NEGATIVITY OF ANARCHISM Engels, suitably glossed. became doctrinal truth: first of all in the German Social Democracy and American DeLeonism and then in Leninism and its derivatives. 'Orthodoxy,' 'deviation,' 'revisionism,' and the remainder of a vocabulary of rigidlfled theology-like system, enforced by a centralized party, signal the transition. This last stage of Marxism, these systems of truth, are fully ideological in the sense of the definition above. (That the Marxisms which have a share of the worldhistorical scene are aprioristic belief-systems resting on definitive foundations is widely recognized for the Leninist instances. If it is less usual to regard Leninism as justifying and mystifying on behalf of a dominant social group, this is in part because, from a, bourgeois standpoint, itself ideological, it seems like a proseletyzing faith. I see its primary function as justification of the rule of the leadership of a party over its members, of the rule, present or future, of a party over society; and as mystification of the people. Leninist Marxism turns out therefore to be an ideology of state-dominion that merges with -appropriates of perhaps is appropriated byideologies of nationalism. Social democracy, of course, has found accommodation with capitalist ideology.) Anarchism, by contrast, while not free of ideological tendency, has never been dominated or delimited by the theories of its philosophical and scientific proponents. Those anarchists who have advocated doctrinal unification have usually affiliated eventually with Marxist parties, as have advocates (the same persons most often) of party-like organizations intended to lead and direct popular movements of social revolution. The anarchist belief is fundamental that no person, no theory, no historical process, stands higher than oneself, and that life does not yield primacy to thought abstracted from it. The most significant legacy from the past therefore is certain values and (especially) principles, the lives, and often the deaths, of exemplary and heroic persons, and cautionary experiences. Resolve and action, knowledge of one's desires and goals, is what matters: which is to say that Marxist accusations of voluntarism do not malign anarchism. Mannheim's classification of anarchism as utopian rather than ideological -because it seeks to sunder and not to sustain the social present- has much to recommend it but is still not accurate and is prejudicial moreover in that 'utopian' (as much as 'ideological') was for Mannheim a term of contrast to the realistic methods of liberal social-scientific meliorism. 27
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