Interrogations - anno II - n. 5 - dicembre 1975

DAVID T. WIECK d11'1'erencein sociological and psychological judgment, disguised by semantics of 'organization' and 'association,' as to conditions under which the individual is lost and power emerges. No fundamental questions of ethics seem implicated. The other area, deeply problematic, is that of pacifism, violence, and revolution. The main anarchist tradition has been revolutionary in a sense that endorses violence as a means of resisting and destroying the apparatus of force and violence by which power is maintained. (That the free society should be non-violent is agreed.) Within the framework of anarchist principle, it can be argued reasonably that violence against an oppressor who maintains his position by violence is not itself an act of oppression since one does not seek to (and will not) enslave or bring into subjection that person. The violenceaffirming or violence-condoning tendency would seem to be asserting that negation of master/servant («slave~) relationships takes priority over the claims to respect for life of those who insist on being masters and, by violence, direct or indirect, make that insistence good. Unfortunately, major social oppression defends itself usually by hired or conscript instruments - and, when defeated, by foreign armies. All these persons are oppressors in their instrumental roles, and subject to seduction and corruption by those roles, yet many in their own way are victims. Here the anarchist who accepts violence is beyond clear guidance of principle. (Even in its terrorist phases, however, anarchist violence has almost always been directed expressly and scrupulously against principals or executives of political and economic oppression, so that, by comparison with the anticivilian terror-warfare of governments, or nationalist guerrilla warfare, or routine police terrorism in countless nations, to say nothing of the savage reprisal taken upon defeated working classes all through history, anarchist terrorism is ridiculously misnamed. Prevalence of an ethics of principle, rather ~han a utilitarianism that lends itself to self-deception, may be a major ground for this (self-) control; while the centering of principle in power-negation rules out the taking of hostages or other instrumental treatments of persons that are the usual transition from resistance to militarized warfare. The breakdown of anarchist principle in the Spanish anarcho-syndicalist movement, especially during the civil war and revolution, is a large and complex topic into which I cannot enter here.) In twentieth century anarchism, not merely within the 40

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