The Complete Libertarian Forum 1969–1984. Edited by Murray N. Rothbard
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Note: This is part of a collection of works by Murray N. Rothbard.
Source
The Mises Institute has made available an electronic version of Rothbard's important "newsletter", called The Libertarian for the first few issues, and then afterwards The Libertarian Forum, which played an important role in the early years of the modern libertarian movement. It can be found at its website in ePub and facsimile PDF versions here <https://mises.org/library/complete-libertarian-forum-1969-1984>.
Facsimile PDF version: The Complete Libertarian Forum 1969-1984. Edited by Murray N. Rothbard. Volume 1: 1969-1975 and Volume 2: 1976-1984 (Auburn, Alabama: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2006).
ePub version: The Complete Libertarian Forum 1969-1984. Edited by Murray N. Rothbard. (Auburn, Alabama: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2012).
Contents
There are two tables of contents here, one "short" with year and volume number, the other "long" with this as well as a list of contetns of the main articles in each issue.
Short ToC
Full ToC
- Preview Issue, March 1, 1969
- Vol. 1.1, April 1, 1969
- Vol. 1.2, April 15, 1969
- Vol. 1.3, May 1, 1969
- Vol. 1.4, May 15, 1969
- Vol. 1.5, June 1, 1969
- Vol. 1.6, June 15, 1969
- Vol. 1.7, July 1, 1969
- Vol. 1.8, July 15, 1969
- Vol. 1.9, August 1, 1969
- Vol. 1.10, August 15, 1969
- Vol. 1.11, September 1, 1969
- Vol. 1.12, September 15, 1969
- Vol. 1.13, October 1, 1969
- Vol. 1.14, October 15, 1969
- Vol. 1.15, November 1, 1969
- Vol. 1.16, November 15, 1969
- Vol. 1.17, November 15, 1969
- Vol. 1.18, December 15, 1969
- Vol. 2.1, January 1, 1970
- Vol. 2.2, January 15, 1970
- Vol. 2.3, February 1, 1970
- Vol. 2.4, February 15, 1970
- Vol. 2.5, March 1, 1970
- Vol. 2.6, March 15, 1970
- Vol. 2.7, April 1, 1970
- Vol. 2.8, April 15, 1970
- Vol. 2.9, May 1, 1970
- Vol. 2.10, May 15, 1970
- Vol. 2.11, June 1, 1970
- Vol. 2.12, June 15, 1970
- Vol. 2.13–14, July, 1970
- Vol. 2.15–16, August, 1970
- Vol. 2.17, September 1, 1970
- Vol. 2.18, September 15, 1970
- Vol. 2.19, October 1, 1970
- Vol. 2.20, October 15, 1970
- Vol. 2.21, November 1, 1970
- Vol. 2.22–23, November 15–December 1, 1970
- Vol. 2.24, December 15, 1970
- Vol. 3.1, January 1971
- Vol. 3.2, February 1971
- Vol. 3.3, March 1971
- Vol. 3.4, April 1971
- Vol. 3.5, May 1971
- Vol. 3.6, June 1971
- Vol. 3.6–7, July–August 1971
- Vol. 3.8, September 1971
- Vol. 3.9, October 1971
- Vol. 3.10, November 1971
- Vol. 3.11, December 1971
- Vol. 4.1, January 1972
- Vol. 4.2, February 1972
- Vol. 4.3, March 1972
- Vol. 4.4, April 1972
- Vol. 4.5, May 1972
- Vol. 4.6–7, June–July 1972
- McGovern???
- The Party Emerges
- Another Lone Nut
- Review of John Hospers' Libertarianism, Part II (R.A. Childs, Jr.)
- Anationalism and Immortality (Jerome Tuccille)
- The Polish Ham Question (Walter Block)
- Arts and Movies (Mr. First Nighter)
- Garbage in New York (Joseph R. Peden)
- Academic Freedom? (Peter Sherman)
- Vol. 4.8–9, August–September 1972 (This issue features Joseph Peden as editor)
- Confronting Leviathan
- Arbitration: A Fundamental Alternate Institution (Ralph Fucetola, III)
- The Law of the Sea
- Transnational Relations
- Review of Bruno Leoni's Freedom and the Law (Gary Greenberg)
- Localism and Bureaucracy In the 19th Century China (M. Rubenstein)
- Bombing the Dikes
- America's Newest Enemies
- Vol. 4.8, October 1972
- Vol. 4.9, November 1972
- Vol. 4.10, December 1972
- The Movement
- Hospers on Crime and the FBI
- The Blackmailer as Hero (Walter Block)
- From the Old Curmudgeon
- Ezra Pound, RIP (James Dale Davidson)
- We Make the Electoral College!
- Freedom, Pot, and National Review
- Recommended Reading
- A Response to the Challenge (Tibor Machan)
- The Editor Replies
- Bormann Once More
- Vol. 4.11, January 1973
- Vol. 5.2, February 1973
- Vol. 5.3, March 1973
- Vol. 5.4, April 1973
- Present at the Creation
- Tax Rebellion
- Personal "Freedom": Review of Harry Browne's How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World (R.A. Childs, Jr.)
- The IBM Case: A Comment (Dominick T. Armentano)
- Contra Psychological "Liberation"
- Jim Davidson and the Week That Was
- From the Halls of Montezuma . . . (Joseph R. Peden)
- Monthly Index of Liberty
- Recommended Reading
- Vol. 5.5, May 1973
- Notes on Watergate
- Review of Murray Rothbard's For A New Liberty (J. Neil Schulman)
- Floyd Arthur "Baldy" Harper, RIP
- McGovern vs. Rothbard
- Arts and Movies (Mr. First Nighter)
- Anti-Tax Demonstration (K.W. Kalcheim)
- Hospers On Rothbard's Rebuttal (John Hospers)
- Recommended Reading
- The Editor's Final Rebuttal
- Vol. 5.6, June 1973
- Vol. 5.7, July 1973
- Vol. 5.8, August 1973
- Vol. 5.9, September 1973
- Vol. 5.10, October 1973
- Hands off the Middle East!
- Libertarians and Culture: A Challenge (James Dale Davidson)
- Send Money!
- "The Libertarian": The Gospel According to LeFevre
- Revolution in Chile
- Friedman's Value-Free Value: Human Liberty (Tibor Machan)
- Technology Forever (Jerome Tuccille)
- Arts and Movies (Mr. First Nighter)
- Vol. 5.11, November 1973
- Ludwig von Mises, RIP
- Libertarian Party
- From the Old Curmudgeon
- The Middle East
- Music: The Art No One Thinks About (Kenneth LaFave)
- Arts and Movies (Mr. First Nighter)
- The Fall of the Republic
- Mr. First Nighter, Soft on the Enemy? (H. Primae Noctis)
- For Conspiracy Theorists Only!
- The "Final Solution" to the Arab Problem
- Vol. 5.12, December 1973
- Vol. 6.1, January 1974
- Vol. 6.2, February 1974
- Two Tiers Crumble
- Relevance?
- What Kind of "Purity"?
- An Open Letter to Irving Kristol
- Political Kidnapping
- Rothbardiana
- Arts and Movies (Mr. First Nighter)
- Background of Middle East Conflict (Bill Evers)
- Save the Oil Industry!
- The Home Front: Review of G. Perrett's Days of Sadness, Years of Triumph (Justus D. Doenecke)
- 101 Ways to Promote Libertarian Ideas
- Vol. 6.3, March 1974
- Vol. 6.4, April 1974
- Vol. 6.5, May 1974
- Vol. 6.6, June 1974
- Vol. 6.7, July 1974
- World-Wide Inflation
- Destutt de Tracy: Early French Classical Liberal (Leonard P. Liggio)
- Conservative Myths in History: Review of E.v. Kuehnelt-Leddihn's Leftism: From De Sade and Marx to Hitler and Marcuse (Ralph Raico)
- Comment on the CLA (Lynn Kinsky)
- The Prophetic Vision of Hillaire Belloc (John P. McCarthy)
- New Rothbard Book
- Vol. 6.8, August 1974
- Whoopee!!
- Kennedy Marriage Revisionism
- Libertarian Advance
- School or Jail?: Review of W. Rickenbacker's The Twelve Year Sentence (Joseph R. Peden)
- From the Old Curmudgeon
- Recommended Reading
- In Search of the Old Curmudgeon (James Dale Davidson)
- About Quotas (W.R. Havender)
- Arts and Movies (Mr. First Nighter)
- Vol. 6.9, September 1974
- Vol. 6.10, October 1974
- Vol. 6.11, November 1974
- Vol. 6.12, December 1974
- Vol. 7.1, January 1975
- Vol. 7.2, February 1975
- Vol. 7.3, March 1975
- Vol. 7.4, April 1975
- Vol. 7.5, May 1975
- Vol. 7.6, June 1975
- Vol. 7.7, July 1975
- Vol. 8.8, August 1975
- Vol. 8.9, September 1975
- Vol. 8.10, October 1975
- Vol. 8.11, November 1975
- Vol. 8.12, December 1975
- Stop Reagan!
- On Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia, I
- Whither Anarchy? Has Robert Nozick Justified the State? (Randy Barnett)
- From the Old Curmudgeon: My New Year's Wish for the Movement
- Recommended Reading
- LP Literature
- The Polish Question In Roosevelt-Churchill-Stalin Diplomacy (Leonard P. Liggio)
- Right-Center Chic
- Vol. 8.13, January 1976
- Vol. 9.2, February 1976
- Vol. 9.3, March 1976
- Vol. 9.4, April 1976
- Vol. 9.5, May 1976
- Vol. 9.6, June 1976
- Vol. 9.7, July 1976
- Vol. 9.8, August 1976
- Vol. 9.9, September 1976
- Vol. 9.10, October 1976
- Vol. 9.11, November 1976
- Vol. 9.12, December 1976
- Vol. 10.1, January 1977
- Vol. 10.2, February 1977
- Vol. 10.3, March 1977
- The New End of Ideology?
- In Defense of Gradualism (Robert Poole, Jr.)
- The Fallacy of Gradualism: A Reply (Tom G. Palmer)
- Human Rights at Home: the Flynt Case
- The New L.R.
- A Black Writer's View of Roots (Anne Wortham)
- A Great Day for Freedom
- From the Old Curmudgeon: The "Libertarian" Church
- Kidnappers at Large
- America and "Human Rights"—East Timor Division
- Arts and Movies (Mr. First Nighter)
- Zaire—Katanga Rises Again!
- Vol. 10.4, April 1977
- Vol. 10.5, May 1977
- Vol. 10.6, June 1977
- Vol. 10.7, July 1977
- Vol. 10.8, August 1977
- Vol. 10.9, September 1977
- Vol. 10.10, October 1977
- Vol. 10.11, November 1977
- Vol. 10.12, December 1977
- Vol. 11.1, January–February 1978
- Vol. 11.2, March–April 1978
- Vol. 11.3, May–June 1978
- Vol. 11.4, July–August 1978
- Vol. 11.5, September–October 1978
- Vol. 11.6, November–December 1978
- Vol. 12.1, January–February 1979
- Vol. 12.2, March–April 1979
- Vol. 12.3, May–June 1979
- Vol. 12.4, July–August 1979
- Nuclear Power Crisis
- Nuclear Power: Beyond "For" or "Against" (Milton Mueller)
- Technological Facts on Nuclear Energy
- Review of The Disaster Lobbby (R. Childs)
- Excerpt from The Disaster Lobby (Melvin J. Grayson & Thomas R. Shepard, Jr.)
- SLS Proposal (Milton Mueller)
- Current LP Planks (Bill Evers & Murray Rothbard)
- Late Bulletin: LR Suppresses Free and Open Debate on Nuclear Power!
- Vol. 12.5, September–October 1979
- Vol. 12.6, November–December 1979
- Vol. 13.1, January–February 1980
- Vol. 13.2, March–April 1980
- Vol. 13.3, May–June, 1980
- Vol. 13.4, July–August 1980
- Vol. 13.5–6, September–December 1980
- Vol. 14.1–2, January–April 1981
- Vol. 15.3–4, June–July 1981
- Crane/Cato Once More, Part 1: An Open Letter to the Crane Machine
- Catogate: Who's the Mole (or Moles) at Cato?
- Hallmarks of a Free Society
- The Moral Foundations of Property Rights (Brian Summers)
- Against the ERA (Wendy McElroy)
- Contra Reason: Review of Arianna Stassinopoulos' After Reason (Richard A. Cooper)
- For a New Liberty Back (Richard Cooper)
- Vol. 15.5–6, August 1981–January 1982
- Vol. 16.1, February 1982
- Vol. 16.2, March 1982
- Vol. 16.3, April 1982
- Vol. 16.4, May 1982
- Vol. 16.5, June 1982
- Vol. 16.6, July 1982
- Vol. 16.6, August 1982
- Vol. 16.7, September 1982
- Vol. 16.8, October 1982
- Vol. 16.9, November–December 1982
- Vol. 17.1, January 1983
- Vol. 17.2, February 1983
- Vol. 17.3, March 1983
- Vol. 17.4, April 1983
- Vol. 17.5–6, May–June 1983
- Vol. 17.7–8, July–August 1983
- Vol. 17.9–10, September–October 1983
- Vol. 17.11–12, November–December 1983
A Semi-Monthly Newsletter
The Libertarian↩
| Joseph R. Peden, Publisher | Washington Editor, Karl Hess | Murray N. Rothbard, Editor |
| PREVIEW ISSUE | MARCH 1, 1969 | 35¢ |
Why The Libertarian?
The libertarian movement is growing at a remarkable pace throughout the country. Yet the organizational forms, the means of communication, among libertarians are not only miniscule, but actually suffered a considerable blow during 1968. Last year saw the collapse of the Freedom School-Ramparts College of Palmer Lake, Colorado, with its attendant Ramparts Journal, Pine Tree Press, and Pine Tree Features. New Individualist Review, the theoretical quarterly published by graduate students at the University of Chicago, is all but defunct, and had been moribund for a long time. The need is acute for far more cohesion and inter-communication in the libertarian movement; in fact, it must become a movement and cease being merely an inchoate collection of diffuse and haphazard personal contacts.
The launching of The Libertarian, a twice-monthly newsletter, was announced at the first meeting of The Libertarian Forum, founded by Gerald Woloz and Joseph Peden in New York City for periodic dinners, lectures and discussions among libertarians. The fact that over sixty persons attended this initial dinner-meeting, some coming from as far away as Buffalo, Delaware, and South Carolina for the affair, demonstrates both the rapid growth of the movement and the widespread eagerness for increased activity and organization.
We believe that one of the greatest needs of the movement at this time is for a frequently appearing magazine that could act as a nucleus and communications center for libertarians across the country. We also believe that while many libertarians have thought long and hard about their ideal system, few of them have been able to rise above the merely sectarian exposition of the pure system to engage in a critique of the present state of affairs armed with the libertarian world-view. This kind of critique is not merely “negative”, as many libertarian sectarians believe. For it is the kind of work that is indispensable if we are ever to achieve victory, if we are ever to get our ideal system off the drawing board and applied to the real world. In order to change the present system we must be able to analyze and explore it, and to see in the concrete how our libertarian view can be applied to such an analysis and to the prospects for social change.
One would think that such a need would be obvious. No movement that has been successful has ever been without organs carrying out this kind of analysis and critique. The key word here is “successful”; for a magazine like The Libertarian is desperately needed only if we wish to unite theory and action, if we wish not only to elaborate an ideal system but to see how the current system may be transformed into the ideal. In short, it is needed only if our aim is victory; those who conceive of liberty as only an intellectual parlor game, or as a method for generating investment tips, will, alas, find little here to interest them. But let us hope that The Libertarian will be able to play a part in inspiring a truly dedicated movement on behalf of liberty.
The Nixon Administration: Creeping Cornuellism
Changeovers in Administration are always a disheartening time for any thoughtful observer of the political scene. The volume of treacle and pap rises to the heavens, as the wit and wisdom and the high statesmanship of both the outgoing and incoming rascals are trumpeted across the land. But this year things are even worse than ever. First we had to suffer the apotheosis of Lyndon Baines Johnson, before last November the most universally reviled President of modern times; but after November, suddenly lovable and wise. And now Richard Nixon has had his sharp edges dissolved and his whole Person made diffuse and mellow; he too has become uniquely lovable to all. How much longer must we suffer this tripe? It is bad enough that we have to live under a despotic government; must we also have our intelligence systematically defiled? Already, Ted Lewis of the New York Daily News, a dedicated Nixonian, tells us gleefully that the new charm and grace and folksy friendliness of Dick and his aides are so pronounced that maybe this time the Presidential “honeymoon” will last the full four years.
Amidst the cloud of goo surrounding the new Administration, it has been difficult for anyone to penetrate the fog and figure out what the new President is all about. Of the thousands of top jobs at the immediate disposal of the new Administration, only 90 have been filled. We have been getting inured to both parties and both sets of rulers having the same policies; but now it looks as if the very same people continue in power, regardless of who happens to be chosen by the public. How much clearer can it be that the much vaunted free elections in the United States are a sham and a fraud, designed to lull the public into believing that their votes really count? It had long become physically impossible for any of us to cast a vote against such ageless and lifetime oligarchs as J. Edgar Hoover; now the same applies to almost everyone in government. In the few cases where the same people do not remain, there is a game of musical chairs with a few people shuffling in and out of the usual Establishment institutions: General Dynamics, Cal Tech, Litton Industries, the Chase Bank, etc. Certainly nothing startling can be expected on Vietnam, where Ellsworth Bunker remains as Ambassador, William Bundy, a longtime hawk, remains in the State Department post on Southeast Asia, and Henry Sabotage returns to head the negotiations in Paris.
Add to all this the fact that the Nixon Administration has been remarkably quiet and torpid—to the hosannahs of the press who proclaim that a return to Babbitt is just what the country needs—and one begins to wonder if there will be any change at all. To the cognoscenti, a little-heralded article in the Washington Post (Jan. 26) makes clear that a new note will indeed be added. It is a note that will mark the peculiar essence of the Nixon content and style; we might call it “Creeping Cornuellism”.
The rise to fame and fortune of Richard C. Cornuelle is a peculiarly 20th-century variant of the Alger success story. Twenty years ago, Dick, a bright young libertarian, was a student of the eminent laissez-faire economist Ludwig von Mises at New York University; and with a few other libertarians of that era he soon saw that the consistent libertarian and laissez-faire position is really “right-wing anarchism”.
As the years went on, Dick decided to abandon the world of scholarship for direct action, which he originally saw as bringing us closer to anarchism in practical, realistic terms. On reading De Tocqueville, he claims to have been the first person in over a century to realize that there exists, in addition to government and private business, a third set of institutions—non-profit organizations. Anyone who had ever heard of a church bazaar also realized this, but Dick brushed such considerations aside; he had found his gimmick, his shtick. He dubbed these non-profit institutions the “independent sector”, and he was off to the races.
After several years of promoting such startlingly new activities as private welfare to the aged, and loans to college students, Dick found a disciple: T. George Harris, an editor of Look. Taking advantage of the Goldwater debacle, Harris published an article in Look at the year’s end of 1964, hailing Dick Cornuelle as the New Messiah, of the Republican party and of the nation, and heralding as the new Gospel a book which Cornuelle was working on—with the substantial assistance of Harris himself. On the strength of the article, Dick’s book was published by Random House, he became Executive Vice-President of the National Association of Manufacturers, and revered advisor to Nixon, Romney, and Reagan, thus pulling off one of the neatest tricks of the decade.
Cornuelle’s stress was on the glory of private charitable institutions, and on the importance of businessmen contributing to more private welfare programs. In another worshipful article following up the Look piece, the San Francisco Examiner (March 28, 1965) asked Dick the $64 question: In essence, if the voluntary welfare sector is so great, where do you fit in? In short, what’s your program? Here entered the virus of Cornuellism. For it seems that, as superb as it is, the “Independent Sector didn’t keep pace while the rest of the country was developing.” The Independent Sector, it seems, has “never learned to organize human activity efficiently.” The Examiner adds: “To show the Independents how, Cornuelle thinks it may be necessary to add another department to the Federal government, of all things . . . It would be an agency that would find out what public problems are coming up and decide how to meet them effectively.” Proclaiming enthusiastic support from all wings of the Republican Party, as well as—big surprise!—a “number of liberal Democrats”, Cornuelle wistfully admitted that the one exception to the Cornuelle bandwagon was Governor Rockefeller, because “He’s committed to state action as opposed to Federal action.” So much for right-wing anarchism!
There is no need to keep belaboring the Cornuelle Saga, After all we are not so much interested in the triumph of one man’s career over “dogmatism” as we are in what this portends for the Nixon Administration. For here is what the Washington Post now reports: a “central theme” of the new Administration will be a nationwide drive to stimulate “voluntary action” against social ills. It adds that Secretary George Romney is “in charge of planning the voluntary action effort.” This concept needs to be savored: government, the quintessence of coercion, is going to plan a nationwide “voluntary” effort. George Orwell, where art thou now? War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Voluntary Action is Government Planning.
The Post goes on to say that Romney, Secretary Finch, and the President “are devotees of the idea that vast and untapped energies of volunteers in an ‘independent sector’ can transform the Nation.” Nixon endorsed the idea in 1965, and recently declared that “the President should be the chief patron of citizen efforts.” And it turns out that last year, Secretary Finch was co-author of a book on the independent sector, with—you guessed it—Richard C. Cornuelle, the “godfather of independent action” and head of the Nixon task-force on independent voluntary action. Two major programs are emerging: a mixed public-private organization chartered by the Federal government to stimulate voluntary action drives, and a series of Presidential awards, like the World War II Navy “E” for Efficiency, to be bestowed by the President in person for outstanding voluntary efforts.
Oh right-wing anarchy, where art thou now? So now we are to have “voluntary” actors bedecked with honors by their Chief, the nation’s top coercive actor; and we will have Dick’s long-standing dream of a Federal agency to stimulate and coordinate these efforts. The Libertarian, for one, would not bet a substantial sum against the prospect of our old friend Dick being appointed to head the new bureau. Who, after all, is better qualified?
But we must not look at this sordid story as merely the saga of a former anarchist who coined a “new” political philosophy which might well result in his climbing to a high post in government. The situation is far more sinister than that. For this “voluntary” hogwash has a familiar smell: the smell of the Presidency of Herbert Hoover, whose political life-style was one of frenetically promoting “voluntary” programs, with the mailed fist of governmental coercion always resting inside the velvet glove. Hoover’s pseudo-“voluntary” New Deal was the complete forerunner of Franklin Roosevelt’s candidly coercive New Deal. It has another smell: the smell of Mussolini’s fascism, in which coercive government multiplied its power by mobilizing the support of masses of misguided “volunteers” from among the citizenry. And finally, Nixon-Cornuellism has the smell of the burgeoning corporate state—the political economy of fascism—which has increasingly marked the American system. It is the “enlightened” corporate state where nothing is any longer distinctively “private” or “public”; everything is cozily mixed, in an ever-intensifying “partnership” of Big Government and Big Business (with Big Unionism as the happy junior partner). This is the sort of polity and economy that we have in the United States, and Creeping Cornuellism embodies still more of it.
Not only more of it; for Nixon-Cornuellism is, to the libertarian, a peculiarly repulsive variant of American corporatism. For it cloaks and camouflages the viper of statism in the soothing raiment of voluntaristic and pseudo-libertarian rhetoric. What political style can be more disgusting than that?
State Of Palestine Launched
During February, the state of Palestine is being launched at Cairo. For the first time in many centuries, Palestine is being proclaimed as an independent nation, free, at least in aspiration, from foreign imperial domination. The delegates are a mixed team of guerrilla fighters from Al Fatah, the largest of the Palestinian guerrilla organizations, as well as members of the Popular Liberation Front.
A highly significant preliminary meeting took place in January in Cairo, at a conference called by the Communist Party, and shepherded by delegates from the Soviet Union. The Communist line has been to force the Arabs to accept the Soviet peace plan and the UN resolution of November, 1967, which is to guarantee the borders of Israel once it surrenders its gains acquired during the Israel-Arab war of 1967: In short, to ratify all the previous aggressive gains of Israel if she withdraws from her latest conquests. Despite the fact that the conference was loaded in favor of the Communist line, the conference was swung from Communist control in favor of a militant position by the leadership and the oratory of Dr. Nabeel Shaath, 30-year-old American-educated professor, formerly teaching at the University of Pennsylvania and now head of the proposed Palestinian state residing in unoccupied Jordan.
Dr. Shaath, a Christian like most of the Palestinian delegation to the conference, declared that “We will not accept any substitute for a war of national liberation. We will not accept any settlement that denies our rights, be it the Security Council or any other proposal or political settlement.” Shaath proclaimed the goal of the Palestinians to be the return of the forcibly exiled Arab refugees to their homes and properties in Palestine, and declared: “We are fighting today to create the new Palestine of tomorrow, a progressive and democratic nonsectarian Palestine in which Christian, Moslem and Jew worship, live peacefully and enjoy equal rights.”
Previous to this meeting, Al Fatah affirmed its emphasis on the independence of its “armed Palestine revolution” from all governments everywhere, obviously implying the reactionary machinations of the Arab governments of the Middle East as well as of the long-standing cynical maneuvers and manipulations by the Soviet Union.
“Private” Enterprise At Work
The way “private” enterprise works in our era of the neo-fascist corporate state is well shown in an article in the Wall St. Journal (Feb. 5) on the National Corporation for Housing Partnerships. The NCHP, created by President Johnson, but supposedly run along the Nixonian lines of revving up the “engine of private enterprise”, wants to raise $50 million from private industry to invest in low-rent housing projects which would eventually mount up to $2 billion of capital.
Praiseworthy? But wait. In order for the corporation to get started, there must be a substantial flow of Federal funds to subsidize rentals in the new projects. The NCHP wants $150 million from the Federal government for this year and next before it sets up business as a corporation. With this huge subsidy, “private enterprise” in the form of the NCHP would be willing to build 10,000 low-rent units in the first year, and hopefully move up to 60,000 units annually.
A particularly desired form of federal subsidy would be to pay a subsidy that would keep mortgage interest costs down to a near-zero sum of 1% per year. With this kind of subsidy, a whole roster of the nation’s largest corporations stand eager to do their great humanitarian work. This includes Kaiser Industries Corp, whose head, Edgar Kaiser, is the president of the NCHP, Westinghouse, Metropolitan Life, Deere and Co., and Ling-Temco-Vought. Many of the biggest banks, such as Chase Manhattan, First National City, Bank of America, Mellon National, would be willing to lend the corporation money to launch its operations. Also, not surprisingly, a host of local realty firms would be happy to join in the bonanza.
“Whenever the ends of government are perverted, and public liberty manifestly endangered, and all other means of redress are ineffectual, the people may, and of a right ought to reform the old, or establish a new government; the doctrine of non-resistance against arbitrary power and oppression is absurd, slavish and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind.”
— Declaration of Rights of Maryland, 1867
The big attraction, apart from humanitarianism, is a huge, guaranteed profit, or, as the Journal puts it, “a guaranteed, Government-supported market to attract profit-motivated private industry and investors.” The estimated annual rate of profit for these investors would begin at over 24% and end at 17%. Pretty good returns for “helping the poor”!
A People’s Court?
In the January 1969 issue of The Center Magazine Gerald Gottlieb, a consultant to the Center For Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara, Calif., has made a proposal of great interest to libertarians. Reviewing the failure of the World Court and other international judicial bodies to preserve the peace and ensure justice to individuals, he proposes the creation by private citizens of a universal court of man “independent of nations and able to render judgment upon those who misuse sovereign power”. Its jurisdiction: crimes against human rights and peace; its legitimacy: arising from the sovereign rights of the people retained by them and not granted to governments. How would such a body enforce its jurisdiction and decisions against sovereign states? By arousing world public opinion through any and all media, through appeals from professional and business associations, churches, social institutions, etc. Recalcitrant States would be faced with boycott and public degradation by an aroused world public. While Gottlieb eventually would depend upon the coercive influence of other states, this is not crucial to his argument. The recent success of the Bertrand Russell War Crimes Tribunal in arousing European sentiment against American actions in Vietnam, and the propaganda success of the American Commission of Inquiry on Conditions in Ireland in 1920-22 in forcing the British government to moderate its policy in the Irish rebellion, suggests that privately-constituted international courts may serve to mitigate the criminality of sovereign states, or at least focus world attention on their grosser violations of human liberties.
Perhaps libertarian foundations and scholars could sponsor further study of this proposal—so libertarian in principle and so feasible in practice.
J.R.P
Sitting On Sidewalk Outlawed
The city of San Francisco has adopted a law giving the police the right to arrest anyone found sitting, lying, or sleeping on the sidewalk. The criminal sitter is subject to punishment of six months in jail and a $500 fine. The law, passed to the great glee of the citizens of the town, is commonly known as the “anti-hippie” law, and everyone is looking forward with enthusiasm to cracking down on hippies who are notorious users of the streets.
While we hold no particular brief for hippies, we must note one more step on the road to a totalitarian America. So now we can’t sit on the street! The police are assuring everyone that the law will be used reasonably, and only against large groups of sitters who obstruct the sidewalks. But liberty requires not that despotic laws be passed and then only moderately enforced, but that the law not be passed at all.
This new incident points up a vital problem in political philosophy: who gets to own and therefore to control the streets. For so long as the urban governments are allowed to continue to own the streets, we are at any time liable to be oppressed by all sorts of regulations and controls made over those of us who use the streets—which means everyone. Thus, during the riots of the summer of 1967, all the cities decreed compulsory curfews for everyone, thus making criminals out of anyone having the effrontery to walk out of his home after, say, 10:00 P.M. How much more despotism over our daily lives is needed before we question whether we are, indeed, a free country?
The only ultimate solution to this problem is to abolish all government ownership and control of the streets, and to turn the nation’s streets over to private ownership, which might assume all sorts of individual, cooperative, or corporate forms. But until that golden day, we must at least see to it that government exercise its ownership powers as little as possible. We must proclaim that the streets belong not to the government, but to the people, for the people to use as they see fit. Community no-ownership is far better than government ownership; for a little obstruction of the streets is better than frozen tyranny.
In the meanwhile, the citizens of San Francisco can count their small blessings, for their streets were saved from a graver fate. One of the eager beavers on the board of supervisors urged a law prohibiting anyone from “standing aimlessly” on the pavement. The law failed to pass, not of course because the supervisors were taken with a sudden fit of concern for the liberty of the individual who might, sometime, wish to stroll or even stand, rather than stride purposefully down the street. No, as so often in the past, vested self-interest came to the unwitting rescue of liberty. For the anti-sitting law was passed under pressure of the local merchants, and the merchants became uneasy at the thought of throngs of aimlessly strolling tourists, with money in their pockets, getting hauled off unceremoniously in the paddy wagon. Like politics, liberty sometimes makes strange bedfellows.
RECOMMENDED READING
Irving Louis Horowitz, “Young Radicals and Professorial Critics”, Commonweal (January 31, 1969). A thoughtful defense of young student radicals and a critique of their conservative Social Democratic opposition among the faculty.
Paul M. Sweezy, “Thoughts on the American System”, Monthly Review (February, 1969). Keen insight into the nature of the American system by one of America’s most intelligent Marxists. Sweezy sees the Nixon appointments as demonstrating an interchangeable ruling class shuttling back and forth between industry and government, and he also examines the differences and “contradictions” between national and local ruling elites. He is also refreshing on the Left for not dismissing the Vietnam War as already ended.
TWO NEW LIBERTARIAN PERIODICALS!
Factotum Bulletin, a bulletin for news of the libertarian movement. Can be obtained from the Center for Libertarian Studies, 1507 W. Hildebrand, San Antonio, Texas 78201. Irregularly published, as supplement to the Center’s Libertarian American.
The Libertarian Connection: a unique bi-monthly. For the subscription price of $2.50, every subscriber has the right to send in stencils which the editors guarantee to mimeograph and staple. It is truly the readers’ magazine. Available at 5610 Smiley, Los Angeles, Calif. 90016.
A Semi-Monthly Newsletter
The Libertarian↩
| Joseph R. Peden, Publisher | Washington Editor, Karl Hess | Murray N. Rothbard, Editor |
| VOL. I, NO. I | APRIL 1, 1969 | 35¢ |
The Scientific Imperial Counsellor:
“To Restore Faith In Government”
America now has, whether we know it or not, an imperial Counsellor. He is a new kind of appointee of the Nixon Administration, a White House aide but with Cabinet rank, empowered to range all over the sphere of domestic policy. The astute Business Week calls him “The adviser who may be closest to Nixon”: Dr. Arthur F. Burns. (Business Week, March 1).
Arthur Burns, a professor of economics at Columbia University, was the first Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers of the Eisenhower Administration. In that Administration Burns took his stand against the old-fashioned conservatives who wanted to roll back some of the New Deal aggrandizement of the federal apparatus. Though he had his technical quarrels with the Keynesians, Arthur Burns was instrumental in saving the day for the permanent Keynesian policy of expanding during recessions and cutting back during booms, and in saving the very existence of the Keynesian-interventionist Council of Economic Advisers itself. Now that old-fashioned conservatives have disappeared from the Republican party, no one talks in terms of abolishing the CEA or its mandate toward perpetual statism.
One of the curious aspects of Arthur Burns’s rise to the pinnacle of power is that, among all economists, he was preeminent as the supposedly value-free “scientist”, the technician, the man who eschews politics and ideology. And yet here he is, at the peak of his career, in the most political, the most ideological job of them all. But, oddly, Burns himself does not acknowledge this fact. He still thinks of himself as a simple scientific technician, at the service of society; he now says of his own role: “I’m not interested in power and influence, I’m interested in doing a job.”
Thus, Burns has become almost the caricature of modern American social science: a group of disciplines swarming with supposedly value-free technicians, self-proclaimed non-ideological workmen simply “doing a job” in service to their masters of the State apparatus: that is, to their military-political-industrial overlords. For their “scientific” and “value-free” outlook turns out to be simply marginal wheeling and maneuvering within the broad frames of reference set by the American status quo and by their masters who enforce that status quo. Lack of ideology simply means lack of any ideology that differs at all fundamentally from the ruling system.
But it seems that these are days of crisis, and in times like these, even the most narrow of statistical craftsmen must become “philosophers”, i.e., must give the show away. So Arthur Frank Burns. Burns himself allows to Business Week that economic problems nowadays are “trivial”, in comparison to the larger domestic concerns over which he now assumes his suzerainty. For, Burns opines, the really important problem is that “a great many of our citizens have lost faith in our basic institutions . . . They have lost faith in the processes of the government itself.” “The President keeps scratching his head,” Burns goes on, “and I as his adviser keep scratching my head—trying to know how to build new institutions . . . to restore faith in government.”
So that is what our new imperial Counsellor is up to. The aggressively “scientific” statistician has become our purported faith-healer, our evangelical Witch Doctor, who has come to restore our faith in that monster Idol; the State. Let us hereby resolve, everyone, one and all, that Arthur is not going to get away with it.
But soft, we must guard our flank, for there is a host of so-called “libertarians” and free-market advocates who swear up and down that Arthur Burns is God’s gift to a free-market economy. Which says a great deal about the quality of their devotion to liberty, as compared to their evident devotion to Power.
Letter From Washington
By Karl Hess
FBI And CIA
Washington power struggles are off and squirming. We note that H. E. W. and Agriculture are vying for control of the programs with which to feed, and also co-opt, the hottest current item among political constituencies, hungry Americans. We hear that the Army, sensing a danger that the endless ground war in Vietnam might not be endless after all and certainly can’t be victorious anyway, is looking for new frontiers on which to place its guidons and that chemical-bacteriological warfare may be just the ticket. (A ticket which, incidentally, may also gain it a better seat than ever at the game of riot control.) All the other services, of course, want their own bug battalions.
We sense, also, that the jet setters of the aero-space conglomerates are pitted in some sort of dinosaurian battle against the graying herd-elders of the industrial establishment for control of not only the available soul of the Administration itself but for the control of the more wordly goodies to be found in taking over government programs (at cost-plus) as we move from the vilified practice of a welfare state run from the White House to the now panegyrized practice of a welfare state, run for fun and profit, from corporate board rooms with the White House just signing the checks and setting the goals. There is little change in who pays the bills, of course.
Libertarians have every reason to view all of these matters with knowledgeable horror. They could predict any enormity of the state simply because they know that enormities are the nature of the state, enormities and crimes against liberty.
There is one area of struggle in Washington, however, that may be viewed with special horror. It is the struggle between the CIA and the FBI for covert control of the government, the world, the galaxy or whatever else comes along.
Talk of the rivalry between these two agencies, or baronies, is a Washington commonplace. Most comments on the struggle, however, reflect mainly from the exotic persons and bureaucratic principalities involved, with endless speculation, for instance, upon whether there were more FBI or CIA informers and paid provocateurs involved in our recent spate of political assassinations. Actually these arguments are rather like parsing scaldic verse, almost entirely academic, in that they concentrate on bureaucratic commas and semi-colons without attending much at all to content.
The content of the struggle mainly involves the weapons with which it is being fought, and the styles of the wielders of the weapons. There is no basic difference beyond that inasmuch as both factions are merely symptoms of an inevitable sickness of the State itself.
The CIA has far and away the greater edge in economic power and in freedom of violent movement. Assassination has been its business overseas all along. There are obvious restraints on its use at home. There also are obvious opportunities for its selective and discreet employment; particularly against the more obscure obstructionists in any situation, persons who mightn’t be widely missed but who might be the crucial difference between one policy or another in its early, intimate stages. The political murder of private citizens has never really caught on here but that is not to say that an imaginative man might not have a go at it anyway—particularly with the vast conspiratorial depths of the CIA upon which to draw.
When it comes to money the CIA has no equal. Although the FBI does have some special and very confidential funds to spend on informers and other covert employees, and even though some cynics might suspect that it could even keep for its own uses some of the vast criminal funds which it regularly, and pridefully, “recovers” when busting bandits, the Bureau has got to come in second. The Agency is not audited at all. There is a Congressional group that is supposed to supervise it but no one really imagines that they can do anything like a thorough job. For one thing, the personnel of the CIA is carried on the payrolls of other agencies and its continual involvement with “national security” means that official secrecy cloaks its daggers and its doings quite effectively.
It is from the CIA’s money-power that much of its realpolitik powers derive. Its subsidy of everything from publishing houses to labor organizations is now well known. No newsman to whom I have recently spoken doubts for a moment that this subsidized estate within a subsidized state is not still thriving. Even if the excuse for the subsidy is, as it always is claimed, exclusively for activities of the person or group outside of the country, these CIA subsidies provide a selective means of encouraging persons or groups who, despite international activities, almost invariably must have some domestic clout as well. This clout, do not misunderstand, is not used on direct behalf of the CIA. But it can be used on behalf of those policies of which the CIA approves and which ultimately will enhance its power.
Where the CIA uses dough, the FBI uses data. Its chief influence, as opposed to outright pressure, derives from the selective use of its files. It is not imaginable, for instance, that even a President could get an item from the FBI’s files if the Director specifically did not want him to have it. After all, it is employees of the Director, not of the President, who tend those files and everyone knows how easy it is for a piece of paper to either appear or disappear in a bureaucracy.
Thus, from President to legislator to syndicated columnist, the FBI can offer data not as something that may be demanded but as a boon which may be conferred—upon the helpful. President Johnson’s notorious use of FBI data to persecute political foes is another Washington press corps conversational commonplace as is the mock dismay at the fact that J. Edgar Hoover should have found in or made of Lyndon Johnson one of his most eloquent supporters despite the fact that, at the outset of The Great Society, it was assumed that the President and the Director followed somewhat different muses.
Thus, in this modern Machiavellian melodrama, we see directly pitted against one another the old-fashioned money and muscle. Florentine intrigue, cloak-and-daggerism of the CIA and the more American, corporate-organizational, file-case, computer-card snoop-and-snitchism of the FBI.
Libertarians, for what small comfort it may bring to a group which probably occupies a special place in files of both the Agency and the Bureau, happen to have the only sure solution to the disease of secret-policism which is what both CIA and FBI represent in a germicidal sense: cure the disease by curing the cause, the State. Every State, sooner or later, has had an urge to defend itself against foes real or imagined, foreign or domestic. This has always resulted in some form of secret or political police organization. There are no exceptions to this iron law of the dungeon.
So long as nation states exist, so long will political police prowl amongst us.
All of which brings us to the remarkable story, recently revealed in the press, of how, according to Nikita Krushchev, the top cop of the Soviet Union, Lavrenti Beria, was done in.
Director Beria, it is now said, made the mistake of entering a Kremlin meeting without his bodyguard whereupon Krushchev, a genuine genius at getting to the nitty gritty of any situation, shot him.
It is predictable that conservatives, particularly, are still clucking and tushing about this latest revelation of the brutality of politics in a totalitarian state. It could not happen, they may exult, in a safe and civilized land such as ours.
And that is precisely the point.
In democratic America there has appeared no way to relieve the head of the political or secret police of his command. In short, what this great Republic lacks in vivid personnel relations, it more than makes up for in tenure.
“Dear Ted”: Prelude To Repression?
There is nothing quite so ominous as the emergence of Richard Milhous Nixon as educational theorist. In his tenure in office so far, Mr. Nixon has been the Man Who Isn’t There, a zero wrapped in a vacuum. Except in the case of our kids; there the President has made a stand, in his “Dear Ted” letter to Father Theodore M. Hesburgh, president of Notre Dame University, and a man who has rivalled the clownish S. I. Hayakawa in vowing to get tough with our students.
So eager was the President to get his views known on this subject that he released the letter to the press (New York Times, Feb. 24) even before Ted had received it. As might be expected, our new educational philosopher came out foursquare against “violence”, “intimidation”, and “threats”, and called for the “rule of reason” to prevail. “Whoever rejects that principle,” intoned Nixon, “forfeits his right to be a member of the academic community.”
Mr. and Mrs. America, how long are we going to suffer this solemn farce? Here is the President of the United States, in command of the mightiest engine of terror and intimidation the world has ever known, a man who every day murders American soldiers and Vietnamese peasants in the hills and rice paddies of Vietnam, a man whose entire machinery of State lives off systematic theft, a man who heads the machinery of slavery known as the draft. And he has the gall to express his horror at the violence of some kids who have broken a few windows, or who have stepped on some campus grass. He has the sheer bravado to call for the substitution of reason for force! In this he shows himself an apt pupil of his beloved predecessor, who had the brass to say, during the July, 1967 urban riots: “We will not endure violence. It matters not by whom it is done, or under what slogan or banner. It will not be tolerated.” Someone should instruct these worthies about the mote and the beam.
“There are but three ways for the populace to escape its wretched lot. The first two are by the routes of the wineshop or the church; the third is by that of the social revolution.”
— Mikhail Bakunin, 1871
But apart from the farcical elements of the situation, Nixon’s entry into educational theory poses an ominous question: is this the prelude to general repression on our campuses? For Nixon, in the Dear Ted letter, openly hinted about possible action “at the state and Federal levels” to crack down on the college campuses. This was supposed to be the prelude to a call for Federal investigation of the campuses at the National Governors’ Conference a few days later. Despite the dubious constitutionality of this proposal, Governor Reagan ardently pushed for the idea, but happily the governors turned it down. Perhaps this has stopped any political groundswell for a Federal crackdown on the campuses; at any rate, the governors have at least given a setback to the Reagan theory of education by bayonet. Let us hope the setback isn’t just temporary.
LIBERTARIAN ASSOCIATES
The following people were generous, and even heroic enough to subscribe to The Libertarian as Libertarian Associates, paying $15 or more:
Mr. James Altes New York, N.Y.
Mr. and Mrs. Walter Block New York, N.Y.
Mr. J. M. Foley Burlingame, California
Mr. Walter Grinder Bogota, New Jersey
Dr. Harold H. Saxton Mayville, N.Y.
Mr. and Mrs. Harry Stern Wilmington, Del.
RECOMMENDED READING
Donald Barnett, “Angola: Report from Hanoi II”. Ramparts (April, 1969). Happy Day! Ramparts lives! The reports of its death were greatly exaggerated. In this article, the anthropologist Dr. Barnett presents an exciting and heartwarming story of his stay with the guerrilla forces of the national liberation movement in Portuguese-run Angola. One thing is made clear: what with the Portuguese government taxing all the peasants’ surplus above subsistence and burning peasant villages and herding them into concentration hamlets, and the guerrillas scrupulously buying everything they use from the peasants, whom do you think the overwhelming mass of peasants supports?
P. T. Bauer and B. S. Yamey, Markets, Market Control and Marketing Reform (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968). 421 pp. 90s. Not really about marketing, but a collection of articles about the free market and government interference, particularly in underdeveloped countries. Professor Bauer is the world’s preeminent economist specializing in underdeveloped countries.
Daniel and Gabriel Cohn-Bendit, Obsolete Communism: The Left-Wing Alternative (New York: McGraw-Hill). 256 pp. $5.95. The story of the almost-victorious French revolution of May, 1968 by its heroic young anarchist leader. The case for an anarchist rather than a Bolshevik revolution.
John Duffett, ed., Against the Crime of Silence (New York: Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, 1968. Available from O’Hare Books, Flanders, N.J. 07836). 662 pp. $8.50 hardbound, $5.75 Flexicloth. The War Crimes Tribunal, sponsored by Bertrand Russell, held its sessions on genocidal American aggression and atrocities in Vietnam at Stockholm and at Copenhagen during 1967. The Tribunal was outrageously smeared in the American press. Here is the detailed record of its hearings and reports. Indispensable for any serious student of the Vietnam War.
Karl Hess, “The Death of Politics”, Playboy (March, 1969). This article marks the appearance of a shining new star in the libertarian firmament. An excellent article, and the first time that the libertarian position has hit the mass market. Lingering traces of statism are due to the fact that the article was written while Mr. Hess was in a period of transition toward the full and complete libertarian credo.
————, The Lawless State. (Lansing, Mich.: Constitutional Alliance, Feb. 5, 1969. Available from Constitutional Alliance, P.O. Box 836, Lansing, Mich. 48904). 30 pp. 400. Rousing libertarian attack on the State. One of the first of a series of handy and inexpensive “minibooks” from this publisher.
David Horowitz with David Kolodney, “The Foundations”, Ramparts (April, 1969). David Horowitz is becoming the best and most intelligent of a new and much-needed breed: muckrakers of the present State Monopoly system. Here he exposes the work of the big foundations, their tie-ins with the government, corporations, universities, and the black movement. First of two parts.
James Ridgeway, The Closed Corporation: American Universities in Crisis (New York: Ballantine Books, 1968). Paper. 241 pp. 95¢. Excellent muckraking book on the universities and their tie-in with the military and governmental-industrial complex. Should silence those naive souls who still think of our universities as private institutions and dedicated communities of scholars.
Madeleine B. Stern, The Pantarch: A Biography of Stephen Pearl Andrews (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 1968). 208 pp. $6.00. A scholarly, though often sneering, biography of a brilliant if eccentric founder of American individualist anarchism.
A Semi-Monthly Newsletter
The Libertarian↩
| Joseph R. Peden, Publisher | Washington Editor, Karl Hess | Murray N. Rothbard, Editor |
| VOL. I, NO. II | APRIL 15, 1969 | 35¢ |
Tax Day
April 15, that dread Income Tax day, is around again, and gives us a chance to ruminate on the nature of taxes and of the government itself.
The first great lesson to learn about taxation is that taxation is simply robbery. No more and no less. For what is “robbery”? Robbery is the taking of a man’s property by the use of violence or the threat thereof, and therefore without the victim’s consent. And yet what else is taxation?
Those who claim that taxation is, in some mystical sense, really “voluntary” should then have no qualms about getting rid of that vital feature of the law which says that failure to pay one’s taxes is criminal and subject to appropriate penalty. But does anyone seriously believe that if the payment of taxation were really made voluntary, say in the sense of contributing to the American Cancer Society, that any appreciable revenue would find itself into the coffers of government? Then why don’t we try it as an experiment for a few years, or a few decades, and find out?
But if taxation is robbery, then it follows as the night the day that those people who engage in, and live off, robbery are a gang of thieves. Hence the government is a group of thieves, and deserves, morally, aesthetically, and philosophically, to be treated exactly as a group of less socially respectable ruffians would be treated.
This issue of The Libertarian is dedicated to that growing legion of Americans who are engaging in various forms of that one weapon, that one act of the public which our rulers fear the most: tax rebellion, the cutting off the funds by which the host public is sapped to maintain the parasitic ruling classes. Here is a burning issue which could appeal to everyone, young and old, poor and wealthy, “working class” and middle class, regardless of race, color, or creed. Here is an issue which everyone understands, only too well. Taxation.
TAX REVOLT IN WISCONSIN
On Tuesday, April 1, the most significant American election since last November occurred in northern Wisconsin. Mel Laird had been elevated from his long-time post as Congressman from this district to his present berth as mighty, hawkish Secretary of Defense. A special election was held on April 1 to fill the Congressional spot.
The Republicans had won this post with great ease for decades, usually amassing about two-thirds of the vote. This year, State Senator Walter Chilsen, Laird’s hand-picked successor, was seemingly safe, and he made his safety even more secure by wrapping himself in the mantle of the Nixon-Laird Administration, and making the election a referendum of the supposedly popular new regime.
Yet, this April, young David Obey, the Democratic choice, defeated Chilsen handily in a stunning upset; the vote was approximately 63,000 to 59,000. Everyone is agreed on the major reason for the upset: the great issue which Obey hammered at again and again—high and crushing taxation. Wisconsin’s Republican Governor Warren Knowles had run for re-election on a platform of pride on not raising taxes; true to political form, as soon as he was safely back in, his political greed came to the fore, and the Republicans of Wisconsin swung behind a program of higher taxes. The outraged public rallied around Obey’s attacks on high taxes, and taxes proved to be a hotter and more important public issue than the Nixon Administration, the Party of Our Fathers, and even love for Mel Laird. An explosion over taxes is at hand, if leaders should arise to articulate the people’s deepest wishes.
“To force a man to pay for the violation of his own liberty is indeed an addition of insult to injury. But that is exactly what the State is doing.”
— Benjamin R. Tucker, 1893
Letter From Washington
By Karl Hess
TAX REVOLT
For those who retain a residual, if not romantic attachment to the notion of peaceful change there is at least one Springlike sign of encouragement along the Potomac. A substantial tax rebellion is underway.
Far and away the largest share of mail to Capitol Hill as well as to the White House concerns taxes—not comments on them, but angry statements of refusals to pay either some or all of the State’s lootish tribute. The same thing is happening at local levels in the 50 states where, as a matter of fact, taxation has been growing overall at a more rapid pace than even at the Federal level. Farmers in Pennsylvania, householders in Brooklyn, housewives in the southwest, all have mounted direct assaults against organized theft by the State. At the local level the success of tax rebellions is astonishing. Any group that can gather a hundred or so members seems assured of, at least, protection against flagrant suppression and has, obviously, a good chance of success. The picture is neither so clear nor so rosy at the Federal level. The number of resistors is surely growing but, because there is no organized or united force in the field, the Federals have open to them such means of suppression as the selective persecution of ‘leaders’ to set Spockian examples. Attorney General Mitchell’s selection of just that device to deal with campus disorders could be a hint of direction but should it fail to suppress the campuses—as hopefully seems to be the case—then it may not be tried against tax resistors.
Another approach could be in the broadest social pressure, with impassioned campaigns to vilify those who resist, as near or actual traitors, and to extol for the “quiet majority” the patriotic, humble, and holy virtues of submitting to taxation without so much as a whimper and certainly not a groan. The Stakhanovites of the Nixon Administration, we may anticipate, will be quiet and eager taxpayers (let’s hear it for Quiet Quentin, he didn’t even claim a deduction for himself!) and their children, equally docile on the campus.
The tax rebellion, also, has evolutionary stages. It will pass from rebellion into revolution at approximately the moment it coalesces, either around a conscious organizing effort or spontaneously around a particular incident.
In either case there seems little, that the State could do about it—as a broadly based movement rather than one in which individuals may, as at present, be picked off and/or terrorized without support or succor.
At any rate it is the nightmare of the State today.
***
Washington, a far cry from most cities, is provided with three competing daily newspapers, not to mention several in the nearby suburbs of Maryland and Virginia. Freedom of the press, you might think, would be enhanced by this fortuitous situation. The truth is drearily different.
Washington also has an ‘underground’ newspaper, the Free Press. It is, as are so many of the type, a generally lighthearted mixture of psychedelic coming and ahhing and radical politics. It has perhaps as great as, but surely no greater, a range of explicitly sexual or scatalogical slang as any current best-seller.
The Free Press is regularly harassed by the police. It now must print hundreds of miles away. Persons selling it have been arrested for the possession of pornography while, in full admission of the essentially political nature of the paper, a judicial refugee from the Flintstones in nearby Maryland has arranged to have some of the editors charged with, believe it or not, sedition against the Free State. (Yea, Free.)
Meantime, how have the watchdogs of liberty responded? The ‘open Administration’ of Richard Nixon apparently couldn’t care less if the paper were closed down. The journalism clubs, associations, and guilds are as silent as the grave. The Washington Post says the fuzz might as well leave the Freep alone because it isn’t influential anyway, thus reducing freedom of the press to a solely utilitarian level and adding a new sub-basement to the structure of The Post’s morality. But the Freep, bless it, still appears.
***
Daily there is new evidence that probing and defending the military-industrial complex is to become a major matter in Congress this session—perhaps the hottest issue of all if the war can be cooled down or, as at present, virtually ignored. In the continuing drama of disputes without difference, opponents of the welfare state now will rise mightily to man the battlements of the warfare state—and, of course, vice versa. As as American President once remarked, in another regard, one hopes neither side runs out of ammunition.
“The schoolboy whips his taxed top, the beardless youth manages his taxed horse with a taxed bridle, on a taxed road; and the dying Englishmen, pouring his medicine, which has paid seven per cent, flings himself back on his chintz bed, which has paid twenty-two per cent, and expires in the arms of an apothecary who has paid a license of a hundred pounds for the privilege of putting him to death.”
— Sydney Smith, 1830
LIBERTARIAN ASSOCIATES
The deepest thanks of The Libertarian go to the newest group of those generous enough to become Libertarian Associates by subscribing at $15 or more:
Mr. R. Dale Grinder Columbia, Mo.
Mr. Milton M. Shapiro Claremont, Calif.
Mr. James Evans, Jr. Los Angeles, Calif. A. R. Pruitt, M. D. Halstead. Kan.
TRANSFORMATION OF A NEWSPAPER
Since the early nineteen-fifties, the National Guardian was considered by many to be a firebrand radical newspaper on the furthermost fringes of the left. It had been so branded for its heroic stand against the onslaught of McCarthyism. In many ways it is true that the National Guardian was the spokesman for “far-left” opinion. But it is equally true that beyond its outspoken anti-McCarthyism, the National Guardian surely was not a radical newspaper.
In a subheading under the National Guardian’s banner was the accompanying motto which expressed both the content and the purpose of its existence. It read: “An Independent Progressive Newsweekly.” Reformism, not radicalism, was indeed its intent and its history, ever since its origins in the reformist Wallace campaign of 1948.
A couple of years ago, after the New Left had begun to stir, the management and direction of the National Guardian began to change. As 1967 became 1968, the “coup” was all but complete. What remained was to alert the public to the newspaper’s new intentions. In February 1968, the statist-patriotic term National was dropped from the paper’s masthead; and, more importantly, the accompanying motto was changed to read: “Independent Radical Newsweekly.”
Although it was from the beginning true to its announced intentions of being a genuinely radical newspaper, i.e., attacking the United States monopoly capitalist-imperialist system rather than simply trying to reform a depraved system that was beyond repair, the new Guardian did have its share of problems. It was indeed radical, but it could no longer truly be called a newspaper.
The new management and staff were inexperienced. The call to radicalism stepped on the ideological toes of many of the National Guardian’s former readers. Subscriptions expired, unrenewed. Impassioned letters of disbelief and abhorrence stormed in with cries of anti-Semitism because of the new leadership’s stand on Black Power and the Arab-Israeli conflict in the Middle East.
Confronted with the major task of rebuilding a large part of its circulation and saddled with an inexperienced, underpaid (often unpaid), and sometimes incompetent staff, the Guardian hobbled along, leaving much to be desired in the area of reportorial journalism.
Most of the pages of the Guardian were given to editorializing. Series after series of eight and ten-part “think pieces” filled its pages for six or seven months. The only really redeeming feature of the Guardian during this period was the weekly report of Wilfred Burchett from Cambodia on the Vietnam War. Burchett’s articles were always poignant, perceptive and uncannily correct in their predictions of unfolding events in southeast Asia.
During the last two months, and particularly in the last several issues, a happy change has been taking place. The pages of the Guardian have been filled with what a newspaper should contain—news. Gone are the misplaced and often incompetent “think pieces”. Editorials are at a minimum. The news stories are most often relevant, and many of them are well-written. The Guardian seems on its way to-becoming a first-rate newspaper.
“Of all debts, men are least willing to pay taxes. What a satire is this on government!”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1841
There appears to be a battle going on under the surface for ideological control of the Guardian between the New Left anarchists and decentralized socialists and some remaining remnants of Old Left Marxism, but it seems certain that it is a battle which the Old Left is doomed to lose. Most of the young radicals see the old Marxists for what they really are—conservative authoritarians.
In many of the news stories and some of the editorials there is a disquieting, almost inexplicable, sentimental disposition toward a working class movement. This tends to produce some news stories and editorials which are irrelevant to libertarian concerns; but, fortunately, this does not interfere with the fine reporting done in other areas.
Apart from Burchett’s reports, now coming from Paris, there are many on-the-spot reports on American Imperialist activities from such places as Latin America, North Korea, and Africa. There is also excellent coverage of the accelerating student movement across the country.
The coverage of the United States military-industrial-university complex and its inner machinations has become increasingly pointed and revealing. Especially fine in this area has been the research and reporting done by the staff of the North American Congress of Latin America. NACLA is a young research group which has expanded far beyond its original intent to study the origins and effects of American Imperialism in Latin America. The NACLA people are doing the laudatory and very necessary work of finding out just which corporations and which universities are receiving government contracts and funds. They are reporting this information along with the discoverable facts on exactly which perverted project each of these corporations and universities is pursuing!
One other weekly attraction is well worth mentioning. The “Wanted” feature picks out one of the members of the state-industrial-university system and gives a brief sketch of his personal criminal activity; thereby giving us a more meaningful concrete and personal understanding of the Power Elite.
The Guardian is, of course, not a libertarian newspaper; but as it improves as a newspaper, it has become increasingly a better source of pertinent information which can be quite helpful to libertarians. In fact, it is the only place where one can find detailed and comprehensive reporting on all aspects of what is generally known as The Movement. As such, it now, more than ever, deserves to be read by libertarians.
— Walter E. Grinder
RECOMMENDED READING
LEFT AND RIGHT. The latest, special 1968 issue of this journal of libertarian thought features a substantial, definitive article by the late historian Harry Elmer Barnes on “The Final Story of Pearl Harbor”. This was Dr. Barnes’ last work, and synthesizes the “revisionist” insights over the past two decades on the real story of Pearl. $1.25, available from Left and Right, Box 395, Cathedral Station, New York, N.Y. 10025.
Leviathan, Vol. 1, No. 1 (March, 1969). New monthly magazine, 56 pp. in tabloid form. New Left periodical, with high-level muckraking and insights into the current American scene. Particularly recommended is the article by Jim Jacobs and Larry Laskowski, “The New Rebels in Industrial America”, a sympathetic insight into the Wallaceite trends among many industrial workers. Also Peter Wiley and Beverly Leman, “Crisis in the Cities: Part One”, on government-corporate “partnership” in the ghettoes, James O’Connor’s overview of the linkage of State and university, and Steve Weissman’s critique of the government-corporate world at Stanford.
Economic Age, Vol. 1, No. 1 (November-December, 1968). A new semi-popular, semi-scholarly English bi-monthly, published by the Economic Research Council, and specializing in free-marketish articles. Recommended in the first issue is G. Warren Nutter, “Trends in Eastern Europe”. In contrast to many free-market economists whose fanatical anti-Communism blinds them to the enormous and heartening changes in Eastern Europe, Professor Nutter hails the accelerating shift from socialism to the free market in the Communist countries. He even concludes that “In a profound sense, the hope of the West lies today in the East.” 2 pounds sterling per year; available from Economic Age, 10 Upper Berkeley St., London W1, England.
Yale Brozen, “Is Government The Source of Monopoly?”, Intercollegiate Review (Winter, 1968-69). A good article in this ISI periodical is something to savor. Professor Brozen shows how government is the source of monopoly in many ways, direct and indirect. Major concentration of the article is the ICC.
Gabriel Kolko. The Politics of War: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1943-1945 (New York: Random House, 1968), 685 pp. $12.95. Monumental and definitive. This is it; the first of a multi-volume study of the origins of the Cold War. Kolko is far superior to such previous leading Cold War revisionists as D. F. Fleming, because Fleming worshipped FDR and thought of Roosevelt’s foreign policy as noble, only to be sabotaged after his death. Kolko is revisionist on U.S. imperialism during as well as after World War II, and shows that America launched the Cold War while World War II was still going on. Kolko exposes the economic interests amidst U.S. imperialism during these years, and also is the first leading historian to develop the Trotskyist insight that the “sellout” at Yalta and other World War II conferences came from Stalin selling out the Communist revolution throughout Europe and Asia on behalf of his Great Power imperial agreement with the U.S. Indispensable for understanding the history of the Cold War and of U.S. foreign policy in our time.
Marion Mainwaring, “Brittany: Revolution in a Cemetery”, The Nation (February 24, 1969). A charming article from Brittany on a grievously neglected national liberation movement—this one from the oppressed Breton people, a Celtic people with their own language and culture, who have been ruled for over 400 years by an illegal occupation by the French. Like other national liberation movements throughout the world, the Breton movement has been growing rapidly. Eventual goal is a Celtic Federation including independent nations in: Ireland, Scotland, Cornwall, the Isle of Man, and Wales. Normans and Occitans (the southern French speaking the langue d’oc and akin to the Catalans oppressed by Spain) are also beginning to yearn for their freedom.
A Semi-Monthly Newsletter
The Libertarian↩
| Joseph R. Peden, Publisher | Washington Editor, Karl Hess | Murray N. Rothbard, Editor |
| VOL. I, NO. III | MAY 1, 1969 | 35¢ |
The Student Revolution
All through the land, this wondrous month of April, the student revolution has spread to campus after campus, even to the most conservative and the most apathetic. Last year confined to Columbia and a few other campuses, this spring’s revolutionary wave has hit all types of campuses, from mighty elite Harvard to working-class San Francisco State, from poor-boy Queensborough Community to formerly conservative Catholic Fordham. This is a wave that must be considered, that must be understood, for it clearly heralds a mighty and accelerating phenomenon in American life.
Many of us, including this writer, thought that the dearth of student revolutionary activity last fall, after the high point at Columbia the previous spring, meant that the campus revolution was fizzling, and was in serious trouble. But, beginning in the late fall with San Francisco State and then Berkeley, the student rebellion has reached a crescendo this spring which few of us have ever dreamed could be possible in America. Of course, the pattern of student activity—of all types—is to start slowly in the fall and reach a peak in the spring. But this year’s peak is so far above last year’s that the permanence of the student revolution seems evident. And all reports state that each succeeding class is more revolutionary than its elders, that freshmen are more radical than seniors; finally, the sudden emergence of radical high-school movements throughout the country again ensures the deepening of the campus rebellion in the years to come.
How, then, should we respond to this remarkable new phenomenon? There are two typical responses to any revolution against State power anywhere, whether it be campus, Negro, or national liberation front. These are the Conservative and the Liberal. The Conservative “answer” is to shoot them down, to use maximum coercion, to bring in courts, police, armies, missiles, you name it, anything to crush and kill. This response accords with the conservative view of the State generally, which is to preserve and cherish the State’s rule at all costs. The Liberal “answer” is to cozen and sweeten, to co-opt with petty and trivial reforms fueled by great gobs of Federal tax-money. In the end, if the revolutionaries persist and refuse to be either beaten or bribed into submission, the liberal, too, turns to State coercion, but with more hand-wringing and more do-gooding pieties. In the end, he will use almost as much force as the conservative, but his “humanitarian” patina often makes him even more repellent to the true libertarian.
In our judgment, neither of these tactics—apart from their morality or immorality—is going to work. The conservative tactic, in fact, is precisely the one that has led to the greatest victories for the revolution. The model proceeds somewhat as follows: a small group of radicals presents their demands; the demands are brushed off by the Administration; the radicals seize a building and/or strike; the Administration calls in the cops, who wade in and beat and club and arrest; this naked manifestation of State brutality polarizes and radicalizes the campuses, pushes almost all the moderate students to the side of the radicals, and the revolution is on. This was the pattern, for example, at Columbia, at San Francisco State, at Harvard. The liberal tactic is by far the most dangerous for the revolution—most clearly successful at this year’s sit-in at formerly sedate Sarah Lawrence—but this too is increasingly failing, witness Cornell and the City College of New York. What, then, would be the successful tactic in dealing with the student revolution? It is beginning to look as if the only successful tactic, ultimately, will be what the press calls “capitulation”. It is interesting that the press and the politicians are beginning to refer to the student body of our nation as one of those “aggressor enemies” that we have become all too familiar with in the past: the “Huns”, the Nazis, the Commies; and now it is our kids, virtually the entire generation of them. What are we supposed to do with them, Mr. Conservative? A little napalm? Or maybe the H-bomb, a “clean” one perhaps, so it won’t fall on too many of us adults? How far are you prepared to go in using brutality and suppression as your answer to all the problems of this century?
For make no mistake; a generation is speaking. Anyone who is the slightest bit familiar with the campus situation knows the total absurdity of the typical conservative belief that the whole thing is being manipulated by a few “Commies” and “outside agitators” who nip from campus to campus exerting their supposedly Svengali-like effect on the nation’s youth. These rebellions are spontaneous and spur-of-the-moment; they take inspiration and heart from rebellions on their fellow campuses, but they are in no sense manipulated by any arcane forces from outside. They stem from the deepest yearnings and values of the kids on campus.
Whether or not capitulation is the only tactic that will work, it is our contention that it is the only moral response we can make. Let us approach this question by considering the usual baffled cry: What do these kids want? Capitulate to what?
The goals of the revolution can be broken down into two different categories: the immediate and the ultimate demands. The immediate goals are the concrete, day-to-day demands that emerge from the everyday crises and irritants of each campus, and each campus and each group of kids will have different variations on a very similar national theme. The ultimate demands deal with the kids’ perception of the fundamental evils inherent in our present educational system, as well as a vision of what that system could and should be like in the future.
The immediate demands deal with concrete cases of the particular university either being repressive or tying in with the military-industrial complex and the war activities of the government. The prime goal is to sever the universities’ all-pervading tie-ins and linkages with the government and its war machine. This year’s major protest demanded the abolition of ROTC on campus. ROTC has become intolerable to our youth; the spectacle of military training insinuating itself as a legitimate part of academic life and of the educational process, the realization that ROTC is training officers to enslave their fellow soldiers and to murder en masse in Vietnam, has become too obscene for any of our articulate and self-respecting kids to tolerate. And these kids never forget that the ROTC is training an elite officer corps who will be employed to enslave and command that hapless mass of youngsters—among whom will be many from our campuses—who will become enmeshed in the toils of the draft. One of the events that radicalized the ordinarily cool Harvard student body was an arrogant speech by President Pusey defending ROTC on campus as supplying a much-needed Harvard elite to our officer corps. This sort of pretension of the right of Harvard men to rule was much too blatantly despotic for the libertarian instincts of the present student generation.
This year ROTC; last year the protests were against the university’s intimate connections with the Institute of Defense Analysis (Columbia), and against the university allowing its facilities to be used for recruiting purposes by the armed forces and its mass of murderers, and by corporations such as Dow Chemical heavily involved in the production of napalm, an instrument of this mass murder.
Everyone gets excited over student disruptions, sit-ins, a few bread crumbs left in rooms, a few blades of grass trampled on; all this leads the general public to a frenzy of denunciation of the “violence” committed by the students. But where oh where is anything like the equivalent frenzy directed at the monstrous engines of violence, slavery, and mass murder against which the kids are directing their protests: the army, the draft, the war, the police? Why not try to tote up the balance sheet of violence committed by both sides and see what comes out?
We are particularly puzzled by that legion of “libertarian conservatives” who condemn the kids unreservedly for “initiating violence”. But who has initiated violence? The kids, or the universities that collaborate in the draft and the war machine, who eagerly obtain funds from the taxpayers for all manner of research and grants, including research for germ warfare? The tie-ins between government and the universities link them inexorably, as witness the acts set forth in James Ridgeway’s recent The Closed Corporation. Particularly grotesque was the Randian argument, put forward by Robert Hessen in a widely distributed article, that Columbia was private property and that therefore the students were and are everywhere violating the sacred rights of private property; in addition, there is a definite sense in the Randian approach that our university system is really pretty good and that the rebel students are in the process of busting up a sound and virtuous institution. Apart from the various specific tie-ins with the State which the Columbia rebels were pinpointing (such as the IDA), nearly two-thirds of Columbia’s income comes from governmental rather than private sources. How in the world can we continue to call it a private institution? Where does private property come in?
In fact, Columbia, as most of our universities—and of course all of our frankly state-owned universities such as San Francisco State or Berkeley—is governmental property, paid for by government though run by corporate leaders tied in with government. And government property is always and everywhere fair game for the libertarian; for the libertarian must rejoice every time any piece of governmental, and therefore stolen, property is returned by any means necessary to the private sector. (In libertarian theory, it is hot possible to steal from someone who is already a thief and who is only losing property that he has stolen. On the contrary, the person who takes stolen property from a thief is virtuously returning it to innocent private hands.)
Therefore, the libertarian must cheer any attempt to return stolen, governmental property to the private sector: whether it be in the cry, “The streets belong to the people”, or “the parks belong to the people”, or the schools belong to those who use them, i.e. the students and faculty. The libertarian believes that things not properly owned revert to the first person who uses and possesses them, e.g. the homesteader who first clears and uses virgin land; similarly, the libertarian must support any attempt by campus “homesteaders”, the students and faculty, to seize power in the universities from the governmental or quasi-governmental bureaucracy.
Randians retort that public universities, too, are under the rule of legitimate authority because these authorities are elected by the taxpayers, who therefore “own” these campuses. Apart from the fact that university trustees are scarcely elected by anyone, this is a particularly grotesque argument for alleged libertarians to use. For it brings them squarely back to the virus of Social Democracy against which they began to rebel decades ago. The government “represents” the taxpayers indeed! If this were true, then any kind of libertarian viewpoint goes by the board, and we may as well all become Social Democrats, applauding any conceivable activity of government so long as an elected government performs the deed. Surely the basic libertarian insight is that the taxpayers do not rule, that, on the contrary, they are mulcted and robbed for the benefit of the State and its cohorts, and therefore the idea that the “public” or the “taxpayers” really own anything is a fundamental lie palmed off on us by the apologists for the State. It is not we but the government rulers that own “public” property, and hence the vital importance of getting all this property from the “public” to the private or “people’s” sector as rapidly as possible. “Homesteading” is often the easiest and most rapid way of accomplishing this goal.
It is particularly amusing that the one act of students which upset the most people, and especially called upon their heads the charge of “initiating violence”, was the act of the Cornell black students in bringing rifles and ammunition on campus. Laws were immediately and hysterically passed imposing the severest penalties on such action. But what’s wrong with carrying guns? Does not every American have a constitutional right to bear arms? And these weren’t even concealed arms, so why the fuss? Surely the crime comes not in carrying weapons but in using them aggressively. Libertarians and conservatives know this full well when they quite properly call for the repeal of gun laws, restricting the right of everyone to bear arms. Why does everyone forget all this when Negro students bear arms? Could it be that for many “libertarian conservatives” racism runs far deeper than devotion to liberty?
Another broad type of immediate demand is the ending of the university’s use of the property-killing power of eminent domain to oust ghetto poor from their homes (major charges at Columbia and Harvard). Surely the libertarian, opposed to urban renewal and eminent domain, can only applaud this goal. A third type of widespread demand is an insistence on simple academic freedom—an insistence that the university is a place for freedom to express radical political views without harassment. The San Francisco State rebellion was touched off by the university’s firing of instructor George Mason Murray, a Black Panther, and this year’s Berkeley strike by the attempted firing of Panther Eldridge Cleaver. The current Queens-borough Community College rebellion was touched off by the firing of a Progressive Labor member of the faculty, Don Silberman. In all these cases the rebels are fighting for an elemental feature of what makes a genuine university.
Again, conservatives might protest that the trustees have the right to fire anyone they please. But, as we have pointed out, this is not so in the vast bulk of our universities that are openly or covertly governmental. The trustees of those colleges that are genuinely private have the legal right to fire anyone, it is true; but so then do the faculty and the students have the right to quit, to demonstrate, or to strike—in protest against the kind of a university where the trustees would do such a thing. And here again, any person concerned with education and freedom of inquiry must agree with that vision of a university where academic freedom rather than trustee dictation prevails.
Another crucially important demand concerns the ways in which the university reacts to the other demands of the rebels: that the State must not be called in to decide the issue. Again, everyone gripes at the disruption of the educational process caused by canceled classes or a barricaded door. But the really violent destruction consists in calling in the police, the brutal cops with their mace and their clubs and their tear gas. It is no wonder that police brutality has been the major and almost instant catalyst of radicalization on campus. There can be no education, no dialogue, no community of scholars, where there are helmets and clubs and bayonets. “Cops Out!” is an elemental and crucial cry that erupts from the embattled rebels, and it is one that any person of elemental good will, let alone a libertarian, must commend. Even more despotic is the new and sinister instrument of Statism first employed this year by Columbia University: the court injunction. The labor unions knew precisely what they were doing when they lobbied to pass the Norris-LaGuardia law outlawing the use of injunctions in labor disputes; libertarian theory requires the extension of this principle to abolishing injunctions everywhere!
For the injunction has two profoundly tyrannical features: (a) it moves to prohibit someone in advance from specific actions that, for libertarians, are totally legitimate. Thus, Mr. X. is enjoined by the courts from demonstrating at College Y because the courts have concluded that X might engage in an illegal action. But to move thus in advance of action is totally illegitimate; a libertarian legal order moves only against people after they have proceeded to commit a crime, and not before. And (b) the alleged violator of an injunction gets thrown into jail by the judge at the latter’s discretion, without a jury trial, without a proper defense, the right to cross-examine, etc. Furthermore, the judge can keep jailing anyone whom he adjudges in “contempt of court”—whether for violating injunctions or for any other reason—as long as he feels like it. The whole area of “contempt of court” is one where judges can reign by their whim unchecked by law or rights. The entire field must be swept aside in the system of libertarian law.
Along with the demand for keeping the State and its minions out of campus disputes comes one for general amnesty, both civil and criminal, in the courts and in the university. Again a perfectly legitimate demand, especially since in the vast majority of cases the kids have done nothing wrong according to libertarian doctrine. Somehow, the curious theory prevails that “it’s okay to disobey a law or a rule, provided you’re willing to take your punishment”, and therefore amnesty very often meets widespread resentment. But the whole point is that the kids, and libertarians too, don’t recognize the justice of the particular rule or law, and that is precisely why they violate it. So therefore they should not, at least according to their lights, be punished. Besides, Mr. Christian Conservative, what’s wrong with mercy?
“There are but three ways for the populace to escape its wretched lot. The first two are by the routes of the wine-shop or the church; the third is by that of the social revolution.”
— Mikhail Bakunin, 1871
Letter From Washington
By Karl Hess
My Taxes
On April 15, I sent the following letter, accompanying my filled-out 1040 Form, to the Tax Collector:
The Declaration of Independence of the United States of America establishes a bill of particulars in regard to intolerable infringements, abuses, and denials of political power which belongs to the people.
The Federal government of the United States of America today is guilty of exactly every sort of infringement, abuse, and denial stated as intolerable by the Declaration of Independence.
I cannot, in conscience, sanction that government by the payment of taxes.
Further, the Federal government of the United States of America has established as a principle, and ruthlessly by the power of its officials enforces as a practice, that it can demand the primary loyalty of the people, that it can exercise all political power on their behalf, that it can wage war without their approval, and that it can and should establish the standards of their behavior and the goals of their lives.
I could not in conscience sanction such a government by the payment of taxes.
Finally, the Declaration of Independence, in the clearest possible language, tells Americans that when a government becomes destructive of the ends of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that it is the right and the duty of the people to abolish such government, to “throw off such government.”
It is in the spirit of that Declaration, and in comradeship with men everywhere who seek freedom and to throw off such governments, that I now refuse to pay the taxes demanded by the government in the attached form.
If the bulk of the immediate demands of the student rebels is proper and praiseworthy from the libertarian point of view, what of the ultimate demands? What do “they” want, down deep? Mainly it is what we touched on earlier: (1) the demand to transfer power from the trustees to students and faculty; and (2) the severing of the university from the government-military-industrial complex. Both demands are interconnected; for the students perceive as few others do, that the American university is a critical and vital part of the ruling system, the instrument by which the Establishment trains the rising generation to become cogs in the military-industrial machine. The new rebels want no part of being such cogs; and all libertarians must bless them for their revulsion against the educationalstatus quo. The students see that the only way to remove the universities from their “brainwashing” and apologetic role on behalf of the State and its allies is to transform the very nature of the university into student-faculty rule. And why not? As we have seen, for governmental universities this is an eminently libertarian demand, a necessary means for transforming governmental into private property. But, in addition, it is a worthy objective for genuine education, and there is no libertarian reason why even legitimate trustees cannot transfer power voluntarily. Such eminent universities as Oxford and Cambridge are essentially “producers’ co-ops”, owned and directed by the faculty. Student-faculty power means a shift back to the university, not as servitor of the military-industrial complex, not as apologist for the State, but as a genuine community of scholars searching for and discovering the truth. This is the vision that animates the student revolutionaries, and it is a noble vision indeed. Considering what our universities have become, it is also a vision radically different from the status quo: hence it is revolutionary.
It is particularly ironic that conservatives and libertarians should be so distressed at the prospect of students having a say in the universities. After all, a free-market proponent is supposed to favor “consumer sovereignty”, and what are students but the consumers of the educational product? Why react with hatred to any attempt by the consumers to influence their education?
Furthermore, conservatives have for decades inveighed, and properly so, against the American educational system. They have seen how that system imprisons and indoctrinates the youth of America into the statist system, how it functions as intellectual apologists for the State apparatus. For decades, no one did anything about this insight. Now, at long last, that the students are reacting precisely against this system, now that they see the evil and are trying to change it, why, Mr. Conservative, why in hell are you on the other side?
The students see even more than the traditional Conservatives did. They see that, apart from other tie-ins, corporations have been using the government schools and colleges as institutions that train their future workers and executives at the expense of others, i.e. the taxpayers. This is but one way that our corporate state uses the coercive taxing power either to accumulate corporate capital or to lower corporate costs. Whatever that process may be called, it is not “free enterprise”, except in the most ironic sense.
“This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.”
— Abraham Lincoln, Inaugural Address, March 4, 1861
And so, libertarians must hail the student revolution, their means and their ends, their demands both immediate and ultimate. These kids, the first generation in a century to really see and understand the evils of the State, deserve encouragement and support and not our condemnation or our petty complaints. Libertarian students and adults alike have begun to realize this truth. One heartening event has been libertarian participation in some of the recent rebellions. One prominent young libertarian not only participated whole-heartedly in the Cornell rebellion, but he was the only person among the rebels to vote against thanking President Perkins for his liberal concessions to student demands.
The most striking adherence came at Fordham University, where the Fordham Libertarian Alliance constitutes our best-organized chapter on the college campuses—hopefully, a harbinger of the future. FLA was the first group on the Fordham campus to raise the libertarian demand of “Abolish ROTC”; SDS, dominated by Progressive Labor on that campus, hung back for weeks because of fear that the “working class” would not go along with such a demand. But finally, SDS swung into line, and the Fordham sit-in on April 23-24, which lasted over 24 hours, included members of SDS, FLA, and mainly, unaffiliated individuals. The sit-in was unpremeditated, spontaneous; there was no manipulation by a few sinister persons, let along outsiders. Instead, everything was spontaneous, joyous, done by discussion and genuine consensus. FLA members conveyed their exhilaration at the true spirit of community animating all of the students, and their joy at the liberating act of taking control of their own lives, at acting dramatically and even heroically for a moral cause. They experienced, for that unforgettable day in their lives, the shared joy of liberation, one that, perhaps some day, all of us may share. God bless them and their generation.
Perhaps the whole thing can be summed up by a sign carried by some of the kids at an anti-war march in New York City on April 5. The sign read simply: “Death to the State. Power to the People.” How can you fault a movement having that as a slogan?
A Semi-Monthly Newsletter
The Libertarian↩
| Joseph R. Peden, Publisher | Washington Editor, Karl Hess | Murray N. Rothbard, Editor |
| VOL. I, NO. IV | MAY 15, 1969 | 35¢ |
MAILER FOR MAYOR
Norman Mailer’s surprise entry into the Democratic primary for Mayor of New York City, to be held on June 17, provides the most refreshing libertarian political campaign in decades. Mailer has taken everyone by surprise by his platform as well as his sudden entry into the political ranks. The Mailer platform stems from one brilliantly penetrating overriding plank: the absolute decentralization of the swollen New York City bureaucracy into dozens of constituent neighborhood villages. This is the logic of the recent proposals for “decentralization” and “community control” brought to its consistent and ultimate conclusion: the turmoil and plight of our overblown and shattered urban government structures, most especially New York, are to be solved by smashing the urban governmental apparatus, and fragmenting it into a myriad of constituent fragments. Each neighborhood will then be running its own affairs, on all matters, taxation, education, police, welfare, etc. Do conservative whites object to compulsory bussing of black kids into their neighborhood schools? Well, says Mailer, with each neighborhood in absolute control of its own schools this problem could not arise. Do the blacks object to white dictation over the education of black children? This problem too would be solved if Harlem were wholly independent, running its own affairs. In the Mailer plan, black and white could at long last live peacefully side-by-side, with each group and each self-constituted neighborhood running its own affairs.
