Anti-authoritarian musings...

I think I might be a libertarian-socialist.

Or:

When did capitalist right-wingers get so trusting, anyway?

Here's libertarian-socialism in a nutshell (at least as I understand it, and if someone can correct me in the comments, PLEASE DO, because I will consider your insight here to be a personal favor).

Libertarians don't want the government controlling their behavior, because having your freedom curtailed by people who are not accountable enough to you SUCKS, and shouldn't happen. Coercion is terrible, and you shouldn't feel coerced by your government. People like myself take this one step further.

I feel that corporations and powerful individuals have too much power to control my life and coerce me, and they're even less accountable to me than the government. At least the government I can vote in or out. Therefore, the answer seems to me that we should be as wary of companies or individuals with power as we are of governments.

We agree that being controlled is bad. But I am willing to point the finger at more entities than the federal or state government, and tell them they're too coercive. More than that, I'm willing to actually stand up and kick them down a notch.

I'm not a socialist because I want the government to control me. I'm a socialist because I'm tired of rich people and the companies they own controlling me, and if I have to use the government to get free, then so be it. I'll use that as long as it's pleasing me, and if the government upsets me, I'll turn that upside-down, too.

Libertarian-socialism (as I understand and practice it) means treating everybody who has power with the same distrust that Libertarians feel toward the government. If you don't want the government rationing your health care, you shouldn't let Blue Cross/Blue Shield do it, either ( so we need health reform). If you don't want the government telling you what you can think or read, you shouldn't let your internet service provider hide parts of the internet from you (so we need net neutrality). If you don't want the government treating you like a servant, you shouldn't let your employer treat you that way either (so we need worker collectivization).

To me this is the only consistent approach. The Libertarian approach, where we eliminate all regulation and accountability except for the right of each individual to spend his or her dollar where he or she pleases, actually curtails personal liberty in a lot of the same ways that state-socialism or state-communism does, because either way you're telling a certain class of people (whether that's a government or a corporation), "You can do whatever you want. We trust you."

Well, guess what. I'm not an obedient person, and I DON'T trust them. I don't trust the government, or my insurance provider, or my ISP. But at least the government has to maintain a pretense of accountability, and at least there is some power to influence it (though it's far more of a grind than it should be, it's more power than I have over Comcast).

Here's a super spiffy real-life example. You know how the state can lay highway through your property using eminent domain? This is something of a necessary evil that can be used right, but that we should always be wary and mistrustful of, and we should always make it a huge pain and potential public relations nightmare to do it. That way we put barriers up to make sure it's not abused.

There was a bill introduced in the Indiana state house which would have let utility companies declare a project a "public good" eligible for eminent domain. Seriously. There is legal precedent for this, and in many states it's legal for utilities to use the same power to use or sieze property that the government has.

Here's my problem with it: Huge energy and utility companies cause more than enough trouble for their ratepayers without the right to straight-up take their property. At least with the government using eminent domain you can hold them accountable and vote them out of office if you don't like the way they're acting. With a utility, you generally don't even have the ability to take your business elsewhere. You can't even stop giving them your money (unless you want to stop having electricity).

This is bad. I think this is bad because it just goes to show how much trust people have in these companies. People who flatly refuse to support the right of the government to chip away at people's property rights will nonetheless completely bend over for a company that wants to do it. CAC killed that bill, and now we're just watching to make sure they don't slip that language into something that they think will get past us.

But seriously. This is what happens when you talk a good line about questioning authority and being free from government control, but turn around and let private businesses do whatever they want. Someone is going to have the right to take your land. Would you rather vote that person into office and out of it, or would you rather it be someone who knows you can't even stop paying them no matter how pissed you are?

Yeah, that's what I thought. The fact that your property rights mean shit at all is because there are laws protecting you. That's right. Laws. Laws mean "government regulation." When you chip away at the government and let private businesses fill the gap, you get crap like power companies with the right to lay pipeline through your land.

