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Title: What is Anarchism? Author: Noam Chomsky Date: November 18 2013 Language: en Topics: introductory Source: Transcript of [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oB9rp_SAp2U]] Notes: This is a transcript of the talk that Noam Chomsky gave at MIT Wong Auditorium on November 18, 2013. The event was sponsored by the Boston Review and based on the topic of Chomsky’s new volume, On Anarchism.
It’s hardly a secret that the terms of political discourse are not
exactly models of precision. And considering the way terms are used,
it’s next to impossible to try to get a meaningful answer to such
questions as what is socialism or what is capitalism or what are free
markets and many others in common usage. That’s even more true of the
term “anarchism.” It’s been not only subject to varied use but also
quite extreme abuse, sometimes by bitter enemies, sometimes,
unfortunately, by people who hold its banner high. So much is the
variation and abuse that it resists any simple characterization. In
fact, the only way I can see to address the question that’s posed this
evening, “What is anarchism?” is to try to identify some leading ideas
that animate at least major currents of the rich and complex and often
contradictory traditions of anarchist thought and, crucially, anarchist
action.
I think a sensible approach can start with remarks by the perceptive,
important anarchist intellectual and also activist, Rudolf Rocker. I’ll
quote him. He saw anarchism not as “a fixed, self-enclosed social
system,” with a fixed answer to all the multifarious questions and
problems of human life, but rather as “a definite trend in the historic
development of mankind,” which strives for “the free, unhindered
unfolding of all the individual and social forces in life.” That’s from
the 1930s.
These concepts are not really original. They derive from the
Enlightenment and the early Romantic period. In rather similar words
Wilhelm von Humboldt, one of the founders of classical liberalism, among
many other achievements, described the leading principle of his thought
as “the absolute and essential importance of human development in its
richest diversity.” That’s a phrase that John Stuart Mill took as the
epigraph to his On Liberty.
It follows from that that institutions that constrain such human
development are illegitimate, unless, of course, they can somehow
justify themselves. You find a similar conception widely in
Enlightenment thought, so, for example, in Adam Smith. Everyone has read
the opening paragraphs of The Wealth of Nations, where he extols the
wonders of division of labor, but not many people have gotten farther
inside to read his bitter condemnation of division of labor and his
insistence that in any civilized society the government will have to
intervene to prevent it because it will destroy personal integrity and
essential human rights, will turn people, he said, into creatures as
“stupid and ignorant” as a human can be. It’s not too easy to find that
passage, whatever the reason may be. If you look in the standard
scholarly edition, the University of Chicago Press bicentennial edition,
it’s not even listed in the index, but it’s one of the most important
passages in the book.
Looked at in these terms, anarchism is a tendency in human development
that seeks to identify structures of hierarchy, domination, authority,
and others that constrain human development. And then it seeks to
subject them to a very reasonable challenge: Justify yourself,
demonstrate that you’re legitimate, and maybe in some special
circumstances or conceivably in principle. And if you can’t meet that
challenge, which is the usual case, the structures should be dismantled,
not just dismantled but reconstructed from below.
The ideals that found expression during the Enlightenment and the
Romantic era foundered on the shoals of rising industrial capitalism,
which is completely antithetical to them. But Rocker argues, I think
quite plausibly, that they remain alive in the libertarian socialist
traditions. These range pretty widely. They range from left
anti-Bolshevik Marxism, people like Anton Pannekoek, Karl Korsch, Paul
Mattick, and others, including the anarchosyndicalism that reached its
peak of achievement in the revolutionary period in Spain in 1936. And
it’s well to remember that despite its substantial achievements and
successes, it was crushed by the combined force of fascism, communism,
and Western democracy. They had differences, but they agreed that this
had to be crushed. The effort of free people to control their own lives,
that had to be crushed before they turned to their petty differences,
which we call the Spanish Civil War.
The same tendencies reach further, to worker- controlled enterprises.
They’re springing up in large parts of the old Rust Belt in the United
States, in northern Mexico. They’ve reached their greatest development
in the Basque country in Spain. Mondragon is partly a reflection of the
achievements of the long, complex, rich Spanish tradition of anarchism,
and partly it comes out of Christian anarchist sources. Also included in
this general tendency are the quite substantial and cooperative
movements that exist in many parts of the world, and I think it also
encompasses at least a good part of feminist and human rights activism.
