How
To Destatize
by
Murray
N. Rothbard
This
first appeared in The
Libertarian Forum, June 1971
The libertarian
movement has long been far stronger on ultimate principle than it
has in strategic thinking. While we cannot overrate the importance
of providing a theoretical picture of the society toward which we
are striving, we have done much more of this needed theorizing than
we have considered how in the world to get from our current "here"
to the ideal "there." This deficiency of strategy and tactics is
highlighted by our general failure to consider two dramatic recent
victories for liberty, for destatizing, and to ponder what lessons
they may offer for future strategy. These recent victories are the
generally rapid movement for the repeal of abortion laws, and the
successful movement to rollback and eventually abolish rent controls
in New York State.
To use those
much-abused terms once more, the "right- wing" of the libertarian
movement tends to be pure "educationists", while the "left-wing"
tends to call for immediate destruction of existing society. Both
strategies are self- defeating, and both in effect insure that the
success of liberty can never be achieved. The educationists call
for increased devotion to education, to spreading the ideas and
the scholarship of libertarianism throughout society, for a new
form of "cultural revolution" in behalf of reason and liberty. Now
while I wholeheartedly endorse the proposal for ever-wider education,
the problem is that this strategy is necessary but scarcely sufficient
for victory, i.e. for translating these libertarian concepts into
the real world. The educationist view tends to hold that as more
people are converted, the State will somehow automatically wither
away. But how? And by what mechanism? Often the educationists explicitly
rule out all possible mechanisms for pressuring the State to roll
itself back or dismantle itself: violence is dismissed as evil,
mass demonstrations as coercive, voting or influencing politicians
as injuring libertarian purity, civil disobedience as violating
the principle that while the laws are on the books they must be
obeyed. But how then is the State to be rolled back? The educationists
have thereby systematically ruled out all ways but one: convincing
the men in power to resign.
In short, Richard
Nixon or Lyndon Johnson or Henry Kissinger or whoever is supposed
to read Atlas
Shrugged or Power
and Market or Human
Action or This
Bread is Mine or whatever and say: "Eureka! This is it!
They're right, and I've been wrong. I resign and look for honest
employment." Now certainly such instant conversions by our sinners
are conceptually possible, and once in a while, in isolated
cases, they indeed happen, and should be saluted and cheered. But
surely history shows that such large-scale conversions are highly
unlikely, to say the least; no ruling elite in history has voluntarily
surrendered its power on any grounds, much less on massive recognition
of its own sins. And surely for libertarians to rest their strategic
perspective on such conversion of sinners would be folly indeed.
And yet that is the strategic dead-end to which our educationists
would consign us.
It is true
that our left-wing R-r-revolutionaries confront the problem of Power,
which the educationists do not; but their strategic prescription
of instant and indiscriminate destruction is not only self-defeating
but suicidal as well. The moral legitimacy of self-defense against
the State is beside the strategic point: the point being that the
use of violence only serves to alienate the very American public
whom we are trying to convince. And "alienate" is of course a very
tame word here: "polarize", "enrage", would be far more accurate.
Another point which the violent revolutionaries forget is that there
has never been a successful armed revolution against a democratic
government; all toppled governments have been seen by the public
to be outside themselves, either as dictatorships or monarchies
(Cuba, China, Russia, 18th Century France, 17th Century England)
or as imperial powers (the American Revolution, the Algerian Revolution).
The Left is fond of pointing to the Tupamaros of Uruguay as a successful
urban guerrilla movement, but the evident point here is that the
Tupamaros have not at this writing succeeded, or shown any signs
of doing so. So long as free elections exist, then, the use of violence
by American rebels will only prove suicidal and counterproductive.
We must reject
then both strategies: the defeatist torpor of the educationists,
and the frenzied nihilism of the Revolutionaries. What then should
be our positive strategy? This is a difficult problem, especially
since the art of strategy and tactics depends on the forces at work
at the particular time. But here is a prime strategic lesson: that
while we must be pure and consistent in principle, we must be flexible
in tactics. We must be willing to adopt any tactic that seems likely
to bring about the goal of liberty, any tactic, that is, that is
not in itself immoral and itself violates the libertarian creed.
Take, for example, the MayDay Tribe demonstrations this spring in
Washington. In contrast to the effective and moving demonstrations
that preceded Mayday, the goal of the Tribe seemed to be to blockade
and "trash" private automobiles, thus typically expressing the Left's
hatred against the private car. For the libertarian, however, not
only was the Mayday tactic counterproductive in alienating the great
bulk of Americans, it also violated libertarian principle by directing
its ire against private property – the very thing that the libertarian
is concerned to defend and expand. No genuine libertarian could
consider such trashing in any way except with abhorrence.
For
a more positive model, let us consider the two most prominent victories
for destatizing in recent years: the repeal of abortion laws and
the substantial removal of rent control in New York. How did these
victories come about? Let us consider the rent decontrol case first,
as a simpler model. Rent control has been imposed in New York since
World War II, and a few years ago it was even imposed anew on postwar
buildings. Seemingly, it was a system destined to last forever.
All these years, the aggrieved landlords of New York had protested,
but in vain. The new recent ingredient was clearly the patent failure
and collapse of housing in New York City in the last few years.
For few new apartment houses have been built in recent years, due
to rent controls and zoning restrictions; existing housing has deteriorated,
and abandonments of houses by landlords unable to pay taxes have
increased, adding to the plight of the homeless. Furthermore, the
Liberal claim that rent controls are merely a temporary device until
the apartment shortage disappeared was given the lie by the fact
that the shortage of apartments in New York has gotten visibly worse
rather than better. In short, as a result of rent controls and high
property taxes, the housing situation in New York has reached a
crisis stage, and it was this crisis situation that impelled the
state authorities to turn to new solutions – to turn, indeed, onto
the firm path of decontrol. But the lesson here is that the government
cannot be induced to change its ways by theory alone; it was the
crisis situation brought about by controls that led Governor Rockefeller
and the state legislators to turn to the free-market theorists who
were there with the decontrol solution at hand. Theory, however
correct, will not be put into effect unless a crisis situation
arrives to force the government out of its habitual bureaucratic
inertia and onto a search for new solutions.
Abortion reform
also had the ingredients of sound libertarian theory at work plus
a crisis situation. The theory had been propounded for years by
pro-abortion groups, but was accelerated recently by the fact that
the Women's Lib groups, in their raucous and annoying manner, had
stumbled across a purely libertarian theory which they propounded
with force and effect: that every woman has the absolute right to
own and control her own body. The attention devoted to Women's Lib
by the media assured that the politicians finally were able to hear,
not a wishy-washy liberal plea for moderate abortion reform, but
the extreme" – and consistent – view that the State had no right
to pass any abortion restrictions whatever.
While libertarian
theory had been firmed up and spread more aggressively, a crisis
situation was becoming ever more blatant: and this was the massive,
nonviolent civil disobedience of women and doctors who obtained
their abortions illegally. And not only were increasing numbers
of women and doctors willing to ignore the law; but others were
increasingly willing to broaden the fuzzy zone that often exists
between legality and illegality: for example, doctors willing to
stretch the definition of "endangering the health of the mother",
which made abortion permissible. Furthermore, it was also becoming
evident that, taking place as they did under conditions of illegality,
the abortions were both unnecessarily expensive and unnecessarily
dangerous. In the case of abortions, then, it was mass civil disobedience
that brought about the crisis situation, while the spread of libertarian
theory made the government more willing to turn to the de-statizing
solution. But not only theory: also the use of the theory
to pressure the politicians, by petition, by noise, by threat of
votes, etc.
As the Marxists
would say, there is needed for victory both the "objective conditions"
and the "subjective conditions. The objective conditions refer to
crisis situations in the real world; for libertarians, finding crisis
situations is easy, especially since these crises (e.g. the abortion
mills, housing decay) have invariably been created by the government
itself. The subjective conditions refer to the need for groups of
libertarians to propound the libertarian solutions to these crises
and to pressure the politicians when the objective conditions are
ripe. Both methods were applied in the successes of housing and
abortion – and both successes were won without a self-conscious
group of pure libertarians bringing their wider and more systematic
doctrines to bear on the struggle. How much greater will the success
be when libertarians will have made their mark as an active, expanding,
self-conscious movement, stepping into crises as they appear and
providing the benefit of their far more systematic insight, or,
to paraphrase the Marxists, "raising the level of libertarian consciousness"
among all parties concerned! Times, moreover, are going to be increasingly
ripe for this sort of action, because crises are piling up as the
failure of the Welfare-Warfare State becomes increasingly manifest
in field after field: education, foreign policy, conscription, welfare,
transportation, etc. As crisis situations multiply, libertarians
will find their own opportunities multiplying as well, provided
we are not stultified by the educationists or discredited by the
nihilists. And we must remember that if we do not pursue these opportunities,
more sinister forces – socialists or more likely fascists – will
be standing in the wings to offer their alternatives to the
failure of the Liberal-Conservative Consensus. Considering the numerous
failures and tyrannies of socialism and fascism it will be easy
to discredit these alternatives – provided that we are there
to offer liberty as the only rational – and reasonable – alternative
to the existing order. But a reasonable alternative emphatically
does not include insane blatherings about "ripping off Amerika".
Liberty is profoundly American; we come to fulfill the best of the
American tradition, from Ann Hutchinson and Roger Williams to the
Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the Jeffersonian
movement, and beyond. AS Benjamin R. Tucker put it, we are "unterrified
Jeffersonian democrats", and we come not to destroy the American
dream but to fulfill it.
Copyright
© 2013 by the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
Permission to reprint in whole or in part is hereby granted, provided
full credit is given.
The
Best of Murray Rothbard
|