This is the transcript of a video that appeared on the Springtime Of Nations youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJb2-bsWP6Y

If you’ve ever seen socialists talk about anarcho-capitalism you’ve probably noticed that they are very insistent that it is not a form of anarchism. Often they’ll even refuse to write the word without quotation marks on the “an”. Their argument is that Anarchism has historically referred to an ideology which advocates forcible collectivization or redistribution of private property, and which treats the traditionally organized private business as equivalent to or even worse than the state. So, are they correct in this claim? Spoiler alert: No. After a ton of research, I’ve put together a fairly comprehensive explanation of why that is. So sit back, settle in and enjoy. This is Byron with Springtime Of Nations, and today: the history of Anarchism.

Ok, so before we get into this, I have to point out that any question that can be formulated as “is X Y” is dependent on the definitions of X and Y, which are not objective facts. Language is just a tool to communicate, and the word “anarchism” is just a sound that I’m making with my monkey mouth right now to try to communicate some idea to you other monkeys watching this. If I told you that by “anarchist” I meant someone who watches Neon Genesis Evangelion, than it may be prudent for you to just accept that and use a different word for the political ideology, at least in the context of that particular conversation. 

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. The ideas of Anarcho-Capitalism do not become any more or less just or correct based on whether you label them as “Anarchism” or not. So, I guess we’ve solved this one. Video over. Thanks for watching. Just kidding.

While the word itself is a matter of semantics, there are certainly actual disagreements of fact about the history that surrounds it. If you ask the average anarcho-communist  about this, they’ll act like what happened was Anarchism was collectivist from its inception and everyone agreed with this until the 1950s when Murray Rothbard randomly started calling himself an anarchist. As I’m going to explain in this video, that is not in fact what happened at all. As we go through this history it’s also going to become very clear that the meaning of words naturally evolves over time, which is something the socialist self described “anarchists” consistently fail to grasp when they act as though “but proudhon called himself a socialist” is this devastating argument. Ironically, its often these same people who will get extremely upset about calling fascists socialist, even though the fascists were using this term much more recently than the individualist anarchists, and if you forget about labels and look purely at economic policy, the views of most fascists were much closer to modern socialism than the views of someone like Benjamin Tucker were.

But I digress. Anarchist History. Let’s go. The first recorded use of the word Anarchism in the English language comes in 1642, at the start of the English civil war. Here it wasn’t a political ideology, no one was going around calling themselves an Anarchist at this point. It was used as a pejorative, probably by supporters of King Charles to describe the parliamentarians who they saw as rebelling against the king. Basically calling them advocates of leaderlessness and chaos.

It wasn’t until about 200 years later in France that Pierre Joseph Proudhon began using the word Anarchism to describe his ideology. He was the first person to do this, and the father of anarchism. In his 1840 essay “What is property?” Proudhon defines anarchy as the absence of a master or sovereign, writing:  Neither heredity, nor election, nor universal suffrage, nor the excellence of the sovereign, nor the consecration of religion and of time, can make royalty legitimate. Whatever form it takes, — monarchic, oligarchic, or democratic, — royalty, or the government of man by man, is illegitimate and absurd.” 

Clearly, no anarcho-capitalist would disagree with this. If you were to ask an ancap to define anarchy they would probably say something very similar, a stateless society. And yet, the very same collectivist anarchists who so fiercely denounce Rothbardianism tend to be much more willing to accept Proudhon as “The father of anarchism”. Why is that? Well, essentially it boils down to a statement Proudhon makes in that same essay in answer to the title of the work: “Property is robbery!”. On its surface, this sounds quite antithetical to the Rothbardian view, not to mention self contradictory. How can property be theft, when the concept of theft itself presupposes the idea of property? And it gets even more complicated when Proudhon, in a later work entitled “Systems of economical contradictions” declares “Property is Liberty!” while still maintaining the Property is theft line.

So what is going on here? Well, to answer that question, we have to understand that Proudhon is French. And there are two very important implications of that. Firstly, it means he’s part of the tradition of continental philosophy, so like Neitzche, Hegel and Foucualt he has a tendency to write somewhat poetically, even at the expense of clarity at times. And secondly, in 19th century France, and Europe as a whole, a large portion of land was still owned by aristocrats, who had acquired their land, and therefore their wealth, not by homesteading, and providing value through a series of voluntary transactions, but by being part of the state. So this property was indeed theft in the straightforward Rothbardian sense. That is, it was land stolen from the peasants who worked it by a hereditary class of nobles that formed the medieval state.

These landed titles were rightfully abolished in the French Revolution of 1789, but were later partially restored. By the time of the 1840s when Proudhon wrote “what is property”? French society was again becoming discontent with this state of affairs. So, the property that Proudhon identifies with Liberty is not in principle the same as the property he identifies with theft, but he believed that in practice the two had become entangled, and the essence of his political ideology, which he named “Anarchism” was an effort to disentangle the two. At one point in “What is Property” Proudhon makes this explicit, declaring his agreement with another philosopher Pierre Leroux in the statement “There is property and property, — the one good, the other bad. Now, as it is proper to call different things by different names, if we keep the name ‘property’ for the former, we must call the latter robbery, rapine, brigandage. If, on the contrary, we reserve the name ‘property’ for the latter, we must designate the former by the term possession, or some other equivalent; otherwise we should be troubled with an unpleasant synonymy.”

When a classical liberal economist, Jérôme-Adolphe Blanqui wrote to Proudhon saying that it was not really property he wanted to abolish, but the abuse of property, Proudhon basically agreed, saying: 

“M. Blanqui acknowledges that property is abused in many harmful ways; I call property the sum of these abuses exclusively. To each of us property seems a polygon whose angles need knocking off; but, the operation performed, M. Blanqui maintains that the figure will still be a polygon, while I consider that this figure will be a circle.” It is kind of strange that he would say this and then go on to say property is liberty, but this was quite a while before he wrote that in his essay “economical contradictions”, so he presumably changed his mind about whether the term “property” could be salvaged in the interim.

