Seriously, whatever superficial (and I mean superficial) aims, goals, and similarities we may share:
all forrms of radical leftism would lead to a vast wasteland of unimaginable proportions.
This would include Tuckerites, Mutalists, and Individual anarchists who reject things like rent and interest as well.
Say what you will about mainstream social democrats, keynesians, progressive liberals, neo-cons or whatever - but they actually all have at least some intellectual merit and standards, and none of them or the systems they would impose would lead us anywhere near the wreckage of radical revolutionary leftism. What merit is there in even thinking about these fringe people?
Another thing:
It would be anathema and counter productive (and rightly so) to associate with uber crazy fringe right wing groups (neo-nazi's, KKK, etc) but somehow there is a socially acceptable element in associating with a freaking neo-Marxist or "revolutionary" anarcho-primitivist - how insane is that?
"As in a kaleidoscope, the constellation of forces operating in the system as a whole is ever changing." - Ludwig Lachmann
"When A Man Dies A World Goes Out of Existence" - GLS Shackle
And a note on how itisn't the same type of "anarchism":
For most of us, I think it is just seeing the evidence and facts and seeing somewhat of a logical conclusion that can be drawn from it. It is overall,nothing too radical when the evidence comes in. It's just kind of a consequence of the facts.
Menger, Bohm-Bawerk, Mises, Hayek, Lachmann etc were radical enough to even think in terms of "minarchy" there is no need for us to assume they would take the extra step*. Rothbard, in this regard, really was just a dude in this tradition kind of adding the numbers together, just like what his predeccecors were doing.
Leftists "propose the system", as it were, and tell us how we accomplish it. That's an act of insanity.
*There is a story of Hayek talking to some of hisstudents in the 80's saying he was too old at this point in his life, but if he were a younger man he would probably be an Ancap. How cool is that if it's true?
Huh?
"Believe it or not, there are a few things worse than the state. And an anarcho-syndicalist legal order would be one of them."
http://mises.org/daily/5590/AnarchoSyndicalism-A-Recipe-for-Ruin
I have a really tough time keeping up with these labels or titles that are given to what people percieve certain "groups" of people to believe. At the end of the day, to me anyway, it is all just a waste of time and ignores any point being made. This even goes with labels that some people here try to associate themselves with; whether it be libertarian, anarcho-capitalist, anarchist. Most of us here are in favor of freedom and I think we can get that message across without labeling everyone with a group name tag.
(I don't even know if what I said was on topic at this point but this thread inspired me to write what I did)
If there were no labels, there would be no words
I can call something a banana because it has every single solitary attribute that defines a banana. When it comes to political or social labels, you'll find many things about a person or group of people that contradict what someone else is going to try and label them as. So I find the whole thing to be a complete waste because you'd really have to have endless knowledge about someone or a group of people to be able to group said person or people into such groups.
I feel that the radical left is a lot more respectable than the radical right. The left at least desires positive ends like community and human fulfillment, while the radical right is pro exclusion, state, and nationalism. For this reason they are more worth attempting to convert and to talk to.
@Jmorris
I'm not going to argue this here. I have no real desire to get philosophical or "meta" on a thread like this.
All I will say is socialism is simply not compatible with market theory. That shouldn't be too contraversial
I think they have their usages as co-belligerents against the state if we can agree that the best way to organise society is at the smallest possible level- i.e. they support secession. That way the modern state apparatus can collapse and we can have small pockets (on a city or county level) of varying systems. Then most people would probably leave the hispster communes and society would be relatively more sane. If Lenin can have useful idiots so can we.
The atoms tell the atoms so, for I never was or will but atoms forevermore be.
Yours sincerely,
Physiocrat
Robert Nisbet would disagree with you. What do you do you mean with "pro exclusion"?
Anway, what you describe sounds more like jingoism, which is essentially centrist. (While I of course think the whole right-left scheme is an anachronism anyway).
I'm a mutualist and I like wasteland
Also, the text about AnSyn being a "recipe for ruin" is disproved by the most powerfull argument- reality. AnSyn system established in Spain lead to economic boom.
Depends on what you mean by caring. If you mean 'talking to' then the answer is this: Because they are radicals. The kind of people who become social democrats do not matter. Even if they become anarchists they will not act. When the revolution comes they will stay at home sitting in their rocking chairs on their verandas while we fight it out alone. And when we win, they'll go along anyway even as social democrats, because that is what they do. They go along.
For the reason that Marko pointed out above.
The OP seems to depict them as evil beasts who are stupid and not worth the time. Which is very disappointing in that most people see us in the same way. I'm far more sympathetic to the left than the right, at least with the left they have good intentions, even if they are a bit too idealistic and misguided in how they wish to satisfy their values, whereas the right is more likely to have a attraction to authoritarianism. (Authoritarianism is despicable no matter how you look at it, while fairness, in some forms is not only acceptable but morally required.)
