Some people might see an internal contradiction between Hoppe’s repeated use of the term “dominated” to describe the role of certain privileged segments of society, and the idea that “libertarian” ideas were formulated by societies based on domination.

But obviously Hoppe does not, since he makes little effort to hide his salivation at the prospect that his avowedly principled belief in self-ownership, non-aggression and rules of initial acquisition will have the effect — just coincidentally, of course — of perpetuating the domination of these same white heterosexual males. So the primary beneficiaries of the ideas of liberty that straight white men invented will be those same straight white men.

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If there is one fact our collective history clearly reveals it is that large, centralized nation-states are the worlds most terrifying institutions. The 20th century alone is testament to this. The rise of fascism brought a premature end to nearly 100 million lives. The rise of the Bolsheviks tells a tale of an increasingly oppressive regime addicted to power. State capitalism and the rise of neo-liberal economics in the west are equally disastrous, responsible for a century of perpetual warfare.

Public intellectual Randolph Bourne once wrote, “war is the health of the state.” In the last century the machines of war reached frightening heights of power. The production of nuclear weapons can end all life as we know it. States may cause the greatest extinction in all of Earth’s history. This — the end of our species and countless others — is a real and looming threat.

The state is a system of power and domination. Such a monopoly serves to institutionalize the creeds of racism, sexism, class division, protectionism, biocentrism and more. This is true even in the most “democratic” of nations, including the United States. Such archism deserves abolition. The state is damned.

Yet, here in the fog, there too exists our beautiful struggle.

There is a great tradition in human history: Liberation. We long to be free. Human action continues to prove that with agency we can do great things for one another. We continue to labor, create, preserve and exercise goodwill.

Our inclined labor will produce a world where the children of humanity will live unbound by chains, where no fire or whip will meet their flesh. There will be no need to pledge allegiance to a nation, but all the reason to imagine a world of real and lasting peace. Not a world of dreamers, but a world of contracts, liberated economics and the splendor of the human condition. The peace of common interest, wildness and mutualism.

We must remember this. We must always remember those who risked and sometimes lost their lives and freedom for such an order. We must remember to love those who raised liberty’s hammer. Those who broke down the walls that caged us. We must remember so light will ever conquer darkness — so liberty will no longer be a simple flame, but a piercing, radiant torch.

We will be free. We will face the world without fear. We will stand together and howl into the face of those who wish to reign over us. We will ever challenge their rule. We will continue our embrace of liberty. Global movements have ignited. Join hands, unite the riot — coordinate and cultivate the free society. As we enter the new year, breath deep, let the winter air fill your lungs. Know that you are an animal, that you are alive and demand your freedom. Damn those who wish to deny you. Stare into the dark night and howl. Howl!

The purpose of this particular essay is simply to apply some of the principles of libertarianism to an interpretation of events in a very special and important period of human history. I have attempted to give a straightforward summary of New Left revisionist findings in one area of domestic history: the antitrust movement and Progressive Era. But I have done so not as a New Leftist, not as a historian proper, but as a libertarian, that is, a social philosopher of a specific school.

In doing this summary, I have two interrelated purposes: first, to show Objectivists and libertarians that certain of their beliefs in history are wrong and need to be revised under the impact of new evidence, and simultaneously to illustrate to them a specific means of approaching historical problems, to identify one cause of the growth of American statism and to indicate a new way of looking at history.

Secondly, my purpose is to show New Left radicals that far from undermining the position of laissez-faire capitalism (as opposed to what they call state capitalism, a system of government controls which is not yet socialism in the classic sense), their historical discoveries actually support the case for a totally free market. Then, too, I wish to illustrate how a libertarian would respond to the problems raised by New Left historians.

Finally, I wish implicitly to apply Occam’s razor by showing that there is a simpler explanation of events than that so often colored with Marxist theory. Without exception, Marxist postulates are not necessary to explain the facts of reality.

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The Left… is convinced of the fundamental equality of man, that all men are “created equal.” It does not deny the patently obvious, of course: that there are environmental and physiological differences, i.e., that some people live in the mountains and others on the seaside, or that some men are tall and others short, some white and others black, some male and others female, etc.. But the Left does deny the existence of mental differences or, insofar as these are too apparent to be entirely denied, it tries to explain them away as “accidental.”…

In fact the Left (or at least most members of it) does not deny that there are differences in individual ability and intellect. But never mind that. Hoppe isn’t satisfied to stop there:

…[The right libertarian] realistically notices that libertarianism, as an intellectual system, was first developed and furthest elaborated in the Western world, by white males, in white male dominated societies. That it is in white, heterosexual male dominated societies, where adherence to libertarian principles is the greatest and the deviations from them the least severe (as indicated by comparatively less evil and extortionist State policies). That it is white heterosexual men, who have demonstrated the greatest ingenuity, industry, and economic prowess. And that it is societies dominated by white heterosexual males, and in particular by the most successful among them, which have produced and accumulated the greatest amount of capital goods and achieved the highest average living standards.

Some people might see an internal contradiction between Hoppe’s repeated use of the term “dominated” to describe the role of certain privileged segments of society, and the idea that “libertarian” ideas were formulated by societies based on domination.

But obviously Hoppe does not, since he makes little effort to hide his salivation at the prospect that his avowedly principled belief in self-ownership, non-aggression and rules of initial acquisition will have the effect — just coincidentally, of course — of perpetuating the domination of these same white heterosexual males. So the primary beneficiaries of the ideas of liberty that straight white men invented will be those same straight white men.

Hoppe is fond of arguing that every single bit of naturally scarce property should be assigned to “some specified individual.” From there, in a typical restatement of his stock argument, he goes on to assume the universal appropriation of all land within a country. And with all land in the entire country, including roads, under individual ownership, it follows that nobody can enter the country or travel along any stretch of road without the permission of some private landowner or landowners. This, at one stroke, solves the “problem” of immigration, since — although national borders as such do not exist — no one but an invited employee or bracero can enter a universally appropriated America without trespassing on somebody’s land. It also solves the gay rights “problem” since, the country being composed overwhelmingly of God-fearing Christian folk like Hoppe himself, nobody will want “those people” on their property. If you find the libertarianism of Thomas Paine and William Godwin hard to stomach, through the miracle of universal appropriation you (assuming you’re a straight white propertied male) can make your own “free” neo-feudal society in the image of The Handmaid’s Tale.

Maybe everybody else who’s not straight, white or male will benefit from having those smart straight white men managing them for their own good.

Hoppe’s ideas of universal appropriation don’t seem to hold up so well, though, at least from the perspective of someone without Herr Doktor Professor Hoppe’s Mount Rushmore-sized brain. Even among right-libertarians, the usual standard of legitimacy in private appropriation of land is that of John Locke and Murray Rothbard: actual occupancy and use. A piece of land that is undeveloped and unaltered is, by definition, unowned. And the vast majority of land in the United States, as no less a libertarian than Albert Jay Nock noted, is vacant and unimproved. The only way — now and in the foreseeable future — that land could ever be universally appropriated is through what Franz Oppenheimer called “political appropriation” and Nock called “law-made property.” This is the same thing that Rothbard — a name you’d think would carry some weight with Hoppe — called engrossment: the enclosure of land not yet occupied or developed, in order to collect tribute from its rightful owners, the first people to occupy it and put it to use.

Leaving aside Hoppe’s views on the universal appropriation of land and exclusion therefrom of “undesirables,” he also neglects the fact that the benevolent, naturally libertarian white men in the “civilized” West spent a few centuries robbing, pillaging and enslaving the non-European parts of the world that it colonized, before they decided to share the blessings of liberty with them. In the process of doing so, they also destroyed an awful lot of preexisting civilization and gutted a lot of civil society — and wealth — there.

Jawaharlal Nehru argued with some plausibility that Bengal was the poorest part of India because that was its first site of infection by the disease of British colonialism, via Warren Hastings. The British systematically stamped out the Indian textile industry as a competitor with Manchester, and also (starting with Hastings’ Permanent Settlement) robbed most of the population of their property in land and turned local elites into wealth extraction conduits for Empire.

And when these good-hearted white Western males they finally did get around to sharing these nifty new ideas of liberty with the people of color they ruled, they kept all the stuff they’d looted in the meantime — as a reward, I suppose, for their selflessness in inventing liberty for the good of all those brown and black people who would otherwise never have heard of it.

It almost makes you wonder, though, if there wasn’t some other, less costly way those unfortunate people of color might have acquired ideas of liberty.

Speaking of which, I almost forgot David Graeber’s account of consensus-based decision-making as an almost universal phenomenon throughout history, as opposed to Hoppe’s idea of “human rights” and “democracy” being some unique creation of the White Male Canon that required a Manhattan Project-level of effort and genius to come up with. Western conservatives (of whom Hoppe is one) typically see human liberty and self-government as the kind of advance ideas that only white males in places like Periclean Athens or Philadelphia ca. 1787 could come up with. On this assumption, Graeber comments:

Of course it’s the peculiar bias of Western historiography that this is the only sort of democracy that is seen to count as “democracy” at all. We are usually told that democracy originated in ancient Athens — like science, or philosophy, it was a Greek invention. It’s never entirely clear what this is supposed to mean. Are we supposed to believe that before the Athenians, it never really occurred to anyone, anywhere, to gather all the members of their community in order to make joint decisions in a way that gave everyone equal say? That would be ridiculous. Clearly there have been plenty of egalitarian societies in history — many far more egalitarian than Athens, many that must have existed before 500 BCE — and obviously, they must have had some kind of procedure for coming to decisions for matters of collective importance. Yet somehow, it is always assumed that these procedures, whatever they might have been, could not have been, properly speaking, “democratic.”

* * *

The real reason for the unwillingness of most scholars to see a Sulawezi or Tallensi village council as “democratic” — well, aside from simple racism, the reluctance to admit anyone Westerners slaughtered with such relative impunity were quite on the level as Pericles — is that they do not vote. Now, admittedly, this is an interesting fact. Why not? If we accept the idea that a show of hands, or having everyone who supports a proposition stand on one side of the plaza and everyone against stand on the other, are not really such incredibly sophisticated ideas that they never would have occurred to anyone until some ancient genius “invented” them, then why are they so rarely employed? Again, we seem to have an example of explicit rejection. Over and over, across the world, from Australia to Siberia, egalitarian communities have preferred some variation on consensus process. Why?

The explanation I would propose is this: it is much easier, in a face-to-face community, to figure out what most members of that community want to do, than to figure out how to convince those who do not to go along with it. Consensus decision-making is typical of societies where there would be no way to compel a minority to agree with a majority decision—either because there is no state with a monopoly of coercive force, or because the state has nothing to do with local decision-making. If there is no way to compel those who find a majority decision distasteful to go along with it, then the last thing one would want to do is to hold a vote: a public contest which someone will be seen to lose. Voting would be the most likely means to guarantee humiliations, resentments, hatreds, in the end, the destruction of communities. What is seen as an elaborate and difficult process of finding consensus is, in fact, a long process of making sure no one walks away feeling that their views have been totally ignored.

* * *

“We” — whether as “the West” (whatever that means), as the “modern world,” or anything else — are not really as special as we like to think we are; …we’re not the only people ever to have practiced democracy; …in fact, rather than disseminating democracy around the world, “Western” governments have been spending at least as much time inserting themselves into the lives of people who have been practicing democracy for thousands of years, and in one way or another, telling them to cut it out.

Those poor brown folks also arguably had more respect for the idea of “property” than their white instructors, when you consider that the white men selflessly extending the benefits of Western civilization to the rest of the world had already robbed the great majority of their own domestic population of their property (e.g. the Enclosures in England) before they decided that property rights were sacred. And that they went on to loot most of the property of the people in the Third World before they finally adjudged the locals as capable of enjoying the blessings of liberty without white supervision. But by that point, again, the commandment “Thou shalt respect property rights — starting NOW!” wasn’t retroactive — it didn’t apply to the enormous mass of wealth those white men and their ancestors had already looted, and continued to sit on. So the primary effect of those Western ideas about “property rights” was to protect the property rights of landed elites and transnational corporations who retained possession of all the land and mineral resources that previous generations of libertarian Western white men had looted for them under colonialism.

So as it turns out, ordinary people throughout the world had already somehow managed to find ways of dealing with each other as equals and settling their differences peacefully without white Western males thinking up libertarianism for them, and when white Western males finally came around with their new and improved idea of Capital-L Liberty they killed, enslaved or robbed most of the human race as compensation for their benevolence.

There’s a great line in Cool Hand Luke that applies here. One of the guards at the prison farm tells Luke that the clanking of the irons he’s wearing will “remind you of what I’ve been telling you — for your own good.” And Luke responds: “Wish you’d stop bein’ so good to me, Cap’n.”

In April, the National Research Council released a report, The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences. The report explains many of the reasons incarceration rates have increased so dramatically in the United States, and analyzes the consequences of mass incarceration. 

The report largely ascribes the growth of America’s prison population to changes in sentencing policies. Until the 1970’s, the federal and state governments employed a system of “indeterminate sentencing,” in which “sentencing was to be individualized and judges had wide discretion” (72). But over the next few decades, America’s sentencing laws changed drastically. The report identifies three phases of this shift. During the first phase, from “1975 to the mid-1980s, the reform movement aimed primarily to make sentencing procedures fairer and sentencing outcomes more predictable and consistent. The problems to be solved were “racial and other unwarranted disparities,” and the mechanisms for solving it were various kinds of comprehensive sentencing and parole guidelines and statutory sentencing standards.” These changes were designed with liberal goals in mind, and often featured “population constraints” to control the growth of prison populations. The second phase, however, was far more punitive. “The second phase, from the mid-1980s through 1996, aimed primarily to make sentences for drug and violent crimes harsher and their imposition more certain. The principal mechanisms to those ends were mandatory minimum sentence, three strikes, truth-in-sentencing, and life without possibility of parole laws.” The authors characterize the third phase as a “period of drift” with relatively few increases in punitive policies (73).

The authors primarily blame the prison population’s growth on this second phase. They note that “truth-in-sentencing” laws, which require prisoners to serve a minimum percentage of their sentence before being released on parole, substantially increased prison populations. Citing research from the Urban Institute, the authors note that “When implemented as part of a comprehensive change to the sentencing system, “truth-in-sentencing laws were associated with large changes in prison populations”” (80). These laws primarily increase prison populations over the long term. The authors quote Spelman, who notes “Truth-in-sentencing laws have little immediate effect but a substantial long-run effect. This analysis makes sense: Truth-in-sentencing laws increase time served and reduce the number of offenders released in future years; the full effect would only be observed after prisoners sentenced under the old regime are replaced by those sentenced under the new law.”  Because these laws only show their full effects in the long term, many studies understate their impact on incarceration rates. “The Urban Institute, Vera, and RAND studies underestimate the effects of truth-in-sentencing laws on prison population growth because they cover periods ending, respectively, in 1996-1998 (for Ohio), 2002, and 1997. Mandatory minimum sentence, truth-in-sentencing, and three strikes laws requiring decades-long sentences inevitably have a “sleeper” effect,” the report notes (82).

In addition to expanding the prison population, these sentencing policies put a lot of discretion in the hands of prosecutors. The authors note that “Two centuries of experience has shown that mandatory punishments foster circumvention by prosecutors, juries, and judges and thereby produce inconsistencies among cases (Romilly, 1820; Reekie, 1930; Hay, 1975; Tonry, 2009b). Problems of circumvention and inconsistent application have long been documented and understood.” While mandatory minimums, truth-in-sentencing laws, and other mandatory punishments were designed to produce more standardized, consistent, and certain punishment, they can actually have the opposite impact. The authors provide specific examples of how this operates:

“Legislative prescription of a high mandatory sentence for certain offenders is likely to result in a reduction in charges at the prosecution stage, or if this is not done, by a refusal of the judge to convict at the adjudication stage. The issue…thus is not solely whether certain offenders should be dealt with severely, but also how the criminal justice system will accommodate to the legislative charge” (Remington, 1969, p. xvii). Newman (1966, p. 179) describes how Michigan judges dealt with a lengthy mandatory minimum sentence for drug sales: “Mandatory minimums are almost universally disliked by trial judges…. The clearest illustration of routine reductions is provided by reduction of sale of narcotics to possession or addiction…. Judges … actively participated in the charge reduction process to the extent of refusing to accept guilty pleas to sale and liberally assigning counsel to work out reduced charges.” Newman (1966, p. 182) tells of efforts to avoid 15-year mandatory maximum sentences: “In Michigan conviction of armed robbery or breaking and entering in the nighttime (fifteen-year maximum compared to five years for daytime breaking) is rare. The pattern of downgrading is such that it becomes virtually routine, and the bargaining session becomes a ritual. The real issue in such negotiations is not whether the charge will be reduced but how far, that is, to what lesser offense” (Newman, 1966, p. 182). Dawson (1969, p. 201) describes “very strong” judicial resistance to a 20-year mandatory minimum sentence for the sale of narcotics: “Charge reductions to possession or use are routine. Indeed, in some cases, judges have refused to accept guilty pleas to sale of narcotics, but have continued the case and appointed counsel with instructions to negotiate a charge reduction.” (78-79)

This has a variety of consequences. It erodes the deterrence that is supposed to come with harsher sentencing. But perhaps more importantly, “Mandatory punishments transfer dispositive discretion in the handling of cases from judges, who are expected to be nonpartisan and dispassionate, to prosecutors, who are comparatively more vulnerable to influence by political considerations and public emotion” (79). In addition to putting leniency in the hands of prosecutors, harsher sentences enable prosecutors to secure convictions without due process, as they can stack charges in order to coerce defendants into accepting plea bargains.

These harsher sentences also play a key role in producing racial disparities. The report summarizes the literature on racial bias at various points in the criminal justice process, including bias against black people who match particular stereotypes. While this racism is clearly present, the authors argue it is statistically small compared to the impact of sentencing policies. They argue that, “The reason for increased racial disparities in imprisonment relative to arrests is straightforward: severe sentencing laws enacted in the 1980s and 1990s greatly increased the lengths of prison sentences mandated for violent crimes and drug offenses for which blacks are disproportionately often arrested” (96).

If social science had played a leading role in policy discussions, these harsh sentencing laws would likely have been seen as undesirable when they were proposed. Unfortunately, “consideration of social science evidence has had little influence on legislative policy-making processes concerning sentencing and punishment in recent decades. The consequences of this disconnect have contributed substantially to contemporary patterns of imprisonment. Evidence on the deterrent effects of mandatory minimum sentence laws is just one such example. Two centuries of experience with laws mandating minimum sentences for particular crimes have shown that those laws have few if any effects as deterrents to crime and, as discussed above, foster patterns of circumvention and manipulation by prosecutors, judges, and juries” (90). It’s predictable that the state would ignore social science evidence. Voters are rationally ignorant, as the cost of studying relevant social science exceeds the benefits to voters of understanding issues. But worse still, as Byran Caplan documents in The Myth of the Rational Voter, voters are rationally irrational. That is, it is instrumentally rational for them to persist in irrational biases that are directly counter to social science, rather than simply being ignorant and agnostic.

The harsh sentences passed during the 1980s and 1990s have been extraordinarily destructive. They have shifted more power into the hands of prosecutors, undermined proportionality, exacerbated racial disparities in the criminal justice system, and played a key role in bringing us an America that incarcerates more people than any  other nation on earth.

Although at least Reason likening the “Wobblies”, whose founding antedates the Russian Revolution by over a decade, to “warmed-over Lenin” is not the most anachronistically wrong description published by a major libertarian organization. After all, the Ludwig von Mises Institute has called them Stalinist.

The use of “extremist” as an automatic pejorative in the headline is already a sign we’re entering intellectually lazy territory. Perceptive leftist Chip Berlet has long tried to explain to his comrades that heedless use of the term “can actually unintentionally undermine civil liberties, civil rights, and civil discourse by demonizing dissent”.

Sure enough, the article’s sneering reference to a desire “to overthrow the entire American economic system” in its opening sentence is already an indication that it will probably not be contributing much of value to the cause of freedom. After all, “to overthrow the entire American economic system” is a pretty good description of, say, Murray Rothbard’s goal. (Not to mention the libertarian pioneers like Karl Hess who were red-card-carrying Wobblies.) And while Reason is far from the rabble-rousing ends of the libertarian movement, even its relatively squishy devotion to independent-leaning people increasingly “born after the Cold War’s end, to whom old tribal allegiances, prejudices, and hang-ups … simply do not make sense” has little to do with what quickly turns out to be a spasm of old-fashioned red-baiting.

The target, Amanda Curtis, is a Democratic senatorial candidate. That should already raise an, um, red flag about any supposed faithfulness to the principles of the IWW, whose Constitution prominently contains the unequivocal rule that “No member of the Industrial Workers of the World shall be an officer of a trade or craft union or political party.”

Hinkle winds himself up by spending half the article griping that center-left Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert-style ridicule doesn’t give equal time to mocking the far left.  Because libertarianism should embody nothing more than a vital-center view of the political spectrum, and was not launched by a rejection of it.

Hinkle’s mention that “Curtis has said some unflattering things about gun rights” might seem, since Reason is presumably supportive of the Second Amendment, an indication of her being not Wobbly enough. In the aftermath of the Ludlow Massacre, Eugene V. Debs weighed in on the subject self-defense against John D. Rockefeller’s strikebreakers:

you should have no more compunction in killing them than if they were so many mad-dogs or rattlesnakes that menaced your homes and your community.

Recollect that in arming yourselves, as you are bound to do unless you are willing to be forced into abject slavery, you are safely within the spirit and letter of the law.

Eventually, Hinkle finally gets to the “far-out” Wobblies.

He starts things off with the egregious assertion that the IWW passively “let the 20th century pass it by”. As Howard Zinn notes, they were in fact bitter opponents of — and crushed by — the century’s dominant economic powers, who were collaborators with state privilege:

In those years, the permanent characteristics of the United States in the twentieth century were being hardened. There was the growing power of giant corporations… And this era saw the inauguration of benign governmental regulation of business, supported by a new consensus of businessmen, Presidents, and reformers, which traditional historians have called “the Progressive Era,” but which Gabriel Kolko (in his book The Triumph of Conservatism) terms “political capitalism.” In retrospect, the IWW appears to have been a desperate attempt to disrupt this structure before its rivets turned cold.

Rothbard ridiculed consensus intellectuals for identifying with progress “the century of horror, the century of collectivism, the century of mass destruction and genocide”. Why should libertarians of all people follow suit?

Hinkle then presents a passage from the IWW Preamble as self-evidently Leninist. Let’s take a phrase-by-phrase closer look:

The working class and the employing class have nothing in common.

First of all, this “working class” and “employing class” aren’t simply automatic aggregates of workers and employers. What makes the population into classes isn’t an inherent tendency of voluntary decisions to engage in employment relations to stratify power, but the predominance of such relations by systematically ruling out alternatives to wage work, artificially increasing the amount of wage work necessary to earn enough to survive, and limiting the opportunities for wage work to those permitted by a restricted pool of employers most of whom can act together as a stable cartel. All of these, and the resulting formation of privileged employers into an employing class, require the coercive power of a state to back them up.

Thus, the division of society into a productive class and a coercive exploiting class that do “have nothing in common” is entirely consistent with longstanding libertarian class analysis of a “productive class” and “political class” drawing their wealth from what Franz Oppenheimer called the “economic means” of obtaining wealth through labor and voluntary exchange and the “political means” of compulsory taking. The analysis is also a rebuke to the “we’re all in this together” liberal rationales, with their eliding of conflicts of interest.

Between these two classes a struggle must go on until…

No parasitical class in history has ever given up its power of its own accord. This “struggle” wasn’t the storming-the-Winter-Palace kind, and not even voting (Father Hagerty dismissed the idea that “Dropping pieces of paper into a hole in a box” could effect meaningful popular control of the state). As Zinn explained, “the Wobblies’ big weapons were the withholding of their labor, the power of their voices.”

…the workers of the world organize as a class…

Such “organization” was decentralized, based on a voluntary understanding of common purpose rather than obedience, and always staunchly in contrast to not only vanguardism, but in a very deep sense politics itself. Zinn noted “They were suspicious of politics”. Samuel Edward Konkin III, an anarcho-capitalist whose Movement of the Libertarian Left (MLL) was a direct predecessor of C4SS, explained:

MLL supports genuine anarchosyndicalist unions which consistently refuse to collaborate with the State. (In North America, that’s the IWW and nothing else I know of.) Second, if you look at the bottom, you’ll note the abhorrence of the IWW to politics and party; they split with the nascent U.S. Socialist Party on the same grounds that MLL split with the formative [U.S. Libertarian Party] — rejecting parliamentarianism for direct action.

The ideal of class-wide organization is also obviously incompatible with — and was in fact a direct response to the existing craft unions’ dependence on  — the model of organizing only a portion of workers to get benefits for them at the expense of workers as a whole. Which is the very model whose modus operandi is persistently assumed to be the only possible one in “libertarian” union-bashing rhetoric.

…take possession of the means of production…

This has nothing to do with nationalization’s possession in name only, including the social democratic kind. See the Mondragon cooperatives for a case study of an economy of distributed “possession” in an allied association of enterprises.

…abolish the wage system…

This is not, as often misunderstood, a call to ban wage labor. Just as the working class and the employing class aren’t mere aggregations of workers and employers, the wage system is not the mere aggregation of voluntary decisions to engage in wage labor. What gives the wage system its systematic form and exploitative power is the marginalization by political suppression of all alternative forms of subsistence. As Kevin Carson explains:

“Abolition of the wage system,” for me, does not mean an end to the sale of labor (after all, according to Tucker, that labor should be paid is the whole point of socialism); it means an end to state-enforced separation of labor from ownership, and labor’s resulting tribute to the owning classes in the form of a wage less than its full product.

C4SS has already explained this in greater detail in an article arguing that “Free the Market, Abolish the Wage System” are a naturally fitting means and end, and in its FAQ on wage labor‘s elaboration that “By abolishing the state, we abolish state-driven monopolization of capital so that there would no longer be a ‘wage system’ in which one’s only choices are working for somebody else or starving.”

Thus, the ideal of many prominent classical liberals of an economy dominated by worker cooperatives, with wage labor receding to a marginal role, is one where the wage system has been abolished in the preamble’s sense:

The form of association, however, which if mankind continue to improve, must be expected in the end to predominate, is not that which can exist between a capitalist as chief, and work-people without a voice in the management, but the association of the labourers themselves on terms of equality, collectively owning the capital with which they carry on their operations, and working under managers elected and removable by themselves. —John Stuart Mill

But such few cooperative bodies of the kind described as survived, might be the germs of a spreading organization. Admission into them would be the goal of working-class ambition. They would tend continually to absorb the superior, leaving outside the inferior to work as wage-earners; and the first would slowly grow at the expense of the last. Obviously, too, the growth would become increasingly rapid; since the master-and-workmen type of industrial organization could not withstand competition with this cooperative type, so much more productive and costing so much less in superintendence. —Herbert Spencer

Provided the sphere of capitalism is restricted, and a large proportion of the population are rescued from its dominion, there is no reason to wish it wholly abolished. As a competitor and a rival, it might serve a useful purpose in preventing more democratic enterprises from sinking into sloth and technical conservatism.  But it is of the very highest importance that capitalism should become the exception rather than the rule, and that the bulk of the world’s industry should be conducted on a more democratic system. —Bertrand Russell

And Konkin explicitly argued that wage labor would become obsolete in a free market:

And wage-labor’s historical benefit may have been as great as the invention of the diaper — but surely toilet-training (in this case, entrepreneurialization) is even a more significant advance?

Ironically, Hinkle would have been correct if only he had bothered to describe the Preamble as Marxist, since its “Instead of the conservative motto, ‘A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work,’ we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, ‘Abolition of the wage system.’ ” is merely a slightly altered quotation of Marx’s “Instead of the conservative motto: ‘A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work!‘ they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword: “Abolition of the wages system!’ ” But the Wobblies were not interested in seizing control of what Marx called “the State parasite feeding upon, and clogging the free movement of society”. In sharp contrast to the redistributionism and fuzzy collectivism of pop Marxism, Big Bill Haywood’s summation of Marx was unrelentingly individualist, both methodologically and prescriptively: “If one man has a dollar he didn’t work for, some other man worked for a dollar he didn’t get.”

…and live in harmony with the Earth.

A phrase that wouldn’t sound out of place on the bumper of David Van Driessen’s car seems an odd thing to point to as “extremist”. And while it dilutes the anti-wage system thrust of the original version (which also had “take possession of the earth“), it’s in line with the ecological theme and nature imagery used since the beginning (the “shell” in “the new society within the shell of the old” was not just a figure of speech). And it doesn’t fit with the affinity of twentieth-century Communism for ecologically heedless mega-industry that spawned Chernobyl.

To Hinkle, Curtis’s use of a Facebook avatar of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn is proof of “her admiration for communist economics”. But while the ranks of the founding Wobblies included communists, capital-C Communists, and supporters of the Soviet Union, that is not the source of their enduring appeal. Murray Rothbard observed that the left’s admiration for Che Guevara was

Surely not because Che was a Communist. Precious few people in this country or anywhere else will mourn the passing, for example, of Brezhnev, Kosygin, or Ulbricht, Communist leaders all. No, it is certainly not Che’s Communist goals which made his name a byword and a legend throughout the world, and throughout the New Left in this country.

What made Che such an heroic figure for our time is that he, more than any man of our epoch or even of our century, was the living embodiment of the principle of Revolution.

When searching for twentieth-century communists for its pantheon, the contemporary real left has gone far beyond the Old Left’s Trotsky and the New Left’s Che, Mao, and Castro, digging deep to find figures marginal in winners’ history, like Rosa Luxemburg, who are untainted by statism.

Voltairine de Cleyre pointed out a factor that crosses over economic shibboleths:

Miss Goldman is a Communist; I am an Individualist. She wishes to destroy the right of property; I wish to assert it. I make my war upon privilege and authority, whereby the right of property, the true right in that which is proper to the individual, is annihilated. She believes that co-operation would entirely supplant competition; I hold that competition in one form or another will always exist, and that it is highly desirable it should. But whether she or I be right, or both of us be wrong, of one thing I am sure: the spirit which animates Emma Goldman is the only one which will emancipate the slave from his slavery, the tyrant from his tyranny — the spirit which is willing to dare and suffer.

An examination of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn’s actual life reveals an individual ill-represented by the single data point of her affiliation with Communist Party USA, which is enough for Hinkle to equate her with “the president of the American Nazi Party”. This “Rebel Girl” who fought the system ever since age sixteen was a real-life Katniss Everdeen. Like the IWW as a whole, she endured repression in the form of both private thuggery and governmental repression in the form of frivolous arrests, trumped-up charges, and censorship. She advocated for feminism and birth control at a time when unions were male dominated, and helped found the ACLU.

It is true that the Soviet Union gave her a state funeral in Red Square, which in context rings as bitterly ironic as Kropotkin spending his final years in the USSR finishing his research on ethics. However, her final resting place is more fittingly in a Midwestern cemetery with American-as-apple-pie anarchists. These include the Haymarket martyrs whose kangaroo-court hanging led a generation of labor organizers to distrust the state, Voltairine de Cleyre and Emma Goldman (both cases in point), Lucy Parsons (yet another fellow “rebel girl”), and Goldman’s lover and “whorehouse physician” Ben Reitman.

Finally, we get the comparison to the Ku Klux Klan. The comparison of a group that produced posters denouncing the KKK as “anti-labor”; that was formed in large part as a direct response to the exclusionary racism of the elitist unions of the time; that prominently counted within its ranks such people of color as Lucy Parsons, Ben Fletcher, and Frank Little; that was among the first to systematically defy segregation laws; that was repressed by KKK-style vigilante thuggery. All solely on the grounds that they must be comparable to the Klan since they’re as “extreme”. And all particularly ironic since Martin Luther King Jr. famously stated in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” that “the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action';” — and who is equally opposed to “extremists for hate or for love”.

But hey, IWW and KKK have the same number of letters in their acronyms, so potayto, potahto.

There can be no prescription old enough to supercede the Law of Nature and the grant of God Almighty, who has given to all men a natural right to be free, and they have it ordinarily in their power to make themselves so, if they please.–James Otis, Jr.

James Otis, Jr. (2/5/1725-5/23/1783) of West Barnstable, Cape Cod, Massachusetts, began his tutelage under Reverend Jonathan Russell and, by fifteen, Otis entered Harvard College and graduated in 1743. He studied law for two years under Judge Jeremiah Gridley, a member of the General Court of Massachusetts. The young conservative (as Otis was earlier in life) then served the Boston vice-admiralty court as advocate general from 1756 to 1760.

In 1760, with the end of the French and Indian War and the accession of George III, his administration compelled customs officials in Massachusetts to apply for new “writs of assistance” in the king’s name. These writs were in effect, search warrants that gave customs inspectors the legal authority to inspect ships, warehouses, homes or wherever else they felt compelled to inspect. Smuggling was common in the colonies due, in part, to high tariffs on sugar and molasses. This encouraged American merchants to deal with French, Dutch and West Indies traders.

Royal officials in London tightened enforcement against smuggling by offering Massachusetts Governor Francis Bernard with a third of the fines collected from such activities. To aid the call for tighter enforcement, Governor Bernard appointed Thomas Hutchinson Chief Justice of Massachusetts. In doing so, Bernard passed over Otis’s father, Colonel James Otis, Sr. This action infuriated the Otis family and led to Otis’s resignation as the king’s advocate general with the vice-admiralty. After resigning, Otis offered assistance to the merchants in their attempt to stop execution of the new writs.

On February 24, 1761, a case came before the Superior Court of Massachusetts by Charles Paxton, the Surveyor of Customs for the Port of Boston, for writs of assistance. Jeremiah Gridley appeared for the customs office. Otis and an associate represented sixty-three Boston merchants, in opposition. Gridley argued the Court of Exchequer had the statutory authority to issue them, that the province law of 1699 had granted the Superior Court jurisdiction in Massachusetts over matters which the courts of King’s Bench, Common Pleas, or Exchequer have, and further that such warrants were necessary in the collection of taxes and in protecting the state from foreign and domestic subversives.

When Otis spoke, one critic described him as “a plump, round faced, smooth skinned, short necked, eagle eyed politician,” but John Adams attended the trial and wrote down the account in his diary and again some fifty years later, “Otis was a flame of fire!”

Otis relied on English law to prove that only special warrants were legal and attacked the writs as “instruments of slavery.” Defending the right to privacy, he proclaimed that the power to issue general search warrants placed “the liberty of every man in the hands of every petty officer.” In perhaps his most moving passage, Otis declared,

A man’s home is his castle, and whilst he is quiet, he is as well guarded as a prince in his castle. This writ, if it is declared legal, would totally annihilate this privilege. Custom house office may enter our houses when they please and we are commanded to permit their entry. Their menial servants may enter, may break locks, bars, and everything in their way; and whether they break through malice or revenge, no man, no court, can inquire. Bare suspicion without oath is sufficient. This wanton exercise of this power is not a chimerical suggestion of a heated brain. What a scene does this open! Every man, prompted by revenge, ill humor, or wantonness to inspect the inside of his neighbor’s house, may get a writ of assistance. Other’s will ask it from self-defense; one arbitrary action will promote another, until society be involved in tumult and blood.

Otis’s oration took some four or five hours and was not taken down stenographically, but it left an indelible impression on the young Adams. With a “profusion of legal authorities,” Adams tells us, “a prophetic glance of his eye into futurity, and a torrent of impetuous eloquence, he hurried away everything before him.” Adams continued, “every man of a crowded audience appeared to me to go away as I did, ready to take arms against writs of assistance.” Adams concluded his summation of the event by pronouncing, “Then and there, the child Independence was born.” Otis challenged not just the royal governor of Massachusetts, not just Parliament, and not just the King, but also the entire British government, with a solid appeal to the Rule of Law. Thus began the American Revolution.

Following the Otis oration, the members of the bench had been swayed, with the exception of Chief Justice Hutchinson, who delayed the vote in an attempt to buy precious time. Hutchinson succeeded in having the writs upheld when, in November of that same year, the case was heard a second time. George III was the new monarch, and the Court of Exchequer routinely issued writs of assistance in England. The Massachusetts judges felt they could no longer refuse to issue them in the colonies as well. Hutchinson had won a temporary victory. In 1765, Hutchinson’s Boston home was destroyed by an angry mob.

Otis’s battle against the writs of assistance won him great public favor for a time. In May of 1761, he won election to the Massachusetts General Court. The news of the election reached a Worchester dinner party. Attending the party were John Adams and Brigadier Timothy Ruggles, who was chief justice of the Common Pleas Court and later a Tory exile. Ruggles declared to Adams, “Out of this election will arise a damned faction, which will shake the province to its knees.”

Ruggles’s prophetic prediction proved even more accurate than he expected for it was 1761 that triggered the Revolution, and the Otis family, father and son, set the wheels in motion. That same year, James Otis Sr. was reelected as Speaker of the House, and together, they succeeded in pushing through an act which forbid any writ which did not specify under oath, the person and place to be searched. However, under the advice of the Supreme Court, Governor Bernard refused to approve the legislation. Nonetheless, the public sentiment had shifted, and talk of an independent nation had begun.

In 1764, Prime Minister George Grenville and the British Parliament had imposed upon the colonies the Sugar Act. The new law placed tariffs on sugar, wine, coffee and other products, and spelled trouble for many American businesses. At the time the Sugar Act was passed by Parliament, Grenville had also submitted a resolution for a Stamp Tax.

Otis was vehemently opposed to the proposition of these new taxes and wrote a pamphlet entitled The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Approved. In this pamphlet, Otis denied any fundamental difference between internal and external taxes. The Parliament dismissed the pamphlet as propaganda while the emotions of the American colonials were sparked.

Otis became an instant celebrity and a month later was elected to a seat in the General Court (legislature). As time passed and the list of American grievances against the Crown grew, Otis played an ever more prominent role in advancing the colonists’ interests. In 1764, he headed the Massachusetts committee of correspondence. The following year he was a leading figure at the Stamp Act Congress in New York City. In 1765, the Stamp Act was passed and Otis stood as one of the Acts most vocal critics. Under the pseudonym “John Hampden,” Otis published in the Boston press a sweeping denial of Parliaments right to tax the colonies without representation.

Otis’s open advocacy of American rights grated on many officials’ nerves; his election to the speakership of the General Court in 1766 was voided by the governor’s veto. Undeterred, Otis teamed with Samuel Adams to confront the next crisis: enforcement of the Townshend Duties in 1767. The firebrand duo drafted a circular letter to enlist the other colonies in planned resistance to the new taxes.

Otis’s pamphlet to the Parliament drew resolute approval from the Whigs in England.

Otis began a gradual loss of his mental faculties. His continued verbal assaults grew worse. In 1769, Otis was in a coffeehouse brawl with a customs official and received substantial injuries to the head. This quickened the pace of his failing mental capacities and two years later, his old adversary, Thomas Hutchinson, appointed a sanity commission which found Otis to be a lunatic.

Throughout the remainder of his life, Otis had intermittent spells of clarity, but he played very little role in the Revolution. He was placed in the care of various friends and family members. While under the care of his sister, Mercy Otis Warren, at Watertown, Mass., he heard rumor of battle. On June 17, he slipped away unobserved, borrowed a musket from a roadside farmhouse and joined the minute men who were marching to the aid of the troops at Bunker Hill. He took an active part in the battle and afterwards made his way home again. In 1783, James Otis, Jr. was struck dead by a bolt of lightning while standing in the doorway of his sisters’ home. A tragic end to an outspoken leader who sent the colonists in the direction of a revolution.

This little bit of history should be remembered by the current administration in their endeavor to allow warrants without recourse to local judges’ permission. This is how the American Revolution was touched off. If the Bush administration is not careful, there is little doubt in my mind that there will be unintended consequences in America’s future!

What is necessary for the use of land is not its private ownership, but the security of improvements. It is not necessary to say to a man, ‘this land is yours,’ in order to induce him to cultivate or improve it. It is only necessary to say to him, ‘whatever your labor, or capital produces on this land shall be yours.’ Give a man security that he may reap, and he will sow; assure him of the possession of the house he wants to build, and he will build it. These are the natural rewards of labor. It is for the sake of the reaping that men sow; it is for the sake of possessing houses that men build. The ownership of land has nothing to do with it. –Henry George

Henry George (9/2/1839-10/29/1897) was born in Philadelphia, the second of ten children of a poor, pious, evangelical Protestant family. His formal education was cut short at 14 and went to sea as a foremast boy on the Hindoo, bound for Melbourne and Calcutta eventually making a complete voyage around the world. Three years later, he was halfway through a second voyage as an able seaman when he left the ship in San Francisco and worked at various occupations (including gold mining) and eventually went to work as a journeyman printer and occasional typesetter before turning to newspaper writing in San Francisco including four years (1871-1875) as editor of his own San Francisco Daily Evening Post. George’s experience in a number of trades, his poverty while supporting a family, and the examples of financial difficulties that came to his attention as wage earner and newspaperman gave impetus to his reformist tendencies. He was curious and attentive to everything around him.

“Little Harry George” (he was small of stature and slight of build, according to his son) was fortunate in San Francisco; he lived and worked in a rapidly developing society. George had the unique opportunity of studying the change of an encampment into a thriving metropolis. He saw a city of tents and mud change into a town of paved streets and decent housing, with tramways and buses. As he saw the beginning of wealth, he noted the appearance of pauperism. He saw a degradation forming with the advent of leisure and affluence, and felt compelled to discover why they arose concurrently. As he would continue to do as he struggled to support his family in San Francisco following the Panic of 1873.

Dabbling in local politics, he shifted loyalties from Lincoln Republicanism to the Democrats, and became a trenchant critic of railroad and mining interests, corrupt politicians, land speculators, and labor contractors. He failed as a Democratic candidate for the state legislature, but landed a patronage job of state inspector of gas meters (which allowed him time to write longer expositions).

As Alanna Hartzok has pointed out, Henry George’s famous epiphany occurred:

One day, while riding horseback in the Oakland hills, merchant seaman and journalist Henry George had a startling epiphany. He realized that speculation and private profiteering in the gifts of nature were the root causes of the unjust distribution of wealth.

His son, Henry George, Jr., said,

…Henry George perceived that land speculation locked up vast territories against labor. Everywhere he perceived an effort to “corner” land; an effort to get it and to hold it, not for use, but for a “rise.” Everywhere he perceived that this caused all who wished to use it to compete with each other for it; and he foresaw that as population grew the keener that competition would become. Those who had a monopoly of the land would practically own those who had to use the land.

…in 1871 [he] sat down and in the course of four months wrote a little book under title of “Our Land and Land Policy [PDF].” In that small volume of forty-eight pages he advocated the destruction of land monopoly by shifting all taxes from labor and the products of labor and concentrating them in one tax on the value of land, regardless of improvements. A thousand copies of this small book were printed, but the author quickly perceived that really to command attention, the work would have to be done more thoroughly.

Over the next several years, George devoted his time to the completion of his major work. In 1879, finding no publisher, he self-published Progress and Poverty (500 copies), and issued the following year in New York and London by Appleton’s after George transported the printing plates to them. The plates were then taken by Appleton’s and the book soon became a sensation, translated into many languages and assured George’s fame, selling over 3 million copies.

At the heart of his critique of Gilded Age capitalism was the conviction that rent and private land-ownership violated the hallowed principles of Jeffersonian democracy and poverty was an affront to the moral values of Judeo-Christian culture. Progress and Poverty was “an inquiry into the cause of industrial depressions and of increase of want with increase of wealth.” In the fact that rent tends to increase not only with increase of population but with all improvements that increase productive power, George finds the cause of the tendency to the increase of land values and decrease of the proportion of the produce of wealth which goes to labor and capital, while in the speculative holding of land thus engendered he traces the tendency to force wages to a minimum and the primary cause of paroxysms of industrial depression.

The remedy for these he declares to be the appropriation of rent by the community, thus making land community owned and giving the user secure possession and leaving to the producer the full advantage of his exertion and investment. This notion of the single tax [PDF] (the term which the successful attorney and free-trade advocate, Thomas G. Shearman (who, along with C.B. Fillebrown, led the more hard-core, pro-free market position within the single tax movement–although later to falter), gave to George’s solution.

George moved his family to New York in 1880 due to the demands as writer and lecturer. In 1881 he published The Irish Land Question, and in 1883-4 he made another trip at the invitation of the Scottish land restoration league, producing on both tours a strong international interest in his ideas. In 1886 he was the candidate for the United Labor Party for mayor of New York, and received 68,110 votes against 90,552 for Abram S. Hewitt (Democrat), and 60,435 for Theodore Roosevelt (Republican). In 1887, George founded the “Standard,” a weekly newspaper (1887-92). He also published Social Problems (1884), and Protection or Free-Trade(1886), a radical examination of the tariff question, An Open Letter to the Pope (1891), a reply to Leo XIII’s encyclical The Condition of Labor; A Perplexed Philosopher (1892), a critique of Herbert Spencer and, finally, his The Science of Political Economy (1897), begun in 1891 but uncompleted at his death, when he was running for Mayor of New York one final time.

George’s legacy has been long and vibrant over the last century, leading to utopian communities, legislators, economists and political activists of all sorts. This is a mixed legacy which one can argue both positive and negative influences. But it cannot be ignored.

An earlier generation of libertarians was interested in Gabriel Kolko, a historian of the Left. Who was he?

Born in 1932 in Paterson, NJ, historian Gabriel Kolko studied at Kent State, the University of Wisconsin, and Harvard University (PhD: 1962). From 1970 until his retirement he taught history at York University in Toronto, where he remains Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus. In Wealth and Power in America (1962) he reflected on persistent poverty in the United States. Other works in American economic history followed. Thereafter, events moved Kolko increasingly into issues of war and peace. Gifted with a definite independence of thought, he was generally seen as part of the New Left.

Kolko’s vision of American economic history overlapped with, but differed from, that of other New Left historians. William Appleman Williams, for example, divided American history into three ages: Mercantilism (1740-1828), Laissez Nous Faire (1819-1896), and Corporation Capitalism (1882 to present). By the early 20th century a “class-conscious industrial gentry” sought to guarantee the dominance of large corporations by using government (1) to engross foreign markets for goods and capital; (2) to provide market stability and predictability, partly through formal or informal cartelization; and (3) to reduce discontent by recognizing union rights (within limits) and instituting a very minimal welfare state. The New Deal rounded out this system of “corporate syndicalism” (Williams’s term). Other New Left historians, including James Weinstein, David W. Eakins, Martin J. Sklar, and R. Jeffrey Lustig, tended to speak of “liberal corporatism” or “corporate liberalism.” Pursuing this system’s origins, historians ventured back into the 19th century, and Kolko’s early work reflected that journey, so let us begin with his second, more focused study, Railroads and Regulation (1965).

The locomotive of history

In Kolko’s view, all historically existing capitalist systems have relied on the state. Once state-promoted railroads had become the biggest 19th-century investment sector, their subsequent difficulties necessarily called forth further aid from a political system eager to help. Given their origins, American railroads essentially rested on gross over- or malinvestment, a situation made worse by the land speculation they encouraged, as well as watered stock and endless promotional scams. Alas, just enough sharp fellows had scrambled into railroading to create a degree of competition that might ruin or certainly inconvenience the owners once they actually had to transport something and make money on their massive fixed capital. Following regulatory proposals through Congress (and elsewhere) between 1877 and 1916, Kolko concluded that railroads dominated overall and got most of what they wanted. This was the birth of self-conscious political capitalism. (Meanwhile, one could add, the railroad industry had done much harm, economically and socially, by fostering “economies” on a new and artificial scale [“national markets”]; and, as economist Michael Perelman writes, the railroad industry’s seeming immunity to market forces confused economists, who developed new — and not necessarily better — economic theories.)

Political capitalism: Free market and strong state

Railroads had spurred the rise of corporations in other key industries, and the new political capitalism necessarily spread to other sectors. Kolko’s Triumph of Conservatism (1963) takes a grand tour of the late-19th- and early-20th-century American economy, its general trends and exceptions to them, covering steel, oil, automobiles, agricultural machinery, telephone services, copper, insurance, meatpacking, and banking. Broadly speaking, America’s rapidly industrializing economy still displayed much decentralization and considerable (and unwelcome) competition. Now, key businessmen consciously sought political solutions to preserve or improve their positions. (This mattered far more than their subjective or theoretical views, including arbitrarily deployed free-market verbiage.) Above all, they wanted the stability and rationalization that only law and the state could give them.

For Kolko, a conservative consensus shaped the “reforms” of the Progressive Era. Politicians generally put business first. Industry wanted (and got) a veto over regulatory agencies. The outcome, Kolko wrote, was political capitalism: “the functional unity of major political and business leaders,” doing business (as of 1963) as the Establishment, an “interlocking social, economic, and political elite.” This was not entirely new. American economic organization during World War I fulfilled the Progressive program of the eastern elites, and later Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt worked within the war model.

In Kolko’s view the best European social theorists shed little light on the specifically American experience. Marx’s “purely economic” categories proved unsuited for dealing with American developments. For Kolko, from 1887 on, new U.S. political bureaucracies aimed at shielding the profits of established businesses from both unwanted competition and unpredictable political developments.

Wealth and power further pursued

In his Main Currents in Modern American History (1976), Kolko presented an overall vision of American history and pursued political capitalism well into the 20th century. Here he stated his disagreements with Williams and the Wisconsin school on the relative importance of the Open Door for American exports. Kolko stressed instead American capital’s need (all through the 20th century) for imported raw materials for their industrial processes, a connection that sheds needed light on persistent American interest (and intervention) in rather secondary overseas markets such as Southeast Asia. (Oil of course speaks for itself.) Kolko thus brought subsidized exports together with American control of overseas resources (raw materials) in a more powerful notion of what the Open Door entailed for American planners from at least 1941 onward.

I would add that since 1789 American federal courts and bureaucracies have tended to see the promotion of private business and economic growth as their main job. (See the critiques of this policy that John Taylor of Caroline wrote between 1814 and 1822.) By the late 19th century, key economic and political actors began to see themselves as a central planning board for the American capitalist system as a whole, a project that the New Deal raised to a new level. Broadly speaking, business was happy enough with these new services, and most Americans complied with the ever-changing new order, perhaps because the federal apparatus had already shown its power to crush whole sections of the American people from 1861 forward — whether separatists, labor unions, or dissenters from World War I. (See below.)

Interestingly, Kolko laments the defeat of the southern and western populism of the 1880s and ’90s, which he calls “the most truly libertarian social force” of its time. The movement’s eclipse was assured when close to a million American populists departed for the farming provinces of Canada (an emigration that American historians mostly ignore). Where labor history is concerned, Kolko sketched the history of an ethnically divided working class, immigrant and native, sold out (as it were) by business-oriented union leaders. He comments,

Violence was used in America more than in any other country that bothered preserving the façade of democracy, but what was clear from this, apart from the fact that the threat to constituted order evoked a response all out of proportion to the real danger, was the readiness to employ yet far more if it were required.

Unlike populism, eastern progressivism was all about sustaining the going order through political capitalism. Referring to World War I, Kolko writes, “The national government had built a vast administrative structure which businesses had defined and guided from its inception, and they might yet do so once again.” Later, New Deal banking legislation reflected the same purpose: “Using political means, big banking could now impose its norms in a national banking structure….”

In chapters 7 (“The Accumulation of Power”) and 8 (“Politics and the Foundations of Power”) ofMain Currents, Kolko zeroes in on the workings of the American political and economic structure. Given the selection of key state officials (especially for foreign policy) from the ranks of big business, big banks, and top law firms, policy is inevitably subservient to the interests of commerce broadly conceived. Even those recruited from other strata receive training in this received outlook. The resulting leadership class exhibits a collective myopia, only made worse by the serial crises that this class manages to produce. Given the higher policymakers’ shared (and fixed) worldview and class ties, conformity, promotion, and fear of losing influence are all that counts. In recent times almost no one has resigned from office over a matter of principle.

The elite proceeds with complete contempt for the wishes of the governed: “‘Freedom’ thereby becomes a posture the powerful tolerate among the powerless, and those in power make certain they will remain ineffectual.” At the same time, consensus “becomes an ideological phrase which wholly obscures the real basis of authority in United States society since the Civil War — law and the threat of repression.”

Kolko paints a gloomy picture of a banal, empty culture with no real community at any level. The early, unconditional, and violent victory of the American elite, along with its inability ever to feel really secure, has led to unhappy results: “Having fulfilled their desire to break the possibility of opposition, they also destroyed, as well, social cohesion and community.” Further, in American political life, “charlatanism, infantilism, cynicism, apathy, and gangsterism have all merged in ever-changing ways with the regulatory functions of the political mechanism and its responsibility to perform essential and predictable tasks.” Deliberate exclusion of the people from any effective participation in political life — or even their own lives — caps the whole edifice.

Inside the American whale

Two recent critics, Robert L. Bradley Jr. and Roger Donway, fault Kolko for not approving of any phase of American capitalism, laissez-faire or corporatist. This is a fair point: He does not approve. But if Kolko stands convicted of not being a libertarian, it is not clear how this invalidates his historical work. History is not theory, and back-and-forth leaps between facts and theory (ideology) may not avail. And the little matter of “laissez-faire” needs another look: A fairly minimal state was quite strong enough in England to clear peasants off the land and (later) to remove sundry traditional rights that blocked rapid industrialization. In the United States, governments undertook similar projects of bourgeois social engineering chiefly in aid of already wealthy or (sometimes) rising interests.

As Kolko knows, big business is not ideologically naïve; its embrace of the state is rational and interest-driven. Like Hobbes and Locke, big business knows that the kind of market society it desires absolutely requires a strong state. The trick is to have such a state while publicly demanding the opposite. Accordingly, big business subsidizes free-market ideas (which retain some mass appeal) and enrolls petty-bourgeois (small-business) elements as defenders of the corporate sector. The authoritarian populist style of Thatcher and Reagan, combining a strengthened state with much free-market rhetoric, showed that this formula sometimes works. It is surely an exercise in futility for anti-imperialists, decentralist conservatives, agrarians, libertarians, etc., to serve such causes.

But to return directly to Kolko, it seems fair to say that his accounts of progressive reform down into the early Cold War have held up rather well. Perhaps Elizabeth Sanders is right to say that big business, while dominant, did not completely control the progressive reform process. Yet Nancy Cohen’s work on the remoter origins of the new federal bureaucratic state allied with corporations reinforces Kolko’s main conclusions.

Running all through Kolko’s important and informative historical work is a consistent critique of (and contempt for) the activities and claims of America’s ruling elite. (They have earned it.) His turn toward the history of wars, American or otherwise, led him to focus on the autonomous power of states, and therewith to an even higher level of criticism.

Part 2: Kolko Abroad

Gabriel Kolko’s historical writing hinges on the interrelations of economic, political, and ideological power in American history. His later work increasingly focused on those phenomena in relation to war, peace, and empire. As his project went forward, Kolko increasingly departed from that Marxist framework in which state power becomes so utterly subordinate as to be historically negligible. The result has been a more realistic, but no less radical, critique.

In The Roots of American Foreign Policy (1969, especially chapters 7 and 8), Kolko connected the domestic and foreign aspects of American political capitalism in terms of class, state and private institutions, economic goals, and supporting ideology. We find here very useful reflections on the forces and ideas underlying “vaunting and fear” and “perpetual war for perpetual peace” (timeworn Old Right phrases) as inevitable companions of American foreign activities. (We can only sample some key points here.)

Class. With similar class origins and the same education, the “very top foreign policy decision-makers were … intimately connected with dominant business circles in their law firms.” The result has been a “dual relationship — one which uses the political structure to advance the domestic and global economic interests of American [political] capitalists,” one that “has characterized Washington leaders for the better part of this century.”

Ends and means. U.S. policymakers use the dependence of raw-material-producing nations as leverage for gaining access to their markets and resources. Strangely enough, for all the American rhetoric about free enterprise, America “is the world’s leading state trader, even though it has consistently attacked this principle when other industrial nations used it to advance their own neocolonial export positions.”

Ideology. Having described the U.S. political economy elsewhere (see part 1 in last month’s issue), Kolko notes that “neo-Hamiltonian” ideas serve as “a justification for the political capitalism that was the most critical outcome of American liberal reform” in its domestic and overseas dimensions. Interestingly, the relatively nonideological American military had failed (as of 1969) to rally around this Hamiltonian ideology of “the positive and predatory state.” The career of Robert McNamara as a corporate-liberal, technocratic secretary of defense “showed how fully the Military Establishment was merely the instrument of warfare liberalism in the Fair Deal-Great Society period.”

World War II

American Non-Diplomacy, 1943– 1945. Kolko’s Politics of War (1968) set out many broad themes that would dominate his later work. U.S. policymakers in 1943–45 found themselves faced with three overriding issues: (1) the global, revolutionary Left; (2) the Soviet Union as a great power and suspected source of all revolutions; and (3) Britain as enemy and rival, mainly because of its sterling bloc and imperial trade preference.

In important respects the real drama began in Italy, where Anglo-American occupation policies set precedents for later occupations: precedents the Soviet Union might exploit as its headlong pursuit of retreating German armies left Soviet forces in possession of Eastern Europe. To keep Italy away from the sterling bloc, Americans elbowed Britain aside, but U.S. and British forces jointly suppressed Italian political activity, disarmed the Resistance, and kept fascist administrators in place, as needed. Britain was promoting France — soon to be liberated — as a phony Great Power subordinate to a projected, British-dominated Western European economic bloc.

Ironically, the French Communist Party, feared by all, had become a patriotic, nationalist bulwark of order. Kolko reasons that if the Soviets (as reputed) controlled the French CP, then Soviet intentions were quite moderate. In Belgium the British repressed the Left. Here was another precedent for the rule cujus regio, ejus economia — whose region, his economy (my phrase). Anglo-American rivalry and their shared suspicion of Soviet intentions affected policies toward every nation about to be occupied by any of the three powers.

Despite Western expectations, the Soviets followed a pragmatic, country-by-country strategy as their armies came westward. In contrast, Kolko writes, “By the end of 1944 both the United States and Great Britain had intervened in the internal affairs of every major Western European nation in order to contain the Left and proscribe each other’s influence, systematically restricting Soviet influence as much as possible while Russia fought the European land war in the theater of central importance.” Underneath mounds of verbiage, then, a de facto division of Europe was in the cards from mid-1943, well before anyone ever yelled “Cold War!” The Soviets, willing enough “to leave the Greeks and Yugoslavs to their own fate,” could not afford such luxuries in Poland or Romania.

As of 1944, American strategic planning was shifting from the German to the Soviet menace, but policymakers postponed almost all diplomatic issues, biding their time until U.S. predominance could settle them in America’s favor. American peace plans, from 1941 forward, consisted of: (1) economic goals “inherited almost completely from the world view of Woodrow Wilson”; and (2) improvisation to meet crises and enforce those goals. Goals were “highly explicit in the economic field,” and American reconstruction of the world economy was “by far the most extensively discussed peace aim.”

