Vol. 6.4, April 1974

A Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher		Murray N. Rothbard, Editor
VOLUME VI, NO. 4	APRIL, 1974	US-ISSN0047-4517

FIVE YEARS OLD!

Yes, dear reader, with this issue the Libertarian Forum celebrates its fifth anniversary. Anniversaries are traditionally a time for nostalgia and self-congratulations, but I believe that the latter is more justified here than is usually the case.

In the first place, we are spectacularly long-lived for a libertarian publication. Unlike all too many sister publications which have begun with pomp and fireworks and then have quickly gone kerplooey, we began with modest aims, and perhaps for that reason are still around and thriving more than ever. We did not aspire, for example, to become the counter-TIME or counter-National Review of the movement, or to provide staff positions for half of the movement.

Secondly, there are few if any ideological magazines – left, right, or center—that do not run on deficits, some of them spectacular. It is a source of pride that the Libertarian Forum has never in its history suffered a deficit. We have always either broken even or earned a modest profit, and we have grown steadily over the years to over double the original circulation. Not only that: for such was the rush of advance subscriptions after we announced our coming birth that we have never had to put a nickel of our own money into the magazine.

Thirdly, we have never suffered either from the financial debility or the faction fights that come with over-staffing. We have adhered strictly to individual responsibility and the division of labor, with yours truly in charge of the content and Joe Peden in charge of the business management of the magazine. As a result, we have enjoyed five years of smooth and felicitous harmony. Because of this strictly defined division of labor, the only instance of friction on the Forum had no effect on the content of the magazine as a whole. That was when Karl Hess, our original Washington editor, left us after a year because, in his rapid ideological course leftward, he could not remain on a journal which sharply criticized the Black Panthers. But since Karl, was only responsible for his own Washington column, this disagreement could have no effect on the rest of the contents of the Forum. Apart from Karl Hess our staff has consisted of two people, period.

Fourth and most important, we have been able to succeed in our aims when founding the magazine. What indeed were those aims? They of course included establishing a continuing libertarian periodical, which was virtually non-existent in early 1969. They included the hope—successful beyond our imaginings—of helping to launch a nationwide libertarian movement, then only a gleam in our and others’ eyes. And so we have celebrated and disseminated news and critiques of the movement. But above all we have wanted to provide an outlet for a continuing application of libertarian theory to the social and political events of the day. It is this function that was not only non-existent in 1969, but is still—after the great expansion of the libertarian movement in intervening years—virtually unique to the pages of the Libertarian Forum. There have been quite a number of periodicals willing to discourse at great length on “John Gait as Hero”, on whether A is or is not always A, or on “Concept and Percept in the Theory of Rational Bisexuality”. But where O where are the journals eager to discuss the energy crisis or Richard Nixon or the latest events in France or the Middle Fast from the point of view of libertarian analysis? Where else are the applications of libertarian doctrine to current events? I still don’t understand why we have no sister publications in this area, but we continue as we started as virtually the only periodical to perform this vital function.

Let us quote at some length from our first editorial in the preview issue of live years ago: apart from the fact that the movement has now become much larger and better organized, the statement of aim is as valid now as it was then:

“The need is acute for far more cohesion and inter-communication in the libertarian movement: in fact, it must become a movement and cease being merely an inchoate collection of diffuse and haphazard personal contacts . . .

“We believe that one of the greatest needs of the movement at this time is for a frequently appearing magazine that could act as a nucleus and communications center for libertarians across the country. We also believe that while many libertarians have thought long and hard about their ideal system, few of them have been able to rise above the merely sectarian exposition of the pure system to engage in a critique of the present state of affairs armed with the libertarian world-view. This kind of ‘critique’ is not merely ‘negative’, as many libertarian sectarians believe. For it is the kind of work that it is indispensable if we are ever to achieve victory, if we are ever to get our ideal system off the drawing board and applied to the real world. In order to change the present system we must be able to analyze and explore it, and to see in the concrete how our libertarian view can be applied to such analysis and to the prospects for social change.

“One would think that such a need would be obvious. No movement that has been successful has ever been without organs for carrying out this kind of analysis and critique. The key word here is ‘successful’: for a magazine like The Libertarian (Forum) is desperately needed only if we wish to unite theory and action, if we wish not only to elaborate an ideal system but to see how the current system may be transformed into the idea. In short, it is needed only if our aim is victory; those who conceive of liberty as only an intellectual parlor game, or as a method for generating investment tips, will, alas, find little here to interest them. But let us hope that The Libertarian (Forum) will be able to play a part in inspiring a truly dedicated movement on behalf of liberty.”

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To be specific, the Lib. Forum had its origin on a rainy automobile trip to Virginia undertaken in January. 1969 by your editor, his wife, and Joe Peden. It was on one of the boring turnpike stretches that Joe Peden first conceived—or at least launched—the idea of the Lib. Forum. It didn’t take much persuasion to talk me into it. Yours—and my—favorite magazine was born.

The background was particularly propitious for the new venture. In the first place. Joe and I, without as yet much concrete evidence, had sensed that the libertarian movement was beginning to grow rapidly in New York and throughout the country. In New York, it seemed that—for the first time in over twenty years—the movement was growing beyond the confines of one small living-room. How right we were was demonstrated far beyond our expectations when, on return from the trip, Joe and Jerry Woloz founded the Libertarian Forum dinners, a series of dinners and after-dinner talks among New York libertarians. It was at the first such dinner that the forthcoming launching of the Lib. Forum was first publicly announced. Sending out notices to a restricted mailing-list, we all expected about twenty-five guests to show up. When over sixty persons attended this initial dinner, some coming from as far away as Buffalo, Delaware, and South Carolina to attend the affair, it was clear that the movement was growing far more rapidly than we had believed.

