Tag Archives | Left and Right

Voltairine de Cleyre, Anarcho-Capitalist?

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

William Gillis is putting together a left-oriented (he doesn’t like the term “left” but I can’t think of a better short way to describe it) series of market anarchist pamphlets in PDF form, reprinting various “historical articles from our tradition that highlight our relation to the revolutionary left and explain Market Anarchist theory in general terms.” There’s one in there by me – and how my piece got in there with classics by Murray Rothbard and Voltairine de Cleyre beats me, but I’m not complaining! Check out the first five.

The de Cleyre piece – co-authored with one “Rosa Slobodinsky,” who, according to Shawn Wilbur, was actually Rachelle Slobodinsky Yarros, wife of Victor Yarros – may be especially controversial. It was written while de Cleyre and Slobodinsky were still in their individualist anarchist phase, and represents a defense of individualist anarchism against the anarcho-communist alternative. (De Cleyre later repudiated individualist anarchism, though without embracing the communist version either; instead she came to favour a more pluralistic vision of anarchism where different economic arrangements, whether individualistic or communistic, would coexist. I’m happy to call that view individualist anarchism even if she wasn’t. Slobodinsky’s later “apostasy” was more serious; she seems to have agreed with her husband in renouncing anarchism entirely, or so at least I infer from this write-up, which portrays her as a self-described “half apologetic pragmatist” who “admired the Soviet Union.” Ah well.)

Voltairine de Cleyre The “especially controversial” part comes in the individualists’ willingness to use the term “capitalistic” to describe their system. As I’ve discussed before, anarcho-socialists tend to go ballistic when anarcho-capitalists claim the legacy of individualist anarchists like de Cleyre. (See for example this review – whose author incidentally appears to think that Crispin Sartwell is an anarcho-capitalist!) Yet to the charge, on the part of anarcho-communists, that individualist anarchism amounts to a form of capitalism, de Cleyre and Slobodinsky reply:

Capitalistic Anarchism? Oh, yes, if you choose to call it so. Names are indifferent to me; I am not afraid of bugaboos. Let it be so, then, capitalistic Anarchism.

I can predict the likely reactions from both sides. Anarcho-capitalists will say: “See, de Cleyre was a defender of capitalism after all! So much for those lefty anarchists who told us that the hem of the individualist anarchist tradition was too purely anti-capitalist for us benighted capitalists to touch. Now we have the individualist anarchists’ own word for it that they were happy to be called capitalist anarchists!” And anarcho-socialists will respond: “De Cleyre and Slobodinsky are clearly using the term tongue in cheek! They’re responding to a smear by insisting on talking about substance rather than labels. They’re not really endorsing capitalism the way you pseudo-anarchists do.”

Let me try to say something to moderate both reactions. What the 19th-century individualist anarchists advocated under the name of a “free market” has both similarities with and differences from what the mainstream of 20th-century anarcho-capitalists have advocated under that name. Anarcho-capitalists tend to stress the similarities and ignore the differences; anarcho-socialists tend to stress the differences and ignore the similarities. It would be a mistake on the part of anarcho-capitalists to seize on de Cleyre’s and Slobodinsky’s use of the term “capitalistic Anarchism” to elide the genuine differences that exist between the two traditions. But by the same token, it is a mistake for anarcho-socialists to seize on anarcho-capitalists’ use of the term “capitalism” as though it implied agreement with existing corporatist capitalism.

Rachelle Yarros AKA Rosa SlobodinskyToo often anarcho-socialists have treated anarcho-capitalists’ mere willingness to use the term “capitalism” as though this terminological choice by itself committed anarcho-capitalists to all sorts of awful things incompatible with the anarchist tradition – and this passage from de Cleyre and Slobidinsky is a useful corrective to that tendency. Anarcho-capitalists likewise tend to downplay, while anarcho-socialists tend to exaggerate, the extent to which the individualist anarchists called themselves “socialists” – as though the choice of terminology were the crucial one. (Tucker, for example, tended to use the term “socialism” favourably in his early writings and pejoratively in his later ones; anarcho-capitalists rarely quote the earlier usage and anarcho-socialists rarely quote the later. I myself have pretty much given up using either “socialism” or “capitalism” to mean anything at all, for reasons I explain here.)

And along with the terminological blinkers come substantive blinkers. You’d never guess, from reading some of the anarcho-capitalists’ attempts to claim the mantle of the individualist anarchists, that most of those individualist anarchists saw the anarchist cause as inextricably bound up with “socialist” causes like worker empowerment and the abolition of the wage system – causes that many anarcho-capitalists in vulgar-libbin’ mode regard as anathema. But then you’d likewise never guess from reading anarcho-socialist critiques of anarcho-capitalism that there have nevertheless been self-described anarcho-capitalists, and prominent ones, who themselves favoured worker empowerment and the abolition of the wage system. All these details call for studying similarities and differences carefully and using the sledgehammer sparingly.

