I. General Neglect of Bastiat

French laissez faire liberal economist Frédéric Bastiat (June 30, 1801-December 24, 1850) has suffered over the years from a particularly bad press. Karl Marx called him “the shallowest and therefore the most successful representative of the apologists of vulgar economics.” This portrait may have stemmed from Marx’s resentment towards a political writer whose writing was clear and who gained a large audience in his lifetime. There is no body of literature asking What Bastiat Really Meant, whereas a cottage industry arose in the case of Marx. And of course Bastiat was a great enemy and trenchant critic of socialism.

Bastiat has been dismissed by those who might have been expected to be friendlier towards him. Thus Joseph Schumpeter wrote: “I do not hold that Bastiat was a bad theorist. I hold that he was no theorist.” English-speaking economists generally have regarded Bastiat as a “mere popularizer” of the ideas of the great Adam Smith.

One of the few writers who had any thing good to say of Bastiat was Franz Oppenheimer, the German sociologist and state theorist. He wrote that “Bastiat clearly distinguishes between ‘production’ and ‘spoliation’ (as John Rae [did] between production and acquisition) and names as the chief forms of spoliation: war, slavery, theocracy, and monopoly.” Further, Bastiat “even defines monopoly entirely correctly as my only predecessor known to me: it carries force into competition and thereby falsifies the correct relation between services received and services earned.”

II. Bastiat’s Life and Writings

Frédéric Bastiat was born in June 1801 in Bayonne. He worked in his uncle’s business from 1818 to 1825, when he inherited his father’s property and set himself up as “a gentleman farmer.” While so occupied, Bastiat read the works of the political economists – Jean-Baptiste Say, Adam Smith, Destutt de Tracy, Charles Comte (perhaps his favorite writer), and Charles Dunoyer. He emerged from this reading a tireless exponent of laissez faire liberalism.

Bastiat began publishing in the Journal des Économistes in 1844, and wrote pamphlets and articles for newspapers. His Sophismes Économiques, in two volumes, appeared in 1844 and 1845.

Bastiat met Richard Cobden in 1845 and threw himself into the French movement for free trade in 1846. With the Revolution of 1848, Bastiat became a member of the legislative assembly, sitting on the Left. There he defended civil liberties but also argued against the restrictionist economic policies of Right and Left alike.

Bastiat’s fullest theoretical statement on economics came in his Harmonies Économiques, part of which appeared after his death. His writings had much influence outside France, in Belgium, Italy, Sweden, and Prussia. The Italian laissez faire liberal Francesco Ferrara was especially taken with Bastiat’s analysis of political seizure of produced wealth (“spoliation”).

Bastiat’s Oeuvres Complétes (Paris: Guillaumin, [various dates of publication and reissue]) consist of seven volumes. Of this material, only something like two fifths seems to have been translated into English. The Economic Harmonies, in English, is the whole French work, but Economic Sophisms andSelected Essays in Political Economy (all three books -Irvington-on-Hudson: FEE, 1964) between them, do not reproduce all that is in the two-volume Sophismes Économiques. Untranslated are Cobden et le Ligue, Libre-Échange, and two volumes of letters and miscellaneous essays.

III. Rothbard on Bastiat’s Work and Influence

In the second volume of his history of economic thought, Rothbard observed that Bastiat and the whole French laissez faire school had fallen into disrepute and neglect. And yet Bastiat had produced a lucid and readable treatment of the pattern of exchange, which stressed human wants and consumption over production and labor (the areas in which English economics had bogged down). This approach centered on mutual benefit resulting from, and causing, exchanges.

Rothbard writes that Bastiat “point[ed] out that all goods, including material ones, are productive and are valued precisely because they produce immaterial services,” thereby helping to pull economic science out of the Smithian ditch. Bastiat’s parable of the broken window refuted Keynesian economics nearly a century before Keynes wrote. In this parable, the “third level analyst,” the economist sees beyond the proto-Keynesian sophisticate’s notion that the window-breaker has stimulated economic growth.

For Rothbard, Bastiat’s unwavering focus on plunder by the state and state-privileged interests made his political economy a weapon in the struggle for freedom as well as an important statement of welfare analysis. Bastiat’s influences on Rothbard himself seems clear; nor is it too much to say that Ludwig von Mises’s “social rationalism”owes much to Bastiat’s discussion of the nature of society and economic life.

IV. Main Themes and System in Bastiat’s Work

Bastiat’s technical writing in the Economic Harmonies must necessarily seem conversational and “unscientific” to today’s mainstream economist. Here are no absurd assumptions, which may or not be true, no modeling, no graphs or equations. There is only a grounded rationalism.

The polemical writings must seem even stranger to moderns. Bastiat proceeds by parable, humorous dialogues, fables, satire, parodies of French literature, and – perhaps best of all – reductiones ad absurdum (tongue-in-cheek legislative proposals and the like). Really, all of Bastiat’s writings, even the most technical, are in effect “popular.” Bastiat, the gentleman farmer with practical business knowledge, argues from experience by way of clear propositions to conclusions which seem obvious once he has spelled things out.

Taken as a whole, Bastiat’s writings lay out the purpose, method, and conclusions of political economy. This involved a running critique of the socialism of the Right (protectionism) and that of the Left. A survey of Bastiat’s main themes should prove rather enlightening.

V. Scope and Method of Economics

Bastiat gives his notion of political economy near the beginning of his Economic Harmonies: “For if there are general laws that act independently of written laws, and whose action needs merely to be regularized by the latter, we must study these general laws; they can be the object of scientific investigation, and therefore there is such a thing as the science of political economy” (Economic Harmonies [EH], p. 2). If, on the other hand, society is entirely an instituted order founded by great geniuses, as claimed by Rousseau, then there could be no political economy. Bastiat rejects this alternative.

From this rather praxeological beginning, Bastiat looks into the “social mechanism” of multilateral exchanges, which enables each individual to receive from his efforts “a million times more than he could have produced; yet no one has robbed anyone” (EH, pp. 4-5). This astounding fact rests on “a natural and wise order that operates without our knowledge” (EH, p. 6). It is precisely the work of economics to understand this order.

This complex order is grounded on self-interest, the very thing that the utopians reject when making arbitrary plans for social betterment (EH, pp. 7-8). Bastiat observes: “If it is strange that people have decried self-interest, not only in its immoral abuses, but also as the providential motive force of all human activity, it is even more strange that they have not taken it into account and have felt that they could work in the social sciences without reference to it” (EH, p. 523). Political economy – economics – does take self-interest into account. Hence Bastiat’s definition: “Political economy has as its special field all those efforts of men that are capable of satisfying, subject to services in return, the wants of persons other than the one making the effort, and, consequently, those wants and satisfactions that are related to efforts of this kind” (EH, p. 31, Bastiat’s italics [and throughout this essay]).

Political economists wish to understand the order resulting from voluntary, self-interested action. They expect that people will act on this knowledge. Sounding a great deal like Mises, Bastiat says that economics does not state, “‘I urge you, I advise you, not to get too close to the fire’; or: ‘I have thought up a social order; the gods have inspired me to create institutions that will keep you far enough away from the fire.’ No; political economy notes that fire burns, announces the fact, proves it, and does the same for all similar phenomena of the moral or economic order, convinced that this is all that is necessary. It assumes than an unwillingness to be burned to death is a basic, innate attitude that it did not create and that it cannot alter” (EH, p. 527).

To those who held that economics was mere theory in some bad sense, Bastiat answered that their proposals themselves rested on implicit theories of some kind. Further: “Our theory is so little opposed to practice that it is nothing else than practice explained. We observe that men are motivated by the instinct for self-preservation and a desire for progress, and what they do freely and voluntarily is precisely what we call political economy…. As we never cease to point out, each man is in practice an excellent economist, producing or exchanging according as he finds it more advantageous to do the one or the other. Everyone gains a knowledge of this science through experience; or rather, the science itself is only this same experience accurately observed and methodically interpreted” (Economic Sophisms [Sophisms], p. 84).

But, of course, Bastiat asks rhetorically, who was he to talk? After all, “it is now an accepted fact that I am a heartless, pitiless man, a dry philosopher, an individualist, a bourgeois – in a word, an economist of the English or American school” (Selected Essays on Political Economy [Essays], p. 142). Evidently, the custom of referring to opponents of state intervention as cruel plutocratic shills for the wealthy (who wish to run down widows and orphans and ethnic minorities, etc., with their air-conditioned SUVs) did not begin in recent years in North America.

VI. Bastiat on Society, Production, and Exchange

Despite the handicap of being a heartless bourgeois, Bastiat kept on writing about the market order based on private property. He starts from the existence of human wants; economics is about want-satisfaction. In seeking to fulfil their needs, men learnt that “there are two kinds of utility” (EH, p. 27). Some things are simply given in nature; others require transformation by human activity to make them useful: “It is not given to man, in fact, to add to or subtract from the existing number of molecules. His role is confined to modifying or combining for his use the substances he finds everywhere about him” (EH, p. 62; Bastiat credits J.-B. Say with the formulation).

Human wants, however, are not fixed. This is important because “[i]t is impossible to find a good solution to the problem of the machine, foreign competition, and luxury, as long as wants are considered as an invariable quantity, or their capacity for indefinite multiplication is not taken into account” (EH, p. 43). To satisfy our progressively increasing wants, we apply labor to material objects. In this process, “certain moral virtues such as orderliness, foresight, self-control, thrift, contribute directly to the improvement of our way of life” (EH, p. 55).

Contrary to such writers as Montaigne and Rousseau, men were not happier when they – hypothetically – lived separately. They improve their lot in society and improve it most when their society rests on uncoerced reciprocal relations. Thus, exchange “is political economy. It is society itself, for it is impossible to conceive of society without exchange, or exchange without society” (EH, p. 59). Exchange increases our prosperity and our power over raw nature. Without it, we could hardly live at all. “If this is true, society is our natural state, since it is the only state in which we can live at all” (EH, p. 60, my emphasis).

Given the endless reiteration of the claim that it was the laissez faire liberals who coldly abstracted people into asocial, atomized individuals in order to arrive at absurd claims, it is interesting that Bastiat does something entirely different. Of Robinson Crusoe, sometimes used by economists to throw light on certain topics, Bastiat observes that Crusoe’s creator, Defoe, stuck close to reality by having his character “save from the shipwreck a few indispensable objects such as provisions, gunpowder, a rifle, an ax, a knife, rope, boards, iron, etc. – decisive evidence that society is man’s necessary milieu, since even a novelist cannot make him live outside it” (EH, p. 64).

Further: “And note that Robinson Crusoe took with him into solitude another social treasure worth a thousand times more, one that the waves could not swallow up: I mean his ideas, his memories, his experience, and especially his language, without which he could not have communicated with himself or formed his thoughts” (EH, p. 64). Now there is a realistic view of the relation of individuals and society, even if I can hardly delve into that interesting hermeneutic/epistemological turn at the end of the sentence. The proper understanding of society was always in the foreground with classical liberals like Bastiat.

Bastiat, in summing up political economy as understood by the French liberal school, presented its ideas ably, with a few new wrinkles of his own. On value theory he quotes Condillac that in any exchange their must be “two gains”; otherwise an exchange would not take place. Bastiat seeks to go behind this statement, but does so by arguing that value arises from the exchange of “services” for other “services” (cf. Essays, pp. 160-161).

Of exchange, Bastiat notes that it “produces two phenomena: the joining of men’s forces and the diversification of their occupations, or the division of labor” (EH, p. 67). “Roundabout barter”can widen the sphere of trade between parties, but it is “indirect exchange” which allows exchange relations to improve human life exponentially. Here “two services are also appraised [an interesting word] but in comparison with… the intermediate commodity, which is called money” (EH, p. 75).

Extension of this form of social cooperation enlarges men’s powers and consumption. Thus, “[t]he general nature of exchange is to lessen the amount of effort in relation to the satisfaction” (EH, p. 76). Life becomes both richer and easier. The “disutility of labor” (Mises), that is, “the pain and drudgery” of producing exchangeable goods (EH, p. 482) does not go away, but the time involved and the conditions of labor improve.

Another offshoot of wider exchange networks is increased human interdependence. Bastiat writes that “the sort of dependence that results from exchange… is a reciprocal dependence. We cannot be dependent on a foreigner without his being dependent upon us. Now, this is what constitutes the very essence of society” (Sophisms, p. 99). Thus, when economic nationalists complain of dependence on foreign goods, they are calling in fact for reduction of mutually beneficial social relations.

Turning to a major teacher of error, Bastiat notes that Rousseau’s view that “the law should transform persons and should create or not create property. In my opinion, society, persons, and property exist prior to the law [not prior to society!], and… I would say: Property does not exist because there are laws, but laws exist because there is property” (essays, p. 97).

Bastiat asks “whether the right to property is not one of those rights which, far from springing from positive law, are prior to the law and are the reason for its existence. This is not, as might be thought, a theoretical and idle question. It is of tremendous, of fundamental importance.”

“Economists believe that property is a providential fact, like the human person.… The law does not bring the one into existence any more than it does the other. Property is a necessary consequence of the nature of man” (Essays, pp. 98-99).

Further: ‘[M]an is born a proprietor, because he is born with wants whose satisfaction is necessary to life, and with organs and faculties whose exercise is indispensable to the satisfaction of these wants. Faculties are only an extension of the person; and property is nothing but an extension of the faculties. To separate a man from his faculties is to cause him to die; to separate a man from the product of his faculties is likewise to cause him to die” (Essays, p. 99).

Present French law miscasts things owing to a fundamental mistake in Roman law: “The Romans could not fail to consider property anything but a purely conventional fact – a product, an artificial, of written law. Evidently they could not go back, as political economy does, to the very nature of man and perceive the relations and necessary connections that exist among wants, faculties, labor, and property.” To do so “would have been absurd and suicidal for them” since “they lived by looting, when all their property was the fruit of plunder, when they had based their whole way of life on the labor of slaves…. They had recourse to a purely empirical definition of property…. (Essays, p. 101).

Steeped in Roman ideology, the jurists claim that property stems from law. But “whereas the jurists’ principle involves virtual slavery, the economists’ principle implies liberty. Property, the right to enjoy the fruits of one’s labor, the right to work, to develop, to exercise one’s faculties, according to one’s own understanding, without the state intervening otherwise than by its protective action – this is what is meant by liberty” (Essays, pp. 109-110).

Hence “free trade has never been a question of customs duties, but a question of right, of justice, of public order, of property” (Essays, p. 111). Any encroachment on property undermines it in the direction of communism. In Bastiat’s opinion it was idle to separate liberty and property:

“I consider the right to property to consist in the freedom to dispose first of one’s person, then of one’s labor, and finally, of the products of one’s labor – which proves, incidentally, that, from a certain point of view, freedom and the right to property are indistinguishable from each other” (Essays, p. 210).

It follows, then, that “the rights of the state can be nothing but the regularizing of pre-existent personal rights. For my part, I cannot conceive a collective right that does not have its foundation in an individual right or presuppose it (Essays, p. 211). Bent on defending private property from its detractors, Bastiat undertakes an extended critique of those writers who have attacked land rent. He finds the justification for rent in services provided by landowners who have brought land in productive use (EH, 236-283).

On all these grounds, Bastiat claims “that the state is not and should not be anything else than thecommon police force instituted, not to be an instrument of oppression and reciprocal plunder, but, on the contrary, to guarantee to each his own and to make justice and security prevail” (Essays, p. 151). Of course, public provision of security was fraught with danger, dangers on which Bastiat spent much of his time. These dangers grew out of sundry mistakes in thinking, and we turn first to those, before closing in on Bastiat’s discussion of political plunder.

VII. Bastiat’s Syllabus of Economic Errors

Bastiat’s famous essay on “What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen” displays his method in a clear light (Essays, 1-50). It is crucial for analysts to get past immediate, apparent (“seen”) consequences into the less obvious (“unseen”) consequences. The latter involve rights violated, economic opportunities foregone, that is, costs imposed on society by political means. The mistake is imagine that such costs do not exist. (Memo this to Two Major Parties.)

Bastiat notes that in the policy debates of his time, it was common for opponents of economic liberty to say, in effect, “Oh, we accept your point in general, but the case of the weavers, the oil producers, or whomever, things are different.” This amounted to saying there are “no absolute principles” (Essays, p. 202, and cf. Sophisms, pp. 96-98). This was a recipe for wildly shifting policies, for a weird mixture of communism and private property settled by the ups and downs of partisan politics – a word, today’s welfare-warfare state, which Francis Fukuyama famously claims as the End of History. In Bastiat’s terms, it is only the death of good sense.

Another source of grave error was classical education, as taught in 19^th-century France. To combat these errors, Bastiat jokingly calls for the abolition of academic degrees. This led him into a long discussion of “the abuse of classical studies” (Essays, p. 244). The problem lay in “sending the youth of France, with the intention of preparing them for labor, peace, and freedom, to drink in, and become imbued and saturated with, the feelings and the opinions of a nation of brigands and slaves.” Socialism and communism stemmed from uncritical study of ancient Rome, whether state or church provided this education.

But so-called Roman “patriotism,” held up for the admiration of moderns, came down to “[h]atred of foreigners, the destruction of all civilization, the stifling of all progress, the scourging of the world with fire and sword, the chaining of women, children, and old men to triumphal chariots….” To reproduce Roman “morality” now, there would have to be “in the heart of Paris, an organization of men who hate to work, determined to satisfy their wants by deceit and force, and consequently at war with society” (Essays, p. 248). Of course Bastiat did believe that such men could be found in Paris)

Men “at war with society” would naturally reintroduce key Roman ideas about society. The first was that “society is a condition outside of Nature, the result of a contract.” This was not wholly untrue in the ancient world: “Rome and Sparta were indeed two associations of men having a common and definite end: pillage; they were not exactly societies, but armies” (Essays, p. 249). The second bad classical notion undergoing contemporary revival was that “law creates rights,” so that great lawmakers – Lycurgus, Solon, Numa, and Plato (on the level of theory) – were the real founders of nations (ibid.).

Bastiat examines a series of French writers and statesmen (some of them certifiable loonies), who had sought to bring to the French the benefit of these antique fallacies, including Fénelon, Rollin, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Mably, Robespierre, and Saint-Just (Essays, pp. 252-264). Now, these writers had their merits, but providing a political doctrine suitable to modern society was not among them. Worse, the false Roman model had affected even jurists like Vattel.

Restated by Rousseau, classical teachings become even more destructive. Rousseau creates an “antithesis between liberty and property.” Only the first is natural. Property, however, is conventional and artificial, subject to endless legislative tinkering as with “the right to employment, the right to poor relief,and the progressive income tax” (Essays, p. 268).

Bastiat comments that Mirabeau’s and Rousseau’s concession to the Legislator of authority over the very definition of property involved no stopping-point. “If the law that creates and disposes of property can take one step toward equality, why not take two? Why not achieve absolute equality?” (Essays, p. 269). Why not indeed? Here Saint-Just surpassed Robespierre and Babeuf surpassed Saint-Just. Could Plato’s militarized communism be far behind?

The mania for classical “republicanism” went so far during the French Revolution that Saint-Just could write that “republican government is founded on virtue, if not on terror” and, further: “Trade ill becomes the true citizen. The hand of man was made only to till the land and to bear arms” (quoted in Essays, p. 270). So much for the complex social order resting on private property and exchange! The Roman ideal amounted to a respectable charter for socialism of one kind or another. We will come back to these matters in the section, below, on social planning.

Bastiat treats other intellectual errors which were not as pernicious. These came down to sloppy thinking or the mere special pleading of interest groups. Here we find misbegotten metaphors of the kind that protectionists use when branding a welcome influx of commodities as a “flood” or “invasion” of foreign goods (Sophisms, pp. 116-119).

Bastiat turned his wit against these second-level errors in such essays as the one on the candle-makers’ petition to blot out the sun for unfair competition (Sophisms, pp. 56-60). In another classic he “argues” for obstructing presently navigable rivers on the protectionist claim that trade impoverishes society (Sophisms, pp. 92-93). Best of all is Bastiat’s argument that if breaks in railroad lines are good because a break leads to more local storage and cartage, then the best railroad of all would be a “negative railroad” consisting entirely of gaps! (Sophisms, pp. 94-95). (Memo to Al Gore.)

VIII. The Theory and Practice of Plunder

Of course Bastiat knew that public policy rested less on venial intellectual error than on deliberate perversion of government from provision of protection to creation of privilege. He wrote much on “spoliation,” of which “plunder” is a fitting translation. The insight that plunder is central to political life was one that Bastiat shared with French laissez faire liberals generally. His use of the concept was very telling.

Remarking claims that plunder is infrequent and localized, Bastiat answers that “however well disposed or optimistic one may be, one is compelled to recognize that plunder is practiced in this world on too vast a scale, that it is too much a part of all great human events, for any social science – political economy least of all – to be able to ignore it” (Sophisms, p. 129). Where plunder was well entrenched, it raised up “a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it” (Sophisms, p. 130). Here one can espy a non-Marxist formulation of the famous base/superstructure problem.

The chief forms of plunder were war, slavery, theocracy, and monopoly. Monopoly disrupted “voluntary exchange of service for service” (Sophisms, p. 132). Everyday theft was everywhere condemned, but theft linked to the warrior ethic enjoyed an unjustified prestige. Plunder in the name of country earned “honors, fame, and glory,” while what little protest arose came from the plundered, in some other country, and had little effect (Sophisms, p. 133).

Plunder followed its own “Malthusian law”: “It tends to expand in proportion to its means of existence and to live beyond its means, and these are, in the last analysis, nothing but the substance of the people.” A state left to follow its natural bent would, in time, destroy “private enterprise, wealth, happiness, independence, personal dignity” (Sophisms, p. 141). In some nations people “would feel themselves lost if they were not governed and administered every step of the way” (Sophisms, p. 143). Not surprisingly, such nations suffered from steady expansion of state power and consequent political instability.

Reflecting on the plundering process led Bastiat to formulate his famous definition of the state: “The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else” (Essays, p. 144). The growing tendency toward “personification of the state” would lead to many “calamities and… revolutions” (Essays, p. 146). The 1848 program of the Socialist Democratic party, which amounted to saying“[t]he state should give a great deal to the citizens and take little from them,” illustrated the problem (Essays, p. 149).

In such a state of public discourse, politicians brought forward all manner of good deeds for the state to do: “Organize labor and the workers. Root out selfishness. Repress the insolence and arrogance of capital. Make experiments with manure and with eggs. Furrow the countryside with railroads. Irrigate the plains. Plant forests on the mountains. Establish model farms. Establish harmonious workshops. Colonize Algeria. Feed the babies. Instruct the young. Relieve the aged. Send the city folk into the country. Equalize the profits of all industries. Lend money, without interest, to those who desire it. Liberate Italy, Poland, and Hungary. Improve the breed of saddle horses. Encourage art; train musicians and dancers. Restrict trade, and at the same time create a merchant marine” (Essays, pp. 140-141).

Not bad for mid-19^th century France. Either of our two venal and corrupt political parties could run on such a platform. Oh, I’m sorry, they already have.

The forms of political plunder were legion. “We have, first of all, licenses of all kinds. No one can become a barrister, a physician, a teacher, a broker, a deal in government bonds, a solicitor, an attorney, a pharmacist, a printer, a butcher, or a baker without encountering legal restrictions” (Essays, p. 181). The result was (and is) fewer competitors and higher prices.

Bastiat continues: “Next comes the attempt to set an artificial price” through tariffs. “This is evidently an effort to destroy the equivalence of services….” Then “comes taxation. It has become a much sought-after means of livelihood.” The constant growth of state employment comes about the more that people want their needs met “by that fictitious being, the state, which signifies a collection of salaried bureaucrats” (Essays, 182).

Not only was protectionisman important form of plunder, by setting a precedent for state intervention in the exchange system, it encouraged more radical programs: “Protectionism has been the forerunner ofcommunism; … it has been its first manifestation” (Essays, p. 114). The latter alarmed the protectionists, for it filled them “with horror” when it became “a matter of sharing their own property, too”; it was at that point that they began circulating books in favor of property (Essays, p. 195).

Building on mercantilist fallacies, protectionists wished to block imports and foster exports. Hence, “[t]heprotectionist system and the colonial system are, then, simply two aspects of one and the same theory.Preventing our fellow citizens from buying from foreigners and forcing foreigners to buy from our fellow citizens are simply two consequences of one and the same principle” (Sophisms, p. 86). If this doctrine were correct, “the general welfare depends upon monopoly, or domestic plunder, and conquest, or foreign plunder” (Sophisms, p. 87). The connection between domestic corporatism and overseas empire has never been more concisely put.

The United States flourished in the relative absence of state-driven plunder. But even there, two institutions of plunder threatened the public happiness: slavery and tariffs. This “two-fold legal scourge, a sad heritage of the Old World,” might in time lead to disruption of the union (Essays, 59-60).

The “prevailing illusion… that is possible to enrich all classes at the expense of one another,” would soon lead to “mak[ing] plunder universal under the pretext of organizing it” (Essays, p. 61). There were three possible paths: “partial plunder” associated with restricted suffrage, “universal plunder” allied to universal suffrage, and “absence of plunder,” the liberal ideal not yet realized (Essays, p. 63).

Although it was economic impossibility, the French public persisted “in seeing an increase in wealth in what the inhabitants steal from each other” (Sophisms, p. 195). Under such circumstances, even revolution could not deliver France from aggravated state plunder. Any foreseeable revolution would issue in further expansions of the state (EH, p. 453).

Some would argue, Bastiat observes, that because the plundering class has to spend its gains somewhere, it will demand “in greater quantity, the services of the classes it has plundered” (EH, p. 464). This would create employment and general social benefit. Needless to say, Bastiat did not think much of this proto-Keynesian multiplier effect. (We might call it the Lockheed theory of history.)

Bastiat points out that men “can secure the means of existence in two ways: by creating them or by stealing them” (EH, p. 479) – precisely Franz Oppenheimer’s central thesis and the reason he regarded Bastiat as his forerunner. To the extent that either creation or predation outweighs the other in a society, we shall find differences in their societies; this is the difference between “industrial” and “militant” societies, to use Herbert Spencer’s terms.

Of course the plunderers must allow some production to take place. In the nature of things, plunder “presupposes” production. Further, instead of “adding to the enjoyments of mankind, it decreases them, and, moreover, it allots them to those who have not deserved them” (EH, p. 480). Plunderers, too, have costs and outlays. They must specialize in force and deceit. But their way of life succeeds up to the point at which that they render production by others completely futile.

Plunder has been widespread. Bastiat comments that there is probably no people on earth inhabiting lands which were not, earlier, the home of other people. Under modern conditions, war, perhaps the highest form of plunder even burdened future generations by lumbering them with increased public debt (EH, p. 514). There was, however, one thing that might prove even worse than generalized, organized plunder. This menace was coerced “fraternity”: the program of the world-improvers and social planners.

