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Title: Anarchism Author: Cindy Milstein Date: February 2012 Language: en Topics: introductory, Lexicon, Institute for Anarchist Studies Source: https://anarchiststudies.org/lexicon-pamphlet-series/lexicon-anarchism/
At its core, anarchism is indeed a spirit—one that cries out against all
that’s wrong with present-day society, and yet boldly proclaims all that
could be right under alternate forms of social organization. There are
many different though often complementary ways of looking at anarchism,
but in a nutshell, it can be defined as the striving toward a “free
society of free individuals.” This phrase is deceptively simple. Bound
within it is both an implicit multidimensional critique and an
expansive, if fragile, reconstructive vision.
Here, a further shorthand depiction of anarchism is helpful: the
ubiquitous “circle A” image. The A is a placeholder for the ancient
Greek word anarkhia—combining the root an(a), “without,” and arkh(os),
“ruler, authority”—meaning the absence of authority. More
contemporaneously and accurately, it stands for the absence of both
domination (mastery or control over another) and hierarchy (ranked power
relations of dominance and subordination). The circle could be
considered an O, a placeholder for “order” or, better yet,
“organization,” drawing on Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s seminal definition
in What Is Property? (1840): “as man [sic] seeks justice in equality, so
society seeks order in anarchy.” The circle A symbolizes anarchism as a
dual project: the abolition of domination and hierarchical forms of
social organization, or power-over social relations, and their
replacement with horizontal versions, or power-together and in
common—again, a free society of free individuals.
Anarchism is a synthesis of the best of liberalism and the best of
communism, elevated and transformed by the best of traditions that work
toward an egalitarian, voluntarily, and nonhierarchical society. The
project of liberalism in the broadest sense is to ensure personal
liberty. Communism’s overarching project is to ensure the communal good.
One could, and should, question the word “free” in both cases,
particularly in the actual implementations of liberalism and communism,
and their shared emphasis on the state and property as ensuring freedom.
Nonetheless, respectively, and at their most “democratic,” one’s aim is
an individual who can live an emancipated life, and the other seeks a
community structured along collectivist lines. Both are worthy notions.
Unfortunately, freedom can never be achieved in this lopsided manner:
through the self or society. The two necessarily come into conflict,
almost instantly. Anarchism’s great leap was to combine self and society
in one political vision; at the same time, it jettisoned the state and
property as the pillars of support, relying instead on self-organization
and mutual aid.
Anarchism as a term emerged in nineteenth-century Europe, but its
aspirations and practices grew out of, in part, hundreds of years of
slave rebellions, peasant uprisings, and heretical religious movements
around the world in which people decided that enough was enough, and the
related experimentation for centuries with various forms of autonomy.
Anarchism was also partly influenced by Enlightenment thought in the
eighteenth century, which—at its best—popularized three pivotal notions,
to a large degree theorized from these revolts. First: Individuals have
the capacity to reason. Second: If humans have the capacity to reason,
then they also have the capacity to act on their thoughts. Perhaps most
liberating, a third idea arose: If people can think and act on their own
initiative, then it literally stands to reason that they can potentially
think through and act on notions of the good society. They can innovate;
they can create a better world.
A host of Enlightenment thinkers offered bold new conceptions of social
organization, drawn from practice and yet articulated in theory, ranging
from individual rights to self-governance. Technological advancements in
printing facilitated the relatively widespread dissemination of this
written material for the first time in human history via books,
pamphlets, and periodicals. New common social spaces like coffeehouses,
public libraries, and speakers’ corners in parks allowed for debate
about and the spread of these incendiary ideas. None of this ensured
that people would think for themselves, act for themselves, or act out
of a concern for humanity. But what was at least theoretically
revolutionary about this Copernican turn was that before then, the vast
majority of people largely didn’t believe in their own agency or ability
to self-organize on such an interconnected, self-conscious, and
crucially, widespread basis. They were born, for instance, into an
isolated village as a serf with the expectation that they’d live out
their whole lives accordingly. In short, that they would accept their
lot and the social order as rigidly god-given or natural—with any hopes
for a better life placed in the afterlife.
Due to the catalytic relationship between theory and practice, many
people gradually embraced these three Enlightenment ideas, leading to a
host of libertarian ideologies, from the religious congregationalisms to
secular republicanism, liberalism, and socialism. These new radical
impulses took many forms of political and economic subjugation to task,
contributing to an outbreak of revolutions throughout Europe and
elsewhere, such as in Haiti, the United States, and Mexico. This
revolutionary period started around 1789 and lasted until about 1871
(reappearing in the early twentieth century).
