"Are Anarchists Thugs?"

A follow up on my; " Why The Conservatives Are Not Libertarians" in this case an explanation as to why todays right wingers who call themselves Libertarians are not. Because homegrown individualist anarchism which was Libertarianism was replaced after Benjamin Tuckers death with the pro capitalist ideology and idealization of Russian reactionary Ayn Rand and later still with the rantings of the Anti-Labour Theory of Value; Austrian School of Economics.

Neither Bombs Nor Ballots: Liberty & The Strategy Of Anarchism
In an article entitled "Are Anarchists Thugs?", Tucker offered a breakdown by profession of Liberty's anarchists. The greatest part proves to be of the professional/intellectual class; the remainder includes independent manufacturers and merchants, farmers, artisans and skilled workers. We see that, although the anarchists - especially of the Liberty group - were not latter-day Jeffersonians in any deep sense, they owned some characteristics in common. The anarchists' hard-core supporters were the socio-economic equivalents of Jefferson's yeoman-farmers and craftsworkers: a freeholder - artisan - independent merchant class allied with free-thinking professionals and intellectuals. These groups - in Europe as well as America - had socio-economic independence, and through their desire to maintain and improve their relatively free positions, had also the incentive to oppose the growing encroachments of the capitalist State.

Individualist anarchism, although suffering from the repression directed against the anarchists in general, appears to have dwindled into political insignificance largely because of the erosion of its political-economic base, rather than from a simple failure of its strategy. With the impetus of the Civil War, capitalism and the State had too great a head start on the centralization of economic and political life for the anarchists to catch up. This centralization reduced the independence of the intellectual/professional and merchant artisian groups that were the mainstay of the Liberty circle.

In 1911 Tucker judged that this centralizing process had created an accumulation of wealth in the "trusts" that had superseded their need for the "four monopolies." He argued that "even the freest competition" could not presently hope to destroy the trusts, which could afford to sacrifice large sums of money to remove new competition. Tucker thought that only political or revolutionary forces could now whittle down this concentration of capital. He warned, however, that the anarchistic economic solution - "and there is no other solution" - must be taught to following generations. In the meantime, anarchists who aid the "propaganda of State Socialism or [violent] revolution make a sad mistake indeed, "hastening the advent of revolution before the people were prepared to do without the State."

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