I’ve got a thread going in the GD forum right now – “Why is there no Libertarian Party outside the United States?” And it is interesting that some European posters seem vague on what libertarianism means – even though Europe has a long history of anarchist movements.
It got me to thinking – what, exactly, is the difference between the kind of libertarianism expressed in the doctrines of the U.S. Libertarian Party, and anarchism in the European tradition? I used to think the matter was simple and straightforward – Libertarians are moderate or “soft” anarchists who don’t want to destroy the state, merely pare it down to what they perceive as essentials. Yet, based on things I’ve read in the past few years, it appears the two ideologies derive from drastically different intellectual and political traditions. Libertarians talk about Locke, Jefferson, John Stuart Mill, Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman. Anarchists talk about Proudhon, Bakunin, and sometimes even Marx. I know George Orwell served in the Spanish Civil War in the militia of a party known as the “P.O.U.M.” – which is usually described as an “anarchist” party even though the “M” stands for “Marxist.” The POUM anarchists seem to have had the idea that land should be worked by peasants’ collectives, factories run by workers’ committees – really more of a syndicalist than a socialist idea, if we define socialism in the Leninist sense. The Industrial Workers of the World, the “Wobblies,” also seem to be anarcho-syndicalists; I know “All workers unite against all bosses!” is one of their slogans. (Nowadays, of course, the Wobblies are a tiny fringe group, and most Americans know the term “anarcho-syndicalist,” if at all, from that scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail: “I already told you, we’re an anarcho-syndicalist commune! We take it in turns to act as a sort of executive officer for the week!”) Libertarians, on the other hand, seem to envision a free-market economy which is pretty much like what we’ve got now, only more so. (A free-market economy with minimal government interference is a good description of what they’ve got in Russia right now, not because the government is libertarian, but because it is ineffectual.)
Based on all this, I get the impression that libertarians and anarchists are aiming at two fundamentally different kinds of society – or perhaps they just have two fundamentally different theories about what kind of society would emerge in the absence of government control. Libertarians imagine something wild, lawless and individualistic, like (an idealization of) the old American Frontier. Anarchists imagine something safe and communal, like medieval feudalism without the lords.
Anyone care to weigh in on this?
