We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
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Sadly none of Britain’s mainstream political parties are, they just vary (slightly) in who they want to benefit from their regulation of civil society. When it comes from choosing amongst which tribal faction of statists will regulate your life, we are spoilt for choice.
So next time you have an earnest young Tory hopeful turn up on your doorstep asking for your vote and pledging to save you from those beastly Labour socialists, ask him where his party stands on the issue of ID cards, which will naturally start off as ‘National Health Benefit Cards’ and then very quickly become mandatory for pretty much anything you try to do, such as open a bank account or rent an apartment.
And then look ‘earnest young Tory’ in the eye, explain why his party is part of the problem rather than part of the solution and then tell him to fuck off. A choice between a party which brought us Michael ‘a touch of the night’ Howard and one which has brought us David ‘RIP’ Blunket is no choice at all. But if you cannot bring yourself to resist the syren call to the ballot box, vote UKIP.
Former Italian prime minister Lamberto Dini, one of the people drawing up the new European Constitution on the EU Convention on the Future of Europe, has flatly and explicitly contradicted British ministers who claimed that the new constitution is only a ‘tidying up exercise’.
Anyone in Britain who claims the constitution will not change things is trying to sweeten the pill for those who don’t want to see a bigger role for Europe
If this constitution is adopted by Britain, control of much of how the state intrudes into society will be placed in a power centre far more remote and less amenable to the British public’s democratic influence politically. It is nothing less than the wholesale disenfranchisement of Britain, talking a moderately effective democratic system of accountability (albeit a long decaying one) and replacing it with European-wide ‘democracy’ that in fact places vastly more power in remote bureaucracies.
Although I never doubted that Tony Blair was simply lying through his teeth, can anyone now doubt that what the Labour government is saying is intentional falsehood pertaining to altering the most fundamental underpinning structure of the British state?
If the Tory opposition was capable of rational analysis, they would start realising that Blair has torn up the rule book and soon rolling back the tide of statism will simply be beyond the legal power of British politicians. If the Conservative Leader was to stand up in Parliament and say “a future Tory government will simply abrogate this constitution on Day One and repatriate democratic accountability to the British people”, then there might be some grounds for thinking they had actually decided not to just be Labour Party Lite as they blather on about ‘good public services’ and tolerate the likes of Chris Patten in amongst their numbers.
What I find so exasperating is the Tory’s refusal to think outside the box. Will they just meekly accept that once the primacy of the EU is complete, they will just have to adapt into their allotted role as a European style ‘Christian Democrat’ Party of the statist centre in return for a place for their snouts at the Euro-trough? Perhaps so. The Conservative Party is a noxious organisation so I cannot say I am surprised, but unless they quickly rediscover their radical roots, Britain as a self-governing entity is finished regardless of the lies to the contrary (just see the remarks of our honest enemy Lamberto Dini).
Unlike most of continental Europe, there is a significant anti-statist element in the mainstream of British society… I don’t mean people like me, who are essentially out on the ‘lunatic fringe’, but the sort of people who Maggie Thatcher tapped into in her excitingly radical but maddeningly inconsistent way. Once this swathe of society finally realises that they no longer have any meaningful outlet for their political aspirations, I wonder if they will just be content to shrug and surrender to the Europe wide majority who favour regulatory top-down statism? I think not.
The Labour Party and all who support Euro-wide statism have seen the way to put all the bits about the role of the state they value beyond British politics: their vision of regulatory statism is about to be locked in and in future, politics will just be about factional pleading for a share of the monies appropriated from the remaining productive sections of the economy. The only antidote to this is for anti-EU politicians to simply refuse to cooperate. The Tory Party would be more useful if they simply walked out of Parliament and declined to return unless the constitution is completely gutted (which of course will never happen). After all, so what if Labour used that opportunity to pass all manner of nasty laws? They have such a large majority they can do that anyway and so it is only by radical action that the Tories can de-legitimise what is being done… i.e. by provoking a constitutional crisis because we are bloody well in one already!
2. The Member States shall facilitate the achievement of the Union’s tasks and refrain from any measure which could jeopardise the attainment of the objectives set out in the Constitution.
If anti-EU activists ever manage to start mounting effective resistance to the EU and actually undermining its authority, do you seriously doubt that laws suppressing what we say and do will not follow?