IX. The Nightmare World of the Social Engineers

The would-be social planners’ programs rested on a set of mistaken notions from the ancient world, as modified by such thinkers as Rousseau. Fortunately, “social planners… lack the force to subject humanity to their experiments….. [E]ven in Russia, even in Persia and Tartary, men must to some extent be taken into account. If the Czar of Russia took it into his head to alter the moral and physical nature of his subjects,” he would soon be out of a job (EH, pp. 9-10). Bastiat, then, could not foresee of the idealistic careers of Stalin and Mao.

The idea that fundamental alteration of human beings and their societies was either possible or desirable owed much to Rousseau’s claim that society was entirely conventional. Bastiat notes that Rousseau’s Social Contract was “useful in showing what characterizes artificial social orders. Start with the idea that society is contrary to Nature; devise contrivances to which humanity can be subjected; lose sight of the fact that humanity has its motive force within itself; consider men as base raw materials; propose to impart to them movement and will, feeling, and life; set oneself up apart, immeasurably above the human race – these are the common practice of the social planners. The plans differ; the planners are all alike” (EH, p. 17).

Unlike political economy, which knows that “society is purely an association… capable of improvement as man himself improves,” the planners’ “false science does not study the concatenation of cause and effect. It does not investigate the good and the evil that acts produce, leaving it afterwards to the motive force of society to select the course to be followed” (EH, pp. 17 and 525). The planners “do not want natural society. What they want is an artificial society, which has come forth full-grown from the brain of its inventor” (EH, p. 526).

Socialism was the codification of ancient and modern error: “Socialism, like the ancient political philosophy from which it emanates, confuses government with society. That is why, every time that we do not want a thing to be done by the government, the socialists conclude that we do not want the thing to be done at all. We are opposed to state education; hence, we are opposed to all education. We object to state religion; hence, we do not want any religion at all…. It is as if they accused us of not wanting to eat, because we oppose the cultivation of grain by the state” (Essays, p. 68).

Acceptance of Rousseau’s and Robespierre’s “Roman” notion that liberty is natural, but property is conventional would “open an unlimited field to the imagination of the utopians.” Worse luck, it would “arouse in all these dreamers a thirst for power” (Essays, p. 104). Such were the dangers of social engineering, whether intended to reconstruct an ancient Spartan or Roman ideal or to realize a utopian form of egalitarianism.

X. Concusions: Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will?

20^th and 21^st -century statism would have appalled Bastiat, but it would not necessarily have surprised him. The fusion of plunder and social betterment has proven politically unbeatable, at least in the short run. While he might never have foreseen the sheer scale of contemporary statist intrusions into civil society, Bastiat did put forward interesting analyses of the consequences of the statist syndrome.

Bastiat writes: “Once an abuse exists, everything is arranged on the assumption that it will last indefinitely; and, as more and more people come to depend upon it for their livelihood, and still others depend upon them, a superstructure is erected that soon comprises a formidable edifice.”

Reform of an abuse was politically difficult: “The moment you try to tear it down, everybody protests; and the point to which I wish to call particular attention here is that those who protest always appear at first glance to be in the right, because it is easier to show the disorder that must accompany reform than the order that should follow it” (Sophisms, p. 176).

Like the tyrant protrayed by Étienne de la Boétie, who buys many friends and allies, the modern state has clients who will mobilize to prevent de-statizing any enterprise. Bastiat writes: “The supporters of the abuse are able to cite specific facts; they can name the particular persons, as well as their suppliers and workers, who will be injured by the reform – while the reformer, poor devil, can refer only to the general good that is to be gradually diffused among the masses. This does not produce nearly so great an effect” (Sophisms, p. 176).

The growth of state-provided public welfare demoralizes society. “Here, we have a peasant who has married late in life, in order to avoid being overburdened with children, forced to care for other people’s offspring. And another who has always practiced continence, we find is taxed to pay for the support of bastards. From the religious point of view, his conscience is clear, but humanly speaking, he must say to himself that he is a fool….” (EH, p. 509). Given this state-made moral hazard, it is unlikely that future generations will conduct themselves by the old moral code. Rousseau had led the way. Bastiat recounts that Rousseau said that “‘[i]n abandoning my children to public education [that is, the orphanage]… I regarded myself as a member of Plato’s republic’” – as well he might, given the promiscuity inherent in Plato’s system of social militarism (Essays, pp. 264 and 247).

Intervention would usher in a general breakdown of public and private ethics. Thus, one might think it impossible “that a whole nation should agree in seeing an increase in wealth in what the inhabitants steal from one another.” But, no, “[w]e have completely accepted this view in France, and are continually devising and improving methods of reciprocal robbery under the name of subsidies and protective tariffs” (Sophisms, p. 195).

How, in Bastiat’s view, could advocates of freedom carry on the fight against economically destructive and socially demoralizing statism? In the first place, they must go forward on the basis of firm principles, principles of morality and political economy. The common political cliché that “there are no absolute principles” amounted to saying: “I do not know which is true and which is false; I have no idea what constitutes good or evil. I do not trouble myself about such questions. The immediate effect of each law on my personal well-being is the only principle that I consent to recognize” (Sophisms, p. 104).

This anti-principled, pragmatic, shifting platform calls to mind the “compassionate conservatism” much in vogue these days. The above sentence could indeed be endorsed, with few exceptions, by every Republican office-holder in the country. Such an open embrace of No Principles would clear the public air and would still leave the Democratic party free to attack the GOP from a more advanced Platonist, Rousseauian, and Robespierrean standpoint.

As for the content of a principled defense of the social order resting on free exchange and private property, Bastiat favored reintegration of two ethical systems which were tending to become separated from one another. The first was religious ethics, which dealt with ultimate things; the second was utilitarian, or economic, ethics, resting on the conclusions of political economy (Sophisms, p. 150). “These two systems of ethics, instead of engaging in mutual recriminations, should be working together to attack evil at each of its poles” (Sophisms p, 153).

Here Bastiat addresses and, I think, resolves, the supposedly troublesome problem of choosing between rights-based and consequentialist analysis, a problem much mooted lately in libertarian circles. Further, in a passage which might well have been intended for today’s conservatives who attribute moral decay to the market, Bastiat says, “[w]ould not a society that, without being intrinsically virtuous, was nevertheless well regulated by the action of the economic system of ethics (by which I mean nothing more than knowledge of political economy), offer opportunities for the progress of religious morality?” (Sophisms, p. 154).

For Bastiat, there was no insuperable conflict between essential moral teachings and economic science. His system reconciled theism, free will, natural law, and voluntary social action. Of free will, Bastiat wrote that he found its existence self-evident, needing (at least from him) no set of proofs (EH, p. 494). As for theism, he found there firmer ground than that held by certain economists. These said, in effect, “[w]e have little faith in God, for we see that the natural laws lead to disaster, and yet we say: Laissez faire!because we have even less faith in ourselves, and we realize that all human efforts to halt the operation of these laws merely hasten the day of catastrophe” (EH, p. 487).

Such a despairing, half-hearted “defense” of free society, based ultimately on pessimism, had no attractions for Frédéric Bastiat. As Henry Hazlitt wrote, “We could use more Bastiats today. We have, in fact, desperate need of them.”

Are you concerned about overpopulation? If you live in a city, or Asia, it is easy to feel justified. But strictly speaking, the Earth has plenty of land, air, food and water for billions more. The limit is energy and the true crisis is poverty.

Billions live in a world of destitution brought about by state-augmented human stupidity and the artificial scarcity inherent to capitalism. A legacy of Western colonialism (since financialized by the IMF and World Bank and euphemized with terms like Structural Adjustment and Fiscal Austerity, but going strong today) extracts wealth from Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia.

The corporation-state’s neglect of the problems wrongly ascribed to overpopulation are to be remedied by further state action — at least according to states like the People’s Gulag of China and unelected superstates like the United Nations.

In his June 24th interview with VICE, environmentalist-politician Michael E. Arth advocated Birth Credits, an authoritarian wet dream:

“Each person would be issued half of a birth credit, which he or she can combine with a partner to have one child, or a person can sell his or her (half) credit at the going market rate. Each additional child costs one more credit. Noncompliance would bring a fine greater than the cost of the credit, and there would be sanctions for non-compliant countries (such as migration restrictions).”

Poor people cannot pay fines; they are poor. What are you going to do, imprison them and their children? Put a lien on their meager income and make their lives even better?

The rich can afford more children and it would become a conspicuous consumption item. Excess fecundity would become fashionable — just the opposite of today’s trend, a moderate trend which puts to rest fears of a crowded planet.

Arth addresses the fashion argument in his book, by noting that European women already limit familial size by choice (average 1.1 children per woman, which results in a negative growth rate). If this is true, and women in the developed, imperialist world already choose not to have kids, what’s the use in putting a gun to their heads and extorting money for a “license”?

This policy would only be applicable to presently virile territories, namely Africa. Is this to be another case of White Man’s Burden, the West imposing special rules on the Rest?

How would Arth deal with accidental pregnancy, forced abortions? What about in cultures where women exert little choice over giving birth, or are raped? These misogynistic regions (Africa and Asia) are where population is actually still increasing briskly! The birth credit is unenforceable there — kleptocratic states can hardly hand out mosquito nets, could they really handle the regulation of birth credits? Does the world need a dystopian new flavor of crime and punishment?

The solution is to raise standards of living and women’s autonomy, not Draconian, state-spawned markets for legitimate birth.

“If we had addressed these issues in 1985, two billion people in the world now living on less than two dollars a day would never have been born … In the 2010 Haiti earthquake, 220,000 people died, mostly because of conditions set up by overpopulation.”

Ignoring the nostalgically genocidal undertone of this claim, the real tragedy is that those who live on more than two dollars a day don’t get subtly blamed for being born. The problem is that centuries of colonialism have impoverished two billion descendants of previously self-sufficient human beings while those that live off the dividends of bloodshed and slavery don’t get branded as irresponsible.

Overpopulation is not why so many innocent Haitians died. The population density of Haiti is 32nd in the world, behind the Netherlands (24th), South Korea (23), and Monaco (2). Monaco has one of the highest living standards on Earth, and it happens to be infested with billionaires. These “nations” are not likely to suffer massive death and disease due to an Earthquake of a similar magnitude, yet they’re far more densely populated than Haiti. Haiti suffers because it is poor.

And Haitains are poor because, since 1492, this thing called slavery. Two centuries after the Haitian Revolution, extractive corporation-states like the IMF employed the services of Western intelligence agencies to overthrow democratically elected Jean Bertrand Artistede… twice.

This is a common neoimperialist tactic, as detailed by John Perkins in “Confessions of an Economic Hitman.” It matters little if there are a billion Haitians or ten, so long as their aggregate labor product is being extracted to pay for sports cars and dog jewelry in the white metropole.

The Limit To Flourishing 

“Implementation of birth credits is the best compromise to the individual rights versus collective rights dilemma, because choice is preserved and the commons has a vastly greater chance of being saved.”

No, the way to save the commons is to stop subsidizing and warring over fossil fuels.

The true Limit to Growth is energy (not that GDP growth alone is desirable). We can desalinize or atmospherically sequester water. Saudi Arabia does just that, thanks to their cursed petroleum reserves. We can use vertical farming and artificial fertilizers, though low-tech, local farming is completely viable as well. Even today, the developed world produces (and wastes) enough food to feed everyone.

Another completely legitimate concern is pollution. The most promising alternative energy sources do not emit toxic gasses. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch could be remedied with biodegradable materials (Cradle-to-Cradle design) coupled with a culturejamming anti-consumerist movement. There is profound demand for sustainability, although consumerist environmentalism is a luxury good, which is why the focus ought to be on global poverty.

The affected community could take direct and/or polycentric legal action to deal with waste dumping. Pollution is today a function of population, but need not be. This blinkered conflation results in calls for more state violence, where corporation-states have been responsible for the vast majority of environmental degradation in the first place — including nuclear waste — the kind that really loves to stick around.

But let’s assume that humanity is just about to overstep Earth’s carrying capacity. Still, the imperialist NATO bloc of “nations” has meager, even negative growth rates. It’s actually a big problem for the workforce-extraction mechanism. The global average growth rate is 1.1% per annum, mostly coming from Asia and Africa. Population growth is a function of poverty. This problem is best solved by overthrowing despotic rulers and sending genuine aid monies liberated and repurposed from their present parasitic financial masters back in the countries that actually consume most of the resources.

The prevailing overpopulation myth, even among otherwise anti-authoritarian people, leads to a really brainfucked, psychopathic disposition when one hears of mass slaughter – oh well, at least the atrocity moves us in the right direction on overpopulation!

Breeders spew out large litters of kids when they expect many of them to die. They also reject contraceptives because they believe an invisible man in the sky frowns upon them. But when “nations” modernize, birth and death rates decline — quality over quantity. Population growth is projected to taper off around 2050, no authoritarianism required.

The greatest threat is not overpopulation but the spectre of it. That is, the fear of a massive problem only tractable by equally massive institutions, superstates, which consolidate global power and undermine individual sovereignty and peace.

“[The road to] Hell is paved with good intentions.” – Samuel Johnson

Wir stellen uns eine Welt ohne Privilegien, Ausbeutung oder Herrschaft vor. Eine Welt ohne institutionalisierten Zwang, Gemetzel oder Ungerechtigkeit. Kurz, Freiheit.

Wie auch immer, die Details darüber, wie eine Gesellschaft ohne zentralisierte politische Autorität aussehen wird sind etwas schwierig vorrauszusagen. Eines der Hauptargumente für die Freiheit in der liberalen Tradition wurde von F.A. Hayek formuliert, was bekannt wurde als „das Wissensproblem“. Er argumentierte das kein einziges Individuum oder eine Gruppe von Individuen alle notwendigen wirtschaftlichen Informationen haben kann um die Wirtschaft zentral zu planen (oder potentiell ein anderes soziales System). Sich diesen Wissensanspruch anzumaßen ist die fatale Einbildung des rationalen Konstruktivismus. Um sicher und effektiv zu funktionieren muss ein System einen dezentralen Ansatz haben – wirtschaftlich gesprochen, bedeutet dies das Individuen eigene Entscheidungen treffen und untereinander ihre rechtmäßigen Erzeugnisse freiwillig und für einen einvernehmlichen Preis tauschen, woraus das Preissystem resultiert.

Seit die Marktanarchisten begriffen haben das konsesuelle Istitutionen zwangsläufig vom Markt und anderen sozialen Kräften geschaffen werden, können wir sagen dass das „Wissensproblem“ von Hayek, in einer staatenlosen Gesellschaft, in der Art wie Unternehmen Konflikte lösen und Sicherheitsdienste anbieten die „Regierung“ bereitstellen. Wir können nicht die einzelnen Details vorhersagen wie freie Menschen sich organisieren werden um die Bedürfnisse zu erfüllen. Die Gestaltung einer solchen Organisation wird eine nie- endende Sache sein, geschaffen durch freies Experimentieren und sich der daraus ergebenden Vielfalt.

Desweiteren, Anna Morgensterns „Anarchism: Necessary but not sufficient“ und Charles Johnson und Roderick Longs „Libertarian Feminism: Can this Marriage Be Saved?“ führen das Argument an, das die Beendigung der Unterdrückung durch die Staatsmacht, ebenso kulturelle Formen der Unterdrückung beendet werden, welche dringend hinterfragt und überwunden werden müssen. Staaten sind die größten Hürden, aber nicht die einzigen, denen man in einer staatenlosen Welt entgegentreten muss.

The recent reports of secret NSA surveillance reveal the important role the whistleblowers play in uncovering government wrongdoing. Edward Snowden is the latest whistleblower to face the Obama administration’s wrath for uncovering executive branch criminality. But another victim of the administration’s War on Whistleblowers is Private Bradley Manning. Manning  currently faces charges of “aiding the enemy,” and was tortured in solitary confinement for months on end, all for releasing documents to WikiLeaks.

While there is no evidence that anyone was harmed by these leaks, the good they have done is enormous. Manning exposed a litany of US war crimes, most famously US troops shooting innocent civilians in the Collateral Murder video. Manning’s disclosures helped end the US occupation of Iraq by revealing “evidence that U.S. troops executed at least 10 Iraqi civilians, including a woman in her 70s and a 5-month-old infant, then called in an airstrike to destroy the evidence.” The leaks also played an important role in helping start the Arab Spring.

But not everyone appreciates Manning’s courageous stand for truth, justice, peace, and liberty. Lisa Williams, president of the board of San Francisco Pride, said that “even the hint of support” for Manning’s actions “will not be tolerated by the leadership of San Francisco Pride.”  This even though Manning is a courageous member of the LGBT community, and has been praised by famed gay rights activist Lt. Dan Choi.

The San Francisco Pride Festival is this weekend, and freedom fighters across the country are uniting to show far more than a “hint” of support. The Bradley Manning Freedom Torch Parade began this weekend in San Francisco, and will feature solidarity events across the US. We at the Center for a Stateless Society were among the first organizations to sponsor this effort to defend whistleblowers. If there is an event near you, I urge you to participate. If not, I suggest you organize one.

Whistleblowers like Manning risk their lives and liberty to shine a light on abusive state power. It’s time for us to stand in solidarity with them.

“The Fourth Estate,” as a nickname for the press, is anecdotally attributed to Edmund Burke, when the House of Commons was opened up to press reporting in the 18th century. The idea is that the press is another branch of government without official recognition, representing the interests of civil society as a whole, and acting as a sort of check or limit on the others. The Fourth Estate’s job, in Anderson Cooper’s words, is “keeping ’em honest.”

But then the original Three Estates themselves — the Crown, the Lords Temporal and Spiritual, and the bourgeoisie — were in theory supposed to be rivalrous interests that kept each other in check. But by the 19th century, after a limited insurgency by upstart industrial interests against the privileges of the landed classes, they had coalesced into a de facto class alliance:  The monarchy, landed interests, Church and industrial capitalists against everybody else.

And in the United States the Fourth Estate, likewise, has ceased to be a check on the official branches of power and instead become part of the same interlocking establishment. We live in a world where the late Katherine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post, told a room full of intelligence officers that “there are some things the American people don’t need to know.” What the establishment press calls “journalism” consists mainly of stenography, studiously writing down exactly what the public spokespersons for “both sides” on any issue have to say about it. “Both sides” are actually the center-left and center-right wing  (center and center-right, really) of the same establishment, with 80% of their assumptions in common. Indeed, some 40% of column inches in newspapers consist of material generated by public spokespersons, press releases and PR departments.

Establishment journalism, as often as not, shares the perspective of the political and corporate establishments it’s supposed to report on. We regularly see talking heads like David Gregory denouncing those, like Edward Snowden, with the temerity to actually expose the activities of those in power. We see the New York Times’ Judith Miller, who acted as Cheney’s mouthpiece in feeding pro-Iraq war propaganda to the American people, chiding Wikileaks for inadequate fact-checking.

But then, it’s hard to take a critical attitude toward people you schmooze with on a daily basis. The above-mentioned Katherine Graham, for example, socialized with JFK, Jackie Onassis, RFK, LBJ, Bob McNamara, Henry Kissinger, and the Reagans.  This collusion between the Fourth Estate and the other three is a lot like what happened between the original Three Estates in 19th century Britain: the Whig landed aristocracy and old-money mercantilists were silent partners who financed much of the industrial revolution, and the new upstart industrial capitalists were cemented into the old ruling class establishment with titles of nobility.

The one unforgivable sin, for a respectable professional journalist in the so-called “Fourth Estate,” is to supplement one’s careful stenography of what “both sides” said with an independent factual investigation as to whether it’s true or not. What “both sides” say must speak for itself. If one side lies, and the other side doesn’t challenge it, it’s not the reporter’s job to tell readers what the truth is. If “both sides” actually agree on many of the structural assumptions of the current system, the existing structure of power will not be called into question by respectable journalism.

James Moore’s idea of the “Second Superpower,” in comparison, stands up pretty well. The Second Superpower, juxtaposed to the United States and the global system of power it enforces, is networked global civil society: essentially all networked citizen activist organizations that challenge the institutional power of the corporate-state establishment. The Second Superpower’s more visible manifestations have included the Zapatista uprising, the anti-globalization movement, The Pirate Bay, Anonymous, Wikileaks, the Arab Spring, Syntagma and M15, and Occupy. It also includes untold thousands of more staid advocacy organizations like Amnesty International and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and big to-dos like the World Social Forum. It includes the Keystone XL blockade and the Israeli divestment boycott.

The Third Estate, in European politics, originally purported to represent “everybody else” besides the King, Church and Nobles. In practice, it represented the ruling elite, or top one percent or so, of townspeople. In England, that meant the owners of the Dark Satanic Mills. The early 19th century working class, while theoretically included in the Third Estate, were in fact subjected to a totalitarian police state.

The Second Superpower, on the other hand, really does represent “everybody else” — in Moore’s words, “planetary society.” Its genuinely democratic nature rests on the essentially non-existent coordination costs and marginal costs of transferring information associated with network technologies.

Among other things, the collapsing entry barriers to recording events in real-time and distributing them on the Web enable the Second Superpower (i.e., you and me) to do something the Fourth Estate refuses to do:  Expose the inner workings of the rich and powerful.

The viral spread of UC Davis police Lt. John Pike pepper spraying calmly seated students in the faces was a shot heard round the world. Cops now routinely complain about the “chilling effect” of being unable to beat anyone up, without the dead certainty that some bystander is capturing it on their cell phone.

Cue in Texas Senator Wendy Davis’s filibuster of a bill to severely tighten government restrictions on abortion. The Republican majority, after three challenges on points of order that seem fishy at best (one such point of order was a pause to adjust her back brace), managed to shut her filibuster down several minutes before midnight. But the yelling crowd of Davis supporters managed to delay a final vote until perilously close to the special session’s expiration time at 12 sharp. Nevertheless, the body took a vote and declared the bill passed just before midnight. But wait: Somebody got a screen capture of the original time-stamp on the bill showing it was passed after midnight! And somebody else saved the official video of Senate proceedings that showed the vote concluding after midnight! And the Republicans were caught altering the time-stamp! And so, it wound up being watched by hundreds of thousands of people on YouTube who deluged the Texas government with outraged complaints.

The morning after, a friend of mine on Twitter (@ami_angelwings) observed that if this had been ten years ago, they probably would have said the bill passed before midnight. The news would have just reported that there was a “controversy,” that “one side said this and one side  said that,” and that would be it. But with so many people watching and knowing the truth they couldn’t. And regular people watching on the internet kept them from being able to pretend something else happened and hide the truth.

It’s interesting that in sports, they’re willing to say “Let’s go to the video” to verify the truth. But in the “serious” news, judging the comparative truth claims of “both sides” by appealing to the factual realm is regarded as “bias.”

But if “serious” journalists aren’t willing to do anything so unprofessional as go to the video, our new Fourth Estate — the Second Superpower — has no such qualms. This illustrates the fundamental game change that networked communications technology has introduced in the age-old struggle between the privileged and non-privileged.

For centuries, the transaction costs and capital outlays for coordinating action have meant that we have been oppressed largely through hierarchical, institutional actors. It also meant that the main challengers to corporate-state rule tend to take the form of other large, hierarchical institutions (labor parties, establishment unions, racial and gender justice organizations dominated by the economically powerful, etc.), and to degenerate into the same kind of internal authoritarianism as the institutions they were fighting. It meant, further, that these countervailing institutions were more likely than not to coalesce into interlocking systems of power with the institutions they were ostensibly fighting.

The new technologies of free communication and association mean, for the first time, we can take on powerful institutions — on a more than equal basis — without becoming powerful institutions. And that means the days of powerful institutions are numbered.

Marktanarchisten lehnen generell alle Formen der Bevormundung ab, welche den freien Menschen die Möglichkeit vorenthalten vernünftige Entscheidungen über ihr Leben zu treffen. Wenn jemand wünscht seine Arbeitskraft für einen Preis zu verkaufen den er angemessen findet, werden wir keine Gewalt anwenden um dies zu verhindern.

Wie auch immer, der Markt erzwingt die natürliche Abschwächung der Ausbeutung. Marktanarchisten tendieren dazu die ökonomische Beherrschung der arbeitenden Menschen als Produkt des Staates und nicht des Marktes zu sehen. In einer freien Welt, ohne Land, Währung, Patenten und Zöllen wäre die ökonomische Abhängigkeit der Arbeiter gegenüber Kapitalisten nahezu zerstört. Kapitalismus, im Sinne eines ungerechten Status quo geprägt von staatlich- geschaffener Monopolisierung des Kapitals, hält die Arbeitskräfte gefangen und verhindert bessere Möglichkeiten durch staatliche Interventionen in den Markt zugunsten einer parasitären Elite.

Wenn Menschen für sich selbst oder an einem Arbeitsplatz mit horizontaler Hierarchie arbeiten können, werden sie es generell bevorzugen. Würden nicht alle von uns Arbeitskollegen den Bossen vorziehen? Für eine kapitalistische Firma in einer freien Gesellschaft würde dies typischerweise bedeuten, dass sie mit ihren Arbeitern besser umgehen muss, da sie ansonsten zu einer anderen Firma, mit besseren Möglichkeiten wechseln – Möglichkeiten die derzeit von der Wurzel an vom Staat verhindert werden.

Während Marktanarchisten üblicherweise keine grundsätzliche moralische Opposition zur Lohnarbeit vertreten, haben wir starke moralische Bedenken zum gegenwärtigen, staatlichen Monopolkapitalismus der die Lohnarbeit zur nahezu unausweichlichen Falle macht.

Mit anderen Worten, Opposition zum Lohnsystem im Sinne eines ungerechten System der Unterdrückung bedeutet nicht das eine Art Anarcho-Polizei Leute verhaften wird die freiwillig ihre Arbeitskraft gegen Lohn anbieten oder Menschen für Lohnarbeit einstellen. Bei der Abschaffung des Staates schaffen wir die staats-getriebene Monopolisierung des Kapitals ab, sodass es kein „Lohnsystem“ mehr gibt in dem einem nur die Wahl bleibt für jemanden zu arbeiten oder zu verhungern.

Legend tells us that healthy newborn infants aroused the envy and hatred of evil spirits. In the absence of the proud mothers, the evil ones stole into the houses, kidnapped the babies, and left behind them deformed, hideous-looking monsters.

Socialism has met with such a fate. Young and lusty, crying out defiance to the world, it aroused the envy of the evil ones. They stole near when Socialism least expected and made off with it, leaving behind a deformity which is now stalking about under the name of Socialism.

At its birth, Socialism declared war on all constituted institutions. Its aim was to fell every injustice to the ground and replace it with economic and social well-being and harmony.

Two fundamental principles gave Socialism its life and strength: the wage system and its master, private property. The cruelty, criminality, and injustice of these principles were the enemies against which Socialism hurled its bitterest attacks and criticisms. Private property and the wage system being the staunchest pillars of society, every one who dared expose their cruelty was denounced as an enemy of society, a dangerous character, a revolutionist. Time was when Socialism carried these epithets with head erect, feeling that the hatred and persecution of its enemies were its greatest attributes.

