This was the first email exchange I had via BlackCrayon.com.
bkMarcus
> billy mac >
Thank you, billy mac. Yours is the first letter written to BlackCrayon.com.
> i understand anarchism is originally a concept of socialist form, > but is more attributed today as more of libertarianism - not socialist/left > > what are your thoughts >
Well, the problem with the question is that different people mean different things by the terms 'libertarian' and 'socialist'.
Emma Goldman would have identified herself as both a libertarian and as a socialist. Her libertarianism was a belief in freedom from The State and from other forms of coercion, whereas her socialism was a belief that the workers needed to unite and throw off the oppression of Capitalism.
We're stuck not only with the problem that people confuse Labels and Descriptions (e.g., when a Republican Partisan talks about "The Free Market" he means What We Have (or once Had) in Capitalist America, rather than studying what the words 'free' and 'market' mean and asking if they describe a system that prohibits the voluntary exchange of cash or barter for drugs or pornography, or a system in which you and I aren't allowed to develop our own currency and exchange it by whatever voluntary rules we come up with), but we also have the problem that different definitions of Socialism and Libertarianism will yield different descriptions.
Is Socialism state-centralization of the economy, or is it any system that levels out the society? From what I've been reading, it seems that for the early 19th-century intellectual, Sociology was any description of how the society did work, and Socialism was any PREscription about how the society SHOULD work.
By that definition, all anarchists were (and still are) socialists -- even the so-called Anarcho-Capitalists.
But obviously, if by Socialism you mean any sort of State-centralization of authority, then anarchists never were and still aren't Socialists -- not even, theoretically, the Anarcho-Communists.
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The first book to get me to take anarchist ideas seriously, was Illuminatus! Trilogy -- which is why it's the first book I list at BlackCrayon.com.
622 pages into the 800-page novel, we find Hagbard Celine's "Definitions and Distinctions" in which he defines SOCIALISM as "The attempted abolition of all privilege by restoring power entirely to the coercive agent behind privilege, the State, thereby converting capitalist oligarchy into Statist monopoly." I've copied the whole set of definitions to the BlackCrayon library and I highly recommend them.
Robert Anton Wilson (the non-fictional man behind the fictional Hagbard Celine) seems to have derived his anarchism from Benjamin Tucker but Tucker does not share the Celine/Wilson definition of Socialism, as he makes clear in his essay, "State Socialism and Anarchism: How far they agree, and wherein they differ."
Tucker defined Socialism as the claim "that labor should be put in possession of its own," and what Wilson/Celine calls Socialism, Tucker called "State Socialism" -- which he identifies with Karl Marx.
Tucker did describe himself as a socialist, and did strongly oppose Capitalism, though what he meant by the C-word is not what the Anarcho-Capitalists claim to mean by it today. For Tucker, Capitalism was based on a rhetoric that promoted laissez-faire and free-market systems, but that would not, in fact, allow for a true Free Market. As he saw it, Capitalism was based on open competition among workers in the context of little or no competition in capital. Capitalism was maintained by the State through several government-sponsored, anti-free-market monopolies, e.g., The Land Monopoly (taken and maintained by military force), and the Capital monopoly (the fact that The State defined what could be used as legitimate currency and allowed a select few banks to decide what interest would be).
Tucker's anarchism supported a truly free market where labor would still compete freely, but so would capital and currency. Again, Tucker's definition of Capitalism was open-competition of Labor in the context of a State-sponsored monopoly on Capital.
(The Tucker-inspired, Wilson/Celine definition of CAPITALISM is "That organization of society, incorporating elements of tax, usury, landlordism, and tariff, which thus denies the Free Market while pretending to exemplify it.)
Furthermore, Tucker was a libertarian by the definition I give in my brief introduction to Philosophical Anarchism i.e., he objected to the initiation of force or fraud, which he called "invasion". Tucker did want to see an end to the Statist and Capitalist systems, which he believed were founded on and maintained by "invasion", but he objected to violent revolution, because it would have to involve proactive coercion, which he saw as strictly "archist" and not properly anarchist.
At this point, I can imagine objections from others who have studied the history of anarchism, but who don't emphasize Benjamin Tucker and the Individualist tradition so strongly. So let me do a very quick historical review ...
[This section of the original letter has now been expanded into its own essay:]
You mention anarchism's history with the "left". I'm with the Libertarian Partisans in my feeling that Left/Right distinctions don't really make sense in a libertarian political map. (For a good history of the terms "Left" and "Right" in politics, check out "Neither Left Nor Right", published in The Freeman, January 1956 -- and I'm sure you already know the World's Shortest Political Quiz, which tries to add a libertarian/authoritarian axis to the one-dimensional left/right political spectrum.)
In the Wilson/Celine set of definitions, "RIGHT ANARCHISTS predict that in the Free Market people would voluntarily choose to compete more often than to cooperate. LEFT ANARCHISTS predict that in the Free Market people would voluntarily choose to cooperate more often than to compete."
I think a more useful division is between the individualist-anarchist philosophy and social-anarchism.
The main thing that separates the Individualist tradition from the more wide-spread Social Anarchism of the so-called Left, is the philosophical emphasis on the individual. For the individualist, anarchism's proscription against rulers means that no peaceful individual should be subjected to the coercive force of any other individual or of any group. For the social-anarchist, the rights of the individual aren't as much of an emphasis as is the concept of a classless, non-hierarchical society.
In my reading so far, the social-anarchists (who do in fact consider themselves leftists) object to private property, object to markets of exchange and object even to individualism. How they imagine they can abolish such things without a coercive government is beyond me. In general, the more rigorous philosophy seems to get done by the individualists. Even Emma Goldman, of whom I'm very fond, focuses more on rhetoric and propaganda than she does on presenting a coherent theory of freedom.
bk
----------------------------------/(o\-- http://www.bkMarcus.com/ \o)/ ---------------------------------------- > From: billy mac > Sent: Monday, August 26, 2002 2:32 PM > To: bkMarcus@BlackCrayon.com > Subject: the "A" word > > > i went back and re-read the essay you wrote regarding the "A" > word and it's origin and place in society > > i guess the way to look at it is: the evolution of the word, like > man, has been nonlinear and now a piece of it is in a lot of > different categories > > thus we have several groups claiming to be Anarchists because it > may be the true path to freedom and peace, which each wants to > claim to have the answer for without giving up their power > > billy mac >
[Please see also Capitalism v. Socialism v. Anarchism
