Anarchism experienced something of a renaissance in 2011. The Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement attempted to establish non-statist autonomous communities, ultimately popping up all over the world, typically in the financial districts of major cities. These communities functioned according to a spontaneously developed system of participatory democracy, with various working groups forming to deal with particular issues of concern to members of the encampments. These working groups would then meet at a general assembly of (ideally) the entire camp, reporting on their work, with any member of the camp being able to participate in the assembly to state whatever was on their mind.
The purpose of the encampments was to serve as a form of prefigurative politics-protesting the status quo by demonstrating an alternative to it. In the case of Occupy, this meant contrasting the US’s neoliberal capitalist version of representative democracy-which looked suspiciously like something more akin to an oligarchy-with a community in which each participant had equal capacity to influence the decision-making of the whole.
For all its flaws (and Occupy’s democratic process has often been criticized for being hectic, unwieldy, and often unproductive), for many the intended message came across-democracy was not as it had been sold by the American educational system, and what it should be is far more intimate, based on earnest debate between community members. Ideally, this is far more empowering than a system in which representatives are elected in a quasi-democratic system (with candidates effectively pre-selected by their ability to raise funds for their campaigns and gain pre-approval by party insiders), and once elected can go to Washington and do whatever they like, in relative secrecy and without any functional input from their constituency.
Alongside this realization, a mental transition was made by many, aided by popular public intellectuals like David Graeber, Noam Chomsky, and the late but no less influential Murray Bookchin: this participatory form of democracy had a philosophical basis in the form of an absolute rejection of arbitrary authority, social stratification, and private property: anarchism.
Inducted into the anarchist tradition in this way, anarchy and democracy appeared to be virtually synonymous concepts-if you took the institutional leadership and class disparities out of the communities which lived under them, participatory democracy is what you would inevitably be left with. How else could a community of equals, unwilling to elect officials and bureaucrats to call the shots, come to agreements about things?
Into the Mire
Of course, what newly inducted anarchists found as they scanned the field of anarchist theory (a discipline developed and hotly debated, arguably, since Pierre-Joseph Proudhon first called himself an anarchist in 1840, advocating a set of ideas almost unrecognizable from any presently advocated school of anarchist thought), was a tangled mess, much of it virulently opposed to democracy in any form.
There has probably never been a time when anarchism could be described as a single, united movement, though there are core similarities between virtually all of its iterations. Born, alongside socialism, in a time of enormous political, economic, and philosophical upheaval, perhaps as soon as Proudhon’s works were read, they were discussed, adapted, and interpreted differently by different people. The greatest split is between social and individualist anarchism, but it is probably more accurate to say that there is a different anarchism for each anarchist. Further complicating the problem, anarchism has typically been viewed by its own theorists as an open-ended theory, which no one person or institution can give a comprehensive definition to which can claim legitimacy over all others. Max Stirner took anarchism to individualistic limits in the form of egoism; Mikhail Bakunin founded so-called collectivist anarchism, in which individuals were viewed as intrinsically linked to communities. Peter Kropotkin took developed this further, in the direction of anarchocommunism; Leo Tolstoy merged his anarchist beliefs with his Christian faith, and is considered the founder of anarchopacifism. Élisée Reclus incorporated naturism, nudism, and vegetarianism into his conception of anarchism, making him something like what would today be called an eco-anarchist or social ecologist. Anarchism which based its theory of revolutionary organization on labor unions came to be known as anarchosyndicalism, without any single author who can be pinned down as its founder. Indeed, there was such a mosaic of anarchist disciplines by the early 20th century that yet another, synthesis anarchism arose to try to stitch them all together, and an attempt by exiled Russian anarchists in the 1920s to create a universal platform for a “General Union of Anarchists.” Neither were especially successful, although anarchosyndicalists and anarchocommunists, for what it’s worth, have always gotten on splendidly. But to make the matter even muddier, there is considerable disagreement even within all these different disciplines.