At the same time that the movement was beginning to grow, there was a particular dearth of libertarian journalism. In 1965, at a time when the libertarian movement had dwindled almost to nothing from being trapped in a conservative movement that had virtually swallowed it up, Leonard Liggio and myself, as a desperation measure, had founded the three-times yearly journal Left and Right. The purpose was to find and mobilize the lingering libertarian elements that had been all but absorbed into the Conservative movement—a movement that had changed spectacularly from the quasi-libertarian movement that it has been from the late 1930’s to the mid-1950’s (the “Old Right”), to a Bill Buckley-dominated “New Right” that was driving in the profoundly statist and anti-libertarian direction of global war, repression of civil liberties and militarism at home, and a theocratic social philosophy. Leonard and I felt it vital to try to retrieve libertarians from the embrace of the New Right, to differentiate them and split them away from the Right-wing, to try to form a separated and self-conscious movement of our own. Secondly, and as a corollary to the process of weaning away the libertarian movement from the Right-wing, we sought to discover the libertarian elements of the then just emerging New Left and to make common cause with them against the Vietnam War, the draft, and military-industrial bureaucracy. Or, to put it briefly, we wanted to put an end to a situation where the only journal I could find to publish a critique of the deterioration from Old Right to New Right (in 1964) was an obscure Catholic theological quarterly.

Having founded Left and Right in 1965, and achieved considerable success in our aims, continuing deficits finally forced us to close its doors in 1968. Besides, we now felt that a periodical more directly oriented to the growing libertarian movement was more sharply necessary. The vacuum in libertarian journalism was accentuated by the collapse, around the same time, of the laissez-faire quarterly published at the University of Chicago, New Individualist Review, and of Rampart College’s Rampart Journal.

But there was also another concrete objective and reason for launching the Forum at that particular time. For the Nixon Administration was just beginning, and we could already see the onrush of Conservatives to worship at the new idol of Power. We didn’t want libertarians to be caught up once again in the Eisenhower-coddling that had helped to wreck the Old Right in the 1950’s. And so we conceived it to be one of our vital functions to expose and attack the new Nixon Administration: how important such a task was even we did not know at the time.

And so, ever since April 1969, first twice and then once every month—though sometimes late—we have proceeded on our allotted tasks. Even in our preview issue, we began our ceaseless criticisms of the then new Nixon Administration:

“Changeovers in Administration are always a disheartening time for any thoughtful observer of the political scene. The volume of treacle and pap rises to the heavens, as the wit and wisdom and the high statesmanship of both the outgoing and incoming rascals are trumpeted across the land. But this year things are even worse than ever. First we had to suffer the apotheosis of Lyndon Baines Johnson, before last November the most universally reviled President of modern times; but after November, suddenly lovable and wise. And now Richard Nixon has had his sharp edges dissolved and his whole Person made diffuse and mellow; he too has become uniquely lovable to all. How much longer must we suffer this tripe? It is bad enough that we have to live under a despotic government; must we also have our intelligence systematically defiled?”

In our first. April 1, 1969 issue, we warned of the ascendancy in the new Administration of Dr. Arthur F. Burns, “The Scientific Imperial Counsellor”. We noted that, despite his powerful government post, Burns still thought of himself as simply a scientific technician, in the service of society: “I’m not interested in power and influence, I’m interested in doing a job.” “Thus,” we commented, “Burns has become almost the caricature of modern American social science: a group of disciplines swarming with supposedly value-free technicians, self-proclaimed non-ideological workmen simply ‘doing a job’ in service to their masters of the State apparatus: that is, to their military-political-industrial overlords. For their ‘scientific’ and ‘value-free’ outlook turns out to be simply marginal wheeling and maneuvering within the broad frames of reference set by the American status quo . . .”

We then noted that—with high irony in the light of our present hindsight—Arthur Burns disclosed to Business Week that he felt his major task to be something spectacularly non-value-free: “For, Burns opines, the really important problem is that ‘a great many of our citizens have lost faith in our basic institutions . . . They have lost faith in the processes of the government itself.’ ‘The President keeps scratching his head,’ Burns goes on, ‘and I as his adviser keep scratching my head—trying to know how to build new institutions . . . to restore faith in government.’”

To “restore faith in government!” We then concluded our editorial:

“So that is what our new imperial Counsellor is up to. The aggressively ‘scientific’ statistician has become our purported faith-healer, our evangelical Witch Doctor, who has come to restore our faith in that monster Idol, the State. Let us hereby resolve, everyone, one and all, that Arthur is not going to get away with it.

“But soft, we must guard our flank, for there is a host of so-called libertarians’ and free-market advocates who swear up and down that Arthur Burns is God’s gift to a free-market economy. Which says a great deal about the quality of their devotion to liberty, as compared to their evident devotion to Power.”

No sooner had we been fairly launched, then we were able to play a major role in what is now the almost legendary beginning of the organized libertarian movement of today: the libertarian split from YAF in August 1969 at St. Louis. In our August 15 issue we wrote “Listen, YAF”, urging the strong libertarian minority within YAF to break away from antithetical conservatism and to break free into a new, separated, and self-conscious libertarian movement. Our small group of “radical libertarians” took thousands of extra copies of the “Listen, YAF” statement and bombarded the YAF delegates with the message. That, plus Karl Hess’s personal speech-making, and the hysterical overreaction of the YAF trads at one of our anarcho-capitalists burning (a facsimile of) his draft card on the floor of the convention, effected the great split which formed the modern movement. Jerry Tuccille’s exultant report on the YAF split. “Report from St. Louis: The Revolution Comes to YAF”, in our Sept. 15 issue, later reprinted in the first book of the new libertarian movement, Tuccille’s Radical Libertarianism, was to become the cherished and almost mythic account of the birth of the new movement.

The movement having grown spectacularly during the year, we in New York figured that the times were ripe for a Libertarian Conference, and issued a call for one over the Columbus Day weekend. The disasters as well as the triumphs of that conference were duly recorded in our November 1 issue, in what I must say was a strikingly honest piece of reporting in a world where ideological movements generally feel constrained to report their advances and to hide their setbacks. It was at that point that I realized that the necessary attacks on “right-wing deviationism” within the movement (devotion to YAF, an interventionist foreign policy, U.S. militarism) had left a weakness on our left flank, with the result that many of our people, especially in the New York-Washington area, had gone over to “ultra-left adventurism” in tactics and even communism in basic social philosophy. This Left tendency was fed by the final burst of left-adventurism during that winter of the expiring of the New Left in random violence. Consequently, we devoted much of the following year to a continuing attack on the Left tendency, finally succeeding. I believe, in isolating that tendency and separating it from the mainstream of the libertarian movement.

