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

Economics Political Theory
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This post by Brainpolice best describes Left-Libertarians

http://anti-libertarian-libertarianism.blogspot.com.au/2011/08/capitalist-ideology-with-mask.html

‘They are anarcho-capitalists with a pink suit’

LL are like ancaps but with lots of hand waving, semantic distortion and appeals to social justice.
But the core philosphy does not differ much at all.

I disagree with all of bp’s political/economic theory, but his descriptive analysis of the various ideological strands of anarchism and libertarianism is very accurate.

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.500NE:

There is no doubt that at least in Argentina that the workers can run a factory once they have one to run. The real question is where did they get the factory?

That is a worthwhile question to ask. I think that there is an answer to the question, which we can discuss if you want. (*) And an interesting conversation to be had around it. But that question is not the question I was answering by pointing to that book. The question I was answering was Freedom4Me73986’s question, “So how does a ‘bossless’ factory work if there’s over 100 workers?” And if that’s intended to be a question about day-to-day operations, as it seems to be, then I think obviously one way to answer it is to take a look at some of the actually existing working factors that have over 100 workers and no boss. Even if there are other questions to answer about, say, the justice or the wisdom of the process that led to them getting the factory in the first place.

If you want to change the subject from that question to an interesting, but distinct question, I’m happy to talk about that too, but I hope you’ll allow that it’s fair for me to try to answer first the question that was originally put to me.

I find it ironic that the workers movement in the book you site is called ‘The Take’

I don’t know that this matters, particularly, but just for reference, I think you misunderstood the content on the page I was pointing to. The “workers movement” that coalesced from the reclaimed factories is not called “The Take.” The Take is a documentary film that Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis made about Argentina, which is mostly about the worker-run factories but also about some other things. The movement that the film and the book help to document is usually called autogestión (meaning roughly “self-management”) or more broadly as an aspect of autonomismo.

(* I think in the particular cases in Argentina that it is important to remember that occupied factories were not simply expropriated from a boss who was trying to run them. Rather, what happened is that the previous proprietors of the factories largely abandoned the factories, often without any notice to the employees and in fact leaving them in the lurch with a great deal of back pay still owed to them. Workers took over the abandoned factories in part as compensation for the money they were owed. Now perhaps this is just and perhaps it is not; my own view is that it depends a lot on the circumstances. Meanwhile, considered in the abstract, it is important to remember that the Argentine economy prior to the takeovers was hardly an example of a freed market; that in a freed market many of the restrictions and barriers to entry that forbid small startups and groups of workers from launching or keeping their own enterprises would be abolished, and so it might well be possible for groups of people to build factories of their own even though in the actually existing, heavily hampered, privileged-industrialist-dominated market of late 90s/early 2000s Argentina they were not able to except by means of occupation.)

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Questions for Charles:

  1. Do you believe in self-ownership?

  2. Do you believe in the NAP?

  3. Do you believe in voluntaryism?

  4. In your left-libertarian/socialist utopia, would I be allowed to employ workers to work for me for whatever wage I want them to work for as long as they voluntarily agree to it?

  5. In your left-libertarian/socialist utopia, would I be allowed to own as much property as I’m willing to buy and acquire non-aggressively?

  6. How is your flavor of socialism better then capitalism?

  7. Is left-libertarianism collectivist?

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.500NE:

Or system here in the U.S. is certainly free enough that a large groups can get together and do the co-op thing.

Well, I see that you are asserting this. But I do not see your argument for it. And my main response is simply to deny that the claim is true – political economy in the U.S. is not really free enough that you can get any kind of useful competitive test to tell you what might become of co-op business models in a truly freed market.

