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capitalist anarchism flag (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

At its peak in the late Nineteenth Century, the anarchist movement terrorized capitalist countries.  The proletariat’s avenging angels assassinated six heads of state and killed scores of bourgeois citizens and government agents.  While labor and capital clashed in strikes and lockouts, homemade bombs exploded in city squares and opera houses.

Yet, such violence was but a manifestation of anarchism’s supreme weapon against capitalism, the idea of “The Deed.”  This siren song called on disenfranchised persons to arise from their wretchedness, and strike down their oppressors.  By tarring capitalism, along with its adherents and guardians, as exploitative, anarchists ideologically equipped willing murderers of bosses and kings alike to become martyrs.

Given the body count and palpable fear, anarchism seemed primed to fulfill Victor Hugo’s dictum that “nothing is stronger than an idea whose time has come.”  But, something strange happened in the Twentieth Century: capitalism did not vanish as prophesized.  Rather, the anarchist movement burned out before undergoing a rebirth at mid-century.  It reemerged as a justification for free markets.

The bloody collectivist experiments of fascism, Nazism, and Soviet communism certainly solidified anarchists’ hatred of the state.  Twentieth Century conflicts revealed what governments could do with a monopoly on violence, the willingness to use it, and modern weapons.  Thus, the non-aggression principle became an ideal rallying cry for anti-statists.  Even Murray Rothbard, the father of anarcho-capitalism, and Ayn Rand could shelve their disdain for each other and fight jointly against big government.

However, anarchism had long affirmed the evils of the state.  It was the angle of attack that differentiated Nineteenth from Twentieth Century anarchists.  The former followed Marx’s sociology by denouncing the state as a tool of bourgeois oppression.  Bosses held the means of production by virtue of property rights which government guaranteed.  Thus, the proletariat had no other recourse to justice except vigilantism.

The Italian anarchist Enrico Malatesta provided the best vivification of his brethren’s objections to capitalism.  In an appeal to the European working class he declared, “every bit of bread they [the bourgeoisie] eat is taken from your children, every fine present they give their wives means the poverty, hunger, cold, even perhaps prostitution of yours.”

One of the fathers of anarchism, Pierre Proudhon, went further with a simple question.  “What is property?  Property is theft!”  Everything the bourgeoisie had was first stolen and then retroactively justified as property rights.  Government was just the institutionalization of the rich man’s dominance over the dispossessed.

Speaking of the state, Proudhon’s words might sound timeless. “To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied on, regulated, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, ruled, censored, by persons who have neither wisdom nor virtue.”  Today’s anarchists agree, but for radically different reasons.

Rothbard and his disciples, such as George Mason University professor Bryan Caplan, attempted more than an empirical rebuke.  Their predecessors had denounced capitalism in strident moral terms despite evidence of higher living standards.  So the proper response was to impute capitalism with morality in the context of individual rights.  As Rothbard demonstrated in a 1974 lecture, contrasting markets with the state was a brilliant ploy.


At a stroke, anarchism rebelled against its past and lunged for the moral high ground by identifying voluntary exchange as the heart of market economies.  Businessmen do not just lack force, respecting individual rights is in their interest.  Markets depend on cooperation.  Moreover, the violence resulting from state coercion neutered the moral critiques of self-righteous muckraking journalists, labor activists, and anarchist bomb throwers.  Contrary to George Orwell’s quip, capitalism does not lead “to dole queues, the scramble for markets, and war.”

Yet, the moral revolution attempted by Rothbard and his spiritual heirs was not well received by fellow classical liberals.  F.A. Hayek expressed skepticism in a 1974 interview with Reason Magazine:

“In the strict sense of anarchism, it is, in my opinion, wholly impossible to civilization.  It is unduly optimistic as regards the intelligence it would require for people to sustain it.  There‘s the kind of anarchism where if people were not compelled they would do all of the right things on their own. That I regard as factually unwarranted and highly unlikely.”

Ayn Rand’s critique had gone a step further in The Virtue of Selfishness, published two years after Rothbard’s Man, Economy, and State:

“But the possibility of human immorality is not the only objection to anarchy: even a society whose every member were fully rational and faultlessly moral, could not function in a state of anarchy; it is the need ofobjective laws and of an arbiter for honest disagreements among men that necessitates the establishment of a government.”

There is, however, an irony in Rand’s claim.  She stumbled upon the major unresolved problem of injecting morality into capitalism, muddied waters.  What makes capitalism moral or not?  How should morality be defined for, or apply to, an economic system?

Rand tried to answer that question in John Galt’s speech in Atlas Shrugged.  What she presented was a restatement of Friedrich Nietzsche’s thesis from On the Genealogy of Morals.  The poor, resentful of the rich, inverted an original morality predicated on strength and outcomes.  The weak, out of impotence, glorified self-sacrifice and demanded it from the strong at gunpoint in the form of the state.  Such a limitation of anyone’s productive abilities, or failure to discard unproductivity, was immoral for Rand. And in that sense, the state reflects the moral degeneracy, or virtue, of its people.

By contrast, Hayek dodged the issue.  He noted that no stateless utopia, of Marxist or capitalist variety, would likely emerge.  So why argue about it?  The best way to build political consensus for change from the economic status quo was rallying around the motor of prosperity, economic freedom.  In debunking central planning lay the best way to halt the growth of government and avoid a road to serfdom.

Call it cheap pragmatism, but Hayek had a point.  Questions about anarchy’s viability, then and now, are academic.  Both Rothbard and Rand got bogged down in esoteric arguments that betrayed some detachment from reality.  Anarchism, like any other ism seeking to inaugurate an earthly utopia, has real world consequences that are not totally accounted for by its adherents.

George Orwell observed first-hand the momentary triumph and eventual tragedy of anarchism.  He arrived in Barcelona in December 1936 to fight Spanish fascism and chronicle the conflict.  He aimed to produce a work meant, “to stir working class opinion in Britain and France.”  Spain, and Catalonia specifically, represented the one area of Europe where anarchism had gained traction.  As he wrote in Homage to Catalonia:

“It was the first time I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties…. Every shop and café had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized… Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal.”

That experiment flickered out two years later.  Like all utopias, anarchy is a fantasy so far beyond this world.