The last chapter examined the issue of pornography, an issue that divides liberal and radical feminists, and tried to show how we might resist the misrepresentations, double standards and the attempts at ‘de-radicalisation’ which characterise the usual discussions of that issue. In the process, surprisingly strong affinities emerged once again between the emphases and habits associated with ‘radical feminism’ and with the Marxist-influenced tradition of ‘critical theory’ respectively. The quick-yet-convoluted dismissals of the empirical case against porn in the dominant liberal discourse, as ingenious as they are seemingly inevitable, cry out for a critique in terms of the notion of (patriarchal) ideology – and that is exactly what they get, in effect, from figures like Catharine MacKinnon. In the attempt to resist what I regarded as the reduction of the critique of porn to a matter of lifestyle-policing, I also stressed another point that is of central importance to critical theorists: the need to critique society as a totality,1 recognising the interconnectedness of social life and the pervasiveness of its oppressive character, rather than attempting to break it up into isolated fragments, patches of light and dark. I stressed the links and parallels between the critique of porn and the critique of capitalism, the limitations of ‘atomistic’ approaches centred on doomed attempts to live individual lives that are politically unproblematic and morally squeaky-clean under a system which is anything but. As Adorno puts it, ‘Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.’2

So whilst the issue of porn is most usually regarded as a battlefield between‘liberal’ and ‘radical’ feminists, central themes from socialist and Marxist feminism hover unavoidably in the background. What I want to do next is to drag those themes into the foreground, and focus more closely on the relationship between feminist ideas and left-wing critiques of capitalism. I already said a little, in Chapter 6, about the historical clashes and affinities between Marxists (or other socialists) and feminists. In this chapter, I take a different tack, and consider a face of feminism that is very rarely seen or acknowledged: anarchist (or ‘anarcho-’/‘anarcha’-) feminism. By giving anarchist ideas the consideration they deserve, I suggest, we can get a clearer view of the vexed question of the relationship between feminist and socialist ideas: we may better see where there is a war, and where there isn’t.

10.1 What is anarchism?

The first thing to note about anarchism is that it is a body of thought and practice which (much like the category of ‘critical theory’) is made more difficult to pin down and define by the fact that it is a position that is inherently uneasy with the whole project of fixing definitions. As one prominent early twentiethcentury anarchist thinker, Emma Goldman, puts it: ‘Anarchism urges man to think, to investigate, to analyze every proposition.’3 Or, to take the words of the Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta: We do not boast that we possess absolute truth, on the contrary, we believe that social truth is not a fixed quantity, good for all times, universally applicable or determinable in advance . . . 4

It should become clearer, in the course of this chapter, why anarchists have tended to take this line. But in any case, their reticence with regard to definitions and absolute statements, their reluctance to ‘pin anything down’, has not removed the practical necessity for anarchists to issue concise and digestible statements of their philosophy, although these have sometimes been offered rather grudgingly. Goldman, having just stated anarchism’s inherent hostility to fixed definitions, nevertheless relents (‘but that the brain capacity of the average reader be not taxed too much . . . ’):

ANARCHISM: – the philosophy of a new social order based on liberty unrestricted by man-made law; the theory that all forms of government rest on violence, and are therefore wrong and harmful, as well as unnecessary.5 This, I suggest, is as good a starting point as any, if we want to get a general overview of what the anarchist approach to politics and to political philosophy is. By elaborating on Goldman’s definition, we may identify the main hallmarks of anarchist thought. First, and most obviously, anarchists have voiced their commitments in the language of ‘freedom’ or ‘liberty’ – and have often insisted that this freedom be full, absolute or ‘unrestricted’ (Goldman). ‘Freedom’ is, of course, a notoriously vexed concept, and so there is a large and urgent question to be asked as to what anarchists mean by it. The answer, inevitably, will vary from one anarchist thinker to another, but a couple of general observations may be made. For one thing, when anarchists talk about ‘freedom’ or ‘liberty’, they are ultimately interested – like those who identify themselves as ‘liberals’ – in the freedom of the individual. This freedom does also have a collective dimension,as will become clearer later, and anarchists also talk in terms of the selfregulation of communities; but it is clear that what is being advocated is not some system in which groups may be ‘free’ or ‘self-determining’ in a way that comes at the cost of the freedom of the individual members of those groups – those groups must be internally free, not just free of external constraints. As the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) insisted, the ‘communes of the next revolution will not only break down the state and substitute free federation for parliamentary rule; they will part with parliamentary rule within the commune itself . . . They will be anarchist within the commune as they will be anarchist outside it.’6

This is not yet to say exactly what this individual freedom is, or how it is possible for it to be fully and universally realised. The stance on that will vary from anarchist to anarchist – and in any case, we cannot adequately understand what anarchists (even in general) mean by ‘freedom’ without looking at this in the context of their other distinctive commitments (to be discussed shortly). Here, I will merely strike a note of caution. It is tempting to assume that anarchists are concerned with what is now often called ‘negative’ liberty. According to a distinction famously articulated by the liberal political theorist Isaiah Berlin in his 1958 essay,7 ‘negative’ liberty is the state of being unconstrained by external agency: I am free if no one ties my hands, stands in my way, locks me in prison or holds a gun to my head. It is notoriously more difficult to say what ‘positive’ liberty is – and Berlin’s own account of it has been justly accused of conflating more than one thing 8 – but the usual understanding is that it connotes a state of self-authorship or self-mastery: I am positively free if I am meaningfully in control of my own life – and as we all know, it’s quite possible to fall short of that condition without being locked up in prison (conversely, it has sometimes been claimed, it is possible to achieve a state of self-mastery even while our negative freedom is denied us). In one sense, it must be true that anarchists are interested in ‘negative’ freedom, or ‘negative’ liberty: they see the freedom of the individual as requiring the absence of restrictions, force or domination by others – as witnessed by Goldman’s ‘liberty unrestricted by man-made law’ – although as we’ll see, they have a distinctive, socialist view of the conditions that are necessary to realise this. But it is clear from the writings of prominent anarchists that they are also interested in freedom in a more positive sense – in what has sometimes been called ‘freedom-to’ 9 – and that, like many socialists (including Marxists), they tie this closely to an ideal of flourishing, self-realisation or fulfilment. As Goldman puts it: ‘Only in freedom can man grow to his full stature. Only in freedom will he learn to think and move, and give the very best in him.’10

As anarchism centrally involves a commitment to individual freedom, equally central is the corresponding opposition to whatever is seen as incompatible with such a commitment, i.e. the threats or impediments to individual freedom. The main enemy or antithesis of freedom is variously identified by anarchists as ‘law’ or ‘government’ (e.g. Goldman), ‘power’ or ‘domination’ or ‘hierarchy’ (e.g. Carol Ehrlich),11 ‘authority’ (e.g. Kornegger,12 R. P. Wolff)13 and – perhaps most obviously – ‘the State’. Anarchists often analyse these phe-nomena not only as violations of individual freedom, but as (literally) violence (albeit often in a covert or unacknowledged form): recall Goldman’s statement, above, that ‘all forms of government rest on violence’. We may understand the point here as twofold. First, there is a point associated with the liberal political theorist Max Weber, that government, no matter how ‘legitimate’, no matter how ‘democratic’ or apparently peaceful and benign, always rests ultimately on the threat of brute physical force: sooner or later – and often, sooner – dissent will be met with nothing more subtle than the policeman’s bodily strength and assorted weaponry. Second, though, we might understand anarchists as making the point that the existence and operation of various forms of government, law and domination, even when things do not come to the point of a physical confrontation, not only rest on the threat of violence, but are themselves already instances of violence: for anarchists, these wreak an everyday (but very real) violence on the individuals that live under them, by constraining their freedom, their powers and even their thought 14 (we might think of this as comparable to the invisible but constant ‘violence’ that some would say is inflicted on a child by an excessively constraining or otherwise psychologically abusive upbringing). In addition to being viewed as forms of violence, government and state, power or authority, domination and hierarchy are described by many anarchists (though certainly not only by anarchists) as having a ‘corrupting’ effect, on those in privileged as well as in subordinate positions within the structures in question. As Marx’s main anarchist adversary Mikhail Bakunin explains, anarchists ‘realise that power and authority corrupt those who exercise them as much as those who are compelled to submit to them’.15

