Benjamin Tucker
A letter to the editor from RAW, which follows up on the article featured here but which also offers a defense to criticism of Benjamin Tucker. From The Match!, and found and preserved for us by Martin Wagner. Some really good sentences in the Tucker portion of the editor. For example:
"The rejection of Tucker’s position on the first World War is entirely justified. But how much does it prove? Gene Debs took a wiser and more 'anarchist' position on that war, and went to jail for it, a reason why I will always love and respect Debs; but, again, any mathematical breakdown of key ideas would show that Tucker’s formulations were more anarchistic more of the time than Debs‘ positions. Thus, on the war, I agree with Debs, not Tucker; on a majority of other issues I agree with Tucker, not Debs. I don’t see the logic of condemning Tucker because of one writing that I don’t agree with. I think that everybody I admire in recent ideological history (Fuller, Pound, Leary, Picasso, Joyce, to name a few) have all taken wrong positions at times, but I don’t see the 'therefore' which leads logically from this to the conclusion that we should reject their right positions."
1 comment:
Back in 2004, I bought a copy of Proudhon's GENERAL IDEA OF THE REVOLUTION that included an introduction by Wilson. The intro appeared to be a reprint of a review he had written elsewhere, but the book didn't say where it first appeared. I guessed that it was from either WAY OUT or THE MATCH!, and I emailed Wilson to ask if he remembered where it was from.
He didn't recall, but commented that it was "almost certainly not
The Match....the editor there didn't like Proudhon [or me]."
(It eventually turned out the be from WAY OUT.)
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