How is Libertarian Socialist not an oxymoron?

I was referred to this sub by someone in r/PoliticalDebate in response to my question there. Sorry if this has been asked, but I didn't see a FAQ.

When I hear "Libertarian", I think of:

Little to no intrusion into people's private lives by the state. Decriminalization of victimless crimes like drug possession and prostitution, minimal policing outside of what is necessary to protect life and limb, and private property. There's a lot to like here.
Laissez-faire attitudes toward business and the economy. Low taxes and very little regulation.
Ultra-wealthy people who don't want to pay taxes or spend money protecting their workers or the environment.

When I hear "Socialist" (assuming Marx, not Denmark), I think of:

Prohibition on private ownership of the means of production. Private citizens may own a house or a car, but not a business.
Centrally-planned economy. Collective farming, five-year plans, top-down management, etc.
Totalitarian government (which is necessary given the need for absolute, unquestioned control over the economy)
Limited freedoms to preserve the power of the state. I know this wasn't Marx's intention, but there is no example of historical socialism without strict social control.

My questions to you are:

How do your definitions of "libertarian" and "socialist" differ from mine? I assume they must.
In a libertarian socialist economy what mechanisms ensures that goods are distributed to those who need them? Do you envision competition and a profit motive, or would there have to be some level of central planning?

in LibertarianSocialismby Cheesy_Discharge

26%

17d

TheSauce___

17d

The word "libertarian" for most of history, and as I understand it in Europe it's still used this way, was code for anarcho-communist.

I.e. very different kind of socialist than what you have in mind. To break that down,

Libertarian = "no government"

Communist = "ownership of the means of your own production"

Cheesy_Discharge

17d

TIL. Thanks

Cosmohumanist

17d

Yeah the modern Libertarians co-opted the mantle and basically kicked out all the original Libertarians. As this person says, Left Libertarianism is all about minimal govt and communities having control of their own lives. What ever State govt that does exist should be dedicated toward the betterment of citizens (maintaining roads, schools, etc) and not for betterment of corporations.

InternalEarly5885

17d

Libertarianism defined as affirmation of self-ownership is not consistent with private property, so it's actually the right-wing libertarianism that is an oxymoron. Private property makes it so that some people have to lose their self-ownership to survive as for example wage laborers.

Cheesy_Discharge

-1

17d

Your point about libertarianism not matching the Mark Cuban definition is what I was really after. That makes your ideology coherent, even if we might disagree about whether it is the best possible system.

My gut tells me that working at a co-op isn't that much more free than working for a wage. It would depend on how productive the overall economy is. I can't really argue that a market socialist economy would be less productive because we don't have real-world data to compare.

unhatedraisin

17d

it’s in Mark Cuban’s material interest to obfuscate what socialism is

enlightenedDiMeS

16d

Your gut would be wrong. There’s data out there, you should look at worker satisfaction and business viability metrics in cooperatively owned businesses.

BadPlayers

16d

Do you think living in a democracy isn't much more free than living under a dictatorship?

Cheesy_Discharge

-2

16d

If a coop was run as a true democracy, it would be paralyzed by having to gain consensus for every decision. Therefore there would still be hierarchy, and you would still have to work for your livelihood.

Also, you would be more tied to your firm. Possibly harder to move if you wanted a different career.

As a software engineer, I get the best of both worlds. I get lots of stock in the company (which is a form of employee ownership), and if the company becomes unpleasant to work for, I can easily move to another company. I am in favor of more jobs being compensated with equity.

C_Dizzle_

16d

check out the spanish company mondragon. it’s a massive company with many subsidiaries that’s worker owned.

i remember reading about a huge subsidiary folding; the company made every effort to find work for everyone who worked at that subsidiary. when it couldn’t find jobs for them, it shifted them from temp to temp until it could.

it ensured the workers at that folded subsidiary that they did not have to worry about their economic security, it would be there for them. and not living in fear of losing everything is its own form of freedom.

