Bill: If it’s “oppression”, then the voluntary arrangement fundamentally implies an injustice, a victimization, and, yes, an aggression …

“Hey, if I re-interpret your statements about oppressive social relationships according my definition of ‘oppression’ in terms of aggression, which you just explicitly rejected, then you end up with an inconsistent position.” Well, yes … yes, I guess you would.

Bill: If it’s okay to engage in directing social opprobrium at people engaged in voluntary behavior you find objectionable, why would it be wrong to impose a tax on them? …

Because “social opprobrium” is a voluntary process involving non-violent social relationships, without the use of legal sanction or physical force against your person or your property. Taxes, fines and jail obviously are not.

Social reputation, social tolerance and social approval are the products of other people’s opinions and choices; but while you own your possessions, and your body, you don’t own other people’s opinions of you. if they choose to cast opprobrium on you for non-violent but oppressive behavior, then they are within their rights on most any minimally libertarian theory.

Of course, it might be that in a particular instance they are acting wrongly, even if they are not acting aggressively — people can use social opprobrium to harass and to bully and to dominate and to exploit the vulnerable even though they are not violating anyone’s rights to person and property. Certainly anyone who advocates the particular “thick” conception of libertarianism that I am defending would agree with you there. But then in order for you to help yourself to the claim that there is something wrong with this kind of misdirected social opprobrium, you must accept the claim that people can act oppressively towards each other without acting aggressively. Which is precisely the claim you were trying to deny.

(My own view, on the contrary, allows for a fairly simple understanding of what’s going on: social opprobrium is not force; it is a social process which can be used either rightly or wrongly; but when social opprobrium is used abusively, oppressively, or in some other way wrongly, then the way to deal with that is to respond to it in kind — with solidarity and social activism of your own, but used rightly and supportively. The reason you shouldn’t use taxes, fines or jail is because physical force is only justified by defense of person and property, and what you’re combating here, while abusive, is not a violation of your rights to person or property.)

Of course I agree with you that left-libertarianism (of the sort defended in those essays) is not the only possible thick conception of libertarianism.(*) I think that it is the correct thick conception to adopt, and that the others generally are not, and I have my arguments for that conclusion, but I think that in order for the arguments to be properly understood, the underlying conceptual issue (about what having a “thick” conception does, or does not, mean) has to be brought out.

(* The first article I linked actually nods towards this at the end, and it has a longer “director’s cut” that discusses the issue in more depth; the second article is an explicit play on the point, in making use of some of Rothbard’s socially conservative writing in order to make a point on behalf of left-libertarianism. Some of the most notable advocates of thick conceptions of libertarianism in clude radical libertarian feminists, traditionalist paleolibertarians, and orthodox Objectivists, a strange set of bedfellows if ever there was one.)

Bill: That means that they view these voluntary choices of others as oppression.

That’s correct, the thick conception of libertarianism they (I) defend includes an explicit claim that voluntary social interactions can be oppressive without ceasing to be voluntary. I don’t see this as a problem for the view. I see it as the point of the view.

Bill: Unless they assume some massive amount of masochism on the part of those they’re claiming are oppressed, they’ve given themselves veto power over legitimacy of the voluntary interactions of those who don’t adopt similar attitudes …

I don’t know what kind of “veto power” you have in mind. If you think that a position against non-aggressive forms of oppression involves some tendency to individually disapprove of, or, say, to non-violently socially stigmatize, at least some behaviors, interactions or relationships which are admittedly voluntary (in the sense of being acted out through strictly non-aggressive means), then of course you are right about that. But is that “veto power” in any meaningful sense of the term? Certainly not in any meaning of the term that involves an exercise of aggressive power. Again, the point of the view, as stated by those who advance it, is to provide some considerations in favor of addressing non-violent social problems through non-violent social means. (Rather than, say, holding that there just are no non-violent social problems, by definition.) If, on the other hand, you think that calling X “oppressive” means assuming “veto power” over X in the sense of legitimating the use of political force to repress X, then, again, that is what the people in question (me included) explicitly deny, and have denied all along. (See for example this discussion of “the authoritarian theory of politics.”)

