Anarchism

    

Objections to Anarchism

"Notes on Anarchism''  in  For Reasons of State 
   Noam Chomsky, 1970

 Anarchist Lysander Spooner On The Civil War

  Hakim Bey, Quantum Mechanics & Chaos Theory

From time to time we will deal with some of the more common objections to anarchism, giving both the criticisms and our answers. Neither critique nor answer can be comprehensive or exhaustive, but they will attempt to outline the problem and suggest an anarchist's approach to answering it. Readers are invited to contribute both critiques and answers.

OBJECTION #1:

ANSWER: Philosophers have long speculated on the origins of human social life and political life. Some have pictured the ancient condition of man as one of total chaos where people went about plundering everything and murdering everyone they could find. Only government, they say, brought order and peace to this world of conflict. Others have argued with some force that people joined together basically for economic reasons - it simply was the only practical way to survive. They have further argued that this need for physical survival ultimately brought government into being since people needed an organization to settle their personal disputes and to protect them from rapacious outsiders. Both theories are based on benevolent views of government and they form the basis for many people's idea of what government is today, or at least what they think government should be today.

Neither theory, however, offers an historically realistic appraisal of the origin and nature of government. A third and much more promising theory was advanced by Franz Oppenheimer, who argued that the state is formed from conquest.

It is, however, difficult to determine how men actually lived in "a state of nature" because we have few records of how social life was then organized. Since we can know little of the primeval beginnings of the human race, it is best that we look at man as we see him every day around us.

It takes little discernment to realize that all modern governments are the result not of benevolent policemenship, as many political scientists would like us to believe, but of conquest, of intrigue and power struggles, and of a desire to gain advantage over others through the creation of the state.

Modern governments were not formed by a social contract, not even one remotely resembling Rousseau's ideal. Rather, some of them are the result of revolutions which merely exchanged one set of rulers for another, while others are the children of ancient governments that have passed down the lordship they gained centuries ago through conquest from one generation of political class to another.

Man could not possibly live as a social animal if he lived in a world of universal antagonism. Social life is made possible by our knowledge that most people most of the time are not going to hurt each other or steal from each other. Without that assurance all social life would come to a standstill and there would be no agency or organization of any kind that could bring peace and order out of such a situation.

Man is a social animal and for the most part he will live in cooperative, peaceful relations with his neighbors. It is in this fact of nature, and not some supposed magical power of government, that we discover the essential ingredient for understanding social stability. People by their nature get along with each other. Government doesn't bring them together or keep them together. People live social lives because it is to their advantage to do so. Government doesn't create order out of chaos. The order of social life is already here.

OBJECTION #2:

ANSWER: In every age and among all people there will arise some disagreements which will be impossible for the disputants to settle peacefully themselves. This is a fact of nature which no anarchist or any other reasonable person will deny.

Though recognizing that there will be disputes and conflict between some people, we must not make the mistake of assuming that most social relationships will be of this nature. Most dealings between people are peaceful and those that involve some conflict are generally resolved satisfactorily and peacefully by the parties actually involved in the disagreement. Only a few such conflicts must be arbitrated by outside parties.

Any dispute that goes to the point of outside arbitration or settlement involves a conflict which will not be settled to the complete satisfaction of both parties.

As George Barrett explained it in his classic pamphlet Objections to Anarchism: "If there are two persons who want the exclusive right to the same thing, it is quite obvious that there is no satisfactory solution to the problem. It does not matter in the least what system of society you suggest, you cannot possibly satisfy that position."

This is as much a fact of nature as is the reality that some people will sometimes get involved in conflict. To assume, as the objection does, that governmentally imposed verdict will be a "peaceful" and a "just" one acceptable to both parties involved, is an unwarrented assumption. It has no fact in nature and no standing in experience. The only thing that "resolves" the conflict is the state's power to enforce its verdict. This ability to club one or both parties into submission to its command is called "justice." It's the only kind of "justice" the state knows and can administer.

It's through this system of "justice" that every state has used its power to favor its friends and to punish its enemies and, in every case, to increase its power over the people.

As anarchists, we say with George Barrett, "such disputes are very much better settled without the interference of authority."

But if it is argued that leaving disputes to be settled voluntarily and without the interference of some ultimate and powerful authority will lead to the eventual domination of the strong over the weak, we answer that today this precisely what you have. The government's strength insures that its will will be done, whether the ends of true justice are served or not.

Perhaps the most socially destructive and far reaching influence this system of "justice via the club" has, lies in what it does to people themselves. It accustoms them to violent settlements of their differences instead of forcing them to rely on the sometimes more difficult but ultimately more peaceful system of arbitrating their problems. In the long run a people's dependence on governmentally established procedures for settling disputes leads to a crippling of that people's ability to settle their own disputes. It accustoms them to look to power for a settlement of all their difficulties and ultimately to confuse real justice with justice brought by the club. It leads in the end to more conflict as people grapple for the reigns of power in order to impose their desires on their neighbors. A lust for power is created and rewarded. The natural tendency of people to peacefully and voluntarily settle their problems is replaced by a system that neither honors nor respects nor tolerates our neighbors.

At the heart of our answer to the second objection are two observations anarchists have long made:

1) that disputes between individuals will neither be common nor long-lived and will not be as destructive to life and property and as hurtful to innocent and uninvolved third parties as are disputes that arise between peoples when they are ruled by governments.

2) that free people, though far from perfect, will be more likely to find reasonable and just solutions to human problems than will ever be found through the exercise of the state's power to intervene in all disputes.

OBJECTION #3:

ANSWER: There are several implied fallacies in this objection:

1) that in a system of non-coercive or natural justice, that is, in an anarchist world, people will naturally degenerate into vile creatures and turn on their neighbors. There will be a war of all against all. (See Objection #4.)

2) that people will quite naturally turn to the club as the foundation of all their social relationships. Violence is viewed as the most effective method of securing valuable human relationships.

3) Leaving retaliatory force in the government's hands will insure that it will be used only as retaliatory force, and when it is administered, it will be done so justly.

As anarchists, we say with Benjamin Tucker: "the State takes advantage of its monopoly of defence to furnish invasion instead of protection." Because we rightly fear power in anyone's hands, we recognize the foolhardiness of establishing a government with a monopoly of power and then expecting that government not to abuse that power. If it's dangerous to allow individuals to protect themselves, how much more dangerous it is to give that power to government.

OBJECTION #4:

ANSWER: This objection rests upon a basic but always recurring fallacy - the notion that men are by nature anti-social and anti-cooperative. And just as wrongly, it proposes government as the solution to man's supposed inclination to destroy or injure all of his fellow humans. This is a positively absurd concept of man's nature and is topped only by the even more absurd faith government preachers have in an assumed benevolent nature of government.

Government does not spring from some fancied weakness in human nature that demands it exist to protect us from each other. Rather, it is created by conquest and is a tool used by a ruling clique to rule and exploit others.

The idea that government springs from man's wickedness, yet itself somehow remaining immune to that wickedness, has been rumbling around in the heads of government apologists for centuries. But, how can imperfect men be given power over their fellow men and be expected to use the power in any but an imperfect way? The mystique of the state apparently makes that question unnecessary for government believers to answer.

Imperfect men driven by imperfect motives somehow, by the theory of government apologists, create perfect or near perfect mechanisms for settling the most pressing problems that afflict men. If there is any theory that qualifies for the land of make-believe, it is this faith in the wisdom, justice, and benevolence of government.

We can, and as anarchists, we do recognize that some people, regardless of the social system involved, will take advantage of others. We deny that this exploitation will be widespread and we can point to solid social evidence to prove our position. What violence there is will be sporadic and short-lived and will have no relation to the bogeyman of "war of all against all" preached by anti-anarchists. Though disputes will not be widespread, or numerous, they will, however, occur.

We must find ways to protect ourselves from predators. But we suggest that the way to do that is not to give people naturally bent toward predation (politicians and other power seekers) a sanctioned means to control us.

In addition to recognizing that there will be no general "war of all against all" in an anarchist world, it is important to note, in dealing with this objection, that between anarchists and statists there is a fundamental difference in their approach to dealing with human problems. It was outlined well by Fred Woodworth in his interesting pamphlet on "Anarchism," when he wrote:

Whereas ordinary people will normally rank interpersonal violence as a last resort of social breakdown or crisis, government operates with violence as its immediate priority; determined course of action are decreed, not voluntarily decided upon; ordered, not freely accepted. If the principle of government were extended consistently and uniformly throughout society, true chaos would result - every civilized relationship would give way to the gun or knife; force, not persuasion. We have only the principle of Anarchy operating - the principle of no compulsion - to thank for the fact that the present social condition is not as faulty as it might be. Numerous social interactions even today still taKe place with an absence of compulsion, although State-ordained procedures are of course increasing daily. In the remaining spontaneous relationships between persons there is no ubiquitous policeman interceding (yet); nonetheless, most transactions, conversations, even quarrels, are accomplished without resort to coercion. Government's standard operating procedure is to use coercion first and discuss matters afterward: "Under penalty of three years in the federal penitentiary or $10,000 fine, or both, you are herewith required to.." etc. This reversal of proper order, and exaggerated tendency to resort to force, is completely typical of governments; the tendency to place social compulsion uppermost is certainly not natural or justified. It should be noted that even those people who defend government get along fine without it in their relations with friends or neighbors, most of the time, and woud think a person rude, insulting, and violent who behaved privately as governments do publicly.

Without government and the power government has to deliver a regimented "justice," people would have no effective or sustained means of dominating their neighbors. Without government they would have to deal with each other as equals and use persuasion and compromise as the basic tools of their social relationships.

But with government, they can short-circuit all the natural social bonds people create to peacefully settle problems. They don't need to persuade; they can club you into submission. They don't need to deal with you directly, they can manipulate a third party to do their bullying for them. Neighbors are driven apart by government. When there is force involved, the ties developed by natural society are crushed.

Left to themselves, people will develop their own rules of social life. These rules need not be uniform in all places, and there need be no one special method of enforcing them. People will naturally find their own solutions to problems and their own ways of establishing and defining the rules of their social life. As anarchists we do not dictate what social institutions will be used to deal with crime. People will have to discover them for themselves.

It's not anarchism that breeds chaos. To government belongs that responsibility. It is not the anarchists who are the violent members of society - it's the government rulers that hold that distinction.

OBJECTION #5:

ANSWER: I don't propose any system of social organization. Whether people would establish agencies for defense purposes or would keep that responsibility for themselves, makes no difference. So long as they did it without coercion, whatever form it took, it would be anarchistic. Anarchist philosophy doesn't dictate what system of protection would be best; that is a practical problem that must be solved again and again by people everywhere.

If tomorrow all police functions were turned over to private police forces, we would have no libertarian society. We would just exchange one set of masters for another. Private police forces are no guarantee of a libertarian society, only the people are. And the people will do it only when they are properly disposed to creating a truly free world. Benjamin Tucker explained it thus: "The moment one abandons the idea that he was born to discover what is right and enforce it upon the rest of the world, he begins to feel an increasing disposition to let others alone and to refrain even from retaliation or resistance except in those emergencies which immediately and imperatively require it." When enough people feel this way, we will have an anarchist society.

Anarchism is a social revolution that will occur only from the bottom up, never from the top down. It must be a people's movement, not a leaders' movement.

To talk about private police forces without realizing that they are not an essential element in creating a libertarian world, but might be a natural outgrowth of that world, is to confuse cause with effect. Such police forces won't bring anarchism, but anarchism might create such police forces. There are no formulas for creating a libertarian social order, and there is, likewise, no way of knowing what shapes social institutions will take in a libertarian society. The future must be free to make its own arrangements. We are not here to design blueprints for society. We are proposing no utopia.

OBJECTION #6:

ANSWER: Most "criminals" in our government-controlled world are victims of the law. They are criminals not because they have injured someone else, but because they have violated some government commandment. They have broken some victimless crime law or some edict the state proclaimed to promote its own welfare, e.g., the draft law or income tax law. Abolish the state and these people will no longer be criminals.

There are some individuals who are genuine criminals - the robber, rapist, murderer - who will have to be dealt with. Whether we protect ourselves individually from these ruffians, or by organizing private defense agencies; whether we try them in courts or at the scene of the crime; whether we imprison them or make them pay restitution to their victims, are all issues that must be settled by anarchist societies when they are faced with the problems. Free people will find ways to secure protection and justice for themselves. The point to be understood is that they will do it for themselves when the need arises. It's not for us to program how they must do it.

There is yet another type of criminal, the institutional criminal, that poses the greatest danger to the health, safety, and welfare of people. He, too, is created by the law, but he has this advantage over all other criminals; he is also the law-maker and the judge of his laws. He is the government.

It is government itself that has been the world's greatest criminal. In the name of patriotism or national defense or manifest destiny or just plain greed, he has slaughtered more people, stolen more money, and terrorized more individuals than have all the criminals throughout all the centuries of human history. It is government that wages war, operates concentration camps and taxes the people. It's government that used the rack, operated the guillotine, and dropped the atom bomb. Not anarchists. It's not an anarchist world that is chaotic and full of conflict - it's the one in which the state exists. And it's because of the state, not in spite of it, htat we have all these.

What do we do with criminals in an anarchist world? We get rid of the biggest one and try to deal with the rest as best we can.

OBJECTION #7:

ANSWER: This is the plaintive cry of the "limited government" preachers. To this Benjamin Tucker replied: "If limited government is good, the perfection of government is no government."

Somehow, somewhere, given a properly intelligent, some say, "objective" populace, the limited government buff suggests that it will be possible to create a machinery of government that will be controllable. Some of these little-government people may even go so far as to tell you how they will do it. But for most it is pure dream and hope out of which they build their plans for a utopian government.

In many instances this thing they want to create and call a limited government has no relationship and none of the essential characteristics, of any government that has ever existed. Generally, these model states have no power to tax and no absolute jurisdiction over a given territory. Without these essential powers there can be no government.

Government grows; that is its nature. Government is a power broker and an instrument for creating privilege. It must continually take on new functions in order to survive.

Not even the most holy Ayn Rand, followed as she might be with an army of the most objective of objectivists, can change this. It is a fact; it is history. It is the very nature of government.

