Anarchism

A Beginner's Guide

Ruth Kinna

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781780741277
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Anarchism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Would you want a world without government? In this clear and penetrating study, Ruth Kinna goes directly to the heart of this controversial ideology, explaining the influences that have shaped anarchism and the different tactics and strategies that have been used by anarchists throughout history to achieve their ends. Kinna covers themes both historical and acutely contemporary, including: Could anarchy ever really be a viable alternative to the state? Can anarchist ideals ever be consistent with the justification of violence? How has anarchism influenced the anti-globalization movement?

strategies for change

It is up to each committed person to take responsibility for stopping the exploitation of the natural world … If not you who, if not now when?

(Earth Liberation Front, http://earthliberation front.com/about)

Do not let anyone tell you that we are only a tiny handful, too weak ever to attain the grand objective at which we aim … All we who suffer and who are outraged, we are an immense crowd; we are an ocean in which all could be submerged. As soon as we have the will, a moment would be enough for justice to be done.

(Peter Kropotkin, Words of a Rebel, p. 63)

Anarchist violence is the only violence that is justifiable …

(Errico Malatesta, The Anarchist Revolution, p. 82)

How do anarchists think they will realize anarchy? This chapter considers some of the options. It begins with a discussion of the central tenet of anarchist strategies for change: that oppression can be overcome only by the free action of the oppressed. The main body of the chapter looks at the ways in which anarchists have translated this idea into different strategies, some revolutionary and some dissenting. Notable examples of strategies in the first group are propaganda by the deed, the general strike and guerrilla warfare. In addition, some anarchists – for instance, social anarchists – have adopted an evolutionary view of revolutionary change, to develop a strategy sometimes referred to as practical anarchism. Anarchists have expressed dissent through different forms of protest: from symbolic action, to direct action and civil disobedience. The discussion shows how, in recent years, anarchists have developed new and innovative ways of using these forms of protest in mass anti-globalization actions, moving away from the notion of strategic change to one of tactical reform.

Anarchist strategies of change have been the cause of serious dispute in the anarchist movement. Anarchist violence and, in particular, the relationship between anarchism and terrorism has been a subject of intense debate and remains one of the most important cleavages dividing anarchists. This issue is examined at the end of the chapter.

The idea that oppression can be overcome only by the action of the oppressed is not a specifically anarchist principle. Yet in the late nineteenth century anarchists put their stamp on the idea by saddling it to a principle of direct or economic action. In this period direct action was contrasted with the rejection of (i) electoral strategies designed to sweep socialist parties to legislative power and (ii) vanguardism, the doctrine of revolutionary elitism linked to Lenin and Bolshevism.

Proudhon had floated the idea that ‘the proletariat must emancipate itself without the help of the government’ as early as 1848 (though in the same year he also successfully stood for election to the French Constituent Assembly). The principle was enshrined in the preamble to the statutes of the IWMA and was supported by a broad range of socialist opinion. It became a bone of contention only in the early 1870s, at the point when the International disintegrated. Then, laying the foundations of what became the division of socialists into anarchist and non-anarchist groups, Bakunin identified himself with the policy of the IWMA in an effort to discredit Marx. Marx, he argued, did not support emancipation by the action of the workers themselves – on the contrary, he believed that ‘the conquest of political power’ was ‘the first task of the proletariat’.¹ In Bakunin’s mind, these two ideas were incompatible. Others shared his view. In 1872, at a meeting in St Imier, Switzerland, anti-authoritarians reinforced Bakunin’s policy distinction by voicing their disapproval with Marx’s decision of 1871 to support the formation of working-class political parties. They argued that a uniform policy of revolution – that is, of political conquest – must not be imposed on the workers; that liberation could be won only by the spontaneous action of the workers; and that revolutionary action must be taken directly against the exploiters through the expropriation of property. Whereas those who supported Marx believed that the workers could, through their representatives, wrest control of the state to achieve liberation, those who followed the nascent anarchist position believed that direct action by the workers held the key to emancipation.

By the time that working class or socialist parties began to appear at the end of the nineteenth century, political action was identified specifically with parliamentarism. Parliamentarism described the electoral strategy favoured by Engels and modelled by the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). It was soon taken up by groups across Europe and became the official policy of the Second International. For anarchists like Malatesta the policy was fundamentally flawed and would ‘only lead the masses back to slavery’.² Many non-anarchist socialists rejected the implication of Malatesta’s view, namely, that participation in parliamentary politics implied a rejection of revolution from below. But for anarchists like Malatesta there was a dichotomy between popular revolution and parliamentary politics. Landauer shared this view: ‘[t]he chief aims of Social Democracy consist in catering for votes … Genuine Socialist propaganda, agitation against private property and all exploitation and oppression is out of the question …’.³

The anarchist rejection of parliamentarism, which came to a head in the Second International, turned on a number of points. In the 1890s Charlotte Wilson outlined the three principle anarchist complaints.

1. The organization of political parties was authoritarian. By seeking to take power in government, socialist parties were attempting to take command. (Chinese anarchists – following Bakunin – raised a more specific complaint. Not only did parliamentarism suggest a desire to command, it also suggested that command would be assumed by or on behalf of a tiny section of the workers – the urban, industrial proletariat – and that it would be exercised against the interests of the rural masses).⁴

2. Party politics was elitist: the ‘lofty ideal of the socialized state appeals to the moral sense of the thoughtful few’, but not apparently to the masses who ‘supply both the dynamic force and the raw material essential to … social reconstruction’.