Given that we have explicitly called for the use of non-violent social activism and cultural change instead of any use of political force to address the oppressive-but-non-aggressive dynamics that we’ve discussed, any charge that what we’re proposing must ultimately logically lead to criminalizing those dynamics seems to be completely unfounded in what we’ve argued. Of course, you might hold that social stigma, cultural politics, etc. can all be problems even if they are not leading into political force — you might hold that the attitudes we take are, say, narrow-minded, or intolerant, or busybodying. And I don’t agree that they are, but you might have an argument for that. (Certainly I don’t think that “social stigma,” say, is something harmless when misused, even though it may be non-aggressive.) But then of course you too are advocating a thick conception of libertarianism — just one which connects libertarianism, say, with a very broad norm of social tolerance, and which exercises a great deal of skepticism towards any sort of social pressure or conscious non-violent activism, rather than with the sort of anti-oppression activism that I have tended to promote. And the argument is not going to be an argument about whether libertarianism should be conceived thinly (as a demand strictly independent of other social or individual norms) or thickly (as integrated with other, interlocking commitments) — it will just be an argument about what other commitments a thick conception of libertarianism ought to be integrated with.

Maybe that’s why I can’t get into thick libertarianism: it sounds like a totalitarian nightmare to me.

Yes, you got it, it’s just like that, except without the totalitarianism.

Getting criticized over the alleged social connotations of your word choice, in light of recent political history in America, is not “totalitarianism” by any conceivable stretch of the imagination. In real totalitarian states people are jailed or killed over the language that they use. Get a grip.

You may not like a particular practice, but there’s no need to use this kind of melodramatic language to describe it. Particularly not when the melodrama distorts the position that you actually intend to criticize. (There are no left libertarians who believe in government speech restrictions. If someone believes in that, they’re not a left libertarian, but rather something else.)

Mark,

The debate between “thick” and “thin” conceptions of libertarianism encompasses several interrelated but more specific debates, having to do with (1) correct application of the non-aggression principle in hard cases; or (2) libertarian strategy and the possibility of there being cultural, intellectual, or other causal preconditions for a free society to emerge, survive, or flourish; or (3) views about the likely effects of liberty, and whether freedom will tend to produce more of certain rare positive goods, or to undermine certain prevalent (but non-coercive) positive evils; or (4) whether the best logical grounds for libertarianism (whatever that may be) also justify some further set of voluntarily-adopted beliefs, principles, projects, practices, traditions, institutions, etc. If you’re interested, I’ve discussed (1), (2), and (4) at some more length in my remarks from the Molinari Society symposium on thickness, and (3) briefly towards the end of my remarks on Matt MacKenzie’s paper on libertarian theories of exploitation.

Because the debate involves a lot of smaller debates that are interrelated but logically distinct from each other, and because many people who consider their conception of libertarianism to be “thin” (e.g. Jan Narveson) often actually end up endorsing a thicker conception in at least one of these respects (the “thinness” that they have in mind in their self-identification usually just amounts to accepting fewer thick commitments in total than are accepted by most self-identified advocates of a “thick” conception), I don’t think there is any good single formula to separate the thick from the thin. The closest that you can come to would be something like this: if you believe that libertarians should (in some sense or another, yet to be discussed) concern themselves (in some sense or another, yet to be discussed) with stuff other than just the non-aggression principle, and ought (in some sense or another, yet to be discussed) try to non-aggressively promote stuff other than just consistent non-aggression as part of their libertarian program, then you’re advocating a thick conception of libertarianism. If not, then you’re promoting a thin conception.

