💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › david-wieck-the-negativity-of-anarchism.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 09:25:42. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: The Negativity of Anarchism Author: David Wieck Date: 1975 Language: en Topics: authority, ethics, feminism, ideology, individualism, introductory, marxism Source: Retrieved on 16 August 2011 from http://quadrant4.org/anarchism.html Notes: From Interrogations: Revue Internationale de Recherche Anarchiste, Paris, France, No. 5 (December 1975)
Anarchism is notoriously pluralistic in the sense that there are many
philosophers and many schools with no obvious common ground except the
rejection of political sovereignty implicit in an-archia. Not
unreasonably, anarchism is frequently taken to be a family of minimally
related ideas that deny the legitimacy of the state and (usually)
propose its abolition. This view, although texts in support of it could
be cited, is narrow; for anarchism is not merely anti-state, somehow it
is an idea or theory of freedom. But this not merely, this freedom, are
indefinite and much in need of elucidation.
I offer here a view of anarchism, a way of understanding it in terms of
a common basis, that I hope will make evident its importance and its
meaning. This is a problematical undertaking, quite different from a
study of the thought of an individual anarchist writer. It calls for
decisions about what is essential in the various anarchist traditions,
and there is high risk that the result be more revelatory of one’s own
bias or predilections than of anarchism past or present. More exactly,
then, the present article is an expression of my intuition, based
chiefly on my personal experience of anarchism, of what is central to
anarchism and what most worthwhile in the sense of statement about human
society and human being. In the course of the reflective effort to
express my intuition as precisely as I can, I have come to see a number
of fundamental issues in a way that is new and illuminating to me.
My discourse is objective in mode and intended for philosophical
scrutiny. I wish to make it quite clear, however, especially because I
believe that what one thinks and claims to know in the objective mode is
inseparable from one’s convictions (where one is coming from, as the apt
phrase had it), that I share the broad attitude or orientation that I
identify as anarchist.
As I say later on, the perspective of anarchism, as a living idea rather
than as an intellectual possibility, is a perspective of oppressed
people to whose anger at their oppression and the oppression of their
comrades anarchism gives voice; the purpose of anarchism is to serve as
a means for putting end to those oppressions. Just how far one can grasp
the meaning of life-conditions that are not one’s own — a question
raised vigorously by blacks and by women — I am not sure. (I have
experienced oppressions but not as a permanent condition to which
society and circumstance have condemned me; in the family of mankind I
have been a middle-privileged person at least.) However that may be, I
am convinced that anarchism can become meaningful only if one has a
concrete sense of the social reality — I am afraid I do not know a
better term out of which it arises, and I hope that I have kept this
reality, namely the human meaning of oppression, in constant view.
To a preliminary conception of anarchism and of what I mean by a common
basis, comparison and contrast of the role of ideas and ideology in the
history of socialism and anarchism will provide a way of approach, less
circuitous than may at first appear.
Anarchism is usually called an ideology, and in some senses of a term
that everyone defines at will, this characterization would be correct if
not very informative. I prefer to define ideology, in the spirit of Marx
and Mannheim, as an aprioristic and rationalized belief system that
serves to justify, and to mystify on behalf of, the dominance and power
of some social group or some institutional complex. (This definition is
meant to comprehend trascendental ideologies, ie., theologies, as well
as social ideologies.) Although I believe it to have broader theoretical
utility, the reader is free to regard this definition, which will have a
thematic function in my discussion, as a means of making distinctions
useful in clarifying the status of anarchism.
Socialism before Marx expressed an incompletely determinate but by no
means abstract ideal, roughly describable as abolition of bourgeois
property, economic exploitation, and class division, vindication of the
dignity of labor, and institution of production for use. Philosophically
and by social science, Marx tried to create for socialism a theory of
method and a justification for its goals. Subsequently, in the
historically important variants of socialism, Marxist theory, or perhaps
more exactly the philosophy and methodology of Engels, suitably glossed,
became doctrinal truth: first of all in the German Social Democracy and
American DeLeonism and then in Leninism and its derivatives.
‘Orthodoxy,’ ‘deviation,’ ‘revisionism,’ and the remainder of a
vocabulary of rigidified theology-like system, enforced by a centralized
party, signal the transition. This last stage of Marxism, these systems
of truth, are fully ideological in the sense of the definition above.
(That the Marxisms which have a share of the world historical scene are
aprioristic belief-systems resting on definitive foundations is widely
recognized for the Leninist Instances. If it is less usual to regard
Leninism as justifying and mystifying on behalf of a dominant social
group, this is in part because, from a bourgeois standpoint, itself
ideological, it seems like a proseletyzing faith. I see its primary
function as justification of the rule of the leadership of a party over
its members, of the rule, present or future, of a party over society;
and as mystification of the people. Leninist Marxism turns out therefore
to be an ideology of state-dominion that merges with — appropriates or
perhaps is appropriated by — ideologies of nationalism. Social
democracy, of course, has found accommodation with capitalist ideology.)
Anarchism, by contrast, while not free of ideological tendency, has
never been dominated or delimited by the theories of its philosophical
and scientific proponents. Those anarchists who have advocated doctrinal
unification have usually affiliated eventually with Marxist parties, as
have advocates (the same persons most often) of party-like organizations
intended to lead and direct popular movements of social revolution. The
anarchist belief is fundamental that no person, no theory, no historical
process, stands higher than oneself, and that life does not yield
primacy to thought abstracted from it. The most significant legacy from
the past therefore is certain values and (especially) principles, the
lives, and often the deaths, of exemplary and heroic persons, and
cautionary experiences. Resolve and action, knowledge of one’s desires
and goals, is what matters: which is to say that Marxist accusations of
voluntarism do not malign anarchism.
Mannheim’s classification of anarchism as utopian rather than
ideological — because it seeks to sunder and not to sustain the social
present — has much to recommend it but is still not accurate and is
prejudicial moreover in that ‘utopian’ (as much as ‘ideological’) was
for Mannheim a term of contrast to the realistic methods of liberal
social-scientific meliorism. Anarchism, non-ideological and prior to
philosophy and to science, we may best, if with slight semantical
awkwardness, speak of as an Idea: a mode of speech familiar to at least
some anarchists, certainly to those in the Spanish and Italian
traditions.
Characterization as an Idea situates anarchism in that constellation or
cosmos of Ideas, kindred in spirit one to another although wholly
concordant by no means, that assumed major significance in the
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Europe and the Americas:
Ideas of socialism, reason, liberty, equality, democracy, mankind,
progress, history, the nation. Certain of these, such as anarchism and
socialism, expressed social ideals directly; certain, among them
socialism, and the idea of the nation equally fatefully, became the
source of later ideologies. We lack an unambiguous name for that
pre-ideological mode of thought; idealistic may be best but in a sense
that is pre-philosophical and discontinuous with philosophic Idealism.
(The sense of Idea here is not Hegel’s but that of a recently emerged
mode of thought that he sought to understand and appropriate. He blamed
the abstract. Ideas for the course of the French Revolution, not
realizing, or preferring not to see that although they were undoubtedly
used as manipulative abstractions, i.e., ideologically, by the wielders
of new power, they had meaning enough, and concretely, for the poor and
oppressed.)
