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Nov. 12, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
33:34
1209 Anarchists, Voting and Strategy - A Roundtable

Three anarchists discuss postelection strategies.

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Oh, hi. It's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
Hi there. Hey, how's it going?
Hello. This is Brad Spangler.
Gary's on the line also.
Who am I speaking with? Oh, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
Brad, you and I had a chat with Wendy a while back about voting.
Stefan, it's so good to hear from you.
It's great to hear from you too.
How are things? Oh, they're going okay.
I'm working on trying to set up a This first of a series of conference calls among bloggers here is just a little bit of an informal conversation about, you know, just the general direction of market anarchist blogging and so forth as a tool to spread our ideas.
And, you know, not a whole lot going on right now.
We're just, you know, trying to set this up as a communications tool to try to see what we can do.
Sounds great. Yep.
Hi, Stephan. Oh, hi.
And who are you? I'm Gary Chartier.
And I'm, well, I say far away.
I'm reasonably far away from Brad, but I'm not actually sure where you are.
In the greater LA in California.
And I'm an academic.
And as I was saying to Brad, don't find many people who are rushing for opportunities to talk about anarchism.
Right. Well, you're certainly warmer than I am.
I'm up in Canada in mid-November, so I'm sure you're having a nicer walk than I am these days.
Whereabouts in Canada? Mississauga?
It's just outside Toronto. Oh, okay.
So it was a pretty exciting election.
Oh, the election? Yeah.
Was that the general topic, was elections, or was it something else?
Yeah, it was. I was going to, you know, really not really even start on that topic until we have more folks on the line, but really, if you want to talk about it, that's great.
Basically, what I was wanting to do was get feedback from a variety of people as far as, you know, what direction people saw U.S. politics going in.
Now, obviously... We're not trying to elect anybody, or at least not as a group.
The point is, though, that because this forms the backdrop, so to speak, or the rhetorical terrain that we're fighting our battles on, so to speak, how is this going to impact our strategy and approach to trying to spread our ideas?
Stephen, do you have any thoughts on the matter?
Yeah, I've done a video series on voting recently and I mean my very brief thoughts are that I think that the election of Obama is a very good thing because what's happened is you've gone from old school southern patriarchal white guy to multicultural young Black,
well-educated, non-military, like you've gone from one, you couldn't, you know, within the current system, you couldn't have a more extreme candidate swing.
Right. And so, in a video I did recently, I was sort of saying that if nothing changes, you're not going to get a bigger change in the heads of government, right?
So if nothing changes, at this point, you have to start to question the system.
That's very perceptive.
That's very perceptive. Because, I mean, we can't – you can't sell someone a cure until they know that they're sick, right, so to speak?
And so, to me, the main goal has been to try and get people away from this fantasy that voting is going to change the system because that's what gives government the illusion that it's a free market environment.
You know, that we participate, we're part of the social contract, we give them sanction, we have a choice, right?
So when you have a choice, you feel like you have a responsibility.
And so, for me, it's just, I'm really trying to pound people that, and I did a really, I'm trying to learn from really passionate speakers these days, because I'm trying to put a little more fire in the belly, and I did a really fiery speech about this.
And just saying, you know, I'm sorry?
I was about to say, you do sound, in contrast to some of your earlier audios, you do sound more like a What's the phrase?
Man on fire. And it's actually a refreshing improvement.
Yes, I think I wanted to build some credibility before lighting the fuse, so to speak, because otherwise you just sound like something.
So I wanted to lay the intellectual framework for the theory, and then I wanted to let rip.
Because, like it or not, passion gets eyeballs, right?
And so I'm really trying to light people up to this possibility that voting doesn't do what they think it does, right?
And so I'm thrilled, in a way, because Obama's not going to be able to change anything, right?
As I said in a podcast once, it's like changing the hood ornament on a car that's going to run you down.
It doesn't really make much difference, right?
So I'm hoping that with this big, quote, change in government...
And also that people will get that voting won't change yet.
And also, I mean, Obama's economic advisor has been heavily involved in working over the national debt.
So Obama knows exactly that he can't make many changes.
I mean, the whole – the steering wheel is cut because there's no fiscal legroom, so to speak.
So, I mean, when he gets in, and I made all these predictions, you know, he's going to say, well, but because of this financial crisis, we can't do what we want to do.
And then there's going to be an eruption of violence in Iraq, because the last thing that the Muslims want, the extremists want, is for the troops to leave Iraq.
I mean, that's why they did 9-11, was to get the troops so that they could get at them in the same way they did with Russia.
So, there'll be an eruption of violence.
I'm sorry? Yeah. Go ahead.
Oh, yeah. So there'll be an eruption of violence in Iraq.
Well, we can't get the troops out of Iraq because it's become more unstable.
And, you know, I can't do the health care thing because the financial crisis.
So, you know, the election-breaking stuff is going to happen within a couple of months.
And so I just try to give those predictions and remind people that all of the energy that they devoted to trying to change the system...
Is merely encouraging the system.
And so I hope that that will help give at least some people in the same way that the Ron Paul candidacy did.
I mean, through my criticism of the Ron Paul candidacy, I did get a lot of people who came over and said, wow, you were kind of right.
It really didn't work out that well.
So I think, you know, the more people try and fail, you know, nobody cheers failure, but the more people try and fail that which doesn't work, the more open they'll be to other solutions.
At least that's my theory.
Best I could come up with the situation.
It sounds like what you're saying, and if this is correct, then I would say I'm in pretty close agreement with you, but when you characterize your positions, basically there are all these different false alternatives, and The sooner the whole list gets checked off, the better. Absolutely.
What we talk about is a kind of chemo, right?
But as long as people think that doing the chicken dance is going to cure their illness, they'll keep doing the chicken dance because it's a lot more fun than chemo, right?
Right. What do you guys think?
Gary, do you have anything else to add?
Thanks, Brett. I'm just continuing to chew over those insightful observations.
I think I'll keep none for the moment.
Okay. Well, I wouldn't characterize this as any sort of policy or anything as far as the C4SS.org effort, but just my own personal opinion, I think that as market anarchists, we're Whether we like it or not, the radical end of the larger libertarian movement.
And unfortunately, that libertarian movement has a tendency to, when a conservative is in power, it skews slightly more left.
And when there's a center leftist like Obama in power as president, then it skews back more toward the right.
I think that We may want to try to break that tendency, and the reason for that is the reformist or moderate wing of the libertarian movement blurs into conservatism so seamlessly that the very word libertarian has been Synonymous with right-wing or conservative.
Libertarianism is regarded as a type of conservatism.
You mean sort of the old-school Goldwater style?
Right, Goldwater style, Ron Paul types, and a more moderate Tato Institute wing.
And sorry, would you say that that also includes the highly minarchist, objectivist groups?
Well... For what purposes?
The reason being, I've noticed that several objectivist groups have been particularly bloodthirsty warmongers in the past few years, to a point where I'm personally tempted to just write them out of the libertarian movement in general.
Yeah, it's kind of... You mean the pick-off, you know, bite-the-head-off-of-bat speeches that have been going on?
Yeah, yeah. The ones where it...
It just seems like some sort of funhouse mirror image of what objectivism was supposed to be in the first place.
Not that I count myself as an objectivist, but I like to think I've studied it well enough to have at least a semi-accurate idea of what an objectivist position on things would be.
It's become a self-parody during the war on terror years.
Well, the moment you try to influence policy, principles become completely expendable, and they always are expended.
But I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt your other point.
You were talking about the left-right libertarian swing.
Oh, well, basically where I was going with that was simply, I think that, my personal opinion anyway, is that we're going to need to make an effort to attack Obama More from, oddly enough,
the left. And that's because there's a natural tendency to swing back more toward the right when there is a center-left president in power, like during the Clinton years, for example.
Moderate libertarian support was essential for the Republicans regaining control of Congress in 1994 during the so-called contract with America.
Oh, so it's the seesaw theory, right?
Sorry, it's the seesaw theory, like if we've got someone heavy on one side of the seesaw, we need to put a few anvils on the other side to balance it out?
Is that where the libertarians get sucked in?
Well, that's not what I'm advocating, but that's what I believe has been occurring, in that there's a natural tendency to swing to the right when there's a leftist in the presidency.
And it swings to the left when there's a rightist in the presidency.
Leftist or rightist as far as the mainstream definition of those terms anyway.
And what I'm actually saying is that I believe in order to break free from that and try to break the false identification or conflation of libertarianism with conservatism,
we actually need to do the work to Develop a more characteristically left-wing yet thoroughly libertarian critique of the ruling class, so to speak, from what could be characterized as a far-left perspective.