Proudhon was not the only one disturbed by the contradictions of society at the time, and in fact  tensions would soon boil over in the 1848 revolution in France, which part of the larger “Springtime of Nations”, a series of Liberal revolutions in Europe for which this channel is named. The revolution, which was supported by both Proudhon and his frenemy, the classical liberal Frederic Bastiat, saw noble titles abolished again. But that same year saw the beginning of the rise of another idea, which would become the mortal enemy of Proudhon’s Anarchism: Communism. Although Karl Marx was influenced by Proudhon’s “what is property” essay, he would come to reject Proudhon’s ideas and wrote an entire essay attacking him called “The poverty of philosophy” in 1847.

The next year, amidst the revolutions, Marx and Engels published The Communist Manifesto. Proudhon clarified his “property is theft” statement several times, denouncing communism. In 1849, one year after the Springtime of Nations and and the publication of the communist manifesto, Proudhon would publish “Confessions of Revolutionary”, where he reflected on his involvement in the revolution and clarified his position somewhat. In this document he stated:

“In my first memoirs, attacking the established order at the front, I said, for example: Property is theft! It was a matter of protesting, so to speak in relief the nothingness of our institutions. I was not then occupied with anything else. Also, in the memoir in which I demonstrated, by A plus B, this stunning proposition, I had taken care to protest against any communist conclusion.”

Indeed, later one of Proudhon’s American followers, an Anarchist named Benjamin Tucker, who will come up later, would clarify Proudhon’s position using writing which is somewhat easier to understand, on account of his not being French:

“It will probably surprise many who know nothing of Proudhon save his declaration that ‘property is robbery’ to learn that he was perhaps the most vigorous hater of Communism that ever lived on this planet. But the apparent inconsistency vanishes when you read his book and find that by property he means simply legally privileged wealth or the power of usury, and not at all the possession by the labourer of his products.” 

“We believe, with Proudhon, that communism is the religion of poverty and slavery; at bottom it is the majority principle itself, and Liberty lives to do it battle.”

You’ll notice in that first quote that Tucker, like Proudhon, thought that Usury, or the charging of interest on loans, shouldn’t exist. Isn’t that contrary to the views of modern Anarcho-Capitalists? Well, it is contrary to our predictions for what a stateless society would look like, but not to our basic prescriptions for what such a society should be. In other words, Proudhon and Tucker were not in favor of banning usury by force, but instead thought that it would naturally disappear when the privileges granted by the state were eliminated.

In his debate with Frederic Bastiat on the topic, Proudhon clarified: “Interest is neither a crime nor an offense” and went on to say:

“this fundamental denial of Interest does not destroy, in our view, the principle – the right, if you will – which gives birth to Interest, and which has enabled it to continue to this day in spite of its condemnation by secular and ecclesiastical authority. So that the real problem before us is not to ascertain whether Usury, per se, is illegitimate (in this respect we are of the opinion of the Church), nor whether it has an excuse for its existence (on this point we agree with the economists). The problem is to devise a means of suppressing the abuse without violating the Right – a means, in a word, of reconciling this contradiction.”

By the way, if you aren’t familiar with this debate, I would highly recommend checking out Roderick Long’s commentary on it. At one point in their exchange Bastiat compliments Proudhon on having “Crushed communism”. I’ll put the link to that in the description. Bastiat is today considered one of the greatest minds of classical liberalism, and as I have pointed out in previous videos, it is highly notable that despite vehemently disagreeing about whether interest on loans would ultimately exist in a free market, they were quite complementary of each other and seemed to consider themselves to be fundamentally on the same side. This is probably even more true of Bastiat’s greatest disciple, Gustave de Molinari, who was the first classical liberal to advocate complete statelessness. Like Bastiat, Molinari criticized Proudhon on interest, but also wrote to Proudhon, inviting him to publish some of his writings in Molinari’s magazine.

Anyway, once again, this was later put in more straightforward language by Benjamin Tucker. in his response to Auberon Herbert, a British thinker who first  coined the term Voluntaryist. Herbert did not identify as an Anarchist, but his positions were very close to those of Proudhon and Tucker, and he often contributed to Tucker’s magazine.

“Auberon Herbert, in his paper, Free Life, asks me how I justify a campaign against the right of men to lend and to borrow. I answer that I do not justify such a campaign, have never attempted to justify such a campaign, do not advocate such a campaign, in fact am ardently opposed to such a campaign. In turn, I ask Mr. Herbert how he justifies his apparent attribution to me of a wish to see such a campaign instituted. It is true that I expect lending and borrowing to disappear, but not by any denial of the right to lend and borrow. On the contrary, I expect them to disappear by virtue of the affirmation and exercise of a right that is now denied,—namely, the right to use one’s own credit, or to exchange it freely for another’s, in such a way that one or the other of these credits may perform the function of a circulating medium, without the payment of any tax for the privilege.”

He also says basically the same thing in response to another reader of his magazine Liberty:

“No Anarchist disputes that it is perfectly legitimate to borrow upon such terms as may be agreed upon in a free market. The complaint of Anarchism is that the market is not free, and that the transactions effected therein are necessarily tainted with injustice. At present, if the young man borrows, whether of the cook or of the bank, the terms of contract are dictated to his disadvantage, by means of a legal privilege or monopoly enjoyed by the bank”

Like many modern Anarcho-Capitalists, Proudhon called for a controlled process of political reform and transition to statelessness after the revolutionary capture of the state. In his essay “The state, its nature, object, and destiny”, Proudhon clarifies that this process should involve market reforms and and tax reform, and denounces the idea of “soaking the rich” and increasing the overall tax burden:

“The Revolution of February raised two leading questions: one economic, the question of labor and property; the other political, the question of government or the State.

