Reconstruction 6.2 (Spring 2006)
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Pedagogy, Ideology, and Space in the Classical Anarchist Conception of Freedom / Michael Vastola
Abstract: This article attempts to understand the term “freedom” through a comparative analysis of how it was mobilized in various anarchist texts from the nineteenth century. Such an analysis helps to differentiate the anarchist conception from its mainstream liberal and libertarian variants. This is accomplished with the aid of a broad spatial framework in which incommensurable notions of space and spatiality are clarified. Likewise, the framework demonstrates the extent to which popular assumptions about pedagogy from the anarchist tradition are based on a contradictory recognition of ideal educational practices. Such practices often utilize a propaganda model that is in many respects antithetical to their ideas about the spatial dimensions of freedom, as well as the central role of freedom in a moral social relation. Though critical of their conception of state power, the author claims that there is still much to learn from the philosophical foundations of classical anarchist thought, particularly when they draw upon (in a largely critical fashion) some of the indispensable concerns and suppositions of the Enlightenment—which may modestly contribute to the post-postmodern reactualization of theories of subjectivity, ideology, and praxis for our historical moment. The importance of new theories of ideology is emphasized, since the absence of a more sophisticated recognition of the concept is a major reason why the anarchist tradition has often failed to sufficiently consider real power relations in its immediate circumstances—as exemplified by many of its simplistic assumptions about authority and pedagogy in the nineteenth century.
<1> Noam Chomsky, in his now famous “Government in the Future” lecture at the Poetry Center of the New York YMYWHA on February 16, 1970, forwarded the thesis that the anarchist political philosophy was the appropriate system of governance for modern society, and that its broad realization would proceed logically from classical liberal thought from which it derives many of its central assumptions and concerns. Anarchism was simply a more rational form of liberalism for the corporate capitalist world. Chomsky, who had another task in mind, never clearly articulated the ideological boundaries that separate classical anarchism from classical liberalism. It is evident that an articulation of those boundaries has been rarely attempted and almost always in a very broad way that leaves much that is relevant vaguely defined. This is unfortunate, given the reality that anarchism is one of the great, though too frequently overlooked, intellectual and social philosophies of the nineteenth century. Furthermore, our contemporary historical moment insists upon a pressing interrogation of a certain rhetorical device that takes the form of a two syllable term--a term that demands to be defended through conquest and fostered through deficit-exacerbating tax cuts, a term that divides the world into moral polarities, a term the meaning of which is the central thread that consistently joins generations of anarchist or libertarian socialist thought. The term is freedom, and this paper will attempt to conceptualize its anarchist form as it was consolidated during the mid to late nineteenth century in Europe. Such a conceptualization will serve the double purpose of locating what I believe to be the essential site of identification for otherwise disparate anarchist forms, and as a site of crucial differentiation for contrasting a unique and relevant anarchist pedagogy with the dominant liberal pedagogy of the period. The ideal conceptual frame for this task is a spatial understanding of how the term freedom operates and expresses itself in anarchist ideology. This is the case because such a framing invites a discourse of structure and centering, which I will utilize to better demarcate the area of effect for anarchist freedom and its precondition: the anti-state revolution. My approach to the subject will elucidate the importance that the idea of freedom holds in a just society and the consequent need for its re-appropriation by neo-Enlightenment-driven philosophies despite the now obvious power of its potential abuse.
<2> I must begin by being clear about the model of anarchism that will serve as the organizational center for my analysis. Beneath a poststructural paradigm all discussion of a center is, at the very least, suspicious. It is understandably asserted that centrality produces marginal formations that can be at least as vibrant and relevant as the recognized foundational structure. My structuralizing—already demanding a language of space—is intended to elucidate differences at the same time that it situates them in the margins. It is, therefore, a compromise with the fringe—with the variation and anomaly. For coherence’s sake this is necessarily so: anarchism, put simply, wears many hats, and most of them are not worn well or only barely worn at all. This creates interesting, though predictable, difficulties that can best be managed by authorizing the most prominent and coherent amalgam of theoretical positions. George Crowder’s remarkable book, Classical Anarchism: The Political Thought of Godwin, Proudhon, Bakunin, and Kropotkin, provides extensive justification for focusing on the collectivist anarchist political theory that finds its most important advocates in Bakunin and Kropotkin by the last quarter of the nineteenth century in Europe. This broad formulation is the one closest to our contemporary understanding of anarchism as a theory that seeks a communistic utopian arrangement of society without a passage through the socialist’s dictatorship of the proletariat or any comparably coercive governmental structure [1]. Likewise, Crowder has argued that the classical tradition of anarchism “is united by a theory of freedom—an account of the nature, value, and social conditions of human liberty—the sophistication and coherence of which has not been fully appreciated” (4). To accomplish the goal of spatially describing liberty in classical anarchist thought it is more important to define parameters than to aggressively integrate the traditionally excluded—though it should be understood that numerous variations have deep sympathies with our model’s single-minded desire for freedom as the sole organizing principle of a moral social relation. Take, for instance, the individualist anarchism that doctrinally surfaced in the United States during the nineteenth century and, due to its aversion to collectivism and reliance on market economies, is now virtually indistinguishable from what we call libertarianism [2].
