"Almost the only persons who may be said to comprehend even approximately the significance, principles, and purposes of Socialism are the chief leaders of the extreme wings of the Socialistic forces, and perhaps a few of the money kings themselves"
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Tucker’s line is a neat little trap: it flatters almost no one, and it indicts almost everyone. He’s not praising socialist “chief leaders” so much as boxing them into a paradox. The people who truly grasp socialism, he implies, are either its most doctrinaire edge-dwellers or the very plutocrats it claims to oppose. That’s not a neutral observation; it’s a warning about how power understands power.
The subtext is Tucker’s anarchist suspicion of mass movements. Socialism, in his view, isn’t primarily a warm moral narrative about solidarity; it’s a theory of control, incentives, and institutional leverage. The “extreme wings” understand the machinery because they’re willing to pull every lever. The “money kings” understand it because they already do. Everyone in the wide, comforting middle - the earnest joiners, the Sunday idealists - is left looking like useful fog.
Context matters: Tucker is writing from the late-19th/early-20th-century ideological street fight, when “socialism” covered everything from labor mutualism to state planning, and when industrial capitalists were consolidating into recognizable giants. Tucker’s own project, “anarchistic” and market-oriented, treated the state as the central enabler of monopoly. So the jab lands in two directions: at socialists who underestimate how state power can replicate hierarchy, and at capitalists who recognize socialist politics as either a threat to manage or a tool to harness.
It works because it refuses the audience the comfort of innocence. If only the extremists and the oligarchs understand the game, the rest of us are the stakes.
The subtext is Tucker’s anarchist suspicion of mass movements. Socialism, in his view, isn’t primarily a warm moral narrative about solidarity; it’s a theory of control, incentives, and institutional leverage. The “extreme wings” understand the machinery because they’re willing to pull every lever. The “money kings” understand it because they already do. Everyone in the wide, comforting middle - the earnest joiners, the Sunday idealists - is left looking like useful fog.
Context matters: Tucker is writing from the late-19th/early-20th-century ideological street fight, when “socialism” covered everything from labor mutualism to state planning, and when industrial capitalists were consolidating into recognizable giants. Tucker’s own project, “anarchistic” and market-oriented, treated the state as the central enabler of monopoly. So the jab lands in two directions: at socialists who underestimate how state power can replicate hierarchy, and at capitalists who recognize socialist politics as either a threat to manage or a tool to harness.
It works because it refuses the audience the comfort of innocence. If only the extremists and the oligarchs understand the game, the rest of us are the stakes.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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