The Emergence of the New Anarchism
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Library.Anarhija.Net The Emergence of the New Anarchism Robert Graham, Various Authors Robert Graham, Various Authors The Emergence of the New Anarchism 1940–1970 (republished 2014) Robert Graham’s Anarchism Weblog, accessed June 25, 2014 at http://robertgraham.wordpress.com/ the-emergence-of-the-new-anarchism/ accessed June 25, 2014 at http://robertgraham.wordpress.com/ the-emergence-of-the-new-anarchism/ lib.anarhija.net 1940–1970 (republished 2014) Contents Herbert Read (1893–1968) .................. 3 Neither Liberalism Nor Communism (1947) . 5 Marie Louise Berneri (1918–1949) ............. 8 The Price of War: By Fire and Sword . 9 Paul Goodman (1911–1972) . 11 Letter to high school graduates . 12 David Thoreau Wieck (1921–1997) . 17 From Politics to Social Revolution . 18 Daniel Guerin (1904–1988) . 28 Three Problems of the Revolution . 28 Alex Comfort (1920–2000) . 41 Barbarism and Sexual Freedom . 41 Some Conclusions ................... 46 Noir et Rouge ......................... 48 Majority and Minority . 49 Organisation Pensee Bataille . 54 George Woodcock ...................... 55 Libertarians and the War . 55 2 In Volume Two of Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertar- ian Ideas, subtitled The Emergence of the New Anarchism (1939– 1977), I document the remarkable resurgence of anarchist ideas and action following the tragic defeat of the Spanish anarchists in the Spanish Revolution and Civil War, and the mass carnage of the Second World War. Below, I have collected additional writings from many of the people who were responsible for that resurgence. Herbert Read, Marie Louise Berneri, Paul Goodman, David Wieck, Daniel Guerin, Alex Comfort, George Woodcock and the Noir et Rouge group in France were among those who made anarchism rel- evant again, despite its critics’ attempts to consign it to the dustbin of history. Volume Two of Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertar- ian Ideas opens with excerpts from Herbert Read’s 1940 essay, “The Philosophy of Anarchism.” Read had declared himself in favour of anarchism in his 1938 publication, Poetry and Anarchism, with which I closed Volume One of the Anarchism anthology. There he wrote that he sought to “balance anarchism with surrealism, reason with romanticism, the understanding with the imagination, func- tion with freedom.” Read was under no illusions regarding how peo- ple would react to his endorsement of anarchism. At the time, the world’s various anarchist movements were in eclipse, and most rad- ical intellectuals supported the Soviet Union with its Marxist ideol- ogy. It was the era of “Popular Fronts” against Fascism, which the Stalinist Communists used to co-opt other forces on the left, result- ing in the further isolation of the anarchists, their inveterate foes and frequent victims (see Chapter 18 of Volume One, “The Russian Revolution”). Herbert Read (1893–1968) Herbert Read (1893–1968) had served in the First World War, which helped turn him into a pacifist. By 1938, he was a noted poet, 3 essayist and art critic. In the 1930s, he helped introduce Surreal- ism to an English audience. After the Second World War, he did the same for existentialism, the philosophy that was being popular- ized in France by people like Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. He was current with the latest intellectual and artistic trends, in- cluding Freudian psychoanalysis, which helped to inform his ap- proach to anarchism, art and education. Read was one of a few bet- ter known intellectuals at the time who expressed anarchist ideas in a contemporary idiom, helping to pave the way for the remark- able resurgence of anarchism that surprised many, including some anarchists, in the 1960s. Other noteworthy contributors to this an- archist renaissance were Paul Goodman and Dwight Macdonald in the United States, Marie Louise Berneri, Alex Comfort and George Woodcock in England, and Giancarlo de Carlo in Italy. I have in- cluded extensive selections from all of these writers in Volume Two of the Anarchism anthology. Not all anarchists were enamoured with these new currents in anarchist theory. Anarchists who took a “class struggle” approach, which emphasized the revolutionary role of the working class and the need for anarchists to take part in working class struggles, such as the Impulso group in Italy, denounced the “new” anarchism as counter-revolutionary, referring to it as “resistencialism,” because writers like Read had purportedly abandoned any hope for a suc- cessful social revolution and instead advocated resistance to author- ity, rather than its abolition (Anarchism, Volume Two, Selection 38). Read, however, had not abandoned the idea of a social revolu- tion. He simply conceived of it in broader terms, and distinguished it from more conventional conceptions of revolution by reviving Max Stirner’s (Volume One, Selection 11) distinction between revo- lution and insurrection. A revolution is “an exchange of political