I'm not satisfied with that, but then... I'm not a Libertarian-capitalist or a market-anarchist or whatever. I'm not required to be satisfied with it, because I'm not the one who created that situation by arguing that the "invisible hand" of the free market/God/Santa/etc. should be the only control placed on what a business or individual can or can't do. I'm not required to be satisfied by this situation, because I never argued that I would be.

Can't say the same for Libertarians.

"Vanguard?"

I'm reading discussions about the idea of a communist "vanguard" for the working class, and trying to sort out my feelings about the whole thing.

The bare bones idea seems to be that you can't wait for a group of people who've been marginalized, denied educational opportunities, and denied opportunity for political expression to figure out how to start a revolution and then do it effectively (since all that crap piled on them seems aimed at preventing precisely that). The solution some people have come up with (if I'm understanding what I'm reading correctly) is that what's needed is for a "vanguard" of intellectual working-class-allies to agitate the working class, get them all riled up and carve out some room for them to express themselves and start exercising the power they were always told they didn't have or deserve.

This sounds fairly reasonable, especially because it's speaking to the part of me that gets very frustrated with low-income self-identified conservatives who repeatedly vote against their own self-interest (oddly, in the name of protecting the sanctity of self-interest itself). However, I feel like I have to check that part of me. That part of me also says that these low-income self-destructive conservatives are obviously too stupid to know what's good for them, and clearly a bunch of educated elites like me (since, though it seems odd to me, an education is kind of an "elite" quality, for good or ill) to come in and take their whole lives and all their problems out of their hands so that someone who knows what to do can make it all better.

How fucking disempowering is that logic? That's why I resist it. If I look at people who disagree with me as though they must be saved from their own decisions, I stop being the person who's trying to help them realize their own power.

Seems to me that's the power and the danger of the "vanguard" notion as well. Obviously not all corners of middle- or working- or lower-class society are going to be class-conscious enough (or have the energy to spare, or have safe enough conditions, though those are obstacles I don't see mentioned much in leftist discussions) to go out and kick patriarchal classist capitalist ass. Obviously those people who have a better idea should lend those skills to something useful instead of using them to further their own power.

But they can use this to further their own power. We've seen this with TEA Parties organized by multi-billion dollar insurance companies that are agitating less-conscious working-class people to give their power over from working for their own welfare to working for the welfare of their oh-so-helpful-and-sympathetic new corporate masters. That's the really nasty thing about astroturf organizing like this; it uses people's suffering and gets them all riled up to diffuse that bitterness and hope in a direction that accomplishes nothing and is therefore "safe" for the companies holding their leashes.

How to organize without doing that? How is it possible to get people interested in a cause without taking their energy and directing it as a commodity belonging to whomever can take it?

I think it comes down to something I learned in a women's empowerment circle (and yes, I attended one for a little while, and still would be if my work schedule allowed it). There is a huge difference between offering support to someone while she works through her problems, and taking her problems out of her hands to solve them for her. One of these affirms her right and ability to control her own life, and one undermines it even as it attempts to assist.

It seems to me there's a place for a "vanguard," but the term makes it sound cohesive enough to worry me. The only reason I'm even conceding the term is that--should the seemingly-impossible occur and a revolution come or... or something--these people will have power. They will. Since I am firmly against power being wielded in secret (since power that is openly named can be more easily held accountable), naming this kinda-sorta-group of people is okay with me right now.

I'm just trying to sort out my feelings on the whole thing, and trying to figure out just what it is that people are advocating when they talk about a "vanguard." I guess it might just be like any "ally" out there. White allies to POC are good, but shouldn't use their advantages to take over anti-racist work. Same with hetero and cis allies to LGBT people, men who support feminism, etc.

Maybe this is a case of an archaic word being jammed into a discussion which has moved beyond it. I'm still not sure what I think; I'm just rambling here and hoping it goes somewhere useful.