Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (114 page)

In
Technics and Civilization
(1934), written at the height of the depression, Mumford used the language of archaeology to distinguish three succeeding phases in industrialization which he defined in terms of their motive power and characteristic materials: the
eotechnic
, the age of water and wood; the
paleotechnic
, the age of coal and iron; and the
neotechnic
, the
age of electricity and alloys. All three overlap and interpenetrate. We have further entered the age of nuclear energy and the silicon chip. However, Mumford was not just concerned with the nature of different technologies, but with the people who use them and their long-term effects. He saw the machine arising out of the denial of the organic and the living and found its apogee in the ‘cult of death’. The threat of nuclear war is simply the ‘supreme drama of a completely mechanized society’.
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The answer according to Mumford does not lie in the destruction of the machine and a return to a more primitive way of life. It involves on the contrary, the ‘rebuilding of the individual personality and the collective group, and the re-orientation of all forms of thought and social activity toward life’.
³⁸
It involves the radical transformation of our society and environment.

In
Technics and Civilization
, Mumford proposes a form of ‘basic communism’ in which production and consumption are ‘normalized’ to meet basic needs. There should be complete equality of basic income. Beyond that, individual wants can be satisfied by direct effort. Mumford suggests that this form of communism implies obligation to share in the work of the community, but there will be no coercion. To the objection that some would not want to work without being forced to, he replies that since we give a minimum of food and shelter and medical attention to criminals, why then should we deny it to the lazy and stubborn. He also recognizes that the quality of work is all important in order to make it attractive and he calls for work for the amateur and not the automaton. ‘As social life becomes mature,’ he insists, ‘the social unemployment of machines will become as marked as the present technological unemployment.’
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At the same time, he acknowledges the potential emancipatory effect of technology in alleviating drudgery and increasing personal autonomy. Finally, he proclaims the slogan ‘Socialize creation!’ – creativity should not be the prerogative of a small caste, but the practice of all.

Such changes cannot occur without a major shift in consciousness, without a move from a mechanical to an organic ideology. We must think in terms of the organic whole, of life in its fullest manifestation rather than in terms of abstractions and fragments. By calling for a ‘dynamic equilibrium’ and not indefinite progress in society, Mumford is a pioneer of social ecology. He looks to a new equilibrium in the environment, with the restoration of the balance between humanity and nature. It would also involve a harmonious balance between industry and agriculture, the decentralization of population, and economic regionalism.

Mumford was never a complete anarchist and sometimes used ‘anarchy’ in the negative sense of chaos. He considered, for instance, the existence of complicated weapons as a mark of ‘international anarchy’. Again, while
he calls for workers’ control and the creation of consumers’ groups in his new social order, he sees industries still operating within the political framework of co-operating States. Nevertheless, while he suggests that the State can take over all banking functions, his vision of regenerated society, of decentralized communities designed to the human scale, is distinctly libertarian.

In his widely influential book
The Culture of Cities
(1938), Mumford went on to offer an iconoclastic study of urban civilization, and to advocate a decentralist, regionalist approach to town and country planning. In the
The Myth of the Machine
(1967) in which he traced back technology to pre-history, he further asserted that man is more than a tool-using animal; he is ‘pre-eminently a mind-making, self-mastering, and self-designing animal; and the primary locus of all his activities lies first in his own organism, and in the social organization through which it finds fuller expression’. Mumford was not just concerned with the hard facts of technology but the mental processes which underlie them.
⁴⁰

Mumford was a great synthesizer. In his positive proposals, he drew on the insights of biologist Patrick Geddes and garden-city pioneer Ebenezer Howard. He was particularly impressed by Kropotkin’s vision of a decentralized society in which people govern themselves and fulfil themselves in work. He felt that Kropotkin’s
Fields, Factories and Workshops
was more important in the 1960s than when it was first written at the end of the nineteenth century. Kropotkin had not only seen how electricity and intensive farming had laid the foundations for a more decentralized urban development, but that they provided ‘the opportunity for a more responsible and responsive local life, with greater scope for the human agents who were neglected and frustrated by mass organizations’.
⁴¹

The libertarian and democratic aspects of Mumford’s thought comes through especially in his later work. Autonomy, which is an essential attribute for any organism to develop, was his central concern. It is his contention that it can only be sustained if technology is made democratic in a democratic society. Final authority should therefore be given to the whole, which involves ‘communal self-government, free communication as between equals, unimpeded access to the common store of knowledge, protection against arbitrary external controls, and a sense of individual moral responsibility for behavior which affects the whole community’.
⁴²

For Mumford, like most anarchists, the best life possible is one that calls for an ever greater degree of ‘self-direction, self-expression, and self-realization. In this sense, personality, once the exclusive attribute of kings, belongs on democratic theory to every man. Life itself in its fullness and wholeness cannot be delegated.’
⁴³
Murray Bookchin, whose own work betrays the influence of Mumford, has complained that he has denatured
the term libertarian into ‘the more socially respectable and amorphous term democratic’.
⁴⁴
Indeed, Mumford liked to style himself a ‘radical conservative’. Be that as it may, his view of technics and his version of democracy remain profoundly libertarian.

The American linguist — philosopher Noam Chomsky has created a revolution in his own field, but he has also become one of the most lively social critics of the United States’ government and its policies. As a linguist, he is principally known for his thesis that all human beings have an innate ‘universal grammar’ which enables them to learn their different languages. At the same time, he shares Bertrand Russell’s ‘humanistic conception’ which regards the young as a gardener regards a young tree, an organism with the potential to be nurtured and encouraged.
⁴⁵
And like Russell, he sees the supreme end in society to be the free growth of the individual.

