"Unruly Equality": A Brief History of Anarchism
Wednesday, 24 August 2016 00:00 By Andrew Cornell, University of California
Press | Book Excerpt
(Photo: Mario Felipe Espinoza González)
This article is excerpted from Unruly Equality: U.S. Anarchism in the 20th
Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016).
In recent years anarchists have played prominent and controversial roles in
radical social movements, domestically and internationally. Yet discussing
the strengths and weaknesses of contemporary anarchism, in relation to other
sectors of the Left, has proven challenging. The very terms anarchy,
anarchism, and anarchist are so overcoded with meanings and burdened by
associations that people frequently talk past one another, or resort to
awkward attempts at humor, even when attempting to discuss them in good
faith.
Since the eighteenth century, at least, the word anarchy has signified a
condition of chaos, disorder, and personal vulnerability owing to the
absence of a center of power capable of enforcing rules; it is still
frequently used in this way today. In 1840, however, a French radical named
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon reclaimed the term anarchy in a fashion similar to
the ways in which the word queer and certain racial slurs have, in recent
decades, been adopted and given positive connotations by the groups of
people they were meant to denigrate. Proudhon argued that under conditions
of profound economic inequality, such as those that reigned in
industrializing Europe, the primary role of political states was to
legitimate and defend the wealth of a minority. It was this joint exercise
of economic and military power that actually made the poor vulnerable (to
hunger, disease, beatings) and ensured society would remain chaotically
ridden with conflict. He had faith that people could live harmoniously if
state coercion and the lopsided distribution of resources was done away
with, famously declaring, "Liberty is not the daughter but the mother of
order."
TO BE AN ANARCHIST WAS TO FIGHT THE ENFORCEMENT OF MISERY UPON COMMON
PEOPLE.
For Proudhon, then, to be an anarchist was to fight the enforcement of
misery upon common people, and he therefore wore the term as a badge of
honor. Other European socialists soon elaborated upon this
conceptualization, and by the 1860s anarchism had emerged as a political
ideology and a specific tendency within the broader labor and radical
movements of Europe. By the end of the century, such ideas had spread around
the world.
Although Proudhon's linguistic reclamation may have been conceptually
brilliant, the meaning he gave to the term never fully displaced its earlier
connotations. As a result, for more than 150 years, anarchists have felt
compelled to begin their speeches and writings with a clarification of what
they mean by anarchy. Authority figures tasked with quashing the movement
have exploited the commonsense understanding of anarchy as chaos in
depicting the intentions of anarchist organizers. The fact that many
anarchists adopted assassination and terroristic bombings as a common tactic
in the closing decades of the nineteenth century made this work of
misinformation easier. Anarchists of this sort exalted the temporary chaos
caused by acts of violence against authority figures because they believed
such acts would lead to a more ordered and egalitarian society, notbecause
they desired chaos or suffering as an end goal.
These conflicting definitions go some way toward explaining the confusion
the word anarchism still generates. But since the 1970s, anarchy and
anarchism have taken on additional associations that further muddle the
picture. In the 1970s, the influential punk band the Sex Pistols released
their first single, "Anarchy in the UK," and proceeded to shock and outrage,
but also captivate, radio and television audiences in a manner that
purveyors of youth-culture products soon found ways to capitalize upon. The
Sex Pistols' connections to anarchists were third-hand; but in the 1980s
some of the punk bands that came in their wake (Crass, Conflict,
Chumbawamba) made important contributions to existing anarchist movements
and progressive campaigns, such as the 1984 miners' strike in England. Yet
an undefined "anarchy" and the circle-A symbol popularized by punk bands
quickly became go-to tropes within the music and fashion industries to
symbolize teen angst, the desire to cut loose, and a shallow nonconformity.
Owing to this association, anarchism is often tagged as an ill-considered,
youthful rebelliousness, rather than as a sophisticated theoretical
tradition and international social movement.
CLASSICAL ANARCHISTS OPPOSED GOVERNMENTS BECAUSE THEY UNDERSTOOD THEIR
ESSENTIAL PURPOSES TO BE UPHOLDING ECONOMIC INEQUALITY AND WAR MAKING.
Punk was not the only outgrowth of the 1970s that has added complexity to
the term anarchism. In a seemingly ironic twist to global politics,
anarchists have emerged as among the boldest and most persistent opponents
of neoliberalism, the political ideology inaugurated, at least symbolically,
by Ronald Reagan's declaration that "government is not the solution --
government is the problem!" Reagan and his allies, such as the United
Kingdom's Margaret Thatcher, were not, of course, opposed to all government,
but rather to the forms of state regulation of business, finance, and trade
that had been implemented during the twentieth century, and which had become
increasingly intolerable to major economic players as conditions changed in
the 1970s. By the late 1990s, neoliberalism had become the hegemonic
policy-making framework for centrist and conservative parties around the
world, prompting resistance by many groups (including anarchists) who found
their well-being endangered by the stripping away of protections and the
growing economic inequality that ensued.
