Wednesday, July 06, 2005

The Sexual Revolution Continues

Stephanie Coontz is a socialist feminist and an academic she has written a controversial essay in the New York Times, which I have reprinted below, reminding us that it was the Sexual Revolution of the Sixties that opened the doors to Same Sex Marriage.

The Social Origins of Private Life; A History of American Families 1600-1900, her excellent social history, I reviewed back in 1996 for Labour News. I used it as a critique of the right wing definitions of 'family' of the time. It is online at: Whose Family Values? The Clash Between Middle Class And Working Class Families .


As I wrote a decade ago:

For the past decade the battle cry of the right wing, in both religion and politics, has been; " return of Family values". Every Reform or Tory politician raises the banner of the Family as the solution to the social problems of their own creating. While the business agenda has been to make Alberta and Canada a lean and mean competitive economy modeled after the United States and wrapped in the rhetoric of laissez fair capitalism, free trade and survival of the fittest. The apologists for the ensuing unemployment, poverty and destruction of social programs hearken back to some golden age of the family as the solution to all our problems.

If the issue is declining education, the solution isn't better funding or ending cutbacks, the solution is the family, giving money to parents to fund their child's education. If John or Jane aren't doing well in school its because they aren't being taught traditional family values.

If there is crime and poverty its probably because of the insidious machinations of the left wing to steal children from their parents and put them into day care centers. If there is unemployment its probably because there are too many women in the workforce, or taking advantage of that insidious day care, and its all the fault of the government which has failed to support the Family.

Canada and Alberta would be a better place if we all returned to the industrious traditions of family values. If we had these values, say its proponents, those lazy bums would get off welfare, the other lazy bums would find jobs and quit draining UI and women would return to their proper place; the home. But whose family values are these that we are assailed with in the Hansard, on the Talk Back radio shows and in the letters and editorials of the newspapers? Are these the family values of the First Nations? The extended families of Canada's aboriginal peoples? Are these the family values of the farm families of immigrant Canadians from before the depression? Are these the family values of the post war era and the nuclear family of mom and pop, two point five kids, a dog, a cat and a two car garage? Are these the family values of the extended families of recent immigrants who come from non European non Christian backgrounds? Are these the family values of the single mother or the gay family?

No this family is the social creation of the Canadian and American middle class. It is a family whose values are thrift, self-help, charity not welfare, pick yourself up by your bootstraps and get the job done, mom in the kitchen, the pleasant patriarchal father and the well behaved children out of the Dick and Jane reader. This family is a myth, a useful political tool of the right wing to blame social problems on us as individuals rather than blaming the capitalist system.

The Origin of the Family, as Frederick Engels pointed out over 100 years ago, is in private property. To understand the different kinds of families, and their class nature it is important we understand their property relations. There are no neutral family values. All values and roles reflect the very material reality from which they originate and which they reproduce. The so called "traditional family values" being extolled today are the middle class values of Dickensian world of dog eat dog. These are not, and never have been, the values of the working class. Our values reflect the traditions of mutual aid and solidarity, values that are not found in the world of high finance or the back benches of the Klein Government.

And in this whole sanctity of marriage debate I come back to my same conclusions as I did then whether the issue is gay marriage, family values (sic), women’s role in society, daycare, etc. What I said back then, still applies today. This can be clearly seen in the vitriolic rantings of the right wing and its religious allies over Same Sex Marriage in Canada. And in the attack on women's rights that I wrote about here in Whose Family Values? Women and the Social Reproduction of Capitalism

Stephanie Coontz also comes back to her original arguments from her 1991 work and those she has published since. In her essay from the New York Times yesterday she reminds us of the forgotten revolution of the sixties, the sexual revolution and its importance in setting the conditions for Same Sex Marriage.

The family changed with the sexual revolution that Wilhelm Reich documented back in the 1920's and by fifty years ago it was in full blown assault on so called traditional family values. Jews were no longer discriminated against by the WASP country club set, Civil rights were being demanded by Afro Americans, and Playboy had just published its first edition.

But inter-racial/ inter-religious marriage was still taboo, whether it was between Jews and gentiles, or between Afro-Americans and whites. Ironically in post war America soldiers returned from the war with Japanese brides, which helped break down the inter-racial marriage taboo, as did the gentrification of the Jews. But it was the sexual and social revolution along with the civil rights movement of the Sixties that the conscious recognition of this taboo appeared in popular culture with the movie Guess Whose Coming to Dinner.

And the same arguments against Same Sex Marriage were used back then to deny inter-racial or inter- religious marriage. You wouldn't want your daughter to marry one applied to the Jewish Doctor, as well as the Black Stevedore and today it applies to the Divorced mother of two.

Common law relations were a sin, divorce was a sin and hard to get. The same arguments about the break down of the family that have surrounded the Same Sex Marriage debate occurred then too over the sin of divorce and the sin of common law relations. No Fault divorce was going to bring down the family and destroy society.

Birth control was a no-no, even after the discovery of the Pill. Always in initial caps, the Pill released women from having to merely have sex for reproduction. Controversial, for the decade of the sixties it was essential to women's freedom and to their pleasure as the feminists advocating birth control in the early 1920's like Emma Goldman and Margaret Sanger knew. The Pill began the modern sexual revolution.

And with it came the outing of the most noxious of the anti-sex secrets of the day; abortions. They were conducted in secret by back alley butchers, with women's sexual freedom came the demand of safe medically delivered abortions, this was a key demand in the new Sexual Revolution. And it remains a demand today as the forces of darkness and moral pulchritude attempt to force women back into the alleys.