For all these reasons, anarchists stress that they are interested not in acquiring control for themselves, or in raising themselves or even the ‘masses’ to higher positions within the systems of domination that exist. As Ehrlich puts it: ‘The goal, then, is not to “seize” power, as the socialists are fond of urging, but to abolish power.’16 It is not that anarchists are opposed to ‘power’ in every sense of that word – even when they declare their intent to abolish it, and even to abolish it ‘in all its forms’. How could they coherently be opposed to what philosophers have called ‘power-to’, i.e. power as a capability or creative capacity?17 As noted above, this is precisely something that anarchists say they want to unleash, nurture and expand. What they are against, then, is something more akin to what philosophers have termed ‘power-over’ – according to one influential definition, ‘A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do.’18 What they are against is a kind of power that is exercised by some over others, a power which uppresses and restricts those others. Of course, even this is not going to be straightforward to articulate and defend. The problem is not necessarily ‘power-over’ per se. Given their focus on open discussion and dialogue and collective decision making, anarchists presumably are not interested in eliminating all influence of some persons over others – what would be the point of such discussion, if nobody ever changed the way they think as the result of anybody else’s contribution? And it’s unlikely that the anarchist will even be interested in eliminating unequal influence, as such, since it seems both inevitable and harmless that some individuals will be more persuasive than others (perhaps by being more charismatic, or simply more right), at least in some contexts.

It may be instructive, at this point, to think of the anarchist position alongside a favourite liberal value that is also prized by anarchists: equality. The advocacy of ‘equality’ can easily be interpreted in such a way as to make it absurd: if the proposal is that all human beings should be rendered the same in all ways, or equal in all their capacities and traits, or treated as strictly equal in their needs, then it’s just stupid – and everyone knows it. But almost nobody takes this to be a refutation of liberal egalitarianism.19 This owes to a recognition that liberals have much more to say on the matter. And the same should go for anarchists. When we ask what more anarchists have to say, as it happens, the favourite liberal notion of equality comes back into view – but not as we know it. Anarchists are interested not only in freedom, but in equal freedom for all individuals – some extend this beyond adult human beings, to children or to non-human animals.20 But for anarchists, the commitments to freedom and to equality are not really distinct, let alone competing: it is not a matter of placing a value on a good (‘freedom’) and then adding that this good is to be distributed equally among persons. Contrary to a common idea among liberals, whereby freedom and equality are inherently in tension – two competing considerations which need to be ‘balanced’ – anarchists understand freedom in such a way that it is conceptually bound up with equality so that the one value implies the other. Freedom is not some good to be parcelled out, so that some may enjoy it whilst others are denied it. For anarchists, human beings are free when their relationships with one another are non-hierarchical, and not otherwise (since to be dominated is to be un-free).

What is important to recognise here is how closely linked are the three hallmarks of anarchism I’ve been describing: the commitment to freedom is one side of a coin which has the opposition to domination or hierarchy as its other side, and therefore there is an equation in anarchist thought between freedom, and conditions of non-domination or social equality. Anarchists have varied in their willingness to specify more positively what such conditions should look like, and where they have been willing, their suggestions have naturally differed. But all, I think, are united by a commitment to ‘bottom-up’ or ‘de-centralised’ and ‘horizontal’ forms of organisation, as opposed to the ‘top-down’, ‘centralised’ or ‘vertical’ form of control epitomised by the state. As the anarchist feminist Penny Kornegger puts it, what is envisaged is a system of ‘overlapping circles rather than a pyramid’.21

This vision of a horizontal as opposed to a vertical mode of organisation has informed – and been interpreted in the light of – existing political movements such as trade unionism and feminism. The fusion of anarchist ideas with industrial trade unionism occurred most notably in Spain in the first half of the twentieth century, giving rise to an ‘anarcho-syndicalist’ movement which became the largest political force during the Civil War of 1936–9 (in the form of the anarcho-syndicalist union Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) and the closely related militant anarchist organisation, Federación Anarquista Ibérica (FAI)). During this period, 60 per cent of the land was worked collectively, with large-scale organisation taking the form of federations linking hundreds of small collectives – the most successful examples being the Peasant Federation of Levant (which included 900 collectives) and the Aragon Federation of Collectives (composed of about 500 collectives).22 Like some trade unionists, many feminists have had an automatic affinity with anarchism, insofar as both movements have shared an ‘emphasis on the small group as a basic organizational unit’.23 Describing the feminist movement of the second half of the twentieth century – and pointing in particular to phenomena such as consciousness-raising groups, rape crisis centres and women’s health collectives – Kornegger writes: ‘Our impulses toward collective work and small leaderless groups have been anarchistic, but in most cases we haven’t called them by that name.’24 In a similar vein, Carol Ehrlich identifies ‘small, leaderless groups where tasks are rotated and skills and knowledge shared’ as a common element of the approach of anarchists and of many feminists.25 Although the details vary, then, the positive commitment of anarchists to horizontal or ‘bottom-up’ organisational forms can be understood in terms of the following cluster of elements: large-scale networks of small groups (where the network is connected ‘horizontally’ rather than being held together by any central authority); within the small groups, a kind of ‘direct-democratic’ participation (facilitated by the groups’ small size),26 an emphasis on discussion, and an avoidance of privileged leadership in favour of ‘task rotation’ – as Ehrlich underlines, anarchists are not necessarily against leadership per se (‘provided that it carries no reward or privilege, and is temporary and specificto a particular task’).27

This ideal of horizontal forms of organisation is not only relevant to the way in which anarchists characterise the kind of society they prescribe and aim for – as we’ll see, anarchists have sometimes been rather wary of the whole project of mapping out their favoured sort of social world. To put it in terms of my earlier distinction, anarchists apply their preference for horizontal modes of co-operation not only in their contributions to ‘static’ theory, but also in their approach to ‘dynamic’ theories and processes of social transformation. This is sometimes expressed in terms of a need to match means to ends: the strategies used to bring about social change must live up to the anarchist values (freedom, non-domination etc.) that motivate that social change in the first place.28 As Ehrlich insists: ‘You cannot liberate yourself by non-liberatory means.’29 Anarchists therefore have opposed hierarchical organisations and parliamentarianism as means of bringing about a better society – a policy which has frequently brought them into conflict with Marxist and other socialist approaches as well as with liberals.30 This is closely tied up with anarchists’ insistence – noted earlier – against seizing power or mimicking or exploiting hierarchy, even where the apparent and avowed purpose is to abolish those very things. Against the strategy of those who seek feminist change through involvement in electoral politics, for example, Ehrlich writes: ‘they will all drown in the depths of things as they are’.31

Like many whose politics are closer to the political mainstream, anarchists have warned of the dangers of seeking power in order to liberate others. Instead, anarchists have placed an emphasis on self-liberation. In Malatesta’s words: ‘We do not want to emancipate the people. We want the people to emancipate themselves.’32

∗ ∗ ∗

The above is certainly not intended as a comprehensive account of anarchist thought, and there is undoubtedly great variation between different anarchist positions. But one thing should by now be absolutely clear: anarchy ࣔ chaos!! Commenting on a right-wing author who conflated the two, George Orwell once remarked that it is ‘a hardly more correct use of words than saying that a Conservative is one who makes jam’.33 No anarchist theorist (as far as I am aware) opposes structure or organisation per se – as Ehrlich points out, anarchists are not opposed to structure, but to a particular kind of structure (the rigid, hierarchical kind).34 In practice, too, we have seen that anarchists are capable of impressive feats of large-scale co-operative endeavour. Nothing, however, could be further from the fiction, which constantly depicts anarchism as terminally haphazard.35 Of course, anarchists are well used to being attacked on this and other grounds – when they are not ignored altogether, that is (as Ehrlich notes, ‘anarchism has veered between a bad press and none at all’).36 It is worth now considering a couple of the most common charges levelled against anarchism, in order to show that they are not nearly so decisive as often assumed. Anarchists are not idiots: they have heard these charges (repeatedly), thought about them and responded; whether or not we think that their responses are ultimately adequate, they are at least compelling enough to show that we are not dealing here with knockdown objections; the responses, too, demand a response.