Every political and philosophical concept or theory demonstrates this amorphous quality, as different thinkers define and extrapolate different aspects of it for their own purposes and without necessarily communicating with one another. But anarchism has been uniquely vulnerable to this lack of clarity, perhaps, precisely because of this individualist streak, which has been there since its foundation. Practically every definition of anarchism from the 19th and early 20th century involves some sort of evocation of the dignity and sovereignty of the individual, and encourages individuals not to subjugate their will to any outside force. Telling people to resist the conformist influences of religion, state propaganda, and the whims of mainstream culture is in my opinion wonderful life advice, taken to a reasonable extent. Taken too far, as it has been by many in the individualist anarchist tradition, tends to simply result in unmitigated chaos.
And yet, while every classical anarchist definition has emphasized the need to neither tolerate coercion nor enact it, many anarchists hold quite dogmatically to their definiton of anarchism, insisting that anyone who disagrees with it simply isn’t an anarchist. The problem was clearly alive and well in the 1980s and ‘90s, of which David Graeber stated:
I call it the “Bob Black” period of anarchism: everyone was a political sect of one, yelling and condemning each other. But then the movement I’d always wanted—one where people worked together with respect—finally materialized, and I had to be part of it.
We’ll come back to Bob Black later.
The environment was toxic enough that Murray Bookchin, one of the more famous proponents of anarchism in the postwar world (in the 1950s, being the most vocal among a tiny handful of self-described anarchists in the US), became so disgusted with the tenor of the anarchist movement of the time that he no longer identified with the word, and wrote a lengthy polemic denouncing what he saw as its abandonment of libertarian ideals which made it “politically and socially harmless — a mere fad for the titillation of the petty bourgeois of all ages.”
Presenting a Handful of Anarchisms
For the sake of analysis, I will present a few definitions of the word from major anarchist figures throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Robert Harding’s The ABC of Anarchism, published in 1889, provides a wonderfully concise definition:
Anarchism (theory) is the doctrine which denies the expediency, morality and justice of compelling men to do even that which it is right they should do. Anarchism (practice) is (a) the renunciation of the desire to compel minorities and others to do what you think they ought to do, and (b) the refusal to be yourself compelled.
Here we see what will be a common theme: anarchy places ethical emphasis on the individual refusing to either be compelled or exercise compulsion on the wills of others.
The next definition is from Élisée Reclus, in his 1902 work The Anarchist:
By definition, the anarchist is the free man, the one who has no master. The ideas that he professes are indeed his own through reasoning. His will, springing from the understanding of things, focuses on a clearly defined aim; his acts are the direct realization of his individual intent. Alongside those who devoutly repeat the words of others or the traditional saying, who make their being bend and conform to the caprice of a powerful individual, or, what is still more grave, to the oscillations of the crowd, he alone is a man, he alone is conscious of his value in the face of all these spineless and inconsistent things that dare not live their own lives.
But this anarchist who has morally rid himself of the domination of others and who is never accustomed to any of the material oppressions that usurpers impose on him, this man is still not his own master as long as he has not emancipated himself from his irrational passions. He must know himself, free himself from his own whims, from his violent impulses, from all his prehistoric animal relics, not in order to kill his instincts, but in order to make them agree harmoniously with the whole of his conduct. Liberated from other men, he must also be liberated from himself in order to see clearly where the truth sought is to be found, and how he will guide himself toward making a movement that does not bring him closer to it, without saying a word that does not proclaim it.
Here Reclus gives a wonderful account of anarchy as principled, critical thought. Anarchists should think for themselves, and not be bound to the precedent set by others, nor to the fashions of their time, nor to the propaganda fed them by the ruling class. Furthermore, they shouldn’t allow themselves to be led in by their own delusions and emotional sentiments either-they should be skeptical, careful, and guided by reason, regardless of what they would like to believe. This is just good life advice, and it sets the stage for individuals in an anarchist society to function without any use for charismatic leaders or state power to compel them to behave “correctly.” Far from the intellectual chaos embraced by later, postmodernism-infused anarchist thought, this is a doctrine of self-discipline and intellectual clarity.