And not much has changed with the Catholic Church teachings on these matters even today.

Sex education books were being published in the sixties which discussed 'petting and necking' and whether one should go 'all the way'. Definitely not before marriage, they advised. Sex education then WAS abstinenance education, and that was all it was.

Homosexuality was a deviance that could be cured these little pamphlets explained, and having a crush on your gym teacher was natural and did not mean you would grow up to be a homo.

As Coontz outlines in her essay it was the sexual revolution of the sixties that liberated us from all the old shit that dominated sexual relations. And not without controversy and the usual detractors from the right, who still to this day blame that revolution for all of society’s problems today.

And it was the 'hetero'-sexual revolution that did influence Women's Liberation and Gay Liberation back then, as witnessed even in the support these movements got from Playboy, much to the chagrin of later anti-sex feminists. But once the hetero-Sexual Revolution began it broadened the meanings given to sexuality and loving and living relationships between people. The Women’s Movement and the Gay Liberation Movement originated in the ideals of the sexual revolution of the sixties.

And it is this revolution that is still being fought against the forces of darkness that insist that their Family Values are sacred, traditional and the best for all of us.

July 5, 2005

The Heterosexual Revolution

© New York Times

By STEPHANIE COONTZ

Olympia, Wash.

THE last week has been tough for opponents of same-sex marriage. First Canadian and then Spanish legislators voted to legalize the practice, prompting American social conservatives to renew their call for a constitutional amendment banning such marriages here. James Dobson of the evangelical group Focus on the Family has warned that without that ban, marriage as we have known it for 5,000 years will be overturned.

My research on marriage and family life seldom leads me to agree with Dr. Dobson, much less to accuse him of understatement. But in this case, Dr. Dobson's warnings come 30 years too late. Traditional marriage, with its 5,000-year history, has already been upended. Gays and lesbians, however, didn't spearhead that revolution: heterosexuals did.

Heterosexuals were the upstarts who turned marriage into a voluntary love relationship rather than a mandatory economic and political institution. Heterosexuals were the ones who made procreation voluntary, so that some couples could choose childlessness, and who adopted assisted reproduction so that even couples who could not conceive could become parents. And heterosexuals subverted the long-standing rule that every marriage had to have a husband who played one role in the family and a wife who played a completely different one. Gays and lesbians simply looked at the revolution heterosexuals had wrought and noticed that with its new norms, marriage could work for them, too.

The first step down the road to gay and lesbian marriage took place 200 years ago, when Enlightenment thinkers raised the radical idea that parents and the state should not dictate who married whom, and when the American Revolution encouraged people to engage in "the pursuit of happiness," including marrying for love. Almost immediately, some thinkers, including Jeremy Bentham and the Marquis de Condorcet, began to argue that same-sex love should not be a crime.

Same-sex marriage, however, remained unimaginable because marriage had two traditional functions that were inapplicable to gays and lesbians. First, marriage allowed families to increase their household labor force by having children. Throughout much of history, upper-class men divorced their wives if their marriage did not produce children, while peasants often wouldn't marry until a premarital pregnancy confirmed the woman's fertility. But the advent of birth control in the 19th century permitted married couples to decide not to have children, while assisted reproduction in the 20th century allowed infertile couples to have them. This eroded the traditional argument that marriage must be between a man and a woman who were able to procreate.

In addition, traditional marriage imposed a strict division of labor by gender and mandated unequal power relations between men and women. "Husband and wife are one," said the law in both England and America, from early medieval days until the late 19th century, "and that one is the husband."

This law of "coverture" was supposed to reflect the command of God and the essential nature of humans. It stipulated that a wife could not enter into legal contracts or own property on her own. In 1863, a New York court warned that giving wives independent property rights would "sow the seeds of perpetual discord," potentially dooming marriage.

Even after coverture had lost its legal force, courts, legislators and the public still cleaved to the belief that marriage required husbands and wives to play totally different domestic roles. In 1958, the New York Court of Appeals rejected a challenge to the traditional legal view that wives (unlike husbands) couldn't sue for loss of the personal services, including housekeeping and the sexual attentions, of their spouses. The judges reasoned that only wives were expected to provide such personal services anyway.

As late as the 1970's, many American states retained "head and master" laws, giving the husband final say over where the family lived and other household decisions. According to the legal definition of marriage, the man was required to support the family, while the woman was obligated to keep house, nurture children, and provide sex. Not until the 1980's did most states criminalize marital rape. Prevailing opinion held that when a bride said, "I do," she was legally committed to say, "I will" for the rest of her married life.

I am old enough to remember the howls of protest with which some defenders of traditional marriage greeted the gradual dismantling of these traditions. At the time, I thought that the far-right opponents of marital equality were wrong to predict that this would lead to the unraveling of marriage. As it turned out, they had a point.

Giving married women an independent legal existence did not destroy heterosexual marriage. And allowing husbands and wives to construct their marriages around reciprocal duties and negotiated roles - where a wife can choose to be the main breadwinner and a husband can stay home with the children- was an immense boon to many couples. But these changes in the definition and practice of marriage opened the door for gay and lesbian couples to argue that they were now equally qualified to participate in it.

Marriage has been in a constant state of evolution since the dawn of the Stone Age. In the process it has become more flexible, but also more optional. Many people may not like the direction these changes have taken in recent years. But it is simply magical thinking to believe that by banning gay and lesbian marriage, we will turn back the clock.

