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at least anarchists understand enough to know that the regulation of the collective is an important aspect of exercizing autonomy--the rules of action are political, are to be collectively decided upon, democratically.
libertarians run away from even this by referring to "natural law"--which really shows that they are little more than bourgeois individualists whose politics lead to a kind of maxium disempowerment, a total abdication of any relation to the social world that conditions them. their notion of "natural law" is a clear index of their servile relation to the existing ideology....read some marx, for christ's sake....
they cannot begin to think of the fact that their positions are historically conditioned and therefore cannot even begin to concieve of what an alternative social order would look like.
capitalism can do and say as it likes--libertarians have nothing to say.
economic assymetries can exist and perpetuate themselves ad inifintium--since most libertarians like to pretend they are howard roarke, they do not care.
what matters is the isolated individual with a gun. the patchwork of origin texts--from locke to ayn rand--are all enormously problematic, but no matter--everything is about the Heroic Individual. the fabrication and maintenance of this fiction precludes any critical reading of texts.
the good thing about "radical libertarian" pseudo-politics lies precisely in this tendency to self-negation.
with the result that i am fine with these folk being out there and confident that the internal logic of their own politics would lead to their effective disappearance from politics.
i do not care what the Heroic Indiivudals do in their armed rural compounds.
i hope they have a great time, lovely lives, etc.
but do not confuse libertarianism with a politics. it is simple capitulation wrapped in a tedious bourgeois mythology.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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