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Happy Birthday, Star Wars

Today is the 30th anniversary of the original Star Wars.

Star Wars first entered my consciousness either just before or just after my 13th birthday, when I saw a homemade sign in the window of a Phoenix, Az. movie theatre announcing “COMING SOON: STAR WARS.” But I assumed it was some movie about wars among Hollywood stars, and I wasn’t interested.

But then I saw this comic book cover, complete with a green Darth Vader (the lefthand pic – of which the righthand pic is obviously a more polished version; both by Howard Chaykin), and I was hooked.

Howard Chaykin - STAR WARS

Then the magnificent one-page and two-page ad spreads started appearing in the newspapers. Soon I got the novelisation, by “George Lucas.” When I read it I thought, “wow, he’s a director, but he could really be a writer too; he writes just like Alan Dean Foster!” Only many years later did I find out the reason for that ….

McQuarrie - STAR WARS

Thus when I sat down on a May afternoon in San Diego to see Star Wars, I already knew it was going to begin with an Imperial spaceship chasing a rebel spaceship. So I scanned the opening starfield, expecting the ships to enter from the left or perhaps from the right …. Then wham! that magnificent overhead shot just blew me away. And everybody else too, apparently; I noticed that ads and commercials started emphasising the third dimension much more post-Star Wars than they had pre-Star Wars.

Star Wars opening scene

Like most Star Wars fans, sometimes I want to strangle George Lucas. But not today. Thank you, George.


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.


Transalpine Goodness

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

A most welcome arrival today, from a bookseller in Basel: several volumes (specifically 5-8 and 11-12, from the years 1817-1819 – though I suspect the binding dates from somewhat later), Le Censeur Europeen beautifully preserved and in excellent condition (and cheap enough for me to afford them!), of Le Censeur Européen, pioneering journal of radical liberal “industriels” and founders of libertarian class theory Charles Comte, Charles Dunoyer, and Augustin Thierry (about whom more here). Some of these volumes can be found as PDFs online, at Google Books or Gallica; but not all of them, and not this legibly.

Now I just need to build a shrine for them ….


MDS Conference Report

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

As I mentioned earlier this month, the Movement for a Democratic Society met in Greenwich Village this past Saturday to elect the board of MDS-Inc. (My hotel was located, perhaps inauspiciously, right across the street from the building where three members of the Weather Underground accidentally blew themselves up in 1970.) I’m happy and honoured to announce that I was among those elected. (My thanks to Brad Spangler for initially getting me involved!)

MDS board pic - photo credit to Thomas Good - click here for the entire photo I’m also pleased by the enormous diversity of the board in general, not only race-wise and gender-wise but ideology-wise. (Some MDS “dissidents,” about whom more below, have claimed that the election of this board was part of some sort of lockstep centralist scheme. If so, it’s the most diverse set of lockstep centralists ever assembled.) And I must say I relish the irony of the co-editor of the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies being on the board of MDS; the only reason Leonard Peikoff isn’t rolling in his grave is that he isn’t dead. (I hope that Murray Rothbard’s spirit, on the other hand, is smiling to see the editor of his Journal of Libertarian Studies in such a role.) (Incidentally, has anyone noticed how similar Rand’s critique of the New Left in “The Cashing-In: The Student ‘Rebellion’” looks like her critique of the libertarian movement?)

Anyway, a chair and three vice-chairs were also chosen: Manning Marable (who gave a great talk on the prison-industrial complex – and whose website logo incidentally bears a curious resemblance to the logo from Red Dwarf), Judith Malina (who gave an exciting performance of an anarchist poem), Paul Buhle (whose Taking Care of Business does for the history of the labour movement what Gabriel Kolko’s work does for the history of capitalists), and Jesse Zearle (who proposed to do MDS outreach to the hip-hop communtiy).

Here’s Tom Good’s report on the conference; here are two of the speeches, one by Tom on the amazing growth of SDS over the past year, and one by Mark Rudd (the best speech of the convention IMHO). Here’s a photo of the board, with names – not the entire board but just those who were present; some members were elected in absentia. (Not sure why I look like an evil psycho in the picture, but they say cameras tell no lies!) And here are some other photos from the conference.

About those “dissidents,” who occasionally disrupted the meeting and were brusquely silenced – some MDS members seem to feel that the MDS leadership has been acting like anti-democratic centralists shoving decisions down the throats of the membership. Most of the MDS leadership, by contrast, seem to feel that these critics are simply troublemakers trying to disrupt the organisation. Those familiar with my posts (see here and here) on the Mises/Cato feud can probably extrapolate my position on this intra-MDS feud as well, namely, that each side has mistakenly painted the other side’s positions as grossly and obviously unreasonable. In any case, one of the decisions taken on Saturday by the “anti-democratic centralists” was to throw the election of MDS officers open to the general membership. If anti-democratic centralism this be, ’tis an odd sort.

Join the Revolution As for the board, part of the point of its diversity, I gather, is to maximise the constituency that such board members might be able to bring into SDS/MDS. In this connection, I suppose my natural “constituency” is left-friendly libertarians and libertarian-friendly leftists, and I hereby encourage all such to consider getting involved in SDS/MDS (most likely SDS if they’re students and MDS otherwise).

Here’s a good online pamphlet introduction to SDS, dating from its glory days; it has the advantages of both brevity and antistate radicalism over the more famous, more reformist Port Huron statement. For what the libertarian / new left coalition was all about, check out the archived issues of Left and Right and the first few years of Libertarian Forum.

Four decades ago SDS played an important role in ending the Vietnam war, ousting two presidents, and popularising a radical critique of the establishment system. What more might SDS have accomplished if it had survived? What more might it yet accomplish now that it’s been revived?

Join us! The struggle against the statocratic/plutocratic empire needs you!


Agora! Dialexis! Ia Ia Cthulhu fhtagn!

I’ve been looking for a label for my particular political orientation.

“Left-libertarian,” “left-Austrian,” and so forth are fine, and I happily use them, but each of them really designates a genus more than a species.

Chris Sciabarra and Sam Konkin horribly merged together by a tragic transporter accidentAgorist” is a bit more specific, but without a qualifier it seems both too narrow (suggesting a stricter adherence to orthodox Konkinism than I can really boast) and too broad (inasmuch as it doesn’t capture my particular quirk of seeking an integration of libertarianism with traditional lefty struggles against racism, patriarchy, and the like).

So, thought I, maybe Agorism plus a qualifier. But what? One possibility is “Left-Agorism,” but that doesn’t really specify what’s more lefty about it. Another possibility is “Dialectical Agorism,” which does suggest (at least for readers of Sciabarra) an integration of Agorism with broader concerns – but it doesn’t specify lefty concerns (even though “dialectical” does have a lefty flavour). Combining them would yield “Dialectical Left-Agorism” – admirably specific on the one hand, butt-ugly on the other.

Maybe I’ll split the difference by alternating between them. Okay, let it be so. Henceforth I am a Dialectical Agorist. That’s right, I said a Dialectical Left-Agorist.


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