National-Bolshevism, communism of-by-for fools: “What’s Left?” February 2016, MRR #393

Wir tanzen mit Faschismus
Und roter Anarchie
Eins, zwei, drei, vier
Kammerad, komm tanz mit mir

Laibach, “Tanz Mit Laibach”

You probably won’t be surprised to learn that Laibach has been accused of glorifying fascism in the past to which their response has been: ‘We are fascists as much as Hitler was a painter.’ Which I assume means they are fascists, they’re just very, very bad at it.

John Oliver. “Laibach goes to North Korea,” Last Week Tonight #45 (7/19/15)

It’s been close to a century since Karl Radek popularized the concept of National Bolshevism. It was June of 1923, after the successful workers’ revolution in Russia and a failed one in Germany which ended the first World War. As the Secretary of the Third International—the Communist International or Comintern—Radek hoped to rally support and solidarity among disaffected German rightwing soldiers, veterans and rank-and-file nationalists for the besieged Soviet Union. The goal was to firm up an alliance between the German Reichswehr and the Russian Red Army, irrespective of the interests of their different working classes, and to this end Radek made an infamous speech in the Executive Committee of the Comintern called “Leo Schlageter: The Wanderer into the Void,” which was endorsed by both Stalin and Zinoviev. Radek praised Schlageter—a conservative WWI veteran who joined the German paramilitary Freikorps to suppress the German workers’ soviet revolution of 1918-19 and who then was executed for sabotage against the French occupation army of the Ruhr—as a national hero and argued that “[t]he insistence on the nation in Germany is a revolutionary act.”

Long before the present-day red-brown alliances in Russian politics, over a decade before the Hitler-Stalin Nonaggression Pact, Radek’s “Schlageter Line” imposed an opportunistic alliance between para-fascist ex-military types and Germany’s revolutionary leftwing working class via the ever-pliant German Communist Party, the KPD. This was a strategy of National Bolshevism for the KDP and the German working class, ultimately to defend the Soviet Union and further that country’s interest in an alliance with Germany. To seal this pact with the devil, KDP Zentrale shut down the insurrectionary Hamburg Uprising by the district KP Wasserkante on October 22, 1923. Radek and Trotsky quickly defended the decision to stop the insurrection by condemning the uprising as premature. What followed was nearly a decade of on again/off again collaboration between the KDP and the NSDAP in the streets and the Reichstag against the SDP-dominated Weimar Republic.

This attraction to National Bolshevism on Radek’s part came as much from his personal experiences in Moabit prison trying to convert reactionary German nationalists to Bolshevism as from his reading of two renegade Hamburg communists, Laufenberg and Wolffheim, who coined the term National Bolshevism. These national communists promoted the idea of a dictatorship of the proletariat in the service of German nationalism, the formation of a German Red Army, and a German-Soviet nationalist-socialist alliance in an all-out war against the US and UK. Sound familiar? Radek’s temporary and purely tactical “Schlageter Line” was part of a shameful history of Soviet and KDP intransigence, sectarianism and double-dealing that ultimately delivered the German working class into the hands of the Nazi Party in power, much as the PCE’s (Spanish Communist Party) machinations and red terror finally betrayed the Spanish proletariat to the clutches of Franco. Radek’s contribution to this debacle was to legitimize, for the first time as an official representative of the Comintern, the synthesis of right and left, ultra-nationalism with revolutionary socialism in Germany, that was the prototype for the obsessions of fascism’s leftwing thereafter.

