Concerning Left-Libertarianism, Edited

Readable version. I finally found time to edit it. The past ten days at school I have tested 500 students. I'm tired. Pardon the repost, but this really is much more readable than before.


Most left-libertarian principles are hard to disagree with when you look at them as statements, say on a flier about why you should join the libertarian cause. On Anti-Statism: Who doesn't want to embrace anti-statist principles? It's a wonderful idea to be free from oppressive state ideological and legislative structures. On Labor: Who doesn't want to support labor? Not many people out there like the idea of sweatshops. On Corporate Corruption: Who doesn't want a society free from corporate corruption? I have yet to find someone who believes corporations are free to be as corrupt as they want to be. On Pluralism: Who believes in freedom and liberty who doesn't see the need for pluralism? Only the fundamentalist religious communities argue against pluralism. I could go on.

Again, there isn't a left-libertarian principle with which most of us would disagree.  It's ideological and political theories like these that we should distrust the most. In other words, I say, what is it then with this fabulous idea that is being hidden? And, Why aren't we doing that? Where's the weakness?

To accomplish left-libertarian goals insists that we maintain an in-the-free-market approach to thinking about and living in Nature. This is troubling because the free market is a capitalist and Capitalist's machine. More on that in a moment. The goal of left-libertarianism sounds great: to achieve socialist ideals within the framework of a free market. I don't think it's possible. It's only effective in service of a greater cause: for example, libertarianism or capitalism. Socialism doesn't really work that way. So, the use of it is suspicious. The idealism in it is the fuel to power cooperation within the capitalist free market.

Left-libertarian philosophy never rises above common sense. Common sense philosophies encounter problems handling paradoxes and complex mechanisms; actually, common sense tends to deny paradox altogether. It's practice is often antithetical to philosophical study. I think the common sense mindset helps shelter left-libertarians from exploring serious problems with their reasons for being libertarians.

A free market cannot exist, in the way we conceptualize it, without a capitalist state to regulate it. Freeing the market from government coercion (regulatory action in libertarianese) is not necessarily going to produce a truly free market. The apathetic adjective "free" to mean the things we mean when we say the noun "freedom" is awfully lazy. Moreover, anti-statist principles within a capitalist framework require a state. It's as if libertarians believe they can accomplish principles developed for a free state outside of that state.

This is ontological, I suppose. Very complicated stuff. And I don't want to oversimplify because I disagree. I've not got the time to write a chapter on this technical point. (I could do a better job than Hayek in his first chapter to The Constitution of Liberty where he frames the definitions for freedom and liberty to fit his ideological cause.) I have yet to see anything describing how to achieve anti-statist principles within a free market. However, we can allow our friends to have their ideals. I don't have a problem with ideals.

There's a bigger problem with left-libertarianism and its rather practical. They simply have no clue what to do with accumulated wealth and corporate power.  You'll hear a lot about rejecting wealth and rejecting corporations. You'll hear a lot about instilling the free market with a moral spirit.  Ok, good.  Reject immorality and corruption. Then what?

Left-libertarianism is not quite up to the task of coping with the social order in the free market. This is the linguistic and philosophical pretzel libertarian theorists developed for their anti-regulatory, anti-socialist beliefs. It's the main reason I'd argue that left-libertarians should give up libertarianism. It's untenable. For libertarians, a free market as such is proof that the natural order is a liberal social order in the free market and capitalism is that order as it functions. Freedom within a free market means being bound to do nothing on behalf of others. This is, in itself, a regulation and in a community would only function to form a state. You don't decide to form this state, it's there. And to wrangle its attitudes, directions, and machinations, you must regulate the state with rules. I sometimes think that libertarians believe The State has an address, one location, that can be smashed, trashed, done away with and that'd be that as long as we agreed not to build another one. But the state is actually bound up with culture, the spirit of place, not an actual place. (And we can read Ludwig von Mises whine about the failure of people to realize this important fact. Of course, his theory goes on to claim that consumers can steer the ship. So, he scolds people for thinking the market is a place and then asks them to think of it in the form of a ship at sea.)

The libertarian theorists and acolytes of Capitalism remind me of the characters in a scene in Wim Wenders' film Falsche Bewegung (Wrong Move) from 1975. The characters, none of whom are satisfied with their lives and are suffering from an inability to realize their desires, try to run from the camera itself. It's a valiant attempt, I suppose, to try to escape the social order. But they aren't permitted to escape and they simply cannot seem to want to do much to actually transform their social space. They merely want to escape. I'm taking the scene out of context to make a point, but it's worth thinking about. Are we willing to work to transform our lives, to produce a new social space, or are we simply looking for an easy escape?

