Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (107 page)

It was in this context that the New Left emerged in the late fifties in the United States and Western Europe, rediscovering and developing a form of libertarian socialism which sought a third path between the organized lovelessness of capitalist States and the bureaucratic centralism of Communist States. In the West, social democratic parties seemed to be merely tampering with capitalism in order to make it more efficient, while Marxist-Leninist parties with their tired dogmas born of nineteenth-century circumstances had little relevance to workers in the affluent societies of the late twentieth century who had little to lose but their mortgages. The Communist Parties of Western Europe, following the parliamentary road to socialism, were desperately trying to make themselves respectable to a disinterested electorate. Marxism’s apologists resorted to notions of ‘alienation’ and ‘false consciousness’ in order to try and explain away the lack of interest of the ‘proletariat’ in class struggle.

At the cultural level, many new ideas were fermenting on the Left. The American sociologist C. Wright Mills called on academics and intellectuals to resist the System. He had revised Marxism by opposing the notion of a power elite to the class model and by stressing the role of the military-industrial complex in American society. His ‘Letter to the New Left’ in 1961 was strongly libertarian in spirit, reflecting a Utopian yearning for social justice and spontaneity. The work of the maverick psychoanalyst and Marxist Wilhelm Reich was rediscovered. His argument that the authoritarian personality is the
sine qua non
of authoritarian regimes and that a sexual revolution must accompany the next political revolution was taken to heart. He wished to create a worker democracy of self-governing individuals free of cruelty and dependency. A. S. Neill, the British educationist and founder of Summerhill, was strongly influenced by Reich: he advocated free
schools in which each individual child governs herself and had a wide influence in educational circles.

The German-American philosopher Herbert Marcuse offered a highly libertarian analysis of the failings of Soviet Marxism. Recognizing with Freud that ‘civilization has progressed as organised domination’, he called in
Eros and Civilisation
(1955) for the release of the forces of repression and the eroticizing of culture. He went on to portray vividly the alienation of the
One-Dimensional Man
(1964) of Western society whose creativity and ability to dissent had been undermined. He concluded that only a non-repressive civilization would be able to give natural expression to unfettered human nature although he did not go so far as to reject the need for government. At the same time, social critics like Lewis Mumford were denouncing the ‘megamachine’ of the new military-industrial complex in the United States, while Paul Goodman was reminding people of the advantages of decentralized communities.

During the early part of the 1960s the ideology of the New Left remained ambiguous. The reigning orthodoxies of Liberalism and Marxism seemed exhausted and irrelevant, but there was no clear alternative. The old class analysis did not seem to fit post-scarcity society and the notion of vanguard parties had been sullied by the Soviet experience. It was not long however before the New Left began espousing the traditional anarchist principles of mutual aid, participatory democracy, and decentralization. Its activists challenged the pyramid of power in university, factory and State. They criticized the oppressive nature of contemporary culture, especially in the realm of the family and sexuality. They called for an end to hierarchy and domination. They opposed the living community to the centralized and bureaucratic State. They wanted to control their lives and forge their own destiny. Like Bakunin, they saw the ‘lumpenproletariat’ despised by Marx — blacks, students, women and the unemployed — as possessing truly revolutionary potential. Where they did turn to the Marxist tradition for inspiration, it was to its more libertarian and syndicalist strands.
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In the process, Marxism itself underwent a sea change. It was possible to talk of the ‘anarcho-Marxism’ of Herbert Marcuse, or for the student militant Daniel Cohn-Bendit to describe himself as a Marxist ‘in the way Bakunin was’. The new ‘libertarian Marxism’ which emerged was closer to anarchism than the official Marxist movements, stressing the role of free will in history, the importance of consciousness in shaping social life, and the need for community-based organization. It was opposed to bureaucracy and militarism and called for the disassembly of the State.
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In Britain, for instance, E. P. Thompson, Raymond Williams, and Stuart Hall called in their May Day Manifesto of 1967 for a new kind of socialist movement based on particular needs and issues; they urged us to withdraw our allegiance
from the ‘political machines’ and to ‘resume our own initiatives’ in extra-parliamentary activity.
⁴

The New Left movement has been called ‘anarchist in its deepest impulses’.
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Not all on the New Left however could be described as entirely libertarian, let alone anarchist; many like Wright Mills merely looked for reforms within a more enlightened form of capitalism. Its leaders rarely challenged the fundamental premisses of late capitalist society. Towards the end of the sixties, many New Left activists turned their backs on traditional radical theory and looked instead to Third World revolutions, especially those in Cuba and China, as model social insurrections. Yet these revolutions themselves were far from being thoroughly libertarian: Che Guevara may have been called the ‘new Bakunin’ but he emphasized the need for a vanguard party and strong leadership. Again, back in the United States, the Black Panthers reprinted Bakunin and Nechaev, yet their dominant ideology was the Third World Marxism of Mao and Frantz Fanon.

Even so, while these reformist and authoritarian strands existed, the mainstream of the New Left undoubtedly espoused many classic anarchist ideas such as workers’ control, decentralization, and direct action. They recognized like Bakunin the revolutionary potential of the marginal and
déclassé
elements in society and argued that the organization of the movement itself inevitably foreshadows the structure of the new society. Above all, they saw the need to create counter-institutions and to build the new society from the bottom up in the womb of the old.
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The anarchism of the New Left was different from its pre-war antecedents in that it was predominantly pacifist and largely existed outside strictly anarchist organizations. Crucially, it also saw feminism as a central issue. Where the main support for the old anarchist movement came from peasants and artisans, the new anarchists were principally disaffected middle-class intellectuals, especially teachers, social workers and students. As a result, there was a new emphasis on the importance of environment, culture and lifestyle.

