... Dan, While I enjoy reading aesthetics, and certainly don't have any objection to people articulating and defending the aesthetic criteria they intend to

... If people have property, they're welcome to build fences. Around their own property. They have no business building fences around *other people's*

... I suppose they should. Let me know when you hit on a complicated issue. Immigration is not a complicated issue. It's a simple issue. If you believe in

Lorraine: OK, dismissing the notions of left and right, which is probably a good idea anyway, the implication seems to be that egalitarianism implies authoritarianism. Actually, I'm agnostic as to whether there's a tradeoff between freedom and equality

Well, O.K., but that wasn't the issue that I was raising. The claim that the individualists were advancing wasn't that egalitarianism implies authoritarianism. Rather, they denied that equality required communistic or collectivistic economic arrangements.

Their usual suggestion was that equal liberty would tend to produce equal access to resources, especially with the destruction of the government land monopoly and the construction of mutual aid networks and a Mutual Bank. They typically held that insisting on communistic and collectivistic economic formulae, with little or no space for individual labor-based property in land and capital, were unnecessary to achieve equality, and undesirable because they would tend towards conformity, rigidity, or outright tyranny.

Square brackets to one side, I also never did describe this argument as an argument between "left libertarians" and "libertarian socialists." I described it as an argument between "most individualist anarchists" (by which I was referring to folks like Benjamin Tucker, the early Victor Yarros, the early Voltairine de Cleyre, et al.) and "communists or collectivists" (by which I was referring to Johann Most, Tucker's frequent sparring partner, as well as to Kropotkin, Bakunin, et al.). It wasn't a debate by left-libs against lib-socs; it was a debate amongst two different kinds of libertarian socialists about just what socialism entailed.

Lorraine: I am very curious if you know of any who come to LL from anagorist or agoraphobic positions such as mine, and if so, what do they claim to have gained or lost in the process?

I don't know about positions specifically like yours, although I do have some friends who came to this left-lib thing after engagements with libertarian communism and, before that, Marxism, if that helps. You can see a lot of different stories, many but not all of them from LLs, at my Reader Question post from a month ago.

But I mentioned it specifically in order to offer myself as an example -- I never was an anarcho-capitalist, and I came to left-libertarianism by way of social anarchism and the counter-globalization movement, which in turn I had come to through radical feminism and the anti-authoritarian Left. (This would have been around 1999-2001; it was hard to go into activista circles without hearing something about Anarchism.)

For what it's worth, although I've certainly changed my mind about some things, I don't think that I've left behind any of the basic commitments that I had back then; just come to a different understanding of how those commitments can and should be brought about. If anything much has changed, it's been that, in thinking through my Anarchism, I've progressively shed more and more of my old attachments to attempts at working through reformist politics, and become more convinced of the need to concentrate on grassroots organizing and direct action. If I've gained anything from my reorientation towards market anarchist economics and individualist notions about social action, it's that it's helped me learn something about how direct action alternatives to statist political economy might work, and about what it means for revolution to really well up from below, through radical experimentation rather than from a formula or vanguard. Of course, whether I've lost something in the process is probably better for someone other than me to judge.

Brainpolice: The term "centrist" has the following possible connotations for me: (1) Fusionism ... (2) Pluralism ... (3) Opportunism ... When the matter is put in these terms, I definitely think that the Alliance of the Libertarian Left tends to be "centrist"

You could use the same three categories in order to argue that Stormfront or "White Nationalism" "tend to be 'centrist.'" It seems to me that if this understanding of centrism would encompass both White Nationalism and also a bunch of crazy-ass anarchist radicals hollering about revolution through black market direct action, it's probably not a good definition of "centrism."

Lorraine: The so-called left-libertarians also position themselves between what they call right-libertarians and libertarian socialists, implying the latter are left of the left, i.e. extremists.

We do?

Comes as a surprise to me. I sure can't recall doing so. Historically, most individualist anarchists have not criticized communists or collectivists for being too far towards a leftist extreme. They've criticized them for views about economic and social organization which the individualists criticized (rightly or wrongly) as too rigid or too authoritarian -- that is, as being too far to the right, not too far to the left.

Lorraine: What conservatives, ancaps, LL's and other right-of-center tendencies seem to have in common is a doctrinaire belief that all power is traceable to the public sector, which is of course the single source of all the world's problems

Really? Do we?

Again, this comes as a surprise to me.

