Anarchism: A Historical Introduction
by George Woodcock
From his 1977 publication, 'The Anarchist Reader'
1 TRADITION AND TERRAIN
Anarchism is a word about which there have been many
confusions. Anarchy is very often mistakenly regarded as the
equivalent of chaos, and an anarchist is often thought of as at best
a nihilist - a man who has abandoned all principles - and at worst a
mindless terrorist. The anarchists whose works I shall be quoting in
this collection were men of elaborate principles, a tiny minority of
whom indeed did perform acts of violence, though they never aspired
to compete, in terms of destructiveness, with the military leaders of
the past or the nuclear scientists of our own day. In other words, I
shall be presenting the anarchists as they were and are rather than
as they have appeared in the fantasies of cartoonists, journalists
and politicians, whose favourite way of abusing an opponent is to
accuse him of promoting anarchy.
What we are concerned with, in terms of definition,
is a cluster of words which in turn represents a cluster of doctrines
and attitudes whose principal uniting feature is the belief that
government is both harmful and unnecessary. A double Greek root is
involved: the word archon, meaning a ruler, and the prefix an,
indicating without; hence anarchy means the state of being without a
ruler. By derivation, anarchism is the doctrine which contends that
government is the source of most of our social troubles and that
there are viable alternative forms of voluntary organization. And by
further definition the anarchist is the man who sets out to create a
society without government.
That concept of society without government is
essential for an understanding of the anarchist attitude. In
rejecting government, the true anarchist does not reject the idea or
the fact of society; on the contrary, his view of the need for
society as a living entity becomes intensified when he contemplates
the abolition of government. As be sees it, the pyramidical structure
imposed by a government, with power proceeding from above downwards,
can only be replaced if society becomes a closely-knit fabric of
voluntary relationships. The difference between a governmental
society and an anarchic society is in his view the difference between
a structure and an organism; one is built and the other grows
according to natural laws. Metaphorically, one can compare the
pyramid of government with the sphere of society, which is held
together by an equilibrium of stresses. Anarchists are much concerned
with equilibriums, and two kinds of equilibrium play a very important
role in their philosophy. One is the equilibrium between destruction
and construction that dominates their tactics. The other is the
equilibrium between liberty and order which dominates their view of
the ideal society. But order for the anarchist is not something
imposed from above. It is a natural order, and is given expression by
selfdiscipline and voluntary co-operation.
The roots of anarchist thought are ancient; I shall
trace some of them thoroughly in the next section of this
introduction. Libertarian doctrines, which argued that as a moral
being man can live best without being ruled, existed among the
philosophers of ancient Greece and China, and among the heretical
Christian sects of the Middle Ages. Elaborately argued philosophies
that were anarchist in all but name began to appear during the
Renaissance and Reformation periods, between the fifteenth and
seventeenth centuries and, even more copiously, in the eighteenth
century, as events built up towards the French and American
Revolutions which ushered in the modern age.
But as an activist movement, seeking to change
society by collective methods, anarchism belongs only to the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. There were times when millions of
European and Latin American working men and peasants followed the
black or black-and-red flags of the anarchists, revolted under their
leadership and set up transitory models of a free world, as in Spain
and in the Ukraine during the periods of revolutionary upheaval.
There were also great writers, like Shelley and Tolstoy, who
expressed in their poems and novels and in their other writings the
essential viewpoints of anarchism. The fortunes of the movement have
fluctuated greatly and, being a movement rather than a party, it has
shown extraordinary powers of revival. As late as the early 1960s it
seemed a moribund, forgotten movement, yet today it seems once again,
as it did in the 1870s, and the 1890s and again in the 1930s, a
phenomenon of urgent relevance.
Perhaps the best point to begin a survey of
anarchist attitudes is with the first man to accept the title of
anarchist, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, a prophet of intellectual fury who
once declared: 'To be governed is to be watched over, inspected,
spied on, directed, legislated over, regulated, docketed,
indoctrined, preached at, controlled, assessed, weighed, censored,
ordered about, by men who have neither right, nor knowledge, nor
virtue. That is government, that is its justice, that is its
morality.'
Proudhon was a largely self-educated printer from
the mountainous French province of Franche - Comte, who in 1840
published a book, Qu'est-ce que la Propriete? (What is Property?),
which became extremely influential in nineteenth century radical
circles; even Marx, later Proudhon's bitter enemy, approved of it.
Proudhon's answer to the question his title posed was 'Property is
Theft*, and the phrase, which identified capitalism with government
as the two main enemies of freedom, became one of the key slogans of
the century.
Proudhon took part in the 1848 French Revolution,
and it was largely under his influence that the famous, ill-fated
alliance of European socialists, the International Workingmen's
Association (better known as the First International), was founded in
1864, the year before his death. Proudhon's books provided the
intellectual infrastructure for the European anarchist movement, and
Michael Bakunin, who became the greatest of the anarchist activists,
always referred to Proudhon as 'the master of us all'.
Perhaps the most significant thing about Proudhon is
that, despite his influence and his following, he refused to
establish a dogmatic doctrine such as Marx bequeathed to his
followers. When an admirer congratulated him on his system, Proudhon
replied indignantly: 'My system? I have no system!' He distrusted
theoretical structures as much as governmental structures. Doctrines,
for him, were never complete; their meanings emerged and their forms
changed according to the situation; he believed that, within broad
channels of principle, political theory-like thought of any kind-was
in a process of constant evolution.
Proudhon also denied that he had founded a political
party-he condemned all parties as 'varieties of absolutism'. In the
formal sense this was true, though he did in fact gather a group of
disciples out of whom the first anarchist movement emerged. Related
to Proudhon's rejection of the idea of a political party was his
action when he was elected to the Constituent Assembly of France
during the Revolution of 1848. He was one of a tiny minority of
representatives who voted against a Constitution approved by the
Assembly and, When he was asked his reasons, he emphasized that he
did not vote against the specific form of the Constitution: 'I have
voted against the Constitution because it was a Constitution.' By
this he implied that he rejected fixed forms of political
organization.
The attitudes which Proudhon exhibited during the
1840s on questions of system, party and political organization not
only reflected the views of earlier libertarian thinkers, like
William Godwin, who had raised precisely the same objections. They
also anticipated, before an actual anarchist movement came into
being, the attitude it would adopt towards political action and the
form it would take. Thus, it has never been possible to talk of
anarchism as a philosophic or political system of the same kind as
Marxism, which assumes that the writings of a man who died in 1883
provide oracular answers to all problems ever afterwards. And
anarchism has never been represented by a political party, because
its followers have wished to retain their freedom to react
spontaneously to concrete situations and have regarded political
parties as sharing the same faults as governments. As for
constitutions, the anarchists have continued to regard them as fixed
and guaranteed political systems which rigidity the state and
institutionalize the exercise of power; neither of these effects is
acceptable to libertarians, who believe that the organization of
community life on a political level should be replaced by its social
and economic organization on the basis of free contractual agreement
between individuals.
Freedom, as all these objections imply, is not
something to be decreed and protected by laws and states. It is
something you shape for yourself and share with your fellow men.
States and laws are its enemies, and from every comer of the varied
spectrum of anarchist beliefs opinion on this point is quite
unanimous. The state is evil and brings not order but conflict.
Authority thwarts the natural impulses and makes men strangers to
each other. As early as 1793, in his great Political Justice, William
Godwin put the point in his resounding periods:
Government lays its bands upon the spring that is in
society and puts a stop to its motion. It gives substance and
permanence to our errors. It reverses the genuine propensities of
mind, and instead of suffering us to look forward, teaches us to look
backward for perfection. It prompts us to seek the public welfare,
not in innovation and improvement, but in a timid reverence for the
decisions of our ancestors, as if it were the nature of mind always
to degenerate and never to advance.
The objection which anarchists have always sustained
to fixed and authoritarian forms of organization does not mean that
they deny organization as such. The anarchist is not an individualist
in the extreme sense of the word. He believes passionately in
individual freedom, but he also recognizes that such freedom can only
be safeguarded by a willingness to co-operate, by the reality of
community, and for this reason, as we shall later see, the discussion
of various kinds of non-coercive organization plays a great part in
anarchist literature. Yet if the anarchist refuses to be ruled by the
dead hand of the past, he accepts the corollary of that refusal; he
does not expect the future to be determined by the present, and for
this reason it is wrong to identify the anarchist with the Utopian.
The essential characteristic of Utopian thought is the creation of an
ideal society, beyond which there will be no progress, no change,
because the ideal is by definition perfect and therefore static. But
the anarchists have always argued that we cannot use our experience
in the present to plan for a future where conditions may be quite
different. If we demand freedom of choice, we must expect a similar
demand from our successors. We can only seek to remove the injustices
we know.
The anarchist is really a natural disciple of the
Greek philosopher Heraclitus. who taught that the unity of existence
lies in its constant change. 'Over those who step into the same
river,' said Heraclitus, 'the waters that flow are constantly
different.' The image is a good one for anarchism, as it has been and
as it remains, since it conveys the idea of a doctrine with many
variations, which nevertheless moves between the banks of certain
unifying principles. And thus, even though there are many different
anarchist points of view, there is a definable anarchist philosophy,
just as there is a recognizable anarchist temperament. It involves
three elements - a criticism of society as it is, a vision of a
desirable alternative society, and a plan for proceeding from one to
the other.
Everything is involved in the question: Having
decided that government is undesirable, can we - and how can we?
-make the further step and show that it is unnecessary as well, and
that there are alternative means of human organization that will
enable us to live without it?
This question involves us in a consideration of the
anarchist view of man's place in the scheme of things. Generally
speaking, anarchists believe in a modified version of the view of the
natural world that was celebrated in the Renaissance, and especially
in the eighteenth century, as the Great Chain of Being. In its most
familiar form the Great Chain of Being was seen as a continuity
proceeding from the humblest form of life to the Godhead, usually
deistically conceived. Alexander Pope expressed the concept admirably
in the Essay on Man:
Vast chain of being ! which from God began, Natures
ethereal, human, angel, man, Beasts, birds, fish, insect, what no eye
can see. No glass can reach; from Infinite to thee, From thee to
nothing …
Everything, in other words, had its place in the
order of being, and if it followed its own nature, all would be well.
