The Invisible Library

China Mieville has a great article over at In These Times about Floating Utopias and the sinister, libertarian shadow, the tax-free micro-nation. It’s a fun read* but the best part is his summation of Libertarianism:

Libertarianism, by contrast, is a theory of those who find it hard to avoid their taxes, who are too small, incompetent or insufficiently connected to win Iraq-reconstruction contracts, or otherwise chow at the state trough. In its maundering about a mythical ideal-type capitalism, libertarianism betrays its fear of actually existing capitalism, at which it cannot quite succeed. It is a philosophy of capitalist inadequacy.

Libertarians have always struck me as either extremely naive or excessively callous. They don’t want to be part of society if they have to share burdens and responsibilities or contribute (other than goods and services that they get cash money paid for). They want to drop out of society and be like hippies, only they still want to drive Hummers and have that leather couch they’ve always wanted.

Over at Crooked Timber, there’s a spirited discussion of Mieville’s essay that, as usual when the Internet and libertarianism get together, has wandered off into various Libertarians arguing that they’ve been unjustly mischaracterized, that real Libertarianism isn’t X, it’s Y. Or if it is X, it’s only x, which isn’t so bad and why do you want me to pay taxes?! Usually, Y is the claim that Libertarians just want to be Free and Left Alone to be Self Sufficient, bootstrap pullers. Or that the value of Y is that Libertarians aren’t really anti-Statist (wink) they just want to build Communities, where everybody pulls their own weight and contributes equally, and on their own terms and doesn’t have to pay for roads and schools and medicine they only use some times but probably won’t because they almost never get sick and don’t intend on having children. You know, the kind of place where everybody knows your name and they’re always glad you came…

Ever notice how Internet Libertarians are always young and in good health? Where are the elderly and infirm Libertarians? Well, if we had Communities rather than States, the infirm would be cared for, like traditional societies used to, before the State took over and started telling people what to do.

Except that in these Old School Communities, the infirm where declared to be possessed or witches. Hell of a health plan, that. “Grandma got pneumonia again and hell if I’m going to pay that bloody prick apothecary’s prices! better start collecting firewood. Make sure to get enough, though, last time the fire was so small. Remember how long it took grandpa to burn?”

Look, there’s no real difference between a Community and a State. One’s just the Big Brother of the other. And contributing to the general welfare is just part of the social contract. If you want to drop out and not contribute just suck it up and be a Hippie. You can’t have society without cooperation.

Which is where Libertarianism falls down and skins it’s knee and starts crying for federal assisted band aides. For any libertarian objectives to function, we’d have to live in a world that had no large state apparatus (or one that was so ineffectual as to be virtually nonexistent) but were all just a loose association of small enclaves,tribal regions and city states. Which means that the closest real-world setting for a Libertarian system is… Afghanistan. Sweet!

This is where Mieville comes in with the real hard hearted nut that no libertarian wants to face: that if you scratch a fussy, middle class Libertarian, you find the same old dreary, unimaginative Authoritarian that has vexed human dignity since the Bronze Age:

But libertarians are political dissidents only in narrowly selfish directions. As respectful of “order” as the most polite bourgeois, they cannot conceive of pirates as antecedents, only as threats. (As indeed they might be, were there any seasteads to plunder.) By distancing themselves from this antiestablishment hydrarchy, the libertarian seasteaders unwittingly identify with the other hydrarchy that Linebaugh and Redicker discuss: the imperialist, maritime state. Coercive political apparatuses, operating internally and externally, are implicitly, sometimes explicitly, part of the libertarian seasteading project. Good Brechtians, we ask: Who is to maintain New Utopia, Laissez-Faire City, the Freedom Ship? Who will cook the feasts and clean the heads? So many reports. So many questions. The fantasists of libertarian seasteading are vague or silent about on-ship labor standards, preferring not to ponder who will swab the decks on which the offshore traders, speculators and Web entrepreneurs will promenade.

They cannot, however, entirely forget the need for other people, non-passengers. An attenuated anxiety about what such a presence reaches the libertarian mind as anxiety about crime—that shibboleth terror of the petty bourgeosie, impossible to banish from the mind.

On Freedom Ship there will be a jail, a “squad of intelligence officers,” and a “private security force of 2,000, led by a former FBI agent, [that] will have access to weapons, both to maintain order within the vessel and to resist external threats.” And while technically the law applied would be that of whichever state lends its flag, Freedom Ship officials make no bones that “the captain’s word will be final.”

That is the authoritarianism at libertarianism’s core, the symbiosis between the “free market” and tyranny. Seasteading libertarians flee the oppression of bourgeois democracy for the tyranny of dictatorship. The need for internal repression is thus admitted. External repression is less hypothetical. It is already here.

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* I’ve always wanted to write a story about a small society who lives on a ship and floats around, having adventures. A sort of Yellow Submarine (sans acid) meets Gulliver’s Travels. with a Mad Captain, of course. A Mad Captain is a necessity. Now I’m thinking maybe it should be set it in a post-oil collapsed world, where the fragmented United States has sent refugees in all directions and after all the world’s nations close their boarders, some take the sea in makeshift micro-nations, turn pirate or cannibal…

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 25th, 2007 at 6:10 pm and is filed under File Under: Unicorns, Kooks, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.