User:Sam Francis/Anarchism

This is intended to be a work in progress for myself. I'll be working on it until I feel it is ready to offer as an alternative to the current version of anarchism. I hope to take the focus away from using subpages and put the content back into the main article. Feel free to make comments on the talk page.

Anarchism is a generic term given to political philosophies advocating a society without government. Anarchists believe that society could be better organised without government and propose many different ways of doing so. As Benjamin Tucker put it, anarchism is the philosophy that "all the affairs of men should be managed by individuals or voluntary associations, and that the state should be abolished."

Contents
1 Overview and brief history
2 Anarchist theory

2.1 Anarchist schools of thought
2.2 'Anarchy', as opposed to chaos and disorder

3 Development of anarchism
4 Thematic articles
5 See also

5.1 Biographies
5.2 Historical events
5.3 Books
5.4 Periodicals
5.5 Theoretical concepts
5.6 Anarchist organizations

6 External links
7 Anarchist theory

7.1 Opposition to the state
7.2 Political roots

7.2.1 French Revolution
7.2.2 Conflict with Marxism

7.3 Capitalism and anti-capitalism

7.3.1 Anarcho-capitalism
7.3.2 Anti-capitalism and globalisation

7.4 Strategies

7.4.1 Revolution
7.4.2 Protest

7.4.2.1 Black Bloc

7.4.3 Syndicalism

7.5 Violence and non-violence

7.5.1 "Propaganda of the deed"

8 Opposition to anarchism

8.1 Theoretical opposition
8.2 Major critics
8.3 Historical opposition

9 History of anarchism/anarchists

9.1 The Ancient World
9.2 Between period
9.3 Godwin
9.4 Proudhon
9.5 19th century

9.5.1 Bakunin
9.5.2 Kropotkin

9.6 etc..
9.7 Anarchism in revolutions

10 See also

10.1 Biographies
10.2 Historical events
10.3 Books
10.4 Periodicals
10.5 Theoretical concepts
10.6 Anarchist organizations

11 External links

Overview and brief history

Although anarchists all wish to reach a stateless society, the proposed methods of political, economic and social organisation vary immensely. William Godwin's vision of a free society published in 1793 alongside a critique of government in An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice is considered the first anarchist treatise and Godwin is credited with founding philosophical anarchism. His society was to be reached rationally and gradually. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's mutualism was to be reached by a similarly peaceful evolution of society. Later in the nineteenth century, though, revolutionaries like Mikhail Bakunin saw a need for violence to overthrow the existing society to reach anarchism; this view encouraged acts of political violence such as the assassinations of heads of state at the end of the nineteenth century, though these actions were regarded by many anarchists as counter-productive or ineffective. Peter Kropotkin's anarchist communism developed from a scientific approach based on an alternative theory of evolution as illustrated in Mutual Aid (1897).

Anarchists played an important role in many of the labour movements, up-risings and revolutions of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including the Russian Revolution (1917) and the Spanish Civil War (1936-9). However, increasingly authoritarian rule and political repression across Russia and southern Europe in the first half of the twentieth century put an end to anarchism as a mass movement for most of that century.

After World War II, a new form of anarchism developed, mainly in North America. This new strand has become known as anarcho-capitalism, and owed more to classical liberalism than to previous anarchist traditions, only being politically related via individualism.

A surge of popular interest in anarchism occured during the 1970s in Britain following the birth of the punk rock movement. Though the early punk scene appropriated anarchist imagery mainly for it's shock value, the band Crass expounded 'serious' anarchist and pacifist ideas, and were to become a notable influence within various late twentieth century protest movements.

At the beginning of the 21st century, anarchism has incorporated strong influences from the feminist and animal rights movements. North American anarchism also takes strong influences from the American Civil Rights Movement and the movement against the war in Vietnam. European anarchism has developed out of the labour movement. Globally, anarchism has also grown in popularity and influence as part of the anti-war, anti-capitalist and anti-globalisation movements.