<3> Collectivization of the means of production, which is so antithetical to freedom in the libertarian ideology, is of singular importance in classical anarchist thought. This is the case because the capitalist class that organically emerges from the competitive exigencies of the market economy is every bit as capable of coercive behavior as a centralized state apparatus. Where proponents of liberalism like T.H. Green took the position that, “The role of the state was to secure sufficient personal freedom for citizens to act as rational moral agents” (Bellamy 141)—anarchists of the day saw the proposition that the state could secure for its citizens anything other than their enslavement as contradictory to the structural logic of the state. The nature of the state, rather, was to transfer, through force if necessary, the personal freedoms of its subjects from the realm of their aggregate will, to the necessarily oppositional foci of state authority. This one-sided exchange, for Mikhail Bakunin, the nineteenth century’s most important and enduring anarchist thinker, was true of “All human societies,” which always “exercised two distinct forms of social authority over the individuals within them” (Saltman 31). The first form is the conventionally understood imposition by individuals or groups of various dictates that are frequently contrary to the will or interests of the subjugated. Bakunin conceived of this hegemonic function as a universal precondition for the dominance of one group over another. Though this form traverses the ideological territory of knowledge domains (i.e. the theological, political, economic, etc.), its statist materiality contrasts with the second form of social authority, which is the result of how the “physical and social worlds” of humankind contain specific tendencies and even exigencies and thus constrain action (God and the State 28). The latter is, of course, beyond the purview of Bakunin’s vision for social change. Just as it is natural for the state to suppress freedom it is also natural for certain varieties of authority to emerge through social relations and normal interaction with the physical world. But, for the Bakuninists, only the former can be abolished and that is their task.
<4> The individualist anarchist is quick to shower aspersions on their collectivist antipode for the presumed inconsistency of their thoughts when applied to the ownership of the means of production. Where the individualist sees unfettered market forces as natural and healthy, the collectivists, very much like their Marxist critics, feel that market freedom is a formal and superficial freedom that inherently precludes actual freedom. So when J.S. Mill, in On Liberty, begins his inquiry into the appropriate role of government by citing as the aim of his essay to explore “the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual,” the collectivist, who shares Mill’s skepticism toward most governmental powers, will understand Mill’s concept of liberty to consist in its formal variety (5). The realm of the actual, on the other hand, is prepared to recognize that a corporate tyranny can be every bit as tyrannical as a governmental one, and the former has always and everywhere—as Adam Smith remarked in The Wealth of Nations—been “different from, and even opposite to [the interests] of the public” (157). In an important respect the classical anarchist is little concerned with the theoretical principle of freedom, but rather with its application to social relations.
<5> This is a problematical assertion. Marxists can easily extend a criticism of the anarchist’s understanding of freedom that sounds a lot like the popular anarchist critique of market liberalism. For that reason traditional Marxists such as Friedrich Engels often held the view that the anarchists had the revolution backwards. In the very moment of the state’s seizure, when the preservation of the revolution was most important, the anarchists wanted to simply relinquish the only viable mechanism for maintaining the proletariat’s power. It is only later, once the last, insidious vestiges of the bourgeois rationality are rendered ineffectual, that the stateless communist association can materialize. Here Engels and his intellectual cadre assume that a dictatorship of the proletariat is a means to eventual liberation from a powerful government. Anarchists’ abhorrence to this schema results from the way they conceptualize governmental structures. Where Engels envisions the populist authoritarian structure as dissolving or growing diffuse with the conceivably protracted passage into communism, anarchists see the authoritarian structure as immanently anti-populist and violently resistant to diffusion. Instead, the structure will always struggle to validate its existence, whether through physical repression or indoctrination, and disseminate ideological and organizational mechanisms that will reproduce the possibilities of its continued existence. Within that schema we can see Lenin’s famous insistence in The State and Revolution that the state is a “special repressive force,” or a structural product of class antagonism that need not be abolished because it will eventually “whither away,” as perhaps the most famous twentieth-century misrecognition of the state form’s tendencies.
<6> David Graeber, in Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, remarks that, “Marxism has tended to be a theoretical or analytical discourse about revolutionary strategy….Anarchism has tended to be an ethical discourse about revolutionary practice” (2004, 6). Parts of Graeber’s observation are arguable, but his notion of an ‘ethical discourse’ is important for a generalized articulation of the anarchist ideology. The classical anarchist, unlike the traditional Marxist, who is not at all comfortable with discussions about morality, sees liberty as a moral force as well as a natural one. That is to say, for the anarchists the correct way to behave in the world consists of principles like unity and cooperation, which they are not afraid to associate with the idea of a moral order that emerges naturally from society. The parallels with the Western theological tradition are numerous and significant, in part requiring that the authoritarian creator is supplanted in favor of a natural order.
<7> In an appropriate conceptual illustration, anarchists would locate ethical considerations in one of three social formations that must be present in a revolutionary seizure of power from the state. Right-ethics fits into the ideological portion of what I am referring to as an axis of emergence. The axis also contains educational and organizational apparatuses and all three overlap at numerous points. This de-centering structure, which is only being utilized in this essay as a means to the fullest possible elucidation of classical anarchist freedom, has as its singular goal the promotion and consolidation of the anti-state revolution [3]. In other words, creating a cogent space in which to articulate these three figurative mechanisms is, in this essay, the logical precondition for the revolutionary expression of freedom as the anarchists understood the concept.