Left-libertarians will say, Hey guys, morality matters. What good does that claim do when you've liberated us from our social contract? What interest exists in self-interest for morality based in a social contract that binds us to the welfare of others? The common sense in progressive libertarianism is not capable of answering these questions. What do libertarians believe morality is? I don't think they know. And I'd venture to claim that in the general scheme of libertarianism it actually doesn't matter.

Self-interest is not complex, not paradoxical. It's at work now. Capitalists understand self-interest. And I mean Capitalist in the Marxian sense: A Capitalist is a rich guy who own the means of production and has accumulated enough wealth to exploit labor. A Capitalist can cooperate with workers, pay them, to produce the means for him to make a profit. Workers understand self-interest, as well, in that it's in their self-interest to cooperate with Capitalists. This is not in itself moral nor an accurate description of the way self-interest should work according to libertarian idealism.

This is another place where left-libertarianism is on shaky ground. They say they support organized labor but only without state interference. It's in the self-interest of Capitalists to resist negotiating with organized labor. An insidious nature to left-libertarian discourse here: They insist that we shall agree to recognize that certain bad results of wealth accumulation and exploitation of labor are the results of state intervention. This is not the same as asserting that no state would lead to better negotiations and less exploitation. The entire "As we begin, let's agree to believe X" formula for their most important concepts is not philosophical nor scientific. It is, on other hand, what we could refer to as coercive regulation.

Left-libertarians created a category that is meant to assuage my concern. They created a category for the wrongly oppressed that strips individual oppressed constituents of difference and then refers to them as "the innocents". Left-libertarians say they oppose "aggression against the innocents". That's fine, but do realize that with that promise, we now have the initial formation of an involuntary social contract within a state.

To return to self-interest for a moment, more significantly, we do not live in a world where self-interest can be equated in any way to freedom and liberty as such. In other words, being able to be self-interested individuals without interference from, say, the state does not seem to me to guarantee more access to freedom and liberty. We do not have a definition for self-interest without capitalism. The word itself is tied up in the enfranchisement of the middle class and self-help literature. We have shaped the literary canon regarding self-interest in service of history as a process justifying capitalism and its conceptualization of the free market. See the pinnacle of this in Samuel Smiles' work on Character and Habit (self-interest as self-help) and Hayek's work on the principles defining the liberal social order of the free market. Both are disingenuous theories, by which we could say they are both self-interested.  Funny how that works, isn't it.

Libertarians, left or not, appear to reject any philosophical framework that moves beyond the free market, in other words capitalism. In my opinion, this makes their critiques of socialism, for example, completely inauthentic and hypocritical. Left-libertarians use the crutch of volunteerism and the crutch of opposition to crude, cold war, anti-socialist libertarianism to make an argument for reassessing libertarian principles.  It's like polishing a turd, in my opinion.

dagConfessions: Power & The Right To Peacefully Assemble

A US citizen visiting Korea for more than a year might have a hard time understanding Korean Democracy without doing a little homework. My wording might seem a little odd, but I think I could have been here for three months and not have come away with the desire to write this post (other than to share the story.)

The longer I live in Korea, the more I learn about the way the government and police operate. What disturbs me isn't the fact that I know about oppression and now I can see it happening outside my window. I'm not precious. I'm coming to terms with the fact that I haven't ever experienced a difference in how citizens think about Law. I guess I'm experiencing a kind of alienation for the first time that I could easily permit to become anger and frustration directed at Koreans and about Korean culture. But I want to resist that temptation because I think it's power I'm experiencing. Power, that as a white guy from the US, I have never confronted. I've read about it, sure. But this is different.

Koreans and Americans do not have the same experience and understanding of Law. A little knowledge of history explains the experiential aspect of the difference between our cultures. It's our, Korean and American, understanding of Law I want to quickly focus on before sharing a story from The Hankyoreh to illustrate my feelings. Feel free to comment if you disagree or want me to flesh this out. I'm more than willing to.

Many Americans, I'm ashamed to admit, don't really know that the reason we think and act like we do, as Americans do, has a lot to do with Laws. In the US, we have a Constitution and system of Laws that protects rights and punishes crimes. Americans like to talk about Rights all the time. We like to insist our Rights are Natural, even that we are born with them. We even have much of Continental Philosophy (See, Kant et al.) to back-up our notions that democratic life within a capitalist market is part of Nature's unknowable plan to guide us to ever more control of ourselves and toward overall Liberty. Nevertheless, we forget that without our enforceable social contract, all our Rights would simply be wishful and hopeful thinking. Yes, I'm saying that Americans take it for granted. I think we all know this is true.

