Statism is Not the Finest Part 2
Political philosophers have examined what kind of government is, in their opinion, the best kind. In voluminous writings justifying various forms of government they either ignore or quickly dispense with the more fundamental question: ****DO WE NEED OR WANT ANY FORM OF GOVERNMENT?****
What is it to be governed? And what is the alternative?
TO BE GOVERNED
To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, censored, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown it all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonoured. That is government; that is its justice, that is its morality.
If Proudhon's description of government sounds too rhetorical or too politically prejudiced, turn to the Oxford English Dictionary for a definition of government: it says that to govern is to rule, conduct, regulate, command, curb, control, sway, influence and determine.
These are the same as verbs which Proudhon uses, but they are in the active tense - the tense of the 'doer'. Most of us receive government in the tense of the 'done to'.
Why should we be ruled, conducted, regulated, commanded, curbed, controlled, swayed, influenced and determined by others?
The function of government is supposedly the control of the less enlightened by the more enlightened. Is there really one group of people more enlightened than the rest - or do they have different, rather than better, ideas? By whose standards are they judged to be more enlightened? And if there is a more enlightened group, why should they dictate to others rather than share their enlightenment with them?
Why divide men into two classes, one of which is to think and reason for the whole, and the other to take the conclusions of their superiors on trust? This distinction is not founded in the nature of things; there is no such difference between man and man as it thinks proper to suppose. The reasons that should convince us that virtue is better than vice are neither complicated nor abstruse; and the less they be tampered with by the injudicious interference of political institutions, the more they will come home to the understanding and approve themselves to the judgement of every man.
Goldwin hints that what government does is to obscure rather than to elucidate. It deliberately keeps the majority of people in the dark in order that the few can get their own way (to power, wealth, and so on) with a minimum of opposition. Is government not an enlightened guide bu a Department of Stealth and Total Obscurity?
Let us look at what it means to be governed by some of the systems of government advocated by political philosophers.
TO BE GOVERNED IN PLATO'S REPUBLIC
To be governed by the system of Plato's Republic would entail being subject to a ruling class of Guardians or Philosopher Rulers. Plato divides people into those who have an economic function and those who have a ruling or military function. The economic class may live in a capitalist structure, but the Guardians live communally with no private property and no nuclear family, in order to prevent private interest superseding the common interest in the Guardian class. The Guardians have all political power and no economic function. Plato has separated reason (the Guardians) and spirit (their Auxiliaries) from appetite (most of the people, who have an economic role). The Guardians would be thoroughly educated - but they would have no practical understanding of the people they were ruling as they would be living totally different lives. This system begs Godwin's question: why divide people into two classes...?
Plato draws the analogy between the soul and the state. If the soul and the state are each composed of reason, spirit and appetite, does it make sense to then suggest that people should stop being a balance of all three components and take up a role as either reason/Guardian, spirit/Auxiliary or appetite/economic function? This may theoretically lead to a balanced state, but how can this lead to a balanced individual?
Also, the notion of totally separate classes which do not interbreed creates a situation familiar to the Aryan philosophy of different races having different functions and different values. The horrific outcome of that kind of philosophy was realized in the slaughter of the Jews in Hitler's Germany. So to be governed in Plato's Republic is to live a totally different and separate life from the people who have political power over you.
TO BE GOVERNED IN HOBBES' LEVIATHAN
Hobbes' political philosophy rests on two assumptions: that the state of nature (i.e. people without government) is a state of war, and that everybody wants to avoid death. He moves through four abstractions - the State of Nature, the Right of Nature, the Law of Nature and the Social Contract - to reach his conclusion that the only way for people to avoid death and provide a safe and comfortable way of life for themselves was for them to acknowledge a perpetual sovereign power, against which each of them was powerless.
To be governed in Hobbes' system is to accept the power of a person or group over you because you fear that, without them keeping order, you could not survive.
The problem with both the Platonic and the Hobbesian solution is that in the interests of authority the majority of people lose their autonomy. Proponents of social contract theories such as that of Rousseau say that the solution to the conflict between authority and autonomy lies in democracy. What does it mean, to be governed by a democracy?
