Since class members will be wrapping up their work for the semester with a response to Kevin Carson’s “A Strategic Green-Libertarian Alliance,” we need to spend a little time dealing with the two keywords: libertarian and green. Both terms are contested, and are claimed by significantly diverse political movements.
Wikipedia’s disambiguation page for the term Libertarianism is useful, essentially dividing those who have claimed the term between libertarian socialist and libertarian capitalist traditions, while acknowledging that the two currents are united by a preoccupation with individual liberty. All libertarians are likely to be definable, positively, in terms of a commitment to the pursuit of equal liberty for all and some adherence to a non-aggression principle, and, negatively, in opposition to various forms of authoritarianism. That’s a lot of important ideas in the mix already, many of them open to a range of interpretations.
At various margins of libertarians, you find anarchists. By itself, anarchism means nothing more than a belief that human beings can and should get along without rulers. Obviously, a commitment to anarchism is a commitment to political liberty, and it’s a position individuals are unlikely to take unless they belive that human affairs can in fact be worked out between people, with a bare minimum of “government” of any kind. In fact, anarchist seem to agree on liberty, and disagree on pretty much everything else, including how to define their one key term.
Kevin Carson calls himself a “free-market anti-capitalist.” It’s an accurate description and a teachable scandal all at the same time. There is no contradiction involved, as long as you understand “capitalism” to be the economic system that has developed in history, rather than some abstract ideal to which actual market economies have conformed to some degree. We used to refer to “actually existing socialism,” to distinguish what happened in “socialist” countries from the abstract systems they drew upon. Carson takes his inspiration from figures like Benjamin R. Tucker, who opposed existing capitalism, not by advocating communism or the like, but by calling for market forms that would be even more free. Poke around his site to see where that takes him.
When you’re dealing with the rather extreme form of libertarian thought espoused by CArson, remember that it was Thomas Jefferson who said that the government governed best when it governed least, and Thoreau who took the next step and suggested it would be best to have a government which governed not at all. And remember that the potentially extreme nature of the position is why we are looking at it in this context. Taking things this far, perhaps too far, shows us something about our own commitments to liberty, tolerance, etc…
I think that anarchism is more about process than theory, and as such, there is general agreement about two things: first, working towards the elimination of unjustified hierarchy; second, using “direct action” to do so. Commitment to this process is how I would define anarchism. Also, it’s worth mentioning that the unwillingness of anarchists to agree on a given theory is much to their credit. The nature of anarchism is to find consensus through debate in a given set of circumstances. As such, real anarchists are never libertarian capitalists.