in- stitutions.” An insurrection “aims at getting rid of these political in- stitutions altogether.” Consequently, he looked forward to a “spon- taneous and universal insurrection” (Volume Two, Selection 1), but discarded “the romantic conception of anarchism–conspiracy, as- 4 the people that will carry through a formidable resistance to the sassination, citizen armies, the barricades. All that kind of futile ag- threat of war, that will percolate through the weak points of the itation has long been obsolete: but it was finally blown into oblivion iron curtain–East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia–will only be- by the atomic bomb.”Today, “action must be piecemeal, non-violent, come impossible if there are no men to take the initiative, if there insidious and universally pervasive” (Volume Two, Selection 36). are no men with the imagination to conceive the right way to strike Defining the measure of progress as “the degree of differentiation the thoughts and hearts of the world. There are those pessimists in society” (Volume Two, Selection 1), Read sought to create an or- who contend that such a hope is Quixotic and that the day of move- ganic society in which everyone is free to develop and express their ments of enthusiasm and faith is past. I would claim that in such unique talents and abilities, bringing forth “the artist latent within times of crisis as our own we learn that the uncompromising rejec- each one of us” (Volume Two, Selection 19). Arguing that “real pol- tion of negative forces–which our critics call Quixoticism–is in fact itics are local politics,” Read proposed a system of direct democ- the only realistic hope of saving ourselves and our culture. And I racy based on functional and communal groups federated with each would also suggest that there are plenty of signs to show that a time other, with their activities being coordinated by ad hoc delegates of this kind provides the very conditions in which a movement of who are never separated from their “natural productive” functions faith and enthusiasm can take root. Already there are some such (Volume One, Selection 130). movements which have had an amazing amount of limited success; When Murray Bookchin started drawing the connections be- Bhave’s crusade for voluntary land redistribution in India is one tween anarchism and ecology in the 1960s, he cited Read as one example. A dynamic eleventh-hour anti-militarist movement that of his inspirations (Volume Two, Selection 48). Read’s emphasis on struck the imaginations of the world’s peoples would be thoroughly local politics can also be found in Bookchin’s writings, in his con- compatible with the historical needs of our time, and it might run cept of “libertarian municipalism.” Bookchin’s distinction between through the channels of our decaying civilisation as the forces of a libertarian politics of directly democratic community assemblies early Christianity burst out from the catacombs into the similarly and the bureaucratic authoritarianism of the state can therefore be moribund structure of imperial Rome. More than ever before, such found in Read’s earlier writings. a movement could change the whole character of human social ex- In the following excerpts from Read’s 1947 BBC lecture, “Neither istence. Liberalism Nor Communism,” he further develops his conception of – George Woodcock anarchism as an alternative kind of politics without the state, em- Resistance, Vol. XII, No. 2, June 1954 phasizing, as Bookchin did later, the insight of the ancient Greek philosophers that a truly democratic politics requires decentraliza- tion and human-scale. Neither Liberalism Nor Communism (1947) It has always been recognized since the time of the Greek philoso- phers that the practicability of a free democracy was somehow bound up with the question of size–that democracy would only 64 5 work within some restricted unit such as the city-state. This was war in all the countries where it can work is the fact that it will the conclusion of Plato and Aristotle in the ancient world, and their be able to provide the nucleus for movements of resistance in the view has been supported in modern times by great political philoso- case of the imposition of foreign–or home-grown–totalitarianisms. phers like Rousseau, Proudhon, Burckhardt and Kropotkin. But I think that it is also just possible that such a movement might Based on this realization, a political philosophy has arisen which play a vital part even in the event of atomic war. Perhaps, when opposes the whole conception of the State. This theory, which we talk of the entire destruction of civilisation by the Bomb, this would abolish the State, or reduce it to insignificance, is sometimes is a little on the rhetorical side. Certainly the big centres will goin known as distributivism, sometimes as syndicalism, sometimes as the event of an atomic war, and most of the population as well, but guild socialism, but in its purest and most intransigent form it is it is just possible that the rural districts and the small towns will called anarchism.