Colin Ward
Colin Ward had a rather unusual request, which was to write the entry on anarchism for the ‘Dictionary of Theology and Society’ edited by Dr Paul A. B. Clarke and Professor Andrew Linzey, to be published in January 1995 by Routledge. Bearing in mind the particular needs of the kind of reader who might refer to such a work, this is what he wrote.
The word derives from the Greek anarkhia meaning without a ruler, and was used
in a derogatory sense until, in the mid-nineteenth century in France, it was
adopted in a positive way to describe a political and social ideology arguing
for organisation without government. In the evolution of political ideas,
anarchism can be seen as an ultimate projection of both liberalism and
socialism, and the differing strands of anarchist thought can be related to
their emphasis on one or the other of these aims. Historically, anarchism was a
radical answer to the question `What went wrong?’ that followed the outcome of
the French Revolution. Conservatives like Edmund Burke, liberals like Alexis de
Tocqueville, had their own responses. Anarchist thinkers were unique on the
political left in affirming that workers and peasants, grasping the chance to
overturn the result of centuries of exploitation and tyranny, were betrayed by
the seizure of centralised state power by a new class of politicians who had no
hesitation in applying violence and terror, a secret police and a professional
army to maintain themselves in power. The institution of the state was itself
the enemy. They applied the same criticism to every revolution of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries.
The main stream of anarchist propaganda for more than a century has been
anarchist-communism, which argues that property in land, natural resources and
the means of production should be held in mutual ownership by local communities,
federating for innumerable joint purposes with other communes. It differs from
state socialism and from Marxist communism in opposing any central authority
which, it has always argued, inevitably leads to governmental and bureaucratic
tyranny, enforced by terror. Anarcho-syndicalism puts its emphasis on the
organised workers who, through a social general strike, could expropriate the
expropriators and establish workers’ control of industry. Individualist
anarchism has several traditions, one deriving from the `conscious egoism’ of
the German writer Max Stirner (1806-1856) and another from a series of American
nineteenth-century thinkers who argued that in protecting our own autonomy and
associating with others only for common advantages, we are promoting the good of
all. They differed from free-market liberals in their emphasis on mutualism,
usually derived from the French anarchist Proudhon. Pacifist anarchism follows
both from the anti-militarism that accompanies rejection of the state with its
ultimate dependence on armed force, and from the conviction that any
morally-viable human society depends upon the uncoerced good will of its
members.
These, and other, threads of anarchist thought have different emphases. What
links them is their rejection of external authority, whether that of the state,
the employer, the hierarchies of administration and of established institutions
like the school and the church. The same is true of more recent varieties of
anarchist propaganda, green anarchism and anarcha-feminism. Like those who
believe that animal liberation is an aspect of human liberation, they claim that
the only ideology consistent with their aims is anarchism.
It is customary to relate the anarchist tradition to four major thinkers and
writers. The first was William Godwin (1756-1836) who in his Enquiry Concerning
Political Justice set out from first principles an anarchist case against
government, the law, property and the institutions of the state. He was an heir
both to the English tradition of radical nonconformity and to the French
philosophes, and although social historians have traced his influence on
nineteenth-century organs of working-class self-organisation, he was not
rediscovered by the anarchist movement until the 1890s.
The second was Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865), the French propagandist who
was the first person to call himself an anarchist. In 1840 he declared that
Property is Theft, but he went on to claim that Property is Freedom. He saw no
contradiction between these two slogans, since the first related to the
landowner and capitalist whose ownership derived from conquest or exploitation
and was only maintained through the state, its property laws, police and army,
while the second was concerned with the peasant or artisan family with a natural
right to a home, to the land it could cultivate and to the tools of a trade, but
not to ownership or control of the homes, land or livelihoods of others.
The third of these anarchist pioneers was the Russian revolutionary Michael
Bakunin (1814-1876), famous for his disputes with Marx in the `First
International’ in the 1870s where, for his successors, he accurately predicted
the outcome of Marxist dictatorships in the twentieth century. `Freedom without
socialism’, he said, `is privilege and injustice, but socialism without freedom
is slavery and brutality’. The last was another Russian of aristocratic origins,
Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921). His original reputation was as a physical
geographer and in a long series of books and pamphlets he attempted to give
anarchism a scientific basis. The Conquest of Bread was his manual on the
self-organisation of a post-revolutionary society. Mutual Aid was written to
confront misinterpretations of Darwinism that justified competitive capitalism,
by demonstrating through the natural history of animal and human societies that
competition within species is less significant than co-operation as a
pre-condition for survival. Fields, Factories and Workshops was his treatise on
the humanisation of work, through the integration of agriculture and industry,
of hand and brain, and of intellectual and manual education. The most widely
read of all anarchist authors, he linked anarchism both with social ecology and
with everyday experience.
