LONG RANT.FIR WARMING.
"The Libertarian as Conservative." To me this is so obvious that I am hard
put to find something to say to people who still think libertarianism has
something to do with liberty. A libertarian is just a Republican who takes
drugs. I'd have preferred a more controversial topic like "The Myth of the
Penile Orgasm." But since my attendance here is subsidized by the esteemed
distributor of a veritable reference library on mayhem and dirty tricks, I
can't just take the conch and go rogue. I will indeed mutilate the sacred
cow which is libertarianism, as ordered, but I'll administer a few hard
lefts to the right in my own way. And I don't mean the easy way. I could
just point to the laissez-faire Trilateralism of the Libertarian Party,
then leave and go look for a party. It doesn't take long to say that if you
fight fire with fire, you'll get burned.
If that were all I came up with, somebody would up and say that the LP has
lapsed from the libertarian faith, just as Christians have in- sisted that
their behavior over the last 1900 years or so shouldn't be held against
Christianity. There are Libertarians who try to retrieve libertarianism
from the Libertarian Party just as there are Christians who try to reclaim
Christianity from Christendom and communists (I've tried to myself) who try
to save Communism from the Communist parties and states. They (and I) meant
well but we lost. Libertarianism is party-archist fringe-rightism just as
socialism is what Eastern European dissidents call "real socialism," i.e.,
the real-life state-socialism of queues, quotas, corruption and coercion.
But I choose not to knock down this libertarian strawman-qua-man who's
blowing over anyway. A wing of the Reaganist Right has obviously
appropriated, with suspect selectivity, such libertarian themes as
deregulation and voluntarism. Ideologues indignate that Reagan has
travestied their principles. Tough sh7t! I notice that it's their
principles, not mine, that he found suitable to travesty. This kind of
quarrel doesn't interest me. My reasons for regarding libertarianism as
conservative run deeper than that.
My target is what Libertarians have in common with each other, and with
their ostensible enemies. Libertarians serve the state all the better
because they declaim against it. At bottom, they want what it wants. But
you can't want what the state wants without wanting the state, for what the
state wants is the conditions in which it flourish- es. My (unfriendly)
approach to modern society is to regard it as an integrated totality. Silly
doctrinaire theories which regard the state as a parasitic excrescence on
society cannot explain its centuries-long persistence, its ongoing
encroachment upon what was previously market terrain, or its acceptance by
the overwhelming majority of people including its demonstrable victims.
A far more plausible theory is that the state and (at least) this form of
society have a symbiotic (however sordid) interdependence, that the state
and such institutions as the market and the nuclear family are, in several
ways, modes of hierarchy and control. Their articulation is not always
harmonious but they share a common interest in consigning their conflicts
to elite or expert resolution. To demonize state authoritarianism while
ignoring identical albeit contract-consecrated subservient arrangements in
the large-scale corporations which control the world economy is fetishism
at its worst. And yet (to quote the most vociferous of radical
Libertarians, Professor Murray Rothbard) there is nothing un-libertarian
about "organization, hierarchy, wage-work, granting of funds by libertarian
millionaires, and a libertarian party." Indeed. That is why libertarianism
is just conservatism with a rationalist/positivist veneer.
Libertarians render a service to the state which only they can provide. For
all their complaints about its illicit extensions they concede, in their
lucid moments, that the state rules far more by consent than by coercion
which is to say, on present-state "libertarian" terms the state doesn't
rule at all, it merely carries out the tacit or explicit terms of its
contracts. If it seems contradictory to say that coercion is consensual,
the contradiction is in the world, not in the expression, and can't
adequately be rendered except by dialectical discourse. One-dimensional
syllogistics can't do justice to a world largely lacking in the virtue. If
your language lacks poetry and paradox, it's unequal to the task of
accounting for actuality. Otherwise anything radically new is literally
unspeakable. The scholastic "A = A" logic created by the Catholic Church
which the Libertarians inherited, unquestioned, from the Randites is just
as constrictively conservative as the Newspeak of Orwell's 1984.
The state commands, for the most part, only because it commands popular
support. It is (and should be) an embarrassment to Libertarians that the
state rules with mass support including, for all practical purposes,
theirs.
Libertarians reinforce acquiescent attitudes by diverting discontents who
are generalized (or tending that way) and focusing them on particular
features and functions of the state which they are the first to insist are
expendable! Thus they turn potential revolutionaries into repairmen.
Constructive criticism is really the subtlest sort of praise. If the
Libertarians succeed in relieving the state of its exiguous activities,
they just might be its salvation. No longer will reverence for authority be
eroded by the prevalent official ineptitude. The more the state does, the
more it does badly. Surely one reason for the common man's aversion to
Communism is his reluctance to see the entire economy run like the Post
Office. The state tries to turn its soldiers and policemen into objects of
veneration and respect, but uniforms lose a lot of their mystique when you
see them on park rangers and garbage- men.