∗ ∗ ∗

In her essay ‘Anarchism’, Emma Goldman notes and counters two of the most common and predictable criticisms that anarchists face:37 first, that anarchism is ‘impractical’ (though a nice idea ‘in theory’); and second, that anarchism is violent or destructive.38 Goldman meets both objections with characteristic verve. I’ll consider each objection, and Goldman’s reply, in turn.

10.2 Be realistic!

Responding first to charges of ‘impracticality’, Goldman retorts: A practical scheme, says Oscar Wilde, is either one already in existence, or a scheme that could be carried out under the existing conditions; but it is exactly the existing conditions that one objects to, and any scheme that could accept these conditions is wrong and foolish. The true criterion of the practical, therefore, is not whether the latter can keep intact the wrong or foolish; rather it is whether the scheme has vitality enough to leave the stagnant waters of the old, and build, as well as sustain, new life.39 Here, Goldman is drawing attention to a kind of (small-‘c’) conservative bias inherent in many familiar demands for us to be ‘realistic’, or to make proposals that are ‘practical’ or ‘feasible’. Those who are strongly critical of the social and political status quo have always been met with accusations of being ‘unrealistic’; and, particularly in the world after the fall of many of the regimes inspired by communist and socialist ideas, we are invariably asked the question, ‘But what would you put in its place?’ Since our answers to that question – if we are able to furnish any at all – are always considered either too vague or too pie-in-the-sky, those answers and also our criticisms of the existing state of things, are often dismissed on the grounds of a failure to be ‘constructive’.40

The problem is that these sorts of demands, expectations and reactions often presuppose exactly the things that the radical critic is calling into question (that is to say, they are ‘question-begging’). People often talk as though it is obvious what it means to be ‘practical’ or ‘realistic’, as though we all know what those words mean, and mean the same thing by them. But the matter is about as far from obvious as you can get. Does ‘realistic’ mean ‘similar to what we already have’ (in much the same way as a naturalistic sketch or painting might be ‘realistic’)? If so, then only small-scale, modest criticisms and suggestions can ever be realistic (so much the worse for ‘realism’, the radical critic might say). Or does ‘realistic’ or ‘practical’ mean ‘possible’? Possible in what sense? Logically, physically, economically, psychologically? Or, does it mean ‘likely to happen’? Likely to happen under what conditions? Isn’t what is (and is not) likely to happen partly up to us – partly, even, a function of the political criticisms we choose to take seriously or to dismiss? Suppose we think that the Government is ruling in a way that is insensitive to the wishes of the people and highly detrimental to their interests, and that it should therefore be kicked out as soon as possible. Suppose also that we are required to be ‘realistic’ and ‘practical’, where these concepts are understood in terms of what is possible or likely under the present Government. Then, surely, those who impose that expectation on us have already dismissed our point of view: they do not reject our position on the grounds that it is impractical; they find it impractical because they reject our position. Anarchists, as Goldman emphasises, are radically opposed to ‘the existing conditions’. And yet they are held to a standard of ‘practicality’ which seeks to tether them to those conditions by rejecting as ‘impractical’ any proposal that is incompatible with them. When conceptions of the ‘realistic’, the ‘practical’ (etc.) are loaded in this way, the decks are stacked against the anarchist, and against any radical critic of the status quo, from the very beginning. None of this means that anarchists themselves (and other radical critics of the status quo) see no value in being practical or realistic – they only reject dominant conceptions of what these things mean. This comes out very clearly in Goldman’s reply, when she identifies ‘the true criterion of the practical’ as being whether some idea or scheme ‘has vitality enough to leave the stagnant waters of the old, and build, as well as sustain, new life’. Of course, it will not always be easy to say exactly what this means, nor to determine which schemes do and do not satisfy the criterion. But what is clear is that practicality cannot be equated with keeping things (more or less) as they are – or as Goldman puts it, ‘keep[ing] intact the wrong or foolish’. Many radical critics of social life as we know it – and anarchists are no exception – take the view that the status quo is ‘realistic’ only in an extremely unimpressive and uninteresting sense: it is the status quo; it is ‘realistic’ qua ‘real’ qua ‘actual’ (and again, we knew that already). But capitalism is not realistic, say Marxists, in the sense of being stable – it is crisis-prone and ultimately doomed. And it is not realistic in the sense of being honest about itself – it relies on ideological forms of thought which paper over social contradictions.41 Many anarchists, too, have suggested that far from being the criterion of the practical, there is something crucially unreal about prevailing social reality. This emphasis on inauthenticity is one that is shared by some critical theorists and twentieth-century anarchists – in particular, the strand of anarchism known as ‘situationism’. The core ideas of situationism are those of the ‘commodity’ and of the ‘spectacle’.42 Situationists identify a particularly radical form of ‘commodification’ as characteristic of modern societies: not only is the capitalist economy arranged around the production, sale and consumption of commodities; in capitalist societies, everything is progressively transformed into a commodity – ideas, culture and even people.43 The idea of people as commodities conveys the sense that they become objects rather than subjects: just one more thing to be churned out and consumed by the social machine, and not agents with either a meaningful inner life or control over their own destiny. And this connects with the second core idea: the ‘spectacle’, an idea which is meant to convey passivity, on the one hand (people are presented as passive spectators rather than as actors in the great social performance), and inauthenticity, on the other (what the spectators are passively taking in is not real life, but something acted out – no more or less than a spectacle). According to this view, it is not anarchism that is unrealistic, but the social world as we know it – a fundamentally unreal world, which – as long as it persists – supresses the possibility of a truly liberated collective life.

Hence the situationist slogan: Be realistic, demand the impossible! None of this is meant to suggest that it would always and everywhere be illegitimate to accuse anarchists of being impractical – maybe (some of) the forms of organisation that they (or some of them) have championed wouldn’t work on the scale and in the manner that they have claimed; maybe ‘human nature’ is indeed such that hierarchies of the kind anarchists want to eliminate will always emerge (a claim that is frequently asserted, but which is much more difficult to establish);44 maybe anarchists and other radical critics really do lack proposals with enough ‘vitality’ to give us any hope of actually being able to overthrow the existing state of things. Maybe. There are endless, involved discussions to be had over these and many other questions. But we would actually have to have these discussions. It is not good enough just to declare relatively more radical criticisms and proposals ‘impractical’; very often, such declarations turn out to mean little more than that the criticisms and proposals in question are radical ones – when we knew that already. It is worth saying something about the terms ‘utopian’ and ‘anti-utopian’, since part of the issue under discussion here has to do with the degree of willingness and ability of anarchists – and others who aim at far-reaching criticisms of current society, such as Marxists and radical feminists – to describe the form of society they envisage. In general, it should be noted that the ‘objection from impracticality’, levelled against anarchists and socialists alike, is two-pronged: either the anarchist or socialist says something about what she wants to see (in which case she is told it is impractical); or she doesn’t – in which case she criticised for not saying anything ‘positive’ (either way, she is seen as failing to be sufficiently ‘practical’ or ‘constructive’). The strand of ‘anti-utopianism’ present in both anarchist and socialist (and, especially, Marxist)45 thought may be seen as a stance of resistance against the second prong. ‘Anti-utopianism’, simply put, is not – as is often assumed – the rejection of ambitious or radical proposals for change; rather, it is the principled reluctance to specify in detail a ‘correct’ or acceptable form of society. To say that this reluctance is ‘principled’ is to say that it is not a mere sign of laziness, or culpable failure of insight, but is thought to follow from key features of the theorist’s view of the world. I’ll mention two important motivations for anti-utopianism now.

