Bjørn Stærk, February 2008
There's a strange term that is used in No Gods, No Masters - An Anthology of Anarchism, which collects 19th and 20th century anarchist writings. The term is 'libertarian communism'. It once described a wing of the anarchist movement. Today it has an unintentinal zen quality, and points to both the contradictions of anarchism and the muddiness of the ideological map.
I read No Gods, No Masters to learn what I on the liberal right might have in common with the anti-authoritarian left. Authoritarians on the left and right often blend together, but is there similar common ground among anti-authoritarians? Like marxism, anarchism is a dead ideology, but the key to understanding today's more pragmatic left and right is to understand the dead ideologies their worldviews resonate with. For the right, it is laissez-faire and law-and-order conservatism, for the left it is anarchism and marxism.
A common improvement on the economic left-right axis is to add a second dimension: authoritarianism. The implication is that the axes are interchangeable, so there's no particular reason why the anti-authoritarian left and right shouldn't be allies, instead of enemies. But this isn't quite true. I believe the two-dimensional ideological map is less useful than the one-dimensional map: It is not complex enough to describe the full variety of political beliefs, and it is too complex to describe the reality of day-to-day politics, in which there is at any time and any place only two opposing worldviews, with everyone (voluntarily, eagerly) located on a line between them.
Anyone who is looking for common ground among anti-authoritarians will find it in Max Stirner, the first author sampled in No Gods, No Masters. Stirner (1806-56) was a proud individualist who opposed any state or group authority, and believed in a society based on voluntary cooperation between egoists. Although Stirner's egoism is not exactly the selfishness of Ayn Rand, there seems no particular reason why he should appeal more to anarchists than to libertarians.
But this doesn't validate the two-dimensional ideological map. Stirner was a philosopher later anarchists felt influenced by, but he did not define the anarchist ideology, nor was he part of the anarchist movement. What he illustrates is that the individualist or anti-authoritarian impulse is not by itself an ideology. Combine it with a socialist understanding of the world, and you get anarchism. Combine it with a capitalist understanding, and you get libertarianism.
The important factor is how you understand the world. Later authors in No Gods, No Masters, like Proudhon, Bakunin and Kropoktin, the real fathers of anarchism, make it clear that anarchists and marxists saw the world they lived in in the same way. Both saw themselves as champions of the proletariat, united against the oppressive forces of capitalism, priesthood and nobility.
Their differences caused friction and conflict, but anarchists were part of the first International, (and for a while also the second), and they supported the bolshevik government in Russia for as long as self-deception would allow. This is why some anarchists could describe themselves as "libertarian communists" without causing anyone's brain to short-circuit. Property, they believed, should be held in common, (thereby communism), but in a decentralized and voluntary way, (thereby libertarianism).
While the establishment of the time feared marxism mostly for its destructive revolutionary power, the anarchists had identified a more subtle flaw: The corruption and inefficiency of centralized power. But the anarchists feared capitalist oppression more than they feared the dictatorship of the proletariat, and so they fought alongside marxists and communists, helping them gain access to the means of their own persecution. By World War 2, anarchism had been crushed between fascism and communism. Anarchists were the original useful idiots.
No Gods, No Masters is a buffet of wishful thinking. Without property and authority, wrote the convicted terrorist Emile Henry in 1894, theft, crime, prostitution and war would disappear. Everyone will volunteer to work, - two or three hours a day should be sufficient.
More experienced anarchists obscured their naivety with theoretical excess. Page after page of rational argument, proving nothing other than the irrelevance of ideological philosophy. I find myself desperate for anything concrete, real human emotions, grounded in real events. Anecdotes, history, anything. Or even just a sense that the world is not a machine that we can take apart and rebuild as we like. The only author who comes close to showing a pragmatic and practical sense is Cecil de Papae, who provides a reality check to the wilder dreams of his comrades.
The marxists were of course no better. In fact, anarchism is evidence against the idea that it was the strength of their theories that brought communists to power in so many countries, instead of some other leftist sect. No - it was survival of the fittest. The one major, relevant difference between marxism and anarchism was that marxists believed in centralized power, and the anarchists didn't. Marxist theory was just as abstract and unreal, and recruited on the same broadly appealing sense of proletarian justice as the anarchists.
What marxism - and communism especially - had that made a difference was people who believed in power. People who were good at running an organization, giving orders, and obeying them. Communism struck, by accident, on a powerful formula: An angry sense of injustice, channeled through an obedient hierarchy. Anarchism had the anger, but not the will to command. And so they lost.
Not that they were any less violent. Anarchists were the pioneers of modern terrorism. Without the state power of the bolsheviks, the anarchist "propaganda of the deed" played out as communist genocides in miniature. As individuals, they killed heads of state, capitalists, and random civilians by the handful. The same class hatred, but better organized, allowed communists to do this by the million.
All this makes me cautious about finding common ground with traditional anarchism. This is not because I don't understand them. Looking back, it's obvious that the supporters of liberalism and democracy were right. But this wasn't apparent at the time. I challenge anyone to claim that, had they been born in the 19th and early 20th century, they could never have become a marxist, an anarchist, an authoritarian nationalist or a fascist. Even knowing what I do today, if I could go back in time, I don't think I would be able to convince a worker or a socialist that capitalism and democracy would work out for the good. "I know your life sucks, and it probably always will, but your children will one day get to vote, and your great grandchildren will live far better than your bosses do today. So hang in there, okay?" Would you be convinced by that?
And the only reason it is so apparent that utopian ideologies don't work, is that we tried most of them, and they didn't work. So we can look back on these turbulent centuries, and we can learn, and try to do better, but we're not superior, only later.
There's actually no need to find common ground with anarchism, because it's dead. Then again, so is libertarianism. There's no room in our world for a pure anti-authoritarian ideology. But there is room, and need, for anti-authoritarian impulses on both left and right. Independently of how we feel about economic issues, it's up to all of us to keep these impulses alive. There's less theoretical silliness and criminal baggage to dispose of if you borrow these impulses from libertarians, but I would rather that the left borrow them from anarchism than not at all. The theoretical particulars are not so important, as long as you learn that one of the tools you have for dealing with the state is to show it the finger.
"The very people who clamor loudest for there to be an opposition within the State thunder against the slightest quibble within the Party. Which goes to prove that all that they too want is that the State should be one. It is not with the State but with the unique individual that all parties are incompatible."
- Max Stirner
"To allege that a group of individuals, even should they be the most intelligent and most well-meaning of individuals, will have the capacity to perform as the brains, the soul, the directing, unifying will of the revolutionary movement and the economic organization of the world's proletariat, is such an affront to common sense and historical experience, that one wonders, in amazement, how a fellow as intelligent as Mr. Marx could have come up with it."
- Mikhail Bakhunin
"Today, the State has come to meddle in every aspect of our lives. From cradle to grave, it smothers us in its embrace. Sometimes as central State, sometimes as provincial- or model-State, occasionally as commune-State, it dogs our every step, looming at every street corner, overwhelming us, gripping us, plaguing us. [..] The results are only too familiar to us. Is there a single branch of State activity that does not disgust those unfortunate enough to have dealings with it? A single branch in which the State, after centuries of existence and patching-up, has not furnished proof of utter incompetence?"
- Peter Kropotkin
Bjørn Stærk, 2008
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