The introduction to the four-volume anthology A Libertarian Reader. It includes a host of writings from all the schools of libertarian socialism, including Social and Individual Anarchism, Syndicalism, Guild Socialism, Council Communism, Situationism and Autonomism. It covers the years 1857 (when libertaire was coined) to 2016.
Libertarian: Its Origins, Use and (attempted) Arrogation
Many men, I know, speak of liberty without understanding it; they know neither the science of it, nor even the sentiment. They see in the demolition of reigning Authority nothing but a substitution of names or persons; they don’t imagine that a society could function without masters or servants, without chiefs and soldiers; in this they are like those reactionaries who say: ‘There are always rich and poor, and there always will be. What would become of the poor without the rich? They would die of hunger!’
Joseph Déjacque[1]
Between 1858 and 1861, French exile and communist-anarchist Joseph Déjacque published the journal La Libertaire, Journal du Mouvement Social in New York.[2] This was the first of many anarchist publications with the word “Libertarian” in their title. The previous year – 1857 – saw the first actual use of the word in the modern sense – libertaire – in an Open Letter he wrote to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the first person to self-proclaim as an anarchist in 1840’s seminal What is Property?.[3]
This letter is of note beyond the coining of libertarian. First, Déjacque’s challenging of Proudhon’s sexism and noting his support for patriarchy was in contradiction with Proudhon’s own stated principles. Second, the extension of Proudhon’s critique of property beyond his market socialism to communist conclusions, predating the rise of anarchist-communism in the First International by over two decades.
However, in the United States “libertarian” has become associated with the far right, with supporters of “free-market” capitalism. That defenders of the hierarchy associated with private property seek to arrogate the word to describe their authoritarian system is both unfortunate and unbelievable to any genuine libertarian. Worse, thanks to the power of money and the relatively small size of the anarchist movement in America, this appropriation of the term has become, to a large extent, the default meaning there. Somewhat ironically, this results in some right-wing “libertarians” complaining that we genuine libertarians have “stolen” their name in order to associate our socialist ideas with it!
This anthology seeks to show the real libertarian tradition by presenting texts by anti-state socialists, whether anarchist or not. The texts included show the rich tradition associated with libertarian and why the left should reclaim the word. For context, though, we first need to sketch the history of the term and discuss why the right should refuse to use it for their appropriation of the word is wrong according to their own ideology. Despite this refusal being consistent with – indeed, demanded by – their own ideology, it must be stressed that few libertarians consider such intellectual honesty by the right likely. Rather, this will either be ignored or excuses invented to retain their stolen goods, as is the case with the crimes of real rather than their ideology’s imaginary capitalism.
Joseph Déjacque: “Be frankly, fully anarchist”
Joseph Déjacque (1821-1864) wrote in response to Proudhon’s attack on the French feminist Jenny d’Héricourt (1809-1875) and entitled his 1857 critique De l’être-humain mâle et femelle (On the Male and Female Human Being). He is one of those figures who deserves better than just a passing mention in the histories of anarchism for he was a precursor of anarchist-communism whose fiery rhetoric and fierce logic remains largely unknown in the English-language movement.
Déjacque rightly denounced Proudhon for his repulsive sexism and showed how Proudhon’s position was at odds with his own principles. He invited him to become “frankly and completely an anarchist” by giving up all forms of authority and property – and so demonstrated that he was a much more astute reader of Proudhon than many others, then and since. The word libertarian was used to describe this consistent anarchism which rejected all private and public hierarchies along with property in the products of labour as well as the means of production.
To fully appreciate Déjacque’s critique we must sketch Proudhon’s ideas.[4]
Proudhon is best known for What is Property? and this book laid the foundations for his subsequent works as well as all forms of modern anarchism. As is well known, he concluded that “property is theft.” This is for two reasons. First, the common heritage of humanity – the land, the means of production – is appropriated by the few. Second, this results in a situation where the worker “has sold and surrendered his liberty” to the property-owner who acquires “the products of his employees’ labour” and “unjustly” profits from their collective toil. If the “worker is proprietor of the value which he creates” then this does not occur under capitalism and to achieve it “all accumulated capital being social property, no one can be its exclusive proprietor.” So all workers “are proprietors of their products” while “not one is proprietor of the means of production”. If the “right to product is exclusive” then “the right to means is common” for “[i]f the right of life is equal, the right of labour is equal, and so is the right of occupancy.”[5]
Less well known is the second conclusion, that “property is despotism.” Property “violates equality by the rights of exclusion and increase, and freedom by despotism.” Proprietor was “synonymous” with “sovereign” for he “imposes his will as law, and suffers neither contradiction nor control” for “each proprietor is sovereign lord within the sphere of his property”. Anarchy, in contrast, was “the absence of a master, of a sovereign”. As he put it in 1846: “property, which should make us free, makes us prisoners. What am I saying? It degrades us, by making us servants and tyrants to one another.”[6]
Property is rejected for two interlinked reasons – it produces oppressive and exploitative relationships between people. Thus “abolition of man’s exploitation of his fellow-man and abolition of man’s government of his fellow-man” were “one and the same proposition” for “what, in politics, goes under the name of Authority is analogous to and synonymous with what is termed, in political economy, Property”. These “two notions overlap one with the other and are identical”. The “principle of AUTHORITY [was] articulated through property and through the State” and so “an attack upon one is an attack upon the other.” Association had to replace both otherwise people “would remain related as subordinates and superiors, and there would ensue two industrial castes of masters and wage-workers, which is repugnant to a free and democratic society.”[7]
It is important to stress that Proudhon’s ideas on economic reform were far wider than many commentators suggest, who sadly all too often focus on his ideas for the organisation of credit. However, this was always seen as a means to achieve the organisation of labour, for labour could not be organised a priori by others nor by the state. Labour had to organise itself, and so “we want the organisation of labour by the workers, without capitalists or masters.”[8] Rejecting capitalism and state socialism, this would be “a solution based upon equality, — in other words, the organisation of labour, which involves the negation of political economy and the end of property.”[9]
“Capitalist and landlord exploitation stopped everywhere, wage-labour abolished,” Proudhon summarised, “due to the immorality, tyranny and theft suffered.” Capitalist firms “plunder the bodies and souls of the wage-workers” and are “a violation of the rights of the public, an outrage upon human dignity and personality.” Freedom meant that there “will no longer be nationality, no longer fatherland, in the political sense of the words: they will mean only places of birth. Whatever a man’s race or colour, he is really a native of the universe; he has citizen’s rights everywhere”[10] – including in the workplace for while free contract must replace government, it did not justify hierarchical organisations:
“If any one-sided conditions should slip in; if one part of the citizens should find themselves, by the contract, subordinated and exploited by the others, it would no longer be a contract; it would be a fraud”[11]
So “under universal association, ownership of the land and of the instruments of labour is social ownership” operated by “democratically organised workers’ associations,” for “the use of which […] may be divided, but which as property remains undivided.” Use rights meant each association was the master of its own fate, able to use its resources as it saw fit while socialisation – property being “collective and undivided” – meant it could not turn new entrants into wage workers.[12] This meant a radical decentralisation of all aspects of life:
“Unless democracy is a fraud, and the sovereignty of the People a joke, it must be admitted that each citizen in the sphere of his industry, each municipal, district or provincial council within its own territory, is the only natural and legitimate representative of the Sovereign, and that therefore each locality should act directly and by itself in administering the interests which it includes, and should exercise full sovereignty in relation to them […] The direct, sovereign initiative of localities, in arranging for public works that belong to them, is a consequence of the democratic principle and the free contract […] it becomes necessary for the workers to form themselves into democratic societies, with equal conditions for all members, on pain of a relapse into feudalism.”[13]
Free contract between these social and economic bodies was expressed by federalism, with this socio-economic federation being run from the bottom-up by means of elected delegates subject to “the imperative mandate and are recallable at will.” In short, the “choice of talents, the imperative mandate, and permanent revocability are the most immediate and incontestable consequences of the electoral principle. It is the inevitable program of all democracy.” Otherwise, “the People reigns and does not govern, which is to deny the Revolution.”[14]
The State, in contrast, is “the external constitution of the social power” and by “this external constitution of its power and sovereignty, the people does not govern itself.” It is the “delegation of the public power: always an alienation of this power, always a power, always an external, arbitrary authority”. This, however, was no accident for the State was “nothing but the offensive and defensive alliance of those who possess, against those who do not possess; and the only part played by the citizen is to pay the police.” It “finds itself inevitably enchained to capital and directed against the proletariat. No political reform can solve this contradiction.”[15] The State was centralised, top-down and unitary for a reason:
“who benefits from this regime of unity? […] the upper classes […] a form of bourgeois exploitation under the protection of bayonets. […] the cornerstone of bourgeois despotism and exploitation”[16]
To “concentrate all public powers in the hands of a single authority […] only created despotism”[17]. This meant that the State “no sooner exists than it creates an interest of its own, apart from and often contrary to the interests of the people […] it makes civil servants its own creatures, from which results nepotism, corruption, and little by little to the formation of an official tribe, enemies of labour as well as of liberty.” It was the “alienation of public power for the profit of a few ambitious men.”[18] This meant replacing the bourgeois State by a new, presumably proletarian, one would simply change masters.
To be genuine, socialism had to be decentralised and federal – a centralised system based on State ownership and control would just produce a different tyranny. This meant Proudhon attacked his colleagues on the left often as much as his enemies on the right – for example, “Louis Blanc represents governmental socialism, revolution by power, as I represent democratic socialism, revolution by the people. An abyss exists between us.” Socialism for Proudhon, as for later anarchists, was “the extinction of poverty, the abolition of capitalism and wage labour, the transformation of property, governmental decentralisation, the organisation of universal suffrage, the effective and direct sovereignty of workers, the balance of economic forces, the substitution of the contractual regime for the legal regime.”[19] In short: “We affirm […] that the people, that society, that the mass, can and ought to govern itself by itself”.[20]
While agreeing with this analysis, Déjacque objected to three aspects of Proudhon’s ideas.
First, he took aim at its great contradiction, namely his vigorous defence of patriarchy. Here was an association – the family – in which there would remain subordinates and superiors, masters and servants. In contrast to his penetrating critique of property and State, this specific subordinate relationship was based on, and defended by, the crudest sexism.
As can be seen from his Open Letter, Déjacque is very familiar with Proudhon’s work – and what would annoy him. His starts with an obvious reference to the masthead of Proudhon’s paper from the 1848 revolution, Le Representant du Peuple (“What is the Producer? Nothing. What should he be? Everything!”) before proclaiming Proudhon a moderate (“juste-milieu”) anarchist, “a liberal” rather than a “real anarchist” or “LIBERTARIAN” knowing that juste milieu (“middle way” or “happy medium”) was used to describe centrist political philosophies that try to find a balance between extremes. The term was associated with the French July Monarchy (1830–1848) which ostensibly tried to strike a balance between autocracy and democracy.[21]
So just as the tensions between monarchical principles and republican ideals was unsustainable and the regime was overthrown in the 1848 Revolution, so Déjacque hoped that the obvious contradictions between Proudhon’s anarchy for the community and the workplace but patriarchy for the home would likewise be rejected in favour of a consistent anarchy. The notion that the family should be excluded from free and equal association was untenable, an affront to both logic and liberty. Hence libertarian – to place at the forefront liberty within any association we may freely decide to join:
“Yet we know, like the anarchist he is, the Libertarian is not an orthodox member of the Proudhon school, that great male and father, but a rebellious son, a schismatic; he professes the emancipation of woman just like the emancipation of the proletarian, the deliverance of all the helots. Contemptible are those who think to protect or serve!”[22]
Second, he extended Proudhon’s critique of property from the instruments of labour to the products of labour. While recognising that Proudhon’s market socialism – worker co-operatives selling their products to other workers – may be required immediately after a revolution, he argued twenty years before Kropotkin and Reclus that this was not the best we could aim for.
