Libertarian socialism.

“Libertarian” originally meant a general opposition to authority of all types. In the United States, the Libertarian Party has conditioned the reception of the idea as being exclusively aanti-statist. Classical libertarians opposed not only the power of centralized government, but of the centralized businesses and corporations that strove to dominat people and societies through the dollar (and often enough, the gun).

A phrase that often provokes confusion is the political moniker “libertarian socialist.” This is essentially a gussied up euphemism for “anarchist,” though one that illustrates the positive content of the concept. Libertarian socialist means one who promotes the decentralized, social ownership of the means of production of a society. So not only do they oppose centralized government power; they also oppose with equal ferocity corporate power, and promote as an ultimate ideal some means of direct, social ownership of economic factors.

What does this mean? The easiest and clearest example would be cooperatives. a libertarian socialist might promote employee and consumer cooperatives as an alternative to normal business organization. A worker-owned and managed firm gives full, democratic power to those that work in a firm, and entitles them to a fair and equal share of profits. In practice, worker cooperatives do wonderfully across many types of business. They generally exceed the productivity of a private firm or corporation in spades. This makes a certain degree of sense intuitively, doesn't it? Workers who share in profits have every incentive to work hard, and workers who participate in managing their firm feel that much more connected and empowered through their work. Study after study demonstrates the viability of cooperatives in terms of productivity relative to traditional business forms. Their chief impediments are access to finance and general education- people aren't taught that these are possible or viable, and they aren't taught the crucial skills of democratic and participatory management. But if we look at one form of employee ownership, the Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP), we see both the wide adoption of this model and an increasing incidence of ESOPs that involve high levels of employee participation in management and majority or 100% ownership of stock.

This example shows the potential of a libertarian socialist framework to address concrete experience in the modern world without selling out and compromising basic principles. Though most ESOPs and cooperatives don't mesh thoroughly with a libertarian socialist value system, they are often a positive step in that direction and prove by their own success the inherent potential of these principles.*

Another model for empowerment that fits this basic value system, the one with greatest historical presence, is anarcho-syndicalism. This is a movement of radical unionism, based around achieving worker control of the economy. Examples of syndicalism include the famous CNT, the anarchosyndicalist union of Spain that spearheaded the spanish Revolution of 1936, fighting off Franco's troops in egalitarian union militias from the factories and villages until displacement and repression by the Stalinist union. The tradition includes the French syndicalists, who strove to recreate an economy of small, democratic workshops of skilled artisans against the onslaught of deskilling and deadening factory work. It includes the IWW, the mostly American union that brought together militants from every job sector to fight for worker control of industry by any means necessary, popularized by folk singer and radical alike.

Americans bridle when they think of unions, perhaps frightened by the presumption of conflict that organized labor brings. They often rightfully cringe at the corruption of many major unions (though are usually more accepting of the institututionalized corruption of big business). Despite this, the vast majority of Americans are still working class, and they still derive most of their income from wages or salaries. Syndicalism sees unionism not as a thing in and of itself, an effort to simply raise wages or elect amenable political candidates. Syndicalism sees unions as the best tool possible for worker control of industry, once again embodying the values and ethos of libertarian socialism.

If we focus on the principles rather than the proper nouns of this movement, we can see evidence of its legitimacy as a tactic in major sectors of the economy. Labor unions in America in the past few years have begun to use their often large pension plans to influence business decisions and put pressure on major financiers. This has taken many forms: funding major workplace buyouts; launching union-funded cooperative start-ups; promoting investment in unionized firms through leveraging weight in major investment funds and bank holdings. In other countries, unions have contributed heavily to the worker-owned sector. Here in Austin, members of the IWW have successfully pressured several businesses to operate as worker-managed collectives.

Syndicalism is scarier than simple cooprativization, because syndicalism denies the right of capital to control the workplace or the profits produced by work. To many Americans this might appear strange and unjustified; investors and their managers invest in the machines and/or facilities necessary for work to happen, and why should they let workers get anything out of the affair besides their agreed upon wages? As I said, relative to actual production itself, there are good arguments that this type of arrangement actually maximizes productivity, or at least enhances it dramatically. There is the basic argument of workplace democracy, that work should be democratic in the same way that government should be democratic, as a basic right of human existence necessary for basic human dignity. I agree with these arguments whole-heartedly. but they do little to address a belief in private property rights of capitalists, banks, or landlords.

