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Title: The Left-Rothbardians Author: Kevin Carson Date: April 2008 Language: en Topics: Murray Rothbard, the market, Left Libertarianism, c4ss Source: Retrieved on 1st September 2021 from https://c4ss.org/content/12938][c4ss.org]] and [[https://c4ss.org/content/13213 Notes: This article was originally published on the blog The Art of the Possible.
In “Libertarianism: What’s Going Right,” I mentioned Left-Rothbardianism
as one possible basis for finding areas of agreement between market
libertarians and the Left. I’d like to go into that in more depth now.
In 2004, I was extremely heartened by the “Era of Good Feelings” between
the Libertarian Party’s Michael Badnarik and the Green Party’s David
Cobb. It gave me some hope for the revival of an even more hopeful
project of some 30-odd years before.
During the late 1960s, Murray Rothbard attempted a strategic alliance of
the “isolationist” and comparatively anti-statist Old Right with the New
Left. That period is the subject of an article by John Payne, “
Rothbard’s Time on the Left.” Payne writes:
By the early 1960s, Rothbard saw the New Right, exemplified by National
Review, as perpetually wedded to the Cold War, which would quickly turn
exponentially hotter in Vietnam, and the state interventions that
accompanied it, so he set out looking for new allies. In the New Left,
Rothbard found a group of scholars who opposed the Cold War and
political centralization, and possessed a mass following with high
growth potential. For this opportunity, Rothbard was willing to set
economics somewhat to the side and settle on common ground, and, while
his cooperation with the New Left never altered or caused him to hide
any of his foundational beliefs, Rothbard’s rhetoric shifted distinctly
leftward during this period.
I would add one qualification, concerning what Payne said about Rothbard
setting economics to the side. In fact, as we will see below, Rothbard
shared some common economic ground with the New Left. At his leftmost
position, Rothbard’s Austrian critique of corporate-state capitalism was
quite radical.
In the late ’50s, according to Payne’s account, Rothbard found himself
at odds with W.F. Buckley and Frank Meyer at the National Review. His
submissions on foreign policy, in a period when he saw the “war-peace
question” as key to the libertarian agenda and referred to the “Verdamte
cold war,” were rejected. Finally, in 1961, Meyer publicly read him out
of the “conservative movement” (or at least out of National Review’s
fusionism).
From the early ’60s on, Rothbard found himself increasingly attracted to
the left-wing revisionist critique of 20^(th) century state capitalism
(or what the New Left called “corporate liberalism“). He was especially
struck by the thesis of Gabriel Kolko’s book The Triumph of
Conservatism, which came out in 1963.
Rothbard’s Misesian critique of the corporate state, which shared so
much common ground with the New Left, was a considerable departure from
Mises’ right-wing political affinities. For Mises, state interventionism
was motivated almost entirely by anti-capitalist sentiment: what Nixon
would have called the “filthy f**king hippies,” or Eric Cartman would
dismiss as “a bunch of G*ddamn tree-hugging hippie crap.”
Rothbard, on the other hand, applied Austrian principles largely from
the standpoint of Kolko’s critique, which saw state interventionism as
motivated mainly by the desire of corporate capitalists themselves to
protect their profits from the destructive force of market competition.
Kolko directly contradicted the orthodox historical account of the
regulatory state, as exemplified by the liberal Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
Specificially, he denied that the Progressive Era legislative agenda was
formulated primarily as a populist restraint on big business, or that
government had intervened in the economy in the 20^(th) century as a
“countervailing force” against big business. Rather, the regulatory
state was an attempt by big business to achieve, acting directly though
the state, what it had been unable to achieve through voluntary
combinations and trusts carried out entirely in the private sector: the
cartelization of the economy, and the creation of stable oligopoly
markets characterized by administered pricing. Payne quotes this summary
statement from Kolko’s book:
Despite the large number of mergers, and the growth in the absolute size
of many corporations, the dominant tendency in the American economy at
the beginning of this [the twentieth] century was toward growing
competition. Competition was unacceptable to many key business and
financial interests.... As new competitors sprang up, and as economic
power was diffused throughout an expanding nation, it became apparent to
many important businessmen that only the national government could
rationalize the economy. Although specific conditions varied from
industry to industry, internal problems that could be solved only by
political means were the common denominator in those industries whose
leaders advocated greater federal regulation. Ironically, contrary to
the consensus of historians, it was not the existence of monopoly that
caused the federal government to intervene in the economy, but the lack
of it.
