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Title: Pluralism and Anarchism
Author: Kenneth Maddock
Date: 1966
Language: en
Topics: Australia, diversity, pluralism, political philosophy
Source: http://www.takver.com/history/sydney/maddock1.htm
Notes: (From “Red And Black” # 2 Winter 1966)

Kenneth Maddock

Pluralism and Anarchism

I

A common objection to anarchist proposals is that they postulate society

without the State, that is, anarchy in one of the two literal senses of

the word. But men, it is objected, need to be governed. Such criticism

may take a naive form, as when it is implied that but for the government

we would all be murdered in our beds. We are to believe that it was to

escape this fate that the citizens assembled and appointed some of their

number to rule the rest, thus instituting the State.

But criticism of the anarchist postulate may take a sophisticated form,

as in the writings of the Italian conservative, Gaetano Mosca. Mosca’s

general theme, which he shares with a group of writers who sometimes go

under the collective label of “Machiavellians”, is the perennial

domination of majorities by minorities. Ruling minorities may come and

go (Pareto: “History is a graveyard of aristocracies”), but always there

are ruling minorities. This permanent feature of society is obscured,

but not altered, by ideological slogans, such as “government by the

people” and “majority rule”. Anarchism is powerless to abrogate this

social law. In Mosca’s words:

“But suppose we assume that the anarchist hypothesis has come about in

the fact, that the present type of social organization has been

destroyed, that nations and governments have ceased to exist, and that

standing armies, bureaucrats, parliaments and especially policeman and

jails have been swept away. Unfortunately people would still have to

live, and therefore use the land and other instruments of production.

Unfortunately again, arms and weapons would still be there, and

enterprising, courageous characters would be ready to use them in order

to make others their servants or slaves. Given those elements, little

social groups would at once form, and in them the many would toil while

the few, armed and organized, would either be robbing them or protecting

them from other robbers, but living on their toil in any event. In other

words, we should be going back to the simple, primitive type of social

organization in which each group of armed men is absolute master of some

plot of ground and of those who cultivate it, so long as the group can

conquer the plot of ground and hold it with its own strength” (The

Ruling Class, 1939, p. 295).

Some of the writers advancing this general type of criticism, while

calling into question the soundness of anarchist theories, manage to pay

the anarchists what looks like a compliment. Thus, Robert Michels speaks

of anarchism as “a movement on behalf of liberty, founded on the

inalienable right of the human being over his own person” (Political

parties, 1915, p. 360). George Molnar speaks of anarchism as “the only

radical movement whose principal avowed concern was with freedom”

(Libertarian Society’s Broadsheet, No. 30).

Now in examining the issues we must distinguish two notions, which it

has been usual to confuse. We must separate the concept of anarchy,

meaning society without the State, from the concept of free society,

meaning society in which no group has any of its activities subjected to

authority or coercion.

Resort to coercion and appeal to authority are standard means of trying

to compel a person or group to conform to a course of action supported

by the person or group resorting to coercion or appealing to authority.

A coercive person or group uses or threatens violence in the attempt to

compel conformity. An authoritarian person or group appeals to some

authority, which is represented as requiring the course of action

demanded by the authoritarian. The notion of sacredness is commonly

annexed to authorities: their requirements are represented as being

obligatory and their credentials as above inquiry. Authorities are of

the most diverse kind. They may be definite, as when appeal is made to

rights conferred by legal status or legal contract. They may be

indefinite, as when appeal is made to the requirements of God or Freedom

or National Interest or Working-Class Solidarity.

Appeals to authority are commonly made when the authoritarian is unable

or unwilling to resort to coercion. His aim is to put you in a position

where, if you do not comply with his demands, you will feel ill at ease

with yourself, will feel guilty. His aim may also be to excite public

animosity against you.

An inquiry into freedom in society can thus be rephrased as an inquiry

into the operation of authority and coercion in society. An activity is

free if not subjected to authoritarian or coercive restrictions. But an

activity that is free in this sense may be repressive, that is, may be

aimed at imposing authoritarian or coercive restrictions on others.

Activities, therefore, may be assigned to one or other of four types:

free and unrepressive, free and repressive, unfree and unrepressive.

unfree and repressive. Scientific inquirers, brigands in de facto

control of a region, domestic slaves and non-commissioned officers in

the army might be taken, at least in certain circumstances, as

respective examples of men involved in the four types of activity.

But in attending concretely to this or that social group, this or that

social activity, this or that social interest, we must keep in mind the

complexity of things. Coercive and authoritarian demands may be

ineffectual, if not in the short then in the long term. Consider, for

example, the attacks made by churchmen at various times on scientific

inquiry, on “immorality” and, to take a current example, on government

policy in Vietnam. The history of legislative attempts to repress

drinking, adultery, robbery with violence and industrial strikes

supports the same conclusion.

