NEGATIVITY OF ANARCHISM state has withered at last, in which the economic form of communism would be the sociological realization of the ethical. Of anarchy one might say instead that ethics had resolved itself into new human being, a metaphor that would signify that faith and trust of persons toward persons, rather than contingent modes of cooperation, would be the vital center. Put otherwise: nothing secures an anarchist society, whether of large extent or of commune-size or consisting of just two persons, except continuous realization of the human potentiality for free agreement and disagreement, always in recognition of the personhood of the other. If anarchism does not remain clear to the last of the institutional thinking that Marxists call materialist, it must finally become incoherent and the individualism (or personalism) that, twinned with the corresponding version of sociality, is the soul of anarchism, would be threatened with extinction. In a society of hierarchies - of discriminations against classes or castes and condemnation of various large numbers of persons to particular kinds of limited existence to others' advantage - coercive Institutional machinery is everything and its guarantee and enforcement by state-power is of the social essence. If we think of voluntary action, choice, decision, autonomy, as central to the meaning of being human - as the main philosophical traditions assert - then anarchism can be understood as seeking to dissolve those institutions of power that make life-decisions for us, that offer to substitute themselves for our freedom and relieve us of burdens of responsibility, and do so whenever they successfully coerce us to accord our will to their demands. Then, anarchism is expressive of a will to restore, and/or create, personhood and human being; whereas in surrendering to or exercising dominion one substitutes for oneself an institutional definition, an institutional being, one ceases to be oneself. It will be plain, I think, given these premises, that by voluntary surrender of freedom, by submission to a protectorate such as the Hobbesian state ls claimed to be, one yields far more than the exercise of certain liberties. Anarchism as Negative IT MAY NOW be clear why a name (an-archist) negative by etymology is appropriate to the import of anarchism. This appropriateness can be Illustrated with respect to a familiar species of power, that of racial oppression. If the thoroughgoing negation of racial oppression is, as one might 43
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