Vol. 3.4, April 1971

A Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher		Murray N. Rothbard, Editor
VOLUME III, NO. 4	April, 1971	75¢

The Conning Of America

Never let it be said that the Lib. Forum is a grim, relentless monolith. Indeed, even within the Sober Center of the anarcho-capitalist movement, we have a range of views stretching all the way from Jerry Tuccille to myself. Everyone else, from Bill Buckley to Ed Muskie to Abbie Hoffman, is a damned extremist, outside of our mainstream dialogue.

Thus, I disagree totally with Jerry’s overall estimate of Charles Reich and his “greening”. To the contrary, I regard Reich’s Con Game as largely a P. R. shuck, and to the extent that the phenomenon is real, as a symptom of a diseased society and a degenerate culture rather than any sort of ally in the fight for liberty.

To raise the least important point first, the aesthetics of the title is itself enough to render to Reich the back of our hand. Who can fail to reach for his figurative musket at anyone who uses a word like “greening” in the title of a book – or anywhere else for that matter? Have we lost all respect for the English language? Indeed, if we wished to skirt the edges of obscenity, the “browning” of America would be a far more accurate title.

But the concept of “greening” has more important implications. For Professor Reich is in his book a naive and adoring celebrant of every repellent aspect of our youth anti-culture. The “greening” is Reich’s symbol of his hoped-for massive rejection of technology and civilization per se and the return to the tribe, the commune, the soil, and primitivism generally. The fact that Reich is opposed to Con II I find less than impressive, since he is hardly the first to take up the cudgels against the ideology of state corporatism. More important is Reich’s equally scornful rejection of Con I: i.e., the ethic of work, purpose, reason, the free market, technology, civilization, and private property – which, I insist, is intimately wrapped up with libertarianism and certainly with any libertarianism that is rational and workable in a country of two hundred million population. Above all, and like so much of the Left, Reich and the anti-culture totally reject the division of labor — a system absolutely crucial to the survival of man in the age of mass population as well as to the full development of the faculties and abilities of every man. But the Left hates and reviles the division of labor because such division leads straight to variety and diversity – to the individuation of every man – and there by negates the Left-socialist-communalist ideal of equality and uniformity of all men. Equality and uniformity can only be achieved in a world of small primitive communes, in which every man and woman does everything at once. The least one can say about such a world is that the vast bulk of the current population would quickly starve and die out; the most one can say is that, in addition, the true humanity – the individuation of every person and his full creative development – would be stifled in the bud, would be destroyed on the altar of the crippling and profoundly anti-human ideal of equality and uniformity.

Reich’s hatred of work and the division of labor erupts in all sorts of ways: for example, his glorification of hippie youth because they wear all-purpose uniforms, where one set of clothes suffices every person for all his activities: playing, sleeping, etc. Those of us who wear suits for working, dressier clothes for parties, shorts for athletics, pajamas for sleeping, etc. are reviled for “alienating” themselves by splitting themselves up into different roles. The uni-clothed man or woman, on the contrary, is ready at any moment to roll in the grass or mud, to sleep, walk around, etc., thus preserving his perpetual state of ad hoc spontaneity (read: irresponsibility and caprice, or “whim-worship”). Let us set aside the correct but too easy point that one great attraction for the hippies is that the uni-clothes don’t have to be washed. More important, this example at one and the same time reveals the hippie-Reich hatred for work, and for the division of labor.

On work: it is clear that no one, even in our permissive age, is going to hold a job for long wearing uni-clothes, especially if he has just rolled in the mud. Secondly, the adoration of caprice and whim-worship means that no one will be able to launch a career, to do a concentrated job of productive work, to advance his mind and intellect, or indeed to do any amount of passable work at all. And as for the division of labor, the old left-wing assault on “alienation” is very precisely the product of the absurd leftist myth that specialization, concentration on a particular line of endeavor, “alienates” one from the “whole man”, from the product of one’s labor, etc. In recent years, it has been fashionable on the Left to exalt the “early Marx”, who concentrated his hostility upon “alienation” and the division of labor, as contrasted to the “later Marx” beloved of the Old Left. But the later Marx, as baneful as he was, at least tried to arrive at a rational system, and tried to understand the workings of society in a systematic way. In our proper reaction against the Old Left, let us not leap from the frying pan of Old Left state despotism to the fire of New Left nihilism and barbarism.

In short, I say to hell with both Con II and Con III. The only hope for America, and for the rest of the world for that matter, is a return to Con I.

To quote again from Frank S. Meyer’s devastating blast at the youth culture (“Counterculture or Anti-culture?”, National Review, Nov. 3):

“It is not a counterculture, it is an anti-culture, for culture is and always has been dependent for its very existence on civility . . . The hallmark of the counterculture, however, is precisely its principled hatred of civility, its violent opposition at all levels to ordered freedom, to the tradition of rational discourse, to the very structure of civilized life. Above all, it hates the prime characteristic of the civilized man, that internalized discipline which looks with suspicion upon those spontaneous, unexamined emotional reactions we have inherited from our barbarian and animal past. The unexamined life which Socrates found unworthy of civilized man is to the devotees of the counterculture their be-all and end-all . . . The constant target of their attack is ‘middle-class values’, a phrase that inquiring analysis reveals to denote the entire gamut of the values upon which Western civilization is founded . . . Marijuana, addictive or not, physically harmful or not, is celebrated as a mode of escape from conceptual thinking, from the pressures of self-discipline without which civilization is impossible”.

