Anarchism and Education

A Philosophical Perspective

Judith Suisa

• Publisher: PM Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781604864441
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Anarchismus

While there have been historical accounts of the anarchist school movement, there has been no systematic work on the philosophical underpinnings of anarchist educational ideas—until now.

Anarchism and Education offers a philosophical account of the neglected tradition of anarchist thought on education. Although few anarchist thinkers wrote systematically on education, this analysis is based largely on a reconstruction of the educational thought of anarchist thinkers gleaned from their various ethical, philosophical and popular writings. Primarily drawing on the work of the nineteenth century anarchist theorists such as Bakunin, Kropotkin, and Proudhon, the book also covers twentieth century anarchist thinkers such as Noam Chomsky, Paul Goodman, Daniel Guerin, and Colin Ward.

This original work will interest philosophers of education and educationalist thinkers as well as those with a general interest in anarchism.

1 Anarchism - definitions and questions

Before moving on to a discussion of the educational ideas associated with anarchism, we need a broad understanding of what the anarchist position involves – and, perhaps equally importantly, what it does not involve.

As a political ideology, anarchism is notoriously difficult to define, leading many commentators to complain of its being ‘amorphous and full of paradoxes and contradictions’ (Miller 1984: 2).

One reason for the confusion surrounding the use of the word ‘anarchism’ is the derogatory meanings associated with the connected terms ‘anarchy’ and ‘anarchic’. The Oxford English Dictionary defines anarchy as (1) absence of government or control, resulting in lawlessness (2) disorder, confusion; and an anarchist as ‘a person who believes that government is undesirable and should be abolished’. In fact, the title ‘anarchist’ was first employed as a description of adherence to a particular ideology by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in 1840 and, as shall transpire, the substantial part of this ideology consisted in far more than a simple rejection of government. Indeed, as many anarchists have stressed, it is not government as such that they find objectionable, but the hierarchical forms of government associated with the nation state.

A second reason for the difficulty in reaching a conclusive definition is the fact that anarchism – by its very nature – is anti-canonical, and therefore one cannot refer to any single body of written work (unlike in the case of Marxism) in the search for definitive answers to questions on the nature and principles of the anarchist position. Furthermore, those anarchists who have written extensively on the subject have seldom formulated their views in the form of systematic works – largely out of a conscious commitment to the popular propaganda of their ideas.

Yet in spite of these difficulties, and in spite of the great variance amongst different anarchist thinkers at different times in history, it is possible to approach a working definition of anarchism by asking what it is that distinguishes it from other ideological positions. From this point of view, Reichert is undoubtedly right in pointing out that anarchism is ‘the only modern social doctrine that unequivocally rejects the concept of the state’ (Reichert 1969: 139).

As the discussion in the following chapters will reveal, as a theory anarchism also addresses basic philosophical issues concerning such notions as human nature, authority, freedom and community. All of these issues have an important bearing on philosophical questions about education, and can be usefully understood in contrast with the views articulated from other ideological perspectives. It is, though, perhaps in light of its rejection of statehood that the theoretical cluster of anarchist ideas is best understood.

Historically speaking, it has been argued (e.g. by Miller, Chomsky and Guerin) that the origins of anarchism as a comprehensive political theory can be traced to the outbreak of the French Revolution. Miller claims that the Revolution, by radically challenging the old regime, opened the way for other such challenges to states and social institutions. Specifically, institutions were now regarded as vulnerable to the demand that they be justified in terms of an appeal to first principles, whether of natural right, social utility, or other universal abstract principles (see Miller 1984: 2–4). Yet anarchism as a political movement did not develop until the second half of the nineteenth century, especially in conjunction with the growing workers’ movement. Indeed Joll argues that although philosophical arguments for anarchism can be found in texts of earlier historical periods, as a political movement, anarchism is ‘a product of the nineteenth century’ (Joll 1979: ix). As Joll points out, ‘the values the anarchists attempted to demolish were those of the increasingly powerful centralized, industrial state which, in the nineteenth and twentieth century, has seemed the model to which all societies are approaching’ (ibid.).