Regardless of the lessons of history, these limited governmentalists assure us that it is within their power to create a limited government. And these are people who insist on calling anarchists "dreamers" and "utopians."

OBJECTION #8:

ANSWER: It's not the anarchist who doesn't understand the nature of man. It's not the anarchist who refuses to learn the lessons history has repeatedly taught. It's not the anarchist who continually puts his hopes in new promises of some nirvana ruled by a "limited" government.

The anarchist cannot be blamed for the world's chaos and terror - for its wars and prison camps and execution chambers, for its surveillance of citizens, for the confiscations of people's property and for the ever-present threat of world-wide nuclear annihilation.

Because we give man credit for being a social animal, we are willing to trust him to deal peaceably with his neighbors - at least most of the time. But we are also wise enough to realize that if we don't want men to abuse power, then we must not give them power. We are realists who recognize man has a social nature, and realists who also know that man, when tempted by power, will be corrupted by it. We say, let man's social nature be the bond that ties men to each other. Yet we warn at the same time that it is because of man's imperfect nature that we must not create government and then trust him to use it peacefully.

Anarchists live in the real world undeluded by dreams of perfect governments, and by hopes that government can reduce crime and eliminate war. We gave up those illusions years ago.

OBJECTION #9:

I think we're in a sad state of affairs when we think of ourselves first so much we lose track of others and of the sense of mankind that John Dunne so aptly wrote about. I hate governmental corruption and injustices as much as you do, but I just don't think libertarianism is the right way to go. I think it's a step in the wrong direction - 180 degrees wrong.

ANSWER: This objection typifies some people's fears that anarchist societies will not work. In time we will take each of the ideas inherent in your objection, lay them out individually so they can be properly understood and then shall answer them. But in the beginning we must understand the underlying philosophy on which this objection rests.

It is this: government introduces an element to human society that makes it possible for people, particularly the disadvantaged, to live in society. It tempers the rough edges of human life, giving protection and justice to those who otherwise would be crushed in the rush for survival. You are saying that people, left untouched by governmental control, cannot be relied upon to treat with mercy and generosity and fairness those who are weaker or who have fallen on unfortunate circumstances.

Government alone, according to your objection, brings to society the one power that is capable of civilizing human relationships and you suggest that without government we would be cast into a hopeless abyss of bandits and gun duels.

In sum, then, your objection assumes that:

1) people left to themselves will not take care of their unfortunate neighbors. People will not freely help anyone, particularly those who can in no way return the favor. Their only concern is themselves and the whole of natural human society is rooted in the reality that only the strong will survive.

2) government alone can correct this human deficiency. Government and governors apparently are immune from the human failing detailed in the first point. From this we must conclude that the governing class is made up of a specially endowed race of human beings who are possessed of characteristics of generosity and mercy unknown anywhere else in the human family.

3) government has a moral claim nobody else has that authorizes it to coercively redistribute wealth from those who produce it to those who cannot take care of themselves. The unfortunate have a claim on others to support them and that if this support isn't voluntarily forthcoming it can be wrenched by force from those who do not freely choose to give it.

Each of these premises, to say the least, is highly questionable, but because they are implicit in your objection they deserve to be discussed.

Apparently you have grown up in a much different world than I have because all around me I meet people helping other people and not asking anything in return. And this is in spite of all the government programs that discourage this kind of voluntary neighborliness. The thousands of private charitable organizations in this country give an irrefutable answer to your assumption that only government can and will help the disadvantaged. In addition to the many formal institutions of charity, there are an untold number of private acts of charity that escape public attention altogether but which, nevertheless, add a most humanizing element to social life.

Only by ignoring altogether the multitude of non-coercive acts of charity that exist all around us can you begin to believe your assumption that the government was the only institution that would have helped You and your folks through your severe health problem. Admittedly, the government did come to your help, but that doesn't prove no one else would have. All it demonstrates for sure is that no one else needed to.

Your second assumption springs quite naturally from your first. If people will not voluntarily assist their neighbors, then the only way to get them to do so is to force them into it.

Who is to do the forcing? If all people are naturally uncaring and selfish then we cannot hope to find anyone possessing the qualities of mercy and generosity needed to care for the unfortunate. Any who step forward for the task must immediately be suspect for their true motives.

However, if you now deny your first proposition and allow that there indeed are people possessed of the qualities needed to unselfishly aid their brothers, then there are two questions that need be asked.

1) Why is a coercive power needed to force people to pay for this charity if there are people who will voluntarily shoulder the burden of their less fortunate neighbors? If you answer that it is because there aren't enough of these people around with enough money to adequately take care of the needs of the disadvantaged, then:

2) Where do those who use government to force others to pay the bill for this coerced "charity" get the privilege of playing Robin Hood? Were do they get the right to take the products of one persons labor and forcibly redistribute it to someone else who has not earned it? You are ignoring the one person in this highwayman's game who is always a victim - the taxpayer. When you tax him you have admitted that he wouldn't freely have given you his money, so where do you get the right to reach into his pocket to take what you want from him? You may try to excuse this act of thefta as being necessary for a noble purpose, but don't hide its nature as an act of plunder. Who is there that will protect the producer from the ravishing raids of the politically powerful who have set upon their course of plunder wrapped behind a cloak of humanitarianism?

Long ago we should have given up the notion that there is some kind of divine right among rulers, that these political masters are cut from a different cloth than the rest of humankind. This fairy tale just doesn't wash. The presence of such jewels as Richard Nixon and Co. should cause even the most believing of today's believers to question the notion that members of the political class have particularly noble and generous characters and are possessed of angelic qualities lacking in the rest of humanity. The governing class is not an elite arising from the people ordained to save mankind from itself. If history should teach us anything, it is that the political class is composed basically of self-servers who thirst for power and privilege and who have found in government the perfect vehicle to achieve their purpose. They are not the noble denizens of this earth that you picture them to be.

You have suggested that an anarchist world would be one full of bandits and gun duels. But the truth is quite contrary. It's a world in which states exist that is full of banditry and gun duels. Governments are virtually unable to check the acts of individual violence that abound in this country and in many cases are directly and indirectly involved in causing them. Throw in a hopelessly outdated court system that doesn't dispense justice and hardly even gets around to dispensing the law, and you have a system that fails miserably to operate the one service government defenders always claim government alone is capable of providing.

But beyond that there is one fact that government defenders often choose to ignore. That is: The biggest and most aggressive bandits and murderers are the governments themselves. Whatever violence there would be in anarchist societies could only pale in comparison to the violence governments through wars and persecutions have brought to human history.

The legalized murder and plunder that go under the name of war are the creations of your beloved government. All the broken lives, destroyed homes, maimed individuals and slaughtered peoples that war leaves in its wake are the children of that state that you so unhesitatingly turn to to be the defender of the downtrodden and helpless.

For everyone like you who has benefited from the state's system of organized theft, there are dozens whose lives have been ruined or destroyed by that same state. Government stands condemned by it own record as an institution that for centuries has been responsible for massive terror, torture, and slaughter. Government has no equal in this grizzly business - and never will.

what I have written so far has largely been a negative response to your remarks. Let me for a bit approach this subject from the positive aspect of anarchism. Anarchism is not a dead or negative philosophy as you suggest - it is very much alive with a positive message for humankind. Far from being solely bent on trying to tear down government, anarchists are a people of peace who ask nothing more than that people respect the humanity and individuality of each other and reject coercion as a way of life. Of course we condemn government every opportunity we get because we recognize it as the single greatest threat there is to human peace and well being. But our attacks on the state are rooted not only in our knowledge that government by its very nature is destructive of true society, but also in our conviction that the full benefits of social life can come only to free people, and, conversely, that only free people can create a climate where true society can flourish.

Anarchist societies will place responsibility for order directly on free individuals, not on formal government. As William Reichert pointed out so well in his book Partisans of Freedom, authoritarians place their faith in the repressive state while anarchists put their trust in social man.

Paraphrasing David T. Wieck, Reichert writes: "Anarchism is not opposed to organization that depends upon the authoritarian principle of command and compulsion for its success. An anarchist society, building upon the social responsibility and initiative of primary groups acting voluntarily, will gradually develop the libertarian social foundations essential for a truly free society."

Anarchism doesn't pretend to offer answers to all the social, economic, and political problems that confront us. It's no grand blueprint that attempts to spell out in detail how anarchist societies of the future will be organized and will solve the problems that confront them.

You challenge me to "set up a society from its roots and project how you see it would be in 100 years under anarchy." In doing so you approach anarchist political philosophy with the same premises you have borrowed from statist ideology. You suggest by such a comment that it is in the power of an anarchist to dream up some social model and program how people would exist in that sort of world. Statists have been trying to do that for centuries and they've always failed.

We don't view people as clay to be shaped and moulded according to our schemes and we have no desire to create models for the future. It's not because our imaginations lack the vitality possessed by other mortals. Rather, it's due to our belief that people know what they want out of life, know how best to achieve it for themselves, and, if left alone, will do so in an orderly and peaceful manner.

We're no afflicted by the urge to create grand designs and then pretend somehow that these visions bear any relationship to what is or could be.

In sum, then, the question is not whether anarchist societies will take care of those who are unable to provide for themselves, but rather whether the aid some few have received from the government isn't greatly overbalanced by the misery, destruction and chaos that governments have always wreaked on the human community.

OBJECTION #10:

William J. Boyer

ANSWER: You are right, of course. There are all sorts of "aggressions" such as you suggest in your objection.

One of the homes in my neighborhood, for example, is peopled by college kids who on occasion enjoy sharing their music with everyone within a 100-mile radius. Again, the other day when riding the bus to work one woman got on who was proudly displaying a grossly pornographic magazine. Some of us whose sexual interests don't lie in such directions could have been offended by the picture.

In the first case, where does the pleasure these college students get from being deafened by their music end and my love for tranquility begin? In the second, where does the woman's pleasure in pornography end before it begins infringing on my desire not to look at such material?

Obviously, in the cases cited both in the question and above, there is conflict. Whether it's resolvable or not is another matter. In beginning our consideration of this issue it will be helpful to recognize a couple points.

1) These problems exist today in a world full of government. They will exist in an anarchist world, too. But let's not suppose that they will in any way be peculiar to an anarchist society. The objection's implication is that today there are ways to deal with these problems - effective ways - that will not be available in an anarchist setting. Which brings us to a second point.

2) Since these problems will always exist, how are they to be handled? Herein lies the difference between the anarchist approach and the approach taken by those who choose to use coercion.

The statist argues that coercion is the only historically tried and proven method available for resolving problems arising between people. Because coercion is used and because it "works" (someone eventually is clubbed into submission), no further defense of their position is required, the argument goes. By implication they assume that the argument for or against their position is closed and that the only things about which there need to be discussion are the proposals offered as alternatives to coercion. No other method has been tried, they argue, and so those who propose other ways must satisfactorily (to their satisfaction, that is) prove that those other ways "will work." It's interesting to note here that the statists who raise this point will often insist that a libertarian be able to prove beyond question that in a free society any and all possible problems will be settled perfectly to everyone's complete satisfaction. Furthermore, these problems must be able to be settled before they ever arise - that is, we must have a patent perfect answer for "solving" every imaginable hypothetical example thrown at us. If we are unable to do so - to their complete satisfaction - then our approach toward dealing with social problems is discarded out of hand as "useless," "idealistic," "unworkable." Ask their "system to withstand the same rigid interrogation and they will cry that we are being unreasonable. Certainly their system has flaws, they answer, but it's better than something that hasn't been tried, isn't it they ask rhetorically.

It's not without reason that statists have long employed this line of argument. By so doing they can put their position beyond dispute and throw the whole weight of the argument on the shoulders of their opponents.

Since some social problems by their very nature are unsolvable to all parties' satisfaction, then, given the conditions the statists impose on the argument, whatever anarchists suggest as ways to approach handling such problems will be vehemently criticized as "impractical" and discarded as "idealistic."

In due course we will consider what, if anything, might be done in anarchist societies to deal with difficult social conflicts, but first we must consider the prevailing notion that coercion is a useful method for settling social problems.

One of the first things to note is that state-administered coercion doesn't settle social conflicts, as its proponents would like us to believe. Rather, it causes these conflicts to smoulder as the parties to the disputes chafe under the injustice they feel has been done to them, and it creates a whole new set of conflicts as the disputants struggle to control the state mechanism itself. This latter fact is something statists wish us to ignore because herein lies the real cancer of their system. The struggle for power, for the opportunity to dominate and dictate what shall and shall not be done lies at the heart of our condemnation of their whole system. It is precisely this struggle for power that leads to the major social ills we face today.

Conflicts between individuals or small groups of people historically pale in comparison to the massive social disruption the state has caused. The statists cannot deny the wars, concentration camps, and torture that have been such an ugly part of history, but they attempt to put the blame for them on "human nature," a bogey man they for centuries have carried in their closet of arguments against freedom. They say that it is an evil human nature that causes these terrible things and that it is government that really holds this perverse nature in check. Without government we would all fall on each other in an orgy of theft, slaughter, and mayhem, or, at any rate, so their litany goes.

Anarchists reply that it isn't "human nature" that is responsible for these ills. Rather, it is the very system of government that creates the worst of the problems and perpetuates them and provides a "justification" for them.

Blatant personal use of violence (murder, theft, extortion, etc.) is recognized by the common mass of human kind as wrong. It's an undesirable and unwanted part of life and in our everyday life we would no sooner think of using it than we would wish that it was used on us. The bully, that is the person who resorts to coercion and violence in his dealings with others, is recognized for what he is. There is no moral justification for a bully's acts and, given the opportunity, no one would have the slightest qualm of conscience about resisting a bully's aggression.

The above is obvious. Obvious, that is, until the bully is the government. Government claims a special moral legitimacy for its existence and its actions. All too sadly for human history, people traditionally have been trained to support these claims.