It seems to me that "libertarians" (maybe not anarcho-capitalists) definitely DO associate with the radical right wing. I don't feel like getting mired in a RP Newsletter discussion, but I think historically it's not an uncommon association, so I'm not sure that's a valid point.
Anyways, aside from that, I don't think the goals we have in common are superficial. Most radical left-wingers I know definitely have their hearts in the right place, they've just read too much Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky and not enough Mises or Rothbard. They're willing to think outside the mainstream and they care about the individual, they're just really confused. Seems like the perfect demographic to try to educate about free markets to me. Maybe we mean different things by "radical left-wing" though because I wouldn't say Keynesians, social democrats, etc etc are even close to more intellectually rigorous
Libertarians often do associate with the right wing and I believe that's why Libertarians have had only minimal success. The right, on average, values authority highly, Libertarians don't. Authority isn't one of those things that are easily justified (in the rational, semi-objective sense) either, people value authority not on rational grounds but primarily for emotional/psychological reasons, making it difficult to break that spell. Anti-authoritarianism is practically the defining feature of Libertarianism, trying to appeal to people who are on average the most authoritarian sure doesn't help our cause.
It's redundant to make such a comment given your avatar
Anyway,
As for as good intentions and / or "morals", I am suspicious of all claims to this. Of course I am morally non-cognative,so that doesn't help - but it is beyond me to psychologize. And frankly I find Procrustean leftist universalist tendencies not very desirable traits in people. Isolationism is probably more ignorable and escapable.
Other than that those talking about "revolutions" - I don't think there is any reason to desire a real live revolution as leftists love so much. I want to be nowhere near such an event
The syndicalist movement in Spain is not, to my knowledge, anarchist in nature. Moreover, syndicalism isn't simply "every employee gets a say in the management of the firm"; alternative methods of management are perfectly acceptable under a state of anarcho-capitalism, and if these arrangements are more profitable then they will tend to be adopted across the market. Anarcho-syndicalism is a "recipe for ruin" because it labors under the same inefficiences as "orthodox socialism" (the lack of a working price mechanism) while adding on the additional encumberment of going without a central planning authority to act as a proxy for market organization. Current syndicalist arrangments operate in a capitalist economy using capitalist methods of gauging profit and loss; the only difference is managerial.
Between syndicalism and orthodox socialism I would vie for the latter, and between market socialism and orthodox socialism I would vie for the former.
In regards to the original post, I "care" about radical leftists because of their boundless entertainment value. I certainly don't take many of them seriously, though.
Nielsio: "Believe it or not, there are a few things worse than the state. And an anarcho-syndicalist legal order would be one of them." http://mises.org/daily/5590/AnarchoSyndicalism-A-Recipe-for-Ruin
This article is awful. The writer did not bother to inform himself of the ideologies on which he spoke and was unable to distinguish between mutualism and anarcho-syndicalism.
I'm not sure about syndicalism but mutualism is purports to be a market system based on an occ/use property norm. There is no reason then that firms would favor producer interests over consumers, because then they would not sell enough to sustain the factory. There have been real life examples of functioning worker co-ops in non-retail settings which, on testimony of locals, provided cheaper goods than before their conversion.
That said one must admit there much less of a reason to save in such a scenario and it would be likely that society would be in a state of net consumption, which is, in my humble opinion, the best argument against such property norms.
Why do people care about leftism? I care about it because, in all of its various retardations of thought, it is an anti-power ideology. The systems it proposes are, more often than not, not. Thus I think it's a good reason to toss the ideology and its systems but try to grab some of the people attracted to it.
The Anarch is to the Anarchist what the Monarch is to the Monarchist. -Ernst Jünger
Neodoxy: I feel that the radical left is a lot more respectable than the radical right. The left at least desires positive ends like community and human fulfillment, while the radical right is pro exclusion, state, and nationalism. For this reason they are more worth attempting to convert and to talk to.
o_O I'd say the radical right ar libertarians. Your conception of the radical right is one that leftists generally want to believe in for reasons of self-aggrandizement.
To support this, I'm defining left and right in terms of their relative support of statism. Building a continuum along those lines you get socialists on the far left, liberals middle left, centrists, conservatives middle right, and libertarians far right being the least statist of all, in fact diametrically opposed to it.
Physiocrat: If Lenin can have useful idiots so can we.
If Lenin can have useful idiots so can we.
/thread
@ Anenome
Why are you defining right as less Statist and left as more Statist?
Serpentis-Lucis:@ Anenome Why are you defining right as less Statist and left as more Statist?
Because that's the direction of intellectual travel.
