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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Political Profiles Series
- Sprache: Englisch
Is it possible to abolish coercion and hierarchy and build a stateless, egalitarian social order based on non-domination? There is one political tradition that answers these questions with a resounding yes: anarchism. In this book, Carissa Honeywell offers an accessible introduction to major anarchist thinkers and principles, from Proudhon to Goldman, non-domination to prefiguration. She helps students understand the nature of anarchism by examining how its core ideas shape important contemporary social movements, thereby demonstrating how anarchist principles are relevant to modern political dilemmas connected to issues of conflict, justice and care. She argues that anarchism can play a central role in tackling our major global problems by helping us rethink the essentially militarist nature of our dominant ideas about human relationships and security. Dynamic, urgent, and engaging, this new introduction to anarchist thought will be of great interest to both students as well as thinkers and activists working to find solutions to the multiple crises of capitalist modernity.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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Contents
Series Title
Title page
Copyright page
1 ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’
2 Freedom and Association
3 Harm Reduction
4 Until All Cages are Empty
5 Closing Thoughts
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Contents
1 ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’
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Series Title
Key Concepts in Political Theory
Charles Jones and Richard Vernon,
Patriotism
Roger Griffin,
Fascism
Peter J. Steinberger,
Political Judgment
Fabian Wendt,
Authority
Eric Mack,
Libertarianism
Elizabeth Cohen and Cyril Ghosh,
Citizenship
Peter Lamb,
Socialism
Benjamin Moffitt,
Populism
Mark Stephen Jendrysik,
Utopia
David D. Roberts,
Totalitarianism
Peter Lamb,
Property
Carissa Honeywell,
Anarchism
Anarchism
Carissa Honeywell
polity
Copyright page
Copyright © Carissa Honeywell 2021
The right of Carissa Honeywell to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2021 by Polity Press
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
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Suite 300
Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-2390-0
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-2391-7 (pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
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1‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’
Introduction
Problems of harm, violence and collapsing resources proliferate on local and global scales, affecting humans (some much more than others), non-humans and the natural environment. Not only the anarchists say so. But, one way of understanding contemporary anarchism is to see it as a connected series of attempts to respond to these problems from an egalitarian and anti-authoritarian perspective. This perspective is grounded in the conviction that orderly society is possible without the need for coercive hierarchy. Each chapter of this book deals with a dimension of contemporary anarchist practice (food distribution, harm reduction and decarceration) and with the core anarchist principles that are manifested through those activities (freedom as connection, prefiguration and transformative justice). It is hoped that you will come to understand the main theoretical commitments of anarchism through seeing how they shape the social movements that anarchists create.
At its core, anarchism seeks to challenge some of the central foundational assumptions of mainstream thinking about the political world, assumptions that anarchists see as responsible for current problems. Much of western political thought rests on the Hobbesian assumption that hierarchy, chains of command and the protection of private property are inevitable, natural and necessary for social order (especially the large-scale, complex structures associated with contemporary life). Added to this, the ‘possessive individualism’ of mainstream western political thinking depicts human beings as locked in a competitive struggle for freedom and security. This ‘grow or die’ survival mythology is so intensely fearful that normal political and economic life looks like a preparation for war (including accumulative stockpiling) and often erupts into actual war.1 Anarchists, alongside critical scholars from various fields, describe this thinking as ‘militarist’ and indict this collection of assumptions for creating political dysfunction and domination. Militarist thinking, they argue, inhibits our ability to connect in the present or to think into the future and develop policies that will meet environmental, human and non-human needs. Anarchists tend to engage in radically transformative responses to the practices and institutions that embody militarist assumptions (or they communicate about them in such a way as to encourage these responses).
The anarchist rejection of current frameworks of electoral politics, representative democracy and formal legal avenues of political action reflects the sense they have that these institutions inevitably and irredeemably maintain militarist logics of fear, competition and hierarchy. This is because (they argue) these institutions proceed by protecting the unjust allocation of private property, inflicting punitive punishments, excluding most people from real decision making and creating categories of excluded beings and beings whose bodies can be used as resources for the benefit of the rest. Current formal political institutions, they argue, are just not up to the task of finding solutions to harm and violence on local and global scales because their commitment to these militarist practices makes them part of the problem.