Mailer and his running mate for City Council President, the writer Jimmy Breslin, realize full well that this striking new idea cuts totally across old-fashioned “left”-“right” lines, that it could logically have an appeal to both groups, or rather to those in both groups that are truly attracted by an essentially libertarian vision. Those who want compulsory integration or those who want the blacks to continue under white rule will not be satisfied with this vision; but those who yearn for liberty, who want whites and blacks to treat each other as independent equals rather than as rulers of one over the other, should flock to the Mailer standard.
Mailer’s other positions flow from his basic libertarian insight. He is opposed to compulsory fluoridation of the water supply, and he favors the freeing of Huey Newton—both libertarian positions in the freeing of the individual and the community from the boot of the State. One of Mailer’s key proposals is that New York City secede from New York State and form a separate 51st State: a position not only consistent with breaking up large governmental bodies but also with the crucial libertarian principle of secession. Secession is a crucial part of the libertarian philosophy: that every state be allowed to secede from the nation, every sub-state from the state, every neighborhood from the city, and, logically, every individual or group from the neighborhood. Mailer’s vision actively promotes this position. He is the first political campaigner since the Civil War to raise the banner of secession, a mighty call which unfortunately became discredited in the eyes of Americans because (a) the South lost the Civil War, and (b) because it was associated in their minds with slavery.
Another superb part of Mailer’s libertarian vision is his reply about where the New York City government would raise funds; he points out that citizens of New York City pay approximately $22 billion in income taxes to the federal government, and that New Yorkers only receive back about $6 billion from federal coffers. Hence, if New Yorkers kept that $22 billion in their own hands . . . That way lies secession indeed!
While Mailer’s all-out decentralization should appeal to left and right alike, in actual fact so far the great bulk of his support is coming from the kids of the New Left. On the West Side of Manhattan, there is in the New Left-oriented Community Free Democratic club at least a strong bloc of ardent Mailer-Breslin adherents. As far as I know, there is nothing like this support on the Right-wing. Again I put the question to Mrs. Conservative: how come? You’ve been griping, and properly so, about swollen governmental bureaucracy for thirty years. For all that time you’ve been calling for decentralization, for fragmenting the government. Now, at long last, a candidate comes along that takes this position (Mailer calls himself a “left conservative”, by the way). Why aren’t you supporting him?
And so The Libertarian makes its first political endorsement: Mailer for Mayor of New York City and Breslin for President of the City Council. But this of course runs us squarely into the very widespread sentiment among libertarians against any support, vote or endorsement whatever for any political candidate. The contention is that any such support constitutes support of, and joining in with, the State apparatus and is therefore immoral for the libertarian.
While I respect this position, I consider it unduly sectarian. The point is that whether we vote or endorse or not, the offices of President, Senator, Mayor or whatever will not become vacant; someone will continue to fill these offices during the coming years. Since there is no way for us to opt for keeping these offices vacant, since we will be stuck with someone in these positions come what may, why shouldn’t we at least express a hope that someone rather than someone else will fill such positions? If we know that either X or Y will fill a given political post, why can’t we express our hope that X will win, or, more likely, that Y will lose? Since we are not yet able to reach that blessed state when both can lose, why not do the best we can with the material at hand for the time being? Or, to put it another way, the State apparatus allows us our biennial or quadrennial electoral choice. It is, to be sure, a piddling choice, a marginal choice, a choice which means little and which of and by itself cannot radically change the existing system. But it is at least something, it is at least some kind of a choice that we are allowed between different groups of would-be masters, and often such a choice may be important—as in the Mailer ideas and candidacy for this year. Why shouldn’t we take advantage of the choices, however piddling, that our State rulers permit us to exercise?
I take as my text Lysander Spooner, one of the great Founding Fathers of individualist anarchism. Spooner wrote:
“in the case of individuals, their actual voting is not to be taken as proof of consent [to the U.S. government] . . . On the contrary, it is to be considered that, without his consent having even been asked a man finds himself environed by a government that he cannot resist; a government that forces him to pay money, render service, and forego the exercise of many of his natural rights, under peril of weighty punishments . . .
Doubtless the most miserable of men, under the most oppressive government in the world, if allowed the ballot, would use it, if they could see any chance of thereby ameliorating their condition. But it would not, therefore, be a legitimate inference that the government itself, that crushes them, was one which they had voluntarily set up, or even consented to.” (Spooner, No Treason: Larkspur, Colorado, 1966, p. 13.)
There is another important reason for not necessarily scorning the endorsement of political parties or candidates. And that is the seeming fact that it is almost impossible to organize ordinary middle-class citizens into action except through political parties. Blacks are organized in the ghettoes, students on campuses, workers—for good or ill—in labor unions, but where are the permanent issue-oriented organizations that successfully attract the great bulk of the country in the middle-class? It seems that the middle-class is only organizationally attracted by political parties, party clubs, etc. If this is so, then political parties become a necessary instrument of the libertarian movement, because if we are to achieve victory we must eventually obtain at the very least the passive support, and hopefully a more active support, of the majority of the middle-class of the country. No organizing among the middle-class has been done by the New Left, although there have been perennial futile attempts to organize the industrial workers by the Marxist elements. The issues, I am convinced, are there: high taxes, inflation, inter-racial clashes arising from failure to achieve community control, a losing or stalemated war, all this can be brought home to the majority of the population. The rhetoric, of course, will have to differ from the rhetoric that appeals to students; but the underlying ideas and philosophy can be the same: individual liberty. But it seems clear the the organizational form for organizing the middle class will have to be a political party or something very much like it.
Libertarian sectarians should ask themselves seriously: do we want victory? If we really want victory for liberty, then we must employ the means necessary for its attainment, and it looks as if political action will be one—though by no means all—of those necessary means. And so Mailer for Mayor.
Letter From Washington
By Karl Hess
REPRESSION, DOMESTIC AND FOREIGN
Latest horrifying report in town is that the Department of Justice, perhaps making use of the barbaric special-arrest-and-detention-camp provisions of the McCarran Act, is planning to escalate its war against dissenters from sniper attacks against leaders to mass arrests of activists generally.
Whether the rumor is true or not, the very existence of the McCarran Act’s provisions for broad round-ups of ‘dangerous’ persons during a time of ‘emergency’ plus the actual maintenance of prison camps on a stand-by basis (as graphically portrayed in Look magazine some time back) is bound to make one wonder.
Should any Senator or Congressman seriously be looking for a libertarian cause to pursue, the abolition of the McCarran Act’s repressive provisions would be an interesting one to consider. For one thing, even proposing it should polarize the legislators, very usefully and very visibly. The lip-service liberty lovers who reach for state power whenever their special notion of order is disordered would, of course, recoil in horror, pompously shouting that the nation must thus defend itself. Liberals would be in their usual dilemma, trying to figure out whether they would lose any patronage or power if the prison camps were closed.
**********
Not a rumor, but just as horrifying, are plans for the new Civil Disorders War Room at the Pentagon. Fed by FBI data channeled through the White House, the new war room will seek completely to computerize all the factors involved in civil disorder such as the location at all times of known activists, militants, dissenters, critics—in short, everyone who attacks the state—as well as the availability and location of all repressive forces from U.S. marshals to paratroopers, state troopers and just plain old storm troopers such as the new Federally-trained phalanxes of paramilitary ‘riot’ police from most of the major cities.
Perhaps the most innovative feature of the war room will be the computer’s reported ability to deal with pictures as input data. It is said that police routinely will photograph all public (and as many private as possible) meetings of dissenters. The photos will then be scanned and, if they show sufficient visual identity points for a face, persons pictured can instantly be identified and their presence at the particular meeting added to the disorder data bank for use in future analyses. Onward and upward with science in the service of the state.
**********
Behind the farce of Vietnam there is tragedy, of course. Its main outline is the number of men, women, children, and soldiers who will die while the politicians in Saigon continue to use the politicians in Washington to bolster their bureaucratic barony. The bureaucrats in Washington, meanwhile, will be concerned solely by the electoral implications of what they do and not by the murder in which they are involved. The tragedy involves all those who must pay for this role-playing with their lives or sanity.
That the tragic sense has reached many in Washington is becoming more and more obvious, although there is no indication that it has penetrated the high, black-iron fence of the White House. At other levels of government, and particularly in the Pentagon itself, there is a growing recognition of the fact that the war is being and will be won by the NLF. Bitterest of all is the recognition that in justice they should win. In the months just ahead this should result in some interesting psychiatric, if not political studies and introspections. No matter what, militarists will continue to justify the war. It should sink them deeper and deeper into a brooding paranoia in which, although all of the facts are against them, they continue to think that it’s all simply an assault on their honest patriotism. But for men of some residual conscience, every day that the war continues will create more of a crisis. Some may even be forced to make decisions—to renounce their role in the tragedy and to seek the redress of immediate withdrawal from Vietnam and long-range withdrawal from imperialism altogether.
S. D. S. And Black Self-Determination
Passing a resolution shining throughout with pure libertarianism and marred by only a few traces of Marxism, the recent Students for a Democratic Society convention in Austin, Texas committed themselves wholeheartedly to the support of the radical Black Panther Party and other black revolutionary groups who have as their purpose the abolition of the American State.
The text of the resolution began: “The sharpest struggles in the world today are those of the oppressed nations against imperialism and for national liberation. Within this country the sharpest struggle is that of the black colony for its liberation . . .” It might have added, of course, that as long as the American Leviathan exists most of us, even the Caucasians, will be enslaved; but it is true that, due to such brutes as the racist white police, far more oppression is executed upon the Negro community.
The Panthers were looked upon by the resolution as the most promising liberators of the blacks. Certainly, now that Negroes everywhere are rejecting the Statist fallacies of the NAACP and other conservative groups and embracing the demands for total freedom advocated by harbingers like Rap Brown, the Panthers offer much potential as an organizing body in the struggle to unshackle the chains that Big White Brother has imposed. As long as it confines itself to freeing the people from political power while not imposing its own rule, the Black People’s (Panther) Army, which is “to be used not only in the defense of the black community but also for its liberation,” may be most important.
Though one or two socialist fallacies blemish the logic of the document, it is made clear that the abolition of the State is the primary and ultimate goal. “The demand for self-determination becomes the most basic demand of the oppressed colony.” Self-determination, taken to its logical conclusion, means the right of every single individual to be free of all political power, i.e., anarchism. Thus it is quite ironic that the U.S. Government, which holds millions in bondage everywhere, pays lip service ‘to the right of self-determination (remember LBJ’s sophisms wherein he pleaded for the self-determination of the South Vietnamese).
Reactionary nationalism, the type of nationalism best exemplified by Hitler and encompassing the Führers of all nation-states in history, is totally rejected, while the completely different revolutionary nationalism, which means simply the uniting of individuals to throw off colonial tyranny, is applauded. As Panther leader G. M. Murray made clear, “We must destroy all cultural nationalism, because it is reactionary and has become a tool of Richard Milhous Nixon and all the U.S. power structure which divides the poor and oppressed, and is used by the greasy-slick black bourgeoisie to exploit black people in the ghetto.”
Everyone professing libertarianism must go hand-in-hand with SDS in “its commitment to join with the Black Panther Party and other black revolutionary groups in the fight against white national chauvinism and white supremacy.” The right of every individual to be free of any nation-state in general, and the U.S. despotism in particular, must be actively supported.
(Note: for the full text of the SDS resolution, see New Left Notes, April 4, 1969, p. 3.)
— Stephen Halbrook
EDITOR’S COMMENT:
The Panthers And Black Liberation
While I do not want to detract from Mr. Halbrook’s excellent article, and while I realize that the great majority of revolutionary anarcho-capitalists are highly enthusiastic about the Black Panthers and their potential for leading a black liberation movement, I must record my serious reservations about the value of the Panthers.
The Panthers have three great virtues: (1) their enormous ability to upset and aggravate the white police, simply by going around armed and in uniform—the supposed Constitutional privilege of every free American but apparently to be denied to radical militant blacks; (2) their considerable capacity for organizing black youth; and (3) excellent black nationalist ideas—particularly in emphasizing a black nation with their own land in such areas as the Black Belt of the South—as expressed in some writings of Eldridge Cleaver.
But there are growing offsetting tendencies so serious as to call the overall merit of the Panthers into grave question. In the first place, there are increasing tendencies for the Panthers to abandon black nationalism almost completely for the Old Left virus of black-white Marxist working-class action. The problem is not only increasing infusions of Marxist rhetoric into the Panther material, but an unfortunate eagerness to reach out and make alliances with white radicals, thereby contradicting the whole point of black power, which is to develop separate black movements resulting in black national self-determination. Even tactically, the original idea was to have alliances between strong, independent black and white radical movements; neither the Panthers nor the white radical movements have grown sufficiently to validate any sort of alliance now, even as a tactic. The most absurd example of this was the decision of the Peace and Freedom Party last year to nominate Eldridge Cleaver for President—a ridiculous decision for both the white and black movements since it involved a supposed black nationalist running for President of a white Republic—the U.S.A. It makes black nationalist sense to run candidates from Harlem or Watts; but not for Senators or Presidents from predominantly white constituencies. The question then arises: are the Panthers really black nationalists?
The second big reservation comes from the increasingly thuggish and Stalinoid tendencies in the Panther movement: viz. (1) the inexcusable pulling of a gun by the Panthers on SNCC leader James Forman, a fellow revolutionary black-nationalist, at a presumed peace meeting between the two groups. Pulling a gun on the State enemy is one thing; pulling a gun on fellow revolutionaries is quite another, and cannot be condoned in any way. Eldridge Cleaver’s reported statement that Forman should have been shot because his strategic views make him “objectively counter-revolutionary” puts the whole affair in an even more grisly light. (2) The equally inexcusable pulling of a gun by the Panthers on the Peace and Freedom party leaders in New York to force those veteran bootlickers of the Panthers to withdraw their duly nominated candidate for the Senate, the pacifist David McReynolds, in order to leave the line blank and allow the Panthers to secretly support the black nationalist Herman Ferguson, who ran a predictably poor race for the Senate on the competing Freedom and Peace party ticket. (3) The outrageous and vicious attack on black revolutionary columnist Julius Lester by Kathleen Cleaver in the Guardian of May 3 for his tactical disagreement with the SDS resolution on the Panthers. This article, devoid of analysis and long on snarling invective, was in the worst tradition of Stalinist billingsgate, in those days often preparatory to a Stalinist purge.
All this means that we should, at the very least, withdraw our enthusiasm from the Panthers. In any event, it is the responsibility of whites to build the white movement, and to concentrate our time and energies therefore on white rather than black affairs.
RECOMMENDED READING
COUNTERPOINT. The nation’s finest student libertarian periodical. Free, and published irregularly in mimeographed form by the Fordham Libertarian Alliance. Solidly anarcho-capitalist, Counterpoint has become increasingly trenchant and radical over the past year. Vol. 2, No. 7 has an excellent article expounding free-market anarchism by Mario J. Rizzo, an exposure of the relations between big business and government in founding the ICC by Joseph Castrovinci, and a refutation of the familiar “if you don’t like it here, why don’t you leave?” argument by David Hagner. FLA led the Fordham sit-in for the ouster of ROTC and every libertarian will enjoy FLA’s handbill “ROTC OUT”, published at the height of the agitation. All available from Fordham Libertarian Alliance, Box 763, Fordham University, The Bronx, N.Y. 10458.
Leviathan. In our April 15 issue, we neglected to give the address of this New Left monthly. It can be obtained from Subscription Department, Leviathan, 2700 Broadway, New York, N.Y. 10025. Price is $5 a year, single copy 50 cents.
NACLA Newsletter. Published 10 times a year by the North American Congress on Latin America. NACLA is the country’s best muckraking organization, no longer confining itself to Latin America as the title might suggest. Latest NACLA publication is the booklet Michael Klare, ed., The University-Military Complex, price $1.00, an indispensable reference handbook of the detailed tie-ins between university professors and the military. Available from North American Congress on Latin America, P.O. Box 57, Cathedral Park Sta., New York, N.Y. 10025.
Barton Bernstein, ed., Towards A New Past: Dissenting Essays in American History (Random House, 1968: Random House-Vintage Paperbacks, 1969). A collection of representative essays, some excellent, by younger New Left American historians. Particularly recommended are Jesse Lemisch on the “mobs” during the American Revolution, and the Revisionist foreign policy articles of Lloyd Gardner and Robert F. Smith. Both are Revisionist on World War II and the Cold War, and Smith is the first historian to footnote Jim Martin’s American Liberalism and World Politics, the mammoth 2-volume dissection of the shift of American Liberals from “isolationism” to war during World War II.
James Weinstein, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State 1900-18 (Beacon Press, 1968; Beacon Paperback, 1969). Indispensable complement to Gabriel Kolko’s work on the origin of government regulation of business in the Progressive Era from the desire of Big Business to achieve monopolistic privilege through government. Weinstein concentrates on the pro-government intervention ideology of Big Businessmen. The “enlightened” Big Business leaders scornfully referred to the NAM (in those days controlled by free-market small businessmen) as “anarchists”.
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The Libertarian↩
| Joseph R. Peden, Publisher | Washington Editor, Karl Hess | Murray N. Rothbard, Editor |
| VOL. 1, NO. V | JUNE 1, 1969 | 35¢ |
THE MOVEMENT GROWS
The libertarian movement, bless it, is on the march. For the first time in memory, there is now a nationwide libertarian organization in existence, the Radical Libertarian Alliance. It was born on May 17, on the occasion of the third meeting of the Libertarian Forum in New York City.
Until this year, the libertarian movement was pitifully small and beleaguered, and any talk of any sort of libertarian organization or even occasional meetings was hopelessly Utopian. But now the movement has been escalating with extraordinary rapidity. In the old days, there would be one new convert a year, and he would be worked on with painful slowness before his conversion could be complete. But now we keep running into kids, some college freshmen, who are not only libertarians, but full-fledged and self-converted, with the “correct line” on everything, from competing private defense agencies to private property rights to war revisionism to alliance with the New Left. It has all been very gratifying.
Compare the state of the movement now, say, to that of a year ago. One year ago the New York movement contained about half a dozen people; now, for the first time in living memory it has escalated to far beyond the capacity of one person’s living room. It was for that reason that Joseph Peden and Jerry Woloz decided to found the Libertarian Forum, basically conceived as a way for the whole New York movement to meet periodically in the confines of one room. We met for the first time on January 31 at the Great Shanghai restaurant in New York City. We expected about 20 people to appear; we got over seventy. It was a glorious moment. People came from as far away as South Carolina and Buffalo for the occasion. The editor spoke about the necessity for thinking in revolutionary terms.
The next meeting was on April 11, when Karl Hess, our most recent and our best-known convert, spoke on the need to avoid letting a sectarian emphasis on economics block our alliance with other, New Left, groups which are overall libertarian in thrust without being sophisticated in economics. The attendance at this meeting was again over seventy. The atmosphere at both meetings was highly enthusiastic, and several on-the-spot conversions were made to the cause. The “Devil” was represented in both cases by his advocates in the form of assorted Randians and red-baiters, who served as useful foils for spirited argument.
The spirit and the attendance at the Forums gave rise to much agitation to progress beyond these simple meetings, and to advance toward a wider and better-organized movement. Our best organized group had been the Fordham Libertarian Alliance, which led the sit-in at the once conservative Fordham campus demanding the ouster of the military cadre known as ROTC from the campus. The FLA had begun only in this academic year, with Gerald P. O’Driscoll, Jr., who graduates this spring with honors in economics, as its dynamic leader. Two years ago, Jerry was a bright young right-winger and ROTC leader, who favored the war in Vietnam. Now he stands as one of the leading spirits of anarcho-capitalist youth. Jerry will proceed next year to graduate work in economics at UCLA, leaving FLA in the capable hands of Frank X. Richter, Dave Hagner, and a host of others.
An important anarcho-capitalist group has also rapidly emerged at Wesleyan College, phenomenal in that it consists almost exclusively of freshmen, led by John Hagel III. Hagel and his remarkable colleagues have already seized control of the Free University at Wesleyan, at which John is already teaching a course in anarchism, and have done extensive organizing work in colleges and prep schools throughout the New England and even Middle Atlantic states. The Wesleyan group also helped lead an anti-ROTC sit-in at the Administration Building there. Adopting the principle of alliance with the New Left, the entire Wesleyan group formed the Earl Francis Memorial Chapter of SDS, and will battle within SDS against the Marxist forces. (Earl Francis was a heroic individualist martyr to the U.S. government; the government refused to recognize his home-steading claim to a gold mine on U.S. land on the grounds that the mine was too small, and ordered him off the land and his house blown up; Francis complied, blowing himself up along with it.)
At State University of New York at Buffalo, Roy A. Childs, Jr. has made the paradigmatic progressive transition from Randianism to Lefevrian pacifism to revolutionary anarcho-capitalism, and has been writing a column in one of the college newspapers and been heard on Buffalo radio.
In the meanwhile, at Stanford University Professor Ronald Hamowy of the history and contemporary civilization departments has been carrying on radical libertarian activities of his own. To old friends, the emergence of the former moderate Ronald as revolutionary is one of the joyous surprises of this age of polarization. Last year, Ronald Hamowy was one of the two or three Stanford professors to support the sit-in for university reform. In the course of his radical activities there, he gave a notable speech, carried in the Stanford paper, which sharply criticized the rigidly non-violent tendency of the draft resistance movement of that era. This year, it was Ronald who suggested the sit-in tactic employed by the student rebels against military research at the Stanford Research Institute, and he sat in for the week-long demonstration. Then, when a court injunction threatened to be employed against a second group of sit-ins, Ronald organized an open letter to the Administration threatening a faculty strike—i.e. refusal to hand in grades—should any student be jailed for violating the injunction against them from even attending their own classes. Not only has Stanford been threatening to fire the signers of this letter, but there have been mutterings that Ronald by his action is trying to “intimidate” the court and is therefore in a state of contempt of court and could be immediately jailed. Such is just one aspect of the repression that is growing and accelerating against the dissenters in this “free” country. (In the old days, libertarians always used to be asked the question: “Well, after all, what liberties have we lost?” No one has asked this question for a long while; the repression is too obvious.)
Speaking of repression, a little whiff of it was felt at the third meeting of the Libertarian Forum at the Jager House in New York, when the libertarian scholar and activist Leonard P. Liggio spoke on the libertarian nature of the New Left. Less than twenty-four hours after the end of this harmless meeting, we heard from unimpeachable sources of someone who had read the report in sextuplicate of a cop spy at the meeting, the other carbons going to other cop organizations. And yet, countless libertarian-conservatives still revere and identify with the polizei! It seems that there were SDS members—horrors!—at the Forum meeting, and that many SDS people are tailed wherever they go by some form of undercover cop.
At any rate, out of that Forum meeting emerged the Radical Libertarian Alliance. In keeping with its libertarian nature, it is envisioned that RLA will be organized in the form of strictly autonomous chapters. At the beginning, most of the chapters will be in various colleges, but there are also several non-campus chapters. There are regional organizers, and there will be meetings in the various regions. The national functions are ones of service: education and coordination. There will be a national Speakers’ Bureau, which will send speakers around to the various chapters for purposes of education and inspiration and a national Publications Bureau to print leaflets and other material. The first material to be issued by the Publications Bureau will be a founding statement of aims and principles, a statement which defines the goals, the strategy, and the principles of the Radical Libertarian Alliance. All who agree with this statement will be admitted to the individual chapters.
Officers of RLA are as follows: Regional Coordinators: John Hagel III for New England and for Prep Schools, Wilson A. Clark, Jr. of the University of North Carolina for the South, and Gerald O’Driscoll as the “missionary” coordinator for California. Overall North American Coordinator is Karl Hess, 1085 National Press Building, N. W., Washington, D.C. Treasurer is Walter Block, 380 Riverside-Drive, New York, N.Y. Anyone who wants to send funds to RLA should send them to Walter. The key post of corresponding secretary has gone to Roy A. Childs, Jr., 109 Wende, Buffalo, New York 14211. Anyone who wants information or advice on joining the organization, forming chapters, getting speakers, etc. or who wishes to send news to other members, should contact Roy Childs.
It is estimated that already, when RLA has hardly been formed, there are at least 26 college chapters alone. The potential for rapid growth is enormous, beginning this fall, especially on those campuses where SDS has come under the control of Marxist elements and where RLA could fill an immediate libertarian vacuum.
Onward and upward!
“An oppressed people are authorized whenever they can to rise and break their fetters.”
— Henry Clay, 1818
Letter From Washington
By Karl Hess
The Coming White Terror
There is going to be a time of repression in this country. It may be quite harsh. For many, including libertarians, it may be frightening and discouraging. For the only vaguely committed it will be too much to bear and they will move back to safe positions in liberal-land or conservative-country, those establishment enclaves whose philosophically peripatetic borders seem now to overlap lovingly and lastingly on the American political landscape.
The facts of the repression are clear, even if not overt. The Deputy Attorney General, Richard Kleindienst, an old friend who, I can assure you, is more than capable of matching rhetoric to action, has been quoted in The Atlantic as saying that student dissenters would be “rounded up” and placed in “detention camps”. His subsequent denial of the quotation was not categorial but only complained that he had been, as politicians apparently always are, misquoted and that, ah hah, even if he had said something like that he hadn’t meant anything like that.
Mr. Kleindienst, as with every one of his political associates with whom I have worked, is sensitive first and foremost to national mood. Although they may sometimes seem to buck its ordinary ebb and flow, they all turn and run in the face of its occasional floods. Such a flood is now evident, with more than 80 percent of persons answering recent polls saying that they approve of stringent crack-downs on student dissent. It is my notion that buried in these responses, and not by too much racist dirt at that, is an implicit desire also for a crackdown on black militants.
The Administration, with some of the most attentive political antennae we have ever seen—look at the power wielded in it by publicists!—is surely going to play the repressive mood for all it is worth. And how much it is worth is, in turn, clearly evident in the fact that Super Semanticist S. I. Hayakawa has become Puissant Politician merely and solely because he has bumbled himself, like the British at Balaclava, into a bloody, dumb, eventually disastrous position of pig-headed glory. The fact that merely cracking a few student skulls has been enough to propel this second-rate social democrat into a first rank of right-wing respect, equal to and possibly even in advance of that other pillar of West Coast educationism, Max Rafferty, must be lesson enough to Richard Nixon and his court that there are political riches in the blood of repression.
There is, however, a growing interpretation, even among some who call themselves libertarians but who probably would be more comfortable as conservatives, that the New Left has brought it all on themselves and, consequently, upon the rest of us and that, in a convenient application of what the Christians might call the Agnus Dei shift, it is the New Left into whom all the daggers of recrimination may be thrust.
No.
It is the libertarian instinct and interpretation that tells us that it is the state, and not those who attack or resist it, that is the guilty or most guilty party in the development of any repression and that to call repression merely reaction is to overlook or even deny the dynamics of state development.
In that dynamic development, the state, any state, always becomes more repressive over the long run rather than less. There are no exceptions to this in the development of any state where the power has been delegated by the people to the politicians, no matter how benign those politicians may seem at any particular point of the development.
Thus, the actions by the New Left, or even the Crazies, that have goaded the state into its current quiet frenzy, are hastened by but not created by those actions. The state must, sooner or later, become more rather than less coercive and repressive. That movement may be accelerated by people’s resistance but it is not created by that resistance. Has not, in fact, the structure of government, state, local, and national, actually become more repressive year by year in this country whether in times of peace, war, languor or riot? The answer is that it has and the very political party which now occupies (and occupies is just the word) the positions of power today is also the very political party which in past campaigns has documented and dealt with that onward course of repression in greatest detail. They are silent now, of course, because what it once called oppressive under Democrats becomes orderliness under Republicans.
Libertarians, who, throughout modern political history, have presented the only clear and consistent analysis of state power, know that the difference between the natural or spontaneous order of a free society, and the enforced order of a state system, is the very difference between the day of human liberation and the night of state coercive-ness.
(Some details of that night as it now unfolds in Washington, appear to include the systematic arrest, on a wide variety of unrelated charges and as often as possible by local police, of student leaders and, subsequently, and perhaps depending upon the reaction to that, of non-student militants and radicals. The Black Panthers, of course, face a repression far more harsh and the key to its success very likely is simply to what extent local police forces, now frothing with a really rabid zeal, can execute Panthers without publicity. They will be helped, probably, by all of those liberal and conservative editors who feel that Panther revolutionary rhetoric is a threat to the orderly development of their own political programs.)
Libertarians have a rather clear-cut choice in facing the repression. They tacitly or otherwise support the state or they can remain with the Resistance. There is no convenient middle course such as simply opting out of the struggle. There may be an appearance of such an option but it is illusory. For instance, even if one is able to retreat to a position in which one has no contact with either the state or the Resistance, a reaction in regard to the state-resistance question is inevitable. For one thing there will be many times when a friend who has not retreated could use your help. By not helping him, and if he is resisting, the state itself has been helped. This is not to call for selfless heroics, but only for principled recognition of the fact that there are two sides in this struggle and libertarians, whose analysis is the most pertinent of all, should not contemplate being able to avoid taking one of those sides. Nor should they avoid the possibility—and I say it is inevitability—that a choice which does not support the Resistance, even if with grave reservations regarding some of its character or characters, actually opposes it and that any choice which does not oppose the state, actually supports it.
Not every libertarian should or could be found at the barricades resisting or in the tunnels undermining state power. None, of course, want to end up in jail. And now they will see the power of the state, awesome and even frightening, and they will see the jails eagerly eating the revolution.
Tactics may have to change. That is only wisdom. But direction? Never! The course is to liberty. The state is the enemy.
DON’T TREAD ON ME
If the Rubber Manufacturers Association can buy enough bureaucrats, the old Fisk slogan “Time to Re-tire” will cease to be a mere advertising slogan and become a gunpoint command.
The April newsletter of the National Highway Users Conference notes that the RMA has “suggested” to the Federal Highway Administration a three-part “tire safety program”. It calls for state laws that would require tire inspection 1) on a periodic basis, preferably semi-annually at a state inspection station; 2) by law enforcement authorities on a spot-check or random basis, and 3) as a pre-condition to the sale of all used vehicles.
The RMA inspection program would make it mandatory to remove passenger car tires from service when tread depth is less than l/16th of an inch. The association pointed out to the Government that this depth has already been recognized by the National Highway Safety Bureau, which requires all new tires to have molded tread wear indicators at the 1/16-inch mark.
The RMA said that only a few states already have compulsory tire inspection programs and expressed dismay that two-thirds of all cars on the road can still be driven without periodic checks for worn-out tires (i. e, by people other than the owner).
All states should enact statutes which would permit “policing authorities” to require removal from a vehicle of any unsafe tire whenever and wherever it may be found, the RMA stated.
The inspection program, the newsletter said, was “submitted in response to proposed Federal motor vehicle safety standards for vehicles in use.” It’s a classic example of how business uses the Government for its own benefit, and helps explain why, after a short bleat of protest for the record, the auto industry crawled in bed with Ralph Nader when he made his propositions.
The propagandists would have you believe the consumer is being protected by the “auto safety” program, but what consumer has the time or the know-how to “respond” to “proposed motor vehicle safety standards”? Car-buying, after all, takes up a very small part of his day.
RMA lobbyists, on the other hand, have absolutely nothing better to do all day than badger and bribe bureaucrats into passing laws that will force more tires on an unwilling public. Once again it is being demonstrated that regulatory agencies work to the benefit of the producer instead of the consumer.
How sweet it is for the country club set in Akron. They can cut loose some of that high-price marketing help that tries to tempt drivers into buying new tires and rely instead on tax-supported state police to do the “selling”.
Some day soon you may be flagged down by a cop with a .38 caliber pistol in one and .38 caliber calipers in the other. He’s authorized to poke around in your tire tread, then force you into the tire store that happens to be nearby. It promises to be the best fee-splitting scheme since justices of the peace started going out of style.
Traditionally the tire industry has been relatively unregulated and consequently highly competitive. But now it is trying to blow out the little Fisk boy’s candle and climb on the wide-tread bandwagon of the Federal Highway Administration.
— Peter Blake
FOR REVOLUTIONARY ANARCHO-CAPITALISM
A fully consistent concern with human liberty such as that which The Libertarian espouses, necessarily involves the acceptance of what may be called Revolutionary Anarcho-Capitalism. Let us see why.
Liberty can only exist when no one’s rights are violated. Since man rightfully owns his own body and the produce of any unclaimed natural resources he mixes his labor with, he has a right to trade this produce with other individuals or groups of individuals. Any threat or initiation of violence against a man or his property is in violation of man’s rights and hence inimical to liberty. So far, Capitalism. (Note, however, the difference between this free-market philosophy and that of our present liberal corporate “capitalism”.)
The “Anarcho” part comes in when it is realized that government by its very nature is coercive. Even a “pure” democracy, one not ruled by a power-elite, such as ours is, is coercive. People who have not consented to the democratic process in the first place will be coerced if they are outvoted. The Anarchistic strain is strengthened by the understanding that the free market provides a better product at a lower price for all goods. For defense, courts, police, roads, information, a money medium, as well as for goods where even classical liberals would restrict government intervention. So far, Anarcho-Capitalism.
Anarcho-Capitalism is not enough, however. Unless we realize that defensive violence in response to aggression is fully consistent with libertarianism, Anarcho-Capitalism can lead to a sterile pacifism. (“Government depredations are immoral, but opposition is also immoral; we can therefore only educate.”). Education alone cannot achieve liberty as can be seen by assuming the most favorable case for “educationalism”. Let’s suppose, for example, that all the people in the world who presently reject Anarcho-Capitalism through lack of knowledge learn the error of their ways. While this would be a great boon, what of the people who defend statism not through error, but through immorality? No ruling class in history has ever given up its power through sweet reasonableness and rational argument. For this, a Revolutionary Anarcho-Capitalist movement is needed.
— Walter Block
RECOMMENDED READING
Karl Hess, “In Defense of Hess,” The New Guard (April, 1969). It is rare indeed for us to be recommending any article in this YAF publication, but Hess’ article is a stirring defense of anarchism. Interestingly enough, reports are that Jerome Tuccille, who argues the archist point of view in the same issue, has since been virtually converted to the libertarian position.
Ferdinand Lundberg, The Rich and the Super-Rich (Bantam, paper). A huge, sprawling, badly organized best-seller, which yet contains indispensable information on the rich families and their relationship with government.
Lewis Mumford, The City in History (Harcourt, Brace, and World, paper). A fascinating, monumental history of the city. Includes analysis of the original city as being a parasitic, military arm of the State, living off society.
Albert Jay Nock, Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (Regnery, paper). It is great to have this modern classic back in print, and in paperback. Nock was an excellent stylist and a profound libertarian, and his book is must reading, despite its suffering from a profound historical pessimism that isolated Nock and robbed him of most of the impact he could have had.
Jacobus ten Broek, Edward Barnhart, and Floyd Matson, Prejudice, War and the Constitution (University of California Press, paper). A reprint of a thorough, scholarly account of America’s most vicious invasion of civil liberties: the mass evacuation into concentration camps of America’s Japanese’-American citizens in World War II.
Gordon Zahn, German Catholics and Hitler’s Wars (Dutton, paper). An impressive indictment of the favorable attitude of the German Catholic hierarchy toward the German State and therefore toward Hitler’s wars.
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A Semi-Monthly Newsletter
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Libertarian Forum↩
| Joseph R. Peden, Publisher | Washington Editor, Karl Hess | Murray N. Rothbard, Editor |
| VOL. I, NO. VI | JUNE 15, 1969 | 20¢ 35 ¢ |
MASSACRE AT PEOPLE’S PARK
Sometimes it is difficult to escape the conviction that there is a sickness so deep in the soul of the American people that they are beyond redemption. On May 15 and in ensuing days the massed armed might of the State, local police, state police, National Guardsmen, zeroed in on a few thousand unarmed citizens of Berkeley, California, who were doing what? Who had taken a muddy lot and transformed it lovingly into a “people’s park”. For this crime, and for the crime of refusing to move from this park which they had created with their own hands, the brutal forces of the State, led by Governor Reagan, moved in with fixed bayonets; shot into the unarmed crowd, wounding over 70 people and murdering the innocent bystander James Rector; flew a helicopter over the crowd and sprayed a super-form of mace over everyone in the area, including children and hospital patients; rounded up hundreds of people and humiliated and tortured them in the infamous Santa Rita concentration camp—one of the major camps for Japanese-Americans during World War II. All this has happened in our America of 1969, and where oh where is the nationwide cry of outrage? Where is the demand for the impeachment of the murderer Reagan and all of the lesser governmental cohorts implicated in this monstrosity?
Sure, there are a few protests from liberals who feel that the use of force was a bit excessive, but one gets the distinct impressive that for the great American masses the massacre was a pretty good show. There is our pervasive sickness. Why this range of reaction from indifference to enthusiasm for this terrible deed? Because the Berkeley park-creators were apparently longhairs and “hippies”, and therefore subhuman with no rights or liberties that need to be respected. There are apparently tens of millions of God-fearing Americans who favor the genocidal destruction of hundreds of thousands or even millions of young people whose only crime is to persist in esthetic differentiation from the mass of the populace.
The American soul-sickness is also manifest in the pervasive reaction to the problem of “violence” in America. Mention “violence” and the average person begins to fulminate against isolated muggers, against Negroes who burn down stores, and against students who blacken a few ashtrays in university buildings. Never does this average American, when he contemplates violence in our epoch, consider the American army and its genocidal destruction of the people of Vietnam, or the American police in their clubbing at Chicago, or their murdering and gassing at People’s Park. Because apparently when the State, the monopolizer of violence, the great bestial Moloch of mass destruction, when the State uses violence it apparently is not violence at all. Only virtually unarmed citizens using force against, the State, or even simply refusing to obey State orders, only these citizens are considered to be “violent”. It is this kind of insane blindness that permitted President Johnson to trumpet that “we shall not tolerate violence, no matter the slogan”, and President Nixon to denounce student violence while lauding the military-industrial complex, and not be laughed out of office.
The cry has gone up that all this was necessary to defend the “private property” of the University of California. In the first place, even if this little lot was private property, the bayoneting, gassing, torturing, and shooting of these unarmed park-developers would have been “overkill” so excessive and grotesque as to be mass murder and torture and therefore far more criminal than the original trespass on the lot. You do not machine-run someone for stealing an apple; this is punishment so far beyond the proportion that “fits the crime” as to be itself far more criminal than the original infraction. So that even if this property were legitimately private the massacre is still to be condemned.
Secondly, it is surely grotesquerie to call the muddy lot “private property”. The University of California is a governmental institution which acquires its funds and its property from mulcting the taxpayers. It is not in any sense private property then, but stolen property, and as such is morally unowned, and subject to the libertarian homesteading principle which we discuss below. The people of Berkeley were homesteaders in the best American—and libertarian-tradition, taking an unused, morally unowned, muddy lot, and transforming it by their homesteading labor into a pleasant and useful people’s park. For this they were massacred.
This is it; this is an acid test of whether any person can in reason and in conscience call himself a “libertarian”. Here the issues are clear and simple; here there are no complicating factors. There is no alleged “national security” involved; there is no “international Communist conspiracy” at work; there are no stores being burned; there are no solipsistic students bellyaching about classes being suspended. The issues are crystal-clear: the armed, brutal, oppressive forces of the State stomping upon peaceful, unarmed, homesteading citizens. Anyone who fails to raise his voice in absolute condemnation of this reign of terror, anyone who equivocates or excuses or condones, can no longer call himself a libertarian. On the contrary, he thereby ranges himself with the forces of despotism; he becomes part of the Enemy.
TO OUR READERS:
Change Of Name
After we had launched The Libertarian, we discovered that a monthly mimeographed periodical with the same name emanating from New Jersey had been publishing for several years. To avoid confusion with this publication, we are hereby changing our name to The Libertarian Forum; no change is involved in policy or format.
Letter From Washington
By Karl Hess
Where Are The Specifics?
Libertarianism is clearly the most, perhaps the only truly radical movement in America. It grasps the problems of society by the roots. It is not reformist in any sense. It is revolutionary in every sense.
Because so many of its people, however, have come from the right there remains about it at least an aura or, perhaps, miasma of defensiveness, as though its interests really center in, for instance, defending private property. The truth, of course, is that libertarianism wants to advance principles of property but that it in no way wishes to defend, willy nilly, all property which now is called private.
Much of that property is stolen. Much is of dubious title. All of it is deeply intertwined with an immoral, coercive state system which has condoned, built on, and profited from slavery; has expanded through and exploited a brutal and aggressive imperial and colonial foreign policy, and continues to hold the people in a roughly serf-master relationship to political-economic power concentrations.
Libertarians are concerned, first and foremost, with that most valuable of properties, the life of each individual. That is the property most brutally and constantly abused by state systems whether they are of the right or left. Property rights pertaining to material objects are seen by libertarians as stemming from and as importantly secondary to the right to own, direct, and enjoy one’s own life and those appurtenances thereto which may be acquired without coercion.
Libertarians, in short, simply do not believe that theft is proper whether it is committed in the name of a state, a class, a crises, a credo, or a cliche.
This is a far cry from sharing common ground with those who want to create a society in which super capitalists are free to amass vast holdings and who say that that is ultimately the most important purpose of freedom. This is proto-heroic nonsense.
Libertarianism is a people’s movement and a liberation movement. It seeks the sort of open, non-coercive society in which the people, the living, free, distinct people may voluntarily associate, dis-associate, and, as they see fit, participate in the decisions affecting their lives. This means a truly free market in everything from ideas to idiosyncrasies. It means people free collectively to organize the resources of their immediate community or individualistically to organize them; it means the freedom to have a community-based and supported judiciary where wanted, none where not, or private arbitration services where that is seen as most desirable. The same with police. The same with schools, hospitals, factories, farms, laboratories, parks, and pensions. Liberty means the right to shape your own institutions. It opposes the right of those institutions to shape you simply because of accreted power or gerontological status.
For many, however, these root principles of radical libertarianism will remain mere abstractions, and even suspect, until they are developed into aggressive specific proposals.
There is scarcely anything radical about, for instance, those who say that the poor should have a larger share of the Federal budget. That is reactionary, asking that the institution of state theft be made merely more palatable by distributing its loot to more sympathetic persons. Perhaps no one of sound mind could object more to giving Federal funds to poor people than to spending the money on the slaughter of Vietnamese peasant fighters. But to argue such relative merits must end being simply reformist and not revolutionary.
Libertarians could and should propose specific revolutionary tactics and goals which would have specific meaning to poor people and to all people; to analyze in depth and to demonstrate in example the meaning of liberty, revolutionary liberty to them.
I, for one, earnestly beseech such thinking from my comrades.
The proposals should take into account the revolutionary treatment of stolen ‘private’ and ‘public’ property in libertarian, radical, and revolutionary terms; the factors which have oppressed people so far, and so forth. Murray Roth-bard and others have done much theoretical work along these lines but it can never be enough for just a few to shoulder so much of the burden.
Let me propose just a few examples of the sort of specific, revolutionary and radical questions to which members of our Movement might well address themselves.
—Land ownership and/or usage in a situation of declining state power. The Tijerina situation suggests one approach. There must be many others. And what about (realistically, not romantically) water and air pollution liability and prevention?
—Worker, share-owner, community roles or rights in productive facilities in terms of libertarian analysis and as specific proposals in a radical and revolutionary context. What, for instance, might or should happen to General Motors in a liberated society?
Of particular interest, to me at any rate, is focusing libertarian analysis and ingenuity on finishing the great unfinished business of the abolition of slavery. Simply setting slaves free, in a world still owned by their masters, obviously was an historic inequity. (Libertarians hold that the South should have been permitted to secede so that the slaves themselves, along with their Northern friends, could have built a revolutionary liberation movement, overthrown the masters, and thus shaped the reparations of revolution.) Thoughts of reparations today are clouded by concern that it would be taken out against innocent persons who in no way could be connected to former oppression. There is an area where that could be avoided: in the use of government-‘owned’ lands and facilities as items of exchange in compensating the descendants of slaves and making it possible for them to participate in the communities of the land, finally, as equals and not wards.
Somewhere, I must assume, there is a libertarian who, sharing the idea, might work out a good and consistent proposal for justice in that area.
Obviously the list is endless. But the point is finite and finely focused.
With libertarianism now developing as a Movement, it earnestly and urgently requires innovative proposals, radical and specific goals, and a revolutionary agenda which can translate its great and enduring principles into timely and commanding courses of possible and even practical action.
“What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms.”
— Thomas Jefferson, 1787
CONFISCATION AND THE HOMESTEAD PRINCIPLE
Karl Hess’s brilliant and challenging article in this issue raises a problem of specifics that ranges further than the libertarian movement. For example, there must be hundreds of thousands of “professional” anti-Communists in this country. Yet not one of these gentry, in the course of their fulminations, has come up with a specific plan for de-Communization. Suppose, for example, that Messers. Brezhnev and Co. become converted to the principles of a free society; they than ask our anti-Communists, all right, how do we go about de-socializing? What could our anti-Communists offer them?
This question has been essentially answered by the exciting developments of Tito’s Yugoslavia. Beginning in 1952, Yugoslavia has been de-socializing at a remarkable rate. The principle the Yugoslavs have used is the libertarian “homesteading” one: the state-owned factories to the workers that work in them! The nationalized plants in the “public” sector have all been transferred in virtual ownership to the specific workers who work in the particular plants, thus making them producers’ coops, and moving rapidly in the direction of individual shares of virtual ownership to the individual worker. What other practicable route toward destatization could there be? The principle in the Communist countries should be: land to the peasants and the factories to the workers, thereby getting the property out of the hands of the State and into private, homesteading hands.
The homesteading principle means that the way that unowned property gets into private ownership is by the principle that this property justly belongs to the person who finds, occupies, and transforms it by his labor. This is clear in the case of the pioneer and virgin land. But what of the case of stolen property?
Suppose, for example, that A steals B’s horse. Then C comes along and takes the horse from A. Can C be called a thief? Certainly not, for we cannot call a man a criminal for stealing goods from a thief. On the contrary, C is performing a virtuous act of confiscation, for he is depriving thief A of the fruits of his crime of aggression, and he is at least returning the horse to the innocent “private” sector and out of the “criminal” sector. C has done a noble act and should be applauded. Of course, it would be still better if he returned the horse to B, the original victim. But even if he does not, the horse is far more justly in C’s hands than it is in the hands of A, the thief and criminal.
Let us now apply our libertarian theory of property to the case of property in the hands of, or derived from, the State apparatus. The libertarian sees the State as a giant gang of organized criminals, who live off the theft called “taxation” and use the proceeds to kill, enslave, and generally push people around. Therefore, any property in the hands of the State is in the hands of thieves, and should be liberated as quickly as possible. Any person or group who liberates such property, who confiscates or appropriates it from the State, is performing a virtuous act and a signal service to the cause of liberty. In the case of the State, furthermore, the victim is not readily identifiable as B, the horse-owner. All taxpayers, all draftees, all victims of the State have been mulcted. How to go about returning all this property to the taxpayers? What proportions should be used in this terrific tangle of robbery and injustice that we have all suffered at the hands of the State? Often, the most practical method of de-statizing is simply to grant the moral right of ownership on the person or group who seizes the property from the State. Of this group, the most morally deserving are the ones who are already using the property but who have no moral complicity in the State’s act of aggression. These people then become the “homesteaders” of the stolen property and hence the rightful owners.
Take, for example, the State universities. This is property built on funds stolen from the taxpayers. Since the State has not found or put into effect a way of returning ownership of this property to the taxpaying public, the proper owners of this university are the “homesteaders”, those who have already been using and therefore “mixing their labor” with the facilities. The prime consideration is to deprive the thief, in this case the State, as quickly as possible of the ownership and control of its ill-gotten gains, to return the property to the innocent, private sector. This means student and/or faculty ownership of the universities.
As between the two groups, the students have a prior claim, for the students have been paying at least some amount to support the university whereas the faculty suffer from the moral taint of living off State funds and thereby becoming to some extent a part of the State apparatus.
The same principle applies to nominally “private” property which really comes from the State as a result of zealous lobbying on behalf of the recipient. Columbia University, for example, which receives nearly two-thirds of its income from government, is only a “private” college in the most ironic sense. It deserves a similar fate of virtuous homesteading confiscation.
But if Columbia University, what of General Dynamics? What of the myriad of corporations which are integral parts of the military-industrial complex, which not only get over half or sometimes virtually all their revenue from the government but also participate in mass murder? What are their credentials to “private” property? Surely less than zero. As eager lobbyists for these contracts and subsidies, as co-founders of the garrison state, they deserve confiscation and reversion of their property to the genuine private sector as rapidly as possible. To say that their “private” property must be respected is to say that the property stolen by the horsethief and the murdered must be “respected”.
But how then do we go about destatizing the entire mass of government property, as well as the “private property” of General Dynamics? All this needs detailed thought and inquiry on the part of libertarians. One method would be to turn over ownership to the homesteading workers in the particular plants; another to turn over pro-rata ownership to the individual taxpayers. But we must face the fact that it might prove the most practical route to first nationalize the property as a prelude to redistribution. Thus, how could the ownership of General Dynamics be transferred to the deserving taxpayers without first being nationalized enroute? And, further more, even if the government should decide to nationalize General Dynamics—without compensation, of course—per se and not as a prelude to redistribution to the taxpayers, this is not immoral or something to be combatted. For it would only mean that one gang of thieves—the government—would be confiscating property from another previously cooperating gang, the corporation that has lived off the government. I do not often agree with John Kenneth Galbraith, but his recent suggestion to nationalize businesses which get more than 75% of their revenue from government, or from the military, has considerable merit. Certainly it does not mean aggression against private property, and, furthermore, we could expect a considerable diminution of zeal from the military-industrial complex if much of the profits were taken out of war and plunder. And besides, it would make the American military machine less efficient, being governmental, and that is surely all to the good. But why stop at 75%? Fifty per cent seems to be a reasonable cutoff point on whether an organization is largely public or largely private.
And there is another consideration. Dow Chemical, for example, has been heavily criticized for making napalm for the U.S. military machine. The percentage of its sales coming from napalm is undoubtedly small, so that on a percentage basis the company may not seem very guilty; but napalm is and can only be an instrument of mass murder, and therefore Dow Chemical is heavily up to its neck in being an accessory and hence a co-partner in the mass murder in Vietnam. No percentage of sales, however small, can absolve its guilt.
This brings us to Karl’s point about slaves. One of the tragic aspects of the emancipation of the serfs in Russia in 1861 was that while the serfs gained their personal freedom, the land—their means of production and of life, their land was retained under the ownership of their feudal masters. The land should have gone to the serfs themselves, for under the homestead principle they had tilled the land and deserved its title. Furthermore, the serfs were entitled to a host of reparations from their masters for the centuries of oppression and exploitation. The fact that the land remained in the hands of the lords paved the way inexorably for the Bolshevik Revolution, since the revolution that had freed the serfs remained unfinished.
The same is true of the abolition of slavery in the United States. The slaves gained their freedom, it is true, but the land, the plantations that they had tilled and therefore deserved to own under the homestead principle, remained in the hands of their former masters. Furthermore, no reparations were granted the slaves for their oppression out of the hides of their masters. Hence the abolition of slavery remained unfinished, and the seeds of a new revolt have remained to intensify to the present day. Hence, the great importance of the shift in Negro demands from greater welfare handouts to “reparations”, reparations for the years of slavery and exploitation and for the failure to grant the Negroes their land, the failure to heed the Radical abolitionist’s call for “40 acres and a mule” to the former slaves. In many cases, moreover, the old plantations and the heirs and descendants of the former slaves can be identified, and the reparations can become highly specific indeed.
Alan Milchman, in the days when he was a brilliant young libertarian activist, first pointed out that libertarians had misled themselves by making their main dichotomy “government” vs. “private” with the former bad and the latter good. Government, he pointed out, is after all not a mystical entity but a group of individuals, “private” individuals if you will, acting in the manner of an organized criminal gang. But this means that there may also be “private” criminals as well as people directly affiliated with the government. What we libertarians object to, then, is not government per se but crime, what we object to is unjust or criminal property titles; what we are for is not “private” property per se but just, innocent, non-criminal private property. It is justice vs. injustice, innocence vs. criminality that must be our major libertarian focus.
RECOMMENDED READING
Liberation, Until recently, this monthly magazine was a rather boring pacifist journal, with endless articles about peace ships and nuclear fallout. Now, under the de facto editorship of Dave Gelber, it has become an exciting New Left magazine. Particularly recommended is Ron Radosh’s scholarly dissection of the phony radical Norman Thomas, in his “Norman Thomas and Cold War Socialism” (February, 1969) and his debate with the pacifist David McReynolds (May, 1969). Liberation is available for 75 cents per issue or $7.00 per year at 339 Lafayette Street, New York, N.Y. 10012.
Journal of American History (June, 1969). This issue of the official journal of the Organization of American Historians has three important articles:
Charles W. Roll, Jr., “We, Some of the People”, studies the apportionment of the state conventions that ratified the American Constitution, and concludes that there was significant malapportionment that favored the pro-Constitution forces, especially in South Carolina, New York, and Rhode Island, and that this malapportionment played a crucial role in pushing through the Constitution. An important reinforcement of the Beardian view of the Constitution.
Thomas G. Paterson, “The Abortive American Loan to Russia”, is a highly useful contribution to Cold War Revisionism, showing how the U.S. used the carrot of a proposed loan to Russia during and after World War II to try to wring massive political concessions. The article whets one’s appetite for Professor Paterson’s recent doctoral thesis, “The Economic Cold War: American Business and Economic Foreign Policy, 1945-50” (U. of California, Berkeley, 1968), available from University Microfilms, Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Gordon B. Dodds, “The Stream-Flow Controversy”. Good article debunking the scientific claims of conservationists, particularly the theory that deforestation causes floods.
A Semi-Monthly Newsletter
THE
Libertarian Forum↩
| Joseph R. Peden, Publisher | Washington Editor, Karl Hess | Murray N. Rothbard, Editor |
| VOL. I, NO. VII | JULY 1, 1969 | 35¢ |
The Meaning Of Revolution
In his vitally important article in this issue, Karl Hess properly refers to the genuine libertarian movement as a “revolutionary” movement. This raises the point that very few Americans understand the true meaning of the word “revolution”.
Most people, when they hear the word “revolution”, think immediately and only of direct acts of physical confrontation with the State: raising barricades in the streets, battling a cop, storming the Bastille or other government buildings. But this is only one small part of revolution. Revolution is a mighty, complex, long-run process, a complicated movement with many vital parts and functions. It is the pamphleteer writing in his study, it is the journalist, the political club, the agitator, the organizer, the campus activist, the theoretician, the philanthropist. It is all this and much more. Each person and group has its part to play in this great complex movement.
Let us take, for example, the major model for libertarians in our time: the great classical liberal, or better, “classical radical”, revolutionary movement of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. These our ancestors created a vast, sprawling, and brilliant revolutionary movement, not only in the United States but throughout the Western world, that lasted for several centuries. This was the movement largely responsible for radically changing history, for almost destroying history as it was previously known to man. For before these centuries, the history of man, with one or two luminous exceptions, was a dark and gory record of tyranny and despotism, a record of various absolute States and monarchs crushing and exploiting their underlying populations, largely peasants, who lived a brief and brutish life at bare subsistence, devoid of hope or promise. It was a classical liberalism and radicalism that brought to the mass of people that hope and that promise, and which launched the great process of fulfillment. All that man has achieved today, in progress, in hope, in living standards, we can attribute to that revolutionary movement, to that “revolution”. This great revolution was our father; it is now our task to complete its unfinished promise.
This classical revolutionary movement was made up of many parts. It was the libertarian theorists and ideologists, the men who created and wove the strands of libertarian theory and principle: the La Boeties, the Levellers in seventeenth-century England, the eighteenth-century radicals—the philosophes, the physiocrats, the English radicals, the Patrick Henrys and Tom Paines of the American Revolution, the James Mills and Cobdens of nineteenth-century England, the Jacksonians and abolitionists and Thoreaus in America, the Bastiats and Molinaris in France. The vital scholarly work of Caroline Robbins and Bernard Bailyn, for example, has demonstrated the continuity of libertarian classical radical ideas and movements, from the seventeenth-century English revolutionaries down through the American Revolution a century and a half later.
Theories blended into activist movements, rising movements calling for individual liberty, a free-market economy, the overthrow of feudalism and mercantilist statism, an end to theocracy and war and their replacement by freedom and international peace. Once in a while, these movements erupted into violent “revolutions” that brought giant steps in the direction of liberty: the English Civil War, the American Revolution, the French Revolution. (Barrington Moore, Jr. has shown the intimate connection between these violent revolutions and the freedoms that the Western world has been able to take from the State.) The result was enormous strides for freedom and the prosperity unleashed by the consequent Industrial Revolution. The barricades, while important, were just one small part of this great process.
Socialism is neither genuinely radical nor truly revolutionary. Socialism is a reactionary reversion, a self-contradictory attempt to achieve classical radical ends liberty, progress, the withering away or abolition of the State, by using old-fashioned statist and Tory means: collectivism and State control. Socialism is a New Toryism doomed to rapid failure whenever it is tried, a failure demonstrated by the collapse of central planning in the Communist countries of Eastern Europe. Only libertarianism is truly radical. Only we can complete the unfinished revolution of our great forebears, the bringing of the world from the realm of despotism into the realm of freedom. Only we can replace the governance of men by the administration of things.
“The right of revolution is an inherent one. When people are oppressed by their government, it is a natural right they enjoy – to relieve themselves of the oppression, if they are strong enough, either by a withdrawal from it, or by overthrowing it and substituting a government more acceptable.”
— Ulysses S. Grant, 1885
Letter From Washington
By Karl Hess
What The Movement Needs
This may well be a long, cool summer of consolidation.
The political establishment will be seeking to consolidate its power behind an advancing wave of law-and-order blue-nose, Constitutional ‘constructionism’. (Constructionism is a new code word for reading the Constitution as instrument of state power rather than individual freedom.)
Radical opponents of the state also will be consolidating. The picture with SDS is now one of building new structures on either side of a schism. YAF is said to be facing a similar task with pro-state “trads” under lively assault from those with at least anti-statist tendencies if not fully fledged libertarian positions. The Resistance, after Staughton Lynd’s moving plea for a “new beginning”, will be attempting to broaden its base far beyond that of fighting the draft. And, of course, the Panthers will simply be trying to stay alive.
For libertarianism, burgeoning now as a movement rather than merely a mood, it will be a crucial time, testing the difference between the dedicated and the dilettante.
The young people in the movement are irrepressible and, in the long term, so is the movement. In the short term, however, much of its velocity will depend upon whether it attracts, along with its great and growing ranks of young militants, those few men of substance who, in the early stages of most movements, can make a difference of years in the movement’s development. Engels’ financial support of Marx is an example. The few who supported the early spokesmen of the New Left are a latter-day example. There are few similar examples on the right, interestingly enough, inasmuch as right-wing support almost exclusively has been toward the institutionalization of a currently vested interest (i.e. anti-Communism, corporate protectionism, class or race privilege, religion) rather than in the development of a new movement.
Because, therefore, there may be a man of substance, and libertarian values, somewhere, who, watching the movement develop, may want to participate in it rather than just talk about it, some words of friendly (dare we say comradely?) advice may be in order.
First there is the simple responsibility to be serious. Taking a pioneering interest without following through could be more destructive of morale than silence. For young people, particularly, the idea of faintheartedness may be the hardest of all to take; There always is hope that heroes will come along and it would be better to have that hope remain unrequited than to have it dashed.
Then there is resistance to a familiar syndrome, the notion of “one thing for sure, we can’t do the whole job alone.” There are two points to make about this to anyone who may appear as a serious supporter of the libertarian movement.
1. You may have to.
2. If so, you can.
The first point, of course, is that it shouldn’t make any difference how many are similarly interested. For an individualist and a libertarian, surely, his own interest should be sufficient to the action. If only one such person appears, that is 100% more than we have now anyway!
The second point is simply a citation of the need of the most effective use of what resources are available rather than any despair that they are limited. If they are all that there is, then prudence says only “use them well.” And courage says, only, “use them!”
One consideration arising from that is the need to use available resources to produce a well-rounded base, if nothing else, hoping that on the base, subsequently, new support will arise. – At the same time, securing a base also helps secure the on-going momentum of the movement itself, by recognizing that it is a movement and that it does require not just casual advancement but hard, full-time organizing, propagandizing, crusading and so forth.
If, on the other hand, there already was a more general sort of support available, the movement could afford what is now a luxury: the support of very specific researches or programs. As it stands, the urge to build various superstructures before the movement is firmly based as a movement is to tactically do just what such imprudence would do tectonically: create a top-heavy structure which would topple in any stiff wind.
One course, in forming the base, would be to inventory needs and evaluate priority versus’ cost and so forth. Practical as well as visionary men should examine this agenda carefully lest the caution of the one extinguish the beacons of the other or the passions of the latter ignore the prudence of the former.
Some of the items which should, in my view, earnestly be considered are these:
—Full-time movement organizers and co-ordinators, at least on a regional basis.
—Creation of even the most modest East Coast ‘center’ for libertarian studies to fill an incredible geographic vacuum. Although the West Coast has seen the development of such centers, the East remains barren.
—Support of our own movement activists, the spearhead people whose speaking on campus, pamphleteering, even arrests and trials, provide the sort of excitement centers which, to cite a compelling example, turned the New Left from a phrase by C. Wright Mills into the wedge which has now opened wide the entire range of radical, revolutionary developments in America.
—Entry into new media, such as films, for libertarian ideas as well as on-going encouragement for those who can break into the regular media. How many good libertarian books or articles go down the drain each year simply because potentially productive people cannot take the time, or afford to do the work on a speculative basis? The number, no matter how small, is too large if the libertarian mood is to turn into the libertarian movement.
—A campus organization. Plans for the Radical Libertarian Alliance already are well advanced as plans. But practical organizational work, production of recruiting materials and so forth requires some practical support which the non-existent means of the founding members simply cannot provide. This does not mean that R. L. A. will not move at all, without added support. It will move, indeed, no matter what. Its founding chapters and members are not to be stopped. But its people know full well that they will, not move with the summer-lightning speed of, say, SDS or YAF because, as in the one case, it does not have (thankfully) the relatively well-heeled zeal of a Progressive Labor Party to send travelers across the country and keep the literature coming or, as in the other case, it does not offer eccentric millionaires a chance to advance their own quirky causes by buying the energies of the young. R. L. A., to be precise about this point, would rather poop along on pennies than take anybody’s money if it came marked with any word other than LIBERTY.
—Travel support for permitting libertarians with something to say to say it where the action is. The fact that the several outstanding libertarian-SDSers couldn’t even afford the train fare to the Chicago convention is just another evidence of wasting major opportunities for want of minor investments.
Not one of those suggestions is made in a spirit of exclusion or primacy. They cover areas which seem commonsensical but they are intended to convey, first and foremost, a sense of base-building as opposed to panacea-pathing. The libertarian who says that this action or that action is all that should be taken or that this or that will ‘solve’ everything is avoiding action, not taking it.
Fixated, narrowly focused approaches may build egos but they can scarcely build movements. The purpose of a revolutionary, in one of the truisms of our time, is to make the revolution. To a libertarian that should mean that the advancement of liberty and the opposition to coercion by all means possible and necessary. It means each person making his part of the revolution as he can best do it, recognizing always that each part is subsumed under the vision of a movement. Many of us may be always restricted to just doing one job or another in the movement. None of us, happily, if we retain faith with liberty itself, will waste our time seeking to be leaders or wanting to be.
We do not want to lead or be led. We want to be free.
We now sense in a way that gives us ties with men in many lands and in many postures of political development, that being free always will be a chancy, iffy, and very conditional transitory condition until the institutions of coercive power have been brought down.
We have advanced through the stage when many thought that freedom could be found simply by retiring to a hilltop somewhere far distant. We know that such a hilltop may be by next Tuesday the site of another government radar station, just as the valley below it may be a detention camp.
We now know that men who want to be free cannot run forever. Sometime, somewhere they must stand firm—and fight, not as the state’s agents fight, with bloody hands and blazing eyes, but as free men fight, in a movement of resistance, with respect for life, each man as he can and each man as he will.
My overall point is that a movement demands many elements. It requires public heroes and private genius; it must work out in the streets as though it were the confident spearhead of a triumphant cause, it must work in garrets and offices as though there would be no tomorrow, it must sometimes bite its tongue at tactical errors, loving the sinner even while deploring the sin.
It must seek its friends in other lands, creating a new citizenry of un-bordered liberty. It must create and recreate its literature. It must teach its young and, equally important, it must find its young.
It must sustain its weary, heal its wounded, and protect its cadre. And, above all, it must know its own heart and mind and be aware of itself as a Movement. Finally, it must have a sense of time and place, knowing where the world is and not nostalgically looking back at where it was. And if it errs it should err on the side of dedication and vision, not on the side of inaction.
Libertarians are not determinists who feel that unseen, mystic forces move men and history in inexorable patterns, up and down fated graphs. Libertarians, being radicals, know that men can move history, that Man is history, and that men can grasp their own fate, at the root, and advance it.
Interestingly and compellingly, libertarians have been through much of this before in this lovely but looted land. The first American revolution, just as with the Russian, was almost a libertarian and not a statist victory. The victory, instead, of the Federalists, with their glib talk of “legal systems” and of measuring liberty in terms of special favors to those who would best “serve” society, was not a foregone conclusion any more than Stalin’s victory was the end in Russia. Contrary forces now seethe in both lands.
Also, in the days before the first American revolution, men heard the same arguments we hear today—that we could never beat the system, so why try; why risk oppression by being uppity; why not keep on trying to go through channels and why not chuck it all because the majority of people don’t want any trouble anyway.
In those days it was erring on the side of militancy and civil disobedience that gave libertarians the opportunity even to speak and to speculate. Caution then would have meant an even deeper gloom today (just look at the Mother Country!).
We are again at such a time and place.
You—whoever you are!—now have it in your power to some extent or another move history and advance libertarianism as a Movement and not a mere moral mutter.
This summer, then, should be the time when you decide just how seriously you actually do take the times—and yourself.
DEFENSE FUNDS
As the oppressive reign of the White Terror begins to roll over the land, defense of the elementary civil liberties of dissenters becomes ever more acutely necessary. Two new defense funds merit our interest and our contribution.
One is for bail money and legal and medical expenses for the arrested and wounded in the People’s Park massacre. Contributions should be sent to: The People’s Park Defense Fund, c/o Free Church, 2200 Parker St., Berkeley, Calif.
The other is for the defense of the eight political dissenters at Chicago last year who have been shamefully indicted by the federal authorities for “conspiracy to promote disorder and riot” under the infamous “anti-riot” Title XVIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968. The entire spectrum of laws against “conspiracy”, along with “incitement”, are methods of suppressing, not concrete action but political defense and freedom of speech. Laws against “conspiracy” have no part in libertarian law, which is only concerned with defending persons and their rights against acts of invasion. Contributions toward the costly defense against this mass indictment may be made out to “Chicago Defense Fund”, and mailed to the Capital Committee to Defend the Conspiracy, 28 E. Jackson Blvd., Chicago, Ill. 60604.
Recommended Reading
Faustino Ballve, Essentials of Economics (Irvington-on-Hudson, New York; Foundation for Economic Education, $3.00 cloth, $1.50 paper). The best single brief introduction to economics. Written from an Austrian rather than Chicagoite viewpoint. Fills an extremely important need.
Andrew Kopkind and James Ridgeway, “Law and Power in Washington”, Hard Times (June 16-23, 1969). A brilliant muckraking dissection of the politics not only of Abe Fortas but of Fortas’ important Washington law firm. Its editors are New Left radicals; this impressive weekly newsletter has improved considerably since the departure of Old Left liberal R. Sherrill. Hard Times is available for $7.50 per year, $6 for students, at 80 Irving Place, New York, N.Y. 10003.
Frederic Bastiat, Economic Sophisms (Foundation for Economic Education, $2.00 paper), and Selected Essays in Political Economy (Foundation for Economic Education, $2.00 paper). The most significant writings of the great 19th-century libertarian laissez-faire economist. Both highly recommended, but the latter more important as containing more systematic articles.
Benjamin Page, “Signals from North Korea”, The Nation. (May 19, 1969). Indispensable if you want to find out what’s going on at the next hot spot which the U.S. might be cooking up in Asia.
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| VOL. I, NO. VIII | JULY 15, 1969 | 35¢ |
Nixon’s Decisions
After half a year of painful agonizing, of backing and filling, of puttering delays, the pattern of decisions of the Nixon Administration is finally becoming clear. It is not a pretty picture. In every single case, the Nixon Administration has managed to come down on the wrong side, on the side of burgeoning statism.
In Vietnam, the war goes on. A simple statement, which the American public hasn’t seemed to understand ever since the negotiations began in Paris last May. The United States has been using the negotiations as a smoke-screen cover behind which to step up the war in South Vietnam, where of course the war began. But first the initial euphoria led Americans, even most of the young anti-war activists, to proclaim that the war was over. And then everyone waited to “give Nixon a chance” to end the war. How long must we wait for this “chance”? How long must we wait to proclaim that the Emperor has no clothes, and that the war goes on? The peace forces in Congress are beginning at last to wake up, and indications are that the anti-war movement will rouse itself from its year-long sleep by this fall. Disgusted by Nixon’s deliberate delays, the National Liberation Front has finally formed the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam which has already been recognized by many countries. The final step in the NLF plan will be to form a provisional coalition government of all anti-imperialist and neutralist forces, which will deliver the final hammer-blows that will shatter the Saigon puppet regime.
In the vital area of the draft, Nixon put on a typically Nixonian performance. After muttering about replacing the draft with a volunteer army and appointing a committee to study the subject, Nixon finally came out in favor of a lottery-draft, the old Kennedy scheme which would replace the current selective slavery system with slavery-by-chance. Hardly an improvement. But, once again, the smokescreen of reform befuddles the public into thinking that a significant improvement is being made.
The military-industrial state has proceeded apace, and the arms race stepped up with the Nixon decision to go ahead with the ABM and MIRV missile boondoggles. Chemical and bacteriological research and experiments continue despite some public exposure. In the field of civil liberties, we shudder in expectation of Burger Court reversals of the excellent landmark libertarian decisions of the Warren Court. The Administration continues to speak about crackdowns on student dissidents, and Deputy Attorney-General Kleindienst spoke of rounding up student dissenters and placing them in “detention camps”. And now the Department of Justice, in a memorandum submitted in the infamous trial of the Chicago 8, brazenly asserts the right of the President or his aides to invade illegally the privacy and property of Americans through electronic snooping if the President in his wisdom and majesty should decide that the people spied upon might be acting against some form of “national security”, foreign or domestic.
In the sphere of economics the Nixon Administration had been highly touted among conservatives. It was supposed to herald a return to the free-market and a check upon galloping inflation through monetary restriction. Again, nothing has happened. The much publicized monetary tightening has been half-hearted at best, and provides no real test of the effectiveness of monetary policy. For the Administration has been doing precisely what its spokesmen had been deriding the Democrats for doing: trying to “fine-tune” the economy, trying to cut back ever so gently on inflation so as not to precipitate any recession. But it can’t be done. If restrictionist measures were ever sharp enough to check the inflationary boom, they would also be strong enough to generate a temporary recession. Furthermore, the basic Nixon Administration commitment to inflation is revealed by its devotion to the world inflationary Special Drawing Rights, and its refusal to consider any rise in the gold price, much less any return to the gold standard.
Instead of cutting back on its own monetary inflation (generated by Federal Reserve purchases of government securities), the Administration has perpetuated the tyranny and the red herring of the 10% income surcharge, another statist heritage of the Johnson Administration. What happens is that the federal government pumps new money into the economy through Federal Reserve expansion, and then, when the people begin to spend their new money and prices begin to rise, the government proceeds to denounce the public for “spending too much” and levies higher income taxes to “sop up their excess purchasing power”—thus levying both a swindle and a double burden upon the long-suffering public. Spending and government fiscal policy, furthermore, are irrelevant to price inflation, which is determined by the supply and demand of money. And even if it were not irrelevant, it is surely unmitigated gall to assume that a tax, a payment for which the consumer receives no service in return, is somehow worse than a price, for which the consumer at least receives a product in exchange. To advocate higher taxes in order to check higher prices is like advocating a person’s murder in order to cure him of disease.
And waiting in the shadows, for the time when the income tax surcharge clearly will have failed—as it already has—lies the spectre of price and wage controls. Secretary of Treasury Kennedy has already threatened us with this spectre, this program for economic dictatorship which is at the opposite pole from anyone’s definition of the free market. Not only is it dictatorship, but it doesn’t work, only serving to add massive economic dislocations to the inflation that proceeds on its merry way. Why, one might ask, does powerful multi-millionaire businessman David Kennedy ponder price and wage controls? Not because he has been somehow brain-washed by “leftists” or because he suffers from capitalist guilt feelings, as conservatives like to believe. But because the business community is beginning to turn more and more to price and wage controls, as a means of using the power of government to clamp down on wage increases. For in the later stages of an inflationary boom, wages begin to catch up to price increases, and this has been happening in recent months. One more example of the present-day “partnership” between government and business!
In addition to this pattern of statism, the Nixon Administration, led by leading conservative-liberal Daniel Moynihan is seriously considering proposing a nation-wide guaranteed annual income through a “negative income tax”. Both conservatives and liberals have become enamoured of this scheme in recent years—a scheme that would inevitably cripple the incentives to work and earn and thereby wreck the American economy.
So what do you say about all this, Mr. “Libertarian-Conservative”—you who looked forward to a “Fabian” rollback of the State during the Nixon Administration, you who put your trust in all those Chicagoite and Randian advisers? When are you going to abandon your reformist illusions? When are you going to face up to the necessity for real opposition to government?
In the meanwhile, it has now become evident that everywhere, down the line, foreign and domestic, there is no difference whatsoever between the Johnson and the Nixon Administrations (even unto the repeated attacks on the “neo-isolationism” of the critics). The only difference is in style and personnel, the replacement of vulgar Texas corn-pone by bland uptight hypocritical Northern WASP. And even in esthetic repulsiveness, it is very difficult to choose between them.
SDS — Two Views
I: Liberated Zone
The chickens came home to roost for SDS. The SDS national convention was in the process of being taken over by the Progressive Labor Party when SDS split in two in June. By its ability to move its members to key national meetings PL was in a position to take control of the national convention which most SDS members avoid as irrelevant to the real political work which occurs on the local level. SDS chapters are independent of the national convention and disregard its decisions.
PL as a Communist organization was welcomed by the trade union wing of the SDS old guard who wished in 1966 to counterbalance the overwhelming flood of students who had joined SDS to oppose the Vietnam war. Committed to clearly radical anti-imperialism rather than Marxist reformism, the mass infusion of youth had already brought about the election of newcomer Carl Oglesby as SDS president in 1965.
PL had made original contributions to the black liberation struggle, student freedom and support of freedom of travel to Cuba. When the May 2nd Movement was founded in the spring of 1964 to oppose the dangerously escalating American intervention in Vietnam by sending medical aid to the NLF, PL members participated in its work. In 1965 when M2M played a leading role in developing a consciousness of opposition to the draft while SDS leaders fumbled the issue, PL members tried to restrain this radicalism and replace anti-imperialist struggle by a trade union fight for socialism. While M2M members viewed Lin Piao’s “Long live the victory of people’s war” as the crucial analysis for anti-imperialist struggle, PL adopted the sectarian and trade unionist socialism associated with the anti-Mao Communists in China. PL forced the dissolution of M2Min order to work in the wider recruiting ground of SDS, but many PL members in M2M, viewing this action as Stalinist, resigned from PL to continue the struggle against the draft and imperialism.
PL had come to oppose the NLF and Ho Chi Minh as capitalist, black liberation as nationalist rather than socialist, Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolution because of the 26th of July Movement was no socialist, Castro was not a Communist and Cuba not a Marxist State. Clearly PL was a crippling counterweight to the revolutionary mass of students in SDS. But, the trade unionist SDS old guard was ousted at the 1966 Clear Lake, Iowa convention by “Prairie Power”, an anarchist trend that swept in from the trans-Mississippi Great Plains region. Although increasingly militant against the draft and university complicity in the war, SDS was held back by PL’s conservatism which fears alienating trade union workers by ‘adventurous’ anti-war action.
The 1968 East Lansing, Mich. SDS convention met in a crisis situation. PL paralyzed the convention, and sought to deflect SDS from anti-war action to a Worker-Student Alliance. SDS national leadership found itself unable to challenge PL effectively. Strong opposition to PL was presented by the SDS anarchist groups whose many black banners of libertarianism were rallying standards against PL. Finally, a lengthy criticism of PL was launched in which former M2M members took a leading role. As a result PL’s attempt to elect members to the SDS national committee was defeated by a narrow margin.
The warning of these events did not effectively penetrate the SDS national leadership. The three national officers ultimately split into three different directions. One became allied with PL, which gained supporters because it emphasized the necessity of winning over the major part of the American people and opposed excesses of Panther-mania, which not only supports the Black Panthers against police repression but uncritically accepts the excessive posturing and the Stalinism that had developed since the jailing of their founder, Huey Newton.
This Panther-mania was created by Mike Klonsky, a second national officer acting as a self-appointed white nominator of the vanguard of the Black liberation movement. Emerging at the 1969 convention as the Revolutionary Youth Movement II, this position views the proletariat as the main force of revolution. The third national officer, Bernardine Dohrn, identified with the Action Faction which denies the leading role in revolutionary struggle to the industrial working class. Recognizing the validity of the revolutionary nationalism and right to self-determination of the Black and Spanish nations in America, they consider the international context—United States involvement in imperialist adventures—as central to undermining the monopoly system and creating the basis for revolutionary action. At the 1969 convention its position paper was called “Weatherman” after its slogan taken from an anti-authoritarian folk song—“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” The paper declared:
As imperialism struggles to hold together this decaying social fabric, it inevitably resorts to brute force and authoritarian ideology. People, especially young people, more and more find themselves in the iron grip of authoritarian institutions. Reaction against the pigs or teachers in the schools, welfare pigs or the army is generalizable and extends beyond the particular repressive institution to the society and the State as a whole. The legitimacy of the State is called into question for the first time in at least 30 years, and the anti-authoritarianism which characterizes the youth rebellion turns into rejection of the State, a refusal to be socialized into American society.
SDS split into two conventions at Chicago. One is dominated by PL’s Worker-Student Alliance and includes the SDS Labor Committee. The New Left SDS includes about a dozen tendencies including the Action Faction, RYM II, Praxis Axis, ISC, Marxist humanists, old guard SDS populists, Prairie Power activists, anarchists and libertarians. (One SDSer’s reaction to the convention was, “Us anarchists have got to get organized.”)
The New Left SDS has adopted two basic principles at its convention: “One: We support the struggle of the Black and Latin colonies within the U.S. for national liberation and we recognize those nations’ rights to self-determination (including the right to political secession if they desire it).
“Two: We support the struggle for national liberation of the people of South Vietnam, led by the National Liberation Front and Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam, led by President Ho Chi Minh . . . We support the right of all people to pick up the gun to free themselves from the brutal rule of U.S. imperialism.”
Having been on the defensive for some time because of PL’s dogmatic hegemony, the original movement spirit has re-emerged in SDS. The ultimate result of the, 1969 New Left convention was the reaffirmation of native American radicalism as part of the international anti-imperialist revolution.
— Leonard P. Liggio
II: Continue The Struggle
There is no question about the fact that the PL cancer had to be excised. In structure, PL was imposing upon a previously open and warm-hearted movement the rigid party discipline and the manipulative maneuverings of a typical Marxist-Stalinist cadre. In content, PL had become systematically counter-revolutionary; every struggle, whether it be for black national self-determination, national liberation against U.S. imperialism, against ROTC and the draft and the war in Vietnam, for student power or the People’s Park, every one of these struggles was hampered or seriously crippled by PL’s opposition, in the name of the sainted Marxian “working class” and because the “working class wouldn’t like it.” In the end it became clear that PL and its WSA satellites would have to go.
The problem is that in the course of this injection of PL and the reactive battle against it, SDS might have been poisoned permanently. For in too many quarters, especially in the vocal national leadership, the old 1966-67 libertarian spirit had been replaced by the virus of Marxism-Stalinism. The mere excising of PL is not nearly enough to insure healthy survival; continuing struggle is necessary to save the “old” SDS.
For while the virtue of the old SDS is that it had an open libertarian spirit rather than a dogmatic Marxian ideology, this very absence of positive theory left a vacuum which, inevitably, Marxism came to fill. For in the course of struggling against PL’s invasion, too many of the “New Left” opponents of PL began to adopt their enemy’s ideology, to call themselves “communists” (even if with a “small c”), and to take on more and more of the trappings of Marxism and socialism. The most infected group within the newly purged SDS is the “Factory Faction” or the “RYM-2” group, headed by Mike Klonsky and Bob Avakian. The Klonsky clique, while being worshippers of the Panthers, place major emphasis on student permeation and conversion of the industrial working class—probably the most reactionary group in the country today. The Klonsky clique also wants to convert SDS into a Marxist-Stalinist cadre organization—a fate which would be equally as bad as becoming a Progressive Labor front. While it is true that the Factory Faction was defeated in the election of officers of the purged SDS, it still remains a menace, especially for its working-class ideology.
Another irritant within the new SDS is the Trotskyite-Draperite Independent Socialist Club, which, like PL, hurled nearly all of its members into SDS and into voting at the national convention. Dogmatically Marxist and so “third camp” as to oppose national liberation struggles, the ISC remains a danger in the wings; its power to manipulate and destroy was well seen last year when it showed itself able, despite being a tiny minority, to control completely and thereby in effect to wreck the fledgling Peace and Freedom Party.
Leonard Liggio has mentioned uncritical “Panthermania” as another large continuing problem for SDS. A further problem, inherently absurd but growing as a menace because nearly everyone in the movement has been too chicken to fight it, is the hokum of the “women’s liberation struggle”. The women’s liberation movement is not a rational and sensible battle against discrimination against women in employment, or against the “feminine mystique”. These positions are scorned by the women’s liberationists as akin to “white liberalism” and “integrationism”. Insisting on a total analogy with black liberation, the women’s liberationists claim that women, too, are systematically oppressed by men and that therefore a separate women’s power struggle is needed against this oppression. This idea seems to me absurd, and probably at least as good a case could be made for the view that men are oppressed and exploited by parasitic women (e.g. through divorce and alimony laws). But, at any rate, the insistence on analogy with the black movement is even more absurd, for the logical conclusion of the women’s liberation struggle would then be . . . women’s nationalism or separatism. Are we supposed to grant women an Amazonian state somewhere? Men-and-women, happily, are inherently “integrationist” and one may hope that they will remain that way.