First, there is the realisation that our forms of thought are shaped by the societies in which we live, and that they may, moreover, tend to take on the ideological function of supporting the interests of those occupying positions of dominance within the system that prevails at a given time: being the products of a particular social system, our imaginations may be constrained by its bounds – some social possibilities are likely just to be too distant from what we have so far experienced for them to occur to us, or even to be comprehensible to us. For example, Kropotkin predicts that, under conditions of freedom, human beings will arrive at a system of collective living that ‘will be a lot more attuned to popular aspirations and the requirements of coexistence and mutual relations than any theory, however splendid, devised by the thinking and imagination of reformers’.46

A second motivation – present in both socialist and anarchist thought, but emphasised particularly strongly by anarchists – has to do with the particular value of freedom: if freedom is really what we’re interested in, the thought goes, then we have no business trying to specify the contours of a future that will be shaped by free individuals – we simply can’t know what such a future will be like; and if we think we can, this is indicative of (at best) arrogance, or (worse) an intent to impose our own will upon that future in an inappropriate way. The anarchist Charlotte M. Wilson (1854–1944) states simply that, ‘when [the workers] find themselves their own masters, they will modify the old system to suit their convenience in a variety of ways . . . as common sense is likely to suggest to free men’.47 Marx, more famously, maintains that it is not his (or our) business to write ‘recipes for the cook-shops of the future’.48 Ironically, perhaps the best motto for anarchist anti-utopianism comes from Lenin, who for many anarchists represents the point at which the authoritarian elements in Marxism triumph over the more truly socialist and egalitarian. Lenin identified the central question in politics as ‘Who whom?’ – i.e. ‘Who does what to whom, and for what purpose?’49 Anarchism is above all a view not about what is to be done – to allude to another of Lenin’s questions 50 – but about who should decide what is to be done. Anarchism is the view that people should decide for themselves what to do, and not have it dictated to them from above. At the same time, there is a clear ‘utopian’ strain in anarchist thought (as there is in socialism too): attempts to describe the world that is to be brought into existence by anarchist struggle. What else could be going on, when (for example) Goldman describes anarchism as ‘the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion; the liberation of the human body from the dominion of property; liberation from the shackles and restraint of government . . . a social order based on the free grouping of individuals for the purpose of producing real social wealth, an order that will guarantee to every human being free access to the earth and full enjoyment of the necessities of life, according to individual desires, tastes, and inclinations’?51 The anarcho-syndicalist Rudolf Rocker affirms the anarchist commitment to some form of utopianism quite unapologetically: People may . . . call us dreamers . . . They fail to see that dreams are also a part of the reality of life, that life without dreams would be unbearable. No change in our way of life would be possible without dreams and dreamers. The only people who are never disappointed are those who never hope and never try to realise their hope.52

There is more going on here than confusion or in-fighting, I think. On the one hand, we have to resist the tendency to dismiss radical political positions unless they can provide us with detailed proposals, for several reasons: first, it paves the way for these to be thrown out on ideologically driven charges of ‘impracticality’; second, it makes some sense to expect that we will not have full epistemic access to utopia; third, a commitment to human freedom seems to imply a commitment to a certain open-endedness in our proposals (we are not primarily proposing any particular set of arrangements, but demanding that people be able to determine for themselves the sorts of arrangements they are to live under). But a recognition of all these points, it seems to me, is quite compatible with continuing to reach for and offer ‘utopian’ glimpses of possible worlds unlike this one. As Malatesta argues, discussions over the shape of an alternative society are indispensable, for it is ‘absurd to believe that, once government has been destroyed and the capitalists expropriated, “things will look after themselves” without the intervention of those who already have an idea on what has to be done and who immediately set about doing it’; ‘social life,’ he adds, ‘as the life of individuals, does not permit of interruption’.53

Perhaps the problem is not with offering utopian sketches, then, but with (a) automatically treating the omission to do so as a refutation of radical politics (and as a vindication of the status quo), and (b) making a mistake about the status of the enterprise we are engaged in when we do make positive suggestions – namely, convincing ourselves that we are in the business of producing permanently valid, non-negotiable blueprints for the future, rather than stimulating one another’s imaginations and impulses towards social change.54 Above all, anarchists are concerned not so much to sketch utopia, but to ease the movement towards it: to propose practical measures which, by evoking a different form of society, might help bring us closer to it. As Malatesta says, to ‘neglect all the problems of reconstruction or to pre-arrange complete and uniform plans are both errors, excesses which, by different routes, would lead to our defeat as anarchists and to the victory of new or old authoritarian regimes. The truth lies in the middle.’55 The answer, on this view, is not to be either a ‘utopian’ or an ‘anti-utopian’, but to understand these terms so as to realise the possibility of being proudly both.

10.3 The passion for destruction

As with the charge of impracticality, Goldman responds to the claim that anarchism is ‘destructive’ or violent by turning the accusation back against the status quo: Destruction and violence! How is the ordinary man to know that the most violent element in society is ignorance; that its power of destruction is the very thing Anarchism is combating? Nor is he aware that Anarchism, whose roots . . . are part of nature’s forces, destroys, not healthful tissue, but parasitic growths that feed on the life’s essence of society. It is merely clearing the soil from weeds and sagebrush, that it may eventually bear healthy fruit.56 Once again, this response turns the accusation on its head by attacking the understanding of the concepts that are used to discredit anarchism: in this case, the concepts of ‘violence’ and of ‘destruction’. Anarchists can agree that violence and at least some kinds of destruction are bad things – just as they can agree that it is important to be ‘realistic’ or ‘practical’ in the right sense of those terms. But this, they believe, is a reason to destroy the destructive forms of social life that now exist, not to preserve them. Just as anarchists might say that it is reality that is unreal and impractical, not anarchism, Goldman is saying that it is not anarchism but the status quo – and in particular the ‘ignorance’ that pervades and underpins it – that is violent and destructive. As with the case of ‘practicality’, then, the problem is that the notions of ‘violence’ and ‘destruction’ tend to get understood in a way that already tacitly reflects an allegiance to the status quo and an antipathy towards positions that seek to overturn it. What we choose to call ‘violent’, or ‘destructive’ in a pejorative sense, is neither a straightforward matter nor an apolitical one. The dominant tendency is to call ‘violent’ and ‘destructive’ all and only those things which upset or disrupt everyday life, conventional morality and the continuance of existing social structures. That is why, when we think of violence, we are likely to think of the mugger or bank robber or terrorist. Slavoj Žižek suggests that this ‘subjective’ violence – so termed because, on Žižek’s picture, this kind of violence will also have a clearly identifiable subject who is the perpetrator – is often the only kind which gets recognised as violence. Against this, he juxtaposes ‘subjective’ with what he calls ‘systemic’ violence: the violence inherent in the ‘smooth’ running of everyday life – in oppressive political structures and exploitative economic relations.57 To understand ‘violence’ in a way that effectively identifies it with disruptions of ‘business as usual’ has a twofold function: it renders the violence inherent in the ‘business as usual’ of capitalist societies invisible-as-violence; and it potentially taints any serious attempt at social change by associating such attempts with violence and destruction. As Goldman points out, there are plenty of things which are in some sense ‘destructive’, but which we find not only permissible but vital: surgery, many forms of medicine and hygiene, the removal of ‘parasitic growths’ or the ‘clearing [of] the soil from weeds and sagebrush’.58 Or, as the nineteenth-century anarchist Mikhail Bakunin famously put it: ‘The passion for destruction is a creative passion too!’59 The quick-and-easy dismissal of anarchism as violent, then, is just as illegitimate and confused as the quick-and-easy rejection on grounds of ‘impracticality’ – and just as misleading as the kneejerk equation of anarchy with chaos. At the same time, there are genuine questions to be asked about the stance of anarchists towards violence. In view of the anarchist commitment to the employment of only those means which they see as living up to anarchist ideals (e.g. the ideal of non-hierarchy), it would make some sense to expect that anarchists must be automatic pacifists. We have seen that anarchists view domination and hierarchy as forms of violence, and oppose them as such. It also seems plausible that the narrower class of acts which we normally designate with the terms ‘violent’ or ‘violence’ – acts of physical coercion, force and the infliction of injury – would count, for anarchists, as acts of domination (and hence violence) of the sort to be opposed, even while it is also emphasised that these more obvious forms of violence are not the only ones to be found in unfree societies. If anarchist organisations must be non-hierarchical in order to be fit to usher in a non-hierarchical future, then must they not also be committed to non-violence? On the whole, however, anarchists have not identified themselves as pacifists. The Christian pacifist (and, some have suggested, a perpetrator of sexual violence)60 Leo Tolstoy stated that ‘[t]he Anarchists are right in everything; in the negation of the existing order and in the assertion that, without Authority there could not be worse violence than that of Authority under existing conditions. They are mistaken only in thinking that anarchy can be instituted by a violent revolution.’61 Tolstoy clearly regards pacifism as the logical consequence of anarchist principles; but as his statement makes clear, anarchists have in general not drawn this conclusion – and some, most notoriously the Russian anarchist Sergey Nechayev, seem to have been full subscribers to the doctrine of ‘by any means necessary’ and apologists for the most bloodthirsty violence.62 In reality, the attitudes of anarchists towards violence in the pursuit of social change have covered an extremely wide spectrum. Is Tolstoy right in seeing this as a failure on the part of many anarchists to live up to their own principles? I won’t try to settle this question here. But what is clear is that we have to approach it with a constant and lively appreciation of Goldman’s insight: that the way in which we understand concepts like ‘violence’ – as with understandings of ‘the political’, discussed in Chapter 8 – is never a politically neutral matter. What is at issue here is no simple question of whether violence is acceptable or not, but also the question of what should count as ‘violence’ – a point of which pacifists have been acutely aware. Goldman’s warning is against being blind to the forms of violence enshrined in the status quo, and of hypocritically tolerating and defending that violence under the guise of a principle of ‘anti-violence’ which rules out in advance practical efforts towards real social change. On the other hand, just as it is crucial to be critical of dominant understandings of the concept of violence, it is also crucial to guard against precisely the sorts of dangerous self-deception and excuse-making that anarchists detect and condemn in certain ‘authoritarian’ strands of socialism. If the Leninist is guilty of confusing a vanguard with ‘the people’, tyranny with democracy,of thinking that a stateless and classless society can be brought about by the seizure of state power by (the self-appointed representatives of) the working class, the anarchist might fall into a parallel delusion when she begins to say of the actions she wants to perform or encourage, ‘That’s not really violence; it’s surgery!’

