Positive Liberty

China Miéville trawls the depths of libertarianism and finds — surprise! — some pretty weird stuff.

I think every sufficiently developed political movement comes pre-equipped with a strawman, the better to distract the members of other political movements. The escapists are ours, and in Miéville they’ve attracted some wonderful attention. (Hint to everyone else except a noted science fiction writer: If you didn’t recognize that Ayn Rand was working within the tradition of messianic and apocalyptic literature, then you weren’t intellectually ready for her. Atlas Shrugged was an allegory, not a game plan.)

Still, my hat’s off to Miéville for two reasons. First, the attack on the strawman really is masterful, and often quite accurate…

Coercive political apparatuses, operating internally and externally, are implicitly, sometimes explicitly, part of the libertarian seasteading project. Good Brechtians, we ask: Who is to maintain New Utopia, Laissez-Faire City, the Freedom Ship? Who will cook the feasts and clean the heads? So many reports. So many questions. The fantasists of libertarian seasteading are vague or silent about on-ship labor standards, preferring not to ponder who will swab the decks on which the offshore traders, speculators and Web entrepreneurs will promenade.

They cannot, however, entirely forget the need for other people, non-passengers. An attenuated anxiety about what such a presence reaches the libertarian mind as anxiety about crime—that shibboleth terror of the petty bourgeosie, impossible to banish from the mind.

On Freedom Ship there will be a jail, a “squad of intelligence officers,” and a “private security force of 2,000, led by a former FBI agent, [that] will have access to weapons, both to maintain order within the vessel and to resist external threats.” And while technically the law applied would be that of whichever state lends its flag, Freedom Ship officials make no bones that “the captain’s word will be final.”

Indeed. “The captain’s word will be final” is the point at which (if not long before) any quasi-reflective libertarian would have mentally transferred this project from the curiosity heap to the outer darkness.

One of the serious challenges that libertarianism faces today is how to balance a high degree of local autonomy (valuable because local practices and local knowledges are a bulwark against tyranny) with a high degree of individual rights (valuable because rights are universal, and belong even to the hated minorities of a given locale). Often the more unthinking sort of libertarian goes all in for local autonomy without realizing that he’s sacrificing individual rights. A local despotism can scarcely be any better than a global one, particularly if the costs of relocating are prohibitive, as they would be on board a purely hypothetical sovereign ship.

I also appreciated Miéville’s critique for the way he ties himself in knots — albeit interesting ones — in trying to explain the relationship between big capital, libertarian political thought, and class interests:

There also have been genuine countercultural maritime polities, shipboard societies opposed to the despotism of state power, that might provide a genuine inspiration. Since the publication in 2000 of Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Redicker’s The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, any discussion on liberté sur mer must reference the grassroots, democratic pirate “hydrarchies” that the authors rescued less from the condescension of history than from its pantomime audience booing.

But libertarians are political dissidents only in narrowly selfish directions. As respectful of “order” as the most polite bourgeois, they cannot conceive of pirates as antecedents, only as threats. (As indeed they might be, were there any seasteads to plunder.)

This is, you know, kinda funny, when you consider the tremendous attention that pirates, private law, and the law merchant in particular have gotten in libertarian circles lately. Private law, of the sea and otherwise, is one of the key topics of recent libertarian political scholarship.

I guess I can forgive him for not being up on libertarian thought: By his own admission, Miéville thinks that libertarianism is not a “real” social theory (which incidentally raises the question of why he bothers to write about it).

But when libertarianism reveals one of the key flaws in his own ideology — socialism — Miéville somehow turns things around, and libertarians are again incompetent, this time because we’re so clearly not the evil capitalists that most socialists would prefer to be up against:

Big capital will support tax-lowering measures, of course, but it does not need to piss and moan about taxes with the tedious relentlessness of the libertarian. Big capital, with its ranks of accountant-Houdinis, just gets on with not paying it. And why hate a state that pays so well? Big capital is big, after all, not only because of the generous contracts its state obligingly hands it, but because of the gun-ships with which its state opens up markets for it.

Libertarianism, by contrast, is a theory of those who find it hard to avoid their taxes, who are too small, incompetent or insufficiently connected to win Iraq-reconstruction contracts, or otherwise chow at the state trough. In its maundering about a mythical ideal-type capitalism, libertarianism betrays its fear of actually existing capitalism, at which it cannot quite succeed. It is a philosophy of capitalist inadequacy.

This is a neat rhetorical trick: Failing to be evil is — apparently — a character flaw. Well, sure: I’ve totally failed at tax evasion, at seizing the reins of the state, and at bilking the common man. Shame on me!

There’s an Austin Powers-ish note in all of this: For Miéville, libertarians are the Diet Coke of evil. We’re not the monsters that he’d like to be slaying, and this bothers him, apparently.

By Miéville’s lights, we who would reform the mixed-market system into a pure (or at least purer) market system have fallen for a “mythical” ideal; we must be deluded. In this we are quite different from, say, avowed Trotskyite socialists like Miéville, who would replace the entire market system with something never before seen in the history of man. These are, one presumes, nothing but hard-headed realists, and they don’t have a single illusion about the wisdom or likelihood of their own preferred end state.

The real truth of the matter is that libertarians are indeed very often the sincere, unfeigned enemies of big capital: We oppose big capital whenever it seeks special privileges from the state, which is depressingly often. Miéville is right to notice it, but wrong to fault us for it. Those who only sometimes oppose big capital in this regard, but who make exceptions for themselves or their friends, are not libertarians. They are lobbyists with delusions of principle.

In opposing big capital, libertarians are not so far removed from the socialists, but we differ radically in our prescriptions. Libertarians want to end the unfair privileges of big capital by cutting them off at their source, which is the state. Without the improper use of state power, the most deeply unfair and anticompetitive practices of the mixed economy would cease to exist. The war profiteering and gunship diplomacy Miéville complains about are anathema to us, too — as are the corporate subsidies, the regulations that prohibit or drive up the costs of local, cooperative ventures; the licensing and taxation systems that favor big businesses over small ones; the crass lobbying that produces so much of what our government now is.

There is good reason to think that much inequality would cease to exist if these abuses were curtailed, and that more sharply defined limits on the state would both be good for the average citizen and also constrain the wealth and power of the super-rich. As a libertarian, this is what I want.

Meanwhile, socialists want… to expand the state virtually without limit. To the problem of corporations co-opting state power, the state itself is the socialists’ proposed solution. Yet it’s beyond me how increasing the size of the danger will accomplish anything of value.

In the process of state expansion, there will certainly be winners and losers. The winners will be those with political pull — that is, the big-capital players and those with the most political savvy. The rest of us, the little folks, the incompetents who can’t bilk the system decently enough, will be talked about, pandered to, but ultimately we will be left out. The corporations will win, because the game of government influence is always rigged in their favor.

So Miéville is almost half-right here: Socialism and libertarianism are both philosophies of class struggle. The libertarian approach would radically limit the power of the state, hoping to curtail the power of the privileged. The socialist approach would expand the power of the state with scarcely a thought about who controls it, or how. Yes, yes, under socialism the power is supposed to be held by the people. But it never is, and we know this now from a full century of practice. Don’t tell me that we (of all people) are the naive ones.

Under socialism, the power held by the captains and the kings, just as it is in any other system. The only real question — the only serious question of politics, I think — is how to constrain them. It’s a question that socialism brushes aside. At least libertarians, for all our occasional escapism, are still usually trying to answer it.