The purpose of state action was, first of all, to help overbuilt
industry simultaneously to operate at full capacity and to dispose of
the surplus product it couldn’t sell at cartel prices. Second, as an
alternative, it was to enable cartelized industry to operate with high
costs and idle capacity and still remain profitable by selling its
product at cost-plus markup through monopoly pricing. (This might as
well have been the mission statement of FDR’s National Industrial
Recovery Administration, by the way.)
This initial perception by Rothbard, that New Left revisionist
historiography was useful for a free market critique of twentieth
century corporate capitalism, led to a considerable amount of
cooperation with New Left scholars.
Rothbard participated in Studies on the Left, a project of New Left
historians James Weinstein and William Appleman Williams. It was
Weinstein, in The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State, who coined the
term “corporate liberalism.” And Williams devised the thesis of “Open
Door Imperialism” to describe American foreign policy. Some of
Rothbard’s contributions to Studies on the Left were included in a
paperback collection of articles resulting from the group’s efforts
through 1967: For a New America.
Rothbard retained friendly ties to the scholarly New Left long after his
disillusionment with the radical student movement. His second venture in
collaborative scholarship (at the comparatively late date of 1972) was A
New History of Leviathan, a collection of critical essays on New Deal
corporatism coedited by Rothbard and the libertarian socialist Ronald
Radosh.
He contributed one article (“Confessions of a Right-Wing Liberal“), in
1968, to Ramparts. (Both David Horowitz and Ronald Radosh, who both
later became two of the most odious members of a neoconservative
movement characterized by its odiousness, were associated with this
leading periodical of the New Left.)
Rothbard founded the journal Left and Right in 1965 as a vehicle for
this academically oriented Left-Right alliance. If you’re at all
interested in this kind of things, browsing the archives there will well
repay your effort.
From his initial scholarly collaboration with New Left academics,
Rothbard moved on to attempt a mass movement in alliance with student
radicals.
The high point of this alliance occurred in 1969. The radical
libertarian/anarchist caucus of the Young Americans for Freedom walked
out of the YAF convention in St. Louis (mainly over the Vietnam War and
the draft). The roots of the contemporary libertarian movement, and most
of its founding personnel, can be traced to this act of secession. Not
long afterwards, Rothbard (along with Karl Hess, a former Goldwater
speechwriter who coined the phrase “extremism in defense of liberty,”
and subsequently moved considerably to the left) organized a mass
meeting of the YAF’s libertarian dissidents with similar libertarian
socialist secessionists from the SDS. During that event, Hess addressed
a combined audience of YAF and SDS insurgents wearing combat fatigues
and a Wobbly pin.
Rothbard’s journal The Libertarian Forum was founded in 1969, at a time
when Rothbard was becoming increasingly disenchanted with the New Left,
and the New Left itself (and specifically the SDS, under onslaught from
the Maoist Kool-Aid drinkers in Progressive Labor and the nihilist
nutcases in the Weather Underground) was disintegrating. Although
Rothbard could get along pretty well with New Left academics, he
apparently suffered considerable culture shock in 1969 at finding out
just how radical the student radicals really were (their blanket
denunciations of academic economists and the wearing of neckties were a
particular affront to Rothbard, who was guilty on both counts).
Nevertheless the first volume of Libertarian Forum was packed with heady
commentary on the New Left alliance.
Take, for example, this quote from the May 1, 1969 issue:
[The students] see that, apart from other tie-ins, corporations have
been using the government schools and colleges as institutions that
train their future workers and executives at the expense of others, i.e.
the taxpayers. This is but one way that our corporate state uses the
coercive taxing power either to accumulate corporate capital or to lower
corporate costs. Whatever that process may be called, it is not “free
enterprise,” except in the most ironic sense.
