Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (126 page)

Violence always produces the results of violence. The result in the victim is either resentful hostility, leading ultimately to counter-violence, or abject subjection. In the perpetrator, it encourages a habit of brutality and a readiness to resort to further violence. A violent revolution is therefore
unlikely to bring about any fundamental change in human relations.

There has therefore been a highly ambivalent attitude to violence and revolution in the anarchist tradition. All anarchists have recognized the State as perpetrating ‘organized violence’, and most have taken part in anti-militarist agitation and opposed wars between States. But there has been a terrorist wing of anarchism, as well as a pacifist wing, and the defenders of minimum use of violence have probably predominated.
³³
Bakunin and Kropotkin both accepted the violence of a popular uprising, believing that it differed from the violence of the State since it benefited the poor and powerless and would lead to a free society. In addition, they would have been unable to carry out the widespread expropriation they advocated without recourse to some violence against property and persons. They defended their position by a kind of ‘just war’ theory which accepts the discriminate use of violence as a regrettable necessity for a just end.

When the opportunity to put his theory into action occurred during the Spanish Civil War, the anarchist Buenaventura Durruti did not shrink from executing landowners. Like Proudhon and Bakunin, he felt it was necessary to destroy the old world in order to create anew:

All anarchists look forward to a peaceful and non-violent society, even those who see it as necessary to use violence to end the violence of the State with its coercive apparatus of police, army and prisons. They are not naive. They see like Hobbes that the force of the State rests on the sword and observe that in time of war and social conflict the State comes into its own and reveals its violent nature. They see the State claiming a monopoly of violence in society, with its wars as mass murder, its soldiers as assassins, its conscription as slavery, and its taxation as physical aggression. They are repelled by the inhumanity of the State’s mass executions and deportations and the cruel absurdity of war which it unleashes upon the world.

Anarchists also recognize that violence is not only physical force but constitutes the foundation of institutionalized forms of domination. As Alexander Berkman pointed out the lawful world is itself violent: ‘our entire life is built on violence or fear of it. From earliest childhood you are subjected to the violence of parents or elders. At home, in school, in the office, factory, field, or shops, it is always someone’s
authority
which keeps you obedient and compels you to do his will.’
³⁵
People are so invaded and violated that they subconsciously revenge themselves by invading and violating others over whom they have authority. Indeed, the word violence comes from the
Latin
violare
and etymologically means violation. Strictly speaking, to act violently means to treat others without respect All forms of domination are inherently disrespectful and violent — economical exploitation, political authoritarianism, as well as sexual and racial discrimination.

Given the anarchists’ respect for the sovereignty of the individual, in the long run it is non-violence and not violence which is implied by anarchist values. As April Carter has written: ‘The utopianism of anarchism logically entails also the utopianism of pacifism, in the sense of rejecting all forms of organized violence.’
³⁶
Unfortunately, the association of anarchism with violence, both in a brief period of its history, and in the popular imagination, has left a dilemma for its adherents. On the one hand, its reputation for illegality has undoubtedly attracted certain individuals who are interested in mindless violence for its own sake. On the other, its philosophical rigour and idealism appeal to those who are most repelled by indiscriminate acts of violence.

The nineteenth-century anarchists were part of the tradition of revolutionary violence forged by the success of the American and French Revolutions. In this they were at one with the Jacobins, the followers of Mazzini and Garibaldi, the Russian populists and the Marxists who saw non-violence as either ineffectual or as objectively supporting the existing order. Engels spoke on behalf of most socialist revolutionaries when he wrote:

The Russian and Spanish Revolutions saw the last great outbursts of anarchist violence on a large scale. Since the Second World War, the modern anarchist movement, inspired by Tolstoy, Gandhi and de Ligt, has tended to be non-violent and constructive. Most anarchists recognize that not only do the means influence the ends, but means are ends-in-the-making. In a nuclear era of total war, anarchists have tried to undermine the State by refusing to obey or co-operate with its immoral demands. They seek to create free zones and libertarian institutions rather than to overthrow the State in a cataclysmic revolution. To raise consciousness and challenge authorities, they have adopted a whole range of tactics from passive to active non-violent resistance, including demonstrations, boycotts, strikes, sit-ins, occupations, and refusing to pay taxes.
³⁸
They hope to change the public opinion on which the legitimacy of the State rests so that people will come to realize that it is not only harmful but also unnecessary. They see like
Godwin that government is founded on opinion as well as the sword: if enough people stop believing that it is right for the State to use violence, the moral authority of the State will disintegrate, and the sword will become useless.

