MBH:

Seriously? Do I have to read everything you write to make sound judgments about your ideas?

No, but I don’t see how this rhetorical question is related to the sentence you’re responding to. My point isn’t that you have to read anything in particular; it’s that if you pre-announce that you’re no longer interested in listening to arguments (“You can argue all day … I don’t buy it”) in this specific conversation, while expecting me to accept conclusions that run directly counter to what I think those arguments establish, then (1) that’s really kind of rude; and (2) I don’t know what to do about that, except to tell you that you’re not likely to get what you want by through this kind of kerygmatic political economy.

Have you ever worked inside a corporation?

Yes, I have.

My point is that legal power is no object on that level. It may as well not be there at all. You can argue that the corporation would never have become so powerful if not for legal power, and I’d agree. But it is what it is.

If you were interested in listening to arguments, I would point out that most of the Fortune 500 depends on ongoing grants of political privilege, not just the long-ago privileges that allowed them to primitively accumulate. The entire “too big to fail” financial industry are an obvious case in point; so are the RIAA, MPAA and the patent monopolists are a case in point; so are the military-petrochemical complex. There’s a reason these dudes allocate so much for their lobbying budget: it’s because they know where their bread has been and is still being buttered.

MBH:

Anarcho-corporatism holds no more or less meaning than free-market anti-capitalism. It’s a way of elucidating seemingly contradictory concepts.

O.K., dude, but what are the concepts? Specifically, what’s the concept you’re trying to elucidate by including the “anarcho-”? I mean, I understand how Roberts, Alito, et al. are “corporatists.” But In what specific respect are nearly half of the United States Supreme Court “anarcho”-anything?

MBH:

But I’m questioning whether or not the corporation needs the government anymore to maintain subsidies, favoritism, copyrights and patents.

How exactly do you envision GE, say, maintaining its patent portfolio against infringement if there is no government to issue or enforce legal patent monopolies? Let’s have some details.

Of course, they could hire the Pinkertons or whoever to go around and bash the heads of infringers. But hiring on your own muscle for that would really be quite expensive, particularly when you consider that they would have no presumption of social support for their position (since it’s no longer protected by the cultural prestige of the State), and since the people whose heads they want to bash are also going to have money and are going to want to be defended against the head-bashing. If GE has to resort to overtly criminal behavior and to pay in full for the enforcement of their own criminal monopoly, then I think you’d find that we’d be in a much better position than we are now. (For the same reasons that Mafia extortion rackets are not a very profitable business model in any but a few markets — most of them markets in which overt criminality is artificially selected for and rewarded, due to the effects of State prohibitions.)

MBH:

You’re approaching this as if certain positions either derive from a particular axiom or not.

Really? Where?

As far as I can tell, you’re the only one who’s mentioned axioms here. What I have said is that boycotts-for-equality or whatever are not uniquely or distinctly anarcho-syndicalist. And that if you tried to use the term “anarcho-syndicalist” in that way, you’d be encompassing a lot of people who certainly don’t understand themselves as anarcho-syndicalist, who are not understood as anarcho-syndicalists by anybody except you personally, and who don’t accept some of the core beliefs (N.B.: core; not axiomatic; we’re talking family relations here) that tend to mark out anarcho-syndicalists from the rest of political movements. For example, Anarchism. Or Syndicalism.

I’m not making the case that Olbermann is secretly coming from an anarcho-syndicalist axiom. I’m making the case that he takes positions that distinctly overlap with those that can be derived from the anarcho-syndicalist axiom.

I don’t think there is an “anarcho-syndicalist axiom.” But in any case, this only underlines my point about conservatism and breathing oxygen. Of course, if you pick some single isolated belief at random without paying any attention to how the person’s beliefs are related to each other, you can find all kinds of “overlaps,” often including “overlaps” that pull in directly opposite directions from one another. Olbermann believes in an active government, and so do militaristic conservatives; so Olbermann is apparently also a militaristic conservative to some percentage, while being an anarcho-syndicalist to some percentage. It seems like his percentage of militaristic conservatism ought to be inversely proportional to his percentage of anarcho-syndicalism, but as specified there’s no reason so far why this should be so — certainly, you can believe in boycotts-for-equality really strongly while believing no less strongly in very active government. Meanwhile, Anarcho-syndicalists are for organizing labor, and so are fascists! So perhaps fascists are 10% Anarcho-syndicalist. Progressives are against religious law, and so are classical liberals, and so are Stalinists! So perhaps liberals and Stalinists are 25% progressive Islamists believe in political revolution, and so do radical feminists, and so do Anarcho-syndicalists! In fact, it’s very important to all of them. So maybe Anarcho-syndicalists are 50% Islamist. Or 50% radical feminist. Or… well.