Consider also this statement by Hess:
The truth… is that libertarianism wants to advance principles of
property but that it in no way wishes to defend, willy nilly, all
property which now is called private.
Much of that property is stolen. Much is of dubious title. All of it is
deeply intertwined with an immoral, coercive state system which has
condoned, built on, and profited from slavery; has expanded through and
exploited a brutal and aggressive imperial and colonial foreign policy,
and continues to hold the people in a roughly serf-master relationship
to political-economic power concentrations.
Libertarians are concerned, first and foremost, with that most valuable
of properties, the life of each individual…. Property rights pertaining
to material objects are seen by libertarians as stemming from and…
secondary to the right to own, direct, and enjoy one’s own life and
those appurtenances thereto which may be acquired without coercion….
This is a far cry from sharing common ground with those who want to
create a society in which super-capitalists are free to amass vast
holdings and who say that that is ultimately the most important purpose
of freedom….
Libertarianism is a people’s movement and a liberation movement. It
seeks the sort of open, non-coercive society in which the people, the
living, free, distinct people may voluntarily associate, dis-associate,
and, as they see fit, participate in the decisions affecting their
lives…. It means people free collectively to organize the resources of
their immediate community or individualistically to organize them; it
means the freedom to have a community-based and supported judiciary
where wanted, none where not, or private arbitration services where that
is seen as most desirable. The same with police. The same with schools,
hospitals, factories, farms, laboratories, parks, and pensions. Liberty
means the right to shape your own institutions. It opposes the right of
those institutions to shape you simply because of accreted power or
gerontological status.
In another article in the same issue, “Confiscation and the Homestead
Principle,” Rothbard proposed a model of privatization far removed from
the kind of corporate looting of state assets you commonly find
advocated in mainstream libertarian venues these days.
What most people ordinarily identify as the stereotypical “libertarian”
privatization proposal, unfortunately, goes something like this: sell it
to a giant corporation on terms that are most advantageous to the
corporation. Rothbard proposed, instead, was to treat state property as
unowned, and allowing it to be homesteaded by those actually occupying
it and mixing their labor with it. This would mean transforming
government utilities, schools and other services into consumer
cooperatives and placing them under the direct control of their present
clientele. It would mean handing over state industry to workers’
syndicates and transforming it into worker-owned cooperatives.
But if this was the appropriate way of dealing with state property,
Rothbard asked, then what about nominally private industry which is in
fact a branch of the state? That is, what about “private” industry that
gets the majority of its profits from taxpayer subsidies?
But if Columbia University, what of General Dynamics? What of the myriad
of corporations which are integral parts of the military-industrial
complex, which not only get over half or sometimes virtually all their
revenue from the government but also participate in mass murder? What
are their credentials to “private” property? Surely less than zero. As
eager lobbyists for these contracts and subsidies, as co-founders of the
garrison stare, they deserve confiscation and reversion of their
property to the genuine private sector as rapidly as possible. To say
that their “private” property must be respected is to say that the
property stolen by the horsethief and the murderer must be “respected.”
Such factories should be taken over by “homesteading workers,” he said.
But he went further, and suggested that a libertarian movement, having
captured the commanding heights of the state and proceeding to dismantle
the apparatus of state capitalism, might actually nationalize such
state-subsidized industry as the immediate prelude to handing it over to
the workers. He went so far as to say that even if a non-libertarian
regime nationalized state capitalist industry with the intention of
hanging onto it, it wasn’t anything for libertarians to get particularly
bent out of shape about. The subsidized industry was no more the “good
guys,” and no less a part of the state, as the formal state apparatus
itself. “…[I]t would only mean that one gang of thieves–the
government–would be confiscating property from another previously
cooperating gang, the corporation that has lived off the government.”
