Center for a Stateless Society » benjamin tucker

I’ve long held that Greek philosophy and modern libertarianism are natural allies, tailor-made for each other ‘ not because they are similar but because through their very differences each can supply the deficiencies of the other. This debate in Liberty is another example. Both sides of this debate shared a common assumption: that respect for others’ rights is not itself a component of our self-interest. From this assumption it follows that one must choose between putting one’s own interests first and regarding other people’s rights as having intrinsic weight. But this is precisely what is challenged by Classical Eudaimonism, the moral theory pioneered by Socrates, developed in different ways by Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics, and accepted by nearly every major moral philosopher before the Renaissance, including Cicero and Thomas Aquinas.

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Left Wing Individualism

David S. D'Amato — Mon, 11 Aug 2014 19:00:51 +0000

Perhaps because I live in Chicago, perhaps because I work with other attorneys, in my day-to-day life I’m surrounded almost exclusively by people who identify with the mainstream, American left, centrist Democrats for whom mere mention of the word “libertarian” calls forth nightmarish imaginings of the Tea Party right. Regrettably, identifying myself as a libertarian stops any meaningful dialogue with this set before it starts; for them, libertarianism is associated with the extreme right wing of a one-dimensional American political spectrum that they have been successfully trained never to question. They often know just enough about Ayn Rand to regard libertarianism as an oversimplified and merciless case for corporate greed, for an economic status quo that finds the one percent growing ever richer while the “middle class” contracts and the poor suffer in sheer destitution. Ironically, this kind of centrist Democrat probably understands capitalism and its effects better than many libertarians, seeing economic predation for what it is and looking (however unsystematically) for something to step in and pull back on the reins. What they haven’t taken the time to understand, however, is either libertarianism as a real philosophy or the cavernous gulf that separates the economic system of the present moment from real free markets.

Because of this reflex revulsion at the mere mention of libertarianism, experience has inclined me to describing my politics as “left wing individualism.” This characterization, I have found, invites questions rather than angry diatribes, preparing the ground for a fruitful conversation as opposed to a futile debate. I borrow the phrasing “left wing individualism” from Eunice Minette Schuster, who made “A Study of Left-Wing American Individualism” the subtitle of her dissertation, Native American Anarchism. Schuster’s book follows Native American Anarchism from its nascent, prototypical forms to its blossoming as a distinct and fully realized philosophical system and movement. Her study is important insofar as it illumes a strain of political philosophy that can seem confusing and oxymoronic within the context of today’s mainstream political debates.

The individualist anarchists that Schuster discusses in the section of her book that treats anarchism in its “mature” state were both extreme individualists and socialists, architects of a project which we at the Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS) undertake to continue today. As advocates of unhampered freedom of competition, property rights, and the sovereignty of the individual, individualist anarchists are a part of the history of the contemporary libertarian movement. At the same time, like C4SS today, this group opposed capitalism and regarded socialism as, in the words of radical reformer Ezra Heywood, “the great anti-theft movement” of their day. Unlike today’s free market libertarians, who often demonize the poor as welfare receiving “takers,” thinkers like Benjamin Tucker, Ezra Heywood, and Josiah Warren (just to name a few) saw the rich as the true idle, freeloading class, the beneficiaries of privileges that allowed them to game the system and put a stop to real market competition.

These early libertarians saw that freedom and competition work for all the reasons that are familiar to us today: division and specialization of labor, the massive amounts of information distilled in prices, and accordingly the folly of attempting to plan the economy through the greatest monopoly of them all, the state. They argued that genuine competition in a free market is the best, surest way to ensure that labor is paid with its full product, that is, to solve what was then often called the Labor Question; this made them socialists, even if they fit uncomfortably with much of the socialist movement. Their fit with the liberal advocates of free trade and competition — the political economists — was no less uncomfortable, finding the individualist anarchists constantly compelled to school the economists in their own doctrine, to point out the errors and inconsistencies that characterized so much of what passed as defenses of free trade.