II

We are now in a position to continue the inquiry, in particular to ask

whether anarchist social organization is, in fact, impracticable, as

Mosca asserts, and whether the anarchists are really the party of

freedom. The only sound approach is through the study of existent

anarchies.

To the question, “Have there been anarchies?”, that is, societies

without the State, an affirmative answer can be given. Anarchies are, or

have been, common in Africa, North America, Melanesia, Australia and

other parts of the world, in societies with primitive or peasant

economies. Conquest and rule by outsiders has modified the political

structures of these societies: either drastically, as when headmen,

native chiefs, village councils and the like, endowed with coercive

authority, have been created by the rulers; or superficially, as when a

colonial administration, staffed only by outsiders, is superimposed on

the indigenous anarchy.

The point about these societies is that they are free from governmental

institutions, that is, there is no one group within them claiming and

exercising authority to regulate the activities of all other groups,

claiming and exercising monopoly on the use of violence in society. Yet

in these societies disputes arise over marriages, land, movable

property, ritual prerogatives and so on, and disputes are settled

(sometimes) despite the political anarchy. In the course of the disputes

the parties promote their conflicting demands by resort to coercion and

appeal to authority. (For a study of the operation of these processes in

a Stateless society, see L. R. Hiatt, Kinship and Conflict, 1965.)

Several conclusions can be drawn from the primitive anarchies.

First, they show that anarchy is a workable political order. Mosca

denied that, holding that a “successful” anarchist revolution would

result in a reversion of society to what he took to be the “primitive

type of social organization”, a multiplicity of petty Statelets

tyrannized over by armed gangs. But the primitive anarchies known to us

through anthropological inquiry are genuinely Stateless. Whether a

Stateless society can be created by abolition of the State where it

already exists is a separate question, and anthropology gives no answer

to it.

Secondly, the primitive anarchies show that authority and coercion are

processes independent of the State, which must be regarded as a

particular social form through which they operate. Abolition of the

State must, therefore, be distinguished from abolition of authority and

coercion. Generalization about “quantities” of authority and coercion in

Stateless, as opposed to State, societies, is impossible; at most sexual

freedom in a particular society of one type could be contrasted with

sexual freedom in a particular society of the other type, and similarly

with other kinds of freedom.

Thirdly, the primitive anarchies show that anarchy, as a political

order, is independent of general acceptance of some monolithic principle

of behaviour, contrary to what some critics have asserted. This kind of

assertion was advanced by George Orwell, for example, in his essay on

Swift:

“This illustrates very well the totalitarian tendency which is explicit

in the anarchist or pacifist vision of Society. In a Society in which

there is no law, and in theory no compulsion, the only arbiter of

behaviour is public opinion. But public opinion, because of the

tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant

than any system of law, when human beings are governed by ‘thou shalt

not’, the individual can practise a certain amount of eccentricity: when

they are supposedly governed by ‘love’ or ‘reason’, he is under

continuous pressure to make him behave and think in exactly the same way

as everyone else” (Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays, 1950, pp.

71–72).

Fourthly, the anthropological evidence shows an association of political

anarchy with simple economies, economies of the type we would call

primitive or peasant. In these societies production is

characteristically by small groups, whose members are often kin to each

other. Such a group produces for its own needs, obtaining what it is

unable or unwilling to produce by direct exchange with other groups of

the same general type. A society with such a simple economy is admirably

adapted to political anarchy. though not all societies with simple

economies are anarchic. What would State authority give to these

societies? Sometimes military protection, sometimes participation in a

far more complex economy. But benefits are secured at a price: military

protection is usually from other States, through taxation the State, in

effect, compels its subjects to labour without pay, and State authority

sanctions the co-existence of great wealth and great poverty. A State,

one may say, has a vested interest in its subjects. The image of the

shepherd and his flock is to the point, for what does a shepherd with

his sheep if not fleece and devour them?

Now it can be objected that these societies, though anarchies, were

unconsciously anarchist. Can anarchist movements institute anarchy where

the State already exists? Anarchists would answer in the affirmative,

pointing to the experience of Spain during the civil war. Their belief

finds some confirmation in accounts given by eye-witnesses who were not

of the anarchist persuasion, notably Orwell, Gerald Brenan, Franz

Borkenau. The parts of Spain where anarchism was seen at its most

impressive, from the point of view of actually instituting some sort of

anarchy, were peasant districts which had long been impregnated with

propaganda. To introduce anarchy all that had to be done was to drive

out the representatives of the State. The basically anarchist peasant

organization would then operate free from State-imposed restrictions.

