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If readers of this blog haven’t figured out by now that I’m an anarchist, more specifically a market anarchist (or anarcho-capitalist) and most specifically an agorist, then they haven’t been paying attention. Being an agorist, I advocate a dual strategy of two forms of revolutionary activity — counter-establishment economic activity (counter-economics) and revolutionary propaganda that focuses on demystifying the state (to clarify its role as merely organized crime with delusions of grandeur).

While I have personally disavowed political reformism, that doesn’t mean I have completely disengaged from the political process. For example, I actively urge more moderate libertarians (or, actually, anybody who claims to stand for freedom) to adopt more consistently principled, and therefore more radical, positions. As Konkin explained, adherence to consistency as a standard is what led him to arrive at the conclusions that became agorism. As I have taken to saying, the polycentric institutions of law and security of a market anarchist society would be market institutions rather than political institutions, and therefore can not be arrived at through political reformism. That is such a discontinuity for some people, though, that the only way they can embrace it is by arriving at those same conclusions on their own, at their own pace and in their own due time. It took me over a decade after first reading Konkin’s New Libertarian Manifesto to reach that point.

That said, perhaps it will be easier to understand why you will catch me expressing opinions on reformist topics from time to time.

In The Partial Observer, James Leroy Wilson asks: Will Real Conservatives Become Democrats?

By “real conservatives”, Wilson means people who honestly do want a smaller government.

I find this an interesting topic, because it allows me to delve into some of the ambiguity surrounding the term “left libertarian”, as the Democratic Party is regarded as the more “leftist” of the two major US political parties. In order to do that effectively, though, a little libertarian history lesson is required. Grab yourself a sandwich and buckle up…

The word “libertarian” was originally used in Europe as a near synonym for the more collectivist varieties of anarchism more common in Europe (as opposed to the individualist anarchists who, while not uniquely American, were predominantly so).

The modern US libertarian movement (and those it has inspired globally), by contrast, was basically born as a movement in the late 1960’s and influenced by pioneering thinkers who, at least as far back as the 1950’s (if I recall correctly), first started using the word libertarian in a desperate attempt to distinguish their continuing espousal of old-fashioned small-government oriented classical liberalism from the big-government democratic socialism that the word liberalism had by then come to mean.

By that same period in the late 1960’s, one of those pioneering thinkers from the 1950’s, Murray N. Rothbard had arrived at a more rigorous refinement of the old individualist anarchism, guided by insights from the free-market Austrian school of economics as well as an informed but skeptical familiarity with Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism. There were others thinking along similar lines, but Rothbard is widely recognized as the most influential. He relentlessly dotted every “i” and crossed every “t” to make the case over and over again that this brand of anarchism he called anarcho-capitalism addressed all concerns about how workable a stateless society would be and that it would be the most ethical, equitable and prosperous form of social organization.

Rothbard best defined the goal. It fell to Konkin a few years later, first in 1974 as I understand it, to first grasp and explain the means, the strategy for reaching that goal — agorism, as outlined above.

The relatively tiny but vigorous libertarian movement of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s was heavily, but not entirely, composed of anarcho-capitalists. It also included people who wanted to see government reduced to such small levels that it became largely a matter of mere academic dispute as to whether it actually qualified as a government or not. I call that one the “government consisting of three schoolgirls and a tame mouse” school of thought. Furthermore, the libertarian movement also included some that wanted a still tiny but more vigorous government — Ayn Rand’s avowed goal of a “night watchman” state, preserving the government monopoly on police, courts and national defense.

I should perhaps note here that while the writings of Ayn Rand were influential to varying degrees across all of these factions, those who seemed to take her a little to seriously earned for themselves early on the disparaging monicker of “Randroids”, for their robotic regurgitation of the subjective whims espoused by the mother of “objectivism”.

In similar fashion, some of the more ideologically combative anarchists labeled non-anarchist libertarians “minarchists” — as in “advocates of minimal government”, as opposed to “advocates of no government” (anarchists). It was, as I understand it, originally supposed to be a disparaging term. It turned out to be a handy term, though, and caught on as a neutral description.

Because Rothbard unfortunately failed to see past political reformism, most of those influenced by him also failed to and the basic result was the Libertarian Party. In order to allow the tiny libertarian movement to hold together around the nexus of the Libertarian Party, early LP leaders had to arrive at a compromise that would allow both anarchists who accepted political reformism and minarchists to both feel included and at home in “their” party. That compromise was the 1974 Dallas Accord, in which it was agreed that the Party would officially remain silent on the matter of whether or not government should even exist at all.

Thus, we wound up with the peculiar and absurd situation of anarchists, often among the brightest and most dedicated in the libertarian movement, putting on suits and ties to run for political office. I can call it absurd. I did it myself. I was an elected city councilman in North Kansas City, Missouri from 1996 to 1998.

This embrace of political reformism resulted in a “dumbing down” and dilution of the libertarian message that naturally flowed from the drawbacks of using electoral politics as a tool to communicate a radical creed. After the Dallas Accord, the libertarian movement grew by absorbing people whose personal preference was for a smaller government than what currently existed, but who didn’t necessarily have a strong education on why no government at all would be best — and weren’t particularly interested in learning. Arrogance and ignorance go hand in hand.

