Liberty Is Less Than Freedom

If left-anarchists wanted to democratize the state rather than smashing it I'd likely be one myself. Definitely most of my favorite artists seem to be left-anarchists or to lean in that direction, I've noticed. And it sometimes seems that only left-anarchists can be depended on to consistently identify all the pernicious ways authority and privilege play out in the world.

But I think that such voluntary associations as humans are capable of usually are facilitated by a relatively legitimate democratic state and robust rights culture and are never going to arise as any kind of "spontaneous order," whether conceived as "perfectly unfettered markets" or "perfectly direct democracy."

I think that it is to an important extent the ineradicable kernel of difference, unpredictability, and agonism at the heart of the political, properly conceived, that constitutes the presumed "fetteredness" of markets for right libertarians or the presumed "indirectness" of democracy for left libertarians. If so, this accounts for the way in which libertarianisms from both directions seem so often to end up advocating as utopian politics what amount to anti-political visions.

For me, markets are as much produced as constrained by the regulations that articulate their flows, and there can be no direct expression of willfulness for democratic citizens with finite knowledge and subconsciouses to contend with.