But anarchism is not an ideological movement. It is an ideological statement. It says that all people have the capacity for liberty. It says that all anarchists want liberty. And then it is silent. After the pause of that silence, anarchists then mount the stages of their own communities and history and proclaim their, not anarchism’s ideologies – they say how they, how they as anarchists, will make arrangements, describe events, celebrate life and work.

Anarchism is the hammer-idea, smashing the chains. Liberty is what results and, in liberty, everything else is up to the people and their ideologies. It is not up to THE ideology. Anarchism says, in effect, there is no such upper case, dominating ideology.

It says that people who live in liberty make their own histories and their own deals with and within it.

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Sin embargo, España es un ejemplo clásico de dos críticas devastadoras a la opinión de consenso llevadas a cabo por el anarquista Karl Hess en una entrevista con la revista Playboy en julio de 1976. Primero, cuando Hess negó “que los monarcas medievales sean muy distintos que nuestros presidentes de hoy en día” fue objetado con el contrargumento de que “Seguramente, incluso siendo anarquista, usted reconocerá que hay algunas diferencias entre los presidentes y los reyes”, pero él insistió: “Los presidentes alcanzan el poder a través de fraudes y apretones de manos, mientras que los reyes optan por la vía mucho menos agotadora del nacimiento. Esa es la única diferencia que puedo discernir”. Segundo, dijo que “La mayoría de los analistas ven el espectro político como un gran círculo, con los gobiernos autoritarios de derecha y de izquierda intersectándose en un punto directamente opuesto a la democracia representativa. Pero mi idea de la política es que sigue una línea recta, con todas las sociedades autoritarias a la derecha y todas las sociedades libertarias a la izquierda”, con “un mundo de barrios en los que toda organización social es voluntaria y las formas de vida están establecidas en grupos pequeños que se asocian por consentimiento mutuo” como lo contrario tanto a la democracia representativa como a la dictadura.

En su introducción a Los Colectivos Anarquistas, Murray Bookchin despreció la interpretación convencional que hizo la socialdemocracia y la vieja izquierda de la Guerra Civil Española como “una lucha entre una república liberal que trató de defender valientemente y con el apoyo popular al estado democrático parlamentario contra los generales autoritarios”. De hecho, la gente común de España “veía a la república casi con tanta animosidad como a los franquistas” y “no les interesaba rescatar a un régimen republicano traicionero, sino reconstruir la sociedad española”. Después de la introducción de Bookchin, se presenta documentación primaria detallada de su éxito cuando lograron contener el poder del Estado lo suficiente como para obtener una oportunidad de luchar.

Lejos de ser lo que la vieja izquierda vio como una quijotesca última resistencia de “rebeldes primitivos” pre-industriales contra la marea de la historia, los anarquistas españoles parecen cada vez más clarividentes en cuanto a la era post-industrial de mañana.

El poder aparentemente imparable del Estado y de sus apéndices plutócratas —los sucesores modernos de los que Bookchin llamó los “enemigos de clase históricos del pueblo español, que van desde los grandes terratenientes y señores clericales heredados del pasado a la creciente burguesía industrial y banqueros de tiempos más recientes”— para desplazar formas alternativas de organización socioeconómica siempre ha dependido totalmente de su capacidad de extraer riqueza involuntariamente: en palabras de Franz Oppenheimer, de los “medios políticos”. Las raíces de los medios políticos se están secando gradualmente a medida que la producción económica se hace cada vez más localizada, menos intensiva en capital, y en consecuencia menos susceptible de ser sometida a la tributación. En el ámbito militar, el poder del ejército permanente está siendo desafiado cada vez con más fuerza por técnicas de guerra de cuarta generación que reviven el espíritu popular de las voluntarias y decididamente anti-estatatistas Brigadas Internacionales.

El futuro cercano nos depara formas organización social a escala humana tan descentralizadas que harán lucir a Monaco como pesadamente burocrático, y que funcionarán sin necesidad de que los individuos renuncien a la soberanía sobre sus vidas personales. Y así es como harán realidad la observación de George Woodcock según la cual “En realidad, el ideal del anarquismo, lejos de la democracia llevada a su extremo lógico, es mucho más parecida a la aristocracia universalizada y purificada”.

Artículo original publicado por Joel Schlosberg el 8 de junio de 2014.

Traducido del inglés por Alan Furth.

For all its brazen anti-statism, Hess’s “red-white-and-blue anarchy” fits like a glove with a cover that proclaims “Happy Birthday, America!” while placing popular Playmate Cyndi Wood, beaming with a joy utterly alien to the patriotism of what Matthew Yglesias calls “grim-faced folks and bourgeois respectability and military jets flying in tight formation”, in a tasteful restyling of the venerable imagery of a flag-carrying Lady Liberty clad in a robe somewhat more revealing than the traditional versions.

Indeed, the issue’s editorial comments place Hess’s American anarchism within the general questioning-authority attitude in the country at a time where, even after the cooling of the tumult of The Sixties, everything still seemed up for grabs. Hess’s explication of “why we’d be better off with no government at all” isn’t treated as all that much farther out than the dissident contributions on the state of the States from better-remembered Gil “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” Scott-Heron and Ron “Born on the Fourth of July” Kovic. As unlikely as it seems in retrospect, given that Hess is now half-remembered at best even in movements he sparked from small-scale technology to libertarianism, it really could seem plausible at the time that he might represent the overall course of the United States.

Befitting Playboy‘s reputation, Sam Merrill’s interview is freewheeling and wide-ranging, yet always clear and readable. Particularly notable is its precision about the sequence of events in Hess’s unruly life, frustratingly elusive in Hess’s own autobiographical writings. The pre-Q&A introductory blurb alone is more concrete than Hess’s entire first autobiography Dear America.

