Read Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism Online
Authors: Peter Marshall
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In Central and South America, the Cuban government has so far failed to widen civil liberties, despite the efforts of the Cuban Libertarian Movement, which mainly works in exile. The Commission of Anarchist Relations in Venezuela has been struggling on two fronts, against the Hugo Chávez government as well as the US-backed opposition. On the other hand, the anarcha-feminists of the Mujeres Creando Collective have made a colourful impact in Bolivia, challenging traditional gender roles and poverty through imaginative direct and symbolic actions.
In South America,
Especifismo
, a concept developed by the Uruguayan Anarchist Federations (FAU), has been taken up by other federations in Brazil and Argentina. Partly inspired by Dielo Truda’s ‘Platformism’, it calls for a specifically anarchist organization with clear objectives to serve as a guide to popular social movements. The Landless Workers’ Movement in Brazil has had some success. The economic crisis in Argentina in the winter of 2001–2 saw anarchy in action when millions of citizens took to the streets for days, setting up neighbourhood assemblies and developing local alternative economic systems. Workers occupied their factories and many are still under their control. The popular slogan
Que se vayan todos
(’All of them should go’) reflected not only frustration with corrupt politicians but with the principle of government itself.
It is however the theory and tactics of the Zapatista movement in southern Mexico which have most caught the attention of anarchists. Named after
the revolutionary Emiliano Zapata and partly inspired by the anarchist Ricardo Flores Magón, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation rose up in 1994 in the poor Chiapas province and demanded the right of the indigenous people in southern Mexico to be different and self-governing. While holding off the armed forces of the Mexican State, they have organized their lives in autonomous municipalities. These are made up of delegates who express the decisions of local assemblies open to all and with no hierarchy. They make ‘laws’, though those who break them are not imprisoned but are obliged to help their communities in some way. Ready to learn from their mistakes, they practise what they call
caminar preguntando
(’to walk while questioning’). Although they do not call themselves anarchists, they are democratic in many ways. The Zapatista movement has no fixed leadership, no executive body and no headquarters. Their charismatic spokesman known as Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos –probably the missing professor of philosophy Rafael Sebastián Guillén Vicente — playfully expresses Left-libertarian views. He likes to criticize himself and says he wears his mask as a ‘vaccine against
caudillismo
’, against the danger of becoming a boss.
69
Nevertheless, his self-promotion and courtship of the media seem close to creating a personality cult.
The example of the Zapatistas has inspired anti-globalization activists. At the International Encounter for Humanity and against Neoliberalism held in Chiapas in 1996, the participants issued the anarchistic declaration, read by Marcos, that it was ‘not an organizing structure; it has no central head or decision maker; it has no central command or hierarchies. We are the network, all of us who resist.’
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It is a far cry from the approach of the ‘Supreme Chief Castro or President Chávez. Ya Basta! groups supporting the Zapatistas have emerged around the world and been involved in setting up the People’s Global Action. The Zapatista struggle for self-determination and resistance against economic dictatorship has been an inspiration throughout the world.
The anarchist sensibility, as I have argued, is much older than biblical or classical times and has existed ever since humans first evolved in Africa and spread across the world. Anarchy has flourished wherever they have rejected authority, hierarchy and domination. Left to themselves, humans have always managed their own affairs creatively and well. Indeed, for most of human evolution and history people have lived peaceful, co-operative lives without rulers, leaders, politicians, soldiers, policemen and taxmen.
Anarchism today is not only with us in remote areas of the globe outside the reach of the tentacles of the State but also in the free spaces within
society which escape its heavy hand. Even in the harshest State environment, a free society exists in embryo ready to break through the shell of the old. Anarchist and libertarian ideas are no longer dormant seeds in the desert, dreaming for life-giving rain. The period of hibernation is over. New shoots are growing up everywhere, all over the world, not only in the crevices and cracks of centralized States, but in expanding enclaves of freedom. Appearing and disappearing like the sun behind clouds, anarchism reveals itself in the most common aspects of everyday life. Just as the world is turning green, so people, especially the young, are acting in an anarchistic way, often without being aware of it.
In most countries, it is now accepted that the onus is on authoritarians to justify their assertions of authority, rather than on libertarians to defend the principle of freedom. It is increasingly recognized that freedom is the mother and not the daughter of order. It is not the honest advocate of freedom who would turn the world upside down, but the brazen juggler of imposed authority and naked power. Freedom is like water: it cannot be contained and wears away the hardest rock.
In these circumstances, anarchism is even more relevant today than in the early nineties when
Demanding the Impossible
was first published. It is still realistic to demand the impossible; indeed, it is more urgent than ever if we are to survive the ecological crisis and reverse the growing injustice and inequality in the world. We need to imagine and realize an alternative future and social reality, one based on autonomy, individuality, community, solidarity and a deep concern for the natural world.
When it comes to choosing between different currents of anarchism, it need not be a question of either/or. They are not mutually exclusive and all flow in the great river of freedom. Like Malatesta, Reclus and Voltairine de Cleyre more than a century ago, I advocate ‘anarchism without adjectives’, anarchism which embraces rather than spurns, which encourages mutual tolerance between different strands and schools. It does not try to impose a common economic system: mutualism can evolve into collectivism, which in turn can develop into voluntary communism. As in republican Spain during the Civil War, land can be held in common while at the same time allowing some to work their own plots. Individualism and community, no more than liberty and equality, are not necessarily opposed. Individualism can be supported by community just as every person should have the equal claim to be free. Indeed, the ideal would be a form of communal individuality in which the maximum degree of individuality is encouraged compatible with social solidarity. The health of an anarchist society might then be judged by the number of so-called ‘parasites’ it could support and the degree of diversity, individuality and eccentricity it could tolerate.
