Re: Zinn and the Libertarians

Jesse:

Besides Halbrook, I expect that Hess was also influenced by Rothbard’s early statements about China during the Left and Right years. Here’s Rothbard, from the original version of “Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty”; Rothbard has been arguing that libertarianism is the most consistent form of radical Leftism, so when he writes “more left-wing,” it’s also supposed to mean “more libertarian”:

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

Which, written in 1965 on the eve of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, is probably kind of embarrassing in retrospect. (Curiously, the part of this passage about Mao’s China, from “In recent years…” to the end of the paragraph, has disappeared in the version of the essay reprinted at LewRockwell.com. The Mises.com version is apparently based on the version from Left and Right I.1, and the LewRockwell.com version from the reprint in Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature; if anyone has a copy of the book lying around, maybe you can tell me whether the omission started with that reprint, or whether it started online.)

Anyway, as you note, this kind of thing was weirdly common; and unfortunately, Maosketeering was becoming increasingly popular in the New Left just as Hess was really digging most into it. You ended up with a lot of weird things, as with pacifist feminist Barbara Deming bizarrely writing in praise of Mao’s Laogai reeducation camps in the middle of what is otherwise a wonderful essay on prison abolitionism.

Advertisement

Help me get rid of these Google ads with a gift of $10.00 towards this month’s operating expenses for radgeek.com. See Donate for details.