The special circumstances of the civil war gave the anarchists the

opportunity of doing this, and an agrarian anarchism persisted in parts

until the final victory of the fascist forces. Borkenau’s account of the

Spanish worker and peasant, the man who proved himself such good

anarchist material, is worth inspection. He argues that Bakuninist

theories, when introduced in Spain during the closing decades of the

nineteenth century, found conditions to which they were peculiarly

appropriate, conditions which had existed since the eighteenth century.

Notable among these were the great economic and cultural gap between

upper and lower classes, the peasant propensity to violence and

brigandage, the hostility to “progress”, especially “progress” in the

form of capitalist enterprise, and the degeneration of the Catholic

Church. The latter condition contributed to the anarchist movement

becoming imbued with moral and religious fervour. Borkenau gives this

vignette of the Spaniard:

“There is a profound difference, in the view of a primitive peasantry,

between the man who breaks the solidarity of the peasant community

itself by criminal acts and the man who, in seeking his own right

against the rich and mighty by brigandage and murder, helps the common

cause of the oppressed. The former, the thief or the murderer who has

killed or robbed a peasant, would be unhesistatingly delivered to the

police or given short shrift by those he had damaged. The latter will be

protected by the poor, throughout his district ... The average Spanish

peasant, would be unhesitatingly delivered to the police or given life

and property characteristic of the well-policed countries of the West”

(The Spanish Cockpit, 1963 ed., p. 15).

The anarchism which developed among such men was compatible with the

exercise of authority and coercion, processes without which no

large-scale social reconstruction could be effected. This should

occasion no surprise, since the example of the primitive anarchies shows

that authority and coercion are not to be identified exclusively with

the State. What the Spanish anarchists aimed at was the abolition of the

State and certain forms of activity upheld by State power (lawyer,

moneylender, landlord, for example), which entailed driving out, and

keeping out, representatives of the State, and instituting new social

arrangements, The resort to coercion and appeal to authority implied in

this would have been inconsistent with anarchy only if serving to create

new groups which, masked by no-State slogans, claimed and exercised

authority and power over all other groups. When this is kept in mind a

new construction can be placed on the authoritarianism attributed to

some of the leading anarchists, notably Bakunin, which need no longer

necessarily be construed as aberrations.

To advert to the distinction between anarchy and free society: in the

primitive world there is anarchy, but not free society, and in Spain

anarchy was instituted, but not free society. It would be naive to

expect authority and coercion to be abolished in civil war conditions,

but in any case anarchy does not require their abolition. At the same

time, it must be admitted that anarchists have often spoken as if what

they wanted was the abolition of authority and coercion in all forms.

Take Kropotkin in his Encyclopaedia Britannica article, for example:

”... harmony in such a society being obtained, not by submission to law

or by obedience to any authority, but by free agreements concluded

between the various groups, territorial and professional, freely

constituted for the sake of production and consumption, as also for the

satisfaction of the infinite variety of needs and aspirations of a

civilized being. In a society developed on these lines, the voluntary

associations ... would ... substitute themselves for the State in all

its functions.

“They would represent an interwoven network, composed of an infinite

variety of groups and federations of all sizes and degrees ... for all

possible purposes ... and ... for the satisfaction of an ever-increasing

number of scientific, artistic, literary and social needs. Moreover,

such a society would represent nothing immutable. On the contrary ...

harmony would (it is contended) result from an ever-changing adjustment

and readjustment of equilibrium between the multitude of forces and

influences, and this adjustment would be the easier to obtain as none of

the forces would enjoy a special protection from the State.

“If... society were organized on these principles, man would not be

limited in the free exercise of his powers in productive work by a

capitalist monopoly, maintained by the State; nor would he be limited in

the exercise of his will by a fear of punishment, or by obedience toward

individuals or metaphysical entities, which both lead to depression of

initiative and servility of mind.”

Kropotkin is failing to unequivocally assert whether or not authority

and coercion will operate as social processes. Much in the tone of his

writing suggests that he is envisaging their disappearance, but then

what is to be made of the groups for “mutual protection” and “defence of

the territory”, which are listed among the “groups and federations of

all sizes and degrees ,.. for all possible purposes”? Such groups are

needed against internal and external enemies who presumably seek to

determine the “ever-changing adjustment and readjustment of equilibrium”

by systematic violence and deception, after the manner of the

conquerors, criminals, etc., with whom history familiarizes us. The

believer in a free society is in a dilemma, for the abolition of

authority and coercion depends on the renunciation of these processes by

all men. That Kropotkin envisaged this is implied by the reference to

the freeing of the individual from “fear of punishment” and “obedience

towards individuals or metaphysical entities’:. Taken seriously this

would mean an abrogation even of moral authority. But as the social

arrangements instituted by the believers in free society are liable to

attack, some form of social defence (“mutual protection”, “defence of

the territory”) is necessary, that is, coercion must be resorted to and

authority appealed to, in order to maintain the free society.