An Idea like anarchism, as I conceive it, is a thought, a thinking, a
conviction, a desire, an aim, a vision of life, whose nature is an
insistence that it be realized and whose full meaning is to become
manifest only in its realization. It expresses a potentiality of human
being, recognizable by human beings and embraceable as a goal that
together they endeavor to consummate. It exists in (and as) social
movements, in (and as) movements of mind, in (and as) the lives,
actions, and experiences of persons. It has ground in the social present
and objectivity and potential reality as a shared and social aim.
Although capable of articulation, it is not essentially conceptual,
certainly not rationalistic. At its core, as its matter, as its material
source, is feeling — feelings about relations among human beings, about
personal identity and worth, about human being.
In terming anarchism an Idea, I mean to convey specifically that it is
non-doctrinal; that it has always been understood rather than defined;
that it gives shared meaning to deep-felt longings; that it indicates an
ideal aim for which a social movement, of everyday human beings who in
practice will often enough contradict their ideals, is called forth;
that it expresses an ought that is an anticipation of its object of
striving; that it serves as object of faith, as ground of solidarity and
mutual aid; that it has been enriched but not transformed essentially by
supporting speculations. and reasoned argument; and that it has remained
continuously and intensely in touch with its originating ideals.
By no means does this anarchism signify mindlessness, irrationalism or
an anti-intellectual attitude — a misinterpretation common in the
youth-radical movements of the 1960’s, possibly reflecting confusion
between (in my terminology) ideas and ideology. On the contrary,
self-education, thinking through and discussing exhaustively the meaning
and consequences of one’s basic beliefs, being their master and not
their servant, these are implicit in the anarchist Idea and were the
norm, and frequently the practice, of traditional anarchist movements.
To say that this Idea is a thought seeking its realization is to say
that it demands a maximum of social inventiveness and practical
imagination, that it demands (again) that one know what one wants. It is
opposite to obedience to ideas abstracted from life and to action
uninformed by thought. This, rather than the anarchism of one or another
theorist, is the anarchism whose meaning I shall try to bring forth.
The fact that the anarchism in question remained essentially an Idea
grounded in feeling does not mean that this Idea has no history or
evolution, but I shall not attempt to deal with that evolution here.
With the foregoing formal conception of anarchism in mind, I now offer a
statement of its content.
The theme of political sovereignty will be the point of departure, with
proviso that we adopt the wide sense of ‘politics’ employed by
contemporary feminists who by speaking of sexual politics have drawn
notice to a veritable host of politics.
(“The term ‘politics’ shall refer to power-structured relationships,
arrangements whereby one group of persons is controlled by another. By
way of parenthesis one might add that although an ideal politics might
simply be conceived of as the arrangement of human life on agreeable and
rational principles from whence the entire notion of power over others
should be banished, one must confess that this is not what constitutes
the political as we know it, and it is to this that we must address
ourselves.” Kate Millett, Sexual Politics, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1970, pp.
23–24.)
On this model (the political as we know it) we may conceive of the
politics of production and consumption, the politics of education, the
politics of race, the politics of religion, the politics of art, the
politics of age — and the politics of every social sphere, the
conventionally political included, in which a group or class or caste
dominates others, or some institutional complex rules the lives of
people. In many of these spheres, exchangeable slogans of freedom and
liberation, and more problematic slogans of power as well, have been
raised.
As might be expected, there is also a politics of liberation — a
politics of overt or covert power-structures that control particular
movements of liberation.
We shall have in mind, then, a panoply of political relationships, among
them, masters and slaves, governors and governed, propertied and
propertyless, employers and employees, male and female, teachers and
students, old and young (and young and old), dominant and subjugated
races, party leaders and party members, bureaucrats and clients, labor
leaders and rank and file, commanders and troops, priests and their
flocks (and on some views: God and human being), imperial nations and
subject-peoples, liberators and those whom they propose to liberate.
With respect to each of the power-relationships one can identify a
‘distinctive ideology, sometimes formally articulated, although rarely
with the thoroughness of orthodox Leninism, sometimes primitive or
parasitic on other ideologies.
Anarchism can be understood as the generic social and political Idea
that expresses negation of all power, sovereignty, domination, and
hierarchical division, and a will to their dissolution; and expresses
rejection of all the dichotomizing concepts that on ground of Nature,
Reason, History, God or other, divide people into those dominant and
those justly subordinated. Anarchism is therefore far more than
anti-statism, but government (the state), as claimant to ultimate
sovereignty and hence to the right to outlaw or legitimate particular
sovereignties, and because sustained from self-interest by those who
guard particular fiefs and turfs, stands at the center of the web of
social dominion and is appropriately the focus of anarchist critique.
Anarchism is anti-political, therefore, in a comprehensive sense for
which electoral and parliamentary abstentionism is a fitting symbol.
The relationship between the anarchist idea and my definition of
ideology is by now obvious: a relationship justified by the aptness of
the anarchist perspective for assessment of the exploitation of ideas by
power and the ideologizing of ideas, a project to which Marxism
contributes mightily but which its own commitment to power betrays. For
the state itself, traditional political philosophy, above all in the
epoch of the nation-state, has provided consistent ideological support.
Anarchism then is the social and political philosophy that proposes the
eradicating of all divisions between (political) haves and have-nots,
the dissolving rather than the redistributing of power; and the
abolishing of identities of ruler and subject, leader and led, learned
and ignorant, superior and inferior, master and servant, human and
inhuman. If the anarchist ideal were realized, all persons in their
unique individuality would be related to each other in multiple
nonstratified societies of voluntary (freely chosen) association.
Today, individuality signifies, almost invariably, membership in an
elite class or caste, opposite a mass, and depends on (is given
definition by) that membership; such individuality is not authentic
because not properly individual. What is presently thought of as
socialization is a stabilized, preferably frictionless politics to which
the subordinate assent. The aim of anarchism is universal and genuine
individuality and complete socialization, their antithesis overcome by,
precisely, the elimination of constraining and distorting contexts of
power. Then ail persons would be political equals, not in the sense of
equality of power (for anarchism negates social power) or necessarily of
goods but in the sense that no one, no group, and no institution would
rule, control, decide for or dominate another. There would be society,
but no polity.
Individuality (uniqueness) and the socialization of human existence, so
reconceived, can be identified as basic values of anarchism, values in
turn describable as social freedom. Justice will no longer be defined in
terms of distribution, or of rights that presuppose sovereignty,
certainly not by lawfulness. If slavery be taken as metaphor for
domination, applicable literally or nearly so to many of its forms,
justice and injustice of institutions can be defined in terms of slavery
so that an Institution is unjust if and insofar as persons implicated in
it are the slaves of others. However benign and altruistically
intentioned, slaveries violate human being systematically and
essentially, and this cannot be made-good. The master of course thinks
otherwise, and otherwise say his ideologies.
Plainly, to strive for the total abolition of slaveries is not the only
possible mode of response to their recognition: if it were, there would
be no liberalisms or Marxisms and anarchists would be everywhere. If
convinced that abolition is Impossible, one may choose to mitigate,
reform or exchange systems of power; without devaluing freedom, one
might not hope for more than marginal and sporadic realization of it.