If the anarchist comes to know himself, he will, as a result, know his environment, men and things. Observation and experience will have shown him that, by themselves, all his solid understanding of life and all his proud will will remain powerless if he does not associate them with other understandings, with other wills. Alone, he would be easily crushed, but, having become strong, he joins forces with other forces, constituting a society of perfect union, since all are linked by the communion of ideas, sympathy and goodwill. In this new social body, all the comrades are so many equals, giving each other the same respect and the same expressions of solidarity. From now on they are brothers, if the thousand revolts of the isolated are transformed into a collective protest and demand, which sooner or later will give us the new society, Harmony.
Here we run into a strange conflict. In other, more explicitly anti-democratic classical anarchist passages, this insistence that one should be part of like-minded groups of free association, “a society of perfect union” in which, it often seems implied, disagreements simply won’t occur. The logic is clear enough; anarchists don’t let anyone tell them what to do, and democratic majorities are no exception.
This is a profound weakness in early anarchist thought, seemingly because if these anarchist thinkers were to acknowledge that disagreements in any community are practically inevitable, they would have to allow for some way of resolving conflicts, which will at one point or another result in the “tyranny of the majority” they equate to despotism. It’s a bit of a mental trap they seem to have set up for themselves.
Another definition is given by Peter Kropotkin 8 years later in 1910, in perhaps the most famous discussion of anarchism ever written, Kropotkin’s submission for the “Anarchism” article in Encyclopaedia Brittanica:
ANARCHISM (from the Gr. an, and archos, contrary to authority), the name given to a principle or theory of life and conduct under which society is conceived without government — harmony in such a society being obtained, not by submission to law, or by obedience to any authority, but by free agreements concluded between the various groups, territorial and professional, freely constituted for the sake of production and consumption, as also for the satisfaction of the infinite variety of needs and aspirations of a civilized being. In a society developed on these lines, the voluntary associations which already now begin to cover all the fields of human activity would take a still greater extension so as to substitute themselves for the state in all its functions. They would represent an interwoven network, composed of an infinite variety of groups and federations of all sizes and degrees, local, regional, national and international temporary or more or less permanent — for all possible purposes: production, consumption and exchange, communications, sanitary arrangements, education, mutual protection, defence of the territory, and so on; and, on the other side, for the satisfaction of an ever-increasing number of scientific, artistic, literary and sociable needs. Moreover, such a society would represent nothing immutable. On the contrary — as is seen in organic life at large — harmony would (it is contended) result from an ever-changing adjustment and readjustment of equilibrium between the multitudes of forces and influences, and this adjustment would be the easier to obtain as none of the forces would enjoy a special protection from the state.
We see, again, that strange optimism-somehow, we are supposed to simply come into agreement with each other, all the time. If we don’t agree, well, they are after all free associations, so we can simply leave. But what if we don’t want to? How will we free ourselves from the specter of democratic coercion, of majorities having their way with minorities, if we have communities of people who mostly quite like each other, but simply encounter an intractable disagreement?
I’ll offer one more definition: that given by Nestor Makhno, the peasant-turned-revolutionary and the first person on this list who not only wrote about anarchism, but tried to live it, as leader of the Black Army in Ukraine, an army of Ukrainian peasants and workers which attempted to establish an anarchocommunist society during the Russian Civil War, between 1918-1921, before finally being betrayed and defeated by the far larger Bolshevik Army.
The record on how life actually functioned under the Black Army is conflicted, and predictably, the most positive accounts are offered by the most partisan authors-such as Pjotr Arshinov, whose History of the Makhnovist Movement (1918–1921) portrays Makhno’s army as refraining from conscription of locals (relying instead on voluntary enlistment) and operating according to the recallable election of all its commanders by the soldiers themselves. Both claims from the highly biased Arshinov (a friend who fought with Makhno side-by-side, and clearly wrote his history with an intent to frame Makhno as a populist hero) are contested by scholars, with some falling on either side based on the relatively scant available evidence.
Certainly, however, it is true that the Black Army at least claimed it intended to prevent authoritarianism in its military hierarchy through elections, which doesn’t seem at all consistent with Makhno’s anarchocommunist views-setting aside direct democracy, even the ancient Athenians would have considered elections a perversion of the political freedom democracy was intended to enshrine. His emotionally potent and (for the period) unusually nuanced writings on anarchy come long after the failure of his revolution, in his 1932 text, The ABC of the Revolutionary Anarchist:
Anarchism means man living free and working constructively. It means the destruction of everything that is directed against man’s natural, healthy aspirations. Anarchism is not exclusively a theoretical teaching emanating from programs artificially conceived with an eye to the regulation of life: it is a teaching derived from life across all its wholesome manifestations, skipping over all artificial criteria.
