The Failure of Anarchism

Keith Preston

• Publisher: Black House Publishing Ltd
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781912759804
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Anarchism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In the late 19th and early 20th century, anarchism was the most feared revolutionary movement in the world. However, by the late 20th century anarchism was eclipsed by the rise of the modern totalitarian states, world wars, and the emergence of technocratic managerial economies. Meanwhile, anarchists have failed to provide alternatives to this dominant form of political economy. In this work, the anarchist theoretician Keith Preston places the blame for these failures on the shoulders of his fellow anarchists. He criticizes the contemporary anarchist movement for having degenerated into a fashionable youth culture that has lost the ferocity of historic anarchism. Instead, present day anarchists are more likely to serve as the lackeys of political correctness than the vanguard of revolution. Preston discusses the possibility of new directions for modern anarchists. These include the formation of strategic alliances for the purpose of overthrowing states, ruling classes, and empires by means of the visionary concept of pan-secessionism. He recognizes that anti-state revolutionaries will eventually need to achieve victory through “fourth generation warfare” i.e. an insurgency on the model of groups like Hezbollah or the Peoples War Group. Further, Preston argues that the social base of anarchism should not be fanciful intellectuals or privileged-class university students. Instead, the foundation of revolutionary struggle should be the “lumpenproletariat” of the permanently unemployed, the dispossessed, the prisoner, the prostitute, and the homeless. Preston subsequently surveys a plethora of trends that provide a basis for anarchist optimism.

Shachtman, Marcuse and Bakunin

It is a great irony that the two principal factions of the present day American ruling class, the Republicans and Democrats, are currently under the intellectual leadership of ideological tendencies derived from neo-Marxism. The neoconservatives who currently lead the Republican Party and therefore the present administration are only a few decades removed from the right-wing Trotskyism of Max Shachtman. The career of Irving Kristol, who made the journey from orthodox Trotskyism in his youth to Shachtmanism to becoming the godfather of neo-conservatism, illustrates and personifies this evolutionary process perfectly. Likewise, the abandonment of its traditional working class constituency by the Democratic Party in favor of identity politics, victimology and cultural leftism illustrates the coming to power of the New Left of the 1960s, whose intellectual guru Herbert Marcuse sought to revise Marxism by transferring the basis of the class struggle from labor within the context of political economy to officially designated victim groups within the context of cultural criticism.

That both neo-conservatism and cultural Marxism in practice closely resemble traditional fascism should come as no surprise given that most of the founding fathers of classical fascism were former Marxists. Indeed, it has long been recognized by astute observers that Marxism in power bears striking similarities to fascism or “national socialism.” Even the New Left icon Susan Sontag once referred to Soviet Marxism as “red fascism”. Throughout the twentieth century, a variety of thinkers, so-called “elite theorists” or “new class theorists” or “neo-Machiavellians”, argued that the contending systems of Soviet Marxism, German or Italian fascism and American or British corporate-welfarism were really just variations of the same basic system, what James Burnham called “managerialism.” That the formerly Trotskyite neoconservatives should incorporate Straussian fascism into their ideological framework should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Mussolini’s abandonment of Marxism in favor of proponents of the “conservative revolution”. That a Democratic administration led by former New Leftists like the Clintons should adopted overtly fascistic tendencies (such as Mrs. Clinton’s plans for reorganizing the US health care industry on the model of Mussolini’s corporatism, police state-oriented “anti-terrorism” legislation and the overt police state massacre at Waco) should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the careers of Juan and Eva Peron, who camouflaged their fascistic tendencies under the veneer of a leftist-populist cover ideology.