“The positive realisation of these three terms [Liberty, Equality, Fraternity] leads us directly and universally to their inevitable complement, Harmony. For an organisation of work to be revolutionary and social, it is therefore absolutely necessary to abolish master, capital or boss, and, the master abolished, to abolish antagonism, isolation or competition, and, antagonism abolished, to find a new stimulant for production.”[23]
Freedom was best defended by free access to both the means of life and the products created using them. As would be expected with a short letter, his sketch of communist-anarchism is too dependent on harmonic coincidences in terms of equating production and consumption even if it does highlight an important issue – needs and deeds do not equate. Proudhon recognised that freedom required that the ownership of the means of life (workplace, land, sea) had to be common to avoid hierarchical relationships, Déjacque went further to argue that for a full life the products also had to be.
Third, Déjacque embraced a revolutionary position as against Proudhon’s reformism, for while Proudhon liked to proclaim himself a revolutionary he opposed insurrection and other forms of militant action (including strikes). Déjacque recognised that capitalism could not be quietly transformed by means of competition from mutualist associations for credit, production and consumption. In this, Déjacque also anticipated the views of later anarchists such as Bakunin, Kropotkin and Goldman.
Before discussing the subsequent use of libertaire, we must note that for all his justified onslaught against Proudhon’s sexism, his defence of d’Héricourt was not completely free of it. It is marked by an ever-so-gallant desire to protect someone who could and did put Proudhon in his place by herself – d’Héricourt was a leading socialist of the Cabet faction, feminist activist, writer, a physician-midwife, a participant (like Déjacque and Proudhon) of the Revolution of 1848 who wrote replies to the sexist essays of Proudhon, amongst others.[24]
After Déjacque: “Libertarian or Anarchist?”
The decade after Déjacque issued his challenge to Proudhon saw André Léo, a feminist libertarian, member of the International Workers’ Association and future Communard, point out the same obvious contradiction to his French followers in her work La Femme et les mœurs:
“These so-called lovers of liberty, if they are unable to take part in the direction of the state, at least they will be able to have a little monarchy for their personal use, each in his own home. When divine right was shattered, it was so that each male (Proudhonian-type) could have a piece of it. Order in the family without hierarchy seems impossible to them – well then, what about in the state?”[25]
Just as she attacked the illogical nature of the prevailing sexism within the wider left, Léo argued that Proudhon’s critique of wage-labour and the State was equally applicable to family relations. Anarchists, to be consistent, cannot be blind to social (“private”) hierarchies while denouncing economic and political ones. Unsurprisingly, almost all subsequent anarchists (including Bakunin and Kropotkin) recognised the need for consistency and so followed Déjacque and Léo in applying Proudhon’s principles against his own contradictory application.
They also sought to apply their ideas within areas Proudhon likewise opposed, namely in the union movement. Thus we find Eugène Varlin, a founding member of the International and later martyr of the Paris Commune, as well as “advocat[ing] equal rights for women” also arguing that “the workers’ own trade union organisations and strike activity” were “necessary to abolish capitalism” and these “societies of resistance and solidarity ‘form the natural elements of the social structure of the future.’”[26] These ideas were championed by Bakunin in the International and “now developed what may be described as modern anarchism” based on “promot[ing] their ideas directly amongst the labour organisations and to induc[ing] these unions to a direct struggle against capital, without placing their faith in parliamentary legislation.”[27] In short, the debates within the First International were predominantly between activists influenced by Proudhon seeking to apply and extend his ideas, producing what would best be described as syndicalism decades before the word.[28] As Daniel Guérin summarised, “in the congresses of the First International the libertarian idea of self-management prevailed over the statist concept.”[29]
However, Anti-Authoritarian was the preferred term in the federalist-wing of the International although it is easy to understand why this was later replaced by libertarian within anarchist circles given libertarian is an obvious antonym to authoritarian and how clumsy anti-authoritarian sounds. The next recorded use of “libertarian” was by a French regional anarchist Congress at Le Havre (16-22 November 1880) which used the term “libertarian communism” while January the following year saw a French manifesto issued on “Libertarian or Anarchist Communism.”[30]In 1883, the Lyon paper Le Drapeau Noir (Black Flag) used the term “libertarian communism” when discussing the need for anarchists to also be communists.[31] Four years later, in 1887, individualist anarchist Benjamin Tucker quoted Ernest Lesigne, a Belgium socialist, in his journal Liberty:
“There are two Socialisms […] One is dictatorial, the other libertarian […] One wishes that there should be none but proletarians. The other wishes that there should be no more proletarians”[32]
The term “libertarian” quickly became an alternative to anarchist. During the agitation for the 1st of May demonstrations in France at the start of 1890, a poster was issued by the Libertarian Youth (Jeunesse Libertaire) against “the rule of the master – the bourgeoisie” – while in the north of France anarchist miners called for a general strike for that day. In 1895 leading anarchists Sébastien Faure and Louise Michel published the newspaper La Libertaire in France.[33] Kropotkin the following year stated that “I cannot help believing that modern Socialism is forced to make a step towards libertarian communism”.[34] This pamphlet was translated into English in 1897 and published in Britain and America. In Italy, Malatesta noted the same year that “the name libertarians” is one “accepted and used by all anarchists” and among those “who seek the abolition of capitalism” there are those who think “a new government needs to be formed – and these are the democratic or authoritarian socialists” and those “who want the new organisation to arise from the action of free associations – and these are the anarchist or libertarian socialists.”[35]
The use of libertarian was acknowledged by others on the left. British Marxist-socialists, in their official account of the London Congress of the Second International in 1896, remarked on how the “Libertarian Socialists had been evicted” from the Zurich Congress three years previously, before noting that Domela Nieuwenhuis was one of the many who spoke “On the Libertarian side” in London. In spite of hostility from many State Socialists, some delegations argued for “the admission of the Free Communists or Libertarians” as these were socialists and delegates from trade-unions.[36] The same year saw the first appearance of a much reprinted leaflet by Individualist Anarchist Joseph Labadie which noted:
“It is said that Anarchism is not socialism. This is a mistake. Anarchism is voluntary Socialism. There are two kinds of Socialism, archistic and anarchistic, authoritarian and libertarian, state and free. Indeed, every proposition for social betterment is either to increase or decrease the powers of external wills and forces over the individual. As they increase they are archistic; as they decrease they are anarchistic.”[37]
The following year saw Elisée Reclus noting that the rise in Social Democracy was “compensated by the growth of libertarian socialism, where the companions in labour, without dictators, without subservience to a book or a collection of formulas, work in concert to found a society of equals.”[38] Also in 1897 we find Benjamin Tucker discussing “libertarian solutions” to land use in contrast to the capitalist “land monopoly” and looked forward to a time when “the libertarian principle to the tenure of land” was actually applied, based on occupancy and use.[39]
By 1899 the British anarchist Henry Glasse was discussing the issue, noting that the “term ‘Libertarian’ in place of ‘Anarchist’ seems to be used with increasing frequency” and concluded that the “newer term pleases me better.”[40] In 1901, Warlaam Tcherkesov stated that it was towards “free, libertarian Communism [that] present humanity is approaching in its evolution.”[41] Six years later Freedom reported the “International Libertarian and Communist Labour Congress” called by the “federations of Libertarian and Communist Labour groups of Holland, Belgium, Germany, Bohemia and London.”[42] Dutch anarchists organised the actual conference while Belgian ones started the publication of the Bulletin de l’Internationale Libertarie (Bulletin of the Libertarian International) in preparation.[43] Mother Earth in America likewise reported on this congress and how it was the “Formation of an International Libertarian Organisation” while its “International Notes” reported on libertarian groups and journals around the world, such as the formation in Switzerland of “a libertarian group whose avowed object is to propagate among the workers the idea of the General Strike for Expropriation.”[44] Emma Goldman stressed that she had “always been of the opinion that Anarchism calls to battle all libertarian elements as against authority,”[45] echoing comments made earlier in “Anarchism: What It Really Stands For”:
“Direct action against the authority in the shop, direct action against the authority of the law, direct action against the invasive, meddlesome authority of our moral code, is the logical, consistent method of Anarchism.”[46]
In 1913, Kropotkin utilised a commonplace phrase when he used “libertarian Communism” to describe his ideas and goals as well as noting that this was what anarchist-communism “was named originally in France.”[47] Anarchists, then, aimed at “repudiating the authoritarian principles of the German Social Democracy” and “spreading libertarian ideas among the workers of the world.”[48] This opposition to mainstream socialism did not, of course, mean anarchists were not socialists, as Emma Goldman explained:
“While it is true that I am an Anarchist. I am also a Socialist. All Anarchists are Socialists, but not all Socialists are Anarchists. Anarchism is the higher form of Socialism. All Socialists who think and grow will be forced to the Anarchist conclusion. Anarchism is the inevitable goal of Socialism. We Anarchists believe in the socialisation of wealth and of land and of the means of production. But the doing away with capitalism is not a cure-all, and the substitution of the Socialistic state only means greater concentration and increase of governmental power. We believe in the revolution. The founders of Socialism believed in it. Karl Marx believed in it. All thinking Socialists of today believe in it. The political Socialists are only trimmers and they are no different from other politicians. In their mad effort to get offices they deny their birthright for a mess of pottage and sacrifice their true principles and real convictions on the polluted altar of politics.”[49]
By the start of the twentieth century libertarian as an alternative to anarchist was well-established within anarchist circles and in wider society (for example, an American Marxist pamphlet against syndicalism muttered “the only type in this country that would correspond with the Syndicalist ‘philosophers’ of France would be Johann Most, Abraham Isaacs, Emma Goldman and other ‘libertarian’ followers of Proudhon, Kropotkin or Bakunin”[50]). Thus we find the syndicalist Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (National Confederation of Labour, or C.N.T.) in 1919 declaring “itself a firm defender of the principles that guided the First International, as conceived by Bakunin” and that its “ultimate goal” was “libertarian communism.”[51]
Like many libertarians across the world, the C.N.T. welcomed the Russian Revolution and joined the Communist International. However, again like other libertarians, it soon broke with the new regime as its members became aware of its true nature. As its National Committee summarised in March 1922:
“We reject all means of struggle that are not direct action and that do not pursue as their goal the establishment of libertarian communism . . . We are and will always be irreconcilable enemies of all dictatorships whatever label they carry . . . We believe in federalism. We recognise that freedom goes from the individual to the community . . . We are and always will be enemies of the state and its institutions. And our principles are those of the C.N.T.”[52]
Unsurprisingly, when faced with the failure of the Russian Revolution, anarchists saw their critique of mainstream Marxism as vindicated along with their vision of social transformation. Thus Goldman concluded that it “is only when the libertarian spirit permeates the economic organizations of the workers that the manifold creative energies of the people can manifest themselves, and the revolution be safeguarded and defended. Only free initiative and popular participation in the affairs of the revolution can prevent the terrible blunders committed in Russia” for “industrial power of the masses, expressed through their libertarian associations – Anarcho-syndicalism – is alone able to organize successfully the economic life and carry on production.”[53] In Japan, anarchists organised All-Japan Libertarian Federation of Labour Unions.[54] So in the 1920s communist-anarchist Bartolomeo Vanzetti was just stating the obvious:
“After all we are socialists as the social-democrats, the socialists, the communists, and the I.W.W. are all Socialists. The difference – the fundamental one – between us and all the other is that they are authoritarian while we are libertarian; they believe in a State or Government of their own; we believe in no State or Government.”[55]
The 1930s saw the British journal Freedom gain the new subtitle of A Journal of Libertarian Thought, Work and Literature while advertising the “Libertarian Association” which amongst other objectives aimed to “encourage Trade Unions and Industrial Co-operative Societies among the wage earners, with a view to these, or similar freely organised bodies, ultimately carrying on production and distribution in the interest of all, thus eliminating the exploitation of labour by capitalists and governments, and inaugurating an era of free Socialism.”[56] In America, Vanguard: A Libertarian Communist Journal was published throughout the 1930s, a decade which also saw the most famous use of “libertarian communism” by the C.N.T. in Spain. When it held its national congress of May 1936 in Zaragoza, with 649 delegates representing 982 unions with a membership of over 550,000, it passed a resolution on “The Confederal Conception of Libertarian Communism.”[57] This resolution on libertarian communism was inspired by the earlier work of Isaac Puente, author of the widely reprinted and translated pamphlet entitled Libertarian Communism first published four years previously. That year, 1932, had also seen the founding by anarchists of the Federación Ibérica de JuventudesLibertarias (Iberian Federation of Libertarian Youth) in Madrid.