TO BE GOVERNED BY A DEMOCRACY
The theory of democracy is that everybody participates in government. By being bother the makers and the obeyers of the law they can combine the benefits of authority with the freedoms of autonomy. The government is the executor of the people's will. In 'The Social Contract' Rousseau says:
...every person, while uniting himself with all, ... obeys only himself and remains free as before.
How does this turn out in practice?
In a unanimous direct democracy - a democracy in which every law which is passed and every decision which is made is decided upon by every person in the society to whom it will apply - it would be true to say that every person unites with all and still only obeys themself. This would be possible only in very small communities of like-minded people - possibly in kibbutzim. However, it is difficult to see what the meaning of authority is in such a situation - if people are obeying themselves then they are being autonomous, and if their opinions coincide and they all act together, they are still being autonomous. To call coinciding autonomy 'authority' is a dubious verbal solution - the notion of authority is redundant in a situation where each person obeys their own decision.
As societies are usually too big for unanimous direct democracy the more prevalent form of democracy is a representative democracy. There are various forms of representative democracy, but most of them are neither truly representative nor truly democratic.
Representative democracy entails people choosing from a limited number of candidates the one whose general political platform is nearest to their own. All the issues that the 'representative' will be deciding on will not be known at the times of the election, and of those that are known there is unlikely to be a representative for every view - let alone for every combination of views:
Suppose, for example, that in an American election there are four main issues: a farm bill, medical care for the aged, the extension of the draft, and civil rights. Simplifying the real world considerably, we can suppose that there are three alternative courses of action seriously being considered on the first issue, four on the second, two on the third, and three on the last. These are then 3×4×2×3=72 possible stands which a man might take on these four issues.
Therefore, if in this hypothetical situation there were fewer than seventy-two different candidates then this 'representative democracy' does not preserve the autonomy of a unanimous direct democracy.
Unanimous direct democracy relies on everybody agreeing about everything. This is very rare. As soon as people disagree the notion of majority rule is introduced - everybody should abide by the decision of the majority. Under the majority rule the majority retain their autonomy and the minority (which may be as many as 49%) have to submit to authority. If the minority submit to authority then they lose their autonomy, and if they retain their autonomy by not co-operating with the government then they deny the authority of that government.
If people agree to majority rule they agree to be bound by laws which they do not will, and therefore they agree to voluntary slavery.
TO BE GOVERNED IN GREAT BRITAIN
In this country once every four or five years people vote in a general election. They usually vote for one of three main political platforms, which are unlikely to coincide exactly with the views many people hold. The choice is narrow - it is between three variations of a mixed economy. There is no radically different alternative within the parliamentary system. Frequently people vote not for what they consider to be the right sort of government, but for what appears to be the least worst choice. Voting is affected by which they think is the least worst for them personally; which they think is the least worst for the nation as a whole; and which they think has a chance of winning - there is a long history of people not voting for the middle party because they think it has no chance of winning. The decision is restricted still further by the information the parties choose to market - often with the aid of an advertising agency. Politics is packaged like soap powder - each year two million pounds of taxpayers' money goes to advertising companies. Recently the conservative party was proposing to spend a million pounds on anti-C.N.D. advertising. Politics is big business - and people's decisions are bound to be influenced by those in control of the business.
To be governed in a so-called democracy such as ours is to be sold the illusion that people are participating in decision-making, whilst in reality a small hierarchical group of capitalists and politicians are in control.
TO BE GOVERNED BY THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT
Revolutionary socialists and Marxists of various kinds believe that capitalism and its accompanying structure, the class-based state, must be overthrown for the majority of people (the working class) to be liberated. They propose to abolish the state by first capturing it and using to destroy capitalism. When the workers have seized control of the state machinery there will be a period which Lenin calls the dictatorship of the proletariat. This will be a reorganizing period, after which the state structure will no longer be needed and will wither away.
However, the state is a tool of the oppressor. Why should people use the oppressor's tool? Why should they abolish class society from above, rather than from below? The tool of government is modelled to implement the government of the many by the few - once a revolutionary party has seized that tool is it not in danger of losing its identity as part of the many and becoming the governing few?
