Socialism as "the Great Anti-Theft Movement"

My latest for CounterPunch magazine

In my latest piece for CounterPunch, I consider the idea of socialism as “the Great Anti-Theft Movement,” a framing first advanced by the great individualist anarchist writer and publisher Ezra Heywood—and carried forward by his protege Benjamin Tucker, as well as the Irish freedom-fighter James Connolly. Here’s an excerpt, but I hope you’ll check out the article and share your thoughts with me:

If Heywood and Tucker’s brand of free market anti-capitalism seems strange today, then it is important to revisit the past: the whole criticism of capitalism advanced by nineteenth century libertarians was that it was a system of state-created legal privilege designed and used to steal labor power, to create a space of difference and monopoly in which the owners of capital could exploit workers.