Koreans have Laws with a big "L", too; it is, after all, the Republic of Korea. But Korean citizens don't think about their Republic as a Republic of Laws in the same manner Americans do. Laws in Korea are tools used by the police and the government to enforce the government's will, which is more appropriately stated as enforce the majority Party's will.

Koreans simply cannot freely speak in public in opposition to their government's ruling Party without worrying about punishment. Nor do they have the ability to freely assemble to protest and/or to organize in dissent without worrying about punishment. And when they do assemble in groups in active dissent, punishment does occur. A tourist passing through Seoul on a summer weekend would have to be blind not to notice the massive police presence in the streets.

I'm trying to come to terms with the visible and sometimes abject oppression many Koreans and immigrants struggle with here. The only thing that keeps me from running back to the US in disgust is that I'm well aware that, though Americans like to pretend it's otherwise, we have abject oppression in the US that is quite comparable while less widespread. In Seoul, it's easy for me to see it. I'm not from here. At home, I have to look for it. But it's there.

What I'm trying to come to terms with is understanding the middle-ground Korea occupies right now between the totalitarianism of the recent past and a more free Democracy of the sometime in the future. And I want to understand why Koreans don't have the feeling that it's their right. That's for another post, though. (And I should say that all the liberal and leftist Koreans I have met would say that it is their right. I'm generalizing here, of course, and I hope not too much.)

Below is a link to a story from a recent edition of The Hankyoreh. Korea's versions of Conservative Republicans are members of the Grand National Party (GNP). The American GOP and the Korean GNP have a lot in common. At this moment in time, both parties' membership likes to claim that they know better than everybody else how to legislate. In addition, they are the parties of old, well-off men and their sons and their wives. GNP visions of Korean daily life remind me of the white power structure that guides the GOP through its decision-making back home.

Currently, The GNP is attempting to enact a law that would make it illegal for people to assemble in groups between 10pm and 6am. The dissenting members of government insist that this could be handled by instituting a permit process, that an outright ban would be too extreme.

The law isn't the problem here; the warrant the GNP uses to argue in support of it is the problem. The GNP's reason is that somebody might break a law or a late assembly might turn violent. It's a real problem, this logic. A US citizen would say without too much pushing: Hey, a person has to commit a crime before being charged with one. We don't use laws to prohibit people from choosing to break laws. People choose to participate in our social contract. If a person breaks a law, then we punish that person. And so on.

In Korea, the social contract is an idea and law is a tool used to enforce participation. For the most part, Koreans accept this enforcement. Rather than shaping legislation that encourages peaceful participation in free discourse, laws that suggest what a true disturbance is, a law is suggested that prohibits all assembly. Most foreign historians and essayists on Korea like to argue that the existence of this general acceptance of oppression is a hangover from the bad days when dictators ran daily life in Korea. Well, I think that's a shitty excuse for a real problem that needs real reform to ever change. In addition, I think it's terribly patronizing to listen to white intellectuals talk about Korea's hangovers. It's a shitty, demeaning, and anti-intellectual means to addressing a complex cultural construct.

GNP introduces bill to completely ban nighttime outdoor assemblies

Here are two paragraphs from the article. They highlight the problem I address above:

The GNP lawmakers at the committee meeting, including Cho, called for the bill to be passed during the February extraordinary assembly after the bill had been handed over to a subcommittee for legal deliberation. GNP Lawmaker Kim Tae-won said concerns over the destruction of evidence or escape were great regarding nighttime assemblies, and they could very likely turn into violent demonstrations. Thus, he added that until a peaceful demonstration culture takes root in South Korea, a time restriction would have to be placed on outdoor demonstrations.

Democratic Party Lawmakers Kang Gi-jung and Kim Yoo-jung, however, protested the bill, saying that since it excessively restricts the people’s Constitutionally-guaranteed basic rights, it would be better to place limits on noise or venues rather than time. They called on the GNP to drop discussion of amending the Assembly Law and instead hold hearings to gather public opinion. A bill proposed by Democratic Party Lawmaker Chun Jung-bae and Democratic Labor Party Lawmaker Lee Jung-hee, currently stuck in committee, would in principle permit nighttime outdoor assemblies under the condition that participants maintain law and order.