On the first of these questions the socialistic democracy is substantially in accord. They admit that it is not a question of the seizure and division of property, or even of its repurchase. Neither is it a question of dishonorably levying additional taxes on the wealthy and property-holding classes, which, while violating the principle of property recognized in the constitution, would serve only to overturn the general economy and aggravate the situation of the proletariat. The economic reform consists, on the one hand, in opening usurious credit to competition and thereby causing capital to lose its income,—in other words, in identifying, in every citizen to the same degree, the capacity of the laborer and that of the capitalist; on the other hand, in abolishing the whole system of existing taxes, which fall only on the laborer and the poor man, and replacing them all by a single tax on capital, as an insurance premium.

By these two great reforms social economy is reconstructed from top to bottom, commercial and industrial relations are inverted, and the profits, now assured to the capitalist, return to the laborer. Competition, now anarchical and subversive, becomes emulative and fruitful; markets no longer being wanting, the workingman and employer, intimately connected, have nothing more to fear from stagnation or suspension. A new order is established upon the old institutions abolished or regenerated.

We affirm, then, and as yet we are alone in affirming, that with the economic Revolution, no longer in dispute, the State must entirely disappear”

You’ll notice in this passage that Proudhon refers to socialistic democracy as agreeing with him when he says the property of the rich in general should not be seized or faced with increased taxation. That’s interesting, as it’s certainly not the position of self described socialists today. This is reflective of the fact that at this point, socialism was a relatively new term, the meaning of which was very much in flux. Proudhon used the term Socialist to signal a general allegiance to the lower social classes and a belief that if his ideas were implemented, they would be better off, which is not how the term would later be used. He also identified socialism with the idea that some things can and should be collectively owned so long as this is achieved voluntarily. On this subject he wrote:

“If by socialism you mean social right, as opposed to individual right, I accept this system as an integral part of the whole system of Humanity; but if you intend to give it predominance over liberty, I deny it. That is communism.”

In my earlier video on the origins of fascism, I called Proudhon a “Libertarian Socialist” for simplicity’s sake. But he never actually used that term for himself. In fact the only person who was calling himself a Libertarian in Proudhon’s day was the first person to do so, Joseph Dejacque. Somewhat ironically, Dejacque was a bitter rival of Proudhon’s, and denounced his individualism. First identifying with Proudhon’s term “Anarchist”, Dejacque soon began to use the term “Libertarian” more frequently, calling Proudhon a “center right anarchist, liberal and not libertarian”. Unlike many other self described socialists of the time, Dejacque was not at all interested in workers keeping the product of their labor. Instead, he maintained that one’s economic contributions were irrelevant, and anytime anyone produced anything of value they were obligated to give it to whoever needed it for free. I probably don’t need to tell you that this is the worldview of a parasite. Mashallah, it remained a fringe idea for the rest of Dejacque’s life. Neither his communistic views, nor his use of the word “Libertarian” would catch on. Dejacque’s magazine, The Libertarian, would only run for 3 years from 1858 to 1861.

Indeed, as long as Proudhon lived the Anarchist movement as a whole would remain relatively close to his views. Even of those self described anarchists who he had some disagreements with often did not disagree with him in a direction that modern anarcho-communists would like. For example, take Anselme Bellegarrigue. He was the author of the first Anarchist manifesto ever written, in 1850. This document is the original source of the often quoted phrase: “Anarchy is order, government is civil war”. That phrase would later be represented by the famous symbol of the A inside the O, meaning Anarchy and Order. What’s interesting about Bellegarrigue is that he was actually not an Anarchist by modern definitions, in that he believed the state should exist in a minimal form, only protecting the lives and property of citizens from domestic criminals and foreign armies. As the Anarchist manifesto states:

“There are only two points among the people on which no divergence of opinion can exist, two points on which converge the good sense of all parties irrespective of details.

Those two points are: The repression of crime against the person and against property, and the defense of the territory … So, well, why should we seek the guardian spirit of a government outside this reservoir of the common aspirations of all? Why should we permit the introduction of a dose of individual attachments to this potion prepared for the health of all?”

That’s right, the anarchy symbol that communists use today comes from a quote by a literal minarchist. The most important implication of the fact that Bellgarigue held this position is that it shows early anarchists believed that private property should in principle be protected, even by the state if they thought it necessary. Bellegarrigue goes on to argue that conservatives and liberals are afraid of socialism, but that they shouldn’t be, because socialism or any other doctrine cannot touch their property unless it is mandated through the state, and therefore it is really the state they should be afraid of.  In his words. “It is therefore shown that socialism is no more to be feared in itself than any other philosophical doctrine. It is established that it can become dangerous only in the condition of governing. That comes down to saying that nothing is dangerous which does not govern; from this it follows that whoever governs is already or can become dangerous — and the strict consequence is still that the nation can have no other public enemy than the government.”

When Proudhon died in 1865 however, the term Anarchist would begin down a path of being appropriated by some people with far more serious deviations from his ideology than Bellgairgue’s minarchism. 1864 has seen the establishment of the international workingmen’s association, later to become known as the First International, an ideologically eclectic alliance of groups affiliated with the labor movement. A common theme of its members was identification with the term socialism, although some elements of the group were recognizable as “socialists” by the terms modern definition, and others were not. In the group’s first few congresses Proudhonian anarchists largely dominated the discussion. At one point, Blanquists  (who were followers of Blanqui, but not the classical liberal Blanqui I mentioned earlier, but his younger brother, who was a statist communist) showed up and denounced the Proudhonists. But they were soon kicked out of the congress.

Unfortunately that would not be the last time their paths would cross. Before Proudhon died, he had designated his most trusted disciple Gustave Chaudey, as the executor of his estate, and basically expected him to succeed him as the next caliph of Anarchism. That sounds pretty important. So, why has basically no one heard of Chaudey? Well, it has to do with both the Blanquists and an Anarchist you might have heard of, Mikhael Bakunin. Although he was never personally close with Proudhon, he was influenced by him quite a bit, to the point that he self identified as an anarchist, although he was certainly influenced by Karl Marx as well. 