So, how significant is it that a figure like Voltairine de Cleyre was willing to call her position “capitalist”? I say: less than some anarcho-capitalists may be tempted to claim, yet more than some anarcho-socialists may care to admit.


Burkes Semi-serious Anarchism, Part 2

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

In a recent post I described the problem posed, for the prevailing interpretation of Burke’s Vindication of Natural Society as satirical, by similarly radical passages occurring in Burke’s nonsatirical writings.

Edmund Burke Most of the writings I cited in that post are on the web (and I provided the relevant links), but one – a brief editorial on Irish poverty from Burke’s 1748 journal The Reformer – has not thus far been available online. Now it is.

As you’ll see, there’s nothing anarchistic on offer here; and real radicals will find Burke’s explanations of poverty too vague and his proposed remedies too modest, especially by comparison with, say, Spooner’s Revolution the Only Remedy for the Oppressed Classes of Ireland.

Nevertheless, in its sympathy for the poor, indignation against the rich, and affirmation of the “natural equality of mankind,” Burke’s editorial certainly resembles the Vindication more than it does the Reflections on the Revolution in France. The same applies to the editorial’s endorsement of such classical liberal doctrines as that the function of government is to “secure the lives and properties of those who live under it” (which had been a central theme of Locke’s Second Treatise) and that the “riches of a nation” consist in the “uniform plenty diffused through a people” rather than in the “luxurious lives of its gentry” (which was to be a central theme of Smith’s Wealth of Nations).

In short, the existence of this early editorial is indeed awkward for those who insist that the radicalism of the Vindication could only have been intended ironically.


Doctor No and the Sex Pistols

Dr. No and Johnny Rotten

So if you were watching the Tonight Show yesternight, you got to hear Ron Paul talking about Austrian economics, followed by Johnny Rotten singing “I am the Antichrist, I am the Anarchist …. Hi, Mr. Paul!” and the two shaking hands. Surreal! Hoping to see a pic of the handshake showing up online – a great symbol of the libertarian/counterculture convergence.

Okay, so Paul isn’t my ideal libertarian, and Rotten – as an admirer of Reagan and Thatcher – isn’t my ideal counterculture dude. But it’s still cool.

Addendum:

I was wrong about Rotten being a Reagan/Thatcher fan; see the comments section.


A Dark Faith

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

Selwyn Duke thinks that those who question the biological basis of various psychological and behavioural differences among races are “practitioners of a dark faith” (pun intended?) incompatible with the teachings of science:

It seems especially odd when you consider that most of these inquisitors [Duke’s term for the antiracist left] are secularists who subscribe to the theory of evolution. Yet, despite their belief that different groups “evolved” in completely different parts of the world, operating in different environments and subject to different stresses, they would have us believe that all groups are identical in terms of the multitude of man’s talents and in every single measure of mental capacity. Why, miracle of miracles, all these two-legged cosmic accidents, the product of a billions-of-years journey from the primordial soup to primacy among creatures, whose evolution was influenced by perhaps millions of factors, wound up being precisely the same. It’s really the best argument for God I’ve ever heard, as such a statistical impossibility could only exist if it was ordained by the one with whom all things are possible.

Duke’s argument as stated is flailing at a straw man, since few of the people he’s criticising have made the extreme claim that different races are “precisely the same” in “every single measure.” But Duke’s claim can be restated in a more moderate form: given the different evolutionary histories of existing races, isn’t it plausible to suppose that more of their differences are genetically based than the antiracist left is prepared to recognise?

eugenics chart The answer is no. Even staying at the level of empirical considerations, we might say that skepticism toward attempts to base behavioural differences among groups on biological grounds is inductively justified for the same reason that skepticism toward attempts to defend astrology is justified: because such attempts have been made over and over for centuries and have all proved spectacularly wrong. Asking us to consider the latest iteration of such theories in dewy freshness and innocence without attention to the long embarrassing history of such claims and their subsequent refutation is, well, unscientific, like asking Charlie Brown to trust Lucy to hold the football one more time. (Such history goes back a long way. Aristotle, for example, thought the failure of the Celtic and Germanic peoples to rival the cultural achievements of Greece was a sign of an innate intellectual defect. It’s ironic that the chief proponents of this type of argument in the 19th and 20th centuries were themselves of Celtic and/or German descent.) And this is before we even get to the social horrors that this sorry history of scientific failure has been used to justify.

