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Libertarianism Elisabeth Wilson 6 Libertarianism elisabeth wilson ideas in the void These notes on Libertarianism are concerned with a style Just as women who have joined the Movement have often of politics. The term ‘Libertarianism’ is vague, and although begun by seeing through the myths about themselves, some people on the Left talk of a ‘Libertarian Movement’ I suddenly and vividly understanding how the man-made think others would say that there is no movement as such, strait-jacket of Womanhood distorts them, so students saw but simply groups of people engaged in various kinds of through the repudiated the great con of bourgeois ‘culture.’ political practice, though sharing certain assumptions. I am An appreciation of High Art and European Culture is not attempting a historical analysis of why this particular dependent on a privileged and ritualised kind of educational kind of politics came into being at a particular time; in fact experience, and it too fits you into a certain mould. To that has been done, by Henri Lefebvre and others. Nor am recognise this comes as a shock since the private, quasi- I attempting a definition of Libertarianism; that would be mystical appreciation of music, painting, etc. is purveyed impossible, because it is nebulous. I am simply suggesting as being a unique personal experience (just as is Love, certain aspects of a highly ideological politics whose Orgasm, Motherhood, for women) but is actually little more ideology is undefined. Libertarians do have a political than the trappings of a bourgeois destiny. approach to which they are very strongly committed; in Art for most of us is a passive spectacle. Nor do we failing to spell it out ( and perhaps this would be impossible relate only to Art as spectators. In the Sixties several French because of its contradictions) they have been of disservice writers (the Situationists) explored a Marx who led them to to the movements and groups they have influenced. One a vision of the whole society as spectacle. ‘The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among of these movements is Women’s Liberation. people mediated by images’, writes Guy Debord. ‘The spectacle is the moment when the commodity has attained the total occupation of social life.’ (2) His book explores Cultural Origins the concept of Alienation, and the massified, manipulated individual he describes ends in a nightmare world with total Libertarianism has literary antecedents. From the time of loss of identity. These ideas have been an important the Romantic Movement in the early nineteenth century a influence on Libertarians, who relate therefore quite significant cultural figure is that of the Artist in Revolt. centrally to Marx, albeit to the early Marx, who, some There is Byron the damned genius, who, interestingly, believe, was not a very good Marxist. repudiated poetry and died fighting for a free Greece; there Spectacle and Violence are the ‘Bohemian’ artists of mid-nineteenth century Paris, who rejected bourgeois morality and hypocrisy; and there If you perceive society as a spectacle, a mirror of illusion, are the Surrealists and Dadaists of the Twenties who cul­ the problem becomes how to smash through it and break tivated the irrational and the Absurd, and some of whom out of your own alienation. (Debord, for all his exhaustive perceived the act of suicide as the logical conclusion of and rather literary analyses, makes no real, practical sugges­ their art. Today these themes reappear; in the form of tions.) Nihilism, the necessity to reject everything, the political action. whole of experience being tainted and poisoned by consum­ erism and competitiveness becomes part of the upsurge towards a total revolutionary position. To espouse violence The descent of the Libertarians is commonly traced from becomes inevitable. The only valid response to the violence nineteenth-century Anarcho-Syndicalists, Narodniks, etc. that has been done us is to destroy the nightmare. I believe it is of more interest to locate them within the wider cultural history of previous epochs, at which I have Violence erupted spontaneously in the streets of Paris, in very briefly and inadequately hinted. Libertarians owe other capitals and on campuses throughout Western Europe more to Nietszhe and Sorel than to Kropotkin or Bakunin and the United States. This brought students, and workers, and in as much as they have turned to the writings of into direct confrontation with the State. Libertarians have Proudhon and Emma Goldman (for example) this was after tended towards direct opposition to the State because they repudiating Marxism-Leninism, and not because they are in espouse direct action; and direct action and spontaneism a line of direct descent. are bound to meet with violence. Lefebvre locates the birth of the ‘new politics’ in the Student movement of the late sixties. The reason why students should have rebelled are not hard to understand. In this