đŸ Archived View for library.inu.red âș file âș colin-ward-anarchism.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 23:42:37. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
âŹ ïž Previous capture (2023-01-29)
âĄïž Next capture (2024-06-20)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: Anarchism Author: Colin Ward Date: February 2004 Language: en Topics: introductory Source: Retrieved on 31st August 2021 from http://www.revoltlib.com/anarchism/anarchism-a-very-short-introduction/view.php
Anarchism is a social and political ideology which, despite a history of
defeat, continually reemerges in a new guise or in a new country, so
that another chapter has to be added to its chronology, or another
dimension to its scope.
In 1962 George Woodcock wrote a 470-page book, Anarchism, which,
continually reprinted as a Penguin Book and translated into many
languages, became probably the most widely read book on the subject in
the world. Woodcock wrote a series of updating postscripts until his
death in 1995.
In 1992 Peter Marshall wrote a book of more than 700 pages called
Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (HarperCollins) which
seems likely to overtake the earlier book in global sales. Woodcock was
greatly relieved: âI now have a book,â he wrote, âto which I can direct
readers when they ask me how soon I intend to bring my Anarchism up to
date.â Like all his other readers, I have been very grateful for Peter
Marshallâs capacity for summarizing complex ideas and for exploring the
by-ways of anarchist history.
For decades, when in search of a fact or an opinion, I would telephone
Nicolas Walter, who died in the year 2000. I greatly value his neat
little pamphlet About Anarchism, which is part of the global treasury of
anarchist literature stocked by the Freedom Press Bookshop in London.
My task has been one of selection: simply an attempt to introduce the
reader to anarchist ideas in a very few words and to point to further
sources. In this rich field the emphases are bound to be my own.
C. W. February 2004
The word âanarchyâ comes from the Greek anarkhia, meaning contrary to
authority or without a ruler, and was used in a derogatory sense until
1840, when it was adopted by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon to describe his
political and social ideology. Proudhon argued that organization without
government was both possible and desirable. In the evolution of
political ideas, anarchism can be seen as an ultimate projection of both
liberalism and socialism, and the differing strands of anarchist thought
can be related to their emphasis on one or the other of these.
Historically, anarchism arose not only as an explanation of the gulf
between the rich and the poor in any community, and of the reason why
the poor have been obliged to fight for their share of a common
inheritance, but as a radical answer to the question âWhat went wrong?â
that followed the ultimate outcome of the French Revolution. It had
ended not only with a reign of terror and the emergence of a newly rich
ruling caste, but with a new adored emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte,
strutting through his conquered territories.
The anarchists and their precursors were unique on the political Left in
affirming that workers and peasants, grasping the chance that arose to
bring an end to centuries of exploitation and tyranny, were inevitably
betrayed by the new class of politicians, whose first priority was to
reestablish a centralized state power. After every revolutionary
uprising, usually won at a heavy cost for ordinary populations, the new
rulers had no hesitation in applying violence and terror, a secret
police, and a professional army to maintain their control.
For anarchists the state itself is the enemy, and they have applied the
same interpretation to the outcome of every revolution of the 19^(th)
and 20^(th) centuries. This is not merely because every state keeps a
watchful and sometimes punitive eye on its dissidents, but because every
state protects the privileges of the powerful.
The mainstream of anarchist propaganda for more than a century has been
anarchist-communism, which argues that property in land, natural
resources, and the means of production should be held in mutual control
by local communities, federating for innumerable joint purposes with
other communes. It differs from state socialism in opposing the concept
of any central authority. Some anarchists prefer to distinguish between
anarchist-communism and collectivist anarchism in order to stress the
obviously desirable freedom of an individual or family to possess the
resources needed for living, while not implying the right to own the
resources needed by others.
Anarcho-syndicalism puts its emphasis on the organized industrial
workers who could, through a âsocial general strikeâ, expropriate the
possessors of capital and thus engineer a workersâ take-over of industry
and administration.
There are, unsurprisingly, several traditions of individualist
anarchism, one of them deriving from the âconscious egoismâ of the
German writer Max Stirner (1806â56), and another from a remarkable
series of 19^(th)-century American figures who argued that in protecting
our own autonomy and associating with others for common advantages, we
are promoting the good of all. These thinkers differed from free-market
liberals in their absolute mistrust of American capitalism, and in their
emphasis on mutualism. In the late 20^(th) century the word
âlibertarianâ, which people holding such a viewpoint had previously used
as an alternative to the word âanarchistâ, was appropriated by a new
group of American thinkers, who are discussed in Chapter 7.
Pacifist anarchism follows both from the anti-militarism that
accompanies rejection of the state, with its ultimate dependence on
armed forces, and from the conviction that any morally viable human
society depends upon the uncoerced goodwill of its members.
These and other threads of anarchist thought have different emphases.
What links them all is their rejection of external authority, whether
that of the state, the employer, or the hierarchies of administration
and of established institutions like the school and the church. The same
is true of more recently emerging varieties of anarchist propaganda,
green anarchism and anarcha-feminism. Like those who believe that animal
liberation is an aspect of human liberation, they claim that the only
ideology consistent with their aims is anarchism.
It is customary to relate the anarchist tradition to four major thinkers
and writers. The first was William Godwin (1756â1836), who in his
Inquiry Concerning Political Justice, published in 1793, set out the
anarchist case against government, the law, property, and the
institutions of the state. He was the partner of Mary Wollstonecraft and
the father of Mary Shelley, and was an heir of both the English
tradition of radical nonconformity and of the French philosophes. His
book brought him instant fame, soon followed by hostility and neglect in
the political climate of the early 19^(th) century, but it had an
underground life in radical circles until its rediscovery by the
anarchist movement in the 1890s.
The second of these pioneers was Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809â65), the
French propagandist who was the first one to call himself an anarchist.
He became famous in 1840 by virtue of an essay that declared that
âProperty is Theftâ, but he also claimed that âProperty is Freedomâ. He
saw no contradiction between these two slogans, since he thought it
obvious that the first related to the landowner and capitalist whose
ownership derived from conquest or exploitation and was sustained only
through the state, its property laws, police, and army; while the second
was concerned with the peasant or artisan family with an obvious natural
right to a home, to the land it could cultivate, and to the tools of a
trade, but not to ownership or control of the homes, land, or livelihood
of others. Proudhon was criticized for being a mere survivor of the
world of peasant farmers and small artisans in local communities, but he
had a ready response in setting out the principles of successful
federation.
The third of the classical anarchist luminaries was the Russian
revolutionary Michael Bakunin (1814â76), deservedly famous for his
disputes with Marx in the First International in the 1870s, where, for
his successors, he predicted with remarkable accuracy the outcome of
Marxist dictatorships in the 20^(th) century. âFreedom without
socialism,â he said, âis privilege and injustice, but socialism without
freedom is slavery and brutality.â His elaborations on this perception
are cited in innumerable books published since the collapse of the
Soviet Union, and subsequently of the regimes it imposed on its
satellites. Typical of Bakuninâs observations was a letter of 1872 in
which he remarked:
I believe that Herr Marx is a very serious if not very honest
revolutionary, and that he really is in favor of the rebellion of the
masses, and I wonder how he manages to overlook the fact that the
establishment of a universal dictatorship, collective or individual, a
dictatorship which would create the post of a kind of chief engineer of
world revolution, ruling and controlling the insurrectionary activity of
the masses in all countries, as a machine might be controlled â that the
establishment of such a dictatorship would in itself suffice to kill
revolution and warp and paralyze all popular movements ...
The last of these key thinkers was another Russian of aristocratic
origin, Peter Kropotkin (1842â1921). His original reputation derived
from his work as a geographer, and in a long series of books and
pamphlets he sought to give anarchism a scientific basis. The Conquest
of Bread (1892) was his manual on the self-organization of a
post-revolutionary society. Mutual Aid (1902) was written to confront
those misinterpretations of Darwinism that justified competitive
capitalism, by demonstrating from the observation of animal and human
societies that competition within species is far less significant than
cooperation as a precondition for survival.
Fields, Factories and Workshops (1899) was Kropotkinâs treatise on the
humanization of work, through the integration of agriculture and
industry, of brain work and physical work, and of intellectual and
manual education. The most widely read on a global scale of all
anarchist authors, he linked anarchism both with subsequent ideas of
social ecology and with everyday experience.
Some anarchists would object to the identification of anarchism with its
best-known writers. They would point out that everywhere in the world
where anarchist ideas have arisen, there is a local activist conspiring
to get access to a printing press, aware of the anarchist undercurrent
in every uprising of the downtrodden all through history, and full of
ideas about the application of anarchist solutions to local issues and
dilemmas. They point to the way in which anarchist aspirations can be
traced through the slave revolts of the ancient world, the peasant
risings of medieval Europe, in the aims of the Diggers in the English
Revolution of the 1640s, in the revolutions in France in 1789 and 1848,
and the Paris Commune of 1871. In the 20^(th) century, anarchism had a
role in the Mexican Revolution of 1911, the Russian Revolution of 1917,
and most notably in the revolution in Spain that followed the military
uprising that precipitated the civil war in 1936. The part played by the
anarchists in these revolutionary situations is described in the
following chapter.
In all these revolutions the fate of the anarchists was that of heroic
losers. But anarchists do not necessarily fit the stereotype of
believers in some ultimate revolution, succeeding where all others had
failed, and inaugurating Utopia. The German anarchist Gustav Landauer
declared that:
The state is not something which can be destroyed by a revolution, but
is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of
human behavior; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by
behaving differently.
Moreover, if the anarchists have not changed society in the ways that
they hoped were possible, the same is true for the advocates of every
other social ideology of the past century, whether socialist or
capitalist. But, as I stress in Chapter 8, they have contributed to a
long series of small liberations that have lifted a huge load of human
misery.
Anarchism has, in fact, an enduring resilience. Every European, North
American, Latin American, and Asian society has had its anarchist
publicists, journals, circles of adherents, imprisoned activists, and
martyrs. Whenever an authoritarian and repressive political regime
collapses, the anarchists are there, a minority urging their fellow
citizens to absorb the lessons of the sheer horror and irresponsibility
of government.
The anarchist press reemerged in Germany after Hitler, in Italy after
Mussolini, in Spain after Franco, in Portugal after Salazar, in
Argentina after the generals, and in Russia after 70 years of brutal
suppression. For anarchists this is an indication that the ideal of a
self-organizing society based on voluntary cooperation rather than upon
coercion is irrepressible. It represents, they claim, a universal human
aspiration. This is illustrated by the way that people from non-European
cultures took Western anarchist ideas and concepts and linked them to
traditions and thinkers from their own countries.
Anarchist ideas were brought to Japan by Kotuku Shusui in the very early
years of the 20^(th) century. He had read Kropotkinâs writings while in
prison during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904â5. When released he visited
California, making contact with the militant anarcho-syndicalists of the
Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and returned to Japan to publish
an anti-militarist journal, Heimen. Kotuku claimed that there was always
an anarchist undercurrent in Japanese life, deriving from both Buddhism
and Taoism. He was one of 12 anarchists executed in 1911, accused of
plotting against the Emperor Meiji. All through the first half of the
century, a series of successors continued propaganda and industrial
action against militarism, and were suppressed by government, to
reappear in a changed climate after the horrors of the Second World War.
Chinese anarchism emerged at much the same time, through the influence
of students who had been to Tokyo or to Paris. Those who studied in
Japan were influenced by Kotuku Shusui, and stressed the links with a
long-established stream in Chinese life. As Peter Marshall explains,
Modern anarchism not only advocated the Taoist rural idyll, but also
echoed the peasant longing embedded in Chinese culture for a frugal and
egalitarian millennium which had expressed itself in peasant rebellions
throughout Chinese history. It further struck a chord with two
traditional concepts, Ta-tâung, a legendary golden age of social
equality and harmony, and Ching-tâien, a system of communal land tenure.
Those young Chinese who studied in Paris were attracted by the writings
of Bakunin and Kropotkin, as well as by Darwinian evolutionary theory.
They rejected attempts to link anarchism with Lao Tzuâs Taoism and with
agrarian history. With the fall of the Manchu dynasty in 1911, both
anarchist factions thought that their hour had come. But in fact the
revolutionary ideology that slowly triumphed in the turbulent history of
20^(th)-century China was that of the Marxist-Leninists. And as we shall
see in Chapter 2, the programs imposed by force on the Chinese were a
dictatorial parody of anarchist aspirations.
Korea, too, has an anarchist tradition linked with 19^(th)-century hopes
for peasant communism, but due to 35 years of Japanese occupation
fiercely resisted by the anarchists, among other political factions,
their reputation is that of patriots in a country where the North is a
Marxist dictatorship while the South is a model of American-style
capitalism.
In India the history of the first half of the 20^(th) century, and the
struggle to end British rule, was dominated by Mohandas K. Gandhi, who
built a unique ideology of nonviolent resistance and peasant socialism
from a series of semi-anarchist sources and linked them with Indian
traditions. From Tolstoy he evolved his policy of nonviolent resistance,
from Thoreau he took his philosophy of civil disobedience, and from a
close reading of Kropotkin his program of decentralized and autonomous
village communes linking agriculture with local industry. After
independence was achieved, his political successors revered his memory
but ignored his ideas. Later in the century Vinoba Bhaveâs Sarvodaya
movement sought a nonviolent land-based revolution, rejecting the
politics of central government.
In Africa, Mbah and Igarewey the authors of a study of the failure of
state socialism imposed by governments draw attention to the
seemingly endemic problem of ethnic conflicts across the continent; the
continued political and economic marginalization of Africa at the global
level; the unspeakable misery of about 90 percent of Africaâs
population; and, indeed, the ongoing collapse of the nation state in
many parts of Africa.
They argue that:
Given these problems, a return to the âanarchic elementsâ in African
communalism is virtually inevitable. The goal of a self-managed society
born out of the free will of its people and devoid of authoritarian
control and regimentation is as attractive as it is feasible in the long
run.
The reader may wonder why, if ideas and aspirations similar to those of
the anarchists can be traced through so many cultures around the world,
the concept is so regularly misunderstood or caricatured. The answer is
to be found in a very small episode in anarchist history.
There was a period, a century ago, when a minority of anarchists, like
the subsequent minorities of a dozen other political movements, believed
that the assassination of monarchs, princes, and presidents would hasten
popular revolution. Sad to say, the most deserving victims, Mussolini,
Franco, Hitler, or Stalin, were well protected, and in terms of changing
the course of history and ridding the world of its tyrants the
anarchists were no more successful than most subsequent political
assassins. But their legacy has been the cartoonistâs stereotype of the
anarchist as the cloaked and bearded carrier of a spherical bomb with a
smoking fuze, and this has consequently provided yet another obstacle to
the serious discussion of anarchist approaches. Meanwhile, modern
political terrorism on an indiscriminate scale is the monopoly of
governments and is directed at civilian populations, or is the weapon we
all associate with religious or nationalist separatism, both of them
very far from the aspirations of anarchists.
In the entry for âAnarchismâ that Kropotkin wrote in 1905 for the
11^(th) edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, he began by explaining
that it is
the name given to a principle or theory of life and conduct under which
society is conceived without government â harmony in such a society
being obtained, not by submission to law, or by obedience to any
authority, but by free agreements, concluded between the various groups,
territorial and professional, freely constituted for the sake of
production and consumption, as also for the satisfaction of the infinite
variety of needs and aspirations of a civilized being.
Implicit in this definition is the inevitability of compromise, an
ordinary aspect of politics which has been found difficult by
anarchists, precisely because their ideology precludes the usual routes
to political influence.
In the course of the revolutionary outbreaks that spread across Europe
in 1848 the Prefect of Police in Paris is said to have remarked of the
anarchist Michael Bakunin, âWhat a man! On the first day of the
revolution he is a perfect treasure; but on the next day he ought to be
shot.â His observation epitomizes both the role and the ultimate fate of
the anarchists and their precursors in a long series of European popular
uprisings.
Chroniclers of all political movements invariably discover antecedents
from the past, and the anarchists found ancestors in the slave revolts
of the Roman Empire and in all subsequent revolutionary upheavals of the
downtrodden. They have similarly identified precursors in such risings
as the Peasantsâ Revolt that began in England in 1391, in the
insurrection of the Taborites in Bohemia in 1493 and that of the
Anabaptists a century later.
In the English Revolution of the civil war years leading up to 1649, the
anarchist element was illustrated by the activities of the Diggers,
Ranters, and Levelers, who, having helped to ensure Cromwellâs success,
were described by one pamphleteer as âSwitzerising anarchistsâ and were
rapidly eliminated once the Protector was securely in power, only to be
followed by the eventual return of the monarchy. But the people who
dared to remove a king had opened the way to more radical thoughts on
the relationship between the individual and the community and between
society and the state. The American and French revolutions of the
following century brought a message beautifully expressed in Thomas
Paineâs Common Sense in 1776:
Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best
state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one;
for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a government
which we might expect in a country without a government, our calamity is
heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer.
Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence: the palaces of
kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise.
