Klafta and left libertarian reconciliation
Definitions are important when discussing complex concepts. I’ve mentioned before the ambiguity of terms like socialism and capitalism in that each can have both a libertarian and an authoritarian meaning. Back in 1993, in Anarchy: a Journal of Desire Armed no. 34, Lance Klafta laid blame for this state of affairs squarely at the feet of Rand in his article “Ayn Rand and the Perversion of Libertarianism“.
Ayn Rand, however, attempted to offer a moral justification of capitalism by substituting the word `capitalism’ for the libertarian meaning of the word “socialism.”
Or, as B.K. Marcus wrote:
“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.”
That ought to cause a few light bulbs to pop up over libertarian heads. I would say that I agree with the Klafta statement, but only with an extremely important qualifier. If we accept that Rand mismatched those terms and their definitions, that ought not to cause us to disregard an important clarification associated with her — that “capitalism” or “libertarian socialism” is the economic system resulting from widespread acceptance of the Zero Aggression Principle — the doctrine of non-initiation of force, fraud or coercion.
Klafta was aware of the ZAP, at least through its contradictory incarnation as the Libertarian Party Pledge, but unfortunately he only showed a shallow or “vulgar” understanding of it, that it is supposedly a blanket condemnation of violence. It’s not. It’s a very philosophically precise understanding of what defines tyranny - the initiation of force. If I weild a club and take a wallet out of your hand, this may or may not be an initiation of force. It all depends on whether its rightfully your wallet, or mine which you stole from me and that I want back.
The ZAP is crucial to understanding the exploitation of the productive class by the political class. Aggression, the initiation of force, is what creates privilege and unequal exchange. If we do not disavow the initiation of force, we are embracing the foundation of tyranny. The ZAP doesn’t preclude the use of defensive or retributive violence — it justifies it.
To put it in more Marxian, and therefore imprecise, terms — the capitalists have been ripping off the workers. Kevin Carson’s blog is practically dedicated to exposing how they do this through aggression-backed subsidies and regulations that have nothing to do with a genuinely free market.. The workers should take back what’s rightfully theirs, their rightful private property under a radical Lockean view, and the only reason this hasn’t been mentioned more prominetly is Rothbard’s failure to reject political reformism, which Konkin saw past and remedied. The ZAP clarifies the line between ethical use of violence in such a workers revolution and the violence of, for example, Leninist state socialism.
Klafta did grasp that state capitalism is not a free market:
The terms of “free agreements” under law are titled in favor of lenders over debtors, landlords over tenants, employers over employees, in a way which would not exist in a “free market.” This leveraging of power is not `objective’ at all.
Just as many Libertarian Party members don’t really understand the ZAP, neither did Klafta, though:
Today Ayn Rand is gone, but like Marx a century ago, hers is the primary influence on the largest libertarian organization existing. Even the pledge which all Libertarian Party members must sign is taken directly from her admonition, “I hereby certify that I do not believe in or advocate the initiation of force as a means of achieving political or social goals.” In spite of their pledge to non-violence, many libertarians are frustrated with election laws and media censorship. An argument which circulates among libertarians of the right is that, if they were more threatening, the government may take steps to accommodate them as it did the black civil rights movement.
Again, it is a fallacy to mistake the Zero Aggression Principle for a blanket rejection of all violence. Rather, it is a tool for determining whether violence is just or unjust.
Violence can be categorized one of three ways:
- Aggression — initiatory violence
- Defensive violence — a simultaneous or near simultaneous response to aggression.
- Retributive violence - response to aggression after the fact.
Aggression is always unjust. Defensive violence is always just, so long as it is proportional to the aggression. Retributive violence is justified only when moderated through a system of law that provides neutral arbitrators. As the state subsists on aggression, justice demands the rise of a polycentric system of law that can lay the state low like the predatory bandits they are while not becoming a new state itself — anarchy.
