Comments Elsewhere

Francois,

I don’t do polemical definitions of “revisionist.” I’m using it in a neutral sense: revisionists are historians who critically re-examine common received wisdom and authoritative accounts about history, and criticize or rejecting the “official” or authoritative understanding of the events.

Whether or not this project is really worthwhile depends on what’s being rejected and what the evidence for the rejecting is. Since I tend to think that official/governmental accounts of history tend to be a pack of distortions, fudging, and self-serving lies, I tend be pretty positive on revisionism, so long as the revisionist in question is herself serious and honest. Zinn’s a good example; I’d also consider somebody like J.R. Hummel or Bob Higgs an example of good honest revisionism. Of course, there are other revisionists out there who are ignorant, stupid or dishonest — take David Irving (please!). But the problem with them isn’t that they’re revisionists. It’s that they’re idiots or charlatans.

vidyohs: I guess I have to spend more time with Lysander, as so far in my readings I haven’t got to the part about him being an anarchist, or least I have come to that interpretation yet. . . . Note I didn’t say you were wrong about Lysander, I just said that, in my quite likely more meager reading of Lysander, I had not made that interpretation. Now that you’ve suggested it, I’ll look closer.

Well, from the sounds of it you’ve already read No Treason. If you haven’t yet gotten the anarchistic implications of Spooner’s view, you might consult his later books, in which he most clearly argues that he views any form of government whatever as illegitimate, e.g. his “Letter to Thomas F. Bayard: Challenging his right — and that of all the other so-called senators and representatives in Congress — to exercise any legislative power whatever over the people of the United States” at http://praxeology.net/LS-LB.htm or his short book “Natural Law; or The Science of Justice: A Treatise on Natural Law, Natural Justice, Natural Rights, Natural Liberty, and Natural Society; showing that all legislation whatsoever is an absurdity, a usurpation, and a crime” at http://praxeology.net/LS-NL-1.htm . Spooner makes it pretty clear there.

I know that workers at various times have risen up and seized the farm from its owners, but my point was that in most cases they probably didn’t get a whole hell of a lot from it, hardly worth the effort unless life in general where the farm is located is also just a living hell for everyone. I guess I am saying that in my view, and in general, while a farm may produce a tidy wealth for one man, typically that wealth divided amongst many men isn’t going very far.

Well, um, in situations where peasants get together and seize control over farms, it has typically been the case that they were seizing control over farms that they were already working on as their primary means of subsistence. The difference is that before they had to work according to the requirements set by a government-privileged landlord, and to turn a hefty share of the fruits of their labor over to him, whereas afterwards they didn’t have to do that. They were already surviving on shares of the income generated from a single (typically very large) farm or plantation; the difference is that, after the expropriation, the shares they got were no longer reduced by the leeching of government-appointed tax farmers and landlords. (* Government-appointed because the landlord typically owed his control over the land to a grant from the Crown or the State based on nothing more than the naked exercise of government power and privilege (to conquest and feudalism in Russia or France; to conquest and colonialism in European-colonized territories in Latin America or Africa).

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.

... Well, the notion of "thickness" was never really intended as a political category for picking out any particular tendency or view within libertarian

... Somewhat, although I'd argue that Loewen's book might actually be more like the kind of theoretical work that Dan might have been looking for. Not so much

Francois

Well, don’t look so surprised. It’s not exactly unusual for Lew Rockwell to say kind things about anti-war revisionist historians, including those on the populist Left. He’ll typically say kind things about almost anyone who he thinks is on the right side of the war issue.

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.

Mark,

The passage above that you’re responding to is a quotation from a published book, Michael Fellman’s The Making of Robert E. Lee. I quoted the passage because I think the historical material in it is interesting and worth putting online. (Although it is in need of some factual corrections — among them the corrections that I included underneath the quotation, with the links to primary sources.) I certainly did not say that “it is unlikely Lee mistreated his slaves.” As you might guess if you read over my sarcastic remark at the end of the quotation about Lee’s protestations of innocence.

You don’t need to convince me that slavery was brutal or that Lee would have had the Norrises whipped after he forced them back into captivity. I’m already all over that. Michael Fellman is the dude who wrote what you’re responding to. But, in fact, you don’t need to convince Fellman, either; he already knows. He didn’t say that it was unlikely that Lee had the Norrises whipped after they were recaptured; he says that it was unlikely that Lee personally did the whipping of the female slave, Mary Norris. Which is probably right: rich landowners like Lee rarely did the whipping personally. The usual custom was to call in another man — often the overseer, or the local constable or sheriff — to do it for him. Fellman is well aware that whipping and other forms of physical torture were standard operating procedure for Southern slavers; as he himself writes: “… slavery was so violent that it cast all masters in the roles of potential brutes. … [C]orporal punishment (for which Lee substituted the euphemism “firmness”) was an intrinsic and necessary part of slave discipline. Although it was supposed to be applied only in a calm and rational manner, overtly physical domination of slaves, unchecked by law, was always brutal and potentially savage.”

For what it’s worth, Fellman’s inclination to believe that Lee called in a third party to do the whipping is corroborated by other evidence; according to Wesley Norris’s first-hand account, Lee first ordered the overseer, Gwin, to tie the recaptured slaves to a post and whip them; after the overseer refused, Norris says that Lee called in the “county constable,” Dick Williams.