It seems like that's a very fruitful prospect, but we've got not only the inertia that leads to the seesaw phenomenon you've described to overcome there, but also it seems to me the active tendency of many people in the media to just reflexively assume that whenever people who are broadly libertarian use the rhetoric of the left, they're really doing it in bad faith.
And it seems to me that there's an extra hurdle to be overcome there, is there not?
Well... Sorry, I would just say that that's been my experience.
When I put out podcasts, I have a podcast called Loving the Lefties.
And whenever I put out stuff that is sympathetic to left-wing perspectives, particularly on issues like war, imperialism, and so on, where the leftist critiques are, you know, fantastic.
I mean, you simply can't talk about this stuff without addressing Noam Chomsky.
And I think he's entirely right in his analysis of this stuff.
I find that I get a lot more, I get a lot more hostility hostility when I sympathize with the left than when I sympathize with the right.
So if that, you know, I think that that buttresses up what you're saying.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
And I think that comes out of a lot of objectivism to some degree, some libertarianism, but for sure it is something that I think you're right.
People are going to try and swing to the right in a way that they didn't swing to the left as far with George Bush.
I believe that to be the case.
Now, obviously, we can't just drop everything and become Maoists.
No? Okay, sorry, let me check that one off.
Okay, not Maoists.
Okay, I'll drop that as a topic.
No Mao. Yeah, Mao's right out.
But I look a little fabulous in one of those little tunics.
Okay. What was that Will Smith line from Men in Black?
You know what? I make this look good.
Absolutely. I got the forehead to be a Maoist.
Surely that should help.
So what specifically do you mean in terms of a leftist critique of Obama?
What sort of stuff do you mean?
Well, that's something I'm actually, at this point, still struggling to articulate.
I think that We may want to be doing things like looking at what some of the more radical implications of libertarianism might mean in terms of the S-word, socialism.
For example, things like Rothbardian property ethics in the context of things like the mortgage meltdown.
Is foreclosure really An example of property rights being asserted or property rights being denied in the context of an environment where banking is essentially the The bookkeeping efforts of a state-subsidized or cartelized banking industry.
Well, I think you could make a very strong argument that once you get government-controlled money supply, there's no such thing as property, right?
Because all property is the values measured in dollars and the dollars have been socialized and, of course, continually bleed value as they use the hidden tax of inflation.
So to me, property rights are not enforceable when you have fiat currency controlled by a central bank.
And I'm sure that the socialists would agree with that because that was one of the platforms, of course, of the Communist Manifesto.
So the fact that he's going to avoid – that Obama is going to avoid talking about this corporatism, right?
Because I really like the way that the leftists identify the fascism within the system, that they talk about how the...
Stephen, could I interrupt you just for a moment?
I believe I've heard a tone or two that may have indicated we have a couple new callers, or at least one maybe.
Sure. Hang on for just a moment.
I'm going to try to...
Hello? Is anybody new online that just joined us?
Feel free to speak up. Hello?
Hello? I heard that beep.
Okay. I just did a menu command that says there's still just three callers on the line, so perhaps someone joined our call and then immediately dropped off for some reason.
I could have sort of heard a couple tones, though.
There must have been an entrance tone and an exit tone.
So, please forgive the interruption.
Oh, no, no, that's fine. That's fine.
Of course, we want to welcome people.
I was just tossing that out as an example.
That's... A fairly libertarian argument, yet it's one you would not hear from a constitutionalist.
It's not a Ron Paulian argument.
It's not something you're going to hear from the Republican Liberty Caucus.
It's not something you're going to hear from the moderate to even centrist wings of the Libertarian Party, even.
You might get something vaguely resembling that from a radical wing of the ELP, but mostly you have to get further...
It's the quote-unquote left of the LP to the ranks of Stephen Molyneux and Brad Spangler and so on and so forth into the more radical anarchists to get that essentially free-market libertarian argument.
But it's also, from the perspective of socialists, that is a thorough socialist argument also because what it's basically saying is this property held by These factions of the ruling class is not legitimate property.
Now, what we're saying as libertarians is that it can be legitimate property, but it's not the legitimate property of the people you're trying to take it away from, or that are trying to kick out the residents.
Rather, it would be the legitimate property of the people that are residing in these homes that are facing foreclosure.
Does that make sense? It does, and I think it does.
I'm just pointing that out as one example of, you know, One of potentially several different positions that sound almost quasi-Bolshevik, yet can be addressed from a thoroughly free market libertarian perspective.
Right, right.
