After weeks of increasingly bellicose agreement on the importance of truth, reason and LGBT rights to the left-libertarian movement, I’ve decided to withdraw my formal affiliations with the Alliance of the Libertarian Left. The ALL was launched initially despite considerable diversity of basic assumptions about theory, strategy and tactics–a dangerous strategy, in many ways, but one which grew naturally, it seems to me, out of the network of friendships, political flirtations, and relations of philosophical hospitality that preceded the ALL, on SEK3 original left-libertarian list and in Tom Knapp’s Blogosphere of the Libertarian Left. The growth and success of the ALLiance has probably spread that network beyond the limits that such an informal agreement could sustain, a circumstance that has certainly been on the minds of some of us more-or-less from the beginning. That’s not a bad thing, and the calls from within the ALLiance for more coherence are not necessarily a bad thing. But, from my purely personal point of view, the way that implicit assumptions about the fine points of the ALLiance have been advanced as if they had been mutually adopted, and the rough handling that a few of us dissenters recieved as a result, was pretty much a bad thing.
I have no interest in stopping any ongoing projects. I’m not dropping any friends. I expect that my affairs will be so bound up with members of the ALLiance that the difference in my explicit affiliations will hardly show. I am, in fact, increasing my participation in some affiliated projects. But for me, as a result of religious and philosophical commitments which were, up until recently, simply not issues for the ALLiance per se, the loose bonds of affiliation have started to feel other than mutual, and other than based in the sort of individualistic dynamic I though (perhaps mistakenly) was at the heart of the whole thing. YMMV, and, if so, more power to ya. But I do not want at any point to feel, for instance, that LeftLiberty or Corvus Editions or my posts here, can be taken to represent or misrepresent anything but themselves, and myself.
I look forward to working on concrete and mutually voluntary projects with fellow left-libertarians in the future.