Cheesy_Discharge

16d

I am all for worker-owned businesses, I just don't think it should be dictated by the government as the only option.

That said, there's more that needs to be done to encourage co-ops in the US. The incentives aren't correctly aligned, especially when private equity firms get involved.

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/should-companies-be-owned-by-their-workers/

Usernameofthisuser

17d

Libertarianism is about individual freedoms and anti state-ism.

Socialism is about worker owned means of production.

They can be combined in various ways and preserve the core tenants of each. For example, if a country decided they were going to have a universal workers cooperatives economy, that would be a form of Libertarian Socialism. (Market Socialism)

GeneralRebellion

17d

There is no individual freedom without workers owning the means of production.

Cheesy_Discharge

17d

If market socialism is the goal, I can see that not requiring quite as heavy a hand to implement. Thanks!

Cosmohumanist

17d

Great description

unhatedraisin

-4

17d

but how would the decision to only have businesses be run by Co-Op be enforced, and if it’s not a forced thing then wouldn’t they be outcompeted by non-democratically ran businesses which currently have more power?

northrupthebandgeek

17d

Businesses as legal entities only exist as such because the state grants them that recognition. There are therefore two socialist outcomes here:

Minarchist socialism: the state still exists, and only recognizes cooperatives as legally valid
Anarchist socialism: the state doesn't exist at all, in which case there's no notion of a "business" (cooperative or otherwise) in the first place - only the workers themselves

In either situation, traditional corporations would be unable to exist at all, and therefore lose any and all power they once had.

LogosLine

17d

You offer the masses something better than the immoral system of wage slavery where a tiny group at the top siphons all of your value and hoards it to themselves.

When you offer someone equal "ownership". Equal say, with an incentive to work together with others, to increase the value not only for yourself but for everyone. You offer a better life to the masses and they will come.

The only people against it are the rich themselves, and their hanger ons.

Usernameofthisuser

17d

It would be a law?

ed523

17d

I don't think so, it would just encouraged by other means, like maybe educating workers how to effectively implement that kind of bottom up control, removing impediments to organization, removing government granted privileges from top down corporations, idk we can brainstorm more ideas but the belief is that most workers would prefer to be part owners of their workplaces if it were possible so that means most of society would want this without the need to force it

holysirsalad

17d

The word “libertarian” originally meant a socialist or communist that was concerned with individual liberty, as opposed to those who believe that a strong state is necessary to administer The Common Good. The American hijacking of the term “libertarian” was courtesy of Murray Rothbard.

There’s a lot of good stuff here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism

Of particular note, since you mentioned Marx, is a great kerfuffle at the First International

That_Mad_Scientist

17d

You have correctly separated private property from personal property. You can't own a business under socialism, because, by definition, that would impede on the right of workers to get the fruits of their own labor without extraction of the surplus value. Liberty doesn't mean you can just do whatever you want without any limits.

And socialism is just what happens when the means of production are owned and controlled by the proletariat. The fact that you think this necessarily implies authoritarianism and a centrally-planned economy just shows a lack of imagination.

Not to mention, the states you speak of, first of which the soviet union, while having started as socialist projects, didn't actually achieve proletarian liberation. By definition, this can't be socialism.

At first, the bolsheviks were, for the most part, council communists, which counts as socialist, but that didn't last very long. For the vast majority of its existence, the USSR was a state capitalist entity. The only difference being, as you point out, that the economy is centralized, instead of free-market.

ed523

17d

What about individual businesses like a craftsperson or freelancer

JustJonny

17d

You're talking about self-enjoyment, right? That is to say, a worker being in control of their own production?

ed523

17d

For sure, self employment and hopefully it's enjoyment

JustJonny

16d

That's an embarrassing phone typo. But the point I was trying to make was that self-employment is a form of socialism, as the worker controls their own labor.

ed523

16d

I think it's compatible but over in r/socialism they'd say not, or at least some would, argument being that each means of production should be owned by all the workers not just the workers that work there and that if so it's still private property. Seems to me that would require a state to own everything in the name of the workers (maybe I'm wrong) so how would the state wither away and all the means of production be owned collectively by all of society?