The State organization, having always been, both in ancient and modern history (Macedonian empire, Roman empire, modern European states grown up on the ruins of autonomous cities), the instrument for establishing monopolies in favour of the ruling minorities, cannot be made to work for the destruction of these monopolies. The anarchists consider, therefore, that to hand over to the state all the main sources of economic life - the land, the mines, the railways, banking, insurance, and so on - as also the management of all the main branches of industry, in addition to all the functions already accumulated in its hands (education, State-supports religions, defense of the territory, etc), would mean to create a new instrument of tyranny.
In an approximate sense such was the fate of the Russian revolution of 1917.
So to be governed by the dictatorship of the proletariat is to allow the power which has been wrested from one small group of people to be entrusted in theory to the whole of the working class, but in practice only to another small group.
From Plato's Guardians to Lenin's dictatorship of the proletariat, to be governed means for the majority of people to be subject to the control of a minority. To be governed means to lose your autonomy and be subject to an authority with which you may or may not agree. It might mean that you are watched, inspected, spied upon, directed in Great Britain......in El Salvador it means that you are imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot.
So why do people want a government? Many, like Hobbes, believe that it is the only way to avoid chaos - they think that people are naturally selfish and chaotic and prone to kill each other. Is this true?
And why do people think they need a government? Is it not because they are so used to having one that they cannot imagine life without one?
Is it that they have lived so long in spite of their bonds that they think they live because of them?
ANARCHISM
Anarchism is the alternative to being governed. Anarchism means, simply, absence of government.
The word 'anarchy' held connotations of chaos, disorder and conflict due to the Hobbesian notion that without government people would be chaotic.
In the English and French revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the term 'anarchist' was used as an insult, to suggest that revolutionaries wanted anarchy in the sense of chaos. Then from 1840 onwards, following P. J. Proudhon, people started calling themselves anarchists, believing that the absence of government need not mean chaos and confusion but could actually be much better for society than the presence of government.
Anarchism is a development of liberalism and socialism. The liberal tradition is concerned with the achievement of freedom, the socialist tradition is concerned with the achievement of equality: anarchism maintains that both must be attained together. Freedom without equality leaves the poor weak and less free than the right and strong, whilst equality without freedom makes us all slaves together. Freedom without equality is not really freedom, and equality without freedom is not really equality. Anarchism arose from the contradiction between liberalism and socialism.
The big difference between anarchism and either liberalism or socialism is that both liberals and socialists depend on the idea of government. Anarchism maintains that freedom and equality cannot be achieved within a system of government because government is, by definition, the control of people by an authoritarian structure.
There is a common assumption that without government modern civilization would crumble. Many people assume that anarchism is a kind of disorganized spontaneity.
This is the reverse of the truth. Anarchists actually want much more organization, though organization without authority. The prejudice about anarchism derives from a prejudice about organization; people cannot see that organization does not depend on authority, that it actually works best without authority.
When compulsion is replaced by consent there will be a need for more organization than ever before - more discussion and more planning - because there will be so many people involved in the decision-making process. Organization will take up more time, but the result will be closer to the feelings and needs of the people concerned.
Anarchism will lead to more complex organization, but it will do away with bureaucracy. Rather than being the bureaucratic instrument of one group imposing upon another, organization will be the interchange of ideas between everybody who is involved in what is being organized.
Anarchists believe that people are not necessarily competitive beings, but are capable of working together for the common good:
The principle of EACH FOR HIMSELF, which is the war of all against all, arose in the course of history to complicate, to sidetrack and paralyse the wall of all against nature for the greatest wellbeing of mankind which can be completely successful only when based on the principle of ALL FOR ONE AND ONE FOR ALL.
Working together in co-operation rather than being coerced into doing things would make work and every other aspect of life more meaningful and more enjoyable for every individual.
Anarchism combines the notion of solidarity with the notion of each person having control over their own life. People would have a clear understanding of what they are doing, and only do what they want to do and what they think is right, rather than be swept along blindly as they have been in the past.