Bakunin was a pan-slavic nationalist, and was inspired by the property norms of the Russian peasantry, which were more collectivist and communal than those of western europe. He once criticized Proudhon’s individualism, writing: “How ridiculous are the ideas of the individualists of the Jean Jacques Rousseau school and of the Proudhonian mutualists who conceive society as the result of the free contract of individuals absolutely independent of one another and entering into mutual relations only because of the convention drawn up among men. As if these men had dropped from the skies, bringing with them speech, will, original thought, and as if they were alien to anything of the earth, that is, anything having social origin.” although he also at times claimed to be the true successor to Proudhon.

As Proudhon grew older, he made his views on property clearer and clearer, and not in a way Bakunin liked. On his deathbed Proudhon would declare:

“I protest that in criticising property, or rather the whole body of institutions of which property is the pivot, I never meant either to attack the individual rights recognized by previous laws, or to dispute the legitimacy of acquired possessions, or to instigate an arbitrary distribution of goods, or to put an obstacle in the way of the free and regular acquisition of properties by bargain and sale; or even to prohibit or suppress by sovereign decree land-rent and interest on capital. I think that all these manifestations of human activity should remain free and optional for all; I would admit no other modifications, restrictions, or suppressions of them than naturally and necessarily result from the universalization of the principle of reciprocity and of the law of synthesis which I propound. This is my last will and testament. I allow only him to suspect its sincerity, who could tell a lie in the moment of death.”

Bakunin basically ignored this, and chose to interpret Proudhon as advocating collectivization of property. As you might expect, the executor of Proudhon’s estate, Gustave Chaudey, was having none of this. The two men were set on a collision course, and this would become apparent in the early meetings of both the First International, as well as another group with largely overlapping membership, the League of Peace and Freedom. The League of Peace and Freedom was formed in response to the growing tension between France and Prussia, and sought to prevent the two powers from going to war. However, in practice they often ended up debating about random things they disagreed on. Naturally, one of those things was property. 

In the organization’s second annual congress at Berne, Switzerland, members voted on what their official position should be on collectivizing privately owned land. Chaudey, along with most of the self described Anarchists voted against that, which made sense, since at the time Anarchist largely meant someone who held Proudhon’s views, more or less. However, Bakunin emerged as the leader of a new faction of self described anarchists who called themselves collectivists. They voted with the likes of Karl Marx and other state socialists to collectivize property. Fortunately though, despite this defection, the Proudhonists still won the vote.

As Chaudey would recount in a letter: “We have done a good enough job at Berne. I found myself in hand-to-hand combat with the famous Bakunin, the Russian revolutionary, carrying in his wake all the collectivists, or partisans of collective property. It’s a new word for that old tune of communism. They also have away of conceiving of the federalist idea which, by expanding it and letting it spread and gowell beyond the concrete(the concrete is the true realism), reduce it to a pure abstraction, a chimera, an imperceptible generality, a sentimental banality. We fought all of that robustly and firmly, and, with a complete victory, we reconstituted the Peace League on a serious and robust foundation.”

This further entrenched the divide between the individualists under Chaudey and the collectivists under Bakunin, and caused Bakunin to grow closer to Marx. In fact, in a letter to Marx shortly after this incident, Bakunin would write:  “I understand better than ever how right you are in following, and in inviting us all to march on the wide road of economic revolution, and in denigrating those among us who would lose themselves on the paths of either national or exclusively political enterprises. I now do what you yourself commenced to do more than twenty years ago. – Since the solemn and public farewells that I addressed to the bourgeois at the Berne Congress, I have known no other society, no other milieu than the world of the workers. – My homeland now is the International of which you are one of the principal founders. – So you see, dear friend, that I am your disciple – and I am proud to be it.”
Unfortunately, despite losing the vote, Bakunin would begin to lead other Anarchists down this same road with him. The turning point came after the League of Peace and Freedom had failed to prevent the Franco-Prussian war, and France was decisively defeated. Soon the Prussians were laying siege to Paris, which happened to be a hotbed of revolutionary sentiment. This led to a sort of coup within the city of Paris, whereby revolutionaries disarmed the small Army garrison and took over the city, cutting ties with the French government and proclaiming a new government: the Paris Commune. 

The Paris commune’s leadership was even more ideologically diverse than the first international, with many not even necessarily identifying as socialist, but simply as Republicans opposed to the French Empire, and its Emperor Napoleon III. The largest single faction of the commune’s elected council were known simply as “independent revolutionaries”, and were somewhat ideologically vague. Several Proudhonist anarchists participated in the commune, among them Chaudey himself, but they were outnumbered and outorganized by the faction that hated them the most: the Blanquists.

Part of Blanquist ideology was the formation of secret cells prepared to violently overthrow the government when the time was right, and Proudhonists were not thinking that way. So, naturally when the Blanquists saw their chance they began working to take control of the commune, and exerted a disproportionate influence on the project. There also just happened to be more of them in the city of paris at the time, and because the city was surrounded first by the Prussian army and later by the French army, Proudhonist reinforcements from other parts of France couldn’t come to back Chaudey up.

So naturally, a few days before the commune was overrun by the French army, the Blanquists decided to take this opportunity to cut off the head of the Anarchist movement. They falsely accused Chaudey of being a spy for the French government and executed him. Chaudey’s last words were “I will show you how a Republican dies!” and then several cries of “long live the Republic!” as he was shot several times by the Blanquists.

Now, what do you think Bakunin did when he found out about this? Surely he condemned this outrageous  murder of his fellow anarchist by statists, right? Wrong! He basically said that Chaudey had gotten what he deserved. In the following meetings of the First International, Bakunin teamed up with a like minded Belgian collectivist Anarchist named Ceasar De Paepe, and went to work convincing the anarchist faction that Chaudey, Proudhon’s hand picked successor, had been misrepresenting the views of Proudhon and even forging documents.

This propaganda campaign against the now leaderless individualist anarchists proved very effective, and soon, even the French and Belgian anarchists, who had once comprised the stronghold of individualism, were either converted to collectivism or driven out of the international workingmen’s association. 

