Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (110 page)

One of the most influential expressions of anarchism has come in the growing Green movement, which has attracted not only libertarian socialists like Cohn-Bendit in Germany but avowed anarchist thinkers like Murray Bookchin in the United States. The new ‘social ecology’, which finds the roots of the ecological crisis in society and calls for an end to hierarchy and domination, has proved to be one of the most fruitful developments in contemporary anarchism.

Whereas nineteenth-century anarchists like Kropotkin still saw the need for the ‘conquest of nature’ and industrial progress in order to eradicate poverty, social ecologists argue that in our post-industrial and
post-scarcity society the principal concern must be to overcome the drive to conquer and master nature. As Murray Bookchin has argued, the very idea of dominating nature probably first evolved from man’s prior domination of woman. In their search for power and desire to dominate, human beings have gone on not only to oppress each other, but also to devastate the planet which sustains them. The traditional anarchist demand to eradicate authority and domination in
society
must therefore be widened to include
nature
as a whole.

In fact, modern ecology confirms many of the central themes of classic anarchism. It offers a model of nature which embraces unity in diversity, equality with difference, equilibrium with change, all within a non-hierarchical framework. It presents the planet as a self-regulating and evolving organism, which reflects the self-regulating and evolving capacity of human beings. As the ecological crisis deepens, social ecology has been a major influence in the new century.

Feminism too has developed the libertarian message of traditional anarchism. Taking their cue from women like Louise Michel, Charlotte Wilson, Voltairine de Cleyre and Emma Goldman, feminists have been drawn to the subtle analysis of power and hierarchy put forward by anarchists. They have also been impressed by their insistence that moral regeneration come before political reform.

In a study of anarchist women in America earlier in the century, Margaret Marsh observed that anarcha-feminists considered themselves exempt from the notions of womanhood that restricted their less liberated sisters and advocated sexual experimentation. They focused primarily on the family, seeing the roots of sexual inequality embedded in the nuclear family. They did not therefore think that reform of laws alone could bring about equality; it was necessary to struggle for personal autonomy and economic independence. They also went further than their socialist sisters by insisting that roles should always be based on preference, not gender, whether it be in sexual relationships, child rearing, or work.
³⁴
Indeed, Emma Goldman’s most important contribution to anarcha-feminism was her recognition that the revolutionary process must take place within the individual mind as well as in society at large.
³⁵

These points were taken up by the second wave of anarcha-feminists in the late sixties who maintained that ‘anarchism is the logically consistent expression of feminism’ since it does not separate political activities from personal dreams of liberation.
³⁶
They argued that as women generally live on the boundaries of capitalism and yet are its most unfortunate victims,
they have a remarkably clear insight into its nature. Their position makes them particularly aware of patriarchy in the family as well as in the State. To anarcha-feminists, the State and patriarchy are twin aberrations; they are both part of the fundamental social and psychological model of hierarchy and domination. It is therefore necessary to destroy ‘all vestiges of the male-dominated power structure, the State itself’.
³⁷

Stressing the principle ‘the personal is political’, the anarcha-feminists have developed a radical critique of everyday life. With relationships being split between subject and object, women have become either commodities to be used by men or passive spectators of the male world. Rejecting the polarities between male and female, adult and child, work and play, sanity and madness, they seek to create a society in which individuals whatever their gender or age can choose their own way of life.
³⁸
They do not want to transfer power from one set of boys to another as has always happened previously in ‘his-story’. Their principal aim is to erode power and authority; in personal terms, they seek individual control over their own bodies and lives – ‘Power to no one, and to every one: to each power over his/her own life, and no others.’
³⁹

In the women’s movement as a whole, there are undoubtedly many ‘natural’ anarchist tendencies. Penny Kornegger contends that ‘feminists have been unconscious anarchists in both theory and practice for years’.
⁴⁰
From this perspective, it has been suggested that feminism practises what anarchism preaches. Indeed, it has even been argued that feminists are the only existing protest group that can honestly be called practising anarchists.
⁴¹

The feminist movement which began in the late sixties developed its own organizational form and practice at the heart of which lay the small ‘consciousness-raising’ group. Spontaneous and non-competitive, without leaders and followers, they resemble the ‘affinity groups’ which played such an important part in the Spanish Civil War. As an international movement, the women’s movement has also adopted the central anarchist principles of decentralization and federalism.

Anarcha-feminists have noted this tendency and have tried to develop it as fully as possible. They wish to avoid the oppression of patriarchy on the one hand and the ‘tyranny of structurelessness’ on the other. They steer clear of reformist campaigns and left-wing parties, preferring to undertake independent direct action over specific issues. Unlike their sisters earlier in the century who worked alongside men in the anarchist movement, many anarcha-feminists prefer to work mainly within the radical women’s movement.
⁴²
They have shown by their example what can be done in a decentralized mass movement based on federally-linked affinity groups.

