abbielives!
22nd May 2007, 02:07
this site is awesome:
http://www.fuckauthority.org/
an essay from the site:
Humanity beyond control: Anarchism and our future
We live during an era of extreme oppression, despair, and anguish, but also an era of great opportunity for positive change. Vast technological, medical, and scientific improvements have been made in recent years, making it technically possible for the human race to guarantee not only subsistence, but prosperity, for all members of its population. The greatest impediment to universal prosperity no longer comes from the natural world; it comes from within our species, from hierarchical human institutions and social systems. Humans have struggled for thousands of years to overcome natural threats to our existence, only to reach a point where our existence is threatened by our own social systems, specifically, at the current point in history, the state-capitalist system.
Global capitalism is an overwhelming catastrophe, perhaps the most dangerous the human species has ever faced. As a result of exploitative capitalist economic policies, billions of people worldwide live in abject poverty and desolation, slowly dying from the moment of their birth from malnutrition and curable diseases, never allowed a chance to experience life as anything but torture, never given a chance to manifest their own creative human potential. In a world ruled by capitalism, 8 million people die every year from poverty, about 22,000 per day.[1] One billion children live in abject poverty, 640 million do not have access to appropriate shelter, 140 million have never attended school, 400 million do not have access to clean uncontaminated water, 500 million do not have basic sanitation, 270 million have no access to health care, and 90 million are severely food deprived.[2] Approximately 12.3 million people worldwide live in conditions of “modern slavery,”[3] while over one billion people live on less than one dollar of income per day and over three billion live on less than two dollars per day.[4] The root of this extreme poverty is clearly political, rather than natural. For example, consider that the world economy actually produces one and a half times the amount of food necessary to provide the entire human population with adequate and nutritious meals, but despite this, one in seven people is severely food deprived.[5]
In the midst of this tremendous poverty, a tiny portion of the world’s population lives in extreme prosperity. At the present time, the 50 richest people in the world have a combined income that is greater than the income of the poorest 416 million.[6] At the end of the 20th century, the world’s 225 richest people had combined assets of over one trillion dollars, equal to the annual income of the poorest 47% of the world’s population, or 2.5 billion people; and the three richest people in the world had assets that exceeded the combined GDP of the 48 least developed countries in the world. It was estimated that it would have cost only 40 billion dollars a year to provide universal access to basic education, health care, reproductive health care, adequate food, clean water, and safe sewers, which was less than 4% of the combined wealth of the 225 richest people in the world.[7]
This sort of astronomical inequality and poverty is an essential feature of the capitalist system. Capitalism encourages people to pursue infinite individual accumulation, regardless of the human and environmental costs of this accumulation. The overall affects of systematic capitalist accumulation are severe, and they have the potential to destroy the entire biosphere and the human race.[8] Moreover, the reckless competition that capitalism mandates necessarily creates a world of extreme material inequality; one in which billions of people fail to meet subsistence even when it is technically possible for every human in the world to live in prosperity. Global inequality has drastically increased as the imperatives of capitalism have been imposed across the world by corporations, their financial institutions (such as the World Bank, IMF, WTO, and G8), and their state and military benefactors. These groups force underdeveloped countries to liberalize trade, reduce tariffs, privatize social services, and loosen environmental and labor restrictions in order to create a situation that is more hospitable to corporations. When countries refuse to comply with the mandates of international capital, they are severely punished and face international sanctions, military assault, or simply a denial of life-saving humanitarian aid. The price for defying elite dictation is severe, but the price for complying with it can be even worse, as countries that do so must allow billions of dollars in debt and material resources to be extracted by corporate mercantilists.
The current system of global capitalism is just the latest extension of a system that has been dominant throughout much of human history, in which certain individuals and groups violently take control of communal resources and then force other people to perform work to regain access to the stolen resources. This system of enforced economic hierarchy has existed in different forms throughout history, but it has always involved horrific poverty, warfare, and oppression. It is clear that anyone who believes in human equality or simply a level playing field for all people has an obligation to overthrow this system of enforced economic hierarchy. The question for people with libertarian and egalitarian tendencies is, how can we organize society in a way that corresponds to our ideals, what system should replace state-capitalism?
The traditional antithesis of capitalism, Marxist socialism, has not proved effective in creating a better world. During the 20th Century, Marxist movements struggling against capitalist hierarchy were not successful in abolishing hierarchy, but merely created new autocratic systems, as the industrial elite were replaced by economic planners, party leaders, and bureaucrats who had direct control over the allocation of the state’s wealth and thus were able to expropriate capital from laborers and peasants, just as the industrial mangers, feudal lords, and slave holders had done before them.
These vanguard Marxist movements failed primarily because of their intrinsic authoritarian nature. They generally assumed that material wealth was the basic source of social power, and the focal point of all class contention, but did not recognize that the root cause of economic inequality is power inequality. While it is quite obvious that human history has been comprised substantially of struggles over the resources essential for subsistence and prosperity, these resources cannot be consolidated by a minority unless the minority possesses consolidated power in other realms of human life, particularly, in the military and ideological spheres. Authoritarian Marxists may have designed their programs to temporarily eliminate material inequality, but failed to realize that such inequality was created by authoritarian social structures, such as the very structures they were attempting to create or take control of.
There is no room for vanguadists of any kind in the anticapitalist movements of the 21st Century. The idea that a morally pure vanguard elite could take over the bastions of ideological, military, and political power and use these tools autocratically to advance the interest of their society as a whole is outrageous and absurd. No vanguard takeover will ever be able to address the fundamental injustices present in hierarchical systems. The problem is not that absolute power is concentrated in the hands of the wrong group of elites; the problem is that power is centralized at all. Any group that consolidates absolute power will always abuse its privileges and exploit its subjects, as is obvious to anyone familiar with the “benign” dictatorships of history. The only free society is one in which all people are equally empowered to defend and advance their own self interest, their own material needs.
There is a fundamental philosophical flaw in both authoritarian Marxism and liberal capitalism; namely, both fail to understand that all people in a society cannot be equal unless they are all free from oppression, and that all people in a society cannot be free from oppression as long as there is material inequality and a hierarchical distribution of the tools of power. Freedom, for the purpose of this essay, will be defined as “the capacity to exercise the widest potential range of action without forceful physical restraint,” thus encompassing both positive freedom—freedom from material need—and negative freedom—freedom from violent human coercion. Social equality will be defined as “a state at which all members of a population have equal opportunity to enhance their own wellbeing,” not necessarily a state in which all members of a population experience exact material equality.
Social inequality—that is, arbitrarily enforced inequality of opportunity among people of different classes, as opposed to a natural inequality of ability—only can be sustained by forceful oppression; so, any politico-economic system which exhibits inequality is not free, if one sector of the population is more or less subject to institutional oppression as a consequence of exercising their own autonomy. Similarly, a politico-economic system has not truly achieved equality among its citizens if power is highly centralized and its institutions have the power to act coercively. Therefore, it would be a mistake to say that equality could ever be realized under a state-socialist regime in which an elite group of economic planners, party leaders, and bureaucrats wield absolute economic, military, and political power over the rest of society; or that freedom could ever be realized in a capitalist country where those at the top of the hierarchy have more opportunity than those at the bottom, and therefore relatively greater license to exercise their autonomy.
For an example of the inequality of freedom present in a liberal capitalist society, consider the penal systems in these countries which are designed to severely punish members of the working class for petty theft or for single cases of homicide, while members of the capitalist class are rewarded for expropriation that, in principle, is identical to working class theft, and will never be held accountable for the thousands of deaths their actions indirectly cause. The social apparatuses in these societies are designed to arbitrarily restrict the freedom of some and enhance the freedoms of others based upon their position in the economic hierarchy. Such a society, in which varying degrees of liberty exist, is not in the least bit freer than any feudal, monarchist, or otherwise authoritarian society; in every case, those at the top of the social system have always had complete freedom to act, while those at the bottom were subject to repression and coercion, and were often severely punished for acting on their own autonomy.
So, for a society to truly realize the ideals of equality or liberty, it cannot only be only socialist, and it cannot only be libertarian; it must be libertarian-socialist, or Anarchist.
What exactly is Anarchism? Anarchism is commonly associated with terrorism, chaos, and irrationality, among other unpopular things, not because these things have anything to do with Anarchist ideas, but because Anarchism is a real threat to the class of people that holds ideological power in the world, and the easiest way to combat a threatening idea is to slander the idea and its proponents, to marginalize it in public discourse. Anarchy is, in reality, the safest, most rational, and least violent social system that has ever been conceived of; it is simply the union of free individuals against oppression and for the perpetuation of freedom in their society. Anarchists seek to abolish all hierarchical and coercive institutions, because these institutions diminish freedom and perpetuate economic inequality and violence, and to create a new, decentralized society in which every person has power over his or her own life, and in which problems are solved organically through cooperation, compromise, and consensus, rather than through institutional violence. Anarchism is about creating a society in which all people are able to fulfill all of their fundamental human needs, in which all people have complete freedom of thought and action.
Anarchists seek to decentralize and democratize political and economic power, so that everyone can participate in making decisions that are relevant to their lives, and so that no one has to suffer under authoritarianism. Any form of centralized power presents a grave threat to the liberty, safety, and prosperity of people everywhere. All of the greatest political tragedies in history, without exception, have occurred when an excessive amount of power became centralized at the disposal of an elite minority. These plutocrats utilized their tyrannical power to exploit the rest of the human population in the desperate pursuit of material wealth, ideological goals, and further centralization of power. All of the most vicious and egregious empires have been ruled in this manner, by elites who were committed to infinite accumulation of material wealth, even to the point of self destruction.
In the modern era, the capacity for such centralization of power is far greater than ever before, and the murderous consequences of such centralization are far more extreme, as was proven most infamously by the regimes of Joseph Stalin and Adolph Hitler, which consolidated totalitarian power and utilized modern technology to systematically execute millions of people they deemed threatening to their power. Today, the crisis of global capitalism is in essence another crisis of an excessive amount of power concentrated in the hands of a tiny minority of the world’s population. This crisis can be seen both internally in specific capitalist countries, and on a global scale, in which all international diplomatic interaction between nation-states occurs in the shadow of a single capitalist hegemon, the United States, and all economic interaction occurs under the shadow of corporate tyrannies and their financial institutions.
