Originally Posted by roachboy

from this thread, what seems clear to me about libertarianism is that it is a simplistic ideology that exploits the sense of individual distinction---separateness from others---and channels it through a sequence of oppositions (the heroic individual vs. the mindless collective being a good one, market vs. state another) each of which is so simplistic as to be funny on its own, and each of which not only has no descriptive contact with the empirical world, but has no hope of having descriptive contact with the empirical world---not if you understand that description of a world or system and the anecdotal are not the same thing. because the tools are not in place to even start understanding how contemporary capitalism in the actual world operates----the fiction "market" as free-floating natural construct gets in the way---system-level effects (stratification of access to cultural capital, say---educational opportunities, economic opportunities) gets mapped onto some arbitirary moral grid (those who make out make out because of some pilgrim's progress style narrative, those who do not make out do not because they are morally deficient, therefore stratification is acceptable--so long as you, the petit bourgeois observer, are not too close the the bottom)----because the heroic individual/mindless collective opposition is operative--regardless of its stupidity both formally and tactically, libertarians tend to erase any notion of the modern state as a democratizing feature of contemporary capitalism (you can in principle organize and bring pressure to bear on the state for resource reallocation, for example--this is basic stuff)---and are suspicious of collective action, the state then becomes some distorting and distorted monster, separated from the heoric lives of these embodiments of petit bourgeois virtue working in this fabulous market arrangements that enable petit bourgeois values to be reflected in material gain---a theory of elective affinity dressed up as a description of capitalism confused with a politics. so libertarians enact a conception of self-disempowerment confused with its opposite.

you can see this all over the place here---organization=collective=bureaucracy=bad with no trace of consideration for types of organization and no space for it---the heroic individual, the yeoman farmer, operating in a fictional landscape, can band together in ad hoc local committees of no determinate structure in order to do what--sit around and affirm that the state of affairs is the state of affairs, stratification a reflection of some bizarre-o moralityscape....

at least anarchism has space for consideration of organization as a problem, and an understanding that there are multiple types of collective action and that the form adopted within an organization has ramifications for outcomes at a host of levels.
at least anarchists have the possibility of a system-level understanding of capitalism.
and at least anarchism does not rely in the end on some goofy moral economy fiction to guide it down the road to total self-disempowerment.

trick is that because at bottom libertarian ideology seems to appeal to one's sense of one's own distinction as it's motor, it is an endlessly flattering counter-factual little world. as an endless flattering counterfactual little world, it is able to get often quite interesting and smart people to reprocess reality in its terms. so the problems are at the level of the assumptions which shape the ideology, not the people who reprocess the world in terms shaped by them.