Except for incidental remarks, I shall avoid discussion of practicality
and the philosophical problems concerning judgment of it, problems that
are particularly difficult because the generalization of anarchist
attitudes toward institutions might have significant results, in keeping
with anarchist values, even if the ideal aim were never approximated. I
limit myself to trying to exhibit the meaning of the anarchist Idea, a
project prior to, even though not fully distinguishable from, judgments
of practicality, and necessary (I believe) because the degree to which
an anarchist perspective restructures perception and anticipation of
human being, of society, and of history, is rarely appreciated
sufficiently.
(Sometimes the characteristics of anarchism discussed here are
expressed, by anarchists and others, as anti-authoritarianism. This is
an unhappy mode of expression, first because anti-authoritarianism is
professed by numerous and diverse political groups; second because there
are forms of authority that do not entail power over persons; third
because authority is that to which power pretends and which its ideology
claims for it; and for other reasons. Authority that is specifically and
voluntarily delegated is not power-over-persons, although it may be
converted to such power. Recognition of the authority of technical
competence is not submission to power, unless the technically competent
are permitted to determine ends as well as means, or to determine means
in a fashion that determines ends. The authority of each in his or her
own sphere of activity is a way of enunciating the freedom of each.
Analysis of authority, to distinguish the genuine from the spurious, has
been lacking in anarchist literature; the problem is met squarely by
Giovanni Baldelli’s Social Anarchism, N. Y.: Atherton Press, 1971. from
which I have learned much.)
Persons familiar with early Marx might suggest that I have just
described uncorrupted Marxism. The matter is worth pursuit both for its
own sake — since I believe Marxism and anarchism to represent truly
basic alternatives — and in order to bring out other important
dimensions of the anarchist Idea, especially its temporality.
Marx might be called a philosophical anarchist in the sense of the
phrase that signifies affirmation of anarchy as an ideal without present
relevance. The conflict between Marx and the anarchists in the First
International makes it clear that Marx did not in organizational
practice or revolutionary program share the anarchists’ negativity
toward power. He demanded control by the central organization over the
sections; he insisted on programmatic unity, in effect the enforcement
of agreement to truths of a leadership-elite; he destroyed the
International rather than permit it to be an association of solidarity
in diversity; he emphatically rejected the anarchist thesis that the
abolition of the state was a present concern. Anarchist criticism of
Marxism, in addition to unjustly Identifying Marx with later dialectical
materialism, sometimes overstresses the historical personage Karl Marx
but, besides foreshadowing the political and ideological practice of
future socialism, including the Leninist monoliths, his behavior
reflects his conception of power and freedom.
The ideals sometimes (not so very frequently) affirmed in Marxism may
not be significantly opposed to those of anarchism; but for all the time
between the present and, in Marxism, the eventual realization of the
ideal there is systematic variance. For Marx as for Marxism, no-power,
to the extent acknowledged, is beyond History, while for anarchists it
is within History, within the present, immanent as potentiality in the
present.
Anarchism provides, as I have indicated, a critique of the politics of
liberation itself — a critique that only a few Marxists have attempted.
Basic to Marxism is the view that economic power is the key to a
liberation of which the power of a party, the power of government, and
the power of a specific class are (or are to be) instruments. Basic to
anarchism is the opposing view that the abolition of dominion and
tyranny depends upon their negation, in thought and when possible
action, in every form and at every step, from now on, progressively, by
every individual and group, in movements of liberation as well as
elsewhere, no matter the state of consciousness of entire social
classes. Thus, anarchists see in Marxism an illusion of liberation and
the creation of new structures of power that forever defer it and that
nullify spontaneous liberations briefly tolerated. Correlatively, in the
anarchist view the choices and actions of individuals are important for
those persons, for their milieu, and for all of us; in the view of
Marxists, collectivities and their actions alone have significance, are
alone objectively real (this has turned out to be the operational
meaning of Marx’s famous Feuerbach-thesis on the individual).
Congruently with theory, the strategies of Marxist movements have been
strategies for conquest and use of power, strategies of affirmation of
politics. In every country ruled by Marxists the basic politics, i.e.
the basic structures of state, have been perpetuated, or if in collapse
reinstituted and revivified, a fact that lends support to the claim that
anarchism is the only social philosophy that asserts an alternative to
the politics of power. (Of the various liberalisms, the anarchist
critique need not be spelled out.)
In the light of the preceding, certain familiar Marxist polemics against
anarchism can be subjected to inversion: the result is polemical also
but perhaps not unfair. Rather than anarchism, it may be Marxism, with
its vision of post-historical transcendence, that is apocalyptic and
utopian. Anarchism rather than Marxism may be capable of sustaining a
conception of genuine social dialectic, for Marx’s theory of
superstructure and the primacy of impersonal economic forces inhibits,
if it does not entirely rule out, an apprehension of continuous
interplay among the many arenas of politics and liberation. It may be
anarchism that implies the more complete view of anthropos because it
does not by abstraction obscure and ignore the psychology and the now so
important sociology of power. And it may be not anarchism but Marxism,
with its econocentrism, its controlling dialectic of technology and
property, that is simplistic and naive.
In the section that follows, part of the meaning of the above theses
will be developed.
Recent revival of interest in anarchism, and the tendency of some North
American and Western European Marxists to revise Marxism in libertarian
directions, allow explanation in terms of the present discussion.
First, anarchism is the natural generic expression for the many
particular movements of liberation, including a number that have emerged
in force only recently. As such a generic Idea, anarchism implies these
liberations, and most lines of argument against particular
power-and-dominance relations tend conversely to generalize to the
anarchist position. Not merely awareness of twentieth century extensions
of state-power, therefore, has given anarchism contemporary relevance
both for radical youth and for various intellectuals and social
philosophers.
Anarchism does more than unify the many themes of liberation. For those
who suspect that power rather than wealth may be the root of oppression,
and that power may be the more comprehensive concept, anarchism offers a
framework of explanation. Marxist have generally derived racism from the
interest of the wealthy classes in dividing the mass of the people
against one another; one does not have to deny this interpretation all
validity to see that the psychology of social or ethnic domination, for
the sake of domination, may be a deeper theme. It has been difficult, in
view of the imperialist actions of the Russian state, to attribute
imperialism and wars to economic and profit considerations primarily. In
many other spheres, the sphere of liberation included, we see power
sought after from motives deeper than a theory centered upon economics
accounts for; while a theory centering upon power is capable of
explaining also the seemingly irrational intensity of acquisitive
behavior.
Third, it is becoming Increasingly apparent that to speak about a ruling
class in the present era is totally inadequate. Nationally and
internationally, the economics of capitalist distribution retains its
disproportionality of wealth and poverty but now power is corporate and
bureaucratic. Even that statement falls short, and phrases like
‘military-industrial complex’ seem ineluctably apt. Individuals and
groups face elaborate structures of power, national and transnational,
and their self-sense, even at relatively high levels of privilege, is
likely to be one of powerlessness, helplessness, insecurity. The class
that rules is not exactly a class of persons but more like an
institutional complex whose administrative and managerial technicians
work, one may say with only slight exaggeration, to job-description.