Anarchists seek to destroy the institutions that perpetuate the hierarchical distribution of politico-economic power, in order to create a society in which all people have an equal amount of power. The ideal Anarchist society would be one in which all hierarchic institutions had been abolished and the institutions that were still necessary had been specifically designed to prevent them from coming under the control of an elite minority. Any and all violent institutions of social control such as the police and military would be dissolved, and every person would have equal access to the tools of violence as well as to information on the workings of the world.
Contrary to misconceptions found in mainstream discourse, an Anarchist or libertarian socialist society would not be without any institutions or any form of organization; people in Anarchist societies could still form mutually beneficial communal institutions. An Anarchist society would simply have abolished mandatory and hierarchical institutions and organizations.
All community policy concerning labor, the economy, social services, education, the environment, technology, and other issues could be decided upon in democratic municipal meetings attended by all citizens of the community. Most (if not all) decisions would be made by consensus. The local councils could elect temporary representatives to serve on larger representative bodies, which could make decisions concerning issues of importance to larger populations of people. These representatives could be recalled at any time by the local council and replaced. In turn, these regional councils could elect representatives to larger assemblies with jurisdiction over larger areas, and these larger assemblies could elect representatives to even larger assemblies, perhaps with international jurisdiction. Such an international assembly would have jurisdiction only over issues of global importance such as human rights issues, war and peace, medical pandemics, and humanitarian aid. For any decision by the larger assembly to take effect at the community levels, the decision would have to be ratified by community assemblies. These councils are not governmental bodies, as they are voluntary institutions that do not have the power to govern, subjugate, or coerce.
All sectors of the economy would be radically transformed, with all goods and services produced in publicly owned work places by self-employed and self-managed workers. In an Anarchist economy, all members of a community would have the freedom to work in different sectors of the economy at different times and to split time between intellectual and physical labor. A system that encouraged laborers to work in all sectors of the economy would inspire greater innovation, as different workers with different abilities perfected techniques for performing necessary tasks. At the same time, people who were uniquely talented in one area would have the freedom to work only in that area. Machines, instead of being used by employers to wage class warfare, as they are now,[9] would be utilized to perform rote tasks found undesirable by people, thus making it possible for people to spend far less time working and far more time on creative and scientific projects.
There are a variety of ways that a transformed economy could be administered, and future societies ought to experiment with different approaches to determine which method proves to be the most effective.
One economic system to consider is the mutualist model: the most individualistic, least communistic model. In a society in which all tools of production and service were publicly owned, and in which all workers were skilled enough to work in a variety of different sectors of the economy, it might be unproblematic to allow market forces to determine the prices of goods and services, and thus the income a worker should receive for performing a certain task; if employers no longer existed, the market would no longer be a tool of elites and would no longer marginalize workers. Market forces would ensure that the economy worked in the interests of the people who depended on it: if a certain good or service was being widely demanded, the price of the good or service would increase and thus it would be more profitable for a worker to employ himself or herself in the ways that would be most beneficial to the society as a whole. This would also ensure that workers who employed themselves in the most onerous work would receive the greatest compensation. At the same time, it is absolutely vital that such a market be under democratic control, with community assemblies in power to enact any restrictions deemed necessary to promote the interest of the society as a whole.
A second system to consider is democratic central planning: a model which strikes a balance between individualism and communism. Economic planners would draw up several potential plans for the economy, and the community council would choose which plan to follow for a certain period of time. Certain exchange rates between products and services would be decided upon, depending on how labor intensive a certain good or service was, and workers would barter with other workers. If this system worked, individuals would still command control over the fruits of their labor, but the planning system would ensure that workers would receive the same amount of purchasing power for the same amount of work.
The final system to consider is Anarcho-communism, which is the least individualistic and the most communistic model. This is simply a gift economy, which realizes the slogan "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” All products created by the community would be available to all members of that community. A community would decide what tasks it needed to complete to be self-sufficient, and workers would complete them as they felt like doing so.
Of course, every person in a community would have complete choice as to how to participate in the economy, as long as this participation did not infringe on the liberties of other community members. Some people might choose to participate individually in the economy, others might band together with friends to form communes, and others might participate in different ways at different times and with different people. The important thing is that an Anarchist economy will be based on negotiation and voluntary interaction, rather than on violence.
While I personally think the Anarcho-communist model is perhaps the most desirable, there is no way to know now which model would be the most successful, and it will take experimentation to arrive at such a conclusion. It is important to remember that Anarchism does not claim to have the one and only correct tactical formula to bring about an ideal society, as Marxism does. Anarchists want to create the most libertarian and egalitarian future that can possibly be created, but we claim to have no precise knowledge about how such a society will be organized, or which specific tactical strategy will create such a society. Perfecting Anarchism will require a great deal of experimentation.
Anarchism and Human Nature
Throughout the history of political philosophy, many people have rejected Anarchism as Utopian and impossible; that is to say, their understanding of human nature suggested that humanity could not function without oppression, suffering, and hierarchy. These critics of Anarchist thought argued that no society could ever achieve complete freedom for all its citizens because of an intrinsically “evil” nature of humans; or, if a society could achieve universal freedom, it would come at a terrible cost. First off, it is absolutely absurd to argue about whether the essential nature of the human species is “good” or “evil.” It is inappropriate to discuss something’s essence in moral terms, because morality is a standard of judging freely taken choices. No one chooses their intrinsic nature, any more than they choose to be born male or female, homosexual or heterosexual, Iraqi or American.
Instead of discussing human nature in terms of morality, we should discuss it in terms of potential. Is every human being born with the potential to be peaceful, loving, creative, and unique? I believe that the answer is yes. Geneticists have not located a gene that makes an individual a criminal or a murder. Every person is born with a physical and genetic foundation on which to build his or her life. Each person has, at the beginning of his or her life, the potential to be a murder, a criminal, or a truly ethical being. While every individual has freedom to shape his or her life, the choices a person is presented with are to an enormous extent dependent on the social environment a person lives in, and thus a person’s social environment often determines which potentiality is realized. People who are unable to fulfill their fundamental human needs[10] because of the constraints of their social environment are far more likely to manifest anti-social potentialities and exhibit “evil” characteristics than people who are able to meet all of their fundamental needs. There are healthy and unhealthy ways to fulfill all human desires. When people are unable to fulfill their desires in healthy ways due to repressive social and cultural forces, they frequently resort to unhealthy, anti-social methods of fulfilling of their desires which involve harming living other beings.
All of the most disturbing anti-social tendencies found in the humans of today are born of the suppression of fundamental human need. For instance, take sexuality: when a person’s sexual needs are suppressed by intolerant cultural or political forces, the needs are transmogrified and manifest themselves in horrible and grotesque ways, leading people to engage in rape, incest, or pedophilia. It’s no coincidence that the people most subjected to cultural suppression are also most likely to engage in anti-social behavior. The Catholic priest must renounce traditional outlets of sexual expression, but his urges still manifest themselves, as a sexual lust for the most vulnerable people in society: children.
For a second example, take power: if an individual feels disempowered at work, at church, or at school, he or she may attempt to compensate by acting cruelly, authoritatively, and sadistically towards people more vulnerable than him or herself: a spouse, a child, an animal, etc. Again, it is no surprise that the people in a society who feel least empowered—members of the oppressed social groups—are the most likely to engage in violent, aggressive, or sadistic behavior.
In a hierarchical society, very few people are able to fulfill all of their fundamental needs; indeed, billions of people never even fulfill their most basic biological needs. It is necessarily this way under a hierarchical system. A person who has fulfilled all his or her needs will never submit to another person, will never allow him or herself to be turned into a soldier or a wage-slave. One individual only wields authority over other people if the oppressor has the power to obstruct the fulfillment of the oppressed people’s fundamental human needs. An employer has power over his or her employs because he or she has the power to deny them their subsistence if they act insubordinately. A government has power over its citizens because it has the power to murder them, to deny them of their right to life. If people were able to fulfill all of their fundamental needs, they would no longer allow themselves to be dominated.
People whose fundamental human needs for companionship, material subsistence, autonomy, sexuality, intellectual exploration, and creative expression are suppressed will always have a tormented and turbulent psychology, will always be internally at war, and will always exhibit anti-social characteristics. The only psychologically healthy society would be Anarchy, in which all humans had would have the opportunity to fulfill their fundamental needs. An Anarchist society which allowed all its members to fulfill their fundamental human needs would almost certainly see a virtual disappearance of violence, sex offenses, and other anti-social behaviors, and an increase in desirable behaviors.
With this understanding of human nature in mind, we can now address specific arguments against Anarchism that deal with human nature. First off, what is human nature, according to critics of Anarchism? In his essay Goals and Visions, Noam Chomsky quotes Nobel Prize winning economist James Buchanan making a prototypical establishmentarian statement about human nature:
“Any person’s ideal situation is one that allows him full freedom of action and inhibits the behavior of others so as to force adherence to his own desires. That is to say, each person seeks mastery over a world of slaves.”[11]
Chomsky notes that this opinion would have been considered “pathological” by any classical liberal thinker. I don’t know anyone who would admit to daydreaming about being a slaveholder, although it’s not entirely surprising to hear such talk from neoliberal economists or Wall Street brokers, who are of course the ideological (and often, hereditary) heirs of America’s slaveholders. We should always remember which people are trying to discredit Anarchism: it’s no coincidence that the people who argue that humans can’t exist without coercion are the people at the top of the social hierarchy, whose privilege would be threatened if coercive institutions were abolished. Regardless of the fact that people attempting to discredit Anarchism have an economic stake in the perpetuation of the current system, their various arguments need to be responded to. I’ll try to do that quickly.