However, the philosophical ideas embodied in anarchist theory did have historical precedents. Some writers have made the distinction between anarchism as a political movement and ‘philosophical anarchism’ which consists of a critique of the idea of authority itself. Miller, for example, notes that, as opposed to the political objection to the state, philosophical anarchism could entail a very passive kind of attitude, politically speaking, in which the proponent of this view evades ‘inconvenient or immoral state dictates whenever possible’, but takes no positive action to get rid of the state or to propose an alternative form of social organization. On this view, one can be an anarchist without subscribing to philosophical anarchism – that is, without rejecting the idea of legitimate authority, and vice versa. However, other theorists, such as Walter, argue that, irrespective of the existence of a philosophical position against authority, all those who identify themselves as anarchists share the positive idea that a stateless society is, however remotely, possible and would be preferable to current society.

Most theorists, in short, seem to agree that, as a political movement, albeit not a continuous one, anarchism developed from the time of the French Revolution onwards, and that it can thus be seen as historically connected with the other major modern political doctrines which were crystallized at around this time, namely, liberalism and socialism. It is indeed around the question of the relationship between these two intellectual traditions that many of the criticisms of anarchism and the tensions within the movement can be understood. In a certain sense, the tensions between liberal and socialist principles are reflected in the contradictions often to be found within the anarchist tradition. While many commentators (see for example Joll 1979; Miller 1984; Morland 1997) describe these apparently irreconcilable tensions as obstacles towards construing anarchism as a coherent ideology, anarchist thinkers writing within the tradition often refuse to see them as contradictions, drawing on particular concepts of freedom to support their arguments. Thus Walter, for example, notes that anarchism

may be seen as a development from either liberalism or socialism, or from both liberalism and socialism. Like liberals, anarchists want freedom; like socialists, anarchists want equality. But we are not satisfied by liberalism alone or by socialism alone. Freedom without equality means that the poor and the weak are less free than the rich and strong, and equality without freedom means that we are all slaves together. Freedom and equality are not contradictory, but complementary […] Freedom is not genuine if some people are too poor or too weak to enjoy it, and equality is not genuine if some people are ruled by others. The crucial contribution to political theory made by anarchists is this realization that freedom and equality are in the end the same thing.

(Walter 1969: 163)

Walter, like many anarchist theorists, often fails to make the careful philosophical distinctions necessary to fully appreciate these complex conceptual issues. Presumably, he does not wish to argue that freedom and equality are actually conceptually identical. Rather, the point he seems to be making is that they are mutually dependent, in the sense that the model of a good society which the anarchists are defending cannot have one without the other. I shall examine these conceptual issues in greater depth in the following discussion.

In spite of Walter’s observation, it is undoubtedly true that, throughout history, different people calling themselves anarchists have often chosen to place more weight on one rather than the other side of the ‘old polarization of freedom versus equality’. Specifically, it is common to find a distinction between anarchists of more ‘individualist’ leanings, and ‘social anarchists’, who see individual freedom as conceptually connected with social equality and emphasize the importance of community and mutual aid. Thus writers like Max Stirner (1806–1856), who represents an early and extreme form of individualism (which Walter suggests is arguably not a type of anarchism at all) view society as a collection of existentially unique and autonomous individuals. Both Stirner and William Godwin (1756–1836), commonly acknowledged as the first anarchist thinkers, portrayed the ideal of the rational individual as morally and intellectually sovereign, and the need to constantly question authority and received opinion – to engage in a process which Stirner called ‘desanctification’. However while Stirner seemed to argue for a kind of rational egoism, Godwin claimed that a truly rational person would necessarily be benevolent. Although sharply critical of the modern centralist state, and presenting an elaborate doctrine of social and political freedom, Godwin, writing in the aftermath of the French Revolution, placed great emphasis on the development of individual rationality and independent thinking, believing that the road forward lay not through social revolution but through gradual reform by means of the rational dissemination of ideas at the level of individual consciousness.