Once the individualists were taken care of, Karl Marx and his Statists turned on their erstwhile allies the anarcho-collectivists, and in 1872, expelled Bakunin and the remaining anarchists from the First International. Marx did this by using his influence to call for the next meeting to be held in the Netherlands, where he knew Bakunin would not be able to attend. This was because Bakunin was in Switzerland, and was a wanted man in both France and the newly formed German Empire. So, Bakunin wasn’t there to defend himself when they took the vote to expel him.  Bakunin and De Paepe had basically been  useful idiots for Marx. After this purge, the collectivist anarchists did form their own organization, called the Saint Imier congress, based in Switzerland.

At this point I want to mention that even though Bakunin and his followers were collectivists they were not Communists. They rejected the idea of “From each according to his ability to each according to his needs”. Bakunin’s economic views were somewhat vague, but were fairly close to what would later become known as Syndicalism, the idea that groups of workers and peasants should collectively own their own factories and farms, and engage in trade with other similarly organized groups of workers and peasants.

However, Bakunin’s followers gradually drifted away from this view over the course of the next four years, and when Bakunin died in 1876, European anarchism would drift still farther from its Proudhonist origins. At the 1877 meeting, The Italian section of the St. Imier Congress, led by a man named Errico Malatesta, would announce their allegiance to  what they called “Anarcho-Communism”, an ideology inspired by the teachings of one of Proudhon’s biggest enemies, Joseph DeJacque. With Bakunin now dead and unable to argue against them, they convinced most of the other anarcho-collectivists to follow suit, and then proceeded to dissolve the congress: the final death blow to the old European anarchist movement based around Proudhon.

So that’s the depressing tragedy of European Anarchism. Proudhon spent 25 years from 1840 to 1865 building up a movement which, while not perfectly aligned with modern Anarcho-Capitalism, was quite close to it. Then in the next 12 years it completely fell apart, descending first into collectivism and then outright communism before having its main organization dissolved entirely. The movement went from being close to Gustave de Molinari but disagreeing about interest, to being close to Karl Marx but disagreeing about the state.

But the flame was not extinguished! Across the Atlantic in America, a young Anarchist named Benjamin Tucker had watched with dismay the disintegration of the European Anarchist movement, and had resolved to do his best to set it straight. Tucker did not judge Bakunin nearly as harshly as I do, but he had a deep contempt for the self proclaimed “Anarcho-Communists” who had bastardized Proudhon’s movement Anarchism. In 1881, at the age of 27, Tucker launched an Anarchist magazine called Liberty, wherein he and many others would very effectively argue for the views of the original Anarchist movement. 

Tucker’s largely American audience were not easily swayed by collectivism, partly, as Karl Marx would observe, because of the difference in context between America and Europe. While Europe had a lot of concentrated wealth and land directly left over from feudalism, America had huge tracts of previously unowned wilderness which was claimed and settled by relatively poor people who made their fortunes through voluntary transactions. While there were of course many abuses enabled by the state, such as slavery and the genocide of native Americans, America was clearly more of a blank slate than Europe. So Proudhon’s “good property” and “bad property” were substantially less entangled than they had been in Europe.

Tucker also placed anarchism as a logical conclusion and outgrowth of the best ideas of the American Revolution, going so far as to famously quip: “The Anarchists are simply unterrified Jeffersonian Democrats. They believe that ‘the best government is that which governs least,’ and that which governs least is no government at all.”

Nevertheless, like Proudhon, Tucker identified Anarchism as a movement fundamentally aligned with labor in its quest to eliminate legal privilege and monopoly, which he believed would result in the elimination of interest and a more egalitarian society favorable to workers. As he would put it “Laissez Faire was very good sauce for the goose, labor, but was very poor sauce for the gander, capital.” For this reason Tucker continued to identify as a socialist. In addition to his view that the Free market would eliminate usury, he also believed that it would largely do away with rent. This is something you also often see floated by modern fake anarchists as “proof” that his views were incompatible with modern anarcho-capitalism. But again, when you look into the specifics of his views this doesn’t really hold up. In an exchange with one of Liberty’s reader’s, who went by the pseudonym “Egoist”, Tucker explains why he thinks rent won’t occur, or will at least be less common, under free market anarchy. The correspondence is very long, but to summarize: He says that the cost of hiring a person or private defense company to defend a piece of land is often greater than the value of the rent you would be able to charge for the land, and so it would not be profitable to attempt to charge people rent.

He says that the reason people are able to do this now, is because the state exists and subsidizes absentee ownership by protecting everyone’s land for free with the police. Modern anarcho-capitalists tend to disagree with this reasoning, but just like his and Proudhon’s position on interest, this really just amounts to different economic predictions about the free market. It is true that Tucker hoped things would turn out that way, but that’s really the same position as our Left-Libertarian friends at C4SS hold, and although they like Tucker don’t like to call themselves capitalist for these reasons, they don’t go around claiming that Ancaps aren’t real anarchists the way that modern commies do. It should also be pointed out that Tucker did own multiple pieces of land, his personal home, and well as his book shop, Unique Books, in New York. Tucker ran that bookshop as a private business for a profit, and had at least one employee there who he paid a wage.

Tucker  also sought to connect with the remnants of the Anarchist movement in Europe and elsewhere.  The same year he started Liberty, 1881, saw the foundation of a new international anarchist organization, the international working people’s association, or black international, in London.

In the second issue of Liberty, Tucker hails the new organization with optimism, and a resolution not to allow it to go the way of the first international. He wrote: “A significant feature of this re-establishment of the International is the thorough accordance of its new plan of organization with strictly anarchistic principles. Every precaution has been taken to avoid even the show of authority and to secure the largest liberty to the component parts of the association. Good! In Liberty there is strength. Henceforth the International is secure against destruction from within by ambition or from without by malevolence.” 