“A society based on universal freedom, cooperation, and voluntary association could never work.” This argument can be easily refuted. There already have been Anarchies that have worked, not only in revolutionary Spain, the Paris Commune, many indigenous societies, and most prehistoric societies, to pick a few examples, but also in everyday interactions between people. Any time a group of people voluntarily comes together to engage in mutually beneficial activities, they are proving that humans can indeed function without coercion and hierarchy.
Furthermore, just because there has not been a sustained Anarchist experiment within a modern nation does not mean that it is impossible for Anarchy to work in a complex modern society. Before the French and American revolutions, reactionaries might have made the same arguments about democracy that they make about Anarchism today: it’s a nice idea, but it’s Utopian, and is without historical precedent in our modern time. Luckily, the American and French democrats dared to leave the past and fought to create a more libertarian and egalitarian world than the one they were born in to.
Anyway, while Anarchism might not be perfect, it is hard to imagine that Anarchism could be any worse than state-capitalism or Marxist-Leninism, the two political systems which do have historical precedent in the modern era. We have a choice to either continue to live under one of these two brutal and anti-human systems, or to create anew and hope for the best.
“People will not work unless they are constantly on the edge of subsistence, so, if a society were to ensure that everyone could obtain subsistence, everyone would stop working.” While I personally think that a society where no one worked and everyone had access to basic necessities would be a vast improvement over the current system—which requires the vast majority of the world’s population to spend the majority of its lifetime working to avoid starvation—I do not believe that people would stop working entirely in a free, nonhierarchical society. Why is it so hard to imagine a community dividing up necessary tasks among able-bodied workers and performing them? Don’t communities work together on volunteer projects at the present time, building communal playgrounds and parks, for example, even though every member of the community is already spending the vast majority of his or her time working for private business? Why can’t the same system also work for maintaining a community’s roads, or growing a community’s food?
There is reason to believe that if hierarchical systems were abolished, the amount of time each person would need to work to maintain a functioning society would drop drastically. If a politico-economic system were created that did not waste trillions of dollars of resources on protecting the privileges of a tiny minority from the rest of the populace, and that used technology not to wage class warfare, but to raise the collective standard of living, society could conceivably function with the average worker spending far less time laboring than they do under the current system.
I think that people would be willing to work for a few hours everyday in exchange for access to a communal store of resources: food, clothes, shelter, select luxury items, etc. Most people have an intrinsic desire to be socially productive and creative, and if they were allowed complete control over their own working environment, I think that almost everyone would want to perform socially beneficial work, especially if every laborer were able to split time between different jobs—some requiring intellectual labor and others manual labor—so that every worker could have the most stimulating and interesting work experience possible. It is hard to believe, anyway, that the billions of people who now do miserable work for starvation wages would not be willing to engage in enriching work in exchange for guaranteed prosperity.
“In an Anarchist society, there would be rampant crime.” First of all, it should be noted when discussing crime and its relation to politico-economic organization that on a global scale, the crimes perpetrated by centralized, hierarchical institutions such as states and corporations overwhelmingly exceed the crimes committed by individual citizens; therefore, if we want to create a safer, less violent society, we should begin by combating institutionalized crime, instead of focusing on individual crime which is extremely insignificant in comparison.
However, an Anarchist society would also be able to keep its individual members safe from civilian crime at least as well as the existing system, in addition to doing away with the far greater institutional crime. People in an Anarchist society would simply form reciprocal relationships with other members of their community to defend themselves, rather than relying on coercive and often predatory institutions for protection. This is how all people protected themselves throughout history until very recently, and it was at least as effective as the current system in keeping people safe. Anarchists assume that if a person was getting raped or assaulted, the person’s friends, family, and neighbors won’t allow it to happen, but would come to the person’s assistance and protect him or her. Because we think that people are willing to help and protect each other, we don’t feel that we need to rely on oppressive governments or police. Anarchists find it bizarre that in the present society people are more likely to trust impersonal strangers such as police, lawyers, and judges to protect them than they are to rely on their own friends and family.
Of course, Anarchism can’t completely do away with crime and murder, but neither can state-capitalism or authoritarian Marxism, or any other political system thus conceived of. However, there is reason to believe that an Anarchist society would be far safer than a state-capitalist society. Anti-social behavior almost always arises in people who have been subjected to severe institutional repression, who have been frustrated in their attempts to fulfill their fundamental needs. If all people had complete control over their lives, and had the opportunity to fulfill all of their fundamental needs, cases of anti-social behavior would be far less frequent than in the current society.
“All people are essentially selfish and anti-social; any system that is based on cooperation is doomed to failure.” Interestingly enough, even if we were to accept the absolutely heinous, despicable view that human beings are necessarily anti-social, which is clearly a erroneous, there would still be reason to dismantle centralized institutions and fight to create a libertarian society, for the simple reason that if individual humans are inherently anti-social, then human-made institutions must be just as anti-social, but far more dangerous, because they are far more powerful. If people will always be violently struggling against each other, it’s better for our species and the biosphere if people fight individually with their bare hands and tools they can build themselves, not as monolithic blocs with atomic weapons. Even if human beings are essentially egoistic, Anarchy can still be established and perpetuated, because it is actually in the egoistic interest of billions of people in the world to establish and maintain a libertarian and egalitarian global society, for the simple reason that the current politico-economic system enslaves, exploits, and brutalizes them. Anarchy does not require self-sacrifice from members of its community to survive; it simply requires that individuals form a lasting union against tyranny.
However, we abuse the human race by even considering such heinous ideas about its essence. The notion that human beings are fundamentally selfish is absurd. While utter selfishness is certainly a trait that capitalism tries to foster, it’s doubtful that the human race would have survived as long as it has as if it were a group of anti-social, profit-maximizing egoists. Humans are sociable beings who generally care for the needs of one another; during times of tribulation, they almost always cooperate and share to collectively survive. In fact, even the enemies of egalitarianism are aware that humans are cooperative beings: in America for example, human compassion is so strong that corporate capitalists have had to spend billions of dollars on propaganda to convince people that the United States’ foreign policy is truly promoting democracy and freedom, that capitalism is lifting people out of poverty and creating a better world. If the enemy regards compassion as so powerful that they need to spend billions of dollars to appeal to it, I don’t think it is wise for people who genuinely want to live in a better world to underestimate its power.
“Anarchy will fail, because people are naturally competitive, and Anarchy seeks to stifle competition.” Actually, Anarchism is about promoting competition, not stifling it; we just want change the focus of this competition. Under state-capitalism, the competitive urge which is almost certainly innate in humans is utterly squandered in a meaningless war of every individual against every other individual for the resources people need to survive, which have been made artificially scare by the capitalist economic system, and for commodities which provide a despicably inadequate substitute for identity and meaning in our culture. This perpetual struggle for wealth benefits no one; it only erodes the intelligence, strength, uniqueness, and adaptability of all individuals, rewarding those who are most obedient and most willing to conform to the roles that the politico-economic structure has prescribed for them. This system turns the human being into yet another mass-produced, interchangeable part.
Under Anarchy, humans would be able to engage in competition over matters that are far more meaningful, beneficial, and interesting; the energy and potential of the competitive urge would not be squandered as it is today. When we have done away with the artificially produced inequity of resources, we will be able to devote our competitive energy towards perfecting ourselves and the world around us. We will compete as artists, as we will all have the time and energy to create and enjoy poetry, theater, music, and art that is truly exquisite and approaches perfection; we will compete as scientists, as we all attempt to develop a greater understanding and appreciation of the universe; we will compete as philosophers, as well all strive to develop meaningful and entertaining stories which help us understand our existence; we will compete as philanthropists, as we all seek to give our own unique gifts to the world and its inhabitants. While there will certainly be differing forms of art, differing scientific theories, differing stories about existence, and different ideas about how to best help living creatures, and thus creative competition between different individuals working in these fields, the end result of the competition will be creative, rather than destructive as it is now. If two armies compete, the result is a field full of corpses. If two artists compete, the result is an enriched experience for both artists, and for everyone who views their art. This is really what Anarchy is about; it isn’t an abolition of competition, but simply a change in its focus, from destruction to creation.
“An Anarchist society would become stagnate and fail to meet its full potential in areas of importance to the human race as a whole, such as in science and art. Development in science and art can only occur within an economically competitive social framework, and such development will ultimately raise the cumulative quality of life more than universal freedom.” I think one would be hard pressed to find a truly gifted mind in science or art who was convinced to pursue his or her work solely by external rather than internal motivation. In fact, many geniuses were so internally motivated that they allowed themselves to fall into poverty or to be socially ostracized in order to continue their work. There is every reason to believe that uniquely talented people would continue to make their contributions to society whether or not they received material reward for doing so. If it is hard to imagine an artist or scientist motivated by external reward, it is nearly impossible to imagine that such a person would have anything worth contributing. I don’t think that people really need manufactured, commercial art, any more than they need the uninspired insights of a career intellectual who just wants to get tenure. Truly g
It’s hard to imagine a social system more nurturing of art and science than an Anarchist society. Throughout history, the number of people who could spend their time creating art or pondering science was extremely limited, as only the richest had the time and energy to devote to such endeavors. In an Anarchist society, absolutely everyone would have the time and energy to devote to art and science; one would expect the number of scientific and artistic advances to increase exponentially.
“Biological evolution cannot occur unless the weakest humans die before they can reproduce, and universal freedom is less likely to raise quality of life as a whole than progressive human evolution.” I think here Anarchists and some non-Anarchists just disagree; nothing is worth a future of perpetual holocaust, no matter what wonderful characteristics the surviving humans could acquire in the end. While these eugenicists dream of a future free of disease, of ultra-intelligent humans, etc, the sacrifice is far too immense and unceasing, and there’s no real reason to believe that the human race will survive long enough to undergo significant evolution anyway.
