Reply #41: The worst shift in American history is when American anarchism

[alcibiades_mystery]

was co-opted by conservative libertarianism.

It left the American Left in an utter quandary, unable to oppose the state apparatus without falling into the stupidities of the free market ideology. That is American libertarianism - a capitalist perversion of the noble tradition of American anarchism. Anarchism understood that you can have and respond to community without the state apparatus. Libertarianism sees no such thing as community without the state and market, and so falls back into childish individualism.

It's really no mistake that this version of libertarianism flourishes in the Western states, precisely where American anarchism had its strongest purchase, as it fought a 40 year civil (guerilla) war against the capitalists and their state toadies in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth century. The capitalists realized that you don't need Pinkertons to beat them, but advertisements.

And so here we are, years later, with Ron Paul. Of course he sounds good to some factions of the left, which retain (thank goodness) an aversion to the state apparatus forged in the labor struggles of our great grandparents. But we've forgotten the simple lesson of those people: society against the fucking state; society against the fucking capitalist exploiters. You can have a community without the state or market!!! So we mistake libertarianism, the ideology that says you can have a community without the state, but not without the market, for real freedom, the freedom that our anarchist forebears brought forth in struggle against the planting and manufacturing class on this continent. We mistake the freedom of the individual in the market for the real freedm to be found in the community.