The Anarchists

Scott Greer, Irving Horowitz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351305747
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Anarchismus

In his new introduction to The Anarchists, Horowitz points out that anarchism is an ideology in search of a movement, and also a psychology in search of a polity. While this seems to be a paradox, the fact is that anarchism has more than one hundred thousand entries on electronic search engines, but one can search high and low for a society that embraces its essential anti-Statist vision. At the same time, anarchism continues to attract people to its premises, seemingly generation after generation. Despite similarities in values and goals, anarchism seems especially attractive to those for whom individualism rather than collectivism provides a way of life. In this, it stands at the opposite pole from Behemoth, from the gods of political order. The Anarchists is a rich collection of theories and practices in the words of those who have rebelled against the restrictive institutions and oppressive conditions imposed by state power upon the individual. Idealists and self-seekers, saints and assassins, they have often served as the conscience of the world and have expressed with eloquence and convictions, the deep-seated sense of anarchy that resides, to a greater or lesser degree, in most human beings.Anarchism is not simply a European import; it is deeply rooted in the American political experience. The volume gives strong representation to this side of the anarchist tradition. Thomas Paine wrote, "Government even in its best state is but a necessary evil. This was a sentiment echoed by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who said, "the less government we have the better." The Anarchists offers the most thoughtful and comprehensive selection of writings by and about those who protest against all rule by man over man, particularly that embodied in the State. As such, this anthology presents the history and philosophy of anarchism in the words of thirty-five of its greatest students, observers, and proponents.

part one

the theory

Introduction

1. Natural Man and Political Man

From its historical beginnings a linguistic ambiguity resides in what the term “anarchism” signifies. The ambiguity is not exclusively a failing of language. It is a consequence of the claims and counterclaims, currents and crosscurrents that necessarily plague a social movement dedicated to “propaganda of the deed” and “scientific liberation from political myth” simultaneously. The anarchists are theorists and terrorists, moralists and deviants, and above all, political and antipolitical.

If we examine the matter from a purely definitional viewpoint, we find the concept of anarchy raising up two contrasting visions. On one hand, it describes a negative condition, that which is unruly or disorganized, that which is not controlled or controllable. Sociologists might say that a condition of anarchy prevails when any event is unstructured or lacking in norms, such as spontaneous crowd behavior. These negative connotations of anarchism have penetrated the scientific literature no less than the popular literature. Nonetheless, there is also a popular positive notion of anarchy as conscious rebellion. What is entailed is a view of anarchy as “un-rule” because formal rule systems are unnecessary and superfluous in the governing of normal men. The phenomenon of altruism, or self-sacrifice of personal ambitions, indicates that spontaneous behavior is not synonymous with irrational behavior. We are thus confronted with a negative concept of anarchy as a condition of unruliness in contrast to a positive view of anarchy as the superfluity of rules.

Anarchist negation is embodied by an event, or an agency of events, such as the group, which rejects external pressures in the form of adjustment to a context of prevailing norms or superimposed rules. Conversely, positive anarchism, anarchy as affirmation, means the “internalization” of rules to such a high degree as to do away with the need for external constraint altogether. This ambiguity in anarchism has as its theoretical underpinning an idealization of natural man in contrast and in opposition to civilized man.

One of the confusions, at least, is not so much the work of anarchism as of the commentators on anarchism who consider it to be exclusively a historical movement or a political organism. Some historians see the demise of anarchism in 1914, or with the absorption of anarchist ideals by social reformers and the awakening of “social conscience” in the middle classes.¹ Others consider anarchist ideas to have been absorbed by mass union and political movements.² And still others place the final death agony of anarchism in 1939, with the collapse of the Spanish Republic.³ What seems to bind the historical school is a consensus that, however fuzzy the beginnings of anarchism might have been, there is no question about its definite terminal point. The plain truth is that as a historical force, anarchism never had much of a reality. When Bakunin spoke of three thousand anarchists in Lyons, he considered this an extraordinary achievement. And even in Republican Spain, the anarchist “organization,” Federation Anarquista Ibérica, could claim only a fractional (and factional) membership.

