Ethereal anarchists
Elsewhere, in a quintessential example of his obscurantism, Watson tells us with finality: "Technology is capital" ATM, p. Farewell to two centuries of political economy and debates over the nature of capitalism: over whether it is a social relation Marx , machines and labor Smith and Ricardo , a mere factor of production neo-capitalist economists or, most brilliantly, the teeth of a tiger H. Farewell to the class struggle!
Farewell to an economics of social and class relations! When Watson slows down his dervishlike whirl and gives us a chance to examine his ecstatic spinning, we find that it leads to the elimination of the social question itself, as a century of socialist thought called it. Watson is now here to apprise us that the great conflict that has beleaguered history is not really workers and bosses, or between subjects and elites. Fools that we have been--it is between human beings and their machines!
Machines are not the embodiment of alienated labor but in fact the "social imaginary" that looms over them and control their lives! And all this time, Marx, Bakunin, Kropotkin, et al. If my conclusion seems overstated, then I would suggest that readers follow Watson himself down into his dark valley of technological absurdity. Approvingly quoting Langdon Winner, Watson enjoins us to practice "epistemological luddism" as a "method of inquiry" BB, p.
To those who notice that these phrases are empty, Watson concedes that they are "inchoate and embryonic" BB, p. But only three paragraphs later, we learn that Watson's luddism is not merely "epistemological" or a "method of inquiry. We will require, he enjoins, "a careful negotiation with technics" and approvingly quoting the mystic Theodore Roszak "the selective reduction of industrialism" BB, p.
Roszak, at least, was sensible enough to speak of a selective reduction of industrialism. For Watson, however, selectivity all but disappears, and his "negotiated" dismantling of industry becomes nothing less than spectacular. We have to "dismantle mass technics" SIH, p. What is Watson's opening "negotiating" position? For the most part, in his other writings, he has long avoided naming which technologies he would keep and which he would dispose of, even airily disparaging the question.
But for one who wishes to "negotiate," the necessity for him to identify technologies he favors and disfavors should be self-evident. These other writings give us some idea of Watson's alternative to the cage of megamechanical civilization. I may be simple-minded, but this seems to be a call to pull down cities and reduce them to forests and farmland.
In the absence of cities and roads, Watson seems to want us to return to small-scale farming, "a clear context where small scale, the 'softness' of technics, labor-intensiveness, and technical limits all crucially matter" BB, p. Clearly tractors and the like will be excluded--they are clearly products of the megamachine.
But I would hope Watson's brave new world will not be so extreme as to exclude the plow and horses--or are we being domineering if we put horses into harnesses? We would thus have to eliminate computers and telecommunications; farewell, too, to telegraphs, radios, and telephones! It is just as well we do so, since Watson doesn't understand telephones: the work of telephone line workers, he says, is "a mystery" to him BB, p. So good riddance! He has also written that "the wheel is not an extension of the foot, but a simulation which destroys the original" MCGV, p.
So away with the wheel! Away with everything that "simulates" feet! And who knows--away with the potter's wheel, which is a "simulation" of the hand! As to energy sources, Watson really puts us in a pickle. He disapproves of "the elaborate energy system required to run" household appliances and other machines, since it renders people "dependent" Christopher Lasch quoted in BB, p. So--away with the mass generation of electricity, and every machine that runs on it! Needless to say, all fossil as well as nuclear fuels will have to go.
Perhaps we could turn to renewable energy as an alternative--but no, Watson has also voiced his sovereign disapproval of "solar, wind and water technologies" as products of "an authoritarian andhierarchical division of labor" NST, p. All of this leaves us with little more than our own muscles to power our existence. Yes, "revolution will be a kind of return" BB, p. To be sure, we will eliminate such noxious products of the megamachine as weapons, but if we also dispense with roads clearly if we do not repair them, they will disappear , typewriters and computers except the computer owned by Fifth Estate, presumably, for otherwise how will Watson's golden words reach the public?
The reader has only to walk through his or her home, look into each room, and peer into closets and medicine chests and kitchen cabinets, to see what would be surrendered in the kind of technological world that Watson would "negotiate" with industrialism. Let it be noted, however, that a return to the economic conditions of twelfth-century Europe would hardly create a paradise. Somehow, even in the absence of advanced technology to generate them, oppressive social relations still existed in this technological idyll.
Somehow feudal hierarchies of the most oppressive kind in no way modeled on ecclesiastical hierarchies, let alone "shaped" by technology superimposed themselves. Somehow the peasant-serfs who were ruled and coerced by barons, counts, kings, and their bureaucratic and military minions failed to realize that they were free of the megamachine's oppressive impact.
Yet they were so unecological as to drain Europe's mosquito-infested swamps and burn its forests to create meadows and open farmland. Happily spared the lethal effects of modern medicine, they usually died very early in life of famine, epidemic disease, and other lethal agents. Given the demands of highly labor-intensive farming, what kind of free time, in the twelfth century, did small-scale farmers have?
If history is any guide, it was a luxury they rarely enjoyed, even during the agriculturally dormant winters. During the months when farmers were not tilling the land and harvesting its produce, they struggled endlessly to make repairs, tend animals, perform domestic labor, and the like. And they had the wheel! It is doubtful that, under such circumstances, much time would have been left over for community meetings, let alone the creation of art and poetry.
Doubtless they sowed, reaped, and did their work joyously, as I pointed out in The Ecology of Freedom. The workman's song--proletarian, peasant, and artisan--expresses the joy of self-expression through work. But this does not mean that work, bereft of machinery, is an unadulterated blessing or that it is not exhausting or monotonous.
There is a compelling word for arduous labor: toil! Without an electric grid to turn night into day, active life is confined to daylight hours, apart from what little illumination can be provided by candles. Dare I introduce such petroleum derivatives as kerosene?
It is one of the great advances of the modern world that the most arduous and monotonous labor can often be performed entirely by machines, potentially leaving human beings free to engage in many different tasks and artistic activities, such as those Charles Fourier described for his utopian phalansteries. But as soon as I assign to technology the role of producing a society free of want and toil, Watson takes up the old dogmatic saw and condemns it to perdition as "the familiar marxist version" BB, p.
Watson may enjoy appealing to unthinking political reflexes that date back to the Marx-Bakunin battles of the First International, but the merit of an idea interests me more than its author. Instead of directly addressing the problem of scarcity and toil in any way, however, Watson settles the issue, at least in his own mind, by quoting his guru, Lewis Mumford: "The notion that automation gives any guarantee of human liberation is a piece of wishful thinking" quoted in BB, p.
It is astonishing that one has to explain this concept to a former Trotskyite like Watson, who should have some knowledge of Marx'sideas. Alas, Mumford does not serve him well. In The Pentagon of Power the same work from which Watson quotes , Mumford himself actually gives what Watson would be obliged to dismiss as "the familiar marxist version. The only way effectively to overcome the power system is to transfer its more helpful agents to an organic complex.
How should the technological level of a free society be determined? Watson's thoughts on this question are such as to render his libertarian views on technics and human needs more authoritarian than is immediately evident. Suppose, for example, that nonindustrialized and even tribal people actually want not only wheels, roads, and electric grids, but even the material goods, such as computers and effective medications, that people in industrialized countries enjoy--not least of all, Watson himself and the Fifth Estate collective.
I have argued in The Ecology of Freedom that no one, particularly in a consumption-oriented country such as the United States, has any right to bar nonindustrialized societies from choosing the way of life they wish. I would hope that they would make their choices with full awareness of the ecological and even psychological consequences of consumption as an end in itself, which have been amply demonstrated for them by the course of developed nations; and I would engage in a concerted effort to persuade all peoples of the world to live according to sound ecological standards.
But it would be their indubitable right to acquire what they believe they need, without anyone else dictating what they should or should not acquire. Not only is my proposal intolerable in Watson's eyes, he cannot even paraphrase it correctly.
He must distort it in order to make it seem ridiculous: "What are we to make of the proposal to develop mass technics and a combination consumer-producer utopia [! The implication of this distortion is, I believe, that poor societies must develop capitalism and technology in order to know the consequences of doing so, irrespective of the fact that the consequences of doing so are quite clear and the information is widely available, not least of all because of communications technology.
