Austro-Athenian Empire » Antiracism

Some Distinctions and Clarifications

Roderick — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 09:37:40 +0000

I want to talk a bit a bit some of the ways in which left-libertarian claims are susceptible of misinterpretation. (Note: when I use the term “right-libertarian” below, I mean “libertarians who deviate rightward from the C4SS/ALL plumbline”!)

1. Right-libertarians sometimes accuse left-libertarians of misrepresenting right-libertarians’ relation to corporatism. “They say we support government favouritism toward big business,” they complain, “yet no libertarian supports any such thing.”

To answer this, I need to invoke the de re / de dicto distinction.

Suppose I’m reading Ozma of Oz, and I think, “hey, this guy Baum is a good author.” Assume I don’t know that Baum also wrote a novel (a lousy one, in fact, though that doesn’t matter for the example) called The Master Key. Would it be true or false to say, “Roderick thinks the author of The Master Key is a good author”?

Well, it’s ambiguous. I don’t have a thought of the form “The author of The Master Key is a good author,” since I’m not aware of any such book. But I do think of Baum that he’s a good author; and since Baum is the author of The Master Key, I thereby think of the author of The Master Key that he’s a good author. So the philosopher’s way of marking the distinction is to say that I believe de re (“of the thing”), but not de dicto (“of what is said”), that the author of The Master Key is a good author.

Or again, suppose I want to marry Griselda. And suppose Griselda is, unbeknownst to me, a pathological liar. Then is it true or false that I want to marry a pathological liar? Well, in one sense it’s true and in another sense it’s false. I don’t have such a desire de dicto; I don’t form any thought expressible as “I want to marry a pathological liar.” But I do have such a desire de re, since there’s a pathological liar that I want to marry.

So when left-libertarians accuse (some) right-libertarians of supporting corporatism, this is to be understood in a de re sense, not in a de dicto sense. Thus the claim is that right-libertarians are supporting certain policies/institutions/phenomena that are in fact instances of corporatism; we are not claiming that right-libertarians are deliberately supporting them qua instances of corporatism – and so pointing out that they’re not is not relevant as a reply to the original point.

2. The left-libertarian call for worker empowerment can itself be construed as a (left-wing) form of corporatism.

Lew Rockwell recently wrote:

[S]yndicalism means economic control by the producers. Capitalism is different. It places by virtue of market structures all control in the hands of the consumers. The only question for syndicalists, then, is which producers are going to enjoy political privilege. It might be the workers, but it can also be the largest corporations.

not a left-libertarian

Lew doesn’t draw the inference that left-libertarians are corporatists, but he illuminates a way in which that inference might be drawn. After all, we too favour economic control by producers, right? So why doesn’t that make our position akin to corporatism?

I think there’s a perilous ambiguity here. In one way, “economic control” can mean ownership; in that sense, we left-libertarians do favour economic control by producers.

But in that sense capitalists (taking that term in the Rothbardian sense) do not favour economic control by consumers; they favour economic control by producers too, even if capitalist employers loom larger in their conception of “producers” than in ours.

When Lew says that capitalism favours consumer control, he’s not talking about ownership; he means that consumer preferences determine production decisions through the price system – which is true enough (although I think that way of putting it makes producers seem too passive – what about advertising? entrepreneurial experimentation?) but that’s just as true when the producers are workers’ co-ops. So there’s no one sense of producer control which is both advocated by left-libertarians and akin to corporatism.

(These issues are closely related to those I’ve discussed under the name of the “POOTMOP” problem, here and here, as well as to the different ways that the libertarian and authoritarian wings of the French industriel movement understood the concept of producer control, discussed here.)

3. There is a tendency among right-libertarians to treat racism and sexism as equivalent to hostility toward persons of a different race or gender. Thus where such hostility is absent, racism and sexism are presumed to be absent also – with the upshot that left-libertarians are seen as exaggerating the amount of racism and sexism around.

