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Ideas

Libertarian Left Free-market anti-, the unknown ideal

By Sheldon Richman

RON PAUL’S 2008 presidential cam- working class and not just union mem- doubt that Third World sweatshops paign introduced many people to the bers, and interested in worker auton- would be the “best alternative” in the word “libertarian.” Since Paul is a omy, not government patronage.” absence of government manipulation. Republican and Republicans, like liber- These passages—the first by inde- Left-libertarians tend to eschew elec- tarians, use the rhetoric of free markets pendent scholar , the toral , having little confidence in and private enterprise, people naturally second by Auburn University philoso- strategies that work through the govern- assume that libertarians are some kind phy professor Roderick Long—read as ment. They prefer to develop alternative of quirky offshoot of the American right though they come not from libertarians institutions and methods of working wing. To be sure, some libertarian posi- but from radical leftists, even Marxists. around the state. The Alliance of the Lib- tions fit uneasily with the mainstream That conclusion would be only half ertarian Left encourages the formation conservatism—complete drug decrimi- wrong: these words were written by pro- of local activist and mutual-aid organiza- nalization, legal same-sex marriage, and free-market left-libertarians. (The pre- tions, while its website promotes kin- the critique of the national-security state ferred term for their economic ideal is dred groups and posts articles elaborat- alienate many on the right from libertar- “freed market,” coined by William ing its philosophy. The new Center for a ianism. Gillis.) (C4SS) encourages But the dominant strain of libertarian- These authors—and a growing group left-libertarians to bring their analysis of ism still seems at home on that side of of colleagues—see themselves as both current events to the general public the political spectrum. Paeans to prop- libertarians and leftists. They are stan- through op-eds. erty and free enterprise—the dard libertarians in that they believe in These laissez-faire left-libertarians mainstream libertarian conviction that the moral legitimacy of private owner- are not to be confused with other vari- the American capitalist system, despite ship and free exchange and oppose all eties of left-wing libertarians, such as government intervention, fundamen- government interference in personal or Hillel Steiner, who tally embodies those values—appear to and economic affairs—a groundless, each in his own way objects to individu- justify that conclusion. pernicious dichotomy. Yet they are left- alistic appropriation of unowned natural But then one runs across passages ists in that they share traditional left- resources and the economic inequality like this: “Capitalism, arising as a new wing concerns, about exploitation and that freed markets can produce. The class society directly from the old class inequality for example, that are largely left-libertarians under consideration society of the Middle Ages, was founded ignored, if not dismissed, by other liber- here have been called “market-oriented on an act of robbery as massive as the tarians. Left-libertarians favor worker left-libertarians” or “market anarchists,” earlier feudal conquest of the land. It has solidarity vis-à-vis bosses, support poor though not everyone in this camp is an been sustained to the present by contin- people’s on government or anarchist. ual state intervention to protect its abandoned property, and prefer that There are historical grounds for plac- system of privilege without which its corporate privileges be repealed before ing pro-market on the survival is unimaginable.” And this: the regulatory restrictions on how those left. In the first half of the 19th century, “build worker solidarity. On the one privileges may be exercised. They see the laissez-faire liberal economist Fred- hand, this means formal organisation, Walmart as a symbol of corporate eric Bastiat sat on the left side of the including unionization—but I’m not favoritism—supported by highway sub- French National Assembly with other talking about the prevailing model of sidies and eminent domain—view the radical opponents of the ancien régime, ‘business unions’ … but real unions, the fictive personhood of the limited-liabil- including a variety of socialists. The old-fashioned kind, committed to the ity corporation with suspicion, and right side was reserved for reactionary

