Date: Sun, 28 Apr 1996 13:47:50 -0400
To: marxism-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU
From: dhenwood-AT-panix.com (Doug Henwood)
Subject: Re: Any thoughts about libertarianism?


At 8:21 AM 4/28/96, Paul Gallagher wrote:

>While reading some old posts on this list about the militia
>movement in the US, I wondered about libertarianism.  Libertarianism
>enjoys enormous support on Usenet, in a variety of forms -
>Objectivism, anarcho-capitalism, RKBA libertarianism ("right to
>keep and bear arms"), the militias, Steve Forbes supporters, Extropians -
>but apparently little support in the general population.  My knowledge
>of libertarians is limited to what I've observed on Usenet, but
>one thing that struck me was their apparent eagerness to
>separate their ideal Capitalism from real existing forms of capitalism,
>which they identify as socialism.  For example, many believe that the
>total privatization and deregulation of the economy will end poverty
>and coercion.
>
>
>I don't know what the political significance, if any, of this
>ideology is, or its class character.

Libertarianism - a many-splendored thing, but let me generalize for a
second - is an extremely popular ideology among middle- and upper-class
Americans, especially those employed in the computer and finance
industries. They're overwhelmingly male and white. It's popularity among
computer types is especially ironic, given that their industry wouldn't
have developed had it not been for decades of U.S. government subsidies,
notably from the Pentagon. The ironies of finance are somewhat less
apparent, but there's little doubt that their 1980s experiments in leverage
would have ended in depression in the 1990s had it not been for various
bailouts engineered by the U.S. government.

You are right that they invent an ideal capitalism that has never existed
and never could, and always trace any faults in K'ism to state
interference. They ignore - and are often completely ignorant of - the
history of state coercion and support necessary to the creation of
capitalism, from the appropriations of primitive accumulation, to the
adventures of imperialism, to the kinds of subsidies and bailouts I
mentioned above. It's an ideology of the successful (and the
as-yet-unsuccessful who swim in their wake) who trace their success
entirely to their own personal efforts. They forget that markets are social
institutions, and that no individual achievement occurs in a vaccuum; every
act of apparent individualism depends on a web of social and historical
connections, but they deny these with a passion. If I had the time, I could
develop a Frankfurt-style analysis of the ideology as a self-flattering
reaction to the very devaluation of the individual under modern organized
capitalism, but I don't have the time.

Doug

--

Doug Henwood
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