Anon73:

Well, Aster mentioned the word “pogrom” before you did, so it’s natural you would repeat it. But I asked because I am unsure about what would count as a “pogrom” in your light.

E.g. would a pogrom against women in prostitution have to involve large-scale murders and massacres (which certainly has happened, many times, but is rarer than other forms of mass violence against women in prostitution)? Or would it be enough if large numbers of women in prostitution were being forcibly rounded up, restrained, beaten or tortured, forced out of their homes and livelihoods, and locked away in prison camps for months or years at a time? If the latter sort of dispossession and terrorization counts, then that’s been the official policy and program of countless patriarchal states throughout the world — among them the state of Denmark until the 1999 partial decriminalization.

Tim Starr: China was vastly better off under Chiang Kai-Shek (before Japan invaded) than under Mao.

Tim, you ignorant fuck.

The “before Japan invaded” is an interesting little clause there. I don’t know whether this is supposed to refer to Japan’s 1931 invasion of Manchuria (in which case we’re only talking about three years total, from Chiang’s capture of Beijing in 1928 to 1931), or the beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937. In either case, I’m not sure whether mentioning the Japanese invasion here is meant to make it seem as though Chiang and the KMT weren’t responsible for any of the mass murder in China while fighting the Japanese (which is absurd; they personally killed millions of people), or if it’s meant to suggest that the mass killing carried out by the KMT’s forces should be blamed on the Japanese invasion rather than on Chiang’s regime (which, if so, is as ridiculous as blaming the Allied military advance for the Holocaust, or blaming U.S. foreign policy for Castro’s repression).

In any case, let’s take a look at what life was like in “vastly better off” China under Generalissimo Chiang and the KMT:

In many ways, the Nationalists were no different than the warlords. They murdered opponents, assassinated critics, and employed terror as a device of rule. Moreover, the Nationalist soldier, like many warlord soldiers, was considered scum, lower than vermin. They were beaten, mistreated, often fed poorly and ill paid; and if wounded or sick they were left to fend for themselves, often to die slow and miserable deaths. In turn, soldiers often treated civilians no better. Looting, rape, arbitrary murder, was a risk helpless civilians faced from passing soldiers or those occupying or reoccupying their villages and towns.

But killing by the Nationalists was also strategic and ideological. After the initial cooperative period, they especially sought out communists or communist sympathizers for execution. When defeating the communists in a particular region and occupying or reoccupying it, they went so far as to kill anyone they felt had cooperated with the communists or had been tainted by them. In one military drive against the communist in 1934 to 1935, they slaughtered or starved to death perhaps as many as 1,000,000 people.2 Moreover, especially during the 1940s, landlords and former officials who had fled from communists or Japanese would follow in the train of Nationalist soldiers and under military protection murder those peasants who they feared or had a grudge against. While such killing may have numbered a few from village to village, when these victims are added up over all the villages and districts involved for well over a hundred-million people, than hundreds of thousands were probably killed, just from this cause alone.

Then there was the process of conscription. This was a deadly affair in which men were kidnapped for the army, rounded up indiscriminately by press-gangs or army units among those on the roads or in the towns and villages, or otherwise gathered together. Many men, some the very young and old, were killed resisting or trying to escape. Once collected, they would be roped or chained together and marched, with little food or water, long distances to camp. They often died or were killed along the way, sometimes less than 50 percent reaching camp alive. Then recruit camp was no better, with hospitals resembling Nazi concentration camps like Buchenwald.3 Probably 3,081,000 died during the Sino-Japanese War; likely another 1,131,000 during the Civil War–4,212,000 dead in total. Just during conscription.

Although this fantastic total is overwhelming enough, we still must add those that died from famine. Famine was treated as a state of nature for China, something to be expected as an Act of God. But where famine was indeed a natural calamity during these Nationalist years, the greed of Nationalist officials, the continued imposition of impossible taxes, the seizing of all the peasants grain, the refusal to provide aid for political reasons, all contributed massively to the death toll. In Honan Province during the famine of 1942 to 1943, Nationalist officials took grain by force from the starving peasants to sell for their own profit, and officials in a neighboring province refused to release their store of grain because of a “delicate local balance of power.”4 Quite likely the Nationalists overall were responsible for 1,750,000 to 2,500,000 famine deaths.

While these deaths from conscription and famine may seem to be the residual of a thoroughly corrupt and incompetent political system, the Nationalist in fact did kill en masse with cold blooded calculation. Perhaps the most remarkable example of this is their dynamiting of the Yellow River dikes in order to stall a Japanese offensive during the Sino-Japanese War. The resulting, calamitous flood likely drowned or otherwise killed 440,000 people, even possible 893,000 according to a Chinese Social Science Institute.5 The flood having washed out a new channel, leaving the old one for peasants to farm and develop. Indeed, over the following years villages and towns were established in or near the old river bed. Then during the subsequent Civil War, near nine years later, to create a barrier between two communist armies by forcing the river to flood back into its old channel, the Nationalists repaired the dikes. As those peasants downstream tried to build dikes against the coming flood, they were bombed by Nationalist planes.

