The State of Statelessness

While anarchism still inspires political action, anarchists do rather little to organize that action into a larger program for change.

I suspect that’s because they are anarchists.

Thanks Henry- that’s possible. I’ll look forward to reading the rest when I have a bit more time.

There is a movement seeking to recreate a stateless frontier to escape to: seasteading. They may use not-very-anarchist slogan “Towards a Cambrian Explosion in Government“, but if we use a distinction between “government” and “state” we may say that Scott’s stateless people had “government” as well. Quiggin has earlier noted how the setup of the “founding fathers” you reference was possible because of that (now-vanished) frontier.

For us, it’s not the budget, it’s the fact that we have no more room in the house for books and I have so many I haven’t read. But that is very tempting, to learn that James Scott has written another book.

“While anarchism still inspires political action, anarchists do rather little to organize that action into a larger program for change. ”

There are numerous anarchist organisations around the world, plus quite large syndicalist unions. In the UK, for example, there is the Anarchist Federation (communist-anarchist) and the Solidarity Federation (anarcho-syndicalist), both national organisations. In Ireland there is the Workers’ Solidarity Movement which has some influence. In Europe, you have federations in France, Italy and so on, which have groups across the country and a weekly newspapers (La Monde Libertaire).

So I would suggest this claim is wrong.

“Unlike its great competitor, Marxism, anarchism was never associated with a coherent program of political change.”

Oh, right. So all that stuff Proudhon, Bakunin and Kropotkin wrote on federations of communes, workers’ self-management, economic-federalism, count for nothing? What about Proudhon’s ideas of a People’s Bank raised during the 1848 revolution? Bakunin’s and Kropotkin’s arguments for expropriating workplaces and forming workers councils?

The ironic thing is that most of what people think of as “Marxism” was first raised by anarchists (communes, workers’ councils, mandating and recalling delegates, workers’ control, and so on). Except the standing for elections, the workers state and central planning of course, all of which proved anarchist warnings of their limitations correct.

“While there were influential anarchist theorists, such as Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin, they tended to be non-systematic thinkers and to have highly romantic theories of politics. ”

Only if you don’t read them! Bakunin and Kropotkin both had quite systematic ideas, with a coherent vision of social change and a future libertarian society. May I suggest the following:

On Proudhon:
http://anarchism.pageabode.com/pjproudhon/introduction-contents

On Bakunin:
http://anarchism.pageabode.com/anarcho/the-revolutionary-ideas-of-bakunin

On Kropotkin:
http://anarchism.pageabode.com/anarcho/mutual-aid-an-introduction-and-evaluation

On Anarchism and Marxism:
http://anarchism.pageabode.com/anarcho/syndicalism-anarchism-and-marxism

for starters. Not to mention An Anarchist FAQ (www.anarchistfaq.org.uk)

And I should point out I was sent a review copy of Under Three Flag and I looked up its discussion of anarchism — I was disappointed to see it make some very basic errors about it and its history.

Incrementally stronger voluntary institutions are significant goods in themselves

The Ku Klux Klan was a voluntary institution. Most people would say that its neutralization — accomplished by the power of the state — was a good thing.

To put the case more generally: Historically, the express purpose of many voluntary associations has been the oppression or exclusion of disfavored social groups. Another pertinent example from not-too-distant US history is the prevalence of restrictive covenants forbidding the sale of houses to blacks or Jews.

(I happen to be in the business of enforcing the laws that make these covenants unenforceable. It makes libertarianism/anarchism a hard sell for me.)

11: The Ku Klux Klan was a voluntary institution. Most people would say that its neutralization—accomplished by the power of the state—was a good thing.

The KKK was a clandestine paramilitary which, while usually opposed by the Federal government (except, you know, during the teens and twenties when it was welcomed into the White House), often collaborated with state and municipal governments in the areas in which it was active.

Be that as it may, I think you are right to say that we need to specify more. I don’t think most of the anarchist activists and theorists I know would support the proposition that the growth of voluntary non-governmental organizations is always a good thing. We don’t even need to look as far down as the Klan to find examples where such organizations are antithetical to many of the values that the largest plurality of anarchists share. Restrictive housing covenants, restricted clubs, almost any sort of profit-making corporate entity, many “religious” organizations — there are plenty of non-governmental actors, most of which are in opposition to government policies at least some of the time, which anarchists are wary of, with good reason.

As for the larger question of anarchists having or not having a coherent political program — yes, we don’t, if you define “political program” as a methodology which seeks to seize state power for a certain class or clique. That’s by way of being a tautology. We do have political programs in many fora which we feel are legitimate sites for our actions. For instance, the Industrial Workers of the World, a heavily anarchist union (we won’t get into the differences between anarcho-syndicalism and industrial unionism here) is engaged in the explicitly political project of advancing worker’s control over their own work. And they’re making some impressive moves for an organization that was moribund for most of the last century. The canard that “anarchists ignore politics” is one we usually hear from our alphabet-soup socialist party interlocutors, but I guess I’m not surprised to see it repeated by less dogmatic people here.

