I mentioned in a recent post that reading Thomas Flanagan’s novels about Ireland has me thinking about revolution – the causes and consequences of revolution, and of course the difficulty of defining “revolution.” Often it is defined quite narrowly as “an attempt to overthrow an existing government by force of arms” and equally often quite expansively as “advocacy for major social change.” In my recent thinking Michael Collins has played a large role, because while there can be no doubt that Collins wanted the British out of Ireland altogether, he became convinced that the best way to do this was to move one step at a time, to accept Dominion status as a way-station to complete independence. This made him, I think, a kind of gradualist revolutionary, though to his Irish opponents it made him into something altogether unrevolutionary, which is why they killed him. (For urgent Irish revolutionaries, the advocacy of anything other than immediate violence made you a “West Briton,” as Miss Ivors calls Gabriel Conroy in Joyce’s story “The Dead.”) 

My interest in anarchism complicates my thinking about these matters. On the one hand, an anarchist society would be radically different than the one we now live in, and in that sense would be the fruit of a revolution. But organized armed revolution could not, in my view, be pursued anarchically – it would be anti-anarchist even if conducted in the name of anarchy. That was also true of the “anarchist” bombers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries: they were not anarchists, for as Proudhon said, “Anarchy is order”; rather, they were Chaotics, a very different thing. To render a social order non-functional in the hope that something more just will somehow rise from the ruins is antithetical to the character of anarchism, which is all about collaboration and cooperation. Terrorism and armed insurrection are thus equally alien to true anarchism. 

So how could anarchism be practiced in such a way that society changes for the better? How is it possible to remake the world without betraying your principles in the process? (“We had to destroy the village in order to save it.”)

I’ve written off and on about these matters for years – see the “anarchism” tag at the bottom of this post – but my thoughts are still largely confused. So I decided to make this post a kind of notebook of ideas. I’ll post today but then I will come back and add second and third thoughts later, and see if some kind of order eventually emerges. After all, isn’t anarchic method appropriate to the study of anarchism? 

If you haven’t read anything I’ve written about this, start with this essay and then this reflection on Christian anarchy.

One more thing: my major guides to thinking about anarchism are 

And now on to the notebook.

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Malatesta thought that the committed libertarian, who cares only about his own freedom of movement, will if he follows his natural course become a tyrant, and in even the best case “anything but an anarchist.” 

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It is vitally important to distinguish anarchism from libertarianism. The highest goods of the libertarian are freedom of action and freedom to own property, both conceived as belonging to the individual. The anarchist, by contrast, seeks some form of the good life in collaboration and cooperation with others. Anarchism is therefore intrinsically social, pluralistic, and unplanned. Because, as Isaiah Berlin says, the Great Goods are not always compatible with one another, you collaborate with people who share your priorities, understanding and accepting that others will find other structures of collaboration. And in pursuing those goods you have the humility to recognize that you don’t know how they may be achieved; that is something you discover through your collaboration. (Related by me: this and this.) 

Anarchism is therefore not a system of government but a practice, and one can practice it at any level of social interaction. The parent who tells two squabbling children to work out their differences themselves, rather than appealing to a parental verdict, is practicing anarchism, and a very important form of it too. (See my comments on machi no hoiku and mimamoru in this post. Anarchist pedagogy!) 

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The true anarchist can never throw bombs, because when you do that you are making decisions for other people without their consent, which is anthithetical to anarchism. 

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Anarchism can never be revolutionary in the sense in which political systems (communism, socialism, fascism) can be revolutionary. But the ultimate effects of anarchism can be far greater than the effects of any of those other movements. As Hannah Arendt said, every revolutionary becomes a conservative the day after the revolution; as The Who said, “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” Anarchism declines bosses altogether. And that is truly revolutionary – but it is only brought about by means so slow and patient that no one can see them at work. 

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It is a shame that, in The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin never describes in detail the revolution that led to the anarchist colony on Anarres. We only learn, in a wonderful story, about “The Day Before the Revolution.” So the question of how principled anarchists revolt is left unanswered. 

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James Scott speaks of “the anarchist tolerance for confusion and improvisation that accompanies social learning, and confidence in spontaneous cooperation and reciprocity.” The key point here is that link between improvisation and “social learning.” An algorithmic order is incompatible with both improvisation and social learning. 

Scott again: in the last hundred years we have learned that “material plenty, far from banishing politics, creates new sphere of political struggle” and also that “statist socialism was less ‘the administration of things’ than the trade union of the ruling class protecting its privileges.” 

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Jacques Ellul thinks that Christians should be anarchists because God, in Jesus Christ, has renounced Lordship. I think something almost the opposite: it is because Jesus is Lord (and every knee shall ultimately bow before him, and every tongue confess his Lordship) that Christians should be anarchists. 

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After I posted my thoughts on Phil Christman’s Why Christians Should Be Leftists I happened to look at this post and noticed that I say that Christians should be anarchists. So I guess that’s a post I’ll have to write. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

UPDATE: I did. 

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Anarchist practice acknowledges (a) that humans flourish most when they’re in constructive, productive interaction with one another, and (b) that many human beings when given the chance to exercise power over others will seize that chance, no matter how much damage they do in the process. Anarchist practice acknowledges both our cooperative nature and our sin nature, and encourages the one while discouraging the other.

The opposite of anarchism is what has happened to the Buy Nothing movement: consolidation, top-down control, aggressive policing to stifle dissent. This is how constructive community action dies. 

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First axiom of Christian anarchism: The Prince of This World’s tools will never dismantle the Prince of This World’s house. 