Even if we define this personnel, together with the major beneficiary
individuals and families, as the ruling class, it remains nonetheless,
in the U.S.A. as in the U.S.S.R., an impersonal power with replaceable
figureheads. The power demands of the American ‘60’s expressed a sense
of contemporary society’s, not America’s alone, central problematic: the
abstraction of power from persons in the form of bureaucratic society,
managerial society, etc. Anarchism becomes more plainly relevant when
power itself, not this group or that class of persons, reveals itself as
the truth of the nation-state and of international capitalism and
nationalistic socialism, and when power rather than wealth is the prime
image of success, the one model presented for emulation.
Fourth, from many sources have come reasons to believe that any theory
that finds the secret of human liberation in something so specific as
the politics of property neglects the interdependence of the many
liberations. Each species of dominance and power re-enforces other
species, directly in ways that can be mapped sociologically, indirectly
by requiring and engendering habits of rule and/or submission. Children
who have undergone hierarchically structured families and schools will
be most fortunate if enabled by countervailing experiences to affirm
themselves thereafter in non-power-structured situations, or to relate
freely and responsibly as persons with persons, or to resist power
rationally rather than by brief rebellion. Solidarity among, professedly
antagonistic groups against challenge from below — the solidarity of
union officials and corporate managers, to name a familiar type — is in
striking contrast to the normal and self-defeating non-solidarity, most
often mutual hostility, of oppressed groups from different categories.
As we proceed more deeply into a world of Institutional management of
human existence, and in that evolution might be approaching, if we have
not already passed, a point of no return, questions of liberation
increasingly reveal themselves as a single issue of manifold human
liberation.
Fifth, the interdependence of the many liberations suggests that human
liberation must be a continuous process and that the anarchist method of
seeking to transform qualitatively the scene of one’s life, of trying to
create spheres of freedom, even when one cannot affect large social
institutions of property and government directly, may be a meaningful
and necessary part of a multidimensional process of liberation in which
many are active in varied and particular ways. This can be expressed by
saying that anarchism proposes the continuous realization of freedom in
the lives of each and ail, both for its intrinsic, immediate values and
for its more remote effects, the latter unpredictable because they
depend on the unpredictable behaviors of persons not known and of
nonpersonal historical processes.
Nevertheless, anarchism remains extraordinarily difficult to adopt other
than philosophically, i.e., intellectually, for it makes a severe
dialectical demand: that persons envision and find ways to overcome a
condition of objective and subjective powerlessness and futility, not by
seeking power or planning its seizure, or by pleading with power, and so
on, which are the ways of politics and the ways also by which people
attempt to cope with everyday oppressions, frustrations, and
resentments, but by negating power absolutely and choosing
powerlessness. (Choice of powerlessness does not, however, imply
passivity or lack of militancy. Anarchism and Taoism have much in common
— but anarchism is not a way of merely personal salvation.) The demand
is severe, given, in the U.S.A. for specific example, a society that is
barren of public ideas other than the power-oriented; given a prevailing
ethics that allows one to do whatever one wants so long as no one is
hurt very directly; given that authentic models of liberty,
individuality, and free cooperation are scarce; given a superficial but
malignant pessimism about human being; given a complex of overlapping
hierarchies such that all but a few people are relatively superb r to
others who are institutionally inferior; given a communications
technology that provides a year-round circus of politics for the
entertainment and mystification of the citizenry; given the rage,
hatred, fear, envy that pervade the nation. Although the youth-radical
movements of the late ‘60’s in the U.S.A. exhibited so many familiar
themes of anarchism that the Movement might be described as
protoanarchist, a plausible interpretation of its collapse is that
(mainly unacknowledged, often magical) expectations of power, even of
instant power, were unfulfilled. Neo-Marxisms that retain a basic
affirmation of power and a reassuring vision of power-through-history,
while seeking to qualify themselves by incorporating libertarian themes,
make lesser psychological and ethical demands.
Whether, in a society (and world) in which the reality and ideality of
power are ubiquitous, anarchism, in the sense of generic liberation, can
have meaning other than to be a way of life for a small number, would
seem to depend on the possibility that the transcendence of power, i.e.,
integral freedom, becomes by many persons concretely imaginable,
concretely thinkable, as the resolution and liquidation of the
power-and-powerlessness polarity. Because such a consciousness has never
yet been realized on a large social scale, with the partial exception of
a certain period in Spain, its potentialities have never been tested.
But the choice of powerlessness, the choice, if run one must, to run
with the hares and not with the hounds, and, beyond that, the choice to
reject such definition of options, is a choice open to each person as a
life-choice, and its intrinsic meanings are not invalidated either by
choices others make or by verdicts of mindless History.
I should like now to begin to present certain implications of an
anarchist view of power and liberation.
In theories justificatory of anarchism one encounters a confusing
variety of ethical arguments — a variety attributable in part but not
entirely to the authors’ desire to emphasize either the theme of
individuality or the theme of sociality. In anarchist movements and the
lives of anarchists, however, one finds something simpler — a consistent
emphasis upon principles and action from principle. Herein I believe
lies a key to the ethical meanings of anarchism.
To the bourgeois, anarchist principle signifies fanaticism, to Marxists
an unrealistic and irresponsible unadaptibility to objective
circumstance and historical necessity. On principle anarchists abstain
from all elections, refuse to form or support political parties or
party-like organizations, refuse to appeal to or accept the aid of
government to achieve immediate desired ends, refuse to accept positions
of power, oppose and seek the downfall of liberal as well as overtly
tyrannical states, oppose all wars and resist military service, refuse
to be married by state or church, and so on. Anarchists refuse to
recognize laws, courts, and police authorities, refuse to defend
themselves by accepted legal procedures. Anarchists make a principle of
direct (i.e., personal and non-mediated) action, a principle of
solidarity, a principle of personal responsibility. In general the word
‘compromise’ means for anarchists compromise of principles, and has only
pejorative connotations. The conclusion would be difficult to avoid,
that this inflexibility is somehow intrinsic to anarchism.
Action from principle has in different contexts very different meanings.
In the anarchist context these various principles, this attachment to
principle, this ethics and politics of strict (but not absolute)
principle, all this becomes intelligible and coherent when the various
principles are referred to a single principle, that one should neither
exercise nor submit to power over persons, either by collectivities or
persons; with the correlative belief that the downfall of power depends
upon action from this principle. By this interpretation, negation of
power can be described as the principle-of-principles of anarchist
action: in the end, perhaps it is, or should be conceived as the only
principle.
(It is important to note that the principles mentioned are nearly all
negative principles. Plainly they call for the supplement of concrete
alternative actions fitted to circumstances, and an anarchist movement
that knows nothing but its negative principles is a movement in decay.)
I believe that the central anarchist principle is best understood in
interconnection with certain more general ideas: that the individual is
the basic social reality; that individual voluntary consent is the
ground of cooperation (giving one’s word, in the traditional anarchist
movements, is the bond that unites); that everyone, oneself not
excepted, is responsible for their actions; that social freedom depends
on the self-discipline of each; and that the assumption of power or
submission to power in any sphere of human activity is a negation of the
fundamental reality of individuals, a negation intrinsically incapable
of offset by other types of considerations. These ideas are, I would
argue, existentially although not formally reciprocal, and are implicit
in the negation of power-overpersons as presented in Section II above.