For Watson, however, the ecological crisis to be too urgent to wait for a policy as slow as mine. How, then, would our lifestyle anarchist handle this very real problem himself? He doesn't tell us, but he does call on people in the industrialized countries to seek "a new relationship to the phenomenal world--something akin to what [Marshall] Sahlins calls 'a Zen road to affluence, departing from premises somewhat different from our own'" BB, p.
May I suggest that this is dodging the issue? If the urgency of resolving the ecological crisis is the paramount factor, Watson's own solution would seem rather inadequate as well, requiring as it does an ethereal spiritual revolution on the basis of one-by-one conversion. Nor is such an approach likely to succeed, any more than Christianity succeeded in creating a loving, self-sacrificing, and all-forgiving world in two thousand years of one-by-one conversions--and the Church, at least, promised pie in the sky as the old IWW song has it in the next world if not in this one.
As for people in the industrial-capitalist world, Watson, who has tried to prejudice his readers against my views as "marxist," "authoritarian," and "dogmatic," suddenly mutates into an ideological despot in his own right. He finds it inconceivable that people could actually make conscious decisions about the use of technology, still less place moral constraints upon it. Quite to contrary, inasmuch as, in his view, technology governs people rather than the other way around, we can scarcely hope to spring the trap and decide for ourselves.
Watson ridicules the notion that "a moral society. He arrogantly forecloses democratic decision-making by ordinary people on the proper use of advanced technologies, because open civic discussions would "inevitably" result in "compliance with the opinion of experts" and "would of necessity bebased on persuasion and faith" BB, pp. Lest we have any doubt that Watson means what he says, he reiterates the same disdainful view: "It's ludicrous [!
One may modestly ask: why should this be "ludicrous"? Expert knowledge is by no means necessary to make general decisions about the uses of technology: a reasonable level of ordinary competence on the part of citizens is usually quite adequate. In fact, today legislators at the local, state, and national levels make such decisions every day, and ordinary people can clearly do the same.
Watson's argument that such decisions are beyond the ken of ordinary people is possibly unknown to him precisely the argument that Lenin advanced in against workers' control of factories which, of course, Watson would abandon wholesale and in favor of one-man management to use Bolshevik terminology. Does our poetic lifestyler really have so little faith in the competence of ordinary people?
Doubtless workers, technicians, and farmers need someone with higher wisdom--perhaps Watson himself--to specify their appropriate level of technology for them? Actually, Watson seems to be suffering from a memory lapse. Somewhat later in his book he gives us the very opposite message, notably that "people have the capacity, in fact the duty to make rational and ethical choices about technics" BB, p.
How, then, will they avoid all the "inevitable" and "necessary" obstacles that Watson himself earlier raised? One gets the distinct impression that, no matter what specific issue us under discussion, if I say yea, Watson is certain to say nay--even if it means he must reverse himself on a later occasion.
Primitivism There is nothing new about the romanticization of tribal peoples. Two centuries ago, denizens of Paris, from Enlighteners such as Denis Diderot toreactionaries like Marie Antoinette, created a cult of "primitivism" that saw tribal people as morally superior to members of European society, who presumably were corrupted by the vices of civilization. This romanticization later infected not only the early nineteenth-century Romantics but thinkers so disparate as Marx and Engels, Jacob Bachofen and Lewis Morgan.
These and others who wistfully thought that humanity had exiled itself from a benign, "matriarchal," caring, and cooperative world to a civilization filled with immoral and egoistic horrors. The more urbanized and suburbanized bourgeois culture of the s was far from immune to this trend. During the s anthropologists celebrated the "noble savage" in his or her pristine paradise, which more than ever seemed like a refuge, however imaginary, for jaded urban and suburban dwellers of the industrial capitalist world.
This anthropology, contrary to less sanguine views of primitive lifeways, argued that foraging peoples were compelled to work at hunting and food-gathering for only a few hours each day. Wrote anthropologists Richard B. Lee and Irven DeVore: Even some of the "marginal" hunters studied by ethnographers actually work short hours and exploit abundant food sources.
Several hunting peoples lived well on two to four hours of subsistence effort per day and were not observed to undergo the periodic crises that have been commonly attributed to hunters in general. For wants are "easily satisfied," either by producing much or desiring little. A fair case can be made, that hunters often work much less than we do, and rather than a grind the food quest is intermittent, leisure is abundant, and there is more sleep in the daytime per capita than in any other conditions of society.
I never accepted the preposterous theory of an "original affluent society," but I waxed far too enthusiastic about primitive attitudes toward the natural world and their compassionate outlook. I even maintained that the animistic qualities of aboriginal subjectivity were something that Westerners could benefit from emulating.
I later came to realize that I was wrong in many of these respects. Aboriginal peoples could have no attitude toward the natural world because, being immersed in it, they had no concept of its uniqueness. It is true that individual tribes had considerable compassion for their own members, but their attitudes toward nontribal members were often indifferent or hostile.
As to animism, in retrospect, I regard any belief in the supernatural as regressive. As I discussed in detail in Re-Enchanting Humanity pp. Aboriginal societies were hardly free from such material insecurities as shortages of game animals, diseases, drudgery, chronic warfare, and even genocidal acts against communities that occupied coveted land and resources. Such a prevalence of premature death, given their level of social and technological development, bears comparison with some of Western civilization's worst features.
Having been too gullible about "organic society" in The Ecology of Freedom, I was at pains to criticize my own work on this score when the book was republished in At that time I wrote a lengthy new introduction in which I distanced myself from many of the views expressed in the first edition of the book. Quite to the contrary, I still stand by the core issues in these societies that I identified in The Ecology of Freedom as sources of valuable lessons for our own time. In the best of cases organic societies organized their economic and cultural lives according to a principle of usufruct, with a system of distribution based on an"irreducible minimum" a phrase I borrowed from Paul Radin , as well as an ethic of complementarity, for all members of the community, regardless of their productive contribution.
Not only does Watson ignore my criticism of my own earlier position, he himself advances a primitive romanticism whose rosy scenarios by far surpass anything I wrote in my book. He serves up all the s myths, indeed, all the puerile rubbish, about aboriginal lifeways of that time--not only Sahlins's "original affluence" economics but the most absurd elements of animistic spirituality.
Primitivity, for this man, is essentially a world of dancing, singing, celebrating, and dreaming. The subjectivity that I came to reject is precisely what Watson still extols: primitive people, in his version, seem to be all mystics at some countercultural "be-in.
That they also do such mundane human things as acquire food, produce garments, make tools, build shelters, defend themselves, attack other communities, and the like, falls completely outside the vision of our Detroit poet. In fact, although tribal society is extremely custom-bound,straitjacketed by taboos and imperative rules of behavior, Watson nonetheless decides, gushingly, that even when aborigines are "living under some of the harshest, most commanding conditions on earth"--no less!
In SALA, while I was arguing against the primitivism of lifestyle anarchists like Watson, I summarized my criticisms of aboriginal society, calling into question the theory of an "original affluence" as well as the idea of a "noble savage. This reservation is entirely lost on our arch-romanticizer, for just as Watson glorifies aboriginals beyond recognition, he now portrays me, beyond recognition, as hostile to aboriginal peoples altogether.
Bookchin "no longer seems to have anything good to say about early societies" BB, p. He even pulls off the old Maoist and Trotskyist stunt of asking, not whether my observations are true or not, but whose interests they serve. In my case, since I fail to romanticize primitive peoples according to Watson's prescription, I clearly aid and abet the bourgeois-imperialist destroyers of primal cultures: "Bookchin's social ecology," he huffs, shares "the assumptions of bourgeois political economy itself" BB, p.
I encountered this level of argumentation some fifty years ago, and whoever can be persuaded by these contemptible methods is welcome to share Watson's polemical world. Like other primitivists in the lifestyle zoo, Watson argues for the sustainability of primitive lifeways by maintaining that in the history of humanity, hunting-gathering societies existed far longer than the societies that followed the rise of written history.
He recycles Lee and DeVore's claim that "for ninety-nine percent of human existence [by which Lee and DeVore meant two million years] people have lived in the 'fairly loose systems of bonding' of bands and tribes" BB, p. It is worth noting that two million years ago, modern-type humans--Homo sapiens sapiens--with their enlarged mental capacities and hunting-gathering lifeways, had not yet emerged on the evolutionary tree.
The hominids that populated the African savannahs were Australopithecines and Homo habilis, who most likely were not hunter-gatherers at all but scavengers who lived on game killed by larger carnivores. Like all hominids and members of the genus Homo including Neandertalers , they probably lacked the anatomical equipment for syllabic speech a feature that some primitivists, to be sure, would see more as an advantage than as a deprivation.
The earliest proto-Homo sapiens sapiens did not appear in Africa until only , to , years ago. And even then they did not forage in an organized fashion such as Watson envisions: as Robert Lewin has noted, "recent archeological analysis indicates that true hunting and gathering--as characterized by division of labor, food sharing, and central placeforaging--is a rather recently emerged behavior," dating from the retreat of the last Ice Age, beginning only some 12, to 15, years ago.
If we calculate using the earliest date that Lewin suggests for the rise of hunting and gathering, years ago--we must conclude that civilization has occupied at least half--or perhaps a third--of our species's cultural history. In any case, what difference does it make if human beings lived as hunter-gatherers for one percent of their existence or fifty? Such a level of discussion is juvenile. The fact remains that, although it took a long time for our species to advance beyond the level of Australopithecine scavengers on the veldt, they evolved culturally with dazzling rapidity over the past 20, years.
Almost invariably, discussions of an "original affluence" enjoyed by hunting and foraging peoples focus on the San people of the Kalahari desert, especially the! Kung "Bushmen," who, until very recently, it was frequently assumed, were living in a pristine state that reflected the lifeways of prehistoric foragers. The studies that are most commonly invoked to support the "affluence" thesis are those generated by anthropologist Richard B.
Writing in the s,Lee noted that it took the! Kung only a few days in a week to acquire all the food they needed for their well-being, ostensibly proving that affluence or, more precisely, free time is one of the great rewards of primitivity.
I may add that by this standard, anyone who chooses to live in a shack, bereft of a sophisticated culture, could be said to be affluent. If this is affluence, then the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski was a wealthy man indeed. In recent years, however, strong doubts have arisen that the! Kung were quite as affluent as s anthropologists made them out to be. As anthropologist Thomas Headland summarizes the current research, "The lives of the! Kung are far from idyllic. An average lifespan of thirty years, high infant mortality, marked loss of body weight during the lean season--these are not the hallmarks of an edenic existence.
Kung life have steadily accumulated. Lee himself has acknowledged shortcomings of his input-output study. For one thing, his calculations of the amount of work the! Kung devoted to subsistence ignored the time spent in preparing food, which turned out to be substantial. Other researchers established that even though the Dobe!
Kung may have appeared well nourished when Lee encountered them, at other times they suffered from hunger and disease. Meanwhile, the theoretical underpinnings of the original-affluence model collapsed. It became clear that while many tribal groups were adapted to their environment at the population level, existence was often harsh for individuals in those groups.
Kung encounter very harsh situations; her own descriptions of them contradict her enthusiasm for their way of life. In SALA, drawing on the work of Edwin Wilmsen, I noted that the lives of the San were actually quite short, that they do go hungry at times, especially during lean seasons, and that they lived in the Kalahari not because it was their habitat of choice from time immemorial but because they had been driven into the desert from their erstwhile agricultural lands by more powerful invaders who coveted their original territory.
Moreover, I wrote, "Richard Lee's own data on the caloric intake of 'affluent' foragers have been significantly challenged by Wilmsen and his associates. Lee himself has revised his views on this score since the s" SALA, pp. Watson's reply to these observations is worth noting: he telephoned Lee himself to query him on this point. He replied that he modified his findings on caloric intake very slightly in the late s--"no more than five percent either way"--but that Bookchin's claim was otherwise spurious.
Note well that the change in Lee's work took place between the mids and the late s, not since the late s. In fact, in his book The! Kung San, Lee dispelled the excessively rosy image he gave of the San in the s by giving evidence of malnutrition among the "affluent" Zhu a San-speaking people.
Adult Zhu, he wrote, "are small by world standards and. Kung from afar, but when we are brought into closer contact with their daily concerns, we are alternately moved to pity by their tales of hardship and repelled by their nagging demands forgifts, demands that grow more insistent the more we give. During the lean months of the year, he noted in , the Zhu "must resort to increasingly arduous tactics in order to maintain a good diet. Our assumptions and interpretations were much too simple.
In societies such as our own, he points out, only some sectors of the population starve during times of hunger. But "during tough times in most aboriginal societies," he writes with amazing sang-froid, "generally, everyone starves or no one does" BB, p. Indeed, "even when primal people starve, 'the whole group as a positive cohesive unit is involved. In consequence, there is generally no disorganization or disintegration either of individual or of the group as such, in stark contrast with the civilized" BB, p.
They all starve to death--and that is that! Are we expected to admire a situation where "everyone starves" because they do so in an organized fashion? Allow me to suggest that this anything but a consolation. Scarcity conditions--conditions of generalized want and hunger--that could result in famine are precisely those that, historically speaking, have led to competition for scarce goods and eventually the formation of class and hierarchical societies.
Far more desirable to develop the productive technologies sufficiently to avoid famine altogether! If such technologies were sufficiently developed, then put to useethically and rationally in a libertarian communist society, everyone could be freed from material uncertainty. This condition of postscarcity would give us the preconditions for one day achieving a truly egalitarian, free, and culturally fulfilling social order.
It might be supposed that, in weighing these two alternatives--scarcity, with the possibility of a community's entire extinction, against postscarcity, with the potentiality to satisfy all basic human needs--Watson might choose the latter prospect over the former. But farbe it from Watson to agree with anything Bookchin has to say! Watson, it seems, would prefer that "everyone starve" together rather than that they have sufficient means to enjoy well-being together.
So cavalier is his attitude about human life, that when I object to it, he reproaches me for being "utterly affronted by affirmative references to death as part of the ecological cycle" BB, p. As a humanist, allow me to state categorically that I am indeed "utterly affronted" by such references, and by Watson's blatant callousness.
It is this kind of stuff that brings him precariously close to the thesis of his erstwhile antihero, Thomas Malthus in HDDE , namely that mass death would result from population growth, whose geometric increase would far outstrip a merely arithmetically increasing food supply. Indeed, it was precisely the productivity of machines that showed thinking people that the Malthusian cycle was a fallacy.
Yes--better machines than death, in my view, and Watson is welcome to criticize me for it all he likes! If Watson is callous toward the objective aspects of primitivism, his attitude toward its subjective aspects, as I have noted, resembles the vagaries of a flower child. An essential feature is his belief that the mental outlooks of aboriginal peoples can override the material factors that might otherwise alter their lifeways.
In effect, for Watson, social development was a matter of conscious selection, choice, and even lifestyle, as though objective realities played no role in shaping of social relations. In SALA I tried to correct this romantic, idealist, and frankly naive view by pointing out that among most tribal peoples--indeed, among most peoples generally--not only economic life but even much of spirituality is oriented toward obtaining the means of life.
Not only does Watson take issue with this statement as economistic, he rejects any economic motivations in aboriginal society: "Economic motivation," he declares, "is the motive within class societies, not aboriginal communities" BB, p. Presumably people whose societies are structured around dancing, singing, and dreaming are immune to the problems--social as well as material--of acquiring and preparing food, fending off predators, building shelter, and the like.
Where I present contradictory evidence--such as the many cases of foragers "stampeding game animals over cliffs or into natural enclosures where they could be easily slaughtered," or "sites that suggest mass killings and 'assembly-line' butchering in a number of American arroyos," or the Native American use of fire to clear land, or the likelihood of Paleoindian overkills of large mammals SALA, p. In fact, the demanding endeavor to gather the means for supporting everyday life may well be the major preoccupation of aboriginal peoples, as many of their myths and cosmic dramas reveal to anyone who examines them without romantic awe.
At some point, clearly, primal peoples in prehistoric Europe and the Near East stopped "refusing" power and property, and from their "loosely knit" band and tribal societies, systems of domination developed--hierarchies, classes, and states--as part of civilization itself. Why this happened is by no means an academic question; nor is the approach we take to understanding the processes of social change a matter of trivial concern. Social changes, both major and minor, do not come about solely as a result of choice or volition.
Even in inspired moments, when people believe they are creating an entirely new world, their course of action, indeed their thinking, is profoundly influenced by the very history from which they think they are breaking away. To understand the processes by which the new develops from the old, we must closely examine the conditions under which human beings are constrained to work and the various problems with which they must contend with at particular moments in history--in short, the inner dialectic of social development.