Rudolf Rocker describes this process in Nationalism and Culture:

Thus gradually a separate class evolved whose occupation was war and rulership over others. But no power can in the long run rely on brute force alone. Brutal force may be the immediate means for the subjugation of men, but alone it is incapable of maintaining the rule of the individual or of a special caste over whole groups of humanity. For that more is needed; the belief of man in the inevitability of such power, the belief in its divinely willed mission. ["We're on a mission from Gad!" - Elwood BLues.] Such a belief is rooted deeply in man's religious feelings and gains power with tradition, for above the traditional hovers the radiance of religious concepts and mystical obligation.

Over the centuries the rationale for this legitimacy has changed, but it's there nonetheless. From being the will of the gods, to being something sanctioned by divine right, form an expression of democracy to the product of an historical dialectic, governments have grasped onto whatever fashionable political theology was current to excuse and defend their existence. Particular governments might fall, but government itself as an institution stood bedrock-solid.

Anarchists, however, challenge the whole structure of government itself, recognizing in it the chief cause of the principal ills facing human society. Our position strikes at the roots of the whole system, not just at the people who temporarily hold power. We know that power corrupts and that the solution is to eliminate the power structures that breed social discord, not to find perfect humans who will be immune to the tempting spell power casts over people.

Anarchists recognize that when coercion is used to settle disputes, the conflicts, as often as not, expand, they don't contract. Force by its nature generates an excuse for more force. Whether the wielder of the force be the individuals immediately involved in the dispute or whether it be the government (through its police), the nature of force remains the same and eventually the outcome of its use is disastrous.

While coercion, no matter who uses it, is destructive, there is a crucial distinction between the private use of coercion as it is wielded by the state. To illustrate this fact, let's return briefly to one of the examples cited earlier.

Suppose that my patience with the loud music coming from a neighbor's home has reached its end and I physically restrain them from playing the music. Whether my other neighbors agree with what I did or not, they would recognize my action simply as a violent reprisal for which I am accountable. The rightness or wrongness of my action will be judged on the merits of the case itself.

Suppose, instead, that I call on a policeman to do the coercing for me. Once the uniformed coercer intervenes, the public will no longer judge the issue solely on its merits. Rather, it now becomes a question of "was the law broken?" As a result, people become more interested in controlling the lawmaking and interpreting machinery than they are with establishing systems for justly settling their conflicts.

Law relieves people of the need to find ways for peacefully negotiating solutions to their problems. It gives them a club with which they crush their neighbor into submission, and having the club, they use it. In the name of the "law" government can do all sorts of legally atrocious things and with confidence proclaim, "we had a right to do what we did."

Because government exists, my college-age neighbors and I can struggle to dominate each other behind the shield of the policeman. We can deal with each other violently and righteously and that's a fact that has far broader implications than statists wish to recognize.

Among those ignored consequences of state-administered coercion are these:

1) By using the policeman we can remain anonymous in our acts of violence against our neighbors. No one ever need know who "complained" to the police and, consequently, all the neighbors become suspect in the eyes of the one accused of violating the law. It's hardly a way to foster strong community bonds.

2) By resorting to the government we mask the nature of coercion behind a shield of respectability. We have hidden from ourselves the genuine brutality of the act itself. We ignore the essential nature of the act, uncritically excusing it as something the government has a right to do simply because it is the government.

3) We give to the political machine a power and "right" to act under a set of moral guidelines quite unlike any that are applicable to the rest of the human community. Where it would be blatantly wrong for an individual to use force and violence against another, the wrongness of that violence is obscured when it is used by the state. For me to steal from my neighbors is wrong. Without exception I couldn't find a neighbor who would disagree with me on that. But if I "authorize" a third party (the tax collector) to do my robbing for me, my neighbors become confused about their right to defend themselves from the thievery. This whole mental subservience makes us perfect targets for most anything the government wants to do to us.

In conclusion, then, I argue that coercion, and in particular institutionalized coercion administered by the state, is a socially destructive way of handling disputes. I also challenge the idea that legislated violence is a time-tested means for achieving peace among people.

But having argued that, the original question still remains unanswered: "in anarchist societies can people protect themselves from offensive behavior?"

Let me answer this in two ways. First, by referring you to an article that appeared in Liberty, an American anarchist journal published by Benjamin R. Tucker. The article appears at the [at this location]. The article is an exchange between Wordsworth Donisthorpe and Tucker. It covers the same issue we are discussing here and in outline form presents Tucker's answer to this objection.

Second, in addition to Tucker's answer, let me add that the foundation on which an anarchist society will be built is toleration. There will be no anarchist world unless people are genuinely tolerant of the things that make their neighbors different from them. Sometimes these differences are offensive to us, but unless we are willing to bear with them until they become threateningly oppressive, we will never see a world built on peace through a respect for individual freedom. This doesn't mean that we can't let our neighbors know we don't appreciate their quirks or outrageous behavior, but it does mean we will first search for every means other than coercion to deal with the conflict. If we become totally frustrated, having exhausted every peaceful means we could, and, we finaly resort to coercion, we must recognize it as a collapse of a better way of dealing with problems and not, as it is today, as something we have a "right" to do.

When there really is no socially sanctioned alternative - when people can no longer rely on the police to do their bidding - then people will begin dealing with problems personally and peacefully.

Being an anarchist, I had to respect my neighbors' wish to listen to loud music. I can assure you I didn't enjoy it. Fortunately, those neighbors have since moved and the problem resolved itself. But if the problem had become unbearable my first responsibility would have been to talk with them about it. If that had failed, then I would have had to look for other, non-violent means of handling the situation. I could have suggested to their landlord that he ask them to turn their music down, or I could have bought some earplugs and shut the noise out totally. There are other things that could have been done before I ever turned to coercion.

The point is that when people are committed to finding non-coercive means of dealing with the things that annoy us, then we will have made our first major step toward a peaceful world. Violence may still erupt sporadically, but it will not be the institutionalized violence so widespread today. In a libertarian society it will no longer be a matter of trying to minutely define and determine where our "rights" end and another begin. The emphasis will be on toleration and it will create an entirely different approach to dealing with problems.

When violence does flare up I suggest that one means of trying to handle such situations would be through community juries. Such juries would have a full range of responsibility for dealing not only with whether the parties to the conflict were justified in resorting to violence, but also what if any punishment should be inflicted for a wrongful use of force. Lysander Spooner detailed the powers and responsibilities such juries might have, so I refer you to his An Essay on the Trial By Jury for further reading.

But community juries are only one possibility. Free people have been ingenious in finding ways for overcoming their problems - and they will be equally ingenious in this area of administrative justice. It would be foolish for us to define and limit those possibilities now. The future must be free to make itself. There is no single way for handling all problems and I trust that in a libertarian world people would discover many effective ways for peacefully and constructively dealing with the social difficulties they encounter.

Since government-dominated society has led us repeatedly to gross injustice, to wars, and to other massive violence, the libertarian alternative is certainly worth considering.

OBJECTION #11:

- J.G. Krol

ANSWER: Because of space limitations I had to condense considerably Mr. Krol's argument, but I hope I have sufficiently preserved the flavor and content of his objection. Trusting that I have done so, I proceed with an answer.

Mr. Krol makes the fundamental mistake of assuming that government is just another industry providing a range of services. He couldn't be more wrong, and in his error misinterprets grossly the thrust of the anarchist attack on government.

Government is not - cannot be - defined by the "services" it provides. Historically, its unique characteristic has not been that it has made roads, delivered mail, swept streets, pushed papers or killed crooks. It's fundamental characteristic has been the means it has used to exist, not the things it has done.

Benjamin R. Tucker defined government as "the subjection of the noninvasive individual to a will not his own." Whether the person(s) doing the subjecting are lone individuals, gangs of ruffians or "legally" authorized representatives of the state, makes not the least bit of difference. They are all acting as governments whenever they force a non-invasive individual to do something that person doesn't freely choose to do. Coercion is the key ingredient of government. It is its distinguishing characteristic. It is the thing that makes goverment government.

If Mr. Krol doesn't accept this definition, then let him show why the anarchist definition of government is inadequate. Let him show us that coercion is not the distinguishing characteristic of that institution that throughout history has carried the name "government." Otherwise, we will be embroiled in a hopeless and purposeless semantic debate.

Like other mini-government people, Mr. Krol appears more to be threatened by the word "anarchism" itself than by the actual philosophy of anarchism. Like the rest of us he was raised with the idea that government is a necessary part of social life. He hasn't been able to break the bonds of that indoctrination. He knows that coercion is evil, so he fantasizes that somehow, somewhere a non-coercive "government" can be organized that will be fully responsive to its constituents' wishes. It will keep the streets clean, carry away the garbage, and deliver the mail and for all these services the people will voluntarily pay the bill. Mr. Krol's idea is that all we have to do is find a way to let the people vote how much they want to be taxed and how they want their tax money spent and we will have found the secret to non-violent government.

Any notion that government will let its victims (that is, the general populace) determine how much tax money will be taken and how the tax money will be spent is folly. By confining yourself to Economics 101, you might think that Mr. Krol's plan is realistic and workable. But a glance at Political Science 101 will convince even the dullest-witted that government isn't going to allow any such thing to happen. After all, what would be the purpose of governing if you couldn't govern? Without control of the pursestrings, as Mr. Krol so well points out, you cannot rule. And ruling is the business of government.

Mr. Krol argues that we can have government (a coercive institution) by "consumer sovereignty" (that is, through voluntary consent). He has constructed a dream-world institution that has no relationship to any government that has ever existed or ever can.

He refuses to understand the true nature of the enemy the anarchists are really fighting.

By its nature government takes what it wants - it doesn't ask for it. The monies we pay into its coffers aren't free will offerings any more than the draft was voluntary service.

Using Mr. Krol's guidelines we can reasonably imagine a group of people voluntarily contributing money to form a pirate organization which is designed to steal from others and to make slaves of people outside the organization. Those inside the organization will not adversely feel the theft or slavery. They could enjoy 100 percent "consumer sovereignty" (the government does exactly what they want it to). For them "consumer sovereignty" is working just fine. But for the exploited it's still exploitation. As much as Mr. Krol might like to ingnore it, "consumer sovereignty" is no protection from the evils government forever creates.

The mafia and other "criminal" gangs are criminal not because of what they do (because what they do really isn't much different from what the government does), but because a prevailing and more powerful gang of thugs has "outlawed" them. If the mafia were able to overpower the now dominating ring of governors and establish itself as the single coercive agent in a given area, then it would assume the same status the government enjoys today. It would "legitimate" its power and find all manner of excuses why it should rule.

Whether a government wields its power democratically (by counting the power of noses), or aristocratically (by assuming that some are better than others and therefore ought to rule), or by simple conquest (might makes right), it rules because it holds the balance of coercive power.

Mr. Krol suggests that anarchists are our own worst enemies. We are visionaries and idealists who have no contact with reality, he says.

Perhaps to some extent he is right.

So long as a free world is kept from being because of a group of government meddlers, then it must remain only a dream. So long as some choose to coerce others, then to that extent we will not have an anarchist society. Anarchists are not interested in perpetuating the ugly scars created by government interference in the natural life of society. We don't want the wars and persecutions and terro government for centuries has plagued us with. We believe in a social order built on human cooperation and mutual aid.

If these be idealistic notions, then we are glad to be idealists. We don't offer detailed and grand plans for how a free society can be achieved and held together. We are not interested in building systems and then making people fit into them. We trust that when left to ourselves we will freely find a multitude of ways for dealing with each other and the problems that arise between us.

Mr. Krol seems annoyed that I won't draw out plans for how a free society will be organized. But in doing so he fails to understand the very roots of anarchism. We are not system builders - that is, we are not afflicted with governmentitis. Rather, we advocate letting people find the free and peaceful systems that best handle their peculiar problems. We don't want to organize society, we want society to organize itself.

Because of the length of this Objection to Anarchism and the several points raised here, I felt it was necessary to divide the objection into parts - each of which has been assigned a number. In responding to the objection these numbers will be used as reference points.

the editor

OBJECTION:

In essence, I do not believe in the inherent good will of my fellow man. The Russians themselves cannot overcome their police state. How can I (we?) when they land? If you say they won't come merely because we don't want them, then go convince Czechoslovakians that they are free!

ANSWER: 

1) You are most correct. There are always going to be volunteers for the God Job. But more than that, we are also going to find people who want to creat God Jobs where there were none before. These are people we have to be every bit as watchful for as for those who vie for already existing power positions.

The great mass of people, however, spend their lives minding their own business, not only because they don't have the time to devote to interfering in other people's lives, but, more importantly, because they just don't have an interest in doing so.

Among the power-hungry, you are quite correct, we will always find ready volunteers for God Jobs. Our purpose shouldn't be to find those who will be efficient Gods or benevolent Gods, but to keep the God Job from ever existing. If we will learn that there is no place for subservience, no need to bow and scrape before others, we will have taken a first and most important step toward freeing ourselves of government. We will have liberated ourselves from the black magic idea that human society needs government to exist. And if we don't believe we need rulers, rulers will have a most difficult chore forcing themselves on us. Most of us just don't want to get involved in politics - and that's as it should be and will be in a free society.

If we refuse to play the game the God Job applicants want us to play, then we will have spoiled their sport. They can go off and play their game by themselves, if they choose, but we will have nothing to do with them running our lives.

The challenge facing us is not just to keep everyone busy watching out for his own hide, but to persuade the great bulk of humankind that the alligators of this world don't have any right to prey upon the rest of us.

2) At least you're honest enough to admit that the limited government concept suffers from a fatal flaw; that is, the inability to keep it limited. The mini-government people will keep blowing their siren song in the wind, but they will never be able to charm their cobra back into its basket. Once born, government by its nature grows and grows and grows. A limited government is the same old social poison, packaged only in a smaller container - a container of which it itself determines the boundaries.

Governments would like us to believe otherwise. For centuries they have fed people many excuses for their existence and by so doing have duped people into submissive obedience and even active acceptance of government. People, as a consequence, have come to believe that their bondage not only is necessary, but is beneficial.

3) Assume that one day you return home to find your house on fire. You aren't going to stand around philosophizing about what you are going to replace the fire with once the flames are extinguished. Being a reasonable person you know the thing to do is to fight the fire and save what you can of your home.

The same holds true for other evils we face during our lives. We keep looking for ways to get rid of them, trusting that life without them will be better than life with them. Life, it is true, may not be perfect, but at least to the extent that the evils are eliminated, life will be better.