From the review: “Here, the very incoherence and malleability of anarchism proved to be an advantage. If it did not achieve much in itself, it allowed others who were associated with it to achieve much indeed. Anarchist newspapers and journalists helped make the Montjuich prison into a source of great shame for Spain, so much so that it proved impossible successfully to prosecute the man who assassinated the prison’s chief torturer.”

Hmm… “Anarchism achieved nothing — anarchists, though, achieved much”. It has a certain ring. Might even prove quite popular with anarchists.

This image of poor old anarchism, unable to aspire to theoretical brilliance and therefore dependent on the kindness of anarchists, reminds me of David Graeber on “Why there are so few anarchists in the academy” in Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (pdf):

It does seem that Marxism has an affinity with the academy that anarchism never will. It was, after all, the only great social movement that was invented by a Ph.D., even if afterwards, it became a movement intending to rally the working class. Most accounts of the history of anarchism assume it was basically similar: anarchism is presented as the brainchild of certain nineteenth-century thinkers—Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, etc.—it then went on to inspire working-class organizations, became enmeshed in political struggles, divided into sects… Anarchism, in the standard accounts, usually comes out as Marxism’s poorer cousin, theoretically a bit flat-footed but making up for brains, perhaps, with passion and sincerity. But in fact, the analogy is strained at best. . . .

Even if one compares the historical schools of Marxism, and anarchism, one can see we are dealing with a fundamentally different sort of project. Marxist schools have authors. Just as Marxism sprang from the mind of Marx, so we have Leninists, Maoists, Trotksyites, Gramscians, Althusserians… (Note how the list starts with heads of state and grades almost seamlessly into French professors.) . . .

Now consider the different schools of anarchism. There are Anarcho-Syndicalists, Anarcho- Communists, Insurrectionists, Cooperativists, Individualists, Platformists… None are named after some Great Thinker; instead, they are invariably named either after some kind of practice, or most often, organizational principle. (Significantly, those Marxist tendencies which are not named after individuals, like Autonomism or Council Communism, are also the ones closest to anarchism.) Anarchists like to distinguish themselves by what they do, and how they organize themselves to go about doing it. . . .

To sum up then:
1. Marxism has tended to be a theoretical or analytical discourse about revolutionary strategy.
2. Anarchism has tended to be an ethical discourse about revolutionary practice.
Obviously, everything I’ve said has been something of a caricature (there have been wildly sectarian anarchist groups, and plenty of libertarian, practice- oriented Marxists including, arguably, myself)

15: the threat of oppressors (or illiberal forces) organizing in the absence of state interference is greatly mitigated if the oppressed themselves are able to organize

I’m not sure that I’d put the question just that way, nor that that formulation lends itself to any kind of blanket statement. Just which oppressive forces are we talking about? A small messianic cult? A revanchist tendency composed of deposed ruling class people? Grassroots collectives dedicated to some reactionary ideology? I’d say it depends greatly on who the enemy is. Of course, in terms of current anarchist practice, getting out in the street to opposed Neo-Nazis, or rightwing Christian extremists, or anti-Muslim bigots, is generally supported. And, in fact, the lack of ability of working class people to organize themselves to respond to those threats is roundly decried. So probably a little of both.

17: One problem with anarchist historiography is that it seams to be stuck in the 19th century

That’s for damn sure. I think there are a couple of things going on: 1. It’s easier to get grants for writing about stuff that doesn’t seem very threatening, and has an authorized, “legitimate” scholarly purpose. 2. Much of what would otherwise be classed as anarchist activity and thought, especially during the 1960s, was perpetrated by people who sadly flirted with Maoism, thus tainting it from a strictly anarchist historical perspective. 3. Much current anarchist theory bears only slight resemblance to much current anarchist organizing efforts. I don’t know who’s fault that is, or even whether we should think of it as a bug or a feature, but it does make studying anarchist praxis pretty difficult.

“A bullet from an anarchist’s pistol had changed global politics.”

Is there evidence that the assassination of that politician was a major factor in the US-Spanish war? I have never heard of this. There are, of course, many instances of political assassination seemingly changing the course of history but wouldn’t most historians caution against putting too much weight on these trigger events? Would WWI have been avoided had Framz Ferdinand not been assassinated?

make that “a major factor in the genesis of the US-Spanish war”

My impression is that Chomsky’s vagueness is not of the kind of “the current world system should be replaced by nothing”, but “by trial and error it’ll evolve into something; we can’t predict what it is”.

mario, I’m reminded of Per Bylund on blueprint anarchism. Of course, Bob Black said it earlier.