That separation was compounded by the wave of publicity, and the resulting accelerated growth, given to the libertarian movement in January and February of 1971. For if the August 1969 YAF convention was the birth of the modern movement, it was the events of early 1971 that catapulted it into nationwide publicity and thereby fed its accelerated growth. If, in short, 1969 was the beginning, early 1971 was the “takeoff”, a launching and an acceleration that continues unto the present day. (This launching was celebrated in the Lib. Forum in “Takeoff”, Feb. 1971 and “Takeoff II”, March 1971 issues.) The continuing nationwide publicity began with the article by Stan Lehr and Lou Rossetto, “The New Right Credo—Libertarianism”, in the New York Sunday Times Magazine section of January 10; Lehr and Rossetto had been discovered by the Times the previous fall as heads of a Columbia University group that had been called “libertarian” supporters of Buckley for Senate. After that came articles in the highly influential New York Times Op-Ed page by Jerry Tuccille and myself, with an attack by Bill Buckley; and the movement was off to the races.

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We stand today at the threshold of great new growth for the libertarian movement, and for the spread of the ideas of liberty throughout the country and indeed across the seas as well (pace the recent spectacular growth of libertarian-type parties in Norway and Denmark.) That growth will be further fueled by the accelerated inflation and the rest of the economic and social messes that statism will be getting us into. As in the past, the Lib. Forum stands ready to record and analyze these developments, and to be, as before, the shield of the valiant and the scourge of the evildoer. And so, to our long-suffering readers: Happy Fifth Anniversary!

FLP Convention: One Step Forward, One Step Back

They tell me that the other Libertarian Parties across the country, including the overall national party, work more or less like clockwork, that they are smoothly functioning and sensible organizations, that factions are at a minimum and that the Real People are firmly in control, with the lunatic fringe confined strictly to the fringe. Oh happy day! So what have they done right, and where has New York gone wrong? What we in New York badly need is a spiritual CARE package of advice from our sister parties.

It is a measure of the state of the Free Libertarian Party of New York that our marathon annual convention (March 29-31) was scarcely enough to finish the Party business. This despite a preceding Special Convention at which we wrangled over the party logo and chose delegates to the National Convention in Dallas in June, and despite the fact that the Convention began every morning promptly at 10:00 A.M. and lasted through special caucuses and post-mortems until after the bars closed at 3:00 A.M. Yet we concluded with no resolutions on issues and no platform, these being put back to yet another mini-convention at the end of April. Three conventions in two months begins to resemble the unfortunate and frenetic Peace and Freedom Party of 1968, which reached a crescendo of almost continuous conventioneering before its rapid demise.

The FLP had emerged the previous April from its founding convention with a superb statement of principles and with a remarkably intelligent and dedicated set of leaders over the embryonic internal Party structure. The accomplishment of the FLP under this leadership in 1973 was staggering: founding the party, maintaining and advancing it as a vital force with limited resources, and running a remarkably successful mayoralty campaign in New York City. For this dazzling success the best elements of this leadership were rewarded with repudiation at the 1974 convention. Internally, the FLP structure is now a shambles. Yet, the convention cannot be set down as an unmitigated disaster, because almost miraculously out of the rubble came an excellent slate of candidates for the 1974 elections in New York State. Whether the FLP can long continue with an internal party mess joined to fine prospects for “external” campaigning is problematic: but right now, all is not lost. Prospects for the future are a mixed bag.

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“The mob is easily led and may be moved by the smallest force, so that its agitations have a wonderful resemblance to those of the sea.”—Polybius.

“Every one that was in distress, and every one that was in debt, and every one that was discontented, gathered themselves unto him; and he became a captain over them.”— I Samuel XXII, 2.

“Calumniate! Calumniate! Some of it will always stick.”—Beaumarchais.

“No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.”—H. L. Mencken.

What went wrong? Why was virtue rewarded with defeat? Such questions can never receive exact answers, but the best estimate may be encapsulated in the above four quotations. Part of the answer is wrapped up, also, in the question of time and energy available. The FLP leadership were almost all Real People, i.e. people who work in the world, who have jobs, whose grip on reality is of a high order. (In another sense, the question: “What or who are the Real People?” may be answered in Louis Armstrong’s famous reply to the question: “what is jazz?”: “If you have to ask, you won’t know the answer.”) Being busy and productive, the leadership had its hands full in running campaigns, and in keeping party affairs going; it did not have the time to engage in inner party squabbles, to hold the hands of those craving for attention, or to answer personal calumny that seemed to be ridiculous on its face—and which, so they thought, would fall of its own lack of weight. In short, it did not have the time to organize a “power” base or structure within the party. Looked at another way, the leadership put its trust in the innate intelligence and good sense of the FLP rank-and-file. There was its fatal error.

While it was thus busy attending brilliantly to important matters, the leadership of the FLP left a “power vacuum” within the party that others hastened to begin to fill. Malcontents. Luftmenschen, “people of the air and wind”, people with nothing better to do, began to gather together, to plan to seize power within the party. Malcontents—even of widely disparate views—found each other in a common cause to repudiate those in power and to substitute themselves. And certainly a vital part of this coalescing of forces was envy: envy of the manifest competence and intelligence of the leadership. It was, of course, ever thus: in the words of Thomas Middleton (our fifth quote),

“If on the sudden he begins to rise:
No man that lives can count his enemies.”

