By Cake Boy

So, I read this text, and reply to what Rothbard says:

Now that the New Left has abandoned its earlier loose, flexible non-ideological stance, two ideologies have been adopted as guiding theoretical positions by New Leftists: Marxism-Stalinism and anarcho-communism.

At this time, we are more likely to see social democracy or Marxism-Leninism. We see Bernie Sanders, or we see this ACP thing. Anarcho-communism isn’t really something anymore, although the ancoms (anarcho communists) themselves claim they are still relevant.

And many libertarians, who are seeking forms of action and allies in such actions, have become drawn to an anarchist creed that seemingly exalts the voluntary approach and calls for the abolition of the coercive State.

This isn’t true in this period anymore; most libertarians are very negative about leftist anarchism. In the past, libertarianism was a little bit more open towards the left, you could say

Anarcho-communism, both in its original Bakunin-Kropotkin form and its current irrationalist and “post-scarcity” variety, is poles apart from genuine libertarian principle.

Here I agree. However, in my view, the ideas of Proudhon and Tucker are also poles apart from those of Bakunin and Kropotkin, although this isn’t widely perceived that way.

If there is one thing, for example, that anarcho-communism hates and reviles more than the State, it is the rights of private property.

They often have a problem with landlordism, but not with other forms of possession. It’s a bit more nuanced. For example, most of them are ok with a farmer owning land for his own use. However, they are opposed to the idea of a landlord extracting rents from hundreds of farmers in a region. So, in a way, they are for private property, but within boundaries. Still, they are not always very clear about this, and they should be

You can view the Bookchinist Rojava project as inspired by anarcho-communism. And within Rojava, you have private property, but not landlordism. So, you can own your land, your farm, but you’re not a landlord. People are generally okay with small-scale private property, but they often have problems with landlords, which is understandable, although libertarians tend to overlook these issues.

In the time of Rothbard, Rojava wasn’t a thing yet, so he couldn’t have known these things.

Ancoms also often don’t really think in terms of ‘rights’. They instead examine dimensions such as class, class interest, ownership, autonomy, and so on. A right is given by a state, and often it doesn’t mean that much. You have the right to shelter, it seems, but still, politicians don’t care when you’re homeless. In the end, a right is just a theory.

I don’t hear ancoms talk about post scarcity, so I don’t know where he got this from.

as a matter of fact, the major reason that anarcho-communists oppose the State is because they wrongly believe that it is the creator and protector of private property, and therefore that the only route toward abolition of property is by destruction of the State apparatus.

They totally fail to realize that the State has always been the great enemy and invader of the rights of private property.

This is ahistorical. It’s strange to read this because I thought Rothbard was a professor. Why doesn’t he know these things? The enclosure of the commons led to the development of capitalism. The state gave common land to landlords to make a more ‘efficient’ system.

The state consistently enforces property rights in the current setting. For example, when I’m a landlord and I own some houses. Suppose one of these houses gets squatted; then, immediately, the state will remove the squatters from the house. Where I live, there are enormous plots of land that are empty, protected by police force all day long, paid for by tax money.

Sometimes the state indeed invades private property, and it’s right that they have crony connections to some landlords. But in most cases, the state has your back when you’re a landlord. It defends you, protects you, and makes sure the working and middle classes won’t take your property. Even in times of an enormous housing crisis, it would protect the empty buildings you own, with which you speculate. When the masses protest against the housing crisis, the police make sure the protest doesn’t escalate into squatting actions, etc. The police do everything to protect landlords, and to protect ‘the property right’. Without it, they would be nothing. Rothbard somehow doesn’t understand this, or he acts as if he doesn’t. Additionally, most landlords are aware of this, which is why 99 percent of landlords are not opposed to the state. They might complain about the leftist features of the state, they might complain about benefits for the poor, etc, but they are never against the state. They just want a state that only exists for them, and never for the working or middle class.

anarcho-communists wrongly identify anarchism with communal living, with tribal sharing, and with other aspects of our emerging drug-rock “youth culture.”

This is such a stupid sentence. When you read Malatesta, you see that he didn’t want to force an economic model on people. His primary goal was to reclaim the land from landlords and the state, and then establish various voluntary social units on that land. These could be communistic or mutualist, or other. It also doesn’t have anything to do with ‘drug rock’, whatever that may be…

The main program of ancoms was to claim all property and then create new voluntary social units, which would replace state capitalism. It’s somewhat similar to what Keith is talking about.

Anarchism could mean communal living, by the way, even within the ancap framework. Within the ancap framework, people could set up communal settings, as long as it was voluntary, etc., as ancaps would say—as long as they bought the land for it, etc.

Anarcho-communists have always been extremely vague and cloudy about the lineaments of their proposed anarchist society of the future.

This is indeed a problem for many ancom thinkers. I would say that only Malatesta is really clear about his political program. This is why Malatesta was the best Anarchist Communist writer. I’m not a follower of his doctrine, but I think it’s a consistent program. And I can imagine that in certain circumstances, people go for these politics.

Furthermore, it is hard to forget the fact that when the Spanish Anarchists (anarcho-communists of the Bakunin-Kropotkin type) took over large sections of Spain during the Civil War of the 1930s, they confiscated and destroyed all the money in their areas and promptly decreed the death penalty for the use of money.

