In the first part I attempted to demonstrate the specific logical twist that allows libertarians (in our hypothetical past, these are urban workers and primarily the technical intelligentsia, who simultaneously embraced the radically liberal ideas of Gustave de Molinari—who had given lectures in Russia not so long ago—the economic theories of the Austrians Menger and Böhm-Bawerk, and Kropotkin’s anarchism) to take an active part in the Russian Civil War on the side of those wishing to redistribute property, namely the practical rural anarchists under Makhno’s command.

How can the city and the countryside interact on equal terms under conditions of external threat? The village is capable of providing the army with people, horses, and food. The townspeople are far fewer in number, but they can provide the army with technological equipment, from spring-loaded carriages for tachankas to rails and wagons, plus repair everything from rifles to locomotives and artillery. It is precisely the city that provides artillerymen, engineers, and telephone operators. But Yekaterinoslav, while highly industrially developed, is still just one city, and it is incapable of producing the full range of military equipment. It doesn’t even produce ammunition or textiles. This means that the free land needs not only to somehow establish an exchange between the city and the countryside but also to trade with distant places, taking into account the hostile environment. Not everything can be obtained from this very hostile environment as a trophy in battle.

The historical Makhno entered into a military alliance with the Bolsheviks, falling into a critical dependence on their ammunition supply, while paying with the blood of his fighters. Ours, convinced by the libertarian preaching that freedom is not for sale and that the market is better than bondage, will attempt direct trade with the Entente powers and beyond, utilizing access to the port of Berdyansk and the railway leading there from Yekaterinoslav. This will help not only to purchase missing industrial goods in exchange for grain but also, for example, to revive the pipe factory by establishing the sea transport of its products to Batumi, and from there to the Caspian oil fields. Makhno is made to understand that the guarantee of peace is interdependence, not just the readiness to slash anyone who invades the native steppes with a saber. Neighbors should be interested in you living and prospering, rather than in quickly wiping you off the face of the earth.

An emissary is sent to Denikin, explaining that American President Wilson is declaring the right of nations to self-determination, and therefore the slogan of a single and indivisible Russia should be pushed into a corner, since he is your ally. If you want, raise slogans about protecting civilization from Bolshevik barbarism. If you want, defend the idea of indeterminacy and the reconvening of the Constituent Assembly. But you will have to forget about our free land, just as about Finland, the Baltics, Poland, two Ukraines, the Far Eastern Republic, and many other lands that will find it useful to do without the authority of Petrograd or any other city. In short: your truth is yours, ours is ours, don’t tread on us. Roughly the same is brought to the attention of Lenin’s government. Namely, we aren’t interfering with you in Petrograd, and you aren’t interfering with us in Hulyai-Pole, and if we need to exchange bread for calico, we are always happy to do so. It is more complicated with Petliura’s Ukraine, since we cannot prevent the peasants in his zone of influence from defecting to our side, and we inevitably find ourselves his enemy. But he will have so many problems with the Volunteer Army, which is neutral to us, that one needn’t worry about him especially much.

Will the Volunteer Army defeat the Bolsheviks if we do not operate in their rear? Perhaps not, but it will certainly be much harder for the Bolsheviks, and they definitely won’t take Crimea (we are on the way to Crimea, and we will let the retreating Denikinites pass, bartering artillery for bread from them). And later, the Reds will also get a thrashing from Pilsudski. The latter might, of course, poke his nose around here too, but that is unlikely: a prosperous land where there has been no war for a year, and where there is trade, including with Pilsudski’s allies, is unlikely to seem like a convenient target to him, unlike the capture of Smolensk. Again: Pilsudski needs buffer territories between himself and Russia—and here we are.

What will we get in the end? The collapse of the Russian Empire into a dozen sufficiently stable sovereign regions with all sorts of self-governance models. Against this backdrop, Gulyaipole will not be the most exotic — after all, there are also the Bolsheviks and some place like Mongolia with Baron Ungern. None of the regions will have the ability to subjugate the others, which was a completely natural state for the world at that time: the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, and Chinese empires all collapsed.

Here, perhaps, a paragraph with a very brief description of the free region’s self-governance model is needed. The land has become heavily depopulated and has ceased to be a scarce resource for a time. Anyone who wishes can take a piece and cultivate as much as they can manage. In the cities, at large enterprises, workers’ assemblies appoint and control guild masters and other management, which results in a certain amount of chaos, as is typical in egalitarian democracies. Small enterprises are either sole proprietorships or cooperatives. There are many consumer cooperatives — a useful form of organization, whether for hiring a janitor or for joint purchases in a village. The gold karbovanets is in circulation, though large denominations are initially quite scarce. For small transactions, anything and everything is used at first, but gradually the market for small change is taken over by tokens issued by the Yekaterinoslav tobacco factory, which guarantee exchange upon presentation for a pack of cigarettes. Following the development of foreign trade, foreign industrialists also appear. However, there is no central authority that could protect their interests. They must negotiate with elected representatives of workers’ collectives and other authoritative figures regarding the terms under which they will be allowed into the market. This usually implies a collective agreement with workers and cartel agreements to coordinate prices with adjacent enterprises. The commune, damn it! The army remains voluntary, yet it sits on a good ration and, in peacetime, engages mainly in border patrolling, so there is a certain surplus of those wishing to serve. Thus, gradually becoming accustomed to a peaceful, civilized life, marred only by skirmishes with Soviet Russia due to Soviet peasants fleeing to the free region, we experience the twenties.

And what next? Will Hitler be able to cope with a much stronger Poland? Will a much weaker Soviet Russia invade Finland? Will Japan go to war with the United States without the Reich as an ally, or limit itself to Asian conquests? Will Great Britain and France retain most of their African colonies? Will the foolish state of Israel appear? Most likely, the world in the twentieth century will be a much less insane place, much more like a natural continuation of the nineteenth century, where the Great War remains the most terrible monument to human arrogance.

Nevertheless, even this branch of development will not avoid the rise of statism and even, for example, the Great Depression. However, if in the actual twentieth century the communists of the whole world had a shining beacon in the form of a thoroughly mythologized Soviet Russia, then in our hypothetical reality, the anarchists of the whole world will also have such a beacon in the form of Hulyaypole. This world will certainly be no less complex and interesting, and therefore thanks to Nihilist for the question; it gave me great pleasure to speculate on this topic.

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.