Three major groups came together in what the Marxists would call this “unprincipled coalition.” One was the Radical Caucus, which pushed the manifestly anti-libertarian and egalitarian idea that all party structure is evil, that all leadership is coercive and un-libertarian, and that true anarchism requires an abandonment of leadership and the division of labor within the Party on behalf of a participatory democracy in which everyone votes on virtually every decision. The Radical Caucus raised the cry of “decentralization”, forgetting that decentralization is only a sound policy in the area of government, precisely because we want government to be as ineffective, as limited and as powerless as possible. If we want any sort of effective libertarian organization, including a Libertarian Party, on the other hand, pushing for decentralization as a supposedly moral issue is simply madness. The only RC member who saw this clearly was its charismatic founder, Samuel Konkin, who explicitly avowed that he was pushing decentralization precisely in order to destroy the Libertarian Party. Yet, even though he made no bones about his objective, the other RC members somehow overlooked Konkin’s stated goals and adopted decentralism as a moral imperative for the party.

Why was Konkin out to wreck the FLP from within? Because he believed, along with LeFevrians and many other anarchists, that any political party whatever is per se aggressive and part of the State apparatus. Where Konkin differed from his colleagues, of course, is that they believed that the moral course was to have nothing to do with the LP. or to attack it from the outside. Employing demagogy from within was not their style. Day after day, then, in meetings and in the pages of his New Libertarian Notes. Konkin hammered away at the FLP leadership, denouncing them as the “Partyarchy”, and as cryptoarchists. Since the “Partyarchy” treated these charges as manifestly absurd, they went unanswered, and the charges, however absurd, began to stick.

The second bloc in the upsurge of the nihilist coalition was the Constitutional Coalition, formed by Howard S. Katz, who had previously abandoned a career as investment counselor to be a “professional libertarian writer.” In the FLP probably alone among the state parties, the believers in limited government (the “minarchists”) are in a minority, since both the RC and the Partyarchy were largely anarchists. Katz was thereby able to appeal to the disaffected minarchists in the party. Remarkably, the supposed polar extremes—the Katz clique, and the Radical Caucus—found themselves in close emotional and organizational affinity in their joint malcontent. Katz, too, was a radical decentralist at least when others were doing the centralizing; thereby the Katz clique took on the certainly unique posture of being at one and the same time pro-statist in content and anti-party-structure in form. Of the four possible permutations: pro-structure anarchist, anti-structure anarchist, pro-structure archist, and anti-structure archist, the latter Katzite position is certainly, whatever else one may say about it, the most bizarre.

Katz’s style was to bombard FLP members, day in and day out with lengthy letters attacking his enemies and setting forth his own position. Presumably he had nothing better to do with his time. Katz employed two major tactics. One was to find a Demon-figure and to hammer away, day after day, with personal attacks upon him. He found that figure in Gary Greenberg, manager of the Youngstein campaign, and who was also the major theoretician and strategist of the “centralist” or pro-structure wing of the leadership. Greenberg, for example, had concluded that the FLP was hamstrung by its excessively decentralized structure; not having any platform or resolutions, no one in the FLP leadership was empowered to make statements for the party, to issue press releases on vital issues of the day on its behalf, or to commit party funds to those ends. Greenberg therefore called for remedying this lack, for making the FLP effective by changing the by-laws to permit the State Chairman to make public statements on behalf of the party if they met with the approval of 2/3 of the State Committee. This sensible proposal, coupled with Greenberg’s being an easy visible target of attacks as a dedicated and highly effective campaign manager and as a person who does not suffer fools gladly, led to an unremitting campaign of personal calumny waged against him by Katz and by others in the party.

If one of Katz’s major tactics was to denounce Greenberg personally as morally evil and as a luster after power, his other tactic was to strike a pose as the moral conscience of the FLP. Greenberg and the rest of the Partyarchy were immoral pragmatists: the Radical Caucus, while lovable and moral, were sectarian and ineffective: only Katz stood aloft, a fuser of “soul” and body, an integrator of morality and practical effectiveness. Again, treating this pose as manifest nonsense, the leadership spent little time in rebutting the endless sermons sent through the mails by the Rev. Katz. Clearly, another big mistake.

The third group of malcontents were various members from outlying districts who felt that not enough attention was paid to their particular campaigns. Manhattan, in short, was tyrannizing over neglected Poughkeepsie where the real action lay. The Poughkeepsie bloc was led by Sanford Cohen, running for Congress from the area, who was euphemistically described by his campaign manager as “hard driving.”

The combustible ingredients were there, and they came together at the 1974 convention. Even so, however, the nihilist coalition might not have won were it not for a basic split within the leadership itself. For the leadership too was divided on the vexed “centralism” question. In the “hard nosed” camp were: Gary Greenberg; Fran Youngstein, the superb mayoralty, candidate; Howard Rich, a young businessman who served as a Vice Chairman of the party and as indefatigable leader of fund-raising and petition drives in the campaign; Leland Schubert; and the editor of the Lib. Forum. The “soft”, middle-of-the-road, quasi-decentralist camp was led by Andrea Millen, the highly effective State Chairwoman of the FLP; and it included Raymond Strong, mathematician and the other Vice Chairman of the party, and Secretary Michael Nichols. A unified opposition and a divided leadership had to spell defeat.

The convention itself was wild, woolly, and often bizarre. Two hours were consumed in wrangling over the party logo. Finally, the “open hand” won out over the “Libersign.” The “furthest-out” point of the convention came when young Michael Maslow, leader of the small “ultra” wing of the Radical Caucus, exuberantly and seriously proposed that the party logo consist of the Jewish Star of David with a swastika inside, thus presumably integrating the great Nazi and Jewish traditions. It was a measure of the convention that it was surprising that enough good sense remained to shout down the Maslow proposal. The high point came when, at the very end of the convention, the endorsement of candidates was nearing its close. One delegate then moved to rescind all previous endorsements in order to provide sexual and ethnic balance to the ticket. To which another exasperated delegate replied: “What this party needs is not ethnic balance but mental balance!”