While judging Hess’s worldview to be “somewhat bizarre,” and occasionally breaking into sheer incredulity at some of Hess’s most startling views (such as when he denies that presidents are essentially different from kings or opposes child-labor laws as “just a typical example of snobby liberal elitism”), Merrill never gawks or patronizes, but carefully and sympathetically probes the underlying worldview behind Hess’s apparently wild changes in political affiliations, lifestyle and milieu that have usually led to the bewilderment summed up by Brian Doherty:

Hess transformed himself from a suit-and-tie anti-communist GOP platform-scribbler and Goldwater speechwriter into a Castro manqué Black Panther cheerleader and Institute for Policy Studies inmate. It’s not surprising that scholars unwilling to dig into philosophical roots might see libertarianism as some inconsistent, ad hoc cobbling together of leftist and rightist notions.

Indeed, Merrill carefully notes Hess’s consistent synthesis of “equal pinches of right-wing self-reliance and rugged individualism, left-wing ecology and conservation and liberal (although he shudders visibly at the word) concern for the welfare of the disadvantaged.” As the culture war lines have become ever more rigidly solidified, this counterexample is ever more welcome.  Nowhere is it more urgent than in environmentalism, with deeply entrenched denial by conservatives and equally entrenched reliance on technocratic solutions by liberals.

While it’s juicy fun to read Hess’s lampoons of a variety of widely-looked-up-to public figures — from FDR (“What makes you think I have anything against Roosevelt? Roosevelt was wonderful — if you like fascists”) to Arthur Schlesinger Jr. (“Most people would call him a left-wing historian.” “He is neither left-wing nor a historian.”); from placing Huey Long among totalitarian “right-wingers” to casually stating that Texas oil billionaire “[H.L.] Hunt was a Stalinist;” or simply listing “Humphrey, Ford, Jackson, Rockefeller, Kennedy, Reagan or any of the other state socialists of the American right” — they aren’t mere provocations.

Instead, they come from a consistent positive worldview. Hess is confident that almost all political power can be devolved to neighborhoods (though this enthusiasm doesn’t prevent some cutting criticism of his time in the suburbs). The few remaining larger-scale necessities would be taken care of by agreements similar to the federations of classical anarchism, sans their tendency towards bureaucracy suspiciously like representative democracy in all but name.  He completely rejects the textbook arguments that representation of any sort is necessary at all, and suggests that management could be handled by chimpanzees and pigeons.

Compared to Hess’s other works, his viewpoint is closest to the previous year’s Dear America and the documentary Karl Hess: Toward Liberty in capturing him at his leftmost. As Merrill notes, “you’ve really moved as far left as you can go.”

This Hess prefers “anarchist” to “libertarian”, and his position on capitalism is: “Theoretical, laissez-faire capitalism doesn’t strike me as immoral — just unnecessary. I’d prefer it to many other ways of running things, but it’s wasteful and causes people to be overly concerned with numbers”.

And Hess pitilessly dissects the empty sophistry of the vulgar libertarian propaganda he used to write for the wealthy: “Mostly, I wrote speeches praising ‘the great system that produces all our material well-being.’ It was easy. I simply leaped from the fact of the productivity to a generalized justification of everything associated with it.”

In discussing his personal experiences with powerful conservative leaders from William F. Buckley Jr. to Gerald Ford, Hess is candid but charitable, and never bitter. He still holds out his original hope that Barry Goldwater would become a New Leftist, though one of Goldwater’s suggestions, that the Soviet Union would eventually become freer than the United States, is too radical for even Hess’s credence.

While skewering conservatives’ phoniness in their lip service to what are still Hess’s ideals of self-reliance and local control, their bloodthirstiness and their devotion to national security, militarism and law and order, Hess would still agree with Matt Stone’s “I hate conservatives, but I really fucking hate liberals”:

“The only reason I’m knocking conservatives is because they’re worth knocking. Liberals scarcely are. Conservatives make a number of grievous errors, but they also make a number of correct analyses. It is not known to me that liberals make any correct analyses.” Liberals’ unlimited elitism and grasping for centralization of power infuriates Hess even more than conservatives, and puts them “slightly farther along the road to dictatorship.”

Surprisingly, Hess retains sympathy for the Norman Thomas socialism of his pre-conservative youth, seeing value in its social programs before the New Deal’s elites removed them from popular control.

To many, Hess’s relative sympathy for Israel may be even more unexpected. He praises its (and Sweden’s!) parliamentary structure for its absence of an executive branch, and thus a personality cult around its leader.  He baffledly replies “I neither endorse nor understand it” when asked about the left’s favoring the Arab states, which rather than being socialist “are feudal … actually pre-capitalist!” While acknowledging that its current location in the Middle East makes it “a roadblock to world peace for generations to come” (though “I think you can make a fairly good case for its having happened in self-defense”), for all his antistatism he believes that “a Jewish state, located in a politically hospitable region [such as “Texas or Orange County. Those areas aren’t being used for much now”], would almost certainly become a great benefit to all mankind.”

Hess comes across as far as possible from the Bill Ayers-style hard leftists who came to be identified with the revolutionary ends of the radical left, disclaiming any attraction to leadership even when pressed if it would be “even for a brief, transitory period”. Indeed Playboy calls him a “humane revolutionary”. While Hess puzzles why conservatives don’t admire the Black Panthers and amends NRA slogans to be more antigovernment, he conspicuously lacks enthusiasm for putting counterrevolutionaries up against the wall: “the freer a society gets, the less need there is to shoot people”. His sheer personal modesty and lack of self-aggrandizement is telling, lacking any impulse towards puffery or dropping the many names he easily could. As he sums up his anarchism: “What did you expect, a lot of rules?”

Hess evinces a commendable skepticism of the counterculture’s widespread and often-disastrous attraction to dubiousness and charlatanism, lacking the trendy enthusiasm for drugs (“pleasurable, but they don’t expand your mind. They make you useless”) or Mao (“an elitist, a bureaucrat”). If anything he takes this a bit too far; he’s unduly dismissive of Timothy Leary as “a clown” (certainly a huckster, but an often-prescient one) and it’s jarring that an anarchist outlaw would have no sympathy for Bonnie and Clyde.

Ours is an era where the left has, in diametric opposition to Hess and Voltairine de Cleyre, become steadily more hostile to American culture — with their occasional attempts to invoke it coming off as insincere — while becoming wedded ever more intimately with its government, and anarchism seems to have difficulty remembering its anti-statism.