The individualist anarchists were sticklers about consistency; if labor was made to come under the law of competition, of supply and demand, then so too should capital. As Schuster points out, the “scientific anarchism” of people like Benjamin Tucker thus “did not appeal to the Capitalist because it demanded not ‘rugged individualism’ but universal individualism” (emphasis added). Because the individualists regarded them as the proximate results of coercive privilege, rent, interest, and profit — the “trinity of usury” — were treated as akin to taxes, allowing the owners of capital the stolen difference between prices under a regime of privilege and prices as they would be under true, open competition. Market competition, therefore, was not the enemy but the friend of the workingman. The argument of market anarchism is simple: If we are to insist that everyone is entitled to whatever he can obtain in a free market, then at least we ought to try having a free market. And a free market cannot tolerate some of the most common historical features of capitalism: aggressive land theft on a massive scale, arbitrary regulatory and licensure systems that function as high cost barriers to market entry and preclude opportunities for self-employment, various direct and indirect subsidies that redistribute wealth to connected firms, and a government-created system of financial laws and institutions which produces the Wall Street cartel we have today. It turns out, then, that capitalism doesn’t quite square with what libertarians really want when we endorse free markets. We’re not as close to a free market system as even many libertarians like to pretend. It is not a matter of making a few tweaks and free market reforms here and there, of privatizing a few governmental monopolies and deregulating a few industries. Rather to get there from here would mean a thoroughgoing, systematic departure from the capitalistic tyranny we have and have had for a long time, a system which indeed is the direct successor of statist systems before from feudalism to mercantilism.

Anarchists such as Warren and Tucker understood this and spent their lives declaiming against an inequitable, capitalistic status quo that systematically disadvantages working people. And notwithstanding the all too eager efforts to consign them to the political right — even to write them out of the anarchist tradition — they belong (if anywhere) on the left, as Schuster understood. Epitomizing the gross misunderstanding of individualist anarchism among left wing academics, historian David DeLeon, in his book The American as Anarchist, labels Benjamin Tucker a “right libertarian” and amazingly names Ronald Reagan and George Wallace as ideological successors. Elsewhere in the book, DeLeon offhandedly classifies Voltairine de Cleyre, whose escapades in anarchism do not lend themselves to any easy pigeonholing, as simply an “Anarcho-Communist.” No less concerning is his incredible claim that Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman were all right libertarians. If one dedicated to the professional study of these figures and their movements can so deeply misinterpret the picture, it is no wonder that individualist anarchism should confuse the mainstream layperson’s political mind.

Calling myself a “left wing individualist” is one of the things I do to help reintroduce the individualist anarchism of the nineteenth century, a tradition that balances the individual and community in a way that is desperately needed in a world dominated by centralized power. The libertarian movement itself, moreover, ought not be so quick to dismiss anarchists such as Tucker as economically illiterate relics of a bygone age. After all, any consideration of how economic relationships would look in a genuine free market is in the nature of pure speculation. Libertarians who believe those relationships would look very much like they do today are seriously lacking in imagination and cannot fathom the depth of the change that real respect for individual sovereignty would bring about.

Brief Introduction To Left-Wing Laissez Faire Economic Theory: Part Two

Natasha Petrova — Sat, 10 May 2014 02:00:12 +0000

In this post, I continue my brief introduction to left-wing laissez faire economic theory. Let’s get started.

After discussing Benjamin Tucker’s four big monopolies, the next big thing to discuss is that of contemporary mutualist/individualist anarchist – Kevin Carson. I already made use of some of his stuff, but I want to highlight the innovations of Kevin.

Kevin discusses how government subsidies to transportation help big corporate interests ship long distance. This leads to artificially big markets and centralized economic actors. The ensuing concentration of wealth leads to more inequality in the economy. As Kevin puts it:

Spending on transportation and communications networks from general revenues, rather than from taxes and user fees, allows big business to “externalize its costs” on the public, and conceal its true operating expenses.

He goes on to describe the centralizing effect of state built and funded infrastructure:

Every wave of concentration of capital in the United States has followed a publicly subsidized infrastructure system of some sort. The national railroad system, built largely on free or below-cost land donated by the government, was followed by concentration in heavy industry, petrochemicals, and finance.

He also engages in novel thinking about economic value theory. His notion is one of a subjective labor theory of value. An integration of the labor approach to value theory with the Austrian subjective approach. He states:

A producer will continue to bring his goods to market only if he receives a price necessary, in his subjective evaluation, to compensate him for the disutility involved in producing them. And he will be unable to charge a price greater than this necessary amount, for a very long time, if market entry is free and supply is elastic, because competitors will enter the field until price equals the disutility of producing the final increment of the commodity.

Other aspects of this approach to economics worth mentioning includes the effect of regulatory government or the state. The consequences of said regulations tend to involve the creation of oligopolies and monopolies. They remove areas of quality or safety from competition and thus produce standardized “markets” without dynamism. Roy Childs Jr. made use of the New Leftist historian, Gabriel Kolko’s work to drive home this point:

As Gabriel Kolko demonstrates in his masterly The Triumph of Conservatism and in Railroads and Regulation, the dominant trend in the last three decades of the nineteenth century and the first two of the twentieth was not towards increasing centralization, but rather, despite the growing number of mergers and the growth in the overall size of many corporations,

toward growing competition. Competition was unacceptable to many key business and financial leaders, and the merger movement was to a large extent a reflection of voluntary, unsuccessful business efforts to bring irresistible trends under control. … As new competitors sprang up, and as economic power was diffused throughout an expanding nation, it became apparent to many important businessmen that only the national government could [control and stabilize] the economy. … Ironically, contrary to the consensus of historians, it was not the existence of monopoly which caused the federal government to intervene in the economy, but the lack of it.1

Other types of economic interventionism that benefit corporate actors include direct taxpayer funded subsidies or corporate welfare. A report mentioned on Alternet discuses how the Fortune 100 companies have recently received 1.2 trillion dollars in corporate welfare. Economic interventionism also takes the form of the U.S. military forcibly opening up markets for U.S. businesses. This is mistakenly considered a part of “free trade”. It’s also worth mentioning the use of the police or military to break strikes as a form of pro-business interventionism. This was particularly true of the allegedly free market gilded age.

What does all the above say about the primary role of the state or government as an actor within the economy? It supports the idea that the state or the government is the executive committee of an economic ruling class to borrow a phrase from Karl Marx. It may also engage in secondary activities like the provision of social welfare for the poor and unemployed, but the level of support is far below that given to dominant corporate actors which often have a multinational reach. These actions don’t mean the state or government generally genuinely cares about the well-being of the least well off. The primary actions of the state or government serve to concentrate money in gthe hands of a ruling class. The secondary ones attempt to clean up the mess created by the drastic inequality created. That ends our analysis. Until next time!

Benjamin Tucker and the Individualist Anarchists (with David D’Amato)

David S. D'Amato — Thu, 08 May 2014 19:00:21 +0000

Senior Fellow and Trustee at the Center for a Stateless Society David D’Amato joins Aaron Powell and Trevor Burrus for a conversation about the idea of voluntary socialism through the lens of the individualist anarchists of the 19th century. They discuss the life and philosophy of Benjamin Tucker, Voltairine de Cleyre, and others, and explain how the definitions of socialism and capitalism have changed over the years.

Brief Introduction To Left-Wing Laissez Faire Economic Theory: Part One

Natasha Petrova — Wed, 07 May 2014 23:00:57 +0000

In my last two blog posts, I responded to Lynn Stuart Parramore’s article titled How Piketty’s Bombshell Book Blew Up Libertarian Fantasies. At the end of the second one, I promised an explanation of the economic theory I used to critique her article. This post will be a brief introduction to said economic theory. Let’s get started.

This theory is called left-wing market anarchism or laissez faire socialism. Its basic contention is that a truly freed market has never existed, and that capitalism is a statist system. There is also the conviction that genuinely freed markets would result in greater relative equality and more worker friendly conditions. The first thing to cover are the four big monopolies identified by the late individualist anarchist, Benjamin Tucker. They are described in his famous essay, State Socialism and Anarchism: How Far They Agree, And Wherein They Differ. They are the money monopoly, land monopoly, tariff monopoly, and the patent monopoly or intellectual property monopolies. Let us consider each in turn.

1) The money monopoly pertains to a government or state grant of privilege to select individuals or people possessing certain types of property. This privilege is the exclusive right to issue money. The effect of this is to keep interest rates artificially high or maintain them period. In a left-libertarian market anarchist society, anyone would be free to issue a currency. There would be a competitive whittling down of lending money to the labor cost of conducting banking business. Another positive effect identified by Tucker would be the absence of control mentioned below:

It is claimed that the holders of this privilege control the rate of interest, the rate of rent of houses and buildings, and the prices of goods,—the first directly, and the second and third indirectly.

