Anarchism

I

Introduction

Anarchism, political concept and social movement that advocates the abolition of any form of State, which is regarded as coercive, and its replacement with voluntary organization. The political doctrine of anarchism has expressed itself through both a variety of schools, whose main differences reflect the anarchists’ differing attitudes towards the economy, and the role of organization both in a future stateless, anarchist society and within their movements.

II

Origins of Anarchism: The Classical Anarchism of the Long 19th Century (1789-1914)

Anarchists and students of anarchism have traced an anarchist tendency throughout recorded history, from ancient China to ancient Greece, to the Christian heretical movements of medieval Europe and to the more radical sects of the English Civil War. Anthropologists have reported stateless and non-coercive “primitive” societies. However, anarchism, as a self-conscious ideology, appeared in Europe during the first half of the 19th century, the uneasy sibling of modern socialism and communism. The word “anarchist” had been used as a term of abuse during the French Revolution, but the first self-proclaimed anarchist was the French writer and political theorist Pierre Joseph Proudhon, who had reached adulthood during the Restoration. However, the concept if not the term was already present in the writings of the English thinker and writer William Godwin, especially in his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and Its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness (1793; final ed. 1798).

Anarchism arose out of the ideological ferment of the French Revolution and in reaction to both the European bureaucratic nation state and the advent of large-scale industrial capitalism. Anarchism derives much of its philosophical impulse from the Age of Enlightenment and particularly from the influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality Among Mankind (1755; trans. 1761). According to the anarchists, freedom is achieved through moral self-direction. Unlike Rousseau, however, the anarchists did not believe that one could be “forced to be free”, even through the settled will of the majority in a democratic polity. Whereas Rousseau believed that freedom preceded the formation of government and had to be limited in order to have a functioning society, the anarchists believed that any executive would result in dictatorship and thus crush freedom. Like Rousseau, most schools of anarchists believed in positive rather than negative freedom. For both, freedom was based on political, economic, and social equality, but whereas Rousseau relied on State coercion and the education of the next generation in the ways of classical republican virtue, the anarchists believed that a stateless society would be accomplished through non-coercive persuasive example and libertarian education.

Anarchism was shaped by several generations of thinkers and activists who lived between the first half of the 19th century and the first three decades of the 20th century. Proudhon may have popularized the word “anarchy” but the Russian thinker, disaffected nobleman, and revolutionary Mikhail Bakunin provided a charismatic example of the anarchist revolutionary in action. He forged the social and political movements associated with anarchism on a variety of national, European, and global stages in the 1860s and 1870s. He led the schism of the anarchists from the Marxists in the First International with his critique of the authoritarian tendencies of Karl Marx and Marxism. In his Statism and Anarchy (1873) Bakunin predicted, prophetically, that the Marxian “dictatorship of the proletariat” would not result in rule by the working classes but rather in a “Red” dictatorship of ex-revolutionaries and experts who would then reinforce the power of the modern State to a hitherto unheard-of degree. His co-national, the geographer, writer, and revolutionary, another disaffected aristocrat of ancient lineage, Pyotr Kropotkin, provided anarchism with a scientifically inspired philosophy to challenge the scientific claims of Marxism. Kropotkin shared with much of the anarchist tradition the scientism and somewhat naïve optimism of 19th-century European social thought, derived from the writings of the sociologist and writer, Auguste Comte. The Italian revolutionary and journalist, Errico Malatesta (1853-1932), challenged the mechanistic and scientistic approaches of both Marx and Kropotkin. He criticized Kropotkin's deployment in the social sciences and politics of models derived from the physical sciences, and emphasized the role of individual and collective will in the shaping of history. See also Philosophy, Western.

III

Schools of Anarchist Thought

A

Mutualism

Several different schools of anarchist thought arose in the 19th century. Proudhon was associated with mutualism. Proudhon objected to the concentration of economic power in the hands of a few monopolists but throughout his life he never promoted communism as the basis of an anarchist society. He condemned equally laissez-faire and State control. He believed that all value derived from labour and promoted the formation of workers’ associations, which would exchange products valued on the amount of time it took to produce them. Foreshadowing syndicalism, which would become an important factor in the French labour movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Proudhonian mutualism argued that workers’ associations would replace the capitalist economy, enabling the political State to wither away. However, mutualism (renamed collectivism by anarchists such as Bakunin) never advocated complete equality. Personal and small-scale property was protected and the lazy worker would receive less than the productive one. Anarcho-collectivism carried on the Proudhonian tradition, particularly in Spain and elsewhere in southern Europe, until the doctrine of anarcho-communism replaced it in the 1890s.

B

Anarcho-Communism

A noted formulation of anarcho-communism can be found in Kropotkin’s work. The anarcho-communists believed that the bases of freedom were sympathy, affection, cooperation, and mutual aid. In an anarchist society the basic needs of all human beings were assured without the need for any sort of competition and rivalry. Unlike mutualism or anarcho-collectivism, anarcho-communism did not invoke the virtue of the work ethic, but argued that each individual was entitled to receive from the common store what was required for his or her needs. In fact the anarcho-communists believed that it was impossible to determine the time value of labour because the common institutions upon which the individual worker relied were the product of generations. Thus even mutualism and anarcho-collectivism were considered flawed and less satisfactory versions of anarchism.

In Mutual Aid (1897) Kropotkin disagreed with the Social Darwinists. Flourishing species and human civilizations were not the winners of the “survival of the fittest”, as the Social Darwinists argued; rather cooperation had been the key: mutual aid rather than naked competition was a more successful strategy. In The Conquest of Bread (1888) and Fields, Factories, and Workshops (1899) Kropotkin mapped out a future society that would be owned by communes of producers reliant on the latest technology in order to generate sufficient amounts of goods. Kropotkin envisaged a society where mental and manual labour would be blended through integral education. He advocated industrial decentralization, the integration of town and country, and the use of new intensive methods of cultivation. In fact, however, the difference between many anarcho-collectivists and anarcho-communists was one of degree not category. Malatesta believed anarcho-communism was nobler but he realized that a temporary phase of collectivism might be necessary and he was far more sanguine about the ability of a modern industrial city to transform itself instantaneously into an anarcho-communist commune on the morrow of the revolution. In any case, many anarchists were agnostic and labelled themselves “anarchists without adjectives”.