Free Ted?

I wrote to the Missoulian today to dispute the characterization of local celebrity terrorist Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber) as a "committed leftist" by Gary Marbut of the Montana Shooting Sports Association, a conservative, libertarian-leaning pro-gun group with historic associations with the Militia of Montana. Marbut is not the only person to identify him thusly. Deni Elliott, the Harvard-educated expert in media ethics who once employed me, claimed that newspapers who didn't regularly identify Kaczynski as left-wing, while they characterized the Freemen and Operation Rescue as right-wing, thereby betrayed their bias.

It's my opinion that this is simply wrong. Kaczynski's outspoken environmentalism is shared by more on the left than the right, but this is just one component of the comprehensive critique of technology developed in his manifesto. It is clear that his real objections are to the progressive features of technology, which he sees as replacing the family as basic social unit with the sovereign individual, replacing the master-apprentice relationship with wage labor, and undermining the Hobbesian sovereign authority with what he considers the destructive notions of liberalism, democracy, and socialism. This is objectively a reactionary critique that could have been made by any 18th century pope.

A street sign near my house is stamped "Free Ted" and has an image of the Unabomber. I'm told that this statement was made by one of the anarchists who used to live there, and I suspect that it reflects not only legitimate concern about the fairness of Kaczynski's trial, but also political sympathy. For a long time I assumed that this was again based on a political misidentification of Kaczynski's politics, but I've come to suspect that elements of Kaczynski's philosophy besides his environmentalism may strike a chord with certain strands of anarchist thought. After all, at least since the days of Proudhon, anarchism, for all the unforgettable good deeds of anarchist workers in the U.S., Spain, and even Russia, has contained a strain of opportunism rooted in its peasant/middle class orientation, that has in practice meant betrayal of working-class interests to those of the worst reactionaries, often under the veneer of a "shocking" radicalism.

And say what you will about Kaczynski, he was certainly a radical and a militant. The question is, militant in the support of what end?