When the label of “libertarian” has become so diluted that a recent Playboy interviewee could in the same breath claim it while insisting he’s “not for” marijuana legalization, we need some public figures with Hess’s down-to-earth, plainspoken, yet unbending radicalism.

Hess gains no comfort from the centralist liberals of the day, whose ideas of police reform involve teaching cops only to shoot straighter. Hess instead embraces the slogan of Power to the People and connects this tendency within the New Left to the embrace of full anarchism. The Right had grown tired of individuals, of people, of communities, saw the only true attainment of its goals through the institution of the nation-state. Hess saw the aims of the Left and of social revolution to be for “the people to be great and for the nations to be nothing”

An article published in early June by Chinese scientists in the international journal, Nature argues “the consequences of these unprecedented programmes have not been thought through — environmentally, technically or economically.” Such projects ultimately result in air and water pollution, soil erosion and large-scale geological hazards such as land subsidence. The authors conclude this project will lead to the vast destruction of forests – endangering rare flora and fauna.

State controlled media offers an alternative story, however, noting the loss of mountain habitat in the region will “lead to the creation of an environmentally sustainable economy based on energy-saving industries.” In their Nature article, though, the scholars note: “Many land-creation projects in China ignore environmental regulations, because local governments tend to prioritize making money over protecting nature.” The authors close by arguing the Chinese government needs to further research the project, recruiting help from other government organizations such as the United States Environmental Protection Agency, United States Geological Survey and an international association of hydrologist’s from the United States and Canada. Though I agree more environmental protection would relieve some ecological stress, these recommendations do not strike the root of the problem — state economic power.

If we instead apply laissez-faire politics to land management we may begin to view land as it is (natural, beautiful and important) as opposed to how it should be.

American libertarian and political philosopher Karl Hess Jr., in his book Visions Upon the Land: Man and Nature on the Western Range, attributes the decline in health of natural lands to inherent problems in government policy, ecological destabilization due to government intrusion and the destructiveness of sweeping land use policies. Hess believes that instead of looking for more laws and regulations to manage natural resources (inevitably enhancing state economic power) we should instead seek an economic system based on voluntary market interactions without the involvement of the state.

This adaptive approach to ecological protection yields incredible results. Take for instance the work of Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom. Her work reveals environmental sustainability is not the product of government intervention, but instead a result of self organized institutions where key management decisions are made as organically as possible. It is also wise to remember the old community based, sustainable management of village lands – suppressed by the great landlords, the communist state and the neoliberal state in succession.

Homogenization is dangerous for both world ecosystems and economics. Nature and human civilization are incredibly complex and dynamic – neither will be sustained by sweeping ideas of natural resource management.

Ecological systems and free markets share an affinity for diversity and both long for sustainability. The dissolution of power and control will advance best management practices. For this reason, we should not look vertically to state institutions, but horizontally to one another in the market. The goal should not be expanding the floor of the cage, the goal should be abolition. Neighborhood environmentalism will build sustainable markets — and markets are beautiful.

Yet Spain is a textbook illustration of two devastating criticisms of the consensus view made by anarchist Karl Hess in a July 1976 Playboy interview. First, when Hess denied “that the medieval monarchs were much different from our Presidents now,” and was incredulously challenged that “Surely, even as an anarchist you must be willing to admit that there are some differences between Presidents and kings,” he insisted: “Presidents achieve power by hoaxes and handshakes, while kings take the far less tiring route of being born. That is the only difference I can discern.” Second, while “Most analysts see the political spectrum as a great circle, with authoritarian governments of the right and the left intersecting at a point directly opposite representational democracy. But my notion of politics is that it follows a straight line, with all authoritarian societies on the right and all libertarian societies on the left,” with the opposite of both representative democracy and dictatorship being “a world of neighborhoods in which all social organization is voluntary and the ways of life are established in small, consenting groups.”

In his introduction to The Anarchist Collectives, Murray Bookchin scorned the mainstream liberal and Old Left interpretation of the Spanish Civil War as “a struggle between a liberal republic that was valiantly and with popular support trying to defend a democratic parliamentary state against authoritarian generals.” In fact, the ordinary people of Spain “viewed the republic almost with as much animosity as they did the Francistas,” and “were concerned not to rescue a treacherous republican regime but to reconstruct Spanish society.” Following Bookchin’s introduction is detailed primary documentation of their success when state power was pushed back enough to give them a fighting chance.

Far from being what the Old Left saw as a quixotic last stand of preindustrial “primitive rebels” against the tide of history, the Spanish anarchists seem ever more prescient of tomorrow’s post-industrial age.

The seemingly unstoppable power of the state and its plutocratic appendages — the modern successors of what Bookchin called the Spanish people’s “historic class enemies, ranging from the landowning grandees and clerical overlords inherited from the past to the rising industrial bourgeoisie and bankers of more recent times” — to crowd out alternative socioeconomic organization has always entirely stemmed from their ability to extract wealth involuntarily — in Franz Oppenheimer’s phrase, “political means.” The roots of the political means are steadily drying up as economic production becomes ever more localized and less capital-intensive, and correspondingly harder to efficiently levy tribute from. In the military realm, the might of the standing army is being increasingly challenged by fourth generation warfare techniques reviving the popular spirit of the voluntary, decidedly un-state-run Brigadas Internacionales.

Human-scale social organization decentralized enough to make Monaco look cumbersome, functioning without requiring any individuals to give up sovereignty over their personal lives, will bear out George Woodcock’s observation that “In reality, the ideal of anarchism, far from democracy carried to its logical end, is much nearer to aristocracy universalised and purified.”

David Morris and Karl Hess’s Neighborhood Power: The New Localism is simultaneously a time capsule from a forgotten moment of the New Left, a glimpse into roads not taken in the four decades since, a counterexample to the assumptions of today’s culture wars, and a prescient foreshadowing of today’s nascent trends towards a post-industrial future.

