Matthew Gaylor has it ass backward

[mattd]

http://ri.xu.org/arbalest/alembic2c.html

"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.