Chomsky however goes beyond Russell’s radical humanism to draw inspiration directly from the anarchist tradition. He has been deeply impressed by Wilhelm von Humboldt’s attempt to draw
The Limits of State Action
(1801) and by his emphasis on the importance of the free choice of the individual.
⁴⁶
But he freely admits that he has been most influenced by Rudolf Rocker, the ‘last serious thinker’, in the direction of anarcho-syndicalism. Ultimately, he bases his libertarian socialism on a belief that all human beings have ‘intrinsic needs for liberty and for being able to exercise
control over themselves
’.
⁴⁷

Chomsky does not see a necessary connection between his social and political views and his linguistic theory. As a Cartesian rationalist, he has argued however that the ‘libertarian left should have a vested interest in innateness’.
⁴⁸
While most socialists and anarchists have argued that character is largely a product of the environment, Chomsky has tried to formulate a biological concept of ‘human nature’ with its own innate intellectual and cognitive aspects.
⁴⁹
In his view, only humans have an ability to use language creatively. He claims that there is no inconsistency in believing that the ‘essential attributes of human nature give man the opportunity to create social conditions and social forms to maximize the possibilities for freedom and diversity, and individual self-realization’.
⁵⁰

To support this view, Chomsky has quoted Bakunin’s view of liberty as the full development of all the powers that are latent in each person, a form of liberty that recognizes ‘no restrictions other than those determined by the laws of our own individual nature, which cannot be regarded as restrictions since these laws are not imposed by any outside legislator or
above us’.
⁵¹
Such natural laws do not limit humans but are the real and immediate conditions of their freedom.

But while Chomsky compares Bakunin’s remarks with his own approach to creative thought, he is reluctant to press the link between his linguistic and social views. He readily admits that one cannot simply deduce social or political consequences from any insights into language. While one may hope to be able to show that ‘structures of authority and control limit and distort intrinsic human capacities and needs, and to lay a theoretical basis for a social theory that eventuates in practical ideas as to how to overcome them’, there are nevertheless ‘huge gaps’ in any such argument.
⁵²

In fact, rather than trying to develop a philosophical foundation for his social beliefs, Chomsky has chosen to express his libertarian sympathies in a persistent critique of American culture and politics. He has been particularly critical of the servility of the American intellectual establishment and the American media who hide their real interests behind a mask of ‘liberal objectivity’.
⁵³
Such intellectuals have come to form a secular priesthood who try to justify the inhuman policies of the State by disguising them in morally acceptable terms. Chomsky has also been one of the most trenchant critics of American administrations, especially in their execution of an aggressive foreign policy from Vietnam to the Gulf War. The key problem lies in what he calls ‘military Keynesianism’, that is, the need for the military-industrial complex in America to find an enemy in order to maintain a high level of military spending.
⁵⁴

Chomsky’s libertarian sympathies are clearest in his unswerving critique of power and in his view that all States of whatever complexion are controlled by privileged elites who rule in their own interests. He has been called a ‘left-wing Marxist’ as well as an anarchist but he tends to call himself a libertarian socialist or socialist anarchist.
⁵⁵
He sees anarchism as the libertarian wing of socialism. He rejects the American individualist tradition of Tucker and stands in the collectivist and syndicalist one inspired by Bakunin. But he sees anarchism not as a doctrine but as a historical tendency of thought and action which has many ways of developing and which will remain a permanent strand of history. ‘What attracts me about anarchism personally’, he openly admits, ‘are the tendencies in it that try to come to grips with the problem of dealing with complex organized industrial societies within a framework of free institutions and structures.’
⁵⁶
In all his social and political writings, he has tried to do precisely that.

Existentialism undoubtedly influenced many anarchists after the Second World War. Not only have the libertarians Stirner and Nietzsche been
called precursors of existentialism, but mere is a close link between the existentialists’ stress on the individual, free choice, and moral responsibility and the main tenets of anarchism. Herbert Read for one found many parallels between the two, and considered both superior to Marxism.
⁵⁷

The most influential exponent of atheistic existentialism was Jean-Paul Sartre, who devoted the whole of his intellectual life to expanding human freedom. In his essay on
Existentialism and Humanism
(1946), he stressed the ineradicable nature of freedom. Since God does not exist, everything is permitted and all moral values are human creations. Again, as there is no fixed human nature (’existence precedes essence’), man is free to fashion himself: ‘there is no determinism — man is free, man
is
freedom.’ But while offering the heady prospect of humanity transforming itself and making its own future, Sartre suggested that the experience of freedom is not one of joy but of anguish: man is ‘condemned to be free’.
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Moreover, as he made clear in his plays, there is no natural solidarity between human beings: ‘Hell is others.’

After the war, Sartre was prepared to collaborate with the Stalinist French Communist Party; and he became a Marxist in 1960. While he developed a libertarian form of Marxism, insisting that we can say no to our conditioning, and called for a form of direct democracy, he aligned himself with the Maoists rather than the anarchists during the 1968 rebellion in France. He found Che Guevara to be the most complete man of his age, not Cohn-Bendit. Towards the end of his life, Sartre acknowledged his affinity with anarchism, but it was with classical anarchism rather than its modern offspring: ‘by way of philosophy’, he said in 1975, ‘I discovered the anarchist in me. But when I discovered it I did not call it that, because today’s anarchy no longer has anything to do with the anarchy of 1890.’
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His road to freedom nonetheless remained within the Marxist tradition, albeit alleviated by an existentialist concern with individual freedom.