As a consequence of this paradigm shift in Western philosophy, the seeming conflict between the rationalist-modernism and egalitarian-universalism of the classical anarchists and the traditionalism, romanticism, anti-modernism, and mysticism of, for instance, Gandhi disappears if each of these are recognized as representing merely the particular values of specific cultural, regional, tribal, or philosophical identities with the claims to “truth” or legitimacy of each being contingent upon and relative to their own unique sets of historical, geographical, tribal, and social-psychological circumstances. A twenty-first-century, postmodern, and culturally relativist anarchism with an orientation towards the particular would be fully capable of incorporating into its political framework elements of each of these seemingly polar opposite perspectives in ways such as that represented by the National-Anarchist tendency described by Schmidt. Indeed, such “strange hybrids” are the likely wave of the future in anarchist thought.
Part 3 - A New Anarchist Perspective
Against the State
Anarchist Meta-Politics and Meta-Strategy in the Twenty-First Century
The State: Its Origins and Purpose
In the several million years that human beings and their ancestral evolutionary prototypes have been in existence, the genus Homo functioned socially within the context of stateless nomadic bands of hunters and gatherers. Indeed, at the time of the American and French revolutions of the late eighteenth century, the model of the hunter-gatherer remained the most prevalent form of social organization throughout most of the then-contemporary world. Statelessness continued in many post-hunter-gatherer societies even as larger and more complex forms of tribal organization emerged with pastoralism and horticulture and then agriculture replacing the hunter-gatherer model as the dominant mode of production. It has only been since the advent of the industrial revolution that the hunter-gatherer form of social organization has lost its dominance. Further, it was not until the apex of the era of colonialism in the late nineteenth century that the world came to be fully dominated by states. It is astounding to contemplate that the species of Homo has lived under the rule of states for much less than one percent of its history.[167]
The earliest states emerged concurrent to advancements in agriculture and literacy. The former made possible the development of a leisure class whose existence rose above the ordinary level of subsistence production and the latter allowed for the greater centralization of information. The evolution of these two social phenomena created the possibility for the ever-greater centralization of power. The state had its beginnings in the civilizations of Mesopotamia, ancient Egypt, the Indus Valley, China, and Central and South America. These early states came about through conquest and relied upon religious mythology or tradition (such as the belief in the divinity of the emperor) for their legitimacy.[168] In pre-modern societies political rule and ownership were typically synonymous. Land and resources were acquired through conquest, trade, or marriage, and those in possession of a particular territory exercised personal political authority.[169]
Though it was the Greeks who first began to both develop political philosophy and separate rulership from ownership, it was the increasingly centralized monarchies of the late medieval and early Renaissance eras that truly began laying the foundations for the state in its modern form through the development of bureaucratic administrative infrastructures.[170] These bureaucracies eventually eclipsed the power of the monarchy, the Church, and other rival centers of authority. The taxation and information-gathering powers of the bureaucracies made it possible for the bureaucracy to gain a monopoly over the processes of raising armies and waging war. Eventually the bureaucracy assumed control of police, judicial, and penal systems as well, thereby concentrating all political authority into the hands of the bureaucracy. By the end of the eighteenth century, the state bureaucracy began to assume a legal personhood of its own capable of maintaining a permanent, corporative, institutional life independent of that of its individual personnel.[171] Hence, the beginnings of the modern state.
The Evolution of Anarchist Thought
As a political philosophy, anarchism has as its guiding principle its critique of the state as a uniquely and inherently parasitical institution. The earliest states of ancient times were rooted in conquest, subjugation, and expropriation. The primary characteristic of modern states is their maintenance of a coercive political-bureaucratic apparatus with a centralized monopoly over the use of violence within a particular geographical region. Whether in their traditional personalized form or modern corporative form, states exist primarily to control territory, monopolize resources, protect an artificially privileged ruling class, exploit subjects, and expand their own institutional power and that of their individual members.[172] The historic rise of states has been accompanied by the development and evolution of schools of thought devoted to critiquing the state. Strands of proto-anarchist thinking can be found among the ancient philosophers of both China and the Greco-Roman world, and among dissenting Christian movements of the medieval and early modern era.[173]
The rise of classical liberalism during the Enlightenment period serves as something of a transitional phase between both traditional forms of political legitimacy and critiques of political authority found in the pre-modern era and the development of modern anarchist thought. In the early eighteenth century, the French explorer Louis Armand observed the social structures of the indigenous people of North America and described such systems as “anarchy.” Proto-anarchist thinkers influenced the revolutions of the late eighteenth century, including the Americans Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine and the Frenchmen Jean Varlet and Sylvain Maréchal. Influenced by the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Edmund Burke, William Godwin developed the first systematic body of modern anarchist thought.
