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Title: Anarchism Author: George Molnar Date: September, 1957 Language: en Topics: futilitarianism, Sydney libertarianism, Utopia Source: Libertarian No. 1. September, 1957. Published by the Libertarian Society at Sydney University. Notes: Transcribed by P. J. Siegl
Max Nomad’s observation that anarchism is a dying creed is largely
correct. The chief landmarks of anarchist history are all a matter of
the past, and even the last rally of libertarian forces to the field in
the Spanish Civil War was witnessed by another, now lost, generation. It
is impossible in the light of this to talk to-day of anarchism in a
spirit of hopefulness about practical advances or in terms of
large-scale aims; what we can say about it will have to be quite
different from discussing the political aims of present-day left-wing
movements. Events of the last hundred years, especially the story of
forty years of successful socialist dictatorship in Russia, make this
easy for us to see; but it is not less clear that a different view of
anarchism, a view of it as something that will change the whole of
society in favour of freedom, has always depended on certain errors.
Those who criticise Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin and the rest for being
utopian are usually not blind to these errors. As a matter of fact such
criticism consists mainly of an exposure of the false optimism of
nineteenth century anarchist theory.
It seems to me, nevertheless, that we cannot dispose of anarchism
entirely by writing off its futuristic and utopian parts as worthless.
There is a streak in anarchist thought which contradicts the utopian
elements: certain passages in anarchist writings emphasise present
protest and present anti-authoritarianism, and play down the concern
with the future and with prospects of achieving massive success. The
fact that this sort of attitude (admittedly in a minor, confused and
epigrammatic way) was already present in nineteenth century anarchist
doctrines is generally ignored by contemporary libertarian sympathisers.
To the initiated as well as to the uninitiated, anarchism is still the
search for “Nowhere”. But to say this is, in my opinion, a
misapprehension which ignores certain tendencies in anarchism, and to
correct such a one-sided view we have to be reminded that in addition to
a considerable amount of naĂŻve speculation anarchism also contains a
realistic line of thought on the nature of society. In the course of
making this point I want to argue that those who work out this realistic
line consistently, by freeing it from its utopian associations, are
entitled to claim a stronger connection with traditional anarchism than
the mere use of the word “anarchist” as an appropriated label.
It has almost become an historians’ convention to regard the beginnings
of modern anarchism as being connected with the activities of Michael
Bakunin. I will follow this convention, not because of its correctness
but because it saves time. Bakunin’s anarchism, which was a late
development of his personal history, had numerous sources: chiefly the
writings of Proudhon and the libertarian aspects of Marx’s work. The
movement which he personally did much to arouse was similarly inspired
and the early history of nineteenth century anarchism is mixed up with
the early history of the socialist movement in general. It was not until
after the entry of Bakunin and his followers into the First
International in the 1860’s that a distinct anarchist position emerged
from the contest, carried on largely within the International, between
Bakuninists and Marxists.
The division between the two parties corresponded, roughly, to the
division between the Latin and Germanic sectors of the socialist
movement. Leading issues between them illustrate some of the main
anarchist points. State-socialists, as they were contemptuously called,
and anarchists were agreed in their aim of bringing about freedom, by
which they meant the removal of the oppression, the exploitation and the
inequalities from the backs of the masses who suffered from them. The
Marxist contention was that this can only be done by the “proletariat”
capturing State power and establishing a dictatorship of its own. Such a
view is the consequence of the Marxist theory that the state is a mere
instrument, a tool of the ruling class for the maintenance of its
position.
Bakunin is seen at his best in attacking this view. “They say that this
State yoke — the dictatorship — is a necessary transitional means in
order to attain the emancipation of the people: Anarchism or freedom is
the goal, the State or dictatorship is the means. Thus to free the
working masses it is first necessary to enslave them.” The State, so
Bakunin argued, is not a mere instrument but an institution with its own
rules of working. It is impossible to capture an institution and force
it to go your own way, it has an influence which cannot be nullified by
the policies of those working within it. Kropotkin, talking of “sincere
Republicans” who want to utilise the organisation that already exists,
made the same point: “And for not having understood that you cannot make
an historical institution go in any direction you would have it, that it
must go its own way, they were swallowed up by the institution.” As for
this dictatorship being “representative” and “transitional”, Bakunin
scornfully rejected this as totally unrealistic. “Thus, from whatever
angle we approach the problem, we arrive at the same sorry result: the
rule of great masses of people by a small privileged minority. But, the
Marxists say, this minority will consist of workers. Yes, indeed, of
ex-workers, who, once they become rulers or representatives of the
people, cease to be workers and begin to look down upon the toiling
masses. From that time on they represent not the people but themselves
and their own claims to govern the people. Those who doubt this know
precious little about human nature.” State-socialism, to Bakunin, was
“freedom” imposed on people and this he regarded as a nonsensical
contradiction. The history of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia is a
thorough verification of his views on Communism. He had foreseen the
mutations of a revolution led by an elite, predicted in particular the
change from the anti-State character of the revolution in its early
spontaneous phase to the conservative, power-seeking nature of the
established Soviet government.