Jim Henley is right about one thing… Iraq is indeed a quagmire. Rather than a quick campaign with decisive results that vindicated their views, they are still fighting to prove their position was justified, struggling to massage the facts, trying to divert attention away from the reality of the effect of overthrowing a nation’s government as their loudly trumpeted ideas of a few short months ago ‘circle the drain’.
I am of course referring to the people who were Saddam Hussain’s ‘useful idiots’ and who opposed the armed overthrow of Ba’athist Socialism… and who are now desperately clutching at daily US casualty rates which can be counted on one hand as some means to snatch a tiny measure of victory from the jaws of absolutely crushing intellectual defeat. I expect more Americans are murdered by other Americans in any one of several major US cities every day than are dying in fighting in Iraq now, just to put it all into some perspective.
One does not have to support the way the US is going about running (or not) Iraq to nevertheless admit that the war itself was a triumph not just for the allies but for the Iraqi people. So to borrow Jim Henley’s tone, damn to hell all the ‘cowardly’ paleo-libertarians and their socialist confreres who really did not care what Saddam Hussain’s regime was doing to the people in Iraq and who still feel no remorse that all the horrors of Ba’athism would still be happening in Iraq today if they had gotten their way.
1. skeptic, sceptic, doubter — (someone who habitually doubts accepted beliefs)
… so in reality we are not truly ‘eurosceptic’ as we do not ‘doubt’ the harmful nature of the EU, but rather we regard that as axiomatic. What is more, we have nothing against Europe per se, it is the regulatory statist political entity called the European Union we abominate. Hell, I used to work for the EU which probably explains why I dislike it so much: I know how it really works.
Scepticism seems to imply ‘doubt’. We have no doubt whatsoever.
It was strangely disconcerting to suddenly see our blog-father off the ether for such a long time, particularly as, like Glenn, Samizdata.net also resides on Hosting Matters servers.
For those of you who do not know, Hosting Matters had an electrical fire and whilst it took us off the air for only a few minutes, the James Brown of the Blogosphere was silenced for most of yesterday.
But he is back and blogging his heart out once more. The world is back running in well-oiled grooves.
Heh.
David Carr asked:
If there are any talented graphic designers out there perhaps they might want to grasp this opportunity to design a symbol that will, from now on, represent the ‘Country formerly known as Britain’.
…and sure enough, a reply has come from the arse end of the Anglosphere.
Oh joy.
Whilst perusing Harry’s Place, I discovered a reference to an essay written by Labour MP Peter Hain in 2000 about ‘libertarian socialism’ over on the Chartist website called Rediscovering our libertarian roots.
The whole notion of this alleged form of libertarianism is something I have commented on before, but I have probably never seen a more clearly written explanation of the true thinking that underpins ‘libertarian socialism’ than this article by Hain.
It is very important to understand what Hain’s essay is and is not. It is not a philosophical paper making logical links between socialism and libertarianism. What it is is a tactical paper very much along the lines of the one I wrote called Giving libertarianism a left hook, only with the opposite objective.
Rather than fisking Hain’s article, I will just quote what I think are the most illustrative sections (emphasis added):
The key elements of libertarian socialism – decentralisation, democracy, popular sovereignty and a refusal to accept that collectivism means subjugating individual liberty.
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Discredited by its association with statism, socialism’s rehabilitation can only be achieved through a recovery of its libertarian roots, applying these to the modern age through Labour’s Third Way.
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Underlying libertarian socialism is a different and distinct notion of politics which rests on the belief that it is only through interaction with others in political activity and civic action that individuals will fully realise their humanity. Democracy should therefore extend not simply to government but throughout society: in industry, in the neighbourhood or in any arrangement by which people organise their lives.
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However, power can only be spread downwards in an equitable manner if there is a national framework where opportunities, resources, wealth and income are distributed fairly, where democratic rights are constitutionally entrenched, and where there is equal sexual and racial opportunity. This is where socialism becomes the essential counterpart to libertarianism which could otherwise, and indeed sometimes is, right wing. It means nationally established minimum levels of public provision, such as for housing, public transport, social services, day-care facilities, home helps and so on. The extent to which these are ‘topped up’ and different priorities set between them, is then a matter for local decision.
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Most individuals need active government to intervene and curb market excess and distortions of market power. For choice and individual aspiration to be real for the many, and not simply for the privileged few, people must have the power to choose.
Nevertheless the old left nostrum that markets equal capitalism and the absence of markets equals socialism, is utterly simplistic. As Aneurin Bevan argued, the extent to which markets are regulated or subjected to strategic intervention by government is not a matter of theoretical dogma, but a practical matter to be judged on its merit. That is why a Third Way Labour government is not passive, but highly active, working in partnership with business and investing in the skills and modern infrastructure which market forces and the private sector do not provide
There are so many problems and manifest contradictions that leap off the page it is difficult to know where to start. The core of what makes this so wrong lies as usual at the meta-contextual level. The problem is one of the distorting lens of the writer’s world view, based as they clearly are on utterly utilitarian principles. Hain says libertarian socialists are characterised by a “refusal to accept that collectivism means subjugating individual liberty”, whereupon he follows with an article which lists the many ways in which his socialist system would in fact do precisely that.
The core of Hain’s view is that politics, which is a euphemism for ‘the struggle for control of the means of collective coercion’, is the essential core around which ‘society’ exists and interacts. Thus when he says society must be ‘completely democratic’, he means society must be completely political (based upon collective coercion). Yet the argument that it is only by this that individual liberty can be realised falls at the first fence by virtue of the fact you cannot opt out of a political society and particularly a democratic political society: if my neighbour gets to vote on all aspects of “any arrangement by which people organise their lives”, then clearly my individual wish regarding what I may do with my own life is by no means my choice unless that choice is quite literally a popular one.
Secondly, if democratic rights are to be ‘constitutionally enshrined’ and the society is completely democratic in all its aspects and therefore completely political, then how can the individual rights of people be insulated from the democratic political process which may seek to abridge them? You can either have complete democracy enshrined or, as the American founding fathers tried with limited success, you can have individual rights enshrined and placed outside the reach of democratic politics, but you cannot logically have both.
The notion that a completely politicized democratic ‘society’ of the kind advocated by Hain could by its very nature allow any personal liberty whatsoever in a meaningful sense is manifestly absurd. If you cannot opt out of something you have not previously agreed to, in what manner are you free? If society is totally political, then you may have ‘permissions’ to do this or that, won by the give and take of democratic political processes but you do not have super-political inalienable rights at all. Politics can in theory make you ‘free from starving’ perhaps (in practise of course it tends to do the opposite), but what about being free to try or not try some course of action? When every aspect of life is subject to the views of a plurality of other people, there is no liberty to just try anything at all on your own initiative. What Hain is arguing for is by his own words collectivism.
It seems to me that one thing all forms of collectivism share is that individual choice is always subordinate to The Group, be it the fascist volk or a local soviet or an anarcho-syndicalist people’s council or whatever other fiction of ‘society’ the state decides to use. So talk of individual rights within the context of a collectivist ‘society’ is either incoherence or if not it is nothing more than a tactical ploy to conflate a violence based system of total governance with its antithesis in a manner well understood. As I wrote in a recent article, unlike a collectivist kibbutz, which is a voluntary collectivist commune, you cannot just walk out of the door of a collectivist ‘society’ and start setting up private arrangements with other willing people if the majority do not want you to do that: they will in fact deputise the use of violence to prevent it.
The logical flaws in the ‘collectivist society replacing collectivist state’ notion are so obvious that they have been pointed out a great many times by a great many people, but I will add my voice to the throng anyway. Hain, like Marx before him, clearly sees libertarian socialism as working towards the ‘withering away of the state’ as a true collectivist ‘society’ comes to replace it. But to maintain such a condition of total political governance will require the use of force to prevent any consensual but not democratically sanctioned acts between willing individuals. To maintain this suppression of spontaneous several relationships, a collectivist socialist ‘society’ must be organised and structured in certain ways that make it indistinguishable from a collectivist socialist state.
So if for a collectivist ‘society’ to function there must be a high degree of politically imposed non-spontaneous behaviour from its ‘citizens’ (such as preventing a person selling their own labour for less than the political community will allow them to), and those mandates must be backed with the threat of violence (i.e. law) if they are not to be ignored, then what we have a political State by any reasonable definition of the word ‘State’, much as Rousseau would have defined one. In fact, socialism must be the most ironic use of language in the history of human linguistics: it is the advocacy of the complete replacement of social interaction with political interaction, the very negation of civil society itself. ‘Politicalism’ would be a more honest term.
Now of course all societies have laws, be it polycentric law or state imposed law. Even the most libertarian society plausibly imaginable will have force backed prohibitions against the unjustified use of violence, which is to say (in very crude and simplified terms) libertarian law deals with ‘that which you may not do without consent of the person to or with whom you are doing it’. You may not cause me harm with dioxin from your factory because I have not given you leave to put your chemicals in my lungs. This law is based on the principle that the individual’s rights to his body (and property) are his own.
However the collectivist places the protection of the political collective as more important than the individual and thus collective law is whatever the political collective says it is. If the political collective says ‘a factory may not put dioxin in Fred’s lungs because we want a more environmentally safe place to live for all of us’, then that is the law because the political collective has said so, not because Fred has the right to control the contents of his own lungs.
But if they say ‘a factory may indeed put dioxin in Fred’s lungs because we want a better economy and more stuff for the rest of us’ then that too is the voice of the collective. And Fred? If he does not like it, well, it is “only through interaction with others in political activity and civic action that individuals will fully realise their humanity”. And if Fred finds himself in the minority? Now Fred has a problem because as the society is ‘totally democratic’, we will have none of this nonsense of independent and politically neutral courts stepping in to support the objective and several rights of Fred against the collective, as if that could happen in our libertarian socialist paradise, we would no longer have our totally democratic society.
So as Hain says it is only through trying to control the means of collective coercion, the means to use force to make people do things, that Fred can ‘fully realise his humanity’, how is this ‘libertarian socialism’ going to protect the individual called Fred’s rights? What if the majority in Hain’s total democracy don’t like Fred? And who will define these ‘individual’ rights? The political collective, of course. Forget constitutions which constrain democracy because those are anti-democratic (which is rather the point). Forget consensual several relationships because everything is democratic, meaning no politically unpopular relationships will be allowed. Forget custom and culture as a means to moderate interactions because that is not political. If Fred is not popular, Fred is just out of luck.
Fascist collectivists try to prevent mixed race sex, socialist collectivists try to prevent ‘undemocratic’ private trade, but the principle of collectivism is always the same. If an individual does something he wants to do in a collectivist ‘society’, it is because the political collective allows him to do it, not because it is his right to do as he pleases with those who are willing participants.
Clearly this democratic ‘society’ of Hain’s is willing to use force to prevent free trade between willing individuals unless they happen to be acting in a manner which is politically favoured. Much as most states currently use force to try and prevent free trade in drugs between willing individuals, the same will be done to any relationship the political collective dislikes. Put another way, this democratic society is in fact a state which will be organised to enforce the political will of the plurality on an epic scale, given that this would be a totally political society. And any time someone tries to opt out, they will quickly discover just how ‘withered away’ the state is under ‘socialist libertarianism’: not very.
Of course just as modern states may be more repressive or less repressive (running on a continuum from, say, Switzerland to North Korea), some implementations of so-called ‘socialist libertarianism’ may be more savage or less savage in their interpretation of an unfettered total political democracy at a given point in time. An individual who shares the views, aspirations and prejudices of the majority may well think that life seems equitable and good. After all, if he is allowed to do the things he wishes to do, why complain? But as the democracy advocated by Hain is total, what if he wants to do that which not popular?
I have long thought that supporters of collectivism (be it of the socialist, nationalist or conservative kind) who are homosexuals or who are people with other lifestyles that will never be popular (in the literal sense of the word, actually favoured by the majority) are unwise in the extreme to advocate anything that does not reserve rights to individuals before collectives. Socialism is by Hain’s own words seen as “…where socialism becomes the essential counterpart to libertarianism which could otherwise – and indeed sometimes is – right wing”. Of course by ‘right wing’ Hain means individualist. Libertarianism puts the rights of the individual as the first of all virtues. Libertarian socialism is individualist collectivism, ergo libertarian socialism is an oxymoron.
So what is Hain’s total political ‘society’ in reality? It is locally organised totalitarianism with Big Brother based in the local town hall rather than in Whitehall.
Sometimes the views of Britain one reads in the American press suggest to me that the authors must have visited Britain in some parallel universe rather than the one I live in.
Every now and again however, I read an article that suggests not just that there are indeed commentators in the USA who understand Britain just fine, but that some of them understand the truth about Britain a great deal better than many British journalists and the majority of Britain’s dismal political class.
The sad truth is that British journalists who are not sounding shrill and alarmed clearly have not grasped the magnitude of what is about to happen to the British people’s remaining ability to live under accountable governance and accessible law. As a result, the only voices in Britain which seem to be aware of the rapidly approaching blackhole that the United States of Europe represents are the perpetually shrill and alarmist tabloid newspapers like the resolutely low-brow Sun newspaper.
