C O M M E N T S   A G A I N S T   A N A R C H I S M
 
"The anarchist agenda is the fulfillment of an ideal. Anarchism is the still ideological negation of the State and of classes, that is to say, the very social preconditions of any separated ideology. It is an ideology of pure freedom which makes everything equal and eschews any suggestion of historical evil. The doctrine requires no more than the reiteration, and the reintroduction into each particular struggle, of the same simple and all-encompassing idea - the same endpoint that anarchism has identified from the first as the movement's sole and entire goal."
 
-          Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle
 
"Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence."
 
-         Karl Marx, The German Ideology
 
Anarchism, wherever it props up a "revolutionary" appearance, and however violent or anti-hierarchic, is nothing but an ideology, complete with its own set of fetishized heroes and ideas.
 
Anarchists rummage around the decomposed corpses of Proudhon, the male-chauvinist ideologue of small cooperative capitalism; of Bakunin, the proto-Bolshevik who called for "the equalization of classes"; of World War I supporter Kropotkin; of the anarcho-statist CNT (now, as usual, trying to bureaucratically organize the struggles of the Spanish proletariat); and of various other imitators and interpreters thereof.
 
The various ideologies of anarchism are just as impoverished as its various ideologues: the rotten anarcho-syndicalism which still fails to see unions as mechanisms for integrating the proletariat into capitalist society; that Collectivism which seeks only to collectivize wage-labor; the laughable Stirnerite individualism that can't comprehend that history is the history of classes, or that our collective enslavement to capital must be abolished collectively; the localist self-managed-property federalism of Kropotkin which attempts to pass itself off as "communist"; or the contemptible hip "alternative scene" anarchism which revels and wallows in the "non-conformist" areas of commodity society.
 
Active anarchists are always looking for fertile ground into which they hope to sow their ideas, which they see as the driving force of the revolution. Those who see the world according to anarchist abstract absolutes such as "No Authority" or "the rights of the individual" always have a conception of themselves as having already grasped the essential, with the remaining task being to awaken everyone else. The anarchist is a missionary. He possesses the key to the jihad to save humanity.
 
Once the anarchist's abstract desires have found their goal in terms of ideals, areas are sought out wherein he can "apply" these ideals. Trade unions, working class culture, the alternative scene, the peace movement, national liberation movements, protests, and various other forms of false or imagined opposition are often "entered into" and thus legitimized and defended.
 
Some of the more political anarchists often have specific views on working class conditions and on the past - and possible future - developments of society. They are not openly anti-historical like the alternative scene freaks or the self-sufficient organic farmers. They are pseudo-historical. Their practice rests on varying degrees of support for "the working class" as it is, and belief in their own necessity as bringers of the light.
 
These two properties of practical anarchism are neither exclusive of each other or exclusive to anarchism: they characterize leftism as a whole. (This is no coincidence considering the token addition of various leftist Causes to the anarchist ideology: feminism, pacifism, gay liberation, anti-racism, anti-imperialism, anti-fascism, community organizing, etc.) They are the inevitable results of revolutionary ideology, understood in the sense of a set of holy ideas, from which practice then is derived.
 
When we say that anarchism is idealist, we don't mean that the destruction of the State is a utopian impossibility: quite the contrary. It just has nothing to do with the realization of an ideal.
 
The search by practical anarchism to apply their ideas has taken many forms. It has been a fusion of conceptions of the future as a matter of realizing abstract absolutes (Justice, Reason, Rights, Democracy, Freedom, etc.) with ridiculous ideas about the proletariat being led to social revolution thanks to the intervention of self-sacrificial idealists, professional educators, or secret elites.
 
The veritable dead weight of anarchist ideology is nothing but an obstacle to real radical possibilities. Down with the State! Down with musty anarchism! We leave anarchism in the deeds and mouths of ideologues and priests!

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