What characteristically distinguishes anarchism from other radical movements is precisely the low premium placed on immediate political success, and the high premium placed on the fashioning of a “new man” in the womb of the old society. The great Italian anarchist, Errico Malatesta, who bridges 19th- and 20th-century European thought as few of his peers did, put the matter directly:

Our belief is that the only way of emancipation and of progress is that all shall have the liberty and the means of advocating and putting into practice their ideas—that is to say, anarchy. Thus, the more advanced minorities will persuade and draw after them the more backward by the force of reason and example.⁴

The classical anarchists, Bakunin, Malatesta, Sorel, Kropotkin, have a shared consensus in anarchism as a “way of life” rather than as a “view of the future.” What is offered is a belief in “natural man” as more fundamental and historically prior to “political man.”

Civilization is viewed as a series of impediments and obstructions preventing the natural man from realizing himself. This represents an inversion of Hobbes’ doctrine of the “war of every man against every man.” In Hobbes, the Leviathan exists for the exclusive purpose of curbing “the solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” character of natural man. From the anarchist standpoint, Rousseau’s doctrine of the natural goodness of man is only a partial solution to the problems presented in Hobbes’ view of human nature. For whether man is “good” or “brutish” is less important to the anarchist than what men do to preserve their inner core. Rousseau shares with the power theorists the idea that self-preservation requires men to contract out their private rights. The Rousseau paradox is that to gain survival entails a loss of humanity. Rights are swallowed up by obligations. The State absorbs Civil society. Natural man is outflanked and outmaneuvered by society.

The anarchist rebuttal to this line of reasoning is that to make a contract, which is an involuntary act to begin with, is really to compromise the natural man. If man is really good, then the purpose of life, in contrast to the purpose of politics, ought to be the restoration of the natural condition of human relations at whatever level of human development thus far achieved. This is not exclusively a matter of internalizing felt needs, but no less, a form of shedding that which is superfluous and unnecessary. Intrinsic to anarchism is an asceticism and an ascetic mood. One finds the anarchist as a historical figure to be a person very close to “natural” values and “fundamental” living conditions. Their attitudes toward matters of food, shelter, sexuality, and the generalized expression of human needs in the social economy are simply that all needs can be satisfied once the “natural laws of society” shed the impediments of civilization. This sublime faith in the natural in contrast to the social accounts to a considerable degree for the central peculiarity of anarchism —the absence of a well worked-out commitment to economic development.

Precisely because economics in its advanced form must necessarily cope with problems of affluence, consumer and producer demands, distribution of goods, allocation of natural resources, etc., the anarchist tends to consider economic prognostication as catering to both the impossible (because prediction is unfeasible for future social systems) and the unnecessary (since any “rational” economy would center on “production for use”). Even in its specifically economic form, such as in the work of Pierre Joseph Proudhon, anarchism makes little attempt to chart the contours of a rational economy. Proudhon’s critique of property relations is everything Marx said it was: abstract, grandiose in statement, and rhetorical in content. Piecework is described as the “deprivation of the soul,” machinery becomes the “protest against homicidal labor,” and economic history as such becomes a “sequence of ideas.”⁵ Even those later figures, like Bakunin and Kropotkin, who accepted the main contours of socialist economics, did so more as an instrument by which the restoration of the feudal workshop could be achieved rather than as a guide to the study of economic realities.

There is a perennial tension between the naturalistic character of anarchism and its emergent participation in socialist currents. On frankly moral grounds the anarchists opposed the stratification of men into classes. Social classes violate the natural equality of men in their psychological-biological characteristics. Anarchism tends to distinguish wage laborers from factory owners in terms of the moral properties of work rather than the alienative features of class relations. A strong pietistic religious element is present: work is good, idleness is evil; the poor are noble while the rich are sinful. Men are naturally equal, while they are socially stratified. Real and legitimate differences are obscured by social position and by family property. Anarchist man sees differences in terms of the quality of mind of each person, the degree of self-realization and self-fulfillment, and the extent of socialization. Capitalist man is the accommodating man: solicitous when profits are at stake, brutal when workers are at stake, cruel when the social system is at stake.