Where Leninism and variants propose wholesale nationalization of both stolen goods and rightful property as a fake remedy for statist banditry, Agorists would instead tend to believe that when revolutionary redistribution of property occurs, it should be handled through a de-centralized, market-based security apparatus on an individual case-by-case basis, using a polycentric, market-based system of law to determine whether any particular property is truly stolen or not. This is in accordance with Agorist Class Theory’s assertion that individual moral choices are involved in how one goes about acquiring wealth and that the sum total of these individual moral choices are what makes one a member of the productive class, the political (parasitic) class or the confused middle class (members of which are destined to eventually gravitate to one of the other classes in the face of growing agorist class consciousness among the productive class and society as a whole).
Samuel Edward Konkin III was fond of inventing new terms, largely because he found existing language inadequate to communicate a lot of the concepts he was trying to convey. One of these is the term “minarchist” — designed to highlight the ironyof a libertarian embracing so-called minimal government. Limited taxation is still theft, limited war is still murder and a limited state is still tyranny — and it contains within it the seeds of even greater tyranny, as constitutional restraints on government power eventually and inevitably become undermined.
A related “linguistic Konkinism” is partyarch, defined as:
“term coined by SEK3 in 1972 to denote “anarchists” who had rejected the State (head of the octopus) only to embrace its tentacle, a political party.”
Dallas Accord style cooperation between partyarchs and minarchists is objectively counter-revolutionary (i.e. — anti-liberty) in that it obscures the real problem — government itself, institutionalized aggression. To reform the state is to attempt to build a state better able to continue its mission of theft, slavery and murder indefinitely. Reformists (both minarchists and partyarchs) attempt to extend the lifespan of the state. The properly libertarian path would instead be to seek the end of the state — revolution.
As I wrote before in Agorist Revolution in a Nutshell:
In a market anarchist society, law and security will be provided by market institutions, not political institutions. Agorists recognize, therefore, that those institutions can not develop through political reform.
A partyarch might object, as I once did when I was a partyarch, that they are not just trying to reform the state but build a responsible transition program to result in its gradual abolition. As Klafta points out in his remarks on the potential rise of an “Objectivist Lenin” and later, we’ve seen what a government-sponsored transition program to a stateless society looks like already — the Soviet Union.
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I don’t think Rand can be saddled with sole responsibility for libertarians’ current use of the words “capitalism” and “socialism.” That use was already widespread before Rand. Mises, for example, so used them in Socialism and The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality, both published prior to Atlas Shrugged and Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. And he didn’t invent that usage either. Already in the 19th century, people were using the terms “capitalism” and “socialism” in a variety of different and deeply incompatible ways, including the one now standard among libertarians. Even Benjamin Tucker, who called himself a voluntary socialism, sometimes uses the term “socialism” (without adjective) as a blanket term for the authoritarian collectivist tendency he’s attacking.
Sometimes I think to would be better to drop the terms “socialism” and “capitalism” entirely rather than attempt to hold them to any one of the many meanings they’ve historically had. (At any rate I never use them without qualifying adjectives.)
[…] While Rothbard was a giant in terms of pure market anarchist theory, he either failed to see past political reformism or his courage failed to be sufficient enough to cause him to forsake it for the full implications of his ideas. Konkin, however, did and the result was revolutionary market anarchism — agorism. Strictly speaking, agorism is just an overlay of a revolutionary strategy consistent with libertarian ethics on top of market anarchist theory. Not in all cases perhaps, but as a tendency, the embrace of the revolutionary attitude additionally allows one to purge one’s self of conservative attitudes that blind one’s self to the full implications of Rothbardian theory, which Richman might call “Free-Market Bolshevism”. and its potential to serve as a basis, once the terminological gap has been bridged, to reunite the modern American libertarian movement, which has historically beeen allied with conservatism, with libertarian socialism instead. […]
[…] Agorism might be considered a branch of anarcho-capitalism or individualist anarchism/mutualism. It might be considered an attempt to reconcile anarcho-capitalism with individualist anarchism and even the rest of libertarian socialism where possible. [1] […]