Making Another World Possible

Anarchism, Anti-capitalism and Ecology in Late 19th and Early 20th Century Britain

Peter Ryley

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781501302831
• eBook ISBN: 9781441113313
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Making Another World Possible identifies the British contribution to the genealogy of modern green and anti-capitalist thinking by examining left libertarian ideologies in the late 19th and early 20th century Britain and highlighting their influence on present day radical thought. As capitalism heralded the triumph of technology, greater production, and a new urban industrial society, some imagined alternatives to this notion of progress based on endless economic growth. The book examines the development of ideas from these dissidents who included communists, class warriors, free thinkers, secularists, and Christian communitarians. All shared the same beliefs that the benefits of industrialism could only be realized through equality and that urban culture depended on a healthy agriculture and harmony with the natural world - concerns that are still of great importance today. This distinctive history of anarchist ideas reappraises the work of thinkers and revises the historical picture of the radical milieu in 19th and 20th century Britain. It will be an essential resource to anyone researching the history of ideas and studying anarchism.

1

Property and progress: The emergence of anarchist political economy

In his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote:

The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying ‘This is mine’, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: ‘Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.’¹

With this deceptively simple statement, Rousseau placed property firmly on the agenda of radical political economy. And in doing so he emphasized that property is not primarily a way of defining how humans interact with material world, it is a social concept that defines how they interact with each other. Rousseau was a pessimist, believing that a peaceful state of nature had been irretrievably corrupted by civilization. Despite the vituperative attacks on him, especially by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and the decisive rejection of his concept of social contract by libertarians, Rousseau’s influence² on anarchism was palpable and spawned a ‘mythic communism’³ that thought that paradise could be regained by creating a world free of private property.

Yet, in the early years of the development of anarchism this was not the main view. Instead, it was dominated by an intellectual tradition, described by Hillel Steiner and Peter Vallentyne as ‘left libertarianism’,⁴ one of a number of distinctive working-class political economies,⁵ which sought to articulate a radical alternative to conventional notions of property in emergent industrial capitalism and to address the paradox of the existence of poverty and servitude in an era of prosperity and liberty.

There were three key elements to this critique. First there was the idea of just and unjust property, where a combination of Locke’s theory of the origin of property and the labour theory of value, as found in classical economics, was used to draw a distinction between different kinds of property or ownership, with some seen as legitimate and others not.

Much else flowed from this basic idea. Obviously, there was a critique of concentrated ownership and property holding, above all, in land and capital. And this, in turn, meant an attack on rent of all kinds and the institution of wage labour. Not only were employment relations seen as economically exploitative, also they were servile and violated the idea of just property in the person. These theorists also rejected many of the mainstays of classical political economy, which was emerging simultaneously from the same intellectual roots. In particular, they refuted ideas associated with Ricardo and, especially, Malthus, about the implications of population growth.

Most importantly for anarchist thinkers, a connection was made between unjust types of property and political power, resulting in a profound anti-statism. This was a common feature of radical thought at the time. For the propagandist of The Black Book,⁶ unjust property was a catalogue of outrage, a record of a kleptocratic church and state living off the productive work of others. For the influential French radical liberal Charles Dunoyer, this was the result of an artificial political hierarchy established as an early stage of social development that was destined to give way to industrialism, ‘a state where the right (of enriching oneself by the exercise of political domination) would be the privilege of no one, where neither a few men nor many men would be able to make their fortune by pillaging the rest of the population’.⁷

Dunoyer, together with Charles Comte, also point to the second main feature of left libertarianism, a class analysis based on the distinction between the productive and unproductive classes. It was evident that those that did the work did not receive the rewards for it. The wealth that flowed from labour passed into the hands of owners, not workers, and so a device for redistribution and restitution was central to radical political economy. According to David Hart, they argued ‘that it was the state and the privileged classes allied to or making up the state … which were essentially non productive. They also believed that throughout history there had been conflict between these two antagonistic classes which could only be brought to end with the radical separation of peaceful and productive civil society from the inefficiencies and privileges of the state and its favourites.’⁸

Finally, left libertarianism began to question the nature of progress. It was not hostile towards progress as conventionally understood. The nineteenth century was a time of supreme confidence in science and technology, which, it was thought, would bring in its wake dynamic and limitless human development. At times this could border on the rhapsodical. As the French anarchist Louise Michel wrote:

Science will bring forth harvests in the desert; the energy of the tempests and whirlpools will carve paths through the mountains. Undersea boats will discover lost continents. Electricity will carry ships of the air above the icy poles. The ideas of Liberty, Equality and Justice will finally burst into flame. Each individual will live his integral part within humankind as a whole. Progress being infinite, transformations will be perpetual.⁹

Thus, anarchists tended to adhere to a modified Whig theory of history. History may not be a record of constant improvement, but it could become so. However, despite this faith, they did not accept the conventional narrative that saw progress as a process of unlimited economic growth and a sustained increase in ‘luxury’, as developed by writers such as Bernard Mandeville and Adam Smith. Instead, progress was to come through intellectual development, social evolution and the liberation offered by a new economic order.