(The argument would be difficult and would probably turn on explication
of ‘individual as basic social reality.’ Here I note only that ‘basic
social reality’ does not entail ‘basic metaphysical reality.’)
In two areas besides the question of property — which will be discussed
separately — anarchists have differed sharply about principles. The
dispute between anarchists who distrust formal organization, anarchist
as well as other, and for whom the term ‘organization’ is pejorative,
and those who hold organization to be essential, would seem chiefly to
represent a difference in sociological and psychological judgment,
disguised by semantics of ‘organization’ and ‘association,’ as to
conditions under which the individual is lost and power emerges. No
fundamental questions of ethics seem implicated.
The other area, deeply problematic, is that of pacifism, violence, and
revolution. The main anarchist tradition has been revolutionary in a
sense that endorses violence as a means of resisting and destroying the
apparatus of force and violence by which power is maintained. (That the
free society should be non-violent is agreed.) Within the framework of
anarchist principle, it can be argued reasonably that violence against
an oppressor who maintains his position by violence is not itself an act
of oppression since one does not seek to (and will not) enslave or bring
into subjection that person. The violence-affirming or
violence-condoning tendency would seem to be asserting that negation of
master/servant (slave) relationships takes priority over the claims to
respect for life of those who insist on being masters and, by violence,
direct or indirect, make that insistence good. Unfortunately, major
social oppression defends itself usually by hired or conscript
instruments — and, when defeated, by foreign armies. All these persons
are oppressors in their instrumental roles, and subject to seduction and
corruption by those roles, yet many in their own way are victims.
Here the anarchist who accepts violence is beyond clear guidance of
principle. Even in its terrorist phases, however, anarchist violence has
almost always been directed expressly and scrupulously against
principals or executives of political and economic oppression, so that,
by comparison with the anticivilian terror-warfare of governments, or
nationalist guerrilla warfare, or routine police terrorism in countless
nations, to say nothing of the savage reprisal taken upon defeated
working classes all through history, anarchist terrorism is ridiculously
misnamed. Prevalence of an ethics of principle, rather than a
utilitarianism that lends itself to selfdeception, may be a major ground
for this (self-) control; while the centering of principle in
power-negation rules out the taking of hostages or other instrumental
treatments of persons that are the usual transition from resistance to
militarized warfare. The breakdown of anarchist principle in the Spanish
anarcho-syndicalist movement, especially during the civil war and
revolution, is a large and complex topic into which I cannot enter here.
In twentieth century anarchism, not merely within the Tolstoyan
tradition, pacifism has been an important minoritarian tendency. Whether
evolutionary or non-violently revolutionary, pacifist anarchism asserts
that violence is even clearer negation of human being than is power, is
perhaps even the genus of power, and introduces into anarchism a concept
of love much stronger than the fraternity of the main tradition —
universal, because unlike fraternity not restricted to solidarity of the
oppressed — and tends thereby to transform the concept of the individual
and the concept of freedom. Love will then be the ultimate positive
concept, opposite to violence. I think that one can say that an
anarchist, of whatever specific persuasion, who does not feel (more than
think) such love and non-violence as ultimate values has not fully
experienced the meaning of anarchism, although love and non-violence are
not easily lived in the midst of the oppression and suffering of others.
In a sense, therefore, the motion of anarchism toward a full ethics of
love, although a motion intrinsic to the Idea, remains to be realized,
and may be realizable only in transition to anarchist society.
In certain anarchist theories, it should be noted, one finds instead of
appeal to principle, essentially utilitarian arguments against the
state, based on historical and scientific studies, that would have no
more than analogical presumption of applicability to other
power-relationships. The contentions of Kropotkin and Rocker, that the
arts and sciences, peace, evolutionary progress, would be favored by
abolition of the nationstate suggest that the question of political
decentralization, anti-statism in a narrow sense, may be distinct and
separable from other questions of power, and such writers have tended to
be somewhat less forceful in their critique of other forms of power.
(Both Kropotkin in 1914 and Rocker in 1939 found it possible to support
the Allied governments at war.) Bookchin’s ecological justification of
anarchism is kindred in method although he is rather more sensitive to
other issues.
With respect to anarchist movements and their ethos, however, I do not
see such speculation as foundational, and I would agree with Malatesta,
whose explicit voluntarism may have expressed most nearly the spirit of
the historical movement and the anarchist idea, that Kropotkin would
have been an anarchist even if his biological and historical theories
had been refuted. If so, the utilitarian and historical arguments would
be confirmatory or, perhaps, a ground recognizable and acceptable to
persons in the middle-privileged strata of society, for whom the
perspective of the oppressed, which is the perspective of anarchism, and
the anger of the oppressed, to which anarchism gives voice, often
stridently, might otherwise be strange, disquieting and frightening,
even abhorrent. Doubtfully would such arguments sustain the passion
invested in the Idea, a faith for which many have given their lives.
The arguments which I see as having priority are, rather than
utilitarian, arguments of morality (justice) or arguments of freedom,
or, when the argument takes eudemonistic form, appeal to actualization
of human being. I am not suggesting inconsistency in an anarchism
grounded in utilitarianism, especially if the concept of utility is
broad; I do suggest the utilitarianism, well-suited to decision-making
in collectivist societies and systems of sovereignty, does not much lend
itself to expression of anarchist intent.
The role of principle in anarchist thought and action, as I understand
it, is to liberate the positive ethical life of human beings. Thus the
principle of power-negation is rather a constitutive principle of the
desired society than a rule for life within that society. Put more
concretely: an authentic relationships between persons, as understood by
anarchists, presupposes the absence of power of some over others, but
‘absence of power’ says nothing positive about the content of that
relationship, and that content will be the creation of those persons.
If such is the meaning of anarchist principles, it would seem to follow
that intercourse in an anarchist society would be conducted under
conditions of voluntary agreement (often tacit, of course) and personal
responsibility-for this seems to be what one would mean by ‘absence of
power.’ Faith in the possibility of anarchist society, then, would
signify faith that, in the absence of structured power, of dominant and
subordinate classes, and of habits of deference to authority and
exercise of power, human beings can use the gift of speech and other
subtle forms of communication to resolve their Intercourse into mutually
beneficial patterns or into intelligent confrontation and disagreement
and if necessary pacific disassociation, without need for commandments
of morality.
One would not, however, say of such a society that it is post-ethical —
as one might of a Marxist society, after the state has withered at last,
in which the economic form of communism would be the sociological
realization of the ethical. Of anarchy one might say instead that ethics
had resolved itself into new human being, a metaphor that would signify
that faith and trust of persons toward persons, rather than contingent
modes of cooperation, would be the vital center. Put otherwise: nothing
secures an anarchist society, whether of large extent or of communesize
or consisting of just two persons, except continuous realization of the
human potentiality for free agreement and disagreement, always in
recognition of the personhood of the other. If anarchism does not remain
clear to the last of the institutional thinking that Marxists call
materialist, it must finally become incoherent and the individualism (or
personalism) that, twinned with the corresponding version of sociality,
is the soul of anarchism, would be threatened with extinction.