To be fair, there were plenty of left-leaning German fascists in the 1920s and 30s, both inside the Nazi Party (Röhm, Gregor and Otto Strasser) and outside (van den Bruck, Jünger, Niekisch). And had the concept of National Bolshevism not existed in Germany by 1923, circumstance would have contrived something analogous, mirroring a common argument made about Hitler. But the initial willingness on the part of the Bolsheviks to cultivate National Bolshevism in Germany came to bite the Left on its ass. (Victor Serge said of the Schlageter tactic: “It’s playing with fire—all right let’s play with fire!”) The ideal of a red-brown, Soviet-Nazi, Russian-German alliance has been a goal of leftwing fascism ever since. From the NSDAP breakaway Combat League of Revolutionary National Socialists through the ultra-Zionist, anti-imperialist LEHI (Stern Gang) in Mandated Palestine to the left Peronist FAR-Montoneros guerrillas in Argentina’s “Dirty War,” the archetypal synthesis of revolutionary left and right epitomized by National Bolshevism has recurred over and over, much like a periodic, virulent outbreak of herpes. Most recently, the anarcho/ultra milieu has witnessed @ publisher AK Press accuse white South African journalist, writer and AK author Michael Schmidt of being a secret National Anarchist in league with Troy Southgate.

AK Press did its due diligence, thoroughly investigated Schmidt’s background, and determined that the rumors of his involvement in National Anarchism were true despite his outward adherence to an odd-duck anarchist Platformism. So AK stopped publication of his current book, removed his previous books from its inventory, and disseminated its lengthy, damning findings as widely as it could in the anarcho/ultra milieu. Schmidt’s story is that he is an anarchist and a journalist who was engaged in legitimate research of fringe fascist elements, and that every fact dug up by his detractors has another more innocent explanation. I think that the evidence is overwhelming that Michael Schmidt is at present a National Anarchist-identified fascist. Now, I really don’t care whether Schmidt infiltrated anarchism with his authentic NA fascist beliefs intact or simply developed his decentralized, tribal white nationalism “organically” over his time in the anarchist movement. The purported synthesis of revolutionary left and right that is at the core of National Bolshevism, National Syndicalism, National Anarchism, National Autonomism, ad nauseam—what this fascist tendency likes to call metapolitics—is a clear enough political signature for folks on the Left and the left of the Left to help screen against infiltration or “entryism,” or even genuine conversion.

Well done.

The issue is not jurisprudence or a fair trial or innocent until proven guilty or incarceration. Libertarians forget that, in promoting voluntary association, they automatically authenticate voluntary disassociation; everything from caveat emptor to outright ostracism. The anarcho/ultra milieu is just that—a milieu—and not a community, so its ability to put social pressure to bear is limited. Nevertheless, the option exists and needs to be exercised.

The initial opportunism and sectarianism that marked Bolshevik Russia’s attempt to set up a German National Bolshevik sock puppet does not account for the ongoing opportunism and parasitism of this fascist tendency’s constant attempts to piggy back onto the Left. But neither does it set up some sort of equivalency between socialism and fascism. This is not an argument either from Hanna Arendt’s sophisticated if misguided thesis in The Origins of Totalitarianism or its dumbed down High School version that, if one travels far enough along the extremes of either political Left or Right one circles back around toward its supposed opposite, and thus that all political extremism is essentially the same. There are plenty of credible differences that make a true distinction between extreme Left and Right—libertarian and totalitarian—which I’ve covered in past columns. Unfortunately, this sophomoric understanding of politics persists, as does its flip side, a kneejerk contrarianism. So, when a mendacious former columnist proclaims on Facebook by analogy to the original American revolution that “This time it’s TWO royal families,” the Bushes and the Clintons, from which we must declare our independence by voting for either Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump, the sheer knuckle-dragging idiocy is breathtaking. He was never the sharpest tool in the shed, particularly when it’s clear there’s no exaggeration, hyperbole or parody intended in his political analysis, such as it is.

What is involved is a sentiment akin to épater la bourgeoisie, the rebellious, indiscriminate desire to stick it to the establishment, which needs to be critiqued. The post-Romantic Decadents of the fin de siècle were fond of skewering the cultural banality, economic regimentation and political conformity of the stodgy middle-class society of their day. In this they prefigured virtually every rebellious Bohemian youth culture that followed, from the wandervogel to punk rock. Michael “Bommi” Baumann expressed this best in How it all Began/Wie Alles Anfing when he wrote: “You still didn’t feel like part of the left; but everything that was in opposition was good, including the neo-Nazis. […] Fascism as such was in opposition though, and you found pure opposition better than this petit-bourgeois mediocrity. You considered everything good that didn’t agree with it.” Or, as Sean Aaberg of Pork Magazine crudely puts it in protesting what he considers our “increasingly uptight society,” his magazine’s rebellion for its own sake and swastika iconography is “not suitable for squares” and a way of “outing closet totalitarians.”