From the outset, neoliberal ideology was developed and promoted by a
tight-knit circle of intellectuals who helped define the modern libertarian
movement. The word libertarian has been historically contested alongside the
term anarchism. Anticapitalist anarchists adopted libertarian as a moniker
following World War I (partly in an attempt to avoid associations with
violence); and a variety of egalitarian political thinkers, such as Noam
Chomsky, have identified as "libertarian socialists" since World War II.
Commonsense associations with the term began to change in the 1960s,
however, when thinkers such as Murray Rothbard and Ayn Rand began widely
promoting a minimal-government, hypercapitalist, and individualist ideology
they called libertarianism. Although most contemporary promarket
libertarians accept the need for a minimal state to protect private property
rights, a few extreme advocates have labeled themselves anarcho-capitalists.
Well-funded by wealthy donors, libertarians continue pressuring centrist and
center-right governments to extend and deepen the neoliberal transformation
of the modern state. Partnering with other sectors of the right, they have
exerted a powerful intellectual and financial influence on the populist Tea
Party movement that emerged in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. This
has led to a situation in which a government-shrinking center is besieged by
"free market" forces on the right who seek to abolish public social
provisions, and on the left by anarchists (often acting in uneasy alliance
with social democrats) who furiously criticize the state's defense of
corporate power and imperialist war-making.
These varied meanings of anarchism often congeal in strange ways. In August
2014 the New York Times Magazine featured a cover story about the appeal of
libertarian Senator Rand Paul among young Republican voters. The illustrator
mimicked a flier for the legendary punk band Minor Threat and snuck a
hand-drawn circle-A symbol into the magazine's masthead. A year earlier,
when Tea Party-affiliated Republicans forced a federal government shutdown,
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid denounced members of the caucus as
"anarchists" who needed to "get a life." Reid explained, "When I was in
school, I studied government and I learned about the anarchists. Now, they
were different than the Tea Party because they were violent. . . . [Tea
Party members are] not doing physically destructive things to buildings and
people, directly, but they are doing everything they can to throw a monkey
wrench into every form of government." In these instances, all of the term's
connotations were at play: anarchism as any antigovernmental politics,
anarchism as violence, anarchism as nineteenth-century anachronism,
anarchism as juvenile behavior and punk rock.
With the ideological waters so muddied in 2013, the Washington Post took the
unusual step of publishing an op-ed by a left-wing academic, titled "The Tea
Party Is Giving Anarchism a Bad Name." In it, Heather Gautney clarified that
"real anarchist communities operate according to radically democratic
principles. They theorize, and even organize, with egalitarian political and
social visions in mind." Gautney acknowledged the contradictory predicament
of contemporary anarchism by noting, "Despite their anti-authoritarianism,
some of today's anarchists concede that states can serve socially important
functions like ensuring sound infrastructure, basic consumer protections and
comprehensive social welfare (though they believe such services are better
executed with decentralized communities)." Understanding this ambivalence
requires an account of the ways anarchists interpreted and reacted to the
expansion of governmental functions, especially social democratic
initiatives, during the twentieth century.
PARTICIPANTS HAVE REFINED THEIR CONCEPTUALIZATION OF THAT ANTICIPATED SOCIAL
ORDER FROM ONE OF UNRULE TO ONE OF SELF-RULE.
Neoliberal and right-wing libertarian movements are motivated by social aims
fundamentally divergent from those of the social anarchists. As noted,
classical anarchists opposed governments because they understood their
essential purposes to be upholding economic inequality and war making. Such
anarchists believed that sociable impulses would lead humans to develop
cooperative, egalitarian economies in the absence of state authority. In
contrast, the neoliberal ideology that came to dominate global political and
economic life at the end of the twentieth century seeks to eliminate
precisely those government functions that were implemented in the
mid-twentieth century to moderate economic inequality. These conservative
critics view humans as naturally competitive, and believe that removing
government restraints on the market will lead to free and just, but
naturally unequal, societies of individuals.
While libertarians and neoliberals promote individual liberty as the supreme
political value, it is a mistake to assume that unlimited individual freedom
is the foundational principle of social anarchism. Instead, as Chiara
Bottici has recently argued, anarchists believe in "the freedom of equals."
