‘If you can’t dance, it’s not my revolution.’
- Emma Goldman
‘A nation of sheeps will beget a government of wolves.’
- Edward R. Murrow
Someone has said that organising artists is like trying to herd cats. Our Commons Group — almost exclusively artists — certainly verified this notion. Whilst a few of us took turns at hosting and facilitating meetings, it was mostly one person who led and co-ordinated from start to finish. He was very good, but at times it was clearly a struggle. The project evolved over time, as people came and went and ideas were tried out and rejected in favour of new ideas. Whilst a few of us worked together, we settled mostly at producing our own individual efforts that might best be described as commenting on the commons rather than embodying specific acts of ‘commoning’. Only on our final, week-long, commons festival did we really come together and work as a team, sharing the efforts and responsibilities needed for a successful outcome.
If I were to describe the politics of the group then, I might say we lurched between a benevolent dictatorship, to anarchism, to a late flowering of communism — and there were stirrings towards revolution along the way! And of course, there was that herding cats issue. Perhaps it’s not just artists who are like cats. Maybe any would-be politicians need to face the fact that they will be cat-herding forever.
Another of Gandhi’s seven social sins — Politics without Principle — is an obvious starting point for this chapter. There are certainly a lot of principles floating around out there, but unfortunately for most of us, most of the time, the system isn’t working. It seems we are still a long way from those ideas around ownership, sharing and the commons that we have explored in the preceding chapters. Big business and the interests of the super-rich seem to take precedence over the voices of the poor and the care of the planet. This is all dressed up as ‘progress’, as if we will all one day benefit, and the problems of climate change and pollution will miraculously be sorted out along the way. So, the ‘principles’ we are presented with; maintaining economic growth, investing in new technology, even job security; are often smoke-screens for a far less palatable agenda. Meanwhile, the poor suffer: Poorer nations suffer from the exploitation and the excesses of the wealthy nations. Poor people in rich nations suffer from the growing inequalities within their societies. And future generations are being made poor already, as they will have to pick up the bill for our negligence and irresponsibility. Rousseau said,’…when the state is close to ruin and subsists only through empty and deluded forms, when in each man’s heart the social bond is broken, when the crudest self-interest insolently adorns itself with sacred name of the public good, then the general will falls silent; the motives of all are kept secret, their votes are no more the votes of citizens than if the state never existed, and the decrees that are falsely passed, under the name of laws, have private interests as their only aim.’ (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract.)
In this chapter we’re looking at that basic question raised in the Introduction: Who Decides? I’ve called this chapter Polity because it seems to encompass all of the possible descriptions that might be deployed to answering that question. There is a more specific meaning to polity, which we will get to later. But for now, let’s make a start, by asking why there might be a polity or a government at all.
State versus Stateless
Any summary of political alternatives cannot fail to mention Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan) and his view that humanity, in its natural state, consists of a life that has: ‘No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continued fear of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’. According to Hobbes, only by voluntarily submitting to an authority, such as a monarchy or a government, can people live together in relative peace and harmony. The suggestion is that what we sacrifice by way of freedom is more than compensated by the stability that is gained. It has to be said though, that for most people in most countries, we have never actually been given a choice about whether we take up this offer of government or not. Most monarchies and governments have taken power at some time in the past — often by violent means — and they have not since considered it appropriate to ask their citizens whether or not we really think it’s a good idea. Most governments therefore are not legitimate, and to say that they govern by consent or ‘have a mandate’ is nonsense. The counter-argument is that we need our freedom, and that we are sensible and wise enough to look after ourselves. A high level of good will and common sense amongst people is assumed, and this allows life to go on without much in the way of government or institutions. But this raises the question — are we really good and sensible enough for such freedom?
The question of whether or not we have sufficient knowledge, skill and co-operation to make society work without authority was posed long ago by Aristotle and he came down firmly on the side that says we cannot make it by ourselves. He said: ‘He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must either be a beast or a god.’ But there have always been plenty around who think otherwise, and their belief in freedom, independence, self-reliance, good will and common sense is often referred to as anarchism.1 (The word is derived from the Greek anarkhia — an = without + arkh(os) = ruler/authority.) It is difficult to take in much of the broad sweep of ideas that anarchism includes, especially in more recent times, but a small review will hopefully bring out some salient features that are important for our discussion.