Such are the problems of believers in free society, but anarchy is

compatible with authority and coercion. Perhaps, then, a device would

have to be borrowed from the communists and, on the analogy of the

withering away of the State in the classless society prepared for by the

dictatorship of the proletariat, anarchy would be conceived of as a

transition period between the present and the free society. But to do

that would be to make the free society what the classless society of the

withered-away State is — a myth.

The anarchist doctrine perennially attracts a mixed bag of idealists,

intellectuals, crackpots, visionaries, malcontents and individuals

drifting on the fringe of law and conventional morality. In rare times

and places the doctrine manages to sum up, to convey with a terseness

wanting to other doctrines, the hatreds and aspirations of great numbers

of men. Then, and only then, with the anarchist beliefs fusing with a

mass movement, does the abolition of the State and the institution of

anarchy become a possibility.

III

The Sydney libertarian position is sometimes summed up in the slogan,

“anarchism, atheism, free love”, but this is an anarchism very different

from the classical variety. In particular, libertarians reject as

illusory the belief that the world as a whole can somehow be

reconstructed after an anarchist or libertarian fashion. Instead,

emphasis is placed on the carrying on of certain activities in the here

and now, notably inquiry and free love, without entertainment of the

hope that they will be generally accepted or that the world can be made

safe for them. Thus libertarians accept, on the one hand, an empiricist

and pluralistic philosophy and, on the other hand, an enmity to what are

believed to be the forces of authority, as when Ian Bedford declares “

an abiding hatred of the State and of all forms of coercion ...

temperamentally unable to stand the police” (The Red and Black, No. 1).

It is this latter feature which, libertarians believe, establishes

continuity between their position and that of the classical

anarchists.Thus A. J. Baker refers to “the interest they have in

struggling against authoritarian forces and ideas” (The Sydney Line,

1963, p. 27), asserting that libertarians “share the anti-authoritarian

interests of classical anarchists” (ibid., p. 29).

Now it can be observed that libertarians are taking up activities which

can and do exist independently. An empirical, pluralistic logic and

social theory do not imply commitment to an anarchist — or what is

thought to be an anarchist — position, as can be seen from the example

of men whose influence on libertarian theory has been deep, notably John

Anderson and Pareto.

It can further be observed that it is only in a special sense that

anarchists can be regarded as anti-authoritarian. Confusion can easily

arise here because (a) some anarchists have equivocally seemed to oppose

all authority and coercion, as we have seen in the specific case of

Kropotkin; and (b) anarchists have generally been opposed to what

loosely may be termed “the authorities”, that is, the police, army, law

courts, parliament and so on, and therefore have been anti-authoritarian

in the restricted sense of “agin the authorities”. But libertarians

would want to be anti-authoritarian in a wider way than that. The point

here is that it is not easy to oppose unequivocally all authority and

coercion and want the institution of new sets of social arrangements.

This is a difficulty which revolutionary reformers cannot evade, as can

be seen from critically reading the classical anarchists and other

promoters of universal nostrums, for example, Wilhelm Reich (see George

Molnar, Broadsheet, No. 39). A simple (not to say simple-minded)

solution would be to adopt the policy of using authority and coercion to

abolish authority and coercion, thus ushering in the free society, but

logically this would be no better than the communist policy of class

domination (by the proletariat) abolishing class domination. The

assumptions underlying such solutions are that authority, coercion and

class domination are acceptable if exercised “in the right way” by “the

right people”, and that aims and policies do not change with changes in

the relative social position of their proponents. That at least some

anarchists have been alive to the falsity of these assumptions is shown

by Michels:

“Nieuwenhuis, the veteran champion of anarchizing socialism with a

frankly individualist tendency, showed on one occasion that he had a

keen perception of the dangers which anarchism runs from all contact

with practical life. At the Amsterdam congress of 1907, after the

foundation of the new anarchist international, he raised a warning voice

against the arguments of the Italian Errico Malatesta, an anarchist

attached to the school of Bakunin. Malatesta, having dilated upon the

strength of bourgeois society, declared that nothing would suit this

society better than to be faced by unorganized masses of workers, and

that for this reason it was essential to counter the powerful

organization of the rich by a still more powerful organization of the

poor. ‘Si tel est ta pende, cher ami,’ said Nieuwenhius to Malatesta,‘tu

peux t’en aller tranquillement chez les socialistes. Ils ne disent pas

autre chose.’ In the course of this first anarchist congress there were

manifest, according to Nieuwenhuis, the symptoms of that diplomatic

mentality which characterizes all the leaders of authoritarian parties”

(Political Parties, 1915, pp. 360–61).

