Ancaps Are Anarchists, Ancoms Are Not. I can prove it.

These reveal the following critical quotations:

“I protest that in criticising property, or rather the whole body of institutions of which property is the pivot, I never meant either to attack the individual rights recognized by previous laws, or to dispute the legitimacy of acquired possessions, or to instigate an arbitrary distribution of goods, or to put an obstacle in the way of the free and regular acquisition of properties by bargain and sale; or even to prohibit or suppress by sovereign decree land-rent and interest on capital. I think that all these manifestations of human activity should remain free and optional for all; I would admit no other modifications, restrictions, or suppressions of them than naturally and necessarily result from the universalization of the principle of reciprocity and of the law of synthesis which I propound. This is my last will and testament. I allow only him to suspect its sincerity, who could tell a lie in the moment of death.” - Proudhon (Proudhon explicitly stating his support for sticky private property)

“Interest is neither a crime nor an offense” - Proudhon (Proudhon explicitly stating interest is not a violation of rights)

“this fundamental denial of Interest does not destroy, in our view, the principle – the right, if you will – which gives birth to Interest, and which has enabled it to continue to this day in spite of its condemnation by secular and ecclesiastical authority. So that the real problem before us is not to ascertain whether Usury, per se, is illegitimate (in this respect we are of the opinion of the Church), nor whether it has an excuse for its existence (on this point we agree with the economists). The problem is to devise a means of suppressing the abuse without violating the Right – a means, in a word, of reconciling this contradiction.” - Proudhon (Proudhon further stating he does not see interest as inconsistent with property rights, proving his support for sticky private property)

“Laissez Faire was very good sauce for the goose, labor, but was very poor sauce for the gander, capital.” - Tucker (Tucker affirming his support for an unregulated market)

“capitalism is at least tolerable, which cannot be said of state socialism or communism” - Tucker (Tucker affirming that capitalism as a system is tolerable and superior to state socialism)

“My Wichita Falls comrade, Mr. Warren, falls into error when he accuses me of “adopting the nomenclature of a class with whom no individualist could harmonize,” meaning, I suppose, by this class the Communists who call themselves Anarchists. Is Mr. Warren aware that the Chicago men never dreamed of adopting the name Anarchist until long after Liberty was started, and that the Communistic Anarchists of Europe did not so style themselves until nearly forty years after Proudhon used the name, for the first time in the world, to designate a social philosophy? Proudhon was an individualist, and to him and those who fundamentally agree with him belongs, by right of discovery and use, the employment of the word Anarchy in scientific terminology. We individualists hold the original title, and we do not propose to be evicted by the first upstart Communist who comes along with a fraudulent claim.” - Tucker (Tucker rejecting the notion that anarcho-communists were genuine anarchists)

“First, I must begin by affirming my conviction that Lysander Spooner and Benjamin R. Tucker were unsurpassed as political philosophers and that nothing is more needed today than a revival and development of the largely forgotten legacy that they left to political philosophy.” - Rothbard (Rothbard praising political philosophy of individualist anarchists)

“I am, therefore, strongly tempted to call myself an “individualist anarchist,” except for the fact that Spooner and Tucker have in a sense preempted that name for their doctrine and that from that doctrine I have certain differences. Politically, these differences are minor, and therefore the system that I advocate is very close to theirs; but economically, the differences are substantial, and this means that my view of the consequences of putting our more or less common system into practice is very far from theirs.” - Rothbard (Rothbard furthermore affirming his differences were almost entirely economic)

In addition to the fact that the individualists explicitly rejected collectivization of property: "In the organization’s second annual congress at Berne, Switzerland, members voted on what their official position should be on collectivizing privately owned land. Chaudey, along with most of the self described Anarchists voted against that, which made sense, since at the time Anarchist largely meant someone who held Proudhon’s views, more or less. However, Bakunin emerged as the leader of a new faction of self described anarchists who called themselves collectivists. They voted with the likes of Karl Marx and other state socialists to collectivize property. Fortunately though, despite this defection, the Proudhonists still won the vote."

To address Proudhon's property is robbery quotation - " And yet, the very same collectivist anarchists who so fiercely denounce Rothbardianism tend to be much more willing to accept Proudhon as “The father of anarchism”. Why is that? Well, essentially it boils down to a statement Proudhon makes in that same essay in answer to the title of the work: “Property is robbery!”. On its surface, this sounds quite antithetical to the Rothbardian view, not to mention self contradictory. How can property be theft, when the concept of theft itself presupposes the idea of property? And it gets even more complicated when Proudhon, in a later work entitled “Systems of economical contradictions” declares “Property is Liberty!” while still maintaining the Property is theft line.

So what is going on here? Well, to answer that question, we have to understand that Proudhon is French. And there are two very important implications of that. Firstly, it means he’s part of the tradition of continental philosophy, so like Neitzche, Hegel and Foucualt he has a tendency to write somewhat poetically, even at the expense of clarity at times. And secondly, in 19th century France, and Europe as a whole, a large portion of land was still owned by aristocrats, who had acquired their land, and therefore their wealth, not by homesteading, and providing value through a series of voluntary transactions, but by being part of the state. So this property was indeed theft in the straightforward Rothbardian sense. That is, it was land stolen from the peasants who worked it by a hereditary class of nobles that formed the medieval state.

These landed titles were rightfully abolished in the French Revolution of 1789, but were later partially restored. By the time of the 1840s when Proudhon wrote “what is property”? French society was again becoming discontent with this state of affairs. So, the property that Proudhon identifies with Liberty is not in principle the same as the property he identifies with theft, but he believed that in practice the two had become entangled, and the essence of his political ideology, which he named “Anarchism” was an effort to disentangle the two. At one point in “What is Property” Proudhon makes this explicit, declaring his agreement with another philosopher Pierre Leroux in the statement “There is property and property, — the one good, the other bad. Now, as it is proper to call different things by different names, if we keep the name ‘property’ for the former, we must call the latter robbery, rapine, brigandage. If, on the contrary, we reserve the name ‘property’ for the latter, we must designate the former by the term possession, or some other equivalent; otherwise we should be troubled with an unpleasant synonymy.”