From the earliest years to their final defeat on the mainland, the Nationalist likely killed from 5,965,000 to 18,522,000 helpless people, probably 10,214,000. This incredible number is over a million greater than all the aforementioned 8,963,000 war dead in all the hundreds of wars and rebellions in China from the beginning of the century to the Nationalist final defeat. It ranks the Nationalists as the fourth greatest demociders of this century, behind the Soviets, Chinese communists, and German Nazis. This democide is even more impressive when it is realized that the Nationalists never controlled all of China, perhaps no more than 50 to 60 percent of the population at its greatest.

— R.J. Rummel, “China’s Democide and War,” Chapter 1 of China’s Bloody Century

Of course he might point out that, while Chiang and his thugs killed 10 million, the Chinese communists and their thugs have killed even more — somewhere around 40-60 million. But if Tim Starr’s notion of “vastly better off” is being starved and tortured and murdered by a regime that killed 10 million in the course of 20 years with effective control over half of China, rather than being starved and tortured murdered by a regime that killed 40-60 million in the course of 60 years of effective control over all of China, then I have to wonder what sort of real difference this is supposed to make for the millions of people dead at Chiang’s hands. In any case, this ridiculous nostalgia for the fourth greatest mass murderer in the history of the world is deeply regrettable.

As for whether Zinn’s stupid comments about the Communist victory in China are some kind of decisive reason for rejecting Zinn’s work out of hand, of course they are not. They are evidence that he was wrong about the Chinese communists. They are not evidence that his work is worthless. Individual claims can be assessed on their merits, and the notion that Zinn’s work as a whole ought to be treated as worthless, or that everything Zinn said ought to be rejected, if he was wrong about one thing — even really wrong about one thing that really mattered — is of course idiotic.

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).

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.

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.

Black Bloke:

Interesting that he quotes something by Murray from his pre-anarchist days to “prove” that Murray himself knew that he wasn’t “really” and anarchist.

Brad:

Actually, if I recall correctly, Rothbard is said to have first become an anarchist in 1950 and the piece mentioned is said to be “from the 1950’s”, so it’s most likely not from before he became a complete anti-statist. That said, anarchists (like any other normal people) change their minds about stuff all of the time. By, at least, the time of the New Banner interview circa 1970(?) he was using the word anarchist to describe himself, if I recall correctly.

For what it’s worth, the article that Anarcho is citing as his critical source (“Are Libertarians ‘Anarchists’?”) is available online from Mises.org (has been for over a year now), which is almost certainly how he came across it, although, as per the usual AFAQ standards of scholarship when it comes to anarcho-capitalists, he doesn’t link to it. It’s the article in which Rothbard declares himself a “non-archist;” at the time his position was basically what Bob LeFevre was arguing for in the 1960s; that is, he had come out against the monopoly state as such (he explicitly argues against “limited government” in the article, and argues that “the pure libertarian must advocate a society where an individual may voluntarily support none or any police or judicial agency that he deems to be efficient and worthy of his custom”), but chose not to call himself an “Anarchist” because, at the time, he thought that “Anarchism” entailed either coercive collectivization, Proudhonian theories of interest, or Tolstoyan pacifism, all of which he rejected. By 1965 he had changed his mind and was speaking positively of anarchism and anarchists (see for example Liberty and the New Left, from Left and Right 1.2) as examples of libertarian politics, and by 1969 (see for example “Anarcho-Rightism” in Libertarian Forum 1.13) he was definitely using both “anarchism” simpliciter and “anarcho-capitalism” to describe his own views. Of course the big shift had partly to do with the fact that he had broken decisively from the Right and was hanging out with anarchists within the New Left; it also had partly to do with the fact that, based on the textual evidence, he seems to have read a lot more actual anarchist writing in between.

Anarcho-Mercantilist:

Tucker himself never described himself as a “mutualist.”

I don’t know off the top of my head whether or not Tucker ever specifically used the letters M-U-T-U-A-L-I-S-T as part of a description of his own views, but, just from a quick glance at materials I have on hand for electronic search, I am reminded that Tucker describes the economic principles he subscribes to (specifically, the cost principle and co-operative organization of capital) as “mutualism” and “mutualistic” in Mutualism in the Service of Capital (originally from Liberty, July 16, 1887; reprinted in Instead of a Book).

