Response to a pair of columns by Garry Reed of the Dallas Libertarian Examiner, falsely accusing the new Danish group Libertarian Socialists of stealing the term "libertarian" from the American Libertarian Right. by Dan Clore
(libertarian)
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
A Real "Libertarian" Bozo
by Dan Clore
In the Dallas Libertarian Examiner, writer Garry Reed responded to the news of the recent founding of a Danish group calling itself Libertaere Socialister, or Libertarian Socialists, with a column entitled "Calling all Stalinist-Jeffersonian-Bozoian Libertarians", claiming that the Danes had stolen the term "libertarian" from the Libertarian Right in America, and that combining libertarianism with socialism made as much sense as combining the politics of Joseph Stalin, Thomas Jefferson, and Bozo the Clown. Several libertarian socialists responded, pointing out (sometimes somewhat rudely) that traditional anarchists, on the Libertarian Left, had used the label "libertarian" for over a century before the Libertarian Right adopted it.
Thus beleagured, Reed wrote another column, this time entitled "Calling all laissez-faire sovereign individual Libertarians". There, instead of facing the facts, Reed accuses his critics of ignorance of the history of the Libertarian Right, and briefly rehearses its roots in classical liberalism. This is, of course, irrelevant, since no one denied that there were precursors to the modern Libertarian Right; the point at issue was the history of the term "libertarian". None of the forerunners that Reed mentions used the label "libertarian" (though one of them, John Stuart Mill, was in fact a libertarian socialist). Thus besieged by evil liberals/progressives/socialists, Reed called on right-libertarians to come to his aid.
Instead, I posted a comment politely pointing out that the libertarian socialists who responded to him were correct on the historical issue of the use of the term "libertarian", and noting the irrelevance of the classical liberals and other forerunners of the Libertarian Right to the matter at hand. This response was deleted for some reason, so I decided to address the issue here.
The use of the term "libertarian" to refer to the extreme anti-authoritarian left (in the traditional sense) wing of the socialist movement dates back to at least the 1850s. One should cite in particular Joseph Déjacque, who published a newspaper titled Le Libertaire, journal du mouvement social (The Libertarian: A Journal of the Social Movement) in New York from 1858-61. I could inundate the reader with data demonstrating the continuous use of the term "libertarian" in this sense down to the present day, but simply noting the fact should suffice.
In contrast, no one seems to have even suggested applying the term "libertarian" to the Libertarian Right before the 1950s, while it was only in the 1960s that the use became common in America, leading to events such as the founding of the Libertarian Party in 1972 and the publication of anarcho-capitalist Murray Rothbard's For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto in 1973. The Danes who founded the new Libertarian Socialist group may not even be aware of this development
As a final irony, one should note that it isn't the Libertarian Left that has been appropriating the term "libertarian" from the Libertarian Right, but the Authoritarian Right. Conservatives from William F. Buckley to Glenn Beck have adopted the label. A term that once indicated an individual who opposed capitalism and the state has been adopted by capitalist statists.
Now, everyone gets a pie in the face sometime, so this column shouldn't be taken as too strong a condemnation of the clown of the moment. It all depends on how the recipient of the honor responds.
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In contrast, no one seems to have even suggested applying the term "libertarian" to the Libertarian Right before the 1950s, while it was only in the 1960s that the use became common in America, leading to events such as the founding of the Libertarian Party in 1972 and the publication of anarcho-capitalist Murray Rothbard's For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto in 1973.
You are wrong on that. Benjamin Tucker, the late-19th-early-20th century individualist anarchist characterized his position as "libertarian" and, in fact, distinguished libertarianism from socialism in his essay "State Socialism and Libertarianism" in 1893.
In the 1950s, people of a classical liberal persuasion began describing their position as "libertarian" because statist socialists had hijacked the term "liberalism", and the classical liberals wanted to distinguish their position from both that kind of "liberalism" and "conservatism".
As a final irony, one should note that it isn't the Libertarian Left that has been appropriating the term "libertarian" from the Libertarian Right, but the Authoritarian Right. Conservatives from William F. Buckley to Glenn Beck have adopted the label. A term that once indicated an individual who opposed capitalism and the state has been adopted by capitalist statists.
While Buckley does have some authoritarianism lurking in his background (from back in the Cold War days), I am puzzled as to why you feel you must characterize Glenn Beck as an "authoritarian". Certainly, nothing he has said recently suggests anything of the kind. If you're going to make accusations, I suggest you back them up with facts.
Benjamin Tucker was a market-oriented anarcho-individualist, but he was still closer to the Libertarian Left than to the Libertarian Right. He was always firmly anti-capitalist. He considered himself a socialist in the traditional sense of worker ownership and control of the means of production. It was when socialism increasingly came to mean "nationalization" that he opposed it.
