Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (118 page)

For ail its Freudian overtones, Comfort’s argument is very suggestive. It offers a wider anthropological and psychological dimension to the traditional anarchist analysis of the State. Comfort however is less convincing on aggression and domination. He suggests that dominance patterns are ‘apparently inseparable’ from all types of relationship among men and animals. And while he suggests that interpersonal aggression is at root a desire to recognize and to be recognized, he asserts ‘Humanity maintains itself by an aggressive attitude towards its environment’.
⁴²
It is a view which most modem anarchists, especially those influenced by social ecology, would reject. Dominance and hierarchy are not inevitable elements of the human condition, and a genuinely free society would encourage the practice of ‘matriform’ values not only amongst its individual members, but also in relation to other species and nature as a whole.

Comfort returned to the issue of aggression in his
Nature and Human Nature
(1966), where he discusses from an evolutionary perspective the origins of humanity, the development of their sexual and social behaviour, their emotional needs, and their place in the world. He sees aggression more common in ‘Man’ [sic] than in other social species and higher primates, suggesting that self-destructive behaviour is ‘one of the most characteristically “human” features’. While an eighteenth-century optimist like Godwin would have seen human beings as social animals liable to outbursts of irrational aggression, Man appears to Comfort ‘more like an irrationally aggressive animal capable of outbursts of sociality’.
⁴³
At the same time, Comfort suggests like Kropotkin that our capacity for love and sociality, even our ‘moral sense’, is in direct continuity with the mutual aid of lower animals. A large part of our aggression is therefore part of our alienation from our animal mode. As a result, Man has become his own worse enemy. Even freedom forced upon us makes us anxious. Aggression is thus presented
as a stress disorder, internalized in suicide and externalized in war.

The cause of this state of affairs, according to Comfort, is the absence in our centralized and technological culture of the orgiastic and socializing experience for which we seem to be programmed by evolution. In the past, religion and art helped organize human feelings and wishes. Comfort now calls for ‘A Technology of the Emotions’ to release the socializing forces within us through fulfilling work.

In his discussion of paternalism or what he calls ‘baboonery’, Comfort strikes a particularly anarchist note when he suggests that since the development of institutional authority, human societies have used ‘government’ to express two incompatible social activities, ‘namely organization or communication and individual or group dominance behaviour — whether the eldest, the strongest, the entrenched or the magic-possessor’.
⁴⁴
A sign that baboonery is on its way out will come when we stop considering government as a matter of power and begin to regard it as a matter of communication. To do this, Comfort recommends a kind of democracy as direct as that of the old Greek city or the small club, in which everyone can be consulted by voting through computers against any policy undertaken by administrators. The government of men would then be replaced by the administration of things.

As a medical biologist concerned with physical and mental well-being, Comfort advocates the complete fulfilment of sexuality. In
Barbarism and Sexual Freedom
, he argued that coercion or institutions sponsored by the State and other such bodies, civil or religious, have no place in sexuality. Like Reich he maintained that a revolution in the moral and personal sexuality of the individual entails an equally radical revolution in the social order. But while rejecting sexual repression, he condemns untrammelled licentiousness in a social vacuum. The bases of sexual freedom, he insists, are: ‘responsibility of the individual for his own acts and their consequences, absence of interference of coercive institutions, economic freedom and security, and social order orientated towards life rather than death’.
⁴⁵

Comfort went on to write widely about
Sexual Behaviour and Society
(1950) and his books on the subject helped shape the ‘permissive society’ of the sixties. But it was in his best-selling
The Joy of Sex
(1972; 2nd edn., 1991) that he developed his hedonistic and libertarian message in its most popular form. Drawing on different cultural traditions, the work offers ‘A Gourmet Guide to Lovemaking’. It is Comfort’s contention that every individual should be free to explore the full range of their sexuality. But again with freedom comes responsibility. The only basic rule is that one should not injure or exploit anyone: ‘you don’t take a novice climbing and abandon them halfway up when things get difficult … A cad can be of either sex.’
⁴⁶
Comfort also wisely suggests that no one should feel obliged
to do anything that they do not want to do, and adults should never involve children in their sexual activities. While it is one of the least inhibited books on sex ever written, its dominant note is one of tenderness and joy.

Amongst anarcho-communists in the United States, Paul Goodman has undoubtedly had the widest influence since the Second World War. Born in New York in 1911, he became a teacher, essayist, poet, novelist, playwright, psychotherapist, and critic. His main concern was to avoid war and to apply anarchist principles to the problems of urban America. He was not primarily an anarchist thinker, but like Colin Ward in Britain was keen to show in concrete ways the practical applicability of anarchist ideas. He helped develop and gave expression to the wave of libertarianism and pacifism in the fifties and sixties which formed part of the New Left in America. His advocacy of anti-militarism, radical decentralization, participatory democracy, and organic community also deeply influenced the counter-culture at the time.

Goodman first proposed his alternative to the size, sprawl and bureaucracy of contemporary America in
Communitas: Means of Livelihood and Ways of Life
(1947), a work he wrote with his architect brother Percival. It offers a libertarian perspective on urban organization, calling for a restoration of the community as a face-to-face voluntary association of individuals united by common needs and interests. They wanted to eliminate the difference between production and consumption and stop ‘quarantining’ work from homes and vice versa. Like William Morris, they recognized that people like to work and be useful, ‘for work has a rhythm and springs from spontaneous feelings just like play, and to be useful makes people feel right’.
⁴⁷
But with its emphasis on discipline, the modern factory system had destroyed the instinctive pleasures of work.