MBH:

Again, you’re assuming that you either are or aren’t an anarchist

Am I? I thought what I was doing was giving you arguments that the spectrum you were trying to draw was not useful, at least not the way you were trying to draw it. (One such argument was the claim that it allowed you to draw “overlaps” which have nothing in particular to do with the real general tendencies of somebody’s political thought; another argument was that it tended to identify people as “anarcho-syndicalist” who would definitely reject that description, and who seem to fall way outside the boundaries of the concept. I don’t see that you’ve responded to these arguments, except to call their conclusion an assumption and to say that you don’t like it.

I think that’s a muddled framing. And I think that if you told radical leftists who had never wrestled with anarchy that they were, say, 25-30% anarchist that they would not be that surprised.

Nowadays? Some might, because Anarchism is increasingly popular on the radical Left, and these days even Trotskyists cite Anarchist literature in their anticapitalist broadsides, while Maoists show up to hang out with Anarchists in towns with a small radical scene.

But this was certainly not the case prior to about 1999; if you asked radical Leftists about their percentage of Anarchism prior to Seattle, what you’d get as a response would most likely be an index either of their doctrinaire Marxist-Leninism (in which case they’d recite a standard Leninist line about the infantile Left) or else of their attitudes toward the New Left (with some liking it and others detesting it). But in any case, I wasn’t talking about the weird socio-ideological dynamics of the “radical Left” social scene — of which Olbermann was not a part, and of which Dr. King and Ella Baker were not parts, either. (Although Baker could perhaps be listed as a “radical Leftist” in an extended, ideological sense.) If you asked Dr. King whether he was “25% Anarchist,” I am almost certain that he would reject the description right away. His writing on law and civil disobedience is specifically shaped by the desire to avoid conclusions that would lead to “anarchy” (quote-unquote). While there is certainly something for anarchists (of any adjective) to get from his writing on legal authority, to simply ignore the basic organizing principles of his thought, and to pretend as if it had no relationship to his conception of a just state (as opposed to anarchic freedom, as he understood it), is to simply ignore Dr. King’s political thought, in favor of tossing around, higgeldy-piggeldy, conclusions that you happen to more or less agree with, without any attention to why those conclusions were concluded, or how far they are or are not allowed to go.

MBH:

It also, necessarily, means total divorce from the conventional System. I don’t even know what that means.

Well, I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean, either, so I suppose that if you don’t know what you mean by it, and I don’t know what you mean by it, it may not have been a good choice of terms for describing the debate. Maybe we should try talking about real, identifiable institutions, or at least noticeable forms of institutions (e.g., “coercive,” “dominating,” “formalized,” whatever it is you have in mind) rather than a nebulous “System”?

I agree that the System has to rejected. But how can alternative institutions ever be entirely uprooted from the System? If they could, would that even be desirable? You’re being way too Dr. Strangelove for me dude.

You’re the one who introduced this “System” stuff out of the blue sky; how would I know whether or not alternative institutions ever can be uprooted from it? It “the System” means something like “society,” then I never said anything about getting out of that, and I don’t think Anarchism has anything to do with that. (Rather, Anarchists specifically distinguish society from the State, in order to explain that they want to reform the one from within, while — in part by — abolishing the other.) If it means something like “the entire institutional structure of society,” then I’ll just recur to my answer about society broadly; there are lots of institutions that Anarchism has no particular beef with, and lots that it suggests we bulk up. If it means something like “systems of domination” or “systems of coercion,” then of course alternative institutions can be uprooted from that — or at least, if they can’t, you haven’t given me any reasons yet to believe that they can’t. (Certainly your analogy to Descartes doesn’t help: Descartes’ problem, if he has one, has to do with his attempt to doubt human sociality. But Anarchism is all about human sociality; it’s simply proposing another, better form for the socializing. What it’s against is (1) coercion specifically, and (2) domination and hierarchy more broadly; but you haven’t yet offered any reasons to think that its critique of coercion or domination is presupposing either coercion or domination, in the way that Descartes’ act of raising doubts supposedly presupposes the social context that he’s trying to raise doubts about.)

MBH:

He was, I think, a right-wing anarchist. That’s what I’m calling “popular” anarchy.

Why? It’s not especially popular.

In any case, Rothbard’s immediatism is distinct from his pro-capitalism or other “right-wing” allegiances. Many anarcho-capitalists are not immediatists — cf. Randy Barnett, for example. If anything, I’d wager that practical immediatism (that is, calling for revolution-right-now, rather than policy reforms) is far more common on the left end of anarchism than on the right end of it; the Rothbardians are rather unusual, amongst anarcho-capitalists, in this regard.

You can argue all day that corporate power would suffocate without the state. I don’t buy it.

Well, I do believe that (or more precisely I believe that things would tend strongly in that direction, with us needing to push forward with conscious activism to get the rest of the way). But if you’re not going to listen to arguments, I don’t know what to do about it. I’m also not sure what all this has to do with Rothbard. My reasons for believing that about corporate power aren’t really particularly Rothbardian, much as I may appreciate a couple of the arguments he made, especially during his New Left phase.

MBH:

No. But I never said that.