In practice, women’s liberation seems to boil down to (a) girls allowing themselves to be as ugly as possible; (b) conning the husband into taking care of the baby; and/or (c) a neo-Puritan ideology of crypto-Lesbianism. At any rate, in allowing women’s liberationism to grow in influence unchallenged, SDS is in danger of making a mockery of its own principles.
But the major problem in SDS is that in order to expel PL, SDS found it necessary, for the first time, to lay down ideological requirements for membership. Until now, there have been no such requirements; now SDS has adopted two principles which every SDSer must support. These are the principles which Leonard Liggio cites in his article. There is nothing wrong with them; on the contrary, they set down an excellent line of support for national liberation struggles, both foreign and domestic, external and internal, against U.S. imperialism. But the problem is that if good principles can be adopted as conditions for membership, then so can bad principles, and it behooves us to be on guard against them.
In fact, waiting in the wings is an expanded set of “unity principles”, which were introduced by the Klonsky clique, but happily rejected by the rank-and-file of “old” SDSers at the convention. But these five principles now get referred to the membership and the chapters for discussion, and it is imperative that at least “point 5” be rejected. Points 1 and 3 are essentially a reaffirmation of the already adopted two points: support for national liberation struggles, internal and external, against U.S. imperialism. Point 4 is an innocuous repudiation of red-baiting. So far so good. But Point 3 fully endorses the women’s liberation hogwash, e.g.: “The struggle for women’s liberation is a powerful force against U.S. imperialism. We are dedicated to fighting male supremacy, to destroying the physical and spiritual oppression of women by men . . . We encourage the formation of ‘women’s militias’ to ensure the fulfillment of the program of total equality for women.”
But if Point 3 should simply be defeated in the interests of sanity, Point 5 is intolerable for any libertarian. Point 5 is a flat-out commitment for socialism: “Recognizing that only through socialism, the public ownership and control of the means of producing wealth, can the people be freed from misery, we declare ourselves a socialist movement . . . Further; . . . socialism can only come through the leading role of the proletariat.” Here is the sticking-point; no libertarian can be a member of an explicitly socialist organization, and one, furthermore, that would make socialism a condition of membership.
But in the meantime there is no cause for despair. The five points failed of adoption at the SDS convention. Furthermore, at Chicago a group of “anarchists, libertarians, and independent revolutionaries” met, symbolically at IWW hall, to form a separate third-force caucus. This group is still in SDS, and remains to continue struggle. That struggle now begins for the minds and the hearts of the local campus chapters, where the membership resides, and where Marxist-Stalinist sectarian factionalism is at a minimum. A particularly shining opportunity appears in those areas (such as New England, and parts of New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area) where SDS chapters have been dominated by PL. Here, an opportunity arises to form new, libertarian-oriented “true” SDS chapters in competition to Progressive Labor.
Even more does the crisis in SDS provide a striking opportunity for the growing student libertarian movement to organize itself as a radical, militant movement free at last from any possibility of socialist subjugation. Radical libertarians are becoming strong enough to organize themselves into a separate movement for the first time. Already, there are two militantly radical libertarian organizations in the field: the Radical Libertarian Alliance, and the Student Libertarian Action Movement, centered in Arizona and with chapters in Georgia and Colorado. There is also a strong possibility that anarcho-libertarians increasingly persecuted in the Young Americans for Freedom will split off after the YAF national convention on Labor Day and form their own organization, freed at last from YAFite fascism. A merger of these three organizations could form a powerful force on the nation’s campuses next year.
— M. N. R.
Recommended Reading
NEW AMERICAN REVIEW, NO. 6. (New American Library: Signet paperback, $1.25. $4.00 for four issues.) Editor T. Solatoroff, of this paperback periodical, writes that the word that best expresses recent trends of thought is “libertarian”. Particularly recommended in this issue are:
Jane Jacobs, “Why Cities Stagnate”, an excellent and perceptive libertarian analysis of the vital importance of the free play of small, innovative entrepreneurs in a city’s healthy growth. A keen attack on government planning and public housing while the same government prevents blacks and other urban dwellers from launching their own activities.
Emile Capouya, “The Red Flag and the Black”: how anarchism has been reviving, particularly during the French revolution last year.
Paul Sweezy and Harry Magdoff, “The Merger Movement: A Study in Power”, Monthly Review (June, 1969). A highly perceptive study of how the Established corporations have used the political arm to cripple and harass conglomerate mergers and their “new men” entrepreneurs. Why don’t free-market economists have as keen a sense of political realities?
Tiziano Terzani, “Storming the Institutions”, The Nation (June 16, 1969). Important article on the revolutionary situation that is rapidly developing in Italy—provides a good background to the current Italian political crisis.
A Semi-Monthly Newsletter
THE
Libertarian Forum↩
| Joseph R. Peden, Publisher | Washington Editor, Karl Hess | Murray N. Rothbard, Editor |
| VOL. I, NO. IX | AUGUST 1, 1969 | 35¢ |
PEOPLE’S MONEY:
Revolt In Minnesota
The idea prevails that to favor gold or silver money is to be a mossback reactionary; nothing could be further from the truth. For gold (as well as silver) is the People’s Money; it is a valuable commodity that has developed, on the free market, as the monetary means of exchange. Gold has been replaced, at the dictate of the State, by fiat paper—by pieces of paper issued and imprinted by the government. Gold cannot be produced very easily; it must be dug laboriously out of the ground. But if paper tickets are to be money, and the State is to have the sole power to issue these virtually costless tickets, then we are all at the mercy of this gang of legalized, sovereign counterfeiters. Yet this is the accepted monetary system of today.
Not only is this system of the State’s having absolute control of our money been accepted by Establishment economists; it has been just as warmly endorsed by the powerful “Chicago” branch of free-market economists. Twenty years ago, almost all conservative, or free-market oriented, economists, favored a return to the gold standard and the elimination of fiat paper. But now the gold standard economists have almost all died out and been replaced by the glib, technically expert Chicagoites, to a man scoffers at gold and simple-minded endorsers of fiat paper. The gold standard has died from desertion of its cause by the right-wing and its economists. Numerous right-wingers who should know better yet continue to fawn upon Milton Friedman and his Chicagoites. Why? Presumably, because they have power and influence, and one never finds conservatives lacking these days when it comes to toadying the power.
In the midst of this monetary miasma, there has now come a voice from out of the past, from the Old Right, and it is one of the most heartwarming events of the year.
Two years ago, Jerome Daly, a citizen of Savage, Minnesota, a suburban town just south of Minneapolis, refused to make any further payments on the mortgage which he had owed to his bank. At his jury trial (First National Bank of Montgomery vs. Jerome Daly) in December, 1968 before Justice of the Peace Martin V. Mahoney, a farmer and carpenter by trade, at which the bank tried to repossess the property, Mr. Daly argued that he owed the bank nothing. Why? Because, the bank, in lending him money, had loaned him not real money but bank credit which the bank had created out of thin air. Not being genuine money, the credit was not a valid consideration, and therefore the contract was null and void. Daly argued that he did not owe the bank anything.
In making this seemingly preposterous argument, Jerome Daly was being a far better economist—and libertarian—than anyone knew. For fractional reserve banking—now a system at the behest and direction of the Federal Reserve Banks—is, like fiat paper, legalized counterfeiting, the creation of claims which are invalid and impossible to redeem. Furthermore, Daly contended that this kind of creation of money by banks is illegal and unconstitutional.
Even more remarkable than Mr. Daly’s thesis is that the jury unanimously held for him, and declared the mortgage null and void; and Justice Mahoney’s supporting decision, delivered last Dec. 9, is a gem of radical assertion of the rights of the people and a thoroughgoing assault on the unwisdom and fraudulence and unconstitutionality of fractional reserve banking.
Bewildered, the First National Bank of Montgomery, Minnesota proceeded in routine fashion to file an appeal with Justice Mahoney for a higher court. But the catch is that in order to file an appeal, the plaintiff has to pay a fee of two dollars. Justice Mahoney, O happy day, refused to accept the appeal on January 22 because Federal Reserve Notes, which of course constituted the fee, are not lawful money. Only gold and silver coin, affirmed the judge, can be made legal tender, and therefore the fee for appeal had not been paid. Justice Mahoney followed this up with supporting memoranda on January 30 and February 5, which are heartwarming blends of sound economics and strict legal constructionism, and which also declared the unconstitutionality of the Federal Reserve Act and the National Banking Act, the capstones of our current interventionist and statist monetary system.
There the matter rests at the moment; but where does it rest? We have it on the authority of Justice Mahoney that debts to fractional reserve banks (i.e. the current banking system) are null and void, that their very nature is fraudulent and illegal (in short, that the banks belong to the people!), that Federal Reserve Notes and fiat paper are unlawful and unconstitutional.
Never has there been a more radical attack upon the whole nature of our fraudulent and statist banking system.
Furthermore, with these embattled Minnesotans, their radicalism is not only rhetoric; they are prepared to back it up with still further concrete acts. Jerome Daly has already announced that if any higher court of the United States, “perpetrates a fraud upon the People by defying the Constitutional Law of the United States (Justice) Mahoney has resolved that he will convene another Jury in Credit River Township (where Savage is located) to try the issue of the Fraud on the part of any State or Federal Judge”. Daly adds, moreover, that the Constable and the Citizens’ Militia of Credit River Township are prepared to use their power to back up the jury’s decision and keep Mr. Daly in possession of his land. The people of Savage, Minnesota, in short, are prepared to fight, to resist the decrees of the state and federal governments, to use their power on the local level to resist the State.
Many dimwits in the libertarian movement—and they are, unfortunately, legion—have charged that in recent years, I have simply become a “leftist”. From the literature of Mr. Daly and his supporters, it is quite clear that this is a heroic band of Old Rightists, of people who have not been nurtured on National Review or the lesser organs of current Right-wing opinion. I am equally and eagerly as willing to hail their libertarian action for the people and against the State, as I am such “leftist” actions as People’s Park.
The test, as Karl Hess indicates in this issue of The Libertarian Forum, is action; action now vis à vis the State. Those who side with the liberties of the people against the government are our friends and allies; those who side with the State against the people are our enemies. It is as simple as all that. The problem, as far as the Right goes, is that in recent years there have been zero actions by the Right against the State; on the contrary, the Right has almost invariably been on the side of the State: against the demonstrators at Chicago, against People’s Park, against the Student Revolution, against the Black Panthers, etc. If the test is, as I hold it to be, action, and “which side are you on, the people or the State”, and not the closeness of agreement on the fifth Lemma of the third Syllogism deduced from whether or not A A, then the Right-wing in recent years—and this means the entire right, from Buckleyites and Randians straight through to phony “anarchists” (or “anarcho-rightists”)—has been a dismal failure. Indeed, it has ranged itself on the side of the Enemy. Thus, in the matter of tax resistance, ten or fifteen years ago the banner of tax refusal was carried by such “rightists” as Vivien Kellems; now the self-same flag is carried by such “leftists” as Joan Baez.
If the “libertarians” of the Right-wing are at all interested in my approbation, there is a simple way to attain it: to acquire one-hundredth of the fortitude and the revolutionary spirit of the New Left resisters against the State; to return to the tradition of Sam Adams and Tom Paine, of Garrison and John Brown, and, in recent years, of Frank Chodorov and Vivien Kellems. Let them return to that great tradition or let them, as rapidly as possible, sink into the well-deserved dustbin of history.
In the meanwhile, all hail to the heroic rebels of Savage, Minnesota, to the perceptive and courageous Jerome Daly and Justice Martin Mahoney. Anyone who wishes to read the full documentation of this case can write to Jerome Daly, 28 East Minnesota St., Savage, Minn. 55378. Anyone who wants to contribute funds (In donations of $1 or more) to carry this case to the Supreme Court is urged to send his checks to the Minnesota Action Fund, 628 Stryker Ave., St. Paul, Minn. 55107.
Letter From Washington
By Karl Hess
The Real Rebels
Now, officially, I am an enemy of the state. Now, technically, I am a fugitive from one of the state’s national police agencies. Now, fundamentally, I am convinced that in the confrontation between the state and freedom there can be no middle ground, no safe haven, no neutral corner, nook, or cranny.
My own situation is not offered as in any way an exemplary model. It is not a course to be recommended, but simply to be reported. I have for some time refused to sanction or support the state system of this or any nation by the payment of taxes. The Internal Revenue Service’s police force is, as a result, now in the process of attempting to seize all property belonging to me. Since my property consists of the tools and books needed to make a living, this action is not simply one of administrative punishment but involves an aspect of survival. I believe in self-defense. Therefore, I will surely attempt to thwart them. This is civil disobedience. Fine.
Also, wherever and whenever possible I have been speaking out against the state and attempting to rally opposition to it. One result has been that the Federal Bureau of Investigation apparently has given to various “conservatives” information from government files which they consider derogatory but which, frankly, I do not inasmuch as it simply attempts to make the point that I tend to be extreme in my political views. True enough. I do believe, as a matter of fact, that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice and that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue. (Incidentally, I am rather painfully aware of the technique in which the FBI uses its files to defame political dissenters because, when I was on ‘the right side’, I was given, as were many of my colleagues, substantial FBI data to be used against rebels, reds, and resisters.)
As a result of becoming a rebel in active fact as well as a rhetorical rebel, certain notions regarding resistance to the state have come into sharper focus for me. (Needless to say, I do not mean that a purely rhetorical rebel cannot be a real one also. It really depends on whether the rhetoric is, in fact, rebellious or merely windy. My colleague, for instance, is as true a rebel as you will find even though he has not, so far as I know, even been arrested for jaywalking.)
I am more convinced than ever that the state must be resisted, not just debated or evaded. The debate, which has raged in the legislature and even in the courts for generations, has achieved nothing but momentary changes in the velocity of state power development. The direction has never changed. Every year, regardless of the rhetoric of our supposed representatives, the direction of state power has been upward. This has proven, to be a dynamic of the system itself and not merely a function of factions within the system. There is every reason to believe that the development of central power will virtually reach critical mass under the present highly defensive, repression-minded, centralist ‘moderate’ or ‘progressive’ Administration (which is supported, do not forget, by the Conservative establishment as well).
The simplest fact of the improbability of representational reform is that in order to get elected, as all agree, a man must promise to “do” something for his constituents. Then to stay in office, he must actually do something, or at least appear to. This hardly makes it feasible for the man to resist the state. He must, instead, use it, curry favor with it, or so play the bureaucratic game as to even outpoint it as in the case of elderly committee chairmen.
Some say, however, that the voters could be ‘educated’ to elect anti-statist candidates. Since all organs of mass media are either controlled by the state or its state-capital ‘partners’, and since almost all schools, also, are either Owned or controlled by the state, from elementary grades through the university, the means of reaching, in order to educate, tens of millions of voters is obscure at the very best.
Others say that in a time of crisis, at any rate, people might turn to ‘anti-statist’ candidates for their own self-preservation. Skipping the fact that the notion of an anti-statist candidate is a contradiction in itself, it should be recalled that in this example it is the crisis, not the candidacy that would be the decisive factor. There may be a lesson in that for those who will struggle to learn it.
That I prefer resistance to reform does not, however, mean that I prefer a particular kind of resistance. My kind, civil disobedience and sounding off, might not be appropriate for many others. I certainly do not claim that it is the most effective course. It just happens to be what I can do, therefore I do it.
Would not retreat from government be just as effective? Perhaps so, if that is what one can do best, or all that one can do. It should be borne in mind, however, that all such retreat is done, ultimately, at the sufferance of the state and under the Damoclean sword of the state. When, or if the retreat irks the state, it will end the retreat. The same applies to those who feel that they can coexist with the state because they measure liberty purely in terms of personal property and profit and highly regard or at least tolerate the state so long as it protects that. The point to remember is the same: all property in a state system exists at the sufferance of the state. When it wishes to take the property, it can.
As a radical American politician once put it: “The state that is powerful enough to give you all you want is powerful enough to take it all away.” No better comment could be made upon the illusory hopes of having a state that is both powerful enough to protect you against all ills foreign and domestic and also somehow weak enough never to threaten you.
Finally, there is the matter of alliances. With whom does an enemy of the state make alliances? There may be a million answers of contentious detail. There is only one answer of overall principle: You do not make alliances with the state itself, you do not make alliances with agents of or supporters of the state—even though you may attempt to change them. The range of alliance, therefore, is restricted to those who also oppose the state.
Within that range there may be many variations of principle, many different goals. Those differences should and must determine future actions. Present actions, however, should be determined by present needs. No need is greater than opposition to the state and reduction of its power. Without that reduction of power all meaning of other differences must remain purely academic.
To refuse to oppose the state we have because we fear, for instance, the state we might have, is to refuse to grasp reality while trembling before ghosts. (Why not, instead, lay the groundwork for resistance to all state power even while resisting the one at hand?)
Today, everywhere in the world, it is established and coercive authority that is called into question, that is under siege. Literally, one cannot even go to the moon to avoid it.
How then neutrality here on earth?
The timeless revolutionary question is timely again: which side are you on? Are you an enemy or friend of liberty? Are you an enemy or friend of the state? Will you be content to act as an agent of the state, or hide as a refugee from it? Or will you resist it where you can, as you can, when you can?
It is liberty that is the idea most threatening to the state. And all men who hold it as an ideal are enemies of the state. Welcome!
Nelson’s Waterloo
President Nixon’s sending of none other than Nelson Rockefeller on an extensive tour of Latin America demonstrates Nixon’s moral obtuseness to the hilt. Sending Nelson on a fact-finding tour of Latin America is like sending a fox on a fact-finding tour of the chicken coops. And while Americans are conveniently blind to the facts of U.S. imperialism, the people of Latin America—the cooped chickens—are all too well aware of them. They know that Rockefeller is their Emperor, that the Rockefeller Empire, with its intimate blend of political and economic rule, is far more their dictator than any of the petty generals ruling over them can ever hope to be.
And so the people of Latin America, at every stop, gave their hated Emperor the reception which he so richly deserved. Three countries barred his entry, and in virtually every stop, riots, demonstrations, anger were the order of the day. Even Rockefeller’s military satraps in charge of the various countries could not keep their subjects in check. All this is prelude to the Latin American Revolution to come, a revolution which will make Vietnam look like a tea party.
The New Deal And Fascism
Interesting new evidence has emerged on the close ties of Roosevelt’s New Deal and fascism. George Rawick reports that some ten years ago he spent a considerable amount of time with Frances Perkins, then professor of labor economics at Cornell University and Secretary of Labor under FDR. Madame Perkins related that at the first meeting of the Roosevelt Cabinet in March 1933, Bernard Baruch, financier and key adviser to almost every President of modern times, walked in with his disciple General Hugh Johnson, soon to become head of the NRA, bringing to each member of the Cabinet a copy of a book by Giovanni Gentile, the Italian Fascist theoretician. La Perkins adds that “we all read it with great care.” (Additional query: what was Baruch doing at a Cabinet meeting?) To be found in George Rawick, “Working Class Self-Activity”, Radical America (March-April, 1969), p. 25.
Radical America is an excellent bi-monthly journal of U.S. radicalism, and is the closest thing to a theoretical journal that is associated with SDS. Available at 50¢ per issue or $3 per year at 1237 Spaight St., Madison, Wisconsin 53703.
“The art of revolutionizing and overturning states is to undermine established customs, by going back to their origin, in order to mark their want of justice.”
— Pascal, 1670
HEINLEIN AND LIBERTY: A Warning
One of the more distressing tendencies among American right-wing “libertarians” is a symptomatic willingness to identify popular authors as freedom-loving if they so much as use the term liberty in their works. The undisputed guru of this coterie is Robert A. Heinlein, writer of scores of science fiction short stories and novels; his book, “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress”, is often singled out as representative of “anarchist” or “libertarian” science fiction. It is an enthralling novelette describing a futuristic moon colony which rebels against planet Earth under the aegis of a small group of classical liberals who have come into power via revolution. The rhetoric of these bourgeois revolutionaries is unabashedly Randian, although a signal character is identified as a “rational anarchist”.
“Moon” is the latest production of the prolific Mr. Heinlein, noted also for “Stranger in a Strange Land”, which supposedly captivated the attention of hip people several years ago. One would expect Heinlein to be somewhat sympathetic to the Movement, having read his Utopian creations which hint at the possibilities of an open society; to the contrary, a bitter awakening is in store for Heinlein fans who are more than armchair devotees of liberty.
According to a February issue of National Review magazine, Robert Heinlein is one of 270 signers of a jingoist petition circulated in the U.S. Author’s Guild by the facile William Buckley and his spiritual cohort Frank S. Meyer. The petition, a belated retort to an earlier anti-Vietnam war roster of authors (which was eminently successful), calls for “the vigorous prosecution of the Vietnam war to an honorable conclusion.” Deep contemplation is not necessary to comprehend the statist, authoritarian implications of such New Right weasel words and the concomitant beliefs of men who would endorse it.
Only one other science fiction writer joins Heinlein in the missive, Poul Anderson; the other signatories are well known in the rightist arsenal (Stefan Possony, Eugene Lyons, Brent Bozell, John Dos Passos, Francis Russell . . . ad nauseam). The case of Robert Heinlein is useful in evaluating both the politics of his followers and the commitments of entrenched and established American writers: It is clear that a writer cannot serve two masters, both justice and the mighty dollar—one must give way, if not on the written page, then in one’s personal life. While Heinlein has never been so explicitly libertarian as to be judged hypocritical, the lesson remains an open and obvious one.
An interesting footnote to this question comes from our British comrades: Several years ago, in Anarchy magazine, the monthly publication of Freedom Press in London, an article appeared on science fiction in the English language, in which Heinlein was singled out as “the only fascist science fiction writer in America.” This prophetic note comes from a libertarian community that has no need for propertied quislings.
— Wilson A. Clark, Jr.
Recommended Reading
RAMPARTS. August 1969 issue. An all-star issue, featuring the best and fullest report to date on the battle of People’s Park. Also: a perceptive article on Mel Laird by Karl Hess, a stress on the central importance of Vietnam by Franz Schurmann, and a superior piece of Rocky-baiting by David Horowitz.
Michael Gamarnikow, Economic Reforms in Eastern Europe (Wayne State University Press). The best single book on the remarkable rush of the Communist countries of Eastern Europe to shift from central planning to a free market. Unfortunately omits Yugoslavia.
Harry Magdoff, The Age of Imperialism (Monthly Review Press, paper). Useful material on current U.S. imperialism, particularly on banking connections and foreign aid.
Scott Nearing and Joseph Freeman, Dollar Diplomacy (Monthly Review Press, paper). Reprint of the first great dissection of early twentieth-century American imperialism.
Jack Newfield, “T. H. White: Groupie of the Power Elite”, The Village Voice (July 17, 1969). Brilliant and acidulous dissection of the best-selling political reporter “Teddy” White,
Peter Temin, The Jacksonian Economy (W. W. Norton, paper). Refutes the standard historians’ myth that Jackson, by his war against the Second Bank of the U.S., engendered bank inflation and then collapse.
A Semi-Monthly Newsletter
THE
Libertarian Forum↩
| Joseph R. Peden, Publisher | Washington Editor, Karl Hess | Murray N. Rothbard, Editor |
| VOL. I, NO. X | August 15, 1969 | 35¢ |
LISTEN, YAF
This open letter is addressed to the libertarians attending the YAF national convention in St. Louis this Labor Day weekend. Notice I said the libertarians in YAF; I have nothing to say to the so-called “traditionalists” (a misnomer, by the way, for we libertarians have our traditions too, and they are glorious ones. It all depends on which traditions: the libertarian ones of Paine and Price, of Cobden and Thoreau, or the authoritarian ones of Torquemada and Burke and Metternich.) Let us leave the authoritarians to their Edmund Burkes and their Crowns of St. Something-or-other. We have more serious matters to discuss.
In the famous words of Jimmy Durante: “Have ya ever had the feelin’ that ya wanted to go, and yet ya had the feelin’ that ya wanted to stay?” This letter is a plea that you use the occasion of the public forum of the YAF convention to go, to split, to leave the conservative movement where it belongs: in the hands of the St. Something-or-others, and where it is going to stay regardless of what action you take. Leave the house of your false friends, for they are your enemies.
For years you have taken your political advice and much of your line from assorted “exes”: ex-Communists, ex-Trots, ex-Maoists, ex-fellow-travellers. I have never been any of these. I grew up a right-winger, and became more intensely a libertarian rightist as I grew older. How come I am an exile from the Right-wing, while the conservative movement is being run by a gaggle of ex-Communists and monarchists? What kind of a conservative movement is this? This kind: one that you have no business being in. I got out of the Right-wing not because I ceased believing in liberty, but because being a libertarian above all, I came to see that the Right-wing specialized in cloaking its authoritarian and neo-fascist policies in the honeyed words of libertarian rhetoric. They need you for their libertarian cover; stop providing it for them!
You can see for yourselves that you have nothing in common with the frank theocrats, the worshippers of monarchy, the hawkers after a New Inquisition, the Bozells and the Wilhelmsens. Yet you continue in harness with them. Why? Because of the siren songs of the so-called “fusionists”—the Meyers and Buckleys and Evanses—who claim to be integrating and synthesizing the best of “tradition” and liberty. And even if you don’t quite believe in the synthesis, the existence of these “centrists” as the leaders of the Right gives you the false sense of security that you can join a united front under their aegis. It is for that very reason that the fusionists, those misleaders, are the most dangerous of all—much more so than the frank and open worshippers of the Crown of St. Wenceslas.
For note what the fusionists are saying behind their seemingly libertarian rhetoric. The only liberty they are willing to grant is a liberty within “tradition”, within “order”, in others words a weak and puny false imitation of liberty within a framework dictated by the State apparatus. Let us consider the typically YAFite-fusionist position on various critical issues. Surely, you might say, the fusionists are in favor of a free-market economy. But are they indeed? The fusionists, for example, favor the outlawry of marijuana and other drugs—after some hemming and hawing, of course, and much hogwash about “community responsibility”, values and the ontological order—but outlawry just the same. Every time some kid is busted for pot smoking you can pin much of the responsibility on the Conservative Movement and its fusionist-Buckleyite misleaders. So what kind of a free market position is one that favors the outlawry of marijuana? Where is the private property right to grow, purchase, exchange, and use?
Alright, so you know the Right-wing is very bad on questions of compulsory morality. But what about the hundreds of billions of dollars siphoned off from the producers and taxpayers to build up the power of the State’s overkill military machine? And what of the state-monopoly military-industrial complex that the system has spawned? What kind of a free market is that? Recently, National Review emitted its typical patrician scorn against leftist carpers who dared to criticize the space moon-doggle. $24 billion of taxpayers’ money of precious resources that could have been used on earth, have been poured into the purely and totally collectivistic moon-doggle program. And now our Conservative Hero, Vice-President Agnew, wants us to proceed on to Mars, at Lord knows what multiple of the cost. This is a free-market!? Poor Bastiat and Cobden must be turning over in their graves!
What has YAF, in its action programs, ever done on behalf of the free market? Its only action related to the free market has been to oppose it, to call for embargoes on Polish hams and other products from Eastern Europe. What kind of a free-market program is that?
YAF, the fusionists, and the Right-wing generally, have led the parade, in happy tandem with their supposed enemies the liberals, in supporting the Cold War and various hot wars against Communist movements abroad. This global crusading against the heathen is a total reversal of the Old “isolationist” Right-wing of my youth, the Right-wing that scorned foreign intervention and “globaloney”, and attacked these adventures as statist imperialism while the Nation and the New Republic and other liberals were berating these Rightists as tools of the Kremlin. But now your Right-wing leaders embrace every socialist, every leftist with a 100% ADA voting record, every Sidney Hook and Paul Douglas and Thomas Dodd, just so long as they stand ready to incinerate the world rather than suffer one Communist to live. What kind of a libertarian policy, what kind even of “fusionist” policy is that justifies the slaughter of tens of thousands of American soldiers, of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese peasants, for the sake of bringing Christianity to the heathen by sword and brimstone? I can understand why the authoritarians applaud all this, they who would like nothing more than the return of Cotton Mather or Torquemada. But what are you doing supporting them?
Surely every libertarian supports civil liberties, the corollary and complement of private property rights and the free-market economy. Where does the Right-wing stand on civil liberties? You know all too well. Communists, of course, have to be slaughtered or rounded up in detention camps. Being “agents of the Devil”, they are no longer human and therefore have no rights. Is that it? But it is not only on the Communist question where the conservatives are despots; don’t think this is just one flaw in their armor. For in recent years, American politics has instructively begun to focus on very crucial issues—on the nature of the State and on State coercion itself. Thus, the cops. The cops, with their monopoly of coercion and their overwhelming superiority of arms, tend to brutalize, club, and torture confessions from people who are either innocent or have not been proven guilty. What has been the attitude of the Right-wing, and your fusionist leaders, toward this systematic brutality, or toward the libertarian decisions of the Warren Court that have put up protections for the individual rights of the accused? You know very well. They hate the Warren Court almost as much as they do Reds, for “coddling criminals”, and the cry goes up everywhere for all power to the police. What can be more profoundly statist, despotic, and anti-libertarian than that?
When Mayor Daley’s cops clubbed and gassed their way through Chicago last year against unarmed demonstrators, the only libertarian reaction was to revile Daley and the cops and to support the rights of the demonstrators. But your fusionist leaders loved and applauded Daley, with his “manly will to govern”, and the brutality unleashed by his cop goons. And take the massacre at People’s Park at Berkeley this year, when one unarmed bystander was killed, and hundreds wounded, and thousands gassed by the armed constabulary for the crime of trying to remain in a park which they had built with their own hands on a state-owned muddy lot. Yet your “fusionists” denounced People’s Park and hailed Reagan and the cops.
And then there is the draft—that obnoxious system of slavery and forced murder. There is nothing anyone even remotely calling himself a libertarian can say about the draft except that it is slavery and that it must be combatted. And yet how namby-pamby YAF has been on the draft, how ambiguous and tangled the fusionist leaders become when they approach the subject? Even those who reject the draft do so only apologetically, and only on the grounds that we could have a more efficient army if it were volunteer. But the real issue is moral. The issue is not to build up a more efficient group of hired killers for the U.S. government; the issue is to oppose slavery as an absolute moral evil. And this no fusionist or Rightist has even considered doing. And even those who reject the draft as inefficient love the army itself, with its hierarchical despotism, its aggressive violence, its unthinking obedience. What sort of “libertarians” are these?
And what of the nation’s educational system in which so many of you have been enmeshed? For years, I heard your fusionist leaders condemn in toto, the American educational system as coercive and statist, and, when in their cups and heedless of their political status, even call for abolition of the public school system. Fine! So what happens when, in the last few years, we have seen a dedicated and determined movement to smash this system—to return control to the parents, as in Ocean Hill-Brownsville in Brooklyn, and take it from the entrenched educationists—or, as with SDS and the colleges, to overthrow the educational rule of the government and the military-industrial complex? Shouldn’t the fusionists have hailed and come to the support of these educational opposition movements? But instead, they have called on the cops to suppress them.
Here is surely an acid test of the fusionists’ alleged love of liberty. Liberty goes by the board as soon as their precious “gder” is threatened, and “order” means, simply, State dictation and State-controlled property. Is that what libertarians are to end up doing—fronting for despots and apologists for “lawnorder”? Our stand should be on the other side—with the people, with the citizenry, and against the State and its hired goon squads. And yet YAF’s central theme this year is its boasting about inventing tactics to call in the judges, call in the cops, to suppress SDS opposition—opposition to what? To the State’s gigantic factory for brainwashing! What are you doing on the barricades defending the State’s indoctrination centers?
It’s pretty clear, or should be by now, what they’re doing there, the fusionists. They’re right where they belong, doing their job—the job of apologists for the State using libertarian rhetoric as their cloak. And since, in recent years, they have snuggled close to Power, these apologetics have become more and more blatant. Fifteen, twenty years ago, the “libertarian-conservatives” used to hail Thoreau and the idea of civil disobedience against unjust laws. But now, now that civil disobedience has become an actual living movement, Thoreau is only heard on the New Left, while the Right, even the “libertarian” or fusionist Right, talk only of lawn-n-order, suppression and the bayonet, defense of State power by any and all means necessary.
You don’t belong with these deceivers on the political make. I plead with you to leave YAF now, for you should know by now that there is no hope of your ever capturing it. It is as dictatorial, as oligarchic, as close to fascism in structure as is so much of the content of YAF’s program. There is no way that you can overthrow the Jones-Teague clique, for this clique is entrenched in power. And behind this clique lie the fusionist gurus: the Buckleys, and Rushers, and Meyers. And behind them lie the real power in YAF—the moneybags, the wealthy business men who finance and therefore run the organization, the same moneybags who reacted hard a few years ago when some of your leaders decided to take a strong stand against the draft.
When YAF was founded, on the Buckley estate at Sharon, Connecticut, there was heavy sentiment among the founders against the title, because, they said, “freedom is a left-wing word.” But the “fusionists” won out, and freedom was included in the title. In retrospect, it is clear that this was a shame, because all that happened was that the precious word “freedom” came to be used as an Orwellian cloak for its very opposite. Why don’t you leave now, and let the “F” in YAF stand then for what it has secretly stood for all along—“fascism”?
Why don’t you get out, form your own organization, breathe the clean air of freedom, and then take your stand, proudly and squarely, not with the despotism of the power elite and the government of the United States, but with the rising movement in opposition to that government? Then you will be libertarians indeed, in act as well as in theory. What hangover, what remnant of devotion to the monster State, is holding you back? Come join us, come realize that to break once and for all with statism is to break once and for all with the Right-wing. We stand ready to welcome you.
Yours in liberty,
Murray N. Rothbard
Letter From Washington
By Karl Hess
Leaders And Heroes
We had a chance to learn a lot about leaders lately.
Also heroes.
There was, for example, the moonshot. The three Federal employees who went on the trip were passengers in fact, passengers in life-style, passengers in character, the great culminating passengers of the great bureaucratic trip. But by going along for the ride they have become heroes, instand, officially certified heroes who, in all probability, will be featured, like meat loaf, in the menus of the state’s school system until some other Federal employee makes it to Mars.
Politically there was another great passenger hanging on for all he was worth (and that is all he’s worth, come to think of it). Richard Nixon, whose only discernible qualification for any office has been that he wants it (oh, does he want it!) treated the affair in proper perspective. He said, gosh, that it was man’s greatest moment. He meant his greatest moment, of course—a fact he gave away by both dropping his name on the moon and dropping his cool with the astronauts, telling the entire world that the neatest thing about being President was actually getting to take free rides to historic events rather than staying home to watch them like all the kids who didn’t want to be leaders quite bad enough. (One recalled, as this marionette figure spoke, that he also had remaked, while helicoptering over Washington’s rush hour traffic, that he was glad he didn’t have to drive to work. His attitude toward the moon thing seemed just about on the same level: he was really glad to get to see the doings close up instead of at home like the working stiffs.)
There was also that leader of the downtrodden, Ralph Abernathy. He said that the whole thing was so awe inspiring that it even made him forget poverty for a moment. And why not? He had an entire special section of seats reserved for him at the launching, thus becoming the first extraterrestrial Tom, you might say. The awesome demonstration probably also made him forget, if he ever had bothered to think about it in the first place, that a lot of his brothers and sisters are being killed these days because they happen to want to solve their problems here on earth.
There also was Billy Graham, gently chiding his old buddy Dick about the moon thing being the greatest moment in man’s history. Fourth greatest, he corrected, right after Christmas, the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection. (Or maybe fifth, right after the invention of the padded collection plate and the 100% religion depletion tax allowance.)
For the best performance by an American leader, however, the prize really had to go to Teddy Kennedy, starring in a re-run of Dickie Nixon’s little-dog-Checkers speech, as produced in actual tragedy by the inmates of the state of Massachusetts under the direction of dynastic destiny out of sheer chutzpah. Since nobody else seems to give a damn that somebody got killed in the process why should we, eh folks?
To savor the play we must first appreciate the scenery. Here is the Senator from Massachusetts, one of the nation’s richest, most pampered young men. Unlike the temporary President of the United States, who got the job by holding his breath and threatening to turn blue unless we let him have it, Teddy Kennedy is widely felt to have some dibs on the job by sheer hereditary right, having not made much ado about any more profound qualification. And here, of course, is this tragedy; indeed, one dead girl in a world full of dead and dying can be called tragic. The point is how it is all perceived. And it is perceived as a problem in practical politics, nothing more. Even the surviving partner in the tragedy perceives it as nothing more and goes on TV to make the point as publicly as possible.
Teddy, it is said, just as it was said of Nixon in his time of crisis, is fighting for his life. It’s a stirring thought. It would be the only thing in that life he ever did have to fight for.
But what manner of warped and hollow men could be said to be fighting for their lives—even forgiving journalistic hyperbole—when all that is involved is whether or not the man will hold a public office? And what manner of people can take seriously the posturings of such public men or translate such public pulling into private agony?
The incident, indeed all of the incidents, tell us perhaps more about our society, our ‘system’ than even about the cardboard cutouts, the political Barbies and Kens who strut on the particular stage at the particular moment.
This supposedly noble land had been bred and fed on this obviously ignoble fare. It seems now impossible to say that all of this horseshit is just some aberration of an otherwise perfect civil comity and economic dynamism. It rather seems that all of this sort of loathsome leadership is the inevitable result of a system which, along with its vast capacity for producing goods, has an exactly equal capacity for producing evils.
Teddy Kennedy, telling his people (his forelock-pulling people down there in the Kennedy village that is the laughably sovereign state of Massachusetts) telling his people that he must be loved if he is to lead them, suggestively warning that if he had to step down they would lose more than a great man, they would lose a great name, asking the ever-loving folk in his ever-loving village to make the great decision for him (oh, my god; decisions, decisions, why not ask the little people to share this great burden with me); Teddy Kennedy who must actually think that whether he stays in the Senate or not is somewhere near as important as whether some man in Roxbury can pay his rent this month, or whether any man will live the night through in Vietnam, that Teddy Kennedy is your Teddy Kennedy America! Just as Richard Nixon is. Just as are Bobby Baker, Litton Industries, Dow Chemical, Nelson Rockefeller and all the other great practitioners of state capitalism and the profiteers of state imperialism.
What I kept thinking as I watched the national leaders disport themselves, and thought of their origins, was that to really love this land you must first learn to loathe this nation and the system for which it stands.
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Against The Volunteer Military
Many libertarians have been misled into supporting the volunteer military proposal. The argument typically goes something like this: the draft is a clear violation of the principle that each man is a complete self-owner; that to take away the free use of a man’s life for two years is to nationalize his most important piece of private property—his own person.
The argument continues: the lottery merely bases the slavery inherent in a draft system on mathematical chance instead of on the chance of getting a deferment and is therefore equally servile. Universal service merely seeks to hide the slavery inherent in the draft system under the cloak of egalitarianism-slavery for all.
The volunteer military idea is seemingly strengthened by analogy to the free market: coercive systems are always inefficient and this applies to coercive systems of acquiring military personnel. A market wage for soldiers will attract the most highly motivated soldiers, the soldiers most likely to re-enlist. Below market-wage soldiers will be poorly motivated, inefficient and will not re-enlist in high percentages—necessitating high training costs due to the high turnover in personnel.
In order to see why the above argument is fallacious, mischievous, and anti-libertarian let us consider the following: A concentration camp is set up whose purpose it is to torture innocent victims. Those unfortunates are dragged in kicking and screaming, are then subdued, tortured, maimed and finally killed. There is only one fact disturbing this otherwise idyllic picture—the concentration camp torturers are not hired at the going market rate as “free enterprise” demands; rather, they are, horrors! draftees. A group of “libertarians” is worried about the poor motivation and inefficiency of the torturers who were drafted against their will and “who just cannot seem to put their hearts into it.” In addition, the sad fact is that the re-enlistment rate is low—necessitating high training costs due to the high turnover in personnel.
What does this “libertarian” group then recommend? It recommends that future torturers be hired at market wage rates—a “volunteer torturary” as it were.
It is not hard for the true libertarian to see the error in volunteer military sentiment when viewed through this analogy. The point is that we must first determine whether the proposed job of the hirelings is consistent with libertarian principles. If it is, only then do we look into the method of hiring which must, of course, be voluntary.
If we mistakenly support voluntary methods of hiring people before we consider precisely what they are being hired to do, we may well become unwitting supporters of the efficient violation of liberties.
In the present political context the consistent libertarian must oppose the draft, but he must also oppose all imperialistic armies, be they drafted or hired.
What the proponents of the volunteer military forget is that there is a fifth alternative to manning imperialistic armies by the draft, lottery, universal service, or the volunteer military—opposition to imperialism under any guise even under the guise of the free market.
Is the libertarian, then, a pacifist, opposed to all armies? Far from it. The libertarian supports defensive armies whose soldiers are hired voluntarily. But this is not enough! Such armies must be paid for only by people who desire defense services and who voluntarily pay for them. Such armies would be more efficient than many presently known, but this efficiency the libertarian could wholeheartedly applaud since it would be used to protect, not violate, liberties. Moreover, such armies would be fully just since they would also be support without violating liberties.
— Walter Block
Hear Ye!Hear Ye!
ANNOUNCING A
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A Semi-Monthly Newsletter
THE
Libertarian Forum↩
| Joseph R. Peden, Publisher | Washington Editor, Karl Hess | Murray N. Rothbard, Editor |
| VOL. I, NO. XI | September 1, 1969 | 35¢ |
National Liberation
The recent rioting and virtual civil war in Northern Ireland points up, both for libertarians and for the world at large, the vital importance of pushing for and attaining the goal of national liberation for all oppressed peoples. Aside from being a necessary condition to the achievement of justice, national liberation is the only solution to the great world problems of territorial disputes and oppressive national rule. Yet all too many anarchists and libertarians mistakenly scorn the idea of national liberation and independence as simply setting up more nation-states; they tragically do not realize that, taking this stand, they become in the concrete, objective supporters of the bloated, imperialistic nation-states of today.
Sometimes this mistake has had tragic consequences. Thus, it is clear from Paul Avrich’s fascinating and definitive book (The Russian Anarchists, Princeton University Press, 1967), that the anarchists in Russia had at least a fighting chance to take control of the October Revolution rather than the Bolsheviks, but that they lost out for two major reasons: (1) their sectarian view that any kind of definite organization of their own movement violated anarchist principles; and (2) their opposition to the national independence movements for the Ukraine and White Russia on the ground that this would simply be setting up other states. In this way, they became the objective defenders of Great Russian imperialism, and this led them to the disastrous course of opposing Lenin’s statesmanlike “appeasement peace” of Brest-Litovsk in 1918, where Lenin, for the sake of ending the war with Germany, surrendered Ukrainian and White Russian territory from the Greater Russian imperium. Disastrously, both for their own principles and for their standing in the eyes of the war-weary Russian people, the Russian anarchists called for continuing the war against “German imperialism”, thereby somehow identifying with anarchy the centuries-old land grabs of Russian imperialism.
Let us first examine the whole question of national liberation from the point of view of libertarian principle. Suppose that there are two hypothetical countries, “Ruritania” and “Walldavia”. Ruritania invades Walldavia and seizes the northern part of the country. This situation continues over decades or even centuries. But the underlying condition remains: The Ruritanian State has invaded and continues to occupy and exploit, very often trying to eradicate the language and culture of, the North Walldavian subject people. There now arises, both in northern and southern Walldavia, a “North Walldavian Liberation Movement”. Where should we stand on the matter?
It seems clear to me that libertarians are bound to give this liberation movement their ardent support. For their object, while it might not be to achieve an ultimate Stateless society, is to liberate the oppressed North Walldavians from their Ruritanian State rulers. The fact that we may not agree with the Walldavian rebels on all philosophical or political points is irrelevant. The whole point of their existence—to free the northern Walldavians from their imperial oppressors—deserves our whole-hearted support.
Thus is solved the dilemma of how libertarians and anarchists should react toward the whole phenomenon of “nationalism”. Nationalism is not a unitary, monolithic phenomenon. If it is aggressive, we should oppose it, if liberatory we should favor it. Thus, in the Ruritanian-Walldavian case, those Ruritanians who defend the aggression or occupation on the grounds of “Greater Ruritania” or “Ruritanian national honor” or whatever are being aggressive nationalists, or “imperialists”. Those of either country who favor North Walldavian liberation from the imperial Ruritanian yoke are being liberators, and therefore deserve our support.
One of the great swindles behind the idea of “collective security against aggression”, as spread by the “inter-nationalist”-interventionists of the 1920’s and ever since, is that this requires us to regard as sacred all of the national boundaries which have been often imposed by aggression in the first place. Such a concept requires us to put our stamp of approval upon the countries and territories created by previous imperial aggression.
Let us now apply our analysis to the problem of Northern Ireland. The Northern Irish rulers—the Protestants—insist on their present borders and institutions; the Southern Irish or Catholics demand a unitary state in Ireland. Of the two, the Southern Irish have the better case, for all of the Protestants were “planted” centuries ago into Ireland by English imperialism, at the expense of murdering the Catholic Irish and robbing their lands. But unless documentation exists to enable restoration of the land and property to the heirs of the victims—and it is highly dubious that such exists—the proper libertarian solution has been advanced by neither side and, as far as we can tell, by no one in the public press. For the present partition line does not, as most people believe, divide the Catholic South from the Protestant North. The partition, as imposed by Britain after World War I and accepted by the craven Irish rebel leadership, arbitrarily handed a great deal of Catholic territory to the North. Specifically, over half of the territory of Northern Ireland has a majority of Catholics, and should revert immediately to the South: this includes Western Derry (including Derry City), all of Tyrone and Fermanagh, southern Armagh, and southern Down. Essentially, this would leave as Northern Ireland only the city of Belfast and the rural areas directly to the north.
While this solution would leave the Catholics of Belfast oppressed by outrageous Protestant discrimination and exploitation, at least the problem of the substantial Catholic minority in Northern Ireland—the majority in the areas enumerated above—would be solved, and the whole question of Northern Ireland would be reduced to tolerable dimensions. In this way, the libertarian solution—of applying national self-determination and removing imperial oppression—would at the same time bring about justice and solve the immediate utilitarian question.
Letter From Washington
By Karl Hess
REFORM
Liberal reformers, among their many mystical rites, particularly are devoted to the rational use of the state’s taxing power. The most rational use, they seem to feel, is in the redistribution of income.
Thus, when Richard the Reformer Nixon recently announced that he too had seen the light and now was ready to smite the rich and relieve the poor, the pitty-patting of the vested ventricles could be heard loud in the land.
Alas, it is all nonsense.
Taxes can never seriously affect the incomes of the rich. Nor are there any known instances of the government actually transferring substantial sums of money to the poor regardless of its source.
Begin, if you will, with the corporations, those artificial, state-coddled economic monstrosities from whose especially privileged endeavors flow the major wealth of the very rich. Corporations cannot pay taxes. Customers pay taxes. Corporations merely collect them. The point is that corporations are not taxed like thee and me. They are taxed only on what they have left over after deducting all of the costs of making it in the first place. They do not pay taxes out of savings, the way individuals must. It is, therefore, apparent that tax increases, for corporations, are paid simply out of price rises or, to repeat, by the customers.
The liberal zeal simply to increase taxes on the corporations is witless at best. It just shifts more of the heavy spending of the state into a relatively “painless” area where the dumb taxpayer, not realizing how the state happily encourages such fictions, growls about rising costs rather than about rising taxes which may, in fact, be what the price rise is about anyway.
But what about just taxing away all of the profits, wouldn’t that discourage price rises? Liberals just don’t know their corporations, apparently. The corporation is perfectly capable of declaring a zero profit at the end of any given year just by raising the bonuses, dividends or even salaries of its owning fat cats.
Conservatives, of course, have long since understood the invulnerability of the preferred position in which laws place corporations. They wouldn’t dream of blowing the whistle on them, however, because (1) conservative ideologues and muckrakers usually get their support from corporations, (2) they tend to be the relatives of corporate owners, or (3) they actually feel that the corporations represent some sort of countervailing power to the state.
That, on the conservative side, is as dumb a posture as the reform zeal is on the liberal side. Corporations in no way present a countervailing force to the state. They are, in effect, licensed by the state, they are treated in special ways (i.e. as though no one in them had any individual responsibility) by the state, taxed in special ways by the state, and so forth. They are either simply economic arms of the state or, to put it another way, the state is simply the police arm of the corporations. Under the American system of state capitalism, as under the similar system in the Soviet Union, that’s just the way it is.
The liberal reformists, however, at least feel that they have been given a great lift by Richard the Righteous in that he has closed up a lot of loopholes through which the very rich have crawled without paying any taxes on huge incomes. They miss, in their mean little zeal for revenge, the big point about such people. The closing of one set of loopholes or, indeed, all loopholes, just means that the rich guy must shift his method of income. It is one of the concomitant strengths of being rich in a state-capitalist system in the first place that it supposes an ability to collect income in whatever form, whenever, and however desired. Only the poor must live pinned tightly to urgent weekly demands of wages and withheld taxes.
There are some loopholes, of course, that would cause pain if obliterated, such as the still scarcely scratched oil depletion allowance. On the other hand, it actually would be more productive of benefit to the poor if, instead of simply clobbering the oily ones, the notion of depletion simply was extended. Manual laborers, for instance, obviously are depleted faster than any damn oil well but the state obdurately refuses to acknowledge it.
Something similar may be observed in another liberal attitude toward the poor. The Nixon Administration’s decision to relieve the very poor of any tax payment at all is liberally viewed as government’s reasonable attempt to get more money into the hands of the poor.
The money belonged to the people in the first place! The government now is just refraining itself from stealing so much of it. But are the poor relieved of the war tax on telephones when they use them? Are they relieved of war taxes on other items? Are they relieved of the taxes and the tolls of the predatory local governments who prey on them? Of course not. In short, for every dollar that government boasts that it is getting into the hands of the poor, it is still likely—and there are no real studies on the subject—that the poor continue to pay more out in tribute to the state at all its wretched levels.
For instance, when government liberally boasts that the poor ‘get’ something from government they include in their bookkeeping the poor’s share of the monstrous defense budget or the lunatic lunar boondoggles. Those are programs the poor would probably would be quite happy to forego if only the government would get altogether off their backs.
The point of all this is that among the grandest mistakes reformers ever make is summed up in the attitude toward taxes and corporations and poor people. The state is simply a gigantic corporation, just like G. M, just as predatory, just as bureaucratic, just as ‘profit’ (power) crazed, but with the added horror of having at its disposal the entire machinery of actual physical coercion.
To regard the taxes (profits) of the state as somehow more pleasant than the profits of the state-sheltered corporation, to think that the bureaucrats of the state have any more concern for the poor than the bureaucrats of the corporation, is one of the most fatal flaws in the reformist character.
THE CZECH CRISIS:
PART I:
The Eastern European Roots
By Leonard P. Liggio
Czechoslovakia, the most industrially advanced East European country when the Communist party assumed power at the end of World War II, had in two decades become economically stagnant. Serious slowing of economic growth was evident by 1962 when the aggregate product grew only 1.4 percent and industrial output declined 0.7 percent. In 1963 aggregate product declined 2.2 percent and national income declined 3.7 percent. Heavy subsidies were expanded for two decades to construct and operate industries without regard for their ultimate productivity. The annual subsidies to maintain these ‘white elephant’ factories has been a phenomenal fifteen percent of the total net national income. Further, twenty percent of the claimed national income consists of unsold finished products which are unsalable due to poor quality or high prices because of inefficient production.
In 1962 there was a deep agricultural failure when production fell 6 percent. This catastrophe was the final result of Communist leader Antonin Novotny’s reversal in 1955 of the party policy of full support for private farmers. Systematic pressure was placed on the small and medium private farmers to enter collective farms. Novotny in 1963 appointed a new premier to try to deflect public opinion toward the political superstructure and away from the real causes in the basic economic system. However, Czech economists began an overall study of the economy. A commission of the economic institute headed by Prof. Ota Sik was strongly influenced by the Yugoslav system of market socialism based upon free price mechanism and profitability as the test of value.
Yugoslavia made the earliest major innovations when it was read out of the Soviet bloc in 1948. The Yugoslav League of Communist leadership, headed by Josef Tito, survived Soviet denunciation because it had gained public support by recognizing that the solution of the problems of the peasant farmers and of agricultural productivity was crucial for an underdeveloped country. Experience indicated that collectivization of agriculture was not the solution for agricultural productivity; this deviation from the Soviet model was a major accusation against Tito.
Brutal purges were conducted in East Europe between 1948-53 against national communists who advocated the principle of autonomy from the Soviet party and its practical application in abandoning agricultural collectivization. Wladislaw Gomulka, Polish party leader until purged as a ‘Titoist’ in 1948, explained (after his rehabilitation in 1956) the root of Stalin’s ‘cult of the personality’ in the Soviet Union as primarily based in Stalin’s policy of collectivization of agriculture after 1929. Gomulka indicated that the introduction of mass violence for the first time in Soviet society led to the elimination of Leninist principles in the communist party and the complete domination of police-state methods in the Soviet Union. (In 1956 Gomulka reversed the collectivization of agriculture in Poland.)
Having challenged the Soviet model in agriculture, the Yugoslavs adopted new techniques in industry. Tito called for the initiation of the gradual withering away of the state apparatus beginning with workers’ ownership of state enterprises. “In the Soviet Union after thirty-one years,” Tito said in 1948, “the factories belong to the state, not to the people . . . they are run by civil servants.”
The Yugoslav party aimed to replace the role of the state bureaucracy in firms by substitution of workers’ self-management. The firm’s workers would control the management of the firm and share in its profits. The test of efficiency is directed to the firm’s competition in the supply and demand market. The goal of eliminating compulsion was introduced. According to vice-president Edward Kardelj: “The maximum effort and initiative of the individual does not depend so much upon directives and controls as it does upon the personal, economic, social, cultural and material interest of the worker who is working and creating in freedom.”
The influence of the Yugoslav experience was very important during the 1956 Thaw. In East Germany, the faculty of the German Academy of Economic Science had engaged in extended discussions of the problems of the withering away of the state. The Academy’s director, Prof. Fritz Behrens, had prepared detailed programs for major decentralization of the economy. It was held that rationality and productivity required autonomy for industrial enterprises. These programs were severely criticized as “anarchism” by the East German government.
Nevertheless, these economic policies received partial application in the New Economic System of the 1960’s. Despite East Germany’s rise to the sixth largest industrial producer in Europe, and three-fold increase in workers’ real income, its investment costs in 1965 had risen phenomenally and it was paying six times what it did fifteen years earlier. The unfinished investments were valued at one year’s gross fixed investment. Planning in building and housing construction had created a disaster. The compulsory collectivization of agriculture in 1960 severely crippled that sector with slaughter of livestock, neglect of fields, and flight of farmers to the cities. The regime was forced to increase investment in agriculture by thirty percent to maintain a stagnant rate of production. Additionally, food comprised twenty-five percent of East Germany’s imports in place of further investment in agriculture. Much of the food imports came from Poland’s private agricultural system.
East Germany’s New Economic System was introduced to gain reliable cost accounting, reduction of production costs, and managerial autonomy. But, the emphasis has been upon achieving this through the panacea of the electronic computer, leaving the central planners in ultimate control. Thus far, the results have not been a major transformation of East German economic production.
In Hungary during the mid-1950’s the popularity of workers’ councils and self-management of firms developed in newspaper discussion of Yugoslav policies following exchange visits of Hungarian and Yugoslav workers. In 1954 the Institute of Economics was established and it presented detailed criticisms of the centralized planned economy, the development of heavy industry at the expense of agriculture, the lack of a role for industrial profitability, the unreal price system. The untenability of planning was examined by Janos Konrai, The Excessive Centralization of Economic Management, Budapest, 1957. Thus, in 1957 the Committee of Economic Experts was formed to propose reform of the economy. Its program called for decentralization, price reform, material incentives, independence for individual firms, abolition of the state control of foreign trade and encouragement of private farms. The government never responded to the proposal, but it contained the ideas which appeared in the New Economic Mechanism, prepared in 1965-66 and implemented in 1968 because of the growing economic crisis. The Hungarian program is the most far-reaching with the exception of Yugoslavia.
In Poland during the 1956 Thaw decentralization and workers’ self-management were introduced. As described in a Polish student weekly, “Workers’ self-government was initiated in Yugoslavia essentially as an initiative from above, in the form of a decree, prepared for the most part by comrade Kardelj on a theoretical basis. In our country, as we all know, it was wrested from the ministers by the workers themselves.” But Gomulka rebuked the idea of far-reaching administrative decentralization in May 1957. “If every factory became a kind of cooperative enterprise,” Gomulka said, “all the laws governing capitalist enterprise would immediately come into effect and produce all the usual results. Central planning and administration . . . would have to disappear.”
As a result, Poland’s cooperation was limited to pioneering in the advocacy of radical economic theory. Oskar Lange’s writings were especially important. Lange has emphasized that Austrian economics, especially the work of Ludwig von Mises, is the sole rational alternative to Marxist theory. The Misesian critique of planning and of calculation under socialism is the major problem for Marxist economists. But even in theoretical discussions, the Polish economists can only go so far. Thus, Stefan Kurowski, the leading Polish exponent of the free market, has, with a few exceptions, not been allowed to publish his studies.
Thus, in the 1960’s, advocacy has been limited to regulated markets and free price formation within central planning. Warsaw Professor Wlodzimierz Brus (General Problems of the Functioning of a Socialist Economy, 1961) was attacked in 1967 (“The Antinomies of the Market Theories under Socialism”) for arguing that planning and the free market are mutually exclusive and that not only a free market in labor but also in capital goods is necessary.
The failure in Poland to proceed with market economy reforms delayed economic development. Late in 1967 three Communist Party plenums were devoted to the economic crisis which was causing unrest in major industrial cities. Food and clothing were in short supply; state warehouses were bursting with unsalable goods due to high prices or inferior quality. In November there was a thirty percent increase in the price of meat. The government explained the meat shortage: managers of minimally controlled enterprises had such good consumer response that they hired more employees to meet the demand but this “excessive increase in employment” was not called for in the central plan and their wages drove up the price of meat. General agricultural problems have developed since Gomulka reversed his private-oriented farm policy; the production of small tractors necessary for Polish farms was halted and only large tractors, for state farms, were available. The private farmers’ fear of collectivization has caused declines in production growth.
With economic crisis threatening to generate popular protest, free market-oriented economists became the scapegoats to hide the real causes rooted in central planning. In March 1968 protests against the existing system had been spearheaded by university students. To the slogan “Long Live Czechoslovakia” they marched through the streets and occupied university buildings and the Ministry of Education with predictable results: a police riot. The student demand for an investigation of the police was met with expulsion of students and dismissal of liberal faculty, such as Adam Schaff for his Marxism and the Individual Leszek Kolakowski, the principal theorist of anti-authoritarian Marxism. Brus and Kurowski were charged with encouraging the students by their programs to undermine central control of the economy (“Socialist Democracy and Market Socialism” in the party newspaper). Brus, Tadeusz Kowalik and Ignacy Sachs were expelled from the party for holding that only the “market can guarantee the basic economic structure during the process of development.”
The intellectual as well as material impact of the economic collapse of orthodox Marxist economics in East Europe has been compared with the 1929 Depression for the West. While the politicians in both cases resisted change, there is a marked difference between the response of economists and intellectuals in the West during the 1930’s and those in the East in the 1960’s. The former, refusing to challenge the Establishment seriously, opted for more elaborately theorized forms of the status quo in the form of Keynesian and Marxist economic theory. In the East the Establishment was really challenged by the intellectuals and economists, who embraced free market economic theory.
Their adoption of market economics was both a response to real conditions and the result of intellectual willingness of some economists East and West to seek dialogue and exchange of conflicting ideas. It is a credit to the East European economists, often members of Communist parties, that they were open to non-Marxist ideas. As Marxists they came to recognize that there were no differences between Marxist economics and the mercantilist, monopoly economics dominant in Western universities; the only clear alternative to the catastrophic planned economics in the East was the free market. Equally important was the openness of European market economists in originating discussions with Marxists. Year after year, they attended joint East-West conference, travelled to the East to initiate dialogue, and invited East Europeans to discuss their Marxism in the West. Unlike Americans they were not inhibited by adherence to the official Anti-communist line, although identification with U.S. policy hardly appears deducible from free market economics. Their healthy, self-confident activism in overcoming the obstacles to dialogue with Marxists has had important historical effects.
(The concluding part will appear in the next issue.)
Hear Ye! ANNOUNCING Hear Ye!
A
Libertarian Conference
The Columbus Day Weekend In New York City From Friday Night, Oct. 10 through Sunday, Oct. 12
At The Hotel Diplomat
Speeches! Panels! Parties!
FEATURED SPEAKERS |
KARL HESS |
Dr. MURRAY N. ROTHBARD |
PANELISTS INCLUDE: Walter Block, R. A. Childs, Jr., Walter Grinder, Leonard P. Liggio, Joseph R. Peden, Robert J. Smith, Jerome Tuccille
COST: Students $7.00 Non-Students $10.00 (10% extra at door)
All who bring sleeping bags are assured of floor space.
For Reservations and Further Information, Write:
The Libertarian Conference Committee
Box 341 Madison Square Station New York, N.Y. 10010
A Semi-Monthly Newsletter
THE
Libertarian Forum↩
| Joseph R. Peden, Publisher | Washington Editor, Karl Hess | Murray N. Rothbard, Editor |
| VOL. I, NO. XII | September 15, 1969 | 35¢ |
REPORT FROM ST. LOUIS:
The Revolution Comes To YAF
BY JEROME TUCCILLE
The place was Stouffer’s Riverfront Inn, St. Louis, Missouri.
The time, August 38-31, 1969.
The occasion, the annual National Convention of the “conservative” student organization, Young Americans for Freedom.
It had been apparent for six months and longer that the leadership of YAF, a traditionally conservative youth organization since the days of its inception in 1961, was being challenged from within by a persistent group of disaffected intellectuals. Just how strong they were, how many they numbered, was impossible to say. Their presence within YAF was revealed every now and then through the publication in The New Guard, the official YAF magazine, of an occasional article dealing with anarchist philosophy or the organization and operation of an anarchist society. But, by and large, The New Guard reflected the conservative thinking of the majority of its readership.
On the surface, there was no indication whatsoever of any major confrontation arising at the convention. Key speakers for the occasion, secured by the conservative YAF leadership, included the usual right-wing luminaries: William F. Buckley, William Rusher, Al Capp (Yes, Al Capp!), Fulton Lewis III, Barry Goldwater, Jr., Phyllis Schafly, Phillip Abbott Luce; major emphasis in the various seminars was placed on formulating an effective strategy for combatting the New Left on campus. All in all, if one merely read the proposed agenda circulated several weeks before the convention, it promised to be a routine excoriation of everyone to the left of Richard Nixon and Billy Graham, with maybe a few wrist-slapping comments for George Wallace and the fire-breathing ultra right.
However, several hours before opening session a group of New York rebels distributed the August 15th issue of The Libertarian Forum which contained an open letter to the convention from Dr. Murray N. Rothbard, urging the libertarians to split completely from the conservative movement.
At the same time, rumors were circulated to the effect that Karl Hess was arriving in St. Louis to address the convention on opening night. Since he was not a scheduled speaker, the implication here was that a demonstration would have to be staged by the radicals to demand that Hess be given a chance to express the opposition point of view. The conservatives, applying their overkill mentality to this potential crisis, were visibly dismayed by the fact that the rebels had come up with a “name” speaker of their own. The fact that the YAF leadership had loaded the convention with some sixteen hard-line conservatives of impeccable anti-communist: credentials was, apparently, not enough. The enemy had come up with Hess as a gesture of defiance, and the only thing to do, of course, was “escalate” their side of the conflict.
To make matters worse for the conservative point of view, Barry Goldwater, Jr. sent word prior to the convention—evidently upon hearing that there might be some ‘trouble’ in St. Louis—that he could not attend. He suddenly felt a need to be with his constituents over the Labor Day weekend.
At approximately 4:30 P.M., just three and a half hours before William Buckley was scheduled to deliver the opening address, Karl Hess’ son, Karl Hess IV, received word that his father would not be permitted to speak on the floor of the convention. Also, many of the anarchist and radical libertarian delegates discovered that they were having difficulty receiving the proper credentials which would admit them for the voting session on Saturday. Young Hess announced to the press that a ‘mini-convention’ would be held under the arch, the symbolic gateway to the west, at 11:00 P.M. following Buckley’s speech. His father was arriving later that evening and would speak to any dissident YAFers who wished to hear his remarks.
Realizing that a major split was underway—made all the more apparent by the heavy television and press attention the anarchists were receiving as they arrived in St. Louis with their black flags unfurled—William F. Buckley called a press conference at 5:30 P.M. Buckley was questioned mainly as to the nature and seriousness of the imminent split which now threatened to disrupt the entire convention. He denied that the confrontation was serious, claiming that the dissident element was too miniscule to be of any real importance. At this point, Karl Hess IV, leader of YAF’s Anarcho-Libertarian Alliance, Walter Block and myself acting as spokesmen for the Radical Libertarian Alliance, broke into the conference and invited Buckley publicly to debate with Hess under the arch later that night, since the YAF leadership would not provide for such an encounter as part of the official proceedings. Buckley declined, stating that he had an article to write that evening and, in any event, he did not think the issue was important enough that it could not wait until a later date.
Now the breach was visible, having been made an issue in Buckley’s own press conference, and the only question that now remained was how many dissident YAFers would split off to the open-air meeting in support of the opposition. The matter remained in abeyance until 8:00 P.M., at which time the convention was officially declared open. But before Mr. Buckley could be introduced to the crowd, a delegation of California anarchists staged a demonstration, demanding that their chapter chairman, Pat Dowd, who had earlier been dismissed for his radical views, be given a seat with the delegates on the stage. The demonstration would have remained a procedural one, rotating around the seating of the ousted chairman, had the conservatives not sent up a ringing chant in support of Buckley. Cries of, “We want Buckley! We want Buckley!” now dinned throughout the ballroom, only to be met with the opposition call, “We want Hess! We want Hess!”
It was only now that the press and the conventioners themselves had a chance to estimate the size of the dissident faction. The ferocity of the cries in opposition to the conservatives clearly startled the traditionalist contingent which now stated chanting the official slogan of the convention:
“Sock it to the Left! Sock it to the Left!”
“Sock it to the State! Sock it to the State!” was the answer to this new attempt to drown them out.
Finally, after a half-hour delay during which the ousted California chairman succeeded in claiming his seat upon the stage, William F. Buckley rose to deliver the official opening remarks of the convention.
The fact that he was, indeed, more than just a little concerned over the size of the opposition forces present in the hall was immediately apparent by the direction of his speech. The first fifteen minutes was devoted to a ringing denunciation of Rothbard’s open letter to the convention, and criticism of some remarks made by Karl Hess in the same issue of their Libertarian Forum. As usual for Buckley, his excoriation dealt with the style rather than the content of the letter, as if the main crime committed was their bad manners in confronting the issues head on rather than fondling them like gentlemen. He continued his speech with the usual conservative tirade about the perils of international communism and our need to arm ourselves at all costs and defend our nation even “unto the consummation of the world.”
Presumably, then, we would all go to heaven with the Pope for blowing up the earth in the name of God.
Another interesting fact worth mentioning here is Mr. Buckley’s attitude on the question of freedom. In his speech he mentioned that freedom is for those who agree to live within the framework of our traditions. Those who deny these traditions become “excommunicants” who then lose their right to the freedom guaranteed by our constitutional republic. Here, precisely, is the mystical element in the conservative mentality which has pushed them so far apart from their former allies: the notion that freedom is a gift to be dispensed among our worthy citizens by a moralistic government. The anarchists claim that freedom is a natural right, and if the state denies it to its citizens, they have a right to seize it themselves.
At 11:00 P.M., following the opening ceremonies, a slow trickle of students began heading for the silver arch dazzling in the moonlight. Gradually their numbers grew, swelling to a crowd of some three hundred sprawled along the hillside beneath the arch facing the Mississippi. Hess, surrounded by his son and other leaders of the radical faction, then delivered his now familiar message. The Right had abandoned its stated principles championing the individual. Power to the People was formerly an old Republican concept, and was now a policy of the New Left. The conservatives, heretofore critical of our expanding federal bureaucracy, were now aggrandizing more power unto the state in order to fight ‘the communist menace’. The chief threat to liberty in the United States was not the splintered radical left, but the efficient, and near-omnipotent United States government. Decentralization and neighborhood control was the only answer for the growing urban crisis, and the Right must join forces with the New Left in a united attempt to realize these goals.
The Hess message was a popular one for those assembled on the hillside—an estimated 20-25% of the total 1200 attending the convention—but his endorsement of a Libertarian Right and New Left coalition clearly polarized the group into two broad camps. The more radical element was enthusiastic about joining forces with at least some libertarian (voluntary commune) factions of the New Left; the more conservative were visibly disturbed and registered some doubts about the “inherent totalitarian tendencies” of collectivism, whether voluntary or otherwise. After Hess’ speech, the crowd broke up into discussion groups, and that’s how the night ended at approximately 3:00 A.M., with a dozen units of concerned students debating issues under the stars.
The main hope of the conservatives the following morning was to divide their opposition into two weak and ineffectual camps. These would be the more “conservative” libertarians who were interested in working within YAF to elect their own directors to the National Board which was completely controlled by hard-line Buckleyites, and to adopt a few libertarian planks into the official platform, calling for: active resistance against the draft; a denunciation of domestic fascism as a twin evil to international communism; legalization of marijuana; immediate pull-out from Vietnam; several changes in YAF’s official Sharon Statement; and an assortment of other pertinent resolutions. These libertarians, led by Don Ernsberger and Dana Rohrabacher, were by far the larger of the two dissident groups, claiming over three hundred members for their Libertarian Caucus.
The second faction of rebels consisted of radical libertarians of anarchists, most of them belonging to Karl Hess IV’s Anarcho-Libertarian Alliance. This contingent was more interested in splitting off from YAF entirely and forming a new alliance with New Left anarchists and anti-statists. They numbered no more than fifty hard-core radicals, but had high hopes of siphoning off as many of the libertarian group as possible by the end of the convention.
The second day proceeded pretty well along the lines that the conservatives had planned. Except for Dr. Harold Demsetz’ speech in the morning enumerating various benefits of the free market, the general tone of the speeches of the day was a hammering away at the negative theme of anti-communism.
But if Friday was a field day for the conservatives, Saturday would be remembered as the day on which all those of even quasi-libertarian sentiment consolidated their forces in general disgust against the whole tone of the convention. The session opened at 11:30 A.M., an hour and a half later than scheduled. The first ninety minutes were occupied by challenges from the floor on the seating of delegates, with the libertarians charging that many of their people were being purged by the conservative leadership in order to minimize their strength during the voting for directors to the National Board and platform resolutions.
Finally the rollcall of states began. The Libertarian Caucus was basing its hope on a slate of nine candidates ranging ideologically from moderate libertarian to anarchist. If two or three of their candidates were elected, and perhaps one or two of their minority plank resolutions passed, the Ernsberger group would have considered it a victory and divorced themselves entirely from the radical Anarcho-Libertarian Alliance. However, this was not to be the case. Before half the roll was called, it was evident that every one of the libertarian candidates was being thoroughly routed and the conservatives eventually succeeded in electing all their candidates to the nine available positions. It was at this point that talk of a walk-out began to spread, for the first time, into the ranks of the moderate libertarians.
Next came the voting on the minority platform resolutions. Disaffection spread rapidly among the entire opposition as, one by one, they saw their resolutions hammered down by the conservatives: immediate withdrawal from Vietnam—defeated; legalization of marijuana—tabled; denunciation of domestic fascism—hooted down and defeated. Then came the issue which was finally to polarize the convention into two hostile, openly-warring camps. The libertarians offered their resolution advocating active resistance to the military draft, and saw it trammeled by a solid majority. It was after the reading of the majority plank on the draft which limited anti-draft agitation to legal channels, that the event took place which was to force everyone present to make an instant decision: either in support of the conservative majority, or against them with the radical libertarians. There could no longer be any room for fence-straddling.
A young man, who shall remain nameless for obvious reasons, stepped forward and grabbed a microphone in the center of the floor. Clearly announcing that it was the right of every individual to defend himself from violence, including state violence, he lifted a card, touched it with a flame from a cigarette lighter, and lifted it over his head while it burned freely into a curling black ash. For fifteen or twenty seconds the hall was locked in numb silence, finally to be shattered by an enraged war cry:
“Kill the commies!”
The next second can best be described as the instant radicalization of the moderate libertarians. While the first onrushers were knocked back by five or six radicals surrounding the “criminal commie”, the ranks of the Libertarian Caucus solidified into a barrier separating the radicals from the howling conservative majority. In the swinging and pushing which followed, the young student who had triggered the melee escaped outside the convention hall. The libertarians, stepping on chairs and raising their fists against the conservatives, sent up a chant:
“Laissez faire! Laissez faire!”
There was no question where they stood now: in clear opposition to the conservative majority.
The majority found their own voices, and howled back in reply:
“Sock it to the Left! Sock it to the Left!”
This was countered with:
“Sock it to the State! Sock it to the State!”
The issues were clearly drawn, and three hundred and fifty libertarians suddenly found themselves in violent opposition to their former conservative allies numbering some eight or nine hundred strong. It took the best part of the next half hour to calm everyone down and get them outside the convention hall. In the early evening hours that followed, the conservatives met privately and passed a resolution condemning the card-burning act as “illegal”, and denouncing the radicals as being “outside the mainstream of Young Americans for Freedom” (echoes of 1964).
This was not to be the end of the visible conflict separating the two groups. Later that night, while the libertarians were conducting their own meeting to discuss future strategy, a swarm of conservatives went stomping throughout the floors of the inn shouting: “Kill the libertarians! Kill the libertarians!” Suddenly it dawned on the minority opposition exactly who their main enemy really was. The New Left? New Leftists had never demanded the blood of the anti-statist Right. The situation was so shocking to some of the instantly-radicalized that there was even talk of traveling only in groups, and locking themselves into their rooms.
However, this defensive attitude was not to last for any considerable length of time. The smell of success had been too exhilarating. In the corridor outside the main convention hall, Dana Rohrabacher, Don Ernsberger, and several of the “moderate” libertarian group were actually setting the pace for the radical anarchists. The former moderates were now painting placards with anarchist slogans—“Smash the State!” “I am an enemy of the State!”—and posting them up on the walls. While a chorus of boos greeted them from conservative onlookers, Rohrabacher mounted a chair and started the now-familiar cry: “Laissez faire! Laissez faire!”
This was picked up instantly by about a hundred fifty of the former moderates, and now it was their turn to go tromping through the corridors of the hotel, forcing the conservatives to scurry into locked rooms. When the counter-demonstration finally exhausted, itself, the conservatives managed to muster a small counter-counter-offensive, chanting the cry, “Lazy fairies!” as they passed the radicals, thereby putting themselves in the unique position of repudiating their own economic philosophy and openly embracing our current system of state-corporate fascism.
The climax of the convention for the radicals came in the form of a meeting of all the libertarian and anarchist groups, including two SDS anarchist chapters. The meeting decided to form a communications network to keep all the organizations, including any New Left organizations that care to participate, in continuous contact with one another. This new loosely-knit organization will be called the Libertarian Confederation, and will be managed and operated by the Maryland-based Society for Rational Individualism.
Some of the radicals will split off entirely from YAF; others will remain on an individual basis and continue to proselytize among the conservative ranks. The most important thing to emerge from this convention is that, for the first time, the most influential forces on the Libertarian Right will be working to establish an open and working coalition with the New Left in their common struggle to resist the abuses of the United States government.
YAF Power Play
In an article written on the St. Louis convention, “Young Authoritarians for ‘Freedom’”, our anarcho-libertarian comrade, Joseph M. Cobb, former editor of the New Individualist Review, contributes an important insight about the racket inherent in the YAF organization. Speaking with one of the founders and long-time leaders of YAF at the convention, Cobb was surprised to find this leader admitting the following:
The anarchists, he charged, were “ruining everything”. Why? Because, Cobb reports, the “National Office of YAF is playing a double game with the older generation of businessmen and politicians, and making it pay”—pay in the form of plush offices, high salaries, and expense accounts. From these right-wing moneybags YAF raises a great deal of money for such theocratic programs, beloved of the right-wing, as the “Campaign for Voluntary Prayer” in public schools. But few students would be attracted by such programs, so programs such as the prayer campaign “generated money which was used to cover money-losing projects, but ones which the kids dig—such as abolishing the draft.” Thus, the YAF leadership obtain money for right-wing causes, but then must use part of the money to attract a mass base of kids, without whom the money would disappear in the long run—thus making YAF a kind of two-way racket. Cobb adds that “YAF is upset because these crazy kids, with their principled opposition to the state, are going to overturn the National Office’s carefully balanced financial-ideological system.”
Cobb concludes with the important insight that “the only way the National Office people can get away with their programs for fund-raising and semi-reformist free-market-ism is to promote the philosophy of “fusionism”! . . . Fusionism is a pseudo-philosophy which attempts to reconcile the libertarian anti-statist position with the traditional conservative authoritarianism. The fusionists are almost perfect examples of the Marxist sociology-of-ideas theory: each social class will invent ideas which further its own class interests.”
Note On Libertarians
It is dramatic and heartwarming that the Revolution has come to YAF. But the euphoria engendered by St. Louis must not be allowed to obscure the fact that this Revolution has not yet succeeded, for the moderate “Libertarian Caucus” has largely decided to stay within this authoritarian organization, to work from within for change. As long as they continue to do so, they will continue to provide a libertarian cover for fascism. They may have been radicalized by the confrontation at St. Louis, but they clearly have not been radicalized enough. To discover why this is so, the curious phenomenon of “conservative” libertarians or even anarchists must be analyzed at length, and this will be done in the next issue of the Libertarian Forum.
Recommended Reading
The Tranquil Statement. A brilliant, rip-roaring statement, adopted aboard the S. S. Tranquil, by the Anarchist Caucus of the Young Americans for Freedom. 15 pp. Available for 35¢ from Elizabeth Crain, 1085 National Press Building, 14th and F Sts., N. W., Washington, D.C. 20004.
Noam Chomsky, American Power and the New Mandarins (Pantheon). A great and unusual book. Not only the best scholarly but angry dissection of the intellectuals in the ruling class, centering on their role in Vietnam. But also excellent for World War II Revisionism in the Pacific, and Spanish War revisionism (pro-anarchist). Professor Chomsky has a clear fondness for the anarchist position.
David Horowitz, ed., Containment and Revolution (Beacon Press, paper). Good essays on the origins of the Cold War; includes a fine paper by Todd Gitlin on the origins of the Cold War in Greece during World War II, and an appreciation of Senator Taft by a young New Left historian.
F. J. P. Veale, Advance to Barbarism (Devin-Adair). It is good to have this outstanding early work of World War II Revisionism, hitherto only published in Britain, at last available in the U.S. The first work that showed that it was Britain, not Germany, that began deliberate mass strategic bombing of civilians.
Hear Ye! ANNOUNCINC Hear Ye!
A
Libertarian Conference
The Columbus Day Weekend In New York City From Friday Night, Oct. 10 through Sunday, Oct. 12
At The Hotel Diplomat
Speeches! Panels! Parties!
FEATURED SPEAKERS |
KARL HESS |
Dr. MURRAY N. ROTHBARD |
PANELISTS INCLUDE: Walter Block, R. A. Childs, Jr., Walter Grinder, Leonard P. Liggio, Joseph R. Peden, Robert J. Smith, Jerome Tuccille
COST: Students $7.00 Non-Students $10.00 (10% extra at door)
All who bring sleeping bags are assured of floor space.
For Reservations and Further Information, Write:
The Libertarian Conference Committee
BOX 341 Madison Square Station New York, N.Y. 10010
A Semi-Monthly Newsletter
THE
Libertarian Forum↩
| Joseph R. Peden, Publisher | Washington Editor, Karl Hess | Murray N. Rothbard, Editor |
| VOL. I, NO. XIII | October 1, 1969 | 35¢ |
Anarcho-Rightism
Karl Hess’s brilliant article in this issue turns the spotlight on a new and curious phenomenon of “libertarians” and even “anarchists” who yet are strongly opposed to revolutionary change, and who therefore at least objectively stamp themselves as defenders of the existing state and the status quo. But this opposition to revolution is no accident; it is part and parcel of the entire world-view of these people—whom we may call “anarcho-rightists”. For the anarcho-rightist, beneath the veneer of his professed anarchism, still remains what he generally was before his anarchistic conversion: a benighted right-winger.
In a sense, it is heartwarming that the overwhelming logic and consistency of the anarcho-capitalist position has won over a large number of former laissez-fairists and Randians. But every rapidly developing movement has growing pains; anarchism’s growing pain is that this conversion has, in all too many cases, been skin deep. The curious conservatism and moderation of the Libertarian Caucus of YAF is but one glaring example of this defect.
Let us analyze the anarcho-rightist. In effect, he says: “O.K., I’m convinced that it is immoral for a government to impose a monopoly of coercion by the use of force, and it possible or even probable that the free market could supply all services now considered governmental, including judicial and police protection. Since this is anarchism, I am an anarchist.”
But his anarchism is only an anarchism for the far distant future, to be achieved solely by patient education, the issuing of leaflets and pronouncements, etc. In the meanwhile, in his concrete, day-to-day attitudes, the anarcho-rightist remains fully as right-wing as he was before. His anarchism is only a thin veneer laid on top of a moral of profoundly “anarchist” and statist views, views that he has not bothered to root out of his social philosophy.
Thus, the anarcho-rightist remains an American patriot. He reveres the American government as the “freest in the world”, he worships the Founding Fathers (failing to realize that the Constitution was a profoundly statist coup d’etat imposed upon the far more libertarian Articles of Confederation), he loves and admires the two major enforcement-good squad arms of the State: the army and the police. Defining the police a priori as defenders of person and property, he supports their clubbing, beating, and torturing of dissenters and opposition movements to the State. Totally ignorant of the American guilt for the Cold War and of the long-time expansionist nature of U.S. imperialism, he supports that Cold War in the belief that the “international Communist conspiracy” is a direct military threat to American liberties. Critical of Establishment propaganda in domestic affairs, he yet has allowed himself to be totally sucked in by the Establishment propaganda about the Communist bogey. Hence, he supports the American military. Even if he opposes the Vietnam War, he does so only as a tactical error that is not in American “national interests”. Although a self-proclaimed libertarian, he shows no concern whatever for the genocidal American murder of millions of innocent Vietnamese peasants. And, beset by a narrow, solipsistic desire to keep his university classes open, he actually takes the lead in defending the State’s brainwashing apparatus—the American schools and colleges (either State-owned or State-subvened)—against the rising opposition to that educational system.