To answer the argument in favor of the rights of property is to reveal the fundamental disconnect between libertarian socialism and the libertarianism we generally encounter in the US. The libertarian socialist tends to accept the charge that all true value is created by labor or the natural world, and that owners of substantial capital got it by stealing the earned wealth of workers or the given wealth of nature, through systemic collusion with government forces. This is a similar to a labor theory of value, in which all value added to a good comes to it through the work done on it alongside its natural value. The great producer of wealth, the great producer of productivity increases that have made modern civilization possible, is intellectual and physical labor. Capital simply amasses labor value from previous ventures or through some instance of petty theft or profiteering, and then repeats the cycle in new business ventures. Think of the foundation of the centralized wealth in America, where did it really come from? Didn't the government give land to railroad companies at well below market rate? Didn't the major industrialists get their start as corrupt profiteers during the Civil War? This is a larger argument, a deeper argument that I can't address fully here, one that demands a different idea of property than the rights of accummulated wealth.

Finally, we can consider another current of libertarian socialism, that of communalism. This has taken many forms, qualititative distinct yet all sharing a basic characteristic. They all focus on community control of assets, and management of that control through democratic community organs. We can include in this any number of religious or utopian communes throughout American history, and even contemporary ecovillages organized socially. We can also include the well-developed school of thought called libertarian municipalism, promoted by the Institute for Social Ecology and its founder Murray Bookchin. This school focuses on a sort of town assembly model, in which a local governing body, directly democratic, owns and manages local property, both physical space and manufacturing or production facilities. The dangers of state control of industry are prevented by using local control instead of national or state ownership. This is a very communitarian philosophy, and maximizes the strengths and weaknesses of any communitarian vision. Again, we can see the possibilities of this line of thinking when we look at numerous successful experiments in community ownership across the country. These range from something as everyday as municipal utilities (for instance our own Austin Energy) or moderate as local ownership of a city sports teams (the Green Bay Packers); to more radical ecovillages and cooperative living projects.

These examples all express common themes. Decentralization, a focus on the local and immediate level of organization, the everyday world of experience- at work, in a union local, in the community and home. A major focus on the control of land and capital. (We might consider it the greatest triumph of mainstream politics it has convinced so many of us to seek power through government and the state instead of through direct ownership and control of capital, rooted in the communities of labor and valuation that create it.) A strong concern with the social ownership of the factors of the economy, either by purchase, creation ad hoc or seizure. A rejection, even disregard of conventional politics and economics. A focus on creating viable projects in the now, instead of planning and theorizing about the future. Political economic projects more experimental and constructive than antagonistic, even if some strategies are adversarial.These features characterize the libertarian socialist tendency, and hence a major theme within anarchist thought and practice as a whole.

Politics

Politics is always ultimately a question of who is allowed to speak to and as power, and who is excluded. Which singular voice or idea, which propositions are allowed to drown out the others, why, and from whom? We can see this in a lecture hall as easily as a federal election, at a concert or in a board meeting. Most of the actually existing rules of power are unwritten, codes of behavior, style and speech that are known implicitly or explicitly by insiders but are unknown to outsiders. Who can speak and how much will their opinion matter, how direct will be its influence on power, these are the core questions of politics. The political process is always analytic in a sense, it always cuts into a population. People are included and excluded to define a hierarchy of legitimate participation. Are you a citizen? Are you an immigrant? Are you rich? Are you an educated professional? Are you white, black, Latino, Asian? What music do you listen to? What language and idiom do you speak? The navigation of power is conditioned by a host of these questions. And the most important question of all, how close is your proposition to the major existing configurations of power? How are your acts and words aligned in regards to the acts and words of the already powerful, be they institutions or individuals?

