Fair Use Blog

Here’s an exchange from Free Society on liberty, trusts, and state socialism, from February 1902, between G. E. Lind and R. W. (presumably Ross Winn). The exchange appears in Free Society Vol. IX, No. 7, p. 3.

Anarchism Exploded.

When the economic development had transformed the social relations of the past into a state of society in which the material interests of one class of individuals became diametrically opposed to the material interests of the other class or classes of individuals, there naturally appeared various economic classes which in order to preserve themselves they were compelled to avail themselves of every opportunity in the struggle for supremacy which ensued. Therefore it was but natural that the class which had secured economic supremacy should make some claim to divine authority and the right to govern the economically inferior, while at the same time claiming to protect society. All this was done in order that the class which had attained economic supremacy might perpetuate its existence as rulers and exploit the economically inferior more successfully, hence the appearance of the State or government, which the Anarchists talk so much about, but understand so little.(1) Then the State is simply an effect instead of a cause, hence the absurdity of advocating the “abolition of the State without abolishing the class struggle which is the cause of the State.(2) Anarchism declares war on the State, which is just as nonsensical as the Democrats smashing the trusts, etc. Socialism would not smash the trusts or declare war on the State, but will absorb the State, and by so doing will absorb the trusts(3) and all the instruments of production and distribution, the result of which would be the abolition of economic classes and consequently the abolition of the oppressive capitalistic State, and the inauguration of the cooperative commonwealth.

G. E. Lind.

Comment

1. But it was the Anarchists who first traced the origin of the State to the existence of a privileged class, and demonstrated that the perpetuation of the privileged class is the inevitable result of the State–its raison d’etre. We prove that privilege is only possible thru the support of the State, and that the abolition of the State is necessary to eliminate privilege.

2. If, as you contend, the class struggle is the cause of the State’s existence, and you wish to abolish the class struggle, you are simply taking another line of reasoning to reach the same objective point–viz., the abolition of the State, which you say is impossible. You appear to be slightly mixed–not an uncommon phenomenon with State Socialists.

3. By establishing the most gigantic trust conceivable–a State monopoly. It is not the forms of monopoly that are evil; but its essence–the principle that abrogates liberty–that sets bounds upon the play of social activity.

4. But your cooperative commonwealth, administered by State officials, will have society divided into two classes–the workers and the governmental directors of industries. The State boss with unlimited power, will constitute a class, and consequently the cooperative commonwealth will not abolish the class struggle. You seem to be in a fair way to explode the fallacies of your own philosophy.

R.W.

—Free Society: A Periodical of Anarchist Work, Thought, and Literature, Vol. IX, No. 7, Whole No. 349 (February 16, 1902). Chicago: A. Isaak, publisher. 3.

Here are two new items, now available from the Fair Use Repository main site. Both are from the issue of Liberty for September 24, 1892.

• Ireland’s Need of a Free Currency, by William Bailie, in Liberty, Vol. IX.–No. 4, Whole No. 238 (September 24, 1892). 2.

  At all periods of human history it is possible to observe a combination of times and conditions that seems conspicuously ripe for the recognition and adoption of certain instalments of general truth embodied in particular ideas and principles borne mostly on the obscure banners of hitherto unnoticed reform. Such an occasion, I venture to believe, is presented by the dawning hopes to which the impending political change gives birth in the state of long-scourged and ever-suffering Ireland…. The economic regeneration of that country through the death of Interest by means of a free currency is the idea which the writer believes peculiarly fitting at this juncture of her career to inaugurate the industrial and social Revolution.

• On Picket Duty, by Benjamin Tucker in Liberty IX.4, Whole No. 238 (September 24, 1892). 1.

  Comrade Bailie’s article in this issue on Ireland’s Need of a Free Currency is suggestive. It certainly is none too early to begin to prepare that unhappy country to make the most of her freedom when she shall get it. The Irishman or Irish-American who devotes himself to that work will do his country immeasurable service. But Ireland’s situation is peculiar. Unlike all other civilized nations, her first and greatest need is free land, not free money….

  The column also includes comments on Wagner, copyright protectionism, and Whitman’s verses in praise of Kaiser Wilhelm.

As usual, these transcriptions were made possible by facsimiles provided through the magnificent work of Shawn P. Wilbur at his Travelling in Liberty online archive.

Read, cite and enjoy!

This is an item from The Egoist, an individualist anarchist paper published by Edward H. Fulton under a series of at least five different names from 1919 to at least 1928, which provided a major forum for plumb-line individualist anarchists, American mutualists, and many former members of Tucker’s Liberty circle during the 1920s. (The paper, for example, provided a new home for Jo Labadie’s Cranky Notions columns, published articles by Austin Wright, Clarence Lee Swartz, Henry Cohen, etc. The periodical began as The New Order (1919), was changed to the 1776 American in 1920, changed to EGO in 1921, went on hiatus for a few years, and then reappeared as The Egoist in 1924. After this issue, Fulton, based on reader responses, changed the title again to The Mutualist, which ran from 1925 until at least 1928. This article appeared at the back of The Egoist IV.6, on page 7 (July 1925).

