Kevin Carson posts on the decentralist tradition on the Left as represented by folks like E. F. Schumacher and Kirkpatrick Sale:

Today, as much as ever, the good guys on the left and right fringe have more in common with each other than with the bad guys in the corporate center. As I’ve written elsewhere, the gun rights and home-schooling people are the natural allies of people into things like human scale technology and worker self-management. It’s the statist neoconservatives of the right-center and the New Republic liberals of the left-center, fighting over control of the corporate state, who are our common enemy.

One might quibble about whether Schumacher is a man of the Left, properly speaking. He was a Catholic convert who had certain affinities with the distributism of Chesterton and Belloc (but then, were Chesterton and Belloc themselves men of the Left or the Right?).

And speaking of Sale, see his article today at Counterpunch: “Imperial Entropy”

Other works on a decentralism that transcends Left and Right that I’ve found interesting are The Vermont Papers by Frank Bryan and John McClaughry and Downsizing the U.S.A. by Thomas Naylor and William Willimon.

While I no longer consider myself a Libertarian in the ideological sense, I think the kind of “small-l” libertarian thinking represented by folks like Sale and Schumacher has a lot to offer.