We must look at the factors that cause apparently stable societies to slowly decompose, giving rise to the new ones that were "chosen" within the limitations of material and cultural conditions. I followed this approach in The Ecology of Freedom, for example, when I examined the nature and causes of the rise of hierarchy. There I tried to show that hierarchy emerged from within the limitations and problems faced by primal societies. I made no pretense that my presentation constituted the last word on this problem; indeed, my most important goal was to highlight the importance of trying to understanding hierarchical development, to show its dialectic and the problems it posed.
Watson not only dismisses this vitally important issue but arrogantly rejects any endeavor to look into "the primordial community to find the early embryonic structure that transformed organic society into class society" BB, p.
Needless to say, he claims that I fail to understand power in aboriginal societies, "where the so-called chief is usually a spokesman and a go-between" BB, p. This was probably true at one time in the early development of chiefdoms, but it is evidence of Watson's static, absolutist mentality that he fails to see that many chiefdoms gradually and sometimes even precipitously transformed themselves, so that chiefs became petty despots and even monarchs long before there were "megamachines" and major technological advances.
Watson's reckless farrago of obfuscation merely beclouds his own ignorance. The fact is that he himself simply cannot answer the question of how social development occurs. Although the pages of BB are bereft of an explanation for the origin of domination, in an earlier work he once brightly suggested: "Somehow [!
How it happened remains unclear to us today" CIB, p. I hate to think how desiccated social theory would become if all its thinkers exhibited the same paucity of curiosity and speculative verve that this off-handed remark reveals. Instead of making any attempt to account for social evolution, Watson merely times the passage of millennia of hominid and human evolution with his stopwatch "ninety-nine percent" , as though timing were more important than examining the causes "which remain unclear for us today" that impelled hominids and humans to make those major decisions that eventually removed them from their simple lifeways and landed them in the complex coils of the "megamachine.
If there is one thing on which everyone--Watson, the anthropologists, and myself--agrees, it is that among foraging peoples today, their subjectivity has failed to prevent either the invasion of commoditiesfrom the industrialized world or its colonization of material life.
But it is worth asking how much deliberate resistance tribal societies have put up against this invasion. For their part, the! Kung, the flagship culture of "original affluence" theorists, seen to be greatly attracted to modern "goodies. Yellen, to cite only one of several accounts, found when he visited Dobe in the mids,! Kung were planting fields and wearing mass-produced clothing; indeed, they had given up their traditional grass huts for "more substantial mud-walled structures.
Where once, as Lee put it, the charge of "stinginess" was one of "the most serious accusations one! Kung [could] level against another," [32] commodities are now shamelessly hoarded: With their newfound cash [the! Kung] had also purchased such goods as glass beads, clothing and extra blankets, which they hoarded in metal trunks often locked in their huts.
Many times the items far exceeded the needs of an individual family and could best be viewed as a form of savings or investment. In other words, the! Kung were behaving in ways that were clearly antithetical to the traditional sharing system. Yet the people still spoke of the need to share and were embarrassed to open their trunks for [the anthropologist].
Clearly, their stated values no longer directed their activity. Kung think so little of their "original affluence" that, even in the decades since the s, many of them have discarded primitive lifeways for the amenities of the "megamachine" and exhibit an eagerness to obtain more than they already have. It may also be that the bourgeois commodity has an enormous capacity to invade primitive economies and undermine them disastrously--Watson's certainties to the contrary notwithstanding.
Reason and Irrationalism As a man whose vision is turned to the past--whether it be the technology of the Middle Ages, or the sensibility of the Paleolithic or Neolithic--it should come no a surprise that Watson favors the more primal imperatives of intuition over intellectual reflection and has very little to say about rationality that is favorable. In this respect, he is nothing if not trendy: the current explosion of interest in irrational charlatans--psychics, divinators, mystics, shamans, priestesses, astrologers, angelologers, demonologers, extraterrestrials, et cetera ad nauseam--is massive.
Humorless though I may be--as Watson tells his readers, on the authority of someone who "knows" me "intimately" surely not John Clark! I have long been a critic of mythopoesis, spiritualism, and religion. Yet as the author of "Desire and Need" and The Ecology of Freedom, I have also fervently celebrated the importance of imagination and the creative role of desire.
My writings on reason contain numerous critiques of conventional or analytic commonly known as instrumental reason, important as it is in everyday life and experience. I have long maintained that the analytical forms of scientific rationality leave much to be desired for understanding developmental phenomena, such as biological evolution and human social history. These fields are better comprehended, I have argued, by dialectical reason, whose study, practice, and advocacy have been my greater interest.
Dialectic is the rationality of developmental processes, of phenomena that self-elaborate into diverse forms and complex interactions--in short, a secular form of reason that explores how reality, despite its multiplicity, unfolds into articulated, interactive, and shared relationships.
It provides a secular and naturalistic basis for bold speculation, for looking beyond the given reality to what "should be," based on the actualization of rationally unfolding potentialities--and, if you please, for formulating utopian visions of a society informed by art, ecology, cooperation, and solidarity. I have devoted a volume of essays, The Philosophy of Social Ecology, to elucidations of the limits of analytic reason and the importance of dialectic.
Thus, in reading BB, I was shocked to find that Watson, descending to the depths of demagoguery, writes not only that I am a promoter of "reified hyper-rationality and scientism" BB, p. Coming from a philosophical naif such as Watson, this distortion could well be attributed to the kind of arrogance that often accompanies fatuity.
But Watson does not restrict his attack to me; rather, he proceeds to mount an attack upon thevalidity of reason itself by attacking its very foundations. Siu quoted in BB, p. It is possible to dismiss this ineffable wordplay as nonsense; an assertion of the significance of insignificance, for instance, would make more sense than this passage, leaving the reader no wiser about the nature of reality.
What is more important, however, is the sheer arbitrariness and reductionism of Watson's nonmethodology. Having brought us into a black hole of "no-knowledge," Watson is free to say anything he wants without ever exposing it to the challenge of reason or experience. As Paul Feyerabend once wrote: "Anything goes! Complaining that "social ecology demands explanation," he argues that "nothing, not even science or social ecology, explains anything definitively.
All explanations are matters of credibility and persuasion, just as all thinking is fundamentally metaphorical" BB, p. Neither Nietzsche nor the postmodernists who currently follow in his wake can have formulated a more disastrous notion, fulfilling precisely my analysis in SALA. Even science, we learn, has not given us knowledge: to my colleague Janet Biehl's observation that "we [knowledgeable human beings] do know more about the workings of nature than was the case with earlier societies," Watson brightly responds, "Even scientists don't seem to agree on.
Yet eight pages earlier Watson noted with sparkling originality, "This doesn't mean that scientific reasoning can't help us to know or explain anything, only that there are other ways of knowing" BB, p. As to science more properly, the sciences, since the notion of a Science that has only one method and approach is fallacious : it or they do not claim to "explain anything definitively," merely to offer the best and most rational explanations dare I use this word? For gaining an understanding of the natural and social worlds, emotions and intuitions they are by no means the same thing are both worse than useless, while for general communal endeavors like politics, they can even be positively harmful, as the irrationalistic messages of fascism indicate.
But neither Biehl or I ever condemned them as inappropriate for the emotional dimensions of human life, such as friendships and families, aesthetics and play. In fact, I defy my irrationalist critics to show me a single quotation from my work in which I disdain the use of metaphor or mythopoesis for creating poetry and works of art.
By trundling out myobjections to their misuse in political and social matters, Watson cannily creates the illusion that I am hostile to them altogether, in all arenas of life. The subject-matter of my own work--indeed, the subject-matter that Watson seems to be debating with me--is neither psychology nor the processes of artistic creation but politics, an endeavor to understand the social world and, in community, to exert conscious choice over forms of social relations.
This endeavor demands an entirely different category of subjective processes from those demanded by artistic creation. In common with science, rationality as it is commonly understood emphatically seeks explanations whose truth is confirmed by observation and logical consistency, including speculation.
That this requirement is not always enough to arrive at truth does not mean that rationality should be abandoned in favor of the metaphors, psychobabble, and "no-knowledge" precepts that spew from Watson's heated imagination.
