On Anarchism

 

Peter Kropotkin

Emma Goldman

Gleaning a few grains of influence from Hilda Hilst, that great and towering Brazilian madwoman of letters, I would like to begin by asking rhetorically whether a dog—any given dog—is a happy, slobbery, gadabout anarchist. A dog doesn’t have much need for entrenched order because a dog shows up amenable and almost excessively prepared in all earnestness for whatever mess or revelry immediately awaits. A dog doesn’t bother thinking life too far beyond how life innately presents. If anarchism is first of all a methodology or ontology or even a metaphysics, it can only ever be tangled up in ideology secondarily. If it has to have an ideology, anarchism invariably ends up twinning itself with grassroots socialism, this business primarily being one of collectivized labour and equitable distribution of profits. The smaller your population the easier this is going to be to manage and administrate. The Mennonites and the Hutterites have probably done as good a job as any, though I guess some hippies of the drop-out ethos made a go of more or less operational communes here and there, learning to fix tractors and grow whatever they could eat and/or sell. This was back when the Age of Aquarius was coming but didn’t. The chronologically second of the two great Russian forefathers of modern anarchism after Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin is widely quoted as having said something in Russian along the lines of: “Competition is the law of the jungle, but cooperation is the law of civilization.” This is how us anarchist folk believe human society ought to function. However, it really should be clear to everybody that, just like the Age of Aquarius, civilization still hasn’t arrived.

Kropotkin was a descendent of aristocrats and he believed in decentralization, self-governing communities, and worker-run enterprises…just like contemporary Canadian activist author Naomi Klein (she of No Logo renown). The exiled and formerly-imprisoned Kropotkin went back to Russia after the October Revolution of 1917 and when he watched Lenin and his Bolshevik cronies build a clumsy top-down version of state-controlled capitalism under the pretence of later inaugurating a “dictatorship of the proletariat” that everybody including Leon Trotsky knew was horseshit, he actually became depressed and hopeless rather than disgusted or incensed. The October Revolution itself had been pure anarchy, but what happened afterward was nothing short of a historic catastrophe from which the world is still reeling. In his wonderful and disorienting book October: The Story of the Russian Revolution, author China Miéville attributes to the emergent technology of trains the collapse of the Czarist regime and the outrageous bedlam that followed. Though some anarchist revolutionaries were briefly held in high regard—like Iosif Bleikhman, “a fiery, unkempt, charismatic figure who spoke his native Russian with what Trotsky described as a ‘Jewish-American accent’ which his audiences enjoyed”—the vast majority of anarchists who participated in the October Revolution ended up dead, imprisoned, or in exile. There would appear to be a very harsh lesson here: only the skeeziest bottom-feeders ever seem to possess that special yen for seizing power.

This infernal revolution of October 1917 did not just pop off like a flashbulb out of nowhere. Radical politics had been building and covertly circulating in Czarist Russia for a good century beforehand, and Russia is indeed a very special case in this respect. Anybody who knows about the life of Fyodor Dostoevsky knows that he came traumatically close to being executed by firing squad for his involvement with subversive organizations. In the 1830s and 1840s, Ivan Turgenev belonged to the same intellectual circles as future radical icons like Mikhail Bakunin and Vissarion Belinsky, and he would later address the drama and danger of the underground revolutionary existence in his elegant but extremely daring 1877 novel Virgin Soil, available to English readers in a wonderful translation from New York Review Books. Even the lion of Russian literature, Leo Tolstoy, practiced a form of Christian Anarchism, refusing to participate in state institutions—courts, the military, even taxation—and leaving behind the legacy of a vast agrarian communal system to bind his followers and devotees in Christ.

Adapting and running with an old theme prevalent in the counterculture of the late 1960s, Canadian ‘green architect’ Jason F. McLennan writes that “the way to subvert the dominant paradigm is to have more fun than they do and make sure they know it.” Whether McLennan knows it or not—I’m guessing he does—he is also echoing supreme anarchist exemplar Emma Goldman who purportedly insisted in the early 1930s: “If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution.” The subversion of the dominant paradigm has so far in history meant that whatever power apparatus is next on the docket will likewise have to be robustly subverted. If you cannot take pleasure in your work and your sabotage, or in your fellows and your comrades, then the mischief you believe you are up to cannot possibly be worthy of the energy and effort it taxes. “Every society,” writes Goldman, “has the criminals it deserves.”