The most liberal supporters of this paper, some of them egoists, have asked me change the name of the paper. John Basil Barnhill was the first to suggest a change. I refused. (See No. 4). Many others have made the suggestion, because egoism refers to a moral doctrine and egoist is not generally understood as individualist, notwithstanding the Standard Dictionary, and others, define “individualist” as “an egoist.” I answered these friends that as I had used various names for small leaflets–names that would suit my only font of big type for change in size of paper–that another change might tend to give me the title of “nut” or “quick-change artist” in regard to names. But they still write urging change of the name–don’t think the name is appropriate for a individualistic discussing political, social and economic matters almost exclusively.

If no one objected to the name, The Egoist, I would make no change, (as no name would compel me to pay an income tax), but some of my best friends want another name–most ANY OTHER name–for the paper. I am not obstinate on immaterial things, so will put the matter up to subscribers. Any name chosen by subscribers will suit me–BUT IT MUST STAND AS LONG AS I LIVE–I hate changes, notwithstanding many publications I see have little red or blue lines below a big new name saying “Formerly, etc., etc.” [“Fawcett’s,” formerly “True Confessions”; “Tax-Payers’ Magazine,” formerly “The Yeoman” for example].

Arthur R. Woolsey suggests the modern style–an engraved heading, “FULTON’S” in large letters, with “Magazine” in small letters beneath in an ornamental extension.

Names suggested:

• Fulton’s Magazine. (Engraved heading.)
• The Individualist.
• Equal Freedom.
• The Plumbliner.
• The Mutualist.
• The Egoist. (Present name.)

None of the new names were chosen or suggested by me. I am leaving the selection to subscribers. Send first, second and third choice. ANY of these names will suit the publisher.

FULTON.

This is an item from a 1916 issue of The American Printer (Vol. 62.12), printed at New York. I noticed it and clipped it out because it’s about the career of Horace E. Carr, a Cleveland-area printer (active in the Cleveland arts scene, influenced by the work of William Morris, and also a friend of the individualist anarchist Fred Schulder, whose pamphlet he printed). Here:

The Success of an Efficient Printer

SOME one sent us a copy of a house-organ that was several years old, and in it we found a marked article by David Gibson, in which he tells in his interesting style the story of Horace Carr, the Cleveland printer. It is worth reading:

Back in 1893, when we all had fresh bank failures every morning for breakfast, a printer in the old Herald job office in Cleveland, O., bought an old treadle press and a few fonts of type from a man who conducted a combination printing shop and candy store out in his neighborhood, which equipment he stored away in a room in his house.

A few weeks later when bank failures were about all anybody had for breakfast, this printer found himself out of a job.

He tried to find another, but the thought came to him very soon that it would be easier to find a few jobs of printing at which both he and the little outfit he had stored away could work.

This theory proved to be correct, and its occurring to him after he had been thrown out of employment is a very good illustration of why throwing out a man very frequently gives him a boost.

His first job was 20,000 counter slips for a neighboring grocery, and for which he agreed to accept provisions as payment.

Now, anybody who has ever been anywhere near a treadle press knows that 20,000 impressions, one at a time, is a whole lot. He didn’t have enough rules to set the job three times–the capacity of his press–and he didn’t feel justified in adding any more to his investment; but–

Where there is want there is a will.

He set the job once, made a mold by beating wet tissue backed with blotting paper down into the type with a hairbrush, held the mold tight to the type between a couple of scrap-steel plates by means of a couple of glue clamps, and baked the impression dry in the kitchen-stove oven.

Then he melted the contents of the hellbox in a soup ladle, cast three stereotype plates, and thus by a little headwork he cut his footwork in three.

The work following this consisted of billheads for job carpenters, business cards for clothes-wringer peddlers, and tickets for milkmen.

He was alive to the value of advertising as appealing to the habits and tendencies of the human mind; when he went out soliciting work he needed something to leave with those on whom he called–something to serve as a reminder.

So he set a line on a card:

Perfect Printing Punctually Performed Pleases Particular People!

He didn’t have enough Ps: there were only six in the font in which he was compelled to set it for display, so he cut the seventh out of a block of maple wood.

Even with all his disadvantages, his work was good enough to impress the city librarian, and he was asked to figure on an annual report.

He got the job even though he was the third highest bidder, by agreeing to set in hand composition what the others proposed to do with a machine. Linotype composition in those days was not up to its present high state of perfection.

The job was too big for his imposing stone, to say nothing of his press, so he made it up on the kitchen table and farmed out the presswork.

With the profit on this job he bought more equipment, and a little later he moved downtown.

This man was Horace Carr.

He is today, perhaps, the foremost strictly type printer in America, and has done as much as any one man to revive this simple, beautiful art and commercially apply it to what would otherwise be the commonplace.

His influence has been felt not only directly through his own work, but by the published examples and exhibitions he has educated the younger printers to his tradition.

It was a big jump from being thrown out of a newspaper job office to his present position, but–

Many a man loses his opportunity by not losing his job.

An examination of some samples of his very early work, which includes some milk tickets, very clearly indicates the reason for his present position.

These early efforts indicate a simplicity, care and cleanliness beyond the same class of work at that time.

He took pains and at the expense of untold labor by reason of lack of common facilities. He used one job to study the next, and doubtless put more pride in his work than he got out in price.

His price may have been market, yet his quality was more than market.