I'm perfectly willing to admit that the average republican rightist is fairly statist and not at all principled in his position against statism, but generally they do support the idea or at least the notion of limited government. Those who do become principled against government become libertarian.
On the other side of the equation the liberal left believes in statism explicitly as a means of 'righting the wrongs of the world,' 'achieving social justice,' etc. And those who become principled in this belief become socialists.
If you ask whom are totalitarians, it is the socialists, not the libertarians. The extreme right has often been branded as 'fascist' and therefore totalitarian, but this is false; fascism was always a leftist concept as well.
The terms left and right don't make any sense unless you cast them in terms of a continuum of support for statism. And while there's plenty of anomalies on both sides, in the main the picture I draw is correct.
I'd say the radical right ar libertarians. Your conception of the radical right is one that leftists generally want to believe infor reasons of self-aggrandizement
Once again, I would suggest you don't get too philisiophical or"meta" on a thread like this, certainly no reason to skepticize the terms being used or implied - which essentially negates you from anything from the topic at hand.
If you want to use to utilize your vocice as to what "the left really means",etc I suggest you create your own thread to maximize the potential of actually sticking with a topic that is primary to your goal- or find one of the plethora of other threads where people wish to quibble about such definitions.
I don't think anyone ( I certainly was not) is too concerned with "what it all means" when entering into a thread that I thought was clearly not all that serious to begin with. It's shorthand language, nothing more, if you're reading into things "deeply" you're reading it wrong.
@Anenome
It's not just the left that wants people to believe this, this is how the vast majority of the political scene defines itself and I'm pretty sure you know that, so there's definetly no reason to give me the face. Also, if you're going to redefine the traditional left/right scale then libertarian should at least be where it realistically should be, on the left.
Neodoxy,
Actually, in the French Congress following their overthrow of the monarchy proto-libertarian economist [edit: Frederic Bastiat, see below] sat on the left, so you've probably got something there.
I see your point. The far-right (= libertarian), far-left (= Totalitarian), seems like a oversimplification however. The Left isn't statist just for the sake of being statist, they adopt Statism because they believe it best brings about the society where their values are satisfied (Fairness and such), just as the Right isn't less Statist for the sake of being less Statist. The Right see the government as a sort of infringement on family values (Something the Right are more likely to value highly), this makes them less Statist only because Statism is a assault on their value system. The Right tend to value family, purity, and authority highly. The Left tend to value fairness and harm reduction the most. People will favor the method they see as best suited to fulfilling their values, as such a Leftist could be a Libertarian if they see it as best fulfilling their values, just as a Rightist could be a totalitarian if they see it as the best way of fulfilling their values. I could go into more details if you like.
PS: I realize that I talk about what values the Left and Right tend to have, this isn't just my opinion, there was a study in moral psychology which focused on this.
That's right, there is more then one left-right scheme in politics. You just mentioned the American one. The Europoean one puts Communists and Anarchists on the far left, while Monarchists and National Socialists would be on the far right. Liberals, Social Democrats and Christian Democrats would be somewhere in the middle, with Conservatives being a bit more right. One shouldn't forget that this is all based on 19th century schemata and I consider them anachronistic. The present political dichotomies are a bit different from the former ones dealing with certaing preferences. global vs. regional state sponsored/controlled vs. private initiative egalitarian synthesis vs, organic structures. There should be more on this to investigate.
@Rcder
That's also where Frederic Bastiat sat. The right is where the defenders of monarchy, and the believers in state privilege and aristocracy sat. The left is where those who challenged tradition and authority sat, whether socialist or classical liberal. It's not exactly perfect, but it's a better match than the right was.
Man, this has not been my week! I meant to say Frederic Bastiat, not Say; to my knowledge Say never served in a political position. Whatever meager reputation I've had on this forum is probably gone now.
Banished!
I like engaging leftists (as long as they're intellectually honest) because they have a different perspective. I don't like being in an echo chamber all the time.
The keyboard is mightier than the gun.
Non parit potestas ipsius auctoritatem.
Voluntaryism Forum
vive la insurrection:And a note on how itisn't the same type of "anarchism":
Indeed, it isn't always the same type at all. Anarcho-communists/socialists and at least some anarcho-syndicalists don't propose anything that I'd call "anarchism", because they define "the state" as something like "the ultimate instrument of class rule". By that definition of "state", a classless society necessarily has no "state". But there could certainly exist a single (and thus monopolistic) administrative apparatus that governs all of the means of production in the society (however indirectly). In fact, that's what the above types of left-anarchists desire. The irony is that this monopolistic administrative apparatus is precisely what anarcho-capitalists identify as "the state".
