I. SOCIAL THEORY.

In explaining their position Sydney libertarians often refer to their interest in social theory. But this phrase, "social theory," can suggest, not only empirical study, but also the making of certain criticisms; and at the same time, the question may be asked: How are these connected with the attitudes and sympathies libertarians have, with their support for particular social causes? Thus (1) we should expect social theory to be concerned with developing true views about the nature and interconnection of social phenomena, and the position of libertarians does depend partly on what they take to be certain facts about how society operates.

But (2) this almost always gets connected with criticism and argument, for the social theorist is led to demolish certain fallacious arguments he encounters. For example, libertarians take the important thing about religion to be the actual, earthly role of religious institutions, but they are also led to attack the theological and moral views of religious people. Or, as a different example, libertarians regard some of Marx's work as an important contribution to the study of society, but in view of misunderstandings about Marxism and the deification of Marx by some, clarity also demands that the predominant anti-empirical, metaphysical part of Marxism be revealed and criticised.

It is easy to see why (1) comes to be accompanied by (2). In any subject matter there are forces obstructing knowledge (cf. Copernicus, Galileo, Darwin), but the obstructions are all the more powerful in the social field. There, recognition of how things are cuts too deep and injures personal hopes and illusions as well as offending influential social groups. As a result, examination of concepts and criticism of beliefs are imperative; people have little chance of becoming aware of truths about society unless at the same time they come to see through prevailing false or absurd beliefs about human conduct and social affairs.

(3) Social theorists have preferences or policies of their own. (Of course, to be a social theorist is not necessarily to be partial or one-sided in a crude sense - Lenin's dictum "all theory is partisan," in the crude way he meant it, illogically denies any distinction between truth and falsity. But the academic notion of complete detachment or disinterestedness wrongly treats the social theorist as a mere external spectator with no social existence and interests of his own.) In the case of libertarians, their social theory is accompanied and stimulated by the interest they have in struggling against authoritarian forces and ideas. And, as a matter of fact, those people who combine (1) and (2) above, i.e.. who are not mere uncritical collectors of "facts," usually do take an anti-authoritarian stand. There can be exceptions; an example of particular interest to libertarians being Pareto, for he presented an account of society much of which libertarians can accept and yet had some authoritarian preferences. But this is rare. Nearly always what passes for social theory amongst supporters of various kinds of authoritarianism are ideology and false belief.

In other words, recognising how society goes on, criticising widespread but mistaken beliefs, and having the interests they have or the particular causes they support, together make up the libertarian position. (As will emerge, it is the anti-authoritarian sympathies they share with them which give libertarians their affinity with, but their social theory which distinguishes them from, classical anarchists.)

What social beliefs do libertarians reject as uncritical? What account do they give of society? An indication may be given if I say something about two categories or concepts which appear indispensable to social theory -- those which can be labeled "pluralism" and "ideology."

(`a) Social pluralism is roughly the view that society is not a single thing but a diversity of different and often competing activities and interests. A popular way of bringing this out is by exposing appeals to the"common good", "the welfare of the people," etc. These phrases suggest unanimity and singleness of interest , but in fact receive emphasis only when there is variety and conflict ---i.e., they enable a particular group to masquerade as representative of all, and so to advance its own particular policies in a covert way. (Note that this is true not only in the case of attempted justifications of censorship, Crimes Acts, the illegalisation of abortion, and so on, it is also true of such things as an interest in good health, fresh air, etc., which, being favoured by most members of society, may appear to be more plausible examples of the common interests of society. These rarely become social or political issues; when they do, however, as with issues about national health services, compulsory T.B. tests, the eradication of smog, and so on, it is quite clear that to refer to them as "the interests of all" is to conceal genuine conflicts of interest.) Contrary to the unitary view of society--which would make past history and present day-to-day politics inexplicable--there are in society many different interests. some of which are simply irreconcilable and remain in permanent conflict.

(b) Libertarians emphasise what is one of Marx's most defensible concepts, that of ideology. Of course, everyone uses the word "ideology" today: Russian and American politicians and all the newspapers, and in relation to Marx's original meaning they all use it wrongly--i.e., they use it to refer to any set of ideas which is taken to support a political interest. Now there were ambiguities in what Marx himself said, and Lenin and the other Russian Communists were mainly responsible for the wrong use current to-day, but what I have in mind is Marx's use of the word "ideology" to describe theories or beliefs which are unconscious expressions of something else or camouflage the promotion of special interests. Compare Marx's own best example: that in 1848 the bourgeoisie spoke of Liberty, Fraternity, Equality, but what they really meant were Infantry, Cavalry, Artillery. (Note the ironic truth which results when we translate into Marx's use references by Khrushchev to "our Communist ideology" or by Eisenhower to "our Christian ideology".) It is convenient, though not essential, to bring out the nature of ideologies by referring to Marx. Pareto, for instance, drew attention to the same type of thing in a different, more ramified way by emphasising the fact that throughout history there have been myths, superstitions, religious views, moral theories, and so on, which taken at their face value are empty of content and. indeed, meaningless, and yet have had immense influence in history. For that matter, if we make even a cursory study of moral justifications, it is easy to detect the presence of ideological processes. Almost every group speaks in the name of the good, right, justice, natural law, progress, happiness, and so on, but it is usually transparent that these are unconscious covers for the promotion of certain policies or interests at the expense of others. (The reference to unconscious covers is to be stressed. Using ideology is quite different from being a cynical or unscrupulous Machiavellian--when people say they are furthering the good, etc., they usually sincerely believe what they say.) It is as if individuals and groups have a blockage, they cannot face up to the unpleasant fact that there are conflicts and differences of interest in society. Hence arises the tendency they have, to use ideology to disguise from themselves and others what their policies really are.

To sum up: An ideology is a belief (or set of beliefs) which (I) masquerades as a true belief and is taken by its believers simply to be a true belief, (ii) in fact, taken literally, is neither true nor false, but instead is absurd or meaningless, (iii) has the actual social role of covertly assisting special interests. Such beliefs or theories, libertarians point out, are not expendable extras which are occasionally let loose on society; on the contrary, they are exceedingly prevalent and influential: it is a rare social or political controversy which is not marked by liberal use of ideological concepts and beliefs. From this arises the importance libertarians attach to criticising ideologies and bringing out their real social roles.

II. ANARCHISM WITHOUT ENDS.

Given this type of social theory, Sydney libertarians point out that although they share the anti-authoritarian interests of classical anarchists they cannot help but be critical of utopian anarchism --i.e., of the kind of anarchism which fixes its sights on the future and contends that the main thing is to work for the achievement of the future "free society." Such a view is open to criticism (a) because it involves a false social theory and (b) because its emphasis on the future obscures what has always been the most important feature of anarchist and libertarian activity, being anarchist or libertarian here and now.

Thus the problem for the utopian anarchist is to explain how the passage from an unfree to a free society is going to take place.But the solution offered (e.g., by Kropotkin) greatly over-emphasises the part that can be played by co-operation and rational persuasion. The ideas and practices which prevail in existing society, it is claimed; are so obviously vicious and illogical that they cannot persist. With the spread of education and the growth of a saner attitude to political and social questions we must expect the gradual triumph of the rational and freedom-loving outlook.

The trouble with this belief is that it assumes education and persuasion occur in a social vacuum, when in fact they occur under definite social conditions, and we can by no means alter these conditions at will. It is likewise assumed that the rational decisions of men have an immense influence on the course of events, when the social facts go against this assumption. Thus, take the operation of social institutions like the State, Churches, the army, universities, and so on. These don't arise because (or just because) certain people get together and decide to create them nor do they continue to exist because certain people have decided to prolong their existence. Institutions are usually there, going on in certain specifiable ways, irrespective of what rational decisions individuals make or fail to make. Anarchists have always been the first to point this out in regard to the State -e.g., that those like the Bolsheviks, who think they capture or control the State are, in fact, captured or controlled by the State; hence the continuity of the State machine and its manner of working from Tsarist to Soviet times. But the same is true of other institutions. Imagine a revolutionary minded bank manager trying to reform the activities of a bank. It is obvious that banking activities have ways of going on, which set severe limits to what individuals can do -e.g., if the manager started giving unlimited overdrafts the bank would collapse; and there is also a second kind of limit: the training, outlook, etc., usually required for a man to become a bank manager. So, the general conclusion we have to draw is this: far from the ideas and decisions of men controlling social activities and institutions, it is much more the other way round. Parts of State apparatus such as the army and public service are not just instruments of the politicians, let alone of "the people"; like newspaper organisations, trade union secretariats, and so on, they have a "life" of their own, and largely shape the outlook of the men who work in them.

All this conflicts with the hopeful belief of the utopian anarchist that by education and rational persuasion men can be led to decide on the formation of a free society. (In this respect, Syndicalists and the I.W.W.--"a new society within the shell of the old"--had a more defensible, though still utopian, position.)

To take concrete case: consider the type of sexually free society Wilhelm Reich advocated. In existing society we have what Reich called the "authoritarian sexual morality," i.e., the denial of adolescent sexuality, emphasis on compulsive monogamy, and so on, which means that the great mass of the people, even jealousy or other disturbances to their sexualities. But, in contrast with this, when they are married, are subject to guilt feelings, possessive, Reich argued, it is biologically perfectly possible for people to have non-authoritarian, orgiastically much more satisfactory, sexual relationships.Well, then, suppose we want to bring about a society in which this kind of sexual freedom prevails. It is highly utopian to think that people could be rationally educated into this, even if many of them would gain from doing so. For sexual freedom to occur on a large scale, two things would have to be achieved: first, a negative requirement, the power of religious and other moralistic forces in society would have to be destroyed; and, secondly, on the positive side, new social conditions would have to arise or be brought about in which it would be possible for straightforward and non-guilt ridden sexual relationships to become widespread. But a policy of rational argument and good wishes would not achieve these results. Thus, to bring about the second, not only would there need to be such obvious conditions as the availability of contraception and abortion, there would also have to be the absence of neurosis and guilt feelings in the people themselves. But these guilt feelings -or, as Reich says, the incapacity of people for orgastic satisfaction -- are mainly derived from childhood training and from the guilts and prohibitions instilled by the existing educational system. But how do we, the would-be revolutionaries, change the existing educational system? By educating the existing educators? But in that case we should need to be already running the educational system! In other words, it is one thing to know how the prevailing sexual ideology affects the sexual life of most people and a quite different thing to bring about a significant disappearance of that ideology.