In part, all of this sounds like truism. So why should anyone defend
illegitimate structures? No reason, of course. And I think that
perception is correct. It really is truism, I think. Anarchism basically
ought to be called truism. But truisms have some merit. One of them is
the merit of being true, unlike most political discourse. This
particular truism belongs to an interesting category of principles,
principles that are not only universal but doubly universal: they’re
universal in that they’re almost universally accepted and universal in
that they’re almost universally rejected in practice. There are many of
these.
For example, the general principle that we should apply to ourselves the
same standards we do to others, if not harsher ones. Few would object,
few would practice it. Or more specific policy proposals, like democracy
promotion or humanitarian intervention. Professed generally, rejected in
practice almost universally. All doubly universal. This truism is the
same—the truism that we should challenge coercive institutions of all
kinds, demand that they justify themselves, dismantle and reconstruct
them if they do not. Easy to say, but not so easy to act on in practice.
Proceeding with similar thoughts, I will quote Rocker again. “Anarchism
seeks to free labor from economic exploitation and to free society from
ecclesiastical or political guardianship, and by doing that opening the
way to an alliance of free groups of men and women based on cooperative
labor and a planned administration of things in the interest of the
community.” Rocker was an anarchist activist as well as political
thinker, and he goes on to call on the workers’ organizations, other
popular organizations to create “not only the ideas but also the facts
of the future itself” within the current society. That’s an injunction
that goes back to Bakunin.
One traditional anarchist slogan is “Ni Dieu, ni Maître,” “No God, no
Master.” It’s a phrase that Daniel Guérin took as the title of his very
valuable collection of anarchist classics. I think it’s fair to
understand the phrase “No God” in the terms that I just quoted from
Rocker — opposition to ecclesiastical guardianship. Individual beliefs
are a different matter. That’s no matter of concern to a person
concerned with free development of thought and action. That leaves the
door open to the lively and impressive tradition of religious anarchism,
for example, Dorothy Day’s very impressive Catholic Worker Movement. But
the phrase “no master” is different. That refers not to individual
belief but to a social relation, a relation of subordination and
dominance, a relation that anarchism, if taken seriously, seeks to
dismantle and rebuild from below, unless it can somehow meet the harsh
burden of establishing its legitimacy.
By now we’ve departed from truism and, in fact, to ample controversy. In
particular, right at this point the rather peculiar American brand of
what’s called libertarianism departs very sharply from the libertarian
tradition. It accepts and indeed strongly advocates the subordination of
working people to the masters of the economy and, furthermore, the
subjection of everyone to the restrictive discipline and destructive the
features of markets. These are topics worth pursuing. I’ll take them up
later, if you would like, but I’ll put them aside here, though also
recommending to you about bringing together in some way the energies of
the young libertarian left and right, as indeed sometimes is done. For
example, it’s done in the quite important and valuable theoretical and
practical work of economist David Ellerman and some others.
Anarchism, of course, is famously opposed to the state while at the same
time advocating “planned administration of things in the interests of
the community,” Rocker’s phrase again, and beyond that, broader
federations of self-governing communities at workplaces. In the real
world of today, the same dedicated anarchists who are opposed to the
state often support state power to protect people and society and the
Earth itself from the ravages of concentrated private capital. Take,
say, a venerable anarchist journal like Freedom. It goes back to 1886,
formed as a journal of socialist anarchism by supporters of Kropotkin.
If you open its pages, you will find that much of it is devoted to
defending rights of people, the environment, society, often by invoking
state power, like regulation of the environment or safety and health
regulations in the workplace.
There’s no contradiction here, as sometimes thought. People live and
suffer and endure in this world and not some world that we imagine. And
all the means available should be used to safeguard and benefit them,
even if the long-term goal is to displace these devices and construct
preferable alternatives. In discussing this, I’ve sometimes used an
image that comes from the Brazilian workers’ movement. It’s discussed in
an interesting work by Biorn Maybury-Lewis. They use the image of
widening the floors of the cage. The cage is existing coercive
institutions that can be widened by committed popular struggle. It
happened effectively over many years. And you can extend the image
beyond. Think of the cage of coercive state institutions as a kind of
protection from savage beasts that are roaming outside, namely, the
predatory, state-supported, capitalist institutions that are dedicated
to the principle of private gain, power, domination, with the interest
of the community at most a footnote. Maybe revered in rhetoric, but
dismissed in practice and, in fact, even in Anglo-American law.