Honest question,
How many "radical" leftists /neo-leftists do you know that have actually made truth claims (even left liberals and soc dems have this problem, though usually they can at least appeal to some form of scientism from time to time)? For me it seems as if it is built off of out of bounds skeptical critiques, psychologisms, passive aggressive behaviour, and random social signaling devices. I think the truth claims died with hard core Marxism.
PS:
That is actually why I kind of made this thread. They can be enjoyable to engage from time to time. But in the long haul, they are the least intellectually satisfying, and get away with the most insane BS from my experience.
Vive,
What exactly do you mean? Are you saying that all leftists do is lie?
No,
To be superficial, I am saying I haven't heard a truth claim. To me it is mostly doing geneologies, "deconstructions", psychologies, and showing the "absudrdity" of an action or custom at some point in history.
This line of thinking does nothing. I know there is more to it than that...but I honestly haven't seen much more.
I belive these people are at least semi-sincere when they do this (as this is how they were brought up / trained). To call them liars would be a bit harsh. To say they are "doing" anything though,that is questionable. If anything, I tend to categorize this as a group that largely "out skeptics" themsleves from being comprehensible. It's an easy honest mistake to make.
Can you give us some examples of modern-day intellectuals who behave in this manner?
And as I love quoting St Max, here's a couple quotes from Ego on the section of criticism, "post structuralism", skepticism:
Every one criticizes, but the criterion is different. People run after the "right" criterion. The right criterion is the first presupposition. The critic starts from a proposition, a truth, a belief. This is not a creation of the critic, but of the dogmatist; indeed, commonly it is actually taken up out of the culture of the time without further ceremony, like "liberty," "humanity," etc. The critic has not "discovered man," but this truth has been established as "man" by the dogmatist, and the critic (who, besides, may be the same person with him) believes in this truth, this article of faith. In this faith, and possessed by this faith, he criticizes.
But I distinguish between servile and own criticism. If I criticize under the presupposition of a supreme being, my criticism serves the being and is carried on for its sake: if I am possessed by the belief in a "free state," then everything that has a bearing on it I criticize from the stand-point of whether it is suitable to this state, for I love this state; if I criticize as a pious man, then for me everything falls into the classes of divine and diabolical, and before my criticism nature consists of traces of God or traces of the devil (hence names like Godsgift, Godmount, the Devil's Pulpit), men of believers and unbelievers; if I criticize while believing in man as the "true essence," then for me everything falls primarily into the classes of man and the un-man, etc.
The truth, or "truth in general," people are bound not to give up, but to seek for. What else is it but the être suprême, the highest essence? Even "true criticism" would have to despair if it lost faith in the truth. And yet the truth is only a - thought; but it is not merely "a" thought, but the thought that is above all thoughts, the irrefragable thought; it is the thought itself, which gives the first hallowing to all others; it is the consecration of thoughts, the "absolute," the "sacred" thought. The truth wears longer than all the gods; for it is only in the truth's service, and for love of it, that people have overthrown the gods and at last God himself. "The truth" outlasts the downfall of the world of gods, for it is the immortal soul of this transitory world of gods, it is Deity itself.
Only as the property of me do the spirits, the truths, get to rest; and they then for the first time really are, when they have been deprived of their sorry existence and made a property of mine, when it is no longer said "the truth develops itself, rules, asserts itself; history (also a concept) wins the victory," and the like. The truth never has won a victory, but was always my means to the victory, like the sword ("the sword of truth"). The truth is dead, a letter, a word, a material that I can use up. All truth by itself is dead, a corpse; it is alive only in the same way as my lungs are alive - namely, in the measure of my own vitality. Truths are material, like vegetables and weeds; as to whether vegetable or weed, the decision lies in me.
You believe that you have done the utmost when you boldly assert that, because every time has its own truth, there is no "absolute truth." Why, with this you nevertheless still leave to each time its truth, and thus you quite genuinely create an "absolute truth," a truth that no time lacks, because every time, however its truth may be, still has a "truth."
Free criticism busies itself with ideas, and therefore is always theoretical. However it may rage against ideas, it still does not get clear of them. It pitches into the ghosts, but it can do this only as it holds them to be ghosts. The ideas it has to do with do not fully disappear; the morning breeze of a new day does not scare them away.
The critic may indeed come to ataraxia before ideas, but he never gets rid of them; he will never comprehend that above the bodily man there does not exist something higher - namely, liberty, his humanity, etc. He always has a "calling" of man still left, "humanity." And this idea of humanity remains unrealized, just because it is an "idea" and is to remain such.
Criticism remains stuck fast in the "freedom of knowing," the freedom of the spirit, and the spirit gains its proper freedom when it fills itself with the pure, true idea; this is the freedom of thinking, which cannot be without thoughts.
Criticism smites one idea only by another, such as that of privilege by that of manhood, or that of egoism by that of unselfishness.