I don’t care how generously one interprets Aristotle, polis is Greek for state. A polis is not a society: it is a parasite upon society. **Poli-**tics is the study of the parasite and how to eradicate it, not the host and its general health. Discourse on the way we voluntarily generate society is economic/societal/cultural discourse, not political.
I’m certainly not going to defend marxism. I’m not sure what you mean by progressivism though.
Progressivism is a political and social term that refers to ideologies and movements favoring or advocating changes or reform, usually in a statist or egalitarian direction for economic policies (government management) and liberal direction for social policies (personal choice). Progressivism is often viewed in opposition to conservative ideologies.
In the United States, the term progressivism emerged in the late 19th century into the 20th century in reference to a more general response to the vast changes brought by industrialization: an alternative to both the traditional conservative response to social and economic issues and to the various more radical streams of socialism and anarchism which opposed them. Political parties, such as the Progressive Party, organized at the start of the 20th century, and progressivism made great strides under American presidents Theodore Roosevelt, William H. Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lyndon Baines Johnson.[1]
Despite being associated with left-wing politics, the term “progressive” has also been used by groups not particularly left-wing. The Progressive Democrats of Ireland have taken the name “progressivism” despite being considered right-wing. The European Progressive Democrats was a mainly heterogeneous political group in the European Union.
Well, I know that progressivism is, at least partially, a synonym for modern liberalism. But then classical liberals were also progressives that opposed the ancien regime, so the term is somewhat ambiguous IMO ?
For instance…I think that non-industrial societies are backward and that industrialization is progress. Am I a progressive ?
Lilburne, good find. Although, I would disagree with you that the culture war is problematic in regards to libertarianism. If libertarians are to fully explicate the nature of what they conceive to be a free society then part of this analysis centre around the debates between left libertarians and conservative libertarians. The fact of the matter is that there are very few people who advocate liberty with no concern about what the consequences of a stateless society would be. If it were a fact that the state were necessary to provide prosperity and that without a state society would be far worse off, libertarians might have a more difficult challenge in front of them. On a similar note, if it could be proven that without the state the Church and other authoritarian institutions would become far more prominent I daresay some libertarians might have to rethink their position. Likewise, if it could be said with quite a degree of confidence that the state is necessary for the preservation of religion, the family and culture some of the more conservative libertarians might become somewhat uncomfortable.
I eagerly await the day where up is down and white is black. I have a list of banks to rob or I mean…extract charity from.
as Aristotle said slavery is natural but let’s not take Aristotle at his word.
Politics is jimmy’s dad knows jimmy’s baseball coach, but Fred is a better baseball player, yet, doesn’t have the pull like jimmy (his dad) to get on the team. Politics were at play.
that other thread with LibertyPatriot was a long discussion on politics. being libertarian is a political stance, so is being conservative, a democrat, etc… each perspectives that individuals have in how they attempt to maintain society. Some people talk about how they would like society, others protest, some others join a political movement, and churches are political in how they attempt to form and impress upon their congregation not simply in the church but outside of the church in their relations with other people, etc…
politics is involved in economic/societal/culture.
my anthropology textbook provides a good definition (Cultural Anthropology; Haviland):
“Political organization is the means through which a society maintains social order and reduces social disorder. It assumes a variety of forms among the peoples of the world, but scholars have simplified this complex subject by identifying four basic kinds of political systems: bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states. The first two are uncentralized systems; the latter two are centralized.”
It’s a large subject. [note: nations are stateless societies and discusses them in the state section of the chapter. It notes how there are roughly 200 states in the world today and most did not exist before the end of WWtwo and “by contrast, probably about 5,000 nations exist in the world today. ‘What makes each a nation is that its people share a language, culture, territorial base, and political organization, and history.’ Today, states commonly have living within their boundaries people of more than one nation; for example, the Yanomami are but one of many nations within the state of Brazil (other Yanomami live within the state of Venezuela). Rarely do state and nation coincide, as they do, for example, in Iceland, Japan, Somalia, and Swaziland. By contrast, some 73% of the world’s states are multinational.”]
Read Adam’s heroic post. This isn’t a conflict between liberals and conservatives. Many libertarians, like myself, have a live and let live attitude. We don’t bring our social preferences to the table and declare them universal norms. The LLss do, under the tired old progressive guises of compassion, and social justice.
In a voluntary society, every actor is able to achieve social justice in the absence of aggression, by merely acting voluntarily to avoid relationships of conflict or duress. I tried to corner Kevin Carson on this and he wiggled out of giving a direct answer to it. How can someone be oppressed when they are in a voluntary relationship? Some LLs will even tell us that they are somewhat prescient, in that they have this concept of eudemonia, which informs them when others are behaving voluntarily, but incorrectly within their [sic] objective notion of flourishing.
You’re misinterpreting laissez-faire to be neglect.
Your conception of anti-statism is very narrow (liberal/conservative). I’d advise (in a non-condescending way) that you to do some more research on this topic. Some Hoppe is not enough and unfortunately, the deans of ancap are more inclined to be involved with LRC than the Mises Community. You’re even less likely to find radical anti-statism of the ancap variety via GMU.