The social and political visage of anarchism is a free, anti-authoritarian society, one that enshrines freedom, equality and solidarity between all its members.
In anarchism, Right means the responsibility of the individual, the sort of responsibility that brings with it an authentic guarantee of freedom and social justice for each and for all, in all places and at all times. It is out of this that communism springs.
Anarchism is naturally innate in man: communism is the logical extrapolation from it.
A few important distinctions can be made here from Harding’s definition: like in the definition given by Kropotkin (one of Makhno’s heroes), anarchy is not merely a moral doctrine of refusing to compel or be compelled (though it is a moral philosophy applied to every sphere of life); it is also a political theory, a version of society (emphasis on the term) in which the conditions are created for authentic human freedom.
Authentic human freedom does not, in Makhno’s definition, mean giving people the freedom to simply do anything. Rather, for Makhno, freedom is precisely the freedom to follow one’s “healthy, natural aspirations.” Entry into anarchy also comes with a price: the “responsibility of the individual” which must be lived up to to guarantee freedom and social justice. To be socially responsible is to be an anarchist; to be an anarchist is to practice libertarian communism.
Makhno rejects anarchism as a rigid and unchangeable doctrine:
...the great libertarian theorists, like Godwin, Proudhon, Bakunin, Johann Most, Kropotkin, Malatesta, Sébastien Faure and lots of others were, I suppose at any rate, loath to confine their doctrine within rigid, definitive parameters. Quite the opposite.
Makhno is careful to point out that anarchism is a fluid philosophy which, concieved as scientifically-minded, changes in response to new information, thereby maintaining only a few rigid postulates:
It might be said that anarchism’s scientific dogma is the aspiration to demonstrate that it is inherent in human nature never to rest on its laurels. The only thing that is unchanging in scientific anarchism is its natural tendency to reject all fetters and any attempt by man to exploit his fellow men.
Makhno believes that it is human nature to reject authority, both in the form of external domination and internal indoctrination. Tolerance for slavery and domination are a backward and illogical development artificially imposed on the human mind. To accept the idea of external domination requires accepting a sort of moral law imposed by God, whose existence Makhno rejects.
Once people reject God and the natural legitimacy of authority, they become aware of their own natural freedom. To Makhno, human nature is beautiful, and this beauty is accessible only through freedom from external domination. “It is at this point only that man awakes to natural freedom, independent of everyone and everything which reduces to ashes anything that defies it, everything that violates nature’s purity and captivating beauty, which is made manifest and grows through the autonomous creative endeavor of the individual.”
It is important to note that for Makhno, freedom is not an end in itself, but a means to the expression of the human spirit in its highest form, one untrampled by a dominating ideology. The ethical ideal of anarchism is both to reject domination of oneself, and to refrain from dominating others. The most complete means of domination is identified by Makhno as the State, a political tool of the exploiting class to bend others to their will. Makhno clearly identifies both bourgeois capitalists and statist socialists Bolsheviks as within this category.
The form libertarian communist society takes is described as follows:
It is chiefly dependent upon the free individuals banded together into affinity groupings — whether prompted by interest, need or inclination — guaranteeing an equal measure of social justice for all and linking up into federations and confederations.
Here we are again, at OWS 80 years later: working groups, assemblies, the movement writ large. And I won’t even go into the Spanish Anarchist Movement of 1936-1939, about which so much has been written (and after which this blog is named), who didn’t shy away from acknowledging that their agricultural collectives and worker-managed factories could certainly be described as democratic and as anarchist. Like other anarchists, Makhno clearly stated his opposition to democracy, but, as in the case of Kropotkin, he is clearly referring to representative democracy when doing so. It seems as if, in the process of rejecting representative democracy, many anarchists casually tossed direct democracy into the mix alongside it, based on the logic of not letting oneself be coerced by majorities.