In short, the fact that, in philosophic theory, the anarcho-rightist is indeed an anarchist should cut very little ice with those anarchists who are truly opponents of the American State, and who are therefore revolutionaries. For when it comes to concrete actions, actions in which he must line up either for the State or for the opposition to that State, he has generally lined up on the wrong side of the barricades—defending the American State against its enemies. So long as he does so, he remains an opponent rather than an ally.
A strategic argument has been raging for some time among revolutionaries whether or to what extent the anarcho-rightist offers prime material for conversion to the revolutionary position. Basically, how much time one spends working on any given rightist is a matter of personal temperament and patience. But one gloomy note must be sounded: there is a grave tendency among many rightists to be solipsistic: in short, to not give a damn about principle, about justice, or, in the last analysis, about liberty. There is a tendency for rightists to be concerned only with their own narrow monetary profits and immediate creature comforts, and therefore to scorn those of us who are dedicated to liberty and justice as a cause. For these ignoble solipsists, any form of dedication to principle smacks of “collectivism” or “altruism”. I had wondered for years why so many Randians, for example, place such great emphasis on combatting “altruism” (which has always struck me as an absurd social philosophy of little importance.) Now I am beginning to realize that for many of these people, “altruism” means any form of devotion to principle, to liberty and justice for all men, to any principle, indeed, which may disturb their own cozy accommodations to the statist evils which they recognize in the abstract.
Thus, when, many years ago, I raised a call for a revolutionary libertarian movement, I was dismissed by these people as crackpotty and unrealistic. There could never be a revolution here, and that was that. Then, in the mid-1960’s, when, almost miraculously, the New Left revolutionary movement began to take hold in America, these libertarians shifted to a new position: that a revolution in this country would never be libertarian, it would only be Marxist and dictatorial. But now, now when libertarian revolutionism has begun to spread like wildfire among the youth, now the anarcho-rightists have begun to display their cloven hooves: they have begun to reveal that they oppose even a libertarian movement. Several of such people have recently declared that I, or rather the revolutionary libertarian movement of which I am a part, am “more of a threat to them” than the State. Why? There appear to be two reasons. First, that any revolution will disturb their cozy accommodations, their petty profits, their lousy classes. In short, their dedication to liberty is so weak, so feeble, that they oppose bitterly any rocking of the boat, any disturbance to their cozy little lives. They don’t really oppose the State, certainly not in practice. They can “live with” the State quite contentedly. The second reason is that many of these people cringe from revolutionary justice, because they know that much of their income and wealth have derived from unjust State robbery.
And so these anarcho-rightists sit basely on the sidelines, hugging their petty comforts, griping and carping about the revolution while the New Left and other revolutionaries put their lives on the line in opposition to the very State which they claim to oppose but do so much to defend. And yet, should the revolution ever succeed, these people expect that the fruits of liberty will drop into their laps, that they will reap benefits which they have done not one whit to earn through struggle. And O the recriminations that they will heap upon us if liberty is not then handed to them, unearned, upon a silver platter. For their own opportunist sakes, anarcho-rightists might ponder the fact that successful revolutionaries, no matter how libertarian, tend to be very impatient with those who have opposed them every step of the way. As Karl Hess has eloquently written, the position of any revolutionary tends to be: “No voice, no choice; no tickee no shirtee; no commitment now, no commitments later.”
Letter From Washington
By Karl Hess
Conservative Libertarianism
Libertarianism has managed to develop its own form of counter-revolutionary conservatism. Its future as a movement, much less as an influence on future social change, could be crushed by it if unopposed and unanalyzed.
Underlying this conservatism are an undying and undeniable respect for institutionalized, traditional injustice, as opposed to possible future injustice, and the unbeatable contradictions of reformism.
No person even on the fringes of a libertarian discussion can have escaped the explicit wording of the former or the overtones of the latter.
Libertarians, this conservative position holds, cannot take part in revolutionary action because, as it now stands, such action always is dominated by persons with a healthy disrespect for private property and a feverish fondness for communist rhetoric.
The argument is made, time and time again, that “if they get power, they will be worse than what we have.” The notion that they might include libertarians if only libertarians were up there on the barricades working with them either eludes these conservatives or they reject it because of their spotless, yea immaculate conceptions of theoretical purity. But most pernicious is the possibility that such persons truly mean what they say: that they prefer the certainty of the injustices we have to any risk of injustices that we might have. There is a trap here deep enough to engulf freedom itself. Theories do not produce revolutionary action. Rather, revolutionary actions enable theories to become practices. It is from the ferment of the action that the ferment of the idea brews its future impact. Long before Mao or machineguns it was apparent that political thought, without political act, equalled zero and that political ideas born in the minds of men have a chance to grow only after actions by the hands of men. Not even Christianity or Ghandian resistance grew solely as an idea. All great ideas have grown as the result of great actions.
No example comes to mind of a great teacher who was not also a great exemplar, a personification of and not merely a mouthpiece of his ideas. Take Christ and the money-lenders. He unquestionably had the benefit of sound advice in regard to economic analysis and pedagogy. He could have held classes to expose usury to a few who would go out and expose it to more and so on and on until the entire world was revulsed by the practice and ceased doing business with the usurers. The story, of course, is different. It tells of a decision to teach by acting.
In the more real, or at least contemporary world we can think of the many political and economic theorists—some of them libertarians!—who did not have the act of revolution to spread their thoughts, as did Karl Marx.
If Bakunin or Warren had had a Lenin we might live in a free and anarchistic world today.
The consequence of conservative libertarianism’s concentration on ideas to the exclusion of action is to turn a prudent sense of priority on its head. The priorities, as I see them, are to first participate in social change so that, second, there will be a chance of influencing its direction later on. Unless one can reject flatly the possibility that there is even going to be a change, the priority should not be to fret about what it might be like, the priority is to maintain a position from which or in which you can do something about it.
The impossibility of simple neutrality in this situation should be apparent. You cannot just say “a pox on both of your houses” because, unfortunately, you happen actually to live in one of the houses. By that act alone neutrality is made impossible—except for those very rare few who actually can withdraw totally, to dream out their isolation so long as, and only so long as, the unleashed dogs of the system, against which they have refused to struggle, are not set upon them.
From the conservative position comes the position of libertarian reformism. It holds that, since there is a good base to build upon—the at least lip-service traditions of liberty in this country, for instance—that the way to avoid the dangers that might lurk on the other side of revolutionary change is to opt for evolutionary change. The repeal of certain laws is, in this position, held as crucial and, of course, it probably is true that if the withholding tax were repealed that the government would be bankrupted as millions of taxpayers simply found themselves unable to pay up.
That is, this situation might be true if it were not for the amazing ingenuity of American state-monopoly-capitalism. Few if any corporation heads would stand idly by and see the source of their prosperity—a partnership with the state—seriously jeopardized. One can imagine a “voluntary” tax withholding system going into effect which, if anything, might be more effective than the state system which, after all, is operated by businessmen anyway even though with a lot of wasteful bureaucratic interference. Same with the voluntary or even ‘corporate’ military concepts. A libertarian should be the first to recognize that such systems would, if anything, make imperialism more effective by making its military machine more efficient. Such reforms, in short, would not necessarily end injustices but might merely streamline them.
More pertinent is the central error of reformism as a possible instrument of change. To reform a system you must, first of all, preserve it against attacks more precipitous than those called for in the reformist timetable. This position not only makes neutrality impossible, it makes siding with the system (the state) unavoidable in the long run.
I sum up my concern over these matters in this way: Libertarians are faced with a real, not merely theoretical world in which revolutionary change is at the very least a real possibility everywhere. If libertarians will not participate in that change they cannot influence that change now or later. It is the important characteristic of this journal that it does not intend to relegate the black flag of the most revolutionary of positions, libertarianism, to the sidelines of any revolution, no matter the color of the other banners unfurling.
The New Boston Tea Party
While thousands of libertarians sit on the sidelines, griping about any action that might ruffle the feathers of the State, two hundred and fifty rebellious and admirable taxpayers staged a new Boston Tea Party, on September 14, at the small community of Boston, Pennsylvania, about 20 miles southeast of Pittsburgh. These citizens, many of them conservative businessmen and women, were vigorously protesting the proposal of Governor Raymond P. Shafer to impose that iniquitous instrument, a state income tax.
The protestors, dressed like their illustrious forebears as Indians, paddled a canoe onto the waters of the Youghiogheny River, and dumped into the river cardboard containers labelled “tea”.
The tax rebels also revived another institution with a glorious and long-lived tradition in America—hanging politicians in effigy. Governor Shafer was hung in effigy, and any politicians who arrived at the demonstration in person were given a hostile, though non-violent, reception.
National Review Rides Again
National Review, the intellectual Field Marshal of the New Right, is getting worried. After several attacks on myself during the course of this year, N. R. has begun to make clear that the rapid growth of the libertarian movement is getting to be a burr under its “fusionist” saddle. In our last issue, Jerry Tuccille detailed Bill Buckley’s devotion of the first half-hour of his keynote address at the YAF convention at St. Louis to a bitter attack upon mine and Karl Hess’s articles in the “Listen, YAF” issue of the Libertarian Forum. Now, Jared C. Lobdell, in the official report on St. Louis (NR, Sept. 23) tries to pooh-pooh the dramatic confrontation at the convention, repeats the same tired old line that “traditionalists” and libertarians are in perfect agreement (on liberty “within the framework of the Western tradition”), except, of course, for a few “extremists” who are for liberty outside Western tradition (whatever that is supposed to mean). That’s us folks, us who really believe, as Buckley correctly charged at St. Louis, that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice and that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.
But now NR has wheeled out its heaviest gun, Frank S. Meyer, to do battle with libertarianism (“Libertarianism or Libertinism?”, NR, Sept. 9)—a sure sign that we are really hurting the Right-wing, for Meyer, a shrewd political strategist, never wastes his words on purely intellectual controversy. All of his columns are calculated for their political impact. Seven years ago, Meyer felt called upon (in his “Twisted Tree of Liberty”, now reprinted in his collection, The Conservative Mainstream) to print an attack upon what was then a very tiny group because we split with the Right-wing on the presumptuous grounds of being opposed to nuclear annihilation. Now that our polarization from the Right-wing is complete and our ranks growing every day, Meyer attempts a more comprehensive critique of libertarianism.
Meyer begins with the complaint that libertarians are really “libertines” (hedonists? sex-fiends?) because we “reject” the “reality” of five thousand years of Western civilization, and propose to substitute an abstract construction. Very true; in other words, we, like Lord Acton, propose to weight the growth of encrusted tradition and institutions in the light of man’s natural reason, and of course we find these often despotic institutions wanting. To Meyer, we propose to “replace God’s creation of this multifarious, complex world . . . and substitute for it their own creation”. Very neat. The world as it is, in short the status quo of statism and tyranny, is, in the oldest theocratic trick in history, stamped with the approval of being “God’s creation”, while any radical change from that tyranny is sneered at as “man’s creation”. Meyer, the self-proclaimed fusionist and “conservative libertarian”, thus stamps himself as simply another incarnation of Sir Robert Fillmer and Bishop Bossuet, another intellectual apologist for the divine right of kings.
Meyer then proceeds to set up a straw man: we libertines, he thunders, believe in liberty as man’s highest end, whereas conservatives uphold liberty as man’s highest political end, i.e. to free man so that he can pursue his own ends. But no libertarian I have ever heard of considers liberty as anything but the highest political end; the whole idea of liberty is to free man so that every individual can pursue whatever personal ends he wishes.
Having knocked down this straw man, Meyer leaps to his real complaint: that we libertines wish to free man so that each person can pursue whatever goals he desires. This, not the phony political end vs. absolute end, is Meyer’s real grievance. No, he declares, men should only be free to pursue their ends within the framework of tradition and “civilizational order”. I have wondered for years what Meyer and his cohorts have really meant by their constant talismanic incantations to “Western civilization”. What, after all, is “Western civilization” or “civilizational order”? In attacking us for our sympathy with the “rampaging mobs of campus and ghetto” and our opposition to the war machine against Communism, the answer becomes fairly clear; what Meyer means by the “bulwarks of civilizational order” is, plainly and bluntly, the State apparatus. It is the State that Meyer is anxious to preserve and protect; it is the State that he holds to be synonymous with, or at the very least, essential to, his beloved but highly vague “Western civilization”. If one reads the National Review theocrats long enough, one almost begins to sympathize with the Russian “Anarcho-Futurists” of Kharkov who, in 1918, raised the cry, “Death to world civilization!”
If Meyer’s poorly reasoned piece is the best that can be hurled against us, and I suppose it is, then we libertarians have nothing to fear on the intellectual front. Libertines of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains—and the privilege of endless subjection to theocratic cant.
Abolition: An Acid Test
It has come to our attention increasingly of late that many self-proclaimed libertarians balk at the idea of abolishing slavery. It is almost incredible to contemplate, for one would think that at least the minimal definition of a libertarian is someone who favors the immediate abolition of slavery. Surely, slavery is the polar opposite of liberty?
But it appears that many libertarians argue as follows: the slave-masters bought their slaves on the market in good faith. They have the bill of sale. Therefore, respect for their property rights requires that slavery be left intact, or at the very least that the slave-master be compensated for any loss of his slave at the market value.
I used to believe, and have written articles to that effect, that the idea that right-wingers uphold “property rights over human rights” is only a left-wing smear. But evidently it is not a smear. For these libertarians indeed go to the grotesque length of upholding property rights at the expense of the human right of self-ownership of every person. Not only that: by taking this fetishistic position these pro-slavery libertarians negate the very concept, the very basis, of property right itself. For where does property right come from? It can only come from one basic and ultimate source—and that is not the pronouncement of the State that Mr. A belongs to Mr. B. That source is the property right of every man in his own body, his right of self-ownership. From this right of self-ownership is derived his right to whatever previously unowned and unused resources a man can find and transform by the use of his labor energy. But if every man has a property right in his own person, this immediately negates any grotesquely proclaimed “property right” in other people.
There are five possible positions on the abolition of slavery question. (1) That slavery must be protected as a part of the right of property; and (2) that abolition may only be accompanied by full compensation to the masters, seem to me to fall on the basis of our above discussion. But the third route—simple abolition—the one that was adopted, was also unsatisfactory, since it meant that the means of production, the plantations on which the slaves worked, remained in the hands, in the property, of their masters. On the libertarian homesteading principle, the plantations should have reverted to the ownership of the slaves, those who were forced to work them, and not have remained in the hands of their criminal masters. That is the fourth alternative. But there is a fifth alternative that is even more just: the punishment of the criminal masters for the benefit of their former slaves—in short, the imposition of reparations or damages upon the former criminal class, for the benefit of their victims. All this recalls the excellent statement of the Manchester Liberal, Benjamin Pearson, who, when he heard the argument that the masters should be compensated replied that “he had thought it was the slaves who should have been compensated.”
It should be clear that this discussion is of far more than antiquarian interest. For there are a great many analogues to slavery today, an enormous number of cases where property has been acquired not through legitimate effort but through State theft, and where, therefore, similar alternatives will have to be faced once more.
Recommended Reading
RAMPARTS, October, 1969 issue. An all-star issue. Particularly recommended are: Karl Hess’s beautifully written, “An Open Letter to Barry Goldwater” (must reading!); David Horowitz’ “Sinews of Empire”, a blistering exposé of international studies institutes in academe; Michael Myerson’s dissection of David Dubinsky and the ILGWU in “ILGWU: Fighting for Lower Wages”; and Peter Collier’s sensitive critique of the myths propagated by the moondoggle in “Apollo 11: the Time Machine”.
Paul Sweezy and Harry Magdoff, “The Great Moondoggle”, Monthly Review (September, 1969). An excellent dissection of the various reasons for the incredible moondoggle program, especially the desire to instill patriotism among the masses by and on behalf of the ruling class. A thoroughly anti-State critique, this is the article Ayn Rand should have written, instead of the jejune apologia for the space program that she did write in the Objectivist. The fact that this article was written in a leftist magazine is a precise indicator of what’s wrong with the Right.
Charles A. Beard, President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War (Archon Press). A reprint of the best single book on Pearl Harbor by the great leader of Pearl Revisionism.
Hear Ye! ANNOUNCING Hear Ye!
A
Libertarian Conference
The Columbus Day Weekend In New York City From Friday Night, Oct. 10 through Sunday, Oct. 12
At The Hotel Diplomat
Speeches! Panels! Parties!
FEATURED SPEAKERS |
KARL HESS |
Dr. MURRAY N. ROTHBARD |
PANELISTS INCLUDE: Walter Block, R. A. Childs, Jr., Walter Grinder, Leonard P. Liggio, Joseph R. Peden, Robert J. Smith, Jerome Tuccille
COST: Students $7.00 Non-Students $10.00 (10% extra at door)
All who bring sleeping bags are assured of floor space.
For Reservations and Further Information, Write:
The Libertarian Conference Committee
BOX 341 Madison Square Station
New York, N.Y. 10010
A Semi-Monthly Newsletter
THE
Libertarian Forum↩
| Joseph R. Peden, Publisher | Washington Editor, Karl Hess | Murray N. Rothbard, Editor |
| VOL. I, NO. XIV | October 15, 1969 | 35¢ |
We Make The Media
The dynamic, cascading, coruscating upsurge of the revolutionary libertarian movement has finally broken into the nation’s mass media—a sure sign, in those unsympathetic quarters, that we are becoming a force to be reckoned with. In the last few weeks, our movement has garnered important publicity in the nation’s press.
Item: The New York Times, for Sunday, September 28, has a long, objective article on Karl Hess, entitled “Goldwater Aide Now a Radical; Adopts Anarchism Philosophy”, along with a fine picture of Karl. After reporting on the influence of the war in Vietnam and the suppression of the student revolt in turning Karl into a pure libertarian, the Times quotes him on Vietnam: “‘We should not have intervened in Vietnam,’ he said. ‘If we had to intervene, we should have been on the other side.’ In comparison to Ngo Dinh Diem, the N. L. F. sounds like a bunch of constitutionalists.” On his shift from anti-Communism to anarchism: “I concluded that my enemy is not a particular state—not Cuba or North Vietnam, for example—but the state itself.”
Item: Newsweek, September 29, has another article on Karl, “Ideologues: You Know He’s Right”. In contrast to the objective tone of the Times, the Newsweek article is snide and supercilious. Typically, in the course of sneering at Karl’s “zigzag” career, Newsweek conveniently forgets to mention that Karl Hess was once one of its own editors. But, in the annals of public relations, “every knock is a boost”, so long as the name gets spelled right, and not only is Karl mentioned, but so too is our own little, no-budget Libertarian Forum—our first breakthrough into the mass media!
Item: the sober, well-edited journal of corporate liberalism, Business Week, has a lengthy article in its September 27 issue, “Economics: Radicals try to rewrite the book”. This is an objective portrayal of new trends in New Left economics, particularly as embodied in the Union for Radical Political Economics (URPE). In addition to the inevitable socialist and Marxist trends in the New Left, Business Week notes, in some surprise, a new element: “free-market anarchism”. The feature in this section is our friend Mike Zweig, a leader of URPE and assistant professor of economics at SUNY at Stony Brook. There is a very good picture of Zweig, with the caption, “calls himself a free-market anarchist”, and then Zweig’s views are discussed as follows:
“There is, in fact, a decided strain of anarchism among the New Left that persists even when the radicalism takes more systematic form. Zweig argues for a society that begins with a revolution to redistribute property (‘the existing distribution of property is the result of theft’) and ends with freedom from any governmental interference.
According to his analysis, modern capitalism has failed because so many of the ‘real costs’ of economic activity are borne by the public at large. Air pollution is an obvious example. A free market that forced everyone to pay the real social costs of production would probably maximize welfare with a minimum of constraints, he contends.”
To Business Week, all this is a “powerful challenge” but “to economists over thirty, such utopian thinking is a sign of intellectual confusion.” But far from being confusion, what Mike is clearly advocating is the extension of private property rights so as to prevent such invasion of private property as has been permitted to occur in the case of air pollution—a pollutant invasion of the person and property of much of the population. What Mike, in short, is advocating is the very “free market” which so many Establishment economists are supposed to be advocating but, alas, in rhetoric only.
And so we’re on the march. Onward and upward.
Class Analysis
Many right-wing libertarians appear to be uneasy in the face of class analysis when it is used to interpret and explicate the nature of political reality. Indeed, one gentlemen at the first Libertarian Forum took the position that there is no such thing as a class. Now obviously the word “exists” is used equivocally; no collective entities exist apart from the individuals which constitute these entities. Yet to say, for instance, that “society” does not exist as some strange entity over and above the individuals who live together in certain relationships and constitute society is not to say that these individuals do not in fact relate to each other in a certain way. Likewise people who share common interests and/or characteristics are said to belong to a class, or sub-division of the society which they help to constitute. Thus, all redheaded females belong to a class, as do all Roman Catholics, and so forth. All who have an interest in a particular piece of legislation also belong to a class. And, all those who share a common commitment to a wide variety of measures, the net result of which is to protect, secure and enhance their power and wealth—to preserve the status quo—belong to an economic class (to characterize the class relevantly). The class above described would in fact be a ruling; class, assuming of course that their ends are actually effected. The key distinction here is not that the ruling class wishes to preserve the avenues by which people can competitively attain positions of wealth, but rather the ruling class is one which seeks to prevent the above, and to use political means (i.e., the coercive power of the state) to secure and expand further the class’s economic gains.
A ruling class, or power elite if you will, can be semi-liquid in composition, admitting new members selectively. Also, other classes may be allowed to share in specific spoils so that people victimized by those in power can be occasionally placated, and made to feel that they also have, a stake in the system. It is necessary to the maintenance of any ruling class that it convince other groups that what it is doing is in their interest as well—that is, what in fact is intended to benefit the few must be peddled as being in the “general interest”. For instance, historian Gabriel Kolko has done a magnificent job of showing how federal regulation of business, long heralded as government control of business for the commonweal, is in fact business control of government, in order to limit competition and cartellize the various industries affected. Moreover, in each instance such regulation was conceived and supported by business to do just this. Yet, the masses have been sufficiently propagandized to believe the opposite of the reality of the situation (cf. The Triumph of Conservatism and Railroads and Regulation). Today, as a result, there exists a welter of enactments which have effectively cartellized the economy to a large extent (something not possible on a real free market as Kolko and others have demonstrated). In other words, there exists a system of monopoly capitalism in which the business elite have, by gaining effective control of the state apparatus, isolated themselves from the full effects of competition. Backing this system up is the whole defense complex which through massive contracts, and, in the last analysis, war, insures that the system keeps operating. Labor is but a junior partner in all this, with small business getting enough to keep this segment relatively content. The poor—those excluded from sharing in the power and wealth of the state capitalism system—are given sops of poverty programs.
The intellectual’s role in all this is crucial. He must effectively propagandize the mass of people by extolling the virtues of the system, and by helping the ruling class come up with suitable reform measures to patch up the more glaring problems, And, in the final analysis, the intellectual, as has been seen at the Stanford Research Institute, stands ready to assist in subduing the natives if they become restless. The intellectual also has a share in the system.
The task of the libertarian is two-fold. He must work as a scholar to destroy the myths which serve to justify and perpetuate the status quo. It is a sad commentary on the right-wing that whereas they were once in the forefront of this endeavor, with men such as Albert Jay Nock and Frank Chodorov, they are now the backbone of the intellectual apologists for the state apparatus. Today the debunking task has fallen to the New Left.
Secondly, and crucially, the libertarian as activist must be ready to step in to help in an overt way to aid in the destruction of the system. No ruling class has ever voluntarily given up power. Education must never stop, but there comes a time when action is also called for (as the Marxists have perceived, there is also education-through-struggle). Those so-called libertarians who, while espousing high sounding principles in support of liberty, in the concrete support state power against any active resistance have clearly failed in both tasks. And those who seek to avoid the problem by trying to “escape” have not only failed as libertarians, but also failed as human beings. Whereas the former group have consigned themselves to the dustbin of history, the latter have a “class” all to themselves: human ostriches.
— Gerald O’Driscoll, Jr.
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The Czech Crisis
Conclusion
The Prague Spring . . . And After
By Leonard P. Liggio
The New Economic Model prepared in 1963 by the Czech economic institute commission headed by Ota Sik contained more advanced concepts than other East European proposals. This was due to the fact that the Czechs had begun their free inquiry later and thus were able to begin at the point where the economists of the other countries had ended. Also, there were a few Czech economists who were willing to espouse entirely radical positions which gave their colleagues the opportunity to present far-reaching changes as a moderate program. Eugen Loebl, director of the Bank of Slovakia, courageously led the criticism of orthodox Marxist economic theory. Although he had just been rehabilitated after years as a political prisoner, Loebl declared that the country needed a mixed economy with 200,000 (30%) of small privately-owned enterprises. (According to Stanford Research Institute-International, entrepreneurs in Czechoslovakia are “already quite free to start small industries” under the 1968 reforms.) Prof. Radoslav Selucky was dismissed from his professorship for the radical market program that he proposed.
Sik’s New Economic Model required that enterprises earn their own way, that investments be financed by the enterprises from their own resources or by borrowing at interest, that prices by determined in the competitive free market based upon the law of supply and demand, and that profits be the criterion of economic efficiency. After strong attacks on it by orthodox theorists, the party adopted it in 1965 and it was scheduled for implementation in January 1967 with the withdrawal of subsidies and central planning and the freeing of enterprises to decide what to produce and at what price to sell it.
Not only was the New Economic Model diluted from the beginning, but ultimately it was made ineffective by the party leadership. Nevertheless, the cumulative effect of the partial implementation as well as earlier removal of controls in selected sectors was reflected in major reductions in material costs of production (the first decline in fifteen years). About 40 percent of the 9 percent rise in the gross income of industrial enterprises during 1967 resulted from savings on material costs. There was a 7 percent growth in industry and 8 percent in national income. The opposition of the right-wing, dogmatic party leadership headed by President Novotny was increasingly resented by the younger party leaders. This was given expression by Alexander Dubcek in his October 1967 criticism of the regime for its hostility to radical economics and its suppression of freedom. This attack on authoritarianism projected Dubcek to prominence and led to his election as first party secretary in January.
The immediate issue in the Communist party’s October plenary meeting was the assault by clubs and tear gas by the Prague police against the thousands of Czech students marching in protest against conditions at the university. Orthodox communist establishments are as fearful of the anti-authoritarian spirit of youth as are the liberal bureaucratic establishments in the West. The students demanded (and eventually were granted) the dismissal of the police officials responsible for the assault on the student protesters. Thereafter, during the ‘Prague Spring’ Czech students were at the center of the radicalization process in their country. “There was an incredible spirit of Liberation. Especially among students—young people generally—there was a spirit of defying anything laid down by authority—the Government, the Party, schools, parents. The atmosphere of questioning was everywhere.” (“Spirit of defiance”, New Left Notes Sept. 16, 1968).
The student struggle was initiated by an ideologically developed cadre of university dissenters called the Prague Radicals; many of them had been expelled or drafted into the army for their organized protests in the universities. But after January 1968 the Prague Radicals were free to organize openly; bypassing the established Czech student association, they formed new youth organizations. The final removal of Novotny by his resignation as president in March was the result of Prague student demonstrations welcoming a national student cavalcade to protest U.S. genocide in Vietnam.
The Soviet invasion forced radical political activism upon the vast majority of Czech students. On November 17 Prague Radicals announced a student strike and occupied the university buildings. They were inspired by the example of the Columbia SDS; SDS activists had been in contact with the Czech students. On the following day all the universities in Czechoslovakia were closed by student strikes and two-thirds of Prague university students joined the occupation of the buildings were SDS-style teach-ins were held. In the succeeding months Prague Radicals demonstrated against censorship and limitations on freedoms until the regime ordered the dissolution of the new student organizations in June 1969.
The sabotage of the New Economic Model by the party right-wing during 1967 had led to the critical central committee plenary session on December 19 which was characterized by violent debates between conservative supporters of central planning and the liberals favoring market economics. Sik led the attack, insisting that to achieve economic reforms and combat bureaucracy the party and government structure would have to be blasted apart by popular action. The centrists were won over to reform and Dubcek was elected party first secretary on Jan. 5, 1968.
Although Ota Sik was appointed deputy premier in charge of the committee of economic advisers, a much more conservative deputy premier was entrusted with actual control over economic departments. Czech radicals proposed market determination of prices, competition among enterprises, incentives for worker productivity, and the end of bureaucratic planning and controls. Centrists preferred cautious change ideologically, politically and economically, and denounced “excessive” freedom. They placed emphasis upon half-way measures such as managerial efficiency, and on maintaining economic planning by technicians and computers with some price freedom but limitations upon the independence of enterprises. Centrists resisted complete decentralization of industrial management, worker self-management of firms, and competition among enterprises for credits and markets. Centrist attitudes parallel those formulated in the Soviet Union under the inspiration of the pioneering but limited contributions of Prof. Liberman of Kharkov University. But Ota Sik has criticized Libermanism as inadequate and simplistic despite its great impact on Soviet economics. Such reforms merely substitute improved goals or indicators, or are “an endeavor merely to limit the number of directive tasks and indicators set by the central planning and managing body.” (Ota Sik, Plan and Market under Socialism, White Plains, 1968).
Thus, the centrists desired a convergence with the humane, manipulative bureaucracy of Western Europe and America behind whose facade of political democracy the bureaucracy’s control expands. Czech radicals continued to publicize their demand for dismantling the bureaucracy, restoration of self-ownership to individual firms and implementation of the free market. Dubcek condemned the “ingrained evil of excessive levelling of incomes and egalitarianism which has rewarded unskilled work more highly than skilled work.” Sik emphasized protection of the consumer: from high prices due to inefficient workers or enterprises and from inferior products caused by “the monopoly position” of state enterprises. “All the lagging enterprises,” Sik noted, “are being protected to the detriment of good enterprises which show initiative and also to the detriment of the consumer.”
To achieve these objectives the Czech radicals sought the reorganization of the Communist Party in order to create a popular movement for reform: the 14th Communist Party Congress was announced for early September 1968. Preparations had been made during preceding months through district elections of Congress delegates; these were almost completely younger members dedicated to reform. The obvious result of the Congress would be the election of a party central committee devoid of conservatives and overwhelmingly radical in commitment. To forestall the party Congress which would have been a qualitative transformation in the nature of a Communist party, the Soviet invasion was launched on August 21. The day before the Soviet invasion, Pravda blasted Czech radicals as subverters of socialism for refusing to follow orthodox Marxist economic planning and centralization.
Within days of the invasion an extraordinary party Congress was held secretly in a Prague industrial plant protected by a volunteer workers’ guard. While the Soviet army ‘controlled’ Prague a new party leadership was appointed by the Congress. The support of the reformers by the students is understandable given the revolutionary spirit of modern youth against authoritarianism. What is the explanation of the widespread, ideologically developed support of the general public and of the workers in particular? For about a year economists had conducted “evening schools of economic policy” for workers in the major industrial centers in order to provide a clear understanding of the New Economic Model and its benefits to the workers as producers and consumers. Thus, during the ‘Prague Spring’ new elections were held for local and general trade union leaders, and younger activists committed to the reforms were elected. After the invasion the trade unions assumed important roles in resisting restrictions on freedoms and organizing mass support for the economic and political reforms which had been introduced. Trade union newspapers and educational departments have become the sanctuaries for reform writers and economists removed after the invasion.
The strong support of the general public for the reform program is the result of the heavy involvement of intellectuals and writers in the reform movement. The year previous, in June 1967 during the Congress of the Writers’ Union, several leading writers and editors were expelled from the party for attacks on the conservative cultural functionaries. The Writers’ Union journal was suspended. The writers and intellectuals realized that their freedom was at the sufferance of the bureaucracy so long as the government controlled the budget for books and periodicals as well as all jobs and salaries. The need of writers to control the media through which they express themselves caused them to join the advocates of free market economics. Economic independence from the government for quality intellectual production was recognized as analogous to economic independence for quality material production. Similarly, it was clear that intellectuals had suffered from pay equalization standards as much as managers, and that the introduction of salary differentiation in the New Economic Model would mean equivalent increases for managers and intellectuals.
The strong intellectual commitment of the Czech public to political and economic reforms will have positive effects in the long-run despite the immediate obstacles. Similarly, the material conditions which impelled consciousness of the need for reforms will not be solved by half-way measures. The Soviet Union has slowed but it has not terminated the reduction of its advantageous trading position in East Europe. West European business has sought East European markets to escape U.S. financial domination; the six East European countries are “the fastest growing regional market in the world” and West European business earned about $3 billion in exports there during 1967. East Europe offers the advantages of large reservoirs of engineers and technicians educated at the tax expense of East Europeans and a low wage labor force disciplined by twenty years of Communist trade unionism. The U.S. share of that trade is minimal since U.S. products tend to be non-competitive with West Europe to whom the East Europeans have turned to escape Soviet economic hegemony. The U.S. would prefer to establish semi-political bilateral trade agreements with the Soviet Union, thus avoiding the embarrassment of the non-competitiveness of U.S. products. Thus, the coolness if not hostility of the U.S. toward the “Prague Spring”, since economic liberalization would not benefit the U.S.; and the refusal of the U.S. to aid Czechoslovakia by returning the gold deposited in here during World War II. The U.S. by its official statements virtually invited the Soviet invasion, and despite a few muted protests, insisted that there would be no interruption in bilateral U.S.—Soviet negotiations.
In comparison, it was several years after the 1956 Hungarian crisis before U.S. disappointment at the failure of its Hungarian supporters wore off sufficiently for bilateral negotiations. Hungarian events were extremely complex with positive as well as negative aspects, and the heartfelt speeches by Czech delegates (since purged) at the U.N. protesting the Soviet invasion clearly differentiated between the two in the face of the U.S. delegate’s self-interested joining of the two events. There was no assumption as in Hungary of army commands by officers previously retired because of their connections with the CIA and NATO (instead a leading conservative general fled to the U.S. when Dubcek was elected). There was no withdrawal of Czechoslovakia from the Warsaw Pact. There was no Czech appeal for intervention of U.S. forces. On the other hand, radical reforms based upon free market economics were not an issue in Hungary. The Czech delegates noted the U.S. disinterest if not hostility to the Czech free market reforms, and denounced the U.S. as equally responsible for the Soviet invasion because the U.S. had initiated the Cold War which had created the atmosphere for internal repression in Czechoslovakia. The concepts of freedom in the “Prague Spring” did not find their inspiration in America; therefore the Czechs could not be disappointed in the lack of American interest in their liberation.
Compared to the situation in Hungary after November 1956 the current situation in Czechoslovakia is far worse. The replacement of Alexander Dubcek by Gustav Husak after more than fifteen months of the January reforms is a major step backwards, while the accessions of Janos Kadar in Hungary and Wladyslaw Gomulka in Poland in the fall of 1956 were forward steps compared to the Stalinist regimes they replaced. Hungary and Poland are agricultural countries (60%) compared to Czechoslovakia (30%), with the heaviest concentration in Slovakia. The Hungarian and Polish farmers benefited from the liberalization of the Kadar and Gomulka leaderships and have played an important role as stabilizing forces since 1956. Similarly, the Catholic Church plays a significant moderating role in rural Hungary and Poland, which is of great assistance to the Communist parties. Only in Slovakia does the Catholic Church have great influence, and that is the most moderate region, causing the least problems for the post-Dubcek leadership.
Having exhausted other means of resistance the Czechs have undertaken a passive resistance campaign in the arena of production. A producers’ strike has been in progress in Czechoslovakia for many months, and the economy has become the central point of struggle. Inflation, shortages, poor quality goods have been the result of the passive resistance responding to central planning, abandonment of workers’ councils, and rejection of free market principles. In Prague, for example, during the first half of 1969 only 276 apartments were completed; fifteen per cent of last year’s rate. An official economic report declared that production continues to fall, imbalance grows, increased wages representing the largest part of income growth. The Soviet interruption of the Czech Radicals’ development of freedom has resulted economically in a great leap backwards. The current general strike of the producers has created a grave economic crisis in Czechoslovakia, and the Novotny regime fell precisely because it could not solve the economic crisis.
A Semi-Monthly Newsletter
THE
Libertarian Forum↩
| Joseph R. Peden, Publisher | Washington Editor, Karl Hess | Murray N. Rothbard, Editor |
| VOL. I, NO. XV | November 1, 1969 | 35¢ |
Two Steps Forward, Two Steps Back
THE CONFERENCE
The first New York Libertarian Conference is over. It was a wild and woolly time, both exciting and dull, wonderful and a shambles. It was great that we held it, but it is highly doubtful that another conference will ever be held in the same form. To quote Dickens: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness . . . it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness . . .”
In contrast to the P.R. snow jobs handed out by other conference organizers, attesting to the joy and grandeur abounding at their meetings, this will be a candid, unvarnished report and appraisal of the Conference. Our readers deserve no less. It is only fair to add that the appraisal of most of the other organizers of the Conference is far more favorable than my own.
PHASE I: The Triumph
Looking backward, the Conference may be divided into two phases, which differed as Day and Night. Phase I, from Friday night through Saturday afternoon, was indeed a triumphant occasion. In the first place, the attendance. By forgetting to put in our ads that anyone could attend a single session for only $2.50, we unwittingly discouraged a lot of our New York people; perhaps thirty or forty more would have appeared if not for this oversight. But even so, over 200 people attended the Conference, perhaps as high as 220, almost all of whom came from out of town. And what out of town! It was incredible. People came, just for this Conference, all the way from California, Florida, Texas, Iowa, Kansas, Wisconsin, Illinois, Ohio, Missouri, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, a large contingent from Michigan, and one heroic young man, John H. C. Pierce, who gave up his summer vacation in order to hitch-hike to the Conference from northern Manitoba! We, the organizers of the Conference, looked out across this sea of faces and hardly recognized a soul. It was a great and historic moment.
As amateur organizers of conferences, it is true that we packed far too much material in the Saturday afternoon panels. There was virtually no break between noon and six P.M. But what material! The papers were of a uniformly high and even scintillating level, and made real contributions to libertarian knowledge. We hope to publish the papers and speeches at the conference in paperback form, to make them available to libertarians across the country and as a permanent part of the libertarian literature.
In the meanwhile, a brief summary of the Phase I papers:
On Friday night, I gave a lengthy overview of the libertarian system, beginning with the natural right of self-ownership, developing the structure of property rights in libertarian theory, and ending with a call for the abolition of the State as quickly as possible. On Saturday, in the Economics panel, Professor Laurence Moss of Columbia and Queens Universities, gave a spirited and witty talk on the “Economics of Sin”, pointing out that the State is continually redefining the “sin” that it outlaws in order to extend its power over the mass of the people, especially the poorest sectors of the populace. Jerry Tuccille, our most recent important convert from the idea of limited government, gave a rousing talk pointing out that laissez-faire, considered logically, must lead one to free-market anarchism. We are honored to be the first publication to announce that Jerry’s book, Radical Libertarianism, will soon be published by Bobbs-Merrill. Mario J. Rizzo, an honors senior in economics at Fordham University, proved to be one of the stars of the Conference, giving a brilliant paper standing Marx on his head, and arguing that, in the kind of interventionist, corporate state economy that we have today, business profits indeed tend to be an index of exploitation of the rest of society, since they are usually derived from the use of State privilege. In short, much of Marx, while totally fallacious for competitive, free-market capitalism, turns out to be unwittingly applicable to the state-monopoly system that we suffer under today. Professor Walter Block, of Rutgers and New York Universities, delivered a sharp critique of the statism and deviations from liberty of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School.
In the “Politics and Liberty” panel, Roy A. Childs, Jr., a student in history and philosophy at SUNY, Buffalo, summarized his recent article which brilliantly used Randian terminology to demolish the inner contributions of the Randian concept of “limited government”. (Roy’s article is “Objectivism and the State: An Open Letter to Ayn Rand”, The Rational Individualist, August, 1969). I gave a talk on how competing police forces and courts could work, and work well, in an anarchist society, and Professor Joseph R. Peden of Baruch College, CUNY, gave a learned and fascinating paper on the thousand years of successful, anarchistic “law and order” in medieval Ireland, an eminently workable society that only fell to the brutal English conquest in the seventeenth century.
The Foreign Policy panel was another highlight of the meeting. R. Dale Grinder, of the history department of the University of Missouri, delivered a learned, witty, and illuminating paper on United States imperialism in China and the Far East, from 1880-1920. Walter Grinder, graduate student at New York University, traced the origins of the Cold War to the counter-revolutionary, expansionist drive of the United States, back from World War II through the aftermath of the first World War. Professor Leonard Liggio, of City College, CUNY, recalled for us the great founder of modern isolationism and anti-imperialism, the laissez-faire economist (and abolitionist) Edward Atkinson, who founded the Anti-Imperialist League during the Spanish-American War, and even sent “subversive” anti-war pamphlets to our soldiers waging an imperialist conquest of the Philippines. This is the isolationist heritage which the New Left has now taken up and the Right-wing has unfortunately abandoned.
So far, so great; but during the Saturday session, an undercurrent of rebellion rumbled from various “Young Turks” who, apparently restive at having to follow trains of thought for more than one paragraph, began to gripe about the “over-structuring” of the conference and to call for general “rapping” (open discussion). The time was to come, all too soon, when general rapping would unfortunately take over. And with this rapping came the disintegration of the conference.
PHASE II: Disintegration
Phase II covers Saturday night through the end of the conference the following night. The disintegration began after Karl Hess’ rousing speech Saturday night, calling for action against the State. Karl threw the meeting open to questions and general rapping, and that’s when trouble arose. The first thing that happened was an intensifying polarization of left and right-wings, each pushing the other into harder, more extreme, and more disparate stands. The point is that within the New York movement, agreement is intense and widespread, and the divergence between “right” and “left” is only a matter of tactics and nuance rather than fundamental principle. But hold a conference like this one, advertised widely and open to one and all, and massive extremes of left and right are bound to appear. It was inevitable that, once widespread rapping began, the almost total lack of communication between extreme left and extreme right, between ultra-left anarchists and anarcho-rightists, would lead to an aggravating polarization between them. Each extreme reacted on the other with cutting dialectical force, each pushing the other farther away from its position. Instead of the conference bringing both extremes, both “deviations” from the main line, together, the rap sessions only served to drive them further apart.
Take, for example, the late Sunday afternoon session, supposed to be devoted to Campus Organizing. The polarization process had continued through Sunday (the demoralization being aggravated by another one of our tactical miscalculations, since half of the people left for home around that time. We did not realize that, outside of New York, no school or business observed Columbus Day). The Campus Organizing session was to be a vital part of the conference, when our campus chapters were to discuss student organizing, development of RLA (the Radical Libertarian Alliance), relations with other fraternal libertarian campus groups, etc. Instead, everyone was so caught up with the intensifying left vs. right struggle that no one bothered to deal with campus organizing, and every speaker plunged further into an orgy of hatred, with left and right winding up literally screaming at each other.
In my view, the major source of intellectual aggression at the conference came from the ultra-left. The problem is that the Sober Center, the intelligent main-line forces, had been geared all along to withstand assault from the extreme right, from those forces that still revere the U.S. government, still favor the Cold War, and still want to “protect” the government-run campuses from student rebellions. The extreme right was there, sure enough, but a larger menace came from the ultra-left, and the center, being geared psychologically only to oppose the right-wing, never really realized the extent of the ultra-left problem that was becoming a major force at the conference.
Thus, the major assault on the center (that is on the Conference itself, which was largely centrist-run), came from ultra-leftist Wilson A. Clark, Jr., formerly a student at the University of North Carolina, and now residing in Washington, D.C. Denouncing the New York group and the “power structure” of RLA (what a laugh that is!), Wilson proceeded to identify two groups as the major Enemy on which the libertarian movement is supposed to concentrate its ire: (a) all academic economists, without exception, that is economics per se; and (b) all people who wear neckties. As a special bonus, Wilson went on to attack people who favor proper English, in contrast to such cultural goodies as soul rapping, street argot, and whatever. Wilson’s inchoate tirade was certainly one of the low points of the conference.
Various other speakers, carried along on a tidal wave of ultra-leftism, even those who knew better, called for an abandonment of the “capitalist” part of anarcho-capitalism, and presumed to claim that a viable anarchist society could be composed of “psychic” exchanges and “tribal sharing” carried on by hippie communes.
By far the best reply to the Clark forces came from Mario Rizzo who, nattily dressed in jacket and tie, announced that one could see from his attire which side of the cultural struggle he was on. Rizzo pointed out that the ultra-left was really abandoning the proper emphasis on political revolution, on abolition of the State, to stress “cultural revolution”, a “revolution” whose implications range from misleading and irrelevant to totally wrong-headed and divisive. Addressing the cultural revolutionaries, Mario concluded by saying that if, as he suspected, they proposed to use coercion to impose their anti-necktieism, then “to hell with you.”
If polarization and “cultural” hogwash was one measure of the disintegration during Phase II, another was the sudden emergency of a typically ultra-left call for immediate action, virtually any action, against the State. The cry was first raised on Saturday night when one ultra-leftist in the audience raised the call, “On to Fort Dix!” This referred to a New Left action against Ft. Dix, New Jersey that had been planned for Sunday. Theoretically, it was supposed to involve merely a demonstration at the fort on behalf of various military prisoners and in opposition to the war. But it was also rumored that an attempt would be made to march onto the fort itself. While there is nothing morally wrong, of course, with the idea of people invading an army fort—quite the contrary—there is a vast gulf between moral correctness and strategic and tactical wisdom. It was that wisdom that was so conspicuously lacking. Nothing could be achieved by such an “invasion”—certainly not a successful capture—and the only thing that could possible be accomplished would be to be gassed and/or bayoneted, and/or clubbed, and/or shot, plus a possible ten years in jail for (literally!) stepping on the grass of army property.
What is more, the wisdom was particularly lacking from the people at our conference, few of whom had heard of the Ft. Dix action until that moment. But the process of polarization had done its ugly work. Goaded beyond endurance by the right-wing’s attack on the very concept and morality of revolution, not only the ultra-left but even the bulk of the center responded swiftly and emotionally to the cry of “On to Ft. Dix!” It was as if, after defending the very concept of action against the State, the center and left felt that they had to rush out and seize the opportunity for any action whatever. It reached the monstrous point that the entire center was willing to call off the whole Sunday daytime proceedings of the convention, a convention for which they had lovingly prepared for many months, in order to rush off in a delirium to embrace the receiving end of the tear-gas canister and the bayonet. Anarcho-martyrism rearing its ugly head!
This sudden onrush at the conference was a superb example of one of the major reasons that anarchist revolutions have never been effective. It demonstrates, for example, why the anarchists lost out to their allies the Bolsheviks after the October 1917 Revolution in Russia. The anarchists were strong in Russia; but anarchists have, tragically, always been what the Randians very effectively call “whim-worshippers”, creatures of the emotional moment, worshippers of the immediate spontaneous emotion of the hour, people who scorn rational forethought and purposeful, long-range planning. One of the main reasons that the Russian anarchists lost out to Lenin is because Lenin, above all, was no whim-worshipper, but a master of patient organization, strategic insight, rational forethought, long-range planning and tactical timing. It is always the kooky anarchists, who suddenly raise the cry, “Seize the street!”, “Storm that government building!”, “Charge the cops!”, and of course it is always the kooky anarchists who are first to get their heads beaten in—and to no avail. Note that it is not the morality of these anarchist actions that is in question (as it is in the case of anarcho-rightists who defend the government or government schools) but the sanity of the actions.
My own role, all of late Saturday night and early Sunday afternoon, was a hasty but in many ways effective one-man crusade to stem the ultra-left tide, and to save the conference: by opposing the Ft. Dix mania. I managed to persuade the great bulk of the center to remain at the conference on Sunday, thus permitting the sessions to continue, so that only a small ultra-left contingent went on the Dix escapade. Most of the speeches on early Sunday afternoon were an implicit or explicit attack on ultra-leftism: Jerry Tuccille effectively reminding the meeting that our main reservoir of potential mass support was the vast middle class (the same middle class so scornfully written off as The Enemy by Clark and others); Leonard Liggio gently but firmly reminding worshippers of the Black Panthers of the Panthers’ abandonment of black nationalism; and myself directly attacking ultra-leftism, Panther-mania, and the Ft. Dix adventure.
As the warriors began returning from Ft. Dix, ultra-left emotionalism started to reach another peak. One left youth leader lamented that he had not been gassed at Dix. And undoubtedly the all-time low arrived when an ultra-left woman from the Phoenix Coalition of Michigan (so ultra-left as to make Wilson Clark appear like a corporation executive) rushed to the podium, fresh from her gassing, to curse obscenely and hysterically at the entire audience for being in New York rather than at the barricades.
The conference ended ingloriously Sunday night on a note of (unfortunately rational) paranoia. For it became evident that the hotel room, the lobby of the hotel, and the street outside were suddenly crawling with plainclothes cops, their badges and their guns bulging prominently from their supposedly civilian attire. One Wobbly leader, familiar with the New York fuzz, spotted a Bureau of Special Services plain-clothesman (the division specializing in political dissent). Why were they there? Were they going to bust the convention? Were they going to apprehend the Ft. Dix marchers? Were some or all of us going to be charged with Conspiracy to cross state lines to incite a riot, h la the infamous Chicago case? Nobody knew, and we still don’t know, but prudence at last won over machismo, and most of us beat it the hell out of there. The convention petered out on a grotesquely ironic note, with the remaining rappers still griping that the main trouble with the conference was that there had not been enough rapping!
Lessons Of The Conference
One obvious lesson of the Conference is the emergence of ultra-left adventurism as a major threat to the movement. And so just as we have devoted several issues of the Libertarian Forum to an attack on anarcho-rightism, we must now devote some energy to a critique of ultra-leftism (which will be appearing soon).
A second lesson is that this sort of large, totally open convention—gathering all manner of leftists, rightists, and cops—has become counter-productive. The need now is for smaller, far more selective, and more homogeneous meetings, in which there will be far more room for much-needed internal education of cadre, and for genuine discussion and dialogue. Leftists and rightists can only be moved toward the center separately, where they cannot reinforce each other’s errors through mutual denunciation. Only when and if left and right have effectively blended into the center will there be need for a second open convention.
Letter From Washington
By Karl Hess
Robin Hood Revisionism
When I was a wee conservative, counting bond revenues at my mother’s knee, it was the dear lady’s practice to frighten me to death with tales of that arch-bandit, Robin Hood. The conservative wisdom was and is that no more dastardly crime lurks in the heart of man than the infamy of taking from the rich to give to the poor. Entire sweeps of political philosophy, in fact, seem to have been motivated by little else than antagonism to poor Robin and his hoods. On the other hand, an entire sweep of political reality, in this nation, was and is motivated by the reverse proposition, that it is okay to rob from the poor and give to the rich.
The Democrats have done it through a welfare system in which the poor are “client” victims who get the crumbs from the bureaucratic table which is the system’s principal purpose. They also characteristically steal the poor blind through construction projects, licenses and franchises, and such other thefts as are most appropriate to men who have risen from precinct politics.
The Republicans have done it through, most lately, the warfare state of corporate liberalism, in which the lives of the poor are daily robbed of meaning or hope so that they may be used solely as cogs in the industrial machine which is the system’s principal purpose. They also steal through the total use of the state and its power, its credit, its regulations, to the end of special advantage for the corporate elite, a form of theft most appropriate to men who have gone to the best schools.
So much for the reverse. What about Robinhoodism, straight and unalloyed? Should we frighten tots with his image? Was his the worst of crimes?
Robin, after sober reflection, wasn’t a half-bad sort. He had one wretched notion that we shall discuss later, but his work, by and large, was healthy, useful, and quite impeccable politically—so far as it went.
Who did he rob? He robbed a bunch of rich churchmen, for one thing. Now what in the world is wrong with that? To hear the conservative diatribes against Robin Hood you would think that the mere fact of having riches is the only standard against which to judge the theft of those riches. In short, the conservative notion is that to steal anything from anybody is a crime—regardless of the source of the thing being ripped off or the nature of the owner’s position in regard to the society in general.
The churchmen, whom Robin robbed, represented one of the great ruling classes of all time and, like every ruling class, their power and their self was the result of the sort of theft that becomes legitimized by longevity. Although much of the income being derived by churches today is from voluntary contributions, much of the capital upon which churches base their economies was extracted in times when the churches had real clout and could force contributions. The Roman Catholic church, of course, is the main user of such capital and is coming under increasing pressure from its priests to divest itself of what even a rudimentary ethical sense should be able to identify as ill-gotten gains. Robin didn’t wait for divestiture. He helped out. So, on the count of robbing rich churchmen, Robin seems quite acceptable to a libertarian.
Robin was most noted, as a matter of fact, for stealing from government officials. Rich government officials. Now how do government officials become rich? How did the Sheriff of Nottingham make his? Or Lyndon Johnson? Or you name him. Politicians make their money by using their office; by, in an ethical sense, stealing advantages which lead to gains. I would say that such gains also are stolen. So, apparently, did Robin Hood.
It seems to me, as a matter of fact, that Robin Hood’s attacks against the militant arm of the state have been purposefully overlooked by conservatives in their attacks against Robin Hood. There has been a preoccupation, instead, with the technicalities of whose forest it was, whether the Sheriff represented a mere aberration in the divinely inspired order of Western civilization, and whether Robin wouldn’t have been better advised to press his case in a duly constituted court (presided over by the Sheriff of Nottingham!).
The reason for this oversight on the part of conservatives may not be innocent or merely myopic. Robin Hood’s main crime, you see, was against an established order, one duly established in accord with the laws, customs, etc., of the time. Robin, on the other hand, thought it was illegitimate. He was, it should be recalled, a very political cat. His gripe was—ah hah—against THE STATE. Those upon whom he preyed, were lackeys or running dogs of THE STATE. It is possible that the specter of Robin Hood today haunts so many conservative dreams not because of their pure thoughts on property rights so much as because of the possibly impure origins of the property dearest to their own hearts. Otherwise, why get so excited about Robin Hood?
There is one reason. It is the only thing that I hold against the old boy and his gassy greenclad gang. They were hung up on King Richard. Now, being hung up on any king is a mistake, I feel. But, until Dick showed up, big as life and raring to get back in the king business, Robin was a beautiful guy. As often happens in life, he was the sort you could go along with wholeheartedly so long as he didn’t have the power he eventually wanted. When the king came back, of course, libertarians in the gang should have just gone back to the woods and started all over again and, by then, they should have had enough local support to stand a better chance than ever of success.
In short, while Robin was robbing, he was doing nothing that should offend libertarian sensibilities and the fact that so much of what he was doing was aimed specifically against state authority should actually draw libertarian cheers. The subsequent fact that he took some of the loot from his anti-state forays and returned it to the people most sorely victimized by the state should draw not only libertarian cheers but humanist ones as well.
There is one other thing about Robin Hood. He apparently is alive and well in Latin America today. The inter-urban guerrillas in Uruguay seem to operate in his spirit but without that hang-up about kings. Good.
I bet you a monk’s bag of silver that conservatives line up with the Sheriff of Nottingham. But don’t worry, Robin, libertarians are on your side.
RECOMMENDED READING
PACIFIC RESEARCH AND WORLD EMPIRE TELEGRAM. A fine, new scholarly publication, concentrating on foreign affairs analysis, and put out by the Pacific Studies Center of East Palo Alto, California. The Sept. 10 issue has excellent articles on Eritrea’s revolution against Ethiopian imperialism (and its U.S. supporters); government subsidies for big business programs in the ghettoes; and the revolutionary movement in Thailand. 12 issues available for $5.00 (50¢ per issue), from Pacific Studies Center, 1963 University Avenue, East Palo Alto, Calif. 94301.
A Semi-Monthly Newsletter
THE
Libertarian Forum↩
| Joseph R. Peden, Publisher | Washington Editor, Karl Hess | Murray N. Rothbard, Editor |
| VOL. I, NO. XVI | November 15, 1969 | 35¢ |
ULTRA-LEFTISM
The Marxians, who have thought longer and harder about revolutionary change than anyone else, have very perceptively discovered two major contrasting errors, two major deviations from the proper revolutionary “line”: “right-wing opportunism” or “liquidationism”, and “ultra-left adventurism”. Right-wing opportunism is above all a moral failure, a willingness to abandon principle for the sake of a “practical” working within the system, a course which invariably leads to becoming a part of the system itself and to opposing the very cause to which the rightist is supposedly devoted. “Ultra-left adventurism” is by no means a moral failure; in fact, the ultra-leftist acts in the world to attempt to achieve the common goal as rapidly as he can. The problem is the ultra-leftist’s total lack of strategic sense; in rushing at the Enemy blindly, emotionally, and with insufficient preparation for allies, he not only inevitably gets clobbered, but he also sinks his own cause at the same time. While the ultra-leftist is morally lovable, his emotional lashing-out at the system can be equally as disastrous to the cause he espouses as the cynical opportunism of the right-liquidationist. Both deviations from the main revolutionary line of rational, protracted struggle must be combatted.
In recent months, ultra-leftism has emerged as a serious problem both in the New Left and in the libertarian movement. On the New Left, ultra-leftism has been chiefly responsible for the galloping disintegration of SDS. The ouster of the Progressive Labor wing of SDS provided an opportunity and a challenge to the remainder of this leading New Left group to return to the libertarian, non-Stalinist, revolutionary path which had marked SDS for a year or two after its 1966 convention. Within the non-PL wing of SDS, the triumph of the “Weatherman” faction over RYM-II was also a hopeful sign, since RYM-II’s Marxism, Stalinism, and worship of the “working class” was almost as aggravated as that of PL. But now the Weathermen are wrecking SDS through their total immersion in ultra-left adventurism.
The Weatherman strategy consists largely of kamikaze charges against the police. Calling for a massive “invasion” of Chicago (“pig city”) on October 8-11, only a couple of hundred frenzied Weathermen and Weatherwomen showed up, to charge the police and get clobbered and arrested for their pains. The latest issue of the Weathermen’s New Left Notes, which used to be the most important theoretical and strategic journal for the New Left, consists solely of pictures of Weathermen and cops slugging it out, interspersed with a few incoherent paragraphs cursing at American society. The curses are understandable; but this whole hysteria has about as much in common with genuine revolution as a barroom brawl has with truly mass action.
The hysteria, and the pitiful failure, of the Weathermen stem not so much from personal psychosis as from incorrect strategic theory. The Weathermen are superb in realizing who the enemy is; the enemy is the State, the State’s goon-squad police, and the public school system, which the Weathermen correctly identify as a vast prison-house for the nation’s youth. (In contrast, PL and RYM-II oppose the Weathermen’s goal of destroying the public school system, because the “working class” likes the schools.) Further-more, in contrast to all other Marxian sects, the Weathermen have come to realize that they cannot rely on the industrial “working class” as their potential reservoir of allies. Everyone recognizes that the working class is precisely the most reactionary, the most social-fascist, the most racist element of American society, and the Weathermen realize that American Marxists have boxed themselves into a complete dead end in pinning their hopes on the workers.
But if not the working class, who? Who is to be the “agency of social change”, the main reservoir of recruits for the revolution? The most sensible answer would be the “middle class” (or as former SDS theorist Greg Calvert called them, the “new working class”), which is after all the vast bulk of the population. But the Weathermen are blocked from trying to appeal to the middle class, (a) because this would end the chronic Marxian-New Left emphasis on the most evidently downtrodden groups, for even though the middle-classes are exploited by the ruling class, it is hard for ultra-left romantics to get stirred up over injustice to those who are not super-poverty-stricken; and (b) because the New Left is so filled with hatred of the middle-class “bourgeois” life-style that it refuses to consider the middle-class as anything but part of the Enemy. If not the working class, or the middle-class, then who? In desperation, the Weathermen reached toward another group: working-class youth-motorcycle hoods, outlaws, high-school dropouts, etc. They fail to realize that even if they could organize the young hoods, they couldn’t accomplish “anything, because the hoods have even less social leverage, less potential to mobilize masses of people (almost all of whom hate the hoods, and with good reason) than the students of SDS.
Having disastrously decided to concentrate on organizing the youth-lumpen, the Weathermen had to decide how to go about it. How to reach the lumpen? It was obvious that campus groups were not the way, and neither could the young lumpen be reached by journals or theoretical discussions. The only, way seemed to be to “gain the respect” of the machismo—instincts of the young hoods by engaging in street-combat with the cops. These street fights were supposed to serve as “exemplary actions” (a current in-phrase) which would mobilize and inspire the young hoods and lead them toward the Weathermen. Well, of course, this nonsensical tactic has not worked and will not work. The only “example”, the only lesson, that any sensible young hood can draw from Weathermanship is that here are a bunch of loonies who go charging the cops and only get clobbered and busted for their pains. What even remotely national young hood would be other than repulsed by the Weatherman “example”?
As far as the Weathermen go, the interesting problem for speculation is what they will do in a year or so, when it will have become obvious, even to them, that they have failed and that they have not raised the standard to which the hoods and dropouts have repaired. If any of the Weathermen are alive and out of jail by that time, perhaps they will then come to their senses, and rethink their strategy and tactics.
Contrast to the futile desperation of the Weathermen the brilliantly successful strategy and tactics of the Vietnam Moratorium. Returning to the successful grass-roots tactics of the Vietnam 1965 teach-ins, the Moratorium of October 15 mobilized literally millions of the “silent majority”, the middle-class, in every village and community in the country, in dramatic opposition to the endless war in Vietnam. While all the factions of SDS stood aloof, scornful of the insufficient radicalism of the Moratorium people, millions of Americans poured out in the largest demonstration in America’s history, and in support of a demand that was phenomenally radical for a middle-class movement: immediate and unconditional withdrawal from Vietnam. If we realize that only a year ago, the middle-class would not support any demand more radical than “please, Mr. President, stop the bombing”, the achievement of the Moratorium is seen to be dazzling indeed. For the future, the idea of escalating the pressure one day per month of the war, is another superb tactical method for mobilizing millions for a continuing increase of pressure on the U.S. government. (But let us hope that the anti-war movement will not be diverted, as it was in 1965, away from local grass-roots actions to spectacular but scarcely productive mass demonstrations confined to Washington.)
The success of the Moratorium stems from its focusing on winning the support of and radicalizing the middle-class—the great bulk of the American population. And here, in particular, lies a crucial lesson for the libertarian movement. The prime center of our movement, as well as the New Left, is now and will continue to be the college campus. Here is the recruitment ground for our cadre and the immediate theatre of our activity. But insofar as we wish to move out into the adult community—and we can never hope to win unless we ultimately do so—we libertarians have a particularly ripe potential in the vast middle class. Here is where we have our “comparative advantage” as compared to the Marxian New Left, and so here is where we should move from our campus focos.
Let me put it this way: at our Libertarian Conference on the Columbus Day weekend, it became evident that both our right-wing and our ultra-leftists were focusing on the wrong problem. The right-wing began the error by charging that, comes the revolution, we libertarians would inevitably lose out to the Marxists, and another State would replace the current monstrosity. In response to this charge, our ultra-lefts proclaimed that what we must do is march out on the barricades with the New Left, earn their respect, and then use this respect to convert the New Left from Marxism to libertarianism. This, I submit, misconceives the problem and the nature of the revolutionary process. The revolutionary process is a huge, complex pattern of activity, with each person and each group concentrating on what it does best—the division of labor is just as important and as valid in revolution in any other sphere of activity. Our objective should not be to convert the Weathermen or the Panthers—probably a hopeless task, and less than crucial in any case. Our objective should be to act where we have a comparative advantage—with the middle class. Put it this way: suppose that it came to a revolutionary crunch, and somehow the mass of the middle-class found themselves forced to choose between us and the Marxists, us and the Weathermen. Which of us would they choose? I don’t think there is any question about the answer. They would choose us, because we stand for freedom and for the rights of private property.
So we don’t have to have an inferiority complex relative to the Marxian New Left. In the long run, our attraction for the middle-class masses is infinitely greater than theirs. So let us pursue the division of labor within the revolutionary process. Let the Weathermen or the Panthers charge the police or try to storm the Department of Justice building. Let us cheer them on as they do battle with the U.S. State Leviathan. But let us not confuse cheering for them with our own strategic and tactical needs. Let us do what we can do best, which is to spread the message and the actions of freedom, and of radical defense of property rights, to the middle-class masses who are potentially our allies and supporters. If we do so, then we won’t have to worry about who will win out in the final result.
For years I have advocated an alliance between libertarians and SDS, but many people have misinterpreted the meaning of such an alliance. I meant, first of all, that when SDS battles the State, it is morally incumbent upon us to support and cheer SDS on, but this does not mean that we should be participating in these actions. Again—the division of labor. (In the same way, we should cheer on the Biafrans as they battle for their freedom against the massed might of the Nigerian State—but that doesn’t mean that it somehow our duty to rush out there and participate in the war.) Secondly, SDS was, in those days, the only revolutionary movement going, it was itself instinctively libertarian, and the only way that our tiny handful of pure libertarians could act to change the world was to orient ourselves to SDS. But now all that is changed: SDS, in the past year, has become largely Stalinoid and is rapidly disintegrating, and the pure libertarian movement has been growing by great leaps and bounds. In this situation, our best strategy is not to join SDS but to develop our own libertarian organizations, on campus and in the adult world, to recruit new pure cadre and to attract the scores of thousands of radical and instinctively libertarian kids who are properly disgusted with the disintegrating SDS and are looking for a place to go. We can provide that ideological and activist home. This is our historic opportunity, and we would be derelict in not taking advantage of this ripe potential for rapid growth.
But if we must orient to the middle-class as our long-range strategy, then this means that many of us must give up much of the petty and irrelevant nonsense that is wrapped up in today’s “cultural revolution”—a “revolution” that can never do anything but totally alienate the middle-class. It is too bad that the middle-class is silly enough to place any importance whatever on the fripperies of hair, life-style, etc. But as long as they do, it is criminal negligence to toss away opportunities to influence them in order to cling to the dubious benefits of the drug-rock culture. If millions of kids could go “Clean for Gene” in 1968, isn’t it infinitely more important to go “Clean for Anarchy”?
“Everything I see about me is sowing the seeds of a revolution that is inevitable, though 1 shall not have the pleasure of seeing it. The lightning is so close at hand that it will strike at the first chance, and then there will be a pretty uproar. The young are fortunate, for they will see fine things.”
— Voltair, 1764
FDP:
NEOLIBERALS IN GERMAN POLITICS
West German President Gustav Heinemann, following this fall’s election, called on Social Democratic Party leader Willy Brandt to become chancellor and Free Democratic Party leader Walter Scheel to become foreign minister in a new cabinet. This coalition’s domestic program is centered upon the reduction of taxes for the white collar and blue collar middle classes, civilian control over the military, and increased individual freedoms. In foreign affairs, they propose permanent good relations with the Soviet Union based upon West Germany’s recognition of the “inviolability of the borders and demarcation lines” in Europe, including the border between East and West Germany, de facto recognition of the East German government through a general treaty, and diplomatic recognition to Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Bulgaria. This would mean a renunciation of the Hallstein Doctrine whereby West Germany withdrew diplomatic relations from any country recognizing East Germany; now many countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America will be likely to recognize East Germany. Meanwhile, West Germany will be able to improve its trading position in East European countries which have long had relations with the U.S., England and France. The Free Democratic Party (FDP) controlling the foreign ministry will give the impetus to this East Bloc diplomatic policy.
The FDP’s policies have been characterized as the “traditions of libertarianism and economic neoliberalism”. It is the heir of the radical individualism of Locke and the rationalism of the French Revolution. Rooted in the values of education and independent property, FDP has been the party of creativity and rebellion. It came into existence after World War II when there was a widespread belief that radical liberalism was outmoded and must disappear before the conservatives’ militarism, clericalism, and authoritarianism or the socialists’ manipulation, repressive tolerance, and exploitation. But, FDP challenged the post-war world with the radical economics of the Austrian School of Mises and Hayek against the Christian Democratic (CDU) and Social Democratic (SPD) parties. When Konrad Adenauer organized the CDU his 1947 program called for nationalization of industry. But, the early necessity for CDU to form a coalition with FDP forced the laissez-faire economist Ludwig Erhard up on the U.S. and Adenauer in 1948 as post-war economic coordinator. Since Erhard belonged to the CDU it was that party and not FDP which gained popular credit for Erhard’s rigorous monetary policies. When the West German government was formed, FDP leader Prof. Theodor Heuss became president, and FDP assumed the justice and interior (police) ministries to keep watch that civil liberties were not violated by the state.
FDP’s disenchantment with CDU came from Adenauer’s pro-U.S. foreign policy. Germans were not enamoured of the U.S. after the brutality they had suffered during the war (cf. Veale, Advance to Barbarism) and during occupation (cf. Salomon, Fragebogen, which was the most widely read post-war German book). Adenauer was viewed as betraying Germany’s historic role of balancing East and West, both during the nineteenth century and the inter-war period. FDP challenged the re-militarization of Germany by the U.S. and led the battle alongside the SPD for reunion of the Saarland Germans when Adenauer sought to sacrifice them to France to gain approval for German re-militarization.
By the mid-1950’s FDP’s demands fox diplomatic relations, with the Soviet Union, trade with East Europe and a neutralist foreign policy pointed to an end to the coalition with the CDU. Extra-parliamentary protest in the streets against U.S. dominated foreign policy influenced the FDP and SPD in parliament into opposition. This street protest was led by now president Heinemann who had resigned from Adenauer’s cabinet and party in 1950 over CDU militarism. As a leading Protestant and anti-collectivist, Heinemann led a campaign for neutralism, and later joined the SPD to agitate for his principles.
In 1957 Adenauer split the FDP, absorbing its cabinet members into CDU while the majority of FDP went into parliamentary opposition. From that date CDU leaders have sought to abolish the proportional representation electoral law in order to destroy the FDP. Dr. Thomas Dehler became FDP chairman and opened party posts to the “Young Rebels” who sought coalition with SPD, who were FDP partners in several state governments. These angry young men rejected the “end of ideology” concept of the 1950’s and replaced “practical” objectives with a totally ideological commitment summarized as “Repeal laws, bureaucracy, and taxation.” They represented the same intellectual ferment which produced the New Left in England and America. The “Young Rebels” established the magazine Liberal and the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for radical education. The “Young Rebels”-FDP alliances with SPD in state governments obviously required a broader agreement than opposition to NATO and U.S. foreign policy, or support for civil liberties. Along with the. FDP, SPD reacted to the feudal, corporatist, Christian socialism of CDU; SPD denounced economic planning in its new program: “Competition and the freedom of initiative of the entrepreneur are important elements of the SPD economic policy.” It further declared: “We Social Democrats demand a free economic development, free competition and private property conscious of its responsibilities to the general good.” Thereafter, SPD often supported Erhard when the statists of the CDU deserted his laissez-faire programs.
Opposition to Erhard in CDU was centered among the Christian trade unionists and major business interests. In 1959 when President Heuss’ term ended, Adenauer was persuaded to accept the presidency until he realized that Erhard was the popular choice to succeed him as chancellor. Adenauer then tried unsuccessfully to force Erhard to become president. Thereafter, FDP campaigned for the retirement of Adenauer and the appointment of Erhard as chancellor. In 1961 that issue gave FDP its highest vote depriving CDU of a majority in Parliament. A CDU-FDF coalition was based on Adenauer’s retirement.
The coalition temporarily split in October 1962 in the Spiegel affair. That magazine, which had the closest ties to FDP, was closed by government police and its editors imprisoned on charges that they had earlier printed information critical of NATO military policy. This suppression occurred in the same week that followed Kennedy’s launching of the Cuban crisis about the editors were known to be critical. Amidst student demonstrations against a police state, FDP ministers resigned and returned only on the dismissal of the guilty party, defense minister Franz Josef Strauss. Adenauer was forced to set his own resignation for mid-1963 when SPD threatened to join FDP in a coalition headed by Erhard. Erhard became chancellor in 1963 in a coalition with FDP. This coalition was successful in the 1965 national elections. But, when Erhard was pressured by the U.S. in 1966 to impose tax increases to pay U.S. occupation army costs to offset the expenses of the Vietnam war, FDP voted against the taxes and Erhard resigned. The new CDU chancellor, Kurt Georg Kiesinger, restored Strauss (a supporter of U.S. war in Vietnam) to the cabinet. To FDP, coalition was impossible with anyone like Kiesinger who had declared: “the question these days is not one of the freedom of the individual vis-à-vis the state, but vice versa, a question of how to defend the authority of the state against an unbridled, anarchic freedom.”
Thereafter, FDP, under the chairmanship of Walter Scheel, used its opposition role to champion the right of protest of German youth and citizens’ rights against the state. In the spring of 1969 FDP joined with SPD to elect Heinemann as West German president in preparation for a joint campaign against Kiesinger in the fall elections. The authoritarianism of Kiesinger, Strauss and the CDU were repudiated by the voters.
— Leonard P. Liggio
ATTENTION, LIBERTARIANS
Many readers of the Libertarian Forum have expressed interest in finding other libertarians near them. Therefore, early next year, the Forum will begin to publish the names and addresses of people who would like to be contacted by other readers of the Libertarian Forum. If you’d like your name to be included, please fill out the coupon on the back of this notice.
A YAF Conversion
Many of us have known Ralph Fucetola III, until recently state chairman of New Jersey YAF and member of the Libertarian Caucus, as an extreme right-winger, and a warmongering and red-baiting “libertarian”. From a recent letter of Fucetola’s to the New Left newsletter Hard Times (Oct. 20-27), it appears that Ralph has seen the light. He writes that he was the one who originally introduced Don Meinshausen (HUAC agent in SDS who later recanted publicly) to Herb Romerstein, long-time HUAC operative and anti-Communist “expert” on youth movements. Ralph adds: “In return, Don introduced me and the rest of the almost-libertarian right to what was happening to our generation. Now it’s three months later, the right is splitting, “anarchy” is the wave of the future. With Don’s—and Karl Hess’s—help we learned the quasi-fascist nature of much of the conservative movement; we learned that we have a role in the Movement, that the state can be stopped, that freedom can be won.” Great, Ralph. May your example be followed by many others. There is more joy in Heaven . . .
Recommended Reading
RAMPARTS, November 1969. With former editors Scheer and Hinckle out, Ramparts is better than ever. Particularly good are: J. Goulden and M. Singer, “Dial-A-Bomb: AT&T and ABM”, an excellent dissection of the giant monopoly AT&T’s political clout in American’s government-industrial complex (and note the revelations about the exploitative super-proci
exploitative super-profits made from defense sub-contracting); Sol Stern’s “Canyon: A Troubled Paradise”, about the persecution of the private property of hippieish Canyon, California by all conceivable agencies of local government; and Earl Shorris’ dissection of the new Social-Democrat idol of the right-wing, “Hayakawa in Thought and Action”.
Peter Brock, Pacifism in the United States (Princeton University Press). This huge, sprawling (1,005 pages) and expensive book is a thorough, definitive history of religious and consistent pacifism before the Civil War. Much material on such great people and individualist anarchists as William Lloyd Garrison and Henry Clarke Wright.
Michael A. Heilperin, Aspects of the Pathology of Money (London: Michael Joseph), $9.50. Professor Heilperin, a student of Ludwig von Mises, is one of the very few economists who still favor a return to the gold standard. This is a collection of his valuable monetary essays ranging over four decades.
Wilhelm von Humboldt, The Limits of State Action (Cambridge University Press), $7.50. A new translation of this little classic, one of the best defenses of laissez-faire in political philosophy. This book influenced Mill’s On Liberty, and is considerably better than Mill’s compromising work.
Corinne Jacker, The Black Flag of Anarchy: Anti-statism in the United States (Charles Scribner’s Sons), $4.50. A pleasant, though superficial, little book which, however, serves as a useful introduction to the history of American anarchism. For one thing, it is the only history of American anarchism now in print.
A Semi-Monthly Newsletter
THE
Libertarian Forum↩
| Joseph R. Peden, Publisher | Washington Editor, Karl Hess | Murray N. Rothbard, Editor |
| VOL. I, NO. XVII | December 1, 1969 | 35¢ |
The Anti-War Movement
October and November saw the outpouring of the most massive opposition movement in the long, black history of the government of the United States. In the October Moratorium literally millions of Americans demonstrated in every village and hamlet in the land. In November, nearly a million took the trouble to travel to Washington and San Francisco for a weekend of demonstration. In a country long inured to “backing the President” in any foreign crisis, this determined and ever growing mass movement against the war is a truly remarkable phenomenon. Who among us, ten, five years ago, could have predicted that millions of Americans would raise their voices and bring their persons to the point of total opposition to an American war effort?
Too many libertarians make various “domestic” questions: the census, taxation, neighborhood control, the central cutting edge of their anti-state concerns. As vitally important as these issues are, they pale into insignificance beside the vital importance of the war and its creator, American imperialism. It is war, losing, perpetual, stalemated war, that will ultimately bring down the American Leviathan. If we look at all the successful revolutions of this century, all of them (with the exception of the Cuban in a very small country) were made possible by a losing or a stalemated war into which the State had brought the country. The stage for the Russian Revolution was set by a disastrous and losing war fomented by the Russian Empire. The Chinese Revolution was made possible by Chiang’s lengthy war against the Japanese. Even the French Revolution of 1789 was the consequence of heavy war debts incurred by the French State. Nothing brings about a revolutionary crisis situation—and no revolutions can occur without such crises—so completely as a “no-win” war; nothing so starkly reveals the inadequacy of the existing State to its citizenry. A losing war is more powerful than decades of patient education in the vital task of demystifying and desanctifying the State apparatus in the eyes of its subject population.
America truly has a bear by the tail in Vietnam. Vietnam is not simply an unfortunate blunder, a mistake that can be promptly rectified. Vietnam is part and parcel of the entire concept of U.S. foreign policy since World War II (in many ways since Woodrow Wilson). For the whole thrust of that policy is to create and preserve American politico-economic domination of the world, or at the very least to preserve that degree of world domination which she already has. This means an American policy of world-wide counterrevolution: the suppression of revolutionary and national liberation movements throughout the “Third World”. Until Vietnam, America was able to exercise its control through puppet and client states, and therefore suffered only a minimal drain on its manpower and financial resources. But in Vietnam this policy was shattered forever on the rock of people’s guerrilla war, a war backed to the hilt by virtually the entire population of Vietnam, North and South. Contrary to much liberal opinion, the Vietnamese war is not a civil war—either between North and South or between different factions within the South. It is a war fought by imperial America and a few of its puppets in Saigon against the liberation movement of the Vietnamese people. It is therefore a war which America cannot win.
The massacre at Song My is not a question of a few battle-crazed soldiers becoming trigger-happy. Such massacres are inherent in the American war effort, and must needs occur time and time again. They have to be a systematic part of the American effort because that effort consists of attempting to use our superior firepower to suppress the independence and the liberation of an entire people. In that sense, the entire population is “VC”, and therefore our war inevitably consists of deliberate slaughter of that huge “enemy”. There is only one way to stop the American massacre policy: to get America the hell out of Vietnam.
Despite the common mythology, President Nixon doesn’t “want peace”—except, of course, the peace of death to the instincts for freedom of the people of Vietnam. For in a way not mentioned by the Establishment, the “domino theory” is correct. It is correct not in the sense that mythical Chinese will “aggress” against more countries in Asia; but in the sense that a clear-cut victory of the Vietnamese people against the American oppressors will give great heart to similar victims of American imperialism throughout the Third World. More liberation struggles will then erupt in Asia and Latin America, and we will have “many Vietnams”. American imperialism will result in a series of permanent stalemate wars, and thereby Death to Leviathan.
The conflict between the dove-moderates and the hawks is but one consequence of the losing Vietnam war. What the Marxists call “the sober circles of American imperialism”—the Harrimans, the Cliffords, etc., seeing the disastrous mess in Vietnam, are now willing to “cut and run”, to take their stand for American imperialism elsewhere—in what would hopefully be more favorable terrain. The right-wingers, as ever motivated by their frenzied and “principled” desire to crush all opposition everywhere without quarter, are determined to save every single domino, come what may.
It is increasingly clear that the Nixon Administration is a right-wing administration. Richard Nixon is an unprincipled and pragmatic opportunist on all conceivable questions but one: “anti-Communism”, that is world counterrevolution. Hence the negotiations at Paris, never very advanced, are moving rapidly backward, and hence the phoniness of the troop withdrawals. I am willing to make the flat prediction that the war in Vietnam will continue for the duration of the Nixon Administration, because the President, cast in the mold of 1940’s anti-Communism, is incapable of liberal co-optation, is incapable of a graceful “cut and run” pullout.
Therefore, the war will go on and on. And therefore, “the movement” is, and will continue to be for many years, primarily an anti-war movement. From May 1968 until the end of that year, virtually the entire Left was duped by the Paris negotiations into thinking that the war was over; then for many months, the Left was paralyzed by the view that Nixon would keep his promises and end the war shortly. Now all that is over. The growth of the anti-war movement is all the more remarkable because it has only been alive for a few months, after a lapse of a year and a half.
And so the renascent anti-war movement builds and builds, surge after mighty surge, month after month. The “silent majority”, a concept based on a few thousand hack Republican telegrams to the White House, pales beside the many vociferous millions, whose number and whose radicalism escalates every week that the war drags on. Every month’s Moratorium will build the pressure, will escalate slowly but surely in its massive pressure on the government, and will continue to radicalize countless millions of middle-class liberals. Yesterday it was “stop the bombing”; today it is “immediate withdrawal”; tomorrow it will be support for the NLF and/or mass civil disobedience, and/or a tax strike or a general strike. The endless war will be the open sluice-gate for massive radicalization.
In the face of this great upsurge, the Nixon Administration has made clear its bursting desire to move over into open fascism—to all-out repression of anti-war dissent. The evidence has been clear for several weeks: Spiro Agnew’s shift from unconscious clown to conscious fascist threatener of the press and the media; Attorney-General Mitchell’s incredible assertion that Agnew was too soft on the traitorous dissenters; Deputy Attorney-General Kleindienst’s move to attempt to indict the life-long pacifist David Dellinger for “incitement to violence”; White House aide Kevin Phillips’ call for the “willingness to go out and crack skulls”. The right-wing Administration is obviously straining at the leash, bursting to give vent to the typical rightist desire to crush and stomp on all opposition.
