‘Anarchists are like Tories’ and other fairy tales

By Joseph Kay; August 1 2011 - Libcom
http://libcom.org/blog/%E2%80%98anarchists-are-tories%E2%80%...

Anarchism has been getting a lot of attention lately, including some oft-peddled but easily refuted myths.

The cops have been urging people to report anarchists to the anti-terrorist police. Various Trotskyist groups like the Socialist Workers Party and AWL have been running prolifically ill-informed articles on why anarchism is bad and wrong and you definitely shouldn’t investigate it for yourself. Numerous members of the Twitter commentariat have also weighed in. Obviously each of these groups has their motives, from cops building up bogeymen to justify their budgets to Trots with one eye on the party coffers worried about the appeal of anarchist ideas to potential young recruits. But the result has been a torrent of disinformation ranging from the spectacularly dishonest to the tragically ill-informed. I’ll correct some of the more common motifs here (consciously leaving aside the interminable reduction of anarchism to the black bloc that accompanies the mourning of every broken window).

Myth #1: Anarchists are like Tories

This one has been peddled by Maeve McKeown and Mark Fisher, amongst many others. For McKeown "There is a fine line between libertarianism (the ideology of some Tories) and anarchism", while Fisher claims a "remarkable congruence with the ‘Big Society’ rhetoric pushed by David Cameron". This 'similarity' supposedly rests on a shared anti-statism. It's ridiculous for several reasons:

1. Anarchists are by and large anti-state communists, Tories are pro-state capitalists. Even in the somewhat limited terms of the political compass, these are diametrically opposed.1 You know who's closer to the Tories than anarchists? Pretty much anyone, certainly mainstream liberals (who are of course governing with them), or anyone who seeks state power to effect their political programme (most of the Marxist left), or anyone who favours some form of market economy (most Guardian readers).

2. Anarchism is a kind of anti-capitalism that comes from the workers' movement, the Tories are a capitalist party that serves the interests of the ruling class. The interests of the employing and the employed classes have nothing in common. The Tories are unashamed class warriors for their side, as anarchists are for ours. I suppose if you prefer to ignore class conflict or pretend class is an old fashioned thing from the 1970s then they look pretty similar. But does this facile nonsense really pass for political commentary?

3. Tories aren't in any meaningful sense 'against the state', they run it! If you fancy yourself a political commentator, distinguishing between political rhetoric and political reality is pretty elementary stuff. The Tories are of course currently running the elected part of the British state, and are using state power to force through their policies against popular opposition (as Nina Power notes, 'Let's stop assuming the police are on our side'). What the Tories oppose, and following in Labour's footsteps are in the process of dismantling, are public sector welfare functions which have been run by the state, not the state itself. Liberal pin-up Adam Smith was remarkably candid about this:

"Laws and government may be considered (…) in every case as a combination of the rich to oppress the poor, and preserve to themselves the inequality of the goods which would otherwise be soon destroyed by the attacks of the poor, who if not hindered by the government would soon reduce the others to an equality with themselves by open violence."

The Tories are so keen on this classical liberal state they don't want it encumbered with pesky welfare functions. Meanwhile more socially minded liberals prefer their 'combination of the rich to oppress the poor' to chuck in a few welfare services to sweeten the deal. Which brings us nicely to...

Myth #2: Anarchists are inconsistent for opposing public sector cuts

In liberal-left mythology, the welfare state was a gift from munificent politicians from a better age. The Golden Age is now being ruined by nasty ideological Tories, and we need some good decent politicians to set things right. That's variously hoped to be the neo-liberal, scabbing Labour Party of Ed Milibot [see video below], or a new workers' party hoped for by some socialists and trade union bureaucrats. Poor, disorientated Sunny Hundal of the Liberal Conspiracy blog has even advocated voting Tory, LibDem and Labour in the last year or so. But this understanding of the welfare state is nonsense. While the [National Health Service] was founded under a Labour government, the formation of the welfare state represented cross-party (i.e. pan-ruling class) consensus, as summed up in the 1943 Beveridge Report. What was the source of this consensus? Fear. The ruling class knew what happened after WWI where revolutions and mass unrest spread across Russia, Germany, Italy - and Britain, with even the police on strike in 1918 and 1919 and tanks on the streets in 1926. So in the words of Tory Quintin Hogg, the ruling class knew "we must give them reform or they will give us revolution". Once the threat of working class revolution was broken, the dismantling of the welfare state could begin (see Charting the class struggle).