The chairman-as-spokesman proposal went down to resounding defeat, by something like 35 to 12, backed as it was by only the hard-nosed wing of the party. Considering the mood of the convention, the vote was scarcely surprising. The big fight came the next day, Sunday, over the elections for party officers and the State Committee at Large. Gary Greenberg, as the focal target of the nihilist coalition, prudently decided not to run for any office whatever: a wise decision, but it meant that Katz and the RC had accomplished their purpose in driving him out of any leadership in the party. Howie Rich also decided not to run for party office. The Partyarchy including both the “moderate” and what we must unfortunately, for labelling purposes, call the “right wing”, agreed on a joint slate: for Chairman. Raymond Strong, a Millen disciple: for Vice-Chairmen. Fran Youngstein (right) and Mike Nichols (moderate); for secretary. Lee Schubert (right); for treasurer. Dolores Grande (moderate). The “left” (again, for want of a better term), ran Bill Lawry’ against Strong. With Sam Konkin, his work accomplished, on the way toward leaving the FLP altogether. Lawry had become head of the Radical Caucus. The united Right and Center managed to win a handy victory for Strong by a vote of 33 to 20, but Lawry was a harbinger of later events in accumulating the votes of the entire Nihilist Coalition: the Radical Caucus, the Katz clique, and the Cohen-Poughkeepsie forces.

The crucial vote then came on the two slots for Vice-Chairmen. The Left again ran Bill Lawry as well as Howie Katz; since there was general agreement on the moderate Nichols, the real fight was between Lawry and Youngstein. Incredibly. Youngstein was defeated—a substantive and symbolic victory for the nihilists of major proportions. Since Fran Youngstein almost manifestly deserved the post, and since the vote also amounted to a repudiation of the great mayoralty campaign, this vote amounted to a veritable Night of the Long Knives. The insult to Fran Youngstein was further compounded and made even more unbelievable by the fact that Katz tied Youngstein for third and fourth place in the voting. The long and persistent campaign of absurdities and defamations was, mirabile dictu, paying off. The votes were: Nichols 29, Lawry 28, Youngstein. 25, and Katz 25.

But more was yet to come. Next came elections for the posts of 5 State Committeemen at Large (Schubert and Grande ran unopposed.) Twelve entries began the complex voting procedure. Again, the result was a smashing victory for the Left, which won three of the five seats; the others went to Andrea Millen (the leader in the voting), and, yes, Fran Youngstein, who rejected the advice of some of her militant supporters to withdraw her sanction from the proceedings by not running for a State Committee post. The important point here, however, is that despite impassioned pleas by Millen and Strong to put at least one “rightist” on the State Committee and thus lend a bit of balance to that body. Fran picked up only three more votes in the State Committee balloting. As a symbolic and moral gesture to express our intense disapproval of the rebuff to Youngstein, some of us (Rich, Greenberg and myself) organized a bullet vote for Youngstein with four abstentions. The bullet-vote movement, in a bit of fresh air at the convention, managed to accumulate eight votes in only a few minutes of politicking.

Of the ten members of the new State Committee, the ideological breakdown may be set forth as follows:

Left-Nihilists: Lawry (Radical Caucus). Katz (Katz clique), Charles Blood (Katz clique). Ellen Davis (Cohen-Poughkeepsie)—4 votes.

Moderate-Millenites: Millen. Nichols. Grande, Strong—4 votes.

Rightists: Youngstein, Schubert—2 votes.

There is a strong possibility that the new County organizations will later be allowed representatives on the State Committee. In that case, the Left may well take over full control, what with prospective representatives from Poughkeepsie, Queens, Brooklyn, and Suffolk.

Meanwhile, while all this was going on, the other, quieter drama was in trying to run a full slate of candidates in the 1974 elections. Particularly important was running a strong candidate for governor, since the FLP, to win a permanent spot on the ballot, must gain 50,000 votes in the gubernatorial race. Fortunately, our old Forum contributor Jerome Tuccille was induced to shift from the Senate to the Governor race; Tuccille’s campaign manager will be the sound thinker and strategist Lee Schubert, who is also running for Attorney-General. For U.S. Senate, the Party endorsed Percy L. Greaves, Jr., veteran Republican politician and a distinguished free-market follower of Ludwig von Mises; the endorsement was a heroic act of rising above petty sectarianism to choose a man who will stress the vital economic issues of this era, and who is also a sound libertarian on civil liberties issues and a veteran isolationist in foreign policy. The heroic good sense came in endorsing a man who is not an anarchist, but who is a libertarian on all the crucial political issues of our time. How come such good sense from delegates who had, only hours before, shown a disposition to be petty, sectarian, and to tear up the pea patch in almost professional acts of troublemaking? Even the Radical Caucus and the Katz clique (with the exception, of course, of Katz himself) voted to endorse Percy Greaves. How come? Who knows? Perhaps it was good sense surfacing at last; perhaps it was a desire not to alienate the right-wing permanently and irrevocably. Furthermore, the Greaves race will be fortunate in having the veteran Republican politician and libertarian Gerry Cullen of Buffalo as campaign manager.

The other candidates on the state ticket also come from the sensible wing of the party: Louis Sicilia of Manhattan for Lieutenant Governor; Dr. Robert Flanzer of Brooklyn for Comptroller: and the aforesaid Lee Schubert for Attorney-General.

Not only were Tuccille. Greaves and the others endorsed virtually unanimously, but the convention was stirred to great enthusiasm by the rousing acceptance speeches of Greaves and Tuccille. Running a largely “middle-class” oriented campaign, furthermore, the ticket has a good chance of picking up disaffected Conservative Party votes in New York, disaffected from the Conservative endorsement of Republican hack Malcolm Wilson for Governor, and its apparent decision to put up an unknown patsy against the hated Jacob Javits. We may well have a good chance for the 50.000 votes!

In reciting the good points of the convention, we should not overlook the beautiful keynote address of Roger MacBride, our electoral voter from Virginia in 1972. MacBride linked libertarians with the radical wing—the Sam Adamses, the Tom Paines—of the American Revolution, which he properly called the “first libertarian revolution.” It was up to us, he declared, to make the second such “revolution”. Just as Patrick Henry exclaimed, upon the signing of the Declaration of Independence, that “we are no longer Virginians but Americans”, so. Roger declared, the result of the “second libertarian revolution” will be to declare that “we are no longer Americans, or Britons, but libertarians.” MacBride for President in ’76?!

