Martin Elson
Left-libertarianism reads libertarianism as democracy in the small-d sense — no one rules, and those affected by a decision make it. In practice that means anti-statism and freed markets (William Gillis’s term, from his 2007 essay “The Freed Market”), joined to the left’s concern with privilege, hierarchy and exclusion. Gary Chartier puts the test plainly — the case rests on showing the two commitments fit, not on redefining either.
Which “left-libertarianism”
The label has two meanings, as Danny of Back to the Drawing Board explains. The academic Steiner–Otsuka–Vallentyne school pairs self-ownership with egalitarian ownership of natural resources. The tradition this site follows — Voltairine de Cleyre, Karl Hess, Samuel Konkin, Kevin Carson, Roderick Long and others, and for a few years in the late 1960s even Murray Rothbard — holds that libertarianism is naturally allied with the left because both aim “to root out oppression and mistreatment in society and demand its rectification.”
How the alliance broke and why it is returning
A word on brainpolice, whose essays turn up across these pages. He wrote only under that name, mostly on his blog Polycentric Order and on the Mises Institute’s community blogs between 2008 and 2010, often arguing in the comments with Stephan Kinsella, Shawn Wilbur and others. Who he was, I don’t know, and he has long since gone quiet online, or so it seems. What I do know is that he pushed me deeper into the possibilities and the problems of libertarianism and anarchism when I was working them out, and his essays still do.
As brainpolice tells it, American libertarianism sat mostly on the left until opposition to the New Deal fused it with conservatism. Earlier, state socialism had pushed out the libertarian socialists after the Marx–Bakunin split. Hess offered the cleaner map: the left disperses power, the right concentrates it. By that measure, libertarians belong on the left.
The core arguments
Chartier’s Framing Left Libertarianism gives the backbone:
- Privilege. Apply libertarian objections to subsidy, monopoly, licensing and tax favors fully, and hierarchical firms weaken while cooperatives gain.
- War. Opposition to state power is opposition to war and empire.
- Equal moral worth. No one has a natural right to rule, which undercuts racism, sexism, ageism, and heterosexism as much as monarchy.
- Non-violent pressure. Boycotts, shunning and solidarity can challenge non-state authority without aggression.
- Unjust titles. Market anarchism does not freeze today’s holdings; many, like Latin American latifundia, were taken by force.
In his interview with qatryk, Long adds the practical side. Licensing, zoning, subsidies and eminent domain tilt the field toward the wealthy. State support lets firms push costs onto others and grow past the size markets would allow. Unions were co-opted by government, so independent unions and mutual aid are the better path. American labor law shows how it happened. The Wagner Act of 1935 gave unions legal standing on the state’s terms, routing their fights through federal boards and binding contracts. The Taft–Hartley Act of 1947 then hollowed them out. It banned sympathy strikes and secondary boycotts, opened the door to right-to-work laws, and let employers sue unions over strikes that broke a contract, which left wildcats unprotected. What it took away was labor’s asymmetric power: small, sudden actions that spread faster than a bureaucracy can answer. Long also notes that markets alone don’t end discrimination; monopoly and protection hide its costs. Long’s strategy: build alternative institutions and educate rather than run for office.
That is my line too, with one reluctant concession. Politics will not get us free, and staking the movement on winning office only teaches it to want the throne. But policy hurts real people in real time — a drug charge, a deportation, a war — and refusing to lift a finger while it happens is purity bought with someone else’s life. So I engage, grudgingly and issue by issue: coalitions that cut state power, harm reduction, defense of people in the way. Damage control, not the road to freedom; the road is the alternatives we build.
David Graeber gave this stance its sharpest form in Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. Policy, he argued, presumes a governing apparatus: an elite that decides it knows better than others how their affairs should run. That makes it the opposite of people managing their own lives. So when you take part in policy debates, “the very best one can achieve is to limit the damage.” What anarchists need instead is what he called Low Theory: practical thinking about the real, immediate questions of changing things, starting from the premise that another world is possible and refusing any vanguard. From the opposite end, Hayek warned that planning by those who claim to know better is a road to serfdom. On that much, the anarchist anthropologist and the free-market economist agree.
The quarrel with the right
The split with right-libertarians is real, brainpolice argues. Right-libertarians, especially Hoppeans around the Mises Institute, admit that interventions distort markets but deny the economy is structurally tilted toward the connected. They pair libertarianism with cultural conservatism, immigration restriction and sympathy for monarchy, and too often rebut a statist caricature instead of the left-libertarian argument. Left-libertarians answer that their view follows from Rothbard’s own analysis of corporate-state partnership.