Cheesy_Discharge

-1

17d

just shows a lack of imagination

I get that historical "socialist/communist" regimes went off the rails, and never approached what Marx was going for.

My assertion is that any transition to socialism from capitalism will require a transition period. This transition period requires temporary totalitarian control (to seize and redistribute private businesses, etc.). The problem is that absolute power is rarely surrendered, once granted. I can imagine exceptions, I just don't like the odds.

BabadookishOnions

17d

My assertion is that any transition to socialism from capitalism will require a transition period. This transition period requires temporary totalitarian control (to seize and redistribute private businesses, etc.).

In fact even this is not really agreed upon by socialists, there was a very famous split between those who thought organising should take place via a centralised government that would supposedly surrender it's authority once socialism can be achieved, and those that thought it was better to organise a socialist society from the bottom up, without a transitionary government. These both would obviously be in the context of a situation where the necessary critical mass of support for change + the ability to defend yourself already exists.

mr_trashbear

17d

Nestor Makhno has entered the chat.

ugavini

16d

What if the transition was done within the shell of the old system? What if co-operatives started up and competed with traditional businesses on the open market? As there is no profit being siphoned off the top they should be able to compete much better than a traditional business. The 'profit' that would have gone to the owner could be used to buy up and operate more factories, farms, apartment buildings etc to add more co-operatives to the federation of co-ops until they completely outcompete all other business and we transition into a socialist world.

Cheesy_Discharge

16d

I would have no problem with tweaking regulations and incentives to encourage more worker-owned firms. Such companies are not illegal now, and there are many examples of successful co-ops, but for some reason they remain a niche. I think the prevalence of private equity firms is part of the reason. PE firms take capitalism to a cartoonish extreme at times.

I’m not sure “profit-siphoning” is holding back firms as much as you suggest it is. It can happen (especially with PE takeovers), but there is a limit to how much investment a company can benefit from. Often they are constrained by labor shortages or the speed at which new facilities can be built. Tech startups typically have no profits during their growth phase. Amazon is a prime example of this. They invested all their profits and incurred huge losses in an effort to grow.

GuyWithSwords

I think we must come up with a way to do it all democratically. I think any totalitarian scheme is doomed to fail even if there is good intentions.

logicalpretzels

17d

Libertarian: freedom, autonomy, right over one’s person, no imposition upon you from government.

Socialism: worker ownership of the means of production, democracy, co-operative and free association.

Don’t see anything contradictory about that. They seem to go hand-in-hand to me.

shevekdeanarres

17d

As others have already pointed out, the phrase 'libertarian' was (and still is in some places) used to connote a broadly anti-state and left-wing politics.

The phrase itself was coined by the French anarchist communist Joseph Dejacque. Etymologically it derives from the French cognate 'libtertaire'. Dejacque eventually relocated to the US, where he published the anarchist communist journal The Libertarian: A Journal of Social Movement.

The transformation of the word in the US to refer to a politics that emphasizes private property was actually a deliberate effort undertaken by so-called 'classical liberals'. Murray Rothbard speaks specifically about this in his 2007 book Betrayal of the American Right:

"...for the first time in my memory, we, 'our side,' had captured a crucial word from the enemy. 'Libertarians' had long been simply a polite word for left-wing anarchists, that is for anti-private property anarchists, either of the communist or syndicalist variety. But now we had taken it over"

Language is of course malleable, but the historical reality here is that the meaning of the phrase was reversed deliberately to muddy the waters politically.

mr_trashbear

17d

Fuck Murray Rothbard entirely.

9thgrave

16d

The one useful thing he did was create a public gender neutral bathroom in NYC.

mr_trashbear

17d

Top commenter nailed it perfectly. The key idea is that power is not centralized or vertically organized on either a social or economic level. Workers own their own means of production, and the State, if any, stays out of personal affairs.