Few things have greater potential for authoritarianism, in my view, than the guru whose vagaries stake out a claim to truth that is beyond logical and experiential scrutiny. In the arts mythopoesis is a way to sharpen and deepen human sensibility; but in politics--a realm where people and classes struggle with each other for power and the realization of their most important communal hopes, and the force field of tension between the dominated and their dominators--mythopoesis, as a substitute for rational inquiry, often becomes demonic, appealing to the lowest common denominator of impulse and instinct in the individuals in a community.
Impulses and instincts, while very commonplace, cannot guide us to the achievement of a better and more humane world; indeed, the use of myth in politics is an invitation to disaster. Watson's rejoinder is to argue that reason, too, has contributed to the slaughterbench of history: "Plenty of blood has flowed,incited by.
If [Bookchin is] going to hold any and all mythic thinking responsible for its excesses, shouldn't he do the same for rationality and dialectics? As a former Trotskyist, Watson should know--better than many of his young anarchist readers--that Marx would have been the first to condemn Stalinist totalitarianism.
Instead, Watson panders to filthy prejudice. As for the supposed link between dialectical reason and the Stalinist system, a much stronger case could be made that mythopoesis fostered the Stalinist cult of personality, the well-orchestrated "May Day" parades, the rewriting of Bolshevik history, and the endless myths about the Great Father of the People who stood atop Lenin's mausoleum--in short, all the trappings that Russian fascism borrowed from the warehouse of mythopoesis.
To call Stalin a dialectician, let alone a philosopher, would be like calling Hitler a biologist or a geneticist. But nothing fazes Watson. If "myth and metaphor" are "needed" and "probably inevitable" in politics BB, p. Certainly, peasant revolutionaries like John Ball and Wat Tyler, in the fourteenth century, genuinely believed in and thus invoked "the idea of a renewed Golden Age," while abolitionists and civil rights clerics took up "the biblical metaphor of exodus" BB, p.
Within the context of those very religious times, these uses of myth by religious people are understandable. Yet it remains troubling that, no matter how much the rebellious peasants believed in the Garden of Eden, their belief was still illusory; Ball could never have created a Garden of Eden on earth, least of all with fourteenth-century knowledge and technology.
And no matter how much the abolitionists and civil rights clerics may have believed in the reality of the biblical exodus, they would have been unable to take American blacks to any such promised land. Even after the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation, as one former Confederate put it, "All the blacks got was 'freedom' and nothing else. In modern times we know better than to accept the reality of superstitions, and today the job of a revolutionary is not to cynically propagate myths for the consumption of the supposedly gullible masses, but to show that domination and exploitation are irrational and unjust.
It is to offer precisely those dreaded "explanations," to form a worldly movement that can struggle to achieve a rational, ecological society in reality. One of the great dangers of myth in politics is its fictional nature; because myth is contrived, its use is therefore instrumental and manipulative, and its application demagogic.
Worse, as a betrayal of the highest ideal of social anarchism--namely, that people can manage their social affairs through rational discourse--the advocacy of myth in politics is implicitly undemocratic and authoritarian. When a myth is based on mystery, it provides a justification for demanding obedience to the inexplicable. Thus, medieval chiliasts claimed that they were instruments of god or his earthly embodiment, only to manipulate their supporters in their own interest, demoralize them, and lead them to terrible defeats.
Watson's own case for mythopoesis rests squarely on the lure of mystery rather than reason; on animalistic adaptation rather than on activity; on acceptance rather than on innovation; and on recovery rather than discovery--the long-hallowed theses of priests, despots, and authoritarians of all sorts. Astonishingly, the myths that Watson himself chooses to propagate can in no way be construed as liberatory, even by those who favor myth in politics, but rather inculcate irrationalism and passivity.
Favorably quoting Joseph Epes Brown, he enjoins his readers to "humble themselves before the entire creation, before the smallest ant, realizing their own nothingness" BB, p. At a time when political and social passivity have sunk to appalling depths, does Watson really feel that such an injunction, applied to politics, would not be laden with extraordinary dangers?
It was a historic contribution of secular philosophy and science to dissolve the seeming objectivity of dreams and reveal them as pure subjectivity--an enlightenment that is by no means complete in the present era of reaction.
For Watson, however, such an enlightenment is problematic at best and obfuscatory at worst. Complaining that I "opt for the reductionism of modern science and economistic rationality" BB, p. He commends what he sees as the aboriginal way of perceiving reality, inasmuch as "'everything that is perceived by the sense, thought of, felt, and dreamt of, exists'" BB, p.
Here he is quoting the anthropologist Paul Radin, who was describing the way American Indian perceptions of reality include everything sensed, felt, and dreamed. Watson, however, turns this description into a prescription, indeed into a desirable epistemology in which dream and reality are essentially indistinguishable.
In order to provide "a larger idea of reality," Watson thereupon transports us not only through this dream world but into ineffable shamanistic knowledge; he aims to convince us that shamanism is a calling, that shamans are seers, poets, sages--and, by implication, that they have access to the special knowledge of reality that is denied to reason and science. He showed that the shamanic life, far from being a calling, was often well-organized and based on trickery handed down from father to son over generations.
Shamans in consolidated tribes commonly formed a social elite, based on fear and reinforced by alliances with other elites, such as chiefs. Here the reason Watson favors the absence of literacy among aborigines becomes somewhat less murky: precisely the use of spoken words by shamans made it all the easier for them to manipulate the community, claim exclusive access to knowledge, use the unrecorded word to instill fear in the community, and thereby manipulate it. Radin's "pragmatic" judgements of their impact were more than justified.
The reader is then referred to pages of Radin's The World of Primitive Man--which Watson should actually hope they will not do, since these pages contain a discussion, not of an African people, but of the Yakuts, a California people, and no "encroaching money economy"is mentioned there at all.
Even when he gets his citations and page numbers straight, Watson's views are nothing if not preposterous. His own mythic view of aboriginals and especially shamans is nearly bereft of social and institutional awareness. He prefers to defend the vagaries of their subjectivity as though, like Athena, it sprang from the head of Zeus.
Without telling us how, he merely asserts that shamanism is "a complex process, bound to be of great interest to an organic, holistic outlook" BB, p. Thus while calling for "an abiding spirituality," he declaims that "we cannot reduce the experience of life, and of the fundamental, inescapable question of why we live, and how we live, to secular terms" BB, p.
We had nothing to lose. All bridges are burned, so all you have to do is go forward. Even now, it sounds more current than almost all other metal from that era. It displays the first crystallisation of extreme metal, where the sense of formal experimentation is every bit as important as grinding riffs.
It still sounds brutally, thrillingly alive. The big difference was the creativity — in the moods, the chord progressions, the take on the vocals. Celtic Frost was his attempt, with Hellhammer co-conspirator Martin Eric Ain, to move beyond the constraints of pure noise. On the last day of May we sat together and throughout the night designed a new band from scratch, literally with pen and paper.
Everything about this new outfit was to be different. We were anarchists. The second, To Mega Therion, was a huge step forward. Even the band name had been intended as a break from metal convention. That changed with the arrival of an American expat going by the name of Reed St Mark, in February , who had been told by a distributor of a young band out in the countryside looking for a drummer.
ETHEREUM FOUNDATION ANNOUNCEMENT
It was in the Renaissance and with the spread of reasoning and humanism through Europe that libertarian ideas emerged. Writers were outlining in their novels ideal societies that were based not on coercion but voluntarism. The Enlightenment further pushed towards anarchism with the optimism for social progress.
Some prominent figures of anarchism begun developing the first anarchist currents. That is the era of classical anarchism that lasted until the end of the Spanish Civil War of and was the golden age of anarchism. Anarchist Mikhail Bakunin opposed the Marxist aim of dictatorship of the proletariat in favour of universal rebellion and allied himself with the federalists in the First International before his expulsion by the Marxists Mikhail Bakunin took mutualism and extended it to collectivist anarchism.
Karl Marx became a leading figure in the International and a member of its General Council. The major reason lay in fundamentally different approaches on how the workers would emancipate themselves. After being expelled from the IWA, anarchists formed the St. Imier International. Under the influence of Peter Kropotkin, a Russian philosopher and scientist, anarcho-communism overlapped with collectivism. Anarcho-communists, who drew inspiration from the Paris Commune, advocated for free federation and distribution of goods according to one needs.
