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Title: Vulgar Liberalism Watch
Author: Kevin Carson
Date: December 11, 2006
Language: en
Topics: liberalism, libertarianism
Source: Retrieved on 4th September 2021 from https://mutualist.blogspot.com/2006/12/vulgar-liberalism-new-class-and-publik.html

Kevin Carson

Vulgar Liberalism Watch

Part I

If you follow the mainstream Democratic blogosphere, you know that any

discussion of cooperation with libertarians will evoke the inevitable

anti-libertarian slurs from some quarters. As Wilson says,

every time... somebody says something about reaching out to

libertarians, then “Libertarianism” itself is put on trial.

The problem is, the people who presume to put it on trial are usually

idiots, who know as little about the history of libertarianism as they

do about the history of anything else.

Case in point: Logan Ferree, in a thoughtful post in his Daily Kos

diary, described the vulgar liberal stereotype of libertarianism:

White men who are opposed to taxes, have read Ayn Rand one too many

times (although once might be too many times) and like their guns and

the Confederacy a lot.

And that’s a pretty cartoonish, not to say stupid, view for a

“reality-based” movement that prides itself on its grasp of the

irreducible complexity of reality and derides its enemies for

black-and-white thinking.

...accepting this characterchure is like believing the description of

liberals at Free Republic. Intelligent, rational liberals like ourselves

can do better than that.

Can? Maybe. And some do--but all too many do not. The vulgar liberal

caricature of libertarianism is, as Logan suggests, an almost exact

mirror image of the know-nothingism at Free Republic. As Archie Bunker

said, “People who live in communes are commune-ists!” And for the vulgar

liberal, likewise, “Libertarians are just pot-smoking Republicans.”

Ferree cites Battlepanda’s recent post, “Two Flavors of Libertarianism,”

as an example of a liberal willing to acknowledge the complexity of the

real libertarian movement. Sure, the Catoids and pot-smoking Republicans

are out there. They’re the advocates of what I call “vulgar

libertarianism”: a crude pro-corporate apologetic barely disguised

behind bogus “free market” principles. But there’s another flavor of

libertarianism:

There is Free Market Anti-Capitalism and a Blogosphere of the

Libertarian Left. There are libertarians that criticize big business and

criticize the role that big government plays in creating big business.

There’s no shame in being unaware of this current of libertarianism.

What is shameful, though, is not only being ignorant, but being proud of

one’s ignorance--indeed, desperately clinging to one’s ignorance with

the fervency of bigots everywhere.

Despite Ferree’s good efforts, the ignorance in some cases was

invincible. Worse yet, some of it went beyond the point of sincere

ignorance, and instead became evidence of bad faith. Wilson sums up,

quite well, all too many of the ensuing comments on Ferree’s post:

But as the comments to Logan’s post indicate, just saying the word

“libertarian” gets some people riled up. Libertarians are greedy

bastards, end of story. Some had the attitude of, “A LIBERTARIAN is

voting for us? We don’t want that!”

The worst of a bad lot was philgoblue, who was apparently channelling

the idiot I debated earlier at Progressive Review.

Libertarians would also be against: Social Security The Minimum Wage

Union Organizing Public Schools etc, etc... Moving in that direction is

the very LAST thing Democrats should do.

When some libertarians attempted to explain their principled opposition

to coercive taxation in a thoughtful way, or to point out the

shortcomings of government-provided schools and roads, philgoblue’s

witty rejoinder was “Dumbfuck,” and

because of some problems, you’re for not building roads, levees and

school?

Dumbass.

Logan Ferree, perhaps acting on the misapprehension that philgoblue’s

ignorance was genuine or that he was arguing in good faith, tried to

explain the left-libertarian position:

A libertarian would argue that if you removed all of the regulations and

government programs that aid the rich and the wealthy, the little guy

wouldn’t need Social Security, the Minimum Wage, or Public Schools.

However you’re dead wrong that they’d be opposed to union organizing.

I’ll make you a deal. Get the Democrats to oppose government policies

that benefit the rich and the wealthy. We do away with all of the

programs that create an uneven playing field in favor of those at the

top.

