From: jamal@bronze.lcs.mit.edu (Jamal Hannah) Message-Id: <199611090436.XAA03379@bronze.lcs.mit.edu> Subject: The Spanish Libertarian Movement & USENET Bickering Date: Fri, 8 Nov 1996 23:36:13 -0500 (EST) The following text assumes that the reader has, to some extent, read Bryan Caplan & James Donald's attacks on anarchism (usually calling it "left-anarchism or "anarcho-socialism"), and attempts to replace it with "anarcho-capitalism" or Libertarian Party support. This was recently posted to USENET (some typos were fixed and a little text was since added). Please feel free to comment. -------------------------------------------------------------------- Not to beat a dead horse, but I'd like to mention that I find it appalling that self-proclaimed "anarcho-capitalists" and Libertarian Party advocates such as James Donald and Bryan Caplan would brush aside the crimes of the catholic church & the fascists they supported in the Iberian peninsula, purely for ideological reasons (that is, they single out the actions of anarchists in the civil war, but downplay the actions of the fascists they were fighting.) Here is a quote I found on a web page dedicated to a film version of Edgar Allen Poe's "The Pit and the Pendulum": "During 350 years, the Holy Inquisition destroyed 500,000 people in Spain and Portugal alone. The total number of victims was never published" - http://www.awn.com/heaven_and_hell/SVANK/svank3.htm If a person does not consider the context of the Spanish Civil War, and the widespread hatred of the Catholic Church in Spain at the time, they might as well justify any kind of lie or exaggeration about the Spanish anarchists and the killings of fascist-supporting members of the Church in the opening phases of the civil war. I should add that it was not being a Catholic specifically that generated hatred, as the catholics in the Basque region of Spain opposed Franco and were bombed by the Nazi Condor Legion... perticularly in Durango. (and these catholics were of course on the same side as the anarchists against Franco.) The only reason the United States' christian movement has not been compared, at some time, to the crude barbarism of the church in old Europe is specificaly because the Christians who came to the United States were in fact outcasts from those european institutions. (of course, there are some who are always trying to establish a christian order along those lines... imagine if every christian in the USA started to behave stricly on the basis of what Jack Chick Publications claim christianity is all about... or worse, Pat Buchanan.) James Donald and Bryan Caplan may find it frustrating that history reveals a different definition of anarchism than the (capitalist) one they have concocted... but this hardly justifies the kind of historical distortions, witch-hunt mentality, and constant demonizations of anarchists that they wish to perpetuate. A few points of note: * Murder, terror, killings, etc. were not "typical" of the anarchists of the FAI and CNT in Spain in 1936. There was a considerable amount of killing done by members of every faction imaginable involved in the war- not based on specific ideologies, but acts of passion and hatred by members of the population that were the inevitable outcome of a _civil war_ (the outbreak of a civil war, especially in modern times, will always represent a spectacular breakdown of ethics, conduct, negotiation and civility. Only a madman would consider initiating a Civil War as a means to an end... which is precisely what Franco did when he staged the military coup from Morocco. If the military of the United States did the same thing today, the population would quickly be polarized into people in full support and full opposition to the military's action. There's a damn good reason why the founding fathers did what they could to make sure the President, Congress, the Senate and the Suprime Court had some amount of power that actualy counterbalenced that of a bunch of generals and military officers, and president Eisenhaur wasn't kidding when he said "Beware the military-industrial complex".) * The anarchists of Spain were no more motivated by "irrational emotion" than any of the people on USENET reading this text, let alone the Libertarian Party, the Cato Institute, or the cult of Objectivism. Certainly, reading James Donald's flame-filled, hysterical accusations (such as that Noam Chomsky supported Pol Pot, etc.) and shrill name-calling, it seems very strange that Caplan, a person who presents himself as an intellectual, would have anything to do with him, let alone echoing his wacky conspiracy theories. People are not motivated by (purely) emotion: they are motivated by their economic conditions. So exploited workers will resist exploitation and at times display this with outbursts of emotion... and right-wing economists like Rothbard, Ludwig von Misus and the like will attack any attempts to abandon capitalism by the workers with, at times, heated emotion. * It was not the propaganda of the FAI & CNT that made employers (mostly (the) fascist Sympathizers) in Spain to seem like "animals" to the workers, but rather the behavior of the employers themselves. The fact that the significant amount of leftist propaganda available today is not causing workers to join leftist organisations in droves is testimony to this: employers simply do not (currently) openly treat their workers like trash the way they did 100 years ago, either because of state regulations, or fear of the very real consequences of completely depriving other human beings of happiness and liberty. (It's bad enough that a worker has limited freedom in their place of employment already). Of course undocumented workers are not counted in this equation: they have no rights and protections to begin with. * There was in fact a very real libertarian movement in Spain. The idea that somehow the "true" libertarian movement/movements only exist or originate in the United States can only be explained by a very narrow definition of what "liberty" in fact means. If "liberty" is ONLY defined by the possession of property... particularly factories, stocks, bonds, land and various means of profit, then one might suppose that the leading economic power would embody this definition. But most Americans in fact do not _own_ any of these things... and even cars and homes are owned by banks and paid for by mortgages and