For what it’s worth, the internecine battle you’re thinking of, between paleolibertarians and so-called “cosmopolitan” libertarians, is not really a battle between thick and thin libertarians. Both those who think (1) that voluntarily cultivating some form of parochial traditionalism is (in some sense) vital to libertarianism, and those who think (2) that voluntarily cultivating some form of anti-traditionalist “cosmopolitanism” is (in some sense) vital to libertarianism, are advancing a thick conception of libertarianism, and battling over which thick conception is the right conception. (There are also those, like me, who think (3) that the battle, such as it is, is largely founded on a confusion, and who advance quite different claims about the best social-intellectual context for liberty from either of the two warring parties. There are also those who think (4) that libertarians shouldn’t be feuding over this stuff at all, and should just push the non-aggression principle and nothing else, wherever they go, whether to rock-ribbed but non-violent white supremacists, or to cocktail parties by snooty but non-violent New York intellectuals, or to rabble-rousing but non-violent popular liberation movements, or to kooky but non-violent survivalist-conspiracy theory types, or whatever. Only those who advocate (4) are advancing a thin conception of libertarianism.)

Hope this helps.

Thanks for the mention, and for the kind words. I agree about the tone of that OC Weekly article. It’s kind of baffling, because the analysis is actually so much better than the analysis in most abusive-cop pieces, but the tone comes off as if it were written by a fugitive from a direct-to-video American Pie script.

As for self-described libertarians, what I’ve found is that they (we) are a pretty diverse lot. A lot are tools or creeps, and especially those “small government” types whose views are conventional enough to fit into the outer fringes of mainstream political discourse. But, while I don’t want much to do with those folks, radical libertarians tend to be a very different sort, and those that I get along with and try to learn from (e.g. Roderick Long, Kevin Carson, Jennifer McKitrick, Carol Moore, Anthony Gregory, Sheldon Richman, Brad Spangler ….) are generally maneuvering to out-Lef the establishment Left, in terms of exposing the class dynamics of the State and making a case for radically decentralist, grassroots approaches that achieve Leftist and feminist goals by ordinary people getting together amongst themselves, and bypassing or confronting the State, rather than collaborating with it or trying to seize control of it. Maybe that approach is the right approach, and maybe it’s the wrong approach; but in any case it’s a very different approach from the one that you’d be likely to see from the “small-government conservative” types, or at your local Libertarian Party, or in your average MeetUp for Chairman Ron’s Great Libertarian Electoral Revolution. And it’s an approach that more libertarians seem to be adopting lately; a tendency which I hope I might be able to encourage, in whatever small ways I can manage.

Anyway, that’s how I see it now. Does that help clarify, or does it muddy?

Ah, I see. Well, I applaud your endurance, if you managed to scroll through the whole thing. When I started the blog almost seven years ago, I was not yet an anarchist, although I was interested in and occasionally sympathetic to libertarian and anarchist ideas. So there certainly are some posts in the older parts of the blog that I would not be willing to stand by today. I now believe that Leftist goals can be attained entirely through the abolition of coercive laws and through free association, and in fact will be attained more fully and more reliably through those means; and also that, even if they could not be so achieved, they would not be worth achieving at the cost of violating even one innocent person’s individual liberty. So I hope that what you had in mind can be chalked up to changing views over the years rather than to inconsistency.

On the other hand, there are many more recent cases in which I expressed a desire for a given piece of legislation to pass or to fail to pass, but I don’t see that as necessarily inconsistent with anarchism. Some legislation violates the rights of peaceful people and some respects those rights; some legislation makes government extremely dangerous and some legislation — e.g. bills to repeal the dangerous legislation — helps curb or ameliorate the danger. What I would repudiate from my days as a state Leftist is not concern with legislation per se, but rather the particular pieces of statist coercion that I was willing to support or excuse. As a practical matter, I have become pretty thoroughly disenchanted with the prospects for any meaningful progress through legislation or electoral politics, but I think the issue at stake is one of strategy, not one of anarchist principle.

Anyway, thank you again for the kind words; I’m glad you enjoy the blog. If I’ve managed to be provoke some interesting thoughts then that’s as much as I’ve ever hoped for.

GT 2007-11-16: Urban homesteading, on how city governments force poor people into the rental economy against their will, and the people-power actions that can be employed to resist this form of government-backed exploitation.

GT 2007-11-25: International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, on the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, and the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence.

William H. Stoddard: Nonetheless, I’m not sure what other short word there is to use for people whose view of economics and labor history is generally compatible with the ideas of Karl Marx.

Well. “Marxist”?

If you need something a bit broader in application, you might try “Marxian,” or, more broadly still, “State Socialist.”