Some anarchists object to the identification of anarchism with its best-known
writers. They point to the fact that its aspirations can be traced through the
slave revolts of the ancient world, the peasant uprisings of medieval Europe, in
the ideology of the Diggers in the English revolution of the 1640s and in the
revolutions in France in 1789 and 1848 and the Paris Commune of 1871. In the
twentieth century, anarchism had a role in the Mexican revolution of 1911, the
Russian revolution of 1917 and most notably in the Spanish revolution that
followed the military rising that precipitated the civil war of 1936. In all
these revolutions the fate of the anarchists was that of heroic losers.
But anarchists do not necessarily fit the stereotype of believers in some final
revolution, succeeding where the others failed, and inaugurating a new society
or utopia. The German anarchist Gustav Landauer (1870-1919) declared that `The
state is not something which can be destroyed by a revolution, but is a
condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of human
behaviour; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving
differently’.
Anarchism has, in fact, an endless resilience. Every European, North American,
Latin American and Oriental society has had its anarchist publicists,
newspapers, circles of adherents, imprisoned activists and martyrs. Whenever an
authoritarian or repressive political regime collapses, the anarchists are
there, a minority among the emerging ideologists, urging their fellow citizens
to learn the lessons of the sheer horror and irresponsibility of government. The
anarchist after Franco, in Portugal after Salazar, in Argentina after the
generals and in the Soviet Union after seventy years of suppression. For
anarchists this is an indication that the ideal of a self-organising society
based on voluntary co-operation rather than coercion is irrepressible. It
represents, they claim, a universal human aspiration.
The main varieties of anarchism are resolutely hostile to organised religion.
Blanqui’s slogan Ni Dieu ni ma te reflects their attitude, particularly in
countries like France, Italy and Spain, with long anarchist and anti-clerical
traditions. But beneath the anarchist umbrella there are specifically religious
trends. The novelist Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) preached a gospel of Christian
anarchism, especially in essays like The Kingdom of God is Within You which
profoundly influenced several generations of pacifist anarchists, as did the
social attitudes of the Society of Friends, particularly the Quaker approach to
decision-making. Similarly several of the radical tendencies in the Catholic
church, particularly the Distributist movement associated with G.K. Chesterton,
with its links with the ideology of Proudhon, or the Catholic Worker movement in
the United States, and its later equivalents in Latin America, have been
strongly attracted by some aspects of anarchist propaganda.
In India, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948) acknowledged that his campaigns
for civil disobedience in the form of non-violent non-cooperation with
government, and his hopes for self-governing village democracy built around
local food production and craft industry, derived from Tolstoy, from the
archetypal American advocate of individualist anarchism, Henry David Thoreau,
and from Kropotkin’s Fields, Factories and Workshops. His work, and that of
successors like Vinoba Bhave and Jayaprakash Narayan has been evaluated from an
anarchist standpoint by Geoffrey Ostergaard. And there are, needless to say,
Western writers who have discovered strongly anarchist elements in Taoism and
Buddhism. One of the best revaluations of the thought of Proudhon, Kropotkin and
Landauer was made by the theologian Martin Buber in his book Paths in Utopia. It
has even been suggested that anarchist movements themselves resemble `chiliastic’ or `millenarian’ religious sects.
This view has been propagated by Marxist historians, designating, for example,
rural Spanish anarchists as `primitive rebels’. More recent work by historians
and anthropologists has destroyed this interpretation. Those villagers were
found to be rational people with a realistic assessment of their situation.
But the mere mention of the millennium leads us to consider the future of
anarchist in the twenty-first century. Anarchists argue that if they are simply
a marginal curiosity in the evolution of political ideas in the twentieth
century, how do we evaluate the major political theories? Marxism may survive in
universities, but as a ruling ideology it exists only in those countries where
the army and secret police remain loyal and unintimidated by popular discontent.
The Fabian variety of socialism through nationalisation has been abandoned even
by its inheritors. The economic liberalism of the free market, even in the
world’s richest countries, creates an `underclass’ of citizens with no access to
it, while capital investment shifts around the world in search of ever cheaper
sources of labour.
