*****Please read the whole post and link before commenting***** For many, however, these root principles of radical libertarianism will remain mere abstractions, and even suspect, until they are developed into aggressive, specific proposals. -Karl Hess Those individuals who call themselves Voluntaryists, Anarcho-Capitalists, and minarchists seem to be more interested in defending the corporations against the common persons right to individual and common shared property. Continually individuals and communities right to enjoy their property is trampled on by major corporations supported by police paid for by government. I am sure that in a freed market you would maybe even donate money in support of corporations to use private police to defend operations such as mining against the will of the local population. After all you need those resources to enjoy your comfortable life in the city. Regardless of the ecological damage(erosion of soil and eutrophication) and potential damage to their water supply do to runoff and chemical seepage. This being said I wonder where your activist scope lies? Because so many of its people, however, have come from the right, there remains about it at least an aura or, perhaps, miasma of defensiveness, as though its interests really center in, for instance, defending private property. The truth, of course, is that libertarianism wants to advance principles of property but that it in no way wishes to defend, willy nilly, all property which now is called private. Much of that property is stolen. Much is of dubious title. All of it is deeply intertwined with an immoral, coercive state system which has condoned, built on, and profited from slavery; has expanded through and exploited a brutal and aggressive imperial and colonial foreign policy, and continues to hold the people in a roughly serf-master relationship to political-economic power concentrations. Libertarians are concerned, first and foremost, with that most valuable of properties, the life of each individual. That is the property most brutally and constantly abused by state systems whether they are of the right or left. Property rights pertaining to material objects are seen by libertarians as stemming from and as importantly secondary to the right to own, direct, and enjoy one’s own life and those appurtenances thereto which may be acquired without coercion. Karl said, Libertarians, in short, simply do not believe that theft is proper whether it is committed in the name of a state, a class, a crises, a credo, or a cliche. This is a far cry from sharing common ground with those who want to create a society in which super capitalists . are free to amass vast holdings and who say that that is ultimately the most important purpose of freedom. This is proto-heroic nonsense. Then the soft spoken man goes on to define libertarianism: Libertarianism is a people’s movement and a liberation movement. It seeks the sort of open, non-coercive society in which the people, the living, free, distinct people may voluntarily associate, dis-associate, and, as they see fit, participate in the decisions affecting their lives. This means a truly free market in everything from ideas to idiosyncrasies. It means people free collectively to organize the resources of their immediate community or individualistically to organize them; it means the freedom to have a community-based and supported judiciary where wanted, none where not, or private arbitration services where that is seen as most desirable. The same with police. The same with schools, hospitals, factories, farms, laboratories, parks, and pensions. Liberty means the right to shape your own institutions. It opposes the right of those institutions to shape you simply because of accreted power or gerontological status. .............................He goes on: Libertarians could and should propose specific revolutionary tactics and goals which would have specific meaning to poor people and to all people; to analyze in depth and to demonstrate in example the meaning of liberty, revolutionary liberty to them. Then he challenges us: Let me propose just a few examples of the sort of specific, revolutionary and radical questions to which members of our Movement might well address themselves. - Land ownership and/or usage in a situation of declining state power. The Tijerina [*] situation suggests one approach. There must be many others. And what about (realistically, not romantically) water and air pollution liability and prevention? - Worker, share-owner, community roles or rights in productive facilities in terms of libertarian analysis and as specific proposals in a radical and revolutionary context. What, for instance, might or should happen to General Motors in a liberated society? To read Karl full argument in 1969 reprinted for you click on the link. panarchy.org/hess/libertarianism.html
Posted on: Fri, 19 Dec 2014 11:26:59 +0000
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