Anarchism to Democratic Confederalism, Part II
“Every anarchist is a socialist, but not every socialist is an anarchist”
Adolph Fischer
“Anarchism is really a synonym for socialism. The anarchist is primarily a socialist whose aim is to abolish the exploitation of man by man.”
Daniel Guerin
A couple of years ago, a friend posted a survey among a group of mostly lefty people asking them to check the multiple political/economic descriptors that applied to them: Anarchist? Communist? Liberal? Democrat? Republican? Libertarian? I pointed out that the “socialist” category was missing, and when this omission was corrected, was surprised that none of the self-identified “anarchists” also checked the “socialist” box.
Members of our club, probably a majority, self-identify as anarchist. Various individuals in our local community also identify as anarchist (and unfortunately, we frequently encounter, as do you, many who use the term “anarchist” synonymously with chaos or mayhem—as in recently when press and pundits referred to the right-wing insurrection at the U.S. capitol as “anarchism.” Oh, if only!).
Well then, what is anarchism?
Sometimes it seems easier to start with what anarchism is NOT. First, as already stated, anarchism is not chaos. There’s also a tendency to dismiss anarchism as “Utopian” and somehow unattainable; and yes, while the goal of universal freedom can be hard to attain, there have been and there are, right now, successful communities operating under anarchist principles.
Along with this, there is a line of thought that under anarchism there is “no government,” but this is not necessarily true; there can be and there is governance consistent with concepts of anarchism, it’s just that governing is non-hierarchical and decentralized, association is voluntary, and leaders are temporary.
This brings us to another big misunderstanding about anarchism, which is what the scholar Murray Bookchin went into detail to call “lifestyle anarchism”: a preoccupation with ideas about individual autonomy rather than social freedom, perhaps dressed in trappings of graffiti and spray paint, and backed with vague notions about nihilism–“spicy liberals” is the description for it that I like. There is nothing wrong with either graffiti as a tactic or nihilism as a belief; Bookchin just felt that within this mindset there was a conspicuous neglect of the collective nature of anarchism, and a convenient acceptance of the narcissism that happens to be consistent with late-capitalist values. One need only visit the publications shelf of the local natural food store to see a raft of quasi-edgy magazines catering to this individualist mindset.
But there are differences between the anarchist thinkers of today and those of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Historian Barbara Epstein has written that, while the modern anarchism arising from the 1999 WTO meetings embodies the same egalitarian and anti-authoritarian perspective of previous times, today’s version is less concerned than 19th century anarchists about the role of the state. She talks about today’s movement tactically allowing for a “flexibility of perspectives”:
“The movement is organized along lines understood as anarchist by movement activists, made up largely of small groups that join forces on an ad hoc basis, for particular actions and other projects. Movement activists call this form of organization anarchist.”
This provides tactical advantages, in particular for the street and for specific actions. The downside to today’s tactically-advantageous “anarchism?” What do we do after we’ve gained success, like, say, after gaining an autonomous zone in Seattle? What governance do we go for? Has anyone thought ahead about this?
This is when a return to the 19th and early-20th century founders of the anarchist movement, and their embrace of socialism, might be valuable. From 1840 to the 1860s, while Marx and Engels were forming ideas about a socialism imposed by a revolutionary vanguard from above, anarchists like Bakunin, Kropotkin, and Proudhon were coalescing ideas about a socialism from below–one based on worker co-ops, voluntary association, and mutual aid. At meetings of what was first named the International Workingmen’s Association–better known as The International–early trade unions, socialists, communists, and anarchists tried to build unity while Marx and Bakunin–the key representatives of their respective communist and anarchist sides–hacked out the differences between their respective camps (with no small amount of acrimony and interpersonal conflict).
