[lbo-talk] What Is a Liberal?

B. docile_body at yahoo.com
Wed May 5 15:38:24 PDT 2010


How does liberalism trump, converge, and/or diverge from anarchism as a methodology? The point of anarchism as I've understood it after reading Chomsky, Bakunin, and even Zinn, was that anarchism was a methodology based on the concept of "anti-authoritarianism."

That is, the litmus test for public policy or other economic development should/would be whether they make society more authoritarian, or less so. Not whether X is "statist," per se, but simply whether such-and-such program (like Social Security) made folks freer, less dependent upon the caprice of bosses, or not. Some state programs actually do this - like unemployment insurance and welfare acting as the "public strike fund" that Frances Fox Piven has referred to it as (at least that's how bosses see it). Expanding the floor of the cage/scope of freedom, in other words.

Chomsky even argued in his intro to French queer anarchist Daniel Guerin's _Anarchism_ - published by Monthly Review (!) - [Guerin also wrote _Fascism and Big Business_, another great one] that anarchism ("libertarian socialism") was the heir to Enlightenment, "classical liberal" ideals of expanding human freedom as much as possible.

-B.

On 5/5/10 5:05 PM, shag carpet bomb wrote:

"hmm. since both kinds of liberals put their faith in method, maybe they should be called "methodological liberals" ha ha. man, if i do say so myself, below would make a good book!"



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