Libertarian Socialists ,the original and REAL Libertarians

Libertarianism was always a leftwing invention ,it rose from the Anarcho-Communist movement.The rightwing “Libertarians” are a new invention and are NOT libertarian at all in my view. They oppose BIG Government but NOT BIG Corporations, a sweeping generalisation I know,as rightwing Libertarians like leftwing libertarians tend to hold a variety of views on the subject, but as a rule of thumb ,Liasse Faire free-market capitalism is hailed as a holy Grail for rightwing libertarians. Unfortunately this means that after a few cycles of “Boom and Bust” ,another description of free market economics, the resourses will be in the hands of those who desire them most. The majority is under the thumb again , libertarian or NOT , as a minority owns the resourses. It was Adam Smith’s liasse Fiare capitalism that produced the new rich who became the robber barons of the industrial revolution,while the majority where worked like slaves. That is why originally in the 1850’s “Libertarianism” was first used by anarcho-communists to avoid the anti-anarchist laws.
   Anarchists have been using the term “libertarian” to describe themselves and their ideas since the 1850s. The revolutionary anarchist Joseph Dejacque published Le Libertaire, Journal du Mouvement social in New York between 1858 and 1861 Max Nettlau, A Short History of Anarchism, p. 75]. According to anarchist historian Max Nettlau, the use of the term “libertarian communism” dates from November, 1880 when a French anarchist congress adopted it [Ibid., p. 145]. The use of the term “Libertarian” by anarchists became more popular from the 1890s onward after it was used in France in an attempt to get around anti-anarchist laws and to avoid the negative associations of the word “anarchy” in the popular mind (Sebastien Faure and Louise Michel published the paper Le Libertaire — The Libertarian — in France in 1895, for example). Since then, particularly outside USA, it has always been associated with anarchist ideas and movements. Taking a more recent example, in the USA, anarchists organised “The Libertarian League” in July 1954, which had staunch anarcho-syndicalist principles and lasted until 1965.
  The US-based “Libertarian” Party, on the other hand has only existed since the early 1970s, well over 100 years after anarchists first used the term to describe their political ideas (and 90 years after the expression “libertarian communism” was first adopted). It is that party, not the anarchists, who have “stolen” the word.

  The modern US rightwing “libertarian” with thier free market beliefs are closer to “rightwing” rather than “Libertarian” and not even in the Libertarian end of the Nolan Chart (see below) IF they believe in unrestricted corporations , which would impose an economic authoritarianism. IMHO It was the failure of Adam Smiths “laisse faire capitalism” to produce the meritocracy that BOTH Adam Smith and Karl Marx believed in, that made Karl Marx write “Das Capital” and then the Communist Manefesto , which is just a pamphlet because all the hard economics are in “Das Capital”.  BOTH Adam Smith and Karl Marx where Libertarians that believed in governmentless societies.

The society “we the people” live in today is a STATE CAPITALIST nightmare. BOTH the right and the left are state capitalists , one preferring Big Business (rightwing) and the other Big Government (leftwing). These are the two cheeks of the same arse that squashs down on the face of freedom!

State capitalism has various different meanings, but is usually described as a society wherein the productive forces are controlled and directed by the state in a capitalist manner, even if such a state calls itself socialist. Corporatized state agencies and states that own controlling shares of publicly-listed firms, and thus acting as a capitalist itself, are two examples of state capitalism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_capitalism

OF COURSE THIS IS JUST FASCISM!!

Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.
Benito Mussolini, fascist dictator of Italy (1922-1943)

Noam Chomsky-Discussion with Libertarian Socialists

During his visit to Ireland to give three other lectures on various topics at the University of Dublin and with Amnesty International Noam Chomsky gave this little known discussion with a Libertarian Socialist group. He answers questions on many topics beginning with the relevance and lessons of the Spanish Civil War.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwr2x3TiQ5E

Here is a short desciption of Libertarian Socialsim . Libertarian socialism aims to create a society in which all violent or coercive institutions would be dissolved, and in their place every person would have free, equal access to tools of information and production, or a society in which such coercive institutions and hierarchies were drastically reduced in scope.
This equality and freedom would be achieved through the abolition of authoritarian institutions such as an individual’s right to own resourses(including the state) ,in order that direct control of the means of production and resources will be gained by the working class and society as a whole. The worker would own his own labour not the state or the community .