Sadly within this mass libertarian movement, the issues which drove Déjacque, Léo and so many others remained to a large extent. Sexist attitudes were all too often expressed, with leading C.N.T. militant Buenaventura Durruti replying to his comrades who were puzzled by his helping with the housework that “[w]hen the woman is working and the man isn’t, the man is the woman of the house. When will you stop thinking like the bourgeoisie, that women are men’s servants? It’s enough that society is divided into classes. We’re not going to make even more classes by creating differences between men and women in our own homes!”[58] Female libertarians, however, did not rely on enlightened male comrades and took their liberation into their own hands by forming the organisation Mujeres Libres (Free Women) with the following aim:
“a) to create a conscientious and responsible female force [originally, a ‘revolutionary force’] that can act as a vanguard of progress; and (b) to this end, to establish schools, institutes, conferences, special courses, etc., designed to empower women and emancipate them from the triple enslavement to which they have been, and continue to be, subject, the enslavement of ignorance, enslavement as a woman, and enslavement as a worker.”[59]
With the failed fascist-military coup and subsequent outbreak of civil war in July 1936, the Spanish libertarians applied their ideas in a widespread social revolution. Workplaces were seized and run by their workers, land was collectivised by farm labourers, women were amongst those who joined the democratic militias sent to liberate the areas under the fascists. Thus, after the “whirlwind of the first days of the battle had passed,” the peasants and workers “were now focused on changing their ways of life and creating new social relationships.” The “transformation in property relations had an effect on the people as well. It changed social relations and toppled, in many cases, the old separation between men and women, as well as the traditional foundations of the bourgeois family. The revolution was like a volcano that shaped the material that it was spewing forth into new forms. Durruti had been right to tell [the journalist] Van Paassen that a new world was being born.”[60] As eye-witness George Orwell recounted:
“The Anarchists were still in virtual control of Catalonia and the revolution was still in full swing […] there was a belief in the revolution and the future, a feeling of having suddenly emerged into an era of equality and freedom. Human beings were trying to behave as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine.”[61]
Anarchists across the world worked to support their comrades with, for example, those in New York forming the United Libertarian Organizations and publishing Spanish Revolution between 1936-8. In Britain, Spain and the World was published until Franco’s victory in 1939, then becoming War Commentary and, after the war, Freedom (which continues to this day). Elsewhere in Britain, the Anti-Parliamentary Communist Federation based in Glasgow proclaimed “The solution: Libertarian Socialism” in mid-1939.[62]
The use of libertarian continued after World War II, with the Free Society Group of Chicago producing a pamphlet in 1951 entitled The World scene from the Libertarian Point of View, featuring twenty-one anarchists giving their outlook on international issues and anarchism’s potential for solving them. Three years later, American anarchists formed the Libertarian League. The word was best known outwith anarchist circles by its use in the subtitle of George Woodcock’s 1962 history of anarchism: “A History of libertarian ideas and movements.” This makes no mention of right-wing use of the word while indicating the long standing use of “libertarian” by anarchists and its origins in Déjacque and later use by Faure.[63] More recently, Robert Graham states that Déjacque’s act made “him the first person to use the word ‘libertarian’ as synonymous with ‘anarchist’” while Faure and Michel were “popularising the use of the word ‘libertarian’ as a synonym for ‘anarchist.’”[64]
Anarchists continue to use the term to this day across the globe.
Libertarian, though, has been used by more than just anarchists. For example, in the 1890s the ex-anarchist Francesco Saverio Merlino proclaimed himself a “libertarian socialist” during his attempts to convince anarchists to embrace parliamentarianism.[65] Immediately after the First World War in Germany, alongside a massive increase in the syndicalist Free Workers Union (FAU) many Marxists, faced with the failure of social democracy and inspired by the example of the soviets in the Russian Revolution, re-evaluated their politics and came to conclusions similar to revolutionary anarchism.[66] Advocating anti-parliamentarianism, direct action and workplace organisation to fight and replace capitalism and its State, these would come to be known as council communists (as opposed to the party communists of Bolshevik orthodoxy). Lenin wrote ‘Left-wing’ Communism: An infantile Disorder to combat the influence of what he termed “semi-anarchist elements”[67] and mocked them – as Engels and Marx had Bakunin – for differentiating between “from below” and “from above,” amongst other ideas which echoed anarchism.[68] These currents later fed into the French Socialisme ou Barbarie group, Situationism, as well as elements within autonomist Marxism.
This is why the expression “libertarian Marxist” is often used to describe dissident Marxists like council communists Anton Pannekoek and Paul Mattick, who form a minority trend at odds with the mainstream of Marxism. Thus we find in 1950 the editors of Left magazine calling Pannekoek “the veteran Dutch Libertarian Socialist and, beyond question, one of the greatest living Socialist thinkers and scholars.”[69] In Britain between 1960 and 1992 the group Solidarity saw themselves as providing a “libertarian-socialist alternative” to “authoritarian class society” and as “part of a revolutionary libertarian tradition” they recognised that to “be meaningful the revolution to come will have to be profoundly libertarian”.[70] Influenced by Socialisme ou Barbarie and Cornelius Castoriadis, their self-managed socialism is hard to distinguish from anarchism and the group included anarchists, Marxists and those who eschewed both labels. In America, we find the American journal Root and Branch calling itself “a libertarian socialist journal” before, in the late 1970s, becoming “a libertarian marxist journal.” Veteran British Marxist academic E.P. Thompson called for a “libertarian Communism, or a Socialism which is both democratic and revolutionary in its means, its strategy and objectives” in 1978.[71] Shelia Rowbotham talked in 1979 of “Libertarian Marxism” along with “libertarians of the early 1970s” in her account of feminism and the British left.[72] All this, of course, did not stop anarchists using the term, for example the British Organisation of Revolutionary Anarchists produced the newspaper Libertarian Struggle: For Workers’ Power in the 1970s.
So while “libertarian” did become broader than anarchist, it was still used by people on the left. Given this underlying similarity, anarchists were happy to share the term with other socialists and those – civil libertarians – who sought an increase in personal liberty and a reduction in social hierarchies and their power. The matter becomes different when “libertarian” is used to defend these private hierarchies.
Property is Theft: On “libertarian” Hypocrisy
So, just as “every anarchist is a socialist, but every socialist is not necessarily an anarchist,”[73] by the 100th anniversary of Déjacque coining the phrase the situation was that while all anarchists were libertarians, not all libertarians were anarchists – but all were left-wing. Over the next 60 years this would change to such a degree that in America – and, to a lesser degree, Britain – “libertarian” now refers to the exact opposite of what it used to mean.
Some historical context is needed. As the term “Liberal” became increasingly associated with the New Deal in the US, some American right-wing liberals privately pondered using the term “libertarian” to describe their ideas. They probably became aware of the term via Charles T. Sprading’s 1913 book Liberty and the Great Libertarians.Sprading was associated with Tucker’s Liberty, so undoubted picked up the word there and his book is a mishmash, including actual libertarians – like Kropotkin, Wilde, Tucker, Bakunin, Goldman – but many liberals. However, American right-wing liberals did not start using the term as their preferred label until the late 1950s. Murray Rothbard, a founder of the so-called “libertarian” right, sheds light on this:
“One gratifying aspect of our rise to some prominence [in the late 1950s] is that, for the first time in my memory, we, ‘our side,’ had captured a crucial word from the enemy […] ‘Libertarians’ […] had long been simply a polite word for left-wing [sic!] anarchists, that is for anti-private property anarchists, either of the communist or syndicalist variety. But now we had taken it over, and more properly from the view of etymology; since we were proponents of individual liberty and therefore of the individual’s right to his property.”[74]
Let us recall what this “proponent” of “the individual’s right to his property” had to say about names and labels:
“Every individual in the free society has a right to ownership of his own self and to the exclusive use of his own property. Included in his property is his name, the linguistic label which is uniquely his and is identified with him. A name is an essential part of a man’s identity and therefore of his property […] defense of person and property […] involves the defense of each person’s particular name or trademark against the fraud of forgery or imposture.”[75]
This “means the outlawing” of someone taking another’s name and pretending to be them as this would be “abusing the property right” of someone to “his unique name and individuality”. Likewise, “the use by some other chocolate firm of the Hershey label would be an equivalent of an invasive act of fraud and forgery.” This was because a “name, as we have seen, is a unique identifying label for a person (or a group of persons acting co-operatively), and is therefore an attribute of the person and his energy” and so “is an attribute of a labour factor.”[76] If someone “inherited or purchased” something which had been stolen then the thing “properly reverts back” to the original creator “or his descendants without compensation to the existing possessor of the criminally-derived ‘title.’ Thus, if a current title to property is criminal in origin, and the victim or his heir can be found, then the title should immediately revert to the latter.”[77]
The hypocrisy is obvious. According to his own ideology, Rothbard admitted to conducting “an invasive act of fraud and forgery” against “the individual’s right to his property.” Thus, if they had any actual principles beyond fetishising property and being shills for the economically powerful, his latter-day followers would stop using the term they stole and let the descendants of Joseph Déjacque – “anti-private property anarchists, either of the communist or syndicalist variety” – use what is rightly theirs.
It could be objected that anarchists do not accept Rothbard’s views of property. True, we advocate use rights rather than property rights: and we were still using the term “libertarian” – in America, for example, the communist-anarchist Libertarian League was active between 1954 and 1965.[78] Yet Rothbard considers his prejudices and desires as a “natural law” and inherent in our “nature” as human beings. So, presumably like evolution and gravity, his “natural law” applies even if we do not believe in it – unless he views, as those expropriating native tribes did, socialists as somehow less than human (but, then, his “natural law” – unlike gravity – needs private police to enforce it….).[79]
So we know when and why the term “libertarian” was appropriated by the right – they saw it being used by the left and simply decided to steal it.[80] Originally, this theft was on the fringes of political discourse but the appropriated usage has mostly displaced the original one in the United States – for example, Sam Dolgoff who was one of the founders of the Libertarian League in the 1950s also helped create the Libertarian Labor Review in 1986 but by 1999 this journal was renamed to Anarcho-Syndicalist Review to avoid its sellers having to continuously explain the origins and real meaning of libertarian.
How did they succeed in turning “libertarian” into its exact opposite? Partly, by the funding received by Big Business keen to secure its position, power and privileges in wider society: wealth skews the outcome in the so-called “marketplace of ideas” as in any capitalist market. Partly, by that most un-libertarian of tactics: the creation of a political party – the Libertarian Party – seeking to be elected to political office. In this way the term “libertarian” became associated with those who would nod in agreement with these words of the French Attorney General who prosecuted Déjacque in 1851:
“Mr. Déjacque […] is one of those hateful socialists who hold society in horror, and who have no other aim, no thought but to constantly excite the wicked passions of those who possess nothing against those who do possess, so that their detestable doctrines may triumph. This is how one foments the hatred of tenants towards landlords and especially of workers towards bosses.”[81]
So if, for genuine anarchists, property is theft for Rothbard theft is apparently property – just as he made an exception for the expropriation of the land from native peoples, so he made an exception for the term he wished to call his ideology. We should not be surprised by this hypocrisy for it mirrors the real history of capitalism – unlike Rothbard’s just-so stories of his imaginary idealised capitalism which has existed nowhere other than inside his fevered brow.
Property is Despotism: On “libertarian” Tyranny
If “libertarians” took their ideology seriously they would stop using the term libertarian – but of course they will not. Property rights are for those who stole the commons, not for those who were using it. In this they reflect the reality rather than the rhetoric of the capitalism they worship. But what of Rothard’s other claim, that “from the view of etymology” he and colleagues were entitled to steal the term from its creators and users? Are “libertarians” actually libertarian?
