WEEK 11: ANARCHISM

WEEK 11: ANARCHISM
1. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: the meaning ordinarily attached to the word “anarchy” is absence of principle, absence of rule; consequently, it has been regarded as synonymous with disorder;
2. George Woodcock: the stereotype of the anarchist is that of the cold-blooded assassin who attacks with dagger or bomb the symbolic pillars of established society; anarchy, in popular parlance, is malign chaos;
3. Proudhon: anarchism reflects a natural harmony among freely associated individuals that renders political rule superfluous;
4. To create anew, anarchists must destroy; to promote harmony, they foment revolution; to reorder society, they free individuals; to realize freedom, they stress moral law;
5. Emma Goldman: it [anarchism] is the philosophy of the sovereignty of the individual. It is the theory of social harmony;
6. Ulrike Heider’s Janus-face anarchism: one face represents the extension of liberals’ principle of individual freedom to its furthest point where personal integrity supersedes government authority; the other refers to nonauthoritarian socialists who refuse to impose a proletarian dictatorship during the transition from capitalism to socialism; when seen together, they suggest that anarchism offers an alternative to liberal capitalism and to authoritarian socialism;
7. AccordinG to John p. Clark anarchism is:
1. A view of an ideal, noncoercive, nonauthoritarian society;
2. A criticism of existing society and its institutions based on this authoritarian ideal;
3. A view of human nature that justifies the hope for significant progress toward the ideal;
4. A strategy for change, involving immediate institution of noncoercive, nonauthoritarian, and decentralized alternatives;
8. Emma Goldman: anarchism stands for direct action, the open defiance of, and resistance to, all laws and restrictions, economic, social, and moral. But defiance and resistance are illegal. Therein, lays the salvation of man. Everything illegal necessitates integrity, self-reliance, and courage. In short, it calls for free, independent spirits, for “man who are men, and who have a bone in their back which you cannot pass your hand through.

Individual Anarchism
1. Although anarchists’ emphases on the individual and society vary, their common concern is with individual freedom as “moral self-direction;”
2. Following Berlin: since positive liberty opens the door to authoritarianism, anarchism can only fall on the negative liberty side of Berlin’s conceptual dichotomy;
3. Crowder: Yet, behind anarchists’ attack on authority is the principle of the inviolability of self-direction by the authentic rational and moral will; anarchists hold a concept of positive liberty for which negative liberty is a necessary precondition and which precludes all authoritarian impulses;
4. Anarchists’ attack on the notion of government: according to William Godwin, governments
1. protect inequalities of property that sustain an economically dependent class—such dependence undermines moral freedom;
2. governmental laws undermine citizens’ moral capacities—the fear of punishment is a demeaning one;
3. when citizens grant authority to government, they also agree to suspend their judgment;
5. Godwin’s ideal individual is subject only to the “coercion” of consistence; society has a right to require everything that is my duty to do, and it, in turn, is bound to do everything that can contribute to its members’ welfare;
6. Rational persuasion takes the place of legal codes; this internal corrective suffices unless society corrupts reason, obscuring the nature of virtuous action and undermining human motivation to pursue it;
7. Max Stirner stresses individual independence to an even greater extend, at time denying any reality beyond the self: I start from a hypothesis by taking myself as hypothesis; I use it solely for my enjoyment and satisfaction; I exist only because I nourish myself;
8. Stirner: family, church, party, and nation are ghosts that haunt us from birth, and all of us fight a lifelong battle to assert ourselves against them;
9. Henry David Thoreau’s Essay on Civil Disobedience: that government is best which govern least, that government is best which governs not at all;
10. When they are not directly serving the state, people continue to support its authority indirectly through numerous acts of habitual conformity;
11. Thoreau: the only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think truly right;
12. Yet, the question is: how will the free individuals combine to form a harmonious society? According to individualist anarchists, social harmony is part of the natural order of things and is accessible to human reason; individualist anarchists tend to give moral principles a foundation in reason;
13. Proudhon: in a given society, the authority of man over man is inversely proportional to the stage of intellectual development which that society has reached; he proposes mutualism as a principle of reciprocal respect that bases economic exchanges on equal value, as a viable alternative, because it adequately balances individual freedom and natural or moral law.

Social Anarchism
1. Marx and Mikhail Bakunin disagreed in four related issues:
1. The relationship between politics and economics: Bakunin praises Marx’s historical materialist method; yet, he disagrees with Marx on which between the economic revolution and the political revolution will precede the other; Bakunin attacks Marx’s “people’s State;” so long as political power exists, there will be ruler and ruled, masters and slaves, exploiters and exploited;
2. Bakunin’s doubts about the “people’s State” should be seen in the historical context—that of tsarist Russia—The question: if the proletariat is to be the ruling class, over whom will it rule? The answer: over the peasant rabble;
3. Bakunin defends the peasantry against “learned” Socialists’ claims to possess superior knowledge; Bakunin places his faith in the people themselves; scientific theories cannot predict when the revolution will occur; nor can it be organized from above; anarchist revolution arises spontaneously in the hearts of the people; it comes like a thief in the night; it is often precipitated by apparently trivial causes; it creates new forms of free social life which arise from the very depth of the soul of the people;
4. Bakunin wants to diffuse science among people, not to impose it upon them; the revolutionary leaders are invisible pilots or the midwifes to the people’s self-liberation, not a Marxist communist party or Leninist party vanguard; Bakunin’s revolution: masses organize a society by means of a free federation from below upward, of workers’ associations first into a commune, then a federation of communes into regions, of regions into nations, and of nations into an international fraternal association;
5. Petyr Kropotkin (challenging Darwin) argues that the evolution of species occurs via the mutual aid between them; Kropotkin: the modern state destroys “particular bonds” and absorbs “social functions” in order better to control its citizens; thus, the unbridled, narrow-minded individualism is an effect rather than the cause of the modern liberal state;

Anarchist Organization in Practice
1. Anarchist acts are less prominent today since anarchists have recognized their limitations;
2. Anarcho-syndicalism, rather than settle for social democratic reforms, they are willing to engage in direct action, including general strikes and industrial sabotage, to gain control of factories and cities;
3. Most anarchists today advocate nonviolent, direct action and stress the need for changes in everyday life, especially work and family relations;
4. They no longer advocate senseless violence; instead, they hope with a dramatic act—a clear direct NO to authority—to inspire the masses to revolution;
5. Three examples:
1) the Iroquois Confederacy;
2) Spanish Civil War; and
3) Anarcho-feminism from the Sixties.

The future of anarchism
1. The cases of the Iroquois Confederacy provides evidence that, under certain circumstances, nonhierarchical organization can persist alongside authoritarian institutions;
2. Anarchists today are transforming the philosophical and political assumptions of classical anarchy whose two questionable philosophical assumptions about human nature, according to Crowder were: 1) human beings actualize an innate potential historically; and 2) humanity evolves through mutual aid institutions;
3. Since many people now question whether moral virtues are knowable through human reason as well as whether humanity is progressing toward any predetermined goal, Crowder claims that these anarchist commitments require reconsideration;
4. Todd May identifies postmodern critiques of representation as the latest extension of anarchist philosophy; anarchists’ own principles require that no one speak or act on behalf of anyone else—let alone Mankind;
5. The rise of global capitalism suggests a need to rethink anarchist politics, especially the relationship between anarchism and socialism; Mark Rupert: contemporary transnational protests of global capitalism and culture often draw on anarchist as well as socialist principles;
6. Rupert shows how during the 1999 protests of the WTO meetings in Seattle anarchists’ decentralized and pluralistic networks of resistance can join socialists’ theory of the emancipatory possibilities in the concrete circumstances of contemporary capitalism;
7. According to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, the Seattle protests marked the emergence of a new proletariat, who will conduct the new—and continuing—struggle for global citizenship and global justice; they name this political subject THE MULTITUDE to distinguish it from Marxists’ industrial working class and liberals’ rights-bearing citizens, both of which are confined to particular historical contexts;
8. Unlike a more orthodox concept of an international proletarian class whose mutual goal and primary purpose is the overthrow of capitalism, the multitude is a fragmented, heterogeneous, and spontaneous series of movements that emerge on behalf of a global humanity;
9. These various popular movements are not opposed to globalization itself, but to the nondemocratic character it currently takes due to the dominance of capitalist interests.