The central focus of the book is the building of neighborhood organizations for the purpose of directly addressing local needs, rather than exerting pressure on the political system to take care of them. After a brief general introductory chapter (which was included in the anthology First Harvest: The Institute of Policy Studies, 1963-83 as representative of how, in the words of its introductory blurb, “[d]ecentralization and participation have characterized IPS activities”), the slim volume gets straight to the process. Initially covering the creation of small, informal local organizations formed ad hoc to deal with specific day-to-day issues, the scale subsequently steadily broadens along with the hopeful broadening of the purview of the organizations themselves. While the growth of any particular is limited, by cooperation they are able to take on more and more of the social, economic and political functions within a single neighborhood, and then between freely associating neighborhoods. The conclusion sketches a decentralized, green, communitarian utopian future, Ecotopia meets a post-industrial News from Nowhere.

Along the way, attention is given to specific practical issues. While technology is not as central a focus as it is in Hess’s other work (one of his other books is Community Technology), there is a decent amount of material on it. This includes prescience in both local food production (Hess was a central participant in forgotten predecessors of today’s urban farming boom), computers (the Community Memory System has a cameo), and renewable, green energy. An entire chapter is devoted to movements by tenants increasing their bargaining power vis-a-vis landlords; while the deck was certainly stacked against them, it seemed to be less utterly so than in today’s era of gentrification.

It should be clarified that the book’s approach is far from completely apolitical. While the strategy outlined steers almost entirely clear of conventional electoral politics and political pressure groups, it is far from purist in rejecting state reforms (to the point of endorsing rent control!) and includes the taking on of political functions from local government, albeit in a manner reminiscent of Proudhon’s dissolving of government into society. And the descriptions of neighborhood governments flexing their muscles sometimes come off as petty authoritarian (which would seem to be part of the appeal for many), though far less than taken for granted today and tempered by the decentralist aspects. Like Murray Bookchin’s municipalism, which it strongly parallels, it can be seen as soft on local state power. Samuel Edward Konkin III’s understandable view of Hess as a “neighborhood statist” at the time parallels anarchist criticisms of Bookchin.

The writing eschews jargon, in the manner of the straightforward, concrete social criticism of contemporaries like Paul Goodman and John Holt. The best rationale is not an elaborate academic argument, but

the residents of the Adams Morgan community growing vegetables on their roofs, mapping out the neighborhood for urban food production, setting up cooperative businesses, talking about small-scale technology, building solar cookers, starting neighborhood assemblies, hosting block parties, having fun (Acknowledgments page).

It deliberately steers clear of ideological posturing, to a degree rare on the left then and virtually unheard-of today. While it is not technical, it offers a clear overview and is well grounded in the relevant background.

Readers familiar with Hess from other periods of his viewpoint-shifting life may be wondering how it compares to his other writings. It is less personal, more conventionally structured, and containing very little of the “enthusiasm and respect for entrepreneurs” his final book lamented his earlier self not having. While he’s moved far from the anarcho-capitalism of “The Death of Politics“, let alone his Goldwaterite days, he maintains a distrust of elites and big government, and a petit-bourgeois friendliness towards non-big business.

How is it a snapshot of trends at the time? In many ways, it benefits from being written after the decline of “the Sixties”. It’s easy to forget that the mid-’70s-left was still optimistic that the tide was in their favor, and it was starting to learn from the mistakes of the Sixties, shifting away from an over-reliance on the protest movement model to more sustainable, less purely idealistic forms to ones with better technical and economic grounding.

Conscience can be a strong motivating factor, but it is also true that the Vietnam War taught us that there is little staying power derived from using morality as the driving force… The lofty ideals of a conscience confront the mundane bureaucratic regulations of the state. (39)

Identity politics, then on the ascendance, was still associated with decentralist and participatory strands which the book is optimistic about. And it would benefit in turn from them: “Serious problems could develop if a choice must be made between supporting the salaries of a black organization as opposed to a white one, or a gay group as opposed to a women’s group. But if the gay organization needs a mimeograph machine”, it and the others would both benefit from pooling it as a common resource (77).

In terms of the rise of an academic left which, despite lip service to Marxism, deals with everything but the means of production, there is a sharp critique of the strategy of raising class consciousness:

The theory is attractive, although probably more so because it permits most people to avoid doing hard work on the local level while they try to refine their rhetoric and ideas until they achieve the final “correct” position. But in a more basic sense it’s wrong-headed because it does not relate to people where they are, and particularly does not do so through an optimistic vision of the future. The sectarianism of the left is often caused by too much talking and too little doing. Picky fights about dogma tend to subside as people work together in some productive enterprise. Or at least the arguments are over very real things. What should be done when a worker breaks a leg and the company refuses compensation is a question that lends itself to much more concrete analysis than what should be done when the workers take over the factory and the army comes in. (42)

While even then, much of the American left was viscerally hostile towards decentralization, the decentralist tendency was far more robust. The acceptance in the discussion of healthcare of the need for patient understanding and control, not just the availability and affordability of service by experts, was far more resonant. Thus little of the book is spent in a defensive crouch. There was already a tendency of assuming that decentralization would go hand in hand with racism, and the authors defend their devolutionary proposals against charges that they would lead to “parochial and racist and illogical” schools (71) and “neighborhood parochialism and small-town isolationism and prejudice” (143), but it was less entrenched in an era where civil rights was seen as emblematic of local organizing and community control was still largely associated with an active Black Power movement.

The ongoing decline of interest in economic alternatives has been both a cause and an effect of the relegation of “alternative” goods to individual consumer choices (usually with Whole Foods-style markups). Optimistic predictions of laundromats becoming community hubs seem wildly out of place in an era when even Barnes & Noble and shopping malls have difficulty staying afloat. Rather than joining together to form a basis for a new society, isolated economic alternatives have floundered to survive in the inhospitable existing economy.