Only one thing is restraining the Administration from moving into open fascism: the knowledge that the cardinal point of the liberal credo is at least the facade of civil liberties. This facade of freedom to dissent is vital to the whole system and ideology of corporate liberalism; this is its central distinction from open dictatorship. And both conservatives and liberals know that if all-out repression comes, it will have to be far worse than in the old McCarthy-HUAC era of the 1940’s and 1950’s. For the reason why the corporate liberals went along with this repression, or did not fight it too strongly, is that the repression was carefully confined to Communist party members and “Communist fronts”. The witch-hunters of those days always claimed to be perfectly content with “heretics” and dissenters; it was not their ideas or their active opposition that concerned them, went the line, but the fact that these were “transmission belts” for the “international Communist conspiracy” through “Communist fronts” certified by the Attorney-General or other sources. Liberals could then step aside and be unconcerned with a narrowly pin-pointed repression. But as even the Department of Justice knows by now, there are no Communist fronts any longer; no one can point to Mr. X’s membership in so-and-so many front groups. Any repression will have to be directed against any and all members of the opposition, which could include liberals as well as anyone else.
Therefore, if Nixon-Agnew attempt open fascism, the result will be a fantastic shift leftward of all liberals everywhere. Even the austere New York Times will be ready to man the barricades. Open fascism could well generate a real revolutionary crisis in the United States.
Our present situation, then, is fraught with enormous opportunities. The prognosis is that, since the war will go on, the anti-war movement will spread and intensify; and if Nixon unleashes his right-wing instincts for all-out repression, he could generate a successful revolution. Only one thing could spoil this picture: if the Administration succeeds in maneuvering the anti-war movement into precipitate violence, and then making that violence an excuse for moving into open fascism. If the movement gives Nixon that excuse, then it would tragically polarize the mass of middle-class liberals rightward instead of leftward, and thus so isolate itself that Nixon could stomp on the radicals without generating liberal resistance. In the coming period, then, it becomes especially important for radicals in the anti-war movement to avoid as the plague any stigma of violence, which would reverse the process of radicalizing the liberal masses, and give Nixon the opportunity to move unopposed into open fascism. Great success is in the air for the anti-war movement; let us not kick it away in futile ultra-left adventures.
A Letter To Moloch
For some time past I have been telling others that the best way to kill a beast is to starve him to death, to withhold from him that particular type of nourishment which keeps him alive, well and powerful. Moloch thrives on human sacrifice; he demands a sizable portion of human productivity in the form of tax dollars which he converts into weapons of murder and other tools of coercion to oppress the very people from whom he exacts his nourishment. Since it is hypocritical to incite others to action while doing nothing oneself, I have decided to take a few small actions designed to give Moloch a hunger pang or two.
The first is membership in the War Resisters League by which one agrees to withhold the tax portion of his monthly phone bill, which is largely used to finance the war in Vietnam. Those desiring more information about this project can contact WRL at Room 1025, 5 Beekman Street, N.Y., N.Y. 10038.
The second step is of a “religious” nature. After careful consideration I have decided to become an ordained minister of the Universal Life Church, an honor which carries with it broad benefits in the form of tax reductions. Anyone discovering a sudden yen for that old-time religion can write the Universal Life Church, 1766 Poland Rd., Modesto, California 95351, and be ordained just for the asking.
Other measures will include refusal to pay my surtax, sales tax on COD purchases, and any other steps anyone can suggest as a means of bumping Moloch from his pedestal. All suggestions are welcomed and will be held in confidence.
To the list of rallying cries now being raised across the nation by our fellow revolutionaries, I would like to add yet another:
STARVE THE BEAST!
— Jerome Tuccille
The Airline Cartel
As Adam Smith so wisely noted: “People of the same trade seldom meet together but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some diversion to raise prices.” For many decades the world’s international airlines have met seasonally to act out Smith’s scenario under the auspices of their cartel—the International Air Transport Association. At these meetings the airline representatives would seek to eliminate competition in the vital area of international fare rates. Fixing prices for air travel meant that competition was limited to auxiliary services—the quality of food, the beauty of stewardesses, the supply of magazines and sweets.
But three factors have recently converged to destroy, at least for the moment, the smooth working of the cartel. Within the next year, 27 airlines will be receiving the first of some 183 Boeing 747 jumbo jets now on order. These carriers are designed to accommodate 350 to 500 passengers and demand a very rapid rise in the number of overseas passengers if they are to be economically profitable. But the whole thrust of the IATA rate policy has been to prefer high fares to an expanded market. Now the market must be expanded as the jumbo jet enters the scene.
Secondly, a number of airline executives have been urging drastic fare reductions, coupled with redirecting merchandising efforts toward creating a mass market for offseason overseas travel. But others have preferred to base their off-season rates on the small but steady stream of businessmen customers who must travel during the offseason whatever the fare. And so the regular fares have remained high and the passenger traffic low, the summer traffic paying for the underutilized winter flights. This dispute over merchandising has been heightened by the desire of certain European countries to expand their tourist season to increase regular year-round employment and develop their winter resort facilities. Advertising has begun to push ski holidays in the Alps, theatre holidays in London, winter music and art festivals in Paris, Amsterdam and Rome.
Lastly, the various governmental bodies which supervise the airlines have, under the pressures of conflicting national interest groups, been less able to coordinate their policies to maintain the cartel and its rate schedules. The dam finally broke when on Sept. 19, Alitalia announced that, since the American CAB had failed to approve, except on a temporary basis, the rate schedule agreed upon at the IATA conference in Dallas, Alitalia was breaking the cartel agreement and cutting its economy fare for New York-Rome round trip off-season flights from $573 to $299 for a minimum of 22 days’ stay abroad. Pan American and the other lines soon announced that they would meet the Alitalia rates. Fares to all points in Europe dropped proportionately, and some lines like Iberian offered free additional flights to Stockholm, Paris and other cities for passengers buying an Iberian flight to Madrid. The immediate effect of the fare reduction was a dramatic jump in sales and passenger loads. The stimulation of the free market has brought new interest in off-season travel and good bargains for vacation seekers. But the big question remains whether the IATA will be able to put the lid on again. A meeting is due to be held in Caracas to establish the fares for the summer of 1970. If the proponents of competition have their way, no such agreement will be made, and the international cartel will be smashed. As Paul Friedlander put it in the N.Y. Times (11/16/69), “if the lesson holds, and the industry can sweep away its 50 year old IATA-dominated tradition of restrictive pricing, selling and treatment of the customer, it might give the spirit of competition an opportunity to build new markets for the airlines, expanding the present limited market to a genuine mass market able to pay the prevailing air fares and willing to fill all the new seats in the brave new airplanes about to come competitively into aviation’s, marketplace.” Or as Adam Smith put it, they must recognize that “consumption is the sole end and purpose of production”.
Note: The N.Y. Times (11/26/69) reports that the IATA meeting in Caracas has tentatively agreed upon a new uniform trans-Atlantic rate schedule which, while reducing fares somewhat from the old IATA rates, would eliminate competition among the airlines in the area of individual and group ticket prices. How long the monopoly can maintain itself is still open to question, since the factors contributing to its breakdown still exist.
— J. R. P.
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A Leftist Looks At YAF
The circus came to town in St. Louis over Labor Day weekend, and the freaks on display were truly an entertaining bunch. John MacKay and Randy Teague were co-ringmasters, making sure that everything” came off just as they had planned. Main attractions included William F. Buckley, Jr., doing his famous word game act. He can cut another notch in his pencil for having won over yet another audience without having used one iota of logic in his entire speech. Also on hand were Fulton Lewis III and Buz Lukens, with Buz stealing the show with some of the most hate-filled, nonsensical demagoguery we have heard in a long time. Keep it up, Buz, we war lovers are behind you all the way! Among the most touching scenes of the show was provided by Officer McClintock of the Pueblo. Most of the audience pitied him because of what he had been through and because the United States government refused to annihilate his captors. A small clique of true libertarians also pitied him, because they couldn’t believe that anyone could be so stupid as to go through what he went through and still come out of it with the same narrow-minded Weltanschauung that he had been fed originally by U.S. propagandists. And what circus would be complete without a clown? On hand to keep everyone in high spirits was that old stand-by, Al Capp. Al was in his usual form, regaling all with such insightful witticisms as the one about how it’s better to be in a rice paddy with the enemy in your cross-hair than to be in college. With rib-ticklers like that, it is no wonder he is the darling of the right.
So if one went to St. Louis for entertainment, one was sure to find satisfaction. The trouble is, is that the above named performers and the bulk of their audience were not simply making idle jests about the desirability of stamping out freedom and self-determination around the world, but were actually serious in their threats and fulminations. The leaders of this venomous gang call themselves “traditionalists”, or “trads”. But with a program like theirs, one wonders what tradition they referring to. Certainly no organization which espouses collective massacre can claim any attachment to a tradition of individual liberty. No organization so adoring of the destructive powers of government can say the philosophy of laissez-faire is part of their tradition. What tradition can there be for an organization which descries the growth of state power one minute, and calls for a greater “defense” budget the next? What philosophy of yesteryear hailed the freedom of the individual to determine his own life as a paramount good, and still insisted that he could not break a law even if obeying meant he became a slave to the government’s will? Even Thomas Hobbes had the generosity to allow for the individual’s self-defense in the face of government aggression. Who, then, can these trads call their intellectual ancestors? Looking back over the history of man, there is only one theory which can be found that is consistent with the ideas of these trads: the theory of the fascist, totalitarian state.
YAF is a morass of contradictions. It wants to be radical but it doesn’t want to break the law. It claims to be fighting for democracy, yet its own internal policy is dictated by a dogma which allows for democratic process only when the majority decision of the voters agrees with the policy of the National Board. YAF board members seem to think that democracy consists of purging all dissenting voices within the organization. The most glaring contradiction in YAF is, of course, the name itself. If “young” means having a senile, illogical, hate-filled mind encased in a young body, then the “Y” in YAF makes sense. If “American” means love of aggressive imperialism abroad and violent repression at home, then the “A” in YAF fits. And if “freedom” means enslavement to arbitrary rule, then the “F” in YAF is comprehensible. I, however, do not share their definition of these terms. Nor will the bulk of American youth be able to make much sense of them. As a youth movement, YAF is hopelessly out of step. YAFers march more with Metternich than Marcuse. Intelligent American youths will be found joining SDS, the RLA, SLAM, the Panthers, or some other such militant anti-government force. Even militant right-wingers with essentially the same viewpoint as YAF will shun it because of YAF’s aversion to action. YAF will continue to exist, though, as a showplace where conservative American businessmen can go to reaffirm their faith in a fascist future for America. That is all that YAF ever really was—or will be.
— John Hogen
Famous Last Words
“Ultra-left adventurism is fun.”
— A libertarian militant
Recommended Reading
Milton Kotler, Neighborhood Government (Bobbs-Merrill, hard cover and paper). Brief work on neighborhoods vs. the expanding central city. Particularly valuable is the historical discussion of the “imperialist” way in which the central cities in the U.S. have seized control over the outlying neighborhoods, very often through the state legislatures and without the neighborhoods’ consent. (Also see Karl Hess’s review of the Kotler book in the December Ramparts.)
Murray N. Rothbard, “Review of J. Weinstein’s The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State, 1900-1918”, Ramparts, December 1969. Review of a book that ranks with Gabriel Kolko’s in revealing how our present interventionist, Mixed Economy, was put in by Big Business for purposes of monopolization.
I. F. Stone, The Hidden Theory of the Korean War (Monthly Review Press), $7.50. It is good to have this great Revisionist work on the Korean War back in print (originally published in 1952). Stone shows conclusively that the U.S. was responsible for the war. For you anarcho-rightists still bamboozled by Cold War myths, read it!
Alfred F. Young, The Democratic Republicans of New York: The Origins 1763-1797 (University of North Carolina Press). Brilliant, definitive, neo-Beardian work on the political struggles over the Constitution and in the 1790’s in New York. One of the best books on the whole period.
A Semi-Monthly Newsletter
THE
Libertarian Forum↩
| Joseph R. Peden, Publisher | Washington Editor, Karl Hess | Murray N. Rothbard, Editor |
| VOL. I, NO. XVIII | December 15, 1969 | 35¢ |
Notes On Repression
I – JUDICIAL FASCISM
As the Nixon Administration bursts at the seams in its eagerness to move into all-out repression of dissent, some crucial implications of its current actions have gone largely unnoticed. Take, for example, the notorious “Conspiracy” trial of the Chicago 8. Many people have remarked that the law itself, which appropriately was passed by Congress as a “civil rights” measure, is unconstitutional, since it outlaws the crossing of state lines with “intent” to “incite” to riot, all of which vagueness clearly violates the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech.
Many more people have noted the unbelievable actions of Judge Julius Hoffman, who has made a continuing mockery of any meaningful principles of justice. Thus, Hoffman sent marshals across the continent in order to arrest two lawyers and drag them to Chicago as prisoners, for the sole “crime” of withdrawing from the case by telegram instead of in person. The judge proceeded to force Panther leader, Bobby Seale, to be represented by William Kunstler, even though Seale refused Kunstler’s aid and in lieu of his ailing lawyer Charles Garry, preferred to defend his own case. Not only did Judge Hoffman force Seale to be defended by a lawyer not of his own choice, but Kunstler himself didn’t want to defend Seale against the latter’s wishes. What kind of a “free country” is it when a man is forced to accept an unwanted lawyer? Then, when Bobby Seale proceeded to defend his case anyway, Judge Hoffman had Seale gagged and shackled in court, to form a sight strongly reminiscent of Nazi or Soviet “justice”. Finally, when Seale tried to escape his bondage and protest his treatment, Judge Hoffman quickly sentenced the prisoner to an unprecedented four years in jail for “contempt of court”.
The point for libertarians to focus on is not the particular despotism of Judge Hoffman, but the evil of the system itself, the American legal and judicial system, that establishes federal judges as petty despots, free to dictate to people at will and virtually unchallenged. The judge is absolute ruler in his court, in practice really not subject to higher judicial review. Furthermore, the power to declare guilty and sentence someone for contempt of court totally violates the basic legal rule of separation between prosecutor and judge. The judge makes the charge of contempt against the defendant. The judge then “hears” his own case as he sees fit, and then the judge, without benefit of jury trial, declares the defendant guilty and pronounces sentence. There is no excuse for this kind of judicial proceedings, and it is high time that libertarians, always alive to the evils of tyranny in the moral and economic spheres, turn their attention to the legal field as well. Libertarian law must be a law shorn of all elements of tyranny and aggression against those not yet proven to be criminal invaders of the person and just property of another man. Judicial despotism is a good place to begin.
II – RADIO-TV
Vice President Agnew’s ugly attacks against the news media, with their clear threats of censorship and their danger to the freedom of the press, have obscured the fact that the news media, and especially radio and television, are closely tied in with the Establishment, with the powers-that-be. Any one of independent mind has long discovered that fact about the American media. Agnew’s seemingly radical attack on the media is a phony, a mere reflection of the deep split, especially over Vietnam, between the two major factions of the ruling class: the sophisticated corporate liberals and the relatively Neanderthal conservatives. Agnew did not care to attack the vast majority of the nation’s newspapers, which are fiercely conservative; instead, he centered his ire on the two bastions of Eastern corporate liberalism: the New York Times and the Washington Post. The networks, which are solidly corporate liberal, came in for a far more roundhouse treatment.
Agnew’s proto-fascist assault should not be allowed to obscure the fact that the networks are monopolistic, and also that virtually no one, certainly not Agnew, has zeroed in on the roots and essence of this monopoly. The original sin came in 1927, when Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover put through the Radio Act of 1927 which nationalized the ownership of air waves (and television channels); from then on, radio frequencies and TV channels continued to be owned by the federal government, which granted licenses to use these frequencies and channels, and set up a Federal Communications Commission to regulate their use. The result could scarcely have been other than censorship and monopoly. As Professor Coase writes: “The situation in the American broadcasting industry is not essentially different in character from that which could be found if a commission appointed by the federal government had the task of selecting those who were to be allowed to publish newspapers and periodicals in each city, town, and village of the United States.” (Ronald H. Coase, “The Federal Communications Commission,” The Journal of Law and Economics, October, 1959, p. 7). In particular, the networks have been able to use the FCC as their tool in outlawing the use of pay-TV, a potentially powerful competitor to the present system of advertiser-paid television.
Radio and television frequencies were, when first discovered, analogous to the opening up of a new Continent. They should have been allocated just as the land of the American Continent was in the main allocated: on the libertarian, homesteading principle of total private ownership to the first user. Radio and TV frequencies should be private just as land is private; only thus can the airwaves escape the blight of corporate-governmental monopoly. The homesteading principle applies equally to both cases.
There are two common arguments against private property in airwaves. One is that different radio and TV stations would be able to interfere and drown out each other’s signals, thus causing “chaos”. This ignores the crucial historical fact that the American common-law courts were, in the 1920’s, working out the perfectly sound doctrine that one station’s interference with a previous station’s signal is an invasion of property rights, and can be prevented on that basis. Thus, as Coase says, “In the case of Tribune Co. v. Oak Leaves Broadcasting Station [Circuit Court, Cook County, Illinois, 1926] . . . it was held that the operator of an existing station had a sufficient property right, acquired by priority, to enjoin a newcomer from using a frequency so as to cause any material interference.” (Coase, p. 31n.) Hoover and other statist-monopolists, knowing this full well, rushed through the Radio Act of 1927 so as to prevent the development of competition and private property rights in the airwaves. As Professor Milton Friedman writes in an excellent and lucid article on the subject, “The owners of these rights [in the airwaves] would have private property in them, which they would protect from trespass as you and I protect our land from trespass, through the courts. They could buy and sell the rights, subdivide them, recombine them, as you and I do with our land. They would have the full protection of the Bill of Rights just as the press now does.” (Milton Friedman, “How to Free TV”, Newsweek, Dec. 1, 1969, p. 82).
The second popular argument against private property in the airwaves is that air frequencies are “limited” in supply. Such an argument can only stem from profound economic ignorance. All resources, all goods are “limited”: that is why they are owned in the first place, and that is why they command a price on the market. If a good were unlimited—as, say, clean air in the days before pollution—there would be no question of owning it or pricing it, since the good would be superabundant in relation to human desires. It is precisely goods that are limited in supply that must be owned by someone—whether by private persons or government—and thereby allocated to their most productive uses through the price system. Iron mines are limited; land is limited; labor is limited; raw materials are limited; capital goods are limited; Rembrandts are limited. Must all these be nationalized therefore?
Now that government has preempted and retained its “domain” over the airwaves, the precise path of getting from nationalized to private airwaves is far less important, than getting rid of the present abomination. There are two cogent alternatives: one is the Coase-Friedman plan of the FCC’s selling the existing frequencies to the highest bidders. The trouble with this is that the money for the sale goes to an illegitimate recipient: the federal government. The other path is more in accord with homesteading principles: simply granting private property in fee simple to the existing stations. In either case, the FCC would then go promptly go out of existence. Governmental monopolizing of the airwaves would at last be at an end.
Letter From Washington
By Karl Hess
Cults And Criticisms
One of the most recondite of Christian heresies is that of stercoranism in which proponents argue to the death over whether the sacred elements of the communion wafer are retained forever in the body or whether they are expelled excretally. This and all other such heresies gained headway, and popularity, rather long after Christianity had emerged as a revolutionary doctrine. In its revolutionary phase, Christianity had emerged as a revolutionary doctrine. In its revolutionary phase, Christianity split no such hairs. It was a thunderous on-my-side-or-against-me sort of thing and, in the houses on either side of that single division there were, as one well known Christian put it, “many rooms”.
In the existential struggle between liberty and authority there also are many rooms, indeed, a thousand flowers bloom on either side of the dividing line.
My own summary of the matter is known as The Oink Principle. It states that if it oinks it is your enemy. If it does not oink it may not be your best friend but it is, at least, not your enemy.
I have consulted lately with my very dear friend, Murray Rothbard, on this matter and he tells me that although he will continue to criticize my, and others’, left wing adventurism, that he has not detected a single oink from my room. I have not, in turn, heard any such sound from his.
There are others, however, who may take Murray’s criticisms as some sort of anathema being pronounced upon them. They may mistake simple criticism for lethal exclusionism. This strikes me as a needless reaction. There are many anarchists who hold, for instance, that not even God is god. Why should they make the mistake of thinking that Rothbard is? He is a comrade, not a deity; a brilliant economist, not a burning bush; a revolutionary theorist, not an executioner.
It is clear by my actions, I am sure, that I do not agree with a substantial portion of Murray’s recent criticism. I even disagree with the emphasis upon criticism itself which seems to have overtaken him. I would prefer, and hopefully expect, that his talents would be turned more to analysis of the political situation generally rather than to the personalities of our part of it in particular. Having even said that, however, I must admit that his latest criticisms of left wing adventurism, which did contain pointed comments about many of us, also contained a thoughtful commentary upon the possibilities of politicizing liberals. I am, as a matter of fact, in close and regular contact with several of the other adventurists criticized in Murray’s commentary. Neither they nor I feel personally offended at all by what he had to say.
We simply disagree.
We say, in effect, “Well, that’s Murray.” We expect that, when all is said and done, Murray, similarly, will sigh and say, “Well, that’s them.”
In struggle there must be room for diversity or else what’s a revolution for? But diversity need not mean bitter divisiveness. Let us divide, indeed, from those who do not stand with us against the common enemies—authority, reaction, counter-revolutionism, elitism, the state. Let us divide, indeed, from the pure theory pettifoggers who seek sanctuary from the state in their solipsism, who support imperialism if it is profitable, genocide if it is by Westerners, and injustice if it is legal.
Of course, divide from them. They are on the other side anyway. But Murray, Clean for Anarchy, is not the enemy of those of us who are Dirty for Dope, Hirsute for Hedonism, Rowdy for Revolution, Randy for Rutting, or Pouring Down for the Weather Bureau. He is the critic of those things. Not the enemy of those things.
Parse not every subordinate clause for an offense. Don’t look under every verb for a worm. Look at the heart of the man and not the varicose veins of his occasional prose. Maybe even then there will be those offended or discontented. So be it. Look then away from the single man there and to the single movement everywhere, the movement toward liberty. If we permit any one of us to so dominate our emotions as to defeat our purposes, then we offer to our enemy a nasty little victory on the platter of personality.
I do not believe in the organic reality of the state or of the movement. I do not believe in things of Man that exist apart from Man. Man’s works are done by men’s hands and heads. But I believe in cooperation. I believe in movements of men. I believe in orders of priority in those movements and in that cooperation. And I believe that not one of us is so important, influential, charismatic, or anointed as to form in and of ourselves a movement or even a focus for a movement.
Therefore, to take the criticism of one person, or the resentment of another, as somehow of an order of importance comparable to the movement itself strikes me as crucially bad judgment.
Let those with grievances discuss them, by all means, aggrieved with griper. Let a thousand memos blossom, a hundred thousand affinity groups flower, and let them carp and cavil—and grow.
But let us not mistake any such part for the whole of the movement. One man’s criticism is one man’s suggestions. But let two men’s reactions overcome their other concerns and what should have been a suggestion may well become a psychosis. This is not to say that the persons criticized are most at fault. It is not to say that anyone is at fault. It is to say that when Rothbard rumbles all need not quake and similarly it is to say that Rothbard, rumbling, should realize that for many who feel him as their mentor, it is difficult to resist an over-reaction. Above all it is not to say that the tactics of the movement must not be debated, even if the debate inevitably involves personalities, life styles, etc. Of course there needs to be such debate.
What we need to do is to debate, disagree, decide, go ahead, often following different courses, sometimes with new comrades but not wasting our time just on making points. We want to make a movement, instead; we want to make our history, not feather our nests or feed our egos.
Murray is not the movement. I am not. You are not. We are. Anarchists are not the movement. Communists are not the movement. Utopian socialists or Utopian laissez-faire-ists are not the movement. Revolutionary nationalists are not the movement. Pacifists are not the movement. Retreatists are not the movement. Weathermen are not the movement. Fidel is not. Ho is not. Eldridge is not. Spock is not. Liggio is not. Abbie is not. They are. We are.
Take the Weathermen for just an instance. Some hate what they did. But how could you in all good conscience hate what they are? They are your brothers.
Murray may dislike what many of us do. He may dwell overlong on it and over loud. Is that an exorbitant price to pay, for instance, for his “Anatomy of the State”? I say it’s a bargain.
Similarly, there are many who dislike what he does. But surely they must recognize that Murray cannot put them in jail, steal them blind, censor them, kill them—as can agents of the state.
Finally, if there must be an ongoing debate about decorum among our little band then at least let it be open and even in the pages of this journal. Murray has raised points to which some, obviously, are dying to answer. Let them do it and let them do it promptly and precisely. Inter-personal notes or memos, as I suggested earlier, might be best of all, but mutterings and rumors will not do at all.
Why don’t I write such answers? Because, as Murray knows, I have heard his criticism, respectfully, and I have rejected it for myself alone. My heart truly does belong to the left. And it is an adventure. An adventure in liberty. And not even Clean Murray, I know, really considers that leprosy.
To my comrades: I love you all!
The Military-Industrial-University Complex
As good as it is, there is more to the October Ramparts than Karl Hess’ masterful “Open Letter to Barry Goldwater”. David Horowitz (author, among other works, of The Free World Colossus) has a hardhitting piece on the universities and those controlling influences, the foundations; or, as Horowitz terms the two, “The Sinews of Empire”. The esteemed editor of this newsletter has pointed out time and again how the role of the intellectual in the statist society is to act as apologist for the ruling class. Horowitz graphically demonstrates specifically how the kept intellectual of today’s United States has in fact apologized for, influenced, and helped shape U.S. foreign policy.
At the end of the Second World War, a new discipline, that of International Studies, with its numerous subdivisions of specific area studies, was inaugurated. Horowitz views this new discipline as a major weapon forged by the foundations in order to gain a great deal of control over major universities in support of ruling class interests. It is, after all, necessary for any ruling class to insure the perpetuation of views salutary to its interests, as well as the recruiting of new personnel to carry out these interests in policy roles. Specifically, a rationale for the new U.S. global imperium was needed, and the foundations, mainly through the various new Institutes of International Studies, determined that the universities would come up with same (or at least those key universities which provide “leadership” to the academic community). The institutes soon became devices for insuring that those academicians who held the “correct line” were rewarded, and that those who did not died on the vine. Power in the affected universities shifted to a marked degree from the relevant departments to the new institutes. Advancement was fastest and most lucrative in these new fields. As anyone who understands the market process could have guessed, resources, talent and research went into the newly subsidized areas. But of course only “productive” (productive to the interests of the foundations, i.e., the ruling class) research would be rewarded. Small wonder that dissent is so lacking in the academic world—it literally was starved while establishment intellectuals prospered. Where would a young man in Harvard or Stanford go but where the money, power and prestige lay?
Who were the men who controlled the foundation money which went to universities after the war? To cite an example, the Russian Institute of Columbia, the first of this new breed of academic subdivisions, was first headed by Geroid T. Robinson, who had been head of the OSS Research and Analysis Branch, USSR Division. In 1945 the Rockefeller Foundation had made a five-year grant of $1,250,000 for the purpose of setting up the institute. The man who was responsible for the disbursing of this money was one Joseph Willits who, like Robinson, was a member of the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations (as were, of course, David, Nelson and John D. Rockefeller). The man who succeeded Robinson in 1951, Philip E. Mosley, was also a member of the CFR, and a former state department officer. Indeed, of the five who headed the institute, only one—Robinson—had had any prior connection with Columbia. Four had been with the OSS or State Department, and three were in the CFR. The new academic discipline had a membership with strange and curious credentials.
In 1948 Columbia received an East Asian Institute from the Rockefeller Foundation. In 1949 it was the Carnegie Foundation’s turn to set up a Columbia institute—the European. The cast here was especially interesting. The European Institute was initially headed by Grayson Kirk—Columbia professor, Carnegie Corp. trustee, CFR member, and Mobil Oil Director. Next year Kirk resigned to become Columbia provost, and was succeeded by Schuyler Wallace, CFR member in good standing. The present head is . . . Philip Mosley, the second head of the Russian Institute. This basic pattern was repeated at Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, etc. As Horowitz puts it, “Like the Hapsburg Royalty, they like to keep the family small and intimate.”
Anyone who thinks that academic freedom, or its offspring, intellectual honesty, can survive long in an atmosphere as described above is either terribly naive or rather stupid. Pressure for intellectual conformity can be as subtle as the lure of handsome grants. Or it can be as explicit as the guiding directive of the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, wherein the purpose of the Institution is described as “. . . to demonstrate the evils of the doctrines of Karl Marx—whether Communism, Socialism, economic materialism, or atheism—thus to protect the American way of life from such ideologies, their conspiracies and to reaffirm the validity of the American system.” If in fact communism, socialism and atheism (Does this make the non-theist, Henry Hazlitt, a conspirator in the promulgation of the evil teachings of Karl Marx?) are evil, such an institute is a very poor device for either discovering the evils, or producing effective counter-arguments (as can readily be seen from the Institution’s output). A priori assumptions do not make for objective analysis. A university’s function is not to produce propaganda but the truth. To do anything else is to cease to function as a center of learning. To function consciously as a “protector” is to become a tool of whomever one is protecting. To become a “protector” of, and to “reaffirm the validity of the American system”, is to become a tool of the U.S. corporate state and its global imperium. This is what Stanford has done. This is what most universities have done.
It is especially tragic that conservatives, who have talked so much in the past about the “liberal establishment”, should be so cold towards the findings of such scholars as Horowitz. For what is the “military-industrial-university” complex but the “liberal establishment” writ large? The only difference is that the rather ridiculous assumption of conservatives that men like Roosevelt and Rockefeller were (are) crypto-socialists has been replaced by the reality of their being proto-fascists. Of course the reason for this shift in the thinking of conservatives is quite obvious, as can be seen strikingly in the case of their chief spokesman, Bill Buckley, the man whom Gore Vidal has so charmingly referred to as a “pro-crypto Nazi”. Buckley, the “liberals’ conservative”, has, like so many of his followers, become part of this establishment. Now that conservatives are in power (even if they have to share it with their partners in the welfare/warfare system, the liberals), and have their man, Strom Nixon, in the White House, they want no more anti-establishment talk. Also explained is why conservatives have reacted so strongly against all recent attempts to carry out one of their former lofty ideals—smashing the statist educational power, be it Columbia, Ocean Hill-Brownsville, or whatever.
No, if the New Right has joined the Old Left, and if the Old Right is literally almost dead, then it is clear that libertarians can turn only to the New Left in their opposition to statism. It is not a question of whether they will make good or bad allies, but that the New Left are the only possible allies. Not to ally with them would be to ratify the existing statist oppression, together with its infrastructure (e.g., the universities). Besides, as can be seen from a little study, the New Left has been correct all along on most major issues (e.g., the universities). The New Left is essentially correct in both theory and practice. They are for “Power to the People”. Damn it, Mr. Conservative, whom are you for power to?
— Gerald O’Driscoll, Jr.
ATTENTION, LIBERTARIANS
Many readers of the Libertarian Forum have expressed interest in finding other libertarians near them. Therefore, early next year, the Forum will begin to publish the names and addresses of people who would like to be contacted by other readers of the Libertarian Forum. If you’d like your name to be included, please fill out the coupon on the back of this notice.
A Semi-Monthly Newsletter
THE
Libertarian Forum↩
| Joseph R. Peden, Publisher | Washington Editor, Karl Hess | Murray N. Rothbard, Editor |
| VOL. II, NO. 1 | January 1, 1970 | 35¢ |
Anarcho-Communism
Now that the New Left has abandoned its earlier loose, flexible non-ideological stance, two ideologies have been adopted as guiding theoretical positions by New Leftists: Marxism-Stalinism, and anarcho-communism. Marxism-Stalinism has unfortunately conquered SDS, but anarcho-communism has attracted many leftists who are looking for a way out of the bureaucratic and statist tyranny that has marked the Stalinist road. And many libertarians, who are looking for forms of action and for allies in such actions, have become attracted by an anarchist creed which seemingly exalts the voluntary way and calls for the abolition of the coercive State. It is fatal, however, to abandon and lose sight of one’s own principles in the quest for allies in specific tactical actions. Anarcho-communism, both in its original Bakunin-Kropotkin form and its current irrationalist and “post-scarcity” variety, is poles apart from genuine libertarian principle.
If there is one thing, for example, that anarcho-communism hates and reviles more than the State it is the rights of private property; as a matter of fact, the major reason that anarcho-communists oppose the State is because they wrongly believe that it is the creator and protector of private property, and therefore that the only route toward abolition of property is by destruction of the State apparatus. They totally fail to realize that the State has always been the great enemy and invader of the rights of private property. Furthermore, scorning and detesting the free-market, the profit-and-loss economy, private property, and material affluence—all of which are corollaries of each other—anarcho-communists wrongly identify anarchism with communal living, with tribal sharing, and with other aspects of our emerging drug-rock “youth culture”.
The only good thing that one might say about anarcho-communism is that, in contrast to Stalinism, its form of communism would, supposedly, be voluntary. Presumably, no one would be forced to join the communes, and those who would continue to live individually, and to engage in market activities, would remain unmolested. Or would they? Anarcho-communists have always been extremely vague and cloudy about the lineaments of their proposed anarchist society of the future. Many of them have been propounding the profoundly anti-libertarian doctrine that the anarcho-communist revolution will have to confiscate and abolish all private property, so as to wean everyone from their psychological attachment to the property they own. Furthermore, it is hard to forget the fact that when the Spanish Anarchists (anarcho-communists of the Bakunin-Kropotkin type) took over large sections of Spain during the Civil War of the 1930’s, they confiscated and destroyed all the money in their areas and promptly decreed the death penalty for the use of money. None of this can give one confidence in the good, voluntarist intentions of anarcho-communism.
On all other grounds, anarcho-communism ranges from mischievous to absurd. Philosophically, this creed is an all-out assault on individuality and on reason. The individual’s desire for private property, his drive to better himself, to specialize, to accumulate profits and income, are reviled by all branches of communism. Instead, every one is supposed to live in communes, sharing all his meager possessions with his fellows, and each being careful not to advance beyond his communal brothers. At the root of all forms of communism, compulsory or voluntary, lies a profound hatred of individual excellence, a denial of the natural or intellectual superiority of some men over others, and a desire to tear down every individual to the level of a communal ant-heap. In the name of a phony “humanism”, an irrational and profoundly anti-human egalitarianism is to rob every individual of his specific and precious humanity.
Furthermore, anarcho-communism scorns reason, and its corollaries long-range purpose, forethought, hard work, and individual achievement; instead, it exalts irrational feelings, whim, and caprice—all this in the name of “freedom”. The “freedom” of the anarcho-communist has nothing to do with the genuine libertarian absence of interpersonal invasion or molestation; it is, instead, a “freedom” that means enslavement to unreason, to unexamined whim, and to childish caprice. Socially and philosophically, anarcho-communism is a misfortune.
Economically, anarcho-communism is an absurdity. The anarcho-communist seeks to abolish money, prices, and employment, and proposes to conduct a modern economy purely by the automatic registry of “needs” in some central data bank. No one who has the slightest understanding of economics can trifle with this theory for a single second. Fifty years ago, Ludwig von Mises exposed the total inability of a planned, moneyless economy to operate above the most primitive level. For he showed that money-prices are indispensable for the rational allocation of all of our scarce resources—labor, land, and capital goods—to the fields and the areas where they are most desired by the consumers and where they could operate with greatest efficiency. The socialists conceded the correctness of Mises’ challenge, and set about—in vain—to find a way to have a rational, market price system within the context of a socialist planned economy.
The Russians, after trying an approach to the communist moneyless economy in their “War Communism” shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution, reacted in horror as they saw the Russian economy heading to disaster. Even Stalin never tried to revive it, and since World War II the East European countries have seen a total abandonment of this communist ideal and a rapid move toward free markets, a free price system, proft-and-loss tests, and a promotion of consumer affluence. It is no accident that it was precisely the economists in the Communist countries who led the rush away from communism, socialism, and central planning, and toward free markets. It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a “dismal science”. But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance. Yet this sort of aggressive ignorance is inherent in the creed of anarcho-communism.
The same comment can be made on the widespread belief, held by many New Leftists and by all anarcho-communists, that there is no longer need to worry about economics or production because we are supposedly living in a “post-scarcity” world, where such problems do not arise. But while our condition of scarcity is clearly superior to that of the cave-man, we are still living in a world of pervasive economic scarcity. How will we—know when the world has achieved “post-scarcity”? Simply, when all the goods and services that we may want have become so superabundant that their prices have fallen to zero; in short, when we can acquire all goods and services as in a Garden of Eden—without effort, without work, without using any scarce resources.
The anti-rational spirit of anarcho-communism was expressed by Norman O. Brown, one of the gurus of the new “counter-culture”: “The great economist von Mises tried to refute socialism by demonstrating that, in abolishing exchange, socialism made economic calculation, and hence economic rationality, impossible . . . But if von Mises is right, then what he discovered is not a refutation but a psychoanalytical justification of socialism . . . It is one of the sad ironies of contemporary intellectual life that the reply of socialist economists to von Mises’ arguments was to attempt to show that socialism was not incompatible with ‘rational economic calculation’—that is to say, that it could retain the inhuman principle of economizing.” (Life Against Death, Random House, paperback, 1959, pp. 238-39.)
The fact that the abandonment of rationality and economics in behalf of “freedom” and whim will lead to the scrapping of modern production and civilization and return us to barbarism does not feaze our anarcho-communists and other exponents of the new “counter-culture”. But what they do not seem to realize is that the result of this return to primitivism would be starvation and death for nearly all of mankind and a grinding subsistence for the ones remaining. If they have their way, they will find that it is difficult indeed to be jolly and “unrepressed” while starving to death.
All this brings us back to the wisdom of the great Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset: “In the disturbances caused by scarcity of food, the mob goes in search of bread, and the means it employs is generally to wreck the bakeries. This may serve as a symbol of the attitude adopted, on a greater and more complicated scale, by the masses of today towards the civilization by which they are supported . . . Civilization is not ‘just here’, it is not self-supporting. It is artificial . . . If you want to make use of the advantages of civilization, but are not prepared to concern yourself with the upholding of civilization—you are done. In a trice you find yourself left without civilization. Just a slip, and when you look everything has vanished into air. The primitive forest “appears in its native state, just as if curtains covering pure Nature had been drawn back. The jungle is always primitive and, vice versa, everything primitive is mere jungle.” (José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses, New York: W. W. Norton, 1932, p. 97).
A Comment
The Working Class
The recent Libertarian Forum articles on “The Conference” and “Ultra-Leftism” are among the most thought-provoking I have read in a long time. Since I find myself in total and sometimes violent disagreement with about ninety-five per cent of the statements made, I shall confine this rebuttal to a few major points. This does not mean that I concur with any other points made.
Since it is a term that has validity only in retrospect, “ultra-leftism” provides an excellent whipping boy for radical historians. The “ultra-leftist” is the guy that failed; had he succeeded, he would have been a “daring tactician” or a “charismatic figure”. While in some cases “ultra-leftism”, whatever it really is, may have been the revolution’s downfall, in other cases (most notably Spain) it could have saved the day.
At any rate, Murray is wrong to regard “ultra-leftism” as a cause of the decline of SDS; the true lesson for us here is that it was a symptom of the true cause, a far greater danger. Murray states that, “The hysteria, and the pitiful failure, of the Weathermen stem not so much from personal psychosis as from incorrect strategic theory.” Exactly the reverse is true since Weatherman’s “ultra-left” errors have psychological origins. Upper middle-class and upper-class kids, instead of sticking to their own valid, campus-related issues, feel so hung-up about their soft easy upbringing that they try desperately to attach themselves to someone else’s more urgent, “down-to-earth” struggles (e.g. Blacks, rank-and-file unionists, etc.). Furthermore, no longer being “down-to-earth” at all themselves once they leave their own sphere, the campus, they adopt a revolutionary ideology totally alien to the American situation. Finally, rejected by Blacks and workers and community people for being pushy, elitist, scrawny idiots, they set out to prove their manhood after a crash course in karate and get their asses whipped, setting back serious radical organization everywhere they go.
Few people will join a revolution unless it is in their own self-interest. All too much of the Movement consists of people who have arrived at a purely intellectual commitment to a revolution that will bring about the society they visualize. When their appeals in the name of humanity, social justice, freedom, equality, or other vague concepts fail to create a mass movement, they withdraw into their own little self-righteous circles, and put out increasingly sectarian and increasingly unread manifestoes.
Murray, as with so many other radicals, declares that the working class is hopelessly reactionary, racist, etc. OK, make your revolution without them—if you can. And if you can, what will you do with this large, restive, powerful, and hopeless group afterwards—the final solution to the labor problem? Equally valid sweeping criticisms can be directed against the middle class (or any other class)—smugness, reformism, even racism of a more sophisticated and less easily eradicable form. At any rate, if “American Marxists have boxed themselves into a complete dead end in pinning their hopes on the workers,” couldn’t this be because most American Marxists are declasse middle class with absolutely nothing to offer the working class?
If anyone thinks the role of the working class is irrelevant, he should ask himself a few questions: Who could shut the country down faster, ten million intellectuals or one million dockers and truckers? If labor is hopelessly co-opted, why is the country being swept with wildcat strikes and even with sanctioned strikes for that matter; why are the fat-ass unions plagued with black caucuses, rank-and-file caucuses, etc.? If the workers were not a potential danger, why does the whole system, especially the schools, the press, and the church, try so determinedly to keep them from thinking for themselves? History shows that workers can act when they see the necessity. And they do ACT. Murray has a distaste for action, but seriously, how else will the Revolution come about?
Aside from the accuracy or error of the articles in question, the articles are a tactical error. Ad hominem attacks, and indiscriminate blasts at important segments of the libertarian movement can only serve the purpose of turning the Libertarian Forum into a minor sectarian sheet constantly congratulating itself on its own correctness. In its short lifetime the Forum has done two difficult jobs: it has demonstrated, in the language of the “rightist” libertarian and to the “rightist” libertarian, the necessity of revolution; and it has called together a lot of people who otherwise would be struggling alone. Is it now to drive them apart?
— Bill Goring
Lurking In The Wings
In the days of the First World War, when governments were wildly stomping out the lives and futures of their people in the name of nationalism and national destiny, one American radical described the process: War is the health of the State. In time of war, the subjects of rulers enthusiastically rally to them—hate the Enemy, volunteer to kill whomever the government wants eliminated, and cheerfully contribute higher taxes. The power and wealth at the command of the state positively swells beyond the peacetime bureaucrat’s wildest dreams. But the issuing of commands always requires willing ears to hear and obey them.
Let it never be said that Uncle Sam doesn’t plan ahead. In 1961 the Office of Emergency Preparedness sprang up meiotically from the four Civil Defense agencies which have functioned for twenty years. The star program of the O.E.P. is the National Defense Executive Reserve: when the war comes, and the government gets its chance to expand overnight, the personnel problem will be solved—in advance. Just as the army maintains officers in reserve status to fight the Enemy, the bureaucracy has the N.D.E.R. standing like 4,000 minutemen ready to fight on the home front—fighting the people (as it were).
Any agency or department head can establish an N.D.E.R. unit. Units currently exist for the Secretary of Commerce, Business and Defense Services Administration, Office of Oil and Gas, Office of Minerals and Solid Fuels, Bureau of Public Roads, Office of Emergency Transportation, Economic Stabilization Agency, Office of Defense Resources, and others.
In times of national emergency, isn’t it curious how the conventional wisdom holds that the spontaneous powers of citizens to organize and bring resources to bear on problems should and must be constrained by bureaucratic control? This is the philosophy of the state, of state-socialism and state-capitalism; the philosophy behind the National Defense Executive Reserve. At the very moment when red-tape and bureaucracy should step aside and let people solve the emergency problems, the government plans to step in, reinforced, to strangle the nation! Who can estimate the added cost in wealth and human life which the growth of bureaucracy and bureaucratic inefficiency has imposed in the past, and will impose tenfold in any future war or national emergency? At a time when the mechanisms of trade and decentralized decision-making—the ability to take instant action, at one’s own economic risk on the basis of localized, specific information—are more than ever needed, the government has habitually aggrandized its own power and authority by prohibiting any activity not first initiated or sanctioned by some bureaucrat’s authority.
In cases where a man supplies an urgent demand and makes a good profit (which should encourage others to watch for similar urgent demands in the future, and supply them in advance), the government makes sure that the is castigated as a “war profiteer”, and certainly taxed if not imprisoned or killed! Such activities will be the duty of the expanded bureaucracy, staffed by the National Defense Executive Reserve force. War is the health of the state.
The state is the pathology of modern society. The expanding substitution of Authority for Trade as the proper form of interaction among people is the full-time job of the millions of little statesmen who labor “in the public interest”. It is the symbiotic relationship between the Authority-merchants of the state and profit-seeking entrepreneurs which causes the perversion of honest economic activity into the exploitative system of state-capitalism. Amazing is the magic of Authority, so legitimate in the public’s mind in contrast to raw, coercive Power; and nothing legitimates the use of Power as well as an Enemy danger. Just like far-sighted land speculators, the bureaucrat Authority-merchants are prepared: the National Defense Executive Reserve awaits their country’s call.
— J. M. Cobb
ATTENTION, LIBERTARIANS
Many readers of the Libertarian Forum have expressed interest in finding other libertarians near them. Therefore, early this year, the Forum will begin to publish the names and addresses of people who would like to be contacted by other readers of the Libertarian Forum. If you’d like your name to be included, please fill out the coupon on the back of this notice.
My Loyalty Oath
“GAINESVILLE, FLA.—Three University of Florida professors and one librarian were fired Nov. 26 because they refused to sign the state’s loyalty oath. Dismissed were law professor Leroy L. Lamborn, psychology instructor Evan Suits, architecture instructor Jerome Miller, and library clerk Ann Bardsley . . .”
The whole thing is pretty ludicrous, really, and I suppose I should be laughing. But being fired has had an unfortunate effect upon my sense of humor. Last week I was an unoffensive librarian, laboring among my catalog cards and dusty bookshelves. Now I am unemployed and publicly branded as an enemy of the state. And all because of a little green IBM card with a seven-line loyalty oath printed on it.
The State of Florida has required a loyalty oath of all recipients of its funds since the early Cold War days back in 1949. When I went to work for the University of Florida a year ago, the oath appeared under my pen between fingerprinting and a form detailing my life history. I signed it with distaste, but I needed the job very badly, and had no choice. The law requires that the oath be notarized. Early this year the university administration decided it had been a bit lax about having the oath notarized—a matter that the Board of Regents and other reactionary politicians consider of utmost importance. So the University’s 3,000 fulltime employees and several thousand more part-time student employees, graduate assistants, and others on the state payroll, were ordered to take a little green IBM card with the oath printed on it and sign it before a notary. All, of course, at the taxpayer’s expense.
The oath originally had a provision in it stipulating that the signer was not a member of the Communist party. A suit by Stella Connell, an Orlando, Fla., schoolteacher, won a court decision knocking out the clause about being a Communist as unconstitutional, so the signing stopped while the University ran around printing up new oaths without the offending clause. Then they began collecting signatures all over again. We were told that those who refused to sign would not be paid until they did. Most of the employees were irritated from having to chase around notarizing the oath, and several hundred—including two entire departments of the University—were so offended by the principle of the thing that they threatened to refuse to sign. But by the November 26 deadline, almost all had surrendered to economic necessity and signed the oath. The three professors and I who still maintained our refusal to sign, were fired. Since I am not a professional educator, I shall probably be able to find a new job. But the three professors, whose jobs are inextricably tied to the government-dominated field of education, face financial and professional ruin.
Because of the events of the past few weeks I now have a great deal of time to consider not only my own reasons for not signing the oath, but the whole purpose and consequence of this oath.
The oath we refused to sign says:
“I the above-named, a citizen of the State of Florida and the United States of America, and being employed by or an officer of the University of Florida and recipient of public funds as such employee or officer, do hereby swear or affirm that I will support the Constitution of the United States and of the State of Florida; that I do not believe in the overthrow of the United States or of the State of Florida by force or violence.”
I refused to sign this oath because it is a piece of pernicious nonsense and an unwarranted invasion by the state into the privacy of the individual. It is nonsense because even if it were desirable to root subversives out of the University, whether they were floor cleaners or professors, no dedicated subversive would blow his cover by signing it. It is pernicious for a number of reasons.
On a practical level, it is a waste of the taxpayer’s money. On a legal level, the many citizens of other states and countries who had to sign it perjured themselves by doing so. Most of my foreign friends were amused—in a contemptuous sort of way—by having to sign the oath, but several were bitterly resentful. If they had refused to sign, they could have lost their visas and been deported. “If I am forced to sign this,” a Persian friend told me, “then the constitution to which I am affirming my support really is not worth the paper it is written on, is it?”
But to me, the worst aspect of being coerced into signing this oath is its effect on individual liberty. What business is it of anyone’s what I support or do not support, believe in or do not believe in? As long as I am an efficient and reliable librarian, who cares what I think about the Constitution of the State of Florida? The answer is, of course, that the state is so unsure of the loyalty of its citizens, particularly the more intelligent people that work in universities, that it cannot rest until it has extracted a pledge of fealty from them.
One of the dangers in making people sign these silly things is, of course, that it reminds the individual that the only way to stay safe and secure is by unquestioning obedience to the state. Unquestioning obedience leads to Buchenwald and Song My, and the destruction of all individual initiative and responsibility. In a University, any kind of loyalty requirement strangles the atmosphere of intellectual freedom which is necessary for scholarly inquiry.
Looking back on this, I wonder: was it better to keep quiet, sign, and stay, or get fired, leaving the university to those more reactionary or subservient than I? Either way, it seems to me, we would have a mighty quiet university. If we had backed down on this, Evan Suits, Lee Lamborn, Jerome Miller, and I would be working for the University of Florida today. And perhaps our sensitivity to individual freedom might have served as some kind of good influence. But it also seems that one can surrender a little here, and a little there—always hoping to fight back next time—until the will to resist is gone.
Since I wasn’t planning the violent overthrow of the government, etc., I could honestly have signed the oath. But the government that demands loyalty to some constitution or belief today, will tomorrow demand our allegiance to some party, or governor, or religion, or . . . Fuehrer. The time to stop the state is now, not when it has become so oppressive that you no longer have the strength or the means to fight.
The American Civil Liberties Union, which is taking our suit for reinstatement through the courts, has a motto: “Eternal Vigilance is the Price of Liberty”.
I agree.
— Ann C. Bardsley
A Semi-Monthly Newsletter
THE
Libertarian Forum↩
| Joseph R. Peden, Publisher | Washington Editor, Karl Hess | Murray N. Rothbard, Editor |
| VOL. II, NO. 2 | January 15, 1970 | 35¢ |
AHA CONVENTION
By Leonard P. Liggio
I. Anarchism on the Agenda
Libertarianism has become academically respectable. Just as the respectability of isolationism emerged five years ago, here is another debt that we probably owe to the New Left. Within a month, a symposium on anarchism was held at a major university with Murray Rothbard and Karl Hess as the principal speakers, and a session of the American Historical Association was devoted to Anarchism. The historical significance of a filled-to-capacity AHA session on anarchism was noted in his introductory remarks by Richard Drinnon of Bucknell University, the chairman. Paul Avrich, Queens College, who gave the first paper, is the author of a recently published book on Russian anarchists; his book was the subject some months ago of an intensive oral commentary by Murray Rothbard. As in almost everything concerned with the growth of libertarian perspectives, Murray Rothbard has been the preeminent pioneer; his open and world-ranging inquiry into libertarian thought and action is the exemplary standard toward which all others’ achievements in libertarian analysis has been directed.
Avrich’s discussion indicated that the monumental conflict between the respective world-views of Marx and Bakunin remain as significant today as a century ago; yet, despite Avrich’s depth of scholarship, a resolution of Bakunin’s own contradictory positions appears as distant as ever. Marx’s call for regimented industrial and agricultural armies had no appeal for the peasant who might be already oppressed by just such a feudal organization of agriculture. Anarchists historically have had a strong interest in peasant farmers and agricultural land as anarchism has flourished in opposition to the feudal landholding systems.
Gabriel Jackson, U. of California-San Diego, discussed the very controversial question of the institutions of Spanish Civil War Anarchism. The participation of an expert such as James J. Martin would have been invaluable. In the anarchist regions of civil war Spain, the free peasants’ land ownership was recognized and tenants turned their lands into freeholds. But, serfs in completely feudal situations were generally transformed into workers on a collective, with occasional liberation into cooperatives. Anarchist ideologists in Spain, after a year, called for a reexamination of the collectivist organization, as it was not productive and was simply living off earlier capital accumulation. Similarly, they had intense criticism of the anarchist military columns for their sectarianism. When their campaigns took them into a district they sought to impose their rationalism by church burnings; peasants were forced to transfer their private farms into collectives; money was outlawed on pain of execution. This anarchist sectarianism of the military columns contributed to the famous popularity of the Spanish Communist Party—as the defender of private property and money, the peasants and townsmen sought protection in C.P. membership. (Noam Chomsky’s “Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship”, in his American Power and the New Mandarins, presents a libertarian critique of Jackson’s liberal treatment of the Spanish Civil War.)
Paul Goodman, the concluding speaker at the session, began with a critical examination of the radical proposals presented at the convention (see Part II). He said that the radical appeal to the historians should have been on the basis of their competence and professional independence, which are being oppressed by political and academic authorities. Anarchists historically found their support among the skilled workers whose competence excluded external management or control, as well as among workers in potentially dangerous work where success was based not on authority but on mutual trust and self-control. The migrants from rural areas who were the main source of unskilled labor were not familiar with self-managing modes in industry and sought solutions in the collectivism of the Marxist unions.
Goodman explained the Marxist rhetoric among student protestors as originating in a similar distinction. The majority of American students are not interested in attending school; they are inmates of school-jails because of the compulsory attendance laws, conscription, etc. They should be permitted to gain their education in appealing work situations; collectivism appears as a reasonable solution only to those in an unnatural situation. Those students who benefit from liberal arts education have sought an improvement in the educational method by transforming the authoritarian classroom situation necessitated by the school-jail institutions into situations permitting more and better study. Five years of intensive investigation have shown that the main student dissatisfaction and support for transformation of universities comes from the upper half of the student body’ the lower half is satisfied since the educational system is aimed at their level.
Adam Smith’s free market economics was noted by Goodman as the epitome of anarchism. The attempt to establish private property against its negation in the state made laissez-faire a revolutionary ideology before its adherents came to compromise with, rather than destroy, feudalism and accepted state monopoly economies. The independence of the competent, the innovator, the entrepreneur, the creator, said Goodman, is at the root of anarchism. Technological progress, Goodman pointed out, has been achieved by the independent innovator and entrepreneur outside of the authoritarian universities and monopoly institutions. The struggle to affirm private property, the absolute ownership of the fruit of one’s free innovation or competence, and to abolish the present negation of private property ownership, is central to anarchist action. Since modern society prepares people more completely for competent independence, the flowering of anarchist thought and action is a reasonable expectation.
II. Long March Made Longer
A major aspect of the AHA convention was the business meetings. In the last couple of years the major scholarly associations in America have been placed on record by their members as opposed to United States aggression against the Vietnamese people. Last year, at the AHA convention which was moved to New York from Chicago to protest the police riot by Mayor Daley’s ‘finest’ during the Democratic National Convention, the major debate concerned the boycott of Chicago. The right-wing liberals proposed that the convention should have been held in Chicago to bring the benefits of the liberals’ “superior enlightenment” to Chicago. The caucus of younger members was totally ineffectual last year. The main speeches were a series of Marxist circumlocutions which drove the majority from the hall in search of freedom from boredom. A minor theme was the attack on the movement of student protests at universities by the leading academic Marxist, Eugene D. Genovese, who since has been appointed chairman of the history department at the University of Rochester.
After almost a year of inaction, a revived committee of younger historians popped-up under the ubiquitous Arthur Waskow. Waskow had acted during the early years of the Anti-Vietnam war movement as a retarding influence seeking dialogue rather than confrontation with Rusk, Bundy, Rostow et al., and as late as last spring spoke at a major conference at the New York Hilton against political organization around anti-militarist issues, proposing instead the liberal issues of environment and ecology. Now he appeared at the convention in the colors of a militant. In the early years of this decade a Conference on Peace Research in History (in which several of the contributors to the Libertarian Forum participated) was organized in the AHA by William L. Neumann—revisionist historian, anti-imperialist spokesman and a leading student of Harry Elmer Barnes. This Conference’s December 1965 meeting in San Francisco occurred after almost a year of U.S. bombardment and invasion of Vietnam. But the program of which Waskow was chairman avoided historical analysis of U.S. policy in the Pacific upon which the Vietnam intervention was premised. On the eve of the 1965 convention the press had announced that the leading radical historian, Staughton Lynd, then at Yale, had arrived in Hanoi to study the effects of U.S. bombing as a representative of Viet-Report. Waskow criticized Lynd for his efforts opposing the Vietnam war by confronting the U.S. government.
The proposals at the 1969 convention which issued forth from Waskow could only have been composed in Bedlam. In essence, they were an attack on the concept of competence. Instead of appealing to historians on the basis of their alienation due to the authoritarian denial of their professionalism in the universities and the AHA, their expertise was equally attacked by the Waskow group. This explicit denial of the historian’s role could not seriously have been proposed, as a means of radically educating historians—and, needless to say, it did not. In contrast, at the Modern Languages Association convention, the radicals led by the New University Conference were able to organize their colleagues on the basis of the general denial of their professionalism, to reform the association and to elect as president for the following year, Louis Kampf, MIT humanities chairman. Despite this problematic AHA situation, Staughton Lynd received about thirty per cent of the votes cast for the AHA presidency.
The final business meeting was devoted to a discussion of resolutions, especially concerning Vietnam. A lengthy resolution emanated from the Waskow group; it began with an opposition to the Vietnam war but mainly dealt with a number of domestic issues such as the police murders of the Black Panthers. Perhaps it was believed that the wider opposition to the Vietnam war would carry a resolution containing issues for which there would be less support. Such a scheme has about it much of the odor of the Old Left rather than the honesty of the New Left which faces issues directly no matter how unpleasant the answers. Additionally, the resolution was burdened with having Waskow as floor leader; as he appeared to be speaking half the time through a dozen interventions, many neutral participants drew negative conclusions about the anti-Vietnam positions.
A substitute motion was offered by William L. Neumann as chairman of the Conference on Peace Research in History. It stated: “We, historians and citizens in this meeting of the American Historical Association, deplore and condemn the war in Vietnam as ill-advised and immoral; we urge immediate withdrawal of all military involvement; and we further pledge ourselves to a fundamental reevaluation of the assumptions of American foreign policy.” Staughton Lynd called on the meeting to support this resolution. Neumann’s anti-war resolution was narrowly defeated by a vote of 610 to 645 in a meeting attended by ten times the number of members who had attended any previous business meeting.
The most outspoken critic was Eugene Genovese, who during the convention was described as having become the Sidney Hook of the younger generation of scholars. For several years Genovese has conducted a personal vendetta against Staughton Lynd because Lynd is not a Marxist and thus bases his politics upon universal moral concepts. Although one might wish Lynd were more rigorous in some historical analyses, he has made the greatest contribution during the 1960’s to post-American Revolution historical scholarship. Genovese’s Marxism causes him to adopt positions of traditionalist, official historians against revisionist radicalism. The logic of Marxism led Genovese to become the leading contemporary spokesman for southern slaveholding, and Karl Marx’s humane opposition to the crime of slaveholding is condemned because this was inconsistent with Marxism. During the past year Genovese opened a wide-front attack on the student movement because he views the New Left as the major impediment to Marxism. At the AHA convention Genovese demanded that the executive council “put down the New Left, put it down now, and put it down hard.” Genovese is becoming the heir-presumptive to the repression propounded by the ex-communists of National Review and the New Leader.
From Libertine To Libertarian
When left-wing critics of the 1930’s attacked him for not embracing doctrinaire Marxism, Ernest Hemingway replied:
“. . . I cannot be a communist now because I believe in only one thing: liberty. First I would look after myself and do my work. Then I would care for my family. Then I would help my neighbor. But the state I care nothing for. All the state has ever meant to me is unjust taxation . . . I believe in the absolute minimum of government.
“A writer is an outlyer like a gypsy . . . If he is a good writer he will never like the government he lives under. His hand should be against it . . .” (Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story by Carlos Baker, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1969).
In the foreword to his own book, Baker writes:
“[Hemingway] was the fierce individualist who resisted fad and fashion like the plague . . . who believed that that government is best which governs least, who hated tyranny, bureaucracy, taxation, propaganda . . .”
It is clear to anyone who has read Hemingway’s work that the novelist, while never an advanced political thinker—and never pretending to be one—, was writing from the viewpoint of a man obsessed with the raw concept of individual freedom. He was the ultimate artist, the essential loner, the recalcitrant individualist who gave substance to William Hazlitt’s theory of “living unto oneself”, of being “a part of the world and yet apart from it at the same time.” Hemingway was the libertarian in embryo, the undeveloped philosopher with a mania for personal liberty, with a hunger for life and the pleasures of life, who gave full reign to his drives and desires without regard for those who would squeeze him into a neat ideological compartment. His only cause was his art, his writing, the perfection of his language, and a search for truth as reflected through his novels.
Hemingway operated within the framework of a basic libertinism, a kind of humanized but non-intellectualized hedonism. The tragedy of his life is that he never advanced beyond this embryonic stage philosophically. While he pursued liberty and spent his life learning how to “live free”, he neglected to construct an ethic to discipline his actions. Consequently, the “spiritual” aspect of his life—the part that is concerned with basic questions of morality, with right and wrong, with good and evil—suffered beyond repair. Peace of mind eluded him; an elemental happiness was denied him to the end. He took his life with his own hand less than a month before his sixty-second birthday.
Frank Meyer notwithstanding, the philosophy of libertarianism and the attitude of libertinism are not to be confused by any except the ignorant. If the libertine is the libertarian in embryo, the true libertarian is the libertine developed to the highest level of ideational morality. He is the libertine strung out to the limits of his potentiality. While the libertine is concerned solely with liberty, the libertarian turns his attention to liberty and justice as an inseparable concept. The libertine operates from the basic premise: I have a right to be free; the libertarian from the premise: I have a right to be free—and so does everyone else.
We can only speculate as to what Hemingway might have become psychologically and emotionally had he been exposed to the writings of Mises, Bastiat, Spooner, Hayek, Rothbard, etc. Perhaps he would have dismissed philosophical libertarianism in the same manner he dismissed doctrinaire Marxism, without realizing that an artist’s morality is evident in his product and affects its final quality. Then again, having rejected Marxism as incompatible with his own notion of freedom, he might have rejoiced at the discovery of a philosophy more attuned to his own native urges.
Today it is possible to look back on Hemingway’s life with some degree of objectivity. The art he produced, if it is good, will long outlive the memory of the man. In reviewing his career nine years after his death, it is possible to appreciate an individual who was a lifelong friend of liberty, though sadly enough, never its master—a libertarian in embryo who failed to idealize his basic attitude toward life.
— Jerome Tuccille
What’s Your Excuse Now?
Last spring, the big revolutionary event in America was the Columbia Revolution. Most “libertarians” condemned this particularly successful New Left venture on the grounds of injury to “private property rights”, putting forth the quaint theory that Columbia University is private property.
This winter, the big revolutionary event is the strike at San Francisco State, a strike which, even more successfully than at Columbia, managed to induce black and white students and the nearby black community to join forces against the administration, and also to enlist essentially conservative and guild-minded faculty. Surely no one could possibly call San Francisco State College a wholly government-owned institution, any kind of “private property”. It is government property, and therefore an institution which all self-proclaimed libertarians are supposed to be against. And yet, despite this most successful disruptive strike against SF State, rumblings and gripings are emerging from the California libertarian movement, including petty peevishness about classes being obstructed. So what’s your excuse now, comrades, for being counter-revolutionary?
Against Taxation
One of the most hopeful recent developments has been the rise of opposition to taxation. Taxation is the vital fuel on which the State runs and has its being. Cut off its funds, its supply, and the State Leviathan will wither and die. Furthermore, a movement in opposition to taxation is bound to strike a responsive chord with the entire tax-exploited middle class. There has recently been formed a National Taxpayers Union, which is dedicated to lancing the State at its vital core: its swollen and unchallenged power of taxation. The energetic libertarian James D. Davidson is the executive director, and Murray Rothbard is one of the four members of the executive committee. For information, write to the National Taxpayers Union, Suite 100,415 Second Street, N. E., Washington, D.C. 20002.
USIA Network
One of the most repellent aspects of statism is that we the taxpayers are forced to pay for our own brainwashing—for the propaganda which the government beams in our direction. One of our ministries of propaganda, the United States Information Agency, is beamed at hapless people overseas. It was to be expected that when our right-wing Administration took over, the thrust of conservatives in power would not be to dismantle the USIA, but rather to boot out subsidies for liberal books and replace them with well-stocked libraries filled with the works of deserving conservatives.
This, indeed, is exactly what has happened. Frank Shakespeare, new head of USIA, is an ultra-conservative, and a friend of conservatism’s pre-eminent TV personality, William F. Buckley, Jr. Buckley was promptly appointed as a member of the USIA’s Advisory Commission. Buckley began to push for more conservative books in USIA libraries, and induced Shakespeare to hire Jim Burnham, Buckley’s co-editor on National Review, to compile a list of deserving books. For nearly $1000, Burnham came up with a five-page list, which—surprise of surprises!—included prominently the works of both Burnham and Buckley, to which Burnham gave high praise. Buckley, wrote Burnham, is “one of the best-known writers of his generation”, and, what is more, “James Burnham’s books have been translated and debated in every major country.” Pretty neat all around. As lagniappe, Burnham also recommended the works of several other editors and contributors of National Review: M. Stanton Evans, John Chamberlain, Russell Kirk, Henry Hazlitt, Stefan T. Possony, and the late Whittaker Chambers.
And so, the result of the Buckley-Burnham shuffle is that National Review has reaped its reward for loyalty to the Nixon campaign and to the Administration. The loser, as usual, is the American taxpayer.
ORGANIZED CRIME
It is a commonplace of history that laws drafted to harass or suppress one socially deviant group will at some future time be used to attack groups or individuals other than those originally persecuted. Thus the emergency powers granted the German Chancellor by the Weimar Republic were used by Hitler to destroy the Weimar regime and plunge Germany into the horrors of the Nazi dictatorship. It is with this in mind that libertarians should examine more closely the Nixon administration’s new legislative war against “organized crime”.
In the President’s message to Congress last April, “organized crime” was identified as the Cosa Nostra— or the Mafia—an “alien” organization said to number some 5,000 individuals working regionally in 24 “families”. (New York Congressman Mario Biaggi, a much-decorated police hero, considers this a gratuitous insult to the Italian-American community.) In the eyes of the Feds, the Mafia’s most heinous crime seems to be that it successfully serves a profitable and expanding market with goods and services which the State has either outlawed or monopolized for itself.
According to Nixon, the Cosa Nostra has a virtual monopoly on illegal gambling—by which he means that the government’s licensed gambling operations are its only real competition; they also are responsible for supplying the American public with illegal drugs like heroin—which is needed by those who become addicted in much the same way a diabetic needs insulin, or like marijuana, whose effects have been described by responsible physicians as less harmful than alcohol or tobacco. (That alcohol and tobacco remain legal may be due to their being a major source of State revenue.) To complete the picture, “organized crime” is accused of underwriting the loan-shark business and actively participating in fraudulent bankruptcies. In other words, the Mafia lends money to high-risk debtors at interest rates commensurate with the probability of default, rates forbidden by law despite the obvious needs of the market; and as for fraudulent bankruptcy, the whole concept of bankruptcy is itself a fraud and a theft by which the State cancels the legitimate indebtedness of the debtor at the expense of the creditor. Indeed the principal criminal actions of the Mafia used to justify the Nixon war on crime are crimes only because they are defined as such by the tyrannical statists who rule America. The Cosa Nostra—serving well its vast American market with profits estimated at $50 billion from gambling alone—is no more sinister than Dow Chemical Company—probably less so.
What then is the real purpose of this new Crusade? Let us look at the weapons which the Feds are demanding from: the Congress. Already authorized to use wiretapping, Nixon wants Congress to legalize the granting of personal immunity from prosecution for witnesses called before federal juries; the result will be to compel witnesses to testify against their will—to become informers or rot in prison. In New York where such a law is already in effect, a professor from the State University has twice been sent to jail for a term of 30 days for refusing to tell a grand jury which of his students is smoking pot.
A second weapon will be to make it a federal crime for a local policeman or public official to accept a bribe from gamblers; also, any gambling operation which involves 5 or more persons or lasts for 30 days or whose daily take exceeds $2,000 will be a federal crime. The clear effect of these laws is to create the skeleton of a national police force reaching into every city and hamlet, every home, factory and shop in America. The ubiquitous football pool will now become a potential federal criminal conspiracy!
But even more ominous is the proposal to create a panoply of weapons to attack the property of “organized crime” through the injunctive powers of contempt and seizure (shades of Truman and the steel mills I), through “monetary fines and treble damage suits” and “the powers of a forfeiture of property”. Let it be noted that none of these extraordinary powers can be limited to the Cosa Nostra—since no such entity exists in law. These “weapons” will apply to the persons and properties of individual citizens who will be convicted of crimes against the State. Or will anyone be safe from sudden disruption or seizure of his wealth on the ground that it is tainted as having been derived from some Mafioso? The President specifically cites his desire to strike “a critical blow at the organized crime conspiracy” by levying fines on their real estate corporations, treble damages against their trucking firms and banks, and seizing the liquor in their warehouses.
In case you still doubt the broader implications of the Nixon war, the President promises that if the Federal Racket Squads successfully enforce the new laws—squads composed of agents of the FBI, SEC, IRS, Post Office, Narcotics and Customs Bureaus and the Secret Service among others—“building on this experience” the Attorney General “will determine” whether “this concept of governmental partnership should be expanded (to other major problem areas) through the formation of additional squads.”
We wonder who will succeed the Mafia as public enemy Number One? Mr. Kleindienst’s “ideological criminals”?
— J. R. P.
A Semi-Monthly Newsletter
THE
Libertarian Forum↩
| Joseph R. Peden, Publisher | Washington Editor, Karl Hess | Murray N. Rothbard, Editor |
| VOL. II, NO. 3 | February 1, 1970 | 35¢ |
BIAFRA, RIP
After more than two years of heroic struggle against overwhelming odds, little Biafra lies murdered—murdered by the centralizing State forces of Nigeria, forces that were backed, of course, by those two great centralizing powers of our time, the United States and the Soviet Union. Over two million Ibo tribesmen—the bulk of the citizens of Biafra—lie dead, two million more lives racked up on the permanently bloody altar of central State power.
The American public is totally unfamiliar with the real situation in Africa. They tend to think of “countries” like Nigeria, the Congo, Gabon, etc. as genuine countries, as people bound together by common ties of culture, language, fellowship, and other attributes of nationhood. Nothing could be further from the truth. None of these African countries are countries in any legitimate sense of the term; they are geographical figments, grotesque parodies of nationhood.
How did they get that way? These nations, though now independent or quasi-independent, are all legacies of Western imperialism. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, Britain, France, and Portugal engaged in a mad scramble to conquer and carve up the numerous tribes and the vast land area of the African continent. The carving was purely the result of scramble and agreement, and had nothing to do with the ethnic, cultural, or tribal boundaries in the continent. Regions and districts were based purely on the administrative convenience of the imperial power, not on the needs or realities of the tribes involved. Many tribes were split down the middle by the boundaries of these “countries”.
One would think that when the British and French finally left Africa, this unholy mess would be straightened out and the needed realignment and splitting-up of countries finally take place. But this was not to be. For the British and French could only rule the immensely greater populations in Africa by finding local rulers, satraps and collaborators, to govern the native population on behalf of the imperial power. The first step of an imperial power is to find or create channels of rule by creating native satraps and “quislings” who can serve as transmission belts for imperial dictation. The Western powers found those satraps in two ways. One was by working through existing tribal chieftains, helping these chieftains cement their rule over their own tribes and over other tribes in the region. Another was by creating an educated urban elite who would staff the offices of government and rule the scattered but silent rural majority of the country. When the British and French made their orderly withdrawal from their official empire, they took care to leave their bureaucratic and feudal satraps in charge of the various countries. Britain and France then remain as de facto, though no longer de jure, imperialists, and the new native elites remain close economic and political collaborators with their old masters. The last thing that the new elites want is self-determination and national justice for the numerous African tribes; their own parasitic and exploitative power rests on retaining the old imperial boundaries and strong central governments derived from imperial rule.
Nigeria, for the libertarian, is a particularly poignant example of the African middle. By favoritism and gerrymandering, the British made sure that the newly independent Nigeria would be governed by the feudal chieftains and emirs of the backward Moslem North. Not only suppressed but also systematically slaughtered were the Ibos of Eastern Nigeria. Everyone knows that the Ibos are generally hated in West Africa for being the embodiment of the “Protestant” virtues: intelligence, hard work, thrift, entrepreneurial ability. Give a few Ibos half a chance and they will create jobs, commerce, and wealth wherever they go. Even more fascinating for the libertarian is that the Ibos, of all the tribes in the region, have always been libertarian and quasi-anarchistic. Their tribe never suffered from centralized rule, and their methods of government were so loose and so local as to be virtually tantamount to no aggressive government—no State—at all. Hence they gave the British conquerors of the nineteenth century by far the most trouble of all the tribes, because the British could find no tribal rulers, no satraps, to act as transmission belts for their rule. Because of the anarchism of the Ibos, the British found them almost unconquerable and found that they could not be ruled. Hence the British, too, hated the Ibos.
When the government of Nigeria began to subject the Ibos to persecution and slaughter, they declared their independence and established the nation of Biafra. Of course Britain supported the Nigerian State. Of course Soviet Russia, with its horror of decentralization, secession, or national independence from central rule, backed the Nigerian State. And of course the United States did the same, piously inveighing against the “Balkanization” of the African continent. All of these Empires want the Third World to have unitary and “efficient” rulers who can follow their own orders, and dictate easily to their subjects below. All of these monster States are implicated in the shame of the murder of little Biafra.
We can only hope that someday Biafra will rise again, and that ethnic justice, come that resurrection morn, will redraw the map of Africa.
LEFT AND RIGHT
The Psychology Of Opposites
What is Left? What is Right?
On the rapidly changing American scene the distinction between Left and Right is becoming more and more a question of personal psychology. The scramble of ideologies is undergoing such an upheaval at present it is virtually impossible to label a political candidate on the basis of his position papers. When Norman Mailer ran in the Democratic Mayoralty primary in New York City last year he identified his political position as “to the left and to the right of everybody else.” And he was right. His radical decentralist program defied all standards of liberal/conservative traditionalism. He scornfully referred to this tradition as “the soft center of American politics” and offered a program closest to the quasi-anarchist position of Paul Goodman.
Anarchists, and those calling themselves anarchists, abound on both sides of the political spectrum, from the grabbag collection of SDS to the split-off faction of YAF. Timothy Leary, running for Governor of California, adopts a platform of pure free-market libertarianism and is called a “Radical Leftist”. Ronnie Reagan, long-time favorite of conservative free enterprisers, promises to Preserve and Protect the corporate-liberal status quo even if he has to break some skulls doing it.
(Curious, isn’t it, what superb bulldogs the conservatives make for the liberal superstructure?).
As Bulldog Nixon swings the Right more accurately into a position of total repression, and Spiro the Righteous roams the earth impugning the courage of those who would rather live than die in Vietnam, everyone of even the slightest libertarian sympathies is polarized more sharply to the Left. So Left is Right and Right is Left. Free market is Left and Socialism is Right. Voluntary communes are Left and State Capitalism is Right.
It’s enough to give you a headache.
But the long-term test of whether an individual will identify with the Left or with the Right is one—as I mentioned earlier—of personal psychology. The Left, it seems to me, has the capacity of bleeding for flesh-and-blood human beings. Even the horrible liberals, lately scorned by both radical capitalists and pot-happy flower children, were originally motivated by the desire to “help the oppressed”. The fact that they chose the worst means possible of doing it—coercion rather than freedom—is another question entirely. The concern for fellow human beings which originally motivated them was genuine. Now they are fat and powerful and they use the Reagans and Agnews to protect them when all attempts at co-optation end in failure. They are the New Conservatives while those who call themselves conservatives are nothing more than bully boys for their corporate-liberal mentors.
The Left bleeds for flesh-and-blood people.
The New Left—the radicals, the revolutionaries, the students who are turning against their social democratic parents—are driven by outrage; they are obsessed with a mania for justice because other human beings are victimized by racism, because fellow humans are imprisoned in rotting tenements riddled with filth and rats. They see the injustice that exists around them and they are incensed because they have the capacity to identify with the victims of an unyielding and thoroughly unresponsive superstructure, a system controlled and operated by insatiable racketeers and their political puppets who will never give up power until they are smashed out of existence.
The Left bleeds for people.
While the Right—even our anarchist friends recently separated from YAF—concern themselves with abstractions. They are more upset over the fact that their free market principles are not given a chance to operate than they are because fellow humans are trapped in overcrowded schools and ghettos. They seem to be incapable of emphasizing with suffering individuals and dismiss all such concern as misguided altruism. Their notion of justice is one which involves only themselves, and they fail to see that they will never enjoy personal freedom until all men are free of injustice. The Objectivist drive for liberty is not so much to create a world in which all men are free to live their lives in peace, but rather to conjure a society in which Galt-like superheroes with wavy hair and “ice-blue eyes” can demonstrate their economic superiority over “parasitic illiterates who litter the welfare rolls.”
Thus it is possible for our anarcho-Objectivist friends in Philadelphia to hold demonstrations calling for the “Release of John Gait”—while Bobby Seale is fighting for his existence in Chicago.
Thus it is possible for our Objectivist friends in Maryland to ask me to prove that Fred Hampton and Mark Clark “had not committed or threatened to commit violations of the rights of others . . .”—after they had been shot in their beds at four in the morning by Chicago police (this article is my answer to them).
Thus it is possible for these same right-wing anarchists to speak of the Vietcong as “communists” and “morally evil” despite the fact that ninety-five percent of them have probably never read Karl Marx and are concerned mainly with the swollen bellies of peasant children.
How does one begin to understand such a mentality? How does one begin to understand an individual who can bleed for an unlikely, dehumanized character out of fiction but not for the young victims of an early-morning police raid on the apartment? How does one understand the special arrogance of fellow “anarchists” who are content to establish a personal sphere of economic freedom and let the rest of society go to hell with itself? How does one understand a “libertarian” organization which wears on its masthead the American dollar sign (hardly the symbol of free market currency), or fellow “anarchists” who cavort in public in stretch suits and gigantic dollar signs plastered over their torsos?
It would be too easy to blame it all on Ayn Rand. This gentle lady did not create this special psycho-mentality out of nothing; she merely tapped an attitude that was already there simmering under the surface and brought it into the open. The fact that so many people responded so enthusiastically to her Cult of Total Self-Absorption (as distinct from genuinely rational self-interest) provides a good deal of insight into the makeup of the right-wing mentality.
The Objectivists, despite all their talk of individual liberty and limited government, are inveterate Right Wingers. Anarcho-Objectivists are no exception for they still adhere to the psychology of fiction-worship and are incapable of bleeding for the flesh-and-blood world surrounding them.
The philosophical division between free market anarchists and voluntary communists is growing less important in light of the current struggle to free the neighborhoods from outside control. The purist ideals of total communal sharing and a totally free market of individual traders are important in themselves as ideals, as logical ends of different though consistent processes of reasoning. But the most important factor in the rough-and-tumble struggle for survival, the war to secure the right of flesh-and-blood people to control their own affairs, is the psychology of comradeship. It is the ability to identify with the actual victims of injustice that cements the bond uniting revolutionaries on the Left, whether they call themselves anarcho-communists, free market anarchists, or just plain radicals.
Terminology has ceased to be important. As we enter a period of overt repression it is this crucial psychological attitude toward our fellow human beings that will determine on which side of the political fence each one of us will stand.
— Jerome Tuccille
Massacres In Vietnam
The Old Right’s great responsibility over the last quarter century has been that of bearer of the most profound truth about the American state. As Harry Elmer Barnes expressed it after the U.S. had unleashed its massive bombings of Vietnam—“we always knew that the business of the U.S. government is mass murder.” The Old Right at the end of the second great imperialist war in 1945 recognized the special repugnance of the U.S. government. The burden of that fact was so great that many sought to evade the responsibility by adopting the historical amnesia of the New Right which paralleled the historical blackout about that war imposed by the Old Left (that this parallel is more than accidental may be suggested by the fact that many of the philosophers of the New Right had been the creators of the historical blackout when they were part of the Old Left).
The massive bombings of civilians by the U.S. air force was a natural development of American imperialism. The fire bombings of German cities such as Hamburg and Dresden, of Japanese cities such as Tokyo, and finally the atomic bombing of two Japanese cities, was the result of the unquestioned assumption which formed the foundation of U.S. policy. The development and application of strategic airpower to civilian populations is the unique contribution of the U.S. to that whimsical facade labeled Christian Civilization.
The Old Right found a uniting element in its condemnation of the U.S. technological implementation of its program which declared a whole people to be The Enemy. On October 5, 1946, in his famous Kenyon College speech “Equal Justice under Law”, (in Arthur Ekirch, Voices in Dissent, An Anthology of Individualist Thought in the United States Citadel Press), which attacked the launching of the Cold War by the untried war criminals of the second world war, Churchill, Truman et al., Senator Robert A. Taft analyzed this American advance to barbarism. Taft described the Cold War policy as an abandonment of international law and the substitution of naked U.S. police power. This was a continuation of the American foreign policy which had lost sight of the truth that the police are incidental to the law, and that any deviation by the police from absolute adherence to law makes the police the creators of complete disorder in society. The U.S. failure to respect the law of humanity by its war against civilians had created the postwar disorder in world society. “Our whole attitude in the world, for a year after V-E Day,” Taft declared, “including the use of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, seems to me a departure from the principle of fair and equal treatment which has made America respected throughout the world before the second World War.”
