April Blog Post: The Anarchist

Politics is a vast area of propaganda, where different ideologies come to fight each other in the form of verbal war and sometimes it is taken to extremes. This post is about defining some of the most extreme views in the same way as Andrew Heywood defined them and you can say it’s a partial review full of plagiarism of the content of his book on political ideologies. All people are political thinkers, whether they know it or not, people use political ideas and concepts whenever they express their opinions or speak their mind.

This post is about Anarchists and how some of them are placing themselves in the political spectrum. Wrongfully anarchy is used every day by politicians in order to blame and to terrorize people but people little know about anarchy and what ideas it supports.

SUBJECTS ADDRESSED:

Freedom – Democracy – Human Nature – Society – Equality – Economy – The Nation – The State – Authority – Nature – Religion – Government – Order – Labor – Wealth – Syndicalism

Anarchist Perspective on Freedom:

Regard freedom as an absolute value, believing it to be irreconcilable with any form of political authority. Freedom is understood to mean the achievement of personal autonomy, not merely being ‘left alone’ but being rationally self-willed and self-directed.

Anarchist Perspective on Democracy:

Endorse direct democracy and call for continuous popular participation and radical decentralization. Electoral or representative democracy is merely a façade that attempts to conceal elite domination and reconcile the masses to their oppression.

Small-scale communities on the other hand allow for people to manage their own affairs through face-to-face interaction leading to a direct democracy model. Individuals can conduct themselves peacefully and harmoniously without the need for government to ‘police’ society and protect them from their fellow human beings. Free individuals can live and work together constructively because they are rational and moral creatures.

Anarchist Perspective on Human Nature:

View human nature in highly optimistic terms. Humans are either seen to have a powerful inclination towards sociable, gregarious and cooperative behavior, being capable of maintaining order through collective effort alone, or to be basically self-interested but rationally enlightened.

Anarchist Perspective on Society:

Believe that society is characterized by unregulated and natural harmony, based on the natural human disposition towards cooperation and sociability. Social conflict and disharmony are thus clearly unnatural, a product of political rule and economic inequality.

Anarchist Perspective on Equality:

Place a particular stress upon political equality, understood as an equal and absolute right to personal autonomy, implying that all forms of political inequality amount to oppression. Anarcho-communists believe in absolute social equality achieved through the collective ownership of productive wealth.

Anarchist Perspective on Economy:

Reject any form of economic control or management. However, while Anarcho-communists endorse common ownership and small-scale self-management, Anarcho-capitalists advocate an entirely unregulated market economy. In other words Collectivist anarchists advocate an economy based upon cooperation and collective ownership, while individualist anarchists support the market and private property. Both have in common an economy in which free individuals manage their own affairs without the need for state ownership or regulation.

Anarchist Perspective on The Nation:

Have generally held that the nation is tainted by its association with the state and therefore with oppression. The nation is thus seen as a myth, designed to promote obedience and subjugation in the interests of the ruling elite.

Anarchist Perspective on The State:

Reject the state outright, believing it to be an unnecessary evil. The sovereign, compulsory and coercive authority of the state is seen as nothing les that legalized oppression operating in the interests of the powerful, propertied and privileged.

Anarchist Perspective on Authority:

View all form of authority as unnecessary and destructive, equating authority with oppression and exploitation. Since there is no distinction between authority and naked power, all checks on authority and all forms of accountability are entirely bogus. Authority is an offence against the principles of liberty and equality.

Anarchist Perspective on Nature:

Have often embraced a view of nature that stresses unregulated harmony and growth. Nature therefore offers a model of simplicity and balance, which humans would be wise to apply to social organization in the form of social ecology.

Anarchist Perspective on Religion:

The idea of God represents the notion of a ‘supreme being’ who commands ultimate and unquestionable authority. Generally regard religion as an institutionalized source of oppression. Church and state are invariably linked, with religion preaching obedience and submission to earthly rulers while also prescribing a set of authoritative values that rob the individual of moral autonomy. As Bakunin proclaimed “The abolition of the church and the State must be the first and indispensable condition of the true liberation of society’.

Anarchist Perspective on Government:

Quoted by Proudhon’s famous diatribes: “To be governed is to be watched over, inspected, spied on, directed, legislated, regimented, closed in, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, assessed, evaluated, censored, commanded; all by creatures that have neither the right, nor the wisdom, nor the virtue.” Government, in other words, is not the solution to the problem of order, but its cause. “However you vote, the government always wins the election.”

Government can be abolished and be replaced by unregulated market competition. Property should be owned by sovereign individuals, who may choose if they wish to enter into voluntary contracts with others in the pursuit of self-interest. A view supported more from the Anarcho-capitalists.

If the state is regarded as evil and oppressive, any attempt to win government power or even influence government must be corrupting and unhealthy.

Anarchist Perspective on Order:

Order is implicit in nature itself: It is not something that needs to be achieved or constructed, but something that, if humans refrain from interfering with it, will simply emerge or blossom.

Anarchist Perspective on Labor:

Labor is a social experience, people work in common with fellow human being and the wealth they produce should therefore be owned on common by the community, rather than by any single individual.

Anarchist Perspective on Wealth:

Private property encourages selfishness, promotes conflict and social disharmony. Inequality in the ownership of wealth fosters greed, envy resentment, and therefore breeds crime and disorder.

Anarchist Perspective on Syndicalism:

Although the purpose of syndicalism is something beautiful and admirable, syndicalism is concentrating too narrowly upon short-term trade union goals and therefore for leading anarchism away from revolution and towards reformism.