LIBERTARIANISM: BOGUS ANARCHY Peter Sabatini A distinct mainstream movement
specific to the United States, Libertarianism had its inception during the
1960s. In 1971 it formed into a political party and went on to make a
strong showing in several elections.[1] Libertarianism is at times referred
to as ``anarchism,'' and certain of its adherents call themselves
``anarchists,'' e.g., the economist James Buchanan.[2] More significant,
the work of US individualist anarchists (Benjamin Tucker et al.) is cited
by some Libertarians.[3] Accordingly, it may rightly be asked whether
Libertarianism is in fact anarchism. Exactly what is the relationship
between the two? To properly decide the question requires a synopsis of
anarchist history. The chronology of anarchism within the United States
corresponds to what transpired in Europe and other locations. An organized
anarchist movement imbued with a revolutionary collectivist, then
communist, orientation came to fruition in the late 1870s. At that time,
Chicago was a primary center of anarchist activity within the USA, due in
part to its large immigrant population.4 (Chicago was also where the
Haymarket affair occurred in 1886. An unknown assailant threw a bomb as
police broke up a public protest demonstration. Many radicals were
arrested, and several hanged on the flimsiest of evidence.) Despite off and
on political repression, the US anarchist movement continued in an
expansive mode until the mid-1890s, when it then began to flounder. By
1900, anarchy was visibly in decline.[5] But like its counterpart in
Europe, anarchism's marginalization in the United States was temporarily
slowed by the arrival of syndicalism. North American syndicalism appeared
1904-1905 in the form of a militant unionism known as the Industrial
Workers of the World (IWW). Anarchists entered the IWW along with
revolutionary socialists. The alliance did not last long. [6] Internal
squabbles soon split the IWW, and for a time there existed anarchist and
socialist versions. Finally, with involvement of the US in WWI, the
anarchist IWW, and anarchism in general, dropped >from the public
domain.[7] Anarchy in the USA consisted not only of the
Bakunin-collectivist/syndicalist and Kropotkin-communist strains, but also
the Proudhon-mutualist/individualist variant associated most closely with
Benjamin Tucker. Individualist anarchy actually had a longer history of
duration within the United States than the other two, but not only because
Proudhon preceded Bakunin and Kropotkin. There were other individualist
anarchists before Tucker who had ties to various radical movements which
predate Proudhon. Within the United States of early to mid-19th century,
there appeared an array of communal and "utopian" counterculture groups
(including the so-called free love movement). William Godwin's anarchism
exerted an ideological influence on some of this, but more so the socialism
of Robert Owen and Charles Fourier. [8] After success of his British
venture, Owen himself established a cooperative community within the United
States at New Harmony, Indiana during 1825. One member of this commune was
Josiah Warren (1798-1874), considered to be the first individualist
anarchist.[9] After New Harmony failed Warren shifted his ideological
loyalties from socialism to anarchism (which was no great leap, given that
Owen's socialism had been predicated on Godwin's anarchism).[10] Then he
founded his own commune ("Modern Times") and propounded an individualist
doctrine which nicely dovetailed with Proudhon's mutualism arriving from
abroad.[11] Warren's activities attracted a number of converts, some of
whom helped to further develop American mutualism. The most important of
these were Ezra Heywood (1829-1893), William B. Greene (1819-1878), and
Lysander Spooner (1808-1887). The advent of the Civil War put an end to
much of the utopian movement and its communal living experiments.
