When reading the work of people like Tucker and Warren, we must remember the social context of their ideas, namely the transformation of America from a pre-capitalist to a capitalist society (see Eunice Minette Schuster, Native American Anarchism, pp. 135-137). The individualist anarchists viewed with horror the rise of capitalism and its imposition on an unsuspecting American population, supported and encouraged by state action (in the form of protection of private property in land, restricting money issuing to state approved banks using specie, government orders supporting capitalist industry, tariffs and so on).
The non-capitalist nature of the early USA can be seen from the early dominance of self-employment (artisan production). At the beginning of the 19th century, around 80% of the occupied population were self-employed. The great majority of Americans during this time were farmers working their own land, primarily for their own needs. Most of the rest were self-employed artisans, merchants, traders, and professionals. Other classes — employees/wage workers and employers/capitalists in the North, slaves and planters in the South — were relatively small. The great majority of Americans were independent and free from anybody's command. They controlled they owned and controlled their means of production. Thus early America was, essentially, a pre-capitalist society. However, by 1880, the year before Tucker started Liberty, the number of self-employed had fallen to approximately 33% of the working population. Now it is less than 10% [Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America, p. 59]. It is only in this context that we can understand individualist anarchism, namely as a revolt against the destruction of working-class independence and the growth of wage-labour, accompanied by the growth of two opposing classes, capitalists and proletarians.
Given the commonplace awareness in the population of artisan production and its advantages, it is hardly surprising that the individualists supported "free market" solutions to social problems. For, given the era, this solution implied workers' control and the selling of the product of labour, not the labourer him/herself. As Tucker argues, individualist anarchism desires "[n]ot to abolish wages, but to make every man dependent upon wages and to secure every man his whole wages" [Instead of a Book, p. 404] and this, logically, can only occur under workers control (i.e. when the tool belonged to the worker, etc. — see section G.2).
Indeed, the Individualist Anarchists were part of a wider movement seeking to stop the transformation of America. As Bowles and Ginitis note, this "process has been far from placid. Rather, it has involved extended struggles with sections of U.S. labour trying to counter and temper the effects of their reduction to the status of wage labour." They continue by noting that "with the rise of entrepreneurial capital, groups of formerly independent workers were increasingly drawn into the wage-labour system. Working people's organisations advocated alternatives to this system; land reform, thought to allow all to become an independent producer, was a common demand. Worker co-operatives were a widespread and influential part of the labour movement as early as the 1840s . . . but failed because sufficient capital could not be raised. . ." [Op. Cit., p. 59 and p. 62] It is no coincidence that the issues raised by the Individualist Anarchists (land reform via "occupancy-and-use", increasing the supply of money via mutual banks and so on) reflect these alternatives raised by working class people and their organisations. Little wonder Tucker argued that:
"Make capital free by organising credit on a mutual plan, and then these vacant lands will come into use . . . operatives will be able to buy axes and rakes and hoes, and then they will be independent of their employers, and then the labour problem will solved." [Instead of a Book, p. 321]
Thus the Individualist Anarchists reflect the aspirations of working people facing the transformation of an society from a pre-capitalist state into a capitalist one. As Morgan Edwards notes:
"The greatest part [of Liberty's readers] proves to be of the professional/intellectual class: the remainder includes independent manufacturers and merchants, artisans and skilled workers . . . The anarchists' hard-core supporters were the socio-economic equivalents of Jefferson's yeoman-farmers and craftsworkers: a freeholder-artisan-independent merchant class allied with freethinking professionals and intellectuals. These groups — in Europe as well as in America — had socio-economic independence, and through their desire to maintain and improve their relatively free positions, had also the incentive to oppose the growing encroachments of the capitalist State." [Benjamin R. Tucker and the Champions of Liberty, Coughlin, Hamilton and Sullivan (eds.), p. 85]
This transformation of society by the rise of capitalism explains the development of both schools of anarchism, social and individualist. "American anarchism," Frank H. Brooks argues, "like its European counterpart, is best seen as a nineteenth century development, an ideology that, like socialism generally, responded to the growth of industrial capitalism, republican government, and nationalism. Although this is clearest in the more collectivistic anarchist theories and movements of the late nineteenth century (Bakunin, Kropotkin, Malatesta, communist anarchism, anarcho-syndicalism), it also helps to explain anarchists of early- to midcentury such as Proudhon, Stirner and, in America, Warren. For all of these theorists, a primary concern was the 'labour problem' — the increasing dependence and immiseration of manual workers in industrialising economies." [The Individualist Anarchists, p. 4]