In a society of hierarchies — of discriminations against classes or
castes and condemnation of various large numbers of persons to
particular kinds of limited existence to others’ advantage — coercive
institutional machinery is everything and its guarantee and enforcement
by state-power is of the social essence. If we think of voluntary
action, choice, decision, autonomy, as central to the meaning of being
human — as the main philosophical traditions assert — then anarchism can
be understood as seeking to dissolve those institutions of power that
make life-decisions for us, that offer to substitute themselves for our
freedom and relieve us of burdens of responsibility, and do so whenever
they successfully coerce us to accord our will to their demands. Then,
anarchism is expressive of a will to restore, and/or create, personhood
and human being; whereas in surrendering to or exercising dominion one
substitutes for oneself an institutional definition. an institutional
being, one ceases to be oneself. It will be plain, I think, given these
premises, that by voluntary surrender of freedom, by submission to a
protectorate such as the Hobbesian state is claimed to be, one yields
far more than the exercise of certain liberties.
It may now be clear why a name (an-archist) negative by etymology is
appropriate to the import of anarchism.
This appropriateness can be illustrated with respect to a familiar
species of power, that of racial oppression. If the thoroughgoing
negation of racial oppression is, as one might reasonably think, a
society in which recognition of racial identity has vanished, or in
which racial terms, if indeed sense can be made of them when oppression
does not define them, have become minor descriptive terms without social
consequence, then it would be foolish to ask what the theory of this
raceless society would be or how it would deal with racial relations.
For the U.S. integrationist movement of the 1950’s the slogan Freedom
Now said all that need be said, just as, more than a century before,
Abolition, a saying that of course earned one the title ‘fanatic,’ a
title yet to be repealed, was all that needed be said of chattel
slavery.
A second illustration, less obvious because even now barely thinkable,
would be a society, usually called androgynous, in which recognition as
male and female would make reference to nothing but certain
physiological matters and reproductive capacities and would be
non-indicative of personality, economic role, or worth. Sexes would not
constitute classes (or more exactly castes) and sexual identity would
have only the significance that each chose to give to it. What this
means requires no elaborate explanation, only a certain imagination, an
ability to rid oneself of preconceptions and to conceive of what seems
incapable of being thought without contradiction. What will be the
relations between the sexes in such a society? — the question makes
erroneous assumptions.
From every locus of power, it has always been inconceivable, because
contrary to the aprioris of the sustaining ideology, that its system be
abolished. From the standpoint of the priesthood it has always been
inconceivable that religion dispense with it, that its flock survive
bereft of shepherd.
With respect to the anarchist concept of social existence, the questions
Who will rule? Who will govern? and — what is less obvious intuitively —
Who will decide? become nonrelevant questions. No theory of
total-society decision-making would be called for. Power to the people,
Let the people decide, although of idealistic intention, perpetuate the
sovereignty of the whole and are not anarchist. In practice such
qualified (democratic) sovereignty means that representatives of the
people constitute a class of decision-makers over against a mass that
makes no decisions except (perhaps) to choose their rulers, a choice
inevitably reconstrued as majoritarian. Where the demos rules, power and
its problems remain; a people represented, as Rousseau said, is
enslaved. Anarchy means the dissolution and disappearance of democratic
sovereignty (or its pretense) also.
In an anarchist society every person decides and there is no class of
deciders. Cooperative actions result from voluntary agreements. This is
easier to visualize in a small society lacking complex relations of
production and distribution; larger scale cooperation presumes
longer-term agreements, reliance on the good will of others as norm,
agreement to standard procedures (non-coercive, non-power-based
institutions) to achieve commonly desired ends and to resolve
differences and conflicts. (A principle of individual decision and
voluntary agreement does not mean that driving on right or left, using
metric or nonmetric measures, not to say basic economic practices, are
continually in question and one knows not what to expect in a
topsy-turvy world.) What must be premissed is that the people involved
shall by and large he willing — as the way they live and are, rather
than by reflective commitment — to affirm each other’s humanity and
uniqueness and to pursue their differing interests under conditions of
voluntary agreement and responsibility for their actions.
In saying that everyone decides, one does not mean that each can cause
the world to be as (s)he would wish it: for there can be just one actual
world, and if I willed the world effectively then I would will it for,
and in lieu of, others. The others, instead, present me with their
spontaneity, their choosings, which of course foreclose many practical
possibilities for me; in more than compensation for which, one would
hope, my possibilities are enriched by living in a world of persons who
are themselves choosing rather than living out the consequences of
technology, market, and other impersonal forces that have preempted
their freedom and mystified their intelligence.
Nor, in saying that everyone decides, does one mean that everyone
conceivably affected by a particular decision participates in it. No
doubt we have, in our everyday experience, little ground for confidence
that the people on whom we depend, economically and otherwise, will
reliably do their best; and so we put faith in complex systems of
control over others, and of course over ourselves. But the anarchist
thought is that social cooperation can be founded upon the autonomy and
responsibility of individuals and groups in their spheres of activity,
so that the society is the product of the decisions of all, both
individually and jointly by agreement.
But it is obvious that no class of deciders, non-collectivity, even if
realizable in a moderately complex world, cannot well be applied to all
the familiar kinds of social processes, even if the society were
disburdened of many functions, such as the military, that would have no
possible place in an anarchy.
Practically, if we are all by our choosings to participate in making our
world, it would seem necessary that a principle — a practical rather
than an ethical principle — of minimum large-scale change be followed
generally, so that communication and intelligence be most effective and
so that individual choices, and in consequence agreements, contractual
and tacit, be made within a world one somewhat understands. The restless
technology of our centuries flourishes in a world where institutions of
power impose its innovations, provide its workforce, and manipulate its
consumers, and where dominant classes are eager to magnify their power
and wealth through technological supremacy. Anarchy would not provide
these conditions, nor could anarchist decision-making be expected to
cope with continuous major technological revolution. Ceaseless and rapid
demographic expansion that forces constant dissolution and reformation
of life-complexes (neighborhoods, towns, cities, regions) creates a
turmoil that free people cannot deal with any more intelligently than
can the present Institutions. Many technological patterns already
existing may also make demands for decision-making that cannot well be
met except on a basis of collective institutions that create
bureaucratic and other forms of power. That is, anarchist society would
not be readily compatible, if compatible at all, with certain practical
goals or ways of life or with certain societal rhythms.
In the era of unchallenged technological ideology, to which Marxism
contributed its share, such concessions would have been regarded as
determining conclusively the reactionary nature of anarchism. In the era
of ideologies of progress, they would similarly have stamped anarchism
as impossible of realization just because it does not extrapolate what
was then thought of as progress, and as undesirable because unsuited to
spiralling future progress. Today it may be easier to agree that
incompatibility with certain practical goals is not necessarily a defect
or limitation. The kinds of things that cannot be done well in an
anarchist society may be just those that release the blind and
uncontrolled historical processes that determine much of our existence
in a manner that renders our will ineffectual and that even determines
our will.
Perhaps the major thrust of serious social thinking for two centuries
has been toward solution of the problem of determination by history, by
the past, by yesterday: how shall we be free today to solve today’s
problems? Virtually all of this thinking, however, has posed the
question as one of achieving control. By sheer force, and sometimes also
by social sciences, statist societies seek to master these historical
processes, and have given very little evidence of ability to do so.
(Besides which, the values and interests in terms of which the attempt
is made are plainly those of the controlling groups or institutions.)