As against the political revolution of the Marxists (which virtually
amounts to the replacement of one set of rulers by another, together
with a change in the slogans of the governing ideology) anarchists
advocated a “social revolution” meaning a change from one form of social
organisation to another. The difference between a social revolution as
seen by anarchists, and any other revolution lies in this: that the
social revolutionary objective is not the capturing but the destruction
of the State-machinery and, consequently, the elimination of power
relationships from society. This follows from the anarchist doctrine
that the State signifies not merely the existence of power placed above
the subjects but includes a whole set of relationships between members
of society. The State on this view is a centralised institution which
claims competence to interfere with independent sections of society; it
lays down and enforces rules in a number of fields and in this way
conducts affairs affecting people — nominally in their interests, in
fact, as often as not, against their interests. The continual extension
of the areas of State operation, already a feature of nineteenth century
Europe, was seen by anarchists as a danger to freedom and consequently
as something to be opposed.
Anarchists recognised that even groups which are interested in capturing
power for the sake of bringing about freedom, notwithstanding the
sincerity of the individuals concerned simply never get past the first
objective. Therefore, the problem as it appeared to them, was always one
of “how to achieve freedom” and never one of “how to capture power”. But
the view they held about their prospects was an optimistic one, to say
the least. Clearly, there can be no talk of “achieving freedom” until we
have dealt with the question of whether social changes of the kind
envisaged by the anarchists can be accomplished at all. Already Proudhon
saw that there was a problem here for him. After rejecting the notion
that governments can bring about social revolutions (governments are by
nature conservative and interested in upholding the status quo) he fell
back on “society itself” accomplishing the change. “Society itself”
meant to Proudhon “the masses when permeated by intelligence”, and he
said that the revolution will take place “through the unanimous
agreement of the citizens, through the experience of the workmen and
through the progress and growth of enlightenment”. Later anarchists had
a not dissimilar solution to offer: “Revolutionary collectivists,” wrote
Bakunin, “try to diffuse science and knowledge among the people, so that
the various groups of human society, when convinced by propaganda, may
organise and combine into federations, in accordance with their natural
tendencies and their real interests.”
Kropotkin’s work was almost entirely devoted to proving that man is by
nature co-operative and altruistic and that the non-co-operative,
aggressive tendencies in people are the result of the authoritarian
social environment in which they live. According to him, anarchist
propaganda works on these latent co-operative tendencies and, by
kindling them, brings about the social revolution. This simple-minded
faith in “the natural genius of the people” has survived into our modern
world. George Woodcock, a contemporary follower of Kropotkin, in
criticising the “pessimism” of Burnham, has this to say: “Where,
however, Burnham and many others of his kind differ from Kropotkin and
the anarchists is in their pessimistic acceptance of the inevitability
of the triumph of the State in its extreme form. The determinism that
dominates their idea is, indeed, hardly tenable on any grounds of logic
or social experience. Nothing is inevitable in society, either
managerial revolution or social revolution. Only tendencies can be
described, and the tendency towards the social revolution is just as
much alive to-day, if less apparent, as that towards the final
consummation of the State.” Woodcock argues that while the State has
made enormous progress, the continued existence of society in its
present form depends on the co-operation of the workers, and therefore
the real power lies in their hands. “The consolidation of the State and
the social death that will follow thereon will never be completed if the
workers once become aware of their power and kill the State by the
paralysis of direct economic action.”
Behind these theories about the coming of the social revolution lie
certain assumptions about the working of society. In the case of
Proudhon’s naïve statement it is easiest to see what is being assumed: a
unanimous agreement among citizens, and the power of education or
propaganda to change people’s beliefs and objectives. Such unanimous
agreement is clearly impossible if people are in conflict on various
demands, and, equally, the most powerful propaganda is doomed to failure
where it goes against vested interests. This obvious truth about society
was not completely ignored by anarchists. In criticising Fourier,
Bakunin calls it an error to believe that peaceful persuasion and
propaganda will “touch the hearts of the rich to such an extent that the
latter would come themselves and lay down the surpluses of their riches
at the doors of their phalansteries.” It seems then that even the theory
of class struggle held by anarchists contradicted their solidarist
beliefs. In this vein Peter Kropotkin talked about the two currents of
history: “Throughout the history of our civilisation, two traditions,
two opposed tendencies, have been in conflict: the Roman tradition and
the popular tradition, the imperial tradition and the federalist
tradition, the authoritarian tradition and the libertarian tradition”.