Libertarians will vote for Democrats because they’d be the only party

pushing for reducing the size of government. After we’ve done everything

we agree on, we can agree to disagree and start fighting again.

The result was what usually follows when one casts pearls before swine:

You’re An Absolute Fool.

Without the protection of the collective, the wealthy and ruthless would

eat 99% of us for breakfast. See most of world history and many current

Third World nations.

Ferree, finally beginning to realize just what kind of utter jackass he

was dealing with, responded:

You’re an absolute idiot.

Without the power and authority of the state, the wealthy and the

ruthless would have no way of maintaining their control over the

remaining 99% of us. See most of world history and many current Third

World nations. In most of the developing world it’s the state, with the

support of institutions like the IMF and World Bank, that is nothing

more than the servant of multinational corporations.

Wasted breath, though. People like philgoblue are so emotionally

dependent on their Art Schlesinger myth about the anti-plutocratic

motivation of big government, he might as well have been speaking

Esperanto. You can take people like philgoblue and rub their noses in

the real history of corporate liberalism, and the role of big business

in setting the Progressive and New Deal agendas, and they’ll just go

right back to repeating their historical mythology without missing a

beat.

Eugene, considerably more civil than philgoblue, repeated the assertion

about anti-unionism, and added that

the “little guy” needs all those programs not because of government aid

to corporations, but because of the nature of capitalism itself. Unless

you’re looking to abolish capitalism, you’ll never be free of the need

for a minimum wage or social insurance.

The “nature of capitalism itself,” as it actually exists, is statist. We

on the libertarian left disagree among ourselves on terminology,

especially in regard to the C-word. Like many individualist anarchists

past and present, I like to distinguish “capitalism” from the free

market, and to reserve the former term for a system of privilege in

which the state intervenes in the market on behalf of capitalists. But

semantic differences aside, most of us libertarian lefties consider the

size and power of corporations under “actually existing capitalism,” and

the extreme concentrations of wealth, to be the result of state

intervention in the market on behalf of the rich and powerful. And

unlike Eugene, we’ve actually tried to make a case for our position,

rather than just asserting it.

On the union thing, Eugene was quickly confronted by a self-styled free

market libertarian and card-carrying union member. And by the way, I

know of at least three free market libertarians (Tom Knapp, Brad

Spangler, and myself) who are card-carrying Wobblies. (Here’s Knapp’s

post on the subject, and here are my comments.) [Note--Rad Geek emails:

“Make it four, for what it’s worth; IU 640, Hotel, Restaurant, and

Building Service Workers here. (Which reminds me, I need to get caught

up on my monthly dues....)”]

Eugene, unfortunately, wasn’t having any of this; he regurgitated

philgoblue’s idee fixe:

I am familiar with the variants of libertarianism.... [??!] “Economic

libertarians” are really greedy Republicans who want to couch their

desire for exploitation in some sort of language of rights and freedoms.

And Karmafish added:

Economic libertarian... is more or less the equivalent of Social

Darwinism.

In other words, “Don’t confuse me with the facts. I’m comfortable with

my hate.” It doesn’t matter how many times you produce documented

evidence of free market libertarians who are enemies of corporate power,

or of the fact that most state intervention benefits the plutocracy at

the expense of the working class, or even that such policies were

drafted by the plutocracy. They’ve got their fingers jammed in their

ears as far as they’ll go, shouting “la la la la la” at the top of their

lungs.

It’s so much more comfortable to believe that large, powerful

corporations arose out of a “laissez-faire” economy, and that government

intervention is the remedy rather than the cause of corporate power. And

that the sun shone out of FDR’s ass, that he was some kind of populist

tribune, a “traitor to his class” who put down the “economic royalists.”

Logan Ferree confronted them with the indisputable fact that many

economic libertarians are neither “greedy Republicans” or “social

Darwinists”; and yet they’re still parroting the exact same dogma they

were before, as if he’d never written the post. I repeat: beyond a

certain point, you have to conclude that you’re no longer dealing with

genuine ignorance, but with someone who is knowingly and deliberately

repeating a lie.

The one saving grace in this whole ugly clusterfuck was DawnG, who

wrote:

The problem... with lumping people into categories is that it opens the

door for stereotypes that, whether rational or absurd, don’t fit

everyone labled in that category.

I thank you for giving us some insights into the minds of a libertarian

and hope you don’t take the reactionary and judgemental componants of

our community as representatives of the whole.

Follow-Up

Since I first posted “Vulgar Liberalism Watch,” I found several more

links to excellent posts on libertarian attitudes toward labor unions.

Thanks to freeman, lc, who links to several of them in this post.

Rad Geek links to some good recent stuff by Roderick Long and Brad

Spangler, as well as this great post at No Treason, by frequent

Mutualist Blog commenter Joshua Holmes, on libertarian attitudes toward

labor unions.

What do libertarians have against labour unions? This question struck me

the other day (because it was better than studying for Business

Associations) and I wondered why libertarians have so much bile for

labour unions.

As an example of the genre, he cites George Reisman, one of the more

viscerally vulgar libertarian writers at Mises.Org. Holmes, in

considering the possible reason for so much anti-union bile, includes

these standout comments:

Reason 1: Unions wouldn’t exist in a free market.

Answer 1: Why wouldn’t they? Perhaps they would actually be the dominant

system for large-scale production enterprises. [Indeed; no particular

reason that labor wouldn’t be the firm and hire capital, instead of the

other way around. KC]

Answer 2: Neither would the water department. How much bile do you have

against public water?

Reason 2: Unions get government protection.

Answer: Sure, who doesn’t? The corporations whose products libertarians

enjoy and often lionise enjoy government protection themselves. Direct

subsidies, research grants, uneven tax laws, transport subsidies,

bureaucratic regulation, etc. all contribute to the success of numerous

corporations. Libertarians seem less bothered by this than with

(admittedly unjust) laws such as the prohibition on firing striking

workers.

Reason 3: Unions attempt to raise wages above the market rate.

Answer 1: In other words, unions attempt to get more for workers. So

what?

Answer 2: The market rate, if I understand it, is what buyers and

sellers are willing to bear. There is no objectively correct wage for

labour — it is the result of the interplay of market actors. Workers

will, of course, push for higher wages, just as management will push for

higher profits....

Freeman also links to a post by Spangler in support of the NYC transit

strike.

So there’s a wealth of examples out there, if you look for them, showing

that libertarians are not monolithically anti-union, and some of us free

marketers are even pretty union-friendly. In fact, you don’t even have

to look for them. As I indicated in the original post, I practically

rubbed philgoblue’s and eugene’s noses in such examples; and, gentlemen,

if either of you is reading this, consider your noses duly rubbed once

again.

So what’s the deal? Confronted with such examples, why do so many

liberals continue to cling so desperately to their false stereotype of

libertarianism? The examples they cite of labor exploitation, pollution

and other corporate malfeasance have about as much to do with genuine

free markets as with Pinochet’s Chile. In fact, they seem to be

gleefully taking vulgar libertarian apologists for Pinochet at their

word in their definition of libertarianism. Are they really unaware that

anti-corporate, pro-union free market libertarians exist, and that

there’s a fairly substantial community of us? Surely philgoblue can’t

plead sincere ignorance, after he’s been practically clubbed over the

head with links proving just that. Are they really unaware of the extent

to which corporate power benefits from state intervention, and the

present system deviates from a free market? I fear the truth, rather, is

that they deliberately reject evidence contrary to their crude

black-and-white stereotype, and consciously embrace the most vulgar of

vulgar libertarian ideas on “free markets,” because they don’t want to

know the truth. It would make it a lot harder to hold on to their

instinctive aesthetic revulsion against free markets, and their illusion

that paternalistic, technocratic corporatism exists to benefit “the

little guy.” Simply put, it’s more comfortable to be ignorant, and

they’ll fight to the death to keep from learning anything.

I say it once more: When somebody confronts you with evidence that your

caricature of them is wrong, and you then calmly repeat that caricature

without batting an eye, you’re no longer ignorant. You’re a liar.

