guess I would like to highlight the ambiguity that sometimes lurks behind rather obscure political labels such as "mutualism". From a certain perspective, this could be portrayed as a good thing in the sense that it stops it from hardening into a dogma. At the same time, the desire for clarity is understandable and perhaps contemporary mutualists should do a better job of hashing out exactly what it is that makes mutualism unique. Mutualism certainly seems to be unique, and that's part of the value I see in it. I'd be interested to see what various self-proclaimed mutualists have to say about this.

The Public Face of Libertarianism

The public face of libertarianism, particularly in America, is essentially paleoconservatism or something along those lines. The recent phenomenon of the Tea Party Movement has apparently reinforced this, with libertarian symbolism and rhetoric being mixed and associated with what seems to dominantly be angry reactionary conservatism that occurs whenever a Democrat becomes the president, with very little libertarian sentiment beyond a rather superficial desire for less taxes and an opposition to social welfare programs.

Radical libertarians, especially libertarian anarchists, have long since noted that the libertarian movement in America has been co-opted by the conservative establishment in various ways. But at another level it could be argued that this association isn't reducible to a co-option, that it was there all along when libertarianism was given a new meaning in the 1960's and formed by people who were originally fleeing from the conservative establishment while taking some of its ideological baggage along with them. In other words, it's partly the fault of at least a notable segment of libertarians themselves, who romantisized and aligned themselves with the political right from the beginning.

Libertarianism is put foreward by many libertarians as being "neither left or right", but it is often hard for them to maintain this claim when the ideological baggage comes out. Sometimes the ideological baggage that comes out is basically American conservatism as it was during the 1st half of the 20th century, repackaged for a new generation. And due to the pet peeve issues that standard libertarians often emphasize, which largely are anti-leftist sentiments, it is no surprise that the public often percieves libertarianism as a sort of frankenstein of the right. Being "anti-government" is framed in superficial, narrow terms.

This is partially a matter of rhetoric. American libertarians have inherited the rhetoric of the old right, rhetoric that stems from a cold war mentality and a romantic conception of early America. But I do not mean to suggest that standard and mainstream libertarians should change their rhetoric in order to better sell themselves to the left while keeping their positions substantively identical. This is because some substance was also inherited along with the rhetoric, and that substance is questionable. The substantance is a ridiculous narrative of American capitalism as a glorious bastion of freedom that is being eroded by the alien forces of communism, multiculturalism, and assorted bugaboos.

It is sometimes rather revealing and disillusioning to see the kinds of issues that some libertarians choose to prioritize: complaining about the civil rights act, doing Lincoln and civil war revisionism, attacking minimum wage laws, argueing that monarchy is better than democracy, and things of this nature. This isn't to say that they are necessarily wrong about these issues (although I beg to differ with Hoppe about monarchy), but their motivations may be wrong. They give the impression that they are mainly anti-state because of its egalitarian face, out of a desire to defend some past tradition or circumstance, or because they favor some special interest or power structure. This is precisely what gives libertarians the reputation of being "wingnuts".

As a result of this, libertarians are largely the laughingstock of most political discourse, and that's unfortunate. But in spite of this libertarianism has internally spawned a revival of more coherant radicalism at its own margins, which is slowly growing and gaining a voice in opposition to the bastardized libertarianism that gets the most press and is marginalizing itself out of existence. This has the potential to change the public face of libertarianism, and I think it's important for libertarian radicals to emphasize the difference between themselves and the right-wing frankenstein that mainstream libertarianism seems to be.