Stephanie Coontz, the director of public education for the Council on Contemporary Families, is the author of "Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage."

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Tuesday, July 05, 2005

Conservatives Bash Canada

By and large Canada Day was slagged from the Right in a demagogic hatred not seen since the debates during the Viet Nam war in the American press. And at that time the Right in the U.S. responded with the simplistic 'Love It or Leave It'.

It seems approriate then to adopt this slogan and apply it to the current crop of virulent Canada bashing right wingers in Canada; those who are columnists in the mainstream, read right-wing, press especially the Sun newpapers and the National Post. The irony is that they get paid for their calumny. America is soooo much better than Canada, but their paycheques are made in Canada, and their health care and social benefits they despise are still delivered to them regardless of their opinions.

Canada basher Ezra Levant's Calgary Sun column; Canada Day looked like a Liberal campaign ad made his comment appropriately on July 4th, not July 1st. Showing his Canadaphobia is merely good old Americaphilia it comes down to the simplistic arguement that goes Canada=The Liberal Party.

Levant whose an out and out Republican like his other Calgary pals Anders and Kenney, wants not only deep intergration with the United States but would like to be American. He even goes so far in his All Things American are good by calling his national publication the Western Standard after the American Conservative magazine the Weekly Standard.

Typical of the right wing in Canada who once upon a time opposed the Liberals under Trudeau they embraced being Anglophiles, all that was British was good.
Levant hearkens back to this time honoured tradition of being an apologist for the good old days of British colonialism (the specious arguement being that
Canada would not be a country if the Brits had not defeated the French and that they 'allowed' us independence under the Act of Westminister) .

In his column he says: "Once upon a time, Canada Day -- when it was called Dominion Day, when we had our old flag, not Lester Pearson's new flag, in Liberal colours -- celebrated what really did make our country great".

It's not just the old union jack or the red ensign that Levant embraces but that other fine Anglo American tradtion; child labour, that so offended Charles Dickens.Decisions on young workers and sour gas deserve cheers

Like the vast majority of Alberta right wingers, Ezra is an Anglo-American apologist by ideology (he was an intern at the Fraser Insitute the voice of the neo-conservative agenda in Canada) while being a Canadian by the accident of birth. He and his ilk's final solution, to what he sees as a degenerate left wing Canada, is to call for Alberta to Seperate from the rest of Canada. Forgetting of course that this American identity is strictly a Calgary phenomena, being the largest American city north of the 49th parallel. Those of us in Redmonton would then demand the right to Seperate from a Seperate Alberta, which true to form would continue on its right wing path of being a one party state in the tradition of Mussolini and Stalin.

Meanwhile not to be outdone, in the city of Toronto another Sun columnist Michael Coren, a born again papist, Anglophile and proud homophobe, denounces Canada in his column: Canada Day? Bah, Humbug!
where he says: "The notion that this is the greatest country on Earth and that our cities are "world class" is, frankly, quite ludicrous. We have little history, few passable museums, mediocre galleries and minimal national pride".

Well there's a case of the pot calling the kettle black, hard to have national pride when those in your nation, the so called patriots continue to bash it in favour of the good old days of British Colonialism or by embracing modern era American Imperialism. Our neo-cons ideology is a mix of bad old Socreds and sad sack Republicans.

And like Levant that is what Coren says; Brits and Americans good Canadians bad: "That's not difficult, of course. We make dreadful television and movies, whether they are funny or not. There are diluted versions of American and British programs and politically tendentious films that are instantly identifiable. They're characterized by bad acting and unfailingly lugubrious plots that often include a hackneyed and out-of-context gay relationship.".

The fact that we make very good TV and have long supplied the humourless Americans with their funniest comedians, since the early days of Hollywood to Saturday Night Live, seems lost on Coren. And with his predicatable homophobia, he dismisses Kids in the Hall was a funny series in both Canada and the United States. But hey why worry about facts when you are bashing Canada and gays in one breathe.

The columnists are not alone in their hatred of Canada, as I pointed out in a recent blog comment on Medicine Hat MP Monte Solberg who expressed much the same senitiments after the same sex bill passed.

Jim Elves at Blogs Canada exposes the rants of the right wing Canada Bashers in blog space with his blog article Calling on the Right to Quash Canada-haters .

Like their paid brethern in Canada's right wing press these supporters of all things Conservative, once again come up with the solution to their woes is to take Alberta out of Canada. They love the one party state in Alberta but hate the one party State in Ottawa, which is actually now a minority government something Albertans have never tried.

What they hate is not a country, not a government in Ottawa, hell when Brian Mulroney's Progressive Conservatives were in power they hated them as well.
Nope they hate Canadians, they want to be Americans.

We Canadians are basically a peoples who embrace a social democratic ethic, that we support individual rights when they are not only good for the individual but for the good of the community as well. The right wing is opposed to all that makes us Canadian.

Thus they oppose gun control in principle, despite the fact that the majority of Canadians approve of gun control and despite the fact it works according to Stats Canada; Gun deaths down in Canada.

And they fail to see that the Federal government billion dollar boondoogle over the gun registry is because it embraced the neo-conservative ideology of privatization and private public partnerships, and because they did not expect the provinces like Alberta, not to buy in (ok that was stupid, but the point is that cost all of us part of the billion).

These yahoos on the right in Alberta have a history that is ridden with anti-french, anti-semitic, anti-native, anti-immigrant, anti-gay, anti-women, anti-union traditions. A right wing based in the old Social Credit party and the KKK in Alberta.