Anarchism, as hinted at above, is very optimistic about people and especially at pains to promote the notion that all that is bad in society is due to culture gone wrong, rather than some intrinsic problem with human nature. By ourselves then, and in our basic nature, we are good — the anarchist would claim. It is government, especially any form of state bureaucracy (that almost inevitably will involve hierarchy) where things go wrong.
Anarchism’s way to organise society is to maximise freedom (especially individual freedom) and to minimise bureaucracy and all else relating to government and state. Nicholas Walter’s pithy quote addresses this: ‘Many people say that government is necessary because some men cannot be trusted to look after themselves, but anarchists say that government is harmful because no man can be trusted to look after anyone else.’ Nicholas Walter — About Anarchism.
A further definition, from Alexander Berkman, again stresses freedom: ‘Anarchism teaches that we can live in a society where there is no compulsion of any kind. A life without compulsion naturally means liberty; it means freedom from being forced or coerced, a chance to lead the life that suits you best.’
Alexander Berkman — ABC of Anarchism.
And Proudhon (the reader may remember him from, ‘property is theft’) gave us this delightful quote:
‘To be governed is to be watched over, inspected, spied on, directed, legislated, regimented, closed in, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, assessed, evaluated, censored, commanded, all by creatures that have neither the right nor wisdom nor virtue…. To be governed means that at every move, operation or transaction, one is noted, registered, entered into a census, taxed, stamped, authorised, recommended, admonished, prevented, reformed, set right, corrected. Government means to be subject to tribute, trained, ransomed, exploited, monopolised, extorted, pressured, mystified, robbed; all in the name of public utility and the general good. Then at first signs of resistance or word of complaint, one is repressed, fined, despised, vexed, pursued, hustled, beaten up, garrotted, imprisoned, shot, machine gunned, judged, sentenced, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed, and to cap it all, ridiculed, mocked, outraged and dishonoured. That is Government. That is its justice and morality!’
Anarchists — wilful cats that they are — don’t fully agree on what to do in place of government however. Traditionally, they have been divided into two broad camps — sometimes defined as the individualists and the collectivists.2
Individualism
It is arguably the individualists who promote the freedom aspect of anarchism the most. As earlier quotes have suggested, freedom means ‘freedom from’, that is, freedom from government, laws, institutions and bureaucracy. It also means ‘freedom to’ — freedom to choose one’s own way of living. Later chapters will develop the ‘freedom to’ aspect as freedom to be the author of one’s own story. But, as far as anarchism goes, this ‘freedom to’ idea often refers to freedom to pursue business interests and to own property. So, the individualist is for freedom, therefore ownership. Individualists are very much into the ownership of property as a guarantor of security, whilst collectivists saw property more or less as an evil. Why would we want more collectivism? Collectivism might suggest planned economies — therefore committees and bureaucracies — and therefore the suppression of freedom and the misery of endless meetings. The endnote gives more details of these contrasts.3
It might seem, at first strike, that a kind of individualist anarchism is very similar to today’s liberal and libertarian notions.4 We’ll see below, however, that those who promote individual freedom nevertheless have very strong ideas about how people should co-operate and above all promote the flourishing of everyone, not just themselves. The contrast with today’s neo-liberal societies (and the utopia I’ve named Privatopia) could not be greater.
Collectivism
As with many of the subjects taken up in this book, there are many names and subtly different meanings that we could use to describe things. This is especially true of anarchism, which seems to have as many subsets as there are anarchist authors. To keep things simple, I’m trying to emphasise just two different categories of anarchism — those that stress the importance of the individual, as we’ve explored above — and those that look at some kind of organisation and shared action in society. For the second category, I am adopting the term ‘collectivist’. Whilst individualist anarchism stresses freedom, collectivism stresses equality.
Perhaps even before humans formed settled communities, there was a tendency for some people to do very much more work that others. The success of one person might be down to hard work, or luck, or both. Meanwhile, failure might be the result of laziness, illness, bad luck or just old age. As such, some gathered large swathes of land for cultivating, whilst others ended up with little or nothing and became hired hands — or slaves — of the rich.
Andro Linklater (Owning the Earth) explains that as a younger man he had joined several communities looking to share resources with each other in a fairer way than offered by the dominant culture of consumer capitalism. Sooner or later they all came up against the problems that had been faced by the early settlers in America. Some people are weaker than others, or just plain lazy, so trying to give them an equal share of what the stronger, harder-working members of the community had toiled to produce just did not seem fair.