At the root of all forms of communism, compulsory or voluntary, lies a profound hatred of individual excellence,

This is also a stupid thing to say. Living in a commune can be a practical option. Think of the people who live in living groups. Within these settings, an individual could excel, not excel, or do anything else. It depends on the individual and the community to what degree it will succeed.

You can imagine a person who really flourishes within such a commune setting. I mean, I used to listen to albums recorded in a communal setting. The kind of Neil Young-style rock albums. One could say that these individuals truly cultivated excellence.

Philosophically, this creed is an all-out assault on individuality and on reason. The individual’s desire for private property,

This is pushed on us, this desire for private property. It’s mainly a cultural thing. For example, I personally want a place to live. I don’t desire to own big plots of land. Neoliberals tell me I should wish to be a landlord, but I don’t take them seriously, and I have never listened to their ‘advice’. I personally don’t like to live in a commune/hippie setting, but I also don’t aspire to be some slumlord, and I think a lot of people are like me. Just give me a place to be, like in the Nick Drake song. Libertarians and neoliberals tell me: you want to be super rich! They think they know me; they assume all kinds of things about me, while they would never listen to me.

Fifty years ago, Ludwig von Mises exposed the total inability of a planned, moneyless economy to operate above the most primitive level. For he showed that money-prices are indispensable for the rational allocation of all of our scarce resources

Of course, you need money to allocate resources. But you don’t need to have a market in which landlords extract rent from people, as Proudhon, George, and Tucker already understood. Landlordism doesn’t add anything to a market; it extracts from it. Suppose you have a customer who buys an apple. The seller of the apple makes a one-dollar profit; from this one dollar, 0,50 cents go to the landlord. The landlord uses this money to monopolize more land, until there is no land anymore that people can homestead. There is no option to escape. Now we have a feudal setting again, which is called ‘freedom’.

The Russians, after trying an approach to the communist moneyless economy in their “War Communism” shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution, reacted in horror as they saw the Russian economy heading to disaster. Even Stalin never tried to revive it, and since World War II the East European countries have seen a total abandonment of this communist ideal and a rapid move toward free markets, a free price system, profit-and-loss tests, and a promotion of consumer affluence.

It’s more complex. For example, within the Makhovia territory, people employed both communist models and market-based systems. The people took over the land and practiced both communism and mutualism on it. Everyone was allowed to create their own monetary unit. This led to inflation.

These so-called ‘free markets’ of neoliberalism have also never really been free. It has always been full of restrictions, crony constructions, subsidies, bailouts, etc. For example, neoliberals often discuss the ‘free real estate market,’ but this isn’t a market at all. This isn’t a system of supply and demand, but a system of legalized corruption and monopoly.

Rothbard has a critique of the leftist anarchists, but he doesn’t really understand why the masses in the 19th century revolted—people were literally hungry back then. The people didn’t care about free market, or no free market, they just wanted to survive, and therefore they joined these leftist mass movements, like socialism and anarchism, etc. Rothbard himself lived a spoiled life, like most libertarians, so he couldn’t really imagine what drove the people towards revolutionary movements.

Libertarians often benefited from the gains of the workers’ movements, but they still want to return to Victorian times. They don’t know what they hope for.

Libertarians can critique leftist anarchism, and some of their critiques are right. But they themselves have never accomplished anything, in any way. It’s easy to be right all the time if you never do anything. If you don’t do things, you can’t fail, as I already said.

Many anarcho-communists are indeed unclear, and there are problems with leftist anarchism. But libertarianism didn’t bring us any further. What was the result of it? This Milei neoliberal? Milei, the American crony, is being bailed out by Trump. Milei is creating a fascist/Zionist police state. Milei is used by American imperialism to gain a foothold in South America. Somehow, naive/childish libertarians don’t get this. They really think Milei is some Robin Hood rebel.

Some say ancap is a psy op. This could be the case. The wealthy can exert significant influence. In the 1980s, neoliberalism was taking hold of the world. Perhaps these thinkers, such as Rothbard, were employed to neutralize anarchist elements and push anarchism into the neoliberal world. Anarchism is not a revolt against the capitalist state, but the anarchist as ‘an entrepreneur’ within the narrow boundaries of Anglo-Saxon/neoliberal modernity.

Neoliberals are happy with ancaps. They will never revolt, they don’t even protest, and they function as a propaganda tool for capitalism and the so-called ‘free market’. An ancap tells you never to protest, never think critically about the system on a fundamental level, and go to your work. The state likes these kinds of ‘anarchists.’

When we read this text, we see that Rothbard doesn’t fully understand the complex history of anarchism and the working-class movements. He only understands the very narrow mathematical quasi-scientific methods he uses. He doesn’t understand the world isn’t as simple as ‘supply and demand’ on a ‘free market’. There are many more things going on. Rothbard doesn’t understand power; he thinks that everything is a free transaction between equals.

The times of Friedman, Fukuyama, and Rothbard are over. We live in a different time now. We don’t live in the 19th century, and we don’t live in the optimism/realism of the 80s. I think that a new anarchism hasn’t been born yet. Will it be born in the future? I don’t know, to be honest, I don’t think so.

Cake #political philosophy