The short answer is no. To prove this we could turn to anarchist thinkers who have long indicated the authoritarian relationships – the private hierarchies – that inequalities of wealth produce. However, we do not need to do this as Rothbard himself presents enough evidence to show the authoritarian nature of capitalism.[82]
Thus we find Rothbard proclaim that the State “arrogates to itself a monopoly of force, of ultimate decision-making power, over a given territorial area.” Then, buried in the chapter’s end notes, he quietly admits that “[o]bviously, in a free society, Smith has the ultimate decision-making power over his own just property, Jones over his, etc.”[83] Such is the power of “private property” for it can turn the bad (“ultimate decision-making power” over a given area) into the good (“ultimate decision-making power” over a given area). Indeed, Rothbard indicates the identical social relationships that anarchists argue mark the State and property:
“If the State may be said to properly own its territory, then it is proper for it to make rules for everyone who presumes to live in that area. It can legitimately seize or control private property because there is no private property in its area, because it really owns the entire land surface. So long as the State permits its subjects to leave its territory, then, it can be said to act as does any other owner who sets down rules for people living on his property.”[84]
Rothbard is not against authoritarianism as such for if the state were a legitimate landlord or capitalist then its authoritarian nature would be fine. Indeed, we read in growing amazement how this “libertarian” quickly eliminates all freedoms worthy of the name because there are “no human rights which are not also property rights”. Thus “a person does not have a ‘right to freedom of speech’; what he does have is the right to hire a hall and address the people who enter the premise.” He “has no right to speak but only a request” that the owner “must decide upon”. In terms of freedom of assembly, owners “have the right to decide who shall have access to those streets” and “have the absolute right to decide on whether picketers could use their street” while “the employer can fire” a worker who joins a union “forth-with.” In short, no rights “beyond the property rights that person may have in any given case.”[85] Yet the “freedom” of the boss to force all his employees to watch anti-union propaganda and fire those expressing their liberties of speech, assembly and organisation is hardly that: it is power, authority, archy.
Ironically, Rothbard himself shows that this is the case when he utilised a hypothetical example of a country whose King, threatened by a rising “libertarian” movement, responses by “employ[ing] a cunning stratagem,” namely he “proclaims his government to be dissolved, but just before doing so he arbitrarily parcels out the entire land area of his kingdom to the ‘ownership’ of himself and his relatives.” Rather than taxes, people now pay rent and the King can “regulate the lives of all the people who presume to live on” his property as he sees fit. Rothbard then admits people would be “living under a regime no less despotic than the one they had been battling for so long. Perhaps, indeed, more despotic, for now the king and his relatives can claim for themselves the libertarians’ very principle of the absolute right of private property, an absoluteness which they might not have dared to claim before.”[86]
While Rothbard rejects this “cunning stratagem” he failed to note how this argument undermines his own claims that capitalism is the only system based upon liberty. As he himself argues, not only does the property owner have the same monopoly of power over a given area as the State, it is more despotic as it is based on the “absolute right of private property”. Indeed, he proclaims that the theory that the State owns its territory “makes the State, as well as the King in the Middle Ages, a feudal overlord, who at least theoretically owned all the land in his domain”[87] without noticing that this makes the capitalist or landlord a feudal overlord within his so-called “libertarian” regime.
In short, Rothbard ends up defending extremely authoritarian organisations and relationships. More, these organisations and relationships are recognised as being identical to those created by the State. This is alleged to be “libertarian” because the hierarchies produced by property are “voluntary,” people “consent” to this authority. Yes, no one forces you to work for a specific employer and everyone has the possibility (however remote) of becoming an employer or landlord. Similarly, in a democratic State no one forces you to remain in a specific State and everyone has the possibility (however remote) of becoming a governor or politician. That some may become a (political or economic) ruler does not address the issue – are people free or not? It is a strange ideology that proclaims itself liberty-loving yet embraces factory feudalism and office oligarchy while rejecting the identical subservient relations of Statism.[88]
The context in which people make their decisions is important. Anarchists have long argued that, as a class, workers have little choice but to “consent” to capitalist hierarchy as the alternative is either dire poverty or starvation. Rothbard dismisses this by denying that there is such a thing as economic power under capitalism, just freedom of contract.[89] It is easy to refute such claims – by turning, yet again, to Rothbard’s own arguments. Consider his comments about the abolition of slavery and serfdom in the 19th century:
“The bodies of the oppressed were freed, but the property which they had worked and eminently deserved to own, remained in the hands of their former oppressors. With economic power thus remaining in their hands, the former lords soon found themselves virtual masters once more of what were now free tenants or farm labourers. The serfs and slaves had tasted freedom, but had been cruelly derived of its fruits.”[90]
If “market forces” (“voluntary exchanges”) result in the few owning most of the property then this is unproblematic and raises no questions about the (lack of) liberty of the working class but if people are placed in exactly the same situation as a result of coercion then it is a case of “economic power” and “masters”! Anarchist Albert Parsons pointed out the illogically of Rothbard’s position long before he put pen to paper:
“Our branch of Socialism holds that all existing statutory and constitutional powers of the Government confer on capitalists and the property-holding classes the power to compel the wage-workers to yield implicit obedience to their command under the penalty of starvation or death by physical violence. This is what we call wage-slavery. We insist that no such thing as freedom of contract can exist between those who hold the means of subsistence as their private property, and who can and do dictate the terms of existence to the propertyless.”[91]
So much for the assertion that “each [would] enjoy absolute liberty” and rights “to one’s liberty and property must be universal” under his pure capitalism.[92] That Rothbard manages to refute himself in his own book is a case study in the power of ideology to blind its true believers.
Liberty or Property?
To talk of “libertarian anarchism” as some do just shows ignorance of the history of both terms. Yet the issue is deeper than Rothbard. The knots he ties himself up in have their origins in the ideas of English philosopher John Locke which deeply influenced him and most defenders of capitalism.[93]
Space precludes a detailed account of Locke’s ideas beyond noting that on the apparently reasonable assumptions that land is given to humanity in common by God and labour is the property of the worker, he weaves a story which ends up with a few (“Masters”) owning the means of life and the rest (“Servants”) having to sell their labour to them. Society is initially in the “state of nature”[94] before escaping from “the state of war” produced by property and its resulting inequality by means of a consented to State which protects property and these inequalities.[95] The few, then, incorporate their justly acquired property into a joint-stock company to establish and run a State whose sole role is to protect property.
That property was not acquired nor States formed in this manner is beside the point, for Locke wishes us to accept the current distribution of wealth and power (the outcome of centuries of coercion) by means of a story of what could have produced this outcome. He uses property in the person to justify (to use his words) “subordinate relations of wife, children, servants, and slaves.”[96]
This does not happen by accident – the more that liberty and labour is proclaimed the “property” of the individual, the more that liberty and labour can be alienated.[97] Once the worker has consented to being under the authority of the wealthy then her labour and its product are no longer hers: “Thus the grass my horse has bit; the Turfs my Servant has cut; and the Ore I have digg’d […] become my Property […] The labour that was mine […] hath fixed my property” in both the product and common resources worked upon.[98] Locke’s defence of property as resting on labour becomes the means to derive the worker of control over, as well as the full product of, her labour. As Proudhon acidly put it:
“the horse […] and ox […] produce with us, but are not associated with us; we take their product, but do not share it with them. The animals and workers whom we employ hold the same relation to us.”[99]
That property proclaims it is liberty yet produces subordination and authority, proclaims it is based on labour’s reward yet enriches the capitalist and landlord are just two of the contradictions of property exposed in Proudhon’s critique. In this way an ideology which proclaims its support for liberty ends up being the means of denying it: “Contracts about property in the person inevitably create subordination.”[100]
This may seem counter-intuitive or contradictory but it is not. It was the aim of the whole theory. Locke was not seeking to undermine traditional hierarchies (beyond the absolute monarchy which was challenging these from above) but rather to reinforce them (including from those subjected to them, from challenges from below). He did so by a “just-so” story whose desired conclusions – his favoured socio-economic system, the one he benefited from – are reached by what appear reasonable steps. And here we have the crux of the matter for in Locke’s “just-so” story the State does rightfully own its property for it is a joint-stock corporation formed by landlords (servants are in civil society but not of civil society and have no say, just as employees are part of a company but its owners run it).[101] Rothbard refuses to take this final step but gives no reason to reject this final chapter of the same fictional story. For we must never forget that this is what Locke’s theory is – a “just-so” story. Both Locke and Rothbard seek to defend the inequalities of capitalism by convincing us to believe his story and ignore history.
This is the context of Locke’s invocation of “consent” to justify subordination – all the land has been appropriated by the few and incorporated by them into States. The servant is free because they can change one Master or State for another. Yet it is a particular kind of freedom which is invoked when it can be exemplified in subjection, for Locke uses self-ownership and “consent” to justify inequalities in wealth, masters and servants, patriarchy[102], non-absolute monarchy, government by the wealthy few, contractual life-time slavery (which he termed “drudgery”), actual slavery, hereditary serfdom (“leet-men”)[103] – the only thing it did not seem to allow were social relationships not rooted in hierarchy.[104]
That Locke himself was a wealthy man is, of course, a coincidence. Just as it is a coincidence that this major investor in the slave trade, while proclaiming that an Englishman could never submit to the slavery produced by absolute monarchy, invented another story – like the one to justify appropriation of land and rationalise master-servant relations – to justify slavery in the form of a “just war.” Slavery was acceptable when the victors in a war started by those they have defeated offered the prisoners a choice: become a slave or die. So even absolute chattel slavery, with the power of life and death, is based on consent – and his investments safe and ethical.
Nor should we forget that Locke did allow servants to sell themselves to a lifetime of labour to the same Master under the name “drudgery.” This is the logic which ends by “demonstrat[ing] that (civilized) slavery is nothing more than an extended wage-labour contract, and an exemplification, not the denial, of the individual’s freedom” for the “assumption that the individual stands to the property in his person, to his capacities or services, as any owner stands to his material property, enables the opposition between freedom and slavery to be dissolved. Civil slavery becomes nothing more than one example of a legitimate contract. Individual freedom becomes exemplified in slavery.”[105] Hence the traditional anarchist description of capitalism as being marked by wage-slavery – Locke’s “drudgery” brings the nature of the hierarches he defends into a clear light and, unsurprisingly, is usually passed over in embarrassed silence by his ideological descendants..
That Locke’s system of “freedom” produces private hierarchies is not surprising as it was precisely this which it aimed to justify, rationalise and defend. The same can be said for Rothbard – with the exception that he wrapped this unfree system under the stolen word libertarian. That both label subjugation as “freedom” is as useful as it is incredulous for it allows Rothbard to claim in all seriousness that a person “cannot alienate […] his control over his own mind and body” while also asserting “workers can sell their labour service.”[106] Carole Pateman states the obvious: “the contract in which the worker allegedly sells his labour power is a contract in which, since he cannot be separated from his capacities, he sells command over the use of his body and himself.” Selling a “labour service” inherently involves selling control over your mind and body for “what is required is that the worker labours as demanded. The employment contract must, therefore, create a relationship of command and obedience between employer and worker.” This “is primarily about a way of creating social relationships constituted by subordination, not about exchange.”[107] It produces authoritarian, not libertarian, social relationships:
“contract doctrine has proclaimed that subjection to a master – a boss, a husband – is freedom. Moreover, the problem of freedom is misrepresented here. The question central to contract theory does not involve the general liberty to do as you please, but the freedom to subordinate yourself in any manner that you please”[108]
Servitude, for classical liberalism, does not deny liberty, but rather embodies it. Hence its internal contradictions, which, as Proudhon noted as regards property, ostensibly upheld freedom, autonomy and justice yet failed to universalise its own ethic and in practice produced both theft (exploitation) and despotism (oppression). Perhaps we should not be too surprised, for it began, and continues to be, an extremely fluid ideological defence of those in power.