With the book’s publication being near the high-water mark of the influence of decentralism, it is emblematic of its rapid decline that such an approach has been almost completely forgotten, even by the survivors of the environment it came from. As the IPS shifted away from the decentralist strands of the New Left, its view of taxes went from “a sort of tithe” (74) to a book enumerating “excellent reasons not to hate taxes”. Aside from a small circle of fans and historians, libertarians half-remember Hess at best, despite his undeniable historical importance, and are puzzled by his lack of enthusiasm for big business and mass markets. Senator Mark Hatfield is usually remembered as a moderate due to his opposition to the Vietnam war, but a quote declaring that “It is clear today that the great experiment of our cities is a failure”, lamenting the loss of “community self-management”, and stating the need for “neighborhood government and interneighborhood cooperation” (97) doesn’t sound much like something one would hear from the lips of Nelson Rockefeller.

The use of the assumed necessity of centralization as justifications by technocratic liberalism and plutocratic conservatism are treated mercilessly:

To the modern liberal disposition this means that central planning, powerful executive-type government, and technocratic elites are justified and, indeed, necessary in running a society “efficiently.”

To the modern conservative disposition this means a justification of the hard class lines in society (the poor will always be with us, the rich will rise to the top naturally) and also justifies a corporate system which, by providing everything for people, makes it unnecessary for people to bother about anything but consuming — and showing up for work on time. (7)

(That last paragraph is a bit different than what one would expect from an opponent of big government, ain’t it?) And the pretense that only conservatives are against “liberal elitism” is far harder to maintain in the presence of a real left that says stuff like this:

Liberals say that smarter people can better represent everyone’s interests. But that just means that the supposedly smarter people can say they better represent those interests. They certainly don’t go out and interview everybody. They may assume that they don’t have to do that because, after all, everyone is pretty much alike. But we know that is simply not true, from experience, and even the existence of the liberal, or elitist, position says clearly that they themselves don’t believe we are all alike. They see themselves, at least, as different. (12)

And down-to-earth causes can unite people across political lines. Conservative James J. Kilpatrick, at what started as a partisan political debate with Hess, recalled that “before the evening was over we were talking about fish in his basement and tomatoes on his roof.” (43)

Given the place of environmentalism in today’s culture wars, it is illuminating to get a reminder of the pre-greenwashed state of the left of the time:

During a meeting a group of avowed Marxists who had been working with automobile workers in Detroit, trying to organize them in opposition to their union and company, were questioned about their ultimate goals. They responded, “To take over General Motors.” “What then?” they were asked. That was enough, they answered; the workers would control production and share in the wealth they themselves have produced. That was said to be “the revolution.”Yet, if we see General Motors as a part of the problem, and the multiplication of steel-bodied, internal-combustion-engine vehicles as contributing to our societal breakdown, a mere change in ownership would not necessarily mean real social change. (119)

(And the modern left would be content with getting a job there.) Since the mainstreaming of “green” hasn’t led to a concomitant questioning of the “need to maintain the rate of growth and the sheer physical output of this society” (119), it’s worth a reminder that such a paradigm is as obsolescent as the fossil fuels it ran on:

Nuclear-power plants, metropolitan sewage-treatment plants, internal-combustion engines or solar cells, in-house waste-cycling systems, and electric cars. It is not only an ecological and economic choice, but a deeply political one. It asks whether we want to move our productive facilities back into our communities, or remain at the mercy of isolated forces operating on criteria that give human concerns a low priority. (124)

While acknowledgement of the non-economic costs of large scale production have started to go into the mainstream, liberals who never question their economic efficiency are stuck hand-wringing, and many buy-small leftists simply duck the question altogether. Morris and Hess make solid use of a knowledge of the inefficiency of big business, citing the work on diseconomies of scale by Ralph Borsodi and Barry Stein, and offering a sharp rejoinder to stock claims of “efficiency”:

Conventional wisdom holds that larger firms are a natural, even a welcome, extension of business activities, and that they should be encouraged. Such concentrations are said to bring with them efficiencies that lower consumer prices. The reality is that prices grow as concentrations grow. The truth is that bigness brings with it higher profits. Also, it is apparently true that bigness breeds slothfulness, that creativity and igenuity are submerged, in the largest firms, to the goal of profitability, that with their influence in distribution and advertising, large corporations can create markets fromt heir most convenient and profitable items rather than bothering to make products that people genuinely need. Their most imaginative efforts are in marketing, not in production of high-quality goods. Even the large profits of huge corporations may not be a sign of business acumen and efficiency. Many large enterprises get their profits as a result of their political influence, through tax write-offs and subsidies, import quotas, and defense contracts, not through competition in the marketplace. (116)

And noting that “volunteer labor, foundation grants, $25-a-week salaries, are flimsy foundations for a new society”, they devote extensive attention to getting a solid economic base through surplus from local business activities. Cooperative organization was already becoming successful at producing surpluses: one co-op was able to allow five-week vacations for its workers, and estimated that current productivity would allow that duration as a norm in a cooperative economy. In an era where it is assumed that skyrocketing technological productivity will somehow never allow an increase in leisure time, it is worth reviving the idea of cooperatives taking surpluses in terms of leisure time rather than wages.

How does the book hold up from today’s perspective? A standard modus operandi of belittling the ferment of the 1960s and 1970s is to acknowledge individual bits and pieces that have become mainstream, like recycling or feminism, but to write off the rest as naive and doomed to failure by inherent impractical utopianism. Some readers of this book of will inevitably do so. But while the book has its share of overly optimistic predictions (cost-competitive solar power by 1990!), it holds up better than many of its contemporaries, being more grounded and pragmatic than the ones focusing solely on symbolic actions and consciousness raising. Many of its ideas were already starting to be put into practice and working in local efforts at the time only to be abandoned, epitomizing not-tried-and-found-wanting-but-found-difficult-and-not-tried. And in many ways it was prescient. Some passages sound like something you’d hear from a city planner today:

Transportation systems became locally oriented. It seemed ridiculous to think that in the old days it was easier to get downtown, a distance of some ten miles, than it was to go sideways to another neighborhood, a distance of half a mile. Now the minibuses, the electric cars which were rented, not owned, by the neighborhood residents, and the bicycles took care of local transportation. (165)

In recent years, there has been a return to some of the ideas, usually without awareness of the past. Urban gardening, which Hess was a pioneer of, has seen a renaissance. The maker movement has started to push modern technology past the era of mass industrialism. “Collaborative consumption” is rediscovered as an unprecedented novelty. Too much emphasis is placed on the role of the latest technology, and too little on social and organizational factors; it is worth getting a perspective on successes with the technology of the ’70s. To modern-day movements, it offers perspective that they didn’t arise in a vacuum.