Anarchists believe that getting rid of government is much like getting rid of any other evil. We don't propose what life will be like after the evil is eliminated, but we do argue that the elimination of the evil itself is a positive step. Life will be better to the extent that we destroy the disease that government inflicts on the body of society.

I must repeat briefly one of the points of anarchist philosophy that is crucial for understanding anarchism. It's a point some people seem to have great difficulty grasping. That is, as anarchists we do not propose how people will organize the day to day activities of their lives. To do so would be to attempt to program the future, to dictate how people in a free society must lieve and relate to one another. Doing so, of course, is folly. For anarchists to do so, however, would not only be foolish but it would be a contradiction of our basic principle. That is, people must be free to live their own lives as they choose to live them.

Anarchists, rightfully, have suggested that there are many peaceful, noncoercive ways of organizing our economic and social lives. While some have gone into great detail imagining how people can socially settle problems which arise between them, it should be emphasized that these are merely speculations about the future. They are not blueprings for that future.

What we do propose, however, is that for society to function freely, anarchistically, it must operate on certain basic principles. Among these principles are justice - or a respect for what is "mine" and "thine" - and the non-initiation of coercion. Founded on these and some root principles, societies could be organized in a multitude of ways.

3a) The state has been reasonably well defined by Benjamin R. Tucker. He wrote: "the state (is) the embodiment of the principle of invasion in an individual, or a band of individuals, assuming to act as representatives or masters of the entire people within a given area."

3b) This issue was discussed briefly in Objection #10 (see Vol. 2, No. 7, of the dandelion.)

But to briefly consider the issue you raise here. You are correct when you say that there are many social relationships in which coercion can be used by one person to dominate another. The family, work situations, friendships, etc., are all subject to occasional coercion. It's unfortunate but true. But that doesn't mean that coercion is a justifiable method of relating to each other. If anything, all it means is that people have failed, they have let their tempers control them and have abandoned the peaceful methods of persuasion in favor of violence.

Of course, we must examine all our social relationships, not merely our political ones. We should be keenly aware that all to often there is only a fine line separating a person's ability to persuade and his ability to dominate and govern. For this reason we must continually assess our relationships with others and strive always to eliminate coercion from those relationships.

But don't confuse violence and coercion with moral authority. And individual or an organization exercising mere moral persuasion, that is, the ability to peacefully convince others to a particular course of action, does not act as a government or a state in so persuading another. People and organizations, indeed, can and do influence others, but as long as there is not coercion or threat of coercion there is no governing.

You say that domination is "natural." Sure it is, if you mean by "natural" that it actually does happen. So is murder and so are theft and child beating and vandalism. That doesn't mean, therefore, that we should condone them or that there aren't better ways peoplE can deal with each other. All it means is that occasionally people resort to violence. Regardless, our goal should be to root out violence and coercion. It may not always be possible, but as anarchists we argue that it is a goal to work for so that all our "natural" relationships can also be peaceful ones.

4) For a more detailed discussion of this, see Objection #10 in Vol. 2, No. 7, of the dandelion.

4a) Naturally, if one person can justly do something then a group of individuals acting together can justly take the same action. Their groupness or individualness has nothing to do with the issue. I beleive that Bastiat in The Law makes a most powerful case for this position. But, again, don't confuse a voluntary organization with a government. One is formed by mutual need, the other is based on coercion and exploitation. Their origins and natures are fundamentally different. You imply here that the voluntary group you describe has some relationship to government when in fact it doesn't. Individuals don't have a claim to steal just as groups of individuals have no claim to the legal thievery of taxation. We cannot multiply our prerogatives merely by banding together.

5) A despot is a single ruling individual whose reign typically is marked by horrible oppression. A state is the institutionalization of government into an "official" organization and power structure. A mob may be unstoppable, unaccountable and uncontrollable and if it uses non-defensive violence it would be acting as a government. But it would not be a state. When power is formalized and "legitimized," then the institution holding that power becomes the state.

6) I cannot agree with you on this issue at all. The rightness or wrongness of an action doesn't depend merely on what is done, but also on how it is done. They very nature of the state is not principally determined by what it does but rather by how it does what it does. This is most important.

For example, anarchists have no objection to education. Quite the contrary. Many have long argued its merits. But we object to coercive, compulsory "education" operated and financed by state taxation. We don't oppose the goal of having people educated, but we object to the means used to achieve it.

7) Individually, you say, you can't defend yourself from the Russian hordes that you believe will swarm over the world if the United States becomes an anarchist society. You suggest that voluntary means of providing for self defense are not feasible.

How do you propose, then, that we resist the Russians? By drafting people into the military - like the Russians do? By spending huge sums of money on defense - like the Russians do? By spying on our people to discover the "traitors" in our midst - like the Russians do? By encouraging people to hate selected foreigners - like the Russians do?

No thanks! If being free of foreign domination means becoming slaves to domestic masters, what have we gained?

The Russian state, a monstrous wart on the Russian people, has become a convenient bogeyman for the American state. My immediate concern, however, is with the domestic monster that has grown up in our midst. Remember, it's a centuries old and proven tactic of the state to use foreign "enemies" as excuses for domination and reasons for extending their domestic power in every direction. At what cost do we protect ourselves from the Russians without installing our own Kremlin in Washington - if we already haven't done so?

Consider another point. If we are so determined to be free that we won't accept domestic-grown masters, is it realistic to suppose that we would tolerate foreign-born ones? the cost to a foreign state to dominate us would be enormous. If such a state were forced to conquer and subjugate a land peopled by individuals who prize their liberty as one of the chief goods of life, imagine the continuing problem that state would have maintaining its control. Do you believe that would be possible or feasible? Even if this foreign state did conquer a free people, how long do you suppose it could maintain its empire? The Russian state is plagued by internal dissent and in the years to come that dissent is bound to grow. It would multiply geometrically if the state extended its borders to the American continent. It would be an empire doomed to dissolution as popular resistance movements would tame, harness and finally rid the land of its masters.

In a free society there is no way of programming what social organizations will arise to deal with problems - one of those problems being the need for self defense from predators. I can't know, therefore, what will fill the "defense" vacuum you write about. Some have suggested several options available to us - options free people have resorted to throughout history in all parts of the world. Self-defense associations raised to meet crises and then disbanded are not uncommon occurrences throughout history.

In closing you say that you don't believe in "the inherent good will of my fellow man." Neither do I. That's why I argue that we can't trust any of them to govern us.

An Exchange Between Wordsworth Donisthorpe and Benjamin R. Tucker

This exchange anent the Objection to Anarchism #10 originally appeared in Liberty, January 25, 1890. The first part is by Donisthorpe; the second; by Tucker.

Sir:

That barrel-organ outside my window goes near to driving me mad (I mean madder than I was before). What am I to do? I cannot ask the State, as embodied in the person of a blue-coated gentleman at the corner, to move him on; because I have given notice that I intend to move on the said blue-coated gentleman himself. In other words, I have given the State notice to quit. Ask the organ-grinder politely to carry his melody elsewhere? I have tried that, but he only executes a double-shuffle and puts out his tongue. Ought I to rush out and punch his head? But firstly, that might be looked upon as an invasion of his personal liberty; and, secondly, he might punch mine; and the last state of this mand would be worse than the first. Ought I to move out of the way myself? But I cannot conveniently take my house with me, or even my library. I tried another plan. I took out my cornet, and, standing by his side, executed a series of movements that would have moved the bowels of Cerberus. The only effect produced was a polite note from a neighbor (whom I respect) begging me to postpone my solo, as it interfered with the pleasing harmonies of the organ. Now Fate forbid that I should curtail the happiness of an esteemed fellow-streetsman. What then was I to do? I put on my hat and sallied forth into the streets with a heavy heart full of the difficulties of my individualist creed. The first person I met was a tramp who accosted me and exposed a tongue white with cancer - whether real or artificial I do not know. It nearly made me sick, and I really do not think that persons ought to go about exposing disgusting objects with a view to gain. I did not hand him the expected penny, but I briefly - very briefly - expressed a hope that an infinite being would be pleased to consign him to infinite torture, and passed on. I wandered through street after street, all full of houses painted in different shades of custard-color, toned with London fog, and all just sufficiently like one another to make one wish that they were either quite alike or very different. And I wondered whether something might not be done to compel all the owners to paint at the same time and with the same tints...

Beginning to feel hungry, I made tracks for the nearest village, where I knew I should find an inn...When I reached the inn, I ordered a chop and potatoes and a pint of bitter, and was surprised to find that some other persons were served before me, although they had come in later. Presently I observed one of them in the act of tipping the waiter. "Excuse me, sir," said I, "but that is not fair; you are bribing that man to give you an undue share of attention. I presume you also tip porters at a railway station, and perhaps custom-house officers" "Of course I do; what's that to you? Mind your own business," was the reply I received. I had evidently made myself unpopular with these gentlemen. One of them was chewing a quid and spitting about the floor. One was walking up and down the room in a pair of creaking boots, and taking snuff the while; and third was voraciously tackling a steak, and removing lumps of gristle from his mouth to his plate in the palm of his hand. After each gulp of porter, he seemed to take a positive pride in yielding to the influences of flatulence in a series of reports which might have raised Lazarus. My own rations appeared at last, and I congratulated myself that, by the delay, I had been spared the torture of feeding in company with Aeolus, who was already busy with the toothpick, when to my dismay he produced a small black clay pipe and proceeded to stuff it with black shag. "There is, I believe, a smoking-room in the house," I remarked depreciatingly; "otherwise I would not ask you to allow me to finish my chop before lighting your pipe here; don't you think tobacco rather spoils one's appetite?" I thought I had spoken politely, but all the answer I got was this, "Look 'ere, governor, if this 'ere shanty ain't good for the like of you, you'd better walk on to the Star and Garter." And, awaiting my reply with an expression of mingled contempt and defiance, he proceeded to emphasize his argument by boisterously coughing across the table without so much as raising his hand. I am not particularly squeamish, but I draw the line at victuals that have been coughed over. To all practical purposes, my lunch was one - stolen. I looked round for sympathy, but the feeling of the company was clearly against me. The gentleman in the creaking boots laughed, and, walking up to the table, laid his hand upon it in the manner of an orator in labor. He paused to marshal his thoughts, and I had an opportunity of observing him with several sense at once. His nails were in deep mourning, his clothes reeked of stale tobacco and perspiration, and his breath of onions and beer. His face was broad and rubicund, but not ill-featured, and his expression bore the stamp of honesty and independence. No one could mistake him for other than he was - a sturdy British farmer. After about half a minute's incubation, his ideas found utterance. "I'll tell you what it is, sir," he said, "I don't know who you are, but this is a free country, and it's market day an' all." I could not well dispute any of these propositions, and, inasmuch as they appeared to be conclusive to the minds of the company, my position was a difficult one. "I do not question your rights, friend," I ventured to say at last, "but I think a little consideration for other people's feelings...eh? "Folks shouldn't have feelings that isn't usual and proper, and if they has, they should go where their feelings is usual and proper, that's me," was the reply; and it is not without philosophy. The same idea had already dimly shimmered in my own mind; besides, was I not an individualist? "You are right, friend," said I, "so I will wish you good morning and betake myself elsewhere." "Good morning," said the farmer, offering his hand, and "Good riddance," added the gentleman with the toothpick...

I reached home at last, and the events of the day battled with one another for precedence in my dreams. Freedom, order; order, freedom. Which is it to be? When I arose in the morning, I tried to record the previous day's experiences just as they came to me, without offering any dogmatic opinion as to the rights and the wrongs of the several cases which arose. "I will send them," I said, "to the organ of philosophic Anarchy in America, and, perhaps, in spite of their trivial character, they may be deemed to present points worthy of comment." What a pity it is that we cannot put our London fogs in a bag and send them by parcel post to Boston for careful analysis!

Wordsworth Donisthorpe
London, England

Tucker's reply in the same issue of Liberty:

The reader of Mr. Donisthorpe's article in this issue on "The Woes of an Anarchist" may rise from its perusal with a feeling of confusion equal to that manifested by the author, but at least he will say to himself that for genuine humor he has seldom read anything that equals it. For myself I have read it twice in manuscript and twice in proof, and still wish that I might prolong my life by the laughter that four more readings would be sure to excite. Mr. Donisthorpe ought to write a novel. But when he asks Liberty to comment on his woes and dissipate the fog he condenses around himself, I am at a loss to know how to answer him. For what is the moral of this article, in which a day's events are made to tell with equal vigor, now against State Socialism, now against capitalism, now against Anarchism, and now against Individualism? Simply this - that in the mess in which we find ourselves, and perhaps in any state of things, all social theories involve their difficulties and disadvantages, and that there are some troubles from which mankind can never escape. Well, the Anarchists, despite the fact that Henry George calls them optimists, are pessimistic enough to accept this moral fully. They never have claimed that liberty will bring perfection; they simply say that its results are vastly preferable to those that follow authority...As a choice of blessings, liberty is the greater; as a choice of evils, liberty is the smaller. Then liberty always, say the Anarchists. No use of force, except against the invader; and in those cases where it is difficult to tell whether the alleged offender is an invader or not, still no use of force except where the necessity of immediate solution is so imperative that we must use it to save ourselves. And in these few cases where we must use it, let us do so frankly and squarely, acknowledging it as a matter of necessity, without seeking to harmonize our actions with any political ideal or constructing any far-fetched theory of a State or collectivity having prerogatives and rights superior to those of individuals and aggregations of individuals and exempted from the operation of the ethical principles which individuals are expected to observe. But to say all this to Mr. Donisthorpe is like carrying coals to Newcastle, despite his catalogue of doubts and woes. He knows as well as I do that "liberty is not the daughter, but the mother of order."

