I have been reading the works of two differing anarchists, the American Lucy Parsons and the Italian Errico Malatesta. Both are regarded by modern students of anarchism as genuine anarchist voices from the past. But when I read them I have problems and they are problems I have with those who conceive of anarchism generally as a matter of human, political action generally. These problems are not concerned with their words condemning the actions of government and the human lack of need for such an entity. Both equally well expose government as the exploiter of the many for the benefit of the privileged few, and for the capitalist class in general, equally well. Both show how government and corruption by capital interests are unavoidable bedfellows just the same. On this, we have no disagreement.
Lucy Parsons and Errico Malatesta
It is, however, when we come to what replaces this in their various rhetorics that the differences emerge. Parsons, for example, talks about our need to be “civilised” as if “civilisation”, and the values of such a thing, were our friend. Malatesta, on the other hand, whilst keen to remove the yoke of government, is equally keen to replace it with another yoke called “solidarity” or, in other places, “voluntary solidarity” although, in that latter formulation, it is not clear that this is voluntary since, throughout his 1891 pamphlet “Anarchy”, he seems to argue for its necessity in replacing government in society rather than our ability to forego it. Indeed, Malatesta in that same document suggests that the “freedom” he and anarchists like him want is “not an absolute metaphysical, abstract freedom”, something which he imagines can be perverted into oppression, but the freedom “which is the conscious community of interests”. Malatesta imagines that if we had this then we would have the freedom which is each member of society chipping in and doing their bit quite willingly and cooperatively.
Yet my mind goes back to one of my imagined forebears in spiritual and philosophical anarchism - Diogenes the Cynic. Judged by the civilised and - let us speak plainly - socialist standards of Lucy Parsons and Errico Malatesta was Diogenes, who defaced coinage, took advantage of whatever natural food and shelter he could find and lived a mostly solitary life [albeit he mingled with others] an anarchist? By their standards, no. But this then becomes exactly the point at issue and that point is the values involved. There is a certain type of anarchist - Malatesta and Parsons may well be two examples of such - for whom anarchism is basically socialism and for such people these two are not so much constant bedfellows as they are regarded as the same thing. I am not one of these people and, for me, anarchism neither implies nor requires socialism - nor is socialism necessarily anarchism at all. There are obvious 20th century examples of why this is so. Russia and the Soviet Union, for example, might have been socialist but this was not anarchism. And, to be honest, I find it just as hard to imagine how state socialism, which is what any socialism founded on the basis of national borders would be, is any kind of anarchism at all.
Yet this is not the root of the problem. For the root of the problem we need to go beyond the reordering of the deckchairs on the Titanic of society that those such as Parsons and Malatesta undertake. Such people survey society and see oppression, poverty, squalor, the domination, economic and political, of some by others, and they condemn it as unjust, unnecessary and unconscionable. I am with such people entirely when they do that and largely for the reasons that they give. A modern, capitalist state is an engine of exploitation that aims to profit a few at the expense of the many and no genuine anarchist could stomach its continuance for any longer than it takes to replace it. However, for all its many irredeemable faults, such a political organisation of society has obviously had certain consequences. It has created a certain kind of civilisation, the kind we see around us today. Indeed, such states have been precisely the process of ever deeper and more thoroughgoing “civilisationing” of human society. This has created not just certain material conditions as the contexts for increasing numbers of lives but a whole raft of expectations - civilised expectations - which certain self-proclaimed anarchists have then seemed to take up and take over as if these were to be incorporated in something properly called anarchism. Diogenes had expressed anarchism as a rejection of civilisation at the level of a 4th century BCE Greek city state. In recent centuries, we’ve had anarchists who wanted to anarchise 19th, 20th and 21st century civilisation rather than to replace or ignore it.
In order not to be misunderstood at this point I should like to make it plain that, contrary to notable anarchists of past and present, people like Parsons and Malatesta, I want to question if the anarchist progress we seek is simply a matter of the political reorganisation of society for the purpose of retaining the imagined benefits of civilisation but by means more politically palatable and justifiable. Should government be kicked out and “solidarity” [which is really Malatesta’s word for socialism] be put in its place, are we any better off? Are we more free? Is this anarchy? What, to question Lucy Parsons, has being “civilised” got to do with any of this when someone like Diogenes [and perhaps also the proto-Daoists] would have told us that being civilised was exactly the problem? Is there a place here for the naive idealisms of those who would tell us that, were human beings set free from the yoke of government, a sentimental feeling would descend upon them and then all human beings together would suddenly work as one for the good of all, old enmities forgotten and old values set aside? It is true to say that both Parsons and Malatesta point out that a good deal of education might need to take place before such things could be achieved - and surely both do realise that people are educated primarily by that which they become used to - but a fundamental question remains in place for both of them and all those like them who see anarchism as the work of political reorganisation of society: does your kind of freedom give me, and any others, the freedom to ignore the context you wish to impose upon things and to mind our own business? Those who care about political organisation will, it seems to me, insist on their preferred options for they are saying its something we must determine, create and keep in place. Such things are a form of civilisation.