Various (non-anarchist) political and sociological commentators have observed that the hierarchies of power that inhere in representative democracies are indeed structurally virtually identical to non-democratic political forms.2 Even in a functional representative democracy, government is exercised by the very few over the very many, and policy choices typically favour powerholders’ short-term interests and their private accumulation of resources. Wider social and environmental costs tend to be minimized or ignored, and economies can appear to grow whilst depleting resources, polluting and destroying ecosystems and catastrophically impacting social well-being.3 Short-term profit orientations and investment calculations are blind to social, animal and environmental costs. These costs include exploitation, oppression, imperialism, child labour, poverty, pollution, ecological damage, slums, homelessness, malnutrition, war, shortened lifespans, pandemics and mass species loss. As this economic growth continues, the few who benefit (for the moment) find that political control (including police, prisons, emergency legislation and border regimes) needs to be intensified and further militarized in order to offset popular resistance to its social and ecological impacts.4
It is increasingly being argued by radical commentators that the changes that are necessary to avert total climate catastrophe will not emerge from this constellation of political and economic relationships, nor the ‘depraved indifference’ to human and non-human suffering that they perpetuate.5 Some ecological changes, like flooding, hurricanes, forest fires, deforestation, droughts and unbearable daytime temperatures, are already killing many people. We are also seeing rapid species loss, loss of sea life and changes to climate that are increasingly undermining agriculture and food production.6 According to critical viewpoints, the climate crisis is the dramatic outcome of the tendency of political and economic elites to dismiss the suffering or harm experienced by those with little or no power (including many people in the global South, poor people, animals, children, ecosystems, etc.) as ‘externalities’, ‘side effects’ or ‘collateral damage’.7 The effects of this dismissal will be catastrophic for everyone.
Anarchism rests on this assertion: coercive political hierarchy (based on legal institutions of punishment and reward and on the protection of private property) is a choice. It is just one response to the dilemma of how to organize human collective life. There are other possible responses to this dilemma, including the non-dominating models of social order and resource management offered by anarchists and others. Archaeological findings relating to the earliest known human civilizations suggest that human beings have been self-consciously experimenting with different political forms since the very beginning. There is no evidence, apparently, that top-down structures of government are necessary for large-scale organization.8 Centralized hierarchy is not the only option, argue the anarchists; it is not inevitable or ‘natural’, and it is deeply dysfunctional if the costs borne by most beings as a result of political repression, economic collapse, environmental degradation and war are considered. These are unfamiliar ideas to some of us, and their unfamiliarity is partly why anarchism is sometimes seen as a juvenile response to authority or understood as advocating ‘chaos’ as a positive goal.
In this introductory chapter, I will say something about the history of anarchist thought and the big names that are usually associated with the tradition, whilst also hoping to show that there are other important sources of anarchist ideas beyond these thinkers. This wider understanding of the roots and routes of anarchism help to make sense of the resurgence of anarchist activity in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and its anti-militarist emphasis on ‘domination’ as the source of global problems. Having set out some of the history and conceptual reference points of anarchism, I will turn to wider concerns about militarism that have emerged in other fields. This helps place anarchism within wider debates about contemporary problems and dilemmas. and it gives us one clear answer to the question ‘Why study anarchism?’ The answer I shall offer to this question goes like this: within the frame of anti-militarism that anarchists share with activist peacemakers and other critical thinkers, we can identify a radically interpersonal (or inter-being) philosophy of grassroots relationship building that aims to foster or model ideals of community wherein all needs are taken seriously. The practices that emerge from these ideas (or the ideas that emerge from these practices) may be a source of new thinking in difficult political times.
