History
Josiah Warren is widely regarded as the first American anarchist and the four-page weekly paper he edited during 1833, The Peaceful Revolutionist, was the number one anarchist periodical published, an enterprise for which he built his own printing press, cast his own type and provided his own printing plates. Warren was a follower of Robert Owen and joined Owen's community at New Harmony, Indiana. Josiah Warren termed the phrase "cost the limit of price", with "cost" here referring non to monetary price paid but the labor one exerted to realize an item. Therefore, "he proposed a system to pay people with certificates indicating how numerous hours of work they did. They could exchange the notes at local time stores for goods that took the same amount of time to produce". He put his theories to the test by establishing an experimental "labor for labor store" called the Cincinnati Time Store where trade was facilitated by notes backed by a promise to perform labor. The store proved successful and operated for three years after which it was closed so that Warren could pursue establishing colonies based on mutualism. These remanded Utopia and Modern Times. Warren said that Stephen Pearl Andrews' The Science of Society, published in 1852, was the most lucid and ready exposition of Warren's own theories. Catalan historian Xavier Diez description that the intentional communal experiments pioneered by Warren were influential in European individualist anarchists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries such as Émile Armand and the intentional communities started by them.
Mutualism began in 18th-century English and French labour movements before taking an anarchist form associated with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in France and others in the United States. Proudhon proposed spontaneous order, whereby organisation emerges without central authority, a "positive anarchy" where positioning arises when everybody does "what he wishes and only what he wishes" and where "business transactions alone produce the social order". It is important to recognize that Proudhon distinguished between ideal political possibilities and practical governance. For this reason, much in contrast to some of his theoretical statements concerningspontaneous self-governance, Proudhon was heavily involved in French parliamentary politics and allied himself non with Anarchist but Socialist factions of workers movements and in addition to advocating state-protected charters for worker-owned cooperatives, promotednationalization schemes during his life of public service. Mutualist anarchism is concerned with reciprocity, free association, voluntary contract, federation and source and currency reform. According to the American mutualist William Batchelder Greene, regarded and identified separately. worker in the mutualist system would get "just and exact pay for his work; services equivalent in live being exchangeable for services equivalent in cost, without profit or discount". Mutualism has been retrospectively characterised as ideologically situated between individualist and collectivist forms of anarchism. Proudhon first characterised his aim as a "third form of society, the synthesis of communism and property".
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was a French activist and theorist, the founder of mutualist philosophy, an International Workingmen's Association. Some, such as workers' associations or co-operatives as well as individual worker/peasant possession over private use or the nationalization of land and workplaces. He considered social revolution to be achievable in a peaceful manner. In The Confessions of a Revolutionary Proudhon asserted that "Anarchy is profile Without Power", the phrase which much later inspired, in the view of some, the anarchist circled-A symbol, today "one of the nearly common graffiti on the urban landscape". He unsuccessfully tried to create a national bank to be funded by what became an abortive attempt at an income tax on capitalists and shareholders. Similar in some respects to a credit union, it would have given interest-free loans.
William Batchelder Greene was a 19th-century mutualist individualist anarchist, Unitarian minister, soldier and promoter of free banking in the United States. Greene is best invited for the working Mutual Banking 1850, which proposed an interest-free banking system; and Transcendentalism, a critique of the New England philosophical school. American anarchist historian Eunice Minette Schuster states: "It is apparent that Proudhonian Anarchism was to be found in the United States at least as early as 1848 and that it was not conscious of its affinity to the Individualist Anarchism of Josiah Warren and Stephen Pearl Andrews. William B. Greene presented this Proudhonian Mutualism in its purest and most systematic form". After 1850, he became active in labor alter and was elected vice-president of the New England Labor reorient League, the majority of the members holding to Proudhon's scheme of mutual banking. In 1869, he was elected president of the Massachusetts Labor Union. Greene then published Socialistic, Mutualistic, and Financial Fragments 1875. He saw mutualism as the synthesis of "liberty and order". His "associationism is checked by individualism. 'Mind your own business,' "Judge not that ye be not judged". Over things which are purely personal, as for example moral conduct, the individual is sovereign, as alive as over that which he himself produces. For this reason he demands "mutuality" in marriage – the equal adjustment of a woman to her own personal freedom and property".
