Whether For Profit-Taking Or For Love-Making: A Note On The Essential Continuity of Right and Left Anarchist Faiths in Whatever Their Preferred Parochial "Spontaneous Order" Looks Like

Upgraded from the Moot "BerserkRL" made an interesting intervention:

You claim that "all market libertarians," including "those who imagine themselves to be of the left," ignore "the contingent historical artifact of regulations, treaties, pricing conventions, provincial customs, norms, infrastructural affordances that passes for 'the market' here and now," etc. Now since you mention libertarian of the left, you're obviously aware that some of us do stress at great length those "contingent historical artifact of regulations, treaties, pricing conventions, provincial customs, norms, infrastructural affordances that passes for 'the market' here and now," etc. So it looks as though you're simultaneously acknowledging and denying our existence. Why's that?

Simply enough, because it doesn't look that way to me, that's why.

I would say that anarcho-capitalists "naturalize" historically contingent exploitative and plutocratic arrangements as a "spontaneous market order" in an effort to legitimize them, while anarcho-socialists expose historically contingent exploitative and plutocratic arrangements in an effort to illegitimize them the better to "naturalize" whatever "spontaneous order" they themselves prefer.

It is my conclusion that these superficially different positions are actually complementary if not identical errors that you are probably mistaking as a paradox or contradiction on my part (which is not to deny that you might still productively disagree with my conclusion).

I think an unexpurgated return to my original quote makes this at least a little bit clearer: "Like all market libertarians (and I do suspect all libertarians, always, even those who imagine themselves to be of the left) his [Ron Paul's] is a vision of freedom and dignity that requires the treatment of key assumptions and institutions of the status quo as natural and inevitable rather than as artificial and historical, and hence his is a profoundly reactionary viewpoint at its base [emphasis added].

Now, I would be the last to deny there is all the difference in the world between profit-taking and love-making -- but to the extent that parochial characterizations of these are universalized (eg, presumably definitive propensity to truck and barter, game theoretical assumptions about wealth maximization strategies, evolutionary justifications for sharing behaviors, anthropological documentation of mutualist impulses, popular anthemic declarations that all you need is love) to provide the basis for false faith in spontaneous orders and programmatic anarchisms I disapprove of them all the same and for much the same reasons (while remaining, nonetheless, a Lennon fan).

(As an aside, as an entirely negative critical rather than positive programmatic vantage I am more sympathetic to anarchisms, especially of the green, socialist, radical democratic, and queer/punk varieties.)