Personally, I think it’s part of the petty-bourgeois delusion that a person can become part of the capitalist elite instead of realizing that they have more in common with the working class.
A lot of it is due to the ideological education of this society. They can see, as anyone who bothers to look, that this country is messed up. The problem though is the immense anti-communist ideology in this society. So they are cut off from real solutions from the start. They’ve been taught that the solutions to the problems are the causes of the problems. The only answers they can see are down roads that will only make things worse instead of better.
False Consciousness. Some people clearly see the problems with capitalism and blame the Jews, some immigrants (and many both), and some people really believe the things they were taught in econ 101 and wind up blaming the problems of capitalism on not enough capitalism.
I think libertarianism as we see it in the US is a uniquely American phenomenon (which occasionally gets exported abroad like in Argentina) that’s born out of our quasi-religious worship of the constitution and the founding fathers. Every US child is taught in school that the founders were all once in a generation geniuses and that the constitution is a masterwork of politics and not a badly outdated document that is only ever invoked by the ruling class to consolidate their own power. The founders believed that capitalist markets were a force for liberation, so we get taught that in high school - although ironically the modern version of that idea of a completely unfettered market is not at all what the American founders had in mind, it’s the extreme that you get to by following their logic.
Has anyone realized most of the right libertarians come from settler colonial states?
The motivations of wealthy libertarians are material, they don’t want to give up their wealth or ability to control resources. However, poorer libertarians don’t have that problem. They don’t have any wealth to give up. Therefore the ideology has to be tied to immaterial things like abstractions. It becomes about liberty, individualism, divine right, etc for them. The wealthy mystify their own relationship with labor and capital because it gives the workers a reason to join them rather than achieve class consciousness.
I agree with some of what you said but mainly disagree with your analysis of poor libertarians. I will use the USA as a model for my post.
Historically we should expect to find more economic fluidity amongst white people, meaning they’d be able to move from worker to labour aristocracy/petty bourgeoisie. The classic example would be for a white worker to labour for a time at a decent paying job, save money, buy a house, and start a business.
So as we see, the class lines would be more blurred in the past because of the stronger wages and free time of labourers, and so there becomes no real need in the present to tie poorer libertarians historically to immaterial things since their interests in the past were absolutely material and aligned.
With the polarization of the economy the class lines become more defined. So then the poor libertarians, stuck without any mobility as workers, become very reactionary and oppose any groups that threaten their elevated or once elevated position. Those who are petit bourgeoisie themselves, even though they may not be poor, are threatened with becoming workers again.
This plays out nowadays as the libertarian to fascist pipeline, though American libertarianism is already inherently reactionary by being supported by colonialism and imperialism (as opposed to, for instance, a petit bourgeoisie in another country trying to rid itself of the shackles of colonialism).
In the American case libertarianism is a petit bourgeois (and white i.e. settler, very key here) ideology that fits very well with the standard Marxist model of the petit bourgeois being the source of fascism.
Both are a false consciousness that, as such, function to obscure class antagonism and support the capitalist order. They are a form of liberal following a slightly different set of high priests than the others, though obviously they are not separate. While many liberals laugh at, for example, Austrian School economists, they do so while incorporating the ideas from that school that fit the current canon. All it takes is laundering them through other economists.
A Marxist analysis will look at the material basis for these ideologies. They are basically the same as for liberalism - they reinforce a substantial portion of the ruling class’s interests. The obvious one is that when the ruling class is interested in cutting its own taxes or regulations, this ideology is very useful. Though it really goes much farther than this: both are cults of capital in the extreme, justifying all capitalist actions as inherently just and all transgressions against them as inherently unjust. Consequently, they can be leveraged for anything that capitalists want except for maybe government grift. If a capitalist lobbying group wants a policy change they can push a “right libertarian” that wants it, easily. If a capitalist lobbying group doesn’t want a policy that threatens their interests, they can fund, say, the Cato institute to tell you some bullshit about how it’s bad according to their economic religion. It’s not fundamentally different from how capitalists fund others members of the political class.
To the extent that it is different is that it is more extreme. It’s a wrecking ball that competes with the interests of other capitalists that benefit from various government policies. So long as there’s a “big government” means by which to increase profit, there will be a fight.
On the personal psychological level there is plenty to discuss but I think the false consciousness is the most important aspect. “Right libertarians” get to pretend to be an outsider political trend, even one opposed to the status quo, and openly recognize various problems in the capitalist system. For example, they get to be vaguely anti-war, at least rhetorically. And they usually try to wash their hands of the decisions made by Democrats and Republicans. Then they go and reinforce the dominant capitalist system. In this sense they are very similar to radlib socdems, just with a different aesthetic for what it means to be an “outsider”.
In my experience, if you can get a right libertarian to actually read socialist theory they can actually be pipelined. Nowhere near 100% rate but better than your average lib. They will be annoying the whole time, though.
A lot of it is atomization. If you are fully atomized like we are in the US, liberatarianism doesn’t seem as silly as it obviously is. Its a logical fantasy caused by these conditions. Similar to wanting a homestead to be “totally self sufficient.” Its a fantasy obviously no one can be “totally self sufficient,” but when you’re immersed in an atomized siciety ot makes perfect sense that people would want that.
Anarcho-capitalism, maybe a bit of opportunism with a heaping helping of tailism. If only the “right” people with the “right” ideological framework were in control, then capitalism would be okay!
Libertarianism, might have big two pillars of support and an underlying refusal to learn anything from history in general or the past experiences of themselves and their peers.
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Petite bourgeoisie with a moderate to low level of capital who don’t want to lose their stuff (or the chance to accumulate more stuff in the future) because they are hoping for future returns to pay out big. That most businesses (or attempts at self employment) just kinda scrape by, year on year, instead of making fabulous sums of money immediately is ignored. I’m fairly confident in saying, a chunk of businesses are only profitable to the owners when the business is sold by the owners to somebody else or while new investors can be convinced to buy in (think of a Ponzi scheme) to the business.
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Workers whose “plan” is to try to get enough savings that their accumulated capital will spontaneously launch them into the ranks of the petite bourgeoisie. To be able to “retire” not with a pension from a government, or employer, or a life savings from working but from passive income siphoned off from a business they start or buy ownership in to. This ignores that most small businesses/self employed folks are just scraping by and there won’t be enough revenue generated to support a person/family without having to continue being full time workers. This ignores that most “fabulous investment opportunities” are just some form of outright Ponzi scheme or structured in such a way to avoid being a Ponzi scheme through some minor legal technicality.
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This mindset can be traced back to a superficial understanding of the subject matter. Individuals often parrot cultural tropes without critically examining their validity or applicability in real-world scenarios. It’s also important to recognize that anarchists, on the left, exhibit the same shortcomings. Anarchism and libertarianism share a similar flaw, often oversimplifying complex issues and failing to consider the nuances and ramifications of their ideas in practical settings.
Basically misguided anti-establishment folks.
