Summary — Murray N. Rothbard, “Anarcho-Communism” (1970)

This short polemical essay is a New Left-era intervention in which Rothbard distinguishes libertarian anti-statism from anarcho-communism. Its scope is narrow but programmatic: it warns libertarians against treating anti-state rhetoric as sufficient for alliance, then moves through property, voluntarism, individuality, economic calculation, post-scarcity, and civilization. The thesis is announced as a boundary line: a creed may oppose the State and still remain alien to libertarianism if it attacks private property, markets, reason, and productive abundance.

Anarcho-communism, both in its original Bakunin—Kropotkin form and in its current irrationalist and "post-scarcity" variety, is poles apart from genuine libertarian principle.

Rothbard’s first conceptual move is to separate anarchism, as he understands it, from communal anti-property politics. Against anarcho-communists who regard the State as the creator and guardian of property, he reverses the causal story: for him, the State is chiefly an invader of property rights. The essay therefore treats private property, the free market, profit-and-loss accounting, and material affluence as mutually supporting features of liberty.

If there is one thing, for example, that anarcho-communism hates and reviles more than the State, it is the right of private property.

The next movement tests the anarcho-communist claim to voluntarism. Rothbard grants only one apparent advantage over Stalinism: anarcho-communist communism is said to be freely chosen. But he immediately destabilizes that concession by stressing the movement’s vagueness about dissenters, markets, and money. His example of Spanish anarchists in the Civil War—confiscation, destruction of money, and penalties for monetary exchange—functions as historical warning that “voluntary” communism may become coercive once property and exchange are treated as pathologies.

The only good thing that one might say about anarcho-communism is that, in contrast to Stalinism, its form of communism would, supposedly, be voluntary.

The philosophical core of the essay is a defense of individuality against egalitarian communalism. Rothbard reads anarcho-communism not merely as an institutional proposal but as an anthropology: it distrusts excellence, accumulation, specialization, and differentiated achievement. Its language of liberation is, in his account, a revolt against the rational, purposive, future-oriented conduct on which liberty and prosperity depend.

The “freedom” of the Anarcho-Communist has nothing to do with the genuine libertarian absence of interpersonal invasion or molestation; it is, instead, a “freedom” that means enslavement to unreason, to unexamined whim, and to childish caprice.

The economic argument then invokes Ludwig von Mises’s socialist calculation critique. Rothbard presents money prices as indispensable signals for allocating scarce labor, land, and capital goods. Without exchange, prices, employment, and profit-and-loss tests, a complex economy cannot know where resources are most valued or efficiently used. Thus anarcho-communism is not simply morally mistaken for him; it is technically incapable of sustaining modern production.

The Anarcho-Communist seeks to abolish money, prices and employment, and proposes to conduct a modern economy purely by the automatic registry of “needs” in some central data bank.

The essay’s attack on “post-scarcity” thought extends this point into the counterculture. Rothbard argues that abundance has not abolished scarcity; it has only made modern scarcity less brutal than primitive scarcity. His standard for genuine post-scarcity is exacting: goods and services would have to become so abundant that their prices fell to zero and acquisition required no effort or scarce inputs.

But while our condition of scarcity is clearly superior to that of the caveman, we are still living in a world of pervasive economic scarcity.

Rothbard closes by turning from economics to civilizational fragility, citing Ortega y Gasset to dramatize the danger of consuming the benefits of civilization while rejecting the disciplines that sustain it. The relevance of the essay lies in this fusion of libertarian property theory, Misesian calculation, and cultural critique: anti-statism is not enough; liberty requires private property, rational exchange, and the institutional memory of production.

Civilization is not “just here,” it is not self-supporting. It is artificial.