Here is one version of FREE MARKET LIBERTARIANISM explained. In this version the Libertarian describes his political philosophy as Ayn Rand OBJECTIVISM . IMHO it cannot work because it buys and sells resourses ,thus making modern robber barons and it STEALS the working mans labour. When YOU work for someone else and they own the resourses YOU WILL BE EXPLOITED (like a disneyland employee). In this description of Objectivist ,free market anarchism, DISNEYLAND and MORMON COMMUNITIES are given as working examples of Objectivism…… I WOULD NEVER CALL DISNEYLAND AN EXAMPLE TO ASPIRE TOO…..WOULD YOU?

http://www.lewrockwell.com/casey/casey45.1.html

Here’s a picture ,if it helps. Where do you fit in?

How a Libertarian Capitalist Became a Libertarian Socialist
Chris Wilson

A couple years back when I was working toward a philosophy major in college, I wrote a rebuttal the section of The Anarchist FAQ that covers anarcho-capitalism. I removed the rebuttal from the web because I didn’t have the time or inclination to continue to maintain it or expand upon it. Three years later, I’ve come to find myself disagreeing with my old rebuttals and agreeing with the FAQ. What follows is my story.

I began my tenure as a right-wing libertarian by reading Ayn Rand, who dissuaded me from the rather muddled left-wing sympathies I held at the time. I was only a Rand enthusiast for a short time, however, and I soon developed an interest in the “more reasonable” free-market thinkers, such as von Mises, Nozick, Hayek, David Friedman, etc. I was an ardent supporter of unimpeded and “stateless” capitalism for the course of almost 3 years, and developed and/or adopted every possible philosophical and economic justification that can be conceived of for its defense. Before I graduated college, however, I expelled my belief that one can claim private property rights upon land. I advocated a labor theory of property, and considering that land is not a produced good, I found that it wasn’t defensible according to the principles I advocated. I concluded that one who hoards land is placing a restriction upon the liberty of others to use it or to travel by way of it without justification, and hence the claimant should compensate them by paying a land value tax to earn exclusive rights to it.

Despite my new Georgist land-socialist views, I still advocated a capitalist economic system with respect to produced goods. However, I did become much more critical of corporations, and I became upset with other libertarians for their lack of focus upon the injustices perpetrated by corporations. I wanted to abolish corporate charters, subsidies, intellectual property, regulatory privileges, land grants, etc., as I considered them violations of liberty. If you press a right-libertarian about the privileges corporations receive, they usually say, “Oh, well I’m against those”, but they hardly ever take the initiative in directing any criticism against them. More often than not, they praise the alleged “virtues” of corporations, while focusing upon how the government violates these corporations “rights”.

When I first became an “anarcho-capitalist”, I thought corporate abuses could be avoided in an economic realm in which corporations didn’t enjoy as many regulatory privileges. I initially liked all the “dot coms” and “ecommerce” companies — I considered the Internet industry to be one in which free market principles were respected, contrary to so many other industries. However, in the past year, I’ve seen all these companies become just as ruthless as any multinational. I thought that all of the “dot coms” were small as a result of the industry functioning according to genuine free market principles, but in reality, they were just small *to begin with*. Most of them are small no longer. Furthermore, the more prosperous of these companies are now seeking to benefit from state privilege, which is evident in the many intellectual property lawsuits that are currently pending in the ecommerce industry.

When I was discovering this (and becoming a hardcore Linux user in the process), I was working as a customer service representative in a large and very well known software corporation (not Microsoft). The act of *working* instead of going to school gave me a new respect for organized labor movements. Additionally, it gave me an appreciation for the extent to which corporations screw their customers. As I spent the next six months working for this producer of buggy software, I came to the realization that my job as a “customer service” rep involved little more than developing clever rationalizations to defend this company’s fraudulent activities. Most other reps bought into the company’s rationalizations — most of the employees, including the supervisors, sincerely believed that the company provided “world class” service to the customers, which couldn’t be further from the truth. I’m ashamed to say that I bought into *some* of the propaganda as a result of searching for ways to pacify irate customers. And because of the position that we were in — that is, being constantly screamed at and criticized for policies beyond our control — it was impossible to refrain from becoming extremely resentful towards rightfully upset customers. Finally, the company adopted some nasty new policies which were so obviously indefensible that I had to end my relationship with the company on general principle. I left completely disillusioned with corporate culture.

Although I favored free markets, I did so because I considered them to be necessitated by the principles that I held. Principles always came *first* for me — not economics. However, around the time that I quit working at the software corporation, it finally truly sank in that businesses couldn’t *care less* about principles. The questions “Is it right?” or “Is it just?” do not even enter the minds of the decision makers of capitalist businesses — such questions are beside the point in their eyes. Although I was a right-libertarian at the time, I held my views because I genuinely believed that they followed logically from my beloved principle of self-government. Even though I knew that *many* capitalist businesses were completely lacking in principles, I did ignorantly believe that this was only true of large government aided corporations. It was very disheartening to learn over time that this fact applies to *most* businesses, regardless of whether or not they happen to be corporations that profit from state favor. If they don’t actually receive favors from the state, then it is typically their *aim* to receive them.