For reasons of this kind, then, Sydney libertarians are wary of talking about reforming society or about future freedom. Instead they use such phrases as "anarchism without ends." "pessimistic anarchism," "permanent protest". "Anarchism without ends" indicates that there are anarchist-like activities such as criticising the views of authoritarians, resisting the pressure towards servility and conformity, having unauthoritarian sexual relationships, which can be carried on for their own sake, here and now, without any reference to supposed future ends. Similarly, the label, "pessimistic anarchism." indicates that you can expect authoritarian forces in any society whatever, that freedom is something you always have to struggle for, and is not something which can be guaranteed in some future society. ("Pessimistic anarchism" also hits off the fact that libertarians have many of the sympathies:and interests of the classical anarchists, but have views about the nature of society more akin to those of the "pessimistic sociologists," Pareto, Mosca and Michels.) Then there is the slogan, "permanent protest,'' which has been borrowed from Max Nomad, who also refers to "permanent revolution" and "perpetual opposition." (Compare, e.g., his books, Rebels and Renegades and Apostles of Revolution.) The libertarian use of the phrase, "permanent protest," has some differences from Nomad's use, for he has more in mind mass revolutionary movements and argues that the underdog is born to be betrayed by all of his would be emancipators, but that the only thing for the underdog to do is to go on protesting. (Compare Albert Camus in The Rebel: "The historic mission of the proletariat is to be betrayed;" and his distinction between (constant) rebellion which he supports and (final) revolution which he opposes because it merely introduces a new form of tyranny.) But while Nomad refers particularly to protest against the social structure as a whole (the overall distribution of power and privilege), libertarians in speaking of "permanent protest" wish rather to stress the carrying on of particular libertarian activities within existing society (i.e., in a country like Australia which has social conditions rather different from those, e.g., in Bulgaria, Spain or Cuba).

What are examples of these activities? A very obvious one is the work of criticism carried on by the Libertarian Society. There are various false theories, metaphysical views, overt and concealed moral and political assumptions that have wide influence in society; the role of the critic is to expose these as illusions or ideologies, and this is a permanent job which has to be carried on from generation to generation. Politicians, priests and policemen don't change just because their justifications of themselves are shown to be illogical or absurd. Similarly, other libertarian activities are carried on here and now and not with an eye to some future state of affairs when they will cease to exist. The utopian picture of a future free society would not even be intelligible to us if we were not already acquainted with examples of unauthoritarian activities in our present society. Contrary to the utopian, the libertarian looks not to some future society in which authoritarianism will have been got rid of and freedom supposedly brought into existence for the first time. Instead, he takes it to be a matter of keeping alive what already exists, of keeping up protest, keeping on struggling to emancipate himself from myths and illusions, and of keeping going his own positive activities. You don't have to reform or overthrow the State before you can carry on libertarian activities. You don't have to wait hopefully for the destruction of religion; you can, here and now, with your children and your friends, resist the pressure from Christian forces. You don't have to try to make the world safe for sexual freedom of the Reichian kind, but you can here and now fight against guilts and ideology and, at least to some extent, live a straightforward, uncompulsive sexual life. In other words, free or unauthoritarian activities are not future rewards, but are activities carried on by anarchist or libertarian- minded groups, here and now, in spite of authoritarian forces.

A.J. Baker

From Collective Action Notes

A common objection to anarchist proposals is that they postulate society without the State, that is, anarchy in one of the two literal senses of the word. But men, it is objected, need to be governed. Such criticism may take a naive form, as when it is implied that but for the government we would all be murdered in our beds. We are to believe that it was to escape this fate that the citizens assembled and appointed some of their number to rule the rest, thus instituting the State.

But criticism of the anarchist postulate may take a sophisticated form, as in the writings of the Italian conservative, Gaetano Mosca. Mosca's general theme, which he shares with a group of writers who sometimes go under the collective label of "Machiavellians", is the perennial domination of majorities by minorities. Ruling minorities may come and go (Pareto: "History is a graveyard of aristocracies"), but always there are ruling minorities. This permanent feature of society is obscured, but not altered, by ideological slogans, such as "government by the people" and "majority rule". Anarchism is powerless to abrogate this social law. In Mosca's words:

"But suppose we assume that the anarchist hypothesis has come about in the fact, that the present type of social organization has been destroyed, that nations and governments have ceased to exist, and that standing armies, bureaucrats, parliaments and especially policeman and jails have been swept away. Unfortunately people would still have to live, and therefore use the land and other instruments of production. Unfortunately again, arms and weapons would still be there, and enterprising, courageous characters would be ready to use them in order to make others their servants or slaves. Given those elements, little social groups would at once form, and in them the many would toil while the few, armed and organized, would either be robbing them or protecting them from other robbers, but living on their toil in any event. In other words, we should be going back to the simple, primitive type of social organization in which each group of armed men is absolute master of some plot of ground and of those who cultivate it, so long as the group can conquer the plot of ground and hold it with its own strength" (The Ruling Class, 1939, p. 295)

.

Some of the writers advancing this general type of criticism, while calling into question the soundness of anarchist theories, manage to pay the anarchists what looks like a compliment. Thus, Robert Michels speaks of anarchism as "a movement on behalf of liberty, founded on the inalienable right of the human being over his own person" (Political parties, 1915, p. 360). George Molnar speaks of anarchism as "the only radical movement whose principal avowed concern was with freedom" (Libertarian Society's Broadsheet, No. 30).

Now in examining the issues we must distinguish two notions, which it has been usual to confuse. We must separate the concept of anarchy, meaning society without the State, from the concept of free society, meaning society in which no group has any of its activities subjected to authority or coercion.

Resort to coercion and appeal to authority are standard means of trying to compel a person or group to conform to a course of action supported by the person or group resorting to coercion or appealing to authority. A coercive person or group uses or threatens violence in the attempt to compel conformity. An authoritarian person or group appeals to some authority, which is represented as requiring the course of action demanded by the authoritarian. The notion of sacredness is commonly annexed to authorities: their requirements are represented as being obligatory and their credentials as above inquiry. Authorities are of the most diverse kind. They may be definite, as when appeal is made to rights conferred by legal status or legal contract. They may be indefinite, as when appeal is made to the requirements of God or Freedom or National Interest or Working-Class Solidarity.

Appeals to authority are commonly made when the authoritarian is unable or unwilling to resort to coercion. His aim is to put you in a position where, if you do not comply with his demands, you will feel ill at ease with yourself, will feel guilty. His aim may also be to excite public animosity against you.

An inquiry into freedom in society can thus be rephrased as an inquiry into the operation of authority and coercion in society. An activity is free if not subjected to authoritarian or coercive restrictions. But an activity that is free in this sense may be repressive, that is, may be aimed at imposing authoritarian or coercive restrictions on others. Activities, therefore, may be assigned to one or other of four types: free and unrepressive, free and repressive, unfree and unrepressive. unfree and repressive. Scientific inquirers, brigands in de facto control of a region, domestic slaves and non-commissioned officers in the army might be taken, at least in certain circumstances, as respective examples of men involved in the four types of activity.

But in attending concretely to this or that social group, this or that social activity, this or that social interest, we must keep in mind the complexity of things. Coercive and authoritarian demands may be ineffectual, if not in the short then in the long term. Consider, for example, the attacks made by churchmen at various times on scientific inquiry, on "immorality" and, to take a current example, on government policy in Vietnam. The history of legislative attempts to repress drinking, adultery, robbery with violence and industrial strikes supports the same conclusion.

II.

We are now in a position to continue the inquiry, in particular to ask whether anarchist social organization is, in fact, impracticable, as Mosca asserts, and whether the anarchists are really the party of freedom. The only sound approach is through the study of existent anarchies.

To the question, "Have there been anarchies?", that is, societies without the State, an affirmative answer can be given. Anarchies are, or have been, common in Africa, North America, Melanesia, Australia and other parts of the world, in societies with primitive or peasant economies. Conquest and rule by outsiders has modified the political structures of these societies: either drastically, as when headmen, native chiefs, village councils and the like, endowed with coercive authority, have been created by the rulers; or superficially, as when a colonial administration, staffed only by outsiders, is superimposed on the indigenous anarchy.

The point about these societies is that they are free from governmental institutions, that is, there is no one group within them claiming and exercising authority to regulate the activities of all other groups, claiming and exercising monopoly on the use of violence in society. Yet in these societies disputes arise over marriages, land, movable property, ritual prerogatives and so on, and disputes are settled (sometimes) despite the political anarchy. In the course of the disputes the parties promote their conflicting demands by resort to coercion and appeal to authority. (For a study of the operation of these processes in a Stateless society, see L. R. Hiatt, Kinship and Conflict, 1965.) Several conclusions can be drawn from the primitive anarchies.

First, they show that anarchy is a workable political order. Mosca denied that, holding that a "successful" anarchist revolution would result in a reversion of society to what he took to be the "primitive type of social organization", a multiplicity of petty Statelets tyrannized over by armed gangs. But the primitive anarchies known to us through anthropological inquiry are genuinely Stateless. Whether a Stateless society can be created by abolition of the State where it already exists is a separate question, and anthropology gives no answer to it.

Secondly, the primitive anarchies show that authority and coercion are processes independent of the State, which must be regarded as a particular social form through which they operate. Abolition of the State must, therefore, be distinguished from abolition of authority and coercion. Generalization about "quantities" of authority and coercion in Stateless, as opposed to State, societies, is impossible; at most sexual freedom in a particular society of one type could be contrasted with sexual freedom in a particular society of the other type, and similarly with other kinds of freedom.

Thirdly, the primitive anarchies show that anarchy, as a political order, is independent of general acceptance of some monolithic principle of behaviour, contrary to what some critics have asserted. This kind of assertion was advanced by George Orwell, for example, in his essay on Swift:

"This illustrates very well the totalitarian tendency which is explicit in the anarchist or pacifist vision of Society. In a Society in which there is no law, and in theory no compulsion, the only arbiter of behaviour is public opinion. But public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law, when human beings are governed by 'thou shalt not', the individual can practise a certain amount of eccentricity: when they are supposedly governed by 'love' or 'reason', he is under continuous pressure to make him behave and think in exactly the same way as everyone else" (Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays, 1950, pp. 71-72).

Fourthly, the anthropological evidence shows an association of political anarchy with simple economies, economies of the type we would call primitive or peasant. In these societies production is characteristically by small groups, whose members are often kin to each other. Such a group produces for its own needs, obtaining what it is unable or unwilling to produce by direct exchange with other groups of the same general type. A society with such a simple economy is admirably adapted to political anarchy. though not all societies with simple economies are anarchic. What would State authority give to these societies? Sometimes military protection, sometimes participation in a far more complex economy. But benefits are secured at a price: military protection is usually from other States, through taxation the State, in effect, compels its subjects to labour without pay, and State authority sanctions the co-existence of great wealth and great poverty. A State, one may say, has a vested interest in its subjects. The image of the shepherd and his flock is to the point, for what does a shepherd with his sheep if not fleece and devour them?