opposition to the State, Libertarians are drawn As he say: ‘Students appear privileged, but they fact pract­ towards the ultimately most marginal groups in society, ical and intellectual difficulties; lack of employment prisoners and outcasts, those that most strongly feel the weight of oppression from the full force of the State come opportunities and acute awareness of a static social practice against them. In the end this too can lead to a glorification which offers no perspective or possibilities.... They derive of violence and illegalism and ultimately to a death trip. their sense of a marginal existence from actual social Victor Serge, the son of Russian revolutionaries and himself conditions which they feel justified in criticising. (1) He an anarchist, describes how this happened to a group he also points to the failures and abdication of the established was associated with in Paris before the first World War. ‘A Marxist (Stalinist) parties. Out of this gulf between organised Stalinism and individual felt oppression arose the positive wave of violence and despair began to grow ... it self-organisation of groups around their specific oppression. was like a collective suicide ... they had to find either money Students, along with the unemployed, women, racial to get away from it all, or else a speedy death against the minorities, were the only ones who could in fact organise whole of society. Out of solidarity they rushed into this in this way. They were free to do so, because the squalid doomed struggle, with their revolvers and their ‘traditional left’ hadn’t bothered about them. trigger-happy arguments.’ (3) 7 Lite-style Politics syndrome. Christianity has always stressed the importance of ‘being saved’, and today this is as much with us as ever, If the whole of life is a spectacle and a commodity, the in the secularised forms of psycho-therapy, the counter­ political challenge also must be total. This becomes the culture, individual self-fulfilment. Vulgarised it appeals to politics of everyday life, life-style politics. us on the tube (‘It was accountancy for me until I discovered To reject ‘straight’ employment, to reject equally the Smirnoff). couple with its implications of repressed sexuality and romantic, possessive ‘love’, to seek personal transformation Life-styles and the Subjective through drugs, or (in the case of gay men) drag, to squat, to There is a similarity here to Jean-Paul Sartre’s philosophy of steal - all these become acts of violent and justified revolt, Existentialism, which stresses the importance of human challenging bourgeois notions of property and propriety. choice, the importance to the individual of recognising his They strike at the deepest fear, the fear of chaos. To real needs and desires and acting upon them with ‘authen­ challenge so radically the norms of society is to bring ticity’, the alternative being to act in ‘bad faith’ of which seething to its surface the deepest petit-bourgeois anguish bourgeois conventions are usually an example. Existential­ and hysteria, because of the terrible insecurities of a com­ ism, too, combines a quasi-Marxist socialism with rampant petitive society. ‘What would happen if nobody worked?’.. idealism. In both cases the essential act is an act of Will ‘They might come and squat in my house...’ ‘The one thing To choose freedom is an act of will; to smash through the I can’t stand is these men dressed like women.’ mirror of illusion is an act of will. To reject your bourgeois privileges, that is, to choose to live on Social Security is Note that these challenges to privacy, to ownership and somehow supposed of itself to create an actual, concrete, to sexual identity have touched the same chord of petit- objective, economic position of power or solidarity with bourgeois hostility in members of the traditional left. They others. This it cannot do, and Libertarians often end up themselves label such challenges petit-bourgeois (just to simply creating tiny ghettoes of the new life-style. They confuse the issue); but in supporting working-class con­ know they are very different from Hippies and the a-political servatism the Left supports what capitalism does to the counter-culture; but in the eyes of working class neighbours working class to divide and stifle it. Naturally working class they are often indistinguishable. Further, the subjective people cling to a ‘respectability’ which differentiates them feeling of power that comes from the act of throwing off from the really poor, the outcasts; and they cling to the the personal yoke of convention is unmatched by any family which has been one of their sources of strength; but material power or basis of co-operation (and in one sense respectability makes docile workers and the family instils the working-class neighbours are right - they correctly respectability. see economic and material similarities between Libertarians and Hippies, nor merely similarities of style).
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