Chris Hables Gray

(It is only fair to tell the reader that I consider myself an anarchist and a feminist. This obviously affects my critique of Libertarianism. Since I share the Libertarian critique of The State in general, and the U.S. Imperial State in particular, I have neglected that issue in the present article.)

"Only we offer technology without technocracy, growth without pollution, liberty without chaos, law without tyranny, the defense of property rights in one's person and in one's material possessions."

Murray Rothbard in For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto

There are a growing number of people who share Mr. Rothbard's sweeping conviction. One of them is Justin Raimondo, a 28 year old gay who is an organizer for the Students for a Libertarian Society (SLS). Justin does not fit your Libertarian stereotype. Ten years ago Libertarians were all "white male heterosexual computer programmers" he says. "I was a freak for a while but I bided my time and it's paid off" he adds, referring to the strong stands SLS and the Libertarian Party (LP) have taken for gay rights and for an open border with Mexico.

Justin is part of the "New Libertarianism that emphasizes civil liberties and anti-state positions much more than it does its defense of "free market" capitalism. This new emphasis has led to an open split with traditional conservatives in the American right like William Buckley; his National Review recently ran a cover story attacking Libertarianism, called "Strange Alliance: Anarchists Backed by Corporate Big Money, Infiltrate the Freedom Movement."

The new emphasis is also probably responsible for many new recruits: students against the draft, gays in San Francisco who support the Libertarians' drive to abolish the vice-squad, Chicanos in Southern California who agree with the fiery attacks on the Immigration and Naturalization Service that are printed in Libertarian Vanguard, the paper of the LP's Radical Caucus.

Yet, along with the strong denunciations of the draft, the INS, racism, homophobia, and U.S. Imperialism, one still finds the traditional libertarian faith in free enterprise and a religious reverence for private property. To sort these various strands out and understand them will take an examination of Libertarian ideology itself, which comes in the second half of this article. First though, let us look at the Libertarian juggernaught in detail, its groups, its publications and its money.

The Children of Liberty and Capital

The main Libertarian groups are the Libertarian Party (LP) which in 1976 was on the ballot in 36 states and garnered 174,000 votes; Young Libertarian Alliance which is the youth affiliate of the LP; and Students for a Libertarian Society (SLS) which is based in San Francisco and now has nearly 60 campus chapters and over 1,000 members.

These groups are serviced by a number of magazines and think-tanks, including Libertarian Review, the main theoretical journal, Inquiry with a circulation of 29,000 (an excellent magazine by the way, with many leftist contributors as well as Libertarians), the Cato Institute in Fan Francisco, and the Center for Libertarian Studies in New York.

The SLS has made the draft their major focus. They also organize around the rights of illegal aliens, opposition to nuclear power, and the elimination of vice-squads. There is a large overlap between the SLS and the LP's Radical Caucus, which claims to represent 10 per cent of the LP's California membership.

The SLS paper Liberty often carries articles as vehemently revolutionary as Libertarian Vanguard. Recent Liberty articles have attacked nukes ("Energy Fascism: How Nuclear Power Serves State Power") and, of course, the draft ("Lies About Conscription: The arguments in favor of the draft are half militarist propaganda, half sanctimonious drivel, and all lies.")

The Libertarian Party itself is more staid and concentrates on running candidates for office on "bread and butter" issues, like cutting taxes and government spending. They do take their civil libertarian stands as well. Ed Clark, LP candidate for Governor of California in the last election came out for legalizing marijuana, decriminalizing prostitution and strongly against Prop. 6, the infamous Briggs initiative against gay school teachers. Ed Clark, currently 1980 LP presidential candidate, is a lawyer for ARCO who specializes in anti-anti-trust law. None of the Libertarians interviewed saw any contradiction in Mr. Clark's belief in liberty and his job keeping the oil companies strong.