Now it can be objected that these societies, though anarchies, were unconsciously anarchist. Can anarchist movements institute anarchy where the State already exists? Anarchists would answer in the affirmative, pointing to the experience of Spain during the civil war. Their belief finds some confirmation in accounts given by eye-witnesses who were not of the anarchist persuasion, notably Orwell, Gerald Brenan, Franz Borkenau. The parts of Spain where anarchism was seen at its most impressive, from the point of view of actually instituting some sort of anarchy, were peasant districts which had long been impregnated with propaganda. To introduce anarchy all that had to be done was to drive out the representatives of the State. The basically anarchist peasant organization would then operate free from State-imposed restrictions. The special circumstances of the civil war gave the anarchists the opportunity of doing this, and an agrarian anarchism persisted in parts until the final victory of the fascist forces. Borkenau's account of the Spanish worker and peasant, the man who proved himself such good anarchist material, is worth inspection. He argues that Bakuninist theories, when introduced in Spain during the closing decades of the nineteenth century, found conditions to which they were peculiarly appropriate, conditions which had existed since the eighteenth century. Notable among these were the great economic and cultural gap between upper and lower classes, the peasant propensity to violence and brigandage, the hostility to "progress", especially "progress" in the form of capitalist enterprise, and the degeneration of the Catholic Church. The latter condition contributed to the anarchist movement becoming imbued with moral and religious fervour. Borkenau gives this vignette of the Spaniard:

"There is a profound difference, in the view of a primitive peasantry, between the man who breaks the solidarity of the peasant community itself by criminal acts and the man who, in seeking his own right against the rich and mighty by brigandage and murder, helps the common cause of the oppressed. The former, the thief or the murderer who has killed or robbed a peasant, would be unhesistatingly delivered to the police or given short shrift by those he had damaged. The latter will be protected by the poor, throughout his district ... The average Spanish peasant, would be unhesitatingly delivered to the police or given life and property characteristic of the well-policed countries of the West" (The Spanish Cockpit, 1963 ed., p. 15).

The anarchism which developed among such men was compatible with the exercise of authority and coercion, processes without which no large-scale social reconstruction could be effected. This should occasion no surprise, since the example of the primitive anarchies shows that authority and coercion are not to be identified exclusively with the State. What the Spanish anarchists aimed at was the abolition of the State and certain forms of activity upheld by State power (lawyer, moneylender, landlord, for example), which entailed driving out, and keeping out, representatives of the State, and instituting new social arrangements, The resort to coercion and appeal to authority implied in this would have been inconsistent with anarchy only if serving to create new groups which, masked by no-State slogans, claimed and exercised authority and power over all other groups. When this is kept in mind a new construction can be placed on the authoritarianism attributed to some of the leading anarchists, notably Bakunin, which need no longer necessarily be construed as aberrations.

To advert to the distinction between anarchy and free society: in the primitive world there is anarchy, but not free society, and in Spain anarchy was instituted, but not free society. It would be naive to expect authority and coercion to be abolished in civil war conditions, but in any case anarchy does not require their abolition. At the same time, it must be admitted that anarchists have often spoken as if what they wanted was the abolition of authority and coercion in all forms. Take Kropotkin in his Encyclopaedia Britannica article, for example:

". .. harmony in such a society being obtained, not by submission to law or by obedience to any authority, but by free agreements concluded between the various groups, territorial and professional, freely constituted for the sake of production and consumption, as also for the satisfaction of the infinite variety of needs and aspirations of a civilized being. In a society developed on these lines, the voluntary associations ... would ... substitute themselves for the State in all its functions.

"They would represent an interwoven network, composed of an infinite variety of groups and federations of all sizes and degrees ... for all possible purposes ... and ... for the satisfaction of an ever-increasing number of scientific, artistic, literary and social needs. Moreover, such a society would represent nothing immutable. On the contrary ... harmony would (it is contended) result from an ever-changing adjustment and readjustment of equilibrium between the multitude of forces and influences, and this adjustment would be the easier to obtain as none of the forces would enjoy a special protection from the State.

"If... society were organized on these principles, man would not be limited in the free exercise of his powers in productive work by a capitalist monopoly, maintained by the State; nor would he be limited in the exercise of his will by a fear of punishment, or by obedience toward individuals or metaphysical entities, which both lead to depression of initiative and servility of mind."

Kropotkin is failing to unequivocally assert whether or not authority and coercion will operate as social processes. Much in the tone of his writing suggests that he is envisaging their disappearance, but then what is to be made of the groups for "mutual protection" and "defence of the territory", which are listed among the "groups and federations of all sizes and degrees ,.. for all possible purposes"? Such groups are needed against internal and external enemies who presumably seek to determine the "ever-changing adjustment and readjustment of equilibrium" by systematic violence and deception, after the manner of the conquerors, criminals, etc., with whom history familiarizes us. The believer in a free society is in a dilemma, for the abolition of authority and coercion depends on the renunciation of these processes by all men. That Kropotkin envisaged this is implied by the reference to the freeing of the individual from "fear of punishment" and "obedience towards individuals or metaphysical entities':. Taken seriously this would mean an abrogation even of moral authority. But as the social arrangements instituted by the believers in free society are liable to attack, some form of social defence ("mutual protection", "defence of the territory") is necessary, that is, coercion must be resorted to and authority appealed to, in order to maintain the free society.

Such are the problems of believers in free society, but anarchy is compatible with authority and coercion. Perhaps, then, a device would have to be borrowed from the communists and, on the analogy of the withering away of the State in the classless society prepared for by the dictatorship of the proletariat, anarchy would be conceived of as a transition period between the present and the free society. But to do that would be to make the free society what the classless society of the withered-away State is--a myth.

The anarchist doctrine perennially attracts a mixed bag of idealists, intellectuals, crackpots, visionaries, malcontents and individuals drifting on the fringe of law and conventional morality. In rare times and places the doctrine manages to sum up, to convey with a terseness wanting to other doctrines, the hatreds and aspirations of great numbers of men. Then, and only then, with the anarchist beliefs fusing with a mass movement, does the abolition of the State and the institution of anarchy become a possibility.

III

The Sydney libertarian position is sometimes summed up in the slogan, "anarchism, atheism, free love", but this is an anarchism very different from the classical variety. In particular, libertarians reject as illusory the belief that the world as a whole can somehow be reconstructed after an anarchist or libertarian fashion. Instead, emphasis is placed on the carrying on of certain activities in the here and now, notably inquiry and free love, without entertainment of the hope that they will be generally accepted or that the world can be made safe for them. Thus libertarians accept, on the one hand, an empiricist and pluralistic philosophy and, on the other hand, an enmity to what are believed to be the forces of authority, as when Ian Bedford declares " an abiding hatred of the State and of all forms of coercion ... temperamentally unable to stand the police" (The Red and Black, No. 1). It is this latter feature which, libertarians believe, establishes continuity between their position and that of the classical anarchists.Thus A. J. Baker refers to "the interest they have in struggling against authoritarian forces and ideas" (The Sydney Line, 1963, p. 27), asserting that libertarians "share the anti-authoritarian interests of classical anarchists" (ibid., p. 29).

Now it can be observed that libertarians are taking up activities which can and do exist independently. An empirical, pluralistic logic and social theory do not imply commitment to an anarchist--or what is thought to be an anarchist--position, as can be seen from the example of men whose influence on libertarian theory has been deep, notably John Anderson and Pareto.

It can further be observed that it is only in a special sense that anarchists can be regarded as anti-authoritarian. Confusion can easily arise here because (a) some anarchists have equivocally seemed to oppose all authority and coercion, as we have seen in the specific case of Kropotkin; and (b) anarchists have generally been opposed to what loosely may be termed "the authorities", that is, the police, army, law courts, parliament and so on, and therefore have been anti-authoritarian in the restricted sense of "agin the authorities". But libertarians would want to be anti-authoritarian in a wider way than that. The point here is that it is not easy to oppose unequivocally all authority and coercion and want the institution of new sets of social arrangements. This is a difficulty which revolutionary reformers cannot evade, as can be seen from critically reading the classical anarchists and other promoters of universal nostrums, for example, Wilhelm Reich (see George Molnar, Broadsheet, No. 39). A simple (not to say simple-minded) solution would be to adopt the policy of using authority and coercion to abolish authority and coercion, thus ushering in the free society, but logically this would be no better than the communist policy of class domination (by the proletariat) abolishing class domination. The assumptions underlying such solutions are that authority, coercion and class domination are acceptable if exercised "in the right way" by "the right people", and that aims and policies do not change with changes in the relative social position of their proponents. That at least some anarchists have been alive to the falsity of these assumptions is shown by Michels:

"Nieuwenhuis, the veteran champion of anarchizing socialism with a frankly individualist tendency, showed on one occasion that he had a keen perception of the dangers which anarchism runs from all contact with practical life. At the Amsterdam congress of 1907, after the foundation of the new anarchist international, he raised a warning voice against the arguments of the Italian Errico Malatesta, an anarchist attached to the school of Bakunin. Malatesta, having dilated upon the strength of bourgeois society, declared that nothing would suit this society better than to be faced by unorganized masses of workers, and that for this reason it was essential to counter the powerful organization of the rich by a still more powerful organization of the poor. 'Si tel est ta pende, cher ami,' said Nieuwenhius to Malatesta,'tu peux t'en aller tranquillement chez les socialistes. Ils ne disent pas autre chose.' In the course of this first anarchist congress there were manifest, according to Nieuwenhuis, the symptoms of that diplomatic mentality which characterizes all the leaders of authoritarian parties" (Political Parties, 1915, pp. 360-61).

If the hope of a general abolition of authority and coercion is rejected as utopian, the question arises of the extent to which authority and coercion can be abolished from the lives of limited groups and their members. Libertarians profess anti-authoritarian interests or preferences, but the precise relation of these to the various activities engaged in by libertarians, whether individually or collectively, is unclear. In this context the complex interplay of social facts must be kept in mind: a group has activities which are participated in, to varying extents, by the group's members and which we may speak of as the characteristic activities of the group, but members have "outside" activities, too, and the outside activities of some members may not be shared by other members. It must also be remembered that "authoritarian", "contra-authoritarian", "anti-authoritarian" and the like are not only terms in a system of social theory, but terms in a system of moral preferences (Cf. "progressive" and "reactionary" in communist terminology). Keeping these points in mind we are in a better position to appreciate some of the obscurities in the libertarian position. Investigation of the obscurities can begin by attending to a type of problem which evidently troubles some libertarians.

Thus Hiatt has suggested that:

". .. it would seem the obvious thing for libertarians to think about playing off the authoritarians against one another. remember well the uneasiness caused at a libertarian conference some years ago when a certain gentleman asked whether the police would be called in if Frank Browne's boys tried to break up the meeting" (The Sydney Line, 1963, p. 122).