Political ideas crossed the Atlantic almost as rapidly in the 18^(th)
century as in the 21^(st), and the American Revolution made the French
Revolution inevitable. Jefferson, Paine, and Franklin had a role in
both, while William Godwin in his Inquiry Concerning Political Justice
was arguing the anarchist case from first principles. Meanwhile, a
series of brave opponents of the new French state, known as the Enragés
and gathered around Jacques Roux and Jean Varlet, opposed the new
rulers. Varlet, who actually survived the Terror, observed that
Despotism has passed from the palace of kings to the circle of a
committee. It is neither the royal robes, nor the scepter, nor the
crown, that makes kings hated, but ambition and tyranny. In my country
there has been only a change in dress.
Anarchism reappeared in the European revolutions of 1848. In the
following year, after the failure of the revolution in Dresden, Bakunin
was imprisoned, condemned to death, and after a year handed over to the
Austrians, condemned again, but in the next year handed over to the
Russians. After six years in the Peter-and-Paul fortress at St
Petersburg he was exiled to Siberia, whence he eventually escaped to
London by way of Japan, San Francisco, and New York. After the
Franco-Prussian War of 1870, Proudhonâs federalist ideas shaped the
short-lived Paris Commune and its âManifesto to the French Peopleâ of
April 1871, which urged:
The absolute autonomy of the Commune extended to all the localities of
France, assuring to each its integral rights and to every Frenchman the
full exercise of his aptitudes, as a man, a citizen, and a worker. The
autonomy of the Commune will have for its limits only the equal autonomy
of all other communities adhering to the contract; their association
must assure the liberty of France.
(Needless to say, although the Commune had an admired anarchist heroine,
Louise Michel, its Manifesto did not extend these rights to
Frenchwomen.)
In the major revolutions of the 20^(th) century there were recognizable
anarchist elements, but in each of them the anarchists were victims of
the new rulers. In Mexico, Ricardo Flores Magon and his brothers had in
1900 begun publication of an anarcho-syndicalist newspaper RegeneraciĂłn,
building up opposition to the dictator Porfirio Diaz, slipping across
the border into California when publication became too difficult. With
the fall of Diaz, Magon established contact with the peasant
revolutionary Emiliano Zapata in the state of Morales in the South,
fighting the efforts of large landowners to annex the land of poor
growers. Magon is said to have made Zapata literate through reading and
discussing Kropotkinâs The Conquest of Bread. Zapata was ambushed and
killed in 1919, while Magon was jailed in the United States and was
murdered in Leavenworth Penitentiary in 1923. Ironically, both men are
celebrated in the Rotunda of Illustrious Men in Mexico City. The
contemporary EZLN (Zapatista Army of National Liberation) is Mexicoâs
modern incarnation of Zapataâs campaign, as is, for example, the MST
(Movement of Landless Rural Workers) in Brazil. Both of these are
campaigns of dispossessed peasants for communal control of land seized
by large-scale cattle-ranching oligarchies.
In the Russian Revolution of 1917 the Bolshevik seizure of power was
pushed through with anarchist slogans like âBread and Freedomâ and âAll
Power to the Sovietsâ, which were very far from daily experience in the
new regime. The anarchist hero of the revolution was the Ukrainian
peasant Nestor Makhno, organizing peasant land seizures and defending
them from both the Bolsheviks and the Whites. Returning Russian exiles
included Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, deported from the United
States, and Kropotkin, who had been obliged to live abroad for 40 years.
Kropotkin addressed critical letters to Lenin and wrote a Letter to the
Workers of Western Europe describing for them the lessons of the Russian
Revolution. His funeral in 1921 was the last occasion when the Russian
anarchists were at liberty until the slow releases from Stalinâs prison
camps after 1956.
Goldman and Berkman tried to tell the truth about Leninâs Russia when
they left the country, but found that the political Left in the West
rejected their message, seeing it as âcounter-revolutionaryâ. The same
kind of exclusion by the political Left faced continual anarchist
attempts to reveal the truth about the Soviet Union, while Stalinist
infiltration destroyed the integrity of a long series of workersâ
organizations in the West.
Italyâs anarchist tradition began when Bakunin settled there in 1863,
recommended to fellow revolutionaries by Garibaldi and Mazzini, whose
nationalism he actually opposed in the name of communal autonomy and
federalism. To this period of Bakuninâs life belong his polemics against
Marx which, accurately and uniquely, foresaw the evolution of Marxist
dictatorships in the 20^(th) century. His disciple Errico Malatesta, who
died under house arrest in Mussoliniâs Italy, initiated streams of
anarchist propaganda in Italy and Latin America, which still flow to
this day in the form of an impressive spread of publications and
campaigns.
In the Far East, the habit of sending young men from affluent families
to complete their education in Europe led to a string of revolutionary
students bringing back to China from Paris the anarchist message of
Kropotkin in his propagandist books The Conquest of Bread, Mutual Aid,
and especially Fields, Factories and Workshops. Many of the shifts and
turns of Communist Party policy in China in the 1950s and 1960s have
recognizable links with Kropotkinâs agenda, although, of course, they
were imposed with the utmost indifference to human suffering. The
celebrated novelist Pa Chin (Li Pai Kan) saw Emma Goldman as his
âspiritual motherâ and constructed his pseudonym from one syllable each
of the names Bakunin and Kropotkin. Needless to say, he was subjected to
âreeducationâ several times, and, in 1989, at the age of 84, was
arrested because of his support for the demonstrators in Tiananmen
Square.
But the country where anarchism put down its deepest roots was Spain,
which in the 1930s had both a mass anarcho-syndicalist trade union, the
CNT (ConfederaciĂłn Nacional del Trabajo), and the FAI (FederaciĂłn
Anarquista Iberica), an anarchist body which emerged periodically from
an underground existence. The revolution of 19 July 1936 in Spain
illustrates another gulf between the anarchist account of events and the
way they are perceived and described by more influential voices.
On 18 July 1936, Spain had three Popular Front governments in the course
of a single day, debating how to oppose the military revolt from the
generals in Morocco, which was moving into mainland Spain, and usually
concluding that resistance was futile. Meanwhile in several cities and
regions, not only were the weapons of the military garrisons and the
civil guards seized, but CNT members took control of factories,
transport, and land. The following day marked the beginning, not only of
a war against Francoâs insurrection, but of a popular revolution.
Francoâs rebellion was aided by weapons, troops, and bomber aircraft
from Mussoliniâs Italy and Nazi Germany, but the Non-Intervention
Agreement upheld by the British and French governments limited the
supply of arms for the anti-Fascist forces to those provided (at the
cost of Spainâs gold reserves) by the Soviet Union. A further heavy
penalty was paid for Soviet support. Stalinâs foreign policy required
the repudiation of the Spanish revolution in the interests of the
âPopular Frontâ concept. In the effort to resist growing Soviet
influence, anarchist and syndicalist militants actually became ministers
both in the Catalan government in Barcelona and in the central
government in Madrid.
The war in Spain wound down to its desolate conclusion in April 1939,
after immense loss of life. In August that year the non-aggression pact
between Stalin and Hitler was signed, and in September the Second World
War began. Francoâs regime in Spain survived until the dictatorâs death
in 1975. The collapse of opposition brought a relentless campaign of
vengeance against those who dared to oppose Franco. There were untold
numbers of executions and the prisons were filled. Millions of Spaniards
lived out their lives in exile.
From the point of view of the anarchists, Spain thus provided terrible
ironies. In terms of the collectivization of agriculture and industry,
it gave a living and inspiring example of Kropotkinâs theories about the
seizure of control by the workers. In those parts of the country that
had not been seized by army units supporting Franco there were
large-scale seizures of land. Spain was a predominantly agricultural
country, in which 67% of the land was owned by 2% of landowners. At the
same time many smallholdings were too small to feed a family. Gerald
Brenan, in his classic book The Spanish Labyrinth, explained that âthe
only reasonable solution through wide tracts of Spain is a collective
oneâ.
In 1936 it was estimated that in those parts of Spain not overrun by
Francoâs troops, about three million men, women, and children were
living in collectivized communes. Observers from the time similarly
reported on the collectivization of factories in Catalonia and of the
reorganization of public services, transport, telephones, gas, and
electricity in Barcelona.
The American philosopher of language Noam Chomsky remembers reading
about these achievements as a boy in New York, in the Yiddish-language
anarchist journal Fraye Arbeter Shtime. There stayed in his mind a
report on a poverty-stricken Spanish town, Membrilla, in whose miserable
huts eight thousand people lived, with âno newspaper, no cinema, neither
a cafĂ© nor a libraryâ. But the villagers shared food, clothing, and
tools, and took in a large number of refugees. âIt was, however, not a
socialization of wealth but of poverty ... Membrilla is perhaps the
poorest village of Spain, but it is the most just.â Chomsky comments
that
An account such as this, with its concern for human relations and the
ideal of a just society, must appear very strange to the consciousness
of the sophisticated intellectual, and it is therefore treated with
scorn, or taken to be naive or primitive or otherwise irrational. Only
when such prejudice is abandoned will it be possible for historians to
undertake a serious study of the popular movement that transformed
Republican Spain in one of the most remarkable social revolutions that
history records.
By now the serious studies have been made, and Chomsky has stressed
their significance and their lessons for the future, since, as he says,
What attracts me about anarchism personally are the tendencies in it
that try to come to grips with the problems of dealing with complex
organized industrial societies within a framework of free institutions
and structures.
The Spanish experience hardly met the second of his criteria, but the
events of 1936 amply justified his comments. These achievements were
barely noticed in the news media of Western Europe outside the journals
of anarchism and the noncommunist far Left, and when George Orwell, back
from Spain, attempted to puncture the conspiracy of silence in his
Homage to Catalonia in 1937, his book had sold a mere 300 copies before
being remaindered to the anarchist bookshop in 1940. Many decades later,
Ken Loachâs film Land and Freedom (1995) was rapturously received in
Spain for dramatizing a key episode in the civil war, hitherto almost
unknown in Spain itself.
Needless to say, in the years of exile, those anarchists who had
survived both the war and Francoâs revenge devoted endless debate to the
fatal decision of the leaders of the CNT to become part of government in
an effort to combat Soviet dominance. Since every variety of anarchism
has opposed the structure of politics and the political system, this
decision was seen as a compromise that brought no advantage and much
discredit. Those anarchists who have explored the issue tend to agree
with the comment of the veteran French anarchist SĂ©bastien Faure: âI am
aware of the fact that it is not always possible to do what one should
do; but I know that there are things that on no account can one ever
do.â
Meanwhile, decades later, a new series of popular uprisings rediscovered
anarchist slogans in heroic defiance of Stalinâs apparently monolithic
empire. Suppressed aspirations emerged on the streets of Hungarian and
Polish cities in 1956 and on those of Czechoslovakia in 1968. They were
harbingers of the subsequent bloodless collapse of the Soviet Union,
after decades of appalling suffering for those who, usually
inadvertently, failed to please their rulers.
As the regimes of their jailers collapsed around them, there was some
comfort for the surviving anarchists, with their black flags of protest
against the new capitalism steered into being by their old oppressors.
They were still monotonously right and their priorities remained the
same.
There is a vital distinction, stressed by anarchists, between society
and the state. It has been obvious for centuries, and although many
political thinkers have ignored this distinction, it was as clear, for
example, to such 20^(th)-century academics as Isaiah Berlin or G. D. H.
Cole as it was in the 18^(th) century to Thomas Paine, cited in the
previous chapter. However, accompanying the collapse of the Soviet
Empire there has been a rediscovery by political enquirers of âcivil
societyâ.
The philosopher Martin Buber was the friend and executor of the German
anarchist Gustav Landauer, whose observation about the nature of the
state as a mode of human behavior is discussed in Chapter 1. In his
capacity as a professor of sociology, Buber provided a striking
polarization of the two principles of human behavior involved: the
political and the social. He saw the characteristics of the political
principle to be power, authority, hierarchy, and dominion, while the
social principle was visible to him in all spontaneous human
associations built around a common need or common interest. The problem
that arose was that of identifying the reason for the continual
ascendancy of the political principle. Buberâs answer suggested that
the fact that every people feels itself threatened by the others gives
the state its definite unifying power; it depends upon the instinct of
self-preservation of society itself; the latent external crisis enables
it to get the upper hand in internal crises ... All forms of government
have this in common: each possesses more power than is required by the
given conditions; in fact, this excess in the capacity for making
dispositions is actually what we understand by political power. The
measure of this excess ... represents the exact difference between
administration and government.
Buber described this excess, which he admitted could not be computed
exactly, as the âpolitical surplusâ, and observed that
its justification derives from the external and internal instability,
from the latent state of crisis between nations and within every nation.
The political principle is always stronger in relation to the social
principle than the given conditions require. The result is a continuous
diminution in social spontaneity.
Social spontaneity is highly valued by anarchists but is not on the
agenda of the politicians involved in dismantling the British postwar
welfare state, and recommending the virtues of profit-making private
enterprise. Anarchists are frequently told that their antipathy to the
state is historically outmoded, since a main function of the modern
state is the provision of social welfare. They respond by stressing that
social welfare in Britain did not originate from government, nor from
the postwar National Insurance laws, nor with the initiation of the
National Health Service in 1948. It evolved from the vast network of
friendly societies and mutual aid organizations that had sprung up
through working-class self-help in the 19^(th) century.
The founding father of the NHS was the then member of parliament for
Tredegar in South Wales, Aneurin Bevan, the Labor Governmentâs Minister
of Health. His constituency was the home of the Tredegar Medical
Society, founded in 1870 and surviving until 1995. It provided medical
care for the local employed workers, who were mostly miners and
steelworkers, but also (unlike the pre-1948 National Health Insurance)
for the needs of dependents, children, the old, and the non-employed:
everyone living in the district.
It was
sustained through the years by voluntary contributions of three old
pennies in the pound from the wage-packets of miners and steelworkers
... At one time the society employed five doctors, a dentist, a
chiropodist and a physiotherapist to care for the health of about 25,000
people.
A retired miner told Peter Hennessy that when Bevan initiated the
National Health Service, âWe thought he was turning the whole country
into one big Tredegar.â In practice, the Health Service has been in a
state of continuous reorganization ever since its foundation, but has
never been submitted to a local and federalized approach to medical
care. A second reflection on the story of Tredegar is that when every
employed worker in that town paid a voluntary levy to extend the local
medical service to every resident, the earnings of even highly skilled
industrial workers were below the liability to income tax. But ever
since full employment and the system of PAYE (automatic deduction of tax
as a duty of employers) was introduced during the Second World War, the
central governmentâs Treasury has creamed off the cash that once
supported local initiatives. If the pattern of local self-taxation on
the Tredegar model had become the general pattern for health provision,
this permanent daily need would not have become the plaything of central
government financial policy.
Anarchists cite this little, local example of an alternative approach to
the provision of health care to indicate that a different style of
social organization could have evolved. In British experience, another
variety was to be found in the 1930s and 1950s in what became known as
the Peckham Experiment in south London, which was essentially a family
health club where medical care was a feature of a social club providing
sporting and swimming facilities. These and much more recent attempts to
change the relationships in meeting universal social needs exemplify the
urgency of the search for alternatives to the dreary polarity of public
bureaucracy on the one hand and private profit on the other. I have
myself heard the former chief architect to the Ministry of Health admit
that the advice he gave for years on hospital design was misguided, and
have heard similar confessions from management consultants, expensively
hired to solve the NHSâs organizational problems.
A century ago, Kropotkin noted the endless variety of âfriendly
societies, the unities of odd fellows, the village and town clubs
organized for meeting the doctorâs billsâ built up by working-class
self-help; as part of his evidence for Mutual Aid: A Factor of
Evolution, and in a later book, Modern Science and Anarchism, he
declared that âthe economic and political liberation of man will have to
create new forms for its expression in life, instead of those
established by the Stateâ. For he saw it as self-evident that âthis new
form will have to be more popular, more decentralized, and nearer to the
folk-mote self-government than representative government can ever beâ.
He reiterated that we will be compelled to find new forms of
organization for the social functions that the state fulfills through
the bureaucracy, and that âas long as this is not done, nothing will be
doneâ.
It is often suggested that as a result of modern personal mobility and
instant communications, we all live in a series of global villages and
that consequently the concept of local control of local services is
obsolete. But there is confusion here between the concepts of
communities of propinquity and communities of interest. We may share
concerns with people on the other side of the world, and not even know
our neighbors. But the picture is transformed at different stages in our
personal or family history when we have shared interests with other
users of the local primary school or health center, and the local shop
or post office. Here there is, as every parent will confirm, an intense
concern with very local issues.
Alternative patterns of social control of local facilities could have
emerged, but for the fact that centralized government imposed national
uniformity, while popular disillusionment with the bureaucratic welfare
state coincided with the rise of the all-party gospel of managerial
capitalism. Anarchists claim that after the inevitable disappointment,
an alternative concept of socialism will be rediscovered. They argue
that the identification of social welfare with bureaucratic
managerialism is one of the factors that has delayed the exploration of
other approaches for half a century. The private sector, as it is
called, is happy to take over the health needs of those citizens who can
pay its bills. Other citizens would either have to suffer the minimal
services that remain for them, or to re-create the institutions that
they built up in the 19^(th) century. The anarchists see their methods
as more relevant than ever, waiting to be reinvented, precisely because
modern society has learned the limitations of both socialist and
capitalist alternatives.