As for Laibach’s sly lampooning of similar left-right political lunacy, return to the postmodern angst which begins their song “Tanz Mit Laibach” and defines the épater les bourgeois motivating much fascist courting of the Left:

Wir alle sind besessen

Wir alle sind verflucht

Wir alle sind gekreuzigt

Und alle sind kaputt
Von Reiztechnologie

Von Zeitökonomie

Von Qualität das Lebens

Und Kriegsphilosophie

Anarchism for Fools: “What’s Left?” April 2014, MRR #371

Part Three: Anarchism of-by-for Fools

What has to be stressed here, regardless of the philosophical foundations of Anarchism, is that National-Anarchism is Anarchism sui generis. An Anarchism of its own kind. We are not answerable to or responsible for the actions of those who also happen to call themselves ‘Anarchists,’ be they contemporary or in the past.

Troy Southgate

When I hear the term sui generis, I reach for my gun. Also, the term “beyond left and right.” Both are attempts to provide a patina of philosophical respectability to the idiocy that is National Anarchism (NA), an oxymoron if there ever was one.

Two columns ago, I discussed the relationship of capitalist libertarianism to historical libertarianism, that is, to old school anarchism. I didn’t require more than a sentence to position anarchism, which referred to itself as social anarchism, within the context of socialism or the Left as a whole. Individualist anarchism, up to and including its current capitalist iteration, is categorical in identifying the various schools of social anarchism as leftist. And that tiny yet shrill tendency calling itself post-left anarchism, first promulgated by Anarchy, A Journal of Desire Armed, acknowledges the leftism of much previous anarchism by defining itself as “post.” That NA describes itself as a unique “category in itself” suits most anarchists just fine, as they would be happy to be completely rid of these poseurs. NA is far from Fascism sui generis, however. In point of fact, NA is Fascism, simple and unadorned and quite generic.

Which brings up the tricky task of defining Fascism proper. The thumbnail description associated with Fascism is that it’s an “anti-liberal, anti-Marxist, anti-capitalist revolutionary ultra-nationalist ideology, social movement and regime.” This tweet-length one-liner is woefully insufficient for most academics interested in researching the nature of Fascism and coming up with a paradigmatic “Fascist Minimum” that can encompass as many types of ultra-right ideological/social phenomenon as possible. But for those on the ultra-right, the above sound bite of a description is too definitive because it tries to nail down what seeks to remain intentionally vague, flexible, and sui generis.

I noted the explosion of political ideas, associations and actions, left and right, that occurred from the fin de siècle to the beginning of the second World War. With respect to the European ultra-right in the decades inclusive of and following La Belle Époque, and aside from Mussolini’s Fascism and Hitler’s National Socialism, there was political futurism, Traditionalism (Evola), völkisch nationalism (Dickel), Novecentismo (Bontempelli), Maurras’s Action Française, young conservatism (Jung), conservative revolutionism (van den Bruck), Franco’s Spain and Salazar’s Portugal, national revolutionism (Jünger), the German Freikorps, the Croatian Ustasha, National Bolshevism (Niekisch), leftist “universal fascism” (Strasser), Codreanu’s Iron Guard, Perón’s Justicialismo, ad nauseum. This is by no means an exhaustive list of fascist, quasi-fascist, para-fascist, and crypto-fascist tendencies, movements and regimes in this era, and in a European context.