The same type of question was raised by R. Poole, reviewing The Sydney Line in a student paper:

"Is, for instance, the action of a householder in refusing admission to a gatecrasher to a party, a display of individual preference, or is he making use of institutionalized property rights?" (Honi Soit, 30 June, 1964).

The answer to the reviewer's question would surely be that such action would be both, since only individual preference makes you want to eject gatecrashers and only institutionalized property rights enable you to do so.

But what underlies these questions is the dilemma of the classical anarchists. You say you do not want to use authority and coercion, that in fact you want to abolish them, if not from the world, then from your own life. But in the meantime there are people who do appeal to authority and resort to coercion. Their actions affect you and your friends and the people you sympathize with. Unless mutually satisfactory arrangements can be arrived at with such people (assuming that their demands cannot simply be ignored, as is often the case), you must either submit to their demands, whatever the injury or cost, or resist, which means resorting to coercion or appealing to authority yourself. (Consider the position of the person framed by the police, as with Donald Rooum, whose adventures are described in Anarchy 36). But even in the mundane course of everyday life, wants are satisfied by entering into arrangements which exhibit coercive or authoritarian features, which impose restrictions, sanctioned by coercive authority, on the parties. Thus, accommodation is secured by some such means as entering into a landlord-tenant relation (compare the non-authoritarian way, which is to sleep all year round on park benches, on beaches and such places), and a livelihood is earned by some such means as entering into a master-servant relation, taking up crime or setting up in business (compare the non-authoritarian way, which is to beg and scavenge).

If some anarchists and libertarians are puzzled or embarrassed by the question of their relation to obvious facts, then the answer is to be traced to their feeling that it is somehow incumbent upon them to act consistently in a non-authoritarian or anti-authoritarian manner. This is of particular interest in the case of libertarians, since a feature of Anderson's philosophy on which libertarians have drawn is a thorough-going criticism of the notion of obligation (see, for example, Baker, Libertarian, No. 1).

But the fact that at least some libertarian behaviour is inexplicable by "anti-authoritarian" interests or preferences cannot be completely ignored. One way in which this discrepancy is accounted for is by invoking the compromises required by the exigencies of life: there is a "hiatus between principle and practice" (Broadsheet, No. 20). We can catch an echo here of the ancient view that "the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak". What needs to be stressed is that "practice" and "flesh" are terms concealing undisclosed principles or preferences. Itis an evasion of the issue to disclose some principles only and then to claim that aspects of behaviour inexplicable by the disclosed principles are the result of mysterious forces, such as "practice" and "flesh". Just as one aim of social criticism is to expose the real interests lurking under cover of ideologies, just as one aim of psychoanalysis is to bring to light repressed motives, so we must look for undisclosed preferences, refusing to be brushed off with partial disclosures, just as we refuse to be satisfied with ideological and neurotic formations.

The question thus becomes: In what circumstances do anti-authoritarian (or any other) preferences operate, what activities give rise to them? The view to be taken here is that such preferences are summary statements of certain conditions required for the continuance of certain activities. Compare Anderson:

"In considering how there came to be mores in a community, we must start from the fact that community is a historical force or set of activities. Now there are relations of support and opposition between any activity whatever and others surrounding it; and likewise we can say that any historical thing has its characteristic ways of working, ways which are variously affected by its historical situation. To say, then, that a society exists is to say that it proceeds along certain lines and that there are conditions favourable and conditions unfavourable to its continuance. Thus, mores are, in the first instance, forms of social operation, the engendering of certain states of things and prevention of others. These may be called the demands or requirements of the society. But when the demands come to be formulated by members of the society (and this takes place through conflict among the demands of members), we have mores in the second instance -- recognition of what is required and what is forbidden -- we have especially the operation of taboo. So there develop from customary tasks and customary constraints the notions of right and wrong ... They (the mores, K.M.) are simply ways of working of that particularly community in its particular environment ... Customs, then, ways of social working, must exist if a society is to exist; but they are not to be understood in the 'purposive' fashion, and they raise, of themselves, no question of goodness. Also there is no question of a total social morality; it is seen that there are conflicting demands, conflicting activities, conflicting forms or organization, within the society" (Studies in Empirical Philosophy, 1962, pp. 242-43).

Taking this general view, we would expect to find that a group professing anti-authoritarian principles is a group having activities of a kind threatened by authority and coercion. This is the case with libertarians, since their interests include inquiry and "free love". These activities are hedged and crowded in all societies by authoritarian and coercive restrictions, if not suffering outright repression. They perennially conflict with social groups interested in upholding false or uncritical beliefs or in applying monolithic principles, they perennially excite public animosity. Anti-authoritarian principles are summary statements, formulations, of certain conditions required for the continued existence of activities so threatened. But not all of the activities of a particular group are likely to need defence in this way and, even if they do, not all of the activities of all members of the group would. For that reason it is false and misleading to represent all one's activities as conforming to anti-authoritarian requirements, as some libertarians seem to do. To represent one's activities in that manner is to misrepresent them, is to make aspects of one's behaviour inexplicable. It is as if the slogan "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" were taken as a complete guide to American social life, or "liberty, equality, fraternity" to French social life. Such misrepresentations are particular instances of the general phenomenon of ideology (see, for example, Baker, Libertarian, No. 2), taking "ideology" in the original Marxist sense of "false consciousness".

IV

Inquiry into the social life of a complex society discloses an immense number of social groups, social activities, social interests, an immense diversity in these and a process of change which, at varying rates, all are undergoing. This plurality is recalcitrant to reduction to any monolithic principle (except when the terms of the principle are so vague that they can be made to cover any situation whatsoever), it defies organization by policies derived from any such principle. Acceptance of monolithic principles implies deception, including self-deception, and policies derived from such principles serve to advance particular interests by misrepresenting them as general interests. Deception and misrepresentation are not peculiar, as some believe, to conservative groups; they are features of the activity of radical groups, too.

It is in this complexity that part of the explanation must be sought for the misleading statements groups make about themselves. A group whose activities are threatened with authoritarian restriction or repression, for example, may signify its resolution in such activities by the formulation of anti-authoritarian preferences and, by a process which is familiar, come to believe that this abstract statement of its determination to continue with the threatened activities is applicable to all the activities of the group and its members. But if such anti-authoritarian preferences were deflated in statement, we would get something like this: We are interested in the activity of inquiry (or watever it is); this activity is of a kind that is perennially threatened by authoritarian restriction or repression; we therefore struggle against authority to the extent that authority endangers our activity.

Now two ways of conducting a struggle are (a) practising the activity, despite the authoritarian threats; and (b) developing a criticism of authoritarian arguments, as such, showing they misrepresent the facts, that they cloak the advancement of special interests and that the appeal to authority is logically fallacious. Both these ways of struggle are applicable when what is threatened is one's inquiries or one's sexual life. The danger is that what is true for certain activities will be mistakenly taken to be true for all activities of the group and its members. Critical scrutiny of libertarian publications suggests that libertarians have shown little sensitivity to this danger, they have been content to generalize from limited aspects of their behaviour to all aspects, thus misrepresenting (expressly or by implication) a part as the whole. This danger is also the rock on which much anarchist writing has been wrecked, with "freedom" being bandied about as if there could be freedom for everyone and everything, when the question is rather one of freedom for what activities of what groups.

Considerations of this sort help to explain the acceptance of the theory, which I believe to be false, of a causal relation between sexual and political repression. This theory, which is discussed at length in the writings of Reich (see, for example, The Sexual Revolution), has been taken up by libertarians (and other anarchists), but there is much in it that is obscure. Thus Molnar criticizes certain English anarchists for failure to lay "vigorous insistence on the connection between sexual and political repression" (Libertarian, No. 2), but fails to specify the nature of the connection he has in mind. The same failure is present in R. Pinkerton's working out of the theme:

"Politically, the subordination of sexual enjoyment to reproduction and the application of the conception of sin to its in-dependent pursuit, are bound up with the maintenance of the authoritarian state ... Sexual docility goes along with docility to other kinds of authority and sexual repression may be a condition of social and political servility in general" (Libertarian, No. 1).

The writer appears to be making assertions about historical relations between social facts, yet on scrutiny it is had to determine just what he does assert, thanks to the vagueness of "are bound up with" and "may be". Such expressions are resorted to by writers who want to maintain simultaneously that A is B and that A is not B.

In this contest the Nayars are of interest. Their sexual pattern is described by Hiatt:

"The young Nair girl, before puberty, is married to a nominal husband--a stranger. This marriage remains entirely formal and in three days is terminated by a divorce. The girl can now take as many lovers as she wishes. The lovers contribute to their mistress's support by presents and money, but this establishes no hold over her. At any time she may dismiss a lover by returning his last gift. The virtue of the system is that it provides the maximum freedom for both men and women, for the lovers were as free as the woman to enter a number of liaisons simultaneously. The arrangement could be broken by either party at any time" (Broadsheet, No. 42).

But the Nayars comprise a caste, they are supported from land owned by them but worked by members of an inferior caste, the special occupation of Nayar men is military, and sexual relations outside the caste are, in general, visited with severe penalties if discovered! The sexual freedom this system allows to men and women must, therefore, be admitted to operate within a rigid framework of authoritarian coercion, in whose maintenance the Nayars, because of their military occupation, play an integral part. Thus, among the Nayars and subject to caste limits, sexual enjoyment is not subordinated to reproduction or subjected to conceptions of sin, and docility to the authoritarian caste system manages to exist without sexual docility. It may be added that sexual freedom of the Nayar kind is peculiar to their caste; such freedom is not a feature of the sexual lives of the members of other castes.

Inquiry is another activity whose relations of support and opposition are complex, for, on the one hand, inquiry is perennially liable to authoritarian restriction and, on the other hand, is inextricably associated with institutions whose continued existence requires them to share in wealth which can be accumulated only by authoritarian coercion. The place of institutions of learning and inquiry in a civilization characterized by great disparities of wealth maintained by State authority, was well understood by the classical anarchists. Kropotkin puts the matter succinctly into the mouth of a worker:

"Where then are those young men who have been educated at our expense? whom we have clothed and fed while they studied? for whom, with backs bent under heavy loads and with empty stomachs, we have built these houses, these academies, these museums? for whom, with pallid faces, we have printed those fine books we cannot even read" (An Appeal to the Young, 1948 ed., P• 13).

The same passionate sense of injustice drove Malatesta to demand that the intellectual recognize: "... the debt he has contracted in educating himself and cultivating his intellect which, in most cases, is at the expense of the children of those whose manual work has produced the means" (Errico Malatesta: His Life and Ideas, 1965, p. 138).