The anarchist image of life is in terms of a moral drama, a drama in which individuals are pitted against social systems. It is little wonder, then, that the anarchist has an apocalyptic attitude toward social classes. Abolish class relations, and the natural man will come to fructification. This attitude toward classes is comparable to the approach that nudists take to clothing. Eliminate clothing, and all people will immediately perceive the absurdity of clothing, as well as its harmful psychological by-products, such as repression and guilt. So, too, runs the anarchist argument. Abolish social classes, and the absurdity of class distinctions will immediately become manifest. The absurd by-products of the class system—oppression of the poor by the rich, impoverishment of the many on behalf of the few, etc.—will give way to the new dawning. Just how this process will install an economy of abundance and distributive justice becomes a matter for future generations to discuss. Just as it would be metaphysics to discuss the problems that would occur in a world of naked people, so too, the anarchist holds the socialists to be metaphysicians for attempting to anticipate the problems as well as the contours of a society without exploitation and an economy without classes.

This tension between “naturalism” and “socialism” is also present in the anarchist stance toward politics. The whole world of politics is itself an embodiment of authority, of arbitrary power. At some level the definition of politics is necessarily linked to the exercise or restraint of power. The whole concept of politics has as its perfect social expression super-ordination and subordination, just as in the previous illustration the whole notion of economics has as its basis, mastery and slavery. Once again then, the reason the anarchists take an antipolitical position, not simply against certain forms of politics, but against the content of politics as such, is that the notion of superordination and subordination, resting as it does on a social concept to justify power, is a superfluity, a civilized manner for expressing the social fact of inequality. The point of view of most anarchists is that the doctrine of self-interest arises only at that point when the interests of society are schismatic or bifurcated. When it is seen or felt that the self is something other than the society, only at that point does hedonism become a force.

The political doctrines of anarchism are totalistic. They are anti-egoistic, because egoism is an expression of civilization. It is antifatalist, because fatalism violates individual liberty. The propensity of natural man is voluntary association based on the practice of mutual aid. The concept of mutual aid, while sharing many properties of altruism, differs from the latter since altruism implies conscious surrender of self in an egotistical milieu. Mutual aid is socially systematized. There is no longer any psychology of egotism in anarchist society, and therefore altruism cannot have a psychological base. One wouldn’t perform an altruistic act One performs social acts at all levels—whether in defense of self or on behalf of other persons. Psychology as a division among men will be broken down in the anarchist world. There will then be a possibility of a truly human association that at the same time overcomes the distinction between the public and the private.

This utilitarian “mutual aid” aspect of anarchism is dominant and fully expressed from Godwin to Tolstoy. It was particularly suitable as the ultimate expression of the plight of the modern peasantry. Collectivist anarchism departs from this social stress to the idea of the individual’s war against the state as a form of self-preservation. The ever-enlarged scope of bureaucratic domination has led anarchism to emphasize the need to survive under the pressures and censures of society.

What characterizes contemporary anarchism, as contrasted with earlier forms, is the highly personal nature of the revolt against authority. There might very well be a sense in which the anarchism of intellectuals is a very special variant of anarchism. It possesses three distinguishing qualities: 1) emphasis on individual responses, on the “politics of truth”; 2) rejection of professionalism and departmental academicism; and 3) belief in the sanctity of the “private life.” In the intellectual’s powerful sense of the distinction between public and private, which D. H. Lawrence in particular has pointed out, and the image of the fighting private intellectual there is perhaps an anomic kind of anarchism, if one may speak of anomie in this connection.