Anarchism developed within this milieu as, in “classical” anarchist
Peter Kropotkin’s words, the “left wing” of socialism. Like all
socialists, anarchists concentrated on the economy, specifically
capitalism, and saw the laboring classes in the factories and fields, as
well as artisans, as the main agents of revolution. They also felt that
many socialists were to the “right” or nonlibertarian side of anarchism,
soft on their critique of the state, to say the least. These early
anarchists, like all anarchists after them, saw the state as equally
complicit in structuring social domination; the state complemented and
worked with capitalism, but was its own distinct entity. Like
capitalism, the state will not “negotiate” with any other sociopolitical
system. It attempts to take up more and more governance space. It is
neither neutral nor can it be “checked and balanced.” The state has its
own logic of command and control, of monopolizing political power.
Anarchists held that the state cannot be used to dismantle capitalism,
nor as a transitional strategy toward a noncapitalist, nonstatist
society. They advocated an expansive “no gods, no masters” perspective,
centered around the three great concerns of their day—capital, state,
and church—in contrast to, for example, The Communist Manifesto’s
assertion that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the
history of class struggles.” It’s not that anarchists didn’t take this
history seriously; there were other histories, though, and other
struggles—something that anarchism would continue to fill out over the
decades.
As many are rediscovering today, anarchism from the first explored
something that Marxism has long needed to grapple with: domination and
hierarchy, and their replacement in all cases with greater degrees of
freedom. That said, the classical period of anarchism exhibited numerous
blind spots and even a certain naïveté. Areas such as gender and race,
in which domination occurs beyond capitalism, the state, and the church,
were often given short shrift or ignored altogether. Nineteenth-century
anarchism was not necessarily always ahead of its day in identifying
various forms of oppression. Nor did it concern itself much with
ecological degradation.
Of course, comparing classical anarchism to today’s much more
sophisticated understanding of forms of organization and the myriad
types of domination is also a bit unfair—both to anarchism and other
socialisms. Anarchism developed over time, theoretically and through
practice. Its dynamism, an essential principle, played a large part in
allowing anarchism to serve as its own challenge. Its openness to other
social movements and radical ideas contributed to its further unfolding.
Like any new political philosophy, it would take many minds and many
experiments over many years to develop anarchism into a more
full-bodied, nuanced worldview—a process, if one takes anarchism’s
initial impulse seriously, of always expanding that worldview to account
for additional blind spots. Anarchism was, is, and continually sees
itself as “only a beginning,” to cite the title of a recent anthology.
From its beginnings, anarchism’s core aspiration has been to root out
and eradicate all coercive, hierarchical social relations, and dream up
and establish consensual, egalitarian ones in every instance. In a time
of revolutionary possibility, and during a period when older ways of
life were so obviously being destroyed by enormous transitions, the
early anarchists were frequently extravagant in their visions for a
better world. They drew on what was being lost (from small-scale
agrarian communities to the commons) and what was being gained (from
potentially liberatory technologies to potentially more democratic
political structures) to craft a set of uncompromising, reconstructive
ethics.
These ethics still animate anarchism, supplying what’s most compelling
about it in praxis. Its values serve as a challenge to continually
approach the dazzling horizon of freedom by actually improving the
quality of life for all in the present. Anarchism always “demands the
impossible” even as it tries to also “realize the impossible.” Its
idealism is thoroughly pragmatic. Hierarchical forms of social
organization can never fulfill most peoples’ needs or desires, but time
and again, nonhierarchical forms have demonstrated their capacity to
come closer to that aim. It makes eminent and ethical sense to
experiment with utopian notions. No other political philosophy does this
as consistently and generously, as doggedly, and with as much overall
honesty about the many dead-ends in the journey itself.
Anarchism understood that any egalitarian form of social organization,
especially one seeking a thoroughgoing eradication of domination, had to
be premised on both individual and collective freedom—no one is free
unless everyone is free, and everyone can only be free if each person
can individuate or actualize themselves in the most expansive of senses.
Anarchism also recognized, if only intuitively, that such a task is both
a constant balancing act and the stuff of real life. One person’s
freedom necessarily infringes on another’s, or even on the good of all.
No common good can meet everyone’s needs and desires. From the start,
anarchism asked the difficult though ultimately pragmatic question:
Acknowledging this self-society juggling act as part of the human
condition, how can people collectively self-determine their lives to
become who they want to be and simultaneously create communities that
are all they could be as well?
Anarchism maintains that this tension is positive, as a creative and
inherent part of human existence. It highlights that people are not all
alike, nor do they need, want, or desire the same things. At its best,
anarchism’s basic aspiration for a free society of free individuals
gives transparency to what should be a democratic processes. Assembly
decision-making mechanisms are hard work. They raise tough questions.
But through them, people school themselves in what could be the basis
for collective self-governance, for redistributing power to everyone.
More crucially, people self-determine the structure of the new from
spaces of possibility within the old.
Anarchism gives voice to the grand yet modest belief, embraced by people
throughout human history, that we can imagine and also implement a
wholly marvelous and materially abundant society. That is the spirit of
anarchism, the ghost that haunts humanity: that our lives and
communities really can be appreciably better. And better, and then
better still.