Anarchism (Beginner's Guides) by Kinna Ruth

Author:Kinna, Ruth [Kinna, Ruth]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781780741277
Publisher: Oneworld Publications (trade)
Published: 2012-10-07T23:00:00+00:00

Instead of looking to anthropology to find evidence of anarchy, some anarchists have preferred to investigate the possibilities of anarchist organization through the lens of utopianism. Utopian traditions of theorizing are well established in anarchist thought. However, anarchism has an ambivalent relationship to utopianism. On the one hand, anarchist writers have been anxious to dispel the charge that they are fantasists. On the other, they have attached a high priority to discussions of future organization. In part this ambivalence stems from an attempt to reconcile a desire to show the viability of anarchy with a commitment to experimentation and variety – in other words, from a desire to show that the idea of anarchy is not inconsistent with anarchist principles. In the other part, the ambivalence can be explained by a specific debate with Marxism. In this particular context, the disavowal of utopianism is an attempt to meet the charge, levelled by Marxists, that anarchist thought is ‘utopian’ in the sense that it is fantastical or impossible. And the affirmation of utopia reflects an eagerness to illustrate the differences between anarchist and Marxist notions of post-revolutionary society and the deficiencies of Marxist an-utopianism. These different positions are outlined below as a prelude to the consideration of two utopian schemes.

The clearest statement of the anarchist suspicion of utopianism appears in Marie Louise Berneri’s Journey Through Utopia, an analysis of utopian thought from Plato to Huxley. In this book she argued that the outstanding feature of most utopias is their authoritarianism. With notable exceptions like William Morris’s News From Nowhere, utopias promise material and spiritual satisfaction as well as social and economic equality at the cost of foisting on their ideal citizens a unifying moral ideal. Typically, utopias fail what Berneri called the test of art: Herbert Read’s standard of individuality and social experimentation.22 Some anarchists have taken the critique further, rejecting utopianism in principle. It is not so much the content of utopias that upsets these anarchists but the very idea of perfection – whether it applies to the social order or to the framing of personality. As Rudolf Rocker argues, anarchism ‘is no patent solution for all human problems, no Utopia of a perfect social order ... since, on principle, it rejects all absolute schemes and concepts’.23 A similar view informs a recent critique of Zerzan. Zerzan’s treatment of primitive society suggests an ‘idealized, hypostatized vision of the past’ that is at odds with the critical self-understanding of the social and natural world that informs primitivist critique. It suggests a recommendation for preconceived ideals in a way that constrains free thought.24

The suggestion that anarchists should consider what post-revolutionary society might look like does not sit easily with this view. Nonetheless, some anarchists have argued that outlining the operation and benefits of anarchy is a necessary part of securing revolutionary change. Utopias rightly force revolutionaries to consider what they want to achieve and how they might set about realizing their aims. This argument was the basis of Kropotkin’s defence of utopianism, for example.

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