Thus we usually hear the loudest cries for liberty from those with substantial power over others – from landlords over tenants, bosses over wage-workers, husbands over wives who promise to “love, honour and obey” – or the well-paid agents of the think-tanks they fund This explains the apparently strange sight of “libertarians” associating with conservatives. The latter seek to defend traditional hierarchies (particularly those associated with the private sphere) while the former seek to defend private hierarchies associated with wealth. These have a significant overlap – and a common basis in subordination rather than freedom. They both defend the freedom of the powerful to rule those subjugated to them and oppose the freedom of the subjugated to resist – whether by direct action or by political means.[109]
Rather than the abolition of politics, “libertarianism” is the merging of political power with property. The landlord would become the actual lord, the employer’s power bolstered by his private police – for this kind of individualist may “begin with asevere criticism of the State but end by recognising its functions in full in order to maintain the monopoly of property, which the State is always the true protector.”[110] That the provision of these functions may be privatised does not change its role for someone “who intends to retain for himself the monopoly of any piece of land or property, or any other portion of the social wealth, will be bound to look for some authority which could guarantee to him possession […] to enable him to compel others to work for him […] And then he will NOT be an Anarchist: he will be an authoritarian.”[111]
“I can neither sell nor alienate my liberty” (Proudhon)
As Rothbard himself shows, capitalism offers no guarantee of freedom to anyone except owners of private property. It was in recognition of this reality that Proudhon argued that “if the liberty of man is sacred, it is equally sacred in all individuals; that, if it needs property for its objective action, that is, for its life, the appropriation of material is equally necessary for all” and so “those who do not possess today are proprietors by the same title as those who do possess; but instead of inferring therefrom that property should be shared by all, I demand, in the name of general security, its entire abolition.”[112] Kropotkin states the obvious:
“In today’s society, where no one is allowed to use the field, the factory, the instruments of labour, unless he acknowledge himself the inferior, the subject of some Sir – servitude, submission, lack of freedom, the practice of the whip are imposed by the very form of society. By contrast, in a communist society which recognises the right of everyone, on an egalitarian basis, to all the instruments of labour and to all the means of existence that society possesses, the only men on their knees in front of others are those who are by their nature voluntary serfs. Each being equal to everyone else as far as the right to well-being is concerned, he does not have to kneel before the will and arrogance of others and so secures equality in all personal relationships with his co-members.”[113]
Property results in a worker being “compelled to sell his labour (and consequently, to a certain degree, his personality) to those who intend to exploit him.” So “staying free is, for the working man who has to sell his labour, an impossibility and it is precisely on account of that impossibility that we are anarchists.”[114] This is why the French syndicalist Émile Pouget, echoing Proudhon, argued that:
“Property and authority are merely differing manifestations and expressions of one and the same ‘principle’ which boils down to the enforcement and enshrinement of the servitude of man. Consequently, the only difference between them is one of vantage point: viewed from one angle, slavery appears as a PROPERTY CRIME, whereas, viewed from a different angle, it constitutes an AUTHORITY CRIME.”[115]
Without freedom within an association, humans will of necessity be harmed. Their development will be stunted and stifled by the subordination and inevitable servility associated with the autocratic nature of social hierarchies. This means how we organise is what matters for “man in isolation can have no awareness of his liberty. Being free for man means being acknowledged, considered and treated as such by another man. Liberty is therefore a feature not of isolation but of interaction, not of exclusion but rather of connection.”[116] So to count as genuinely libertarian, it is necessary but not sufficient for a group to be freely joined – otherwise you end up with such obvious nonsense as voluntary slavery being “libertarian” – it must also be run by all its members, it must be an association and not a hierarchy:
“organisation, that is to say, association for a specific purpose and with the structure and means required to attain it, is a necessary aspect of social life. A man in isolation cannot even live the life of a beast […] Having therefore to join with other humans […] he must submit to the will of others (be enslaved) or subject others to his will (be in authority) or live with others in fraternal agreement in the interests of the greatest good of all (be an associate). Nobody can escape from this necessity.”[117]
Freedom of association is not enough – freedom within association is just as important for “it is the ideas of individual freedom which we bring with us to the association which determine its more or less libertarian character.”[118] What specific economic arrangements would exist would vary – on the basis of workers’ control of their workplaces anarchists have supported many different economic systems. Proudhon advocated mutualism (distribution according to deed[119]), others – starting with Déjacque – libertarian communism (distribution according to need) with the “single proviso (which is implicit, since without it anarchy would be impossible)” that “communism be voluntary and so organised to leave scope for other living arrangements.”[120] However, the abolition of private hierarchies is required for it to be genuinely libertarian:
“Liberty is inviolable. I can neither sell nor alienate my liberty; every contract, every condition of a contract, which has in view the alienation or suspension of liberty, is null: the slave, when he plants his foot upon the soil of liberty, at that moment becomes a free man. […] Liberty is the original condition of man; to renounce liberty is to renounce the nature of man: after that, how could we perform the acts of man?”[121]
Given what libertarian originally meant, its opposition to both public hierarchies (the State) and private hierarchies (property, patriarchy, racism), it is easy to understand why the current situation of “libertarian” being used to describe the ideology anarchism was created fighting – Lockean or “classical” liberalism – is so deplorable to anarchists. Particularly as Rothbard himself presents more than enough evidence to show that the libertarian critique of capitalism is correct. As Proudhon suggested long ago:
“But if the public highway is nothing but an accessory of private property; if the communal lands are converted into private property; if the public domain, in short, assimilated to private property, is guarded, exploited, leased, and sold like private property,—what remains for the proletarian? Of what advantage is it to him that society has left the state of war to enter the regime of police?”[122]
The appropriation of “libertarian” by the right is just “primitive accumulation” or “immanent domain” applied to socio-political theory – the current users of, say, land are not using it as others think they should so it must be taken from them by those others who claim to use it better. Locke’s original theory was postulated, in part, to justify the expropriation of native land by European settlers/invaders. Rothbard, likewise, concluded that the people who coined and used the term libertarian were not using it in the right way, so he and his supporters were justified in taking it over.
“We are at completely opposite poles” (Rothbard)
Interestingly, Rothbard in an unpublished – and at times extremely inaccurate – article entitled “Are Libertarians ‘Anarchists’?” written around the same time he stole the term “libertarian” stated that we must “conclude that we are not anarchists, and that those who call us anarchists are not on firm etymological ground and are being completely unhistorical.” For anarchism “arose in the nineteenth century, and since then the most active and dominant anarchist doctrine has been that of ‘anarchist communism’” an “apt term” for “a doctrine which has also been called ‘collectivist anarchism,’ ‘anarcho-syndicalism,’ and ‘libertarian communism’” and so “it is obvious that the question ‘are libertarians anarchists?’ must be answered unhesitatingly in the negative. We are at completely opposite poles.” As for the individualist anarchists (who also called themselves socialists, incidentally), they “possessed socialistic economic doctrines in common” with the others. This was “probably the main reason” why the “genuine libertarians” of this era “never referred to themselves as anarchists”[123] – not that they referred to themselves as libertarians either.
A more likely reason for them not referring to themselves as such would be that they, unlike Rothbard, recognised that anarchist theories were an interwoven whole and its anti-statism reflected its anti-capitalism, and vice versa. They may also have recognised the confusion which would be produced by, as well as the intellectual dishonesty of, appropriating a name used by others. Even those libertarians closest to the classical liberal tradition – such as the individualist anarchists – recognised the differences between the two:
“Jus, the London organ of semi-individualism, combats the doctrine that surplus value – oftener called profits – belongs to the labourer because he creates it, by arguing that the horse, by a parity of reasoning, is rightfully entitled to the surplus value which he creates for his owner. So he will be when he has the sense to claim and the power to take it; for then the horse will be an individual, an ego. This sense and power the labourer is rapidly developing, with what results the world will presently see. The argument of Jus is based upon the assumption that certain men are born to be owned by other men, just as horses are. Thus its reductio ad absurdum turns upon itself; it is hoist with its own petard.”[124]
Of course, Rothbard changed his mind and not content with stealing “libertarian” also decided to proclaim his ideology that oxymoron “anarcho-capitalism”. Yet anarchism, regardless of dictionary definitions, was never opposed to just the State. As Kropotkin summarised, its origin was “criticism of hierarchical organisations and authoritarian conceptions in general.”[125] For Proudhon, “the Revolution in 1848 struck authority,” and “Authority is Church, State, Capital.”[126] Likewise we find individualist anarchists attacking capitalism as well as the State:
“CAPITALISM. — That system of social or industrial institutions by which an exploiteur is enabled to appropriate to himself the increase resulting from industry, which belongs, and which would otherwise go, to the laborer, or be returned to the land. An abnormal relation of labor to commerce, which subjects labor to the control of an owner of the land, or of any property or goods for which the land will exchange.”[127]
Anarchism “does mean to abolish the boss – religious, political and economic.”[128] The consistent libertarian, like Emma Goldman, rightly notes that as regards “to the great mass of working girls and women, how much independence is gained if the narrowness and lack of freedom of the home is exchanged for the narrowness and lack of freedom of the factory, sweat-shop, department store, or office?”[129] As Herbert Read summarised:
“The essential principle of anarchism is that mankind has reached a stage of development at which it is possible to abolish the old relationship of master-man (capitalist-proletarian) and substitute a relationship of egalitarian co-operation. This principle is based, not only on ethical grounds, but also on economic grounds.”[130]
Ironically, Rothbard himself shows why a non-socialist “libertarian” theory – to quote Malatesta – ends up “contradicting itself” and “would turn into aristocratism and tyranny.”[131] To fixate on political authority at the expense of other – apparently more contractual – ones is ideological fetishism at its worse.
Slavery is Freedom
In short, “libertarians” suggest that voluntary subjugation – driven by economic necessity – equals liberty. But subjugation is still unfreedom, voluntary hierarchy still archy, consented authoritarian relationships still authoritarian.[132] It is a degradation of our ideas of freedom for it suggests that the only issue with, say, dictatorship or slavery is that they are involuntary. Yet we find “libertarian” Robert Nozick arguing just that – not only can someone “sell himself into slavery” but also “if one starts a private town, on land whose acquisition did not and does not violate the Lockean proviso, persons who chose to move there or later remain there would have no right to a say in how the town was run.”[133] In short, the social relationships of capitalism – factory fascism and office oligarchy – should be extended to all aspects of life.
We even find support for fascism by those retroactively proclaimed as “libertarians” by their ideological descendants, such as “classical liberal” Ludwig von Mises who wrote in the late 1920s:
“It cannot be denied that fascism and similar movements aiming at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has, for the moment, saved European civilization. The merit that fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history. But though its policy has brought salvation for the moment, it is not the kind which could promise continued success.”[134]
His followers today try to dismiss this eulogy to fascism by noting it was driven by fear of socialist revolution and that fascism was not viewed as a long-term solution. In other words, once the masses were sufficiently terrorised and internalised their inferior position then a “liberal” regime could and should return.[135] As such, it is no “absurd contention that Mises endorsed fascism” but simply the facts and even his defenders argue he saw it as a mere temporary expedient – “an emergency makeshift,” to use his words.[136] This is confirmed by von Mises acting as an advisor to Austrian fascist leader Engelbert Dollfuss.[137]
It must also be stressed that this was no temporary aberration as von Mises viewed state repression of the labour movement as a normal aspect of his “liberal” regime. As a firm believer that unions, high wages and public welfare caused the great depression, “Mises argued that ultimately there was no choice but to abolish all government intervention and to confront union power head on.”[138] It takes a true ideologue to not notice the contradiction in urging the abolition of all government intervention while also urging that troops be sent in against rebel workers. However, this is no isolated case as Kropotkin noted:
“the state of laissez-faire, which liberal economists like to talk to us about, and against which social-democrats love to break their lances, is a product of the imagination that has never existed and will not exist since it would be a contradiction of principles.