Not so the Socialism that has been caught in the trap of the evil ones, of the political monsters. This sort of Socialism has either given up altogether the unflinching attacks against the bulwarks of the present system, or has weakened and changed its form to an unrecognizable extent.

The aim of Socialism today is the crooked path of politics as a means of capturing the State. Yet it is the State which represents the mightiest weapon sustaining private property and our system of wrong and inequality. It is the power which protects the system against every rebellious, determined revolutionary attack.

The State is organized exploitation, organized force, and crime. And to the hypnotic manipulation of this very monster, Socialism has become a willing prey. Indeed, the representatives or Socialism are more devout in their religious faith in the State than the most conservative statists.

The Socialist contention is that the State is not half centralized enough. The State, they say, should not only control the political phase of society, it should become the arch manager, the very fountain-head, of the industrial life of the people as well, since that alone would do away with special privileges, with trusts and monopolies. Never does it occur to these abortionists of a great idea that the State is the coldest, most inhuman monopolist, and if once economic dictatorship were added to the already supreme political power of the State, its iron heel would cut deeper into the flesh of labor than that of capitalism today.

Of course, I will be told that Socialism does not aim for such a State, that it wants a true, just, democratic, real State. Alas, the true, real, and just State is like the true, real, just God, who has never yet been discovered. The real God, according to our good Christians, is kind and loving, just and fair. But what has he proven to be in reality? A God of tyranny, of war and bloodshed, of crime and injustice. The same is the case with the State, whether of Republican, Democratic, or Socialist color. Always and everywhere it has and must stand for supremacy, hence for slavery, submission, and dependency.

How the political scene-shifters must grin when they see the rush of the people to the newest attraction in the political moving-picture show. The poor, deluded, childish people, who are forever fed on the political patent medicine, either of the Republican elephant, the Democratic cow, or the Socialist mule, the grunting of each merely representing a new ragtime from the political music box.

The muddy waters of the political life run high for a time, while underneath moves the giant beast of greed and strife, of corruption and decay, mercilessly devouring its victims. All politicians, no matter how sincere (if such an anomaly is at all thinkable), are but petty reformers, hence the perpetuators of the present system.

Socialism in its inception was absolutely and irrevocably opposed to this system. It was anti-authoritarian, anticapitalistic, anti-religious; in short, it could not and would not make peace with a single institution of today. But since it was led astray by the evil spirit of politics, it landed in the trap and has now but one desire—to adjust itself to the narrow confines of its cage, to become part of the authority, part of the very power that has slain the beautiful child Socialism and left behind a hideous monster.

Since the days of the old Internationale, since the strife between Bakunin, Marx and Engels, Socialism has slowly but surely been losing its fighting plumes—its rebellious spirit and its strong revolutionary tendencies—as more and more it has allowed itself to be deceived by political gains and government offices. And more and more, Socialism has grown powerless to arouse itself from the political hypnosis, thereby spreading apathy and passivity in proportion to its political successes.

The masses are being drilled and canned for the political cold storage of Socialist campaigns. Every direct, independent, and courageous attack on capitalism and the State is being discouraged or tabooed. The stupid voters wait patiently from one political performance to another for the comrade actors in the theater of representation to give a show, and perhaps perform a new stunt. Meanwhile, the Socialist congressman introduces yard upon yard of resolutions for the waste basket, proposing the perpetuation of the very things Socialism once set out to overthrow. And the Socialist mayors are busy assuring the business interests of their towns that they may rest in peace, no harm will ever come to them from a Socialist mayor. And if such Punch-and-Judy shows are criticised, the good Socialist adherents grow indignant and say that we must wait until the Socialists have the majority.

The political trap has transferred Socialism from the proud, uncompromising position of a revolutionary minority, fighting fundamentals and undermining the strongholds of wealth and power, to the camp of the scheming, compromising, inert political majority, busying itself with non-essentials, with things that barely touch the surface, measures that have been used as political bait by the most lukewarm reformers: old age pensions, initiative and referendum, the recall of judges, and other such very startling and terrible things.

In order to achieve these “revolutionary” measures, the elite in the Socialist ranks go down on their knees to the majority, holding out the palm leaf of compromise, catering to every superstition, every prejudice, every silly tradition. Even the Socialist politicians know that the voting majority is intellectually steeped in ignorance, that it does not know as much as the ABC of Socialism. One would therefore assume that the aim of these “scientific” Socialists would be to lift the mass up to its intellectual heights. But no such thing. That would hurt the feelings of the majority too much. Therefore the leaders must sink to the low level of their constituency, therefore they must cater to the ignorance and prejudice of the voters. And that is precisely what Socialism has been doing since it was caught in the political trap.

One of the commonplaces of Socialism today is the notion of evolution. For heaven’s sake, let’s have nothing of revolution, we are peace-loving people, we want evolution. I shall not now attempt to prove that evolution must mean growth from a lower to a higher state of mind, and that thus Socialists, from their own evolutionary standpoint, have failed miserably, since they have gone back on every one of their original principles. I only wish to examine into this wonderful thing, Socialist evolution.

Thanks to Karl Marx and Engels we are assured that Socialism has developed from a Utopia to a science. Softly, gentlemen, Utopian Socialism is not the kind that would allow itself to be caught in the political trap, it is the kind that will never make peace with our murderous system, it is the kind that has inspired and still inspires enthusiasm, zeal, courage, and idealism. It is the kind of Socialism that will have none of the disgustingly cringing compromise of a Berger, a Hillquit, a Ghent, and other-such “scientific” gentlemen.

Every daring attempt to make a great change in existing conditions, every lofty vision of new possibilities for the human race, has been labeled Utopian. If “scientific” Socialism is to substitute stagnation for activity, cowardice for courage, acquiescence for daring, submission for defiance, then Marx and Engels might never have lived, for all the service they have done to Socialism.

But I deny that so-called scientific Socialism has proven its superiority to Utopian Socialism. Certainly, if we examine into the failure of some of the predictions the great prophets have made, we will see how arrogant and overbearing the scientific contentions are. Marx was determined that the middle class would get off the scene of action, leaving but two fighting forces, the capitalistic and proletarian classes. But the middle class has had the impudence not to oblige comrade Marx.

The middle class is growing everywhere, and is indeed the strongest ally of capitalism. In fact, the middle class was never more powerful than it is today, as can be adduced by a thousand facts, but mainly by the very gentlemen in the Socialist ranks—the lawyers, ministers, and small businessmen—who infest the movement. They are making of Socialism a respectable, middle-class, law-abiding issue because they themselves represent that very tendency. It is inevitable that they should espouse methods of propaganda to fit everybody’s taste and strengthen the system of robbery and exploitation.

Marx prophesied that the workers would grow poorer in proportion to the increase of wealth. That did not come to pass, either, in the way Marx hoped. The masses of workers are really getting poorer, but that has not prevented the rise of an aristocracy of labor in the very ranks of labor. A class of snobs who—because of superior wages and more respected positions, but mainly because they have saved a little or acquired some property—have lost sympathy with their own kind, and are now the loudest proclaimers against revolutionary means. Truth is, the entire Socialist Party of today is recruited from these very aristocrats of labor; that’s why they will have nothing to do with those who stand for revolutionary, anti-political methods. The possibility of becoming mayor, congressman, or some other high official is too alluring to allow these upstarts to do anything that would jeopardize such a glorious chance.

But what about the much-extolled class consciousness of the workers which is to act as such leaven? Where and how does it assert itself? Surely, if it were an innate quality the workers would long since have demonstrated this fact, and their first act would have been to sweep clean from the Socialist ranks lawyers, ministers, and real-estate sharks, the most parasitic types in society.

Class consciousness can never be demonstrated in the political arena, for the interests of the politician and the voter are not identical. The one aims for office while the other must stand the cost. How then can there be a fellow-feeling between them?

Solidarity of interests develops class consciousness, as is demonstrated in the Syndicalist and every other revolutionary movement, in the determined effort to overthrow the present system, in the great war that is being waged against every institution of today in behalf of a new edifice.

The political Socialists care nothing at al1 for such a class consciousness. On the contrary, they fight it tooth and nail. In Mexico, class consciousness is being demonstrated as it has not been since the great French Revolution. The real and true proletarians, the robbed and enslaved peons, are fighting for land and liberty. It is true they know nothing of the theory of scientific Socialism, nor yet of the materialistic interpretation of history, as laid down in Mare’s Das Kapital, but they know with mathematical accuracy that they have been sold into slavery. They also know that their interests are inimical to the interests of the land robbers, and they have risen in revolt against that class, against those interests.

How do the class-conscious monopolists of scientific Socialism meet this wonderful uprising? With the cries of “bandits, filibusters, anarchists, ignoramuses”—unfit to understand or interpret economic necessity. And predictably, the paralysing effect of the political trap does not permit of sympathy with the sublime wrath of the oppressed. It must move in straight-laced legal bounds, while the Indian Yaquis, the Mexican peons have broken all laws, all propriety, they have even had the impudence to expropriate the land from the expropriators, they have driven back their tyrants and tormentors. How then can peaceful aspirants for political jobs approve such conduct? Trying hard for the fleshpots of the State, which is the staunchest protector of property, the Socialist cannot possibly affiliate with any movement that so brazenly attacks property. On the other hand, it is quite consistent with the political aims of the party to oblige those who might add to the voting strength of class-conscious Socialism. Witness how tenderly religion is treated, how prohibition is patted on the back, how the anti-Asiatic and Negro question is met with, in short how every spook prejudice is treated with kid gloves so as not to hurt its sensitive souls.

by Emma Goldman

To most Americans Anarchy is an evil-sounding word — another name for wickedness, perversity, and chaos. Anarchists are looked upon as a herd of uncombed, unwashed, and vile ruffians, bent on killing the rich and dividng their capital. Anarchy, however, to its followers actually signifies a social theory which regards the union of order with the absense of all government of man by man; in short, it means perfect individual liberty.

If the meaning of Anarchy has so far been interpreted as a state of the greatest disorder, it is because people have been taught that their affairs are regulated, that they are ruled wisely, and that authority is a necessity.

In by-gone centuries any person who asserted that mankind could get along without the aid of worldly and spiritual authority was considered a madman, and was either placed in a lunatic asylum or burned at the stake; whereas to-day hundreds of thousands of men and women are infidels who scorn the idea of a supernatural Being.

The freethinkers of to-day, for instance, still believe in the necessity of the State, which protects society; they do not desire to know the history of our barbarian institutions. They do not understand that government did not and cannot exist without oppression; that every government has committed dark deeds and great crimes against society. The development of government has been in the order, despotism, monarchy, oligarchy, plutocracy; but it has always been a tyranny.

It cannot be denied that there are a large number of wise and well-meaning people who are anxious to better the present conditions, but they have not sufficiently emancipated themselves from the prejudices and superstitions of the dark ages to understand the true inwardness of the institution called government.

“How can we get along without government?” ask these people. “If our government is bad let us try to have a good one, but we must have government by all means!”

The trouble is that there is no such thing as good government, because its very existence is based upon the submission of one class to the dictatorship of another. “But men must be governed,” some remark; “they must be guided by laws.” Well, if men are children who must be led, who then is so perfect, so wise, so faultless as to be able to govern and guide his fellows.

We assert that men can and should govern themselves individually. If men are still immature, rulers are the same. Should one man, or a small number of men, lead all the blind millions who compose a nation?

“But we must have some authority, at least,” said an American friend to us. Certianly we must, and we have it, too; it is the inevitable power of natural laws, which manifests itself in the physical and social world. We may or may not understand these laws, but we must obey them as they are a part of our existence; we are the absolute slaves of these laws, but in such slavery there is no humiliation. Slavery as it exists to-day means an external master, a lawmaker outside of those he controls; while the natural laws are not outside of us — they are in us; we live, we breathe, we think, we move only through these laws; they are therefore not our enemies but our benefactors.

Are the laws made by man, the laws on our statute books, in conformity with the laws of Nature? No one, we think, can have the temerity to assert that they are.

It is because the laws prescribed to us by men are not in conformity with the laws of Nature that mankind suffers from so much ill. It is absurd to talk of human happiness so long as men are not free.

We do not wonder that some people are so bitterly opposed to Anarchy and its exponents, because it demands changes so radical of existing notions, while the latter ofend rather than conciliate by the zealousness of their propaganda.

Patience and resignation are preached to the poor, promising them a reward in the hereafter. What matters it to the wretched outcast who has no place to call his own, who is craving for a piece of bread, that the doors of Heaven are wider open for him than for the rich? In the face of the great misery of the masses such promises seem bitter irony.

I have met very few intelligent women and men who honestly and conscientiously could defend existing governments; they even agreed with me on many points, but they were lacking in moral courage, when it came to the point, to step to the front and declare themselves openly in sympathy with anarchistic principles.

We who have chosen the path laid down for us by our convictions oppose the organization called the State, on principle, claiming the equal right of all to work and enjoy life.

When once free from the restrictions of extraneous authority, men will enter into free relations; spontaneous organizations will spring up in all parts of the world, and every one will contribute to his and the common welfare as much labor as he or she is capable of, and consume according to their needs. All modern technical inventions and discoveries will be employed to make work easy and pleasant, and science, culture, and art will be freely used to perfect and elevate the human race, while woman will be coequal with man.

“This is all well said,” replies some one, “but people are not angels, men are selfish.”

What about? Selfishness is not a crime; it only becomes a crime when conditions are such as to give an individual the opportunity to satisfy his selfishness to the detriment of others. In an anarchistic society everyone will seek to satisfy his ego; but as Mother Nature has so arranged things that only those survive who have the aid of their neighbors, man, in order to satisfy his ego, will extend his aid to those who will aid him, and then selfishness will no more be a curse but a blessing.

A dagger in one hand, a torch in the other, and all his pockets brimful with dynamite bombs — that is the picture of the Anarchist such as it has been drawn by his enemies. They look at him simply as a mixture of a fool and a knave, whose sole purpose is a universal topsy-turvy, and whose only means to that purpose is to slay any one and every one who differs from him. The picture is an ugly caricature, but its general acceptance is not to be wondered at, considering how persistently the idea has been drummed into the mind of the public. However, we believe Anarchy — which is freedom of each individual from harmful constraint by others, whether these others be individuals or an organized government — cannot be brought about without violence, and this violence is the same which won at Thermopylae and Marathon.

The popular demand for freedom is stronger and clearer than it has ever been before, and the conditions for reaching the goal are more favorable. It is evident that through the whole course of history runs an evolution before which slavery of any kind, compulsion under any form, must break down, and from which freedom, full and unlimited freedom, for all and from all must come.

From this it follows that Anarchism cannot be a retrogade movement, as has been insinuated, for the Anarchists march in the van and not in the rear of the army of freedom.

We consider it absolutely necessary that the mass of the people should never for a moment forget the gigantic contest that must come before their ideas can be realized, and therefore they use every means at their disposal — the speech, the press, the deed — to hasten the revolutionary development.

The weal of mankind, as the future will and must make plain, depends upon communism. The system of communism logically excludes any and every relation between master and servant, and means really Anarchism, and the way to this goal leads through a social revolution.

As for the violence which people take as the charachteristic mark of the Anarchist, it cannot and it shall not be denied that most Anarchists feel convinced that “violence” is not any more reprehensible toward carrying out their designs than it is when used by an oppressed people to obtain freedom. The uprising of the oppressed has always been condemned by tyrants: Persia was astounded at Greece, Rome at the Caudine Forks, and England at Bunker Hill. Can Anarchy expect less, or demand victories without striving for them?

by John Most and Emma Goldman

We must get rid of the Anarchists! They are a menace to society. Does not Hearst say so? Do not the M. & M. and the gentlemaen of the Chamber of Commerce, who have also declared war on Labor, assure us that the Anarchists are dangerous and that they are responsible for all our troubles? Does not every skinner of Labor and every grafting politician shout against the Anarchists? Isn’t that enough to prove that the Anarchists are dangerous?

But why are all the money bags and their hirelings so unanimous in condemning the Anarchists? Generally they disagree on many questions and they bitterly fight each other in their business and social life. But on TWO questions they are always in accord.

Smash the Labor Unions!
Hang the Anarchists!

WHY? Because the Labor Unions are cutting the bosses’ profits by constantly demanding higher wages. And the Anarchists want to abolish the boss altogether.

Now, what is the matter with the Anarchists? What do you really know about them, except the lies and misrepresentations of their enemies — who are also the enemies of the workers and opposed to every advancement of Labor? If you stop to think of it, you really know nothing of the Anarchists and their teachings. Your masters and their press have taken good care that you shouldn’t learn the truth about them. Why?” Because as long as they can keep you busy shouting against the Anarchists, they are safe in their saddle on the backs of the people.

That’s the whole secret.

What do the Anarchist really want? When you know that, you will be able to decide for yourself whether the Anarchists are your enemies or your friends.

The Anarchists say that it is not necessary to have murder and crime, poverty and corruption in the world. They say that we are cursed with these evils because a handful of people have monopolized the earth and all the wealth of the country. But who produces that wealth? Who builds the railroads, who digs the coal, who works in the fields and factories? You can answer that question for yourself. It is the toilers who do all the work and who produce all that we have in the world.

The Anarchists say: The products of Labor should belong to the producers. The industries should be carried on to minister to the needs of the people instead of for profit, as at present. Abolishing monopoly in land and in the sources of production, and making the opportunity for production accessible to all, would do away with capitalism and introduce free and equal distribution. That, in turn, would do away with laws and government, as there would be no need for them, government serving only to conserve the institutions of today and to protect the masters in their exploitation of the people. It would abolish war and crime, because the incentive to either would be lacking. It would be a society of real freedom, without coercion or violence, based on the voluntary communal arrangement of “To each according to his needs; from each according to his ability.”

That is what the Anarchists teach. Suppose they are all wrong. Are you going to prove it by hanging them? If they are wrong, the people will not accept their ideas, and therefore there can be no danger from them. But, if they are right, it would be good for us to find it out. In any case it is a question of learning what these Anarchists really want. Let the people hear them.

But how about violence? you say. Don’t the Anarchist preach and practice violence and murder?

They don’t. On the contrary, the Anarchists hold life as the most sacred thing. That’s why they want to change the present order of things where everyone’s hand is against his brother, and where war, wholesale slaughter in the pursuit of the dollar, bloodshed in the field, factory and workshop is the order of the day. The poverty, misery and bitter industrial warfare, the crimes, suicides and murder committed every day of the year in this country will convince any man of intelligence that in present society we have plenty of Law, but mighty little order or peace.

Anarchism means OPPOSITION to violence, by whomever committed, even if it be by the government. The government has no more right to murder than the individual. Anarchism is therefore opposition to violence as well as to government forcibly imposed on man.

The Anarchists value human life. In fact, no one values it more. Why, then, are the Anarchists always blamed for every act of violence? Because your rulers and exploiters want to keep you prejudiced against the Anarchists, so you will never find out what the Anarchist really want, and the masters will remain safe in their monopoly of life.

Now, what are facts about violence? Crimes of every kind happen every day. Are the Anarchists responsible for them? Or is it not rather misery and desperation that drive people to commit such acts? Does a millionaire go out on the street and knock you down with a gaspipe to rob you of a few dollars? O, no. He builds a factory and robs his workers in a way that is much safer, more profitable and within the law.

Who, then, commits acts of violence? The desperate man, of course. He to whom no other resort seems open. Violence is committed by all kinds of people. Such violence is mostly for the purpose of theft or robbery. But there are also cases where it is done for social reasons. such impersonal acts of violence have, from time immemorial, been the reply of goaded and desperate classes, and goaded and desperate individuals to wrongs from their fellow-men, which they felt to be intolerable. Such acts are the violent RECOIL from violence, whether aggressive or repressive; they are the last desperate struggle of outraged and exasperated human nature for breathing space and life. And their CAUSE LIES NOT IN ANY SPECIAL CONVICTION, BUT IN HUMAN NATURE ITSELF. The whole course of history, political and social, is strewn with evidence of this fact. To go no further, take the Revolutionists of Russia, the Fenians and Sinn Feiners of Ireland, the Republicans of Italy. Were those people Anarchists? No. Did they all hold the same political opinions? No. But all were driven by desperate circumstances into this terrible form of revolt.

Anarchists, as well as others, have sometimes committed acts of violence. Do you hold the Republican Party responsible for every act committed by a Republican? Or the Democratic Party, or the Presbyterian or Methodist Church responsible for acts of individual members? It would be stupid to do so.

Under miserable conditions of life, any vision of the possibility of better things makes the present misery more intolerable, and spurs those who suffer to the most energetic struggles to improve their lot, and if these struggles only immediately result in sharper misery, the outcome is sheer desperation. In our present society, for instance, an exploited wage worker, who catches a glimpse of what work and life might and ought to be, finds the toilsome routine and the squalor of his existence almost intolerable; and even when he has the resolution and courage to continue steadily working his best, and waiting until new ideas have so permeated society as to pave the way for better times, the mere fact that he has such ideas and tries to spread them brings him into difficulties with his employers. How many thousands of rebel workers, of Socialists, of Industrialists and Syndicalists, but above all of Anarchists, have lost work and even the chance of work, solely on the ground of their opinions? It is only the specially gifted craftsman who, if he be a zealous propagandist, can hope to retain permanent employment. And what happens to a man with his brain working actively with a ferment of new ideas, with a vision before his eyes of a new hope dawning for toiling and agonizing men, with the knowledge that his suffering and that of his fellows in misery is not caused by the cruelty of fate, but by the injustice of other human beings—what happens to such a man when he sees those dear to him starving, when he himself is starved? Some natures in such a plight, and those by no means the least social or the least sensitive, will become violent, and will even feel that their violence is social and not anti-social, that in striking when and how they can, they are striking, not for themselves, but for human nature, out-raged and despoiled in their persons and those of their fellow sufferers. And are we, who ourselves are not in this horrible predicament, to stand by and coldly condemn these piteous victims of the Furies and Fates? Are we to decry as miscreants these human beings who act with heroic self-devotion, often sacrificing their lives in protest, where less social and less energetic natures would lie down and grovel in abject submission to injustice and wrong? Are we to join the ignorant and brutal outcry which stigmatizes such men as monsters of wickedness, gratuitously running amuck in a harmonious and innocently peaceful society? NO! We hate murder with a hatred that may seem absurdly exaggereated to apologists for war, industrial slaughter and Ludlow massacres, to callous acquiescers in governmental and plutocratic violence, but we decline in such cases of homicide as those of which we are treating, to be guilty of the cruel injustice of flinging the whole responsibility of the deed upon the immediate perpetrator. The guilt of thes homicides lies upon every man and woman who, intentionally or by cold indifference, helps to keep up social condidtions that drive human beings to despair. The man who flings his whole life into the attempt, often at the cost of his own life, to protest against the wrongs of his fellow-men, is a saint compared to the active and passive upholders of cruelty and injustice, even if his protest destroy other lives besides his own. Let him who is without sin in society cast the first stone at such a one.

THE BLAST GROUP
GROUP FREEDOM
ITALIAN ANARCHIST GROUP VOLONTA
UNION OF RUSSIAN WORKERS

PER} EMMA GOLDMAN & ALEXANDER BERKMAN

Direct action — peaceful, dignified, civil disobedience — is practiced when one wishes to purposely break the law for a social, economic or environmental purpose. It is proper, even necessary, to disobey the law when human rights are at stake. It is proper to challenge the status quo. It is proper to challenge power structures and it is proper to challenge the rule of law. If a society is totally obedient totalitarianism will surely reign. In a civil society people must obey conscience rather than law — if a law is unjust it must be broken. As elected officials ignore cries from the public and seek to enact laws that favor big business at the expense of the population it is proper to disobey. This is what is happening in North Carolina.

The new veto-proof Republican majority has been moving quickly, working on a number of new powerful laws that seek to serve special interests as opposed to people.

Duke-Progress Energy, the largest utility monopoly in the United States, is being awarded rate hikes by a favorable energy commission (the energy commission attempts to simulate a “market force” to keep the giant in check) in hard economic times. The utility giant is also doubling down on dirty energy resources while backing away from conservation and efficiency programs which would save working families money in the current economic slump.

Aqua America, the nation’s largest private water company, has an active subsidiary in North Carolina. Privatization of local municipalities is becoming a big issue in the state all while the legislature is also moving to strip local municipalities of the right to manage their own water. Government officials are also trying to bring fracking to the Tar Heel state. The bills promoting our nations latest energy boom classically use state power to uphold industry. The latest “fast track frack bill” seeks to allow eminent domain,compulsory pooling, and a number of other pro-industry “regulations.”

In the halls of power in Raleigh, politicians are also working to expand the regressive sales tax, cut spending on education, cut public safety nets and reduce unemployment benefits. One must not forget efforts at reforming the state’s criminal justice system and voting rights as well.

In response a small group of people began to organize what has come to be Moral Mondays. Organized by the NAACP, weekly protests have been held every Monday since mid April to raise awareness about the newest democratic assault occurring in the south. At the first Moral Monday there were 17 arrests while tens of supporters showed solidarity. Every single week this protest has grown, and now, as Reverend William Barber of the NAACP puts it, Moral Mondays “are a movement … not a moment.” Crowds have surged into the thousands and they sing, cheer and chant as over 100 people are now being arrested. As the legislature is soon drawing to a close, so too are Moral Mondays.

The movement will remain important, however, for a long time to come. It will remain important not because a Republican majority is being challenged. Not because of the progressive wishes of the movement (though folks across all political spectrums have shown support). Not even because of the calls for a more representative government. Moral Mondays will remain important rather because of the disobedience. Moral Mondays are composed of active, concerned and engaged individuals challenging state power. Civil disobedience is the most powerful tool available to libertarians. The power, the right, the willingness to disobey is fundamental to a free society. Power must be challenged.

State interests are different from individual interests. State interests are also different from community interests. Though agents of the state remind us that they are elected officials and that they are “public servants,” we must not forget that first and foremost they are “state servants.” The state seeks power, wealth and influence over society. The state seeks to serve vested interests as opposed to individual/collective interests. As individuals we seek health, creative labor, peace, leisure, love, companionship and clean and safe communities. The public is at odds with the state.

As this “Moral Spring” draws to a close here in North Carolina, I hope the citizens here realize they will always be at odds with the state, even with their prefered “state servants” in power. Indeed only in opposition to rule will our households, communities and Earth be healthy. Only without rule will we truly be liberated.

Related articles

• 120 people arrested during eighth Moral Monday protest (myfox8.com)
• State NAACP President, Rev. William Barber, Is Emerging as the Leader of Moral Monday Protests in North Carolina (blackchristiannews.com)
• Moral Mondays (appalachianson.wordpress.com)
• Moral Monday crowds swell in week 8; first protestors appear in court (newsobserver.com)
• Reading Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” On My Way To A Demonstration (stuffjeffreads.wordpress.com)

A White House petition asking US president Barack Obama to pardon NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has passed the 100,000-signature mark, theoretically compelling a response from the Obama administration (I say “theoretically” because the finish line on these petitions has been moved before).

