2. Assembling the Vanguard
The next step is the assembling of the “principled militants” whom Bakunin recognized as the intellectual and activist vanguard of the insurgency. This is not to be confused with the Marxist-Leninist concept of the “vanguard” whose only purpose is the achievement of military dictatorship for the sake of managing a centrally planned economy. We are now in need of an organizational framework that can play the same role as that of the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI) in the development of Spanish anarchism. Translated into modern American terms, such an organization would be a combination of a think tank and activist and propaganda front, sort of an anarchist alternative to ruling class entities of a similar nature such as the American Enterprise Institute or Democratic Leadership Council. Perhaps a better model might be Marcus Raskin’s Institute for Policy Studies or some of the radical libertarian think tanks like the Ludwig von Mises Institute or the Independent Institute. To play its proper role, such an organization would have to not only issue position papers and conduct conferences but also involve itself in day-to-day activist efforts of the type the Stalinists coordinate with their International ANSWER and maintain a presence within larger, more mainstream political organizations such as the ACLU, NRA, labor unions, single-issue pressure groups, territorial secession movements, grassroots community action groups, or the minor political parties. Obviously, the only kind of ideological framework suitable for such an effort would be something akin to Voltairine de Cleyre’s “anarchism without adjectives,” i.e., a non-sectarian, non-purist, tendency open to anarchists of all hyphenated tendencies as well as their fellow travelers. When I met Abbie Hoffman in 1987, I asked him what he thought the most common mistake made by radical activists was and he quickly replied that the main problem was that too many radicals waste time arguing over secondary issues like this or that “ism” rather than focusing on more immediate problems. We would do well to heed his advice. Larry Gambone describes the problem with doing otherwise:
Read even the most superficial book on anarchism and you will discover that many forms of anarchism exist— anarchist-communism, individualist-anarchism, anarcho-syndicalism, free-market anarchism, anarcho-feminism and green-anarchism. This division results from people taking their favorite economic system or extrapolating from what they see as the most important social struggle and linking this to anarchism. . . . The hyphenation presents a danger. Like it or not, everyone, without exception, compromises, modifies or softens their beliefs at some point. Where they compromise is what is important. Do they give up on the anarchism of the other aspect? You can be sure that most hyphenated anarchists will prefer to drop the libertarian side of the hyphen. There are plenty examples of this occurring.
In other words, our core creed must be “Anarchy First!” applied within context of decentralism, populism, and libertarianism. Here is a set of potential “first principles” for an anarchist-led libertarian-populism:
1. Minimal and decentralized government organized on the basis of community sovereignty and federalism.
2. A worker-based, cooperative economy functioning independently of the state, the corporate infrastructure, and central banking.
3. A radically civil libertarian legal system ordered on the basis of individual sovereignty, individual rights, and restorative justice.
4. A neutralist, non-interventionist foreign policy and a military defense system composed of decentralized, voluntary militia confederations.
5. A system of cultural pluralism organized on the basis of voluntary association, civil society, localism, regionalism, decentralism, and mutual aid.
6. The achievement of the above through an all-fronts strategy of grassroots local organizing, local electoral action, secession, civil disobedience, militant strikes and boycotts, organized tax resistance, alternative infrastructure, and armed struggle.
This is a generalized program that anti-state radicals of virtually any ideological stripe ought to be able to agree upon. I suspect that those who do not agree might be inclined towards an excess of purism, sectarianism, or utopianism. Unfortunately, those with such an outlook will simply have to fall by the wayside. Principled realism should be our primary analytical and strategic tool. The first order of business in developing a strategic paradigm is to give due consideration to the actual structure of the United States, politically, economically, and culturally. I also include Canada and Mexico within a program for a new North American radicalism, but there are differences in those countries that might require a somewhat varying approach from those of radicals in the United States. For ideas on a building on libertarian radicalism in Canada, I would highly recommend the works of Larry Gambone. For Mexico, we might of course wish to look to the EZLN for leadership.
3. Left/Right and the “Culture Wars”
A principal issue for American radicals is overcoming the conventional Left/Right divide. An understanding of the distribution of the US population, geographically and ideologically, might be of some help in dealing with this problem. The majority of the US population lives in 75 large metropolitan areas. These are also the areas that tend to be the most culturally mixed, the most leftward leaning politically and with the greatest numbers of minorities, whether ethnic and religious minorities or feminists and homosexuals. Whenever a national election is held, much is made over the blue-state/red-state divide, but this is not an adequate description of the political distribution of the US population. The actual divide is much more decentralized, with big cities, university towns, environmentalist havens, and coastal and border areas constituting the “blue” and landlocked areas, smaller towns, and rural counties representing the “red.” When the entire US population is broken down on purely ideological lines, about half of the US public votes “blue” and the other half votes “red.” In fact, it is only because the US Electoral College system allows influence for the “reds” beyond their actual population numbers that the “blues” are not completely dominant as they would be in a completely majoritarian system (in my view, this is a good thing).
