Anarchism

« view that people ought to prefer their own self-interest to any other principle of conduct, was first developed in ananarchist direction by the Young Hegelian Stirner .

Extending Feuerbach's argument against religion to strike at all notions of ‘the sacred', Stirner ( 1845 ) argues that people's potential for self-realization is impeded by the very idea of ethical obligation.

Among the various ‘spooks' that restrict our lives at present, the state, with its demand forobedience, is one of the most oppressive.

The state is not the sacred institution we suppose it to be, but merely anespecially pervasive agency of violence and coercion.

Self-interest demands that we dismantle it.

These argumentsmay be challenged on many points.

For example, the anarchist arguments based on natural law and natural rightsmay be thought to illustrate some familiar problems with those doctrines, such as the apparent arbitrariness of thecontent attributed to them (see Natural law §5 ).

Kropotkin does not adequately justify his emphasis on mutual aid rather than competition; Rothbard's natural rights are narrowly defined to exclude the possibility of ‘positive' rightsto welfare assistance of the kind historically associated with government intervention.

More generally, all theseanarchist arguments may be accused of a certain one-sidedness.

Taken by themselves, the anarchists' criticisms ofthe state are often powerful, but their attacks are seldom balanced by any fair consideration of points ingovernment's favour.

The tendency is to set out a vivid catalogue of the evils of which the state is capable, and toleave the argument at that.

3 Types of anarchy After the attack on the state, the next step in the anarchist case is the presentation of some account of the stateless society as a desirable alternative.

The general pictureanarchists present varies from case to case; their different grounds of opposition to government imply differentvalues to be promoted in anarchy.

At one extreme is Kropotkin's vision of a society characterized by voluntarymutual aid, at the other Stirner's conception of a ‘union of egoists' in which the only constraints on people'sconduct will be the limits of their personal power.

A major source of contrast between different anarchies is theissue of how goods should be distributed.

Roughly speaking, the classical tradition argues for the rejection orrestriction of private property; the individualist school defends it, looking to market exchange as its central model ofsocial relations.

The dominant view in the classical tradition is Kropotkin's ‘communist' anarchism, which requiresdistribution according to need (see Communism ).

At the other end of the spectrum, contemporary individualists like Rothbard reject virtually all restrictions on the operation of the market, and are happy to accept the label ‘anarcho-capitalist'.

On this view, even services traditionally performed by governments, such as law enforcement anddefence, should be voluntarily purchased from private suppliers.

An intermediate position is occupied by Proudhon's‘mutualism' (see Proudhon, P.-J. ), under which goods are to be distributed by free contract, with the strong qualification that prices be fixed according to units of labour-time.

The good society would thus be one in which allwould work, and each (assuming roughly equal abilities and industry) would receive roughly similar rewards(Proudhon 1923 ).

The many difficulties faced by all of these schemes lead to a general problem with conceptions of anarchy, that of how to ensure social order in the absence of the familiar enforcement machinery of the state.

Hereagain there are several different proposals.

Confronted by the problem of crime, most classical anarchists firstsuggest that there will be very much less crime in the absence of private property and its associated inequalities.But assuming the likelihood of at least occasional criminal acts and, more generally, interpersonal disputes, they partcompany over the best response.

For some, such problems will be solved by an eventual universal convergence ofethical judgment brought about by either or both of the following: (1) the release (especially through revolutionarycomradeship) of natural feelings of solidarity hitherto suppressed by artificial state-imposed divisions; (2) animprovement in rational understanding of ethical obligations resulting from advances in the natural and socialsciences.

A second response to the problem of order is the device of public censure, under which people will bebrought into line by the pressure of public opinion.

Third, some individualists are happy to endorse a system ofcourts and coercive enforcement, as long as this is maintained by voluntarily paid subscription.

4 Theories of transition A perennial difficulty in anarchist thought is the question of how society can pass from the existing state system, apparently well entrenched, to the future stateless order.

It was principally on this point that the anarchistand Marxist streams of nineteenth-century socialism eventually diverged (see Socialism ).

Anarchists like Bakunin rejected the Marxist notions of a vanguard party and a transitional period of revolutionary government on theground that these devices are incipiently authoritarian, and in this they may appear prescient.

But the price of theirconsistency is that they are left to formulate a plausible alternative.

Some anarchists insist on strictly nonviolentmeans, relying on rational enlightenment (Godwin) or religious reawakening (Tolstoi).

Bakunin and Kropotkinemphasize the role of science in promoting progress through rational agreement.

Individualists like Tucker ( 1972 ) are generally committed to nonviolence, allowing at most passive forms of civil disobedience such as refusing to serve inthe armed forces or to pay taxes.

Alongside these irenic views, and sometimes awkwardly combined with them,there is also a strong commitment in some anarchists (Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin) to revolutionary action (seeRevolution ).

All these thinkers agree in principle that the anarchist revolution must be spontaneous or ‘bottom-up' rather than subject to any kind of leadership that could evolve into a government.

There are, however, variousproposals for ways of stimulating the revolution without actually leading it.

‘Anarcho-syndicalists' believe that therevolution is to be advanced by direct industrial action culminating in a general strike (Rocker 1938 ).

The school of ‘propaganda by deed' urges that the insurrection be inspired by sudden, symbolic acts of anti-bourgeois terrorism.The resulting popular association of anarchism with arbitrary violence is, however, unfair and misleading.

It is truethat some anarchists, like Bakunin, place an emphasis on the violent destruction of the existing order thatsometimes goes beyond the recommendation of a necessary means to an end and becomes a form of self-affirmation held to be valuable in itself.

But this tendency is not distinctively anarchist, and neither follows from norfits comfortably with the most fundamental anarchist principles, which give priority to autonomous judgment andethical restraint.

5 The ‘new' anarchism The anarchists' principled repudiation of governmental organization even for the purposes of revolution is one of several factors that contributed to the eclipse of anarchism as a politicalforce after the Second World War.

Against a background of expanded welfare states in the West and state socialisthegemony in the East, the inheritors of the classical tradition in particular were challenged to revise their thinking.The results have been described as a ‘new' generation of anarchist thought (Runkle 1972 ).

Not surprisingly, some post-war anarchists (see, for example, Ward 1973 ) have retreated from theories of comprehensive social. »