“Fundamentally, liberal economists […] never wanted it – their ideal having not been laissez-faire, not laissez-passer, but on the contrary, to do a lot on behalf of the capitalist. Carte Blanche for exploitation guaranteed by the State – they never had another ideal. What can be said of the facts? […] when did the State not take the side of the capitalist against the worker? They have many sabres and bullets for the workers, but have they ever thrashed the exploiters?”[139]
This expresses an ideological blindness which is staggering – government intervention against labour and for capitalist property rights is not government intervention. In short, the state clubbing workers is good (and liberty) but it providing medical care for the cracked heads is wrong (and tyranny). Errico Malatesta put it well:
“The criticism liberals direct at government consists of wanting to deprive it of some of its functions and to call upon the capitalists to fight it out among themselves, but it cannot attack the repressive functions which are of its essence: for without the gendarme the property owner could not exist, indeed the government’s powers of repression must perforce increase as free competition results in more discord and inequality.”[140]
So while self-proclaimed libertarians were fighting fascism in Italy, Spain and elsewhere, those “classical liberals” later proclaimed as “libertarians” were supporting it – and giving advice to fascist politicians.[141] This is no isolated case, for fellow “classical liberal” Friedrich von Hayek had postulated the need for a temporary dictator to eliminate the excesses of democracy before supporting the dictatorship of Pinochet in Chile.[142] Nor should we forget that Milton Friedman praised Pinochet for introducing a “free market” in Chile: apparently a “free” market in labour is consistent with workers being terrified of striking – or merely talking back to their boss – in case their tortured corpse ends up on the side of the road.[143] Both, needless to say, praised the Chilean economic “miracle” shortly before it crashed in 1982.
It would be remiss to not mention von Mises’ political vision after the Second World War. In stark contrast to Proudhon’s radical decentralised vision of 1851, our erstwhile supporter of (temporary) fascism “championed a program of thorough political centralization” in which “the state alone should direct the whole administration of the county” and the “communal authorities would have to execute the tasks set for them by the general legislation. Their only revenue would come from the state and from public firms and property.”[144] Hardly libertarian, but essential to stop local social experiments and so force the people to be free (free, at least to von Mises’ satisfaction if not their own).[145]
Any contradiction a free (capitalist) market and an even stronger State is more apparent than real, as seen on many occasions. For liberalism has always been bound up with the most illiberal of policies, with various spurious arguments invoked to not only deny others – blacks, slaves, the colonised, peasants and working class – the liberties which the liberals claim for themselves but also to justify oppression in the name of liberty. The notion that “classical liberalism” is simply the politics of freedom was – and is – repeatedly undermined by its reliance on the exploitation and oppression of “inferiors.” For the freedom of the liberal classes was always founded on the exploitation of others and to achieve their freedom these – whether black slaves, women, the working class, etc. – all had to give way. At best, the “classical liberals” suggest it is the price (others) paid to maximise liberty, understood in a very specific and very limited manner. At worse, they are blind to the matter or simply cannot understand the issue.
Finally, as noted above, a key element of the appropriation of “libertarian” by the right was the creation of well-funded think-tanks. The first and probably still the most famous is the American Cato Institute, founded in 1974 by Murray Rothbard and Charles Koch (Rothbard was later unceremoniously expelled by Koch). How Koch gained the fortune he used to help arrogate “libertarian” is of note here, for it exposes yet more hypocrisy and links to fascism.
After being subject to law-suits for patent infringement, their father, Fred Koch, moved to the Soviet Union – which did not recognise intellectual property rights – in 1929 to help Stalin’s regime set up fifteen modern oil refineries. His company also built the third-largest oil refinery in the Third Reich, a project which was personally approved by Hitler. In short, the Koch business was built using labour with no means of challenging management or seeking higher wages. Returning to America, he became a leading member of the anti-Communist John Birch Society and helped amend the constitution of the state of Kansas in 1958 to make it a right-to-work state – like Stalin and Hitler, he used the State to weaken organised labour and violated the sacred right of free contract by outlawing agreements between companies and unions to ensure that all who benefit from union contracts contribute to their costs. Koch, then, sought to create in America the same lack of unions he had benefited from under Stalin and Hitler. Perhaps it should also come as no surprise that Fred Koch saw the benefits of fascism:
“Although nobody agrees with me, I am of the opinion that the only sound countries in the world are Germany, Italy, and Japan, simply because they are all working and working hard. The laboring people in these countries are proportionately much better off than they are any place else in the world. When you contrast the state of mind of Germany today with what it was in 1925 you begin to think that perhaps this course of idleness, feeding at the public trough, dependence on government, etc., with which we are afflicted is not permanent and can be overcome.”[146]
Koch seemed oblivious that he himself had enriched himself by “feeding at the public trough” and “dependence on government,” albeit Stalin’s and Hitler’s governments rather than a democratically elected one. Likewise, labouring people had little choice in “working hard” under the three fascist regimes he praised, but that they were “much better off” than in a regime which let them organise is unlikely to say the least.
Of course, the Koch family cannot be blamed for their father’s politics and actions – but, surely, as good advocates of property rights they must realise that their fortune is the product of aggression?[147] It is the stolen labour of workers toiling in slave-states, but they seem not to be keen on returning it to those – or their descendants – who suffered producing it. Yet perhaps it is not too surprising that the beneficiaries of past aggression may wholeheartedly support a “non-aggression” principle from now on, for the monopolisers of social wealth have an interest in maintaining their social position, property and power.[148]
Likewise, seeking to maintain and expand their managerial authority and profits may explain Charles Koch and his brother David following in their father’s anti-union politics than belief in the individual freedom of those whom they deny freedom of speech, assembly and organisation within their plants (as a result of private government). Likewise, Koch industries’ numerous environmental and safety fines over the years may explain their opposition to governmental regulation far better than a desire for individual freedom, as a strong commitment to individual rights would mean opposing the imposition of externalities on others. Similarly, being billionaires may shape their opposition to taxation for social spending far more than an ideological commitment to freedom.
The ease with which “libertarians” can embrace fascism, dictatorship and slavery should raise questions over the nature of the liberty they claim to champion (alongside Carole Pateman, David Ellerman is of note in recognising the true nature of Nozick’s Lockean ideology[149]). That so many others were willing to accept the use of “libertarian” by obvious authoritarians says much about the state of intellectual discourse in an unequal society. Noam Chomsky suggests an obvious reason for Nozick being taken seriously:
“The real question to be raised about theories that fail so completely to capture the concept of justice in its significant and intuitive sense is why they arouse such interest. Why are they not simply dismissed out of hand on the grounds of this failure, which is striking in clear cases? Perhaps the answer is, in part, the one given by Edward Greenberg in a discussion of some recent work on the entitlement theory of justice. After reviewing empirical and conceptual shortcomings, he observes that such work ‘plays an important function in the process of [. . .] ‘blaming the victim,’ and of protecting property against egalitarian onslaughts by various non-propertied groups.’ An ideological defence of privileges, exploitation, and private power will be welcomed, regardless of its merits.”[150]
So right-wing use of libertarian is also “completely unhistoric” and “not on firm etymological ground”. It would be less confusing – and consistent with their own stated principles – if they were to change their name to something more appropriate.
Libertaire ou Libertarienne?
Now, do not be confused. It is possible to argue that some people should rule others, that some people – by some favoured criteria – are just better than others and so rightly should govern them, that specific forms of hierarchy are fine, and so on. That can be a consistent, if wrong, ideology. What is not acceptable is to call such a system “anarchist” or “libertarian” – particularly when these terms were coined expressly against the notion that having wealth gives you that right.
In France, where the anarchist movement cannot be so easily ignored as in America or Britain, the free-market right have been forced to call their ideology “libertarianisme” and themselves as “libertariens” – rien, of course, being French for “nothing” or “nought” and so indicating that it has nothing to do with liberty. So rather than a single entry for two distinctly different – nay, opposed – set of ideas with a distinctly different origin and aims as on the English-language Wikipedia, the French site has two entries: one for libertaire and one for libertarianisme.
It is well beyond time for the same to occur in the English language. So what would be an appropriate name for these so-called “libertarians” of the right? They could call it voluntarism, a term coined by English liberal Auberon Herbert in the late 19th century. As well as being invented by their own ideological tradition, it is more appropriate ideologically as they support all forms of voluntary arrangements regardless of their internal liberties (or lack thereof). Yet that raises questions of how “voluntary” an agreement is if a few own the bulk of resources in a society. As Individualist Anarchist Victor Yarros put it:
“A system is voluntary when it is voluntary all round […] not when certain transactions, regarded from certain points of view, appear voluntary. Are the circumstances which compel the labourer to accept unfair terms law-created, artificial, and subversive of equal liberty? That is the question, and an affirmative answer to it is tantamount to an admission that the present system is not voluntary in the true sense.”[151]
Yarros rightly denounced those who “want liberty to still further crush and oppress the people; liberty to enjoy their plunder without fear of the State’s interfering with them”, liberty “to summarily deal with impudent tenants who refuse to pay tribute for the privilege of living and working on the soil.”[152]
Rothbard himself – when discussing the abolition of slavery and serfdom – let the cat out of the bag by admitting that economic power exists when the means of production are appropriated by the few, as under even the capitalism of a “just-so” story. As he suggested, the Lockean Proviso that land can only be appropriated by labour when “where there is enough, and as good, left in common for others” may “lead to the outlawry of all private property of land, since one can always say that the reduction of available land leaves everyone else […] worse off.”[153] So “voluntarians” may not be best as it still leads to awkward questions about the sanctity of property and the social relationships it generates. Appropriation by the few inevitably leads to the liberty of the many being worse off – which should be the key criteria for an ideology proclaiming itself “libertarian” but is not for the all too obvious reasons indicated.
Perhaps we could take a leaf from socialist history for most “libertarians” of the right (following Rothbard) advocate forming political parties, standing in elections and taking political office to ensure that the State disappears (or, as their ideals rarely appeal, joining existing right-wing ones, such as the British Conservative and American Republican parties, and smuggling in their changes that way). In short, a classical Marxist strategy.[154] This leads to an obvious label for their ideology: marxo-capitalism. It could be objected that their economic ideas are completely opposed, seeking to privatise not nationalise, but that did not stop their appropriation of “libertarian” or “anarchist.” They could explain that marxo-capitalism obviously differs from “classical” Marxism (marxo-socialism, if you like) but shares a common desire to utilise “political action” to ensure that the State “withers away” (at least to their own satisfaction, if not to anyone else’s).[155]
Regardless of the obvious accuracy of this label we doubt that it will be viewed favourably and enough on the left would rush to dispute it: unlike for anarchism and libertarian, when Marxists for obvious reasons had no objections to their rivals on the left being associated with the far-right. Carole Pateman suggests “contractarian” for she was well aware of the real history of libertarian:
“I shall refer to [this…] as contractarian theory or contractarianism (in the United States it is usually called libertarianism, but in Europe and Australia ‘libertarian’ refers to the anarchist wing of the socialist movement; since my discussion owes something to that source I shall maintain un-American usage).”[156]
But contracts take place once property is in place and, moreover, property is their core principle – liberty like labour being considered as the property of an individual – so propertarian would be best. This has the advantage of warning others which side they will take in a conflict between liberty and property, so avoiding that obvious confusion non-propertarians feel when the propertarian supports authoritarian social relationships and (private) restrictions on fundamental liberties.
Interestingly, Ursula Le Guin used the term in her 1974 classic of anarchist science-fiction, The Dispossessed. One of the anarchist characters notes that inhabitants of Anarres (the communist-anarchist moon) “want nothing to do with the propertarians” of Urras, a capitalist world. The anarchist protagonist, Shevek, does discover there some people who describe themselves as “libertarian” but these declare themselves close to communist-anarchism (asked whether they are anarchists they reply: “Partly. Syndicalists, libertarians […] anti-centralists”).[157] It should be noted that “archist” and “propertarian” is used pretty much interchangeably in The Dispossessed to describe Urras, showing clear understanding of Proudhon’s original argument that property was both “theft” and “despotism.”
Yet regardless of the actual name decided upon, they should not call themselves libertarian for both historical reasons and “from the view of etymology” – and if the propertarians took their stated principles seriously they would join us in so-doing.