Therefore, as partisans of working class struggle, of course anarchists oppose the cuts. On the one hand, the cuts are a direct attack on hundreds of thousands of workers' livelihoods and those of their families. Attacks on benefits thrust the millions of sick and unemployed deeper into poverty. On the other hand, public services form part of our 'social wage', with health-care, education and so on being provided universally by capitalism in general rather than being paid for by individual workers out of their wage packets. So of course anarchists oppose these attacks. Just as you can oppose the organization of human society into classes whilst fighting for better wages, terms and conditions for the working class in the meantime, you can oppose the organization of human society into states whilst demanding our needs to health-care [and] education are met. The inconsistency here is not on the part of anarchists, but those who wish to reap the fruits of the class struggle whilst opposing or denying the class struggle itself.

Myth #3: Anarchists are against organization

This one is a perennial favourite. Like the colour black in fact. It is of course, completely untrue, but is a favoured criticism by liberals and statist socialists alike.2 It doesn't take much to refute. Just the existence of national organizations like the Anarchist Federation and the Solidarity Federation - themselves part of international organizations - should be enough. But it's worth drawing out a few more of the implications. The basic claim of the 'anarchists are against organization' canard is to equate organization with hierarchy. These are not at all the same thing, but otherwise intelligent people seem to have all sorts of problems separating them out. For example, Mark Fisher quotes popular blogger Richard Seymour (a.k.a. Leninology):

"Richard Seymour argued that hierarchy 'is, as much as anything else, an ordering of priorities and tasks, a division of labour (...) there is nothing about hierarchy per se that is objectionable. On the other hand, there is such a thing as the tyranny of structurelessness.'"

Did you spot the slight of hand? Hierarchy or structurelessness, organization or 'anarchy'. Of course, this isn't the definition of hierarchy at all. A hierarchy, when talking about organizations, is not of tasks but of people. The ideotypical example is the military, where information flows up the chain of command and orders flow down. But the whole state is organized this way, as are TUC unions and Marxist parties. This is a form of organization, but it is not the only form, as its advocates would have you believe. On the other hand, anarchists are highly critical of tyrannies of structurelessness (e.g. see this piece), but do not see a tyranny of hierarchy as the solution. Rather, anarchists typically favour non-hierarchical organization in the form of federalism.

Anarchist federalism is, in fact, fairly straight forward. I'll use the example of SolFed, since I'm most familiar with it, but it's not the only, nor necessarily the best example. All members belong to a Local, all Locals belong to the national Federation. All local decisions are made by Locals on the basis of one member, one vote while all national decisions are made by the Federation on the basis of one Local, one vote. Any member can bring a proposal to their Local for discussion, and if it requires Federal action the Local can take the proposal to the national Federation. There is no central or steering committee running it. No paid officials. No full-timers. We have four national lay officials; national secretary, national treasurer, international secretary and external relations officer. None have any policy-making power, all are given clear mandates setting out what they can and cannot do and all are subject to immediate recall if they overstep. There's numerous other mandates for things like training and particular projects or campaigns.

Anarchist federalism is highly scalable, because whenever a group is too large to function on the basis of face-to-face direct democracy, it can simply divide and co-ordinate its activity through councils of mandated, recallable delegates. So if we grew to say 100 members in Brighton, we could simply divide into either geographical groups for Hove, Central, Falmer, Hannover, Hollingbury, etc, or industrial groups such as Education, Public Sector, Transport, Unemployed, or some combination of the two, co-ordinated via a city-wide delegate council. In this way of organizing, decision-making power remains with the membership at all times. In other words, the organization is non-hierarchical and formal structure ensures that equality; the twin tyrannies of structurelessness and hierarchy are avoided. This isn't rocket science, and anyone who's serious about changing the world should probably take it seriously rather than emulating capitalist organizational tenets like hierarchical structures.

Endnotes

1. Indeed, Mark Fisher's notion of 'Capitalist Realism' rests precisely on the reduction of the political spectrum to a small bubble in the top-right quadrant to which There Is No Alternative, a reduction his caricature of anarchism helps perpetuate.

2. You can of course find self-defining anarchists who are opposed to formal organization ('insurrectionary anarchism' would be the obvious current), but this by no means justifies the claim anarchism per se is opposed to organization.