Although it was started in London, most of the new group’s strength would come to lie in America. However, Tucker’s optimism would soon dissolve as the black international would start to succumb to communism. One of the chief architects of this movement was Tucker’s arch rival, Johann Most. Originally a German Marxist politician, Most started calling himself an Anarchist, which led to him being expelled, not voluntarily leaving, the Germany’s Marxist party, the SDAP, the year before Tucker started publishing Liberty. 

Soon after this, Most would immigrate to Chicago where he became the core of the so called anarcho-communist movement in America. His disciples consisted mostly of German immigrants to Chicago, and they steadily began to take over the International working people’s association. At the time observers would speak of a split between the Tucker’s “Boston Anarchists” who were individualists, and Mosts’ “Chicago Anarchists” who were communists. As Tucker would later describe the relationship between the two: “John Most used to say–and I understand that most Communists agree with him–that on the night of the revolution the first number on the programme will be a massacre of the ‘Tuckerites.” 

Tucker actually published several issues of German language version of Liberty, Libertas, to compete with Mosts’ newspaper Freiheit among the German speaking Chicagoans, but it did not achieve much popularity.  Most proceeded to run the International Working People’s association into the ground with his adventurist advocacy of riots and assassinations, culminating in the 1886 Haymarket Riot, which saw Most’s gang engage head on in an armed clash with the gang calling themselves the police. This led to the seven prominent chicago anarchists receiving the death sentence and a general crackdown against anarchist activities.

In the aftermath of this affair, Tucker responded in Liberty to the suggestion that his movement should stop calling itself anarchist in order to distance themselves from the bomb throwing communist terrorists. Tucker was Adamant that they stand their ground, writing: “My Wichita Falls comrade, Mr. Warren, falls into error when he accuses me of “adopting the nomenclature of a class with whom no individualist could harmonize,” meaning, I suppose, by this class the Communists who call themselves Anarchists. Is Mr. Warren aware that the Chicago men never dreamed of adopting the name Anarchist until long after Liberty was started, and that the Communistic Anarchists of Europe did not so style themselves until nearly forty years after Proudhon used the name, for the first time in the world, to designate a social philosophy? Proudhon was an individualist, and to him and those who fundamentally agree with him belongs, by right of discovery and use, the employment of the word Anarchy in scientific terminology. We individualists hold the original title, and we do not propose to be evicted by the first upstart Communist who comes along with a fraudulent claim.”

And Tucker and his friends did in fact experiment with some other terminology for their ideas. In 1884, Tucker wrote in Liberty that “The world is fast dividing itself into two schools, the Authoritarians and the Libertarians, the Archists and the Anarchists”. And following this, he would occasionally refer to himself as a Libertarian, although he preferred the word Anarchist. So, are we to take the fact that Tucker is using Dejacque’s term “Libertarian” to mean that he considers himself on the same side as Joseph DeJacque? No, for a few reasons. First of all, if its not clear by now, Tucker was a huge stan of Proudhon, who Dejacque hated. Secondly, although Dejacque did not actually use the word communism, he clearly was a communist, and as I’ve shown in a million quotes by now, Tucker hated Communism.

So, did Tucker steal the communist’s word, Libertarian? Well, you could say that, but there are some nuances here. Dejacque was a pretty obscure figure, so his use of the term “Libertarian” did not catch on, even among the more anti-property anarchists. Bakunin for example did not call himself a Libertarian. Even Malatesta and the self proclaimed anarcho-communists who dissolved the International workingman’s association did not immediately use that word.

According to “The Anarchist FAQ” which is a collectivist source, the next time the term was used by communists after 1861 was in 1880 when the phrase “libertarian communism” was used at an obscure regional conference in France. It’s very possible Tucker was not even aware of this. After that, communists don’t really start calling themselves Libertarians again until 1892, when a communist named Jean Faure revived Dejacque’s paper “The Libertarian” in French Algeria. This was several years *After* Tucker had already started using the term.

So,  I think it’s fair to say that the communists were not really using the term “Libertarian” at the time and therefore by the standard of occupancy and use, it was available to be homesteaded by the individualist anarchists, that is the real anarchists.

In any case Tucker would continue to fight the good fight about twenty years after the haymarket riot, until his book store in New York burned down in 1908.  After this, Tucker was pretty tired of arguing with a world full of idiots, and decided to hang up his hat and retire to France for the rest of his life. In his old age, Tucker became less optimistic about the prospects for a free society, saying that the decades of state intervention and corporatism might make it so that even if the state were abolished, monopoly would be triumphant, however, in the same paragraph he said that anarchists should still not favor state socialism, because that was the direction society was headed anyway, and someone needed to be around to argue for competition. Around the same time he also began to believe that civilization as a whole was probably doomed. In private correspondence though, Tucker also wrote “capitalism is at least tolerable, which cannot be said of state socialism or communism”. 

Tucker’s descent into pessimism would mark the beginning of the dark age of Anarchism. A period from 1908 until the 1950s when the commies who stole the term predominated, and the flame of individualist anarchism was only kept alive by a handful of people. One of the most important characters from this period was H.L. Mencken, a famous journalist who devoted much of his career to attacking the excesses of government. Because individualist anarchism was so obscure by this point, Mencken did not call himself an anarchist to avoid association with the communist anarchists, but he was certainly familiar with and nostalgic for the old anarchism.

How do we know this? There are a few pieces of evidence. First, Mencken would write in 1919 that ““Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.” The black flag he is referencing, is the black flag of anarchism. 

Mencken would later publish a dictionary of quotes, in which he included several quotes relating to the state from Proudhon and other classical anarchists.

Mencken would also explicitly lament the capture of the term anarchism by the communists, at one point writing a denunciation of Tucker’s old Rival Johann Most, and contrasting his vision with the philosophy of his personal hero Neitzeche, who Mencken considered an anarchist. 