Because of this issue — sometimes referred to as the ‘free-rider problem’ — all societies have tried to find ways to achieve a fairer distribution of land, property and other goods to address the imbalance. Compassion leads us to wish to share with those who, through injury, bad luck or old age, do not have the means to work and provide for themselves. But fairness demands that we receive a just reward for our efforts and those who work hardest deserve a larger share. Linklater traces how this story has been played out in different times and different places. Whilst the ‘solutions’ have been very different, the reasons for trying are really as described above.
So the issue comes down to a balance between freedom and equality. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (The Discourse on the Origin of Inequality) recognised two types of inequality — natural, because of physical differences — and moral, or political, because of the laws and conventions of society. We saw above how society tries to address the ‘natural inequality’ issue through compassion for those who are less able. The ‘political inequality’ is the other aspect that society must address, the issue of fair shares. If we are free then we have the opportunity to better ourselves any way we wish. If society does not restrict this freedom then we have what is known as ‘equality of opportunity’. For some, equality of opportunity is still not enough. They might argue, for instance, that since we are all essentially owners of the land then we all have the right to the proceeds of land use. This approach is seen as favouring a different kind of equality — equality of outcome. ‘To each according to his needs’, is an especially ambiguous phrase — it is not obvious that we should all end up with the same levels of income and consumption. (Karl Marx’s famous quote, originally from the Critique of the Gotha Program, says, ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!’ It may have been taken from Louis Blanc, but also may be based on a quote from Pierre Leroux: ‘From each according to his capacity; to each according to his work’, but note the somewhat different meaning.) We might also note that the equality of outcome stance may be seen as unreasonable for other reasons than simply about what is a fair distribution. People are too diverse for fairness to be resolved by these simple equations. But if we favour distribution and fair shares, then at the very least we are saying that people should get what is owing to them for the amount of effort they have put in. This alternative kind of distribution is referred to as ‘proportionality’. ‘Genuine equality means not treating everyone the same, but attending equally to everyone’s different needs’, as Terry Eagleton has it. Ronald Dworken (Taking Rights Seriously) gave the example of putting two people on a diet of 3000 calories. One is an athlete who needs 5000 calories. The other is an elderly lady who requires only 2000. Both have been treated equally, but treated unfairly. This balance of freedom and equality is one we will return to and please see also Murray Bookchin’s comments in the endnote.5
Matthew Crawford (The Case for Working with your Hands) offers us yet another angle on this. He says: ‘… consider the paradoxical truth that equality is an aristocratic ideal. It is the ideal of friendship — of those who stand apart from the collective and recognize one another as piers. As professionals, or journeymen, perhaps. By contrast, the bourgeois principle is not equality but equivalence — a positing of interchangeability that elides human differences of rank.’ (Crawford therefore, rather unexpectedly, seems to support aristocratic values to allow us to speak openly about difference.)
Deciding on fair shares raises the question of how this distribution is organised and administered and who decides what is fair. A community or a nation may have a ‘welfare net’ to distribute resources to those who need them. The welfare net stresses the community aspect of society. As societies become more complex, the various resources that make up a welfare net, especially the massive investments made for infrastructure in transport and telecommunications, likewise become more complex — we cannot simply take resources directly from production and hand them out to those in need. So the usual solution is to achieve the welfare net through taxation. Tax may be recovered from what people own, or it may be from the proceeds of their labour, or both.
But here we run up against the problems inherent in our various ‘rights’ of ownership. The political question that arises is, when does a fair distribution, which allows for life’s unpredictable problems, become an imposition on our rights of ownership and the fruits of our labours? The enjoyment of our property and benefiting from the fruits of our labours are therefore rights that all political systems need to respect, along with trying to provide a welfare net for those who have fallen on hard times. So, from our anarchist perspective, we can see how the two poles of individualist and collectivist try to balance the considerations we have looked at above.
The collectivist end of the anarchism spectrum, therefore, might be seen as favouring the distribution side of this equation. So, the drive towards equality of the collectivists seems to involve a curtailment of the freedom of the individualists. It is hard to see though, given the complexities of modern societies alluded to above, how this could be achieved without bureaucracies and therefore something approaching government.
Proudhon is sometimes identified as an individualist anarchist, but also referred to as a ‘mutualist’. He had a deep concern for equality. In particular, he identified the three forms of economic rent we discussed in the previous chapter, (from ownership and rent, from the labour of others and from money itself) and saw these as an evil to be eradicated so as to benefit the ordinary worker. See endnote for the full quote.6
Though they may see themselves as radically distinct, collectivist anarchism flows naturally into being more or less pure communism. So, in our brief summary of alternative polities, we will take a look at this next.
Communism
Communism is a system of government — or rather, no government — proposed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. (See, in particular, The Communist Manifesto.) Whilst there are similarities between collectivism and communism there are also differences. Communism distributes all wealth by default. Proudhon takes up this problem of excessive sharing in What is Property? He says:
‘Communism is oppression and slavery… Communism is essentially opposed to the free exercise of our faculties, to our noblest desires our deepest feelings…
communism violates the sovereignty of the conscience of equality: the first by restricting spontaneity of mind and heart, and freedom of thought and action; the second, by placing labour and laziness, skill and stupidity, and even vice and virtue on an equality in point of comfort.’
Pierre Joseph Proudhon — What is Property?
Proudhon, then, is picking up on the point above, about the equality of outcome and whether this is truly fair, but also hinting at the further point referred to earlier, that this kind of distribution inevitably involves a structure to make it work — a state — in order to enforce the kind of equality that the communists seem to think could exist naturally.
Communism though, like anarchism, is a belief in no government. If people believe that a fair distribution of resources is required and that a bureaucracy needs to be put in place to achieve it, then this is socialism rather than anarchism or communism. So, whilst there may be ‘socialist’ states, if we are to be true to the original definition of communism then there cannot be communist states. The only ‘state’ in communism is an intermediate stage, known as the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ — which allows for the re-distribution of wealth and the eventual more or less equality of all citizens. The ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ leads to a change in the ‘superstructure’ — in Karl Marx’s terms — meaning culture changes to accept, as a given, a more egalitarian society. This, in turn, leads to full communism, which can be defined as:
The countries that have come closest to establishing communism have had, arguably, very bad experiences. But no nation has really come that close to full communism. For all its faults, it remains a noble ambition. Anarchism and communism were, and are, of course, identified as utopias — which some of their advocates accept and others fight to reject.
In this chapter we are not looking, at this stage, to consider left/right issues, but one that can be mentioned here, in passing, is the ‘Rochdale principles’ of Robert Owen, which are often taken as the basis for socialism. See endnote.7 (It is interesting to compare the very practical suggestions of Owen’s principles, and how these were enacted in his mill works in Scotland, with the ideas of Charles Fourier, and his ‘phalanesteries’, ideal communities, which he proposed and a few of which were actually built.)
Communism hoped for those ‘oppressed’ by a powerful elite to regain the ‘means of production’ and therefore be able to take control of their own lives. Ironically, both Marx and, arguably the founder of modern economics, Adam Smith, saw capitalism as a necessary intermediate stage for a better world. Whilst writing about capital and acknowledging the almost magical power by which all kinds of resources are mediated through money, nonetheless Marx seems to have failed to appreciate the lure of money to almost everyone. In large societies, with few social bonds, selfishness becomes a growing problem. Consumption is an addiction. Privatopia reigns. Releasing serfs and peasants from domination only gave room for human nature (at least the more selfish part) to exert its tendency to profit from and exploit people. ‘…to each according to their need’ is open to a lot of hyperbole when it is our own needs that we are considering. The bourgeois capitalist is a caricature that communists, and Marxists generally, just replace with an equally unlikely caricature of ‘the worker’. This presents us with too simplistic a picture — valorising one group over another is divisive and ignores the complexity of real people. As Proudhon seems to be alluding to in the quote above, only a powerful bureaucracy was able to enforce the kind of equality that had been envisioned by communism, and in many ways this became no better than the previous exploitation by the rich elite — perhaps worse.
Communism aims at changing the system, and this will, in turn, change the social relations between people. But, as we explore elsewhere in this work, we could well ask whether change really can come about by changing the structure (capitalism and/or economics) first, such that the ‘superstructure’ — the social relations, the culture and the way people view the world — will likewise change to accommodate the structural change. My conclusion is that people and culture need to change, and that structural change can only follow once this happens. (I have to add here that what has been explained above about base and superstructure is the usual interpretation of Marxism, and has filtered through to economics generally. Marx and Engels themselves were a good deal more ambivalent about what takes precedence — the culture or the economics.)
One contemporary activist and author who has brought valuable insights to these matters — and, especially, the class issue — is Michael Albert. Albert points out that between workers and capitalists there is a third group, which he refers to as the co-ordinator class. Such professions as doctors, engineers, architects and lawyers tend to exercise a lot of control within society and their position, Albert argues, is privileged. Albert even suggests that a revolution, supposedly to benefit the working class (as in the initial stage of communism, to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat, described above) would actually benefit the co-ordinator class. It is these people, he suggests, who would take up the administrative roles in the reformed society, giving them extra power, whilst the lot of the workers remains little changed.8 It may even have been the jealousy of the co-ordinator class for the ruling elite that has been the real source of revolution in the past. The workers did not benefit — they just saw a change in their oppressors. Albert goes on to describe what he considers a just way of arranging work and paying an equitable wage for people’s contribution to society.9 A similar split into three layers of society occurs in many utopian novels, and indeed in the classic dystopian novel, 1984.
As mentioned above, whilst there may be ‘socialist’ states, there cannot be communist states, if we are to be true to the original definition of communism. Anarchism and communism, in all their forms, mean no government. We will return to anarchism again later in the chapter, but for now, let’s move on to look at the other side of things. If we were to accept the need for government, then what kind of government would we wish for?
The Purpose of Government
One of the benefits of looking at anarchism and communism is as a wake-up call. If we were to try to run our lives without government we would at once realise the responsibilities that would be on all of us for getting society to function. If, however, we agreed on the need for a government, it does not mean that we can then shirk all responsibility and just blame the politicians when things go wrong. We still need to take some responsibility for deciding on what kind of government best suits our needs.
John Stuart Mill identified: ‘… one very simple principle as entitled to govern absolutely the dealings of society with the individual in the way of compulsion and control… That principle is… [T]hat the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community against his will, is to prevent harm to others.’ (John Stuart Mill — On Liberty.)
Thomas Jefferson said: ‘The care of life and happiness and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government.’
It is difficult to think of any government disagreeing with Mill and Jefferson, but, of course, the aims they identified are very broad and general ones. Also, they tend to be focused on preventing things from going wrong, rather than actively making things better.
A more cynical view of government is that it is primarily for the protection of property — and, of course, this invariably means the protection of the rich over the poor.10 Government’s function of protecting private property comes originally from Cicero. Meanwhile Rousseau said: ‘Property is the true foundation of civil society.’ However, also in his Discourse on Inequality, he argues that property brings discord and conflict. He agrees that government is established to protect the property rights of the rich over the poor. But this strategy, he told us, ‘irretrievably destroyed natural liberty, established for all time the law of property and inequality… and for the benefit of the few ambitious men, subjected the human race thenceforth to labour, servitude and misery.’ From this, and other criticisms, we might say that government is the ‘monopoly of legitimate violence’, that is, the only power that can uphold its rules by force over its citizens.
Apart from preventing harm and protecting property, could we identify some further aims for government that provide more of a vision for a better world? Rousseau gave us a starting point: ‘One of the most important things for a government to do, therefore, is to prevent extreme inequality of wealth, not by depriving the rich of their possessions, but by denying everyone the means of accumulating them; and not by building poor-houses but by ensuring that the citizens do not become poor.’ (The Social Contract.) Rousseau’s quote takes us back to our discussion of the commons in the previous chapter. We could say that government’s chief purpose, other than preventing harm, is to manage the commons. We saw that, in a sense, governments already do this in an indirect way. Could it be more direct and conscious, so that we really get to grips with how we might use natural resources and protect wild nature?
So what about a world where the purpose of government is to realise the common good, rather than just to protect whatever goods we might be holding on to at the moment? What about a world that is premised on human flourishing, with an emphasis on compassion, equity, enhancement of the environment, a respect for nature and a sense of responsibility for our shared natural commons? If we agree that some kind of governance is a good thing, then can we find a way of getting a governance system that focuses on these kinds of aims?
Types of Government
What kind of government would deliver such solutions? How do we begin to sort out the various strands of political thought that are on offer?
We have to go back to the ancient Greeks, to Plato and Aristotle, to get our definitions. From them, we have: One ruler is a monarchy or dictatorship. Rule by a few is an