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CHAPTER ONE
RECLAIMING LIBERTARIANISM:
TOWARD A DEMOCRATIC ANTI-AUTHORITARIAN POLITICS
I. Anti-Authoritarianism, Libertarianism and Neoliberalism
On the eve of an anarchist-led street celebration of Margret Thatcher’s death, an editorial
appeared in
The Telegraph
bearing the headline: “Anarchists should be mourning Margaret
Thatcher’s death, not celebrating it. She did more to roll back the frontier of the state than any
other prime minister” (Young 2013). And such is the state of anti-authoritarian politics within
mainstream discourse in much of the Western world. The anti-authoritarian imaginary has been
so reduced that “rolling back the state” means little more than a neoliberal call to cut welfare
programs
and social spending, privatize public enterprises and attack unionized labor. In such a
context, to be opposed to the state is to support Thatcher’s class warfare. It is, in other words, to
support neoliberalism.
In the United States, the term libertarian has come to mean not (only) an opposition to
centralized state power and a commitment to individual freedom, but rather to signify support for
neoliberal capitalism and an opposition to collective endeavors – indeed an opposition to politics
itself.
Paradoxically, libertarianism – insofar as it provides ideological support for the neoliberal
regime – is, in fact, not an anti-statist theory at all. In the U.S., the term libertarian has been used
not so much to resist the centralized power of the state, but to
mobilize
and
redirect
state power
in the interest of capital. As David Harvey (2005, 2 and 19) has shown, while neoliberal
theory
– often attributed to F.A. Hayek and Milton Friedman – is grounded in the belief that the
political economy of society is best organized by “liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms
and skills within an institutional framework characterized
by strong property rights, free markets,
and free trade,” its primary
political
task has been to “re-establish the conditions for capital
34
accumulation and to restore the power of economic elites.” In essence, neoliberal policies have
amounted to a form of class warfare carried out by capital against labor. Most bluntly, both
Thatcher and Reagan prioritized a direct assault on what each perceived as a bastion of labor
union power: the defeat of the miners’ union in the U.K. and the air traffic controllers’ union in
the U.S. Perhaps even more pernicious have been the general
trends regarding income and
wealth inequality since the rise of neoliberal policies toward the end of the 1970s and early
1980s. To take but two examples: 1) the share of both income and wealth of the top 1%, which
had been steadily falling since the Great Depression, began to rise dramatically again around
1980 and this trend has continued to the present day; 2) Real wages, which had been rising
proportionally with productivity began to stagnate since 1980, despite productivity continuing to
rise, resulting in rising profit rates (
ibid
. 15 – 25).
More recently, the approximately $700 billion
bailout of the major U.S. banks in 2008 remains perhaps the clearest recent example of a
“neoliberal state…a state apparatus whose fundamental mission was to facilitate conditions for
profitable capital accumulation on the part of both domestic and foreign capital” (
ibid
. 7).
In the developing world, the deeply statist character of neoliberalism has been even
clearer. In Iraq, for example, after the U.S.-led invasion and occupation, the full force of the most
powerful state in the world aimed to provide conditions for profitable capital accumulation. The
Coalition
Provisional Authority, under Paul Bremer, ensured that international capital was given
greater freedom in the form the privatization of state-owned enterprises, full ownership rights by
foreign firms of Iraqi businesses and full repatriation of foreign profits. “The labour market, on
the other hand, was to be strictly regulated. Strikes were effectively forbidden in key sectors and
the right to unionize was restricted” (
ibid
. 6). To take one other striking example, consider the
rise of neoliberalism in Chile. As Naomi Klein (2007) has
demonstrated, neoliberal policies –
35
with Friedman’s explicit support – came to Chile through the brutal military regime of Augusto
Pinochet. How supposed libertarians such as Friedman could defend neoliberalism in Chile – to,
for example, use words like “free markets” in a context in which tens of thousands of political
dissidents were tortured (
ibid
. 146) – belies his primary professed political commitment to
human freedom. More broadly, neoliberalism in the developing world often requires an
aggressive and violent state to implement its policies and suppress dissent to them. Lesley Gill
(2000) has aptly described neoliberalization in Bolivia as the “armed retreat of the…state.” This
phrase – the armed retreat of the state – well captures the basic problem with identifying
libertarianism with neoliberalism (or using the former as ideological justification for the latter).
Quite simply, neoliberalism neither objects to centralized state
power nor prioritizes human
freedom – as Eduard Galeano succinctly described the situation in Pinochet’s Chile, “People
were in prison so that prices could be free” (Klein 2007, 114). Libertarianism in the United
States has therefore become a political perspective that actively promotes its inverse: an assertion
of centralized state power in the interests of capital at the expense of the freedom’s of most
everyone else. Moreover, while libertarians in the United States (most accurately called
neoliberals) claim to oppose concentrated state power – a claim that seems transparently false
given the
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