“If Anarchy is established, elitist reactionaries will simply reinstitute hierarchical and coercive institutions.” While elitist reactionaries would almost certainly attempt to subvert any Anarchist experiment, the threat of a group establishing hierarchic and coercive institutions would be greatly diminished, as establishing such an institution would require a large body of people to knowingly and willingly subject themselves to exploitation. Freed slaves do not typically renounce their freedom. However, the struggle against oppression and centralization will never entirely end, and people living within libertarian-socialist societies would have to remain vigilant to ensure that their society was not subverted.
The Anarchist Social Contract
What should an Anarchist society do if one person infringes on the liberties of another? Can it protect the freedom of persecuted people without being coercive? First of all, it is important to distinguish between two types of freedom: absolute freedom, and relative or social freedom. Absolute freedom is something that every human being has throughout his or her entire life. From any point in space and time, a person has an infinite number of different possible actions, and he or she can choose to perform any of these actions. So, people living in Nazi Germany had the absolute freedom to practice Judaism, and people in Bolshevik Russia had the absolute freedom to speak out against the crimes of the government.
When people talk about freedom in political discussions, however, they aren’t talking about absolute freedom, which can never be taken away or expanded, no matter what political system is in power, but instead relative or social freedom. Social freedom encompasses the range of activities that a person can engage in without expecting to receive a coercive reaction from individual members of society or social institutions. So, the United States’ constitution grants its citizens the right say whatever they want without being subjected to imprisonment or execution. Relative freedom is basically determined by a social or political contract which dictates what individual actions merit what social reactions. An Anarchist society might also be based on an informal social contract for organic interaction between free individuals: every individual is free to act in any way that does not threaten the life or fundamental liberty of another person without being subjected to a coercive reaction from another individual. If a person violates this contract, then he or she theoretically forfeits its protection, and may be subject to a coercive reaction from another free individual.
So, individual members of an Anarchist society would be justified in acting to limit the actions of any person who infringed on the freedom of another person. In such a case, the person who committed the anti-social behavior could be taken before a democratic community court, which could make a decision as to how individuals could act to ensure that the criminal did not commit the same crime again. If a person was convicted of pedophilia, for instance, he would not have to be incarcerated, but would simply be kept away from vulnerable children by community members. It is important to remember that while people in an Anarchist society would be completely free to do whatever they wanted to do, they would not be protected from the social consequences of their actions, the reactions from other completely free members of their society.
The Anarchist
What defines the individual Anarchist? This is a highly important question, as there can never be an Anarchist society, but only a society of Anarchists. The Anarchist revolution must not only be an external revolution which restructures the physical reality of the world; it must also be an internal revolution within every member of a society that restructures every subject. In a Nietzschean sense, an Anarchist revolution must transform the human race, from one that accepts authority, to one that rebels against it; from one that is complacent with oppression, to one that has an untainted, unquenchable thirst for freedom; from one merely survives, to one that lives joyously, passionately, and imaginatively. The will to freedom exists within every person, and only centuries of repression have been able to stifle or transmogrify it.
The Anarchist is forever at war with all forms of oppression—psychological, physical, and emotional; forever at war with anything that would steal his or her autonomy and thereby diminish his or her existence. Oppression has permeated human society to great depths, and it is the Anarchist’s task to search out these hidden oppressions and unveil them, so that they may be destroyed. By its very nature, oppression seeks to cloak itself, so that the oppressed begin to perceive the oppression as a natural part of life. The Anarchist unveils the mythology that justifies the oppression, for in destroying oppressive devices, the Anarchist increases his freedom and thereby exists more fully. The Anarchist desires not only to be free himself, but for the entire human community to be equally free, for the entire human race to exist more fully, and thus he attempts to arouse in others the same enlightenment and thirst for freedom that he knows. The Subject of the past created altars and monuments, gifts to gods and kings; the Anarchist creates art and explores science, gifts to humanity.
Tactical considerations for revolutionary change
The greatest priority for people Americans who wish to live in a libertarian and egalitarian world must be bringing about revolutionary change in the United States. The underdeveloped world is more than willing to liberate itself, as it has proven repeatedly; the greatest impediment to revolutionary change in the undeveloped world has come from the governments of the developed world. The greatest service the people of the United States could do for the people of the underdeveloped countries would be to overthrow the government that has repeatedly thwarted revolutionary struggles for liberation in the underdeveloped world.
If we wish to bring about revolutionary change, we must first start by waging ideological warfare against the powers that be. It is important to keep in mind, when developing a tactical strategy for revolution, that neither capitalism nor statism can survive without the consent of at least some of its victims. Without disciplined, domesticated proletarians willing to fight as soldiers in wars of expansion abroad or as police to control domestic populations, without workers in the factories, fields, and offices and consumers in the stores, both systems would ultimately crumble. This bodes well for the enemies of state-capitalism: if we can convince people to stop participating in their own oppression, the oppressive systems would disintegrate, and a freer world could be built on the ashes of the old order. Theoretically then, the next revolutionary change could occur without any blood being shed whatsoever, with the victims of state-capitalism bringing the system to a standstill by refusing to participate in it and then seizing private property and taking collective control over it. A gradual, nonviolent evolutionary change may not turn out to be practical or desirable as compared to a rapid revolutionary change, but we must remember that state-capitalism is dependent on its victims, and so our best strategy for destroying it is to help awaken its victims.
Most Americans share our libertarian and egalitarian values, but do not have access to important factual information about capitalism, imperialism, and Anarchist theory, and thus they can be easily manipulated by the billion dollar propaganda industry. As long as the American populace remains ignorant about the human costs of American imperialism and global capitalism, and about Anarchist alternatives to the status quo, we will not be able to build a mass based libertarian socialist movement. To combat ignorance about these tremendously important political issues, we can share factual information about political events with the public, as well as the conclusions that we have drawn from these facts, and let them decide for themselves whether or not they agree with our conclusions. We will never win the ideological war by expressing our opinions in incestuous academic journals and websites. Instead, we ought to share our ideas and suspicions about the way the world works, as well as our ideas about Anarchist alternatives on pirate radio stations, in massive campaigns of pamphleting, and in publications written for audiences of ordinary people instead of for activists. We must arm people with knowledge, and invite them to liberate themselves.
Finally, we must strive to “build the structure of the new society within the shell of the old," to quote a Wobblie slogan—by working within our communities to build voluntary institutions of mutual aid to feed the hungry and house the homeless, but also to allow people to enjoy themselves and build relationships. Companionship, love, and happiness are highly revolutionary emotions, particularly in a society that promotes insecurity, anxiety, hatred, and depression as a way to foster compulsive consumerism. If there is to be a truly revolutionary society, it must be built on the ideal of achieving universal happiness, not ignorant bliss, but the sort of happiness that comes with enlightenment, companionship, and freedom.
Humanity beyond control
Some interesting questions present themselves as we begin to contemplate a society without coercion and social control. How would a truly liberated human race live? What would the human race be able to achieve if it were not fettered by a vicious social system designed to promote the most undesirable human impulses and stifle the most beautiful impulses? What would define the culture and society of a human race no longer constrained by hierarchical systems which strive to stultify creativity, uniqueness, and brilliance and encourage conformity, obedience, and submission? These questions have not yet been answered, and cannot be answered until a truly liberated society is established, but it is obvious that life in the Anarchist society of the future will be far more interesting and fulfilling than life under the state-capitalism of today. Although we cannot know specifically what life will be like in the Anarchist society of the future, we can make a few speculations as to how it will differ from our present existence.
Life in an Anarchist society would be healthier, more interesting, and more fulfilling than life under state-capitalism. At present, the vast majority of a person’s lifetime is spent attempting to perpetuate his or her existence: laboring at rote tasks in order to earn subsistence, forming superficial relationships with other humans when it is economically necessary to do so, even theoretically paying the right amount to the church in hopes of entering entrance to heaven. For those who wish to see the human race move beyond this Pavlovian existence, Anarchism is the only option. For people living in an Anarchist society, creative, productive work would be a desirable end in itself, not a necessary means of existence. Companionship would be a desirable end in itself, and not a means of increasing one’s economic wellbeing. Spirituality would be an end in itself for those people who still wished to partake in spiritual experiences.
Imagine a society that did not routinely deny its members the right to fulfill their fundamental needs, that did not routinely suppress their free action. Imagine a society without government, prisons, police, militaries, churches, or private property. This prospect—for a humanity beyond control—is the most glorious future that our species could aspire to, and it is worth devoting one’s entire existence to bringing it about.
[1] Time Magazine, The End of Poverty (http://www.time.com/time/archive/preview/0,10987,1034738,00.html)
[2] UNICEF (www.unicef.org (http://www.unicef.org)), State of the World’s Children 2005
[3] International Labor Organization (www.ilo.org (http://www.ilo.org))
[4] Net Aid (www.netaid.org (http://www.netaid.org)), “What is Poverty?”
Global Issues (www.globalissues.org (http://www.globalissues.org)), “Poverty facts and stats”
[5] UN Food and Agricultural Organization, cited in the Greenpeace (www.greenpeace.org (http://www.greenpeace.org)) article “Feeding the world: fact versus fiction”
[6] A Compendium of Inequality: The Human Development Report 2005 (www.globalpolicy.org (http://www.globalpolicy.org))
[7] United Nations, cited in the Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research (www.transnational.org (http://www.transnational.org)) article, World Statistics: The Global Humanitarian Crisis.
[8] See Noam Chomsky’s Hegemony or Survival, for a discussion of the very real threat to human survival posed by state-capitalism. In particular, see Chomsky’s introductory chapter, and his discussions on the Cuban Missile Crisis, global climate change, and the militarization of space.
[9] Machines are currently used to marginalize the power of workers. Machines replace workers, thereby decreasing the number of available jobs and increasing the number of unemployed workers, thereby lowering wages and decreasing the power of workers generally.
[10] These fundamental human needs include physiological needs, safety needs, belongingness and love needs, esteem needs, intellectual needs, and aesthetic needs, according to the famous psychologist Abraham Maslow.
