Jamesd-david Honig:Good cop,bad cop

[jamesd at echeque.com]

     --
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
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