From an anarchist standpoint the history of the twentieth century has been an
absolute justification of the anarchist critique of the state. It has been the
century of the totalitarian state, subverting every other form of human
organisation into organs of state power. It has consequently been the century of
total war, reaching out to enrol every last citizen into the war machine,
promoted by rivalry for markets among the great powers and by the free market in
weapons, where every local dictator is fed by the state-sponsored arms trade of
the rich nations. Similarly anarchists see the anti-clericalism of the
nineteenth-century precursors vindicated by the late-twentieth- century
re-emergence of militant religion, whether in the form of Protestant, Catholic,
Jewish, Muslim, Hindu or Sikh fundamentalism, as a justification for
persecuting, attacking and slaughtering adherents of other faiths.
Finally, they see themselves as precursors of universal yearnings for the
humanisation of work. Kropotkin urged the decentralisation of industry on a
small scale and its combination with food production for local needs, arguing
for `a new economy in the energies used in supplying the needs of human life,
since these needs are increasing and the energies are not inexhaustible’. He was
almost unique in foreseeing current issues in these terms, just as he foresaw
the history of economic imperialism in the twentieth century, leading to wars
which `are inevitable so long as certain countries consider themselves destined
to enrich themselves by the production of finished goods and divide the backward
nations up among themselves … while they accumulate wealth themselves on the
basis of the labour of others’.
A century and a half of anarchist propaganda has had no visible effect on the
world outside. But the concerns it has raised are bound to become the
overwhelming social issues of the coming century. Can humanity outgrow
nationalism and the religious loyalties that have become inextricably entangled
with it? Can we overcome differences without resort to weapons? Can we feed,
clothe and house ourselves and stay healthy without the obligation to win
purchasing power by selling our time and talent to organisations we hate? Can we
organise ourselves to gain a livelihood that does not add to the destruction of
our own environment and that of other people and other species, far away?
This series of questions is very far from the preoccupations of any political
party with the faintest hope of electoral success. Anarchists are, as they have
always been, among the people who, by raising them, condemn themselves to exile
to the fringe of political and social agitation. Rejecting both the polarities
of the voting system and the simplicities of a coup d’ ‚ tat to replace the
existing order by the imposition of a new order, the anarchists, whether they
want or not, pursue a path of permanent opposition. They stress that the history
of the twentieth century is crowded with new orders, installed and subsequently
dethroned at a vast human cost. In predicting this, the anarchists have been
steadfastly correct.
One of the most interesting and suggestive modern anarchist propagandists was
the American writer Paul Goodman (1911-1972) who wrote, later in life, that:
For me, the chief principle of anarchism is not freedom but autonomy, the
ability to initiate a task and do it one’s own way … The weakness of `my’
anarchism is that the lust for freedom is a powerful motive for political
change, whereas autonomy is not. Autonomous people protect themselves stubbornly
but by less strenuous means, including plenty of passive resistance. They do
their own thing anyway. The pathos of oppressed people, however, is that, if
they break free, they don’t know what to do. Not having been autonomous, they
don’t know what it’s like, and before they learn, they have new managers who are
not in a hurry to abdicate …
Any inquirer, chancing upon his words, will recognise that he is describing not
only the problem of anarchism but that of any liberatory ideology. The
anarchists emerge from the dilemma with rather more credit than most.
==Bibliography==
* M. Buber ”Paths in Utopia”, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1949.
* D. DeLeon ”The American as Anarchist: reflections on indigenous radicalism”, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press 1978.
* P. and P. Goodman ”Communitas: means of livelihood and ways of life” (1947), New York: Columbia University Press 1990.
* D. Goodway (editor) ”For Anarchism: history, theory and practice” London: Routledge 1989.
* P. Kropotkin ”Fields, Factories and Workshops” (1899), London:Freedom Press 1985.
* P. Marshall ”Demanding the Impossible: a history of anarchism” London: Harper Collins 1992.
* G. Ostergaard and M. Currell ”The Gentle Anarchists” Oxford: Clarendon Press 1971.
* L. Tolstoy ”Government is Violence: essays on anarchism and pacifism”, London: Phoenix Press 1990.
* C. Ward ”Anarchy in Action”, London: Allen & Unwin 1973, Freedom Press 1985.
* G. Woodcock ”Anarchism: a history of libertarian ideas and movements” Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1963