Reproduced Gratefully From:  http://flag.blackened.net/daver/anarchism/objections.html

Transcribed by rael@ll.mit.edu (Bill Lear)

A French writer, sympathetic to anarchism, wrote in the 1890s that ``anarchism has a broad back, like paper it endures anything''---including, he noted those whose acts are such that ``a mortal enemy of anarchism could not have done better.''[1] There have been many styles of thought and action that have been referred to as ``anarchist.'' It would be hopeless to try to encompass all of these conflicting tendencies in some general theory or ideology. And even if we proceed to extract from the history of libertarian thought a living, evolving tradition, as Daniel Guerin does in Anarchism, it remains difficult to formulate its doctrines as a specific and determinate theory of society and social change. The anarchist historian Rudolph Rocker, who presents a systematic conception of the development of anarchist thought towards anarchosyndicalism, along lines that bear comparison to Guerins work, puts the matter well when he writes that anarchism is not

a fixed, self-enclosed social system but rather a definite trend in the historic development of mankind, which, in contrast with the intellectual guardianship of all clerical and governmental institutions, strives for the free unhindered unfolding of all the individual and social forces in life. Even freedom is only a relative, not an absolute concept, since it tends constantly to become broader and to affect wider circles in more manifold ways. For the anarchist, freedom is not an abstract philosophical concept, but the vital concrete possibility for every human being to bring to full development all the powers, capacities, and talents with which nature has endowed him, and turn them to social account. The less this natural development of man is influenced by ecclesiastical or political guardianship, the more efficient and harmonious will human personality become, the more will it become the measure of the intellectual culture of the society in which it has grown.[2]

Nevertheless, at a particular time there is every reason to develop, insofar as our understanding permits, a specific realization of this definite trend in the historic development of mankind, appropriate to the tasks of the moment. For Rocker, ``the problem that is set for our time is that of freeing man from the curse of economic exploitation and political and social enslavement''; and the method is not the conquest and exercise of state power, nor stultifying parliamentarianism, but rather ``to reconstruct the economic life of the peoples from the ground up and build it up in the spirit of Socialism.''

But only the producers themselves are fitted for this task, since they are the only value-creating element in society out of which a new future can arise. Theirs must be the task of freeing labor from all the fetters which economic exploitation has fastened on it, of freeing society from all the institutions and procedure of political power, and of opening the way to an alliance of free groups of men and women based on co-operative labor and a planned administration of things in the interest of the community. To prepare the toiling masses in the city and country for this great goal and to bind them together as a militant force is the objective of modern Anarcho-syndicalism, and in this its whole purpose is exhausted. [P. 108]

Anarcho-syndicalists are convinced that a Socialist economic order cannot be created by the decrees and statutes of a government, but only by the solidaric collaboration of the workers with hand and brain in each special branch of production; that is, through the taking over of the management of all plants by the producers themselves under such form that the separate groups, plants, and branches of industry are independent members of the general economic organism and systematically carry on production and the distribution of the products in the interest of the community on the basis of free mutual agreements. [p. 94]

...in facing the problem of social transformation, the Revolution cannot consider the state as a medium, but must depend on the organization of producers.
We have followed this norm and we find no need for the hypothesis of a superior power to organized labor, in order to establish a new order of things. We would thank anyone to point out to us what function, if any, the State can have in an economic organization, where private property has been abolished and in which parasitism and special privilege have no place. The suppression of the State cannot be a languid affair; it must be the task of the Revolution to finish with the State. Either the Revolution gives social wealth to the producers in which case the producers organize themselves for due collective distribution and the State has nothing to do; or the Revolution does not give social wealth to the producers, in which case the Revolution has been a lie and the State would continue.
Our federal council of economy is not a political power but an economic and administrative regulating power. It receives its orientation from below and operates in accordance with the resolutions of the regional and national assemblies. It is a liaison corps and nothing else.[4]

The anarchists put the thing upside down. They declare that the proletarian revolution must begin by doing away with the political organization of the state....But to destroy it at such a moment would be to destroy the only organism by means of which the victorious proletariat can assert its newly-conquered power, hold down its capitalist adversaries, and carry out that economic revolution of society without which the whole victory must end in a new defeat and a mass slaughter of the workers similar to those after the Paris commune.[5]

I do not pretend to know the answers to this question. But it seems clear that unless there is, in some form, a positive answer, the chances for a truly democratic revolution that will achieve the humanistic ideals of the left are not great. Martin Buber put the problem succinctly when he wrote: ``One cannot in the nature of things expect a little tree that has been turned into a club to put forth leaves.''[8] The question of conquest or destruction of state power is what Bakunin regarded as the primary issue dividing him from Marx.[9] In one form or another, the problem has arisen repeatedly in the century since, dividing ``libertarian'' from ``authoritarian'' socialists.

Despite Bakunin's warnings about the red bureaucracy, and their fulfillment under Stalin's dictatorship, it would obviously be a gross error in interpreting the debates of a century ago to rely on the claims of contemporary social movements as to their historical origins. In particular, it is perverse to regard Bolshevism as ``Marxism in practice.'' Rather, the left-wing critique of Bolshevism, taking account of the historical circumstances surrounding the Russian Revolution, is far more to the point.[10]

The anti-Bolshevik, left-wing labor movement opposed the Leninists because they did not go far enough in exploiting the Russian upheavals for strictly proletarian ends. They became prisoners of their environment and used the international radical movement to satisfy specifically Russian needs, which soon became synonymous with the needs of the Bolshevik Party-State. The ``bourgeois'' aspects of the Russian Revolution were now discovered in Bolshevism itself: Leninism was adjudged a part of international social-democracy, differing from the latter only on tactical issues.[11]

I am a fanatic lover of liberty, considering it as the unique condition under which intelligence, dignity and human happiness can develop and grow; not the purely formal liberty conceded, measured out and regulated by the State, an eternal lie which in reality represents nothing more than the privilege of some founded on the slavery of the rest; not the individualistic, egoistic, shabby, and fictitious liberty extolled by the School of J.-J. Rousseau and other schools of bourgeois liberalism, which considers the would-be rights of all men, represented by the State which limits the rights of each---an idea that leads inevitably to the reduction of the rights of each to zero. No, I mean the only kind of liberty that is worthy of the name, liberty that consists in the full development of all the material, intellectual and moral powers that are latent in each person; liberty that recognizes no restrictions other than those determined by the laws of our own individual nature, which cannot properly be regarded as restrictions since these laws are not imposed by any outside legislator beside or above us, but are immanent and inherent, forming the very basis of our material, intellectual and moral being---they do not limit us but are the real and immediate conditions of our freedom.[12]

Humboldt's vision of a society in which social fetters are replaced by social bonds and labor is freely undertaken suggests the early Marx., with his discussion of the ``alienation of labor when work is external to the worker...not part of his nature...[so that] he does not fulfill himself in his work but denies himself...[and is] physically exhausted and mentally debased,'' alienated labor that ``casts some of the workers back into a barbarous kind of work and turns others into machines,'' thus depriving man of his ``species character'' of ``free conscious activity'' and ``productive life.'' Similarly, Marx conceives of ``a new type of human being who needs his fellow men....[The workers' association becomes] the real constructive effort to create the social texture of future human relations.''[13] It is true that classical libertarian thought is opposed to state intervention in social life, as a consequence of deeper assumptions about the human need for liberty, diversity, and free association. On the same assumptions, capitalist relations of production, wage labor, competitiveness, the ideology of ``possessive individualism''---all must be regarded as fundamentally antihuman. Libertarian socialism is properly to be regarded as the inheritor of the liberal ideals of the Enlightenment.

Rudolf Rocker describes modern anarchism as ``the confluence of the two great currents which during and since the French revolution have found such characteristic expression in the intellectual life of Europe: Socialism and Liberalism.'' The classical liberal ideals, he argues, were wrecked on the realities of capitalist economic forms. Anarchism is necessarily anticapitalist in that it ``opposes the exploitation of man by man.'' But anarchism also opposes ``the dominion of man over man.'' It insists that ``socialism will be free or it will not be at all. In its recognition of this lies the genuine and profound justification for the existence of anarchism.''[14] From this point of view, anarchism may be regarded as the libertarian wing of socialism. It is in this spirit that Daniel Guérin has approached the study of anarchism in Anarchism and other works.[15] Guérin quotes Adolph Fischer, who said that ``every anarchist is a socialist but not every socialist is necessarily an anarchist.'' Similarly Bakunin, in his ``anarchist manifesto'' of 1865, the program of his projected international revolutionary fraternity, laid down the principle that each member must be, to begin with, a socialist.

A consistent anarchist must oppose private ownership of the means of production and the wage slavery which is a component of this system, as incompatible with the principle that labor must be freely undertaken and under the control of the producer. As Marx put it, socialists look forward to a society in which labor will ``become not only a means of life, but also the highest want in life,''[16] an impossibility when the worker is driven by external authority or need rather than inner impulse: ``no form of wage-labor, even though one may be less obnoxious that another, can do away with the misery of wage-labor itself.''[17] A consistent anarchist must oppose not only alienated labor but also the stupefying specialization of labor that takes place when the means for developing production

mutilate the worker into a fragment of a human being, degrade him to become a mere appurtenance of the machine, make his work such a torment that its essential meaning is destroyed; estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the labor process in very proportion to the extent to which science is incorporated into it as an independent power...[18]

Anarchosyndicalists sought, even under capitalism, to create ``free associations of free producers'' that would engage in militant struggle and prepare to take over the organization of production on a democratic basis. These associations would serve as ``a practical school of anarchism.''[20] If private ownership of the means of production is, in Proudhon's often quoted phrase, merely a form of ``theft''---``the exploitation of the weak by the strong''[21]---control of production by a state bureaucracy, no matter how benevolent its intentions, also does not create the conditions under which labor, manual and intellectual, can become the highest want in life. Both, then, must be overcome.

In his attack on the right of private or bureaucratic control over the means of production,, the anarchist takes his stand with those who struggle to bring about ``the third and last emancipatory phase of history,'' the first having made serfs out of slaves, the second having made wage earners out of serfs, and the third which abolishes the proletariat in a final act of liberation that places control over the economy in the hands of free and voluntary associations of producers (Fourier, 1848).[22] The imminent danger to ``civilization'' was noted by de Tocqueville, also in 1848:

As long as the right of property was the origin and groundwork of many other rights, it was easily defended---or rather it was not attacked; it was then the citadel of society while all the other rights were its outworks; it did not bear the brunt of attack and, indeed, there was no serious attempt to assail it. but today, when the right of property is regarded as the last undestroyed remnant of the aristocratic world, when it alone is left standing, the sole privilege in an equalized society, it is a different matter. Consider what is happening in the hearts of the working-classes, although I admit they are quiet as yet. It is true that they are less inflamed than formerly by political passions properly speaking; but do you not see that their passions, far from being political, have become social? Do you not see that, little by little, ideas and opinions are spreading amongst them which aim not merely at removing such and such laws, such a ministry or such a government, but at breaking up the very foundations of society itself?[23]

to abolish property, the basis of all civilization! Yes, gentlemen, the Commune intended to abolish that class property which makes the labor of the many the wealth of the few. It aimed at the expropriation of the expropriators. It wanted to make individual property a truth by transforming the means of production, land and capital, now chiefly the means of enslaving and exploiting labor, into mere instruments of free and associated labor.[24]

The civilization and justice of bourgeois order comes out in its lurid light whenever the slaves and drudges of that order rise against their masters. Then this civilization and justice stand forth as undisguised savagery and lawless revenge...the infernal deeds of the soldiery reflect the innate spirit of that civilization of which they are the mercenary vindicators....The bourgeoisie of the whole world, which looks complacently upon the wholesale massacre after the battle, is convulsed by horror at the destruction of brick and mortar. [Ibid., pp. 74, 77]

The consistent anarchist, then, should be a socialist, but a socialist of a particular sort. He will not only oppose alienated and specialized labor and look forward to the appropriation of capital by the whole body of workers, but he will also insist that this appropriation be direct, not exercised by some elite force acting in the name of the proletariat. He will, in short, oppose

the organization of production by the Government. It means State-socialism, the command of the State officials over production and the command of managers, scientists, shop-officials in the shop....The goal of the working class is liberation from exploitation. This goal is not reached and cannot be reached by a new directing and governing class substituting itself for the bourgeoisie. It is only realized by the workers themselves being master over production.

As a further illustration, consider the following characterization of ``revolutionary Socialism'':

The revolutionary Socialist denies that State ownership can end in anything other than a bureaucratic despotism. We have seen why the State cannot democratically control industry. Industry can only be democratically owned and controlled by the workers electing directly from their own ranks industrial administrative committees. Socialism will be fundamentally an industrial system; its constituencies will be of an industrial character. Thus those carrying on the social activities and industries of society will be directly represented in the local and central councils of social administration. In this way the powers of such delegates will flow upwards from those carrying on the work and conversant with the needs of the community. When the central administrative industrial committee meets it will represent every phase of social activity. Hence the capitalist political or geographical state will be replaced by the industrial administrative committee of Socialism. The transition from the one social system to the other will be the social revolution. The political State throughout history has meant the government of men by ruling classes; the Republic of Socialism will be the government of industry administered on behalf of the whole community. The former meant the economic and political subjection of the many; the latter will mean the economic freedom of all---it will be, therefore, a true democracy.

What is far more important is that these ideas have been realized in spontaneous revolutionary action, for example in Germany and Italy after World War I and in Spain (not only in the agricultural countryside, but also in industrial Barcelona) in 1936. One might argue 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. Under these conditions of authoritarian domination the classical libertarian ideals developed further by Marx and Bakunin and all true revolutionaries cannot be realized; man will not be free to develop his own potentialities to their fullest, and the producer will remain ``a fragment of a human being,'' degraded, a tool in the productive process directed from above.