My own sympathies naturally lie with Snowden, and the petitioners’ hearts are presumably in the right place, but I can’t help thinking that the petitioners have things backward.

Edward Snowden committed no crime. Rather, he exposed the crimes of the very administration being petitioned (and “classification” of information for the purpose of concealing criminal activity is itself illegal). To presume, as this petition does, an entitlement on the part of an acknowledged criminal to pardon — or to persecute — the hero who brings that criminal’s actions to light is, in a word, perverse.

Obama and his associates haven’t just violated “their” own codified laws. They have, by their own admissions, declared and prosecuted war on the very people in whose names they claim their power, wandering well beyond the pale of authoritarianism and raising the totalitarian flag over their battlements.

It isn’t Snowden who needs clemency. It’s Barack Obama, his co-conspirators and his accessories before and after the fact. Nor is it Snowden alone before whom the crooks should be made to grovel for mercy. The fate of the Obama Spy Ring rightfully belongs in the hands of ALL its victims.

Will these telecom voyeurs, these data burglars — and their bosses — be made to truly pay for their crimes? It seems unlikely, as they are made members of the world’s most powerful organized crime syndicate, the government of the United States.

While the gang occasionally finds itself compelled to throw a bit player or two under the bus to simmer things down a bit, the kingpins, ringleaders and shot-callers usually walk without consequence. Which explains why US Senators Charles Schumer (D-NY) and Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and US Representative Mike Rogers (R-MI) are at present freely vocalizing their “fury” at Snowden instead of modeling orange coveralls while making big rocks into small rocks on the grounds of some penal institution.

This isn’t just some random racket ginned up by a few assorted thugs. It’s far bigger than that. If we want to get clear of these schemers and their schemes, we’re going to have to suppress the larger racketeer-influenced corrupt organization. That is, we must abolish the US government — preferably sowing salt in the earth of, and leaving not one stone standing atop another in, Washington, DC.

Otherwise, we’ll just have to be satisfied with absurd and hopeless gestures, like asking Barack Obama to forgive Edward Snowden for revealing, and us for noticing, his crimes.

David Cameron, the UK prime minister, has been caught pants down. His tie is not on straight and he begins his speech grasping for straws. “We do live in a dangerous world. We live in a world of terror and terrorism”, he says playing on people’s fear. He references a recent attack on a British soldier before launching into praise for the UK’s security apparatus. Cameron gives a firm defence of the secret services.

An explosive leak of documents has been exposed out of the shadow of darkness detailing the full extent of the global surveillance state. The US, it turns out, has been spying not just on the world but on its own citizens as well. Americans are angry. What an outrageous flagrant abuse of their rights! The American people have discovered that the ring of gangsters in power does not include them. They are outside that inner circle. The vested, powerful interests do not exist for their benefit.

After the sinkhole of university debt, the rhythm of life becomes a steady climb up the property ladder into a deeper hole of debt against the steady backdrop of the humdrum march of salaried work.

Workers will never be free. Bosses will always rule. Asking the state to gift you the privilege of shorter hours and high wages is a fantasy. In the fairy-tale of Cinderella, a poor working girl is whisked off her feet into a glamorous kingdom of wealth and riches. The message is a pathetic hope of vanity and acceptance.

Employees, don’t be slaves! The boss will always reap the rewards of your work. You will never own the products of your work. You will never own your dignity. You will always be owned.

Take back your work. We need a world of entrepreneurs and small businesses. Creating your own business to challenge the power of a corporation is the most subversive thing you can do.

Bitcoin is a tool towards this goal. Anyone can engage in trade.

When the odds are uncertain, the ballsy gain. But when you start your demand for certainty, you start following what everyone else is doing and nothing new gets made. An economy can’t progress if we’re all doing the same, and any profit there is not real (probably from exploitation).

There is a centuries-old conflict since the beginning of history between a side that wants to systematise and centralise, and a side that challenges established tradition and culture. “Work within the rule of law,” they say. Place your trust in experts to judge for us they say. Put limits on what can or cannot be done, and abide by them, they say. But for all their posturing and alluring talk, that attitude is and always will be one of servile following and faceless lack of identity.

The power of the state derives from a self-certification of serving the national interest. And the more that we give up our power as free individuals, the more we become dependents in the hands of an elite class asking to be gifted higher wages and better working conditions.

When the system becomes centralised, it becomes a magnet for powerful economic actors. Corporate lobbyists subvert democratic mechanisms, huge cartels dominate and small businesses are forced out. Tools of oppression like patents and copyrights grant huge amounts of power over the economy. And that is how the system becomes corrupt.

The co-opted watch television, work 9-5 to pay off debt for the car and the house just mortgaged, and keep voting for politicians who support global tyranny and the destruction of individual freedom (“Well, the other guy is worse, right?”). And, worst of all, they keep paying taxes to fund the architecture of oppression. They will defend positive aspects while downplaying the impact or severity of the reprehensible.

I want to address tax avoidance. Tax avoidance is a legitimate form of protest. There is no reasonable excuse for supporting an organisation whose policies you fundamentally disagree with. Using a moral imperative to compel citizens to offer their financial consent to morally corrupt organisations (such as the state) is the biggest myth of our time. At best it’s a logically fallacious conflicting condition. At worst it’s bare-faced manipulation.

Bitcoin is a powerful tool to withdraw financial support for organisations we disagree with on a moral level. Forget its financial benefits (of which there are many). It has a deeper fundamental argument. This is why financial anonymity and lack of financial censorship is important.

We need the ability to choose to whom we make our payments. Payment is a form of speech – financial speech. When you pay someone, you are consenting to their work. A payment is giving approval to the recipient. This is the basis of the free market, and one lost with compulsory payment like the taxation process.

When the ability for freedom of financial speech is totally compromised, then we have lost a fundamental power. Our payments landscape is dominated by a cartel.

In December 2010, an arbitrary and unlawful financial blockade was imposed on Wikileaks by Bank of America, VISA, MasterCard, PayPal and Western Union. WikiLeaks had published the biggest leaks in journalistic history, which triggered an aggressive retaliation from powerful groups. The attack has destroyed 95% of their revenue, and Bitcoin was their single lifeline.

The ongoing blockade is outside of any accountable public process. It is without democratic oversight or transparency. The blockade of WikiLeaks by politicized US finance companies continues regardless.

And Wikileaks is not an odd case. Financial censorship is a regular tool of control.

Anonymity is another important factor. Anonymity preserves individual dignity. When the rule of law outgrows the moral judgement of its population, black markets emerge. Trade moves underground and the counter-economy establishes itself as a thriving bazaar of fast-moving creatives.

Revolutionary ideals materialise when society protects individuals. Can a society which rigidly enforces all its complex conflicting laws progress? Women and gay rights were radicals less than a century ago. History shows us that many guilty figures in hindsight turned out to be luminaries and heroes before their time.

David Cameron continues by asserting that the UK secret services abide by a strict framework of law. He is on the defensive and makes a series of statements that are no less than lies. He tells how the UK government values the privacy and respect of its citizens in the highest regard, despite that the UK has the highest density of surveillance anywhere.

Just this week the leaders from the 8^th wealthiest nations met in London for the G8 summit amidst protests across the capitals. The response was swift. Police heavy-handedly suppressed dissent, arresting over 50 people and breaking up demonstrations. Their excuse: if the protestors had only collaborated to plan a ‘proper’ protest with the police, then it would be a legal protest.

Let’s build our own markets.

Let’s find ways of constructing systems that don’t need corrupt authorities.

The counter-economy is here and now. A market of over a billion people: exchanges, markets, all over Europe. Bitcoin is booming. Bitcoin is not the revolution, but it is a big tool towards a grander future. One full of vision, empowerment, liberty and progress. We have a chance to take things forwards, to reconstruct our financial system (a powerful oppressor of people worldwide). Don’t fuck it up. Be part of it. Engage with this growing market otherwise you’ll be left behind.

Parler de libertarianisme de gauche, c’est parler d’une position qui est à la fois libertarienne et de gauche. Elle est de gauche en ce qu’elle s’engage pour :

• l’analyse de la lutte des classes
• l’opposition aux privilèges corporatistes
• la lutte contre la pauvreté structurelle
• le partage de la responsabilité pour les vulnérabilités économiques
• la redistribution de la richesse
• l’empowerment du peuple par le peuple
• l’humanisation des conditions de travail
• la protection des libertés civiles
• la lutte contre les guerres de la drogue
• la lutte pour les droits des travailleurs du sexe
• le respect de l’environnement et des animaux
• l’émancipation et la libération des enfants
• le rejet du racisme, du sexisme, du nativisme et des chauvinismes nationaux
• le rejet de la guerre, de l’impérialisme et du colonialisme.

En même temps, le libertarianisme de gauche défend qu’il faut :

• solidement protéger les propriétés légitimes
• soutenir la liberté du marché et l’idéal social de la coopération volontaire et pacifique
• lutter à tous les niveaux contre les politiques statistes

Une position de gauche

Une position de gauche se signale par un intérêt pour les rapports de subordination, d’exclusion et de dépossession. Les libertariens de gauche se sentent avant tout concernés par ces thèmes. Mais ils différent des autres gens de gauche en ce qu’ils :

• affirment la valeur autonome de protections solides pour les possessions légitimes. Posséder est l’expression et le moyen de s’opposer aux rapports de subordination et de soutenir la prospérité. C’est une contrainte à prendre en compte dans les moyens d’actions légitimes.
• font des prédictions différentes sur les suites réelles de la liberté du marché. Un marché libre n’est justement pas un terrain de jeu pour les plus grosses entreprises.
• offrent des explications différentes sur les origines et la persistance de certains phénomènes sociaux révoltant. Ainsi, la domination au travail et la récurrence de la pauvreté sont plutôt dus à la persistance des privilèges d’une élite qu’à un marché libre.
• réclament d’autres remèdes pour ces phénomènes. En particulier, ils luttent contre les injustices tolérées ou perpétrées par l’État et encouragent l’action solidaire et volontaire.

Les libertariens de gauche partagent avec le reste de la gauche l’idée qu’il existe des gagnants et des perdants prévisibles dans la société au-delà des talents individuels. Mais ils soutiennent que ce n’est pas une conséquence d’un marché libre. C’est la conséquence d’agressions perpétrées par l’État contre ses citoyens. L’État est toujours un appareil utilisé par les plus riches pour leurs profits et ceux de la caste des haut-fonctionnaires. La lutte des classes doit être une lutte contre l’État.

Les libertariens de gauche partagent avec le reste de la gauche l’idée que les plus grandes entreprises jouissent de privilèges qui ne profitent qu’à eux au détriment du public. Mais ils insistent sur le fait que la seule réponse correcte est la suppression des subventions, des marchés captifs et des régulations qui créent des monopoles. Il faut réduire l’influence de l’État sur les marchés car il faut toujours s’attendre à ce qu’elle ne serve qu’à décourager l’innovation au profit des monopoles existants ce qui a pour effet d’appauvrir le public.

Les libertariens de gauche sont également outragés par la pauvreté structurelle et la reconnaissance que les plus riches et les plus sociables rédigent les lois économiques et politiques à leur avantage au détriment des pauvres. Mais ils insistent sur le faut que la pauvreté n’est pas une conséquence des marchés libres. Elle est la conséquence du vol à l’échelle des États des populations via des privilèges comme les délivrances de licence, la propriété intellectuelle ou les règles urbanistiques. Ces règles empêchent la population de réaliser ses talents ou en augmentent le coût. Éliminer la pauvreté c’est éliminer les vols des biens communs que sont les privilèges garantis par l’État.

Les libertariens de gauche partagent avec le reste de la gauche la compassion pour les acteurs économiques les plus vulnérables et reconnaissent que ces acteurs ne peuvent se défendre seuls, qu’ils faut partager leur prise en charge et subvenir à leurs besoins concrets et moraux. Mais ils insistent sur le fait que ce sont d’abord les mutualisations des moyens d’aide qui doivent primer. Il faut s’attendre à ce que les arrangements privés soient plus efficaces et intelligents que l’aide étatique financée par des taxes et les limitations dans les choix d’aide que cela implique.

Les libertariens de gauche partagent avec le reste de la gauche la conviction que la redistribution de la richesse est utile sinon nécessaire. Mais ils se refusent à sanctionner un seul modèle de redistribution et à l’imposer par l’acquisition agressive des possessions légitimes. Ils suggèrent que la redistribution doit être effectuée via le système légal en soutenant les aides solidaires mutualistes et en laissant les marchés libérés des privilèges réduire les inégalités.

Les libertariens de gauche croient comme les Verts ou la Nouvelle Gauche que les prises de décisions doivent être décentralisées et que les gens doivent pouvoir s’impliquer au maximum dans les décisions qui les concernent. Mais ils soutiennent que toute association doit être consensuelle, une fois certains droits inaliénables garantis. Les décisions prises en haut des pyramides sont plus faillibles car les preneurs de décision individuels ont toujours tendance à privilégier leurs intérêts sur ceux du public. Les unités politiques de faible ampleur sont les plus humanisantes et les plus à même de résoudre les problèmes réels des gens. La décentralisation doit pouvoir arriver jusqu’au niveau individuel.

Les libertariens de gauche ont réalisé comme le reste de la gauche que les espaces de travail hiérarchiques sont abrutissants et déresponsabilisants. Ils sont moralement répréhensibles. Mais ils insistent sur le fait que de tels espaces sont d’autant plus plausibles que l’État est fort. Les hiérarchies servent à limiter les capacités des travailleurs à utiliser leurs connaissances pour répondre souplement et efficacement aux défis posés par les impératifs de production et distribution et par les besoins des clients. Dans un marché libre, l’inefficacité des structures hiérarchiques les amèneraient à disparaître pour être remplacées par des alternatives plus dignes comme l’auto-emploi ou le travail dans des coopératives. Les hauts-fonctionnaires d’un État ont toujours tendance à privilégier les leurs dans la conduite des entreprises et les régulations étatiques limitent toujours les pouvoirs des syndicats pour lutter contre les hiérarchies.

Les libertariens de gauche partagent avec le reste de la gauche un vrai enthousiasme pour les libertés civiles. Mais ils affirment que l’État est le premier ennemi de ces libertés et que le meilleur moyen de préserver nos libertés est de préserver notre contrôle sur nos corps et nos biens.

Les libertariens de gauche croient comme le reste de la gauche que la guerre contre la drogue est destructrice, raciste et absurdement coûteuse. Mais ils insistent sur le fait que la meilleure protection contre les campagnes de prohibition de toutes sortes est de respecter les droits des personnes sur leurs corps et biens légitimes, que donc les limitations agressives contre ces échanges nuisibles mais volontaires devraient être interdites.

Les libertariens de gauche se sentent aussi concernés par le bien-être des travailleurs du sexe. Mais ils notent que les actions étatiques violentes contre ces travailleurs créent ou intensifient les risques inhérents à ce type de travail.

Les libertariens de gauche s’opposent comme le reste de la gauche passionnément à la violence policière et à la corruption. Mais ils insistent sur le fait que ces phénomènes ne sont pas anecdotiques et dus à quelques pommes pourries, mais une conséquence inévitable de la concentration étatique des pouvoirs et de la déresponsabilisation des acteurs qu’elle crée.

Les libertariens de gauche partagent avec le reste de la gauche une préoccupation persistante pour la qualité de l’environnent et le bien-être des animaux. Mais ils insistent sur le fait que ces dégâts peuvent être empêchés et soignés sans l’intervention de l’État dès lors que les biens légitimes des agents et leurs corps sont fortement protégés. Au contraire, actuellement, l’État protège le plus souvent les pollueurs et soutient ceux qui maltraitent les animaux.

Les libertariens de gauche se soucient comme le reste de la gauche du bien-être des enfants. Mais ils soulignent l’importance du respect des droits des enfants à contrôler leurs corps et leurs biens. Ils refusent de les considérer comme la propriété de leurs parents et refusent qu’un État paternaliste interfère avec leurs libertés. L’État n’est pas le protecteur des enfants mais les contraint en les forçant par exemple à aller à l’école.

Les libertariens de gauche partagent avec le reste de la gauche la conscience de la répugnance des racismes, sexismes, hétérosexismes, nativismes et chauvinismes nationaux. Mais ils insistent sur le rôle crucial de l’État dans la création et la perpétuation de ces discriminations. Les actions solidaires et non-agressives sont la juste réponse avec les discriminations persistantes. Ils promeuvent l’abolition du monopole d’État sur le mariage et l’ouverture des frontières pour favoriser les migrations.

Les libertariens de gauche s’opposent fermement comme le reste de la gauche aux impérialismes et aux colonialismes. Mais ils insistent sur le fait que l’État ne fait que reproduire là un comportement qu’il adopte à l’intérieur de ses propres frontières par rapport aux classes dominées. Toute interférence contre un comportement pacifiste sur son propre territoire est déjà moralement répréhensible. Par conséquent, la conscription est une forme d’esclavage injuste. Ils insistent sur la probabilité de réduction des guerres qu’entraîne la libre circulation des hommes et les marchés libres. L’opposition à la guerre est en soi une opposition à l’État.

Une position libertarienne

Une position libertarienne est marquée, comme je le suggère, par le soutien à l’égalité d’autorité entre les hommes, par la forte volonté de protections robustes des biens légitimes et par l’incitation à la coopération pacifique et volontaire, à l’inclusion des échanges commerciaux. Les libertariens de gauche partagent ces préoccupations mais différent des autres libertariens en ce qu’ils :

• font des prédictions différentes sur les effets probables de la libération des humains et de l’élimination des agressions institutionnalisées qui les empêchent de coopérer pacifiquement et volontairement, comme le maintien des entreprises hiérarchisées.
• appellent à accepter les conséquences de la construction d’une société libre. L’élimination des privilèges étatiques doit servir la solidarité, la diversité et la lutte contre la pauvreté.
• n’ont pas la même approche socio-historique des causes et dynamiques des phénomènes sociaux, en ce que la richesse n’est pas tant vue comme un résultat des vertus individuelles que comme la résultante de privilèges étatiques et en considérant que les discriminations sont moralement répréhensibles et doivent être non-agressivement traitées

Les libertariens de gauche pensent comme les autres libertariens que personne n’a plus de droit naturel qu’un autre à édicter les lois et que les autorités non-consensuelles sont teintées d’illégitimité. Cette égalitarisme implique naturellement une tendance à l’anarchisme, puisque l’autorité des États n’est jamais consensuelle. Mais les libertariens soutiennent en plus que le soutien de l’égalité en autorité des humains implique la lutte contre toutes les discriminations. Ils considèrent aussi que les décisions individuelles peuvent être moralement critiquables et que tous les moyens non-agressifs peuvent être utilisés pour s’y opposer.

Les libertariens de gauche soutiennent la propriété comme les autres libertariens. Mais ils rejettent la légitimité d’une quelconque propriété intellectuelle et soutiennent que les biens acquis avec l’aide essentielle de l’État ou par la violence sont illégitimes. Il revient aux individus de décider collectivement s’ils veulent que certains bien soient communs ou non. Il y a des limites claires que les gens peuvent poser pour protéger leurs possessions, mais les franchir ne justifie pas l’usage de la violence. Il est toujours possible de s’opposer sans surenchérir dans l’agression aux vols ou agressions d’autrui.

Les libertariens de gauche partagent avec les autres libertariens l’idée que la coopération volontaire et pacifique doit fonder les relations sociales. Mais ils différents des autres libertariens en soutenant que si la force peut être utilisée en réponse à une agression, tout type de réponse à la violence doit permettre à chacun d’exprimer pacifiquement sont individualité. Les associations ne sont légitimes que si elles permettent à tous leurs membres de s’exprimer et d’influencer autant que possible la trajectoire du collectif.

Même s’ils rejettent le capitalisme, les libertariens de gauche sont enthousiasmés par les marchés libres. Ils défendent que tous doivent pouvoir librement échanger parce qu’ils pensent en tirer un bénéfice, que les prix sont d’excellents guides pour les producteurs et distributeurs, largement supérieurs aux planifications et que les associations et individus doivent prendre sur eux les bénéfices comme les coûts de leurs choix. L’injustice de fond qu’est l’État tord les prix et contraint les options des marchands. Par ailleurs tous les échanges humains ne sont pas nécessairement marchands ni n’ont toujours besoin d’être commercialisés.

Une vision transformée

Les libertariens de gauche embrassent des idéaux libertariens et gauchistes.

Ils veulent montrer qu’il est raisonnable de s’opposer à la pauvreté structurelle tout en favorisant la liberté des marchés, de chercher la dignité des travailleurs et la protections des biens légitimes, de favoriser la liberté d’association tout en s’opposant aux discriminations arbitraires, d’encourager à la fois la paix et les libertés économiques, de rejeter toute guerre comme un impérialisme et de toujours soutenir la coopération volontaire et pacifique.

Ce faisant, ils offrent une vision attirante et provocance de la politique et veulent un monde qui se signale par plus de liberté et de justice.

écrit par Gary Chartier.

traduit par Xavier Gillard.

É importante, ao ouvirmos os formadores oficiais de opinião na mídia, perguntarmo-nos o que eles realmente querem dizer com as palavras que usam. Como Orwell destacou em “A Política e a Língua Inglesa,” aqueles no poder usam a linguagem para obscurecer o significado, mais amiúde do que para torná-lo inteligível.

Bom exemplo é a recorrência de frases tais como  “colocou em perigo nossa segurança nacional” e “ajudou o inimigo,” de pessoas como Eric Holder, Peter King e Lindsey Graham, em referência a vazamentos por pessoas como Bradley Manning e Edward Snowden. Pois bem, eles, com suas escolhas de palavras, certamente pretendem provocar certas associações nas mentes dos ouvintes. Se não formos cuidadosos, poderemos ver-nos na condição de reagir exatamente como aqueles que usam essas palavras pretendem — permitindo que as palavras deles tragam à nossa mente lares, famílias, vizinhos, igrejas, todo um estilo de vida, ameçados de invasão e destruição por um inimigo sem nome e sem face — nas palavras dos Dois Minutos de Ódio de Orwell, “os exércitos sinistros … bárbaros cuja única honra é a atrocidade.”

Se porém olharmos para atrás das palavras, o significado real delas é por vezes inteiramente diferente. Para as pessoas dos tipos que enunciam essas palavras, “segurança nacional” é uma ordem corporativa-estatal imposta pelos Estados Unidos, administrada por pessoas como elas próprias, que possibilitam a corporações globais extraírem recursos e trabalho dos povos do mundo e viverem de rentismo não fruto do trabalho. “O inimigo” é você. E o perigo é você conseguir perceber o que está acontecendo e perturbar o confortável esqueminha deles.

Alex Carey, historiador da propaganda, argumenta que o pilar central do domínio da elite em democracias de massa é a engenharia do consentimento. No final do século 19 dois fenômenos emergiram simultaneamente: Primeiro, a corporação gigantesca e o nexo de poder entre corporação e estado; e, segundo, a ameaça a esse nexo de poder a partir de alfabetização universal e sufrágio universal. Daí a importância da propaganda, de administrar a opinião pública, nos sistemas políticos formalmente representativos.

Samuel Huntington escreveu, em A Crise da Democracia, em 1974, que os Estados Unidos, nas duas décadas após a Segunda Guerra Mundial, haviam sido a “potência hegemônica num sistema de ordem mundial” — estado de coisas só possível por causa de uma estrutura interna de poder na qual o país “era governado pelo presidente atuando com o apoio e a cooperação de indivíduos decisivos no Executivo, na burocracia federal, no Congresso, e nas mais importantes empresas, bancos, escritórios de advocacia, fundações, e mídia, que constituem o establishment privado.” E isso, por sua vez, só era possível por causa da aquiescência, a passividade, do povo estadunidense, e da aceitação, por ele, desse estado de coisas como natural, inevitável e perfeitamente legítimo.

Os anos sessenta, como poderíamos esperar, deixou essas pessoas morrendo de medo. Até então, o “contrato social do Novo Pacto” havia funcionado razoavelmente bem (pelo menos para os brancos da classe média): Daremos a vocês uma casa no subúrbio, uma TV, carro novo cada cinco anos, e emprego estável com benefícios e aumentos periódicos de salário. Em troca, vocês comparecerão ao trabalho entre as épocas de renovação de contrato e nos deixarão administrar as fábricas como entendermos correto, sem preocuparem suas lindas cabecinhas com esse assunto. E vocês nos deixarão administrar o mundo no interesse de GE, GM e United Fruit Company, e farão vista grossa quando colocarmos no poder regimes fascistas genocidas ou criarmos esquadrões da morte em Indonésia, Nigéria e América Latina.

Os anos 1960 foram a primeira vez desde a Segunda Guerra Mundial em que pareceu surgir a ideia, em significativa parcela do público, de que “outro mundo é possível.”

Desde então, a administração da opinião pública para engendrar consentimento tornou-se duplamente importante para elas. Eis porque a comunidade de “segurança nacional” lança-se a operações psicológicas para administrar as percepções do público do mesmo modo que administra as percepções referentes ao inimigo em tempo de guerra — sendo a meta, em ambos os casos, manipular a reação desejada de nós.

Vejam, nós realmente somos o inimigo. Vez por outra um deles deixa escapar algo e revela que toda aquela conversa acerca de governo representando a vontade soberana do povo é conversa para boi dormir. Por exemplo, a declaração do ex-Secretário de Imprensa de Clinton, Sandy Berger, em 2004: “Temos demasiado em jogo no Iraque para perdermos o povo estadunidense.”

É por isso que eles ficam tão irados quando pessoas como Manning e Snowden contam ao inimigo — a pessoas como você e eu — a feia verdade acerca de como a linguiça deles é feita. O poder deles depende de manter-nos — o inimigo — no escuro.

Artigo original afixado por Kevin Carson em 15 de junho de 2013.

Traduzido do inglês por Murilo Otávio Rodrigues Paes Leme.

In a recent piece that got lots of replay from the online liberal commentariat, Michael Lind (“The Question Libertarians Just Can’t Answer,” Salon, June 4) posed what he considered an unanswerable question to libertarians: “Why are there no libertarian countries?… If libertarianism was a good idea, wouldn’t at least one country have tried it?”

If anything, Lind’s argument proves too much. He’d be answered by an equally profound silence if he challenged advocates of social and economic justice to name one country without economic exploitation by a privileged class. Every country in the world has an interventionist state. Every country in the world has class exploitation. Every country in history with a state, since states first arose, has also had classes and economic exploitation. The correlation is one hundred percent.

This fact is key to understanding why Lind’s framing of the question is so naive. Lind writes as though the adoption of this or that form of polity by “countries” was simply a matter of peoples collectively deciding on the best way of life for everyone involved. “We” tried that other thing and it didn’t work, then “we” tried this and it worked better.

