Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (116 page)

In his unfinished multi-volume
History of Sexuality
(1978–84), Foucault further showed how the self had become prey to power from within. He traced the change in sexuality from the
ars erotica
of the ancients to the confessional control of the Christian era. As a ‘confessing animal’, Western man became subject to socio-sexual control.
⁷³
In the early nineteenth century, the individual had become self-aware as a subject of sexuality, at roughly the same time as the psychiatrization of insanity and the spread of the penitentiary occurred. The bourgeoisie built a code of sex for its own self-assertion by erecting the monogamous heterosexual couple as exemplar and fount of morality, and pillar of society. Sex was thus reconstructed as the preoccupation of self-searching and confessing individuals, rather than being, as it had been to the ancients, a sophisticated and impersonal source of pleasure.

Foucault pitted Nietzschean psychological understanding of power
against Marxist economic analysis. Yet he rejected Wilhelm Reich’s view that repression is a product of authoritarian societies. For Foucault the will to power, particularly in the form of sexual domination, will always be present in humanity although its form may change in the course of history. This led him to a marked anti-utopianism in his attitude to revolution. He offered no alternative to existing capitalist society. In a televised debate with Chomsky in Amsterdam in 1971, he refused to draw a model of society and argued that the task of the revolutionary is to conquer power, not to try and bring about justice which is merely an abstraction mirroring the dominant class interests of society.
⁷⁴

There is clearly much in Foucault which makes him of interest to anarchists. His critique of power and his depiction of modern culture as a form of domination are illuminating and persuasive. He rejected politics in its conventional form since he believed that all revolutions, if they retain the State, tend to deteriorate into Stalinism.
⁷⁵
Instead, he favoured decentralized and spontaneous revolutionary movements.

This led him to support the student rebellion in Paris in 1968. At the time, he argued that it was the duty of prisoners to try to escape. Because of his distrust of institutions he rejected revolutionary tribunals as well as courts of justice. And while not rejecting traditional class struggle, he called for specific struggles against ‘particularized power’ by women, prisoners, conscripted soldiers, hospital patients and homosexuals.
⁷⁶

Foucault, like many contemporary anarchists, rejected the rational, liberal culture of the West which he saw as a disastrous and coercive offshoot of the Enlightenment. His intellectual fire harks back to the early pyrotechnical tradition in anarchism which prefers explosive outburst to cool analysis. He once confessed: ‘I would like my books to be … Molotov cocktails or minefields; I would like them to self-destruct after use, like fireworks.’
⁷⁷
Nevertheless, it is too great an exaggeration to say that he was with Marcuse ‘the high priest who presided over the wedding of anarchism and the counter-culture’.
⁷⁸
Foucault offers no concrete way to conquer power, and argues that it can never be entirely dissolved. Ultimately, Foucault’s maverick form of structuralism is inspired more by Nietzschean individualism than by anarchism. He might inspire anarchists in his analysis of power and his criticism of modem culture, but he himself vigorously denied that he was an anarchist.

T
HIS
CENTURY
HAS
PRODUCED
few great original thinkers of an anarchist stamp. Most anarchists have merely adopted the ideas of the classic nineteenth-century thinkers or tried to put them into action. Only Emma Goldman and Murray Bookchin have helped develop new anarchist currents, notably feminism and social ecology. Several others like Noam Chomsky have been drawn to anarchism but have made their main contribution in fields other than anarchist political theory; they have smudged the narrow line between anarchism and libertarianism but have not completely erased it. Three outstanding exceptions to this trend have been Herbert Read and Alex Comfort in Britain and Paul Goodman in the United States.

Herbert Read was directly involved in the anarchist movement before and after the Second World War, wrote several impressive works on anarchist philosophy and helped make surrealism respectable in Britain. But he was primarily a man of letters, a social commentator and art critic, rather than a man of action. Born on a remote Yorkshire farm in 1893, he acknowledged, as Proudhon had done, that by birth and tradition he was a peasant On his father’s death in 1903, he left the North York Moors to go to an orphan’s school in Halifax, thereby leaving a ‘world of innocent wonder’ which he tried to recapture throughout his adult life. After leaving school, he went to work in the Savings Bank in Leeds, before moving to London, and becoming a civil servant in the Ministry of Labour and the Treasury, where he acquired an enduring dislike of bureaucrats. He eventually became an assistant keeper at the Victoria and Albert Museum, a post which provided a base for his subsequent career as an art critic, poet and educationist.

As a young man in Leeds, Read was at first a fanatical Tory. He traced his conversion to anarchism through a reading of Edward Carpenter’s
Non-Governmental Society
before the First World War. It opened up a whole new range of thought. He went on to read eagerly the works of Proudhon, Bakunin and Kropotkin. He was also influenced by Nietzsche, Sorel, Ibsen
and Tolstoy who supported anarchist philosophy and Marx and Shaw who attacked it.

As Read makes clear in his autobiography
Annals of Innocence and Experience
(1940), his experience of the First World War as an officer only confirmed his libertarian opposition to militarism and the State. As early as April 1918, he wrote to a friend that his political sentiment was ‘a revolt of the individual against the association which involves him in activities which do not interest him; a jumping to the ultimate anarchy which I have always seen as the ideal of all who value beauty and intensity of life. “A beautiful anarchy” – that is my cry.”
¹
He became an anarchist and pacifist although he did not publicly profess his anarchism until 1937.

