Tag Archives | Anarchy

Anarchy Among the Austrians

As aforementioned, I spent last weekend at the Austrian Scholars Conference. Here’s a list of some of the presentations most likely to be of interest to readers of this blog:

  • Irish anarchy Irish philosopher Gerard Casey argued that recent historical research has largely confirmed Joseph Peden’s theses (see here and here) concerning the stateless or near-stateless character of ancient and medieval Ireland.
  • Those who admit that stateless legal mechanisms might work for small tribes often deny that they could be effective in an advanced economy; Ed Stringham countered this objection by explaining how various sophisticated financial transactions in 17th-century Amsterdam received no protection from the state but nevertheless secured compliance via reputation effects.
  • Vedran Vuk presented a paper detailing how a free-market military defense might operate, and in particular how it could avoid the free-rider problem.
  • Gil Guillory presented a plausible and attractive business model for a private security agency.
  • Gerrit Smith Geoff Plauché defended Aristotelean liberalism, whatever that is.
  • Laurence Vance lectured on the libertarian ideas of Gerrit Smith, the 19th-century abolitionist, feminist, free-trader, and land reformer. (Laurence has also reprinted one of Smith’s books, The True Office of Civil Government; go to this page and scroll down to no. 123.)
  • Tom Woods lectured on the significance for Austro-libertarians of the work of Seymour Melman, New Left critic of the military-industrial complex.
  • Tom also described a forthcoming posthumous book by Murray Rothbard, Betrayal of the American Right, which apparently is as much an autobiography as it is a critique of the increased sidelining of libertarian ideas in the 20th century conservative movement.
  • Joe Salerno argued that Lionel Robbins’ classic quasi-praxeological 1932 Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science (1st edition here; 2nd edition here) was not only influenced by Ludwig von Mises but, more controversially, was also an influence on Mises.

A few of these talks are online as audio files here.


XXXploitation!!!

exploited dude Matt MacKenzie’s Molinari Society paper Exploitation: A Dialectical Anarchist Perspective is now online. A teaser:

[S]hould libertarians be interested in exploitation? It seems to me that, as a matter of fact, many contemporary libertarians are either relatively uninterested in or suspicious of the concept of exploitation …. [I]t often involves assumptions about politics and economics that are unacceptable from a libertarian point of view. Despite these considerations, I will answer the question in the affirmative – libertarians should be interested in exploitation. Furthermore, I will argue that an appropriately comprehensive libertarianism should recognize, 1) that there are both coercive and non-coercive forms of exploitation, 2) that state capitalist societies are pervasively exploitative, and 3) that exploitation deserves an appropriately, though not exclusively, political response.

Also check out Charles Johnson’s comments.


The Readiness is ALL

Agorist Action Alliance In the wake of the recent shadow falling upon MLL, which has affected not only the listserv but the very term “Movement of the Libertarian Left” – now claimed by the list moderator as his legal “property”! – several new institutions have formed to carry on the authentic MLL legacy. I’ve blogged previously about the LeftLibertarian2 listserv and the Left-Libertarian blog aggregator (started up by Kevin Carson and Jeremy Weiland respectively).

Alliance of the Libertarian Left The two latest entries are the Agorist Action Alliance or A3 (webpage launched by Brad Spangler) and the Alliance of the Libertarian Left or ALL (webpage launched by your humble correspondent). These both may be regarded as continuations of the original spirit of the MLL, but with the A3 emphasising the MLL’s specifically agorist focus, while ALL emphasises the MLL’s broader ecumenical tradition. Simultaneous membership in A3 and ALL is both possible and encouraged!


Left-Libertarian Space Opera

Hey, this is Europe. We took it from nobody; we won it from
the bare soil that the ice left. The bones of our ancestors, and the
stones of their works, are everywhere. Our liberties were won in
wars and revolutions so terrible that we do not fear our governors:
they fear us. Our children giggle and eat ice cream in the palaces
of past rulers. We snap our fingers at kings. We laugh at popes.
When we have built up tyrants, we have brought them down.
And we have nuclear fucking weapons.

– Ken MacLeod

Geoff Plauché’s recent post on John Wright’s “Golden Age” trilogy (see also my review from a few years back) reminded me that I’ve never gotten around to blogging about Ken MacLeod’s “Fall Revolution” series.