The continued application of total war against civilians was carried out against the Korean people by the U.S. air force, 1950-53. Although some of the facts of U.S. genocide against the Korean people were reported at the time in European papers, little was known about it in America due to the blackout by the government-inspired press (the tentative moves recently by a few elements of the media toward independence brought forth the massive bellows from the offices of the chief magistrate as well as of the president of the senate).
Thus, when the U.S. unleashed its massive fire power against the Vietnamese people, it was remnants of the Old Right who understood immediately the absolute barbarism being applied in Vietnam while the Old Left and most of the amorphous New Left spent months in utter confusion about the realities of U.S. policy due to an almost incurable patriotism. The pacifist movement had shared the Old Right’s analysis and burden regarding American barbarism during and since the second world war. As a result they were equally in the forefront in understanding the genocidal nature of the war against the Vietnamese people (A. J. Muste, Dave Dellinger and Staughton Lynd were most active in this regard).
Old Right elements in the current anti-imperialist movement emphasized what others had not the memory or the experience with U.S. barbarism to know. Thus, they were in a position to perform a vanguard function by initially raising the issue of genocide and presenting the earlier history of U.S. barbarism to convince those anti-imperialists who had not yet shed their love affair with the U.S. government. Finally, after the U.S. intervention in Vietnam had become understood, the anti-imperialist movement adopted the radical critique presented by the Old Right. The Old Right transmitted to the Movement as a whole the realization that the U.S. government and its agents are war criminals. The recognition of the criminal nature of the U.S. state and its servants was the major intellectual advance which permitted the Movement to grow from protest to resistance.
The Vietnamese in the northern and southern parts of their country have been subjected to the war crimes committed by the U.S. war criminals for more than five years. They have been poisoned with chemicals and anti-personnel gases, bombed by anti-personnel bombs, cluster bombs and the many other devices developed by U.S. know-how. B-52 saturation bombings, ‘free fire zones’ air strikes, search and destroy missions, torture, atrocities and massacres by the U.S. have become the everyday life of the Vietnamese people. Having suffered this genocide the Vietnamese may wonder if it was not irony when the incumbent chief U.S. war criminal insisted that the atrocities and barbarism must continue in order to save them from . . . massacres. As recent revelations have verified, the Vietnamese are being subjected daily to massacres by the U.S. The victims include men, women and children. The most famous crime attributed to the Germans during World War II was the 1942 massacre in the Czech town of Lidice where every male was shot, but not the women and children. The U.S., unlike the Germans, has universalized the atrocity to make a Lidice out of the whole of Vietnam.
The chief manager of genocide touched all our hearts by his sincerity when he declared recently: “We saw the prelude of what would happen in South Vietnam when the Communists entered the city of Hué last year. During their brief rule there, there was a bloody reign of terror in which 3,000 civilians were clubbed, shot to death and buried in mass graves.” The case of Hué was discussed in an article in The Christian Century (Nov. 5, 1969) by Len Ackland who had lived in Hué and speaks Vietnamese. Writing about the seizure of Hué by the National Liberation Front, he said: “When on the first day of the attack, about 20 Vietcong entered Gia Hoi (a precinct of 25,000 residents in Hué) in order to secure the area, they carried with them a list of those who were to be killed immediately as ‘enemies of the people.’ According to Le Ngan, director of Hué’s special police, the list consisted of five names, all those of officers of special police.” The Catholic priest of the district explained that “none of his clergy or parishioners were harmed by the NLF.” The Saigon rulers refused to make Hué an open city to save the lives of the citizens. Instead, the Saigon army and U.S. marines undertook the systematic destruction of Hué by bombing and artillery in order to dislodge the NLF who had gained control of the city without resistance. No Saigon officials have sought to estimate the number of people killed by the American bombings and artillery attacks on Hué. Tran Van Dinh, a former Vietnamese envoy to Washington who broke with the Thieu-Ky regime, is a resident of Hué and described how members of his own family had been reported by the Saigon government as killed by the NLF while the family knew they had been victims of the U.S. bombing and had been buried in temporary graves since a regular burial was impossible during the U.S. bombardments. As George McT. Kahin, Cornell professor and America’s most prestigious Southeast Asian scholar, has noted, the three thousand people who died in Hué were mainly the victims of U.S. bombs, bullets, shells and napalm—an additional aspect of the overall genocide committed by the U.S. against the Vietnamese people. So much for the fabricated “Vietcong massacres”.
Having observed the complete lack of accuracy in the presidential statement, it is necessary to ask why it was possible for the NLF to take Hué in a few hours without many shots while it required 26 days for the U.S. marine corps to recapture Hué at the price of thousands killed by American bombardments. The northern half of South Vietnam (part of the province of Annam which is divided by the 17th parallel) had been the center of the struggle of Vietnam’s Buddhist majority for freedom from the Diem dictatorship which they caused to be overthrown in 1963. When the Thieu-Ky government imposed similar restrictions on their freedom, the Buddhist students in cooperation with the civil authorities and army commanders in this region in this region established an autonomous government in early 1966. Accepting the good faith of U.S. pro-consul, Henry Cabot Lodge, these civil, military and religious leaders of the Vietnamese of the region were betrayed and the Saigon troops were flown into Hué and other cities in U.S. transports to seize control and arrest the local leaders. Those who escaped became members of the National Liberation Front. Thus, leading the forces which entered Hué two years later were the former Buddhist leaders of Hué. These were welcomed by their compatriots, the citizens of Hué, while the Saigon officers and troops fled. Given the purges and executions committed by the Saigon police in Hué for two years, that only five special police in the district, according to the non-NLF source, were to be punished suggests the validity of the frequent accusation against the NLF that they are too mild and insufficiently rigorous in carrying out popular justice against the major criminals of the state apparatus. But, then it has always been beyond the conception of our European minds how Asians have such reverence for human life, even of an enemy. The race against time is whether the Vietnamese will have taught this to Americans before they are exterminated.
— Leonard P. Liggio
Recommended Reading
ANTIOCH REVIEW. The Fall, 1969 issue ($1.50) is a special issue devoted to a critique of the professional scholarly associations. Particularly recommended are Alan Wolfe on the political science association and Martin Nicolaus on the sociologists.
Frederick Forsyth, The Biafra Story (Baltimore: Penguin Books, paper, $1.45). A sympathetic account of the Biafran struggle by a British journalist.
H. D. Graham and T. R. Gurr, The History of Violence in America (New York Times: Bantam Books, paper, $1.25, 822 pp.) Fascinating report on the history of American violence, as delivered to the national commission on violence. Particularly recommended are the two deeply and thoroughly researched articles by Prof. Richard M. Brown: “Historical Patterns of Violence in America”, and “The American Vigilante Tradition”, on the numerous American movements for private, non-governmental justice.
George Kateb, “The Political Thought of Herbert Marcuse”, Commentary (January, 1970), 15 pp. A quietly effective refutation of much of the nonsense perpetrated by the leading New Left philosopher.
Mickey and John Rowntree, “More on the Political Economy of Women’s Liberation”, Monthly Review (January, 1970), 6 pp. The first sensible article on the women’s liberation hokum, pointing out that capitalism emphatically does not insist that women remain in the home (certainly a precapitalist hangover), and rational economic reasons why wage rates for women tend to be lower and unemployment rates higher than for men.
A Semi-Monthly Newsletter
THE
Libertarian Forum↩
| Joseph R. Peden, Publisher | Washington Editor, Karl Hess | Murray N. Rothbard, Editor |
| VOL. II, NO. 4 | February 15, 1970 | 35¢ |
THE TASK AHEAD
The libertarian movement stands on the threshold of a notable future. In the past year, the movement was launched into the “take-off” stage of its hoped-for future growth. In the past year, libertarianism has changed from a congeries of local small “circles” into an emergent mass movement, largely among the nation’s youth. The strong and militant libertarian minority broke off, or was broken off, from the conservative-statist Young Americans for Freedom, including virtually the entire YAF body from California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Virginia. The large and growing California movement is moving toward its own organization, and is organizing its own Left/Right conference in Los Angeles at the end of February. The Pennsylvania and other ex-YAF elements have merged with the Society for Rational Individualism to form the new, many-thousand strong Society for Individual Liberty. The Student Libertarian Action Movement, several “Libertarian Alliances” and numerous organs and journals of opinion have emerged during the past year. Articles expressing or commenting on this new and vibrant trend have appeared in such mass-circulation magazines as Playboy, Ramparts, Newsweek, and—the latest—Cavalier (March, 1970), and the accession of Karl Hess to the pure libertarian cause has had an enormous impact.
The burning question before us is: where do we go from here? How do we accelerate our growth and build upon, rather than lose, our momentum? This is a problem which all of us must think about and discuss, especially since strategy and tactics are an art rather than anything like an exact science.
It seems to me that the prime consideration is to develop the libertarian movement—the “cadre”—as such. Many libertarians spend too much of their time and energy worrying about alliances: should they ally themselves with Right or Left or whatever? A far more important task is to build our own movement, especially now that we are strong enough to do so. Only by building our own movement, after all, can we spread and develop our own notably important and striking body of ideas. Strategic and tactical alliances with other groups are all very well, but they should flow from our own strength, with the idea always uppermost that we are “using” our allies as leverage to make our own ideas more effective.
Unfortunately what has happened all too often is that libertarians have forged alliances out of weakness, and then have begun to abase themselves before those allies, whether of Right or Left, so that soon the means becomes an end in itself, and preserving the alliance, or keeping our allies happy, comes to take on more importance than the spread of our own doctrines. Let us always remember that we should be using our allies, rather than the other way round. This means that it is fatal to stop criticizing our allies from our own principled point of view; for once we stop doing that, we begin to abase ourselves before tactical allies, and to lose sight of the point of the whole proceeding: the advancement of libertarianism. We should stop worrying about alienating our allies, and let them worry more about alienating us.
Furthermore, we have reached a point in history where there is little room for fruitful alliances with other organizations. YAF is of course impossible; but so now is SDS, which has become either orthodox Stalinist, or, as in the case of the Weathermen, politically psychotic. What has happened is that the Weathermen, finding no mass base of support anywhere, has decided that the entire American population, that is those who are not Weathermen members, are The Enemy, and therefore must be wiped out—in a despairing and crazed attempt thereby to help the liberation movements overseas. Therefore, the Weatherman leadership now exalts indiscriminate violence against any Americans, including even the abominable and psychotic murder of Sharon Tate. As a result, the Weathermen chanted “Charlie Manson power”, and hailed the murder of “the pig” Sharon Tate, since in their lexicon, everyone, not simply the police, have become “pigs” who are to be “offed” (gotten rid of). There is little or nothing to be gained, at this point, from organizational alliances; what we must do, then, is to attract the myriad of unorganized individuals, on the Left or the Right, who are instinctively libertarian, and who are groping for libertarian guidance and fellowship. This, as I understand it, is part of what the February California conference is designed to do.
But if we are to concentrate on developing our own organization, then we must be able to deal with divisions; among ourselves, for right now we encompass a very wide spectrum from “extreme right” to “extreme left”. Unless we can find a way to “peacefully coexist” among ourselves, there is little we can do to advance our cause in the “outside” world. But this means that the width of our spectrum has to be reduced, for if our differences are too wide, we become inherently more antagonistic than harmonious, and any attempts at unity will be a phony papering-over of differences that will fail just as readily as an alliance with YAF or SDS.
What I would like to see, then, is for both the extreme right and the extreme left of our movement to move sharply toward the center—to use an odious term, toward our “mainstream”. For our “anarcho-rightists”: for our ex-YAFers, ex-Randians, etc. this means largely abandoning totally their vestigial devotion to the American State: toward our Constitution, our foreign policy, our army, and our police. We must hold as our foremost objective the abolition of that State. For our anarcho-leftists this means abandoning the capricious urge for immediate “action” against that State, regardless of its certain failure, and the tendency to abandon free-market and individualist principles for the sake of unity with a powerless and trivial handful of communist-anarchists. Both extreme groups should prepare themselves to settle down, calmly and soberly but with cool and passionate dedication, to a thoughtful and protracted lifelong struggle for liberty and against the State. But this means that we must try to build a permanent movement, and that we try to develop lifetime careers that would enable each one of us to maximize our influence on behalf of liberty. And this means abandoning the “now generation’s” heedless and hedonic emphasis on the immediate present moment, and instead returning to the old-fashioned “Protestant ethic” emphasis on building steadily and rationally toward the longer future. We must try our best to become, as much as possible, “professional libertarians”, that is, people with lifelong careers in the service of libertarianism.
One important form of struggle which tends to be scorned by both of our extremes is simple, orthodox political action. This kind of working for political candidates is surely unglamorous, but it is often important for itself—in keeping a far “greater evil” out of office on behalf of a decidedly “lesser evil”—and also in reaching vast numbers of middle-class citizens who cannot be reached in any other way. We would like to abolish these various political offices, but so long as these offices exist, and the State offers us a choice, however puny, we often can influence our fate in an important way by deciding between them. And while, in the ultimate sense, we oppose both candidates, there are often times when one is far worse than the other; if, for example, we were faced with a choice between Richard Cobden or Genghis Khan for President, we would surely plunge into the Cobdenite movement with enthusiasm, despite Cobden’s falling a bit short of the pure anarchist position. But what we should then do would not be to bury our own identify within that movement, but rather continually propagandize within it for a more pure and consistent libertarian viewpoint. Such is the proper role of an ideological alliance.
What the movement needs more of, in short, is what the country as a whole needs more of nowadays: the tempering of the immediate, hot-headed, irrational passions of the moment into a sober, rational, farseeing, dedicated, protracted struggle toward a libertarian future.
Phony Libertarianism
Shortly after the YAF convention last August that organization was stripped of its libertarian veneer when several hundred libertarian radicals and anarchists split away to form their own society. Now it is apparent, judging by the YAF magazine The New Guard, that subtle attempts at co-optation are being made to seduce the dissidents back to YAF.
Co-optation is a rare practice for the Right Wing. The Right has always preferred to bludgeon its opponents out of existence than to corrupt them with favors. After all, it is ungentlemanly for any self-righteous protector of Christian civilization to sully his reputation by flirting with the Devil.
But the latest editor of The New Guard, Ken Grubbs, is a decent fellow in many ways. He really thinks of himself as a libertarian and he would rather sit down and reason with the occupiers of People’s Park before unleashing Ronnie Reagan to chew them up. I suspect that if it comes to a final showdown Ken Grubbs will turn his head sadly rather than stay and enjoy the massacre. And that is more than one can say about your run-of-the-mill Buckleyite.
Understanding this, we can now flip through the January, 1970 issue of The New Guard until we come to an editorial entitle, “YAF: a Philosophical and Political Profile”. The editorial deals with the results of a “survey” designed to ascertain the philosophical/political makeup of the YAF membership. For the first time to my knowledge Objectivism has now been admitted into the “mainstream” of YAF thought. According to this mythical “survey” ten percent of the YAF membership subscribe to the Objectivism of Ayn Rand while another twelve percent adhere to the libertarianism of Ludwig von Mises. How does the rest of YAF break down? Nine percent apparently like Frank Meyer’s “fusionism”; forty-eight percent thrill to the tune of Bill Buckley’s “conservatism”; another fifteen percent dance to the beat of Russell Kirk’s “traditionalism”; and the final six percent march in goose-like step to L. Brent Bozell’s “radical traditionalism”.
Even if we were to accept these figures as the results of a genuine survey it would still mean that seventy-eight percent of the YAF membership subscribe to a pro-administration, pro-status quo position ranging the Right Wing gamut from Frank Meyer to Brent Bozell (Bozell, by the way, recommends a church-state reverence for a Christian past with Roman Catholicism offered as the “path to our salvation” while Russell Kirk relies upon “moral prescriptions from our ancestors” and an “aristocracy based upon vocational, artistic and intellectual excellence.”).
But even Objectivism these days is no guarantee of libertarian principles. Jeffrey St. John is an Objectivist and he continually makes the rounds tooting his horn for the destruction of “international communism” and the suppression of dissidents at home. In short he is a conservative, as Ayn Rand herself has become a selfish conservative, adding a dash of atheism to the Right Wing brew which is only now becoming fully assimilated into it.
All this is nothing more than a prelude to the piece de resistance of the January issue, an article entitled “The Theatre of the ‘Conspiracy’”, authored by the Hippie Hatchet Man of the New Right, Phillip Abbott Luce.
What is one to make of Luce?
What is one to make of anyone who exchanges one brand of fascism for another and, hypocritically enough, tries to label his new position libertarianism? The very word, libertarian, is shortened to four letters in the mouth of someone like Luce. It is easier to respect the raw, open, undisguised hatred of Strom Thurmond than the same Right Wing line when it is deliberately concealed by long hair, aromatic weed, and New Left cultural jargon.
Luce begins his article by describing the Conspiracy Trial in Chicago as a “legal happening”. He then goes on to excoriate the defendants for their “overt refusal . . . to cater to the generally accepted etiquette of courtroom procedure.”
He continues:
“The defendants have made it abundantly clear from the time of their indictments that they consider the trial a crock. One of the defendants, Tom Hayden of SDS infamy, has written, ‘Since the trial has sparked widespread international concern, the Conspiracy hopes to turn it into a political showdown.’”
“From the outset, the eight defendants have attempted to make a mockery of the trial.”
“. . . Judge Hoffman is in a most unenviable position of having to attempt to act as a responsible and reasonable judge over a group of incorrigible media-oriented indictees. What indeed is a judge, conditioned to sane trials, to do when a defendant keeps shouting ‘You fascist dog! You fascist pig!’?”
“. . . to the Conspiracy the whole thing is a revolutionary game to be played on their terms or not at all.”
“The defendants have done everything possible to turn their trial into a stage show.”
“Bobby Seale had the dubious distinction of being the most outrageous of the defendants . . . He was aiming for publicity and possible martyrdom. His outbursts gained him both when the judge was forced to bind and gag him lest he continue to disrupt the trial.”
“Judge Hoffman was ultimately forced to sentence Seale to four years in prison for contempt of court.”
In the course of his despicable diatribe Luce refers to himself as a “civil libertarian” and even hints that he is a “radical”.
He is, of course, nothing of the sort. It would be too easy to dissect his analysis of the trial (part of which was originally published in National Review) and show him up for what he really is, but his own words condemn him more effectively than anyone else’s possible could.
Can any libertarian doubt that the Chicago trial is a political act staged by the federal government to make an example of some of the leading dissidents in the country?
How can any libertarian condemn the defendants for refusing to play according to the rules established by their executioners?
If the trial is not a mockery of justice, then what is it? And if it is a mockery, how can a libertarian fault the victims for treating it as such?
How can any judge be forced to sentence anyone to four years for contempt of court—unless by the political authorities?
How can any libertarian criticize Seale for demanding his moral right to defend himself? And how can any libertarian regard such a demand as contempt of court deserving of punishment?
How can anyone of even the slightest libertarian persuasion portray Judge Hoffman in the role of a reluctant victim of circumstances—a man who has shown nothing but contempt for the defendants and their attorneys from the start, mispronouncing their names and upholding every objection raised to every point they have tried to make in their own behalf?
No, Phillip Abbott Luce is not a libertarian. Nor is he a radical. With his long hair and hippie demeanor he is an effective weapon for the New Right in its attempts to co-opt the libertarian Right and in its desire to cloak its authoritarian nature with a facade of superficial libertarianism.
Whatever the reasons, he has allowed himself to be used as bait by the Buckley establishment. When they tire of his services they will cut him off. Perhaps, then, he can head up the Libertarian Wing of the American Nazi Party or go scuttling back to Progressive Labor.
What genuine libertarianism has to offer is consistent and persistent opposition to the policies of the U.S. government. Anything less gives libertarianism a bad name.
— Jerome Tuccille
MEET LIBERTARIANS
EAST
Massachusetts
William Baumgarth
114 A Richards Hall
Harvard University
Cambridge, Mass. 02138
Scott Borowsky
62 Overbrook Drive
Wellesley, Mass. 02181
Cathy Longinotti
Dawes House
Smith College
Northampton, Mass. 01060
Connecticut
Sign of the Dollar
219 Hamilton St.
Hartford, Conn. 06106
New York
Edward Smith
627 Second Ave.
New York, N.Y. 10016
New Jersey
Ralph Fucetola III
65 Mount Prospect Ave.
Verona, N. J. 07044
Pennsylvania
R. Lawrence Conley
923 4th Ave.
E. McKeesport, Pa. 15035
Delaware
Sally Stern
533 Country Club Drive
Woodbrook,
Wilmington, Del. 19803
SOUTH
Virginia
Teddy G. Caudell
4043 Tennessee Ave., N. W.
Roanoke, Va. 24017
Tennessee
Karen and Garrett Vaughan
Apt. 2201
5709 Lyons View Pike
Knoxville, Tenn. 37919
Georgia
John L. Snare
Box 33
Mercer University
Macon, Ga. 31207
Florida
Stephen Halbrook
514 Leisure Lane
Tallahassee, Fla. 32304
Randy Sides
Box 14481
Gainesville, Fla. 32601
Alabama
E. E. Culver
3405 Atlanta Ave.
Montgomery, Ala. 36109
Louisiana
Richard C, Johnson
Box 20882
Louisiana State Univ.
Baton Rouge, La. 70803
Texas
Mike Holmes
113 Baker College
Rice University
Houston, Tex. 77001
MID-WEST
Wisconsin
Donald McKowen
9343 West Lincoln
Milwaukee, Wise. 53227
Ted Sanstadt
Box G
Waushara Argus
Wautoma, Wise. 54982
Illinois
William J. Haga
Box 2068, Sta. A
Urbana, Ill. 61820
Missouri
David Zubatsky
323 Clara
Apt. 202
St. Louis, Mo. 63112
Mike Medvic
9018 Tudor
Overland, Mo. 63114
FAR WEST
Nevada
Arene Hackett
2150 Pinon Hill Dr.
Carson City, Nev. 89701
California
Northern California
Chris Gould
40 Tappan Lane
Orinda, Calif. 94563
Hal Jindrich
555 Middlefield # 5201
Mountain View, Cal. 94040
Rod Manis
Hoover Institution
Stanford, Calif. 94305
Sharon Presley
1154 Hanover
Daly City, Calif. 94014
Rosalie Nichols
2861 37th Ave.
Sacramento, Calif. 95824
Southern California
Kenneth Berger
2125 Via Rivera
Palos Verdes Estates,
Calif. 90274
Lowell Ponte
511 Terracina Boulevard
Redlands, Calif. 92373
Milton Shapiro
451 Converse Ave.
Claremont, Calif. 91711
Armed Forces
Jerry Whitworth
CR Division
USS Ranger CUAGI
FPO San Francisco, Calif. 96601
Hawaii
William Danks
1645 Dole St.
Apt. 402
Honolulu, Hawaii 96822
Canada
John Egolf
Box 523
Souris, Manitoba, Canada
Byron Fraser
5487 Buckingham Ave.
Burnaby 2, British Columbia,
Canada
Recommended Reading
James M. Buchanan, Cost and Choice (Chicago: Markham Pub. Co., 1969). A prominent Chicago School economist goes a long way toward adopting the Austrian theory of individualist, subjective value economics. Brief and non-mathematical, the book adopts the Mises-Hayek theory of costs.
Jane Jacobs, The Economy of Cities (New York: Random House, $5.95). Brilliant, scintillating work celebrating the primacy for economic development, past and present, of free-market cities. Also see the appreciative review by Richard Sennett, “The Anarchism of Jane Jacobs”, New York Review of Books (January 1, 1970).
James O’Connor, “The Fiscal Crisis of the State: Part I”, Socialist Revolution (January-February, 1970), 42 pp. (Available for $1.50 from Agenda Publishing Co., 1445 Stockton St., San Francisco, Calif. 94133). Analysis of current statism by a young Marxist economist who understands that the struggle to control and use the State is the current form of the “class struggle”.
Joseph Pechman, “The Rich, the Poor, and the Taxes They Pay”, The Public Interest (Fall, 1969), 22 pp. (Available for $1.50 at 404 Park Ave. So., New York, N.Y. 10016.) How the poor, rather than the rich, pay the taxes for the modern American welfare state.
John M. Peterson and Charles T. Stewart, Jr., Employment Effects of Minimum W age Rates (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, August, 1969), 165 pp. (Available for $2.00 from the American Enterprise Institute, 1200 17th St. N. W., Washington, D.C. 20036.) The most thorough, up-to-date study on the extent to which minimum wage rates have caused unemployment.
A Semi-Monthly Newsletter
THE
Libertarian Forum↩
| Joseph R. Peden, Publisher | Washington Editor, Karl Hess | Murray N. Rothbard, Editor |
| VOL. II, NO. 5 | March 1, 1970 | 35¢ |
Free Bill Kunstler!
The infamous Conspiracy trial in Chicago has piled repressive horror upon horror: conviction under a patently unconstitutional law that sends people to jail not for any criminal actions but solely for “intent”; the dragging of defense lawyers across the continent under arrest because they withdrew from the case by telegram; the refusal to permit Bobby Seale to defend himself; the subsequent shackling of Seale and then his summary conviction by Judge Hoffman for contempt and being sent to jail for four years; the convictions and sentencing of the defendants by Hoffman for contempt; the willingness of the minority jurors to override their belief in innocence in order to get home; and finally and most infamously, the summary conviction of the defense lawyers for contempt, with the chief lawyer, William Kunstler, being sentenced for more than four years in jail, for the crime of zealous and militant defense of his clients.
The actions of Judge Hoffman have, as nothing else, exposed for all to see the despotic nature of the federal judicial system in America. The judge is a tinpot tyrant, and very little that he says and does has, in actual fact, been subject to the review even of other judges, let alone the public at large. Contempt convictions enable the judge, the allegedly aggrieved party, to “try” the case himself, without benefit of jury or defense counsel or the usual safeguards of the legal system, and then to declare guilt himself and to carry out the sentence.
All this is bad enough, and the contempt convictions of the defendants are bad enough, but the conviction of Bill Kunstler strikes at the heart of any chance that defendants, especially political defendants who are charged with the crime of dissent, will be able to get any sort of fair trial in America. For if Bill Kunstler is sent to jail, what lawyer is going to put his neck in a noose for any future defendants? Who is going to be active and zealous and try his very best on behalf of his clients? And that, of course, is the purpose of Judge Hoffman: to strike a mortal blow at militant legal defense, and thereby to deprive any further dissenters of the right to the best defense they can possibly get.
As in everything else, Judge Hoffman was brutally frank about his purpose. In the course of sentencing Kunstler, Hoffman said: “If crime is, in fact, on the increase today, it is due in large part to the fact that waiting in the wings are lawyers who are willing to go beyond professional responsibilities, professional obligations, professional duty in their defense.” He added that the knowledge that such lawyers were available had a “stimulating effect” on potential criminals. Sure; if we eliminated defense lawyers altogether, it is still more sure that the conviction rate in this country would skyrocket; and we would also be hip-deep into a totalitarian society. One of the glories of the Anglo-Saxon legal structure is that everyone is innocent until proven guilty after the best possible case has been put up in his defense; if we are going to scrap this elementary legal safeguard, then this country is really lost, and none of us are safe.
If we are going to prevent total fascism in this country, if we are going to save the vestiges of American freedom, then all of us must make the freeing of Bill Kunstler a central concern. Here is a cause which surely our entire libertarian spectrum, regardless of other differences, should be able to back without stint or qualification. As Jerry Tuccille has urged, let us worry less about the oppression meted out to a non-existent fictional character, and more about the real oppression going on around us. One leading young writer, who calls himself a “philosophical anarchist”, has complacently and smugly declared: “After all, America is 95% free.” Well, Bill Kunstler is soon going to be zero free, and if his conviction for defending dissenters is allowed to stand, if he is going to be incarcerated for that sort of “crime”, then make no mistake, none of us is free.
Renew! Subscribe!
The Libertarian Forum is coming close to its glorious first anniversary, and the time for renewals is fast approaching. We are already the longest-lived, and the most important, libertarian organ in the country. Where else do you know that regularly, twice a month, you will receive news of the libertarian movement, analysis of events of the day from a libertarian perspective, discussion and critique of libertarian theory and practice? Furthermore, we have a nationwide circulation, and this means that each one of us, who tend to be isolated in his or her own community, can keep contact regularly with the broader, nationwide movement. The Libertarian Forum provides to each of us a sense of broader community which, at least so far, is the only one that we have.
So we urge each one of you to renew your subscriptions as they fall due. Furthermore, we are operating on a shoestring, and so any more subscriptions that you can get for us would be deeply appreciated. If each one of you found just one more subscriber for us we would be on a handsome footing.
We have only done as well as we have out of the generosity of our Libertarian Associates, who have earned our lasting gratitude by donating $15 or more during this first year of our existence. Renewals, and expansion, of our Associates is vital to our continued existence and growth. Associates and potential Associates should realize that it is only their generosity that allows us to make the Forum available to students at a reduced rate, and students, of course, are by far the largest source of new libertarians.
We welcome the following to the ranks of the Libertarian Associates:
Roy Halliday, Saugerties, N.Y.
H. G. Jinrich, Mountain View, Calif.
Jack Montgomery, State University, Arkansas.
PEOPLE JUSTICE
A significant control element in the preservation of law and peace within a society is the potential criminal’s fear of public exposure—not the imprisonment or fines he may suffer, but the humiliation and personal shame that results from the discovery and the publication of his delinquency. All criminals avoid, if they can, exposure to the censorious judgment of public opinion. By the same token, if a particular act is not judged criminal by public opinion, the State has great difficulty in capturing, prosecuting and convicting the alleged criminal successfully. Ultimately, in any society, a crime is any act that is not socially acceptable to the community as a whole, and the criminal is an isolated social deviant from the mores which the community by the widest social consensus determines to be “the law”. This would be just as true in an anarchic society as it is in a society which has developed the instrumentality we call the State.
This suggests that libertarians might do well to turn their attention to the task of exposing the manifest criminality of the State and its lackeys—not only by decrying taxation as theft or in the generalized terms so common in libertarian literature—but in specific and concrete terms with names, dates, places, victims and the specific crimes committed.
In the early history of the Celtic and Germanic tribes from whom so many of us are descended, free men met regularly with their neighbors to denounce alleged criminal acts committed by members of the community and to demand justice in the form of compensation to the victim for his injury. The community as a whole heard the case and in various ways aided the injured party to achieve his rights. Henry II of England is given credit for “creating” the grand jury as a means by which crimes could be detected and criminals brought to justice. Actually his jury system was part of a successful attempt to transfer the prosecution and punishment of crimes from the hands of free men acting within the traditions and with the consent of their neighbors to the hands of the royal justices and the royal courts imposing royal law for royal profit. The primitive but effective people’s courts were coopted and transformed into State courts, imposing legal rules and penalties unknown previously, and creating a State monopoly over the means of securing justice. As is well attested, this monopoly became the chief instrument by which the medieval state was strengthened and the profits of the courts were a most valued source of its income. In our own times, the grand jury has become an instrument of State oppression, controlled by judges and district attorneys, and selected from a narrow, unrepresentative panel of citizens. It is notorious that prospective jurors are selected from lists of property holders, chambers of commerce, and other highly select groups. This selectivity is used to ensure that the grand jurors reflect and protect the interests of the local ruling elites—racial, social and economic. In some areas, the grand jurors have openly acknowledged their group role by forming permanent “grand jurors’ associations” which perpetuate their collective self-identity and enhance their social solidarity. Thus the grand jury system is an important agency for the ruling elite who wield the power of the State, and monopolize the processes of justice. It seems to me that libertarians must find a way to reverse this process. We must take the law into our own hands once again like our ancient forefathers. We do so already in many ways—for example, we usually punish those who fail to pay their debts by publicizing the fact, thus alerting the community at large and greatly limiting the debtor’s future opportunities for delinquency. Newspapers publish the names of persons arrested, convicted or even suspected of crimes, thus opening them to public shame and ostracism. We regularly ask prospective employees, tenants, borrowers for letters of recommendation as to their character, and general reputation. A good reputation is still among a man’s most valued possessions.
Since we no longer possess the power to attain justice by threat or use of violent force upon those who have aggressed against us, deprived us of rights or property, (the State having seized and monopolized this power)—we must seek justice by the only means still readily available to us—the mobilization of public opinion. The criminals must be identified, their crimes exposed to the public eye, their reputations in society blackened until they are overtaken by remorse and offer to submit to justice and make compensation to the victims of their crimes.
Is this just another Utopian libertarian scheme? Another moral tract on what might be if we can “smash the State” in an apocalyptic moment? I believe it is not. Let us look for a moment at the Song My massacre and the Vietnam war as a whole. It is very likely that the immediate perpetrators of this atrocious crime will never be tried and punished by the courts of the United States, military or civil. The technicalities of the law, the pre-trial publicity, the lack of jurisdiction of military courts over ex-soldiers, and of civil courts over acts perpetrated outside their jurisdiction, the general political nature of the whole episode make it unlikely that much will come of the case. What would be valuable, however, is for some means to be found to determine the actual scope of the massacre, the names of those responsible and the degree of their guilt. If the men involved were so ruined in reputation that they were driven to retire from the army, or even forced into exile—the cause of justice would be served and the next time an officer led his troops into another Song My he would think more than once about murdering its population. If the government cannot perform this service, it could and should be done by private citizens who could constitute themselves as a Commission of Inquiry and set about the task of publicizing the nature of the crimes and the identification of the criminals.
In fact, on a broader scale, this job has already been done. In 1967 Bertrand Lord Russell, the distinguished British mathematician and philosopher, convoked an international panel of famed writers, historians, lawyers and scientists to sit as a tribunal to inquire into charges that the United States government had perpetrated a series of war crimes in violation of specific international treaties on the rules of war and a host of common crimes against the Vietnamese people. Two sessions were held, in Stockholm and then in Copenhagen, in which expert witnesses gave testimony in vivid detail as to the enormity of U.S. criminal acts in the Vietnam war. Though invited to testify, American officials refused to answer the charges and confined themselves to harassing the members of the tribunal and its staff, and demanding that their NATO allies cooperate in the task. The testimony was completed four months before the Song My massacre—but the American people were kept unaware of its findings. It documented in the most damning detail a record of human bestiality that places the United States among the all-time greats as a criminal State. (The full record of the testimony before the tribunal is available in paperback from O’Hare Books, 10 Bartley Road, Flanders, New Jersey, Price $5.75, appropriately titled Against the Crime of Silence.)
Indeed, the same technique is being used by former Justice Arthur Goldberg and Roy Wilkins of the NAACP to investigate the nationwide crackdown on the militant Black Panther Party. Since J. Edgar Hoohaw described the Panthers as the greatest single threat to the internal security of America (whatever happened to the Communist Party?), local police across the country have slain 28 Panthers, wounded, arrested and harassed hundreds of others, and subjected them to such violence that their white attorney has described it as “genocidal”. While the Goldberg-Wilkins Commission is clearly not sympathetic to the Panthers’ political views, its own prestige as part of the American Establishment, its very existence as an independent focus of public scrutiny of the police and their repressive tactics, ought to make the State and its lackeys more cautious in their continuing repression, and awaken those many Americans who still believe “It can’t happen here!”. The Russell Tribunal and the Goldberg-Wilkins Commission of Inquiry offer libertarians excellent models for future action. Serious thought should be given to the possible creation of private commissions of inquiry, local or national in scope, to expose the criminality of the State and its minions, to arouse the public against the vile and dastardly invasions of personal privacy by the FBI and other wiretappers, to inform them of the political and economic links between various special interests and the officials of the State, and of the rampant criminality of the police themselves. There is already a widespread suspicion that the cause of justice is deflected for reasons of State. When a respected member of the Warren Commission, Sen. Russell of Georgia, publicly admits that he thinks Lee Oswald was part of a conspiracy whose other members are still at large, how can the public believe in the integrity of justice under our State? When the admitted assassin of Martin Luther King publicly disputed the judge who sentenced him, insisting that he was not the sole murderer, the court silenced him and the case was closed. As Tom Wicker pointed out in the New York Times, (Dec. 16, 1969):
By now it is almost established practice for the Government to look outside existing institutions for a remedy or an explanation when serious crimes or shocking situations become too apparent to ignore. (This) derives from a developing mistrust of the official institutions and agencies of American justice—a mistrust, most seriously, of their motives, their very willingness to be fair and impartial, and a growing skepticism about their ability to function.
If Wicker is correct, the American people may be waiting for us to act!
— J. R. P.
Doctors And Drugs
Two recent medical reports on drugs make an important contribution to the raging controversy over the endemic use of drugs among the “now” generation.
I. The Canadian Report
Canada has appointed a commission of inquiry into the spreading use of drugs, headed by Dr. Keith Yonge, president of the Canadian Psychiatric Association. A memorandum by Dr. Yonge, summing up what will be concluded in the report, has been published in the Toronto Globe and Mail. Dr. Yonge’s findings lend scientific confirmation to the empirical impressions of many of us who have observed friends and acquaintances becoming absorbed into the “drug culture”. Dr. Yonge writes:
“. . . the use of these drugs (from marijuana on up) does indeed induce lasting changes in personality functioning, changes which are pathological in so much as they impair the ‘mental and social well-being’ . . . . The harmful effects are of the same order as the pathology of serious mental illness (psychosis), namely in distorting the perceptual and thinking processes and in diverting awareness from reality, impairing the individual’s capacity to deal with the realities of life.
“The argument that marijuana is no more harmful than alcohol is specious . . . The primary action of alcohol is that of a relaxant. Impairment of mental functioning occurs when intoxicating quantities are taken. Marijuana, as with all the psychotropic drugs, on the other hand, acts solely as an Intoxicant, its effects being primarily the distortion of perception and reasoning.
“In psycho-social development man grows from the prevalence of self-gratification and dependency, with little regard for reality, to the prevalence of self-determination and . . . involvement in his society. Against this progression, the trend toward ‘instant’ self-gratification and artificial self-exploration (by the use of psychotropic drugs) is distinctly regressive—a reversion to the immature, the primitive. The regression is further evidenced in the other trends in group behavior with which the non-medical use of drugs tends to be associated—reversion to the crude or primitive . . . however much these may be rationalized as emancipation from socio-cultural oppression.”
Right on, Doctor!
II. The Berger Report
A remarkably keen insight into one of the major causes of the spreading drug abuse was contained in an article in the December issue of Medical Times, by Dr. Herbert Berger, chairman of the Committee on Drug Abuse of the Coordinating Council of the City of New York, and associate professor of clinical medicine at New York Medical College. Reporting on a study of 343 teenage drug addicts and their families over a seven-year period, Dr. Berger found one striking factor common to all these youths: “an absolute hatred of ‘Compulsory Education’”, a hatred that came upon them early in primary school and had become fully developed by the age of 12. As Dr. Berger writes: “These are often uneducatable individuals. They believe that we arbitrarily deny them their freedom and insist on their attendance in school. Like all who are jailed they resent both the jailer and the jail. Society has incarcerated them in school—against their will. This is, in their eyes, an unjust punishment, therefore they feel within their rights to retaliate by breaking school windows, by criminal activity and by disrupting classes.”
Dr. Berger concludes that if education were made voluntary, some students would go eagerly to school, while “others would embrace apprenticeship in trades where they are sorely needed . . . Left to their own devices these adolescents may develop at their own pace: some quicker, some slower than that which an arbitrary society has chosen for them. Their goals may be vastly different from those which we have established. They are not necessarily wrong. Who would dare argue that a good carpenter is not a greater asset than a poor lawyer!”
Dr. Berger’s findings independently confirm the writings of Paul Goodman and others on the crippling effects of compulsory attendance laws on the nation’s youth. The youth are now indeed being imprisoned in the vast jailhouse of our public schools merely for the “crime” of being under 16 or 18 years of age. To liberate them the compulsory attendance laws must be repealed.
Postal Note
We have been hearing from several subscribers that they have not received some issues of the Forum, or that an issue has been severely delayed. The fault, dear reader, lies not in us but in our beloved Post Service. So if any of you should fail to get any issue, let us know, and we will try to send you the missing copy.
The Great Society
“What, then, is the productive contribution of government?”
— Murray N. Rothbard
The distant, leveled ground is stubbled with the stumps of trees.
The masons holler to teams of workmen on the slope
Pushing boulders by twos and threes.
The masters, waiting on the raised catwalk,
Shrug their stooping shoulders.
The stonecutters lay their chalk and chisels down.
Nimrod has come today.
To put an old crone to work.
Sweeping up.
— James D. Davidson
Recommended Reading
Benjamin Quarles, Black Abolitionists (Oxford Univ. Press, paper, $1.95). The neglected story of the role played by Negroes in the abolitionist movement.
Ronald Radosh, “The Bare-Knuckled Historians”, The Nation (February 2, 1970). Excellent report on the fracas at the December historians’ convention.
Peter Dale Scott, “Tonkin Bay: Was There a Conspiracy?”, New York Review of Books (Jan. 29, 1970), 11 pp. (Available for 50¢, annual sub. for $10, at 250 West 57th St., New York, N.Y. 10019.) The best work yet on Tonkin Gulf Revisionism, showing not only that there was no North Vietnamese attack even after severe U.S. provocation, but also that lower echelon intelligence officials undoubtedly fabricated the attack to induce the President to attack the North.
A. J. P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War (Fawcett, paper, 95¢). The great revisionist work on 1939, now out in a second edition, in which Taylor effectively answers his critics.
Stanley Diamond, “Who Killed Biafra?”, New York Review of Books (Feb. 26, 1970). Excellent pro-Biafra article by a distinguished anthropologist.
Edmundo Flores, “Land Reform in Peru”, The Nation (Feb. 16, 1970). The story of the only relatively thoroughgoing land reform not put into effect by Communist-led governments.
Peter Michelson, “Fictive Babble: Review of Ayn Rand’s The Romantic Manifesto”, New Republic (Feb. 21, 1970). Slashing critique of Rand’s latest book, including the point that the Rand of 1969 has begun to write like the villains of her own novels.
Murray N. Rothbard, “The Guaranteed Annual Income”, The Rational Individualist (September, 1969). (Available for 50¢, annual sub. $4.00, at 800 Hillsboro Drive, Silver Spring, Md. 20902.) A critique of the Nixon welfare program.
Robert Z. Aliber, “Gresham’s Law and the Demand for NRU’s and SDR’s: A Reply”, Quarterly Journal of Economics (November, 1969), pp. 704-05. Points out that the SDR “paper gold” will not necessarily cure the U.S. balance of payments. Gresham’s Law will induce foreign countries to prefer SDR’s to dollars, not just to gold.
(In general, the New York Review of Books is a brilliantly edited, scholarly bi-weekly tabloid eminently worth reading.)
A Semi-Monthly Newsletter
THE
Libertarian Forum↩
| Joseph R. Peden, Publisher | Washington Editor, Karl Hess | Murray N. Rothbard, Editor |
| VOL. II, NO. 6 | March 15, 1970 | 35¢ |
The New Left, RIP
We have to face it; we must face it: The New Left is dead. Dead as a doornail. Kaput. For those of us who hailed the New Left when it appeared, and urged libertarians to ally with it, this is a painful realization. But reality must be faced. That glorious, heady, revolutionary period of the life of the New Left (1964-1969) has come to an end.
First, the evidences of death. The evidence is everywhere. Perhaps the patient is not totally dead, but surely it is “medically dead”; the brain is long gone, the heart and spirit are failing fast, and what we are left with are the final reflexive convulsions of the corpse: the mindless and febrile twitchings of such pathetic and decaying groups as the Weathermen and the Patriot Party, the feeble high-camp of Yippie guerrilla theatre, the arrant nonsense of Women’s Liberation. The heart and body of the New Left are gone.
Almost from its inception, SDS was the heart and soul of the New Left, the bearer and carrier of its best libertarian and revolutionary instincts. SDS is dead, in an aggravated state of rapid disintegration, its onetime open libertarianism replaced by a handful of fanatic Stalinoid sects. The broader anti-war movement, which had SDS at its core, has folded completely in a few short months. At the brink of a crucial take-off after the October and November 1969 demonstrations, the left-liberal Moratorium, possibly scared of its own potential, possibly intimidated by Mitchell and Agnew, simply tucked tail and ran, folding at the horrifying prospect of its own rapid growth. And the New Mobe, organizer of the successful November demonstration, has sundered apart, taken over by feeble ultra-Left groups who want to graft on to the anti-war issue every cause but the kitchen sink. While America’s genocidal war in Vietnam goes on, virtually the entire Left has suddenly gotten bored with the whole issue and hived off to worry about the Environment—an eminently safe and co-optable issue where even Richard Nixon has become a militant. (Will the fellow who advocates air pollution please stand up?) Sure, Nixon’s cunning and demagogic Nov. 3 speech won over the “silent majority” temporarily. But what kind of a movement is it, how viable is it, that folds up and disappears at the first sign of a setback? Even the Democratic politicians, who had rediscovered the war issue at the time of the October moratorium, have slipped back into innocuous silence.
The student movement, which again had SDS at its heart, has also faded away. Columbia, Berkeley, San Francisco State, City College, Cornell, all the great centers of past struggle, are quiet and likely to remain so. It’s true that it’s been a cold winter, and that come spring, the students may well start up again. But even if they do, their demands are no longer in any sense revolutionary or even meaningful. Let’s face it: does one more “black studies institute” really matter? Are we supposed to go to the barricades for a demand that is innocuous at best, ludicrous at worst? The revolutionary student movement is dead also.
And black nationalism, the only sometime revolutionary force outside the students, has also shot its bolt. SNCC, the great and imaginative co-founder of the New Left and of the black liberation struggle, is dead. The Muslim groups and the Republic of New Africa have faded away. The cultural nationalists have disappeared. What we are left with are the Black Panthers who have (a) abandoned black nationalism for Marxism, and (b) are being systematically chopped down by the police, who are overreacting to a threat that never really existed, since the Panthers have far more support among adoring white radicals than they do in the black community. In retrospect, black nationalism has been finished since the murder of that superb leader, one of the great men of our epoch, Malcolm X. Those who murdered Malcolm knew that the black community would not be able to come up with anyone remotely approaching his stature and his potential. Those who came after Malcolm have been pygmies, excrescences upon a dying though only emerging cause. Instead of black national liberation, we now have only . . . what? Demands of black studies institutes, and, of course, the dashiki and the Afro haircut. The black liberation movement is dead.
II
If, then, the New Left is dead, this does not mean that its short life was not a glorious one. Its accomplishments were many and remarkable. It created the most intense, the most notable, and the most far-flung anti-war movement in the history of protest against American imperial wars. The New Left anti-war movement was begun by SDS in early 1965, and spread to almost an entire generation, and beyond. It succeeded in toppling an American President, and in forcing a halt to the bombing of North Vietnam. It managed to use that war, furthermore, to bring a consciousness of the imperialist nature of American foreign policy to millions of people. And it also managed to use the war to radicalize countless numbers of Americans, to reveal the imperial corporate state nature of the American system.
In the process, and here is perhaps the New Left’s biggest achievement, it destroyed Liberalism. Liberalism, with its muddled thinking, its hypocrisies, its almost universally accepted cover for corporate state tyranny and imperial aggression, has been forever exposed, in its total intellectual bankruptcy, by the young New Left movement. No one will hereafter take Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. or Max Lerner, or Walt Rostow seriously. To accomplish this destruction of Liberalism with no support in the Establishment, with virtually no financial resources, and in complete opposition to a State-subvened culture, was a remarkable feat. And it took the New Left, with its passionate dedication and its ability to expose the consequences in reality of Liberalism’s rhetoric, to do the job.
The New Left began in late 1964, with the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, and while it hardly succeeded in overturning the American university system, it has made an indelible mark. Before the New Left, corporate liberalism had succeeded in establishing a monstrous educational Leviathan that treated the growing mass of students as passive cogs in the machinery, as raw material to be processed to take their place in the state-monopoly system. The New Left has changed all that; the students and the youth are no longer the passive instruments of the “Age of Apathy” of the 1950’s, no longer the “Organization Men” of that epoch choosing jobs upon graduation with careful calculation of their pension rights. The youth are now almost universally active, independent, critical, even militant. Moreover, the universities will never again be able to treat the students as simple cogs; at least partial reforms have taken place, so that the wishes and views of the students will be at least consulted and to some extent heeded. The Liberal educationists will never again sit so pretty and comfortable upon their educational thrones.
Thus, the New Left made an indelible imprint upon an entire generation, a whole age-group becoming adults in fundamental opposition to bureaucracy and authoritarianism, refusing totally to be the Organization Men of their predecessors. This legacy of the New Left will remain, as will, of course, continuing notable contributions from particular individuals and scholars: the inspiring insights of Paul Goodman, the blend of moral passion and historical scholarship of Noam Chomsky, the fundamental revision of the study of the domestic and foreign American Leviathan by William Appleman Williams and his numerous and able young students in the historical profession.
III
But the New Left leaves also an unfortunate and negative tendency in American Life, and one that shows every sign of spreading through the country even as the political revolution goes to its grave. I refer to the so-called “cultural revolution”, or “counter-culture”, that blight of blatant irrationality that has hit the younger generation and the intellectual world like a veritable plague. There are strong signs, in fact, that the spread of the cultural “revolution” even as the political revolution fades is no accident; for, as Aldous Huxley foresaw in his remarkable Brave New World three decades ago, it is relatively easy for the Establishment to co-opt the cultural rebels by simply adopting the new “counter-culture”, and keeping the erstwhile rebels content on the ancient formula of despots: “bread and circuses”, except that now it’s dope and circuses. What better way to pull the teeth of knowledgeable dissent than to spread the ethic of indiscriminate “love”, the substitution of the hallucinatory exploration of a mythical “inner space” for a rational and purposeful acting upon reality in order to change it, the conscious abolition of reason and clarity of thought on behalf of vague, inarticulate stumblings and primitive “non-verbal communication”?
There are growing signs that the Establishment has indeed decided to embrace the “counter-culture”. Time, in its review of the 1960’s, called for precisely this kind of co-optation. And Time, Life, and the New York Times all celebrated the passive puerilities of the “Woodstock Nation”, while carefully and completely ignoring the murders and the systematic violence at the West Coast rock festival last December at Altamont. A particularly horrifying straw in the wind is the fact that the New York Times devoted the coveted front page of its Sunday Book Review of February 22 to a laudatory blurb for the works of the English psychiatrist R. D. Laing. Laing, the logical culmination of the militant irrationality of the counter-culture, goes so far as to proclaim the superior virtues of insanity in our “sick society”.
Thirty years ago, Ludwig von Mises wrote of a “revolt against reason” which he saw around him. But that revolt was tiddly-winks compared to the current open, all-out drive to liquidate reason and to substitute the ethic and the epistemology and the life-style of insanity.
How did the counter-culture take hold of the New Left? It began with an admirable desire to avoid the mistakes of the Old Left, especially the Old Left’s emphasis on government action and reform through government. Instead, the New Left wished to emphasize individual or personal liberation. But instead of arriving at a philosophy of individualism and rationality, the form of personal “liberation” which it came to adopt was the counter-cultural “liberation” from reason and the consequent enslavement to unexamined whim.
Let us look more closely at this spreading counterculture: the contempt for reason, logic, clarity, systematic thought, or knowledge of history; the hostility to science, technology, and human material progress; the hatred of hard work, planning, and long-range forethought; the hostility to “bourgeois comfort”. In education, the cultural rebels are opposed to reading, to course content, to gaining knowledge, as “structured” and “repressive”; in place of which they would put free-form, gradeless, “rapping” about their own unexamined and puerile “feelings”. And, the counter-culture exalts: immediate, momentary sensory awareness, aggravated by hallucinatory drugs; a corollary Rousseauan worship of the primitive, the “noble savage”, the poverty-stricken, of “back-to-nature”; dropoutism and living from moment to moment on pure subsistence. In religion, the strong rational elements of our Western Greco-Judeo-Christian tradition have been thrown overboard for a banal Oriental mysticism and devotion to magic, astrology and Tarot cards. All in all, we are being hit with an extreme, mystical, anti-intellectual degenerate form of what Sorokin called “sensate culture”. What it amounts to is a systematic, multi-faceted attack on human reason.
Noam Chomsky has written, on the counter-culture: “One bad effect is the revival of fanaticism. A lot of youthful dissidents think in terms of an unrealistic time-scale when they think of social change. When Marx wrote about capitalism, he was highly indignant, but he didn’t go out and have tantrums in the streets. Youth, like other marginal groups, will fail to make a distinction between what’s emotional and what’s rational. Rationality is not a gift you should concede to the enemy if you want to succeed.”
For those who are eager to discover a different culture, what a blessed relief it is to turn from the sewage of the counter-culture to the genuine, rational culture of the Enlightenment! The recently published second volume of Peter Gay’s superb history of the Enlightenment, The Science of Freedom (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969, $10.00, 705 pp.) carries one into a glorious world, of Condorcet, of Hume, the Physiocrats, the philosophes; they were not, most of them, anything like consistent libertarians; but their entire cultural framework was one of devotion to: reason, science, technology, human progress, individual liberty, free trade, and the free-market economy. We find the great Condorcet and his paean to rational liberty: “The moment will come, then, when the sun will shine only on free men on this earth, on men who will recognize no master but their reason.” One Condorcet, one philosophe, is worth the whole contemporary pig-pen.
The time has come for us to make a stand for reason. The time has come for us to realize that liberty, no matter how glorious, is not enough; for what good would liberty be, what good any social system, if entire generations go crazy, following Leary into a drug-besotted retreat from the world, following Marcuse into a “liberated” and “un-repressed” ignorance and whim-worship, following Laing into open insanity? We must raise the banner of Liberty and Reason, Now and Forever, One and Inseparable! We must eradicate the counter-culture before it destroys the world.
IV
If the genuine, the political New Left is dead, and what we are left with, overshadowing its positive legacy, is the spreading plague of the counter-culture being embraced by the Establishment, then what of the future? What is now the prognosis for the Movement? In the first place, there is no necessity for long-run despair. All revolutionary movements proceed in zigs and zags, with revolutionary periods succeeded by periods of counter-revolution and falling-back. We are now at the beginning of a period of counter-revolution.
As the Marxists discovered long ago, there is a proper strategy and tactic for periods of recession and counterrevolution. This strategy amounts to a sobering up, a cool abstinence from provoking State repression, a quiet concentration on patient, long-range educational work, on what the Marxists call “base-building”. The heady wine of r-r-r-revolutionary posturing and phrasemongering must be replaced by the cool draught of rational analysis.
Furthermore, there may well be great positive benefits from this coming period of recession. Leonard Liggio has offered a brilliant analogy between the zig-zag fortunes of the Movement and the Austrian (Mises-Hayek) theory of the business cycle. In Austrian theory, the recession is the healthy and necessary response of the economy to the excesses and malinvestments of the preceding inflationary boom. Perhaps there are similar cycles in the fortunes of revolutionary movements. For just as the late stages of an economic boom throw up excesses and malinvestments which must be cleansed by recession, so the later years of the New Left had increasingly buried its sound elements and thrown up unsound and degenerate forms which are now all that survive. Perhaps the function of the coming recession is to serve as a healthy purgative: to cleanse the Movement of these excrescences, of this diseased tissue, so that, come the opportunity, the Movement will be a sound and healthy organism ready for the next advance.
For A New America
The now unfortunately defunct journal Studies on the heft was by far the outstanding theoretical and scholarly product of the New Left. It began in 1959, when the New Left was only a gleam upon the horizon, founded by a bright young group of graduate history students at the University of Wisconsin, who were under the inspiration of Professor William Appleman Williams. The first, or Wisconsin, phase of Studies was, in my view, its finest; there, it brought to the intellectual world the insights and researches of Williams and his students, insights that were destined to change the course of American historiography and even the way in which young scholars began to look at current America. The Williams contribution was to destroy the generally accepted image of the New Deal and of the Wilsonian and Progressive periods of twentieth-century America. The Williams school has shown that, rather than the Progressive-Wilson-New Deal being “progressive” movements by the mass of the people to curb and regulate Big Business and establish an anti-business form of welfare state, they were really generated by Big Business leaders themselves in order to cartellize and monopolize the economy through the instrument of Big Government. And rather than the foreign wars and interventions by Wilson and FDR being “enlightened” moves to spread democracy and “collective security” throughout the world, they turn out to have been aggressive acts to establish the world-wide hegemony of an American Empire, at the service of this same Big Business ruling class. The function of the Liberal intellectuals was to serve as ideological apologists for this neo-mercantilist corporate state. Hence, Williams’ brilliant term, “corporate liberals”.
After the movement of Studies to New York in 1963, the journal lost much of its emphasis on scholarship and revisionist American history, and plunged actively into New Left “movement” activity, with lengthy reports and commentaries, for example, on the short-lived “community action projects” among the urban poor. In its later years, Studies was increasingly torn apart between those of its editors who wanted to continue to stress movement activism as well as the emerging “cultural revolution”, and the more theoretical who wished to turn the journal into a center for building a frankly socialist theory on behalf of a supposedly imminent socialist party. But the problem was that both tendencies were no longer interested in continuing the real genius of Studies, its historical scholarship. The deadlock among the editors caused Studies to fold in 1967.
In a profound sense, the opening and closing of Studies performed similar historic roles: for just as the emergence of Studies foreshadowed the later birth of the New Left, so its death also foreshadowed the New Left’s demise. The same tendencies which tore Studies apart (mindless activism and the counter-culture on the one hand, sectarian Marxian socialism on the other) were two of the major reasons for the later dissolution of the New Left as a whole.
An important book has now been published which contains the best of the articles from Studies on the Left. It is a pleasure to see that the best articles from Studies have been resurrected, enshrined, and available in book form. The book is For a New America (New York: Random House, $10.00), edited by James Weinstein and David W. Eakins, two of the editors of Studies (Weinstein being undoubtedly the single most important editor over its life-span.)
The star of the collection is undoubtedly Part I, “American Corporate Liberalism, 1900-1948”, which presents a Williamsite revision of modern American history. Every article in this section is important and to be recommended. They include William A. Williams’ review-article of Ernest May’s whitewash of American Imperialism at the turn of the century; Martin J. Sklar’s lengthy and devastating critique of Wilsonian “liberalism”; James Weinstein’s discussion and explanation of the pro-union attitudes of the Big Business Establishment during the Progressive period and Ronald Radosh’s exposition of the pro-corporate state views of American union leaders; Murray N. Rothbard’s critique of the widespread myth that Herbert Hoover believed in laissez-faire, showing instead that Hoover was the founder of Roosevelt’s New Deal and corporate state; and John Steinke and James Weinstein’s delightful little revelation that Joe McCarthy learned his red-baiting from none other than the liberal Norman Thomas.
Parts III and IV, which deal with ethnic questions, are also excellent, featuring one of the earliest statements of the black power position (1962) by Harold Cruse, and a scintillating defense of Hannah Arendt against her Zionist detractors by Norman Fruchter. Part II, “An American Socialism”, is the least valuable part of the book, representing a tortured attempt of the “theoretical” wing of the later Studies board to develop a new prolegomena to the theory for a new socialist party. But even here, Weinstein’s review-article of the scholarly literature on the Socialist Party is very useful, as is especially Gabriel Kolko’s realistic pessimism on the viability of both the Old and New Lefts.
There are, inevitably for such a collection, a few articles from the old Studies which I miss, and which could easily have been included if the tendentious socialist articles had been dumped: the conflict which raged around the Fruchter article, between Fruchter and Old Left Judeophile Marxists Louis Harap and Morris U. Schappes (Fall, 1965); Michael A. Lebowitz’ brilliant review-article of Lee Benson’s Concept of Jacksonian Democracy (Winter, 1963); Joseph R. Conlin’s review of Old Left Marxist Philip Foner’s history of the IWW (Mar.-Apr., 1966); and Todd Gitlin’s and Shin’ya Ono’s searching critiques of the dominant “pluralist” theorists of American political science (Summer, 1965).
All in all, one of the most important books of the year.
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–First Anniversary Issue–
A Semi-Monthly Newsletter
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| Joseph R. Peden, Publisher | Washington Editor, Karl Hess | Murray N. Rothbard, Editor |
| VOL. II, No. 7 | April 1, 1970 | 35¢ |
THE MAD BOMBERS
Over fifteen years ago, a nutty, oddly likeable little man named George Metesky started placing bombs around mid-town New York City, fortunately setting them in such a way that no one was injured. After several bombings, Metesky, dubbed the “Mad Bomber” by the press, was finally picked up and put away. Nowadays, not only would he be a hero of the Left, but he is almost a model of its current incarnation. Like the Newest Left, he had a genuine political grievance, in fact much the same political grievance; in his case, it was injustice at the hands of Con Edison, a State-created and privileged monopoly. And like the, present Left, he despaired of or was uninterested in carrying out a protracted ideological and political struggle against Con Ed and the State which created it. Instead, like the newest Looney Left, though devoid of mass popular support (to put it mildly) he decided to go over into armed struggle. His decision was certainly less conscious and less ideological than that of the Newest Left; but it was also considerably less dangerous.
There have been mutterings on the Left for months about going over into armed struggle, or into urban guerrilla warfare against the System. Now it looks as if they have done so. The insanity of their decision can be easily gleaned by reading the works and studying the examples of the successful revolutionaries and guerrilla warriors. Over and over, the vital point is that before launching armed struggle, the guerrillas must have the support of the bulk of the population of the area (whether peasants or urban residents). They must, in the metaphor of Mao and Che, “swim as a fish in the water” of the surrounding population. Fidel, for example, did not begin his revolution by landing with a handful of armed men in Oriente Province. He began it with years of previous political education and preparation which built up enthusiastic support in the Cuban population, especially among the peasantry. He arrived at the proper “water” first before putting in the “fish”. And it was precisely Che’s complete failure to heed his own advice that led to his own murder and to the rapid extinction of his guerrilla band in Bolivia.
If guerrillas launch their struggle without public support, they are doomed to total failure, to ending just like Metesky and Che. But not only that: the reason why American counter-insurgency quickly evolved into genocidal slaughter in Vietnam is precisely because the Vietnamese guerrillas had the support of virtually the entire population, and therefore the American effort necessarily meant war conducted against the entire population. In short, armed struggle against popular support means genocidal war. It is hard to see how the new Mad Bombers of the Left can help but deteriorate in a similar way. The Mad Bombers, of course, have nothing like the power of the U.S. war machine in Vietnam. But they face an urban population in America who are totally and violently opposed to their aims and their tactics. They are operating in a water in which they cannot hope to swim. Therefore, the logic of the situation demands that they begin to bomb everyone and everything. So far, they have been scrupulous in setting their bombs at night, and in giving advance warning to clear the buildings. But how long will it go on before the Bombers begin to escalate their struggle against the entire American population?
The Looney Left has apparently fallen for the old turn-of-the-century Left-wing anarchist and nihilist nonsense of the “propaganda of the deed”, the notion that daring and violent deeds will attract the support of the masses to one’s cause. All that these deeds can attract will be the undying hatred of the vast bulk of the American population, which will call down upon the head of the Looney Left the full force of the State apparatus. The only question now is how many innocents will be dragged off to the pokey from the provocations of the unhinged. And so, in a striking illustration of the “cleansing” process that we mentioned in our last editorial (“The New Left, RIP”, Mar. 15), the Looney Left, frenzied, unhinged, its judgment hopelessly addled by drugs, proceeds to bomb its way to self-destruction.
The Knudson Revolt
Four years ago, Ken Knudson, a member of the pacifist Peacemaker Movement, pioneered in a new form of tax resistance: the idea of claiming enough exemptions on the Form W-4 Employee’s Withholding Exemption Certificate so that no tax can be withheld from one’s wages. Last fall, on October 5, at Lincoln Park in Chicago, a dozen people gathered to form the first tax resistance group based on the Knudson method. All the members adopt the Knudson approach and claim the exemptions; then they take the money which would have been paid into the U.S. treasury and pool it into a cooperative association, the Chicago Area Alternative Fund, which uses the funds for constructive, as well as voluntary, purposes. Anyone interested can write the Fund at 1209 W. Farwell, Chicago, Ill. 60626.
Liberty And The University
I recently received from a colleague a little packet of literature publicizing the activities of the University Centers for Rational Alternatives, Inc., a loose organization of scholars and educators formed for the purpose of defending academic freedom, “the freedom to speak, to teach, to learn, to inquire, to criticize, and to challenge” within the university community. Perceiving these to be principles which I strongly support myself, my first reaction was a cautious Bravo! and I read further. Soon I found the UCRA taking a position against arson, assault and battery, deliberate destruction of academic hardware, looting of files, forcible occupation of buildings, and intimidation of students. Right on! I said to myself, and read right through the little packet of literature.
Strangely, however, my enthusiasm began to cool by the time I had finished. Although I did not encounter a single statement which, in isolation, could be construed to violate sound libertarian principles, going back to read between the lines, to study what was left unsaid as well as what was said, to consider the context in which high-sounding principles were presented, I began to find grounds for suspecting that the UCRA was not such a staunchly libertarian organization as its rhetoric implied.
The big tip-off was that in all the pages devoted to elaboration of the ways in which SDS goonsquads posed a threat to freedom in the university community, there was barely a mention of the frequent failures of the university itself to promote liberty within and without its institutional perimeters. And one need not appeal to some specious, new-leftish distortion of the meaning of the term “freedom” to show that the university’s record is not spotless. Let us examine three ways in which the university falls short of the ideal:
First, if a free society means one in which the threat to the individual of coercion by arbitrary authority is minimized by strict observance of the principle of the rule of law, the academic community should form itself as a model, a miniature replica, of such a society. Yet within the university, the range of arbitrary authority which the student is expected to accept in exchange for access to the knowledge he seeks is often unnecessarily broad. It must not be forgotten that what the students are protesting is often the meddlesome paternalism of an administration which, far from promoting the development of the student as a free individual, seems aimed instead at inculcating the pseudo-value of “respect for authority” as an end in itself. How can the UCRA insist that the rule of law (a system, we are taught, based on the impartial application of explicitly formulated general rules to decisions for specific cases) must extend to the university campus when the procedures for disciplining students, selecting administrators, and dismissing faculty members are a model of the rule not of law, but of caprice, favoritism, prejudice, and vacillating submission to transient pressure groups? Sidney Hook, the founding father of the UCRA, gives away too much of his true position when he fondly recalls his golden undergraduate days at Columbia when “Nicolas Murray Butler was both the reigning and ruling monarch.” (NYU Alumni News, May 1968).
The second way in which the university too often violates libertarian principles occurs when it itself strays across the line, so insistently drawn by the UCRA, between mere advocacy of a cause, defensible no matter how repugnant the cause itself, and the actual use of physical force or threat of force to advance that cause. We don’t need to be so abstract as to point out that every time the university accepts a dollar in tax money, extorted from citizens by the Internal Revenue Service, it is cooperating in the perpetration of initiated violence. There are more direct instances available. When the university cooperates with the Selective Service System, it is contributing to the biggest sell-out of the American tradition in the history of the nation. (One constructive accomplishment of the campus left has been to bring about a limitation of university complicity in this form of legalized slavery.) Again, when it allows its relations with the military to drift beyond the point of allowing the military to state its own case against the pacifists (recruiting and probably even most ROTC activities are defensible on grounds of academic freedom) to the point of donating the time of its salaried staff or permitting unpaid use of its facilities and real estate to pursue military objectives, the university is coming dangerously close to putting its corporate finger on the trigger.
Finally, one of the oldest principles of libertarianism holds that although the use of defensive violence is legitimate to counter force initiated by others, defensive force must never be excessive. You don’t hang a pickpocket; and you don’t flog a peeping Tom. So why should the UCRA cheer university administrations on when the police whom they call in to quell campus disturbances throw restraint to the wind and, instead of exacting an eye for an eye, take ten for one?
If the UCRA were truly a libertarian group, they would be as concerned with those threats to freedom that originate from within the academic establishment as they are with those posed by the campus rebels. The fact that its members are silent on these points is sufficient reason to suspect that it is something quite different. But what? Not simply another stuffy voice protesting youthful affronts to decorum and good grooming (although Hook lets his guard slip again to expose a good measure of this attitude as well: “during a talk I was giving, one of these bearded fellows stood up and tried to break up the meeting. He had a big black beard. It probably hid a weak chin.” (NYT, Jan. 26, 1969).
No, no such petty principle could have united Abba Lerner, A. A. Berle, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Lewis Feuer, Edward Teller, Henry Walich, and Bertram Wolfe! What does this motley collection of corporate liberals, old socialists, and unreconstructed conservatives have in common that could have brought them together, if that common principle is not a true concern for academic freedom? One doesn’t have to exercise much imagination to see that what they all have in common is a position of privilege within the academic establishment. The UCRA is a united front action of the academic elite to defend themselves against a perceived threat to their status!
But still, shouldn’t the campus libertarian welcome the voice of the UCRA speaking out on behalf of academic freedom, even though their perception of the problem is one-sided and their motives are suspect? No, because an organization of this type actually poses a threat to the advancement of academic freedom. It addresses itself to those scholars and teachers with natural libertarian inclination, who are alarmed by campus disruptions, and attempts to persuade them that to defend academic freedom they must uphold the state quo (or even the status quo ante, in some cases). Intentional or unintentional, this is a splitting tactic by which the UCRA forestalls what would be the only genuine hope for establishing academic freedom (and the only genuine threat to the privileged position of the academic establishment), which lies in the potential of an alliance between the libertarian right and the radical left.
Libertarians in the academic community must learn to keep a cool head in the campus crisis, and not be panicked into thinking that the only alternatives are to support the UCRA elite, who benefit from their position of power within the old repressive institutions, or to sell out to the new left, which aims at replacing these old with new but equally repressive revolutionary institutions. Instead, they must pursue the goal, no matter how difficult it may seem, of promoting a libertarian alternative with an appeal to the best elements of both the left and the right. Academic freedom, yes; academic privilege, no!
— Edwin G. Dolan
Ass’t. Prof, of Economics Dartmouth College
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Tax Resistance
With the income tax deadline looming steadily on the horizon, those who have been flirting with the idea of not filing might pick up a small paperback entitled, How to Refuse Income Taxes, authored and published by Lucille E. Moran. The book can be obtained by sending a dollar to Miss Moran at P.O. Box 641, Tavernier, Florida 33070. I have not yet read the book, but Miss Moran says she has been refusing to file for eight years at this point (legally) and has gotten away with it. The key point is not to file at all, claims the authoress. Her book will fill you in on what to do from there.
Free market libertarians are not the only ones concerned with tax resistance. The Manhattan Tribune, a radical left weekly published in New York City, has recently offered two articles on tax refusal by Bob Wolf who is also a regular contributor to The Realist. One of his pieces dealt with the ten percent surcharge added to the phone bill four years ago to help finance the war in Vietnam. Bob states that about six thousand people including himself have so far refused to pay the tax. When the federal government tried, to collect $2.97 from him last April, he wrote to his tax collector and advised him that since the war was illegal he (the revenue agent) might want to re-examine his own position to avoid being tried at a war crimes trial in the future. He also offered to help find the taxman a job in some legitimate field of work.
Finally, the government managed to collect $6.00 in back taxes from Bob by sending a couple of agents to his employer’s office and putting a garnishee on his salary. The cost in time and labor to the government certainly far exceeded the amount collected. As Bob still refuses to pay the tax voluntarily he again owes some $16.00 in outstanding taxes. He is patiently waiting for some well-salaried government agents to drop around at his employer’s office once again and personally demand Uncle Sam’s “protection” money.
The second article dealt with the War Tax Resistance 330 Lafayette St., New York City, an organization that distributes anti-war tax literature and offers the services of tax-resistance counselors. Among the sponsors are Dr. Benjamin Spock, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger and Allen Ginsberg!
This group is mainly concerned with the deduction of that portion of our total taxes used to finance the war and to manufacture war machinery. In the original statement issued by this organization the point was made that the “right of conscientious objection to war belongs to all people, not just to those of draft age.” Bob Wolfe in his own letter to the tax assessor warns that those seeking to enforce the collection of war taxes may be guilty of complicity in the commission of war crimes.
The main drawback in using the Vietnam war as the basis for one’s refusal to pay taxes is that this position is invalidated the minute the war ends. For this reason free market radicals who conscientiously object to all taxes might be more interested in Miss Moran’s proposal for its long-range possibility. In any case tax resistance is an area where radicals of every persuasion can make common cause, using whatever arguments they will to serve their own libertarian ideals.
— Jerome Tuccille
(Ed. Note: The February 13 issue of Tax Talk, published by War Tax Resistance, lists the names and addresses of the War Tax Resistance centers throughout the country, as well as news of other WTR activities.)
Census Resistance
This is the year of the decennial Federal snoop, the compulsory invasion of the privacy of each one of us by our Big Brother in Washington. In addition to the usual head count, the Census Bureau will mail every person a questionnaire, forcing us to answer a minimum of 23 questions, under penalty of a $100 fine. Furthermore, twenty percent of us will be compelled to fill out an additional questionnaire containing over 66 questions.
One way of combatting the compulsory Census is to support those bills in Congress to make the non-head count questions strictly voluntary. Another way is Resistance. If you decide to resist (the maximum penalty for this step being a $100 fine after legal prosecution) or even to answer the questions under protest, CENSUS RESISTANCE ’70 provides a form for you to send to them, informing them whether you are answering under protest or are refusing to answer the questions; they also have a form for you to attach to your census questionnaire telling the Census Bureau of your protest or refusal. In this way, CENSUS RESISTANCE ’70 is organizing a mass protest movement. Furthermore, this organization plans to take to the federal courts and on up to the Supreme Court to fight the first case in which the government tries to fine someone for census refusal (Only two such fines were levied in the 1960 census). For information, write to: CENSUS RESISTANCE ’70, 304 Empire Building, 13th and Walnut Sts., Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19107.
Capsule Wisdom
“Is it reason that produces everything: virtue, genius, wit, talent and taste. What is Virtue? Reason in practice. Talent? Reason enveloped in glory. Wit? Reason which is chastely expressed. Taste is nothing else than reason delicately put in force, and genius is reason in its most sublime form.”
M. J. DeChenier—1806
Recommended Reading
A. S. DeVanyet al, “A Property System for Market Allocation of the Electromagnetic Spectrum: A Legal-Economic-Engineering Study”, Stanford Law Review (June, 1969), pp. 1499-1561. Comprehensive article on how private property rights could be allocated in radio-TV frequencies.
F. A. Hayek, “Three Elucidations of the Ricardo Effect”, Journal of Political Economy (March-April, 1969), pp. 274-85. It’s great to have Hayek back writing economics, this time a welcome addition to Austrian business cycle theory, in rebuttal to the criticisms of Sir John Hicks.
Henry Hazlitt, “Compounding the Welfare Mess”, National Review (Feb. 24, 1970). Brief critique of the Nixon welfare program.
Robert A. Mundell, “Real Gold, Dollars, and Paper Gold”, American Economic Review (May, 1969), pp. 324-31. An anti-gold Chicago economist concedes that the root cause of the balance of payments problem has been the American artificial undervaluation of gold.
Robert R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution (2 vols., Princeton University Press, paperback). Professor Palmer’s epochal work now in paperback. An integrated study of the French and other European—as well as the American—Revolutions, showing the connections. Definitive. American Revolution is shown to be a truly radical one. Sympathetic to the revolutionary cause.
Warren C. Robinson, “A Critical Note on the New Conservationism”, Land Economics (November, 1969), pp. 453-56. When the ignorant blather of conservationists was at last refuted by economists a decade or so ago, the conservationists fell back to a more limited position, of preserving a few natural amenities. Refuted here by Prof. Robinson, who also points out that the average taxpayer earns hardly more than half the average income of the wilderness camper whom that taxpayer is forced, by the conservation program, to subsidize.
A Semi-Monthly Newsletter
THE
Libertarian Forum↩
| Joseph R. Peden, Publisher | Washington Editor, Karl Hess | Murray N. Rothbard, Editor |
| VOL. II, NO. 8 | APRIL 15, 1970 | 35¢ |
The Cure For Air Pollution
The new glamor issue in American politics is pollution. It is common to hear predictions that human life has only a few more decades left on this planet. And it is common to hear increasingly strident demands for massive governmental action to stop pollution NOW. Only the government can save us, so the chorus goes, from the evil industrialists who pollute in order to make a profit.
This “emergency” is exactly what the Monster in Washington wants. Just as war and depression are used as excuses for stampeding the people into turning their lives over to an all-too-eager government, so pollution promises to be the issue that will keep the Monster fed now that the people are taking its war away from it. Before we feed the Monster, let us look at its role in causing the pollution crisis.
We will not look at the multitude of ways government itself pollutes (Atomic Energy Commission, Army Engineers, Supersonic Transport, etc.) or encourages others to pollute (farm program, oil import restrictions, highway construction program, etc.). Instead we will do what must seem rather strange for a libertarian, by focusing on an area where government should have acted but didn’t (which is rather strange for a government). Government has defaulted in the little-known corner of the law known as the law of nuisance.
The right to property necessarily implies the right to use one’s property free from the interference of others, as well as the obligation not to use it in any way which interferes with the rights of others. One who dumps garbage on your lawn is violating your right to property. More subtly, one who allows particulate matter to escape from his factory smokestack five miles away so that it leaves a layer of soot on your house is also violating your right to property. Because he is violating your rights, he has no right to operate in such a manner. His only moral alternatives are to find a way of running the factory so that it doesn’t pollute your property, to pay you to put up with the pollution, or to close the factory.
Unfortunately, the law of nuisance has applied this principle only partially. The reason is the peculiar division of the law of nuisance into two parts—private and public—which have little in common with each other. Private nuisance is a field of tort liability in which an individual can maintain an action to collect damages for or to enjoin any unreasonable interference with his use or enjoyment of his land. Public nuisance is a field of criminal law in which the state can prosecute anyone whose act or omission causes inconvenience or damage to the public at large. Almost all public nuisances are defined by statutes. The only time an individual is allowed to bring an action for public nuisance is when he has suffered a special damage which the public at large has not suffered.
Air and water pollution caused by industry obviously fall into the category of public, rather than private, nuisance because it often affects thousands of people. And since it affects the people in a given area relatively uniformly, no private individual is allowed to sue. The only thing left is government prosecution, but government has typically been the “partner” of industrial polluters until now.
Why does government prohibit private suits for public nuisances? The official reason is to prevent a “multiplicity of suits”, but the reason underlying that is to prevent the hindrance of industrial expansion by making industry pay for its pollution or stop polluting.
Even if private suits for public nuisances were allowed, the slowness and costliness of the statist adjudication system would be an effective bar to the maintenance of property rights in most cases. A major reason why people have not put more pressure on the courts to allow private suits for public nuisances is probably that most people realize that the courts are simply too inefficient to help them.
What is the result of all this? Pollution has reached its present destructive level largely because people whose rights have been violated have not been provided a legal remedy, and because the monopolistic nature of government prevents them from turning elsewhere for a remedy. It is as if the government were to tell you that it will (attempt to) protect you from a thief who steals only from you, but that it will not protect you if the thief also steals from everyone else in the neighborhood, and further, that it will prevent you from protecting yourself.
Now that the pollution problem has literally thrust itself into people’s faces, they attack the profit system and demand that government “go after” industry. To continue the above analogy, it is as if people were to respond to a rash of thefts by attacking the character of everyone who enters the neighborhood and by demanding that the government lock up all such strangers.
The solution is not to protect businessmen from paying for their own pollution, nor is it to penalize businessmen for being businessmen. The solution is to recognize the right of individual people to protect their property rights.
— Frank Bubb
U.S. IMPERIALISM
Spurred on the experience in Vietnam, a whole new generation is demanding to know the truth about American foreign policy. They no longer believe the continual flow of lies coming from the State Department and Pentagon. They want to know why U.S. soldiers, bombs and napalm are massacring a whole people in southeast Asia. Why are American boys being sent to kill and die in the hills and jungles of a peasant country ten thousand miles away? Whose interests are these soldiers defending? Since it is the peasants who are being slaughtered (perhaps by the millions), it is obvious that it is not the peasants’ interests that are being defended. The questioning generation in the U.S. knows that it is not their interests that are being “defended”. Just whose interests are being defended?
Fortunately, each year brings an increasing number of profound Cold War myth-debunking or “revisionist” articles and books into publication. During the past decade an important reawakening to place among academics, and among radicals in general, concerning the nature and history of U.S. imperialism which have helped to shed light on whose interests America’s foreign policy has been defending in southeast Asia and elsewhere. 1969 was a vintage year for such works. Apologizing for passing over other important contributions, it seems fair to limit the field to the following three works mainly because of their brevity, pointedness and clarity: Corporations and the Cold War, ed. by David Horowitz (Monthly Review Press, 249 pp.); The Roots of American Foreign Policy by Gabriel Kolko (Beacon Press, 166 pp.); and The Age of Imperialism by Harry Magdorff Monthly Review Press, 208 pp.). Each of these books is an important contribution in its own right; taken together, they combine to become a superb introduction to a clearer understanding of U.S. imperialism.
The Horowitz collection contains a seminal essay by William A. Williams, “The Large Corporation and American Foreign Policy”, in which this master revisionist sets forth his grand thesis: In the 1890’s after the manifest destiny of continental empire had been fulfilled, the businessmen and governmental leaders continued on with the “frontier thesis” mentality. That is, they believed that the option of continental expansion had acted as a safety valve which served to ease the social and economic dislocations among the more populous and established business, industrial and agricultural communities. There was some truth to this thesis, and since the depressed economic conditions of the 1890’s coincided with the end of the continental frontier, the “frontier thesis” was further confirmed in the minds of the ruling elite. This confirmation was fashioned into an institutionalized ideological faith.
Rather than busying themselves with the necessary task of restructuring (decentralizing and liberating, my solution, not Williams’) the domestic economy (an economy which was seriously distorted by both the Civil War and postwar intervention), the U.S. ruling class began on a well planned course of extra-national political-economic expansion within the categories of the “frontier thesis” in order both to “solve” the domestic ills and to maintain and extend their own position of economic control within the domestic sphere. The ideology which accompanied this expansion was that the extension of the free market was an extension of freedom. However they, of course, never tried to reconcile the inherent contradiction of free trade rhetoric and the central role that the state played in bringing about that “free trade”. Freedom, self-determination and international peace came to be defined in terms of conditions which did not interfere with the new engine of international peace and freedom—“America’s” expanding commercial relationships otherwise known as the Open Door Policy.
The American foreign policy over the past seven decades has been a continuous implementation of this basic policy. “Economic expansion abroad equals prosperity at home” has been the constant theme.
