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If there’s one thing Tom Knapp knows how to do well, it’s stir up a bunch of shit. This is, in fact, laudable on his part. If I may explain…

In a set of recent correspondence, mostly over blog posts and blog comments, but with some of it conducted via email and therefore unavailable for public inspection, Knapp has been providing a great deal of grunt work in clarifying some pernicious misconceptions in the modern libertarian movement about the natures of war and socialism. In doing so, he’s also been making a good faith effort to refine his own thinking and share the insights thus gained.

Linkage to a great deal of reading:

• Casus Belli Aches
• Comments re: appeal from Jorge to donate to Antiwar.com
• Followup post from Jorge on the discussion that erupted in comments above, plus more comments
• Also, They Live on Cheese
• Comments, re: Also, They Live on Cheese

Generally, Knapp attempts to clarify for others that pacifism and anti-imperialism are two seperate, distinct strands of opposition to war. Those who refuse to acknowledge this commit the inaccuracy, and attempted personal smear in my opinion, of making the blanket generalization that opposition to war is supposedly opposition to self-defense.

That seems particularly pertinent to me because I’ve been mulling how best to respond to my friend Bedlam’s post about a comment by the Dalai Lama:

At the end of the talk someone from the audience asked the Dalai Lama: “Why didn’t you fight back against the Chinese?” The Dalai Lama looked down, swung his feet just a bit, then looked back up at us and said with a gentle smile, “Well, war is obsolete, you know.” Then, after a few moments, his face grave, he said, “Of course the mind can rationalize fighting back … but the heart, the heart would never understand. Then you would be divided in yourself, the heart and the mind, and the war would be inside you.”

While the words of the Dalai Lama are eloquent and express a seemingly noble sentiment, I respectfully disagree with this sort of pacifism. To the Dalai Lama, defensive violence is as morally objectionable as initiatory violence (aggression). This ignores the matter of personal responsibility. I believe that to the extent one’s heart is troubled by necessary exercise of defensive violence, it is a measure of what extent one has failed to truly integrate that understanding into one’s overall philosophical outlook.

We see a similar error in all of the various blanket denunciations of “hate”. Proponents of this view implicitly and unrealistically deny the very possibility of righteous anger. My own sentiments were perhaps best expressed by the great Malcolm X, when he said:

Usually when people are sad, they don’t do anything. They just cry over their condition. But when they get angry, they bring about a change.

…and with regard to pacifism in particular:

Concerning nonviolence, it is criminal to teach a man not to defend himself when he is the constant victim of brutal attacks.

That’s not to say that there are not times and places when non-violence might not be the wisest approach. It is not the only tool, though, and is not necessarily the best one for all situations. Non-violence ought not to be a suicide pact.

The opposite yet complementary extreme is adhered to by war proponents. They confuse the State with the self, calling aggressive wars of conquest “self-defense” and use it to attempt to justify the slaughter of innocents. You can see a great deal of this in following the discussion that revolves around Knapp on the topic of war, linked above in this post. This sublimation of one’s own identity to the State has been noted before as but another variant of Stockholm Syndrome.

The ironic thing is that both pacifists and warmongers commit different varieties of the same intellectual error. They have a moral astigmatism that fails to see matters in a sufficiently fine-grained detail that would allow them to discern issues of individual rights and individual responsibilities. Look closer, my friends. Look closer.

Later in Knapp’s epic debate saga, the topic turns from war to socialism — largely, IMO, because Knapp won and the war proponents fragile egos won’t allow them to admit this.

Tom Knapp, you see — like Kevin Carson, myself, Professor Roderick Long and the Libertarian Left in general — holds that free-market anarchism is, in all essentials, fundamentally compatible with and/or identical to a genuinely voluntary, anti-state socialism.

As Long explains:

The first explicit defender of Market Anarchism was the 19th-century economist and social theorist Gustave de Molinari. The idea was taken up by the individualist anarchists, particularly those associated with Benjamin Tucker’s journal Liberty. More recently, Market Anarchism has been revived by a number of thinkers in the libertarian movement. The terms “anarcho-capitalism” and “voluntary socialism” have both been associated with the Market Anarchist tradition.

To see why, we must ultimately explore the origins of what socialism and libertarianism even are.

First, though, we need to make sure we are familiar with a tool that is fundamental to clear thinking, in my opinion — General Semantics. From the Wikipedia article:

Advocates of GS view it as a form of mental hygiene that enables practitioners to avoid ideational traps built into natural language and “common-sense” assumptions, thereby enabling practioners to think more clearly and effectively…

Many GS practitioners view GS techniques as a kind of self-defense kit against manipulative semantic distortions routinely promulgated by advertising, politics, and religion.

As an example of how accuracy in the ongoing debate over political terms like capitalism and socialism is dependent on the precision of thought General Semantics brings, I’m going to quote in its entirety a comment by myself on a post by my friend Curious Muse regarding the shallow consumerism of the holiday buying season.

This is actually an extremely interesting topic, because the closer you scrutinize it, the more confusing it can be *until* one (hopefully) falls back on General Semantics to combat the cognitive dissonance and related despair.