Maybe it’s best to start with a story. It’s one that I think captures something important about the anarchist attitude to breaking the law, which is one of the most immediately recognizable habits of the anarchist. (As the CrimethInc. collective writes, ‘If you want to be sure you never contribute to war, genocide, or oppression, the first step is to stop following orders.’9) In her short story, ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’, anarchist science fiction author Ursula Le Guin writes of a perfect dream-like city. The people she describes there live in ‘boundless and generous contentment’, cultured, sophisticated, compassionate, expressive and free. As a vignette of city life, Le Guin describes in detail the citizens in the throes of a joyful summer festival. They are having a really great time. However, in a dark rotten room hidden away in one of the public buildings of Omelas, a single neglected, malnourished and frightened child is imprisoned.
For reasons that are not made explicit in the story, the happiness and flourishing of the entire city ‘depend wholly on this child’s abominable misery’. These are the terms on which the prosperity, and ultimately the law, of Omelas rests. It falls on the citizens, usually in their youth, to make their peace with the compromise on which the city is founded. In the terms of the story, this compromise is painful, but rational and ultimately inevitable. The happiness of the whole city has been weighed against the suffering of one child and this careful moral calculation of the greater good has been codified in a sort of social contract that overwrites individual citizen responsibility for the child’s suffering. The law represents the optimal outcome under an unfortunate set of circumstances. It is not expected or appropriate for the residents of Omelas to question their pleasant and comfortable life. They are asked to trust that the law is the result of responsible, wise and considered reflection. If they break this contract, the prosperity will end. Their duty to their fellow citizens is to tolerate the suffering of the child.
Most of the people are willing to do this. But there are a small number of individuals who cannot live with this contract: ‘They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back.’ These individuals forsake the law that makes life pleasant and predictable in Omelas and choose instead a precarious life without guarantees, stepping towards an unknown world where anything could happen, even chaos. They demonstrate a willingness to become subject to the radical vulnerability of both responsibility and uncertainty, things which the law in Omelas protected them from.10 ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’ is not really a metaphor for anarchism as such. The story is a thought experiment; the reader wonders whether they might ‘walk away’ from the social contract on which Omelas is based, even if the alternatives were unknown or uncertain, or possibly unpleasant. The story expresses something of the anarchist agenda to reveal what they see as the dark roots, the secrets, and the hidden dominations of unequal social and political structures that appear democratic and just.
The anarchist spirit that Le Guin’s story captures is one of negation, a refusal to make contractual peace with suffering or avoidable harm even if it can be justified or normalized as inevitable or necessary. This spirit was expressed by the nineteenth-century Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta when he claimed that ‘it is the duty of humanity that no one should suffer’.11 It is a political project of ‘contagious disobedience’ that is not framed as a war or a binary conflict between militarized enemies with irreconcilable interests but as an attempt at unlimited solidarity between beings whose needs are irrevocably intertwined.12 From the anarchist point of view, the shared global precarity revealed by pandemic, climate change and global economic dysfunction finally, irrefutably, demonstrates the interdependence of all living beings. From this point of view, embracing shared vulnerability can become a positive political and economic project. Precarity is the condition of being vulnerable. It can be even more importantly mobilized as a political force as we notice that some human and non-human beings bear the burdens and costs of this shared vulnerability to a much greater extent than others.13
The obstinate and possibly impractical impulse of unlimited solidarity is not the whole picture of anarchism, but it is important if we want to understand where anarchists are coming from, and why anarchism can seem like such a confrontational position. As it is expressed in the animal liberation lyrics of British punk band Conflict, ‘It means that we are no longer prepared to sit back and allow terrible cruel things to happen.’ This anarchist refusal is also apparent in the anti-fascist no pasarán of the Spanish Civil War, the ‘fuck off’ of anarchist-inspired punk musicians like Crass and Conflict, and in English poet Sean Bonney’s ‘A.C.A.B. Nursey Rhyme’, which ends with the line ‘say “no justice, no peace” and then say “fuck the police”’.14 In mainstream political discourse, this stance is taken to be naive and unrealistic at best and, at its worst, potentially dangerous and chaotic if taken seriously by disgruntled individuals and groups.
