The Martin Duberman Reader (5 page)

In turning to the anarchist movement, I think we can see between it and the new turn taken by SNCC and CORE (or, more comprehensively still, by much of the New Left) significant affinities of style and thought. These are largely unconscious and unexplored; I've seen almost no overt references to them either in the movement's official literature or in its unofficial pronouncements. Yet the affinities seem to me important.

But first I should make clear that in speaking of anarchism as if it were a unified tradition, I'm necessarily oversimplifying. The anarchist movement contained a variety of contending factions, disparate personalities, and differing national patterns. The peasant anarchists, especially in Spain, were fiercely anti-industrial
and antiurban and wished to withdraw entirely from the state to live in separate communities based on mutual aid. The anarcho-syndicalists of France put special emphasis on the value of a general strike and looked to the trade unions as the future units of a new society. Michael Bakunin advocated violence; Leo Tolstoy abhorred it. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon believed in retaining individual ownership of certain forms of property; Enrico Malatesta called for its abolition in every form. Max Stirner's ideal was the egotist engaged in the war of “each against all”; Prince Peter Kropotkin's was human solidarity, a society based on the union of voluntary communes.

These are only some of the divisions of strategy, personality, and geography that characterized the anarchist movement. What bound these disparate elements together—what makes plausible the term “anarchism” in reference to all of them—is their hostility to authority, especially that embodied in the state, but including any form of rule by man over man, whether it be parent, teacher, lawyer, or priest. The anarchists were against authority, they said, because they were for life—not life as most men had ever lived it but life as it might be lived. Anarchists argued, in a manner reminiscent of Rousseau, that human aggression and cruelty were the products of imposed restraints. They insisted that the authoritarian upbringing most children were subjected to stifled spontaneity, curiosity, initiative, individuality—in other words, prevented possession of themselves. If they could be raised free—freed economically from the struggle for existence, intellectually freed from the tyranny of custom, emotionally freed from the need to revenge their own mutilation by harming others—they could express those “natural” feelings of fraternity and mutual assistance innate to the human species.

The anarchists' distrust of the state as an instrument of oppression, as the tool by which the privileged and powerful maintained themselves, is generally associated with nineteenth-century classical liberalism, with John Stuart Mill and, in this country, with the Jeffersonians. But by the end of the nineteenth century and increasingly in the twentieth, liberals began to regard the state as an ally
rather than an enemy; only the national government, it was felt, had the power to accomplish regulation and reform, to prevent small groups of self-interested men from exploiting their fellows.

Today the pendulum has begun to swing back again. In the liberal—but more especially in the radical—camp, the federal government has lost some of its appeal; veneration is giving way to distrust; from an instrument of liberation, the central government is once more being viewed as a threat to individuality. This shift is the result of accumulated disappointments. The regulatory agencies set up to supervise the monopolists have been discovered to be operating in the interests of the monopolists; farm-subsidy programs have been exposed as benefiting the richer operators while dispossessing tenant farmers and sharecroppers; the urban renewal program seems to be aggravating rather than alleviating the housing problems of low-income groups; civil rights legislation has added to the sheaf of paper promises without making any notable dent in existing inequities; the poverty program begins to look like one more example of the fallacy of treating symptoms as if they were causes; and the traditional hostility between big government and big business has given way to a cozy partnership whereby the two enterprises have become almost indistinguishable in their interests.

The anarchists believed that man was a social creature, that he needed the affection and assistance of his fellows, and most anarchist versions of the good life (Max Stirner would be the major exception) involved the idea of community. The anarchists insisted, moreover, that it was not their vision of the future but rather society as presently constructed that represented chaos; with privilege the lot of the few and misery the lot of the many, society was currently the essence of
dis
order. The anarchists envisioned a system that would substitute mutual aid for mutual exploitation, voluntarism for force, individual decision making for centralized dictation.

All of these emphases find echo in SNCC and CORE. The echoes are not perfect: Black Power is above all a call to organization, and its acceptance of politics (and therefore of “governing”) would offend a true anarchist—as would such collectivist terms as
“black psyche” or “black personality.” Nonetheless, the affinities of SNCC and CORE with the anarchist position are substantial.

There is, first of all, the same belief in the possibilities of community and the same insistence that community be the product of voluntary association. This, in turn, reflects a second and still more basic affinity: the distrust of centralized authority. SNCC's and CORE's energies, and also those of other New Left groups like Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), are increasingly channeled into local, community organizing. On this level, it's felt, participatory democracy, as opposed to the authoritarianism of representative democracy, becomes possible. And in the Black Panther Party, where the poor and disinherited do take a direct role in decision making, theory becoming reality at least in part—as, on the economic side, in the Mississippi-based Poor People's Corporation, which to date has formed some fifteen cooperatives.

Then, too, SNCC and CORE, like the anarchists, talk increasingly of the supreme importance of the individual. They do so, paradoxically, in a rhetoric strongly reminiscent of that long associated with the Right. It could be Herbert Hoover (or Booker T. Washington), but in fact it is Rap Brown who now reiterates the Negro's need to stand on his own two feet, to make his own decisions, to develop self-reliance and a sense of self-worth. The two ends of the political spectrum in this country have started to converge—at least in terms of vocabulary if not in terms of interests or goals. But the anarchist tradition is not of equal relevance to the New Left and to the traditional Right, except that it feeds their shared distrust of centralized power. The Right, however, has never been so much antiauthority as simply anti-one-kind-of-authority—that associated with the federal government. To the Right, authority has been bad when it emanates from Washington but good when associated with the Church, the Law, the schoolroom, the home, the Anglo-Saxon way. Far from being hostile to established opinion, the Right galvanizes its legions in its defense.