The major argument of anarcho-communism was that Bakunian perspective would lead to antagonism among collectives. At the turning of the century, anarchism had spread all over the world. In China, small groups of students imported the humanistic pro-science version of anarcho-communism. Tokyo was a hotspot for rebellious youth from countries of the far east, pouring into Japanese capital to study.
During that time, a minority of anarchists embarked into utilizing of violence in order to achieve their political ends. This kind of strategy is called propaganda of the deed. The dismemberment of the French socialist movement into many groups and the execution and exile of many Communards to penal colonies following the suppression of the Paris Commune favoured individualist political expression and acts.
Even though many anarchists distanced themselves from these terrorist acts, anarchists were persecuted and given bad fame. Illegalism, stealing the possessions of the rich because capitalists were not their rightful owners, was another strategy which some anarchists adopted during those same years. Anarchists enthusiastically participated in the Russian Revolution.
During the revolution, anarchists had concerns, but they opted to support the revolution instead of the Whites. However, they met harsh suppression after the Bolshevik government was stabilized. Anarchists in central Russia were either imprisoned, driven underground or joined the victorious Bolsheviks. Anarchists from Petrograd and Moscow instead fled to Ukraine. With the anarchists being crashed in Russia, two new antithetical currents emerged, namely platformism and synthesis anarchism.
Platformists sought to create a coherent group that would push for the revolution while the latter were against anything that would resemble a political party. The victory of the Bolsheviks in the October Revolution and the resulting Russian Civil War did serious damage to anarchist movements internationally. Many workers and activists saw the Bolshevik success as setting an example and communist parties grew at the expense of anarchism and other socialist movements.
Spain had a long anarchist tradition and anarchists played an important role in the war. In response to the army rebellion, an anarchist-inspired movement of peasants and workers, supported by armed militias, took control of Barcelona and of large areas of rural Spain where they collectivised the land. The Soviet Union provided some limited assistance at the beginning of the war, but the result was a bitter fight among communists and anarchists at a series of events named May Days as Joseph Stalin tried to seize control of the Republicans.
However, the s witnessed a revival of anarchism. The main causes of such a revival may have been the perceived failure of Marxism—Leninism and the tension build by the Cold War. During this era, anarchism was mostly part of other movements critical to both the state and capitalism such as the anti-nuclear, environmental and pacifist movements, the New Left, or the counterculture of the s.
Anarchism was also associated with the punk rock movement as exemplified by bands such as Crass and the Sex Pistols. Although feminist tendencies have always been a part of the anarchist movement in the form of anarcha-feminism, they returned with vigour during the second wave of feminism in the s. Around the turn of the 21st century, anarchism grew in popularity and influence as part of the anti-war, anti-capitalist and anti-globalisation movements. Some anarchist factions at these protests engaged in rioting, property destruction and violent confrontations with the police.
These actions were precipitated by ad hoc, leaderless, anonymous cadres known as black blocs—other organisational tactics pioneered in this time include security culture, affinity groups and the use of decentralised technologies such as the internet. A significant event of this period was the confrontations at the WTO conference in Seattle in Anarchist ideas have been influential in the development of the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico, and the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria, more commonly known as Rojava, a de facto autonomous region in northern Syria.
Anarchist schools of thought Anarchist schools of thought had been generally grouped in two main historical traditions individualist anarchism and social anarchism which have some different origins, values and evolution. In a chronological and theoretical sense, there are classical—those created throughout the 19th century—and post-classical anarchist schools—those created since the midth century and after.
Beyond the specific factions of anarchist thought is philosophical anarchism which the theoretical stance that the state lacks moral legitimacy without accepting the imperative of revolution to eliminate it. A component especially of individualist anarchism, philosophical anarchism may accept the existence of a minimal state as unfortunate and usually temporary, necessary evil, but argue that citizens do not have a moral obligation to obey the state when its laws conflict with individual autonomy.
In abandoning the hyphenated anarchisms i. The various anarchist schools of thought or currents are not distinct entities, but intermingle with each other. Classical Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was the primary proponent of anarcho-mutualism and influenced many future individualist anarchist and social anarchist thinkers Collectivist and communist anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism are all considered to be forms of social anarchism. Mutualism and individualism were the other notable anarchist currents through the 19th and early 20th century.
Social anarchism rejects private property, seeing it as a source of social inequality while retaining respect for personal property and emphasises cooperation and mutual aid. Mutualism Mutualism began in 18th-century English and French labour movements before taking an anarchist form associated with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in France and others in the United States.
Proudhon distinguished between ideal political possibilities and practical governance. For this reason, much in contrast to some of his theoretical statements concerning ultimate spontaneous self-governance, Proudhon was heavily involved in French parliamentary politics and allied himself with the socialist factions of the workers movement.
During his life of public service, he began advocating state-protected charters for worker-owned cooperatives and promoting certain nationalisation schemes. Mutualist anarchism is concerned with reciprocity, free association, voluntary contract, federation and credit and currency reform.
Mutualism has been retrospectively characterised as ideologically situated between individualist and collectivist forms of anarchism. Collectivist anarchism Collectivist anarchism, also known as anarchist collectivism or anarcho-collectivism and referred to as revolutionary socialism or a form of such, is a revolutionary form of anarchism commonly associated with Mikhail Bakunin and Johann Most. At the epicentre of collectivist anarchism lies the belief in the potential of humankind for goodness and solidarity which will flourish when oppressive governments are abolished.
Collectivist anarchists oppose all private ownership of the means of production, instead advocating that ownership be collectivised. This was to be achieved through violent revolution, first starting with a small cohesive group through acts of violence, or propaganda by the deed, to inspire the workers as a whole to revolt and forcibly collectivise the means of production.
However, collectivisation was not to be extended to the distribution of income as workers would be paid according to time worked, rather than receiving goods being distributed according to need as in anarcho-communism. Collectivist anarchism arose contemporaneously with Marxism, but it opposed the Marxist dictatorship of the proletariat despite the stated Marxist goal of a collectivist stateless society.
Anarchist, communist and collectivist ideas are not mutually exclusive—although the collectivist anarchists advocated compensation for labour, some held out the possibility of a post-revolutionary transition to a communist system of distribution according to need. Anarcho-communism developed out of radical socialist currents after the French Revolution, but it was first formulated as such in the Italian section of the First International. The theoretical work of Peter Kropotkin took importance later as it expanded and developed pro-organisationalist and insurrectionary anti-organisationalist sections.
To date, the best known examples of an anarcho-communist society i. Through the efforts and influence of the Spanish anarchists during the Spanish Revolution within the Spanish Civil War starting in , anarcho-communism existed in most of Aragon, parts of the Levante and Andalusia as well as in the stronghold of Catalonia. Anarcho-syndicalism Anarcho-syndicalism, also referred to as revolutionary syndicalism, is a branch of anarchism that focuses on the labour movement.
Anarcho-syndicalists view labour unions as a potential force for revolutionary social change, replacing capitalism and the state with a new society democratically self-managed by workers. Anarcho-syndicalists believe that only direct action—that is, action concentrated on directly attaining a goal as opposed to indirect action such as electing a representative to a government position—will allow workers to liberate themselves.
They should not have bosses or business agents—rather, the workers should be able to make all the decisions that affect them themselves. Rudolf Rocker was one of the most popular voices in the anarcho-syndicalist movement. He outlined a view of the origins of the movement, what it sought and why it was important to the future of labour in his pamphlet Anarcho-Syndicalism. The International Workers Association is an international anarcho-syndicalist federation of various labour unions from different countries.
It was also an important force in the Spanish Civil War. Individualist anarchism Individualist anarchism refers to several traditions of thought within the anarchist movement that emphasise the individual and their will over any kinds of external determinants such as groups, society, traditions and ideological systems.
Individualist anarchism is not a single philosophy, but it instead refers to a group of individualistic philosophies that sometimes are in conflict. In , William Godwin, who has often been cited as the first anarchist, wrote Political Justice, a book which some consider the first expression of anarchism. Godwin advocated individualism, proposing that all cooperation in labour be eliminated on the premise that this would be most conducive with the general good.
Max Stirner here in a sketch by Friedrich Engels is usually considered a prominent early individualist anarchist An influential form of individualist anarchism called egoism, or egoist anarchism, was expounded by one of the earliest and best-known proponents of individualist anarchism, the German Max Stirner. According to Stirner, the only limitation on the rights of individuals is their power to obtain what they desire without regard for God, state, or morality.
