Will Holmes

Really, I don’t see how you and I can agree at all in our concept of socialism. What makes you imagine that I think the next step in the evolution of society will be a political interference with evolution? Aren’t you coming it a little too strong? Where is your authority for supposing that the socialists want to stop all such blithering nonsense as competition and stop it quick? — inferring, of course, that they will attempt to stop it by force. (A) Or that socialism would be a despotism that would compel men to do precisely what they would prefer to do if let alone? In short, what works on socialism, considered as authoritative, have you read that leads you to believe that under the cooperative commonwealth the non-invasive individual would be deprived of liberty, that competition would be prohibited by law, that a political state would be the sole arbiter of men’s lives and fortunes, or that individuals would (officially) be compelled to do anything contrary to reason and decency? (B) I ask this not as an apologist for socialism but as a test of fairness.

I am away off here near a little village in a shoestring valley of the New Mexico desert. I am and for years have been practically cut off from the world of thought and action. I take no capitalist papers. I have but few books. But I have kept my ear to the ground, and if there is in the onward march of events one thing above all others that is made plainer to me every day it is the trend toward socialism as the next step. Don’t misunderstand me. I am not looking for a perfect socialist state or commonwealth in the near future. I know it will be imperfect, somewhat chaotic, perhaps mildly despotic in the beginning; but it will be humanitarian, it will abolish sweatshops, child-labor, wage-slavery, unemployment and the thousand horrors that make the present system an inferno. Society will cease to be the law of the jungle, there will be an end of war; peace and a large measure of intelligent contentment will abide. (C) On what do I base my belief in these prophecies? On the platform to which socialists the world over are committed, officially and unofficially. Now honestly, friend Kuehn, don’t you think (D) such a state of society, even if we should have a political state to enforce it for a time, would be preferable to our present infernal (lack of) system? I do, and that is why, while ardently desiring liberty and all its concomitants, I affiliate with the socialists. Let us have socialism as the next step (since we cannot have anarchism) and keep on struggling and striving for the ideal which is sure to come. Believe me, it will be much easier and safer to do this under socialism than it is now. Why kick against the pricks? Socialism, in some degree, is inevitable. (E) Is it not better to recognize this and go with the ever swelling tide than to wear ourselves out in a vain attempt to stop it. Remember the story of Canute. (F)

All intelligent socialists repudiate state capitalism (which I am led to believe you have mistaken for socialism), yet state ownership and control under the present system is better than individual ownership and private monopoly of the means of subsistence. (G) Witness the European countries before the war, Australia and New Zealand as proof. Let the nation own the trusts. State capitalism is the entering wedge; the cooperative commonwealth will be the next step. Liberty will be the full fruition. Such is the program to which I am committed.

Of course I would very much prefer freedom of the individual, voluntary association and absence of invasive authority at the start, but it may not be. The vast majority — the numbskull masses — at present hav’nt the faintest conception of the meaning of equal freedom. The right to compete with them means the right to cut their neighbor’s throat; liberty means license; absence of governmental authority the right to pillage and destroy. They must be taught, led, perhaps coerced before they will see what is for their own good; and yet the very doing of it must (and will) be by their own consent and by their own will; in other words the masses will continue to delegate the power to make them good until they are good. (H)

Oh, I know that this is contrary to the teachings of the philosophers. I used to be fond of quoting Emerson and Washington Irving to show how good people would be if they were let alone. I have gotten over that. Experience of many years has led me to the conviction that most men are naturally invasive; you can even see evidence of this in the child who has had no experience of the world. (J)

I confess, that unlike you, I have not gotten over the sentimental or the emotional stage. For me there is still a Cause. Capitalism, to me, is not a mere bug to be put under a microscope, coldly studied or examined, or a theorem in geometry, to be tried, tested and analyzed; it is a monstrous thing, to be destroyed, annihilated. I would deal with capitalism as the early cow-boys dealt with a horse-thief: kill it first and try it afterward. (K)

As a worker for socialism I can do something, even in this little desert town, although we have to bear our share of social ostracism and contumely; were I to declare myself an anarchist I could not live here; we would be lucky not to have our house burned over our heads. Both my wife and I went thru that sort of thing once, as you very well know. In Geneva, where for sheltering Parsons I was threatened with a coat of tar and feathers and a free ride on a fence rail, and in Chicago where we were advertized, blacklisted, imprisond and hounded from pillar to post. We rather gloried in our martyrdom then. But now we are old and have perhaps become more timid. At any rate we do not see anything to be gained either for ourselves or the Cause by butting our heads against a stone wall, and so we continue to wallow in the mire of opportunism.

