Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (130 page)

When people are able to choose the nature of their work and control its process they do not wish to avoid it like the plague. The most important principle is that every one should be free to decide when, where and how they work. Work can only be fulfilling if it is undertaken voluntarily. The worker can hate his work in the factory, and be mentally and physically exhausted at the end of the day, but a couple of hours in his allotment in the evening can completely restore him.

As for the ‘work-shy’, it is generally the case, as Berkman pointed out, that laziness implies the right person in the wrong place. Many find little pleasure in their work simply because they do not know how to work well. In an anarchist society, there would no longer be any physical compulsion to work, and material incentives in the form of money and goods would not operate. Nevertheless, every member of the community would have the opportunity to realize his or her mental and physical potential while mixing their labour with nature. Without a rigid division and hierarchy of labour, without the tyranny of the clock and the wage system, people would be able to undertake freely the work which suits them best and remain in control of their labour and their product. As a result, it would be extremely unlikely if there were not enough able-bodied people to satisfy the basic needs and elementary comforts of the entire community.

In our post-scarcity society in the West, the need to work is far less than it was in the nineteenth century. With the development of modern technology we have now reached an era of potential abundance for all. It is no longer necessary for everyone to work, and certainly not in stultifying and degrading labour. As with the body, so with society: the health of a
free community might well be measured by the number of ‘parasites’ it could support as an organism without going under. So-called loafers, idlers, wastrels and good-for-nothings should all have their place in the sun. Apart from excluding the young, the elderly and the infirm, it is a mean principle which says that a person who does not work cannot eat. In an anarchist society based on voluntary and integrated labour, there would room for
homo ludens
as well as
homo faber
. Work would finally lose its coercive character and be transformed into meaningful play; it would no longer involve suffering but become a joyful and graceful affirmation of life.

A major criticism of anarchism is that by refusing to participate in traditional politics, its adherents are inevitably left out in the cold. In general, it is undoubtedly anti-political in the traditional sense, in that it does not offer a specific programme of political change but a platform for personal and social liberation. As a result of their rejection of parliamentary and representative government, anarchists have tended to remain on the fringe of organized politics. In their refusal to compromise they may have maintained their theoretical purity, but they have also been practically ineffective, condemned to wallow in the political doldrums. Whether it be in one-party States or pluralist democracies, political parties have now become an almost universal demand. But what for many democrats is seen as a practical weakness can also be a theoretical strength. The anarchists remain the conscience of the Left, offering a profound critique of authority and power and holding up the combined ideals of equality and freedom. They are the most persistent critics of the Left and Right, and offer a third, largely untried path, to freedom.

Not all anarchists however are uncompromising. Even though they do not see a solution in parliamentary politics in the long run, some anarchists are prepared to support democratic movements if they think they are going in a libertarian direction. Godwin was in theory a republican, but in practice a Whig. Proudhon became a deputy in the National Assembly during the 1848 Revolution. Bakunin urged the boycott of elections not as a principle but as a strategy. And in Spain, many anarchists voted in the 1936 elections for the Popular Front and some of their leaders were prepared to become ministers in the Republican government in order to fight Franco’s rebels. Since then, Paul Goodman has argued that a general election can be an educational experience and approved of voting for candidates committed to particular policies. Many anarchists are prepared to engage in local rather than national politics, since to do so is in keeping with their views on decentralization and autonomy.

Whether to use violence or not to achieve their aims has also divided anarchists. Some in the past have advocated terrorism as a last resort while others have been absolute pacifists. In its purest form, anarchism stands for peace and freedom while governments and States perpetrate violence and disorder. However, most anarchists have made a distinction between the violence of the oppressor and the violence of the oppressed, and have justified the use of revolutionary violence as a legitimate weapon with which to resist and eventually overthrow the organized violence of the State. A revolution is by its very nature one of the most violent processes in history, even if it remains relatively bloodless.

In the nineteenth century, anarchist thinkers vacillated on the question of violence. Godwin hoped to bring about gradual and peaceful change through education and enlightenment, but he felt that man was not yet sufficiently rational to be able to persuade an assailant to drop his sword through the mere use of reason. While Proudhon countenanced revolution and participated in the 1848 Revolution, he directed most of his energies to building up alternative institutions. Bakunin more than any other anarchist thinker celebrated the ‘poetry of destruction’, but he was opposed to arbitrary violence and isolated acts of terrorism. Kropotkin always preferred reason to the sword, and eventually favoured evolution rather than revolution to bring about social change, yet still he refused to condemn terrorists. Only Tolstoy and Gandhi were strict pacifists, although the latter felt that it was better to fight than to refuse to bear arms out of cowardice.

Following the Civil War of the Spanish Revolution, the carnage of the Second World War, and the continued threat of nuclear annihilation, an increasing number of anarchists have adopted a reformist and gradual approach to change. They are still prepared to take direct action, but in a non-violent way. They have recognized with Tolstoy and Gandhi that means cannot be separated from ends; they are ends-in-the-making. As activists in the 1968 Paris rebellion observed: ‘The revolutionary organization has to learn that it cannot combat alienation through alienated forms.’
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It is as impossible to create a free society by using coercive means as it is to use violence in order to bring about lasting peace.

Rather than attempting a violent confrontation with the State, which only leads to more repression, many modern anarchists seek like Gustav Landauer to make it obsolete by forming new relationships and institutions. By changing themselves, they change the character of social relationships. Since government is founded on opinion, as Godwin and Tolstoy observed, it will only wither away when enough people believe that it is unnecessary and withdraw their support. Such a process will inevitably be long and gradual, especially as many authoritarian values have been internalized and people are brought up to be dependent on bosses and rulers. But an
anarchist society will only be achieved when society consists of anarchists; liberation will occur only when individuals have liberated themselves.

