Some Personal Thoughts on Anarchism




"What I think is most important about anarchism...is its recognition that there is and will always be a need to discover and overcome structures of hierarchy, authority, and domination and constraints on freedom: slavery, wage-slavery, racism, sexism, authoritarian schools, etc., forever. If human society progresses, overcoming some of these forms of oppression, it will uncover others...[a]narchism does not legislate ultimate solutions to these problems. I see it as a rather practical 'philosophy', inspired by a vision of the future that is more free and more conducive to a wide range of human needs..."
Noam Chomsky, in a 1983 interview



"Anarchy, absence of master, of sovereign--that is the form of government to which we draw closer day by day, and which the inveterate habit of mistaking the man for the rule and his will for the law makes us regard as the last word in disorder and the exemplification of chaos. The story is told that a seventeenth century Parisian bourgeois, having heard tell that in Venice there was no king, the fellow was dumbfounded beyond recovery, and thought that he would die from laughter upon first hearing anything so ridiculous. Our prejudice is like that: we all more or less want a leader or leaders..."
Pierre Proudhon, in What is Property?



"This art of living counter to all forms of fascism, whether already present or impending, carries with it a certain number of essential principles...[to] free political action from all unitary and totalizing paranoia...[to] develop action, thought, and desires by proliferation, juxtaposition, and disjunction, and not by subdivision and pyramidal hierarchization...[and to] not become enamored of power."
Michel Foucault, in his Preface to Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia



"By observing what governments do, we have discovered their true purpose. They control the production and distribution of wealth with partiality. We can confirm that this is indeed their purpose by observing what they do not do...those who believe that governments exist to serve the whole country and not just a part of it must believe in fairies. Governments rule with partiality and no part of society can be explained unless this is understood."
Derrick Pike, in The Nature of the State




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These quotes were taken from a variety of sources to illustrate the four main sources of my personal anarchist beliefs. 1)Classic anarchist theory (represented by Proudhon); 2)Contemporary anarchist theory (represented by Chomsky); 3)Non-anarchist philosophy (represented by Foucault); 4)Non-violence and anarcho-pacifism (represented by Pike). These fours sources, while very divergent, have informed my own personal anarchist leanings.

No label could do justice to the myriad of belief systems within the hearts and minds of the anarchists of the world today. Suffice to say, this applies to my personal anarchism as well. Using traditional anarchist terminology, I would say I am an anarcho-communist pacifist. However, this does not take into account my interest in non-anarchist thought--ranging from philosophy of science to postmodern social theory to Eastern mysticism to phenomenology--nor does it take into account the fact that my anarchism is partly inspired by some un-anarchist sources.

So then, discarding traditional labels, I could perhaps call/name myself a post-Christian anarcho-pacifist Taoist. What do these terms, these labels, these WORDS...what do they mean? Without getting into any arguments about semantics, syntax, signifieds, signifiers or other such verbal gymnastics, allow me to elucidate.





THE EVOLUTION OF MY ANARCHISM


I first encountered anarchism briefly in high school. In my eleventh-grade A.P. American History class, my teacher--a Mr. Peter Bedford--attempted to show us students that history was not as clear cut as we had been taught. Columbus was not a benevolent saint, Washington wasn't perfect, the U.S. did not have a manifest destiny to conquer the North American continent--these myths were exploded. But the term anarchism was introduced when we studied the Sacco and Vanzetti case. In this class, we examined the evidence (together, as a class) and write a short paper on whether or not Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty. In the course of the investigation, I learned that the two Italian immigrants were anarchists--the "radical of the radical" as the two later themselves put it. I came to the conclusion that no, they were not guilty. This was the first time I really learned that the U.S. government scapegoated someone because of political beliefs.

Following this I became increasingly liberal, eventually radical. This was difficult for me because I was from a middle-class background and lived in a middle-class area. My friends were middle-class, mostly white, and for the most part, we were all fairly complacent about socio-political change and human rights. We had some inkling that society needed to change, but were too busy being 'normal' self-absorbed teens to care that much.

After graduation, I went off to a conservative Christian college in Grantham, Pennsylvania--Messiah College. This place was perhaps the most stifling place I had ever been. Guys like Falwell and Robertson were all the rage. Political views were somewhere to the right of Genghis Khan. Minds were closed. Unusually, I kept moving left. I wanted to learn about the intersection of Christianity with socialism. Having had to read Marx and Engel's Communist Manifesto my senior year in high school for a European history class, socialism had become something of a minor obsession. But by the spring of my freshman year at Messiah, I had become convinced that socialism wasn't the key: anarchism was.

I recall reading Richard Sonn's Anarchism and marvelling that real people, in real places in history, had come to realize--albeit briefly--some truly anarchistic and liberating social arrangements. Names like Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Landauer, Malatesta, Goldman, and Durruti were indelibly stamped in my brain.

About the same time, I had discovered postmodernist and post-structuralist philosophy. This led me to question some of the assumption which ran rampant in Plato, Aristotle, and on down to Descartes and Hegel and beyond. As a philosophy major, these were exciting times.

Yet these were lonely times. I seemed to be the only one I knew interested in both postmodernism and anarchism. Todd May's The Political Theory of Post-Structuralist Anarchism was a new Bible for me. It was an intellectual high without peer (once I finally got around to understanding it, that is).

Armed with my new interest in the 'holy trinity' of my education--Christianity (Kierkegaard, Barth, Tillich, e.g.), anarchism (Proudhon, Kropotkin, Goldman, e.g.), and postmodernism (Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida, e.g.)--but cursed (not really-I brought the grades on myself) with abysmal grades, I dropped out of college after that one year. So I became an intellectually hungry 18-and-a-half year old who was in dire need of structure but yearned for anarchist theory, postmodern musings, and Christianity in some form or another.





Postmodern Anarchism?













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