“Add to this stew the sort of beliefs and myths that pervade the counterculture – the hatred of the ‘ethic of achievement’, the attack upon the nuclear family and heterosexual monogamy in the name of ‘polymorphous sexuality’: stir in the superstitions that proliferate within it – astrology, phony Eastern mysticism, Satanism. Corrosive of reason and tradition alike . . .”

One point that the youth culture makes is a perpetual gripe at the alleged “hypocrisy” of their elders. Yet what is more grossly hypocritical than the spectre of this Charles Reich, very comfortably ensconced in his professorship at Yale, wearing love beads, celebrating the hip, and calling upon everyone else to drop out, to take to the tribal and the communal hills? What is more repulsive than this man, living high on the hog from the royalties of a runaway best seller, sneering at “capitalist greed”, scoffing at the materialism of our culture, etc.? I think it perfectly legitimate to call upon Professor Reich to put up or shut up: to drop out himself, to leave Con II Yale, to abandon his materialistic royalties, and to hie him to a hippie commune, or forever hold his peace. Are there any takers on a bet that the good professor will do no such thing? How much longer are we going to reward these parasites, waxing fat by exploiting a “materialism” which they themselves proclaim to be the quintessence of evil? How much longer are we to take such Con Men seriously?

Unquestionably the best article I have seen on the Reichian greening was by the sociologists Peter and Brigitte Berger in the New York Times Op-Ed page of Feb. 15, “On the Eve of the Blueing of America”. The Bergers brilliantly and incisively make the crucial point: that despite Reich’s arrogant claim to be the prophet of a coming America composed exclusively of primitive tribal communes, that this counter-cultural dropping out will only affect the sons and daughters of the upper classes. Perhaps there will be mass dropouts from work, from reason, from responsibility and purpose, but these dropouts will come only from upper-class Jews and WASPS, dropping out from affluence, Harvard, and Berkeley. But the working-class kids, the students at Fordham and Wichita State, are not about to drop out, not by a long shot. They have not been raised in a luxury which they can afford to scorn in order to seek out a “romantic” life of egalitarian poverty. They have been raised close enough to poverty to hate it and to devote themselves to escaping from its spectre. In short, the working class kids, and especially such “ethnics” as Poles, Irish, and Italians, are not going to drop out; on the contrary, they will rise up rapidly to fill the needed technological and business jobs to keep our society and our economy going and progressing. In short, the sons of the blue-collar workers will rise rapidly to fill the jobs abandoned by the effete and permissively raised children of the affluent. In this way, the “working class” will triumph in a manner which will be as gall and wormwood to the Marxists who have called for a proletarian uprising. Surely this is an excellent and hopeful prognosis for America – an America where Horatio Alger will be more relevant than he has been for many decades.

In short, Con III is profoundly dysfunctional – a tragic dead end for America. Whoever follows that route will end up as the flotsam and jetsam of our society; far from allying ourselves with the “greens”, we should give them nothing but our contempt. We should ally ourselves with the healthy rather than the diseased forces in America – with the decent citizens of the working and middle classes – and upper as well – who cleave to the Con I virtues of hard work, purpose, and rational individualism. The real struggle of the future is Con I vs. Con II, and our task is to “raise the consciousness” of the Con I’s, to show them that so long as the corporate statists of Con II are on their backs, they will never be allowed to achieve their own values and life-goals. Let the Con III dropouts sink into the cesspools of their own making. Our lot is with William Graham Sumner’s Forgotten Man, the “honest, sober, industrious citizen, unknown outside his little circle, paying his debts and taxes, “the man “who has no political influence, and who has known no way in which to secure the chances of life except to deserve them”, the man “hard at work tilling the soil to get out of it the fund for all the jobbery, the object of all the plunder, the cost of all the economic quackery, and the pay of all the politicians and statesmen who have sacrificed his interests to his enemies.” Our lot is with Middle America.

First Midwest Libertarian Festival

Come one, come all! The Middle West, which has been lagging behind the two Coasts in holding libertarian festivals, announce its first libertarian conference!

The Midwest Libertarian Festival will be held on Saturday, May 1, at Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, Illinois, at 10:00 A.M. Host: Paul Varnell.

Exact location of the conference will be available at the Information Desk, Student Center.

Guest Speakers: Tibor Machan, David Friedman, Joseph DeJan.

“Feudalism, serfdom, slavery, all tyrannical institutions, are merely the most vigorous kind of rule, springing out of, and necessary to, a bad state of man. The progress from these is in all cases the same–less government.”

— Herbert Spencer.

AVAILABLE!

1968 Pearl Harbor issue of

Left And Right.

The final story of Pearl by the historian,

HARRY ELMER BARNES.

$1.25 per issue.

BUY FROM LEFT AND RIGHT,

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New York, N. Y, 10025

Stateless Societies: Ancient Ireland

By Joseph R. Peden

Libertarians have often dreamed of escaping the tyranny of the State; some have sought to do so by seeking refuge in distant and uninhabited lands where they could live in solitary hermitage or in small communities held together by the principle of voluntary association and mutual aid. But historians know that such experiments seldom survive in peace for long; sooner or later the State finds and confronts them with its instinctive will to violence, its mania for coercion rather than persuasion, for compulsion rather than voluntarism. Such has been the fate of the Mormons and Mennonites, the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Amish people, among others.