monthly installments... or land and apartments are rented. Evidently a very large portion of the American population do not, and never had what is defined as "liberty" by right-wing economists. If, however, the definition of a libertarian is one who resists authority, and seeks to maximize human independence, the number of movements qualifying as "libertarian" tends to be a good deal broader than the narrow scope offered by the "Libertarian Purity Test". The fact that some people here may be quite used to seeing the word "socialism" repeatedly in close proximity of the word "fascism" in pro-capitalist journals does not change the fact that there was a very real socialist movement that effectively fused collectivism and individualism, preventing one from corrupting the other. (i.e. anarchosyndicalism) * The right-wing Libertarian Party argument that no socialist can be a "libertarian" is based on the definition of "libertarian" as one who does not "initiate force". Therefore no-one who resists capitalism could _EVER_ be considered a "libertarian" by this narrow definition since resisting the status quo involves, at some level, whatever capitalists choose to define as "coercion" (considering that Ayn Rand and Robert Heinlein called hippie poets, liberal voters, environmentalists, reformist social-democrats and anyone else who disliked capitalism even the slightest bit a "totalitarian", there's substantial proof that this definition of "coercion" or "initiating force" is pretty damn broad.) On the other hand, the original libertarian definition is "one who is opposed to external authority". Bryan Caplan's attack against the Spanish anarchists, basically an expanded version of James Donald's crude texts, insists that the term "libertarian" was somehow incorrectly used by the Spaniards. Now this is really bizarre, considering it flies in the face of thousands of first-hand accounts of actual history, and actual people who experienced actual events and followed actual principles. * The fact that Benjamin Tucker was an individualist anarchist (who heartily supported Peter Kropotkin, a self-proclaimed anarchist communist, and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, basically the founder of the libertarian socialist movement) who happened to be situated in the United States does little to support the assertion by Bryan Caplan in his dubious "Anarchist Theory FAQ" that American anarchism was somehow originally a strictly anti- socialist phenomenon (anti state-socialist, certainly). It should be noted that all of the people he and others have used as examples of "founding fathers of modern (right-wing) libertarianism" such as Ayn Rand, Ludwig von Misus were not in fact anarchists or libertarians, but right-wing economists & philosophers. No amount of rewriting of history in the last 30 years changes this fact. For some reason, right-wing libertarians seem to have come to the conclusion that ardent denunciations of whatever is labeled "socialism" and support of private property are sufficient qualifications for being a "libertarian"... but if this were true it would make anyone who ever denounced worker's movements with flowery, intellectual sounding language a "libertarian". Why Ayn Rand's critique of the dictatorial USSR would somehow make her "more libertarian" than Emma Goldman, who did the same much more effectively years beforehand (yet is ignored because she was a libertarian socialist) is downright bizarre. * Socialism is not a polar-opposite of capitalism, but is built _on top_ of it (or rather, succeeds it). The collectives of Barcelona were in fact socialist, regardless of what James Donald may insist (he seems to assume that since they actually worked, and since they were "libertarian" collectives, they MUST have been "capitalist", or nothing at all.) The existence of money, wages, personal possessions or the production of commodities are not the defining factor here- it is _worker's democratic control of the means of production_ that is. An achievement of actual economic democracy, where workers themselves have a real effect on production, rather than simply the employer, management, or shareholders is an incredible difference from what we have today in capitalist businesses, large or small. This is why the collectives in Barcelona are called an example of "anarchism in action". It is interesting to note that Donald flip-flops on this issue... alternately claiming the collectives were a shambles or a failure, or, if this argument doesn't hold, claiming that they were not libertarian socialist, but in fact more like his personal version of capitalism (!) * Let's me just say one thing about "anarcho-capitalism". If it could have ever happened that capitalism could exist in modern industrial society without an authoritarian force to perpetuate it, it would have had to have happened before the establishment of corporations and other vast economic structures that effect many people. There is absolutely no indication that a version of capitalism without any state structure at all would mark the end of the corporation - in fact, criticisms of corporations and corporate-welfare are pathetic or non-existent from the Libertarian Party-ists, Objectivists and so on. To these people, a single anarcho-syndicalist worker is considered a greater enemy then the entire McDonald's or Microsoft empire. No amount of promises that corporate welfare will be abolished _after_ the Libertarian Party is established as the government hold any weight: why aren't these people spending money, time and resources to oppose corporations right _now_? It is utterly impossible that capitalism could become "nice" while protecting and defending the "bad" version along the road to a promised "nice" capitalism. (ironically, capitalism is only tolerable to workers now _because_ of the existence of government as it is, with it's regulations and protections... proposing a system devoid of federal protections and made up of xenophobic "gated communities" and private police- forces to keep the "rabble" safely away from private property is a twisted way of making capitalism seem more palatable to the average human being. I'm reminded of the movie "Blade Runner"... not a very nice world to live in.) Anyway, that's all I have to say, for now. - Jamal Hannah jamal@bronze.lcs.mit.edu Liberty for the People page: http://flag.blackened.net/liberty/liberty.html