Until now all human history has been only a perpetual and bloody immolation of millions of poor human beings in honor of some pitiless abstraction - God, country, power of state, national honor, historical rights, judicial rights, political liberty, public welfare.
Like Marx, anarchists believe that people have been alienated by wage labour and used as pawns by the church and politicians as well as capitalists.
One of the most famous phrases of anarchist literature is Proudhon's "PROPERTY IS THEFT". This sentiment was not new - it had been part of the Diggers' outcry in the seventeenth century:
The sin of property we do disdain,
No man has any right to buy and sell the earth for private gain,
By theft and murder they took the land,
Now everywhere the walls spring up at their command.
Proudhon and the Diggers before him believed that an individual has a right to occupancy in the products of their own labour, but no further - and also that nobody has the right to misuse either their own of anybody else's products, either by expropriating, destroying or forcing them to produce something which their rightful possessors do not like or want. Thus property under capitalism is theft, because workers are stripped of the products of their labour.
To achieve anarchism the people must seize control of the means of production by social revolution - and, rather than handing them over to a socialist state, they must destroy the state apparatus and reorganize production on the basis of common ownership.
Anarcho-syndicalists base their case purely in the workplace. The French word 'syndicalism' simply means trade unionism. Anarcho-syndicalists today work within the trade union movement and aim to undo the hierarchies which have evolved within trade unions and make every individual member equally important and equally active - thus preparing the ground for an anarchist workers' revolution.
The argument against syndicalism is that, like Marxism, it sees everything in terms of the workplace and class struggle - whereas many people do not have jobs and there are many other crucial struggles such as the women's struggle and the struggles of racial minorities within a country.
Many anarchists involve themselves in a broad spectrum of struggles other than trade unionism - such as anti-militarism, racial and sexual equality, and civil liberties in general.
Some methods of political struggle with which anarchists are particularly identified are propaganda by deed, civil disobedience and direct action.
Propaganda by deed means demonstrations and uprisings which are symbolic actions designed to win useful publicity. After a wave of violent acts by individual anarchists during the 1890s this method became identified with violence, but there is no reason why it should be. Anarchism is often associated in people's minds with violence, but very few anarchists are commit violent deeds and some anarchists are pacifists. The percentage of anarchists who have used violent means is no more than that of other political groups.
Civil disobedience is a particular kind of propaganda by deed which involves the open and deliberate breaking of a law in order to gain publicity.
Direct action used to mean the opposite of parliamentary action. In the context of the unions it means what is now more often called "industrial" action. The point is that the action is applied directly by the people involved in a situation, rather than indirectly by representatives. The aim is to win some measure of success rather than mere publicity.
So anarchism is not merely a political philosophy but a practical alternative to government which people can start to implement now.
Many anarchists get annoyed with philosophical anarchists who believe that anarchism is a nice ideal but not really achievable and are therefore happy to talk and write about anarchism but not work towards it. How do we know what is achievable until we start to work towards it?
As Marx said,
Philosophers have only INTERPRETED the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.
One reason why some people believe that an anarchist society is not achievable is that they believe in something which they call "human nature". They say, "Human nature is acquisitive," and "Human nature is competitive." But nobody can really know these things. All we know is what people are like in the society in which we see them - and in an acquisitive and competitive society people are, on the whole, acquisitive and competitive. There are empirical reasons for this. It does not prove that people will always be like this.
Many of people's beliefs are forced on them by the ideology of the ruling class. Why else would they fight and die for what Bakunin calls "pitiless abstractions"? Why else would the oppressed people of one country fight the oppressed people of another country, instead of them all fighting their oppressors?
We do not know of any such thing as "human nature". It is used like Hobbes' "state of nature" - a fictional device dressed up as history and used to endorse the status quo. It is interesting that the status quo is usually endorsed by saying that things could be much worse without the present system, rather than saying that the present system is a good thing.
Some people say that an anarchist society would be unstable. Would it? And if it were, would that necessarily be a bad thing? What does instability mean?
Kropotkin sees the flexibility of an anarchist society as an advantage rather than a problem:
...such a society would represent nothing immutable. On the contrary - as is seen in organic life at large - harmony would (it is contended) result from an ever-changing adjustment and readjustment of equilibrium between the multitudes of forces and influences, and this adjustment would be the easier to obtain as none of the forces would enjoy a special protection from the state.
