Could you please review a YouTube video about Makhnovshchina? In particular, I am interested in the context of the Civil War. Let’s imagine that you are a libertarian living in Russia during those years. For whom would it be more logical to root: for the Cadets with their parliamentarism, market economy, and civil liberties, or for the Makhnovists with their anarchism, land redistribution, and collective self-governance?

Nihilist (the question is accompanied by a donation of 0.00012BTC)

Here is the video:

The question is interesting, but it’s not too difficult to give a short answer: of course, it would have made sense for libertarians at that time and in those places to support the Makhnovists specifically. Under the conditions of a civil war, it is impossible to build a normal free market anyway, but functional institutions of anarchy are more or less realistic.

Nevertheless, that key thesis regarding the Makhnovist movement, which is repeated twice in the proposed video — the state always defeats those who refuse to be it — requires an adequate response. Therefore, let’s try to estimate what joining the Makhnovist movement could have provided for libertarians.

To start with: where could they have even come from? Obviously, from the city. The works of Menger and Böhm-Bawerk had already been published in Russian and served as the foundation for the scientific critique of Marxism. So our hypothetical libertarians are a sort of reading club that could have continued to peacefully study all this theory, if practice hadn’t arrived right on their doorstep. In the conditions of the general revitalization of political thought before the February Revolution, they could have been arguing in journals with Milyukov and Struve about how to organize Russia, but when Soviets began to appear across the country, it became obvious that the workers’ striving for self-governance could not be ignored.

The main libertarian thesis regarding historical private property during periods of turbulent social transformation is this: Yes, the peaceful exchange of property titles is an obvious basis for continued ownership. But the forced seizure of property is an equally obvious basis for restitution. And in conditions where a thoroughly corrupt tsarist regime distorted all relationships through its abuses, including those concerning property, no one can truly establish to what extent each transfer of property titles was voluntary and to what extent it was forced. This means that defending all historical property rights indiscriminately means primarily defending injustice. And the grand war for the redistribution of property and social relations themselves occurring right now on our doorstep fully confirms this thesis.

Therefore, with all due respect to the representative of the Kadets, Mr. Struve, a member of the Special Council under General Denikin, the truth is more likely on the side of Batka Makhno. The peasants are fully entitled to redistribute the land so that everyone cultivating the land disposes of the fruits of their labor, and the workers are fully entitled to organize their own labor self-management. But this is precisely restitution, not the permanent order of things, and gradually property rights must stabilize so that they may thereafter pass from subject to subject exclusively through peaceful means. The permanent revolution that Comrade Trotsky dreams of is for those for whom war is a mother, whereas for us, peaceful labor is closer—unlike that Trotsky, who neither plowed the land nor worked in a factory. But Comrade Trotsky is right about one thing: we must permanently rid ourselves of anyone who would attempt to establish political power until those who desire it move on, otherwise all the conquests of the revolution will go to waste, for power is coercion, and the forced transfer of property rights will give rise to new demands for restitution.

In short, when in our hypothetical reality in October 1919 the Makhnovists entered Ekaterinoslav, they discovered a well-organized grassroots libertarian workers’ movement there, and their subsequent interaction was conducted on quite equal terms. How did the libertarian workers propose to organize the interaction between the city and the countryside?

I will write about this in my next post so as not to delay the publication, as I have already had a long pause due to my move to Serbia.