We cannot hope for a world in which this subterranean calculus is absent. It "Power" is simply the ability to form semi-coherent organizations and events that sustain themselves and/or increase over time. Last night I went to a wonderful show at Enchanted Forest, known to many Austinites for their performances that mix the aesthetics of raves and jam band shows with more ambitious performance art. I had a great time, even though they had problems with the sound system. During one of these problems, someone whipped out a set of bongos and started playing, trying to get a drum circle going. The MC vied with him a bit, and it was entertaining. Eventually the MC drowned him out be blasting a hip-hop song. I'm using this as an example of power dynamics because it's fairly innocent. The drummer tried to participate in the event directly, through starting a drum circle. Functionally, this was an attempt to share int he power of this particular event, to bring the audience into the show. The MC put a stop to it, albeit humorously. He was able to because he had an instrument of power unavailable to the drummer- a set of giant speakers. There was a momentary contest of power within the event, and the MC won through superior technology.

Now, frankly, as an audience member, if the whole event had been derailed into a drum circle, I would have been pissed. I wanted to see skilled performers, not be in a drum circle. So I'm glad the MC won. My point is simply that power is exercised all the time, in every event, every organization, any cluster of people.

The point of political thought though should be to bring these power mechanisms to light as they happen, to point out the process of exclusion and inclusion that is occurring, to evaluate them. This is the constructive element of political thought, to question whether or not the particular processes of inclusion and exclusion are appropriate, "fair," etc. For a political movement, there must be some sort of focus, some sort of tendency to promote, but we should be aware that this process is occurring. We can then always be mindful of the possibility of doing otherwise, of modifying our politics, or of adapting them to the times without losing the core of values we want to promote. So we must note and critique inclusions and exclusions. We must evaluate this process as it occurs. And we must always be able to focus our attention beyond the particular political arrangement of the moment and towards the actual values that are guiding us.

Purpose.

[Philosophy exists to defend and disclose the shining of the world, and to help that shine speak to Power]

Philosophy, or something we can call philosophy, is radically distinct from analysis, and that's its ultimate justification. In a critical vein, it reminds us of the limitations of analysis, and the imposition within our analysis of presumptions that separate us from things in themselves. This isn't something that can be truly "corrected" out of importance, it's part of the nature of thought and experience. Thought is directed, intentional, and intentionality, attention moves towards those qualities in beings that it recognizes. Analytic thought attends to given qualities, dissects and organizes them, develops patterns for them, comprehends them as organized systems. Yet because it is drawn to those qualities of being it already recognizes, it does not tend to a full observation.

In truth, "full observation" of a being cannot be an instrumental act, it must begin with an assumption of a thing's indeterminacy and accept the permanence of its own chaos. Chaos in this sense simply means perpetually indeterminate. As critique, philosophy points out the limitations of will and thought for analyzing beings, for getting at the Being[s] of beings I suppose. [I mean that Being is just that quality of a thing, still particular to it, that evades the attention of our will and thought. So Beings for beings, not Being for beings, maybe...] As a constructive project, philosophy opens space for aspects of the world to continually present themselves to and assert themselves into discourse. It does this through the formation of concepts that enable communication between radically distinct beings and states of Being, allowing the presentation of Being through events. The ambiguity of event, the mutual determination of their character by entangled beings, discloses the Being in which these beings participate. [Truth of a thing is revealed in its action and what it produces in concert with other things, other beings, other people, etc...]

The Technical Embrace

I was at a talk tonight by Norman Solomon, on media and the war. I'm not quite sure what I expected but I know it didn't occur. He spoke mostly about the role between technology, education and the normalization of war, of the way that our society is carved as a grand hoax. That the people employed to put society at risk are for some reason trusted to its salvation. And that our fascination with and portrayal of technology in war and technology in general, royal science as some would call it, covers over and obscures the reality of American society, that we are to a large extent a nation of war. Half our taxes go to it, it's the real welfare and jobs training program for most of America, and big science is built and organized around it.

Some of his words reminded me of the absolute horror and frustration I feel about the whole miserable business. For instance, he talked about the Cold War a bit, and living under the shadow of nuclear annihilation. And I am amazed at how easily a reality so obvious that few demand or desire its memory is forgotten, and the administration plays with nuclear toys and bridles that we resist their development and use. For fifty years the whole of humanity lives under the fear of death come screaming out of the sky like demons from the nightmares of insane mystics, and these wretches play with them, for money, for sick pleasure, who knows.