But let any species break the chain by departing from its nature, and
disaster would ensue. It was a doctrine that would appeal to a modern
ecologist. The concept derived ultimately from the Greek idea, most
clearly developed by the Stoic philosophers, that man belonged to
nature, responded to its primal laws. and that in nature he might
find the model for his own societies. It had its analogues in the
philosophies of ancient China, and thirty years ago, as I remember,
anarchists were fond of quoting some remarks the Taoist sage Lao Tse
is said to have made in reproaching Confucius for devising means to
make people behave morally.
When the actions of the people are controlled by
prohibitive laws, the country becomes more and more impoverished.
Therefore the wise man says: 'I will design nothing, and the people
will shape themselves. I will keep quiet and the people will find
their rest. I will not assert myself, and the people will come forth.
I will discountenance ambition, and the people will return to their
natural simplicity.'
But Chinese wisdom was a late discovery so far as
European anarchists were concerned. For them the concept of the unity
of the natural law came by a devious route from the world of
classical antiquity, through the neo-Platonists of Hellenistic
Alexandria, and thence by way of the rediscovery of ancient wisdom
during the Renaissance and the consequent erosion of the hierarchical
cosmogony of the Middle Ages. By the time the essential idea of the
Great Chain of Being had reached the anarchists. God had been
displaced from its head or bad been rationalized into a principle of
harmony, and probably the most influential individual in carrying out
the transmission was the Swiss writer, author of the famous
Confessions' Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Rousseau had been widely acclaimed and widely
blamed, as a proto-liberal, a proto-communist, a proto-anarchist.
Many of his critics, thinking only of his authoritarian aspect,
regard him as mainly responsible for the deification of the State
which emerged in the French Revolution and in all subsequent
revolutions. His theory of a tacit social contract by which authority
was established in ancient times and made binding on subsequent
generations was especially repugnant to the anarchists with their
concept of an unfettered future, and all the principal anarchist
theoreticians from Godwin to Kropotkin criticized him unreservedly on
this point.
Yet despite their objections to his idea of a
primeval social contract, there is a great deal the anarchists
derived from Rousseau, including his romantic stress on spontaneity,
his idea of education as a drawing out of what is latent in the child
so that the natural instincts for good are developed, and his sense
of the primitive virtues. Though Rousseau was not the first writer to
adumbrate the concept of the Noble Savage, there is no doubt that the
anarchists received principally from him their predilection for
pre-civilized man, so that their writings have been full of
descriptions of primitive societies able to arrange their social
affairs and even to create fairly elaborate cultures without
resorting, at least openly, to a system of authority. And the whole
of the anarchist viewpoint is neatly summed up in one phrase of
Rousseau: 'Man was born free and is everywhere in chains!'
Essentially, the anarchists believe that if man
obeys the natural laws of his kind, he will be able to live at peace
with his fellows; in other words, man may not be naturally good. but
he is - according to the anarchists - naturally social. It is
authoritarian institutions that warp and atrophy his cooperative
inclinations. During the nineteenth century, a great deal of support
was given to this belief by the various types of evolutionary
doctrine that gradually became accepted by scientific opinion as the
century built up to the publication of Darwin's epoch-making Origin
of Species in 1859. Darwin and his predecessors established firmly
that man belonged in the chain of evolution, and that the same basic
laws governed his physical make-up and instinctual behaviour as
governed those of the animal world. Indeed, as it was finally
admitted with reluctance and heart-searching, he belonged to the
animal world. Thus it became possible to compare human societies and
those of other species, and when Peter Kropotkin, the Russian
anarchist who was also a trained scientist, examined the evidence for
evolution and reinforced it with his own field studies in Siberia, he
came to the conclusion that one of the key factors in the evolution
of successful species was not so much their power to compete as their
inclination to cooperate. He developed this theory in Mutual Aid
which, as soon as it was published in 1902, became one of the seminal
works of anarchist theory.
Kropotkin argued that even the intellectual faculty
is 'eminently social', since it is nurtured by communication -mainly
in the form of language, by imitation, and by the accumulated
experience of the race. He admitted that the struggle for existence,
of which such evolutionists as Thomas Henry Huxley made a great deal,
was indeed important, but he saw it as a struggle against adverse
circumstances rather than between individuals of the same species,
and he suggested that where it did exist within a species it was
always injurious. Kropotkin argued that far from thriving on
competition, natural selection sought out the means by which
competition could be avoided, and those means he called mutual aid',
that, henceforward, would be one of the key concepts of anarchism.
Since evolutionary doctrine had strengthened the
links in the chain that united man to the animal world, Kropotkin
argued that the same laws applied to human societies as to animal
societies. Man, he contended, was not naturally solitary, as Rousseau
had suggested. He was naturally social. And his natural form of
social organization was that based on voluntary co-operation. Since
it precluded the need for government, such organization would result
in the fulfillment of the apparent paradox of order in anarchy, and
order in anarchy is natural order. Organization that depends on
coercion for its existence, on the other hand, is a perversion of
natural order, and far from producing social peace, it ends always in
strife and violence.
Some of the anarchists went beyond Kropotkin's
biological and sociological arguments to the margins of psychology,
and Proudhon in a way anticipated Jung's doctrine of the collective
unconscious when, in that great work of his maturity, De la Justice
dans La Revolution et dans I'Eglise, he suggested that deep in the
human psyche, in the minds of all of us, lies a sense of justice that
we have only to recognize for it to become active.
An integral part of a collective existence, man
feels his dignity at the same time in himself and in others, and thus
carries in his heart the principle of a morality superior to himself.
This principle does not come to him from outside; it is secreted
within him, it is immanent. It constitutes his essence, the essence
of society itself. It is the true form of the human spirit, a form
which takes shape and grows towards perfection only by the
relationship that every day gives birth to social life. Justice, in
other words. exists in us like love, like notions of beauty, of
utility, of truth, like all our powers and faculties.
The final corollary of this belief that man should
live by natural law, and that natural law establishes
co-operation-voluntary co-operation-as the fundamental basis of
society, is the argument that differentiates most anarchists from the
pure individualists like Max Stirner; the argument that freedom is a
social virtue.
What the anarchists are really trying to find is a
way out of the alienation that in the contemporary world, in spite of
- or perhaps rather because of - its vast organizational
ramifications, leads to man being isolated among the masses of his
fellows. What has happened is a kind of polarization, in which the
State has taken over from the individual the communal
responsibilities that once gave his personal life the extended
dimension of fellowship, both in the local setting and in the world
in general; in most modern societies responsibility is in urgent
danger of being strangled by paternalistic authority.
Both the gigantism and the impersonality of the
modern state are repugnant to anarchists. They wish not only to
recreate a living fellowship between man and man, but also to
eliminate the distance which authority places between individual men
and the initiation of socially necessary activities. This involves
two concepts which one finds in all the varieties of anarchism. The
first is one of social organization; it is the principle of
decentralization. The second is one of social action; it is the
principle which I think can best be described by the phrase
individual capability.
The basis of the principle of decentralization is
the anarchist view that what characterizes the State, apart from its
foundation on authority and coercion, is the way in which it
cumulatively centralizes all social and political functions, and in
doing so puts them out of the reach of the citizens whose lives they
shape. Hence men are deprived of freedom to decide on their own
futures, and this means that they lose the sense of purpose in their
lives. Some people are cushioned by wealth and privilege from feeling
the direct impact of this process, though they too are affected in
insidious ways, but the poor and the underprivileged experience the
impositions of the paternalistic state in a very direct way.
For these reasons the anarchist proposes, as the
necessary basis for any transformation of society, the breaking down
of the gigantic impersonal structures of the State and of the great
corporations that dominate industry and communications. Instead of
attempting to concentrate social functions on the largest possible
scales, which progressively increases the distance between the
individual and the source of responsibility even in modern
democracies, we should begin again from the smallest practicable unit
of organization, so that face-to-face contacts can take the place of
remote commands, and everyone involved in an operation can not only
know how and why it is going on, but can also share directly in
decisions regarding anything that affects him directly, either as a
worker or as a citizen. Such an attitude, of course, implies that the
activity of the functional groups into which society divides itself
will be voluntary. In areas into which the State has not penetrated,
this happens already in our society, as it did to a far greater
extent in the past, and a great deal of socially useful work - as
Kropotkin and Tolstoy so abundantly pointed out - is carried on
entirely by voluntary organizations. Many anarchists have drawn from
this fact the conclusion that if the structure of the State were
dismantled, there might be an initial period of disorganization, but
that given man's social inclinations there would be little difficulty
in establishing a network of voluntary arrangements; in fact, they
would probably spring up in response to the need for them.
All this, of course, is echoed in the theory of
participatory democracy put forward in the 1960s by North American
radicals who had been influenced, directly or indirectly, by the
teachings of the anarchists. The great argument that has always been
brought against anarchist decentralization and participatory
democracy is that both will lead to the fragmentation of society. To
this I can imagine an anarchist theoretician answering that
decentralization indeed means the fragmentation of the State, but
that the fragmentation of the State would lead to the strengthening
of society and of the social bonds among its members. He would urge
that the social alienation which occurs in modern society through the
rule of gigantic corporations is itself the worst of all sources of
social fragmentation, and that by inducing people to co-operate
regularly in decisions relating to their own lives, decentralization
will in fact eliminate the alarming atomization of modern communities
into lonely individuals dependent on authority personified by the
policeman and the social worker.
