Anarchism: principles, currents and criticism

General principles

Lack of hierarchical authority

Anarchism is a political philosophy that presents a vision of a human society without hierarchy, and which proposes strategies to achieve it, by overthrowing the authoritarian social system. The main objective of anarchism is to establish a social order without decision maker (leaders can exist, in the sense that they will take care of the general organization but they are not owner and they do not have more than decision-making powers than these comrades). An order based on the voluntary cooperation of free and conscious men and women, who aim to promote a double development: that of society and that of the individual who participates in it. According to essayist Hem Day, it cannot be said enough, anarchism is order without government; it is peace without violence. It is precisely the opposite of everything that he is accused of, either out of ignorance or bad faith.

Anarchist thought is therefore opposed to all forms of social organization that oppress individuals, enslave them, exploit them for the benefit of a few, constrain them, prevent them from realizing their full potential. At the source of any anarchist philosophy, we find a desire for individual or collective emancipation. The love of freedom, deeply rooted among anarchists, leads them to fight for the advent of a more just society, in which individual freedoms could develop harmoniously and would form the basis of social organization and economic relations. and policies.

Anarchism is opposed to the idea that coercive power and domination are necessary for society and fights for a libertarian form of social and economic organization, that is to say based on collaboration or cooperation rather than coercion. The common enemy of all anarchists is authority in any form, the state being their main enemy: the institution that claims the monopoly of legal violence (wars, police violence), the right to steal (tax) and to appropriate the individual (conscription, military service).

Stateless society

(The Korean Anarchist Federation established in 1929 a revolutionary Stateless Commune in Manchuria on a set of territories grouped into libertarian cooperatives and uniting 2 million peasants and guerrillas to fight against the Japanese invasion.)

The visions that the different anarchist tendencies have of what a stateless society would be or should be, on the other hand, are very diverse. Opposed to any credo, the anarchist advocates the autonomy of moral conscience beyond good and evil defined by a majority orthodoxy, a power with a dominant thought. The anarchist wants to be free to think for himself and to freely express his thoughts.

Some so-called “spontaneous” anarchists believe that once society is freed from the artificial shackles imposed on it by the state, the previously thwarted natural order would spontaneously re-establish itself, symbolized by the “A” within an “O” (“The anarchy is order without power”, Proudhon). These are situated, in accordance with the heritage of Proudhon, in an ethics of natural law (itself affiliated with Rousseau).

Others believe that the concept of order is no less “artificial” than that of the state. The latter think that the only way to do without hierarchical powers is not to allow coercive order to take hold. To these ends, they advocate the self-organization of individuals through federalism, as a means allowing the permanent questioning of authoritarian social operations and their media justifications. In addition, the latter only recognize imperative mandates (voted in general assembly), revocable (therefore controlled) and limited to a precise mandate and limited in time. Finally, they think that the mandate should only intervene in case of absolute necessity.

Anarchists differ from the Marxist vision of a future society by rejecting the idea of ​​a dictatorship of the proletariat which would be exercised after the revolution by a temporary power: in their eyes, such a system could only lead to tyranny. They are in favor of moving directly, or at least as quickly as possible, to a stateless society, which would be achieved through what Bakunin called the spontaneous organization of labor and the collective ownership of associations freely organized and federalized producers in the communes.

Pierre Kropotkine, for his part, sees libertarian society as a system based on mutual aid, where human communities would function like groups of equals ignoring any notion of borders. Laws would become useless because the protection of property would lose its meaning; the distribution of goods would, after the expropriation of wealth and the pooling of the means of production, be ensured by a rational use of “take on the job” in a context of abundance, and of rationing for rarer goods.

“Property is robbery!”

In What is Property? (1840), Pierre-Joseph Proudhon exposes the misdeeds of property in a society. This book contains the famous quote “Property is robbery!”. Later, in Theory of Property, Proudhon changes his mind and, paraphrasing his famous formula, he declares: “Property is freedom!” ».

Subsequently, this refusal of property evolved according to the different currents of anarchism, individualist or collectivist. It serves as the basis for illegalism in France, and for expropriatory anarchism, although the latter encourages the theft of the bourgeois in order to finance anarchist activities, and not on the basis of opposition to property as a such.

Currents and patterns

During the last third of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, anarchism was one of the two great currents of revolutionary thought, in direct competition with Marxism. With Mikhail Bakunin, who played a decisive role in the First International, from which he was ousted by the supporters of Karl Marx in 1872, anarchism took a collectivist turn in the face of the mutualist tendency and respectful of small private property defended by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.

Under the influence of libertarian communists, the project of a reorganization of society then emerged on the basis of a federation of production collectives ignoring national borders. In the years 1880-1890, under the inspiration in particular of Errico Malatesta, anarchism split between insurrectionists and supporters of a gradualist conception that was both “syndicalist and educational […] based on the pacifist primacy of lived solidarity” .

Typology

In 1928, in the Anarchist Encyclopedia, the Russian Voline defined “the three main ideas”: “1° Definitive admission of the syndicalist principle, which indicates the true method of social revolution; 2° Definitive admission of the communist principle (libertarian), which establishes the basis of organization of the new society in formation; 3° Definitive admission of the individualist principle, the total emancipation and happiness of the individual being the true goal of the social revolution and of the new society.

In 2007, the historian Gaetano Manfredonia offers a rereading of these currents on the basis of three models.

• The first, “insurrectionary”, encompasses both highly organized movements and individualists who want to destroy the authoritarian system before building, whether they are Bakuninians or supporters of de facto propaganda.
• The second, “syndicalist”, aims to make the union and the proletarian class the main architects of both the overthrow of present society and the creators of future society. Its most successful expression is undoubtedly the National Confederation of Labor during the Spanish social revolution of 1936.
• The third is “achieving educationist” in the sense that individualist anarchists emphasize preparing for any radical change through libertarian education, a formative culture, community life trials, the practice of self-management and gender equality, etc This model is close to the gradualism of Errico Malatesta and reconnects with the “evolutionism” of Élisée Reclus51.

Criticism

According to the philosopher and historian of liberal-oriented political ideas Philippe Nemo, an anarchist society is impossible both theoretically and in practice. He finds that, at most, only “brief historical examples” could be observed but no lasting achievement. He considers this impossibility to be definitive based on the questions posed in the 19th century by Lord Acton concerning politics: who should wield power and what should be its limits. According to him, the anarchist response, especially of socialist anarchists, which brings together unlimited power, exercised by the people as a whole, without this power being confiscated by an individual or a group of individuals, is fundamentally unstable. For Nemo, this solution cannot last because it tends to become either a totalitarian system (taking control of power by an individual or a group) or a liberal democracy (limitation of the powers exercised by all). In contrast to the anarchist response, according to Nemo, both of these responses are stable since, in the first case, the state’s powers over all easily allow it to remain in power, while in the second, “liberalism makes possible the existence of political opponents, keeping democracy alive”.

The political scientist Édouard Jourdain, indicates that “In line with the reception in the United States of French Theory, marked mainly by authors such as Foucault, Deleuze and Derrida, certain theorists undertook to criticize an anarchism marked by the philosophy of the Enlightenment in turning to post-structuralism or postmodernism.” Thus, according to Jourdain, post-anarchist authors such as Saul Newman and Todd May criticize conceptions of “classical anarchism”. One of these concerns the essentialist conception of human nature and subjectivity: the latter being in essence good, the abolition of power by realizing “natural” humanity would allow a harmonious society.

(Includes texts from Wikipedia translated and adapted by Nicolae Sfetcu)