[11] Noam Chomsky, Chomsky On Anarchism
Edit: removed a the name of a person upon request by them - Sentinel
http://www.fuckauthority.org/
an essay from the site:
Humanity beyond control: Anarchism and our future
We live during an era of extreme oppression, despair, and anguish, but also an era of great opportunity for positive change. Vast technological, medical, and scientific improvements have been made in recent years, making it technically possible for the human race to guarantee not only subsistence, but prosperity, for all members of its population. The greatest impediment to universal prosperity no longer comes from the natural world; it comes from within our species, from hierarchical human institutions and social systems. Humans have struggled for thousands of years to overcome natural threats to our existence, only to reach a point where our existence is threatened by our own social systems, specifically, at the current point in history, the state-capitalist system.
Global capitalism is an overwhelming catastrophe, perhaps the most dangerous the human species has ever faced. As a result of exploitative capitalist economic policies, billions of people worldwide live in abject poverty and desolation, slowly dying from the moment of their birth from malnutrition and curable diseases, never allowed a chance to experience life as anything but torture, never given a chance to manifest their own creative human potential. In a world ruled by capitalism, 8 million people die every year from poverty, about 22,000 per day.[1] One billion children live in abject poverty, 640 million do not have access to appropriate shelter, 140 million have never attended school, 400 million do not have access to clean uncontaminated water, 500 million do not have basic sanitation, 270 million have no access to health care, and 90 million are severely food deprived.[2] Approximately 12.3 million people worldwide live in conditions of “modern slavery,”[3] while over one billion people live on less than one dollar of income per day and over three billion live on less than two dollars per day.[4] The root of this extreme poverty is clearly political, rather than natural. For example, consider that the world economy actually produces one and a half times the amount of food necessary to provide the entire human population with adequate and nutritious meals, but despite this, one in seven people is severely food deprived.[5]
In the midst of this tremendous poverty, a tiny portion of the world’s population lives in extreme prosperity. At the present time, the 50 richest people in the world have a combined income that is greater than the income of the poorest 416 million.[6] At the end of the 20th century, the world’s 225 richest people had combined assets of over one trillion dollars, equal to the annual income of the poorest 47% of the world’s population, or 2.5 billion people; and the three richest people in the world had assets that exceeded the combined GDP of the 48 least developed countries in the world. It was estimated that it would have cost only 40 billion dollars a year to provide universal access to basic education, health care, reproductive health care, adequate food, clean water, and safe sewers, which was less than 4% of the combined wealth of the 225 richest people in the world.[7]
This sort of astronomical inequality and poverty is an essential feature of the capitalist system. Capitalism encourages people to pursue infinite individual accumulation, regardless of the human and environmental costs of this accumulation. The overall affects of systematic capitalist accumulation are severe, and they have the potential to destroy the entire biosphere and the human race.[8] Moreover, the reckless competition that capitalism mandates necessarily creates a world of extreme material inequality; one in which billions of people fail to meet subsistence even when it is technically possible for every human in the world to live in prosperity. Global inequality has drastically increased as the imperatives of capitalism have been imposed across the world by corporations, their financial institutions (such as the World Bank, IMF, WTO, and G8), and their state and military benefactors. These groups force underdeveloped countries to liberalize trade, reduce tariffs, privatize social services, and loosen environmental and labor restrictions in order to create a situation that is more hospitable to corporations. When countries refuse to comply with the mandates of international capital, they are severely punished and face international sanctions, military assault, or simply a denial of life-saving humanitarian aid. The price for defying elite dictation is severe, but the price for complying with it can be even worse, as countries that do so must allow billions of dollars in debt and material resources to be extracted by corporate mercantilists.
The current system of global capitalism is just the latest extension of a system that has been dominant throughout much of human history, in which certain individuals and groups violently take control of communal resources and then force other people to perform work to regain access to the stolen resources. This system of enforced economic hierarchy has existed in different forms throughout history, but it has always involved horrific poverty, warfare, and oppression. It is clear that anyone who believes in human equality or simply a level playing field for all people has an obligation to overthrow this system of enforced economic hierarchy. The question for people with libertarian and egalitarian tendencies is, how can we organize society in a way that corresponds to our ideals, what system should replace state-capitalism?
The traditional antithesis of capitalism, Marxist socialism, has not proved effective in creating a better world. During the 20th Century, Marxist movements struggling against capitalist hierarchy were not successful in abolishing hierarchy, but merely created new autocratic systems, as the industrial elite were replaced by economic planners, party leaders, and bureaucrats who had direct control over the allocation of the state’s wealth and thus were able to expropriate capital from laborers and peasants, just as the industrial mangers, feudal lords, and slave holders had done before them.
These vanguard Marxist movements failed primarily because of their intrinsic authoritarian nature. They generally assumed that material wealth was the basic source of social power, and the focal point of all class contention, but did not recognize that the root cause of economic inequality is power inequality. While it is quite obvious that human history has been comprised substantially of struggles over the resources essential for subsistence and prosperity, these resources cannot be consolidated by a minority unless the minority possesses consolidated power in other realms of human life, particularly, in the military and ideological spheres. Authoritarian Marxists may have designed their programs to temporarily eliminate material inequality, but failed to realize that such inequality was created by authoritarian social structures, such as the very structures they were attempting to create or take control of.
There is no room for vanguadists of any kind in the anticapitalist movements of the 21st Century. The idea that a morally pure vanguard elite could take over the bastions of ideological, military, and political power and use these tools autocratically to advance the interest of their society as a whole is outrageous and absurd. No vanguard takeover will ever be able to address the fundamental injustices present in hierarchical systems. The problem is not that absolute power is concentrated in the hands of the wrong group of elites; the problem is that power is centralized at all. Any group that consolidates absolute power will always abuse its privileges and exploit its subjects, as is obvious to anyone familiar with the “benign” dictatorships of history. The only free society is one in which all people are equally empowered to defend and advance their own self interest, their own material needs.
There is a fundamental philosophical flaw in both authoritarian Marxism and liberal capitalism; namely, both fail to understand that all people in a society cannot be equal unless they are all free from oppression, and that all people in a society cannot be free from oppression as long as there is material inequality and a hierarchical distribution of the tools of power. Freedom, for the purpose of this essay, will be defined as “the capacity to exercise the widest potential range of action without forceful physical restraint,” thus encompassing both positive freedom—freedom from material need—and negative freedom—freedom from violent human coercion. Social equality will be defined as “a state at which all members of a population have equal opportunity to enhance their own wellbeing,” not necessarily a state in which all members of a population experience exact material equality.
Social inequality—that is, arbitrarily enforced inequality of opportunity among people of different classes, as opposed to a natural inequality of ability—only can be sustained by forceful oppression; so, any politico-economic system which exhibits inequality is not free, if one sector of the population is more or less subject to institutional oppression as a consequence of exercising their own autonomy. Similarly, a politico-economic system has not truly achieved equality among its citizens if power is highly centralized and its institutions have the power to act coercively. Therefore, it would be a mistake to say that equality could ever be realized under a state-socialist regime in which an elite group of economic planners, party leaders, and bureaucrats wield absolute economic, military, and political power over the rest of society; or that freedom could ever be realized in a capitalist country where those at the top of the hierarchy have more opportunity than those at the bottom, and therefore relatively greater license to exercise their autonomy.
For an example of the inequality of freedom present in a liberal capitalist society, consider the penal systems in these countries which are designed to severely punish members of the working class for petty theft or for single cases of homicide, while members of the capitalist class are rewarded for expropriation that, in principle, is identical to working class theft, and will never be held accountable for the thousands of deaths their actions indirectly cause. The social apparatuses in these societies are designed to arbitrarily restrict the freedom of some and enhance the freedoms of others based upon their position in the economic hierarchy. Such a society, in which varying degrees of liberty exist, is not in the least bit freer than any feudal, monarchist, or otherwise authoritarian society; in every case, those at the top of the social system have always had complete freedom to act, while those at the bottom were subject to repression and coercion, and were often severely punished for acting on their own autonomy.
So, for a society to truly realize the ideals of equality or liberty, it cannot only be only socialist, and it cannot only be libertarian; it must be libertarian-socialist, or Anarchist.
What exactly is Anarchism? Anarchism is commonly associated with terrorism, chaos, and irrationality, among other unpopular things, not because these things have anything to do with Anarchist ideas, but because Anarchism is a real threat to the class of people that holds ideological power in the world, and the easiest way to combat a threatening idea is to slander the idea and its proponents, to marginalize it in public discourse. Anarchy is, in reality, the safest, most rational, and least violent social system that has ever been conceived of; it is simply the union of free individuals against oppression and for the perpetuation of freedom in their society. Anarchists seek to abolish all hierarchical and coercive institutions, because these institutions diminish freedom and perpetuate economic inequality and violence, and to create a new, decentralized society in which every person has power over his or her own life, and in which problems are solved organically through cooperation, compromise, and consensus, rather than through institutional violence. Anarchism is about creating a society in which all people are able to fulfill all of their fundamental human needs, in which all people have complete freedom of thought and action.
Anarchists seek to decentralize and democratize political and economic power, so that everyone can participate in making decisions that are relevant to their lives, and so that no one has to suffer under authoritarianism. Any form of centralized power presents a grave threat to the liberty, safety, and prosperity of people everywhere. All of the greatest political tragedies in history, without exception, have occurred when an excessive amount of power became centralized at the disposal of an elite minority. These plutocrats utilized their tyrannical power to exploit the rest of the human population in the desperate pursuit of material wealth, ideological goals, and further centralization of power. All of the most vicious and egregious empires have been ruled in this manner, by elites who were committed to infinite accumulation of material wealth, even to the point of self destruction.
In the modern era, the capacity for such centralization of power is far greater than ever before, and the murderous consequences of such centralization are far more extreme, as was proven most infamously by the regimes of Joseph Stalin and Adolph Hitler, which consolidated totalitarian power and utilized modern technology to systematically execute millions of people they deemed threatening to their power. Today, the crisis of global capitalism is in essence another crisis of an excessive amount of power concentrated in the hands of a tiny minority of the world’s population. This crisis can be seen both internally in specific capitalist countries, and on a global scale, in which all international diplomatic interaction between nation-states occurs in the shadow of a single capitalist hegemon, the United States, and all economic interaction occurs under the shadow of corporate tyrannies and their financial institutions.