It’s also worth remembering that anarchists condemned really existing
states, not visions of unrealized democratic dreams, such as government
of, by, and for the people. They bitterly opposed the rule of what
Bakunin had called “the red bureaucracy,” which he predicted 50 years in
advance would be among the most savage of human creations. They also
opposed parliamentary systems that are instruments of class rule. The
contemporary United States, for example, which is not a democracy, it’s
a plutocracy. That’s very easy to demonstrate. The majority of the
population has no influence over policy. As you move up the
income/wealth scale, you get more and more influence. The very top
people get what they want. Well established by academic political
science but familiar to everyone who looks at the way the world works. A
truly democratic system would be quite different. It would have the
character of “an alliance of free groups of men and women based on
cooperative labor and a planned administration of things in the
interests of the community.”
In fact, that’s not too remote from one version of the mainstream
democratic ideal. Actually, one version. I’ll stress that. I’ll return
to others. Take, for example, the leading American social philosopher of
the 20^(th) century, John Dewey. His major concerns were democracy and
education. No one took Dewey to be an anarchist. But pay attention to
his ideas. In his conception of democracy, illegitimate structures of
coercion must be dismantled, and that includes domination “by business
for private profit through private control of banking, land, industry,
reinforced by command of the press, press agents, other means of
publicity and propaganda.” He recognized that “power today resides in
control of the means of production, exchange, publicity, transportation,
and communication. Whoever owns them rules the life of the country,”
even if democratic forms remain. And until these institutions are in the
hands of the public, politics will remain “the shadow cast by big
business on society.” Very much what we see around us, in fact.
It’s important that Dewey went beyond calling for some form of public
control. That could take many forms. He went beyond. In a free and
democratic society, he wrote, the workers should be “the masters of
their own industrial fate,” not tools rented by employers, not directed
by state authorities.” That position goes right back to the leading
ideas of classical liberalism articulated by von Humboldt, Smith,
others, and extended in the anarchist tradition.
Turning to education, Dewey held that it is “illiberal and immoral” to
train children to work “not freely and intelligently but for the sake of
the work earned,” to achieve test scores, for example, in which case
their activity is “not free because it’s not freely participated in” and
it’s quickly forgotten too, as all of us know from our experience. So he
proceeded to conclude that industry must be changed “from a feudalistic
to a democratic social order” and educational practice should be
designed to encourage creativity, exploration, independence, cooperative
work — exactly the opposite of what’s happening today.
These ideas lead to a vision of society based on workers’ control of
productive institutions, the links to community control within the
framework of free association and federal organization. In the general
style of thought that includes, of course, along with many anarchists,
others too, say G.D.H. Cole’s guild socialism in England, left
anti-Bolshevik Marxism, a current development, such as, for example, the
participatory economics and politics of Michael Albert, Robin Hahnel,
Stephen Shalom, and others, along with important work in theory and
practice by the late Seymour Melman, his associates, and many others,
notably Gar Alperovitz’s very valuable recent contributions on
worker-owned enterprise and cooperatives. Not just talk but actual
taking place.
Going back to Dewey, he was as American as apple pie, to borrow the old
cliché, right in the mainstream of American history and culture. In
fact, all of these ideas and developments are very deeply rooted in the
American tradition and in American history, a fact which is kind of
suppressed but is very obvious when you look into it. When you pursue
these questions, you enter into an important terrain of inspiring, often
bitter struggle. That’s ever since the dawn of the Industrial
Revolution, which was right around here, Lowell, Lawrence, eastern
Massachusetts, mid-19^(th) century.