Though anarchists took control of large areas of the east of Spain during the civil war in the 1930s, anarchism was never taken as a central ideology for any nation or society for any significant length of time. However, it's influence on modern political thought is still considered significant. As Andrew Heywood writes in Political Ideologies,

Anarchists have highlighted the coercive and destructive nature of political power, and in so doing have countered statist tendencies within other ideologies... anarchism has had a growing influence on modern political thought. Both the new left [including "anticolonialism, feminism and environmentalism"] and the new right [including anarcho-capitalism and free market economics], for instance, have exhibited libertarian tendencies, which bear the imprint of anarchist ideas. (Political Ideologies (second edition, 1998) p.210-211.)

Anarchist theory

Anarchist schools of thought

From William Godwin's free society, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's mutualism to Max Stirner's individualism, the roots of anarchist thought were always varied, with many different views of what a society without government should be like. Individualists, taking much from the writings of Stirner, among others, demanded the utmost respect for the liberty of the individual. Anarchist communists like Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin built on the Marxist critique of capitalism and synthesised it with their own critique of the state, developing a view of society where the fate of the individual was tied to that of society.

Anarcho-syndicalism developed as the industrialised form of this libertarian communism, emphasising industrial actions, especially the general strike, as the primary strategy to achieve anarchist revolution, and 'build the new society in the shell of the old'.

In the latter half of the twentieth century, two new schools of thought developed in North America: namely, anarcho-capitalism and primitivism. Anarcho-capitalism built on the classical liberal tradition, taking the distrust of government further and claiming that free markets could provide justice and security; the state was not required, its intervention was harmful. Primitivists like John Zerzan proclaimed that civilisation -- not just the state -- would need to be abolished to create liberty and a just social order.

'Anarchy', as opposed to chaos and disorder

From mainstream media and everyday language to many academic political works, the word 'anarchy' is often used to refer to lawless and chaotic political situations where, for instance, warlords rule by virtue of military force or there is a temporary power vacuum. The current political situation in Somalia, for example, is often referred to as anarchy, since it has no central government.

This use of the word implies a broad definition: usually, any situation where there is no internationally recognised form of government can be considered 'anarchy'. Anarchists, however, reserve the term anarchy for an anarchist society: that is, a society organised on the principles of anarchism, though exactly what these principles are differs from anarchist to anarchist. Primitivists, for instance, assert that in prehistoric times human society was organised on such principles as they define them (for example, non-hierarchal decision making), and so call these ancient societies anarchies.

Development of anarchism

Although anarcho-primitivists assert that for the longest period of human history, human society was organised on anarchist principles, there is little evidence available to support this notion. However, anarchist ideas are generally held to go back as far as Ancient Greece, where Zeno of Citium was, according to Kropotkin, "[t]he best exponent of Anarchist philosophy in ancient Greece" and the philosopher Aristippus said that 'the wise should not give up their liberty to the state'.

Zeno distinctly opposed his vision of a free community without government to the state-Utopia of Plato. "He repudiated the omnipotence of the state, its intervention and regimentation, and proclaimed the sovereignty of the moral law of the individual." Zeno argued that although the necessary instinct of self-preservation leads humans to egotism, nature has supplied a corrective to it by providing man with another instinct -- sociability. Like many modern anarchists, he believed that if people follow their instincts, they will have no need of law courts or police, no temples and no public worship, and use no money (free gifts taking the place of the exchanges). Zeno's beliefs, unfortunately, have only reached us as fragmentary quotations.[1] (http://www.blackcrayon.com/page.jsp/library/britt1910.html)

Some also interpret the Ancient Chinese philosophy of Taoism as the oldest example of anarchist doctrine[2] (http://www.tao.ca/thinking/texts/taoanarch.html).

The first author to have published a treatise explicitly advocating the absence of government was William Godwin in An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793); though he did not use the word anarchism, he is today regarded as the "founder of philosophical anarchism"[3] (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/godwin/). The term "anarchist" is thought to have first come into use during the French Revolution as a derogatory term against the left, but Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, in the 1840s, adopted the term to describe his political philosophy.

