The Rothbardian Reconstruction of the Political Spectrum

 Via: ATS

Rothbard’s classic 1965 essay, “Left and Right: Prospects for Liberty,” is a must read for anarchists, libertarians, anti-statists, and decentralists of any species. This essay as much as any other really defines the historical context and trajectory of our common fight, irrespective of our other differences.

By Murray Rothbard
Mises Institute

[Originally appeared in Left and Right, Spring 1965, pp. 4-22.]

The Conservative has long been marked, whether he knows it or not, by long-run pessimism: by the belief that the long-run trend, and therefore Time itself, is against him, and hence the inevitable trend runs toward left-wing statism at home and Communism abroad. It is this long-run despair that accounts for the Conservative’s rather bizarre short-run optimism; for since the long run is given up as hopeless, the Conservative feels that his only hope of success rests in the current moment. In foreign affairs, this point of view leads the Conservative to call for desperate showdowns with Communism, for he feels that the longer he waits the worse things will ineluctably become; at home, it leads him to total concentration on the very next election, where he is always hoping for victory and never achieving it. The quintessence of the Practical Man, and beset by long-run despair, the Conservative refuses to think or plan beyond the election of the day.

Pessimism, however, both short-run and long-run, is precisely what the prognosis of Conservatism deserves; for Conservatism is a dying remnant of the ancien régime of the preindustrial era, and, as such, it has no future. In its contemporary American form, the recent Conservative Revival embodied the death throes of an ineluctably moribund, Fundamentalist, rural, small-town, white Anglo-Saxon America. What, however, of the prospects for liberty? For too many libertarians mistakenly link the prognosis for liberty with that of the seemingly stronger and supposedly allied Conservative movement; this linkage makes the characteristic long-run pessimism of the modern libertarian easy to understand. But this paper contends that, while the short-run prospects for liberty at home and abroad may seem dim, the proper attitude for the libertarian to take is that of unquenchable long-run optimism.

The case for this assertion rests on a certain view of history: which holds, first, that before the 18th century in Western Europe there existed (and still continues to exist outside the West) an identifiable Old Order. Whether the Old Order took the form of feudalism or Oriental despotism, it was marked by tyranny, exploitation, stagnation, fixed caste, and hopelessness and starvation for the bulk of the population. In sum, life was “nasty, brutish, and short”; here was Maine’s “society of status” and Spencer’s “military society.” The ruling classes, or castes, governed by conquest and by getting the masses to believe in the alleged divine imprimatur to their rule.
The Old Order was, and still remains, the great and mighty enemy of liberty; and it was particularly mighty in the past because there was then no inevitability about its overthrow. When we consider that basically the Old Order had existed since the dawn of history, in all civilizations, we can appreciate even more the glory and the magnitude of the triumph of the liberal revolution of and around the 18th century.

Part of the dimensions of this struggle has been obscured by a great myth of the history of Western Europe implanted by antiliberal German historians of the late 19th century. The myth held that the growth of absolute monarchies and of mercantilism in the early modern era was necessary for the development of capitalism, since these served to liberate the merchants and the people from local feudal restrictions. In actuality, this was not at all the case; the King and his nation-State served rather as a superfeudal overlord re-imposing and reinforcing feudalism just as it was being dissolved by the peaceful growth of the market economy. The King superimposed his own restrictions and monopoly privileges onto those of the feudal regime. The absolute monarchs were the Old Order writ large and made even more despotic than before. Capitalism, indeed, flourished earliest and most actively precisely in those areas where the central State was weak or non-existent: the Italian cities, the Hanseatic League, the confederation of 17th century Holland. Finally, the old order was overthrown or severely shaken in its grip in two ways. One was by industry and the market expanding through the interstices of the feudal order (e.g., industry in England developing in the countryside beyond the grip of feudal, State, and guild restrictions.) More important was a series of cataclysmic revolutions that blasted loose the Old Order and the old ruling classes: the English Revolutions of the 17th century, the American Revolution, and the French Revolution, all of which were necessary to the ushering in of the Industrial Revolution and of at least partial victories for individual liberty, laissez-faire separation of church-and-state, and international peace. The society of status gave way, at least partially, to the “society of contract”; the military society gave way partially to the “industrial society.” The mass of the population now achieved a mobility of labor and place, and accelerating expansion of their living standards, for which they had scarcely dared to hope. Liberalism had indeed brought to the Western world not only liberty, the prospect of peace, and the rising living standards of an industrial society, but above all perhaps, it brought hope, a hope in ever-greater progress that lifted the mass of mankind out of its age-old sink of stagnation and despair.

Soon there developed in Western Europe two great political ideologies, centered around this new revolutionary phenomenon: the one was Liberalism, the party of hope, of radicalism, of liberty, of the Industrial Revolution, of progress, of humanity; the other was Conservatism, the party of reaction, the party that longed to restore the hierarchy, statism, theocracy, serfdom, and class exploitation of the old order. Since liberalism admittedly had reason on its side, the Conservatives darkened the ideological atmosphere with obscurantist calls for romanticism, tradition, theocracy, and irrationalism. Political ideologies were polarized, with Liberalism on the extreme “Left,” and Conservatism on the extreme “Right,” of the ideological spectrum. That genuine Liberalism was essentially radical and revolutionary was brilliantly perceived, in the twilight of its impact, by the great Lord Acton (one of the few figures in the history of thought who, charmingly, grew more radical as he grew older). Acton wrote that “Liberalism wishes for what ought to be, irrespective of what is.” In working out this view, incidentally, it was Acton, not Trotsky, who first arrived at the concept of the “permanent revolution.” As Gertrude Himmelfarb wrote, in her excellent study of Acton:

his philosophy develop(ed) to the point where the future was seen as the avowed enemy of the past, and where the past was allowed no authority except as it happened to conform to morality. To take seriously this Liberal theory of history, to give precedence to “what ought to be” over “what is,” was, he admitted, virtually to install a “revolution in permanence.”
The “revolution in permanence,” as Acton hinted in the inaugural lecture and admitted frankly in his notes, was the culmination of his philosophy of history and theory of politics… This idea of conscience, that men carry about with them the knowledge of good and evil, is the very root of revolution, for it destroys the sanctity of the past… “Liberalism is essentially revolutionary,” Acton observed. “Facts must yield to ideas. Peaceably and patiently if possible. Violently if not.” [1]

The Liberal, wrote Acton, far surpassed the Whig:

The Whig governed by compromise. The Liberal begins the reign of ideas… One is practical, gradual, ready for compromise. The other works out a principle philosophically. One is a policy aiming at a philosophy. The other is a philosophy seeking a policy. [2]

What happened to Liberalism? Why then did it decline during the nineteenth century? This question has been pondered many times, but perhaps the basic reason was an inner rot within the vitals of Liberalism itself. For, with the partial success of the Liberal Revolution in the West, the Liberals increasingly abandoned their radical fervor, and therefore their liberal goals, to rest content with a mere defense of the uninspiring and defective status quo. Two philosophical roots of this decay may be discerned: First, the abandonment of natural rights and “higher law” theory for utilitarianism. For only forms of natural or higher law theory can provide a radical base outside the existing system from which to challenge the status quo; and only such theory furnishes a sense of necessary immediacy to the libertarian struggle, by focussing on the necessity of bringing existing criminal rulers to the bar of justice. Utilitarians, on the other hand, in abandoning justice for expediency, also abandon immediacy for quiet stagnation and inevitably end up as objective apologists for the existing order.
The second great philosophical influence on the decline of Liberalism was evolutionism, or Social Darwinism, which put the finishing touches to Liberalism as a radical force in society. For the Social Darwinist erroneously saw history and society through the peaceful, rose-colored glasses of infinitely slow, infinitely gradual social evolution. Ignoring the prime fact that no ruling caste in history has ever voluntarily surrendered its power, and that therefore Liberalism had to break through by means of a series of revolutions, the Social Darwinists looked forward peacefully and cheerfully to thousands of years of infinitely gradual evolution to the next supposedly inevitable stage of individualism.

An interesting illustration of a thinker who embodies within himself the decline of Liberalism in the nineteenth century is Herbert Spencer. Spencer began as a magnificently radical liberal, indeed virtually a pure libertarian. But, as the virus of sociology and Social Darwinism took over in his soul, Spencer abandoned libertarianism as a dynamic historical movement, although at first without abandoning it in pure theory. In short, while looking forward to an eventual ideal of pure liberty, Spencer began to see its victory as inevitable, but only after millennia of gradual evolution, and thus, in actual fact, Spencer abandoned Liberalism as a fighting, radical creed; and confined his Liberalism in practice to a weary, rear-guard action against the growing collectivism of the late nineteenth-century. Interestingly enough, Spencer’s tired shift “rightward” in strategy soon became a shift rightward in theory as well; so that Spencer abandoned pure liberty even in theory e.g., in repudiating his famous chapter in Social Statics, “The Right to Ignore the State.”

In England, the classical liberals began their shift from radicalism to quasi-conservatism in the early nineteenth century; a touchstone of this shift was the general British liberal attitude toward the national liberation struggle in Ireland. This struggle was twofold: against British political imperialism, and against feudal landlordism which had been imposed by that imperialism. By their Tory blindness toward the Irish drive for national independence, and especially for peasant property against feudal oppression, the British liberals (including Spencer) symbolized their effective abandonment of genuine Liberalism, which had been virtually born in a struggle against the feudal land system. Only in the United States, the great home of radical liberalism (where feudalism had never been able to take root outside the South), did natural rights and higher law theory, and consequent radical liberal movements, continue in prominence until the mid-nineteenth century. In their different ways, the Jacksonian and Abolitionist movements were the last powerful radical libertarian movements in American life. [3]

Thus, with Liberalism abandoned from within, there was no longer a party of Hope in the Western world, no longer a “Left” movement to lead a struggle against the State and against the unbreached remainder of the Old Order. Into this gap, into this void created by the drying up of radical liberalism, there stepped a new movement: Socialism. Libertarians of the present day are accustomed to think of socialism as the polar opposite of the libertarian creed. But this is a grave mistake, responsible for a severe ideological disorientation of libertarians in the present world. As we have seen, Conservatism was the polar opposite of liberty; and socialism, while to the “left” of conservatism, was essentially a confused, middle-of-the road movement. It was, and still is, middle-of-the road because it tries to achieve Liberal ends by the use of Conservative means.

In short, Russell Kirk, who claims that Socialism was the heir of classical liberalism, and Ronald Hamowy, who sees Socialism as the heir of Conservatism, are both right; for the question is on what aspect of this confused centrist movement we happen to be focussing. Socialism, like Liberalism and against Conservatism, accepted the industrial system and the liberal goals of freedom, reason, mobility, progress, higher living standards the masses, and an end to theocracy and war; but it tried to achieve these ends by the use of incompatible, Conservative means: statism, central planning, communitarianism, etc. Or rather, to be more precise, there were from the beginning two different strands within Socialism: one was the Right-wing, authoritarian strand, from Saint-Simon down, which glorified statism, hierarchy, and collectivism and which was thus a projection of Conservatism trying to accept and dominate the new industrial civilization. The other was the Left-wing, relatively libertarian strand, exemplified in their different ways by Marx and Bakunin, revolutionary and far more interested in achieving the libertarian goals of liberalism and socialism: but especially the smashing of the State apparatus to achieve the “withering away of the State” and the “end of the exploitation of man by man.” Interestingly enough, the very Marxian phrase, the “replacement of the government of men by the administration of things,” can be traced, by a circuitous route, from the great French radical laissez-faire liberals of the early nineteenth century, Charles Comte (no relation to Auguste Comte) and Charles Dunoyer. And so, too, may the concept of the “class struggle”; except that for Dunoyer and Comte the inherently antithetical classes were not businessmen vs. workers, but the producers in society (including free businessmen, workers, peasants, etc.) versus the exploiting classes constituting, and privileged by, the State apparatus. [4] Saint-Simon, at one time in his confused and chaotic life, was close to Comte and Dunoyer and picked up his class analysis from them, in the process characteristically getting the whole thing balled up and converting businessmen on the market, as well as feudal landlords and others of the State privileged, into “exploiters.” Marx and Bakunin picked this up from the Saint-Simonians, and the result gravely misled the whole Left Socialist movement; for, then, in addition to smashing the repressive State, it became supposedly necessary to smash private capitalist ownership of the means of production. Rejecting private property, especially of capital, the Left Socialists were then trapped in a crucial inner contradiction: if the State is to disappear after the Revolution (immediately for Bakunin, gradually “withering” for Marx), then how is the “collective” to run its property without becoming an enormous State itself in fact even if not in name? This was a contradiction which neither the Marxists nor the Bakuninists were ever able to resolve.