The first serious scholarly study of the industrial worker in those
years was 90 years ago. It’s by Norman Ware. It’s still very much worth
reading. He reviews the hideous working conditions that were imposed on
formerly independent craftsman and immigrants and farmers, as well as
the so-called “factory girls,” young women brought from the farms to
work in the textile mills around Boston. He mentions that, he reviews
it. But he focuses attention on something else—what he calls “the
degradation suffered by the industrial worker,” the loss “of status and
independence,” which could not be cancelled, even where there
occasionally was some material improvement. And he focuses on the
radical capitalist “social revolution, in which sovereignty and economic
affairs passed from the community as a whole into the keeping of a
special class of masters,” often remote from production, a group “alien
to the producers.” Ware shows, I think pretty convincingly, that “for
every protest against machine industry and privation there can be found
100 protests against the new power of capitalist production and its
discipline.” In other words, workers were struggling and striking not
just for bread but also for roses, in the traditional slogan of the
workers’ communities and organizations. They were struggling for dignity
and independence and for their rights as free men and women.
Their journals are very interesting. There’s a rich and lively labor
press written by working people, artisans from Boston, factory girls
from the farms. In these journals they condemned what they called the
“blasting influence of monarchical principles on democratic soil, which
will not be overcome until “they who work in the mills will own them,”
the slogan of the massive Knights of Labor, “and sovereignty will return
to free and independent producers.” Then they will no longer be “menials
or the humble subjects of a foreign despot, the absentee owner, slaves
in the strictest sense of the word, who toil for their masters.” Rather,
they will regain their status as “free American citizens.”
The capitalist revolution instituted a crucial change from price to
wage. It’s very important. When a producer sold his product for a price,
Ware writes, “he retained his person. But when he came to sell his
labor, he sold himself.” I’m quoting from the press. That’s a big
difference. He lost his dignity as a person as he became a slave, a wage
slave, to use the common term of the period. One hundred sixty years
ago, a group of skilled workers repeated the common view that a daily
wage was equivalent to slavery, and they weren’t warned, perceptively,
that a day might come when “wage slaves will so far forget what is due
to manhood as to glory in a system forced on them by their necessity and
in opposition to their feelings of independence and self-respect,” a day
that they hoped would be far distant. These were very popular notions in
the mid-19^(th) century, in fact, so popular that they were a slogan of
the Republican Party. You could read them in editorials of The New York
Times. That’s then, not now. But that day may come back. Let’s hope.
Labor activists of the time warned, bitterly often, of what they called
“the new spirit of the age: Gain wealth, forgetting all but self.” That
was the new spirit of the age 150 years ago. In sharp reaction to this
demeaning spirit, there were quite enormous and active rising movements
of working people and radical farmers. Radical farmers actually began in
Texas and spread through the Midwest and much of the country. It was, of
course, an agricultural country then. These are the most significant
democratic popular movements in American history. They were dedicated to
solidarity, mutual aid. They were crushed by force. We have a very
violent labor history as compared to other countries. But it’s a battle
that’s not over, far from over, despite setbacks, often violent
repression.
There are familiar apologists for the radical revolution of wage
slavery, and they have an argument. They argue that the workers should
indeed glory in a system of free contracts voluntarily undertaken. There
was an answer to that 200 years ago by Shelley in his great poem “The
Masque of Anarchy.” This was written right after the Peterloo massacre
in Manchester, England, when the British cavalry brutally attacked a
peaceful gathering of tens of thousands of people—the first major
example of huge, nonviolent protest and the reaction of the state
authorities to it. They were calling for parliamentary reform. Shelley
wrote that we know what slavery is. “Tis to work and have such pay/As
just keeps life from day to day/In your limbs, as in a cell/For the
tyrants’ use to dwell. … Tis to be slave in soul/And to hold no strong
control/Over your own wills, but be/All that others make of ye.”
That’s slavery. That’s what working people and independent farmers were
struggling against. The artisans and factory girls who struggled for
dignity and independence and freedom might very well have known
Shelley’s words. Observers at the time noted that they were highly
literate. They had good libraries. They were acquainted with the
standard works of English literature. This is before mechanism and wage
slavery. The wage system ended, or at least curtailed, the days of
independence, high culture, and security. Before that, Ware points out,
a workshop might be what he called a lyceum. A journeyman would hire
boys to read to them while they worked. These were social businesses,
with many opportunities for reading, discussion, mutual improvement.
Along with the factory girls, the journeyman, the artisans bitterly
condemned the attack on their culture.