Lapses in reason like this could be forgiven in 1902, when there were no real-world anarchist experiments to analyze. 120 years later, armed with a vast wealth of information about the successes and failures of anarchism in practice, we should know better.
Anti-Democrats, Or Confused Democrats?
The problem, it seems, is what one runs into when one asks present-day anti-democratic anarchists to explain how decisions should be made in an anti-democratic anarchist society. The answer? Frankly, I haven’t been able to get a straight one whenever I’ve asked; whoever wishes to offer one, the comment section is open to you.
It’s truly unclear how one would. Democracy can be defined in quite a straightforward manner-the Greek root words literally translate to “rule by the people.” Democracy is the decision-making process that exists when you take away kings, magistrates, and politicians. If decisions have to be made on a collective level (as any sane person will admit that they do) and you don’t want leaders to do it, democracy is what you have left to work with-and in democracies, there are often opposing sides-one side eventually wins, while the other loses and is forced to live with an outcome they dislike. As Abraham Lincoln said, “you can’t please all of the people all the time.” So unsurprisingly, the anti-democratic crowd is full of criticisms, but not much in the way of suggestions.
Take Bob Black, someone who hates democracy so much he wrote the lengthy essay Debunking Democracy, and an entire book on Murray Bookchin for daring to suggest direct democracy might be a pretty solid and anarchic way of making decisions. How could that be? Look how many Russian aristocrats disagreed with him 100 years ago!
Black’s arguments against democracy are, disappointingly, all the usual ones from the conservative playbook. He quotes the famous anarchist-sorry, I mean monarchist-Thomas Hobbes 5 times, includes the requisite argument about the deplorable behavior of the Athenians detailed in Thucyudides’ History of the Peloponnesian War (after all, what’s changed since 415 BC?) and presents the stunning assertion that, believe it or not, “The majority isn’t always right.”
It’s not even that these critiques are wrong, per se. Making decisions on a communal level is hard, and in this sense conservative critiques of “mob rule” have legitimacy. It’s true, educating a public so that it is competent to participate in a political process would be expensive, and even then it is virtually certain they will make bad decisions with some regularity-something, I suppose we are to assume, the elites who currently make decisions don’t already do.
But at least conservative arguments, however flawed, offer something genuinely different as an alternative. But Black isn’t a conservative. The key question that always brings us back to the idea of democracy is this: what do you have that’s better?
Well, Black has no solutions to offer in Debunking Democracy-he simply shits on the dinner table and leaves, which, to be clear, I fully respect. Where does he offer an answer, though? I mean, there has to be some alternative if we’re going to go to such lengths to reject democracy.
Well, Black does have an answer elsewhere, offered in Anarchy 101. Just so it’s clear I’m not quoting anything out of context, I’ll provide his entire statement on the matter:
Well, if you don’t elect officials to make the decisions, who does make them? You can’t tell me that everybody can do as he personally pleases without regard for others.
Anarchists have many ideas about how decisions would be made in a truly voluntary and cooperative society. Most anarchists believe that such a society must be based on local communities small enough for people know each other, or people at least would share ties of family, friendship, opinions or interests with almost everybody else. And because this is a local community, people also share common knowledge of their community and its environment. They know that they will have to live with the consequences of their decisions. Unlike politicians or bureaucrats, who decide for other people.
Anarchists believe that decisions should always be made at the smallest possible level. Every decision which individuals can make for themselves, without interfering with anybody else’s decisions for themselves, they should make for themselves. Every decision made in small groups (such as the family, religious congregations, co-workers, etc.) is again theirs to make as far as it doesn’t interfere with others. Decisions with significant wider impact, if anyone is concerned about them, would go to an occasional face-to-face community assembly.
The community assembly, however, is not a legislature. No one is elected. Anyone may attend. People speak for themselves. But as they speak about specific issues, they are very aware that for them, winning is not, as it was for football coach Vince Lombardi, “the only thing.” They want everyone to win. They value fellowship with their neighbors. They try, first, to reduce misunderstanding and clarify the issue. Often that’s enough to produce agreement. If that’s not enough, they work for a compromise. Very often they accomplish it. If not, the assembly may put off the issue, if it’s something that doesn’t require an immediate decision, so the entire community can reflect on and discuss the matter prior to another meeting. If that fails, the community will explore whether there’s a way the majority and minority can temporarily separate, each carrying out its preference.
