Mihail Pojarsky/Russian libertarianism
What did I mean when I speak about finding our own tradition at the end of a video about libertarianism? Zwolinsky and Tomasi write about the history of early American libertarianism in their new book The Individualists: Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for the Soul of Libertarianism [1](I highly recommend it, by the way). And they describe what was the difference between him and European libertarianism. In France and Britain at the end of the 19th century, libertarian sentiments formed mainly as a response to the socialist threat. At that time, the most popular form of socialism in Europe was statist socialism (including Marxism), involving strong state intervention in the economy.
In the USA, the most popular were not statist, but utopian forms of socialism (this is like "we retire to the community and live in justice"). As a result, many early American libertarians were simultaneously socialists. They saw a threat to freedom not only in the state, but sometimes in capitalism as well. Slavery was their main object of struggle. If libertarians in Europe defended existing freedoms from threat, then in the USA they sought, on the contrary, to demolish the existing unjust order. That is, in Europe libertarianism was protective, in the USA it was revolutionary. But in the 20th century, the American tradition mixed with the European one, and libertarianism became protective again. Defending traditional American freedoms from enemies: communism, the USSR, the New Deal, etc.
After the collapse of the USSR, the image of the enemy became worse, the unifying factor disappeared and libertarianism began to shake completely from internal conflicts. As a solution, Zvolinsky and Tomasi propose to return to the authentic revolutionary ideals of the struggle for social justice. Rothbard was the first to propose a return to the origins of American anarchism, but then he plunged into his paleo-crap.
What about us? Why on American anarchism, if we have our own, which the Russians are primarily famous for? I began my acquaintance with political philosophy by reading Kropotkin at school - it turns out that I have come full circle. Kropotkin, Bakunin, the populists - this is exactly what Russian libertarianism can build its continuity from. If American anarchists were driven by abolitionism, then the main theme of Russian anarchists was the fight against serfdom and its legacy. Slavery left a legacy of current racial problems in the United States. Imperial serfdom, and then Soviet serfdom, left us their problems. This is social stratification, contradictions between the center and the regions, other "internal colonialism". And here, of course, the very thing is to raise the slogans of social justice to the banner.
However, many Russian anarchists and populists (and not only them) doted on the most vile, unjust and vile Russian institution - the peasant community. And this is a problem. However, Rothbard could share the general pathos of the American anarchists, but not their ideas about the economy. So we should also remember that the peasant community was created by Peter I, the main statist of Russian history, in order to simplify taxation, and only then was it surrounded by the mythology of antiquity. Accordingly, we can borrow general revolutionary pathos from Russian anarchists and populists, but not specific solutions.
Mihail Pojarsky 2023-06-15