The lesson for the sensible folk in the FLP emerges clearly from the mixed results of the Convention, the internal structure of the party, already weak, is now and at least for the coming year, hopeless. The only hope there lies in long-range, patient organization and internal reeducation within the party, the neglect of which led directly to the present shambles. But even last year, the party structure, hobbled as it was, was unimportant: the real action, the chance at educating the “outside world” which is, after all our real purpose, lies with the candidates in a campaign. And we have, once again – as in previous years—an excellent slate of candidates to concentrate on.

All this leads, also, to some basic philosophical reflections on membership organizations per se. The market works, and works beautifully. And so do business firms within the market, where individual employers and employees contract for pay for the performance of certain tasks. There is no nonsense there about voting: there is a minimum faction fighting or waste of energy in trying to win majority consensus for every decision. Membership organizations with voting power are inherently wasteful and ineffective, especially since the assets of the organization are communally owned, with each member having one vote over the communal assets. Similarly, it is no accident that producers’ cooperatives, business firms with each worker having one vote over communally owned assets, have always and without exception been outcompeted in the free market by individually owned or corporate-owned firms. (In the latter, the only voting is per share voting by the stockholders in proportion to their ownership of assets.) Individually owned firms; partnerships; corporations, all work; voting cooperatives do not. Legally, there is no way to form a political party on a non-communal structure, on a structure that would not be subject to upheavals against the mighty principles of individual responsibility and the division of labor. The best that can be done with political parties is to try to inject as much individual responsibility and division of labor, as little participatory democracy, as possible and as necessary for efficiency.

But while the basic structure of political parties cannot be changed, non-party organizations can. It is possible to establish activist libertarian organizations that don’t mess with participatory egalitarianism. (Sam Konkin, for example, has now established his own New Libertarian Alliance which is totally subject to his personal control. No nonsense about “decentralization” there!) May it not be possible for a libertarian organization to be formed, nationwide, with no nonsense about voting, with professional, fulltime paid organizers that can create a mighty, mass activist organization of libertarians” We can only hope.

The Mysterious World Of The CLA

We have just received a press release from Miss Elizabeth Keathley, who describes herself as an “Anarchist Feminist Writer”, and as a “spokesperson for the California Libertarian Alliance”, announcing her candidacy for the nomination for governor of California on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket. This is to be a primary race against one or more of what she concedes to be “socialist” candidates.

We must say that we are bemused. The California Libertarian Alliance, along with the Society for Individual Liberty, emerged as the result of the famous August 1969 split of libertarians from YAF. The “Libertarian Alliance” concept has always pushed the following: direct action of some sort as opposed to political action, an alliance of all wings of libertarians in such action, and (implicitly) a counter-culture lifestyle. In practice, the latter two motifs have led to stress on unity only with left-wing anarchists. Apparently, unity with such middle-class minarchists as John Hospers doesn’t carry the emotional satisfaction sought by the Alliance movement.

In the 1960’s alliance with the Left on such issues as Vietnam and the draft made a lot of sense: in the 1970’s alliance with conservatives on the crucial free-market economic issues makes an equal amount of sense. But in neither epoch does an alliance with left-wing anarchists make any sense at all. Left-wing anarchists (a) are befuddled of intellect to the point of mindlessness: (b) are emotionally and ideologically opposed more to private property and the free market than they are to coercion; and (c) their counter-culture lifestyle and emotional hostility to jobs and careers turn off not only the middle class but almost everyone else as well. Hence, the left-wing anarchists have no social leverage whatever: in fact, their social leverage is negative. One left-wing anarchist at libertarian gatherings will alienate two or more regular people from the libertarian ranks. Alliance with left-wing anarchists is therefore at all times pointless; if we want to read rousing anti-State passages from Bakunin, we don’t need these people to show us the way. Furthermore, to top it off, the sort of rootless Luftmenschen who enjoy close quarters with left-wing anarchists are also the sort of people for whom left egalitarianism seems to exert a fatal attraction. The complete leftward drift of the Hunter College libertarian “festivals” in New York is only the most recent example of the inherent failure of the Alliance concept.

A leading feature of the Alliance idea was always direct rather than political action. Which makes particularly puzzling the entry in force of the California Libertarian Alliance (CLA) into the Peace and Freedom Party. Why in blazes the Peace and Freedom Party (PFP) rather than the Libertarian Party, which is particularly strong in California? Does the CLA feel closer to the admitted socialists in control of the PFP than they do to the LP? If so, then why? Those numerous libertarians who denounce all political action as sanctioning the State have a cogent, if in our view an erroneous, position. But if one does believe in political action, then why for heaven’s sake the Peace and Freedom Party? Even the idea of penetrating a major party in force. Democrat or Republican, makes a certain amount of sense. But the Peace and Freedom Party? The actions of the CLA passeth understanding. Could it be the emotional attraction of a counter-culture haven? Let us hope not.

Joining the PFP was a cogent position in 1968, when Vietnam and the draft were the critical issues, and when no Libertarian Party was in existence. But now? For us in New York, mention of the PFP is like an unwelcome voice from the past. The PFP, though a small party in New York (it had considerably fewer members than the Free Libertarian Party has today), was faction-ridden to the point of rapid demise. When launched in early 1968, it had no platform or socialist guidelines; it had only a two-point statement of principles to which every party member had to subscribe: the first was an innocuous plank about every individual and group controlling their own lives, to which even Richard Nixon could have adhered; the second was a call for immediate withdrawal from Vietnam. It soon became apparent that the PFP, both in New York, and in California and in points in between, was under the total working control of the Draperite wing of the Trotskyite movement, that wing owing allegiance to one Hal Draper, a librarian at Berkeley. Although there were only a few hundred Draperites throughout the country, organized into the Independent Socialist League (now grandiosely called the International Socialists), every Draperite had been sent into the PFP and had early won all the positions of power, including all the paid organizing posts within and between each state. The Draperite straw boss of the New York party was one Sy Landy, and the Draperites, anxious for “minorities” within the party, had acquired Chicano cachet by booming the mysterious, charismatic figure of one Carlos Aponte as national organizer. In New York, the Draperites were able to keep control by securing the support of left-wing anarchists and assorted hippies and “artists”. Before the year was out, the New York party had died a mercifully swift death.

