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Against all Oppression by Matt Williams |
One of my greatest frustrations is being completely misunderstood when I say I am an anarchist. Many people either misunderstand what it means to be an anarchist or dismiss it as utopian if they do. The popular image of the anarchist is someone intent on spreading chaos, whose hobbies are blowing up buildings and assassinating world leaders. This is a total distortion. Anarchists are not advocates of chaos and destruction. Anarchists see all forms of authority, hierarchy and coercion, including both the state and the corporation, as oppressive and unnecessary. We instead believe that it is both possible and desirable to build a society based on the principals of voluntary, nonhierarchal social organization. Such a society, not chaos, is the only thing properly described as anarchy.
One fact that is key to understanding anarchism is that it is a form of socialism. Anarchism originated in the same general socialist milieu of the nineteenth century as Marxism and, indeed, predates it slightly. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the first man to spit in the face of society by calling himself an anarchist and affirming that people could live without rulers, did so in his book What is Property?, in which he defined property as theft on the first page. Anarchists, under the leadership of the exiled Russian ex-nobleman Mikhail Bakunin, were active in the First International. Indeed, the organization disintegrated as a result of shenanigans pulled by a certain power-hungry Karl Marx and his cronies on the executive committee. They threw Bakunin and the sizable (possibly majority) anarchist faction out of the organization; they then moved its headquarters from London to New York to make sure the anarchists didn’t find some way of rejoining.
Anarchists, like all socialists, believe that the economy should be controlled by those who actually do the work--not parasites like CEOs and stockholders. Unlike the forms of socialism, however, most people are familiar with, anarchists reject the mediation of the state as a means of popular control of the economy. The tyranny of the Soviet Union and other Marxist-Leninist states was not a fluke, but the inevitable result of "state socialism," often more accurately called state capitalism by anarchists--the means of production are still in the hands of the few, only now they are government officials, not private individuals. The actual form of socialist economic organization advocated by anarchists varies widely, from pure communism ("from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs") to a free market socialism based on nonhierarchal collectives (known as individualist anarchism). All anarchists, however, agree that that everyone who does work should have equal input and control in decision making, and that those who do no constructive work have no proper role at all.
Another important aspect of anarchism to understand is its ideals. At its heart, anarchism is an ideology of opposition to any and all forms of oppression. Anarchists do not reject all standards of interpersonal and social behavior simply because we reject all institutionalized laws and rules. Quite the opposite. Most forms of anarchism highly value a sense of personal ethical responsibility. It could not be otherwise when we seek to build a society founded on the principal of voluntary cooperation and mutual aid. At the same time that anarchists place great stress on solidarity, we also uphold the importance of individual freedom. You must determine what makes you happy and pursue it. Different strains of the anarchist tradition place differing amounts of emphasis on the two values, but both are always present. This simultaneous stress on both community and individuality may seem to be a contradiction, but, if it is a contradiction, it is one from which anarchism draws strength. Both are understood to be necessary for human happiness.
An anarchist society would not be a static utopia, but one that is continually evolving, adapting itself to meet new challenges. Still, it is possible to lay out what an anarchist society might look like. In an anarchist society any decisions that affect the entire community would be made by consensus--everyone would have to agree to the decision so that no one would have to carry it out against their will. Decisions affecting smaller social groups, such as families and workshops, would be made the same way. Each local community would be autonomous but still interconnected with other nearby communities. Some centralized bodies would exist to facilitate these connections, but they would have no power to enforce decisions on individual communities. They would simply coordinate exchange between communities and help organize regional projects. Further, delegates to these central bodies would be immediately recallable if the community was unhappy with them.
Anarchism’s critics’ favorite point to harp upon is how a society without law, jails or coercion would deal with crime, in the sense of anti-social acts. This is admittedly anarchism’s weakest point, but the problem is not as overwhelming as it seems. For starters, most crime today is the result of the inequality and alienation produced by the authoritarian, hierarchal society we live in and would therefore not exist in anarchy. What little crime that would be left would not be dealt with by punishment, nor would attempts to resolve crimes take the adversarial form they do in the current court system. Instead they would be resolved by negotiating between the offender and the victim to find some way that the offender could pay back the victim. The very rare completely incorrigible person would be exiled from the community to fend for him- or herself.