While their long-term goal is to replace the State by a federation of self-managing communes, contemporary anarchists are not content to dream of a mythic future. They try and change their lives here and now. As such, the strategy of most anarchists of ‘dropping out’ to create an alternative lifestyle is closer to Stirner’s view of insurrection rather than Bakunin’s view of revolution:

This does not mean that some anarchists are not prepared to take to the streets and even raise barricades, as in May 1968 in France. Anarchists also joined in the riot against the Poll Tax in London in March 1990. But the vast majority of modern anarchists prefer, like the Provos in Holland, to provoke rather than to destroy, they choose to work in the Green, peace and women’s movements, not underground. After their somewhat apocalyptic past, they have come to realize the ultimate folly of trying to realize peaceful ends through violent means. Violence is undoubtedly the method of the ignorant and the weak, and the more enlightened people become, the less they will resort to compulsion and coercion.

T
HE
RIVER
OF
ANARCHY
which has flowed continuously since ancient times — sometimes fitfully, sometimes at flood level — has carried a wide variety of theories and movements to the far corners of the earth. As a political philosophy, anarchism not only questions many of the fundamental ideas and values by which most people have lived their lives, but also offers a trenchant, empirical critique of existing practices. It seeks to create a society without government or State, a non-coercive, non-hierarchical world in which fully realized individuals associate freely with one another.

As a movement, anarchism has only partially realized its aims on a large scale for brief periods at times of social upheaval, but it has gone a long way in creating alternative institutions and transforming the everyday life of many individuals. It has a whole range of strategies to expand human freedom right here and now. As a result, it has an immediate and considerable relevance to contemporary problems as well as to future well-being. It provides a third and largely untried path to personal and social freedom beyond the domain of the tired social models of State-orchestrated capitalism or socialism.

Although anarchism offers an interpretation of both history and society, it cannot be called a ‘political’ theory in the accepted sense since it does not concern itself with the State. It calls for non-participation in politics as conventionally understood, that is the struggle for political power. It places the moral and economic before the political, stressing that the ‘political’ is the ‘personal’. If anything, it wishes to go beyond politics in the traditional sense of the art or science of government.

Political theorists usually classify anarchism as an ideology of the extreme Left. In fact, it combines ideas and values from both liberalism and socialism and may be considered a creative synthesis of the two great currents of thought. With liberalism, it is wary of the State and shares a concern for the liberty of the individual. Like liberals, anarchists stress the liberty of choice, the liberty to do what one likes. They advocate the freedom of enquiry, of thought, of expression, and of association. They call for
tolerance and forbearance in relations with others and are opposed to force and dogma. They assume that if people are left to pursue their natural desires and interests, the general well-being will result.

At the same time, anarchism like liberalism is suspicious of centralized bureaucracy and concentrated political authority. It recognizes that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. It is fearful of the triumph of mediocrity and the tyranny of the majority. It calls for social pluralism and cultural diversity. It echoes Alexis de Tocqueville’s ideal of liberty and community and J. S. Mill’s celebration of individuality. In many of these values, anarchism links up with the libertarian Right.

Unlike liberalism, however, anarchism extends the principle of freedom to the political as well as the economic sphere, confident that a natural harmony of interests will prevail if people are left to themselves. It is opposed to the State, believing that freedom cannot be achieved
through
the State, but only
from
the State.
¹
It rejects the need for a constitution or social contract to set up government. It goes beyond the liberal justification of law to establish rights, to protect freedom and to solve disputes. Where liberals rely on the rule of law established through parliament and political parties, the anarchists argue that such institutions are not the bulwark but the grave of genuine freedom. They see no need for the government to defend society against external threat or internal dissension. They do not want to limit the powers of the State, but to dissolve them altogether. Where the principle attributed to Jefferson ‘That government is best which governs least’ is liberal, the anarchists join Thoreau in saying ‘That government is best which governs not at all.’

At the same time, mainstream anarchism contains many elements of socialism. As Malatesta wrote liberalism is ‘a kind of anarchy without socialism’ whereas true anarchy is based on a socialist concern with the equality of conditions.
²
Since the 1840s anarchism has usually been seen as part of a wider socialist movement. It embraces the socialist critique of capital, property and hierarchy, and stresses the need for solidarity and mutual aid. It is closer to Marxism than democratic socialism in so far as it recognizes that sudden change may be necessary and that the State should ultimately wither away. Both look forward to a free and equal society. Anarchism differs from Marxism however in its scrupulousness about the means required to reach such a society — it rejects political parties and the parliamentary road to socialism as well as the establishment of any form of workers’ State. It stresses that means cannot be separated from ends, and that it is impossible to use an authoritarian strategy to achieve a libertarian goal.