He wrote: “It is obvious, of course, that the sort of anarchy preached by Nietzsche differs vastly from the beery, collarless anarchy preached by Herr Most and his unwashed followers. The latter contemplates a suspension of all laws in order that the unfit may escape the natural and rightful exploitation of the fit, whereas the former reduces the unfit to de facto slavery and makes them subject to the laws of a master class, which, in so far as the relations of its own members, one to the other, are concerned, recognizes no law but that of natural selection. To the average American or Englishman the very name of anarchy causes a shudder, because it invariably conjures up a picture of a land terrorized by low-browed assassins with matted beards, carrying bombs in one hand and mugs of beer in the other. But as a matter of fact, there is no reason whatever to believe that, if all laws were abolished tomorrow, such swine would survive the day. They are incompetents under our present paternalism and they would be incompetents under dionysian anarchy.”

It is no surprise than, that Mencken would use Tucker’s word “Libertarian” to refer to himself in 1923, and although he didn’t use that word often, his use of the word would later be adapted by the new Libertarian movement of the 1950s. To understand this new libertarian movement, you have to understand a pretty obscure figure by the name of Frank Chodorov. Chodorov was a writer for Mencken’s publication American Mercury, and like Mencken, he basically agreed with the classical anarchists, but disdained the communist direction the movement had taken.

Reflecting on love for anarchism as a young man, Chodorov would later write:

“I don’t know whether I took to Kropotkin and Proudhon because they furnished me with arguments with which to refute the socialists on the campus or because they wrote much about individualism, which seems to be ingrained in my make-up.”

In that quote he mentions Kropotkin, an anarcho-communist of the early 20th century. Chodorov would distance himself from the term anarchist as he came to appreciate the extent of contemporary anarchists hostility to private property, writing:

“If a man cannot enjoy the fruits of his labor, without let or hindrance, he is enslaved to the one who appropriates his property; a slave has no property rights. Besides, I reasoned, the abolition of private property could be accomplished only by the intervention of an all-powerful State, which the anarchists were so bent on destroying. This incongruity curbed my short lived passion for anarchism.”.

Like Mencken, Chodorov would find himself interacting mainly with the American right, although he always vociferously rejected being labelled as a conservative, declaring “As for me, I will punch anyone who calls me a conservative in the nose. I am a radical.” 

It was Chodorov who would first coin the modern libertarian rallying cry of “Taxation is theft” with his 1947 pamphlet “Taxation is robbery!”. And it was this pamphlet that would attract the attention of a young student named Murray Rothbard. Rothbard had grown up in a milieu of Marxism and collectivist anarchism. His parents had been anarcho-communists in their younger days, but had grown to reject it. However, they still had the book Anarchism by Paul Eltzbacher  lying around in their library, which a young Rothbard was quick to pick up. Eltzbacher was not an anarchist, but many anarchists would value his book as a historical record long after its publication in 1900. This included Steven T. Byington, an individualist anarchist and regular contributor to Tucker’s Liberty.

Because of the book’s historical value and the fact that it specifically discussed Benjamin Tucker and Liberty and length, Byington translated the work into English for publication in Liberty. It was this translation that a young Rothbard would read in his early adolescence. Initially a paleoconservative, after reading Chodorov’s taxation is robbery, Rothbard would become a disciple of Chodorov, who in turn introduced him to the works of H L Mencken. Impressed by the uncompromising nature of their critiques of the state, and intrigued by their references to Anarchy, Rothbard decided to investigate anarchism more thoroughly. At that time, the late 1940s, Individualist anarchism was a very obscure doctrine, far overshadowed by the self proclaimed communist anarchists.

However, Rothbard was aware of Tucker from the Eltzbacher book he had read as a child, and decided to investigate him. As luck would have it, the only library in the world which contained an archive of Tucker was in New York, where Rothbard lived. After reading through Liberty vociferously in the winter of 1949, Rothbard was converted. That same winter, he would attend the seminar of Ludwig Von Mises, and likewise be converted to the Austrian school of economics. 

Proudhon and Tucker had written at a time when the dominant school of economic thought was the classical economics of Adam Smith, which led to their acceptance of the labor theory of value and their belief that interest and rent would be eliminated by free market competition. However, Rothbard’s education in the Austrian school led him to reject this idea, and he would merge Mises’ economic views with Tucker’s political views to form the core of a new ideology which he would later call “Anarcho-Capitalism”.

Rothbard would explain this in his essay “The Spooner Tucker Doctrine, an economists view”, wherein he would highly praise Tucker along with another individualist anarchist who I’m sure many anarcho-capitalists watching this are aware of: Lysander Spooner. However, Rothbard would also qualify his praise noting that he objected to their economic views. He wrote:

“First, I must begin by affirming my conviction that Lysander Spooner and Benjamin R. Tucker were unsurpassed as political philosophers and that nothing is more needed today than a revival and development of the largely forgotten legacy that they left to political philosophy.”

“I am, therefore, strongly tempted to call myself an “individualist anarchist,” except for the fact that Spooner and Tucker have in a sense preempted that name for their doctrine and that from that doctrine I have certain differences. Politically, these differences are minor, and therefore the system that I advocate is very close to theirs; but economically, the differences are substantial, and this means that my view of the consequences of putting our more or less common system into practice is very far from theirs.”

Modern collectivist anarchists often like to cite a certain couple out of context Rothbard quotes in order to claim that he and his followers are not anarchists. Firstly Rothbard wrote:

“One gratifying aspect of our rise to some prominence is that, for the first time in my memory, we, “our side,” had captured a crucial word from the enemy. Other words, such as “liberal,” had been originally identified with laissez-faire libertarians, but had been captured by left-wing statists, forcing us in the 1940s to call ourselves rather feebly “true” or “classical” liberals. “Libertarians,” in contrast, had long been simply a polite word for left-wing anarchists, that is for anti-private property anarchists, either of the communist or syndicalist variety. But now we had taken it over, and more properly from the view of etymology; since we were proponents of individual liberty and therefore of the individual’s right to his property”

As I noted earlier, the word Libertarian did come into consistent use by the communists to which Rothbard refers until around the turn of the 20th century, and before that it had been used on and off by both sides, although it was originally coined by the communist Joseph Dejacque.  In the 20th century though, the term was actually first taken by “Our side” on the suggestion of Dean Russell, shortly followed by Frank Chodorov. Chodorov’s involvement makes me suspect that this was influenced by his days as an anarchist, but I can’t prove that. In any case, in this quote Rothbard is referring to the word “Libertarian” not the word “Anarchist”, and somewhat ironically, modern Rothbardians actually have a much better historical claim to the word “Anarchist” than the word Libertarian.