I’d go Rothbard one further. Why is the criterion for de facto
government status the amount of profits directly subsidized from state
revenue? What about corporations that function within a web of state
regulatory protections, and artificial property rights like Bill Gates’
“intellectual property,” without which they couldn’t operate in black
ink for a single day. Anyone who’s read much of my work for any length
of time knows that I consider the entire Fortune 500 a pretty good proxy
for such de facto branches of the state. As I already argued in an
earlier post, the largest corporations are so intertwined with the state
that the very distinction between “public” and “private” becomes
meaningless.
To reinforce that impression, bear in mind that (as Hess’s remarks above
on property suggest) Rothbard considered all land titles not traceable
to a legitimate act of appropriation by human labor to be utterly null
and void. That meant that titles to vacant and unimproved land were
void, and all such land in the United States should be open to immediate
homesteading. It meant all the real estate in Southern California
currently held as real estate investments by the railroads, pursuant to
the land grants of the nineteenth century, should immediately become the
absolute freehold of those currently making rent or mortgage payments on
it. It meant that all the land in the Third World currently “owned” by
quasi-feudal landed oligarchies should immediately become the property
of the peasants working it; and land currently being used by corporate
agribusiness and other cash crop operations, in collusion with those
same landlords, should be returned to the peasants who were evicted from
it.
In short, Rothbard didn’t exactly fit the “pot-smoking Republican”
stereotype you see the commenters over at Kos regurgitating. This is
getting way, way long. I originally intended to fit all the
Left-Rothbardian material into one post. But I’ll save the material on
Rothbard’s left-libertarian successors (Sam Konkin, Joseph Stromberg,
and the rest) for another post.
This post starts where the first half left off: Rothbard’s disillusion
with (and abandonment of) his New Left alliance. Now I want to look at
some of the people who continued the left-Rothbardian tradition.
Karl Hess was just getting into his full left-wing swing when Rothbard
gave up the New Left as a lost cause. Even during Rothbard’s most
enthusiastic attempts at collaboration with the Left, Hess was already
to the left of Rothbard. As I mentioned in Part I, at one point he was a
Wobbly. He continued to move leftward into the 1970s, in 1975 writing
the libertarian socialist tinged Dear America.
As the 1970s wore on, his leftism took on more of a “Small is Beautiful”
coloring, with an emphasis on human scale technology and neighborhood
democracy. In this period he wrote the highly recommended book Community
Technology, and coauthored Neighborhood Power with David Morris.
By around 1980 or so, Hess also started drifting back to the right,
although he never went as far in that direction as Rothbard did in his
last years. His autobiography Mostly on the Edge, written after his
shift back to the right, still retained much of the generally
decentralist and anti-bigness spirit of his earlier years.
In considering the career of Samuel Edward Konkin III, I rely among
other things on his own account of the history of the Movement of the
Libertarian Left. If you want the full, complicated history of all the
organizations he built, go to Konkin’s account (along with obits by Jeff
Riggenbach and Phil Osborn) and you’ll get all the organizational
details and humanizing anecdotes you can handle. I’m skipping over a lot
here, because my main focus is on his ideas and the people today who
were influenced by them.
Konkin (aka SEK3), a native Albertan and a social crediter in his callow
youth, was an associate of Rothbard dating back to the days of the YAF
schism (he was a Wisconsin delegate at the St. Louis convention where it
took place). His Movement of the Libertarian Left continued to develop
Rothbard’s thought in the leftward direction that Rothbard himself had
abandoned.
Despite Rothbard’s disillusion with the libertarian-left alliance, the
collaboration of 1969 between YAF and SDS dissidents had a certain
momentum of its own. For example, according to SEK3’s history of the
Movement of the Libertarian Left, Libertarian Alliances formed on a
number of college campuses through the 1970s. The phenomenon was kicked
off in February 1970, when the California Libertarian Alliance organized
a Left-Right Festival of Mind Liberation. Speakers included Karl Hess;
the free market libertarian Robert LeFevre; Carl Oglesby; Dana
Rohrahacher (yeah, him), who was known as the “Johnny Grass-seed” of the
YAF radicals back when he was good for something; and Sam Konkin.