Egoist anarchists argue that egoism will foster genuine and spontaneous union between individuals. It was re-discovered and promoted by German philosophical anarchist and homosexual activist John Henry Mackay. Josiah Warren was a pioneer American anarcho-individualist, who drew inspiration from Proudhon. Henry David Thoreau — was an important early influence in individualist anarchist thought in the United States and Europe. Thoreau was an American author, poet, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, philosopher and leading transcendentalist.
He is best known for his books Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, as well as his essay, Civil Disobedience, an argument for individual resistance to civil government in moral opposition to an unjust state. From these early influences, individualist anarchism in different countries attracted a small yet diverse following of Bohemian artists and intellectuals, free love and birth control advocates see anarchism and issues related to love and sex ,individualist naturists and nudists, freethought and anti-clerical activistsas well as young anarchist outlaws in what became known as illegalism and individual reclamation.
Post-classical and contemporary Anarchist principles undergird contemporary radical social movements of the left. Interest in the anarchist movement developed alongside momentum in the anti-globalization movement, whose leading activist networks were anarchist in orientation. As the movement shaped 21st century radicalism, wider embrace of anarchist principles signaled a revival of interest. Anarchism continues to generate many philosophies and movements, at times eclectic, drawing upon various sources and syncretic, combining disparate concepts to create new philosophical approaches.
Anti-capitalism stays prominent within contemporary anarchism, continuing the tradition of classical anarchism. Anarcho-pacifism is a tendency that rejects violence in the struggle for social change see non-violence. Christian anarchism is a movement in political theology that combines anarchism and Christianity.
Anarcho-transhumanism is a recently new branch of anarchism that takes traditional and modern anarchism, typically drawing from anarcho-syndicalism, left-libertarianism, or libertarian socialism, and combines it with transhumanism and post-humanism. Some anarcho-transhumanists might also follow technogaianism. Free-market anarchism, or market anarchism, includes several branches of anarchism that advocate an economic system based on voluntary, market interactions without the involvement of the state.
Certain individualist anarchists and mutualists supported this economic system. Left-wing market anarchism is a modern branch of free-market anarchism which strongly affirm the classical liberal ideas of self-ownership and free markets while maintaining that taken to their logical conclusions these ideas support strongly anti-capitalist, anti-corporatist, anti-hierarchical and pro-labour positions in economics; anti-imperialism in foreign policy; and thoroughly radical views regarding cultural issues such as gender, sexuality and race.
Green anarchism, or eco-anarchism, is a school of thought within anarchism that emphasises environmental issues, with an important precedent in anarcho-naturism and whose main contemporary currents are anarcho-primitivism and social ecology. According to AbdelRahim, civilisation was the result of the human development of technologies and grammar for predatory economics. Language and literacy, she claims, are some of these technologies. Insurrectionary anarchism is a revolutionary theory, practice and tendency within the anarchist movement which emphasises insurrection within anarchist practice.
Critical of formal organisations such as labour unions and federations that are based on a political programme and periodic congresses, insurrectionary anarchists instead advocate informal organisation and small affinity group based organisation as well as putting value in attack, permanent class conflict and a refusal to negotiate or compromise with class enemies. The document was based on the experiences of Russian anarchists in the October Revolution which led eventually to the victory of the Bolsheviks over the anarchists and other groups.
Post-anarchism is a theoretical move towards a synthesis of classical anarchist theory and poststructuralist thought, drawing from diverse ideas including post-left anarchy, postmodernism, autonomism, postcolonialism and the Situationist International. After being expelled from the IWA, anarchists formed the St. Imier International.
Under the influence of Peter Kropotkin, a Russian philosopher and scientist, anarcho-communism overlapped with collectivism. Anarcho-communists, who drew inspiration from the Paris Commune, advocated for free federation and distribution of goods according to one needs. The major argument of anarcho-communism was that Bakunian perspective would lead to antagonism among collectives.
At the turning of the century, anarchism had spread all over the world. In China, small groups of students imported the humanistic pro-science version of anarcho-communism. Tokyo was a hotspot for rebellious youth from countries of the far east, pouring into Japanese capital to study. During that time, a minority of anarchists embarked into utilizing of violence in order to achieve their political ends.
This kind of strategy is called propaganda of the deed. The dismemberment of the French socialist movement into many groups and the execution and exile of many Communards to penal colonies following the suppression of the Paris Commune favoured individualist political expression and acts. Even though many anarchists distanced themselves from these terrorist acts, anarchists were persecuted and given bad fame.
Illegalism, stealing the possessions of the rich because capitalists were not their rightful owners, was another strategy which some anarchists adopted during those same years. Anarchists enthusiastically participated in the Russian Revolution. During the revolution, anarchists had concerns, but they opted to support the revolution instead of the Whites. However, they met harsh suppression after the Bolshevik government was stabilized.
Anarchists in central Russia were either imprisoned, driven underground or joined the victorious Bolsheviks. Anarchists from Petrograd and Moscow instead fled to Ukraine. With the anarchists being crashed in Russia, two new antithetical currents emerged, namely platformism and synthesis anarchism. Platformists sought to create a coherent group that would push for the revolution while the latter were against anything that would resemble a political party.
The victory of the Bolsheviks in the October Revolution and the resulting Russian Civil War did serious damage to anarchist movements internationally. Many workers and activists saw the Bolshevik success as setting an example and communist parties grew at the expense of anarchism and other socialist movements. Spain had a long anarchist tradition and anarchists played an important role in the war. In response to the army rebellion, an anarchist-inspired movement of peasants and workers, supported by armed militias, took control of Barcelona and of large areas of rural Spain where they collectivised the land.
The Soviet Union provided some limited assistance at the beginning of the war, but the result was a bitter fight among communists and anarchists at a series of events named May Days as Joseph Stalin tried to seize control of the Republicans. However, the s witnessed a revival of anarchism. The main causes of such a revival may have been the perceived failure of Marxism—Leninism and the tension build by the Cold War. During this era, anarchism was mostly part of other movements critical to both the state and capitalism such as the anti-nuclear, environmental and pacifist movements, the New Left, or the counterculture of the s.
Anarchism was also associated with the punk rock movement as exemplified by bands such as Crass and the Sex Pistols. Although feminist tendencies have always been a part of the anarchist movement in the form of anarcha-feminism, they returned with vigour during the second wave of feminism in the s.
Around the turn of the 21st century, anarchism grew in popularity and influence as part of the anti-war, anti-capitalist and anti-globalisation movements. Some anarchist factions at these protests engaged in rioting, property destruction and violent confrontations with the police. These actions were precipitated by ad hoc, leaderless, anonymous cadres known as black blocs—other organisational tactics pioneered in this time include security culture, affinity groups and the use of decentralised technologies such as the internet.
A significant event of this period was the confrontations at the WTO conference in Seattle in Anarchist ideas have been influential in the development of the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico, and the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria, more commonly known as Rojava, a de facto autonomous region in northern Syria. Anarchist schools of thought Anarchist schools of thought had been generally grouped in two main historical traditions individualist anarchism and social anarchism which have some different origins, values and evolution.
In a chronological and theoretical sense, there are classical—those created throughout the 19th century—and post-classical anarchist schools—those created since the midth century and after. Beyond the specific factions of anarchist thought is philosophical anarchism which the theoretical stance that the state lacks moral legitimacy without accepting the imperative of revolution to eliminate it.
A component especially of individualist anarchism, philosophical anarchism may accept the existence of a minimal state as unfortunate and usually temporary, necessary evil, but argue that citizens do not have a moral obligation to obey the state when its laws conflict with individual autonomy. In abandoning the hyphenated anarchisms i. The various anarchist schools of thought or currents are not distinct entities, but intermingle with each other. Classical Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was the primary proponent of anarcho-mutualism and influenced many future individualist anarchist and social anarchist thinkers Collectivist and communist anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism are all considered to be forms of social anarchism.
Mutualism and individualism were the other notable anarchist currents through the 19th and early 20th century. Social anarchism rejects private property, seeing it as a source of social inequality while retaining respect for personal property and emphasises cooperation and mutual aid. Mutualism Mutualism began in 18th-century English and French labour movements before taking an anarchist form associated with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in France and others in the United States.