“Aha!” say the collectivists!, but what about the Rothbard quote where he says “We are not anarchists”? Well, let’s look at that one one in context.

“We must conclude that the question “are libertarians anarchists?” simply cannot be answered on etymological grounds. The vagueness of the term itself is such that the libertarian system would be considered anarchist by some people and archist by others. We must therefore turn to history for enlightenment; here we find that none of the proclaimed anarchist groups correspond to the libertarian position, that even the best of them have unrealistic and socialistic elements in their doctrines. Furthermore, we find that all of the current anarchists are irrational collectivists, and therefore at opposite poles from our position. We must therefore conclude that we are not anarchists, and that those who call us anarchists are not on firm etymological ground, and are being completely unhistorical. On the other hand, it is clear that we are not archists either: we do not believe in establishing a tyrannical central authority that will coerce the noninvasive as well as the invasive. Perhaps, then, we could call ourselves by a new name: nonarchist.”

The first thing to note about this quote is that its from an article that Rothbard never had published, and it contradicts the angle Rothbard states multiple times in other sources both before and after this was written in the mid 1950s. Rothbard was calling himself a “private property anarchist” in private correspondence by 1950, and In Betrayal of The American Right, Rothbard specifically says “I became an anarchist”, and he says the same thing in a talk he gave on his ideological development in 1981, just as a couple of quick examples.

Secondly, if you carefully compare this quote to what he wrote in “The Spooner Tucker Doctrine”, the only difference is that in that text, he emphasizes that his disagreements with Spooner and Tucker about actual political prescriptions are only minor. Even in the “nonarchist” article, the main point he’s stressing is that most of his contemporaries who called themselves anarchists were commies, and he wanted to distance himself from them. And who can blame him? Since the last Saint Imier congress in 1877, the collectivist anarchists had only gotten worse.

Some of them would misappropriate Proudhon’s ideas into Syndicalism, and go on to form the protofascist “cercle proudhon” which we covered in an earlier video. Others would devolve into Chomskyites, or what Keith Preston has dubbed “Anarcho-Social Democrats”. Despite their severe distortion of Proudhon’s word “Anarchism”, the early anarcho-communists could at least be said to have some sincere idea of freedom. Makhno’s Black Army for example would abolish taxation and refuse to control the operation of Ukraine’s railroads. But none of that virtue can be found in the likes of Noam Chomsky and his modern followers who call themselves anarchists. These are people who say “maybe someday we’ll be against the state” but in practice cheer for its growth at every turn. So called anarchists head over heels in love with the very welfare state that Bismark first used to suppress revolutionary sentiment. Chomsky has even  expressed support for gun control. A complete joke.

Not all of them are that bad. Murray Bookchin for instance was much more serious about Anarchism, and consequently, not as virulently hostile to Libertarianism a la Rothbard. At one point he said: “People who resist authority, who defend the rights of the individual, who try in a period of increasing totalitarianism and centralization to reclaim these rights—this is the true left in the United States. Whether they are anarcho-communists, anarcho-syndicalists, or libertarians who believe in free enterprise, I regard theirs as the real legacy of the left, and I feel much closer, ideologically, to such individuals than I do to the totalitarian liberals and Marxist-Leninists of today.” –
Its no surprise than, that Bookchin would eventually become disillusioned with the anarchist movement and stop calling himself by that name towards the end of his life. Happily, his ideas have lived on and been implemented to some extent in Rojava, as we have discussed in a previous video.

In any case, I hope this video has clarified some points about the history of anarchism, and the individualist lineage of Rothbardian anarchism, from Proudhon, to Chaudey and Tucker, to Mencken and Chodorov, to Rothbard. Rothbard was an anarchist before he was even an Austrian, and his philosophy of Anarcho-Capitalism is merely the Anarchism of Spooner, Tucker and Proudhon through the lens of more modern economic analysis. The collectivists meanwhile, have attempted to obscure the truth at every turn. Bakunin lied about Proudhon and justified the murder of Chaudey, then Malatesta betrayed Bakunin and brought the ideology even closer to Marx. And now, Noam Chomsky, who can’t even live up to the sincere anti statism of Malatesta or Kropotkin, has the nerve to say that we’re not real anarchists?

Luckily, their whining doesn’t seem very effective. Ancaps today have reclaimed the mantle of anarchism from its collectivist usupers. I’d like to close out with a final quote from Benjamin Tucker on the subject: “They cannot answer Proudhon; they will not accept him; they must lie about him. But they should lie more shrewdly.”

If you’ve watched this all the way through, thank you so much. Please do smash that like button, these longer videos especially take quite a long time to research and create, and the quick second to click like really helps us out. But even more importantly, I have a question for my viewers: what historical libertarian or anarchist figure has influenced you the most? Leave a comment down below, as I do read every comment and if you have any questions for me I’ll probably respond.  If you like this content and you’d like to see more thoroughly researched content like this. I’d also recommend subscribing and turning on notifications as we’re just getting started on this channel and we have a lot more great stuff coming every week. 

Finally I have some exciting news. As you know if you’ve been reading these descriptions we recently partnered with the Liberty Guild Discord server, which I’ve linked in the description, so definitely go and check them out if you’re interested in having conversations with likeminded people. We’ve also recently launched Springtime Of Nations.org where you’ll see  global news on pan-secessionism, as well as Libertarian analysis similar to this video but in a written form. My friend Charlie Lee just recently published a very interesting story about a separatist village in Burma which the government just bombed. Link is in the description.

Ok, I just talked for a very long time. I think that’s everything. Until next time comrades, peace to you and yours.