MA1: All Power To The Soviets

“Confiscation and the Homesteading Principle”

by Murray Rothbard

The essential encapsulation of Rothbard’s radically anti-state version of Lockean property theory as the basis for the revolutionary redistribution of property.

Part of the Market Anarchy Zine Series.

Title is a reference to a popular rallying cry of peasants and factory workers who were scared that the Bolsheviks would impose centralized authority over their autonomous farms, coops and seized workplaces. Of course in the most quintessentially cynical Russian move Lenin had his Bolshevik goons start using the anti-Bolshevik slogan, thus confusing the workers into supporting State Power when they thought they were supporting local autonomy. On the one hand this is reminiscent of the “zaxlebax” principle, which reminds us that the terminologies and definitions of left and right have shifted so drastically over the years that we should pay attention to the underlying ideas and not stop at false assumptions. On the other, it expresses the overlap of Rothbard’s call for the establishment of repossessed producer’s coops with the slogan’s original meaning.

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~ by rechelon on June 5, 2008.