Federally they became Preston Mannings Reform Party/Alliance/Conservative Party, they are Albertans first, Canadians second. Which much to their own chagrin puts them in the same camp as the Quebecois, whom they bash out of jealousy for their asymetrical autonomy.

This then is the politics of the right in Canada as embraced by the Levants and Corens, and by the Reform/Alliance/Conservative party of Harper. Simply put they are not just pro-American, but virulently anti-Canadian and anti- Quebec because we are both Social Democratic countries.

As long as the majority of Canadians and Quebecois embrace the politics of the left by voting for the NDP, Liberals and BQ, the Conservatives will remain a regional party of Alberta. Ralphs party on the federal stage. A party that wanted to create a firewall around Calgary but disguised their aristotilian city state aspirations for an American outpost in the heartland of Canada's energy market by calling for annexation of the entire province.

Albertan's who are conservative never think of themselves as Canadians, to do so would mean we would have to share our wealth with the rest of the country, rather than horde it in a mean spirited way. The Alberta Government and its Federal arm; the Conservative pary, want deep integration with the United States, hence their support for the right wing rump that calls for seperation.

Since the right wing is so concerned with democracy and applauded the American invasion of Iraq to bring down a dictatorship and give the people a democracy perhaps they will applaud if the Federal government did the same thing in Alberta to secure the oil reserves for all Canadians, and to bring democracy to the oppressed and exploited peoples of Alberta. But somehow I don't think so.

Once upon a time the conspiratorial right wing published a manifesto of the new right in America it was entitled "None Dare Call It Treason". The new right in Alberta has supped deeply at the cup of this kind of politics and encourage if not call for Alberta seperation outright. But I dare to call it what it is; Sedition and treason agianst all that is Canadian, and the rantings of Levant, Coren, Solberg and the bloggers continues to prove this time after time.
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Monday, July 04, 2005

A NEW AMERICAN REVOLUTION


HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY
WORKING PEOPLE OF AMERICA

"It has been my fate to be a worker all my life."--Jo Labadie

"government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one." Thomas Paine

Independence day,was a day forgotten by the early 19th Century American master craftsmen, landowners, rich farmers, and religious revivalists. It was revived and celebrated by the 'mechanics and artisans' of the American Republic. The origin of July 4th celebrations in the United States were the celebrations of apprentices and journeymen in revolt against the social conservatives of the the day, their masters. It was their day to demand the fruits of the revolution their right to the fruits of their labour. (Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic; New York City & the Rise of the American Working Class 1788-1850, OUP 1984)

It was this struggle of labouring men and women in America that led to the Free Labour movment which eventually confronted the Democratic Tyrants of Tamminy Hall in New York with a new political party called the Republican Party. It was this party under Abraham Lincoln that called for the freedom of the labouring man, and freeing of the slaves so that they could enjoy the fruits of their labour as mechanics, artisans and farmers. (Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labour)

Freedom was no slogan for a new toothpaste, or another coffee shop. Freedom was not something to be exported at the end of the bayonet. Freedom was for the individual to enjoy his or her right to the fruits of their labour. For it was well known that labour produced all value.

The radical American individualist was an anarchist. Influenced by Prodhoun, Stirner and the First International Working Mens organisation, anarchists like the Haymarket martyrs were joined by the individualist anarchists like Benjamin Tucker and Joseph Labadie, who understood the labour theory of value was essential for demanding individual freedom.

The anarchists are simply unterrified Jeffersonian Democrats. They believe that “the best government is that which governs least,” and that which governs least is no government at all. Benjamin Tucker

They shared no cant with the capitalist, the monopolist as they called them, for these robber barons stole the labour of others, leaving them in poverty while living in mansions fit for kings. They were athiests, abolitionists, feminists, and socialists. Their socialism was not that of Europe, not State Socialism, but that of the 'free association of producers'.

Not to abolish wages, but to make every man dependent upon wages and secure to every man his whole wages is the aim of Anarchistic Socialism. What Anarchistic Socialism aims to abolish is usury. It does not want to deprive labor of its reward; it wants to deprive capital of its reward. It does not hold that labor should not be sold; it holds that capital should not be hired at usury. Benjamin Tucker

They were individualist socialists. They were a 'unique', as Stirner refered to the egoist, socialist movement in a new nation. A nation that was built not on monarchies or old families, nor status or wealth but built by labour. Their individualist anarchism enthralled and influenced the emigre anarchist Emma Goldman, and horrorfied statist socialists and craft unions. They were the extreme left of the labour movement .

IF I WERE to give a summary of the tendency of our times, I would say, Quantity. The multitude, the mass spirit, dominates everywhere, destroying quality. Our entire life--production, politics, and education--rests on quantity, on numbers. The worker who once took pride in the thoroughness and quality of his work, has been replaced by brainless, incompetent automatons, who turn out enormous quantities of things, valueless to themselves, and generally injurious to the rest of mankind. Thus quantity, instead of adding to life's comforts and peace, has merely increased man's burden.

The oft repeated slogan of our time is, among all politicians, the Socialists included, that ours is an era of individualism, of the minority. Only those who do not probe beneath the surface might be led to entertain this view. Have not the few accumulated the wealth of the world? Are they not the masters, the absolute kings of the situation? Their success, however, is due not to individualism, but to the inertia, the cravenness, the utter submission of the mass. The latter wants but to be dominated, to be led, to be coerced. As to individualism, at no time in human history did it have less chance of expression, less opportunity to assert itself in a normal, healthy manner. Emma Goldman, Minorities Versus Majorities

American Anarchist Socialism was the result of the direct experiences of working men and women as they suffered abject poverty while wealth flowed around them. It was the poltical and economic trajectory of a nation of labourers and farmers an Artisnal nation. And it was the artisan that celebrated 'their ' independence as being one and the same as their 'nation'.

