Cat herding 101
I was reviewing some stuff and noticed where I had promoted on Digg a recent book review by Kevin Carson. There was one key passage in the piece that seemed particularly apt for explaining the overall left-libertarian approach as I see it.
“…[M]ost people who display egalitarian reactions against existing inequalities and concentrations of wealth may well believe that what they hate is the “free market.” But that’s only because the rhetoric of “free markets” has been perverted, for the most part, by apologists for those concentrations of wealth which result from privilege and other forms of state intervention. What they hate, they rightly hate. They’re wrong to believe that what they hate is the “free market.” But it’s hard to blame them, when you can’t turn on the TV or read an editorial page without seeing a fundamentally statist economic system of special privilege and protection for big business and the rich described as “our free market system.”
This has organizational implications for both radicals and moderates, both libertarians and “leftists”. The socio-political mass maneuver that needs to be accomplished can be compared to a zipper zipping. Proponents of fundamentally correct but often tragically misapplied theory, on the one hand, need to be melded with groups of people who, on the other hand, have instinctually latched onto approximately correct views about the world around them and then rationalized/supported those views with less-than-ideal theory.
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