Changing social conditions also explains why Individualist Anarchism must be considered socialistic. As Murray Bookchin notes:
"Th[e] growing shift from artisanal to an industrial economy gave rise to a gradual but major shift in socialism itself. For the artisan, socialism meant producers' co-operatives composed of men who worked together in small shared collectivist associations, although for master craftsmen it meant mutual aid societies that acknowledged their autonomy as private producers. For the industrial proletarian, by contrast, socialism came to mean the formation of a mass organisation that gave factory workers the collective power to expropriate a plant that no single worker could properly own. These distinctions led to two different interpretations of the 'social question' . . . The more progressive craftsmen of the nineteenth century had tried to form networks of co-operatives, based on individually or collectively owned shops, and a market knitted together by a moral agreement to sell commodities according to a 'just price' or the amount of labour that was necessary to produce them. Presumable such small-scale ownership and shared moral precepts would abolish exploitation and greedy profit-taking. The class-conscious proletarian . . . thought in terms of the complete socialisation of the means of production, including land, and even of abolishing the market as such, distributing goods according to needs rather than labour . . . They advocated public ownership of the means of production, whether by the state or by the working class organised in trade unions." [The Third Revolution, vol. 2, p. 262]
So, in this evolution of socialism we can place the various brands of anarchism. Individualist anarchism is clearly a form of artisanal socialism (which reflects its American roots) while communist anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism are forms of industrial (or proletarian) socialism (which reflects its roots in Europe). Proudhon's mutualism bridges these extremes, advocating as it does artisan socialism for small-scale industry and agriculture and co-operative associations for large-scale industry (which reflects the state of the French economy in the 1840s to 1860s). Hence Individualist Anarchist support for "the cost principle" (or "cost the limit of price") and artisanal production ("The land to the cultivator. The mine to the miner. The tool to the labourer. The product to the producer"), complemented by "the principle of association" and mutual banking.
In other words, there have been many schools of socialism, all influenced by the changing society around them. In the words of Proudhon "[m]odern Socialism was not founded as a sect or church; it has seen a number of different schools." [Selected Writings of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, p. 177] As Frank H. Brooks notes, "before Marxists monopolised the term, socialism, was a broad concept, as indeed Marx's critique of the 'unscientific' varieties of socialism in the Communist Manifesto indicated. Thus, when Tucker claimed that the individualist anarchism advocated in the pages of Liberty was socialist, he was not engaged in obfuscation or rhetorical bravado." [The Individualist Anarchists, p. 75] Looking at the society in which their ideas developed (rather than a-historically projecting modern ideas backward) we can see the socialist core of Individualist Anarchism. It was, in other words, an un-Marxian form of socialism (as was communist-anarchism).
Thus, to look at the Individualist Anarchists from the perspective of "modern socialism" (say, communist-anarchism or Marxism) means to miss the point. The social conditions which produced Individualist Anarchism were substantially different from those existing today and what was a possible solution to the "social problem" then may not be one suitable now (and, indeed, point to a different kind of socialism than that which developed later). Moreover, Europe in the 1870s was distinctly different than America (although, of course, the USA was catching up). For example, there was still vast tracks of unclaimed land (once the Native Americans had been removed, of course) available to workers (which explains the various acts the US state to control land access — see section F.8.5). In the towns and cities, artisan production "remained important . . . into the 1880s" [David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labour, p. 52] Until the 1880s, the possibility of self-employment was a real one for many workers, a possibility being hindered by state action (for example, by forcing people to buy land via Homestead Acts, restricting banking to those with specie, and so on). Little wonder that Individualist Anarchism was considered a real solution to the problems generated by the creation of capitalism in the USA and that, by the 1880s, Communist Anarchist (and later anarcho-syndicalism) became the dominant forms of anarchism. By the 1880s, the transformation of America was nearing completion and self-employment was no longer a real solution for the majority of workers.
