Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (115 page)

With Albeit Camus, the links with anarchism and the anarchist movement are much closer. Camus was born in Algeria, a
pieds-noirs
, the son of poor-white settlers in the French colony. Despite his childhood poverty, the open-air life in the sun left him with a permanent love of the Mediterranean and its clarity. Having learned his ethics on the football pitch, he left university to become a journalist. In 1934, he became a member of the Communist Party, conducting propaganda amongst the Algerians. He left soon after to develop his own brand of libertarian humanism.

In his short novel
The Outsider
(1939), Camus depicted a young man who simply refuses to play the game and to lie about his feelings, whether to his girlfriend or to the judge who condemns him to death for the killing of an Arab. Camus described his deadpan hero as dying for the sake of truth
– ‘the only Christ we deserved’, no less. But for all its lyrical celebration of a young working-class demi-god of the beaches, the novel has little overt political message, except perhaps in its implication that, in bourgeois society, the man who seeks truth is bound to be an outsider.

In the more philosophical essay
The Myth of Sisyphus
(1942), Camus developed his doctrine of the absurd. The work opens with the statement: ‘There is one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.’
⁶⁰
To the question whether life is worth living, Camus argues that the human condition is fundamentally absurd. There is an ineradicable discrepancy between human desire and reality: man is born to die, and yet he seeks eternity; he longs for certain knowledge, and yet he is surrounded by a sea of doubt. The absurd therefore lies in ‘the confrontation of the irrational and the wild longing for clarity’.
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Yet the answer does not lie in killing oneself. Camus insists that we should rebel against absurdity by continuing to live. The authentic man is ‘He who, without negating it, does nothing for the eternal … Assured of his temporally limited freedom, of his revolt devoid of future and of his mortal consciousness, he lives out his adventure within the span of his lifetime.’ Like Sisyphus he rolls his stone uphill in the firm knowledge that it will roll down again, sharing ‘his scorn for the gods, his hatred of death and his passion for life’.
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He knows that his task is ultimately futile but he completes it all the same, with a certain satisfaction in work well done. Within the confines of his condition, he is master of his days, and in this sense, the absurdity of the world can be seen as an invitation to happiness.

While denying any transcendental reality, Camus felt that it was possible to work on earth for the improvement of humanity. In this, he remained a resolute humanist. As he wrote during the war in
Letter to a German Friend
, ‘I have chosen justice to remain faithful to the earth. I still think that the world has no final meaning, but I know that something in it has meaning, and that is man, because he is the only being to demand that he should have one.’
⁶³

When the Second World War broke out, Camus moved to France and worked in the Resistance, collaborating with Sartre on the journal
Combat
from 1943 to 1946. Although he liked to think of himself first and foremost as an artist, a pagan apostle of the absurd, he threw himself into the political turmoil of the period. Despite his Communist youth, he became increasingly suspicious of the abstract political ideals which had led to Nazism and Stalinism. Rather than revolution, he began calling for rebellion. Where the former often ends in the sacrifice of the individual, the latter involves an instinctive refusal to obey authority and an affirmation of personal identity. As his play
Caligula
demonstrates, one cannot destroy everything without destroying oneself.

But Camus’ evolution was gradual. Although he had left the Communist Party before the war, in 1944 he was still defending in
Combat
the foreign policy of the Soviet Union: ‘we must never forget that Russia adopted the nationalistic policy which she now pursues only after she had in vain proposed a system of collective security. Neither must we forget that, alone among all other states, she offered general disarmament.’
⁶⁴
In the same year, he also called for a popular, working-class democracy to be established in France.

After the war when resistance did not lead to the expected revolution in France, Camus argued that all revolutions lead to new tyrannies. He was convinced that none of the evils which totalitarianism claimed to be fighting against were worse than totalitarianism itself. In opposition to Communism, he began preaching the politics of tolerance and moderation; he told his critics that he did not learn about freedom from Marx, but from poverty. He now preferred piecemeal change and addressed specific ills. In 1946 he took up the theme of some earlier
Reflections on the Guillotine
, which had dwelt on the horrors of legalized murder, to write, in
Neither Victims nor Executioners
(1946), a brilliant denunciation of the death penalty as the vengeance of an unjust society.