Lloyd C. Gardner’s “The New Deal, New Frontiers, and the Cold War: A Re-examination of American Expansion 1933-1944” in the Horowitz collection is a brilliant reinterpretation of the “Good Neighbor” Roosevelt Era. The New Deal, far from being a period of “socializing” the economy, was, in its first phase, a period when the corporate-liberal leaders of U.S. state capitalism regrouped themselves for reentry into the shattered international economy, this time better prepared at home (more centralized control) to gain absolute global domination. Foreign political-economic expansion once again became the key to pulling the domestic economy out of depression. Armed with the Reciprocal Trade Act, the Import-Export Band, Lend-Lease, and finally with massive military might, the U.S. leaders had, by 1946, gained what they sought—control of the “free world” empire including the IMF and World Bank abroad and the Full Employment Act at home.
The Open Door Policy had but one more nut to crack, Bolshevism, and so the Americans began and heated up the Cold War. Not only was entry into the Russian markets important, but perhaps even more importantly, the Cold War was needed (along with export and investment outlets) to maintain Keynesian “defense” spending which would ensure the smooth operation of the whole vast system, as well as keeping the “free world” from throwing off its imperialist yoke through leftist insurgency.
Gabriel Kolko begins his book with a very important chapter, “The Men of Power”, in which he convincingly identifies Big Business leaders as the ruling class in America. He shows that this ruling class dominates all of the important command posts through which limits are placed on the American System, both economic and political. There is a definite appearance of pluralism throughout the system; however, although certain competition and dissent is tolerated with the limiting parameters laid down by the ruling class, no competition or dissent is tolerated which would change the fundamental character the system’s limits.
Big Business needs have become the singularly important “fount” for determining both domestic and especially foreign policy. Two excellent essays in the Horowitz collection complement Kolko’s findings perfectly: “Business Planners and American Postwar Expansion” by David W. Eakins is, in a word, a gem, and one looks forward with anticipation to reading his forthcoming book along similar lines. The corporate liberal research associations were very busy and very influential throughout the New Deal, WW II, and in the postwar period. These business “think tanks” served as the key link between Big Business and government both as a repository of policy plans and as a willing source of supply for key personnel to implement those policies.
The intricate interrelationships between the National Planning Association, the Committee for Economic Development and the plans and implementation of the Marshall Plan are studied in detail. The NPA had what was later to become the Marshall Plan ready in 1944 and they were only waiting for a politically propitious moment to make it operative. The plan had no humanitarian intent whatsoever and was based solely on American domestic needs to keep corporate liberalism from retreating back into depression, to bring all of Europe under the American hegemony, and to increase corporate profits. The Truman, Acheson, Harriman “Red Menace” campaign came to their aid, and the business community increased the velocity of that scare campaign to the point where the politically propitious moment did arrive.
The second of these essays is G. William Domhoff’s “Who Made American Foreign Policy, 1945-1963?” The answer is that Wall Street made and implemented the policy during these years. Domhoff explores the vital importance of the Council on Foreign Relations as the key link between Big Business and the various executive departments which carry out U.S. foreign policy. In addition to the CFR, the importance of the CED, the RAND Corporation, the National Security Council and other organizations as additional links are discussed.
Kolko’s chapter, “The U.S. and World Economic Power”, is an important overview of the international economy and the U.S. role in it. Fortunately Harry Magdoff’s more detailed work fits in with Kolko’s essay to give a more complete picture of the international web of U.S. imperialism.
Together they show how important the Third World’s raw materials are to the U.S. domestic economy and that it is imperative for the U.S. ruling class to maintain access to and control over these materials.
Foreign aid is used in various ways to serve U.S. corporate interests (it serves no-one else’s). It is used as a subsidy to the export sector. It is used to build infrastructure for the import sector. It is used to buy and maintain friendly comprador governments and oligarchies. It is used as a carrot to woo while military and CIA presence is used as the stick to convince. A careful mixture of grants and loans are used to make the various “free world” economies mere political-economic appendages to the U.S. economy. Both Kolko and Magdoff stress the “oneness” of U.S. economic, political and military foreign policy aspects. Magdoff’s chapter “Aid and Trade” is an absolutely devastating exposure of foreign aid.
In his chapter “The Financial Network”, Magdoff displays a keen depth of understanding concerning the nature of central banking and its role in the U.S. as an agency of imperialism. Central banking (the Fed), credit expansion, the major banks and their overseas branches, the IMF, and the dollar as the international reserve currency; all of these are discussed along with their interrelationships with one another and their relation to foreign aid and the spread of U.S. economic-military presence throughout the world.
Magdoff also destroys the “GNP myth” which states that since the annual foreign trade is less than 10% of the GNP, it is not very important to the economy, and therefore any talk of economic imperialism is just so much Marxist-Leninist propaganda. To say that, say, 5% of GNP is somehow unimportant in the first place would be ridiculous because 5% is a big chunk in absolute terms. But more importantly, what kinds of goods are included in that 5%? GNP figures tell us little. The imports are materials which are absolutely necessary for the survival of the system as it now functions. The exports are vital to those corporations which do the exporting. And, then, who generally controls these exporting and importing businesses? Members of the ruling class, of course. But even more important than the import-export trade is the overseas investment. Only the yearly capital exports are included in the GNP figures, the accumulated totals are not. Total revenues flowing from overseas investments have now reached the point where, by themselves, they are higher than the GNP of any other western nation. The relation between overseas investment, government aid in making those investments, and the profits thereby generated to the ruling class cannot be overestimated. U.S. imperialism is a fact, GNP or not.
The two final chapters of the Horowitz collection strike the final death knell to any lingering illusions concerning the relation between free enterprise and the U.S. economy. The U.S. economy may be a market economy, but it is a ruling class encapsulated, increasingly fascistic market economy. Joseph D. Phillips’ “Economic Effects of the Cold War” and Charles E. Nathanson’s “The Militarization of the American Economy” are frightening essays which show just how intimately interrelated business and government have become. It is increasingly difficult (often impossible) to tell where the one sphere ends and the other begins.
Kolko’s final chapter “The U.S. in Vietnam, 1944-1966: Origins and Objectives” is probably the best short (52 pp.) overviews yet to appear on the history of the Vietnam War and on Vietnam’s strategic importance to the U.S. world empire. The Vietnamese War was not an inexplicable mistake into which the U.S. just happened to slip. Neither is the war a civil war. It is an imperialist war between the people of Vietnam and the American imperialist aggressors aided by their compradors in Saigon.
Kolko goes through the history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam from Yalta and Potsdam, to the victory of the people’s revolution in China, to the complete economic support of the French via Marshall Plan funds, to the Geneva Conference of 1954, to American “advisors”, and finally through the massive buildup of ground troops and the introduction of advanced mass murder techniques—good old “Yankee knowhow”.
One point is brought out with particular clarity. The U.S. ruling class is indeed rightly worried about the “fall” of Vietnam leading to a series of similar “falls” throughout southeast Asia and elsewhere; for the domino theory is correct:, though not in the crude sense that it is usually presented. As the Vietnamese win their self-determination by throwing off the American aggressors and their comprador Saigon regime, other peasants will see that it can be done, and together, the peoples of southeast Asia will ultimately push the American beast from their lands. As this happens the U.S. world hegemony will begin to crumble everywhere, and consequently the domestic system which depends for its stable existence on the world empire will enter a period of internal convulsions.
If libertarians are ever to forge a movement, they must be knowledgeable social critics, thoughtful strategists and relevant activists. To do this, they must know and understand the enemy (they must know whose interests are being defended in Vietnam), i.e., they must know and understand U.S. imperialism. An investment of several hours in reading these three books will take one a long way towards such an understanding.
— Vincent Ninell
The Individualist
An excellent new libertarian magazine has just beer launched! This is The Individualist, the new monthly journal of the Society for Individual Liberty, and an outgrowth of The Rational individualist, the magazine of the predecessor Society for Rational Individualism. The individualist is a fully professional magazine, with numerous ads, and excellent layout and art work; the new publisher is the young libertarian, James Dale Davidson, who is also executive director of the new and rapidly growing National Taxpayers Union. Featured in the initial, February, 1970 issue (recently off the press) is an article on “The Great Ecology Issue: Conservation and the Free Market”, by Murray N. Rothbard, who will contribute a monthly economic column for the magazine. The article is a libertarian critique of all aspects of the latest Ecology, or Environment, craze.
The forthcoming March issue will focus on a critique of the Pentagon and military spending, featuring an informative inside look at military spending by former Assistant Secretary of Defense A. Ernest Fitzgerald.
The Individualist is a bargain, available for 75¢ a copy or $5.00 per year, at 415 Second St., N.E., Washington, D.C. 20002.
The Tuccille Book
Sound the trumpet! Ring dem bells! I have recently had the privilege of reading the manuscript of Jerome Tuccille’s forthcoming new book, Radical Libertarianism: A Right-Wing Alternative, which Bobbs-Merrill will be publishing in May. It is an extremely important book, and one which I can recommend wholeheartedly.
The vital importance of Jerry Tuccille’s book lies in its filling a critical gap that has long existed in the libertarian literature. In the past year especially, numerous college students and other new people have shown increasing interest in libertarianism and in our libertarian activities. But, when they come to us and ask for a single book that will clearly, simply, yet comprehensively show them what libertarianism is all about, what have we been able to offer them? Only a scattering of mighty tomes, leaflets, and journal articles, all important, but none of which can provide to the newcomer a clear and comprehensive survey of the field. The loss of adherents to our cause because of this defect has undoubtedly been great.
But now Jerry Tuccille arrives to remedy this crucial defect. The Tuccille book provides, with great lucidity and clarity, inexpensively and in remarkably short space, a thorough survey of not only the basic principles, political, economic, and strategic, of libertarianism, but also an exciting recent history of the libertarian movement, and its relationship to the various strands of “Left” and “Right”. Now we have a book to give to the budding libertarian—and one which all of us can enjoy as an overview of the field. After the neophyte reads Radical Libertarianism, we can then supply him with more specialized readings as he so desires.
Another great boon for the cause is the fact that Jerry’s book is being published by a prominent, major publisher. This means that the book can and hopefully will be widely available, and also that each one of us can push the book in our local book, library, college, radio, and TV outlets. The Tuccille book gives us a focus for education, and for agitation, a central focal point for our activity. Many youthful libertarians have been understandably restive at the lack of clear-cut forms of activity which they may usefully undertake. Well, here is a center for their activity of which they can be truly proud.
A particularly welcome feature of the book, from my point of view, is the remarkable soundness of Jerry Tuccille’s positions on virtually every one of the problems with which he deals. It is not very often that a critic as notoriously finicky as myself, as ready as I am to do battle with “heresies” of the right or the left, can find so little to disagree with as in Tuccille’s Radical Libertarianism.
You owe it to yourself: read this book, then recommend or buy it for your friends. And then push it—everywhere!
Details on the price, etc., will be printed here as soon as the book is available.
Note: The book has already received a good advance notice in Virginia Kirkus’ newsletter for librarians, an excellent one in Publishers’ Weekly, and a grudging acknowledgment in National Review. Onward and upward!
Recommended Reading
Now in paperback:
Two excellent new books, reviewed earlier in the Forum:
James Weinstein and David W. Eakins, eds., For a New America (Random House, paper, $2.95), reviewed Mar. 15.
Jane Jacobs, The Economy of Cities (Random House, paper, $1.95), reviewed Feb. 15.
Two economics textbooks: new and improved editions have recently appeared of the following excellent economic texts:
Morris Bornstein, ed., Comparative Economic Systems (Revised edition, Homewood, Ill.: Richard D. Irwin). By far the best reader on this topic. Contains crucial articles by Mises and Hayek on the impossibility of economic calculation under socialism, Hayek’s famous article on the price system as a transmitter of knowledge, Eucken on central planning in Germany, and the best single article on free-market developments in Yugoslavia by Rudolf Bicanic.
W. E. Kuhn, The Evolution of Economic Thought (2nd edition, Cincinnati, Ohio: Southwestern Pub. Co.). A completely neglected volume, this is the best text on the history of economic thought. Contains a full and fair account of Menger, Bohm-Bawerk and the Austrian School, the Mises-Hayek theory of the business cycle, and the Mises-Hayek refutation of economic calculation under socialism.
A Semi-Monthly Newsletter
THE
Libertarian Forum↩
| Joseph R. Peden, Publisher | Murray N. Rothbard, Editor | |
| VOL. II, NO. 9 | MAY 1, 1970 | 35¢ |
Farewell To The Left
Now that Spring has arrived, the Left is on the move again, but where is it going, and how is it trying to get there? After five months of torpor, the anti-war demonstrations on April 15 were a feeble shadow of last November, and the fragmented crowds seemed more interested in the irrelevant problem of the Black Panthers than in opposing the expanding war in Southeast Asia. Concentrating on the Panthers not only deflects support and attention from the anti-war cause; it also focuses efforts on purely legal defense instead of opposition to the government’s war policies.
And there is another consideration. Too many in our movement are willing to sacrifice truth and the making of vital distinctions on the altar of political “unity” with our supposed allies. It is true that the police murder of Panthers Hampton and Clark in Chicago last December was unconscionable. It is also true that a systematic campaign to destroy the Panthers by all levels of government seems to be underway. But we must also distinguish the New York trial of the Panthers from the Hampton-Clark murder and the Chicago trial of the Conspiracy 7. For the Panthers in New York are charged, not with dissenting speech as was the Conspiracy, but with a conspiracy to bomb department stores—an undoubted criminal offense. The fact that their excruciating high bail discriminates against the poor and serves to imprison the Panthers before conviction is true and deplorable. But it is also true that these particular Panthers might well be a group of criminals and therefore deserving of no support whatever from anyone claiming to be a libertarian.
In recent months, in fact, there has been an increasingly dominant tendency on the Left—apart from the nefarious bombings—to engage in wanton violence against property that is indisputably private. The latest tactic of the Left is “trashing”—the indiscriminate breaking of windows on houses, buildings, cars. Trashing may be psychologically satisfying to those who enjoy acts of destruction; but what else can it accomplish? Strategically, trashing is an excellent means of “turning off” almost everyone, working class and middle class alike, all of whom react in horror to such wanton nihilism, and who know full well that their own properties might be next. And even apart from strategy, what is the meaning and purpose of trashing? What but an indiscriminate assault on private property, and therefore on the concept of private property itself?
In the days of the New Left, of for example the Berkeley, Columbia, San Francisco State and Peoples’ Park struggles, their assault was against property that was either clearly governmental, or was governmental down-deep (such as Columbia). It was then possible for libertarians to support such people’s campaigns against State and State-created property. But the current, or Newest Left, shows no interest in any such distinctions; it seems to be against all property period, and especially property that is private. Take, for example, last year’s seizure of a small, undeniably private, and non-governmental Spanish church in East Harlem by a Puerto Rican gang called the Young Lords. The Young Lords seized the church by force and violence, and demanded the “right” to use the church premises to feed and indoctrinate the public, all in the name of calling themselves “the community” and “the people”. As if the congregation that owns the Church is not just as much a part of “the people” as this youth gang! Being anti-Christian, furthermore, the Young Lords could only see the Church space as remaining “unused”, since religious services cannot qualify as legitimate “use”.
The shocking point about this hooligan action was not so much the act itself, but the response on the part of New Yorkers. The entire Liberal community reacted by lavishing praise upon the Young Lords, and it chastised the church for not being responsive to the “needs of the people”. Not one word was devoted to attacking this deed as aggression against private property. Even the libertarian movement in New York was strangely silent.
Recently, hooliganesses of the Women’s Liberation Movement seized the offices of Grove Press, and issued numerous “demands”. One particularly revealing demand was the call upon Grove Press to stop printing “dirty books” which “degrade women”. Once again, Women’s Lib shows itself to be a twisted 20th-century reincarnation of Puritanism, of the old harridan Carrie Nation destroying bars and saloons with her ax. But the point is that once again the Left, almost automatically, employed violence—not against government property, or quasi-government property, or against the police—but against property that is indisputably private. Fortunately, Grove Press did not answer in the spineless Liberal manner of John Mack Carter, editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal, to a similar recent invasion. Instead of defending his office, Carter spoke to these intruders for 11 hours, and wound up paying them to put out a women’s lib supplement of the Journal. Grove Press called in the police to carry those female invaders out, and proceeded to charge them with criminal trespass. Crime is crime, and it must be put down with due and proper firmness; otherwise, appeasement of the criminal aggressor will only encourage his (or her) voraciousness for further aggression. As libertarians, and as people, we want a non-aggressive world; and to achieve this we must reinforce the general reluctance to commit crime by apprehending and punishing the criminal.
But, it might be asked, isn’t it a terrible thing to call in the State police for self-defense? Certainly not. While no libertarian enjoys calling upon the State for defense, the fact remains that the State has arrogated to itself a compulsory monopoly of the function of police protection. In such a situation, the State police are the only ones we can call upon for defense. Who among us, set upon by a gang of muggers, would fail to call for the police if we could? But the defense of property against Left hooligans differs not one iota from its defense against non-political muggers. To say that calling in the police for defense against crime is immoral is also to say that walking on the streets is immoral or flying on planes is immoral, or sending a letter is immoral, because these are all, unfortunately, monopolized or subsidized by government. If it is moral to use the monopoly Post Office, it is equally moral to use the services of the State police to aid in one’s defense against crime. For while the State is the major criminal organization in our society, it is by no means the only one.
And it is not only the current means employed by the Left that I am attacking; it is their new-found ends as well. Of what relevance to libertarianism, for example, are the demands of the Women’s Liberationists? In what way is it “libertarian” to foist their perverted values upon the general culture and upon society? In what way is it libertarian to agitate for black studies institutes, or for a 5% raise for cafeteria workers? In what way is it libertarian in any sense to call for umpteen billion dollars of tax money to “beautify” the environment? Let us take, for example, the current demands of the student rebels and contrast them to the student rebellions of 1968 and 1969. The major 1968 demand at Columbia, the main purpose in view, was eminently libertarian: the divesting of Columbia from support of the American war machine. The 1968-69 student demand at Fordham was similar: to divest Fordham of the mercenaries of ROTC. But what are the current demands of the student rebels? At Columbia, the demand is so absurd as to be understandable only to the psychotic participants in our “counter-culture”: that Columbia put up the bail money for the Black Panthers. What in the world has Columbia to do with the Panthers? The absurdity and irrationality of this “December 4” movement at Columbia should be evident. This is apart from the important point that the Panthers may well be guilty of the serious charges against them.
The current Fordham rebellion is demanding . . . what? Equal student participation with the faculty in determining curriculum and policy, and, in particular, the retention of an English professor who was denied tenure. Is this what the student “revolution” has come to? Once anti-militarist, are we now going to the barricades to enforce the principle that any teacher, no matter how incompetent, must be continued for life once he is hired? But who is better able to determine his competence, or who should be more in a position to pass such judgment, than his own colleagues in a department? Furthermore, to call for a voice for students in decision-making is scarcely the same as calling for equal or total student power. Students, after all, do know far less than their teachers; otherwise, why do they agree in such large numbers to pay considerable sums in tuition to supply salaries to those same teachers? The educational theory of the counter-culture: that students and teachers are all “equal”, that no one knows more than anyone else, that courses should consist not of content and knowledge but of “rapping” about students’ feelings; all this makes nonsense of going to school or college in the first place. For this kind of rapping can far better take place at the local candy store.
We can go further than this. If both the ends and the means of the current Left have become either irrelevant or antithetical to liberty, we must then ask ourselves: do we want the current Left revolutionary movement to succeed? Let us put it this way: if we could push a magic button, and replace Nixon and his Administration by, say, Mark Rudd or Robin Morgan of Women’s Lib, would we push that button? In my view, no rational libertarian could answer Yes to this crucial question. To contemplate America in the grip of the Weathermen or Women’s Lib is to envision a truly nightmare world. Not only does Dick Nixon shine in comparison; I would venture to predict that a Rudd or a Morgan reign would make even Joe Stalin seem like Albert Schweitzer. For make no mistake: the Left is now in the grip, not just of Marxists-Stalinists, but also, for the first time in the history of Marxism, it is a movement that is Marxist in ideology but totally nihilist in attitude, world-view, and lifestyle. There have been few more repellent blends in the history of social thought than the current one of the goals of Stalin blended with the attitude and tactics of the nihilist Nechayev. For at least the Marxism of Stalin’s day tried its best to be rational, to pursue the goals of science and reason; they did not pursue insanity almost for its own sake, or as a “liberating” force.
If, then, we have nothing in common with either the means or the purposes of the current Left, then we must cease thinking of ourselves, in the current political and ideological context, as “Leftists”. We must bid farewell to the Left.
One tragedy in this whole affair is that many of the libertarians of New York, New England, and Washington, D.C. have completely forgotten the crucial strategic principle of Lenin: that, in associating with other groups, one must remain firm and steadfast in one’s principles, while remaining open and flexible in one’s tactics, in response to ever-changing institutional conditions. The original idea in allying ourselves with the New Left was to work with a new generation permeated with strong libertarian elements. Now that the New Left has died, and its genuine libertarian elements have disappeared, objective conditions require that we make a tactical shift away from the current Left. Instead, too many of our young East Coast libertarians have done just the opposite of Lenin’s strategic advice: they cling as a vital principle to the mere tactic of alliance with the Left; and they abandon their original principles (free-market, private property rights) that led them to becoming libertarians, and therefore into making tactical alliances in the first place. They have placed their very libertarian principles in the category of a disposable tactic, while they raise to the status of a mighty principle a mere tactical alliance. They have tragically allowed the means to become an end, and the end to become a mere means.
It was several years ago, I believe, that the brilliant young Marxist historian, Eugene D. Genovese, began denouncing the New Left as “nihilistic gangsters”. At the time, I thought he was unfairly traducing a great and hopeful young movement. Now I think he might well have been more prescient, more far-seeing, than the rest of us. Perhaps Gene saw more deeply into the processes of change as they had begun their work. At any rate, “nihilistic gangsters” is certainly what the Left has become. Let us therefore bid them farewell.
I agree with all of Jerry Tuccille’s strictures against conservatives in this issue; but the Left provides us no solace either. The distinguished Leftists he mentions are only a few of the honorable exceptions to the bleak Left-wing landscape.
We must face the hard facts: in the current world, we should think of ourselves as neither Leftists nor Rightists. We are libertarians period, with precious little hope of allies among the organizations of either wing. Since there is therefore no hope whatsoever for a libertarian revolution in the foreseeable future, our only viable strategy is to abandon the current thirst for mindless activism, and to build a long-run libertarian movement. In short, to leave the streets for the study, to place our emphasis on education, not just for other people but also for ourselves, to build up and add to the noble structure of libertarian theory and scholarship that already exists. There is much work to be done, in developing libertarian theory as well as in spreading the gospel of that theory to those who have not yet heard of it. For those who are looking so desperately for something “to do”, here is an enormous task waiting to be done.
We must abandon the range-of-the-moment view so typical of our counter-culture, and we must return to the long-range view of such of our founders as Albert Jay Nock. Nock, writing in an age (the 1930’s and 1940’s) of rock-bottom hope for libertarians, said that he did not despair, because in every age, no matter how benighted, there are always a few, a Remnant, that understands. At the very least, that Remnant will pass the torch of rational libertarianism to future generations. There is a goal which, while limited, has the virtue of being eminently attainable, if we but have the will.
PROTOS
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Natural Allies Revisited
The shaky alliance between libertarians and conservatives was originally predicated on the assumption that, despite their obvious differences, they were really “natural allies” beneath the surface. Now that the breach on the Right has become a permanent fissure it might be worthwhile to re-examine this premise more closely to see just how valid it was to begin with.
Surely the rhetoric delivered by both camps was similar if not identical. Rand and Reagan, von Mises and Buckley have all spoken in terms of “individualism”, “self-reliance”, “free enterprise”, “private initiative”; without exception libertarians and conservatives alike have denounced “collectivism” as the prime evil afflicting modern society. Theoretically, they appeared to be cut of the same cloth and when they disagreed on specific issues it was regarded more as a family squabble than as a serious falling-out over fundamentals.
The main bond cementing the libertarian-conservative alliance was an economic one; both schools identified themselves primarily with free-market economic principles. When conservatives became repressive on questions of civil liberties, censorship, sex and abortion laws, military conscription, libertarians took them to task but still continued to fall back on the “natural allies” argument. After all, conservatives were still champions of the free market. If they got a bit touchy on other issues it was because their basic premises were mangled. So what if they were a little inconsistent? Everybody knew that most conservatives were anti-intellectual and none too clever. All they needed was a little education. Stick with them and pretty soon they would all be libertarian radicals, quoting Aristotle instead of Jesus and Pope Paul, starting their own post offices and hiding draft dodgers in their finished basements.
Slowly it became apparent that the only common ground uniting libertarians and conservatives was their theoretical adherence to the free market. On virtually every single issue that came to prominence in the ’60’s—anti-abortion legislation; censorship of “offensive” literature; civil disobedience and dissent; repressive sex laws; the war; draft resistance; decentralization and neighborhood control; pollution; ad infinitum—libertarians and conservatives found themselves on opposite sides of the fence. It was at this point that libertarians began to ask themselves a key question: just what is the free market anyway? is the free market merely the elimination of public welfare? is it an end to income and corporate taxes? is it freedom for company A and company B to produce war machinery for an overseas military escapade?
Or is the free market something else? is the free market primarily the right of people, individually or cooperatively, to trade voluntarily without interference? If the free market is another name for voluntarism, voluntary trade and voluntary association, then does it not include all he issues enumerated above? is not abortion a free-market decision between doctor and patient; “offensive” literature a free-market decision between seller and buyer; civil disobedience a free-market decision by individuals not to put up with legalized violence; sex a free-market decision between or among consenting adults; decentralization a free-market attempt to take power away from centralized bureaucracies? If the answer to all these questions was yes, then could it be said that conservatives really believed in the free market?
So it has come to pass that the free-market rhetoric of conservatives is just that: flimsy sloganeering. Neither Nixon in Washington nor Reagan in California is any more a free enterpriser in practice than were the liberals who preceded them. Replace a liberal administration with a conservative one and you have merery come up with a change in priorities. The conservatives would rather fill the bellies of cops than those of welfare recipients, and perhaps they would prefer to raise public funds through a different set of taxing procedures—but these are the only real differences. It’s difficult to see how any one administration is more laissez-faire in the economic sense than another.
If this is the case, it follows that the only bond left uniting libertarians and conservatives—dedication to the free market—is actually nonexistent. In fact, on an issue-to-issue basis, a better case can be made for the claim that there are more points of agreement between libertarians and liberals. At least liberals are more frequently libertarian on noneconomic questions and, as we are witnessing, not much worse than conservatives on the economic issues.
One practicing liberal who has grasped this fact lately is Tom Wicker of the New York Times. His article in the January, 1970 issue of Playboy, “Forging a Left-Right Coalition”, was a perceptive look at the startling similarities between libertarians of the Left and Right. His column in the New York Times, March 29, 1970, “Will the Real Conservatives Please Stand Up?”, describes how Senator Sam Ervin’s bitter attack on No Knock and Preventive Detention laws is not inconsistent with his opposition to civil rights legislation. “Ervin’s kind of conservatism . . . is not the kind . . . that holds cheap the rights themselves. It is not affected with the myopia that prevents fearful men from seeing that if individual rights are taken away from any man or class of men they are taken away from all; and that once suspended or destroyed they are most unlikely to be recognized again by a state power that will have been loosed from the restraints of the ages.” We hear little talk of this kind from conservatives these days who talk instead of suspending certain liberties until the world is safe from communism.
Murray Rothbard has frequently spoken of the importance of both revolutionary and reformist tactics in the struggle for liberty. While we are organizing our tax rebellions and anti-war protests we might also consider the possibility of turning libertarianism into a major political force in the United States. The Free Democrats of West Germany have served a useful purpose, aligning themselves with whatever party comes closest at the time to their own ideals. The election of civil libertarians to office is useful for the very practical reason that they are less likely than conservatives to use repressive measures in order to crush anti-state activities. If we can stop thinking of libertarianism primarily in economic terms, and consider it instead in its broader aspects involving civil, social, moral, and intellectual freedoms as well, we will finally stop regarding ourselves as a “rational” subdivision of the Republican Party.
Libertarians and conservatives are no more “natural allies” than were Lysander Spooner and Edmund Burke. As free enterprise becomes less and less a part of Right Wing economic policy in American, the bond that tied libertarians to the Right grows more and more threadbare. So we find ourselves once again assuming the traditional libertarian position: intellectuals in opposition to authoritarian government—the disloyal opposition. As radicals in opposition to the status quo we are, by definition, members of the Radical Left as far as political posture is concerned.
As the ’70’s roll on it will, I think, be on the Left among the Paul Goodmans, Carl Oglesbys, and Norman Mailers that we find our future allies for freedom.
— Jermone Tuccille
Recommended Reading
Anarcho-capitalism, the idea that the free market can supply police and judicial protection by means of privately competitive agencies, was once only a gleam in the eye of the editor of the Libertarian Forum. In the past, the libertarian French economist Gustave de Molinari championed the idea in 1848, shocking his mentor Frederic Bastiat with his “extremism”; but Molinari didn’t elaborate the concept, and in later years he partially retreated from it. The American individualist anarchists of the late 19th century, Benjamin R. Tucker and Lysander Spooner, also championed the idea, but again rather sketchily. The major flaw in their proposal was that each jury was supposed to make an ad hoc, on-the-spot decision, without any guidance from a rational, objective Law Code requiring adherence to the rights of person and property.
In the last year or so, however, anarcho-capitalism has come into its own, and there are now available three expositions on how Stateless, privately competitive courts and police forces could work.
One, published last year, is a booket by Jarret B. Wollstein, Society Without Coercion, available for $1.50 from the Society for Individual Liberty, 800 Hillsboro Drive, Silver Spring, Md. 20902. Another is the booklet by Morris and Linda Tannehill, The Market for Liberty, available for $3.95 from M. G. Tannehill, Box 1383, Lansing, Mich. 48904. And finally, there is an article by David Friedman, one of the most recent converts to anarcho-capitalism, “The Prescriptions of 2001”, in his column. “The Radical”, published in the YAF magazine, The New Guard (March, 1970), available at 60¢ a copy or $4 a year, at 1221 Massachusetts Ave., N. W., Washington, D, C. 20005. Bets are now open on how long Friedman will be able to put up with YAF, and/or vice versa.
A fourth exposition will soon be available in the midst of a new, full-sized book by Murray N. Rothbard, called Power and Market. More news later.
Jerry Tuccille’s scintillating new book. Radical Libertarianism: A Right-Wing Alternative (Bobbs-Merrill), will be available in early May. The price is $5.00, a veritable bargain!
Three excellent articles have appeared recently which, from different perspectives, strongly and trenchantly attack the irrational counter-culture of today’s youth, while at the same time attacking the “rational” statism of the Establishment against which the youth are reacting. These are:
Robert Brustein, “Revolution as Theatre”, The New Republic (March 14). The young left as irrational “guerrilla theatre”.
Michael Novak, “Do Students Want Education?”, Commonweal (March 13). No, answers Novak, sadly but strongly.
Robert Nisbet, “Subjective Si! Objective No!”, New York Times Book Review (April 5). Assailing the anti-objectivity of recent radical “social science”.
A Semi-Monthly Newsletter
THE
Libertarian Forum↩
| Joseph R. Peden, Publisher | Murray N. Rothbard, Editor | |
| VOL. II, NO. 10 | MAY 15, 1970 | 35¢ |
THE STATE OF THE MOVEMENT
(Editorial Note: We are proud lo reserve this issue for an article on the state of the Left by Professor Leonard P. Liggio. Of all the libertarians in this country, Leonard Liggio has had the closest long-time association with the New Left and with its most important publications. In the light of this special knowledge, Professor Liggio’s analysis of the current state of the Left takes on particular importance. Leonard Liggio teaches history at the City College of the City University of New York.)
BY LEONARD P. LIGGIO
I
The Movement has been facing the disintegration of the primary centers of the New Left, especially SDS, with confusion and dismay. What is really necessary is rational, cool-headed and realistic analysis. First, the general reaction of confusion and dismay reflects both emotionalism and conservatism (the same thing ultimately)—sadness at the loss of something familiar. Second, it reflects a refusal to face reality, to understand the current state of the Movement on the basis of analysis of the past and allocation of responsibility.
The Movement is defined by the central issue of American politics—foreign affairs. American imperialism, abroad and imposed on the Black nation on this continent, establishes the American political spectrum. The Movement is the opposition to that imperialism. While the issues were not presented as clearly in the first half of the 1960’s, in 1965 it became unquestioned. Vietnam has been world historically significant on a multitude of levels. The Movement’s progenitors were the remnants whose commitment to anti-U.S. imperialism survived the New Deal’s intervention in 1941: the Old Right, pacifists, and independent socialists. What had not been united by common ideology before, was fused by the common fate of sedition trials, FBI harassment, draft resistance convictions, etc. during the Second World War. A decade later this decimated group provided the chief opposition to U.S. intervention in Korea.
Draft resistance is the major focus of anti-imperialist activity. As a result those imprisoned for draft resistance have historically been the moral leadership of the Movement—after what they have suffered there is little more that the State can do. Dave Dellinger served his prison term for heroic opposition in the Second World War just as Larry Gara and Staughton Lynd did during the Korean War. Of that period, Michael Harrington wrote:
Thus the leading figures in the pacifist peace movement in the early ’50’s—among them A. J. Muste, Dorothy Day and David Dellinger—were from an earlier-political generation. By-and-large they were isolated, from the mainstream of American liberalism which supported the containment policies of the Truman Administration, backed the Korean War and had not yet reacted to the H-Bomb. And being without any great political influence, they found themselves having to devote most of their efforts to defending their own political ideas: raising funds to aid conscientious objectors and draft resisters and fighting the government, particularly the FBI, which tended to confuse all opposition with support of the Soviet Union. (“The New Peace Movement”, The New Leader, August 20, 1962.)
Opposing corporate liberalism, aiding draft resisters and fighting the government—the essentials remain constant!
When the Johnson-Humphrey administration escalated the U.S. intervention in Vietnam in early 1965, a unique grass-roots response developed on college campuses—the teach-ins. Spontaneous individual opposition to the government was offered the dual opportunity of immediate protest and of information for continuing protest. The teach-ins were organized by faculty and student groups, frequently including the local SDS chapter. The government’s reaction was swift: to try to discourage them and where that was not possible to send out government speakers to repeat Dean Rusk’s brilliant analysis of world affairs. On each campus the teach-ins became the starting point for long-term organizing against the war among the students and among their neighbors. But, their non-continuation relieved the government of the daily indications of grass-roots opposition represented in every college teach-in.
SDS played a central role in these events, since its radical opposition attracted thousands of students who were awakened politically by the war. SDS itself became temporarily paralyzed after the summer of 1965. Its opposition to the government had lost it its last friends among defenders of the American welfare state, starting with Irving Howe. It was in that milieu that some of the old guard SDS leadership had received its inspiration; and yet the popularly elected president, Carl Oglesby, and vice president, Jeff Shero, represented the large number of new members drawn from all over the country (bad-mouthed as “Texas anarchists” by the Old Guard). This newer group was described at the time by Staughton Lynd:
In SDS as in SNCC workers seek to apply the participatory philosophy to their own organizations, ask-that central offices be abolished, leaders rotated, and executive committees be curbed by general staff meetings . . . For the moment participatory democracy cherishes the practice of parallelism as a way of saying No to organized American, and of initiating the unorganized into the experience of self-government. The SNCC or SDS worker does not build a parallel institution to impose an ideology; on it. He views himself as a catalyst, helping to create an environment which will help the local people to decide what-they want . . . In the meantime the very existence of the parallel institutions is felt to be a healthier and more genuine experience than any available alternative. It seems better to sit in the back of the room in silent protest against the bureaucrats up front than to seek to elect a man to join the executive committee, (“The New Radicals and ‘Participatory Democracy’” Dissent, Summer 1965.)
With native American genius the SDS mass membership opted for direct opposition to U.S. imperialism—by confrontation with the draft. Coming from within the American people, they did not fear the Justice Department, Federal Courts or the rest of the U.S. apparatus of repression. The SDS Old Guard, however, faced by the FBI, sought the familiar cover of the government’s apron strings, and using its vast liberal contacts in the Johnson-Humphrey administration, it managed to blunt SDS opposition during the fall of 1965. In this situation, others began to fish in troubled waters.
II
A coalition of groups was formed in Berkeley in the fall of 1965 to hold a mass demonstration against the war. Instead of the long-term organizing and hard ideological work that characterized the New Left, the Berkeley march was based upon the idea that U.S. aggression in Vietnam could be stopped quickly by the impression made upon the government by a mass demonstration. While one-shot mass action appealed to the traditions of the Old Left, the underlying conception was something different—the politics of theatre. Emphasis was placed upon publicity, any kind of publicity, for its own sake. The march was supposed to shake the foundations of imperial America by the “energy” that theatrical politics represented. This introduction of the theatre of politics alongside serious political work has had profound consequences, for it occurred simultaneously with the widespread introduction of the drug culture and was viewed as the politicized aspect of that culture.
That this occurred at Berkeley was not accidental. The Berkeley Free Speech Movement in the fall of 1964 against the educational factory system was one of the most revealing events of the 1960’s. Its target, Clark Kerr, was the monarch of the academic establishment. One of his foremost contributions to contemporary civilization was the recommendation that to prevent rebellion against the “new slavery” (Clark Kerr’s own term) that current American bureaucracy represents, the general use of drugs among the population should be introduced during leisure hours. Is it accidental that as the opposition and resistance to the Vietnam aggression became widespread among educated American youth, vast infusions of drugs occurred throughout the United States? Principals of high schools in major metropolitan areas permit the known selling of “foreign mud”, as the Chinese call drugs, since it maintains their primary objective—order, which would otherwise be disturbed by the students’ rage against the compulsory education system. As Henry Anderson has noted:
What is needed is not more people blasted out of their minds. There are more than enough people out of their minds already, including almost all the world’s statesmen. What is needed is more people in their minds—their right minds. It is not really humanizing to hallucinate that everything is lovable, loving and lovely. For everything is not. What is needed is more people who can see what is really there . . . Nothing pleases the keepers of our political-economic zoo more than contented, amiable, unambitious inmates. Nothing displeases them more than critics who voice their discontents and do something affirmative about them. Aldous Huxley perceived this clearly in Brave New World, and it is one of the ironies in this vale of ironies that Huxley himself became enthralled by what he had earlier perceived as one of the techniques of Anti-Man.
That irony is all the more significant for libertarians since Huxley’s example contributed mightily to gutting libertarianism of its promising organizational and literary potential (in southern California typically); mescaline cultism in the late 1950’s made libertarianism the weak reed it is today.
The Berkeley Free Speech Movement raised very significant issues about American society and its domination by corporate liberals. The role of libertarians in its leadership was heartening. However, it may be meaningful that once the Vietnam intervention had escalated and raised the level of consciousness, local libertarians tended to abandon their leadership roles and refused to participate in the development of the anti-war protest that led to the massive Vietnam Day rally at Berkeley in late May. Local libertarians were indeed denouncing the anti-war activists and leading the “filthy speech movement” instead. Why? Libertarians must examine their attitudes to explain their continuous failure to participate in meaningful opposition to the government, and their attraction to irrelevant actions. Libertarians must be credited with positive stands opposing the draft and contributing to the New Left’s attack on conscription. But once that was achieved there was a tendency to reject long-term commitment to the practice of that policy and the inspiration of other policies consistent with it. Except for the rare individual libertarians, young and mature, who wrote, spoke or acted publicly against the war, the libertarians’ silence on such real issues have been deafening. And then they wonder why they are not taken seriously.
III
During 1966 the Movement regained its momentum and its media-centered politics was balanced by serious organizing programs. This new impetus in SDS was the result of the emergence of “Prairie Power”; a real takeoff in the Movement had occurred. (Those interested in Movement thinking during this transition period should read the essays of SDS and SNCC organizers, and comments including Ronald Hamowy’s “Left and Right Meet” in Andrew Kopkind (ed), Thoughts of Young Radicals.) SDS engaged in quiet, efficient and successful organizing. It boycotted all mass demonstrations.
Among the reasons they were successful was the loose organizational and ideological nature of SDS. With almost no real national bureaucracy, each organizer and each autonomous chapter established its own forms, its own place, its own image. Since there was little official SDS ideology, and what there was was populist and libertarian, it was attractive to the large numbers of American students who were growing conscious of their opposition to the educational factory system, the bureaucracy, the draft and the war. They could develop politically in a Movement which could desire victory of the National Liberation Front in South Vietnam while wishing their own victory in America on a different set of priorities and philosophy. SDS’s decentralization permitted the articulation of people’s natural instincts for freedom.
If numbers of libertarians had participated in this development there was every reason to expect that libertarian inclinations could have been clarified into a consistent libertarian philosophy. At the time Movement people hoped very much that libertarians would participate actively. But libertarians generally attacked the New Left and criticized the few libertarians who understood the importance of the Movement to the future growth of libertarianism and the importance of libertarianism to the future growth of the Movement. No libertarian can honestly criticize the movement who has participated in it. To those who bemoan the current situation of the New Left, one must legitimately ask! where were the libertarians when their participation would have made a difference?
Thus, in the absence of any number of Consistent libertarians in the Movement, the natural instincts in SDS became confused. This confusion was aided by the entry into SDS of members of traditional socialist groups. Although traditional socialist groups hared SDS for its anarchism, their response was nor criticism but participation. Just as libertarians assumed important roles in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and anti-draft resistance because they had a consistent ideological analysis of affairs, so with the refusal of libertarians to participate, others with a consistent ideological analysis, in this case socialists, naturally assumed leading roles. In the reaction of SDS activists to this process, many became psychologically exhausted and retired, while others sought to fight the socialists organizationally without opposing their philosophy. In the end these activists rationalized their complete alienation from the rank and file of SDS and, in the last year, abandoned the rank-and-file SDS (after pestering them with their socialistic harangues), and sought a new rank-and-file among the street corner youth and the drug culture.
The roots of that turn in direction had two sources. One was the recognition after these elements in SDS had adopted socialism that the American blue- and white-collar worker as well as the SDS-oriented college student all rejected socialism as the means of liberation from total slavery in America. Second was the widespread growth of the hippie culture with its adoption of conservative, i.e., communitarian, ideas. The hippies with their biblical coats of many colors, modes of life, etc. became a ready attraction for the picture-oriented newsmedia. Their publicity attraction to the media was a magnet to those who, in contrast to the serious SDS organizers for whom anonymity was a primary premise, felt that publicity and politics were the same things. Some of the publicity-minded organizers of the Berkeley mass march, such as Jerry Rubin, had made the claim that the hippies were the revolutionaries. Along with Abbie Hoffman, a protest at the Pentagon in the fall of 1967 was turned into a hippie “happening” to levitate the Pentagon. (While politicized hippies were charging the ranks of the airborne division—once they had broken through they did not know why they had done it and withdrew—a last-minute SDS decision to send experienced organizers resulted in their convincing several dozen troops to defect and led to the new development of GI organizing.) From that “happening” the sky was the limit for media-oriented politics and the Yippie party was established to run a pig in the 1968 presidential election. Membership in the Yippie party never exceeded three but the media treated it as though it had fifty million. Why?
Perhaps some explanation is to be found in the following comment by Irving Howe, prince of the right-wing socialist gang who form the intellectual vanguard defending the existing academic system and who represent everything that libertarians are against. After abstracting the political New Left from his comments, he discussed the cultural New Left:
The “new leftist” appears, at times, as a figure embodying a style of speech, dress, work and culture. Often, especially if white, the son of the middle class . . . he asserts his rebellion against the deceit and hollowness of American society. Very good; there is plenty to rebel against. . . He tends to think of style as the very substance of his revolt, and while he may, on one side of himself, engage in valuable activities in behalf of civil rights, student freedom, etc., he nevertheless tacitly accepts the “givenness” of American society, has little hope or expectation of changing it, and thereby, in effect, settles for a mode of personal differentiation.
Primarily that means the wish to shock, the wish to assault the sensibilities of a world he cannot overcome. If he cannot change it, then at least he can outrage it . . . But “the new leftist” is frequently trapped in a symbiotic relationship with the very middle class he rejects, dependent upon it for his self-definition: quite as the professional anti-Communist of a few years ago was caught up with the Communist party which, had it not existed, he would have had to invent—as indeed at times he did invent. So that for all its humor and charm, the style of the “new leftist” tends to become a rigid anti-style, dependent for its survival on the enemy it is supposed to panic. To epater le bourgeois—in this case, perhaps, to epater le pere—is to acquiesce in a basic assumption of at least the more sophisticated segments of the middle class: that values can be inferred from, or are resident in, the externals of dress, appearance, furnishings and hair-dos . . .
Victimized by a lack of the historical sense, the “new leftist” does not realize that the desire to shock and create sensations has itself a long and largely disastrous history. The notion, as Meyer Schapiro has remarked, that opium is the revolution of the people has been luring powerless intellectuals and semi-intellectuals for a long time. But the damnable thing is that for an almost equally long time the more sophisticated and urban sectors of the middle class have refused to be shocked. They know the repertoire of sensationalism quite as well as the “new leftist”; and if he is to succeed in shocking them Or even himself, he must keep raising the ante. (“New Styles in ‘Leftism’”, Dissent, Summer 1965.)
The shared commitment of adult and youth to physical externals explains the media’s insatiable hunger for new sensations and avoidance of serious political values. Among the media’s creations has been the Black Panthers.
IV
Huey Newton had a brilliant approach to resistance to oppression: by tailing the Oakland police in the ghetto and insisting on police observance of ordinary civil liberties; Newton’s insistence on the vindication of every person’s right to carry arms was another positive contribution. However, the media found this a new sensation, and instead of encouraging Black people in other cities to develop similar neighborhood self-defense programs the Panthers launched a national party that imposed local units in other cities. The media trap has been literally fatal to the Panthers. The ever-thoughtful Julius Lester has offered an excellent analysis:
I see around me almost an entire generation of black youth being martyred needlessly and because I have been a part of the movement, because I have contributed my thinking to this revolution of ours, I must bear some of the responsibility for the needless deaths. It takes more than guts to make a revolution. It takes more than courage to risk one’s life for an ideal. It takes more than a willingness to die. It takes sense enough to know when to say “Advance” and when to say “Retreat”. It takes sense enough to know what your organization can do and what it can’t do. Because one has a gun and some bullets doesn’t mean to go out and shoot a cop. Cops, guns and bullets are not in short supply. They’ll be there whenever one is ready. Prior to that, however, one needs to build himself a base, so that when he proceeds to shoot that copy, he has minimized as much as possible the dangers of losing his own life . . . The deaths of Hampton and Clark were needless because they were totally without protection against what eventually happened. If they had a base in the black community, the police would not have dared come in and shoot them in cold blood. The Black Panther Party has support within the black community, but it has no real base. Its base is among the white radicals. Black America has related to the Panthers as involved spectators at a football-game. They have not been involved as active participants. And because they have not it is a simple matter for the police to come into the community and take off whomever it wants to . . . Just as it hurts the parent of a soldier killed in Vietnam that his child died for no reason, it hurts to say the same about Hampton and Clark. But it must be said in the hope that, some lives will be saved . . . The young are the revolution’s most valuable resource. The Panthers have used that resource irresponsibly, endangering lives when it was not necessary, and most of all, by adhering to a politics of romanticism, not revolution, a politics which enshrines the dead and does little for the living . . . And tactically, the Panthers should be supported . . . Though I find the politics of the Panthers to be, in great part, but not wholly, destructive, it is impossible to forget that the Black Panther Party is composed of individuals . . . I must oppose the organization and support the individuals in it whom ‘the man’ is trying to take off. (Liberation, February 1970.)
White radicals have been committed to media showmanship and not to serious politics. When SNCC in 1966 ‘emphasized the concept of Black Power among Black people, the white former organizers of SNCC were asked to organize their fellow white people. For white America’s liberation was the best thing possible for Black America’s liberation. But this path was not pursued, since it was realized that organizing white Americans was not possible when grounded on the socialist concepts being espoused in SDS. Instead, SDS’s leadership attacked those in the Movement who did begin such work. Thus, in April, 1969, at the Austin, national council meeting, SDS condemned SSOC (Southern Student Organizing Committee centered in Nashville), which along with SNCC was SDS’s fraternal associate. SSOC had been founded by the southern whites who had worked in SNCC. With the Confederate flag as its symbol it sought to develop political consciousness of their oppression among southern whites on the basis of their equally separate culture. The assault on SSOC was the clearest signal to the Movement of the New Left’s organizational disintegration. Carl Oglesby has commented:
At the last SDS Thing I was at, the Austin NC, the handwriting was already on the wall . . . For a long time I was baffled. Last fall the word began to reach me: It was being said that I had “bad politics”. How could that be, I wondered, since I thought I had no politics at all. But by winter I conceded the point: no politics is the same as bad politics. So there followed a time in which I experimented with only the “mass line”. It didn’t come to much. My mind and my instincts only became adversaries. By spring I had to deactivate, couldn’t function, had to float. What I know now is that this did not happen to me alone. On every quarter of the white Left, high and low, the attempt to reduce the New Left’s inchoate vision to the Old Left’s perfected remembrance has produced a layer of bewilderment and demoralization which no cop with his club or senator with his committee could ever have induced . . . SDS will have to take its share of the blame for this. Much more interested in shining with the borrowed light of Panther charisma than in asking all the hard practical questions, much more interested in laying out the metaphysical maxims that identify the “vanguard” than in assuming real political responsibility, this SDS, which so often chews its own tongue for being “petty bourgeois”, must shamefully confess its origins precisely when it tries to vainly transcend them in worship of “solidarity” which really amounts to so much hero-worship . . . it is net lost causes, however heroic, or martyrs, however fine, that our movement needs. It needs shrewd politicians and concrete social programs. Not theoretical (really theological) proofs that The People Will Win in the End, but tangible social achievements now. Not the defiance of a small, isolated, band of supercharged cadre who, knowing they stand shoulder to shoulder with mankind itself, will face repression with the inner peace of early Christians, but a mounting fugue Of attacks on political crime of all sorts, oh all fronts, at all levels of aspiration, from all sectors and classes of the population, so that repression can never rest, never find a fixed or predictable target. (Liberation, August-September 1969; this special issue has not been as widely read as it deserves.)
V
The restoration of good politics is required for the Movement’s future. The disappearance of organizational efforts which practiced bad politics is a very favorable development and is a reflection of the basic health of the Movement. Furthermore, the conditions from which the Movement sprang have intensified. The factory educational system has not been restructured; the military system has not been abolished. Yet those who are subject to those systems, who are in schools and have to arrange their future choices facing taxes on their bodies and on their incomes to maintain militarism, are increasing daily. The overwhelming significance of this was presented in a special issue of Fortune, “American Youth: Its Outlook is Changing the World” (January 1969), which is must reading for anyone interested in the Movement; particularly important are the articles “A Special Kind of Rebellion” by Daniel Seligman, and “Student Activists: Free-Form Revolutionaries” by Charles Burck. The latter concludes: “Philosophically, what seems likely to be most durable is the Movement’s strong individualism and its quest for personal freedom.”
Seligman emphasizes that youth would be important today if only by their sheer numbers; additionally, “there is undeniably something special in the educational level Of today’s youth. Educated youth have to be taken seriously in any society; even when they condemn it bitterly, they are presumed to be its future leaders. Almost eight million members of the young generation today are or have been in college (versus about two million for that 1938 group). No other society in history has ever had to deal with mass-educated youth.” But Fortune is concerned not merely with college youth but with what it calls the “forerunners” among college students. “Forerunners”, now almost 45% of college students, are those whose – attitudes differ from others in college, but whose attitudes will become increasingly prevalent in society, thus, Fortune emphasizes that it is not a question of a generation gap, which has the agreeable implication that this younger generation will accommodate eventually to the State. It is the attitudes of the ‘forerunners’ that will become dominant in America; “this particular young generation is by all odds the most interesting to come along in all of U.S. history,” Fortune editorialized, “it will shortly preside over the revolutionary changes that await us.”
A Semi-Monthly Newsletter
THE
Libertarian Forum↩
| Joseph R. Peden, Publisher | Murray N. Rothbard, Editor | |
| VOL. II, NO. 11 | JUNE 1, 1970 | 35¢ |
The New Movement: Peace Politics
There is no doubt about it: Richard Milhous Nixon is the most effective organizer that the anti-war movement has ever had. Before Cambodia, and its ancillary Kent State, the anti-war movement was dead as a dodo. Confused and lulled by the Johnson Paris negotiations followed by Nixon’s promises of withdrawal, the anti-war movement had all but disappeared into ecology and into the febrile nonsense of guerrilla theatre, Women’s Lib, Weathermania, Panther worship, Yippies and Crazies, etc. The only organization with a potential for heading a mass movement, the Vietnam Moratorium, had dissolved in despair. Now, at the one stroke of the aggression into Cambodia and the consequent massacre at Kent State, Dick Nixon has revived the anti-war movement at a pitch, an intensity, a breadth and a sanity many times what it ever was before. A veritable Phoenix, a giant, has arisen from the ashes, and it’s all a brand new ballgame.
None of this glorious flowering renders obsolete our recent pessimistic editorials (“The New Left, RIP”, Mar. 15; “Farewell to the Left”, May 1). On the contrary, one of the happiest facts about the recent upsurge is that, at long last, it consists of “real people”, and this great influx of real people has totally dwarfed and rendered insignificant the whole gaggle of Crazies-Panthers-Weathermen, etc. of the extreme Left. The interesting point is that the shocking events of Cambodia and Kent State impelled millions of people to think at long last: “Alright, now this is serious. Now we must stop this monstrous war.” And with this welcome turn to seriousness, the movement suddenly realized that all the hogwash and puerility, the guerrilla theatrics and the indiscriminate “trashings”, the pointless demonstrations and the rock-throwings, had to go. Seriousness had to replace self-indulgence. And it was clear that seriousness could mean only one thing: concerted, non-violent purposive political action, that is, action upon our political “representatives”.
To those libertarians who reject violent revolutionary action, either out of moral or strategic principle, I would say this: If you oppose violent action, then you have the profound moral obligation to favor and to press all effective forms of non-violent action. Non-violence must not mean passivity. In the present context, non-violent political action can take numerous effective forms, all of them amounting to irresistible political pressure upon the politicians in Congress and even the executive branch. The new anti-war movement has swiftly moved into these forms of action. There is the lobbying and the petition campaigns in Congress; one of the most effective and “consciousness-raising” is the petitions for the McGovern-Hatfield bill to cut off all appropriations for our Southeast Asia adventure after July of next year. Another is the mass campaign for the impeachment of Richard Nixon for his barbaric aggression in Southeast Asia, an aggression that is unconstitutional for its violation of the sole power of Congress to declare war, and flagrantly anti-libertarian for its high crimes against peace and against humanity, its mass murder and mass destruction. The fact that the impeachment campaign will undoubtedly not succeed is totally beside the point; its effectiveness lies in getting the previously unthinkable idea of impeachment of our rulers into the public consciousness; the result will be a massive desanctification and delegitimation of our rulers among the populace. So that maybe the “fifth” impeachment campaign from now will succeed.
Vigorous peace lobbying and political petitions mean finally, peace politics. It means favoring or punishing political candidates, particularly in the national arena, on the single crucial political theme of our epoch: war or peace. It means the same sort of ruthless concentration on this overriding issue that brought the Anti-Saloon League its victory in the Prohibition Amendment. It means, in short, that if two people are running for office, of whom A favors immediate withdrawal from Southeast Asia, while B is better on lower taxes or on price control but fudges on the war, we must choose A, and regardless of his party affiliation.
It has taken the Left-liberals, i.e. those who make up the bulk of the anti-war movement, a very long time to arrive at this sensible and cogent idea of Peace Politics. Indeed, this was precisely the overriding issue, the issue of war, peace and America’s imperial foreign policy, that led me and a tiny handful of friends to “leave” the Right-wing over a decade ago. It was the Right-wing’s inexorable shift from pro-peace “isolationism” in the thirties, forties and early fifties, to its current position of all-out war that made our break with the Right-wing inevitable.
It is long forgotten now, but the unsung originator of Peace Politics was Mark Lane, then an Assemblyman in New York. Many months before tragic events were to thrust him into the role of pioneer in Kennedy Assassination Revisionism, and at a time when the peace movement was Old Left and embodied in the SANE Nuclear Policy Committee, Mark conceived the simple but cogent idea that the Left should concentrate its political action on the one overriding issue of war or peace, and, for example, that it be prepared to endorse otherwise conservative candidates who might be better on the peace question than their liberal opponents.
I well remember the small meeting in New York called by Mark Lane to propagate his idea among the Left and among the peace groups. Aside from Leonard Liggio and myself, I don’t think there was one person in that room who had anything but scorn for Mark’s proposal. Pacifist after pacifist, leftist after leftist, liberal after liberal, arose to denounce the idea: it would neglect and disparage civil rights for Negroes, it would neglect the crucial goal of socialism, it would subordinate personal “witness” and street demonstration for the more comfortable indoor activity of old-fashioned political action. And so the opportunity was lost, the Left and the anti-war movement drifted impotently for several more years—until our bombing campaign against North Vietnam, and the Lane idea of peace politics was lost and forgotten, seemingly beyond repair.
But now the idea of peace politics has been almost miraculously revived. The student movement has been transformed into a university-wide movement of students, faculty, and even college presidents. Young people who became Clean for Gene are now, in far greater numbers, becoming Clean for McGovern and Hatfield. Anti-war sentiment has expanded in the ranks of businessmen, particularly those who do not subsist on the handouts of war contracts, and even unto the President’s Cabinet. The anti-war movement has, for the first time, become a truly mass movement, made up in the greatest part, as we said above, of “real people”. These real people will be nothing if not repelled by trashing, guerrilla politics, Panthermania, and all the rest of the nonsense of the ultra-Left. Real people understand lobbying and petitions, and they understand political action at the polls. They can readily understand Peace Politics. Here is the only direction that the anti-war movement can go if it is to succeed. Already, the movement had succeeded in toppling Lyndon Johnson, and now it has certainly caused the Nixon Administration to be at least more cautious in its evident aim of expanding the war.
You can’t fool all of the people all of the time. The Libertarian Forum takes no pleasure in being consistent and almost along, left, right or center, in predicting that Richard Nixon’s aim was not to withdraw from Vietnam but to get further into the war under the guise of a rhetorical withdrawal. Nixon’s lies and hypocrisies will no longer work. The supposedly absolute June 30 deadline for withdrawal from Cambodia is already seen at the time of writing (May 23) to be a sham and a hoax; for we will continue at the very least to supply air and artillery support to the Saigon invaders of Cambodia, and we will continue to use our fleet to blockade the Cambodian coast. And what will happen when the forces of Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia (recently deposed by a CIA-led military clique) and his National United Front (misleadingly smeared in the American press as “North Vietnamese”) capture the Cambodian capital of Pnom Penh? At the very least, a strong, militant and growing Peace Politics movement might be able to prevent Nixon from following his instinct to move into Cambodia en masse to make “free Cambodia” safe for its current military dictatorship. At the most, Peace Politics might be able to force America to get out of Southeast Asia.
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Jerry Tuccille’s article in this issue, written before the Cambodian invasion, turns out to be remarkably prescient. For now its call for a form of tactical rapprochement with Left-liberalism has suddenly become of the highest relevance. And Peace Politics is the path.
The New Libertarianism
With the official disbanding of the Vietnam Moratorium Committee and the disintegration of New Left activism in general, a vacuum has been created within the radical movement. As the productive elements of New Leftism fade away, the void is quickly being filled by a familiar two-headed beast: the old scarred and ugly face of doctrinaire Marxism and the more hideous visage of self-righteous nihilism. The absence of a well-formulated philosophical base to support the activist programs of the New Left has given birth to a new generation of crusading irrationalists, frustrated bomb-throwers, and penis-hating feminists.
What this means to libertarians is that the fundamental anti-authoritarianism and anarchism of the radical movement is in serious danger of being eroded. The great challenge that is presented to libertarians at the beginning of the 1970’s is to salvage this splintering movement and transform it into a healthy and creative radicalism over the next ten years.
It is to make the New Libertarianism the movement of the 1970’s; to make our brand of radicalism as influential in the next decade as the New Left was in the middle and late 1960’s.
How do we go about it?
The first thing we ought to learn is how to avoid the mistakes of our predecessors. The last best chance for free market radicalism in the United States came in the late 1950’s following the publication of Atlas Shrugged and the establishment of Objectivism as an organized intellectual movement. Some twelve or thirteen years later we now see that Objectivism has failed in its long-range goals; it has failed to strike a responsive chord in the general population. While Objectivist literature has sold into the millions, the basic tenets of Objectivist philosophy have not, and I think we can safely say, will not take root in society at large. The high sale of books is no guarantee that the public is also buying the ideas presented. A quick scan of the best-seller lists is ample proof that people prefer a “good read” more than anything else.
Objectivism has failed to become a mass movement primarily because it failed to grapple, except in an arrogant and highly superficial manner, with the key issues of the past ten years. While Objectivists engaged in the exclusive luxury of abstractions and ideology, a war was going on, housing and education among other vital institutions were coming apart, the cities were exploding with violence, the American middle class was falling into a daze, and government grew increasingly more repressive.
What was the Objectivist cure for this? Selfishness.
What was the cause of all our ills? Altruism.
What should we do about exploited minorities? Leave them alone.
This is hardly the stuff to fire the imagination of a populace literally begging for solutions and definitive answers to their questions. Why? The Objectivists failed to respond. Champions of the marketplace, they remained aloof from the disordered marketplace of American society and the public has rewarded them accordingly with silence.
If the New Libertarianism is to succeed it will have to do so by responding to the issues, by applying theory to the marketplace. The way things are shaping up, the primary concerns of the next few years are going to be: the continuing war in Asia and its progenitor, an imperious U.S. foreign policy; ecology and pollution control; housing and education; women’s rights (as distinct from the loony women’s separatist fringe); day care centers for working mothers; the development of expanded abortion facilities; cheaper and better medical assistance for the poor. To these we can add our own bête noir—taxation and the regulated economy.
Instead of replying, “rational self-interest”, when people want to know how to meet these concerns, we will have to demonstrate how a strict enforcement of property rights will protect them from environmental contaminants; why the free market will provide them with abortion clinics and day care centers (perhaps as a fringe benefit of private employment); how expanded health care can be made available to all without the AMA to lobby against competition and restrain the flow of medics into society. After all, is it not the purpose of the free market to supply demand in the most efficient manner? Why should suggestions to meet the demands of low-income groups be simplistically dismissed as altruism if these suggestions are in accord with libertarian principles? is it not in our own interest to offer solutions to the issues before the authoritarians co-opt them for their own ends?
Another tactic we will have to develop if we are to build a mass libertarian movement is obtaining favorable exposure in the major media. The major organs of communication are largely controlled by liberals. It was the liberal news-media which actually brought the New Left into prominence through constant and favorable exposure. A blackout in the mass media will lead to the certain death of any incipient movement. If the ideas are not favorably analyzed by the opinion-makers (And let’s face it. Public opinion is a manufactured product. If most people were rational enough to formulate their own opinions we would now be living in at least a reasonably libertarian society), their chances of taking root are reduced to nil.
To do this will require severing any lingering ties with the brand of “conservatism” currently practiced by the Nixon-Agnew-Reagan-Buckley Club and staking out a more independent course. The liberals are completely down on the New Left these days. They have finally realized that the current crop of New Leftists actually wants to kill them. “Kill a Parent a Day” was the theme of a recent SDS gathering. The liberals in their usual muddled and soft-headed manner are capable of sitting down over martinis and debating the pros and cons of whether they should be wiped out or not. By merely not advocating the wholesale slaughter of liberals we offer a Modest Proposal (If only Jonathan Swift were alive today) agreeable to at least the less-masochistic liberals. I have no doubt that some of them crave Death by Flagellation. But most are ready to lionize anybody who is not in favor of exterminating them and I see no reason why we should not capitalize on this situation while it lasts.
There is an area on the Left, ranging from Mailer and Goodman among the radicals to Hamill and Wicker among the quasi-libertarian liberals, that is becoming more receptive to the New Libertarian position. It strikes me that this is the best strategic position for us at the beginning of the 1970’s, with the more outspoken critics of government repression who have access to the major communications media. The alternative is to remain in an ideological Ivory Tower, vilifying everyone not in full agreement with ourselves as “irrational” and “immoral”, where we are certain to die the slow inevitable death of the Objectivists. If the New Libertarianism follows a similar fate, any hope for free marketism in the foreseeable future will vanish with it. It will certainly be a long time before an opportunity such as this is made available again.
It is for us now to succeed where the Rand and her mimics failed before us.
— Jerome Tuccille
The Judges
Americans used to have an enormous, almost religious, reverence for the federal judiciary, and especially for the members of the Supreme Court. They were as gods. As a result, this group of life-appointed oligarchs, with the absolute power to make the final, ultimate decisions on interpretation of the laws and of the Constitution, had unquestioned power to rule our lives. Calhoun, one hundred and forty years ago, forecast the pernicious, statizing role of the Supreme Court, deducing his prediction from the very nature of government. If you have a Constitution, he pointed out, however rigorous the limits it places on government, these limits will dissolve if you leave the power to interpret that Constitution in the hands of a monopoly Supreme Court, appointed by the government itself. This means that one organ of government is able to decide on the limits of its own power, and over the years, the party in power will inevitably decide to keep expanding that power, and weakening its limits. The results, Calhoun saw early on in the process, will necessarily be to dissolve the constitutional checks on federal power. And that is precisely what has happened. The idea of a strictly limited, laissez-faire government turns out to be a Utopian, unrealistic one. It can never work, which is one of the main reasons why anarchists see the necessity for eliminating the State altogether, rather than try to limit and confine it once it is there.
In recent years, however, we have had the growth of a healthy skepticism and irreverence toward the Supreme Court, and the more this spirit of doubt and hostility spreads, the better. This means that libertarians should welcome all the campaigns to question or impeach the Supreme Court, regardless of the specific merits or demerits of the people involved. The seemingly foolish Birch Society campaign to impeach Earl Warren had the liberating effect of desanctifying, or de-legitimating, the Chief Justice in the eyes of much of the public. Ditto the roar of disapproval that ousted Abe Fortas, ditto the lengthy and caustic going-over accorded Clement Haynsworth and Harrold Carswell, ditto the impassioned drive to impeach Justice Douglas. All of these have their very useful cumulative impact. The Supreme Court will never be the same.
Movers, Write!
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The Lenin Centennial
April 22 marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, and is a date which should not pass unnoticed by libertarians. And not alone because of our gratitude to him for providing a colossal practical confirmation of Benjamin Tucker’s 1897 prediction that “whatever the State Socialists may claim or disclaim, their system, if adopted, is doomed to end in a State religion, to the expense of which all must contribute and at the altar of which all must kneel!”
Quite aside from their socialist content, he who takes advantage of this centennial year to review a few of Lenin’s writings will discover many sound principles of importance to any movement opposing the status quo. The following examples are drawn from the famous pamphlet “What is to be Done?”
On theory: “Without a revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary movement,” The importance of theory is still greater, because “our party is only in the process of formation, its features are only just becoming outlined, and it has not yet completely settled its reckoning with other tendencies in revolutionary thought which threaten to divert the movement from the proper path.”
On alliances: “Only those who have no reliance in themselves can fear to enter into temporary alliances with unreliable people.” But, [now quoting Marx], “If you must combine, then enter into agreements to satisfy the practical aims of the movement, but do not haggle over principles, do not make ‘concessions’ in theory.”
On spontaneity vs. consciousness: Lenin mocks the view that “in the same way as men and women will multiply in the old-fashioned way notwithstanding all the discoveries of natural science, so the new social order will come about in the future mainly as a result of elemental outbursts, notwithstanding all the discoveries of social science and the increase in the number of conscious fighters.” He warns that following the spontaneous movement, the line of least resistance, leads to “the domination of bourgeois [read “statist”] ideology for the simple reason that bourgeois ideology is far older in origin than Social-Democratic [read “libertarian”] ideology; because it is more fully developed and because it possesses immeasurably more opportunities for becoming widespread.”
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On terrorism: The terrorists argued that their methods were necessary to “excite” the movement, and give it a “strong impetus”. Lenin replied, “It is difficult to imagine an argument that disproves itself more than does this one! Are there not enough outrages committed in Russian life that a special ‘stimulant’ has to be invented? On the other hand, is it not obvious that those who are not, and cannot be, roused to excitement even by Russian tyranny will stand by ‘twiddling their thumbs’ even while a handful of terrorists are engaged in single combat with the government?”
On organization: “Our primary and most imperative practical task [is], namely, to establish an organization of revolutionists capable of maintaining the energy, the stability, and continuity of the political struggle.”
These and many other passages deserve the attention of libertarians as the 1970’s begin, for our movement today has much in common with the bolshevism of the Iskra period. As Lenin wrote in 1902,
We are marching in a compact group along a precipitous and difficult path, firmly holding each other by the hand. We are surrounded on all sides by enemies, and are under their almost constant fire. We have combined voluntarily, especially for the purpose of fighting the enemy and not to retreat into the adjacent marsh, the inhabitants of which, right from the outset, have reproached us with having separated ourselves into an exclusive group, and with having chosen the path of struggle instead of the path of conciliation. And now several in our crowd begin to cry out: Let us go into this marsh! . . .
Oh yes, gentlemen! You are free, not only to invite us, but to go yourselves wherever you will, even into the marsh. In fact, we think that the marsh is your proper place, and will render you every assistance to get there. Only let go of our hands, don’t clutch at us, and don’t besmirch the grand word “freedom” . . . .
Within fifteen years of writing these words, Lenin’s “compact group” had become the dominant political force in Russia. What can we learn from him to help us do as well? What will 1984 bring if we fail?
— Edwin G. Dolan
A Semi-Monthly Newsletter
THE
Libertarian Forum↩
| Joseph R. Peden, Publisher | Murray N. Rothbard, Editor | |
| VOL. II, NO. 12 | JUNE 15, 1970 | 35¢ |
THE NIXON MESS
It is increasingly apparent that the major qualities necessary to a man’s becoming President (demagogy, slick political opportunism) are unsuited to resolving what the Marxists call the “inner contradictions” of his program and of the system for which he has become responsible. A President invariably begins his term with the enormous advantage of a lengthy “honeymoon” and the best of support from press and country; he continues with the enormous advantage of the power and prestige of his monarchial office. But his usual eclectic, vacillating, and ad hoc policies cannot, by their nature, resolve any major crises into which he and his predecessors’ programs may have embroiled the country. It took “master politician” Lyndon Johnson four years to lose his “credibility” among the public; it has taken master politician Richard Nixon only a year to get into the equivalent mess.
The central feature of Nixon’s Administration is the absolute contradiction between the rhetoric of his promises and the reality of his program. He has promised peace, prosperity, withdrawal from Vietnam, and a turn toward freedom of enterprise; he has brought us precisely the opposite. The contradictions have been so glaring that even the long-patient American public has begun to awaken to the true situation.
Take, for example, the draft. Nixon begins on a cloud of voluntarist rhetoric, hints about a volunteer army, and the appointment of the Gates Commission which recommends immediate repeal of the draft. Anarcho-Nixonite friends assured me at the start of his reign that, if he brought us no other goodies, at least he would end conscription-slavery. What has he wrought, in reality? A phony lottery scheme, phony because the high numbers are being drafted in addition to the low. And phony also because along with the supposed relief of the lottery came the increased slavery of removal of collegiate and graduate school deferments. So that the draft has gotten worse rather than better. Never before have so many of our youth contemplated flight to Canada.
Promising early withdrawal from Vietnam, Nixon has brought us only a widening and deepening of the war into all of Southeast Asia. The CIA-engineered overthrow of the popular neutralist Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia by a military clique meant that the tiny Cambodian Communist guerrilla forces (the Khmer Rouge) were joined by a mighty mass movement headed by Prince Sihanouk himself; now we and our puppets face the forces of the new National United Front, overwhelmingly backed by the Cambodian population. We have gotten ourselves into a much deeper tangle than before, even if our forces really leave eastern Cambodia by the end of June.
On the economic front, Richard Nixon’s “free enterprise” government has proposed a catastrophically statist guaranteed annual income program, which destroys the incentives to work among the mass of the population, a program which has only been temporarily halted by Senator John Williams’ (R., Del.) embarrassing discovery that, in Massachusetts, for example, a family on the “negative income tax” dole can make over $7,000 a year, considerably more than the annual income of the average working family of the area.
Particularly embarrassing for Nixon and his “free market” economic advisers is Nixon’s inflationary recession. Since approximately last November, the American economy has been in a decided recession, with industrial production and “real” GNP falling, other indicators of economic activity declining, unemployment rising, the stock market in dire trouble; and yet, price inflation continues galloping away at a rate of about 7% a year, while interest rates, already the highest for over a century, continue their inexorable march upward. All that Nixon’s economic advisers can do is to continue to assure us that prosperity is just around the corner. As Gore Vidal acidly put it, historically Democrats have gotten us into wars, and Republicans into recessions; Richard Nixon has performed the notable feat of getting us into both, and at the same time!
The phenomenon of inflationary recession cannot be understood by Establishment economists, whether of the Keynesian or the Milton Friedman variety. Neither of these prominent groups has any tools to understand what is going on. Both Keynesians and Friedmanites see business cycles in a very simple-minded way; business fluctuations are basically considered inexplicable, causeless, due to arcane changes within the economy, although Friedman believes that these cycles can be aggravated by unwise monetary policies of government.
I remember vividly a prophetic incident during the 1958 recession, when the phenomenon of inflation-during-recession hit the country for the first time. I attended a series of lectures by Dr. Arthur F. Burns, former head of the Council of Economic Advisers, now head of the Federal Reserve Board, and someone curiously beloved by many free-market adherents. I asked him what policies he would advocate if the inflationary recession continued. He assured me that it wouldn’t, that prices were soon levelling off, and the recession soon approaching and end; I conceded this, but pressed him to say what he would do in a future recession of this kind. “Then,” he said, “we would all have to resign.” It is high time that we all took Burns and his colleagues up on that promise.
For both Keynesians and Friedmanites have essentially one set of recommended policies for business fluctuations. In an inflationary boom, taxes are supposed to rise, monetary policy to be more stringent; in various ways, and with different emphases among the two groups, money is taken out of, or not fed into, the economy. Conversely, during a recession, money is fed into the economy, deficits are incurred, and the economy stimulated. But, during recessions, activity and employment are supposed to be falling off, and prices falling; what happens if prices are still rising? Our economic managers are then caught on the horns of an escapable dilemma; if they pump money into the economy, they may turn around the recession, but then prices will gallop away at an alarming rate; and if they tighten the monetary screws in order to stop the inflation, then recession and unemployment will deepen alarmingly. The Nixon response, predictably, has been to take neither clear-cut line, but to fudge, hesitate, vacillate, do both and neither. And the result, predictably, is that Nixon has prolonged the dilemma, has prolonged the mess of inflation-cum-recession. With no clear-cut program, Nixon has impaled himself more and more upon the dilemma’s horns.
When Nixon first came to office, he continued the rapid rate of monetary inflation of the Johnson Administration. Finally, his conservative advisers won out and Nixon stopped expanding the money supply, which remained constant from about June, 1969 to February, 1970. He was prepared to accept the recession which inevitably arrives when monetary inflation stops, or at least a mild form of recession; but he was also assured by his Friedmanite advisers that price inflation would end by the end of the year. The recession arrived, all right, on Friedmanite schedule, but lo and behold! prices have continued on their rapid advance. Having no theoretical tools to explain this, the Friedmanites could only come up desperately with wider and wider statistical “time lags”, to the extent that Friedman has now begun to talk, almost absurdly, of two-year time lags between cessation of monetary inflation and a fall in prices. Frightened by the failure of Friedmanite policy, the Federal Reserve Board, under the supposedly free-marked and anti-inflationary Arthur Burns, has resumed, since February, the old disastrous 9-10% annual rate of monetary inflation.
The fact is that only “Austrian School” economics, virtually unknown today, can explain the phenomenon of price inflation of consumer goods during recession. It is not at all a question of mechanical statistical “lags”, lags which seem always to change as the desired economic result disappears over the horizon. The Austrians point to two reasons for continuing price increases. One is unknown to the mechanistic Friedmanites, but acknowledged by other, more sensible economists: that prices depend not only on the quantity of money but also on the subjective demand to hold money on the part of the populace. As an inflationary boom proceeds and prices continually rise, expectations of future increases become built-in to the psychology of the public. Hence, their demand to hold money begins to fall, as people decide to make their purchases now rather than later when they know that prices will be higher. The mere cessation of monetary inflation cannot, all at once, reverse these inflationary expectations. Hence, prices will keep rising until the determination of the government not to inflate the money supply further becomes credible among the public. The Nixon Administration’s anti-inflationary sincerity has never become credible, partly due to the hysterical attacks by Friedman and his followers on the hard-money, non-inflationary Nixon policy from June, 1969 on. With the money supply constant at long last, Friedman and his influential followers began a continuing drum-fire of attack, calling for resumption of Friedman’s talismanic proposal of a continuing expansion of the money supply by 3-4% per year. When Burns and Nixon finally resumed monetary inflation in February, of course, Friedman now felt that they had gone too far, but the point is that Friedman’s moderate inflationism had a disastrous effect upon the short-lived non-inflationism of the Administration and upon its credibility among the public.
The second basic reason for inflation of consumer goods’ prices in a recession is a uniquely Austrian explanation. For the heart of the Austrian theory of the business cycle is that the inflationary boom leads to over-investment of the “higher orders of production”, an over-expansion in capital goods’ industries. What is needed during a recession, and what the recession accomplishes, is a shift of resources from the swollen capital goods, to the underinvested consumers’ goods industries. What impels this necessary readjustment is a fall of prices in the capital goods industries relative to consumer goods, or, to look at it another way, a rise in consumer goods’ prices relative to other prices. The beginning of a recession is marked by wage and cost pressure upon profits in the capital goods industries, with selling prices in these industries relatively falling, and the relative rise in prices and therefore in profits in consumer goods inducing resources to move into these latter industries. The process ends with the end of, and therefore recovery from, the recession.
As a result, every recession in the past has been marked by this shift of resources, and a rise in consumer goods prices relative to capital goods prices (and also to other “producers’ goods” prices, such as wages in capital goods industries.) But the point is that nobody worried about this, because in past recessions monetary deflation, contraction of the money supply, meant that prices in general were falling. Nobody cared, for example, if consumer goods’ prices fell by 10% while producers’ goods prices were falling by 20%. But now, absolute federal control of the banking system means that we never can enjoy an outright contraction of the money supply, and hence prices in general can never fall. Therefore, the relative rise in consumer goods prices that occurs in every recession now takes the most unpleasant form of an absolute rise in the cost of living.
The absence of monetary deflation and hence of a general fall in prices has unpleasantly removed the veil over the usual rise of relative consumer prices. The absence of the old-fashioned monetary deflation means that the consumers have to suffer both recession and unemployment and ever-higher prices of the goods they must buy. The supposedly “humanitarian” manipulation of the monetary and credit system to end old-fashioned deflation during recessions (a manipulation agreed to by Keynesians, Friedmanites, and even many Austrians), has brought us only the worst of both worlds: the worst features of both inflation and recession.
As for those annoyingly high interest rates, they must continue to climb ever upward; the only thing that can bring them down is a really stiff recession, a recession which includes the levelling off of prices. But since the Nixon Administration is not willing to contemplate a stiff recession and a truly anti-inflationary program, interest rates can only continue their march into the stratosphere. (And since the high interest rates were probably the major factor in the stock collapse, it is hard to see the stock market engaging in any brisk recovery.)
In the short run, the only sound way out for the Nixon Administration is to be willing to engage in a truly rigorous anti-monetary inflation program, to stop inflating the monetary supply and, indeed, to engage in some old-fashioned monetary contraction. The recession would then be sharp but short-lived, and recovery would be brisk and healthy. The anti-inflationary monetary contraction must be sharp and determined enough to offset the inevitable rise in relative consumer prices and to change the inflationary expectations of the public; it must be rigorously “hard money”. Only then will prices level off and even (gloryosky!) decline, and only then will interest rates fall. The Administration must cease pursuing the Friedmanite pipe dream of a levelling off of prices along with recovery but without abandoning monetary inflation. In the long run, of course, we need a total overhaul of our inherently statist and inflationary monetary system, with a liquidation of the Federal Reserve System and a return to a genuine gold standard.
But the Nixon Administration is likely to turn, if turn decisively it does, in precisely the opposite direction. Unwilling to bring monetary inflation to a halt, unwilling to go into a truly “hard money” program, it might very well add onto its vacillation and drift a turn toward the totalitarian method of wage-and-price controls. Already there are ominous signs of wage-price controls on the horizon. Arthur F. Burns, the man our anarcho-Nixonites assured us was soundly free-enterprise, now talks of “voluntary” or even coercive price controls. Such business economists as Pierre Rinfret and Lionel Edie and Co., have already frankly called for wage-price controls. There are two things wrong with such controls: one, they are the totalitarian antithesis of freedom or the free economy, and two, they don’t work, leading instead to the “suppressed” inflation of black markets and eternal shortages and misallocation of resources. Why, then, are so many of our “conservative” business economists reaching for such controls? Precisely because profit margins are being squeezed by the pressure of wage-costs, as they always are in recessions; and therefore, these business economists hope to stop wage increases by the use of compulsion and the State bayonet.
Guaranteed income schemes; continuing budget deficits; monetary inflation; and now wage-price controls; under the cover of traditional free-enterprise rhetoric, the Nixon Administration continues us ever further down the path toward the economy of fascism. But none of this will solve the crises brought on by his and his predecessors’ policies. He cannot end the war in Southeast Asia by expanding it, and he cannot end price inflation by continuing to inflate the money supply, or by coercive attempts to overrule the forces of supply and demand. Richard Nixon is sinking deeper into his own quagmire. He cannot bring us peace, he cannot bring us inflation-less prosperity. Nixon’s goose is cooked.