The same was true in England, incidentally, where conditions were much
harsher. There’s actually a great book about this by Jonathan Rose
called The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. It’s a
monumental study of the reading habits of the working class of what we
think of as Dickensian England. He contrasts what he calls “the
passionate pursuit of knowledge by proletarian autodidacts” with the
“pervasive philistinism of the British aristocracy.” Actually, I’m old
enough to remember residues that remained among working people in New
York in the 1930s, who were deeply immersed in the high culture of the
day. It’s another battle that may have receded, but I don’t think it’s
lost.
I mentioned that Dewey and American workers and farmers held one version
of democracy with very strong libertarian elements. But the dominant
version has been radically different. Its most instructive expression is
at the progressive end of the mainstream spectrum. That is among people
who are good Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Kennedy liberals. Here are a few
representative quotes from icons of the liberal intellectual
establishment on democratic theory.
The public are “ignorant and meddlesome outsiders.” They have to “be put
in their place.” Decisions must be in the hands of an “intelligent
minority” of “responsible men,” namely, us, and we have to be protected
“from the trampling and roar of the bewildered herd” out there. The herd
does have a function in a democratic society. They are supposed to lend
their weight every few years to a choice among the responsible men. But
apart from that, their function is to be “spectators, not participants
in action.” And all of this is for their own good. We should not succumb
to “democratic dogmatisms about men being the best judges of their own
interests.” They are not. They are like young children. You have to take
care of them. We are the best judges of their own interests. So their
attitudes and opinions have to be controlled for their own benefit. We
have to “regiment the minds of men the way an army regiments their
bodies, ” and we have to discipline the institutions responsible for
what they called “the indoctrination of the young”: schools,
universities, churches. If we can do this, we can get back to the good
old days — this is complaints about the 1960s — when “Truman had been
able to govern the country with the cooperation of a relatively small
number of Wall Street lawyers and bankers,” then we will have true
democracy.
These are quotes from icons of the liberal establishment: Walter
Lippmann, Edward Bernays, Harold Laswell, the founder of modern
political science, Samuel Huntington, Trilateral Commission, which
largely staffed the Carter administration. The conflict between these
conceptions of democracy goes far back. It goes back to the earliest
modern democratic revolution in 17^(th) century England. At that time,
there was a war raging between supporters of the king and supporters of
parliament. That’s the civil war that we read about. But there was more.
The gentry, the men who called themselves “the men of best quality,”
were appalled by the rabble, who didn’t want to be ruled by either king
or parliament, like the Spanish workers in 1936, neither side. They had
their own pamphlet literature, and they said they wanted to be ruled by
“countrymen like ourselves that know our wants. It will never be a good
world while knights and gentlemen make us laws that are chosen for fear
and do but oppress us and do not know the people’s source.” That’s
17^(th) century England.
The essential nature of this conflict, which is far from ended, was
captured nicely by Thomas Jefferson in his later years. He had serious
concerns about both the quality and the fate of the democratic
experiment. He made a distinction between what he called aristocrats and
democrats. The aristocrats are “those who fear and distrust the people
and wish to draw all powers from them into the hands of the higher
classes.” The democrats, in contrast, “identify with the people, have
confidence in them, cherish and consider them as the honest and safe,
although not the most wise, depository of the public interest.”
The modern progressive intellectuals—the Wilson, Roosevelt, Kennedy
intellectual left, those who seek to put the public in their place and
are free from democratic dogmatisms about the capacity of the ignorant
and meddlesome outsiders to enter the political arena—they’re
Jefferson’s aristocrats. These basic views are very widely held, though
there are some disputes, namely, who should play the guiding role.
Should it be what the liberal intellectuals call the technocratic and
policy-oriented intellectuals, the ones we celebrate as the Camelot
intellectuals, who run the progressive knowledge society, or should it
be bankers or corporate executives? In other versions, should it be the
central committee or the guardian council of clerics? They are all
pretty similar ideas.
And they’re all the examples of the ecclesiastical and political
guardianship that the genuine libertarian tradition seeks to dismantle
and reconstruct from below, while also changing industry from a
feudalistic to a democratic social order, one that’s based on workers’
control, community control, respects the dignity of the producer as a
genuine person, not a tool in the hands of others, in accordance with a
libertarian tradition that has deep roots and, like Marx’s old mole, is
always burrowing quite close to the surface and ready to spring forth.