When there is no longer government, irrelevant traditions which have become fossilized in our way of life will be dispensed with. Instead of an anomalous jumble of past and present we shall have a society which is a true reflection of the people in it at any particular time.
Critics of anarchism often ask, "What about law and order?" They are concerned that without "law and order" everything would go wrong. But what is this law and order that they talk so highly of? It is the laws of the ruling class, imposed by the police to defend the status quo. These laws frequently do not have a value in themselves, but are modelled to defend the ruling class and most particularly to defend its property from those who think it should be distributed more fairly. As the Diggers said,
They make their laws to chain us well...
And these laws can be altered when they no longer suit the ruling class. In February this year the law was altered concerning Greenham Common - the deeds of the land were revoked in an attempt to stop the women's protest against cruise missiles. A similar incident occurred to stop the Diggers in the seventeenth century when common land was enclosed.
People also ask: "What about exchange?" and many other important questions about how an anarchist society will run. The only answer is that nobody knows. The whole point about an anarchist society is that it will be what its members want it to be. So nobody can prescribe what it will be like. It will evolve form the contributions of all its members.
Anarchism is the most radical political philosophy. It is easier to say what it will not be than what it will be - it will not be a system with a government, but what it will be will be determined by the people who make it.
It is a philosophy which combines autonomy and solidarity by putting faith in people rather than institutions.
Anarchism is often described as destructive. It is destructive only of government, bureaucracy, classes, class-based laws, bourgeois ideology, property stolen from the wage-slave - i.e. it is destructive of capitalism and the state apparatus – which must be destroyed before people can be free and equal.
So for the sake of redundancy lets have a small Q&A and answer some questions that most statists ask me.
Aren’t anarchists bomb-throwers?
No — at least not compared to, say the United States Government, which drops more bombs every day on Iraq than anarchists have thrown in the almost 150 years they have been a political movement. Why do we never hear of “bomb-throwing Presidents”? Does it matter if bombs are delivered horizontally by anarchists rather than vertically by the U.S. Government?
Anarchists have been active for many years and in many countries, under autocratic as well as democratic governments. Sometimes, especially under conditions of severe repression, some anarchists have thrown bombs. But that has been the exception. The “bomb-throwing anarchist” stereotype was concocted by politicians and journalists in the late 19th century, and they still won’t let go of it, but even back then it was a gross exaggeration.
Has there ever been an anarchist society that worked?
Yes, many thousands of them. For their first million years or more, all humans lived as hunter-gatherers in small bands of equals, without hierarchy or authority. These are our ancestors. Anarchist societies must have been successful, otherwise none of us would be here. The state is only a few thousand years old, and it has taken that long for it to subdue the last anarchist societies, such as the San (Bushmen), the Pygmies and the Australian aborigines.
But we can’t go back to that way of life.
Nearly all anarchists would agree. But it’s still an eye-opener, even for anarchists, to study these societies, and perhaps to pick up some ideas on how a completely voluntary, highly individualistic, yet cooperative society might work. To take just one example, anarchist foragers and tribesmen often have highly effective methods of conflict resolution including mediation and nonbinding arbitration. Their methods work better than our legal system because family, friends and neighbors of the disputants encourage disputants to agree, helped by sympathetic and trustworthy go-betweens, to find some reasonable resolution of the problem. In the 1970s and 1980s, academic supposed experts tried to transplant some of these methods into the American legal system. Naturally the transplants withered and died, because they only live in a free society.
Anarchists are naïve: they think human nature is essentially good.
Not so. It’s true that anarchists reject ideas of innate depravity or Original Sin. Those are religious ideas which most people no longer believe in. But anarchists don’t usually believe that human nature is essentially good either. They take people as they are. Human beings aren’t “essentially” anything. We who live under capitalism and its ally, the state, are just people who have never had a chance to be everything we can be.