My own view, and I expect Fellman’s view too, although I can’t speak for him, is that it doesn’t make any moral difference whether Lee personally held the whip when Mary Norris was tortured, or whether he handed the whip over to someone else and ordered him to do the torturing on his behalf. But while I don’t think it makes any difference, Lee would have thought that it made a moral difference — because, in the slaveholding culture of white Virginia, it was considered unseemly for a “gentleman” to personally, physically participate in lashing a slave, and especially unseemly for him personally, physically participate in lashing a woman. This helps explain why the accusations that Lee himself whipped Mary Norris were considered so sensationalistic at the time — even though Lee and all of his white friends and neighbors were perfectly comfortable with having slaves whipped; it also helps explain Lee’s indignant protests at the story, although, again, he had never hesitated to use whipping, chaining, and other forms of “firmness” against the people that he enslaved. It doesn’t change my reaction to what Lee did one bit whether he whipped Mary Norris himself, or whether he ordered someone else to do it for him; but it does help understand Lee’s reaction to some of the things that were said about him.

Hope this helps.

BP,

I’m late to this party, but I’ve been late to a lot of parties lately, and am trying to catch up, so….

1. This is a really excellent and thoughtful post. Thanks for putting it out there.

2. Of course you’re right that there are substantive, not merely rhetorical differences between the norms advocated by most libertarian socialists (as the term is conventionally understood) and anarcho-capitalists (Rothbardian or otherwise). And that these differences include difference over norms of just enforcement. (Not just what free associations would be best to make but also what even counts as free or unfree association.) If Spangler has leaned a lot on questions of rhetoric and semantic distinctions, I hardly think it’s because he wants to argue that there is no substantive difference. It’s because he wants to do a better job than the conventionally-drawn subcultural battle-lines have done so far in showing where those substantive differences really are. And (given Brad’s usual orientation towards activism in particular) I expect that a lot of the upshot is supposed to have to do with where the opportunities for alliance and cooperation in spite of real differences might be.

(In particular, if someone tends to believe, as many anarcho-capitalists do, that conventionally pro-capitalist Constitutionalists or minimal-statists are closer to the anarcho-capitalist position than conventional libertarian socialists are, then that’s probably one of the things that might need rethinking. Not because anarcho-capitalists and conventional Red-and-Blackers have the same conception of freedom or domination, but because anarcho-“capitalists” and limited-governmentalists don’t have the same conception either. And I expect that Brad thinks — anyway, I know that I think — that, purely verbal agreements and purely verbal conflicts to one side, when allowed free rein and carried through consistently, the syndicalist or anarcho-communist or anarcho-collectivist or mutualist conceptions of these terms, and the anarcho-“capitalist” conception, are plausibly closer to each other in theoretical structure, and definitely closer to each other in practical political effects, than either the libertarian socialist conception is to state socialism, or the anarcho-“capitalist” conception is to minarchism or Constitutionalism.)

1. In response to Alex Peak’s comments on economic panarchy, you write “Spangler isn’t exactly talking about that either – he’s claiming that there’s no meaningful distinction between the groups, and I explained why I think that this is misleading.” I agree that Alex’s comments were off to one side of your concerns and of Brad’s original point. But I don’t know why you read Brad as “claiming that there’s no meaningful distinction between” libertarian socialists and anarcho-capitalists. As I read Brad’s posts, his point was that (consistent, agoristic, whatever) Rothbardian anarcho-capitalism is a species of the genus “libertarian socialism.” Certainly he explicitly says that there are lots of other kinds of socialists who are not left-Rothbardians; I think his argument also allows for there being lots of other kinds of libertarian socialists who are not left-Rothbardians. It’s a subset relationship, not an identity. The point as I understand it doesn’t have anything to do with claiming that Rothbard’s and Kropotkin’s versions of socialism are fully compatible, let alone identical; it has more to do with convincing people who are Rothbardians that they are one among many kinds of libertarian socialists — not really supporters of capitalism (as Brad thinks they should understand the term). Which presumably will have some impact on how they position themselves in debates about the political-economic status quo, and in their thinking about their political relationship to other anarchists, on the one hand, and “libertarian” state-capitalists, on the other.

2. You write: “Part of why I think that Spangler’s claims are misleading is that he seems to think that if you think that the state intervenes to uphold an unjust allocation of property and that the consequences of abolishing the state naturally lead to a redistribution of property, this makes you a libertarian socialist, but that’s not what libertarian socialism is defined by. It involves fairly specific notions about property at a different conceptual level, and it doesn’t entail a reduction of the issue to the pre-existance of a state.”

That’s a strong definitional claim, but I’m not sure where you’re getting your definitions of “libertarian socialism” from. Apparently not from Benjamin Tucker, who called his ideas both libertarian and socialist, but was also very emphatic that he didn’t share the “fairly specific notions about property” advanced by, say, Kropotkin or Bakunin. (Whether or not he was on the same page as Proudhon depends on how you read Proudhon; which is of course a contested issue within libertarian socialist thought.) People who nowadays call themselves “libertarian socialists” do tend to agree with Kropotkin more than they do with Tucker, but that seems like variation and changes in majority opinion amongst socialists; not a change in the boundaries of who counts as a socialist and who doesn’t. If Tucker is not going to be counted as a libertarian socialist, then I’d need to know why not; certainly he considered himself one and was commonly accepted as one at the time. If he does get counted, then I’d like to know what definitional criterion having to do with “fairly specific notions about property” would consistently accept him but turn out consistent Rothbardians. If there isn’t one, then it seems like your definitional criterion is either too broad or too narrow to consistently line up with the paradigm cases. In which case you would need a different criterion.

... Well, the map of Michigan that I have in front of me was presumably created by one or more human beings. But it doesn't seem to be an "abstraction." It's a