Thus it is this tabloid rag that Washington Times journalist Paul Craig Roberts quotes extensively:
Next month, Mr. Blair intends to give his approval to a new European Union constitution, which would create a United States of Europe and turn Parliament into the equivalent of a local council.
Trevor Kavanagh, political editor of the Sun, Britain’s largest newspaper, says Mr. Blair’s decision signs away 1,000 years of British sovereignty and hands “control of our economic, defense, foreign and immigration policies to Brussels. The EU will also gain authority over our justice, transport, health and commerce systems and dictate the strength of union power.”
Mr. Blair has ruled out a referendum or vote on his decision to terminate the existence of Britain as a country. He says the issue is too complicated for voters to understand.
Think about that for a moment. Do you think it is too difficult for people to understand the difference between being an independent country and a province in a European empire? Do you think voters can’t understand the difference between electing a government that is accountable to them and being ruled from afar?
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Britain’s unique legal system, with its habeas corpus and double jeopardy protections, would cease to exist. Native Britons could be imprisoned for voicing opposition to their cities being overrun by Third World immigrants. But Mr. Blair thinks these changes are too difficult for British voters to evaluate.
[…]
Britons can be arrested for self-defense. Imagine having to decide whether to submit to rape, robbery or assault or face arrest for responding with excessive force. Force capable of driving off an attacker is likely to be “excessive,” especially if accomplished with use of a weapon.
[…]
Habeas corpus and protection against double jeopardy mean little when criminal sanctions apply to self-defense and to children playing with toy guns. It might be that, practically speaking, the British have already lost the protection of their law. In choosing Mr. Blair, perhaps the British people showed an indifference to continued national sovereignty.
Read the whole article. I am indifferent to the fading vaingloriousness of states. However I am far from indifferent to a process that will lock in the ever increasing growth of state by making its power centres even more remote than they already are, thereby making them immune to even the weak checks and balances of locally sourced law and democracy.
Many have fought the advent of the European super-state in Britain, but it has just been one issue amongst many. Only now and oh so very belatedly have a few newspapers and media commentators picked up the horn and sounded it. Suddenly it is dawning on them that the battle has now reached the very last ditch almost unnoticed, whilst the mass of people sleepwalk towards the end of a thousand years of evolving political culture. Lose this one and there will be no more political means left for opposition. No doubt the perpetual growth of mass surveillance and the impending introduction of ID cards at this time is just a coincidence. Sure.
Welcome to a dying nation.
As I have had a couple lengthy e-mails asking me to explain my hostility to PoliticalCompass.org, I thought I would do so in a new post.
My big problem with PoliticalCompass.org is that it makes inherently statist and left/right valued assumptions to which there is no appropriate answer unless you share those assumptions, making the test fine if all the world fitted neatly into the left/right, socialist (US=liberal)/conservative continua… but the world just ain’t that simple.
Although they claim to provide a more sophisticated representation of political views than the crudity of left and right, they in fact strip away some of the true issues that differentiate statists and anti-statists. At best they differentiate one form of statist from another, separating social democrats from communists from conservatives. If you think you can usefully differentiate an agorist or anarcho-capitalist libertarian from a minarchist libertarian from a Kritarchist libertarian using the political compass tests, you are sadly mistaken.
I would argue that as the very meaning of their ‘libertarian’ axis is badly flawed, if they tell you your political coordinates are x,y, as they have no real understanding of what one of the four axes represents, the test and thus the coordinates on the ‘compass’ it generates, are highly suspect, to put it mildly.
There is no such thing as voluntary collectivism when applied to an entire society, which means ‘collectivist’ libertarianism does not accept several liberty and thus is not libertarian at all: if you live collectively on a kibbutz, one day you may decide it was all a big mistake and just say “screw this crap” as you walk out the door. If the other people in the kibbutz use force to stop you leaving, it is they who are the criminals… try doing that in a collectivist society (which in reality means a collectivist state) and you will find that the door to a non-collective existence is in fact a prison cell or a chimney. → Continue reading: More musings on the Political Compass
Michael Totten has stepped in that steaming pile on the information superhighway known as PoliticalCompass.org and thereby concluded he is ‘one of us’… well… sort of.
Now as Michael is a thoughtful sort of leftie, it would pain me not at all if he holds onto that thought and bounces it around for a while. Maybe he will conclude that rational libertarianism may indeed be a better intellectual home for him than either the statist left or statist right.
However he will not find the answers to that question by taking the preposterous test offered by PoliticalCompass.org
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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