Toward a libertarian theory of class

Roderick T. Long’s “Toward a Libertarian Theory of Class,” which first appeared in Social Philosophy & Policy (Summer 1998), is finally available for download as a two-part PDF — here and here.

I think this is a seminal work in the ongoing struggle to build a hardcore radical Libertarian Left movement from three disparate strands — libertarian capitalism, libertarian socialism, and what Long calls “libertarian populism.” If you consider yourself a Libertarian Leftist, you should really read this. If you consider yourself a serious Libertarian Left activist, you should really study this thoroughly and add it to your intellectual arsenal.

Drawing inspiration from Murray

We of the Agorist Action Alliance and the Alliance of the Libertarian Left today work to draw frustrated and disenfranchised freedom activists from “left” and “right” together into a vital anti-state, anti-war, libertarian Leftist movement. And granted, the task seems overwhelming. But back in 1971, after three decades of political “homelessness” and being stonewalled in his efforts to unite libertarian strains from both Old Right and New Left, eternal optimist Murray Rothbard still maintained his dream of building such a coalition. Listen to this rallying cry, the closing paragraphs from The Betrayal of the American Right.

“And so we now face an America ruled alternately by scarcely differentiated conservative and liberals wings of the same state-corporatist system. Within the ranks of liberalism there is a growing number of disaffected people who are increasingly facing the fact that their own credo, liberalism, has been in power for forty years, and what has it wrought? Executive dictation, unending war in Vietnam, imperialism abroad and militarism and conscription at home, intimate partnership between Big Business and Leviathan Government. An increasing number of liberals are facing this critical failure and are recognizing that liberalism itself is to blame. They are beginning to see that Lyndon Johnson was absolutely correct in habitually referring to Franklin Roosevelt as his ‘Big Daddy.’ The paternity is clear, and the whole crew stands or falls together.

“Where, then, can disaffected liberals turn? Not to the current Right, which offers them only more of the same, spiced with a more jingoistic and theocratic flavor. Not to the New Left, which destroyed itself in despair and random violence. Libertarianism, to many liberals, offers itself as the place to turn.

“And so libertarianism itself grows apace, fueled by split-offs from conservatism and liberalism alike. Just as conservatives and liberals have effectively blended into a consensus to uphold the Establishment, so what America needs now — and can have — is a counter-coalition in opposition to the Welfare-Warfare State. A coalition that would favor the short-term libertarian goals of militant opposition to the Vietnam War and the Cold War generally, and to conscription, the military-industrial complex, and the high taxes and accelerated inflation that the state has needed to finance these statist measures. It would be a coalition to advance the cause of both civil liberty and economic freedom from government dictation. It would be, in many ways, a renaissance of a coalition between the best of the Old Right and the old New Left, a return to the glorious days when elements of Left and Right stood shoulder to shoulder to oppose the conquest of the Philippines and America’s entry into World Wars I and II. Here would be a coalition that could appeal to all groups throughout America, to the middle class, workers, students, liberals, and conservatives alike. But Middle America, for the sake of gaining freedom from high taxes, inflation, and monopoly, would have to accept the idea of personal liberty and a loss of national face abroad. And liberals and leftists, for the sake of dismantling the war machine and the American Empire, would have to give up the cherished Old Left-liberal dream of high taxes and Federal expenditures for every goody on the face of the earth. The difficulties are great, but the signs are excellent that such an anti-Establishment and antistatist coalition can and might come into being. Big government and corporate liberalism are showing themselves to be increasingly incapable of coping with the problems that they have brought into being. And so objective reality is on our side.

“But more than that: the passion for justice and moral principle that is infusing more and more people can only move them in the same direction; morality and practical utility are fusing ever more clearly to greater numbers of people in one great call: for the liberty of people, of individuals and voluntary groups, to work out their own destiny, to take control over their own lives. We have it in our power to reclaim the American Dream.”

You can read this 36-year-old passage and be inspired by it, heartened by the fact that Rothbard never surrendered his vision. Or you can bewail three decades of experimentation and (so far) failure and suggest that our current efforts are a tremendous waste of time.

I choose to be inspired by Rothbard’s spirit and stay the course.

A (very) minor quibble

I’m enjoying Murray Rothbard’s The Betrayal of the American Right so much that I’m gently sipping it, just a chapter or two a day. It’s really an extraordinary history lesson, certainly for libertarians and probably for anyone else who feels a disconnect with what generally passes for “Right” or “Left” these days.

I do quibble with the book’s title. Betrayal is part memoir, and with that in mind, the title works. After all, Rothbard first dabbled with politics in the 1940s, and his right-wing Republican friends were then largely antistate, antiwar, and isolationist; when conservatives showed their true colors and turned tail in the ’50s, he understandably felt betrayed. But the book is broader than memoir. It details the longer and bigger story of “homeless” laissez-faire liberals and individualist anarchists, expelled first from their birthplace on the Left and smeared by double-crossing socialists and progressives, then likewise disenfranchised and vilified by the treacherous Right. It’s a chronicle of shifting alliances, of rebuilding, and of launching new political movements. The title The Betrayal of the American Right is too limiting. It doesn’t even begin to hint at the full story or the book’s scope.

Regardless, Betrayal is what my pals in PR used to call “boffo.” Must reading.

How Left individualists turned Right

The brand spankin’ new Murray Rothbard book, The Betrayal of the American Right, is so far (since I’m still reading it) delivering what I anticipated — a first-rate history not of the conservative right-wing but of the 20th century journey taken by individualist laissez-faire liberals on the road to modern libertarianism. And I think the book is vital reading for radical libertarians who still struggle with the idea of making their home on the Left.