What is important, however, although perhaps not immediately evident, about these anarchist refusals are the multiple visions of possible alternatives that stand behind the ‘no’ or the ‘fuck off’. A ‘no’ to one thing is logically premised on a ‘yes’ to something else. The nineteenth-century Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin argued that the urge to destroy what we don’t want is also necessarily the urge to create what we do want. This kind of destruction coincides with the creation of an alternative. A ‘no’ to police violence is premised on a ‘yes’ to care for the bodies and minds of stopped, arrested or incarcerated individuals, a ‘no’ to the state is a ‘yes’ to self-organized institutions, and a ‘no’ to hierarchy suggests a ‘yes’ to more profoundly democratic structures. Or, in the words of the Black Rose Anarcho-Feminists, ‘Anarchism indicates what people should not do to one another’ and then (as the ‘yes’ behind that ‘no’) ‘all the groovy things people can do and build together, once they are able to combine efforts and resources on the basis of common interest, rationality and creativity’.15
A partial vision of what anarchists are saying ‘yes’ to is contained in early twentieth-century Russian activist and essayist Peter Kropotkin’s entry on anarchism in the 1921 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, in which he names ‘free agreements’ and ‘interwoven networks’ of federations aimed at the meeting of needs as central anarchist aspirations:
Anarchism is a principle or theory of life and conduct under which society is conceived without government – harmony in such a society being obtained, not by submission to law, or by obedience to any authority, but by free agreements concluded between the various groups, territorial and professional, freely constituted for the sake of production and consumption, as also for the satisfaction of the infinite variety of needs and aspirations of a civilized being. In a society developed along these lines, the voluntary associations which already now begin to cover all the fields of human activity would take a still greater extension so as to substitute themselves for the state in all its functions. They would represent an interwoven network, composed of an infinite variety of groups and federations of all sizes and degrees, local, regional, national and international – temporary or more or less permanent – for all possible purposes: production, consumption and exchange, communications, sanitary arrangements, education, mutual protection, defence of the territory, and so on: and, on the other side, for the satisfaction of an ever increasing number of scientific, artistic, literary and sociable needs.16
In this passage, and in the anarchist tradition exemplified more broadly in the writings of (among others) Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, Gustav Landauer, Errico Malatesta, Emma Goldman and the anarchists of Spain, the ‘no’ to police forces, armies, governments, corporations, landowners, colonialism, prison, marriage, meat, social mores, regimentation and law has been underpinned by ‘yeses’ to relationships of freedom, equality, care and trust. Starting with these authors, their affiliates and the ideas and movements that they inspired gives us the opportunity to improvise a focused definition of anarchism, which can help to map the terrain of its wider politics. This is not to claim that these authors or their contexts are the only sources or origins of anarchist thought and practice nor that their thinking defines the boundaries of anarchism.
As writer Maia Ramnath highlights in her work on Indian decolonial movements, these western authors represent just one ‘contextually specific manifestation’ of a larger global tradition of anti-authoritarian and egalitarian thought and action which also occurs ‘in many other forms in many other contexts’. 17 In a similar vein, anthropologist Jack Weatherford argues that anarchism, defined as ‘respectful individualism and equality’ in societies operating ‘without strong positions of leadership and coercive political institutions’18 in fact entered into the political culture of Europe from accounts of indigenous societies in South America brought back by travellers and colonialists from the early sixteenth century: ‘For the first time the French and the British became aware of the possibility of living in social harmony and prosperity without the rule of a king.’19 Early French ethnographers apparently revived the Greek-derived word ‘anarchy’ to describe this phenomenon of orderly society without formal hierarchy that they observed in some of the peoples they encountered.20
‘Classical’ anarchism
Starting with the writings of Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Landauer, Malatesta and Goldman is one way to draw together three important early anarchist claims that can orientate our understanding of some anarchist writing and activism. These are, firstly, that the state is a violent instrument of control and economic injustice; secondly, that freedom and individuality are social and relational (not ‘possessive’ or competitive), pursued through bonds of trust and reciprocity; and, thirdly, that genuine social order and security are the products of interdependence and mutual aid. These authors presented anarchism as a form of socialism opposed to social and economic inequality, political hierarchy, capitalism and the state to be pursued by means of direct action by the working class and the peasantry through cooperative organizations.
French politician, philosopher and early proponent of mutualist economic policies, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, appropriated the term ‘anarchy’ in the mid-nineteenth century as an egalitarian and libertarian ideal and used it to make his case against private property, legal government and compulsory authority. He argued that individuals should not be able to accumulate so much that they can reduce others to dependence. His famous claim that ‘property is theft’ embodies his objection to this economic imbalance. The property ownership he opposes is that which is unearned, including things like interest on loans and income from rents and inheritance. This is contrasted with ownership rights over those goods produced by one’s own labour or the resources necessary for that work. Inherited and unearned property leads to the division of society into two classes: those who live off the proceeds of their capital and those who are obliged to sell their labour. The relation between property and labour, he argued, is one of deep inequality, and it is enforced and maintained through legal domination. According to Proudhon, legal government also stunts individuals and breaks communal ties. It is characterized by its location of authority in public officials who control behaviour with fixed, general rules, enforced by threats of physical punishment. One feature of the just society frequently emphasized by Proudhon is the existence of mutual respect among its members, arising from the individual’s capacity to recognize and value in others the distinctively human dignity he finds in himself.21
With the exception of Proudhon, whose best-known works were published in the 1840s, the anarchist movement connected to the writing and activism of the figures named above emerged from within the internationally expanding workers’ movement of the 1860s. Debates that arose within the International Workingmen’s Association between Karl Marx and Mikhail Bakunin about the role of the state in the anticipated workers’ revolution were critical in distinguishing the two figures and the different forms of socialism that they espoused. Marx stressed that revolutionary struggle should be directed against the basis of capitalism and private property rather than state and law. Bakunin argued that the state and the law were equally problematic and must be immediately abolished alongside hereditary capital. As part of this argument, he argued the key prefigurative point that the means that are used as part of the revolutionary struggle will be reproduced in the outcome of that struggle. Thus the means of social change must be consistent with the ends that are desired: ‘Liberty can be created only by liberty.’ This ruled out any kind of top-down revolutionary vanguardism as it was expressed in authoritarian socialist traditions.
This is the basis of the anarchist objection to Marxist revolutionary strategy. Anarchists, like Bakunin and others, argued that to begin by seizing political power is merely to ensure the perpetuation of the state in another form. The revolution must not be from above, they argued, or it will merely reproduce what it was trying to destroy. Early twentieth-century political activist and orator Emma Goldman firmly echoed this sentiment in her essay ‘What I Believe’, in which she argued that there is a mutually constitutive relation between what we are seeking and how we seek it.22 She was more interested in the daily political work of movement building through education and social programmes than in precipitating or leading the climactic explosion of revolutionary moments or episodes.23 More recently, indigenous-anarchist writer and activist Taiaiake Alfred has also argued this point, writing that ‘How you fight determines who you will become when the battle is over, and there is always means–ends consistency at the end of the game.’24 Anarchists working in this tradition see political struggle as a work in process in which political actors become what they strive for.25
Emma Goldman worked as an activist, orator and pamphleteer for various causes in the early twentieth century, including support for the labour movement and striking workers; opposition to the First World War draft and to war in general; free speech, free love (the campaign to challenge the institution of marriage) and free sexuality; defence of sex workers; opposition to prisons; and access to birth control, campaigns for which she was often imprisoned. Her work makes links between anarchism and critical thinking about sexuality, emotion, intimacy, desire and feminist politics. Her life and work made it clear that freedom for women could not be achieved without fundamental changes at the intimate level of love and sexuality. She pointed out that free sexual expression cannot exist between unequal beings.26 She saw marriage and the nuclear family model in particular as social and legal institutions that stood in the way of women’s sexual and reproductive freedoms. That these practices were pursued wholeheartedly by women demonstrated for Goldman the extent to which women were taught to desire that which denied them their freedom and maintained their financial, emotional and political dependency.