The prediction made a century ago by the classical liberal economist William Graham Sumner that men would one day be divided into only two political camps, Socialists and Anarchists, is now on the verge of realization. Marxism and its derivatives, principally neo-conservatism and cultural Marxism, are now the dominant ideological perspectives in all of the modern countries. The early anarchist thinker and rival of Marx, Mikhail Bakunin, noted that if state-socialism ever came to power, it would produce the bloodiest tyrannies in history, which it eventually did in the forms of the “managerial” states of the last century. But now things are coming full circle. Gabriel Kolkhoz recently noted that, since the disappearance of the Soviet Union as a restraining force, global resistance to American hegemony has become more and more widespread, more effective and more decentralized in the form of what William Lind calls “fourth generation warfare”, the essence of which pits conventional states against non-state entities. Along the same lines, Martin Van Creveld predicts that the era of large national states of the type traditionally glorified by Jacobins and Marxists is on its way out, with decentralized, heterogeneous, smaller scale polities being the wave of the future. Indeed, it might be argued that the overthrow of the New World Order and the nation-state system by the fourth generation forces signifies the ultimate and perfect vengeance against the Marxists by the Anarchists for the events of the First International, Kronstadt and Barcelona. Could it be that the Marxists did indeed conquer the “world to be won” only to have it pulled out from underneath them by their pesky Anarchist enemies who, as Rothbard noted, “shall repeal the twentieth century”?

The Fruits of Anarchist “Anti-Racism”

“Certain attitudes derived from the New Left and the so-called counter-culture permeated neo-anarchism and had a deleterious effect upon it. Chief among these was elitism. It was the common belief among the New Left that the majority of the population was “co-opted”, “sold-out”, “racist” and “sexist”. For the hippie-left, most people were considered to be beer-swilling, short-haired rednecks. Much of this youthful hostility was directed against their parents and hence was more of an expression of adolescent rebellion than political insight. With the exception of those who opted for anarcho-syndicalism, most neo-anarchists carried this contemptuous attitude with them. The majority was written-off as hopelessly corrupted and this attitude still continues today. Such contempt is in complete contrast to classical anarchism, which even at its most vanguardist, saw itself as only a catalyst or spokesman for the masses. While rejecting the majority, they became infatuated with minorities. The New Left, scorning workers, turned to racial minorities and the “poor” as possible agents of social change. Native people, prisoners, drop-outs, homosexuals, all have been given a high profile, virtually to the exclusion of the rest of the population.”

-Larry Gambone, Sane Anarchy, 1995

An article in the Intelligence Report, the journal of the state-connected, crony-capitalist, cop-friendly, “private” espionage and surveillance agency known the Southern Poverty Law Center remarked: “Unifying anarchists has been likened to herding cats. But if there is one theme that most anarchists will rally around, it is that of stamping out racism, especially organized racism driven by white nationalist ideology. Many younger anarchists are members of Anti-Racist Action, a national coalition of direct-action “antifa” (short for “anti-fascist”) groups that confront neo-Nazis and racist skinheads in the street, often resulting in violence.”

And what do these anarchists have to show for all of this “anti-racist” zealotry? How well are these anarchists regarded by actually existing people of color for their efforts? An item that has recently been circulating in the anarchist milieu with the revealing title, “Smack a White Boy, Round Two”, demonstrates just how much “solidarity” is felt towards the mostly, white, middle-class, left-anarchist movement by the supposed beneficiaries of its anti-racism:

Dread locked white punks, crusties with their scabies friends, and travelling college bros swarmed a space on the dividing line of gentrification in the Bloomfield/Garfield/Friendship area late July 2009 in Pittsburgh for the annual CrimethInc convergence. Whereas previous CrimethInc convergences had been located deep in wooded areas, this particular one took place in a poor, black neighborhood that is being pushed to the borders by entering white progressive forces.

There were those that had experienced CrimethInc’s oppressive culture and people for years and others who had experienced enough oppression after just a few days. Our goals were to stop CrimethInc, their gentrifying force, and to end the convergence right then and there for all that they had done.

Just a few blocks away, eight anarchist/autonomous/anti-authoritarian people of color* gathered to discuss a direct confrontation. We arrived from different parts of these stolen lands of the Turtle Island. Some came from the Midwest, some from the Northeast, some born and raised in Pittsburgh. Altogether we represented 7 different locations, half of us socialized as female a variety of sizes, skin color, with identities of queers, trans, gender-queers, gender variants, and womyn. With little time and a desire for full consensus, we quickly devised a plan.

