Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (127 page)

Depending on whether they are individualists stressing the liberty of the individual, or collectivists emphasizing social solidarity, anarchists align
themselves with liberalism or socialism. In general, anarchism is closer to socialism than liberalism. Kropotkin called anarchy ‘the No-Government system of Socialism’, Johann Most declared that anarchism is ‘socialism perfected’, and Rudolf Rocker regarded it as ‘a kind of voluntary socialism’.
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More recently, Daniel Guérin has argued that anarchism is only one of the streams of socialist thought and is really a synonym for socialism.
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But while this approach might help to rehabilitate anarchism amongst other socialists, it would inevitably exclude individualist anarchists like Max Stirner and Benjamin Tucker and modern anarcho-capitalists like Murray Rothbard. Anarchism finds itself largely in the socialist camp, but it also has outriders in liberalism. It cannot be reduced to socialism, and is best seen as a separate and distinctive doctrine.

The word ‘libertarian’ has long been associated with anarchism, and has been used repeatedly throughout this work. The term originally denoted a person who upheld the doctrine of the freedom of the will; in this sense, Godwin was not a ‘libertarian’ but a ‘necessitarian’. It came however to be applied to anyone who approved of liberty in general. In anarchist circles, it was first used by Joseph Déjacque as the title of his anarchist journal
Le Libertaire, Journal du Mouvement Social
published in New York in 1858. At the end of the last century, the anarchist Sébastien Faure took up the word, to stress the difference between anarchists and authoritarian socialists.
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For a long time, libertarian was interchangeable in France with anarchist but in recent years, its meaning has become more ambivalent. Some anarchists like Daniel Guérin will call themselves ‘libertarian socialists’, partly to avoid the negative overtones still associated with anarchism, and partly to stress the place of anarchism within the socialist tradition. Even Marxists of the New Left like E. P. Thompson call themselves ‘libertarian’ to distinguish themselves from those authoritarian socialists and communists who believe in revolutionary dictatorship and vanguard parties. Left libertarianism can therefore range from the decentralist who wishes to limit and devolve State power, to the syndicalist who wants to abolish it altogether. It can even encompass the Fabians and the social democrats who wish to socialize the economy but who still see a limited role for the State.

The problem with the term ‘libertarian’ is that it is now also used by the Right. Extreme liberals inspired by J. S. Mill who are concerned with civil liberties like to call themselves libertarians. They tend to be individualists who trust in a society formed on the basis of voluntary agencies. They reject a strong centralized State and believe that social order, in the sense of the security of persons and property, can best be achieved through private firms competing freely in the market-place. In its moderate form, right
libertarianism embraces
laissez-faire
liberals like Robert Nozick who call for a minimal State, and in its extreme form, anarcho-capitalists like Murray Rothbard and David Friedman who entirely repudiate the role of the State and look to the market as a means of ensuring social order.

While undoubtedly related to liberalism and socialism, true anarchism goes beyond both political tendencies. It maintains that liberty without equality means the liberty of the rich and powerful to exploit (as in capitalist States), and equality without liberty means that all are slaves together (as in communist States). Anarchism leaves Left and Right libertarianism behind since it finds no role for the State and government, however minimal. Its roots may entwine and its concerns overlap, but ultimately anarchism forms a separate ideology and doctrine, with its own recognizable tradition.

The most common criticism of anarchism is that it is based on a simplistic view of human nature. Certainly anarchists all insist that humanity has a largely untried libertarian potential. Human beings, they believe, are capable of living without imposed authority and coercion. A system of punishments and rewards is not essential to shape their behaviour and rulers and leaders are unnecessary to organize society. Human beings, anarchists point out, have regulated themselves for most of history and are capable of leading productive and peaceful lives together. While a few individualist anarchists appeal to self-interest to bring about the natural order of anarchy, most anarchists emphasize the potential for solidarity and believe that in a non- coercive society the values of mutual aid, co-operation, and community would flourish.

