NEGATIVITY OF ANARCHISM Tolstoyan tradition, pacifism has been an important minoritarian tendency. Whether evolutionary or non-violently revolutionary, pacifist anarchism asserts that violence is even clearer negation of human being than is power, is perhaps even the genus of power, and introduces into anarchism a concept of love much stronger than the « fraternity> of the main tradition - universal, because unlike fraternity not restricted to solidarity of the oppressed - and tends thereby to transform the concept of the individual and the concept of freedom. Love will then be the ultimate positive concept, opposite to violence. I think that one can sav that an anarchist, of whatever specific persuasion, who does not feel (more than think) such love and non-violence as ultimate values has not fully experienced the meaning of anarchism, although love and non-violence are not easily lived in the midst of the oppression and suffering of others. In a sense, therefore, the motion of anarchism toward a full ethics of love, although a motion Intrinsic to the Idea, remains to be realized, and may be realizable only in transition to anarchist society. (c. Utilitarianism and Anarchism) In certain anarchist theories, It should be noted, one finds instead of appeal to principle, essentially utilitarian arguments against the state, based on historical and scientific studies, that would have no more than analogical presumption of applicability to other power-relationships. The contentions of Kropotkin and Rocker, that the arts and sciences, peace, evolutionary progress, would be favored by abolition of the nationstate suggest that the question of political decentralization, anti-statism in a narrow sense, may be distinct and separable from other questions of power, and such writers have tended to be somewhat less forceful in their critique of other forms of power. (Both Kropotkin in 1914 and Rocker in 1939 found it possible to support the Allied governments at war.) Bookchin's ecological justification of anarchism Is kindred in method although he is rather more sensitive to other issues. With respect to anarchist movements and their ethos, however, I do not see such speculation as foundational, and I would agree with Malatesta, whose explicit voluntarism may have expressed most nearly the spirit of the historical movement and the anarchist idea, that Kropotkin would have been an anarchist even if his biological and historical theories had been refuted. If so, the utilitarian and historical arguments 41
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