Individualist anarchism was itself reduced to an agitprop journalistic
enterprise of some measurable popularity.[12] And in this form it found its
most eloquent voice with Benjamin Tucker and his magazine Liberty. Tucker
had been acquainted with Heywood and other individualist anarchists, and he
subsequently converted to mutualism.[13] Thereafter he served as the
movement's chief polemist and guiding hand. The Proudhonist anarchy that
Tucker represented was largely superseded in Europe by revolutionary
collectivism and anarcho-communism. The same changeover occurred in the US,
although mainly among subgroups of working class immigrants who were
settling in urban areas. For these recent immigrants caught up in tenuous
circumstances within the vortex of emerging corporate capitalism, a
revolutionary anarchy had greater relevancy than go slow mutualism. On the
other hand, individualist anarchism also persisted within the United States
because it had the support of a different (more established, middle class,
and formally educated) audience that represented the earlier stream of
indigenous North American radicalism reflecting this region's unique, and
rapidly fading, decentralized economic development. Although individualist
and communist anarchy are fundamentally one and the same doctrine, their
respective supporters still ended up at loggerheads over tactical
differences. [14] But in any event, the clash between the two variants was
ultimately resolved by factors beyond their control. Just as
anarcho-communism entered a political twilight zone in the 1890s, American
mutualism did likewise. Tucker's bookstore operation burned down in 1908,
and this not only terminated publication of Liberty, but also what remained
of the individualist anarchism ``movement.'' The aggregate of support upon
which this thread of thought had depended was already in dissipation.[15]
Individualist anarchy after 1900 receded rapidly to the radical outback.
What then does any of this have to do with Libertarianism? In effect,
nothing, aside from a few unsupported claims. Libertarianism is not
anarchism, but actually a form of liberalism. It does, however, have a
point of origin that is traceable to the same juncture as anarchism's
marginalization. So in this limited sense there is a shared commonality. To
be more precise, the rapid industrialization that occurred within the
United States after the Civil War went hand in glove with a sizable
expansion of the American state.[16] At the turn of the century, local
entrepreneurial (proprietorship/partnership) business was overshadowed in
short order by transnational corporate capitalism.[17] The catastrophic
transformation of US society that followed in the wake of corporate
capitalism fueled not only left wing radicalism (anarchism and socialism),
but also some prominent right wing opposition from dissident elements
anchored within liberalism. The various stratum comprising the capitalist
class responded differentially to these transpiring events as a function of
their respective position of benefit. Small business that remained as such
came to greatly resent the economic advantage corporate capitalism secured
to itself, and the sweeping changes the latter imposed on the presumed
ground rules of bourgeois competition.[18] Nevertheless, because capitalism
is liberalism's raison d'tre, small business operators had little choice
but to blame the state for their financial woes, otherwise they moved
themselves to another ideological camp (anti-capitalism). Hence, the
enlarged state was imputed as the primary cause for capitalism's
``aberration'' into its monopoly form, and thus it became the scapegoat for
small business complaint. Such sentiments are found vented within a small
body of literature extending from this time, e.g., Albert Jay Nock's Our
Enemy, The State (1935); what may now rightly be called
proto-Libertarianism.[19] As a self-identified ideological movement,
however, Libertarianism took more definite shape from the 1940s onward
through the writings of novelist Ayn Rand. The exaltation of liberal
individualism and minimal state laissez-faire capitalism that permeates
Rand's fictional work as a chronic theme attracted a cult following within
the United States. To further accommodate supporters, Rand fashioned her
own popular philosophy (``Objectivism'') and a membership organization.
Many of those who would later form the nucleus of Libertarianism came out
of Objectivism, including two of its chief theoreticians, John Hospers and
Murray Rothbard.[20] Another conduit into Libertarianism carried a
breakaway faction >from William F. Buckley's college youth club, the Edmund
Burke-style conservative Young Americans For Freedom. [21] More academic
input arrived from the Austrian school of neoclassical economics
promulgated by F.A. Hayek and Ludwig von Mises (of which the economist
Rothbard subscribes).[22] All these marginal streams intermingled during
the mid to late 1960s, and finally settled out as Libertarianism in the
early 1970s.[23] It is no coincidence that Libertarianism solidified and
conspicuously appeared on the scene just after the United States entered an
economic downturn (at the same time Keynesian economics was discredited and
neoclassical theory staged a comeback). The world-wide retrenchment of
capitalism that began in the late 1960s broke the ideological strangle hold
of a particular variant of (Locke-Rousseau) liberalism, thereby allowing
the public airing of other (Locke-Burke) strains representing disaffected
elements within the capitalist class, including small business interests.
Libertarianism was one aspect of this New Right offensive. It appeared to
be something sui generis. Libertarianism provided a simplistic status quo
explanation to an anxious middle class threatened by the unfathomed malaise
of capitalism and growing societal deterioration, i.e., blame the state.
