A student recently asked me what was known of “Rothbard’s opinion on the events of early May, 1968 in France.” I turned to Joe Stromberg, Jedi Master of the Rothbard Archives, who kindly dug out for me two columns Rothbard wrote for the Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph in 1968: “The Student Revolution” and “French Revolution – 1968.”
For anyone curious about the results, here’s a brief summary:
Rothbard celebrates the French student revolt as a refutation of “the widespread myth that revolutions, whether or not desirable, are simply impossible in the modern, complex, highly technological world.” He describes the revolt as an instance of “that famous revolutionary weapon never until now successfully used: the general strike,” which he thinks has become more viable now that “complex technology requires skilled people to work it.”
Rothbard points to the “decade of near-dictatorship by Charles deGaulle,” an “archaic, bureaucratic” state education system, and “massive police brutality” as the chief causes of the revolt. While the students’ “aims are vague and confused,” they are “instinctive libertarians” with the right enemies if not yet the right goals. Contrary to those who describe the student rebels as Communists, Rothbard replies that the students in fact “tend to be anarchists” who “correctly regard the Communist Party as a pillar of the existing Establishment.” Students who revere Mao and Che Guevara do so not because these men are Communists (since the students have no great affection for Brezhnev) but because they showed that in our “modern, complex, and militarized world” people are still “able to make revolution.”
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Wasn’t Rothbard at about that time trying to form an alliance between Republicans dissatisfied with their party and the anti-war Democrats to form a viable third force in political action?
His dismissal of French students’ communist tendencies seems to be rather tempered. He later reverted to his traditionalist roots, if my memory of history is right, and probably would not have been so tolerant of their attitudes.
So were these columns examples of some kind of political tact?
Murray was frequently trying to forge alliances with groups to fight particular battles. I recall a few years before his passing seeing him in a photo with Phyllis Schlafly.
Here’s a woman who’s only gripe about the invasion of Iraq was that women were in combat. And she thinks the US should retake the Panama canal.
But in many ways she’s on the right side of economic issues; such as opposition to NAFTA. But these coalitions are so difficult to maintain. After 9-11, most conservatives jumped right on the war bandwagon, and now only spew venom towards libertarians. I doubt that even Murray could have held the paleolib-paleocon coalition together after 9-11. But he never would have stopped trying.
duodecimal,
He was attempting an alliance between the libertarians and decentralist of the YAF, and their libertarian-decentralist counteparts in the New Left. If you can beg, borrow or steal (or buy) the first volume of Libertarian Forum, which he put out with Karl Hess, it’s some amazing reading.
In the 1990s, with Clinton in office, and the American right adopting an anti-government stance, even on foreign policy matters, it might have seemed strange that MNR had once reached out to the left during the Vietnam War. And yet today, it is easier to understand the despair libertarians felt for the right, given such as this from Robert Alt at NRO today: “Iraqis generally subscribe to a philosophy that respects strength, and not weakness. Failing to respond to the violence therefore would invite still more violence, not less. More than simply addressing those who commit the acts, however, the Coalition must address those in Tikrit and Fallujah who are sympathetic to the violence. Here, the problem is that the anti-Western sentiment has been habituated through years of propaganda and kickbacks to loyalists, both of which have produced profoundly negative effects on the character of these people. To quote a Baghdad store owner, the problem is that ‘the Iraqi person must be rebuilt,’ and this will take time.” http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/alt200404010932.asp.
Has anyone on the left lately suggested the use of mass violence to reconstruct the mental character of a foreign people in a nation currently being militarily occupied by the US? One can’t but wonder about the roots of political ideology that would tolerate much less celebrate such recommendations.
On the subject of France ’68, Rothbard also endorsed Daniel and Gabriel Cohn-Bendit’s book Obsolete Communism in an early edition of Libertarian Forum, describing its authors as “heroic” leaders of the French revolt. See the April 1, 1969 issue.
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