What's your beef with Roderick Long and "left-libertarianism"?

[John_James]

@Charles Johnson

I think bossing and conventional employment are both (1) likely to be unstable, and economically unsustainable, in a fully freed market; and (2) kind of shitty ways to treat your fellow human beings.

So you mean like…If someone wants to work for me and be my employee, I shouldn’t hire them? Because employing them would be a shitty thing to do?

“You think that being pro-free market, and simultaneously against- private ownership of capital goods, [. . .] isn’t paradoxical?”

I don’t know, man.

I find that hard to believe. You clearly seem to have spent a great deal of time thinking about this.

I’m not against what you seem to think I’m against, so I don’t feel like I’m under much of an obligation to figure out whether that combination is paradoxical or not.

What do I think you are against? What are you against? I’m not clear on either of these points.

As for “obligation”, I don’t see how your obligated to anything in this matter. You don’t have to talk to me. You don’t have to post here. You made a statement, and I simply asked you a clarifying question. Of course you have no “obligation” to answer it. I mean if you can’t or won’t, I guess that’s fine. I just see no reason for it. It’s a very simple question.

@Charles Johnson

But part of the reason that “free-market anti-capitalism” sounds paradoxical is because most people (both people who consider themselves anti-capitalists, and people who consider themselves pro-) tend to operate on a tacit or explicit assumption that, if an economic system allows for private investment in capital goods or individual ownership of capital goods, then to the extent it allows for that, it is naturally going to drive towards an equilibrium characterized by gigantic concentrations of capital ownership, mediated through top-down corporations on the one hand; and large masses of people with little or no ownership of the capital needed to sustain their own livelihoods, on the other.

Oh. Silly me. I thought people thought it was paradoxical because according to the dictionary definitions of all those words (free-market, anti, capitalism, paradoxical), it is paradoxical.

My mistake.

“So…what’s wrong with using a term people in general better understand”

I don’t know exactly who are the “people in general” that you have in mind. And I don’t know what “term” you think would be obviously better for their understanding. Maybe you could give me some examples of each.

People who use dictionaries to determine the most commonly understood meanings of words.

Words that dictionaries define as meaning what you’re trying to say.

Certainly, when I leave out the bit about “leftism” or about “markets” or about “anti-capitalism” and I just call myself a “libertarian” or an “Anarchist” (both of which I often do), most people that I talk to don’t really have much of an immediate idea what that means, either.

I’m sure they have a better idea than if you called yourself a “white black man woman” and then proceeded to try and explain how that’s not at all paradoxical.

@Charles Johnson

But it seems to me that the best way to deal with a situation like this is to be self-conscious about the fact that my positions are by and large positions that I’ve come to outside of most people’s horizons of political understanding. And any terms that I choose to describe them are necessarily terms that are going to need some significant further explanation, clarification, and engaging with the initial misunderstandings that people have. If anything, there is some positive use in choosing terms that provoke people to question their assumptions, and to realize that they can’t understand quite what’s going on just by pulling out the set of thoroughly conventional political categories that they have in their cookie-cutter drawer.

So why not just make up your own term for “what you are”? Wouldn’t that achieve the goal you’re shooting for much more effectively and guarantee no one will have any preconceived notions?

I can help. We can call you…a…orplitaryist.

From now on, when anyone asks how you define your political philosophy, you just tell them you’re an orplitaryist. I guarantee no one will have any idea what you’re talking about, and will not be confident that they know anything about what you do or what you believe. (Other than perhaps a lot of unconformist things, which, I’m pretty confident we can assume is the case anyway when you spout paradoxical nonsense like “free-market anti-capitalist”.)

At most, they’ll assume you’re either a little crazy, or a little ridiculous, which, again, can easily be the case with terms you already use, and may very well be true anyway. But I’m confident that with this new term, it will be much less likely. I recommend you try it and see how it goes. I for one would be much more likely to ask someone what an “orplitaryist” is than for them to explain how they came to the conclusion that “free-market anti-capitalist” isn’t paradoxical, and why they felt the need to use such a term. In fact, if anyone ever told me they were a “free-market anti-capitalist”, or a “libertarian socialist” or something of that sort, I wouldn’t be confused to a point of asking them for clarification, I would feel like I had all the information about them I needed…and go talk to someone else.

I think you should try this new angle and see how you like it.

Charles Johnson. The orplitaryist.