An anarchist thinking continued to evolve throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, anarchist movements tended to splinter into multiple directions representing different types of focuses or emphasis among anti-state radicals. In some ways anarchism is comparable with Christianity with its historic processes of perpetually dividing and subdividing into an ever-greater number of both major traditions and lesser sects derived from those traditions.[174] François Richard identified three major traditions within anarchism: the leftist-socialist tradition, the extreme individualism of the German thinker Max Stirner which overlaps with the Anglo-American libertarian tradition, and an elitist form of aristocratic-individualism that in French political culture has been called “anarchism of the right.”The first of these traditions is represented by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, Errico Malatesta, and Emma Goldman; the second by Stirner, John Henry Mackay, Josiah Warren, Benjamin Tucker, Karl Hess, and Murray Rothbard; and the third by H. L. Mencken, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Ernst Jünger, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Salvador Dalí.
Classical socialist-anarchism has as its principal focus an orientation towards social justice and uplifting the downtrodden. The radical individualism of Stirner and the English and American libertarians posits individual liberty as the highest good. The Nietzsche-influenced aristocratic radicalism of the anarchists of the right places its emphasis not only on liberty but on merit, excellence, and the preservation of high culture. It would seem that each of these perspectives has its place within the context of an effective anti-state radicalism. The ideals advanced by each of these strands of anarchist thought—social justice, liberty, meritocracy—would seem to be such that no functional or durable civilization can dispense with.
The Variety and Complexity of Anarchist Movements
The number and variety of anarchist movements or tendencies has grown exponentially over the course of the last century, particularly since the end of the Second World War. The anarchists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were primarily divided into the mutualist, collectivist, communist, syndicalist, and individualist camps with occasional outliers such as the rationalist Christian pacifist anarchism of Leo To
lstoy. The cultural upheavals and radical political movements of the 1960s and 1970s along with broader economic, cultural, technological, and demographic changes in Western societies during the same period brought with them not only a renewed interest in the anarchist movements of the past but an immense diversity of new schools of anarchist or anarchist-influenced thought with their own unique emphasis. These include Green anarchism, primitivism, anarcha-feminism, anarcho-capitalism, market anarchism, agorism, voluntarism, queer anarchism, situationism, national-anarchism, platformism, Islamic anarchism, indigenous anarchism, black anarchism, post-left anarchism, geo-anarchism, insurrectionary anarchism, and others too numerous to mention.
Given the scattered nature of these various anarchist trends and their widely divergent and sometimes even conflicting goals, the first question any serious student of anarchist movements has to first ask is whether anarchism will ever evolve into a movement that is large enough and well-organized enough to pose a credible threat and alternative to the modern state. Virtually all of the contending schools of anarchism have something of value to add to a wider anti-state movement. Some are oriented towards the achievement of socio-economic justice, others towards preservation of the natural environment, still others towards the defense of individual liberty and economic prosperity. Some are focused on the defense of historic outgroups traditionally subject to persecution, others towards the promotion of alternative lifestyles, others towards the defense of traditional cultures, still others towards the perceived needs of particular cultural, religious, or ethnic identities. Many of these objectives would seem to complement each other and provide balance in areas where others fall short. In many ways, these contending schools of anarchist thought reflect the natural diversity of humanity. Each represents a necessary building block in the wider project of creating a future civilization where anarchism is the prevailing political, economic, and social philosophy.
Indeed, if anarchism were to be compared to Christianity, then it might be said that anarchism and Christianity both represent broad meta-philosophical paradigms. Christianity has three major traditions—Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Protestantism—with many contending smaller sects or denominations. Likewise, anarchism has three major traditions—socialist-anarchism, liberal-libertarian anarchism, and aristocratic-individualist anarchism. Each of the particular trends within anarchism represents yet another anarchist denomination. The most important question that emerges from this analysis is to ask whether the various schools of anarchism can ever be unified for the purpose of attacking the common enemy in the form of the state.
Towards a New Synthesism
To date, the most successful anarchist movement was that organized by the Spanish anarchists during the early to middle twentieth century and which briefly attempted to create a revolutionary society based on classical anarchist principles during the midst of the Spanish Civil War. The Spanish anarchists have been criticized for varying reasons by subsequent generations of anarchists, but the fact that remains is they were one of the few anarchist movements in history that managed to not only win the support of a significant portion of the population of a major country but also provide a fascinating case study of anarchist participation in an actual revolutionary situation and civil war.