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defenders of absolute monarchy and understood libertarianism’s left-wing Hess wrote, “On the far right, law and plutocracy. For a long time “left” signi- roots. order means the law of the ruler and the fied radical, even revolutionary, opposi- In his 1965 classic and sweeping order that serves the interest of that tion to political authority, fired by hope essay “Left and Right: The Prospects for ruler, usually the orderliness of drone and optimism, while “right” signified ,” Rothbard identified “liberal- workers, submissive students, elders sympathy for a status quo of privilege or ism”—what is today called libertarian- either totally cowed into loyalty or a return to an authoritarian order. These ism—with the left as “the party of hope, totally indoctrinated and trained into terms applied even in the United States of , of liberty, of the Industrial that loyalty,” while the left “has been the well into the 20th century and only , of progress, of humanity.” side of politics and economics that began to change during the New Deal, The other great to emerge after opposes the concentration of power and which prompted regrettable alliances of the French revolution “was conser- wealth and, instead, advocates and convenience that carried over into the vatism, the party of reaction, the party works toward the distribution of power era and beyond. that longed to restore the hierarchy, sta- into the maximum number of hands.” At the risk of oversimplifying, there tism, theocracy, serfdom, and class (1854-1939) was the are two wellsprings of modern pro- exploitation of the Old Order.” editor of Liberty, the leading publica- market left-libertarianism: the theory of When the arose in the 1960s tion of American individualist anar- political economy formulated by Murray to oppose the , the military- chism. As a Mutualist, Tucker rigorously N. Rothbard and the philosophy known industrial complex, and bureaucratic embraced free markets and voluntary as “Mutualism” associated with the pro- centralization, Rothbard easily made exchange void of all government privi- market anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proud- common cause with it. “The Left has lege and regulation. Indeed, he called hon—who sat with Bastiat on the left changed greatly, and it is incumbent himself a “consistent man,” side of the assembly while arguing with upon everyone interested in ideology to a reference to the economic philosophy him incessantly about economic understand the change… . [T]he change of the English free-traders Richard theory—and the American individualist marks a striking and splendid infusion Cobden and John Bright. Tucker dis- anarchist Benjamin R. Tucker. of libertarianism into the ranks of the dained defenders of the American status quo who, while favoring free competi- tion among workers for jobs, supported “LEFT” SIGNIFIED RADICAL OPPOSITION TO POLITICAL AUTHORITY, FIRED BY capitalist suppression of competition among employers through government’s HOPE AND OPTIMISM, WHILE “RIGHT” SIGNIFIED SYMPATHY FOR A STATUS QUO “four monopolies”: land, the tariff, OF PRIVILEGE OR A RETURN TO AN AUTHORITARIAN ORDER. patents, and money. “What causes the inequitable distri- bution of wealth?” Tucker asked in 1892. Rothbard (1926-1995) was the leading Left,” he wrote in “Liberty and the New “It is not competition, but monopoly, theorist of radical Lockean libertarian- Left.” His left-radicalism was clear in his that deprives labor of its product. ... ism combined with Austrian economics, interest in and partici- Destroy the banking monopoly, estab- which demonstrates that free markets patory , pro-peasant land lish in finance, and down will produce widespread prosperity, social reform in the feudal Third World, “black go interest on money through the benef- cooperation, and economic coordina- power,” and worker “homesteading” of icent influence of competition. Capital tion without monopoly, depression, or American corporations whose profits will be set free, business will flourish, inflation—evils whose roots are to be came mainly from government con- new enterprises will start, labor will be found in government intervention. Roth- tracts. in demand, and gradually the wages of bard, who called himself an “anarcho- But with the fading of New Left, Roth- labor will rise to a level with its prod- capitalist,” first saw himself as a man of bard deemphasized these positions and uct.” the “Old Right,” the loose collection of moved strategically toward right-wing The Rothbardians and Mutualists opponents of the New Deal and Ameri- paleoconservatism. His left-libertarian have some disagreements over land can Empire epitomized by Sen. Robert colleague, the former Goldwater ownership and theories of value, but Taft, journalist John T. Flynn, and more speechwriter Karl Hess (1923-1994), their intellectual cross-pollination has radically, . Yet Rothbard kept the torch burning. In Dear America brought the groups closer philosophi-