Although anarchists often make moral appeals to the best in people, just as often they appeal to enlightened self-interest. Anarchism is not a doctrine of self-sacrifice, although anarchists have fought and died for what they believe in. Anarchists believe that the carrying-out of their basic idea would mean a better life for almost everyone.
How can you trust people not to victimize each other without the state to control crime?
If you can’t trust ordinary people not to victimize each other, how can you trust the state not to victimize us all? Are the people who get into power so unselfish, so dedicated, so superior to the ones they rule? The more you distrust your fellows, the more reason there is for you to become an anarchist. Under anarchy, power is reduced and spread around. Everybody has some, but nobody has very much. Under the state, power is concentrated, and most people have none, really. Which kind of power would you like to go up against?
But — let’s get real — what would happen if there were no police?
As anarchist Allen Thornton observes, “Police aren’t in the protection business; they’re in the revenge business.” Forget about Batman driving around interrupting crimes in progress. Police patrol does not prevent crime or catch criminals. When police patrol was discontinued secretly and selectively in Kansas City neighborhoods, the crime rate stayed the same. Other research likewise finds that detective work, crime labs, etc. have no effect on the crime rate. But when neighbors get together to watch over each other and warn off would-be criminals, criminals try another neighborhood which is protected only by the police. The criminals know that they are in little danger there.
But the modern state is deeply involved in the regulation of everyday life. Almost every activity has some sort of state connection.
That’s true — but when you think about it, everyday life is almost entirely anarchist. Rarely does one encounter a policeman, unless he is writing you a traffic ticket for speeding. Voluntary arrangements and understandings prevail almost everywhere. As anarchist Rudolph Rocker wrote: “The fact is that even under the worst despotism most of man’s personal relations with his fellows are arranged by free agreement and solidaric cooperation, without which social life would not be possible at all.”
Family life, buying and selling, friendship, worship, sex, and leisure are anarchist. Even in the workplace, which many anarchists consider to be as coercive as the state, workers notoriously cooperate, independent of the boss, both to minimize work and to get it done. Some people say anarchy doesn’t work. But it’s almost the only thing that does! The state rests, uneasily, on a foundation of anarchy, and so does the economy.
Culture?
Anarchism has always attracted generous and creative spirits who have enriched our culture. Anarchist poets include Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Blake, Arthur Rimbaud, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. American anarchist essayists include Henry David Thoreau and, in the 20th century, the Catholic anarchist Dorothy Day, Paul Goodman, and Alex Comfort (author of The Joy of Sex). Anarchist scholars include the linguist Noam Chomsky, the historian Howard Zinn, and the anthropologists A.R. Radcliffe-Brown and Pierre Clastres. Anarchist literary figures are way too numerous to list but include Leo Tolstoy, Oscar Wilde, and Mary Shelley (author of Frankenstein). Anarchist painters include Gustav Courbet, Georges Seurat, Camille Pissarro, and Jackson Pollock. Other creative anarchists include such musicians as John Cage, John Lennon, the band CRASS, etc.
Supposing you’re right, that anarchy is a better way to live than what we have now, how can we possibly overthrow the state if it’s as powerful and oppressive as you say it is?
Anarchists have always thought about this question. They have no single, simple answer. In Spain, where there were one million anarchists in 1936 when the military attempted a coup, they fought the Fascists at the front at the same time that they supported workers in taking over the factories, and the peasants in forming collectives on the land. Anarchists did the same thing in the Ukraine in 1918–1920, where they had to fight both the Czarists and the Communists. But that’s not how we will bring down the system in the world of the 21st century.
Consider the revolutions that overthrew Communism in Eastern Europe. There was some violence and death involved, more in some countries than in others. But what brought down the politicians, bureaucrats and generals — the same enemy we face — was most of the population just refusing to work or do anything else to keep a rotten system going. What were the commissars in Moscow or Warsaw to do, drop nuclear weapons on themselves? Exterminate the workers that they were living off?
Most anarchists have long believed that what they call a general strike could play a large part in crumbling the state. That is, a collective refusal to work.
If you’re against all government, you must be against democracy.