Starting from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libertarian Alliance,
and drawing associates involved with the mushrooming Libertarian
Alliances all over New York and the West Coast, Konkin organized many of
his fellow travellers into a left-Rothbardian movement that took on the
name New Libertarian Alliance in 1974. Konkin created the NLA as an
underground organization, for promoting his stategy of Counter-Economics
and his ideology of Agorism. In 1978, he founded the Movement of the
Libertarian Left as an above-ground counterpart to the NLA. The Agorist
Institute popped up at some point thereafter, if you’re still keeping
track. (I’m not blind to the humor in this mad proliferation of
organizations, believe me – more about which below.)
Konkin’s chief strategic focus, in keeping with his doctrinaire
anti-political stance, was what he called “Counter-Economics” or
“Agorism.” The idea was outlined in Konkin’s New Libertarian Manifesto:
to build a black market counter-economy, and drain resources from the
corporate state nexus, until the free market counter-economy finally
supplanted the state capitalist system altogether.
Konkin’s ideas on counter-economics dovetail to a considerable extent
with the left-wing ideas of dual power and prefigurative politics. I
discussed a counter-economic strategy based on those concepts, from a
libertarian socialist perspective considerably to the left of Konkin’s,
in “Building the Structure of the New Society Within the Shell of the
Old“:
Economic counter-institutions, unfortunately, work within the framework
of a larger corporate capitalist economy. They compete in markets in
which the institutional culture of the dominant firms is top-down and
hierarchical, and are in great danger of absorbing this institutional
culture themselves. That’s why you have a non-profit and cooperative
sector whose management is indistinguishable from its capitalist
counterparts: prestige salaries, middle management featherbedding,
bureaucratic irrationality, and slavish adherence to the latest
motivational/management theory dogma. The problem is exacerbated by a
capitalist financial system, which extends positive reinforcement (in
the form of credit) to firms following an orthodox organizational model
(even when bottom-up organization is far more efficient)….
The solution is to promote as much consolidation as possible within the
counter-economy. We need to get back to the job of “building the
structure of the new society within the shell of the old.” A great deal
of production and consumption already takes place within the social or
gift economy, self-employment, barter, etc. The linkages need to be
increased and strengthened between those involved in consumers’ and
producers’ co-ops, self-employment, LETS systems, home gardening and
other household production, informal barter, etc. What economic
counter-institutions already exist need to start functioning as a
cohesive counter-economy.
Konkin’s other major innovation was his development of libertarian class
theory. The roots of Rothbard’s and Konkin’s class theory lie in the
French thinkers Saint-Simon, Comte, and Dunoyer, and in the radical wing
of English classical liberalism. They identified the ruling class as
those interests that obtained their wealth by acting through the state.
The classic thinker in this tradition was the English free market
radical Thomas Hodgskin, who made the distinction between “natural” and
“artificial” rights of property. The former, he said, followed naturally
from possession and served to secure the individual’s ownership of his
labor product. Artificial property rights, on the other hand, were
creations of the state which enabled the holder to collect tribute from
the product of labor. Holders of artificial property rights included the
great landlords with their feudal rents, the politically connected
mercantile capitalists, and the recipients of assorted other privileges
and immunities.
The ideas of the French positivists and of Hodgskin were taken up in
Franz Oppenheimer’s distinction between “natural appropriation” and
“political appropriation” of the land, and between the “economic means”
and “political means” to wealth. Political appropriation of land was the
chief political means to wealth.
The classical political economists had acknowledged that most people
will enter wage employment only when all the land is appropriated and
they no longer have direct access to self-employment on their own land.
This was a commonplace observation made by Smith, Ricardo, and Malthus.
Oppenheimer’s radical contribution was to observe that although the land
was indeed all appropriated, it had never been naturally appropriated;
it had, rather, been politically appropriated by the great landlords
acting through the state. The great landlords used their artificial
property rights in the land to control access to it and charge tribute
to those working it, and in many cases to hold vast tracts of it out of
use altogether. Only under these circumstances, in which the means of
direct subsistence were made inaccessible to labor, could labor be
forced to sell its services on disadvantageous terms (the British ruling
class literature at the time of the Enclosures was full of frank
admissions that the only way to get people to work hard enough, for a
low enough wage, was to steal their land). Privilege was the political
means to wealth, and the state was the organized political means.
