Are we "alongside night" yet?

Very, very nice! J. Neil Schulman is now offering his 1979 classic libertarian sci-fi novel Alongside Night as an absolutely FREE downloadable PDF. Pass it on! (Read it first, though, if you haven't already...)

My apologies to Naomi Wolf

A few weeks ago, I didn’t have much good to say here about Naomi Wolf’s new Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries. I called the book “a mixed and largely uninspired bag of left-centrist polemic against the usual suspects (Bush, Cheney, et al.), battle cry rhetoric, and sketchy advice on writing press releases, arranging town hall meetings, launching blogs, petitioning our masters and, of course, getting out the vote (especially after we dump that pesky ol’ Electoral College).” And of Wolf herself, I wrote that she’s “neither an out-of-the-box thinker nor particularly radical.”

Now I’m regretting that review. Not because I don’t stand by my assessment of the book, but because I was way too hard on Naomi Wolf, whose humility, insight, and integrity really shine in her podcast interview last week on “The Lew Rockwell Show.” This podcast is absolutely riveting. Wolf spends as much time asking Lew questions as he does questioning her. It’s a real give-and-take, a sharing of common ground that, I suspect, surprised Wolf. And it certainly seems to have delighted Lew, who in the course of 51 minutes opens Wolf’s “progressive” eyes to the realities of the State, the Federal Reserve, government schools, and so much more. More than once in the discussion, Wolf’s conventional left-center beliefs are obviously shaken and she confesses, “You’re so right. I’d never made that connection before.”

This extraordinary podcast is something you’ll want to download right here and copy onto CDs for your “progressive” friends and family. It’s a revelation. And I’ll look forward to seeing how some of Naomi Wolf’s “light bulb” moments during this interview are reflected in her future interviews and writings.

This Friday, fly the Gadsden flag

A piece of mine from six years ago, somehow still appropriate:

"In our town, hundreds of us traditionally lug our picnic hampers, wineglasses, and illegal fireworks to the beach on Independence Day. What we call the Big Stuff, the "official," often disappointing show sanctioned by the city fathers, launches from the pier about 9:00 p.m. An hour earlier, the prohibited pyrotechnics — you might call it the People’s Stuff — begin lighting up the sky spectacularly along the water’s edge for a couple of miles south.

"Not too surprising, the beach is always festooned with U.S. flags fluttering beside the bonfires and barbecues. This year, I expect I’ll see more of them than ever.

"But my little party won’t fly Old Glory this summer. Instead, in response to the political profit Bush, Ashcroft, Daschle, and the rest of our masters now reap from last September, we’ll hoist my polyester Gadsden flag, named for its designer, 'the Sam Adams of South Carolina,' radical-liberal Son of Liberty Christopher Gadsden. What better time than this July 4th – while FBI sentinels comb library records for the reading patterns of 'suspicious' patrons – to let the old rattlesnake banner snap loudly at our beach site?"

Read the entire article here.

Saul Alinsky's class struggle analysis

[Continuing my reflections on Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals]

Saul Alinsky’s approach to class conflict analysis was simple, which is not a bad thing at all. He wrote:

“On top are the Haves with power, money, food, security, and luxury. They suffocate in their surpluses while the Have-Nots starve. Numerically the Haves have always been the fewest. The Haves want to keep things as they are and are opposed to change. Thermopolitically they are cold and determined to freeze the status quo.

“On the bottom are the world’s Have-Nots. On the world scene they are by far the greatest in numbers. They are chained together by the common misery of poverty, rotten housing, disease, ignorance, political impotence, and despair; when they are employed their jobs pay the least and they are deprived in all areas basic to human growth. Caged by color, physical or political, they are barred from an opportunity to represent themselves in the politics of life. The Haves want to keep; the Have-Nots want to get. Thermopolitically they are a mass of cold ashes of resignation and fatalism, but inside there are glowing embers of hope which can be fanned by the building of means of obtaining power. Once the fever begins the flame will follow. They have nowhere to go but up. …

“Between the Haves and Have-Nots are the Have-a-Little, Want Mores — the middle class. Torn between upholding the status quo to protect the little they have, yet wanting change so they can get more, they become split personalities. … They insist on a minimum of three aces before playing a hand in the poker game of revolution. Thermopolitically they are tepid and rooted in inertia. Today in Western society and particularly in the United States they comprise the majority of our population.”