For example, Walter Block argues that because heterosexual male employers are attracted to women, they are more likely to be prejudiced in their favour rather than against them.

But racism and sexism are found in more forms than simply that of hostility (not that there isn’t plenty of that form around too – and we all know, too well, that being a heterosexual male is not exactly an obstacle to hostility against women). A white male employer who feels no hostility toward women or minorities may still be inclined to pay them less or deny them positions of authority if he holds, say, prejudicial expectations about their likely capacities.

But what if these expectations are rationally justified? The problem is that they generally aren’t. And the arguments on behalf of such expectations are so shockingly sloppy (as, e.g., Anne Fausto-Sterling shows), and the historical track record of such arguments is so wretched, that an employer’s indulgence in such expectations is overwhelmingly likely to be the result of an irrational bias, most often one unconsciously absorbed from the culture. In such cases we will say that the empoyer’s decision is shaped by racism or sexism – but in saying that, we are not (necessarily) saying that the employer is an evil, hate-filled person. After all, by analogy: most people are statists, but that doesn’t mean that most people are filled with hated for individual liberty.

Walter says in the same piece that the persistence of unjustified racist or sexist prejudices is unlikely, since “as we know from our study of business cycles, any such conglomeration of error cannot long endure without continued statist interference with markets.” Now of course we have “continued statist interference with markets,” so for anything Walter says here we could still have plenty of prejudice in the real world. But in any case I question the implied (and un-Austrian!) assumption that the market always gets us to equilibrium in the long run. There’s a difference between saying that the market has a tendency to equilibrium and saying that the market eventually reaches equilibrium. After all, everything on earth has a tendency to move toward the center of the earth, but that doesn’t mean that everything eventually gets to the center of the earth. Culture matters; it’s not just an epiphenomenon of the price system.

And of course, comme l’on dit, “we are market forces.”

Torremolinos, Torremolinos

Roderick — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 19:58:30 +0000

A successfully iconic satire destroys the viability of its target. After Tina Fey’s celebrated skit on SNL, for example, Russia’s visibility from Alaska could never again be invoked without derision as an argument for Sarah Palin’s expertise in international affairs. This is a lesson that Sean Gabb really should have taken to heart before offering this particular defense of race-baiting anti-immigrant politician Enoch Powell ….

We therefore say this with regard to Enoch Powell. He was a classical scholar of great brilliance and distinction. His Lexicon to Herodotus (1938) is one of the most valuable works ever produced on the ancient historian. As well as in Latin and Greek, he was fluent in every main European language, and in Welsh. He was also at least competent in several ancient and modern oriental languages.
— Sean Gabb, 2011

And then you get cornered by some drunken greengrocer from Luton with an Instamatic and Dr. Scholl sandals and last Tuesday’s Daily Express and he drones on and on and on about how Mr. Smith should be running this country and how many languages Enoch Powell can speak and then he throws up all over the Cuba Libres.
— Monty Python, 1972

Cory Maye To Be Freed

Roderick — Sat, 02 Jul 2011 04:03:37 +0000

Cory Maye, about whose case I’ve blogged previously (here, here, here, and here), is finally due to be released. (CHT Sheldon.) It falls short of what he deserves – he was required to plead guilty to manslaughter for exercising his right to defend himself and his family, and he’s being offered no compensation for the unjust treatment he has received – but it beats being murdered by the state or spending the rest of his life in a cage, the two fates that judges had previously chosen for him.

All honour to Radley Balko for his untiring efforts to keep this case before the public!

Addendum:

If you’re interested in donating to help Maye get his life back together, Radley has details.

Them Poor Old Slaveholding Founders Need All the Help They Can Get

Roderick — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 06:33:06 +0000

Walter Williams writes:

Here’s my hypothesis about people who use slavery to trash the Founders: They have contempt for our constitutional guarantees of liberty. Slavery is merely a convenient moral posturing tool as they try to reduce respect for our Constitution.