The Kinsella episode shows the habit. Stephan Kinsella lumped diverse left-libertarians together as “Marxian” and declared their views unlibertarian without engaging them. Libertarianism is an umbrella for argument, not a closed orthodoxy, and dropping the word “capitalism” is a substantive position, not a betrayal.
The right’s best case deserves better than the caricature it sometimes gets from our side too. Put at its strongest, it runs like this.
Stephan Kinsella gives the cleanest version. Libertarianism, he argues, is not a mood about hierarchy. It is a theory of property: it says who may use a scarce resource when people’s plans conflict. That precision is the point. It gives one test for when force is justified, and every addition — equality, solidarity, anti-hierarchy — blurs the test and invites someone to impose their values on a voluntary arrangement. A worker who signs on with a boss has not been aggressed against, and a libertarianism that says otherwise has stopped being one.
Hans-Hermann Hoppe adds a claim about society. A stateless order needs thick non-state institutions — family, church, close community — to keep the peace and pass on norms. The left, in his telling, has spent a century dissolving those and handing their work to the state. On this view cultural conservatism is not a betrayal of liberty but its support beam.
I take both seriously, and I still reject them. Kinsella’s precision is borrowed. The test works only once titles are settled, and today’s titles were shaped by conquest, enclosure and state grants. Rothbard himself argued in 1969 that land seized by force should go to those who work it, not to the heirs of the seizure. He later backed away from it, but the argument stands on its own. Nor does a thick libertarianism send the police after voluntary bosses: it works through boycotts, unions and alternatives, which is to say persuasion and exit.
There is also a deeper reply, the one The Unfinished Exclusions makes. Kinsella stands with Rothbard against voluntary slavery: a person’s will cannot be handed over, so a contract to sell yourself cannot be enforced.
David Ellerman asks the next question. If the will cannot be sold for a lifetime, how can it be sold by the hour? Nothing that voids the slave contract depends on its length. The law already agrees whenever the deed is a crime: a worker told to dump waste in a river is charged alongside the boss, not treated as the boss’s tool. Kinsella’s worker has not been punched. But the wage contract claims to transfer the one thing his own theory says cannot move, and calling that non-aggression misses where the wrong lies. Kinsella has an answer, and it deserves its strongest form. On his title-transfer theory a job is not a promise of your will but a running series of transfers: you can quit at any moment, and the boss pays for work as it is done. That defuses the slave contract. It does not touch the rental. Even hour by hour, the contract assigns everything the worker did to the employer, as if the employer had done it, and the law refuses that assignment the moment a crime is involved. The defender of the rental has two roads: follow Nozick to voluntary slavery, or explain why Rothbard’s reason stops at the factory gate.
The question I put to any arrangement is the one from Start Here — is a person being used as an input, can they leave, and who wrote the arrangement? Where they can’t, the precise test has hidden the problem, not solved it. The self-ownership premise underneath all this gets its full hearing in the Propertarianism section.
Hoppe is half right. Voluntary community matters, and the state has crowded much of it out. But the church’s decline is not the left’s doing. People are leaving on their own; in the United States, membership in a house of worship fell below half the population in 2020, a first in Gallup’s eight decades of polling. Community does not need a church to hold it. Humanism is liberal in the old, broad sense — reason, freedom of conscience, the dignity of persons — rather than left or right on economics; believers can hold it too, and it offers the voluntary bonds Hoppe wants without the gate. And his covenant communities would expel people for their politics or their way of life. That is a small state with a gate, and a mini-state is still a state. David Ellerman presses harder. Autocracy’s sophisticated defenders, from Roman law to the medieval contract of subjection, rested it on consent, not force. So the line that matters is not consent against coercion but alienation against delegation: did people hand over their right to govern themselves, or only lend it to someone who answers to them? Covenant communities, charter cities and seasteads revive consent-based rule on the first model. Paul Romer’s charter cities were to be run by appointed technocrats with no city elections, and their defenders answered that residents chose to come and could always go. That is Ellerman’s point: for classical liberalism, consent plus a way out is enough, so it can live with a benevolent viceroy. Exit is not enough. The other question still has to be asked: who wrote the arrangement? A right that cannot be handed over cannot be signed away, however freely the pen moves. That argument gets its full hearing in the Propertarianism section. Respect for human beings is the limit on any social experiment, and his fails it.