<8> The ideology of the stateless space is not based on a doctrine “concerned above all with securing the right to do as one pleases” (Crowder 8). As George Crowder insists, the amoral character of such a doctrine wouldn’t be at all consistent with classical anarchist thought, because, “Far from being ruthlessly individualistic or amoral, the anarchists are, without exception, highly moralistic in temper” (9). And neither are they convinced that the abolition of the state and the collectivization of the means of production will necessarily secure a greater degree of virtue amongst the liberated. Rather, these things are the preconditions for a process-orientated attainment “that must be completed by the efforts of individuals themselves” (Crowder 72). Private property and statism facilitate inequality, which is a violation of the natural order. The natural order is also a moral order. The importance of the natural to the anarchist worldview is stated explicitly by Bakunin when he remarks: “The liberty of man consists solely in this: that he obeys natural laws because he has himself recognized them as such” (God 30). Thus, freedom rests upon individual recognition of the natural and, in turn, the unnatural, socially harmful, consequences of unrestrained individualism. The individual is only free collectively, and one’s actions should be geared toward cooperation and consensus building because society is a fact of the human condition.
<9> If one is naturally inclined to participate in the social, one must also learn the correct way of being in the world. This consists in the will to harmonious interaction and such concomitant notions as “autonomy, voluntary association, self-organization, mutual aid, direct democracy,” etc. proceed logically from that will (Graeber 2). As David Graeber notes, one of the nineteenth century’s most important anarchist thinkers, “Peter Kropotkin…had thrown social Darwinism into a tumult from which it still has never quite recovered by documenting how the most successful species tend to be those which cooperate the most effectively” (Graeber 16). This indicates that the ideological disposition of anarchists toward cooperation was in fact, by the end of the nineteenth century at least, grounded in their belief in certain natural organizational patterns. Likewise, voluntarism, so central to their thoughts, could only emerge from a virtuous life theory. But, contrary to charity in liberal thought, voluntary action was not meant to ameliorate social ills that economic systems inevitably produce—it was presumed that such ills would not appear under a cooperative system—instead, voluntary action was part of the process of being in the world as a naturally social individual. Charity implies compensation for a deficiency by those who have more than they need. In a moral system neither would one be deficient nor have more than one requires. Any economic arrangement of that kind would violate the harmony of the social space for the material benefit of individual spaces that are contrary to the natural order [4]. Voluntarism is an acknowledgment that certain difficulties arise from the most perfect of systems and the ideal method for handling such difficulties is not to embrace the bureaucratic methodology of the state, but to inculcate values that will aid in the surmounting of unforeseen problems. Unfortunately for the anarchists, this inculcation (my term, but an appropriate one) has an authoritarian quality to it and, as such, brings up its own ‘difficulties’ concerning the type of education that is most suitable to an authentic liberty.
<10> An anarchist pedagogy is an almost self-contradictory concept, but it properly belongs to the educational apparatus of my axis of emergence. If one considers that the classical anarchist’s unanimity in their contempt for organized religion rests in its traditionally authoritarian—and consequently immoral—character, one should rationally anticipate that a bourgeois liberal education would draw similar contempt for identical reasons. This is certainly the case. Nevertheless, wouldn’t the transmission of anarchist ideology to other, more skeptical or underage individuals, belong to a formal approach? The answer is no, and the approach that Bakunin prescribes, or, rather, fails to adequately prescribe, suggests that for the individual, “It is only by studying, and by making use, by means of his thought, of the external laws of…nature…that he succeeds in gradually shaking off the yoke of external nature…the yoke of an authoritarian social organization” (Science and the Urgent Revolutionary Task 351). The “integral education” Kropotkin and Bakunin both espouse a version of is articulated clearly by Kropotkin:
We maintain that in the interests of both science and industry, as well as of society as a whole, every human being, without distinction of birth, ought to receive such an education as would enable him, or her, to combine a thorough knowledge of science with a thorough knowledge of handicraft. …To the division of society into brain workers and manual workers we oppose the combination of both kinds of activities; and instead of “technical education,” which means the maintenance of the present division between brain work and manual work, we advocate the integral education, or complete education, which means the disappearance of that pernicious distinction. (Fields, Factories and Workshops 369)
Without attempting an exhaustive analysis of anarchist education, which is beyond the scope or inclination of this project, I must assert that the educational apparatus is, by the classical anarchists, the most loosely examined of thenecessary social formations for the broad implementation and consolidation of the anarchist vision. So-called ‘integral education’ describes an educational goal, viz. abandoning the division of intellectual labor. It is consequently a strictly instrumentalist pedagogy: one that has as its only aim the inculcation of a revolutionary consciousness that will bring about the anti-state revolution. Presumably this is accomplished by providing the same scientific learning to the laborer that is offered to the middle class university student. But this says nothing about the transmission of knowledge from the educator, who is in a privileged position, to the students, whose position, in the conventional working class and bourgeois classroom, is one of passive receiver [5]. Not quite a liberatory interaction.