Consider:
“Thrift” used to be considered a capitalist virtue, yet it’s now (in common parlance, anyway, even if I prefer to be more precise myself) “anti-capitalist”.

Example (second paragraph):
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,11069-1891251,00.html

Incongruent? Yes it is, until you recognize that words can have multiple, distinct definitions — some of which are designed to obfuscate as much as enlighten.

If “capitalism” is held as being genuine devotion to a free market, property rights, productivity and resulting prosperity — then clearly saving money (accumulating capital) is a “Good Thing(tm)”.

But if “capitalism” has nothing to do with a free market and is instead all about using the power of the state to craft market distorting privileges on behalf of a political class — then accumulation of capital by ordinary people becomes something mildly subversive to the established order and will be discouraged.

Clearly, capitalism[1] is not capitalism[2]. [emphasis added]

Related reading:
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/11/creative-crime-of-thrift.html
http://www.bradspangler.com/blog/archives/172

We are material beings and attempting to acquire material wealth is an unavoidable part of that. It is my firm belief, though, that the widespread sense of spiritual ennui accompanying ritualistic purchase of trinkets is the emotional manifestation of a deeper realization. That realization is this — the game is rigged. You’re not supposed to really get ahead in life.

Seem like a stretch? Then try this mental experiment.

Imagine yourself buying some expensive, fancy piece of consumer entertainment electronics that you don’t really need.

Seems a little bit shallow and a little bit of a guilty pleasure, does it not?

Now, STOP! Backup…

Instead, now imagine yourself spending the same amount of money buying the tools/equipment you need to set up the home based business you always wanted, and you’re filled with hopes and dreams of providing for your family better than ever before and establishing your own economic independence.

Which would be more exhilirating? But which purchase is more likely to happen?

In a marriage without love, sex can be embittering as you realize that you’re just going through the motions.

Likewise, in a society that’s not a free market, trading becomes embittering as you realize that you’re just going through the motions.

This bit by myself illustrates that capitalism can have, in practice, multiple definitions — some of which imply statism and some of which imply the opposite — Liberty. I also touched on that matter very briefly in the post “The role of consumerism in class oppression“, cited above.

Kevin Carson has a new post up: The Creative Crime of Thrift. The quotes he gives illustrate well one reason that State Capitalism is not a free market, for public policy introduces market distortions that provide perverse incentives to the working class, discouraging them from accumulating capital. This serves to keep workers cowed and dependent on employers.

A libertarian socialist would call this situation capitalism. An anarcho-capitalist would call it socialism. Both would be partially right and partially wrong — because each has differing definitions of “capitalism” and “socialism”. Both would, or at least ought to, agree on this point, though — it is class oppression and not a truly free market.

That’s why I more often label myself a “market anarchist” rather than an “anarcho-capitalist” these days. Capitalism, rightly or wrongly, suggests different things to different people.

To someone from the Libertarian Party / Cato Institute “mainstream” of the modern American libertarian movement, “capitalism” is intrinsically good because they see it as synonymous with voluntarism and a lack of coercion. This is rooted in the profound and very true observations by Austrian economists, such as the great Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard, that the fundamental characteristic of markets is not movement of currency, but voluntary, mutually agreeable cooperation and exchange. To a libertarian, then, even non-profit groups are part of “The Market”. In other words, The Market consists of the entire sphere of all genuinely voluntary, non-coercive activity.

To those influenced by Marxist pseudo-left ideas, this seems like a tortured and alien definition of the market — a disingenuous rhetorical trick by libertarians. In actuality, though, this only reflects how important, how revolutionary those insights from free-market Austrian economics are. It sounds like nothing you’ve ever heard before. Guess what? Everything you’ve ever heard before is what has made such a mess of the world.

The heirs of this profound intellectual legacy, the libertarian movement, have failed to live up to it, though. The libertarian movements “mainstream” is poisoned by a cultural affinity to the Right that blinds them to the matter of nominally “private” interests that are in actuality full partners with the literal apparatus of government — the sum total of which is the true State. Once again, this is an understanding that I’ve shared before:

Let’s postulate two sorts of robbery scenarios.

In one, a lone robber points a gun at you and takes your cash. All libertarians would recognize this as a micro-example of any kind of government at work, resembling most closely State Socialism.

In the second, depicting State Capitalism, one robber (the literal apparatus of government) keeps you covered with a pistol while the second (representing State-allied corporations) just holds the bag that you have to drop your wristwatch, wallet and car keys in. To say that your interaction with the bagman was a “voluntary transaction” is an absurdity. Such nonsense should be condemned by all libertarians. Both gunman and bagman together are the true State.

Of course, most fail to condemn it. To put the matter succinctly, the problem with libertarians (in general) is that they are insufficiently libertarian. Kevin Carson refers to this tendency as “vulgar libertarianism“.

While the conventional Left fails to discern the specifics of what’s wrong with Corporate Statism, they do sense there is something fundamentally wrong with it — which vulgar libertarians shamefully fail to do.