Anarchists seek to destroy the institutions that perpetuate the hierarchical distribution of politico-economic power, in order to create a society in which all people have an equal amount of power. The ideal Anarchist society would be one in which all hierarchic institutions had been abolished and the institutions that were still necessary had been specifically designed to prevent them from coming under the control of an elite minority. Any and all violent institutions of social control such as the police and military would be dissolved, and every person would have equal access to the tools of violence as well as to information on the workings of the world.
Contrary to misconceptions found in mainstream discourse, an Anarchist or libertarian socialist society would not be without any institutions or any form of organization; people in Anarchist societies could still form mutually beneficial communal institutions. An Anarchist society would simply have abolished mandatory and hierarchical institutions and organizations.
All community policy concerning labor, the economy, social services, education, the environment, technology, and other issues could be decided upon in democratic municipal meetings attended by all citizens of the community. Most (if not all) decisions would be made by consensus. The local councils could elect temporary representatives to serve on larger representative bodies, which could make decisions concerning issues of importance to larger populations of people. These representatives could be recalled at any time by the local council and replaced. In turn, these regional councils could elect representatives to larger assemblies with jurisdiction over larger areas, and these larger assemblies could elect representatives to even larger assemblies, perhaps with international jurisdiction. Such an international assembly would have jurisdiction only over issues of global importance such as human rights issues, war and peace, medical pandemics, and humanitarian aid. For any decision by the larger assembly to take effect at the community levels, the decision would have to be ratified by community assemblies. These councils are not governmental bodies, as they are voluntary institutions that do not have the power to govern, subjugate, or coerce.
All sectors of the economy would be radically transformed, with all goods and services produced in publicly owned work places by self-employed and self-managed workers. In an Anarchist economy, all members of a community would have the freedom to work in different sectors of the economy at different times and to split time between intellectual and physical labor. A system that encouraged laborers to work in all sectors of the economy would inspire greater innovation, as different workers with different abilities perfected techniques for performing necessary tasks. At the same time, people who were uniquely talented in one area would have the freedom to work only in that area. Machines, instead of being used by employers to wage class warfare, as they are now,[9] would be utilized to perform rote tasks found undesirable by people, thus making it possible for people to spend far less time working and far more time on creative and scientific projects.
There are a variety of ways that a transformed economy could be administered, and future societies ought to experiment with different approaches to determine which method proves to be the most effective.
One economic system to consider is the mutualist model: the most individualistic, least communistic model. In a society in which all tools of production and service were publicly owned, and in which all workers were skilled enough to work in a variety of different sectors of the economy, it might be unproblematic to allow market forces to determine the prices of goods and services, and thus the income a worker should receive for performing a certain task; if employers no longer existed, the market would no longer be a tool of elites and would no longer marginalize workers. Market forces would ensure that the economy worked in the interests of the people who depended on it: if a certain good or service was being widely demanded, the price of the good or service would increase and thus it would be more profitable for a worker to employ himself or herself in the ways that would be most beneficial to the society as a whole. This would also ensure that workers who employed themselves in the most onerous work would receive the greatest compensation. At the same time, it is absolutely vital that such a market be under democratic control, with community assemblies in power to enact any restrictions deemed necessary to promote the interest of the society as a whole.
A second system to consider is democratic central planning: a model which strikes a balance between individualism and communism. Economic planners would draw up several potential plans for the economy, and the community council would choose which plan to follow for a certain period of time. Certain exchange rates between products and services would be decided upon, depending on how labor intensive a certain good or service was, and workers would barter with other workers. If this system worked, individuals would still command control over the fruits of their labor, but the planning system would ensure that workers would receive the same amount of purchasing power for the same amount of work.
The final system to consider is Anarcho-communism, which is the least individualistic and the most communistic model. This is simply a gift economy, which realizes the slogan "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” All products created by the community would be available to all members of that community. A community would decide what tasks it needed to complete to be self-sufficient, and workers would complete them as they felt like doing so.
Of course, every person in a community would have complete choice as to how to participate in the economy, as long as this participation did not infringe on the liberties of other community members. Some people might choose to participate individually in the economy, others might band together with friends to form communes, and others might participate in different ways at different times and with different people. The important thing is that an Anarchist economy will be based on negotiation and voluntary interaction, rather than on violence.
While I personally think the Anarcho-communist model is perhaps the most desirable, there is no way to know now which model would be the most successful, and it will take experimentation to arrive at such a conclusion. It is important to remember that Anarchism does not claim to have the one and only correct tactical formula to bring about an ideal society, as Marxism does. Anarchists want to create the most libertarian and egalitarian future that can possibly be created, but we claim to have no precise knowledge about how such a society will be organized, or which specific tactical strategy will create such a society. Perfecting Anarchism will require a great deal of experimentation.
Anarchism and Human Nature
Throughout the history of political philosophy, many people have rejected Anarchism as Utopian and impossible; that is to say, their understanding of human nature suggested that humanity could not function without oppression, suffering, and hierarchy. These critics of Anarchist thought argued that no society could ever achieve complete freedom for all its citizens because of an intrinsically “evil” nature of humans; or, if a society could achieve universal freedom, it would come at a terrible cost. First off, it is absolutely absurd to argue about whether the essential nature of the human species is “good” or “evil.” It is inappropriate to discuss something’s essence in moral terms, because morality is a standard of judging freely taken choices. No one chooses their intrinsic nature, any more than they choose to be born male or female, homosexual or heterosexual, Iraqi or American.
Instead of discussing human nature in terms of morality, we should discuss it in terms of potential. Is every human being born with the potential to be peaceful, loving, creative, and unique? I believe that the answer is yes. Geneticists have not located a gene that makes an individual a criminal or a murder. Every person is born with a physical and genetic foundation on which to build his or her life. Each person has, at the beginning of his or her life, the potential to be a murder, a criminal, or a truly ethical being. While every individual has freedom to shape his or her life, the choices a person is presented with are to an enormous extent dependent on the social environment a person lives in, and thus a person’s social environment often determines which potentiality is realized. People who are unable to fulfill their fundamental human needs[10] because of the constraints of their social environment are far more likely to manifest anti-social potentialities and exhibit “evil” characteristics than people who are able to meet all of their fundamental needs. There are healthy and unhealthy ways to fulfill all human desires. When people are unable to fulfill their desires in healthy ways due to repressive social and cultural forces, they frequently resort to unhealthy, anti-social methods of fulfilling of their desires which involve harming living other beings.
All of the most disturbing anti-social tendencies found in the humans of today are born of the suppression of fundamental human need. For instance, take sexuality: when a person’s sexual needs are suppressed by intolerant cultural or political forces, the needs are transmogrified and manifest themselves in horrible and grotesque ways, leading people to engage in rape, incest, or pedophilia. It’s no coincidence that the people most subjected to cultural suppression are also most likely to engage in anti-social behavior. The Catholic priest must renounce traditional outlets of sexual expression, but his urges still manifest themselves, as a sexual lust for the most vulnerable people in society: children.
For a second example, take power: if an individual feels disempowered at work, at church, or at school, he or she may attempt to compensate by acting cruelly, authoritatively, and sadistically towards people more vulnerable than him or herself: a spouse, a child, an animal, etc. Again, it is no surprise that the people in a society who feel least empowered—members of the oppressed social groups—are the most likely to engage in violent, aggressive, or sadistic behavior.
In a hierarchical society, very few people are able to fulfill all of their fundamental needs; indeed, billions of people never even fulfill their most basic biological needs. It is necessarily this way under a hierarchical system. A person who has fulfilled all his or her needs will never submit to another person, will never allow him or herself to be turned into a soldier or a wage-slave. One individual only wields authority over other people if the oppressor has the power to obstruct the fulfillment of the oppressed people’s fundamental human needs. An employer has power over his or her employs because he or she has the power to deny them their subsistence if they act insubordinately. A government has power over its citizens because it has the power to murder them, to deny them of their right to life. If people were able to fulfill all of their fundamental needs, they would no longer allow themselves to be dominated.
People whose fundamental human needs for companionship, material subsistence, autonomy, sexuality, intellectual exploration, and creative expression are suppressed will always have a tormented and turbulent psychology, will always be internally at war, and will always exhibit anti-social characteristics. The only psychologically healthy society would be Anarchy, in which all humans had would have the opportunity to fulfill their fundamental needs. An Anarchist society which allowed all its members to fulfill their fundamental human needs would almost certainly see a virtual disappearance of violence, sex offenses, and other anti-social behaviors, and an increase in desirable behaviors.
With this understanding of human nature in mind, we can now address specific arguments against Anarchism that deal with human nature. First off, what is human nature, according to critics of Anarchism? In his essay Goals and Visions, Noam Chomsky quotes Nobel Prize winning economist James Buchanan making a prototypical establishmentarian statement about human nature:
“Any person’s ideal situation is one that allows him full freedom of action and inhibits the behavior of others so as to force adherence to his own desires. That is to say, each person seeks mastery over a world of slaves.”[11]
Chomsky notes that this opinion would have been considered “pathological” by any classical liberal thinker. I don’t know anyone who would admit to daydreaming about being a slaveholder, although it’s not entirely surprising to hear such talk from neoliberal economists or Wall Street brokers, who are of course the ideological (and often, hereditary) heirs of America’s slaveholders. We should always remember which people are trying to discredit Anarchism: it’s no coincidence that the people who argue that humans can’t exist without coercion are the people at the top of the social hierarchy, whose privilege would be threatened if coercive institutions were abolished. Regardless of the fact that people attempting to discredit Anarchism have an economic stake in the perpetuation of the current system, their various arguments need to be responded to. I’ll try to do that quickly.