As exploited peoples all over the world are beginning to realize, their true enemy is always within their midst – the coercive violence of the State – and it must be fought constantly in the very heart of its dominions. Every libertarian must fight the State from where he is: in his home, his place of business, in the schools, community and the world at large. His task is to resist the State and to dismantle it by whatever means are at hand.

Historically, States do not dismantle willingly or easily. While they can disintegrate with startling speed, as in Russia in 1917 or France in 1968, almost always new States arise to take their place. The reason for this, I believe, is that men cannot bring themselves to believe in the practical feasibility of a society in which perfect liberty, security of life and property, and law and justice can be attained without the coercive violence of the State. Men have for so long been enslaved by the State that they cannot rid themselves of a Statist mentality. The myth of the State as a necessary part of social reality constitutes the greatest single obstacle to the achievement of a libertarian voluntarist society.

Yet the historian, if he but chooses to look and report his findings, knows that many societies have functioned successfully without the existence of the State, its coercive apparatus and monopoly of organized violence. It is my purpose here to present one example of such a society, one that existed for more than a thousand years of recorded history, terminated only by the massive military efforts of a more populous, wealthy and aggressive neighboring State. I will describe for you the millenial – long anarchic society of Celtic Ireland – destroyed after a six-century struggle against the English State in the wake of the military victories, confiscations and genocidal policies of successive English governments in the 17th century.

English historians have usually justified Ireland’s fate by characterizing its people as uncivilized and barbaric, its society as being anarchic. Christopher Dawson is quite clear on this point: “The essence of barbaric society is that it rests upon the principle of kinship rather than on that of citizenship, or that of the absolute authority of the State”. Ireland certainly relied upon kinship relationships in its social cohesion and it never by any stretch of imagination enjoyed the dubious benefit of a citizenship conferred by the absolute authority of the State.

The distinguished Anglo-Irish historian of the Norman invasion and colonization of Ireland, G. H. Orpen, said quite frankly that Celtic Irish society was “anarchic” in that it had scarcely any of the political institutions or officials customary in a “civilized society”. Nationalist historians like Eoin MacNeill, who actively participated in the overthrow of English rule in the period 1916-1922, considered these opinions just another smear by the English conquerors and insisted that the ancient Irish had as much of a State as they needed.

A younger generation of Irish historians, less caught up in the great struggle for national liberation than MacNeill, have candidly admitted the embarrassing fact: Irish society was indeed anarchic. As D. A. Binchy, the leading contemporary Irish expert on ancient Irish law, has written: “there was no legislature, no bailiffs, no police, no public enforcement of justice” and “the State existed only in embryo”. “There was no trace of State-administered justice”.

But if Ireland was essentially an anarchistic (or libertarian) society, how was law and order maintained? How was justice secured? Was there not incessant warfare and rampant criminality?

To answer the last of these questions first – of course there were wars and crime. Has there ever been a society-statist or otherwise – without war and crime? But Irish wars were almost never on the scale known among other “civilized” European peoples. Without the coercive apparatus of the State which can through taxation and conscription mobilize large amounts of arms and manpower, the Irish were unable to sustain any large scale military force in the field for any length of time. Irish wars, until the last phase of the English conquest in the 16th and 17th centuries, were pitiful brawls and cattle raids by European standards. The contemporary Irish historian, Kathleen Hughes, has remarked that one reason why the English conquest, begun in the 12th century under Henry II and completed only under William III in the late 17th century, was so long in being achieved was the lack of a well-organized State in Celtic Ireland. A people not habituated to a Statist conception of authority are incapable of considering a defeat in war as anything more than a temporary limitation upon their liberty. Submission to the enemy is viewed as no more than a necessary and temporary expedient to preserve one’s life until opportunity for revolt and recovery of liberty presents itself. The English, of course, considered the Irish notorious in their faithlessness (they repeatedly repudiated oaths of submission and allegiance to their English conquerors); they were repeatedly characterized by English commentators as natural-born, incorrigible rebels, barbarians, savages who refused to submit to the kind of law and order offered by the English State. The Irish, unfettered by the slave mentality of people accustomed to the tyranny of the State, simply refused to surrender their liberty and libertarian ways.

Let us now examine more closely Irish society and Irish social institutions.

The basic polity of the ancient Irish was the Tuath. Membership was restricted to Free men who owned land, or were members of recognized learned professions, – poets, seers, physicians, jurists or clergymen, or who were skilled craftsmen, millers, metal workers, architects, wood carvers, shipwrights, fishermen, musicians, chariot-makers, etc. Excluded were propertyless men, slaves, foreigners, outlaws and minor artisans. Political actions were undertaken within the annual assembly of all the Free men; kings were elected or deposed, wars declared and peace treaties agreed upon, questions of common interest discussed and policies decided. The assembly was the sovereign people acting.

The members of the tuath were not necessarily bound by ties of kinship, except incidentally. It was not a tribe or clan in the sense of being based upon a common kinship – real or imaginary. Kinsmen often lived and acted within different Tuatha and individual members could and often did secede, and join another tuath. Also two or more tuatha could and did coalesce into one body. The tuath is thus a body of persons voluntarily united for socially beneficial purposes and the sum total of the landed properties of its members constituted its territorial dimension. Historically there were from 80 to 100 or so tuatha at different periods in Irish history, and few were larger than perhaps a quarter to a third of the modern Irish county. The population is unlikely to have exceeded 25,000 souls, and was usually smaller.