Well, O.K., so what did you say? Just what is it about Olbermann’s efforts that does give off this anarcho-syndicalist signal? The fact that he sticks up for Mexicans? A lot of people stick up for Mexicans, not just anarcho-syndicalists. (As much as I might like it if all my friends in the immigration freedom movement were anarcho-syndicalists — certainly it would make strategy meetings a lot easier — generally they are not.)

Is it the combination of the roughly egalitarian end with the use of economic action that’s supposed to make it secretly anarcho-syndicalist? If so, that would seem to include virtually the entire history of the labor movement, a lot of the civil rights movement, the Irish Land League (the folks who coined the term “boycott”), and a lot of other folks who would be very surprised to hear that they are secretly anarchists. Of course, again, you could redefine “anarcho-syndicalist” to mean something other than “revolutionary anti-statism in which a free society is conceived without government or bosses, in which economic production is primarily organized through the structure of democratic industrial unions.” But if you’re doing that, it might help to say what you do understand it to mean. If Olbermann counts as “distinctly anarcho-syndicalist” does the UFW also? (In which case, why even keep the “anarcho” around? Why not just say “syndicalist”?) How about the Montgomery Bus Boycott or the Irish land campaigns? (In which case, why even call it “syndicalism”? Why not just “Leftism,” which doesn’t refer to the specific ideological tendencies that “anarcho-” and “syndicalism” do?)

I’m pointing to how Olbermann exhibits substantially higher degrees of anarchism than O’Reilly.

Based on what? The fact that you find his politics more agreeable? I mean, look, I like Dr. King’s politics more than I like Olbermann’s, and Ella Baker’s more than I like Dr. King’s. But I wouldn’t pretend that either of the two is an Anarchist. They have other, different positions, which happen to agree with Anarchism on some important particulars, and to disagree with Anarchism on others.

It is probably true that back when the number of soi-disant libertarians was much smaller than it is now, those who defended radical views and spoke with more heated rhetoric were probably a larger percentage of the total number of people calling themselves “libertarian” at the time, and probably also exercised more influence over the movement than they do now. Of course, the difference is not because the absolute numbers of hotheaded radicals are now lower (they are almost certainly much higher), or because hotheaded radicals have fewer outlets than they used to (there are a lot more, read by a lot more people), but rather because a lot of very mildly heterodox conservatives and corporate liberals (Bill Maher, Glenn Reynolds, whatever), who wouldn’t have imagined calling themselves “libertarians” in the 1960s-1970s, are willing to call themselves that now.

MBH:

So endorsing the boycott of an economy that discriminates against Mexicans is to anarcho-syndicalism as breathing is to conservatism?

Yes, just about.

Do you really, seriously think that the idea of using boycotts to protest absurd or unjust laws is a uniquely anarcho-syndicalist idea? If so, where in the world did you get such a notion? I wish that every boycotter in the world were secretly broadcasting on a “distinctly anarcho-syndicalist wavelength,” but I think you can really only make that claim by making the meaning of “anarcho-syndicalist” so broad as to render it utterly meaningless.

MBH:

Was that not Rothbard’s position?

1. Rothbard was many things, but he was not a typical Anarchist. If that was his position, it wouldn’t make it “the popular kind” of anarchy.

2. Rothbard was very fond of this quote by William Lloyd Garrison:

Urge immediate abolition as earnestly as we may, it will, alas! be gradual abolition in the end. We have never said that slavery would be overthrown by a single blow; that it ought to be, we shall always contend.

Note the difference between the ideal propounded and the outcome expected; note also that for Garrison, “immediate abolition” certainly didn’t just mean anything that would result in the end of slavery immediately (you could do that by killing all the slaves, say, or forcing them all against their will onto ships bound for Liberia, both of which he opposed). What Garrison specifically wished for was universal conversion and the immediate emancipation of all slaves everywhere by repentant ex-slavers. I suppose that, similarly, the ideal that Rothbard has in mind (without expecting it) is that all rulers everywhere would immediately lay down their arms due to a universal conversion to radical libertarianism and spontaneous universal adoption of the Libertarian Legal Code within an advanced industrial society. Of course, what he actually worked for would be quite different in practice, but not because his practical aim was “just-smash-the-state-right-now-and-who-cares-what-succeeds-it,” either. He had a fairly specific idea of what should succeed it, and how he was trying to bring that about. The point of the whole exercise, rather (at least, the point Rothbard took) was that you can’t successfully bring the expected outcome about if you lose sight of the righteous ideal. He was mainly concerned — and in this, he was genuinely in line with Garrison — with keeping the discussion on the basis of conscience, solidarity, and the transformation of individual relationships, rather than letting it sink into utilitarian calculation or political excuse-making for continuing to violate innocent people’s rights.

See for example Why Be Libertarian?. (N.B.: he mentions the button-pushing test in this essay; for what it’s worth, you may notice that the test he proposes is a button “for instantaneous abolition of unjust invasions of liberty,” not a button for just abolishing government invasions and leaving the rest just as-is.)