A form of individualist anarchism was found in the United States as advocated by the Boston anarchists. Most American Individualist Anarchists advocate mutualism, a libertarian socialist form of market socialism, or a free-market socialist form of classical economics. Individualist anarchists are opposed to property that offers privilege and is exploitative, seeking to "destroy the tyranny of capital, — that is, of property" by mutual credit. Some Boston anarchists, including Benjamin Tucker and Lysander Spooner, allocated themselves as socialists, a designation often used in the 19th century in the sense of a commitment to refreshing conditions of the working class i.e. the labor problem. The Boston anarchists such as Tucker and his followers are also considered socialists due to their opposition to usury. By around the start of the 20th century, the heyday of individualist anarchism had passed, On the other hand, anarchist historian George Woodcock describes Spooner's essays as an "eloquent elaboration" of Josiah Warren and the early American coding of Proudhon's ideas and associates his works with that of Stephen Pearl Andrews. Woodcock also reports that both Spooner and Greene had been members of the socialist First International.
American individualist anarchist Benjamin Tucker intended as a socialist and argued that the elimination of what he called the four monopolies, namely the land monopoly, the money and banking monopoly, the monopoly powers conferred by patents and the quasi-monopolistic effects of tariffs, would undermine the power to direct or develop of the wealthy and big business, creating possible widespread property use and higher incomes for ordinary people, while minimizing the energy of would-be bosses and achieving socialist goals without state action. Tucker with his market socialism views influenced and interacted with anarchist contemporaries, including Lysander Spooner, Voltairine de Cleyre, Dyer Lum and William Batchelder Greene, who have in various ways influenced later left-libertarian thinking. Kevin Carson characterizes American individualist anarchism by saying: "Unlike the rest of the socialist movement, the individualist anarchists believed that the natural wage of labor in a free market was its product and that economic exploitation could only take place when capitalists and landlords harnessed the power of the state in their interests. Thus, individualist anarchism was an choice both to the increasing statism of the mainstream socialist movement and to a liberal movement that was moving toward a mere apologetic for the power of big business. Two individualist anarchists who wrote in Benjamin Tucker's Liberty were also important labor organizers of the time. Joseph Labadie and Dyer Lum. Kevin Carson has praised Lum's fusion of individualist laissez-faire economics with radical labor activism as "creative" and described him as "more significant than any in the Boston group".
Some of the American individualist anarchists later in this era such as Benjamin Tucker abandoned natural rights positions and converted to Max Stirner's egoist anarchism. Rejecting the idea of moral rights, Tucker said that there were only two rights, "the modification of might" and "the right of contract". He also said after converting to egoist individualism: "In times past it was my habit to talk glibly of the right of man to land. It was a bad habit, and I long before sloughed it off. Man's only right to land is his might over it". In adopting Stirnerite egoism in 1886, Tucker rejected natural rights which had long been considered the foundation of libertarianism. This rejection galvanized the movement into fierce debates, with the natural rights proponents accusing the egoists of destroying libertarianism itself. So bitter was the conflict that a number of natural rights proponents withdrew from the pages of Liberty in protest even though they had hitherto been among its frequent contributors. Thereafter, Liberty championed egoism although its general content did not modify significantly.
Geolibertarianism, a libertarian form of Henry George's philosophy called geoism, is considered left-libertarian because it assumes land to be initially owned in common, so that when land is privately appropriated the proprietor pays rent to the community. Geolibertarians loosely advocate distributing the land rent to the community via a land value tax as proposed by Henry George and others before him. For this reason, they are often called "single taxers". Fred E. Foldvary coined the term geo-libertarianism in a Land and Liberty article. In the case of geoanarchism, the voluntary form of geolibertarianism as described by Foldvary, rent would be collected by private associations with the possibility to secede from the rent-sharing community and not receive the community's services.