The chief personage within the tuath was the king. The nature of kingship in ancient Ireland must be sought in pre-Christian times. As is commonly the case among ancient peoples, the basic social unit – here the tuath – was essentially a cultic association. The cult is the basis for social, political and military cooperation among the body of worshippers. The king is first and foremost the high priest of the cult; he likewise presides over the assembly of worshippers and acts in their behalf in secular as well as sacred functions. The Irish kings were clearly the chief priests of the tuath; their inauguration ceremonies, the sites of the assemblies, the traditions of the people confirm this fact. The conversion to Christianity modified the religious functions of the kings to fit the requirements of Christian practices, but did not entirely eliminate them.

As was common, the kingship was hereditary, like pagan priesthoods. The king was elected by the tuath from within a royal kin-group (the derbfine) consisting of all males in three generations descending from a common ancestor who was a king. The royal kin-group usually nominated one of its members, or if a dispute arose and could not be settled otherwise, joint kings were elected. Kings who displeased the tuath were often deposed, and those who were mutilated in any way had to abdicate – the result of a religious taboo, one of many that were attached to the office of king.

To what extent was the king the representative of a State? The Irish kings had only two functions of a State-like character: they were required to preside over the assembly of the tuath and represent it in negotiations with other tuatha; and they were expected to lead the tuath into battle when it went to war. He clearly was not a Sovereign himself and exercised no rights of administering justice over the members of the tuath. When he himself was party to a suit, he submitted his case to an independent judicial arbiter. And he did not legislate.

How then was law and order maintained?

First of all, the law itself was based upon immemorial custom passed down orally through a class of professional jurists known as the filid. These jurists added glosses to the basic law from time to time to make it fit the needs of the times; several schools of jurisprudence existed, and the professional jurists were consulted by parties to disputes for advice as to what the law was in particular cases, and these same men often acted as arbitrators between suitors. They remained at all times private persons, not public officials; their functioning depended upon their knowledge of the law and the integrity of their judicial reputations. They are the only “judges” Celtic Ireland knew; their jurisprudence was her only law, national in scope, and completely detached from the tuath, the kings and their respective wishes.

How was this law of the filid enforced? The law was enforced by the action of private individuals allied with the plaintiff and defendant through a system of sureties. Men were linked together by a number of individual relationships by which they were obligated to stand surety for one another guaranteeing that wrongs would be righted, debts paid, judgements honored, and the law enforced.

The system of sureties was so well developed in Irish law that there was no need for a Statist system of justice. There were three different kinds of surety: in one the surety guaranteed with his own property the payment of a debt which the debtor did not or could not pay; another kind saw the surety pledge his person that the debtor would not default; if the debtor did default, the surety had to surrender himself as a hostage to the creditor; he then had to negotiate a settlement with his captor. In a third instance, a man might pledge to join the creditor in enforcing the judgement against the debtor if he failed to pay the full amount of the judgement; in this case the debtor was liable to double damages since he must pay the original creditor and also pay a compensation to the surety for compromising his honor.

Almost every conceivable legal transaction was worked out through the taking and giving of sureties. As the Irish law made no distinction between torts and criminal offences, all criminals were considered as debtors – owing restitution and compensation to their victims – who there by became their creditors. The victim gathered his sureties and proceeded to apprehend the criminal or to publicly proclaim his suit and demand that the criminal submit to adjudication of their differences. At this point the criminal might send his sureties to negotiate a settlement on the the spot or agree to submit the case to one of the filid.

The Irish law recognized the all too likely fact that a poor man may have difficulty in getting a rich, powerful man to submit a dispute to negotiation or arbitration by the filid. It therefore provided for a special kind of distraint. According to this procedure, the plaintiff was obliged to appear at the gate of the defendant’s house and sit there from sunset until sunrise fasting the whole while; the defendant was likewise bound either to keep a similar fast, or submit to adjudication of the dispute. If he broke his fast, or refused to submit to adjudication for three days, he was said to have lost his honor within the community, and could not enforce any claim of his own. As the law code put it: “He who does not give a pledge to fasting is an evader of all. He who disregards all things is paid by neither God nor man”. Thus the ultimate sanction was to be considered an outlaw by the community – to lose one’s own legal status. This custom, which invokes the moral feelings of the community to insure justice, was used during the Anglo-Irish war of 1916-22 when Irish prisoners in English custody used the hunger strike to win public sympathy for their cause. (Those reminded of the tactic of Gandhi in his struggle against British imperialism should not be surprised to learn that ancient Hindu law has a fasting procedure just like that in ancient Irish law).

The essentially libertarian nature of Irish society can also be seen in the fact that the native Irish never issued coinage. Historians have generally interpreted this phenomenon as another sign of the barbaric nature of the Irish society and its economic and technological backwardness. Indeed, although in contact with the Celtic states of ancient Britain and Gaul, and later with the Roman and Anglo-Saxon peoples of Britain, and with the Viking princes who established trading colonies all around the coasts of Ireland, all of whom issued silver coinage within their realms, it is strange that the Irish never followed suit. They certainly had access to both gold and silver from native sources; they travelled abroad and knew the monetary usages of their neighbors; and the metalworkers capable of creating such masterpieces as the Tara brooch or the Ardagh chalice were certainly capable of striking coins.