Despite the short-lived attempt to found a Fascist International Congress at Montreux, Switzerland in 1934-35, the relationships between these highly fractious tendencies, movements and regimes were often less than cordial, and sometimes quite brittle. To briefly illustrate: when National Socialist Germany and Fascist Italy formed their Rome-Berlin Axis in 1936 it became clear that Mussolini’s Italy was to play “second fiddle” to Hitler’s Germany in military expansion, empire building, and war against the allies. The Allied invasion of Italy led to German intervention and invasion to shore up Mussolini’s Fascist regime, resulting in the consolidation of the rump Italian Social Republic in northern Italy in 1943. The pseudo-leftist Salo Republic proved a “shrinking puppet-state of the Nazis in economic and agricultural production, in foreign affairs, and in the military campaign against the Allies.” (Roger Griffin) Both Germany and Italy came to the aid of Franco’s Nationalist rebels in Spain with military and financial assistance between 1936 and 1939. After Nationalist victory, Franco joined with Mussolini and Hitler to clamp down on liberal, democratic, secular social elements generally, and specifically to smash the international socialist working class, from anarchist to Bolshevik. But, given that Francoismo was above all traditionalist in orientation, Franco also dissolved the overtly fascist Falange as a party, declared Spanish neutrality, refused to enter the war as an ally of Germany, nixed a plan to seize Gibraltar and close the Mediterranean to the British fleet, and even allowed Jewish refugees escaping the Nazi Final Solution to transit Spanish territory. Italian Fascism made easy accord with the monarchy and the Vatican. Rightwing Italian critics of Mussolini and his Fascist regime were rarely imprisoned, but were occasionally placed under house arrest. Julius Evola was kept at arms length, never embraced but never renounced. Hitler’s National Socialist Germany was far more brutal in dealing with right wing critics and competitors. During the Night of the Long Knives (Operation Hummingbird) in 1934, Hitler ordered the murder of aristocratic and Catholic conservative opposition figures (von Bose, von Schleicher, von Kahr, Klausener, and Edgar Jung), as well as the purge of National Socialism’s left wing. Ernst Röhm, leader of the Sturmabteilung (SA), was first imprisoned and then killed, while Nazi leader Gregor Strasser was assassinated. His brother, Otto Strasser, was driven into exile. The literary figure, war veteran and national revolutionary Ernst Jünger was kept under constant surveillance by the regime.

(Röhm and the Strasser brothers considered themselves “second revolutionaries.” Yet it would be a “historical mondegreen,” referencing Death in June, to believe that the actual history of the Third Reich would have been much different had either of these three been führer instead of Hitler.)

Fascism guilefully thinks of itself as sui generis, beyond left and right. The various groupings within and surrounding Fascism, as well as its National Socialist “blood brother,” each insist on their status as sui generis. In attempting to synthesize a violent opposition to Enlightenment liberalism, Marxism, and capitalism with an embrace of populism, revolutionism, and ultra-nationalism, these ultra-right ideologies, movements and regimes exemplify not fusion and unification but splitting and division. Their sense of distinctiveness and uniqueness might be laid at the feet of Nietzsche and his philosophy of aristocratic individualism, what Jünger called the sovereign individualism of the Anarch. Yet more fundamental socio-political causes must be cited. Unlike Marxism’s highly programmatic politics, the Fascist ultra-right was decidedly less programmatic, and what platforms it did generate were intensely idiosyncratic. Leninism posited a scientific, universalist, international socialism that, when corrupted by nationalism, devolved into particular socialist types, say, a socialism with Chinese or Vietnamese or Cuban characteristics. By contrast, the particular cultural, social and national characteristics of the countries out of which Fascism arose, combined with Fascism’s innate syncretic tendencies, has produced a plethora of Fascist types. Consider the problem of nationalism. In opposition to the secular nationalism born of the Enlightenment, there is Evola’s Traditionalist pan-European Imperium on the one hand and on the other hand de Benoist’s Europe of a thousand flags comprised of separate tribal ethnies. Way stations along this spectrum are völkisch pan-Germanic Aryanism and the Romantic organic nationalism that was a fusion of local ethnic groups within a given nation-state. Then there is the issue of racism. National Socialism’s biological racism and virulent anti-Semitism stands in stark contrast to Italian Fascism which was relatively free of anti-Semitic and eugenic strains until influenced and then subsumed by Nazi Germany.