<11> The failure to meaningfully distinguish an anarchist educational apparatus is a significant failing of the emergent form. The reason for this failing belongs to the prevalence of the revolution-first-precise-organization-second mentality that guided many of their Victorian theories. As Bakunin remarked: “Improve working conditions, render to labor what is justly due to labor, and thereby give the people security, comfort, and leisure. Then believe me, they will educate themselves…” (In Federalism, 1867). Organization, liberation, and the necessary education are all subsumed in a remarkably unconvincing way. More will be said on this later, but first the question of organization is paramount to an understanding of the two forms just discussed.
<12> For Bakunin, freedom belongs to a particular space; liberty is constructed within a specific social framework. This means within a social collective. Without the appropriate environment human interaction will fail to constitute Bakunin’s ideal. Administrative authority, in this arrangement, will be fluid and never embedded in permanent offices, nor in a class or in the hands of career professionals (Saltman 49). In order to destroy power’s bourgeois form it needs to be diffused among the collective and never firmly situated in a position of authority, and privilege can not be a viable means to attaining such a position. Richard B. Saltman says of Bakunin’s organizational vision that, “Within a fully formed system of collective self-discipline as within all systems of natural influence, [Bakunin] argued, such arbitrary authority based on privilege could not exist” (50). Needless to say, this is a redoubtable claim, but it must be understood that anarchists were quite cognizant of the natural desire for power contained in the individual. The popular contention amongst anarchist thinkers of the period was that a different organization of social life would reconstitute this urge into solidarity. Such a transubstantiation is expressed by Kropotkin when he insists, “Let us arrange matters so that each man may see his interest bound up with the interests of others, then you will no longer have to fear his evil passions” (Place of Anarchism 16). Likewise, in contradistinction to the division of labor, the new social arrangement scoffs at Adam Smith’s acquiescent pin-makers [6], who are alienated slaves to a dispersed production apparatus, within the centralized authoritative apparatus of the state. The latter apparatus is necessary to keep the former in place and each would be reversed by the anti-state collective. People, when freed to do so, will develop their own organically dictated organizations; the exact shape and design must result from the exigencies of the process as molded by a shared vision for what is to be achieved. This vision must overcome the many obstacles in society that cling to antiquated notions of the individual and the logical governmental form.
<13> As David Graeber points out, the conceptual limitations imposed on the anarchist organizational project of an anti-state utopia begin with the word ‘utopia’ itself, which “first calls to mind the image of an ideal city…with perfect geometry—the image seems to harken back originally to the royal military camp: a geometrical space which is entirely the emanation of a single, individual will, a fantasy of total control” (65). Contrast that authoritative organizational model with the one that proceeded from the Spanish Civil War in 1936. In Myrna Margulies Breithart’s spatial and geographical analysis of the Spanish anarchist communities during the war, she points out that the late nineteenth century European-oriented anarcho-syndicalists in Spain [7] sought “The replacement of government with an ‘administration’ of life through community and workplace networks” (92). The Spanish anarcho-syndicalists were working toward a new conception of how the individual is expected to interact with the state in the absence of compulsion. This unique relation manifested itself decades later through direct action, which was “adopted as a method to initiate radical social change [by encouraging] people to explore their community and work environments; to examine how centralization dominates the spatial and temporal rhythms of their lives; and to begin to articulate alternatives” (Breithart 93). This is a process of self-radicalization intended to empower the masses so that they can foster the responsibility necessary to effectively administer to their new space in the absence of its authoritative, centralized administration. Cultural meeting centers, or ateneos, became important features of rural Spanish villages in order to accommodate the self-empowerment process (ibid.).
<14> An anarchist ethos, given its loathing of ownership and inclination toward collective use, is necessarily antithetical to the territorial imperative that is a major source of aggressive tendencies in the Bourgeois subject (Manata 22). Because we have proposed as our model the collectivist anarchist that predominated in Europe during the late Victorian period, we understand the classical anarchist to be categorically averse to private property ownership and personal acquisition beyond communally determined need [8]. Therefore, both the physical space, the boundaries, and the social space, the idea of community, are shared by each recognized member of the group. Typical of social groups, the threshold for recognition is outward acceptance of collectivist ideology and willingness to participate in the practices of the group. In this context, it is necessary for rigor’s sake that we differentiate between the physical (tangible) world, and the social experience of the world (Kuper 247). It should be clear by now that both are conceived of interchangeably by the classical anarchist when they conflate the physical organization of resources and living space with the attitudes produced by these arrangements. The state, then, is not just a tangible, repressive bureaucracy with an army and a capitol. It is also an ethos of mis-organization that, as stated in the Spanish “direct action” example, has a “spatial and temporal rhythm”that injects itself into the corrupted ideology of the peasant laborer or industrial proletarian. The state is a way of knowing the world that precludes ideal organization on both levels of being and which requires ideological (a certain way of knowing), educational (a certain way of transferring knowledge), and organizational (a certain way of arranging physical and social space to facilitate and sustain right-knowledge) counter-structures to contest its artificial imposition. This pervasive, dual ontological recognition of the authoritarian state is expressed by Bakunin when he remarks: “We revolutionary anarchists are proponents of universal popular education, liberation, and the broad development of social life, and hence are enemies of the state and of any form of statehood” (Statism and Anarchy 135). It may appear strange to conflate the absence of universal education with the function of the state, but for the anarchists it justifiably belongs to the anti-liberatory ontological rhythms of the state apparatus. The linking of learning to liberty is the logical consequence of a totalizing vision of the state structure versus its stateless antipode. The term “ideology,” made superfluous by the power/knowledge composition of Foucauldian social relations, is a crucial feature of any liberatory narrative and it belongs to the same need for a totalizing theory that looks to organization and structure as spatial sites of potential repression and emancipation.