Anarchism was pronounced moribund in the early sixties and then made a remarkable and unexpected revival towards the end of the decade. But in America and Europe the New Left underwent a crisis after 1968. The riot following the Democratic Party Convention in Chicago in 1968 proved the high-point of mass opposition to the State in America, as did the uprising and general strike in France the same year. By the early 1970s, the New Left had disintegrated as a coherent movement. In desperation, splinter groups like the Weathermen in the US, the Baader-Meinhof Gang in Germany, the Red Brigades in Italy, and the Angry Brigade in Britain, all of whose libertarian credentials were doubtful to say the least, resorted to bombings and kidnappings in order to speed up the collapse of the capitalist State. Their actions only made it all the more vigilant and repressive.

In the meantime, the world-wide economic recession of 1973–4 checked post-scarcity utopianism; the vast majority of rebellious youth put away their beads and tried to make it once again in straight society. They reverted to type. Only a few persevered with the commune movement. Nevertheless, the libertarian legacy of the sixties remained powerful, and the seventies saw widespread experimentation with alternative ways of living, especially in urban and rural communes and co-operatives. Anarchy was no longer a forgotten dream.

Proudhon’s maxim ‘Anarchy is Order’, commonly reduced to the symbol
, has become one of the most common graffiti on the urban landscape. The feminist, pacifist, municipal and Green movements which emerged in the seventies and eighties were distinctly libertarian in their organization and goals.
⁴³
They have gone from strength to strength. Punk rock, whose themes echoed those of the Situationists, helped a new generation to see the limitless possibilities in rebellion. Anarchism today is no longer dismissed as the creed of bomb-throwers, but is increasingly recognized as that of thoughtful individuals who are asking awkward questions and proposing new ways of seeing and doing. Anarchy has been reinvented and the new anti-capitalist, anti-war and anti-globalization movements reflect its decentralized and non-hierarchical ways of organizing and its libertarian goals.

A
NARCHO-CAPITALISM
HAS
RECENTLY
had a considerable vogue in the West where it has helped put the role of the State back on the political agenda. It has become a major ideological challenge to the dominant liberalism which sees a role for government in the protection of property. The anarcho-capitalists would like to dismantle government and to allow complete
laissez-faire
in the economy. Its adherents propose that all public services be turned over to private entrepreneurs, even public spaces like town halls, streets and parks. Free market capitalism, they insist, is hindered not enhanced by the State.

Anarcho-capitalists share Adam Smith’s confidence that somehow private interest will translate itself into public good rather than public squalor. They are convinced that the ‘natural laws’ of economics can do without the support of positive man-made law. The ‘invisible hand’ of the market will be enough to bring social order.

Anarcho-capitalism has recently had the greatest impact in the United States, where the Libertarian Party has been influenced by it, and where Republicans like Ronald Reagan wanted to be remembered for cutting taxation and for getting ‘the government off people’s backs’. In the United Kingdom, neo-Conservatives argue that ‘there is no such thing as society’ and wish to ‘roll back the frontiers of the State’ – a view adopted evangelically, in theory if not always in practice, by Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990. State socialism is attacked not so much because it is egalitarian but because it seeks to accrue more powers for the State to exercise centrally.

The phenomenon of anarcho-capitalism is not however new. With the demise of Benjamin Tucker’s journal
Liberty
in 1907, American individualist anarchism lost its principal voice; but its strain of libertarianism continued to re-emerge occasionally in the offerings of isolated thinkers. The young essayist Randolph Bourne, writing outside the anarchist movement, distinguished between society and the State, invented the famous slogan
‘War is the Health of the State’, and drew out the authoritarian and conformist dangers of the ‘herd’.
¹

Franz Oppenheimer’s view of the State as ‘the organization of the political means’ and as the ‘systematization of the predatory process over a given territory’ influenced libertarians and conservatives alike in the twenties.
²
The Jeffersonian liberal Albert Jay Nock reached anarchist conclusions in
Our Enemy the State
(1935) at the time of the New Deal. A conservative of the
laissez-faire
school, he foresaw ‘a steady progress in collectivism running into a military despotism of a severe type’.
³
It would involve steadily-increasing centralization, bureaucracy, and political control of the market. The resulting State-managed economy would be so inefficient and corrupt that it would need forced labour to keep it going.

Nock’s warning did not go unheeded. Friedrich A. Hayek spelt out in
The Road to Serfdom
(1944) the dangers of collectivism. In his restatement of classic liberalism in
The Constitution of Liberty
(1960), he rejected the notion of social justice and argued that the market creates spontaneous social order. But while he wished to reduce coercion to a minimum, he accepted the need for the coercion of a minimal State to prohibit coercive acts by private parties through law enforcement. He also accepted taxation and compulsory military service. While a harsh critic of egalitarianism and of government intervention in the economy, he was ready to countenance a degree of welfare provision which cannot be adequately provided by the market. His views have had an important influence on neo-Conservatives, especially those on the right wing of the Conservative Party in Britain.