In opposition to this deplorable multilateral confusion, though, the Libertarian Left has come to life. This school of thought, the blossoming of libertarianism into the genuinely revolutionary creed that will be required to really win Liberty for all humanity, is perhaps best summarized by the sub-title of Kevin Carsons blog: “free-market anti-capitalism”.

That phrase sounds like a contradiction to both vulgar libertarians and conventional Leftists alike. That’s because both fail to distinguish between two definitions of capitalism: “capitalism as a free-market” and capitalism as “State Capitalism”, a variety of statism and antithetical to a genuinely free market. Carson uses the word “capitalism” not in the sense that even principled but imprecise libertarians more attuned with the Right often do, but in the sense the Left means when they denounce “capitalism” — capitalism as it actually exists now. That the conventional Left is unaware that there might be other definitions of capitalism is irrelevant to the matters Carson most often concerns himself with — showing how a principled libertarianism is essential to actually achieving Leftist social goals and that statism is counter-productive to those ends.

Just as capitalism can have multiple definitions, so can socialism. To many, including myself when I was young and somewhat more foolish than I am now, socialism has been synonymous with State Socialism, of either the Marxist or Fabian “social democratic” variety. That’s not the whole story, though…

The American individualist anarchists of the 19th century considered themselves “socialists” and also accepted that what they wanted was best summarized as “a free market”. Great clarification on this matter can be obtained from an essay by B.K. Marcus, “Socialism“. Here’s one important excerpt:

Emma Goldman would have identified herself as both a libertarian and as a socialist. Her libertarianism was a belief in freedom from The State and from other forms of coercion, whereas her socialism was a belief that the workers needed to unite and throw off the oppression of Capitalism.

We’re stuck not only with the problem that people confuse Labels and Descriptions (e.g., when a Republican Partisan talks about “The Free Market” he means What We Have (or once Had) in Capitalist America, rather than studying what the words ‘free’ and ‘market’ mean and asking if they describe a system that prohibits the voluntary exchange of cash or barter for drugs or pornography, or a system in which you and I aren’t allowed to develop our own currency and exchange it by whatever voluntary rules we come up with), but we also have the problem that different definitions of Socialism and Libertarianism will yield different descriptions.

…followed by another one:

Is Socialism state-centralization of the economy, or is it any system that levels out the society? From what I’ve been reading, it seems that for the early 19th-century intellectual, Sociology was any description of how the society did work, and Socialism was any PREscription about how the society SHOULD work.

By that definition, all anarchists were (and still are) socialists — even the so-called Anarcho-Capitalists.

But obviously, if by Socialism you mean any sort of State-centralization of authority, then anarchists never were and still aren’t Socialists — not even, theoretically, the Anarcho-Communists.

Outside the U.S., the first self-described anarchist, Proudhon, proclaimed:

The social revolution is seriously compromised if it comes through a political revolution.

Much like my comment to Curious Muse regarding “capitalism”, socialism[1] is clearly not socialism[2].

What socialism “is” has been distorted by the long domination of the socialist movement by Marxists and similar proponents of State Socialism, such that there are now multiple definitions of (and mental associations with) the term.

Properly understood, then, Tom Knapps encounters are a result of vulgar libertarians refusing to acknowledge any definition of socialism apart from State Socialism. They stamp their feet and pout like little children, resolutely determined not to think.

If anything that is voluntary on all sides is, at the very least, acceptable to the point that it at least can not righteously be opposed by force, then one has to come to grips that a stateless society will have “capitalistic” and “socialistic” aspects in practice. Hippy communes. Farmers co-ops. Employee owned enterprises. Workers syndicates. Unions.

Ultimately, vulgar libertarians, on this point anyway, fail to distinguish libertarianism from personal preference for a particular class of business models.

Now, as it is, I happen to share that same belief in the superiority of for-profit business models. That however, is distinct from my libertarianism — which is solely predicated on non-aggression. What business models win out in competition is for the Market to determine — not you and me.

I believe that once a stateless society is achieved, the continuing evolution of the market will drive out inefficient business models. Prices and investment are demonstrably a means of distributed information processing. A genuinely free market will continually dynamically adapt to satisfy the panoply of human wants and needs.

But here’s something else important to consider…

We’re not currently in a stateless society. The foundation of the oppression of the productive class by the political class is coercion, and an important aspect of it are the accompanying market distortions. Prices and investment as they currently exist carry information, but the accuracy of that information is inversely proportional to the degree of statism in a society. They are often faulty signals within capitalism in practice.

One potential implication of that is this…

Cooperative, small-scale non-profit enterprises — small islands of “voluntary socialism” — might have as good a chance at finding good answers to questions of production, distribution and consumption as state allied corporations acting on bad information do. Why follow the Pied Piper of government lies manifested in bogus interest rates, inflationary currency and so forth — when one might have a better chance by just casting about randomly?

Wouldn’t it be ironic if overcoming the obstacle to a genuinely anarcho-capitalist society, the State, required a new vision for, and better understanding of, “socialist revolution”? I believe that may be the case.

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