One thing that Marx and Bakunin could agree upon was the importance of material analyses. Where a liberal might say that societal problems like racism or sexism are things out in the world that are independent of economics, a materialist view would be that racism and sexism are inevitable outgrowths of material conditions; Bakunin thus agreed with Marx’s historical materialism: that religious, political, and cultural concerns are caused by economic manifestations, rather than the other way around.
These material conditions could include material relations that are authoritarian, such as domination and submission (slavery, feudalism, capitalism), or, relations that are cooperative (socialism, anarchism, communism). The historical materialist view essentially captures the difference between today’s liberals, who employ single-issue mindsets around things like racism and sexism without addressing them systematically, and leftists, who keep an awareness of the underpinnings of capitalism in addressing the same problems. Another example might be the difference between seeing Trumpism as an anomaly, or seeing it as a natural consequence of capitalism. Essentially, in today’s USA, it is the difference between reformist and revolutionary mindsets; from philosopher and activist Vanessa Willis:
“While the tendency to reduce societal effects to economics is sometimes dismissed as ‘class reductionism’, to make a world without sexism and racism would require a massive redirection and mobilization of resources–interventions that are not compatible with capitalist motivations for seeking profit; this is not to say that sexism and racism don’t also have to be dealt with in revolutionary movements.”
Early anarchists and Marxists disagreed about the role of the state and electoral politics in moving the revolutionary process forward. Where both Marx and Bakunin wanted the end product to be True Communism–a place where workers, rather than capitalists, owned the means of production (the land, the tools, the factories, the distribution systems), the profound disagreement in their two camps was on the way of getting from here to there. Marx wanted the transformation of private property into collective property to be accomplished by the “power of the state” and predicted an eventual “withering away of the state” in the process, whereas anarchists like Bakunin denounced, on first principles, use of the state, favoring direct action instead. From Barbara Epstein:
“Anarchists… criticized Marxists for tending in practice to treat the state as an instrument that could simply be taken over and used for other ends. Anarchists saw the state not as a tool, but as an instrument of oppression, no matter in whose hands. The Stalinist experience lent credence to that critique.” (A famous quote from Bakunin: “When the people are being beaten by a stick, they are not much happier if it is called the People’s stick.”)
It’s not just a utopian dream; anarchist-like forms of governance and economic socialism have had varying degrees of success in places ranging from early-20th century Makhnovia (Ukraine), 1930’s Catalonia (Spain), 1930’s Shinmin (Manchuria), to today’s Oxaca, Chiapas, and Rojava. Anarchist-informed production has gained credibility in everything from Bernie Sander’s talk of worker’s co-ops to Worker-Self-Directed Enterprises (WSDE’s), with examples like the Mondragon Corporation, a federation of worker cooperatives in Basque Spain. These are means of production that are owned by the workers–in other words, socialism emanating from the bottom up.
So… once again; repeat after me: anarchism is a socialism. In the next installment we expand on anarchist socialism and how it can be applied to existing and future institutions and governing concepts, and perhaps paradoxically, why these applications probably shouldn’t use the word “anarchism” in their descriptions. In the last essay of the series we will explore how these concepts could be realized specifically in the city of Columbia, Missouri, and what they might look like. Finally, in the same way that the Star Wars movie franchise started partway through and circled back to Chapter I, we might circle back to complete a Part I to see how, and in what context, concepts of anarchism arose in the first place.
Or not. Anarchists are flexible that way.
References
‘Anarchy in the USA’: Global media reacts to Capitol chaos by Holly Ellyat, CNBC
Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm by Murray Bookchin
Bakunin: The Creative Passion. Leier, Mark, 2006. Seven Stories Press, New York, 374 pp.
Anarchism: From Theory to Practice. Guerin, Daniel, 1970. Monthly Review Press, 166 pp.
Dialectical and Historical Materialism by J. V. Stalin September, 1938
What Could It Mean to Say, “Capitalism Causes Sexism and Racism?” by Vanessa Wills, Philosophical Topics
Anarchism and the Anti-Globalization Movement by Barbara Epstein, Monthly Review