{"id":371,"date":"2016-07-08T13:27:24","date_gmt":"2016-07-08T13:27:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bohemiantangents.com\/?p=371"},"modified":"2020-02-15T19:23:24","modified_gmt":"2020-02-16T00:23:24","slug":"from-anti-capitalist-to-pro-capitalist-the-many-faces-of-libertarianism-part-i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bohemiantangents.com\/?p=371","title":{"rendered":"From Anti-Capitalist to Pro-Capitalist: The Many Faces of Libertarianism, Part I"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ever since Ron Paul came into prominence, his version of free market capitalist libertarianism is what people equate with libertarianism. This is based on the deliberate disregard for history so that free market capitalism devotees can use a word connoting “liberty” to give a rose-colored hue to their movement and entice millions to join.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The free market adoring ideologue Murray Rothbard plainly explained in his book, Betrayal of the American Right, what his capitalist cultists in the United States had accomplished:<\/strong><\/p>\n

“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…’Libertarians’ 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 the proponents of individual liberty and therefore of the individual’s right to his property”<\/strong><\/p>\n

Having opened a portal into the real history of the word he helped to steal from the “enemy”, Rothbard enables Joseph D\u00e9jacque, the first self-described libertarian, to enter an informed examination of libertarianism’s history.\u00a0D\u00e9jacque (1821-1864)\u00a0was a French\u00a0early anarcho-communist<\/a> poet and writer and the first recorded person to employ the term “libertarian”\u00a0(French: libertaire) for himself in\u00a0a political sense.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Unlike Pierre- Joseph Proudhon, the first self-described anarchist and founder of mutualism, \u00a0D\u00e9jacque\u00a0argued that, “it is not the product of his or her labor that the worker has a right to, but to the satisfaction of his or her needs, whatever may be their nature.”In New York he serialised his book in his periodical “Le Libertaire, Journal du Mouvement social” that ran from 1858 to 1861 and was the first anarcho-communist journal published in the United States and the first anarchist journal to use the term “libertarian”.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Anarcho-communism is a theory of anarchism which advocates the abolition of the state, capitalism, wages, and private property (while retaining respect for personal property) and favors common ownership of the means of production, direct democracy, and a horizontal network of voluntary associations and workers’ councils with production and consumption based on the guiding principle: “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need”<\/strong><\/p>\n

http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Anarchist_communism<\/strong><\/p>\n

D\u00e9jacque was anti-authoritarian and anti-elitist to the extreme, rejecting the division between a visionary and his inner circle and the “vulgar herd”, the people. He was equally opposed to all forms of social republicanism, to the dictatorship of one man and to the little prodigies of the proletariat, seemingly prophesying Lenin and the Bolsheviks. He wrote that: \u2018a dictatorial committee composed of workers is certainly the most conceited and incompetent, and hence the most anti-revolutionary, thing that can be found…(It is better to have doubtful enemies in power than dubious friends)\u2019. He saw \u2018anarchic initiative,\u2019 \u2018reasoned will\u2019 and \u2018the autonomy of each\u2019 as the conditions for the social revolution of the proletariat, the first expression of which had been the barricades of June 1848. In D\u00e9jacque\u2019s view, a government resulting from an insurrection remains a reactionary fetter on the free initiative of the proletariat. Or rather, such free initiative can only arise and develop by the masses ridding themselves of the \u2018authoritarian prejudices\u2019 by means of which the state reproduces itself in its primary function of representation and delegation. D\u00e9jacque wrote that: \u2018By government I understand all delegation, all power outside the people,\u2019 for which must be substituted, in a process whereby politics is transcended, the \u2018people in direct possession of their sovereignty,\u2019 or the \u2018organised commune.\u2019 For D\u00e9jacque, the communist anarchist utopia would fulfil the function of inciting each proletarian to explore his or her own human potentialities, in addition to correcting the ignorance of the proletarians concerning \u2018social science.\u2019”<\/strong><\/p>\n

He also thought that “government, religion, property, family, all are linked, all coincide.\u2019 The content of the social revolution was thus to be the abolition of all governments, of all religions, and of the family based on marriage, the authority of the parents and the husband, and inheritance.<\/strong><\/p>\n

D\u00e9jacque established his proposed state as follows “\u201cthe state of affairs where each would be free to produce and consume at will and according to their fantasy, without having to exercise or submit to any control whatsoever over anything whatever; where the balance between production and consumption would establish itself, no longer by preventive and arbitrary detention at the hands of some group or other, but by the free circulation of the faculties and needs of each.<\/strong><\/p>\n

http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Joseph_D%C3%A9jacque<\/strong><\/p>\n

The common element for all people calling themselves “libertarian” is opposition to the tyranny of the state. The manner of this opposition and the acknowledgment of other forms of tyranny done under the pretext of “liberty” is another matter. So-called “right libertarians” are concerned with “aggression” but this does not seem to apply to factory owners or capitalists aggressing upon workers with 14 hour days, locking them in fire traps, having children work in horrific conditions in mines or other adult workers often dying as a result of working conditions. One capitalist’s liberty is based on the radical infringement on many other people’s liberty.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The historical journey of libertarianism as a concept having many guises and the clashes of those economic forces and theories laying claim to that word is a long story. So this is just Part I of that story.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ever since Ron Paul came into prominence, his version of free market capitalist libertarianism is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[5,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-371","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-history"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6bHu9-5Z","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bohemiantangents.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/371","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bohemiantangents.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bohemiantangents.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bohemiantangents.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bohemiantangents.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=371"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/bohemiantangents.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/371\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":372,"href":"https:\/\/bohemiantangents.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/371\/revisions\/372"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bohemiantangents.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=371"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bohemiantangents.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=371"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bohemiantangents.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=371"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}