You can be an individualist on your own or join up with other
individualists, forming what Stirner called ‘a union of conscious egoists’. You can be a social anarchist who values both her autonomy and individuality. So-called ‘life-style’ anarchism is not necessarily opposed to anarcho-syndicalism, self-management or libertarian municipalism. You can adopt an anarchist life style, challenge authority and domination in the workplace, participate in unions striving for better and freer conditions, and at the same time defend the wilderness and other species and enjoy the sensuality and adventure of the natural world.
You can run free in the woods (where they still exist), dive into the sea (where it is not polluted) as well as link up with neighbours and friends in affinity groups where you live and love. You can be rooted in your own bioregion, promoting its diversity and well-being. You can create horizontal webs of co-operation to replace pyramids of power. You can become involved in alternative networks of communication which have no central control. You can undermine and dissolve coercive power, whether it be in yourself, at home, in the streets, in the workplace, or in the institutions of the State. You can challenge the mechanical reason which leads to the. Panopticon and the Pentagon and celebrate the imagination, intuition, the playful, the magical, the marvellous, the wild and the free. You can transform yourself and the world around you. No one path is paramount: there are many different ways up a mountain.
The threats to human freedom and equality are local and global; the response cannot fail to be interconnected. The organized warfare of modern States, the ruthless exploitation of transnational corporations and the blind hatred of religious fundamentalists can be subverted by an ethos of universal love, justice and reverence for all life. There is no need to despair or feel powerless, for as the ‘velvet revolutions’ in the former Soviet bloc, the self-managing citizens of Argentina and the Zapatista peasants of Chiapas in Mexico have shown, if enough people do not accept those in power they cannot stay there for long.
In the meantime, we can challenge and dissolve relations of power and domination. We can form convivial affinity groups, develop libertarian communities and co-operatives, create permanent as well as temporary autonomous zones within the fissures of authoritarian society. We can develop grassroots, participatory institutions. Depending on how it is used, the Internet can also create networks of like-minded people all over the world sharing their experiences and knowledge and organizing protest and resistance.
This history of anarchist thought and action demonstrates that anarchism constantly reinvents itself in new guises according to changing conditions and has flourished at different times at a local and national level. Many experiments were short-lived and often in times of social dislocation,
but the fact they took place at all shows that they are part of the creative experience of humanity. If it has happened on a small scale in the past, it can take place on a larger scale in the future. If the free citizens of Athens could set up a form of direct and participatory democracy two and a half thousand years ago, then with all our subsequent experience the creation of a free and ecological society is well within the realm of possibility. It is realistic to demand what others find impossible.
In one sense, anarchism is utopian in that it imagines the world as it could be. But it is also realistic in that it conserves and develops ancient traditions of self-help and mutual aid and profound libertarian tendencies within society. Above all, anarchism addresses itself to
homo ludens
(playful humanity) along with
homo faber
or
homo sapiens
(working or thinking humanity). Emma Goldman allegedly once said: ‘If I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution.’ I would add, if there be no joy, imagination, spontaneity, conviviality and fun, it isn’t my free society.
REFERENCE NOTESPlace of publication is London, unless otherwise specified
; n.d.
indicates that no date of publication was given on the copyright page of the book referred to.
1
See
Roget’s Thesaurus
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), p. 165
2
Quoted in James D. Forman,
Anarchism: Political Innocence or Social Violence
(New York: Watts, 1975), p. 4
3
William Butler Yeats, ‘The Second Coming’,
Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats
(Macmillan, 1950), p. 211
4
John Locke, ‘An Essay concerning the True Original, Extent and End of Civil Government’ (1690),
Of Civil Government, Two Treatises
(Dent, 1936), pp. 118, 126 (Bk. II, para. 4, 19)
5
George Woodcock,
Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements
(1962) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), p. 450
6
James Joll,
The Anarchists
(1964), (2nd edn.: Methuen, 1979), p. ix; Irving L. Horowitz, ed.,
The Anarchists
(New York: Dell, 1964), p. 588
7
See Daniel Guérin, ‘Postscript: May 1968’,
Anarchism: From Theory to Practice
(1965) (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970), p. 156
8
Joll,
The Anarchists
, op. cit., p. 262; see also his ‘Anarchism - a Living Tradition’,
Anarchism Today
, eds. David E. Apter & James Joll (Macmillan, 1971), pp. 212–25
9
Woodcock,
The Anarchist Reader
(Fontana, 1977), p. 55; see also his Preface to the Second Edition of
Anarchism
, op. cit., pp. 7–8
10
See David Miller,
Anarchism
(Dent, 1984)
11
Peter Kropotkin, ‘Añarchism’,
Encyclopaedia Britannica
(1910), reprinted in
Anarchism and Anarchist Communism
, ed. Nicolas Walter (Freedom Press, 1987), p. 10.
12
See Murray Bookchin,
The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy
(Palo Alto: Cheshire Books, 1982), ch. vii
13
For other anarchists writers, see Michael Scrivener, ‘The Anarchist Aesthetic’,
Black Rose
, I, 1 (1979), 7–21
14
See V. I. Lenin,
‘Left-Wing’ Communism, An Infantile Disorder
(1920)