While Horace Carr’s plant is not large today, and his business is not large as compared with that of many printers, yet it is more than complete, and his patronage is unique.

It is not always well to measure a success with a tapeline; more frequently a micrometer will do.

His product is mostly small-edition work involving strictly type design.

He gets better than market prices for his work even though he may not get all that he thinks it is worth.

Few of us ever get what we think we are worth.

Horace Carr can actually express a personality or a business in type.

For instance, a letterhead for a millinery store would express the feminine in type selection and color scheme, in direct contrast to the boldness expressed in a letterhead for a machine shop.

The writer once saw a letterhead that he designed [p. 20] for a fashionable undertaker. You would have known that it was for one of that profession without reading it. The type selection had a suggestion of early religious printing, and the whole was done in purple and black to suggest mourning.

While Horace Carr’s work has all been performed in Cleveland, yet his first real recognition came from abroad. Some samples of his work fell into the hands of the British Printer, one of the leading typographical journals of England.

And there is a good example in this for any man in any field of endeavor: A man may do good work in some place and get recognition for it another; a mechanic may do good work in one shop and get recognition for it in another; a man may do good work on one farm and get his reward on another.

A man should be efficient for his own sake, in his own selfish interest, rather than out of consideration for the man for whom he may be immediately working.

The efficient man can get a job anywhere; it becomes a selection of jobs rather than just a job.

An efficient man doesn’t have to work under unjust conditions; he can go where the conditions are just.

The efficient man can be absolutely certain of the money return if he makes efficiency the first consideration.

–From The Success of an Efficient Printer, in The American Printer: A Semi-Monthly News, Business and Technical Journal 62.12 (June 20, 1916). 19-20.

Source

• Google Books: American Printer and Lithographer, Volume 62, pp. 17-18

Fred Schulder (left, with Adeline Champney, right)

I am happy to announce a new transcription now available over at the main Fair Use Repository site: a rare Anarchist pamphlet from Cleveland, in 1899, of Fred Schulder’s essay, The Relation of Anarchism to Organization:

[. . .]

The theory of anarchism has a destructive, as well as a constructive side. It, being the doctrine of equal liberty, it is necessarily opposed to all that destroys this equal liberty, classing all such destructive agencies under the general term “government.” This word has been defined by anarchists as invasion of the non-invasive individual’s liberty. In this sense, I must insist that the word be used in this discussion, for in this sense I shall use it: and if, in criticising my statements, you use the word in a different sense, you are not criticising the thought expressed by me, but only a thing of your own manufacture.

It may be claimed, however, that government, even in this sense, is but imperfectly defined until we know what does, and what does not, constitute invasion of equal liberty in every imaginable case. I concede that a difficulty exists here—that the line cannot be quite definitely drawn. But pray, have those who thus object, a remedy to offer? Have their courts of justice (?) ever discovered the true line? Have they ever discovered what, as an argument against a social theory, is claimed to be undiscoverable? Or, have they not, on the contrary, perpetrated invasions of equal liberty so gross that even the dullest mind must perceive it and cry out in disgust? Under liberty, however, this difficulty will continue to grow less; men will ever more realize their mutual dependence, and this must increase with the development of the social organism. And realizing this mutual dependence, they will adjust these minor differences according to their intelligence—an adjustment which government often prevents.

Now let us get back to the main point: anarchism is necessarily opposed to all government; the state is essentially governmental (that is to say, invasive), not only in its reaction on other organisms, but also in the forming of its own organization; it invades the liberty of its own members. What the anarchist objects to in the state is not the element of organization but the element of government.

Take the element of government out of the state, and no anarchist will object to the remains.

Since organization vastly increases the strength and efficiency of that which is organized, the anarchist sees in organized government—that is, organized invasion—the most effective and the most dangerous kind of invasion. The doctrine of equal liberty necessarily implying the unconditional self-ownership of the individual, it logically follows that it implies, also, the ownership of his product. The taking of the producer’s product without his consent is described by the anarchist as robbery. Hence anarchism is opposed to robbery—to all robbery. And again it finds in organized robbery the most effective form. Through the instrumentality of the state some individuals acquire a monopoly of opportunities, some of which are absolutely necessary to the production of wealth, and others very helpful to it. Such opportunities are freedom to the use of land, the freedom of trade, the freedom to use any medium of exchange which will be accepted, the freedom to invent or to copy, etc.,—monopolies which are unthinkable in absence of government, and which enable their holders to extract from the producer, as a tribute for allowing him to utilize whatever is so monopolized, such a portion of his product as is equaled by the benefits derived from this utilization. Now, since the monopolization of natural opportunities is based on invasion of equal freedom—on government,—its necessary economic result, the exaction of this tribute, (which, I believe, I am safe in saying, constitutes the greater part of the whole product) is also based on government.

Such is the fruit of organized robbery. And again, anarchism is opposed, not to the organization, but to the robbery. Although, of course, without the robbery, the organization would be without purpose in this instance, and consequently would not exist.

Having seen that anarchism is not opposed to organization itself, let us now go a little further and see if it does not in some cases indirectly further organization, by opposing that which tends to prevent or retard this organization. Since organization, as we have seen, is the life-principle of all aggregation or association, it is obvious that it would take place naturally wherever the individuals composing an association found it mutually advantageous. And it would take place as rapidly as they fuond it to be to their mutual advantage, provided this organization were not opposed by other forces. All such opposition must necessarily be in the nature of invasion of liberty; such opposition must be government. Anarchism then, by opposing government, would indirectly further such organization.