Whatever successes the Spanish anarchists were able to achieve seem rooted in several important factors. First, the role of the Iberian Anarchist Federation in acting as the principled militants leading mass organizations that Bakunin had insisted would be necessary during any actual revolutionary struggle. Second, the ability of the National Confederation of Workers to win the support of substantial sectors of the Spanish working class was particularly important. Third, there was the leading role played by the anarchists in organizing the resistance to the uprising by the army against the Republic. Last, there was the compatibility of anarchism with the traditional communal peasant life of rural Spain.
The question that emerges is how these efforts can be replicated in contemporary nations and under contemporary cultural and economic circumstances. Given the immense variation and complexity of contemporary anarchist thought, and the even greater complexity and diversity of modern societies, it would seem that a theoretical framework identified in the past with such terms as “anarchism without adjectives” or “synthesis anarchism” would be the most appropriate. These represented efforts within classical anarchism to unite all of the contending anarchist factions into a comprehensive alliance and which criticized those anarchists who had adopted a Marxist-like class determinism. Among the prominent supporters of this position were Voltairine de Cleyre, Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, Errico Malatesta, Max Nettlau, Sébastien Faure, Mollie Steimer, Gregori Maximoff, and Voline. Some of these issued a statement saying:
To maintain that anarchism is only a theory of classes is to limit it to a single viewpoint. Anarchism is more complex and pluralistic, like life itself. Its class element is above all its means of fighting for liberation; its humanitarian character is its ethical aspect, the foundation of society; its individualism is the goal of mankind.[175]
The Contributions of National-Anarchism
National-Anarchism is a relatively new tendency within anarchism, yet it has grown rather rapidly in recent years. It also remains one of the most controversial strands within contemporary anarchist thought. However, national-anarchism brings to the table an interesting set of ideas which may be quite helpful in the long-term development of a more effective anarchist movement. The principal weaknesses of the present-day anarchist movement are its scattered and fragmented nature which prevents it from exercising a concentrated assault on the state, its lack of a coherent strategy for achieving revolutionary goals, and its failure to develop a more thorough critique of the state as it actually exists in modern societies. The ideas found within national-anarchism make important contributions towards the creation of a new theoretical model that is fully capable of effectively addressing these questions.
At the core of the national-anarchist philosophy is the concept of decentralized particularism. Conceptually, this overlaps very well with the insights of neo-tribalism which postulates that humans are hard-wired by evolutionary biology to exist within tribal forms of social organization as opposed to the mass societies of modernity which are increasingly dominated by omnipresent states.[176] Like neo-tribalism, national-anarchism advocates replacing modern mass societies and their all-encompassing states with autonomous, stateless tribes reflecting an open-ended plethora of cultural orientations as opposed to the model of homogenized universalism endorsed by both the left-wing establishment and the forces of global capitalism. This theoretical framework helps to address certain problems faced by modern anarchist movements in several ways.
First, such a framework provides a comprehensive paradigm that is capable of generating a reconciliation and accommodation between contending anarchist factions. While the many sub-tendencies within modern anarchism in many ways complement each other and even serve as correctives to the other’s weaknesses, it is also true that the variations in focus found among the scattered anarchist sects will inevitably be the source of irreconcilable conflicts as well. The national-anarchist concept of the tribe allows for the many diverse tribes within anarchism to achieve sovereignty and autonomy within the context of their own independent communities. The model of decentralized particularism means that within the general context of an anarchist civilization some of the component communities will be anarcho-communist, syndicalist, anarcho-capitalist, primitivist, traditionalist, feminist, queer, vegetarian, Christian, Islamic, pagan, etc., according to the preferences of the local community in question and its inhabitants. The model of a confederation of anarchist tribes with each of these reflecting their own particular values fits well with the need to forge a pan-anarchist front that unites anti-state radicals as the leadership corps of a larger libertarian-populist movement that creates alternative infrastructure towards the goal of pan-secession as its primary strategic
vehicle. Tribal anarchism provides a framework where both contending anarchist tribes and stateless tribes of non-anarchists can peacefully coexist and unite against the state.
Second, this model is one that is capable of addressing and accommodating the very real fault lines found among the general population of any real world society. The early proponents of synthesis anarchism recognized in their 1927 manifesto “the difficulty of getting a large part of the population to accept our ideas. We must take into account existing prejudices, customs, education, the fact that the great mass of people will look for an accommodation rather than radical change.” Indeed, anarchists are as aware as anyone of the deep-rooted social conflicts involving class, race, religion, culture, nationality, gender, sexuality, regional identities, occupation, social status, age, and so forth. Some anarchists have misguidedly sought to address such matters by agitating for even greater demographic conflict the result of which is to unfortunately cooperate with the “divide and conquer” strategy typically employed by states as a means of preventing unified resistance to itself on the part of subjects by playing different population groups off against one another.
Attack the System Page 15
