Back to Chapter Eight | Up to the Table of Contents | Forward to Chapter Ten


CHAPTER NINE

THE LIBERTARIAN ANARCHIST ALTERNATIVE


I believe that Anarchism is the finest and biggest thing man has ever thought of; the only thing that can give you liberty and well being, and bring peace and joy to the world. 1
Alexander Berkman

The Anarchist heritage provides one of many reactions to Classical Marxism Leninism. It rebels against economism and centralism/authoritarianism, but often to a distorting extreme. As we'll see, it makes many significant contributions while also regrettably creating some new problems and leaving many old ones unaddressed.

Anarchism is a set of libertarian ideas, strategies, goals, behind which no one has yet constructed an encompassing theory. It overlaps Classical Marxism in many places while going beyond and falling short of it in others. It diametrically opposes Leninism at almost all points. It is constructed largely upon a basis of anti-authoritarian impulses. In this chapter we examine it, as espoused by its most famous 'believers', trying throughout to gather positive insights rather than to do a really thorough critique.

Anarchists believe that evolution is largely driven by people's tendencies toward mutual aid and the self-assertion of individual and social needs. They feel that the fulfillment of each brings sequentially ever greater moral goodness and joy, but they also warn that the process has countless pitfalls. They argue that history's ugliness arises when things interfere with people's otherwise natural tendencies toward sociability, thereby causing painful conflicts. The things they put highest in causing oppressive diversions from what would be an ideal flow of history are the influences of property, religion, government, hierarchy, and the existence of nation states and patriotism. And so Bakunin said:

Until now all human history has been only a perpetual and bloody immolation of millions of poor human beings in honor of some pitiless abstraction -- God, country, power of State, national honor, historical rights, judicial rights, political liberty, public welfare. 2
While Malatesta said:
We believe that most of the ills that afflict mankind stem from bad social organization, and that man could destroy them if he wished and knew how. 3
People are naturally good; they have tendencies to sociability and they want health, liberty and well being. History is an evolutionary flow toward a condition of political and economic freedom wherein social instincts are free to reign and people have the capacities to meet their own needs. The flow is exceptionally long and rocky precisely because when an impediment arises the ensuing bad conditions of "existence suppress and stifle the instincts of kindness and humanity in us, and harden us against the need and misery of our fellow man." 4 In essence the Anarchists believe that when oppression exists it is because some people's natures have become maligned by their positions in society, while other people accept their plight because they become convinced it is either just or necessary. The oppression persists because the warped people continue their unjust behavior and the downtrodden people more or less accept it ad-infinitum, or at least until they, through the reality of their situations, understand its unjustness and rebel against it.

Anarchists believe that the accumulation of property and power are one of the means by which people have almost timelessly warped their own instincts toward goodness and so have oppressed others. They feel that property and the products of human labor are all social goods which owe their existence to nature and to the social labors of countless individuals and so they feel that private ownership is a kind of theft, wherein what should really be communal is appropriated for the individual, to the detriment f all other individuals. They believe that once people have appropriated what should be owned communally, they have gained unjust advantages which they then automatically seek to defend and justify. By a vicious dynamic property and wealth become central to such people's identities and lead them to oppress others precisely in efforts to defend or to gain more power and wealth. So Bakunin says:

Much more seriously than they themselves realize, property is (their) God, their only God, which long ago replaced in their hearts the heavenly god of the Christians. And, like the latter, in days of yore, the bourgeois are capable of suffering martyrdom and death for the sake of this God. The ruthless and desperate war they wage for the defense of property is not only a war of interests: it is a religious war in the full meaning of the word. 5
Power, wealth, and authority once they appear in history march through hand in hand, creating people who oppress, and then justify and defend that state of oppression. As Berkman says:
Authority tends to make its possessor unjust and arbitrary; it also makes those subject to it acquiesce in wrong, subservient, and servile. Authority corrupts its holder and debases its victim. 6
And so Bakunin shows the relations of power and wealth to each other:
Political power and wealth are inseparable. Those who have power have the means to gain wealth and must center all their efforts upon acquiring it, for without it they will not be able to retain their power. Those who are wealthy must become strong, for, lacking power, they run the risk of being deprived of their wealth. The toiling masses have always been powerless because they were poverty stricken, and they were poverty stricken because they lacked organized power. 7
The anarchists feel, then, that the devil in history is the "power principle," the reality that once inequalities appear they tend to persist, to create and to recreate themselves over and over to the detriment of the whole of humanity's real potentials for rewarding sociability. For the anarchists once inequity arises it creates rationalizations that twist people's characters making some into oppressors and some into more or less acquiescent oppressed.
Power operates only destructively, bent always on forcing every manifestation of life into the straightjacket of its laws. Its intellectual form of expression is dead dogma, its physical form brute force. And this unintelligence of its objectives sets its stamp on its supporters also and renders them stupid and brutal, even when they were originally endowed with the best of talents. One who is consistently striving to force everything into a mechanical order at last becomes a machine himself and loses all human feeling. 8
So in the anarchist view people have instinctively good tendencies that are often sidetracked by the development of inequities and by the persistence of ignorance of the true state of things. For the anarchists law plays a very important role in the whole dynamic. It is used by those who have, to justify their relative good fortune, and to convince those who have not, that their plight is a necessary one that should be made the best of, but not actively opposed. Thus law justifies the accumulation of wealth and power, gives legitimacy to those who have it, and puts reins on those who don't. And law is believed because it is high sounding, because it appeals to what is good in people by preaching its own equity, and because within its totality it also includes all those common sense precepts of behavior that people normally accept anyhow. As Kropotkin points out:
Such was law and it has maintained its twofold character to this very day. Its origin is the desire of the ruling class to give permanence to customs imposed by themselves for their own advantage. Its character is the skillful commingling of customs useful to society, customs which have no need of law to insure their respect, with other customs useful only to rulers, injurious to the mass of the people, and maintained only by the fear of punishment. 9
So the anarchist view is one of impeded human goodness leading to oppression and the defense of oppression by power and by law. But who administers the laws and who really applies the accumulated power?
In all times and in all places, whatever be the name that the government takes, whatever has been its origin or its organization, its essential function is always that of oppressing and exploiting the masses, and of defending the exploiters and oppressors. Its principle characteristic and indispensable instruments are the policeman and the tax collector, the soldier and the prison. 10
Tendencies toward sociability are abrogated at least for a span of history and at least to a certain extent -- the state evolves. It creates, recreates, accumulates, and defends power, privilege, and wealth, and it has no other important purpose or capacity.
Every type of political power presupposes some form of human slavery for the maintenance of which it is called into being. Just as outwardly -- that is in relation to other states -- the state has to create certain artificial antagonisms in order to justify its existence, so also internally the cleavage of society into castes, ranks and classes is an essential condition of its continuation. The state is capable only of protecting old privileges and creating new ones; in that, its whole significance is exhausted. 11
The state and the whole social organization take varying forms and evolve precisely as the struggle of people's inner natures to assert themselves affects those forms and moves them ever so gradually toward political and economic equity. But in the meantime government prevails and continues by one means or another in its gruesome work. Proudhon's rather long 'catechism' of the ills of government probably best exemplifies the anarchist vehemence on the subject if not their clarity of understanding:
To be governed is to be watched over, inspected, spied upon, directed, legislated, regimented, closed in, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, assessed, evaluated, censored, commanded, all by creatures that have neither the right nor wisdom nor virtue.... To be governed means that at every move, operation, or transaction, one is noted, registered, entered in a census, taxed, stamped, priced, assessed, patented, licensed, authorized, recommended, admonished, prevented, reformed, set right, corrected. Government means to be subjected to tribute, trained, ransomed, exploited, monopolized, extorted, pressured, mystified, robbed, all in the name of public utility and the general good. Then at the first sign of resistance or word of complaint, one is repressed, despised, vexed, pursued, hustled, beaten up, garroted, imprisoned, shot, machine gunned, judged, sentenced, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed, and to cap it all, ridiculed, mocked, outraged, and dishonored. That is government, this is its justice and morality! 12
For the anarchists government is thus the administrative vehicle by which any society's most powerful wealthy groups enforce their wills over everyone else's. Thus, for anarchists, whatever economic socio-cultural form a particular society has, if there is oppression, there is also a state upholding that oppression in the interests of the rich, and to the detriment of everyone else.

In the flow of history one such social economic form that has emerged, that impeded man's natural tendencies and that preserves itself, is capitalism. Anarchists see it as a system of mass robbery wherein those who own steal from those who must sell their labor, while the state justifies and defends the whole process. They feel that under capitalism liberty is a pretense because, although people do have certain freedoms, most are not 'rich' enough, or free enough from their bosses to get any real pleasure from their freedoms. The anarchists, like the Marxists, feel that the whole of society is organized around the maintenance of ruling class wealth to the relative detriment of everyone else's situation and of all people's overall potentials for good.

They feel that capitalism's inequities cause crime and promote false ideas and they feel that the maintenance of capitalism is itself the greatest of all possible crimes because it inevitably leads to pillage, war, persecution, and hardship.

Capitalism is the greatest crime of all; ... it devours more lives in a single day than all the murderers put together. 13
The anarchists perceive that beyond its legal apparatus and its police, capitalism prevails because it sells itself to the people as something worth preserving, fighting, and even dying for. The capitalists are the burglars; the workers are the burglarized, and the state is the vehicle that forces the workers to praise their exploiters. The exploitation is accomplished by means of the laws of the state, its schools, its socialization processes and of course finally by its coercive powers.
Just now I want to tell you why the worker does not take the burglar by the neck and kick him out; that is, why he begs the capitalist for a little more bread or wages, and why he does not throw him off his back altogether. It is because the worker, like the rest of the world, has been made to believe that everything is all right and must remain as it is; and that if a few things are not quite as they should be, then it is because 'people are bad', and everything will right itself in the end, anyhow. 14
The anarchists see capitalism built on inequity, private accumulation, coercion, the power of the state, and the power of the big lie. They have no faith in the power of reform. They believe that reforming conditions to try to alleviate one problem is most often totally useless, sometimes succeeds in one area to the detriment of some other, and also often incidentally actually works to legitimate the whole system and thus do more harm then good. Malatesta talks at length of the dynamics:
The fundamental error of the reformists is that of dreaming of solidarity, a sincere collaboration between masters and servants, between proprietors and workers, which even if it might have existed here and there in periods of profound unconsciousness of the masses and of ingenuous faith in religions and rewards, is utterly impossible today.

Those who envision a society of well stuffed pigs which waddle contentedly under the ferule of the small number of swineherd; who do not take into account the need for freedom and the sentiment of human dignity: who really believe in a god that orders for his abstruse ends, the poor to be submissive and the rich to be good and charitable -- can also imagine and aspire to a technical organization of production which assures abundance to all and is at the same time materially advantageous both to the bosses and to the workers. But in reality social peace based on abundance for all will remain a dream, so long as society is divided into antagonistic classes, that is employers and employees. And there will be neither peace nor abundance. 15

The oppressed either ask for and welcome improvements as a benefit graciously conceded, recognize the legitimacy of the power which is over them, and so do more harm than good by helping to slow down or divert and perhaps even stop the processes of emancipation. Or instead they demand and impose improvements by their action, and welcome them as partial victories over the class enemy, using them as a spur to greater achievements, and thus they are a real help and a preparation to the total overthrow of privilege, that is, for the revolution. 16

Above everything else, then, anarchists are concerned with putting history back on a course aimed toward complete freedom for all. They are revolutionaries and the bulk of their writings and efforts deal with the goals they seek and the methods by which they hope to help all people reach them. Since they see human nature as basically sociable and good, anarchists envision a future society which is completely unleashed from restraint, and in which, as a result, there is the highest possible amount of material and spiritual fulfillment for all. Kropotkin says:
We already foresee a state of society where the liberty of the individual will be limited by no laws, no bonds by nothing else but his own social habits, and the necessity which everyone feels, of finding cooperation, support, and sympathy among his neighbors. 17
The anarchists believe such a thing possible precisely because they see that all history shows the only result of coercive institutions is the blocking rather than the fruition of freedom, and this because people tend to sociability naturally and are only hindered by the creation of inequity or the centralization of power. Thus as Emma Goldman says:
Anarchism is the only philosophy which brings to man the consciousness of himself, which maintains that god, the state, and society, are non-existent, that their promises are null and void, since they can be fulfilled only through man's subordination. Anarchism is therefore the teacher of the unity of life; not merely in nature, but in man. There is no conflict between the individual and the social instincts: the one the receptacle of the precious life essence, the other the repository of the element that keeps that essence pure and strong. The individual is the heart of society, conserving the essence of social life; society is the lungs, which are distributing the element to keep the life essence -- that is, the individual, pure and strong. 18
Anarchists believe societies should serve each individual's needs and aspirations as well as those of the whole collectivity. They see individual and social needs as harmonious. They thus require elimination of government, private accumulation, and all forms of socially coercive power, precisely because they believe these contribute only oppressions to the societies in which they persist. Anarchists want an end to all obstacles that stand between people and the fulfillment of their needs, and so they want communal ownership, collective participatory decision making, and activity solely through mutual agreements.
What we want, therefore, is the complete destruction of the domination and exploitation of man by man; we want man united as brothers by a conscious and desired solidarity, all cooperating voluntarily for the well being of all; we want society to be constituted for the purpose of supplying everybody with the means for achieving the maximum well being, the maximum possible moral and spiritual development; we want bread, freedom, love, and science -- for everybody. 19
The anarchists are not content solely with an attack upon the institutions of old. They believe that during history's passage people have been mutilated by their conditions and have thereby adopted countless anti-social counter productive ways of thinking and acting. And these too have no place in anarchism's future visions.
It is not only against the abstract trinity of law, religion, and authority that we declare war. By becoming anarchists we declare war against all this wave of deceit, cunning, exploitation, depravity, vice -- in a word inequality -- which they have poured into all our hearts. We declare war against their way of acting, against their way of thinking. The governed, the deceived, the exploited, the prostituted, wound above all else our sense of equality. It is in the name of equality that we are determined to have no more prostituted, exploited, deceived, and governed men and women. 20
For as Berkman points out :
Life in freedom, in anarchy, will do more than liberate man from his present political and economic bondage. That will be only the first step, the preliminary to a truly human existence. Far greater and more significant will be the results of such liberty, its effects upon man's mind, upon his personality. The abolition of the coercive external will, and with it the fear of authority, will loosen the bonds of moral compulsion no less than of economic and physical. Man's spirit will breathe freely, and that mental emancipation will be the birth of a new culture, a new humanity. 21
In essence the anarchists are concerned with creating full communism in people's minds and hearts and in their institutions, but their methods and priorities are very different from those of the Classical Marxist Leninists.

The anarchists understand that capitalism exists largely because it is accepted as just or at least necessary. They realize that "social structure rests on a basis of ideas, which implies that changing the structures presupposes changed ideas." 22 They realize that revolution is merely an excited part of evolution, an excited part of the continual flow of human relations towards conditions of universal mutual aid. And so they realize that "only that revolution can be fundamental which will be the expression of a basic change of ideas and opinions." 23 They know that revolutions break out against bad conditions and in hope of achieving better, and they know that--

Indispensable for the beginning of any revolution are, first of all, the realization of dissatisfaction with the present, the consciousness of the endlessness of this condition and of its irreparability by customary means, and finally, a readiness for risk in order to change this condition. 24
In the anarchist view revolution can proceed when there is a mass change of public ideology -- its success or failure depends upon whether the desires of the masses are translated into organic changes or merely misled or redirected into new kinds of oppression, by the use of bad tactics, by ill preparedness, by ignorances, or by treachery. And so anarchists feel the necessity to determine what should not be done lest they impede revolutionary potentials or subvert the revolution itself, and what should be done to foster revolutionary potentials and to ensure that once revolution breaks out it progresses toward full success.

Anarchist are exceptionally attentive to the possibilities of errors and to the chance of bad means subverting desired ends:

It all depends, as you see, on what your purpose is, what you want to accomplish. Your aims must determine the means. Means and aims are in reality the same; you cannot separate them. It is the means that shape your ends. The means are the seeds which bud into flower and come to fruition. The fruit will always be of the nature of the seed you planted. You can't grow a rose from a cactus seed. No more can you harvest liberty from compulsion, justice and manhood from dictatorship. 25
Let us learn this lesson well because the fate of revolution depends upon it. "You shall reap what you sow" is the acme of all human wisdom and experience. 26

The anarchist criticisms of the Bolshevik revolution are virtually merciless and the general lesson they teach is simply that motion alone is not the sole criterion of revolutionary value; rather it is motion to what end, victory with what result. And when anarchists are accosted and told they are too demanding and the pace they would set for the development of revolutionary program is too exacting they reply with no hesitation:

Maybe you think this too slow a process, a work that will take too long. Yes, I must admit that it is a difficult task. But ask yourself if it is better to build your new house quickly and badly and have it break down over your head, rather than to do it efficiently, even if it requires longer and harder work. 27
Given their overall awarenesses, the anarchists have a few very simple criteria for judging the totality of all their programs:
...that is to unite the dissatisfied elements, to promote the acquaintance of separate units or groups with the aspirations and actions of other similar groups, to help the people define more clearly the true causes of dissatisfaction, to help them define more clearly their actual enemies, removing the mask from those enemies who hide behind some decorous disguise, and finally, to contribute to the elucidation of the nearest practical goals and the means of their realization. 28
So in thinking tactically about revolution anarchists oppose the use of any tactics that inhibit revolutionary activities or foster traits which might subvert their ultimate goal. They oppose the use of centralization because it corrupts leaders and paralyzes followers, they oppose using capitalist methods and especially a new state formation because such activity would subvert and the rest of their ends, and they oppose sectarianism, arrogance, and the use of repression, and the indiscriminate use of violence because each of these fosters bad attitudes and impedes any intimations of revolutionary possibilities.

But it is easiest to let them speak for themselves about each of these points in sequence: Representatively, Rudolf Rocker says of centralism and other capitalist forms:

For the state, centralism is the appropriate form of organization, since it aims at the greatest possible uniformity in social life for the maintenance of political and social equilibrium, but for a movement whose very existence depends on prompt action at any favorable moment and on the independent thought and action of its supporters, centralism could be but a curse, by weakening its power of decision and systematically repressing all immediate action. 29

Just as the functions of the bodily organs of plants and animals cannot be arbitrarily altered, so that, for example, one cannot at will hear with his eyes and see with his ears, so one also cannot at pleasure transform an organ of social repression into an instrument for the liberation of the oppressed. The state can only be what it is: the defender of mass exploitation and social privileges, the creator of privileged classes and castes and of new monopolies. 30

And Malatesta argues on the questions of mental attitude, violence, and repression:
To the 'will to believe', which cannot be other than the desire to invalidate one's own reason, I oppose the 'will to know', which leaves the immense field of research and discovery open to us. As I have already stated, I admit only that which can be proved in a way that satisfies my reason -- and I admit it only provisionally, relatively, always in the expectation of new truths which are more true than those so far discovered. No faith then, in the religious sense of the word. 31

Violence is justified only when it is necessary to defend oneself and others from violence. It is where necessity ceases that crime begins.... The slave is always in a state of legitimate defense, and consequently his violence against the boss, against the oppressor, is always morally justifiable and must be controlled only by such considerations as that the best and most economical use is being made of human effort and human sufferings. 32

Terror has always been the instrument of tyranny.... Those who believe in the liberating effects and revolutionary efficiency of repression and savagery have the same kind of backward mentality as the jurists who believe that crimes can be prevented and the world morally improved by the imposition of stiff punishments. 33

Since anarchists believe in the necessity of creating liberated people as well as a liberated social structure, and since they believe in the critical importance of education and preparation for administering a new society, their programs generally center around activities aimed at radicalizing workers' initiatives and consciousnesses, and bettering their position to eventually take over society through expropriation and to then administer society in accord with their long accumulated firsthand knowledge. They form organizations that at least try to involve people at all levels and spread skills and information. They do lots of political education, and they prepare workers for the tasks of striking, taking the factories, and then effectively reorganizing society according to new dictates without the imposition of new central authorities.

To these ends they believe in forming industry wide workers organizations that can strike, and that prepare workers for their eventual 'administrative' roles. They believe in breaking down barriers between town and country and between intellectual and manual workers as early in the organization process as possible. Thus with regard to preparation for new conditions they say:

That reorganization will depend, first and foremost, on the thorough familiarity of labor with the economic situation of the country: on a complete inventory of the supply, on exact knowledge of the sources of raw material, and on the proper organization of the labor forces for efficient management. 34
And since the anarchists feel that it is necessary for reorganization to be from the bottom up rather than ordered by a new central authority, they feel that the revolutionary program must include means by which workers gain the personal initiative and knowledge to handle the tasks themselves.

