“This is not an attitude that is conducive to genuinely democratic deliberation.”

What the feministing post says, quite straightforwardly, is that they have better things to do with their time: more interesting people to talk to and more useful ways to spend their time than rehashing Feminism 101 yet again for yet another group of dudes on the web too lazy to pick up a copy of Sisterhood is Powerful. And why should they be expected to do anything different?

The goal of the feminist movement is to stop men’s oppression of women, not to sit around “deliberating” with sexists until they are persuaded to be a bit less sexist than they are. Sometimes the second is a means to the first, and sometime it is a distraction from it or even an obstacle to it. When they conflict, the first is always more important.

Matt,

Let me try to put the point in a less “arid” way by not mentioning the word “philosophical.”

Enmity towards people who are wealthy and opposition to wealth as such are two different things and need to be distinguished if you want to offer any kind of useful characterization of people’s reasons for action.

There are lots of reasons that you might feel enmity towards people who are wealthy today. It might be because you have some kind of problem with wealth itself. On the other hand, it might be because you think there’s nothing wrong with wealth but there is something wrong with the way most people come by it. You may remember that Adam Smith, just to take one example, often wrote quite harshly of the wealthy people of his own day, because he thought that many of them came by their wealth dishonestly (through feudal privilege and mercantilist political patronage). It is perfectly possible, and probably even wise, to criticize how many people in our current state-dominated, cartelized, subsidized, hyperregulated business environment come by their wealth, without having any problem with wealth itself or the idea of people having it. If that makes you “anti-wealth,” in the sense you’re trying to push, well, then what’s wrong with being “anti-wealth?”

Matt: A related test might be to ask whether they basically see all of society as “in this together” or if they frame everything in terms of oppressors vs oppressed.

Are you claiming here that any claim to the effect that one social class oppresses another reflects “resentment” of the people identified as oppressors? Or do you mean to make some more limited claim?

Matt: … this was composed with modern political landscapes in mind, so applying it to past eras may not yield coherent mapping.

Any “mapping” that doesn’t count Marx or Proudhon as a leftist is, I’d submit, a bad mapping, regardless of what you were aiming at. The term has a perfectly good meaning already, which includes a bunch of people from the past couple centuries in addition to OCAP or some dude writing comments on Arianna Huffington’s website, and if you meant to specifically gripe about ascetics or the envious or player-haters or whatever then you should probably find a term that better matches what it is you want to discuss.

Matt,

If you want to claim that leftists are all anti-propertarian and liberals aren’t, I think you’re mistaken (for some reasons I’ll mention below). But whether that claim is mistaken or not, being opposed to private property is not the same thing as being opposed to wealth per se. The technically correct term for what you’re trying to capture is “communist,” not “leftist.”

There are leftists out there who have been opposed to wealth as such, or who claimed to view wealth as such as morally corrosive. (Tolstoy, in his old age, claimed to be one such thinker; although the preferences manifest in his actions were rather different from the preferences expressed in his writing.) But most of the thinkers identified as paradigmatic leftists didn’t think this or anything like it. They have usually thought that material wealth (comfort, health, good food, rewarding work, enjoyable leisure, etc.) was a good thing and professed a desire that everybody should have it as far as it’s possible.

It’s true that Marx and Trotsky and Chomsky oppose private property, or at least private property in land and the means of production. But they don’t oppose wealth. Their complaint against private property is that they (wrongly) think that it stands in the way of ensuring wealth for everybody and (wrongly) conclude that forcible collectivization of land and the means of production is a just way to solve this alleged problem. The idea is that this would end the artificial scarcity allegedly endemic to capitalist forms of production, and bring about an era of unprecedented prosperity.

As for Proudhon, he was not against private property. He was against one conception of private property based on grants of state privilege, and in favor of another based on possession and use. Benjamin Tucker, to take another example, also defended private property (while condemning state-granted monopoly).

And as for whether or not somebody has “enmity” against the actually existing wealthy, well, who cares? I take it that the issue here is philosophical principles, not loyalty or affection towards any particular group of people.

Right or wrong, all the folks I named, when they expressed enmity towards wealthy people, expressed it not because they were wealthy, but because they concluded that those people obtained their wealth illicitly, and did so in a way that unfairly hindered other people from gaining wealth. Depending on a thinker, their conclusion may be wise or foolish (I think Proudhon’s understanding of matters was much sounder than Marx’s), but in either case they aren’t coming down on wealth as such, just on what they (rightly or wrongly) regard as wealth acquired through injustice.

J.C. Earnharth: I think there is something to be said for not allowing liberty to be swamped under by non-liberty minded folks.

1. Are you suggesting that the government has the right to use force against immigrants on the basis of their political opinions? Or, worse, on the basis of political opinions they may not even hold but happen to be held by a lot of people from their former home?

2. The post is about whether immigration without a government permission slip ought to be treated as criminal. Do you seriously think that liberty is going to be enhanced by condemning immigrants who don’t notify the government of their whereabouts and intentions at all times, and praising those who patiently trudge through years of pointless paperwork?

J.C. Earnharth: It’d be one thing if our nation was the nation of 1815, where basically the economic laws of gravity associated with liberty and freedom pretty much forced you to behave in a liberty oriented fashion in the U.S.

Yeah, unless you were a white planter in the South. Then there was that little slavery and ethnic cleansing thing.

But hey, who’s counting?

