Those images of protesters clad in black with their faces hidden behind scarves and hoods as they stormed police lines in Genoa make it tempting to dismiss their opposition to globalization as stemming from anger, not reflection.
The name of their rallying cry doesn’t help either. Anarchism sounds too much like a synonym for the chaos and confusion they recently brought to the streets of Italy and to previous economic summits in Seattle, Washington, D.C., Melbourne, Prague and Quebec City. Yet it would be foolish to write off those young militants as inspired by nothing more profound than “Easy Rider” or some other version of the Hells Angels’ philosophy of life.
The anarchist movement has a long history and a perfectly coherent ideology.
It is not likely to go away anytime soon. It is more likely due for a renaissance. Arguably, it is tailor-made for the increasing numbers of people who feel alienated by the incessant absorption of all the Earth’s societies and local cultures into a brave, new, one world of free trade and Golden Arches.
That last mouthful may sound a bit mystical. But anarchism can be easily understood by considering a kind of work-a-day experience many of us share.
For instance, as a teenager I worked in a florist shop. The owner was a hail-and-well-met fellow, overflowing with enthusiasm and possessing a booming voice to match. Every morning, he would take a look at our stack of orders for prom corsages and funeral wreaths and announce the obvious: “Boys, we’ve got our work cut out for us today.” Then he would dart from one workstation to another, pulling a gladiola out of one centerpiece, impulsively sticking an extra carnation into another and generally getting in the way.
He had a real talent for that, not being a florist himself but having come to the business from a totally different walk of life. From the standpoint of us worker bees, he was a burden we had to bear until the daily relief from that part of our toil. By 11 o’clock, he would generally get a phone call from a buddy inviting him to lunch, a game of cards, or maybe an afternoon at the racetrack.
Thus freed from the distraction of his presence, we would churn out bridal bouquets and altar vases by the dozens. At closing time, the boss would return. Surveying a shop floor covered with scraps of ribbon, leaves and stems, he’d proclaim victory: “Well, we got the job done, didn’t we?”
No matter how many times repeated, that performance was greeted by a collective rolling of our eyes at the boss’ inclusion of himself in the “we” who had gotten the job done. During more than one smoke break, we toyed with the calculation: If we had managed to turn out X amount of work in the hours the boss left us in peace, how much more might we have accomplished if he hadn’t come in at all?
And at that point, sitting on the potting benches of a Northwest Side florist shop, we raised precisely the philosophical question that had haunted Prince Peter Kropotkin and Emma Goldman, the great theoreticians of anarchism: Bosses, who needs them?
Unlike their kissing cousins, the socialists, anarchists apply that question to all social arrangements, from a small workshop to the highest level of government. Socialists argue that the problem with government is that it is in the hands of the wrong people. Put right-minded folks–that is, socialists–in charge of government and it would work just fine.
Anarchists say that a boss is a boss, whether a factory owner, a president or a commissar. Government is an unnecessary burden at best and more likely a tyrannical noose around its subjects’ necks, argued Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the 19th Century French writer who was the anarchist movement’s founding father.
“To be governed,” he wrote, “is to be at every operation, at every transaction, noted, registered, enrolled, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished.”
Proudhon’s solution was to get rid of all bosses without exception. It was he who coined the political use of the word anarchy, which comes from the Greek and means “no leader.” Proudhon and his successors taught that, just as we managed nicely in that florist shop without the boss, so should all of society be run by the workers themselves.
How, you ask, would those little worker-administered workshops coordinate their efforts in the absence of any higher order authority?
Anarchy’s ideal
Just like we did in the florist shop. Not infrequently, we would run short of some necessity in those afternoons when the boss was gone. We didn’t phone up Sportsman’s Racetrack and ask that he be paged so he might call the wholesale supply house. We just called ourselves and asked our counterparts, the worker bees there, to send over some mums, say, real quick.
But can you run a whole country that way? But how do you pay each other for supplies and products if there is no government to guarantee the money supply?
Those are, indeed, tough questions.
The fascinating thing is that they don’t necessarily seem important to ordinary people, when they find themselves up against the wall of real life. Anarchism can make sense to them.
A few years back, I was traveling through a part of Greece where a little village had been scheduled for demolition so an airport could be expanded. A government wanting to take away their ancestral homes had no standing in the eyes of the peasants who lived there. They were flying black flags, the traditional symbol of anarchy, from their windows. On their walls they had written: i anarkhia, i thanatos (anarchy or death).
Prostitutes’ rebellion
The British novelist George Orwell was a participant-observer in the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s. He reports that, in the midst of that bloody conflict, the prostitutes of Barcelona kicked out their pimps and procurers and proclaimed themselves to be an anarchist commune.
Consider, then, globalization from the viewpoint of its opponents–and not just those young people who take to the streets but all those with the nagging suspicion that something is afoot that isn’t to their benefit. Every few months, they see the leaders of a few nations coming together to plot the next step in the process. They do so behind closed doors. Everybody else is, essentially, being enrolled, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, etc.–whether they like it or not.
Now, the leaders of the great economic powers aren’t dummies. They get reasonable public-relations advice, so they don’t come on like Louis XIV and say that they are doing these things simply for their own benefit.
To the contrary, they piously proclaim that free trade will launch all of us into an unprecedented era of worldwide prosperity. They soft-pedal a reasonable corollary to that prediction: While we might be headed to a rosy economic future, there are bound to be bumps in the road leading there. History makes that probable: The industrial revolution of the 19th Century similarly was hailed as making prosperity available to all–which eventually it pretty much did. But not before several generations of factory workers had put in 12-hour days working in oppressive conditions and living in slums.
To the barricades
Which is why a lot of those 19th Century workers lent a ready ear to the radical political prophets of their day. Accordingly, we shouldn’t be all that surprised to see increasing numbers of our contemporaries fly the black flag of anarchy, at least mentally. For those who feel that the scale of authority is growing so large as to crush the average person, anarchy is a logical mental refuge–precisely because it holds out the promise of a return to a human-scale society.
Of course, like the fabled Missourians, you could say: “Show me” an example of where anarchism has worked. It can’t be done, but there is no reason to think that such practical considerations make it any less attractive. To the contrary, the anarchist impulse seems to flourish where the prospects for success are dimmest. Something about taking on the greatest powers in the name of the powerless has always made anarchists equate martyrdom with accomplishment.
In 1921, two Italian-American anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, were convicted of murdering a paymaster and factory guard in a foiled burglary attempt. The prosecutor made more of their political beliefs than of the scant evidence linking them to the crime, which sparked worldwide protests on their behalf, but to no avail.
Calmly awaiting execution in a Massachusetts prison, Vanzetti spent his time translating a poem by an Italian comrade.
It began: “Give flowers to the rebels failed . . . “