In a debate about the role of women in the 1935 Spanish anarchist movement, Goldman put women’s experiences at the forefront of her view of freedom and equality: ‘I have seen too many broken bodies and maimed spirits from the sex slavery of women not to feel the matter deeply or to express my indignation against the attitude of most of you gentlemen.’27 In her essay ‘Marriage and Love’, Goldman argues that the state and the capitalist have vested interests in controlling the reproduction of future workers and soldiers and thus in controlling women’s bodies: ‘The defenders of authority dread the advent of a free motherhood, lest it rob them of their prey. Who will fight wars? Who would create wealth? Who would make the policeman, the jailer, if women were to refuse the indiscriminate breeding of children? The race, the race! Shouts the king, the president, the capitalist, the priest.’28 This, she argued, is why women’s sexuality was limited by convention and law to ownership within marriage, and why marriage locked women into dependency and subservience.
Yet, importantly, she argued that living without love and sexual expression is not a liberating option for women either. Neither state reform nor female suffrage would deliver the freedom women needed, according to Goldman, because what was required were opportunities to experience real intimacy and deep emotions of genuine equality between men and women that could only be achieved through a reconfiguration of intimate and reproductive relationships outside of the demands of the state and capitalism. Goldman attempted to show that the demands of sexual and individual freedom are not at odds with the need for love and reciprocity. She argued that ‘if partial emancipation is to become a complete and true emancipation of woman, it will have to do away with the ridiculous notion that to be loved, to be sweetheart and mother, is synonymous with being slave and subordinate.’29
The experiences of women were crucial to Goldman’s anarchism because they showed the interior depth of the reach of state and capitalist domination and the extent to which (even well-meaning) men benefited from their complicity with it (and also suffered from the loss of genuine intimacy). More importantly, the pockets of resilient female sexuality and love that survived even under these stultifying, controlling conditions proved for her that these are powerful aspects of human longing that exist outside of the reach of social conditioning, legal control and cultural norms. As Goldman saw it, individual agency and the spirit of genuine connection and freedom will be able to transcend the structures of domination that exist because some impulses simply cannot be co-opted by an unjust social order, no matter how interior its reach.30
Bakunin, Kropotkin, Goldman and Malatesta all developed theories of anti-statist socialism and contributed towards creating a theory and practice of freedom and equality that was opposed to hierarchy and committed to decentralization. They went much further than Proudhon in the emphasis they placed on interdependence as a necessary and desirable feature of human society.31 This interdependence is a crucial feature of anarchism, which has a distinctly relational approach to freedom and social order. From the anarchist point of view, solidarity is the foundation of freer, safer and more equal societies. Anarchism offers a distinctive model of social order, one in which people do not see their relationships between each other as defined by the authority of the state, the law and the police but instead through the free agreements that they make between themselves.32 In the following chapters, this model of social order permeates many of the anarchist practices that are described. This quote from the work of early twentieth-century Bavarian anarchist Gustav Landauer captures the anarchist sense of the revolutionary significance of building free relationships: ‘The state is a relationship between human beings, a way by which people relate to one another; and one destroys it by entering into other relationships, by behaving differently to one another.’33
His perspective anticipated some of the relational insights of mid twentieth-century French philosopher Michel Foucault’s governmentality thesis, which posits that we are not solely governed by ‘institutions’ apart from ourselves, but that we all govern each other via a complex web of relations. This complex web of relations can manifest the commodity driven values of capitalism, the hierarchical othering of the state and the patriarchy of the nuclear family, or they can manifest the unconditional respect and reciprocity of friendship and kinship, and the egalitarianism of socialism.34 Human actions and relationships are the means of shaping and ordering collective life. Thus, from this perspective, political change is a programme of relationship transformation. The point, from the anarchist view, is that we have choices about the kinds of societies that we live in, choices that we can exercise through the way that we relate to each other. As Malatesta argued:
Abolition of government does not and cannot signify destruction of the social bond. Quite the opposite: the cooperation which today is forced and which is today directly beneficial to the few, will be free, voluntary and direct, working to the advantage of all and will be all the more intense and effective for that … Out of the free collaboration of everyone, thanks to the spontaneous combination of men in accordance with their needs and sympathies, from the bottom up, from the simple to the complex, starting from the most immediate interests and working towards the most general, there will arise a social organization, the goal of which will be the greatest well-being and fullest freedom of all … . Such a society of free human beings, such a society of friends, is Anarchy.35