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Ideas

cally. What unites them, and distin- tion (for and by railroads, for example), ated Tucker’s Liberty, and the identifica- guishes them from other market liber- voting restrictions, tariffs, patents, and tion of worker exploitation harked back tarians, is their embrace of traditional control of money and banking. at least to (1787- left-wing concerns, including the conse- In other words, the twilight of feudal- 1869), a free-market radical who was quences of plutocratic corporate power ism and the dawn of capitalism did not one of the first to apply the term “capi- for workers and other vulnerable find everyone poised at the starting line talist” disparagingly to the beneficiaries groups. But left-libertarians differ from as equals—far from it. As the pro- of government favors bestowed on cap- other leftists in identifying the culprit as market sociologist Franz Oppenheimer, ital at the expense of labor. In the 19th the historical partnership between gov- who developed the conquest theory of and early 20th centuries, “” did ernment and business—whether called the state, wrote in his book The State,it not exclusively mean collective or gov- the corporate state, state capitalism, or was not superior talent, ambition, thrift, ernment ownership of the means or pro- just plain capitalism—and in seeing the or even luck that separated the prop- duction but was an umbrella term for solution in radical laissez faire, the total erty-holding minority from the property- anyone who believed labor was cheated separation of economy and state. less proletarian majority—but legal out of its natural product under histori- cal capitalism. Tucker sometimes called himself a THE TWILIGHT OF FEUDALISM AND THE DAWN OF CAPITALISM DID NOT FIND socialist, but he denounced Marx as the EVERYONE POISED AT THE STARTING LINE AS EQUALS—FAR FROM IT. representative of “the principle of authority which we live to combat.” He thought Proudhon the superior theorist Thus behind the political-economic plunder, to borrow Bastiat’s famous and the real champion of freedom. philosophy is a view of history that sep- phrase. “Marx would nationalize the productive arates left-libertarians from both ordi- Here is something Marx got right. and distributive forces; Proudhon would nary leftists and ordinary libertarians. Indeed, Kevin Carson seconds Marx’s individualize and associate them.” The common varieties of both philoso- “eloquent passage”: “these new freed- The term capitalism certainly sug- phies agree that essentially free markets men became sellers of themselves only gests that capital is to be privileged over reigned in from the time of the after they had been robbed of all their labor. As left-libertarian author Gary , though they eval- own means of production, and of all the Chartier of La Sierra University writes, uate the outcome very differently. But guarantees afforded by the old feudal “[I]t makes sense for [left-libertarians] left-libertarians are revisionists, insist- arrangements. And the history of this, to name what they oppose ‘capitalism.’ ing that the era of near laissez faire is a their expropriation, is written in the Doing so … ensures that advocates of myth. Rather than a radical freeing of annals of mankind in letters of blood freedom aren’t confused with people economic affairs, England saw the and fire.” who use market rhetoric to prop up an ruling elite rig the social system on This system of privilege and exploita- unjust status quo, and expresses soli- behalf of propertied class interests. tion has had long-distorting effects that darity between defenders of freed mar- (Class analysis originated with French continue to afflict most people to this kets and workers—as well as ordinary free-market economists predating day, while benefiting the ruling elite; people around the world who use ‘capi- Marx.) Carson calls it “the subsidy of history.” talism’ as a short-hand label for the Through enclosure, peasants were This is not to deny that living standards world-system that constrains their free- dispossessed of land they and their kin have generally risen in market-oriented dom and stunts their lives.” had worked for generations and were mixed economies but rather to point out In contrast to nonleft-libertarians, forcibly turned into rent-paying tenants that living standards for average work- who seem uninterested in, if not hostile or wage-earners in the new factories ers would be even higher—not to men- to, labor concerns per se, left-libertari- with their rights to organize and even to tion less debt-based—and wealth dis- ans naturally sympathize with workers’ move restricted by laws of settlement, parities less pronounced in a freed efforts to improve their conditions. poor laws, combination laws, and more. market. (Bastiat, like Tucker, supported worker In the American colonies and early The “free-market anti-capitalism” of associations.) However, there is little republic, the system was similarly left-libertarianism is no contradiction, affinity for government-certified bureau- rigged through land grants and specula- nor is it a recent development. It perme- cratic unions, which represent little

