Anarcho-capitalism and U.S. Jews
The U.S. culture reinforces the Jewish characteristic of maintaining an ethnic identity, meaning that no one, except white Protestants, can simply be American.
Between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, it was commonplace to point out the great coincidence between being an ethnic Jew and being a communist. I use the expression “ethnic Jew” to avoid confusion, for example: Karl Marx was an atheist and was raised as a Lutheran from the age of 6; but, from an ethnic point of view, he was Jewish, because his mother was a Jewish woman. An individual chooses to convert, but does not choose his mother. Judaism is Law. According to the Law, anyone born from a Jewish womb is a Jew and, therefore, has to follow the Law. Thus, Judaism is a religion that is confused with matrilineality, and can come into conflict with the self-determination of the Jew. And because of this hereditary nature of religion, it is very easily confused with ethnicity. Another relevant thing is that, in fact, women are very important for the transmission of a culture – it is not for nothing that we say “mother tongue” to refer to someone’s first language.
Whether due to the high incidence of internal marriages, observance of the Law or the mere fact of being raised by a woman with a culture other than Christian, the Jews constituted a different cultural group, even if they lived with Christians outside the ghettos. Therefore, it is possible to carry out a social or cultural investigation asking why there were so many Jewish intellectuals relevant to communism, without there being any sense in taking any biological element into consideration. The force of racism at that time, unfortunately, made that the association between Judaism and communism had very poor explanations.
Nowadays, an ideology that stands out as being greatly influenced by Jewish intellectuals is anarcho-capitalism. Let’s do the math. Its founder is Murray Rothbard, born in 1920 in the USA, son of a Polish Jewish father and a Russian Jewish mother. Rothbard recognizes as an important predecessor for anarcho-capitalism Ludwig von Mises, a Jew born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1881, whose family was ennobled. This was not uncommon in the Austro-Hungarian Empire; Jewish families that managed to accumulate a lot of income came near to the traditional nobility, either by gaining nobility titles or mixing through marriage, like Wittgenstein’s family. Another foreign figure linked to anarcho-capitalism is Ayn Rand, or Alissa Rosenbaum, a Jew born in the Russian Empire in 1905. Both she and Mises were naturalized in the USA. In the 1950s, before inventing anarcho-capitalism, Rothbard went from being a fan to a hater of Ayn Rand. She didn’t consider herself an anarcho-capitalist, but she is still the most pop figure of such ideology, having spread through novels and television appearances the idea that the State is an evil to be fought by economically strong individuals. The problem between Rand and Rothbard was personal.
In the younger generations, we have Robert Nozick, born in 1938 in New York, the son of Jews, his father being Russian. Nozick is not an anarcho-capitalist, but almost: he is the literal proposer of the minimal state, and Rothbard considered him important enough to dedicate a chapter of his Ethics of Liberty to him. (The other authors who got critical chapters were Hayek and Berlin, a Gentile and a Jew, but I don’t think it’s worth including them in the sphere of arnarcho-capitalism because they are, unlike Nozick, reasonably described as liberal and are not on the periphery of academic debate.) Furthermore, Wikipedia lists a trio of notable disciples of Rothbard, and one of them is Edward Block, born in 1941, a Jew from New York. (The other two Gentile disciples are the right-wing German Hans-Hermann Hoppe, born in 1949, who is the most famous of all, and Samuel Konkin, a left-wing Canadian who died prematurely in 2004 at the age of 56.)
Taking these Jews into account, it is not possible to say that, as in the case of communism, it is a matter of irreligious Jews. Of these, only Ayn Rand and Block are atheists. Rothbard considered himself half agnostic, half reformed Jew (which is strange, but consistent with the state of doubt of agnosticism); as for the others, I didn’t find any explicit mention of their religious beliefs, and it’s difficult for an intellectual to be an atheist or agnostic without having this information available on internet. I highlight that Nozick taught in Israel, and is very dedicated to his Jewish identity. Out of five, we have 2 and a half atheists.
Taking into account all the key people of anarcho-capitalism, we have four Jews and two Gentiles. I compute the following: Mises, Rothbard, Rand (popularizer malgré soi), Block, Hoppe and Konkin. I exclude Nozick from this list because he was not an anarcho-capitalist and he was not a popularizer of this ideology, nor would he have such a capacity, because he was not pop like Ayn Rand. And it is important to notice that the two Gentiles are disciples, not pioneers or inspirers of anarcho-capitalism. Furthermore, none of the Gentiles are religious: Hoppe is an agnostic like his master, and Konkin was an atheist.