Why then did they not do so? Libertarians can see one possible reason immediately. Coinage is usually the product of the State monopolists, who, through legal tender laws, compel sellers to accept state coinage which is always overvalued in comparison to its bullion value. Only the coercive power of the State can sustain the use of a debased coinage in the free market which prefers bullion which exchanges at its free market value rather than at a state imposed exchange rate.

Thus the peculiar absence of coinage among the Irish a thousand years, after its introduction in Britain is further testimony to the absence of the State in Irish society.

Under the impact of the Norman invasion of Ireland in the twelfth century, Irish institutions and customs under went considerable strain as they tried to cope with so alien a social and political system as that represented by the statism of the English imperialists. But in the end the two systems were incompatible. Under the Tudor monarchy with its strong absolutist tendencies, a systematic, intense and ultimately successful policy of conquest and cultural genocide was directed against the native Irish. The rebellions, conquests, and confiscations of the 17th century finished the destruction of the old anarchic society. Yet surely the spirit of liberty lived on in the hearts of the Irish peasantry to emerge again and again down to the present day whenever the oppression of the foreigners became too great. The shadow of the past is always very real and present in Ireland, and the memory of liberty has never faded from the minds of the people.

Note: Historians writing about stateless societies have a tendency to use “statist” terminology and conceptions in describing essentially stateless ideas and institutions. Irish historians have been particularly guilty in this respect. Least affected are the works of Myles Dillion, The Celtic Realms (London, 1967), and Early Irish Society (Dublin, 1954); also D. A. Binchy, Anglo-Saxon and Irish Kingship (London, 1970); and Kathleen Hughes, in her introduction to A History of Medieval Ireland (London, 1968), by A. J. Otway-Ruthven.

Bits And Pieces

By Jerome Tuccille

(This article will appear in a paperback anthology, dealing with Charles A. Reich’s The Greening of America, to be published later this year.)

The division between libertarians and conservatives in Right Wing circles has received a good deal of publicity in the past few years, and especially since the early fall of 1970. Libertarians have accused the Buckleyites of sacrificing their stated principles in favor of individual liberties in order to carry on an increasingly hawkish foreign policy against Communist China and the Soviet Union; the conservatives have derided libertarians for failing to understand the ominous nature of the communist threat which they regard as the single greatest evil afflicting mankind today. For those on the Left who have been confused by all this ideological squabbling off their starboard, it is worth taking a look at some of these distinctions more closely.

The libertarian-conservative rift does not merely involve differences over foreign policy, as some have claimed. While the conservatives have included a large dose of libertarian rhetoric in the presentation of their philosophy, especially as regards economic freedom in the marketplace, their main concern has always been the maintenance of traditional order in society. They speak of individual liberty, but by no means in absolutist terms. According to William F. Buckley, Jr., the freedom of the individual is to be contained within the structure of an orderly society based on the preservation of traditional western religious and cultural values. Order has always taken dominance over liberty in the conservative hierachy, and this accounts for their championship of censorship laws and other legislation governing the sexual and moral practices of the population.

Libertarians, on the other hand, are absolutists on the question of individual liberties. While free market libertarians are committed to an Ethic of private property and economic freedom, their main emphasis is on voluntarism; that is, they are not concerned about the habits and life–styles of other people so long as they remain non-aggresive. The individualist libertarian is willing to permit others to group together in communes, to share their wealth and property and means of production, if such a system is organized on a voluntary basis. He is not interested in regulating the non-violent activities of the general citizenry in any way, even when he considers their moral and cultural values to be at total variance with his own. The libertarian believes in defensive violence when his own freedom is threatened, but he will never try to violate the rights of others or force them to adopt a certain pattern of life because he thinks it is morally superior.

So we see how David Brudnoy, writing in the December 15, 1970 issue of National Review, can denigrate The Greening of America by Charles A. Reich as an “Epistle to the Unwashed.” The conservative is morally outraged by Reich’s infatuation with the youth subculture, and not impressed at all by the fact that Reich’s message is profoundly libertarian in most of its major aspects. The sensibilities of the conservative, his disdain for all cultural innovations outside the mainstream of the American tradition, take priority over his rhetorical devotion to the principles of voluntarism and individual freedom.

There is much one can say against the Reich book. He is too eager to embrace every aspect of the youth subculture as positive and beneficial. He is too tolerant of the wide-Suit epitomized the American Corporate image, and pro-spread use of drugs and their so-called “mind-expanding” faculties, even as drugs – especially hard drugs – are becoming less and less important on the campus social scene. Most damaging of all is Reich’s condemnation of reason and logical thought in favor of “less rigid” forms of communication: mind expansion, mysticism, rapping, etc. . . . It was precisely this lack of commitment to logical and constructive thinking which was responsible for the gradual degeneration of the New Left between 1965 and 1970. Starting out with a healthy, though basically instinctive penchant for decentralized political power at home and anti-militarism in foreign affairs, the New Left, largely because of its failure to develop a positive and rational program of its own, turned to philosophical nihilism and terroristic acts of “propaganda by the deed” as a means of bringing down the Corporate State. Without a sound philosophical base, and the ability to translate abstract principle into concrete political terms, no movement can hope to survive over the long run. It would be a sad development if this basic flaw in Reich’s conception of Consciousness III was to become responsible for its demise over the next few years.

Less crucial than this is the fact that Reich doesn’t seem to fully understand the cause of the transition between Consciousness I and Consciousness II. He defines Consciousness I as the “American dream . . . that success is determined by character, morality, hard work and self-denial.” Consciousness I believes in self-interest, competitiveness and suspicion of one’s neighbors. Consciousness II is defined as the belief in the supremacy of organizations and institutions over the Ethic of individual freedom. Consciousness II is the “assumption of corporate power to plan the economy, allocate resources, divide areas of business activity, fix prices, limit entry of new businesses, and . . . control the buyers themselves.” But Reich refers to the growth of monopolies and corporate power, and the consequent destruction of the free market, as the aggrandizement of “private power” which later gave way to the creation of the “Corporate State.” He fails to understand that the emergence of Corporate Power and the development of the Corporate State are one and the same thing. He still clings to the erroneous view that the free market brought about its own destruction and resulted in “monopolistic private power,” and that the Corporate State was established during the Roosevelt era as a means of regulating the inequities of the marketplace.

This is simply not the case. As we have learned from a variety of sources – free market economists Murray Rothbard, Ludwig von Mises and Henry Hazlitt on the Right; revisionist historians Gabriel Kolko, William A. Williams and G. William Domhoff on the Left – the consolidation of monopoly power in the late-nineteenth century was brought about with the vital assistance of an already-emerging Corporate State sixty years before Franklin D. Roosevelt came along. Reich correctly identifies the great “Robber Barons” of the 1900’s – Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Harriman and Ford among others – as the real “socialists” and “collectivizers” of American society, the “uprooters” and “killers” of the “American dream.” But he does not recognize the fact that these “subversives” did not destroy the freedom of Consciousness I by “market exploitation,” but, rather, they used State Power as a means of destroying the competitiveness and decentralization of the market to further their own interests. Consciousness I and the freedom of the marketplace was not subverted by a “Calvinistic” uptightness and suspicion of one’s fellow man, as negative and unhealthy as these attitudes are. The Ethic of individualism and free trade was ultimately brought down by the only power capable of doing the job – the power of political authority acting to further the interests of a few corporate lobbyists at the expense of the powerless multitudes.

Against these defects in the Reich presentation, we can counterbalance his masterful dissection of Consciousness II and his description of Consciousness III and the prospects it offers for the “Greening” of the American society of the future. No one has succeeded as Reich has in driving to the core of the Corporate State mentality. In the 1950’s the Organization Man and the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit epitomized the American Corporate image, and provided us with a good deal of insight into the dehumanizing aspects of a society in which the individual had lost almost complete control, over the direction of his own life. We lived with this new awareness for a while and lamented the fact that Big Government, Big Business, Big Labor, Big Bombs and Big Politics seemed to dominate our entire way of life. But before we could do anything to rectify the situation, we suddenly passed from the bland and faceless Eisenhower era into the grinding crush of John F. Kennedy’s Ivy League imperialism. From Dwight D. Eisenhower, father of all the people–he was the American people for Christ’s sake! – we placed our fate in the hands of J.F.K.’s think-tank intellectuals and his legions of pragmatic social engineers. And then, of course, in the aftermath – the aftermath of L.B.J, and Vietnam and the inevitable erosion of civil liberties at home – the problems of the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit were suddenly trivial by comparison. We now look back to the “Ike” days with a certain fondness, as if everything was really okay back in the ’50’s, those halcyon years of “free enterprise,” rock’n roll and Thursday night bowling games.

This is the great power of the Reich analysis. He opens our eyes wide and clear to the fact that we have been living a dream for fifty years and longer. On one hand there is the Consciousness II mentality reassuring us that things will be all right again with the proper planning, proper organization, proper reordering of priorities; the Consciousness II mentality with the sheer arrogance to assert that Vietnam would never have been if only J.F.K. were still around – the same J.F.K. of the Bay of Pigs and Cuban Missile show–down, the same J.F.K. who was responsible for unleashing Robert MacNamara on the world. And on the other hand we have Consciousness I still adhering to the brainless assumption that the Organization Man was a free enterpriser, that the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit was a heroic individualist who would find his true level through integrity and hard work in the open marketplace.

Both Consciousness I and II are living the lie. I is more lovable, perhaps, in that he is the one who has had his ideals shot down and his dreams destroyed. But II has also become victimized by his own system to such an extent that he believes – he actually believes after all that has happened – that another forty billion dollars or a new busing law is going to cure the ills of mankind.

In one of Reich’s most incisive chapters, “The Machine Begins to Self-Destruct,” he describes how this gigantic bureaucratic Monolith is already collapsing of its own inefficiency. The Corporate State is falling apart because of its inability to function any longer. We see it happening every day, all around us, particularly in our urban centers. We are undergoing nothing less than a complete institutional breakdown. Our educational facilities for elementary and high school grades are virtually inoperative, and in many cases they have become a physical as well as a mental hazard to the young. Police protection – theoretically a necessary evil designed for the protection of life and property – has long been an agency of domestic imperialism. Sanitation, fire prevention, housing, libraries, museums, parks, transportation, nearly every civic service one can think of is either in a state of disrepair, or else it is operating on a level far below that which we have a right to expect. On top of it all the tax schedule is higher now than it has ever been – many claim we have reached the saturation point – and our local governments are all claiming bank ruptcy. So we have empty public coffers, a near collapse in all our vital institutions and an excruciating tax rate which, if it is raised much higher, will most likely foster a state of active resistance in the law-abiding middle class. No one but the most adamant Consciousness II will deny that the machine is, indeed, self-destructing.

