Jamesd-david Honig:Good cop,bad cop
jamesd at echeque.com
jamesd at echeque.com
Sat Dec 8 09:38:47 PST 2001
--
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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