Well, I can speak only for myself, not for American political culture as a whole. But I oppose and hate taxes because taxes pay for the government. I’m an anarchist, so I oppose and hate the government. So I also oppose and hate the taxes that make it possible.

You mention that taxes pay for social welfare programs. Sure they do; they also pay for missiles to blow up houses in Pakistan and for bombs to murder Iraqi children with. You might say that what you’d like to do is to pay in for the welfare and not pay in for the warfare. I’m sure you would; so would I. But if you got to pick and choose which projects your money went to, that would be a fine thing, but it wouldn’t be taxes anymore, would it? If you get to choose where it goes, then it’s voluntary mutual aid, and for that you need neither a government nor taxes, which necessarily entail that money is taken from people and put to purposes which the government, not those people, decide on.

Take this example: a village council decides that the farmers who live there have to give a certain percentage of their grain crops for a common grain storehouse for use in emergencies. The chief and elders request it and it’s done by the citizens. This is an example of taxation.

No it’s not. Tax collectors don’t “request”; they threaten. If people voluntarily agree to support a common project, then you’re not describing taxation anymore. You’re describing donations.

Man, a “anarchists can’t get organized” joke. Ho ho ho. Never heard one of those before.

“ANARCHISM … the name given to a principle or theory of life and conduct under which society is conceived without government – harmony in such a society being obtained, not by submission to law, or by obedience to any authority, but by free agreements concluded between the various groups, territorial and professional, freely constituted for the sake of production and consumption, as also for the satisfaction of the infinite variety of needs and aspirations of a civilized being.” – P.A. Kropotkin

I don’t mean to be an old stick in the mud, but really, this old chestnut involves such a complete misunderstanding of what the overwhelming majority of anarchists in the history of the world (who have tended to assign a lot of importance to freely constituted, participatory assocations) have thought, that it really just fails as humor.

Well, one way is just by distinguishing the terms “anarchistic socialism” and “state socialism.” Francis Tandy (a follower of Tucker) used the term “voluntary socialism.” Today, Kevin Carson likes to use the term “free market anti-capitalism”.

If more than two or three words are needed, you can explain that, even though most people today use “socialism” to refer only to state socialists, anarchistic socialism has been around as part of the socialist movement longer than Marxism and Social Democracy have, and that anarchistic socialism is based on the idea that workers should own the means of production, either individually or as part of voluntary associations, rather than the government owning the means of production, as state socialists suggest. You might also point interested parties to Benjamin Tucker’s essay, “State Socialism and Anarchism: How Far They Agree and Wherein They Differ,” which explicitly mentions Proudhon and his ideas, and is, I think, one of the finest discussions of the distinction ever put to paper.

You write: “PLEASE NOTE THAT PROUDHON WAS BY NO MEANS A SOCIALIST, AT LEAST NOT BY THE MODERN DEFINITION OF THE TERM, …”

Well. Proudhon certainly was a Socialist by his own definition of the term, and by the definition of the term that was widely in use at the time amongst other people who called themselves Socialists. In the General Idea, he flatly states that Socialism is “the new name for the Revolution,” and also that “But an idea cannot perish. It is born again, always from its contradictory. Let Rousseau triumph: his glory of a moment will be but the more detested. While waiting for the theoretical and practical deduction of the Contractual Idea, complete trial of the principle of authority will serve for the education of Humanity. From the fulness of this political evolution, we finally arise the opposite hypothesis: Government, exhausting itself, will give birth to Socialism as its historic sequel.”

If many people who use the word “Socialism” today think that it implies something incompatible with Proudhon’s views (e.g. government expropriation of the means of production, or central economic planning by the state), that hardly settles the question of whether or not Proudhon should be called a Socialist. Those people may be using the word incorrectly or confusedly. Or they may be using it as part of an ideological package-deal, which should be combated rather than pandered to. I for one see no reason why the views of Karl Marx, Eduard Bernstein, V.I. Lenin, or whoever you like have a better claim to the word “Socialism” than the views of Proudhon, or other anarchistic socialists, such as Josiah Warren, Benjamin Tucker, Victor Yarros, et al. Proudhon came to both the term and the movement years before Karl Marx ever did, and there is an old and continuing tradition of anarchistic socialism that rejects, root and branch, the Marxist disaster of State monopoly and State planning.

Many people today misunderstand what the word “anarchist” means; they think that an anarchist is someone who advocates riot and social disorder. Nothing could be further from the views that Proudhon was referring to when he called himself an “anarchist.” Does that mean we should go around saying, “Proudhon was by no means an Anarchist, at least not in the modern definition of the term”? No, of course not. What we should do is correct the misconceptions that people have about the meaning of the term “Anarchism.”