If people still have irreconcilable differences about the issue, the minority has two choices. It can go along with the majority this time, because community harmony is more important than the issue. Maybe the majority can conciliate the minority with a decision about something else. If all else fails, and if the issue is so important to the minority, it may separate to form a separate community, just as various American states (Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont, Kentucky, Maine, Utah, West Virginia, etc.) have done. If their secession isn’t an argument against statism, then it isn’t an argument against anarchy. That’s not a failure for anarchy, because the new community will recreate anarchy. Anarchy isn’t a perfect system — it’s just better than all the others.
My jaw frankly dropped when I read this passage. Bob Black is a communalist! We can all go home! This guy wrote an entire book about how Murray Bookchin, the founder of libertarian municipalism, isn’t a real anarchist because of his support for libertarian municipalism-and then offered a point for point endorsement of libertarian municipalism, laying it out as anarchist gospel.
You can try to pick this answer apart and differentiate this passage from Bookchin’s program. I’m not sure you’ll have much luck doing so. But what you definitely cannot do is extricate it from Black’s own accusations of “statism” and “governmentalism.” I’m sure he wouldn’t want to call them that, but I have a suggestion for what he could call it that I suspect he’d like even less.
In fairness to Black, maybe this piece was written before his criticisms of democracy, and his perspective simply changed? The Anarchy 101 piece is undated, so who knows? Except that this passage immediately follows a denunciation of democracy, so what are we to make of this?
Black has run into the wall anarchism will always bump in to, so long as it rejects democracy-a wall summed up by Bookchin in Communalism, the Democratic Dimension of Anarchism in 1994:
Unless everyone is to be so psychologically homogeneous and society’s interests so uniform in character that dissent is simply meaningless, there must be room for conflicting proposals, discussion, rational explication and majority decisions — in short, democracy.
Bookchin, rather than shrinking away from the fractious nature of democracy, embraced it. For Bookchin, whose thinking was characterized by the idea of dialectical growth and development, the conflict which occurs in honest debate of an idea in an open democracy is precisely the point, the thing which allows for change, progress, and improvement:
If consensus could be achieved without compulsion of dissenters, a process that is feasible in small groups, who could possibly oppose it as a decision-making process? But to reduce a libertarian ideal to the unconditional right of a minority — let alone a “minority of one” — to abort a decision by a “collection of individuals” is to stifle the dialectic of ideas that thrives on opposition, confrontation and, yes, decisions with which everyone need not agree and should not agree, lest society become an ideological cemetery. Which is not to deny dissenters every opportunity to reverse majority decisions by unimpaired discussion and advocacy.
Bookchin’s work is characterized by an insistence, based on the historical examples he was aware of, that democracy can work-provided people are persistent, and provided they can put their egos aside for their communities as a whole when the time came to make a decision. We don’t have to be islands of one, intellectually owning everyone we come into contact with, and we simultaneously don’t have to be meek orchid-gardeners making concessions to each other’s feelings at any cost. We could, perhaps, simply engage in honest and well-intentioned debates, accepting at the outset that we may not get what we want at the end. That, to me, is not only the principled and mature position-it’s the anarchist refusal to compel or be compelled in its most vital form. To be compelled to do something is abhorrent; to tolerate a decision you don’t agree with sometimes is adulthood.
If the best anti-democratic anarchists have to offer in opposition to democracy is more democracy, shouldn’t we be able to set the idiotic infighting within anarchism aside, and offer a coherent political programme in its stead, one which doesn’t end with an uneasy question mark? Are we incapable of having mature conversations about issues we disagree on as soon as the stakes are raised even a hair?
If we truly are, then I have bad news for you: we will never be able to create institutions alternative to the state. And it would probably be for the best if we didn’t.
I came to this article with only a vague idea of what anarchism means, and have come away with a new mental framework of its history, its proponents and their different interpretations, and how it relates to direct democracy, and representative democracy.
I am grateful for the education provided here!