Instances of government opposing organization are numerous. Let us take society in general. There is a natural tendency for people to shift about, until they finally settle where they find surroundings to which they are best adapted. This tendency is being interfered with by organized government—the state—through emigration and immigration laws. In thickly-populated parts of the earth we find government prohibiting emigration, while in relatively thinly-populated countries the same force is directed against immigration.

In the industrial organism, government interference is so obvious that it is needless to point out any particular case. Wherever we turn, we find ourselves confronted by tariffs, patents, copyrights, licenses, and numerous other legislation. While these laws effectually rob the producer, they also retard industrial organization. For in the absence of these interferences, under free competition, each, after taking into account the economic demand and natural opportunities, would take to such employment as would be best fitted to his peculiar abilities. This he does now, after taking into account also the tax, fine, or (as I should call it) the robbery, which is attached to the consumption of some products, and which tends to disturb the demand. Now, if this legislation remained unchanged, the adaptation would at last become perfect, and although the producer would still be robbed, the organization of industry would not be retarded. But on account of the constant fighting among the robbers for the plunder, and through other causes, this legislation is ever changing, and the energy, which under freedom, would be used for further organization, is wasted in re-adaptation to changed interfering agencies. Hence, such legislation retards industrial organization; and anarchism, since it opposes government, both organized and unorganized, indirectly furthers social and industrial organization.

[. . .]

–From Fred Schulder, The Relation of Anarchism to Organization (1899; Cleveland, Horace E. Carr)

Schulder (1874-1961) was a anarchist writer, speaker, and sometime traveling salesman — during 1907-1908, he made a living travelling throughout America selling books from Benjamin Tucker’s publishing house and subscriptions to Liberty. He had a conscience marriage with fellow anarchist writer Adeline Champney; their son, Horace Champney, was an anti-war radical involved with A Quaker Action Group, who sailed a boat full of medical supplies to North Vietnam during the American War. James J. Martin described this pamphlet by Schulder in the context of the younger generation of individualists trying to build on the work of Tucker and the Liberty circle: Others attempted the task assumed by [William] Bailie in reconciling the many elements which went to make up individualist anarchism from the combined influence of Spencerian and Stirnerite doctrines. One of these projected syntheses was the brief outline of Fred Schulder, The Relation of Anarchism to Organization. Another was Francis D. Tandy, an associate of Cohen in Denver, whose Modern Social Tendencies and Voluntary Socialism were anarchist works of considerable repute, showing influence of Tucker, Spencer and Thoreau. Both Tandy and Schulder were recipients of Tucker’s approval in their activities along the program of educational propaganda for the anarchist cause (Men Against the State [1970/2009], p. 258). (Tucker may well have approved of Schulder’s efforts, on the whole, but the reaction to the pamphlet in Liberty [“On Picket Duty,” XIII.12, p. 1] was to make fun of the typesetting. Having read the original, I can say that this was an accurate enough complaint; but perhaps not entirely to the point.) Schulder’s essay is, in any case, an interesting attempt at discussing the possibilities of consensual social organization, and the anti-social, anti-coordinative features of State force, from a framework based on Spencerian evolutionary theory.

Now available thanks to Benjamin Sojda at Transcribing Liberty:

Vol. I, No. 12
January 7, 1882

Until someone shall have formulated and demonstrated a correct science of justice, the way is ever open to constant confusion as regards the subject of right and rights. The columns of a newspaper are not the place to develop such a science; nevertheless, the matter is so important that we have determined, reconsidering our previously-announced purpose to drop it, to once more re-state our position. On several occasions our editorials have been sharply criticized by parties who are supposed to know something of the principles of Liberty; not that they would differ from us, if they carried in mind the distinction that must necessarily be kept in view in discussing the bearing of Liberty upon human acts, but simply that they have got into the habit of carelessly defining acts without reference to the sphere of the individuals acting.

The right to do a thing and the abstract right of a thing involve two essential different principles. For instance, we have defended the right of individuals to make contracts stipulating the payment of usury, and should strike at the very essence of Liberty if we did not; but this defense of individual right by no means carries with it the defense of usury as an equitable transaction per se. In defending the right to take usury, we do not defend the right of usury. He who cannot see this has not mastered the A B C of social analysis. One of our critics, who has twice challenged our defense of individuals who voluntarily choose to be parties to usury, strenuously defends "free rum." Would he like to be accused of saying thereby that it is right, as a matter of principle, to drink rum inordinately? No, he is a sever believer in ...

Read the whole thing at Transcribing Liberty.

Now available thanks to Benjamin Sojda at Transcribing Liberty:

Liberty Vol. I, No. 7
October 29, 1881

The most serious calamity attendant upon false premises in the realm of thought is that the avowed and conscientious enemies of despotism are made to be persistent advocates and defenders of the pivotal agencies upon which it hinges. We do not make this assertion in a spirit of self-sufficiency and conceit, and are aware that those who differ from us will, of course, turn it against ourselves. Naturally, we feel very positive that the philosophy which shapes the teachings of Liberty is correct and unanswerable; but we are fallible, and, if the history of human opinions reaches anything, it is that nothing in this world is a finality.