Open doors and raw materials. Throughout Politics of War Kolko stresses the centrality of Secretary of State Cordell Hull’s conception of free trade as American officials’ chief war aim, aside from bare victory. This “free trade” was of course the famous Open Door policy, which was considered to be a global panacea, and which entailed a very large role for American state power as its motor of progress. As Kolko puts it,

For an international free trade doctrine, the Hullian program, which in principle received the approbation of most business organizations and firms interested in the subject, seemed to rely much more strongly on the Federal government’s active and continuous intervention than Adam Smith’s invisible hand, but nearly a century of pragmatic business-government relations had determined the precedent.

As I noted in part 1, Kolko adds American planners’ felt need for access to overseas resources and key raw materials to the William Appleman Williams school’s emphasis on the Open Door policy for American exports of goods and capital. This broadening of the applied Open Door reflected American policymakers’ own internal expansion of their operational ideology. A “right” to raw-materials access is a perfect counterpart to a “right” to overseas markets, and from at least May 1944, U.S. policymakers treated American access to raw materials as a self-evident implication “of the Open Door, which originally only meant equality with the most-favored foreign nation rather than [with a target country’s] domestic interests.”

The Open Door (or equal opportunity everywhere) for American corporate business was the key to U.S. world policy and something to which the United States would readily sacrifice its professed interest in overseas democracy. If American economic goals had been met, Kolko speculates, the United States could easily have tolerated total Soviet control of Eastern Europe, with that region back in its old, semicolonial economic role and the Russians as middlemen. “Rhetoric aside, expedient references to the Open Door … functionally meant American economic predominance, often monopoly control, over many of the critical raw materials on which modern industrial power is based.” There was little that was truly new in the full use of state power to shape this “free market.” With intermediaries like the Saudi oligarchs and the Iranian state on the payroll, America “saw underdeveloped areas primarily as a problem of raw-materials supplies, and that misery and stagnation would be the basis of such an American-led world was of no consequence in American planning for peace.”

Conduct of the war. Britain and the United States had long planned what became the terror bombing of World War II. In the Far East the Americans hoped to use both Russia and the atom bomb against Japan. In Kolko’s view (Politics of War), “The war had so brutalized the American leaders that burning vast numbers of civilians no longer posed a real predicament by the spring of 1945.” In the end, a “mechanistic attitude” prevailed. For U.S. leaders there was never any moral dilemma about using the new gadget. Elsewhere Kolko writes that, whatever the other side’s systematic inhumanity, “the Allies consistently transgressed traditional legal and ethical standards concerning civilians and war crimes,” and in Korea (1950–1952) the United States departed even farther from those rules.

Global planning and open doors. The United Nations grew up in the shadow of “the reality that America’s brand of internationalism was truly a plan for its own hegemony in the postwar world” (Main Currents of American History). U.S. plans for world monetary reform entailed accelerated trade and turnover, and massive overseas (private and state) lending as a floor under U.S. exports. American policymakers fielded their choicest “anticolonial” rhetoric as leverage in the quest for raw materials. Expected American control over the UN would make colonial economic resources available to all mankind, but mostly to American corporations. More practically, Washington used the leverage supplied by Lend-Lease and other means to open up the British trade bloc and to deprive Britain of its export markets in Latin America and, in time, its Middle Eastern and Iranian oil fields.

Anatomy of a War

The outcome of all this American effort was the classic Cold War system that “contained” defeated enemies (Germany and Japan) and certain victors (Russia and Britain) under the guise of containing communism. This broad story continues in Kolko’s Limits of Power, coauthored with his wife, Joyce Kolko (1972), but here we shall rush ahead into Vietnam, as treated in Kolko’s Anatomy of a War (1994 [1985]). In great detail Kolko sketches out the “vast orgy of violence [that] was the product … of the capital intensive premises of U.S. reliance on firepower. Officers fought the only war possible and the Vietnamese people paid a monumental price not because of individual caprices but because the United State’s entire military system performed exactly as it was intended to” (emphasis added).

Kolko thoroughly discusses the ideology and practice of “the Revolution” (the party in Hanoi and allied forces in South Vietnam) and tensions between them. In North and South alike, those resisting the Saigon government and American forces showed remarkable adaptability in military and economic affairs that belied the top-down Leninist party model.

War, economy, and state

Kolko’s Century of War (1994) is a broad study of the impact of modern wars on society and politics. One important conclusion Kolko draws is that “it was not the wisdom of Leninist revolutionaries, much less the glacially paced manifestation of Marxist axioms regarding the economy, but rather the folly of old orders that was the origin of the Left’s greatest political and ideological successes in the twentieth century.” Twentieth-century wars were the clearest expression of this universal ruling-class folly. (As for the war-bred Left, Soviet pragmatic conservatism and the power lust of left-wing leaders in various countries aborted its radical social and nationalist goals.)

World War I was a technology-driven train wreck that irreparably scarred European civilization and marginalized officer classes everywhere, sidelining their feudal-heroic values and replacing them with technocrats allied with heavy industry. If “stupidity in high places has been the bane of modern history,” Americans leaders — ever surprised, idiotically optimistic — earn special mention.

War, capital, and the state

Kolko’s tour of mankind’s bellicose folly leads him to conclude that conservative, Weberian, and Marxist theories of bureaucracy “gravely distort much of mankind’s past experiences” and leave researchers unable “to fathom the consummately self-destructive irresponsibility of leaders playing with the lives of their subjects and gambling on the very future of their social and political orders.” He sees some kind of radical, humanist exit as needed, but gives only hints in the works surveyed here. Kolko’s historical thought might seem to rest on methodological cynicism and justified anger. It is perhaps better to see it as the product of stark realism and considerable intellectual courage.

Charles T. Sprading was a libertarian activist and prolific writer in a number of causes, ranging from freedom and freethought advocacy, cooperativism, Irish Independence, publisher of libertarian books and periodicals, opponent of anti-blue laws, and, in his last years before his health failed him (d. approx 1960), supporter of the Bricker Amendment and strident opponent to the U.N.

Probably his best-known work outside of Liberty and the Great Libertarians (Los Angeles: The Libertarian Publishing Company, 1913, reprinted in 1978 and 1995), was The Science of Materialism (New York: The Truth Seeker Company, Inc., 1942) which ran through several reprints and one of the most popular freethought works of the 1940’s and 1950’s. He wrote freethought essays throughout his life and numerous other freethought books. Another freethought work, Science versus Dogma (Los Angeles: The Libertarian Publishing Company, 1925) is largely a defense of evolution written with the assistance of the naturalist, David Starr Jordan. Two other freethought books were American Religions (a humorous look at American religion) and Is Materialism A Science?

Sprading was a significant transitional figure in the evolution of the libertarian movement. Starting as a “plumb-line protagonist of freedom” (“plumb-line” generally referred to the Tuckerite wing of the anarchist movement. See, for example, Men Against the State by James J. Martin, who refers to Sprading as one of the Tuckerites.), he remained an anarcho-spencerian proponent of the law of equal rights throughout his life. Perhaps the most well-known proponent of this form of “rational anarchism” was Victor Yarros, particularly in his early writings in Benjamin Tucker’s periodical, Liberty (1881-1908. Yarros was co-editor of Liberty for a period of time.). Yarros was to later move from his radicalism to a form of progressive liberalism, particularly during the period writing for the socialist and freethought publisher, E. Haldeman-Julius.

As an interesting aside, one copy of Liberty and the Great Libertarians has been located with an inscription in the front to President Woodrow Wilson, “a fellow worker for a greater freedom”. Sprading held high hopes for Wilson’s term of office. Sprading admired Woodrow Wilson, as many radical classical liberals (i.e., libertarians–Spencer Heath is another example) did. Wilson was the author of a book entitled, The State, highly regarded by the classical liberals of the time, many of whom were to join with him in his administration. Some shed their fundamental beliefs and stayed with him in positions of power. Others, such as Albert Jay Nock (who worked under William Jennings Bryan in the State Department), left in horror over the directions that his administration was going, never to return to politics again.

As is frequently the case, alas, once in power, Acton’s Disease soon becomes a permanent ailment.

It was particularly saddening to see so many single taxers (influenced by the works of Henry George and tended to be the political activists in the radical wing of the classical liberal movement) in his administration as, in many respects, they were localists in their orientation akin to modern paleolibertarianism and paleoconservativism. The single tax position (taxing only the ground rent of land) places the tax base on land and hence, the benefits from this tax, such as roads and other public services, naturally accrue to the neighboring communities. Many single taxers, including Henry George, sought a drastic reduction in the power of the federal government (contrary to Wilson’s designs). George, for example, wanted the Navy entirely abolished as well as other federal departments. Others, including Nock and Chodorov, believed that the entire structure of the federal government should be limited in size to a single (albeit large) building.

Sprading began his career as a wealthy landowner in the San Francisco area until his properties were destroyed in the Great Earthquake of 1906 (one of the founders of the Oakland Museum and his name remains on the building), following which he traveled to Los Angeles, where he remained until his death.

A leading figure of the Los Angeles Liberal Club, along with several other “plumb-liners”, such as Clarence Lee Swartz (author of What is Mutualism? in 1927 and editor of Benjamin Tucker’s Individual Liberty in 1926), Cassius V. Cook (Rocker Publications), Sadie Cook (Rocker Publications) and H. F. Rossner, Sprading was part of the radical wing of the organization. He formed The Libertarian League around 1920 which published a periodical called The Libertarian for several years. Its primary emphasis was opposition to the blue laws (Sunday business closure laws) and prohibition. Incidentally, this was the only organization which H.L. Mencken officially joined. The Declaration of Principles of The Libertarian League, which remains a good statement to this day, from Sprading’s Freedom and Its Fundamentals (Los Angeles, Libertarian Publishing Company, 1923, pp. 9-10) expressed his position:

The Law of Equal Freedom, as Adopted by The Libertarian League

Since life itself contains the impulse of physical growth and the development of faculties and therefore needs room and freedom to function; and since liberty is necessary to the exercise of faculties; and since the exercise of faculties is essential to happiness; therefore, to attain happiness one must have liberty. And since liberty, being essential to the individual, is also necessary to the race; and since this necessitates limiting the liberty of each to the like liberty of all, we therefore arrive at the sociological Law of Equal Freedom.

Libertarian Principles:

• Freedom of thought is essential to the discovery of truth.
• Freedom of speech is essential to the vindication of truth.
• Freedom of the press is requisite for the dissemination of knowledge.
• Freedom of assembly is essential for the discussion of public questions.
• Freedom in education is essential to the development of correct principles of study and teaching.
• Freedom in science is essential to the demonstration of fact, through investigation and experimentation.
• Freedom in literature, art and music is necessary for the highest expression of conceptions and emotions.
• Freedom in amusements and sports is essential to the fullest enjoyment of recreation.
• Freedom in religion is necessary to avert persecution (as, e.g., for adopting and professing religious opinions, and for worshiping or not worshiping, according to the dictates of conscience).
• Freedom of initiative and association is necessary for efficiency and economic in individual or co-operative enterprise.

Equal Freedom and Its Friends was written approximately 1920, between the publication of his Liberty and the Great Libertarians and Freedom and Its Fundamentals. War, Its Cause and Cure was written in the late 1930’s and continues the approach taken in Chapter XI, “Freedom and Militarism” in Freedom and Its Fundamentals. Here is an excerpt from Chapter XI (pp. 165-6, 179-182):

Militarism is a violation of the principle of Equal Freedom. Militarism is founded on force; its method is violence; its theory is “Might is right”; its purpose is to conquer or destroy. Its greatest heroes are those who have slaughtered the greatest number of people. When differences between nations are settled by appeals to force, and not to justice, the stronger nations soon demonstrate that they are right. While the majority of men have outgrown the notion that a pugilist is in the right and an invalid is in the wrong because the former can thrash the latter, an analogous opinion is still entertained by those nations that rely solely on arms to vindicate the right.

The function of the militarist is war. His business is a fighting one. His teachings are to prepare the people for war and to excite other countries to war.

The distinguishing characteristic of the militarist is parasitism; the power and ability to destroy, and to levy tribute, to impose arbitrary restrictions and collect taxes, to take and to consume; in short, to govern…

Even the people in republics, who boast that “We are the Government,” have not a word to say about whether they are to be involved in war and killed. They may have something to say about whether the tariff is to be LOWERED or not, but they have nothing to say about whether they are to be LOWERED into the grave or not.

It is a simple matter to decide whether you want to kill or be killed. Most people have already decided in their own minds against killing, but they have no opportunity to vote against it. They should work for general disarmament.

(1) Those who believe in the use of the ballot should demand it in matters of life and death to themselves and their nation.

(2) Let those who vote for invasive war be registered as such, both male and female, so they may be called on first to face the bullets.

(3) Take away from the military class the power to declare war.

(4) Secret diplomacy should be wiped out; the people should know what is now concealed from them.

(5) Let an International Board of Arbitration composed of men of peace, not militarists, furnish an International Guard, composed of the navies and air fleets of all countries, and if this guard behaves itself, it will soon be seen that even it is not needed.

(6) Demand that the nations accept Equal Freedom (which implies equal rights and equal opportunities) as the guiding principle of nations.

One way to abolish invasive war, is to stop invading other countries. The way to stop bloodshed is to refuse to shed blood. The way to abolish the military class is to stop supporting it. Stop teaching war. Stop believing in war. Stop patronizing war papers. Stop teaching strife; teach mutual aid.

Stop teaching destruction, teach and practice co-operation.

Stop teaching force and murder; teach justice and liberty.

Instead of war mottoes like “My country, right or wrong,” let us have peace mottoes something like these:

It is better to work for your own country than to fight for another country.

It is nobler to live in peace in your own country than to die fighting in another.

It is finer to strive for the liberty to live, than to die in a ditch at the command of a class.

With proper teaching peace can be brought about, the teachers of force and murder must be replaced by teachers of truth and justice, of equal liberty, and the brotherhood of all mankind.

When that day comes murder will cease, for the militarist will have no way to glorify it…

His views on economics, like a number of libertarians of the time, leaned toward co-operation. He wrote several books on the subject, Mutual Service and Cooperation (1930), Cooperation—The Economic Solution(1935) and Ethics of Cooperation (early 1950’s). James P. Warbasse’s book, Cooperative Peace (Cooperative Publishing Association,, 1950) explains their economic theories. You will find Cooperation, the journal of the cooperative movement, was radically antipolitical in its focus during the 1920’s.

Sprading’s Real Freedom (Wetzel Publishing Co., Inc., 1954) and The World State Craze (Wetzel Publishing Co., Inc., 1954) were his final works. Real Freedom continued the effort of Sprading to describe the general position of libertarianism and follows Liberty and The Great Libertarians, Freedom and Its Fundamentals, Equal Freedom and Its Friends and Positive and Constructive Freedom and the Struggle for Rights and Freedom (1959) in this effort.

The World State Craze was his final attack on militarist trends in the U.S. This includes his defense of the Bricker Amendment and his opposition to the United Nations treaties (which he foresaw as destroying the last constitutional protections of the American citizen), as well as his opposition to the Marshal Plan and the World Bank. By this time, he lost any of the belief of the traditional 19th century classical liberal in international agreements for peace. As he made clear (pp. 19-22):

The talk about an “International Police Force” is a fraud. A police force belongs to a city, is governed by the city, and can be discharged and replaced by the city. This is not true of the armed force to control the world that is proposed. No city or citizens have any control of it. It is an International body, and must be controlled by an International State, and this International State supersedes all National States. It sets aside all the national sovereignties of all nations…

In the light of existing standards of international morality, the natural question is whether the people of the United States will consent to a military force of sufficient strength to crush the armed forces of this country?

American youth will be expected to join or be conscripted into a force which might be used to overwhelm the United States, and the citizens of this nation will have to pay the largest part of the expenses of that army, as it did of World War II…

The nature of a World State is to rule the world. Its nature is to encroach upon the legal rights and activities of the national states within the federation and to effect gradually a centralized form of government under which nations’ rights disappear…

A World State rulership is foreign rule to all nations and no nation likes foreign rule. The English rule has been the most perfect for centuries, and yet its colonies revolted against that rule. Now how can one expect the rulership of a World State to be satisfactory to all nations?

The history of the past furnishes plenty of evidence of nations revolting against foreign rule. As a World State is of that nature, revolt against that rule is certain when it conflicts with the interests of some nations, and when these revolts occur, the revolting nation must be subdued. Judging from past history, there will be plenty of such revolts, which will mean perpetual war, instead of peace.

…So this International Army will have plenty to do in suppressing uprisings which will not mean “peace” that has been heralded to the world by the Internationalists, but perpetual war.

Sprading is an important transitional figure. Not only was he one of the few classical liberal/libertarian activists spanning the period from WWI to the Cold War, but he was, along with Leonard Read and Frank Chodorov (although predating both), a leading advocate of the evolution of libertarians from their traditional nomenclature of “liberalism” into the new terminology of “libertarianism”. Beginning at the turn of the century and continuing through WWI, progressives had largely co-opted the term “liberal” from its traditional meanings of rationalism, free markets at home and abroad into almost the opposite sense–a hatred of individualism, pro-regulations, creation of an amazing array of taxes, and the imperialist Wilsonian internationalism which has dominated the last century in American liberal foreign policy.

Largely through the proliferation of Sprading’s writings, the term libertarian had become popularized throughout the radical classical liberal circles increasingly estranged from their traditional position on the left by a proto-fascist progressive liberalism. With the loss of the once dominating Cleveland Democrats who supported the hard gold, anti-tariff, pro-laissez-faire classical liberals, and the rise of the Wilsonian progressives, the old liberalism was supplanted by progressivism. The last great effort by the classical liberals was their anti-prohibition efforts in the 1920’s and the feeble attempts to organize (such as the Liberty League in the 1930’s) against their quisling, Franklinstein (as FDR was referred to by a libertarian radical of the time, E. C. Riegel).

The final issue which separated libertarians from the left was the growing awareness by the libertarians that the other leftist groups sanctioned a tyrannical soviet regime responsible for the murder of millions of people under Stalin. As this problem was swept under the rug or ignored by many of the leftists of the period (particularly among the communist and socialist left), the libertarian left would not condone such measures. This process continued through the 1920’s and, by the mid-30’s, was largely complete (Murray Rothbard’s classic essay, “Left and Right: Prospects for Liberty” discusses this in a different focus than the one here.

The creation of the new classical liberal paradigm, libertarianism, largely followed the personalities and philosophies identified in Sprading’s classic Liberty and the Great Libertarians. By identifying the libertarian American traditions and those elsewhere with fundamental principles of individualism and equal freedom, the radical classical liberals of the ‘20’s, and 30’s were able to clearly grasp who their friends were, and who were not. Sprading was known by many radicals throughout various anarchist and pro-freedom movements and his name would crop up in as many periodicals that he did not write for as the ones he did (Marcus Graham’s MAN! which was published part of the time in Los Angeles during the 1930’s is an example. See MAN! An Anthology of Anarchist Ideas, Essays, Poetry and Commentaries (London: Cienfuegos Press, 1974) edited by Marcus Graham) at a time when libertarian and pro-freedom periodicals and books were few and far between.

The evolution and popularity of new paradigm was to continue with the creation of the Foundation for Economic Education with Leonard Read (who had studied the missteps of The Liberty League and the Chambers of Commerce), F.A. Harper, Henry Hazlitt, Ludwig von Mises, and such independents as Rose Wilder Lane, Isabel Paterson, R.C. Hoiles and Robert LeFevre with the founding of the Freedom School during the 1950’s.

By the time that Charles T. Sprading died around 1960 of pneumonia, he was little remembered by the current crop of libertarians. His old friends and colleagues were all dead and forgotten. A few people still remembered him, including Queen Silver. You can find references to Sprading in Wendy McElroy’s biography, Queen Silver: The Godless Girl (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Press, 1999), for example, and in Emma Goldman’s Living My Life, Vol. I (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1931) which mentions Sprading’s financial support for Goldman.