The majority of the CrimethInc kids were in the ballroom on the second floor watching and participating in a cabaret. A group of us began gathering attendees’ packs, bags, shoes, banjos, and such from the other rooms on the second floor and moving it all down the hallway towards the stairs. We had gone pretty unnoticed, mostly due to lack of lighting.

Once those rooms had been emptied, it was time for the main event. We gathered at the ballroom’s doorway furthest from the stairs following the final act of the cabaret.

“On the count of three. One, two, three!” one APOCista said.

“Get the fuck out!”, we all shouted.

And the eviction began. One apocer began reading ‘An Open Letter to White Radicals/Progressives’, while the others began yelling at the attendees to gather their things and leave. Irritated by their continued inaction after about 10 minutes or so, one of the people involved in the action shouted,

“This is not an act! Get your shit, or we’ll remove it for you!”

So much for anarchists as the exemplars of multicultural brotherly love. Now, before I get to other questions, let me say that I actually think the “Anarchist People of Color” group who carried out this “eviction” had a point. Many white leftists and progressives do indeed regard non-whites as children in need of rescue by enlightened folks such as themselves, and often assume a paternalistic attitude when dealing with people of color. And while I’m not so sure that “gentrification” by white anarchist kids is quite on the level of gentrification by upper-middle class, affluent, professional people organized into state-connected “civic organizations” and “business associations”, and operating in collusion with crony-capitalist “developers”, the overall point is still well-taken. Gentrification does indeed frequently assume the character of a kind of urban imperialism, and white, middle-class “progressives” who never tire of wearing their racial liberalism on their sleeves are often at the forefront of such efforts. Indeed, it might be argued that gentrification serves the same purpose in modern urban societies as the dispossession of native or indigenous peoples’ in frontier or colonial societies, i.e., naked robbery carried out under the banner of enlightenment, progress, and paternalism or cultural and class chauvinism. Some would go even further and argue that mass immigration serves a similar purpose, e.g., economic and cultural dispossession of the indigenous poor and working class in order to provide labor for capitalists, clients for social services bureaucrats and voters for political parties and ethnic lobbies. But that might be “racism”.

The obsession with “racism” exhibited by modern leftists appears to be rooted in a number of things. Some are the obvious, e.g., the political, cultural and intellectual backlash against such horrors as Nazism, South African apartheid, “Jim Crow” in the American South, the Vietnam War and other manifestations of extreme colonialism. Another is the need for the radical Left to find a new cause once the horrors of Communism were revealed. Still another is the universalist ethos that emerged from Enlightenment rationalism. Yet another is the adolescent rebellion against society mentioned by Gambone. And another is the quasi-Christian moralism exhibited by many left-wingers: “Love thy exotically colored neighbor.”

It’s like this, my fellow anarchist comrades: World War Two is over. Hitler is dead. George Wallace is dead. Bull Conner is dead. Jim Crow has been relegated into the dustbin of history. Apartheid is finished, and Nelson Mandela eventually became South Africa’s head of state. In case you haven’t been paying attention, the United States now has a black President. Many of the largest American cities have black-dominated governments. In the wider society, “racism” has become the ultimate sin, much like communism or homosexuality might have been in the 1950s. By continuing to beat the dead horse of “white supremacy”, anarchists are simply making our movement look like fools.

No doubt there are many reading this that will raise the issues of the high rates of imprisonment among blacks and Hispanics, police brutality, the medical neglect of illegal immigrants in detention centers, or the high unemployment rates in American inner cities. Do you really think that no whites have ever been adversely affected by these things? Do you think there are no whites in jail or prison for frivolous reasons? Who receive shoddy medical care? Who are adversely affected by state-capitalism and plutocratic rule? Who are subject to police harassment or violence, or who are shabbily treated by agents or bureaucrats of the state? Who are subject to social ostracism because of their class, culture, religion or lifestyle?