Today, this trend has gotten so out of hand that we are faced with the ludicrous spectacle of hypocritical avowed “libertarians” who support aggressive wars of conquest, torture, police state surveillance tactics and corporate statism so thoroughly corrupt as to bring even the term “free market” into unjustified disrepute. As a precursor to that, I remember well a patronizing little lecture I received a few years back, from a fellow with an apparent double-digit IQ, who told me that I didn’t belong in the Libertarian Party because libertarianism had nothing to do with anarchism. After I fell out of my chair laughing, I decided he was right, in his own special little way.

When non-libertarians ask me what’s with these muttonheaded “vulgar libertarians” as Kevin Carson calls them, I despair of all the explaining it would take to adequately show that they are the retarded, schizoid, mutant bastard grandchildren of a fatal flaw in the thinking of one of the libertarian movements otherwise greatest — Rothbard. Perhaps in the future I will have the luxury of just directing them toward this post.

In 1974, the same year as the Dallas Accord, Konkin first started putting forth his ideas on agorism, addressing the results of the strategic shortcoming in Rothbard’s work on anarcho-capitalism — political reformism.

When he did so, he started talking about and trying to build what he called the “Movement of the Libertarian Left” (MLL) as the nexus for agorism. This was not leftism per se in the conventional sense of the wider political universe, but the “left”, more radical, side of the libertarian political spectrum that ranged from anarchists on the left to first the original minarchists and then Constitutionalists and paleoconservatives on the right.

Konkin was also non-sectarian enough to recognize that as political reformism expanded the right side of the libertarian political spectrum, the MLL ought to maintain a dialogue and engagement with the “radical left”. For example, the Left Libertarian Yahoo group that he started and ran until his death, was open to mutualists, Georgists and any others that had a certain compatibility. They were all “left libertarian” to Konkin, but his aim was to promote agorism as the crunchy nugget at the center of that Tootsie Pop.

At the same time all of this was going on, these three plus decades since the Libertarian Party was founded, those other anarchists (of the more collectivist, historically European bent) hadn’t forgotten that they were using the word libertarian first. Upon encountering Randroids and “vulgar libertarians”, some of them got pretty pissed about what they perceived as a gross distortion of the word libertarian — and it’s hard to blame them. So they independently started using the term “left libertarian” to distinguish themselves.

Now let’s weave another strand into the tapestry of this saga. Sporadically throughout the 1990s from what I can tell, and perhaps before, the pre-Marxian class theory of Comte and Dunoyer occasionally kept surfacing in discussion among more principled (particularly anarchist) libertarians here and there. It came to be referred to as Libertarian Class Theory. Its rediscovery was inevitable, as it had a huge influence on the 19th century classical liberals that the minarchists of today supposedly look up to. That influence was in the degraded form of positing “net tax payers” and “net tax consumers”. In actuality, though, Libertarian Class Theory broadly describes two opposing classes distinguished by the means with which they acquire wealth — the productive class and the political (or parasitic) class. An enlightened understanding of economics reveals several ways other than taxes and direct government expenditures to unjustly profit at the expense of your fellow man through the exercise of aggression by proxy on ones behalf by the government.

That’s important to an understanding of the different shades of meaning of the term “left libertarian”. Here’s why. Take Libertarian Class Theory. Add in frequently overlooked matter such as Rothbard’s explanation of property rights arising independently of, and often at odds with, state assignation of property title. One then winds up with a lot of potential common ground between Konkin’s version of “left libertarian” and those other people who call themselves “left libertarian” — anarcho-syndicalists, anarcho-communists and others on the “radical left”. As an example, read Kevin Carson’s “Austrian and Marxist Theories of Monopoly Capital: A Mutualist Synthesis“.

All this talk of radicalism may have some readers in a tizzy, wondering what it has to do with whether or not small government conservatives and moderate libertarians belong in the Democratic Party. Don’t worry. This wasn’t a “bait and switch” essay.

As a lot of stuff, such as the post from psychopolitick that I recently blogged, explains — authentic libertarianism of either the radical or moderate persuasion, is in many senses “left wing”. Indeed, that has been where libertarians and proto-libertarians have historically been found.

Furthermore, it could be said that the state socialism inspired by Marx hijacked that historically libertarian “left” and that these several years after the near global meltdown of state communism, a mere blink of the eye in the grand sweep of history, is potentially just a transition period in which a drifting “left wing” that itself ranges from moderate to radical has been in search of a new radical creed to orient itself on. I and others like me seek to provide that radical creed by further refining and evangelizing the thought of men like Rothbard and Konkin.

In short: We’re the Libertarian Left, and we’re the new Reds.

The existence of Reds implies the existence of Pinkos. As I started out explaining, some people will take a while to personally come to terms with the futility of political reformism and embrace a revolutionary approach. I want to encourage them to do so as quickly as possible, but that is a deeply personal matter of conscience and not to be taken lightly. I respect that.

There will be shades of pink. Some will work within the Libertarian Party, some will work within the Democratic Party and others will find still other vehicles for their activism. One thing is for sure, though — libertarians need todays Republican Party like they need a hole in the head.

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