Benjamin Tucker Quotes
It was at this point — the necessity of striking down monopoly — that came the parting of their ways [of Socialists and Anarchists]. Here the road forked. They found that they must turn either to the right or to the left, — follow either the path of Authority or the path of Liberty. Marx went one way; Warren and Proudhon the other. Thus were born State Socialism and Anarchism.
Benjamin Tucker, 1854–1939, Political Philosopher & Individualism Anarchist, “State Socialism and Anarchism: How Far They Agree, and Wherin They Differ“, Liberty 5.16, no. 120, March 10, 1888
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Ataturk was not receptive toward Communism as some other world leaders were at the time. He saw its weakness far earlier than many others.
Most Americans looked at anarchists as communists. They generally were not, and opposed state communism as much as state capitalism. In many ways they distrusted government the way some modern libertarians do.
What a difference a century makes. 100 years after, this was no longer a radical anarchist position. It was the position of many conservative Republicans, Libertarians, and Tea Party types.
It is hard for us today to understand why intelligent, thoughtful, people would seriously consider and even advocate anarchy. Yet there were many intelligent people who preached anarchy. The key to understanding this is that it is also hard for us to realize how terrible and actually dangerous was typical life under the Russian Government of the Czars. It was not only that most people were serfs--virtually slaves, but the government officials, the military and civilian both, could and did, abuse people in every way imaginable. In America today, if any of us were unfortunate to be the victim of violence, the odds are high that it would be at the hands of another citizen. In Russia (and other countries) at the time, the odds were that the perpetrator of the violence was a government official or government sanctioned person—police, military, aristocrats, civil officers. As but one example. Cossacks would frequently get drunk, pillage and rape a community and kill any who resisted—all with impunity. This quotation from Tolstoy is the classic argument of the anarchist at the time. It was impossible that the absence of government could be as bad as the government then was.
The reason that this quotation is important is that most Americans from the 1920s on concerned with Marxism and communism in the United States, conflated Marxism with Anarchists as if Marxists were anarchists who were bent on violence. In reality, to most Marxists, anarchists were more their enemy than the capitalists. Stalin was then only 28 years old and the Russian revolution was 9 years in the future.
Benjamin Ricketson Tucker was an American anarchist. A 19th-century proponent of individualist anarchism which he called "unterrified Jeffersonianism", Tucker was the editor and publisher of the American individualist anarchist periodical Liberty (1881–1908) as well as a member of the socialist First International.