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What Scottish Independence Means for Anarchism

by Daniel Hawkins
VIA:The Art of Not being Governed

Something earth-shattering is about to happen.

Tomorrow, the British-ruled country known as Scotland will vote for their independence.
The news has been focusing almost entirely on what this will mean for the UK and Europe. Most people have been completely preoccupied with what this will mean for the area economically. But that isn’t half the story; the trivialization of the matter should not be surprising. In all likelihood, if you’re an American reader, you probably hadn’t even heard of the Scottish independence referendum until the last week or two. But don’t be fooled; this is a momentous and historic event. This vote has the power to change the world forever. This may seem like a long-winded article, but I beg you to stay with it, and watch for the results of what may be the most important vote in history.
To understand why this is so important for you and why this could potentially transform the world as we know it, we have to learn the story behind it. To know why many Scots want to separate from England and the UK, we must first understand why these two countries are so different; we have to understand the history and nature of Great Britain.

First, some lessons in terminology are in order. If this seems elementary to you, I apologize, but most of us Americans are kept in ignorance by our media and schools, so this is important. The British Isles consist of: Ireland, Scotland, England,* the Isle of Man, Ireland, and many surrounding islands. The British government rules over all of the British Isles except for the Republic of Ireland. What we call Great Britain consists of one island divided into three countries: England, Wales, and Scotland. This is the British mainland, stretching from Dover in the south to the Orkneys in the north. The United Kingdom, however, is a little different. The UK consists of: Great Britain (i.e., England, Scotland, and Wales), as well as the Isle of Man, Northern Ireland, and several other islands. While the Union Jack does not contain the Welsh flag, it basically integrates the countries of the UK into it:



This is their story:

2,400 years ago, war and agricultural pressures forced the Celts to leave their homelands (modern-day France, Spain, and other parts of the European mainland). Sailing north, the Celts peopled the British Isles. From the Stone Age to the Iron Age, they dominated the area.** The marks of their rich and ancient history can be seen all over the Isles, from the Ring of Brodgar to Stonehenge, from the Meath Stone of Destiny to Castell Henllys.
Slowly, the Celts formed their own distinct sub-cultures and societies. The inhabitants of the large island to the west became known as the Irish. On the mainland known today as Great Britain, the Britons occupied the south. To the north lived the Picts, or the Scots as they were also called. The wild land on the west coast belonged to the Welsh. Over the centuries—due to some amount of luck and bloody struggle—remnants of these Celtic cultures have managed to survive in many parts of the British Isles.

Both the Romans and Greeks attempted to colonize the Isles, but to little avail. Upon hearing of its tempestuous sea and its wild people, the Romans were too afraid to enter Ireland. They tried and failed to tame the Welsh, and were repeated repelled by the fearsome Scots/Picts to the north. It seemed their domain would have to remain in the south. After much frustration, the Roman emperor Hadrian built a 73 mile-long stone wall between present-day Scotland and present-day England. For centuries, Hadrian’s Wall was considered the border between the wilder north and the more civilized south. This was only the beginning of the divide.

The Britons and the Romans lived together, sometimes in peace and other times in war. The Romans totally changed the cultural landscape, influencing everything on the British mainland, from law to art to religion, but the Britons still held fast to their heritage. Most historians consider their legacy to be the civilizing of the Britons. Ultimately, though, the land proved to be too distant and too wild compared to their homelands for the Greeks or the Romans to govern. As the Roman and Greek presence in Britain dwindled, another invasion began.

Driven by their own conflicts and agricultural pressures, three tribes from modern-day Germany sailed across the sea and into the British Isles. In the northernmost area of Germany, along the Danish border, came the Jutes. Just south of them came the Angles. From further south still came the most dominant tribe, the Saxons. Cousins to the Vikings who came later, these tribes brought with them a new religion, a new writing system, and a new language. They never quite made a strong impact in Ireland, Scotland, Cornwall, or Wales, however. Like the Greeks and Romans before them, these Germanic tribes were mostly restricted to the south. The Celtic lands proved again unconquerable.
Eventually, these three Germanic tribes became known as the Anglo-Saxons. Their new domain was called Angle-Land, or as we call it today, England. The Anglo-Saxon influence cannot be overstated. The English language owes its existence to the Anglo-Saxons (going back to the writing of Beowulf). We even borrow our days of the week from their religion: for example, Woden (their cognate of Odin) lends his name to Wednesday. As Christianity spread through Europe, it is believed by scholars that some Britons were Christianized earlier than the Anglo-Saxons, but that the Anglo-Saxons played a crucial role in establishing Catholicism as the first official religion of England.
By the 9th century AD, (after about 250 years of rule) not only was their culture unrecognizable, but the style of government in England was completely different than the Celtic lands outside it. While the Celts probably clung to polycentric law and clan chieftains, the Anglo-Saxons created a mix of Germanic and Roman governing systems. What came out was a patchwork of earldoms, with written laws and legal monopolies. While language and religion easily crossed borders, the legal culture struggled to. These differences divided the Celts from the English, and enmity grew between them at every opportunity.

The Viking invasion had a considerable effect on life in the British Isles. These pagan pillagers had little mercy for what was, to them, a fertile land ripe for harvest. Unlike the Romans, they battled the Irish Celts for as long as they could. The threat to the English way of life was so great that the Anglo-Saxon earls united under a high king, establishing, for the very first time, the English Monarchy.***

The Vikings remained there for about 150 years, building permanent settlements in Ireland, Scotland, and most notably, eastern England. The area of England ruled by the Vikings became known as Danelaw. The remaining English lands—Wessex and part of Mercia—could be considered more civilized, but life was not easy for them. The English and Vikings were nearly constantly at war. Some Celts allied themselves with the Vikings in order to push the Anglo-Saxons out of their lands, but ultimately failed. The new English Monarchy claimed control of Wales and Cornwall, forming Britannia.