But upon one thing all school of sociology will agree, - namely, that the very first step in all reasoning looking to human well-being is to fix upon a correct scientific basis of right and wrong. These terms are upon everybody's lips, from the prattling stripling to the hoary theologian and moralist, and yet the average man has no fixed conception of what it is that constitutes an action as right or wrong. At every step we find people disputing and arguing over the right and wrong of a thing, but arrest them in any instance, and ask them what constitutes right and wrong in nature and practice, and they are totally unable to answer. And yet the whole argument in every case is useless and worthless until this point is settled.

The chief mischief attending this lamentable absence of a true scientific standard of right grows out of the universally accepted inference that, as soon as one is convinced that a practice is what he calls wrong, it is his next and imperative duty to set about to interdict that practice by force. ...

Read the whole thing at Transcribing Liberty.

This is an article of Karl Hess’s, which appeared in the October 1969 issue of the New Left magazine Ramparts, pp. 28-31. Hess had been a close friend of Barry Goldwater during the early 1960s and had worked as the chief speechwriter in his 1964 presidential campaign.

An Open Letter to Barry Goldwater

It probably isn’t the highest or hottest item on your agenda, but every now and then you might think about why we are now on opposite sides of the fence—or why the fence is growing more like a barricade every day. My side is what is loosely called the New Left, a position to which you will undoubtedly refer a thousand times in a thousand speeches but about which, if the present is an indication, you will know less and less the more often you mention it.

The thing that first attracted me to the New Left was the familiar ring of what was being said there. Decentralization. The return to the people of real political power—of all power. There was also something very attractive in the New Left’s analysis of the American corporate system and its use of political power to preserve and enlarge itself. The way the largest corporations had so strenuously opposed you and supported Johnson, for instance, certainly made it seem fruitful to ask why. Could it have been that you might not have played ball quite so well as he?

There was, of course, a seemingly dissonant sound in the New Left’s attitude toward American adventures abroad. You had championed, and I had fully seconded, the notion that, morally, American arms could and should be used anywhere to fend off incursions by THEM. The crucial question which I permitted, even forced, myself to ask—and which you must never face if you are to hold onto your position in regard to THEM—was simply Who are THEY? And, lo and behold, THEY turned out to be a lot of US.

Let’s face it, we were trying to have it both ways. On the one hand, we spoke of freedom and liberty; on the other, of arming, adventuring, seeking and grasping. We spoke of a world that could not be half slave and half free, but we worked for a world that would be all American. We spoke of the evils of federal power but clucked approval at the same evils on a local scale. We spoke of letting the blacks in on our shuck, but when it came to liberation, we spoke of law and order.

Contradictions like these inevitably tear apart any structure—even a friendship, even a world—once you see them. Because you are, so far as my experience has permitted me to judge, the most essentially honest and potentially radical major American political figure, I am still betting that they could tear apart your position and that some day you will find yourself on this side of the barricades. As a matter of fact, the last time we met you were edging in this direction anyway. You described it yourself one day during your successful 1968 campaign for reelection to the Senate. We were in your living room, just shooting the shit. When the histories are written, you said, I’ll bet that the old right and the New Left are put down as having a lot in common and that the people in the middle will be the enemy. That’s right. They do and they are.

That same week, as I recall, you spoke at the University of Arizona where you said that you had much in common with the anarchist wing of SDS. Anarchist! SDS! Remember? You said those words and you were not struck by lightning. And the point is that you have, or at least had, a lot in common with most of SDS. Now it’s probably their turn to snort in disbelief and even derision, and I do admit that I have passed over lightly such details as imperialism, but at least both of you—you then, SDS now—have sought to grasp certain political problems radically, by the roots.

Even before you made your speech about some commonality of interest with SDS, former SDS president Carl Oglesby knew that there was at least a historic echoing from the right of positions which have come to be regarded as New Leftist. Senator Taft, for instance, led the fight against NATO, making many of the same points that SDS makes on a broader scale about imperialism. I know that you departed long ago from a foreign policy position even roughly akin to Senator Taft’s, but perhaps knowing that the New Left’s position did not spring full-blown from the brow of Chairman Mao might at least let you examine, or re-examine, America’s role as the world’s policeman and protector of markets.

Why even bother with the suggestion? The answer is probably more romantic than reasonable. Common sense tells me that the rhetoric has ended and the revolution has begun. But nostalgia keeps suggesting that maybe we could speak for a minute and even agree that it would be far better, and so very much more decent, to give up power rather than having to go through, once again, the agony of having it taken away. I know you at least sensed this once as you contemplated the many changes you felt were inevitable and not very far off.

You caused virtual apoplexy among conservatives when you spoke, as you did in 1964, of the inevitability of world government, which you saw as developing through the political enlargement of such military arrangements as NATO. Your perception of change was right on. Your notion of how it would be accomplished, if you think about it (which I must admit too few of us did during the hectic days of the campaign), was a flat contradiction of your other principles—those regarding the return of political power to individuals. For a man as suspicious of central government as you were, the idea of accepting even the possibility of one huge, overall, overpowering government was 180 degrees off. Clarence Streit and other liberals thought it a silver lining in your otherwise cloudy aspect, of course. And there again you were quite correct in your perception: liberals are fatheads. The only thing worse than a big government is a bigger one!

