Libertarian Left: Libertarian Socialism and Anarcho-Communism

The bet that the state causes more of the coordination problem than it solves, and that people released from top-down command will out-organize the institutions now claiming to organize them for their own good.

Every time the communist program of distribution by need failed in practice, a state was running it. The argument is that the cure is not to scrap the program but to remove the administrator.

A bet that one institution, the industrial union federated across the whole economy, can do two jobs the rest of the left hands to separate organs: win the raise this Friday, and run production once capitalism is gone.

A reading of Marx that takes him at his word on worker self-emancipation, and files every twentieth-century state that promised communism by acting on workers' behalf under evidence for the prosecution, not the defense.

Read 1917 carefully and you find the Bolshevik party did not rescue the soviets from counter-revolution but quietly took their place, which is why this tradition insists that only the recallable council, factory committee, and assembly can give the phrase "dictatorship of the proletariat" any literal meaning.

Capitalism's drive to accumulate and the planet's capacity to absorb that drive have stopped being compatible, and the bet here is that the labour movement and the green movement only win their fights together because they were always fighting the same enemy.

A wager that the adjective is load-bearing: socialism without an emancipatory political form will rebuild a class society under new management, and freedom without socialised production amounts to the freedom of the propertyless to accept whatever wage is on offer.

The wager that the twentieth century discredited the wrong half of socialism: worker ownership never required a planning ministry, the planners imported that on their own, and a minimal state alongside a cooperative economy can carry the weight the commissariat fumbled.

When industrial capitalism breaks people, the progressive answer is not the barricade and not the free market but the social scientist with a clipboard, working alongside the union hall and the regulatory commission to do the patient remedial repair that everyone else on the political menu finds too boring to bother with.