A once-famous book, James Burnhamâs The Managerial Revolution, traced a
shift in power in companies from shareholders to managers. But another
more recent change in the power structure of public services of every
kind has been felt, for example, all through the education system. It is
the rise to dominance of professional managers who are the new
unassailable masters of every kind of institution. Middle-class
professionals in, say, public health, environmental planning, schools
and universities, and the social services have found themselves
subjected to the same kind of managerial Newspeak that used to outrage
working-class trade unionists. Mastery of its grotesque jargon has
become the prerequisite for appointment and promotion throughout the job
market, except in the submerged economy of hard repetitive work, where
the old assumptions of insecurity, long hours, and low pay remain true.
The new managerialism has such insubstantial foundations and has aroused
such resentment among people proud of their professional skills (as was
also true of skilled workers displaced by globalization) that it is
bound to be challenged by a new breed of advocates of workplace
democracy. Already the authors of alternative textbooks of management
are borrowing the language, if not the intentions, of the anarchists,
for example with a manual entitled Managing Without Management, and
another called Action and Existence: Anarchism for Business
Administration.
It seems inevitable that anarchist concepts will be reinvented or
rediscovered continually, in fields never envisaged by the propagandists
of the past, as people in so many areas of human activity search for
alternatives to the crudities and injustices of both free-market
capitalism and bureaucratic managerial socialism. It is possible to
discern four principles that would shape an anarchist theory of
organizations: that they should be (1) voluntary, (2) functional, (3)
temporary, and (4) small.
They should be voluntary and functional for obvious reasons. There is no
point in advocating individual freedom and responsibility if we go on to
set up organizations in which membership is mandatory, or which have no
purpose. There is a tendency for bodies to continue to exist after
having outlived their functions. They should be temporary precisely
because permanence is one of those factors that hardens the arteries of
any organization, giving it a vested interest in its own survival, or in
serving the interests of its office-holders rather than performing its
ostensible functions. Finally, they should be small because in small,
face-to-face groups the bureaucratizing and hierarchical tendencies
inherent in all organizations have least opportunity to develop.
The 20^(th) century experienced or witnessed every variety of state
socialism, and learned that if its rulers are ruthless enough, they can
impose, for a while, the most bizarre regimes and describe them as
socialism. As socialism has been grossly misrepresented, so anarchism
suffers from the widely held view that it is simply another variety of
millenarianism, the belief in the eventual arrival, âafter the
revolutionâ, of a period of ultimate happiness when all the problems
that beset humanity will have been solved, permanently.
The 19^(th)-century anarchist propaganda, in common with other varieties
of socialist propaganda, frequently implied this, but I have seldom met
20^(th)-century anarchists who admitted to this simple faith. As for the
great 20^(th)-century tragedy of the Soviet Union, promising earthly
paradise for future generations earned by todayâs sacrifice, the
anarchist inquest on it was written as long ago as 1847 by Bakuninâs
friend, the Russian populist Alexander Herzen:
If progress is the goal, for whom then are we working? Who is this
Moloch who, as the toilers approach him, instead of rewarding them,
draws back, and as a consolation to the exhausted multitudes shouting,
âWe, who are about to die, salute thee!â, can only give the mocking
answer that after their death all will be beautiful on earth. Do you
really wish to condemn human beings alive today to the mere sad role of
caryatids supporting a floor for others one day to dance upon? Of
wretched galley slaves who, up to their knees in mud, drag a barge with
the humble words âFuture Progressâ on its flag?
A goal which is infinitely remote is not a goal at all, it is a
deception. A goal must be closer â at the very least the laborerâs wage
or pleasure in the work performed. Each epoch, each generation, each
life has had, and has, its own experience, and en route new demands
grow, new methods.
Socialism in the 20^(th) century promised âjam tomorrowâ so regularly,
and the promise remained so often unfulfilled, that as Herzen insisted,
new generations will have to evolve their own more immediate social
aims, which, the anarchists hope, will be structured around styles of
social organization other than the machinery of the state.
But because it is frequently suggested that anarchism is simply
inappropriate for the scale of modern society, the concept of federalism
is vital for any attempt to build an anarchist theory of organization.
Anarchist approaches to federalism are fully discussed in Chapter 9.
The anarchists claim that popular self-organization could provide those
new forms of social organization which, as Kropotkin put it in an
observation I have cited earlier, would undertake âthose social
functions that the state fulfills through the bureaucracyâ. However,
these are not the only issues that are raised when skeptics dismiss
anarchism as a primitive ideology that is simply not relevant to the
modern world. They have a different reason, as they observe the modern
nation state and the intense hostilities and rivalries arising between
the government of any major state and others. Or, indeed, the lethal
hatreds visible among different factions within one territory that has
been designated as a state, and the frightening antagonisms that emerge
between the adherents of different religions. They may notice especially
the poisonous legacy of European imperialism to the territories that the
empire-building powers seized and colonized.
It is probably still important to remind the British, French, Belgians,
Germans, Spanish, Portuguese, Italians, Dutch, Austrians, Greeks, Turks,
Russians, and Americans, among others, that most of the intractable
disputes around the globe today are a direct result of the imperialist
policies of their one-time rulers, with their fatal fascination for
seizing some other part of the world, and their cynical application of
the slogan âDivide and Ruleâ. All around the world people are suffering
today as a result of the activity of the empire-builders, and militant
attitudes usually succeed in making matters worse. For nationalist
movements, as Avi Shlaim has expressed it,
have an in-built tendency towards extremism and xenophobia, towards
self-righteousness on the one hand and demonizing the enemy on the
other. History is often falsified and even fabricated to serve a
nationalist political agenda.
It is hard to see how the anarchists, with an absolute hostility to both
religious rivalries and territorial politics, can engage in these
disputes, beyond the direct rejection of imperialism, except to wish
that they were in the past. Abstention itself can be a perilous, though
necessary, attitude, and we have all observed around the globe instances
when the zealots have turned their most vicious attention to those who
dare to attempt an accommodation with the people on âthe other sideâ.
Martin Buber, who, half a century ago, made some valuable contributions
to an assessment of anarchism, warned his fellow Zionists as long ago as
1921 that if the Jews in Palestine did not live with the Arabs as well
as next to them, they would find themselves living in enmity with them.
When he died, 44 years later, the obituarists noted that his advocacy of
bi-nationalism caused him to be ostracized by the orthodox as âan enemy
of the peopleâ.
These 20^(th)-century responses were certainly not anticipated by the
19^(th)-century anarchists. Their classical statement on religion as a
social phenomenon came from the most widely circulated work of the
Russian anarchist Michael Bakunin, God and the State. In this fragment,
written in 1871, he deplores the fact that belief in God still survived
among the people, especially, as he put it, âin the rural districts,
where it is more widespread than among the proletariat of the citiesâ.
He thought this faith in religion was all too natural, since all
governments profited from the ignorance of the people as one of the
essential conditions of their own power; while weighed down by labor,
deprived of leisure and of intellectual intercourse, the people sought
an escape. Bakunin claimed that there were three routes of escape from
the miseries of life, two of them illusory and one real. The first two
were the bottle and the church, âdebauchery of the body or debauchery of
the mind; the third is social revolutionâ. Social revolution, he
asserted,
will be much more potent than all the theological propagandism of the
freethinkers to destroy to their last vestige the religious beliefs and
dissolute habits of the people, beliefs and habits much more intimately
connected than is generally supposed.
Bakunin then turned to the powerful, dominant classes in society who,
while too worldly-wise to be believers themselves, âmust at least make a
semblance of believingâ because the simple faith of the people was a
useful factor in keeping them down. Finally, in this particular
statement of his attitudes, Bakunin turns to those propagandists for
religion who, when you challenge them on any specific absurdity in their
dogma, relating to miracles, virgin births, or resurrection, loftily
explain that they are to be understood as beautiful myths rather than
literal truths, and that we are to be pitied for our prosaic questions,
rather than them for propagating mythology as truth.
Bakuninâs opinions were much the same on this matter as those of his
adversary Karl Marx, one of whose best-known phrases was his description
of religion as the âopium of the peopleâ. And the historians of ideas
would categorize liberalism, socialism, communism, and anarchism all as
products of the period known as the Enlightenment, the result of the Age
of Reason, the ferment of ideas and the spirit of inquiry between the
English Revolution of the 1640s and the American and French revolutions
of the 1770s and 1780s.
In parochial English terms, one slow, grudgingly conceded result of the
Enlightenment was religious toleration. We tend to forget that England
has a state church, founded because of a row that Henry VIII had with
the Pope over one of his divorces. It too claimed its martyrs, as the
long history of the suppression of dissenters reminds us, as does the
continual struggle for religious freedom. It wasnât until 1858 that
legal disabilities were lifted from believing Jews, and not until 1871
that people who could not subscribe to the 39 Articles of the Church of
England were admitted to the ancient universities. The Church of England
may be an irrelevance to the majority of the British people, but it is a
reminder of an important social and political fact. One result of the
Enlightenment was that the people who wrote the constitutions of many
states sought to learn the lessons of history and the horrors of
religious wars by insisting on the absolute separation of religious
practices from public life. Religion was to be a private affair.
This was true of the founding fathers of the United States of America,
whose ancestors had fled religious persecution in Europe; it was true of
the French Republic, and consequently of those countries which, with
immense loss of life, liberated themselves from French imperialism. And
it is true of many new republics similarly founded as a result of the
collapse of imperialism in the 20^(th) century. Some key examples are
the republics of India, Turkey, Egypt, Algeria, and Israel.
Now, all over the world, the secular state is under threat. Secular
political regimes in North Africa and the Middle East are confronted by
militant religious movements, and there is a growing fundamentalist
threat to the secular constitution of the United States. This isnât what
Bakunin or Marx, or any other political thinker of the 19^(th) century,
from Alexis de Tocqueville to John Stuart Mill, predicted.
The unexpected and unwelcome change in the religious atmosphere which we
call fundamentalism arose from a trend in religious revivalism in the
United States after the First World War, which insisted on belief in the
literal truth of everything in the Bible. The use of the term has spread
to describe trends in the Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, and Shinto
religions which, to outsiders, present similar features. They are a
threat not only to the hard-won concept of the secular state, which
anarchists may not feel to be important, but to the hard-won freedoms of
every citizen. The anarchist and secularist propagandist Nicolas Walter
urged us to take this threat seriously, stressing that
Fundamentalist Christians are trying to suppress the study of evolution
and the practice of contraception and abortion in the West and the Third
World. Fundamentalist Jews are trying to incorpoate the whole of
Palestine into Israel and to impose the halachah, the traditional law of
Judaism. Fundamentalist Muslims are trying to establish Muslim regimes
in all countries with Muslim populations (including Britain) and to
impose the sharia, the traditional law of Islam. And fundamentalists of
all faiths are using assassination and terror all over the world to
suppress freedom and discussion of such matters.
This is an absolute tragedy for that majority of citizens in any country
who are simply concerned with the ordinary business of living, feeding a
family, and enjoying the daily pleasures of life, as well as for those
who aspire to improve conditions through community action and social
justice.
Governmental suppression of religion never works. The Soviet Union
witnessed 70 years of state hostility, sometimes violent and sometimes
benign, to religious activity. When the regime collapsed, there was a
huge revival of the Orthodox faith and a happy hunting ground for
American Protestant evangelists. In Soviet Central Asia, Malise Ruthven
suggests,
the local elites, attached to Islamic customs and recognizing a degree
of affinity between Islamic and social values, cheated on their
anti-religious activities as assiduously as they faked their
cotton-production figures. Gatherings of old men reading the Koran would
be described to zealots of the Society for Scientific Atheism as
meetings of Great Patriotic War veterans.
In Turkey, Kemal Ataturk, who also shared Bakuninâs views on religion,
embarked on a dictatorial policy of what we might call
âde-Islamificationâ. His current successors are prevented from
instituting even a façade of democracy precisely because of the threat
of the return of religion. On a different time-scale, the Shah of Iran,
who was a ruthless Westernizer, was succeeded by a fundamentalist regime
that no one predicted. Egypt and Algeria are torn apart by rival elites
of the secular or religious state. In the United States the most
powerful of all political lobbies is that of the Christian Coalition,
with a growing influence in the Republican Party. It denies any
responsibility for the murder of the last doctor to perform an abortion
in the American South.
It is disappointing and unexpected for secularist anarchists, who
thought that wars of religion belonged to the past, now to have to
confront issues of the recognition of difference, while they are trying
to move on to the issues that unite rather than divide us. One approach
they can take is that of the anarchist propagandist Rudolf Rocker, a
century ago, in the Jewish community of Whitechapel in east London. Some
secularist allies had chosen the propaganda of provocative behavior on
Sabbath mornings outside the synagogue in Brick Lane. Asked his opinion
of these demonstrations, Rocker replied that the place for believers was
the house of worship, and the place for nonbelievers was the radical
meeting. But the scene has changed. For the same building that has seen
many faiths come and go, as a Huguenot church, a dissenting
meeting-house, and a Jewish synagogue, is now a mosque. Anyone harassing
the emerging worshipers today is not a secularist Bangladeshi but an
English racist, menacing and heavy, bent on instilling fear and making
trouble.
It has been said, for example, of the Bharatiya Janata (âIndian
Peopleâsâ) Party (BJP) in India, who succeeded in spreading communal
violence into parts of the Punjab where different communities had
previously lived in harmony together, that the name of the disease is
not fundamentalism but ethnic nationalism. This view fits other parts of
the globe, and in such instances, including many areas of the Islamic
world, we can again choose to blame the endless humiliations and
devaluations of the local culture inflicted by Western imperialism.
The fear and terror induced by the overscale images of âterrorismâ and
âfundamentalismâ â call them the figures of an international or
transnational imagery made up of foreign devils â hastens the
individualâs subordination to the dominant norms of the moment. This is
as true in the new post-colonial societies as it is in the West
generally and the United States particularly. Thus to oppose the
abnormality and extremism embedded in terrorism and fundamentalism â my
example has only a small degree of parody â is also to uphold the
moderation, rationality, executive centrality of a vaguely designated
âWesternâ (or otherwise local and patriotically assumed) ethos. The
irony is that far from endowing the Western ethos with the confidence
and secure ânormalityâ we associate with privilege and rectitude, this
dynamic imbues âusâ with a righteous anger and defensiveness in which
âothersâ are finally seen as enemies, bent on destroying our
civilization and way of life.
Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism
(London: Chatto and Windus, 1993)
Edward Saidâs difficult diagnosis (see box below) envelops big truths.
The countries of the Near and Middle East were for centuries subjected
to one imperialism or another, their cultures ridiculed or patronized,
and even their boundaries formed by lines drawn on the map by European
governments and business. They are valued today according to their oil
resources or as potential markets, while they are awash with weapons
left over from Cold War bribes. The Western secular religion of
conspicuous consumption was readily adopted by Middle Eastern rulers,
but they offered nothing but frustrated hopes to the poor majority of
their subjects.
Another vital issue was raised by the Moroccan scholar Fatima Mernissi,
when she was asked to provide a preface for the English translation of
her book on Women and Islam.
When I finished writing this book I had come to understand one thing: if
womenâs rights are a problem for some modern Muslim men, it is neither
because of the Koran, nor the Prophet, nor the Islamic tradition, but
simply because those rights conflict with the interests of a male elite.
The elite faction is trying to convince us that their egotistical,
highly subjective and mediocre view of culture and society has a sacred
basis.
In common with all the other left-wing factions of the late 19^(th) and
early 20^(th) centuries, the anarchists saw territorial and religious
separatism as irrelevant preoccupations that human society had outgrown.
Their only possible message is the hope that zealotry will lose its
impetus when its leaders find they have no followers, as people discover
more interesting, more enjoyable, or at the very least less lethal,
issues to discuss with their neighbors.
From the fall of the Bastille in 1789, which actually released only
seven prisoners, to the death of Stalin in 1953, which slowly liberated
millions, the anarchists, through personal experience, provided an
impressive literature on the defects of the penal system. Kropotkinâs
first book was his account of his experiences In Russian and French
Prisons (1887), and Alexander Berkmanâs was his Prison Memoirs of an
Anarchist (1912).
It was Kropotkin who first used the phrase âprisons are the universities
of crimeâ, and his observation remains true in the sense that the first
imprisonment of any offender becomes a guarantee that he, like the
people with whom he shares a cell, will learn in jail a long series of
more sophisticated criminal techniques than the petty larceny that
started off his prison career. Kropotkin claimed in 1886 that a society
built around cooperation rather than competition would, for that very
reason, suffer less from antisocial activity. He argued that
Peoples without political organization, and therefore less depraved than
ourselves, have perfectly understood that the man who is called
âcriminalâ is simply unfortunate; that the remedy is not to flog him, to
chain him up, or to kill him on the scaffold or in prison, but to help
him by the most brotherly care, by treatment based on equality, by the
usages of life among honest men.
It could be claimed that the best service the British and American
governments in the two world wars of the 20^(th) century could have
provided to the cause of penal reform was the imprisonment of
war-resisters. The jailed objectors, beyond the appalling hardships that
befell some of them in the First World War, had several important
attributes. They tended to be literate people and keen observers of
their surroundings and of their fellow prisoners. They also had a useful
sense of moral superiority over their jailers, seeing the humiliations
they suffered as a reflection, not of their own situation, but of that
of the good citizens who had chosen to incarcerate them.