The main weakness of the argument that anarchism is somehow against ‘human nature’ is the fact that anarchists do not share a common view of human nature. Amongst the classic thinkers, we find Godwin’s rational benevolence, Stirner’s conscious egoism, Bakunin’s destructive energy, and Kropotkin’s calm altruism. Some like Godwin and Stirner stress the importance of enlightenment and education, others like Bakunin and Kropotkin have great faith in the creative energies of the masses. Emma Goldman had little time for existing majorities, but still thought that all human beings are ultimately capable of becoming free and governing themselves.

The majority of anarchists believe that human beings are products of their environment, but also capable of changing it. Some of the more existentially minded among them insist that ‘human nature’ does not exist as a fixed essence. We may be born into a particular situation, but we are largely what we make of ourselves.
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The aim is not therefore to liberate some ‘essential self by throwing off the burden of government and the
State, but to develop the self in creative and voluntary relations with others.

Another traditional criticism of anarchism is that it assumes the natural goodness of man. It is true that from Godwin onwards the classic anarchist thinkers have depicted human beings as corrupted and deformed by the burden of the State, and they have argued that people will not be able to realize their full potential until it is abolished. But it is not simply a question of pitching some mythical ‘natural man’ in a state of innocence against corrupt ‘political man’. Few anarchists believe in natural goodness. Godwin argued that human beings are born neither good nor bad, but made so by their circumstances. Bakunin felt that man is born a ‘ferocious beast’ but his reason enables him to develop into a social being. Stirner felt that we are irredeemably egoistical; all we can do is to become conscious of the fact. Kropotkin came closest to a notion of ‘natural goodness’, but felt not that it is intrinsic as Rousseau had argued, but rather that it has evolved in the form of a moral sense in the co-operative behaviour of human beings in their struggle for survival.

It was George Bernard Shaw’s view that we are simply not good enough for anarchism. In his Fabian tract
The Impossibilities of Anarchism
(1893), he rejected Kropotkin’s claim that man is naturally social and gregarious. It would have been impossible, Shaw argues, for the institution of property to come into existence unless nearly every man had been eager ‘to quarter himself idly on the labour of his fellows, and to domineer over them whenever the law enabled him to do so’.
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But such a Hobbesian view of man, as countless anarchists have pointed out, is profoundly unhistorical; there have been societies where people do not desire to exploit and dominate each other. Even within existing Western society, there are many people who do not do what Shaw considers ‘natural’. If this is the case, then the ability to live without domination and exploitation is part of the legacy and potentiality of human beings. Since such an ability has existed and continues to exist, there is no reason to suppose that it cannot exist on a wider scale in the future.

If anything, it could be argued that the anarchists have not only a realistic, but even a pessimistic view of human nature. This is not merely because some anarchists like Emma Goldman have little faith in the masses. More importantly, it is the profound awareness of anarchists of the corruption inherent in the exercise of power that leads them to criticize political authority. The rise to prominence of Hitler and Stalin this century does not make the anarchist argument weaker but stronger. Precisely because the concentration of power in the hands of a few rulers has led to such enormous oppression, it is prudent to decentralize political authority and to spread power over as wide an area as possible. Power should be dispersed
not because people are good, but because when a few wield it exclusively they tend to cause immense injury.

The central issue which distinguishes anarchists from liberals and authoritarian socialists and communists is of course the role of the State in society. The anarchist critique of the Marxist-Leninist State has been only too painfully vindicated. The great Communist revolutions this century in Russia, China, Vietnam and Cuba have all underlined the danger of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ swiftly becoming the dictatorship of a party, if not the dictatorship of a party leader. They have vividly demonstrated the implausibility of the State ever ‘withering away’ once political control has been centralized and its apparatus colonized by a bureaucratic elite. Wherever vanguard parties have existed, the people have been left behind. It is the Marxist-Leninists, and not the anarchists, who have been naive in thinking that, after a society had suffered the centralization of authority and the concentration of power, the resultant State could then gradually be dismantled. As George Orwell observed, the totalitarian State governs its subjects not only by naked force but by trying to define reality, even to the extent of manipulating their thoughts through the control of permissible language.