A central theme of all the Libertarian groups, and one of their main differences with the traditional conservatives, is a strong opposition to U.S. Imperialism. "Liberty or Empire?" asks Earl Ravenal in an anti-draft article in Liberty. The LP is active in the Campaign to Stop Government Spying which includes many left and liberal groups. The Cato Institute has given money to both the Youth Project ($2,000 in '77-78), for The Citizens Committee for Constitutional Liberty, and $17,000 to the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) for "joint work on the Pentagon." IPS is a well-known leftish think tank that also publishes the social democratic paper In These Times.

It is not surprising that the Libertarians can give money to worthy liberal causes, for they aren't poor. The Cato Institute has a yearly budget of a million. SLS has a projected budget for next year of $200,000. Much of this money can be traced to one person, Charles Koch (pronounced "Coke") who has a net worth of between $500 and $700 million. His diversified engineering company, which also raises cattle and owns pipelines, has annual sales of $350 million. A large amount of the Cato money comes from Koch and he generously contributes to other Libertarian causes, especially SLS.

Cato's board includes Sam Husbands, a Vice-president of Dean Witter Reynolds Inc. and Dave Padden who has his own securities firm in Chicago. Obviously a number of "entrepreneurs" such as these men give generously. But except for Koch, I can't find evidence of any BIG money.

The multinationals obviously aren't interested in a doctrine that describes itself as "revolutionary" and calls for an end to the military-industrial complex. As Milton Mueller, the National Coordinator of SLS, ironically notes, "We don't find a lot of interest in free markets from capitalists."

A large percentage of the money for the LP and the SLS either comes from their grassroots or as grants for special projects. SLS is trying to raise money from liberals, such as Stewart Mott, for anti-draft work, and from "goldbugs and hard currency advocates" for a campaign in favor of the "free market" and the gold standard.

A close look at the various Libertarian institutions reveals a number of interesting interlocks. Despite its claim to total independence, the Students for a Libertarian Society was the brainchild of Ed Crane Ill (President of Cato), Murray Rothbard (Board of Directors of Cato), and Bill Evers (Editor of Inquiry). Both Rothbard and Evers are on the-Editorial Board of Libertarian Vanguard which is edited by Justin Raimondo, the SLS organizer mentioned above. Ali are active in the LP, on both the state and national levels.

The immediate prospects for the Libertarians are good. They have many productive financial and media contacts and the organizational skills to exploit them fully. They also have a political ideology that many people find attractive. Part of this attraction is explainable by the failure of so many of the other modern ideologies. As Bill Evers explains, "Conservatism is not very attractive_ it's anti-peace. New Deal liberalism is having hard times lately. A lot of alternatives that have seemed plausible have been found wanting--fascism, state socialism which is not a big hit."

But there is more than the failure of the alternatives. There is the ideal itself. How does Libertarianism come down in favor of capitalism but against the capitalist state? How can it believe in both absolute individual freedom and the freedom to exploit both nature and people?

The Libertarian Credo

There are two central premises of Libertarianism. In Murray Roth-bard's book The New Liberty it is explained quite directly:

The central core of the Libertarian creed...is to establish the absolute right to private property of every man (sic): first, in his (sic) own body and second, in the previously unused natural resources which he (sic) first transforms by his (sic) labor.

Libertarians try to prove that property rights follow from the individual's right to control their own person. We shall look at those mental gymnastics in a moment. But the first thing to note is that the "civil" libertarianism of Libertarianism comes from the principle of individual liberty. The defense of capitalism, of inheritance, of the domination of nature by "man" and the right to exploit the labor of another people, springs from the second principle--the absolute right to property.

At the core of Libertarian property rights is what can be called the "magical labor theory of appropriation." Libertarians believe that not only do you deserve the fruits of your direct labor in the everyday sense but that anything and everything "previously untouched" once affected by your labor, or affected by something once affected by your labor, be comes, in perpetuity, the property of you and your heirs. Rothbard approvingly quotes John Locke when he claims:

Thus, the grass my horse has bit, the turfs my servant has cut, and the ore I have digged in my place, where I have a right to them in common with others, become my property without the assignation or consent of any body.