It should be stressed that this recognition did not lead the anarchists into the Marxist error of denying the objectivity of scientific findings. Thus, Malatesta insisted that:

"The truth, science, is neither bourgeois nor proletarian, neither revolutionary nor conservative, and everybody can feel interested in its progress" (ibid., p. 140).

Much academic activity is mindless pedantry, much is vocationally directed, much is at the service of powerful social groups. But granted this, the interdependence of inquiry, taken in the sense of the operations of sceptical and catholic minds, with learning and research, must be insisted on, since the latter supplies the materials for the former. Inquiry cannot even begin to exist without learning and research and, where both are found, they mutually stimulate each other. But, as the anarchist understood, the universities and research institutions depend for their existence on apportionments of the accumulated wealth made possible by the hierarchial and authoritarian organization of society.

Inquiry, then, must be regarded as standing in a parasitic relation to official authority and coercion, but from this the conclusion cannot be drawn that inquiry should emasculate itself by submission to authoritarian demands. An inquirer who did that would cease to be an inquirer. We can put the matter alternatively by asserting that from the fact of interdependence no obligation can be derived. No question of logic or science can be settled by appeal to authority. The ideologies of social groups form part of the subject-matter of inquiry-and hence the attempts such groups make, always have made and always will make, to restrict inquiry.

In recognizing the complexity and diversity of social facts, in denying that this complexity and diversity can be coordinated according to a monolithic principle, such as Maximization of Pleasure, Resist not Evil, To Each According to his Need, Social Service or the like, we are taking a pluralistic view of society. This pluralistic view contains implications for the criticism of anarchist and libertarian positions. In particular, by directing attention to the plurality of social groups, social activities and social interests, it raises the question of what can be understood by the principles advanced by the adherents of such positions, whether the principles are intended to be extended over society as a whole, as in the case of the classical anarchists, or to operate only in the lives of "the happy few", as in the case of the Sydney libertarians. Thus, it is asserted by and about the anarchists that they "stand for" freedom, that they are the party of freedom. It is asserted by and about the libertarians that they are anti-authoritarian. that they have anti-authoritarian interests and preferences, that they oppose authority ("permanent opposition", "permanent protest").

Now it is evident that these are misleading statements of aim or activity. The "freedom" that anarchists aim at calls for the restriction or repression of many social groups, activities and interests, which are to disappear so that "freedom" can triumph. But what is realistic in anarchist policies is not the abolition of authority and coercion, since these will evidently be operative during the period of restriction and repression, but the abolition of the State, at least in certain historical circumstances, of a rare and probably non-recurrent type (Spain during the 1930s, the Ukraine in the early post-Revolution years). Authority and coercion are independent of the State and, empirically, there is no evidence that they are increased or decreased by the presence or absence of the State. The State is simply a particular social form through which they operate at some times and places. From this it follows that, although abolition of authority and coercion would entail abolition of the State, abolition of the State would not entail abolition of authority and coercion. Anarchy, then, must be distinguished from free society: critical scrutiny of anarchist texts reveals that the anarchists have been equivocal on what they were aiming at.

"The "anti-authoritarianism" of libertarians is partial or selective, since, in fact, libertarians enter into situations exhibiting features which are authoritarian or coercive or both (landlord-tenant relations, master- servant relations, and so on). But the principles on which the selection is made are inexplicit. Libertarians make a point of "criticism", including criticism of authority, and it is here that some of the responsibility for confusion is to be located, since there is a tendency to blur the distinction between vulgar and learned usages of the verb "to criticize". In vulgar usage, to be critical of something is to be against that something; in learned usage, this is not the case: in saying that Edmund Wilson has criticized the novels of Henry James we are not saying that he is somehow opposed to, somehow against, the novels. To say, then, that you are critical of authority is to leave obscure the sense in which you are critical, it is to leave a conveniently fuzzy and obscure region in which you can hit to and fro, whether wittingly or unwittingly, between the two usages. The fact that libertarians enter voluntarily into authoritarian arrangements suggests that they are critical in the learned sense only, but as against that many libertarian statements assert, explicitly or by implication, that they are critical in the first sense. This ambiguity is parallel to the anarchist ambiguity as to the notions of anarchy and free society.

Pluralistic conceptions involve the rejection of the notion that there can be monolithic principles in accord with which all activities of all groups can be conducted. "Freedom" is a particular example of such a principle. But the same general view would seem to hold when it is a case of all the activities of a single group and its members. This leads to the rejection of "Anti-Authoritarianism". when understood as such a principle.

To recognize social plurality is to recognize a variety of relations of support and opposition between a variety of activities engaged in by a variety of groups. These relations include restriction and repression by appeal to authority and resort to coercion. It is within this matrix that the meaning of demands for freedom and statements of anti- authoritarian preference is to be sought. Such a demand is a demand for the removal of a restriction or repression; such a statement of preference is a statement of resistance to restriction or repression. Freedom is not, therefore, a minority interest, since any group in respect of any activity may have occasion to demand freedom. But the activity for which freedom is demanded may be restrictive or repressive, as is the case with many political and religious demands. The fact of struggle and conflict between activities precludes any coherent advocacy of freedom for all activities of all groups. In this connection the people interested in certain activities may find themselves in opposition to servile ideologies which purport to draw up a "social balance sheet", showing how all activities can be adjusted to each other, that is, regulated by powerful social groups, in such a way as to further "the interests of all". We can cast the argument in alternative terms, saying that groups have activities, that activities exhibit regularities and require certain conditions for their continuance, and that a part of the regularities and requirements may come to be verbally expressed in rules, demands, preferences and the like which, like all verbal expressions, may be misleading. Anarchist and libertarian activities are not exceptional.

A feature of social life is the tendency of statements of demands and preferences to assume a life of their own, to swell out into ideologies, and one of the tasks of criticism is to deflate these monstrous growths. Illusions about freedom do not enjoy a privileged status, they are not above criticism.

Kenneth Maddox

Originally from From "Red And Black" # 2 Winter 1966

It has almost become an historians' convention to regard the beginnings of modern anarchism as being connected with the activities of Michael Bakunin. I will follow this convention, not because of its correctness but because it saves time. Bakunin's anarchism, which was a late development of his personal history, had numerous sources: chiefly the writings of Proudhon and the libertarian aspects of Marx's work. The movement which he personally did much to arouse was similarly inspired and the early history of nineteenth century anarchism is. mixed up with the early history of the socialist movement in general. It was not until after the entry of Bakunin and his followers into the First International in the 1860's that a distinct anarchist position emerged from the contest, carried on largely within the International, between Bakuninists and Marxists.
The division between the two parties corresponded, roughly, to the division between the Latin and the Germanic sectors of the socialist movement. Leading issues between them illustrate some of the main anarchist points. State-socialists, as they were contemptuously called, and anarchists were agreed in their aim of bringing about freedom, by which they meant the removal of the oppression, the exploitation and the inequalities from the backs of the masses who suffered from them. The Marxist contention was that this call only be done by the "proletariat" capturing State power and establishing a dictator ship of its own. Such a view is the consequence of the Marxist theory that the State is a mere instrument, a tool of the ruling class for the maintenance of its position.

Bakunin is seen at his best in attacking this view: "They say that this State yoke -- the dictatorship -- is a necessary transitional means in order to attain the emancipation of the people: Anarchism or freedom is the goal, the State or dictatorship is the mean. Thus to free the working masses it is first necessary to enslave them." The State, so Bakunin argued, is not a mere instrument but an institution with its own rules of working. It is impossible to capture an institution and force it to go your own way, it has an influence which cannot be nullified by the policies of those working within it. Kropotkin, talking of "sincere Republicans" who want to utilise the organisation that already exists, made the same point: "And for not having understood that you cannot make an historical institution go in any direction you would have it, that it must go its own way, they were swallowed up .by the institution." As for this dictatorship being ."representative and "transitional", Bakunin scornfully rejected this as totally unrealistic. "Thus, from whatever angle we approach the problem, we arrive at the same sorry result: the rule of great masses of people by a small privileged minority. But, the Marxists say, this minority will consist of workers. Yes, indeed, of ex-workers, who, once they become rulers or representatives of the people, cease to be workers and begin to look down upon the toiling masses. From that time on they represent not the people but themselves and their own claims to govern the people. Those who doubt this know precious little about human nature." State-socialism, to Bakunin, was "freedom" imposed on people and this he regarded as a nonsensical contradiction. The history of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia is a thorough verification of his views on Communism. He had foreseen the mutations of a revolution led by an elite, predicting in particular the change from the anti-State character of the revolution in its early spontaneous phase to the conservative, power-seeking nature of the established Soviet government.

As against the political revolution of the Marxists (which virtually amounts to the replacement of one set of rulers by another, together with a change in the slogans of the governing ideology) anarchists advocated a "social revolution" meaning a change from one form of social organisation to another. The difference between a social revolution as seen by anarchists, and any other revolution lies in this: that the social revolutionary objective is not the capturing but the destruction of the State-machinery and, consequently, the elimination of power relationships from society. This follows from the anarchist doctrine that the State signifies not merely the existence of power placed above the subjects but includes a whole set of relationships between members of society. The State on this view is a centralised institution which claims competence to interfere with independent sections of society; it lays down and enforces rules in a number of fields and in this way conducts affairs affecting people--nominally in their interests, in fact, as often as not, against their interests. The continual extension of the areas of State operation, already a feature of nineteenth century Europe, was seen by anarchists as a danger to freedom and consequently as something to be opposed.

Anarchists recognised that even groups which are interested in capturing power for the sake of bringing about freedom, notwithstanding the sincerity of the individuals concerned simply never get past the first objective. Therefore, the problem as it appeared to them, was always one of "how to achieve freedom" and never one of "how to capture power." But the view they held about their prospects was an optimistic one, to say the least. Clearly, there can be no talk of "achieving freedom" until we have dealt with the question of whether social changes of the kind envisaged by the anarchists can be accomplished at all. Already Proudhon saw that there was a problem here for him. After rejecting the notion that governments can bring about social revolutions (governments are by nature conservative and interested in upholding the status quo) he fell back on "society itself" accomplishing the change. "Society itself" meant to Proudhon "the masses when: permeated by intelligence", and he said that the revolution will take place "through the unanimous agreement of the citizens, through the experience of the workmen and through the progress and growth of enlightenment." Later anarchists had a not dissimilar solution to offer: "Revolutionary collectivists," wrote Bakunin, "try to diffuse science and knowledge among the people, so that the various groups of human society, when convinced by propaganda may organise and combine into federations, in accordance with their natural tendencies and their real interests."