Kevin Carson has quoted Alexander Cairncross to the effect that:

the American worker has at his disposal a larger stock of capital at home than in the factory where he is employed….

Said capital or property would serve as collateral or backing. This would increase the bargaining power of labor in relation to capital, because the laborers would be able to organize their own credit systems for conducting independent business apart from the capitalists. As Gary Elkin notes:

It’s important to note that because of Tucker’s proposal to increase the bargaining power of workers through access to mutual credit, his so-called Individualist anarchism is not only compatible with workers’ control but would in fact promote it. For if access to mutual credit were to increase the bargaining power of workers to the extent that Tucker claimed it would, they would then be able to (1) demand and get workplace democracy, and (2) pool their credit buy and own companies collectively.

2) The land monopoly consists of governments or states granting or protecting land titles not based on occupation and use. This is a critique of absentee landlordism and the rent following therefrom. This has the effect of shutting out land based work as a competitive factor with industry. It also destroyed the independence to be derived from occupying land or making use of a stateless commons.

3) The tariff monopoly pertains to the protection of the profits of domestic capitalist industry from foreign competition. This increases the price of goods and thus extracts more of the product of laborers from them. It also helps create oligopolies or monopolies, because there is no competitive whittling down of profit or size. It’s worth noting that Pierre-Joseph Proudhon thought the money monopoly had to be abolished before the tariff monopoly, because the people put out of work by foreign competition would need a market with a vast demand for labor to find different work.

4) The patent or intellectual property monopoly allows people to extract monopoly prices from things that could conceivably be competed over. A person is also denied the ability to use their property in a way they see fit through aggressive force. Two people can write the same book without stealing from each other. Patents are also pooled by corporations to prevent any competition and to control economic resources. This allows them to lock the third world into a dependence on them for technology. In addition to the above, Kevin Carson has noted:

A survey of U.S. firms found that 86% of inventions would have been developed without patents. In the case of automobiles, office equipment, rubber products, and textiles, the figure was 100%.

The one exception was drugs, in which 60% supposedly would not have been invented. I suspect disingenuousness on the part of the respondants, however. For one thing, drug companies get an unusually high portion of their R & D funding from the government, and many of their most lucrative products were developed entirely at government expense. And Scherer himself cited evidence to the contrary. The reputation advantage for being the first into a market is considerable. For example in the late 1970s, the structure of the industry and pricing behavior was found to be very similar between drugs with and those without patents. Being the first mover with a non-patented drug allowed a company to maintain a 30% market share and to charge premium prices.

In my next post, I will continue this introduction.

Stay tuned!

May Day: An American — And Libertarian! — Holiday

Kevin Carson — Wed, 30 Apr 2014 18:00:28 +0000

Americans have been conditioned to think of May Day as a “commie holiday,” one associated until recently with military parades in Red Square and leaders of Marxist-Leninist regimes exchanging “fraternal greetings” in the names of their respective peoples. They might be surprised to learn it was originally an American holiday, created by Chicago workers in commemoration of the eight-hour day campaign and the Haymarket Martyrs.

Perhaps even more surprising — as much so to modern American libertarians as anyone else — is the fact that May Day is part of the free market libertarian movement’s heritage. That’s counter-intuitive for obvious reasons. Since the time of Mises and Rand, American libertarianism has generally been identified — often justifiably — with a reflexive defense of capitalism and big business. But despite the rightward political shift of the free market movement in the 20th century, there was a very large free market Left in the 19th century, frequently with close ties to the labor and socialist movements.

Classical liberalism had common Enlightenment roots, overlapping considerably in its origins with the early socialist movement. A broad current of thinkers, like the British Thomas Hodgskin and the American individualist anarchists (or Boston anarchists) around Benjamin Tucker and Liberty magazine, belonged within both the free market libertarian and libertarian socialist camps. In their view capitalism was a system in which the state intervened in the market on behalf of landlords and other rentiers, enforcing the artificial property rights, monopolies and artificial scarcities from which profit, interest and rent derived. They saw the proper goal of socialism as abolition of these monopolies, allowing market competition in the supply of capital and land to drive the assorted rents derived from them down to zero, so that the natural market wage of labor would be its full product.

So perhaps it’s not so surprising after all that many of these thinkers would have close ties with, or be active participants in, the American socialist and labor movements. Benjamin Tucker himself, although a self-described socialist, was fairly lukewarm toward labor organization. He saw the chief avenues of action as organizing against absentee landlords and setting up interest-free mutual banks, and took an agnostic view of whatever particular forms of association people might choose in an economy free of such monopolies.

But several members of the Boston anarchist group and the Liberty circle were active participants in the New England Labor Reform League or William Sylvis’s National Labor Union, and later in the American Labor Reform League. There was also a significant contingent of individualists in the International Working People’s Association (formed by anarchists who withdrew from the First International as it became increasingly dominated by Marx’s followers), and in the nationwide movement and general strike for the eight-hour day. Some leading individualists involved in socialist and labor politics included Ezra Heywood, William Greene, J.K. Ingalls and Stephen Pearl Andrews.

Individualists like Dyer Lum later attempted to build bridges with the radical labor movement. Lum tried to fuse the individualist framework of economic analysis with radical labor activism. He was closely involved with the Knights of Labor and AFL. Lawrence Labadie went on to promote individualist anarchist and mutualist ideas within industrial unions — first in the Western Federation of Miners and then in the Wobblies.

The popular association of May Day with Marxist-Leninist parties and state communist regimes reflects an overwhelming ideological victory for the apologists of corporate capitalism in the 20th century. The ideological counter-offensive began with the cult of “Old Glory” and the Pledge of Allegiance in the 1890s, continued with the movement for “Americanization” within workplaces and public schools, and culminated in the War Hysteria and Red Scare of the Wilson administration and the brown-shirt terror tactics of the American Legion, Klan and local Red Squads.

This ideological victory was associated with another, largely contemporaneous victory: The association of “free markets” and “free enterprise” with corporate capitalism in the public mind, and the belief (also promoted by the authoritarian managerialists of the “progressive” movement who went on to steal the name “liberal”) that the regulatory state and big business are adversaries rather than allies.

Today is an excellent time not only to reclaim May Day as a quintessentially American holiday, entirely compatible with the love of liberty, but to reclaim free markets as the enemy of corporate power and capitalism.

Did Someone Say McThor’s? on C4SS Media

James Tuttle — Wed, 23 Apr 2014 19:00:35 +0000

C4SS Media presents Joel Schlosberg‘s “Did Somebody Say McThor’s?” read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford.

Only in an industry with grotesquely overextended operating costs could a film like Hulk take significant creative risks, gross a quarter-billion dollars, and still be regarded as box office poison. Even in an economy stacked against their audience awareness, comics properties like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and The Walking Dead have achieved multimedia success while remaining independently owned. Steadily decreasing capital costs for multimedia production could allow this to become the rule rather than the exception.

Benjamin Ricketson Tucker

James Tuttle — Mon, 21 Apr 2014 19:00:44 +0000

Following the military defeat of the Southern Jeffersonians in the Civil War and the war reparations placed upon their property and livelihood, the American political world was left to the Hamiltonians for a generation. There were few options left. Jeffersonians in the North were tagged as Copperheads and rebel sympathizers. Southern Jeffersonians were disenfranchised in more ways than one. Tariff increases initiated by the Republican Party sent long-time Jeffersonian strongholds into bankruptcy. Many would later attempt to rebuild the lost economy of the South with the few scraps left by the carpetbaggers of the North; others left for the West in the hopes of finding better opportunities. The power gained by the Republicans was to give political control of the South and most of the other states within the Union to the G.O.P. With this free hand, there was little opposition to the special grants and privileges which were sought by their supporters and interests.

The next political battle the Jeffersonians were to undertake was much later against the Tariff. This effort energized a new generation of Jeffersonians. Tariffs, by the late 1870’s not only eliminated the federal debt but filled the coffers of the federal government with a surplus unheard of by any of the previous administrations. Indeed, it was an embarrassing surplus with little reason to exist. There were interest groups fighting over control of this surplus, including railroad interests, Northern banking interests and ex-soldiers and soldier wives’ pension demands.

Much of the later American designs in the Pacific and elsewhere were a consequence of this surplus as Republicans fought to gain additional territory through military occupation and continued increasing control over lands reserved for Indians. Imperial designs were made upon Spanish claims.

As the Republicans understood, tariffs are a natural income for a nationalist state. It places control at the border as to what products may or may not enter. It is only a national state dominated by special interests which inherently benefits from these taxes. What is the proper revenue for local needs and focuses on benefits accrued from individuals within states and local jurisdictions for a republican state allied with other republican states in a federal system? Of necessity, it must be a form which, if not a voluntary payment, is of a nature which is controlled by the polity closest to the individual, wherein choices are made on the smallest level possible. Tariffs were certainly not the answer

The growing Free Trade Movement sought an end to the tariffs and corruption in state and federal governments by every means available to them, leading to several outcomes. The first and most important was the rise of the Democratic Party with Grover Cleveland [PDF] at its helm. The next most important were the rise of the “Mugwumps” within the Republican party. For many Jeffersonian radicals, neither went far enough or sufficiently effective in their efforts and looked for alternatives.

The first major movement of the radical Jeffersonians evolved from the insights of a young journalist and firebrand, Henry George. With the publication of Progress and Poverty, as well as number of other books, pamphlets, essays and articles, a new movement arose with ideas for a dynamic capitalist free society, the single tax movement. The idea of limiting all government to a single tax based upon land value was debated across dinner tables and lecture halls throughout the country. It would preserve the Jeffersonian ideal by its primary emphasis upon providing income for cities and local communities (as land taxes have always done) and little for the higher levels (state and federal) save for what would accrue for a frugal government willing to provide for state and national concerns. This paleolibertarian notion was the direction of political activism for radical libertarians for generations.

Following the Civil War came a growing preoccupation with public corruption, beginning to overshadow concerns among reformers with Reconstruction itself. Their enthusiasm for the Republican party began to evaporate during Grant’s administration. Tucker described his only sojourn into politics in The Life of Benjamin Tucker, Disclosed by Himself, In the Principality of Monaco, At the Age of 74:

Four years of Grant and corruption had disgusted me with the Republican party, and the chance of seeing an honest man in the White House in the person of Horace Greeley, whom I had so long admired, made me eager for the fray. In Theodore Tilton’s …establishment of his new paper, The Golden Age, I found an immediate opportunity for participation, as Tilton, in his youth a Tribune reporter under Greeley, had espoused the cause of his old employer, and was devoting both pen and tongue to his election. …I had still a few weeks in New Bedford, and it occurred to me that a part of that time might well be devoted to a canvass for subscriptions to The Golden Age. Less than a week’s work in the city resulted in a list of respectable propositions, — about thirty names, I believe, — and without previous consultation with the management of the paper, I dispatched both the addresses and the money…, they rose promptly to the occasion. Straightway came a letter … urgently inviting me to take the agency for the entire State of Massachusetts. My refusal [was] based on the ground that I was soon to accompany my parents to Vermont…However, even in hopelessly Republican Vermont, I had one opportunity, while at Bellows Fall, to lift my feeble voice in the good cause…

The stagnation of party politics in the mire of narrow partisanship and repeated scandals during the “Great Barbecue” of the Gilded Age cleared the way. The abolitionist, freethinker and father of the mutual insurance industry, Elizur Wright, spoke to black voters in the 1872 election that the Party of Lincoln had only freed the slaves as a wartime “expedient…It is you[r] obvious policy not to wed yourselves for better or worse to either party…but to go for that which best deserves and most needs your help…The great question now before the Republican party, and all the rest of us is whether after our bloody cutting out of cancer [slavery], we are to rot by the cancer of our corruption.” While he supported Grant’s troops ordered to combat the KKK, he would later say, “What is the use of keeping people’s throats from being cut, if they are to be perpetually robbed?” (p. 180-81).

By July 4, 1876, Wright would found, with other former abolitionists (such as Moses Harmon), the National Liberal League which supported black emancipation, women’s rights, but above all they identified themselves as individualists threatened by the imposition of state-enforced Christian dogma: “The platform of the coming millions is the individual,” as Wright would say (p. 182). The League’s stress was upon personal rights, civil liberties and freedom of thought. Anthony Comstock’s crusade against vice and obscenity was to become their most noted battle front, with Ezra Heywood, who was arrested for the publication of his essay, Cupid’s Yoke. D.M. Bennett, editor of freethought periodical, The Truthseeker, was also arrested by Comstock for mailing a copy of Cupid’s Yoke through the U.S. Postal Service.

Ezra Heywood, an elderly abolitionist and opponent of the Civil War (he had opposed the violent methods used by Lincoln as well as that of the Confederate States of America), was highly regarded as a “gentle anarchist” who was fighting a battle for freedom of information, and the rights of consenting adults to their own personal relationships. An ardent feminist as well (and married to a strident feminist, Angela Heywood), he believed that men had reduced women to such socioeconomic dependence that, in order to live, women were forced to chose between selling their labor for next to nothing or selling their bodies into unwanted unions. This Heywood believed to be an insufferable injustice and devoted his writings to free love as a form of freedom from another type of slavery, as he explained in Uncivil Liberty as well as in Cupid’s Yoke.

Here is the point where the subject of this article comes in, for he meets Ezra Heywood in 1873 at the National Free-Love Convention held in Ravenna, Ohio. Benjamin Tucker, who had become one of the controversial feminist Victoria Woodhull‘s “boy-toy” at the age of 19. As a long-time friend, J. William Lloyd would describe Tucker as a:

Well-groomed, fashionably dressed, with a neatly trimmed dark beard (beards were fashionable then), a swarthy complexion, flashing black eyes, a frequent if perhaps slightly nervous laugh, and a charmingly genial manner, which I never knew him to lose… Handsome, a brilliant translator, an editor of meticulous care and finish, a trenchant reasoner, with a faith and enthusiasm for his “ism” that had no bounds, he was like a strong current that swept us along… Tucker’s manner of writing was what chiefly attracted attention to him. No more fiery and furious apostle ever put pen to paper. A veritable baresark of dialectics. He was dogmatic to the extreme, arrogantly positive, browbeating and dominating, true to his “plumb-line” no matter who was slain, and brooked no difference, contradiction or denial. Biting sarcasm, caustic contempt, invective that was sometimes almost actual insult, were poured out on any who dared criticize or oppose… this swashbuckler, on paper, when you met him in person, was the most genial, affable, and charming gentlemen that you could possibly imagine, kind, gentle and always smiling. I discounted this as toward myself but I could not learn that anyone had ever had a hard spoken word from him, and I have never to this day heard of one who had. Face to face this tiger was a dove.

Benjamin R. Tucker was to become America’s greatest expositor of the philosophy of “unterrified Jeffersonianism” (as he called it), most commonly known as anarchism. Child of a Quaker father. a Jeffersonian Democrat and Painite Unitarian mother activist, both of old Yankee stock, he grew up as a child reading Darwin, Spencer, Buckle, Huxley and Tyndall, and listened to speeches by such as Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Emerson, Wendell Phillips, Carl Shurz and Charles Bradlaugh. When he moved in 1872 to Boston to study at MIT, he would meet and become friends with other American radicals like Josiah Warren, William B. Greene, Stephen Pearl Andrews and, of course, Ezra Heywood. As a matter of course while beginning his career as a journalist, mainly with the Boston Globe, he would work with journalists, many sympathetic with his views, and become familiar with other writers who would come into his circle of friends as he began publishing, editing and writing in the radical press of this time.

In 1892 in “Why I am an Anarchist” in The Twentieth Century, a New York weekly edited by Hugh O. Pentecost, Tucker said that anarchy is,

The realization of liberty. Destroy the banking monopoly, establish freedom in finance, and down will go interest on money through the beneficent influence of competition. Capital will be set free, business will flourish, new enterprises will start, labour will rise at a level with its product. And it is the same with the other monopolies. Abolish the tariffs, issue no patents, take down the bars from unoccupied land, and labour will straightaway rush in and take possession of its own. Then mankind will live in freedom and in comfort. That is what I want to see; that is what I love to think of. And because Anarchism will give this state of things, I am an Anarchist.” (reprinted in Man! An Anthology of Anarchist Ideas, Essays, Poetry and Commmentaries edited by Marcus Graham, London: Cienfuegos Press, 1976. p. 136)

Tucker’s beliefs were set down in the first issue of Liberty in August 1881:

Liberty insists on the sovereignty of the individual and the just reward of labor; on the abolition of the State and the abolition of usury; on no more government of man by man, and no more exploitation of man by man; on Anarchy and Equity.-Liberty‘s war-cry is ‘Down with authority’ and its chief battle with the State-the State that corrupts children; the state that trammels law; the State that stifles thought; the State that monopolizes land; the State that give idle capital the power to increase, and through interest, rent, profit and taxes robs industrious labor of its products.

Tucker is best known as the author of Instead of a Book, By a Man Too Busy to Write One and Individual Liberty, both collections of essays culled mainly from Radical Review (1877-1878) and Liberty (1881-1908). Tucker’s free-wheeling, laissez-faire, free market anarchism tinged with free love, Stirnerism with a good dose of humor, was analyzed, criticized, commended and blackballed, but it could not be ignored. His periodicals included discussion, propaganda, literary writings of note, debates, essays. The periodicals were brilliantly edited, typed in the best formats of its day, with beautiful artwork and photos. It would be in his periodicals that libertarians would know what is available and what were the issues were being debated.

A generation of radicals grew up reading his periodicals, books and essays in America, Europe and elsewhere. His staff of associates and writers were the best that Liberty produced. He popularized Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, and printed G.B. Shaw prior to any other American publisher. When Liberty stopped publishing in 1908 when Tucker’s bookstore burned down, he would continue to write and communicate with others until his death in Monaco.

His impact was considerable, both within his own generation, and to the generations of libertarians that have come afterward as Rudolf Rocker points out in Pioneers of American Freedom (Los Angeles: Rocker Publication Committee, 1949. pp. 118-154)

Did Somebody Say McThor’s?

Joel Schlosberg — Sat, 05 Apr 2014 18:00:17 +0000

The analogy in the headline “Thor 2 is a Cinematic McDonald’s Cheeseburger” (Eileen Jones, Jacobin) is apt. There is indeed a strong parallel between the predominance in comics-to-film adaptations and diner-food restaurants: A few homogenous, formulaic products aimed at broad mass-market appeal. But far from Jones’s “perfect example of how market competition does not actually provide us with the highest quality product,” both are textbook illustrations of Benjamin Tucker’s 1899 observation that “the trusts, instead of growing out of competition, as is so generally supposed, have been made possible only by the absence of competition, only by the difficulty of competition, only by the obstacles placed in the way of competition — only, in short, by those arbitrary limitations of competition which we find in those law created privileges and monopolies.”

When asked by Equal Time for Freethought if the fact that “we have McDonald’s, we have Burger King, we have Arby’s; we’ve got a number of entities out there competing with our business” means the current market economy is fundamentally different than the overt chartered monopolies of the mercantilist age, Douglas Rushkoff replied that “McDonald’s and Burger King are essentially the same thing; in the long run the same class of speculators, of shareholders, who are running these companies. The problem is that it’s impossible for smaller, local entities — for people who actually do things, who create value in sustainable ways — to compete against them. And the worse the policies of these companies get, the harder it is actually for us to compete against them, because they get regulations put in place by government that actually cements their place in.”

Intellectual property law is similarly written to benefit big established players, concentrating monopoly rights to the backlog of ideas. A sequel to an adaptation of a character based on mythology owned by a corporation whose bread-and-butter is drawing on folklore exemplifies the funnel effect. It’s even explicitly noted in Jacobin that Marvel is “focused to an alarming degree on denying ownership rights to its content creators.”

Rushkoff notes that contrary to the view that due to economies of scale, “mass production and industry is somehow more efficient than local commerce, local creation of goods and services” in fact “[i]t’s only more efficient when you write laws that make it more efficient. So while big industry is certainly more efficient for, maybe, making microchips, or making things that you need big companies and thousands of people to do, it’s not more efficient to make oats that way, or corn that way; or any of the things that we can make and store locally for one another.” One of which is engaging sequential-art stories on paper. The small teams of writers and illustrators that produce individual comics stories issue-by-issue resemble the independent mom-and-pop diners that predominated before the subsidized rise of fast food chains. Rather than taking centralized production as given and reining in its worst aspects, removing the chokehold of distribution gatekeepers would allow a multitude of small-scale producers to connect directly with their audience.

In the early twentieth century, competition between local newspapers for readership produced comics masterpieces like Little Nemo in Slumberland and Krazy Kat. A Tuckerite competitive market would unleash that ferment on — to borrow an idea invented in those funny pages — Popeye’s spinach.