Everyone has something to gain from taking a look at Neighborhood Power.

Em 2004, eu estava extremamente animado sobre a “Era of Good Feelings” entre os políticos Michael Badnarik do Partido Libertário e David Cobb do Partido Verde. Isso me deu alguma esperança para o renascimento de um projeto ainda mais esperançoso de 30 anos e poucos atrás.

Durante o final da década de 1960, Rothbard tentou uma aliança estratégica com o movimento da “Old Right” americana “isolacionista” e comparativamente antiestatista com a “New Left” americana. Esse período é o assunto de um artigo de John Payne, “Rothbard’s Time on the Left”. Payne escreve:

No início da década de 1960, Rothbard viu a “Nova Direita”, exemplificada pela revista National Review, como perpetuamente unida com a Guerra Fria, que rapidamente se tornaria exponencialmente mais intensa no Vietnã, e as intervenções do estado que a acompanhava. Então ele partiu à procura por novos aliados. No movimento da “New Left” americana, Rothbard encontrou um grupo de estudiosos que se opôs à Guerra Fria e a centralização política, e possuía uma massa a seguir com alto grau de potencial de crescimento. Vendo essa oportunidade, Rothbard estava disposto a pôr a ciência econômica de lado e se estabelecer em um terreno comum e, ao passo que sua cooperação com a New Left nunca alterou ou provocou o afastamento de qualquer de suas crenças fundamentais, a retórica de Rothbard mudou nitidamente em direção à esquerda durante esse período.

Eu adicionaria uma ressalva, a respeito do que Payne disse de Rothbard pondo a ciência econômica de lado. Na verdade, como veremos a seguir, Rothbard compartilhou de algum terreno econômico comum com a New Left. Na sua posição mais a esquerda, a crítica austríaca de Rothbard do capitalismo de estado corporativo era bastante radical.

No final da década de 50, de acordo com o relato de Payne, Rothbard encontrou-se em desacordo com W. F. Buckey e Frank Meyer na National Review. Suas apresentações sobre política externa, em um período em que ele viu a “questão guerra-paz” como algo chave para a agenda libertária e referiu-se à Guerra Fria como verdammte [N.T.: verdammte, do alemão, “condenável”], foram rejeitadas. Finalmente, em 1961, Meyer publicamente interpretou-o como fora do “movimento conservador” (ou, pelo menos, fora do fusionismo do National Review).

As partir do início da década de 60 em diante, Rothbard se viu cada vez mais atraído à crítica revisionista da esquerda docapitalismo de estado do século 20 (ou o que a New Left chamou de corporate liberalism). Ele ficou especialmente impressionado pela tese do livro de Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism, que foi publicado em 1963.

A crítica misesiana de Rothbard do estado corporativo, em que compartilhou tanto em comum com a New Left, foi um afastamento considerável das afinidades políticas de direita de Mises. Para Mises, o intervencionismo estatal foi motivado quase que inteiramente pelo sentimento anticapitalista: aquilo que Nixon teria denominado de “fodidos hippies sujos” ou Eric Cartman (personagem de South Park) repudiaria como “um bando de lixo hippie abraçador de árvores malditos”.

Rothbard, por outro lado, aplicou os princípios da Escola Austríaca, em grande parte do ponto de vista da crítica de Kolko, que viu o intervencionismo estatal como motivado principalmente pelo desejo dos próprios capitalistas corporativos em proteger seus lucros da destrutiva força da competição do mercado. Kolko discordou diretamente do relato histórico ortodoxo do estado regulador, como exemplificado pelo progressista Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. Especificamente, ele negou que a agenda legislativa da Era Progressista fora formulada primeiramente como uma restrição populista sobre as grandes empresas, ou de que o governo interviu na economia do século 20 como uma “força contra balanceadora” contra as grandes empresas. Pelo contrário, o estado regulador foi uma tentativa das grandes empresas alcançarem, agindo diretamente através do estado, o que tinha sido incapazes de alcançar através de combinações voluntárias e trustes executados inteiramente no setor privado: a cartelização da economia e a criação de mercados oligolopolistas estáveis caracterizado por fixar preço. Payne cita essa declaração resumida do livro de Kolko:

Apesar do grande número de fusões e do crescimento no tamanho absoluto de muitas corporações, a tendência dominante na economia americana do início deste século [vinte] foi em direção a crescente concorrência. A concorrência era inaceitável para muitas empresas fundamentais e interesses financeiros… Visto que novos concorrentes surgiram e como o poder econômico foi difundido em toda a nação em expansão, tornou-se evidente a muitos empresários importantes que somente o governo nacional poderia “racionalizar” a economia. Embora as condições específicas variassem de indústria para indústria, problemas internos que podiam ser solucionados apenas por meios políticos foram o denominador comum daquelas indústrias cujo lideres defenderam grandes regulações federais. Ironicamente, ao contrário do consenso dos historiadores, não foi a existência de monopólio que levou o governo federal a intervir na economia, mas a falta dele.

O propósito da ação estatal era, em primeiro lugar, ajudar a construir, excessivamente, a indústria, de modo simultâneo, a operar em capacidade plena e dispor do produto excedente que não poderia vender a preços de cartel. Em segundo lugar, como uma alternativa, era para permitir a indústria cartelizada operar com altos custos e capacidade ociosa e ainda permanecer-se lucrativa por vender seus produtos pela fixação de preços cost-plus através da precificação de monopólio (isso poderia também ter sido a declaração de missão do Ministério de Recuperação Industrial Nacional do presidente Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a propósito).

Essa percepção inicial de Rothbard, de que a historiografia revisionista da New Left foi útil para uma crítica ao livre mercado do capitalismo corporativo do século 20, levou-o a uma considerável soma colaborativa com estudiosos da New Left.