Academics and intellectuals, whose job it is to formulate unifying theories and overarching explanations of phenomenon, have been stymied by the variegated nature of Fascism. Attempts to define a “Fascist Minimum” have been as diverse as Fascism itself. Marxist approaches have predominated, and at times have been augmented by post-Marxist modernization, structural and psycho-historical theories. Liberal reactions to Fascism have remained thoroughly splintered, ranging from Nolte’s theme of resisting modernization to Payne’s understanding of a new kind of nationalist authoritarian state. A related conceptual constellation offered by Mosse’s “third way,” Sternhell’s “new civilization” and Eatwell’s “new synthesis” hints at a way forward. Personally, I find Roger Griffin’s summation that “Fascism is a political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism” the most convincing.*

Which brings us back to National Anarchism. Troy Southgate has been engaged in “serial Fascism” based on a “palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism” for most of his political career, pursuing the next big Fascist thing from the National Front, through the International Third Position, the English Nationalist Movement, the National Revolutionary Faction, Synthesis and the journal Alternative Green, to his current New Right and National Anarchist affiliation. “As a prelude to an anticipated racial civil war and a collapse of the capitalist system,” NA seeks to “[E]stablish autonomous villages for völkisch communities, which have seceded from the state’s economy and are no-go areas for unwelcomed ethnic groups and state authorities.” Setting aside the ersatz weekend hipster tribalism of your typical Burning Man participant as an outright insult to aboriginal realities, NA’s anti-statist ethnic tribalism is, in actuality, well within the range of Fascist nationalism demarcated by Evola and de Benoist. NA’s racism falls within the spectrum defined by German Nazism and Italian Fascism as well. (“My race is my nation,” or so goes the White Nationalist slogan.) Whether NA prefers mutualism or autarky to national socialism or corporatism for its so-called anti-capitalist economics is also not unusual. Presenting itself as a resynthesis of “classic fascism, Third Positionism, neo-anarchism and new types of anti-systemic politics born of the anti-globalization movement” simply reveals the syncretic character inherent in Fascism as a phenomenon. That this segment of the “groupuscular right” champions a “a stateless palingenetic ultranationalism” amounts to subtle nuance, not radical difference. Nothing distinguishes NA from Fascism proper. Nothing sui generis here. Absolutely nothing.

So, let’s forego all the academic abstractions and get down to brass tacks. Individuals who claim NA talk to, hang out with, organize among, and act alongside fellow ultra-right Fascists. They claim to “go beyond left and right,” but they fully identify themselves as New Right. If NAs rear their ugly pinheads on internet forums like anarchist LibCom or leftist RevLeft, they are immediately identified, isolated, and purged. And if they openly show their faces at explicitly anarchist and leftist events, they risk a serious beat down. In contrast, NAs can and do freely join, discuss, argue and debate on white nationalist/white supremacist forums like Stormfront. They’re also welcome on disgruntled anarcho-individualist and self-styled pan-secessionist Keith Preston’s greatly attenuated Attack The System forum. His American Revolutionary Vanguard argues that “the mainstream of the anarchist movement has become unduly focused on left-wing cultural politics, countercultural lifestyle matters, and liberal pet causes.” His stated goal is to go beyond the Left/Right political spectrum to: “work towards a synthesis of the currently scattered anarchist tendencies. These include anarcho-collectivism, syndicalism, mutualism, post-structuralism, Green anarchism, primitivism and neo-tribalism from the Left, and anarcho-capitalism, anarcho-monarchism, anarcho-feudalism, national-anarchism, tribal-anarchism, paleo-anarchism and Christian anarchism from the Right.”

Fuck this fascist noise!
—
*[F]ascism is best defined as a revolutionary form of nationalism, one that sets out to be a political, social and ethical revolution, welding the ‘people’ into a dynamic national community under new elites infused with heroic values. The core myth that inspires this project is that only a populist, trans-class movement of purifying, cathartic national rebirth (palingenesis) can stem the tide of decadence.
Roger Griffin, Nature of Fascism
[Fascism is] a genuinely revolutionary, trans-class form of anti-liberal, and in the last analysis, anti conservative nationalism. As such it is an ideology deeply bound up with modernization and modernity, one which has assumed a considerable variety of external forms to adapt itself to the particular historical and national context in which it appears, and has drawn a wide range of cultural and intellectual currents, both left and right, anti-modern and pro-modern, to articulate itself as a body of ideas, slogans, and doctrine. In the inter-war period it manifested itself primarily in the form of an elite-led “armed party” which attempted, mostly unsuccessfully, to generate a populist mass movement through a liturgical style of politics and a programme of radical policies which promised to overcome a threat posed by international socialism, to end the degeneration affecting the nation under liberalism, and to bring about a radical renewal of its social, political and cultural life as part of what was widely imagined to be the new era being inaugurated in Western civilization. The core mobilizing myth of fascism which conditions its ideology, propaganda, style of politics and actions is the vision of the nation’s imminent rebirth from decadence.
Roger Griffin, The palingenetic core of generic fascist ideology