“A society based on universal freedom, cooperation, and voluntary association could never work.” This argument can be easily refuted. There already have been Anarchies that have worked, not only in revolutionary Spain, the Paris Commune, many indigenous societies, and most prehistoric societies, to pick a few examples, but also in everyday interactions between people. Any time a group of people voluntarily comes together to engage in mutually beneficial activities, they are proving that humans can indeed function without coercion and hierarchy.
Furthermore, just because there has not been a sustained Anarchist experiment within a modern nation does not mean that it is impossible for Anarchy to work in a complex modern society. Before the French and American revolutions, reactionaries might have made the same arguments about democracy that they make about Anarchism today: it’s a nice idea, but it’s Utopian, and is without historical precedent in our modern time. Luckily, the American and French democrats dared to leave the past and fought to create a more libertarian and egalitarian world than the one they were born in to.
Anyway, while Anarchism might not be perfect, it is hard to imagine that Anarchism could be any worse than state-capitalism or Marxist-Leninism, the two political systems which do have historical precedent in the modern era. We have a choice to either continue to live under one of these two brutal and anti-human systems, or to create anew and hope for the best.
“People will not work unless they are constantly on the edge of subsistence, so, if a society were to ensure that everyone could obtain subsistence, everyone would stop working.” While I personally think that a society where no one worked and everyone had access to basic necessities would be a vast improvement over the current system—which requires the vast majority of the world’s population to spend the majority of its lifetime working to avoid starvation—I do not believe that people would stop working entirely in a free, nonhierarchical society. Why is it so hard to imagine a community dividing up necessary tasks among able-bodied workers and performing them? Don’t communities work together on volunteer projects at the present time, building communal playgrounds and parks, for example, even though every member of the community is already spending the vast majority of his or her time working for private business? Why can’t the same system also work for maintaining a community’s roads, or growing a community’s food?
There is reason to believe that if hierarchical systems were abolished, the amount of time each person would need to work to maintain a functioning society would drop drastically. If a politico-economic system were created that did not waste trillions of dollars of resources on protecting the privileges of a tiny minority from the rest of the populace, and that used technology not to wage class warfare, but to raise the collective standard of living, society could conceivably function with the average worker spending far less time laboring than they do under the current system.
I think that people would be willing to work for a few hours everyday in exchange for access to a communal store of resources: food, clothes, shelter, select luxury items, etc. Most people have an intrinsic desire to be socially productive and creative, and if they were allowed complete control over their own working environment, I think that almost everyone would want to perform socially beneficial work, especially if every laborer were able to split time between different jobs—some requiring intellectual labor and others manual labor—so that every worker could have the most stimulating and interesting work experience possible. It is hard to believe, anyway, that the billions of people who now do miserable work for starvation wages would not be willing to engage in enriching work in exchange for guaranteed prosperity.
“In an Anarchist society, there would be rampant crime.” First of all, it should be noted when discussing crime and its relation to politico-economic organization that on a global scale, the crimes perpetrated by centralized, hierarchical institutions such as states and corporations overwhelmingly exceed the crimes committed by individual citizens; therefore, if we want to create a safer, less violent society, we should begin by combating institutionalized crime, instead of focusing on individual crime which is extremely insignificant in comparison.
However, an Anarchist society would also be able to keep its individual members safe from civilian crime at least as well as the existing system, in addition to doing away with the far greater institutional crime. People in an Anarchist society would simply form reciprocal relationships with other members of their community to defend themselves, rather than relying on coercive and often predatory institutions for protection. This is how all people protected themselves throughout history until very recently, and it was at least as effective as the current system in keeping people safe. Anarchists assume that if a person was getting raped or assaulted, the person’s friends, family, and neighbors won’t allow it to happen, but would come to the person’s assistance and protect him or her. Because we think that people are willing to help and protect each other, we don’t feel that we need to rely on oppressive governments or police. Anarchists find it bizarre that in the present society people are more likely to trust impersonal strangers such as police, lawyers, and judges to protect them than they are to rely on their own friends and family.
Of course, Anarchism can’t completely do away with crime and murder, but neither can state-capitalism or authoritarian Marxism, or any other political system thus conceived of. However, there is reason to believe that an Anarchist society would be far safer than a state-capitalist society. Anti-social behavior almost always arises in people who have been subjected to severe institutional repression, who have been frustrated in their attempts to fulfill their fundamental needs. If all people had complete control over their lives, and had the opportunity to fulfill all of their fundamental needs, cases of anti-social behavior would be far less frequent than in the current society.
“All people are essentially selfish and anti-social; any system that is based on cooperation is doomed to failure.” Interestingly enough, even if we were to accept the absolutely heinous, despicable view that human beings are necessarily anti-social, which is clearly a erroneous, there would still be reason to dismantle centralized institutions and fight to create a libertarian society, for the simple reason that if individual humans are inherently anti-social, then human-made institutions must be just as anti-social, but far more dangerous, because they are far more powerful. If people will always be violently struggling against each other, it’s better for our species and the biosphere if people fight individually with their bare hands and tools they can build themselves, not as monolithic blocs with atomic weapons. Even if human beings are essentially egoistic, Anarchy can still be established and perpetuated, because it is actually in the egoistic interest of billions of people in the world to establish and maintain a libertarian and egalitarian global society, for the simple reason that the current politico-economic system enslaves, exploits, and brutalizes them. Anarchy does not require self-sacrifice from members of its community to survive; it simply requires that individuals form a lasting union against tyranny.
However, we abuse the human race by even considering such heinous ideas about its essence. The notion that human beings are fundamentally selfish is absurd. While utter selfishness is certainly a trait that capitalism tries to foster, it’s doubtful that the human race would have survived as long as it has as if it were a group of anti-social, profit-maximizing egoists. Humans are sociable beings who generally care for the needs of one another; during times of tribulation, they almost always cooperate and share to collectively survive. In fact, even the enemies of egalitarianism are aware that humans are cooperative beings: in America for example, human compassion is so strong that corporate capitalists have had to spend billions of dollars on propaganda to convince people that the United States’ foreign policy is truly promoting democracy and freedom, that capitalism is lifting people out of poverty and creating a better world. If the enemy regards compassion as so powerful that they need to spend billions of dollars to appeal to it, I don’t think it is wise for people who genuinely want to live in a better world to underestimate its power.
“Anarchy will fail, because people are naturally competitive, and Anarchy seeks to stifle competition.” Actually, Anarchism is about promoting competition, not stifling it; we just want change the focus of this competition. Under state-capitalism, the competitive urge which is almost certainly innate in humans is utterly squandered in a meaningless war of every individual against every other individual for the resources people need to survive, which have been made artificially scare by the capitalist economic system, and for commodities which provide a despicably inadequate substitute for identity and meaning in our culture. This perpetual struggle for wealth benefits no one; it only erodes the intelligence, strength, uniqueness, and adaptability of all individuals, rewarding those who are most obedient and most willing to conform to the roles that the politico-economic structure has prescribed for them. This system turns the human being into yet another mass-produced, interchangeable part.
Under Anarchy, humans would be able to engage in competition over matters that are far more meaningful, beneficial, and interesting; the energy and potential of the competitive urge would not be squandered as it is today. When we have done away with the artificially produced inequity of resources, we will be able to devote our competitive energy towards perfecting ourselves and the world around us. We will compete as artists, as we will all have the time and energy to create and enjoy poetry, theater, music, and art that is truly exquisite and approaches perfection; we will compete as scientists, as we all attempt to develop a greater understanding and appreciation of the universe; we will compete as philosophers, as well all strive to develop meaningful and entertaining stories which help us understand our existence; we will compete as philanthropists, as we all seek to give our own unique gifts to the world and its inhabitants. While there will certainly be differing forms of art, differing scientific theories, differing stories about existence, and different ideas about how to best help living creatures, and thus creative competition between different individuals working in these fields, the end result of the competition will be creative, rather than destructive as it is now. If two armies compete, the result is a field full of corpses. If two artists compete, the result is an enriched experience for both artists, and for everyone who views their art. This is really what Anarchy is about; it isn’t an abolition of competition, but simply a change in its focus, from destruction to creation.
“An Anarchist society would become stagnate and fail to meet its full potential in areas of importance to the human race as a whole, such as in science and art. Development in science and art can only occur within an economically competitive social framework, and such development will ultimately raise the cumulative quality of life more than universal freedom.” I think one would be hard pressed to find a truly gifted mind in science or art who was convinced to pursue his or her work solely by external rather than internal motivation. In fact, many geniuses were so internally motivated that they allowed themselves to fall into poverty or to be socially ostracized in order to continue their work. There is every reason to believe that uniquely talented people would continue to make their contributions to society whether or not they received material reward for doing so. If it is hard to imagine an artist or scientist motivated by external reward, it is nearly impossible to imagine that such a person would have anything worth contributing. I don’t think that people really need manufactured, commercial art, any more than they need the uninspired insights of a career intellectual who just wants to get tenure. Truly g
It’s hard to imagine a social system more nurturing of art and science than an Anarchist society. Throughout history, the number of people who could spend their time creating art or pondering science was extremely limited, as only the richest had the time and energy to devote to such endeavors. In an Anarchist society, absolutely everyone would have the time and energy to devote to art and science; one would expect the number of scientific and artistic advances to increase exponentially.
“Biological evolution cannot occur unless the weakest humans die before they can reproduce, and universal freedom is less likely to raise quality of life as a whole than progressive human evolution.” I think here Anarchists and some non-Anarchists just disagree; nothing is worth a future of perpetual holocaust, no matter what wonderful characteristics the surviving humans could acquire in the end. While these eugenicists dream of a future free of disease, of ultra-intelligent humans, etc, the sacrifice is far too immense and unceasing, and there’s no real reason to believe that the human race will survive long enough to undergo significant evolution anyway.