<15> I would argue that, before we can return to the anarchist educational apparatus and address its various inadequacies, a case must be made for the recuperation of the concept of ideology that situates it between the reductive “false consciousness” of early Marxist and much classical anarchist thought, and the superfluity of its postmodern projection [9]. In the latter’s case, we find the Foucauldian discourse alive and flourishing in the contemporary academy and it brings with it certain potentially disempowering notions. As Terry Eagleton convincingly demonstrates in his writing on the subject of ideology, a Foucauldian might suggest that “to limit the idea of power to its more obvious political manifestations would itself be an ideological move,” which leads to the unfortunate consequence that, “if there are no values and beliefs not bound up with power, then the term ideology threatens to expand to [a] vanishing point” (Ideology 7). The anarchist is concerned, first and foremost, with a revolutionary subjectivity leading to the liberated subject. Foucault’s decision to abandon the subject has been appropriately criticized by those who see his willingness to speak of resistance to power as contrary to a view that degrades the subjective materiality of the resister and makes the points of resistance so numerous and widely dispersed as to call into question the possibility for the significant alteration of social relations. As Eagleton says of the late historian/theorist, for Foucault, “subjectivity itself would seem just a form of self-incarceration; and the question of where political resistance springs from must thus remain obscure” (Ideology 146) [10].
<16> Resistance also requires a field of action. While the Traditional Marxist recognizes the field, theirs is an idea of ideology that conflates indoctrination with a view of the world that isn’t strictly Marxist—i.e., devoted to the revolutionary seizure of power by the dictatorship of the proletariat. In the context of the anti-state revolutionary project what is significant about this narrative is not the action, but the field on which the action is meant to occur. For the anarchist liberatory objective to have meaning, there must first be some ground to stand upon. To use a Freirean term, the author of which I will return to shortly, there must be some variety of an oppressor/oppressed social relation to contest in order for revolutionaries, as well as reformers, to situate their target. This is not to say that Freire’s somewhat facile essentialist dichotomy is necessary for a critical recognition of “what is to be done.” Only that some demarcated space of recognizable oppression, some evident inequality in power relations, must exist in order for the anarchist to know where to strike. As I mentioned previously, this suggests the need for a critical validation of totality. As John Sanbonmatsu says of Gramsci’s action-oriented approach to theory, “the responsibility of the leader is to discern patterns in the total field of significations, social and economic structures, cultural objects, and so on, which together constitute the background or horizon of action” (Postmodern 135). Though the anarchist, classical or otherwise, would reject Gramsci’s acceptance of authority in the form of leadership, the need for a vision of the total space of dissent and change, and a theory driven by praxis, are coextensive sympathies. It should come as no surprise, then, that many classical anarchists have fallen into the Marxist ‘false consciousness’ trap when articulating the ideology of the other.
<17> The difficulties manifest in both conceptions of ideology—postmodern and Marxist—arises when the individual is interpolated into the prevailing social structures or ideological formations. This is demonstrated by reference to the societal articulation of the educational apparatus when Jurgen Habermas, in his seminal work, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, observes that, regarding bourgeois education at the beginning of the nineteenth century, “The ‘private people’ on whose autonomy, socially guaranteed by property, the constitutional state counted just as much as on the educational qualifications of the public formed by these people, were in truth a small minority, even if one added the petty to the high bourgeoisies” (84). The ‘education’ of the elite-controlled constitutional state (or its normative procedures for right-knowledge) must, presumably, given Habermas’ most frequently utilized, traditional Marxist definition, consist of the inculcation of false-consciousness as a means to the maintenance of the status quo—i.e. a social network of indoctrination that reproduced its own institutional validity through an exclusivity that is only permitted because the excluded are afflicted by ideology. This interpretation assumes that there is a fixed outside to the ideology of the masses that only requires the antithesis of the initial indoctrination to liberate the popular consciousness of the exploited. But this process is hegemony from a different direction. Consciousness is inflicted on the individual from above (still) and outside (which the masses are not prepared to define until they have been acted upon as one might an object). If, however, we locate the limitations of the bourgeois education in its need to rely upon the “passive ideology” of the excluded, we speak of a single possible ideological formation amid a variety. This conception, far from being rhetorical, constitutes the precondition for an education of participation—or (and I am thinking of Paulo Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” here) a dialogue that recognizes humans in the process of humanization as unfinished or becoming (Freire 84). In this context the pejorative conception of ideology is fundamentally disempowering, as well as being problematical to the point of irrelevance. It lends itself to the possibility of an indoctrinated subjectivity with a truth outside of itself—a truth as having. Instead, a dialogic conception of a developed subjectivity contains the immanent possibility of liberation through truth-as-process and dialogue. This latter articulation allows the subject to speak the world without an extraneous and authoritative truth constraining its speech. To accomplish that we must look toward a broader understanding of ideology as the medium through which conscious social actors make sense of the world they live in. Such an understanding leaves us to explore the extent to which the actor is conscious and what factors are present in the construction of the actor’s specific consciousness without assuming its complete falsity or truth.