However real this danger is, it must not be used as an excuse to slip back into the sort of mistake that Goldman uncovers: the uncritical acceptance of a dominant understanding of ‘violence’, which presents itself as politically neutral and uncontested – something which it can never be. The point is that the need for criticism extends to a need for self-criticism; not that it is somehow permissible, when this turns out to be more difficult than expected, to give up. This sentiment should not be an unfamiliar one to any anarchist. The emphasis on reflexive self-criticism, I noted earlier, is one of the core commitments of ‘critical theory’, but it is also definitive of anarchism’s resistance to definition. To return to the statement from Goldman from which we started out: ‘Anarchism urges man to think, to investigate, to analyze every proposition.’63

∗ ∗ ∗

Perhaps even more so than with Marxism and socialism, there are historically close connections between anarchist ideas and feminism. With some exceptions – in particular, Proudhon 64 – the anarchist tradition has been committed to the ideal of equality between the sexes.65 Emma Goldman, sometimes regarded as the founder of anarcha-feminism, identified patriarchy as one of the major structures to be opposed by anarchists (along with the state, religion and property), advocated women’s education about contraception, and was one of a handful of feminists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to speak out in favour of ‘free love’ – an idea often assumed to be distinctive of ‘second-wave’ feminism. Goldman wrote, in 1897:

I demand the independence of woman, her right to support herself; to live for herself; to love whomever she pleases, or as many as she pleases. I demand freedom for both sexes, freedom of action, freedom in love and freedom in motherhood.66

Alongside the theoretical commitment of many anarchists to feminist principles, the early twentieth century has seen striking examples of the fusion of anarchist and feminist ideas in practice. The mujeres libres (‘free women’) – although they did not describe themselves as ‘feminist’ (on grounds of the term’s ‘bourgeois’ connotations) – were a formidable presence during the Spanish Civil War, committed equally to anarcho-syndicalism and to the empowerment (capacitación) of women.67 Beyond the fact that anarchists have been feminists (and that many of them have also been women), though, what does anarchism have to do with feminism? Whilst Marxism and feminism are regarded by some as going hand-in-hand,68 and by others as in essential tension,69 my sense is that – today at least – anarchism and feminism are most often regarded as unconnected. The moniker ‘anarchist-feminist’ is thus looked on as a mildly comical curiosity, an inventive (even perverse) amalgamation of ‘right-on’ affiliations. It is pretty clear, however, that the alliance of anarchism and feminism is not simply an aggregation of two unrelated commitments – and anarchist feminists themselves have certainly not seen it that way. Anarchists have often taken feminist ideals to be already implicit in anarchist ones. More clearly than with Marxism and socialism – commitments which are often initially stated in terms of class, ownership of the means of production, or material equality (not, by themselves, enough to satisfy all the concerns of feminists) – anarchism is based on an explicit commitment to human freedom: on the assumption that women are human, anarchism is interested in their freedom as much as anybody’s. As Goldman emphasises: ‘all human-beings, irrespective of race, colour, or sex, are born with the equal right to share at the table of life’.70

It seems that the generality or open-endedness of anarchism – more often looked upon as culpable vagueness – is its strength here. Unlike Marxism (at least on some readings of the latter), anarchism is not first and foremost a theory of how society is structured and develops – or at least, it is not a theory which gives primacy to any particular element of social life (such as class) in its depiction of societal development. Rather than ‘class’ or ‘the commodity’, the fundamental phenomenon for many anarchists is something extremely general: the relationship and interplay between the individual and the collective in social life. Goldman makes this explicit: A thorough perusal of the history of human development will disclose two elements in bitter conflict with each other; elements that are only now beginning to be understood, not as foreign to each other, but as closely related and truly harmonious, if only placed in proper environment: the individual and social instincts. The individual and society have waged a relentless and bloody battle for ages, each striving for supremacy, because each was blind to the value and importance of the other.71 Whilst we might designate this, i.e. the idea of a profound but soluble tension between individual and collective, as the ‘descriptive core’72 of anarchism – much as anarchists like Goldman would probably hate this formulation – the ‘normative’ core is clearly the central commitment to freedom (and the corresponding opposition to domination), which is seen as capturing something vital for the flourishing of human beings. Recall Goldman’s statement, quoted earlier (putting its abundant use of the ‘generic’ male pronoun aside): ‘Only in freedom can man grow to his full stature. Only in freedom will he learn to think and move, and give the very best in him.’ As we have seen, this attachment to freedom comes with a (sometimes more visible) hostility to whatever is perceived as a threat to such freedom, and it is significant for feminists that this hostility is consistently described by anarchists in terms of a hostility towards all forms of domination.73 Freedom is what anarchism is for; un-freedom or domination is what it is against. There is no specification of the type or source of domination, of the person or group that imposes or suffers it, and no suggestion that any one form of domination (e.g. class domination) is inherently privileged in importance over any other (although there is surely room for the acknowledgement that some forms will be more salient than others at any given historical moment).