Thematic articles

Anarchism is a vast subject that touches a lot of topics. Below are links to articles that discuss and argue various aspects of anarchism with reference to different anarchist strands of thought.

See also

For a dictionary definition, see wiktionary:anarchism

Biographies

Historical events

Books

Periodicals

Theoretical concepts

Anarchist organizations

External links

Anarchist theory

Discussion of differences starts here: though all anarchists oppose the state, some oppose capitalism, some propose capitalism; some propose violent revolution, some peaceful change; etc.

Opposition to the state

Main article: Anarchist opposition to the state

Anarchists are most famous for opposing the existence of states or government. Indeed, in the past many anarchists refused to defend themselves in court because they did not wish to participate in what they viewed as illegitimate institutions, instead choosing to go to jail or die.

The critique of states is built on the same principle opposing concentration of authority, which according to anarchists inevitably leads to abuse of power.

In lieu of states, libertarian socialists seek to organize themselves into voluntary institutions (usually called collectives) which use direct democracy or consensus for their decision-making process. Some libertarian socialists advocate combining these institutions using rotating, recallable delegates (http://wiktionary.org/wiki/Delegate) to higher-level federations. Others, however, have advanced strong critiques of federated systems, and these federations have rarely been carried out in practice. (For an example of anarchist federations, see spanish anarchism.)

Contrary to popular opinion, libertarian socialism has not traditionally been a utopian movement, tending to avoid dense theoretical analysis or prediction of what a future society would or should look like. The tradition instead has been that such decisions cannot be made now, and must be made through struggle and experimentation, so that the best solution can be arrived at democratically and organically, and to base the direction for struggle on established historical example.

Anarchists often suggest that this focus on exploration over predetermination is one of their great strengths. Critics counter that by refusing to explain how certain aspects of society would function under their system, anarchists are essentially avoiding questions that they cannot answer.

Political roots

As Albert Meltzer and Stuart Christie put it in their book The Floodgates of Anarchy, anarchism

has its particular inheritance, part of which it shares with socialism, giving it a family resemblance to certain of its enemies. Another part of its inheritance it shares with liberalism, making it, at birth, kissing-cousins with American-type radical individualism, a large part of which has married out of the family into the Right Wing and is no longer on speaking terms. (The Floodgates of Anarchy, 1970, page 39.)

French Revolution

Conflict with Marxism

In rejecting property and the state, libertarian socialists put themselves in opposition to both capitalist democracy and to Marxism. Although Anarchists and Marxists share a belief in an the ultimate goal of a stateless society, Anarchists criticized Marxism for advocating a transitional phase under which the state is used to achieve this aim. Historically the movement has often been ignored in the much more visible conflict between Marxism-Leninism and capitalism. Anarchist movements have come into conflict with both capitalist and Marxist forces, sometimes at the same time, as in the Spanish Civil War. Other political persecutions under either party have resulted in a strong historical antagonism between anarchists and Leninist Marxists (and their descendants, i.e. Maoists). In recent history, however, anarchists have repeatedly formed alliances with Marxist-Leninist groups.

The antagonism can be traced to the International Workingmen's Association (or the First International), a congress of radical workers, where Mikhail Bakunin, who was fairly representative of the libertarian socialist view, and Karl Marx, whom anarchists accused of being an authoritarian, came into conflict on various issues. Bakunin's viewpoint on the illegitimacy of the State as an institution and the role of electoral politics was starkly counterposed to Marx's views in the First International. Marx and Bakunin's disputes, which split the International into "Bakuninists" and "Marxists", eventually led to Marx taking control of the First International and expelling Bakunin and his followers from the organization. This was the beginning of a long-running feud between anarchists and what they call "authoritarian communists" (or sometimes just "authoritarians").

In the early twentieth century, anarchism's political influence is generally thought to have ended: in Russia anarchists were overcome by state communism, while in Spain in the 1930s, after reaching the pinnacle of its influence, Spanish anarchists were first overcome by their Marxist allies, and then both Communists and Anarchists were overrun by the Fascist forces General Franco.

