Is agorism compatible with anarchism?

[thelastindividual]

Bakunin? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakunin#Anti-semitism
Proudhon? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre-Jos ... ged_racism

Anti-semitism and racism were pretty common in the 19th century. The only exception to the trend seems to be Karl Marx. SEKIII was writing in a completely different time period.

[BillyWitchDr.]

Bakunin? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakunin#Anti-semitism
Proudhon? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre-Jos ... ged_racism

Anti-semitism and racism were pretty common in the 19th century. The only exception to the trend seems to be Karl Marx. SEKIII was writing in a completely different time period.

What did he say that was anti-Semitic?

[thelastindividual]

What did he say that was anti-Semitic?

What SEKIII? I don't know, maybe you should ask patrick.

[patrickhenry]

As I noted konkin is "borderline" but being jewish myself I can pickup on certain undertones that most other don't. I'm not really here to argue if he is or isn't anti-semitic. I will let others dig through his words and decide for themselves.

In 1978 the Institute for Historical ReviewInstitute for Historical Review
The Institute for Historical Review , founded in 1978, is an United States Holocaust denial organization that describes itself as a "public-interest educational, research and publishing center dedicated to promoting greater public awareness of history." Critics have accused it of being an antisemitic "pseudo-academic body" with links to Neo.Nazis..
(IHR) was founded by Willis CartoWillis Carto
Willis Allison Carto is a longtime figure on the American far right. He describes himself as Thomas Jefferson and populism, but is primarily known for his promotion of antisemitic canard and Holocaust denial....
as an organization dedicated to publicly challenging the commonly accepted history of the Holocaust. The IHR sought from the beginning to attempt to establish itself within the broad tradition of historical revisionism, by soliciting token supporters who were not from a neo-Nazi background such as James J. Martin and Samuel Edward Konkin IIISamuel Edward Konkin III
Samuel Edward Konkin III was the author of the New Libertarian Manifesto and a proponent of the political philosophy which he called agorism....
, and by promoting the writings of French socialist Paul Rassinier and American anti-war historian Harry Elmer Barnes to attempt to show that Holocaust denial had a broader base of support besides just neo-Nazis

[patrickhenry]

As for Bakunin and Proudhon? As TLI said "different time in history" also I don't follow them hook line and sinker either. but for every anti-semitic comment by a anarchist you have many who stood side by side with them. Rudolph Rocker, Nestor Makhno and many others.

[jack]

About calling Proudhon and Bakunin anti-Semites, I don't give a shit about Proudhon since I don't even consider him to be an anarchist. However with Bakunin, Bakunin wasn't a theorist of anarchism, just a famous anarchist, the anarchist movement is so fucking fantastic that it was started by actual workers in the International before the idea was even written down by Kropotkin. So saying Bakunin was an anti-Semite, which is true, is a moot point because he didn't found anarchism.

[shawnpwilbur]

You can add Marx to the list of those who made antisemitic comments. It seems to have been the hardest prejudice for otherwise radical thinkers to avoid. In the 19th century, we some people with really advanced notions about gender equality and even race, who can't seem to remember that "Jew" and "banker" aren't the same word. And we get the people like Marx and Morrison Swift who want to eliminate religion, and end up attacking Jews for their religiosity, as well as all the Shylock stuff. In some cases, like Marx and Proudhon, the nasty stuff (which is real nasty) appears along with other stuff which is very positive and tolerant.

The issues around IHR are complicated. Konkin was among those who seems to have defended IHR on free speech grounds. It goes downhill from there with other folks, though not always in the ways the critics claim....

[Guest]

shawn, hal draper wrote an article refuting the 'anti-semitic marx' accusation. i haven't read it because i couldn't give a fuck either way (i value marx, bakunin, proudhon, et al, to the extent that i do, for those utterances that i find useful; i reject as absurd the notion that because they may have held shitheaded views in some other area that it somehow has fuckall to do with the useful stuff); but you're invited to submit a rejoinder if you find draper's rebuttal lacking. (my gut instinct is to wonder why the hell a jew would be an anti-semite; but i understand such anomalies do exist even today.) here's the blurb:

The legend according to which Marx was an anti-Semite swings on the projection of the late-twentieth century understanding of “political correctness” onto 19th century writing, and in particular on Marx’s review of Bruno Bauer’s article “On the Jewish Question.” The work has been circulated in grossly edited form by right-wingers with the specific aim of slandering Marx’s character. In fact the article is a defence of the civil rights of Jews, as well as being a profound study of the relation between social and political rights in bourgeois society more generally.