It was the New Left that most sharply outlined the direction which was consistent with your root principles—decentralization. SDS’s early movement into neighborhood organizing was a manifestation of this. The current and, I think, monumentally significant work on neighborhood government by Milton Kotler—a colleague of mine at the Institute for Policy Studies—is more emphatically libertarian in nature than any single statement, action, stance or proposal of the entire Republican Party, with the Democrats thrown in to boot. And the present movement of SDS out into the neighborhoods, fields and factories, as well as into the schools, is deeply involved with putting power back where you, most emphatically of all working politicians, always said it belonged: in the hands of the people—not the people of some sociological abstraction, but the people in one-by-one, community-by-community reality.

In the long liberation of the blacks in this slave-haunted land, you also perceived a transfer of power as sharply as anyone—back then. You spoke of blacks having to have real political power before they could be free, and you risked and got a political mudbath by emphasizing that power far and beyond the then currently chic bullshit about bigger and better welfare checks, bigger and better federal fetters for a people already bloody from white, liberal legislation.

Today there are blacks who are putting into practice what you spoke about. They are struggling for real political power and they will get it even if they have to take it in combat. The Black Panthers are the vanguard of that struggle. Nineteen have died in it so far. They are in black reality the echo of a white past which you supposedly respect and even revere—the first American Revolution.

Senator, if you had been born black, and poor, you would now be a Panther or I seriously misjudge the strength of your character and convictions.

The Panthers are dying for the sort of liberty that you used to talk about. Dying, boss, not talking. Can’t you hear a brother’s voice even when it’s his last gasp? Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice and moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue, and where in the name of Jefferson, Adams, and that grandfather of yours who said fuck foreign kings and wars and came to the U.S., where in all their names is there a more extreme grasp for liberty and justice than in this black colony now breaking away? Here are people who desperately needed some fellow extremist somewhere up there in hazy Washington to talk to, and all they heard was law and order, law and order, the clanking of cell doors, the thud of clubs and the crack of small arms fire.

There won’t be a chance to talk now because wars are much too loud. But while there was a chance, where were you? Where were we all—all of us who made our living talking about liberty, and then didn’t recognize it when it started flowering at our feet, because the petals were black and red and not red-white-and-blue.

I guess it would have been political suicide to talk to a Panther when you wanted to get back into the Senate. But you faced that once before and didn’t even flinch. Remember?

In 1964, it seemed as if there were a real possibility of racial trouble resulting from your campaign. I happen to think you are as color-blind as any man in American politics, but the image of your most red-necked followers blurred it all, and the race issue was a rising concern. To make matters worse, some of your most respected political advisors (real professionals) had talked long and loosely enough about the beneficial effects of racial disturbances on your candidacy to ring alarms for anyone. They claimed that one good race riot would put you in office. They knew, long before Spiro Agnew and probably as soon as George Wallace, that millions of white Americans were just bone scared of the black liberation movement and that it would take very little violence to shake out any government and put in any man with a tough reputation—and that’s just the kind you had.

I am convinced that, had it not been for one crucial action by you, efforts to incite racial trouble would have been inevitable. But you took the action, risking your entire candidacy as you did it. You called in some key reporters for an off-the-record briefing and made a single point: you said that if any racial trouble resulted from your candidacy, you would drop out of the race even if it were the day before the election. It was a flat unqualified pledge and I know you meant it. It not only stopped any insane incendiarism among your supporters, but it also put you on the line for killing your candidacy if there was trouble—whatever the cause.

You see, it’s things like that—the sort of gut courage and conviction that corporate liberals and the country club conservatives who so admire you couldn’t even imagine—that makes me miss you here on this side of the barricades.

But this side, you probably feel, is not anti-communist and you have spent an entire lifetime fighting Communism. Well, so had I. And because it was so easy just to fight, I had stopped thinking about what the hell it was we were fighting about in the first place. I would judge, by all I can read, that anti-communists today are operating almost exclusively from information, images and mind-sets formed in the Thirties and Forties.

Fresh from the horror of the purge trials, the slaughter in the Ukraine, the rise of Stalinism, it was easy to be anti-communist then. It was so easy, in fact, that it distorted the entire direction of the right in America. Its direction had been very individualistic, isolationist, decentralist—even anarchistic—and certainly radical compared to the corporate statism that had been rising ever since Herbert Hoover refined the process of federal rationalization of the economy.

Anti-communism twisted the direction of the right, which I feel, if left undisturbed, would today be near the New Left on most major issues. Unexamined anti-communism made possible these cop-outs: that the proper role of government could be the enhancement of industrial growth and corporate profit as a part of building a strong nation to beat back the Red peril; that citizenship training had to be intensified, education redirected, and certain liberties foresworn in order to—dig it—preserve liberty.

I will bet you an autographed picture of Jerry Rubin against a Readers Digest flag decal that not one of your friends who are so oburatelyobdurately anti-communist today can honestly fill you in on the essential differences between communism in North Korea, Viet-Nam, and Cuba—and Russia. Between China and Poland, between Rumania and Hungary and so forth. And I would double the whole bet that they wouldn’t even know where to look to find out what the Panthers, SDS, and the New Left in general have to say about Soviet Communism, about small c communism, about Marcuse, about anything.

