Rothbard and Che

Miscellaneous General
1

I’ve Confused. I’m A hardcore Libertarian,Anarcho-capitalist and great fan of rothbard but why did he write an article in which he avoids criticism of Che Guevara? I know it was probably during his strategic alliance with the left so is it possible this is why he avoided the issue?

or did he made a mistake? or is this piece a fake?

I wondered if anyone could shed any light on why they think he wrote it .I’m certain rothbard didn’t like che and i can’t name a libertarian who does so why this article?

the article i’m referring to is

http://mises.org/journals/lar/pdfs/3_3/3_3_1.pdf

p.s.

please no one take this as an insult to rothbard or anyone else. I regard him as my main influence in libertarianism as well as other things.I consider him one of the greatest men ever.

2

Rothbard’s time on the Left

Nonetheless, it seemed that the young members of the group were
becoming anarchistic, and were driving the more statist “Old
Guardsmen” of the group away.

A hopefully decisive moment for SDS came at its national convention
at Clear Lake, Iowa. . . . There, it was expected to elect an Old
Guardsman as president. But the grass-roots members of SDS,
many of them wearing “I Hate the State” buttons, decisively
defeated the Old Guard and elected a slate of national officers sympathetic
to their goals. It was the convention of Clear Lake that
marked a signal repudiation of the Old Guard by SDS; in effect, it
meant the sharp weakening of Social Democrat influence in the
organization. The path was cleared for new directions, for new
aims, for giving the radicals and libertarians their head.25
This development gave Rothbard good reason to believe that
SDS was leaning his way, so he continued to woo the group in Left
and Right, going so far as to run an editorial, which he most likely
wrote himself, called “Ernesto Che Guevara: RIP” in the
Spring-Autumn 1967 issue.26 This eulogy for Che was not without
criticism for the man. He was chided as “not a distinguished administrator,
and an even poorer economist.” Specifically, Che’s policies
that steered Cuba toward autarky were dismissed as "arbitrary and
uneconomic."27

While Rothbard maintained his commitment to laissez faire economics
here, left-wing rhetoric appears frequently throughout all
the issues of Left and Right and, more importantly, in the single article
Rothbard wrote for Ramparts, the largest New Left publication in
the late 1960s. “Confessions of a Right-Wing Liberal” appeared in
the June 15,1968 edition of Ramparts, and was Rothbard’s own retrospective
account of how his alliance with the New Left came
about. In the opening lines, he emphasized that he had not abandoned
the Right, the Right had abandoned him:

Twenty years ago I was an extreme right-wing Republican . . . who
believed, as one friend pungently put it, that “Senator Taft had sold
out to the socialists.” Today, I am most likely to be called an
extreme leftist, since I favor immediate withdrawal from Vietnam,
denounce U.S. imperialism, advocate Black Power and have just
joined the new Peace and Freedom Party. And yet my basic political
views have not changed a single iota in these two decades!
It is obvious that something is very wrong with the old labels, with
the categories of “left” and “right,” and with the ways in which we
customarily apply these categories to American political life. My
personal odyssey is unimportant; the important point is that if I
can move from “extreme right” to “extreme left” merely by standing
in one place, drastic though unrecognized changes must have
taken place throughout the American political spectrum over the
last generation.29

[:)]

3

Rothbard was a man of fantastic intellect, talents and ideas. But when he tried to compromise those ideals to gain appeal, he lost ground.

There is a lesson in what Rothbard tried, what the Paleos tried, and what the tea party folks try now. You cannot change the state or socialists through compromise and accommodation.

4

Well we can easily look back and demur, but what needs to be remembered is that there was no such thing as the internet.

I myself find it hard to imagine such a situation. The paradigm shifted, he didn’t. No doubt he altered his rhetoric, but I don’t blame him for that.

It was write with the anti-war, anti-state crowd or really not get published at all. He did try to form allies for sure - but I see it as great that he did.

Rothbard tried and it didn’t work. Seriously - if he can’t do it, no-one can.

Granted he did learn the lessons himself though;

What We Mean by Decentralization - Rockwell

Rothbard himself, in the course of experience, changed his view on the best method for organizing ideological movements. Early on, he was attracted to the idea of top-down management, with cadres and followers and cells of every sort. He saw that this worked for the Communists, so why not for the libertarians? He was right to say that nothing in libertarian theory prohibits top-down management insofar as it is voluntary and rooted in private property.

But later on in life, he changed his mind and wrote that he found serious problems with this model, and they are related to the same problems that appear with political centralization. In the Libertarian Forum, August 1981, he writes:

“I would like to take this opportunity to admit my previous error in calling for an ultra-centralist model for the [Libertarian Party]. Several years in the [LP] have soured me on centralism permanently. Putting the rule of the Party, or of the movement as a whole, into the hands of one man or of one tight group is a recipe for disaster. First, it means that if a few people sell out to opportunism, the rest of the movement is dragged along with it. But second, and more generally, even if the Machiners were a bunch of wonderful people, since they are not omniscient they are bound, as are all of us to make mistakes. And just as the mistakes of a government­-controlled economy can ruin a nation, so the inevitable mistakes of a tight ruling clique can ruin a party or a movement. I still think it absurd to think of decentralism as ‘the libertarian’ form of organization. How we organize is not a matter of libertarian principle, so long as we do not violate the non-aggression axiom. But it appears that neither radical decentralism nor ultra-centralism will work in any organization…. [M]oderation and balance should be our organizational mode.”

5

I prefer not to have heroes, then I don’t have to trip over myself trying to justify everything they ever did. It is ok to love Rothbard for his ideas, but to acknowledge that some of his political alliances backfired badly. Portraying him as someone who didn’t make mistakes isn’t healthy IMO.

Right, because if there was an internet … uhm, wat?