Anarchism by Fools: “What’s Left?” February 2014, MRR #369

Part Two: Anarchism of-by-for Fools

I think it was Bill Clinton that once said that if you thought the ’50s were great, you’re probably a Republican, and if you thought the ’60s were great, you’re probably a Democrat.

Bill Maher, “Bill Maher Isn’t Sorry,” Politico (11-21-13)

And if you thought the ‘70s were great, you’re probably a libertarian. Libertarianism is just anarchy for rich people. Libertarians are big business fucks who don’t want to smash the state, but instead lobby the government for more tax cuts.

The number of prominent entrepreneurs, politicians and entertainers who openly declare themselves to be libertarian is legion. Mark Ames has done an excellent exposé regarding how libertarianism became the house philosophy for capitalism [“When Congress Busted Milton Friedman (And Libertarianism was Created by Big Business Lobbyists),” NSFWCORP, 11-16-12], and Bruce Gibney has revealed how libertarianism has infested the tech industry (“Silicon Valley’s Libertarian Problem,” Inc., 8-13-12). Science fiction has long speculated about the consequences of a free market capitalism run amok, from the cyberpunk of William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash to mainstream SF like Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and oddities like Max Barry’s Jennifer Government.

Flipping from science fiction to history, it needs to be made clear that the use, or rather abuse of the term libertarianism in America has almost nothing to do with the use of the term libertarianism historically. Of European political origin, and synonymous with social anarchism, historic libertarianism belonged to the broad category of socialism, and for the most part was leftist in orientation. It was extremely hostile to and ardently opposed to the classical liberalism of the Manchester School of Economics. Classical liberalism propounded a limited state assigned the narrow task of strictly protecting life, liberty and property while a laissez-faire capitalist economy was allowed unfettered activity, regulated only by the invisible hand of the market. Social anarchism in the European context was the majoritarian collectivist, mutualist, syndicalist and communist anarchism advocated by Bakunin, Proudhon, Rocker and Kropotkin in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries. It was challenged by the minority individualist anarchism of Mackay and Stirner. Yet even then this minority tendency was highly critical of capitalism and bourgeois individualism. Nevertheless, noted anarcho-communist Albert Meltzer raised objection that “Individualism (applying to the capitalist and not the worker) has become a right-wing doctrine […] the ‘Individualist Anarchist’ approach that differs radically from revolutionary anarchism in the first line of descent. It is sometimes too readily conceded that ‘this is, after all, anarchism’.”

The rugged individualism and self-reliant frontier ethic of American society proved inimical to social anarchism and nurturing to individualist anarchism. The waves of revolutionary anarchist immigrants to this country, while responsible for extensive labor unrest and the founding of May 1st as International Workers Day, tended to de-radicalize and assimilate quickly. The anarchist individualism of Josiah Warren, Benjamin Tucker and Lysander Spooner fit right into and bolstered the American conservative mainstream, even as it remained critical of the capitalism of its day. Yet it took American conservatism’s confrontation with the ebullient, if somewhat crazed politics and counterculture of the 1960s, to separate out the individualist, pro-capitalist and limited government strains of the conservative movement proper into a bona fide anti-statist, radically individualistic quasi-anarchist capitalist movement by 1969. Anarchist capitalists like Murray Rothbard, and former Goldwater speechwriter Karl Hess (before he moved to the anarchist left), actually attempted to forge alliances with compatible New Left individuals and organizations between 1965 and 1968. Jerome Tuccille’s pair of books, It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand and Radical Libertarianism, detail this history for anyone interested.