ANARCHISM AND GOVERNMENT
Ludwig von Mises, the greatest modern advocate of democracy and representative government, has never raised any objection against the modern anarchist position; every critique of anarchism made by Professor Mises has been aimed at the older authors of the movement, those who believed that the members of society would all voluntarily submit to the moral code. The older anarchists who held this view were Utopians, i.e., they believed that a perfect society was attainable, where no one would break the moral code. Modern anarchists do not hold this view, however. Rather, they recognize that no social system could conceivably guarantee that no one would break the moral code. Modern anarchists are fully aware that the search is not for a perfect social system, but for the best (most moral) system among those conceivable. Because anarchists seek the best, they naturally choose that system which in no way institutes the breaking of the moral code. This means a system in which no government, i.e., taxing authority or legalized coercive agent, exists. Anarchism, like any other projected social system, is based upon fundamental moral principles. In dealing with social systems, the primary question we must ask is the moral one. Only secondarily is it necessary to inquire into the utilitarian aspects of the system we have chosen. Thus, the demonstration that in a perfectly moral, anarchist, society—perfectly moral in the sense that no criminal actions are legalized—everyone would be better off materially and psychically is secondary to our major concern. The question whether anarchist society is “workable” betrays an immaturity of mind and lack of knowledge and vision. One thing is outstandingly clear to the student of history: Free men are capable of devising methods of coping with all their problems, moral and utilitarian, without invading the freedom and property rights of others. Historical examples are innumerable. In short, anarchism does not expect that everyone will obey the moral code requiring that no one invade the property rights of another; but, anarchism does hold that, in our efforts to prevent and punish such invasions as do occur, we may not invade these same rights (as is done when government is established). Thus, anarchism simply requires that human rights not be invaded by anyone or any group for any reason, supposedly beneficial or otherwise. The State is by nature an invader of men’s rights, just like any “private” criminal; and government must be subject to the same-moral sanctions as are imposed already upon such “private” criminals. Anarchists hold that morality must be upheld in all cases, and not abandoned whenever State actions are involved. Men have long since rejected the Divine Right of Kings; surely it is now past time to do the same with all claims that the State is Extra-Human or Extra-Moral. The State must be judged on the same level and by the same principles as all other human actions and institutions; one rule applies to all. If, upon examination, the State is found to be committing immoral or criminal acts (as anarchists hold it is), then the State must be treated in the same way that we treat a “private” criminal. Anarchists ask no more than this. It is often objected to the anarchist analysis that, while morally it is correct, it ignores the fact that government is a necessary part of any society, that no society could exist without it. This argument would, indeed, carry much weight if it were valid. But it is, in fact, a perfect example of the logical fallacy of begging the question. The necessity of government is just assumed. The Statist, if he wishes to use this argument, must first explain why the State is a necessary part of any social system. In fact, the requirement of explanation lies doubly heavy upon the Statist’s shoulders because he is arguing that he be allowed to institute criminalism. He is, in effect, arguing that there must be an outlaw in every society in order for that society to remain intact. This doctrine is not only paradoxical; it is obviously absurd as well. For the whole purpose of morality is that outlaws should be eliminated from society. Yet the Statist has the temerity to assert that in every geographical area one outlaw (and his legions) are required if the moral code is to be upheld. Reason demands that this criminal assertion be rejected.
— John V. Peters
Announcing the Formation of the
INSTITUTE FOR MARKET ECONOMY STUDIES
A non-profit foundation dedicated to the dissemination of voluntarist-anachrist principles. Plans are under way to hold classes in free market economics biweekly in the New York area.
For further information, write
Box 763
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Abortion Repeal
On one point, at least, the Women’s Liberation forces are libertarian and correct: and that is the basic libertarian concept that every person and therefore every woman has the absolute right to govern and control her own body (or, as we might put it, everyone has the fundamental property right in his own body, or the “right of self-ownership”). This fundamental property right immediately rules out slavery, and the draft. And it also rules out any and all laws restricting any woman’s right to perform an abortion.
Too many libertarians tend to dismiss the traditional Catholic counter-argument as unworthy of discussion. That argument is important and cogent, but, I believe, wrong: that abortion constitutes the killing of a living human being, and is therefore tantamount to murder. If the Catholic position were correct, then all abortion would have to be outlawed as murder. The proper answer, I believe, has nothing to do with turgid and slippery arguments as to when life really begins, when the fetus becomes human, when the soul arrives, etc. The vital consideration, from my point of view, is not whether or to what extent the fetus lives or is human, but precisely the fundamental libertarian axiom that each individual has the absolute right of property in his or her own body.
The crucial point is that the fetus is contained within the body of its mother; it is, in fact, a parasite upon that body. The mother has the absolute right to get rid of this parasitic growth, this internal part of her body. Period. Therefore, abortions should be legal.
From The “Old Curmudgeon”
A German politician of a few decades ago once said: “When I hear the word ‘culture’ I reach for my revolver.” I’m sure we can all think of a lot of words we’d like to substitute for “culture” in that remark. For example: “counter-culture”; “youth culture”; “alienation”; “sense of belonging”; “the Environment”; “the community”; “relevant”; “Women’s Liberation”; “where his head’s at”; “groovy”; “rapping”; and “Right On!”
Free Men Make The Best Freedom Fighters
Modern nomad/troglodytic living is easy, low-cost, comfortable—offers substantial freedom and safety NOW. 4 issues memo-forum to nomad-trog in trade for life-style description; others $2.
Preform 1f, Box 141, Glendale, CA 91209
RECOMMENDED READING
Individualist Anarchism. Until recently, there have been virtually no books in print on the fertile field of the American tradition of individualist anarchism. Now, two important books fill some of this need.
Henry J. Silverman, ed., American Radical Thought: The Libertarian Tradition (Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath Co., 1970, paper), immediately replaces Krimerman and Perry’s Patterns of Anarchy as the best collection of readings in individualist anarchism. Professor Silverman has collected significant readings on American libertarianism, beginning with Jefferson and Paine, and then moving quickly to the anarchists, most of whom, fortunately, were individualists. Included in this handsome volume are contributions, among others, from Warren, Tucker, Spooner, Thoreau, Garrison, Ballou, as well as contemporary contributions from American anarchists. The latter include Carl Oglesby’s call for a left-right alliance, Karl Hess’s classic “Death of Politics” from Playboy, the scintillating “Tranquil Statement” of the Anarchist Caucus of YAF in the summer of 1969, co-authored by Karl Hess’s son, and two contributions from Murray N. Rothbard: “Confessions of a Right-Wing Liberal” from Ramparts, as well as the “Student Revolution” from the May 1, 1969 issue of your own Lib. Forum. The collection is nothing if not up-to-date. Price is not listed on the cover; this paperback must be ordered either from Heath or from a college bookstore.
The pioneering history of American individualist anarchism has just been reprinted: the 1932 study by Eunice Minette Schuster, Native American Anarchism: A Study of Left-wing American Individualism (available at $12.50 from the Da Capo Press, 227 West 17th St., New York, N.Y. 10011). Schuster’s study is much less satisfactory than James J. Martin’s Men Against the State for Warren, Spooner and Tucker, but Martin’s book is out of print, and also does not cover such important Christian anarchists as Ann Hutchinson, and the Garrison movement. So Schuster is indispensable for students of American anarchism.
DOUBLE ISSUE
A Semi-Monthly Newsletter
THE
Libertarian Forum↩
| Joseph R. Peden, Publisher | Murray N. Rothbard, Editor | |
| VOL. II, NO. 13-14 | JULY, 1970 | 35¢ |
On Civil Obedience
Mr. Leonard E. Read, President of the Foundation for Economic Education, the oldest established organization for laissez-faire, has now given us all an Independence Day present: a frank repudiation of the American Revolution and of that great libertarian document, the Declaration of Independence, on which that Revolution was grounded. (“Civil 
obedience”, Notes from FEE, July.) How have Mr. Read and FEE, who proclaim themselves to be libertarian and have many times hailed that same Declaration, gotten themselves into this odd position? FEE was the organization where, over twenty years ago, I first met the late Frank Chodorov, a great libertarian who introduced our generation of young libertarians to Thoreau and his Essay on Civil Disobedience. How is it that now Leonard E. Read writes an essay sternly calling upon everyone to obey the law at all times, regardless of how immoral or unjust any law may be? For twenty-five years, Leonard Read has labored to bring us liberty, and, behold, he has brought us the profoundly anti-libertarian stone of Civil obedience.
Apparently, Mr. Read was provoked into writing this essay by running into trouble with his youth cadre. He tells us that after he and his colleagues had finished instructing their Undergraduate Seminar on the immorality and injustice of the bulk of our laws, the main question raised by the students was: “Am I not warranted in breaking an immoral law?” An excellent question, indeed, but one that apparently disturbed Mr. Read. For even a believer in laissez-faire, let along an anarchist, must concede that the great bulk of our laws is despotic, exploitative, immoral and unjust. Why, then, should these criminal and unjust edicts be obeyed? Why indeed?
Mr. Read is very firm on his answer to the students: no law, no matter how immoral, may be disobeyed. No one must knowingly disobey any law, regardless of its content. He is not nearly as clear, however, on the reasons for his stand, which quickly become cloudy, self-contradictory, and irrelevant.
Mr. Read’s first reason for commanding obedience to all law is a curious one, considering his past record as an ardent defender of each individual’s following his own moral principles, of being true to himself, whatever these principles may be. After preaching the immorality of invading the natural rights and the property of any individual for nearly twenty-five years, Mr. Read has apparently and suddenly become a moral relativist. If the individual is to disobey an immoral law, he wonders, “how is an immoral law to be defined?” Even if he is sure that regulation or special privilege is immoral, he says, his is “quite a minority view these days”. And then he adds, rather sadly for someone who had once been so firm on each individual’s following his own moral judgment: “contemporary ethical standards vary so that no law will pass everyone’s test of morality”, and so no person may use his conviction of a law’s immorality to break that law.
Let us be quite clear what Mr. Read’s current position implies. The government, let us say, passes a law, ordering every citizen to turn everyone known by him to be a Jew (or Negro, or redhead, or whatever) over to the authorities to be shipped to a concentration camp. Mr. Read would surely consider such a law criminally unjust; but he would feel morally obligated to obey, because who is he to set his own ethical views against “contemporary ethical standards?” Mr. Read considers conscription a monstrous slave law; and yet, he would presumably condemn any young person evading the draft for disobeying the law, and presumably would also turn this young draft evader in to the authorities if the law so decreed.
Mr. Read’s argument evidently suffers from a grave inner contradiction. He raises the variability of definitions of morality and of ethical standards as an argument for not acting on one’s own perception of the injustice of any law. And yet he turns around and enjoins upon us all the absolute ethical commandment of obeying all laws, no matter their content, even though he admits in his article that many people dispute the justice of these laws. In short, Mr. Read uses ethical variability as the reason for ethical relativism, for preventing people from acting on their own moral judgments, and yet from that selfsame ethical variability he somehow comes up with a universal ethical absolute: obedience to every law, regardless of one’s moral judgment. If, indeed, ethical standards are variable and therefore we should not presume to act on our own moral principles, then neither can there be an absolute ethical imperative for everyone to obey the law. Mr. Read can’t have it both ways.
DOUBLE ISSUE
NOTICE: During July and August, we will publish special Double Issues: one covering July 1-July 15, and another August 1-August 15. We will return to our regular publishing schedule in September.
Let us contrast Mr. Read’s ethical relativism and plea for civil obedience to some of his own earlier writings, writings in those golden days when FEE was at the center of libertarian thought and activity in this country. Thus, in his “The Penalty of Surrender” (Essays on Liberty, Vol. I, FEE, 1952, pp. 253-63), Read wrote eloquently that one must not compromise one’s moral principles, because, in the field of morality, the slightest compromise can only mean surrender. Read recognized then, of course, that no person is infallible, and that therefore one’s moral principles might be in error, but that he must follow them nevertheless. “A principle . . . is a matter of personal moral judgment . . . I am convinced that no person is capable of rising above his best judgment. To live in strict accordance with one’s best judgment is to live as perfectly as one can . . . A rule of conduct emerges with crystal clarity: reflect in word and in deed, always and accurately, that which one’s best judgment dictates. (Italics Read’s.) . . . To do less, to deviate one iota, is to sin against yourself, that is, against your Maker as He has manifested Himself in you. To do less is not to compromise. To do less is to surrender I” (Ibid., pp. 258-60.) Hear, hear! But how does the eloquent and uncompromisingly principled Leonard Read of the early 1950’s square with the Leonard Read of 1970, who claims that since “contemporary ethical standards vary, and the majority may not agree, no individual is justified in breaking a law that he may consider deeply immoral? Isn’t his later position “surrender” and “sin”? And, furthermore, the early Read said: “Principle does not lend itself to bending or to compromising. It stands impregnable. I must either abide by it, or in all fairness I must on this point regard myself, not as a rational, reasonable person, but rather as an unprincipled person.” (Ibid., p. 256.)
Another eloquent product of the early Read was “On That Day Began Lies.” (Ibid., pp. 231-252.) Read took his essay from a text by the frankly anarchist Leo Tolstoy. “From the day when the first members of councils placed exterior authority higher than interior, that is to say, recognized the decisions of men united in councils as more important and more sacred than reason and conscience; on that day began lies that caused the loss of millions of human beings and which continue their work to the present day,” Read built his article on this superb passage. Again Read wrote: “the nearest that any person can get to right principles—truth—is that which his highest personal judgment dictates as right. Beyond that one cannot go or achieve. Truth, then, as nearly as any individual can express it, is in strict accordance with his inner, personal dictate of Tightness. (Italics Read’s.) The accurate representation of this inner, personal dictate is intellectual integrity. It is the expressing, living, acting of such truth as any given person is in possession of. Inaccurate representation of what one believes to be right is untruth. It is a lie. . . Thus, the best we can do with ourselves is to represent ourselves at our best. To do otherwise is to tell a lie. To tell lies is to destroy such truth as is known. To deny truth is to destroy ourselves.” (Ibid., p. 233.)
Read went on to attack the idea of subordinating one’s own perception of truth to the opinions of other men in “councils”, organizations or governments, and particularly to attack the idea that a group of men labelling themselves “government” can morally perform acts (murder, theft, etc.) that individual men would not perform. He concludes: “How to stop lies? It is simply a matter of personal resolve to act and speak in strict accordance with one’s inner, personal dictate of what is right. And for each of us to see to it that no other man or set of men is given permission to represent us otherwise.” (Ibid., p. 252.) And let us underline here that, in both of these early essays, Mr. Read writes of “acting” and of “deeds” as well as merely speaking in accordance with one’s inner convictions.
And finally, Leonard Read’s noble Conscience on the Battlefield (FEE, 1951), a pamphlet which seems to have been long out of print at the Foundation. Here Read candidly condemned war as “liberty’s greatest enemy” and as, simply, “evil”. The essay is written in the form of a dialogue between Read’s current self—or his Conscience—and with what would have been his self if he had then been dying on a battlefield in Korea. Read admonishes the dying soldier that, simply because the government had sent him there to fight, the soldier cannot escape moral guilt for killing his fellow human beings. The government’s calling it moral or legal or calling it war cannot alter the fact that killing in that war was unjustified murder of his fellow men.
Read wrote of the “failure to grasp the idea that when the right to act on behalf of one’s self is delegated to another, this cannot reasonably be done without an acceptance of personal responsibility for the results of the delegated authority . . . Let authority for your actions be transferred to government, a collective, without an exact accompaniment of your personal responsibility for that authority . . . and . . . you will act without personal discipline as a result of the mistaken belief that there can be authority without responsibility . . . And this, I submit, is the illogical process—call it foreign policy or whatever—which leads you to kill another person without remorse or a feeling of guilt.” (Ibid., pp. 30-31.) And the fact of government action is no moral aid to one’s conscience, for government “is but a name given to an arrangement which consists only of individuals. They—and they alone—are responsible for what they do collectively as government. They—and they alone—are subject to Judgment.” (Ibid., p. 29.)
And the early Read went even further in his moral condemnation of the American war-machine; in the guilt for “there can be no distinction between those who do the shooting and those who aid the act—whether they aid it behind the lines by making the ammunition (the “merchants of death”?) or by submitting to the payment of taxes for war.” (Ibid., p. 11.)
Now I am not saying that the Leonard Read of 1951 would have counselled the soldier or the taxpayer for the war machine to break the law—to refuse to involve himself in the guilt of mass murder. But surely it is inconceivable that the Read of 1951 would have condemned the man of conscience who broke the law by refusing to participate in mass murder, especially by referring to minority positions and to differing “contemporary ethical standards”.
So much for Read’s argument against an individual refusing to obey a law he considers immoral. Read’s second argument against law-breaking is scarcely an argument at all: it is the raising of the old spectre, the old bogety, of “anarchy”. He seems to place himself squarely in the middle-of-the-road, in the middle between socialism on the one hand and the “enormous anarchistic reaction” to socialism on the other. But from his tone, and from his curious injunction that State laws must be obeyed regardless of their content, it is abundantly clear that Mr. Read regards anarchism—the maximum of individual liberty—as somehow a far greater threat to his version of liberty than socialism itself. He must, else he would not opt for obedience to all state laws, no matter how despotic, as compared to the outside chance of anarchism! A curious position indeed, especially since the ranks of anarchism are enormously weaker than the might and power of the State. That Mr. Read has gone far down the statist road is evident also from the fact that his legendary politeness and courtesy in polemic has begun to slip: “I see an enormous anarchistic reaction . . . And back of it all—giving the movement a false dignity—are an increasing number of persuasive writers and speakers flaunting the labels of scholarship.” (Notes from FEE, p. 1.) Never has Mr. Read written in such angry personal tones of writers and speakers on behalf of statism or socialism. Curious once more!
“Anarchy,” writes the current Mr. Read, is “approaching epidemic proportions.” (Would that it were so!) Anarchy, Read warns, is “unplanned chaos”, which is no better than the “planned chaos” of socialism. “Unplanned chaos”—an interesting term. Does Mr. Read mean by this term the free market, for that is precisely what we free-market anarchists advocate? But if freedom and the free market is “chaos”, how then does Leonard Read’s view of the market differ from that of Karl Marx, who scornfully referred to the market as “anarchy of production”? is freedom, at last, to be called “chaos”?
The term “planned chaos” is taken from a booklet of the same title by the distinguished laissez-faire economist, Ludwig von Mises. But Mises does not, as does Read, contrast government planning to planlessness as the available polar alternatives. To Mises, the desideratum is that each individual plans for himself: “The alternative is not plan or no plan. The question is: whose planning? Should each member of society plan for himself or should the paternal government alone plan for all? The issue. . . is spontaneous action of each individual versus the exclusive action of the government. It is freedom versus governmental omnipotence.” (Ludwig von Mises, Planning for Freedom, South Holland, Ill.: Libertarian Press, 1952, p. 45.) And Mises adds: “There is no other planning for freedom and general welfare than to let the market system work.” (Ibid., p. 17.) The aim of free-market anarchists is precisely to end governmental omnipotence and planning, and to substitute for this each man’s planning for himself. Or does Mr. Read, in contrast to Mises, consider each man’s planning for himself to be “planless chaos”? (This is not to say that Mises is an anarchist, but that Mises would not make the egregious error of referring to the market as “planless chaos”.)
We should add that the early Read had a far different view of “chaos”; to him, “chaos” signified the individual’s abandonment of principle: “If principle is abandoned, even compromise will not be possible. Nothing but chaos!” (Essays on Liberty, Vol. I, p. 263.)
Mr. Read admits that almost everyone breaks laws every day, but only, he hastens to add, because they don’t know what the laws may be. Thus, he cites a business firm which might or might not be breaking the antitrust laws for almost any action it may perform. So far, so good (although this contradicts the position taken in Conscience on the Battlefield, pp. 14-15.) But Mr. Read has not looked deeply enough at reality. Surely, he must be familiar with the fact that every citizen breaks laws, knowingly and intentionally, every day. Does he not know that millions, every day, discard gum wrappers on streets, fudge a bit on their income taxes, cross the street on the red light, commit fornication out of wedlock, etc.—and without the world falling apart? Has not even Leonard Read himself, even he, once in a while driven 62 miles per hour in a 60-mile per hour zone?
Read professes joining the revolutionaries in his “distaste for the plethora of oppressive laws presently on the statute books”. But the remedy, he insists, must only be repeal of the laws rather than breaking them. But how in the world does he think that laws get repealed? The best way of forcing our politicians to repeal a law is to render that law absolutely non-enforceable, in short, by mass breakage of that law. How does Mr. Read believe that perhaps the single greatest tyrannical law in American history—Prohibition—got repealed? Prohibition got repealed because it had become totally unenforceable in that greater part of the country where people decided that the act—even as a Constitutional amendment—was absurd and despotic, and they simply and knowingly ignored the law. The mass drinking during Prohibition was one of the greatest—and most successful—movements of mass civil disobedience in history. It won, and surely every libertarian must consider this victory a’ great triumph for liberty—a triumph brought about by nothing else than mass breakage of The Law. Leonard Read writes that “lawbreaking merely adds to the existing confusion”, and that “if any idea or action does not lead to enlightenment, it is worthless, if not downright destructive.” Contrary to Mr. Read, the lawbreaking during Prohibition was very clear, and extremely enlightening, both to the government and to the general public. What it told the government was that Prohibition was an act so despotic and so invasive of the personal freedom of the public that that law could not be enforced, regardless of the sums of taxpayers’ money spent on government snoopers and prohibition enforcement agents. The lawbreaking enlightened the public and the government that there are some limits beyond which the government may not go in its dictatorship over society. The government will never attempt Prohibition again, thanks to that lawbreaking and that enlightenment. This is a process of enlightenment which the Marxists have aptly called “education through struggle”.
Mr. Read, in contrast, apparently believes that laws are repealed by one individual genius rising up and sounding the trump, and then, presto, the unjust law is dissolved. This Great Man view of history is all too popular among the public ignorant of historical processes, and Mr. Read picks a peculiarly absurd example by singling out the alleged influence toward libertarian repeal of oppressive laws by one Father Paolo Sarpi. Sarpi, according to Read, was a sixteenth-century Venetian priest, “whose analysis, reasoning and expositions crumpled the mighty power combination of Church and State. . .” He then quotes the historian Andrew Dickson White as hailing Sarpi, who had “fought the most bitter fight for humanity ever known in any Latin nation, and won a victory by which the whole world has profited ever since.” (Notes from FEE, p. 2.)
Leonard Read accuses some of us of giving the anarchist movement a “false dignity” by “flaunting the labels of scholarship”. Well, that is one sin which Mr. Read can never be accused of committing. No scholarship—or historical knowledge whatsoever—is being flaunted here. In the first place, it is historiographical nonsense to think that a law, let alone a structure of laws, can be “crumpled” by one person writing a book, no matter how persuasive that book. Other things have to happen, too, but these are things which Mr. Read does not choose to face, for they involve pressure, social forces, politics, and even violence. They involve, in short, a struggle against Power. But setting this point aside, one boggles at the ignorance of history flaunted by Mr. Read: no one with the slightest knowledge of sixteenth or seventeenth-century European history can treat Mr. Read’s account of Father Sarpi with anything but a round horselaugh. Not only didn’t Father Sarpi “crumple” a darn thing, either directly or indirectly; Sarpi’s role was, to the contrary, to defend the laws of the Venetian State against the Church. Rather than the prophet of “repeal of oppressive laws”, Father Sarpi was the apologist for existing State law against its Churchly critics. Furthermore, and to put the cap on Mr. Read’s historical balderdash, these Venetian laws were decidedly oppressive and anti-libertarian. They included the refusal of the Venetian State to allow the Church the right to establish orders or erect religious buildings without state permission, and the expulsion of the Jesuit order from Venetian territory. Leonard Read’s heroic prophet of liberty who supposedly “crumpled” an entire structure of oppressive laws by writing a book, turns out to be merely an apologist for existing oppressive laws! Leonard Read the historian makes Leonard Read the social philosopher tower like Aristotle.
Perhaps Mr. Read’s problem is that he took as his historical authority one Andrew Dickson White, a man who was not even a very good historian when he wrote his works in the late nineteenth century. History is a cumulative discipline, and historical scholarship seventy-five odd years ago was in its infancy. And even in that age of flagrant bias and feeble scholarship among all too many historians, Andrew Dickson White was particularly blinded in his historical outlook by his almost fanatical anti-Catholic bias. Father Sarpi was against the Papacy, and for Andrew Dickson White that was credentials enough.
Is Mr. Read, then, counseling obedience to all law? is there no edict,’ no oppression, no injustice, no matter how flagrant or how gruesome, that Leonard Read will not swallow? No, he is willing to draw the line somewhere: where freedom of speech is infringed. I shall obey the law, Mr. Read states, “so long as I am free to speak my piece and write about it.” He adds with self-satisfaction: “That’s my criterion!” for “turning revolutionary”.
I have heard this criterion from Ayn Rand and now from Leonard Read, but I must confess that I simply cannot understand how this criterion is arrived at. How is it grounded in libertarian principle? Neither Read nor Rand has offered any derivation for their criterion. In fact, the criterion seems to me an absurd one for a libertarian to promulgate. Suppose that a man burgles my home, assaults me and my family, and kidnaps me; have I no moral right to defend myself provided that he allows me to register my protest and even send a letter to the Times? What sort of libertarian principle is this? For that is what Mr. Read is saying: no matter how much the government criminally robs us, kidnaps us, enslaves us, brutalizes us, we must not defy or disobey the edicts of this criminal gang provided they allow us to raise our voices in protest. But why? Why?
I can understand such an argument from Social Democrats like Sidney Hook. For people like Hook, property rights are unimportant; indeed the only right worth defending is freedom of speech (and to press the lever at the ballot-box). Given the preservation of such freedom of speech, such “human right”, every act of government is morally legitimate and therefore must morally be obeyed. But Leonard Read and Ayn Rand are supposed to be upholders of property right; they are supposed to believe that property right is a human right just as sacred as freedom of speech. How come this abandonment, this surrender of the rights of property, including the property right in one’s own person as is violated in conscription? How can libertarians and defenders of property rights suddenly abandon such rights as unimportant, and claim that the right of self-defense, or even the moral right to disobey unjust laws, arises only when freedom of speech is violated? Do not Read and Rand know that freedom is indivisible, that the willingness to sanction the loss of freedom in one area means that other areas inevitably are abandoned? Surely they have written this many times, as did Mr. Read in “The Penalty of Surrender”. On what day began lies?
Furthermore, aside from his abandonment of libertarian principle, Mr. Read, as in his acceptance of the Sarpi fable, betrays a curiously naive view of strategy in the real world. Does he really believe that he can accept an increasingly totalitarian framework of laws and of State power, keep counseling total civil obedience, and then, when the State puts the final nail in our coffin by suppressing our freedom of speech, suddenly say. “OK, that’s it. I now become a revolutionary.” Does he really believe that one can meekly accept 99% of one’s enslavement and then suddenly stand up, a defiant revolutionary, at the last nail in the coffin? Read the revolutionary would last about ten seconds before finding his way to the nearest hoosegow. But perhaps Mr. Read believes that, like Father Sarpi, he need then only rise and proclaim: “I become a revolutionary”, for the State’s oppressive regime to “crumple” once more.
I agree with Herbert Marcuse on virtually nothing, but his analysis of freedom of speech in the United States as the keystone in a system of “repressive tolerance” is close to the mark. It is as if the Establishment can oppress us by all manner of laws, privileges, and regulations, but then ostentatiously allow dissenters like Ayn Rand or Leonard Read to speak and publish, and then tell everyone here and abroad: “See, we do have a free country. What are you all complaining about?” Freedom of speech, especially when, as in the case of Leonard E. Read, it conspicuously does not lead to action against the State, serves the State well as its showcase, its “Potemkin village”, to bamboozle the public into believing that we in fact live in a “free society”. By embracing freedom of speech as the only freedom worth defending or clinging to, Leonard Read and Ayn Rand fall beautifully into the co-opting trap of repressive tolerance.
One wonders, too, whether Mr. Read realizes that even freedom of speech, especially that of the more annoying dissenters, is being interfered with, harassed, and crippled, right now in the United States. Such repression has taken myriad forms: for example, the Chicago Trial of the Conspiracy 8, the Chicago police riot of 1968, FCC regulation of radio and TV stations, the outlawing of the Washington Free Press, the persistent governmental harassment of the San Diego underground press, the endemic wiretapping indulged in by government, and numerous other examples, What was the massacre at Kent State but the murder of students who were exercising their freedom of speech and assembly by peaceful demonstrations? Even if our puny little libertarian movement has been harassed and intimidated in our exercise of freedom of speech and assembly by the force of government. Every one of our dinners and conferences in New York was infiltrated and reported on in detail by police spies, plainclothesmen virtually surrounded our major New York conference, and FBI agents have intimidated people who had attended the conference (obviously getting their names from police spies.) Do you, Leonard, consider this an invasion of our freedom of speech and communication? What of your criterion now?
Senator Sam Ervin (D., N. C), one of the few conservatives in Congress genuinely concerned about liberty of the person, has been conducting a lone, one-man campaign in the Senate attacking the existence of computerized files in the Federal government containing a dossier on hundreds of thousands of American “malcontents” who have committed no crimes. Senator Ervin says that the existence of these files brings us close to being a “police state”. The Senator charges that “the very existence of government files on how people exercise First Amendment rights, how they think, speak, assemble and act in lawful pursuits, is a form of official psychological coercion to keep silent and to refrain from acting.” (New York. Times, June 28.) Are you, Leonard Read, going to be less critical of our burgeoning police-state than Senator Ervin, a man who has never claimed to be a consistent libertarian? I know, too, that I and many other peaceful libertarians are on that infamous list.
Of course, it is very possible that Mr. Read simply does not care about this repression of freedom of speech, even of the speech of libertarians. For he does say that his criterion rests on whether “I am free to speak my piece and write about it.” I have no doubt whatever that, long after the freedom of speech and communication of others, of active anti-Statists, has been suppressed, Leonard E. Read will be allowed to speak and publish unhampered. His freedom of speech is not likely to be in danger, not so long as any tolerance remains in our system of repressive tolerance. Perhaps, after all, Mr. Read is only concerned about his freedom of speech, and the devil take anyone else’s. But at least he should ask himself: why? Why is it that my freedom of speech remains unsullied while others are suppressed? is it because the State considers me a boon rather than a bane, especially as I continue to preach ardently in favor of civil obedience?
Having proclaimed, but not defended, the criterion of free speech for disobeying any law, Mr. Read goes on to a third argument for civil obedience: an argument from strategy. Mr. Read asserts that anarchists, “who flout law and order as a matter of principle, cannot logically or convincingly present the case for freedom,” whereas himself and FEE can do so, because “our respect for law and order may well engender a corresponding respect for our commitments to freedom.” Perhaps, but I don’t see it; it seems to me rather that anarchists who declare that unjust laws may morally be disobeyed, will engender respect for their consistency in upholding the principle of freedom, for their consistency in principle and in deed. On the other hand, FEE’s respect for a system of law which surely observes, at the hands of any libertarian, only condemnation, can only seem to most people, and to most budding libertarians, as craven surrender of principle. To quote the early Read, FEE’s course will seem to most thinking people as “sin” and “surrender”. Why in blazes does a system of laws and decrees which even Leonard Read acknowledges to be unjust and oppressive deserve “respect”? Does the burglar, the kidnapper, the mugger, deserve “respect” for his decrees? On that day began lies I
Finally, Mr. Read gives us our Independence Day present: his repudiation of the Declaration of Independence. Quoting the Declaration, “whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter it or abolish it”, Read makes an enormous concession: that, on the grounds of the Declaration, we should all long ago have become revolutionaries! He admits: “the grievances listed (in the Declaration) are hardly distinguishable from the oppressive laws imposed on us by our own government. According to the Declaration, I should have turned revolutionary several decades ago.” Hear, hear! However, he says, he rejects the criterion of the Declaration—which amounts to the right of self-defense against long-continued abuses of liberty—for his own “criterion” of invasion of freedom of speech.
His argument against the Declaration, however, is not in his own realm of libertarian social philosophy but in the role of Leonard Read as Historian. “The more I study the history of revolutions,” Read intones, “the more evident” it is that “the replacement (is) worse than the government overthrown!” The American Revolution is, apparently, a miraculous exception to this historical rule. So much for revolution!
In contrast to his gaffe on Father Sarpi, Leonard Read is joined in this historical error by many historians and by the great mass of the American public, who have thereby been lulled into repudiating revolutions and denying their own revolutionary past. This old bromide is, however, dead wrong; we might almost say, in reverse, that most revolutionary governments have been far better, on balance, than the ones overthrown. Even the French Revolution, much abused by Tories and Conservatives then and since, and surrounded by armed invaders from counter-revolutionary crowned heads, was on net balance a great blessing for liberty and free enterprise. The French Revolution swept aside crippling feudal and mercantilist restrictions and oppressions, and set the stage for agricultural liberty and for the Industrial Revolution in France. I will here simply refer Mr. Read—and other counter-revolutionaries—to a monumental work of comparative history, Barrington Moore’s Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. Moore conclusively demonstrates that, in contrast to Tory mythology, it was precisely through violent revolution that America, Britain, and France were able to achieve as much liberty and democracy as they did; in contrast, it was those countries which industrialized without internal violence: e.g. Germany and Japan, which landed in modern totalitarianism. (Indeed, poring through Moore, now available in paperback, is one of the best single antidotes to the ignorance of history that unfortunately goes beyond Mr. Read to the entire libertarian movement.)
Mr. Read and FEE have not always been so down on the Declaration of Independence. Quite the contrary. Thus, in an article for FEE lionizing the Declaration, Ralph Bradford hurled this challenge to his contemporaries: “Would You Have Signed It?” (Ralph Bradford, “Would You Have Signed It?”, Essays on Liberty, Vol. VI, FEE, 1959, pp. 9-18.) Obviously the Leonard Read of 1970 would not have. Stoutly defending the Declaration and its signers, Bradford denounced the modern critics who dismiss the Declaration “because the principles asserted in those documents come between them and their plans for collectivization by force.” (Ibid., p. 11.) Bradford concluded his article: “The thing to remember is that when the chips were down, they (the signers) were men! The piece of paper they had signed was not a thing a signer could squirm out of or explain away later. It was not a vague statement of political and social principles. (Italics mine.) . . . In bold phrases it recited the political and economic sins of the King of England, and it declared that the Colonies were free from the rule of the British government. In the eyes of that government, such statements were treasonable; and treason was punishable by death . . . Would you have signed it?” No, most assuredly, the Leonard Read of today would not, in a million years, have signed such a document.
To conclude: Leonard E. Read, sternly and with unusual asperity, has told us in no uncertain terms that we must respect and obey all laws whatsoever, regardless of how unjust, unless and until Leonard Read’s freedom of speech shall be impaired. He has offered no intelligible argument whatsoever, let alone an argument grounded in libertarian principle, for this commandment to civil obedience. The conservative theorist James Burnham was far clearer and more candid in his ultimate argument for government: irrational mystery, Burnham wrote: “there is no adequate rational explanation for the existence and effective working of government . . . Neither the source nor the justification of government can be put in wholly rational terms . . . Consider the problem of government from the point of view of the reflective individual. I, as an individual, do in fact submit myself . . . to the rule of another—to government. But suppose that I ask myself: why should I do so? why should I submit myself to the rule of another? what justifies his rule? To these questions there are no objectively convincing answers in rational terms alone . . . why should I accept the hereditary or democratic or any other principle of legitimacy? Why should a principle justify the rule of that man over me? . . . I accept the principle, well . . . because I do, because that is the way it is and has been.” So enamoured is Burnham of this mystical “argument” for civil obedience that he actually lauds the mythology that States were founded by gods, and thereby have divine sanction: “In ancient times, before the illusions of science had corrupted traditional wisdom, the founders of Cities were known to be gods or demigods.” (James Burnham, Congress and the American Tradition, Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1959, pp. 3, 6-8.) But suppose, we may counter to Jim Burnham, we now begin not to accept the principle of the legitimacy of rule. What then? Obviously, Burnham’s mystical decrees can scarcely be persuasive argument to anyone but Burnham himself, if that. We must be guided by reason and by libertarian principle, and in that realm, Mr. Read’s case has not even begun to be made—perhaps, because he dimly sees that he can make no case for civil disobedience in reason and in liberty.
As we look over this sorry record, a persistent question confronts us: where are the laissez-faire revolutionaries? You don’t have to be an anarchist, after all, to be a revolutionary (although it helps). Tom Paine, Thomas Jefferson, Sam Adams, the signers of the Declaration, the patriots of the Boston Tea Party, none of these men were anarchists, no, they were, somewhat like Leonard E. Read, laissez-faire libertarians. And yet what splendid revolutionaries they were! There is a world of difference, however, between them and Leonard E. Read—and what a difference, O my countrymen! Somewhere in the explanation of that difference lies the key to the tragic decline of the American Republic. Frank Chodorov and Ralph Bradford and the Leonard E. Read of twenty years ago understood that difference full well.
Meanwhile, while Mr. Read stands up and orders our youth to respect and obey all laws whatsoever while their (or his!) freedom of speech remains, I for one am willing to stand behind our earlier group of laissez-faire libertarians, they who were “men”, they who never surrendered principle, they for whom on no day began lies, they who magnificently wrote:
We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness—That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness . . . when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security.
Adam Smith Warned You: Inflation Always Leads To Crisis.
“When national debts have once been accumulated to a certain degree, there is scarce, I believe, a single instance of their having been fairly and completely paid. The liberation of the public revenue, if it has been brought about at all, has always been brought about by a bankruptcy.” —THE WEALTH OF NATIONS.
One great economist after another has agreed with him. From Frederic Bastiat to Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman and Henry Hazlitt—all have Warned of the irreparable damage inflation does to a nation and the appalling toll it can take from your labor, your savings, your plans . . . and your dreams.
In previous inflations a few farsighted investors managed to prosper. But the loopholes by which they salvaged their wealth are being tightened in this one. There is no sure way to protect yourself.
Are you prepared, now:
• to see the value of your stocks cut in half?
• to lose your job or business?
• to have your loans called?
• to see mortgages and car loans soar further in cost?
• to face a general business recession?
YOUR INFLATION DEFENSE
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From The “Old Curmudgeon”
Penn Central may be in a veritable mess, but one recent managerial tactic at that railroad was truly a stroke of genius. Six female employees, beguiled by the propaganda of Women’s Lib, had protested vigorously that they were being shunted into the “stereotyped roles” of secretaries and typists. They demanded absolutely equal treatment with men. The management responded by giving them the equal treatment they so richly deserved: shifting them to the dangerous and backbreaking job of checking freight cars, a job that had previously been confined to the male “oppressors”. Liberated females, however, somehow are never satisfied. When they complained about the shift, the management retorted: “They wanted equal rights, didn’t they?”
It’s about time the Women’s Libbers realized that not all male jobs are the glamourous ones of advertising executives, publishers, lawyers, etc. The Women’s Libbers deserve the “liberation” they want; first step: freight-car checking.
RECOMMENDED READING
Panther Revisionism.
Robert Brustein, “When the Panther Came to Yale”, New York Times Magazine (June 21). Panther disruption at Yale.
Tom Wolfe, “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s”, New York (June 8, 40(5). A brilliant, scintillating article that is the Talk of the Town. Witty, insightful dissection of Panther-worship among New York’s Beautiful People. Lenny Bernstein and his cohorts will never be the same.
Drug Culture.
Milton Travers, “Each Other’s Victims,” McCall’s (June). A moving true story of a father’s struggle to save his son from the drug culture.
Anarchism.
Benjamin R. Tucker, Instead of a Book (New York: Haskell Reprints, $15.00). At last, back in print, the great classic of individualist anarchism; it’s a pleasure to read Tucker’s logical, “plumb-line” dissection of numerous deviationists.
American History: Big Business, Big Labor, Big Government
Melvin I. Urofsky, Big Steel and the Wilson Administration (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, $8100). Excellent Kolko-esque study of the role of Big Business in the statism and collectivism of the Wilson era, concentrating on the steel industry.
Robert H. Zieger, Republicans and Labor, 1919-1929 (Lexington, Ky., University of Kentucky Press, $8.25). Excellent work on the pro-union views of Herbert Hoover and his wing of the Republican Party.
Ronald Radosh, American Labor and United States Foreign Policy (New York: Random House, $10.00). The best book so far on U.S. labor leaders as willing servants of American imperialism abroad. Concentrates on U.S. labor in World War I, also in the Cold War.
DOUBLE ISSUE
A Semi-Monthly Newsletter
THE
Libertarian Forum↩
| Joseph R. Peden, Publisher | Murray N. Rothbard, Editor | |
| VOL. II, NO. 15-16 | AUGUST, 1970 | 35¢ |
Hatfield For President?
Senator Mark Hatfield (R., Oregon) has become famous in recent years for his courageous independence from the Nixon Administration, and for his intrepid battle against the draft and the Vietnam War. Year after year Senator Hatfield has introduced bills for the abolition of conscription, and he is now co-author of the McGovern-Hatfield amendment designed to cut off all funds for the war in Southeast Asia by 1971. At the end of June, Senator Hatfield amazed Washington by breaking party protocol and sharply suggesting that Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew might not be nominated in 1972, especially if the war and the economy continue in the mess that they’re in now. Columnist Mary McGrory reports that “some of Hatfield’s like-minded colleagues in the Senate whispered ‘Right On’ to him the morning after”. (New York Post, June 30.)
A friendly Senate colleague of Hatfield’s explained to Miss McGrory, concerning Hatfield’s statement that the party might turn to Ronald Reagan in 1972, that “Mark did not want to seem to be pushing himself forward as a candidate.” And the knowledgeable Miss McGrory adds: “The disillusioned Senator’s name might turn up in the New Hampshire primary ballot in 1972. He might even be running as an independent with John V. Lindsay. . .”
There has been rising interest within the peace movement in a third political party, a party that would mobilize all the forces against conscription and war in a broad coalition that would, once and for all, smash the old frozen party structures, especially the Democratic Party, run by the bosses and hacks, and bring vital issues and choices concerning them back into American politics. As the extreme Right said six years ago (but not lately): we need a choice not an echo, and we have been getting only echoes for far too long. The Republican Party was born in the 1850’s, when the Whig party structure refused to take a clear-cut stand on the extension of slavery, and so they were shunted aside for a new party designed to focus upon that neglected issue. The Democratic Party has refused to take a clear-cut stand against the war and against conscription, it has been virtually indistinguishable from the Republicans in the great blob of the Center, and it deserves therefore to disappear in the wake of a new party which will mobilize the public on these vital issues.
When most people think of a possible new party, they think of a candidate something like John Lindsay, and, indeed, most people think of Senator Hatfield as being ideologically similar to the liberal New York mayor. But this is not the case, and libertarians especially should be alerted to the crucial differences. Mark Hatfield thinks of himself, not as a modern-day liberal but as a “classical liberal”, a nineteenth-century liberal devoted to the creed of a strictly limited government: limited at home and abroad. Hatfield thinks of himself as a disciple of Senator Robert Taft, and his courageously antiwar policy is of a piece with Taft’s “isolationism”, the foreign-policy of the Old Right before the “World Anti-Communist Crusade”-mentality infected and took over the conservative movement in this country. In domestic affairs, too, Mark Hatfield believes in reducing the power of government to its classical liberal dimension of defending the free-market economy.
Above all, Mark Hatfield has had the acute perceptiveness to be virtually the only one of the small band of classical liberals in Congress to see that the old rhetoric, the old political labels, have lost their usefulness. He has been the only one to see that the classical liberal is more happy with many aspects of the New Left than he is with his old-time allies in the conservative movement. In short, Mark Hatfield is the only classical-liberal politician I know of who understands and agrees with the Left/Right concept—with the idea that the libertarian has more in common with the New Left than with the contemporary Right. More important, Mark Hatfield sees that the only hope for liberty on the political front is to forge a new coalition, a coalition combining the libertarian ideas of both Left and Right, and consisting of the constituencies to whom these ideas would appeal: students, anti-war people, blacks, and middle-class whites opposed to statism and war. A Hatfield-forged coalition would base itself squarely on slashing the powers of government at home and abroad: in getting out of Southeast Asia and reestablishing a pro-peace, “isolationist”, foreign policy; in repeal of the draft; and, domestically, in reducing the powers of Big Government in favor of a free, decentralized society.
Senator Hatfield is intelligent enough to see that, in contrast to a generation ago, a libertarian program of today, in today’s political climate, cannot be couched in rhetoric pleasing only to an extreme right-wing that is now hopelessly anti-libertarian. His rhetoric will be modern, in keeping with the perceptions of today, and in keeping with his knowledge of how a broad libertarian coalition could be forged. And make no mistake: the Senator does refer to himself, consciously, as a libertarian, and this in itself is almost unheard of in American politics.
I know, I know; I know all about the cries of protest that will now be welling up in scores of libertarian hearts, those hearts which, like mine, are steeped in innate and instinctive distrust for any and every politician. The remarkable thing is that Mark Hatfield himself understands such distrust just as well, and probably shares it. A while ago he told a group of us, spontaneously bringing up the point himself: “I have not, like Faust, sold my soul to politics.” I believe him. And if the time should ever come when Mark Hatfield runs for the Presidency, I shall enlist without hesitation behind his banner.
DOUBLE ISSUE
NOTICE: During July and August, we will publish special Double Issues: one covering July 1-July 15, and another August 1-August 15. We will return to our regular publishing schedule in September.
Black Flag For A New Decade
Radical Libertarianism: A Right Wing Alternative. By Jerome Tuccille. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970. 109 pp. $5.00.
Here is a book which goes on the must read list for radicals interested in sorting out the politics of the sixties with an eye to identifying some blind alleys and finding some new directions. Tuccille speaks for the rapidly growing numbers of radical libertarians, people who know where they are going, and speaks to the broadest possible spectrum of people who want to get to the same place but just haven’t gotten things quite straight in their heads yet. He has written, quite simply, the best, most up-to-date, statement of radical libertarian principles there is around, and, since a major publisher has had the good business sense to see its enormous sales potential, everybody can get a copy without writing to some obscure P.O. Box in New York.
Unless you are a very recent subscriber to this magazine, and have thus missed articles here by radical libertarians Murray Rothbard (June 15, 1969) and Karl Hess (October, 1969) you don’t have to ask what is radical libertarianism. But in case you do want an answer to that question, Tuccille’s book is where to find it. That’s what he wrote it for. When you read it, you will find that radical libertarianism (or anarcho-libertarianism, a label some prefer) is a movement right-wing in origin and ecumenical in appeal. Taking one thing at a time, let’s look at the right-wing origin first.
You don’t have to get very far into the book before you find out that radical libertarianism is not a “new right” being set up to complement the new left. The new right are the finks—William Buckley deserves and gets more abuse than anyone else—who sold out on the last shreds of the American Revolution along about the time of the Korean War. They are the ones who, in Rothbard’s words, dedicated themselves to “the preservation of tradition, order, Christianity and good manners against the modern sins of reason, license, atheism and boorishness”. The new right are the Greek Colonels and John Mitchells.
The old right used to have a pretty strong libertarian element in it, although anyone who can’t remember back that far himself will probably not have heard of three-quarters of the names Tuccille cites. If you go way back, you get to Benjamin Tucker and Lysander Spooner—Lysander who?? These were men who didn’t like American imperialism and militarism, state monopoly capitalism, high taxes, and parasitic bureaucrats, cops climbing your fire escape to peek and see if you are violating the laws which regulate sexual conduct among consenting adults, or customs agents who snoop to see what sort of imports you are bringing back from Acapulco. They did like isolationism and volunteer armies (if any), community control, doing your own thing, and, if anyone had thought it up yet, they would have liked Black Power (as Tuccille does).
Well, it is nice to know that radical libertarians are for all those good things, you may be saying to yourself, and maybe all the quotes from Thomas Jefferson will be useful for winning over a few YAFers (in fact, Tuccille has a very interesting appendix on the subject of the libertarian breakaway faction of the YAF), but of what interest is all this right-wing stuff to me, a card-carrying member of the Woodstock generation? Answer is simple: radical libertarians know how to bridge the phony “gap” between left and right. That means that you can get enough people on your side to make things happen now, in the seventies, before 1984 catches your fraction of a faction with its pants down.
The simple libertarian lesson is that left and right are only irreconcilable opposites so long as they are fighting it out for who gets to run the state. As long as it is class against class, state capitalism vs. state socialism, then politics of revolution is just a matter of kto-kovo (translation: who screws whom) as Lenin would have put it. The irreconcilability of the statist left and the statist right derives from two simple axioms. (1) There can only be one state in a given country at a given time, and (2) all states are alike regardless of who runs them. That last is important. If there were any substantive difference between state capitalism and state socialism, the historical process might someday bring about a resolution of the conflict. But as it is, it’s just scorpions in a bottle.
So, now we are all convinced that statism is a hopelessly bad trip, but does that help? Won’t we just have another round of kto-kovo with the anarcho-socialists fighting it out with anarcho-capitalists? Tuccille makes a big point of raising this question and answers a decisive no. It is worth quoting him at some length on this.
This is the beauty of anarcho-libertarianism: utter and complete toleration for any and all styles of life so long as they are voluntary and nonaggressive in nature. Only under such a system can the capitalist and socialist mentalities coexist peacefully, without infringing on the rights of other individuals and communities.
The capitalist and socialist schools of anarchy . . . are united on the most crucial question of all: the absolute necessity for people to take control over their own lives, and the dismantling and final elimination of state authority over the life of man. Their major disagreement is one of personal attitudes concerning the makeup of human nature itself. Will man, left to his own devices, elect to live privately, trade his wits and talents on the open market, accept the fruits of his own labor and provide for his own happiness, and agree to relieve the misfortunes of those less talented than himself by voluntary means—or would he prefer to organize himself in voluntary communes, share the tools of production and the fruits of labor without angling for a larger proportionate share than his fellows, and live in a condition of spontaneous social communism?
Tuccille thinks the former. Tom Hayden thinks the latter. The two could cheerfully coexist in separate enclaves in an anarchist society. But far more important than the possibility that they could cheerfully coexist is the fact that even if their contrasting life styles generated the utmost antipathy and personal hatred, as long as the state had been dismantled and finally eliminated, and as long as both recognized and acted on the fundamental libertarian principle that “every individual has the right to defend himself against any person or organization . . . that initiates the use of force against him”, then the prejudice of the one could never mean the enslavement of the other.
— Edwin G. Dolan
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The State: ENEMY OF LATIN AMERICA
Unfortunately it seems that all too often libertarians, when debunking the great “U.S. Government is the international good guy” myth by pointing to the revisionist histories which are so unmarred by jingoism and great power chauvinism, concentrate on the topics which Leviathan’s apologists choose to emphasize—namely the world wars, the Cold War, and Vietnam—and ignore the other manifestations of U.S. imperialist aggression which the press of the U.S. ruling class fails to mention. Why always be on the defensive and explode only the lies Amerika chooses to discuss, why not attack every oppression the world’s greatest oppressor executes? The broad revisionist must be broad indeed.
The subject of U.S. imperialism in Latin America is undoubtedly one of such ignored topics. Moreover, the study of Latin America is doubly the responsibility of the libertarian, for the domestic situation there, besides being inseparable from U.S. imperialism, is highly significant on its own account as a problem which demands consistent explanation from the viewpoint of free market economics. Can any school ignore Third World development and still hope to win adherents in this day and age?
Many on both Left and Right have attempted to explain the political and economic problems of Latin America—the poverty and misery, the lack of freedom, and so forth—and have contributed highly significant but questionable analyses. These pitfalls are recognizable in two well-known representatives of the Left and Right, men who are highly libertarian in many areas—namely, Che Guevara and Ludwig Von Mises.
Che presented the Left analysis clearly in his speech “On Sacrifice and Dedication” delivered on June 18, 1960. The U.S. imperialists had been kicked out because “the first thing we want is to be masters of our own destiny, to be an independent country, a country free from foreign interference, a country that seeks out its own system of development without interference and that can trade freely anywhere in the world.” In a word, the libertarian imperative of national self-determination was finally a reality. But what next? “Basically, there are two ways. . .One of them is called the free enterprise way. It used to be expressed by a French phrase, which in Spanish means ‘let be.’ All economic forces, supposedly on an equal footing, would freely compete with each other and bring about the country’s development.” So far, so good. “That is what we had in Cuba, and what did it get us?” Wait a minute, Che, did not the U.S. and Cuban States consistently sabotage the free market in Cuba before the Revolution? Indeed, every example of “free enterprise” Che enumerates may be traced to dislocations caused by, in his own words, the tendency of Cuba’s businessmen “to make deals with the soldiers of the moment, with the politicians in power, and to gain more advantages.” In such a system “wealth is concentrated in the hands of a fortunate few, the friends of the government, the best wheeler-dealers.” Naturally Che also pointed out how the U.S. Government prevented Cuban development. Hence, if anything, his critique of the old system should have led him to advocate its opposite—the free market—instead of rejecting economic freedom just because the old ruling class misleadingly called their system free enterprise. Yet, on the contrary, after tracing all evils to the State, Che exclaimed that “we, the government, should carry the weight and the direction of industrialization, so that there will not be any anarchy.” But the Cuban people abhorred this (no doubt Batista had used the same excuse!): “And today, in the process of industrialization which gives such great importance to the state, the workers consider the state as just one more boss, and they treat it as a boss.” The workers acted so for good reason: in spite of the laudable—but fruitless—fight of certain elements within the Cuban government against bureaucracy and commandism through the 60s, the inherent nature of the all glorious Plan, the antithesis of the free market, reveals itself today in the increasing authoritarianism and bureaucraticism of the new Cuban State. According to the latest reports—e.g., Adam Hochschild in Liberation, Dec. 1969 and Maurice Zeitlin in Ramparts, March 1970—all decisions are made by the top elite and shoved down the throats of the masses below.
Enough of the Left analysis at this point; it has a good critique but very bad proposals. The Right analysis does not even offer a decent critique. Take Mises; to be sure, in the purest economic theory he is the age’s greatest economist, but his views on world affairs, particularily his naive beliefs on U.S. history, are totally unrealistic. According to Mises, the wealth of the West, especially Amerika, and the poverty of the East and the Third World stem from the fact that the former have been peaceful “free” enterprisers while the latter, due to several factors such as statism, suffer from a shortage of capital. (cf. Human Action, 3rd ed., pp. 496-8). Mises’ solution for Latin America would no doubt be more capital investments from their kindly Northern Neighbor.
Paul Baran knew much more about Latin America and the rest of the Third World than does Mises. He states categorically that “the principle obstacle to their development is not shortage of capital.” Baran, a Marxist, could just as well have been a free market economist on this question: he clearly traced the present gross misallocation (not scarcity) of most Third World capital to State intervention in the market (cf. Baran, Political Economy of Growth, Ch. 7). Andre Gunder Frank, James Petras, and other Marxists have written a wealth of literature documenting—sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously—the essential role played by the State in keeping the masses of Latin America in poverty. Actually, any competent writer on Latin America, including everyone from UN (and hence U.S. imperialist) propagandists like Raul Prebisch to neo-fascists such as Helio Jaguaribe, cannot fail to mention that which is inseparable from Latin American under-development and poverty: the Imperial Northamerican State and the various Latin American semi-feudal States. To be sure, virtually everyone, like Che, discounts the inherent oppressiveness of the State when it comes time to propose a solution; yet if they offered a solution consonent with their critiques, they could propose nothing other than revolutionary free market anarchism.
One of the best comprehensive documentaries on the subject, which would serve as an excellent introduction to interested libertarians, is Latin American Radicalism, ed. by Horowitz, Castro, and Gerassi (Vintage, $2.45). There is obviously no space here to discuss all the many State interventions which have sabotaged the economies of the various Latin American countries; a short summary of the general position of the articles in this volume indicates the astounding role of the State in insuring utter poverty for the masses.
O. M. Carpeaux traces U.S. imperialism in Latin America from the time of the Monroe Doctrine, promulgated to give the U.S. privileges in world commerce and as a cover for Western expansion, and from the aggressions against Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico, etc., TR’s Big Stick imperialism, the various Marine invasions in this and the last century, and so forth ad nauseam. Ample evidence is given to prove how the U.S. over and over has invaded Latin American countries and killed its people, monopolized its resources and seized its means of production in order to insure Amerikan hegemony primarily so that big business could secure—through privileges denied competitors—high yielding investments, rich deposits of raw materials, and restricted markets. The U.S. has never been content to abide by the rules of fair play in the market place of the world; no, Amerikan business has always demanded State-enforced privileges to suppress competition in “her” markets, to monopolize the sources of raw materials, and to insure a higher return on investments than the market would have set.
The story of U.S. intervention in the Dominican Republic in 1965 is told by Goff and Locker, who document the sugar interests of LBJ’s advisors. This of course is part of a more general study concerning the alliance between the U.S. imperialists and the feudal Latin American oligarchies by which both use each other to oppress the masses but ultimately the latter play marionette to the former or face a coup sponsored by the CIA. John Saxe-Fernandez documents the military aid by which the U.S. keeps the Central American dictators in power. What is to be done? is answered by Debray, Che, Torres and other revolutionaries in the last section. The volume clearly demonstrates the truth of the prediction by the great liberator Bolivar in 1829: “The United States appear to be destined by Providence to plague America with misery in the name of liberty.”
And Mises says the road to development is paved with more Western capital! Naturally, the libertarian would never want to see free trade restricted; but the U.S. Government has forever insisted on sabotaging the free market and bringing the rest of the world to its knees by bribes in the form of “grants” from the Alliance for “Progress” and other such organs, or force in the form of CIA assassinations or Marine Massacres. Truly, liberation from U.S. domination would do much to unshackle the chains on the Latin American economies.
An added effect of the death of U.S. imperialism would be that the various dictators could be overthrown and the means of production seized by the masses, who would have owned them in the first place had a free market existed all along rather than feudalism/state capitalism. Few if any of the Latin American oligarchies could stay in power a week if there were no U.S. imperialism to back them up.
One has only to study the economic history of almost any country in Latin America to understand how governments, kept in power by foreign governments (first Spain and other European colonialists, later the U.S.) have never allowed a free market so as to hold the masses in serfdom and guarantee the small ruling elite all the wealth. Every government intervention in the economy has as its purpose to grab more wealth for the ruling class; it is no accident that wherever a State exists wealth coincides with—not the ability to serve consumers in the market—but ruling power, i.e., the ability to plunder the poorer members of society.
Aldo Ferrer, by no means a radical, shows how the process works in his important book The Argentine Economy. While he does not say so in those words, Ferrer traces stagnation to the State and offers economic analyses and empirical data to substantiate how the Argentine State intervenes in the economy to increase the wealth of the rich, the ruling class. Virtually every single upset in the economy or reason for under-development in Argentine history was directly caused by the State; the inference which Ferrer fails to draw, the other side of the same coin, is that none of this could have occurred without a State. It takes a State to plunder the masses, it takes a State to make the poor poorer so the rich can get richer, it takes a State to make the free market an impossibility. The present State was exported from the State of Spain. Its purpose was an imperialist one, namely, to extract wealth from the colony so that, through mercantilist manipulation of the economy, the ruling class would become richer. Together with the new requirement of plunder by a new ruling class—the one residing in the colony, this necessitated the extermination of the Indians (Argentina rapidly learned “free enterprise” à la Northamerical) and monopolization of the land. All of this presupposed a State. Unused land reserved for monopolists by the State, Ferrer points out, had as its purpose exploitation of the poor by their rich oppressors by perpetuating a monopoly of the valuable land resource in the hands of a small elite. Wages were forced down well below their marginal productivity, since the masses were not allowed to homestead and so had to work for wages in order to survive, and since the big landowners could get by with gross inefficiency and hence high agricultural prices since they owned all the natural resources.
The masses were (and are) also exploited by the wealthy elite through the State’s policy of never-ending inflation. As Ferrer clearly shows, inflation is based on a governmental desire to spend money it has “created” on those holding the puppet strings, but even more on the fact that prices rise faster than wages, i.e., real wages decrease while profits zoom upwards. This profit inflation is all the better for the rich in control of the State to make plundering returns and capital accumulation through theft; furthermore, import costs rise which means a bounty on exports, all of which amounts to price increases for the masses and State privileges for domestic producers on the home and foreign markets. Finally, as if the above were not enough to fulfill the parasitic urges of the criminal class controlling the State to concentrate all the wealth in their hands, all sorts of blatantly regressive taxes—especially tariffs and excise taxes—are imposed upon the masses. Tariffs, which are high as heaven in Argentina, of course allow domestic business to be grossly inefficient and charge exorbitant prices to the poor. Insult is added to injury when the plunder extracted by regressive taxation is spent progressively—that is, all the subsidies and spending of the State are for the benefit of the ruling oligarchy.
Ferrer hesitates to employ such strong language but his data certainly back it up. They back up the class nature of the Argentine State, the principle that the purpose of the State is to make the rich richer by making the poor poorer, and the inference that the State must be abolished, the ex-propriators expropriated, and a completely free market substituted for the present system of monopoly State feudalism/capitalism if real economic development is ever to occur.
— Stephen P. Halbrook
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The Black Declaration of Independence printed in the New York Times, July 3, 1970, is one of the most refreshing documents to emerge from the Black Power movement since the speeches of Malcolm X. With incisive clarity the authors of this statement have brilliantly paraphrased the language of the original Declaration of Independence and catalogued a long list of grievances with a notable absence of emotionalism and simplistic rhetoric. The document was prepared by the National Committee of Black Churchmen, 110 East 125th St., New York City, and signed by forty black clergymen of various faiths.
Starting with the opening words of the Declaration of Independence—“When in the course of Human Events, it becomes necessary for a people . . .”—the Black Declaration goes on to enumerate a multitude of abuses inflicted on the black community by government. These include: the “desecration” of “Dwelling Places, under the Pretense of Urban Renewal”; swarms of “Social Workers, Officers and Investigators” sent into the black communities to “harass our People”; the stationing of “Armies of Police, State Troopers and National Guardsmen” in ghetto neighborhoods “without the consent of our People”; “the dissolution of school districts controlled by Blacks” whenever they oppose outside domination; and racist attitudes in general which have isolated blacks in dilapidated areas and denied them adequate housing, schooling and employment as well as their ordinary Constitutional Rights.
The value of this Declaration rests in the fact that its creators have confined themselves to a careful historical analysis of calculated injustice, and they have stayed clear of generalized polemics about “fascism”, “capitalist exploitation”, and the usual sloganeering that has replaced reasonable discussion at a time it is needed most.
The document ends with the statement that blacks have continually petitioned government for an end to “Repressive Control” and that government has “been deaf to the voice of Justice and of Humanity.” The final tone is ominous: “. . . unless we receive full Redress and Relief from these Inhumanities we shall move to renounce all Allegiance to this Nation, and will refuse, in every way, to cooperate with the Evil which is Perpetrated upon ourselves and our Communities.”
This breath of fresh air is a welcome change at a time when the American nation is being inundated on all levels by torrents of fiery prose. Unless there is a sharp reversal of our government’s foreign and domestic policies at once, the Second American Revolution may pre-date the two-hundredth anniversary of the first.
*********
From the New York Times, July 5, 1970, comes word that Governor William G. Milliken of Michigan will sign a bill allowing citizens the right to file suit against public agencies and private industries which pollute the environment. Michigan will become the first state to specifically insure citizens of this fundamental right to protect their own property against unwanted invasion by contaminating elements. Other states planning similar legislation are New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Colorado, California and Texas, and a federal bill is now before the U.S. Senate.
All the authorities are doing here is putting on the books a right which has always belonged by Natural Law to the people: the right of self-defense. The injection of harmful ingredients into our air supply is automatically a violation of property rights since they will eventually find their way into someone else’s lungs. Likewise, water, sound and soil pollution invariably results in physical harm to other persons.
So we can thank the politicians for stating a principle which should have been obvious to everyone years ago. One beneficial aspect of this legislation is that, for a rare change, legality coincides with Natural Law. The Law ’n’ Order Neanderthals don’t have to worry anymore about breaking a law when they sue the Atomic Energy Commission for poisoning their children.
*********
Lately, a few libertarians have grown fond of supporting the Mafia as a legitimate black market organization operating outside the entrepreneurial restraints of government. They reason that many Mafia activities such as gambling, melting silver coins, loansharking, prostitution, even peddling narcotics are voluntaristic in nature and ought not to be considered illegal.
Much of this is true. But what is overlooked is the fact that the Mafia no more welcomes competition in its various enterprises than does the federal government, and has gone to even greater lengths to suppress it. The racketeers have supplied their competitors with cement boots before taking them swimming, firebombed their places of business, and run competing ice cream and garbage trucks from the highways. They have utilized torture, mutilation and murder to keep their “free market” businesses from enduring the hardships of competitive enterprise.
In addition, Mafia-controlled unions are responsible for the grand-scale pilfering that has gone on for years on the docks and at our airports. The Cosa Nostra families are no strangers to the less-than-subtle art of extortion—shaking down neighborhood storekeepers for the right to stay in business. So, while there is a hilarious side to the spectacle of exotic characters with names like Tony “Big Walnuts” Perrotta or Mario “Apricots” Terrazzo eluding the clutches of Big Government, it is dangerous to romanticize their peculiar brand of Black Market Monopoly. The Mafia is every bit as Law ’n’ Order-happy as Spiro Agnew. It is its own law and its own order. And Mafiosi have never been too strong on due process.
Nixon And The Economy
The editor has commented recently (June 15 issue) on “The Nixon Mess.” In some respects Professor Rothbard has understated the case against Nixon. Consider what is euphemistically being referred to as “the liquidity crisis.” What this crisis amounts to is a profit squeeze on firms in the capital goods industries—Professor Hayek’s “higher orders of production.” Rothbard has explained in the June 15 article that liquidation in the capital goods industries is a necessary condition for the end of a boom, and a return to economic “normalcy.” Much investment specialized to these industries must become worthless in the process; it would have been better, of course, if the investments had never been made. However, bygones are bygones, and no policy could be more wistful and ill-conceived than one which would attempt to “save” investments which have been demonstrated (on the market) to have been unwisely pursued. As much capital as is possible must be salvaged, and re-invested in the production of consumers’ goods, so that resources can be applied to the production of goods that are most highly desired. It is this latter process which eventually slows the price-inflation in the consumers’ goods industries (by increasing the supply of consumers’ goods), and eventually results in the proper ratio of investment in capital goods relative to consumers’ goods—the correct “structure of production.”
In effect, the Nixon Administration has announced that it will not permit this process to be carried out. Arthur Burns recently stated (The Wall Street Journal, July 3, 1970) that the Federal Reserve System “is fully aware of its responsibility to prevent . . . a scramble for liquidity” (i.e., disinvestment).” An unnamed official of the Fed (WSJ, 7/3/70) has stated that that organization finds even Friedman’s suggestion for steady growth in the money supply too extreme (calling Friedman’s idea “sheer fanaticism”).
Consider also the implications of the Penn Central fiasco. The Nixon Administration, by its actions, is all but saying that it will not permit any large corporation to go under. The railroads are a clear case of an industry which needs disinvestment. Conservative estimates see 35 percent of the nation’s trackage as not being economically justifiable. Probably at least that much of Penn Central’s trackage should be pared. Yet the government wants to step in, to lend the corporation money, in order to try to prevent the inevitable. For years the railroad has been covertly disinvesting in the only way it could—given the tight regulation of the industry—, by allowing the quality of its service to deteriorate. This is no longer enough. Unfortunately, the Nixon Administration will undoubtedly duplicate the policies of the Eisenhower Administration as regards the railroads: grant loans to the weakest lines in order to tide them over a recession. Professor George Hilton, in his The Transportation Act of 1958, has amply demonstrated the folly of the previous loan guarantees given the railroads. Railroads are even more susceptible to economic fluctuations (especially the Eastern lines) than a capital goods industry like steel. A given percentage downturn in steel or auto production often results in a greater percentage downturn in rail profits. If the railroads had been permitted to disinvest earlier, they would not be in the trouble they are in now. If not permitted to disinvest now, they will be in even worse shape when the next recession hits.
Nixon, however, is not satisfied to emulate past follies. He is apparently determined to extend government aid to any major firm in any industry that wants it. A lot of ignorant people have written a lot of arrant nonsense about inflation’s being caused by a “wage-price spiral.” But the kernel of truth hidden in all this talk must not be overlooked. Ever since the Hoover New Deal, the policy of the federal government has been moving toward one of assuring the profitability of American big business (thus guaranteeing for itself an important source of support for its policies—foreign and domestic). With the government more and more willing to underwrite losses, there is less and less incentive for corporate heads to heed the warnings of the market, and curtail operations where indicated. If he should continue to invest when he should be disinvesting, the businessman can now go to the federal government should crisis strike. All of this, we are told (WSJ, 7/3/70), has led some of Nixon’s top aides to an “anti-business feeling”; these aides point out that business executives preach free enterprise, but “come running to us” when they get into trouble. One can be sure that these aides will soon “shape up,” or be “shipped out!”
The point here is that the business executive now need not cut prices in the face of falling demand; or resist wage demands of unions. Union leaders need worry less about whether they are asking for more than a market wage. The federal government has announced its willingness to supply cash—virtually to print money up if necessary—to major corporations that find themselves in a “liquidity crisis” (i.e., find themselves over-extended). Keynesian Walter Heller has spoken of an “inflationary bias” in our economy. In doing so, he is perhaps being more prescient than Milton Friedman (for some reason inexplicable to this author, Professor Friedman considers Nixon to be a brilliant man bent on bringing libertarianism to America). Up with free enterprise!
What is happening now is what Ludwig von Mises predicted nearly sixty years ago would happen to those countries which adopted the economics of inflationism. Inflation up until very recently in this country has been largely unanticipated; it has in effect been a tax on money holdings. The public is now beginning to expect further inflation, and, as with any tax, are finding ways to avoid the tax. In economic terms, they are decreasing their demand for money. Rather than go through the painful process of contradicting these inflationary expectations, the government has apparently chosen to meet them. To do this, the government must continue to inflate at something like the present 9 to 10 percent rate. But this will lead to expectations of inflation, and a further decrease in the demand for money; and to a “need” for further inflation . . . Mises has been largely dismissed by modern economists. His analysis is not supposed to be “applicable” to a modern economy (wasn’t Germany a modern economy in the 1920’s?). Yet seldom has an analysis been so applicable as is Mises’ now. Unless the present course is reversed, we are on the long, slow (but inevitable) road to the destruction of our monetary system. And, as Mises has so often and so ably pointed out, if there is any one institution whose evolution is necessary for modern civilization as we know it, it is that of money. If this administration does not blow us up, it may have the dubious distinction of having brought us to the economic ruin that so many others have failed in accomplishing.
— Gerald O’Driscoll, Jr.
A Semi-Monthly Newsletter
THE
Libertarian Forum↩
| Joseph R. Peden, Publisher | Murray N. Rothbard, Editor | |
| VOLUME II, NO. 17 | SEPTEMBER 1, 1970 | 35¢ |
THE SOCIALIST SCHOLARS CAPER
Once again, dear reader, your own Lib. Forum has made the mass media. The fact that the reference, though prominent, was also malicious, distorted, and absurd, should not make us despair. However distorted, “as long as the name is spelled right” and it was, some of the tens of thousands out there who read about us might have the urge to look into us more closely, to see the Devil plain as it were, and then their conversion is always possible.
The story begins with the Socialist Scholars Conference, which, confusedly, is the name both for an organization of socialist scholars and for the conferences that they have held in New York every year since 1965. Not being a socialist, I am not a member of the SSC organization, but I have attended many of their conferences, for many of their papers and panels have been lively, interesting, and informative. Never having much influence on the Left, the SSC conferences have been declining in recent years, since they have suffered, along with the rest of the Left, from a growing group of young militants who hold scholarship and intellect to be worthless and “irrelevant”, and who therefore long to purge the word “Scholars” from the title. (If we ask the logical question: If they don’t want scholarship, why do they join an organization of scholars and then try to wreck it? Why do they bother?—then we are in deep waters indeed, for then we would be trying to explain much of the destructiveness and unreason that has overcome the Left in recent years.)
From the beginning, into these pleasant if not earth-shaking sessions strode one Mrs. Alice Widener, wealthy owner and editor of an unimportant, Red-baiting newsletter called USA. A self-styled “authority” on the Left, La Widener arrived every year at the SSC sessions, and reported on them with unwavering misinterpretation and ignorance of what the whole thing was all about. La Widener trying to make sense of all the nuances of social philosophy was truly a bull let loose in a china shop. One famous gaffe of hers was the time she attended a session on slavery featuring Eugene D. Genovese and Herbert Aptheker. Trying desperately to link the then famously radical Genovese with the admitted Communist Aptheker, Widener had them in solid agreement, when the entire scholarly world knows that, in their views on slavery, Genovese and Aptheker could not be further apart in every possible way. But apart from the misinterpretations of Widener was her strange notion that the SSC was in some way the Politburo of the Left, so that its papers and panels set down the annual line for all the Left underlings everywhere. Widener’s annual reports from the conferences, ever agog with new crisis and horror, have always provided welcome horselaughs for the SSC members, who were particularly amused by the fact that, of all the people in the country, in or out of the SSC, only Mrs. Widener seemed to think of these sessions as having any earth-shaking importance.
Mrs. Widener’s annual blatherings only took on importance from the fact that they have been solemnly reprinted, year after year, as lead articles in Barron’s., a pro-laissez-faire Wall St. weekly of large circulation, blessed with an editor of neo-Randian persuasion; from Barron’s, they percolated to a readership of conservatives who imbibed her annual nonsense as Gospel, and took from it their world-view as to what was going on in the world of Left scholarship.
Well, comes 1970 and the June 13-14 meeting, and Professor Leonard Liggio and myself were invited to speak at a panel to be organized by Professor Liggio, and devoted to “Left/Rightism”—specifically, to a reassessment of the Old Right and how it prefigured much of the New Left criticisms of welfare-warfare America. We devoted considerable care to preparation of the papers, and I must say that much enjoyment was had by all, although how much influence we had on the assembled Left is dubious, since the overwhelming majority of our audience were our own libertarians, with an occasional leftist wandering in who didn’t seem to know the difference between Franklin and Teddy Roosevelt. At any rate, our entire panel was devoted to an appreciative portrayal of the hard-hitting views of the Old Right and their libertarian approach to war, foreign policy and militarism, as well as to education, state-monopoly-capitalism, decentralization, the judiciary, and civil liberties. Especially lauded by us were such “Old Rightists” as: Senator Taft, John T. Flynn, Frank Chodorov, Albert Jay Nock, Garet Garrett, Felix Morley, Senator borah, H. L. Mencken, Rep. Howard Beffett, etc.
Enter La Widener. (USA, June 19-July 3; Barron’s, July 13.) Or rather, enter La Widener by remote control, since it is all too clear that she did not attend any of the Conference. Her entire report is taken up with lengthy quotes from unimportant position papers issued ahead of the Conference by the SSC organizers; there is not a word on any of the panels, that is, on the content of the Conference itself, except, mirabile dictu, on ours! To our panel came her assistant, one Falzone, accompanied by a certain Miss Poor from the Orlando Sentinel. (In thus ignoring all the other panels, Widener-Poor-Falzon completely missed the real story of the Conference, which was its total domination by the crazed forces of Women’s Liberation, whose well-attended and almost continuous panels barred The Enemy—men—from daring to attend. Seconded, I might add, by singularly truculent and unscholarly youths from the Free Joan Bird Committee.)
So there we are, Leonard Liggio and myself, with our names spelled correctly, on the front page of the mighty Barron’s! There, Poor-Falzon-Widener report that in introducing me, Professor Ronald Radosh, moderator of the panel, made “snide remarks” about the American flag (Oh no! Good God! Not that!), and added that I had once, somewhere, described the flag as a “rag”, and they noted that I did not immediately leap up and protest this attribution. So much for what I didn’t say at the panel. Next, in a truly cunning piece of research that must leave us all agog, our intrepid authority on social movements finds repeated links between Professor Liggio and myself (Oh, wow!). From there, our indefatigable scholar goes on to find what she believes to be the key, the key evil article which set the line for the entire Socialist Scholars Conference, and since we already know that the SSC in turn functions as the Politburo of the Left, for the entire Left-wing in America. And that article, dear reader, is none other than Leonard Liggio’s “State of the Movement”, which comprised the Lib. Forum of May 15. So there we are, emblazoned on the front page of Barron’s as kingpin of the entire Left in America! There follows two quotes from the Liggio article: one in which Leonard dared to quote favorably from Julius Lester (in a highly intelligent attack that he had levelled on the ultra-adventurism of the Panthers), and another in which she scoffs at an example of Liggio’s “so-called Libertarian thinking, the example being praise for early SDS opposition to the draft!
I suppose we must reconcile ourselves to the fact that there are people in this world so divorced from reality that they really believe that Leonard Liggio and the Lib. Forum are the high panjandrums of the American Left—just as there are people who believe that the world is being run by twelve secret Jewish Illuminati. And I suppose we must accept the fact that there are “authorities” on political philosophy so lame-brained as to believe that a libertarian is someone who approves of the draft. But what is this nonsense doing on the front page of Barron’s”?
But, and here we rise from the merely stupid to the slightly sinister, isn’t it odd that in all the concentration by Mrs. Widener on our panel, there is not a single word of what we actually said at the panel, at the content of our rather lengthy remarks? On this, the actual substance of what we said at the Conference, the team of Poor-Falzon-Widener falls strangely silent. The reason for this odd silence should be clear; if she had written one word of what we actually said at the Conference, it would have blown her entire thesis of us as leading Marxists and socialists sky-high. For even a gullible conservative readership that has virtually forgotten its past might think twice at talks exclusively devoted to praising Taft, Nock, Flynn, etc.
The Barron’s article predictably sent many conservative readers into a tizzy. Instead of rejoicing at the fact that some socialists, at least, are coming to see a great deal of merit in libertarian, Old Right perspectives, their reaction was just the opposite. “What! Murray Rothbard, a free-market economist, is now a socialist! What happened?” Obviously, what these people need badly is to stop reading La Widener and to start reading the Lib. Forum and its ancillary and recommended readings. Like all prospective readers, they are welcome. Why did we put on this panel at the Socialist Scholars Conference? Because we were asked. I am sure that we would do the same at a conference of conservative intellectuals; but the important point is that we have not been asked by any such conference, which says a great deal about the current ideological scene.
At any rate, I have written a letter of protest to Barron’s setting the record straight, which has of this writing not been printed (perhaps following the Randian line of denouncing but not “giving sanction to” The Enemy?). If it is printed, then the Great Socialist Scholars Caper will have one more installment.
More On Ardrey
Some further notes on Jerry Tuccille’s critique of the Ardrey-Lorenz fad among libertarians:
1. The “territorial imperative” thesis can be, and has been, used far more easily to defend not individual private property but collective-herd property, as well as interstate wars. Thus, dogs prefer to use lampposts which other dogs have also used, thereby displaying a collective tribal “property” “instinct”?
2. The “instinct” concept is generally tacked on when we lack a genuine explanation for a phenomenon. Thus, even Adam Smith explained the universal phenomenon of exchange and market, not in terms of mutually rational advantage, but of an innate “instinct”, or “propensity to truck and barter”. Man, in particular, must use his mind to learn, to formulate his goals and the means to attain them. He has no inborn instinct to guide him automatically to the correct choices, as the bird or the salmon are supposed to be guided.
3. The whole basis for the “territorial imperative” among animals rests on the fact that animals are bound within the environment in which they find themselves. If a group of animals are adapted only to the environment of a certain area, X, and they are forced to leave X they will die. They must then defend this environment to the death. Man, on the contrary, is unique among living beings for his capacity to change his environment, to leave, transform, and alter his circumstances on behalf of his own survival and progress. Man is not bound to a fixed plot of earth and all the environmental conditions upon it; he can move, he can build shelter against the elements, he can transform the earth, etc. And so the animal-derived argument for territory cannot apply to man.
4. As for scholarly authority, a friend of mine tried to organize a scholarly conference of biologists, ethnologists, etc. to discuss the Lorenz thesis; try as he might, he could not find one scholar to take the Lorenz side. All the others had flatly rejected it.
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A subject getting much attention lately is the studies on evolution and human behavior performed by a new breed of ethnologists whose chief pioneers are Konrad Lorenz, Robert Ardrey, and Desmond Morris. Playboy covered the new ethnologists in an article by Morton Hunt appearing in the July, 1970 issue, and the New York Times Magazine recently published an interview with Konrad Lorenz. Basically, what the ethnologists are saying, is that man has survived and become dominant over all other earthly creatures because he was the most murderous and most savage of all the primates. The primordial ancestors of man were the first to develop the use of weapons, and in the struggle for survival through evolutionary time, man emerged triumphant because he learned the art of murder and violence better than his competitors. Man, according to the ethnologists, is still largely driven by violent genetic instincts which set him off from time to time on an orgy of war and mass destruction.
The part of this theory which is of primary concern to propertarians is the claim that man’s hunger for real estate, for a private plot of earth over which he can reign supreme, is an integral part of his nature as a violent being. According to Ardrey, it is useless for the social engineers to try to “socialize” man, to take away his property and make him share his possessions with the multitudes, because to do so is to tamper with the basic nature of man as a private, acquisitive animal. What the socialists are doing is forcing man to act in variance with his own nature, and thus they are setting the stage for revolutionary uprisings against their governments. The “territorial imperative”, man’s drive for private chunks of real estate, say the ethnologists, is stronger than his sexual urge. Ardrey argues that since this instinct is inborn in man it will be part of his genetic makeup as long as he exists. It is better to leave man alone, to let him have his land and possessions, since to tinker with his instincts will only increase his penchant for violence.
The controversy involved here is that most free-market libertarians base their arguments for private property and free trade on reason: the private-property, free-trade system is better because it is the most rational way for man to exist. What Ardrey is saying, at least implicitly, is that a socialist society is somehow more rational and would be a less violent way for man to live. But since man is more instinct-driven, more apt to act on irrational instincts than he will on rational considerations, and since this is part of his basic, unchanging nature, it is better to leave him alone with his selfishness, his greed, his drive for land and gadgets.
Both Ardrey and Lorenz seem to be contradicting themselves later when they state that man does have the capacity, because of his evolving brain, to overcome his violent nature. Both Ardrey and Lorenz declare explicitly that man’s emerging capacity for reason may enable him to chain down his murderous instincts and live in harmony with his fellows. They have put themselves in the precarious position of saying, on the one hand, that man can never overcome his violent nature because it is permanent in his genes and, on the other, that man’s reason does give him a chance for peace after all. They are attempting to have it both ways and therefore their arguments in favor of man the competitive property owner are tenuous at best.
The great weakness in this position, it seems to me, rests in the fact that the eth