Soviet Affairs Desk, 1/3/22
I discovered anarchist philosophy from the anarcho-capitalist or “ancap” angle: The view that maximal freedom can be achieved by abolishing the government and all of its disastrous market regulations (distortions), dissolving its monopoly on violence, and allowing a truly free market to run its course. For someone naturally inclined toward a libertarian mindset, this is not such a big pill to swallow, at least not in hypothesis. Imagine my shock, then, to learn in my studies that the history of anarchist thought and praxis is riddled to the marrow with socialism. This—this is a bit of a pill.
My formal introduction to anarchist philosophy came from The Anarchist Handbook, a selection of essays from a variety of anarchist thinkers ranging from the nineteenth to twentieth century (compiled by Michael Malice). Many of the earlier essays therein come from prominent socialists like Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin, Benjamin Tucker, and Peter Kropotkin—the latter a proponent of anarchist communism. Four distinct flavors of socialism, from the nebulous to the painstakingly detailed. (Curiously, only Tucker’s definition of socialism is amenable to the liberty-centric ancap mindset—which must be why no other prominent socialists define it that way.)
The dirty little secret for ancaps is that for decades following the nascence of anarchism, there wasn’t much daylight between anarchists and garden-variety socialists. Both generally disdained capitalism and the bourgeoisie, advocating through propaganda and direct action for the liberation of the proletariat. The socialists believed such an end could be achieved through the means of the state; the anarchists, not so much. This disparity, however, did not stop them from working arm-in-arm against the oppressions of, for instance, Tsarist Russia. Speaking of which, the Marxists who came out on top in the Russian Revolution held to a general policy of using strong and zealous anarchist networks to create disruption, then putting the anarchists up against the wall when power was secured.
Must be why anarcho-socialist thought leaders have routinely rejected Marxism; some because they did not disbelieve their lying eyes when Marxism led to calamity, others (like Bakunin) because they recognized the reckless idiocy of Marxism without first having to see it put to the test.
Anyway. The essay from The Anarchist Handbook that struck me hardest was “Anarchism & American Traditions” (1909) by Voltairine de Cleyre—more on account of her florid and fiery prose than on her ideas. Which is not to suggest that her ideas are weak or unconvincing; just that I am a sucker for forceful prose. After reading her essay, which argues brilliantly for the anarchism in America’s DNA, I needed more. So I purchased a collection of her essays, poetry, and short fiction. In it, I was rather shocked to find de Cleyre spouting the same sort of socialist rhetoric that the “democratic socialists” of today hold so dear, minus the fetishization of health care. Her writing was so magnetic; her thinking crystal clear. I felt a bit let down. Why did you do this to me, dear Voltairine?
Why? Because de Cleyre lived in a different America, that’s why. The industrializing America of early capitalism, wherein unions clashed with capitalists over wages and conditions and an eight-hour workday. The urban America of Chicago and Philadelphia and New York, flooding with immigrant labor, taking in more at any given time than she (America) could realistically assimilate and support. Where was she (America) supposed to put them all; what were they all supposed to do? And how could a creature like de Cleyre, a private English teacher, so brimming with social empathy, look upon the huddled and impoverished masses of mostly immigrant laborers without horror? She, like the socialists who fomented the French Revolution, was driven to revolutionary ideology by despair at all the poverty sprawling around her. (Note: It was Hannah Arendt, in her book On Revolution, who revealed to me the core difference between the successful American Revolution and the disastrous French one: There wasn’t much poverty in Revolutionary America, and so the impetus for the war rested upon freedom as opposed to equality, one of which is a more practical ideal than the other.)
After finishing Voltairine de Cleyre’s collection and ruminating on it for many days, I was able to understand her point of view and even sympathize with it; if I had lived in de Cleyre’s America, I probably would have been a socialist too. (Irrelevant yet wild side note: A deranged young anarchist once tried to assassinate de Cleyre, shooting her thrice at point-blank range, once in the chest and twice in the back as she turned to flee; he failed, and she—a staunch advocate for prison reform—refused to testify against him, and then advocated successfully for him to be transferred to a mental institution; it is rumored that when she died years later, it was with those three bullets still lodged in her flesh.)