<18> I see this as the foundation of a properly anarchist education. Though the classical anarchists did not anticipate it, nor did they widely question the bourgeois, authoritative nature of their educational projects, a cogent educational apparatus is required for the revolutionary seizure that is fundamental to their understanding of freedom. This radical pedagogy, in addition to recognizing a multitude of ideologies, especially amongst different anarchist thinkers, must also embrace the idea of totality—something the anarchist does reflexively. John Sanbonmatsu is persuasive on this point:
Radical pedagogy as such functions literally to reveal or bring to light what would otherwise remain unseen—the hidden structures of meaning and power that shape our lives—and this can only happen by revealing the whole. Every so-called critical social movement seeks to reveal thebackground itself—that is, to make the background, as it were, become figure. (Postmodern 193)
The radical pedagogy is crucial for the formation of the ideological apparatus in our axis, which directly impresses itself upon the organization of life and labor. The highly interdependent nature of the axis’ mechanisms of revolutionary seizure and consolidation makes the educational contradictions needful of reconciliation before we can begin to interrogate the role of praxis in the emergence of freedom.
<19> When Kropotkin asserts that it has been demonstrated by various experiments that it is possible to teach a fourteen or fifteen year old, “a broad general comprehension of nature, as well as of human societies” (Fields 412)—a specific educational theory is being promulgated. For the sake of brevity I will use the very popular and still very important Freirean lexicon, which would situate Kropotkin’s approach well within the orbit of a banking education. In that methodology the learner passively accepts the teacher’s deposits of knowledge. This conventional interaction is “characteristic of the ideology of oppression [and] negates education and knowledge as processes of inquiry” (Pedagogy of the Oppressed 72). Instead of constituting a crucial first step toward an understanding of natural freedom, as anarchists would hope, the banking method is the imposition of an ideal upon a submissive depository. One has every right and, in fact, obligation to look with incredulity upon any freedom born of indoctrination, but the spirit of the proposed interaction—particularly when one considers its central importance to the anarchist’s liberatory project—is clearly indicative of an authentic striving toward collective liberation. The mistake is contained in the notion that natural laws will reveal themselves through conventional subject matter dispersed by the conventional teacher-subject, only now in a workplace, as though the field of transmission alone would serve to transform the interaction from authoritative and repressive to integral and revolutionary. A concept as simple as Freire’s problem-posing educational alternative could serve to effectively resituate this misplaced notion.
<20> In keeping with the anarchist’s singular aim, Freire suggests:
Whereas banking education anesthetizes and inhibits creative power, problem-posing education involves a constant unveiling of reality. The former attempts to maintain the submersion of consciousness; the latter strives for the emergence of consciousness and critical intervention in reality. (81)
The straightforward act of questioning existing social relations and authority in general fits both the problem-posing approach and the anarchist agenda. The “emergence of consciousness” belongs to the same “critical intervention” that is foundational to the ideological structure of the axis. Without an anti-authoritative understanding of power the subject cannot be free from its lopsided relationship to power. Instead the subject will internalize the normalcy of the arrangement and reject the possibility, as well as the need, for alternatives. That is why the anarchists saw their misguided ideas on education as so important to the surfacing of the liberatory ideology amidst repressive governmental and economic forms. Even deprivation was susceptible to eradication by the power of knowledge. If the revolutionaries could only seize control of the sciences the way they would the means of production, and use the former to improve the latter, starvation would become anachronistic and general prosperity would increase without even taking into consideration the redistribution of wealth, which would undoubtedly occur early in the revolutionary process. As Kropotkin alleged concerning the long ages of suffering that he attributes to the ignorance that prevailed, “human genius, stimulated by our modern renaissance, has already indicated new paths to follow” (Fields 416). His faith in learning comes from his experience of the things that have “been won…by obscure teachers who only too often fall crushed under the weight of church, state, commercial competition, [and the] inertia of mind and prejudice” (Fields 413). If only Kropotkin had recognized the importance of the revolutionary education as much as he did the importance of the revolutionary educator, or depositor, then a greater cogency may have spread to the anarchist thought of the period.
