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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.
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