The anarchists have been equally vociferous in condemning the liberal State as an unnecessary and harmful check to social development. Far from creating social order, they see it as the principal cause of social disorder. They point out that at the root of the modern democratic State there is a fundamental paradox: its rhetoric celebrates the participation of the people in the political process and yet asks them to sign away their liberty periodically in elections and prevents them from participating directly in the decisions which most affect their lives. Rather than defending the ‘national interest’ or promoting the ‘general good’, governments still tend to further the interests of those with power, privilege and wealth. At best they perpetrate the tyranny of the majority; at worst, the tyranny of a minority.

In his spirited defence of social democracy, Shaw maintained that anarchist fears about the tyranny of the majority in a parliamentary democracy are unfounded since under such a system it usually proves too costly to suppress even a minority of one. There is moreover a ‘fine impartiality about the policeman and the soldier, who are the cutting edge of State power’.
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He was convinced that once the workers had ousted the ‘gentlemen’ in the House of Commons, they would use the State against the upper classes and landlords in order to buy land for the people. At the end of the nineteenth century Shaw’s argument may have seemed plausible, but,
unfortunately, where the workers have been able to send their representatives to parliaments those representatives have tended to join the ruling class and be corrupted by political power. The political establishment has proved far more subtle in co-opting its enemies than Shaw foresaw or imagined.

The central liberal contention that the State is necessary to fight the enemies of liberty from within and without has more weight. As L. T. Hobhouse wrote: ‘The function of State coercion is to override individual coercion, and, of course, coercion exercised by any association within the State.’
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From this point of view, every liberty rests on a corresponding act of control. Clearly a liberal State which respects basic human rights is preferable to a despotic State which does not, and the use of soldiers to prevent the lynching of innocent minorities is preferable to their use in shooting dissidents and so-called ‘counter-revolutionaries’.

Bertrand Russell, who considered pure anarchism ‘the ultimate ideal, to which society should continually approximate’, made a similar defence of the minimal State.
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He agreed with the anarchists that a good community springs from the unfettered development of individuals, that the positive functions of the economy should be in the hands of voluntary organizations, and that anarcho-syndicalism was more nearly right than socialism in its hostility to the State and private property. But he still felt a limited State to be necessary: to exercise ultimate control in the economic sphere; to establish a just system of distribution; to maintain peace between rival interests; and to settle disputes whether within or outside its borders.

But this liberal and social democratic defence offered by apologists for the State can be pressed too far. The coercive nature of the State, exemplified by its army, police, and prisons, is invariably greater than its protective nature. Equally, it is presumptuous to consider the State essential to the protection of the people of a country from internal disruption or external threat. A nation which consists of a network of decentralized communities would be more difficult to conquer than a centralized State, and a foreign invasion can be foiled by well-organized civil disobedience. A people-inarms is preferable to a professional standing army, but the best form of defence is non-violent direct action which seeks to dissuade the enemy rather than to kill him. In the absence of a professional police force, communities are quite capable of maintaining public security for themselves and have done so for centuries.

Another substantive liberal argument for the State is that it can provide for the welfare of its disadvantaged citizens. Clearly, some anarchists have committed the ‘genetic fallacy’ in thinking that because the State originated in conquest and fraud, it must always remain conquering and fraudulent. The struggles of reformers and working people over the centuries have
ensured that the liberal-democratic State does provide some basic social services and welfare for its citizens. But these positive provisions can be better supplied by voluntary associations than State agencies. Released from top-heavy bureaucracies, such organizations will encourage personal initiative and mutual aid. They will be able to satisfy more directly the needs of the people and involve them in their management. To be effective, medicine and education do not require State sponsorship any more than industry and agriculture do. What they need is to be managed by the producers and consumers in democratic committees and councils.