If democracy means that people control their own lives, then all anarchists would be, as American anarchist Benjamin Tucker called them, “unterrified Jeffersonian democrats” — they would be the only true democrats. But that’s not what democracy really is. In real life, a part of the people (in America, almost always a minority of the people) elect a handful of politicians who control our lives by passing laws and using unelected bureaucrats and police to enforce them whether the majority want it or not.
As the French philosopher Rousseau (not an anarchist) once wrote, in a democracy, people are only free at the moment they vote, the rest of the time they are government slaves. The politicians in office and the bureaucrats are usually under the powerful influence of big business and often other special interest groups. Everyone knows this. But some people keep silent because they are getting benefits from the powerholders. Many others keep silent because they know that protesting does no good and they might be called “extremists” or even “anarchists” (!) if they tell it like it is. Some democracy!
Well, if you don’t elect officials to make the decisions, who does make them? You can’t tell me that everybody can do as he personally pleases without regard for others.
Anarchists have many ideas about how decisions would be made in a truly voluntary and cooperative society. Most anarchists believe that such a society must be based on local communities small enough for people know each other, or people at least would share ties of family, friendship, opinions or interests with almost everybody else. And because this is a local community, people also share common knowledge of their community and its environment. They know that they will have to live with the consequences of their decisions. Unlike politicians or bureaucrats, who decide for other people.
Anarchists believe that decisions should always be made at the smallest possible level. Every decision which individuals can make for themselves, without interfering with anybody else’s decisions for themselves, they should make for themselves. Every decision made in small groups (such as the family, religious congregations, co-workers, etc.) is again theirs to make as far as it doesn’t interfere with others. Decisions with significant wider impact, if anyone is concerned about them, would go to an occasional face-to-face community assembly.
The community assembly, however, is not a legislature. No one is elected. Anyone may attend. People speak for themselves. But as they speak about specific issues, they are very aware that for them, winning is not, as it was for football coach Vince Lombardi, “the only thing.” They want everyone to win. They value fellowship with their neighbors. They try, first, to reduce misunderstanding and clarify the issue. Often that’s enough to produce agreement. If that’s not enough, they work for a compromise. Very often they accomplish it. If not, the assembly may put off the issue, if it’s something that doesn’t require an immediate decision, so the entire community can reflect on and discuss the matter prior to another meeting. If that fails, the community will explore whether there’s a way the majority and minority can temporarily separate, each carrying out its preference.
If people still have irreconcilable differences about the issue, the minority has two choices. It can go along with the majority this time, because community harmony is more important than the issue. Maybe the majority can conciliate the minority with a decision about something else. If all else fails, and if the issue is so important to the minority, it may separate to form a separate community, just as various American states (Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont, Kentucky, Maine, Utah, West Virginia, etc.) have done. If their secession isn’t an argument against statism, then it isn’t an argument against anarchy. That’s not a failure for anarchy, because the new community will recreate anarchy. Anarchy isn’t a perfect system — it’s just better than all the others.
We can’t satisfy all our needs or wants at the local level.
Maybe not all of them, but there’s evidence from archaeology of long-distance trade, over hundreds or even thousands of miles, in anarchist, prehistoric Europe. Anarchist primitive societies visited by anthropologists in the 20th century, such as the San (Bushmen) hunter-gatherers and the tribal Trobriand Islanders, conducted such trade between individual “trade-partners.” Practical anarchy has never depended on total local self-sufficiency. But many modern anarchists have urged that communities, and regions, should be as self-sufficient as possible, so as not to depend on distant, impersonal outsiders for necessities. Even with modern technology, which was often designed specifically to enlarge commercial markets by breaking down self-sufficiency, much more local self-sufficiency is possible than governments and corporations want us to know.
One definition of “anarchy” is chaos. Isn’t that what anarchy would be — chaos?
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the first person to call himself an anarchist, wrote that “liberty is the mother, not the daughter of order.” Anarchist order is superior to state-enforced order because it is not a system of coercive laws, it is simply how communities of people who know each other decide how to live together. Anarchist order is based on common consent and common sense.
When was the philosophy of anarchism formulated?