Oh, absolutely.
And it seems like there are a number of other moves that can be made there.
to emphasize the degree to which the positions the Obama administration seems to be moving toward articulating are ones that really are designed to benefit particular corporate constituencies and to which those policies tend to in fact You know,
undermine the economic security of poor and working class Americans precisely because they mount the interventions in the market on behalf of big players.
I mean, I think that's right.
And I think that one of the...
I'm sorry, go ahead.
I didn't interrupt you. No, I was winding down.
Please go ahead. I just mean that the way that libertarians of the political bent tend to attack the war on drugs, they tend to attack welfare, But they don't tend to attack what the leftists would call corporatism or something like the globalization movement and some of the predations that corporations go for.
And of course, they don't see that corporations are socialist constructs as much as the welfare state.
And that corporations were specifically invented to shield the ruling class or the corporate owners from liability and responsibility for losses.
That they were not a free market invention, but a statist invention.
And that's where I think one of the real divides is between the left and the right within the freedom movement.
That, as you say, the people who are more on the right tend to criticize the...
The programs which are supposed to benefit the poor while the ones on the left tend to criticize the programs that benefit the rich.
And I think that's a real shame.
I like mixing it up, right?
Talking about corporatism with the rightists and talking about the welfare state with the leftists.
And it really does tend to open up some fertile ground.
Stefan? Don't ever feel shame for being consistently libertarian.
No, no. I mean, mix it up all you want.
Yeah, but it's tempting. Sometimes it's tempting to speak to, you know, to preach to the choir, so to speak, and to preach counters to the choir can be a challenge.
Okay. Okay.
Well, I'll tell you why, again, strictly as my own personal opinion, I personally think it's actually more important to appeal to the left than And it really is sort of a half-formed idea or theory almost of social change,
and that is this in a nutshell, that libertarianism has been, in terms of its body of rhetoric, not libertarian theory itself, but the body of rhetoric developed in support of libertarianism over the past few decades, has been written or developed to appeal more to the right.
And what has happened is that we've developed an appeal to rightists, yet it is leftists that are characterized more by their devotion to ideas.
Because conservatism is not an actual ideology.
Conservatism is more of a tendency or stance.
And I believe what libertarians have been hitting their head up against the wall about, so to speak, is that conservatives are not actually influenced by ideas.
They're influenced by emotions.
Marx called them reactionaries.
They're reacting to the new ideas proposed by the left.
In order for libertarians to win the war of ideas, we have to At least be more engaged with the people who are concerned with ideas.
Now, obviously, I'm not trying to insult conservatives to the extent to where I'm saying they have no ideas at all or that they're incapable of dealing with ideas, but conservatives tend to not be swayed by ideas.
You can argue with a conservative over and over and over again and win the argument And they will not change their mind.
That's the point. And when all is said and done, they will say, well, but you're just too radical.
Yeah, I'm not comfortable with it.
Yeah. You can win the argument over and over and over again.
You can win the argument every single time, over and over and over again, all day long, And the conservative will not change their mind.
And leftists are not necessarily prone to either, but I believe, or perhaps I'm hoping at least, that the so-called left is more in tune with the whole concept of ideas, and that they may be more inclined to change their mind.
If the argument gets won over and over and over again.
Well, I think you're right, and I think the other thing that, just to jump in for a sec, I think the other thing that's important is that clearly what we have is a multi-generational project, and therefore I think it's important to focus on younger people who are more open to changing their minds and who are generally more on the left than on the right.
That's true also. That's true also.
We need to focus on the young and the young skew left anyway.
It really seems to me that there's tremendous potential there if you can highlight two things, as Brad was suggesting earlier, but not perhaps elaborating on as much right now, the real importance of a genuine class analysis that is consistent with and supportive of a libertarian approach.
And at the same time, an authentic acknowledgement to folks on the left of the extent to which the conversation we're having is a conversation about means rather than ends.
But if you can say, look, you know, I am no more excited Right,
but one who's even more harmful to the poor, who they say they care about, right?
Well, but I think the point is that you can, yeah, yeah, exactly.
So I think you have to figure out how to blunt that precise kind of knee-jerk reaction.
Very true. Very true.
Yeah, I've done a video.
I just did a review based on a bunch of requests of this movie Zeitgeist Addendum, which came out, which is a good analysis of the money stuff, but goes all bong-laced hippy-dippy on social change and just makes the most egregious economic errors that you can imagine.