The phrase ``spontaneous revolutionary action'' can be misleading. The anarchosyndicalists, at least, took very seriously Bakunin's remark that the workers' organizations must create ``not only the ideas but also the facts of the future itself'' in the prerevolutionary period. The accomplishments of the popular revolution in Spain, in particular, were based on the patient work of many years of organization and education, one component of a long tradition of commitment and militancy. The resolutions of the Madrid Congress of June 1931 and the Saragossa Congress in May 1936 foreshadowed in many ways the acts of the revolution, as did the somewhat different ideas sketched by Santillan (see note 4) in his fairly specific account of the social and economic organization to be instituted by the revolution. Guérin writes ``The Spanish revolution was relatively mature in the minds of libertarian thinkers, as in the popular consciousness.'' And workers' organizations existed with the structure, the experience, and the understanding to undertake the task of social reconstruction when, with the Franco coup, the turmoil of early 1936 exploded into social revolution. In his introduction to a collection of documents on collectivization in Spain, the anarchist Augustin Souchy writes:

For many years, the anarchists and the syndicalists of Spain considered their supreme task to be the social transformation of the society. In their assemblies of Syndicates and groups, in their journals, their brochures and books, the problem of the social revolution was discussed incessantly and in a systematic fashion.[26]

The ideas of libertarian socialism, in the sense described, have been submerged in the industrial societies of the past half-century. The dominant ideologies have been those of state socialism or state capitalism (of increasingly militarized character in the United States, for reasons that are not obscure).[27] But there has been a rekindling of interest in the past few years. The theses I quoted by Anton Pannekoek were taken from a recent pamphlet of a radical French workers' group (Informations Correspondance Ouvrière). The remarks by William Paul on revolutionary socialism are cited in a paper by Walter Kendall given at the National Conference on Workers' Control in Sheffield, England, in March 1969. The workers' control movement has become a significant force in England in the past few years. It has organized several conferences and has produced a substantial pamphlet literature, and counts among its active adherents representatives of some of the most important trade unions. The Amalgamated Engineering and Foundryworkers' Union, for example, has adopted, as official policy, the program of nationalization of basic industries under ``workers' control at all levels.''[28] On the Continent, there are similar developments. May 1968 of course accelerated the growing interest in council communism and related ideas in France and Germany, as it did in England.

Given the highly conservative cast of our highly ideological society, it is not too surprising that the United States has been relatively untouched by these developments. But that too may change. The erosion of cold-war mythology at least makes it possible to raise these questions in fairly broad circles. If the present wave of repression can be beaten back, if the left can overcome its more suicidal tendencies and build upon what has been accomplished in the past decade, then the problem of how to organize industrial society on truly democratic lines, with democratic control in the workplace and in the community, should become a dominant intellectual issue for those who are alive to the problems of contemporary society, and, as a mass movement for libertarian socialism develops, speculation should proceed to action.

In his manifesto of 1865, Bakunin predicted that one element in the social revolution will be ``that intelligent and truly noble part of youth which, though belonging by birth to the privileged classes, in its generous convictions and ardent aspirations, adopts the cause of the people.'' Perhaps in the rise of the student movement of the 1960s one sees steps towards a fulfillment of this prophecy.

Daniel Guérin has undertaken what he has described as a ``process of rehabilitation'' of anarchism. He argues, convincingly I believe, that ``the constructive ideas of anarchism retain their vitality, that they may, when re-examined and sifted, assist contemporary socialist thought to undertake a new departure...[and] contribute to enriching Marxism.''[29] >From the ``broad back'' of anarchism he has selected for more intensive scrutiny those ideas and actions that can be described as libertarian socialist. This is natural and proper. This framework accommodates the major anarchist spokesmen as well as the mass actions that have been animated by anarchist sentiments and ideals. Guérin is concerned not only with anarchist thought but also with the spontaneous actions of popular revolutionary struggle. He is concerned with social as well as intellectual creativity. Furthermore, he attempts to draw from the constructive achievements of the past lessons that will enrich the theory of social liberation. For those who wish not only to understand the world, but also to change it, this is the proper way to study the history of anarchism.

Guérin describes the anarchism of the nineteenth century as essentially doctrinal, while the twentieth century, for the anarchists, has been a time of ``revolutionary practice.''[30] Anarchism reflects that judgment. His interpretation of anarchism consciously points toward the future. Arthur Rosenberg once pointed out that popular revolutions characteristically seek to replace ``a feudal or centralized authority ruling by force'' with some form of communal system which ``implies the destruction and disappearance of the old form of State.'' Such a system will be either socialist or an ``extreme form of democracy...[which is] the preliminary condition for Socialism inasmuch as Socialism can only be realized in a world enjoying the highest possible measure of individual freedom.'' This ideal, he notes, was common to Marx and the anarchists.[31] This natural struggle for liberation runs counter to the prevailing tendency towards centralization in economic and political life.

A century ago Marx wrote that the workers of Paris ``felt there was but one alternative---the Commune, or the empire---under whatever name it might reappear.''

The empire had ruined them economically by the havoc it made of public wealth, by the wholesale financial swindling it fostered, by the props it lent to the artificially accelerated centralization of capital, and the concomitant expropriation of their own ranks. It had suppressed them politically, it had shocked them morally by its orgies, it had insulted their Voltairianism by handing over the education of their children to the frères Ignorantins, it had revolted their national feeling as Frenchmen by precipitating them headlong into a war which left only one equivalent for the ruins it made---the disappearance of the empire.[32]

It is not very difficult to rephrase these remarks so that they become appropriate to the imperial systems of 1970. The problem of ``freeing man >from the curse of economic exploitation and political and social enslavement'' remains the problem of our time. As long as this is so, the doctrines and the revolutionary practice of libertarian socialism will serve as an inspiration and guide.

NOTES:


This   essay   is   a   revised  version  of  the  introduction  to  Daniel
      Guérin's  Anarchism:  From  Theory  to  Practice.  In  a slightly
      different version, it appeared in the New York Review of Books, May
      21, 1970.

[1] Octave   Mirbeau,   quoted   in   James  Joll,  The  Anarchists,  pp.
      145--6.

[2] Rudolf Rocker, Anarchosyndicalism, p. 31.

[3] Cited  by  Rocker,  ibid.,  p.  77.  This  quotation  and that in the
      next  sentence  are  from  Michael  Bakunin,  ``The  Program  of  the
      Alliance,''  in Sam Dolgoff, ed. and trans., Bakunin on Anarchy, p.
      255.

[4] Diego  Abad  de  Santillan,  After  the  Revolution,  p.  86.  In the
      last  chapter, written several months after the revolution had begun,
      he  expresses  his dissatisfaction with what had so far been achieved
      along these lines. On the accomplishments of the social revolution in
      Spain,  see  my  American Power and the New Mandarins, chap. 1, and
      references  cited  there; the important study by Broué and Témime
      has  since  been  translated  into  English.  Several other important
      studies   have   appeared   since,   in   particular:   Frank  Mintz,
      L'Autogestion  dans  l'Espagne  révolutionaire  (Paris:  Editions
      Bélibaste, 1971); César M. Lorenzo, Les Anarchistes espagnols et
      le  pouvoir,  1868--1969  (Paris:  Editions  du Seuil, 1969); Gaston
      Leval,  Espagne  libertaire, 1936--1939: L'Oeuvre constructive de la
      Révolution  espagnole  (Paris: Editions du Cercle, 1971). See also
      Vernon  Richards,  Lessons of the Spanish Revolution, enlarged 1972
      edition.

[5] Cited  by  Robert  C.  Tucker,  The  Marxian  Revolutionary  Idea, in
      his discussion of Marxism and anarchism.

[6] Bakunin,  in  a  letter  to  Herzen  and Ogareff, 1866. Cited by Daniel
      Guérin, Jeunesse du socialisme libertaire, p. 119.

[7] Fernand   Pelloutier,  cited  in  Joll,  Anarchists.  The  source  is
      ``L'Anarchisme  et  les  syndicats  ouvriers,'' Les Temps nouveaux,
      1895.  The  full  text  appears in Daniel Guérin, ed., Ni Dieu, ni
      Maître, an excellent historical anthology of anarchism.

[8] Martin Buber, Paths in Utopia, p. 127.

[9] ``No  state,  however  democratic,''  Bakunin  wrote,  ``not  even  the
      reddest  republic---can  ever  give the people what they really want,
      i.e.,  the  free  self-organization  and  administration of their own
      affairs  from the bottom upward, without any interference or violence
      from  above,  because  every  state,  even  the pseudo-People's State
      concocted by Mr. Marx, is in essence only a machine ruling the masses
      from  above,  from  a privileged minority of conceited intellectuals,
      who  imagine that they know what the people need and want better than
      do  the  people themselves....'' ``But the people will feel no better
      if  the  stick  with  which  they  are  being  beaten is labeled `the
      people's  stick'  ''  (Statism  and  Anarchy  [1873],  in  Dolgoff,
      Bakunin  on  Anarchy,  p.  338)---``the  people's stick'' being the
      democratic Republic.

           Marx, of course, saw the matter differently.

           For  discussion  of  the  impact  of  the  Paris Commune on this
      dispute,  see  Daniel  Guérin's comments in Ni Dieu, ni Maître;
      these  also  appear,  slightly  extended,  in  his  Pour un marxisme
      libertaire. See also note 24.

[10] On  Lenin's  ``intellectual  deviation''  to  the  left  during  1917,
      see  Robert Vincent Daniels, ``The State and Revolution: a Case Study
      in  the Genesis and Transformation of Communist Ideology,'' American
      Slavic and East European Review, vol. 12, no. 1 (1953).

[11] Paul Mattick, Marx and Keynes, p. 295.

[12] Michael   Bakunin,   ``La   Commune   de   Paris   et   la  notion  de
      l'état,''  reprinted in Guérin, Ni Dieu, ni Maître. Bakunin's
      final  remark  on  the  laws of individual nature as the condition of
      freedom  can  be  compared  to  the creative thought developed in the
      rationalist  and  romantic traditions. See my Cartesian Linguistics
      and Language and Mind.

[13] Shlomo  Avineri,  The  Social  and  Political  Thought of Karl Marx,
      p.  142,  referring  to comments in The Holy Family. Avineri states
      that  within  the  socialist  movement  only  the Israeli kibbutzim
      ``have   perceived  that  the  modes  and  forms  of  present  social
      organization  will determine the structure of future society.'' This,
      however,  was  a  characteristic  position  of anarchosyndicalism, as
      noted earlier.

[14] Rocker, Anarchosyndicalism, p. 28.

[15] See Guérin's works cited earlier.

[16] Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme.

[17] Karl   Marx,  Grundrisse  der  Kritik  der  Politischen  Ökonomie,
      cited  by Mattick, Marx and Keynes, p. 306. In this connection, see
      also  Mattick's  essay  ``Workers' Control,'' in Priscilla Long, ed.,
      The New Left; and Avineri, Social and Political Thought of Marx.

[18] Karl   Marx,   Capital,   quoted   by  Robert  Tucker,  who  rightly
      emphasizes  that  Marx  sees the revolutionary more as a ``frustrated
      producer''   than   a   ``dissatisfied   consumer''   (The   Marxian
      Revolutionary  Idea).  This  more  radical  critique  of  capitalist
      relations  of  production  is  a  direct outgrowth of the libertarian
      thought of the Enlightenment.

[19] Marx,  Capital,  cited  by  Avineri,  Social  and Political Thought
      of Marx, p. 83.

[20] Pelloutier, ``L'Anarchisme.''

[21] ``Qu'est-ce   que   la   propriété?''  The  phrase  ``property  is
      theft''  displeased Marx, who saw in its use a logical problem, theft
      presupposing  the  legitimate  existence  of  property.  See Avineri,
      Social and Political Thought of Marx.

[22] Cited in Buber's Paths in Utopia, p. 19.

[23] Cited   in   J.   Hampden   Jackson,   Marx,  Proudhon  and  European
      Socialism, p. 60.

[24] Karl  Marx,  The  Civil  War  in  France,  p.  24.  Avineri observes
      that  this  and  other  comments  of  Marx  about  the  Commune refer
      pointedly  to intentions and plans. As Marx made plain elsewhere, his
      considered assessment was more critical than in this address.

[25] For   some   background,   see   Walter  Kendall,  The  Revolutionary
      Movement in Britain.

[26] Collectivisations:   L'Oeuvre   constructive   de   la   Révolution
      espagnole, p. 8.

[27] For   discussion,   see   Mattick,  Marx  and  Keynes,  and  Michael
      Kidron,  Western  Capitalism Since the War. See also discussion and
      references cited in my At War With Asia, chap. 1, pp. 23--6.

[28] See   Hugh   Scanlon,   The   Way   Forward  for  Workers'  Control.
      Scanlon  is  the president of the AEF, one of Britain's largest trade
      unions.

           The   institute  was  established  as  a  result  of  the  sixth
      Conference  on  Workers'  Control, March 1968, and serves as a center
      for disseminating information and encouraging research.

[29] Guérin, Ni Dieu, ni Maître, introduction.

[30] Ibid.

[31] Arthur Rosenberg, A History of Bolshevism, p. 88.

[32] Marx, Civil War in France, pp. 62--3.


BIBLIOGRAPHY


Avineri,   Shlomo.  The  Social  and  Political  Thought  of  Karl  Marx.
      London: Cambridge University Press, 1968.

Bakunin,  Michael.  Bakunin  on  Anarchy.  Edited  and  translated by Sam
      Dolgoff. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972.

Buber, Martin. Paths in Utopia. Boston: Beacon Press, 1958.

Chomsky, Noam. Cartesian Linguistics. New York: Harper & Row, 1966.

------.  American  Power  and  the  New  Mandarins.  New  York:  Pantheon
      Books, 1969.

------. At War with Asia. New York: Pantheon Books, 1970.

Collectivisations:    L'Oeuvre    constructive    de    la    Révolution
      espagnole.  2nd  ed. Toulouse: Editions C.N.T., 1965. First edition,
      Barcelona, 1937.

Daniels,  Robert  Vincent.  ``The  State  and  Revolution:  a Case Study in
      the  Genesis  and  Transformation  of Communist Ideology.'' American
      Slavic and East European Review, vol. 12, no. 1 (1953).

Guérin,    Daniel.    Jeunesse   du   socialisme   libertaire.   Paris:
      Librairie Marcel Rivière, 1959.

------.   Anarchism:   From   Theory  to  Practice,  translated  by  Mary
      Klopper. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970.

------. Pour un marxisme libertaire. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1969.

------, ed. Ni Dieu, ni Maître. Lausanne: La Cité Editeur, n.d.

Jackson,   J.   Hampden.  Marx,  Proudhon  and  European  Socialism.  New
      York: Collier Books, 1962.

Joll, James. The Anarchists. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1964.

Kendall,  Walter.  The  Revolutionary  Movement  in  Britain  1900--1921.
      London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969.