There is certainly nothing wrong with opposing the genuine oppression of people of other races or colors, and many anarchists and other radicals engage in laudable displays of support for the people of Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Tibet, Latin America, and indigenous ethnic groups who are subjected to occupation or imperialist aggression. Yet, the obsession with “racism” found among many Western radicals has become pathological in nature. Whenever I encounter these “anti-racism” hysterics, I am reminded of the cultic, fundamentalist religious sects, where no amount of devotion to the cause is ever good enough. Go to church three times a week? Not good enough, you need to be there six times a week. And there is little doubt that the war between Anarchist People of Color and Crimethinc will produce a great deal of “What are we doing wrong, us shitty white supremacists?” self-flagellation among many “anti-racist” left-anarchists.

This obsession with “racism” on the part of many anarchists might be worth it if it had the effect of recruiting or converting many thousands or millions of people of color to our cause. Yet, the simple truth is that decades of anti-racism hysteria has produced an anarchist movement that is as white as it ever was. This does not mean that there are never any non-whites to be found in anarchist circles. Of course there are. But are they representative of the cultural norms of the ethnic or racial groups from where they came? Not in my experience. Instead, the relatively small numbers of people of color who can be found in North American anarchist circles are usually immigrants from other places, or products of ethnic minority cultures that have assimilated into a wider white culture, for instance, blacks who grew up in white middle-class neighborhoods or minorities who participate in white youth subcultures, like punk rock. Honestly speaking, what would a typical African-American or Latino think if they wandered into the standard anarchist discussion group and found themselves in the midst of the usual anarchist banter about “racism”? What would they think, other than, “What a bunch of freaks!”

This does not mean that anarchists should become “pro-racist”. It simply means that it would be more productive if anarchists would simply re-orient themselves towards the ostensible purpose of anarchism, i.e., “a political philosophy encompassing theories and attitudes which consider the state, as compulsory government, to be unnecessary, harmful, and/or undesirable, and promote the elimination of the state or anarchy.” I recently came across a Facebook page with the heading “The Other Anarchists” which described itself thus: “For those who wish to see the state abolished, but are not nihilists, terrorists, or idiots. Including some: free market anti-capitalists, anarcho-capitalists, anarcho-monarchists, voluntaryists, social anarchists, Christian anarchists, Green anarchists, and our fellow-travelers ([non-violent] Luddites, paleoconservatives, minarchists, left-conservatives, retroprogressives, and the like).”

This would seem to be about right. Perhaps we can work with the nihilists and terrorists, but the idiots really need to be shown the door. What should anarchists do about “racism”? Just forget about it. Yes, you read that right. Many anarchists engage in many worthwhile projects that many different kinds of people can benefit from, like antiwar activism, labor solidarity, prisoner defense, support for the homeless, and resistance to police brutality, the protection of animals from cruelty, environmental preservation, alternative media or alternative education. These are issues that transcend color lines. Just stick to these and let “people of color” work out their own problems for themselves.

The APOC/Crimethinc battle may well be indicative of what the future of the political Left will be. I have predicted before that the center-left will be dominant in American politics for the next several decades due to demographic, cultural and generational change in U.S. society. It is widely predicted that the non-white populations will collectively outnumber whites in the U.S. by the 2040s. As the non-white population grows due to demographic trends and large-scale immigration, and as class divisions widen, there is likely to be a split within liberalism between the mostly white, upper middle class, cultural progressives and the mostly black and Hispanic lower classes, which include many persons with more conservative views on social questions like gender roles, abortion, homosexuality and religion.

A Zogby poll concerning the level of public sympathy for the matter of secession indicated that the principal source of support for genuinely radical ideas (like separatism) comes not from the “far right” or backwoods militiamen but from young, unemployed, uneducated blacks and Hispanics in the he...

Table of contents

• Table of Contents
• The Failure of Anarchism
• Introduction : Anarchism or Anarcho-Social Democracy?
• Shachtman, Marcuse and Bakunin
• Law and Anarchism