Conclusion
As Noam Chomsky summarises, “libertarianism” is marked by “dedication to free market capitalism, and has no connection with the rest of the international anarchist movement” which “commonly called themselves libertarian socialists, in a very different sense of the term ‘libertarian.’” It is a “quite different thing and different development, in fact [it] has no objection to tyranny as long as it is private tyranny.”[158] Genuine libertarians, to use Voltairine de Cleyre’s words, have a different perspective:
“Break up [. . .] every home that rests in slavery! Every marriage that represents the sale and transfer of the individuality of one of its parties to the other! Every institution, social or civil, that stands between man and his right; every tie that renders one a master, another a serf.”[159]
The true libertarian sides with militant workers challenging capitalist authority, radical women undermining patriarchy, rebellious blacks struggling for civil rights rather than, as the propertarian, siding with the private hierarchies being struggled against.
Given the origins of the word libertarian and their own stated principles, the naïve would think that the right would stop using the term for, after all, the propertarians refute themselves and show why their appropriation of the term is wrong. They should help us reclaim what is rightfully ours and stop using the term Rothbard admitted they stole. Yet this is unlikely, for from Locke onwards “property” has been used to justify subjugation, exploitation, oppression and the stealing of resources used by others.
Writing in the 1980s, Murray Bookchin noted that in the United States the “term ‘libertarian’ itself, to be sure, raises a problem, notably, the specious identification of an anti-authoritarian ideology with a straggling movement for ‘pure capitalism’ […] This movement never created the word: it appropriated it from the anarchist movement of the [nineteenth] century. And it should be recovered by those anti-authoritarians […] who try to speak for dominated people as a whole, not for personal egotists who identify freedom with entrepreneurship and profit.” Thus anarchists should “restore in practice a tradition that has been denatured by” the free-market right.[160]
Today, over 160 years after Déjacque coined the term in its modern sense and from which current (valid and invalid) usages derive, we anarchists and other libertarian socialists should reclaim the word and its original meaning. This necessary task has become harder in the intervening years since Bookchin wrote but that is no reason not to rise to the challenge for Déjacque’s conclusions are as true as ever:
“– Property is the negation of liberty.
“– Liberty is the negation of property.
“– Social slavery and individual property, this is what authority affirms.
“– Individual liberty and social property, that is the affirmation of anarchy.”[161]
So considered in terms of our political, social and economics ideas it is unsurprising that anarchists have been using the word libertarian for over 160 years. Regardless of the attempts by others ignorant of both the history of that term and the reality of capitalism to appropriate it for their hierarchical and authoritarian ideology, we will continue to use libertarian in its original sense of seeking freedom for all and the ending of every hierarchical and authoritarian institution and social relation.
Iain McKay
A Note on the Texts
We have sought to select texts which are not included in the usual anthologies from writers and activists from all the major schools of libertarian thought: anarchism (mutualist, collectivist, communist, individualist), syndicalism (anarchist or not), guild socialism, libertarian Marxism (council communism, situationism, autonomism), social ecology, to name the most significant, as well as those who rejected all these and just called themselves libertarians or libertarian socialists.
Needless to say, not every writer or organisation was consistently libertarian nor necessarily remained one for the length of their political career and so we have selected works which express their ideas when they were.
We have also sought to include texts related to significant social movements and revolts – the First International (1864-1877), the Paris Commune (1871), the Russian Revolutions (1905 and 1917), the Mexican Revolution (1910-20), the Italian Biennio Rosso (1919-1920), the Spanish Revolution and French Factory Occupations (1936), France (1968) amongst others. In addition, we have included writings on thinkers who wrote before the term libertarian was coined for, like anarchism, they expressed ideas which would later be recognised as libertarian. However, it would be anachronistic to include writings by such thinkers here (an exception is Proudhon as he influenced Déjacque and continued writing after the term was coined).
We are well aware that the texts concentrate on Western Europe and North America in spite of libertarian ideas and movements being international in scope, stretching across the globe from Chile and Argentina to China and Japan. This is unfortunate but unavoidable given the resources available. We hope others will rise to that challenge.
The texts are in British-English, not American-English.
End Notes
[1] Down with the Bosses! And Other Writings, 1859-1861, (Gresham, OR: Corvus Editions, 2013), Shawn Wilbur (ed.), 5.
[2] Max Nettlau, A Short History of Anarchism (London: Freedom Press, 1995), 75-6.
[3] This introduction is based on my article “160 Years of Libertarian,” Anarcho-Syndicalist Review 71 (Fall 2017).
[4] Sadly, very little of Proudhon’s voluminous writings are available in English. The most comprehensive is Property is Theft! A Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Anthology (Edinburgh/Oakland/Baltimore: AK Press, 2011).
[5] Property is Theft!, 117-8, 112, 95. This aspect of Proudhon’s ideas is often ignored or denied. See my introduction to Property is Theft! or my article “Proudhon, Property and Possession,” Anarcho-Syndicalist Review 66 (2016)
[6] Property is Theft!, 133, 132, 135, 248.
[7] Property is Theft!, 503-6, 583.
[8] Besancon municipal library, MS 2881 f. 30v.
[9] Property is Theft!, 202.
[10] Property is Theft!, 596, 584, 597.
[11] Property is Theft!, 563.
[12] Property is Theft!, 377, 153, 137.
[13] Property is Theft!, 595.
[14] Property is Theft!, 279, 273, 267.
[15] Property is Theft!, 482, 491, 566, 226.
[16] Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, La fédération et l’unité en Italie(Paris: E. Dentu, 1862), 27-28.
[17] Property is Theft!, 447.
[18] “Regarding Louis Blanc – The Present Utility and Future Possibility of the State”, Anarcho-Syndicalist Review No. 66 (Winter 2016)
[19] Les Confessions d’un révolutionnaire (Garnier: Paris 1851), 177, 358.
[20] Property is Theft!, 483.
[21] “We will attempt to remain in a juste milieu, in an equal distance from the excesses of popular power and the abuses of royal power” (in the words of King Louis-Philippe).
[22] “M.*** et le Libertaire,” Le Libertaire, 31 January 1860.
[23] “Organisation du travail II,” Le Libertaire, 7 May 1860.
[24] Jenny P. d’Héricourt, La Femme affranchie: réponse à MM. Michelet, Proudhon, É. de Girardin, Legouvé, Comte et autres novateurs modernes (Woman Emancipated: Response to Michelet, Proudhon, É. De Girardin, A. Comte and Other Modern Innovators) in two volumes (Bruxelles: A. Lacroix, Van Meenen et Cie, 1860).
[25] quoted by Carolyn J. Eichner, Surmounting the Barricades: Women in the Paris Commune (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2004), 40.
[26] Robert Graham, We do not Fear Anarchy, we invoke it: The First International and the Origins of the Anarchist Movement (Oakland/Edinburgh: AK Press, 2015), 77, 128.
[27] Kropotkin, Direct Struggle Against Capital: A Peter Kropotkin Anthology (Edinburgh/Oakland/Baltimore: AK Press, 2014), 170, 165.
[28] For a discussion of Proudhon’s influence, see my review of Marcello Musto’s Workers Unite! The International 150 Years Later in Anarcho-Syndicalist Review 69 (Winter 2017).
[29] Anarchism: From Theory to Practice (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970), 47.
[30] Nettlau, 145.
[31] “Anarchie et Communisme”, Le Drapeau Noir (Lyon), 16 September 1883.
[32] “Socialistic Letters,” Liberty, 17 December 1887 (originally published in Le Radical, 13 April 1887).
[33] Nettlau, 162.
[34] L’Anarchie: sa Philosophie, son Idéal (Paris: Stock, 1896), 31.
[35] Complete Works of Malatesta (Chico/Edinburgh: AK Press, 2016) 3: 57, 252.
[36] Proceedings of the International Worker’s Congress, London, July-August, 1896 (Glasgow/London: The Labour Leader, 1896), 7, 17, 20.
[37] Joseph Labadie, Anarchism: What It Is and What It Is Not (1896).
[38] “Préface,” F. Domela Nieuwenhuis, Le socialisme en danger (Paris: P.-V. Stock, 1897), vi.
[39] “Attacked Because We Do Not Know It All,” Liberty, February 1897.
[40] “Libertarian or Anarchist?” Freedom, January 1899.
[41] W. Tcherkesov, Freedom, January 1901.
[42] Freedom, February 1907.
[43] Maurizio Antonioli (ed.), The International Anarchist Congress: Amsterdam (1907), (Edmonton, Alberta: Black Cat Press, 2009), 6-7.
[44] Mother Earth, April 1907, 111; March 1907, 54.
[45] “A Rejoinder,” Mother Earth, December 1910, 326-7.
[46] Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader (New York: Humanity Books, 1998), 76-7.
[47] Modern Science and Anarchy (Oakland/Edinburgh: AK Press, 2018), 198, 205.
[48] “The Reckoning,” Mother Earth, September 1914, 211.
[49] Emma Goldman, “Anarchists Socialists” The Agitator, 1 April 1911.
[50] James O’Neal, Sabotage: Socialism vs. Syndicalism (Saint Louis, Missouri: The National Rip-Saw Publishing Co., 1913), 2.
[51] Quoted by Jason Garner, “Separated by an ‘Ideological Chasm’: The Spanish National Labour Confederation and Bolshevik Internationalism, 1917–1922,” Contemporary European History Vol. 15, No. 3 (2006), 303.
[52] Quoted by Garner, 318.
[53] Red Emma Speaks, 394, 395.
[54] John Crump, Hatta Shūzū and Pure Anarchism in Interwar Japan (Ipswich: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), 74
[55] Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, The Letters of Sacco and Vanzetti (New York: Penguin Books, 1997), 274.
[56] Freedom: A Journal of Libertarian Thought, Work and Literature, January, 1931.
[57] José Peirats, The C.N.T. in the Spanish Revolution 1 (Hastings: The Meltzer Press, 2001) 1: 103-10.
[58] Quoted by Abel Paz, Durruti in the Spanish Revolution (Edinburgh/Oakland: AK Press, 2007), 341.
[59] Quoted by Martha A. Ackelsberg, Free Women of Spain: Anarchism and the struggle for the emancipation of women (Edinburgh/Oakland: AK Press, 2005), 147.
[60] Paz, 493, 496.
[61] Homage to Catalonia (London: Penguin, 1989), 2-3.
[62] Wildcat Group (ed.), Class War on the Home Front: Revolutionary Opposition to the Second World War (Manchester: Wildcat Group, 1986), 13.
[63] George Woodcock, Anarchism: A History of libertarian ideas and movements (England: Penguin Books, 1986), 233.
[64] Robert Graham (ed.), Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas 1 (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 2005) 1: 60, 231.
[65] Malatesta, Complete Works 3: 290-1.
[66] Serge Bricianer, Pannekoek and the Workers’ Councils (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1978). The same occurred in Britain, but to a much smaller extent: Mark Shipway, Anti-Parliamentary Communism: The Movement for Workers’ Councils in Britain, 1917-45 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988).
[67] Collected Works 28: 514. Lenin also attacked the Italian anti-parliamentarian communists around Amadeo Bordiga but as these remained (and remain) tied to the Bolshevik orthodoxy that the dictatorship of the proletariat was expressed in the dictatorship of the party as well as a highly centralised economic regime, they cannot be considered remotely libertarian.
[68] While Lenin’s diatribe remains recommended reading on the Leninist-left, council communist Herman Gorter’s lengthy rebuttal Open Letter to Comrade Lenin (1920) is less well-known. Suffice to say, the bulk of the world’s Communists followed Lenin’s position and have never let the failure to achieve socialist revolutions bother them.
[69] “Some Remarks on Parliamentarism,” Left, May 1950.
[70] Maurice Brinton, For Workers’ Power: The Selected Writings of Maurice Brinton (Edinburgh/Oakland: AK Press, 2004), 157, 294, 377.
[71] E.P. Thompson, “The Poverty of Theory, or an Orrery of Errors,” The Poverty of Theory, and other essays (London: Merlin Press, 1978), 382.
[72] Shelia Rowbotham, “The Women’s Movement and Organising for Socialism,” in Shelia Rowbotham, Lynne Segal and Hilary Wainright, Beyond the Fragments: Feminism and the Making of Socialism (London: Merlin Press, 1979), 32.