Many people would dismiss this vision of social organization as nice, but utopian and impractical. I do not claim that an anarchist society would be perfect, just that it would have the least problems of any possible society. Non-authoritarian societies are certainly possible. In the past, there have been many non-authoritarian forms of social organization which, while not truly anarchist, come close in many ways; various American Indian societies are good examples. Further, many communes and collectives that exist today are structured according to anarchist principals. The Hermes collective is one such example. Finally, anarchism was briefly and very effectively put into practice on a large scale in both the Ukraine during the Russian Revolution and large parts of Spain during the Spanish Civil War; these experiments both failed primarily because they were betrayed by the Leninists with whom they were supposedly allied.
You may still insist that anarchy can not work on a large scale on a long term basis. Fine. I disagree with you, but this view is understandable. What frustrates me is people who use the excuse that anarchism is "utopian and impractical" to dismiss its powerful critique of existing institutions. That is a total cop-out. Its criticisms can be accepted and a compromise worked out with (what you regard as) the demands of reality. The normal result of this is libertarian socialism, in which there is a decentralized, direct and participatory democratic state of minimal proportions. Advocates of this have included Rosa Luxemburg, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Mahatma Gandhi, the Zapatistas and some elements in the Green movement.
Anarchists are often criticized by both liberals and state socialists for their refusal to get involved in electoral politics (which goes to the point where most anarchists don’t even vote, never mind form political parties). There is good reason for this. On the few occasions anarchists have gotten involved, they have at best achieved nothing and often been very badly burned. You simply cannot achieve a transition to a stateless society by means of the state, no matter what the Marxists say; their attempts to do so provide all the evidence you need. The basic anarchist problem is that when using the state to work for social change, you are imposing decisions on people and working from the top down. The state is inevitably an authoritarian institution. People can only be empowered by doing things for themselves and organizing from the ground up. The state can only create new structures of control, not structures of freedom.
Furthermore, power is almost inevitably corrupting. It is the very rare human being who, no matter how initially idealistic he or she is, once placed in a position of power will not be tempted to gradually use it more and more for his or her own benefit. Those in positions of authority are cut off from those they may have originally intended to serve; they gradually loose touch with their constituents’ wants and needs and get sucked into the false world of power. Once poisoned by power, they are not going to give it up. They certainly will not take measures to divest those in authority of power and return it to the direct control of the people. Liberation will never be achieved by means of authority. The state, at best, can be used to blunt some of the big corporations’ major excesses and to mollify the worst aspects of poverty. The state, hoever, will never be able to rectfy these problems.
Anarchists’ rejection of liberal statism means that they often seek completely different means and methods of dealing with social problems. The first main tactic is direct action. The original form of this is the labor strike, devised by anarchists in the nineteenth century as an alternative to the Marxists’ attempts to get elected and then change the laws. Since then, the forms of direct action have expanded to include sabotage, blockades, monkey-wrenching, protests and many other tactics. Many non-anarchist groups such as Earth First! now use direct action, recognizing it as both effective and empowering. The other major anarchist tactic is to try to create autonomous, free spheres of life in this authoritarian world. These projects range from collectively operated cafés to trying to create tenant-owned housing projects and to make local communities self-sufficient.
That, in brief, is anarchism. This, of course, is my own personal understanding of it, and there are probably anarchists out there who would squabble with some of my points. In presenting an overview I have certainly swept some of the differences among various types of anarchism under the rug--there are egoist, individualist, syndicalist, communist, primitivist, Situationist, pacifist, green and feminist anarchisms that differ on important points. My own leanings are towards communism and pacifism to give you a sense of my biases. In the end, however, there are enough points in common among the various schools of anarchism to consider them as one distinct system of thought, one that offers a powerful and uncompromising critique of modern industrialized market capitalist society in all its aspects.