3. Socialist parties would inevitably get bogged down in the mire of political competition.

… the man who wins is he with the loudest voice, the readiest flow of words, the quickest wit and most self-assertive personality. Immediately it becomes the business of the minor personalities to drag him down, as the old struggle for place and power repeats itself with the socialistic societies themselves.⁵

With the success of the parliamentary strategy and the entry of socialists into state legislatures, anarchists reinforced these complaints. One was that the comforts of office were corrupting and that parliamentary politics encouraged reformism. Emma Goldman developed this critique in the light of the success of American women’s suffrage campaign. Against the claim that women could improve the quality of public life by their participation, she argued that women would be swallowed up by the system. It was a mistake, she argued, to think that the corruptness of politics was a question of ‘morals, or the laxity of morals’. Politics was ‘the reflex of the business and industrial world, the mottos of which are: “To take is more blessed than to give”; “buy cheap and sell dear”; “one soiled hand washes the other” ’. Women could no more emancipate themselves through participation in party politics than working men; their entry into parliamentary legislatures would end in their own corruption, not the reform of the system. Moreover the scope of parliamentary politics was simply too narrow to enable women to tackle the real causes of their oppression: the hypocritical conventions that constrained them and inhibited their emotional development. For as long as women clung to the mistaken belief that parliamentary action was making a difference they would be deflected from the real task of emancipation. Consequently, Goldman concluded: ‘woman is confronted with the necessity of emancipating herself from emancipation’.⁶

Traditionally, the anarchist critique of parliamentarism has extended from the refusal to participate in electoral politics to the boycotting of elections. Today some modern anarchists are willing to relax the strict prohibition on the boycotting of elections, pointing out that abstention can advantage repressive movements. Whilst the main thrust of anarchism is directed against electoral activity, anarchists like John Clark argue there is some scope in modern democracies for anarchists to vote tactically, particularly in referenda and local elections.

Unlike parliamentarism, vanguardism provides no space for compromise. The anarchist concern with vanguardism as a form of political action was stimulated by the rise of Leninism and the success of the Bolshevik revolutionary strategies. Otto Rühle’s critique of Bolshevism described this concept (which Lenin elaborated in his 1902 pamphlet What is To Be Done?) in the following terms:

The party was considered the war academy of professional revolutionists. Its outstanding pedagogical requirements were unconditional leader authority, rigid centralism, iron discipline, conformity, militancy, and sacrifice of personality for party interests. What Lenin actually developed was an elite of intellectuals, a centre which, when thrown into the revolution would capture leadership and assume power.

On this account vanguardism represents a dramatic return to Marx’s policy of political action – one that blatantly contradicts the principle of worker emancipation. Indeed, Rühle argued that vanguardism was posited on a belief that the workers were incapable of emancipating themselves. The Russian revolution, he noted, provided an excellent opportunity for the workers to take direct control of the revolutionary process through the organization of the soviets. Yet the actions of the workers were frustrated largely because Lenin failed to

… understand the real importance of the soviet movement for the socialist orientation of society. He never learned to know the prerequisites for the freeing of the workers. Authority, leadership, force, exerted on one side, and organization, cadres, subordination on the other side … Discipline and dictatorship are the words which are most frequent in his writings … he could not comprehend, not appreciate … what was most obvious and most … necessary for the revolutionary struggle for socialism, namely that the workers once and for all take their fate in their own hands.⁷

The positive strategies that anarchists have developed for worker emancipation do not reject the possibility of education or the coordination of revolutionary actions. Early on Bakunin argued that the success of the revolution and, indeed, any collective action, turned on ‘a certain kind of discipline’. He also believed that agents organized in secret, fraternal associations (‘brotherhoods’) could play a valuable role in encouraging and helping the masses in revolutionary situations: ‘[o]ne hundred revolutionaries, strongly and earnestly allied, would suffice for the international organisation in the whole of Europe. Two, three hundred revolutionaries will suffice for the organisation of the greatest country’.⁸ He even argued that these agents might exercise a ‘collective dictatorship’ in the process of revolution. Yet just as he distinguished natural authority from state authority, he drew a line between his understanding of discipline/dictatorship and the statist ideas he associated with Marx. Anarchist discipline, he argued, was ‘not automatic but voluntary and intelligently understood’. And when it came to dictatorship, Bakunin noted:

This dictatorship is free from all self-interest, vanity, and ambition for it is anonymous, invisible, and does not give advantage or honour, or official recognition of power to a member of the group or to the groups themselves. It does not threaten the people because it is free from official character. It is not placed above the people like state power because its whole aim … consists of the fullest realisation of the liberty of the people.⁹

Malatesta endorsed Bakunin’s position. The masses, he argued, were perfectly capable of rebelling against their oppressors, but they lacked technical skill and they needed ‘[m]en, groups and parties … who are joined by free agreement, under oath of secrecy and provided with the necessary means to create th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• introduction
• one what is anarchism?
• two anarchist rejections of the state
• three anarchy
• four strategies for change
• five concluding remarks
• Index