[73] Adolph Fischer, Philip S. Foner (ed.), The Autobiographies of the Haymarket Martyrs (New York: Monad Press, 1977), 81.
[74] The Betrayal of the American Right (Auburn: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2007), 83.
[75] Man, Economy, and State, with Power and Market (Auburn: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2009), 670-1.
[76] Man, Economy, and State, 671, 679.
[77] The Ethics of Liberty (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1982), 56.
[78] Sam Dolgoff, Fragments: A Memoir (London: Refract Publications, 1986), 74, 89.
[79] Those who appreciate irony may gain some pleasure in knowing that individualist-anarchists like Benjamin Tucker and Joseph Labadie would join communist-anarchists like Peter Kropotkin and Emma Goldman in being arrested under Rothbard’s “natural law” if they sought to apply their ideas – all natural outlaws, if you like.
[80] The far-right appropriating words associated with the left predates this. Fascism, for example, comes from the Italian term fascismo which is derived from fascio meaning a bundle of rods. This had been used by labour organisations in Italy, known as fasci, since the nineteenth century due to the symbolism of the fasces suggesting strength through unity: a single rod is easily broken, while the bundle is difficult to break. Italian, Spanish and other fascists invented “National Syndicalism” while German ones called their group the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, something which for many on the free-market right apparently proves that they were really socialists.
[81] Journal des Débats, 23 October 1851, 3.
[82] The following discussion draws on “Section F – Is ‘anarcho’-capitalism a type of anarchism?” of An Anarchist FAQ (Edinburgh/Oakland: AK Press, 2008) volume 1, the answer being “No” of course.
[83] The Ethics of Liberty, 170, 173.
[84] The Ethics of Liberty, 170.
[85] The Ethics of Liberty, 113-6, 118, 132, 114.
[86] The Ethics of Liberty, 54.
[87] The Ethics of Liberty, 171.
[88] This obvious contradiction has been noted outwith the genuine libertarian tradition, most recently by Elizabeth Anderson, Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk about it) (Princeton University Press, 2017). Sadly, she – like others – take their appropriation of “libertarian” at face value and, while usefully exposing the evils of private hierarchies, has no principled objection to wage-labour, as noted in a review in Anarcho-Syndicalist Review 73 (Spring 2018).
[89] The Ethics of Liberty, 221-2.
[90] The Ethics of Liberty, 74.
[91] Albert Parsons, “The object of the Social Revolution,” contained in Lucy Parsons, Life of Albert R. Parsons, with Brief History of the Labor Movement in America (Chicago: Lucy E. Parsons, 1889), 89.
[92] The Ethics of Liberty, 41, 123.
[93] The following discussion draws upon my chapter “Organisation” in Anarchism (New York: Routledge, 2018), Nathan Jun, Leonard Williams, Benjamin Franks (eds).
[94] It must be stressed that Locke’s “state of nature” is marked by wealth inequalities and numerous hierarchies, including Kings. As Carole Pateman notes, “Locke’s state of nature, with its father-rulers and capitalist economy, would certainly not find favour with anarchists”. (The Problem of Political Obligation: A Critique of Liberal Theory, [Cambridge: Polity Press, 1985], 141)
[95] see C.B. MacPherson’s The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964) or Carole Pateman’s The Problem of Political Obligation.
[96] John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), Peter Laslett (ed.), 322. Given that the rationale for all these forms of subjection were justified in liberal theory in the same manner – consent or contractual – Déjacque was right to argue that there was no logical reason to defend patriarchy than any other archy and so the anarchist critique cannot stop at the front-door of the home any more than that of the workplace.
[97] Macpherson, 214-5.
[98] Locke, 289.
[99] Property is Theft!, 129.
[100] Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Cambridge: Polity, 1988), 153.
[101] Macpherson, 251-2.
[102] Teresa Brennan and Carole Pateman, “‘Mere Auxiliaries to the Commonwealth’: Women and the Origins of Liberalism,” Political Studies, Volume 27, Issue2 (June 1979).
[103] John Locke, “The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina,” Political Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), Mark Goldie (ed.).
[104] Classical Liberal defence of numerous hierarchical social relationships is a theme of Domenico Losurdo’s Liberalism: A Counter-History (London/New York: Verso, 2011).
[105] Pateman, The Sexual Contract, 72, 66.
[106] The Ethics of Liberty, 135, 40.
[107] Pateman, 151, 58.
[108] Pateman, 146.
[109] For a useful discussion along similar lines, see Corey Robin, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin (Oxford University Press, 2011).
[110] Kropotkin, Modern Science and Anarchy, 139.
[111] Kropotkin, Direct Struggle against Capital, 203.
[112] Property is Theft!, 96, 91.
[113] Modern Science and Anarchy, 226.
[114] Kropotkin, Direct Struggle against Capital, 203, 160.
[115] Daniel Guérin (ed.), No Gods, No Masters: An Anthology of Anarchism (Edinburgh/San Francisco: AK Press 2005), 427.
[116] Michael Bakunin, Selected Writings (London: Jonathan Cape, 1973), 147.
[117] Errico Malatesta, Errico Malatesta: His Life and Ideas (London: Freedom Press, 1993), 84-5.
[118] Kropotkin, Modern Science and Anarchy, 225-6.
[119] It should be noted that Proudhon did not advocate labour-notes, as many commentators have suggested, see my “Proudhon’s Constituted Value and the Myth of Labour Notes,” Anarchist Studies 25: 1 (Summer 2017) or my “The Poverty of (Marx’s) Philosophy,” Anarcho-Syndicalist Review 70 (Summer 2017).
[120] Malatesta, Complete Works of Malatesta 3: 261.
[121] Property is Theft!, 92.
[122] Property is Theft!, 222.
[123] Strictly Confidential: The Private Volker Fund Memos of Murray N. Rothbard (Auburn: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2010), 32, 27, 30, 31.
[124] Benjamin R. Tucker, “On Picket Duty,” Liberty, 2 July 1887.
[125] Modern Science and Anarchy, 135
[126] Les Confessions d’un révolutionnaire (Garnier: Paris 1851), 380.
[127] J. K. Ingalls, Social Wealth: The Sole Factors and Exact Ratios in its Acquirement and Apportionment (New York: The Truth Seeker Company, 1885), 313.
[128] Jo Labadie, “Cranky Notions”, The Agitator, 1 February 1912.
[129] Red Emma Speaks, 161
[130] Anarchy and Order: essays in politics (London: Faber and Faber Ltd, 1954), 92.
[131] Complete Works of Malatesta 3: 293.
[132] It is possible, of course, that in a free society some may seek hierarchy, that they forgo their liberty and their rights, let a few own the means of life in a given area and let them rule. If so, then there is little that can be done – we simply recognise them for what they are, willing slaves, and not suggest they are free. What little which can be done is – as libertarians do today – making them aware of their position and rights as well as encouraging the spirit of revolt.
[133] Anarchy, State and Utopia (Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1974), 371, 270.
[134] Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism: A Socio-Economic Exposition (Kansas City: Sheed Andres and McMeek Inc., 1978), 51.
[135] As von Mises later wrote in a fan letter to Ayn Rand: “You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them: you are inferior and all the improvements in your conditions which you simply take for granted you owe to the effort of men who are better than you.” (quoted by Jörg Guido Hülsmann, Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism [Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2007], 996).
[136] Hülsmann, 360.
[137] “Before Dollfuss was murdered for his politics [in July 1934, by Nazis], Mises was one of his closest advisers.” (Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “The Meaning of the Mises Papers,” Free Market Vol. 14, No. 4 [April 1997]). After the events in Charlottesville at the “Unite the Right” rally in August 2017, some commentators noted how many of the “alt-right” fascists used to be “libertarians.” In spite of protests by “libertarians,” as can be seen there are historic links between their ideology and fascism. More, they share many of the same perspectives on numerous forms of authoritarian structures and social relationship. As such, the pipe-line from the one to the other comes as no surprise.
[138] Hülsmann, 621.
[139] “Une Conférence sur l’Anarchie”, La Révolte, 5 August 1893.
[140] Errico Malatesta, Anarchy (London: Freedom Press, 2001), 47.
[141] It must be noted that Austrian unemployment remained stubbornly high in spite of Dollfuss’ brutal assault on workers in the early 1930s. For more details of this grim period, see “Propertarianism and Fascism,” Anarcho-Syndicalist Review 75 (Winter 2019).
[142] Andrew Farrant, Edward McPhail and Sebastian Berger, “Preventing the ‘Abuses’ of Democracy: Hayek, the ‘Military Usurper’ and Transitional Dictatorship in Chile?” The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 71, No. 3 (July, 2012), pp. 513-538.
[143] For details, see “Section C.11: Doesn’t neo-liberalism in Chile prove that the free market benefits everyone?,” An Anarchist FAQ (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2008) 1: 342-53.
[144] Hülsmann, 743-4.
[145] Such as the municipal socialism von Mises saw in “Red Vienna” during the 1920s and cut short by the rise of Austro-fascism.
[146] Quoted by Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (New York: Anchor Books, 2017), 37-8.
[147] The “entitlement theory of justice in distribution is historical; whether a distribution is just depends on how it came about.” If “some people steal from others, or defraud them, or enslave them, seizing their product and preventing them from living as they choose, or forcibly exclude others from competing in exchanges” then the resulting distribution of holdings is unjust. This, in turn, means rectification is required and this “principle uses historical information about previous situations and injustices done in them” as well as “information about the actual course of events that flowed from these injustices, until the present” to produce a situation “if injustice had not taken place.” (Nozick, 151-3) Given that few land titles and subsequent holdings have been acquired justly, few if any “libertarians” seek to do more than pay lip-service to this so-called fundamental principle and take current holdings as if they were the product of non-aggression. As for Locke, so for Nozick: his story is more important than history.
[148] Rothbard argues in the situation where the descendants of those who initially tilled the soil and their aggressors (“or those who purchased their claims”) still extract “tribute from the modern tillers” that this is a case of “continuing aggression against the true owners”. This means that “the land titles should be transferred to the peasants, without compensation to the monopoly landlords.” (The Ethics of Liberty, 65) He fails to note that the extracted “tribute” has been used to invest in industry and transform society. Why ignore what the “tribute” has been used for? Does stolen property not remain stolen property after it has been transferred to another? And if the stolen property is used for investment, so ensuring the creation of a society in which one class has to sell their liberty to another, then any surplus coming from that capital is as stolen as the capital itself, as both were generated directly and indirectly by the theft.
[149] David P. Ellerman, Property and Contract in Economics: The Case for Economic Democracy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992).
[150] The Chomsky Reader (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987), 188.
[151] “Spencer’s Defence of Liberty,” Liberty 16 May 1891.
[152] “On the Road to Anarchy,” Liberty 2 July 1887.
[153] The Ethics of Liberty, 240.
[154] After the collapse of Stalinism, Rothbard urged “action by government” to return property “to its original owners” and where this could not be done, workers should receive “private, negotiable shares.” Workers would not be allowed to directly take-over their workplaces and land: “Ownership is not to be granted to collectives or cooperatives or workers or peasants holistically, which would only bring back the ills of socialism in a decentralized and chaotic syndicalist form.” (“How and How Not to Desocialize,” Economic Controversies [Auburn, Alabama: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2011], 443-46) Not only did this echo Bolshevik arguments against workers’ control in 1917, it also reflected how the State was utilised to limit the options of the many during the primitive accumulation and mercantilism used to create capitalism in the first place.
[155] The term “marxo-capitalism” also explains how propertarians like von Mises and von Hayek supported fascism against the threat of socialism: Marx advocated the “dictatorship of the proletariat” as a temporary expedient on the road to a stateless society, they likewise embraced the temporary expedient of the “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.”
[156] The Sexual Contract, 14.
[157] The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (London: Grafton Books, 1986), 70, 245.
[158] Chomsky on Anarchism (Edinburgh/Oakland/West Virginia: AK Press, 2005), 235.
[159] The Voltairine de Cleyre Reader (Oakland/Edinburgh: AK Press, 2004) 72.
[160] The Modern Crisis (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1986), 154-5.
[161] Down with the Bosses!,17.
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