Well, I don’t regard slavery as “merely a convenient moral posturing tool,” but yes, I do have contempt for the Constitution’s so-called guarantees of liberty, and I am certainly out to try to reduce respect for that statist and statism-enabling document. So yes, he’s essentially right about people like me.

Jim Crow Returns to Alabama, Part 2

Roderick — Sat, 18 Jun 2011 04:50:34 +0000

For a giggle, check out this critique (CHT Brandon) of my recent immigration post, by a “John J. Ray, M.A., Ph.D.” (Yes, he’s one of those.) The best bit is when the guy infers my deranged mental state from my picture. Yes, this picture. René Allendy, move over!

Jim Crow Returns to Alabama

Roderick — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 16:52:13 +0000

This past Thursday the Alabama legislature put on their white hoods and enacted the harshest anti-immigrant regime in the country, one even more tyrannical than Arizona’s ethnic-cleansing laws.

As in Arizona, the new edict “allows police to arrest anyone suspected of being an illegal immigrant if the person is stopped for some other reason”; but it also “requir[es] schools to find out if students are in the country lawfully,” “requires all businesses to check the legal status of workers using a federal system called E-Verify,” “makes it a crime for landlords to knowingly rent to an illegal immigrant,” and in a flourish of pure petty malice, “mak[es] it a crime to knowingly give an illegal immigrant a ride.”

The old Jim Crow laws enforced discrimination based on the colour of a person’s skin; the new Jim Crow laws enforce discrimination on the basis of a person’s birth on the wrong side of an imaginary line. Though of course racist motivations are not exactly absent.

To make sure that racism and misogyny continue to march hand in hand, the legislature also passed an abortion ban on the same day. Well heck, if the state can treat immigrants as second-class persons, why can’t it do the same to women, and force them to use their bodies as incubators for unwanted fetuses?

If only we could get some Republicans in power! They’re for smaller government, you know.

Well, There’s Spam, Egg, Sausage, and Spam; That’s Not Got MUCH Spam In It

Roderick — Sun, 29 May 2011 05:15:16 +0000

Kevin Carson, in the new Freeman, on European “socialism” versus American “capitalism”:

[S]ocial democracy treats privilege as normal and leaves it intact – then regulates it to make it bearable to the subordinate classes without altering its fundamental nature as privilege. But most of the positive aspects of the European model simply duplicate what could be achieved by dismantling privilege altogether.

(Celý piroh.)

In the same issue, see John Blundell on the Grimké sisters and Stephan Kinsella on IP. There’s other good stuff too.

Travelin’ Man

Roderick — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 23:11:13 +0000

This semester is shaping up to be the most conference-intensive I’ve had. In January I had a double conference in La Jolla (a Liberty Fund on contemporary classical liberal thought, followed by a workshop on John Tomasi’s forthcoming book Free Market Fairness) and an IHS conference in Fredericksburg. Then this past weekend was my department’s annual conference (schedule here). As for what’s coming up:

1. Austrian Scholars Conference, Mises Institute, Auburn AL, March 10-12. Our Molinari Symposium on Spontaneous Order, originally scheduled for the Eastern APA in Boston last December, has been resurrected at the ASC thanks to the Mises Institute’s gracious rescue (despite the panel’s being, as Charles notes, “rather different fare from that normally offered at the ASC”).

Also at the ASC, Molinari Institute Research Associate (and Alford Prize winner) Gil Guillory will be presenting a paper on “The Structure of Production of Free Market Adjudication” earlier on Friday, and I’ll be chairing a panel on “Socialism, Racism, and Method” on Saturday; for details, see the schedule.

2. Prague Conference on Political Economy, CEVRO Institute, Prague, Czech Republic, March 25-27. I’ve organised a panel on free-market anarchism with Ed Stringham; see the schedule here and abstracts here. This’ll be my third trip to Prague (making the Czech Republic the first European country I’ll have visited more than twice).