When a classical liberal economist, Jérôme-Adolphe Blanqui wrote to Proudhon saying that it was not really property he wanted to abolish, but the abuse of property, Proudhon basically agreed, saying: “M. Blanqui acknowledges that property is abused in many harmful ways; I call property the sum of these abuses exclusively. To each of us property seems a polygon whose angles need knocking off; but, the operation performed, M. Blanqui maintains that the figure will still be a polygon, while I consider that this figure will be a circle.” It is kind of strange that he would say this and then go on to say property is liberty, but this was quite a while before he wrote that in his essay “economical contradictions”, so he presumably changed his mind about whether the term “property” could be salvaged in the interim. "

To address Rothbard referring to right-libertarians "stealing" a word - " Modern collectivist anarchists often like to cite a certain couple out of context Rothbard quotes in order to claim that he and his followers are not anarchists. Firstly Rothbard wrote:

“One gratifying aspect of our rise to some prominence is that, for the first time in my memory, we, “our side,” had captured a crucial word from the enemy. Other words, such as “liberal,” had been originally identified with laissez-faire libertarians, but had been captured by left-wing statists, forcing us in the 1940s to call ourselves rather feebly “true” or “classical” liberals. “Libertarians,” in contrast, had long been simply a polite word for left-wing anarchists, that is for anti-private property anarchists, either of the communist or syndicalist variety. But now we had taken it over, and more properly from the view of etymology; since we were proponents of individual liberty and therefore of the individual’s right to his property”

As I noted earlier, the word Libertarian did come into consistent use by the communists to which Rothbard refers until around the turn of the 20th century, and before that it had been used on and off by both sides, although it was originally coined by the communist Joseph Dejacque. In the 20th century though, the term was actually first taken by “Our side” on the suggestion of Dean Russell, shortly followed by Frank Chodorov. Chodorov’s involvement makes me suspect that this was influenced by his days as an anarchist, but I can’t prove that. In any case, in this quote Rothbard is referring to the word “Libertarian” not the word “Anarchist”, and somewhat ironically, modern Rothbardians actually have a much better historical claim to the word “Anarchist” than the word Libertarian. "

To address Rothbard seemingly disavowing the word anarchism - " “Aha!” say the collectivists!, but what about the Rothbard quote where he says “We are not anarchists”? Well, let’s look at that one one in context.

“We must conclude that the question “are libertarians anarchists?” simply cannot be answered on etymological grounds. The vagueness of the term itself is such that the libertarian system would be considered anarchist by some people and archist by others. We must therefore turn to history for enlightenment; here we find that none of the proclaimed anarchist groups correspond to the libertarian position, that even the best of them have unrealistic and socialistic elements in their doctrines. Furthermore, we find that all of the current anarchists are irrational collectivists, and therefore at opposite poles from our position. We must therefore conclude that we are not anarchists, and that those who call us anarchists are not on firm etymological ground, and are being completely unhistorical. On the other hand, it is clear that we are not archists either: we do not believe in establishing a tyrannical central authority that will coerce the noninvasive as well as the invasive. Perhaps, then, we could call ourselves by a new name: nonarchist.”

The first thing to note about this quote is that its from an article that Rothbard never had published, and it contradicts the angle Rothbard states multiple times in other sources both before and after this was written in the mid 1950s. Rothbard was calling himself a “private property anarchist” in private correspondence by 1950, and In Betrayal of The American Right, Rothbard specifically says “I became an anarchist”, and he says the same thing in a talk he gave on his ideological development in 1981, just as a couple of quick examples.

Secondly, if you carefully compare this quote to what he wrote in “The Spooner Tucker Doctrine”, the only difference is that in that text, he emphasizes that his disagreements with Spooner and Tucker about actual political prescriptions are only minor. "

Joseph Dejacque even appeared to concede the word "anarchism" to Proudhon - " In fact the only person who was calling himself a Libertarian in Proudhon’s day was the first person to do so, Joseph Dejacque. Somewhat ironically, Dejacque was a bitter rival of Proudhon’s, and denounced his individualism. First identifying with Proudhon’s term “Anarchist”, Dejacque soon began to use the term “Libertarian” more frequently, calling Proudhon a “center right anarchist, liberal and not libertarian”. Unlike many other self described socialists of the time, Dejacque was not at all interested in workers keeping the product of their labor. Instead, he maintained that one’s economic contributions were irrelevant, and anytime anyone produced anything of value they were obligated to give it to whoever needed it for free. "

The original anarchists agreed with Proudhon - " Indeed, as long as Proudhon lived the Anarchist movement as a whole would remain relatively close to his views. Even of those self described anarchists who he had some disagreements with often did not disagree with him in a direction that modern anarcho-communists would like. "

Does this evidence hold up? I really don't see how this isn't clear and obvious proof of individualist anarchism's roots in the exact same political philosophy as capitalist anarchism, the only difference being their economic predictions of a laissez-faire market. In fact I would go as far as to say that Tucker explicitly stated that anarcho-communists were attempting to co-opt the term and pretty much rejected the idea that they were anarchists; this was far before anyone rejected the validity of capitalist anarchism. I also provided a fairly comprehensive post explaining everything, in both article and video form, and I provided links to ebooks containing some of these major quotations. NOTE: all non quotes from a political thinker came from the first linked article. Credit to where it is due.

source

Comments

Sort:hotnew top