Anarchy 66/Observations on Anarchy 63

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OBSERVA­TIONS ON ANARCHY 63:

ANAR­CHISM, SO­CIETY AND THE
SO­CIAL­ISED MIND

Francis elling­ham’s article in anarchy 63, is ex­tremely valu­able and thought-pro­vok­ing, but it seems to me that much of his argu­ment re­mains open to ques­tion. I think his at­tempt to make a key dis­tinc­tion be­tween a so­ciety and an anar­chist milieu is un­real and can only be

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sus­tained by giv­ing to both words a very par­tic­u­lar mean­ing, a mean­ing which is not con­tained in the gen­eral cur­rency of either. It also leads him to adopt quite in­de­fens­ible posi­tions. To argue, for ex­ample that “so­ciety” before the Indus­trial Re­volu­tion did not exist, or that “the Greeks had no con­cept of, or word for, ‘so­ciety’,” is surely to narrow the word to apply simply to the very spe­cial phenom­ena that the Indus­trial Re­volu­tion has helped to create.

  This dis­tinc­tion is not only un­real, it is un­im­port­ant, and has the un­fortun­ate con­se­quence of ob­scur­ing the ma­jor dis­tinc­tion that the Indus­trial Re­volu­tion has helped to create. This is not simply the greater size of the so­cial unit (to which Francis Elling­ham re­fers), but the greater scale of organ­isa­tion. All <span data-html="true" class="plainlinks" title="Wikipedia: pre-indus­trial so­ciet­ies">pre-indus­trial so­ciet­ies had this much in com­mon, they were small-scale and dom­in­ated by the na­ture of the rela­tion­ships of their mem­bers. They were human-scale com­mun­it­ies. Even the Roman Empire was, per­force, a large num­ber of human-scale com­mun­it­ies linked by a com­mon rule and legal sys­tem. The reason for this em­phasis on a human-scale was simple. In the ab­sence of mech­an­ical trans­port a com­mun­ity was re­stric­ted largely to the cap­a­city of its mem­bers to reach most parts of it with a fair degree of facil­ity on foot. A sec­ond­ary factor was the very large degree of econ­omic self-suf­fi­ciency that was prac­tised.

  After the Indus­trial Re­volu­tion the scale on which all oper­a­tions of trade and gov­ern­ment were con­duc­ted grew to enor­mous pro­por­tions. The change was not only quant­it­at­ive, it was qual­it­at­ive too, for these oper­a­tions ceased to be human-scale they be­came machine-scale. Armed with the new powers of machines and machine meth­ods of organ­isa­tion and ad­min­ist­ra­tion the forces oper­at­ing here no longer do battle against the forces of free­dom with­in the so­cial order, that stage is long past. To­day they are de­term­in­ing the very na­ture of the so­cial order. This is why, de­spite the spread of ballot-box-<bwr>monger­ing, there is less free­dom in our so­ci­eties today than there was 100, or even 200, years ago.

  This is the ma­jor con­se­quence of the growth of machine-scale so­ci­eties and it seems clear that even if these so­ci­eties do not suc­ceed in de­stroy­ing us al­to­gether with the new ways of war that they have pro­duced, they will achieve an even more dis­ast­rous di­min­u­tion of free­dom over the next 100 years.

  A shop­keeper or trader in a human-scale com­mun­ity is a poten­tial danger to free­dom be­cause he is always seek­ing to ex­tend his scale of oper­a­tions until they dom­in­ate and, at least in part, con­trol the rest of the com­mun­ity. In such cir­cum­stan­ces, how­ever, this poten­tial threat rarely be­comes actual since the coun­ter­vail­ing forces (other shop­keep­ers, the small scale of other fields of eco­nomic activ­ity, the pot­ency of a small-scale com­mun­ity’s moral code and so on) will act as an ef­fect­ive brake on his am­bi­tions.

  In a machine-scale so­ciety this brake is re­moved. Rival traders are merged, taken over or simply driven to bank­ruptcy; the machine-scale of the trader’s new oper­a­tions is but­tressed by a sim­ilar scale in other spheres, in bank­ing, trans­port, gov­ern­ment and so on; and as

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for moral­ity and such com­mands as “love thy neigh­bour”, which may be taken to be in­com­pat­ible with his eco­nomic ex­ploit­a­tion or sub­juga­tion, it is ignored. The new power is able to ignore it be­cause the power of moral­ity is a pro­duct of human rela­tions with­in a human com­mun­ity. Under machine-scale oper­a­tions com­mun­ity is murd­ered and re­placed by the mass. Since the mem­bers of a mass are no longer in a power-rela­tion­ship with each other and are merely in­stru­ments of a re­mote centre, they can have no moral rela­tion­ships (for there is then no power of sanc­tions, ostra­cism and so on to en­force them). Men no longer de­vote the toil of their daily lives to the com­mon good, they be­come sub­ordin­ate and pas­sive parts of the machine-scale schemes of others for pro­fit.