So, as I read Parsons and Malatesta, I am not always so sure that their version of freedom leaves us what I would call anarchistically free. They both seem to want a de facto political organisation to be the case in the world. They both configure the world socially and want to determine the context for social interaction taking place to provide for the needs of human beings. In short, they both, and certainly not only they in the history of political anarchism, imagine civilisation continuing, if in ways more politically suitable to their tastes. They are, I think, thinking of people as classes and imagining the world based on what they regard as the right relationships between these classes. They have become obsessed with a certain kind of political theorising, one that focuses on a socialist/capitalist binary opposition. This is their first, and a fatal, mistake, one the Daoists of old did not imagine when they imagined the Daoist idyll, as they sometimes did. Their thinking has been shaped by the world of their experience and its values in a way they might not have realised so that what civilisation wants they want too - but just by better means, as they see it.
Yet people are not classes. People are individuals. People may think for themselves, act for themselves and decide their own needs and priorities in life for themselves. Indeed, most of us would imagine some kind of coercion to be taking place where such things were inhibited. Civilisation has told people that certain standards and certain things are things that they should expect to have and be induced to want and, in some but not all cases, anarchists, perhaps persuaded by the need to have a convincing rhetoric for civilised people, seem to want them too. But I can’t go along with them. Civilisation, its values and its tendencies, are the problem and not the solution. An anarchised civilisation is a contradiction in terms. Its anarchy or civilisation, as the first anarchists suggested, and not anarchy and civilisation. You can’t have anarchy and an organised economy for anarchy says things will organise themselves without it being any kind of organisation at all. So you might have to choose between anarchy and Netflix rather than imagining you can have both. You might have to do without mobile communications devices if you want social justice and equality. You might have to source your own food and maintain your own shelter and do without wasting your time watching You Tube videos if you want an end to government.
I am, of course, suggesting that anarchism, anarchistically configured, does not concern itself with the world. That, in fact, is exactly what the anarchy of nature is [and so often the anarchy of those taking their cues from nature as the first anarchists did]. It is not concerned with how things turn out for everyone or the prosecution of an ideologically acceptable plan for the world. It has no plan: it just takes place for it is not civilised. It is at odds with that kind of anarchism which is a political motivation for the pursuance of social and organisational goals. Anarchy has no goals and anarchism is merely the practice of life where one is free - and not least free from civilisation and its centralising tendencies. In this, I have no doubt that human solidarity would be a good thing in many cases and I don’t think that, in every case, “civilised” values are uniformly bad. Yet neither do I think that these are things that should be mandated or should be goals. There shouldn’t be any goals: this is anarchy! If any given person is not free to not want what you want, to not act as someone else prescribes, than I see no anarchy here. I see the coerced compromises of civilisation [even a socialist civilisation!] which become the hegemonies of a privileged few or the forced customs of collectives - and I see both as equally undesirable. So anarchism for me is the dissolution of borders and the annihilation of countries and the concept of nationality. It is a revaluing of all values, as Nietzsche described it, because anarchism is, first and foremost, a matter of values and not of politics and political organisation. It is about each person at the personal level and not about how people are organised when thought of as groups or classes of person. Anarchy, first of all, is the situation we as living human beings are in, a state and condition of our existence, and not something we may or may not create. Anarchism that rushes straight to how society is politically ordered is more concerned with ideological organisation than anarchy’s disorder as order. It is anarchism that has forgotten that no leaders means no leadership except that which each being has as a part of its own constitution.
But now you’re scared because my anarchism seems a lot more anarchic than yours. Its dangerous and not safe. Its anarchy that you don’t control! [What else would anarchy be?!] You might actually have to take responsibility for the whole of your life under my description of such an anarchism. The safety net is hard to see here. But did Diogenes talk about a safety net? Did Zhuangzi imagine us worrying about medical care for society? Civilisation does that, promising you long life and peace so long as you participate in its game. Do you believe this lie it cannot demonstrate in practice? Anarchy and anarchism, on the other hand, now becomes the spiritual and philosophical thing I have been claiming all along it is exactly because of this: it is a matter of differing values. Its a matter of asking what your life is and how it comes to be and you can’t go any further with anarchy and anarchism until you have answered this question. Many, of course, well known anarchists included, never ask this question and assume that civilisation, and the values it promotes and supposes, is what life is all about: what it provides, an imagined anarchist society should also provide. Therefore, such people never question if civilisation has got life right or not and neither do they ask how civilising activities have shaped and affected the people it has maintained and supported. Yet its exactly that that the spiritual and philosophical anarchists do put in question. Is life about its length, as a civilised person might maintain, or its quality regardless of length, as a spiritual and philosophical anarchist might maintain, for example? Is it about “social wealth”, as the civilised Malatesta suggests, or individual freedom in a world that is a natural anarchy, as a spiritual and philosophical anarchist might suggest?