These observers recognized and publicized what a handful of
19^(th)-century reformers had already pointed out: that many of their
fellow prisoners, serving the current prison sentence for a lifetime
career of petty theft, petty violence, drug-dealing, or drunken idiocy,
came from a background that made their offenses and incarceration almost
inevitable. Many of us, learning the cost to the citizen of keeping any
individual in jail, and realizing that it is far more than our own
incomes, could fervently wish that we had taken heed of the warnings of
the penal reformers, who had sought to draw our attention to the common
factors in the lives of the people we imprison. Frequently, for example,
inmates have a background of institutional childhood, of mental
instability, or of educational failure. They are also, overwhelmingly,
male.
Recognition of these factors was one of the influences at the end of the
19^(th) century leading to the establishment in both Britain and America
of the probation service, in which, as an alternative to prison, a
probation officer was charged with the task of becoming the friend and
adviser of the offender, and with helping him to lead a normal working
and family life. Through much of the 20^(th) century there was a slow
humanization of the penal system, so far as this was possible, inspired
by the reformers who had been inmates and observers in the war years,
despite frequent opposition from the staff of penal establishments.
Practitioners of various therapeutic approaches gained access,
sporadically, to the penal system, with the support of some prison
governors, with significant results. They urged the prison staff that
their own status and job satisfaction would be enhanced if their work
was perceived as curative rather than custodial. Many anarchists were
skeptical about these efforts to civilize the penal system, and so, of
course, was the popular press, which regularly described open prisons as
holiday camps (revealing their journalistsâ ignorance of both). In the
decades following the Second World War, many countries witnessed a
steady decline in the prison population. (Notable exceptions were the
Soviet Union and the nations whose governments it influenced.) David
Cayley explained that
The Netherlands set the standard, bringing a rate of 90 prisoners per
100,000 of population after the war down to a remarkable 17 per 100,000
in 1975 ... Reductions in imprisonment had been brought about by what
Dutch criminologist Willem de Haan once called the âpolitics of bad
conscience.â
But from the late 1970s onwards, the politics of bad conscience were
replaced by the contrasting approach described by the criminologist
Andrew Rutherford as âa politics of good conscience about imprisonmentâ.
Criminal statistics are notoriously difficult to interpret, because they
reflect simply the number of arrests for a range of offenses that any
police force is expected to record. But penal statistics are readily
available and tell a terrifying story. David Cayley reported in 1998
that
To help house the 1.5 million Americans currently in prison, 168 new
state prisons and 45 new federal prisons were built between 1990 and
1995 alone, but these were still not enough to accommodate the numbers
of new prisoners ... The United States has now exposed so many of its
citizens â especially its Black and Hispanic citizens â to the
brutalizing effects of its prisons that a self-fulfilling prophecy has
been set in motion. The more Americans who are manhandled by the
criminal justice system, the more there are whose behavior seems to
justify and demand this treatment.
By the year 2000, prisons in the United States had received their
two-millionth inmate. The sociologist David Downes remarked at a
conference on crime at New York University that no other nation in
history has ever put a bigger proportion of its citizens in jail. The
judicial system also ensures that African-American men have a 1 in 4
chance of going to prison during their lifetimes, while the chance is 1
in 23 for their white fellow citizens. Professor Downes was asked
whether Europe would be affected by the American example. He replied
that âThe components of a steep rise in imprisonment in Europe have
already been assembled.â His answer was correct, and Britain leads
Europe in the proportion of its citizens that it incarcerates.
Alternative approaches, shared by the anarchists with other penal
reformers, have been rejected by the politicians and their public. This
does not persuade reformers to change their opinions, but merely to
await an eventual shift in public attitudes.
There is just one field of law-breaking and law-enforcement in which a
policy of decriminalization is gaining advocates, and which would
greatly reduce the prison population. This concerns the imprisonment of
drug users and drug traders. Everyone agrees this policy is an expensive
failure that, as David Cayley observes, âhas fostered evils far worse
than those it was supposed to eliminateâ. It has the additional irony
that many users find the drugs of their choice are more easily available
inside prison than on the outside. Here it is worth noting the opinions
of the anarchist Errico Malatesta, as far back as 1922, long before our
parents or grandparents imagined that we had a drug problem.
<quote>
It is the old mistake of legislators, in spite of experience invariably
showing that laws, however barbarous they may be, have never served to
suppress vise or to discourage delinquency. The more severe the
penalties imposed on the consumers and traffickers of cocaine, the
greater will be the attractions of forbidden fruits and the fascination
of the risks incurred by the consumer, and the greater will be the
profits made by the speculators, avid for money.
It is useless, therefore, to hope for anything from the law. We must
suggest another solution. Make the use and sale of cocaine free from
restrictions, and open kiosks where it would be sold at cost price or
even under cost. And then launch a great propaganda campaign to explain
to the public, and let them see for themselves, the evils of cocaine; no
one would engage in counter-propaganda because no one could exploit the
misfortune of addicts.
Certainly the harmful use of cocaine would not disappear completely,
because the social causes which create and drive those poor devils to
the use of drugs would still exist. But in any case the evil would
decrease, because nobody could make profits out of its sale, and nobody
could speculate on the hunt for speculators. And for this reason our
suggestion either will not be taken into account, or it will be
considered impractical and mad. Yet intelligent and disinterested people
might say to themselves: Since the penal laws have proved to be
impotent, would it not be a good thing, as an experiment, to try out the
anarchist method?
Errico Malatesta in UmanitĂ Nova, 2 September 1920,
reprinted in V. Richards (ed.), Errico Malatesta: His Life and Ideas
(London: Freedom Press, 1965)
In two European cities, Zurich and Amsterdam, local authorities have
boldly sought to implement such a policy, and in Britain, by the
beginning of the 21^(st) century, at least two chief constables have
expressed a similar point of view, earning sensational headlines but
little practical support.
Politicians of the major parties in Britain won popular acclaim with
rhetoric about giving offenders a âshort, sharp shockâ or sending them
to âBoot Campsâ, and by circumscribing the efforts of the probation
service to keep released offenders out of jail. Even the staccato,
single-syllable language of these programs indicates that the intention
was not to cope with the problem of crime but to satisfy the
headline-writers of the popular press, the real determinants of penal
policy. In the United States, the Republican Partyâs electoral success
is seen to be related to its ability to portray its opponents as âsoft
on crimeâ.
Meanwhile, suicides grew among young prisoners jailed for offenses that
were a nuisance, rather than a threat, to society. Moreover, it is
perfectly obvious that prison does nothing to reduce the crime rate. As
Lord Waddington, Home Secretary to Margaret Thatcher, put it, âPrison is
a very expensive way of making bad men worseâ. Even the politicians no
longer believe in the policies they administer. This is hardly
surprising when you consider the statistics. In 2003 it was reported
that 84% of young people released from custodial sentences in Britain
rapidly reoffend. Figures from the United States would exceed this
record.
But the issues raised by the anarchists, among the ranks of the penal
reformers, will not disappear. They are made more intractable by
societyâs assumptions, as manipulated by the popular press.
Another crucial question, which arose early in the history of anarchism,
concerned its application to the world of work, especially since the
anarchist pioneers tended to have links with the emerging trade union
movement. They identified with the radical end of the union spectrum,
proclaiming anarcho-syndicalism (from the French syndicat, meaning
union), which saw every local industrial struggle as a step towards a
general strike, when the collapse of capitalism would lead to a
take-over by the workers.
In France the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) and in Spain the
ConfederaciĂłn Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) became large-scale mass
movements, as, for a time, did the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)
in the United States. There were, of course, inbuilt conflicts within
syndicalist unions, between those members who were willing to fight and
sometimes win little local battles over small issues, and the militants
who hoped to turn every small dispute into the final struggle to seize
control of the means of production and thus âexpropriate the
expropriatorsâ, continuing production under workersâ control.
But the fading away of the aim of liberating work has little to do with
the gulf between reformers and revolutionaries in the workersâ
organizations. It has a far closer connection with the new, ultimate
weapon in the hands of employers against the claims of workers: âaccept
our conditions or we will transfer our activities and your jobs to
South-east Asia or Latin America, where the labor force will be
delighted to work on our terms.â The owners of capital remain in the
rich world, but the providers of labor are now in the developing world,
and if they should demand a larger share of the products of their work,
the employers simply shift to a cheaper labor force in another country.
Meanwhile, the rich world has a concealed labor force of its own.
Agricultural work in the picking and packing of fruit and vegetables is
undertaken by gang-masters with their teams of illegal immigrants, East
European public employes waiting for wages in their own countries,
students, and migrants. Another underclass copes with telephone and
Internet inquiries, operating in call centers from provincial Britain to
Bangalore in India.
A century ago, the ânew unionismâ in Britain and the IWW in America set
about organizing and representing the unskilled and uncounted workers on
the fringes of the official economy, and succeeded. At the same time,
the anarchist Kropotkin was addressing a British audience which assumed
that Britain was the workshop of the world, and that for ever more the
whole globe would depend on textiles from Lancashire, coal from
Newcastle, and ships from the Clyde. In 1899, when he wrote his Fields,
Factories and Workshops, one of his aims was to demonstrate that, while
the politicians and economists thought in terms of vast factories, the
greater part of industrial production was actually carried out in small
workshops and little local enterprises. Electricity and modern transport
had decentralized production, and Kropotkin urged that this liberated
not only the location of work but the individualâs choice of occupation.
It was now possible to combine brain work and manual work, which was his
industrial ideal.
Anarchists are seldom to be found in the diminishing world of career
employment in formal industry or bureaucracy. They tend to find their
niche in the informal or small-scale economy. This is not surprising,
since industrial psychologists frequently report that satisfaction in
work is directly related to the âspan of autonomyâ it offers, meaning
the amount of the working day or week in which the workers are free to
make their own decisions. In this post-industrial world of work, the
only serious study of the small businessman finds him to be not a
Thatcherite hero, but a creative rebel against the compulsion to be
either an employer or an employee. Paul Thompson reports that
It turns out that far from being an especially purposeful breed of men,
Samuel Smilesâ heroes a hundred years on, many small businessmen are
closer to a kind of drop-out. They disliked the whole modern capitalist
ethic, and especially being employed by others; instead they preferred
to feel the satisfaction of providing a âserviceâ and âdoing a good
jobâ. Quite often it was a mere chance that allowed them to find their
present vocation. Moreover, they will not provide the basis for our next
industrial revolution, because they donât want to expand: that would
imply employing people and losing the personal relationships they like
to have with a small number of workers.
Findings like these are far from the expectations of the
anarcho-syndicalists, who envisaged a triumphant take-over of the
factory by its workers, but they indicate clearly that anarchist
aspirations are close to the dreams of vast numbers of citizens who feel
trapped by the culture of employment.
The editors of a well-known anthology of anarchist writings remark that,
from the school prospectus issued by William Godwin in 1783 to Paul
Goodmanâs book of 1964 on Compulsory Miseducation, âno other movement
whatever has assigned to educational principles, concepts, experiments
and practices a more significant place in its writings and activitiesâ.
Godwinâs tract was published as An Account of the Seminary that will be
Opened on Monday the Fourth Day of August, at Epsom in Surrey, for the
Instruction of Twelve Pupils. It failed to convince enough parents, and
the school never opened. In this pamphlet he declared that
modern education not only corrupts the heart of our youth, by the rigid
slavery to which it condemns them, it also undermines their reason, by
the unintelligible jargon with which they are overwhelmed in the first
instance, and the little attention that is given to accommodating their
pursuits to their capacities in the second.
And he added that
there is not in the world a truer object of pity than a child terrified
at every glance, and watching with anxious uncertainty the caprices of a
pedagogue.
A later book of Godwinâs, The Enquirer (1797), contains, as his
biographer rightly says, âsome of the most remarkable and advanced ideas
on education ever writtenâ. Its opening words are the splendid
affirmation that âThe true object of education, like that of every other
moral process, is the generation of happinessâ. And it goes on to assert
the rights of the child against the automatic assumptions of authority
by the adult world. For example, he observed that
Children, it is said, are free from the cares of the world. Are they
without their cares? Of all cares, those that bring with them the
greatest consolation are the cares of independence. There is no more
certain source of exultation than the consciousness that I am of some
importance in the world. A child usually feels that he is a nobody.
Parents, in the abundance of their providence, take good care to
administer to them this bitter recollection. How suddenly does a child
rise to an enviable degree of happiness, who feels that he has the honor
to be trusted and consulted by his superiors?
Between these two resounding manifestos came Godwinâs best-known book,
his Inquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793). In the course of this
book he diverged sharply from progressive opinion in Britain and from
the Enlightenment philosophers Rousseau, Helvetius, Diderot, and
Condorcet, all of whom put forward schemes for national systems of
schooling, postulating an ideal state, which in Godwinâs view was a
contradiction in terms. He outlined his three major objections thus:
The injuries that result from a system of national education are, in the
first place, that all public establishments include in them the idea of
permanence ... public education has always expended its energies in the
support of prejudice ... This feature runs through every species of
public establishment; and even in the petty institution of Sunday
schools, the chief lessons to be taught are a superstitious veneration
for the Church of England, and to bow to every man in a handsome coat
...
Secondly, the idea of national education is founded in an inattention to
the nature of mind. Whatever each man does for himself is done well;
whatever his neighbors or his country undertake to do for him is done
ill. It is our wisdom to incite men to act for themselves, not to retain
them in a state of perpetual pupilage ...
Thirdly, the project of a national education ought uniformly to be
discouraged on account of its obvious alliance with national government.
This is an alliance of a more formidable nature than the old and much
contested alliance of church and state. Before we put so powerful a
machine under the direction of so ambitious an agent, it behooves us to
consider well what we do. Government will not fail to employ it to
strengthen its hand and perpetuate its institutions ... Their views as
instigators of a system of education will not fail to be analogous to
their views in their political capacity ... [Even] in the countries
where liberty chiefly prevails, it is reasonably to be assumed that
there are important errors, and a national system has the most direct
tendency to perpetuate those errors and to form all minds on one model.
Some admirers of Godwinâs thought have been embarrassed by this
rejection of âprogressiveâ opinion. They recall the hard struggle to
achieve free, universal, compulsory education for all in both Britain
and the United States after 1870. (There is a confusing similarity of
educational language in Britain and the United States. In the United
States âpublicâ schools are the primary and secondary schools provided
at the public expense. In Britain âprivateâ and âpublicâ are the words
used to describe the junior and senior schools funded by affluent
parents for their privileged children; the schools described as âstateâ
schools are actually administered by local government authorities.) In
Britain, a centenary publication from the National Union of Teachers in
1970 explained that âapart from religious and charitable schools,
ââdameââ or common schools were operated by the private enterprise of
people who were often barely literateâ, and it dismissed the widespread
working-class hostility to the School Boards of the 19^(th) century with
the remark that âparents were not always quick to appreciate the
advantages of full-time schooling against the loss of extra wagesâ.
But more recently historians have seen this resistance to state
schooling in a quite different light. Stephen Humphries found that, by
the 1860s, working-class private schools (as opposed to what is meant
today by private schools) were providing an alternative education to
that of the charitable or religious âNationalâ or âBritishâ schools for
about one-third of all working-class children, and he suggests that
This enormous demand for private as opposed to public education is
perhaps best illustrated by the fact that working-class parents in a
number of major cities responded to the introduction of compulsory
attendance regulations not by sending their children to provided state
schools, as government inspectors had predicted, but by extending the
length of their childrenâs education in private schools. Parents favored
these schools for a number of reasons: they were small and close to home
and were consequently more personal and more convenient than most
publicly provided schools; they were informal and tolerant of irregular
attendance and unpunctuality; no attendance registers were kept; they
were not segregated according to age and sex; they used individual as
opposed to authoritarian teaching methods; and, most important, they
belonged to and were controlled by the local community rather than being
imposed on the neighborhood by an alien authority.
Humphriesâ remarkable observation was reinforced by a mass of
contemporary evidence exhumed by Philip Gardner in his book on The Lost
Elementary Schools of Victorian England. This researcher concluded that
these working-class schools
achieved just what the customer wanted: quick results in basic skills
like reading, writing and arithmetic, wasted no time on religious
studies and moral uplift, and represented a genuinely alternative
approach to childhood learning to that prescribed by the education
experts.
In the view of the historian Paul Thompson, the price of eliminating
these schools through the imposition of the national education system
was
the suppression in countless working-class children of the appetite for
education and ability to learn independently which contemporary
progressive education seeks to rekindle.
Radically different as it is from the history of education as taught to
student teachers, this approach helps us to locate the anarchist
thinkers in the spectrum of educational ideas. These include, for
example, the speculations of Leo Tolstoy on the school he started at
Yasnaya Polyana, and those of Francesco Ferrer (1859â1909), the founder
of the âModern Schoolâ movement. Ferrer opened his first school in
Barcelona in 1901, aiming at a secular, rationalist education. He
inspired emulators in several countries and aroused the enmity of the
church. When the Spanish government called for conscription in Catalonia
for its war in Morocco in 1909, Ferrer was held responsible for street
battles in Barcelona in which 200 demonstrators were killed, even though
he was not present. He was executed, but his campaign for secular
education did not die. After the revolution of 19 July 1936, at least
60,000 children in Catalonia attended Ferrer schools.