Now if you mean that the system in the U.S. “free enough” in the sense that there are not any laws which forbid co-ops from existing, then sure, that is true, but I hardly think that’s the only thing that you need to keep track of. Often the effects that government has on the economy have little to do with what it bans outright or what it mandates outright, but rather with what it subsidizes, what it taxes, and the ripple effects of the ways in which it reshapes certain key markets, e.g. for money, credit, land, insurance, etc. Actually-existing co-ops tend to face a lot of consistent practical problems that are related to a few key issues – well-entrenched, often subsidized competition from big incumbents; the difficulty of getting access to capital, either for initial capitalization or for later expansion, relative to their conventionally capitalist-owned competitors; the large scale and volume that are necessary to cover the initial costs of starting up and the fixed costs of staying in business. There’s a lot of stuff to talk about here, some of which we could dig into and some of which we could probably only get at in outline without some pretty serious digging into empirical research and number-crunching. But briefly what I’d want to say is that none of these common pain points is really innocent of, or independent of, government privileges or industrial policy. Governments have many policies which systematically favor large incumbents over small startups of any kind; which artificially juice credit to big businesses and artificially stabilize the operation of the kinds of financial markets that most favor corporate-owned over worker-owned businesses; which massively increase the fixed costs of starting or maintaining a business, in ways that most hurt small community-dependent operations like co-ops; etc.

There is of course a lot of fine-grained points to argue about here, and I’m mostly outlining my view rather than giving you the defense of it, but for the defense I would largely point you to the essays in, e.g., Markets Not Capitalism.

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Freedom4Me73986:

Left-libertarians are mostly socialists.

Maybe. Or maybe not. As I’ve said, I personally am happy enough to sign on for Tucker’s (explicitly pro-market, anti-state) understanding of “socialism.” Provided that in context it’s understood that that’s what I mean, or the conversation will easily turn to explaining that that’s what I mean. But I know a lot of left-libertarians and, anecdotally speaking, I know a number of left-libertarians (such as Kevin Carson) who agree with me on that; and a number of left-libertarians (such as Roderick Long, Tom Knapp, or I think also Sheldon Richman) who do not agree with me on that, and do not want to use the term – for reasons that I find understandable, even if I disagree with them. Beyond anecdotes, I really have no idea which group is in the numerical majority; I haven’t made any attempt at polling active left-libertarians about this (and I expect you haven’t either).

Charles even admitted to being … anti-capitalist/anti-boss/anti-property rights.

I “admitted,” or rather, happily agreed to, two of these things. Not to three of them. You may of course think that being anti-capitalist, anti-boss, and anti-property rights all naturally go along with each other as a matter of course. (That’s a common enough belief, both for people who are anti- and for people who are pro-.) But if you’re going to take a look at what I’ve admitted or agreed to, you should keep in mind that I don’t agree that they do.

There are kinds of anti-capitalism (take Marx’s–please!) which are of course anti-property rights (generally because they believe that if you have property rights you are always therefore naturally going to get bosses and concentrations of ownership in the hands of capitalists). But there have also been kinds of anti-capitalism, older and (I would argue) more radical than Marx’s which do not think that (see for example Proudhon, Tucker, Dyer Lum, Voltairine DeCleyre, or many of the other historical writers who appear in Markets Not Capitalism) – who argue, quite on the contrary, that bosses and corporate ownership persist largely because of systematic governmentalist assaults on free competition and on the property rights of workers. (So that the best way to get an economy without bossing and with diffuse rather than concentrated ownership is to get rid of all government barriers to competition and all government restrictions on poor people’s property rights.) You may of course disagree with this approach, but it is mine, and it pretty directly affects the issue of whether the positions on the left side of the forward slashes are really the same as the positions on the right side.

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Maybe. Or maybe not. As I’ve said, I personally am happy enough to sign on for Tucker’s (explicitly pro-market, anti-state) understanding of “socialism.” Provided that in context it’s understood that that’s what I mean, or the conversation will easily turn to explaining that that’s what I mean

The results of enforcing such a thing would lead to catastrophic conclusions. I don’t see what there is to be happy about, other than leftism for leftism sake.

These are all Ricardians and people working under LTV assumptions, they do no good to care about..

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But there have also been kinds of anti-capitalism, older and (I would argue) more radical than Marx’s which do not think that (see for example Proudhon, Tucker, Dyer Lum, Voltairine DeCleyre, or many of the other historical writers who appear in Markets Not Capitalism) – who argue, quite on the contrary, that bosses and corporate ownership persist largely because of systematic governmentalist assaults on free competition and on the property rights of workers.