Long closes on the point of it all: mainstream libertarians, mostly on the right, can learn about private power from the left, and the left can learn about markets and the state from those same libertarians.
Sources
- Gary Chartier, “Framing Left Libertarianism, A First Pass” (Liberalaw, 2008). Privilege, war, equal moral worth, unjust titles. original · copy here
- Danny, “Why Do I Call Myself a Left-Libertarian?” (Back to the Drawing Board, 2009). The two meanings of the label. archived · copy here
- brainpolice, “What Is Left-Libertarianism?” (Polycentric Order, 2008). Fusionism, thin and thick, Hess’s map. archived · copy here
- brainpolice, “The Left-Libertarian vs. Right-Libertarian Controversy” (Polycentric Order, 2008). The Hoppean split. archived · copy here
- brainpolice, “Kinsella’s Closed System” (Polycentric Order, 2010). An umbrella, not an orthodoxy. archived · copy here
- Roderick T. Long, interview by qatryk (Liberalis, 4 January 2008). State favoritism, unions, discrimination, strategy. archived · copy here
- Stephan Kinsella, “What Libertarianism Is,” in Property, Freedom, and Society: Essays in Honor of Hans-Hermann Hoppe (Mises Institute, 2009; reprinted in Mises Daily, 21 August 2009). Libertarianism as a theory of property in scarce resources; brainpolice replied, and Kinsella answered on his blog. original
- Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Democracy: The God That Failed (Transaction, 2001). Covenant communities and the case for cultural conservatism. full text
- Murray N. Rothbard, “Confiscation and the Homestead Principle” (The Libertarian Forum 1, no. 6, 15 June 1969). State-seized and state-subsidized property to those who work it; he later backed away from it. Kinsella on Rothbard, 1969 vs. 1974 · Carson on the same essay
- Kevin A. Carson, “Labor Struggle: A Free Market Model” (Center for a Stateless Society, 2010; on The Anarchist Library as “Labour Struggle in a Free Market”). Wagner and Taft–Hartley as co-optation; labor’s asymmetric, networked power. Carson’s works, The Anarchist Library
- Labor Management Relations Act (Taft–Hartley Act), 1947. Bans on sympathy strikes and secondary boycotts; right-to-work; suits over contract-breaking strikes.
- David Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004), pp. 9–10. “Against policy (a tiny manifesto)”; Low Theory; no vanguards. original
- F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (University of Chicago Press, 1944). Central planning and the drift from liberty; fuller treatment in Order and Knowledge, including where Hayek kept more state than this site does.
- David Ellerman, “Inalienable Rights: A Litmus Test for Liberal Theories of Justice” (Law and Philosophy 29, 2010). Contracts of self-alienation, from voluntary slavery to voluntary autocracy, as invalid in principle.
- David Ellerman, Neo-Abolitionism: Abolishing Human Rentals in Favor of Workplace Democracy (Springer, 2021). The employment contract as the rental of persons; if the will cannot be sold for life, it cannot be sold by the hour. publisher
- Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Basic Books, 1974), p. 331 (voluntary slavery permitted); Murray N. Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty (Humanities Press, 1982), ch. 19 (the will is inalienable).
- David Ellerman, “Listen Libertarians! Part I: The fundamental consent-versus-coercion misframing” (ellerman.org, 14 June 2012). Autocracy and slavery defended by consent; alienation versus delegation. original
- David Ellerman, “The Charter Cities Debate and Democratic Theory” (ellerman.org, 5 February 2011). Charter cities, free cities and seasteading as consent-based nondemocratic government. original
- Stephan Kinsella, “A Libertarian Theory of Contract: Title Transfer, Binding Promises, and Inalienability” (Journal of Libertarian Studies 17, no. 2, 2003). Contracts as title transfers; why voluntary slavery is void. original. See also his “Thoughts on Walter Block on Voluntary Slavery” (2022): original
- Jeffrey M. Jones, “U.S. Church Membership Falls Below Majority for First Time” (Gallup, 29 March 2021). 47% in 2020, down from 70% in 1999. original
- Gary Chartier and Charles W. Johnson (eds.), Markets Not Capitalism: Individualist Anarchism Against Bosses, Inequality, Corporate Power, and Structural Poverty (Minor Compositions, 2011). Freed markets against capitalism-as-privilege. full text
- William Gillis, “The Freed Market” (2007). Coins “freed market” for the market without state privilege, so the term no longer defends today’s corporatism. original · Anarchist Library copy