Camus at the time came in contact with Spanish anarcho-syndicalists in France, supporting the Spanish Federation of Political Prisoners and associating with the editor of the CNT’s paper
Solidaridad Obrera.
He also became friendly with the editors of the French syndicalist and anarchist magazine
Témoins, Le Libertaire
and
Le Monde Libertaire.
They helped him appreciate the libertarian tradition and showed that it was quite possible to be an anti-communist on the Left.

The most substantial expression of his new position appeared in his widely influential study
The Rebel
(1951). In his Preface to the 1953 English translation of the work, Herbert Read welcomed it enthusiastically: ‘With the publication of this book, a cloud which has oppressed the European mind for more than a century begins to lift. Once again it becomes possible to hope — to have confidence again in man and in the future.’ The work is a sustained onslaught on those abstract ideals which too readily degenerate into nihilism and terrorism. It explores the perversion of rebellion in which rebels, rather than electing to live in a godless world, erect new tyrannical divinities to worship.

In detailed studies, Camus explores literary and philosophical examples of revolt which show that he had studied, albeit in a partisan spirit, anarchist and libertarian thought. He argues, for instance, that de Sade demanded absolute liberty for himself in order to satisfy his desires regardless of others, and despite his generous nature entertained fantasies of absolute dictatorship. Again, Nietzsche’s denial of God and all values became easily
distorted and were used to justify National Socialism. By destroying all abstractions, Stirner made of himself an abstraction; his ‘individual-king’ ends up on the ruins of the world, ready to commit any form of destruction. Bakunin and Nechaev both called for total liberty, but the result was that one contributed to the Leninist notion of dictatorship, while the other fostered the cult of murder for political ends. Camus saves his greatest ire for Hegel who maintained there were no values but those produced by history, and his follower Marx whose Utopian Messianism found final expression in the Soviet police State.

Camus’ distinction between revolution and rebellion directly echoes Stirner’s between revolution and insurrection. Revolution changes little since it merely substitutes one set of masters for another, whereas rebellion may change human nature by creating a new metaphysics and morals. Rebellion protests against absurdity, suffering and injustice and creates a moral value based on the idea of moderation. It implies recognition of the integrity of the individual and seeks relative aims in politics. According to Camus, rebellion is the refusal to be treated as an object and to be reduced to simple historical terms.

Nevertheless, rebellion is not a lonely and solitary act. It does not destroy human solidarity but rather affirms the common nature of all humans which thereby eludes the world of power. In the experience of the absurd, suffering is individual, but when it moves to rebellion, it is aware of being collective, ‘the adventure of all’. The first step of the estranged spirit is to recognize that he or she shares such estrangement with all human beings. Rebellion therefore takes the individual out of solitude: ‘I rebel, therefore we are.’
⁶⁵

At the end of his long study, Camus celebrates the libertarian and rebellious spirit in history and conies out in favour of anarcho-syndicalism as the only alternative to bourgeois nihilism and authoritarian socialism: ‘Syndicalism, like the commune, is the negation, to the benefit of reality, of abstract and bureaucratic centralism.’
⁶⁶
It alone expresses the message of the libertarian tradition which has been submerged by prevailing authoritarian thought.