A final, more intangible affinity between anarchism and the entire New Left, including the advocates of Black Power, is in the
area of personal style. Both hold up similar values for highest praise and emulation: simplicity, spontaneity, naturalness, and primitivism. Both reject modes of dress, music, personal relations, even of intoxication, which might be associated with the dominant middle-class culture. Both, finally, tend to link the basic virtues with “the people,” and especially with the poor, the downtrodden, the alienated. It is this
lumpenproletariat
—long kept outside “the system” and thus purportedly uncorrupted by its values—that is looked to as a repository of virtue, an example of a better way. The New Left, even while demanding that the lot of the underclasses be improved, implicitly venerates that lot; the desire to cure poverty co-habits with the wish to emulate it.

The anarchist movement in the United States never made much headway. A few individuals—Benjamin Tucker, Adin Ballou, Lysander Spooner, Stephen Pearl Andrews, Emma Goldman, Josiah Warren—are still, in most cases faintly, remembered, but more for the style of their lives than for any impact on their society. It isn't difficult to see what prevented them from attracting a large following. Their very distaste for organization and power precluded the traditional modes for exerting influence. More important, their philosophy ran directly counter to the national hierarchy of values, a system of beliefs, conscious and otherwise, that has always impeded the drive for rapid change in this country. And it is a system that constitutes a roadblock at least as formidable today as at any previous point in our history.

This value structure stresses, first of all, the prime virtue of accumulation, chiefly of goods, but also of power and prestige. Any group—be it anarchists or New Leftists—that challenges the soundness of that goal, that suggests that it interferes with the more important pursuits of self-realization and human fellowship, presents so basic a threat to our national and individual identities as to invite almost automatic rejection.

A second obstacle that our value structure places in the path of radical change is its insistence on the benevolence of history. To the average American, human history is the story of automatic
progress. Every day in every way we have gotten better and better. Ergo, there is no need for a frontal assault on our ills; time alone will be sufficient to cure them. Thus it is that many whites today consider the “Negro Problem” solved by the recent passage of civil rights legislation. They choose to ignore the fact that the daily lives of most Negroes have changed but slightly—or, as in the case of unemployment or imprisonment, for the worse. They ignore, too, the group of hard-core problems that have only recently emerged: maldistribution of income, urban slums, disparities in education and training, technological unemployment—problems that show no signs of yielding to time but that will require concentrated energy and resources for solution.

Without a massive assault on these basic ills, ours will continue to be a society where the gap between rich and poor widens, where the major rewards go to the few (who are not to be confused with the best). Yet it seems highly unlikely that the public pressure needed for such an assault will be forthcoming. Most Americans still prefer to believe that ours is either already the best of all possible worlds or will shortly, and without any special effort, become such. It is this deep-seated smugness, this intractable optimism, that must be reckoned with—that, indeed, will almost certainly destroy any call for substantive change.

A further obstacle facing the New Left, Black Power advocates and otherwise, is that their anarchist style and mood run directly counter to prevailing tendencies in our national life, especially those of conformity and centralization. The conformity has been commented on too often to bear repetition, except to point out that the young radicals' unorthodox mores (sexual, social, cultural) are in themselves enough to produce uneasiness and anger in the average American. In insisting on the right of the individual to please himself and to rely on his own judgment (whether in dress, speech, music, sex, or stimulants), SNCC and SDS may be solidly within the American tradition—indeed may be its mainstream—but this tradition is now more central to our rhetoric than to our behavior.

The anarchist focus in SNCC and SDS on decentralization, on
participatory democracy, and on community organizing likewise runs counter to dominant national trends. Consolidation, not dispersion, is currently king. There are some signs that a counterdevelopment has begun but as yet the overwhelming pattern continues to be consolidation. Both big government and big business are getting bigger and, more ominous still, are coming into ever-closer partnership. As Richard J. Barber has documented, the federal government not only is failing to block the growth of huge conglomerate firms by antitrust action but is contributing to that growth through procurement contracts and the exchange of personnel. The traditional hostility between business and government has rapidly drawn to a close. Washington is no longer interested in restraining the giant corporations, and the corporations have lost much of their fear of federal intentions. The two, in happy tandem, are moving the country still further along the road to oligopoly, militarism, economic imperialism, and greater privileges for the already privileged. The trend is so pronounced and there is so little effective opposition to it that it begins to take on an irrevocable, even irreversible quality.

In the face of these monoliths of national power, Black Power in Lowndes County is minuscule by comparison. Yet while the formation of the Black Panther Party in Lowndes brought out paroxysms of fear in the nation at large, the announcement that General Motors's 1965 sales totaled $21 billion—exceeding the gross national product of all but nine countries in the world—produced barely a tremor of apprehension. The unspoken assumption can only be something like this: it is less dangerous for a few whites to control the whole nation than for a local majority of Negroes to control their own community. The Kafkaesque nature of life in America continues to grow.

Black Power is both a product of our society and a repudiation of it. Confronted with the continuing indifference of the majority of whites to the Negro's plight, SNCC and CORE have lost faith in conscience and time, and have shifted to a position that the white majority finds infuriating. The nation as a whole—as in the case of the abolitionists over a hundred years ago—has created a
climate in which earlier tactics no longer seem relevant, in which new directions become mandatory if frustration is to be met and hope maintained. And if the new turn proves a wrong one, if Black Power forecloses rather than animates further debate on the Negro's condition, if it destroys previous alliances without opening up promising new options, it is the nation as a whole that must bear the responsibility. There seems little likelihood that the American majority will admit to that responsibility. Let us at least hope it will not fail to recognize the rage that Black Power represents, to hear the message at the movement's core: