$1.00 for the first copy. $0.60 for every additional copy.

“From the individualist point of view, competition is synonymous with emulation, or stimulation. . . For individualists, then, the expression ‘freedom of competition’ means the complete possibility for individual affirmation in all fields. In other words, full opportunity for every individual, in association or alone, to present, diffuse, and put into practice all conceptions and methods with similar or differing aims, without any fear of restrictive interference by a State, governmental administration, or any human being whatsoever. In the field of economic action freedom of competition means full opportunity for the producer – in association or alone – to develop his individual effort according to his taste. That is to say, to put into action his ingenuity, to call on his creativity and personal initiative, without the fear of clashing with a regulation which limits the conditions of his production. . . .

“Any hindrance of this opportunity, or liberty, has as a result the increase of uniformity. Who says ‘uniformity’ says fossilization, regression, retrogression. In an environment in which there is no competition degradation results: the producer, instead of evolving towards the artist, devolves towards the labourer; the latter recedes into the automaton; and the consumer loses himself in fatuity and vulgarity. . . . The concentration of manufacture into the hands of a few, mass-production in immense industrial barracks, conscription and permanent armies – all these push the human personality towards the beast of the herd, making it into flesh for shepherds and dictators. . . .”

CNBC describes the Corporate Perception Indicator as “a far-reaching survey of business executives and the general population from 25 markets,” “research firm Penn Schoen Berland survey[ing] 25,012 individuals and 1,816 business executives.” The results of the survey show quite unsurprisingly that the general public associates government with words like “corruption,” “lies,” “incompetence,” and “thieves.” As for big business, the words that came to the minds of those surveyed included, again, “corruption” and “thieves,” also “monopoly” and “power.” Interestingly, overall perceptions of both corporations and government appear to be largely negative. In American political discourse, the political right is characterized by a perceptible overpraise of business, devoted to a view of corporations that sees them as essentially free market actors, “creators” and “doers” that give us progress and innovation. Even if this is not true of everyone on the American right, certainly such sentiments are important to the right’s narrative on free markets. The right looks on government, in contrast, as the bungling and inept meddler attempting to hold back our industrious and our productive, the supporter of the lazy and parasitic who would rather live on the government dole than work for a living.

On the left, corporations are perceived as putting profits above people, as willing to do anything to suck more and more of the world’s natural wealth into the hands of a grasping, extravagant one percent. Government, on the other hand, is treated as the agent of “the greater good” or “the public good,” a kind of benevolent, altruistic mother to us all.

In the United States, people who identify themselves as free marketers or libertarians are much more likely to align with the former of these competing narratives, the right’s assertion that the corporation is the home of the movers and the shakers, the creative and energetic champions of free enterprise. This relationship between self-identified libertarians and the American right helps explain the broader anarchist movement’s pardonable reluctance to accept individualist or market anarchists as the genuine article. Further, hostility toward communism has a long history in individualist anarchism, typified by Benjamin Tucker’s frequent denunciations, yet certainly preceding them.[1]

We may observe at this juncture that both the right and the left share the historically and empirically ridiculous theory that government and corporate power are locked in an eternal war. But it is a great politico-economic myth that governments and large corporations operate at variance with one another, that one must align herself in her political commitments with one or the other, never both, never neither. For left wing individualists, surveys which demonstrate dissatisfaction with and negative attitudes toward both actually make perfect sense. That big business should be associated with greed and governments with corruption is hardly astonishing or remarkable. Further, these results underline the problem with seeing corporate power and government power as rivals, rather than seeing them much more accurately as codependent partners in crime, mutually reinforcing components parts of a larger phenomenon we might call a ruling class or power elite.

We needn’t risk the cognitive dissonance that comes with treating the State as the great restraint upon the socially destructive avarice of multinational corporations. For we find, whenever we bother to look, that elites in the business community regularly work with the public sector to create conditions accommodating to monopolism. The ideal of free and open competition, however championed in corporate press releases and political campaigning, is nowhere to be found and indeed never has been. Thus do market anarchists prosecute our laissez faire critique of capitalism. We come from an older tradition of American libertarians, radicals who contemned capitalism as much as any communist, but understood the importance of individual rights and mutually beneficial trade.

It is interesting to witness anarchist communists and syndicalists develop strict, exclusionary criteria for anarchism, particularly insofar as the arguable father of our doctrine, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, was neither, his mutualism containing many market-friendly if not outright pro-market elements. No less important for anarchism as it developed in America is Josiah Warren, whose first forays into anarchist thought antedate Proudhon. If market or individualist anarchism represents a form of “pseudo-intellectualism,” then some of the anarchist tradition’s brightest lights must apparently be relegated to the dustbin of history. Granting that opposition to not only political but also economic authority is a necessary condition for the true anarchist, individualists like Warren (and his followers such as Benjamin Tucker) more than qualify.

Whether our communist and syndicalist comrades admit it or not, free market ideas figured prominently in fledgling anarchist thought, regarded as perfectly consistent with and a natural outgrowth of, to quote Warren, “the absolute right of supreme individuality.” Considering Warren as an example, many contemporary anarchists may not know that anarchist luminary Peter Kropotkin acknowledged Warren as an inspiration and, in the words of Crispin Sartwell, “a precursor of (and influence on?) Proudhon.” In discussing Warren’s legacy, Sartwell observes one of the major, continuing tensions between the individualist and communist strains of anarchism, the debate on “lifestyle anarchism.” Sartwell argues, quite correctly in the author’s view, that Warren “belongs squarely in what is called by its opponents ‘lifestyle anarchism’: that strain concerned with creating alternatives within the interstices in the existing system rather than arming to overthrow it.” “Peaceful Revolutionist” that he was, Warren emphasized experiments in the creation of practical alternatives to dominant economic and social modalities. To Warren, the whole of life was open to and the subject of reform. This holistic approach, the universality of his critique of the existing state of affairs, he likely inherited from Robert Owen, even while dispensing with other aspects of Owenite thinking. Indeed, Warren’s departure from Owen and his ideas offers us an illuminative proxy for the tensions and debates that still divide individualist from communist elements within anarchism. Warren worried about the overwhelming of the individual within combinations and, paraphrasing Sartwell, imposed a priori schemes. Communists often tend to see the undisciplined “lifestylism” of Warren-type experimentation as essentially bourgeois, outside of or ancillary to genuine class struggle.

Discussing early figures in anarchism such as Warren opens opportunities to reflect on the similarities that unite all anarchists. We can pause to wonder what someone with Warren’s breadth of interests and hopes for reform might think of twenty-first century problems and perceptions thereof.

As all anarchists understand, politics is at bottom conquest, spoliation and rape. Everything else, everything peaceful, voluntary and consensual is something different, throwing the distinction between the “politics means” and the “economic means” once again into sharp relief. The economic means to wealth is defined by the normal, even obvious standards we refer to in interactions with merchants, our friends, and family, the mutually beneficial guidelines we use to cooperate and trade with coequals. The political means, by contrast, is the acquisition of wealth by aggression, by forcible extraction through systematic privilege. The State, being the organization with a monopoly on the legal use of force, is the wellspring of such privilege. As Josiah Warren pointed out in Equitable Commerce:

Theorists have told us that laws and governments are made for the security of person and property; but it must be evident to most minds, that they never have, never will accomplish this professed object; although they have had the world at their control for thousands of years, they have brought it to a worse condition than that in which they found it, in spite of immense improvements in mechanism, division of labor, and other elements of civilization to aid them. On the contrary, under the plausible pretext of securing person and property, they have spread wholesale destruction, famine, and wretchedness in every frightful form over all parts of the earth, where peace and security might otherwise have prevailed. They have shed more blood, committed more murders, tortures, and other frightful crimes in the struggles against each other for the privilege of governing, than society ever would or could have suffered in the total absence of all government whatever.

A deep, principled loathing of both big business and government unites all anarchists. Confronted with the alarming realities of the present moment, its authoritarian repressions and economic maladies, anarchists ought to help one another in peaceful projects to build a freer, better world. Data such as those contained in the Corporate Perception Indicator survey show a world fully primed for our anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist critiques. It falls upon us to communicate our message, to do the constructive work of inaugurating a new order.

[1] Relatedly, in True Civilization, Josiah Warren wrote, “What is called conservatism has all the time been entirely right in its objections to communism, and in insisting on individual ownership and individual responsibilities both of which communism annihilates; conservatism has also shown wisdom in its aversion to sudden and great changes, for none have been devised that contained the elements of success.”

Kevin Carson discusses the role of the commons in market anarchism.