This ambition of control is a way of human pride.
In anarchist society human beings would, presumably, seek to free
themselves from processes of institutional momentum by consciously
choosing rhythms of change, and technologies, harmonious with viable
rhythms of life-choice, in order to avoid a need, for survival, to
create institutions of power. That we should cease to court disaster,
that we should simplify and make possible the solution of primary
life-problems in the mode of freedom, should not, especially in view of
the number and magnitude of disasters our species produces for itself,
be an unreasonable negative principle, particularly because there appear
to be no reasons why a comparatively stable and comparatively simplified
society need be reduced to spinning-wheel technology or to
changelessness. We might, if such a society were realized, become able
at last to apply an authentic spirit of experimentation to the practical
problems of life-something virtually impossible under present
conditions.
Anarchist conceptions of individuality and socialization can be made
clearer through brief consideration of the relation between anarchist
theories labelled ‘individualist’ or ‘mutualist’ and those labelled
‘communist’ or ‘syndicalist.’ In these remarks I shall not encompass
certain bourgeois individualisms that call themselves anarchist but have
nothing in common with anarchism as a social movement and historic idea;
for example, so-called anarcho-capitalism.
The main anarchist movements communist or syndicalist, endeavor to
encompass the aspiration to socialism, so that predoctrinal socialism
could be regarded as that aspect of (generic) anarchism that is
specifically concerned with the politics of production, distribution,
and wealth. Individualist and mutualist anarchism, however, usually deny
that community or society have even the secondary substantiality
accorded to them in the communist or syndicalist versions. In the
present world (it is held) society and community are fictions by which
some individuals, cooperating for the purpose, justify their violent
domination and exploitation of others; while what might be mistakenly
regarded as community or society in a condition of true freedom would
actually be no more than the sum of the unhindered actions of
individuals and their associations. For individualists, the mutually
advantageous cooperation of individuals would be achieved through an
agreed-upon medium or principle of exchange and other conventions
intended to guarantee maximally the self-sovereignty of the individual.
But it is the plain intended consequence of the individualists’
proposals that the ends identified here earlier as socialist be achieved
— if one regards collective ownership as but one proposed means for the
abolition of classes and of kinds of property, governmentally
legitimated and protected, that make possible the exploitation of person
by person. The American individualist anarchist Stephen Pearl Andrews
(The Science of Society, 1848), while rejecting the forms in which
democracy and socialism were usually conceived, wrote that the
sovereignty of the individual represented the fulfillment of the spirit
of both, and the later individualist Benjamin Tucker held that
individualism was that species of socialism which chose the way of
liberty against the way of invasive autority, to which latter, he
thought, the anarchist communists, wittingly or unwittingly, succumbed.
And if the principle that every person decides correctly expresses the
communist and syndicalist versions of anarchism, the self-sovereignty
dear to individualists is given full recognition.
There is however plainly a tension between thinking of a society of free
individuals and thinking of a society of free individuals, particularly
if in the first case ‘society’ might better be placed in quotation
marks; and to opt for one or the other is to invite practical and
psychological consequences, perhaps just because one’s choice reflects
one’s sense of what is more painfully lacking in one’s world. In an
ethic of individualism, with its economic corrolaries, Kropotkin saw
something reminiscent of capitalist apologetics for the aggressive and
acquisitive and exploitative individual; in Kropotkin’s visions of
communism the individualists saw the absorption of the individual into a
sovereign whole.
Just this tension between individualism and socialism, experienced by
every anarchist movement, might be seen as rendering anarchism
indecisive and ineffectual. Looked at from the standpoint of ideas, or
of the search for requirements to fulfill a vision of human being, this
same tension can be seen as preserving anarchism against that tendency
to surrender to sovereignty of the whole, at first disguised and then
overt and practically irreversible, that individualists fear in
anarchist communism and which Marxist communism has again and again
instantiated. (If communism and syndicalism are more than standard
procedures, or institutions. in the sense of the preceding section, if
they do not allow for effective choice of alternatives, they are
incompatible with anarchism.) Malatesta’s anarchism, which rejected
hyphenation and sectarianism, sought to preserve this tension within an
unqualified undivided anarchism. Until and unless the polarity of
Individual and society is resolved into a world without social power, it
would seem important that a movement of people and ideas directed to
that end remain acutely conscious of the polarity and by one or another
means preserve that tension; for it is, on the anarchist view, only in
an anarchical society that individuality and sociality can cease to be
in systematic conflict.
The individualism of anarchism is no doubt equivocal, especially because
it must be prepared to let go ultimately what it jealously guards. But
it is certainly not a bourgeois individualism, as Marxism, beginning
with Marx’s attack on Stirner, has represented it. In Stinrer’s
philosophy, not called anarchist by him but generally affirmed by
individualist anarchists, philosophic egoism is absolute and others are
merely Instruments for my satisfactions. But this egoism is precisely
philosophic rather than psychological which means that egoism does not
bar love of others or voluntary cooperative association (free unions).
Although Stirner, a badly misunderstood philosopher if my reading of him
is correct, wrote of the self-interested self and praised it, he wrote
by habit in the first person plural, thus setting the problem of
uniqueness as the problem of all persons and not the problem (as posed
by Nietzsche later) of an elite or future Mite; he called for a general
rebellion of the unique ones, all of us, in our own behalf.
The question of ‘the individual as basic social reality’ runs deeper,
however, than I have so far pursued it here, deeper indeed than I shall
be able to. How this exploration might run, I shall briefly sketch. At
the center of anarchist critique of existing societies is the thesis
that they are characterized by the submergence of individuals in
networks of power-institutions — so that, insofar, the Marxist method of
analyzing past history in institutional terms is basically correct in
intention, if dogmatic and oversimplifying in its standard applications.
Thus the force of the statement that the individual is the ultimate
social reality is normative and programmatic, and the claim is
inseparable from other aspects of a complex ethical ideal of human
being. Here and now, this reality is an incompletely realized potential.
This view of the individual does not entail Stirner’s metaphysical and
epistemological individualism, which can be regarded as an effort to
ground a normative view in philosophy-proper. Yet, as I hope I have
succeeded in at least suggesting, the affirmation of the individual does
not reach its anarchist meaning, and its complete distinctness from
bourgeois and other alienating conceptions of individuality, until it is
thought in the context of the transcendence of power. For knowledge of
that transcendence we have to rely upon our severely incomplete
experience of ourselves and others in situations of love and caring and
community, where the subjectivity of others is significantly present to
us; about these, and about the anarchist ideal, a language of ‘person’
may be less misleading than a language of ‘individual.’ In that context,
by the hypothesis of anarchism, the individuals cease to be in
systematic antagonism, and ‘individual’ and ‘social’ cease to be
descriptive of conflict.
Such a view of the individual is not, so far as I can see, in essential
conflict with a philosophy of social sciences that prefers, for what I
would consider reasons of methodology, to regard relations as prior and
individuals as derivative.
I have spoken only about anthropos, and a few tentative words, no more,
about Nature and Humanity must be said. In a profound sense, anarchism
is atheistic. (By atheism I mean precisely the negation of theism, not
the negation of religious feeling or of spirituality.) The intense
atheism of traditional anarchism would seem to be more than terrestrial
in its ardor — no mere anticlericalism — and more also than negational
of God as legitimator of governmental and clerical authority.
