Keith Preston (anarchist)

Keith Preston (born on October 29, 1966 in Lynchburg, Virginia, United States) is a Third Position and self-described "pan-secessionist" writer and activist. He is the founder and director of American Revolutionary Vanguard, which promotes an "alternative political vision that is anti-authoritarian, non-militarist, non-Marxist and decentralist," which de-emphasizes "left-wing cultural politics, countercultural lifestyle matters, and liberal pet causes," in favor of "a synthesis of the currently scattered anarchist tendencies" prominently including alliances with tendencies "from the Right," including "anarcho-capitalism, anarcho-monarchism, anarcho-feudalism, national-anarchism, tribal-anarchism, paleo-anarchism and Christian anarchism."

Biography
In the 1980s, Preston became strongly opposed to American foreign policy in the Third World, and was heavily influenced by the left-wing radicals Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Alexander Cockburn and Michael Parenti. Preston is staunchly anti-communist, and originally joined the anarchist movement because of the anti-state and anti-Marxist ideals of the anarchism. Having arrived at anarchism through the works of Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Preston joined the Industrial Workers of the World, served on the national board of the Workers Solidarity Alliance. In 2002, Preston described himself as a "socialist-anarchist in the classical Bakuninist tradition."

In the 1990s, he discovered the works of Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard, which led him to be influenced by the Austrian School of economics, particularly Mises' critique of planned economies, Rothbard's legal theory and critique of plutocracy, Friedrich von Hayek's social theory, and Hans Hermann Hoppe's critique of liberal democracy. He incorporated those ideas into a wider syndicalist-mutualist framework that maintains the emphasis of classical anarchism towards producer-oriented economic arrangements, such as cooperatives, land trusts, mutual banks, barter and exchange networks, partnerships, works councils, agrarian communes, militant industrial unions, family enterprises, small farms and small businesses.

During the 2008 US presidential election, Preston supported Republican candidate Ron Paul and wrote a series of articles defending Paul for LewRockwell.com. In October 2008, he was awarded the Chris R. Tame Memorial Prize by the United Kingdom's Libertarian Alliance for his anti-capitalist essay, "Free Enterprise: The Antidote to Corporate Plutocracy".

Criticism
Infoshop.org refer to American Revolutionary Guard as national anarchist or neo-Nazi, saying "Be aware that there are efforts underway to fuse nationalist, white supremacist and neo-nazi ideology with anarchism."