Breaking down the “red/blue” divide on stricter ideological grounds, it is important to realize that rank and file Democratic voters are typically far more reasonable people than the cultural Marxists or shyster politicians who comprise their leadership. Similarly, most rank and file Republican voters are not radical theocrats or crypto-Nazis as the reactionary Left hysterically proclaims. Indeed, most Republican voters are political moderates, “small c” conservatives in the Goldwater tradition, libertarians, Second Amendment advocates, or simply taxpayers or business interests “voting with their pocketbooks.” Even many on the “religious right” are single-issue voters opposed to abortion and perceived, and often genuine, attacks on their culture or religious liberty by militantly secular liberal elites. And the hardcore racist right wing exemplified by the Klan, Nazis, skinheads, etc., has no sympathy in mainstream American society. A conventional politician who received the endorsement of David Duke or the National Alliance would regard such an endorsement as a liability. Unpleasant though it may be for persons with a generally cosmopolitan cultural outlook to consider, like the “religious right,” the “white right” is not without legitimate grievances against mainstream society. A “white nationalist” website lists some of these:
It is a long list. Burdensome racial preference schemes in hiring, racial preference schemes in university admissions, racial preference schemes in government contracting and small business loans. Beyond quotas there is the denial of rights of free speech and of due process to Whites who are critical of these governmental policies. We have special punishments for assaults committed by Whites if the motives might be racial. In addition, Whites pay a proportion of the costs of the welfare state that is disproportionate to what they receive in benefits. But the most exploitative aspect of the situation is that neither the racial quotas, the business preferences, the loss of freedom of speech, nor the disproportionate contributions to the welfare state have m
anaged to sate the appetites of non-Whites living in the United States. The more Whites sacrifice, the more non-Whites demand. Many Whites are beginning to believe that no amount of tribute, other than mass suicide, would satisfy the non-White demands. If our presence stirs up that much hatred in the hearts of non-Whites, then the only sensible course of action is to separate ourselves from them.
Anyone familiar with the totalitarian speech codes of the US university system, the “anti-whiteness” theory of the type subscribed to by the crazier sectors of the reactionary Left, or the increasingly repressive policies concerning free speech in the European Union countries (for example, the David Irving case) that will eventually be imported into the United States as the cultural Marxists come to power with their Marcusean ideology of “repressive tolerance” will understand that the complaints of the white nationalists are not exactly without merit.
As I mentioned earlier, the real political battle of the future is not between the Left and Right but an intra-Left civil war between the liberal-Marxist-statist-totalitarian Left and the libertarian-populist-decentralist-anarchistic Left. An authentic Right of the Burke-Metternich-Maistre variety does not exist in the United States (it never really did) and the closest things to it (the “religious right” and the “white right”) represent points of view that were dominant in America long ago but have been losing power consistently for decades upon decades and are trying to “go down fighting.” If our principal enemies of the future are going to be the cultural Marxists of the type that now dominate the EU, then we must prepare ourselves for the day when the Clinton-Gore-Kerry types are the conservative Republicans. This process is developing very rapidly. The present neocons were to the left of the liberal Democrats of the 1960s. Now they are the establishment Right. The New Left of the 1960s is now in the on-deck circle and will soon be up to bat. Any viable strategy for the libertarian-left must be prepared to meet this challenge head-on.
The strategy that I am going to recommend is tripartite, multi-tiered, and “all-fronts” oriented in nature. The “tripartite” aspect of it involves building a radical movement that draws from the Left, Right, and Center alike against the neoconservative/cultural Marxist ruling class. The “left” element involves assuming certain positions and undertaking actions that are actually to the left of the 1960s-style “New Left.” The first matter is to adopt an attitude of complete rejection of the state. While 1960s radicalism had an anarchistic strand to it, the mainstream of the New Left’s view of the state was standard left-liberal, social-democratic New Class welfarism. Few enthusiasms from that era have proven to be a greater failure. This does not in any way mean that we adopt the “neoliberal” economic outlook of the corporate right. Far from it. We need an authentic libertarian-populist approach to economic radicalism that regards “big government” and “big business” as two sides of the same enemy coin. This is obviously a complicated matter and I will address the issue in more detail below. Second, we need to abandon the bourgeois identity politics that have grown out of the New Left. The legacy of this has been to create a constituency for the left wing of capital among elite members of traditional minority groups, including educated professionals among blacks, feminists, and homosexuals, middle-class ecology enthusiasts, animal-lovers, and so on. The best approach here would be to attempt to pull the rank-and-file elements of the traditional minorities out from under their bourgeois leadership. This means that anarchist revolutionaries such as ourselves would need to seek out common ground with nationalist and separatist elements among the non-white ethnic groups against the black bourgeoisie of the NAACP, poor and working class women against the upper-middle class feminist groups like NOW, and the gay counterculture (complete with its transsexual, hermaphrodite, and transgendered elements) against the more establishment-friendly gay middle-class.
Indeed, we have not even begun to touch on the possibilities for building a radical movement rooted in part in marginalized social groups ignored, despised, or persecuted by the establishment.
