How were non-Marxist form of socialism viewed during the Cold War? Especially during McCarthyism?

by Whinfp

Would you have been put on some black list in the US if you identified as an anarchist (in particular a market socialist anarchist like Pierre-Joseph Proudhon or Benjamin Tucker, an anarcho-egoist like Max Stirner, a collectivist anarchist like Bakunin, or an AnCom like Peter Kropotkin or Emma Goldman) or as a Owenite or Fourierist or as any form of non-Marxist socialism based on worker cooperatives rather than nationalization. Would you have been viewed as a danger to the country?

DocShoveller

You are right to mention different anarchisms because different periods of US history responded to different anarchisms differently!

Owenism in the 1840s had an easier time than, say, Anarcho-Syndicalists in the 1910s, and the US has developed its own unique (and much more right-wing) forms of Egoism in the 20th century. It's also nice to see someone reference the anarchist influence on the Owens (Robert was, after all, a close friend of William Godwin).

Anarcho-Communists and Anarcho-Syndicalists have almost always had a hard time in US history. The labour movement during the post-Civil War depression was led by anarchists like Albert and Lucy Parsons, the repression of which led to the Haymarket Affair of 1886. A labour protest in Chicago turned ugly when a bomb was thrown, killing a policeman. The police opened fire on the crowd, killing at least four people. Eight anarchists were arrested, tried, and executed for "masterminding" the "riot" despite many of them being able to prove they were not present at the scene (the bomber was never identified). The following months and years saw a brutal police crackdown and a significant press backlash against anarchism, and parts of the US labour movement sought to distance themselves. A collection of primary sources about the Haymarket Affair can be found here.

In 1901 Leon Czolgosz, a disciple of Emma Goldman, assassinated President William McKinley. McKinley's successor, Teddy Roosevelt, declared "when compared with the suppression of anarchy, every other question sinks into insignificance." In the 1910s, several states criminalised Syndicalism, defining it as essentially terrorism (or, to look at it from another perspective, they defined the crime of terrorism but called it "Syndicalism").

In 1927 Sacco and Vanzetti, Italian-American anarchists, were executed for robbery and murder on shaky evidence, despite a seven year campaign for a retrial or clemency. Their judge, Webster Thayer, was quoted as saying he would "get them good and proper" and referred to the defendants as "anarchistic bastards".

So as you can see, there is a long history of persecution against anarchists in US culture. Formal blacklists (such as in the McCarthy era) don't tend to look too closely into the exact philosophical positions of the people they indict - many of the Hollywood stars named by/for HUAC were liberals who had merely been against Nazism before the US right thought it seemly.

The most up-to-date history of anarchism (and its reception) is Ruth Kinna's The Government of No One, which covers most of this. I think the US right has long treated opposition to capital as synonymous with opposition to society, and thus left-anarchisms have usually been regarded as a threat.