Personally, I can see there being a State that exists purely to manage large scale infrastructure, and ensure that the rights of others to exist freely are not impeded by the actions of others, which would extend to non-human entities as well. This could also be achieved by various organizations of professionals. Functions might include maintaining and standardizing large-scale roadways and railways, managing shared and undeveloped land through science, and ensuring that a justice system is impartial and equitable. It's easiest to conceptualize those things being the function of a State as we think of it, but with telecommunications and the internet being so ubiquitous, those things could more feasibly be managed by independent, large scale organizations.

Picture a typical capitalist Democracy as a pyramid, with elected officials at the top of the State power structure, and the ultra wealthy at the top of the economic power structure. I won't get into the mess of a corporatocracy like the US here to keep the visual simple.

You can think of Libertarian Socialism (or Anachro-Syndicalism, or any of the other adjacent -isms) as more of a web, or even many overlapping circles.

A common argument is that Capitalism mirrors the "laws of nature" with the most capable gaining the most power. That argument falls apart with even a 6th grade level understanding of ecology. No self-sustaining system functions as a neat hierarchy. There is no "food chain". Only food webs. In fact, the more hierarchical an ecological system becomes, the more prone it is to catastrophic failure, collapse, and extinction. By considering human society as a key part of an ecological system, and applying theories of ecology to how that society is organized, we can build a system of self governance that is not only more sustainable, but allows more personal liberty.

I was banned from r/Libertarian for saying essentially this exact thing. Funny how that works, eh?

To learn more, look into both Anachro-Syndicalism and Bookchin's Social Ecology theories.

Nice to see you actively learning and engaging in this thread. Welcome!

Cheesy_Discharge

17d

Thanks for the detailed response!

pickles55

17d

Why do you think I care about a corporations freedom to screw over their workers and customers? I want individuals liberty to be prioritized through strong labor protections. Regulations exist to protect people from businesses. The business owning class deliberately captured the term libertarianism and made sure it was associated with deregulation, we don't agree with that

Cheesy_Discharge

17d

Why do you think I care about a corporations freedom to screw over their workers and customers?

Because of the word "libertarian".

TIL that it meant something else historically, and you are using that definition in this sub, but the average person is going to think of the Koch brothers or Mark Cuban. Seems like a branding problem.

jonny_sidebar

17d

Lots of good replies already, but wanted to point out to OP that Marxism is only one version of Socialism. The terms aren't synonymous and there are other Socialist traditions (like Anarchism) that do not descend from Marx.

OnceWasInfinite

17d

It's an umbrella term for varieties of social anarchism and libertarian Marxism, and other anti-authoritarian leftist philosophies like Bookchin's communalism. Some might point to Rojava or the EZLN as current real world examples, although this isn't without controversy.

mr_trashbear

17d

Bookchin's Social Ecology is another great example, that I often find pretty digestible for folks new to these ideologies.

While I understand some of the critiques of Rojava, I am constantly inspired by what those folks have been able to build from the ashes of a horrific conflict.

OnceWasInfinite

16d

I agree, he tends to get left out of a lot of leftist discussions (outside of Bookchin circles) being both non-Marxist and non-anarchist. I think the future will rediscover Bookchin.

mr_trashbear

16d

His takes are digestible for more classic/mainstream liberal audiences, which I think is important. Our goal should be to educate, organize, and then agitate. Alienation and purity politics don't really get there. I don't give a damn what kind of leftist someone is as long as they are a good person and willing to actively build the world we can all collevtively agree will be better, regardless of how it's spiced. Hell, I have close friends that literally work for the Democratic Party. They are still allies in my book.

Leftists too often gatekeep and look for traitors. Meanwhile, fascists recruit whoever will listen. If we want the left to build a better world, we have to stop it from eating itself constantly.