Things have changed so drastically over the course of the last century. Poverty has not been vanquished, of course, nor has equality been achieved. (What are we, magicians?) But the grinding poverty of the early twentieth century has largely vanished, and there is, for the time being, still a remnant of the middle class, thanks in part to the anarchist/socialist failure to dismantle capitalism, and in part to the success of their advocation for labor reform. The ladder is much easier to climb now, and the rungs nearer the bottom are not quite so terrible. The socialism of today is not that of a starved proletariat crying out for work and bread, but rather what Nassim Taleb might call the “Soviet-Harvard” socialism of overprivileged and overprotected Millennials and Zoomers, brought to you by our corrupt universities, teachers unions, and schools of ed. Work and bread? Fuck that—we want “free” school and “free” healthcare. Oh yeah…and we want to be paid not to work.
I’m not going to waste any more space here pissing on our darling Millennial/Zoomer socialistas and their fashionable Fully Automated Luxury Communism. Back to the immigrant workers and their struggles against the capitalists of previous centuries. Elsewhere in The Anarchist Handbook, you’ll find a not-entirely-consequential essay by one Emma Goldman entitled “Minorities vs. Majorities” (1910). Moreso on account of the colorful lore surrounding Ms. Goldman than her qualities as a writer, I sought out more of her work. First, I read her short account of exile in Soviet Russia: My Disillusionment in Russia. Though no fan of Marxism, Goldman was optimistic—even ecstatic—about Lenin’s revolution. Upon returning to the land of her birth, she expected to be greeted by a socialist paradise, or at least the brilliant makings of one. Instead, she found yet more grinding poverty, bureaucratic disfunction, and naked kleptocracy; all of her valiant efforts to improve the situation came to naught. And she, unlike so many of her contemporaries (Hello? New York Times? Anyone working here?), had the integrity to call a spade a spade: not only to denounce the atrocities of Leninism but to write about them plainly for all the world to read.
Next, we turn to Goldman’s gripping autobiography, Living My Life, wherein I hit upon the question that originally kickstarted this essay. But first, a bit on Emma Goldman and why she matters. Born in Russia, she fled antisemitic oppression in St. Petersburg with her family, landing in New York. She worked in Rochester and then New York City as a seamstress and anarchist agitator (not sure how she found her way to anarchism; that bit seems to have been abridged). She once tried prostituting herself to fund an assassination attempt by her lover, Alexander Berkman, upon the capitalist Henry Frick. She failed—and so did the assassination. Not long afterward, she was arrested for “inciting a riot” and sentenced to a year in prison at Blackwell’s Island Penitentiary, where she worked as a nurse. (The chapter on her stint is, by the way, one of the most profound studies of humanity I have ever had the pleasure to read.) The cop who arrested her offered to let her go if she agreed to spy on the anarchists for the government. She declined. And later, as we’ve already seen, she was exiled, along with many other anarchist/socialist agitators of Russian descent.
Goldman’s ideology aligned closely with that of the American socialists. Take a look at this quote from her speech in Union Square, probably her most famous:
“Well, then, demonstrate before the palaces of the rich; demand work. If they do not give you work, demand bread. If they deny you both, take bread. It is your sacred right!” (Emphasis mine.)
This was pretty much the one that got her arrested, and in pondering it, I had to ask: What right did any of these benighted immigrant laborers have to come to the U.S. and expect to be given jobs and bread? They took a risk. And risks bear consequences, be they positive, negative, or a wash. They’d all bought into some pie-in-the-sky advertisement for a land of plenty, only to be greeted by many of the same obstacles to well-being that they’d hoped to leave behind in their shithole countries of origin. Sacred right? Speech is a right. Assembly is a right. Religious practice is a right. Arms are a right. But work and bread? Bread does not come from God (so to speak) but from the Earth—from work. And work comes from ourselves.
And here is where the anarcho-socialists and the ancaps part ways. It would seem that for the ancaps, who arose not from the grave of serfdom but from that of industrialism, The Bill of Rights is the first and last word. In small, decentralized communities, socialist or communist principles can work wonders. But at scale, bureaucracy is required for the equitable redistribution of precious work and bread. And bureaucracy can always be gamed; it’s a feature, not a bug. Socialism begets the Nanny State. The Nanny State, a model of inefficiency and kleptocracy, begets Corporatism. We’ve got all the proof of it we need: hundreds of years of it, spread across all six inhabited continents.
At the end of the day, there is no coherent argument for large-scale anarcho-socialism. Redistributionism requires government; the free market does not. But all is not lost for the ancomms. In an ancap society (smaller-scale by necessity), they would be perfectly free to set up their little communes and thrive in peace.
More of my writing can be found at gsrichter.substack.com and www.gsrichter.com