But that’s not how it happens. Since their first appearance, states have without exception been the mechanism through which a ruling class — kings, priests, landlords, capitalists, state bureaucrats — extracts a surplus from the rest of society.

The model of political economy in a country isn’t something “we” decide, even in formally representative democracies like the United States. “Democracy” functions only within parameters set by the larger system for ensuring its self-propagation. And the system is defined by economic exploitation. That’s true of the “Nordic social democracy” model beloved of Lind and the “center-left” he represents, as much as any other. European social democracy and the American New Deal were implemented, not by “society,” but through the primary agency of a state dominated by corporate capitalist interests. The social democratic/New Deal model is simply the form of capitalism that the more intelligent, progressive capitalists believe to provide the maximum sustainable long-term yield of rent extraction from society with a minimum of social unrest and economic instability. The money redistributed downward via welfare and Social Security is a small fraction of the total transferred upward via the assortment of artificial scarcity rents and monopoly tribute enforced by the state.

So by Lind’s evidentiary standard, it is equally utopian to hope for genuine economic and social justice. Every society governed by a state has been, ipso facto, an exploitative class system.

If Randroid newsletter-monger Robert Tracinski had deliberately set out to prove this, he couldn’t have done a better job than his attempted rebuttal to Lind:

“The libertarian utopia, or the closest we’ve come to it, is America itself, up to about 100 years ago. It was a country with no income tax and no central bank. (It was on the gold standard, for crying out loud. You can’t get more libertarian than that.) It had few economic regulations and was still in the Lochner era, when such regulations were routinely struck down by the Supreme Court. There was no federal welfare state, no Social Security, no Medicare.”

The clear implication is that the main contemporary deviation from 100% libertarianism is the liberal welfare state and all that other (in Eric Cartman’s words) tree-hugging hippie crap. Just take the existing model of corporate capitalism, subtract the regulatory-welfare state, and you get the libertarian utopia that prevailed in the Gilded Age.

Well, not quite. The welfare state and social safety net aren’t the defining features of statism. They are, rather, secondary interventions carried out by the capitalist state in response to the instabilities generated by primary state interventions like absentee landlordism (the appropriation and enclosure of vacant and unimproved land), restrictions on competition in the supply of credit, patents and copyrights, and all the other artificial property rights and artificial scarcities that have prevailed since the dawn of capitalism.

Never mind that the Gilded Age Tracinski lionizes was itself the arena of massive state interventions like the state-financed creation of the railroad system that made a corporate-dominated national market possible, high tariffs, the use of patent pooling and exchange to cartelize industry, and the use of federal troops to break strikes. Capitalism from its very beginning was founded on massive state violence:  The Enclosures and other land expropriations; the engrossment of entire continents in settler societies in the New World and Australia by landed interests; the forcible transformation of the entire world into a supplier of natural resources and slave labor for the mercantile powers; the creation of a virtual apartheid state in industrial Britain via the Laws of Settlement, Poor Laws and Combination Laws. Capitalism, in short, was founded by robbing the entire planet.

So Lind is correct. There’s not a single country in the world in which free and equal human beings can peacefully cooperate and share or exchange the product of their labor without an interventionist state. And so long as the interventionist state exists, there will never be economic and social justice.

作者：穆瑞·罗斯巴德

译者：程晔

【《左与右》杂志创刊号主题社论，1965年】

无论保守党是否自知，他们身上早已打上长期悲观的印记。长期趋势，甚至时间本身，都在与他作对，因此，国内的趋势不可避免地通往左翼国家主义，而在国外，趋势则是通向共产主义。正是这种长远的绝望，反而古怪地催生出短期的乐观。既然保守党已经无望地放弃了长期，成功的唯一希望就寄托在当前。在外交事务上，这种观点使得保守党绝望地呼吁与共产主义决战，因为他觉得等的越久，事态将不可避免地更糟糕；在国内，这让他集中精力于下届选举，他总是希望获胜，却怎么都实现不了。保守党是实用主义的典范，他们又为长期的绝望所困，拒绝考虑或计划选举以外的事情。

然而，短期和长期的悲观主义，恰恰是保守主义的应有之报，保守主义是前工业时代旧政权垂死挣扎的残余，因此，它是没有未来的。它在当代美国的化身－近来复兴的保守党，体现了腐朽势力，基督教原教旨主义者，乡村和小城镇的盎格鲁撒克逊美国白人的垂死挣扎。但是，自由的前景在哪里？自由意志主义者大多误把对自由的展望，与貌似强大、据说是盟友的保守运动联系在一起。这种纽带让人们容易理解，为什么当代自由意志主义者也染上长期悲观的特征。但本文挑战这一观点，认为无论在国内国外，虽然自由的短期前景似乎很暗淡，但无法遏制的长期乐观，才是自由意志主义者应有的正确态度。

本论断基于一种历史观：首先，在18世纪前，西欧存在一个可识别的旧秩序（18世纪后，旧秩序仍在西方以外继续生存）。无论旧秩序是以封建主义，还是东方专制主义的形式，其显著特征都是暴政、剥削、停滞、固定的社会等级、绝望并饥寒交迫的绝大多数人口。总之，生活是“肮脏、粗野、短命的”，那里有梅因的“身份社会”和斯宾塞的“军事社会”。统治阶级的统治手段是征服，并且让大众相信所谓的君权神授。

旧秩序过去是自由的大敌，现在仍然是；在过去的时代，它尤其显得强大，因为那时完全无法预见它必然会被推翻。当我们考虑到，自有史以来，旧秩序几乎一直遍布所有的文明；我们更加可以体会到，18世纪自由主义革命的胜利所带来的，无与伦比的伟大和荣耀。

19世纪末，反自由主义的德国历史学家在研究西欧历史时，陷入了极大的误区，他们混淆了这场斗争的一部分特征。他们错误地认为，对于近代早期资本主义的发展，绝对君主制和重商主义是必要的，原因是，它能起到把商人和民众从本地的封建约束中解放出来的作用。在现实中，那根本不是实情，封建制度正在市场经济的和平发展之下消融，而国王及其单一民族国家所扮演的角色，更像是再次推行和巩固封建主义的超级封建领主。国王把他自己的管制和垄断特权叠加在封建特权之上。君主专制国加强了旧秩序，比以前更专制。事实上，资本主义蓬勃发展得最早、最活跃的地方，正是那些中央政府很薄弱，或不存在的地区：意大利城邦、汉萨同盟、十七世纪的荷兰邦联等。而最终通过两个途径，推翻或剧烈撼动了旧秩序的根基：第一 ，工业和市场沿着封建秩序的缝隙扩展（例如，英国的工业是在封建主、国家和行会管制不到的农村发展起来）。第二个更重要的途径是，一系列巨变式的革命，摧枯拉朽般地动摇了旧秩序和旧的统治阶级：17世纪的英国革命、美国革命、法国大革命，所有这些革命都是必要的，它们开启了工业革命，至少部分地宣告了个人自由、自由放任的政教分离、以及国际和平的胜利。等级社会，至少部分地让渡到“契约社会”；军事社会也部分地让位于“工业社会”。现在，大多数人能够灵活地劳动和定居，生活水平迅速提高，达到简直不敢想象的地步。确实，自由主义不仅给西方世界带来自由、和平的前景，以及工业社会里不断提高的生活水平，而也许最重要的，是它带来的希望－－能够日益进步，将大众从长年累月的停滞和绝望中解救出来的希望。

围绕这一新的革命现象，西欧很快发展出两大政治思想：一个是自由主义：希望之党，激进之党，自由之党，工业革命之党，进步之党，人性之党；另一个是保守主义：反动之党，渴望恢复旧秩序的等级制度、国家主义、神权政治、奴隶制、和阶级剥削的政党。因为道义无疑站在自由主义一边，保守党为掩盖真相，呼吁浪漫主义、传统主义、神权政治和非理性主义，以此模糊意识形态的格调。政治意识形态两极分化，在意识形态谱系上，自由主义极“左”，保守主义极“右”。伟大的阿克顿勋爵，在其影响力的暮年，天才地感悟到，真正的自由主义本质上是激进和革命的（他是思想史上为数不多的几个有趣人物之一，越老越激进）。阿克顿写道：“自由主义渴求应该怎么样，而不顾现状是什么”。顺便说一句，阿克顿在得出这一观点时，第一个达到了“永久革命”的境界，比托洛茨基还早。格特鲁德·希梅尔法布在其杰出的阿克顿研究专著中写道：

　　“他的哲学发展到这样的地步－－公开把未来视为过去的敌人，除非碰巧符合道德，否则不允许为过去保留任何权力。他承认，认真看待这种自由的历史理论，将‘应该如何’优先于‘现状如何’；实际上就是在构筑‘永久革命’”。

阿克顿在就职演讲中暗示，并在注释里坦率承认，“永久革命”是自己的历史哲学和政治理论的顶峰。…人的身上携带着善与恶的知识，这种良知的理念是革命的本源，它摧毁了过去的神圣性。……“自由主义本质上是革命的”，阿克顿评论道，“现实必须让位于理念。如果有可能，用和平和耐性，否则，就用暴力”【注1】。

“自由党远远超越了辉格党”，阿克顿写道：

　　“辉格党人由妥协支配。自由党一开始就由思想主导……一个实用、渐进、准备妥协，另一个在哲学指导下制定原则。一个用政策对付哲学，另一个为哲学寻求政策。【注2】”

那么，自由主义发生了什么？它为什么在19世纪衰落了呢？这个问题众说纷纭，但也许根本的原因，是自由主义自身命脉的内部腐化。随着西方自由主义革命部分成功，自由党人激进的热情日益冷却，逐渐放弃了自由主义的目标，偃旗息鼓，仅仅满足于守护无望和缺陷重重的现状。这一衰落有两个可辨识的哲学根源：第一、拥护功利主义，放弃自然权利和“高级法”。要想超越现行体制挑战现状，唯有自然法或高级法理论才能提供激进的根基；唯有这样的理论，一心要把犯罪的现行统治者推上正义的法庭，从而让自由意志主义的斗争充满了必要的紧迫感。相反，功利主义者为了权宜放弃正义，不顾当务之急而止步不前，最终，无可避免地沦为现有秩序的客观辩护者。

自由主义衰落的第二大哲学影响是进化论，或称社会达尔文主义，它为作为社会激进力量的自由主义划上了终止符。社会达尔文主义者戴着和平、玫瑰色的眼镜，用无比缓慢，无穷渐进的社会进化眼光，错误地看待历史和社会。他们无视一个基本事实，即历史上统治阶级从不曾自愿放弃权力，因此自由主义不得不采取一系列革命手段取得突破。社会达尔文主义者和平地憧憬，经过千百年无限缓慢的演变，达到据说是必然的个人主义阶段。

思想家赫伯特·斯宾塞是一个有趣的例证，19世纪自由主义的衰落体现在他身上。一开始，斯宾塞是一个卓越的激进自由主义者，甚至几乎是纯粹的自由意志主义者。虽然，斯宾塞起初并没有在理论上放弃自由主义；但是，随着社会学和社会达尔文主义的病毒占据他的灵魂，他不再将自由意志主义视为一种不断发展的历史运动。总之，斯宾塞期待纯粹自由的最终理想，同时，他开始相信自由的胜利必然会到来―― 但只有在经过上千年的渐进演变之后。于是， 斯宾塞实际上抛弃了斗争、激进的自由主义信条；只把自己的自由主义实践局限于疲倦的后防行动，以对抗十九世纪后期日益增长的集体主义。有趣的是，疲倦的“右倾”战略很快让斯宾塞在理论上也变得右倾；结果，斯宾塞甚至在理论上也抛弃了纯粹的自由。例如，否定其著作《社会静力学》中的名篇：《无视国家的权利》。

十九世纪初，英国古典自由主义者开始从激进转变成准保守主义；这一转变的试金石，是英国自由党对爱尔兰民族解放斗争所普遍持有的态度。那是一场双重的反抗斗争：1、反抗英国的政治帝国主义。2、反抗该帝国主义强制推行的封建地主所有制。其实，真正的自由主义诞生于反对封建土地制度的斗争中。（包括斯宾塞在内的）英国自由党人像保守党一样，无视爱尔兰人争取民族独立的决心，尤其对他们反抗封建压迫、争取农民财产权的主张视而不见，这标志着自由党已经正式放弃真正的自由主义。只有在美国－－激进自由主义的伟大家园（封建主义从未在南部以外地区扎根），自然权利、高级法理论、以及随之而来的激进自由运动才能声势浩大地继续下去，直至十九世纪中叶。杰克逊主义和废奴运动各自以不同的方式，成为美国历史上最后两场强有力的激进自由意志主义运动。【注3】

于是，随着自由主义从内部分崩离析，西方世界不再有希望之党，不再有能领导斗争的“左翼”运动，去对抗国家和毫发未损的旧秩序残余。在枯萎的激进自由主义留下的空白中，一场新的运动趁势兴起：社会主义。今天的自由意志主义者惯于把社会主义看成与自己截然相反的信条。然而，这是一个严重的错误，它应为当今世界自由意志主义者严重的思想迷惑负责。正如我们已经看到，保守主义是自由的对立面；而比保守主义“左”的社会主义，本质上是一场混乱的中间道路运动。它曾经是，现在仍然是中间道路，因为它试图用保守的手段去实现自由的目的。

总之，罗素·柯克声称社会主义是古典自由主义的传人，而罗纳德·哈姆威认为社会主义是保守主义的继承者。两人都是正确的，问题是看待这场混乱的中间道路运动的侧重点在哪里。社会主义接受工业体系和自由党的目标－－自由、理性、人口流动、进步、提高大众生活水平、终结神权政治和战争。在这些方面它与自由主义相近而与保守主义相违。但它试图用中央集权、中央计划、公有制等不相容的保守手段，来实现这些目标。或者更准确地说，社会主义从一开始就有两个不同的流派，一个是传自圣西门的右翼独裁派，该派赞美中央集权、等级制度、集体主义，是那个设法接受并主导新兴工业文明的保守主义的写照。另一个是相对更倾向自由意志主义的左翼，以马克思和巴枯宁两种不同形式为代表，左翼是革命派，该派对实现自由主义和社会主义的自由目标更感兴趣：尤其是要粉碎国家机器，实现“国家的消亡”，并“终结人对人的剥削”。有趣的是，马克思主义的名言：“用对物的管理取代对人的统治”，可以迂回地追溯到十九世纪初，伟大的法国激进放任自由主义者查尔斯·孔德（他与奥古斯丁·孔德无关）和查尔斯·迪诺耶身上。“阶级斗争”的概念也能追溯到同一源头，除了在迪诺耶和孔德眼里，对立的阶级本来并不是商人与工人，而是社会中的生产者（包括自由商人、工人、农民等）与由国家机器选定并赋予特权的剥削阶级。【注4】在圣西门迷茫和混乱的一生中，他曾一度与孔德和迪诺耶走的很近，并从他们那里捡起阶级分析，结果全搞砸了。他混乱地把市场上的商人、封建地主与其他特权者一起，归入“剥削者”。马克思和巴枯宁照搬了圣西门主义，结果严重误导了整个左翼社会主义运动，以至于不仅要粉碎压迫的国家，他们甚至认为必须彻底摧毁生产资料的资本主义私有制。左翼社会主义者拒斥私有财产，尤其拒斥资本，那么，他们就受困于一个关键的自相矛盾上：如果革命之后国家消失（巴枯宁版是立即消失，马克思版是逐渐“消亡”），即使名义上国家已经没有了，怎样才能既不在事实上成为一个庞大的国家，又能让“集体”支配其财产呢？这是马克思和巴枯宁的追随者从未解决的一对矛盾。

二十世纪到来时，社会主义取代激进自由主义成为“左翼”党，它成为这一自相矛盾的牺牲品。大多数社会主义者（费边社、拉萨尔派、甚至马克思主义者）大幅右转，完全抛弃旧的自由意志主义目标和理想－－革命和国家的消亡，他们变成安逸的保守主义者，永久接受国家和现状，以及二十世纪之交欧洲社会迅速建立并固化的全套架构：新重商主义、国家垄断资本主义、帝国主义和战争。保守主义也已改革重组，试图应对现代工业体系，并成为翻新的重商主义－－一种国家主义政体，其标志是直接或间接地向偏爱的资本家和准封建地主授予国家垄断特权。右翼社会主义与新保守主义之间的纽带变得非常紧密，前者与后者的政策主张类似，不过披着煽动性的民粹主义伪装：因此，帝国主义的对立面是“社会帝国主义”，约瑟夫·熊彼特一针见血地将其定义为－－“企业家及其同伙用社会福利让步的手段吸引工人。而社会福利让步又貌似取决于出口垄断主义的成功。”【注5】

历史学家很早就认识到，在意大利和德国，右翼社会主义与保守主义的亲缘关系。俾斯麦主义首次把两者融合在一起，之后才轮到法西斯主义和国家社会主义。后者实行了民族主义、帝国主义、军国主义、神权政治、右翼集体主义等保守主义项目，这些项目保留，甚至巩固了旧特权阶级的统治。但直到最近，历史学家才开始认识到，英国和美国也出现了类似的模式。因此，伯纳德·塞梅尔在那本反映二十世纪之交英国社会帝国主义运动的辉煌历史著作中，展示了费边社怎样欢迎帝国主义在英国的兴起。【注6】19世纪90年代中期，当英国自由党分裂成激进左翼与自由帝国主义右翼时，费边社的共同领导人比阿特丽斯·韦伯痛斥激进派为“自由主义者与反帝主义者”，却称赞后者为“集体主义者和帝国主义者”。萧伯纳拟定费边社官方宣言－－《费边主义与帝国》（1900年），其中称赞帝国主义并攻击激进派“仍坚持个人共和主义（和）不干预的僵化界限理念”。（后来，萧伯纳赞美斯大林、墨索里尼和奥斯瓦尔德·莫斯利爵士的国内政策，完全做到了前后一致）。对照之下，“一个大国……必须把文明的利益作为整体来统治（世界帝国）。”自此之后，费边社与保守党、自由党帝国主义者密切合作。事实上，在1902年底，西德尼·韦伯与比阿特丽斯·韦伯建立了一个叫做“系数”的秘密智囊团；该俱乐部的主要成员之一，保守党帝国主义者利奥波德·S·埃默里，透露道：“不管怎么看，西德尼和比阿特丽斯更关心如何借助一切可以借助的力量，把自己的福利国家想法付诸实施，远远甚于公开成立早期社会党的胜利….毕竟，这没什么大惊小怪。就像（约瑟夫）张伯伦本人的职业生涯所表明的，“帝国主义的外交政策与社会主义或半社会主义的内政相结合”。【注7】埃默里写道，“系数”的其他成员在运动中承担“专家小组或总参谋部”的职能，他们分别为：自由党帝国主义者理查德·霍尔丹；地缘政治家哈尔福德·J·麦金德；《国家评论》的出版人、憎恶德国的帝国主义者利奥波德·马克西；保守党社会主义者和帝国主义者米尔勒子爵；海军帝国主义者卡莱恩·贝莱尔斯；著名记者加尔文；萧伯纳；摩根银行合伙人克林顿·道金斯爵士；以及爱德华·格雷爵士－－他首次在俱乐部会议上勾画的政策，促使英国在第一次世界大战中与法俄缔结协约国。【注8】

不出所料，在第一次世界大战期间，欧洲社会党人，甚至连马克思主义者都背叛了革命和平主义的旧理念。在战争中，每一个社会党支持“自己”国家的政府，拉下了古典社会主义左翼崩溃的帷幕（尤金·维克托德布斯领导的美国社会党是一个光荣的例外）。从那时起，社会主义者、准社会主义者与保守主义者同流合污，接受国家和混合经济（＝新重商主义＝福利国家干预主义＝国家垄断资本主义，这些术语不过是表述同一基本现实的同义词）。正是为了应对这一崩溃，列宁与第二国际决裂，掀起复兴左翼社会主义的运动，以重建古典的革命马克思主义。

事实上，列宁几乎不知道的是，他的成就远不止于此。众所周知，“纯化”运动铲除近来的腐败、渴望返回古典的纯正，普遍进一步纯化了古典源头中正确的成分。事实上，在马克思和恩格斯的著作中，有一些“保守”的论调，往往鼓吹国家、西方帝国主义和侵略性民族主义的正当性。正是大师在这些问题上的自相矛盾，促使大部分马克思主义者后来转向“社会帝国主义”阵营。【注9】列宁的阵营比马克思、恩格斯本人更“左”。列宁的革命立场更坚决地对准国家，他始终捍卫并支持反抗帝国主义的民族解放运动。从另一些重要意义上看，列宁主义也同样更“左”。马克思的批判集中在市场资本主义本身，而列宁考虑的中心则是他认为的资本主义最高阶段：帝国主义和垄断。因此，就像列宁在实践中所做的，他把矛头对准国家垄断和帝国主义，而不是自由放任资本主义。对于自由意志主义者来说，他的做法远比马克思更意气相投。近年来，随着列宁主义世界的分裂，一个更左倾的趋势崭露头角：中国式。中国人几乎完全把重心放在发动不发达国家的革命上，他们不仅蔑视右翼马克思主义与国家妥协，还准确无误地把枪口对准封建和准封建土地所有制，把资本和准封建地主捆在一起的垄断特权，以及西方帝国主义。毛派事实上抛弃了古典马克思主义对工人阶级的强调，他们更集中贯彻列宁主义的努力，全力推翻当今世界旧秩序的主要壁垒。【注10】

在当代转向右翼集体主义的过程中，法西斯主义和纳粹主义是内政上的逻辑顶点。确实，西方权势集团一贯认为，法西斯主义和共产主义本质上完全相同。自由意志主义者也习惯了这种看法。尽管这两个体系无疑都是集体主义，但他们在社会经济内容上差异巨大。共产主义是真正的革命运动，它无情地罢免并推翻旧的统治精英；而法西斯主义则相反，它巩固旧统治阶级的权力。因此，法西斯主义是反革命运动，它施加给社会一整套垄断特权；总之，法西斯主义是现代国家垄断资本主义的样板。【注11】法西斯主义证实了，它对大企业的利益有如此大的吸引力（当然，共产主义从来没有）。这就是法西斯主义在1920/1930年代早期如此公然，如此明目张胆的原因。【注12】

现在，我们做好准备，可以分析美国的情景。我们看到，相比之下，由当代保守党宣传，并为大多数美国自由意志主义者所接受的美国近代史是一个误区。误区大致如下：直至新政前，美国或多或少，曾是自由放任的庇护所；后来，罗斯福受到费利克斯·法兰克福、校际社会主义协会、以及其他“费边社”和共产党阴谋家的影响，策划了一场让美国转向社会主义道路的革命，并打算跃进到共产主义。今天，按照此观点或类似观点看待美国经验的自由意志主义者，往往把自己看成“极右翼分子”；保守主义紧接在他左边，再左一点是中间道路，然后再向左才是社会主义和共产主义。因此，一些自由意志主义者极其渴望给人扣上“赤色分子”的帽子。既然在他们眼里，美国正不可阻挡地走向社会主义和共产主义，他们急不可耐地忽略中间阶段，把一切对手涂抹成红色。

有人可能认为，“右翼自由意志主义者”能立即看到该观念的严重缺陷。就看一件事，他们强烈反对开启社会主义之门的所得税修正案，而该修正案于1909年通过时，国会两党绝大多数都投票赞成。如把此事件看成走向左翼社会主义的一大步，那就要把主导第16修正案的塔夫脱总统视为左派，肯定没人敢冒然这么做。其实，无论从任何意义上看，新政都不是一场革命；新政的全套集体主义项目早在意料之中：大萧条时期，胡佛总统实行过类似的项目；此外，在第一次世界大战期间，美国由战争集体主义和中央计划主导。新政各项目的每一个元素：中央计划、创建工农业强制卡塔尔网络、通货膨胀和信贷扩张、人为提高工资率并在整体垄断架构之下推广工会、政府监管和政府所有权，这一切早在前两个十年就已预见并勾勒出。【注13】新政项目赋予大企业特权，将大企业的利益置于集体主义的塔尖，这绝不会让人联想起社会主义或左翼主义，里面闻不到一丝平等主义或无产阶级的味道。不，这个迅速成长的集体主义，其亲缘根本不是社会主义－共产主义，而是法西斯主义，或称右翼社会主义。二十年代，许多大商人公开表示，他们渴望用自己能控制的集体主义体制，来取代准自由放任体系。当然，一眼就能看出，塔夫脱、威尔逊、胡佛等人并不是地下共产党，而是法西斯党的先驱。

保守党谬解新政，而1930年代早期的列宁主义运动却看透了新政的实质。直到30年代中期，应苏联外交关系的迫切需要，全世界共产党阵营急剧转变为“人民阵线”，列宁主义运动才开始赞同新政。因此，在1934年，英国的列宁主义理论家R·帕尔梅·杜特发表简短而尖锐的分析，称新政为“社会法西斯主义”－－披着煽动性的民粹主义伪装，其实质却是法西斯主义。这是保守党的对手们对新政最有力、最尖锐地谴责。杜特写道，罗斯福的政策“转变为一种战争形式的独裁”。政策的本质是借助国家复兴局，强制推行国家垄断资本主义；用通货膨胀来资助商业、银行业、农业；通过降低实际工资来部分地没收人民财产；采用政府固定工资并强制仲裁的手段，管制并剥削劳工。杜特写道，剥去新政“社会改良主义的‘进步’伪装”，剩下的现实仍是国家极权资本主义和工业奴隶制下的新法西斯体系，并且隐含“发动战争”。杜特引用享有盛誉的《当代史杂志》编辑的话，令人印象深刻地总结道：“新美国将既不是旧式的资本主义，也不是社会主义。如果当前的趋势是法西斯主义，那将是一个美国式法西斯主义，它体现了一个伟大中产阶级国家的经验、传统和希望（写于1933年中）”。【注14】

因此，新政不是美国过去的质变；相反，它仅仅是过去那些在胡佛当政时，在一次世界大战的战争集体主义中，以及在进步年代里，早已提出并实施的国家特权网络的进一步扩张而已。关于国家垄断资本主义在美国的起源， 加布里埃尔·科尔科博士在其杰作《保守主义的胜利》一书中有最透彻的剖析，科尔科把国家垄断资本主义称为“政治资本主义”，并从进步年代的“改革”中追踪其起源。正统历史学家一直把进步年代（大约1900年至1916年），视为自由市场资本主义变得越来越“垄断”的时期。于是，故事这样展开，为了对付垄断者与大企业的统治，无私的知识分子和有远见的政客转向政府干预，以改革并管制这些恶势力。而科尔科在其伟大著作中展现的现实，却几乎与此完全相反。科尔科揭示出，尽管在世纪之交，大企业利益集团为稳定巩固经济实力，掀起兼并和成立信托的浪潮，但却在自由市场上竞争力量的冲击之下，迅速破坏和瓦解。正是为了应对市场竞争风暴下的节节败退，自1900年后，大企业越来越多地向联邦政府寻求援助和保护。总之，联邦政府的干预，其原意不是为体恤公众疾苦，遏制大企业垄断；而是为了替大企业（以及小企业行业协会）建立它们未能在自由市场竞争风暴中得逞的垄断。左右两派一直受到一个观念的误导，认为政府干预本身是左倾和反商业的。因此，右派中普遍流行着把公平交易看作红色新政的误区。以摩根利益为首的大商人，与几乎是学术界唯一例外的科尔科教授都意识到，垄断特权只能由国家建立，不可能是自由市场的运行结果。