But all that changed through the Civil War and after as America became an industrial capitalist nation of robber barons. Great monopolies were created, the first military industrial complex, one that gave power to the two political parties, the Democrats and the Republicans. No longer were either the voice of the 'workingman', whom they gave sufferage to in order to win their votes. Thus was born the rebellion of workers to create a 'third party' as well as various socialist parties and social organizations like unions and the farmers Grange movement.

There were from the beginning two different strands within Socialism: one was the Right-wing, authoritarian strand, from Saint-Simon down, which glorified statism, hierarchy, and collectivism and which was thus a projection of Conservatism trying to accept and dominate the new industrial civilization. The other was the Left-wing, relatively libertarian strand, exemplified in their different ways by Marx and Bakunin, revolutionary and far more interested in achieving the libertarian goals of liberalism and socialism: but especially the smashing of the State apparatus to achieve the "withering away of the State" and the "end of the exploitation of man by man." Interestingly enough, the very Marxian phrase, the "replacement of the government of men by the administration of things," can be traced, by a circuitous route, from the great French radical laissez-faire liberals of the early nineteenth century, Charles Comte (no relation to Auguste Comte) and Charles Dunoyer. And so, too, may the concept of the "class struggle"; except that for Dunoyer and Comte the inherently antithetical classes were not businessmen vs. workers, but the producers in society (including free businessmen, workers, peasants, etc.) versus the exploiting classes constituting, and privileged by, the State apparatus. Having replaced radical liberalism as the party of the "Left," Socialism, by the turn of the twentieth century, fell prey to this inner contradiction. Most Socialists (Fabians, Lassalleans, even Marxists) turned sharply rightward, completely abandoned the old libertarian goals and ideals of revolution and the withering away of the State, and became cozy Conservatives permanently reconciled to the State, the status quo, and the whole apparatus of neo-mercantilism, State monopoly capitalism, imperialism and war that was rapidly being established and riveted on European society at the turn of the twentieth century. For Conservatism, too, had re-formed and regrouped to try to cope with a modern industrial system, and had become a refurbished mercantilism, a regime of statism marked by State monopoly privilege, in direct and indirect forms, to favored capitalists and to quasi-feudal landlords. The affinity between Right Socialism and the new Conservatism became very close, the former advocating similar policies but with a demagogic populist veneer: thus, the other side of the coin of imperialism was "social imperialism," which Joseph Schumpeter trenchantly defined as "an imperialism in which the entrepreneurs and other elements woo the workers by means of social welfare concessions which appear to depend on the success of export monopolism...” Murray Rothbard

While there was plenty there was plenty of want as well, as thousands of new immigrants flooded America seeking their economic freedom from serfdom in Europe. What they found was an America that would use and abuse them for their labour by allowing capital its unfettered freedom. Such freedom of capital is often mistakenly called, even today, individualism. But it is not. As homegrown Socialists like Jack London would discover.

Man being man and a great deal short of the angels, the quarrel over the division of the joint product is irreconcilable. For the last twenty years in the United States, there has been an average of over a thousand strikes per year; and year by year these strikes increase in magnitude, and the front of the labor army grows more imposing. And it is a class struggle, pure and simple. Labor as a class is fighting with capital as a class.

Workingmen will continue to demand more pay, and employers will continue to oppose them. This is the key-note to LAISSEZ FAIRE,-- everybody for himself and devil take the hindmost. It is upon this that the rampant individualist bases his individualism. It is the let-alone policy, the struggle for existence, which strengthens the strong, destroys the weak, and makes a finer and more capable breed of men. But the individual has passed away and the group has come, for better or worse, and the struggle has become, not a struggle between individuals, but a struggle between groups. So the query rises: Has the individualist never speculated upon the labor group becoming strong enough to destroy the capitalist group, and take to itself and run for itself the machinery of industry? And, further, has the individualist never speculated upon this being still a triumphant expression of individualism,--of group individualism,--if the confusion of terms may be permitted?

Jack London, The Class Struggle
Speech first given before a Ruskin Club banquet in the Hotel Metropole on Friday, October 9, 1903.

The artisan sensibility rejected the mass production that was becoming America it rebeled against the moderinization and dehumanization of the machinery of capitalism that denied individuality. And thus anarchism as expressed by American individualist socialists would find a comrade in William Morris and his Socialist Artisan Craft movement in England.

But the Great War came, amidst increasing working class strikes and rebellions, and thus Uncle Sam was born. The nativist patriotic representation of the new industrial military complex. And July 4th became a day not of celebration of freedom and labour but of the monopoly of power, economic and political, of the new American ruling class. A class that declared war on working people. And has continued that war at home and around the world for the last 100 years.

Anarchists were outlawed , arrested, deported, cleaned out by the State (regardless of the party in power) with the help of the American Federation of Labour, the churches, and of course all the other patriots. Laws were passed outlawing Anarchism and criminal syndicalism, the right of workers to form militant unions to overthrow capitalism. Those laws still exist on the books today.

Which is a great seque into this Independence Day in a nation that is both isolationist and imperialist, patriotic to a fault, where both the Democrats and Republicans and their right and left supporters, continue to battle to maintain their monopoly on power.