Bullshit. Employer-employee relationships exist VOLUNTARILY. Rich and poor have always existed and will always exist b/c of the division of labor and the fact that some people are naturally smarter then others, something SOCIALISTS cant seem to wrap their heads around. So whats wrong w/ a boss hiring people who need work to work for him?

Also are u going to take a crack at the questions ive asked?

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  1. and 2. Yes and yes. See here. I happen to be a natural-rightser, and in fact one of a rather fanatical and absolutist kind. Roderick Long is also, for whatever that is worth. (There are left-libertarians who are not natural-rightsers, but of course there are also right-libertarians – David Friedman, for example – who are not. The issue is more or less orthogonal to the left-lib/right-lib divide.)

  2. I don’t know exactly what you mean by that. I wouldn’t call myself a “voluntaryist” as that term was used e.g. by Wendy McElroy or Carl Watner, and I wouldn’t call myself a “voluntaryist” as that term seems mostly to be used today within the movement. Not because I am in favor of involuntary social relationships, but rather because when I’ve encountered the term it usually seems to come along with a pretty hefty package of additional beliefs about ideal libertarian social and political strategy (for example a fairly “thin,” anything-that’s-peaceful specification of what social or cultural goals libertarians might care or might not care about advancing through non-coercive means). And while I’m happy to get as fire-breathing and radical as they are about defending the principle of consensuality in all social relationships, there is a lot in the package of additional beliefs that I am not necessarily interested in signing on for.

  3. Sure; given that everyone involved consents to the arrangement, in my view you should be “allowed” to do whatever you want without de jure restriction. However, I have some reasons for thinking that you might have more trouble than you expect to finding a market for your wares – workers may not be interested in buying the kind of arrangement that you are selling.

  4. Yes. Again, no de jure restrictions. However, I think that both natural and social factors would tend to produce some quite stringent de facto restrictions on the kinds of scale that you’re likely to be able to maintain without aggression, privilege, state subsidy, or insulation from competition.

  5. Well, that’s not really a question I can pot the answer to in a short forum post or even a long one. I could say that I think it both more efficiently satisfies consumer preferences and also that there are independent ethical reasons to favor it, but my reasons for that have to do with a lot of threads of argument about a number of related, but importantly distinct, topics. Anyway, if you want a broad overview of some of the reasons I have for taking the approach that I do, the Liberty, Equality, Solidarity essay that I linked above may help as a starting point. And so might Bits & Pieces on Free-Market Anti-Capitalism.

  6. Not as I understand it. I am an individualist Anarchist.

I do defend (and other left-wing market Anarchists also do defend) some economic or social arrangements that other libertarians have denounced as “collectivist” – for example, the occupation and reclamation of abandoned faciltiies by squatters and urban homesteaders; voluntary unionism; cooperatively-managed worker-owned shops; and consensual communal ownership of open commons, without the involvement or management of the state. But the reason that I defend these things is because I think the charges of “collectivism” are in fact false, and the way I defend them is generally by trying to show, if I can, how they are really quite compatible with a radical interpretation of individual sovereignty and equal liberty. Maybe I’m wrong about that, of course, but if so, it is in the way that anyone can be wrong about the downstream applications of their fundamental principles.

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Freedom4Me73986:

Bullshit. Employer-employee relationships exist VOLUNTARILY. Rich and poor have always existed and will always exist

Well, so now I know that you believe that. But I don’t know what your argument for it is.

In any case, I do think that, in the current economic landscape, there are a number of important political privileges granted to large corporate employers, and a number of impoverishing and restricting political burdens inflicted on working-class folks. Do you disagree with that claim? If so, why? If not, then we’ve got to consider what might change if the privileges and the burdens were removed.

And if I think that workers are often forced into depending on an employment relationship in order to make a living, largely as the downstream social result of that set of subsidizing privileges and impoverishing burdens, then that does imply that, ceteris paribus, were the privileges and the burdens to be abolished, then you’d tend, on the margin, to see fewer workers entering into employer-employee relationships. Maybe you disagree with this. But even if so, that is obviously not exactly the same thing as some kind of utopian belief that everybody is equally smart or equally stupid, or that nobody would ever be poor in a freed market.

The real question here is (1) what survival strategies poor people have available to them and which are foreclosed as a result of political pressure; (2) how much the “rich” would be able to find poor workers willing to work for them on conventional wage-labor terms, when fixed costs of living are much lower and when a much richer set of alternative livelihoods are available outside of the corporate economy; and (3) how often ordinary people’s flashes of insight or cleverness is frustrated by state-imposed barriers to entry, or how often rich people’s stupidities are protected from market consequences by politically protected markets, bailouts, and the suppression of competition.

b/c of the division of labor

O.K. But I don’t reject the division of labor, you know. What I think is that in freer markets labor would be divided along different lines from the way it is currently divided. (A co-op of course is a division of labor; the fact that the workers participate in management decisions hardly means that everybody in the shop is doing the same damned thing.)

Also are u going to take a crack at the questions ive asked?

I was in the midst of typing answers to them at apparently the same time as you were firing off this response. Patience, please.

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Autolykos:

Thank you for the kind welcome.

If I may, I’d like to present a hypothetical situation to you. Suppose that there’s a factory owned by a single individual. He then offers to pay some people from the surrounding area to use the machines in his factory to make things. Would you call the factory owner a “boss”?

I don’t know, from the description you gave me. Probably? But it depends on what you have in mind. I think it matters a lot how the pay and the conditions of labor are determined, and that it matters at least as much, probably more, how much the people being paid to work with the machines in the factory are dependent on keeping up that specific relationship with the owner to make their living, i.e., how much they are able to, and how much they actually do, have viable alternative sources of support.

So for example if people are dropping in to the factory without much of a binding obligation over time, are choosing it as just one among a broad range of options for their day-to-day livelihood, and take home some pay for their time or output while they are there, then sure, that sounds a lot more like some horizontal and really fairly casual trade or contract-labor relationships than like bosses and their employees. If they work mainly or only at the factory, over the long term and in an open-ended arrangement, but their “pay” for working their involves not just cash but for example gaining significant shares of ownership in or residual profits from the factory that they are working in then that is also hard to see as a simple boss-employee relationship, although for different reasons (in this case because the more the “employee” is employed in the factory, the more they become a partner rather than a hireling of the owner). Now if you are imagining that they will have a long-term, open-ended, binding arrangement with the owner, can be summoned to report more or less at the owner’s will, are mostly or exclusively dependent on keeping that particular job in order to make a living rather than having significant alternative sources of support, etc., then that is starting to sound more like a boss-employee relationship.

Of course all of this is going to be really highly dependent on a lot of specific details. It’s easy for something to be a causal contract labor arrangement in name while really being a pretty narrowly confined boss-employee relationship in fact; and it’s possible for things that are formally set out as employer-employee relationships to really functionally work out more like a partnership than like employment. In that kind of case I’m more interested in the way the relationship works out de facto than I am in the name that it is called by.

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Me:

I personally am happy enough to sign on for Tucker’s (explicitly pro-market, anti-state) understanding of “socialism.”

vive la insurrection:

The results of enforcing such a thing would lead to catastrophic conclusions. I don’t see what there is to be happy about, other than leftism for leftism sake.

What in the world are you talking about? Did you read the article (Tucker’s “State Socialism and Anarchism”) that I linked above as an explanation of what this specific understanding of the terms means? The whole point of “Tucker’s … understanding of ‘socialism,’” as Tucker makes quite clear in that essay, is that what he advocates is a form of social economy that doesn’t come from enforcing anything at all, but rather from the results completely free competition, when a particular set of powerful political restrictions are removed. He thinks that anti-capitalist ends will be achieved – if they are to be achieved at all – only through voluntary market means. That is the whole point of the exercise.

Now maybe you think that he is wrong about the overall tendency of market competition in the absence of government monopolies; maybe you think that, Tucker’s arguments about the Four Monopolies notwithstanding, competition would really result in arrangements that are just as dominated, or even more dominated, by, say, conventional corporate ownership and employment relations. But if so, then I still don’t see what “catastrophic conclusions” you have to cry about. Since Tucker had no plans (and I have no plans) to “enforce” anything on anyone at all, the outcome of the competition, then if we are wrong, would just be the kind of conventionally capitalistic society that you are hoping for. But if on the other hand we are right, and it turns out that mutualistic alternatives really are more competitive than conventional corporate ownership etc., then that seems like proof enough they aren’t going to lead to catastrophe after all.

