This essay was prepared by the Black Rose Bookshop Collective for presentation at the Australian Anarchist Centenary Celebrations Conference held in May 1986 in Melbourne. Only about half of this essay was presented at the allocated conference session. It was originally written with publication in mind, but due to the constant pressures of the collective project, publication never occurred. Now at last you can read the full text of this important assessment of the state, structure and direction of the anarchist movement in Australia.The present Black Rose collective should not be held responsible for the content of this essay, as the collective has totally changed in membership. Some traditions, practices and strategies are continued by the present Black Rose Collective.
John Englart
We and a great deal of others recognise that this society is in a very bad state. Virtually wherever one looks one can see oppression, injustice, alienation and destruction of the environment. Men oppress women. Oppression of Lesbians and gays. People sell their time in alienated wage labour and buy it back as alienated leisure. Land is continuously stolen from aborigines. Forests are vandalised for profits. And moving in the background is the endless marching towards global war. Merely to mention the social ills of our time is to evoke the misery and frustration this society creates. All this presents a picture of a sick society stumbling to its doom. In creating anarchy, we have our work cut out for us.
Compounding the situation are people's attitudes towards how to make a better society. Most people, if they even see a solution, see it in terms of better government rather than no government, and most of these people do nothing but complain. A sense of apathy and hopelessness pervades the discussion of social issues. While some people don't care, others feel that the problems are so large that as individuals there is nothing which can be done. These attitudes of apathy and hopelessness are obviously one of the effects of the alienation our society creates, but within themselves they also recreate the social alienation. Many people who recognise the problems of our society alienate themselves even more through an over-indulgence of television. Television reinforces the status quo through its content, expands the fetish for commodities, and keeps people barricaded at home away from the rest of society. But even more dangerous is the social inactivity caused by an over-indulgence with drugs, especially heroin.
We have all seen the breakdown of personal relationships caused by people needing something to "help them along". A reliance on drugs is another commodity relation and is incredibly destructive for people like ourselves who see the need to organise and create new social relations. Heroin, in particular, can be very enticing when one has been abused by society or when one rejects that society altogether. But heroin is not a radical alternative. It must be seen as another form of social control which negates and alienates the radical tendencies in people who otherwise may have the energy and vision to become active in the anarchist movement. We have all seen this happen too many times to be unconcerned with its effects upon our movement as a whole.
Despite this, the people still struggle and the rulers respond. While co-option is the favoured tactic in Australia today, repression is still available to them if they judge it more effective. Any campaign which cannot be swallowed whole by the Labor Party and turned against its supporters is either locked out of mainstream politics or physically attacked. This in turn provides more reasons for people to give up in despair.
As an anarchist movement, we face problems which are specific to ourselves. The worst of which is the general negative attitude of people towards the idea of anarchy. The idea has been blackened by denigration and its supposed equivalence with chaos. Our reputation has been tarnished by the fact that in most places and at most times there has been a minority of people who advocated violence to certain degrees. This orientation towards violence appears to many people to be the most common or only aspect of anarchy. This view is constantly reinforced in the status quo through the media, television, and education systems.
At the bottom of this problem and what is at stake is a view of human nature. It is not the word anarchy which frightens people, it is the idea of life without government. Society is taught and people believe that it is human nature to be greedy, cruel, competitive, and aggressive. It is therefore necessary for government to restrain us all in our own best interests.
Without government, goes the popular wisdom, life would be nasty, brutish, and short. In this light it is easy to see why we are regarded as mad bombers by people who have never heard of us. All political movements of any significance in modern times have experimented with terrorism at some stage. However, only anarchism has had terrorism defined as its essence. The mass subconscious saw the individual anarchists, the enrages, of the late 19th century confirming their own fears of freedom and revealing the shape of things to come. Despite our best endeavours and the passage of a century we are still saddled with that burden. The problem of anarchism being seen as intrinsically negative must be overcome. Considerable work needs to be done to raise awareness of what anarchism stands for both inside and outside the movement.