Most of us familiar with Rothbard’s seminal essay “Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty” understand how laissez-fairists dominated the oppositional Left against the Old Regime in the late 18th century, then began sharing that end of the spectrum, sometimes uncomfortably, with socialists and “progressives” by the late 1800s. That alliance was strengthened, Rothbard explains, during World War I in resistance to the despotic evils of the Wilson camp:

“During the 1920s, then, the emerging individualists and libertarians — the Menckens, the Nocks, the Villards, and their followers — were generally considered Men of the Left; like the Left generally, they bitterly opposed the emergence of Big Government in twentieth-century America, a government allied with Big Business in a network of special privilege, a government dictating the personal drinking habits of the citizenry and repressing civil liberties, a government that had enlisted as a junior partner to British imperialism to push around nations across the globe. The individualists were opposed to this burgeoning of State monopoly, opposed to imperialism and militarism and foreign wars, opposed to the Western-imposed Versailles Treaty and League of Nations, and they were generally allied with socialists and progressives in this opposition.”

What had not been thoroughly documented until now, though, was the ol’ switcheroo of the 1930s, when radical individualists found themselves expelled suddenly from the Left and pushed into alliance with the conservative right-wing. Rothbard places this unfortunate event at the feet of FDR’s New Deal. Libertarians, he explains, recognized the New Deal as “the imposition of a fascistic government upon the economy and society,” with Big Business playing a major role in running the show. But much to their astonishment, these laissez-faire radicals discovered that “their former, and supposedly knowledgeable, allies, the socialists and progressives, instead of joining in with this insight, had rushed to embrace and even deify the New Deal, and to form its vanguard of intellectual apologists.” Rothbard continues:

“The individualists and laissez-faire liberals were stunned and embittered, not just by the mass desertion of their former allies, but also by the abuse these allies now heaped upon them as ‘reactionaries,’ ‘fascists,’ and ‘Neanderthals.’ For decades Men of the Left, the individualists, without changing their position or perspectives one iota, now found themselves bitterly attacked by their erstwhile allies as benighted ‘extreme right-wingers.’ …

“Isolated and abused, treated by the New Dispensation as Men of the Right, the individualists had no alternative but to become, in effect, right-wingers, and to ally themselves with the conservatives, monopolists, Hooverites, etc., whom they had previously despised.”

I don’t really buy into the idea that Mencken, Nock, and the others had no alternative but “to ally themselves with the conservatives, monopolists, Hooverites, etc.” Granted, going their own way, standing firm in their laissez-faire Leftism, and participating in a multi-front attack on the New Deal may have seemed at the time less effective politically than joining a broader coalition. But the fact is, even that broad coalition, philosophically weak as it was, couldn’t stop the FDR steamroller. And what's worse, the individualists essentially surrendered the left-wing to corporate collectivists for 70 years.

It’s now our job as radical Rothbardians to reclaim our position on that left wing of the political spectrum, and even lead it.

New Rothbard book now shipping

I just received word from the Mises Institute that my copy of The Betrayal of the American Right has shipped. I’ve been chompin’ at the bit for this book since last March, when I first heard its publication was scheduled for “sometime this year.” Betrayal is a previously unpublished 1970s era manuscript by the late Murray Rothbard, and Thomas E. Woods, Jr., who wrote the book’s introduction, says it’s the closest thing to a Rothbard memoir we’ll ever see. Writes Woods: “It is not just a history of the Old Right, or of the anti-interventionist tradition in America. It is the story — at least in part — of Rothbard’s own political and intellectual development: the books he read, the people he met, the friends he made, the organizations he joined, and so much more.” And for us radical Rothbardians (aka Libertarian Leftists), there is also this, from the Mises Institute press release:

“How many [historians] know that the left and right changed place from the late 50s through the 1960s? Very few indeed. What Rothbard shows is that the cause of peace is our heritage, and that free markets has been united with the antiwar cause from the founding fathers through the Old Right and as late as the 1950s.

“There is so much in this book to appreciate but especially valuable are his comments on the left in the 1960s. There might have seemed to be some hope for some type of collaboration. They were against the war and for civil liberties at a time when the right was becoming increasingly imperialist and warmongering. Rothbard explains his attempt to educate the left on economics. Alas, there was no hope. He had to go it alone and forge a completely new movement called libertarianism.”

When it arrives in a few days, The Betrayal of the American Right goes right to the top of my “to read” stack.

Update: I see that the Mises Institute already has a free PDF download of Betrayal available. God bless those glorious Austrian bastards! (Buy the hardcover edition anyway. The Mises folks really deserve our support.)

Sy Leon, R.I.P.

One of my libertarian bibles when I first discovered this crazy movement back in the very early 1970s was Sy Leon’s None of the Above. In fact, it was my guidebook to becoming an unrepentant nonvoter. Leon was what you’d call a Big Name in the movement back then. In the ’60s, he taught alongside Butler Shaffer, Roy Childs, and James Martin at Robert LeFevre’s Rampart College in Colorado; he even ran the school after it moved to southern California. He founded the League of Non-Voters. He was one of the libertarian movement’s heavy-hitters, one of its biggest promoters.

Sy Leon died without any movement fanfare this past spring. My friend Butler Shaffer offers a tribute to him this morning, which is worth reading for both its insight and its historical perspective.