I appreciate the simplicity of Alinsky’s class theory. It paints a valid picture of the struggle. But it fails to acknowledge the role of the State, and for that reason, it’s incomplete. The agorist (radical Rothbardian, radical market) approach to class theory recognizes Alinsky’s Haves, Have-Nots, and Have-a-Little, Want Mores, but adds the overarching shadow of the oppressive, managerial State to pull the class war into tighter focus.

Even more simply than Alinsky, agorist class theory draws a sharp line between just two principal classes: a parasitic ruling class (which gains by the existence of the State) and a productive class (which loses by the existence of the State). But unlike Alinsky, it also concedes that people are complex and often confused, so it applies a graduated spectrum to measure a person’s (or group’s) actions as predominantly statist or agorist. While Alinsky divided the world into near-Randian bad guys (Haves), good guys (Have-Nots), and wishy-washy masses (Have-a-Little, Want Mores), agorists allow for greater shades of difference in the class struggle without compromising principles.

I’ll continue to evaluate Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals as a guide for libertarian revolution in the coming weeks. In the meantime, for further expansion on agorist class theory, go here.

Remember, remember...

Saul Alinsky's "ideology of change"

[Continuing my reflections on Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals]

When the late Saul Alinsky wrote Rules for Radicals in 1971, most existing handbooks for revolution were largely bogged down in communist rhetoric. And Alinsky admirably committed his book to “splitting this political atom, separating this exclusive identification of communism with revolution.” But in doing so, I think he made a mistake in dismissing ideology altogether.

“An organizer working for and in an open society is in an ideological dilemma,” Alinsky wrote. “[H]e does not have a fixed truth — truth to him is relative and changing; everything to him is relative and changing. He is a political relativist.” Alinsky’s “free-society organizer” is “loose, resilient, fluid, and on the move in a society which is itself in a state of constant change.” Anticipating the likely charge that such an activist is “rudderless,” Alinsky explained that the effective revolutionary has only one conviction — “a belief that if people have the power to act, in the long run they will, most of the time, reach the right decisions.” But without guiding principles or goals of any sort, how do you know when “right decisions” have been made? Alinsky doesn’t really address this.

Likewise, by embracing a wishy-washy, directionless “ideology of change,” Alinsky had no use for political consistency. After all, how can you be consistent when your only “good” is change for the sake of change? “In the politics of human life,” Alinsky wrote, “consistency is not a virtue. To be consistent means, according to the Oxford Universal Dictionary, ‘standing still or not moving.’ Men must change with the times or die.” In other words, keep moving, keep changing, and maybe, just maybe, you’ll eventually fall into something that works. But in Alinsky’s world, even if you finally create a workable, free society, you’ve got to keep moving and changing anyway. If you don’t, like a shark, you’ll die.

I think Saul Alinsky’s “ideology of change” is nonsense. In fact, I’m not sure he really believed it. More likely, he leaned on it to make Rules for Radicals acceptable to the broadest range of activists. But even with the book’s philosophical problems, there’s still much of value in it. I’ll have further thoughts to share in the next week.

Happy Anarcho-Halloween!

Rules for Radicals

“Libertarianism is clearly the most, perhaps the only truly radical movement in America,” wrote the great Karl Hess almost 40 years ago [The Libertarian Forum, June 16, 1969]. “It grasps the problems of society by the roots. It is not reformist in any sense. It is revolutionary in every sense.”

Unfortunately, outside of Samuel Edward Konkin III’s New Libertarian Manifesto (1980), very little appropriate literature on revolutionary strategy is available to radical Left Libertarians who’ve grown beyond the basic “why to” to the inevitable “how to” stage. Most guides to revolution focus on seizing power, not diminishing it. And most are written from an explicitly communist point of view. Even left-collectivist organizer Saul Alinsky recognized this in 1971:

“The Have-Nots of the world, swept up in their present upheavals and desperately seeking revolutionary writings, can find such literature only from the communists, both red and yellow. Here they can read about tactics, maneuvers, strategy and principles of action in the making of revolutions. Since in this literature all ideas are imbedded in the language of communism, revolution appears synonymous with communism. … We have permitted a suicidal situation to unfold wherein revolution and communism have become one.”

To set right the situation, Alinsky wrote Rules for Radicals, “a revolutionary handbook not cast in a communist or capitalist mold, but as a manual for the Have-Nots of the world regardless of the color of their skins or their politics.” There is no doubt when reading Alinsky that he was willing to lean on government when he believed it necessary. He was by no means an anarchist. But Rules for Radicals remains, after 36 years, the closest thing we have to what might be called a “generic” tract on revolutionary “how to.” And for that reason, I intend to reflect here on some of its contents over the next few days.