Kropotkin's work was almost entirely devoted to proving that man is by nature cooperative and altruistic and that the non-cooperative, aggressive tendencies in people are the result of the authoritarian social environment in which they live. According to him, anarchist propaganda works on these latent cooperative tendencies and, by kindling them, brings about the social revolution- This simple-minded faith in "the natural genius of the people" has survived into our modern world. George Woodcock, a contemporary follower of Kropotkin, in criticising the "pessimism" of Burnham, has this to say: "Where, however, Burnham and many others of his kind differ from Kropotkin and the anarchists is in their pessimistic acceptance of the inevitability of the triumph of the State in its extreme form. The determinism that dominates their idea is, indeed, hardly tenable on any ground of logic or social experience. Nothing is inevitable in society, either managerial revolution or social revolution. Only tendencies can be described and the tendency towards the social revolution is just as much alive today, if less apparent. As that toward the final consummation of the State." 'Woodcock argues that while the State has made enormous progress, the continued existence of society in its present form depends on the cooperation of the workers and therefore the real power lies in. their hands. "The consolidation of the State and the social death that will follow thereon will never be completed if the workers once become aware of their power and kill the State by the paralysis of direct economic action." Behind these theories about the coming of the social revolution lie certain assumptions about the working of society. In the case of Proudhon's naive statement it is easiest to see what is: being assumed: a unanimous agreement among citizens, and the power of education or propaganda to change people's belief's and objectives. Such unanimous agreement is clearly impossible if people are in conflict on various demands, and, equally, the most powerful propaganda is doomed to failure where it goes against vested interests. This obvious truth about society was not completely ignored by anarchists. In criticising Fourier, Bakunin calls it an error to believe that peaceful persuasion? and propaganda will "touch the hearts of the rich to such an extent that the latter would come themselves and lay down the surpluses of their riches at the doors of the phalansteries." It seems even that even the theory of class struggle held by anarchists contradicted their solidarist beliefs. In this vein, Peter Kropotkin talked about two currents of history: "Throughout the history of our civilization, two traditions, two opposed tendencies, have been in conflict: the Roman tradition and the popular tradition, the imperial tradition and the federalist traditions, the authoritarian tradition and the libertarian tradition." So that even anarchists had to admit that solidarity of entire societies is a fiction. However, apart from the rulers who would nor he interested in freedom, there is the large mass of oppressed, the workers, to whom anarchist theory was supposed to apply. But the working class itself displays no solidarity in support of any one cause, and anarchists, to uphold the view that a revolution from below is possible, had to fall back on the quite implausible theory of "real interests'-of underlying, non-apparent solidarity. Thus when Bakunin came to criticise the German socialists he explained the fact that German workers in general have no anarchist leanings by blaming Lassalle and Marx for misleading the German proletariat. This argument is very unconvincing. By the same reasoning it could be made out that Italian or Spanish anarchists were, underneath, "really" Marxists misled by Bakunin's glibness.

Equally unsuccessful are Kropotkin's efforts to show that the co-operative tendencies in workers, or any other tendencies held to be favourable to the spread of anarchy, are more real or more fundamental than those admittedly existing trends which are unfree, or which make for conflict. We could here object to the "psychologising" of social phenomena implied by the talk about tendencies in individuals favoured by Kropotkin. But a more important point about the view that the workers have a "natural tendency" to anarchism or that it is in their "real interests" is that we cannot empirically distinguish natural tendencies from others we could call unnatural. Woodcock's argument is open to the same objection: the tendency towards the social revolution is not apparent because it consists of something the workers are supposed to have but do not in fact have--an interest in the general strike. In a realistic moment Bakunin himself admitted this on talking in detail about the working class. He found that there is a labour aristocracy.of more developed, literate individuals, as well as an unconscious mass of workers. He found that artisans such as, for instance, blacksmiths show signs of revolutionary instincts while others, mainly better paid craftsmen, have distinctly bourgeois ambitions and outlook. Among joiners, printers, tailors, he found, as a consequence of the degree of education and special knowledge required for these trades, more conscious thinking but also more bourgeois smugness; while, to instance a final example, he noted that those who are thoroughly imbued with a revolutionary spirit are in a minority and comprise what he called "a revolutionary vanguard". Observations of this kind, noting the variety of ways and directions in which workers are motivated, contrast sharply with the talk about workers' solidarity favoured by socialists of every kind.

Connected with this solidarist view, which sometimes goes so far as to lead to a description of the free society as one from which all disagreements have vanished, is the view that freedom is something which affects society as a whole. Bakunin takes the line that equality and socialism are necessary conditions of freedom. "The serious realisation of liberty will be impossible so long as the vast majority of the population remains dispossessed in points of elementary need." Accordingly, freedom means "freedom-for-all", and this is all that it means. The question raised by this way of talking is again whether the "serious realisation of liberty" 'is at all possible, whether freedom is something of which we can sensibly ask: is it realisable? It seems that if Bakunin was right we could not explain how the idea of freedom arose at all unless we postulate an original fully socialistic and egalitarian society, a sort of "condition of grace" from which subsequent human societies have fallen. Nor could we understand how the State encroaches on freedom unless we took the most illogical step of regarding it as standing vis-a-vis an already existing free society, attacking it from the outside. It is on this view hard to grasp how anarchists came to support freedom in the first place, and, in fact, we do find them sometimes talking in a way which denies that the attempts to dominate and rule over people arise out of genuine demands for power. When in this mood, anarchists ask us to regard the State as a "distortion", as a "horrible fiction" somehow not of the human world. But anarchists, of all people, cannot deny the unfictitious, matter of fact existence of authority and we find that it was in drawing attention to it that they have over-reached themselves and have put forward a doctrine on which freedom (except in the nebulous future) is impossible. As a consequence of this false theory of freedom anarchists were utopian in their political pronouncements. On their totalistic view of freedom as a state of society yet to come they could not accommodate in their thought those piecemeal activities and social forces struggling against authority which, in practice, they clearly recognised. Liberty is something not found at present, something that will "really" come only in the future: hence the utopian concern with the future of society.

There is a marked internal contradiction in anarchism between the utopian social reformer's outlook and the clear-cut attack on authority which does not invoke the common good. Evidence of this is that no matter how pronounced their escapist preoccupations were anarchist thinkers never freed themselves from ambivalence when talking about the future. They recognised that "to indoctrinate and dictate to the future" is a form of authoritarianism, the more so since the social role of the picture of a happy future, in religion no less than in politics, is to cloak present demands which would not be as readily acceptable without the reference to the rewards of "kingdom come". One gains the impression that anarchists vaguely suspected the true function of utopian thought. In the case of their critique of socialism this is evident: they demonstrated that the socialist Utopia, the use of repressive institutions for the ending of repression, disguises an immediate demand for the leadership of the proletariat as means of gaining power. Anarchists readily pointed out that it is a mistake to think that this sort of thing will lead to freedom. In spite of this, they commit a similar mistake in suggesting the final triumph of forces struggling for freedom. Bakunin's dictum "Liberty is the goal of the historic progress of humanity." fairly obviously involves the erroneous belief that there are special interests in politics--such as the interest in freedom or in gaining power--which can operate to the exclusion of all opposition. The point, expressed differently, amounts to this: Bakunin's claim that history is on the side of anarchism implies that some day some social changes will take place that will have as their effect the elimination of social struggle. This possibility is highly metaphysical and we can safely ignore --both in Marx and Bakunin--the notions of inevitability which they had learnt from Hegel. History is not on the side of the working class, nor is it on the side of the State, Prussian or Oceanian. The analogy with "1984" is apposite even though in its content the anarchist Utopia is the exact reverse of Orwell's "world of victory after victory, triumph after triumph: an endless pressing, pressing, pressing, upon the nerve of power." But it resembles the latter very closely In treating a mythical striving for one-sided success as a possible historical development.

The ambivalence of anarchists comes out, among other instances, in the fact that they did not adhere rigidly to their conception of the State-society as completely unfree, and the State-less society as entirely free. As in the case of its complement, the unitary view of society, there are gaps in this theory forced by the recognition of facts. Kropotkin's two currents of history is expressed in this way: "Between these two currents, always alive, struggling in humanity - the current of the people and the current of the minorities which thirst for political and religious domination - our choice is made." Here is a passage illuminated by a different conception of freedom, as something which is always alive and struggling within society against authoritarian tendencies which are every bit as genuine as what is opposed to them. Anarchism, in this untypical excerpt, is a support of freedom which is one thing alone with other causes that can be supported or opposed. The coming or not coming of the social revolution recedes in importance, since freedom and authority are always struggling, and the chief issue becomes one of immediate opposition to the State. Contradicting a great deal of his utopianism, Bakunin himself, echoing Marx, once said that "to think of the future is criminal." Malatesta, on occasions, also emphasised the anarchist concern with opposing presently existing, established authorities: "How will society be organized? We do not and we cannot know. No doubt, we too have busied ourselves with projects of social reorganization, but we attach to them only a very relative importance. They are bound to be wrong , perhaps entirely fantastic."

It appears that not all anarchist thought was cast in a utopian mould. The statements quoted indicate, I think, an advance in realism. Along this line we can take freedom as a character, not of societies as a whole but of certain groups institutions, and people's ways of life within any society, and even then not as their exclusive character. Equally, on this view, piecemeal freedoms will always meet with opposition and those who are caught up in them will resist conformist pressures. The "permanent protest" implied by this is carried on without the promise of final triumph but in a spirit of "distrusting your masters and distrusting your emancipators", and with no intention of wanting to make the world safe for freedom. This security seeking ideal, or some variant of it, is the aim of the modern socialist movement, but it involves it in trying to capture power for the sake of enforcing its demands on the rest of society, thereby leading to the very authoritarianism that revolutionaries have ostensibly renounced. As against this way of proceeding non-utopian anarchism has to be described as futile. The futility consists not in being a failure at revolutionary politics but in refusing to deal in terms of success or failure; in not attempting to carry out, or even propose, wide, all-embracing policies that bear on the whole of society and are meant to further the final revolution. Only in this way can one hope to avoid that illusory optimism which claims as its victims all those who try to engage mass support of workers, or who try to persuade quantities of people whose interest in anarchy is negligible.

There is considerable agreement between position of permanent protest (such as the one formulated by Max Nomad) and what nineteenth century anarchists had to say. I am thinking especially of their attacks on the State, on the Church and other authoritarian institutions; their criticisms of the security-craving ideals of the bourgeoisie and of the workers who caught it from them; of the domineering relationships which characterise economic life; of the authoritarian ideology of Marxism and of the compromising stand of reformists, etc. But where upholders of permanent protest would part from old-fashioned anarchists is over the contention that in all this there is something that will lead to a social revolution and a rosy, free state of future society. Freedom has always had a hard road to tread, as the biography of any anarchist will amply prove, and nothing that anarchists ever said has succeeded in making the idea of freedom flourishing in safety and security in any way less implausible than it is. But some of the things they have said indicate, as I have tried to show, that the contest between freedom and authority is the permanent order of the day. Doing politics, advancing freedom as a programme for the entire human race, cannot change this; it can only foster illusions about the way society runs.