If the hope of a general abolition of authority and coercion is rejected

as utopian, the question arises of the extent to which authority and

coercion can be abolished from the lives of limited groups and their

members. Libertarians profess anti-authoritarian interests or

preferences, but the precise relation of these to the various activities

engaged in by libertarians, whether individually or collectively, is

unclear. In this context the complex interplay of social facts must be

kept in mind: a group has activities which are participated in, to

varying extents, by the group’s members and which we may speak of as the

characteristic activities of the group, but members have “outside”

activities, too, and the outside activities of some members may not be

shared by other members. It must also be remembered that

“authoritarian”, “contra-authoritarian”, “anti-authoritarian” and the

like are not only terms in a system of social theory, but terms in a

system of moral preferences (Cf. “progressive” and “reactionary” in

communist terminology). Keeping these points in mind we are in a better

position to appreciate some of the obscurities in the libertarian

position. Investigation of the obscurities can begin by attending to a

type of problem which evidently troubles some libertarians.

Thus Hiatt has suggested that:

”... it would seem the obvious thing for libertarians to think about

playing off the authoritarians against one another. remember well the

uneasiness caused at a libertarian conference some years ago when a

certain gentleman asked whether the police would be called in if Frank

Browne’s boys tried to break up the meeting” (The Sydney Line, 1963, p.

122).

The same type of question was raised by R. Poole, reviewing The Sydney

Line in a student paper:

“Is, for instance, the action of a householder in refusing admission to

a gatecrasher to a party, a display of individual preference, or is he

making use of institutionalized property rights?” (Honi Soit, 30 June,

1964).

The answer to the reviewer’s question would surely be that such action

would be both, since only individual preference makes you want to eject

gatecrashers and only institutionalized property rights enable you to do

so.

But what underlies these questions is the dilemma of the classical

anarchists. You say you do not want to use authority and coercion, that

in fact you want to abolish them, if not from the world, then from your

own life. But in the meantime there are people who do appeal to

authority and resort to coercion. Their actions affect you and your

friends and the people you sympathize with. Unless mutually satisfactory

arrangements can be arrived at with such people (assuming that their

demands cannot simply be ignored, as is often the case), you must either

submit to their demands, whatever the injury or cost, or resist, which

means resorting to coercion or appealing to authority yourself.

(Consider the position of the person framed by the police, as with

Donald Rooum, whose adventures are described in Anarchy 36). But even in

the mundane course of everyday life, wants are satisfied by entering

into arrangements which exhibit coercive or authoritarian features,

which impose restrictions, sanctioned by coercive authority, on the

parties. Thus, accommodation is secured by some such means as entering

into a landlord-tenant relation (compare the non-authoritarian way,

which is to sleep all year round on park benches, on beaches and such

places), and a livelihood is earned by some such means as entering into

a master-servant relation, taking up crime or setting up in business

(compare the non-authoritarian way, which is to beg and scavenge).

If some anarchists and libertarians are puzzled or embarrassed by the

question of their relation to obvious facts, then the answer is to be

traced to their feeling that it is somehow incumbent upon them to act

consistently in a non-authoritarian or anti-authoritarian manner. This

is of particular interest in the case of libertarians, since a feature

of Anderson’s philosophy on which libertarians have drawn is a

thorough-going criticism of the notion of obligation (see, for example,

Baker, Libertarian, No. 1).

But the fact that at least some libertarian behaviour is inexplicable by

“anti-authoritarian” interests or preferences cannot be completely

ignored. One way in which this discrepancy is accounted for is by

invoking the compromises required by the exigencies of life: there is a

“hiatus between principle and practice” (Broadsheet, No. 20). We can

catch an echo here of the ancient view that “the spirit is willing, but

the flesh is weak”. What needs to be stressed is that “practice” and

“flesh” are terms concealing undisclosed principles or preferences. Itis

an evasion of the issue to disclose some principles only and then to

claim that aspects of behaviour inexplicable by the disclosed principles

are the result of mysterious forces, such as “practice” and “flesh”.

Just as one aim of social criticism is to expose the real interests

lurking under cover of ideologies, just as one aim of psychoanalysis is

to bring to light repressed motives, so we must look for undisclosed

preferences, refusing to be brushed off with partial disclosures, just

as we refuse to be satisfied with ideological and neurotic formations.

The question thus becomes: In what circumstances do anti-authoritarian

(or any other) preferences operate, what activities give rise to them?

The view to be taken here is that such preferences are summary

statements of certain conditions required for the continuance of certain

activities. Compare Anderson:

“In considering how there came to be mores in a community, we must start

from the fact that community is a historical force or set of activities.