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more than a corporatist suppression of In a freed market left-libertarians securities. As in all wars, government the pre-New Deal spontaneous and self- expect to see less wage employment and gained power and well-connected busi- directed labor/mutual-aid movement, more worker-owned enterprises, co-ops, nessmen gained taxpayer-financed for- with its “unauthorized” sympathy partnerships, and single proprietorships. tunes and hence unfair advantage in the strikes and boycotts. Before the New The low-cost desktop revolution, Inter- allegedly of the Gilded Age. Deal Wagner Act, big business leaders net, and inexpensive machine tools make “War is the health of the state,” leftist like GE’s Gerard Swope had long sup- this more feasible than ever. There would intellectual Randolph Bourne wrote. ported labor legislation for this reason. be no socialization of costs through Civil war too. Moreover, left-libertarians tend to transportation subsidies to favor nation- These conflicting historical views are harbor a bias against wage employment wide over regional and local commerce. well illustrated in the writings of the pro- and the often authoritarian corporate A spirit of independence can be expected capitalist novelist (1905-1982) hierarchy to which it is subject. Workers to prompt a move toward these alterna- and Roy A. Childs Jr. (1949-1992), a lib- today are handicapped by an array of tives for the simple reason that employ- ertarian writer-editor with definite leftist regulations, taxes, intellectual-property ment to some extent entails subjecting leanings. In the 1960s Rand wrote an laws, and business subsidies that on net oneself to someone else’s arbitrary will essay with the self-explanatory title impede entry to potential alternative and the chance of abrupt dismissal. “America’s Persecuted Minority: Big employers and self-employment. As Because of the competition from self- Business,” which Childs answered with well, periodic economic crises set off by employment, what wage employment “Big Business and the Rise of American government borrowing and Federal remained would most likely take place in Statism.” “To a large degree it has been Reserve management of money and less-hierarchical, more-humane firms and remains big businessmen who are banking threaten workers with unem- that, lacking political favors, could not the fountainheads of American statism,” ployment, putting them further at the socialize diseconomies of scale as large Childs wrote. mercy of bosses. corporations do today. One way to view the separation of left-libertarians from other market liber- tarians is this: the others look at the IN A FREED MARKET LEFT-LIBERTARIANS EXPECT TO SEE LESS WAGE American economy and see an essen- EMPLOYMENT AND MORE WORKER-OWNED ENTERPRISES. tially free market coated with a thin layer of Progressive and New Deal inter- vention that need only to be scraped Competition-inhibiting cartelization Left-libertarians, drawing on the work away to restore liberty. Left-libertarians diminishes workers’ bargaining power, of New Left historians, also dissent from see an economy that is corporatist to its enabling employers to deprive them of a the conservative and standard libertar- core, although with limited competitive portion of the income they would ian view that the economic regulations free enterprise. The programs constitut- receive in a freed and fully competitive of the Progressive Era and New Deal ing the are regarded as sec- economy, where employers would have were imposed by social democrats on ondary and ameliorative, that is, to compete for workers—rather than an unwilling freedom-loving business intended to avert potentially dangerous vice versa—and self-employment free of community. On the contrary, as Gabriel social discontent by succoring—and licensing requirements would offer an Kolko and others have shown, the cor- controlling—the people harmed by the escape from wage employment alto- porate elite—the House of Morgan, for system. gether. Of course, self-employment has example—turned to government inter- Left-libertarians clash with regular lib- its risks and wouldn’t be for everyone, vention when it realized in the waning ertarians most frequently when the latter but it would be more attractive to more 19th century that competition was too display what Carson calls “vulgar liber- people if government did not make the unruly to guarantee market share. tarianism” and what Roderick Long calls cost of living, and hence the cost of Thus left-libertarians see post-Civil “Right-conflationism.” This consists of decent subsistence, artificially high in War America not as a golden era of lais- judging American business in today’s sta- myriad ways—from building codes and sez faire but rather as a largely corrupt tist environment as though it were taking land-use restrictions to product stan- business-ruled outgrowth of the war, place in the freed market. Thus while dards, highway subsidies, and govern- which featured the usual military con- nonleft-libertarians theoretically recog- ment-managed medicine. tracting and speculation in government- nize that big business enjoys monopolis-