Some Marxists have formulated views that closely resembled syndicalism, and thus expressed more affinity with anarchist ideas. The American Marxist leader Daniel De Leon, for example, who joined and reorganized the Socialist Labor Party in 1890, advocated a form of "industrial unionism" (known as DeLeonism), which was similar to syndicalism, although De Leon himself made a point of distinguishing between the two ideologies.

Several libertarian socialists, notably Noam Chomsky, believe that anarchism shares much in common with certain varients of Marxism such as the council communism of left-wing Marxist Anton Pannekoek. In Chomsky's "Notes on Anarchism", he suggests the possibility "that some form of council communism is the natural form of revolutionary socialism in an industrial society. It reflects the intuitive understanding that democracy is severely limited when the industrial system is controlled by any form of autocratic elite, whether of owners, managers and technocrats, a "vanguard" party, or a state bureaucracy."

Autonomist marxism and situationism are also regarded as being anti-authoritarian varients of Marxism that closely resemble libertarian socialism.

See also: anarchism and Marxism

Capitalism and anti-capitalism

Anarcho-capitalism

brief description of ideas & theory; protagonists; conflict with socialist tendencies in anarchism -- perhaps seperate article linked to?

Anti-capitalism and globalisation

Anarchist influence in today's anti-capitalist movements

Strategies

Revolution

Necessity of revolution as per Bakunin and Kropotkin; revolution as a change in power structures as opposed to "Revolution" as the process of creating anarchism/communism

Protest

Black Bloc

Origins in Germany; popularity in North American protests

Syndicalism

France & Spain

Violence and non-violence

Pacifist (anti-war) tradition; non-violent tradition; "violence is necessary" (Malatesta, Bakunin)

Many anarchists see violent revolution as necessary in the creation of an anarchist society. Along with many others, Errico Malatesta argued that the use of violence was necessary in creating an anarchist society; as he put it in Umanità Nova:

It is our aspiration and our aim that everyone should become socially conscious and effective; but to achieve this end, it is necessary to provide all with the means of life and for development, and it is therefore necessary to destroy with violence, since one cannot do otherwise, the violence which denies these means to the workers.[4] (http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/anarchists/malatesta/rev_haste.html)

But is violence necessary in maintaining such a society? Some people feel that anarcho-communism could only be sustained by the use of force -- many of these individuals argue that capitalist enterprises would spring up in such a society unless they were suppressed. These critics see this as an inherent contradiction within socialistic anarchist theory: they feel that anarchism could not be sustained without coercion, but if coercion were used, it would not be anarchism.

Most of anarchism's adherents will start by arguing that it is force that maintains current capitalist economics and all forms of government -- the basis of the argument being that hierarchal relationships ultimately rest on force. Certainly, there are few, if any, anarchists who think that violence should play a role in a future society. Some anarchists, who have been called anarcho-pacifists, reject violence altogether.

"Propaganda of the deed"

Anarchism first achieved mass media attention during the Second Industrial Revolution, when anarchists assassinated rulers of Russia (1881); in the French Republic (1894); in Italy (1900); and in the United States (1901). Although anarchists are divided on whether, or not, to accept violence as a political tool, most anarchists reject such "propaganda by deed" as ineffectual at best and counterproductive at worst. Although some are pacifists, most would accept the need for a robust self defence of a revolution by the working class.

Opposition to anarchism

Theoretical opposition

Major critics

eg. Marx from a Marxist POV

Historical opposition

History of anarchism/anarchists

The Ancient World

Although anarchism is generally considered to be a development in Western philosophical and political thought, some would disagree. Rejection of coercive authority can be traced as far back as Ancient China, where Taoism is declared by some to have been the oldest example of anarchist doctrine[5] (http://www.tao.ca/thinking/texts/taoanarch.html). In fact, similar rejections of authority can probably be found in every society, if one looks hard enough; whether or not they are anarchist is a question for debate. Anarcho-primitivists assert that for the longest period of human history, human society was organised on anarchist principles. However their critics claim that such a projection of their abstract principles is simply an adaptation of the mainstream project of western value systems onto the rest of the world.