A week after I quit the software company, I got lucky and snagged a job providing tech support at a local ISP. I thought to myself that this company, being a local business, would be fundamentally different. While I do greatly prefer working for the ISP to working for the mega-software giant, it quickly became obvious to me that the motivations and principles (or lack thereof) of the president and major shareholders of the ISP are no different from that of any major corporation. Although the ISP is relatively small as of now, it doesn’t aim to remain as such for very long. I will say that an ISP’s expansion is generally not favored by employees, as it forces us to take responsibility for customer issues that we’re in no position to fix (as was so common with the software company). Furthermore, those who run the company still think of the employees as a cost to be minimized. The rule is to hire as few as possible, pay them as little as possible, and make them work as often as possible. Since starting with the company, I’ve taken on many more responsibilities than just tech support, but my wages haven’t risen. Despite the technical nature of my job, the workers at the nearby grocery store make more than I, as they’re unionized and I’m not.

My experience in the work world forced me to seriously reconsider my advocacy of capitalism in any form. As I was still very committed to libertarian principles, I began to study the “socialist anarchists”. (I put “socialist anarchist” in quotes, as I now consider such a term to be a redundancy — anarchists are necessarily socialists.) I forced myself to consider the fundamental disagreement that separates Bakunin, Kropotkin, and Malatesta from Rand, von Mises, and Friedman. My answer to myself: The advocates of capitalism believe that one can sign away or sell off one’s liberty, whereas anarchists do not. As a right-wing libertarian capitalist, I was of the opinion that one could enter into a morally binding agreement in which one sacrifices one’s liberty in exchange for a wage. My position was that a worker would be committing fraud against the employer if he attempted to retain rights to the full product of his labor. My argument was that if an employer has a “legitimate” prior claim upon the capital being used, then he has the right to dictate its terms of use. The laborer doesn’t have the right to anything more than what the capitalist agrees to give, just as the capitalist doesn’t have the right to take anything more than what the laborer agrees to give. (Of course, I didn’t realize in my early “anarcho-capitalist” days that capitalists almost always demand more than what the worker initially agrees to give.)

My current position is that one cannot be ethically bound by agreements that restrict one’s liberty to be self-governing. It has always been my view that one cannot be bound by an agreement to be a slave. Although one can enter into a contract that mandates one to serve as a slave, one should be considered free to cease honoring that contract at any time. However, I hadn’t been applying this principle to all forms of domination — I only applied it to full-time chattel slavery, not to wage slavery, domestic tyranny, etc. When I was working out my views regarding this issue, I decided to simplify my decision by subjecting myself to a thought experiment: Jones is a individual who has zero access to capital, which excludes him from being self-employed. He must must find somebody who will share access to capital if he is to continue to eat. Fortunately, Smith has plenty of capital, and is willing to share it — under certain conditions of course. Smith says to Jones that he can use Smith’s capital to produce, *provided* that Jones engages in 90% of the productivity while Smith engages in 10%. Also, Jones will only receive 10% of the revenues despite all of his hard work, while Smith gets to keep 90% for his hoggish self. Jones agrees to these conditions because he has no other option. Is Jones morally bound by his agreement to allow Smith to keep 8 in 9 parts of what what Jones produces? The capitalist, of course, answers, “Yes”, and I once would have given the same answer, even though I knew intuitively that such an arrangement would be grossly unfair. My current answer is “No” — this relationship between Smith and Jones is inherently exploitive, and Jones is entitled to much better.

That completed my conversion to real anarchism, which is to say *libertarian socialism*. The evolutionary process was slow — it didn’t happen all in one night. I continued to consider myself an individualist anarchist for awhile, and remained more attracted to the ideas of Tucker and Proudhon than any of the social anarchists. But as I read more Bakunin, Kropotkin, Malatesta, and Rocker and studied the Spanish Civil War and Russian Revolution, I concluded that social anarchism was a better alternative. Unlike the individualist or mutualist varieties of anarchism, anarcho-communism doesn’t provide an avenue for capitalism to reestablish itself and it has had partial revolutionary success in the past histories of countries such as Spain and the Ukraine. What initially turned me off to social anarchism is the fact that many of its advocates don’t address the prospect of what’s commonly called the “tyranny of the majority”, which I think is a valid concern. It cannot be emphasized enough that under anarchism, nobody would be forced to join a commune or a federation. If one wishes to be free to work independently of a democratic collective, this freedom would be acknowledged and respected, provided that one doesn’t attempt to hoard more resources than one uses or employ people for a wage. Granted, anarchists wouldn’t *ban* wage labor, but “agreements” in which workers sign away their liberty would not be enforced.