Matt,

If your dividing line between “liberals” and the “left” wouldn’t count (just to pick a couple examples) Pierre Joseph Proudhon or Karl Marx or Leon Trotsky or Ellen Willis or Noam Chomsky as a leftist, then maybe your attempt at a definition is ill considered, and ought to be revised. That is, if you mean for “left” to be a term of analysis and criticism that applies to real people over the past several decades, rather than a merely polemical term for whoever you find distastefully envious at the moment.

Jeremy: “Certainly there are those on the left who advocate greater state control, deprioritization of business freedom, obnoxious anti-americanism, etc. However, you must look at it from the perspective of the other side as well. Having a Kerry/Edwards sticker may not make you a Molotov cocktail throwing Black Bloc’er …”

Just so we’re clear, whatever you think of the Black Bloc, they do not “advocate greater state control.” Black Blocs are an anarchist protest formation. They favor the abolition of the State as such. If you think that being of the Left, or the radical Left, ipso facto equates to greater state interventionism, then you need to think harder about the variety of people who come under the Leftist banner.

Brian,

I think you’re oversimplifying the causes of the riots in France (the relationship of the police to residents of the immigrant ghettoes, just to take one example, seems to have been pretty important). But even if the riots were purely about “violent rejection of French culture,” there’s two different elements that you have to look at in that formula: (1) the rejection of French culture (whatever that comes to concretely), and (2) the violent expression of that rejection. I’d like to suggest that (1) is not a sufficient condition for (2), and Belgium and Switzerland are good examples of why.

It’s true that Belgium, like many of its neighbors, has problems with bristling, sometimes-violent relationships between the white population and the residents of immigrant ghettoes. What I was referring to, though, was the prickly but notably nonviolent relationship between Flemings and Walloons (as well as the small German-speaking minority), not the relationship between the white ethnic groups and the population in immigrant ghettoes. The fact that these two kinds of relationships across inter-ethnic divides are so different might tell you something about the underlying causes. Perhaps it has more to do with the way that immigrants and their descendents are treated by the government than it does with whether or not any particular national group is “assimilating” to, selectively incorporating elements of, rejecting, or simply ignoring the culture of other national groups within the country?

The point here is that people very often cite countries that have suffered ethnic bloodbaths within living memory (the Balkans in the past decade, for example) in order to “demonstrate” the need for unitary, homogenous national cultures within the borders of a given state. I find this frankly ridiculous. Quebec is not descending into civil war; Czechoslovakia existed and then disappeared without bloodshed; and Switzerland has remained as peaceful, prosperous, and free as any country in Europe for several centuries. There’s precious little evidence to suggest that “balkanized silos” of people who aren’t substantially alike in their language, religion, literature, etiquette, habits, leisure activities, dress, or other elements of culture, are a sufficient condition for making inter-ethnic relationships particularly hostile, let alone openly violent. What does tend to reliably produce inter-ethnic hostility and violence are political arrangements in which some national groups are ghettoized and politically and culturally subordinated to other national groups. In other words, the issue here is political domination vs. political equality, not cultural melting pots vs. cultural salad bowls.

“… we can’t afford the rise of balkanized silos or a salad-bowl scenario.”

Yeah, that would be horrible. I mean, we could end up like Switzerland or Belgium.

Unless, just maybe, violence in certain multinational societies (French immigrant ghettoes, the Balkans, Iraq) has more to do with issues of constitutional politics, and not much at all to do with cultural “assimilation” or the lack of it, after all?

Indy: “Well, that, and there are a bunch of corporate whore economic libertarians who are trying to kill america.”

Please don’t use the word “whore” as a slur when what you mean is “unscrupulous apologist.” Women in prostitution are doing a job, some of them in quite desperate circumstances, and don’t deserve being used as part of your derisive vocabulary.

Mike T.: “My problem with Libertarians (whichever style of grammar they use for the “l”) is I’ve never met one who doesn’t think that the Government and the Buisness World are two diametricly opposed forces, instead of two barely disseperate groups working in collusion to keep the status quo right where it wants to be.”

Well, expand your horizons.

Historically, libertarianism was a movement of the economic and social left, associated with wildcat unionism, opposition to mercantilism, and anti-imperialism, as well as abolitionism and radical feminism. Some (Benjamin Tucker’s circle) went so far as to describe themselves as “anti-capitalist” or “voluntary socialists.” For various reasons, a few of them good and most of them quite bad, libertarians drifted from their roots in the left into intellectual and political alliances with the Right during the 1930s-1950s onward. There are many of us making deliberate efforts to reverse this trend, for both theoretical and strategic reasons. (I happen to think that trying to pitch radical change to the existing cultural elite is a damned fool project. I also happen to think that anti-racism, feminism, wildcat unionism, populism, anti-authoritarianism, etc. are the right positions to hold, and essential parts of any sane politics.)

Hope this helps.

“That assault resulted in the repression the Bolsheviks then unleashed on the left opposition and anarchists in Russia, using the invasion as the basis for claiming they were under attack from White Russians and Imperialists and that all opposition to the Bolsheviks would be considered counter revolutionary.”

This is an important point, but this way of putting it lets the Bolsheviks off the hook too easily. The imperial adventures in Russia didn’t cause the Bolshevik Terror; Bolsheviks caused it. The imperialist support for the Whites only provided them with an excuse for baring their fangs as they’d been hoping to do for quite some time.

Of course, the imperial war in Russia was still unjust, on other, independent grounds, besides the evil excuse-making function that it served for Lenin, Trotsky, et al.