Anarchist thought gains unity if its atheism is taken as assertion that
human being must establish its freedom within Nature. (By Nature I do
not mean a material universe merely. Nature I understand as coextensive
with what is.) Anarchism then would be expressive of universal rejection
of power, in the symbol, for the case of the institutional Christian
religions, of the Divine Monarch, the universal despot who, on grounds
of transcendental ideology, i.e., theology, claims Man’s obedience and
His priority in being. Correlatively, anarchists have generally set
great store, even excessive store, by science, philosophy, and reason,
thereby expressing faith, I believe, that these means will enable us to
achieve such understanding of Nature as will establish our freedom
within it.
Unlike Marxist socialism, however, unlike Marx, young Marx included,
anarchism is rarely anthropocentrically humanistic in the sense of a
vision of Nature as enemy, menace, object of conquest and control by
technology, arena for human dominance — the inverse of theistic
subjugation. I understand anarchism as affirming humankind and opposing
our subordination or subjugation to either divinities or to natural laws
that we do not understand and make our own — as seeking our freedom but
not our dominance or our independence of Nature.
To be careful I should not say that anarchists have always been clear
about these matters. The Christian context of the Western world to which
anarchism has mainly been limited has not made such clarity easy. I mean
to suggest that anarchism readily extrapolates, and that its spirit
calls for extrapolation, to a certain vision of Nature analogous to its
vision of society; where individual persons, human societies, and the
human species, live in relationship with other individual beings and
species, affirming our being our creative uniqueness, and our freedom,
but not seeking a supremacy that would signify an alienation of
humankind in antagonism to what we cannot control or understand. Thus
the harmony of society and person can be transposed to the larger case,
and anarchism gains force and scope and completion insofar as it stands
for such harmony of persons and world.
Whether only contingently, because anarchism took root mainly outside
Germanic Europe, or for more essential reasons, anarchism does not much
reflect that Feuerbachian humanism, according to which the God-idea is
merely a projection of human ideals, that Marx adopted and by which he
disposed easily of the religious question, with the consequence, one
might speculate, that Nature lost its sacredness, without which it is
difficult if not impossible that human beings be sacred to themselves.
For anarchism, perhaps more Catholic than Protestant in its religious
background and sources, God has had a more serious reality than for Marx
— reality as image of power, as pretended reality of power. One may not
be mistaken — but one may be — in thinking that the angry rebellion of
anarchist against the God of the Christian churches has represented a
profound and thwarted spirituality.
In contemporary anarchist literature, the theme of atheism is less
conspicuous, less urgent — perhaps because our cosmic freedom has been
gained, but in the mode of independence and dominance, or in the mode of
illusion of freedom, and our problem is rather one of rediscovering our
being in Nature, a different religious problem than that of the
God-monarch.
The chief thing that I have wanted to show is that anarchism represents
a fundamental ideal of human existence: that it represents something
other than mere absence of government, something other than the freedom
to do anything one wants, something different than a freedom limited by
what will harm others. It represents instead the aim of social union, on
a ground of unique individuality, where no class or caste divisions
exist between people and where integral individuality and integral
society, non-antithetical, have become two aspects of the same life. The
deepest meaning of this anarchist freedom, if I see rightly the
implications of what I have written, is that certain significant
barriers to the realization of potentialities of human being will have
been broken. Integral individuality and integral society are ancient as
well as modern values, and every system of ethics and social philosophy
could be said to have endeavored to accommodate them to each other. I
suggested that anarchism is a social idea of importance, and not merely
a peculiar kind of member in the series tyranny, monarchy, oligarchy,
democracy... anarchy, because it claims to identify, in power, the
missing clue. It presents both a conception of general and ultimate
social/personal harmony, which may well turn out to be an ideal beyond
reach, and a conception of social/personal harmony in any circumscribed
realm, any relatively closed human system, as small as the sphere of
one’s immediate life-circle, where the negation of Ideologically
justified, socially divisive patterns of domination are (by hypothesis)
a necessary condition for social/personal harmony. As a practical goal,
the free society can hardly recommend itself for its probability,
whatever exactly probability means in such matters; but the Idea
reflects itself, sometimes as a secular philosophy of love, into the
daily life of persons who derive from it their values.
If we are to discuss anarchism as a social philosophy, we will want it
to be more than a set of feelings at the core of an Idea, and something
more than an abstract resolution of power-and-powerlessness. During the
course of this article I have set down a number of propositions, beyond
the initial propositions of the first sections, that I would like to
recapitulate here:
metaphysical) reality;
negation of the fundamental human reality;
affirms the free development of individuality as the condition of
realizing our sense of humanity;
anarchy;
power/powerlessness that can be described as integral freedom;
person decides;
always realizable potentiality;
definition, institutional being, institutional will, for oneself;
from the determinism of history;
ground of union in freedom;
the lives of each and all;
foundation of free society;
continuously.
About these propositions I wish to claim that they indicate a
nonsimplistic view of society and human being that provides a mode of
social analysis, an image of the ethical potentiality of man, and a
proposal of method for realizing that potentiality.
If one is to consider anarchism as a philosophy, one will of course ask
about the nature of metaphysical and epistemological commitments and
their foundation. This question threatens to reintroduce the
fragmentation into schools that I have sought to overcome, for on these
questions anarchist differ sharply and I have chosen to view anarchism
in a way that avoids such commitments. I should like now, however, to
give a positive sense to this avoidance, and I offer the following
thoughts, intended to be no more than suggestive; their elaboration will
have to await another occasion.
We are a puzzle to ourselves, I believe, because we do not fully
experience our own humanity, and this in turn is because we cannot fully
experience the humanity of others so long as we exist in the many
interlocking relations of masterhood and servitude. We yield to those
structures of power in order to live in a human world that preexists
each of us and demands that we discipline ourselves to cultures
organized around Insignia, languages, persons, institutions,
mythologies, and philosophies of power. We move dialectically to a plane
of consciousness of our common humanity, instantiated uniquely in each
person, as we move dialectically to a plane of social existence in which
we wield no power over others and do not allow ourselves to be
determined in our being by the power that they wield. Only then do we
realize the meaning of subjectivity in another or, authentically, in
ourselves. By that move, we bring love to reality, for such recognition
of subjectivity is what I understand by love.
Put otherwise: Certain truths must be brought to be, must be made
living, before their meaning can be apprehended more than negatively.
(Thus anarchism, in this respect like Marxism, transposes the
philosophical questions into questions of actualization and
realization.) What I see in anarchism is the indication that human being
will become adequately self-conscious, and therefore free toward the
future, and dichotomies of thought and action will dissolve, only when
human beings free themselves from one another and, in certain
significant senses, from themselves.
Thus anarchism can be seen as proceeding from the hypothesis that there
is a negative task to be accomplished before we can genuinely experience
ourselves as human beings and grasp our relationships to one another.
Throughout, therefore, anarchism is, ideationally, essentially negative.
Whereas with respect to particular social problems this would be a gross
defect, anarchism is concerned with a far more fundamental kind of
question, and from its vision of the potentialities residing in our
actual human situation its thoroughgoing negativity would seem to follow
and to be the foundation of creation.