  It is our own age, and one that has the temer­ity to at­tach to it­self the label of pro­gress, that singles out for its ac­claim and re­ward not its art­ists or philo­sophers, or even its states­men, but its gro­cers, its pork butchers, its pur­vey­ors or soap and butter sub­sti­tutes.

  It is in­struc­tive that Francis Elling­ham shares the de­fect of much anar­chist lit­era­ture in re­fus­ing to grapple seri­ously with the prob­lem of eco­nomic organ­isa­tion. This is curi­ous, for even Marx was merely ac­know­ledging the obvi­ous when he in­sisted on the key role of eco­nom­ics as a de­termin­ant so­cial force. (He was surely wrong to in­sist it is the dom­in­ant so­cial force, but that is an­other story.)

  At one point Francis Elling­ham de­clares that prior to the Indus­trial Re­volu­tion the state played no di­rect part in eco­nomic af­fairs. This is surely a slip of the pen, or has he ever con­sulted any of the stand­ard texts on the his­tory of the English wool trade, and the ef­forts of the state to reg­ulate it in minut­est de­tail? Has he never heard of the Tudor “Stat­ute of Ap­pren­tices” and the numer­ous at­tempts made under the first Eliza­beth, to go no further back, to reg­ulate wages and prices? What does he sup­pose the Ludd­ites were fight­ing for if not to re­tain these ele­ments of eco­nomic pater­nal­ism in face of the powers of the new machine forces?

  Does he know no­thing of the same mon­arch’s role in finan­cing the trading-cum-piracy activ­it­ies of Drake and, later, of the new com­panies of Mer­chant Ven­tur­ers? And at a time when the Church was an in­teg­ral part of the state organ­isa­tion and en­gross­ing a ma­jor share of the com­mun­ity’s eco­nomic in­cre­ment does he sup­pose all those vast and splen­did cath­edrals were built with a mix­ture of prayer, as­cet­i­cism and the free­will of­fer­ings of the credu­lous?

  This omis­sion leads to a fail­ure to re­cog­nise the basic cause of our cur­rent polit­ical di­lemma. Owing to the vast scale of the forces em­ployed it is now im­pos­sible for people at the base to con­trol them, even if they should want to. A gen­er­a­tion or so ago Robert Michels made the reason for this clear, al­though he omit­ted to spell out the mechan­ics of it. He pointed out that mass polit­ical parties (and it holds true of al­most any mass organ­isa­tion) have an in­built dis­posi­tion towards olig­archic leader­ship. Anar­chists, of course, start with this kind of as­sump­tion, but what are the mechan­ics?

  As an organ­isa­tion grows, de­ci­sion-mak­ing is neces­sar­ily oper­ated on a repre­sent­a­tional basis. The bigger the scale the more re­mote the repre­sent­a­tion and the more power­ful the mechan­ism by which repre­sent­at­ives are se­lec­ted. In polit­ics this is true at both the prim­ary (party) stage of se­lect­ing a can­didate, and at the sec­ond­ary stage of a pub­lic elec­tion. As the scale con­tinues to grow there comes a point where the power of the repre­sent­at­ive machin­ery, how­ever organ­ised, be­comes greater than the power of the elector­ate. We are a long way past this stage to­day. What needs de­termin­ing is just what form of so­cial organ­isa­tion we can have which is sus­cept­ible to the con­trol of all the mem­bers of a given so­ciety.

  Talk here of an “anar­chist milieu” is hope­lessly vague and im­prac­tic­able, and cer­tainly pro­vides no kind of tan­gible al­tern­at­ive to which masses of be­wild­ered and dis­il­lu­sioned people can turn.

  Since the dom­in­ant aspect of our power­less­ness is the sheer big­ness of the scale of the forces con­front­ing us, is it reason­able to sup­pose that the first requis­ite is small-scale forms of organ­isa­tion which it is pos­sible for us to con­trol?

  The com­mon­est answer one is apt to re­ceive to such a sug­ges­tion, is, “We can’t put the clock back”. One can only re­ply to this that if we can de­vise some form of so­cial organ­isa­tion which will reap the real bene­fits of techno­logy with­out al­low­ing machines and machine-scale oper­a­tions to dis­tort and per­vert human needs we shall have made the most sig­nif­i­cant step towards so­cial pro­gress in the his­tory of man­kind.

London

john papworth

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