Read wanted to change the world and tried to show through his works on art and education how people could liberate themselves from authoritarian ways of seeing and being. But he was not ready to engage in mere propaganda aimed at the working class: ‘Intellectuals writing for proletarians will not do’, he wrote. ‘It is merely another form of
la trahison des clercs.
’
²
Nevertheless, he was closely associated from 1938 to 1953 with the Freedom Press (which had been set up by Kropotkin at the end of the nineteenth century).

Read’s anarchist development was gradual but irreversible. At first he was ready to give the Russian Revolution the benefit of the doubt because of Lenin’s commitment to the withering away of the State and his maxim that ‘While the State exists there is no freedom. When there is freedom, there will be no State.’
³
But the suicide of the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky in 1930 triggered off Read’s doubts and henceforth he lost few opportunities to denounce the central control of the Communist State. His hopes were greatly aroused by the Spanish Revolution, and he supported enthusiastically the anarcho-syndicalism of the CNT. He was particularly impressed by the religious intensity of the Spanish anarchists; in a poem he wrote for them, he declared:

Read, like Wilde, saw his anarchist philosophy flower directly from his aesthetic concerns. A life without art, he believed, would be a ‘graceless and brutish existence’.
⁵
Taking up Eric Gill’s cry ‘To hell with culture’, he criticized the elitist culture of his day as ‘dope, a worse dope than religion’.
⁶
In its place, he wanted to develop a democratic culture which could best be achieved through the expansion of personal and social freedom. Read believed human beings to be naturally creative: ‘If we follow
this Natural Order in all the ways of our life, we shall not need to talk about culture. We shall have it without being conscious of it.’
⁷
At the same time, the artist can only realize his full creative potential if he is free and art autonomous. There is therefore a vital and organic link between freedom and culture.

Read looked to education as the principal means of encouraging the growth of the creative and autonomous person; indeed, his greatest contribution to anarchist theory was probably in the area of education. He saw an inextricable link between the disordered state of modern civilization and the traditional systems of schooling. The cause of our ills can be traced to the suppression of the creative spontaneity of the individual which is the result of coercive discipline, authoritarian morality, and mechanical toil. Existing schools, he felt, were nothing more than ‘abattoirs of sensibility’.
⁸

In his
Education through Art
(1943), Read advocated a libertarian form of education which George Woodcock has called ‘a method of creating anarchists by stealth’.
⁹
It was consciously intended to be ‘deeply anarchist in its orientation’.
¹⁰
In Read’s view, the aim of education should be the ‘individuation of the self, which involved both the concurrent development of the ‘uniqueness’ and the ‘social consciousness’ of the individual.
¹¹
Education must be not only a process of personal development but also of social integration and reciprocity.

It was Read’s contention that the social virtues necessary for a free life are more likely to be encouraged by developing an aesthetic sensibility in the young rather than by inculcating knowledge and science. He therefore advocates a system of education which makes the innate sensibility of the child the basis of mental development. Children are natural artists, and by practising creative art, they can develop a balanced personality and become lively members of the group or community to which they belong. The child however can only enter the world of co-operation if he or she is liberated from fear by adult sympathy and understanding.

But how is this then to be achieved? By no apparent method at all, Read suggests. The necessary self-discipline arises out of the activity itself:

He will try and establish a relationship of reciprocity and trust which will encourage mutual aid amongst his pupils. Discipline will not then be imposed but discovered. It was the same message as that preached by
Godwin two centuries before, but was considered entirely modern and progressive when reiterated by Read.

Apart from his writings on education and art, Read wrote two libertarian classics
Poetry and Anarchism
(1938) and
The Philosophy of Anarchism
(1940). He felt anarchism to be the only political philosophy which advocates the kind of freedom necessary for creativity, the only approach consistent with a love of justice. Like Bakunin, he recognized that ‘in order to create it is necessary to destroy’, that is, to break existing forms in order to change the nature of our civilization.
¹³
It seemed just as important to him to destroy the established bourgeois ideals in literature, painting and architecture as it was to destroy the established bourgeois ideals in economics. In Read’s view, the English in particular have no taste merely because of their lack of social freedom.

It was Read’s Wildean concern with the development of true individuality which most preoccupied him. In his
Philosophy of Anarchism
, he asserted that the measure of progress is the ‘degree of differentiation in a society’ and the richness and intensity of experience. The farther a society progresses, the more clearly the individual stands out of the group. The future unit of society is ‘the individual, a world in himself, self-contained and self-creative, freely giving and freely receiving, but essentially a free spirit.’
¹⁴
But Read recognized that the kind of complete personal freedom advocated by Stirner means ‘inevitable decadence’; the individual must find his place within the organic community of a co-operative commonwealth.
¹⁵
The whole case for anarchism rests on the assumption that the right kind of society is an ‘organic being’ for the organic life of the group is self-regulative, like the life of all such entities.
¹⁶