Ken MacLeod Despite rather different political sensibilities, MacLeod’s and Wright’s series share some similarities. Like the “Golden Age” trilogy, the “Fall Revolution” tetralogy focuses on conflicts between different varieties of libertarians, not just between libertarians and statists. MacLeod also shares Wright’s zest for injokes; MacLeod’s books are filled with sly references for libertarians, leftists, science-fiction fans, and even philosophers to pick up on. (His chapter titles, for example, include “The Machinery of Freedom,” “To Each As He Is Chosen,” “The Summer Soldier,” “The Court of the Fifth Quarter,” “Looking Backward,” “News From Nowhere,” “The Coming Race,” “Vast and Cool,” “In the Days of the Comet,” “Another Crack at Immanentizing the Eschaton,” and “What I Do When They Shove Chinese Writing Under the Door.”)

The “Fall Revolution” comprises four interlocking books – The Star Fraction, The Stone Canal, The Cassini Division, and The Sky Road – that cut back and forth across vast swathes of future history, from the pubs of 1970s Glasgow to farflung planetary colonies centuries hence – though thanks to life-extension technology the same characters keep showing up in all the different eras, with minor characters in some of the books showing up as major characters in others.

The Cassini Division But what is most distinctive about the characters is their dizzying varieties of antistate radicalism: MacLeod gives us anarcho-capitalists, anarcho-primitivists, Tuckerite mutualists, Stirnerite anarcho-communists, and even market-friendly Trotskyists (not an oxymoron in MacLeod’s universe), all arguing with or scheming against each other, loving, fighting, and mourning each other, against the backdrop of wars, revolutions, and social upheavals in which they play their parts. MacLeod mostly doesn’t take sides or play favourites, and indeed seems to relish his wrangling protagonists in all their ideological diversity (well, except he doesn’t much like the primitivists). For example, an encounter between a sort-of-anarcho-capitalist society and a sort-of-anarcho-communist society in The Cassini Division highlights the strengths and flaws of each. (Austrians who’re wondering how the anarcho-communist society solves the calculation problem will find the answer, however unsatisfactory, in The Sky Road.) MacLeod isn’t pushing One Big Answer here; on the contrary, each entry in the series subtly deconstructs the central assumptions of the previous one.

Nevertheless, one character’s speech seems to express MacLeod’s own perspective, broadly speaking:

[W]hat we always meant by socialism wasn’t something you forced on people, it was people organizing themselves as they pleased into co-ops, collectives, communes, unions…. And if socialism really is better, more efficient than capitalism, then it can bloody well compete with capitalism. So we decided, forget all the statist shit and the violence: the best place for socialism is the closest to a free market you can get!

Good reading, comrades!


Long Live Secession

Inasmuch as the Left-Libertarian Yahoo Group’s chief moderator, formerly a terrific left-libertarian whose name rhymes with “Hey, Feel Cool, Man,” has apparently fallen to the Fallen to the dark side dark side (both in the no-longer-a-left-libertarian sense and in the suddenly-deciding-to-reject-dissenting-posts sense), some of its members have started an alternative discussion list called LeftLibertarian2. (I missed most of the excitement, just getting caught up on my mail now.)

Since the aforesaid moderator will not permit the existence of the new list to be mentioned on the old list, I announce it here. As far as I’m concerned the new list is the list. (There’s also the LeftyLibertarian list but I’m not sure what its status is. Also, check out the Left-Libertarian blog aggregator.)


Anscombe in Alabama

At the end of this week I’m off (if traveling a few blocks from my office counts as “off”) to the Austrian Scholars Conference, where I’ll be giving a paper on Austro-libertarian themes in the work of Elizabeth Anscombe. Here’s the first paragraph:

Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe (1919-2001) – better known as Elizabeth Anscombe, Liz Anscombe, or G. E. M. Anscombe – was one of the foremost figures of 20th-century Anglophone philosophy, making important Elizabeth Anscombecontributions to philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, and moral philosophy. Yet this monocle-wearing, cigar-smoking, multilingual Cambridge don and mother of seven, a Catholic social conservative who ate out of tuna cans while lecturing and once intimidated a mugger into leaving her alone, who shocked the right with her antiwar activism and the left with her anti-abortion, anti-contraception activism, and who coined the term “consequentialism” (she was against it), is far less well known among Austro-libertarians than among professional philosophers. The aim of this paper is to show why Anscombe deserves the attention of Austro-libertarians.

Read the rest here.


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