These elements include the handicapped, the mentally ill, students, youth, prostitutes and other sex workers, prisoners, prisoner’s rights activists, advocates for the rights of the criminally accused, the homeless and homeless activists, anti-police activists, advocates of alternative medicine, drug users, the families of drug war prisoners, immigrants, lumpen economic elements (jitney cab drivers, peddlers, street vendors), gang members, and many others too numerous to name. On these and other similar issues, our positions should be to the left of the ACLU. Adopting this approach will bring with it the opportunity to politically penetrate the rather large lumpenproletarian class that exists in the United States with little or no political representation. At the same time, the last thing we should wish to do is emulate the mistakes of the New Left by adopting an ideology of victimology and positioning ourselves as antagonists of the broader working masses. Nothing could be more self-defeating. The defense of marginal populations way beyond any efforts in this area offered by the left establishment should be part of our program, but only part. Our main focus should be on the working class itself, the kinds of folks who work in the vast array of service industries that comprise the bulk of the US economy.
This is the “center” part of our strategy. I am not advocating a return to old-fashioned labor unionism of the type championed by the classical anarcho-syndicalists. I believe the decline of unions is permanent in nature and while traditional labor unions might still have a role in play in a twenty-first-century class struggle, it will only be on the margins. Instead, the economic foundation of class struggle in the future will be alternative economic enterprises and service delivery arrangements operating independently of state and corporate structures. Foremost among them will be worker-owned and operated enterprises and non-state social or health services originating from what is called the “independent sector.” This is an article on political strategy and not economics so I will not go into a great deal of detail here except to say that the main political implication of this is that organizations formed for the defense of such economic institutions against state repression or state-imposed monopolies will be vital part of any future radical coalition.
As for the broader question of the relationship between the state and the economy, we need a populist economic program that favors elimination of state intervention into the economy on behalf of privileged interests and the reduction of taxes starting from the bottom up. This is an issue that dissidents from across the spectrum ought to be able agree on, from socialists to libertarians to paleoconservatives to Greens. Kevin Carson’s “A ‘Political’ Program for Anarchists” provides a good overview of how to approach this. As anti-state radicals, we should take a position of rejecting the welfare state as a means of poverty relief, while at the same time rejecting the scapegoating of the poor common to the talk radio right wing. We should instead be quite outspoken about the damage to done to poor communities (particularly rural farmers and inner-city minorities) by state interventions such as agricultural policy and urban renewal. As an intermediate stage to full abolition of the welfare state, we might consider the “negative income tax” suggested by Milton Friedman back during the Nixon era, whereby the costs of welfare management could be cut back drastically by distributing cash payments or vouchers directly to the poor and eliminating the bureaucratic middlemen that absorb most of the welfare budget. With this approach, it might even be possible to increase subsistence payments to the poor while simultaneously cutting back significantly on both bureaucracy and taxes. The writings of Murray Rothbard, Karl Hess, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Kevin Carson, and Larry Gambone also contain some interesting ideas on how to go about “de-statizing” those industries and services presently operated by the state.
It is of the utmost importance that the working masses view us as the champions of their economic interests. Nothing less will be sufficient. Our populist coalition must include rank and file blue-collar workers, working class taxpayers, union members, smal
l businessmen, farmers, the self-employed, the urban poor, single moms, and the homeless. We do this not by promising entitlement rights to all, but by eliminating state-imposed obstacles to economic self-determination and self-sufficiency, placing state or state-corporate industries and services directly into the hands of the workers and consumers, developing alternative economic arrangements independently of the state, eliminating taxes from the bottom up, and gradually phasing out archaic state-assistance programs, with poverty relief and social security programs being the last to go once the corporate state has been fully dismantled. This is precisely the opposite of the “cut taxes and regulations at the top, eliminate subsidies to the bottom” approach favored by the right-wing corporatists. Our approach should be “cut taxes and regulations at the bottom, eliminate subsidies to the top.” On these matters, authentic fiscal conservatives and authentic class war militants should be able to agree. We should describe our economic program as neither “conservative” nor “socialist” but as simple “economic justice.”
If we appeal to the Left with a defense of marginalized or scapegoat population groups and to the Center with an emphasis on economic justice, then how will we appeal to the Right? This is likely to be the most controversial aspect of our program. There are indeed many areas where the radical Left and the radical Right have much in common. One obvious area of possible collaboration would be opposition to imperialist warfare and military interventionism on behalf of ruling class interests. Another is on libertarian-populist economic issues of the type mentioned above. There is certainly no reason why the libertarian-left cannot endorse the civil liberties issues of the right, such as freedom of religious practice, the right to home school, Second Amendment rights against the gun-grabbers, personal property rights against eminent domain and asset forfeiture laws, opposition to the use of anti-racketeering laws to harass anti-abortion activists, abusively anti-male “child support” and other divorce-related laws, speech codes, self-defense rights, tax resistance, intrusive zoning, licensing, or environmental laws, and so on. If militiamen or right-wing patriot types wish to drive without licenses or tags, so be it. Common law rules of tort and liability would still apply.
Attack the System Page 20