Kevin Carson discusses how Obama doesn’t want to defeat ISIS too badly.

Cory Massimino discusses individualist anarchism and hierarchy.

Kevin Carson discusses a book on new forms of worker organization.

Mel Gurtov discusses America’s return to Iraq.

Corey Robin discusses Labor Day readings.

Rizwan Zulfiqar Bhutta discusses lessons in counter-terrorism.

Ron Jacobs discusses the rational unreason of imperial war.

Conor Friedersdorf discusses what going to war with Syria would really mean for the U.S.

Robert Murphy discusses why we need to scrap the empire to have a free society at home.

Ezra Klein discusses the DNC’s braindead attack on Rand Paul.

Lew Rockwell discusses why libertarians are winning.

Lucy Steigerwald discusses why we don’t need a police czar.

Anthony Gregory discusses class theory in the first part of a series.

Tariq Ali discusses current Pakistani politics.

Benjamin W. Powell discusses market regulation of secondhand smoke.

Nathan Goodman discusses the labor politics of prisons.

Rick Sterling discusses myths about the conflict in Syria.

Dave Lindorff discusses the re-invasion of Iraq.

Belen Fernandez discusses Patrick Cockburn’s new book on ISIS.

Thom Holterman discusses Gary Chartier’s book on anarchy and legal order.

Lucy Steigerwald discusses why reassessing WW2 is a good idea.

Justin Raimondo discusses anti-interventionism and its discontents.

Rachel Burger discusses incest and the state.

Sheldon Richman discusses whether freedom requires empire.

Sheldon Richman discusses the crisis in Ukraine.

Jeff Sparrow discusses wars conducted in the name of humanitarianism.

Vassily Ivanchuk beats Alexey  Shirov

Vassily Ivanchuk beats Gary Kasparov.

Individualist anarchism, in short, is the view that the individual human being is the building block of “society.” Therefore, whatever political system, or more accurately, apolitical non-system, is in place, ought to give primacy to the individual and respect their sovereignty as a free being. The non-system that best accomplishes this is anarchism.

Hierarchy is “a system or organization in which people or groups are ranked one above the other according to status or authority.” In some instances this kind of system is inherently wrong (or bad in itself); in others it is permissible and even good, in even others it is not inherently bad but still objectionable.

Where hierarchy is obviously problematic, even immoral, is when it is maintained through the initiation of force. As individualists, we maintain the sovereignty of the individual and regard a person’s personal autonomy as extremely morally relevant. The ability to exercise one’s faculties and capacities to the best of their ability according to their own volition is each individual’s fundamental right (and since each person has this right, it implies a limitation for when one forcibly impedes the actions of another).

The act of subordinating another’s goals by force and replacing them with your own is an affront to the individuality of both people and a violation of rights. The act of aggression is immoral in itself, yes. But a system of hierarchy maintained by aggression makes certain individuals subject to the authority of others; where one is merely a serf, obedient to the higher levels of the hierarchy, there is no individuality – something we are obviously against.

This leads the individualist to reject the use of violence, and therefore, the state. The state, contrary to the social contract theorists, relies on violence to maintain its funding and its monopoly on the legitimate use of force within a region. States are systems of aggressive, hierarchical, predators. They are the antithesis to individualism.

For many anarchists, private property is inherently hierarchical, and therefore impermissible. They are only partially right. In some sense, private property does create a hierarchy between the owner of a piece of property and everyone else. However, private property has other benefits that are worthy of consideration. There is no reason to restrict our analysis to a single question of hierarchy or no hierarchy. There are other morally relevant factors.

Private property is useful for a number of reasons, many of them consequential. A system of private property creates a prosperous, wealthy, society that can efficiently allocate scarce resources. Additionally, and of significant importance for the individualist, private property is vital for personal autonomy. As Roderick Long writes,

“The human need for autonomy: the ability to control one’s own life without interference from others. Without private property, I have no place to stand that I can call my own; I have no protected sphere within which I can make decisions unhampered by the will of others. If autonomy (in this sense) is valuable, then we need private property for its realization and protection.”

Without private property, the scope of the individual is restricted in favor of the community or society. As individualists we ought to be concerned with maximizing the autonomy of each person and private property is beneficial to that goal.

