The emergence of a libertarian left in the U.S.
Kevin Carson is optimistic that a anti-capitalist free market left is starting to influence the debates in the U.S..
Excerpt:
“As modest as Wilkinson’s and Boudreaux’s concessions may seem, I’m convinced that nothing of the sort would have happened ten or fifteen years ago. Back then, such commentary would have passed completely unremarked on in the conventional libertarian press. The fact that the two articles were subjected to such critical scrutiny, and the authors felt the need to restate their positions, reflects a couple of developments:
First, the rise of the networked, hyperlinked culture of the Worldwide Web. Because of this, it’s possible for anyone with a few hundred bucks to own their own printing press, and to publish critical responses to articles by high-profile authors. And in the process of doing so, it’s possible to link not only to the original article but to all evidence used in rebuttal–what used to be called “Fisking,” although that’s not a word in much use any more. This means that libertarian commentary is no longer restricted to highly capitalized libertarian publishing concerns, foundations and think tanks, or dependent on wealthy donors.
Second, the rise of a fairly self-conscious and cohesive free market Left. This community has coalesced in movements like the Alliance of the Libertarian Left, and the present community of writers at Center for a Stateless Society. We don’t just tip our hats to the distinction between “pro-market” and “pro-business”; we make it a central focus of our analysis.
As Professor Roderick Long, director of the C4SS’s parent body the Molinari Institute, put it, traditional libertarianism had a sort of figure-ground problem. Traditional libertarians, who tended to have a cultural affinity with the Old Right and the GOP rooted in decades of anti-communist and anti-New Deal alliance, looked at the existing corporate economy and saw the statism in it as amounting largely to friction in an essentially market-based system.
We on the free market Left, on the other hand, look at the corporate economy and see it as defined by statism. We see it as our task to defend free markets and human freedom as such — not to defend the legitimacy of most existing large business enterprises and existing concentrations of wealth.
And we’re having an increasing influence on the way the debate is framed.”
