ANARCHY
FOR REGULAR FOLKS
Someone on the Anarchy Africa Yahoo! list wrote me privately and challenged
my position in my thread "The Bog". The strongest point in hir refutation, in my opinion, is that we Anarchists have
not enjoyed astounding success and we need to take a good, hard look at
ourselves and determine why and what we can do about it.
While I do not
think that we'll find that answer among the Structuralists
or the Post-Structuralists, I recognize the crying
need for this self-examination.
It should be an
internal audit among us Anarchists, in my opinion. While the thinking of
non-Anarchists may help us in that endeavor, I think that we have the answers
within the body of our own literature and we need not turn to agents of The Man
like psychoanalysts for the answers. Certainly we cannot be made to feel that
the opinions of those who have not adopted Anarchism as their own are de
rigueur to consider.
One of my ongoing concerns
is the redemption of Anarchy from the "punks" and misfits of all
stripes who have become the soi-disant representatives and spokespersons for
Anarchism.
While I certainly
do not fault people who have become a little freaky as a result of living in
sick societies (hey, who hasn't); I also recognize that the disturbed and the dysfunctional cannot
be depended upon to be the ballast of any society, certainly not one that will
require the exquisite common sense and self control that Anarchy will.
I would go further
and say that we cannot even depend upon the proletariat to be those who make
the revolution happen.
Please don't jump.
Kindly allow me to explain my position.
In contradiction to
Bakunin and Kropotkin,
Gustav Landauer did not have faith in the proletariat
to either be galvanized into a revolutionary body or to be able to carry out a
successful revolution.
Landauer's heart was shredded by the suffering of
the proletariat and to the purpose of eradicating their suffering, most
especially, he devoted his thought and efforts as clearly articulated in FOR SOCIALISM: "Priests and middle class
citizens who submit to moral restraint have introduced the practice of speaking
of these poor wretches as if they were animals, though they are innocently
guilty for our despicable innocence. They are called beasts, swine, goats and
animals. You stare at their features, when they lie in the morgue. You have
spared your own flesh, and your notoriously sensitive hearts! Look at the poor,
the miserable, the sunken, the criminals and whores, you good citizens, you withdrawn
and reserved youths, you chaste girls and honorable women. Look and learn: your
innocence is your guilt; your guilt is your life." – pg. 41
Yet, he knew that
the revolution could only be carried out with the support of the Middle Class.
He also wrote:
"There they succumb to drink and can often no longer live without being intoxicated.
They get drunk because nothing is so essentially alien
to them as sobriety." – ibid.
As part of his
scathing and uncompromising critique of Marxism he wrote: "Let it finally
be understood, what is really being said here. It is recognized here that the
workers are not a revolutionary class, but a bunch of poor wretches who must
live and die under capitalism. ..But everything that is recognized, admitted ad
conceded here, is a blow against Marxism, which seeks to understand the workers
in their role as producers not as the poor lowest stage of capitalism but as
the destiny-chosen bearers of the revolution and socialism." – pg. 86
"But a major
part of suffering is the realization of ones' bad situation; and how many
proletarians to this extent undergo not the least suffering!" – pg. 111
"…what is
called the proletariat will never of itself be the embodiment of a
people..." –
pg. 117
Even Bakunin, in a moment of brutal honesty, addressed the
proletarians thus: "Let us then be good brothers and comrades, and let us
organize ourselves. Do not think that we are at the end of the Revolution, we are at its beginning. The Revolution is
henceforth the order of the day, for many decades to come. It will come to find
us, sooner or later. Let us therefore prepare and purify ourselves and become
more genuine, let us be less talkers, less criers,
less phrasemongers, less drinkers and less rakes. Let us gird our loins and
properly prepare ourselves for this struggle which will save all peoples and finally
emancipate humanity." THE BASIC BAKUNIN WRITINGS 1869-1871, Translated
and Edited by Robert M. Cutler, pg. 65
The revolution must
have the support of the middle class and middle aged, the middle of the road –
the sober of mind, the possessors of self-discipline, those able to compromise,
those with the wisdom of decades of living under their belts.
The task at hand,
then, as we see from the quotes above from Landauer,
is to sensitize the middle class to the sufferings of the poor. We must counter
the lack of identification with the poor that has been cultivated among the
middle class as a method of "divide and conquer" on the part of the
bourgeoisie.
The transition into
a normalized Anarchic society after the revolutionary period will not be
carried out by enraged teenagers, no matter how sympathetic we may be as to the
reasons for their outrage.
Anarchy has to be
the Movement of the stable, the mature, the rational, *the average*.
The revolution
cannot leave us with a patchwork of Freetown Christianias.
Neither can the
revolution cannot leave us with what Bakunin has
rightly said is a negative stance – Anarchism. We must be *for* something. This the enraged and the too pained to function, precisely
those now being attracted to Anarchism and running it afoul, cannot do.
Only when the
Middle Class realize who they are being used and abused and overcome the
illusion that they are not among the disenfranchised, just like the poor, will
the Revolution occur.
Saul Alinsky recognized that too and just before his death he
planned to undertake the major project of his life - the political
radicalization of the average Joe. See
the interview he granted to Playboy Magazine in 1972, entitled "Empowering People, Not Elites" on this URL: http://tinyurl.com/qov5t . He did not live to succeed. That's a
tragedy. If anyone could have done it, he could have. He was uniquely gifted to
be the catalyst that set off an explosion of awareness and desire for radical
change among the Middle Class.
Anarchy, in the
final analysis, has to be a Revolution of the average people - not the
intellectual, not the punk, not the enraged and disturbed past the point of
being able to function. It cannot reach the necessary critical mass if it
is the Movement of those on the sidelines of society.
I am convinced that
the reason that Anarchy has not succeeded is because it has not convinced the
Middle Class that they are among the outsiders, they too are disenfranchised,
they are working 60 hours a week when about two hours per day will suffice
if technology is employed properly, that they are *emotionally and
psychologically destitute* and that is what is impinging on their ability to
connect with others and that is why it is worth their while to get radical.
Anarchy must create
a way of life that average people can live, feel comfortable with and feel at
home in. Anarchy cannot be an "alternative lifestyle".
Either Anarchy will
speak to and for the mainstream, or it won't succeed.
Doreen Ellen Bell-Dotan, Tzfat, Israel
Anarchist and 50-Year-Old
Grandmother