It is interesting to see how their approach led a variety of anarchists
to offer educational opinions in anticipation of the progressive
propagandists of a century later. For example, Bakunin, in a mere
footnote to a polemic on a different topic, envisaged the school as a
lifelong resource for us all:
They will be schools no longer; they will be popular academies, in which
neither pupils nor masters will be known, where the people will come
freely to get, if they need it, free instruction, and in which, rich in
their own experience, they will teach in turn many things to the
professors who shall bring them knowledge which they lack. This then
will be a mutual instruction, an act of intellectual fraternity.
He was writing in 1870, and if his argument is familiar this is
precisely because identical aspirations were expressed a century later
by people like Ivan Illich and Paul Goodman in America, or in Britain by
Michael Young, and by Professor Harry RĂ©e. In 1972 RĂ©e told an audience
of young teachers that
I think we are going to see in your lifetime the end of schools as we
know them. Instead there will be a community center with the doors open
twelve hours a day, seven days a week, where anybody can wander in and
out of the library, workshops, sports center, self- service store and
bar. In a hundred years time the compulsory attendance laws for children
to go to school may have gone the same way as the compulsory laws for
attendance at church.
His prophecy is unlikely to be fulfilled, for within ten years of his
address, an incoming government was blaming the collapse of the British
manufacturing industry on, of all unlikely scapegoats, the schools.
There followed a new regime of unprecedented intervention by central
government in the management and curriculum of primary and secondary
schools, which in Britain are provided by local authorities. These
included the imposition, for the first time, of a National Curriculum by
the central government, a continuous program of testing children at
particular ages, and an avalanche of form-filling for teachers. (This
endless assessment proved beyond doubt that schools in affluent
districts achieve higher marks than schools in poor areas with a
majority of children whose native language is not English. These are
social facts that most people already knew.)
By 1995, Her Majestyâs Chief Inspector of Schools was declaring that the
real impediment to the development of a better educational system in
Britain was âa commitment to particular beliefs about the purposes and
conduct of educationâ, and that what was needed was âless learning by
doing and more teaching by tellingâ. He was repudiating a hundred years
of progressive influence on the official, compulsory education system,
fitfully moving up the age-range from the nursery to the secondary
school. One irony about the rejection of âprogressiveâ education by
politicians of the political Right is that the educational aims of many
anarchists would be completely acceptable to them. Michael Smith, the
historian of The Libertarians and Education, remarks that Proudhon
was always conscious of the fact that the children he was talking about
were the children of workers. Work was going to be their life when they
grew up. Proudhon saw nothing wrong with this. The work a man did was
something to be proud of, it was what gave interest, value and dignity
to his life. It was right, therefore, that school should prepare the
young for a life of work. An education that was divorced from the world
of work, that is, an education that was entirely bookish or
grammar-schoolish in conception, was valueless from the point of view of
ordinary working-class children. Of course, an education that went too
far in the other direction, which brought up children merely to be
fodder for factories, was equally unacceptable. What was required was an
education which would equip a child for the workplace but would also
give him a degree of independence in the labor market. This could be
achieved by giving him not just the basis of a trade but, as well, a
whole range of marketable skills which would ensure that he was not
totally at the mercy of an industrial system which required
specialization of its workers and then discarded them when the
specialization was no longer of interest to the firm. Thus Proudhon was
led to the idea of an education that was âpolytechnicalâ.
Readers will have guessed, correctly, that Proudhon was concerning
himself solely with the education of boys, but this was not true of such
successors as Kropotkin, with his hopes for the integration of brain
work and manual work, not only in education but in life; nor of such
heroes as Francesco Ferrer in Spain, whose approach was similarly that
of an education for emancipation, as opposed to what he saw as education
for subservience. Michael Smithâs most interesting pages for the English
reader describe âIntegral Educationâ in practice, through the experience
of the French anarchist Paul Robin and the school he ran from 1880 to
1894 at Cempius. It was based upon workshop training and the abandonment
of the classroom in favor of what we would now call the resource center.
Cooking, needlecraft, carpentry, and metalwork were undertaken by both
sexes, while âthe Cempius children, both girls and boys, were among the
first children in France to go in for cyclingâ.
Co-education, sexual equality, and atheism brought down Robinâs school,
but another celebrated French anarchist, SĂ©bastien Faure, ran a famous
school called La Ruche (âThe Beehiveâ). Michael Smith comments that
âFaure had learned one very significant lesson from Robinâs downfall:
stay completely out of the state system and thus be assured of complete
independence.â But in Britain there has been a continual effort to
introduce the approaches of libertarian education into the school system
funded by all citizens. Another historian, John Shotton, has traced the
history of these attempts, and of similar efforts to help all those
children who have been excluded by the official system.
A century of progressive experiments have had a profound effect on every
school, most evidently the primary schools. The role of the teacher has
changed from that of fearsome martinet to that of friendly guide, while
corporal punishment, once the mainstay of the school system, has been
legally outlawed. There is, however, a distinction to be made between
âprogressiveâ education and âlibertarianâ education, which in practice
revolves around the issue of compulsory or voluntary attendance at
lessons. Foremost among the libertarians was A. S. Neill, who for many
decades ran Summerhill School in Suffolk, which survives to this day,
led by his daughter Zoë Readhead.
Neill could not stand the high-minded and manipulative progressives. By
the 1930s he was writing to Dora Russell of Beacon Hill School that she
and he were âthe only educatorsâ. As one of his mentors, Homer Lane, put
it:
âGive the child freedomâ is the insistent cry of the New Educators, but
then its exponents usually devise a âsystemâ which, although based on
the soundest of principles, limits that freedom and contradicts the
principle.
Lane was echoing the opinion of William Godwin in The Enquirer, when he
found that Rousseau, even though the world was indebted to him âfor the
irresistible energy of his writings and the magnitude of his
speculationsâ, had fallen into the common error of manipulating the
child:
His whole system of education is a series of tricks, a puppet-show
exhibition, of which the master holds the wires, and the scholar is
never to suspect in what manner they are moved.
The anarchist approach has been more influential in education than in
most other fields of life. It may be contested and deplored by
authoritarians, with their own nostalgia for an idealized past, but it
is difficult to conceive that young people will tolerate in the future
the educational regime to which the grandparents of their rulers were
subjected.
In some parts of the world, the battle for the freedom of the young is
in the past. In others, it has still to be won. Some of the attempts in
Britain to provide an alternative experience for the young people who
are excluded from the official education system are described in Chapter
8.
For a century, anarchists have used the word âlibertarianâ as a synonym
for âanarchistâ, both as a noun and an adjective. The celebrated
anarchist journal Le Libertaire was founded in 1895. However, much more
recently the word has been appropriated by various American free-market
philosophers â David Friedman, Robert Nozick, Murray Rothbard, and
Robert Paul Wolff â so it is necessary to examine the modern
individualist âlibertarianâ response from the standpoint of the
anarchist tradition.
In approaching this theme, one obstacle to circumnavigate is the German
advocate of âconscious egoismâ, Max Stirner. He was born Johann Caspar
Schmidt (1806â56) and his book, published in 1845, Der Einzige und sein
Eigentum, was translated into English in 1907 as The Ego and His Own. I
have made several efforts to read this book, but have continually found
it incomprehensible. I used to excuse myself with the comment that the
cult of the âEgoâ seemed to me as distasteful as Nietzscheâs âSupermanâ,
but anarchist admirers of Stirner assure me that his approach is quite
different from Nietzscheâs. They argue that Stirnerâs âconscious egoismâ
does not in any way deny the human tendency towards altruistic behavior,
precisely because our own self-image is gratified by the way we perceive
ourselves as social beings. They also draw my attention to Stirnerâs
anticipation of the later perception by Robert Michels of an âiron law
of oligarchyâ, diagnosing an inbuilt tendency of all human institutions
to ossify into oppressive bodies, which have to be opposed in the name
of individual liberty.
Far more typical than Stirner of the anarchist individualist current was
a long series of American activists and innovators, predating the
vigorous history of anarchist propaganda among numerous immigrant groups
of the late 19^(th) and early 20^(th) centuries: German, Russian,
Jewish, Swedish, Dutch, Italian, and Spanish. Such guidebooks as James
J. Martinâs Men Against the State (which first appeared in 1953) and
David DeLeonâs The American as Anarchist: Reflections on Indigenous
Radicalism (which first appeared in 1978) provide a rich and varied
history in the United States of inventive individual and social
anarchist argument and experiment.
The immigrant tradition was of social and collective ventures rapidly
growing into deeply rooted organizations for welfare and conviviality.
It included workersâ unions, schools, and cooperatives. The indigenous
tradition was far more individualistic but its protagonists have had a
remarkable range of impacts on American life. Their chroniclers
distinguish between the ideologies of these libertarians of the Left,
and that of the libertarians of the Right. As David DeLeon separates
them: âWhile the libertarians of the Right despise the state because it
hinders the freedom of property, Left libertarians condemn the state
because it is a bastion of property.â
The first of these luminaries was Josiah Warren (1798â1874) who,
disappointed by the failure of Robert Owenâs cooperative colony of New
Harmony, set up a Time Store in Cincinnati, whose customers bought goods
in return for âlabor notesâ promising the trader an equivalent product
or service. This was followed by a cooperative Village of Equity in
Ohio, the long-lived âmutualistâ village of Utopia, and the community of
Modern Times on Long Island that similarly retained its cooperative
character for at least 20 years. Warrenâs belief in the importance of
the individual led him to advocate communal kitchens, to ârelieve the
females of the family from the full, mill-horse drudgery to which they
otherwise are irretrievably doomedâ.
Lysander Spooner (1808â87) wanted an America of self-employed
individuals sharing equal access to credit. He argued, too, that
if a man has never consented or agreed to support a government, he
breaks no faith in refusing to support it. And if he makes war on it, he
does so as an open enemy, and not as a traitor.
Stephen Pearl Andrews (1812â86) similarly accepted that the sovereignty
of the individual applied to every individual. Consequently, as Peter
Marshall explains,
He consistently opposed slavery and tried to free the state of Texas by
raising money to buy off all of its slaves but the war with Mexico
intervened. He also argued that sexual behavior and family life should
be matters of personal responsibility beyond the control of Church and
State.
Like that of Warren, the individualism of S. P. Andrews led him to
recommend communal nurseries, infant schools, and cooperative
cafeterias, in order to liberate women.
Benjamin R. Tucker (1854â1939) was, in his day, the best-known of the
American individualist anarchists, since his journal Liberty lasted a
quarter of a century, until his Boston printing shop was burned down in
1907. He was also the pioneer translator of Proudhon and Bakunin.
But among the American libertarians of the 19^(th) century, the most
individual and the best remembered is Henry David Thoreau (1817â62). His
famous book Walden is an account of the two years he spent seeking
self-sufficiency in the hut he built for himself near Concord,
Massachusetts. This did not imply a withdrawal from American life, for
the man who declared that the soldierâs natural enemy is the government
that drills him was his countryâs most forthright subversive. One of his
essays, usually called âOn the duty of civil disobedienceâ, though
originally published in 1849 as âResistance to civil governmentâ,
attracted no attention at the time, but subsequently influenced both
Tolstoy and Gandhi (who read it in prison in South Africa). Martin
Luther King read it as a student in Atlanta, and recalled that,
Fascinated by the idea of refusing to cooperate with an evil system, I
was so deeply moved that I reread the work several times. This was my
first intellectual contact with the theory of nonviolent resistance.
Thoreauâs essay on civil disobedience, originating in his sense of
outrage at the United Statesâ governmentâs Mexican War and at the
continuance of black slavery, began its history as a lecture to his
fellow citizens at the Concord Lyceum in 1848. When the abolitionist
John Brown took up arms against the United States in 1859 and was
condemned to death, Thoreau, against some opposition, delivered an
address in the Town Hall called âA Plea for Captain John Brownâ. Many
decades later Havelock Ellis remarked that Thoreau was âthe one man in
America to recognize the greatness of the occasion and to stand up
publicly on his sideâ.
Another remarkable American individualist, Randolph Bourne (1886â1918),
invented a famous phrase during the First World War, as he observed the
process by which his country was manouevred into participating in that
war. âWar is the health of the stateâ, he claimed, and he explained that
The State is the organization of the herd to act offensively or
defensively against another herd similarly organized. War sends the
current of purpose and activity flowing down to the lowest level of the
herd, and to its most remote branches. All the activities of society are
linked together as fast as possible to this central purpose of making a
military offensive or military defense, and the State becomes what in
peacetime it has vainly struggled to become ... The slack is taken up,
the cross-currents fade out, and the nation moves lumberingly and
slowly, but with ever accelerated speed and integration, towards the
great end, towards that peacefulness of being at war ...
His perception of the way that 20^(th)-century governments have been
able to manufacture and manipulate opinion is amply demonstrated by
events in the 90 years since he was writing. American anarchist
individualist protesters have lobbied in the streets against the
policies of the United States government ever since. One was Ammon
Hennacy, always described as âthe one-man revolutionâ, who maintained a
continual individual protest against United States imperialism, from the
East Coast to the Southwest, and another was Dorothy Day of the Catholic
Worker Movement, who testified for many decades of the 20^(th) century
to her faith in self-organizing cooperative communities, which in
political terms has to be described as anarchism.
Some time later, in the 1970s, a series of books, from academics rather
than activists, proclaimed a different style of American libertarianism.
They were Robert Paul Wolffâs In Defense of Anarchism; Robert Nozickâs
Anarchy, State and Utopia; David Friedmanâs The Machinery of Freedom;
and Murray Rothbardâs For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto. This
phalanx of authors have provided the âideological superstructureâ of the
swing to the Right in federal and local politics in the United States,
and in British politics for the aim of ârolling back the frontiers of
the Stateâ, which was actually a cloak for increased subservience to
central decision-making. Robert Paul Wolff claimed that âphilosophical
anarchism would seem to be the only reasonable belief for an enlightened
manâ. Robert Nozick is said by the historian Peter Marshall to have
âhelped to make libertarian and anarchist theory acceptable in academic
circlesâ â no small achievement; while David Friedman has popularized
for an American readership the argument of Friedrich von Hayek that
welfare legislation is the first step on The Road to Serfdom.
Peter Marshall sees the economist Murray Rothbard as the most aware of
the actual anarchist tradition among the anarcho-capitalist apologists:
He was originally regarded as an extreme right-wing Republican, but went
on to edit La BoĂ©tieâs libertarian classic Of Voluntary Servitude and
now calls himself an anarchist. âIf you wish to know how the
libertarians regard the State and any of its acts,â he wrote in For a
New Liberty, âsimply think of the State as a criminal band, and all the
libertarian attitudes will logically fall into place.â He reduces the
libertarian creed to one central axiom, âthat no man or group of men may
aggress against the person or property of anyone else.â Neither the
State nor any private party therefore can initiate or threaten the use
of force against any person for any purpose. Free individuals should
regulate their affairs and dispose of their property only by voluntary
agreement based on contractual obligation.
Rothbard is aware of a tradition, but he is singularly unaware of the
old proverb that freedom for the pike means death for the minnow. For
the bleak facts about the United States economy are that 10% of its
citizens possess 85% of the nationâs net wealth, and that this minority
are also the people who benefit from every reduction in the nationâs
social welfare budget.
The libertarians of the Right have, nevertheless, a function in the
spectrum of anarchist discussion. Every anarchist propagandist finds
that the audience or readership is perplexed by the very idea that it
might be possible to organize human life without government. That is why
Kropotkin, as a libertarian of the Left, as we saw in Chapter 3,
insisted that anarchist propagandists should identify new forms of
organization for those functions that the state now fulfills through
bureaucracy.
Murray Rothbard was one of the founders of a Libertarian Party in the
United States, seeking, as Peter Marshall explains, to abolish âthe
entire Federal regulatory apparatus as well as social security, welfare,
public education and taxationâ, and urging the United States âto
withdraw from the United Nations and its foreign commitments, and to
reduce its military forces to those required for minimal defense.â
Beyond an aspiration to repeal all âvictimless crimeâ laws, we did not
learn about any commitment to a change in the United States penal
system, which now imprisons a larger proportion of the population than
any other nation that keeps reliable records. But in any case, the other
philosophers of the new libertarian Right seem to have a less sweeping
agenda. Robert Paul Wolff, for example, in the 1998 reprint of his book
In Defense of Anarchism, suggests that âa system of in-the-home voting
machines be set upâ, each of them âattached to the television setâ, to
decide social and political issues. He asserts that âsocial justice
would flourish as it has never flourished beforeâ.
Most anarchists would see this as a rather pathetic evasion of the
issues raised by the anarchist criticism of American society, and would
prefer to commemorate a far richer heritage of dissent in the United
States, exemplified by a long series of well-remembered propagandists,
from Thoreau in one generation and Emma Goldman in another, down to Paul
Goodman, who bequeathed an intriguing legacy to his anarchist
successors. In his last article in the American press, he suggested that
For me, the chief principle of anarchism is not freedom but autonomy,
the ability to initiate a task and do it oneâs own way. The weakness of
âmyâ anarchism is that the lust for freedom is a powerful motive for
political change, whereas autonomy is not. Autonomous people protect
themselves stubbornly but by less strenuous means, including plenty of
passive resistance. They do it their own way anyway. The pathos of
oppressed people, however, is that, if they break free, they donât know
what to do. Not having been autonomous, they donât know what itâs like,
and before they learn, they have new managers who are not in a hurry to
abdicate ...
The 19^(th)-century American individualists were busy creating communes,
cooperatives, alternative schools, local currencies, and schemes for
mutual banking. They were busy social inventors exploring the potential
of autonomy, including womenâs liberation and black equality. Their
experience, in the social climate of America, illustrates Martin Buberâs
insistence, cited in Chapter 3, on the inverse relationship between the
social principle and the political principle. The practice of autonomy
generates the experience that enlarges the possibility of success. Or as
the American anarchist David Wieck expresssed it: âThe habit of direct
action is, perhaps, identical with the habit of being free, prepared to
live responsibly in a free society.â
The American âlibertariansâ of the 20^(th) century are academics rather
than social activists, and their inventiveness seems to be limited to
providing an ideology for untrammeled market capitalism.
The gulf between anarchist aspirations and the actual history of the
20^(th) century could be seen as an indication of the folly of
impossible hopes, but for the concurrent failure of other political
ideologies of the Left. Which of us was not profoundly relieved by the
collapse of Soviet communism, even though we have had little reason to
rejoice in subsequent regimes? As the penal settlements slowly emptied
of their survivors, the true believers were obliged to question their
assumptions.
Many years ago, the American journalist Dwight Macdonald wrote an
article on âPolitics Pastâ which included a long footnote that he later
told me was the most-quoted paragraph he had ever written. His footnote
said:
The revolutionary alternative to the status quo today is not
collectivized property administered by a âworkersâ stateâ whatever that
means, but some kind of anarchist decentralization that will break up
mass society into small communities where individuals can live together
as variegated human beings instead of as impersonal units in the mass
sum. The shallowness of the New Deal and the British Labor Partyâs
postwar regime is shown by their failure to improve any of the important
things in peopleâs lives â the actual relationships on the job, the way
they spend their leisure, and child- rearing and sex and art. It is mass
living that vitiates all these today, and the State that holds together
the status quo. Marxism glorifies âthe massesâ and endorses the State.
Anarchism leads back to the individual and the community, which is
âimpracticalâ but necessary â that is to say, it is revolutionary.
In a partial, incomplete, but visible way, several of the revolutions he
sought have already transformed the surface of life. To take an example
that is by definition superficial, one that is obvious and visible but
seldom discussed, consider the revolution in dress in the second half of
the 20^(th) century. Fifty years ago in Britain, the social class of
men, women, and children could be recognized from their clothing. Today
this is no longer true, except for the tiny minority who can read the
signs of expensive and exclusive dress. This is usually attributed to
the growth of mass production and the fact that the garment trade is the
first route to the global economy for a low-paid workforce in the
âdevelopingâ world. But it has more to do with the relaxation of dress
codes, pioneered all through the 20^(th) century by the radical
nonconformistsâ rejection of fashion.
The ignoring of dress codes based on occupation or social class was a
small and personal rebuff to convention. But of course a far more
significant revolution, gaining ground all through the century, has been
the womenâs movement, rejecting the universal convention of male
dominance. Among its anarchist pioneers was Emma Goldman, with her
trenchant pamphlet on The Tragedy of Womenâs Emancipation, arguing that
the vote, which had failed to liberate men, was not likely to free
women. Emancipation, she argued, must come from the woman herself,
First, by asserting herself as a personality, and not a sex commodity.
Second, by refusing the right to anyone over her body; by refusing to
bear children, unless she wants them; by refusing to be a servant to
God, the State, society, the husband, the family etc., by making her
life simpler, but deeper and richer. That is, by trying to learn the
meaning and substance of life in all its complexities, by freeing
herself from the fear of public opinion and public condemnation. Only
that, and not the ballot, will set women free ...
It was among the anarchists that the habit began of what were called
âfree unionsâ as opposed to marriages licensed by church or state. Today
these are almost as common as regular marriages, with the result that
the stigma once associated with illegitimacy has, during the century,
disappeared. This change was, of course, accelerated by the
pharmacological revolution of the contraceptive pill.
Alex Comfort (1920â2000) was a physician, novelist, poet, and anarchist.
His lectures to meetings of the London Anarchist Group in the late 1940s
gave rise to his book Barbarism and Sexual Freedom, published by Freedom
Press in 1948 at a time when no ârespectableâ publisher would issue such
a book. This in turn led to his Sexual Behavior in Society and to his
phenomenally successful manuals on sex. In his book More Joy: A
Lovemaking Companion to The Joy of Sex (1973), he included an anarchist
account of the connection between sexuality and politics. He asserted
that
acquiring the awareness and the attitudes which can come from good
sexual experience does not make for selfish withdrawal: it is more
inclined to radicalize people. The anti-sexualism of authoritarian
societies and the people who run them does not spring from conviction
(they themselves have sex), but from the vague perception that freedom
here might lead to a liking for freedom elsewhere. People who have
eroticized their experience of themselves and the world are, on the one
hand, inconveniently unwarlike, and on the other, violently combative in
resisting political salesmen and racists who threaten the personal
freedom they have attained and want to see others share.
Comfort hoped that his books would provide both reassurance and
liberation, and that they would be a contribution to another
20^(th)-century revolution: that of the relationships between parents
and children. It is hard to imagine in todayâs Western Europe the
punitive behavior of parents towards children that was taken for granted
a century ago.
The same is true of the relationships between teachers and children. The
recollections of people who were schoolchildren in the first decade of
the 20^(th) century are full of accounts of the physical punishment they
received or that they continually feared. In the centuryâs last decade a
law in Britain banned corporal punishment in schools. This was not a
sudden legal decision. It reflected the influence of a handful of
âprogressiveâ schools on general educational thinking.
Many observers claim that the school system has failed to prepare for
the dilemmas that came in the wake of the abandonment of physical
punishment. The teacher is deprived of the weapon that was seen as the
ultimate sanction of the school. This has resulted in increased numbers
of children being excluded from school because teachers have declined to
have them in the class. Anyone who has observed how one disruptive
member of the class can make learning impossible for the whole group has
no criticism to make of those teachers (especially since their employers
put pressure on them not to upset statistics).
In the 1960s and 1970s an intriguing situation arose in several British
cities: London, Liverpool, Leeds, and Glasgow. Groups of enthusiasts
found empty buildings and set up âfree schoolsâ to provide an informal
education for children who were either excluded from school or had
excluded themselves through truancy. (One of them, White Lion Free
School in London, lasted from 1972 to 1990.) The regime of these schools
was consciously modeled on the experience of the progressive school
movement. I asked a veteran of those experiments why the idea had not
been revived among the new generation of excluded children at the start
of the new century. She gave me two reasons: first, the legal
requirement in Britain for all schools to teach the National Curriculum
introduced during the Thatcher regime and retained by its successors;
and second, the difficulty of finding premises that would meet the
safety and sanitary regulations prescribed for schools. However, it is
hard to imagine returning to the regime of fear that governed schools a
century ago. The quiet revolution in education can only move forward.
Two other changes in Britain from the 1960s also seem irreversible. One
is the removal of the fear of criminal prosecution for homosexuality.
This had been recommended in a government report commissioned from John
Wolfenden and published in 1957, but years of argument and agitation
were needed to engineer a change in the law. The other was the ending of
capital punishment in 1965. On the eve of the debate that brought this
change, the anarchist publishers Freedom Press presented every Member of
Parliament with a copy of their edition of Charles Duffâs devastating
book, A Handbook on Hanging, which took the form of an enthusiastic
manual for executioners. Only very humorless observers would complain
that support for campaigns to end barbaric laws was a contradiction of
the anarchist anti-parliamentary stance.
Taken together, the social changes in Britain that I have listed are an
indication that while the anarchists have made little progress towards
the large-scale changes in society that they hoped to bring about, they
have contributed to a long series of small liberations that have lifted
a huge load of human misery.
Several anarchist groups sought to link together these struggles for
human liberation into a conscious campaign with a wider relevance. In
the Netherlands, the Provos introduced games and playful alternatives to
ridicule the official city management. Their most famous ploy was to
litter Amsterdam with white bicycles for public use, to demonstrate that
cars were unnecessary. They were followed by the Kabouters, or gnomes,
forerunners of the Green movement. One of them, Roel van Duyn, made the
same links between anarchism and cybernetics, the science of control and
communication systems, that had been suggested by the founder of
cybernetics, the neurologist Gray Walter. He had pointed out that
We find no boss in the brain, no oligarchic ganglion or glandular Big
Brother. Within our heads our very lives depend on equality of
opportunity, on specialization with versatility, on free communication
and just restraint, a freedom without interference. Here too, local
minorities can and do control their own means of production and
expression in free and equal intercourse with their neighbors.
Among French attempts to sharpen the widespread vaguely libertarian
trends were the Situationists, notably Raoul Vaneigem with his manifesto
on The Revolution of Everyday Life (1967). As Peter Marshall puts it:
The way out for the Situationists was not to wait for a distant
revolution but to reinvent daily life here and now. To transform the
perception of the world and to change the structure of society is the
same thing. By liberating oneself, one changed power relations and
therefore transformed society ...
The Situationists, like the Kabouters, have passed into history without
managing to transform society, but France and the Netherlands, like
Britain, have seen a series of modest gains in civilization.
Then the quiet revolution became noisier as, thanks to the Internet, the
anarchists were linked to a variety of anti-capitalist protesters in a
series of large-scale demonstrations whenever global bodies met to
advance their interests. George Monbiot, in his book Captive State,
describes how
In April 1998, a ragged band of protesters inflicted the first of a
series of defeats on a coalition of the most powerful interests on
earth. The 29 richest nations had joined forces with the worldâs biggest
multinational companies to write âthe constitution of a single global
economyâ. Proposed and drafted by businessmen, secretly discussed by
governments, the Multilateral Agreement on Investment would, had it
succeeded, have granted corporations the right to sue any country whose
laws restricted their ability to make money. The treaty was, its
opponents claimed, a charter for the corporate takeover of the world.
Monbiot explains how the leaking of this secret treaty in 1997 led to
objectors posting the details on the Web, guaranteeing demonstrations
wherever the governmental negotiators might meet. Public pressure and
internal disputes obliged the global leaders to abandon their
negotiations, only to revive them under the auspices of the World Trade
Organization. Its negotiators met in Seattle in November 1999, but the
talks there collapsed as tens of thousands of people from around the
world protested outside, in the name of the poor countries and the
planetâs environment.
In the string of demonstrations that began at Seattle, the techniques
adopted by the Provos and Kabouters were used to ridicule the forces of
law and order. Sean Sheehan, in his account of contemporary anarchism,
describes the scene in Prague, a year after Seattle, where in
demonstrations against the International Monetary Fund,
mini armies of protesters came dressed as fairies and armed with feather
dusters to tickle the ranks of heavily clothed, armed police. At such
protests, lines of transport tend to be blocked not so much by burning
barricades and street battles but by giant contraptions like the
Liberation Puppet, capable of snarling up a major highway.
But after five days of protest had brought a World Trade Organization
conference close to collapse, the heavily armed police responded. As
Sheehan reports,
That the size and organization of the protests spooked the police into
frenzied and blatantly illegal behavior was confirmed by the fact that
of the 631 arrests, only 14 ever went to trial.
Having started gently and humorously, the big international
demonstrations of opposition to global capitalism are no longer quiet
revolutions. There seems to have been a pact between the worldâs police
forces to escalate the violence of their response to demonstrators. Sean
Sheehan goes on to record that
âNormalâ police violence at Seattle escalated at the anti-capitalism
protest in Gothenburg in June 2001 to the issuing of live ammunition to
the police with three people shot. When another anti-capitalist protest
was mounted in Genoa in July, the event turned into a violent riot, with
armored vans driving at speed into crowds of protesters and a
late-night, cold-blooded and very violent assault by the police on a
building where media activists and their material were lodged.
One young anarchist was killed at Genoa, and his death prompted a
renewed discussion of strategies of protest. Maybe there are subtler
ways of undermining global capitalism? The quiet revolutionaries who
transformed the culture of Western countries in the 20^(th) century have
not yet discovered them.
A frequent criticism of anarchism is that it is an ideology that fits a
world of isolated villages, small enough to be self-governing entities,
but not the global, multi-national society that we all inhabit in real
life. But in fact the major anarchist thinkers of the past: Proudhon,
Bakunin, and Kropotkin, had a federalist agenda that was a foretaste of
modern debates on European unity.
That minority of children in any European country who were given the
opportunity of studying the history of Europe as well as that of their
own nations learned that there were two great events in the 19^(th)
century: the unification of Germany, achieved by Bismarck and the
Emperor Wilhelm I; and the unification of Italy, won by Cavour, Mazzini,
Garibaldi, and Vittorio Emanuale II. These triumphs had been welcomed by
the whole world (which in those days meant the European world) because
Germany and Italy had left behind all those silly little principalities,
republics, papal provinces, and city states, to become nation states,
empires, and, of course, conquerors.
They had become like France, whose little local despots were finally
unified by force, first by Louis XIV with his majestic slogan âLâĂtat
câest moiâ, and then by Napoleon, heir to the Grande Revolution, just
like Stalin in the 20^(th) century, who built up the administrative
machinery of terror to ensure that the slogan was true. Or they had
become like England, whose kings (and its one republican ruler, Oliver
Cromwell) had conquered the Welsh, Scots, and Irish, and sought to
dominate the rest of the world outside Europe. The same thing was
happening at the other end of Europe. Ivan IV, appropriately named âThe
Terribleâ, conquered central Asia as far as the Pacific, and Peter I,
known as âThe Greatâ, using the techniques he had learned in France and
Britain, took over the Baltic, most of Poland, and the west of Ukraine.
Advanced opinion throughout Europe welcomed Germany and Italy to the
gentlemanâs club of national and imperial powers. The eventual results
in the 20^(th) century were appalling adventures in conquest, with the
devastating loss of life among young men from the villages of Europe in
the two world wars, and the rise of populist demagogues like Hitler and
Mussolini, as well as their endless imitators to this day, who claim
LâĂtat câest moi. Consequently, although we have had all too few
politicians arguing for the breakdown of nations, we have a host of them
of every persuasion who have sought European unity: economic, social,
administrative, or, of course, political.
Needless to say, in efforts for unification promoted by politicians we
have a multitude of administrators in Brussels issuing edicts about
which varieties of vegetable seeds, or what constituents of beefburgers
or ice cream, may be sold in the shops of member nations. The newspapers
joyfully report all this trivia. The press gives far less attention to
another undercurrent of pan-European opinion, evolving from the views
expressed in Strasbourg from people of every political hue, claiming the
existence of a âEurope of the Regionsâ, and daring to argue that the
nation state was a phenomenon of the 16^(th) to 19^(th) centuries, which
will not have any useful future in the 21^(st) century. The forthcoming
pattern of administration in the federated Europe that they are
struggling to discover is a link between, let us say, Calabria, Wales,
Andalusia, Aquitaine, Galicia, or Saxony, as regions, rather than as
nations, seeking their regional identity, economically and culturally,
which has been lost in their incorporation in nation states, where the
center of gravity is elsewhere.
In the great tide of nationalism in the 19^(th) century there was a
handful of prophetic and dissenting voices, urging the alternative of
federalism. It is interesting, at least, that those whose names survive
were the three best-known anarchist thinkers of that century. The
political Left as it evolved in the 20^(th) century has dismissed their
legacy as irrelevant. So much the worse for the Left, since the debate
is now monopolized by the political Right, which has its own agenda in
opposing both federalism and regionalism.
First among these anarchist precursors was Proudhon, who devoted two of
his books to the idea of federation in opposition to that of the nation
state. They were La FĂ©dĂ©ration et lâUnitĂ© en Italie of 1862, and in the
following year his Du Principe Fédératif. Proudhon was French, a citizen
of a unified, centralized nation state, with the result that he was
obliged to become a refugee in Belgium. And he feared the unification of
Italy on several different levels. In his book De la Justice of 1858, he
had forecast that the creation of the German Empire would bring only
trouble both to the Germans and to the rest of Europe, and he pursued
this argument into the political history of Italy.
On the bottom level was history, where natural factors like geology and
climate had shaped local customs and attitudes. âItalyâ, he claimed,
is federal by the constitution of her territory; by the diversity of her
inhabitants; in the nature of her genius; in her mores; in her history.
She is federal in all her being and has been since all eternity ... And
by federation you will make her as many times free as you give her
independent states.
It was therefore unnatural for Italy to become a nation state.
He understood that Cavour and Napoleon III had agreed to make a federal
Italy, but he knew they would rely on a vainglorious princeling from the
House of Savoy who would settle for nothing less than a centralized
constitutional monarchy. And beyond this, he profoundly mistrusted the
liberal anti-clericalism of Mazzini, not through any love of the Papacy
but because he recognized that Mazziniâs slogan âDio e popoloâ could be
exploited by any demagogue who could seize the machinery of a
centralized state. He saw that the existence of this administrative
machinery was an absolute threat to personal and local liberty. Proudhon
was almost alone among 19^(th)-century political theorists to perceive
this:
Liberal today under a liberal government, it will tomorrow become the
formidable engine of a usurping despot. It is a perpetual temptation to
the executive power, a perpetual threat to the peopleâs liberties. No
rights, individual or collective, can be sure of a future.