As Walter comments (Walter 1969: 174), such individualism, which over the years has held an intellectual attraction for figures such as Shelley, Emerson and Thoreau, often tends towards nihilism and even solipsism. Walter ultimately questions whether individualism of this type is indeed a form of anarchism, arguing rather that libertarianism – construed as a more moderate form of individualism which holds that individual liberty is an important political goal – is simply one aspect of anarchist thought, or ‘the first stage on the way to complete anarchism’ (ibid.). The key difference between this kind of individualist libertarianism and social anarchism is that while such libertarians oppose the state, they also, as Walter notes (ibid.), oppose society, regarding any type of social organization ‘beyond a temporary “union of egoists” ‘ as a form of oppression.

Many commentators have acknowledged that leading anarchist theorists did not see individual freedom as a political end in itself (see, for example, Ryth Kinna, in Crowder 1991). Furthermore, central anarchist theorists, such as Kropotkin and Bakunin, were often highly disparaging about earlier individualist thinkers such as William Godwin and Max Stirner, for whom individual freedom was a supreme value. ‘The final conclusion of that sort of Individualist Anarchism’, wrote Kropotkin in his 1910 article on ‘Anarchism’ for the Encyclopaedia Britannica,

maintains that the aim of all superior civilization is, not to permit all members of the community to develop in a normal way, but to permit certain better- endowed individuals ‘fully to develop’, even at the cost of the happiness and the very existence of the mass of mankind….

Bakunin, another leading anarchist theorist, was even more outspoken in his critique of ‘the individualistic, egoistic, shabby and fictitious liberty extolled by the school of J.J. [Rousseau] and other schools of bourgeois liberalism’ (Dolgoff 1973). Accordingly, several theorists have proposed that it is in fact equality, or even fraternity (see Fidler 1989), which constitutes the ultimate social value according to the anarchist position. Others, like Chomsky, have taken the position that anarchism is simply ‘the libertarian wing of socialism’ (Chomsky, in Guerin 1970: xii) or that ‘anarchism is really a synonym for socialism’ (Guerin 1970: 12). Indeed, Adolph Fischer, one of the ‘Haymarket martyrs’ sentenced to death for their part in the libertarian socialist uprising over the struggle for the eight-hour work day in Chicago, in 1886, claimed that ‘every anarchist is a socialist but not every socialist is an anarchist’. (quoted in Guerin 1970: 12).

The arguments of anarchist theorists such as Chomsky and Guerin, to the effect that the best way to understand anarchism is to view it as ‘libertarian socialism’, are also supported by the work of political scientists such as David Miller, Barbara Goodwin and George Crowder. Goodwin, for example, states that ‘socialism is in fact the theoretical genus of which Marxism is a species and anarchism another’ (Goodwin 1987: 91), whereas Crowder goes so far as to say that ‘from a historical point of view classical anarchism belongs more properly within the socialist tradition’ (Crowder 1991: 11).

It is certainly true that the most influential anarchist theorists in recent history, in terms of developing and disseminating anarchist ideas, belonged on the socialist end of the anarchist spectrum. Many of the central ideas of this tradition were anticipated by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865), commonly regarded as the father of social anarchism. Yet the bulk of social-anarchist thought was crystalized in the second half of the nineteenth century, most notably by Michael Bakunin (1814–1876) and Peter Kropotkin (1842–1912). Other significant anarchist activists and theorists in this tradition include Errico Malatesta (1853–1932), Alexander Berkman (1870–1936), Emma Goldman (1869–1940), and, more recently, Murray Bookchin (1921–2006), Daniel Guerin (1904–1988) and Noam Chomsky (1928—).

Apart from the differences in emphasis in terms of the individualist– socialist continuum, one can draw other distinctions within the broadly socialist approach amongst different variants of social anarchism which have been expressed in different political and historical contexts. Briefly, these five main variants are: mutualism, federalism, collectivism, communism and syndicalism. Although this taxonomy is conceptually useful, it is important to remember that the views of many leading anarchist theorists often involved a combination of strands from several of these different traditions.