It seems to me that your position is something like this: you admit that capitalism which inhibits liberty; robs, degrades and murders the individual, is a bad thing; socialism which also inhibits liberty but does not rob or murder the individual is worse than capitalism; therefore you prefer capitalism to socialism. The syllogism may be faulty; I don’t claim to be a traind logician, but it is up to you to point out the flaw. (L)

You ask us: What makes you think anarchism an ideal — something to be dreamd of that must ever remain afar? Well, you and other plumbline friends who regard liberty under the capitalist system as a practical reality should certainly be counted fortunate. How you all come to be immune from the rent collector, the tax gatherer, the robbing employer and the profit-grabber — not to mention other exploiters — beats me. How much liberty do you exercise in wearing protected clothing, in eating protected food, in yielding a large modicum of your individualism to the government which protects you? I really don’t get you when you say liberty is practical here and now. (M)

Anarchism (I was the first to use that word, friend Kuehn) is the doctrine that all the affairs of men should be managed by individuals or voluntary associations, and that the State should be abolished. — Tucker’s definition. I have called this an ideal — a dream. How many people in the world are there who regard it as something else? (N)

But I have finished. While this is not written with the expectation that it will be published, you are at liberty to give it out if you see fit. As I said in my former letter: you have the whip hand. You can castigate, lampoon, sneer and make raw deductions to your heart’s content. I am at your mercy. But remember this: No cause is lost to him who mocked, derided, lampooned, hath placed his Cause on a pedestal, to be worshipped, though afar off. (O)

Herman Kuehn

A. My authority is in the fact that scientific socialism consists of a formula for abolishing competition. That means, to the extent that it has any meaning, that progress is to be stopt.

B. I’ve read pretty much all that Kautsky, Gronlund, Berger, Debs, Simons and Allen Benson hav contributed to Science. All of them agree that Competition is abominable, that Cooperation is benign, however inefficient; that capitalism is a growth that could hav fructified without authoritarianism; that no great enterprise can be consummated by those who desire it, but that those who do not desire must be compeld to contribute. I hav read other Scientists of the same school, and not one of them is immune from such hallucinations. All of them quite gravely and seriously arraign Individualism as iniquitous and profess to be animated by an impossible altruism and to conceive the individual as a cell in a Unit of Being which they call the social organism.

C. Sweat-shops, child-labor and the thousand horrors are the legitimate offspring of a reliance on the State. I see no wide choice between a State administerd by meddlers of the Roosevelt type and meddlers of the Berger type. No, I do not regard a change from frying pan to fire as desirable. I want a change from all authoritarian reliance and I deem it easier, far easier, to effect such a change than to establish a new style of despotism. What we have now is bad enuf — I do not care to encourage the notion that the choice is so narrow.

D. I hav no dout of frend Holmes’ perfect willingness to assure me the safety to which he refers; but I dout his ability to keep the faith he pledges with so much sincerity. He is today free to criticize the government, wretched as it is; I woud have no such freedom once the socialists captured the powers of government.

E. It is here now, for that matter, in its most essential details. Nearly every one is convincd that without reliance on authority we would be at one another’s throats. It is because we already have too much of that sort of reliance that I shudder at the prospect of more of the like. I do not share the ideals of those confiding friends who pin their faith on a miracle: that liberty is only to be secured by the grace of despots.

F. Canute’s tactics were not sagacious. Why try to stem the tide or quarrel with an earthquake? Nor is it wise, merely because a pestilence is inevitable to profess to admire its ravages. I hate all despotism and I do not intend to pretend that I love despots because they belong to the working class.

G. I make no mistake in identifying socialism with the purpose to make the abstraction calld the State the universal employer, the universal landlord and the universal banker. Holmes and others who overlook that identity are mistaken. Just as it is a mistake to consider individual ownership and private monopoly of the means of subsistence, as possible if there were no superstitious reliance on a non-existent Ideal. Neither private nor public ownership of natural resources is possible in the absence of deference to Illusion. There never was, and there never can be a private monopoly. It is singular that so alert-witted a man as Holmes needs be reminded that while the fruits of monopoly extortion may be privately enjoyed, that its sanction and its protection must be authoritarian. Holmes intimates that he can sense no remedy for monopoly except more of it. My preference in the line of remedies is for all intelligent people to withdraw their acquiescence from the notions that a despotically-protected monopoly is malignant when its benefits accrue to one individual but that it is benign when all but its victims get the loot.

