NB: Это английский перевод русскоязычной беседы, которая доступна здесь.
Volodymyr Zolotaryov is one of the most influential libertarian thinkers in Ukraine. Despite being a well-developed, independent socio-economic direction in the West, post-Soviet libertarianism has always been in the shadow of globalist left-liberalism and anti-globalist conservatism. Some call this current rightist liberalism, others - rightist anarchism. However, explanations of nuances are better heard from someone who wishes to represent this current. Check out his blog on Medium as well.
AV: Greetings, Volodymyr!
VZ: Greetings!
AV: Please provide the readers with a brief introduction about yourself. What do you do for a living, what are your interests, what have you achieved, and what do you still hope to achieve?
VZ: I started engaging in politics in the late 80s during the "Perestroika" era. For some time, I led one of the Ukrainian classical liberal parties and participated in elections both as a candidate and as a consultant. For example, I was the first Ukrainian politician to advocate for Ukraine's NATO membership back in 1993. It so happened that I observed the process of "the formation of the Ukrainian state" from a fairly close distance and that process raised many questions that standard political theory could not answer. I began seeking answers and eventually came across the Austrian economic school and libertarianism, whose answers satisfy me to this day. I realized that the political method, as a means of change, practically doesn't work and that the entire socio-political machine in the form of parties and NGOs is either part of the system or useful idiots who create a smokescreen for it and direct people's efforts in the wrong direction. In 2002, I participated in elections as a candidate for the last time, and since 2010, I haven't been involved in political life even as a consultant. I don't want to waste time on activities that are doomed from the start. I want to say right away that the political method can be used, but it should be done not in the manner imagined by our activists. One should follow the principle "a libertarian only comes to power once".
In general, I'm a sort of downshifter, a person who consciously rejected a political career and doesn't regret it for a second. The main focus of my activities is enlightenment. I have written two books - "Plan B for Ukrainians" and "The Libertarian Perspective". Today, I am busy translating books and editing translations of Austrian libertarian literature for the Wellbooks publishing house.
AV: Your media activity is primarily focused on popularizing libertarianism in Ukraine. How would you explain what is it to an apolitical person without higher education?
VZ: Libertarianism is the legal, ethical, and economic implications of the principle of self-ownership, that is, the idea that a person belongs to themselves. For example, libertarianism explains why taxes are theft and why you are not obligated to obey the state (you have no obligations to the state because there is no contract with it). Libertarianism explains what the state is, where it came from, and why and for whom it is needed. In its economic part (the Austrian economic school theory), libertarianism explains the colossal damage that the state inflicts on people. Libertarianism explains how people can live without the state. Finally, libertarianism is an optimistic ideology; it rejects the entire modern apocalyptic statist agenda - COVID, global warming, resource depletion, rising inequality, privileges for minorities, etc.
AV: If we increase the complexity and analyze deeper, how correct is my assumption that libertarianism is the ideology of the conservative part of the middle class, the part influenced by Christianity? Outsiders often imagine libertarians in top hats, tuxedos, and with cigars in their mouths, but all the people I know from this movement are quite simple, far from upper-class ethics and aesthetics. You don't stand out from this crowd - you wear simple clothes yourself, and your wife isn't packed in Gucci and Versace. A libertarian I once knew, a cryptocurrency expert Oleksiy Sherstnev, boasted of having money but still presented himself simply and strictly, never driving a Ferrari. Although nowadays it is not at all a problem for minimally wealthy people. A ten-year-old Ferrari costs only $100,000 in Ukraine. If buying in Europe or the USA, it will be even cheaper. And you can find branded clothes for less than a thousand dollars. Modesty - is that to appeal more to the proletariat and small business, or is libertarian aesthetics consciously and fundamentally ascetic?
VZ: Libertarianism is the ideology of the free, and people understand freedom better when they earn their own living. Therefore, I would say that a self-employed person, regardless of their income, is a potential supporter of libertarianism. A person leading a parasitic lifestyle, primarily a state employee, is unlikely to be interested in this ideology, although, of course, there are exceptions. As for the upper class, the mistake of the Left is that they believe the upper class is interested in weakening the state. In reality, it's quite the opposite. The upper class always sleeps in the same bed with the state because it is interested in the legislative closure of markets and other regulations that limit competition. For example, IT giants like Google or Facebook provide censorship to the state and control the narrative nowadays, helping to push the state agenda. The state supports their monopoly through patent legislation. If representatives of the upper class or simply wealthy people openly oppose the system, they are either demonstratively killed, like McAfee, or they lose money, like Musk.
AV: Libertarians often complain about nasty communists. But if in the West it's somewhat justified because there are direct heirs of the Frankfurt School and thousands rally under red banners, then in the post-Soviet space I knew only three and a half real communists. While the Antifa movement in Kharkiv was active and under my guidance, we searched long and in vain for socialist economists. Although only recently they were manufactured in numbers similar to seaweed and birch sap, by 2012, they were already somewhere in a parallel reality. Socialist humanitarians and engineering technicians could be encountered, including in teaching positions at universities, but not economists. In one of your videos, you said that everyone believed in Lenin in the USSR while you alone saw his idiocy early, but I hardly know such people. The editor of "Echo of Moscow," Alexei Venediktov, was an ideological communist until 1991, but besides him, I only know dissidents and punks. One of the past guests of my blog, now a 74-year-old Andriy Voytsekhovsky, calls himself a Sovok and a democratic leftist, yet he congratulates people on Easter and prefers Switzerland to Brezhnevism. Can you tell me anything about fervent Komsomol members in the USSR and their subsequent fate? Isn't the hyper-focus of modern libertarians on communists a consequence of the safety of such a position, compared, for example, with criticism of nationalists? How much of a Soviet man do you think you are? And aren't your convictions a particularly Soviet belief in ideal capitalism, about which another dissident, Vladimir Bukovsky, spoke a lot, seeing socialism in the USA of the 70s and 80s?
VZ: I don't have much to say about Komsomol members, I wasn't part of the nomenclature. I've heard that "Komsomol money" mainly went into the banking business. As for the "hyper-focus" on communists, it should be understood that for a libertarian, there isn't much difference between Marx and, say, Stiglitz or Krugman. Communism is just the extreme form of statism, so it will always serve as a scarecrow in critical constructions. The standard technique in criticism is to compare with some hyperbolized example, that is, when you tell someone, "Look - you're just as much of a jerk as this well-known jerk". The last resort jerk in this lineup is a communist, there are no bigger jerks than that, so nationalists don't occupy the extreme position and are rarely used as a scarecrow. For example, I always tell the nationalists that they are communists who took bread away in 1933, that is, I compare their statism with the extreme version of statism.
In my view, I'm not a Soviet man. Although I had a quite normal and sometimes happy childhood and a decent youth, I don't associate it with the "Soviet system", and I don't feel any nostalgia for the Soviet Union. I regret that there's no time machine; I would send Soviet nostalgists to live for a month or two in the real Soviet Union. Despite all our problems, we live much better now.
As for the "particularly Soviet belief in ideal capitalism", I don't think it ever existed. People didn't know what capitalism was then, they still don't know now. They believed in the "West", not in capitalism. I also believed and the loss of this belief made me a libertarian because it forced me to seek answers, and I found more serious answers than "it's all because such-and-such won the elections".
AV: In your book "The Libertarian Perspective" and some YouTube videos, you talk a lot about human rationality, about the necessity of building all social premises on this very rationality. However, from the perspective of efficient energy application, it's much more rational to go with the flow rather than against it. Applied to our country - Ukraine - this means being a civic nationalist, a liberal-globalist, or a national democrat. These are the people who control education and the media in the country, they enjoy decent monetary allowance. For a capable, educated person, there is no reason not to seek their employ. Even the most closely related movement - ethnic nationalism - is allowed only to the siloviki here, and for a learned individual, it is an irrational idealism. And our positions - they are outright radical idealism, on the verge of religious fanaticism. Why do you think your position is more correct and rational than the position of Kyivan liberal Valery Pekar, who is respected by Ukrainian elites and is a friend of Francis Fukuyama, or the position of your former comrade from the "People Matter" movement, Maksym Nefedov? And is it rational for a talented person to live in Ukraine?
VZ: The Austrian School doesn't speak about rationality; it excludes it as unnecessary. "Rationality", essentially, is an outsider’s opinion about how well you've aligned your goals with your means. Only you know this, however; an outsider is not needed here. We cannot explain how society works through the opinion of outsiders who don't participate in the process of your activity regarding that very activity. I don't speak about rationality (though I sometimes use that word, it's a sin), but about incentives, which is somewhat different. And here you are correct - there are few incentives to be a libertarian in Ukraine. In fact, today, the incentives are only of an ethical nature - "to know the truth", "not to be a brute", and so on.
AV: Left liberalism is built around the ideology of "human rights", a secular quasi-religion in conflict with both traditional Abrahamic monotheisms and modern attempts to resurrect ancient polytheisms. In the United States, disputes about whether Christian owners of private bakeries should bake cakes for homosexual weddings are still raging. Left liberalism answers - unequivocally yes. Conservatism tries to object. How will supporters of human rights and religious people coexist in a libertarian society?
VZ: In a libertarian society, there is no endless list of "human rights" which can include anything. This idea itself implies that there is someone who "grants" a person his rights, and accordingly, all these rights can be revoked by this someone for some "legitimate" reason, such as COVID or global warming. For a libertarian, a person has a natural right to own their body; it's part of their nature, which we discover analytically rather than establish normatively. What is called "human rights" is essentially a mix of sinful and righteous. "Human rights" are either simply part of the rights to one's body (and broader - property rights) - the right to freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, the right to bear and use arms - or they are politicians' wishes, like all "positive rights", such as the "right to vacation". Therefore, in a libertarian society, there are no legal issues with "insulting religious feelings", whatever the faith may be; there are no legal issues with "racism" or "homophobia" if practiced on the property of a "racist" or "homophobe". Furthermore, speaking of today's fashionable version of collectivism, any claims based on "identity" and its alleged violation are dismissed in such a legal framework because you don't own your identity; you need at least two for this dance. You may want to be called "Your Majesty", but everyone around you, for some reason, calls you "a putz". Apparently, you're doing something wrong; reality is often not attuned to desires.
Within the framework of the state with its false idea of the "public", there is no solution to this problem. Essentially, whoever owns public space dictates the agenda. Libertarians offer a solution - we need to get rid of the public space and thus depoliticize our lives. If you like Hamas, you can run around your apartment (or your summer cottage, or the street or square you own) with a "Palestinian" flag. But you can't do it where the owners don't like Hamas, and you can't force them to let you onto their territory with police help.
There's another side to the problem. Libertarian law is based on the fact that every conflict is unique. That is, a judge "under libertarianism" will never be satisfied with a description of the conflict as "a Christian baker refused to bake a cake for a gay wedding" because labels are at work here, not living people and the history of their interaction. In general, we can say that the baker was within his rights, but I can imagine that there may be a situation where he would be wrong, although formally, the situation would correspond to this description.
AV: I heard rumors that Mikhail Svetov, de facto the main libertarian in the Russian Federation, one of the few media-active opposition figures there, visited Kyiv before the war began. And apparently, he didn't find common ground with some local libertarians. Was that you, or perhaps Gennadiy Balashov from the "5.10" movement? What is your opinion on Mikhail and his prospects? And on Gennadiy and "5.10"? I remember how, at the peak of the movement's popularity, their activists from Kharkiv approached me for consultations, all of them proletarians. I was impressed by their hyperactivity, which ultimately brought no results. Where they are now - I don't know. But I do know that the phenomenon was disliked by the leader of the liberal wing of the "National Corps" party - Vladyslav Sobolevsky. He branded them as Malorussians, lost between the now-banned "Party of Shariy" and the now-banned OPzZH. The most active Ukrainian libertarian on X (formerly Twitter), Sergiy Cherevan, is regularly called a Malorussian, including by the popular far-right Telegram channel "Catarsis", allegedly owned by the well-known SSU employee Eugen Karas. Can it be said that libertarianism in Ukraine is more in demand among national minorities than among ethnic Ukrainians?
VZ: Honestly, I know practically nothing about the activities of the LPR and Svetov. I am acquainted with some mostly former members of the LPR by correspondence course, and that's all.
As for "minorities", I don't quite understand the claims of some on expressing the will of the "majority" or "minority". These people don't have a certificate or letter of attorney that gives them the right to speak on behalf of a group, especially a group with extremely blurred boundaries, not directly related to human activity. I, for example, easily identify myself as a Ukrainian nationalist because a) libertarianism is the most suitable ideology for the Ukrainian mentality, and b) its implementation will make Ukrainians wealthy and Ukraine the strongest country on Earth. Within the framework of their ideology, it is impossible to prove that I am not a nationalist.
AV: In conclusion, please give your forecast for the development of the situation both in Ukraine and in Eastern Europe in general - for the coming years and decades. What advice would you give to those who have already left the country and those who have decided to stay? What will happen to your "antipolitical doctrine" in the event of rapid growth in the influence of artificial intelligence on people's lives, or in the event of a global nuclear war? Is your assessment of the average person optimistic or pessimistic?
VZ: I don't want to make any global forecasts; they are too easy to get wrong. Of all the listed things, I can only say that I don't believe in artificial intelligence and its special influence on our lives. First of all, intelligence is a social phenomenon; there is no spherical intelligence in a vacuum (a rational ocean on Solaris is impossible), so it's cheaper to create new natural intelligence than artificial intelligence. But this doesn't mean that the use of text compilers, what is now called AI, cannot complicate our lives. It might if it's done by the state, if it restricts this market, or directly uses compilers for its purposes. But this is not an AI problem; it's a problem of the state.
Otherwise, our future is determined by the interaction of two self-organizing processes - roughly speaking, the "market", which generally works for the independence of the individual from the state (the internet, mobile communications, cryptocurrencies, autonomous energy sources), and the parasitic "anti-market", which works for enslavement. Whichever is faster will win. Here I have a question to which I have no answer. It looks like this - is today's insolent and open encroachment of the state worldwide just the last attack on weakened humanity when there's no point in hiding because the enemy is almost defeated, or, on the contrary, is it a desperate gesture, a refusal to believe that the war is already lost? I would like the latter to be true. In any case, such processes are often invisible to us and are more felt than realized. They say that the USSR was doomed as early as 1982, but if someone had told me in 1982 that the USSR would not exist in 10 years, I would have laughed long and hard in response.
AV: Thank you for your time!
VZ: You're welcome!