Where Free Trade is a euphimism like Freedom. Meaning exactly its opposite in practice. Where liberty is a brand of insurance. Where neo-conservatives are defined as libertarians, and liberals are Republican lite. Today the criminal syndicalism act and the anti-anarchist act are replaced with the equally vile Patriot act. Where War is Peace, and Freedom Wage Slavery.

The fearmongering, the palatable terror of shallow patriotism has once again come around full circle. The President says 'yer fer us or against us', and he means those who hold the monopoly on power. Be it Wall Street, the Pentagon, the churches or the government.

All that is old is new again. There is good reason to harken back to the Vietnam war. Unlike the Korean War which was the hot cover for a Cold War that had begun ten years earlier, Vietnam was a catalyst for social change in America. A new left and a new right, a libertarian movement emerged in America in the sixties in opposition to the War. And today that movement is once again active opposing the current war in Iraq.

The neo-con artists who claim the title libertarian, are nothing of the sort, their ilk is merely the Republican party of Nixon and Goldwater. And once again the old boys from the late sixties are in power, in the media, in the universities, in the corporations and in the government. Even Kerry who was a Seventies radical, disavowed his anti-war activism during his campaign for President. His saluting to the nation hoping to become Commander in Chief wa for naught. Why vote for Republican lite when you can have the real thing.

But the sixties didn't die when everyone started becoming hip capitalists. There was an essential movement towards a revival of anarchistic socialism as Tucker called it. A movement of the real Libertarian Left and Right.

And it has been revived, again. The timing could not be better. The new right is the old right, the new left is the old left. An anti-statist, anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist libertarian movement was begun in the early sixties, and it is essential to see it continue today.

And it has begun, with the Anti-War movement. One that seperates the real libertarians from the neo-con artists of the Republican party, the Libertarian Party and the Conservative Party in Canada. The Imperialist warmongers in the United States are facing opposition from Libertarians left and right. Which has not happened since the Viet Nam war, when the Libertarian Right broke from the Young Republicans for Freedom as the Libertarian Left was purged by the Maoists in the SDS.

The only voices of dissent are heard, today, on the Left – or, at least, are raised by those who in no sense consider themselves conservatives. While a great number of yesterday's left-wing anti-imperialists defected to the War Party during the Clinton years, a new campus movement aimed at Israel's depredations against the Palestinians in the West Bank has arisen, along with a growing antiwar movement. This is where all the vitality, the rebelliousness, the willingness to challenge the rules and strictures of an increasingly narrow and controlled national discourse resides.

Who is fighting against the all-out assault on our civil liberties, and resisting Bush's drive to war? It sure ain't the conservatives, who seem intent on overthrowing our old Republic and installing in its stead a global Empire. As the political elites unite behind a program of endless wars abroad and state repression at home, the old labels of Left and Right are increasingly meaningless: liberals and conservatives, increasingly, have come to stand for minor variations on the same theme. Now is the time for libertarians to, finally, break free of all that – just in time to take a leading role in the next upsurge of social and political change.

Justin Raimondo is Editorial Director of AntiWar.Com.



So if you think the Cato Institute or Tucker Carlson are Libertarians well lets take an issue like:

House Passes Constitutional Amendment to Ban Flag Burning
By Mike Allen Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, June 23, 2005; Page A05

And see what real Libertarians said about this same issue during the Viet Nam war.















LEFT AND RIGHT:
A Journal of Libertarian Thought
(published from 1965-1968)

EDITORIAL
Volume 3, Number 3; Spring-Autumn 1967

ON DESECRATING THE FLAG
The Congress of the United States, in its wisdom, has
now moved to make a federal offense out of "desecrating
the flag'. No doubt the great bulk of those who fought for,
and voted for, this law, believe themselves to be devoted
Christians and champions of the rights of private property.
We shall prove that they are nothing of the kind.
The first thing that should be clear about the flag is
that it is simply a piece of cloth with parallel stripes
of certain colors. So the first thing that we should ask
ourselves is: what is there ahout a piece of cloth that
suddenly renders it sacred, holy, and above defilement
when red and white stripes are woven into it? Contrary
to many of our hysterical politicians, the flag is not our
country; still less is the flag the freedom of the indivi-
dual. The flag is simply a piece of cloth. Period. There-
fore he who tampers with or .desecrates' that piece of
cloth is not posing any kind of a threat to our freedoms
or our way of life.
Consider the implications of taking the contrary posi-
tion: if the flag is nor just a piece of cloth, then this means
that some form of mystical transsubstantiation must take
place, and therefore that weaving a piece of cloth in a
certain manner suddenly invests it with great and awe-
some sanctity. Indeed Webster's defines 'desecrate': as
'to divest of a sacred character or office'. Most people
who revere and worship the flag in this way are religious;
but to apply to a secular object this kind of adoration
is nothing more nor less than idolatry. Religious people
should be always on their guard against the worship of
graven images; but their worship of State flags is nothing
less than that kind of idolatry.
If, indeed, the flag is a symbol of anything through-
out history, it has been the battle standard of the thugs
of the State apparatus, the banner that the State raises
when it goes into battle to kill, burn, and maim inno-
cent people of some other land. All flags are soaked in
innocent blood, and to revere these particular kinds of
cloth, then, becomes not only idolatry but grotesque
idolatry at that, for it is the worship of crime and mur-
der on a massive scale.
There is another critical point in this whole contro-
versy that nobody, least of all the defenders of anti-
desecration laws, seems to have mentioned. When some-
one buys flag cloth, this cloth is his private property,
to do with as he sees fit: to revere, to place in the closet ...
or to desecrate. How can anyone deny this who believes
in the rights of private property? Anti-desecration laws
and ordinances are clear-cut and outrageous invasions
of the rights of private property, and on this ground alone
they should be repealed forthwith.
Freedom must mean, among other things, the freedom
to desecrate.

