Anarchy 31/Anarchism and practicability

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An­arch­ism and prac­tic­ab­il­ity

JEFF ROBIN­SON

Ask the present people of Bri­tain if they would like to live in a peace­ful, class­less, race­less so­ci­ety and the only dis­sent­ers would be those who ima­gined they had some­thing to lose or who for reas­ons of per­sonal in­ad­equacy or sup­port of re­ac­tion­ary ideas ap­prove of hier­arch­ical so­ci­ety and dread a world of free and equal hu­man be­ings. Ex­plain to the as­sent­ers the prob­able time scale, the fact that much of ‘our Brit­ish way of life’ must be dis­carded, and that the per­sonal ef­fort in­volves much more than a vote every 5 years and their num­ber greatly di­min­ished. There re­mains those people who are dis­en­chanted with present so­ci­ety, see the need for rad­ical change and, most im­port­ant, are pre­pared to do some­thing about it.

  Now tell these re­main­ing people that you are de­scrib­ing an an­arch­ist so­ci­ety and that the method of achiev­ing it is an­arch­ism and you are left with a few curi­ous people and the con­vinced liber­tar­ians. Why then do so many well-in­ten­tioned people re­ject an­arch&shhttps://www.facebook.com/y;ism and devote their ener­gies to short-term solu­tions to hu­man prob­lems which rarely deal to last­ing good? One of the main reas­ons is that they re­gard an­arch­ism as im­prac­tic­able. The ar­gu­ments used to sup­port this as­ser­tion fall into two cat­egor­ies: the first con­cerns as­sump­tions which an­arch­ists are falsely ac­cused of mak­ing; the second con­cerns views they do ex­press. The first group are the fa­mil­iar ‘ra­tion­al­isa­tion’ based on fear, pre­ju­dice and ig­nor­ance. Such as ‘an­arch­ists be­lieve people are natur­ally good’ when all that is main­tained is that they could be good enough to live in a free so­ci­ety. Or that ‘you can’t change hu­man nature’ (whatever that is) when what you hope to change is hu­man be­ha­viour. Or that ‘men are con­cerned primar­ily with self-in­terest’ which is true and the cre­ation of a har­mo­ni­ous so­ci­ety is surely in every­one’s self in­terest. Or it is poin­ted out that priv­ate grief and per­sonal ant­agon­isms would still ex­ist in a free so­ci­ety as though lovers’ quar­rels ne­ces­sit­ate a stand­ing army.

  The second cat­egory of ob­jec­tions, however, those based on ac­tual an­arch­ist ideas in­cludes many valid points which must be con­sidered if an­arch­ism is ever to be­come a prac­tical, pos­it­ive force in so­ci­ety. There must be plenty of people, per­haps even a few in high places, who would be glad to adopt liber­tar­ian solu­tions to hu­man prob­lems if they thought such solu­tions real­istic. They often do adopt them in

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