The ideals and institutions of authority tend to cluster together, both
subjectively and objectively. You may recall Edward Gibbon's remark about
the eternal alliance of Throne and Altar. Disaffection from received dogmas
has a tendency to spread. If there is any future for freedom, it depends on
this. Unless and until alienation recognizes itself, all the guns the
Libertarians cherish will be useless against the state.
You might object that what I've said may apply to the minarchist majority
of Libertarians, but not to the self-styled anarchists among them. To my
mind a right-wing anarchist is just a minarchist who'd abolish the state to
his own satisfaction by calling it something else. But this incestuous
family squabble is no affair of mine. Both camps call for partial or
complete privitization of state functions but neither questions the
functions themselves. They don't denounce what the state does, they just
object to who's doing it. This is why the people most victimized by the
state display the least interest in libertarianism. Those on the receiving
end of coercion don't quibble over their coercers' credentials. If you
can't pay or don't want to, you don't much care if your deprivation is
called larceny or taxation or restitution or rent. If you like to control
your own time, you distinguish employment from enslavement only in degree
and duration. An ideology which outdoes all others (with the possible
exception of Marxism) in its exaltation of the work ethic can only be a
brake on anti-authoritarian orientations, even if it does make the trains
run on time.
My second argument, related to the first, is that the libertarian phobia as
to the state reflects and reproduces a profound misunderstanding of the
operative forces which make for social control in the modern world. If
and this is a big "if," especially where bourgeois Libertarians are
concerned what you want is to maximize individual autonomy, then it is
quite clear that the state is the least of the phenomena which stand in
your way.
Imagine that you are a Martian anthropologist specializing in Terran
studies and equipped with the finest telescopes and video equipment. You
have not yet deciphered any Terran language and so you can only record what
earthlings do, not their shared misconceptions as to what they're doing and
why. However, you can gauge roughly when they're doing what they want and
when they're doing something else.
Your first important discovery is that earthlings devote nearly all their
time to unwelcome activities. The only important exception is a dwindling
set of hunter- gatherer groups unperturbed by governments, churches and
schools who devote some four hours a day to subsistence activities which so
closely resemble the leisure activities of the privileged classes in
industrial capitalist countries that you are uncertain whether to describe
what they do as work or play. But the state and the market are eradicating
these holdouts and you very properly concentrate on the almost
all-inclusive world-system which, for all its evident internal antagonisms
as epitomized in war, is much the same everywhere. The Terran young, you
further observe, are almost wholly subject to the impositions of the family
and the school, sometimes seconded by the church and occasionally the
state. The adults often assemble in families too, but the place where they
pass the most time and submit to the closest control is at work. Thus,
without even entering into the question of the world economy's ultimate
dictation of everybody's productive activity, it's apparent that the source
of the greatest direct duress experienced by the ordinary adult is not the
state but rather the business that employs him. Your foreman or supervisor
gives you more "or-else" orders in a week than the police do in a decade.
If one looks at the world without prejudice but with an eye to maximizing
freedom, the major coercive institution is not the state, it's work.
Libertarians who with a straight face call for the abolition of the state
nonetheless look on anti-work attitudes with horror. The idea of abolishing
work is, of course, an affront to common sense. But then so is the idea of
abolishing the state. If a referendum were held among Libertarians which
posed as options the abolition of work with retention of the state, or
abolition of the state with retention of work, does anyone doubt the outcome?
Libertarians are into linear reasoning and quantitative analysis. If they
applied these methods to test their own reasoning they'd be in for a shock.
That's the point of my Martian thought experiment. This is not to say that
the state isn't just as unsavory as the Libertarians say it is. But it does
suggest that the state is important, not so much for the direct duress it
inflicts on convicts and conscripts, for instance, as for its indirect
back-up of employers who regiment employees, shopkeepers who arrest
shoplifters, and parents who paternalize children. In these classrooms, the
lesson of submission is learned. Of course, there are always a few freaks
like anarcho-capitalists or Catholic anarchists, but they're just
exceptions to the rule of rule.
Unlike side issues such as unemployment, unions, and minimum-wage laws, the
subject of work itself is almost entirely absent from libertarian
literature. Most of what little there is consists of Randite rantings
against parasites, barely distinguishable from the invective inflicted on
dissidents by the Soviet press, and Sunday-school platitudinizing that
there is no free lunch this from fat cats who have usually ingested a lot
of them. In 1980, a rare exception appeared in a book review published in
the Libertarian Review by Professor John Hospers, the Libertarian Party
elder state's-man who flunked out of the Electoral College in 1972. Here
was a spirited defense of work by a college professor who didn't have to do
any. To demonstrate that his arguments were thoroughly conservative, it is
enough to show that they agreed in all essentials with Marxism-Leninism.