Why would you go to Chomsky for ideas about what future societies would look like? That’s just not his metier, it never has been, and he’s never claimed it was. Kropotkin, Purchase, even Peter Lamborn Wilson, are better guides for the directions that anarchists tend to go in when they imagine a post-state society.

Bylund’s argument linked above seems facile at best, strikingly dishonest at worst. What does the following argument even mean?
“A real anarchist is an enemy of the state. This is the obvious core and starting point, anarchism means anti-state. But it doesn’t really do to simply understand that the state is inefficient, ineffective, dangerous, and destructive. One also has to want–that is, really really want–to abolish the state altogether. So being anarchist means one really wants nothing to do with the state, and it also means any anarchist is opposed to whatever the state is about.”

“Opposed to whatever the state is about”? So all we need to do to invalidate any anarchist proposition is show that a state has advanced the same idea? Or is there some essence of the state that is left unspoken? The latter seems to be Bylund’s argument, and that essence is apparently any kind of trans-local organization. Never mind that anarchists who advance the ideas of federated groups virtually always include provisions for the immediate and direct recall of delegates. This so-called “libertarian anarchism” far from being “pure” anti-statism, smacks of a covert desire for a society structured as a war of all against all to me. Which we pretty much already have: it’s called “capitalism” (except that the highest echelon tends to operate in a semi-permanent truce).

Bylund sounds like he’s arguing for Robin Hanson’s “common but insensibly stupid” ideological attitude #2, in addition to #1. But on the other hand it’s not clear what his “essence of the state” is (it explicitly isn’t cooperation/organization, trans-locality isn’t explicitly discussed) and what kinds of scenarios would qualify as anarchist. His essence of the market, “free people make choices individually or collectively in order to achieve some kind of value, and they have no way of escaping the responsibility of their actions” could arguably describe conventional democratic states.

One possible defense of anarchist detailing of post-state society is that they are simply making predictions and defending against claims that anarchy must be horrible.

“A real anarchist is an enemy of the state.”

A real anarchist opposes power in all its forms, not just state power but also, for example, economic power wielded by non-state actors (a k a corporations). Anarchism in the original meaning of the word is not consistent with fake anti-government oligarchical libertarianism in the contemporary American sense of the word.

“So being anarchist means one really wants nothing to do with the state, and it also means any anarchist is opposed to whatever the state is about.”

Anarchism has historically challenged the legitimacy of the state and this has perhaps been the most defining issue (states don’t readily tolerate those that deny its legitimacy) but it is narrow and misleading to reduce anarchism to opposition of state power.

Interestingly, the English version of wikipedia defines anarchism as

“a political philosophy which considers the state undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful, and instead promotes a stateless society, or anarchy. It seeks to diminish or even abolish authority in the conduct of human relations.”

The German version is much broader:

“Anarchismus ist eine politische Ideenlehre und Philosophie, die Herrschaft von Menschen über Menschen und jede Art von Hierarchie als Form der Unterdrückung von individueller und kollektiver Freiheit ablehnt. Daher wird von seinen Anhängern eine anarchistische Gesellschaft als freiwilliger Zusammenschluss von selbstbestimmten Individuen und Kollektiven propagiert. Unter der Anarchie in diesem Verständnis wird damit die Aufhebung hierarchischer Strukturen – bis hin zur Auflösung der staatlichen Organisiertheit der menschlichen Gesellschaft – verstanden.”

The French version:

“L’anarchisme est un courant de philosophie politique développé depuis le XIXe siècle sur un ensemble de théories et pratiques anti-autoritaires. Fondé sur la négation du principe d’autorité dans l’organisation sociale et le refus de toutes contraintes découlant des institutions basées sur ce principe[2], l’anarchisme a pour but de développer une société sans domination, où les individus coopèrent librement dans une dynamique d’autogestion.”

The German and French versions don’t even mention the state whereas the English one uses state as the defining issue. I assume this points to a loss of anarchist intellectual traditions in the anglophone discourse.

Brian Patrick Mitchell wrote that self-described anarcho-capitalists should instead use the term “akratist” since it is kratos (force) which they purportedly object to rather than arche (recognition of rank).

Why would you go to Chomsky for ideas about what future societies would look like? That’s just not his metier, it never has been, and he’s never claimed it was. Kropotkin, Purchase, even Peter Lamborn Wilson, are better guides for the directions that anarchists tend to go in when they imagine a post-state society.

I imagine future societies looking much like this:

http://us.123rf.com/400wm/400/400/pilat/pilat0806/pilat080600026/3179474.jpg