Senator, the world has changed. The Provisional Revolutionary Government in South Viet-Nam (that’s our bunch, not yours) has issued a political platform which evidences much of the concern for individual liberty, freedom of trade and ownership of actually private property that Republicans used to rhapsodize about before they won political power. Have you read it? Or if you have read it but not believed it, have you actually tested your doubts?

I suppose that even mentioning Viet-Nam would cause you to stop reading this—if you’ve even begun. I know how deeply you feel about it, because once I did also and in just the same way. I’ll just sketch what happened and suggest that if you ever care to follow the same path, who knows, we might yet bump into each other again.

We thought that Viet-Nam was another case of international communism trying to bend the free world’s borderlines. Diem was reisting THEM—a story that was easy to buy and impossible to prove. But in truth, the NLF was local, and was bent on pursuing justice for the South Vietnamese who were being stripped of land and political power by Diemist politicians. From there on, the errors were compounded.

You once said that it wasn’t worth a single American life just to save face in Viet-Nam. But how many lives is it costing today to do just that? Today the face is Richard Nixon’s. Yesterday it was Lyndon Johnson’s. At least you took a crack or two at Lyndon. Is your friend Dick really any different? Or have you changed your mind about that fatal ratio between face and lives?

It occurs to me, Senator, that there is a document written by a fellow named Goldwater, an ex-Air Force general, that bears on this issue. It was a position paper you prepared for an Air Force project, as I recall. It discussed convergence between the communist and non-communist nations, but you didn’t see convergence as simply a matter of the two blocs coming together. You felt that perhaps as the communist bloc broke up and the demands of the people were felt, free institutions would develop strongly there, but that at the same time they might crumble in the other bloc. There could be a time, you felt, when Eastern Europe would be moving into freedom while America was sinking into tyranny.

Isn’t there something familiar going on today? Aren’t there in fact more difference between the communist parties of Eastern Europe than between, say, the Democrats and Republicans in this country? Aren’t we showing a tendency to side with the Soviets against dissident communist regimes—China being a foremost example? Isn’t there a revival among your very colleagues in the Senate and House of the security-law syndrome that did so little but hurt so much during the Fifties? Wasn’t there something more than just signpost sloganeering in the description of the Chicago police riot as Prague West? Isn’t Czechoslovakia just Russia’s Viet-Nam—not as brutal or bloody but just as politically obscene?

If you ever got a chance to read the New Left’s literature you might feel a jolt of recognition, page after page, as you found an analysis of the U.S.-U.S.S.R. detente that makes many of the points you once made. I can imagine that the word left would turn you off; yet, in an historical sense, you were a prominent leftist when you attacked established power, as you used to attack it. You even wrote several times of your position as being classically liberal—classically, that is, leftist. Is it socialism that still haunts the phrase for you? It shouldn’t. You are now supporting an administration which is practicing the sort of industrial-military socialism that Bismarck developed. Is the socialism of, for instance, neighborhood control of the community’s resources really more frightening than that?

Which reminds me of Ocean Hill-Brownville, or People’s Park. Senator, they were doing just what you used to talk about. You should have been there. Your old ideas were.

You used to make the liberals froth when you spoke against federal influence in the schools. Federal money, you used to say, inevitably leads to federal pupils, and the liberals turned pale, threw up their dickies, and said you were a heartless monster. Well, they treated McCoy the same way at Ocean Hill when he said that his folks should run their own school and not your folks.

And your old buddy Ronald Reagan! Now there’s a lesson in liberty for you. On one side of People’s Park there is the State of California with its right of eminent domain. It took the land. I would say it stole the land. How, I wonder, do you describe the right of eminent domain? On the other side are people who have an exotic notion about ownership. They don’t think it should be exercised at the point of a gun or a bayonet. They worked that land. They homesteaded it. They owned it in a sense far deeper than any government proclamation. Think of it that way: a scrap of government paper on one side; real people on the other, and your old friend Ronald Reagan, so help us, now supporting that scrap of paper against the people, with as much bloodcurdling diligence as any man you ever fought in the political arena. Senator, are you really sure you want to be a deputy sheriff for state power? That’s just what you are on the other side of the fence at the People’s Park!

Student dissent generally? Why did you have to come down so solidly on the side of the police? Don’t you remember that they are the employees of the state, not the people? Why couldn’t we have heard your rebel voice, instead of your company manners, when push came to shove at Berkeley and Columbia? Wasn’t that a time to re-examine the entire structure of the system? Was there any more appropriate man to do it, after the years you had spent talking about the dangers of a schooling that might force people to conform rather than encourage them to think? Why couldn’t you, of all men, see what was on the other side of those broken windows on the campus?

We had a discussion once about the campus scene, and it seemed clear to me that you would be in a far different position as a student than you are as a senator. Not long ago, you reminded me, marijuana was as common a smoke as burley in the Southwest. Nobody thought much about it, you said. I don’t really know what you thought about it then, but I can’t imagine anyone else in the Senate with your sort of good, bull-headed devotion to politically inadvisable principles, who could better take the lead in stopping the insane rampage against young people going on across the country in connection with a drug which, you freely admit, was as common as and much less troublesome than whiskey back where you came from.