Centralization might, then, be called the disarming of a nation for the
profit of its government ...
Everything we now know about the 20^(th)-century history of Europe,
Asia, Latin America, or Africa supports this perception. Nor does the
North American style of federalism, so lovingly conceived by Thomas
Jefferson and his friends, guarantee the removal of this threat. One of
Proudhonâs English biographers, Edward Hyams, comments that
it has become apparent since the Second World War that United States
Presidents can and do make use of the Federal administrative machine in
a way which makes a mockery of democracy.
And his Canadian translator Richard Vernon paraphrases Proudhonâs
conclusion thus:
Solicit menâs views in the mass, and they will return stupid, fickle and
violent answers; solicit their views as members of definite groups with
real solidarity and a distinctive character, and their answers will be
responsible and wise. Expose them to the political âlanguageâ of mass
democracy, which represents âthe peopleâ as unitary and undivided, and
minorities as traitors, and they will give birth to tyranny; expose them
to the political language of federalism, in which the people figures as
a diversified aggregate of real associations, and they will resist
tyranny to the end.
This observation reveals a profound understanding of the psychology of
politics. Proudhon was extrapolating from the evolution of the Swiss
Confederation, but Europe has other examples in a whole series of
specialist fields. The Netherlands has a reputation for its mild or
lenient penal policy. The official explanation of this is the
replacement in 1886 of the Code Napoleon by âa genuine Dutch criminal
codeâ based upon cultural traditions like âthe well-known Dutch
ââtoleranceââ and tendency to accept deviant minoritiesâ. I am quoting
the Netherlands criminologist Dr Willem de Haan, who cites the
explanation that Dutch society
has traditionally been based upon religious, political and ideological
rather than class lines. The important denominational groupings created
their own social institutions in all major public spheres. This process
... is responsible for transforming a pragmatic, tolerant general
attitude into an absolute social must.
In other words it is diversity and not unity that creates the kind of
society in which you and I can most comfortably live. And modern Dutch
attitudes are rooted in the diversity of the medieval city states of
Holland and Zeeland, which demonstrates, as much as Proudhonâs
regionalism, that a desirable future for all Europe lies in an
accommodation of local differences.
Discussions about European integration in the 1860s prompted a skeptical
reaction from Proudhon:
Among French democrats there has been much talk of a European
confederation, or a United States of Europe. By this they seem to
understand nothing but an alliance of all the states which presently
exist in Europe, great and small, presided over by a permanent congress.
It is taken for granted that each state will retain the form of
government that suits it best. Now since each state will have votes in
the congress in proportion to its population and territory, the small
states in this so-called confederation will soon be incorporated into
the large ones ...
Swallowing up neighboring countries may be unfashionable nowadays, but
we can see Proudhonâs misgivings being realized in the way debates and
decisions of the European Community are dominated by the large states at
the expense of the smaller member nations.
The second of my 19^(th)-century mentors, Michael Bakunin, demands our
attention for a variety of reasons. He was almost alone among that
centuryâs political thinkers in foreseeing the horrors of the clash of
modern nation states in the First and Second World Wars, as well as
predicting the results of centralizing Marxism in the Russian Empire. In
1867 Prussia and France seemed to be poised for a war about who should
control Luxembourg and this, through the network of interests and
alliances, âthreatened to engulf all Europeâ. A League for Peace and
Freedom held its congress in Geneva, sponsored by prominent people from
various countries, such as Giuseppe Garibaldi, Victor Hugo, and John
Stuart Mill. Bakunin seized the opportunity to address this audience,
and published his opinions under the title Fédéralisme, Socialisme, et
Anti-Théologisme. This document set out 13 points on which, according to
Bakunin, the Geneva Congress was unanimous.
The first of these points proclaimed
That in order to achieve the triumph of liberty, justice and peace in
the international relations of Europe, and to render civil war
impossible among the various peoples which make up the European family,
only a single course lies open: to constitute the United States of
Europe.
His second point argued that this aim implied that states must be
replaced by regions, for it observed
That the formation of these States of Europe can never come about
between the States as constituted at present, in view of the monstrous
disparity which exists between their various powers.
His fourth point claimed
That not even if it called itself a republic could any centralized,
bureaucratic and by the same token militarist State enter seriously and
genuinely into an international federation. By virtue of its
constitution, which will always be an explicit or implicit denial of
domestic liberty, it would necessarily imply a declaration of permanent
war and a threat to the existence of neighboring countries.
Consequently his fifth point demanded
That all the supporters of the League should therefore bend all their
energies towards the reconstruction of their various countries, in order
to replace the old organization founded throughout upon violence and the
principle of authority by a new organization based solely upon the
interests, needs and inclinations of the populace, and owning no
principle other than that of the free federation of individuals into
communes, communes into provinces, provinces into nations, and the
latter into the United States, first of Europe, then of the whole world.
The vision thus became bigger and bigger, but Bakunin was careful to
include the acceptance of secession. His eighth point declared that
Just because a region has formed part of a State, even by voluntary
accession, it by no means follows that it incurs any obligation to
remain tied to it for ever. No obligation in perpetuity is acceptable to
human justice ... The right of free union and equally free secession
comes first and foremost among all political rights; without it,
confederation would be nothing but centralization in disguise.
Bakunin refers admiringly to the Swiss Confederation, âpracticing
federation so successfully todayâ, as he put it, and Proudhon too
explicitly took as a model the Swiss supremacy of the commune as the
unit of social organization, linked by the canton, with a purely
administrative federal council. But both remembered the events of 1848,
when the Sonderbund of secessionist cantons were compelled by war to
accept the new constitution of the majority. Proudhon and Bakunin agreed
in condemning this subversion of federalism by the unitary principle.
There must be a right of secession.
Switzerland, precisely because of its decentralized structure, was a
refuge for numerous political refugees from the Austro-Hungarian,
German, and Russian empires. One Russian anarchist was even expelled
from Switzerland: he was too much even for the Swiss Federal Council.
This was Peter Kropotkin, whose ideas connect 19^(th)-century federalism
with 20^(th)-century regional geography.
Kropotkinâs youth was spent as an army officer in geological expeditions
in the Far Eastern provinces of the Russian Empire. His autobiography
tells of the outrage he felt to see how central administration and
funding destroyed any improvement of local conditions, through
ignorance, incompetence, and universal corruption, and through the
destruction of ancient communal institutions which might have enabled
people to change their own lives. The rich got richer, the poor got
poorer, and the administrative machinery was suffocated by boredom and
embezzlement. There is a similar literature from any other empire or
nation state.
In 1872 Kropotkin made his first visit to Western Europe, and in
Switzerland was intoxicated by the air of democracy, even a bourgeois
one. In the Jura hills he stayed with the watch-makers, a community of
self-employed craftsmen. His biographer Martin Miller describes his
reactions:
Kropotkinâs meetings and talks with the workers on their jobs revealed
the kind of spontaneous freedom without authority or direction from
above that he had dreamed about. Isolated and self-sufficient, the Jura
watchmakers impressed Kropotkin as an example that could transform
society if such a community were allowed to develop on a large scale.
There was no doubt in his mind that this community would work because it
was not a matter of imposing an artificial âsystemâ such as had been
attempted by Muraviev in Siberia but of permitting the natural activity
of the workers to function according to their own interests.
His stay in the Jura hills was a turning point for Kropotkin. The rest
of his life was, in a sense, devoted to gathering the evidence for
anarchism, federalism, and regionalism.
Kropotkinâs approach is not simply a matter of academic history. In a
study of Un federalista Russo, Pietro Kropotkin (1922), the Italian
anarchist Camillo Berneri quotes the âLetter to the Workers of Western
Europeâ that Kropotkin handed to the British Labor Party politician
Margaret Bondfield in June 1920. In the course of it he declared that:
Imperial Russia is dead and will never be revived. The future of the
various provinces which composed the Empire will be directed towards a
large federation. The natural territories of the different sections of
this federation are in no way distinct from those with which we are
familiar in the history of Russia, of its ethnography and economic life.
All the attempts to bring together the consituent parts of the Russian
Empire, such as Finland, the Baltic provinces, Lithuania, Ukraine,
Georgia, Armenia, Siberia and others, under a central authority are
doomed to failure. The future of what was the Russian Empire is directed
towards a federation of independent units.
Today we can see the relevance of this opinion, ignored for 70 years. As
an exile in Western Europe, Kropotkin had close contact with a range of
pioneers of regional thinking. The relationship between regionalism and
anarchism has been handsomely delineated by the geographer Peter Hall,
when director of the Institute of Urban and Regional Development at
Berkeley, California, in his book Cities of Tomorrow (1988). There was
Kropotkinâs fellow anarchist geographer ElisĂ©e Reclus, arguing for
small-scale human societies based on the ecology of their regions. There
was Paul Vidal de la Blache, another founder of French geography, who
argued that âthe region was more than an object of survey; it was to
provide the basis for the total reconstruction of social and political
lifeâ. For Vidal, as Professor Hall explains, it was the region, not the
nation, which
as the motor force of human development; the almost sensual reciprocity
between men and women and their surroundings, was the seat of
comprehensible liberty and the mainspring of cultural evolution, which
were being attacked and eroded by the centralized nation-state and by
large-scale machine industry.
Finally there was the extraordinary Scottish biologist Patrick Geddes,
who tried to encapsulate all these regionalist ideas, whether
geographical, social, historical, political, or economic, into an
ideology of reasons for regions, known to most of us through the work of
his disciple Lewis Mumford.
Professor Hall pointed out that
many, though by no means all, of the early visions of the planning
movement stemmed from the anarchist movement, which flourished in the
last decades of the nineteenth century and the first years of the
twentieth ... The vision of these anarchist pioneers was not merely of
an alternative built form, but of an alternative society, nether
capitalist nor bureaucratic-socialist: a society based on voluntary
cooperation among men and women, working and living in small
self-governing communities.
Those 19^(th)-century anarchist thinkers were a century in advance of
their contemporaries in warning the peoples of Europe of the
consequences of not adopting a regionalist and federalist approach.
After every kind of disastrous experience in the 20^(th) century, the
rulers of the nation states of Europe have directed policy towards
several kinds of supranational entities. The crucial issue that faces
them is whether to conceive of a Europe of States or a Europe of
Regions.
To do them justice, the advocates of a united Europe have developed a
doctrine of âsubsidiarityâ, by which governmental decisions outside the
remit of the supranational institutions of the European Community should
be taken by regional or local levels of administration, rather than by
national governments. A resolution has been adopted by the Council of
Europe, calling for national governments to adopt its Charter for Local
Self-Government, âto formalize commitment to the principle that
government functions should be carried out at the lowest level possible
and only transferred to higher government by consent.â
This precept is an extraordinary tribute to Proudhon, Bakunin, and
Kropotkin and the ideas that they were alone in voicing (apart from some
interesting Spanish thinkers like Pi y Margall or Joaquin Costa). Of
course it is one of the first aspects of pan-European ideology that
national governments will choose to ignore, though there are obvious
differences between various nation states in this respect. In many of
them, for example Germany, Italy, Spain, and even France, the machinery
of government is considerably more devolved than it was 50 years ago.
The same is true of the former Soviet Union.
One anarchist thinker from the Netherlands, Thom Holterman, has set out
the criteria which anarchists would see as the prerequisites for a free
united Europe. His warning is precisely that the obstacle to a Europe of
the Regions is the existence of nation states. Another is that because
the thinking and planning of the future of Europe is in the hands of
governmental bureaucracies, they are all preparing for a Europe of the
bureaucrats.
Kropotkin used to cite the lifeboat institution as an example of the
kind of voluntary and non-coercive organization envisaged by anarchists
that could provide a worldwide service without the principle of
authority intervening. Two other examples of the way in which local
groups and associations could combine to provide a complex network of
functions without any central authority are the post office and the
railways. You can post a letter to Chili or China, confident that it
will get there, as a result of freely-arrived-at agreements between
different national post offices, without there being any central world
postal authority at all. Or you can travel across Europe and Asia over
the lines of a dozen different railway systems, public and private,
without any kind of central railway authority. Coordination requires
neither uniformity nor bureaucracy.
When Kropotkinâs Fields, Factories and Workshops first appeared in 1899,
the precursors of the Green movement found it an inspiration, since its
author stressed the productivity of small-scale decentralized industry,
and of a âhorticulturalâ approach to food production, for its immense
output. When his book was re-issued at the end of the First World War,
an added preliminary note observed that: âIt pleads for a new economy in
the energies used in supplying the needs of human life, since these
needs are increasing and the energies are not inexhaustible.â
In those days this was a rare recognition of the limits to growth. Today
we have a vast literature on the problems of resource depletion and
environmental destruction. The difficulty for environmental activists,
trying to enlist the support of fellow citizens, is one of priorities:
which campaign most urgently needs a helping hand? Capitalism roams the
globe, seeking the least protected labor market and the least protected
physical environment, in order to stimulate, and to win, an ever-growing
market for its goods. It describes this process as âconsumer
sovereigntyâ and thus evades any responsibility for its ruthless
exploitation of poor people and weak economies. The richer we are, the
more we are inclined to shrug off our share of this responsibility.
For many years now, we in the rich economies have had a series of
movements and campaigns described in general terms as âenvironmentalâ,
âconservationistâ, or âgreenâ, or even âecologicalâ, drawing our
attention to the crises of the environment, global warming, and the
depletion of finite resources. Critics of these campaigns in the rich
world point out that they do not always include an awareness of the
plight of the rich worldâs poor. Amartya Sen remarked on the paradox
that âIn the poor world the poor are thin and the rich are fat. In the
rich world the rich are thin and the poor are fat.â He is the author of
a famous study of who eats and who starves, and of what they eat, with a
theory of âentitlementsâ, defining these as the set of âalternative
commodity bundles which a person can commandâ. His observation is a
reminder that in every society there are several simultaneous food
cultures, ultimately determined by levels of poverty and affluence. In
the poor world the powerful and wealthy and their military elites live
grandly, while the poor are ill-nourished and sometimes starving. In the
rich world a significant poor minority lives on the âjunk foodâ that the
affluent can afford to despise. In Britain the number of children
growing up in poverty trebled between 1968 and 1998.
Any discussion of environmental issues has to start with the fact of
malnutrition in a world of plenty, and then proceed to examine the high
cost of the rich worldâs âcheapâ food. Kropotkinâs arguments included
the claim that a densely populated small country like Britain could feed
itself from its own land, an idea regarded as absurd even though it was
based on European experience. A century later I had the pleasure of
meeting Jac Smit, president of the Urban Agriculture Network and
coauthor of the United Nations report on Urban Agriculture: Food, Jobs
and Sustainable Cities, who explained how in Chinese cities 90% of
vegetables are locally grown, and that
Hong Kong, the densest large city in the world, produces within its
boundaries two-thirds of the poultry, one-sixth of the pigs, and close
to half the vegetables eaten by its citizens and visitors.
The best-known examples of urban intensive food production are provided
by the vast cities of South-East Asia. Singaporeâs 1,500 hectares of
âagro-technology parksâ are famous. As their admirer Geoff Wilson points
out,
The inescapable logic is that while rural agriculture can need up to
eight fossil fuel energy units to produce one food energy unit sold in
supermarkets, urban agriculture can provide up to eight food energy
units for every one fossil fuel energy unit.
Tim Lang, a professor of food policy who has been concerned for years
with the implications of findings like these, reminds us that
Supermarket distribution systems are totally dependent upon cheap
energy. Far from being more convenient, hypermarkets are actually making
us make more, not less, shopping trips. The average number increased by
28 percent between 1978 and 1991. Shoppers also have to go further: the
distance rose by 60 percent between 1978 and 1991 ... The common factor
to all this is the food retailersâ use of centralized distribution
systems. Each firm has its own regional distribution centers (RDCs). All
food goes to the RDC and thence to the shops. As a result the food
travels much further ...
This is known as the food-miles issue. It has been extended to even more
bizarre lengths by the policies of the giant food retailers, searching
the globe for suppliers who are cheapest, regardless of the diversion of
local water supplies from meeting traditional local needs. In my nearest
town in East Anglia I can buy Mexican carrots, Australian onions,
African mange-tout peas, and Peruvian asparagus. This fact contributes
far more to global warming than my careless use of electricity.
Professor John Houghton, Chairman of the Royal Commission on
Environmental Pollution and of the United Nations Advisory Panel on
Climate Change, thought there was something absurd in the fact that he
had eaten delicious new potatoes for his lunch. They had been delivered
by a 40-tonne lorry to his local hypermarket after being flown by
superjet to England. And, as he commented, âI could have grown them in
my own back garden.â
His remark was important because it illustrates the gulf between our
green aspirations and our actual behavior. In exploring this gap, the
work of the American anarchist Murray Bookchin has been significant and
influential. He, like Rachel Carson, had been a propagandist on
environmental issues in the 1950s and 1960s, and this gave him the same
kind of forerunner status in the emerging American Green movement. He
linked this with the homegrown American anarchist tradition. âWhat we
are trying to doâ, he explained,
is to redeem certain aspects of the American Dream. There are, of
course, several American dreams: one is the John Wayne tradition of the
cowboy going out to the West, and the whole notion of pioneering
individualism; another is the immigrant American dream, this being the
land of opportunity where the streets are made of gold. But there is a
third American dream, which is the oldest of the lot, dating back to
Puritan times, which stresses community, decentralization,
self-sufficiency, mutual aid and face- to-face democracy.
