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from anarchism Contemporary currents In the 1970s the theories of anarchism aroused more interest and sympathy than at any time since the Russian revolution. The same cannot be said of the anarchist movement itself. After World War II, anarchist groups and federations re-emerged in almost all countries where they had formerly flourished--the notable exceptions being Spain and the Soviet Union--but these organizations wielded little influence compared to that of the broader movement inspired by libertarian ideas.Such a development is not inappropriate, since anarchists have never stressed the need for organizational continuity, and the cluster of social and moral ideas that are identifiable as anarchism has always spread beyond any clearly definable movement. The Russian writer Count Leo Tolstoy refused to call himself an anarchist because those who used the title at that time in Russia were terrorists; nevertheless, he had developed out of his rational Christianity a form of pacifist radicalism that rejected the state and all forms of government, called for the simplification of life in the name of moral regeneration, and sought to replace property by free communism. An impressive example of the breadth of anarchist influence is Mahatma Gandhi, who based his strategy of nonviolent civil disobedience in South Africa and India on the teachings of nonviolent anarchists such as Tolstoy and Thoreau and who remembered his reading of Kropotkin when he devised for India the plan of a decentralized society based on autonomous village communes. Gandhi's village India has not come into being, but the movement known as Sardovaya, led by Vinoba Bhave and Jaya Prakash Narayan, has been working toward it through gramdan--community ownership of land. By 1969 a fifth of the villages of India had declared for gramdan, and, while this remained largely a matter of unrealized gestures, it represented perhaps the most extensive commitment to basic anarchist ideas in the contemporary world.In the West the appeal of anarchism has been strongest, at least since 1917, among the intellectuals. Kropotkin's arguments for decentralization have wielded their strongest influence among writers on social planning such as Patrick Geddes, Lewis Mumford, and Paul Goodman--himself a declared anarchist. Anarchist treatises from Godwin onward have contributed to the progressive movement in education, and the most influential of the many books written by the libertarian critic Sir Herbert Read was his Education Through Art (1943). But in the 1960s and 1970s anarchism became popular among rebellious students and the left in general because of the values it opposed to those of the increasingly technological cultures of western Europe, North America, and Japan.Here the mediating thinker was undoubtedly Aldous Huxley, who anticipated many elements of the "counter culture" of the 1960s and 1970s. In Brave New World (1932) Huxley had presented a warning vision of the kind of mindless, materialistic existence a society dominated by technology might produce. In his "Foreword" to the 1946 edition, he stated his belief that only by radical decentralization and simplification and by a politics that was "Kropotkinesque and co-operative" could the dangers implicit in modern society be avoided. In his later writings he explicitly accepted the validity of the anarchist critique of existing society.The emergence of anarchist ideas in a wider frame of reference began in the American civil rights movements in the 1950s, with their recognition of the need to resist injustice through other than legal channels in the name of a morality different from that recognized by constituted authority. By the end of the 1950s the new radicalism in the United States, Europe, and Japan had begun to take a course separating it from the narrower issues of the civil rights movement; it shifted toward a general criticism of the elitist structure and materialist goals of modern industrial societies--Communist as well as capitalist. Within this movement there was a limited revival of traditional anarchism--exemplified in the sudden popularity of the American writer Paul Goodman and the emergence in Britain of a sophisticated monthly, Anarchy, that applied anarchist ideas to the whole spectrum of modern life.In all of this, however, anarchism was only one strand in what can be described as a climate of rebellion rather than an ideology. Anarchist ideas were mingled with strains of Leninism, early Marxism, unorthodox psychology, and often with elements of mysticism, neo-Buddhism, and Tolstoyan Christianity. None of the leaders of the student rebellions in the United States and Germany or the militants of Zengakuren in Japan could be called in any literal and complete sense an anarchist, although they had read Bakunin as well as Marx and "Che" Guevara. In Paris, the leaders of the Anarchist Federation admitted that they had no influence at all on the strikes and street fighting in 1968 that seemed to threaten the very existence of the French state.To all these movements, which rejected the old parties of the left as strongly as they did the existing political structure, the appeal of anarchism was strong and understandable. The anarchist outlook, in its insistence on spontaneity, on theoretical flexibility, on simplicity of life, on love and anger as complementary and necessary components in both social and individual action, appeals to those who reject the impersonality of institutions and the calculations of political parties. The anarchist rejection of the state, the insistence on decentralism and local autonomy, found strong echoes among those who talked of participatory democracy. The recurrence of the theme of workers' control of industry in so many manifestos of the 1960s, notably during the Paris insurrection of 1968, showed the enduring relevance of Anarcho-Syndicalist ideas.The anarchist insistence on direct action had an almost universal appeal to the radicals of the 1960s and 1970s, who advocated extraparliamentary action and confrontation. Some student groups in France, the United States, and Japan accepted Bakunin's pan-destructionism, holding that existing society was so corrupt that it had to be swept completely away. They were fond of quoting a sentence of Bakunin:There will be a qualitative transformation, a new living, life-giving revelation, a new heaven and a new earth, a young and mighty world in which all our present dissonances will be resolved into a harmonious whole.This kind of secular apocalypticism, which envisaged total violence as the paradoxical way to total reconciliation, linked many of the radicals with the anarchists who took to terrorism in the 1880s and 1890s. Now, as then, violence proceeded from theory to action, as the upsurge of terrorist bombings and urban-guerrilla activity demonstrated at the end of the 1960s.But there were others who believed with Tolstoy and Gandhi that a moral change must come first and who sought revolution by evolution. Paul Goodman, with his proposals for urban reform as a step toward a freer society, was one of them. Some turned to the creation of models of a different kind of society in the form of utopian communities. This has been a recurrent feature of radical movements, appearing in the United States during the mid-19th century, in Britain as a form of constructive pacifist protest during World War II, and in the United States in the 1970s as a way of manifesting one's rejection of normal life-styles.Experience suggests that utopian experiments and radical actions are not likely to achieve that wholly nongovernment society of which libertarians have dreamed. The true value of their vision was stated by the anarchist poet Herbert Read in his last book, The Cult of Sincerity (1968):My understanding of the history of culture has convinced me that the ideal society is a point on a receding horizon. We move steadily towards it but can never reach it. Nevertheless we must engage with passion in the immediate strife . . .It is precisely as an ideal, as a touchstone to judge the existing world, that the anarchist vision is useful. It corresponds to a recurrent and necessary strain in human thought--the revulsion against regimentation, against large organizations, against complexity and luxury. The insights of the anarchist are likely to find their maximum usefulness in urban and rural planning, in the development of community relations based on full participation, in integrated education, and perhaps most of all in encouraging what Read calls a "process of individuation, accomplished by general education and personal discipline." Anarchism is a moral and social doctrine before it is a political one; it stands as a permanent reminder of the perils of national and corporate giantism and of the virtues of local interests and loyalties. It teaches the vigilance by which man may be able to avoid such bleak utopias as those of Aldous Huxley and George Orwell.(G.W.) |
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Are there any places in 1984 where Orwell exaggerates or inaccurately depicts humans as you know them to be? |
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1984: VerisimilitUDE |
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Does the novel suffer from instances of implausibility (unbelievability)? |