In other words, anarchists insist that a meaningful or substantive
experience of freedom is possible only under conditions of economic and
political equality, which, in their view, can be achieved only through
ongoing practices of solidarity prompted by care for the well-being of
others.
Of course, intentions are one thing and outcomes another. At times
anarchists' theorizations of the functions and motivations of government
have foreclosed opportunities to redistribute resources, especially after
the growth of liberal welfare-state programs, and at times put them in
strange company, such as when some decried federal enforcement of civil
rights legislation in the American South. These uncomfortable moments of
resonance between radical and conservative forms of antistatist politics
serve as especially rich sites for evaluating the coherency of anarchist
political philosophy and movement strategy.
Nevertheless, it was to emphasize the egalitarianism at the heart of
anarchist ethics -- that factor most clearly distinguishing anarchism from
neoliberalism -- that I chose Unruly Equality as the title for my study of
U.S. anarchism in the twentieth century. Since the movement was initiated in
the 1860s, anarchists have defied laws, orders, and social conventions,
asserting themselves impertinently in the eyes of authorities; they have
been loud, defiant, and uncontrollable -- in a word, unruly. They have done
so in pursuit of greater economic, social, and political equality for all
human beings, making them unruly egalitarians. But in a different sense,
unruled equality might be posited as the political ideal, the end goal, and
the sociological hypothesis of the movement. Anarchists believe that
political rule is constituted not solely to protect and enhance the life of
humans but also to enforce inequality for the benefit of a minority at the
expense of many others. Following from this, anarchists suggest that a more
egalitarian society will require less ruliness -- that is, less coercive
power -- a condition they embrace. Perhaps the most interesting aspects of
twentieth-century anarchism, from the standpoint of political theory, are
the ways participants have refined their conceptualization of that
anticipated social order from one of unrule to one of self-rule, along with
the ways their strategic thinking has evolved in light of new understandings
of power and the practical successes and failings of other social movements
also seeking greater freedom and equality.
If you want journalism that challenges authority and is accountable to you
-- not to government or corporate interests -- then make a donation to
Truthout today!
This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. It may not
be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.
ANDREW CORNELL
Andrew Cornell is an educator and organizer currently serving as Visiting
Assistant Professor of American Studies at Williams College. He is the
author of Unruly Equality: U.S. Anarchism in the 20th Century (University of
California Press, 2016) and Oppose and Propose! Lessons from Movement for a
New Society (AK Press, 2011).
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A. Giroux
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"Unruly Equality": A Brief History of Anarchism
Wednesday, 24 August 2016 00:00 By Andrew Cornell, University of California
Press | Book Excerpt
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reference not valid.Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink
reference not valid.
(Photo: Mario Felipe Espinoza González)
This article is excerpted from Unruly Equality: U.S. Anarchism in
the 20th Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016).
In recent years anarchists have played prominent and controversial roles in
radical social movements, domestically and internationally. Yet discussing
the strengths and weaknesses of contemporary anarchism, in relation to other
sectors of the Left, has proven challenging. The very terms anarchy,
anarchism, and anarchist are so overcoded with meanings and burdened by
associations that people frequently talk past one another, or resort to
awkward attempts at humor, even when attempting to discuss them in good
faith.
Since the eighteenth century, at least, the word anarchy has signified a
condition of chaos, disorder, and personal vulnerability owing to the
absence of a center of power capable of enforcing rules; it is still
frequently used in this way today. In 1840, however, a French radical named
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon reclaimed the term anarchy in a fashion similar to
the ways in which the word queer and certain racial slurs have, in recent
decades, been adopted and given positive connotations by the groups of
people they were meant to denigrate. Proudhon argued that under conditions
of profound economic inequality, such as those that reigned in
industrializing Europe, the primary role of political states was to
legitimate and defend the wealth of a minority. It was this joint exercise
of economic and military power that actually made the poor vulnerable (to
hunger, disease, beatings) and ensured society would remain chaotically
ridden with conflict. He had faith that people could live harmoniously if
state coercion and the lopsided distribution of resources was done away
with, famously declaring, "Liberty is not the daughter but the mother of
order."
To be an anarchist was to fight the enforcement of misery upon common
people.
For Proudhon, then, to be an anarchist was to fight the enforcement of
misery upon common people, and he therefore wore the term as a badge of
honor. Other European socialists soon elaborated upon this
conceptualization, and by the 1860s anarchism had emerged as a political
ideology and a specific tendency within the broader labor and radical
movements of Europe. By the end of the century, such ideas had spread around
the world.
