As soon as a new party springs up and begins to show signs of success, a lot of political tramps are immediately attracted to its ranks.
These men possess a certain amount of influence. They are trained politicians, well versed in the art of packing conventions and proficient at counting the ballots. When they come to the new party with crocodile tears of repentance coursing down their cheeks, it is too weak to refuse their aid. It opens its arms and kissing away their repentant tears, places them in the front rank where glory awaits them. The result of this is a large gain in votes and sometimes success at the polls. But this victory is only gained at the expense of principle, and the last state of that party is worse than the first.
(Francis D. Tandy, Voluntary Socialism, ch. 13, 1896)
Archive | 2008
Random July 4th Roundup
Happy Independence Day! Celebrate the American Revolution! The one currently underway, I mean.
Meanwhile, check out this article about how easy it is for our immigration laws to turn a U.S. citizen into an undocumented alien overnight, and the Kafkaesque nightmare that awaits those attempting to undo the tangle.
In other news, the first comment in over two years has been added to the Mises blog post discussing the Kevin Carson JLS symposium. I link to it because otherwise no one will see it (I only know about it because I authored the original post and so receive automated updates). Those interested in the pros and cons of the labour theory of value, take a look.
Today Academia, Tomorrow the World!
I’m pleased to report that this list of the top 100 liberal arts professor blogs (selected by what criteria or procedure I don’t know) includes four libertarian ones: Chris Sciabarra’s, Jacob Levy’s, Liberty & Power, and your humble Empire.
Now Bigger and With More Angry Workers!
I’ve always meant to buy myself a copy of the 1927 film Metropolis, Fritz Lang’s futuristic tale of class struggle and sexy robots, but I never got around to it (though I’ve seen it on tv a couple of times). Now I’m glad I waited.
Two Reviews
1. The July/August 2008 issue of the New Individualist features a review by Will Thomas (“Atlas, Seen Through Many Eyes,” pp. 52-55) of Ed Younkins’ anthology Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged: A Philosophical and Literary Companion. 
Here’s what he says about my contribution (which he kindly includes among the “best essays” that “accurately represent Rand’s distinctive worldview while bringing something new to the table”):
In “Forced to Rule,” philosopher Roderick Long looks at how Atlas Shrugged may have been in part a response to Plato’s dialogue the Republic. The Republic portrays a collectivist utopia where material life and education are sharply controlled by the government. All must act from duty, not self-interest – even the rulers, who should be wise men forced to rule against their inclinations. Long points out that this is strange, since Plato’s appear to focus on individual flourishing. How can there be individual happiness without any freedom? But Plato was a dualist, holding that real knowledge, truth, and virtue proceed from a realm of Ideas only dimly reflected in material reality, and this made him pessimistic about practical affairs. Long shows how Rand strikes back at this conception of man in Atlas Shrugged and details implicit references to Plato in the text. Rand reject the dichotomy of mind versus body and its attendant splits of spirit versus matter, love versus sex, and art versus engineering. In the climax of Atlas, Rand puts Plato’s doctrine to the test as the villains try to torture John Galt – the best and wisest of men, “an engineer and philosopher” – to make him rule them. (Spoiler: It doesn’t work.)
2. Joel Parthemore has an online review of my colleague Kelly Jolley’s excellent book The Concept ‘Horse’ Paradox and Wittgensteinian Conceptual Investigations. While the book’s topic may appear narrow and arcane, “its target,” as Parthemore notes “is nothing less than the nature of structured thought itself.”
Property, Commerce, Capitalism
Proudhon is a bit like Hegel (by whom he was indirectly influenced) in that he attempts to synthesise and reconcile a myriad of apparently opposing viewpoints, and so it’s risky to rely on any single formulation taken out of context as a reliable indicator of his views, when it may be only a provisional approximation, or one side of a dialectical opposition. Shawn Wilbur has a useful post today about Proudhon’s use of the term, and concept, property.
Another post from Shawn refers to a recent interesting article in French. Here’s a quick translation:
A Commerce Without Capitalism
And if commerce and exchange were inseparable from the creation of real spaces of resistance? So many niches of experimentation of a future society – a better one, of course – may be found in the four corners of the world: from the Cartoneros [cardboard recyclers] of Argentina inventing their own economy, to the Diggers of San Francisco trying out freedom-from-payment, passing to the trabendo of the Marseilles quarters that mocks sealed borders [anybody know what this refers to?], without forgetting the utopian anarchists of the 19th century who took the first steps toward workers’ cooperatives. Everywhere there is exchange, there is barter, there is giving and recompensing, there is sharing: in short, there is collective resistance to a capitalist society that seeks to reduce commerce to a mere accumulation of capital with money as the sole intermediary.
The rejection of commerce by the extreme left, generally speaking, is indicative of this confusion between capitalism and commerce. It is true that in a country where six central purchasing centers handle the exchanges among 60 million consumers and 400,000 farmers, it is difficult to think otherwise! And Wal-Mart, the U.S.-based multinational distributor, is now the largest enterprise in the world, ahead of the oil companies.
Yet for all that, one cannot abandon commerce solely to the traffickers in profits. As Michel Besson of the Minga association likes to remind us, “there have always been men and women who desired to exchange with one another in a respectful and peaceful manner, simply because it is much more agreeable for everybody to live without competing with one another, without exploiting one another, without swindling one another. Equity in exchanges forms a part of the culture of many societies around the world.” And it is for this reason that today, over and above the concept-marketing of equitable commerce, there exists around the world a profusion of commercial alternatives, each more amazing than the next, each with its limits since it must come to terms with capitalist society, they offer another way of living together. Sometimes these alternatives escape the supervision of centralist States, which, anxious that nothing should subsist outside their sphere of control, consequently stigmatise such exchanges as “black-market,” “informal,” clandestine – which do not even count in the GDP! Nonetheless, and extremely happily, such experiments remind us that prior to the exchange of merchandise there is also a human exchange, a mode of relation among persons. An exchange that may give birth to emancipation.