I think American identity has a variety of themes in it, the chief two being the trace of democracy and the trace of Empire. They oppose each other. There's a third trace though, the trace of technophilia, the love of applied reason. I have a deep suspicion that this is where the real ambiguity lies, that the fate of the battle between democracy and Empire rests in the allegiance of this faction, the faction oriented primarily to the world or metal and earth outside the social dynamics of man. Where shall they place their loyalty, to the Empire that offers them capital or the demos that offers them something else? The ambiguity lies in the fact that technophilia or the embrace of the nonhuman world can take two general forms. We can approach it with reverence as a way to learn the truth of the world to better respect and work alongside it. Or we can crave technology as a pure expression of power over the world. One involves understanding, the other simply contrivance and use, isolated interest.

I think the democratic forces of society can only win when this skilled faction works through respect and reverence, when it forsakes the appeal of simple power. We don't often know this, but I think it is necessary.

[or another way of putting things- will the war machine or the smiths turn towards the State or against it?]

Reform or Revolution, rough

The question that often seems to determine where leftists orient themselves in the world of politics is that of reform or revolution. The question more specifically is this: is it possible to make incremental improvements to society without changing its basic mechanisms, and still achieve the vision of a free and classless world? Or is it necessary to cast aside the entire edifice of society, private property, law as we know it, commerce as we know it, and create something entirely new?

The basic problem with reform is that certain properties change for the system of society as a whole, but the basic institutional framework does not change. The anarchist would say that so long as a the structures of power maintain their form, oppression will repeat itself no matter what. Bakunin famously predicted that under state communism, the people would still be beaten down as ferociously as under the czar or worse- only it would be by the "people's" stick.

Closer to home, many have pointed out that we're fighting a rearguard battle when we try and regulate the corruption of big business, and reveal its collusion with government for the benefit of the few over the many. This is only a distraction, because as long as the corporate form exists as it does today, all these reforms will be outweighed by the overwhelming financial and political power of the owning classes. We must abandon the corporate form altogether, or radically transform it.

Many anarchists are far stronger in their criticism than this. They point to rather embarassing history of civilization itself, and note the absence of any real viable democracy in which class society in some form exists, or even when any centralization of economic and cultural power whatsover exists. We can start with Enron and keep swinging back the clock to the early nation states back to Rome and Babylon, and the same basic patterns repeat. As long as there is concentration of wealth and power, and s long as society is organized to support this concentration, we will see corruption, we will find abuse and exploitation rampant. This isn't a mere technical problem or a momentary lapse of integrity. The problems stem from a basic logic of domination and control at the heart of our society, an ascendence of will over and against empathy. So long as this remains, our every liberation will b turned against us and every new freedom will carry with it the same cages, even if the bars be shaped differently.

So this leads us to espouse a revolution, a total rejection of what is and creation of something new. Yet revolutions are strange affairs, and surprisingly few of them ever seem to have "worked" in any sense of the term. I think the problem of revolutions might be equally fundamental as the problems of reforms. When you cast off the mechanisms that govern a society, you have no real way of guaranteeing which mechanisms will replace them, and generally they seem to fall back to the most immediate, unreflective level of power. Instead of revolution, we lose the developed socia structures of class and caste and fall instead into simple association bound by ethnicity or tribe, identification based on the body, and the ordering principle of direct violence.

I was reading about the Guild Socialists earlier this week. They were a remarkable political group in England that flourished briefly in the first half of the century. They wanted society devolved to be run by congresses of guildsmen and consumers, locally based and democratic. Yet even this intelligent and broadly thinking group recommended a militia governed by the the society's political organ as a whole. I was shocked- after pages and pages of discussion of coordination between decentralized craftsmen and consumer associations, they still decided to call for a martial force controlled by a centralized political power.

Political violence stands as a sort of black hole, denying constructive analysis. We condemn and critique the violence of nations often enough, but I think we still preserve a lingering idea of some sort of truth to be found in political force. Ths makes sense really. If we are to destroy the received institutions and mechanisms for the distribution of social power, how are we to establish the legitimacy of whatever is to replace them? Since the dawn of history, violence has established and maintained almost every political system that exists. How are we to break with this and still transform society?

I am no idealistic pacifist. I don't abandon the idea of force entirely, a priori. I don't necessarily condemn groups that use it. Yet we must realize that to deploy it means to suspend all other mechanisms for governing a society, all those reasons we demand change in the first place. ...