Exactly how the turfs ol' John Locke's servant digs become his is never explained, although one can imagine it's because the servant, like the horse, belongs to Mr. Locke. In a similar way, the value that workers bring to an enterprise belongs, not to the workers, but to the capitalists since he or she "owns" them and their work at the price of a wage.

Several simple ideas lie at the core of this pleasant hubris. The first is that property rights are monolithic and perpetual. Rothbard sees them in absolutist terms--all or nothing. There is no division of property rights? only limits when your rights (like the right to burn down your forest) run into someone else's right (for their air to be smoke-free).

And who gets ownership; this indivisible bundle of rights? Well Roth-bard argues coyly that either 1)"the creator" gets it, or 2) "another man or set of men ...appropriate it by force" or 3) "every individual in the world has an equal quotal share." This leaves out a host of other possibilities: property rights held by smaller units than the whole world--villages, or cities, or worker collectives; certain property rights held by one group and others by a separate group; use as a part of ownership criteria; need as a part of ownership criteria.

Such complexity may be disconcerting but it is also more realistic. A lack of natural realism is at the core of the Libertarian position toward property rights--the idea that everything in the natural world could, and should be, completely owned by people.

Jerry Mander, in his book Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, describes this attitude perfectly:

To the capitalist, profit-oriented mind, there is no outrage so great as the existence of some unmediated nook or cranny of creation which has not been converted into a new form that can then be sold for money. This is because in the act of converting the natural into the artificial, something with no inherent economic value becomes "productive" in the capitalist sense.

Rothbard cites Wolowski and Levasseur, two 19th century laissez-faire French economists, who say pretty much the same thing, with a different perspective:

Nature has recognized her master, and man feels that he is at home in nature. Nature has been appropriated by him for his use; she has become his own; she is his property before him, there was scarcely anything but matter; since him, and by him, there is interchangeable wealth.

Now the wholesale degradation and dismemberment of the natural world into "interchangeable wealth" may have seemed fine and grand in the 19th century, but Rothbard and the Libertarians should know better by now. This old idea of "Man's" natural right to conquer and own nature can be found throughout history, from the Bible, through Karl Marx, all the way to Exxon. It is one of the major reasons that homo sapien/homo lupen (man the thinker/man the wolf) has brought the whole planet to the edge of destruction. If we don't cease to see nature as an object to exploit and realize it is an organic whole that we are a part of, we will soon go over that edge.

Our Frenchmen in the above quote also reveal just how "masculine" a philosophy Libertarianism is. There seems to be an almost complete lack of feminism in the whole movement. There is no critique of hierarchy, nor of linear dichotomous thinking. For Libertarians the personal is not political, the economic is.

In the Cato office the women secretaries scurry about filling the needs of the overwhelmingly white male executives. Small groups of these men raise money, arrange the events, write the papers, hire other men, all to build the Libertarian Movement. Social change is seen mechanistically, like in Marxism, step by step. Not as an organic interaction between personal realities and society as a whole.

Although Libertarians have vast differences with Marxists on philosophical issues, they share many tactical ideas. In an essay on the lessons of Leninism (which he mentions in For A New Liberty), Murray Rothbard applauds the Leninists' means of achieving their ends; he calls for a Libertarian cadre to spread the good word to the uninformed; and he asks Libertarians to go along with decisions made by officials of political organizations they belong to.

This essay was quoted extensively in one of the recent National Review articles. Although Libertarians responded in several publications to most of the issues raised in the NR articles, they were silent on the issue of Leninist tactics. When I asked Bill Evers for a copy of the essay, he said he'd lost it.

The Libertarians take "good" stands on some women's issues like the ERA, but they are oblivious to the insights of feminism. This is reflected especially in their process, no different then male dominated groups of the last 2,000 years. And it is tied to the economism and "man" over nature that is so much part of their philosophy.

