From: The Anarchism of the Occupy Movement
The Anarchism of the Occupy Movement
Anarchism and an Anarchical Praxis
In the popular imagination, anarchism is typically associated with chaos. Various self-appointed anarchists have affirmed such associations (see Bey 2003). At times, anarchists have advocated violence in the form of propaganda of the deed (Fleming 1988, 156–69) or bloody revolution (Bakunin 1972) as instrumental in achieving liberation. Nonetheless, affirmation of violence for its own sake constitutes a minority position in the anarchist tradition.
Anarchism is a sophisticated ideology premised on opposition to externally imposed hierarchy. Central to anarchism is the primacy of the individual, who is seen to possess intrinsic moral worth, forming the existential core of anarchism as the teleological pursuit of individual freedom. This view is expressed most clearly by Mikhail Bakunin ([1871] 2008, 76), a Russian anarchist who considered himself a ‘fanatical lover of liberty’, claiming it to be the ‘unique condition under which intelligence, dignity and human happiness can develop and grow’. This conception of liberty, however, differs from the conception central to bourgeois liberalism, that is, a ‘formal liberty which is dispensed, measured out and regulated by the State … a perennial lie that represents nothing, but the privilege of a few, based upon the servitude of the remainder’ (Bakunin [1871] 2008, 76). According to anarchist thought, all forms of coercive imposition from without violate individual liberty. As Chomsky (1970, xi) identified, the central notions of anarchism grew out of the Enlightenment. Their roots are found in Rousseau’s ([1755] 1984) Discourse on Inequality, von Humboldt’s ([1854] 1969) The Limits of State Action and Kant’s (1996, 429) formulation that one should ‘act in such a way’ as to ‘always treat humanity … never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end’. These works share an insistence that freedom cannot be legitimately withheld from without and that arbitrary authority should be dismantled if found to lack justification.
Anarchists regard the state as the primary perpetrator of coercion and the most egregious example of externally imposed hierarchy. Government is seen as the operationalisation of state power. Consequently, anarchism is anti-state and anti-government. As Proudhon ([1851] 2004, 294) argued:
To be governed is to be … spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be governed is to be… repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed … That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.
The state institutionalises domination, constituting ‘the greatest hindrance to the birth of a society based on equality and liberty, as well as the historic means designed to prevent this blossoming’ (Kropotkin [1897] 1997, 1).
Anarchism, Socialism and Capitalism
Engels ([1872] 2001, 75), acknowledging this rejection of the state, speciously asked why anarchists ‘confine themselves to crying out against the political authority of the state’ while ignoring the principal source of tyranny: capitalism. Contrary to this persistent characterisation (see also Draper 1970), the anarchist objection to externally imposed hierarchy entails more than mere opposition to the state. It demands a rejection of arbitrary and coercive social relations in all forms. Indeed, there are consistencies between the anarchist denunciation of externally imposed hierarchy and Marx’s (1956, 159–60) discussion of alienation insofar as both proclaim a vision of society in which coercive social relations are replaced by the free formation of social bonds.
Anarcho-capitalists and libertarians of the right have, in recent intellectual history, asserted the non-negotiability of property rights, as well as the view that the market can actualise freedom (see Nozick 1974). Yet, anarchism, particularly in its social strands, has also traditionally denounced capitalism as conducive to exploitation, alienation and anomie. The competitive bourgeois egoism engendered by capitalism constantly threatens social atomism and fragmentation, and the imposition of hierarchy fundamental to capitalist social relations constitutes a form of arbitrary domination (see Bookchin 2004, 161–62). Compelling workers to sell their labour power on the market, capitalism engenders hierarchy by ensuring concentrated, private control over the means of production, and hence fundamental control of the terms of employment and material income of the majority. In addition, capitalism largely precludes other social forms by forcing the worker into the realm of market relations.
According to social anarchists, capitalist social relations are inherently oppressive and exploitative. This view culminates in Proudhon’s ([1840] 2007) famous declaration that ‘property is theft!’, promoting hierarchy and domination. For anarchists, the state is complicit in this insofar as it enforces laws, maintains systemic stability and panders to the interests of capital. Capitalism is ultimately supported by the violence of the state. Even Hayek ([1944] 1994, 45), the libertarian champion of unregulated capitalism, conceded that ‘in no [market] system that could be rationally defended would the state just do nothing’. The state plays a significant role in maintaining the status quo.
As Rocker (1938, 16) claimed, anarchism is ‘the confluence of the two great currents which … since the French Revolution have found such characteristic expression in the intellectual life of Europe: socialism and liberalism’. Anarchism, in this view, opposes the ‘exploitation of man by man [sic]’ characteristic of capitalism (Rocker 1938, 16). Yet, it also opposes ‘the domination of man over man [sic]’ (Rocker 1938, 28) endemic to statist formulations of socialism. Anarchism aims at a critical sublation of the two, insisting that socialism possess a libertarian spirit, or it will not be at all (Foner 1977, 81). Therefore, anarchists not only oppose alienated labour in anticipation of a future in which capital is appropriated by the mass of workers, but also argue that this appropriation must be direct rather than managed by ostensibly representative vanguards or hierarchies imposed from outside. For anarchists, emancipation can only be realised by people liberating themselves from externally imposed hierarchy.
An Anarchical Praxis
Liberation does not entail a rejection of organisation. Anarchists maintain that in pursuit of anarchical social forms, individuals and communities should simultaneously decide upon and live (prefigure) social arrangements, rather than having them imposed from without or after a revolutionary moment. This is consistent with the view of various anarchists, including Chomsky (2005, 191–94), Graeber (2004, 7–8) and Rocker (1938), that it would be arrogant and profoundly undemocratic to declare how anarchist social forms should be organised or how they would function. Instead, it is more important to pursue participatory organisational forms and strive for the development of non-hierarchical social structures towards an emancipated future.
Central to anarchism’s revolutionary praxis is the conflation of means and ends (Franks 2006, 99). Anarchists hold that the means of struggle and revolution cannot be separated from the ends of a liberated society. As Bookchin (2004, 11) observed, the historical failure of anti-systemic forces has shown that revolutionary processes (the means) cannot be separated from revolutionary goals (the ends). This emphasis on means and ends has shaped anarchism’s rejection of the Marxian dictatorship of the proletariat. Anarchists have long warned of the domination promoted by statist forms of socialism, with Bakunin (1972, 329) cautioning that a ‘red bureaucracy’ would produce a tyranny worse than any yet experienced. This rejection of state socialism is explained by the conviction that an instrument of domination – the state – cannot be used to achieve liberation; that ends cannot be separated from means:
[The Marxists say] this [proletarian] dictatorship, is a necessary transitional device for achieving the total liberation of the people … freedom, is the goal, and the state, or dictatorship, the means. Thus, for the masses to be liberated they must first be enslaved. (Bakunin [1873] 2005, 179)
In the practical exercise of collective decision-making, anarchists advocate decentralisation to suppress the emergence of hierarchy (Bakunin 1972, [1873] 2005; Bookchin 1991). The construction of an emancipated society is only possible when people are able to participate directly in decision-making processes. This demands that collective decision-making, where necessary, must take the form of participatory practices independent from the state. Decentralisation dissolves centralised units into smaller localities, obviating the need for a centralised state (see Bookchin 1991; Kropotkin [1912] 1992). Anarchists advocate the creation of autonomous, directly democratic social institutions in the realm of civil society, and strengthening those institutions until they exist alongside, and can replace, existing hierarchies. A participatory praxis also entails the grassroots collectivisation of political and economic organisations in order to produce alliances that are able to resist and oppose the power of state and capital.
Anarchism demands that emancipatory struggle should prefigure the liberated society it seeks. The means and ends of political struggle cannot be differentiated, lest the means supplant the ends. Non-hierarchical social structures must be derived from within the revolutionary process; their construction is both the means and ends of this process, necessarily occurring alongside the dissolution of hierarchy and exploitation. This is known as dual power or counter-power and concerns building ‘the structure of the new society in the shell of the old’ (Industrial Workers of the World 2010) to the point at which the shell can be discarded.
The new anarchist structure would be predicated not on compulsion and violence, but spontaneity and the human impulse towards mutual aid. According to Kropotkin ([1902] 2008, 162–64), the state and capitalism alienate people from one another. They undermine sociable instincts – inherent, Kropotkin ([1902] 2008) thought, to human speciation – and discourage the development of community by mediating social relations through money and the commodity form, as well as rationalising social relations through bureaucratisation and rules-based control. Kropotkin argued that in the absence of the state and capital, multifarious, non-hierarchical social forms based on mutual aid would spring spontaneously from the needs of the masses.[1] It is not possible to know precisely how such institutions would look or function. In practice, their realisation entails the creation of local citizen assemblies in which the majority of decisions are made, confederalism for decisions requiring large-scale input, and the promotion of self-management rather than economic management that is dictated by capitalist or state bosses (Bookchin 1999, 151–52).
Source: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/morgan-rodgers-gibson-the-anarchism-of-the-occupy-movement
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