H. I perceive that we are invited to delegate our power to those who are good so that we may become good, under the guidance of the good and scientific. But that has ever been the plea of superstition and despotism.

J. The child produces nothing, and, as Holmes says, it is without experience. When it becomes a producer it ceases to be an invader. I challenge Holmes to cite a page from the book of experience that men who are not in superstitious reverence to governmental Ideals are ever invasiv. And his remedy for the invasive spirit is to encourage tyrannical meddlesomeness — the only formidable kind of invasion that afflicts humanity.

K. I commend to frend Holmes the task he has so sedulously avoided. He will find it quite interesting to forego his dislike of analysis and investigation. He will find that the monstrous thing he calls capitalism can be extirpated by the simple process of withdrawing support from the only prop that upholds it. I could point out the prop for him, but he cannot help finding it for himself when he substitutes research for sentimentalism. It was ever the way of the sentimentalist, as George Meredith pointed out in his chapter on Riding the Hippogriff to fight a stink with a perfume; and to cultivate the itch for the pleasure of scratching.

L. The syllogism is faulty. It starts with the assumed premise that one who is opposed to the logical outcome of reliance on despotism must choose one or another of the logical outcomes of despotism. I do not admit that the hindrances to liberty are the results of capitalism. Capitalism itself is the result of authoritarian inhibitions. Capitalism is an effect — not a cause. Every socialist I know claims to be a scientist. I think that claim preposterous when made by any person who does not see that capitalism is an effect — not a cause. It is a test of intelligence! I see no fundamental difference between capitalism and socialism. Both are examples of reliance on despotism. A plague o’ both their houses!

M. I acquit Holmes of intentional misconception. Those who see the practicality of Liberty see — what comes to the same thing — the practicality of Intelligence. Every test of despotism has proved its inadequacy to fulfil its promises. Every test of freedom has made good. Hence we do not regard Freedom as an Ideal but as a practical condition of prosperity. We pay usury, taxes and royalty because we who are intelligent live among governmentally-perverted people who lack intelligence. The Idealist, on the other hand, despite every experience, still conceives of some style or fashion in despotism that will work the great miracle. Libertarians are not striving to establish liberty, as Holmes seems to believe. We are trying to weaken the devotion of the superstitious to their Ideals so that we as well as they may be prosperous — as we certainly will be when unhinderd.

Prosperity is possible only in an environment in which each individual is free (that is: unhinderd) to pursue happiness at his own cost.

N. Tucker never included in any definition of anarchism that tenet quoted by Holmes referring to the abolition of the State. His position, derived from Proudhon, was that as men grew wiser the abstraction men revere as the State would be dissolved in the economic organism. Free men will, of course, either manage their own affairs, or by a division of effort will have cooperativ enterprises cooperativly manajd. Such cooperativ manajment would not include so patent an absurdity as, for instance, that some of us cooperate to insure against dust damaj and inconvenience by hiring a cooperative sprinkling device that we will therefore entrust the manager of the sprinkling cart with supervision over our cooperativ hospitals, libraries and bridges. Nor does the definition comprise the stupidity that no cooperative enterprize can be successful unless it hav power to compel the unwilling to contribute to its maintenance. An individual might join hundreds of associations, or none. But why call this an ideal? Even with intelligence as low as at present it has already been discovered that a man may be a member of a volunteer fire department, of the Knights of Booly-Magooly, of a life insurance association, and a hundred similar groups not one of them under the same management or under the manajment of the men who are entrusted with the governmental job of making us good.

O. This is an open forum. No one is ever sneered or lampooned out of its pajes. Every argument I have advanced is either true or false, regardless of the terms in which it is expresst. Friend Holmes is invited to show wherein the cause he worships has been misrepresented. Criticism of scientific socialism is always resented by those scientific worshippers. While they do not so express it, what they resent is not so much the sneer as the sacrilege. Here’s a fair test: I sneer at, I deride, the notion that obsesses every scientist that capitalism is the cause of anywhat. For years I have been deriding that baseless notion, and the only mode the scientists hav met this is to complain of the sneer. Let Holmes try his powers on it.