-- On 8 Dec 2001, at 13:50, Marcel Popescu wrote:
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
Rothbard is scarcely distinguishable from Spooner, Spooner very much in the same camp as Tucker, and so forth. If you go back a hundred years you can easily trace a thread of alliance and ideological connection connecting freemarket anarchists very similar to moderns with the most socialist anarchists. Back before 1910, before socialist terror and tyranny had been tried to any large extent, there was no large gap between socialists an anarchists. Most socialist thought that only a modest about of killings and beatings would be required, most anarchists thought that the less property rights were enforceable, the more giving and sharing their would be. In the period 1936-1938 anarcho socialism was actually tried, and therefore the ideology ceased to exist among all those familiar with this bloody and disastrous experiment, except in the sense that many mourned over its failure, though the brand name continued to be cynically used for an utterly different program. Those who continued to call themselves socialists after 1938 reinvented and reinterpreted the anarchists of the past, giving new and strange meanings to their words to strip them of any anarchist tendencies, like Mullah Omar torturing the text of the Koran to make it mean a garbled mixture of postmodernism, marxism, nationalism, and the customs and prejudices of his home village. The parting of the ways came earlier in the US than it did in Europe. In the US, socialist anarchism faded sometime around the turn of the century. In Europe, it died in 1936-1938 The history of anarchism in the US is as follows (simplified and abbreviated). Originally there was no real distinction or separation between class struggle anarchism and individualist anarchism in the US. The class struggle anarchists encountered a lack of working class support, and came to be dominated by vanguardists. Vanguardism is of course utterly incompatible with anarchism. The split started when Tucker (then the most prominent individualist anarchist) denounced vanguardist "anarchists" who had been murdering various people, among them innocent working class people, to advance their political goals. The split became progressively more vehement, with the individualist anarchists taking increasingly capitalistic positions. The vanguardist anarchists, which you would call left anarchists, became utterly discredited by their excesses, and this, combined with a distinct lack of proletarian support, made possible an anti anarchist crackdown which for a time silenced all forms of anarchism in the US. The anarchist movement in the US eventually recovered, but the class struggle anarchists remained discredited by their criminal excesses in the US, and by their inability to maintain any real connection with the US working class, and never recovered. When the anarchist movement reappeared in the US, it was dominated by procapitalist thinkers who grounded their arguments in economic theory. The leading lights of modern US anarchism have been economists. The socialist "anarchists" in the US is a recent European import, merely an offshoot of the European movement which stole the anarchist brand name, when anarcho socialism died in Catalonia, much as modern liberals stole the "liberal" brand name in the US. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG Qn04k2XwwEv4zBiIuDCgiGxWdnxN8v7gwPTUuW2G 46n7bbvc1CcmPw5hh9pUodS00eWG56eChdniq22D6