That's the arguement from Rothbard's libertarian perspective, a critique of destructive stupidity of patriotism, the patriotism of the military industrial religious state. When the arguement is about the American fetish of property rights that is the arguement from the libertarian right or neo-liberal perspective.

Property Rights are a fiction even in the country that enshrined them in their Constitution as proven by the Supreme Court that just banned property rights in the United States. And in Canada the Conservatives and neo-cons want property rights enshrined in the Constitution just like the United States.

As Prodhoun said; Property is Theft. Property is Freedom. The right to your own property/ what you posses, to do with as you will is freedom, to deprive people of propety or possesions to profit from, to use as capital, is usury as Tucker called it.
And so the property arguement is consistant with Tuckers individualist socialism.

So what was Rothbards new libertarianism of Left & Right? Why is it relevant today? Because it is a consistent critique of the neo-cons even today, especially today.

 THE DEATH OF POLITICS
Karl Hess

The following text was originally published in PLAYBOY, March 1969. It is also available as part of Karl Hess' autobiography, as available from Laissez Faire Books. This web edition is now completed with the readers' letters concerning this article, published in the June 1969 issue of PLAYBOY.

Murray Rothbard, writing in Ramparts, has summed up this flawed conservatism in describing a "new younger generation of rightists, of `conservatives' ... who thought that the real problem of the modern world was nothing so ideological as the state vs. individual liberty or government intervention vs. the free market; the real problem, they declared, was the preservation of tradition, order, Christianity and good manners against the modern sins of reason, license, atheism, and boorishness." The reactionary tendencies of both liberals and conservatives today show clearly in their willingness to cede, to the state or the community, power far beyond the protection of liberty against violence. For differing purposes, both see the state as an instrument not protecting man's freedom but either instructing or restricting how that freedom is to be used.

Reading Left & Right should be an eyeopener to a new generation of anarchists and libertarians, who may not know the esoteric history of the libertarian movement of the New Left and New Right and how they came together in the sixties.


FROM FAR RIGHT TO FAR LEFT — AND FARTHER — WITH KARL HESS

James Boyd

This text was originally published in The New York Times Magazine, December 6, 1970.

On a June afternoon in 1960 Karl Hess 3rd, an assistant to the president of Ohio's vast Champion Paper and Fibre Company, was driving toward Cincinnati, lost in the manipulative thoughts common to rising young executives. Suddenly the sound of a police siren intruded and he pulled over, perplexed but not alarmed, for in his world the police menaced not.

"Mr. Hess?" The trooper spoke deferentially. "The White House is trying to reach you, sir. Please call this number."

He called. Would he write the platform for the upcoming Republican National Convention at Chicago, the platform Richard Nixon would run on for President? He would; shortly thereafter he moved into an office in the White House.

At 37, clean-cut, huskily handsome, mellow-voiced, he was the kind of fellow that big business loans out to politicians to advise them what to do and say, a fellow who conducted seminars for Congressmen, authored Republican white papers on military and diplomatic strategy, would one day help ghost a book on defense policy for Representative Mel Laird. He was good at it, was in demand. In 1964 he did his stint again, co-authoring the Republican platform and staying on as Barry Goldwater's speech man in the Presidential run. Better than anyone else, Karl Hess could tell you what conservative Republicanism stood for.

Nowadays when the sirens sound, Hess scrams for the nearest exit. From Goldwaterism, which sought to abolish half of government, he has progressed to anarchism, which would abolish all. Night after night he socks it home to receptive audiences that the old conservatives were wiser than they knew: that growing militarism and welfarism have brought the garrison state and stagnation to America, just as they had prophesied; that the Old Right must join forces with the New Left in a libertarian revolution to restore neighborhood government by boycotting all other kinds. The Hess platform for 1970 is a blueprint for resistance to authority: don't pay taxes; don't submit to the draft; don't move out when the government condemns your neighborhood in the name of eminent domain; pay no attention to permits, licenses or craft certificates; hide political prisoners; support all who resist — whether it be Vivien Kellems, Rhody McCoy or the Panthers.

"The revolution occurs," Hess says, "when the victims cease to cooperate."

Why did he defect from the palace to the barricades?

"The immediate cause was Vietnam," he says. "Conservatives like me had spent our lives arguing against Federal power — with one exception. We trusted Washington with enormous powers to fight global Communism. We were wrong — as Taft foresaw when he opposed NATO. We forgot our old axiom that power always corrupts the possessor. Now we have killed a million and a half helpless peasants in Vietnam, just as Stalin exterminated the kulaks, for reasons of state interest, erroneous reasons so expendable that the Government never mentioned them now and won't defend them. Vietnam should remind all conservatives that whenever you put your faith in big government for any reason, sooner or later you wind up as an apologist for mass murder."

If Vietnam persuaded Hess that government is evil, the new technology convinced him it is an unnecessary evil. "Power institutions developed because of scarcity. Historically, there was never enough of the necessities to go around, so people submitted to kings and armies, either to steal from others or to defend what little they had. But new developments in ways of growing and making things mean there is no longer any logical reason for scarcity, and so there is no longer any justification for the nation-state that outweighs its obvious threat to human survival."