RoastKrill

17d

The "prohibition on private ownership" is in fact the abolition of ownership of the means of production. This means their ownership is not enforced by state power, but rather the workers are free to use them as they wish. There is no necessity for the state to sieze privately held means of production, but rather those who need to use them to produce things will do so, and preventing others from exercising that right would be the soruce of violence.

kevans2

17d

I'll actually make this more simple. Every country has 2 systems. 1) a political system like authoritarianism, democracy, oligarchy, kleptocracy 2) an economic system like communism, socialism, capitalism. So for example, you could have authoritarianism paired with communism but you could also have authoritarianism paired with capitalism. In the same way, you could have democracy paired with capitalism or democracy paired with socialism or communism. So you really have 2 sets of criteria (How power is distributed in the country and how the economic system is structured)

clemmion

17d

The residue of the Cold War enabled those sympathetic to private interests to co-opt the label “libertarianism.” While some economists in the 20th century dabbled in the philosophy of libertarianism, the main thrust of libertarianism came from socialist thinkers like Bukharin and Sartre.

The right wing version of libertarianism has erroneously claimed the general term “libertarianism” as a way of moralizing economics in reaction to the moral impulse of progressives to promote social equality.

airclay

17d

Stop thinking about what you think and pick up a history book

Clear-Garage-4828

17d

I would also like to know what books you are referring to? I find libertarian socialism way underrepresented in history books.

I consider myself a libertarian socialist, but would love to know what books u were thinking of

democracy_lover66

17d

Look for stuff by Murray Bookchin.

Anarchists aren't a fan, but that's why I call myself a libsoc and not an anarchist.

airclay

-1

17d

all of them

Cheesy_Discharge

17d

Going straight for the dismissive insult comes across as defensive, just FYI.

Every history book I have read shows that socialism has always gone hand-in-hand with totalitarianism and a loss of individual freedoms. There are zero examples of an industrialized country going socialist and not implementing significant restrictions on personal liberties.

History is exactly why I am asking this question.

airclay

17d

Not a dismissive insult but a suggestion based on a post about someone not understanding a historical term and describing why by explaining what they think about things...

Cheesy_Discharge

-1

17d

Typically the modern definition of a word supersedes it's historical meaning. The onus is on you to provide that context as you are the one using the less common usage. In this sub, I get that the archaic definition is assumed, but I made it clear that I was dropping in from elsewhere.

Others ITT have explained that their ideology is based upon the historical definition, which answered my questions.

airclay

17d

I don't have any onus? what you mean?

Cheesy_Discharge

17d

There's no onus on you in this sub. In this sub you can safely assume that everyone knows what you mean by "libertarian".

In the rest of the world, 95 out of 100 people you meet are going to be confused when you call yourself a "libertarian socialist", because you are using an archaic definition of the word.

Therefore, outside of this sub, the onus is on you to explain that you are using the word in a way different from the common understanding. Someone isn't ignorant just because they are using the dictionary definition of a word.

You could always just tell everyone who asks about your ideology to "crack a history book, ffs", but that probably won't sway a lot of people to your side.

libertarian an advocate or supporter of a political philosophy that advocates only minimal state intervention in the free market and the private lives of citizens.

airclay

17d

OHHHHHH, I'm not a preacher or selling anything. Just a guy making comments on a place for making comments. And I do love a good RTFM comment. It's super weird to call something an oxymoron and expect everyone interested in said thing coddle your understanding by way of trying to sway you one way or the other.

BetweenTwoInfinites

17d

It’s not just a historical definition though, as is evidenced by the existence of this sub.

gouellette

17d

Because Authority is the vehicle by which Revolution is maintained, but Socialism is the outcome of that revolution.

Sunforger42

16d

The way I embrace it is by saying there are certain things I believe are human rights. Food, shelter, medicine, maybe education. Everything else? As long as you don't hurt anyone else or infringe on their rights to do their thing, then do your thing.

Consistent-Budget396

16d

From my perspective, I’ve always used the term to describe my own political views as I am pro state economic intervention but against state infringements upon individual freedoms.

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