The strengths of the anarchist perspective reside in the way that it fills some of the weaknesses of Classical Marxism Leninism: it puts more emphasis upon people's needs and natures, better grasps the role of non-material factors in history, understands authority and anti-authoritarianism better, is generally somewhat less sectarian, acknowledges as more important the roles and dynamics of institutions, work relations, and especially the state, has a more freeing tone, and puts more emphasis on the fallibility of its own practitioners and on the need for personal improvement. In essence it adds to Classical Marxism a libertarian emphasis that overthrows many of Classical Leninism's major precepts, without eliminating any of its radical content.

Anarchist weaknesses reside in shortcomings and imbalances. Anarchism puts more emphasis on individuals than does Classical Marxism but it still lacks a 'psychological model' that can be a basis for common collective tactical analyses. It critiques hierarchical authority but doesn't really offer concrete organizational alternatives. It lacks an overall theory that can be used not only to support its major general assertions, but also to help practitioners analyse new situations and further examine familiar ones. Perhaps most importantly, although it has excellent desires vis-a-vis political education, increasing popular initiatives, and improving personalities, it has little real methodology for accomplishing any such ends. It minimizes the importance of impediments and thus fails to even roughly understand them. Anarchism is a consciousness with important things to say about revolution but with little power to actually guide one's activities. It is simply too divorced from the difficulties of mass organizing/organization and motion. Criticizing centralism and realpolitik to deserved extremes, its practice and rhetoric both make clear an obvious gap concerning what should take the place of centralism and realpolitik.

Though our summary has been very concise, it has nonetheless shown that anarchism is at least as relevant to some areas of our present concern as Classical Marxism Leninism. Much could be gained by studying anarchist literature in more detail, in at least as much detail as is given for example, to the works of Classical Marxism Leninism. The one is too 'utopian', the other too 'reactionary', but both can certainly inform us. Further we might reasonably guess that whenever a new revolutionary ideology is developed it will not really so much contradict most anarchist perspectives as greatly broaden and enlighten them.

In our next chapter we show how Maoism in fact moves a bit toward synthesizing Classical Marxist Leninist strengths with complementary anarchist ones. We particularly emphasize Maoist efforts to broaden theory, broaden methodology, diminish sectarianism, overcome authoritarianism, overcome economism, and deal better with questions of personality in politics, freedom, centralization, leadership, and strategy in general, all in the context of the specific Chinese socio-political cultural pragmatic situation.


FOOTNOTES

1. Berkman, What is Communist Anarchism?, Dover.

2. Bakunin in Quotations from the Anarchists, edited by Paul Berman, Praeger Publishers.

3. Malatesta in Quotations, op. cit.

4. ibid.

5. Bakunin, The Knouto-germanic Empire, quoted in Berman, op. cit.

6. Berkman, op. cit.

7. Bakunin in Science and the Urgent Revolutionary Task, quoted in Berman, op. cit.

8. Rudolf Rocker, Anarcho-Syndicalism, London.

9. Kropotkin in Kropotkin's Revolutionary Pamphlets, M.I.T. Press.

10. Berkman, op. cit.

11. Rocker, op. cit.

12. Proudhon in Quotations, op. cit.

13. Berkman, op. cit.

14. ibid.

15. Malatesta in Vernon Richards, Malatesta's Life and Ideas, London.

16. ibid.

17. Kropotkin, op. cit.

18. Emma Goldman in Anarchism and Other Essays, Dover, New York.

19. Malatesta, op. cit.

20. Berkman, op. cit.

21. ibid.

22. Kropotkin in Quotations, op. cit.

23. ibid.

24. ibid.

25. Berkman, op. cit.

26. ibid.

27. ibid.

28. Kropotkin, op. cit.

29. Rocker, op. cit.

30. ibid.

31. Malatesta, op. cit.

32. ibid.

33. ibid.

34. Berkman, op. cit.


Back to Chapter Eight | Up to the Table of Contents | Forward to Chapter Ten

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.