Camus’ new approach led to a public dispute with Sartre in 1952 over the French Communist Party. Camus refused to have anything to do with Stalinism, while Sartre like most left-wing intellectuals at the time argued that it had to be taken into account since it had the support of a large part of the working class. The uprising in Hungary in 1956 led to a further clash. Although both condemned its suppression, Sartre argued that Stalinism had been a necessary evil and that Russian Communism could still become more democratic. Camus, on the other hand, insisted in the
Franc-Tireur
in February 1957 that there is no possible evolution in a totalitarian society:
‘Terror does not evolve except towards a worse terror, the scaffold grows no more liberal, the gallows are not tolerant. Nowhere in the world has there been a party or a man with absolute power that did not use it absolutely.’
⁶⁷

But rather than developing his anarcho-syndicalist sympathies, Camus soon veered in the opposite direction. In the 1955 elections, he supported the campaign of Mendès-France and called for a French Labour Party. In a speech ironically published in 1957 in the revolutionary syndicalist journal
La Révolution Prolétarienne
, he argued that the liberty of each is bounded by the liberty of his fellows, and that this liberty is defined by a body of law whose supremacy the State must recognize. He had reached the classic liberal defence of parliamentary democracy.

Camus was ready to admit that Gandhi was the ‘greatest man of our time’ and that nuclear weapons had fundamentally changed the nature of international relations. But over the question of Algeria, his birthplace, he refused to budge. Where Sartre wholeheartedly advocated Algerian independence, Camus merely called for moderation on all sides during the war of independence and equal rights for Algerians and French under the colonial system. He was unable to go beyond the myth of a French Algeria and tried to organize a truce. When accepting the Nobel prize in 1957 (refused by Sartre), Camus’ speech was interrupted by an Algerian student who asked him why he did not condemn the use of torture in Algeria. Camus replied that he loved justice, but if he had to choose between justice and his mother, he would choose his mother. It was the very opposite of Godwin’s stance: Godwin had asked what magic there is in the word ‘my’ to overturn the dictates of everlasting justice. By choosing his mother before justice, Camus by extension chose his tribe, his nation and his race. As a result, he remained faithful to his roots, a left-wing colonialist, an outsider on the African shore and in metropolitan France, a man who was prepared to accept injustice for a place to live in the sun with his kind.

Unfortunately, Camus was unable to extricate himself from his dilemma. Two years later, in January 1960, he was killed in a car crash; a return railway ticket was in his pocket. Once again, the absurd had triumphed.

The French social theorist Michel Foucault has been called a modern anarchist, although like Sartre he did not use the term and even denied that he was one.
⁶⁸
There can be no doubt that a profound libertarian spirit pervades his work, and he has made a brilliant analysis of how knowledge is used as an instrument of power and domination, an analysis which has influenced many anarchists. Foucault attempted in
The Order of Things
(1966) nothing less than an archaeology of the human sciences by revealing the fundamental codes (’epistemes’) underlying our culture. Far from celebrating the Enlightenment as bringing about progress through reason and science, he saw it as an intensification of human suffering and social control.

In
Madness and Civilization
(1961), he located towards the end of the eighteenth century the shift in the perception of madness from it being accepted as meaningful unreason (the ‘wisdom of folly’) to it being considered a disease. He went on in
Discipline and Punish
(1975) to trace eloquently, if at times inaccurately, the ideological foundations of modern punitive society in the Enlightenment. Foucault’s central insight turns on the recognition that the power to punish is not essentially different from the power to cure or to educate. ‘Is it surprising’, he asks, ‘that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?’
⁶⁹
This tendency is best symbolized by the ‘model’ prison called the Panopticon designed by the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham which allowed complete surveillance of the inmates.
⁷⁰

Foucault’s study of prisons led him to an analysis of social power in general. What characterizes modern culture for Foucault is coercion. He follows Nietzsche, not Marx, in seeing power in non-economic terms: ‘Power is war, a war continued by other means’, that is to say ‘unspoken warfare’.
⁷¹
Even repression is a subordinate effect of power. Although power is an ineradicable part of the human condition, bourgeois society invented a new type of power — disciplinary power. Unlike sovereign power which was exercised chiefly over the earth and its products, disciplinary power is concentrated on ‘human bodies and their operations’ in the form of surveillance.
⁷²
Thus in the dialectic of knowledge as the will to power, reason becomes a technology of power, and science an instrument of domination.