And it's confusing people because basically I say it just comes down to it's the game show, gun or no gun, right?
That's all it comes down to.
It doesn't. You can call it government, corporate, union, welfare, war.
It doesn't matter. It all comes down to is a gun used to create change?
Is the initiation of the force deployed?
And I think that's where I've gotten a lot of agreement with people because there is almost nobody who will say, I think that We should deal with social problems using violence.
I mean, nobody can state that upfront, right?
And we get a lot of – so people say, oh, the welfare and so on.
It's like, well, but we should not try and solve the problems of poverty by using violence, right?
And just hammering that point over and over again, that seems to be the magic phrase that unlocks the possibility of new ideas for people.
And it seems like in that connection that it becomes really important for stressing the degree to which anarchists have a big tool bag.
That if you abandon violence, it doesn't therefore follow that there are all kinds of other ways you have of influencing the behavior of individuals and groups non-violently.
That don't fit into the paradigm of the commercial transaction.
It seems to me that there are folks who think, well, if you're talking about market anarchy, you're not talking about the state, you're automatically therefore assuming that the commercial transaction is going to resolve every social problem.
Your toolkit is tremendously limited.
And it seems to me really important to remind folks of how many options you've got once you put the status option off the table.
I think that's bang on.
I just wrote a book recently called Everyday Anarchy, which is just talking about how, as people always say, well, give me an example of an anarchist society.
And I say, well, that would be you, right?
I mean, you got your job without violence.
You have your marriage without violence.
I'm sure that you don't discipline your kid by throwing them into a jail cell.
You have a voluntary, I mean, you get together with your friends, not at gunpoint.
You make the decisions in your life.
Who to marry, what job to have, what hobbies to have, what friends to have.
You make all of those decisions based on voluntarism and you have huge ways of influencing people.
You don't pay your friends to come and spend time with you, or at least I hope you don't, unless you're Charlie Sheen, I guess.
But just reminding people that anarchism is not some abstract future utopian society, but it's actually the life that you live now.
And that really helps people to understand that it's not a theory that they don't understand.
And of course, if the government came along and said, here's who you have to marry, People would say, well, no, I want a completely free choice in a marriage partner.
So they desperately love anarchy.
And if the government said, well, this is the job you have to take, people would revolt, right?
So people love voluntarism in their life.
It's really hard to get them to cross over that bridge to understanding that what is good for you is actually good for everyone.
And there's so many other, as you say, the toolbox is very large.
The toolbox with the gun is just one thing, right?
Absolutely. Can you just repeat the name of the book since I'm going to go hunt it up?
Oh, it's totally free.
You can get it from my website in audiobook or PDF. There's three in the series.
I just wrote them over this year.
The first is called Everyday Anarchy.
It's very short, and I think it's well read.
I hope so, anyway.
And the second is practical anarchy, which is an exploration of a variety of non-status solutions to the general social problems.
And the third is how not to achieve freedom, which is a passionate and Occasionally bitter attack upon the mistakes of political libertarianism and how empirically for 300 years we've tried to use politics to reduce the power of the state and people seem to be utterly blind to the escalating failures of that approach and just keep doing the same thing over and over and I sort of go into why and I think those three are entertaining.
The second one you probably know quite a lot of, you know, like how anarchism deals with roads and health care and the money supply and so on.
But I think the first or the third would be – may have some stuff that would be helpful for you.
And because it's free, you can hand it out to anyone you think would be – would find it useful.
There's been about 20,000 of these downloaded so far, so it's actually quite good.
Well, I would like to be able to stay on the phone longer, but it looks like I need to wrap this up on my end.
Would you gentlemen be open, not necessarily committed to, but open to the idea of having a blogger's conference call once a month?
I would be totally down for that.
I think that would be great.
Okay. Okay.
Then what I will do is later today I'll publish a new event.
We'll try to make it, let's see, today is Saturday, November 15th, so let me pull up the old calendar here and try to pick a similar Saturday next month.
Or is there a certain particular day and time that works better for you, Steph?
No, this works great.
It works well. It works great.
Saturday morning, 10 a.m.
is really what works best for me a lot of times.
So looking at December, I'm seeing Saturday 13th, I believe.
And that's actually a couple weeks, almost a couple weeks before the actual holiday holidays.
So that might actually be our last chance to really not be a cramp in people's schedule anyway.
Sure. So maybe a December conference call December 13th, same bat time, same bat chance.
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