So that even anarchists had to admit that solidarity of entire societies
is a fiction. However, apart from the rulers who would not be interested
in freedom, there is the large mass of oppressed, the workers, to whom
anarchist theory was supposed to apply. But the working class itself
displays no solidarity in support of any one cause, and anarchists, to
uphold the view that a revolution from below is possible, had to fall
back on the quite implausible theory of “real interests” — of
underlying, non-apparent solidarity. Thus when Bakunin came to criticise
the German socialists he explained the fact that German workers in
general have no anarchist leanings by blaming Lassalle and Marx for
misleading the German proletariat. This argument is very unconvincing.
By the same reasoning it could be made out that Italian or Spanish
anarchists were, underneath, “really” Marxists mislead by Bakunin’s
glibness.
Equally unsuccessful are Kropotkin’s efforts to show that the
co-operative tendencies in workers, or any other tendencies held to be
favourable to the spread of anarchy, are more real or more fundamental
than those admittedly existing trends which are unfree, or which make
for conflict. We could here object to the “psychologising” of social
phenomena implied by the talk about tendencies in individuals favoured
by Kropotkin. But a more important point about the view that the workers
have a “natural tendency” to anarchism or that it is in their “real
interests” is that we cannot empirically distinguish natural tendencies
from others we could call unnatural. Woodcock’s argument is open to the
same objection: the tendency towards the social revolution is not
apparent because it consists of something the workers are supposed to
have but do not in fact have — an interest in the general strike. In a
realistic moment Bakunin himself admitted this on talking in detail
about the working class. He found that there is a labour aristocracy of
more developed, literate individuals, as well as an unconscious mass of
workers. He found that artisans such as, for instance, blacksmiths show
signs of revolutionary instincts while others, mainly better paid
craftsmen, have distinctly bourgeois ambitions and outlook. Among
joiners, printers, tailors, he found, as a consequence of the degree of
education and special knowledge required for these trades, more
conscious thinking but also more bourgeois smugness; while, to instance
a final example, he noted that those who are thoroughly imbued with a
revolutionary spirit are in a minority and comprise what he called a
“revolutionary vanguard”. Observations of this kind, noting the variety
of ways and directions in which workers are motivated, contrast sharply
with the talk about workers’ solidarity favoured by socialists of every
kind.
Connected with this solidarist view, which sometimes goes so far as to
lead to a description of the free society as one from which all
disagreements have vanished, is the view that freedom is something which
affects society as a whole. Bakunin takes the line that equality and
socialism are necessary conditions of freedom. “The serious realisation
of liberty will be impossible so long as the vast majority of the
population remains dispossessed in points of elementary need.”
Accordingly, freedom means “freedom-for-all”, and this is all that it
means. The question raised by this way of talking is again whether the
“serious realisation of liberty” is at all possible, whether freedom is
something of which we can sensibly ask: is it realisable? It seems that
if Bakunin was right we could not explain how the idea of freedom arose
at all unless we postulate an original fully socialistic and egalitarian
society, a sort of “condition of grace” from which subsequent human
societies have fallen. Nor could we understand how the State encroaches
on freedom unless we took the most illogical step of regarding it as
standing vis-Ă -vis an already existing free society, attacking it from
the outside. It is on this view hard to grasp how anarchists came to
support freedom in the first place, and, in fact, we do find them
sometimes talking in a way which denies that the attempts to dominate
and rule over people arise out of genuine demands for power. When in
this mood, anarchists ask us to regard the State as a “distortion”, as a
“horrible fiction” somehow not of the human world. But anarchists, of
all people, cannot deny the unfictitious, matter of fact existence of
authority and we find that it was in drawing attention to it that they
have over-reached themselves and have put forward a doctrine on which
freedom (except in the nebulous future) is impossible. As a consequence
of this false theory of freedom anarchists were utopian in their
political pronouncements. On their totalistic view of freedom as a state
of society yet to come they could not accommodate in their thought those
piecemeal activities and social forces struggling against authority
which, in practice, they clearly recognised. Liberty is something not
found at present, something that will “really” come only in the future:
hence the utopian concern with the future of society.
There is a marked internal contradiction in anarchism between the
utopian social reformer’s outlook and the clear-cut attack on authority
which does not invoke the common good. Evidence of this is that no
matter how pronounced their escapist preoccupations were anarchist
thinkers never freed themselves from ambivalence when talking about the
future. They recognised that “to indoctrinate and dictate to the future”
is a form of authoritarianism, the more so since the social role of the
picture of a happy future, in religion no less than in politics, is to
cloak present demands which would not be as readily acceptable without
the reference to the rewards of “kingdom come”. One gains the impression
that anarchists vaguely suspected the true function of utopian thought.
In the case of their critique of socialism this is evident: they
demonstrated that the socialist Utopia, the use of repressive
institutions for the ending of repression, disguises an immediate demand
for the leadership of the proletariat as a means of gaining power.