From Collective Action Notes

The word "ideologie," coined about 1797, to mean simply "the science of ideas," was given a political application when Napoleon referred contemptuously to political idealists and reformers as "ideologues," and in this sense was taken over and expanded by Marx. But, although largely because of Marx, "ideology" and "ideological" are fashionable political words to-day, their current use ignores what was definite and distinctive in Marx's theory of ideologies. At the same time this theory has been largely neglected by commentators on Marxism. (1) It is, therefore, worth recalling Marx's theory and showing how a defensible, general view of ideologies emerges from a critical study of it.

I.

For Marx ideologies arise in the first place in his account of the ruling ideas of each age as being an expression of the material conditions of the ruling class. By extension each class is said to have its appropriate ideology, so that the class struggle is accompanied by a corresponding battle of ideologies. In a well-known passage Marx says: "The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness." (2) This is the ground for such statements on ideology as the following: "If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process." Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology corresponding forms of consciousness, retain the semblance of independence." (3)

So far ideologies, as ideas or sets of ideas dependent on material economic conditions, are merely adjuncts to Marx's theory of historical materialism. (This theory will not be discussed here; it can simply be noted in line with familiar criticism that historical materialism, taken literally, leads to the logical and causal errors of monism, and wrongly tries to reduce to economic factors other equally real factors, such as political, administrative and scientific activities.) If this were all that Marx meant, nothing additional would be conveyed by speaking of "ideologies" instead of "ideas." But what is, according to Marx, distinctive about an ideology, what makes it more than merely a dependent reflection of economic conditions, is that it is essentially an illusory or distorted idea, belief, theory or philosophy, an idea which masquerades as something other than it is. Even when Marx talks in this way, however, we have to distinguish what is just an echo of his historical materialism from what is not. It is commonly not noticed that there is an ambiguity in Marx's references to ideologies as illusions or as disguising their real content. An idea or belief may be illusory or distorted because it involves the general error (according to Marx) of denying historical materialism; i.e., of being taken to be as real as or to have a causal role independent of economic forces (cf. Engels' statement that an ideology is "occupation with thoughts as with independent entities, developing independently and subject only to their own laws", (4). But when Marx refers, for instance, to the aristocratic concepts of honour and loyalty and the bourgeois concepts of freedom and equality as examples of ideology, he is indicating that ideologies, unlike some other ideas, are distorted or subject to illusions in a specific way; they appear to state or advocate certain specific things, when what they are really doing is advocating certain other specific things. It is this kind of illusion that "The German Ideology" emphasises. "...active, conceptive ideologists, who make the perfecting of the illusion of the class about itself their chief source of livelihood." "Each new class which puts itself in the place of the one ruling before it, is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interest as the common interest of all the members of society, put in an ideal form." "Whilst in ordinary life every shopkeeper is very well able to distinguish between what somebody professes to be and what he really is, our historians have not yet won even this trivial insight. They take every epoch at its word and believe that everything it says and imagines about itself is true."

Emphasis has to be placed on this distinction between "ideas" and "ideologies" in order to deal with ambiguities that arise in Marxism about the status of science and the status of proletarian ideas. The two questions come together because of the claim that Marxism itself as "scientific socialism" is both a science. and the expression of proletarian interests and policies.

All science is sometimes implied by Marxists to be ideology, as when they insist on their theory of relative truth. According to this, no view, including the Marxist view itself, has objective or absolute truth; each view (as "superstructure:') is relative to the social conditions prevailing at the time it is presented. There is some dispute about whether Marx at any time meant this to apply to non-social views and hence to natural science: peculiar observations about the dialectics of nature certainly imply that there is bourgeois physics, bourgeois mathematics, and so on, but it has been argued (e.g. by Sidney Hook) that this was a flight of fancy of Engels but not of Marx. Leaving this aside, if we confine ourselves to social science, on the simple superstructure and relative truth view, it would follow that any social theory or science is a class one, so that there would be no distinction in respect of truth between Marxism and other social views; all would be relative and forms of ideology. Despite this, however, Marx spent a good deal of time showing the unscientific or false character of bourgeois views (e.g., economic views) and he was led to make the often-quoted statement: "With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations, a distinction should always be made between the material transformations of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophical-in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out.." (5) The clear implications here that the study of social conditions (as well as natural science) can be precise and correct goes against the simple, ideas=superstructure, view; it is implied that though the study of social conditions will itself have social conditions, unlike ideology, it need not be distorted by those conditions and can discover genuine or objective truths.

The same qualifications of the superstructure model led Marx to treat the ideas or views of the working class as uncooridinate with those of other classes. This contrast he and Engels marked by reserving "ideology" as a derogatory label for the views of the other classes. But we need to notice that in this they differ from Lenin and later Communists, who speak freely of the "proletarian ideology." For example, Lenin (in emphasizing the need for a proletarian vanguard, said: "They fail to understand that an ideologist is worthy of that name only when he marches ahead of the spontaneous movement," and thus used "proletarian ideologists" in a favourable fashion; while in saying: "In a society torn by class contradictions there can be no extra-class or super-class ideology," he also denied what is precisely a key feature of ideologies according to Marx - to purport to speak in the name of all classes. No doubt this is partly just a terminological difference, but even so, Marx's use has more content and is the more defensible, for the use of "ideology" by Lenin and his successors (as well as by our own newspapers and political spokesmen) deprives the word of a specific use by obscuring altogether Marx's contrast between ideological and non-ideological expressions of social views and policies.

II.

Let us, then, insist with Marx on a distinction between ideology and non-ideology. We may, however, still criticise his treatment of proletarian ideas and policies as different in nature from those of the other classes. What is offered as a straightforward statement of the difference, that the ideas of the working class are superstructure which accurately reflect the coming economic structure of society, whereas the ideas of the bourgeoisie are necessarily distorted and ideological reflections, proves difficult to disentangle from the Hegalian metaphysics that remain in Marxism. The distinction between accurate and distorted reflections, along with the associated distinctions between real and illusory and between conscious and unconscious interests or aims is closely connected with Marx's theory of the "contradictions of capitalism" and of the inevitability of socialism. The view is that since the capitalist class is by nature incompatible with impending economic developments, it can have only an illusory consciousness of society, whereas the proletariat by its coming in consciousness in an undistorted way (or even by being that through that through which society is coming to consciousness of itself) is, in fact, accelerating changes that are in its own interests. An example of this type of argument is given by the concept of self-alienation which Marx took over from Hegel. Arguing that private-property and the proletariat are contradictory opposites, Marx says: "The propertied class and the class of the proletariat present the same human self-alienation. But the former finds in this self-alienation its confirmation and its good, its own power: it has in it a semblance of human existence. The class of the Proletariat feels annihilated in its self-alienation: it sees in it its own powerlessness and the reality of an inhuman existence." He goes on to argue that the self-alienation of the proletariat will of necessity be overcome. "Private property drives itself in its economic movement towards its own dissolution, only, however, through a development which does not depend on it, of which it is unconscious and which takes place against its will, through the very nature of things; only inasmuch as it produces the proletariat as proletariat, that misery conscious of its spiritual and physical misery, that dehumanisation conscious of its dehumanisation and, therefore, self-abolishing. The proletariat executes the sentence that private property pronounced on itself by begetting the proletariat." (6) Without taking up finer questions such as whether concepts like self-alienation and self-consciousness have any factual content when applied to classes, it is clear that the distinctions made depend on two assumptions: (i) that society is of necessity changing its economic structure to socialism. and (ii) that the impending structure is the criterion for the reality or unreality of the outlook of a class. But these assumptions stand only if we accept the literal theory of the contradictions of capitalism and thereby make the category mistake of believing that there can be logical contradictions between things. Suppose instead we interpret this theory as referring to a social conflict between equally real forces. It then follows, of course, that if the proletariat wins the bourgeoisie will suffer and vice versa, but there is nothing in this to show that the one class is more, or less, alienated from itself, or subject to illusions about its "real interests," than the other.

If we treat the Marxist view, not as system of necessary truths, but as an empirical account of social situations, we may reformulate Marx's distinction between the outlook of the proletariat and those of the other classes as follows: Ideology has been an essential accompaniment of all previous ruling and revolutionary classes. In the case of slave-owners, feudalists and the bourgeoisie, their professed social and political policies, their legal and ethical theories, philosophies and religions, have all been ideological disguises for social demands in the interests of their class. Without ideology the bourgeoisie, for instance, could not have enlisted sufficient support to overthrow the feudal system or to remain in power. But the working class can succeed in its revolutionary struggle with the ruling capitalist class without disguising its real aims and interests by ideology. It can do this because (perhaps) the existence of so many more proletarians obviates the aid of other classes in obtaining power, and because the economy it aims at will contain no classes to be exploited and so pacified by ideology.

This picture of an end to ideology, however, ignores historical reality. Apart from criticisms of the notion of the classless society, which is itself a piece of consolatory ideology, the prediction that an undivided proletariat will rationally emancipate itself, forgets that the proletariat will require leaders or emancipators who have. or when they capture State power will come to have, special interests and an accompanying ideology of their own. The examples available since Marx's time of successful revolutions made in the name of the proletariat show that there has been an ample, continued occurrence of ideology. Within Communist countries the differentiation of groups according to the power, status and economic advantage they possess has been accompanied (as in persisting capitalist countries) by ideological beliefs which camouflage the favours received by ruling groups at the expense of those who continue to be ruled. That this is an outcome that could have been anticipated is quite clearly indicated in the following unqualified statement by Marx of what happens when one ruling class displaces another:

"Each new class which puts itself in the place of the one ruling before it, is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interest as the common interest of all the members of society, put in an ideal form: it will give its ideas the form of universality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones. The class making a revolution appears from the very start, merely because it is opposed to a class, not as a class but as the representative of the whole of society; it appears as the whole class of society confronting the one ruling class. It can do this because, to start with, its interest really is more connected with the common interest of all other non-ruling classes, because under the pressure of conditions its interest has not yet been able to develop as the particular interest of a particular class. Its victory, therefore, benefits also many individuals of the other classes who are not winning a dominant position, but only in so far as it now puts these individuals in a position to raise themselves into the ruling class. When the French bourgeoisie overthrew the power of the aristocracy, it thereby made it possible for many proletarians to raise themselves above the proletariat, but only in so far as they became bourgeois." ("The German Ideology.")

But Marx forgot all this when he came to talk about the proletarian revolution, with the ironical result that his own writings have provided the vocabulary and concepts for the ideology of a new ruling class of managers and State officials. For the same reason, Lenin was, after all, right, but unwittingly, when he spoke of the "proletarian ideology."