This is where Bookchin came into conflict with yet another American
dream. As ecological awareness spread among the children of the
affluent, the national guilt over the genocide of indigenous peoples led
to an exaltation of the Noble Savage, and a distaste for ordinary
mortals who hadnât got the Message. What was seen as âDeep Ecologyâ
became fashionable among those affluent enough to âget away from it allâ
and pursue every kind of mystical belief, so long as the checks kept
flowing into their bank accounts. Many of Bookchinâs fellow citizens
shifted from an involvement in social issues to a sentimental and
privileged idealization of âwildernessâ and the natural environment,
with a consequent misanthropy towards their fellow humans.
Bookchinâs vigorous repudiation of these approaches has sought to
confront the abandonment of social concerns in an increasingly divided
America, re-asserting the claims of âSocial Ecologyâ and aiming, as he
said, to advance âa serious challenge to society with its vast,
hierarchical, sexist, class-ruled, state apparatus and militaristic
historyâ.
Most anarchists would take it for granted that an ecologically viable
society is incompatible with capitalism and its demand for continually
expanding markets, achieved through the invention of wants and the
built-in obsolescence of consumer goods. At the same time, most of us
feel that in seeking more ecologically viable ways of living, we cannot
wait until the downfall of the capitalist system. The Green movement has
been in existence long enough for its adherents to learn which
approaches are most relevant for them.
In the 1970s I was lucky enough to be employed to start a journal for
teachers and students called the Bulletin of Environmental Education
(BEE). One of its most stimulating mentors was an inventive young man
called Peter Harper, who in 1975 went to Wales to join a group of
enthusiasts who were starting the Center for Alternative Technology
(CAT) at Machynlleth, in an old quarry in a landscape of industrial
dereliction. By the end of the century that enterprise (operating as a
workersâ cooperative of 28 members) was being visited by about 80,000
people every year, including 20,000 children, and is world-famous as a
demonstration site for environmentally friendly power generation,
building construction, and sewage disposal. I am told that it generates
90% of its own energy requirements in renewable form from sun, wind, and
water.
Since he has long practical experience in this field, I take Peter
Harperâs conclusions seriously. He told interviewers in 1998 that
The craze for self-sufficiency and small-is-beautiful has passed. Donât
try to do it all yourself. Start where you are strong, not where you are
weak ... Donât try to make your energy: try to save your energy. Most of
the action is going to be in cities, where the majority of humans will
soon be living and where, contrary to our old Arcadian assumptions,
sustainable modern lifestyles are more easily achieved.
His continual probing of the environmental consciousness of our fellow
citizens has led him to make a different distinction from that between
Deep Ecologists and Social Ecologists. Peter Harper divides us into
Light Greens (with more money than time) and Deep Greens (with, perhaps,
more time than money). The Light Greens, he suggests, are involved with
the new technology of solar heating, fuel-efficient lightweight motor
cars, and sustainable consumption, while the Deep Greens believe in
small, insulated houses, bicycles and public transport, homegrown food,
repair and recycling, local currency schemes, and barter.
Meanwhile, the rest of society will continue to belong to the culture of
MORE! For, as he observes,
People aspire to greater convenience and comfort, more personal space,
easy mobility, a sense of expanding possibilities. This is the modern
consumerist project: what modern societies are all about. It is a
central feature of mainstream politics and economics that consumerist
aspirations are not seriously challenged. On the contrary, the implied
official message is âHang on in there: we will deliver.â The central
slogan is brutally simple: MORE!
Some of us, Peter Harper noted in his Schumacher Lecture at Bristol in
2001, have apocalyptic visions of uncontrollable catastrophes in the
future resulting from indiscriminate economic activity. He, as an
optimist, and from his own experience as an environmental activist, has
a different expectation. He thinks that as life gradually gets worse for
everyone else, the Deep Greens (the people he calls the recessive genes
of the sustainability movement) will be found to have solved what he
calls the great riddle of reconciling modernity and sustainability:
âThey will quite visibly be having a good time: comfortable, with varied
lives and less stress, healthy and fit, having rediscovered the
elementary virtues of restraint and balance.â
Twenty-five years of offering environmental choices to fellow citizens
who came to the Center for Alternative Technology with a variety of
motives have led Peter Harper to adopt his relaxed approach to the task
of convincing us all that our lifestyles have to change. Murray Bookchin
would probably react differently, but many years earlier he posed the
same issues in discussing the nature of a liberatory technology, one
which frees rather than enslaves us. Can we imagine, he asked, that an
ecologically viable economy could be based on a centralized nation state
and its bureaucratic apparatus? He urged that, from the standpoint of
the viability of the planet and all living things on it, anarchist
concepts are not merely desirable, they are necessary:
What was once regarded as impractical and visionary has now become
eminently practical ... If community face-to-face democracy, a
humanistic, liberatory technology, and decentralization are conceived of
merely as reactions to the prevailing state of affairs â a vigorous
ânayâ to the âyesâ of what exists today â a compelling, objective case
can be made for the practicability of an anarchist society.
Environmental and ecological concerns have been advocated long enough
for us to recognize peaks and troughs in the support they receive from
the general, uncommitted public, whose involvement is vital for the
manipulators of change. There are fashions in crisis-consciousness, as
in most other aspects of our communal life. A comforting thought for
anarchists is the reflection that a society advanced enough to accept
the environmental imperatives of the 21^(st) century will be obliged to
reinvent anarchism as a response to them.
For a very strong case has been made by such authors as Murray Bookchin
and Alan Carter that anarchism is the only political ideology capable of
addressing the challenges posed by our new green consciousness to the
accepted range of political ideas. Anarchism becomes more and more
relevant for the new century.
Peter Marshall (ed.), The Anarchist Writings of William Godwin (London:
Freedom Press, 1986)
Stewart Edwards (ed.), Selected Writings of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
(London: Macmillan, 1969)
K. J. Kenafick (ed.), Marxism, Freedom and the State (London: Freedom
Press, 1984)
Paul Avrich (ed.), The Conquest of Bread (London: Allen Lane, 1972
[1892])
Colin Ward (ed.), Fields, Factories and Workshops (London: Allen and
Unwin, 1974; London: Freedom Press, 1985 [1899])
John Hewetson (ed.), Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (London: Freedom
Press, 1987 [1902])
The passage quoted from Landauer is from Martin Buber, Paths in Utopia
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949).
F. G. Notehelfer, Kotuku Shusui: Portrait of a Japanese Radical
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971)
Robert A. Scalapino and George T. Yu, The Chinese Anarchist Movement
(Bristol: Drowned Rat Publications, 1985)
Hai Ki-Rak, History of the Korean Anarchist Movement (Tuega, Korea:
Anarchist Publishing Committee, 1986)
Adi Doctor, Anarchist Thought in India (Bombay: Asia Publishing House,
1964)
Geoffrey Ostergaard and M. Currell, The Gentle Anarchists (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1971)
Sam Mbah and I. E. Igarewey, African Anarchism: The History of a
Movement (Tucson, Arizona: See Sharp Press, 1997)
For the extent of anarchist involvement in assassinations, see Charles
Townshend, Terrorism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2002)
Kropotkinâs article on anarchism for the 11^(th) edition of the
Encyclopedia Britannica is reprinted in Peter Kropotkin, Anarchism and
Anarchist Communism (London: Freedom Press, 1987)
Thomas Paine, Common Sense (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971 [1776]) J.
Varlet, quoted in George Woodcock, Anarchism (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1963)
Paris Commune, cited in Woodcock op. cit.
John Womack, Zapata and the Mexican Revolution (London: Thames and
Hudson, 1972)
John Ross, The War Against Oblivion: The Zapatista Chronicles (Monroe,
Maine: Common Courage Press, 2000)
Sue Branford and Jan Rocha, Cutting the Wire: The Story of the Landless
Movement in Brazil (London: Latin American Bureau, 2002)
Paul Avrich, The Russian Anarchists (New Jersey: Princeton University
Press, 1967)
Carl Levy, âItalian anarchism 1870â1926â, in For Anarchism: History,
Theory and Practice, ed. David Goodway (London: Routledge, 1989)
Gerald Brenan, The Spanish Labyrinth (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1943).
Pierre Broué and Emile Témine, The Revolution and the Civil War in Spain
(London: Faber, 1970)
Burnett Bolloten, The Spanish Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1979)
Noam Chomsky, American Power and the New Mandarins (New York: Random
House, 1967)
S. Faure, cited in Vernon Richards, Lessons of the Spanish Revolution
(London: Freedom Press, 1953; 3^(rd) edn. 1983)
M. Buber, âSociety and the Stateâ, in World Review, July 1951, reprinted
in M. Buber, Pointing the Way (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957)
Colin Ward, Social Policy: An Anarchist Response (London: London School
of Economics, 1996; Freedom Press, 2000) James Burnham, The Managerial
Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1944)
Richard Koch and Ian Godden, Managing Without Management (London:
Nicholas Brealey, 1996)
Pierre Guillet de Monthoux, Action and Existence: Anarchism for Business
Administration (Chichester: John Wiley, 1983)
A. Herzen, From the Other Shore (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1956;
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979)
Avi Schlaim, in The Guardian, 29 March 2003
M. Buber, Israel and Palestine (London: East and West Library, 1952)
M. Bakunin, God and the State, in Bakunin on Anarchy, ed. Sam Dogloff
(London: Allen and Unwin, 1973)
N. Walter, cited in Colin Ward, âFundamentalismâ, in The Raven, 27, Vol.
7, No. 3 (London: Freedom Press, 1994)
Malise Ruthven âPhantoms of ideologyâ in Times Literary Supplement, 19
August 1994
R. Rocker, cited in W. J. Fishman, East End Jewish Radicals 1875â1914
(London: Duckworth, 1975)
E. W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto and Windus, 1993)
Fatima Mernissi, Women and Islam: An Historical and Theological Inquiry
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991)
Peter Kropotkin, In Russian and French Prisons (New York: Schocken
Books, 1971 [1887])
Alexander Berkman, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist (New York: Schocken
Books, 1970 [1912])
David Cayley, The Expanding Prison: The Crisis in Crime and Punishment
and the Search for Alternatives (Toronto: Anansi, 1998) David Downes,
âThe Macho Penal Economy: Mass Incarceration in the United States. A
European Perspectiveâ, Lecture at New York University, February 2000.
Errico Malatesta, in UmanitĂ Nova, 2 September 1920, reprinted in V.
Richards (ed.), Errico Malatesta: His Life and Ideas (London: Freedom
Press, 1965)
David Waddington, on BBC Radio 4, 19 February 2003 Geoffrey Ostergaard,
The Tradition of Workersâ Control, ed. Brian Bamford (London: Freedom
Press, 1997)
Paul Thompson, Why William Morris Matters Today: Human Creativity and
the Future World Environment (London: William Morris Society, 1991)
William Godwin, An Inquiry Concerning Political Justice (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1976 [1793]); *Uncollected Writings *(1785â1822), eds J. W.
Marken and B. R. Pollin (Gainsville, Florida: Scholarsâ Facsimiles,
1968)
Paul Goodman, Compulsory Miseducation, 2^(nd) edn. (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1971)
National Union of Teachers, The Struggle for Education (London: NUT,
1970)
Stephen Humphries, Hooligans or Rebels? An Oral History of Working-Class
Childhood and Youth 1889â1939 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981)
Philip Gardner, The Lost Elementary Schools of Victorian England
(London: Croom Helm, 1984)
Paul Thompson, âBasic Skillsâ, in New Society, 6 December 1984
Francesco Ferrer, see Paul Avrich, The Modern School Movement: Anarchism
and Education in the United States (New Jersey: Princeton University
Press, 1980)
Michael Bakunin, God and the State (London: Freedom Press, 1910; New
York: Dover, 1970)
Harry RĂ©e, reported in The Teacher, 8 April 1972
H. M. Chief Inspector of Schools, interviewed in The Times, 1 February
1995, and reported in The Times Educational Supplement, 27 January 1995
Michael Smith, The Libertarians and Education (London: Allen and Unwin,
1983)
John Shotton, No Master High or Low: Libertarian Education and Schooling
1890â1990 (Bristol: Libertarian Education, 1993)
Jonathan Croall, Neill of Summerhill: The Permanent Rebel (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983)
Jonathan Croall (ed.), All the Best, Neill: Letters from Summerhill
(London: André Deutsch, 1974)
Max Stirner, The Ego and His Own, tr. Steven Byington (New York:
Libertarian Book Club, 1963 [1907])
James J. Martin, Men Against the State (Colorado Springs: Ralph Myles,
1970)
David DeLeon, The American as Anarchist: Reflections on Indigenous
Radicalism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978)
Henry David Thoreau, in Carl Bode (ed.), The Portable Thoreau
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979)
Randolph Bourne, War and the Intellectuals: Collected Essays 1915â 1919
(New York: The Resistance Press, 1964)
Ammon Hennacy, The Autobiography of a Catholic Anarchist (New York:
Catholic Worker Books, 1954)
Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness (New York: Harper and Row, 1952)
Robert Paul Wolff, In Defense of Anarchism (New York: Harper Colophon,
1976)
Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974)
David Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom (New York: Harper, 1975)
Murray Rothbard, For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto (New York:
Collier, 1978)
F. von Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (London: Routledge, 1944)
Paul Goodman, âPolitics within Limitsâ, reprinted in Taylor Stoehr
(ed.), *Crazy Hope and Finite Experience: Final Essays of Paul Goodman
Dwight Macdonald, âPolitics Pastâ, in Encounter, April 1957
Emma Goldman, âThe Tragedy of Womenâs Emancipationâ, in Anarchism and
Other Essays (New York: Dover, 1969 [1911])
Alex Comfort, More Joy: A Lovemaking Companion to The Joy of Sex
(London: Quartet, 1973)
Charles Duff, A Handbook on Hanging (London: Freedom Press, 1965)
Rudolf de Jong, Provos and Kabouters (Buffalo, NY: Friends of Malatesta,
no date)
Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life, rev. edn. (London:
Rebel Press, 1983)
George Monbiot, Captive State (London: Macmillan, 2000)
Sean M. Sheehan, Anarchism (London: Reaktion Books, 2003)
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, The Principle of Federation, tr. Richard Vernon
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979)
Edward Hyams, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (London: John Murray, 1979)
Willem de Haan, The Politics of Redress (London: Unwin Hyman, 1990)
Arthur Lehning (ed.), Bakunin: Selected Writings (London: Jonathan Cape,
1973)
Martin Miller, Kropotkin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976)
Camillo Berneri, Peter Kropotkin: His Federalist Ideas (London: Freedom
Press, 1942 [1922])
Peter Hall, Cities of Tomorrow (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988)
Council of Europe, âThe Impact of the Completion of the Internal Market
on Local and Regional Autonomyâ (Council of Europe Studies and Texts,
Series No.12, 1990)
Thom Holterman, âA Free United Europeâ, in The Raven, 31, Vol. 8, No. 3
(London: Freedom Press, 1995)
<biblio> Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famine (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1981)
Jac Smit et al., Urban Agriculture: Food, Jobs and Sustainable Cities
(New York: United Nations Development Program, 1996)
Tim Lang, in Ken Worpole (ed.), Richer Futures: Fashioning a New
Politics (London: Earthscan, 1999)
John Houghton, cited in The Raven, 43, Vol. 11, No. 3 (London: Freedom
Press, 2001)
Murray Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism (London: Wildwood House 1974)
Peter Harper, interviewed in W. & D. Schwartz Living Lightly: Travels in
Post-Consumer Society (Oxford: Jon Carpenter 1998), and âNatural
Technologyâ, lecture to the Schumacher Society, Bristol 2001
Alan Carter, A Radical Green Political Theory (London: Routledge, 1999)
</biblo>
An earlier interpreter of anarchism remarked that âanarchism is like
blotting-paper: it soaks up everythingâ, and, like most political
ideologies, it can be given a variety of emphases. Beyond the general
histories described in the Foreword, there are several books I should
mention, providing alternative or additional interpretations extending
those explored in this volume.
Max Blechman (ed.), Drunken Boat: Art, Rebellion, Anarchy (Brooklyn, NY:
Automedia; and Seattle, WA: Left Bank Books, 1984)
Murray Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism (London: Wildwood House, 1974)
Alan Carter, A Radical Green Political Theory (London: Routledge, 1999)
Howard J. Ehrlich (ed.), Reinventing Anarchy, Again (Edinburgh and San
Francisco: AK Press, 1996)
Clifford Harper, Anarchy: A Graphic Guide (London: Camden Press, 1987)
George McKay (ed.), DIY Culture: Party and Protest in Nineties Britain
(London: Verso, 1998)
Jon Purkis and James Bowen (eds), Twenty-First Century Anarchism:
Unorthodox Ideas for a New Millennium (London: Cassell, 1997)
Sean M. Sheehan, Anarchism (London: Reaktion Books, 2003)