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iRad I.3 in Print, iRad I.2 Online

By on July 13, 2013 4

The third issue (Spring 2013) of The Industrial Radical will be back from the printers and on its way to subscribers shortly, featuring articles by Less Antman, Jason Lee Byas, Kevin Carson, Nathan Goodman, Anthony Gregory, Trevor Hultner, Charles Johnson, Joshua Katz, Thomas L. Knapp, Abby Martin, Chad Nelson, Sheldon Richman, Jeremy Weiland, and your humble correspondent, on topics ranging from NSA surveillance and whistleblowing, the Turkish revolt, the Boston lockdown, the Keystone XL pipeline, intellectual property, and the futility of gun control in an age of 3-D printing, to compulsory schooling, American militarism, conscription, worker exploitation, property rights, prison ethics, rape culture, the pros and cons of communism, and the dubious legacy of Margaret Thatcher.

The Industrial Radical I.3 (Spring 2013)

With each new issue published, we post the immediately preceding issue online. Hence a free pdf file of our second issue (Winter 2013) is now available here. (See the first issue also.)

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French Liberalism Meets Boston Anarchism

By on July 9, 2013 0

… which is actually a pretty good description of my politics.

Anyway: In 1888, the Journal des Économistes – the chief periodical of classical liberalism in France, at that time under the editorship of Gustave de Molinari himself – published an article about individualist anarchism in America, with particular focus on the writers associated with Benjamin Tucker’s periodical Liberty. The author was Sophie Raffalovich, about whom more below. Benjamin Tucker replied in the pages of Liberty a few months later. The Journal des Économistes would return to the subject of Tucker and Liberty in 1902, in a piece by Paul Ghio.

I’ve now translated and posted the pieces by Raffalovich (“The Boston Anarchists”) and Ghio (“An American Anarchist”); I’ve also posted Tucker’s reply to Raffalovich (“A French View of Boston Anarchists”).

So who was Sophie Raffalovich? Most of the information I’ve been able to find out about her (see especially here, here, and here) is really about her family. Her parents were the Russian Jewish banker Hermann Raffalovich and the anti-Bonapartist literary patron (and Spencer/Mill fan) Marie Raffalovich; her brothers were the economist Arthur and the poet Marc-André. In 1890 she married the Irish reformer William O’Brien (he writes about her, with somewhat gag-inducing sentimentality, here), with whom she clashed on the issue of women’s suffrage (he was for it, she was against – her gay brother was also against gay rights, so I guess it figures), and published several books of essays as “Mrs. William O’Brien.” The only picture I’ve been able to find for her is from an announcement of their wedding (right); I don’t know why her nationality is represented by what looks like an American flag. (His is the Irish naval jack.) After losing her fortune in World War I (it had been invested in Russia and Germany) and her husband in 1928, she moved to France, where she hid out during World War II and the German occupation – not the safest spot in the world for a Jewish libertarian – and managed to evade Nazi scrutiny. She spent her final years as an impoverished invalid in Picardy. When she was born (1860), Jules Verne had not yet published his first book; when she died (1960), Sputnik had already fallen from orbit.

Paul Ghio is much more of a cipher; I’ve found no birth or death dates for him. He taught economics at the Collège Libre des Sciences Sociales in Paris. He would later write an entire book on American anarchism, as well as volume 1 of an economic treatise (but I’ve seen no evidence of a volume 2). The latter work is dedicated to Molinari, and sings the praises of La Boétie to boot. Ghio also has an essay in the Journal des Économistes on the Chicago anarchists, which I may translate when I get a chance.

Welcome to the Desert of the Huckabee

By on July 7, 2013 31

Mike Huckabee projects such an aura of cuddly friendliness, and in reality he is such a vile, bloodthirsty creep.

Just saw him favourably quoting these words from MLK’s Letter from Birmingham Jail:

One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.” Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law.

Huckabee conveniently omitted the lines that follow – “Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.” – presumably in order to leave the impression that MLK would be down with Huckabee’s thumping-select-portions-of-the-Bible method of determining the content of the moral law.

The occasion for Huckabee’s foray into natural-law jurisprudence was his protest against the restrictions on political advocacy that churches have to follow in order to qualify for tax-exempt status.

Then after finishing up the tax-exempt issue, Huckabee immediately segues into a denunciation of “illegal” immigration, even to the point of condemning the placing of canisters of water in the desert where immigrants can find them. ’Cause nothing expresses the moral law better than laws requiring people to leave their neighbours to die of thirst.

Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbour unto him that fell among the thieves?

Guys and Dolls

By on June 25, 2013 8

Highly recommended: Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference by Cordelia Fine, a feminist neuroscientist who punctures innatist myths about gender difference. Buy copies for your friends who think “Science!” has shown that men and women are genetically programmed for differences in blah blah blah.

The title is a nod to Anne Fausto-Sterling’s earlier Myths Of Gender: Biological Theories About Women And Men, which I also highly recommend – but Fine’s book is not only more up-to-date, but also more accessible and reader-friendly; so it makes a better introduction for the feminist-resistant.

Against Maslow

By on June 18, 2013 14

To say that food and safety are more basic needs than reason and morality is essentially to say: “I am untrustworthy and will stab you in the back when the chips are down.”

I prefer Aristotle:

For every intellect chooses what is best for itself, and the decent man obeys his intellect. Now it is true also, concerning the upright man, that he performs many actions for the sake of his friends and his country, and if necessary dies for them. For he will discard both wealth and honours and in general the goods people fight over, gaining the fine for himself; for he would prefer a short time of intense pleasure to a long mild one, and a year of fine living to many years of living at random, and a single fine and great action to many slight ones. Now this like as not results for those who die for others; indeed they choose a great fine thing for themselves.

And Cicero:

For a man to take something from his neighbour and to profit by his neighbor’s loss is more contrary to nature than is death or poverty or pain or anything else that can affect either our person or our property. … If a man wrongs his neighbour to gain some advantage for himself he must either imagine that he is not acting in defiance of nature or he must believe that death, poverty, pain, or even the loss of children, kinsmen, or friends, is more to be shunned than an act of injustice against another. … If he believes that, while such a course should be avoided, the other alternatives are much worse – namely, death, poverty, pain – he is mistaken in thinking that any ills affecting either his person or his property are more serious than those affecting his soul.

And Seneca:

Every living thing has an initial attachment to its own constitution; but a human being’s constitution is a rational one, and so a human being’s attachment is to himself not qua living being but qua rational being. For he is dear to himself in respect of what makes him human.

(Rand, of course, situates herself squarely on both sides of this issue.)

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