Danelaw finally fell—partly through war and partly through political alliances—toward the end of the Anglo-Saxon reign. The mark of the Vikings was left, but a new age was about to begin. After the death of King Edward the Confessor, several English earls vied for his throne. As England was weakened, a Norman nobleman by the name of William laid claim. The Normans, including Duke William, were descendants of Viking invaders, but were well integrated into French culture. With imperial ambitions and a name to make, William was about to change the face of the Britain forever.

William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy and King of Great Britain

In 1066, following political scandals involving the Anglo-Saxon earls, William invaded in full force. The Anglo-Saxons fell, and their kingdom fell with it. What followed was a revolution in law and culture. But, we must know, it came at a terrible price. It was not enough for William the Conqueror to subjugate western England. He conquered what remained of Danelaw, as well as the earldoms surrounding Hadrian’s Wall. This was the Harrowing of the North. With a method of Total War, William starved, smoked, and rooted out the English and Celts wherever he could. Moving further north, his invasion of Scotland proved to be a bloody campaign, culminating in the temporary defeat of the Scottish monarchy and clans.

William’s attempts to quell the Welsh and the Irish did not prove as successful as his English campaign. However, even after his death, his imperial legacy carried on. Eventually, alliances were made and broken, and the Normans brought their hammer down on these Celtic lands. But the United Kingdom was yet to be born. There remained strong pockets of Celtic resistance in Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, and their respective monarchs and chieftains put up a fight for another few centuries. Future monarchs like Queen Elizabeth I would follow in William’s footsteps, laying claim to the whole of the British Isles.

In William’s time, however, he exercised iron-fisted control over what lands he could govern. Building upon the heavily Romanized legal system in England, he ordered a massive census to be taken of everyone in his kingdom. This tome became known as the Domesday Book. The event was such a defeat for the free peoples, our word “doom” (and Doomsday) as well as our connotation of “reckoning” come from this act. As a uniform tax code was imposed on his kingdom, William centralized the government in a way that hadn’t been seen since the Roman occupation. As monarch of Britain, William paved the way for even more bad blood between the English and the Celts.
William the Conqueror not only centralized and formalized the law, but also helped to establish the Feudal system. While Feudalism existed in one form or another in the rest of the British Isles, it took a particularly strong hold in England in the form of Manoralism (essentially an aristocratic plantation system). This system was far more codified than any semi-Feudal system in the past or in the Celtic lands. The various dukes, earls, and barons of England often held some influence in the king’s court.

To be an English feudal lord, however, it was usually a prerequisite that one had to have Norman ancestry, since the Normans were the conquering force. This class of British citizenry became known as Anglo-Normans. Beneath them were the un-assimilated Celts and Anglo-Saxons, who often toiled in the fields and were conscripted into wars in the name of their feudal lords. In many cases, the Scots were literally enslaved by the English. This was the Medieval Age in Britain. With its own parliament, court, and monarchy, that special mix of Brittonic, Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Viking, and Norman cultures became what we know today as England.

Scotland, among the other Celtic lands, grew up with its own history. With very little Roman influence, very little Anglo-Saxon influence, some Viking influence, and some Norman influence, the Celtic culture of Scotland remained quite dominant for centuries. While it isn’t as prominent as in Ireland or Wales, Scotch Gaelic is still spoken by 1.1% of the Scottish population. Throughout the Middle Ages and Early Modern Era, Scotland and England had a “love-hate relationship,” to say the least. Different Houses of Scotland had different attitudes toward the English nobility and monarchy. Sometimes, a Scottish monarch would simultaneously be the English monarch, and vice versa. Sometimes, they would be separate. The history is complicated, to say the least. In any case, the Scots were never quite comfortable.

To say that the Scots were subject to foreign rule is both correct and incorrect, depending on whom you ask. The Unionist idea is generally that both countries exist on the same island, and the various intermarriages between the royal families forged a de facto relationship that served as the basis for the formal union. But there has never been any consensus on this issue in Scotland. Repeatedly, English monarchs attempted to truly conquer Scotland, but largely failed. In the periods of English rule, bloody rebellions were always sure to come. One of the most notable early wars came in the form of the First War of Scottish Independence, pitting King Robert the Bruce and William Wallace against King Edward (“Hammer of the Scots”) I. If you’ve seen Braveheart, you should be a little familiar with this war. A period of independence followed****, but only for 18 years. Then followed the Second War of Independence, which lasted for about 25 years. Several rebellions were fought in the following centuries. As the English Reformation commenced, Scotland held onto Catholicism and also adopted Presbyterianism. This religious divide represented, and still represents, a massive divide between the cultures of the two nations. A true union between the two nations seemed impossible.

Robert the Bruce, King of Scotland. William Wallace and Robert the Bruce remain enormously important figures in Scotland.

A union did come, however. When Scottish monarchs held sway in England—particularly the Stuarts—the idea of a union was supported by most of the Scots. In 1603, the Scottish monarch James VI (James I in England) became the first monarch of Great Britain. This drove a wedge into Scotland between those who were satisfied with British rule (as long as it meant having a Scottish monarch to represent their interests), and those who believed that a union, no matter who was in charge, would be ultimately controlled by aristocrats. The divide remains there today.
For 100 years, the debate raged on, as did the English Civil War. However, the general idea (at least as phrased by the Unionists) was that it would be a Union of the Crowns. For the duration of the 17th century, both countries had separate parliaments. Both nations had their disputes with their respective governments, but they were, in fact, distinct. Eventually, the Scottish Stuart line was deposed forever. Still, many Scots believed having a Scottish parliament would act as a bulwark against disconnected, English interests (sound familiar?). But as the 18th century dawned, things changed.

On May 1, 1707, the Union of the Kingdom of Great Britain was formed. If you ask a Unionist, they will tell you that the Scottish parliament and English parliament unified into one parliament—the Parliament of Great Britain, centered in Westminster—consisting of both Scottish and English members to represent regional interests. If you ask a Scottish Nationalist, however, they will tell you that Scotland was utterly robbed of its sovereignty. The Scottish parliament did vote in favor of a Union, but as we libertarians know, it’s hard saying whether or not a parliament truly represents the wishes of its people. In either case, Scottish representation and sovereignty was formally handed over to England for the first and final time.