The traditional litmus test to determine whether one is a "left libertarian" or "right libertarian" is one's position on the ownership of land. Left libertarians believe the earth and all it's resources in their natural state are the common inheritance of all mankind (or, at least those who currently live on the land or on top of those resources), but that anything made from them can be privately owned. Right libertarians believe that anything can be privately owned, usually including intangible things like "intellectual property". Using this criterion, Tucker would certainly by a "left" libertarian. So would Henry George, Ralph Borsodi and the younger Herbert Spencer. Murray Rothbard was a "right" libertarian on the land question, but was "left" on "intellectual" property.
Unfortunately, that distinction has now become muddled, and "left" libertarians are now considered to be those who favor positions more identified with the political Left, like open immigration.
But "socialism", by definition, cannot be libertarian, because what it means is social ownership (i.e., owned by Society -- i.e., the State) of the means of production. This is incompatible with worker ownership and control, because what that means is that each worker owns his own labor, his own workspace (or the right to use it), and the product of his labor.
Please note: In the original, traditional sense, "socialism" did not mean ownership by society or the state (which are not the same thing, in any case), but ownership and control of the means of production by the workers themselves. That included ownership by self-employed individuals, as advocated by Benjamin Tucker, for example.
Excellent piece. All I ever want is just a recognition of the origin of the term. It's a losing battle with the general careless usage of these kinds of terms. It doesn't help that orthodox partisan media celebrities, eager to differentiate themselves from their colleagues, have taken to calling themselves "libertarian," instead of "independent." That should be enough to offend the capital "L" Libertarians.
When a straight-forward advocate for the theocratic part of the GOP, like Glenn Beck is calling himself a "libertarian" and tossing around "statist," things are messed-up. Militarized borders, a massive internal security apparatus, and policing the world are all far from "libertarian."
It is too easy with all of our access to information, for people to only ever read things from a perspective that they already have and miss out on the chance to learn from each other.
Thanks for writing this. The use of the term libertarian is certainly an issue that deserves some examination. I go by the definition that dictionaries generally point to - favoring or seeking to maximize individual liberty - and base things off that.
The good thing about people like Beck using "libertarian" is that he has a large audience that probably includes people looking for alternatives to the status quo. So if we label things "libertarian" it might get the attention of some of these people and get them thinking in a more libertarian direction.
Have you heard of the Alliance of the Libertarian Left (all-left.net)? It is full of individualist and mutualist types. It's useful for addressing the left-libertarian/right-libertarian gap and many of us run in both circles.
I'm not really familiar enough with Mencken to place him. But my friend S.T. Joshi has edited collections of his work, and I've been meaning to get them and read them sometime.
Darian:
I am familiar with the Alliance of the Libertarian Left. I'm pretty close to them on many issues. I'm a member of the yahoogroup list LeftLibertarian2, and there are also members who occasionally post to my own Smygo list.
As one of the founding members of the Danish "Libertære Socialister" (Libertarian Socialists) that apparently occasioned this discussion I'm astounded - and somewhat amused - to see that it's made waves across the Atlantic ocean!
I'd like to thank you for your piece above. I had googled our name before and had - to my surprise - found some American libertarians complaining about it on usenet newsgroups, but I had no idea that it'd moved on beyond that. Fancy thing, that Internets.
Whereas I understand that the coupling of "Libertarian" and "Socialist" may seem oxymoronic in an American context, you are of course correct that it is neither necessarily nor historically so. Even if most of us are aware that the term "Libertarian" in the US has been all but entirely co-opted by the right wing, the corresponding Danish term "libertær" has no such history and has been in little use outside of academic circles, lending itself easily to our use without the jarring sound that the combination likely evokes with American "libertarians".
Most of us are anarchists and we chose the name to communicate a fusion of the libertarian, radically democratic and anti-authoritarian aspects of the anarchist tradition, with the focus on social justice, mutual aid and collective endeavour of the socialist tradition, at the same time distancing us from the statist, undemocratic and authoritarian versions of the latter and from the anti-social, chaotic and lifestylist versions of the former. I realise that this combination is not well-known in the US, but it really was a mainstream of socialism during the 19th and early part of the 20th century. In Europe there are quite a few organisations that describe themselves as libertarian socialists or even libertarian communists, reaching back to a time before communism was identified exclusively with leninism/state socialism (yes, there was such a time).
By the way, speaking of ambiguous political terms, the term "liberal" in Denmark (as often in Europe) denotes "right wing" (in the sense of classical liberalism) and our counterparts to the (modern) American right wing "Libertarians" would in Danish be termed "ultraliberale" (ultraliberals). It all goes to show that one does well not to hasten to conclusions concerning what might be appropriate usage in another language. Thank you for your setting the record straight :)
Another LS member chiming in. Rasmus did an excellent job of describing our reasons for using the name we do, so I won't add to that. I'd just like to encourage both sides of the argument to read the excellent first volume of a new historical review of anarchism : Black Flame, by Michael Schmidt and Lucien van Der Walt. The root of the term libertarian are firmly grounded in class-struggle, socialist anarchism, not the extremely individualist or capitalist ideas of, say, Max Stirner or Ayn Rand.