From this list, we can see that all the relevant anarcho-capitalist Jews are Ashkenazi from the United States, perhaps with Russian origins (I found no information about the origins of Block’s parents). Therefore, whatever the cultural trait that links Judaism to anarcho-capitalism, this is a trait that appeared or emerged in the USA, among Ashkenazi people of Eastern European origin. Even though there are so many Ashkenazic Jews in Europe, no prominent anarcho-capitalists Jew emerged from there. There is only Hoppe, a German conscious of his traditional noble origins, revolted against American occupation of West Germany and sympathetic to the Palestine cause.
The Jewish trait that seems to me to be of obvious importance in anarcho-capitalism is the Law. Anyone who studies anarcho-capitalism, without converting to it, is amazed by the fact that anarcho-capitalists, in the last instance, use no force to enforce the law. Everything relies on contract, enforced by private courts and private militias that are contracted. Therefore, the system only works if the owners of the force decide to comply with the contract and provide the services. In anarcho-capitalism, the Law is enough.
Now, in the Christian tradition, we learn to deal with the idea that God rules the Kingdom of Heaven and Caesar rules this one, and it is up to us to give him what is due. There is divine justice, which is eschatological, but the law, when referred to without adjectives, is the law of Caesar. In Judaism, it is different. The Law, without adjectives, is that of Moses, received directly from God and interpreted by rabbis after successive generations.
In the diaspora, Jews, for better or worse, maintained communities governed by the Law without there being a State to enforce it. Hence it does not seem completely absurd, for an individual of Jewish culture, that the Law requires no State to be enforced.
But anarcho-capitalism goes beyond contracts when it comes to morality: they believe that society must sanction reprehensible individuals, who have not broken any contract, by means of boycott. This is, in fact, cancel culture as a form of justice (as I have already had the opportunity to show in greater detail). Now, as we learn with Finkelstein, cancel culture first emerged in the USA during anti-communism, and included the practice of blacklisting, that Jewish elites used against leftist Jews with the aim of controlling the community’s image and integrating with the country’s ruling elites. (Cf. Holocaust Industry, chap. 1, and I will burn that bridge, chap. 1.) It is not that they only had this practice with Jews, but that only with Jews was the reputation of the community at stake.
It is well known that the practice of blacklisting, cited by Rothbard as an example of boycott in hist Ethics of Liberty, led artists to commit suicide, due to the inability to earn their own living. The prominence that Jewish businessmen have in the cultural sector in the USA is also well known.
This justice by boycott has a theological precedent in excommunication. This is what Maimonides writes on excommunicated Jew: “He may not teach others and others may not teach him. Nevertheless, he may study himself, so that he does not forget what he has learned. He may not be hired, nor is he allowed to hire others. We should not engage in trade with him. [Indeed,] we should not have any business dealings with him except the bare minimum necessary for his livelihood.” We can say, therefore, that the cancel culture proposed by anarcho-capitalists is a secular and more radical version of the excommunication described by the Law. The radicality may have been added by the witch-hunt culture of the Protestant world, in which there was no Inquisition and the dynamics were a bit like a lynching, with a lot of public outcry over the executions. After all, in the cancel culture proposed by Rothbard, there is no judge’s verdict; it has to be an initiative of several individuals. In Judaism, excommunication is decreed by a religious authority, not by an angry mob.
Another relevant thing about U.S. culture is the importance of community life, caused at least in part by the neutral and secular character of the state. In USA, immigrants and their descendants form separate neighborhoods and communities, with a very different profile from the mix that occurred in Brazil. An Italian-American has a distinct identity; in Brazil, Italian ancestry is a curiosity about a person, and tends to be one ancestry among many. I, for example, am not an “Italian-Brazilian”, I am a Brazilian with Italian ancestry, and Portuguese ancestry, and Amerindian ancestry, and African ancestry… It is more relevant to a Brazilian’s identity their place of birth than their ethnic or racial origins. Thus, U.S. culture reinforces the Jewish characteristic of maintaining an ethnic identity, meaning that no one, except white Protestants, can simply be American.
In this scenario, it makes sense to envision the possibility of ending the State and creating multiple self-sufficient communities. And so we have a non-exhaustive explanation of why anarcho-capitalism has so many ethnic Jews.
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