Despite the importance for wider economic thought of writers like William Ogilvie,¹⁰ British left libertarianism was predominantly developed by William Godwin and Thomas Hodgskin. It was not solely a native tradition, though; they drew many of their influences from other European thinkers, and it is impossible to complete the picture without proper consideration of a third figure, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Proudhon’s significance and influence is manifest as he expanded on the left libertarian concept of property and took it further by developing a theory of exchange – mutualism. And it was he who made the firm connection between radical ideas about property with a critique of the concept of progress. Whilst Godwin may have hinted at it, Proudhon made it explicit.

Property and class in early British left libertarianism

William Godwin’s great work An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness, first published in 1793 at the onset of the Napoleonic wars, is now seen as one of the founding documents of classical anarchism. Already the published author of several works of non-fiction and three novels, the book brought Godwin fame and a respected place in radical circles. He followed it shortly with his best-regarded novel, Caleb Williams, and shortly after began his relationship with Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), a formidable radical partnership that ended in Wollstonecraft’s untimely death in childbirth. Their daughter, Mary, survived and was to find her own fame by eloping with the poet Shelley and writing her celebrated gothic novel, Frankenstein. Godwin continued to publish though with small financial reward and ended his days, ironically, living off a government sinecure.

Political Justice is a wide-ranging book, placing political economy within an ethical framework, and provides a foundation for much of the left libertarian writing that followed. In particular, it laid down the parameters for the discussion of property and its central role in classical anarchist thought. Godwin identified three distinct ‘degrees’ of property. The first clearly relates to his ambiguous attitude to Utilitarianism.¹¹

The first and simplest degree is that of my permanent right in those things the use of which being attributed to me, a greater sum of benefit or pleasure will result than could have arisen from their being otherwise appropriated.¹²

This is a straightforward defence of the right of personal property in the necessities of life (housing, food, clothes etc.) against seizure by others. Such a view is uncontentious, even if the Utilitarian justification is clumsy. It is with his second and third degrees of property that Godwin becomes more explicitly political.

The second degree ‘is the empire to which every man is entitled over the produce of his own industry.’ This is very different from the first degree and marks a departure from Utilitarianism, implying the existence of a natural right to property conferred through labour. Godwin is explicit that this includes ‘even that part of it the use of which ought not to be appropriated to himself’.¹³

This, of course, raises a problem. If one person produces the necessaries of life who, by right of labour, owns them, how is the right of the rest of the community to these necessaries – Godwin’s first degree of property – enforced? The obvious answer is some form of equitable exchange, but instead Godwin refines what he means by property by removing the absolute right of disposal.

The producer, according to Godwin, ‘has no right of option in the disposal of anything which may fall into his hands … He is only the steward. But still he is the steward. These things must be trusted to his award.’ The community exercises its control over the disposal and distribution of this property through ‘censorial power’, since ‘All men cannot individually be entitled to exercise compulsion on each other, for this would produce universal anarchy. All men cannot collectively be entitled to exercise unbounded compulsion, for this would produce universal slavery’.¹⁴

The idea of property as a conditional right, held in trust for the whole community and, implicitly, for future generations, is found in much modern Green political thought, but it isn’t exclusive to it. If the first degree of property gives rights, the second gives duties. The second qualifies but does not negate the first. The second is, however, negated by the third degree, the dominant property relationship of the late eighteenth century, which is ‘… a system … by which one man enters into the faculty of disposing of the produce of another man’s industry’. He continues:

There is scarcely any species of wealth, expenditure or splendour, existing in any civilized country, that is not, in some way, produced by the express manual labour, and corporeal industry of the inhabitants of that country… Every man may calculate, in every glass of wine he drinks, and every ornament he annexes to his person, h...

Table of contents

• FC
• Contemporary Anarchist Studies
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Preface
• 1  Property and progress: The emergence of anarchist political economy
• 2  Kropotkin and the rise of anarchist communism
• 3  The English individualists
• 4  Individualist anarchism in late Victorian Britain
• 5  Anarchist communism in the era of outrage
• 6  The rise of ecological anarchism
• 7  Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index