Second Follow-up: More on Labor Unions

In “Follow-Up: Vulgar Liberalism Watch,” I pointed to several

libertarian blog posts as evidence that not all free market advocates

share the vulgar libertarians’ employer-skewed scenario of free labor

markets, and that some are even quite union-friendly. Now Ian Bertram of

Panchromatica points me to this:

It may be of course that the ASI is really saying that employers should

be able to hire and fire for any reason whatsoever without those fired

having any remedy. If we accept this for the sake of argument, what

would be the implications of such a radical approach?

First of all we need also to assume a completely free market in labour,

with employers and employees able to seek whatever terms they wish and

to negotiate with each other about those terms. It seems likely that

employers would use agents to carry out the negotiations since the CEO

of a company is not going to want to have to constantly negotiate with

each and every worker directly. These agents would probably be directly

employed since the work would be ongoing, although it presumably could

be outsourced as is frequently the case with accounting services.

On the employee side they would presumably also want to employ someone

to negotiate on their behalf. After all their normal working skills are

unlikely to include the skills needed for negotiations, (although I

suppose some workers could develop those skills over time and with extra

training and may wish to move into this area, thus allowing for

‘upskilling’ in the labour force). Inevitably this will not be by direct

employment, but through some form of agent. Over time, economies of

scale and the workings of the market are likely to lead to these agents

combining into larger units much as other businesses do. Some will be

more successful than others and will therefore gain more business. Some

may diversify into areas other than simple wage negotiations and into

areas such as holidays, pension benefits etc.

Over time, relationships between employers and employees agents would

begin to to stabilise into formal agreements, with contracts setting out

terms of employment for a defined period.

Hang on — this is beginning to sound very familiar! Isn’t this a trade

union?

I would add that, in a free labor market, what’s good for the gander is

good for the goose. If employers are free to refuse or withdraw

employment for any reason or no reason, then workers are likewise free

to withdraw their labor for any or no reason. That means that, in the

absence of a freely negotiated contract, workers are free to engage in

secondary sympathy or boycott strikes. Teamsters and longshoremen are

free to refuse to handle scab cargo. The Railway Labor Relations Act and

Taft-Hartley are out the window.

The great CIO organizing strikes of the early ‘30s, remember, were won

before the Wagner Act passed. They were won by non-government-certified

unions, without any union-shop contract clause to help them. The union

membership was created, in other words, by the very act of striking.

Paid union membership in a plant might be just a few percent, until a

flying squadron announced a walkout--at which the entire labor force

joined by voting with its feet. I suggest it might actually be easier to

organize disgruntled workers by such means, in hot blood, than to get

them to jump in cold blood through all the hoops of the NLRB

certification process.

And those early industrial union victories were won by strategic

leadership planning strikes the way a general staff plans a military

campaign. The successful strikes involved multiple echelons of defense,

with strikes at every stage in the production process. In some cases,

the support of transport workers turned them into regional general

strikes. The whole body of labor legislation, with Taft-Hartley and the

various transport labor relations acts at its heart, was created to

outlaw just such a successful strategy. The object of corporate liberal

legislation was to domesticate the labor revolution of the early ‘30s,

and to place the rank-and-file under the firm supervision of union

bureaucrats at the local plant level.

As Ian said, it was the employers who wanted to bring contract and

predictability into the process. My guess is that, without Taft-Hartley

and Wagner, they might well again be begging for the kind of stability

that a union contract provides. As I recall, one of the reasons that

Gerard Swope and like-minded employers favored industrial unionism in

the ‘30s was precisely that they were so much easier to deal with than a

whole gaggle of craft unions, any one of which could disrupt production

unpredictably. In other words, the industrial union could potentially

solve the same problem that earlier attempts at company unions were

intended to solve. The leadership of an industrial union, if given the

government-backed power to suppress wildcats and enforce contracts, was

a handy tool for labor discipline.

I’ll take it one step further. I suspect that labor relations are

potentially a case of asymmetric warfare. That is, in a situation of

labor war, the cost and risk to the workers of circumventing management

surveillance and control will be a fraction of the cost to the employer

of implementing it. It’s a lot like the old offensive-defensive arms

race in the days of ballistic missile defense, when offensive

counter-measures were a lot cheaper than the defenses.

