Communism,"
for its part, once referred to a cooperative society that would be based
morally on mutual respect and on an economy in which each contributed to the
social labor fund according to his or her ability and received the means of
life according to his or her needs. Today, "communism" is associated
with the Stalinist gulag and wholly rejected as totalitarian. Its cousin,
"socialism" -- which once denoted a politically free society based on
various forms of collectivism and equitable material returns for labor -- is
currently interchangeable with a somewhat humanistic bourgeois liberalism.
During
the 1980s and 1990s, as the entire social and political spectrum has shifted
ideologically to the right, "anarchism" itself has not been immune to
redefinition. In the Anglo-American sphere, anarchism is being divested of its
social ideal by an emphasis on personal autonomy, an emphasis that is draining
it of its historic vitality. A Stirnerite individualism -- marked by an
advocacy of lifestyle changes, the cultivation of behavioral idiosyncrasies and
even an embrace of outright mysticism -- has become increasingly prominent.
This personalistic "lifestyle anarchism" is steadily eroding the
socialistic core of anarchist concepts of freedom.
Let
me stress that in the British and American social tradition, autonomy and
freedom are not equivalent terms. By insisting the need to eliminate personal
domination, autonomy focuses on the individual as the formative component and
locus of society. By contrast, freedom, despite its looser usages, denotes the
absence of domination in society, of which the individual is part. This
contrast becomes very important when individualist anarchists equate
collectivism as such with the tyranny of the community over its members
Today,
if an anarchist theorist like L. Susan Brown can assert that "a group is a
collection of individuals, no more and no less," rooting anarchism in the
abstract individual, we have reason to be concerned. Not that this view is
entirely new to anarchism; various anarchist historians have described it as
implicit in the libertarian outlook. Thus the individual appears ab novo,
endowed with natural rights and bereft of roots in society or historical
development.1
But
whence does this "autonomous" individual derive? What is the basis
for its "natural rights," beyond a priori premises and hazy
intuitions? What role does historical development play in its formation? What
social premises give birth to it, sustain it, indeed nourish it? How can a
"collection of individuals" institutionalize itself such as to give
rise to something more than an autonomy that consists merely in refusing to
impair the "liberties" of others -- or "negative liberty,"
as Isaiah Berlin
called it in contradistinction to "positive liberty," which is
substantive freedom, in our case constructed along socialistic lines?
In
the history of ideas, "autonomy," referring to strictly personal
"self-rule," found its ancient apogee in the imperial Roman cult of
libertas. During the rule of the Julian-Claudian Caesars, the Roman citizen
enjoyed a great deal of autonomy to indulge his own desires -- and lusts --
without reproval from any authority, provided that he did not interfere with
the business and the needs of the state. In the more theoretically developed
liberal tradition of John Locke and John Stuart Mill, autonomy acquired a more
expansive sense that was opposed ideologically to excessive state authority.
During the nineteenth century, if there was any single subject that gained the
interest of classical liberals, it was political economy, which they often
conceived not only as the study of goods and services, but also as a system of
morality. Indeed, liberal thought generally reduced the social to the economic.
Excessive state authority was opposed in favor of a presumed economic autonomy.
Ironically, liberals often invoked the word freedom, in the sense of
"autonomy," as they do to the present day.2
Despite
their assertions of autonomy and distrust of state authority, however, these
classical liberal thinkers did not in the last instance hold to the notion that
the individual is completely free from lawful guidance. Indeed, their
interpretation of autonomy actually presupposed quite definite arrangements
beyond the individual -- notably, the laws of the marketplace. Individual
autonomy to the contrary, these laws constitute a social organizing system in
which all "collections of individuals" are held under the sway of the
famous "invisible hand" of competition. Paradoxically, the laws of
the marketplace override the exercise of "free will" by the same
sovereign individuals who otherwise constitute the "collection of
individuals."
No
rationally formed society can exist without institutions and if a society as a
"collection of individuals, no more and no less" were ever to emerge,
it would simply dissolve. Such a dissolution, to be sure, would never happen in
reality. The liberals, nonetheless, can cling to the notion of a "free
market" and "free competition" guided by the "inexorable
laws" of political economy.
Alternatively,
freedom, a word that shares etymological roots with the German Freiheit (for
which there is no equivalent in Romance languages), takes its point of
departure not from the individual but from the community or, more broadly, from
society. In the last century and early in the present one, as the great
socialist theorists further sophisticated ideas of freedom, the individual and
his or her development were consciously intertwined with social evolution --
specifically, the institutions that distinguish society from mere animal
aggregations.
What
made their focus uniquely ethical was the fact that as social revolutionaries
they asked the key question -- What constitutes a rational society? -- a question
that abolishes the centrality of economics in a free society. Where liberal
thought generally reduced the social to the economic, various socialisms (apart
from Marxism), among which Kropotkin denoted anarchism the "left
wing," dissolved the economic into the social.3
In
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as Enlightenment thought and its
derivatives brought the idea of the mutability of institutions to the
foreground of social thought, the individual, too, came to be seen as mutable.
To the socialistic thinkers of the period, a "collection" was a
totally alien way of denoting society; they properly considered individual
freedom to be congruent with social freedom and, very significantly, they
defined freedom as such as an evolving, as well as a unifying, concept.
In
short, both society and the individual were historicized in the best sense of
this term: as an ever-developing, self-generative and creative process in which
each existed within and through the other. Hopefully, this historicization
would be accompanied by ever-expanding new rights and duties. The slogan of the
First International, in fact, was the demand, "No rights without duties,
no duties without rights" -- a demand that later appeared on the mastheads
of anarchosyndicalist periodicals in Spain and elsewhere well into the
present century.
Thus,
for classical socialist thinkers, to conceive of the individual without society
was as meaningless as to conceive of society without individuals. They sought
to realize both in rational institutional frameworks that fostered the greatest
degree of free expression in every aspect of social life.