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Ideas

tic privileges, they also defend corpora- lence or antidiscrimination laws. For ture, indefinite detention, and surveil- tions when they come under attack from left-libertarians, southern lunch-counter lance among other assaults on domestic the left on grounds that if they were not racism was better battled through civil thrown in for good meas- serving consumers, the competitive peaceful sit-ins than with legislation in ure. Meanwhile, the historical Washing- market would punish them. “Vulgar lib- Washington, which merely ratified what ton-Wall Street alliance—in which reck- ertarian apologists for capitalism use the had been accomplishing lessness with other people’s money, term ‘free market’ in an equivocal sense,” without help from the white elite. fostered by guarantees, bailouts, and Carson writes, “[T]hey seem to have Why do left-libertarians qua libertari- Federal Reserve liquidity masquerades trouble remembering, from one moment ans care about nonviolent, nonstate as deregulation—has brought yet to the next, whether they’re defending oppression? Because libertarianism is another financial crisis with its heavy actually existing capitalism or free premised on the dignity and self-owner- toll for average , additional market principles.” ship of the , which sexism and job insecurity, and magnified Wall Street Signs of Right-conflationism can be racism deny. Thus all forms of collec- influence. seen in the common mainstream liber- tivist hierarchy undermine the libertar- Such nefariousness can only hasten tarian defensiveness at leftist criticism of ian attitude and hence the prospects for the day when people discover the left- income inequality, America’s corporate a free society. libertarian alternative. Is that expecta- structure, high oil prices, or the health- In a word, left-libertarians favor tion realistic? Perhaps. Many Americans care system. If there’s no free market, equality. Not material equality—that sense that something is deeply wrong why be defensive? You can usually make can’t be had without oppression and the with their country. They feel their lives a nonleft-libertarian mad by comparing stifling of initiative. Not mere equality are controlled by large government and Western Europe favorably with the under the law—for the law might be corporate bureaucracies that consume United States. To this, Carson writes, oppressive. And not just equal free- their wealth and treat them like sub- “[I]f you call yourself a libertarian, don’t dom—for an equal amount of a little jects. Yet they have little taste for Euro- try to kid anybody that the American freedom is intolerable. They favor what pean-style social democracy, much less system is less statist than the German Roderick Long, drawing on , full-blown state socialism. Left-libertari- one just because more of the welfare calls equality in authority: “Lockean anism may be what they’re looking for. queens wear three-piece suits… . [I]f equality involves not merely equality As the Mutualist Carson writes, we’re choosing between equal levels of before legislators, judges, and police, “Because of our fondness for free mar- statism, of course I’ll take the one that but, far more crucially, equality with leg- kets, mutualists sometimes fall afoul of weighs less heavily on my own neck.” islators, judges, and police.” those who have an aesthetic affinity for True to their heritage, left-libertarians Finally, like most ordinary libertari- , or those for whom ‘petty champion other historically oppressed ans, left-libertarians adamantly oppose bourgeois’ is a swear word. But it is our groups: the poor, women, people of war and the American empire. They petty bourgeois tendencies that put us in color, gays, and immigrants, docu- embrace an essentially economic analy- the mainstream of the American pop- mented or not. Left-libertarians see the sis of imperialism: privileged firms seek ulist/radical tradition, and make us rele- poor not as lazy opportunists but rather access to resources, foreign markets for vant to the needs of average working as victims of the state’s myriad barriers surplus goods, and ways to impose intel- Americans.” to self-help, mutual aid, and decent edu- lectual-property laws on emerging Carson believes ordinary citizens are cation. Left-libertarians of course industrial societies to keep foreign man- coming to “distrust the bureaucratic oppose government oppression of ufacturers from driving down prices organizations that control their commu- women and minorities, but they wish to through competition. (This is not to say nities and working lives, and want more combat nonviolent forms of social there aren’t additional, political factors control over the decisions that affect oppression such as racism and sexism behind the drive for empire.) them. They are open to the possibility of as well. Since these are not carried out These days left-libertarians feel vindi- decentralist, bottom-up alternatives to by force, the measures used to oppose cated. American foreign policy has the present system.” Let’s hope he’s them also may not entail force or the embroiled the country in endless overt right. state. Thus, sex and racial discrimina- and covert wars, with their high cost in tion are to be fought through boycotts, blood and treasure, in the resource-rich Sheldon Richman blogs at Free Associ- publicity, and demonstrations, not vio- Middle East and Central Asia—with tor- ation (www.sheldonrichman.com).

32 The American Conservative March 2011