Bona fide means genuine, but the existence of American capitalist libertarianism doesn’t absolve it from being full of shit, despite having multiplied and broadened in the last fifty odd years. Today, the American libertarian spectrum includes those with libertarian tendencies like quirky liberal Bill Maher and eccentric conservative Clint Eastwood, the mainstream of corporate libertarianism described above and the Libertarian Party proper, and the pure libertarianism of anarcho-capitalist economist Murray Rothbard and free market anarchist, 3D gun printer Cody Wilson. To quote an old saying, “the dose makes the poison” (or as Tom Waits sings: “She always had that little drop of poison.”) There is plenty of evidence that toxins like arsenic or radioactive iodine, in tiny amounts, are not just harmless, but might actually be healthy (See Henry I. Miller’s “Can Tiny Amounts of Poison Actually Be Good For You?”, Forbes, 12-20-11). In science, its called hormesis. Just so with capitalist libertarianism. A little bit, in the form of Bill Maher, can be bracing, invigorating and healthy. Too much, as with corporate libertarianism, can be sickening, and the pure libertarianism of anarchist capitalism are out-and-out deadly.

The reason I extended Bill Maher’s quote above is because the 1950s didn’t actually end until 1965, and the 60s in truth spanned from roughly 1965 to 1975. Similarly, the 70s actually covered from 1975 until 1985. I attempted, with a couple of left anarchist friends, to explore some form of left-right association with an equally small group of anarchist capitalists around 1975, a story I’ve told many times before. Big mistake. Aside from constantly babbling about their secret stashes of gold and silver bullion, those free market anarchists were all talk and no action. All they pontificated about were the blessings of capitalism without a state, until I shot back that, if the US government was overthrown today, US corporations would buy and install another government tomorrow, because American capitalism needs a state to protect it, regulate it, keep it safe and healthy. Free market capitalism is a myth, because capitalism requires government. Unfortunately, corporate capitalism in this country has already bought off the government lock, stock and barrel, even as a strand of corporate capitalism advocates a privatizing, deregulatory, anti-tax libertarianism that is fundamentally unhealthy for our body politic, what Rothbard in 1994 called “Big Government libertarianism.”

The 70s were also formative to the rise of capitalist libertarianism, in part because of the anti-Keynesian turn to the right produced by the election of Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the United States. This quasi-libertarian variant came to be known as neoliberalism, which combined domestic privatization, deregulation, financialization, rolling back organized labor, and dismantling the welfare state with an aggressive, interventionist foreign policy. In its neoconservative permutation, it preached a democratic imperialism spread internationally by military power. Most recently, the Tea Party movement has distinguished itself from both establishment Republicans and orthodox conservatives with a virulent strain of libertarianism. While libertarian-like tendencies seem to be proliferating like a plague, attempts to build alliances between rightwing libertarians and congruent left libertarians have never amounted to shit. From the demise of the Radical Libertarian Alliance to the recent hard times experienced by Lou Rockwell’s Antiwar.com, time and again the idea of libertarian left and right working together have amounted to delusion and derangement.

As you might have noticed, this discussion of American style capitalist libertarianism has veered toward ill health and affliction, from the explicit analogy with poison to the implicit comparison with pathology. Well, let’s take the metaphor a step further. Matt Taibbi, in his Rolling Stone article “The Great American Bubble Machine” (7-9-9) described the role of Goldman Sachs in crashing the economy and bringing about the Great Recession. “The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” Classical liberalism, capitalist libertarianism, corporate libertarianism, anarchist capitalism, neoliberalism, Tea Party libertarianism; they are all structural capitalist modifications encompassed by this vampiric theme, first explored by Karl Marx in volume one of Capital:
As capitalist, he is only capital personified. His soul is the soul of capital. But capital has one single life impulse, the tendency to create value and surplus-value, to make its constant factor, the means of production, absorb the greatest possible amount of surplus-labor. Capital is dead labor, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.

Time for a wooden stake, beheading, and fiery cremation.