Right now, the Peace and Freedom Party is confined to its original California base. Whether the Draperites are still in control we know not, though it appears from Miss Keathley’s statement that socialists of one sort or another are still running the show. On the national scene, the PFP certainly has no future; it is an unwanted relic of the past, even on the Left. Why should libertarians get themselves tied to a dead end, and a socialist dead end to boot?

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In all ages, whatever the form and name of government, be it monarchy, republic or democracy, an oligarchy lurks behind the facade .

Sir Ronald Syme in The Roman Revolution

Phillip H. Willkie, RIP

I see by the papers that Phil Willkie is dead, at the age of 54, in his home town of Rushville. Indiana. I knew Phil in the years just after World War II, when he was going to Columbia Law School and I was a graduate student there.

Phil was a leader in the Social Democratic wing of the American Veterans Committee, a short-lived leftish veterans group formed to offset the “reactionary” American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars. He and others in that wing were locked in struggle with the Communists and their allies, who formed the left-wing of the AVC. About that particular struggle I couldn’t care less, then or now. But Phil Willkie was an interesting character. Here he was, beginning a law career as the only son of a man who had been catapulted to the Republican Presidential nomination only half a dozen years or so earlier—in as bizarre a nomination as we might ever hope to see in America. Wendell Willkie had been a literal public unknown a few short months before the nomination, an obscure utility magnate with no political experience whatsoever and even a Democratic party registration. Yet the powerful Eastern Establishment bankers and industrialists who financed the Republican party and who were intensely eager to enter World War II, were then bereft of a Presidential nominee: for the leading candidates, Robert A. Taft and Thomas E. Dewey, were at that time both isolationists and opponents of American entry into the war (Dewey was later, under the aegis of the Rockefeller-controlled Chase National Bank, to see the light.) And so the Eastern Establishment, using every dirty trick in the book and coining some new ones of their own, put across this unknown on the Republican convention. But one thing they did know about Willkie: he could be trusted to support the Roosevelt drive toward war. Which he did not only then but during the war, when he wrote an idiotic if highly touted little book called One World. But there is no question about the fact that Wendell Willkie looked like a President, with his leonine head and rugged good looks: also he was, indeed, an authentic Hoosier and could therefore be put across as a good Middle American.

And so here was Phil Willkie, much paler but otherwise looking remarkably like his old man, large head and all. Never have I met a man who was more purely a political animal, his every waking thought the staking out of a political career which he hoped, hoped, hoped would bring him to the Presidency. His leadership in the AVC was to be the opening gun of a campaign to inherit his father’s presumed leadership of the liberal internationalist wing of the Republican party. Phil even had, tagging along with him at all times, a self-appointed campaign manager and political adviser, a skinny kid eager to rise to the top along with his charge. And so the two of them would sit, hour after hour, plotting the measured drive to the brass ring. There was a lot of pathos about the whole business, even in those days. Wendell had never had any true base of support in the party, and so there was only the father’s name to inherit, and that name was bound to grow more shadowy over the years. Who knows of Wendell Willkie now? And then there was the fearful fate of the young Roosevelts, uppermost in Phil’s mind at the time: how to avoid their laughable role as jackanapes? I remember that at one point the kid adviser solemnly advised Phil to cultivate support among the conservative stalwarts of the Republican party by telling dirty jokes—in private, of course—about Eleanor Roosevelt. I don’t remember Phil’s response, but I think he viewed it as a good idea.

I never saw Phil Willkie since those Columbia days, but once in a while I would see a little squib about Phil’s being a state legislator in Indiana. And now I will never know whether his remarkably restless and driven soul was able to make peace with the fact that he would clearly neyer catch that brass ring: not even State Senator much less President of the United States. I am sorry for Phil, though I must admit not for the rest of the country, that he never made it in politics; whether or not he found contentment in his life in Rushville, I hope that his soul will rest in peace.

Arts And Movies

By Mr. First Nighter

The Oscars. Most of the comment on the Oscars has been devoted to the always boring, bumbling, but somehow lovable Academy Awards dinner that ran an hour over on nationwide television. Far more important, however, was the content of the awards themselves, and in particular the titanic struggle that was waged between The Sting and The Exorcist for Academy honors.

The Sting, directed by George Roy Hill, was a charming, brilliantly directed, suspenseful, richly textured comedy about two lovable con-men and the con they pulled during the 1930’s on a leading gangster. It embodied the best of Old Culture film-making. The Exorcist, on the other hand, was the embodiment of all that is sick and degenerate in modern culture, pandering to the fashionable cult of the occult, to morbidity and irrationality, and to Pop religion at its most decayed. Particularly sickening, furthermore, was the central point of the film: the swinish degradation of a young girl. Where were the protests of the women’s libbers? The roping in of a spate of Jesuits as technical advisers secured the mass audience, defused the otherwise expected opposition of church groups, and gained a family rating when Triple X would have been a more cogent label. The thumping repudiation of this Friedkin-Blatty swill by the Academy members was a welcome sign that health still exists in American culture and in the film industry. This year’s Oscar award therefore had a special, and an exhilarating, significance.

Unfortunately, Blatty did win the award for the Exorcist screenplay. But Hill happily won as Best Director. The acting awards, too, displayed good sense by the membership. The only clinker was Jack Lemmon, hopelessly miscast in Save The Tiger as a depressed Jewish garment manufacturer; this award reflected the usual Academy sentimentality for comic actors who turn, once in a while, to a “serious” performance. But, happy day. Glenda Jackson won for her superior acting performance in A Touch of Class, beating out the impossible Streisand playing Streisand in The Way We Were. John Houseman certainly deserved the best supporting actor award for his brilliant performance as an arrogant law professor in The Paper Chase, as did the marvelous Tatum O’Neal for her tough, lovable urchin role in Paper Moon. (Though Tatum was scarcely a supporting actress, and should have been entered for the lead actress award.) Of the defeated nominees, we would like to see more of Marsha Mason, whose off-beat acting lent a special magic to a tawdry nothing called Cinderella Liberty and to its standard whore-with-heart of gold role.

