Samizdata

I just got around to reading the PoliticalCompass.org FAQ in which they ‘answer’ the question of “You can’t be libertarian and left wing” by claiming otherwise. Well before we even start with the body of the FAQ that is, yet again, a false dichotomy. Why? Because libertarians are neither ‘left wing’ nor ‘right wing’. For my personal views on why ‘left’ and ‘right’ are just meta-contextual frames of reference which are really meaningless in actual ideological terms, read my Giving libertarianism a ‘left hook’. Allow me to casually dissect the FAQ:

This is almost exclusively an American response, overlooking the undoubtedly libertarian tradition of European anarcho-syndicalism. It was, after all, the important French anarchist thinker Proudhon who declared that property is theft.

For one, I am British. For another, PoliticalCompass.org was the subject of informal discussion at a well attended and very British Libertarian Alliance meeting a few months ago and it was treated with complete derision.

To describe anarcho-syndicalism as ‘libertarian’ is preposterous as there is no individual liberty to do anything or even exist beyond the collective’s needs. It is a system that refuses to recognize the existence, much less the possibility of ownership, of several property beyond that which you have immediate use of. Let me put it this way: if you claim you own something that you are not in actual use of, you are thereby depriving someone else of using it, the anarcho-syndicalists regard it as perfectly legitimate to use force to take your stored goods for the collective’s perceived good. None of this ‘freely entered contracts’ or ‘freely associated trading’ nonsense for them. Although claims are made to the contrary, you do not in reality even have the liberty of owning your own labour, as if you produce something, you cannot freely trade it with another individual and acquire several property with it. Anarcho-syndicalism is communal living that is enforced with violence against any who claim ownership of any means of production with sophistication beyond the level of the hunter-gatherer (i.e. nothing less that primitive tribal Communism implemented at a local, rather than national, level).

Yes, yes, I realise theorists will leap up and down to disagree with my characterisation of anarcho-syndicalism but when you boil away the inane verbiage, that is the truth. That the people at PoliticalCompass.org cannot grasp that individual liberty and anti-collectivism are the defining characteristic of libertarianism is just an indication of their lack of comprehension of the words they use.

On the other side of the Atlantic, the likes of Emma Goldman were identified as libertarians long before the term was adopted by some economic rightwingers. And what about the libertarian collectives of the mid-late 1800s and 1960s? Americans like Noam Chomsky can claim the label ‘libertarian socialist’ with the same validity that Milton Friedman can be considered a ‘libertarian capitalist’.

The concept of Chomsky, an apologist for the genocidal Khmer Rouge, as a libertarian is beyond parody. Presumably they regard a policy to slaughter class enemies by the million as a form of ‘liberty’ and hence libertarian? That they quote Chomsky is not surprising however. It is his linguistic theories that were to some extent responsible for the term ‘liberal’ changing meaning (in the USA) from an advocate of limited governance to a socialist. Chomsky is nothing less than an advocate of linguistic incoherence as the only non-oppressive way to use language. His views are best summed up as ‘Truth is Oppression’. Thus the name for Communist East Germany, the German Democratic Republic, was perfectly acceptable to him. Never mind that it was neither democratic nor a republic. Sure, Chomsky may have called himself a ‘libertarian’ but that does not make it true. PoliticalCompass.org use the word ‘libertarian’ in much the same way, stripping it of any meaning which inconveniently falls outside their own meta-context.

The assumption that Social Darwinism delivers more social freedom is questionable.

So here we are told that libertarians, by rejecting the welfare state, favour a system that will lead to less social freedom. That is of course the socialist (and fascist) view of the result of non-state centred society. But how does that change the fact that rejecting welfare states is indeed a view held by libertarians? All libertarians (and some conservatives) regard alternative ways of dealing with social problems as being better: ways that involve liberty rather than state imposed laws. If they do not think that, they are not libertarians.

Yet it is clear from the FAQ that PoliticalCompass.org think the alternative to a welfare state is people starving in the street rather than the growth of charitable institutions. Again, that is fine for socialists to think that…they are socialists after all. But for them to fail to understand that libertarians do not think that because a libertarian view of ‘social justice’ is based upon non-coercion is just proof that when they use the term ‘libertarian’ they do not actually know what they are talking about.

Which of these two views are correct is utterly irrelevant as all that matters within the context of what PoliticalCompass trying to do is to correctly characterise what the views associated with each label they bandy about actually is.

The welfare states of, for example, Denmark and The Netherlands, abolished capital punishment decades ago and are at the forefront of progressive legislation for women, gays and ethnic minorities – not to mention cannabis and anti-censorship. Such developments would presumably be envied by genuine libertarians in socially conservative countries – even if their taxes are lower.

It does not seem to occur to these people that genuine libertarians might not be any more at ease with ‘conservative’ statism that ‘socialist’ statism. So called ‘progressive’ legislation for women, gays and ethnic minorities are just more violence backed statist interposing between private social interactions: there is nothing ‘libertarian’ about that, regardless of how commendable or not the objective is.

I do not expect the socialists at PoliticalCompass.org to agree with libertarian views. But if they cannot even understand that the essence of the libertarian position is that state legislation (i.e. violence based government action) to mediate the nature of voluntary interpersonal civil relationships is the antithesis of social liberty, then they are so uninformed, so ignorant of the political spectra they are purporting to describe with their ‘compass’ as to be completely incoherent and worthless as a measure of anything. It is not a matter of whose world view is correct, just a matter of knowing what other people actually think.