Mr. Carrico, are you saying that if a progressive activist campaigning for morphological freedom (freedom to use recreational drugs, freedom to use the morning-after pill or get an abortion, freedom to request a doctor's assistance to commit suicide, etc) has exhausted all the human and financial resources in the progressive circles he has access to he should not ally himself with libertarian activists simply because they are libertarians? I understand that there are technoscience questions on which progressives and libertarians are at odds but can't and shouldn't they work together on those on which they are like-minded? Isn't winning the cause more important than making sure our allies share our groupthink?
It's a rule of thumb, not a fundamentalist article of faith. On particular campaigns one can and will ally with all sorts of people, of course -- because, among other things, people incarnate multiple, partial, and contradictory identifications after all, and also because people are usually persuadable whatever their foolishness on this or that particular issue.
However, we're living in the shit stinking ruins of market fundamentalist ideology. Your scenario presumes a circumstance in which progressive resources are exhausted but somehow there are vital swarms of well-meaning libertopians around to pick up the slack. You'll forgive me, but I find the terms of the thought-experiment a tad... fanciful. Not to put too fine a point on it, the remaining dead enders I know of who are still insisting on the obvious righteousness of the simplistic self-serving pieties they swallowed from Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand are too fucking stupid to waste serious time on in a world that isn't buying corporate-militarist bullshit anymore and is instead clamoring for change. If you want to devote your time to spoon feeding these guys on your dime, be my guest.
More seriously, however, I do think that there are obvious and important differences that make a difference between left and right perspectives on technodevelopmental questions. Declarations of a genial catholicism of political outlook in the names of shared devotion to "technological" outcomes tends in my view disastrously to evacuate one's technodevelopmental perspective of actual critical purchase.
If, for example, you want to defend consensual prosthetic self-determination (implied by your examples of access to safe abortion, relatively harmless recreational drugs, and well-regulated assisted suicide) you need to think long and hard about what that word "consensual" means and what it depends on. For me, in a fairly typical progressive construal of the matter, consent is more legible and legitimate as such the more it is substantiated by access to reliable public information, basic income, healthcare, and education. Your libertopian "allies" may seem superficially to share my commitment to "morphological freedom" (I prefer the phrase "consensual prosthetic self-determination," but that's no biggie) but if for them this "freedom" amounts to the primarily consumerist, primarily negative liberty that treats "market transactions" as non-coercive by fiat whatever the terms that misinform and duress them, then it turns out these libertopian "allies" actually weren't substantially allies at all, and you only thought they were because you were being sloppy and superficial in your thinking for whatever reasons.
Now, if you want to dismiss this sort of critique as "groupthink" on my part, by all means do so. The phrase I would use in preference would be "critical intelligence."
3 comments:
Exactly. Let's look at a typical libertarian position on drugs.
"... [S]urely the state should not be permitted to regulate what we can put into our own bodies. Drug prohibition is both repressive and counterproductive . ..." /David Boaz, "Libertarianism: A primer."/
O.K. Prior to 1906 there was absolutely zero regulation on drugs. But results of that hands-off (and it was really hands-off, no that old "it wasn't even really tried" dodge please.) approach wasn't at all libertopia of private rating agencies, competent doctors or new efficient pharmaceuticals.
Result was that no one really knew WHAT they put in "our own bodies", it was literally "The Great American Fraud", as Hopkins put it. Aren't libertarians anti-fraud? Then why they advocate a solution PROVEN to be fraudsters' wet dream?
Probably the best illustration of what it was like is this passage:
"[B]romo-Seltzer has substituted for its acetanilid, acetphenetedin (sic! -An.), which is very much the same
thing and is fraught with the same dangers, but doesn't "sound as bad" to
the public ear. Laxative Bromo-Quinin has discarded its acetanilid and
now uses phenacetin, a somewhat less powerful coal-tar derivative, It still
preserves the lying legend: "Will cure a cold in one day," which it will " /Samuel Hopkins Adams "The Great American Fraud", available here: http://www.archive.org/details/greatamericanfra00adamiala /
Phenacetin and acetophenetidin, are really one and the same drug related to paracetamol, and as modern studies show, it has more side effects than the latter, but is much more safe than acetanilid (about the only good thing you can say about acetanilid is that it's non-addictive.)
