NEGATIVITY OF ANARCHISM the web of social dominion and is appropriately the focus of anarchist critique. Anarchism is anti-political, therefore, in a comprehensive sense for which electoral and parliamentary abstentionism is a fitting symbol. The relationship between the anarchist «idea» and my definition of ideology is by now obvious: a relationship justified by the aptness of the anarchist perspective for assessment of the exploitation of ideas by power and the ideologizing of ideas, a project to which Marxism contributes mightily but which its own commitment to power betrays. For the state itself, traditional political philosophy, above all in the epoch of the nation-state, has provided consistent ideological support. Anarchism then is the social and political philosophy that proposes the eradicating of all divisions between (political) haves and have-nots, the dissolving rather than the redistributing of power; and the abolishing of identities of ruler and subject, leader and led, learned and ignorant, superior and inferior, master and servant, human and inhuman. If the anarchist ideal were realized, all persons in their unique individuality would be related to each other in multiple non-stratified societies of voluntary (freely chosen) association. Today, individuality signifies. almost invariably, membership in an elite class or caste, opposite a mass, and depends on (is given definition by) that membership; such individuality is not authentic because not properly individual. What is presently thought of as socialization is a stabilized, preferably frictionless politics to which the subordinate assent. The aim of anarchism is universal and genuine individuality and complete socialization, their antithesis overcome by, precisely, the elimination of constraining and distorting contexts of power. Then all persons would be political equals, not in the sense of equality of power (for anarchism negates social power) or necessarily of goods but in the sense that no one, no group, and no institution would rule, control, decide for or dominate another. There would be society, but no polity. Individuality (uniqueness) and the socialization of human existence, so reconceived, can be identified as basic values of anarchism, values in turn describable as social freedom. Justice wlll no longer be defined in terms of distribution, or of rights that presuppose sovereignty, certainly not by lawfulness. If slavery be taken as metaphor for domination, applicable literally or nearly so to many of its forms, justice and ,injustice of institutions can be defined in terms of «slaven: so that an 31
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