on allying with the Left

Rothbard on splits and alliances:

NEW BANNER: At the outset, your newsletter, Libertarian Forum, was co-edited by Karl Hess. He has since departed. What ideological differences Led to this split?

ROTHBARD: [...] The concrete split came when I made a very tangential attack on the Black Panthers. [...] But more deep than that is the fact that Karl after having been an anarcho-capitalist for some time shifted over to become an anarcho-communist or anarcho-syndicalist. I don't really see any basis for collaboration between the two groups, because even if we are both against the existing state, they would very quickly come up with another state. I don't think you can be an anarcho-communist or an anarcho-syndicalist. You know if the commune runs everything, and decides for everything, whether it is a neighborhood commune or a mass country commune -- it really does not matter in this case, somebody's got to make the communal decision. You can't tell me that you'll have participatory democracy and that everybody is going to equally participate. There is obviously going to be a small group, the officiating board or the statistical administrative board or whatever they want to call it, whatever it's going to be, it's going to be the same damn group making decisions for everybody. In other words, it's going to be a coercive decision for the collective property. It will be another state again, as far as I can see. So I really can't see any basis for collaboration. That is really part of a broader analysis of the communist versus the individualist position.

You see, I was one of the people who originated the idea of an alliance with the New Left. But I didn't think of it in these terms. I didn't think of an alliance with the New Left as living in communes with the Black Panthers. I thought of it as participating with the New Left in anti-draft actions or in opposition to the war. I conceived of a political rather than an ideological alliance. While we are both against the draft, let's have joint rallies to attack it, or something like that. This is a completely different sort of thing.

This incidentally has been a problem with libertarians for a long time. Both in the old days when they were always allied with the right-wing and now when they tend to be allied with the left. You start allying yourself with a group and pretty soon you find yourself as one of the group. In other words, the alliance slips away. Start with the idea that we are going to work with either conservatives or radicals for specific goals and somehow they start spending all their time with these people and they wind up as either conservatives or radicals. The libertarian goal drops away and the means become the ends. This is a very difficult problem because you don't want to be sectarian and have nothing to do with anybody. Then you're never going to succeed at all. I think that one of the answers to it is to have a libertarian group which is strong enough to keep reinforcing the libertarianism of our members.

[...]

NEW BANNER: Do you see any wisdom in anarcho-capitalists allying with today's New Left?

ROTHBARD: There is no New Left now. The New Left is really finished -- there isn't any such animal anymore. One of the reasons that I liked the New Left in the old days, in the middle-60's, was that there were a lot of libertarian elements in the New Left. Not only was there opposition to the war and the draft, but also opposition to bureaucracy, central government and so forth. But all that seems to have dropped out. There is really nothing going on in the New Left now at all.

NEW BANNER: Why do you think the New Left has never strongly supported the anti-draft movement? They seemed to have been more anti-war , but not concerned with anti-draft.

ROTHBARD: They were against the draft, but as you say, they didn't really have their heart in it. They really weren't against the draft. They are in favor of the People's Republic draft, when the People's Republic gets established. I remember when Castro first got in power in 1959. A lot of the more sincere Castro followers said that one of the great things about Castro was that he had abolished the draft. Of course, he had, but a couple years later it was back. So you see, they're against a draft by a reactionary government, but not by a people's government. Ha, ha.

"The New Banner Interview with Murray N. Rothbard"