Be of no doubt that where you land in answering these questions will determine what values you have. For me, anarchism must be more thoroughgoing than wanting to supply the same kind of life to people, albeit one with more equal distribution of resources in a world more free of coercion, on better political terms. As I have already described it, this type of anarchism seems little more than reorganising deckchairs on the Titanic so that everybody gets a bit more of the sun on the way down. This, it seems to me, whilst not a bad outcome, is an inadequate one and one in which anarchism is reduced to a political theory and so restricted from being genuine anarchism. As my metaphor suggests, its an epic missing of the point. Such a genuine anarchism would be an anarchism of values and goals, a real freedom rather than a freedom to be told to live in another way that isn’t like the old way you were told to live in before. Enforced socialism is no more anarchism than statism, government or capitalism is. Genuine anarchism is self-knowledge, self-education and self-determination, albeit in a world where you are not the only thing that exists.
You might reply that socialist civilisation is better than capitalist civilisation though and I wouldn’t really disagree. But I’m an anarchist and not a socialist and anarchism is not socialism! I believe in freedom pushed to its farthest possibilities and that means freedom from societal values, from civilising, as much as it means freedom to share values with others. It means freedom from the centralising tendencies of the socialist human being as much as the capitalist one and we may note here that both might equally want “civilisation”, regardless of their other profound differences, for civilisation services both equally well. It means noting that civilisation itself is far from a benign outcome of human existence and activity, one that has, in myriad ways, produced multiple forms of harm. Even as I write this there is a global panic about Covid-19, a corona virus, the spread of which has been magnified and enabled many times over by the existence of civilisation even whilst that same civilisation argues over how, or even whether, to stop its spread. This has all been made incredibly more complicated by civilised people’s need to carry on with their civilised lives, the form of life many of them are now entrapped within in their metropolitan existence. Numerous civilised people have hoarded supplies leaving the most vulnerable with little or nothing. “Yay!” for civilised values and the world it has created by creating networks people could take advantage of in order to hoard. Such forced centralisation, a by-product of the civilisation project, has endangered us all. It is not clear that socialism would have saved us either although in more socially-minded countries they seem to have got it under control better than those not so socially-minded.
This is but one current example and I encourage everyone to think about civilisation and the pitfalls of its existence and the problems it creates. They are things at least some anarchist forebears thought were destructive of a proper humanity. I also encourage people to compare it to the anarchism of actionless action that I have spoken to in my series of books on the subject of anarchy. My argument here, as part of that wider argument, has been that anarchism is not socialism even though anarchists may choose to act socially or even out of social concern. It has also been that anarchy and civilisation are two very different and, in my view, incompatible things. If you look at the characteristics of anarchy as I have discussed it in four books it is not something deliberately organised with set aims and purposes or desired outcomes. Anarchy, and so any anarchism that models its manner of operation, has no desired outcomes but only the outcomes that can, at any given time and place, happen.
Accepting this would, no doubt, require a change of mind in a great many who now consider themselves anarchists yet who would also not like to lose the relatively comfortable, civilised lifestyles that they have been in receipt of thanks to civilisation - if they can help it at all. Unfortunately, though, they must choose. This is because anarchism, whilst being about the exploited workers on poverty wages and the corporate conglomerates who wants to poison your land so that its executives can become billionaires, is also about whether having a mobile phone is compatible with social justice or if owning luxury possessions is compatible with the world taking place as it can without desire or intention. I think its not and so I see civilisation and anarchy as antagonistic as Diogenes did and as the first Daoists did, those who placed simplicity far above civilisation - thought of as values. They were those who thought the antidote to civilisation's ills was simplicity. So I see civilisation as the problem rather than, as sadly all too many do, as the standard. And so I see authentic anarchist living, the practice of an anarchist life, as not something that civilisation gets to define or standardise. “Peace comes from within. Do not seek it without,” The Buddha is reported to have said. Doing so, it seems to me, he suggested that organising the world, even in ways we might imagine better, is not our concern. And besides, it will organise itself anyway along much more properly uncivilised, anarchist lines. All by itself. That is what I think Cynics and Daoists alike once understood very well.
And its the only way it can.
This is an extract from the fourth and final book in my series on spiritual and philosophical anarchism called There is Nothing to Stick to. It will be titled The Spiritual Anarchist's Philosophical Handbook. The three volumes published so far can be read here.
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