We have been studying political philosophies that support or advance toward bottom-up democracy through top-down structures of authority. Anarchism also aims at bottom-up democracy, but more radically does not propose any top-down authority for support. Just as Thoreau wrote in Civil Disobedience, “That government is best which governs the least”, Anarchists believe in getting rid of government as much as possible. This may or may not leave room for a diminished government that leans towards capitalism or socialism, but it is at odds with communism imposing a dictatorship even though it also ultimately aims at direct governance by the people. Hard capitalism could be similar if not identical to anarchism (remember that communists consider capitalism to be anarchism already but anarchism for the wealthy rather than for the common people), however capitalism traditionally relies on the state for money and military support. Socialism is not compatible with complete anarchism because it presupposes a state structure, but a more libertarian socialism would aim at anarchism as much as it is possible and feasible, just like communism.
How feasible is anarchy?
Some say it is impossible. Others say it is entirely possible and
we can figure it out and live it now. Others say we cannot figure it out,
but we should dream the impossible and strive to achieve what may only be a
dream for now. To many anarchism is no different than Hobbes’ state of
nature: nasty, brutish and short-lived. Without government, the police
and military for example, how would the powerless and marginalized be defended
from the powerful and dominant? Anarchists would side with Saint-Simon,
the socialist, and argue that technology and culture have advanced to a point
where power can be held by the people without the necessary abuses of the
state. Government and structures of power, they would argue, are already
inherently abusive, and anarchism would be less abusive than the current
structures of power. For instance, while the powerful could still hire
private armies to do what they want without fear of the state police,
international wars would become virtually impossible.
One can find the idea
that power is inherently abusive in ancient Chinese and Greek thought (Daoism
and Stoicism specifically), in the thought of Rousseau and Thoreau, as well as
libertarianism of 1800s France and America today. The term ‘anarchism’
was used as a negative term by the Royalists against the Parliamentarians
during the English Civil War (involving Hobbes and Locke). During the
French Revolution, progressives who began opposing the dictatorship of
Robespierre began using the term in a positive way. This prefigured the split
between communists and anarchists. The question is, is centralized
authority more or less abusive than decentralized authority? All the
political philosophies theoretically aim at decentralized authority, but none
trusts decentralized authority like anarchism. One could equally say that
none trusts dictatorship like communism that we have studied so far, but
fascism (which we study next week) believes in dictatorship like communism but
does not believe in evolving toward direct democracy.
Proudhon
The first to call
himself an anarchist by name was Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809 – 1865). He
is best known for the quote, “Property is theft”, from his work, “What is
Property?”. He is also quoted famously for saying, “Anarchy is order”,
the possible origin of the A surrounded by an O which is the symbol of
anarchism. Marx and Proudhon were friends for awhile in Paris before
splitting over differences. Proudhon argued for a collectivism of co-ops
and communes without the need for a centralized state. Unlike Marx and
communism, Proudhon did not believe in the nationalization of property under
state ownership. Through free association, individuals labor in
collectives and reap the fruit of their efforts without individual or
collective ownership of the kind Locke felt the state must protect.
Rather than property, Proudhon argued for possession through mutual and
voluntary use.
While communists such as
Marx argued that dictatorship was necessary to transform society, Proudhon and
his followers recalled the French Revolution and argued that this would be a
step backwards that would take power from the people rather than giving power
to the people. Proudhon repeatedly spoke of “the people”, and regarded
all government as tyranny. This goes beyond Rousseau, who believes in
central government that has the support of the general will. Proudhon
argued that property was the cause of all wars, including religious wars and
the French Revolution, and so if possession through use made property rights
unnecessary war would become a thing of the past. Towards the end of his
life, Proudhon began to compromise with the idea of a balance of central
authority as a socialist, but retained his belief that mutualism was superior
and more trustworthy than authority.
Bakunin
Socialists in Europe
became polarized at this time between the communists who followed Marx and the
Anarchists who followed Proudhon and the Russian Mikhail Bakunin (1814 – 1876).
A Hegelian like Marx, Bakunin had met both Marx and Proudhon in
Paris and translated Hegel and the Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels into
Russian. Like Lenin and Trotsky, Bakunin was exiled from Russia for his
criticism of the tyrannical power of the Tsar. Unlike Marx, Engels, Lenin
and Trotsky however, Bakunin had come to distrust authority even under the
guise of socialism and communism. At meetings of the First International
socialist congress, Marx argued that they should participate in European
national elections while Bakunin argued that they should abstain from voting
and complying with state held power. Bakunin argued for rising up against
the state in acts of open rebellion, what he called “the propaganda of the
deed” (actions speak louder than words). Later anarchists would use this
phrase to describe bombings and assassinations against those they believe
oppress the common people. The Marxists, who dominated the congress,
expelled Bakunin and his followers. Bakunin continued to argue that no
one should be given political power, not even the workers, as this power would
come to exploit the workers themselves. All dictatorship is
self-perpetuating, and a communist dictatorship would merely claim to be the
voice of the people. Marcuse and Chomsky have both been influenced by Bakunin
in their criticism of communist dictatorship.