Furthermore, the replacement of private property with collective ownership doesn’t eliminate the existence of hierarchy. It merely changes the higher level of the hierarchy from the property owner to the majority of the collective. Under collective ownership, whoever happens to be in the majority has the say over what the property is used for, and are, therefore, in a place of authority over the minority.

Worthy of note is the question of parenting or the family. The parent-child relationship is historically hierarchical. However, without going too much into the complicated realm of children’s rights, the authority employed by proper parents in raising their children does not rely on force in the same sense that force is used against an adult (where to draw that line is another messy question). While there are instances of force that are unjust, such as abuse, there are other instances of force that are just, such as making a child eat their dinner. And since the parent-child hierarchy is seemingly beneficial to the individuals involved, the individualist anarchist is alright with it. (For more on an individualist anarchist view of children’s right, see the section of this essay entitled “The Rights of Children”)

What about systems of non-violent hierarchy? Many of these will depend on the details of the situation and the specific context. But we can generally say hierarchy, even “consensual” hierarchy, is always potentially problematic for the individualist. Since we consider autonomy and the exercise of one’s faculties of primary importance, situations where people voluntarily submit to the complete authority of others, creating a hierarchy, might very well be objectionable.

Consider a small town in which everyone, for one reason or another, voluntary submits all their property to collective ownership. For reasons explained above about the effects of private property on consequences and autonomy, we can say a town of private property is preferable to a town of collective ownership. So as individualists who value prosperity and autonomy, we have good reason to object to the voluntary communist town – even if it’s merely taking the stance that the townspeople are making a poor decision and should instead adopt a system of private property.

For reasons mentioned above, the initiation of force is impermissible for the individualist. After all, using force would be subjecting the townspeople to our will, which is actively immoral and worse than their voluntary decisions. So it would be wrong to use force to prevent the townspeople from creating voluntary communism.

However, using things such as persuasion, educational campaigns, or boycotts are permissible, and perhaps encouraged (whether are not these are effective, worthy measures is a different question). We recognize that voluntary communism is a bad system for the people who live there (and also potentially bad for others, for economic reasons or if the ideas start to spread and gain support), and subjecting themselves to the whim of the majority is misguided, so it wouldn’t make sense to remain ambivalent on the question.

There is also the concept of communal property forms that are horizontally organized and self-managed. These aren’t exactly the same a collective ownership models. Common pool resources where he private possessory rights of the individual are strictly defined are much more likely to protect and encourage personal autonomy and individualism than full on collectivism, despite being possibly problematic depending on how exactly the pools are organized.

The question of workplace hierarchy is possibly objectionable, but not inherently. Large, hierarchical workplaces that tend to treat workers like cogs in a machine or tools of the employers are clearly not in line with the individualist philosophy. A workplace where the employees on the lower rungs are pushed around and treated with little respect from their employers ought to be objected to (non-aggressively) by anyone concerned about autonomy and respect for persons.

Now, this doesn’t imply that all workplace hierarchy is everywhere and always bad. Sometimes it will be preferable for economic reasons. Sometimes the hierarchy is minimal and the employees have a say and are treated with respect. Sometimes the firm is hierarchical, but still relatively flat. While many of the giant corporations today are antithetical to individualist commitments, not all workplace hierarchy is inherently bad. It merely has the potential to be bad.

Merely asking if something is hierarchical and ending our moral analysis there is misguided. Similarly, merely asking if something is coercive and ending our moral analysis there is misguided. Individualism holds multiple things to be morally relevant. Aggression and negative liberty is important, yes. But so is personal autonomy. And so are prosperity and good consequences. Both political economy and moral philosophy require a kind of value pluralism combined with meticulous analysis.

The lesson to be learned about non-violent hierarchy is that it, like most things in life, is not inherently bad but it has the potential to be bad. Voluntary systems of hierarchy promote a culture of obedience and collectivism, and could possibly lead to systems that do rely on violence. They discourage individuality, freethinking, and autonomy. For these reasons, non-violent hierarchy is never inherently wrong for the individualist anarchist, but is always potentially problematic and often objectionable.

The individualist anarchist position on hierarchy falls somewhere between “it’s always wrong” and “it’s never wrong.” Sometimes it is. But other times, it’s not. Like I said earlier, the relationship between anarchism and hierarchy is tricky and messy. Part of being an individualist, a human being, is to rigorously and exhaustively think through things yourself. There aren’t always hard and fast principles that do our thinking for us, no matter how comfortable the armchair is.