(When Audre Lorde said “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” her next sentence was: “They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”) 

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James Scott, from Two Cheers for Anarchism: 

Lacking a comprehensive anarchist worldview and philosophy, and in any case wary of nomothetic ways of seeing, I am making a case for a sort of anarchist squint. What I aim to show is that if you put on anarchist glasses and look at the history of popular movements, revolutions, ordinary politics, and the state from that angle, certain insights will appear that are obscured from almost any other angle. 

And: 

The great flaw of all these administrative techniques is that, in the name of equality and democracy, they function as a vast “antipolitics machine,” sweeping vast realms of legitimate public debate out of the public sphere and into the arms of technical, administrative committees. They stand in the way of potentially bracing and instructive debates about social policy, the meaning of intelligence, the selection of elites, the value of equity and diversity, and the purpose of economic growth and development. They are, in short, the means by which technical and administrative elites attempt to convince a skeptical public — while excluding that public from the debate — that they play no favorites, take no obscure discretionary action, and have no biases but are merely making transparent technical calculations. They are, today, the hallmark of a neoliberal political order in which the techniques of neoclassical economics have, in the name of scientific calculation and objectivity, come to replace other forms of reasoning.

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Peter Marshall, in Demanding the Impossible, says this: 

While there are many different currents in anarchism, anarchists do share certain basic assumptions and central themes. If you dive into an anarchist philosophy, you generally find a particular view of human nature, a critique of the existing order, a vision of a free society, and a way to achieve it. All anarchists reject the legitimacy of external government and of the State, and condemn imposed political authority, hierarchy and domination. They seek to establish the condition of anarchy, that is to say, a decentralized and self-regulating society consisting of a federation of voluntary associations of free and equal individuals. The ultimate goal of anarchism is to create a free society which allows all human beings to realize their full potential. 

I think something needs to be added here: that human beings do not “realize their full potential” as mere individuals, separated or even alienated from others, but instead can achieve their telos only in meaningful (cooperative, negotiated) relation to others. 

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Kołakowski says that it’s possible to be a conservative-liberal-socialist. But maybe the only way to achieve that glorious consummation is by being an anarchist. Anarchism is the means by which the various social good represented by those three traditions can be not just articulated but realized. For me, a person of strong conservative temperament, anarchism opens space for acts and practices of conserving. 

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Anarchism, properly understood, is an extreme form of politics — but its extremity is fundamentally different in character than the extremities of left totalitarianism and right authoritarianism. It is extreme in its refusal of coercion, in the absoluteness of its suspicion of power. (This point is related to Malatesta’s statement, quoted above, that libertarianism, which is not anarchism, leads to tyranny. The libertarian is suspicious of others but never of himself.) 

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David Graeber and David Wengrow: 

For much of the twentieth century, social scientists preferred to define a state in more purely functional terms. As society became more complex, they argued, it was increasingly necessary for people to create top-down structures of command in order to co-ordinate everything. This same logic is still followed in essence by most contemporary theorists of social evolution. Evidence of ‘social complexity’ is automatically treated as evidence for the existence of some sort of governing apparatus. If one can speak, say, of a settlement hierarchy with four levels (e.g. cities, towns, villages, hamlets), and if at least some of those settlements also contained full-time craft specialists (potters, blacksmiths, monks and nuns, professional soldiers or musicians), then whatever apparatus administered it must ipso facto be a state. And even if that apparatus did not claim a monopoly of force, or support a class of elites living off the toil of benighted labourers, this was inevitably going to happen sooner or later. This definition, too, has its advantages, especially when speculating about very ancient societies, whose nature and organization has to be teased out from fragmentary remains; but its logic is entirely circular. Basically, all it says is that, since states are complicated, any complicated social arrangement must therefore be a state. 

Actually, almost all these ‘classic’ theoretical formulations of the last century started off from exactly this assumption: that any large and complex society necessarily required a state. The real bone of contention was, why? Was it for good practical reasons? Or was it because any such society would necessarily produce a material surplus, and if there was a material surplus — like, for instance, all that smoked fish on the Pacific Northwest Coast — then there would also, necessarily, be people who managed to grab hold of a disproportionate share? 

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Tolstoy, from My Religion: 

A disciple of Jesus should be prepared for everything, and especially for suffering and death. But is the disciple of the world in a more desirable situation? We are so accustomed to believe in all we do for the so-called security of life (the organization of armies, the building of fortresses, the provisioning of troops), that our wardrobes, our systems of medical treatment, our furniture, and our money, all seem like real and stable pledges of our existence. We forget the fate of him who resolved to build greater storehouses to provide an abundance for many years: he died in a night. Everything that we do to make our existence secure is like the act of the ostrich, when she hides her head in the sand, and does not see that her destruction is near. But we are even more foolish than the ostrich. To establish the doubtful security of an uncertain life in an uncertain future, we sacrifice a life of certainty in a present that we might really possess.

The illusion is in the firm conviction that our existence can be made secure by a struggle with others. We are so accustomed to this illusory so-called security of our existence and our property, that we do not realize what we lose by striving after it. We lose everything, — we lose life itself. Our whole life is taken up with anxiety for personal security, with preparations for living, so that we really never live at all. 

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Berdyaev, from Slavery and Freedom: 

The religious truth of anarchism consists in this, that power over humanity is bound up with sin and evil, that a state of perfection is a state where there is no power of human over human, that is to say, anarchy. The kingdom of God is freedom and the absence of such power; no categories of the exercise of such power are to be transferred to it. The kingdom of God is anarchy.

 

To be continued…