111.

In reconstructing Marx's theory, we need first to meet a charge that is sometimes made against the entire account of ideologies, viz., that it is really an elaborate argumentum ad hominum, since it replaces considered discussion of views and policies by an attack on motives. H.B. Action, for instance, cautiously suggests this when he says: "The unmasking of ideologies , in the sense of showing the class interests that prompt them, is only in place when the belief that is thus unmasked has already been shown to be false. Thus, quite apart from questions of good manners that may differ form place to place and time to time, no controversalist is entitled to refer to his opponent's motives unless the arguments that his opponent has used have been shown by argument to be untenable." This is a salutory comment on the logic of Marxists themselves, many of whom regularly evade issues by confusing appeals to motives or class origins with criticisms of beliefs. Nevertheless, it is easy enough to distinguish logical criticism from social theory, and we have to stress what Acton does not stress, that as an independent contribution to social theory the study of ideologies is precisely the study of the motives, or rather the social reasons, for the presentation of certain views. Not all studies of the man are argumenta ad hominem; we may criticise beliefs, but we may also independently study the motives men have for their beliefs (Acton obscures this and appears to think our main or only interest is in argument when he speaks of our being entitled to refer to motives only under special conditions). These are two distinct procedures, both of which are, in fact, employed when we class beliefs as "ideologies." On the one hand (though this has not been the aim of this paper), we can present philosophical criticisms of the beliefs themselves; to mention obvious candidates, it has often been argued by realistic thinkers that the key doctrines of religion, traditional ethics and political philosophy, along with those of dialectical materialism, are (apart from having various inconsistent formulations) taken at their face value, false or, more pointedly, logically absurd. On the other hand, as students of society we may study the social origins and functions of ideological beliefs and try to solve the problem of why they are so widespread and politically influential.

What we can disentangle from Marx's account of class beliefs, particularly of bourgeois beliefs, is a theory of ideology which can be generalised to take in far more than "class" beliefs. For it is to be stressed that Marx's rigid class categories (limited as they are to economic divisions) do not do justice to the variety of social conflicts, even if a new class of bureaucrats and managers is added to them. There are important variations amongst "the bourgeoisie" and "the working class," as well as amongst "bureaucrats," or, what comes to the same thing, there are in society many groups and organisations (along with different groups, different and competing forms of activity, within these) which cut across the class categories. As a result, we have to speak guardedly of class ideologies and recognise the much more ramified role of ideology in society. We have to recognise that as well as such broad ideologies as national, class and religious ideologies, there are many other sets of beliefs whose content and social function is ideological. There is, for example, a distinctive trade union ideology, a distinctive academic ideology; industrial experts, lawyers and army officers, for that matter, real estate agents and sporting officials, usually have a special ideology of their own; and moreover, in the case of all of these, as well as the ideology, i.e., the typical or prevailing one, there may also be competing or minority ideologies. There are, of course, differences in the conceptual richness or poverty of these ideologies: and the more special ideologies are usually derivatives in the sense that their main concepts are usually borrowed from well-established ideologies, but they are separate ideologies because (to anticipate following discussion) what it is that they distort or rationalise depends on the particular type of social organisation with which they are connected. (Naturally, these various ideologies cannot be discussed or even illustrated in the present brief paper; doing so is really what the major part of libertarian day-to-day criticism consists in.)

The views or beliefs Marx labeled "bourgeois ideology and all other ideological views have this in common: taken literally, they appear to discuss, justify or advocate certain things, but the disguised, unconscious, social function they really have is that of advancing specific but unmentioned social interests (and of obstructing other specific but unmentioned social interests). They are "disguised" because they contrast with undisguised formulations; i.e., ones which explicitly and unambiguously indicate what interests are being advanced and why; they are "unconscious" because the persons who believe them are unaware of their disguised, actual function. This is the type of process which Marx illustrated many times; for example, when he refers to the inappropriate Roman terms in which the French Revolutionaries thought of themselves: "Camille Desmoulins, Danton, Robespierre. Saint-Just, Napoleon, the heroes as well as the parties and the masses of the old French Revolution, performed the task of their time in Roman costume and with Roman phrases, the task of unchaining and setting up modern bourgeois society" (7) ; when in discussing the 1848 Revolution he speaks of replacing "the inscription: 'Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite' by the unambiguous words: 'Infantry, Cavalry, Artillery' or when he refers to religion as "the opium of the people," i.e., as an opiate to compensate people for their frustrations (8), and speaks of "dissolving the religious world and revealing its secular foundations" and of the earthly family as "the secret of the holy family." (9) As Engels summed it up (though with an ambiguous first sentence) "Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously, it is true, but with a false consciousness. The real motive forces impelling him remain unknown to him; otherwise it simply would not be an ideological process." (10)

There is thus a close parallel between Marx's account of ideology and the psychological explanations introduced by Freud. Marx draws attention to the operation in the social sphere of mechanisms similar to such Freudian ones as unconscious motivation, rationalisation, substitution and displacement. According to Freud, for instance, the motive for a line of action may be rationalised , i.e. the real but unacceptable reason replaced by a spurious reason or a repressed wish, blocked in one direction, may receive a disguised outlet in a different direction. Equally, according to Marx, a social group, like the French bourgeoisie of 1848, may rationalise the motives for its use of coercion, or, like frustrated members of a religious sect, may find in comforting beliefs a substitute way of gratifying its social wishes. In the case of ideology, of course, concepts and beliefs, as distinct from neurotic symptoms and dream formations, are the outcome of the distorting processes. But it is useful to illustrate ideological concept formation by a further Freudian analogy. Parallel to the Freudian account of dream-work and of the distinction between the manifest and latent contents of a dream, we have, as it were, a type of social fantasy or dream-work which results in a manifest content of ideological concepts, subject to the complexities of secondary elaboration, so that they emerge as political ideals, moral fiats, religious beliefs, conceptions of the common interest of society, and so on. But the latent content, the interpretation, of this ideological work, what helps to stimulate it and what it socially satisfies (though in an inadequate way) are down to earth demands or wishes that arise under the pressures of social existence. (The part of Freud's work closest to that of Marx, and the best detailed study of a particular ideology, is his study of religion, "The Future of an Illusion.")

It is to be emphasised that the formation of ideological concepts and beliefs, influenced by tradition and past ideas and emerging in response to particular social tensions, is an unconscious and usually a slow process. For Marx's references to the disguised or distorted character of ideologies have often been wrongly construed as claim that cynical, unscrupulous manipulation rules in politics and elsewhere, that it is just a matter of captains of industry, politicians, bureaucrats, pressure groups, and so on, deliberately setting out to provide suitable propaganda for the gullible masses. No doubt calculated propaganda, along with deliberate trickery, political and conscious careerism, and so on, are inseparable from political and related activities, but this is far from accounting for the role of ideology. Deliberate political propaganda, for instance, like advertising, can proceed by repetition, distortion, omission and straight forward lies, but its success on any large scale requires: (a) the existence of propagandists captured by the views they are presenting, caught up in the social activities out of which the views arise (cf. the characteristic rationalisations of most journalists and political party workers) and (b) an appeal to particular demands or frustrations arising out of existing social circumstances (in Aldous Huxley's words: "The propagandist is man who canalises an already existing stream. In a land where there is no water he digs in vain"). For example, when Hitler in Mein Kampf suggested that with a propaganda campaign on sufficiently large scale the mass of the people can be made to believe anything, he wrongly assumed that propagandists are exempt from ideology and can intervene in society as they please; but, in fact, the later success of his own propaganda depended on the presence of a Nazi Party whose members by no means saw through the views they expressed, and on an appeal to existing social forces receptive to an ideology of nationalism and antisemitism.

The picture of machiavellian power-seekers and of their manipulation of ideology is thus too simple; it over-estimates the role of conscious decisions by individual persons and neglects the fact that ideologies, whether of a widespread or a special kind, arise in the course of social activities and capture members of dominant groups no less than those who are dominated. Ideologies help to disarm potential opponents by obscuring and compensating for their social frustrations, but they also help groups which seek to impose their policies on others to rationalise their possession of, or search for, power and privilege, and to impart strength and enthusiasm to their own ranks.

The position which has been presented is that the views, both of the broadest kind associated with groups seeking to assert themselves in society at large and of the more special kind expressed by groups seeking to implement their policies within particular organisations are commonly ideological. The open expression of particular wants and demands and of the fact that there are opposed wants and demands is inhibited, and is replaced by distorted, and often conceptually elaborate, expressions of the same think. This process, as has been stressed, arises out of the pressures and conflicts of social life and is largely an unconscious one, affecting members of groups which profit from an ideology as much as those who are diverted and pacified by it. For this reason it is a misunderstanding of the nature of ideologies to dismiss them as unimportant epiphenomena of "real historical forces." They do not have the role their believers take them to have, but they are quite real and powerful historical factors. (When an Oxford professor, J. Plamenatz insists that, "common notions of justice, honour and dignity" will not disappear from politics, we can agree with him, but not for the reason he would give.) Put differently, ideologies are the currency with which socio-political transactions are, in fact, conducted, and as such they influence and limit the transactions which occur. While one consequence of this is that groups in a position to exercise power are limited or hampered by their own ideology, it also follows that groups which resist developing an appropriate ideology can expect to have little impact on society or on particular organisations, To take what might be imagined to be a negative instance, the growth of scientific inquiry has been accompanied by an alteration but not a dimunation of ideology in society, and the inquirers themselves rarely escape ideology when their subject matter is social or when they come to express their own social demands. All the more utopian, then, are those realistic enough to see through many current ideologies and yet, like some modern anarchists, believe that they have a programme for the future which can not only be achieved but can be achieved in a rational non-ideological way. They fail to realise that a social revolution of the kind they envisage always has required, and still requires, a movement which disseminates and is captured by a new ideology; or put the other way, they fail to realise that it one thing to see through ideologies, to know their symptoms and origins and to struggle against them, but quite another thing to cure society of them.

NOTES

1. A brief but illumination account is found in Max Eastman's "Marx, Lenin and the Science of Revolution," repeated in his "Marxism: Is it a Science?" A more recent, more detailed account is given in H.B., Action's "The Illusions of the Epoch," which is scholarly but shows less insight into social realities.
2. "A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy," Preface.
3. Marx and Engels, "The German Ideology"
4. "L. Feuerbach," Part IV
5. "A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy," Preface, my emphasis
6. Marx and Engels, "The Holy Family."
7. "The 18^th Brumiere of Louis Bonaparte."
8. Early article
9. "Theses on Feuerbach"
10. Letter to Mehring, July, 1893

From Collective Action Notes. Originally from "The Libertarian" (Australia, Libertarian Society of Sydney University) # 2, September 1958