To overcome this state of affairs, the Goodmans recommended workers’ participation and control, and relatively small units with relative self-sufficiency. This would enable each community to enter into a larger whole with solidarity while retaining an independent outlook. They further advocated like Kropotkin the integration of factory and farm, town and country as well as decentralization and regional autonomy. The economy should be based on the production of useful things rather than of profit.

Goodman saw himself as a creative artist preserving and developing the anarchist tradition. He did not think that there could be a history of anarchism in the sense of establishing a permanent state of things called anarchist. What anarchists must do is to decide where ‘to draw the line’ against the authoritarian and oppressive forces at work in society.
⁴⁸

For Goodman anarchism is grounded in the proposition that

Goodman described himself as a ‘community anarchist who believes that coercive sovereign power is always a poor expedient’. He always considered freedom and health to be absolute goods and was convinced that ‘organism-self-regulation’ works out best. His anarchism went beyond liberalism since he felt the negative definition of freedom as mere freedom from interference is both trivial and in fact indefensible. Instead, he advocated freedom in the positive sense as
’the condition of initiating activity’.
⁵⁰
Without this ability, people might be formally free, but in practice powerless and enslaved.

At the same time, Goodman was pragmatic and argued that the ‘relativity of the anarchist principle to the actual situation is of the essence of anarchism’. He therefore affirmed the Jeffersonian Bill of Rights (as opposed to the Constitution) as a great historical achievement, fundamental to further progress. In their day, Congregational churches and the free medieval cities were anarchist in spirit. Even the civil rights movement in the United States was ‘almost classically decentralist and anarchist’. Far from being directed only to a glorious future, anarchism for him involved perpetual vigilance to make sure that past freedoms are not lost and do not turn into their opposite; it is ‘always a continual coping with the next situation’.
⁵¹

Goodman thought utopian thinking necessary in our era in order to combat the emptiness of the technological life and to think up new social forms. On the other hand, he liked to call himself a ‘Neolithic Conservative’. He recognized that in the modern world the anarchist should be a conservator of libertarian traditions as well as pressing for gradual change by fostering beneficial tendencies in society. Like Landauer, he wrote: ‘A free society cannot be the substitution of a “new order” for the old order; it is the extension of spheres of free action until they make up most of the social life.’
⁵²

Goodman was ready to accept voting for candidates in national elections who were unambiguously opposed to the Cold War and believed that an
electoral campaign could be a powerful means of educating the public. Nevertheless, he was totally opposed to traditional politics as ‘a matter of “getting into power”, and then “deciding”, directing, controlling, coercing, the activities of society’.
⁵³
In the normal functioning of a free community of interests, there is no need for abstract power except in the case of emergencies. Abstract power, in the form of discipline, bureaucracy and management, universally debases the persons involved and thwarts normal and healthy activities.

In tracing the evolution of government, Goodman describes how in the past conquerors and pirates intervened in traditional, peaceful, ‘community-anarchy’. Piracy then became government, ‘the process of getting people to perform by extrinsic motivations, of penalty and blackmail, and later bribery and training’. A continual state of emergency was created. The result today is that some individuals aspire to be top managers and obtain power for its own sake, while most people experience utter powerlessness. In modern centralized States, ‘we mostly see the abortions of lively social functioning saddled, exploited, prevented, perverted, drained dry, paternalized by an imposed system of power and management’.
⁵⁴

Goodman, like Bourne, argues that the principal lesson of modern history is that ‘War is the health of the State’. Sovereign national States have grown by preparing for war and waging war. Even education has become regimented to ‘apprentice-training for war’. The only pacifist conclusion is therefore the anarchist one — to decentralize regionally and localize wherever possible for such a process promotes peace, encourages initiative, and creates a more ‘vivid and intimate life’.
⁵⁵

Goodman’s pacifism is necessarily revolutionary. It does not look to traditional politics but tries to dispel the mesmerism of abstract power. It practises civil disobedience and direct action. Above all, it tries to live communally and without authority, to do useful work and feel friendly, and so positively
’to replace an area of power with peaceful functioning’.
⁵⁶

Given his psychoanalytic background, Goodman was not opposed to all forms of violence. He felt that face-to-face violence, like a fist-fight, is natural; if anything, it does damage to try and repress it. Again he felt it was inevitable that oppressed people, like blacks in the US or the French during the Nazi occupation would fight back. He refused to make a moral judgement about this kind of violence because it was like a force of nature. But when violence becomes organized as in modern warfare, and some abstract policy rather than personal anger leads people to kill, then he was completely opposed to it: ‘all war is entirely unacceptable because it mechanises human beings and inevitably leads to more harm man good. Therefore I am a pacifist.’
⁵⁷
While Goodman recognized guerrilla fighting to be a classic anarchist technique and refused to condemn it, he felt
that especially in modern conditions, ‘
any
violent means tends to reinforce centralism and authoritarianism’.
⁵⁸
In
A Message to the Military Industrial Complex
(1965) of the United States, he declared in characteristic style: