Fair Use Blog

Part IV of Benjamin Tucker’s Instead of a Book, by a Man Too Busy To Write One, on Socialism, is now available in full in the Fair Use Repository‘s online edition of the work. This adds several newly transcribed essays focusing on the meaning of socialism, arguing that Anarchistic Socialism is the most consistent form of socialism and arguing against the common assumption that socialism is synonymous with State monopoly over production. The essays newly available are:

• Socialism: What It Is, which argues that the word Socialism should be proudly claimed, or reclaimed, by Anarchists, in spite of the appropriation of the word by State Socialists. Tucker argues that Anarchistic Socialism is the most consistent form of socialism.
• Armies That Overlap, in which Tucker claims (against the claims of the paper Twentieth Century) that Anarchism and Socialism, properly defined, are neither coextensive nor exclusive; they are two overlapping struggles.
• Socialism and the Lexicographers, which compiles a large list of dictionary and encyclopaedia definitions of the word Socialism in response to State Socialists’ recent attempts to use a dictionary definition to read Anarchists out of the socialist movement.
• The Sin of Herbert Spencer, discussing the apparent class bias in Spencer’s later work, which Tucker interprets as attacking only government privilege for the poor, while remaining silent about government privilege for the rich. Tucker also praises the work of Spencer’s English followers, especially Auberon Herbert, as more consistent.
• Will Professor Sumner Choose? addresses remarks by the liberal political economist William Graham Sumner, arguing that while his arguments against State Socialism are quite telling, consistency demands that he should endorse the radical laissez-faire position of Anarchistic Socialism.
• After Freiheit, Der Sozialist responds to a polemical attack on the German edition of Liberty by a State Socialist newspaper.
• State Socialism and Liberty argues that State monopoly over the means of production necessarily involves tyranny, and that free individual people must be able to withdraw and form their own arrangements at will.
• On Picket Duty discusses arguments from the English Marxist Edward Aveling on the tyranny of State Socialism, the relationship between individualist anarchism and communist anarchism, the relationship between individualist anarchism and laissez-faire classical liberalism, gradualists who see State Socialism as part of a transition to Anarchism, and Terence Powderly’s attacks on Oscar Wilde.