Basic Principles of Anarchism: action, power, and common care

Anarchism
Basic Principles of Anarchism
Terese Howard
9/5/09

“ANARCHY IN CHINA.; Disorder Due to "Boxers" Is Spreading -- Foreign Troops to Protect Legations in Peking. Shanghai May 27 – reports received to-day indicate that affairs around Peking are extremely critical….Large portions of the Province of Pi-Chi-Li and Shang-Lu are in a state little better than absolute anarchy, and disorder is spreading…” (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9F05E3D81339E733A2575BC2A9639C946197D6CF).

Newspaper articles, like this one, reporting of the breakdown of order in a country under the label of “anarchy,” are not uncommon. Is this social disorder, called “anarchy,” the same as the society of “anarchy” that anarchists are striving for? This sort of confusion is all too frequent. The “anarchy” referred to in the article above does hold one thing in common with the anarchy of the political theory of anarchism – the lack of, resistance of, or absence of government. However, the commonalities between these uses of the term stop there. Contrary to the state of disorder called anarchy in the article above, anarchism has been defined by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon as true social order. For Proudhon, and most anarchists, anarchism does not automatically exist when government is taken away. Anarchy requires not just the abolition of oppressive authority and power structures, but the creation of mutual, consensual, and active structures by and of all people’s involvement in society.

I will address here five basic principles of anarchism: Anti-Authoritarian, Direct action, (anti)Property, Mutual aid, and Consensus. Although debate is widespread among anarchist within each of these principles, each of these principles would still be included by almost all anarchists.

The term “anti-authoritarian” is used so often within anarchist communities that it has even come to be used as a substitute for calling someone or something anarchist. The principle behind being anti-authoritarian is that authorities posses a power of domination which leads to all sorts of evils. This, of course, is not specific enough. What is meant of authority? Are all forms of authority included? What is meant by domination? What sorts of evils? These questions cannot all be answered in this space (if at all), but some clarity can be given. Authority itself means little without power. Addressing the problems of oversimplified treatments of authority and power Uri Gordon divides power into three categories: “power-to (the basic sense of power as the capacity to affect reality); power-over (power-to wielded as domination in hierarchical and coercive settings); and power-with (power-to wielded as non-coercive influence and initiative among people who view themselves as equals)” (Gordon, Anarchy Alive!, 48). For Gordon, the type of power which accompanies authoritarian people and structures is power-over. In being anti-authoritarian anarchist seek freedom form societal structures that enable some people to have power over others – enabling coercion, force, and domination. This sort of authority-power is manifest in society in the form of governments, states, bosses, police, self proclaimed leaders, and countless other systems and settings. Anarchism strives to abolish these forms of authority and power.

It is important to recognize the vastness of anarchist’s rejection of authorities in order to contrast it from the frequent misconception of anarchism as simply the rejection of government. Rejection of the government would be nothing without rejection of the state as well. The idea of the government is that it legitimizes the state, and the idea of the state is that it maintains order, but government and state then ultimately become the same thing. The state is another way of saying the government’s realm. Emma Goldman argues in her famous essay Anarchism: what it really stands for, “A natural law is the factor in man which assists itself freely and spontaneously without any external force, in harmony with the requirements of nature…. That governments do not maintain themselves through such harmonious factors is proven by the terrible array of violence, force, and coercion all governments use in order to live” (Goldman, Anarchism: what it really stands for, 36). Goldman points here to both the harm and unnecessary of governments and the state as forms of authority over society.

So what happens without government and is power all bad? These questions are related in that they address the anarchic society anarchism is striving for. If anarchist critique of power is taken as abhorrence to all forms of power then anarchism itself would be a complete contradiction. In fact “anarchists are hardly ‘against power’. This common misconception is easily shown untrue by anarchist political language, in which ‘empowerment’ is mentioned as a positive goal” (Gordon, 49). The goal of anarchism is not to abolish all power (as if that were possible) but to empower everybody. The anti-power that is present is in effort to create the conditions for the possibility of empowerment of others. When all the power is in the hands of a few this power blocks the free flow of power by forcing people to be in a position of dis-power. Dis-power in this way is necessary for the extreme power of the few.

Empowerment is both created and manifest through direct action. Direct action does not just mean protests, street blocks, lock downs, and such. Direct action entails all actions which are done in direct response to a given situation. If you are driving down a road and you come upon a tree in the road, a direct action response would be to get out and move the tree out of the road right then and there yourself. Not calling the forest service and waiting for them to find a worker and send him down to move the tree sometime in the next week, you just move the tree. Direct action is played out in anarchist communities by people “being the change they want to see.” In Denver Colorado for example, Food not bombs, Derailer Bicycle collective, Free School Denver, community gardening networks, and countless more, are projects that take direct action to create the desired society. The principle of direct action is both a way of life and a theory. It is tied to the resistance of government and the hope for further freedoms.

For anarchists, the dismantling of power structures goes beyond power positions occupied by people (eg. governments with presidents, corporations with CEOs…), into power systems occupied by laws and ideologies. A fundamental force of this power is private property. There are a variety of approaches to private property within anarchism, however. For some there should be no system of property at all. For others property should be collectivized. And for a few private property should continue to structure society. Proudhon’s famous statement “property is theft” expresses the anti-logic of property. The logic behind private property is that one can keep resources to oneself without having to actually protect the resource oneself because the government and police force will protect it for her/him. Emma Goldmen states, “there is hardly a modern thinker who does not agree that government organized authority, or the State, is necessary only to maintain or protect property and monopoly” (Goldmen, 36). Furthermore, Goldmen exclaims, “Monopolizing the accumulated efforts of man, property has robbed him of his birthright” (Goldmen, 34). If humans have the right to live off the land and resources then private property has robbed them of that right. Under private property laws, only owners have the right to use what they own, so if you don’t own anything you don’t have the right to use anything.

Many anarcho-communists, or otherwise communally minded anarchists, call for property to be collectivized. Peter Kropotkin calls for “The expropriation of social capital and the taking of it into common ownership…all such capital being taken over by the cultivators, the worker’s organizations and the agricultural and municipal communes” (Kropotkin, No Gods No Masters, 275). In this way ownership becomes directly related to the labor of production and direct use. Much like the Indigenous way where you only have what you have with you (if a chicken goes off beyond your protection it is no longer under your use and therefore up for grabs), this treatment of collective property ties ownership to labor, protection, use, and locality. You cannot own land because you do not create it. Everyone can live off the land as freely as the land allows it.
Anarcho-capitalists usually believe in private property. Anarcho-capitalism is basically capitalism without government. Because it has no government it gets classified with anarchism, but it differs greatly from other forms of anarchism in this belief in private property. There is much contention over whether anarcho-capitalist should even be labeled anarchist for that reason. (I will not get into this at this time.)

Again here one may ask, “But what will this anarchic society look like without government or property?” We have seen how direct action takes the place of government in taking responsibility for getting things done, but this does not tell us how people work together to do this. The idea of mutual aid comes into play here. Mutual aid is just what it sounds like – people mutually aiding each other with labor and needs. Peter Kropotkin, the first the use the phrase “mutual aid,” describes it as society in which people share labor and resources, instead of these means being owned and paid for, or owned by the state and redistributed. Kropotkin argues that “a society restored to possession of all the accumulated wealth within it, can largely provide everyone with a guarantee of plenty, in return for four or five hours of effective, manual toil at production each day” (Kropotkin, 324). With mutual aid both the labor and the resources are shared – not owned. This structure is exemplified in Ursula Le Guin’s novel The Dispossessed which tells the story of an anarchic society. In that society everybody works voluntarily wherever they are needed and have the know-how in return for sharing all the materials and such which the society produces. The key here is that it is voluntary mutual aid in interdependence.

For a growing number of anarchists, consensus is a central principle of anarchism. Consensus is most emphasized by communally minded anarchists and Indigenous anarchist, and is less emphasized by individualist anarchists. Consensus can be exercised between any number of people on any issue. Group consensus decision making in collectives is one exemplary place in which consensus is exercised today. Consensus refers to the consent of individuals or groups to another/s. Democracy is not consensus because it does not wait on the consent of the people for an action, but only the agreement of the majority. Consent does not necessarily mean agreement with the issue at stack, but rather an agreement that one will allow the decision to be made and followed through. In consensus everyone involved makes the equally so that there is never anyone who voted in the minority and is left out as a result. This sort of consent facilitates a communal freedom and functioning that resists domination of the few. Like direct action and the theory of mutual aid, consensus is only possible as a voluntary action/response. If the conditions of a given situation are not conducive to voluntary consensus, such as when a police man stands behind you with a gun and tells you to consent, then consensus is not reached. Power dynamics critically affect the possibility or outplay of consensus.

Anarchism’s rejection of what can be called authoritarian power structures is only the handmaiden to anarchism’s idea of a society of direct action, mutual aid, and consensus. The ultimate goal is not just to dismantle oppressive power structures, but to facilitate the development of empowering structures for all people. The negatives and the positives of anarchy are inextricably related. The absence of government alone does not make anarchy. Anarchy must be lived out in order to exist.

Goldman, Emma. Anarchism: what it really stands for, Voasha Publishing, 2008.
Gordon, Uri. Anarchy Alive!, Pluto Press: London, 2008.
Kropotkin, Peter. No Gods No Masters, AK Press: Oakland, 2005.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9F05E3D81339E733A2575BC2A9639C946197D6CF