Women in Movies. The cynical degradation of Linda Blair in The Exorcist lends point to the growing feminist charge that women have been treated badly in movies in recent years. No question about it, and the problem is not simply degradation, but the fact that women have been reduced to generally nothing roles. Actors rather than actresses are now the box-office draws, and get the juicy parts. Typical of female roles was the treatment of the leading girl in Paper Chase. The lead actress led a shadowy, unmotivated and peripheral existence, and the love interest in the film had about the same stature. Whatever the reason, it is not a centuries-old male conspiracy. For if we contrast the Golden Age of the 1930’s and 40’s, we see a rich and vital role for female actresses, ranging from intelligent, independent and sophisticated roles for the Katherine Hepburns. Carole Lombards, and Rosalind Russells, to the “sex object” roles, ranging from Sophia Loren to the Jean Harlows and Ann Sheridans. And even the Harlows and Sheridans were often sassy rather than purely passive types. I don’t know the full explanation for the decay of the female role in films, but I submit that one likely reason is the decay from Old to New Culture, from Hero to Anti-Hero in films. The Old Culture heros, the Gables and Tracys and Grants, were so strong and—yes, let’s say it—manly that they could afford to play opposite independent heroines, and both the film and the audience benefited thereby. But now in the age of the weak, purposeless, and snivelling anti-hero, the female lead has to be reduced to a virtual zero to lend the anti-hero any substance at all. So, while the New Culture seems to be more egalitarian, and lends rhetorical support to women’s lib, the upshot of the whole shebang is that women are given a raw deal. Which may have relevance not just for movies but for society as a whole.

Apologies!

Apologies are due our readers for delays in the last couple of issues. Much of the delay has been due to our printer’s problems with equipment, which are now hopefully remedied. Also, by an unfortunate juxtaposition in our March issue, it looked as if the poem by J. William Lloyd, follower of Benjamin Tucker in the late nineteenth century, was part of our “Libertarian Songs—II”. Actually, the two are unrelated, even though—to confuse the matter—Lloyd’s lyrics are obviously set to the tune of “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean”.

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Review Of John T. Flynn, ‘As We Go Marching’

By William Stewart

Review of John T. Flynn’s As We Go Marching, Free Life Editions. 1973.

Modern day social science classes, when they bother to discuss fascism at all, take one of two highly questionable approaches. Either they view fascism as something peculiar to the German and Italian experiences (perhaps arising out of some flaw in the German and Italian cultures) and hence something that could never happen in America; or they tell us that America will definitely become fascist, unless we wise up and adopt the entire spectrum of socialist politics and culture. Now, with the reprinting of John T. Flynn’s As We Go Marching, there is a highly readable and marvelously informative work of the third general approach to fascism.

Unlike socio-cultural approaches. Flynn sees fascism as primarily arising out of economic phenomena. Unlike the Marxists and other socialists, these economic forces are not borne out of dialectical forces of history, but from the nature of the market economy and systematic intervention in the market. By attempting to regulate and manage the economy, the government sets in motion forces with which it cannot cope – except with further intervention. The internal logic of the development of a totally planned economy is remarkably similar to the analysis put forth by economist Ludwig von Mises in his famous article. “Middle-of-the-Road Policy Leads to Socialism.” Like the Marxists, Flynn offers two alternatives: either continue down the road to fascism, or return to the more traditional American system of freedom and free enterprise.

To discover the nature of fascism. Flynn spends the first two-thirds of the book looking for the essential features of fascism in an historical analysis of Germany and Italy (the book is worth reading just for this historical analysis). He finds eight essential and defining features of fascism: (1) no restraint upon government powers, i.e., totalitarianism, (2) management of the government by a dictator—the leadership principle. (3) the government is organized to manage the capitalist economy under the leadership of an immense bureaucracy, (4) the economy is organized on the syndicalist model, i.e., producing groups are formed into craft and professional categories under the supervision of the state. (5) the society operates on the planned, autarchial principle. (6) the government holds itself responsible to provide the nation with adequate purchasing power by public spending and borrowing, (7) militarism is used as a conscious mechanism of government spending, and (8) imperialism is included as a policy flowing from militarism and other elements of fascism. Other elements found in fascist societies, such as racism, are mere window dressing and not necessary to the fascist system. If we find a nation using all of these devices. Flynn states, we will know that it is a fascist nation.

In comparing these elements with America (this book was first published in 1943) Flynn finds all the necessary elements save dictatorship and full totalitarianism. In applying his framework to modern America, we find that most of these elements, especially in the management of the economy, more prevalent than ever. With conservative’ Richard Nixon announcing that he is a Keynesian and the abortive attempt at full wage and price controls, control of the economy and a spiraling public debt indicate that Flynn may indeed be correct: we are being drawn down the road to fascism. Moreover, the popularity of ‘energy self-sufficiency’ and neo-mercantalist economic theorizing, the autarchial principle is in full bloom.

Militarism is probably only temporarily kept under the table (a sudden revival of it after the post-Vietnam disallusionment dies down would not be surprising) and as for dictatorship—well, we have the John Birch Society warning of powerful executive orders which spell out the mechanism for a full takeover of the American society.

At the very least, As We Go Marching should be food for thought and an impetus to further scholarship into the nature of fascism and the forces operating behind the American political scene. The only shortcoming of this edition is that it lacks an updated bibliography to serve as a starting point for further reading by those not familiar with Flynn’s point of view, Flynn’s 1943 bibliography does not include Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom and more recent analysis by authors such as Murray Rothbard, Ayn Rand and James Martin would serve as a good starting point for anyone concerned with the erosion of individual and economic freedom in America.

A brief introduction by New Left historian Ronald Radosh places Flynn in his proper historical perspective. Flynn is probably best known for his anti-communist works in the McCarthyite era, but As We Go Marching is more representative of his consistent anti-militarist and, anti-imperialist (indeed, his pro-individualist) point of view. As We Go Marching is an indispensable work for anyone concerned with economic freedom and the contemporary American Scene.