This stuff gets messy, pretty much right out of the gate. As if we expected anything else. There are plenty of sincere comrades of various persuasions, not to mention our share of out-and-out trolls, ready to point out the dangers, difficulties and obvious follies of an Alliance of the Libertarian Left. Any common language or agreement on more than very basic principles, upon which some more practical form of alliance might be solidly grounded, is strictly something to come. We’ve bet on a shared intuition that the obviousness of our folly is somewhat illusory. The leap of faith represented by the ALL is not to be taken any more lightly than that marked by out identification with anarchism. We come armed with some tools, not least of which is the SEK3-inspired affirmation of diversity: Everyone here disagrees. It’s not the surest foundation for an alliance, and it leaves open possibilities, not least of them that we could be wrong.
I hope that we are all a little bit wrong, particularly in those areas where we are most married to the particular dogmas of our own libertarian sects. And hopefully we will all learn to divorce ourselves a bit from those dogmatic beliefs, not in the interest of agreement, necessarily, but in the interest of working usefully with our differences, with our own relations to the traditions from which we draw inspiration, etc. It should be a very interesting project, in any event.