Anarchists readily pointed out that it is a mistake to think that this
sort of thing will lead to freedom. In spite of this, they commit a
similar mistake in suggesting the final triumph of forces struggling for
freedom. Bakunin’s dictum “Liberty is the goal of the historic progress
of humanity” fairly obviously involves the erroneous belief that there
are special interests in politics — such as the interest in freedom or
in gaining power — which can operate to the exclusion of all opposition.
The point, expressed differently, amounts to this: Bakunin’s claim that
history is on the side of anarchism implies that some day some social
changes will take place that will have as their effect the elimination
of social struggle. This possibility is highly metaphysical and we can
safely ignore — both in Marx and Bakunin — the notions of inevitability
which they had learnt from Hegel. History is not on the side of the
working class, nor is it on the side of the State, Prussian or Oceanian.
The analogy with “1984” is apposite even though in its content the
anarchist Utopia is the exact reverse of Orwell’s “world of victory
after victory, triumph after triumph: an endless pressing, pressing,
pressing upon the nerve of power”. But it resembles the latter very
closely in treating a mythical striving for one-sided success as a
possible historical development.
The ambivalence of anarchists comes out, among other instances, in the
fact that they did not adhere rigidly to their conception of the
State-society as completely unfree, and the State-less society as
entirely free. As in the case of its complement, the unitary view of
society, there are gaps in this theory forced by the recognition of
facts. Kropotkin’s two currents of history is expressed in this way:
“Between these two currents, always alive, struggling in humanity — the
current of the people and the current of the minorities which thirst for
political and religious domination — our choice is made”. Here is a
passage illuminated by a different conception of freedom, as something
which is always alive and struggling within society against
authoritarian tendencies which are every bit as genuine as what is
opposed to them. Anarchism, in this untypical excerpt, is a support of
freedom which is one thing alone with other causes that can be supported
or opposed. The coming or not coming of the social revolution recedes in
importance, since freedom and authority are always struggling, and the
chief issue becomes one of immediate opposition to the State.
Contradicting a great deal of his utopianism Bakunin himself, echoing
Marx, once said that “to think of the future is criminal”. Malatesta, on
occasions, also emphasised the anarchist concern with opposing presently
existing, established authorities: “How will society be organised? We do
not know and we cannot know. No doubt, we too have busied ourselves with
projects of social reorganisation, but we attach to them only a very
relative importance. They are bound to be wrong perhaps entirely
fantastic.”
It appears that not all anarchist thought was cast in a utopian mould.
The statements quoted indicate, I think, an advance in realism. Along
this line we can take freedom as a character, not of societies as a
whole but of certain groups, institutions and people’s ways of life
within any society, and even then not as their exclusive character.
Equally, on this view, piecemeal freedoms will always meet with
opposition and those who are caught up in them will resist conformist
pressures. The “permanent protest” implied by this is carried on without
the promise of final triumph but in a spirit of “distrusting your
masters and distrusting your emancipators”, and with no intention of
wanting to make the world safe for freedom. This security seeking ideal,
or some variant of it, is the aim of the modern socialist movement, but
it involves it in trying to capture power for the sake of enforcing its
demands on the rest of society, thereby leading to the very
authoritarianism that revolutionaries have ostensibly denounced. As
against this way of proceeding non-utopian anarchism has to be described
as futile. The futility consists not in being a failure at revolutionary
politics but in refusing to deal in terms of success or failure; in not
attempting to carry out, or even propose, wide, all-embracing policies
that bear on the whole of society and are meant to further the final
revolution. Only in this way can one hope to avoid that illusory
optimism which claims as its victims all those who try to engage mass
support of workers, or who try to persuade quantities of people whose
interest in anarchy is negligible.
There is considerable agreement between a position of permanent protest
(such as the one formulated by Max Nomad) and what nineteenth century
anarchists had to say. I am thinking especially of their attacks on the
State, on the Church and other authoritarian institutions; their
criticisms of the security-craving ideals of the bourgeoisie and of the
workers who caught it from them; of the domineering relationships which
characterise economic life; of the authoritarian ideology of Marxism and
of the compromising stand of reformists, etc. But where upholders of
permanent protest would part from old-fashioned anarchists is over the
contention that in all this there is something that will lead to a
social revolution and a rosy, free state of future society. Freedom has
always had a hard road to tread, as the biography of any anarchist will
amply prove, and nothing that anarchists ever said has succeeded in
making the idea of freedom flourishing in safety and security in any way
less implausible than it is. But some of the things they have said
indicate, as I have tried to show, that the contest between freedom and
authority is the permanent order of the day. Doing politics, advancing
freedom as a programme for the entire human race, cannot change this; it
can only foster illusions about the way society runs.