Rothbard made this the centerpiece of his class theory, treating
collusion with the state as the political means to wealth, and the
ruling class as those who attached themselves to the state and used its
subsidies, privileges and special protections as a source of profit.
Rothbard stated these principles, among other places, in “The Anatomy of
the State.”
Konkin took this basic insight and ran with it, applying it in detail to
the concrete conditions of American state capitalism. The ruling class
was not only state functionaries, but the central banks and associated
large financial interests, and the commanding heights of the corporate
economy most closely tied to the statist finance system. Agorism was the
revolutionary movement of those engaged in the economic means,
attempting to take as much economic activity as possible out of the
control of the ruling class. Konkin’s agorist class theory was set forth
in the first chapter of his unfinished work Agorism Contra Marxism. That
chapter is appended to Wally Conger’s excellent Agorist Class Theory,
which itself is based on the chapter and surving scraps of Konkin’s work
in the area. An in-depth class analysis of the financial system and its
industrial satellites, based on the same version of libertarian class
theory, is set forth in an article by Walter Grinder and John Hagel:
“Toward a Theory of State Capitalism.”
As Konkin said, Agorist and Marxist class theories pretty much agree
when it comes to those at the top and bottom of their respective class
systems. “The differences arise as one moves to the middle of the social
pyramid.” The main difference regarding the middle is that Agorist class
theory is a lot closer to the “petty bourgeois producerism” of the
nineteenth century populists. Agorists don’t have any problem with
entrepreneurship or entrepreneurial profit. What they have a problem
with is the rentier classes, deriving absentee incomes from huge
fortunes with the help of the state. Those at the top of the pyramid
generally act through the state to make sure they don’t have to engage
in entrepreneurship. Rather, the state protects them from risk and
competition, and thereby enables them to collect secure long-term rents
(see, for example, here and here – please do!).
In 1999, Konkin founded the LeftLibertarian yahoogroup, the venue
through which I first came into contact with him, his ideas, and his
wide circle of friends. I had several years of stiulating discussion
there that influenced my development to no end. In 2007, three years
after Konkin’s death, the list imploded over a political dispute between
J. Neil Schulman and just about everybody else, and most of the
important figures in Konkin’s circle migrated to the Left-Libertarian2
group. Konkin’s old yahoogroup is pretty much an empty shell, although
Neil Schulman and Kent Hastings stayed with it (and the archives are
well worth digging into). Because of a similar dispute with Neil over
the rights to the name “Movement of the Libertarian Left”, several
members of LeftLibertarian2 collaborated to form a successor
organization, the Alliance of the Libertarian Left. Again, just about
all the leading figures in the old MLL migrated to the ALL and left the
old body as an empty shell owned by Schulman.
I know, I know. I’m the first to acknowledge how comical Konkin’s
alphabet soup of organizations must seem to anyone on the outside. To
beat you to the joke, it’s like one man founded the Judean People’s
Front, the Popular Front of Judea, and all those other “splitter”
organizations at the same time. Sam’s personality reminds me a bit of
Bakunin’s. With his childlike enthusiasm for founding endless
organizations (with cool acronyms, of course) and publications, issuing
name cards, and forming conspiratorial undergounds, it’s hard to keep
track of it all without a score card.
But his ideas deserve to be taken seriously in their own right, and his
work had a serious effect that belies the snicker factor in all the
organizational mitosis described above. His theoretical ideas in the New
Libertarian Manifesto, and in his unfinished work on agorist class
theory, are both monumental contributions to libertarian thought. His
ideas inspired a large circle of prominent libertarians who are
influential in a wide range of organizations and publications today, and
their ripple effects continue to spread outward.