Incidentally, I think it's also inaccurate as a description of what conservatives believe. Burkean and Kirkean conservatives have always believed it very important to recognize that power is traceable to origins in culture and civil society, beyond, deeper than, or in some sense "prior to" political government. (They usually point to ranks of order in families and churches, possibly also in education, and to traditional social rites of deference.) The difference is that conservatives are perfectly happy with power, so they think that that's what makes "pre-political" society awesome.

Brainpolice: 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.

Do I need to mention that some of us are actually deviants from standard American social anarchism, some of whom have substantive objections to the currently popular understandings of libertarian socialism?

Not all of us are former anarcho-capitalists, or came to the left-libertarian conversation from out of political L/libertarianism.

Edward: My main reason for faulting Gandhi is that even if he was not a proponent of the INC's controlled industrialization he still should be blamed for it because he should have easily foreseen that a more controlled economy would result form the British withdrawal.

India under the INC government certainly had a controlled economy. But I deny that it had a more controlled economy. The Indian economy was plenty controlled under British colonialism. (You may, for example, remember a minor tiff over a government salt monopoly.) Although it was, of course, controlled in different directions, and for different interests.

In any case, given that Gandhi's satyagraha campaigns were consistently directed against government control and, when they touched on economic issues, for economic freedom from colonial restrictions, I do not see how he should be blamed for the actions of third parties, which he often opposed. You can be aware of likely bad consequences of ending an existing form of government violence, but still be for ending the existing violence, without approving of, or being to blame for, those consequences. The blame lies with the third parties actually inflicting them.

scineram:

He wants him in jail for incitement of treason and violent revolution

This is obviously a ridiculous stretch which goes beyond any conceivable immediate threat into the pure criminalization of political opinion. (Much like those who, not so long ago, wanted government to imprison anyone who advocated the overthrow of the United States government, just for advocating it.) But even if this were true, how does that make things better? There’s nothing morally wrong with “treason” against nonconsensual governments. (In fact it is not treason at all; you can only betray something that had a binding claim on your loyalty to begin with. Governments do not.) Or with revolution. Proposing to imprison a man for either is just as tyrannical as proposing to imprison him for any other form of political speech.

scineram:

To my knowledge Hitler never killed anybody, just spoke.

Dude, seriously?

You do understand the difference between orders and incitement, don’t you? And, in turn, between incitement and advocacy? And, while we’re here, between the literal use of language and the use of metaphor?

MBH: Screaming ‘fire’ in a crowded theater is just using words too.’

Of course you are quoting the ruling in Schenck v. US (1919), another appalling ruling that took an exceptional case of very minor and limited import (in which incitement, based on knowing deception, can become criminal by inflicting an imminent, threat to the life and limb of reasonable people acting on the deceptive claim) and then strips out all of those limiting factors and wildly extends the principle by way of an idiotic analogy between physical danger to individual people, and ideological “danger” to the legitimation of Woodrow Wilson’s war policies. (Holmes was upholding the tyrannical Espionage Act of 1917, and defending the government’s decision to lock Charles Schenck in a cage for half a year, as punishment for printing pamphlets against the draft and advocating that men refuse to fight in World War I.)

This is not an encouraging precedent. And your application of it here is quite as ridiculously authoritarian.

MBH:

What should be said about arational language-games?

As an Anarchist, I do not consider objections to government taxation to be “arational.” In fact I am quite happy to call such objections “benign,” except that that’s too weak a term of praise.

I’m sorry, refresh me again on what’s “irresponsible” about calling for revolution against government taxation?

Or how, generally, objecting to government income taxes actually — how? — supports the “default setting,” i.e. the political-economic status quo?

(I also meant to note that the “First they came for the Communists” version is particularly relevant for those who are happy to look the other way when police violence is directed against dirty-hippy trouble-makers like the Anarchists at Red & Black — because they are sure that being Respectable Citizens means that the police are on their side. So, now I’ll note it.)

Kevin,

Great piece, but, for reference, the Niemoeller quote doesn’t begin with “First they came for the Jews.” There are a lot of versions circulating, but the one that Niemoeller accepted when asked in an interview (years later) begins “First they came for the Communists.” (The order being Communists, trade unionists, Jews, and then me.)

Besides historical accuracy (because they did first come for the Communists), his point was that the Nazis had started by attacking the people he was the most unsympathetic to (Niemoeller was an evangelical minister and had originally supported the Nazis because of his anti-Communism), but that his refusal to stand up for the human rights of his political enemies, when they were isolated and targeted by the Nazis, created the precedents that eventually led to the mass round-ups and massacres against the Jews, and eventually also to Niemoeller himself ended up in Dachau (for his protests against the Reich Church.)

Cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came... for discussion of the history of the text.