Jesse: I think (though I’ve never been entirely sure) that Rothbard there was referring to the Leninist/Maoist views of revolution and not to their practices once in power. Rothbard liked that they were targetting feudal and colonial regimes, as opposed to industrial societies whose economies were closer to the Rothbardian ideal of markets and property rights.

That’s probably part of what he had in mind, yes. (The New Left fascination with Maoism was also somewhat, although not entirely, driven by enthusiasm for his revolutionary theory; especially his writing on People’s War and bottom-up revolution. Feminist groups used the practice of “speaking bitterness” as a model for consciousness-raising; third worldist Leftists took a lot of direction from both the Chinese government’s and the Cuban government’s support for worldwide guerrilla uprisings against empire; etc.)

But on the other hand, it does seem odd that Rothbard would foreground the Sino-Soviet split if his concern were just with Maoist theories of revolution, and not with supposed practical differences in how the USSR and the PRC regimes were operating ca. 1965 (e.g. that the USSR regime had settled into a comfortable statehood as an imperial superpower, while the PRC regime was still somehow furthering “revolutionary” “left-wing” aims while in power). It also seems odd that he would specifically mention their “scorning Right-wing Marxist compromises with the State,” which again sounds as much like the 1965 attitude towards domestic revisionism and the bizarre 1960s experiments with mock-decentralism-from-above as anything. In any case, given that this big push in revolutionary theory by official Maoism at the time was so closely and explicitly connected not just with ongoing guerrilla uprisings in the third world, but also with internal Chinese state projects, which were supposedly aimed at reviving the old spirit of the revolution within China and at thoroughly smashing the rotting counterrevolutionary revisionist line, etc. etc., I’m not sure how cleanly the line between 1960s Maoist revolutionary theory and 1960s Maoist practices in power can really be drawn.

When was Halbrook’s stuff on Maoism mainly being put out? It may be that Rothbard had simply changed his mind by that point, or had sharpened a distinction which he hadn’t yet been ready to clearly draw in ’65.

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.

LNC Region 7,

I agree with you that law enforement is a haven for bullies and abusers. One might be tempted to call unprovoked violence the occupational disease of government police officers, if not for the fact that it is their occupation. But I haven’t seen any evidence that would convince me that this is “increasing” as of late. There was plenty of bullying and violence to go around back in the days of Bull Connor, too.

The main difference between then and now is that, thanks to shifts in both technology and civil society, people now have more means of communicating with each other than the reflexively pro-authority establishment media; and more means of documenting police abuse as it happens. So it’s not that the problem is increasing; it’s that documentation of the problem is increasing. The next question is whether, given our increasing knowledge and connections, we can now do something about it.