78 lines
3.8 KiB
Plaintext
78 lines
3.8 KiB
Plaintext
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* Reflections on the Anarchist Principle
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Tom Jennings
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1:125/111
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The following is the opening essay in "THE BLACK FLAG OF
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ANARCHISM AND OTHER ESSAYS", available from Employee Theft Press,<2C>
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($2.50 from 1369 Haight St, San Francisco CA 94117) -- all funds
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from the sale of this pamphlet go to "WITHOUT BORDERS ANARCHIST
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CONFERENCE & FESTIVAL", to be held in San Francisco this
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July 20 - 25.
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Reflections on the Anarchist Principle
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by Paul Goodman
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"Anarchism is grounded in a rather definite proposition: that
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valuable behavior occurs only by the free and direct response of
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individuals or voluntary groups to the conditions presented by
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the historical environment. It claims that in most human affairs,
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whether political, economic, military, religious, moral,
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pedagogic, or cultural, more harm than good results from
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coercion, top-down direction, central authority, bureaucracy,
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jails, conscription, states, pre-ordained standardization,
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excessive planning, etc. Anarchists want to increase intrinsic
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functioning and diminish extrinsic power. This is a social-
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psychological hypothesis with obvious political implications.
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"Depending on varying historical conditions that present various
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threats to the anarchist principle, anarchists have laid their
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emphasis in varying places: sometimes agrarian, sometimes free-
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city and guild-oriented; sometimes technological, sometimes anti-
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technological; sometimes Communist, sometimes affirming property;
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sometimes individual, sometimes collective; sometimes speaking of
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Liberty as an almost absolute good, sometimes relying on custom
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and 'nature'. Nevertheless, despite these differences, anarchists
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seldom fail to recognize each other, and they do not consider the
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differences to be incompatibilities. Consider a crucial modern
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problem, violence. Guerrilla fighting has been a classical
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anarchist technique; yet, especially where, in modern conditions,
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*any* violent means tends to reinforce centralism and
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authoritarianism, anarchists have tended to see the beauty of
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non-violence.
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"Now the anarchist principle is by and large true(1). And far
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from being 'utopian' or a 'glorious failure', it has proved
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itself and won out in many spectacular historical crises. In the
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period of mercantilism and patents royal, free enterprise by
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joint stock companies were anarchist. The Jeffersonian bill of
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rights were anarchist. Progressive education was anarchist. The
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free cities and corporate law in the feudal system were
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anarchist. At present, the civil rights movement in the United
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States has been almost classically decentralist and anarchist.
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And so forth, down to details like free access in public
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libraries. Of course, to later historians these things do not
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seem to be anarchist, but in their own time they were regarded as
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such and often literally called such, with the usual dire threats of
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chaos. But this relativity of the anarchist principle to the
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actual situation is of the essence of anarchism. There *cannot*
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be a history of anarchism in the sense of establishing a
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permanent state of things 'anarchist'. It is always a continual
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coping with the next situation, and a vigilance to make sure that
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past freedoms are not lost and do not turn into the opposite, as
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free enterprise turned into wage-slavery and monopoly capitalism,
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or the independent judiciary turned into a monopoly of courts,
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cops, and lawyers, or free education turned into School Systems."
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Footnote(1) "I, and Other anarchists, would except certain states
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of temporary emergency, is we can be confident that the emergency
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is *temporary*. We might except certain simplistic logistic
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arrangements, like ticketing or metric standards or tax-
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collection, if we can be confident that the administration, the
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'secretariat', will not begin to run the show. And we might
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except certain 'natural monopolies', like epidemic control,
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water-supply, etc."
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First published in ANARCHY 62 (April 1966)
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