Rothbard participou do Studies on the Left, um projeto de historiadores da New Left como James Weinstein e William Appleman Williams. Foi Weinstein, em The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State, que cunhou o termo “progressismo corporativo”. E Williams desenvolveu a tese “Open Door Imperialism” para descrever a política externa americana. Algumas contribuições de Rothbard para o Studies on the Left foram incluídas em uma coleção de artigos de livro de bolso resultantes de esforços do grupo até 1967: For a New America.

Rothbard manteve laços de amizade com acadêmicos da New Left por muito tempo depois de sua desilusão com o movimento estudantil radical. O seu segundo empreendimento mais arriscado em uma bolsa de estudos colaborativa (relativamente ao final do período de 1972) foi A New History of Leviathan, uma coleção de ensaios críticos sobre o corporativismo no New Deal, co-editado por Rothbard e pelo socialista libertário Ronald Radosh.

Ele contribuiu com um artigo (“Confessions of a Right-Wing Liberal“), em 1968, para a revista Ramparts (tanto David Horowitz e Ronald Radosh, que juntamente depois tornaram-se dois dos membros mais detestáveis de um movimento neoconservador caracterizado por suas odiosidades, foram associados com esta publicação importante da New Left).

Rothbard fundou o periódico Left and Right, em 1965, como um veículo para sua aliança de esquerda e direita enviesada academicamente. Se você estiver muito interessado nesses tipos de coisas, procurar os arquivos retribuirá bem seu esforço.

De sua colaboração acadêmica inicial com acadêmicos da New Left, Rothbard moveu-se para tentar a sorte com um movimento de massa em aliança com estudantes radicais.

O ponto alto dessa aliança ocorreu em 1969. A facção libertária de viés anarquista radical do grupo ativista Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) saiu da convenção desta instituição, em St. Louis (principalmente sobre a Guerra do Vietnã e do recrutamento militar obrigatório). As raízes do movimento libertário contemporâneo, e da maioria do seu pessoal fundador, pode ser traçada a este ato de secessão. Não muito tempo depois, Rothbard (juntamente com Karl Hess, um ex-redator de discurso do antigo político Barry Goldwater que cunhou a frase “extremismo em defesa da liberdade”, e, posteriormente, moveu-se consideravelmente para a esquerda) organizou um encontro em massa dos dissidentes libertários do YAF com secessionistas socialistas libertários semelhantes vindos do grupo ativista estudantil Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Durante esse evento, Hess discursou a uma audiência coligada do YAF e insurgentes do SDS usando uniformes militares e um broche da Industrial Worker of the World (N.T.: O I.W.W. é um sindicato industrial internacional de tendência anarquista também conhecido como “Wobblies”).

A publicação The Libertarian Forum, de Rothbard, foi fundada em 1969, na época em que Rothbard estava se tornando cada vez mais desencantado com a New Left, e a própria New Left e especificamente o SDS, sob ataque dos fanáticos maoístas doPartido Trabalhista Progressista e dos idiotas niilistas do grupo ativista Weather Underground, estava se desintegrando. Embora Rothbard pudesse ter convivido muito bem com os acadêmicos da New Left, ele aparentemente sofreu um considerável choque cultural em 1969 ao descobrir precisamente o quão radical os estudantes radicais eram (as denúncias encobertas de economistas acadêmicos e do uso de gravatas feitas por eles foram uma afronta particular a Rothbard, que foi culpado sobre os dois resultados). Apesar disso, o primeiro volume do Libertarian Forum foi embalado com o comentário impetuoso sobre a aliança da New Left.

Pegue, por exemplo, esta citação de 1º de Maio, da edição de 1969:

[Os estudantes] veem que, independente de outro merchandising editorial, as empresas tem se utilizado das escolas e faculdades do governo como instituições que treinam seus futuros trabalhadores e executivos à custa de outros, isto é, dos pagadores de impostos. Isto é somente um caminho em que o nosso estado corporativo utiliza o poder taxativo coercitivo tanto para acumular capital corporativo quanto para abaixar os custos das empresas. Independente de como o processo é chamado, não é “livre iniciativa”, exceto no sentido mais irônico.

Considere também essa declaração de Hess:

A verdade… é que o libertarianismo deseja avançar os princípios da propriedade mas de forma alguma pretende defender, sem mais nem menos, toda propriedade que atualmente é chamada de privada. Muitas dessas propriedades são roubadas. Muitas são de títulos duvidosos. Estão profundamente interligadas com um sistema estatal coercitivo, imoral, que sancionou, constituiu e lucrou com a escravidão; se expandiu e explorou através de uma política externa imperial e colonial brutal e agressiva, e continua a manter as pessoas numa relação a grosso modo de servo-mestre com concentrações de poder político-econômico. Os Libertários estão preocupados, primeiro e acima de tudo, com a mais valiosa das propriedades, a vida de cada indivíduo… Direitos de propriedade relacionados a objetos materiais são vistos por libertários como emanando, e… um importante secundário do direito de possuir, direcionar, e desfrutar de sua própria vida e daqueles acessórios adicionais que podem ser adquiridos sem coerção… Isso está muito longe de compartilhar opiniões com aqueles que desejam criar uma sociedade na qual super-capitalistas estão livres para juntar grandes posses e com aqueles que dizem que isso é o propósito mais importante da liberdade… O libertarianismo é um movimento popular e um movimento de libertação. Ele procura um tipo de sociedade livre, não coercitiva, na qual as pessoas, vivas, livres e distintas, possam se associar livremente, desassociar, e, como bem julgarem, participar nas decisões que afetam suas vidas… Significa pessoas livres coletivamente para organizar os recursos de sua comunidade mais próxima ou organiza-los individualmente; significa a liberdade de ter um judiciário baseado e apoiado na comunidade aonde desejado, nenhum onde se preferir, ou serviços de arbitração privada aonde isto é visto como mais desejável. O mesmo com a polícia. O mesmo com escolas, hospitais, fábricas, fazendas, laboratórios, parques e pensões. A liberdade significa o direito de moldar suas próprias instituições. Ela se opõe ao direito dessas instituições te moldarem simplesmente graças a um poder acumulado ou status gerontológico.