Through the work of Kropotkin in the late nineteenth century, free agreement through mutual aid organizations in particular came to be strongly associated with anarchism. Worker cooperation through labour cooperatives, unionization efforts, mutual saving funds, emergency funds, skills sharing, cooperative educational organizations, health care and credit cooperatives were not novel, or necessarily anarchist, but anarchists like Kropotkin radicalized the meaning of these institutions. His book Mutual Aid emphasized the human propensity for voluntary reciprocal exchange of resources and services for mutual benefit and put it at the centre of the anarchist alternative model of human social order. His ideas fitted into an emerging, influential evolutionary world view popularized by Charles Darwin’s work on natural selection. Kropotkin emphasized evolutionary findings that illustrated the significance of cooperation in the struggle for survival. He was a geographer and a biologist and challenged the ways in which Darwin’s theory of evolution had been interpreted. He argued that the Social Darwinist focus on competition overstated just one aspect of evolution, ignoring the significance of cooperation within (and often between) species: ‘sociability is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle.’36
Starting with an examination of non-human animals, Kropotkin claimed that ‘natural selection continually seeks out the ways precisely for avoiding competition as much as possible.’37 He argued that few animal species exist by directly competing with each other. In fact, he argued, those who practise mutual aid (within and across species boundaries) are likely to experience the best evolutionary prospects. Contemporary biologists might describe this in terms of co-evolution or symbiogenesis – natural systems comprised of evolving relationships and connected growth.38 Kropotkin framed human practices of mutual aid as evolutionarily pivotal by linking cooperation (rather than competition) to survival, progress and civilization. These ideas proved very popular in an era of dramatic economic restructuring, migration and social dislocation.
Kropotkin’s work was translated widely and read in various parts of the world, from Europe to the Eastern Mediterranean, Japan and South America. According to Kropotkin, mutual support, not mutual struggle, was the key to social development and an effective mechanism of association and coordination. As he argued, humans, in their pursuit of various ends and interests, create, discover, modify and destroy social organizations as they strive to meet their needs and the needs of others. Mutual aid organizations thus form networks of humans interacting in various ways, creating and assigning capacities as necessary (to create and distribute goods, provide health care or manage conflict, for example). In this way, coordination is achieved not by unifying and centralizing individuals and networks into a single territorial hierarchy like a state but by federalization and agreement. From the late nineteenth century until the Second World War, these ideas and practices were widespread in the European workers’ movement and within communities of migrant workers, and also in parts of the colonized world where the nation-state was deemed too weak to protect workers from foreign economic penetration.39 They have emerged again, more recently, in response to meeting needs during coronavirus pandemics.
By the end of the nineteenth and into the early twentieth centuries, anarchism had developed as a transnational mass working-class and peasant movement that exerted a powerful ‘gravitational force’ around the globe as the main focus of resistance to capitalism, landlordism, autocracy and imperialism. Research suggests that the movement developed through interconnected networks of activists across the continents of Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas.40 Anarchism emerged during this first era of globalizing empire ‘primarily’ as ‘a movement of the most exploited regions and peoples of the world’ in those areas closely enmeshed in global processes of capital accumulation and subject to imperial penetration.41
This is an important point because it connects the early development of anarchism to the resurgence since the early 1990s of anarchist theory and practice, which has emerged specifically in response to accelerating and intensifying patterns of capital accumulation facilitated by the neoliberal economic policies of powerful global institutions (sometimes referred to as the second era of globalizing empire). The policies of these global institutions have ensured that large corporate interests have retained economic control over the countries that had won formal political independence from colonial domination following the Second World War.42 Since around 1980, wealth has been flowing upwards from poor countries to rich countries in accelerating patterns of transfer. Within rich and poor countries, wealth has flowed upwards to corporate and financial elites. In the words of medical anthropologist and global health campaigner Paul Farmer: ‘in the course of these events, progress toward tolerable levels of inequality and sustainable development virtually stopped. Neocolonial patterns of center-periphery dependence, and of debt peonage, were reestablished, but without the slightest assumption of responsibility by the rich countries for the fate of the poor.’43 Thomas Piketty tells a similar story about national and world-resource flows in his 2014 economic study Capital in the Twenty-First Century.44