Thus, far from advocating the breakdown of society
at the same time as they seek the destruction of authority, the
anarchists are in fact hoping to strengthen social bonds and social
virtues by reinforcing community relationships at the most basic
grassroots level. What they envisage is a reversal of the pyramid of
power which the State exemplifies. Instead of authority descending
from some political heaven by a ladder of bureaucracy, they see
responsibility beginning among individuals and small groups given
dignity by freedom. The most important unit of society, in their
view, is that in which people co-operate directly to fulfil their
immediate needs. Nobody can assess these needs better than those who
experience them. This basic nuclear unit appears in various forms
among the anarchist writers. Godwin called it the parish; Proudhon
called it the commune; the syndicalists called it the workshop. The
name matters very little; the fact of direct collaboration and
consultation between the people most intimately involved in a phase
of living is the important thing.
Most social problems in fact crop up at this level
of the house, the street, the village, the workshop, and many of the
libertarian writers have, like Proudhon and Godwin, been extremely
cautious in discussing organization beyond this stage. Living on the
edge of a pre-industrial age. Godwin thought that no more was needed
than the occasional national assembly of local delegates called to
discuss exceptional matters of common interest, plus a system of
juries of arbitration. And even these he envisaged as only a
temporary measure, a transitional device to tide us over until the
day when men would be mature and would need no political machinery
whatever.
The industrial revolution forced the modification of
such splendid speculations; as soon as railways and factories
appeared, it was obvious that even without government a more
elaborate system of co-ordination than scattered and loosely linked
parishes and communes was needed.
At this point it may be appropriate to step into
parenthesis and draw the most vital distinction between the
anarchists and the Marxists - at least so far as the Marxists have
performed in history. Because of Marx's view of the dominance of the
economic factor in the exploitation of one man by another, his
followers were inclined to ignore the lethal characteristics of other
forms of power. As a result, they not only elaborated a theory of
dictatorship of the proletariat, but also proved its lack of validity
by allowing the dictatorship to become in all Communist countries a
hidebound party rule. By ignoring the processes of power, the
revolutionists who claimed to follow Marx destroyed freedom as
effectively as any confraternity of South American generals.
The anarchists have the ironic advantage over the
Marxists that they have never established a free society shaped
according to their ideals, except for short periods in small areas,
and therefore they cannot be accused of failure in its development.
At the same time, from the early 1870s, Bakunin and his followers
prophesied quite accurately that the Marxist failure to understand
that power is psychologically as well as economically based would
lead to a recreation of the State in a new form. For their part, they
recognized that economic and political inequality were
interdependent, and from the beginning they attacked what Godwin
called 'accumulated property' as strongly as they criticized
centralized government. In this way they were the true descendants of
those heretical sects of the Reformation who combined the
condemnation of earthly government with a kind of communitarianism.
Godwin substituted the idea of justice - as Proudhon would do after
him - for that of the deity, but essentially his reasoning belonged
in the dissenting tradition.
Our animal needs, it is well known, consist in food,
clothing and shelter. If justice means anything, nothing can be more
unjust than that any man lack them. But justice does not stop here.
So far as the general stock of commodities holds out, every man has a
claim not only to the means of life, but to the means of a good life.
It is unjust that a man works to the point of destroying his health,
or his life, while another riots in superfluity. It is unjust that a
man has not leisure to cultivate his mind while another does not move
a finger for the general welfare. Justice demands in fact that each
man, unless perhaps he be employed more beneficially to the public,
should contribute to the cultivation of the common harvest, of which
each man consumes a share. This reciprocity ... is of the very
essence of justice.
None of the late anarchists ever went beyond
Godwin's statement that reciprocity is the essence of justice. But
they modified its application. Once the industrial revolution had
changed patterns of manufacture and transport, it was impossible for
even an advocate of the small peasant and the individual craftsman
like Proudhon to ignore the fact that complexity of organization was
a social if not a political necessity. The anarchists tried to
accommodate this fact in industrial terms by falling back on the
concept the Utopian socialist Saint-Simon compressed into the
aphorism: 'We must replace the government of men by the
administration of things.' A late nineteenth-century generation
deeply involved in trade union activity evolved a theory of
anarcho-syndicalism, which envisaged union-controlled workshops as
the setting in which men might learn to organize the production of
necessary goods and services. They also recognized that within limits
it might be possible to delegate certain functions to technological
experts, and even an anarchist so distrustful of domination by the
syndicates as Errico Malatesta could say: 'Government signifies
delegation of power, that is, abdication of the initiative and
sovereignty of all men into the hands of a few. Administration
signifies delegation of work, that is. the free exchange of services
founded on free agreement.
Today we look with a justified cynicism upon the
trust which earlier anarchists like Malatesta were inclined to place
in administrators; on any level, even outside government, we have
learnt how easily administrative work, unlike most other forms of
work, can convert itself into power, and today, among anarchists as
among others, there is a lively vigilance wherever administration
shows signs of becoming converted into bureaucracy. Administration is
like a medicinal drug, excellent in homeopathic portions but fatal -
to freedom at least-in large doses. But the need for it in some
degree cannot be denied even by the man who rejects government.
If administration as opposed to government has been
one way the anarchists thought of mitigating the centrifugal
tendencies of a decentralized society, the other was the
semi-political device of federalism. Even politicians who are far
from being anarchists have recognized the perils of attempting to run
a large or even a small country by a monolithically centralized State
machine, and the result has been a variety of semi-federal
constitutions like those of the United States, Canada and
Switzerland. In no case have these countries entirely abandoned the
principle of authority, and power in all of them is still inclined to
flow from above downwards, often with great force, as recent American
history has demonstrated. The anarchist envisages a different kind of
federal society, one in which responsibility begins in the vital
nuclei of social life, the workplace and the neighbourhoods where
people live. In such a vision all matters of purely local
concern-matters by which no outside interests are affected -should be
decided locally by the people most directly involved. Where
neighbourhoods have interests in common, they should federate loosely
to discuss co-operation and arbitrate differences, and so upwards,
through provinces to larger geographical entities, until, with all
frontiers abolished, the whole world becomes a federation of
federations of federations, bringing together every small community
in a kind of symbiotic unity like a great structure of coral.
Such a radical and radiant concept of federalism is
linked with the principle I have called individual capability.
Anarchists have always argued that, given the right conditions of
free development, every man is capable of deciding directly on social
and political issues. The question became urgent in the
mid-nineteenth century when working men first began to think that
their interests might be better served by seceding from political
parties which were dominated by middle-class leaders. The First
International was founded in 1864 on this basis; one of its leading
principles was summed up in the slogan: 'The liberation of the
workers is the task of the workers themselves.' Some interpreted this
to mean that they should set up political parties of their own, and
the various labour parties and Marxist socialist parties arose from
their efforts. But as the anarchists translated it, the idea involved
the rejection of ordinary political action; they opposed not only the
more authoritarian forms of government, but also parliamentary
democracy in its customary form, by which the people elect a
representative for a period and abandon their affairs to his
discretion until the next election. Proudhon summed up the anarchist
attitude to this kind of system, in which demagogues can gain and
keep power by manipulating the will of the people, when he declared
that 'Universal Suffrage is Counter-Revolution.' This was not meant
as an anti-democratic statement; it was meant to condemn a system in
which voters choose a spokesman every few years and for the rest of
the time abdicate their rights and duties as citizens.
The anarchist preference is for an arrangement by
which people decide directly on what affects them immediately, and,
where issues affect large areas, appoint assemblies of delegates
rather than representatives, chosen for short periods and subject to
recall. They favour devices that can give rapid expression to public
opinion, like the referendum, but they also seek to ensure that every
minority is as far as possible self-governing, and above all that the
will of the majority does not become a tyranny over dissidents. The
anarchist view of social organization is, indeed, summed up in the
phrase direct action, but so is their view of the means of changing
society.
What direct action means in practical terms has
varied from generation to generation and from one type of anarchism
to another, and I shall allow its form to emerge in the later
sections of this introduction as I pass on from the theory with which
up to the present I have been involved to the historical development
of anarchism as theory modified by action.
2 THE ANARCHIST FAMILY TREE
Anarchism, as I have just suggested, is not merely
an abstract theory about society. It has developed out of social
conditions; it has been shaped by cultural influences; it has
expressed itself in varying forms of action, by which in turn it has
been modified.
As a doctrine that criticizes actual contemporary
society and proposes both an alternative arrangement and a means to
attain it, anarchism really began to take shape about four centuries
ago during the period of the Reformation. Significantly, this was
also the period when the modern nation-state, to which anarchism is
the extreme antithesis, began to take shape. But before dealing with
that vital historical conjunction, it is well to look at some of the
more devious historic threads that over the centuries have helped to
shape the anarchist viewpoint.
At the same time as they proclaim their urgent
desire to liberate themselves from the dead hand of tradition,
anarchists like to believe that their roots run deep into the past,
and the paradox is only apparent. As we have seen, the whole
worldview within which anarchism is embraced depends on an acceptance
of natural laws manifested through evolution, and this means that the
anarchist sees himself as the representative of the true evolution of
human society, and regards authoritarian political organizations as a
perversion of that evolution. It follows naturally that anarchists
should be concerned to validate their claims to speak on behalf of
natural and historic man, and Kropotkin carried this process to a
logical end when he maintained that the roots of anarchism were to be
found in a long war between liberty and authority that had already
begun in the Stone Age. In Mutual Aid he made much of the anarchic
character of tribal societies that live by elaborate patterns of
customary co-operation with no visible system of authority. He failed
to take into account that authority does not have to be embodied in a
person, such as a king or a high chief; it also thrives in the
elaborate systems of taboo and obligation that govern most primitive
groups. Primitive man is rarely free in our sense of the word. What
Kropotkin did prove - and this had its importance to the anarchist
viewpoint-was that primitive man seems quite naturally to seek out
patterns of co-operation.
Freedom in a form we might recognize seems to be a
product of those communities on a harsh and rocky seacoast which
became the city states of ancient Greece. Yet the freedom Athenians
enjoyed was not of a kind the anarchists would have approved, since
it was based on the institution of slavery, and even Utopian
political philosophers like Plato and Aristotle conceived societies
where the freedom of some would depend on the servitude of others.
Only a few mystics, like the devotees of the Eleusinian mysteries,
and a few philosophers like the much-maligned Epicurus and Zeno the
Stoic, conceived a society accepting all moral men as equals, and
only Zeno and his followers seem to have combined that vision with a
clear rejection of government.
The same applies to the Roman Republic, which at the
time of the French and American Revolutions was regarded as the
ancestral home of liberty. Brutus was held to be a great republican
hero, and even today radicals regard the slave leader Spartacus as a
spiritual ancestor. In fact it is doubtful if either Brutus or
Spartacus would understand freedom as anarchists do, since they had
not yet made the vital conjunction between freedom and equality.
Brutus represented a patrician oligarchy; when he stabbed Caesar it
was to defend the rights and authority of the social class from which
he sprang. Even the slave rebellion Spartacus led was unconcerned
with general liberation; Spartacus and the gladiators associated with
him in leading the rebellion merely wanted to return to their own
countries and take up their lives again among their own peoples.
But though a modem anarchist would find few
congenial voices in the ancient world, by the fourteenth century the
way discontented men began to speak had changed, as the words
Froissart puts into the mouth of John Ball make quite clear.
Things cannot go well in England, nor ever will,
until all goods are held in common, and until there will be neither
serfs, nor gentlemen, and we shall be equal. For what reason have
they, whom we call lords, got the best of us? How did they deserve
it? Why do they keep us in bondage? If we all descended from one
father and one mother, Adam and Eve, how can they assert or prove
that they are more masters than ourselves? Except perhaps that they
make us work and produce for them to spend!
Those words were spoken when the feudal system of
the Middle Ages was breaking apart in England and the peasants were
in a state of revolt against the imposition of serfdom. John Ball was
one of their leaders, and the significant thing about him is that he
was what men in those days called a hedge priest - a wandering
preacher with no church who propounded a heretical and millenarian
form of Christianity.
With millenarian Christianity we are approaching one
of the two most vital historical strands in the anarchist tradition
-the line of dissent which first took on a religious form, and then
in the eighteenth century became secularized and welded to more
rationalist currents of thought connected with the changes in
political organization that the Renaissance precipitated. Already,
long before the Reformation, millenarian sects were keeping the
medieval rulers of Church and State in a constant ferment of anxiety.
Bishops and kings united in the great war that had to be fought in
the south of France to exterminate the so-called Albigensian or
Catharist heresy which was regarded as a major threat to the
stability of the medieval social order, and long before Luther
appeared, radical ideas were being preached among conventicles of
lowly people who believed that in the very near future the powerful
were due to be laid low and the meek to inherit the earth.
The rigorous persecution of medieval heretics was
directed largely towards expunging their doctrines from the popular
mind, and our information regarding them has come down to us mainly
in the distorted form to which their opponents chose to give
publicity. Nevertheless, it seems certain that many such sectarians
went beyond mere doctrinal arguments to changes in behaviour directed
towards social and political adjustments of a radical type, including
the abolition of poverty and the dissolution of political government.
All this was bound up with the very idea of the millenium, the
thousand-year reign of Christ in which men would return to a simple
and holy life, sharing all and accepting the direct rule of God and
his saints. Internally the millenarian sects, like such modem radical
sects as the Doukhobors and Mennonites, were less libertarian than
they may seem over the spaces of history, yet their conflict with
earthly authority did have eventual political consequences as secular
dissent emerged out of the need for freedom of worship demanded by
religious dissent. In the Netherlands, in France, in Britain, the
religious dissenters rose to the leadership of movements opposed to
the despotic monarchies established in most of Europe after the
breakup of feudalism.
In long-term consequences the most important of
these movements uniting political and religious dissent was the
seventeenth-century English Revolution, which reached its peak in the
Civil War of the 1640s and in the Commonwealth, England's only
interlude of republican rule. It was under the Commonwealth that,
among a whole cluster of radical groups such as the Fifth Monarchy
Men and the Levellers, there emerged the first real proto-anarchists,
the Diggers who, like later anarchists, identified economic with
political power and who believed that a social rather than a
political revolution was necessary for the establishment of justice.
Gerrard Winstanley, the Diggers' leader, had gone
all the way along the road of dissent to the point where he made the
final identification of God with the principle of Reason.
Winstanley's doctrine of God as reason was identical with what Leo
Tolstoy, the other great Christian anarchist, meant when be declared
that The Kingdom of God is within you.'
In fact, Winstanley used the same phrase.
Where does that Reason dwell? He dwells in every
creature according to the nature and being of the creature, but
supremely in man. Therefore man is called a rational creature. This
is the Kingdom of God within man. Let reason rule the man and he
dares not trespass against his fellow creatures, but will do as he
would be done unto. For reason tells him - is thy neighbour hungry
and naked today? Do thou feed him and clothe him; it may be thy case
tomorrow and then he will be ready to help thee.
Winstanley decided that it was his mission to speak
up for the disinherited, for the common people who had been very
little helped by Cromwell's victory, and in 1649 he published a
pamphlet called The New Law of Righteousness which began with a
denunciation of authority as thorough and as basic as anything in
later anarchist literature. 'Everyone that gets an authority into his
hands tyrannizes over the others,' Winstanley declared, and went on
to show that not only masters and magistrates, but also fathers and
husbands 'do carry themselves like oppressing lords over such as are
under them . . . not knowing that these have an equal privilege with
them to share the blessing of liberty.' He went on to link the
absence of liberty with what he calls 'this particular property of
mine and thine', to whose presence he also attributes the existence
of crime. Finally, after many variations on this theme, he sketches
out his vision of the free society, based on the teachings of Christ
whom he gives the name of Universal Liberty. The passage in which he
does so is worth quoting, since it does get surprisingly near -
considering the gap of two centuries-to the kind of social
arrangement nineteenth-century anarchists projected in their
imaginations.
When this universal equity rises up in every man and
woman, then none shall lay claim to any creature and say, This is
mine and that is yours. This is my work, that is yours. But everyone
shall put their hands to till the earth and bring up cattle, and the
blessing of earth shall be common to all; when a man hath need of any
corn or cattle, he shall take from the next store-house he meets
with. There shall be no buying and selling, no fairs and markets . .
. And all shall cheerfully put to their hands to make those things
that are needful, one helping another. There shall be none lords over
others, but everyone shall be a lord of himself, subject to the law
of righteousness, reason and equity, which shall dwell and rule in
him, which is the Lord.
Living in an agrarian age, Winstanley saw the main
problem as ownership of the land, and, like a true anarchist, he
believed the problem could be solved only by the direct action of the
common people. So in the spring of 1649 he led a company of his
followers to squat on unused land in southern England and cultivate
it for their own sustenance. The local landowners and the State went
into alliance against this threatening little company. The landlords
sent men to drive away their cattle and destroy their crops. Cromwell
sent soldiers, but withdrew them when he found they were being
converted by the Diggers. The Diggers practised passive resistance as
long as they could endure, and then departed.
Winstanley, who has a fair claim to being the first
of the anarchists, withdrew into an oblivion so deep that even the
date of his death is not remembered (though it is known he influenced
the earlier and more militant Quakers), and once the English
Revolution had spent its course it was not until the era of the
French Revolution, more than a century later, that a recognizable
strain of anarchistic thought again emerged.
When it did, it combined with elements derived from
English dissent a great deal that was developed from - or often in
reaction to - the Renaissance idea of the proper ordering of society.
The political order of the Middle Ages had been organic in form, a
balance of Church and king, of baronies and free cities, whose
haphazard nature was illustrated most vividly by the fact that the
kings had no permanent capitals, but travelled from royal castle to
royal castle followed by vast trains of wagons bearing the royal
property. At the same time there was-in theory at least - a tightly
graded social order in which every man knew his place, which
compensated for the lack of an elaborate political system; there were
also cracks in the medieval order in which men might enjoy freedom
and good community life, as happened in some of the cities of Italy
and Germany.
The medieval social order, never so stable as its
later defenders have argued, disintegrated between the twelfth and
fourteenth centuries, a development that coincided with the revival
of humanist learning, which is one way of defining the Renaissance.
Man now became important for his qualities as an individual rather
than for the position he held in a graded society, but whether this
was a net gain for freedom must be judged in the light of the fact
that at the same time the organic order of the medieval world was
replaced by a faith in rationally devised political patterns.
Renaissance individualism was culturally
invigorating, but not necessarily anarchist in quality. It stressed
self-development at the expense of others; it was freedom without
equality, liberty without community. It produced splendid artists but
also remorseless villains. One can illustrate the difference between
Renaissance individualism and historic anarchism by comparing the two
men who made the name of Malatesta famous in Italian history.
Sigismondo Malatesta was a ruthless fifteenth-century soldier of
fortune who ruled his own domain with such brutality that he became
known as the Tyrant of Rimini. He was at the same time a freethinker
and a perceptive patron of the arts, but at no stretching of the
phrase could he be called a socially motivated man. The other
Malatesta, Errico, was a nineteenth-century would-be doctor who
turned anarchist and abandoned his career to spend his life wandering
the earth as a poor man and helping people in a dozen countries to
rebel against tyranny. This Malatesta combined a genuinely
individualist temperament with a sense of the indivisibility of
liberty.
The other aspect of the Renaissance lay in its
emphasis on order. This was reflected in the many rationally planned
cities built at that time, and in the search for political order
which led to the concepts of ruthless political action developed by
men like Machiavelli, and to the plans of ideal social orders devised
by Thomas Moore in Utopia and Tomasso Campanella in The City of the
Sun, Most such Utopian writers, even when they advocated common
property, portrayed essentially authoritarian societies, as rigidly
controlled as the new cities. Such an attitude was in keeping with
the rise of the modern national state, which began in Cromwell's
England, was developed in the France of Louis XIV, and, ironically,
was completed during the French Revolution when conscription was
introduced and gave Napoleon the means to extend nationalism into
imperialism.
Yet at the same time the Renaissance inclination to
liberate thought from dogma tended to produce thinkers who offered
libertarian alternatives to the total rule of authority. Diderot and
Etienne de la Boetie were examples in France; in Britain perhaps the
most important representatives of this trend 'were the philosopher
John Locke and the radical Tom Paine, who took part in both the
American and French Revolutions and was condemned to death in
absentia by the English for writing The Rights of Man. Paine was in
many ways near the anarchists, particularly when he emphasized the
vital distinction between society and government. 'Society is
produced by our wants,' said Paine, 'and government by our
wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting
our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices . . .
Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces
of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise.'
Paine's influence permeated the native libertarian
movement of nineteenth-century America and helped to shape the
thought of anarchists as varied as Henry David Thoreau, Josiah Warren
and Benjamin Tucker. One of his personal friends was William Godwin,
whose Enquiry concerning Political Justice (1793) deeply influenced
Coleridge, Wordsworth and Shelley, provided the foundation for Robert
Owen's Utopian efforts, and was probably the most complete study of
the faults of government as government ever written. Godwin derived
from both ancestral strains of modern anarchism, religious dissent
and Renaissance rationalism. As a young man he belonged to a tiny
sect called the Sandemanians who denied Church government, believed
in sharing goods among the faithful, and argued that religious men
had no place in the affairs of State. For a while Godwin served as a
dissenting pastor; then be was converted to rationalism and
substituted reason for faith without abandoning the social ideas that
stemmed from his religious dissent. He was also influenced by the
ideas of the French Enlightenment, and wrote Political Justice
largely to clarify his own views of recent developments in the French
Revolution.
There were in fact proto-anarchists at work in
France at that time, enrages like Jacques Roux and Jean Varlet, but
such men were too involved in action to develop a written ideology,
and it was Godwin, from the distance of London, who criticized the
authoritarian direction which the Jacobins had given the Revolution.
In Political Justice he attacked the theory and
practice of government with what was to become the classic anarchist
argument: that authority is against nature and that social ills exist
because men are not at liberty to act according to reason. As an
alternative be sketched out a decentralized libertarian society in
which small autonomous communities will be the essential units and in
which even democratic political practices will be minimized because
majority rule is a form of tyranny and voting for representatives is
an abdication of personal responsibility.
Godwin developed theoretical anarchism as thoroughly
as it has ever been done. What later libertarians added to his
arguments was the dimension of action as they moved from the
thinker's study to the social jungle.
3 THE CLASSIC ANARCHIST MOVEMENT
The seeds of great movements often lie in what seem
at the time mediocre lives or small and insignificant encounters.
Certainly, a time traveller who returned to the cafes of Paris and
the wretched hotel rooms of the Latin Quarter, where revolutionaries
gathered in the early years of the 1840s. would be hard put to it to
recognize the men who would become the great rallying names of the
century. France was then a monarchy once again, but it was ruled by
the most liberal of the Bourbons, Louis Philippe, the so-called
Citizen King, and in those years, when the ferment of French
discontent was building up to the revolutionary peak of 1848, Paris
gave rather grudging asylum to those who had fled from harsher
regimes. One could meet there Spanish federalists, Italian
carbonarists and Poles intriguing to re-establish their country, then
divided up between Russia, Prussia and Austria-Hungary. There were
many Russians who had fled from the oppressive tyranny of the Tsar
Nicholas I, and a fair number of Germans who had found it discreet to
absent themselves from Prussia and from the petty states of the
Rhineland.
Among the more obscure expatriates who lived in this
atmosphere of intrigue and expectancy were a Russian and a German who
were to be seen often together and sometimes in the company of a
French radical journalist who was more inclined than most of his
countrymen to mingle with the foreign revolutionaries. They were all
young and all poor, and as they talked into the small hours of many a
Parisian morning nobody detected the long shadows they were already
casting into the future.
For the stocky Frenchman in the seedy green
redingot, with a broad peasant face fringed with monkey whiskers, was
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who had just given the nineteenth century one
of its greatest battle cries-Property is Theft \ He had already
declared himself an anarchist, and was the first man ever to accept
that label with pride and defiance. The Russian, a penniless nobleman
of gigantic stature and inexhaustible charm, was Michael Bakunin; he
was busily inciting insurrection among the lesser Slav peoples in the
Austrian Empire, and had just attracted attention by an essay
entitled Reaction in Germany which in a series of pungent phrases had
summed up the paradoxes that lie at the heart of anarchist doctrines.
'Let us put our trust in the eternal spirit which destroys and
annihilates only because it is the unsearchable and eternally
creative source of all life. The urge to destroy is also a creative
urge.'
The German in the trio was Karl Marx, himself a
notable creator of historic phrases and in those days an almost
irrepressible fountain of German metaphysics; his contribution to the
gatherings apparently consisted largely of long expositions of the
philosophy of Hegel for the edification of his companions. Marx, of
course, was to be the ancestor of modern authoritarian communism,
though he and Engels would not issue their Communist Manifesto for
several years to come; Proudhon and Bakunin were to become the
founders of anarchism as a social revolutionary movement. In time
bitter enmities would divide the three, and even in the 1840s their
relationship was guarded. There is extant a correspondence between
Marx and Proudhon leading to a breach of relations in 1846. In it
they discuss the possibility of establishing a liaison between social
revolutionaries, and the difference in approaches is already evident
as one contrasts Marx's rigid dogmatism with Proudhon's exploratory
flexibility. Bakunin left an actual record of his encounters with
Marx in the 1840s.
Marx and I were friendly enough in those days. We
saw one another often, for I respected him a great deal for his
science and for his passionate and serious devotion - mingled though
it was with a certain personal vanity-to the cause of the
proletariat, and I sought avidly his ever instructive and intelligent
conversation. Yet there was really no intimacy between us. Our
temperaments did not suit each other. He called me a sentimental
idealist - and he was right. I called him vain, perfidious and sly -
and I was right too!
Yet for a little time Marx and the two anarchists
were united in their realization that the great
pre-nineteenth-century revolutions, the English Revolution of the
seventeenth century and the American and French Revolutions of the
eighteenth, had proceeded only part of the way towards a just
society, because they had been political rather than social
revolutions. They had rearranged the patterns of authority, giving
power to new classes, but they had in no fundamental way changed the
social and economic structure of the countries in which they had
taken place. The great slogan of the French Revolution-liberty,
equality, fraternity-had become a mockery, since political equality
was impossible without economic equality, liberty was dependent on
people not being enslaved by property, and fraternity was impossible
across the chasm that at the end of the eighteenth century still
divided the rich from the poor.
Neither Marx, Proudhon nor Bakunin considered the
possibility that such results might be inherent in the revolutionary
process, which twentieth-century experience seems to suggest may
always entail the substitution of one elite for another. But one
thing Proudhon and Bakunin both understood more clearly than Marx:
that a revolution which does not get rid of authority will always
create a power more pervasive and more durable than that which it has
replaced. They believed that a revolution without authority, that
destroyed powerwielding institutions and replaced them by voluntary
cooperative institutions, was indeed possible and could happen in
their time. Marx was at once more realistic and more deluded. He
recognized the vital role power plays in revolutions, but he believed
it possible to create a new kind of power, the power of the
proletariat working through the party, which in the end would
dissolve itself and produce the ideal anarchist society which he too
believed the final, desirable goal of human endeavour; Bakunin was
right in accusing Marx of excessive optimism and in prophesying that
a Marxist political order would turn out to be a rigid oligarchy of
officials and technocrats.
But when Marx, Proudhon and Bakunin met in the Latin
Quarter all this was in the future. Looking to the past, between
these men and the French Revolution lay the generation of the
so-called Utopian socialists, like Cabet and Fourier and Robert Owen
who recognized that the French Revolution had failed to attack the
radical questions of social injustice, and who proposed as a remedy
various forms of the socialization of wealth and productivity. They
were called Utopian because they wished to create here and now
experimental communities that would demonstrate how a just society
might work. From Proudhon on, the anarchists were influenced in many
ways by the Utopian socialists, and particularly in their notion of
the small community as the basis of society. But they differed from
them in rejecting the rigidity of Utopian socialist planning, which
they believed would lead to new kinds of authority, and they also
believed that there was a reprehensible elitism in the idea of a
socialist elect demonstrating to the people how an ideal society
should work. The anarchist mystique was based on the idea that people
could create for themselves, spontaneously, the social and economic
relations they needed. What one really required, they argued, was not
to fabricate new and artificial social forms but to find ways of
activating the people so that out of their natural groupings and
popular traditions the institutions appropriate to a free society
might evolve.
Not until the 1860s did these aspirations begin to
coalesce into an actual anarchist movement. During the wave of
revolutions that swept Europe in 1848 both Bakunin and Proudhon were
actively engaged. Bakunin took part in risings in Paris and Prague
and fought beside Wagner on the barricades in Dresden. Captured in
Saxony, he ended as a prisoner of the Tsar in the notorious
Peter-and-Paul Fortress, and only in 1861 did he escape via Siberia,
Japan and the United States to western Europe where he resumed his
revolutionary activity. Proudhon took part in the 1848 revolution in
Paris and became an early disillusioned member of the National
Assembly. He learnt quickly how parliamentary activity puts a man out
of touch with the people, and spent much more of his time during the
revolutionary year on fierily independent journalism in a series of
newspapers - The People, The Representative of the People and The
People's Friend - which were successively suppressed because the
revolutionary authorities could not endure his impartial attacks on
all sides in the new republic, which he accused of being devoid of
ideas. Proudhon also tried to organize the workers economically in
the People's Bank, which was really a kind of Credit Union where
goods and services could be exchanged on the basis of labour costs.
He hoped this would be the start of a network of free relationships
between producers - such as peasants, artisans and co-operative
workshops - which would displace ordinary market relationships and
liberate the worker from dependence. The People's Bank was perhaps
the first anarchist mass organization; it had gained a membership of
27,000 when Proudbon was imprisoned in 1849 for his criticisms of the
newly elected President, Napoleon Bonaparte, who later became Emperor
as Napoleon III.
Almost all of Proudhon's remaining life was spent in
prison or exile. He remained a minority of one, glorying in the fact
that he led no party. Yet precisely because he was independent his
influence grew immensely during the Second Empire. Towards the end of
his life, which came in 1865, he wrote De la Capacite Politique des
Classes ouvrieres, in which he argued that political parties were
operated by members of the social elite and that working men would
only control their own destinies when they created and operated their
own organizations for social change. Many French workers were
influenced by such ideas, and they formed a movement aimed at the
regeneration of society by economic means. They called themselves
Mutualists, but essentially they were anarchists who hoped to gain
their ends peacefully by means of producers' co-operation.
Out of meetings between 1862 and 1864 between these
French disciples of Proudhon and English trade union representatives
emerged the International Workingmen's Association - the First
International. Marx's followers foster the legend that he founded the
International, but he took no part in the early negotiations and at
the final meeting in London on 28 September 1864 at which the
Association was set up, he was only - as he put it - 'a mute figure
on the platform'.
Thus the First International was never a Marxist
body. It included socialists, anarchists of many kinds, and people
who were neither. Nobody knows how large its membership became. Both
its supporters and its enemies for their own varying reasons tend to
exaggerate its membership and its influence. Yet there is no doubt
that, especially in the Latin-speaking lands of southern Europe, the
Association gave workers and peasants a stimulus to struggle on their
own behalf as they had never done before. But behind all the devotion
and the grand and elevating aspirations, the International became a
battleground of ideologies and personalities. Proudhon was dead by
the time the Association became an active organization in 1865, yet
the differences that had already begun to emerge between the trio of
revolutionaries in those early days in Paris survived to become
magnified in the setting of the International, and the conflict
between Marx and the Mutualists, and later between Marx and Bakunin
personally, not only reflected the temperamental differences of the
protagonists, but also the fundamental differences in means - which
automatically means a difference in ends - between the authoritarian
socialists and the libertarian anarchists.
Marx and his followers, being more astute
tacticians, managed to entrench themselves in positions of
organizational power. It was Marx who drafted the rules of the
Association and gained virtual control of the General Council,
established in London. His influence in the branches, mainly in Latin
countries, was less certain, and the annual Congresses turned into
battles between Marx and Bakunin, who headed the Italian, Spanish and
French Swiss contingents. Having already created a secret brotherhood
of revolutionaries in Italy, Bakunin had joined the International in
1868. His methods as an organizer were eccentric but curiously
effective, and he created the world's greatest anarchist movement-in
Spain - by sending to Barcelona an Italian engineer who knew no
Spanish yet possessed the kind of charisma that made a common
language unnecessary. Anselmo Lorenzo, who later became a leader of
the Spanish anarchists, left a fascinating description of the
incident which Gerald Brenan quoted in The Spanish Labyrinth.
Fanelli was a tall man with a kind and grave
expression, a thick, black beard, and large black expressive eyes
which flashed like lightning or took on the appearance of kindly
compassion according to the sentiments that dominated him. His voice
had a metallic tone and was susceptible of all the inflections
appropriate to what be was saying, passing rapidly from accents of
anger and menace against tyrants and exploiters to take on those of
suffering, regret and consolation, when he spoke of the pains of the
exploited, either as one who, without suffering them himself,
understood them, or as one who through his altruistic feelings
delights in presenting an ultra-revolutionary ideal of peace and
fraternity. He spoke in French and Italian, but we could understand
his expressive mimicry and follow his meaning.
The battle within the International assumed many
aspects. It was a duel between Marx and Bakunin. It was also a battle
between Germanic and Latin groups. But the fundamental differences
were other than those of personality or culture. They became defined
in the endless debates that consumed the years between 1868 and the
split which destroyed the International in 1872. The Marxists argued
for political organization aimed at transforming the proletariat into
a ruling class. The anarchists argued for the economic organization
of the workers according to their occupations. Authoritarian versus
libertarian, political action versus industrial action, transitional
proletarian dictatorship versus immediate abolition of all State
power: the debate went on and the two points of view were
irreconcilable. Debate turned into conflict. At the Basel Congress of
1872 the Marxists expelled Bakunin and transferred the General
Council to New York where it would be out of reach of the anarchists;
it was dead by 1874. The anarchists meanwhile set up their rival
International; it survived the Marxist rump by three years and was
dead by 1877.
Yet the anarchist movement lived on, as a pattern
rather than an organization, in scattered groups and individuals,
always in contact, holding melodramatic conferences which scared the
respectable, and rarely united. A few dedicated and talented men like
Peter Kropotkin and Errico Malatesta shaped the ideology of
anarchism, and between 1880 and 1900 it flowered amazingly. At one
extreme were the followers of Leo Tolstoy, who advocated non-violent
resistance and strongly influenced Gandhi in his strategy of
satyagraha or civil disobedience, which finally won Indian
independence. Others devoted their energies to free schools or to
communities where people tried to live communally without the
restrictions implied in Utopian theory. Yet others sought an alliance
between anarchism and the revolution in the arts which at the turn of
the century initiated the Modernist movement in Europe and especially
in France. Painters like Pissaro and Signac and Vlaminck and the
young Picasso called themselves anarchists; so did poets like
Mallarme and men of letters like Oscar Wilde.
All anarchists saw themselves as propagandists for
freedom but while some confined their propaganda to writing and
speaking, others elaborated the theory and practice of propaganda by
deed. This was an early form of an idea favoured in our own day, that
a political theory becomes valid only when it is activated. It
originated, not among the anarchists, but with an extreme Italian
republican. Carlo Pisacane (who had discarded his title of Duke of
San Giovanni), and who probably expressed the idea more succinctly
than anyone has since done: 'The propaganda of the idea is a
chimera'. Ideas result from deeds, not the latter from the former,
and the people will not be free when they are educated, but educated
when they are free.'
Borrowing Pisacane's insight, Italian anarchists
exemplified the propaganda of the deed by starting small Quixotic
insurrections which had no hope of success but which it was
mistakenly thought would arouse the people to undertake their own
liberation. Then, during a brief interlude which has plagued the
record of anarchism ever since, a few mainly isolated individuals
took to the practice of assassinating symbolic figures to draw
attention to injustice. During the 1890s a king of Italy, a president
of France, a president of the United States, an empress of Austria
and a prime minister of Spain fell victim to these strange and
terrible enthusiasts. Most anarchists had nothing to do with such
acts, and regarded them with very mixed feelings, until in the end
most of them reacted in horror, as the French anarchist novelist.
Octave Mirbeau, did when Emile Henry threw a bomb into a crowded cafe
and killed innocent people. 'A mortal enemy of anarchism,' said
Mirbeau, 'could have acted no more effectively than this Henry when
he threw his inexplicable bomb into the midst of peaceful and
anonymous persons. Henry says and affirms and claims that he is an
anarchist. It is possible. Every party has its criminals and fools,
because every party has its men.'
Terrorism quickly died away as an anarchist method,
except in Spain and Russia, where all kinds of politics had
traditionally been violent. Only a few individual anarchists ever
practised it, and to think of the anarchist as a man with a bomb is
like considering every Roman Catholic a dynamiter because of Guy
Fawkes. Movements are indeed manifested through the actions of
individuals, but one must distinguish between the person and the
idea, and the idea of anarchism has never been invalidated by the
extremities of its fanatics.
Nineteenth-century anarchism in fact recovered very
quickly from the damage done by the terrorists, and in the last years
of the century moved into its phase of broadest influence through the
development of a movement to create libertarian unions of syndicates.
The movement called itself anarcho-syndicalism; essentially its
viewpoint was that unions should be regarded not merely as
instruments for getting better wages, but also as agents for the
transformation of society. The unions would be involved in a constant
struggle to change society by the classic method of the general
strike and, taking over and running the places of production during a
revolution, to form the infrastructure of the new society.
Anarcho-syndicalism had much early success in
France, where the CGT was run by anarchists until 1914. There were
large syndicalist movements in Italy and Latin America, while the
International Workers of the World (IWW) in the United States was
syndicalist in its approach. But it was in Spain that
anarcho-syndicalism, like anarchism itself, reached its apogee. There
it appealed for its moral and idealistic qualities; it became not
merely a political movement but also a quasi-religious movement of
puritanical tinge which gave Spaniards a surrogate Reformation.
Anarchism won over the factory workers of Barcelona; it spread like
evangelical wildfire among the landless peasants of Andalucia and
Valencia. In the 1930s, at its height, the great anarchist union, the
National Confederation of Labour (CNT), had more than two million
members. Spain represented the true peak of the nineteenth century
anarchist movement, extending far into the twentieth century, for
Spanish anarchism reached its apogee and its end during the Spanish
Civil War of the later 1930s.
In Spain the anarchists showed that in local and
spontaneous efforts their methods were effective; where they failed
was in co-ordination on a larger scale. For example, in Barcelona it
was the anarchist grasp of street fighting tactics that defeated the
attempt by Franco's generals to seize power. Similarly, in the rural
areas the villagers established free communes, and even critical
commentators were impressed by the natural efficiency and Spartan
fortitude with which the people set about rearranging their lives on
the lines indicated by the nineteenth-century anarchist prophets.
Yet all this comradeship and self-sacrifice, which
showed so admirably that small, dedicated groups could indeed put
anarchist teachings into practice, was doomed to vanish, largely
because the anarchist virtues of spontaneity and voluntary action are
alien to the spirit of war - even of civil war -which is totalitarian
in nature. They failed to resist effectively the fascists who
advanced on the village communes from the south and destroyed them,
or the communists who undermined the anarchist position behind the
republican lines. Two years of war and political intrigue broke the
spirit of the Spanish anarchists. The historic movement created by
Bakunin and Proudhon died when Franco's armies marched unopposed into
anarchist Barcelona. But the anarchist idea, as distinct from the
movement, did not, and in the last decade it has risen like a phoenix
from the fire of its own transformation.