Proudhon distinguished between ideal political possibilities and practical governance. For this reason, much in contrast to some of his theoretical statements concerning ultimate spontaneous self-governance, Proudhon was heavily involved in French parliamentary politics and allied himself with the socialist factions of the workers movement. During his life of public service, he began advocating state-protected charters for worker-owned cooperatives and promoting certain nationalisation schemes.
Mutualist anarchism is concerned with reciprocity, free association, voluntary contract, federation and credit and currency reform. Mutualism has been retrospectively characterised as ideologically situated between individualist and collectivist forms of anarchism.
Collectivist anarchism Collectivist anarchism, also known as anarchist collectivism or anarcho-collectivism and referred to as revolutionary socialism or a form of such, is a revolutionary form of anarchism commonly associated with Mikhail Bakunin and Johann Most.
At the epicentre of collectivist anarchism lies the belief in the potential of humankind for goodness and solidarity which will flourish when oppressive governments are abolished. Collectivist anarchists oppose all private ownership of the means of production, instead advocating that ownership be collectivised. This was to be achieved through violent revolution, first starting with a small cohesive group through acts of violence, or propaganda by the deed, to inspire the workers as a whole to revolt and forcibly collectivise the means of production.
However, collectivisation was not to be extended to the distribution of income as workers would be paid according to time worked, rather than receiving goods being distributed according to need as in anarcho-communism. Collectivist anarchism arose contemporaneously with Marxism, but it opposed the Marxist dictatorship of the proletariat despite the stated Marxist goal of a collectivist stateless society.
Anarchist, communist and collectivist ideas are not mutually exclusive—although the collectivist anarchists advocated compensation for labour, some held out the possibility of a post-revolutionary transition to a communist system of distribution according to need. Anarcho-communism developed out of radical socialist currents after the French Revolution, but it was first formulated as such in the Italian section of the First International.
The theoretical work of Peter Kropotkin took importance later as it expanded and developed pro-organisationalist and insurrectionary anti-organisationalist sections. To date, the best known examples of an anarcho-communist society i. Through the efforts and influence of the Spanish anarchists during the Spanish Revolution within the Spanish Civil War starting in , anarcho-communism existed in most of Aragon, parts of the Levante and Andalusia as well as in the stronghold of Catalonia.
Anarcho-syndicalism Anarcho-syndicalism, also referred to as revolutionary syndicalism, is a branch of anarchism that focuses on the labour movement. Anarcho-syndicalists view labour unions as a potential force for revolutionary social change, replacing capitalism and the state with a new society democratically self-managed by workers.
Anarcho-syndicalists believe that only direct action—that is, action concentrated on directly attaining a goal as opposed to indirect action such as electing a representative to a government position—will allow workers to liberate themselves. They should not have bosses or business agents—rather, the workers should be able to make all the decisions that affect them themselves. Rudolf Rocker was one of the most popular voices in the anarcho-syndicalist movement.
He outlined a view of the origins of the movement, what it sought and why it was important to the future of labour in his pamphlet Anarcho-Syndicalism. The International Workers Association is an international anarcho-syndicalist federation of various labour unions from different countries. It was also an important force in the Spanish Civil War.
Individualist anarchism Individualist anarchism refers to several traditions of thought within the anarchist movement that emphasise the individual and their will over any kinds of external determinants such as groups, society, traditions and ideological systems. Individualist anarchism is not a single philosophy, but it instead refers to a group of individualistic philosophies that sometimes are in conflict.
In , William Godwin, who has often been cited as the first anarchist, wrote Political Justice, a book which some consider the first expression of anarchism. Godwin advocated individualism, proposing that all cooperation in labour be eliminated on the premise that this would be most conducive with the general good.
Max Stirner here in a sketch by Friedrich Engels is usually considered a prominent early individualist anarchist An influential form of individualist anarchism called egoism, or egoist anarchism, was expounded by one of the earliest and best-known proponents of individualist anarchism, the German Max Stirner.
According to Stirner, the only limitation on the rights of individuals is their power to obtain what they desire without regard for God, state, or morality. Egoist anarchists argue that egoism will foster genuine and spontaneous union between individuals. It was re-discovered and promoted by German philosophical anarchist and homosexual activist John Henry Mackay. Josiah Warren was a pioneer American anarcho-individualist, who drew inspiration from Proudhon. Henry David Thoreau — was an important early influence in individualist anarchist thought in the United States and Europe.
Thoreau was an American author, poet, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, philosopher and leading transcendentalist. He is best known for his books Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, as well as his essay, Civil Disobedience, an argument for individual resistance to civil government in moral opposition to an unjust state. From these early influences, individualist anarchism in different countries attracted a small yet diverse following of Bohemian artists and intellectuals, free love and birth control advocates see anarchism and issues related to love and sex ,individualist naturists and nudists, freethought and anti-clerical activistsas well as young anarchist outlaws in what became known as illegalism and individual reclamation.
Post-classical and contemporary Anarchist principles undergird contemporary radical social movements of the left. Interest in the anarchist movement developed alongside momentum in the anti-globalization movement, whose leading activist networks were anarchist in orientation. As the movement shaped 21st century radicalism, wider embrace of anarchist principles signaled a revival of interest. Anarchism continues to generate many philosophies and movements, at times eclectic, drawing upon various sources and syncretic, combining disparate concepts to create new philosophical approaches.
Anti-capitalism stays prominent within contemporary anarchism, continuing the tradition of classical anarchism. Anarcho-pacifism is a tendency that rejects violence in the struggle for social change see non-violence. Christian anarchism is a movement in political theology that combines anarchism and Christianity. Anarcho-transhumanism is a recently new branch of anarchism that takes traditional and modern anarchism, typically drawing from anarcho-syndicalism, left-libertarianism, or libertarian socialism, and combines it with transhumanism and post-humanism.
Some anarcho-transhumanists might also follow technogaianism. Free-market anarchism, or market anarchism, includes several branches of anarchism that advocate an economic system based on voluntary, market interactions without the involvement of the state. Certain individualist anarchists and mutualists supported this economic system. Left-wing market anarchism is a modern branch of free-market anarchism which strongly affirm the classical liberal ideas of self-ownership and free markets while maintaining that taken to their logical conclusions these ideas support strongly anti-capitalist, anti-corporatist, anti-hierarchical and pro-labour positions in economics; anti-imperialism in foreign policy; and thoroughly radical views regarding cultural issues such as gender, sexuality and race.
Green anarchism, or eco-anarchism, is a school of thought within anarchism that emphasises environmental issues, with an important precedent in anarcho-naturism and whose main contemporary currents are anarcho-primitivism and social ecology. According to AbdelRahim, civilisation was the result of the human development of technologies and grammar for predatory economics.
Language and literacy, she claims, are some of these technologies. Insurrectionary anarchism is a revolutionary theory, practice and tendency within the anarchist movement which emphasises insurrection within anarchist practice.
Critical of formal organisations such as labour unions and federations that are based on a political programme and periodic congresses, insurrectionary anarchists instead advocate informal organisation and small affinity group based organisation as well as putting value in attack, permanent class conflict and a refusal to negotiate or compromise with class enemies. The document was based on the experiences of Russian anarchists in the October Revolution which led eventually to the victory of the Bolsheviks over the anarchists and other groups.
Post-anarchism is a theoretical move towards a synthesis of classical anarchist theory and poststructuralist thought, drawing from diverse ideas including post-left anarchy, postmodernism, autonomism, postcolonialism and the Situationist International. Some post-leftists seek to escape the confines of ideology in general also presenting a critique of organisations and morality.
Influenced by the work of Max Stirner and by the Marxist Situationist International, post-left anarchy is marked by a focus on social insurrection and a rejection of leftist social organisation. Queer anarchism is a theory that suggests anarchism as a solution to the issues faced by the LGBT community, mainly heteronormativity, homophobia, transphobia and biphobia. Religious anarchism refers to a set of related anarchist ideologies that are inspired by the teachings of religions.
While many anarchists have traditionally been sceptical of and opposed to organized religion, many different religions have served as inspiration for religious forms of anarchism, most notably Christianity as Christian anarchists believe that biblical teachings give credence to anarchist philosophy. Other examples include Buddhist anarchism, Jewish anarchism and most recently Neopaganism.
Synthesis anarchism is a form of anarchism that tries to join anarchists of different tendencies under the principles of anarchism without adjectives. It is the main principle behind the anarchist federations grouped around the contemporary global International of Anarchist Federations.
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