Despite the dominant authoritarian trend in existing society, most contemporary anarchists therefore try and extend spheres of free action in the hope that they will one day become the mainstream of social life. In difficult times, they are, like Paul Goodman, revolutionary conservatives, maintaining older traditions of mutual aid and free enquiry when under threat. In more auspicious moments, they move out from free zones until by their example and wisdom they begin to convert the majority of people to their libertarian vision. Aware mat the political is the personal, they work from their particular situation, but they do not rest there. Part of the whole, they reach out to embrace humanity, transcending State boundaries and cultural barriers alike.

Anarchists now recognize that there are many rooms in the communal house of change and that there is no clear-cut distinction between reform and revolution: revolution after all is merely accelerated evolution. They therefore support all movements which seem to be headed in a libertarian direction. They seek to dismantle power pyramids and develop networks of co-operation. They build alternative institutions: free schools, which encourage learning by desire and respond to individual needs; factories based on the principles of self-management and workers’ control; housing associations and communes which pool resources and share skills and conviviality. They try and develop a counter-culture which overcomes the split between science and art, reason and imagination, mind and body. They are concerned with the here and now, not merely with a mythical future; they are unwilling to postpone pleasure indefinitely.

With the collapse of anarcho-syndicalism as a major movement in the 1930s, it seemed for a time that anarchism would remain more of a personal philosophy than a social force. All that was changed with the resurgence of anarchism in the fifties and sixties. In India, the
Sarvodaya
movement attempted to develop Gandhi’s vision of a decentralized society of self-sufficient, self-governing village republics. The popular revolution in Hungary in 1956 threw up workers’ councils on the anarchist pattern. Many of the chief preoccupations of the New Left — such as participatory democracy, decentralization, workers’ control and self-management — were central anarchist themes. The uprising in France in 1968, which was largely anarchist in character, provided an unprecedented example of a large-scale revolutionary struggle in late capitalist, late twentieth-century Europe. It was this event, coupled with the widespread resurgence of anarchism among the young throughout the world, which obliged historians of anarchism to add postscripts to their books admitting that they had been too hasty in announcing the demise of the movement.

Anarchism today is still very much a living and vibrant tradition. In the West anarchist individualism has inspired much of the thinking on the libertarian Right On the Left, socialism has had to develop in a libertarian direction, to concern itself with personal freedom as well as social equality in order to retain its appeal.

In Eastern Europe, the Marxist-Leninist States have collapsed from their own internal contradictions and failure to win popular support. The old centralized bureaucracies have been dismantled and there has been a renewed call for fundamental freedoms. The success of the massive demonstrations for freedom and democracy in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Poland in the 1980s demonstrated the efficacy of the anarchist tactic of non-direct action and the general strike. Even in the republics of the former Soviet Union the role of the State is being discussed critically once again, with the leading role of the Communist Party roundly rejected. The student-inspired democracy movement which flourished all too briefly in China in 1989, with its call for autonomous unions and freedom of speech and assembly, was strongly libertarian. Before the tanks finally rolled into the centre of Peking, it provided a remarkable example of spontaneous popular organization without leaders. While the main thrust of the recent social movements in former Communist States has undoubtedly been towards greater democracy, not all wish to imitate the capitalist West. Many seek to reconstruct a form of libertarian socialism with a human face in the crumbling ruins of Marxist-Leninist centralism.

Anarchism might reject many of the realities of twentieth-century social and economic organization, but the signs are that it will help form and be in tune with those of the twenty-first century. It is totally opposed to the highly industrialized, centralized and militarized modern States. It is not committed to economic growth and consumerism. It does not want to exploit people and other species and destroy and pollute the environment. On the contrary, it poses personal autonomy against remote bureaucracies, the organic community against mass society, the balanced integration of town and country against rural deprivation and urban anomie, human relations inspired by trust and solidarity against those based on fear and self-interest. It wishes to end psychological dependence and social injustice so that all can develop the full harmony of their being.

Ever since the furious dispute between Marx and Bakunin which led to the schism in the international labour movement and the demise of the First International, Marxists have lost no opportunity to criticize anarchism as a puerile and extravagant dream. Most Marxists have taken their cue from
George Plekhanov who asserted at the end of the last century that anarchism is a kind of ‘bourgeois sport’ and argued that ‘in the name of revolution, the Anarchists serve the cause of reaction; in the name of morality they approve the most immoral acts; in the name of individual liberty they trample under foot all the rights of their fellows’.
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Lenin at least derided Plekhanov’s ‘Philistine’ and ‘clumsy’ dissertation on the theme that an anarchist cannot be distinguished from a bandit. He also criticized him for completely ignoring the ‘most urgent, burning, and politically most essential issue’ in the struggle against anarchism, namely the relation between the Revolution and the State.
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Yet although Lenin agreed with the anarchists that it was necessary ‘to smash the bourgeois State’, he still called for the dictatorship of the proletariat in a centralized State and dismissed anarchism along with other forms of left-wing communism as an ‘infantile disorder’.
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In similar vein, the historian Alexander Gray damned anarchists when he declared magisterially: ‘Anarchists are a race of highly intelligent and imaginative children, who nevertheless can scarcely be trusted to look after themselves outside the nursery pen.’
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