.
with no legitimate existence in a post-revolutionary world.
Unfortunately for those living under communist regimes, society did not function as Marx suggested. The peasants, aristocrats, artisans and shopkeepers did not disappear of their own accord: they, like everyone else who did not fit conveniently into the industrial proletariat, had to be eliminated, as they interfered with the theoretical system Marx had imposed on society. Marx, who described them as ‘reactionaries’ trying ‘to roll back the wheel of history’, might have approved of their extermination. The ‘social scum’ of the lumpenproletariat, which came to include indigenous people, had to be disposed of just as hastily, in case they became, as Marx warned, ‘the bribed tool of reactionary intrigue’. As the theory so woefully failed to fit society, society had to be remodelled to fit the theory. And Marx provided the perfect excuse for ruthless extermination. By personalizing oppression as ‘the bourgeoisie’ he introduced the justification for numberless atrocities. The simplicity, of both the theory and the objective, is attractive and enticing. Even today, it is hard to read The Communist Manifesto without wanting to go out and shoot a member of the bourgeoisie, in the hope of obtaining freedom from oppression.
Moreover, Marx’s industrial proletariat, modelled on the factory workers of Lancashire, upon whom he relied to foment revolution, turned out to be rather less inclined to revolt than the peasants, or, for that matter, the petty bourgeois, artisans, factory owners, aristocrats and educated middle classes from whom he drew almost all his early disciples. In order to overcome this inconvenience, Marx effectively re-invokes, in the form of bourgeois communist ideologues such as himself, the guardian-philosophers of Plato’s dictatorship. Rather than trust the faceless proletariat to make its own decisions, he appoints these guardians to ‘represent and take care of the future’ of that class.
His prescriptions, in other words, flatly fail to address the critical political question, namely ‘who guards the guards?’ Democratic systems contain, in theory at least, certain safeguards, principally in the form of elections, designed to ensure that those who exercise power over society do so in its best interests. The government is supposed to entertain a healthy fear of its people, for the people are supposed to be permitted to dismiss their government. The Communist Manifesto offers no such defences. As the ancient Greeks discovered, guardian-philosophers tend rapidly to shed both the responsibilities of guardianship and the disinterested virtues of philosophy.
Moreover, by abolishing private property and centralizing ‘all instruments of production in the hands of the State’,20 Marx granted communist governments a possibly unprecedented power over human life. Officials could decide what – indeed whether – people ate, where they lived, how they worked, even what they wore. Marx himself, in other words, devised the perfect preconditions for totalitarian dictatorship. The ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’21 transforms itself, with instant effect, into the dictatorship of the bureaucrat.
This problem is compounded by the Utopian myth at the heart of the Manifesto’s philosophy: that with the triumph of the proletariat, all conflict will come to an end, and everyone shall pursue, through ‘the free development of each’, ‘the free development of all’. But history does not come to an end; dialectical materialism has no ultimate synthesis. New struggles do, and must, emerge as needs change, interests diverge and new forms of oppression manifest themselves, and a system which takes no account of this is a system doomed to sclerotic corruption. Indeed, Stalin and Mao recognized this, through their perpetual discovery of the new enemies required to sustain the dynamic of power.
Marx helped the industrial working class to recognize and act upon its power. His analysis remains an indispensable means of understanding both history and economics. But his political programme, as formulated in the Manifesto, was a dead end. It stands at odds with everything we in the global justice movement claim to value: human freedom, accountability, diversity. Any attempt to systematize people by means of a simple, let alone binary, code will founder, with disastrous consequences both for those forced to conform to the Marxist ideal, and for those judged by the all-powerful state to offend it.
At first sight, anarchism appears more compatible with the ideals of a global justice movement. It is the political idea I find most attractive, and to which, almost instinctively – however much I have now come to reject it intellectually – I keep returning. For the first few years in which I had a system of political beliefs, I considered myself an anarchist. Anarchism’s purpose, of course, is to reclaim human freedom from the oppressive power of distant authority. Every atrocity committed by the state is a standing advertisement for self-government. Over the past one hundred years, as everyone knows, states have been responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of combatants and civilians in wars concocted principally for the purpose of expanding the wealth and power of the dominant elite. They have sought to destroy entire ethnic or religious groups: Jews, Roma, Tartars, Kurds, Tutsis, Bosnian Muslims, East Timorese, Maya, Mapuches and many more. They have engineered famines, destroyed ecosystems, killed political opponents and curtailed the most basic human freedoms.
Those who have succeeded in capturing the wealth and power of the state have enriched themselves enormously at public expense: both King Leopold of Belgium and his indigenous successor Mobutu Sese Seko used the Congo as his personal treasury, effectively enslaving an entire nation for the purpose of filling his own pockets. The men and women who have governed all the recent superpowers – Britain, the USSR and the United States – have sought to enhance their power and secure domestic support without redistributing wealth, by seizing control of other nations and looting their economies. When anarchists assert that the state is a mechanism for violently depriving humankind of its freedom, we are forced to agree that it has repeatedly been used for this purpose. Anarchism, as a result, presents the most consistent – and within the global justice movement the most popular – challenge to the world order this manifesto invokes, in which governance plays a major role.
But the history of the past century, or even, for that matter, the past decade, is hardly an advertisement for statelessness either. When the government of Sierra Leone lost control of its territory, the lives of its people were ripped apart by men who are commonly described as ‘rebels’, but who possessed no policy or purpose other than to loot people’s homes and monopolize the diamond trade. They evolved the elegant habit of hacking off the hands of the civilians they visited, not because this advanced any political or economic programme, but simply because no one was preventing them from doing so. Only when foreign states reasserted governance in Sierra Leone were the bandits defeated and relieved of their weapons.
When the state effectively collapsed in the former Soviet Union, losing its capacity to regulate and tax its citizens, the power vacuum was filled immediately, not by autonomous collectives of happy householders, but by the Mafia, which carved its empires out of other people’s lives. The assets of the former state were seized not by the mass of its citizens, but by a few dozen kleptocrats. Anyone who sought to resist them was shot.
For most of the past decade, the eastern Congo has been effectively stateless, and the people who in earlier eras endured the depredations of King Leopold and President Mobutu, have been repeatedly attacked by six marauding armies and scores of unaffiliated militias, squabbling over their resources. Two million people have died as a result of this ‘civil war’.
Anarchists would be quick to insist both that there is a difference between the stateless chaos of places like the eastern Congo and true anarchism (in which freely associating communities can seek mutual advantage through cooperation) and that many of the recent atrocities in stateless places were caused either by the collapse of the state or by the aggression of neighbouring states. We will turn to the first point in a moment, but it should surely be obvious that the second argument causes more problems for the anarchist position than it solves. Unless anarchism suddenly and simultaneously swept away all the world’s states and then, by equally mysterious means, prevented