Hospers thought he could justify wage-labor, factory discipline and
hierarchic management by noting that they're imposed in Leninist regimes as
well as under capitalism. Would he accept the same argument for the
necessity of repressive sex and drug laws? Like other Libertarians, Hospers
is uneasy hence his gratuitous red-baiting because libertarianism and
Leninism are as different as Coke and Pepsi when it comes to consecrating
class society and the source of its power, work. Only upon the firm
foundation of factory fascism and office oligarchy do Libertarians and
Leninists dare to debate the trivial issues dividing them. Toss in the
mainstream conservatives who feel just the same and we end up with a
veritable trilateralism of pro-work ideology seasoned to taste.
Hospers, who never has to, sees nothing demeaning in taking orders from
bosses, for "how else could a large scale factory be organized?" In other
words, "wanting to abolish authority in large-scale industry is tantamount
to wanting to abolish industry itself." Hospers again? No, Frederick
Engels! Marx agreed: "Go and run one of the Barcelona factories without
direction, that is to say, without authority!" (Which is just what the
Catalan workers did in 1936, while their anarcho- syndicalist leaders
temporized and cut deals with the government.) "Someone," says Hospers,
"has to make decisions and" -- here's the kicker -- "someone _else_ has to
implement them." Why? His precursor Lenin likewise endorsed "individual
dictatorial powers" to assure "absolute and strict unity of will. But how
can strict unity of will be ensured? By thousands subordinating their will
to the will of one." What's needed to make industrialism work is "iron
discipline while at work, with unquestioning obedience to the will of a
single person, the soviet leader, while at work." Arbeit macht frei!
Some people giving orders and others obeying them: this is the essence of
servitude. Of course, as Hospers smugly observes, "one can at least change
jobs," but you can't avoid having a job just as under statism one can at
least change nationalities but you can't avoid subjection to one
nation-state or another. But freedom means more than the right to change
masters.
Hospers and other Libertarians are wrong to assume, with Manchester
industrialist Engels, that technology imposes its division of labor
"independent of social organization." Rather, the factory is an instrument
of social control, the most effective ever devised to enforce the class
chasm between the few who "make decisions" and the many who "implement
them." Industrial technology is much more the product than the source of
workplace totalitarianism. Thus the revolt against work reflected in
absenteeism, sabotage, turnover, embezzlement, wildcat strikes, and
goldbricking has far more liberatory promise than the machinations of
"libertarian" politicos and propagandists.
Most work serves the predatory purposes of commerce and coercion and can be
abolished outright. The rest can be automated away and/or transformed by
the experts, the workers who do it into creative, playlike pastimes whose
variety and conviviality will make extrinsic inducements like the
capitalist carrot and the Communist stick equally obsolete. In the
hopefully impending meta-industrial revolution, libertarian communists
revolting against work will settle accounts with "Libertarians" and
"Communists" working against revolt. And then we can go for the gusto!
Even if you think everything I've said about work, such as the possibility
of its abolition, is visionary nonsense, the anti-liberty implications of
its prevalence would still hold good. The time of your life is the one
commodity you can sell but never buy back. Murray Rothbard thinks
egalitarianism is a revolt against nature, but his day is 24 hours long,
just like everybody else's. If you spend most of your waking life taking
orders or kissing ass, if you get habituated to hierarchy, you will become
passive-aggressive, sado-masochistic, servile and stupefied, and you will
carry that load into every aspect of the balance of your life. Incapable of
living a life of liberty, you'll settle for one of its ideological
representations, like libertarianism. You can't treat values like workers,
hiring and firing them at will and assigning each a place in an imposed
division of labor. The taste for freedom and pleasure can't be
compartmentalized.
Libertarians complain that the state is parasitic, an excrescence on
society. They think it's like a tumor you could cut out, leaving the
patient just as he was, only healthier. They've been mystified by their own
metaphors. Like the market, the state is an activity, not an entity. The
only way to abolish the state is to change the way of life it forms a part
of. That way of life, if you call that living, revolves around work and
takes in bureaucracy, moralism, schooling, money, and more. Libertarians
are conservatives because they avowedly want to maintain most of this mess
and so unwittingly perpetuate the rest of the racket. But they're bad
conservatives because they've forgotten the reality of institutional and
ideological interconnection which was the original insight of the
historical conservatives. Entirely out of touch with the real currents of
contemporary resistance, they denounce practical opposition to the system
as "nihilism," "Luddism," and other big words they don't understand. A
glance at the world confirms that their utopian capitalism just can't
compete with the state. With enemies like Libertarians, the state doesn't
need friends.