<21> Though, as in this case, the anarchist conceptualization of freedom possesses many questionable assumptions of its own, it is less important to promote their model than to learn from their concerns. In these times there is much in the classical anarchist form that deserves recuperation. What proceeded from their belief in liberty was a philosophical system guided by praxis. In fact, liberty and its societal form were inseparable. Contrast the contemporary academy’s obsession with abstraction and erudite novelties, all in the presumptuous name of the “end of philosophy,” to an anarchist praxis that is even more grounded in autonomous action than what Antonio Gramsci referred to as Marx’s “philosophy of praxis” (Selections 405). Mikhail Bakunin, often considered the great theorist of anarchism, rejected any attempt to situate himself in what he perceived as the same passive philosophical echelon that philosophers like Marx supposedly inhabit [11]. Of course, Bakunin’s perception of Marx is more hyperbole than fact and there is strong evidence to suggest that Bakunin did strive toward the same philosophical stature he claimed to hate, but his project was still guided by the “propaganda by the deed” tradition of anarchism: doing what needs to be done without overt philosophizing. As Saltman remarks, “the practical purpose for which the theoretical structure of collectivist anarchism was erected [was] to comprehend the contemporary condition of the working classes and to facilitate a liberatory socialist revolution” (97). For that reason classical anarchists took seriously the ways that our axis of emergence could be put into practice in society and used a language of strategy alongside many of their theoretical ruminations. Unfortunately their organizational ethos may be inimical to the very harmonious social order they desired. Its dispersion and fragmentation of authority maps itself onto the sprawling postmodern suburbs that produce the bulk of anarchism’s contemporary adherents in the United States. This ethos is then taken to the streets in often absurdly disorganized and ineffectual protests, which seem more like self-serving ends-in-themselves for the so-called anarchists involved. As Freire recalls of the tensions between freedom and authority for the transformative educator that still haunt the liberatory pedagogical process, “Because we were dedicated to overcoming the legacy of authoritarianism so prevalent among us, we fell into the opposite error of limitless freedom, accusing the legitimate exercise of authority of being an abuse of authority.” He then goes on to insist that, “Freedom without limit is as impossible as freedom that is suffocated or contracted. If it were without limit, it would take me outside of the sphere of human action, intervention, or struggle” (Pedagogy of Freedom 95-6). In order for the people to seize freedom from existing authoritative structures certain forms of authority will inevitably arise from the movement for change. Gramsci fittingly suggests that this authority must be minimized by the masses that lend it legitimacy, without obviating its quintessential organizational function (Selections 144). The anarchist’s intense preoccupation with freedom is a potentially decisive component in holding legitimate authority accountable to the movement.
<22> According to Crowder, “It was the Enlightenment and the [French] revolution that laid the foundations of the systematic social and political theory that became known as anarchism” (18). What may be most relevant in our contemporary convalesce of the system’s principles are the aspects that originate in the Enlightenment, such as “a commitment to universal rationality,” including a total view of nature, and the primacy of the subject (Zengotita 40). As Freire explained during the very early appearance of postmodern and poststructural thought, “To deny the importance of subjectivity in the process of transforming the world and history is naïve and simplistic. It is to admit the impossible: a world without people” (Pedagogy of the Oppressed 50). Similarly and, I think, crucially, Thomas de Zengotita, in his essay “Common Ground: Finding our way back to the Enlightenment,” remarks that “You can align yourself with humanist ideals of modern progress without committing yourself to what modernity actually did” (41). While the classical anarchists utilized a totalizing theory of society to guide their revolutionary project, It is not their specific organizational modality that should be restored—the one that lent itself to an application marked by spontaneism and localism, which has already been inherited from the failures of the New Left in the sixties [12]—but the ideal of organization’s centrality to a praxis-driven association and/or theory bent on social change. What must materialize from the emergence of the properly anarchist space of freedom is a place of security and sanity in a time that recognizes neither as a viable possibility (Tuan 3). For us the anarchist space can not be literal or tangible, but a morality of refusal—the refusal to legitimate authority because it is authority and to always and everywhere question its legitimacy precisely because it is in some ways privileged. The need for social progress must guide the authority/incredulity dialectic toward its horizon line. There is no rational alternative to that movement. But neither can there be settled understanding of what, exactly, the horizon is. Only that without a goal there is abeyance and the tragedies that follow.
<23> Freedom has occupied a central position in the political discourse of recent years. At no point has its meaning been in dispute—which is to say that at no point has there been any broad, substantive discussion about what the word means. Some simply have it and some do not; some love it dearly and others hate it so much that they are willing to murder the innocent to prevent it from triumphing. In Usama bin Laden’s message to the American people just prior to the presidential elections he dismissed the notion that he and his followers hate freedom and insisted that they “fight because [they] are free men who don’t sleep under oppression” (AlJazeera.Net). A good case can be made that in many respects bin Laden’s understanding of freedom is not so different from the average US policy maker’s, only remarkably antithetical in practice. Yet the term has been mobilized, without nuance or complexity, as the rhetorical foundation of our response to a contemptible event. It is almost certain that any thorough discussion of how the term is being popularly employed would reveal a vast panoply of indefensible assumptions and absurd inconsistencies, as well as the occasional glaring contradiction--for such is the nature of the word when it is used unthinkingly. It is a dangerous concept and immanently susceptible to exploitation. That is why many would rather leave it to its current owners and look for a more careful phraseology to define the objectives of a just society. But the contradictions in the anarchist tradition make it clear that this is a concept worth fighting for. How else does the hypocrisy of their conventional educational schema make itself so evident without reference to their driving goal and its ideological and organizational manifestations? Their fault, in this case, is not in their goal, but in their refusal to look closely enough at how instruction in anarchist ideas could transpire without practices that run counter to their ideals. It would appear, in this context at least, that freedom must insist upon its own examination. If it is to mean anything it must involve the opportunity and the impulse to question its own possibilities in a society. The supposition of freedom represses debate and, as a consequence, is profoundly unfree. But this is certainly not a new contention, and one of the more provocative contemporary theorizations of freedom’s limits can be found in Slavoj Zizek, who insists that radical political thought must take seriously a “Leninist Freedom.”