In the 1740s, a huge group of rebellious Scots—known as the Jacobites—attempted to throw off English rule. This was one of the most significant Scottish Nationalist movements in history. Again, depending on whom you ask, their goals were either: to install a Stuart to the throne of the Union, or to install a Stuart to the Scottish throne and dissolve the Union. After a close fight, the Battle of Culloden signaled the defeat of the Jacobites. The English monarch (in this case the Anglo-German George II) would remain the monarch of Great Britain and the United Kingdom. The defeat was meant to be eternal. The Highland Clearances followed, sometimes with legal blows like the Highland Dress Act and the Disarming Act.

The bloody Battle of Culloden ushered in and solidified an era of Scotland’s ethno-cultural cleansing.

The 19th century was one of relatively absolute English rule. Expanding across the globe, the British Empire now had more than enough power to rule over most of its colonies. With Scotland as its neighbor, this proved to be relatively easy. A few skirmishes broke out here and there, but the Scots mostly deferred to the political process when they attempted to gain more independence. As the 20th century began, echoes of chaos came from the west.
The Irish War of Independence rocked the British Isles. The issue of Irish independence tore permanent rifts within the British and Irish citizenry. Ireland, much like Scotland, was once a Celtic nation, and had developed a completely different ethnic, religious, and cultural heritage from England. Their own wars of independence were fought, and their sovereignty was never taken quite as seriously as Scotland’s by the British government. From 1918 into the ‘20s, the gravity of the Irish desire to break from England was felt by nearly everyone. This history warrants its own article, if not series of books, but to keep it brief: The northern Irish province of Ulster had long been inhabited by both an Irish Catholic underclass and Anglo-Irish Protestant “planters.” The Planters exercised much political and economic control over the area, extending down into Ireland.

Michael Collins, Irish politician and first leader of the IRA. He was ultimately assassinated.

Because so many people of British ancestry lived in Ulster, when the Anglo-Irish Treaty was finally signed in 1921, Ulster—which from then on was called Northern Ireland—opted out of the newly-formed Irish Free State in favor of joining the UK. The Irish Republican Army (IRA), which had fought for independence, was fragmented into two main groups: those who supported Northern Ireland’s loyalty to Britain, and those who wanted a united Ireland. Fueled by religious and political differences, the two sides formed their own paramilitary organizations and political parties. Violence over this issue lasted throughout the 20th century and into today. It was not contained to Northern Ireland, however, but spread across the water into Great Britain and the United States. While the violence has subsided, the divide remains.

The issue of Irish independence and the violent tenacity of the IRA lit a fire beneath the British government. With a large Catholic populace, many Scots were sympathetic to the Irish cause from the start. Others still (mostly Unionists) supported the Loyalist cause. Scots, for most of the 20th century, were not only preoccupied with being drafted into both World Wars, but generally were disinterested in armed resistance. Like Ulster, Scotland remained (and remains) divided on Unionism. Violence, for the most part, has been out of the question. With the formation of the Scottish National Party (the SNP) in the early half of the 20th century, Scotland gained significant political influence in Westminster. By the 1990s, Scotland regained its own parliament. Most people term this phenomenon “devolution” (you be the judge about what connotation that brings).

As Britain lost its colonies overseas, hopes for Scottish separatism grew. In the 1970s, upon discovering oil in the North Sea (in Scottish waters), many Scots—particularly Nationalists—supported the idea that the revenue from the oil should flow into Scotland. British Petroleum (BP), formerly the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, immediately focused on obtaining North Sea oil. Norway obtained much of the oil, but many Scots viewed the oil as belonging not to Britain as a whole, but to Scotland. With billions of barrels of oil at stake, it’s no wonder that BP is urging Scotland to stay in the Union. The financial concerns of England (well, more accurately, English Corporatists) are taking center-stage. The English aristocrats and bureaucrats are begging Scotland to stay in the Union. The attitude of many of those in the “Better Together” campaign can be called, at times, condescending. The shackles of empire are quaking under the strength of the Scottish spirit of liberty.


More importantly, the breaking up not only of the United Kingdom but of Great Britain itself means that large governments, maybe the State itself, could lose power at any moment. It’s no surprise to anyone that the idea of secession is gaining legitimacy around the world. Kurdish secession, Ukrainian/Russian secession, Venetian secession, Texan secession, the successful South Sudanese secession—even the corporatist propaganda outlets are taking notice. The question posed by these movements is: “If Scotland can successfully break away after 1,000 years of attempted and successful English rule, why can’t we?”

That’s the question of the century. That’s what it all comes down to. One of the many definitions of “nation” (and the one I favor) is: “an aggregation of persons of the same ethnic family, often speaking the same language or cognate languages.” (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/nation).By this definition, and by the measure of History, these are two separate nations. Here’s a more important point:

Any human being—regardless of origin, regardless of reason, regardless of political position—deserves to be free. They deserve to make their own destiny. Many conservatives, libertarians, and even some anarchists have been criticizing Scottish independence as silly. Their new government, and the SNP in general, may turn Scotland in to a socialist nation in the style of Sweden or Denmark. This is true. Most Scottish Nationalists lean fairly hard to the Left. But that doesn’t always have to be the case. Who knows what will happen to Scotland in the future. Even if it is the case, why does it matter? It’s not my country. They are their own people, each individual Scot is his or her own person. It’s not my place nor is it my desire to tell them what to do.
Whether or not Scotland can be economically viable is a matter of debate, but everyone should note that the same country that churned out world-renowned shakers like Adam Smith and James Watt has a historical foundation to stand on when it comes to economics.

 Many Scots want to be free. They’re tired of the English yoke. They’re tired of being subjects of the Queen and Prime Minister. They’re tired of getting pushed into Britain and America’s costly wars, and tired of sacrificing their freedom in the process. They want to trade with who they choose to trade with. They want to break away and form their own destiny. As Lysander Spooner said about the American Civil War:
“The question of treason is distinct from that of slavery; and is the same that it would have been, if free States, instead of slave States, had seceded. On the part of the North, the war was carried on, not to liberate the slaves, but by a government that had always perverted and violated the Constitution, to keep the slaves in bondage; and was still willing to do so, if the slaveholders could thereby induced to stay in the Union. The principle, on which the war was waged by the North, was simply this: That men may rightfully be compelled to submit to, and support, a government that they do not want; and that resistance, on their part, makes them traitors and criminals.”