Also, this is a thread about the influences on left-libertarianism, which is not the antithesis of conservative libertarianism, nor is it liberal libertarianism. It is as Adam pointed out, elements of statist ideology doing what they did with the neo-conservative and neo-liberal movements currently, and progressive movement in the past. Merging with an ascendant movement by trying to patch regressive ideas onto it.
There is nothing evolutionary about socialism in any of its forms. Collectivism, egalitarianism etc. These are all old ideas, going back to Nimrod and Babel.
LS, I think we’re sort of talking past one another here. I agree that many libertarians on both side of the “left-right” divide bring their social values to the table and declare them to be “good”. But that wasn’t really what I was talking about, I wasn’t implying any value judgements, rather, I was talking about value free analysis of what a stateless society might look like. For example, Carson might say that he values small, local firms on the grounds of justice, but that it just won’t happen. Or Long might say that he hates white males and wishes that in a stateless society there would be one single, homogenous race of anti-religious, cultural leftists, but there’s no way that’s going to happen.
To the extent that we can make a well supported claim that a stateless society will look one way or another, I think that libertarians have a duty, in the name of intellectual honesty, to emphasize that it will take such a form. If it turns out that Long is correct and that once the state disappears so will racism, authoritarianism, the family, bossism and all those nasty things then libertarians should take this criticism and decide how their stance towards libertarianism is given this. This is quite distinct from saying that he thinks a stateless society should be all these things, which is what I rightly believe you to be criticizing.
If you’d like to point me in the right direction, I’d be inclined to read a bit (not sure how soon I can get to it) but this isn’t really an area that interests me right now (go back five months and you can be sure that I’d say this is an area that really interests me). That said, I happen to disagree with your characterization of GMU. Horwitz, Boettke and Prychitko are all principled libertarians who would readily admit that they are, in a sense, “Rothbardians”. I’m certain that they’d be some of the first to admit that they’ve been hugely influenced by Rothbard and would consider him to be a wonderful individual.
Polis means both state, and society, like most ancient languages, there was no differentiation between the two in Attic Greek.
I have pointed this out many times as the planner conundrum. If we believe that value (and values) are subjective, then it is impossible to predict what form a free society would take. If it was possible to see the future of billions of agents acting independenly and voluntarily, then we could attribute prescience to ourselves, and go straight to a planned economy that mimics free market outcomes.
That is the opposite of Long and Carson’s position.
If it was accurate, you would have a point.
Hit me up when you are interested.
I don’t care. It’s just a fact of life, that people who are state subsidized, are going to be compromised to one degree or another. Some biases are very difficult to escape, and I don’t see any evidence that certain Austrians and Libertarians have escaped them. They talk one way, but walk another. So while they may have libertarian ideals, they may have shrines to Rothbard, they may say all the right things at conferences, if they are on the dole, then its hard to make a case for being radical.
This is bullshit, plain and simple. I reject racism, nationalism and traditionalism on the grounds that they are collectivist. They contradict individualism in both the methodological and normative sense of the term.
I have a feeling that you don’t understand Marxism very well - because LL’s are NOT marxists.
And this has nothing to do with left-libertarianism. In fact, LL’s tend to have analysis of this “progressivism” picked up from none other than Murray Rothbard, borrowed from Gabriel Kolko and others, in which “progressivism” is viewed as having a corporatist, statist veneer. In either case, it is simply ignorant to conflate the political “progressivism” of FDR and Wilson with a general rejection of cultural conservatism. They’re hardly the same thing.
Are you influenced by Proudhon?
Did I write that LLs were marxists?
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You’re engaging in a red herring - you were talking about the cultural position of many LL’s, such as an opposition to racism and traditionalism. That is not based on collectivism, it tends to be based on an individualist stance against those things.
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Ironically, due to the trappings of the 19th century, Proudhon actually held psuedo-racialist and nationalist views. But we don’t venerate him for his cultural view, we venerate him for his anarchism and his critique of the marx and the state-socialists.
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Proudhon was not a garden-variety “collectivist”: it’s hard to maintain such a claim about someone who promoted the concept of “the sovereignty of the individual”. His ideas became increasingly individualistic over time, and he was a central figure influencing what later came to be individualist anarchism. The genuine vulgar collectivist anarchists such as Murray Bookchin deny that he was an anarchist precisely because of his individualist “deviations”.
Given the context of the thread, you implied that they are.
Absolutely it does. LLs share similar culturally left values as progressives. I mean, that is the argument I heard over and over last year, how LLs are reaching out to disaffected leftists and trying to bring them into libertarianism, because leftists supposedly are closer to libertarianism than conservatives.
You should always ask me directly instead of assuming. I am not implying that LLs are marxists. They are influenced by marxists, as recently Long used an appeal to Rothbard with Kinsella to make that point, and Carson openly has claimed he is attempting an Austrian-Marxian synthesis.