Sunday Night Smackdown: Anarchists Don’t Get It

Since someone asked me to articulate why I routinely make fun of anarchists in general(and not just idiotic anarcho-capitalists), I’ll take the bait. Let’s be clear on something here, when I make fun of anarchists, I do so concerning people who think we should do away with the State altogether. There might be many self-described anarchists who perhaps don’t(although I’m not sure they’re anarchists proper), and if they don’t- I have little grouse with them. My issue lies with people who focus on the State as the fundamental institution of repression and ignore the fact that it’s just as prevalent, even perhaps more, in society outside of State oversight.

It’s important to note that while oppressive power structures can be reinforced by the State, a lack of oversight allows oppression to grow freely and unchecked. Domestic violence, reinforcement of gender roles and stereotypes, racism, casteism etc. exist outside State jurisdiction, as does workplace discrimination, arbitrary firing etc.

At the end of the day, the State in democracies are bound by strict rules and laws, which as flawed in principle or implementation as they may be, don’t extend outside that sphere. For instance, even if the Government wants to restrict your freedom of political expression, it has to portray you as a threat or danger to others. It has to paint your speech as incitement or compromising national security, as was the case in the recent NDTV blackout decision.

On the other hand, NDTV itself can arbitrarily fire you if your political expression doesn’t match up with their line and if not, make your situation uncomfortable enough to force you out. The same is true for a lot of workplaces which do not have strict labour regulations in place. I’m not aware of labour regulations that actually protect freedom of expression in the workplace.

There are other matters that should be troubling. The McCarthyist purges led to around 200 people being directly imprisoned, but what is less talked about is that over 10,000 workers were fired on mere suspicion, not by the Government, but their employers.

And if you’re under the impression this happens only because of State ideological leanings, wake up and smell the coffee. Here’s quoting W.E.B. DuBois from ‘Black Reconstruction’:

The decisive influence was the systematic and overwhelming economic pressure. Negroes who wanted work must not dabble in politics. Negroes who wanted to increase their income must not agitate the Negro problem. Positions of influence were only open to those Negroes who were certified as being ‘safe and sane,’ and their careers were closely scrutinized and passed upon. From 1880 onward, in order to earn a living, the American Negro was compelled to give up his political power.

Stripping individuals and groups of a political voice isn’t always the work of the State, for most people at the receiving end of political coercion, it comes from outside the State structure. You don’t even have to go all the way to the USA- talk to a Chamar in Northern India or housewives practically anywhere and you’ll get a sense of what I mean.

This of course, doesn’t mean State coercion is a bed of roses, but if you’re thinking I’m arguing that, you shouldn’t be reading this.

I can very well see the counter-argument being, ‘But we’re saying the State should be dismantled with all other coercive oppression.’- which is all well and good in theory, but the fault with this argument lies in believing that such oppressive hierarchies can be dismantled without exerting some form of power in itself. To quote Engels:

The anarchists put the thing upside down. They declare that the proletarian revolution must begin by doing away with the political organization of the state….But to destroy it at such a moment would be to destroy the only organism by means of which the victorious proletariat can assert its newly-conquered power, hold down its capitalist adversaries, and carry out that economic revolution of society without which the whole victory must end in a new defeat and a mass slaughter of the workers similar to those after the Paris commune.

I know not of any anarchist who doesn’t believe that the State doesn’t fall under the category of coercive power structures and at least if we are to talk about the forms of anarchism prevalent in Europe at the turn of the 20th Century which tend to be glorified as alternative models to more orthodox Marxist models and democratic socialism/social democracy/Fabian socialism. Carl Landauer in his magisterial ‘European Socialism: A History of Ideas and Movements’ notes-

“To be sure, there is a difference between individualistic anarchism and collectivistic or communistic anarchism; Bakunin called himself a communist anarchist. But the communist anarchists also do not acknowledge any right to society to force the individual. They differ from the anarchistic individualists in their belief that men, if freed from coercion, will enter into voluntary associations of a communistic type, while the other wing believes that the free person will prefer a high degree of isolation. The communist anarchists repudiate the right of private property which is maintained through the power of the state. The individualist anarchists are inclined to maintain private property as a necessary condition of individual independence, without fully answering the question of how property could be maintained without courts and police.”

It’s really an absurd proposition that oppressive structures in society can be dismantled without coercion, whether it’s racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, casteism or classism. The fact of the matter is that in historical context, almost every step to improve the conditions of workers, to address discrimination and dismantle oppression has been achieved through an increase not decrease of regulations and the State, whether it’s been social welfare, public education, full employment, anti-discrimination measures etc. Moreover, neoliberalism has precisely been accompanied by increasing deregulation and complemented by attacks on full employment and the welfare state. Does nobody read Kalecki?

Actually, I’m not even sure why I’ve bothered writing so much on the matter and wasted a few precious minutes of my life writing this essay that would have been better spent on ‘Can I Has Cheezburger?’- this really should be self-evident, guys.

I haven’t even gone into the deeper economic and sociological questions that plague any sort of anarchist model. If you really want to contend that this may become relevant a few centuries into the future, that’s basically not much different from Sci-Fi fantasies and you don’t see Sci-Fi fantasies pretending to be serious political theorising. It fails both as an analytical framework of positive analysis and as a normative theory of political action.

This is precisely what happens when you take the most self-righteous kind of liberalism, theoretical bullshitting out of context, historical and sociological ignorance, edginess and a healthy serving of cannabis and let it all stew in a pot for too long. I really mean it when I say anarchism is a political theory for 4dgy morons.

I sincerely don’t care if whacking anarchism makes me a Eurocentric incrementalist liberal, a Stalinist or some sort of white supremacist. The Left needs a better kind of thinkers and activists.