Lacking a feminist/organic view of nature, it is not surprising to find that the Libertarian attitude toward society is reductionistic. They argue that there is no such thing as society, there is merely a collection of "interacting individuals".

The Libertarian Frank Chodorov says, "Society is a collective concept and nothing else... When the individuals disappear so does the whole. The whole has no separate existence." Of course one cannot have society without people: That doesn't mean society is only atomistic individuals multiplied.

Society ("community" is a better word) is greater than that, just as a poem is more than a random collection of words. The principle is well recognized in philosophy, biology, physics, and poetics.

"Behind Every Great Fortune, Look For the Crime"

Economism looms large when we look at the nuts and bolts of running a Libertarian "society." While there are exceptions, such as the brilliant critic of psychiatry Dr. Thomas Szasz, most libertarians cannot deal with anything that can't be taken, packaged, litigated, or sold.

Therefore Libertarians depend on economics for making all social decisions. The "free market" will answer all our questions. Do we need colored toilet paper? Yes, if it can be sold for a profit. Should we kill all the whales? Yes, if the owner feels that is the best way for him or her to benefit from them. And someone will own the whales in the Libertarian world.

But what makes this a rational process anyway? What evidence is there that the lust for profits is the best way to make a society's economic and ethical decisions? Libertarians argue that industrial capitalism is proof that the individual quest for maximized profit is the sure road to greater social good. This is hardly a convincing case. In three hundred years of capitalist development great wealth has been produced, it is true. But there has also been the destruction of thousands of other species and hundreds of human cultures. It seems that a world that survived millions of years of people living in other social forms might not be able to survive even a few hundred years of capitalism.

The "free market" is as irrational a mechanism of decision-making as was the divine right of kings. One seeks to perpetuate feudal privilege, while the other, the economic and ecological exploitation that is capitalism.

Libertarians should confront the fact that it is profits and the "free market" that has led to the present government-business alliance. If there wasn't a state, capitalists would invent one. The best way to maximize profits is to regulate your market, eliminate or join with your competitors, repress similar or superior products and ignore externalities such as pollution or the occupational diseases of "your" workers. The "free" in "market" is free to get away with all these things at the expense of everyone else.

Capitalism has a symbiotic relationship with the state, but even if it could exist independently it would be a system of oppression. Jerry Mander also goes into this in his book on television and mass culture. Mander sees a grave problem in the new mass media technologies that can be traced to the inevitable, and imposed, inequality of capitalism. Mander states:

Such distinguished corporate experts as Louis Kelso have been predicting our present malaise ...Kelso argues that as capitalist enterprise grows, the rich must get richer and the poor poorer because owners of business have more kinds of income. They have wage income, which is many times higher than that of the average wage earner, and they also have dividend income...In periods of economic growth they enjoy large profits that may be used for further capital investment, which will provide additional profits at a later time.

In order to prevent the development of Libertarian Capitalism into either a State or an oligarchy of the wealthy, Libertarians claim that cam petition will keep business small and honest.

"What keeps A&P honest is the competition, actual and potential, of Safeway, Pioneer, and countless other grocery stores" says Rothbard. Surely he doesn't really believe that A&P is honest?

But maybe he does. Here's what he says about another industry:

..in the nineteenth century, the railroads and their competition provided a remarkable energizing force for developing their respective areas. Each railroad tried its best to induce immigration and economic development in its area in order to increase its profits, land values, and value of its capital; and each hastened to do so, lest people and markets leave their area and move to the ports, cities, and lands served by competition railroads.

This is not an accurate description of the role of railroads in the 19th century. What about the land frauds? What about the deaths of thousands of Chinese and other workers? What of the shattered Indian cultures? In California, the Southern Pacific (SP) wielded incredible power for 30 years--their agents would demand to inspect their farmer-customer accounts and would then set freight rates at the maximum level that allowed that farmer to survive.