4 PHOENIX IN THE AWAKENING DESERT
In these pages I have been stressing the differences
between anarchism and more dogmatic political orthodoxies, and
especially between anarchist groups and the tightly hierarchical
structures of political parties whose aim is power. When anarchism
existed as an identifiable movement, it had intellectual leaders but
no organizational leadership. It always included within itself a
variety of viewpoints on tactics and on the nature of the desirable
society that co-existed with a remarkable degree of mutual tolerance,
rather like the religious sects of India. In the last resort, it was
always the idea expressed, directly in action that was dynamic rather
than the movement.
In fact, even when anarchism was most popular and
its organizations numbered their followers in the millions, as the
CNT did in Spain, the structure was always a fragile and flexible
frame within which the power of spontaneous thought remained the
important motive force. It is because anarchism is in essence an
anti-dogmatic and unstructured cluster of related attitudes that it
can flourish when conditions are favourable, and then, like a plant
in the desert, lie dormant for seasons and even for years, waiting
for the rains to make it blossom again. In an ordinary political
faith, the party is needed as a kind of church, a vehicle of the
dogma, but anarchism has been nearer to the mystical faiths that rely
on personal illumination, and for this reason it has never needed a
movement to keep it alive. Many of its important teachers, as we have
seen, were solitary, dedicated individualists like Godwin and Thoreau
and Stirner. Those who granted the need for organization wanted it to
be minimal, so that even Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, intellectual mentor
of the historic anarchist movement, warned his followers against any
rigidity of thought or action. With few exceptions, the anarchist
originators avoided the trap of becoming infallible gurus, and it is
significant that there has never been a single anarchist book that
has been put forward and accepted as a political gospel in the same
way as Marx's das Kapital. In fact, widely-read anarchist books like
Kropotkin's Memoirs of a Revolutionist or Herbert Read's Poetry and
Anarchism, or the essays of Paul Goodman, to give a few varied
examples, retain their freshness and appeal precisely because their
intent is to awaken thought, not to direct it.
It is this peculiarly unpartisan element in
anarchist thought that makes it resilient and durable, and explains
why the downfall of the movement in Spain with Franco's victory,
though it certainly meant the end of the movement founded by Proudhon
and Bakunin, did not mean more than a temporary eclipse of the
anarchist idea. Between 1939 and the beginning of the 1960s,
anarchism did not play a great part in the affairs of any country or
in the thoughts of anyone but a few libertarian intellectuals and a
few ageing veterans of past battles. Yet from the early 1960s there
has been a rebirth, the ideas of anarchism have emerged rejuvenated,
have clothed themselves in action, have stimulated the young in age
and spirit, and have disturbed established hierarchies on both the
Right and the Left. In the process, anarchist doctrines and methods
have been carried far beyond the remnants of the old anarchist
movement. New kinds of organization have appeared, new modes of
action have evolved, but they reproduce surprisingly faithfully -
even among people who hardly know what the word anarchism means or
who perhaps have never beard it - the ideas on the defects of present
society and the desiderata of a better society that have been taught
by seminal thinkers in the libertarian tradition from
seventeenth-century Winstanley down to Herbert Read and his
successors in our own generation.
Turn now to the sequence of events. World War II,
following Franco's victory, completed the breakdown of the
international anarchist movement. The process began as early as 1918.
In Russia, after the 1917 October Revolution, the Bolsheviks
recognized the anarchists as their main rivals and eliminated them,
but only after a struggle in which large areas of the Ukraine became
a kind of anarchist peasant community under a guerilla leader Nestor
Makhno, who fought brilliantly against Whites and Reds but finally
fled to western Europe in 1921 to escape destruction by Trotsky's
legions. The advent of fascism in Italy and nazism in Germany meant
the end of the anarchist movement in both countries, and by the time
the Reichswehr had completed its conquests of the Second World War,
the only anarchists at large and active were in Britain, the United
States, Switzerland and the more liberal Latin American states, of
which Mexico was the most important. Every country where a mass
anarchist movement had once existed - Russia, France, Italy and
Spain-was by 1942 existing under a totalitarian regime.
There ensued a situation quite new in anarchist
history, for during the Second World War it was in the
English-speaking countries that anarchism demonstrated the greatest
vitality and the tradition was interpreted in completely new ways.
The stimulus did not come only from Spanish, Italian and Russian
refugees who represented the movement created by Proudhon, Bakunin
and Kropotkin. It came also from writers reared in the modernist
movement who had learnt their anarchism as much from Oscar Wilde and
William Morris and William Godwin.
In Britain this interim movement, as I call it
because it represents a transition between nineteenth-century and
late-twentieth-century anarchism, drew together not only British
writers and painters who had emerged between the 1920s and the 1940s,
but also many refugee artists from eastern Europe, from France and
Belgium. There were English painters like Augustus John and John
Minton, Russian constructivists like Naum Gago and Polish
expressionists like Jankel Adier. Herbert Read and John Cowper Powys
represented the older writers, but Dylan Thomas was a declared
anarchist, and so were Alex Comfort, George Woodcock and Denise
Levertov.
In the United States also, anarchism escaped from
its traditions to be transformed by younger interpreters. In New York
it centred around Dwight Macdonald, then running Politics, and Paul
Goodman, already relating accepted libertarian doctrine to
contemporary American problems of rural decay and urban chaos. In San
Francisco, even during the early 1940s, a literary anarchist movement
which had floating links with the more traditional movement among
Italian emigres arose under the leadership of the poet Kenneth
Rexroth; other poets like Robert Duncan and Philip Lamantia and,
later on, Kenneth Patchen and Allen Ginsberg became closely involved,
so that anarchism was one of the motivating philosophies of the beat
movement in California.
This tendency for anarchism during the 1940s to
become lodged like a seed germ in the minds of a few English-speaking
intellectuals led to interesting theoretical developments,
particularly in the fields of science and education. Ever since
Kropotkin modified evolutionary theory by publishing Mutual Aid,
libertarian thinkers have attempted to relate their doctrines to
whatever sciences of man seem to be currently important. During the
present century the place biology had held in the speculations of
Kropotkin and of his associates like Elisee and Elie Reclus was
assumed by psychology. Long before he became the improbable guru of
geriatric sexology. Alex Comfort wrote a valuable anarchist treatise
in the psychology of power, Authority and Delinquency. The teachings
of Erich Fromm - particularly in The Fear of Freedom -made their
appeal to anarchists in the 1940s, and so did the heretical Freudian
teachings of Wilhelm Reich, which related psychological to political
repression and sought in neurosis the origins of coercive power. The
most important anarchist writer to be influenced by modem
psychological theory was Herbert Read, who drew copiously on the
theories of Freud, Adler and especially Jung to support the other
characteristic departure of anarchist theory during the 1940s - an
intensified recognition of the need for a new type of education that
would enable men to accept and also to endure freedom. (I say endure
quite deliberately because - as the very title of Fromm's The Fear of
Freedom suggested - it had dawned on libertarians in the
mid-twentieth century [as it had dawned earlier on Proudhon] that
freedom is an austere discipline whose advantages may not be
immediately evident to the masses accustomed to State tutelage and
the welfare society.) Herbert Read believed that the educational
system as it existed, with its emphasis on merely academic learning,
prepared men for obedience, not for freedom; in his books, such as
Education through Art and The Education of Free Men, he argued that
the schools should be transformed to educate the senses before they
touched the mind, and that the harmonious personality which resulted
from education through art would not only live a more balanced
individual life, but would also achieve, with a minimum of
disturbance, the peaceful transformation of society of which the
anarchists had long dreamed, a transformation in which people who
were inwardly at peace and therefore at peace with each other could
make equality and fraternity compatible with freedom.
When the war ended in 1945, and countries like Italy
and France were liberated, there was a kind of rattling of the bones
in the movement Bakunin had created. Old anarchists met again; an
uneasy liaison appeared between them and the English-speaking
intellectuals who had extended anarchist theory during the 1940s.
There were even international congresses; but the one I attended at
Berne in 1946 was a strangely spectral affair, with a few old men and
a few young men gathering beside the grave of Bakunin, to orate, to
play Mozart in his memory and to dream of repeating his achievement.
The old movement was not resurrected in any
meaningful way, yet the anarchist idea, as distinct from the
organization, has certainly been born again, and the rebirth has
taken place largely outside the gallant but scanty groups of
veterans. The crucial decade was the 1960s. The 1950s - the decade of
cautious careerist youth-had been a period of hibernation for
anarchist ideas, though they were kept alive by a few poets and
essayists. But as that decade ended, the idea seemed suddenly active
again. It developed in two different ways.
First, there was the scholarly interest. Nowadays,
in view of the wealth of available material, it is bard to remember
how little had been written on anarchism up to 1950 in a spirit of
scholarly enquiry. There were the apologias of the anarchists and the
diatribes of their opponents, but few objective records of what
anarchism meant and what anarchists had done. The first complete
history of anarchism ever written, in English or any other language,
was my own Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements,
which appeared in 1962. Other general histories followed, and also
biographies of the more important anarchist thinkers and activists,
as well as reprints of their works, so that anarchism during the
1960s became at last academically respectable.
But that was the anarchism of the past, of the
classic thinkers, the historic movement that had been moribund since
1939. What began to emerge in the 1960s was the actual revival of the
anarchist current of thought accompanied by active movements among
young people in many European and American countries. Often the name
did not re-emerge; often the dogma was diluted by other strains of
radical thought; rarely was there an attempt to re-establish
continuity with a movement in the past. But the idea re-emerged,
clear and recognizable, and in countries as varied as Britain and
Holland, France and the United States, it attracted adherents on a
scale unparalleled since the days before the First World War.