And this prevalent grasping at straws attitude accounts for the success of
Robert Nozick's popularization of Libertarianism, Anarchy, State, And
Utopia (1974). It rode the crest of this polemic rift within liberalism.
The book was deemed controversial, even extreme, by establishment liberals
(and social democrats long pacified by the welfare state), who, secure in
power for decades, were now under sustained attack by their own right wing.
Yet at bedrock, Nozick's treatise was nothing more than old wine in a new
bottle, an updating of John Locke.[24] Libertarianism is not anarchism.
Some Libertarians readily admit this. For example, Ayn Rand, the radical
egoist, expressly disavows the communal individuality of Stirner in favor
of liberalism's stark individualism.[25] Plus Robert Nozick makes pointed
reference to the US individualist anarchists, and summarily dismisses them.
[26] This explicit rejection of anarchism is evidence of the basic
liberalist ideology that Libertarians hold dear. But more specifically,
within the movement itself there exist factional interests. [27] There are
Libertarians who emphasize lifestyle issues and civil liberties (an
amplification of John Stuart Mill's On Liberty). They want the state out of
their "private" lives, e.g., in drug use and sexual activity. Others are
chiefly concerned with economics. They champion
laissez-faire/``free-market''/ neoclassical economics, and fault the state
for corrupting ``natural'' capitalism. Although both groups despise the
state intensely, neither wants to completely do away with it. This minimal
state position, sufficient by itself to debar Libertarianism from
classification as anarchism, is embraced by Rand, Buchanan, Hospers, and
Nozick. [28] More revealing, however, is why Libertarians retain the state.
What they always insist on maintaining are the state's coercive apparatuses
of law, police, and military.[29] The reason flows directly from their view
of human nature, which is a hallmark of liberalism, not anarchism. That is,
Libertarianism ascribes social problems within society (crime, poverty,
etc.) to an inherent disposition of humans (re: why Locke argues people
leave the ``state of nature''), hence the constant need for ``impartial''
force supplied by the state. Human corruption and degeneracy stemming from
structural externalities as a function of power is never admitted because
Libertarianism, like liberalism, fully supports capitalism. It does not
object to its power, centralization, economic inequality, hierarchy, and
authority. The ``liberty'' to exploit labor and amass property unencumbered
by the state is the quintessence of capitalism, and the credo of
Libertarianism ne liberalism, all of which is the utter negation of
anarchism. Lastly to be addressed is the apparent anomaly of Murray
Rothbard. Within Libertarianism, Rothbard represents a minority perspective
that actually argues for the total elimination of the state. However
Rothbard's claim as an anarchist is quickly voided when it is shown that he
only wants an end to the public state. In its place he allows countless
private states, with each person supplying their own police force, army,
and law, or else purchasing these services from capitalist venders.[30]
Rothbard has no problem whatsoever with the amassing of wealth, therefore
those with more capital will inevitably have greater coercive force at
their disposal, just as they do now. Additionally, in those rare moments
when Rothbard (or any other Libertarian) does draw upon individualist
anarchism, he is always highly selective about what he pulls out. Most of
the doctrine's core principles, being decidedly anti-Libertarianism, are
conveniently ignored, and so what remains is shrill anti-statism conjoined
to a vacuous freedom in hackneyed defense of capitalism. In sum, the
``anarchy'' of Libertarianism reduces to a liberal fraud. David Wieck's
critique of Rothbard, applicable to Libertarianism in general, will close
this discussion. ``Out of the history of anarchist thought and action
Rothbard has pulled forth a single thread, the thread of individualism, and
defines that individualism in a way alien even to the spirit of a Max
Stirner or a Benjamin Tucker, whose heritage I presume he would claim - to
say nothing of how alien is his way to the spirit of Godwin, Proudhon,
Bakunin, Kropotkin, Malatesta, and the historically anonymous persons who
through their thoughts and action have tried to give anarchism a living
meaning. Out of this thread Rothbard manufactures one more bourgeois
ideology.''[31]
END NOTES...see
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