In the West, an anti-authoritarian tendency can be traced to Ancient Greece, with philosophers like Zeno of Citium, the founder of the Stoic philosophy, who was, according to Peter Kropotkin, "[t]he best exponent of Anarchist philosophy in ancient Greece". Zeno distinctly opposed his vision of a free community without government to the state-Utopia of Plato. "He repudiated the omnipotence of the state, its intervention and regimentation, and proclaimed the sovereignty of the moral law of the individual." Zeno argued that although the necessary instinct of self-preservation leads humans to egotism, nature has supplied a corrective to it by providing man with another instinct -- sociability. Like many modern anarchists, he believed that if people follow their instincts, they will have no need of law-courts or police, no temples and no public worship, and use no money (free gifts taking the place of the exchanges). Zeno's beliefs, unfortunately, have only reached us as fragmentary quotations. Aristippus also said that the wise should not give up their liberty to the state.[6] (http://www.blackcrayon.com/page.jsp/library/britt1910.html)

In fact, some anarchists assert that anarchism is not so much a movement as an historical tendency; indeed, Bakunin saw thought and rebellion as the principal tenets of human nature as well as of anarchism. However, there was certainly no coherent ideology that called itself "anarchism" until the nineteenth century, when anarchism -- then often referred to simply as "Revolutionary Socialism" -- emerged as the libertarian side of the growing socialist and communist movements of that period.

It can also be conjectured that in past times, many people were anarchists but did not have the opportunity to get such ideas openly published, and that many people did have anarchist fancies but did not dare take them seriously.

Between period

need some accounts of anarchist-related activity/events before 19th century

Later movements -- such as the Free Spirit in the Middle Ages, the Anabaptists, The Diggers and The Levellers -- have also expounded ideas that have been interpreted as anarchist.

Godwin

The first author to have published a treaty explicitly advocating the absence of government (without using the name anarchism) seems to be William Godwin, in 1793.

Proudhon

The French philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, in the 1840s, is considered to have been the first to refer to oneself as an "anarchist", which he did in a non-derogatory fashion, becoming the first to articulate a social philosophy that called itself anarchism. He referring to anarchy as absence of government.

19th century

Most of the labor movements of the time were fiercely anti-capitalist, and the resulting organisations produced many utopian visions for how they wished to transform society. Anarchism developed and flourished in this environment, and had a profound mutual relationship with labor movements until well into the 20th century.

Bakunin

Mikhail Bakunin, a Russian aristocrat and the intellectual heir of Pierre Joseph Proudhon (who adopted the term anarchist in its modern political meaning) was the first major proponent of the philosophy of libertarian socialism. Bakunin summarized the philosophy: "We are convinced that freedom without Socialism is privilege and injustice, and that Socialism without freedom is slavery and brutality." Bakunin's conflict with Marx (discussed above under Conflict with Marxism) was the most visible and well-known split between "authoritarians" and "libertarians" to take place in the nineteenth century working class movement. Some people maintain that Bakunin's conspiratorial organisational techniques reveal an authoritarian structure behind a libertarian gloss.

Kropotkin

The next major step in the development of libertarian socialism came with Peter Kropotkin, another Russian aristocrat who expounded a philosophy that he dubbed "anarchist communism". His writings included The Conquest of Bread and Fields, Factories and Workshops. Kropotkin gave up his nobility and refused the offered position of secretary of an important geographical society on moral grounds. He traveled across the world, using his training as a geographer to catalog productivity, and concluded that an admirable lifestyle could be achieved for all with only five hours of work per day for part of your adult life. He also elaborated an idea called mutual aid, which he believed humans were naturally driven towards.

etc..

Anarchism in revolutions

Topics that warrant subpages:

  • Anarchism in Britain.
  • Anarchism in Spain.
  • Anarchism in... any country or area where there has been a significant anarchist movement.

See also

Biographies

Historical events

Books

Periodicals

Theoretical concepts

Anarchist organizations

External links


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