Now we come to Consciousness III According to Reich, Consciousness III “starts with self. In contrast to Consciousness II, which accepts society, the public interest, and institutions as the primary reality, III declares that the individual self is the only true reality.” III “postulates the absolute worth of every human being – every self.” “But III’s do not compete in ’real life.” They do not measure others, they do not see others as something to struggle against. People are brothers, the world is ample for all.” Consciousness III rejects . . . manipulation of others, for one’s own purpose. . . .” This emphasis on individual self-esteem and corresponding respect for the individuality of all others, with the accent on non-violence, non-coercion and non-aggression, is the basis for the libertarian philosophy. Consciousness III, shorn of the negative aspects outlined earlier – reliance on drugs and denigration of rational thought – is profoundly libertarian in all its elements.

If Reich is guilty of anything in his discussion of the Consciousness III mentality, his guilt rests in a naive faith that a change in consciousness will revolutionize the entire face of American society. It is true, certainly, that a fundamental change in everyone’s basic attitudes toward life will eventually result in a complete restructuring of a society’s political, social and cultural institutions. But this is rather like saying: if everyone refuses to aggress against his neighbors, we will have eliminated the need for police protection; or, if everyone stopped drinking to excess we will have done away with alcoholism. The Reich prescription for a Revolution by Consciousness is actually a tautology. The Revolution and the adoption of Consciousness III are identical. We will have a libertarian society if everyone becomes a libertarian. We will have an end to military imperialism and an expansion of domestic civil liberties if Richard Nixon, J. Edgar Hoover, Melvin Laird, John Mitchell and every other power-merchant in the country becomes a III, a libertarian. Until that happens, unfortunately, we must continue to resist, to disobey, to fight against the Corporate machine in the most intelligent manner we know how. It is necessary, as long as the military draft remains in force, to fight it openly and support those who refuse to have their lives nationalized in the name of national defense; to engage in tax resistance as a means of weakening the power of centralized government; to boycott elections when no real alternatives are offered; to agitate for local control of schools, police, sanitation and other civic institutions; to keep the pressure continually on the political structure in order to break it down and make it more responsive; to work for reform within the system to achieve desired changes in our judicial, social and economic policies, and to implement revolutionary tactics such as massive civil disobedience whenever reform becomes impossible.

This is not to minimize the impact of the Reich message, however. He has given us a valuable document in this time of violence and militaristic nation-states. Charles Reich is a true revolutionary, a brother in the struggle against power and political tyranny. It is for libertarians, and anyone else who believes in the future of mankind, to join in the expansion of Consciousness III, to improve upon it and intellectualize it in the areas it is weakest, and to get on with the struggle to “Green” and libertarianize the earth.

A Libertarian Rebuttal: Conservatism Examined

By James Dale Davidson

Those who have followed the growing split in the right wing movement realize that many old-fashioned, red-blooded Americans would be perfectly happy to see the collapse of the U.S. Government. This – you may say–is not an ordinary opinion. Obviously not. But it is hardly so harebrained as it might seem. Advocates of libertarianism have made a compelling case for a totally free market, a case which most people have never heard and much of which has only recently been set forth for the first time. Dr. Murray Rothbard, the outstanding economist, has published POWER AND MARKET, a devastating critique of all functions of government. It would be hard to over-estimate the force of Dr. Rothbard’s ideas. Writing in the February issue of the INDIVIDUALIST, Senator Mark Hatfield comments as follows: “(N)ot only does he argue persuasively against the economic functions of government, but also suggests alternative methods of dealing with problems normally assumed by government. In other words, one cannot offhandedly reject the thesis of this book as a flight of fancy.”

When a U.S. Senator says that a proposal to abolish his job cannot be dismissed as a flight of fancy, you may properly infer he is telling the truth. Libertarianism makes sense. Those who have never been attracted to conventional “right wing” thought find libertarianism appealing. This is not lost on Mr. William Buckley and his conservative cohorts at NATIONAL REVIEW. Ever since libertarian ideas came to public attention, the Buckley crowd has tried desperately to obviate their appeal. Having no arguments to answer libertarianism, the conservatives have turned to ad hominem attack. At first, Buckley suggested that all libertarians were, in his words, “irresponsible libertines.” The contention was that anyone who takes liberty seriously invites being debauched. The conservatives abandoned this approach only when the appeal of debauchery proved irresistible. After one speech delivered by Mr. Buckley to a Young Americans for Freedom group, hundreds of listeners responded to warnings of “libertinism” by seeking out a libertarian meeting in order to join in the fun.

It is now obvious, even to conservatives, that in a country where “X”-rated movies are sold out the charge of debauchery does little to discourage converts. The latest conservative tactic, one presently employed, is to suggest that all libertarians are crude, naive fanatics. The conservatives’ version of a libertarian, if he could be brought to life, would be a sort of humorless, philosophic bird–watcher who falls out of bed every morning at four to sneak out in the woods in search of a previously unsighted solipsism. Consider the notion, popularized by Buckley, that libertarianism arises from a desire to de-nationalize lighthouses. In a flood of articles in various publications in recent months conservatives have harped continuously about lighthouses, so much so that one wonders about the source of their fascination. In all of libertarian literature there is scarcely one sentence about lighthouses.