Since making the transition from right-wing to left-wing libertarianism, I’ve discovered that factionalism and sectarianism is just as pervasive here as it was there, if not more so. Technology is a good example of an issue that divides the anarchist movement. On one hand, there are the anarcho-primitivist luddites who eschew all forms of complex technology and wish to return to a hunter-gather society, and on the other, there are the anarchists who feel that technology can be beneficial if its development is directed by workers themselves in a manner that is accountable to the communities it affects. I fall somewhere in the middle between the two positions — I have no desire to return to a hunter/gatherer society, but would also prefer not to rely upon technology that requires a division of labor so extreme that productivity becomes an alienated and meaningless activity. Working within the computer industry, I also understand that when technological complexity transcends our ability to understand it, this is an instance of the machine being in control of us and not vice-versa. Whether technology is a form of liberation or domination is a topic hotly debated by anarchists, but they agree, contra the right-wing “libertarians”, that a society in which human-created circumstances force people to “agree” to subject their will to that of a boss is by no means “free”.
 
http://world.std.com/~mhuben/wilson_1.html

Part of the “Critiques of Libertarianism” site.
http://world.std.com/~mhuben/libindex.html

Last updated 10/25/07.

BUT at the end of the day , Libertarianism works because it is so diverse. The people can form a system that suits thier society and thier social justice . In pre-Franco Spain many forms of anarchist/Libertarian societies flourished in many different forms, from argocultural societies to urban ones.There were several variants of anarchism in Spain: the peasant anarchism in the countryside of Andalusia; urban anarcho-syndicalism in Catalonia, particularly its capital Barcelona; and what is sometimes called “pure” anarchism in other cities such as Zaragoza. However, these were complementary trajectories, and shared a great deal of ideological similarities It took BOTH Franco and Hitler ,to bring down the Spainish Anarchists!! That was how strong they where.

“Whether the mask is labeled Fascism, Democracy, or Dictatorship or the Proletariat, our great adversary remains the Apparatus-the bureaucracy, the police, the military…. No matter what the circumstances, the worst betrayal will always be to subordinate ourselves to this Apparatus, and to trample underfoot, in its service, all human values in ourselves and in others.”– The French worker philosopher Simone Weil,1945

Law is stagnation , Conformity is death by boredom and ignorance ,Obedience is for slaves and Specialisation is for insects!

MEDEVAL LIBERTARIANISM ,REMEMBER FREEDOM IS NOT FREE!!!!

September 11th, 1297 was the day that Wallace rallied his men to face English forces at Stirling Bridge.  In the film Braveheart, this battle is depicted in a scene where Wallace delivers his famous “Freedom Speech.”

“I am William Wallace.
And I see a whole army of my countrymen, here in defiance of tyranny!
You have come to fight as free men. And free man you are!
What will you do without freedom? Will you fight?
Fight and you may die.
Run and you will live—at least awhile.
And dying in your bed many years from now, would you be willing to trade all the days from this day to that for one chance, just one chance, to come back here as young men and tell our enemies that they may take our lives but they will never take our freedom!”

MODERN SCIENTIFIC LIBERTARIANISM…. CHAOS IS THE NATURAL ORDER

The Secret Life of Chaos-(BBC 2010)-Full Length Documentary

Chaos theory has a bad name,(like anarchy ,its political version) conjuring up images of unpredictable weather, economic crashes and science gone wrong. But there is a fascinating and hidden side to Chaos, one that scientists are only now beginning to understand.
It turns out that chaos theory answers a question that mankind has asked for millennia – how did we get here?
In this documentary, Professor Jim Al-Khalili sets out to uncover one of the great mysteries of science – how does a universe that starts off as dust end up with intelligent life? How does order emerge from disorder?
It’s a mind bending, counter intuitive and for many people a deeply troubling idea. But Professor Al-Khalili reveals the science behind much of beauty and structure in the natural world and discovers that far from it being magic or an act of God, it is in fact an intrinsic part of the laws of physics. Amazingly, it turns out that the mathematics of chaos can explain how and why the universe creates exquisite order and pattern.
And the best thing is that one doesn’t need to be a scientist to understand it. The natural world is full of awe-inspiring examples of the way nature transforms simplicity into complexity. From trees to clouds to humans – after watching this film you’ll never be able to look at the world in the same way again.

https://cuthulan.wordpress.com/2009/11/04/libertarian-vs-authoritarian-todays-real-politic/

THE TRUTH WILL SET YOU FREE
THE TRUTH IS YOU ARE FREE
UNTIL SOMEONE TRIES TO STOP YOU
FREEDOM IS
AS FREEDOM DOES
THERE IS NO JUSTICE , THERE’S JUST US