The draft is another raid on young people that you did take the lead on—once. It was your very first presidential campaign pledge. You didn’t bullshit about it. You said that as president you would end the draft. Period. Just end it. You didn’t fuzz it up with after the emergency or after we study it, like your chum Dick. You may recall that the draft was the subject of our very last conversation. In preparation for your return to the Senate, I had worked up material for a flat-out repeal of the draft which, I felt, could appropriately be your first order of business when you were in the Senate and, hopefully, raising hell instead of brownie points.

I don’t cry about politics anymore, but if I did, I surely would have when you replied that in regard to anti-draft legislation you thought you should wait and see what Dick Nixon was going to do! You know what Dick Nixon always does! He shillies for a while. Then he shallies. Then he very carefully sets out in every direction at once, arriving exactly nowhere some time later, but promising that tomorrow he’ll begin again.

But, since you’ve returned to the Senate, it seems as if you are forever checking with someone to see if the coast is clear. You used to tell a joke about the little old lady you met in the hotel lobby who asked if you didn’t used to be Senator Goldwater. It’s getting less funny as time goes on. Something is happening out in the world, out on the streets. Much of it involves things you have said and thought throughout your life; much it involves things with which you profoundly disagree but which you should at least subject to a new dialogue. All of it involves a basic crisis, the sort of broken faith in state power that you have urged, the sharp awareness of the meaning of political power as the power of people against the power of overriding institutions. On the other hand (I mean the other side, your side now), there is ossification, resistance to radical change, support of vested power, liberal reformism, rule and repression by fiat and that most abhorrent of all organically collectivist notions—that the state really can and should claim the loyalty, blood and lives of all born to its borders and its bias.

Maybe that’s where you want to be after all. If I had only read about you, over the years, I would come to that conclusion and let the matter drop as being of little real importance. But instead, I have worked with you over the years. I think that even with the absolute disagreement I now have with you in regard to American imperialism, corporate-state capitalism, and anti-communism, there is such a crucial point of mutual interest on the New Left in regard to political power (it properly exists only in the people and in their communities) that you should be here and not over there. Because that’s where it’s at today, Senator. Here or there. The left of the individual people of this entire earth, taking back the power that the politicians and the exploiters stole from them, or the right of reaction, of established authority, of vested interests, of police, politics, and power.

There was a time when you used to drive the professional pols stark, staring mad because whenever you discovered that you had made a mistake on a position you would just come right out and say, Folks, I was wrong. Now here’s how it is.

Well, again, take a long, hard look at the contradictions between liberty at home, imperialism abroad; anti-colonialism abroad, black colonialism at home; free markets in the speeches, state-industrial-complex in the reality; local responsibility in the platforms, local suppression in the precinct houses; anti-communism for Castro, detente for Brezhnev; unshirted hell about welfare programs, unzippered lust for warfare programs.

I will have to admit that there is not exactly a long line queued up on the New Left waiting to hear from you. But there’s a hell of a lot more room for you over here, I would think, than in a Republican Party which regards Everett Dirksen as a hero and you as a maverick, respectable now only because you seem to have been broken to the bit.

In case you want to visit my side some time, there are a lot of pamphlets and things around that you might find interesting. And ideas. And, most of all, people. Good people. Love to see you over here. But if not, that’s okay. We’ll be up your way sooner or later anyway. See you. Right on.

Karl Hess is a former editor of Newsweek. He was the principal author of the 1960 Republican platform, a co-author of the 1964 platform, and Goldwater’s chief speech writer.

Now available thanks to Robert Graham at Robert Graham's Anarchism Weblog:

Robert Graham's Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas presents Bakunin's critique of the Church and State, posted in support of Pussy Riot.

Read the whole thing at Robert Graham's Anarchism Weblog.

Now available thanks to Shawn P. Wilbur at Contr'un:

 Here's the concluding section of Déjacque's "The Revolutionary Question," which undoubtedly contains a couple of the most fire-breathing footnotes in the literature:

The Revolutionary Question

Conclusion

Thus, as solution, liberty, equality and fraternity.

Liberty of thought,

Liberty of love,

Liberty of labor,

Liberty of action :

Liberty in everything and for everyone.

Equality of rights, equality of duties: social equality.

Fraternity, that is social character impressed by the simultaneous action of liberty and equality on the page of humanity; vignette which follows from the text; last syllable which concludes the formula according to the spelling out of two others; qualifier of solidarity and unity.

And, as means of operation, as transitional means, direct legislation.

And let no one repeat that the people are too ignorant; that it is to put into their hands an instrument of which they will no know how to make use; that they must wait, and wait for those who have the science to govern them. No, I would respond to these leather-breeches of the revolution, to these Decembraillards of the dictatorship. It is only by working at the forge that one learns to be a blacksmith; it is only by making law that the people will learn to make them well. I know well that the apprentice blacksmith strikes himself more than once on the fingers before knowing to forge well. That teaches him to pay more attention to what he does, and, as they say, “to make the trade enter the fingers.” The people, apprentice legislators, will also sometimes strike themselves by legislating, which will teach them to examine more closely the propositions and better manage their vote. And if, one day, it makes bad laws, the next day, it will be done with them, and put them on the scrap heap, ...

Read the whole thing at Contr'un.