Here’s an analogy: suppose that the next time a child goes missing, I say, “hey, maybe the child was kidnapped by Jews who wanted to use its blood to make matzohs.” When criticised for this suggestion, I exclaim indignantly, “Isn’t it possible that this is what happened? Shouldn’t we consider every possibility? Don’t you politically-correct inquisitors care about truth?” Well, of course my suggestion is possible in some abstract sense. But in light of the actual history of such speculations – their empirical ungroundedness, plus their horrific results – such a suggestion on my part would properly be assigned to the “pointlessly offensive provocation” file rather than to the “serious scientific hypothesis” file. And the fact that I find such hypotheses salient, despite their empirical weakness, reveals my own biases. (Of course all this applies to gender as well – which is why I was glad to see Larry Summers booted out of the presidency of my alma mater.)

But there is more involved here than empirical considerations, because empirical science deals only with the enabling conditions of mind, not the constitutive conditions. (For this distinction see here, here, here, and here.) In short, there are truths about what mind is that are accessible only to philosophical inquiry, not to empirical inquiry; and such truths place constraints on what sorts of empirical hypotheses about mind, and differences among minds, are admissible. Different races may indeed have reached mindedness by somewhat different evolutionary paths, but as long as it is mindedness they have reached, then whatever is philosophically knowable about mindedness will apply to all races equally. (It’s certainly not an astonishing statistical anomaly, calling for appeal to divine intervention, that widely separated and diverse cultures have converged on, for instance, the proposition that 7 + 5 = 12.)

As an example, it used to be popular in racist circles to say that certain races lacked a moral sense. Duke might say, “well, that’s an admissible empirical hypothesis – there’s no evolutionary guarantee that all races will have the same capacities – let’s do some tests and find out.” But suppose that it turns out, via philosophical analysis, that having a moral sense is part of having a mind – that mental and moral capacities are conceptually linked. In that case the suggestion will not be an admissible empirical hypothesis; its coherence has already been ruled out on conceptual grounds.

There is thus a sad irony in the fact that Duke’s argument is receiving favourable press among some praxeologists, because Duke’s complaint that antiracists’ dismissal of evolution-based arguments is an expression of “faith” is strikingly similar to the frequent mainstream characterisation of Austrian praxeology as a “cult” for dismissing empirical approaches to economics in favour of a priori considerations. From the materialist/empiricist/psychologistic/scientistic standpoint, any appeal to philosophical rather than empirical considerations counts as “faith” rather than science. But this simply evinces a lack of understanding of the nature of philosophical reasoning. Praxeologists recognise such critiques as bogus when directed at praxeology; they should recognise that such critiques are equally bogus when directed at the antiracist left.

I’ve argued in previous posts (see here, here, and here) that a number of popular hypotheses about genetically grounded behavioural differences are simply ruled out by philosophical considerations. In addition, there are cases where although certain hypotheses are not absolutely ruled out, their a priori probability is lowered. For example, one reason for stressing environmental (as opposed to biological) determinants of mentality as much as antiracist thinkers do is that mentality itself consists to a significant degree in transactions with the physical and social environment rather than merely what is going on inside the skull. This discovery, however, was reached by philosophical/conceptual rather than empirical means (the “externalist revolution,” as we may call it, of which Wittgenstein was the principal herald), and has gone largely unrecognised by those working in the empirical sciences – which is one reason that empirical researchers continue to proceed as though everything relevant to mentality were located in the brain. The externalist dimension of mentality does not absolutely rule out innatist hypotheses, but it does give us a reason we would not otherwise have had to look more closely at environmental determinants of mental features than we otherwise might.

In short, then, when a hypothesis is either impossible or relatively unlikely for a priori reasons, has a poor track record a posteriori as well, and has the inferiority of certain groups as its principal upshot, the suggestion that the hypothesis might have been prompted more by prejudice than by fearless scientific inquiry seems less like the “political correctness” about which Duke wails than it does simple common sense.


Mises Was a Red

Cylon raiders over Grand Central Station 1. I’m back from the Misesfest (appropriately held next to Grand Central Station, which Mises used to cite as an example to illustrate Austrian methodology). Great conference! My contribution, “Mises as Radical: Retrospective on Rothbard’s Thesis,” is now online.

A few other items:

2. One of the two NYC hotels I stayed in (the less fancy one) had the following sign posted in the passenger elevator: “This is not a passenger elevator. It is unlawful for any person other than the operator or those necessary for handling freight to ride on this elevator.” A law not rigorously enforced, I guess.

3. I’m sad to see that Laissez Faire Books, whose catalogues I’ve been getting since I was an undergraduate, is going out of business. But on reflection it’s not surprising; I realise I haven’t ordered anything from them for quite a while, and I suspect that’s true of many others as well, and for the same reason – in the age of the internet it’s just not as crucial a resource as it used to be.

4. On the science-fiction front, check out some major spoilers for Galactica: Razor (conical hat tip to Norm Singleton) and rumours of a brand-new Dune movie.


Powered by WordPress. Designed by WooThemes