Some anarchists think that anarchist ideas were expressed by Diogenes the Cynic in ancient Greece, by Lao Tse in ancient China, and by certain medieval mystics and also during the 17th century English Civil War. But modern anarchism began with William Godwin’s Political Justice published in England in 1793. It was revived in France by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in the 1840s (What Is Property?). He inspired an anarchist movement among French workers. Max Stirner in The Ego and His Own (1844) defined the enlightened egoism which is a basic anarchist value. An American, Josiah Warren, independently arrived at similar ideas at the same time and influenced the large-scale movement at the time to found utopian communities. Anarchist ideas were developed further by the great Russian revolutionary Michael Bakunin and by the respected Russian scholar Peter Kropotkin. Anarchists hope that their ideas continue to develop in a changing world.
This revolutionary stuff sounds a lot like Communism, which nobody wants.
Anarchists and Marxists have been enemies since the 1860s. Although they have sometimes cooperated against common enemies like the Czarists during the Russian Revolution and the Spanish Fascists during the Spanish Civil War, the Communists have always betrayed the anarchists. From Karl Marx to Joseph Stalin, Marxists have denounced anarchism.
Some anarchists, followers of Kropotkin, call themselves “communists” — not Communists. But they contrast their free communism, arising from below — the voluntary pooling of land, facilities and labor in local communities where people know each other — to a Communism imposed by force by the state, nationalizing land and productive facilities, denying all local autonomy, and reducing workers to state employees. How could the two systems be more different?
Anarchists welcomed and in fact participated in the fall of European Communism. Some foreign anarchists had been assisting Eastern Bloc dissidents — as the U.S. Government had not — for many years. Anarchists are now active in all the former Communist countries.
The Communist collapse certainly did discredit much of the American left, but not the anarchists, many of whom do not consider themselves leftists anyway. Anarchists were around before Marxism and we are still around after it.
Don’t anarchists advocate violence?
Anarchists aren’t nearly as violent as Democrats, Republicans, liberals and conservatives. Those people only seem to be nonviolent because they use the state to do their dirty work — to be violent for them. But violence is violence. Wearing a uniform or waving a flag does not change that. The state is violent by definition. Without violence against our anarchist ancestors — hunter-gatherers and farmers — there would be no states today. Some anarchists advocate violence — but all states engage in violence every day.
Some anarchists, in the tradition of Tolstoy, are pacifist and nonviolent on principle. A relatively small number of anarchists believe in going on the offensive against the state. Most anarchists believe in self-defense and would accept some level of violence in a revolutionary situation.
The issue is not really violence vs. nonviolence. The issue is direct action. Anarchists believe that people — all people — should take their fate into their own hands, individually or collectively, whether doing that is legal or illegal and whether it has to involve violence or it can be accomplished nonviolently.
What exactly is the social structure of an anarchist society?
Most anarchists are not “exactly” sure. The world will be a very different place after government has been abolished.
Anarchists don’t usually offer blueprints, but they propose some guiding principles. They say that mutual aid — cooperation rather than competition — is the soundest basis for social life. They are individualists in the sense that they think society exists for the benefit of the individual, not the other way around. They favor decentralization, meaning that the foundations of society should be local, face-to-face communities. These communities then federate — in relations of mutual aid — but only to coordinate activities which can’t be carried on by local communities. Anarchist decentralization turns the existing hierarchy upside down. Right now, the higher the level of government, the more power it has. Under anarchy, higher levels of association aren’t governments at all. They have no coercive power, and the higher you go, the less responsibility is delegated to them from below. Still, anarchists are aware of the risk that these federations might become bureaucratic and statist. We are utopians but we are also realists. We will have to monitor those federations closely. As Thomas Jefferson put it, “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”
Any last words?
Winston Churchill, a deceased alcoholic English politician and war criminal, once wrote that “democracy is the worst system of government, except for all the others.” Anarchy is the worst system of society — except for all the others. So far, all civilizations (state societies) have collapsed and have been succeeded by anarchist societies. State societies are inherently unstable. Sooner or later, ours will also collapse. It’s not too soon to start thinking about what to put in its place. Anarchists have been thinking about that for over 200 years. We have a head start. We invite you to explore our ideas — and to join us in trying to make the world a better place.