Kidron,    Michael    Western   Capitalism   Since   the   War.   London:
      Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968.

Mattick,   Paul.   Marx   and   Keynes:  The  Limits  of  Mixed  Economy.
      Extending Horizons Series. Boston: Porter Sargent, 1969.

------.   ``Workers'   Control.''   In  The  New  Left:  A  Collection  of
      Essays, edited by Priscilla Long. Boston: Porter Sargent, 1969.

Marx,  Karl.  The  Civil  War  in  France,  1871. New York: International
      Publishers, 1941.

Pelloutier,  Fernand.  ``L'Anarchisme  et  les  syndicats  ouvriers.'' Les
      Temps nouveaux, 1895. Reprinted in Ni Dieu, ni Maître, edited by
      Daniel Guérin. Lausanne: La Cité Editeur, n.d.

Richards,   Vernon.  Lessons  of  the  Spanish  Revolution  (1936--1939).
      Enlarged ed. London: Freedom Press, 1972.

Rocker, Rudolf. Anarchosyndicalism. London: Secker & Warburg, 1938.

Rosenberg,  Arthur.  A  History  of  Bolshevism  from  Marx  to  the First
      Five  Years'  Plan. Translated by Ian F. Morrow. New York: Russell &
      Russell, 1965.

Santillan,  Diego  Abad  de.  After  the  Revolution. New York: Greenberg
      Publishers, 1937.

Scanlon,  Hugh.  The  Way  Forward  for  Workers'  Control. Institute for
      Workers' Control Pamphlet Series, no. 1, Nottingham, England, 1968.

Tucker,  Robert  C.  The  Marxian  Revolutionary  Idea.  New  York: W. W.
      Norton & Co., 1969.

Reproduced Gratefully From:  http://flag.blackened.net/daver/anarchism/objections.html

Anarchist Lysander Spooner
On The Civil War

Now, what is true in Europe, is substantially true in this country. The difference is the immaterial one, that, in this country, there is no visible, permanent head, or chief, of these robbers and murderers, who call themselves "the government." That is to say, there is no one man, who calls himself the state, or even emperor, king, or sovereign; no one who claims that he and his children rule "by the Grace of God," by "Divine Right," or by special appointment from Heaven. There are only certain men, who call themselves presidents, senators, and representatives, and claim to be the authorized agents, for the time being, or for certain short periods, of all "the people of the United States"; but who can show no credentials, or powers of attorney, or any other open, authentic evidence that they are so; and who notoriously are not so; but are really only the agents of a secret band of robbers and murderers, whom they themselves do not know, and have no means of knowing, individually; but who, they trust, will openly or secretly, when the crisis comes, sustain them in all their usurpations and crimes. What is important to be noticed is, that these so-called presidents, senators, and representatives, these pretended agents of all "the people of the United States," the moment their exactions meet with any formidable resistance from any portion of "the people" themselves, are obliged, like their co-robbers and murderers in Europe, to fly at once to the lenders of blood money, for the means to sustain their power. And they borrow their money on the same principle, and for the same purpose, viz., to be expended in shooting down all those "people of the United States"--their own constituents and principals, as they profess to call them--who resist the robberies and enslavement which these borrowers of the money are practising upon them. And they expect to repay the loans, if at all, only from the proceeds of the future robberies, which they anticipate it will be easy for them and their successors to perpetrate through a long series of years, upon their pretended principals, if they can but shoot down now some hundreds of thousands of them, and thus strike terror into the rest.

Perhaps the facts were never made more evident, in any country on the globe, than in our own, that these soulless blood-money loan-mongers are the real rulers; that they rule from the most sordid and mercenary motives; that the ostensible government, the presidents, senators, and representatives, so called, are merely their tools; and that no ideas of, or regard for, justice or liberty had anything to do in inducing them to lend their money for the war. In proof of all this, look at the following facts.

Nearly a hundred years ago we professed to have got rid of all that religious superstition, inculcated by a servile and corrupt priesthood in Europe, that rulers, so called, derived their authority directly from Heaven; and that it was consequently a religious duty on the part of the people to obey them. We professed long ago to have learned that governments could rightfully exist only by the free will, and on the voluntary support, of those who might choose to sustain them. We all professed to have known long ago, that the only legitimate objects of government were the maintenance of liberty and justice equally for all. All this we had professed for nearly a hundred years. And we professed to look with pity and contempt upon those ignorant, superstitious, and enslaved peoples of Europe, who were so easily kept in subjection by the frauds and force of priests and kings.

Notwithstanding all this, that we had learned, and known, and professed, for nearly a century, these lenders of blood money had, for a long series of years previous to the war, been the willing accomplices of the slave-holders in perverting the government from the purposes of liberty and justice, to the greatest of crimes. They had been such accomplices for a purely pecuniary consideration, to wit, a control of the markets in the South; in other words, the privilege of holding the slave-holders themselves in industrial and commercial subjection to the manufacturers and merchants of the North (who afterwards furnished the money for the war). And these Northern merchants and manufacturers, these lenders of blood-money, were willing to continue to be the accomplices of the slave-holders in the future, for the same pecuniary consideration. But the slave-holders, either doubting the fidelity of their Northern allies, or feeling themselves strong enough to keep their slaves in subjection without Northern assistance, would no longer pay the price which these Northern men demanded. And it was to enforce this price in the future--that is, to monopolize the Southern markets, to maintain their industrial and commercial control over the South--that these Northern manufacturers and merchants lent some of the profits of their former monopolies for the war, in order to secure to themselves the same, or greater, monopolies in the future. These--and not any love of liberty or justice--were the motives on which the money for the war was lent by the North. In short, the North said to the slave-holders: If you will not pay us our price (give us control of your markets) for our assistance against your slaves, we will secure the same price (keep control of your markets) by helping your slaves against you, and using them as our tools for maintaining dominion over you; for the control of your markets we will have, whether the tools we use for that purpose be black or white, and be the cost, in blood and money, what it may.

On this principle, and from this motive, and not from any love of liberty, or justice, the money was lent in enormous amounts, and at enormous rates of interest. And it was only by means of these loans that the objects of the war were accomplished.

And now these lenders of blood-money demand their pay; and the government, so called, becomes their tool, their servile, slavish, villainous tool, to extort it from the labor of the enslaved people both of the North and the South. It is to be extorted by every form of direct, and indirect, and unequal taxation. Not only the nominal debt and interest--enormous as the latter was--are to be paid in full; but these holders of the debt are to be paid still further--and perhaps doubly, triply, or quadruply paid--by such tariffs on imports as will enable our home manufacturers to realize enormous prices for their commodities; also by such monopolies in banking as will enable them to keep control of, and thus enslave and plunder, the industry and trade of the great body of the Northern people themselves. In short, the industrial and commercial slavery of the great body of the people, North and South, black and white, is the price which these lenders of blood money demand, and insist upon, and are determined to secure, in return for the money lent for the war.

This programme having been fully arranged and systematized, they put their sword into the hands of the chief murderer of the war, and charge him to carry their scheme into effect. And now he, speaking as their organ, says: "Let us have peace."

The meaning of this is: Submit quietly to all the robbery and slavery we have arranged for you, and you can have "peace." But in case you resist, the same lenders of blood-money, who furnished the means to subdue the South, will furnish the means again to subdue you.

These are the terms on which alone this government, or, with few exceptions, any other, ever gives "peace" to its people.

The whole affair, on the part of those who furnished the money, has been, and now is, a deliberate scheme of robbery and murder; not merely to monopolize the markets of the South, but also to monopolize the currency, and thus control the industry and trade, and thus plunder and enslave the laborers, of both North and South. And Congress and the president are today the merest tools for these purposes. They are obliged to be, for they know that their own power, as rulers, so-called, is at an end, the moment their credit with the blood-money loan-mongers fails. They are like a bankrupt in the hands of an extortioner. They dare not say nay to any demand made upon them. And to hide at once, if possible, both their servility and their crimes, they attempt to divert public attention, by crying out that they have "Abolished Slavery!" That they have "Saved the Country!" That they have "Preserved our Glorious Union!" and that, in now paying the "National Debt," as they call it (as if the people themselves, all of them who are to be taxed for its payment, had really and voluntarily joined in contracting it), they are simply "Maintaining the National Honor!"

By "maintaining the national honor," they mean simply that they themselves, open robbers and murderers, assume to be the nation, and will keep faith with those who lend them the money necessary to enable them to crush the great body of the people under their feet; and will faithfully appropriate, from the proceeds of their future robberies and murders, enough to pay all their loans, principal and interest.

The pretense that the "abolition of slavery" was either a motive or justification for the war, is a fraud of the same character with that of "maintaining the national honor." Who, but such usurpers, robbers, and murderers as they, ever established slavery? Or what government, except one resting upon the sword, like the one we now have, was ever capable of maintaining slavery? And why did these men abolish slavery? Not from any love of liberty in general--not as an act of justice to the black man himself, but only "as a war measure," and because they wanted his assistance, and that of his friends, in carrying on the war they had undertaken for maintaining and intensifying that political, commercial, and industrial slavery, to which they have subjected the great body of the people, both white and black. And yet these impostors now cry out that they have abolished the chattel slavery of the black man--although that was not the motive of the war--as if they thought they could thereby conceal, atone for, or justify that other slavery which they were fighting to perpetuate, and to render more rigorous and inexorable than it ever was before. There was no difference of principle--but only of degree--between the slavery they boast they have abolished, and the slavery they were fighting to preserve; for all restraints upon men's natural liberty, not necessary for the simple maintenance of justice, are of the nature of slavery, and differ from each other only in degree.

If their object had really been to abolish slavery, or maintain liberty or justice generally, they had only to say: All, whether white or black, who want the protection of this government, shall have it; and all who do not want it, will be left in peace, so long as they leave us in peace. Had they said this, slavery would necessarily have been abolished at once; the war would have been saved; and a thousand times nobler union than we have ever had would have been the result. It would have been a voluntary union of free men; such a union as will one day exist among all men, the world over, if the several nations, so called, shall ever get rid of the usurpers, robbers, and murderers, called governments, that now plunder, enslave, and destroy them.

Still another of the frauds of these men is, that they are now establishing, and that the war was designed to establish, "a government of consent." The only idea they have ever manifested as to what is a government of consent, is this--that it is one to which everybody must consent, or be shot. This idea was the dominant one on which the war was carried on; and it is the dominant one, now that we have got what is called "peace."

Their pretenses that they have "Saved the Country," and "Preserved our Glorious Union," are frauds like all the rest of their pretenses. By them they mean simply that they have subjugated, and maintained their power over, an unwilling people. This they call "Saving the Country"; as if an enslaved and subjugated people--or as if any people kept in subjection by the sword (as it is intended that all of us shall be hereafter)--could be said to have any country. This, too, they call "Preserving our Glorious Union"; as if there could be said to be any Union, glorious or inglorious, that was not voluntary. Or as if there could be said to be any union between masters and slaves; between those who conquer, and those who are subjugated.

All these cries of having "abolished slavery," of having "saved the country," of having "preserved the union," of establishing "a government of consent," and of "maintaining the national honor," are all gross, shameless, transparent cheats--so transparent that they ought to deceive no one--when uttered as justifications for the war, or for the government that has succeeded the war, or for now compelling the people to pay the cost of the war, or for compelling anybody to support a government that he does not want.

The lesson taught by all these facts is this: As long as mankind continue to pay "national debts," so-called--that is, so long as they are such dupes and cowards as to pay for being cheated, plundered, enslaved, and murdered--so long there will be enough to lend the money for those purposes; and with that money a plenty of tools, called soldiers, can be hired to keep them in subjection. But when they refuse any longer to pay for being thus cheated, plundered, enslaved, and murdered, they will cease to have cheats, and usurpers, and robbers, and murderers and blood-money loan-mongers for masters.

Reproduced from 'National Anarchist' 

Hakim Bey, Quantum Mechanics & Chaos Theory

Quantum Mechanics & Chaos Theory:
Anarchist Meditations on N. Herbert's Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics By Hakim Bey

1. Scientific worldviews or "paradigms" can influence -- or be influenced by -- social reality. Clearly the Ptolemaic universe mirrors theocentric & monarchic structures. The Newtonian/Cartesian/mechanical universe mirrors rationalistic social assumptions, which in turn underlie nationalism, capitalism, communism, etc. As for Relativity Theory, it has only recently begun to reflect -- or be reflected by -- certain social realities. But these relations are still obscure, embedded in multinational conspiracies, the metaphysics of modern banking, international terrorism, & various newly emergent telecommunications-based technologies.

2. Which comes first, scientific paradigm or social structure? For our purpose it seems unnecessary to answer this question--and in any case, perhaps impossible. The relation between them is real, but acts in a manner infinitely more complex than mere cause-&-effect, or even warp-&-weft.

3. Quantum Mechanics (QM), considered as the source of such a paradigm, at first seems to lack any social ramifications or parallels, almost as if its very weirdness deprives it of all connnections with "everyday" life or social reality. However, a few authors (like F. Capra, or Science-Fictioneers like R. Rucker or R. Anton Wilson) have seen Quantum Theory both as a vindication of certain "oriental philosophies" & also as prophetic of certain social changes which might loosely & carelessly be lumped under the heading "Aquarian."

4. The "mystical" systems evoked by our contemplation of Quantum facts tend to be non-dualist and non-theocentric, dynamic rather than static: Advaita Vedanta, Taoism, Tantra (both Hindu & Buddhist), alchemy, etc. Einstein, who opposed Quantum theory, believed in a God who refused to play dice with the universe, a basically Judeo-Protestant deity who sets up a cosmic speed limit for light. The Quantum enthusiasts, by contrast, prefer a dancing Shiva, a principle of cosmic play.

5. Perhaps "oriental wisdom" will provide a kind of focusing device, or set of metaphors, or myth, or poetics of QM, which will allow it to realize itself fully as a "paradigm" & discover its reflection on the level of society. But it does not follow that this paradigm will simply recapitulate the social complexes which gave rise to Taoism, Tantra or alchemy. There is no "Eternal Return" in the strict Nietzschean sense: each time the gyre comes round again it describes a new point in space/time.

6. Einstein accused Quantum Theory (QT) of restoring individual consciousness to the center of the universe, a position from which "Man" was toppled by "Science" 500 years ago. If QT can be accused of retrogression, however, it must be something like the anarchist P. Goodman's "Stone Age Reaction" -- a turning-back so extreme as to constitute a revolution.

7. Perhaps the development of QM and the rediscovery of "oriental wisdom" (with its occidental variations) stem from the same social causes, which have to do with information density, electronic technology, the ongoing collapse of Eurocentrism & its "Classical" philosophies, ideologies & physics. Perhaps the syncresis of QT & oriental wisdom will accelerate these changes, even help direct them.

8. Table of Paradigms

With Their Spritual, Political & Economic Parallels

I. Paleolithic -- shamanic -- non-authoritarian -- hunter/gatherer

II. Neolithic -- polytheistic -- authoritarian -- agricultural

III. Earth-centered Cosmos -- theistic -- monarchial/theocratic (hierarchical) -- urban

IV. Sun-centered Cosmos -- monotheistic -- divine right of kings -- colonialism & imperialism

V. Mechanistic universe -- deist or atheist -- democracy, capitalism, communism -- industrial/technological

VI. Relativistic universe -- Modernism -- cybernocacy -- post-industrial (electronic)

VII. Quantum universe . . .

9. Just as Modernism here parallels Relativity Theory as a sort of spiritual concomitant, so "oriental wisdom" seems to attach itself to QT. But what political systems, what economics would derive from this amalgamation?

10. QT, which attempts an explanation of the reality "behind" Quantum facts, lags far behind QM itself. Unlike Relativity, QM offers no coherent ideas about "reality," only a set of statistical possibilities, tools for prediction. QM "works" -- but Quantum facts remain unexplained. The excitement of the science for non-scientists lies in the way it seems to have revived speculative philosophy as an integral part of the scientific endeavor: at present, competing theories about Quantum "reality" rival any occultist or mystical excesses for sheer madness & breathtaking incredibility. In Quantum Reality, physicist Nick Herbert outlines eight philosophies or world views, "Quantum Realities," all based on Quantum fact but all different.

11. Quantum Reality Number One (QRI) - -the Copenhagen interpretation. "There is no deep reality." Objects, everyday real things, "float on a world that is not as real." (Bohr, Heisenberg.) Emphasis on "Uncertainty," and thus comparable to Buddhist "Anti-realism" or even Berkelean Idealism. The Copenhagen "orthodox ontology" leads directly to QR2, which posits an observer-created reality in which the act of measurement gives rise to observed reality ("The moon is demonstrably not there when no one looks" -- N.D. Mermin).

12. QR3 -- "Reality is an undivided wholeness." Developed by W. Heitler. In this interpretation, "the observer appears, as a necessary part of the whole structure, and in his full capacity as a conscious being. The separation of the world into an 'objective outside reality' and 'us,' the self-conscious onlookers, can no longer be maintained. Object and subject have become inseparable from each other." According to Bohm, "One is led to a new notion of unbroken wholeness which denies the classical analyzability of the world into separately and independently existing parts. . . . The inseparable quantum interconnectedness of the whole universe is the fun damental reality."

13. Capra's popularization of this stance in Tao of Physics explores possible leads in Far Eastern mysticism. But none of the "orientalists" have so far noted a much more relevant metaphysics in sufism, especially Ibn Arabi's doctrine of the oneness of being (wahdat al-wujud). My intuition says that Ibn Arabi might prove a goldmine to Quantum Theorists, but the "mingling of two oceans" conjured up by such an imagined confrontation would involve decades of hard labor to grasp & contain -- & so I leave it to someone else to follow up.

14. Bell's Theorem, which proves or seems to prove that Quantum Reality is "non-local," bolsters rather than deflates what we might call the taoist theory of QM, or in Herbert's phrase, QR3. Something in Bell's Theorem seems to be violating Einstein's cosmic speed limit-some superluminal aether or "field," or Faster-Than-Light particles -- or telepathic particles! So far this bizarrarie can be experimentally demonstrated only though negative inference; no laboratory "hard" evidence of such a "field" (or whatever) has been uncovered. Randomicity Theory suggests that non-local phenomena will remain inaccessible-that superiuminal signaling devices ("ansibles" in SciFi terminology) will prove impossible to decode, hence useless. However, this remains unproven. If telepathy exists, then human consciousness may already be making use of such codes.

15. QR4 -- "The many worlds interpretation" (H. Everett, 1957) suggests that the wave function never collapses -- that every possible event actually occurs, either in "our" world or in some instantaneously created "alternative universe." The Copenhagenists deny reality altogether; Everett offers infinite realities: an elegant solution, so far totally unverifiable . . . but . . . SciFi Heaven! (I wish to expropriate one of Everett's notions, the non-collapse of the wave function, for my own fanciful synthesis [see below].)

16. QR5 - -Quantum Logic. What Einstein did to Euclidean geometry, some Quantum physicist/mathematicians hope to do to Boolean (Classical) Logic. Other than making it easier to think about, I'm not sure how this new logic would relate to QR -- but it sounds like a good idea.

17. QR6 -- "Neo-realism." Einstein, Planck, Schrodinger, Bohm & de Broglie have all looked for ways to "save the phenomena," to discover & describe Quantum Reality per se, rather than take the disagreeable step of agreeing with Copenhagian anti-realisms ("Atoms are not things" -- Heisenberg. "There is no quantum world" -- Bohr.) Reconciling the neo-realist project with Quantum facts leads to some very peculiar positionssuch as maintaining that the world is real but "non-local."

18. Could it be that the quarrel between anti-realists & neo-realists arises from a semantic problem about the definition of "reality?" It looks to me as if both sides are maintaining that reality means Classical reality. Thus the Copenhagenists are forced to deny that ordinary objects exist -- an absurdity - -while the neo-realists are reduced to looking for loopholes in QM, & seem so far to have been utterly frustrated. But if QR & "ordinary reality" are both real, modalities of the same one reality, then the dichotomy vanishes like a delusion caused by bad grammar. The only problem then remaining is that of Quantum measurement, which asks in effect how "quantumstuff" "becomes" "ordinary objects?"

19. QR7 -- "Consciousness creates reality." Von Neumann posits that only one kind of stuff exists, quantumstuff, & that ordinary objects are "made" of it. At some point the wave function, the all-possible nature of quantumstuff, "collapses" into a single statistical probability, a quantum jump which somehow "creates the world." Where does this occur? The only logical answer appears to implicate human consciousness as the setting of the wave function collapse. Ironic that Von Neumann, the wizard of cybernetics & strategic game theory, should have been forced to develop a math which suggests that human consciousness must be written into any complete explanation of QR. Von Neumann's interpretation is not the same as QR2, "observer-created reality," in which the observer could as easily be a measuring device as a human being; QR2 tacitly accepts a basic dualism between a real "Classical" measuring device, and Quantum unreality itself. Nor does QR7 necessarily imply Buddhist-style anti-realism or Idealism: reality exists, but only in conjunction or "unity" with con- sciousness.

20. On one hand this trend leads to a kind of neo-Aristotelian neo-Platonism -- such as QR8, Heisenberg's "duplex world" of potentials and actualities, in which real objects appear almost as manifestations or hypostases of a Quantum Reality which is both more abstract & yet "more real" than everyday things.

21. On the other hand however Von N's "all-quantum" explanation of QR harks back to & strengthens the "taoist" arguments of QR3. Here, rather than a platonic modified non-dualism we get a strong & radical monism, in which "matter" & "consciousness" cannot be distinguished except as modalities of a single reality.

22. In effect, might one not say (as in QR4) that the wave function never collapses -- but that there still remains only one reality? That there has never been a "fall" from one into two? If QR is non-local, if "phase interference" & Bell's proof mean that all Quantum-particles which connect hologrammatical instantaneous connections with each other -- if all "matter" was originally (before the Big Bang) one dimensionless macro-particle/wave -- then all particles are implicated in all waves, & vice versa. The universe is (as Capra says, quoting Hindu sources) a seamless net of jewels, every jewel reflected in every other. The wave function collapse in this case would constitute a mathematical description of a mode of individual consciousness & its awareness of the world, its inherent implicatedness in the totality & oneness of that world -- in fact, its virtual identity with that world. The wave function collapse would then not actually describe a physical event at all; in effect, it would have never happened. The universe is now what it was & ever shall be: one reality.

23. As far as I know, this synthesis of QR3 and QR7 (lucky numbers!) violates current thinking in Quantum Theory -- & perhaps even the "Quantum facts" as well. Still . . . science marches on; things may change & become even weirder. I have a strong hunch that the ongoing study of randomicity (e.g. at thermonuclear temperatures) may shed light on QR philosophy in the near future. Another source for the next breakthrough in physics may well come from brain physiology -- provided it can tear itself away from rat-running & linguistic rat-holes & address itself to the problem of consciousness. New work on the "morphogenetic field" in biology looks promising; personally, I feel less enthusiasm for cognitive philosophy & AI research.

24. My groping attempt at a synthesis is suggested by what I call Chaos Theory, which holds to the axiom that reality itself subsists in a state of ontological anarchy. "The one gave birth to the two, the two to the 10,000 things" -- but all this IS the tao & nothing but the tao. Yin & yang have no being in themselves, but act as interpenetrating modalities of the tao. The real/unreal dichotomy enslaves us in false consciousness. Looked at from one point of view, nothing is real; from another point of view, everything is real; from another, "nothing is real except the Real"; from yet another, "I am the Real" (ana'I Haqq, a sufi "koan"). These semantricks create a set of paradoxes -- and the resolution will give us an essentially metalinguistic certainty of being's oneness. Such oneness cannot be structured or defined in any way. It has no "ruler" and no "laws" -- hence, ontological anarchy.

25. On a mathematical (or statistical) level, the chaotic nature of reality may manifest as randomicity; I suspect it manifests in the Uncertainty Principle as well. Whatever the truth of these speculations, I feel that Chaos Theory & Quantum Theory are moving closer & closer together. If this is so, then we may be able to predict some social implications of Quantum Theory as a "paradigm" -- and thus answer the questions posed in paragraph nine -- by looking at the social programme of Chaos Theory or ontological anarchy.

26. Chaos Theory, like any good theory, can be applied to anything, from physics to literary criticism -- just as it can absorb energy from any kind of source, from the heretical spiritual teachings of sufis, Ismailis, Ranters, shamans or sorcerers -- to QM itself. Thus it may provide the link, yoke, nexus or connection between QM & "oriental wisdom," & help define the paradigm we're looking for.

27. Chaos Theory predicts that Quantum Theory will fail to turn up any "hidden laws," hidden variables that restore some privileged class of objects or perceptions to a status of objective reality at the expense of other objects & perceptions. The anti-realists who recognize only the measuring device as real, & the neo-realists who yearn for a "Classical" resolution of QM's paradoxes, are simply proposing different ways of "saving the phenomena" -- or metaphorically, of preserving reality as we know it. Consensus Reality. This project seems doomed from the start -- at least, to us chaotes. The new paradigm will shatter Consensus Reality, & with it all authoritative representatives of scientific "truth."

28. This is not to claim that the "solving" of Quantum Theory will somehow result in an anarchist Utopia. The predictive power of Chaos Theory seems to falter here. After all, total destruction is as much a "type" of chaos as the most benign visions of Bakunin or Stirner. In effect the social & economic results of the new paradigm depend on forces other than those described or controlled by the paradigm, whatever its claims to absoluteness. For instance, an economy which mirrors this paradigm will almost certainly involve the abolition of "work" as we know it (a relic of Classical physics) -- but what replaces it may either enslave us more miserably than "work" could ever accomplish, or it may liberate us in harmony with the visions of "zero-work" radicals, neo-situationists & anarchists.

29. Similarly Chaos Theory can make no predictions about the development of technologies which mirror the paradigm, such as telepathic signaling, FTL spaceships, ansibles, controlled ESP or other fancies indulged in by fantasists (including me). Social change resists all such sibylline seductions, since it involves the incalculability of consciousness itself, & of human history. I can foresee Quantum dystopias as easily as Utopias.

30. Given all these caveats however. Chaos Theory still envisions a Quantum-Social-Paradigm with distinctly anti-authoritarian implications -- in one sense a reprise of the Paleolithic/shamanic worldview, in another sense wildly post-postmodern. Such a "movement" or change would transcend all current definitions of Anarchism, whether communist, syndicalist, libertarian-capitalist or individualist. So far there is no name for what I'm talking about.

31. Like Quantum Theory itself, this politique/poetique is still emergent. It can only be sensed as it emerges or begins to emerge from the "facts" of everyday life, just as Quantum Theory peeps out of the strangeness of Quantum facts. Somewhere in the welter of Quantum Theory & Chaos Theory the paradigm is already bom, & waits for us to assist at the mystery of its naming, of its transmutation from potentiality to actuality. In this action poets & physicists may play equal parts, for the glory of Quantum Theory is that by restoring consciousness to its theorems it has turned science once again into a type of "Natural Philosophy" -- or alchemy.

32. Fleshing out the vision of a world somehow based on the mind-boggling perceptions of QM linked with the alien realizations of "oriental wisdom" - -a world which lives with ideas such as non-locality, particles which travel backwards in time, alternative universes, randomicity at the heart of creation, etc. etc. . . . this is properly the work of Utopian Science Fiction -- at this point in history. Perhaps within a few years it will become the province of revolutionaries, artists, philosophers -- the unacknowledged legislators of a lawless future -- anarchs of the new paradigm.

33. QM is said to be "complete" -- but then so are all scientific systems in their moment of power. QM should by no means be fetishized either by scientists or poets, since Quantum Theory itself may hold the seeds of a paradigm which overthrows even QM. The tao which can be spoken is not the tao; the moment Quantum Theory presents itself as "complete," it must be at once attacked. Chaos theory seems to predict that Quantum Theory will flourish as long as it remains "incomplete," not tied down on any Classical (or even non-Boolean) procrustrean beds-metalogical, metalinguistic, essentially unstructured -- "free," like reality itself -- which is a state not of Anarchism but of anarchy, even to the very roots of being