Now there are relations of support and opposition between any activity

whatever and others surrounding it; and likewise we can say that any

historical thing has its characteristic ways of working, ways which are

variously affected by its historical situation. To say, then, that a

society exists is to say that it proceeds along certain lines and that

there are conditions favourable and conditions unfavourable to its

continuance. Thus, mores are, in the first instance, forms of social

operation, the engendering of certain states of things and prevention of

others. These may be called the demands or requirements of the society.

But when the demands come to be formulated by members of the society

(and this takes place through conflict among the demands of members), we

have mores in the second instance — recognition of what is required and

what is forbidden — we have especially the operation of taboo. So there

develop from customary tasks and customary constraints the notions of

right and wrong ... They (the mores, K.M.) are simply ways of working of

that particularly community in its particular environment ... Customs,

then, ways of social working, must exist if a society is to exist; but

they are not to be understood in the ‘purposive’ fashion, and they

raise, of themselves, no question of goodness. Also there is no question

of a total social morality; it is seen that there are conflicting

demands, conflicting activities, conflicting forms or organization,

within the society” (Studies in Empirical Philosophy, 1962, pp. 242–43).

Taking this general view, we would expect to find that a group

professing anti-authoritarian principles is a group having activities of

a kind threatened by authority and coercion. This is the case with

libertarians, since their interests include inquiry and “free love”.

These activities are hedged and crowded in all societies by

authoritarian and coercive restrictions, if not suffering outright

repression. They perennially conflict with social groups interested in

upholding false or uncritical beliefs or in applying monolithic

principles, they perennially excite public animosity. Anti-authoritarian

principles are summary statements, formulations, of certain conditions

required for the continued existence of activities so threatened. But

not all of the activities of a particular group are likely to need

defence in this way and, even if they do, not all of the activities of

all members of the group would. For that reason it is false and

misleading to represent all one’s activities as conforming to

anti-authoritarian requirements, as some libertarians seem to do. To

represent one’s activities in that manner is to misrepresent them, is to

make aspects of one’s behaviour inexplicable. It is as if the slogan

“life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” were taken as a complete

guide to American social life, or “liberty, equality, fraternity” to

French social life. Such misrepresentations are particular instances of

the general phenomenon of ideology (see, for example, Baker,

Libertarian, No. 2), taking “ideology” in the original Marxist sense of

“false consciousness”.

IV

Inquiry into the social life of a complex society discloses an immense

number of social groups, social activities, social interests, an immense

diversity in these and a process of change which, at varying rates, all

are undergoing. This plurality is recalcitrant to reduction to any

monolithic principle (except when the terms of the principle are so

vague that they can be made to cover any situation whatsoever), it

defies organization by policies derived from any such principle.

Acceptance of monolithic principles implies deception, including

self-deception, and policies derived from such principles serve to

advance particular interests by misrepresenting them as general

interests. Deception and misrepresentation are not peculiar, as some

believe, to conservative groups; they are features of the activity of

radical groups, too.

It is in this complexity that part of the explanation must be sought for

the misleading statements groups make about themselves. A group whose

activities are threatened with authoritarian restriction or repression,

for example, may signify its resolution in such activities by the

formulation of anti-authoritarian preferences and, by a process which is

familiar, come to believe that this abstract statement of its

determination to continue with the threatened activities is applicable

to all the activities of the group and its members. But if such

anti-authoritarian preferences were deflated in statement, we would get

something like this: We are interested in the activity of inquiry (or

watever it is); this activity is of a kind that is perennially

threatened by authoritarian restriction or repression; we therefore

struggle against authority to the extent that authority endangers our

activity.

Now two ways of conducting a struggle are (a) practising the activity,

despite the authoritarian threats; and (b) developing a criticism of

authoritarian arguments, as such, showing they misrepresent the facts,

that they cloak the advancement of special interests and that the appeal

to authority is logically fallacious. Both these ways of struggle are

applicable when what is threatened is one’s inquiries or one’s sexual

life. The danger is that what is true for certain activities will be

mistakenly taken to be true for all activities of the group and its

members. Critical scrutiny of libertarian publications suggests that

libertarians have shown little sensitivity to this danger, they have

been content to generalize from limited aspects of their behaviour to

all aspects, thus misrepresenting (expressly or by implication) a part

as the whole. This danger is also the rock on which much anarchist

writing has been wrecked, with “freedom” being bandied about as if there

could be freedom for everyone and everything, when the question is

rather one of freedom for what activities of what groups.