Translations of this article:

• Spanish, El anarquismo individualista y la jerarquía

.

“I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival … It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.”

Of course, Adams was correct. There are 4th of July celebrations all across the country — fully equipped with the activities mentioned in his letter plus tons of food and fireworks. Today, however, there is an urgent need for collective reflection on the all too important idea behind the holiday — liberty — and its unique history in the country.

A society rooted in liberty would be defined simply as (to borrow from Merriam Webster) one “free from oppressive restrictions imposed by authority on one’s way of life, behavior or political views.” We in the United States enjoy degrees of freedom, but said freedom is not absolute. Furthermore, there currently exist aggressive barriers to achieving a free society (such as structural poverty and racism to name only a couple) and such barriers are institutionalized, protected and upheld by state power.

Social power, however, works in opposition to state power. Throughout our collective history, liberty has been achieved by people either working around power structures or directly engaging them, forcing change. Liberty is not the product of legislation, but the sum of human action. It is important to remember that patriotism is not allegiance to government or obedience to law, but rather defending and advocating moral positions in spite of the power structure.

There is something classically American about questioning authority and having distrust of large centralized governments. This tradition is experiencing a needed resurgence as of late, and along with it, so too are libertarian politics.

There are many libertarian “schools,” but in the mid-nineteenth century, a vibrant American school, known as individualist anarchism, existed with other varieties. This tradition is gaining popularity again today in the form of market anarchism. Independent scholar Kevin Carson, in his landmark book Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, describes this philosophy as free market anti-capitalism. Carson writes:

The classical individualist anarchism of Josiah Warren, Benjamin Tucker and Lysander Spooner was both a socialist movement and a subcurrent of classical liberalism … Thus, individualist anarchism was an alternative both to the increasing statism of the mainstream socialist movement, and to a classical liberal movement that was moving toward a mere apologetic for the power of big business.

This tradition resists domination, violence and privilege because these societal attributes are violations of liberty and human dignity. The idea embraces markets that are crafted by the spontaneous order of inclined labor and holds that society can be organized around voluntary interactions. Anarchism is the belief that human beings are fundamentally good so as we pursue happiness in absolute liberty, our natural instincts for altruism and cooperation will produce a free and prosperous society. These ideas are self-evident and as American as apple pie. On this Independence Day light your bonfires, celebrate liberty and further embrace American anarchism.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Originally published as an article in Free Life, the journal of the Libertarian Alliance (U.K.), in Vol. II, No. 2 (Spring 1981), “My Anarchism” defends a bracing individualism, and opens up a challenge to communist theories of ownership: if access to the means of production is mediated entirely through social relationships and communal connections, does this mean social liberation? Or does it just mean a new social capitalism, with the individual finding herself at the mercy of new monopolies, administered “horizontally” by the majority?

“The common ownership of the means of production would confront me with the choice: integrate or perish. Any group, or federation of groups, can be as powerful as any state if it monopolises in any given area the potentialities of action and realisation. The result would be social totalitarianism. . . .”

“What power could I exercise for example if I were stuck at the base of the pyramid of workers’ councils proposed as the administrative structure for indus­tries in the communist society? At best, and in its purest form, such a system might produce an ‘anarchism’ of groups. It would not produce an anarchism of individuals…”

“There is no vertical authority exercised by a State, but there is horizontal authority exercised by ‘soc­iety’ in the form of customs that are often more ubi­quit­ous and despotic than modern governments. . . . All col­lec­t­i­v­ities need norms to which their members must conform if they are to function. And these norms need sanctions to ensure that they are obeyed. Anarchism has never existed as a form of society, nor is it ever likely to. Indeed, I consider it a grave mistake to conceive of anarchism as asocial theory. Anarchism is not a form of society. It is the cutting edge of individualism. . . .”

Sidney Parker was a prolific individualist anarchist writer and editor best known for his long-running egoist journal Minus One, later retitled The Egoist and Ego, which ran from 1963–1993.

On this episode the Annoying Peasants will be discussing mutualism, individualist anarchism and Carson’s books – Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective, and The Homebrew Industrial Revolution.

Kevin Carson, a well-known and well-respected mutualist talks to us about mutualism, his views on a free society, and more. We get to hear his views on economics, including his ideas on how to fuse the Labor Theory of Value with the Subjective Theory of Value, business structures, management, history, and technology.