Although Proudhon's linguistic reclamation may have been conceptually
brilliant, the meaning he gave to the term never fully displaced its earlier
connotations. As a result, for more than 150 years, anarchists have felt
compelled to begin their speeches and writings with a clarification of what
they mean by anarchy. Authority figures tasked with quashing the movement
have exploited the commonsense understanding of anarchy as chaos in
depicting the intentions of anarchist organizers. The fact that many
anarchists adopted assassination and terroristic bombings as a common tactic
in the closing decades of the nineteenth century made this work of
misinformation easier. Anarchists of this sort exalted the temporary chaos
caused by acts of violence against authority figures because they believed
such acts would lead to a more ordered and egalitarian society, notbecause
they desired chaos or suffering as an end goal.
These conflicting definitions go some way toward explaining the confusion
the word anarchism still generates. But since the 1970s, anarchy and
anarchism have taken on additional associations that further muddle the
picture. In the 1970s, the influential punk band the Sex Pistols released
their first single, "Anarchy in the UK," and proceeded to shock and outrage,
but also captivate, radio and television audiences in a manner that
purveyors of youth-culture products soon found ways to capitalize upon. The
Sex Pistols' connections to anarchists were third-hand; but in the 1980s
some of the punk bands that came in their wake (Crass, Conflict,
Chumbawamba) made important contributions to existing anarchist movements
and progressive campaigns, such as the 1984 miners' strike in England. Yet
an undefined "anarchy" and the circle-A symbol popularized by punk bands
quickly became go-to tropes within the music and fashion industries to
symbolize teen angst, the desire to cut loose, and a shallow nonconformity.
Owing to this association, anarchism is often tagged as an ill-considered,
youthful rebelliousness, rather than as a sophisticated theoretical
tradition and international social movement.
Classical anarchists opposed governments because they understood their
essential purposes to be upholding economic inequality and war making.
Punk was not the only outgrowth of the 1970s that has added complexity to
the term anarchism. In a seemingly ironic twist to global politics,
anarchists have emerged as among the boldest and most persistent opponents
of neoliberalism, the political ideology inaugurated, at least symbolically,
by Ronald Reagan's declaration that "government is not the solution --
government is the problem!" Reagan and his allies, such as the United
Kingdom's Margaret Thatcher, were not, of course, opposed to all government,
but rather to the forms of state regulation of business, finance, and trade
that had been implemented during the twentieth century, and which had become
increasingly intolerable to major economic players as conditions changed in
the 1970s. By the late 1990s, neoliberalism had become the hegemonic
policy-making framework for centrist and conservative parties around the
world, prompting resistance by many groups (including anarchists) who found
their well-being endangered by the stripping away of protections and the
growing economic inequality that ensued.
From the outset, neoliberal ideology was developed and promoted by a
tight-knit circle of intellectuals who helped define the modern libertarian
movement. The word libertarian has been historically contested alongside the
term anarchism. Anticapitalist anarchists adopted libertarian as a moniker
following World War I (partly in an attempt to avoid associations with
violence); and a variety of egalitarian political thinkers, such as Noam
Chomsky, have identified as "libertarian socialists" since World War II.
Commonsense associations with the term began to change in the 1960s,
however, when thinkers such as Murray Rothbard and Ayn Rand began widely
promoting a minimal-government, hypercapitalist, and individualist ideology
they called libertarianism. Although most contemporary promarket
libertarians accept the need for a minimal state to protect private property
rights, a few extreme advocates have labeled themselves anarcho-capitalists.
Well-funded by wealthy donors, libertarians continue pressuring centrist and
center-right governments to extend and deepen the neoliberal transformation
of the modern state. Partnering with other sectors of the right, they have
exerted a powerful intellectual and financial influence on the populist Tea
Party movement that emerged in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. This
has led to a situation in which a government-shrinking center is besieged by
"free market" forces on the right who seek to abolish public social
provisions, and on the left by anarchists (often acting in uneasy alliance
with social democrats) who furiously criticize the state's defense of
corporate power and imperialist war-making.
These varied meanings of anarchism often congeal in strange ways. In August
2014 the New York Times Magazine featured a cover story about the appeal of
libertarian Senator Rand Paul among young Republican voters. The illustrator
mimicked a flier for the legendary punk band Minor Threat and snuck a
hand-drawn circle-A symbol into the magazine's masthead. A year earlier,
when Tea Party-affiliated Republicans forced a federal government shutdown,
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid denounced members of the caucus as
"anarchists" who needed to "get a life." Reid explained, "When I was in
school, I studied government and I learned about the anarchists. Now, they
were different than the Tea Party because they were violent. . . . [Tea
Party members are] not doing physically destructive things to buildings and
people, directly, but they are doing everything they can to throw a monkey
wrench into every form of government." In these instances, all of the term's
connotations were at play: anarchism as any antigovernmental politics,
anarchism as violence, anarchism as nineteenth-century anachronism,
anarchism as juvenile behavior and punk rock.