In its classical model, the notion of the fighting romantic against the world is antithetical to anarchism as a theory, but quite in keeping with the “deviant” psychological characteristics of the anarchists as people. The anarchist as a person tends to be highly deviant, closely allied to the criminal sectors in European society, and to the lumpenproletariat in the United States, the tramps, hoboes, and rummies. While the anarchist does not define himself as a criminal (criminality is seen as a form of lower-class egotism—excusable rather than practicable) he does not consider the criminal, as does the bourgeois, to be “an enemy of society.” Indeed, they have close dealings since anarchists have at times hired out as professional criminals to commit assassinations and bank robberies in Italy and Spain. But the anarchist who steals does not do so for his own self-interest. He carefully allocates funds making very sure that nothing is used for creature comforts. He will kill, but he is very careful not to harm anyone who is innocent from the viewpoint of the class struggle. He will cajole, but not for the purpose of keeping the reigns of power. The goal, however ill-defined, is all-important. And the means used in its attainment (the overthrow of the state and of the class system) are moral in virtue of these aims. Therefore, the means used are conditioned only by the question of efficiency of realizing the ends. No ethic is attached to them. Clearly, the anarchist is not a pragmatist. He does not accept the idea that there is a means-ends continuum. The purposes of violence determine its good or its evil character—and not the fact of violence as such. This dichotomization gives to the anarchist the appearance of criminality, while distinguishing his essence. It also provides for a life-style that is often awkward and difficult to manage —since he must work with egotists while maintaining his altruism; and cooperate with derelicts while urging a “new man” theory of social change; and he must oppose totalitarianism in theory while maintaining authoritarian personality traits in his personal habits and behavior.

The fundamental development of anarchism as a social agency for change and as an intellectual mood reached full expression in the nineteenth century. It is not inconsequential to take note of the philosophical climate and technological level surrounding this development. The philosophical point of view underlying classical anarchism is not so much Hegel’s dialectics as it was Kant’s ethics. The only true morality that the anarchist would recognize is one in which there would no longer be a distinction between what is done for one’s self and what is done for others.

A derivative of this is the antitechnological claims of anarchism. These turn out to be fundamentally petty bourgeois or peasant. The notion of community was very strong in Utopian varieties of community life. Small-scale farming and small-scale industry, where there was indeed intimacy and rapport between the people at work, where work itself was an organizing principle and a viable one, were a vital principle of life writ large. This combination of the technology of the small factory and the small farm, combined as it was with this highly rationalistic Kantian image of what a moral man defines the communal obligation to be, reveals the anarchist as antitechnological in his stance just as previously he is described as antipolitical and anti-economic. He is total in his commitment to a social ethic in which the personality is part and parcel of that social view. And the alienation of men from the sources of their labor, and from the machine directly, violates this social ethic. The fact that anarchism in its most distilled form is the idea of the brotherhood of man and the naturalness of this equality, any separatist movement, such as nationalism or racialism, that has imaginary pressures from the exploiting strata of every state has to be sharply opposed. The main evil of nationalism is not solely that it breeds wars, but that it does so because nationalism is unnatural Civilization sets up arbitrary differentiations so that national distinctions intensify and exaggerate factors making for conflict: patriotic gore, class animus, racial purity. They are unreal and susceptible to dissolution and alteration. Their only reality derives from the power relations that are caused by class domination and legal rationalization.

The philosophic stance of anarchism is juxtaposed against the power relations of society. Anarchism is a commitment to the idea of nature, to the belief that nature is an “essence,” while society is an “accident.” It stands in contrast to the idea of existence because the concept of existence, as it has unfolded in both Marxist and Existentialist thought, involves problems of revolution, of change in terms of other men, in terms of a fundamental theory of the redistribution of power, in terms of the redistribution of wealth rather than the notion of wealth as such. So that the difference between socialism and anarchism is primarily a difference between those who would abolish the forms of social relations as they now exist, and those who would abolish the content of all hitherto existing class society. The socialist has ultimate visions of future society through the redistribution of power, property, etc. The anarchist sees any such compromise as stillborn and doomed to perpetuate in new form the same divisions that have riven society historically. For the anarchist, the root of the problem is society; for the socialist, the root of the problem is class. This helps explain, in addition to the fierce per...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition
• Acknowledgments
• Part One The Theory
• Part Two The Practice
• Subject Index
• Name Index