Anarchism for a Post-modern Age

“The thin and precarious crust of decency is all that separates any civilization, however impressive, from the hell of anarchy or systematic tyranny which lie in wait beneath the surface.”

Aldous Leonard Huxley (1894-1963), British author

I. Summary of Theories

Politics, in most of its forms, has neglected. The notion that we’re able to safely and successfully deliver also the setting of priorities and the management of our daily lives into elite or some political class is thoroughly discredited. Politicians cannot be trusted, no matter the system where they operate. No group of balances, checks, and constraints, is proved to work and reevaluate their unconscionable actions and the pernicious effects that these have on longevity and our wellbeing.

Ideologies – by the benign to the malign and from the divine into the pedestrian – have driven the gullible race into the verge of annihilation and rear. Democracies have degenerated to plutocracies. Socialism and its poisoned fruits – Marxism-Leninism – have wrought on a scale. Only Nazism and Fascism compare with them unfavorably. The concept of this nation-state culminated in the Yugoslav succession wars.

It’s time to look at a decried and much-derided alternative: anarchism.

Anarchism is frequently mistaken for left handed thinking or the advocacy of anarchy. It is. If anything, the libertarian strain in anarchism makes it nearer to the right. Anarchism is the umbrella term covering both social and political theories – among them classic or cooperative anarchism (postulated by William Godwin and, afterwards, Pierre Joseph Proudhon), radical individualism (Max Stirner), spiritual anarchism (Leo Tolstoy), anarcho-communism (Kropotkin) and anarcho-syndicalism, instructional anarchism (Paul Goodman), along with communitarian anarchism (Daniel Guerin).

The narrow (and familiar) type of political anarchism springs from the belief that human communities can survive and thrive through voluntary cooperation, with no coercive central authorities. Politics corrupt and subvert Man character. Authorities are instruments of self-enrichment along with self-aggrandizement, along with embodiment and the reification of said subversion.

As Michael Bakunin proposed the outcome is to seek out the overthrow of systems that are political. Governments must be compared with all and any means, including violent action. What should replace your condition? There is very little agreement among anarchists: biblical authority (Tolstoy), self-regulating co-opertaives of employees (Proudhon), a federation of voluntary associations (Bakunin), trade unions (anarcho-syndicalists), ideal communism (Kropotkin).

What is common to this smorgasbord is the affirmation of liberty as the value. Equality justice, and welfare cannot be sustained without it. Its mechanisms and the state is incompatible with it. Apply the instruments of government enforce and to further their particular interests and Statistics of authority and the classes will definitely misuse their remit. The state is imagined and laws are enacted with this intention of unfair and gross exploitation. Violence is perpetrated by the condition and is the cause rather than the treatment of social ills.

Anarchists think that human beings are totally capable of rational self-government. In the Utopia of anarchism, individuals decide to belong to society (or to exclude themselves from it). Rules are adopted by agreement of all the members/citizens through direct participation . Comparable to participatory democracy, components can recall holders of workplaces.

It’s important to highlight that:

“… (A)narchism does not preclude social association, social order or rules, the proper delegation of authority, or even of certain types of government, as long as it is distinguished by the state and as long as it is administrative and not oppressive, coercive, or bureaucratic.”

(Honderich, Ted, ed. – The Oxford Companion to Philosophy – Oxford University Press, New York, 1995 – p. 31)

Anarchists aren’t opposed to law, business and order, or the presence of authority. They’re contrary to the usurpation of power from individuals or by courses (classes ) of individuals for personal gain during the subjugation and exploitation (however subtle and concealed ) of other, less fortunate men and women. Every arrangement and establishment should be put to liberty and personal liberty and law’s double acid tests. It should be abolished if it fails both of the two.

II. Contradictions in Anarchism

Anarchism is not prescriptive. Anarchists think that each society’s voluntary members must decide the specifics of functioning and the order of the own community. Anarchism provides no coherent recipe about how to build the ideal community. This, naturally, is the Achilles’ heels.

Consider crime. Anarchists of all stripes agree that most all individuals have the right to practice self reliant by coordinating to suppress malfeasance and remove criminals. Yet, is that not the quiddity of this oppressive state, its laws and regulations, police, prisons, along with military? Are the origins of this coercive state and its rationale not rooted in the need?

Some anarchists believe in changing society through violence. Are these criminals or freedom fighters? If they are opposed by voluntary grassroots (vigilante) associations in the very best of anarchist convention – should they fight back and thus frustrate the actual will of the people whose welfare they promise to be looking for?

Anarchism is a chicken and egg proposition. It’s predicated on people’s well-developed awareness of responsibility and grounded in their”natural morality”. Yet, all anarchists admit that these endowments are decimated by millennia of repression. Life in anarchism is, thus, directed at restoring the preconditions to life in anarchism. Anarchism seeks to revive its components’ constitution without which there could not be a anarchism in the first location. This self-defeating bootstrapping leads to convoluted and half-baked transitory phases between the nation-state and pure anarchism (thus anarcho-syndicalism and some forms of proto-Communism).

Primitivist and green anarchists reject engineering, globalization, and capitalism in addition to the state. Yet, technology, globalization, (and capitalism) are in opposition to this classical, hermetic nation-state as can be philosophical anarchism. They are more voluntary and less more . This costume defiance of modern introduces insoluble contradictions to the concept and practice of late twentieth century anarchism.

Indeed, the term anarchism has been trivialized and debauched. Performers all, environmentalists, feminists, peasant revolutionaries, and animal rights activists promise to be anarchists with falsity that is equivalent and certainty.

III. Reclaiming Anarchism

Errico Malatesta and Voltairine de Cleyre distilled the essence of anarchism to encircle all of the representations that oppose the country and abhor capitalism (“anarchism without adjectives”). In a deeper level, anarchism wants to recognize and classify asymmetries. Guys, the nation, along with the rich – are, respectively, more powerful than women, the individuals, and the poor. These are three inequalities from many. It’s anarchism’s undertaking .

This can be done in either of two ways:

1. By replacing them by self-regulating associations of individuals that are free and violently dismantling existing structures and institutions. The Zapatistas movement in Mexico is an effort to do just that.

2. Or, by creating voluntary, self-regulating associations of free individuals whose purposes parallel those of established hierarchies and institutions (“double power”). Gradually, the latter will be replaced by the prior. This route is followed by the development of certain associations.

Whichever approach is adopted, it is vital to identify those asymmetries that encircle others (“main asymmetries” vs.”secondary asymmetries”). Most anarchists point in the ownership of land and in the state as the asymmetries. The condition is an transfer of electricity from the individual to a coercive and unfair hyperstructure. Property represents the disproportionate accumulation of riches by individuals. Crime is merely the natural reaction to those glaring injustices.

However, property and the state have been secondary asymmetries, not main ones. There have been civilizations devoid of either or both periods in history and there are. The primary asymmetry appears to be natural: a few individuals are born more intelligent and stronger than many others. The sport is skewed in their favor not because of a sinister conspiracy but because they value it (meritocracy is the base stone of capitalism), or because they could induce themselves, their wishes, along with their priorities and preferences on other people, or because their adherents and followers think that rewarding their leaders may optimize their own welfare (aggression and self-interest are the cornerstone of social organizations).

It’s this main asymmetry which anarchism should address.