For example, if you think about it, you can probably think of a hundred

ways to raise costs and reduce effiency on your job, with virtually no

chance of getting caught. Many of them, like working to rule, are

nothing more than glorified passive-aggression.

Another example: the authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto argue that

unauthorized communication between workers and customers is, contrary to

the assumptions of clueless management, the best promotional tool a

company can have. What they neglected to mention is that, when workers

are disgruntled, telling customers the truth about the company is the

best way to break it. In the absence of unions, the workers’ only real

bargaining leverage may be the customer’s favorable image of the

company. For the customer to see the worker as his ally and the company

management as their common enemy is the bosses’ worst nightmare. “Open

mouth sabotage” is just another form of the “swarming” that so alarmed

David Ronfeldt et al in their work on “netwar.” In this age of networked

activism, it’s possible for disgruntled employees, through a campaign of

emails, letters, phone calls, discussion board posts, and anonymous

websites, to totally overwhelm their employers with negative publicity.

Lane Kirkland once suggested, only half-heartedly, that he was tempted

to seek a repeal of all labor legislation since Norris-LaGuardia (which

simply took federal militias and courts out of labor disputes). He

speculated that, if labor and management were allowed fight it out with

all the weapons at their disposal in a free market, labor would do

better than under the present regime. I suspect he was right. After all,

as the slogan goes, all we have to do is fold our arms, and we can bring

their world to a stop.

Part II

Sometimes the biggest obstacle libertarians face in communicating with

“progressive” liberals is libertarians: i.e. the common liberal

impression, often justified, that libertarians are just pot-smoking

Republicans who see corporate welfare queens as the victimized party in

modern society. As I’ve said before,

in my list of statist evils, the guys who are breaking legs rank

considerably higher than the ones handing out government crutches. All

too many libertarians could care less about the statism that causes the

problems of income disparity, but go ballistic over the statism intended

to alleviate it. It’s another example of the general rule that statism

that helps the rich is kinda sorta bad, maybe, I guess, but statism that

helps the poor is flaming red ruin on wheels.

But sometimes the obstacle is the utter tenacity with which liberals

themselves hold on to their own misconceptions: e.g., that the state is

the only possible means of coordinating cooperative behavior between

human beings, and that the only alternative is a Hobbesian free-for-all.

This was illustrated by an interesting open thread at John Quiggin’s

blog. It was quickly taken over by a discussion of the benefits of

cooperative behavior in game theory.

The beginnings were quite promising. Meika started with a link to a

story about Timothy Killingback’s work.

Under the typical public goods game, an experimenter gives four players

a pot of money. Each player can invest all or some of the money into a

common pool. The experimenter then collects money thrown into the pool,

doubles it and divides it amongst the players. The outcome: If every

player invests all the money, every player wins big. If every player

cheats by investing a just few dollars, every player reaps a small

dividend. But if a cooperator squares off against a cheater – with the

altruist investing more than the swindler – the swindler always gets the

bigger payoff. Cheating, in short, is a winning survival strategy.

Under the new model, the team introduced population dynamics into the

public goods game.

Players were broken into groups and played with other members of their

group. Each player then reproduced in proportion to the payoff they

received from playing the game, passing their cooperator or cheater

strategy on to their offspring. After reproduction, random mutations

occurred, changing how much an individual invests. Finally, players

randomly dispersed to other groups, bringing their investment strategies

with them. The result was an ever-changing cast of characters creating

groups of various sizes.

After running the model through 100,000 generations, the results were

striking. Cooperators not only survived, they thrived and maintained

their numbers over time. The key is group size.

Terje supplemented this with a recommendation of Richard Dawkins’ The

Selfish Gene for its “insights in the area of altruism arising from

systems that are seemingly driven by payoffs for selfish action.” He

added:

To a large extent it is why I think the use of state based coersion to

supposedly enforce and ensure altruism and co-operative behaviour is

mostly flawed and unnecessary. Most of what the state currently does in

the name of altruism (ie the welfare state) can be better achieved in

the long term by individual acts of charity, free market dynamics and

civil society.