<24> An immediate response to this claim might see it as a categorical mainstream rejection of anarchist conceptualizations of freedom. But are things really so clear? Surely Zizek’s sustained (and frequently brilliant) attacks on liberalism share substantial common ground with collectivist anarchist critiques. And his invocation of the substantive differences between formal freedom and its “actual,” Leninist variant, is not completely incommensurable with many classical and contemporary anarchist assumptions (On Belief 121). Indeed, Zizek is attempting to theorize, or theoretically authorize, the kind of authentically radical “act” that will permit new freedoms to emerge outside the intractable Real of capital. The crucial question of commensurability first articulates itself not with concern to whether or not the liberal consensus must be shattered—and Zizek has become, arguable, the most eloquent and important theorist of this question—but around the equally important question of praxis. We might take as a germane example the sort of discussions that have circulated around the Chavez presidency in Venezuela, and contrast them with the Zapatista movement in Mexico [13]. What is authentic liberation? What exactly constitutes an authentic political act? In theoretical terms, what is the legitimate role of universality/particularity? These questions are truly significant to the forms of resistance and/or seizure that may materialize in the coming years. If from nothing else we can take heart from the reality that what has been categorically rejected by the radical left is the possibility of authentic freedom under capitalist relations of production.
Works Cited
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Bakunin, Mikhail. God and the State. Trans. B. Tucker, et. al. New York: Free Press, 1970.
Bakunin, Mikhail. “Science and the Urgent Revolutionary Task.” Mikhail Bakunin’s Selected Writings. Trans. Steven Cox and Olive Stevens. New York: Grove Press, 1973.
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Bellamy, Richard, ed. Victorian Liberalism: Nineteenth-Century Political Thought and Practice. New York: Routledge, 1990.
Breithart, Myrna Margulies. “The Integration of Community and Environment: Anarchist Decentralism in Rural Spain, 1936-39.” The Human Experience of Space and Place. Eds. Anne Buttimer and David Seamon. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980.
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Notes
[1] George Woodcock’s enduring definition is also instructive: “A system of social thought, aiming at fundamental changes in the structure of society and particularly—for this is the common element uniting all its forms—at the replacement of the authoritarian state by some form of non-governmental co-operation between free individuals” (Anarchism 13). For the purposes of this essay I will be emphasizing the notion of the ‘free individual’ in Woodcock’s definition. [^]
[2] Gary Kline’s The Individualist Anarchist: a Critique of Liberalism, is persuasive on this point. [^]
[3] The axis is both an apposite word choice for this conceptualization and a tongue-in-cheek allusion. [^]
[4] Bakunin believed that “there should be no restrictions on what individuals could acquire by their own skill, energy, and thrift” (Oliver 3). I will be following most scholars on the subject of collectivist anarchism by treating this idea as an idiosyncratic and aberrant theoretical oversight on Bakunin’s part. [^]
[5] Working class education tended toward unthinking memorization to a greater degree than its middle and upper class counterparts. However, all forms would strike today’s critical pedagogue as utilizing a repressive teacher/taught banking approach. [^]
[6] See chapter 1, book 1, of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, which famously deals with the division of labor. [^]
[7] Anarcho-syndicalism locates greater organizational and decision making power in the vast array of trade unions that would exist after the abolition of the state—i.e., power at the level of production within the collective. As Daniel Guerin in Anarchism, explains about Bakunin’s vision for trade unionism: “after the abolition of the wage system, trade unions would become the embryo of the administration of the future; government would be replaced by councils of workers’ organization” (57). [^]
[8] Again, Bakunin is the unaccountable exception. [^]
[9] The conflation of Foucault and postmodernism is a debatable decision, but one that Terry Eagleton’s Ideology: an Introduction, and John Sanbonmatsu’s The Postmodern Prince: Critical Theory, Left Strategy, and the Making of a New Political Subject, have given me substantial cause to make for the purpose of discussing a generalized attitude toward the concept of ideology. [^]
[10] This quote also pertains to the structuralism of Louis Althusser, whose structural terminology I have appropriated in various places in this essay while discarding many of the more disempowering implications of his general system. I feel that is the most appropriate treatment of Althusser in our historical moment. [^]
[11] See Aileen Kelly’s, Mikhail Bakunin: a Study in the Psychology and Politics of Utopianism. New York: Oxford UP, 1982. [^]
[12] See Sanbonmatsu’s The Postmodern Prince…, for an impressive account. [^]
[13] A remarkable example can be found in an October, 2004 European Social Forum panel that featured John Holloway, Fausto Bertinotti, Hilary Wainwright, and Phil Hearse: http://www.marxsite.com/TheDebate%20on%20Power.htm. The debate, entitled, “Strategies for Social Transformation,” is exemplary for its elucidation of incommensurably disparate conceptions of state power. We might locate a similar problematic in the recent work of Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, as well as in its broad reception by left activists and academics. [^]