Dear Chris,
Thanks very much for the inaugural copy of ALLiance. I really appreciate your sending me a paper copy. There was a discussion on Yahoo’s LP Radicals a while back about the merits of e-newsletters versus paper sent through the post office. One member disdained the idea of paper as an ecological waste, saying everybody but a few “luddites” was on the internet anyway. But a few others defended a multi-media approach to communciation, using what I found to be quite well founded and reasoned arguments. Anyway, I often have difficulties with my “ancient” Dell L800CXE computer, Windows ME operating system, and my clunky old cathode ray tube screen. Sometimes with this primitive setup, and a dial-up connection out in the boondocks, downloading and printing PDF’s isn’t always an easy option, and reading a document of any length on screen is a chore I just don’t care to take on. So, I very much appreciate your offering a nice, comfortable hardcopy through the gold old fashioned post office for us “technologically challenged” libertarians.
I’m flattered by your invitation to write something for ALLiance, but as you might have seen from my very occasional and sporadic posts to several libertarian Yahoo forums, I’m hesitant to identify myself as a “left” libertarian. I’ve tried to explain why on Left Libertarian 2, though I’m not sure if anyone found my reasons coherent. I’m comfortable with the compound, “liberal libertarian”. In a letter to the late Chris Tame, I wrote of a “larger libertarianism” I envisioned. I like Phillip Jacobson’s, Three Voluntary Economies.
My focus is much more on personal freedom and the individual’s pursuit of his or her own happiness than patriotism, the Constitution, and free market economics. I believe that the rights to life, liberty and property are essential tools to the securing of these supremely valued life goals. I suppose many left-libertarians would see me as a “right” libertarian because of my basically “old school” propertarianism, but I definitely do not see myself as such.
I’ve been reading debates between minarchists and anarchists for decades, beginning in the late 80’s in The (Libertarian) Connection. Erwin S. “Filthy Pierre” Strauss, the current and long-time publisher, and Jim Stumm, publisher of the long-running Living Free, were the two main minarchists arguing against the anarchists, who included Bob Shea, Brick Pillow, John Zube, and Jackpine Savage. While for most of my libertarianism I’ve been pretty much a “default” minarchist, and upon reflection, may lean that way today, on a more intellectual level I’ve taken a more or less neutral stance toward these two main libertarian forums. I find that BOTH have ethical, pragmatic AND DEFINITIONAL problems.
I can’t remember where I read it, but an anarchist once wrote to a minarchist, that as a means of defining libertarianism, he found the “maximum freedom principle” much too vague. Well, I find the central concept of anarchism vague—”the state”. The best I’ve been able to come up with is that “the state” is nothing more than a mental construct shared by billions of human beings involving premises and behaviors among and between “rulers” and “ruled”. It seems to me like anarchists have reified this complex process of human behavior and ideas in much the same way that patriots and nationalists have reified “their country” and “America”. (By the way, I am neither a nationalist nor a patriot.) Maybe it isn’t so much that I favor or accept “the state” as a necessary evil, but am uncomfortable on an intellectual level with a facile acceptance of a grossly under-defined and subjective concept as an almost concrete, objective and independently existing entity. An enemy that is at best only semi-real, seems like a poor foundation for any political theory, including anarchism. Likewise, opposition to “statism”, including, presumably, radical minarchism. (Statism and statist, were once often used by libertarian minarchists to describe a political philosophy they adamently rejected, but now it seems to be used, dare I say co-opted, by anarchists as a subtle smear-word for non-anarchism/ists, including libertarians.)
The debate between minarchists and anarchists, at its core, often resembles an elaborate exercise in semantical gymnastics. Some anarchists advocate, or at least condone, “anarchist governments”. (I’m not the only one who’s confused by this concept.) Kieth Preston, in his Liberty and Populism: Building an Effective Resistance Movement in North America, writes of “anarchist” “city-states”, “anarcho-papis[m]“, and “anarcho-monarchis[m]“! In the same essay he writes that most anarchists favor the “town meeting” approach of “direct democracy”. To decide what? Whose fate???! It makes me nervous to think it might ever be mine.
Is the system or systems, method or methods, advocated by anarchists truly any better, any more supportive of individual freedom, than libertarian minarchy, or are there patterns of, and tendencies toward, oppression, injustice, AND AGGRESSION, that are camouflaged by abstruse, academic, anarchist theories, and bold and heroic slogans? Is the anarchist “intellectual class” or “vanguard” Keith Preston calls for in the aforementioned work, our wise and learned advisor, or latter-day Napoleans, leading us trusting lumpen-proletariat, anarcho-foot-soldiers to our brave new Animal Farm?
Now don’t get me wrong. There are plenty of valid doubts one may have about minarchism. I’ve had them myself, and continue to. But whether anarchy is BETTER, or even SUBSTANTIALLY DIFFERENT, remains an open question I’ll take my sweet time in answering. Stefan Molyneux’s accusation that people who don’t embrace anarchism “cling” to “the state” is in many cases completely off the mark. Thinking libertarians may have very well-considered reasons for being cautious and non-committal about the anarchy-minarchy question. They may find his entire paradigm pat and simplistic. One part of it that I’ve found glaringly dubious for years is the perception of humans as some kind of “homo economicus”, who calmly and efficiently calculate their cost-benefit ratios, focused quite rationally and single-mindedly on their “self-interest”. Millions, nay billions, of this planet’s masses are mystical, emotional and often suicidally tribal. Molyneux’s neat and tidy analysis of how “dispute resolution organizations” will function suggests to me a very poor sense of mass psycho-sociology. How many potential libertarians turn deaf ears to this and similar “lessons” in how “anarchy will work”.
At this point, somewhat shame-faced, I must admit I have little better to offer. At 50 years of age, I’m seriously re-assessing how much time I want to contribute to this so-called freedom struggle, or to argue with other libertarians over what ideologies, paradigms, programs or strategies I am willing to accept and “get behind”. Two years ago, after 19 years of membership, I quit the Libertarian Party. Electoral politics are ethically messy and often quite boring, with little gain for the time and effort invested. The Libertarian Reform Caucus has made this even more so. And, as I’ve just explained, I have intellectual reservations about anarchism.
I seem to be asking different questions and focusing on different problems than left-libertarian anarchists. What IS aggression? What are proper responses to aggression? What intellectual systems, theories, etc., in response to or dealing with aggression are optimal? Anarchism? Minarchism? One or more syntheses of these? Something as yet unthought of?
How much should I RESIST aggression, and if I resist it, in what ways? By speaking out against it? What would be the consequences of such verbal protest? Ridicule? Threats, by government, and “good” citizens? Do I have the courage to speak out? To civilly disobey? Do I have the support of other libertarians? How much should I, and CAN I, EVADE aggression? How much should I submit to it? If there are no perfect freedom paradigms—theories, philosophies, ethico-political systems—with their consequent strategies, how much can I comfortably compromise, and “get behind” “the least of all possible evils”?
For me, these are deep and serious questions. I’m sorry Chris, your anarchist allies haven’t quite answered them for me. It seems I must solve these maddening puzzles alone.
If you’re not too put off with this rather contrary letter, I would like to continue to receive your journal. Maybe there are things I can learn from it still. We could see.
Best of luck to you and your comrades in your personal freedom struggles,
James N. Dawson