于是，科尔科表明，自西奥多·罗斯福的新民族主义开始，至威尔逊的新自由到达顶峰，从保险、银行、肉类、出口、直到一个又一个的一般性行业。其实，今天的右派们认定为“社会主义的”管制，不仅受到大商人们的一致称赞，甚至就是他们亲自策划的。他们处心积虑，试图通过补贴、稳定和垄断特权来控制经济体。安德鲁·卡内基的观点很典型；他对钢铁行业的竞争状况忧心忡忡――不管是成立美国钢铁公司，还是著名的由摩根公司赞助的 “加里的晚餐”，都无法抑制住竞争。卡内基在1908年宣称：“我总是想，只要政府一管，问题就能妥善解决。”卡内基宣称，政府管制本身并不值得大惊小怪，“虽然煤气公司的资本受到法院的控制，但资本是绝对安全的。所以，将所有资本置于政府的控制之下，也同样安全”。【注15】

科尔科表明，摩根一手创建美国进步党，就是要惩罚塔夫脱总统，把罗斯福重新选上台，因为塔夫脱总统过于热衷起诉摩根企业。左翼社会工作者往往会在无意间，为保守主义－国家主义披上民粹主义的伪装。联邦贸易委员会的创建，标志着威尔逊的新自由达到了顶峰。大企业非但不视其为危险的社会主义，反而踊跃欢呼那些政府支持、授予特权、和监管竞争的项目生效，自己的夙愿终于得偿（威尔逊的战争集体主义受到更热烈的欢迎）。1915年底，联邦贸易委员会主席、前伊利诺伊制造商协会主席爱德华·N·赫尔利兴高采烈地宣布，设立联邦贸易委员会，是为了将州际商务委员会对铁路和货运，美联储对银行家，和农业部对农民的作用，推广到“一般性行业”。【注16】正如后来的欧洲法西斯主义轰轰烈烈上演的那样，每一个经济利益集团都组成垄断卡特尔，并纳入社会经济结构等级中相对应的特权位置。著名的公司律师，阿瑟·杰罗姆·艾迪的观点尤其有影响力，他的专业是成立商会，并协助创建联邦贸易委员会。他在代表作中猛烈抨击商业竞争，呼吁政府控制并保护工业“合作”，艾迪鼓吹说：“竞争是战争，战争是地狱”。【注17】

当今的右派谴责进步年代的知识分子为“社会主义者”？在某种意义上，他们的确是社会主义者，但那是什么样的“社会主义者”？俾斯麦德国的保守党国家社会主义－－众多现代欧洲和美国政体的原型。十九世纪晚期，大批美国知识分子在其旗下接受高等教育。科尔科指出：

　　“当代知识分子眼里的保守主义……莱斯特·沃德、理查德·T·伊利、和西门·N·帕顿的理想化国家……都是这段时期众多美国学者受到的特别教育的结果。十九世纪末，美国学术界的社会和经济理论主要受到大学的影响。集中福利职能的俾斯麦主义理想国家……是由1880-1890年代，在德国深造的数千个主要学者们量身定制的。【注18】”

此外，德国主要的极端保守主义教授，亦被称为“讲坛社会主义者”，其理想是刻意把自己打造成“霍亨索伦王朝的知识分子保镖”－－他们无疑做到了。

科尔科作为进步年代知识分子的典范，恰如其分地引用由摩根资助的《新共和》杂志编辑赫伯特·克罗利的话。克罗利将西奥多·罗斯福的新国家主义系统化，称赞这种新汉密尔顿主义是集体主义的中央控制体系，是能将社会整合成等级结构的体系。

展望进步年代，加布里埃尔·科尔科总结道，

　　“战争期间，在联邦一级的各行政和应急部门，创建了政界和企业联手的局面，一直延续到下一个十年。事实上，企业在战争时期赢得了最毋庸置疑的胜利…..大企业获得各监管机构和行政部门的全力支持。正是在战争期间，寡头垄断和价格市场协议才能在美国经济的主导部门中有效运作。权力在经济体中快速扩散，相对较低的准入门槛几乎消失了。尽管重要的……新立法停止了，但利用进步年代奠定的基础，各行业的状况得到稳定和巩固。联邦政府和企业的联合延续到整个1920年代及以后。在进步年代，在现代工业主义的背景下建立的，利用联邦政府来稳定经济的原则，成为后来众多政治资本主义流派的基础。

从这个意义上看，进步主义并没有在1920年代死去，而是成为美国社会基本结构的一部分。【注19】”

新政也同样如此。30年代中后期，罗斯福政府摇摆着左倾了一点点，随后，于1940年开始国防与战争合同经济，又重新巩固了与大企业的结盟。自此之后，这种经济和政体一直统治着美国，体现为永久的战争经济，羽翼丰满的国家垄断资本主义和新重商主义，以及当代的军事工业复合体。自美国社会在二次大战中被彻底军事化和政治化之后，其基本特征从未改变－－反而有加强的趋势，甚至在日常生活中，人也越来越被塑造成顺从的，为国家和军事工业复合体服务的“组织人”。小威廉·H·怀特在其名著《组织人》中明确指出，企业实行的这种塑造，是采纳了“启蒙”社会学家与其他社会工程师的集体主义观点。同样一目了然的是，这种和谐的观点的产生，不能简单地归咎于大商人们天真无邪－－这种“天真”与将工人和经理塑造成温顺的奴仆，为军事工业复合体的大官僚机构服务的要求相吻合。这可不是巧合。在“民主”的幌子下，教育变成纯粹的大规模技术训练，只为将人塑造成庞大官僚机器上的一个齿轮。

与此同时，共和党和民主党一如既往，就像在二十世纪前两个十年所做的一样，仍然扮演形成与支持该体制的两党。“一致主义”－－两党在表面的分歧下共同支持现状－－并不是自1940年后才开始的。

至于硕果仅存的一小股自由意志主义者，他们怎样应对美国意识形态谱系的变迁？二十世纪美国伟大的自由主义意志者，阿尔伯特·杰伊·诺克的一生，可以给我们一个富有启发性的答案。1920年代，当诺克的激进自由意志主义理念成型时，人们普遍把他看成极左分子，于是，他自己也这么认为。在他的思想和政治生涯中，始终趋于把关注的焦点对准那个时代的主要敌人：柯立芝－胡佛当局的保守党国家主义；因此，对于诺克，他的好友和同事、自由意志主义者门肯，以及其他激进者来说，为了对抗共同的敌人，自然要加入准社会主义者阵营。另一方面，当新政取代胡佛时，兑了水的社会主义者和摇摆的左翼干涉主义者跳上新政的宣传车；在左翼阵营中，只有诺克和门肯这样的自由意志主义者与（人民阵线前的）列宁主义者意识到，罗斯福是胡佛的延续，不过是改头换面而已。老胡佛与艾尔·史密斯等保守派人士认为罗斯福走得太远，也有人反感其浮夸的民粹言辞。激进者会与这些人组成统一战线，这太自然不过了。但问题是，虽然一开始，诺克和他激进的同事们理所当然地鄙视新找到的盟友，却很快开始接受他们，甚至兴高采烈地自己也贴上以前鄙视的标签－－“保守”。就像历史上多次意识形态变迁一样，对于激进派的基层，这种转变是在缺少正确的思想领袖的情况下，在不知不觉中发生的。另一方面，对于诺克，以及在某种程度上对于门肯，问题则出在更深的层次上。

诺克和门肯各自以迥异的方式，精雕细琢打造了辉煌的自由意志主义学说，但在他们的学说中，一直存在一个致命缺陷；长期以来，两人都犯了悲观主义的大错。两人都对人类接受自由体制不抱希望；对激进自由学说得到实践应用感到绝望。两人都以个人的方式，逃避思想领袖的职责。门肯是快乐的享乐主义，诺克则傲慢又讳莫如深。因此，尽管两人对自由事业作出巨大贡献，但却不能自觉地成为自由意志主义运动的领袖：两人都无法展望自由党会是希望之党、革命之党，更不用提是世俗的救世之党。犯悲观主义的错误，是跌进保守主义深渊的第一步；因此，尽管诺克大体上仍是自由意志主义者，但悲观的激进者实在太容易接受保守的标签，以至于模仿起陈词滥调：预设一个反对任何社会变革的先验立场。

引人入胜的是，结果，阿尔伯特·杰伊·诺克沿着他敬爱的精神先驱斯宾塞的思想路径，同样以纯粹的激进自由意志主义者开始；同样为把自己的理论付诸实践，为发起群众运动，而快速放弃其思想中凝聚的激进革命战术；最终，同样至少部分地，从战术上的保守跌进了实质上保守。

因此，尤其是当自由意志主义者凭感觉在意识形态谱系中站位以后，他们与被迫口头上接纳自由意志主义（却不接受其实质内容）的老派保守党结合，共同反对罗斯福政府。对于老派保守党来说，罗斯福政府要么在实质上，要么在口头上过于集体主义了。第二次世界大战加强并巩固了此联盟；主张和平与“孤立主义”的势力统统被他们的敌人打成“右”边的人，随后，他们自己也接受了这种定性。这一现象与美国以前所有的战争时期迥异。到第二次世界大战结束时，自由意志主义者自认为是“极右翼”，保守党紧接在其左边，这种看法已成了他们的第二天性；因此，这个谱系上的大错一直延续至今。尤其是，当代自由意志主义者忘了或从未意识到，反战、反军国主义一直是包括自由意志主义在内的“左翼”传统；因此，当新政时期的历史偏差自我纠正后，“右翼“再次变成推行全面战争的大党。当假想的保守“盟友”觉醒后，尾随其后的自由意志主义者措手不及，不明白发生了什么事。自由派已经完全丧失了过去的意识形态标志和指导方针。

那么，如果重新在意识形态谱系上找到自己的位置，自由的前景将怎样？在当代自由意志主义者眼里，世界正走向社会主义和共产主义，他们相信自己几乎与任何群众运动的前景阻断隔离，难免会沉浸在长期悲观中。但当我们意识到现代文明不可或缺的必需品时，景象立刻变得光明：法国和美国等伟大的西方革命，引发大规模自由主义运动，完成了推翻旧秩序的任务。自由主义运动带来了工业革命的荣耀、自由的增长、人口流动、以及不断提高的生活水平，我们今天仍然保有的这一切成就。尽管有反动的、退往国家主义的小波动，当今的世界仍远远超越过去。当我们又考虑到，直至十八世纪的西方，专制主义、封建主义、神权政治、军国主义等旧秩序，仍以各种形式主宰一切人类文明，我们必须以前所未有的乐观主义来看待人已有的成就，和人能达到的高度。

然而，有人可能会反驳说，无望的专制主义、停滞不前的历史纪录只会让人更悲观，因为它显示出旧秩序的韧性和耐久性。鉴于过去一个世纪的倒退，新秩序尤其显得脆弱易逝。但是，这种肤浅的分析忽略了随新秩序革命而来的巨变，巨变显然是不可逆的。正是因为贫苦大众心中的期待和希望湮灭了，旧秩序才能坚守奴隶制长达几百年；人们顺从地俯首于君权神授的统治者脚下，他们认命地被奴役，野蛮地活着，勉强度日。但自由主义革命，不仅在西方大众，而且在仍处于封建统治的不发达世界人民的心中，植入了不可磨灭的印记：人们炙热地渴望自由，渴望耕者有其田，渴望国际和平，也许最渴望的，是只有工业文明才能实现的人口流动和不断提高的生活水平。大众将永远不会再接受旧秩序任人摆布的奴隶制；自由主义和工业革命已经唤醒了这些要求，自由终将取得长期的胜利。

只有自由，只有自由市场，才能组织并维系一个工业体系。人口越膨胀、越爆炸，工业经济的运行越要不受限制。随着工业体系的发展，自由放任与自由市场的必要性越来越明显，逆其道而行将导致崩溃和经济危机。在一个全面推行社会主义的社会里，国家主义的危机尤其显著和尖锐，因此国家主义不可避免的崩溃，首先会在社会主义阵营（即共产党）国家醒目凸显。社会主义内在的矛盾冲突最一览无遗。它拼命试图履行其宣称的目标：工业增长、提高群众生活水平、并最终消亡国家，却越来越无法用集体主义的手段达到这些目的。因此，社会主义的崩溃是必然的。首先，社会主义计划的逐步垮台不容易看清。因为，与马克思错误的预言相反的是，列宁主义的夺权从未在发达资本主义国家实现，每一个实例都发生在深受封建压迫的国家。其次，共产党上台后没有立即尝试推行社会主义经济，而是等到多年以后：在苏联，列宁最心爱的理论家布哈林本打算扩大新经济政策，往自由市场方向前进。直到30年代初斯大林强制推行集体化，才逆转了列宁新经济政策的智慧。即使是号称狂热的中国共产党领导人，也直到1950年代末才推行社会主义经济。在每一个国家，工业化的推进都带来一系列经济崩溃，情况如此严重，以至于共产主义国家不得不违背意识形态原则，一步步地从中央计划撤退，以各种形式、不同程度地返回自由市场。苏联的利伯曼计划引人瞩目，而波兰、匈牙利和捷克斯洛伐克等国，早已大步推行无可避免的去社会化进程。在所有社会主义国家中，南斯拉夫走得最远，它比其他国家更早摆脱斯大林的铁腕统治，短短十几年，去社会化的进程速度快、进展大，当今的南斯拉夫经济并不比法国更社会主义化。确实，国家的统治者仍然自称为“共产党”，但这已与基本的社会经济事实无关。在南斯拉夫，中央计划几乎已经绝迹。私营部门不仅在农业中占主导地位，在工业中的比重甚至更大，公共部门的权力已经彻底下放，自由定价，自负盈亏，每一间工厂都成立工人合作所有制，真正的社会主义几乎消失了。只要完成最后一步――从工团控制转变成个人股份所有权，就彻底走上资本主义道路。信仰共产主义的中国，与《每月评论》杂志社的马克思主义理论家们都看得一清二楚，并发出警告－－南斯拉夫已不再是社会主义国家。

半个世纪前，路德维希·冯·米塞斯教授发表著名的见解，认为社会主义国家缺乏真正的价格体系，因而不能进行经济计算，无法成功地实行任何经济计划。人们可能会认为，自由市场经济学家们会逐渐证实该理论的相关性，为米塞斯深刻的见解欢呼．事实上，米塞斯的一个追随者若干年前写过一本小说，里面预见了去社会化的过程。然而，无论是作者本人，还是其他自由市场经济学家，没有丝毫迹象表明他们认识到共产党国家的变化，更不用说向其致敬了。也许因为他们几乎歇斯底里的看待所谓的共产主义威胁，认识不到那个铁板一块的威胁有任何瓦解的可能。【注20】

因此，越来越多共产党国家被迫从根本上去社会化，并将最终达到自由市场。不发达国家的状况也让自由意志主义者坚持乐观。环顾全球，不发达国家的人民到处掀起推翻封建旧秩序的革命。令人难以置信的是，美国正竭尽全力压制这些革命；而正是同样的革命历程让美国和西欧挣脱了旧秩序的束缚。但越来越明显的是，甚至压倒性的武装力量也无法抑制民众跨入现代世界的渴望。

现在，来看美国和西欧国家。在这里，乐观的情况不太明朗，准集体主义体系的内在矛盾并不像社会主义那样一览无遗。然而，在自以为是的凯恩斯主义经济专家折磨之下，未来同样笼罩在经济危机中：逐渐上升的通货膨胀，严重恶化的国际收支，曾经不可一世的美元岌岌可危；最低工资标准带来的长期失业；永久的战争经济，长期积累的、深层的不经济扭曲。此外，美国潜在的危机不仅在经济上，道德正在美国年轻人的心中萌生，势头迅猛，鼓舞人心。年轻人反抗权威官僚的束缚，反对整齐划一的大众教育，反对国家爪牙的残暴和压迫。

此外，这里仍然保有相当程度的言论自由和民主形式，至少从短期上看，这有利于自由意志主义运动的成长。幸运地的是，美国仍拥有自由意志主义的思想和行动的伟大传统，尽管过去的半个世纪，在国家主义和暴政的掩盖下，这一传统已几乎湮灭。但即使其意义在实践中已被剥离，却仍能在日常用语中体现，仅此就足以为未来的自由党提供坚实的意识形态基础。

那么，用马克思主义的话来说，自由胜利的“客观条件”遍布全世界，而且比以往任何年代都多；无论何地，民众都已决定要求更高的生活水平，要求自由的承诺，而国家主义和集体主义处处都无法满足这些目标。那么，需要做的很简单，即胜利的“主观条件”，比如，要有越来越多知情的自由意志主义者，将信息传递给世界各国人民，告诉人们自由与纯粹的自由市场是解决问题、化解危机之道。除非有大量的自由意志主义者引导人们走上正确的道路，否则自由就不能彻底实现。但也许创造这样一场运动最大的绊脚石，是当今世界自由意志主义者的典型心态－－悲观绝望。悲观大多源自对历史的误读，他觉得自己和寥寥几个同事们无可避免地脱离群众，因此与历史潮流隔离。于是，他不把自己看作是一场能够并且终将创造历史的、潜在运动的一份子，而是变成一个孤独的历史事件评论员。当代自由意志主义者已经忘记了，比起自己，十七和十八世纪的自由主义者面对的困难是压倒一切的。在前工业革命时代，自由主义几乎没有取胜的可能。然而，当时的自由主义者不满足于作悲观的少数派，相反，他们统一了理论和行动。自由主义成长并发展成意识形态，领导并指引民众，发动了改变全世界命运的革命；十八世纪的革命取得了巨大的突破，扭转了历史进程－－从长年累月的停滞和专制统治，走向名副其实的，自由、理性、富足的世俗理想国。旧秩序已死或奄奄一息；各种试图重返旧秩序来运行现代社会和现代经济的反动企图，注定要彻底失败。过去的自由党为当代自由意志主义者留下光辉的传统，不仅有意识形态，而且还有绝地反攻式的胜利。他们也留下可供自由意志主义者仿效的正确战略战术遗产：要成为领导者，不要自视清高疏远民众，而且不要堕入短期乐观。短期乐观不切实际，直接带来幻灭，然后导致长期悲观。正如从对立面看，长期悲观导致只顾眼前，因而自我挫败。短期乐观的原因之一，是战略上幼稚和单纯的看法：自由的胜利只需要教育更多的知识分子，接着由他们教育意见领袖，然后由意见领袖说服民众，最后国家就会静静地卷铺盖溜走。问题没那么简单；自由意志主义者面对不仅是教育，而且还有权力的问题；统治阶级从不曾自愿放弃权力－－这是历史的规律。

当然，在美国，权力的问题还很遥远。对于自由意志主义者，现在这个时代的主要任务是摆脱不必要的、令人衰弱的悲观主义，将目光放在长期的胜利上，并着手铺设通往目标的道路。要做到这一点，首先，他必须彻底纠正对意识形态谱系的错误看法，他必须发现谁是他的朋友和天然盟友，也许首要之务，是认识到他的敌人是谁。用知识武装自己，才能在激进、长期乐观的精神鼓舞下继续前进。自由意志主义思想史上的伟人之一，伦道夫·伯恩正确地指出，这正是青年的精神。让伯恩激励的话语成为自由精神的路标：

　　“青年是理性的化身，青年与死板的传统较量。青年无情地质问每一条成规，为什么？这条规则对谁有利？当辩护者支支吾吾、回避答案时，他用自己新鲜、纯洁的理性精神分析制度、习俗、观念，他发现这些东西愚蠢、空洞甚至有害，本能地要推翻它们，用自己丰富的构想来构建自己的领地。

青年是酵素，他们在全世界鼓动所有这些质疑、检验的态度。年轻人厌恨诡辩和虚伪，坚持事物的原貌；如果没有年轻人制造麻烦，社会将彻底腐烂死亡。正是老一辈制定世故的政策，到处隐藏令人不悦的事，或心照不宣、缄口不语、又精心掩饰，只当这些事情不存在。但与此同时，疮口继续溃烂，一成不变。青年是猛烈的杀菌剂。他们揪住不可告人的丑事，坚持要说法。难怪老年人恐惧不信任年轻人。青年是复仇女神厄里倪厄斯的审判……

我们的老年人总是乐观看待当前，悲观展望未来；年轻人则悲观对待当前，光荣期盼未来。正是这种希望，才是推动进步的力量，也可以说是唯一的推动力…

那么，生命的秘密在于，决不要失去这美好的朝气。青年的躁动应该沉淀出精华－－理智、强大、敢想敢做的进取精神。这种精神必须灵活应变、不断成长，能够热情接纳新思想，敏锐洞察老经验。用一颗真实、温暖的心应对世事，就找到了永远年轻的秘密。永远年轻就是救世。”【注21】

【完】

注释：

【注1】格特鲁德·希梅尔法布《阿克顿勋爵》（芝加哥大学出版社，1962年），第204-05页。

【注2】同上，第209页。

【注3】对照卡尔·贝克尔《独立宣言》（纽约：古籍出版社，1958年），第六章。

【注4】孔德和迪诺耶的资料，以及对整个意识形态频谱的分析，要感谢伦纳德·P·Liggio先生。乌托邦运动本有积极和动态的一面，却在我们的时代备受诋毁，请参阅艾伦·Milchman《让·雅克·卢梭的社会和政治哲学：乌托邦与意识形态》－11月评论（1964年11月）：第3-10页。同样对照于根森·鲁伦《希望的哲学家：恩斯特·布洛赫》，刊于利奥波德·Labedz主编的《修正主义》（纽约：Praeger出版社，1962年），第166-78页。

【注5】约瑟夫·熊彼特《帝国主义与社会阶层》（纽约：经线书籍，1955年），第175页。顺便说一句，熊彼特意识到，当代帝国主义根本不是资本主义的固有阶段，而是倒退回资本主义之前的早期帝国主义，不过是封建军事阶层在推动帝国主义侵略的过程中，吸纳了少数特权资本家参与而已。

【注6】伯纳德·塞梅尔：《帝国主义和社会改革：英国的社会－帝国思想，1895－1914》（剑桥：哈佛大学出版社，1960年）。

【注7】 塞梅尔引述利奥波德·S·埃默里《我的政治生涯》（伦敦，1953年），第74-75页。

【注8】当然，要点不在于这些人是“费边阴谋论”的产物，而是相反，到世纪之交时，费边式社会主义如此保守，以至于要与英国的政治生活中其它占主导地位的新保守主义潮流密切保持一致。

【注9】因此，见贺拉斯·B·戴维斯《国家、殖民地与社会阶层：马克思和恩格斯的地位》，《科学与社会》（1965年冬季）：26-43页。

【注10】当代唯一继续强调产业工人阶级的马克思－列宁主义教派，是以第四国际的国际委员会为代表的，支持分裂的托洛茨基派运动。

【注11】见亚历山大·J·格罗斯精辟的文章，《极权主义中的“主义”》，《美国政治科学评论》（1964年12月）：第888-901页。格罗斯写道：

“共产党……一般采取直接或间接措施，连根拔起现有的社会经济精英：地主贵族、商人、大部份中产阶级和农民，以及官僚精英、军队、公务员、法官和外交使团。…第二、在每一个共产党夺取政权的实例中，都宣传一个重要的意识形态，即承诺建立无产阶级或工人的国家……共产党为处于经济地位底层的阶级提供向上层流动的机会，从教育和就业方面看，机会总是大大超过在前政权统治下。最后，每一个共产党统治的国家，都曾试图改变经济体系的基础，通常从农业经济转向工业经济。……（德国和意大利版的）法西斯主义…是社会经济上的反革命运动。……它不仅没有剥夺或消灭已有的社会经济精英。恰好相反，法西斯主义非但不阻止，反而促进商业向垄断寡头聚集的趋势…

如果术语“资本主义”仅限于指自由放任体系，毫无疑问，法西斯主义经济体制不是自由市场经济，因此不是“资本主义”；但其运作难道不是在保护现有的社会经济精英，维持对他们的物质奖励吗？”（同上，第890-91页）

【注12】关于在那个年代，用法西斯主义和右翼集体主义改造美国的想法和计划，见穆瑞·罗斯巴德《美国大萧条》（普林斯顿出版社：Van·Nostrand，1963年）。同样对照加埃塔诺·萨尔维米尼和George LaPiana，《如何对付意大利》（纽约Duell，斯隆和皮尔斯出版社，1943年），第65ff页。

萨尔维米尼敏锐地写道：“事实上，法西斯经济是由国家，即纳税人，为私营企业承担责任。在法西斯主义的意大利，国家为私营企业的失误买单。…盈利是私人和个人的。亏损是公众和社会的。”加埃塔诺·萨尔维米尼《在法西斯主义的斧头下》（伦敦：维克多·高兰兹出版社，1936年），第416页。

【注13】见罗斯巴德《美国大萧条》各处。

【注14】帕尔梅·杜特《法西斯主义和社会革命》（纽约：国际出版社，1934年），第247-51页。

【注15】见加布里埃尔·科尔科《保守主义的胜利：美国历史的重新解读－1900年至1916年》（伊利诺伊州伦科市：自由出版社，1963年），第173和各处。科尔科开始影响美国史学方法，例见David·T·Gilchrist和W·大卫·刘易斯主编《南北战争时期的经济变迁》（特拉华州格林维尔市：Eleutherian米尔斯哈格利基金会， 1965年），第115页。科尔科对铁路研究的补充和鉴定著作，《铁路和管制－1877年至1916年》（普林斯顿：普林斯顿大学出版社，1965年），因出版太晚未能引用。克里斯托弗·D·斯通的《州际商务委员会：美国交通运输往事》一文，简述了州际商务委员会在铁路行业扮演的垄断者角色，见《新个人主义评论》（1963年春季刊）：第3-15页。

【注16】科尔科《保守主义的胜利》， 第274页。

【注17】阿瑟·杰罗姆·艾迪《新的竞争：商业和工业世界剧变的基础调研－由竞争转向联合的基础条件》，第七版。（芝加哥：AC McClurg出版社，1920年）。

【注18】科尔科《保守主义的胜利》，第214页。

【注19】同上，第286-87页。

【注20】令人高兴地是，威廉·D· 格兰普发表于《商业视野》杂志的《共产主义经济的新方向》一文是个例外。（1963年秋季刊）：第29-36页。格兰普写道：

“哈耶克说，中央计划将导致奴役。那么，减少政府的经济职权，就应该可以摆脱奴役。共产党国家可以证明这是正确的。那将是马克思主义者指望不上，哈耶克的支持者也预料不到的，国家的消亡。”（同上，第35页）文中提到的小说是亨利·黑兹利特《伟大的理想》，纽约：阿普尔顿·世纪·克罗夫茨出版社，1951年）

【注21】伦道夫·伯恩《青年》，《大西洋月刊》（1912年4月）;转载于Lillian Schlissel主编的《伦道夫·伯恩的世界》（纽约：EP达顿出版社，1965年），第9-11页和15页。

The Conservative has long been marked, whether he knows it or not, by long-run pessimism: by the belief that the long-run trend, and therefore time itself, is against him. Hence, the inevitable trend runs toward left-wing statism at home and communism abroad. It is this long-run despair that accounts for the Conservative’s rather bizarre short-run optimism, for since the long run is given up as hopeless, the Conservative feels that his only hope of success rests in the current moment. In foreign affairs, this point of view leads the Conservative to call for desperate showdowns with communism, for he feels that the longer he waits the worse things will ineluctably become; at home, it leads him to total concentration on the very next election, where he is always hoping for victory and never achieving it. The quintessence of the practical man, and beset by long-run despair, the Conservative refuses to think or plan beyond the election of the day.

Pessimism, however, both short-run and long-run, is precisely what the prognosis of conservatism deserves, for conservatism is a dying remnant of the ancien régime of the preindustrial era, and, as such, it has no future. In its contemporary American form, the recent Conservative revival embodied the death throes of an ineluctably moribund, fundamentalist, rural, small-town, white Anglo-Saxon America. What, however, of the prospects for liberty? For too many libertarians mistakenly link the prognosis for liberty with that of the seemingly stronger and supposedly allied Conservative movement; this linkage makes the characteristic long-run pessimism of the modern Libertarian easy to understand. But this chapter contends that, while the short-run prospects for liberty at home and abroad may seem dim, the proper attitude for the Libertarian to take is that of unquenchable long-run optimism.

The case for this assertion rests on a certain view of history which holds, first, that before the eighteenth century in Western Europe there existed (and still continues to exist outside the West) an identifiable Old Order. Whether the Old Order took the form of feudalism or Oriental despotism, it was marked by tyranny, exploitation, stagnation, fixed caste, and hopelessness and starvation for the bulk of the population. In sum, life was “nasty, brutish, and short”; here was Maine’s “society of status” and Spencer’s “military society.” The ruling classes, or castes, governed by conquest and by getting the masses to believe in the alleged divine imprimatur to their rule.

The Old Order was, and still remains, the great and mighty enemy of liberty; and it was particularly mighty in the past because there was then no inevitability about its overthrow. When we consider that basically the Old Order had existed since the dawn of history, in all civilizations, we can appreciate even more the glory and the magnitude of the triumph of the liberal revolution of and around the eighteenth century.

Part of the dimensions of this struggle has been obscured by a great myth of the history of Western Europe implanted by antiliberal German historians of the late nineteenth century. The myth held that the growth of absolute monarchies and of mercantilism in the early modern era was necessary for the development of capitalism, since these served to liberate the merchants and the people from local feudal restrictions. In actuality, this was not at all the case; the king and his nation-State served rather as a super-feudal overlord reimposing and reinforcing feudalism just as it was being dissolved by the peaceful growth of the market economy. The king superimposed his own restrictions and monopoly privileges onto those of the feudal regime. The absolute monarchs were the Old Order writ large and made even more despotic than before. Capitalism, indeed, flourished earliest and most actively precisely in those areas where the central State was weak or nonexistent: the Italian cities, the Hanseatic League, the confederation of seventeenth-century Holland. Finally, the Old Order was overthrown or severely shaken in its grip in two ways. One was by industry and the market expanding through the interstices of the feudal order (for example, industry in England developing in the countryside beyond the grip of feudal, State and guild restrictions). More important was a series of cataclysmic revolutions that blasted loose the Old Order and the old ruling classes: the English Revolutions of the seventeenth century, the American Revolution, and the French Revolution, all of which were necessary for the ushering in of the Industrial Revolution and of at least partial victories for individual liberty, laissez-faire, separation of church and state, and international peace. The society of status gave way, at least partially, to the “society of contract”; the military society gave way partially to the “industrial society.” The mass of the population now achieved a mobility of labor and place, and accelerating expansion of their living standards, for which they had scarcely dared to hope. Liberalism had indeed brought to the Western world not only liberty, the prospect of peace, and the rising living standards of an industrial society, but above all, perhaps, it brought hope, a hope in ever-greater progress that lifted the mass of mankind out of its age-old sinkhole of stagnation and despair.

Soon there developed in Western Europe two great political ideologies, centered around this new revolutionary phenomenon: one was liberalism, the party of hope, of radicalism, of liberty, of the Industrial Revolution, of progress, of humanity; the other was conservatism, the party of reaction, the party that longed to restore the hierarchy, statism, theocracy, serfdom, and class exploitation of the Old Order. Since liberalism admittedly had reason on its side, the Conservatives darkened the ideological atmosphere with obscurantist calls for romanticism, tradition, theocracy, and irrationalism. Political ideologies were polarized, with liberalism on the extreme “left,” and conservatism on the extreme “right,” of the ideological spectrum. That genuine liberalism was essentially radical and revolutionary was brilliantly perceived, in the twilight of its impact, by the great Lord Acton (one of the few figures in the history of thought who, charmingly, grew more radical as he grew older). Acton wrote that “Liberalism wishes for what ought to be, irrespective of what is.” In working out this view, incidentally, it was Acton, not Trotsky, who first arrived at the concept of the “permanent revolution.” As Gertrude Himmelfarb wrote in her excellent study of Acton:

. . . his philosophy develop(ed) to the point where the future was seen as the avowed enemy of the past, and where the past was allowed no authority except as it happened to conform to morality. To take seriously this Liberal theory of history, to give precedence to “what ought to be” over “what is,” was, he admitted, virtually to install a “revolution in permanence.”

The “revolution in permanence,” as Acton hinted in the inaugural lecture and admitted frankly in his notes, was the culmination of his philosophy of history and theory of politics. . . . This idea of conscience, that men carry about with them the knowledge of good and evil, is the very root of revolution, for it destroys the sanctity of the past. . . . “Liberalism is essentially revolutionary,” Acton observed. “Facts must yield to ideas. Peaceably and patiently if possible. Violently if not.” [1]

The Liberal, wrote Acton, far surpassed the Whig:

The Whig governed by compromise. The Liberal begins the reign of ideas. . . . One is practical, gradual, ready for compromise. The other works out a principle philosophically. One is a policy aiming at a philosophy. The other is a philosophy seeking a policy. [2]

What happened to liberalism? Why then did it decline during the nineteenth century? This question has been pondered many times, but perhaps the basic reason was an inner rot within the vitals of liberalism itself. For, with the partial success of the Liberal Revolution in the West, the Liberals increasingly abandoned their radical fervor and, therefore, their liberal goals, to rest content with a mere defense of the uninspiring and defective status quo. Two philosophical roots of this decay may be discerned. First is the abandonment of natural rights and “higher law” theory for utilitarianism, for only forms of natural or higher law theory can provide a radical base outside the existing system from which to challenge the status quo; and only such theory furnishes a sense of necessary immediacy to the libertarian struggle by focusing on the necessity of bringing existing criminal rulers to the bar of justice. Utilitarians, on the other hand, in abandoning justice for expediency, also abandon immediacy for quiet stagnation and inevitably end up as objective apologists for the existing order.

The second great philosophical influence on the decline of liberalism was evolutionism, or Social Darwinism, which put the finishing touches to liberalism as a radical force in society. For the Social Darwinist erroneously saw history and society through the peaceful, rose-colored glasses of infinitely slow, infinitely gradual social evolution. Ignoring the prime fact that no ruling caste in history has ever voluntarily surrendered its power, and that, therefore, liberalism had to break through by means of a series of revolutions, the Social Darwinists looked forward peacefully and cheerfully to thousands of years of infinitely gradual evolution to the next supposedly inevitable stage of individualism.

An interesting illustration of a thinker who embodies within himself the decline of liberalism in the nineteenth century is Herbert Spencer. Spencer began as a magnificently radical liberal, indeed virtually a pure libertarian. But, as the virus of sociology and Social Darwinism took over in his soul, Spencer abandoned libertarianism as a dynamic historical movement, although at first without abandoning it in pure theory. In short, while looking forward to an eventual ideal of pure liberty, Spencer began to see its victory as inevitable, but only after millennia of gradual evolution, and thus, in actual fact, Spencer abandoned liberalism as a fighting, radical creed and confined his liberalism in practice to a weary, rear-guard action against the growing collectivism of the late nineteenth century. Interestingly enough, Spencer’s tired shift “rightward” in strategy soon became a shift rightward in theory as well, so that Spencer abandoned pure liberty even in theory, for example, in repudiating his famous chapter in Social Statics, “The Right to Ignore the State.”

In England, the classical liberals began their shift from radicalism to quasi-conservatism in the early nineteenth century; a touchstone of this shift was the general British liberal attitude toward the national liberation struggle in Ireland. This struggle was twofold: against British political imperialism and against feudal landlordism which had been imposed by that imperialism. By their Tory blindness toward the Irish drive for national independence, and especially for peasant property against feudal oppression, the British Liberals (including Spencer) symbolized their effective abandonment of genuine liberalism, which had been virtually born in a struggle against the feudal land system. Only in the United States, the great home of radical liberalism (where feudalism had never been able to take root outside the South), did natural rights and higher-law theory, and consequent radical liberal movements, continue in prominence until the mid-nineteenth century. In their different ways, the Jacksonian and Abolitionist movements were the last powerful radical libertarian movements in American life. [3]

Thus, with liberalism abandoned from within, there was no longer a party of hope in the Western world, no longer a “Left” movement to lead a struggle against the state and against the unbreached remainder of the Old Order. Into this gap, into this void created by the drying up of radical liberalism, there stepped a new movement: socialism. Libertarians of the present day are accustomed to think of socialism as the polar opposite of the libertarian creed. But this is a grave mistake, responsible for a severe ideological disorientation of libertarians in the present world. As we have seen, conservatism was the polar opposite of liberty; and socialism, while to the “left” of conservatism, was essentially a confused, middle-of-the-road movement. It was, and still is, middle-of-the-road because it tries to achieve liberal ends by the use of conservative means.

In short, Russell Kirk, who claims that socialism was the heir of classical liberalism, and Ronald Hamowy, who sees socialism as the heir of conservatism, are both right; for the question is on what aspect of this confused centrist movement we happen to be focusing. Socialism, like liberalism and against conservatism, accepted the industrial system and the liberal goals of freedom, reason, mobility, progress, higher living standards for the masses, and an end to theocracy and war; but it tried to achieve these ends by the use of incompatible, conservative means: statism, central planning, communitarianism, etc. Or rather, to be more precise, there were from the beginning two different strands within socialism: one was the right-wing, authoritarian strand, from Saint-Simon down, which glorified statism, hierarchy, and collectivism and which was thus a projection of conservatism trying to accept and dominate the new industrial civilization. The other was the left-wing, relatively libertarian strand, exemplified in their different ways by Marx and Bakunin, revolutionary and far more interested in achieving the libertarian goals of liberalism and socialism; but especially the smashing of the state apparatus to achieve the “withering away of the State” and the “end of the exploitation of man by man.” Interestingly enough, the very Marxian phrase, the “replacement of the government by men by the administration of things,” can be traced, by a circuitous route, from the great French radical laissez-faire liberals of the early nineteenth century, Charles Comte (no relation to Auguste Comte) and Charles Dunoyer. And so, too, may the concept of the “class struggle”; except that for Dunoyer and Comte the inherently antithetical classes were not businessmen versus workers, but the producers in society (including free businessmen, workers, peasants, etc.) versus the exploiting classes constituting, and privileged by, the State apparatus. [4] Saint-Simon at one time in his confused and chaotic life was close to Comte and Dunoyer and picked up his class analysis from them, in the process characteristically getting the whole thing balled up and converting businessmen on the market, as well as feudal landlords and others of the State privileged, into “exploiters.” Marx and Bakunin picked this up from the Saint-Simonians, and the result gravely misled the whole left-socialist movement; for, then, in addition to smashing the repressive State, it became supposedly necessary to smash private capitalist ownership of the means of production. Rejecting private property, especially of capital, the left socialists were then trapped in a crucial inner contradiction: if the State is to disappear after the revolution (immediately for Bakunin, gradually “withering” for Marx), then how is the “collective” to run its property without becoming an enormous State itself in fact, even if not in name? This was a contradiction which neither the Marxists nor the Bakuninists were ever able to resolve.

Having replaced radical liberalism as the party of the “left,” socialism, by the turn of the twentieth century, fell prey to this inner contradiction. Most socialists (Fabians, Lassalleans, even Marxists) turned sharply rightward, completely abandoned the old libertarian goals and ideals of revolution and the withering away of the State and became cozy conservatives permanently reconciled to the State, the status quo, and the whole apparatus of neomercantilism, State monopoly capitalism, imperialism, and war that was rapidly being established and riveted on European society at the turn of the twentieth century. For conservatism, too, had re-formed and regrouped to try to cope with a modern industrial system and had become a refurbished mercantilism, a regime of statism, marked by State monopoly privilege, in direct and indirect forms, to favored capitalists and to quasi-feudal landlords. The affinity between right socialism and the new conservatism became very close, the former advocating similar policies but with a demagogic populist veneer. Thus, the other side of the coin of imperialism was “social imperialism,” which Joseph Schumpeter trenchantly defined as “an imperialism in which the entrepreneurs and other elements woo the workers by means of social welfare concessions which appear to depend on the success of export monopolism.” [5]

Historians have long recognized the affinity, and the welding together, of right-wing socialism with conservatism in Italy and Germany, where the fusion was embodied first in Bismarckism and then in fascism and national socialism – the latter fulfilling the Conservative program of nationalism, imperialism, militarism, theocracy, and a right-wing collectivism that retained and even cemented the rule of the old privileged classes. But only recently have historians begun to realize that a similar pattern occurred in England and the United States. Thus, Bernard Semmel, in his brilliant history of the social-imperialist movement in England at the turn of the twentieth century, shows how the Fabian Society welcomed the rise of the imperialists in England. [6]   When, in the mid-1890s, the Liberal Party in England split into the radicals on the left and the liberal-imperialists on the right, Beatrice Webb, co-leader of the Fabians, denounced the radicals as “laissez-faire and anti-imperialists,” while hailing the latter as “collectivists and imperialists.” An official Fabian manifesto, Fabianism and the Empire (1900), drawn up by George Bernard Shaw (who was later, with perfect consistency, to praise the domestic policies of Stalin and Mussolini and Sir Oswald Mosley), lauded imperialism and attacked the radicals, who “still cling to the fixed-frontier ideals of individualist republicanism (and) noninterference.” In contrast, “a Great Power . . . must govern (a world empire) in the interests of civilization as a whole.” After this, the Fabians collaborated closely with Tories and liberal-imperialists. Indeed, in late 1902, Sidney and Beatrice Webb established a small, secret group of brain-trusters, called The Coefficients; as one of the leading members of this club, the Tory imperialist, Leopold S. Amery, revealingly wrote:

Sidney and Beatrice Webb were much more concerned with getting their ideas of the welfare state put into practice by anyone who might be prepared to help, even on the most modest scale, than with the early triumph of an avowedly Socialist Party. . . . There was, after all, nothing so very unnatural, as [Joseph] Chamberlain’s own career had shown, in a combination of Imperialism in external affairs with municipal socialism or semi-socialism at home. [7]

Other members of The Coefficients, who, as Amery wrote, were to function as “Brain Trusts or General Staff” for the movement, were: the liberal-imperialist Richard B. Haldane; the geopolitician Halford J. Mackinder; the Imperialist and Germanophobe Leopold Maxse, publisher of the National Review; the Tory socialist and imperialist Viscount Milner; the naval imperialist Carlyon Bellairs; the famous journalist J. L. Garvin; Bernard Shaw; Sir Clinton Dawkins, partner of the Morgan Bank; and Sir Edward Grey, who, at a meeting of the club first adumbrated the policy of Entente with France and Russia that was to eventuate in World War I. [8]

The famous betrayal during World War I of the old ideals of revolutionary pacifism by the European Socialists, and even by the Marxists, should have come as no surprise; that each Socialist Party supported its “own” national government in the war (with the honorable exception of Eugene Victor Debs’s Socialist Party in the United States) was the final embodiment of the collapse of the classic Socialist Left. From then on, Socialists and quasi-Socialists joined Conservatives in a basic amalgam, accepting the state and the mixed economy (= neo-mercantilism = the welfare state = interventionism = state monopoly capitalism, merely synonyms for the same essential reality). It was in reaction to this collapse that Lenin broke out of the Second International to reestablish classic revolutionary Marxism in a revival of left socialism.

In fact, Lenin, almost without knowing it, accomplished more than this. It is common knowledge that “purifying” movements, eager to return to a classic purity shorn of recent corruptions, generally purify further than what had held true among the original classic sources. … Lenin’s camp turned more “left” than had Marx and Engels themselves. Lenin had a decidedly more revolutionary stance toward the State, and consistently defended and supported movements of national liberation against imperialism. The Leninist shift was more “leftist” in other important senses as well. For while Marx had centered his attack on market capitalism per se, the major focus of Lenin’s concerns was on what he conceives to be the highest stages of capitalism: imperialism and monopoly. Hence Lenin’s focus, centering as it did in practice on State monopoly and imperialism rather than on laissez-faire capitalism, was in that way far more congenial to the libertarian than that of Karl Marx. In recent years, the splits in the Leninist world have brought to the fore a still more left-wing tendency: that of the Chinese. In their almost exclusive stress on revolution in the undeveloped countries, the Chinese have, in addition to scorning Right-wing Marxist compromises with the State, unerringly centered their hostility on feudal and quasi-feudal landholdings, on monopoly concessions which have enmeshed capital with quasi-feudal land, and on Western imperialism. In this virtual abandonment of the classical Marxist emphasis on the working class, the Maoists have concentrated Leninist efforts more closely on the overthrow of the major bulwarks of the Old Order in the modern world.

Fascism and Nazism were the local culmination in domestic affairs of the modern drift toward right-wing collectivism. It has become customary among libertarians, as indeed among the Establishment of the West, to regard fascism and communism as fundamentally identical. But while both systems were indubitably collectivist, they differed greatly in their socioeconomic content. Communism was a genuine revolutionary movement that ruthlessly displaced and overthrew the old ruling elites, while fascism, on the contrary, cemented into power the old ruling classes. Hence, fascism was a counterrevolutionary movement that froze a set of monopoly privileges upon society; in short, fascism was the apotheosis of modern State monopoly capitalism. [10] Here was the reason that fascism proved so attractive (which communism, of course, never did) to big business interests in the West – openly and unabashedly so in the 1920s and early 1930s. [11]

We are now in a position to apply our analysis to the American scene. Here we encounter a contrasting myth about recent American history which has been propagated by current conservatives and adopted by most American libertarians. The myth goes approximately as follows: America was, more or less, a haven of laissez-faire until the New Deal; then Roosevelt, influenced by Felix Frankfurter, the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, and other “Fabian” and communist “conspirators,” engineered a revolution which set America on the path to socialism, and further on beyond the horizon, to communism. The present-day libertarian who adopts this or a similar view of the American experience, tends to think of himself as an “extreme right-winger”; slightly to the left of him, then, stands the conservative, to the left of that the middle-of-the-road, and then leftward to socialism and communism. Hence, the enormous temptation for some libertarians to red-bait; for, since they see America as drifting inexorably leftward to socialism and, therefore, to communism, the great temptation is for them to overlook the intermediary stages and tar all of their opposition with the hated Red brush.

One would think that the “right-wing Libertarian” would quickly be able to see some drastic flaws in this conception. For one thing, the income tax amendment, which he deplores as the beginning of socialism in America, was put through Congress in 1909 by an overwhelming majority of both parties. To look at this event as a sharp leftward move toward socialism would require treating President William Howard Taft, who put through the Sixteenth Amendment, as a Leftist, and surely few would have the temerity to do that. Indeed, the New Deal was not a revolution in any sense; its entire collectivist program was anticipated: proximately by Herbert Hoover during the depression, and, beyond that, by the war-collectivism and central planning that governed America during World War I. Every element in the New Deal program: central planning, creation of a network of compulsory cartels for industry and agriculture, inflation and credit expansion, artificial raising of wage rates and promotion of unions within the overall monopoly structure, government regulation and ownership, all this had been anticipated and adumbrated during the previous two decades. [12] And this program, with its privileging of various big business interests at the top of the collectivist heap, was in no sense reminiscent of socialism or leftism; there was nothing smacking of the egalitarian or the proletarian here. No, the kinship of this burgeoning collectivism was not at all with socialism-communism but with fascism, or socialism-of-the-right, a kinship which many big businessmen of the twenties expressed openly in their yearning for abandonment of a quasi-laissez-faire system for a collectivism which they could control. And, surely, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, and Herbert Clark Hoover make far more recognizable figures as proto-Fascists than they do as crypto-communists.

The essence of the New Deal was seen, far more clearly than in the Conservative mythology, by the Leninist movement in the early 1930s; that is, until the mid-thirties, when the exigencies of Soviet foreign relations caused a sharp shift of the world communist line to “Popular Front” approval of the New Deal. Thus, in 1934, the British Leninist theoretician R. Palme Dutt published a brief but scathing analysis of the New Deal as “social fascism” – as the reality of fascism cloaked with a thin veneer of populist demagogy. No Conservative opponent has ever delivered a more vigorous or trenchant denunciation of the New Deal. The Roosevelt policy, wrote Dutt, was to “move to a form of dictatorship of a war-type”; the essential policies were to impose a State monopoly capitalism through the NRA, to subsidize business, banking, and agriculture through inflation and the partial expropriation of the mass of the people through lower real-wage rates and to the regulation and exploitation of labor by means of government-fixed wages and compulsory arbitration. When the New Deal, wrote Dutt, is stripped of its “social-reformist ‘progressive’ camouflage,” “the reality of the new Fascist type of system of concentrated State capitalism and industrial servitude remains,” including an implicit “advance to war.” Dutt effectively concluded with a quote from an editor of the highly respected Current History Magazine:

The new America [the editor had written in mid-1933] will not be capitalist in the old sense, nor will it be socialist. If at the moment the trend is towards fascism, it will be an American fascism, embodying the experience, the traditions, and the hopes of a great middle-class nation. [13]

Thus, the New Deal was not a qualitative break from the American past; on the contrary, it was merely a quantitative extension of the web of State privilege that had been proposed and acted upon before: in Hoover’s administration, in the war collectivism of World War I, and in the Progressive Era. The most thorough exposition of the origins of State monopoly capitalism, or what he calls “political capitalism,” in the United States is found in the brilliant work of Dr. Gabriel Kolko. In The Triumph of Conservatism, Kolko traces the origins of political capitalism in the “reforms” of the Progressive Era. Orthodox historians have always treated the Progressive period (roughly 1900–1916) as a time when free-market capitalism was becoming increasingly “monopolistic”; in reaction to this reign of monopoly and big business, so the story runs, altruistic intellectuals and far-seeing politicians turned to intervention by the government to reform and to regulate these evils. Kolko’s great work demonstrates that the reality was almost precisely the opposite of this myth. Despite the wave of mergers and trusts formed around the turn of the century, Kolko reveals, the forces of competition on the free market rapidly vitiated and dissolved these attempts at stabilizing and perpetuating the economic power of big business interests. It was precisely in reaction to their impending defeat at the hands of the competitive storms of the market that big business turned, increasingly after the 1900s, to the federal government for aid and protection. In short, the intervention by the federal government was designed, not to curb big business monopoly for the sake of the public weal, but to create monopolies that big business (as well as trade associations of smaller business) had not been able to establish amidst the competitive gales of the free market. Both left and right have been persistently misled by the notion that intervention by the government is ipso facto leftish and antibusiness. Hence the mythology of the New-Fair Deal-as-Red that is endemic on the right. Both the big businessmen, led by the Morgan interests, and Professor Kolko, almost uniquely in the academic world, have realized that monopoly privilege can only be created by the State and not as a result of free-market operations.

Thus, Kolko shows that, beginning with Theodore Roosevelt’s New Nationalism and culminating in Wilson’s New Freedom, in industry after industry, for example, insurance, banking, meat, exports and business generally, regulations that present-day rightists think of as “socialistic” were not only uniformly hailed, but conceived and brought about by big businessmen. This was a conscious effort to fasten upon the economy a cement of subsidy, stabilization, and monopoly privilege. A typical view was that of Andrew Carnegie; deeply concerned about competition in the steel industry, which neither the formation of U.S. Steel nor the famous “Gary Dinners” sponsored by that Morgan company could dampen, Carnegie declared in 1908 that “it always comes back to me that government control, and that alone, will properly solve the problem.” There is nothing alarming about government regulation per se, announced Carnegie, “capital is perfectly safe in the gas company, although it is under court control. So will all capital be, although under government control.” [14]

The Progressive Party, Kolko shows, was basically a Morgan-created party to reelect Roosevelt and punish President Taft, who had been overzealous in prosecuting Morgan enterprises; the leftish social workers often unwittingly provided a demagogic veneer for a conservative-statist movement. Wilson’s New Freedom, culminating in the creation of the Federal Trade Commission, far from being considered dangerously socialistic by big business, was welcomed enthusiastically as putting their long-cherished program of support, privilege, and regulation of competition into effect (and Wilson’s war collectivism was welcomed even more exuberantly). Edward N. Hurley, chairman of the Federal Trade Commission and formerly president of the Illinois Manufacturers Association, happily announced in late 1915, that the Federal Trade Commission was designed “to do for general business” what the ICC had been eagerly doing for the railroads and shippers, what the Federal Reserve was doing for the nation’s bankers, and what the Department of Agriculture was accomplishing for the farmers. [15] As would happen more dramatically in European fascism, each economic interest group was being cartelized and monopolized and fitted into its privileged niche in a hierarchically-ordered socioeconomic structure. Particularly influential were the views of Arthur Jerome Eddy, an eminent corporation lawyer who specialized in forming trade associations and who helped to father the Federal Trade Commission. In his magnum opus fiercely denouncing competition in business and calling for governmentally-controlled and protected industrial “cooperation,” Eddy trumpeted that “Competition is War, and ‘War is Hell’.” [16]

What of the intellectuals of the Progressive period, damned by the present-day Right as “socialistic”? Socialistic in a sense they were, but what kind of “socialism”? The conservative state socialism of Bismarck’s Germany, the prototype for so much of modern European — and American — political forms, and under which the bulk of American intellectuals of the late nineteenth century received their higher education. As Kolko puts it:

The conservatism of the contemporary intellectuals . . . the idealization of the state by Lester Ward, Richard T. Ely, or Simon N. Patten . . . was also the result of the peculiar training of many of the American academics of this period. At the end of the nineteenth century the primary influence in American academic social and economic theory was exerted by the universities. The Bismarckian idealization of the state, with its centralized welfare functions . . . was suitably revised by the thousands of key academics who studied in German universities in the 1880s and 1890s. [17]

The ideal of the leading ultraconservative German professors, moreover, who were also called “socialists of the chair,” was consciously to form themselves into the “intellectual bodyguard of the House of Hohenzollern” – and that they surely were.

As an exemplar of the Progressive intellectual, Kolko aptly cites Herbert Croly, editor of the Morgan-financed New Republic. Systematizing Theodore Roosevelt’s New Nationalism, Croly hailed this new Hamiltonianism as a system for collectivist federal control and integration of society into a hierarchical structure. Looking forward from the Progressive Era, Gabriel Kolko concludes that:

a synthesis of business and politics on the federal level was created during the war, in various administrative and emergency agencies, that continued throughout the following decade. Indeed, the war period represents the triumph of business in the most emphatic manner possible . . . big business gained total support from the various regulatory agencies and the Executive. It was during the war that effective, working oligopoly and price and market agreements became operational in the dominant sectors of the American economy. The rapid diffusion of power in the economy and relatively easy entry virtually ceased. Despite the cessation of important new legislative enactments, the unity of business and the federal government continued throughout the 1920s and thereafter, using the foundations laid in the Progressive Era to stabilize and consolidate conditions within various industries. . . . The principle of utilizing the federal government to stabilize the economy, established in the context of modern industrialism during the Progressive Era, became the basis of political capitalism in its many later ramifications.

In this sense progressivism did not die in the 1920s, but became a part of the basic fabric of American society. [18]

Thus the New Deal. After a bit of leftish wavering in the middle of the late thirties, the Roosevelt administration recemented its alliance with big business in the national defense and war contract economy that began in 1940. This is an economy and a polity that has been ruling America ever since, embodied in the permanent war economy, the full-fledged State monopoly capitalism and neomercantilism, the military-industrial complex of the present era. The essential features of American society have not changed since it was thoroughly militarized and politicized in World War II — except that the trends intensify, and even in everyday life men have been increasingly molded into conforming organization men serving the State and its military–industrial complex. William H. Whyte, Jr., in his justly famous book, The Organization Man, made clear that this molding took place amidst the adoption by business of the collectivist views of “enlightened” sociologists and other social engineers. It is also clear that this harmony of views is not simply the result of naïveté by big businessmen — not when such “naïveté” coincides with the requirements of compressing the worker and manager into the mold of willing servitor in the great bureaucracy of the military-industrial machine. And, under the guise of “democracy,” education has become mere mass drilling in the techniques of adjustment to the task of becoming a cog in the vast bureaucratic machine.
Meanwhile, the Republicans and Democrats remain as bipartisan in forming and supporting this establishment as they were in the first two decades of the twentieth century. “Me-tooism” — bipartisan support of the status quo that underlies the superficial differences between the parties — did not begin in 1940.

How did the corporal’s guard of remaining libertarians react to these shifts of the ideological spectrum in America? An instructive answer may be found by looking at the career of one of the great libertarians of twentieth-century America — Albert Jay Nock. In the 1920s, when Nock had formulated his radical libertarian philosophy, he was universally regarded as a member of the extreme Left, and he so regarded himself as well. It is always the tendency, in ideological and political life, to center one’s attention on the main enemy of the day, and the main enemy of that day was the conservative statism of the Coolidge-Hoover administration; it was natural, therefore, for Nock, his friend and fellow-libertarian H. L. Mencken and other radicals to join quasi-Socialists in battle against the common foe. When the New Deal succeeded Hoover, on the other hand, the milk-and-water socialists and vaguely leftish Interventionists hopped on the New Deal bandwagon; on the Left only the Libertarians such as Nock and Mencken and the Leninists (before the Popular Front period) realized that Roosevelt was only a continuation of Hoover in other rhetoric. It was perfectly natural for the radicals to form a united front against Roosevelt with the older Hoover and Al Smith conservatives who either believed Roosevelt had gone too far or disliked his flamboyant populistic rhetoric. But the problem was that Nock and his fellow radicals, at first properly scornful of their newfound allies, soon began to accept them and even don cheerfully the formerly despised label of “Conservative.” With the rank-and-file radicals, this shift took place, as have so many transformations of ideology in history, unwittingly and in default of proper ideological leadership; for Nock, and to some extent for Mencken, on the other hand, the problem cut far deeper.

For there had always been one grave flaw in the brilliant and finely-honed libertarian doctrine hammered out in their very different ways by Nock and Mencken; both had long adopted the great error of pessimism. Both saw no hope for the human race ever adopting the system of liberty; despairing of the radical doctrine of liberty ever being applied in practice, each in his own personal way retreated from the responsibility of ideological leadership, Mencken joyously and hedonically, Nock haughtily and secretively. Despite the massive contribution of both men to the cause of liberty, therefore, neither could ever become the conscious leader of a libertarian movement, for neither could ever envision the party of liberty as the party of hope, the party of revolution, or a fortiori, the party of secular messianism. The error of pessimism is the first step down the slippery slope that leads to conservatism; and hence it was all too easy for the pessimistic radical Nock, even though still basically a Libertarian, to accept the conservative label and even come to croak the old platitude that there is an a priori presumption against any social change.

It is fascinating that Albert Jay Nock thus followed the ideological path of his beloved spiritual ancestor Herbert Spencer; both began as pure radical Libertarians, both quickly abandoned radical or revolutionary tactics as embodied in the will to put their theories into practice through mass action, and both eventually glided from Tory tactics to at least a partial toryism of content.

And so the Libertarians, especially in their sense of where they stood in the ideological spectrum, fused with the older Conservatives who were forced to adopt libertarian phraseology (but with no real libertarian content) in opposing a Roosevelt administration that had become too collectivistic for them, either in content or in rhetoric. World War II reinforced and cemented this alliance; for, in contrast to all the previous American wars of the century, the pro-peace and “isolationist” forces were all identified, by their enemies and subsequently by themselves, as men of the “Right.” By the end of World War II, it was second nature for libertarians to consider themselves at an “extreme right-wing” pole with the Conservatives immediately to the left of them; and hence the great error of the spectrum that persists to this day. In particular, the modern libertarians forgot or never realized that opposition to war and militarism had always been a “left-wing” tradition which had included Libertarians; and hence when the historical aberration of the New Deal period corrected itself and the “right-wing” was once again the great partisan of total war, the Libertarians were unprepared to understand what was happening and tailed along in the wake of their supposed conservative “allies.” The liberals had completely lost their old ideological markings and guidelines.

Given a proper reorientation of the ideological spectrum, what then would be the prospects for liberty? It is no wonder that the contemporary Libertarian, seeing the world going socialistic and communistic, and believing himself virtually isolated and cut off from any prospect of united mass action, tends to be steeped in long-run pessimism. But the scene immediately brightens when we realize that that indispensable requisite of modern civilization — the overthrow of the Old Order — was accomplished by mass libertarian action erupting in such great revolutions of the West as the French and American Revolutions, and bringing about the glories of the Industrial Revolution and the advances of liberty, mobility, and rising living standards that we still retain today. Despite the reactionary swings backward to statism, the modern world stands towering above the world of the past. When we consider also that, in one form or another, the Old Order of despotism, feudalism, theocracy, and militarism dominated every human civilization until the West of the eighteenth century, optimism over what man has and can achieve must mount still higher.

It might be retorted, however, that this bleak historical record of despotism and stagnation only reinforces pessimism, for it shows the persistence and durability of the Old Order and the seeming frailty and evanescence of the New — especially in view of the retrogression of the past century. But such superficial analysis neglects the great change that occurred with the revolution of the New Order, a change that is clearly irreversible. For the Old Order was able to persist in its slave system for centuries precisely because it awoke no expectations and no hopes in the minds of the submerged masses; their lot was to live and eke out their brutish subsistence in slavery while obeying unquestioningly the commands of their divinely appointed rulers. But the liberal revolution implanted indelibly in the minds of the masses — not only in the West but in the still feudally-dominated undeveloped world — the burning desire for liberty, for land to the peasantry, for peace between the nations, and, perhaps above all, for the mobility and rising standards of living that can only be brought to them by an industrial civilization. The masses will never again accept the mindless serfdom of the Old Order; and given these demands that have been awakened by liberalism and the Industrial Revolution, long-run victory for liberty is inevitable.

For only liberty, only a free market, can organize and maintain an industrial system, and the more that population expands and explodes, the more necessary is the unfettered working of such an industrial economy. Laissez-faire and the free market become more and more evidently necessary as an industrial system develops; radical deviations cause breakdowns and economic crises. This crisis of statism becomes particularly dramatic and acute in a fully socialist society; and hence the inevitable breakdown of statism has first become strikingly apparent in the countries of the socialist (that is, communist) camp. For socialism confronts its inner contradiction most starkly. Desperately, it tries to fulfill its proclaimed goals of industrial growth, higher standards of living for the masses, and eventual withering away of the State and is increasingly unable to do so with its collectivist means. Hence the inevitable breakdown of socialism. This progressive breakdown of socialist planning was at first partially obscured. For, in every instance, the Leninists took power not in a developed capitalist country as Marx had wrongly predicted, but in a country suffering from the oppression of feudalism. Second, the Communists did not attempt to impose socialism upon the economy for many years after taking power; in Soviet Russia until Stalin’s forced collectivization of the early 1930s reversed the wisdom of Lenin’s New Economic Policy, which Lenin’s favorite theoretician, Bukharin, would have extended onward towards a free market. Even the supposedly rabid Communist leaders of China did not impose a socialist economy on that country until the late 1950s. In every case, growing industrialization has imposed a series of economic breakdowns so severe that the communist countries, against their ideological principles, have had to retreat step by step from central planning and return to various degrees and forms of a free market. The Liberman Plan for the Soviet Union has gained a great deal of publicity; but the inevitable process of desocialization has proceeded much further in Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. Most advanced of all is Yugoslavia, which, freed from Stalinist rigidity earlier than its fellows, in only a dozen years has de-socialized so fast and so far that its economy is now hardly more socialistic than that of France. The fact that people calling themselves “communists” are still governing the country is irrelevant to the basic social and economic facts. Central planning in Yugoslavia has virtually disappeared. The private sector not only predominates in agriculture but is even strong in industry, and the public sector itself has been so radically decentralized and placed under free pricing, profit-and-loss tests and a cooperative worker-ownership of each plant that true socialism hardly exists any longer. Only the final step of converting workers’ syndical control to individual shares of ownership remains on the path toward outright capitalism. Communist China and the able Marxist theoreticians of Monthly Review have clearly discerned the situation and have raised the alarm that Yugoslavia is no longer a socialist country.

One would think that free-market economists would hail the confirmation and increasing relevance of the notable insight of Professor Ludwig von Mises a half-century ago: that socialist states, being necessarily devoid of a genuine price system, could not calculate economically and, therefore, could not plan their economies with any success. Indeed, one follower of Mises, in effect, predicted this process of desocialization in a novel some years ago. Yet neither this author nor other free-market economists have given the slightest indication of even recognizing, let alone saluting, this process in the communist countries — perhaps because their almost hysterical view of the alleged threat of communism prevents them from acknowledging any dissolution in the supposed monolith of menace. [19]

Communist countries, therefore, are increasingly and ineradicably forced to desocialize and will, therefore, eventually reach the free market. The state of the undeveloped countries is also cause for sustained libertarian optimism. For all over the world, the peoples of the undeveloped nations are engaged in revolution to throw off their feudal Old Order. It is true that the United States is doing its mightiest to suppress the very revolutionary process that once brought it and Western Europe out of the shackles of the Old Order; but it is increasingly clear that even overwhelming armed might cannot suppress the desire of the masses to break through into the modern world.

We are left with the United States and the countries of Western Europe. Here, the case for optimism is less clear, for the quasi-collectivist system does not present as stark a crisis of self-contradiction as does socialism. And yet, here, too, economic crisis looms in the future and gnaws away at the complacency of the Keynesian economic managers: creeping inflation, reflected in the aggravating balance-of-payments breakdown of the once almighty dollar; creeping secular unemployment brought about by minimum wage scales; and the deeper and long-run accumulation of the uneconomic distortions of the permanent war economy. Moreover, potential crises in the United States are not merely economic; there is a burgeoning and inspiring moral ferment among the youth of America against the fetters of centralized bureaucracy, of mass education in uniformity, and of brutality and oppression exercised by the minions of the State.

Furthermore, the maintenance of a substantial degree of free speech and democratic forms facilitates, at least in the short run, the possible growth of a libertarian movement. The United States is also fortunate in possessing, even if half-forgotten beneath the statist and tyrannical overlay of the last half-century, a great tradition of libertarian thought and action. The very fact that much of this heritage is still reflected in popular rhetoric, even though stripped of its significance in practice, provides a substantial ideological groundwork for a future party of liberty.

What the Marxists would call the “objective conditions” for the triumph of liberty exist, then, everywhere in the world and more so than in any past age; for everywhere the masses have opted for higher living standards and the promise of freedom and everywhere the various regimes of statism and collectivism cannot fulfill these goals. What is needed, then, is simply the “subjective conditions” for victory; that is, a growing body of informed libertarians who will spread the message to the peoples of the world that liberty and the purely free market provide the way out of their problems and crises. Liberty cannot be fully achieved unless libertarians exist in number to guide the peoples to the proper path. But perhaps the greatest stumbling block to the creation of such a movement is the despair and pessimism typical of the Libertarian in today’s world. Much of that pessimism is due to his misreading of history and his thinking of himself and his handful of confreres as irredeemably isolated from the masses and, therefore, from the winds of history. Hence he becomes a lone critic of historical events rather than a person who considers himself as part of a potential movement which can and will make history. The modern Libertarian has forgotten that the Liberal of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries faced odds much more overwhelming than those which face the Liberal of today; for in that era before the Industrial Revolution, the victory of liberalism was far from inevitable. And yet the liberalism of that day was not content to remain a gloomy little sect; instead, it unified theory and action. Liberalism grew and developed as an ideology and, leading and guiding the masses, made the revolution which changed the fate of the world. By its monumental breakthrough, this revolution of the eighteenth century transformed history from a chronicle of stagnation and despotism to an ongoing movement advancing toward a veritable secular utopia of liberty and rationality and abundance. The Old Order is dead or moribund; and the reactionary attempts to run a modern society and economy by various throwbacks to the Old Order are doomed to total failure. The Liberals of the past have left to modern Libertarians a glorious heritage, not only of ideology but of victories against far more devastating odds. The Liberals of the past have also left a heritage of the proper strategy and tactics for libertarians to follow, not only by leading rather than remaining aloof from the masses, but also by not falling prey to short-run optimism. For short-run optimism, being unrealistic, leads straightway to disillusion and then to long-run pessimism; just as, on the other side of the coin, long-run pessimism leads to exclusive and self-defeating concentration on immediate and short-run issues. Short-run optimism stems, for one thing, from a naïve and simplistic view of strategy: that liberty will win merely by educating more intellectuals, who in turn will educate opinion-molders, who in turn will convince the masses, after which the State will somehow fold its tent and silently steal away. Matters are not that easy. For libertarians face not only a problem of education but also a problem of power, and it is a law of history that a ruling caste has never voluntarily given up its power.

But the problem of power is, certainly in the United States, far in the future. For the Libertarian, the main task of the present epoch is to cast off his needless and debilitating pessimism, to set his sights on long-run victory and to set out on the road to its attainment. To do this, he must, perhaps first of all, drastically realign his mistaken view of the ideological spectrum; he must discover who his friends and natural allies are, and above all perhaps, who his enemies are. Armed with this knowledge, let him proceed in the spirit of radical long-run optimism that one of the great figures in the history of libertarian thought, Randolph Bourne, correctly identified as the spirit of youth. Let Bourne’s stirring words serve also as the guidepost for the spirit of liberty:

[Y]outh is the incarnation of reason pitted against the rigidity of tradition; youth puts the remorseless questions to everything that is old and established — Why? What is this thing good for? And when it gets the mumbled, evasive answers of the defenders it applies its own fresh, clean spirit of reason to institutions, customs and ideas and finding them stupid, inane or poisonous, turns instinctively to overthrow them and build in their place the things with which its visions teem. . . .

Youth is the leaven that keeps all these questioning, testing attitudes fermenting in the world. If it were not for this troublesome activity of youth, with its hatred of sophisms and glosses, its insistence on things as they are, society would die from sheer decay. It is the policy of the older generation as it gets adjusted to the world to hide away the unpleasant things where it can, or preserve a conspiracy of silence and an elaborate pretense that they do not exist. But meanwhile the sores go on festering just the same. Youth is the drastic antiseptic. . . . It drags skeletons from closets and insists that they be explained. No wonder the older generation fears and distrusts the younger. Youth is the avenging Nemesis on its trail. . . .

Our elders are always optimistic in their views of the present, pessimistic in their views of the future; youth is pessimistic toward the present and gloriously hopeful for the future. And it is this hope which is the lever of progress — one might say, the only lever of progress. . . .

The secret of life is then that this fine youthful spirit shall never be lost. Out of the turbulence of youth should come this fine precipitate — a sane, strong, aggressive spirit of daring and doing. It must be a flexible, growing spirit, with a hospitality to new ideas and a keen insight into experience. To keep one’s reactions warm and true is to have found the secret of perpetual youth, and perpetual youth is salvation. [20]

Translations for this article:

• Chinese, 左与右：自由的前景

References:

[1] Gertrude Himmelfarb, Lord Acton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), pp. 204–05.

[2] Ibid., p. 209.

[3] Carl Becker, The Declaration of Independence (New York: Vintage Books, 1958), chap. 6.

[4] The information about Comte and Dunoyer, as well, indeed, as the entire analysis of the ideological spectrum, I owe to Mr. Leonard P. Liggio. For an emphasis on the positive and dynamic aspect of the Utopian drive, much traduced in our time, see Alan Milchman, “The Social and Political Philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Utopia and Ideology,” The November Review (November, 1964): 3–10. Also cf. Jurgen Ruhle, “The Philosopher of Hope: Ernst Bloch,” in Leopold Labedz, ed., Revisionism 

[5] Joseph A. Schumpeter, Imperialism and Social Classes (New York: Meridian Books, 1955), p. 175. Schumpeter, incidentally, realized that, far from being an inherent stage of capitalism, modern imperialism was a throwback to the precapitalist imperialism of earlier ages, but with a minority of privileged capitalists now joined to the feudal and military castes in promoting imperialist aggression.

[6] Bernard Semmel, Imperialism and Social Reform: English Social-Imperial Thought, 1895–1914 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960).

[7] Leopold S. Amery, My Political Life (1953). Quoted in Semmel, Imperialism and Social Reform, pp. 74–75.

[8] The point, of course, is not that these men were products of some “Fabian conspiracy,” but, on the contrary, that Fabianism, by the turn of the century, was socialism so conservatized as to be closely aligned with the other dominant neo-Conservative trends in British political life.

[9] Thus, see Horace O. Davis, “Nations, Colonies, and Social Classes: The Position of Marx and Engels,” Science and Society (Winter, 1965): 26–43.

[10] See the penetrating article by Alexander J. Groth, “The ‘Isms’ in Totalitarianism,” American Political Science Review (December, 1964): 888–901. Groth writes:

Undoubtedly, the Fascist economic system was not a free-market economy, and hence not “capitalist” if one wishes to restrict the use of this term to a laissez-faire system. But did it not operate . . . to preserve in being and maintain the material rewards of, the existing socioeconomic elites?

[11] For examples of the attractions of fascist and right-wing collectivist ideas and plans for American big businessmen in this era, see Murray N. Rothbard, America’s Great Depression (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 2000). Also cf. Gaetano Salvemini and George LaPiana, What to Do With Italy (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1943), pp. 65ff.

A recent story out of Elwood, Indiana once again underscores the pervasiveness of victim blaming in our culture. In Elwood, a 14-year-old girl faces relentless bullying and harassment, all because she was raped and impregnated by a 17 year old boy. “I can’t walk out the door without someone calling me a whore or slut,” she said. Locals have vandalized her family’s home, writing misogynistic slurs on their garage doors.

This story is a horrifying reminder of how often people in our society blame and re-victimize survivors of violence and abuse. But often victim blaming isn’t just perpetuated by individuals, but institutionalized, as  in the US military. Lisa Wilken, who was raped in the US Air Force, told USA Today, “The damage that has been done to me hasn’t been by the act of the assault, it has been the treatment that I have received through the process.” Likewise, there have been many cases of prisoners being threatened and attacked by guards for reporting rapes.

And while victim blaming in sexual violence cases is particularly traumatizing, victim blaming is often applied to other forms of violence as well. For example, it permeates the justifications given for US bombings that kill civilians. The Obama administration claims that all military age males killed are “militants” until proven otherwise. Even 16-year old American citizen Abdulrahman Al-Awlaki was initially branded a militant after a US drone strike killed him in Yemen, although as Glenn Greenwald points out “nobody claims the teenager was anything but completely innocent.”

After Abdulrahman was identified, a different style of victim blaming was used. When asked about the executive branch killing an innocent American 16-year old, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs responded “I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father if they are truly concerned about the well being of their children.” Gibbs was referencing Anwar al-Awlaki, Abdulrahman’s father, an American citizen and radical Muslim cleric who was also assassinated by the US government with no charges or trial. Anwar al-Awlaki was already known to be dead by the time Abdulrahman was killed, so it is not just cruel to blame him for his son’s death, but chronologically absurd.

Victim blaming is similarly used to justify state violence at home — for example, in cases of police militarization.

Late at night on January 4th, 2012, armed men broke into Matthew Stewart’s home with guns blazing.  Matthew, a startled gun owner and military veteran, fired back on the home invaders, killing one and wounding several others. Stewart was also severely wounded and hospitalized.

In an ordinary home invasion, the victim would not be blamed for defending himself. But in this case the aggressors were police officers, so Matthew Stewart was jailed and the state began a victim blaming smear campaign against him. The accusations flew fast. Weber County Attorney Dee Smith was not content to just smear Matthew Stewart as a “cop killer,” seek the death penalty against him, and claim that the cops were justified in their aggression because Matthew was peacefully growing marijuana plants. No, he also found it necessary to spread baseless lies that Matthew Stewart was a pedophile and a terrorist. All this because Matthew defended his home from violent aggressors.

After a year and a half of abuse in jail, Matthew Stewart committed suicide. And the victim blaming and degradation still didn’t end. Police officers trespassed in his home again even after he was dead and the state’s case against him was closed. Officer Jason Vanderwarf harassed Matthew’s grieving family members on Facebook, writing “now you all can feel our pain.” Vanderwarf was one of the initial aggressors, having lied on the initial search warrant and participated in the home invasion.

Here are two simple principles for decent human beings: 1) Initiating violence is wrong; 2) Don’t blame the victims of aggression and violence.

We need to stand up for these principles. And we need to hold those who violate them accountable, whether they are rapists, misogynists, military commanders, presidents, prosecutors, or police.

Naomi Wolf is taking a lot of flak this week from supporters of alleged NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden for her suggestion (via Facebook post) that Snowden may “not be who he purports to be” and that his “emphases seem to serve an intelligence/police state objective, rather than to challenge them.” The upshot, of course, being that perhaps Snowden isn’t blowing a real whistle against the state, but instead disseminating disinformation on the state’s behalf.

One particularly nasty response, from David Lindorff at Counterpunch, charges Wolf with “wild-eyed speculation,” “baseless and libelous accusations” and — oh, the humanity! — “self-promotion and grandstanding.”

On the one hand, I’m not sure that Wolf is really on to anything here. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes a whistleblower really is someone who’s seen too much and thinks the world needs to see it too.

On the other hand, I don’t find Wolf’s musings outrageous. A bit paranoid, perhaps, but who can blame her? We’re well past the point where it’s become obvious that yes, they really ARE out to get us.

What’s behind the vitriolic responses to Wolf? In my opinion, two things: Confirmation bias and tunnel vision.

Most of us out here in the wilderness of political dissent have long suspected that the US government’s intelligence collection activities are closer to all-encompassing than the government itself usually admits to. That suspicion isn’t wild speculation — long before Snowden revealed the alleged details of the NSA’s phone and Internet spying, politicians and bureaucratic lobbyists had publicly advocated for and requested exactly those capabilities. Yes, they were shouted down and censured in public  … but that doesn’t mean they didn’t get what they wanted in the government’s hidden “black” budget lines.

Snowden is telling us the one thing everyone loves to hear: That we’ve been right all along. Naturally, we want very much to believe him. That’s called confirmation bias. It doesn’t mean he’s lying. It just means we’re prone to believe him because we want to, rather than because we should.

Most of us out here in the wilderness of political dissent — and yes, this includes me — also often miss the forest for the trees when considering the intent and impact of government statements and admissions. The trees are us activists on the political margins. Our relationship to the state is adversarial, and we naively (and perhaps a bit grandiosely) assume that when the US government addresses matters we care about, it is talking to us. But that’s usually not the case.

Usually, when government addresses matters we care about, it is talking to the forest: The hundreds of millions of Americans who fall into the “mainstream” or “apolitical” (or as we special, beautiful, dissident trees like to sneer, “apathetic”) categories of civic involvement.

How does this tunnel vision affect our assessment of Snowden’s revelations?

Well, the way we trees see it, the government has been “forced” to “admit” that it’s doing nasty, illegal things that concern us and that all right-thinking people (i.e. people who think like us trees) will find outrageous.

But how does “the forest” see it? Being a tree myself, I can only guess, but my guess is that they see it the way they see most displays — even allegedly accidental ones — of government power. That is, they see it as a warning not to step out of line. A warning against discussing things on the Internet or over the phone that Uncle Sugar might not approve of. A warning, to put as fine a point as possible on it, that Big Brother is watching them.

At some point, an emerging police state stops trying to hide or justify its nastiness and starts emphasizing and flaunting that nastiness — although it may do so subtly or indirectly instead of openly. Its minions no longer worry about convincing you they’re right. They’re content to just bully, threaten and scare you into submission.

Wolf’s hypothesis is that the Snowden revelations may be an intentional instance of the latter — perhaps timed to distract attention from the trial of real whistleblower Bradley Manning — rather than an accidental failure of the former. Is she right? I don’t know. But the idea is far from outrageous, and should be taken seriously.

Last Wednesday I gave a talk titled “Which Way Forward for the LGBTQ Movement” in which I argued that LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning) rights are undermined by the state and capitalism, and that anarchism is the solution. Topics discussed include the Stonewall Riots, police violence, prisons, HRC, Jane Marquardt, Israeli pinkwashing, healthcare, patents, and the repression of Private Manning.