“If Anarchy is established, elitist reactionaries will simply reinstitute hierarchical and coercive institutions.” While elitist reactionaries would almost certainly attempt to subvert any Anarchist experiment, the threat of a group establishing hierarchic and coercive institutions would be greatly diminished, as establishing such an institution would require a large body of people to knowingly and willingly subject themselves to exploitation. Freed slaves do not typically renounce their freedom. However, the struggle against oppression and centralization will never entirely end, and people living within libertarian-socialist societies would have to remain vigilant to ensure that their society was not subverted.
The Anarchist Social Contract
What should an Anarchist society do if one person infringes on the liberties of another? Can it protect the freedom of persecuted people without being coercive? First of all, it is important to distinguish between two types of freedom: absolute freedom, and relative or social freedom. Absolute freedom is something that every human being has throughout his or her entire life. From any point in space and time, a person has an infinite number of different possible actions, and he or she can choose to perform any of these actions. So, people living in Nazi Germany had the absolute freedom to practice Judaism, and people in Bolshevik Russia had the absolute freedom to speak out against the crimes of the government.
When people talk about freedom in political discussions, however, they aren’t talking about absolute freedom, which can never be taken away or expanded, no matter what political system is in power, but instead relative or social freedom. Social freedom encompasses the range of activities that a person can engage in without expecting to receive a coercive reaction from individual members of society or social institutions. So, the United States’ constitution grants its citizens the right say whatever they want without being subjected to imprisonment or execution. Relative freedom is basically determined by a social or political contract which dictates what individual actions merit what social reactions. An Anarchist society might also be based on an informal social contract for organic interaction between free individuals: every individual is free to act in any way that does not threaten the life or fundamental liberty of another person without being subjected to a coercive reaction from another individual. If a person violates this contract, then he or she theoretically forfeits its protection, and may be subject to a coercive reaction from another free individual.
So, individual members of an Anarchist society would be justified in acting to limit the actions of any person who infringed on the freedom of another person. In such a case, the person who committed the anti-social behavior could be taken before a democratic community court, which could make a decision as to how individuals could act to ensure that the criminal did not commit the same crime again. If a person was convicted of pedophilia, for instance, he would not have to be incarcerated, but would simply be kept away from vulnerable children by community members. It is important to remember that while people in an Anarchist society would be completely free to do whatever they wanted to do, they would not be protected from the social consequences of their actions, the reactions from other completely free members of their society.
The Anarchist
What defines the individual Anarchist? This is a highly important question, as there can never be an Anarchist society, but only a society of Anarchists. The Anarchist revolution must not only be an external revolution which restructures the physical reality of the world; it must also be an internal revolution within every member of a society that restructures every subject. In a Nietzschean sense, an Anarchist revolution must transform the human race, from one that accepts authority, to one that rebels against it; from one that is complacent with oppression, to one that has an untainted, unquenchable thirst for freedom; from one merely survives, to one that lives joyously, passionately, and imaginatively. The will to freedom exists within every person, and only centuries of repression have been able to stifle or transmogrify it.
The Anarchist is forever at war with all forms of oppression—psychological, physical, and emotional; forever at war with anything that would steal his or her autonomy and thereby diminish his or her existence. Oppression has permeated human society to great depths, and it is the Anarchist’s task to search out these hidden oppressions and unveil them, so that they may be destroyed. By its very nature, oppression seeks to cloak itself, so that the oppressed begin to perceive the oppression as a natural part of life. The Anarchist unveils the mythology that justifies the oppression, for in destroying oppressive devices, the Anarchist increases his freedom and thereby exists more fully. The Anarchist desires not only to be free himself, but for the entire human community to be equally free, for the entire human race to exist more fully, and thus he attempts to arouse in others the same enlightenment and thirst for freedom that he knows. The Subject of the past created altars and monuments, gifts to gods and kings; the Anarchist creates art and explores science, gifts to humanity.
Tactical considerations for revolutionary change
The greatest priority for people Americans who wish to live in a libertarian and egalitarian world must be bringing about revolutionary change in the United States. The underdeveloped world is more than willing to liberate itself, as it has proven repeatedly; the greatest impediment to revolutionary change in the undeveloped world has come from the governments of the developed world. The greatest service the people of the United States could do for the people of the underdeveloped countries would be to overthrow the government that has repeatedly thwarted revolutionary struggles for liberation in the underdeveloped world.
If we wish to bring about revolutionary change, we must first start by waging ideological warfare against the powers that be. It is important to keep in mind, when developing a tactical strategy for revolution, that neither capitalism nor statism can survive without the consent of at least some of its victims. Without disciplined, domesticated proletarians willing to fight as soldiers in wars of expansion abroad or as police to control domestic populations, without workers in the factories, fields, and offices and consumers in the stores, both systems would ultimately crumble. This bodes well for the enemies of state-capitalism: if we can convince people to stop participating in their own oppression, the oppressive systems would disintegrate, and a freer world could be built on the ashes of the old order. Theoretically then, the next revolutionary change could occur without any blood being shed whatsoever, with the victims of state-capitalism bringing the system to a standstill by refusing to participate in it and then seizing private property and taking collective control over it. A gradual, nonviolent evolutionary change may not turn out to be practical or desirable as compared to a rapid revolutionary change, but we must remember that state-capitalism is dependent on its victims, and so our best strategy for destroying it is to help awaken its victims.
Most Americans share our libertarian and egalitarian values, but do not have access to important factual information about capitalism, imperialism, and Anarchist theory, and thus they can be easily manipulated by the billion dollar propaganda industry. As long as the American populace remains ignorant about the human costs of American imperialism and global capitalism, and about Anarchist alternatives to the status quo, we will not be able to build a mass based libertarian socialist movement. To combat ignorance about these tremendously important political issues, we can share factual information about political events with the public, as well as the conclusions that we have drawn from these facts, and let them decide for themselves whether or not they agree with our conclusions. We will never win the ideological war by expressing our opinions in incestuous academic journals and websites. Instead, we ought to share our ideas and suspicions about the way the world works, as well as our ideas about Anarchist alternatives on pirate radio stations, in massive campaigns of pamphleting, and in publications written for audiences of ordinary people instead of for activists. We must arm people with knowledge, and invite them to liberate themselves.
Finally, we must strive to “build the structure of the new society within the shell of the old," to quote a Wobblie slogan—by working within our communities to build voluntary institutions of mutual aid to feed the hungry and house the homeless, but also to allow people to enjoy themselves and build relationships. Companionship, love, and happiness are highly revolutionary emotions, particularly in a society that promotes insecurity, anxiety, hatred, and depression as a way to foster compulsive consumerism. If there is to be a truly revolutionary society, it must be built on the ideal of achieving universal happiness, not ignorant bliss, but the sort of happiness that comes with enlightenment, companionship, and freedom.
Humanity beyond control
Some interesting questions present themselves as we begin to contemplate a society without coercion and social control. How would a truly liberated human race live? What would the human race be able to achieve if it were not fettered by a vicious social system designed to promote the most undesirable human impulses and stifle the most beautiful impulses? What would define the culture and society of a human race no longer constrained by hierarchical systems which strive to stultify creativity, uniqueness, and brilliance and encourage conformity, obedience, and submission? These questions have not yet been answered, and cannot be answered until a truly liberated society is established, but it is obvious that life in the Anarchist society of the future will be far more interesting and fulfilling than life under the state-capitalism of today. Although we cannot know specifically what life will be like in the Anarchist society of the future, we can make a few speculations as to how it will differ from our present existence.
Life in an Anarchist society would be healthier, more interesting, and more fulfilling than life under state-capitalism. At present, the vast majority of a person’s lifetime is spent attempting to perpetuate his or her existence: laboring at rote tasks in order to earn subsistence, forming superficial relationships with other humans when it is economically necessary to do so, even theoretically paying the right amount to the church in hopes of entering entrance to heaven. For those who wish to see the human race move beyond this Pavlovian existence, Anarchism is the only option. For people living in an Anarchist society, creative, productive work would be a desirable end in itself, not a necessary means of existence. Companionship would be a desirable end in itself, and not a means of increasing one’s economic wellbeing. Spirituality would be an end in itself for those people who still wished to partake in spiritual experiences.
Imagine a society that did not routinely deny its members the right to fulfill their fundamental needs, that did not routinely suppress their free action. Imagine a society without government, prisons, police, militaries, churches, or private property. This prospect—for a humanity beyond control—is the most glorious future that our species could aspire to, and it is worth devoting one’s entire existence to bringing it about.
[1] Time Magazine, The End of Poverty (http://www.time.com/time/archive/preview/0,10987,1034738,00.html)
[2] UNICEF (www.unicef.org (http://www.unicef.org)), State of the World’s Children 2005
[3] International Labor Organization (www.ilo.org (http://www.ilo.org))
[4] Net Aid (www.netaid.org (http://www.netaid.org)), “What is Poverty?”
Global Issues (www.globalissues.org (http://www.globalissues.org)), “Poverty facts and stats”
[5] UN Food and Agricultural Organization, cited in the Greenpeace (www.greenpeace.org (http://www.greenpeace.org)) article “Feeding the world: fact versus fiction”
[6] A Compendium of Inequality: The Human Development Report 2005 (www.globalpolicy.org (http://www.globalpolicy.org))
[7] United Nations, cited in the Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research (www.transnational.org (http://www.transnational.org)) article, World Statistics: The Global Humanitarian Crisis.
[8] See Noam Chomsky’s Hegemony or Survival, for a discussion of the very real threat to human survival posed by state-capitalism. In particular, see Chomsky’s introductory chapter, and his discussions on the Cuban Missile Crisis, global climate change, and the militarization of space.
[9] Machines are currently used to marginalize the power of workers. Machines replace workers, thereby decreasing the number of available jobs and increasing the number of unemployed workers, thereby lowering wages and decreasing the power of workers generally.
[10] These fundamental human needs include physiological needs, safety needs, belongingness and love needs, esteem needs, intellectual needs, and aesthetic needs, according to the famous psychologist Abraham Maslow.
[11] Noam Chomsky, Chomsky On Anarchism
Edit: removed a the name of a person upon request by them - Sentinel