Considerations of this sort help to explain the acceptance of the

theory, which I believe to be false, of a causal relation between sexual

and political repression. This theory, which is discussed at length in

the writings of Reich (see, for example, The Sexual Revolution), has

been taken up by libertarians (and other anarchists), but there is much

in it that is obscure. Thus Molnar criticizes certain English anarchists

for failure to lay “vigorous insistence on the connection between sexual

and political repression” (Libertarian, No. 2), but fails to specify the

nature of the connection he has in mind. The same failure is present in

R. Pinkerton’s working out of the theme:

“Politically, the subordination of sexual enjoyment to reproduction and

the application of the conception of sin to its in-dependent pursuit,

are bound up with the maintenance of the authoritarian state ... Sexual

docility goes along with docility to other kinds of authority and sexual

repression may be a condition of social and political servility in

general” (Libertarian, No. 1).

The writer appears to be making assertions about historical relations

between social facts, yet on scrutiny it is had to determine just what

he does assert, thanks to the vagueness of “are bound up with” and “may

be”. Such expressions are resorted to by writers who want to maintain

simultaneously that A is B and that A is not B.

In this contest the Nayars are of interest. Their sexual pattern is

described by Hiatt:

“The young Nair girl, before puberty, is married to a nominal husband —

a stranger. This marriage remains entirely formal and in three days is

terminated by a divorce. The girl can now take as many lovers as she

wishes. The lovers contribute to their mistress’s support by presents

and money, but this establishes no hold over her. At any time she may

dismiss a lover by returning his last gift. The virtue of the system is

that it provides the maximum freedom for both men and women, for the

lovers were as free as the woman to enter a number of liaisons

simultaneously. The arrangement could be broken by either party at any

time” (Broadsheet, No. 42).

But the Nayars comprise a caste, they are supported from land owned by

them but worked by members of an inferior caste, the special occupation

of Nayar men is military, and sexual relations outside the caste are, in

general, visited with severe penalties if discovered! The sexual freedom

this system allows to men and women must, therefore, be admitted to

operate within a rigid framework of authoritarian coercion, in whose

maintenance the Nayars, because of their military occupation, play an

integral part. Thus, among the Nayars and subject to caste limits,

sexual enjoyment is not subordinated to reproduction or subjected to

conceptions of sin, and docility to the authoritarian caste system

manages to exist without sexual docility. It may be added that sexual

freedom of the Nayar kind is peculiar to their caste; such freedom is

not a feature of the sexual lives of the members of other castes.

Inquiry is another activity whose relations of support and opposition

are complex, for, on the one hand, inquiry is perennially liable to

authoritarian restriction and, on the other hand, is inextricably

associated with institutions whose continued existence requires them to

share in wealth which can be accumulated only by authoritarian coercion.

The place of institutions of learning and inquiry in a civilization

characterized by great disparities of wealth maintained by State

authority, was well understood by the classical anarchists. Kropotkin

puts the matter succinctly into the mouth of a worker:

“Where then are those young men who have been educated at our expense?

whom we have clothed and fed while they studied? for whom, with backs

bent under heavy loads and with empty stomachs, we have built these

houses, these academies, these museums? for whom, with pallid faces, we

have printed those fine books we cannot even read” (An Appeal to the

Young, 1948 ed., P· 13).

The same passionate sense of injustice drove Malatesta to demand that

the intellectual recognize: “... the debt he has contracted in educating

himself and cultivating his intellect which, in most cases, is at the

expense of the children of those whose manual work has produced the

means” (Errico Malatesta: His Life and Ideas, 1965, p. 138).

It should be stressed that this recognition did not lead the anarchists

into the Marxist error of denying the objectivity of scientific

findings. Thus, Malatesta insisted that:

“The truth, science, is neither bourgeois nor proletarian, neither

revolutionary nor conservative, and everybody can feel interested in its

progress” (ibid., p. 140).

Much academic activity is mindless pedantry, much is vocationally

directed, much is at the service of powerful social groups. But granted

this, the interdependence of inquiry, taken in the sense of the

operations of sceptical and catholic minds, with learning and research,

must be insisted on, since the latter supplies the materials for the

former. Inquiry cannot even begin to exist without learning and research

and, where both are found, they mutually stimulate each other. But, as

the anarchist understood, the universities and research institutions

depend for their existence on apportionments of the accumulated wealth

made possible by the hierarchial and authoritarian organization of

society.

Inquiry, then, must be regarded as standing in a parasitic relation to

official authority and coercion, but from this the conclusion cannot be

drawn that inquiry should emasculate itself by submission to

authoritarian demands. An inquirer who did that would cease to be an

inquirer. We can put the matter alternatively by asserting that from the

fact of interdependence no obligation can be derived. No question of

logic or science can be settled by appeal to authority. The ideologies

of social groups form part of the subject-matter of inquiry-and hence

the attempts such groups make, always have made and always will make, to

restrict inquiry.