3. Future of Free Cities Conference, Roatán, April 3-5. Roatán is an island off the coast of Honduras, though the conference is sponsored by Guatemala’s Francisco Marroquín University. This’ll be a new southernmost point for me. I’m not making a presentation, just participating in general discussion. Talk of seasteading is to be expected.

4. Mises Circle: Strategies for Changing Minds Toward Liberty, Chicago IL, April 9. I’ll be speaking on what I used to call “outreach to the left.” Here’s more info.

5. Association of Private Enterprise Education (APEE) conference, Nassau, Bahamas, April 10-12. I’ll be chairing a sequel to last year’s Free-Market Anti-Capitalism panel; this time around we’ve got Steven Horwitz on “Banks as the Anti-Capitalism at the Heart of Capitalism,” Sheldon Richman on “The Gilded Age: No Golden Era,” Darian Worden on “Capitalism, Free Enterprise, and Progress: Partners or Adversaries?,” and Charles Johnson on “Markets Without Commercialism; Commerce Without Capitalism.”

Unfortunately, our session conflicts with a session on Anarchism featuring, inter alia, Dan D’Amico and Bruce Benson – argh! Maybe next time we do a FMAC panel we should stick “Anarchism” in the title to make the organisers less likely to schedule such conflicts.

6. Pacific APA, San Diego CA, April 20-23. I’ll be a commentator on a panel on “Exploitation and the State” on the afternoon of the 20th, and then our other snowed-out Molinari Symposium, the Author-Meets-Critics session on Gary Chartier’s Economic Justice and Natural Law, is being resurrected on the evening of the 23rd; schedule details here.

When we had to cancel in Boston, Charles suggested inquiring whether the Pacific APA might accept us as refugees. I thought the odds were low, as the Pacific’s schedule was already posted. And the national APA office confirmed my pessimism, telling me there was no way. But then the Pacific graciously said yes! (Charles also suggested asking the Mises Institute about having the other symposium at the ASC. So thank you Pacific APA, thank you Mises Institute, and thank you Charles.)

Our session was added too late to be listed on the APA’s online program, but I’m told it will be in the printed program. (Yes, I thought it’d be the other way around too.) Unfortunately, the exploitation session conflicts with a session critiquing the work of my friend Elizabeth Brake (so I won’t be able to play the role of Brake claque), and the Chartier session conflicts with the Ayn Rand Society (that fact plus the late hour means turnout may be low); but on the plus side, Gary Chartier, who would have had to miss the Boston meeting because he’s boycotting air travel, will be able to attend the San Diego meeting (as it’s within driving distance). In any case, April in San Diego is a lot nicer than December in Boston!

I’ve got other stuff scheduled for beyond this semester – but that’s surely enough for now.

R.I.P. Dwayne McDuffie

Roderick — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 22:24:55 +0000

I’m saddened to learn of the (evidently sudden and unexpected) death of comic-book and animated-film author Dwayne McDuffie.

A longtime writer for both DC and Marvel Comics (among others), McDuffie also played the chief role in developing the “Milestone” line of characters and situations created by black artists and licensed (rather than sold) to DC Comics; the most famous of these is the teenage superhero Static.

McDuffie was also a chief writer for DC’s series of animated tv shows and videos, including the Justice League series and the recent followup, Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths, and he served as producer, editor, and writer for Ben 10: Alien Force. By odd coincidence, his video adaptation of Grant Morrison’s All-Star Superman was released just today.

Only a few months ago he was expressing his hope to script adaptations of Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing or Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns; I suspect the (now posthumous) project he refers to as “scripted … but I can’t say what it is for about a year” is that Batman: Year One film that people are talking about.

McDuffie was a terrific writer, and an inspiring and effective spokesperson for a greater minority voice in the comics industry. He will be missed.

A Slightly Less Unknown Ideal, Part 2

Roderick — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 17:19:03 +0000

Sheldon’s American Conservative article on left-libertarianism is now online.