This economic coercion, this economic dictatorship, isn't even coercion according to the Libertarian cosmology that says the only real coercion is physical violence (some add fraud as well). None mention concentrated economic power as a threat to liberty because it is within the natural framework of the market--the strong competitor shall get rich.

This seems a modern form of Social Darwinism, a concept invented by Spencer, "the great libertarian," according to Rothbard. The exploiter will survive; nature is to be owned, society doesn't exist, the market measures everything and everyone's worth. It is no accident that intellectually it turns to conservatism and economically has led from inventor-capitalists and robber barons to corporate managers and government bureaucrats. Tell It To The judge

But let's press on for a minute and ask, "What institution is going to mediate between everyone's property rights? What is going to mesh the free market with the real world? You won't believe it but the magic key ism.. the courts.

Not one state-sanctioned court, but a multitude of private courts with private police serving their clients for a fee. And what keeps them honest? Competition. And what if you hire one court and the child mol ester down the block hires another? Both courts hire a higher one to work things out. Can this be practical?

How anyone can believe that courts can balance and adjudicate all the conflicting interests that will make up a Libertarian "society" is an amazing testimony to blind faith. The real world shows us that justice is not the product of the legal system; its product is social control.

Even now the vast majority of violent crimes never lead to convictions , the simplest civil case can be stalled for years, and the highest bidder invariably buys the decisions they want: either directly or more subtly through high-priced talent, high-powered connections, or class privilege. Profit making courts would have to be at least as corrupt and oppressive; that's the product of courts.

Whither liberty?

Why this renaissance of laissez-faire capitalism? It seems to me that

Libertarianism allows for a recognition of just how serious our condition is--in the form of the critique of the State and the military-industrial complex--without having to come to grips with the deeper causes of the crisis.

Su Negrin, a feminist writer, describes these causes, or rather, the cause, as unfreedom.

Exploitation.

Oppression.

Domination.

Expectation.

Objectification.

These are aspects of unfreedom starting with the most crude and ending with the most subtle. There are different kinds of unfreedom and there are different degrees of unfreedom. Unfreedom can involve violent coercion or unseen self-restriction. Unfreedom functions on an individual level as well as a social level. Unfreedom involves a subtle interrelated network of all of the above.

I assume the validity of all manifestations of unfreedom because of my premise that freedom involves the maximum realization of one's distinct and ever-changing potential, and this goes for everybody.

The nation-state is only part of the network of unfreedom. But it is the only part the Libertarian ideology is explicitly against.

"New" Libertarianism is young still, many new ideas will be brought to it, especially by gays, women, and third world people. Ideas about feminism, culture, process, and spirit. Views that have no place in Libertarianism as we see it today. How they will change Libertarianism, if they do at all, is anyone's guess.

One thing is certain though, unless Libertarianism can come to grips with the fact that Capitalism is also a system of domination--even without a state, then it is doomed to be just another half-revolutionary system--like state socialism which has brought us the gulag and Chinese Coca-Cola.

This means going beyond rebellion against the role of dominated subject; of free individual oppressed by the state. Libertarians must reject the "right" to dominate as well. Negrin argues that The root structure of-domination, the thing that holds it all together, is our acceptance of being dominated and our willingness to dominate others.

It seems that every Libertarian sees him or herself as a swashbuckling entrepreneur inventing wonderful products and selling them to an admiring public for vast profits. Is this the natural human condition? It hasn't been my experience. Most people work, hour after hour, year after year, at deadening, killing, meaningless labor in order to buy food, shelter, and drugs. Libertarians choose not to be exploited but they don't understand that to really do that they must choose not to exploit as well. In the Libertarian world of owners there will always be the owned. It is time to go beyond all that. It is time to say I will be neither slave, nor master.

Chris Gray is a member of Palo Alto, California Black Rose and active in the anti-nuclear movement.