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Alright! Now that we got answers from our new resident pedant…

Questions for Freedom4Me73986:

  1. Do you believe in living in the woods?

  2. Do you believe you should do it?

  3. Do you believe you should already have done it a long time ago?

  4. In your woods utopia, would I be allowed to not live there while you don’t use computers to get on the Internet where the government controls you to tell us how living in the woods is so great?

  5. In your woods utopia, would I be allowed to be as far away from it as possible and not receive any contact from you whatsoever?

  6. How is your flavor of woods better than civilization?

  7. Is woodsianism orplitaryist?

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Alright! Now that we got answers from our new resident pedant…

Questions for Freedom4Me73986:

  1. Do you believe in living in the woods?

  2. Do you believe you should do it?

  3. Do you believe you should already have done it a long time ago?

  4. In your woods utopia, would I be allowed to not live there while you don’t use computers to get on the Internet where the government controls you to tell us how living in the woods is so great?

  5. In your woods utopia, would I be allowed to be as far away from it as possible and not receive any contact from you whatsoever?

  6. How is your flavor of woods better than civilization?

  7. Is woodsianism orplitaryist?

Take a guess.

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THAYR TAYKN’WAY OWR FRAIDOMZ!

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Yes, I assumed you would either answer my questions with a question, or post a video you’ve already posted multiple times.

Could you please answer the questions yourself?

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Serpentis-Lucis wrote the following post at Sun, Jun 3 2012 12:07 AM:

@ Cortes

It has been shown that there are indeed differences between people who identify as “left” and who identify as “right”. When I say difference I don’t just mean on the mundane level of policy prescriptions; the differences are on a moral level. There are also differences in the way they think. Which is why people on the “right” and “left” disagree with each other so intensely, or rather the average person on the “left” and “right” disagree so intensely. (When it comes to politicians they, as I’m sure you’re aware, don’t care much about anything other than stealing as much as possible while in office. Staying in office is the other thing they care about.)

I agree with you in that it seems to be a waste of time arguing over if “Right” is closer to freedom or if “Left” means closer to freedom. The issue of where to draw the line between “Right” and “Left” is problematic as well. There are differences nonetheless.

This appears circular to me. So people identify as "right and left’ because there are differences between the ‘right and the left’ therefore people who identify with the right and left disagree with one another…

Ok…

But what proves that there is a right and left?

I still am not convinced there is anything to prove the legitimacy of ‘left’ and ‘right’ as a sound conceptual basis in the first place.

It is a distraction; we talk all day about ‘right’ and ‘left’ and forget the real continuum: State intervention versus its absence.

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You are doing sleight of hand mixing words people can wrap their head around with vacant left wing advocacy / hollow sloganing and political sloganing

  • The occupancy / use theory and no interest theory are economically stupid arguments that would be catastrophic for civilization. These truths are evident

  • I said “enforce” for a reason. The old adage that “the market doesn’t give a shit what you use to compete in it” rings true - there is no reason to bring up any theoretical structure for a business arangment in regards to a market unless you are being subvervisive and intellectualizing where you ought not. It’s silly, so why bring it up?

  • It is correct I can not advocate interest, rent, etc - but it does exist in the current world and within the realm of real expectations and accepted custom. That is good- at least it shows it is real, and is sustaining what is being sustained now - it isn’t intellectual masturbation that can rabble rouse catastrophic conclusions for “the good cause”. However, just as I can’t advocate beyond aesthetic, you just as well can not advocate against. In this case I still hold the advantage, what I talk about is “real”, where you would make up an abstract fantasy.

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@ Cortes

Differences justify different labels. If A and B have different values then why not apply different labels to them? I assume you think of “Right” and “Left” as more than just labels, at least that is the only logical explanation I can think of, otherwise you are arguing against applying labels when there are clearly differences. Just because apples and oranges are both a kind of fruit doesn’t mean that you can simply say fruit when talking about apples and oranges, doing so would be detrimental to clarity. I see “Right” and “Left” as merely labels where “Right” means the person holds certain value priorites and “Left” hold different value priorities.