Mutualism represents the basic anarchist insight that society should be organized not on the basis of a hierarchical, centralist, top-down structure such as the state, but on the basis of reciprocal voluntary agreements between individuals. Perhaps the best-known, and certainly the earliest, proponent of this type of anarchism was Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who, writing in the mid-nineteenth century, envisaged a society composed of cooperative groups of individuals exchanging goods on the basis of labour value, and enjoying the credit of a ‘people’s bank’. Proudhon was criticized by later anarchists for appealing primarily to the petit bourgeoisie, and for failing to deal with the basic issues of social structure as regards the class system, industry and capital. Indeed, he often wrote with horror of the increasing threat of massive industrialization, expressing a romantic wish to preserve small-scale trade, artisans’ workshops and cottage industry. Nevertheless, his views on private property and his argument that social harmony could only exist in a stateless society, were highly influential and were later developed by leading anarchist thinkers, notably Bakunin.

Federalism is basically a logical development from mutualism, referring as it does to social and economic organization between communities, as opposed to within communities. The idea is that the society of voluntarily organized communities should be coordinated by a network of councils. The key difference between this anarchist idea and the principle of democratic representation is that the councils would be established spontaneously to meet specific economic or organizational needs of the communities; they would have no central authority, no permanent bureaucratic structure, and their delegates would have no executive authority and would be subject to instant recall. This principle was also elaborated by Proudhon and his followers, who were fond of pointing to international systems for coordinating railways, postal services, telegraphs and disaster operations as essentially federalist in structure. What is notable about the elaborate attempts by Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin and other anarchists to show how federalist arrangements could take care of a wide variety of economic functions, is that they illustrate the point that anarchism is not synonymous with disorganization. As the twentieth-century anarchist Voline clarifies:

it is not a matter of ‘organization’ or ‘nonorganization’, but of two different principles of organization. … Of course, say the anarchists, society must be organized. However, the new organization must be established freely, socially, and, above all, from below. The principle of organization must not issue from a center created in advance to capture the whole and impose itself upon it, but, on the contrary, it must come from all sides to create nodes of coordination, natural centers to serve all these points…

(quoted in Guerin 1970: 43)

It thus seems appropriate to view federalism not so much as a type of anarchism but, as Walter suggests, ‘as an inevitable part of anarchism’ (Walter 1969: 175).

Collectivism takes the aforementioned points one step further and argues that the free and just society can only be established by a workers’ revolution which will reorganize production on a communal basis. Many central figures of the twentieth-century anarchist movement – notably Bakunin and his followers in the First International – were in fact collectivists. They opposed both the more reformist position of the mutualists and federalists, on the one hand, and what they saw as the authoritarian revolutionary position of the Marxists on the other.

Anarchism and Marxism

Many of the central ideas and principles of social anarchism overlap with those of Marxism, perhaps nowhere more explicitly than in collectivism, the form of anarchism most closely associated with Marxist socialism in that it focuses on the class struggle and on the need for social revolution. However, there are crucial differences between the anarchists and the Marxists, and indeed much of Bakunin’s political theory took the form of an attack on Marx. Specifically, the anarchists opposed common, central ownership of the economy and, of course, state control of production, and believed that a transition to a free and classless society was possible without any intermediate period of dictatorship (see Walter 1969: 176).

Fundamentally, the anarchists consider the Marxist view of the state as a mere tool in the hands of the ruling economic class as too narrow, as it obscures the basic truth that states ‘have certain properties just because they are states’ (Miller 1984: 82). By using the structure of a state to realize their goals, revolutionaries will, according to anarchism, inevitably reproduce all its negative features (the corrupting power of the minority over the majority, hierarchical, centralized authority and legislation, and so on.) Thus the anarchists in the First International were highly sceptical (with, it has to be said, uncanny foresight) about the Marxist idea of the ‘withering away of the state’.

The anarchists also argued that the Marxist claim to create a scientific theory of social change leads to a form of elitism in which the scientific ‘truth’ is known only to an elect few, which would justify attempts to impose this truth on the...