So why – you wonder – is there such a big fuss? The answer is that as always it is the conservative tactic to portray any departure from the status quo as something ridiculous. In all the conservative attacks upon libertarians one would be hard pressed to find one argument which does not rest upon the contention that an idea is silly if its implications extend beyond the bounds of consensus politics. But surely, you may tell yourself, there must be more to conservatism than that. No, hardly. Conservatism is just what Russell Kirk has always insisted it should be – the belief that whatever exists is good.

Mr. Buckley says that libertarians are naive, but one could hardly imagine a more naive, mindless doctrine than conservatism. Conservatives do not believe anything in particular. They have no specific philosophy. In practice, they are always a generation or so behind the times. Whatever the liberals advocated 25 years ago, conservatives are defending today. If you doubt it, employ an empirical test. Read today’s Mr. Buckley and try to distinguish his pitch from that of yesterday’s Harry Truman. The difference is not worth yawning over.

It does not take much of a philosopher to realize that with the conservative position constantly (if slowly) changing, those who advocate it are caught up in a plexus of absurdities. For example, Buckley is deeply offended by unflattering comparisons between heroes of the American state and their counterparts abroad. His attitude is inevitable, for by the very nature of conservatism, conservatives cannot see all societies in the same light. Conservatives favor stability and preservation of the status quo. But they can favor only one status quo at a time. If they were logical, they could hardly help but admire such noble personages as Premier Kosygin, who has probably done more to maintain the status quo than any government leader in this century. Kosygin is one of history’s great conservatives.

Buckley and his crowd cleave to contradictions which would make modest men blush. They claim to be a force against statism. Yet their most notable libertarian gesture of the past decade was when James Burnham came out in favor of legalizing firecrackers. They say they favor liberty. But their prime occupation is apologizing for Richard Nixon, a man who has about as much respect for human liberty as Mao Tse Tung. Buckley says that he and his chums understand what the free market really is. Yet who among them (I do not count Henry Hazlitt as part of the Buckley crowd) was ever concerned or knowledgable about economics? Look at the backgrounds of the NATIONAL REVIEW contributors. They are a coterie of ex-commies and religious mystics and theocrats.

As the American state becomes more totalitarian (and who could deny that it is?), Mr. Buckley will be impelled by the dynamics of his own illogic to apologize for whatever happens. He has gone along with the gag this far. Why stop now? Unless he admits to the libertarian contention that political positions need not be defined by what is admissible in the status quo, Buckley will turn out to be no better than the tired old men of another time who shrugged over Auschwitz and Buchenwald.

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Libertarian Conference

The libertarian conference held at Columbia University Law School, New York City, on March 13–14, was a resounding success. Three hundred people attended the conference, and everyone was struck by the seriousness and eagerness to learn of virtually everyone in the audience Gary Greenberg, the New York Libertarian Association, and Society for Individual Liberty (SIL), are to be commended for an excellent and expert organizing job. In contrast to the RLA conference in New York a year and a half ago, there was no hysteria, no uproar, no screaming at each Other by Left, Center, and Right factions of the movement. There was no lunging for the microphone by rowdies of any of the factions. More and more it becomes clear that SIL and its affiliates – and regardless of minor differences within its ranks – are going to be the major conduits for libertarian organizing in this country.

Highlight of the conference was the debate between Roy Childs, Jr. and the sinister Jeffrey St. John, veteran Randian-Buckleyite radio and TV commentator, on “anarcho-capitalism vs. limited government”. Making his debut as a debater, Roy gladdened the hearts of all libertarians by clobbering and turning-inside-out the suave rhetorician, trapping St. John repeatedly in ignorance, logical contradictions, and outright evasions. More important, the largely neo-Randian audience realized this full well, and was deeply impressed by Roy’s superior logic. Now that the Randian monolith has been shattered forevermore, there are a great many Randians around the country who are interested in and susceptible to the rational arguments for anarcho-capitalism.

All this illustrates a growing truth about our movement: that the most susceptible to extensive and long-lasting conversion to Liberty are far more the sober, sensible middle classes of our country, rather than the drug-besotted ranters against work, individualism, and private property, that handful calling for destruction of “Amerika” and all its works.

Army Intelligence Reads The Forum

Recent revelations of the snooping activities of Army Counterintelligence showed that the Army was engaged in massive spying and reportage on virtually every group–left or right-wing – in some way outside the Establishment consensus in American life. One of the activities of the Army’s Counterintelligence Analysis Branch (CIAB) was to subscribe to “underground” publications, and the cover address it used was “R. Allan Lee Associates” of Alexandria, Va. When the revelation broke recently, we realized that, sure enough, R. Allan Lee Associates had been until recently subscribers to the Lib Forum, only failing to renew just before the publicity hit the fan.

Who knows what secret name and address the CIAB is, using now, somewhere among our vast array of subscribers? But at any rate, welcome CIAB, even if you are using stolen taxpayers’ money to report on taxpayers; maybe you’ll learn something from reading us. And more important, to you, Mr. and Mrs. Libertarian out there, if the CIAB is reading us avidly and with care, can you afford to lag behind?