The Spanish Civil War
During the Spanish Civil
War (1936 – 1939), the fascist general Francisco Franco fought for control of a
divided Spain with the support of the fascist governments of Italy and Germany
and American corporations such as General Motors, Ford and Texaco. Those
on the left, the communists, socialists and anarchists, saw the war as a
struggle for freedom, while those on the right saw the war as a struggle for
Christian civilization. On the left were peasants, workers and
intellectuals. On the right were the clergy, the military, land owners
and business interests. Anarchism had gained more influence in Spain than
elsewhere in Europe, and for a brief time, especially in Andalusia and
Catalonia, land and industries were collectivized and run as mutualist co-ops.
Unfortunately, this success frightened the communists as well as the
fascists, and infighting between communists and anarchists weakened the left
side of the war. With the victory of Franco in 1939, these communities
were crushed and thousands of anarchists and communists shot. I
personally saw walls in Barcelona that were riddled with pockmarks from this
period. This is known as a brief period where anarchism did flourish and
work as a political form, but because it was so brief and crushed by fascism
its feasibility remains controversial. Would it have survived and
flourished had Franco and the powers that backed him not been victorious, or
would it have been swallowed up by communism or another form of power?
Squatter’s Rights
One concept of anarchism
that still has a following today is squatter’s rights. Do the poor have
the right to seize unused property such as houses and factories and use them as
they see fit, gaining possession of these lands and facilities through use?
Capitalism and communism would say no, because property is the right of
the individual or the state, not to be seized voluntarily. Anarchists
argue that people should take possession of buildings that are not used and put
them to good use for the good of any who wish to contribute to the effort.
There are countless squatter’s communities around the world, especially
in impoverished areas (consider homeless camps visible underneath freeway
overpasses here in the East Bay). In Detroit there have been activists
for decades who help poor families break into unused homes and repair them so
that they can be used, resulting in continuous struggles with local police.
Some of these activists even call the police and let them know what homes
they are “liberating” to wear down police already busy with other matters.
Free Love & Women’s
Rights
Anarchism is often in
solidarity with free love and women’s rights movements. Just as anarchism
wants an end to the domination of the wealthy over the poor, it also seeks an
end to other forms of oppression such as the tyranny of the male over the
female. Anarchists often are champions of free love, the voluntary sexual
association of individuals rather than the prescribed and state sanctified
sexual union of marriage, as well as women’s rights such as equal treatment,
suffrage, contraception, and abortion. While this is much more accepted
today under state systems, sexual relations outside of marriage were considered
criminal in the past and remain so in many places today. Emma Goldman
(1869 – 1940) was a feminist and anarchist who argued the real anarchist and
social revolution should be concerned with ridding society of gender
inequality. Critical of both American capitalism and Soviet communism,
she is considered one of the first revolutionary feminists who hoped that one
day women would be recognized as full individuals who are able to get married
or not and have children or not without the coercion of the state or culture.
Now we consider two
thinkers who are not only affiliated with anarchism but increasingly important
today: Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault. Both criticize the way power and
information are held in society and the oppressive nature of human
institutions. However, Chomsky is very much a positivist who believes
that there are true human rights and objective facts while Foucault is very
much an existentialist and Nietzschean who believes that any conception of true
rights or objectivity is itself oppressive in the same way as all human
institutions. Both agree that power as it is practiced today marginalizes
the truth, perspective and reality of the oppressed, but they disagree over
whether this is monstrous or all too human. This is an important debate
within not only anarchism but many other schools of thought. Are human
beings always dominating and marginalizing, or are there just forms of social
life that liberate us from domination? Are there true human rights, or
are human rights another form, perhaps more evolved, of political domination
and control? On the one hand, with positivism, we can agree that there
are human rights and social forms we believe in and push for, but on the other,
with skepticism, we know that America, Britain and the Soviet Union have paid
great lip service to human rights while ignoring and marginalizing brutality
and domination at home and abroad. Either way, we should push for the
good while maintaining skepticism.