Like the New Left, to which it was loosely related,
the movement which one might call neo-anarchism had double roots. It
sprang partly from the experience of those who became involved in the
civil rights movement in the United States as early as the mid-1950s,
and partly from the great mass protests against nuclear disarmament
that were held in Britain during the early 1960s. In Britain the
protest movement was developed by the Campaign for Nuclear
Disarmament, and within the CND there appeared a more militant group
called the Committee of One Hundred, in which Bertrand Russell was
active but which also included a number of anarchist intellectuals
from earlier decades. Quite apart from these links with classic
anarchism, there was within the Committee of One Hundred, as always
happens when militant pacifism encounters a government irremediably
bent on warlike preparations, a spontaneous surge of anti-State
feeling, that is to say, anarchist feeling still unnamed. Arguments
surfaced in the Committee of One Hundred in favour of methods
advocated by the anarchists. Groups dedicated to direct action and to
exploring the implications of a society without war and violence and
hence without coercion sprang up all over Britain. At the same time
the remnants of the anarchist movement was revivified, and the
anarchists-in the new sense as well as the old - became a vocal and
active element in British political life, few in comparison with the
larger political parties, but more numerous and more influential than
they ever were in the England of the past.
A striking characteristic of the neo-anarchism that
emerged in Britain and the United States at this time was that, like
so many modern protest movements, it represented mainly a trend among
the young, and the middle-class young especially. In 1962, at the
beginning of the upsurge, the British anarchist periodical Freedom
conducted a survey of the occupations and class backgrounds of its
readers. Past anarchist movements had consisted mainly of artisans
and peasants, with a few intellectual leaders recruited from the
upper - and middle-class intelligentsia. The Freedom survey revealed
that in the Britain of the 1960s only 15 per cent of the anarchists
willing to answer questions about themselves belonged to traditional
groupings of peasants and workers; of the remaining 85 per cent, the
largest group consisted of teachers and students, and there were also
many architects, doctors, journalists and people working
independently as artists and craftsmen. Even more significant was the
class shift among the young; 45 per cent of the readers over 60 were
manual workers, as against 23 per cent of those in their thirties and
10 per cent of those in their twenties. Very similar proportions
exist in anarchist and near-anarchist movements in most Western
countries. The new libertarianism has been essentially a revolt, not
of the under-privileged, and certainly not of the skilled workers,
who are busy defending their recent gains in living standards, but of
the privileged who have seen the futility of affluence as a goal.
Undoubtedly one of the factors that has made
anarchism popular among the young has been its opposition to the
increasingly centralized and technocratic industrial cultures of
western Europe, North America, Japan and Russia. In this context an
important mediating figure-though the orthodox anarchists have never
accepted him - was Aldous Huxley. Huxley's pacifism and his early
recognition of the perils of population explosion, of ecological
destruction and psychological manipulation, all combined in a social
vision that in many ways anticipated the preoccupations of
neo-anarchism during the 1960s and 1970s. Already in the 1930s, with
Brave New World, Huxley had presented the first warning vision of the
kind of mindless, materialistic existence a society dominated by
technological centralization might produce. In his Foreword to the
1946 edition of that book, Huxley declared that the perils implicit
in modern social trends could only be averted by switching over to
rapid decentralization and simplification in economic terms, and to
political forms that - as he put it-would be 'Kropotkinesque and
co-operative'. In later books, and especially in his novel. After
Many a Summer, Huxley enlarged on his acceptance of the anarchist
critique of the existing order, and it was largely through these late
works of his, often taught in college English courses, that the
libertarian attitude was transmitted to the generation of the 1960s
and welded on to their concern for environmental regeneration.
Even in mood, in its insistence on spontaneity, on
theoretical flexibility, on simplicity of living, on love and anger
as complementary and necessary components of social as well as
individual action, anarchism had a special appeal to a generation
that rejected the impersonality of massive institutions and the
pragmatic calculations of political parties. In terms of social
organization, the anarchist rejection of the State, and the
insistence of decentralism and grassroots responsibilities, have
found a strong echo in a contemporary movement which demands that its
democracy be not representative but participatory and that its action
be direct. The recurrence of the theme of workers' control of
industry also shows the enduring influence of the ideas Proudhon
created and passed on to the anarcho-syndicalists.
The movement in which anarchist ideas perhaps came
most dramatically to the surface in recent years was the Paris
insurrection of 1968. It was a largely spontaneous affair, in which
left-wing party leaders and trade union leaders had little control,
and in which something resembling the old anarchist scenario for a
libertarian revolution was actually enacted. The students occupied
their colleges, they raised the black flag of the anarchists on the
Bourse, and they inspired the workers to strike and sit in their
factories. For a few days De Gaulle's power, and the vainglorious
nationalism he represented, hung in the balance; only by making a
deal with his enemies in the army could his rule survive long enough
for the basic conservative forces in French society to reassert
themselves. The events in Paris demonstrated, as similar events in
Athens and Bangkok and elsewhere have later done, that despite their
sophisticated techniques of holding power, modern governments are
almost as vulnerable as their predecessors, and in some ways more
vulnerable, since contemporary society has become such an elaborately
interlocking structure of bureaucratic machinery that even a slight
failure of function quickly becomes magnified in its effects. In such
circumstances the rebel becomes rather like a small State in a world
seemingly dominated by nuclear superpowers; his ability to disturb
the intricate balance gives him certain advantages, and there is no
doubt that because of the dynamics of the situation contemporary
radicals have managed to change social attitudes and induce retreats
on the part of authority that would not have been likely even a
decade ago. But we have to bear in mind that these retreats are
largely tactical. Nowhere has a spontaneous rebellion in recent years
resulted in a radical change in the actual structure of power.
Governments may have changed; the pattern of authority has not been
fundamentally disrupted.
A recognition of this fact has led some contemporary
anarchists to abandon the direct attack on the citadel of power, on
the assumption that it may collapse through undermining if they can
change the attitudes of people at the grassroots level. Two
interesting examples of this approach-interesting largely because of
their mutual contrasts-came respectively from Holland and India.
In Holland-where Domela Nieuwenhuis and Bart de Ligt
had created a considerable pacifist-anarchist movement before the
Second World War-there have been two neo-anarchist movements, the
Provos in the 1960s and the Kabouters in the 1970s. The differences
between the two groups illustrate fairly well the scope of variation
in terms of tactics that has existed among anarchists in recent
years. Provo is a contraction of provocation, and it was precisely by
provocation, in the form of noisy demonstrations, eccentric
happenings, original forms of mutual aid, that the Provos set out to
stir the Dutch people from a too complacent acceptance of the welfare
state into which Holland had transformed itself. The actions of the
Provos were reminiscent of one of the anonymous posters that appeared
in Paris during the insurrection of 1968: 'The society of alienation
must disappear from history. We are inventing a new and original
world. Imagination is seizing power.' By using their imagination, the
Provos sought to give the tactics of rebellion a new twist so that
the despair of ever attaining a free society which gnaws secretly at
every anarchist - became in its own way a weapon to be used in
forcing governments to show their true faces. The weak provoke; the
strong unwillingly expend themselves. Having stirred the imagination
of the Dutch, the Provos showed their difference from ordinary
political parties by voluntarily disbanding themselves. Three years
later some of them came together in a new group, the Kabouters or
Goblins, dedicated to working through local administrations at the
municipal level, ignoring the higher levels of government.
In India anarchism has been a respected if not much
implemented concept ever since Gandhi described himself as 'a kind of
anarchist', and planned a decentralized society based on autonomous
village communes. When India became independent, mainly through a
civil disobedience movement which Gandhi had developed to a great
extent under the influence of Tolstoy and Thoreau, Gandhi's
associates abandoned his plan since they wished to make India a State
with a great army and a vast bureaucracy modelled on that of the
British Raj; the result has been the virtual dictatorship which Mrs.
Indira Gandhi has recently established by abrogating all the
essential freedoms. Nevertheless, some of Gandhi's followers decided
to develop his more anarchistic thoughts, and one of the most
important libertarian movements in the con temporary world has been
Sarvodaya, the movement led by Vinova Bhave and Jayaprakash Narayan,
which has sought to make Gandhi's dream a reality by means of gramdan
- the ownership of the land by autonomous communities. By 1969 a
fifth of the villages of India had declared themselves in favour of
gramdan, and while there is much more of intent than achievement in
such a situation, it represents an extensive basic commitment to
fundamentally anarchistic ideas. Sarvodaya has also been one of the
more significant nuclei of resistance to Mrs. Gandhi and her rule by
force.
Anarchism, in summary, is a phoenix in an awakening
desert, an idea that has revived for the only reason that makes ideas
revive: that they respond to some need felt deeply by people - and,
since activists are always the tip of any social iceberg, by more
people than overtly appear concerned. Anarchism's recent popularity
has been in part due to a general reaction against the monolithic
welfare state, and already some of the libertarian proposals, like
the greater involvement of workers in industrial control and the
greater decisive say by people in matters that affect them locally
and personally, were beginning to take shape in the 1960s as part of
a general shift towards participatory democracy.
Up to now, indeed, there has been little progress
towards using anarchist concepts in the wider organization of
society, and it is here that the critics feel they are on stronger
ground as they talk of the difficulty of handling mass industry - and
mass populations-by anarchist methods. Yet it is not impossible that
technology might offer some of the means to that end. For technology
itself is neutral; there is - as Lewis Mumford pointed out long ago
in Technics and Civilization -nothing to suggest that a
technologically developed society need be either centralized or
authoritarian or ecologically wasteful. And one can - to give an
example - conceive a time arriving when people in control of their
technology might use electronic communications to inform themselves
of all sides of a public issue and use the same means to make their
wishes known and effective without intermediaries. In this way, the
institution of the referendum, which is now so clumsy that it is
rarely used, could be applied to all important decisions, and
referenda could be adjusted to the particular constituencies actually
affected by a decision. Democracy might then be direct and active
again, as it once was, for the citizens at least, in ancient Athens.
And if a live democracy, participatory and direct, may not yet be the
naturally ordered society of anarchy, it would still represent a
historic step in that direction.
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