Secession is a dangerous idea. The failure of secession movements or any rebellion can inspire two things: a renewed faith in large, imperial governments, or a loss of faith in government in general. In my opinion as an anarchist, I am not always disheartened when revolutions fail. The political process, after all, is fundamentally opposed to liberty. If secession movements win, the results are obvious. If this referendum passes, it could mean that the concept of empire, that the concept of government, is in its death throes. As the “libertarian moment” approaches, this could mean the dawning of an era of real, honest freedom. Yes, secession could mean that Scotland could fall under another corrupt government, and yes, I believe that all government is slavery. I’m not a Minarchist. The key difference here, and the reason why I as an anarchist support this movement, is because this is a step toward the right direction. I don’t want the Scots to stop at national independence. I want them only to pass through and go on to better things. I don’t want Scottish Nationalism; I want Scottish Separatism. I want real independence for each and every Scot, for each and every human.

 “Once one concedes that a single world government is not necessary, then where does one logically stop at the permissibility of separate states? If Canada and the United States can be separate nations without being denounced as in a state of impermissible ‘anarchy’, why may not the South secede from the United States? New York State from the Union? New York City from the state? Why may not Manhattan secede? Each neighbourhood? Each block? Each house? Each person?”
–Murray Rothbard

Soar Alba gu bràth

Footnotes:
*Whether Cornwall should be considered part of England is its own issue. A heavily Celtic area, Cornwall has its own unique history and culture, along with a thriving independence movement of its own.
**A large portion of historians term this area of Europe “Gaul” (the name the Romans gave it), and so term the Celts who moved away “Gaels.” We call their language/culture Gaelic. There are subtleties and debates about this terminology, however.
***It was around this time that Scotland came under a monarch. However, it remained a Scottish monarch for centuries, and most monarchs had considerably weaker control over the clans when compared with the English system of governance. Even after the Norman invasion, Scotland (due to its distance and its distinct culture) was difficult to pull under their yoke.
****While Edward ultimately failed to unite the kingdoms under his rule, he did succeed in taking the Stone of Scone as a spoil of war. The Stone of Scone (also called the Stone of Destiny) was symbolically used as the coronation rock for the high kings of Scotland, and remains an important cultural icon. The Stone was placed under the Coronation Chair in Westminster Abbey, where it remained for centuries. In 1950, some Scottish Nationalist students attempted to steal the Stone and return it to Scotland; however, the British police returned it. In the 1990s, in a symbol of amicable union and apology for past offences, the stone was returned to Edinburgh.

A Libertarian View of Nationalism, Secession, and Ethnic Enclaves

By Murray Rothbard

[Editor’s Note: This is a Selection from “Nations by Consent:Decomposing the Nation-State”]
The “nation,” of course, is not the same thing as the state, a difference that earlier libertarians and classical liberals such as Ludwig von Mises and Albert Jay Nock understood full well. Contemporary libertarians often assume, mistakenly, that individuals are bound to each other only by the nexus of market exchange. They forget that everyone is necessarily born into a family, a language, and a culture. Every person is born into one or several overlapping communities, usually including an ethnic  group, with specific values, cultures, religious beliefs, and traditions. He is generally born into a “country.” He is always born into a specific historical context of time and place, meaning neighborhood and land area.

The modern European nation-state, the typical “major power,” began  not as a nation at all, but as an “imperial” conquest of one nationality-  usually at the “center” of the resulting country, and based in the capital  city-over other nationalities at the periphery. Since a “nation” is a complex of subjective feelings of nationality based on objective realities, the  imperial central states have had varying degrees of success in forging among  their subject nationalities at the periphery a sense of national unity incorporating submission to the imperial center. In Great Britain, the English  have never truly eradicated national aspirations among the submerged  Celtic nationalities, the Scots and the Welsh, although Cornish nationalism seems to have been mostly stamped out. In Spain, the conquering  Castilians, based in Madrid, have never managed-as the world saw at  the Barcelona Olympics-to erase nationalism among the Catalans, the  Basques, or even the Galicians or Andalusians. The French, moving out from their base in Paris, have never totally tamed the Bretons, the Basques, or the people of the Languedoc.

It is now well known that the collapse of the centralizing and imperial Russian Soviet Union has lifted the lid on the dozens of previously suppressed nationalisms within the former U.S.S.R., and it is now becoming clear that Russia itself, or rather “the Russian Federated Republic,” is simply a slightly older imperial formation in which the Russians, moving out from their Moscow center, forcibly incorporated many nationalities including the Tartars, the Yakuts, the Chechens, and many others. Much of the U.S.S.R. stemmed from imperial Russian conquest in the nineteenth century, during which the clashing Russians and British managed to carve up much of central Asia.

The “nation” cannot be precisely defined; it is a complex and varying constellation of different forms of communities, languages, ethnic groups, or religions. Some nations or nationalities, such as the Slovenes, are both a separate ethnic group and a language; others, such as the warring groups in Bosnia, are the same ethnic group whose language is the same but who differ in the form of alphabet, and who clash fiercely on religion  (the Eastern Orthodox Serbs, the Catholic Croats, and the Bosnian Muslims, who, to make matters more complicated, were originally champions of the Manichaean Bogomil heresy). The question of nationality is made more complex by the interplay of objectively existing reality and subjective perceptions. In some cases, such as Eastern European nationalities under the Habsburgs or the Irish under the British, nationalisms, including submerged and sometimes dying languages, had to be consciously preserved, generated, and expanded. In the nineteenth century this was done by a determined intellectual elite, struggling to revive peripheries living under, and partially absorbed by, the imperial center.

First, we can conclude that nor all state boundaries are just. One goal for libertarians should be to transform existing nation-states into national entities whose boundaries could be called just, in the same sense that private property boundaries are just; that is, to decompose existing coercive nation- states into genuine nations, or nations by consent.

In the case, for example, of the eastern Fredonians, the inhabitants should be able to secede voluntarily from Fredonia and join their comrades in Ruritania. Again, classical liberals should resist the impulse to say that national boundaries “don’t make any difference.” It’s true, of course, as classical liberals have long proclaimed, that the less the degree of government intervention in either Fredonia or Ruritania, the less difference such a boundary will make. But even under a minimal state, national boundaries would still make a difference, often a big one to the inhabitants of the area. For in what language-Ruritanian or Fredonian or both?-will be the street signs, telephone books, court proceedings, or school classes of the area?

In short, every group, every nationality, should be allowed to secede from any nation-state and to join any other nation-state that agrees to have it. That simple reform would go a long way toward establishing nations by consent. The Scots, if they want to, should be allowed by the English to leave the United Kingdom, and to become independent, and even to join a Gaelic Confederation, if the constituents so desire.

A common response to a world of proliferating nations is to worry about the multitude of trade barriers that might be erected. But, other things being equal, the greater the number of new nations, and the smaller the size of each, the better. For it would be far more difficult to sow the illusion of self-sufficiency if the slogan were “Buy North Dakotan” or even “Buy 56th Street” than it now is to convince the public to “Buy American.” Similarly, “Down with South Dakota,” or a fortiori, “Down with 55th Street,” would be a more difficult sell than spreading fear or hatred of the Japanese. Similarly, the absurdities and the unfortunate consequences of fiat paper money would be far more evident if each province or each neighborhood or street block were to print its own currency. A more decentralized world would be far more likely to turn to sound market commodities, such as gold or silver, for its money.
…
One obvious problem with the secession of nationalities from centralized states concerns mixed areas, or enclaves and exclaves. Decomposing the swollen central nation-state of Yugoslavia into constituent parts has solved many conflicts by providing independent nationhood for Slovenes, Serbs, and Croats, but what about Bosnia, where many towns and villages are mixed? One solution is to encourage more of the same, through still more decentralization. If, for example, eastern Sarajevo is Serb and western Sarajevo is Muslim, then they become parts of their respective separate nations. But this of course will result in a large number of enclaves, parts of nations surrounded by other nations. How can this be solved? In the first place, the enclave/exclave problem exists right now. One of the most vicious existing conflicts, in which the US has not yet meddled because
it has not yet been shown on CNN, is the problem of Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian exclave totally surrounded by, and therefore formally within, Azerbaijan. Nagorno-Karabakh should clearly be part of Armenia. But, how then, will Armenians of Karabakh avoid their present fate of blockade by Azeris, and how will they avoid military battles in trying to keep open a land corridor to Armenia?
Under total privatization, of course, these problems would disappear. Nowadays, no one in the U.S. buys land without making sure that his title to the land is clear; in the same way, in a fully privatized world, access rights would obviously be a crucial part of land ownership. In such a world, then, Karabakh property owners would make sure that they had purchased access rights through an Azeri land corridor.

Decentralization also provides a workable solution for the seemingly insoluble permanent conflict in Northern Ireland. When the British partitioned Ireland in the early 1920s, they agreed to perform a second, a more micro-managed, partition. They never carried through on this promise. If the British would permit a detailed, parish by parish, partition vote in Northern Ireland, however, most of the land area, which is majority Catholic, would probably hive off and join the Republic: such counties as Tyrone and Fermanagh, southern Down, and southern Armagh, for example. The Protestants would probably be left with Belfast, county Antrim, and other areas north of Belfast. The major remaining problem would be the Catholic enclave within the city of Belfast, but again, an approach to the anarcho-capitalist model could be attained by permitting the purchase of access rights to the enclave.

Pending total privatization, it is clear that our model could be approached, and conflicts minimized, by permitting secessions and local control, down to the micro-neighborhood level, and by developing contractual access rights for enclaves and exclaves. In the U.S., it becomes important, in moving toward such radical decentralization, for libertarians
and classical liberals-indeed, for many other minority or dissident groups-to begin to lay the greatest stress on the forgotten Tenth Amend- ment and to try to decompose the role and power of the centralizing Supreme Court. Rather than trying to get people of one’s own ideological persuasion on the Supreme Court, its power should be rolled back and minimized as far as possible, and its power decomposed into state, or even local, judicial bodies.
[Image credit.]

Beyond Nationalism, But Not Without It

BY Ashanti Alston
from Anarchist Panther zine #1

 What motivates me more than anything else about anarchism and its relevance to Black revolution is that it has offered me some powerful insights into why we have not been able to recover from our defeat (the 60’s revolution) and advance forward to the kinds of untities, organizations and activities that make for invincible revolutionary movements.

There are all kinds of Nationalisms and there are all kinds of reactions to nationalism. I would like to address this issue from the perspective of someone who has moved through and grown within some of the Black Nationalisms specific to the Black Community. I would like to share what that means to me as it pertains to the questions you raised for this ONWARD theme of Anarchism and Nationalism.

"…we have been taught either to ignore our differences, or to view them as causes for separation and suspicion rather than as forces for change. Without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression. But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist. – Audre Lorde

Great quote. I’ve taken it from the latest issue of Arsenal #4 (page 4) as it introduces its own discussion into the very same theme. As a Black anarchist TIRED of primarily white anarchists just totally dismissing nationalism, I truly appreciate Arsenal & Onward taking this on as two of the newest newspaper/mags on the scene.


Black nationalism saved my life, in a sense, as a teenager in the 1960’s. It "jarred" my unconscious acceptance of amerikkanism dogging my peoples and helped me to see the larger picture. I am a 60’s child. There was Malcolm, there was H. Rap Brown and Stokeley Carmichael of the Black Power movement, and then there was the Black Panther Party. All were nationalists, all represent, also, an evolution of nationalism within the black community. But because of the totally racist, genocidal dynamic within this Babylonian Empire, the black nationalist understood that we must…we must…we must primarily look to ourselves to free ourselves. Point blank. And none of these thinker felt it was necessary to ‘check in’ with The White Man (from the ruler to the revolutionary) to see if it was okay. Ha! Picture that. It was about our survival as a people, not as that mythical "working class" or that equally mythical "citizen." SO, for me, as this teenager who had just witnessed the 60’s Rebellions in my own hometown, my own thoroughly racist hometown, nationalism was a lifesaver. WE MUST LOVE EACH OTHER. BLACK IS BEAUTIFUL. WE MUST CONTROL OUR OWN COMMUNITIES. Etcetera, etcetera.


Its funny cause as an anarchist searching for some good anarchist shit from the 60’s to be able to hold up and show "proof" that the anarchist were better on the position of Nationalism than the Marxists and Leninists, I found hardly anything! I found some positive stuff from a "libertarian" publication but to my surprise they represented the "anarcho-CAPITIALIST tendency! Yet, I found them to be on point and consistent on RESPECTING nationalism and national liberation. ("The Libertarian Forum" of the late 60’s and early 70’s. Karl Hess, Joseph Peden, and Murray N. Rothbard). They, at least, understood that black people’s nationalist struggle was a struggle against the State, the Babylonian state. They, also, looked at what the nationalist groups were doing in their actual grassroots practice, like creating concrete defenses against repression and alternatives in survival institutions. Thus, they liked what the Panthers were doing on the ground through their programs and supported that kind of nationalism as being compatible with "anarchism on the ground." Paul Goodman made similar observations of the early civil rights movement groups. But it was understood that these groups were dealing with issues of survival against genocide, and that these groups were developing their own analyses and programs to rally their communities. One last thing about the libertarians of LF, they interestingly enough were critical of the Panthers when the Party turned towards Marxism and other authoritarian ideologies because in their "on the ground" practice the survival programs were no longer spontaneous responses to specific oppressions but increasingly had to be kept under the tight control of the Party.


Nationalism and statism are different in that nationalism can be anti-state. But they can have commonalities in that nationalism may only be against a particular kind of state, such as a Racist State, or a Fascist State. Anarchism and nationalism are similar in that they are both anti-statist, but what does it mean when the specific anarchist movements within a specific country are racist and dismissive of any and all nationalism, be it reactionary or revolutionary???? For me, even the nationalism of a Louis Farrakhan is about saving my people, though it is also thoroughly sexist, capitalist, homophobic and potentially fascist. Yet, it has played an important part in keeping a certain black pride and resistance going. Their "on the ground" work is very important in keeping an anti-racist mentality going. As a black anarchist, that’s MY issue to deal with cuz they’se MY FOLKS. But it points to where anarchism and nationalism have differences, and that is in anarchists having NO understanding of what it means to be BLACK in this fucked up society. We do not have the luxury of being so intellectual about this excruciating boot on our collective neck, this modern-day middle-passage into the Prison Industrial Complex, this…that…this…that.

As a postmodernist anarchist, identity politics is important to me. Go back to Audre Lorde’s quote. Every time I hear someone talk about my people as if we are just some "working class" or "proletariat" I wanna get as far away from that person or group as possible, anarchist, Marxist, whatever. As a postmodernist anarchist I also find my people’s experience the font from which we will find our way to liberation and power. That’s what I get from being the "insurrection of subjugated knowledges. My nationalism gave me that kind of pride because it was such a rejection of White thinking or at least a decentering of the primacy of white thought, capitalist, socialist, whatever. I say this to say that folks outside of our experience need to respect that they aint got no monopoly on revolutionary thinking and dam sure aint got none on revolutionary practice. It is easy to sit back and intellectualize about our nationalism from the modernist, eurocentric framework of rational, scientific, materialist models. While one does that, it is our nationalism which constantly rally our people come together, remember our history, love ourselves, dream on and fight back. Black anarchists and anti-authoritarian revolutionaries understand the limitations of nationalism in terms of its historical sexism, hierarchy, or its modernist trappings in general. But we also recognize anarchism modernist trappings in the form of American racist privilege when it comes to people of color.


The efforts of Lorenzo Kom’boa Erving, Greg Jackson and others to build an organization/federation of black community partisans/organizers is an example of uniting black revolutionary nationalism and anarchism. I believe that Black Fist, even if called generally a people of color or third world anti-authoritarian organization, understood the necessity to be grounded in the experiences of black and brown communities. Thus, the experiences of the Panthers and the Brown Berets and other like groups were essential. The question seems to be whether white anarchists and anti-authoritarians can work with such groups. Even if those two groups no longer exists, their experiences are important.


White folks need to deal with being ANTI-RACIST ALLIES to folks of color communities and activists. Activists in particular because we are usually whites’ entry point into any possible relationship with our communities.. Anarchist theory and practice cannot take the form of a mere adherence to the founding fathers and canonal practices, such as Kropotkin, Bakunin, and the Spanish Civil War. Tired of hearing it! Anarchism HERE in Babylon must reflect our unique problems and possibilities for struggle. Our struggles are not just against capitalism. Too simple. Our struggles are not just against racism. That’s, also, too simple. There’s all kinds of negative isms we are fighting against and just as importantly, all kinds of worlds we are fighting for. That’s why I feel that the whole idea and practice of "convergences" and "spokescouncils" are sooooo important to activists in general to learn from and enhance because they are about making space for all "Voices" to be heard and factored into the decision-making so that whatever activities comes forth from it prefigures the kind of new worlds we truly want. This rambles, right? My apologies. I end this by advising: WHITE ANARCHISTS, DEAL WITH BEING THE BEST ANTI-RACIST ALLIES YOU CAN. WE NEED YOU BUT WE WILL DO THIS SHIT WITHOUT YOU.


To my folks of color:

COME ENVISION…envision a world, of worlds within our world where there’s principled co-existence within the wonderful diversity of the Black Community.

Harlems / Spanish harlems / watts / hip-hop communities / villages of the Carolina coast / college communities / gay-lesbian-transgender communities / zulu nation / new afrikan / religious communities that come together mainly on Saturday or Sunday / squatter communities / outlaw communities / kemetic communities / ibo-ghanaian-sierra leonean-ethiopian-rasta neighborhoods / nomadic poet-artist tribes / and then those of us who just be plain ignant and harmless and crazy when we have to be and fun-loving and like to journey through and between communities and sometimes just create new mixed ones…WHAT IF ? …and HOW ?


Ella Baker said we can do it if we can trust ourselves and get away from leadership-led revolution; Kwesi Balagoon said we can do it if we willing to create a chaos that will shut this mutha down; Audre Lorde said we can do it if we LEARN TO LOVE AND RESPECT OUR BEAUTIFUL DIVERSITY and reject the tools of our oppressors; Harriet Tubman daid aint a better way t live THAN AT-WAR FOR A RIGHTEOUS CASUE; and Franz Fanon said if we smack that mutha across the face, drive that pig outta your territory at the point of a gun IS LIBERATING FOR THE SOUL.

WHAT IF ? Envision it…HOW?…


Like Huey Newton’s community of communities, BEYOND NATIONALISM and fully self-determining, embracing our diversity of beliefs, lifestyles and non-exploitative economic arrangements, reuniting Earth-loving peoples with a loving Earth.

Through the Imagination, All is possible.