As Peter Sabatini points out:
"The chronology of anarchism within the United States corresponds to what transpired in Europe and other locations. An organised anarchist movement imbued with a revolutionary collectivist, then communist, orientation came to fruition in the late 1870s. At that time, Chicago was a primary centre of anarchist activity within the USA, due in part to its large immigrant population. . .
"The Proudhonist anarchy that Tucker represented was largely superseded in Europe by revolutionary collectivism and anarcho-communism. The same changeover occurred in the US, although mainly among subgroups of working class immigrants who were settling in urban areas. For these recent immigrants caught up in tenuous circumstances within the vortex of emerging corporate capitalism, a revolutionary anarchy had greater relevancy than go slow mutualism." [Libertarianism: Bogus Anarchy]
Murray Bookchin argues that the development of communist-anarchism "made it possible for anarchists to adapt themselves to the new working class, the industrial proletariat, . . . This adaptation was all the more necessary because capitalism was now transforming not only European [and American] society but the very nature of the European [and American] labour movement itself." [Op. Cit., p. 259] With the changing social conditions in the US, the anarchist movement changed to. Hence the rise of communist-anarchism in addition to the more native individualist tradition and the change in Individualist Anarchism itself:
"Green emphasised more strongly the principle of association than did Josiah Warren and more so than Spooner had done. Here too Proudhon's influence asserts itself. . . In principle there is essentially no difference between Warren and Proudhon. The difference between them arises from a dissimilarity of their respective environments. Proudhon lived in a country where the sub-division of labour made co-operation in social production essential, while Warren had to deal with predominantly small individual producers. For this reason Proudhon emphasised the principle of association far more than Warren and his followers did, although Warren was by no means opposed to this view." [Rudolf Rocker, Pioneers of American Freedom, p. 108] This social context is essential for understanding the thought of people like Greene, Spooner and Tucker. For example, as Stephen L. Newman points out, Spooner "argues that every man ought to be his own employer, and he envisions a world of yeoman farmers and independent entrepreneurs." [Liberalism at Wit's End, p. 72] This sort of society was in the process of being destroyed when Spooner was writing. However, the Individualist Anarchists did not think this transformation was unstoppable and proposed, like other sections of US labour, various solutions to problems society faced. Moreover, they adjusted their own ideas to changing social circumstances as well, as can be seen by Greene's support for co-operatives ("the principle of association") as the only means of ending exploitation of labour by capital.
Therefore Rocker was correct when he argued that Individualist Anarchism was "above all . . . rooted in the peculiar social conditions of America which differed fundamentally from those of Europe." [Op. Cit., p. 155] As these conditions changed, the viability of Individualist Anarchism's solution to the social problem decreased. Individualist Anarchism, argues Morgan Edwards, "appears to have dwindled into political insignificance largely because of the erosion of its political-economic base, rather than from a simple failure of strategy. With the impetus of the Civil War, capitalism and the State had too great a head start on the centralisation of economic and political life for the anarchists to catch up. This centralisation reduced the independence of the intellectual/professional and merchant artisan group that were the mainstay of the Liberty circle." [Op. Cit., pp. 85-6]
By not taking into account these conditions, the ideas of the likes of Tucker and Spooner will be distorted beyond recognition. Similarly, by ignoring the changing nature of socialism in the face of a changing society and economy, the obvious socialistic aspects of their ideas will be lost. Ultimately, to analyse the Individualist Anarchists in an a-historic manner means to distort their ideas and ideals. Moreover, to apply those ideas in a non-artisan economy without the intention of radically transforming the socio-economic nature of that society towards one based on artisan production one would mean to create a society distinctly different than one they envisioned (see section G.3).