Never a Dull Moment

For several years some of us have been proclaiming, unheeded, that the New Left was very different from the Old; that this was not just another embodiment of the old Liberal-Socialist-Communist attitudes and coalition. Now the press is beginning to catch on; everyone knows that the fiery leader of the French student revolution, Daniel (Danny the Red) Cohn-Bendit, is an anarchist and not a socialist, that Red Rudi Dutschke, the German student leader, has at least anarchist tendencies, and that anarchist views permeate the New Left in the United States. C.L. Sulzberger, of the New York Times, writes that “the new generation seems nostalgically to be groping toward old-fashioned anarchism.” And now even J. Edgar Hoover concedes that the New Left is anarchist rather than communist.

Curiously enough, the attitude of Hoover and other observers seems to hold that anarchists are at least as evil as communists. After a quarter-century of being bombarded with propaganda about the menace of Communism, which we were taught to hate because it was tyrannical statism, we are now supposed to turn around and regard anarchism as perhaps an even greater danger because it is totally against the state! There is surely something very peculiar going on here. How are we expected to shift our hatreds from arch-statism to ultra-anti-statism so rapidly? And yet, presumably, the public is prepared to do this, so ready are they to shift their hatreds on cue (e.g., from Germany to Russia, from Japan to China) from their rulers.

The answer to this inconsistency is quite evidently that the U.S. government and its Establishment propaganda machine are not in the least bit anti-statist. Their gripe against Communism is not that it is statist, but that the Communist Party takes over exclusive control of the state, without making any provisions for cutting in our ruling classes for a piece of the loot. It is this exclusion of the American imperial rulers from shares in the plunder of Communist countries that has set them implacably against Communism. American imperial foreign policy has always been the “Open Door” — an open share in the looting of undeveloped countries. Anti-Communism is a function of the firm Communist closing of that imperial door.

And so, while there are still very few anarchists in the world, the ideological enmity of the American ruling classes toward anarchism is far greater than toward Communism. For anarchism would get rid of the state — all states — completely. It is instructive, by the way, that American imperialism gets along well with those Communist countries which have more or less abandoned the revolutionary, anti-statist side of Communism: Soviet Russia being the outstanding example.