Implying that's my thought process on calling some of them Right wing. Which isn't.
Secondly Lightman stated that left Anarchism was "The only one of real relevance in the 19th century" a statement which implies that there was a Right Anarchism at the time, just that it was irrelevant in the 19th century. If it wasn't the American Individual Anarchists, then what was it? If you have been trying to tell me "There were none at the time" then the previous statement was miswritten, not only for implying the existence of Right Anarchists at the time, but for even saying "Left Anarchists" because if there is no right, then a distinction of the left is pointless. Of course, you're not Lightman, so you can't really make a definite statement on that.
You're being transcendentally pendantic
What Lightman thinks on this subject is irrelevant. What we're discussing is what you wrote on the subject. And the problem is that you're criticizing the ahistoricity of an opponents claim
while also falling into the same trap yourself.
Yes, in some cases his sentence would imply that there was a contemporaneous right-wing anarchist movement. But this isn't the case. "Left anarchism" would have been entirely redundant in that era, because there was no right-wing anarchism.
But the problem is that your own notions of left and right are ahistorical, a point which I will elaborate later.
What? There are a lot of things I find confusing here. First off, who said anything about Right Anarchism being "pro-capitalist." The number of Anarchist flavours that are completely okay with Capitalism can be counted on one finger, and major well known proponents of it are three at the most. Claiming that it is the totality of "Right Anarchism" makes a Right/Left division pointless.
Secondly...what?
The distinction between Right and Left Anarchism is in my mind, Right is Individualist. Left is Collectivist.
If this is wrong, then what is Right Anarchism? If its just the An-Caps, why act like there's an entire section of Anarchism that is "Right" when it's just a single, small, disliked group among dozens of other "Left" ones?.
And here's the ahistorical definition I spoke of. What compounds this problem is not only a false dichotomy between individualism and collectivism, but the fact that this is a
very recent redefinition of "left-wing" vs. "right-wing".
Historical, "left" and "right" with reference to politics has meant one's relation to the existing system of political-economic power. It dates back to the French Revolution, when the supporters of the aristocracy, the Church and the monarchy sat on the right side of the National Assembly, while their opponents, the classic liberal Girondins and Jacobins, sat in the center-left and left respectively. And when the Jacobins were in power, the
Enrages and the politically organized
sans-cullotes, described themselves as being to the "left" of the Jacobins.
What is crucial to this is that nothing about these distinctions ever included collectivism or individualism as the distinction. ANd if it ever entered into the discussion, it was usually the left who was championing the individual against the hierarchical arch-collectivism of the existing social order, whether it was the feudal
ancien regime in France, or modern industrial capitalism.
Early American anarchists weren't right-wing by any meaningful sense of the term. They may have been pro-market, but their notions of property were very socialist in nature. Nearly all of them were Georgists, and very explicitly rejected homesteading legitimations of property. They all opposed absentee ownership, whether of land or capital, and opposed wagedom as a hierarchical and misanthropic.
This is why men like Spooner and Spencer considered themselves socialists, and opposed capitalism: these things they rejected were all antecedents of the capitalist economic system,and they quite explicitly placed themselves on the socialist left.
Frankly, there's almost no similarities between classic American individualist anarchists and modern anarcho-capitalists, beyond a general respect for markets. Their notions of propriety and liberty stand fundamentally at odds with each other, and any attempt by anarcho-capitalists to latch onto their legacy is is base opportunism, of which they are hardly alone in doing. Spiritually baptizing the deceased as exponents of your ideology is one of man's oldest intellectual exercises.