Noam Chomsky (1928 –
present)
Chomsky, who has openly
declared himself an anarchist, is one of the foremost critics of American
empire and colonialism as was the late Howard Zinn. He first became
famous and secured tenure at MIT in the 50s as a linguist and philosopher of
language with his theory of universal grammar, also called x-bar y-bar theory
(essentially, that there are basic structures of grammar inherent to all human
language such that ancient Chinese has nouns and verbs just like modern
English). In the late 60s, he gained far more fame across many academic
disciplines and the reading public as a critic of the Vietnam war and American
empire. One of his most famous books is Manufacturing Consent (1988) that
he co-wrote with Edward Herman, which argues that the American mass media
maintains silence about the brutality of our military, corporations and allies
while repeatedly putting the brutality of our enemies and opponents on display.
For example, TV news programs and newspapers devoted many minutes of
airtime and inches of print discussing suppression of dissent in communist
countries while maintaining media silence about the same forms of suppression
here at home and in Central and South America.
Chomsky states that all
forms of authority and domination should be challenged and if the forms are
unjustifiable they should be dismantled. Chomsky clearly has the
political, economic, and military domination of America over much of the rest
of the world in mind. Because power is by nature domineering and
potentially abusive, the burden of proof should be on the authority itself to
justify its own existence and importance. Chomsky is consistently
critical of academic journals maintaining silence as he is of the mass media,
arguing that even left-wing academics are either brainwashed into believing
that the West and America stand for freedom and democracy in the face of the
evidence he collects or know what not to say and practice self censorship to
maintain and advance their careers. Chomsky criticizes forms of democracy
and libertarianism as practiced in America and Britain that give property
rights overriding support (like Locke) while maintaining silence about poverty
and the gap between the rich and the poor, as well as Soviet communism for
being an enemy of true socialism. Chomsky argues, unlike Foucault, that
there is a true human nature and that unjust institutions contradict and
violate this nature, however he does also say that we do not know enough about
human nature to know whether it is basically anarchistic and libertarian or
oppressive and domineering. In other words, he hopes that Mencius is
right but we do not know enough to rule Xun Zi out.
Michel Foucault (1926 –
1984)
Foucault is now a very
celebrated and well studied thinker not only in philosophy but also in history,
sociology and political science. He also taught briefly at Berkeley.
His books are critical historical studies of social institutions and
practices such as prisons, psychiatric hospitals, science and sexuality.
Foucault called himself a Nietzschean (a follower of Nietzsche, who we
will study next class along with how some Nazis misused his philosophy) and his
critical philosophy centers on the idea of the human tendency to privilege what
is labeled as good while marginalizing and dominating what is labeled as evil.
The famous story is that Foucault went on vacation to the Riviera and
brought Nietzsche, who he had not yet read, with him, and then stayed in his
hotel room the entire time reading Nietzsche.
As a Nietzschean,
Foucault is deeply critical of any claim to absolute or objective knowledge,
distrusts binary dichotomies such as good/bad, true/false, opinion/knowledge or
sane/insane, and understands truth as a struggle between competing forces,
institutions and interpretations. Institutions must support binary
divisions to maintain power and pronounce themselves objective holders of
genuine knowledge and truth. This bends our view of reality such that the
dominant system (religion, science, politics, etc) is simply identified with
truth and the messy historical process and evolution of systems of thought is
obscured.
For Foucault knowledge
is always involved with serving power, just as for Nietzsche truth is always
involved with desire. We have all heard ‘Knowledge is Power!’ as a good
thing, but for Foucault knowledge is not only power, it is domination. He
states that truth is not outside power, but is a thing of this world.
Foucault studies the complicated historical situations when one form of
power, knowledge and dominance shifts to become another form as circumstances
change. A dominant theme of his work is that with industrialization
people have to learn to police and dominate themselves and the authorities have
to convince them that it is their own idea and independence. Marcuse
describes something similar in One-Dimensional Man.
Thus, science such as
psychiatry serves powerful interests while baptizing itself as disinterested
objective truth, and the average person believes that they are smart and free
for believing what they are told in a magazine rather than understanding the
complicated and brutal process of various forms of truth that compete with each
other. However, Foucault believes that we should push for what we want
and strive for greater understanding while knowing that we are naturally
greedy, abusive, marginalizing, and ignorant.
Power is not just a
negative thing, but everything, so the form of the bad is the form of the good.
Thus, communists who declare themselves to be liberators are also oppressors,
and people who feel oppressed by society are also helping to oppress themselves
through fear and desire. Human nature is neither good nor evil, but the
two together. While not openly calling himself an anarchist, Foucault
distrusted all forms of authority and became disenchanted with communism and
other forms of left wing thought. His conception of power is very similar
if not identical to anarchist criticisms of society.