In recognizing the complexity and diversity of social facts, in denying

that this complexity and diversity can be coordinated according to a

monolithic principle, such as Maximization of Pleasure, Resist not Evil,

To Each According to his Need, Social Service or the like, we are taking

a pluralistic view of society. This pluralistic view contains

implications for the criticism of anarchist and libertarian positions.

In particular, by directing attention to the plurality of social groups,

social activities and social interests, it raises the question of what

can be understood by the principles advanced by the adherents of such

positions, whether the principles are intended to be extended over

society as a whole, as in the case of the classical anarchists, or to

operate only in the lives of “the happy few”, as in the case of the

Sydney libertarians. Thus, it is asserted by and about the anarchists

that they “stand for” freedom, that they are the party of freedom. It is

asserted by and about the libertarians that they are anti-authoritarian.

that they have anti-authoritarian interests and preferences, that they

oppose authority (“permanent opposition”, “permanent protest”).

Now it is evident that these are misleading statements of aim or

activity. The “freedom” that anarchists aim at calls for the restriction

or repression of many social groups, activities and interests, which are

to disappear so that “freedom” can triumph. But what is realistic in

anarchist policies is not the abolition of authority and coercion, since

these will evidently be operative during the period of restriction and

repression, but the abolition of the State, at least in certain

historical circumstances, of a rare and probably non-recurrent type

(Spain during the 1930s, the Ukraine in the early post-Revolution

years). Authority and coercion are independent of the State and,

empirically, there is no evidence that they are increased or decreased

by the presence or absence of the State. The State is simply a

particular social form through which they operate at some times and

places. From this it follows that, although abolition of authority and

coercion would entail abolition of the State, abolition of the State

would not entail abolition of authority and coercion. Anarchy, then,

must be distinguished from free society: critical scrutiny of anarchist

texts reveals that the anarchists have been equivocal on what they were

aiming at.

“The “anti-authoritarianism” of libertarians is partial or selective,

since, in fact, libertarians enter into situations exhibiting features

which are authoritarian or coercive or both (landlord-tenant relations,

master- servant relations, and so on). But the principles on which the

selection is made are inexplicit. Libertarians make a point of

“criticism”, including criticism of authority, and it is here that some

of the responsibility for confusion is to be located, since there is a

tendency to blur the distinction between vulgar and learned usages of

the verb “to criticize”. In vulgar usage, to be critical of something is

to be against that something; in learned usage, this is not the case: in

saying that Edmund Wilson has criticized the novels of Henry James we

are not saying that he is somehow opposed to, somehow against, the

novels. To say, then, that you are critical of authority is to leave

obscure the sense in which you are critical, it is to leave a

conveniently fuzzy and obscure region in which you can hit to and fro,

whether wittingly or unwittingly, between the two usages. The fact that

libertarians enter voluntarily into authoritarian arrangements suggests

that they are critical in the learned sense only, but as against that

many libertarian statements assert, explicitly or by implication, that

they are critical in the first sense. This ambiguity is parallel to the

anarchist ambiguity as to the notions of anarchy and free society.

Pluralistic conceptions involve the rejection of the notion that there

can be monolithic principles in accord with which all activities of all

groups can be conducted. “Freedom” is a particular example of such a

principle. But the same general view would seem to hold when it is a

case of all the activities of a single group and its members. This leads

to the rejection of “Anti-Authoritarianism”. when understood as such a

principle.

To recognize social plurality is to recognize a variety of relations of

support and opposition between a variety of activities engaged in by a

variety of groups. These relations include restriction and repression by

appeal to authority and resort to coercion. It is within this matrix

that the meaning of demands for freedom and statements of anti-

authoritarian preference is to be sought. Such a demand is a demand for

the removal of a restriction or repression; such a statement of

preference is a statement of resistance to restriction or repression.

Freedom is not, therefore, a minority interest, since any group in

respect of any activity may have occasion to demand freedom. But the

activity for which freedom is demanded may be restrictive or repressive,

as is the case with many political and religious demands. The fact of

struggle and conflict between activities precludes any coherent advocacy

of freedom for all activities of all groups. In this connection the

people interested in certain activities may find themselves in

opposition to servile ideologies which purport to draw up a “social

balance sheet”, showing how all activities can be adjusted to each

other, that is, regulated by powerful social groups, in such a way as to

further “the interests of all”. We can cast the argument in alternative

terms, saying that groups have activities, that activities exhibit

regularities and require certain conditions for their continuance, and

that a part of the regularities and requirements may come to be verbally

expressed in rules, demands, preferences and the like which, like all

verbal expressions, may be misleading. Anarchist and libertarian

activities are not exceptional.

A feature of social life is the tendency of statements of demands and

preferences to assume a life of their own, to swell out into ideologies,

and one of the tasks of criticism is to deflate these monstrous growths.

Illusions about freedom do not enjoy a privileged status, they are not

above criticism.