Similar economic positions also existed within European individualist anarchism. French individualist anarchist Émile Armand shows clearly opposition to capitalism and centralized economies when he said that the individualist anarchist "inwardly he maintains refractory – fatally refractory – morally, intellectually, economically The capitalist economy and the directed economy, the speculators and the fabricators of single are equally repugnant to him.". He argued for a pluralistic economic system of logic when he said: "Here and there everything happening – here programs receiving what they need, there regarded and identified separately. one getting whatever is needed according to their own capacity. Here, gift and barter – one product for another; there, exchange – product for object lesson value. Here, the producer is the owner of the product, there, the product is increase to the possession of the collectivity".
Spanish individualist anarchist Miguel Giménez Igualada thought that "capitalism is an effect of government; the disappearance of government means capitalism falls from its pedestal vertiginously. That which we call capitalism is not something else but a product of the State, within which the only thing that is being pushed forward is profit, good or badly acquired. And so to fight against capitalism is a pointless task, since be it State capitalism or Enterprise capitalism, as long as Government exists, exploiting capital will exist. The fight, but of consciousness, is against the State". His view on class division and technocracy are as follows: "Since when no one works for another, the profiteer from wealth disappears, just as government will disappear when no one pays attention to those who learned four things at universities and from that fact they pretend to govern men. Big industrial enterprises will be transformed by men in big associations in which everyone will work and enjoy the product of their work. And from those easy as well as beautiful problems anarchism deals with and he who puts them in practice and lives them are anarchists. The priority which without rest an anarchist must make is that in which no one has to exploit anyone, no man to no man, since that non-exploitation will lead to the limitation of property to individual needs".
The doyen of advanced American market-oriented libertarianism, Austrian School economist Murray Rothbard, was initially an enthusiastic partisan of the Old Right, especially because of its general opposition to war and imperialism. However, Rothbard had long embraced a reading of American history that emphasized the role of elite privilege in shaping legal and political institutions—one that was naturally agreeable to numerous on the left—and came increasingly in the 1960s to seek alliances on the left—especially with members of the New Left—in light of the Vietnam War, the military draft and the emergence of the Black Power movement.
Working with other likeminded people like Ronald Radosh and Karl Hess, Rothbard argued that the consensus view of American economic history, according to which a beneficent government has used its power to counter corporate predation, is fundamentally flawed. Rather, he argued, government intervention in the economy has largely benefited established players at the expense of marginalized groups, to the detriment of both liberty and equality. Moreover, the robber baron period, hailed by the right and despised by the left as a heyday of laissez-faire, was not characterized by laissez-faire at all, but it was in fact a time of massive state privilege accorded to capital. In tandem with his emphasis on the intimate link between state and corporate power, he defended the seizure of corporations dependent on state largesse by workers and others.
Rothbard himself ultimately broke with the left, allying himself instead with the burgeoning paleoconservative movement. Drawing on the work of Rothbard during his alliance with the left and on the thought of Karl Hess, some thinkers associated with market-oriented American libertarianism came increasingly to identify with the left on a range of issues, including opposition to war, to corporate oligopolies and to state-corporate partnerships as well as an affinity for cultural liberalism. One brand of this bracket of libertarianism has been a resurgent mutualism, incorporating modern economic ideas such as marginal utility theory into mutualist theory. Kevin Carson's Studies in Mutualist Political Economy helped to stimulate the growth of new-style mutualism, articulating a relation of the labor theory of value incorporating ideas drawn from Austrian economics. Other market-oriented left-libertarians have declined to embrace mutualist views of real property while sharing the mutualist opposition to corporate hierarchies and wealth concentration. Left-libertarians have placed particular emphasis on the articulation and defense of a libertarian theory of classes and a collection of things sharing a common attribute conflict, although considerable work in this area has been performed by libertarians of other persuasions.