DAVID T. WIECK oppression of their comrades anarchism gives voice; the purpose of anarchism is to serve as a means for putting end to those oppressions. Just how far one can grasp the meaning of life-conditions that are not one's own -a question raised vigorously by blacks and by women- I am not sure. (I have experienced oppressions but not as a permanent condition to which society and circumstance have condemned me; in the family of mankind I have been a middle-privileged person at least.) However that may be, I am convinced that anarchism can become meaningful only if one has a concrete sense of the «social reality,> -I am afraid I do not know a better termout of which it arises, and I hope that I have kept this reality, namely the human meaning of oppression, in constant view. The Anarchist Idea To A PRELIMINARY conception of anarchism and of what I mean by a common basis, comparison and contrast of the role of «ideas» and «ideology» in the history of socialism and anarchism will provide a way of approach, less circuitous than may at first appear. Anarchism is usually called an ideology, and in some senses of a term that everyone defines at will, this characterization would be correct if not very informative. I prefer to define ideology, in the spirit of Marx and Mannheim, as an aprioristic and rationalized belief-system that serves to justify, and to mystify on behalf of, the dominance and power of some social group or some institutional complex. (This definition is meant to comprehend trascendental ideologies, i.e., theologies, as well as social ideologies.) Although I believe it to have broader theoretical utility, the reader is free to regard this definition, which will have a thematic function in my discussion, as a means of making distinctions useful in clarifying the status of anarchism. Socialism before Marx expressed an incompletely determinate but by no means abstract ideal, roughly describable as abolition of bourgeois property, economic exploitation, and class division, vindication of the dignity of labor, and institution of production for use. Philosophically and by social science, Marx tried to create for socialism a theory of method and a justification for its goals. Subsequently, in the historically important variants of socialism, «Marxist theory,» or perhaps more exactly the philosophy and methodology of 26
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