Em outro artigo na mesma edição, “Confisco e o Princípio de Apropriação”, Rothbard propôs um modelo de privatização bem distante do tipo de pilhagem corporativa de ativos estatais que normalmente se encontra sendo defendido nos fórunss de libertários tradicionais de hoje em dia.

O que a maioria das pessoas normalmente identifica como a proposta de privatização “libertária” estereotipada, infelizmente, parte de algo como isso: vendê-la para uma grande corporação sob as condições que são mais vantajosas para a corporação. Rothbard propôs, como alternativa, tratar a propriedade estatal como sem dono e permitindo-a ser apropriada por aqueles que verdadeiramente a ocupam e que misturam seu trabalho nela. Isso significaria transformar serviços de utilidade pública do governo, escola e outros serviços em cooperativas de consumo e colocando-os em controle direto de sua clientela atual. Significaria ceder a indústria estatal à sindicatos de trabalhadores e transformá-la em cooperativas sob posse dos trabalhadores.

Porém se isso era o modo apropriado de lidar com a propriedade estatal, Rothbard questionou, em seguida, e sobre a indústria nominalmente “privada” que, na verdade, é um braço do estado? Isto é, o que acontece com a indústria “privada” que recebe a maioria de seus lucros de subsídios vindos dos pagadores de impostos

Mas se é assim com a Universidade de Columbia, e quanto à General Dynamics? E quanto à miríade de corporações que são partes integrais do complexo militar-industrial, que não só conseguem mais da metade ou às vezes toda sua receita do governo, mas também participam de assassinato em massa? Quais são suas credenciais à propriedade “privada”? Certamente menores que zero. Como ávidas lobistas para esses contratos e subsídios, como co-fundadoras do Estado-guarnição, elas merecem confisco e reversão de sua propriedade para o setor privado genuíno o mais rápido possível. Dizer que sua propriedade “privada” deve ser respeitada é dizer que sua propriedade, a propriedade roubada pelo ladrão de cavalos e do assassino, deve ser “respeitada”.

Essas fábricas deveriam ter sido tomadas por “trabalhadores que trabalharam nela”, ele diz. Mas ele foi mais longe, e sugeriu que um movimento libertário, tendo capturado os altos comandos do estado e prosseguindo a desmantelar o aparato do capitalismo de estado, poderia, na verdade, nacionalizar essa indústria subsidiada pelo estado como o prelúdio imediato a entregá-la aos trabalhadores. Ele foi tão longe ao ponto de dizer que, mesmo se um regime não-libertário nacionalizasse a indústria capitalista estatal com a intenção de se manter nele, não era algo para os libertários ficarem irritados particularmente com a questão. A indústria subsidiada não seria mais o “mocinho”, e não menos que uma parte do estado, como o próprio aparato estatal formal. “[Isso] significaria apenas que uma gangue de ladrões – o governo – estaria confiscando propriedade de outra gangue cooperada prévia, a corporação que vivia do governo”.

Eu iria além de Rothbard. Por que, de fato, o critério pelo status do governo é o montante dos lucros diretamente subsidiados vindo da receita estatal? E as corporações que funcionam dentro de uma teia de proteções regulatórias estatais, e os direitos de propriedade artificiais semelhantes a “propriedade intelectual” do Bill Gates, sem o qual eles não poderiam operar noponto de equilíbrio da receita por um único dia. Qualquer um que tenha lido muito do meu trabalho, por um dado período de tempo, sabe que eu considero todas as “500 maiores empresas da revista Fortune”, de fato, uma ótima representação desses braços do estado. Como eu já argumentei em uma postagem anterior, as maiores empresas estão tão entrelaçadas ao estado que a própria distinção entre público e privado torna-se sem sentido.

Para reforçar essa impressão, tenha em mente que (como as observações de Hess sobre a propriedade sugerida) Rothbard considerou todos os títulos de terra não rastreáveis sobre um ato legítimo de apropriação pelo trabalho humano, a estar totalmente nula e desocupada (veja aqui, aqui e aqui). Isso significa que títulos de terra devolutas e não cultivadas seriam nulas e todas essas terras nos Estados Unidos deveriam estar abertas para apropriação imediata. Significa que todo imóvel realmente existente do sul da Califórnia, no presente momento mantido como investimentos imobiliários autênticos através de estradas de ferro, de acordo com as concessões de terras do século 19, deveria, imediatamente, se tornar propriedade livre e alodial absoluta daqueles que atualmente que estão sob aluguel ou o hipotecam. Significa que toda a terra no Terceiro Mundo, atualmente, “possuída” por oligarquias fundiárias quase feudais deveria imediatamente tornar-se a propriedade dos camponeses que nela trabalharam. E a terra atual que está sendo usada pelo agronegócio corporativo e outros tipos de produção agrária exclusivamente para o mercado, em conluio com esses mesmos proprietários de terras, deveria ser devolvida aos camponeses que foram expulsos dela.

Em suma, Rothbard não se encaixava exatamente no estereótipo do “maconheiro do Partido Republicano” que você vê comentaristas regurgitando junto ao fórum de discussão política do Kos. Esse artigo está ficando muito, muito longo. A princípio, tentei encaixar todo o material de rothbardianos de esquerda em uma postagem. Mas irei poupar o material sobre os sucessores libertários de esquerda de Rothbard (Sam Konkin, Joseph Stromberg e o resto) para outra postagem. [Que você vê amanhã por aqui.]

Artigo original afixado por Kevin Carson.

Tradução de Rodrigo Viana. Revisão por Adriel Santana.

The libertarian left has many luminaries, but few as quirky, thoughtful or influential as Wilson and Hess. Wilson brought us our concern for the SNAFU principle. Hess brought us our understanding of the left/right spectrum. And both brought us a shameless embrace of counter-culture and a playful interest in all things counter-economic. The first joint is smoked around minute 2:45, the second around minute 27.  Enjoy, then enjoy again.

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