The most important association of Konkin’s left-Rothbardian followers
today is the Alliance of the Libertarian Left. There’s nothing remotely
“Judean People’s Front” or splinterish about it. If anything, it’s a
textbook example of how an affinity group should be organized in an era
of networked politics. It is a large, vibrant community of
left-Rothbardians and other left-wing allies (like me). It’s an umbrella
organization something like an Agorist International.
In a sense, the Alliance of the Libertarian Left is an improvement on
its MLL predecessor. The old MLL was almost entirely made up of Konkin’s
Agorist fellow-thinkers. Although it was descended from Rothbard’s
attempt at a New Left alliance, it included only one side–the market
libertarian side–of the alliance. There weren’t any New Leftists or
libertarian socialists in sight. The closest they came to dialogue with
the genuine left was when some anarcho-commies or Georgists stopped by
the LeftLibertarian list for a while and then moved on. Although the
nucleus of the new ALL is made up of Konkin’s old associates, it
includes a much larger accretion of left-wing movements. Several
Tuckerites and mutualists of my general stripe (who stress the socialist
as much as the market aspect of individualist anarchism), and quite an
assortment of geolibertarians. In addition to the old core of Agorists,
there are a good many small-a agorist fellow-travellers. Chuck Munson
(Chuck0) of Infoshop even has friendly ties with several members of the
ALL. In a sense, the Alliance of the Libertarian Left is exactly the
kind of left-right alliance Rothbard tried and failed to achieve almost
forty years ago.
So despite Sam’s seeming silliness with all his organizations, in the
end he built something important that lasted. He impressed his thought
on a wide range of people, and brought them together, and most of them
are still together and building on his and each other’s. His influence
continues to leaven the broader libertarian movement in ways we may
never fully realize the importance of in our lifetimes.
Just by looking at the links on the Alliance of the Libertarian Left
site, or clicking the movement’s associated blog ring, the Blogosphere
of the Libertarian Left, you can find a wide range of sites hosted by
Konkin’s old fightin’ comrades from the St. Louis days, more recent
disciples of left-Rothbardianism and Counter-economics, and some even
newer left-wing friends like me, who–despite never having considered
ourselves followers of Rothbard or Konkin–have been strongly influenced
by their thought.
Brad Spangler’s site, Agorism.Info, reproduces the NLM along with many
of Konkin’s other pamphlets.
The Agorist Action Alliance (A3) was created by Spangler as an activist
organization for coordinating agorist propaganda and counter-economic
organization.
KoPubCo, a publishing outfit owned by old Konkin associate Victor Koman,
has reprints of much of the MLL’s literature, including reprints of New
Libertarian Notes and Strategy of the Libertarian Left.
The Rothbard-founded scholarly journal, Journal of Libertarian Studies
has since December 2004 had a left-Rothbardian editor, Roderick T. Long.
Another member of the Alliance of the Libertarian Left, Sheldon Richman,
is (sic) editor of Leonard Read’s long-lived periodical The Freeman; he
has in recent years moved its editorial stance in a decidely
left-libertarian direction and been a vocal critic of state capitalism.
Joseph Stromberg – although completely unaffiliated with the Alliance of
the Libertarian Left–is nevertheless something of a Left-Rothbardian
eminence. He has himself rejected as artificial attempts to divide
Rothbard’s career into left- and right-leaning phases. But the division
is quite useful in my opinion, and Stromberg clearly falls into the
left-Rothbardian category when it comes to his analysis of the role of
interests in U.S. foreign and domestic policy.
Probably the two centerpieces of his body of work are:
“The Political Economy of Liberal Corporatism,” and
Beard, W.A. Williams, and the neo-Marxists) of monopoly capital and
imperialism into an Austrian theoretical framework, in “The Role of
State Monopoly Capitalism in the American Empire.” This article I cannot
recommend highly enough.
In addition, it’s worthwhile to browse his archives at LewRockwell.Com
and Antiwar.Com. Although Mises.Org… doesn’t maintain an author archive,
his work can be found by a Google search of their site. Probably his
single greatest work, aside from the two articles mentioned above, is
his lengthy annotated bibliography of revisionist literature on war and
foreign policy: “War, Peace, and the State.”