[shawnpwilbur]

shawn, hal draper wrote an article refuting the 'anti-semitic marx' accusation. i haven't read it because i couldn't give a fuck either way (i value marx, bakunin, proudhon, et al, to the extent that i do, for those utterances that i find useful; i reject as absurd the notion that because they may have held shitheaded views in some other area that it somehow has fuckall to do with the useful stuff); but you're invited to submit a rejoinder if you find draper's rebuttal lacking. (my gut instinct is to wonder why the hell a jew would be an anti-semite; but i understand such anomalies do exist even today.) here's the blurb:

Yeah. I've read that stuff. The stuff by Marx certainly has been circulated by anti-Marxists, without context, as a smear of elements of Marx's thought that have very little relation to the question. But even the Marxist defenses acknowledge that Marx said some sketchy stuff. As I said, he was hardly alone, and he was very far from the worst offender. And I consider some of the folks who went pretty far off the deep end with the Jew/banker/Kings of the Epoch nonsense as pretty important libertarian writers--when they were talking about other subjects. There's no simple way to just black-box the racism, sexism, etc., and no point, really, in the sort of apologetics that Draper is up to. Yes, the economic stereotype was widespread, and talk about "the Jews" often didn't map onto actual Jewish people, and, yes, there probably are real differences between 20th century antisemitism and 19th century anti-Jew rhetoric. But I'm not sure it's just "political correctness" to suggest that ethnic stereotyping probably isn't cool, just because "everybody's doing it." Guys talking big about social science, waxing eloquent about issues like race and nationality, probably shouldn't be entirely left off the hook for not being able to distinguish between "the Jews" and "the bankocracy" (or whatever.)

[thelastindividual]

You can add Marx to the list of those who made antisemitic comments.

You mean 'On the Jewish Question'? It was a criticism of Bruno Bauer who had said that if the Jews wanted emancipation they should give up their religion. 'Judentum' in german also means commerce and most of the second half of the book is a pun at Bauer's expense attacking capitalism.

[BillyWitchDr.]

You can add Marx to the list of those who made antisemitic comments. It seems to have been the hardest prejudice for otherwise radical thinkers to avoid. In the 19th century, we some people with really advanced notions about gender equality and even race, who can't seem to remember that "Jew" and "banker" aren't the same word. And we get the people like Marx and Morrison Swift who want to eliminate religion, and end up attacking Jews for their religiosity, as well as all the Shylock stuff. In some cases, like Marx and Proudhon, the nasty stuff (which is real nasty) appears along with other stuff which is very positive and tolerant.

The issues around IHR are complicated. Konkin was among those who seems to have defended IHR on free speech grounds. It goes downhill from there with other folks, though not always in the ways the critics claim....

Marx was a self-hating jew?

[thelastindividual]

Marx was a self-hating jew?

I think it's important to remember the distinction between Jews as a 'Race' (Whatever the hell that is) and Jews as followers of Judaism. Marx was ethnically jewish but an atheist in terms of religion.

[BillyWitchDr.]

Marx was a self-hating jew?

I think it's important to remember the distinction between Jews as a 'Race' (Whatever the hell that is) and Jews as followers of Judaism. Marx was ethnically jewish but an atheist in terms of religion.

Isn't anti-Semiticism against both ethnic and religious jews?

[patrickhenry]

Isn't anti-Semiticism against both ethnic and religious jews?

actually anti-semitism would be hatred towards all semitic people not just jews but to answer your question yes. Hitler didn't differentiate between atheist jews and orthodox jews.

[shawnpwilbur]

You can add Marx to the list of those who made antisemitic comments.

You mean 'On the Jewish Question'? It was a criticism of Bruno Bauer who had said that if the Jews wanted emancipation they should give up their religion. 'Judentum' in german also means commerce and most of the second half of the book is a pun at Bauer's expense attacking capitalism.

Right. This is the standard explanation from the Marxist sites. And I think it's a weird argument. It acknowledges that the "economic stereotype" was widespread, and then absolves Marx of prejudice because prejudice was widespread. (Note that somebody like Draper will cherry-pick comments from political rivals and call them "nazi-like," although we have to assume that if "the Jews" doesn't refer to the Jews in Marx's case, because of the widespread stereotype, there's a similar disconnect in other cases.)

Take a case that almost nobody but me really cares about: Pierre Leroux. In his "Malthus and the Economists" he sets up this extended, brilliant, and really funny illustration of what's wrong with capitalism. He wanted to show that the answer to the Malthusian argument that we will always have poor people is that proper management of resources, and particularly of waste products, could create a "circulus" as a result of which everyone could have access to a subsistence, even if they didn't labor. This is proto-ecological stuff, in an era when Europe is just discovering animal fertilizer, so it's no surprise when the punchline of this long and somewhat naughty story is that capitalism eats and eats and eats, but just won't shit, and let the circulus take it's course. So there will always be poor people until capitalism, a kind of willful constipation, is taken out of the picture. All of this is good fun, and rings true in various ways: Good Stuff. But Leroux doesn't really have access to a discourse on "capitalism," since that term is barely coming into use in the late 1840s, when he is writing. So the corpulent figure at the center of the story is "The Jews, Kings of the Epoch," a phrase we know better from Toussenel: Not So Good Stuff -- and certainly a stereotype that we would like to see gone. Right-wing smears of socialism and anarchism aside, there are some continuities between libertarian socialist uses of the "economic stereotype" and the later forms of antisemitism.