This is the point at which Paul Kelly, our exemplary vulgar liberal,

jumped in:

Regarding welfare etc, quite often those individuals decide it is more

efficient and rational to do these things collectively, through a

central authority. It makes economic sense.

Frequent Mutualist Blog commenter P.M. Lawrence confronted him on the

issue:

Actually, no, PK, it doesn’t make economic sense — unless of course the

range of options has been restricted beforehand. Guess what, in our time

and place it has been restricted like that.

Lawrence was kind enough to direct Kelley to my blog for some relevant

material. Kelly’s response:

So everyone should wander around guessing who is the most needy and give

them money? Just pick the skinniest person? Or should research be done?

And they say the government schools aren’t teaching critical thinking

skills! Lawrence’s rejoinder:

I’m sorry PK, was there some reason you didn’t find the material I

referred you to at Kevin Carson’s site, or is it just that you think I

should spoonfeed things?

Surely you aren’t under the impression that (a) the problems would be as

great as they are now if only efforts were made to engineer them out

(rather than provide governmental palliative care for them), and (b)

that only a government can ever handle problems?

Fatfingers attempted to interpret Kelly’s comments in a charitable light

(i.e., finding some way of reading them as something other than total

idiocy)....

PM, don’t confuse collectivism for government. PK talks about

collectives, and you assume government. While I personally believe

government will inevitably organically arise from collectives, for the

purposes of thought experiments, stick with the given parameters.

...but Kelly wasn’t having any of it:

You’re right PM, I’m not going to read a long economic paper explaining

why it’s better for everyone to walk around making their own individual

decisions. I would prefer a spoonfeeding please.

Lawrence came back:

Fatfingers, I did not “assume” that PK was talking about governments. He

was explicitly talking about central authority, not merely some form of

co-operative or collective action. That’s what a government is. If you

are obliged to submit to it, it qualifies under the walks like a duck

test.

Finally, tipped off by Lawrence to the interesting thread, I stopped by

and left a comment:

As P.M. Lawrence said, it is Paul Kelley who assumes that cooperative

effort can only be organized through government, and PML who is trying

to get it into PK’s head that cooperative (or collective) effort can be

achieved by voluntary means.

The fact that PK automatically dismisses any suggestion that voluntary

cooperation is possible as a call for “everyone [to] wander around

guessing who is the most needy and give them money,” suggests to me that

PK’s problem goes beyond mere historical illiteracy. The underlying

problem is far more basic: an inability (or unwillingness) to recognize

a non sequitur in his own argument. If he is unable to acknowledge a

fundamental logical flaw in his argument, all the empirical evidence in

the world won’t do him any good.

But I’m more than willing to accept a person’s admission that he’s too

lazy to follow a simple link that directly concerns the validity of a

general assertion he made, or that he’s uninterested in any evidence as

to whether his opinion is correct–just so long as he’s willing to admit

that his opinion is, as a result, absolutely worthless.

For anyone else who is interested, though, there is a wealth of

historical material on associations for mutual aid among the working

class before the rise of the welfare state. Kropotkin’s last two

chapters on the recent history of Europe in Mutual Aid are a good

starting point.

E.P. Thompson has a great deal of good information on sick benefit

societies, burial societies, and other mutuals in The Making of the

English Working Class.

Colin Ward’s Anarchy in Action contains a section on the “welfare road

we failed to take.”

Dr. Bob James is one of the best historians of working class friendly

societies in the 18^(th) and 19^(th) centuries. Many of his articles can

be found at the “Radical Tradition” site.

Finally, Section J.5.16 of An Anachist FAQ has an amazing amount of

material on such self-organization, including extended block quotes and

many, many references.

The kinds of voluntary mutual aid described by these writers were first

suppressed by the capitalists (because they were seen as potential

breeding grounds for subversion, and a possible basis for mutual

economic support during strikes), and later crowded out or suppressed by

regulation when the New Class decided that working class

self-organization was atavistic and should be supplanted by the

benevolent supervision of “qualified professionals.” David Beito’s From

Mutual Aid to the Welfare State is a history, in large part, of the

latter phenomenon, in addition to a good account of mutual aid

organizations themselves.