It is not just that anarchism has a fluidity and open-endedness, which might lend it affinities with any movement against oppression – anti-racism or anti-colonialism, for example. Anarchists have shared a concern, characteristic of ‘radical’ feminists in particular, with the personal and the everyday,74 a recognition of oppression and domination within those spheres, and an ‘emphasis upon transforming the whole of public and private life’75 – even if this commonality is often unacknowledged by both sides (as Kornegger puts it, ‘feminists have been unconscious anarchists in both theory and practice for years’).76 This is Ehrlich’s thesis in her 1977 essay, ‘Anarchism, socialism, and feminism’ (from which I’ve quoted several times already in the course of this chapter). Ehrlich argues that situationism, in particular, can provide a framework well suited to radical feminists’ concerns: All radical feminists and all social anarchist feminists are concerned with a set of common issues: control over one’s own body; alternatives to the nuclear family and to heterosexuality; new methods of child care that will liberate parents and children; economic self-determination; ending sex stereotyping in education, in the media, and in the workplace; the abolition of repressive laws; an end to male authority, ownership, and control over women; providing women with the means to develop skills and positive self-attitudes; an end to oppressive emotional relationships; and what the Situationists have called ‘the reinvention of everyday life’.77

In the remainder of this chapter, I’ll use Ehrlich’s argument to explore the relationship between anarchism, feminism, and socialism. We have already seen some of the reasons for seeing affinities between anarchism and feminism. But what about the relationship between each of these – or the synthesis of the two implied in the position of ‘anarchist feminism’ – and socialism? Is there a war? If so, who are the adversaries? The interesting thing about Ehrlich’s thesis, as we’ll see, is that she is saying both that there is a war and that there isn’t. On the one hand, all paths lead to the same ‘social anarchist’ (and feminist) destination: there is a sense, then, in which anarchists, socialists and feminists only need to make themselves ware of the fundamental agreement that already exists between them. But Ehrlich’s message is not the (either naı̈ve or sinister) ‘can’t-we-all-get-along’ line, discussed earlier:78 there is an equally important sense in which the disagreements are all too real. Her point is that the usual division into rival camps or ‘isms’ does not reflect deep-seated and intractable disagreements between the philosophies of anarchism, feminism and socialism, but owes instead to their adherents’ failure to be faithful to what they claim are their own core principles.

∗ ∗ ∗

Given the affinities between anarchism and feminism, it is no surprise to find that the criticisms which anarchists have made against some forms of socialism – in particular, Marxism – echo some of the main criticisms made by radical feminists. Above all, anarchists have argued that ‘authoritarian socialism’ – a term sometimes used to pick out the forms of socialism that are being opposed without tarring the whole of socialism with the same brush – re-enacts and entrenches forms of domination, exploitation and oppression which the overthrow of capitalism should aim to eliminate. Because of this, it is also argued, authoritarian socialism is doomed to failure, relative to its own ultimate objectives – such as the goal of realising a classless society. It is important to note that this disagreement overwhelmingly manifests itself as a difference within what I’ve called ‘dynamic’ theory: anarchists and Marxists both state a commitment to a future society that is both classless and stateless; but whilst Marx famously holds that the state will ‘wither away’ at some point after its seizure by the proletariat, anarchists regard this as hopelessly naı̈ve, and argue that new power elites will emerge and that those who have found themselves in control of the state will cling on to it at any cost.79 It is, sometimes, much easier to agree on distant visions than on immediate courses of action. Thus, the disagreements between anarchists and socialists often belong to a kind I described in Chapter 6: invisible or near-invisible at the level of theory, but unmistakable in practice. Ehrlich is well aware of the tensions between anarchist or radical feminists, on the one hand, and those described as ‘socialist feminists’, on the other: ‘The newer socialist feminists’, she observes, ‘have been trying in all manner of inventive ways to keep a core of Marxist-Leninist thought, update it, and graft it to contemporary radical feminism. The results are sometimes peculiar.’80 What Ehrlich suggests is that such attempts produce only a comforting-but-empty rhetoric that obscures a deeper tension: ‘an incredible smorgasbord of tasty principles – a menu designed to appeal to practically everyone’.81 She sees as implicit in feminism – and, more strongly, radical feminism – the view that ‘non-hierarchical structures are essential to feminist practice’, and adds: ‘This, of course, is too much for any socialist to take.’82

From this, she concludes that feminism is ‘far more compatible’ with a certain kind of anarchism than with most kinds of socialism. Whilst ‘[b]oth [anarchists and radical feminists] work to build alternative institutions, and both take the politics of the personal very seriously’, she observes, ‘[s]ocialist feminists are less inclined to think either is particularly vital to revolutionary practice’.83 The latter are, of course, quite capable of lip-service – Ehrlich refers to socialist-feminist statements such as, ‘We agree that all oppression,whether based on race, class, sex, or lesbianism, is interrelated and the fights for liberation from oppression must be simultaneous and cooperative’84 (one of the principles agreed by the first national conference of socialist feminism, held in Ohio in 1975). But the suggestion is that the clash between the commitments and priorities of radical or anarchist feminists and self-described ‘socialist feminists’ always makes itself felt in practice (and perhaps in theory,too, once we look beyond the reassuring slogans). At the same time, Ehrlich is adamant that anarchism and socialism are not in tension. Rather, the ‘social anarchism’ that she espouses is itself a form of socialism: Contrary to popular belief, all social anarchists are socialists. That is, they want to take wealth out of the hands of the few and redistribute it among all members of the community. And they believe that people need to co-operate with each other as a community, instead of living as isolated individuals.85 Here, Ehrlich’s line is in keeping with the anarchist tradition in general. Just as Tolstoy regarded pacifism as the logical conclusion of anarchist principles (whether anarchists realised it or not), so anarchists have consistently claimed that their position is not only a form of socialism, but that it is the ‘truest’ form – the one which most faithfully and correctly draws out the consequences of central socialist principles. As John Most and Emma Goldman once argued, the ‘system of communism logically excludes any and every relation between master and servant, and means really Anarchism’.86 In a similar vein, Malatesta and Hamon, reacting to the expulsion of anarchists from the Second International, reflected: It could be argued with much more reason that we are the most logical and most complete socialists, since we demand for every person not just his entire measure of the wealth of society but also his portion of social power, which is to say, the real ability to make his influence felt, along with that of everybody else, in the administration of public affairs.87

Summing up these sentiments, Rudolf Rocker famously declared: ‘Socialism will be free, or it will not be at all.’88 If socialism implies anarchism, the implication is also held to work the other way around: anarchism implies socialism. (It is worth noting, at this point, that the term ‘libertarian’ was being used as a self-description for around one hundred years before its appropriation by the American right in the 1970s.)89 Although anarchism is now often thought of as having more in common with right-wing ‘free-market’ politics than with socialism – due to a shared hostility to state control – anarchists have traditionally regarded their position as incompatible with the ‘propertarian’ system of power and domination associated with the capitalist mode of production. As the editorial collective of the online ‘Anarchist Library’ points out: It has always struck anarchists as somewhat strange and paradoxical (to say the least) that a system of ‘natural’ liberty (Adam Smith’s term, misappropriated by supporters of capitalism) involves the vast majority having to sell that liberty in order to survive. Thus to be consistently libertarian is, logically, to advocate self-management, and so socialism.90 And, developing this connection: To be a true libertarian requires you to support workers’ control otherwise you support authoritarian social relationships. To support workers’ control, by necessity, means that you must ensure that the producers own (and so control) the means of producing and distributing the goods they create. Without ownership, they cannot truly control their own activity or the product of their labour. The situation where workers possess the means of producing and distributing goods is socialism. Thus to be a true libertarian requires you to be a socialist.91 Summing up both directions of implication, Bakunin states: ‘we are convinced that liberty without socialism is privilege, injustice; and that socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality’.92 So what is going on here? On the one hand, we hear that there are profound tensions between anarchism and socialism (and between feminism and socialism): Ehrlich tells us that anarchism and feminism are much more compatible with one another than either is with socialism (although even the anarchism-and-feminism pair may sometimes need a little help recognising the fundamental agreement that exists between them). On the other hand, we are told that anarchism stands to socialism not as an opponent or rival but as its truest expression. There’s actually no particular mystery about this, I think. In the first place, we can say that what we have here is a war between those who say there is a war and those who say that there isn’t. And one thing we have to recognise is that this still counts as a war. In many of the cases where this line is most applicable, there will be a deep division – a fundamental clash of interests or perspectives – and also a secondary clash between those who are trying to unmask that division and those who are trying to protect and conceal it (those who are concerned to ‘paper over social contradictions’, as Marx would have it). But there are also cases where the reverse is true: i.e. there is a fundamental unity or agreement, and then a secondary clash between those who assert that unity and those who deny it – and this secondary clash is still a clash, and may have real effects.93 Even if anarchists are right to say that themost logical conclusion to draw from socialist principles is anarchism, there remains a very real practical conflict between those who say that we must that we must abolish it, through means which more closely resemble the sort seize the state, through means which mimic its structure, and those who say of society we would like to bring about.94

∗ ∗ ∗

By this point, it may strike readers as though this has been the chapter in which, after a lengthy build-up, I finally ‘come out’ as an anarchist. That is not how I see it. Although I am, as it happens, beginning to think that this is the position which most closely corresponds to my own way of thinking about politics, my point has not been to try to vindicate or make the case for anarchist feminism. The most I hope to have done here is to have given some sense of what anarchism and anarchist feminism have meant to their proponents, and why the usual grounds on which they are dismissed are highly dodgy: above all, I have tried to emphasise some of the things anarchism is not. Anarchism does not simply romanticise chaos. It does not oppose structure or organisation outright. It is not merely destructive, and what it proposes is not so obviously impractical as is almost universally assumed – partly this is because ‘practicality’ is not a straightforward or politically neutral concept; but it is also because, although individual anarchists may make plenty of concrete political proposals, it would be a ‘category error’ to identify anarchism with any particular one or set of these. The most important point to come out of this discussion, I think, is a point about the significance of the taxonomy between anarchism, socialism and feminism: that we should abandon the habit of thinking of these as if they were rival teams or products, and as if we were faced with a choice as to which one to support or buy. Instead, ‘anarchism’, ‘socialism’ and ‘feminism’ emerge as rough-and-ready labels for different habits of thought, priorities and ways of looking at the world. Throughout this book, I’ve tried to show what is right and important in certain habits of thought and perception associated with feminism, Marxism and critical theory. In this chapter, I’ve tried to do the same for the insights and habits associated with the label ‘anarchism’: a distrust of hierarchy and domination, wherever it might appear; a correspondingly broad conception of the ‘political’; a fluidity and open-endedness as to political vision; and a commitment to universal interrogation, including (equally) the relentless interrogation of ourselves. I want to end this chapter, however, by returning to the point from which we began: the anarchist discomfort with labels and definitions. In politics, labels swarm around us like flies. Part of the reason for my being so cagy about the affiliation ‘anarchist’ (or any other, for that matter)95 comes from the fact that many people simply cannot rest until they have selected and attached a label to any political position or proposal they come across. One of the many disadvantages of the fetish for labels is that the latter often serve to obscure the very content that they are supposed to represent. Labels such as ‘anarchist’, ‘feminist’ and ‘socialist’ – as we’ve seen – are continually used with either an inadequate or a positively inaccurate sense of what they mean. It is much more rare to come across cases where people feel able, confident and permitted to explain themselves and what they actually think, without recourse to labels. For that reason, it seems apt to end with some exemplary words from an article by Angela Davis, in which she does not label herself (or ‘the tradition of feminism with which I have always identified’), but instead states what that tradition does: it ‘emphasizes not only strategies of criticism and strategies of transformation but also a sustained critique of the tools we use to stage criticism and to enact transformation’.96

An Introduction to Feminism – Chapter 10: Among sisters: anarchism, socialism

and feminism

I take this title from a chant published in the radical feminist newspaper It Ain’t Me Babe (1 December 1970, p. 11; cited in Ehrlich 1977, p. 4):

We build autonomy

The process of ever growing synthesis

For every living creature.

We spread

Spontaneity and creation

We learn the joys of equality

Of relationships

Without dominance

Among sisters.

We destroy domination

1. In all its forms. Cf. Horkheimer (1999).

2. ‘Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen’. Translated in Adorno (1974, p. 39, §18).

3. Goldman (1969, p. 50).

4. Malatesta (1965, p. 21).

5. Goldman (1969, p. 51).

6. Kropotkin (1970, p. 132).

7. Berlin (1970 [1958]).

8. See Raymond Geuss’s talk on freedom of speech, addressed to a student occupation

in Cambridge (Geuss 2011).

9. As opposed to freedom-from.

10. Goldman (1969, p. 61). Cf. Bakunin’s statement that everyone ‘should have the

material and moral means to develop his humanity’ (1964, p. 409).

11. See Ehrlich (1977).

12. See Kornegger (1975).

13. See Wolff (1970).

14. Many anarchists have espoused something reminiscent of the Marxist theory of

ideology: they have argued that our forms of thought are distorted by the inhuman

societies in which we live and which have produced us, and that our thought and

powers of imagination would be profoundly different (and better) under conditions

of freedom. For instance, the anarchist political theorist William Godwin (also hus-

band of Mary Wollstonecraft and father of Mary Shelley) argued that wage labour

creates a ‘sense of dependence’ and a ‘servile and truckling spirit’, thus ensuring

that the ‘feudal spirit still survives that reduced the great mass of mankind to the

rank of slaves and cattle for the service of the few’ (see Godwin 1986, pp. 125–6).

Arguably, though, Godwin took this a bit far when he claimed that the mental

powers unleashed by an anarchist revolution would allow human beings to cure all

disease and to live forever.

15. Bakunin (1964, p. 249). See also Bakunin (1867).

16. Ehrlich (1977, p. 7).

17. A classic articulation of power as power-to comes from Hobbes: power is a person’s

‘present means . . . to obtain some future apparent Good’ (Hobbes 1985 [1641], p. 150).

A more recent example is Hannah Arendt, who understands power as ‘the human

ability not just to act but to act in concert’ (Arendt 1970, p. 44).

18. Dahl (1957, pp. 202–3).

19. Actually, it is an element – but only an element – of Marx’s critique of egalitarianism

(see his Critique of the Gotha Programme, written in 1875).

20. E.g. Kropotkin (1897): ‘Civilised man . . . will extend his principles of solidarity to the

whole human race and even animals.’

21. Kornegger (1975, p. 5).

22. See Kornegger (1975); Dolgoff (1974).

23. Kornegger (1975, p. 15); cf. Ehrlich (1977, p. 8).

24. Kornegger (1975, p. 14).

25. Ehrlich (1977, p. 8). Cf. also Allen (1970)

26. ‘the key concept underlying both the social/political and the economic structure of

libertarian socialism is “self-management”, a term that implies not only workers’

control of their workplaces but also citizens’ control of their communities (where

it becomes “self-government”), through direct democracy and voluntary federation’

(Anarchist Editorial Collective 2009, p. 9).

27. Ehrlich (1977, p. 11).

28. ‘For example, the anarchist collectives in Spain were organised in a bottom-up

manner, similar to the way the C.N.T. (the anarcho-syndicalist labour union) was

organised before the revolution’ (Anarchist Editorial Collective 2009, p. 10; emphasis

mine).

29. Ehrlich (1977, p. 4).

30. Cf. Lenin’s 1919 letter to ‘Comrade Sylvia Pankhurst’ (Lenin 1972).

31. Ehrlich (1977, p. 4).

32, This statement first appeared in the Italian magazine l’Agitazione (18 June 1897),

and is reprinted in Malatesta (1965, p. 90). Cf. Bakunin: ‘revolution should not only

be made for the people’s sake; it should also be made by the people’ (Guérin 1997,

vol. 1, p. 141).

33. Orwell (2001, p. 298).

34. Ehrlich (1977).

35. As Ehrlich notes: ‘Unfortunately, the picture of a gaggle of disorganized, chaotic

anarchist women, drifting without direction, caught on’ (ibid., p. 11).

36. Ibid., p. 6.

37. It’s worth pointing out that these objections, and many of the possible responses

I’ll mention, are also applicable to the case of non-anarchist socialist and Marxist

views.

38. Goldman’s impression of the most common objections facing anarchists is one

shared by later theorists. As self-described ‘anarca-feminist’ [sic] Penny Kornegger

notes: ‘Anarchism has been maligned and misinterpreted for so long that maybe

the most important thing to begin with is an explanation of what it is and isn’t.

Probably the most prevalent stereotype of the anarchist is a malevolent-looking

man hiding a lighted bomb beneath a black cape, ready to destroy or assassinate

everything and everybody in his path. This image engenders fear and revulsion in

most people, regardless of their politics; consequently, anarchism is dismissed as

ugly, violent, and extreme. Another misconception is the anarchist as impractical

idealist, dealing in useless, Utopian abstractions and out of touch with concrete

reality. The result: anarchism is once again dismissed, this time as an “impossible

dream”’ (Kornegger 1975, p. 4).

39. Goldman (1969, p. 49).

40. I discuss the conservative (and ideological) force of prevailing notions of ‘construc-

tiveness’

41. See (especially) Marx and Engels’s The German Ideology (1987; written 1845–6, first

published 1932).

42. See Debord (1994).

43. ‘The individual does not own himself, and is not permitted to be his true self. He has

become a mere market commodity, an instrument for the accumulation of prop-

erty – for others . . . Individuality is stretched on the Procrustes bed of business . . . If

our individuality were to be made the price of breathing, what ado there would be

about the violence done to the personality! And yet our very right to food, drink and

shelter is only too often conditioned upon our loss of individuality. These things are

granted to the propertyless millions (and how scantily!) only in exchange for

their individuality – they become the mere instruments of industry’ (Baginski 1907,

p. 150).

44. Goldman (1969, pp. 61–2) has an equally brisk response to this objection: ‘Poor

human nature, what horrible crimes have been committed in thy name! Every fool,

from king to policeman, from the flatheaded parson to the visionless dabbler in

science, presumes to speak authoritatively of human nature. The greater the mental

charlatan, the more definite his insistence on the wickedness and weaknesses of

human nature. Yet, how can any one speak of it today, with every soul in a prison,

with every heart fettered, wounded, and maimed? [ . . . The] experimental study

of animals in captivity is absolutely useless. Their character, their habits, their

appetites undergo a complete transformation when torn from their soil in field and

forest. With human nature caged in a narrow space, whipped daily into submission,

how can we speak of its potentialities?’

45. For a statement of the Marxist opposition to ‘utopianism’, see Engels’s Socialism:

utopian and scientific (Engels 1993).

46. Kropotkin in Guérin (1997, vol. 1, p. 232).

47. Wilson (2000, p. 23).

48. See Marx’s 1873 ‘Afterword’ to the second German edition of Capital, vol. I.

49. See Geuss (2008), who suggests that this might represent a promising central ques-

tion around which to structure political philosophy (as opposed to currently preva-

lent approaches which prioritise questions of ideal ‘justice’).

50. See Lenin (1969).

51. Goldman (1969, p. 62).

52. Rocker (2005, p. 95).

53. Malatesta (1995, p. 121).

54. This is something which many radical feminists have understood (although their

interpreters very often have not). Referring to the contrast between the intent and

the reception of Shulamith Firestone’s best-known work, the Dialectic of Sex, Faludi

writes: ‘In one of the later chapters, Firestone floated a “sketchy” futuristic notion

that she intended only “to stimulate thinking in fresh areas rather than to dictate

the action”’ (Faludi 2013, p. 54).

55. Malatesta (1995, p. 121).

56. Goldman (1969, pp. 49–50).

57. See Žižek (2009).

58. Goldman (1969, p. 50).

59. Bakunin (1971, p. 55).

60. See A. Dworkin (1987, chapter 1).

61. Tolstoy (1900; original emphasis).

62. See Nechayev’s ‘Revolutionary Catechism’ (1869), which includes such openly terror-

istic statements as: ‘Above all, those who are especially inimical to the revolutionary

organization must be destroyed; their violent and sudden deaths will produce the

utmost panic in the government, depriving it of its will to action by removing the

cleverest and most energetic supporters.’

63. Goldman (1969, p. 51; emphasis added).

64. Nochlin (2007, p. 220, fn. 34) observes that, alongside his early articulations of anar-

chism, Proudhon also wrote ‘the most consistent anti-feminist tract of its time,

or perhaps, any other’, La Pornocratie ou les femmes dans les temps modernes, which

‘raises all the main issues about woman’s position in society and her sexuality

with a paranoid intensity unmatched in any other text’. On the other hand, Proud-

hon’s contemporary Joseph Déjacque apparently recognised the inconsistency of

patriarchy with anarchist principles, and called on Proudhon to either ‘speak out

against man’s exploitation of woman’ or ‘do not describe yourself as an anarchist’

(see Cohn 2009).

65. See e.g. Bakunin, in his 1866 ‘Revolutionary catechism’: ‘Equal political, social, and

economic rights, as well as equal obligations for women’ (Bakunin 1971, p. 93).

66. Goldman (1897).

67. See Ackelsberg (2005).

68. And not just by Marxist feminists: in my own experience, many liberals and those

to the right of liberalism assume that a woman who is ‘on the left’ will inevitably

be a feminist too.

69. Mainly by non-Marxist feminists, including some categorised (by themselves or by

others) as ‘radical feminists’.

70. Goldman (2003, vol. 2, p. 450).

71. Goldman (1969, p. 51).

72. See my earlier discussion of the ‘descriptive-normative’ core of feminism in

Chapter 2.

73. See, once again, Ehrlich (1977, p. 17).

74. By the same stroke, it might be argued that there are important affinities between

anarchism and ‘progressive’ philosophies of childhood and education, since chil-

dren, like women, mainly inhabit what has traditionally been called the ‘private

sphere’.

75. Ehrlich (1977, p. 12).

76. Kornegger (1975, p. 13; emphasis added).

77. Ehrlich (1977, p. 7).

78. See Chapter 6 above.

79. As Kornegger (1975, p. 4) puts it: ‘the means create the ends, . . . a strong State

becomes self-perpetuating’.

80. Ehrlich (1977, p. 5).

81. Ibid., p. 5.

82. Ibid., p. 6.

83. Ibid., p. 7.

84. Ibid., p. 5.

85. Ibid., p. 7.

86. Goldman & Most (2008/2009, p. 28).

87. In Guérin (1997, vol. 2, p. 20).

88. Rocker (1938, p. 28).

89. ‘In fact, anarchists have been using it as a synonym for anarchist for over 150 years,

since 1858. In comparison, widespread use of the term by the so-called “libertarian”

right dates from the 1970s in America (with, from the 1940s onwards, limited use

by a few individuals)’ (Anarchist Editorial Collective 2009, p. 15).

90.Anarchist Editorial Collective (2009, p. 18).

91. Ibid., p. 19.

92. Dolgoff (1974, p. 127).

93. It is worth noting that Marx believes in the importance of this second case as

much as in the first: since he holds that everyone, not only the proletariat, would

fundamentally be better off in a classless society than in one riven by class divisions

and an alienation that affects all classes, he must be seen as trying to counter the

dominant denial of this correspondence of interests as well as dominant denials of

the points at which interests diverge.

94. For that matter, there also remains a real conflict between those who theorise

and act in the light of the unity of anarchist and feminist principles, and those

(sometimes termed ‘manarchists’) who carry on as though it were possible to be an

anarchist whilst trampling over women.

95. I make an exception for ‘feminist’, much as I would make an exception for ‘anti-

racist’ or ‘anti-fascist’, and perhaps ‘anti-capitalist’. Maybe the problem is with posi-

tive labels, then, rather than labels per se.

96. Davis (2008, p. 20).