While the New Left’s confrontation with the State deepened over the Vietnam War, a remarkable shift in consciousness occurred which came to be known as the ‘counter-culture’. Following the pioneering example of the Beats (notably Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Tuli Kupferberg and Gary Snyder), young people in the US began to challenge the lifestyle of their parents and the values of the nuclear family. Taking the advice of Timothy Leary, many dropped out and turned on to mind-expanding drugs. They began creating ‘counter-institutions’ such as communes, collectives, co-operatives, rock festivals, love-ins and sit-ins. They challenged authority
whatsoever form it took and insisted on the right to think and act for themselves. They tried to create a real community in the heart of ‘the lonely crowd’.

Although they practised different strategies, those who dwelled in the counter-culture were opposed to the modern technological, militarized, and centralized State which seemed to offer only instant death by nuclear war or gradual, lingering death by tedium in factory or office. Capitalism promised freedom and affluence, but all it seemed to deliver was bland conformity, the packaging of time and space, and boredom. Many of the young decided ‘to do their own thing’. They celebrated tolerance and diversity and sought the free satisfaction of desire. The social nature of the movement found expression in slogans like ‘Make Love, not War’ – a principle with profound social and psychological implications since it recognized the link between sexual repression and organized violence.

While not a conscious anarchist, Jerry Rubin was infected by the libertarian tendency of the counter-culture in America when he declared:

The counter-culture which erupted in America in the late 1960s has been described, not implausibly, as ‘the new anarchism’.
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Theodore Roszak, in his classic study
The Making of a Counter-Culture
(1970), specifically listed among its major sources and ingredients anarchist social theory. In his rhapsodic
Where the Wasteland Ends
(1972), he further recommended anarchism as a politics uniquely swayed by ‘organic sensibility … born of a concern for the health of cellular structure in society and a confidence in spontaneous self-regulation’. His ‘visionary commonwealth’ on the far side of the urban-industrial wasteland is a decentralized society based on the commune and neighbourhood, combining Proudhon’s economic mutualism with Kropotkin’s harmonious blend of fields and workshops.
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The counter-culture was a product of the first American youth movement
in history. The pioneers were the hippies, street people and flower children. They rejected the cultural templates of the dominant culture and tried to create their own alternative scene. Partly as a result of their ‘mind-expanding’ drug experiences — as encouraged by Aldous Huxley, Ken Kesey and Timothy Leary — they wanted to change people’s consciousness and cleanse ‘the doors of perception’. But it was also a question of change for change’s sake, or as Yippie leader Abbie Hoffman put it,
Revolution for the Hell of It.

Like the overtly political New Left movement, the counter-culture was fundamentally anarchist without being conscious of it, especially in its rejection of majority rule and its stress on the moral responsibility of the individual. The military draft became terminally emblematic of the authoritarian State in the United States, for on signing one not only pledged service to a State which was killing mindlessly and pointlessly in Vietnam, but also signed oneself over to the System in all its poisonous finery.

The counter-culture was also anarchist in its critique of the centralized and technological State and in its widespread desire to see a return to a simpler life closer to nature.
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Faced with the prospect of collusion with suburbia and the military-industrial complex, American youth set up communes and collectives in the city centres or in the country. In the midst of affluence and consumerism, they chose voluntary poverty, like Thoreau in
Walden
, like the monastics of old, preferring to go without, borrow, improvise or steal rather than work.

The counter-culture was tolerant of diversity and eclecticism. Unlike the classic anarchist thinkers, who as heirs of the Enlightenment looked to reason and science to bring about progress, the gurus of the counter-culture rejected the ‘rationality’ and ‘objectivity’ which had been so debased by the dominant culture in its attempts to justify war, poverty and injustice. The pendulum swung in the other direction, towards a reinvigorated spirituality, towards subjectivity, feelings, sensations, play, mysticism, and magic. Critical thought was often a casualty, spurned in favour of blissing out, of abdicating entirely from careful thinking.

Unlike their more politicized counterparts in the New Left, the inhabitants of the counter-culture were not, strictly speaking, revolutionary. They did not seek to overthrow the government or State but rather tried to live out their dreams on its boundaries or in its interstices.
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The counter-culture was full of contradictions. A desire to eat organic foods often coexisted with chemical experimentation with drugs. The influence of women’s liberation led to a convergence of sexual styles which encouraged androgyny (long hair, beads etc.), but in some communes traditional ‘male’ and ‘female’ roles were voluntarily adopted and accentuated. The communes also offered the apparent freedom to break with parental
values and ‘to do what you will’, but there were also strong moral pressures to conform to certain ‘alternative’ norms and values. Letting it ‘all hang out’ was not always entirely inspiring or beautiful. The ideal was the ‘together’ person, who was ‘cool’, ‘laid back’, and in control of his or her life. In practice, much of what passed for ‘freedom’ was little more than self-indulgence. The experimentation with drugs did not always put people in touch with a ‘higher reality’, more usually rendering them less energetic, duller, in the long run. Excepting a small, dogged minority, the disaffected children of the affluent soon left the underground when the money and the kicks ran out.

The counter-culture never offered a real threat to the
status quo
; many of its fashions were taken up by the market, and many of its members eventually co-opted by the dominant society and culture. The political movement of the New Left, however, did have a real, if not a lasting, effect. In the United States, student unrest burst out on the Berkeley campus of the University of California in 1964 after the authorities tried to arrest a student activist. In the ensuing struggle with the police on campus, which left many injured, the Free Speech movement was born. In the following year, students combined with local youth to occupy a vacant lot, and tried to create a ‘People’s Park’ but the police eventually ensured that the bulldozers prevailed. It marked a symbolic turning-point for those whose concern with democracy and nature led them into direct confrontation with the forces of the State.