Hess feels that the logic of decentralization and the impulse of people to take things onto their own hands is visible everywhere and will crumple Stalinist states at about the same rate it does capitalist ones.

"They are in the same boat and they know it; remember, it was the Communist party of France that bailed out the Gaullists from the student-worker revolution. You'll see that alliance more and more, because Stalinism is only the perfected model of state capitalism. Anarchism is the common enemy of both."

A little booklet has fallen out of his shirt pocket. It is a membership card in the International Workers of the World,(sic)* which I had wrongly thought was long ago defunct. "We used to have a labor movement in this country, until I.W.W. leaders were killed or imprisoned. You could tell labor unions had become captive when business and government began to praise them. They're destroying the militant black leaders the same way now. If the slaughter continues, before long liberals will be asking, 'What happened to the blacks? Why aren't they militant anymore?'"

Why, you ask, are the hardhats so hostile to radicals?

"The men in construction unions are the least representative of workingmen. They are at the mercy of government appropriations, the pawns of goons who tell them whether they can work or not. They know that their wages are inflated, conditioned on a monopoly given them by politicians and on excluding blacks who would like to work. No wonder they are insecure and turn violent at the thought of change. They are creatures of the worst elements in our society, perfect examples of what government and its collusions do to decent people."

"Libertarianism is rejected by the modern left — which preaches individualism but practices collectivism. Capitalism is rejected by the modern right — which preaches enterprise but practices protectionism. The libertarian faith in the mind of men is rejected by religionists who have faith only in the sins of man. The libertarian insistence that men be free to spin cables of steel as well as dreams of smoke is rejected by hippies who adore nature but spurn creation. The libertarian insistence that each man is a sovereign land of liberty, with his primary allegiance to himself, is rejected by patriots who sing of freedom but also shout of banners and boundaries. There is no operating movement in the world today that is based upon a libertarian philosophy. If there were, it would be in the anomalous position of using political power to abolish political power." (* a common mistake that is still made today, it's the Industrial Workers of the World. ep)



We need a new libertarian revival that recognizes what Rothbard and Hess did, that Tucker and Goldman did, that accepts the labour theory of value is the begining of liberty. That private property is an economic fiction that does not gaurntee liberty but the exact opposite. And that capitalism is monopolistic usury.

Is there such a revival in the making? It certainly appears so, especially with the mobilization against war and imperialism at Anti-War.com. And even further there are counter economy Libertarians known as Mutualists who recognize an anarchist labour theory of value.

Samuel Edward Konkin III (SEK3 to his libertarian and sci fi cronies) inherited Rothbard and Hess's mantel of being on the Left of the Libertarian right. His Movement of the Libertarian Left still finds a place in my anarchist philosophy. Sam passed away last year, and the American Libertarian movement lost a consistant anarchist critic of psuedo-libertarianism of the neo-cons.

I discovered a kindered spirit in Sam, back in the early seventies, he was originally from Edmonton and we shared common interests in Anarchism and Sci-Fi.
He introduced me to right wing anarchism, and we debated off and on over the years. Prior to his passing we had revived short belated coorespondence, and he had actually asked me to represent him at the New Left reunion at the University of Alberta, the graduating class of 68, where Sam was the only right wing Anarchist on the Gateway amidst a horde of socialists.

There is a certain irony that the scion of American Libertarianism should be a Canadian. But it is not unusual when you look at where he came from, the Social Credit movement in Alberta. Another of the radical prairie populist federalist movements. But unlike the current ilk around Ralph Klein or Stephen Harper in this province, or the more extreme Seperatist right, Sam was a Libertarian. He, like Hess and Rothbard would have no cant with the likes of Kenney, Solberg, or Anders.

As Sam developed his particular economic philosophy of mutualism which he called Agora, he left his old militancy behind him. But a new challenge has seen his comrades seek to revive his project for a Libertarian Left, as the American State bares its Imperialist Authoritarian nature for the world to see.

This July 4th the American masses will cry "We're Number 1", as your Ruling Class wars are fought by a volunteer army of black, asian, latino and white working class men and women, as Fox news cheers them on.

The disparate and disfunctional Anarchist movement in North America needs of a new socialist indvidualism that a real Movement of the Libertarian Left could provide. A Proletarian Monism is needed for the Libertarian Movement in North America. A move beyond the labels of right and left, not as a third way, but in the dialectical understanding that as indivduals we are not merely the subjects of our property but that we are social beings who subject (individualize) collective property through the free association of producers.

The proletarian monism of Joseph Dietzigen and Foucault's critque of Governmentality/State Theory allow us to once again posit an anarchist alternative to the capitalist market place in this age of global bio-political crisis.

Anarchist comrades of the Movement of the Libertarian Left your country needs you. You live in the heart of the beast as Che said, and the world needs you to expose it to the light of reason in the name of Freedom and Liberty for all.

We need a federation of the left and the right in the Libertarian movement based on consistant principals of our historical struggle for the liberation of the working class. Karl Hess and SEK3 saw that years ago.

BUILDING A NEW LIBERTARIAN MOVEMENT - Wally Conger
[The following, which I co-authored with the late Samuel Edward Konkin III, originally appeared in slightly different form under the title “Smashing the State for Fun & Profit!” in Tactics of the Movement of the Libertarian Left (Vol. 5, No. 1), May Day 2001. I offer it here as a clarification of “Libertarian Leftism,” an illuminating piece of political revisionist history, and a contribution to Tom Knapp’s ongoing Symposium on Building a New Libertarian Movement.

The New Libertarian Manifesto
by Samuel Edward Konkin III.

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