With the ideological waters so muddied in 2013, the Washington Post took the
unusual step of publishing an op-ed by a left-wing academic, titled "The Tea
Party Is Giving Anarchism a Bad Name." In it, Heather Gautney clarified that
"real anarchist communities operate according to radically democratic
principles. They theorize, and even organize, with egalitarian political and
social visions in mind." Gautney acknowledged the contradictory predicament
of contemporary anarchism by noting, "Despite their anti-authoritarianism,
some of today's anarchists concede that states can serve socially important
functions like ensuring sound infrastructure, basic consumer protections and
comprehensive social welfare (though they believe such services are better
executed with decentralized communities)." Understanding this ambivalence
requires an account of the ways anarchists interpreted and reacted to the
expansion of governmental functions, especially social democratic
initiatives, during the twentieth century.
Participants have refined their conceptualization of that anticipated social
order from one of unrule to one of self-rule.
Neoliberal and right-wing libertarian movements are motivated by social aims
fundamentally divergent from those of the social anarchists. As noted,
classical anarchists opposed governments because they understood their
essential purposes to be upholding economic inequality and war making. Such
anarchists believed that sociable impulses would lead humans to develop
cooperative, egalitarian economies in the absence of state authority. In
contrast, the neoliberal ideology that came to dominate global political and
economic life at the end of the twentieth century seeks to eliminate
precisely those government functions that were implemented in the
mid-twentieth century to moderate economic inequality. These conservative
critics view humans as naturally competitive, and believe that removing
government restraints on the market will lead to free and just, but
naturally unequal, societies of individuals.
While libertarians and neoliberals promote individual liberty as the supreme
political value, it is a mistake to assume that unlimited individual freedom
is the foundational principle of social anarchism. Instead, as Chiara
Bottici has recently argued, anarchists believe in "the freedom of equals."
In other words, anarchists insist that a meaningful or substantive
experience of freedom is possible only under conditions of economic and
political equality, which, in their view, can be achieved only through
ongoing practices of solidarity prompted by care for the well-being of
others.
Of course, intentions are one thing and outcomes another. At times
anarchists' theorizations of the functions and motivations of government
have foreclosed opportunities to redistribute resources, especially after
the growth of liberal welfare-state programs, and at times put them in
strange company, such as when some decried federal enforcement of civil
rights legislation in the American South. These uncomfortable moments of
resonance between radical and conservative forms of antistatist politics
serve as especially rich sites for evaluating the coherency of anarchist
political philosophy and movement strategy.
Nevertheless, it was to emphasize the egalitarianism at the heart of
anarchist ethics -- that factor most clearly distinguishing anarchism from
neoliberalism -- that I chose Unruly Equality as the title for my study of
U.S. anarchism in the twentieth century. Since the movement was initiated in
the 1860s, anarchists have defied laws, orders, and social conventions,
asserting themselves impertinently in the eyes of authorities; they have
been loud, defiant, and uncontrollable -- in a word, unruly. They have done
so in pursuit of greater economic, social, and political equality for all
human beings, making them unruly egalitarians. But in a different sense,
unruled equality might be posited as the political ideal, the end goal, and
the sociological hypothesis of the movement. Anarchists believe that
political rule is constituted not solely to protect and enhance the life of
humans but also to enforce inequality for the benefit of a minority at the
expense of many others. Following from this, anarchists suggest that a more
egalitarian society will require less ruliness -- that is, less coercive
power -- a condition they embrace. Perhaps the most interesting aspects of
twentieth-century anarchism, from the standpoint of political theory, are
the ways participants have refined their conceptualization of that
anticipated social order from one of unrule to one of self-rule, along with
the ways their strategic thinking has evolved in light of new understandings
of power and the practical successes and failings of other social movements
also seeking greater freedom and equality.
If you want journalism that challenges authority and is accountable to you
-- not to government or corporate interests -- then make a donation to
Truthout today!
This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. It may not
be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.
Andrew Cornell
Andrew Cornell is an educator and organizer currently serving as Visiting
Assistant Professor of American Studies at Williams College. He is the
author of Unruly Equality: U.S. Anarchism in the 20th Century (University of
California Press, 2016) and Oppose and Propose! Lessons from Movement for a
New Society (AK Press, 2011).
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Middle Class Endure Another Clinton?
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