Yet no one did the study. The kind of systematic, relatively unbiased study FDA now mandates. Manufacturers injected dozen rabbits with acetanilid, didn't see anything wrong after cursory examination and moved on. Doctors, qualisied enough to have an opinion on the issue were divided, and the public... Well, even if they had an opinion they had no choice. Most medicines weren't even labelled for trade secrecy reasons. Samuel Hopkins Adams was an experienced muckraker. If even he mixed up facts about anilide drugs, Average Joe had no chance to learn anything.
So, would anyone "choose" in any meaningful sense a medicine which may or may not contain component which may or may not have deadly side effects, and which may or may not really do anything good to you? It's gamble, not choice, and I think everyone will agree, even libertarians.
So, WHY? Why government non-regulation resulted in XIX century medicine not being that different from Russian Roulette? Where were all the "private rating agencies", "non-fraudulent contractual relationship of self-ownhers", "market's maximal efficient distributions" etc.?
True, FDA was later hijacked by Drug Warriors, and generally is exactly the sort of technocracy anyone should be suspicious of. But merely abolishing it and hoping that Market Fairy will do the rest is Most. Stupid. Plan. Ever.
Excellent comment. And of course the examples could be endlessly multiplied.
One has to love the libertopian "futurists" forever pining after Gilded Age horrorshows of injustice and exploitation or warlordism of the kind best exemplified in contemporary failed states (usually states rendered failures by corporate-militarist experiments in neoliberal structural adjustment -- the "Third World" -- or free-market "reconstruction regimes" after neoconservative military invasions or starve-the beast exacerbated natural disasters -- Iraq, Katrina). One wishes these futurists -- indeed, Retro-Futurists -- would just transplant themselves directly and permanently to one of their free market paradises and see how long they would last there, while the rest of us get on with the business of infrastructure, accountable governance, and research and development.
Part of them don't actually. And that's one of a more foolish things about libertarianism.
I once had discussion with a (smal-l) libertrian on exactly that topic. At first he made all the usual noises about Founding Fathers' intent, said that for 150 yeaars US were "closest thing" to a libertarian state, suggested to return to pre-WWI government spending levels, usual stuff. He attacked "nanny-staters", said that libertrarian state "wasn't any sort of corporate dystopia" and asked if I had read reason.com.
Then I pointed that Gilded Age pretty much was the mother of all corporate dystopias... (and added a few personal remarks on how "market correcting itself" looks from the inside.) Suddenly it al changed. US wasn't at all libertarian at any point in the history. Government may prohibit me to purchase Delaware to rule there as a king, sorry, lawful owner, and even if it doesn't it's its duty to raise taxes so it can buy Delaware back. Roads should be nationalised, and govenment may interfere in labor disputes, whenever threat of violence, but has to be fair to both employer and employee. Finally I found out that there's just one thing government may not do, something horrible called "The New Deal". When I pointed out that he pretty much allowed every individual component of that thing done by That Man, he replied that That Man did it for all the wrong reasons, and that corporate America benefitted from the New Deal too. "We [libertarians] are a big tent, not all of us are minarchists, you see."
With conversations like those, who needs drugs?
Ok, that's not typical reaction to mere mention of the Gilded Age, but it's quite telling. That's all there is to any kind of conservatism nowadays, both in US and elsewhere. "Roosvelt was wrong. I don't know why, Mommy Ayn told me so." For most of the current generation libertarians it's not even racism in disguise, or something they really hope to benefit from, it's simply a logic-defying phobia.
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