by Sari Krosinsky
Daily Lobo Columnist
By popular demand, I bring you the shortest class you'll have this semester: Anarchism 101, introduction to anarchist thought in 700 words or less.
I'll warn you that you shouldn't bother to take this as a definitive course, for two reasons. 1. There are as many kinds of anarchism as there are anarchists, to a power of three. 2. Any complex ideology compressed into the space of the average newspaper article is bound to leave a great deal out.
With that in mind, what follows is a composite of my own perceptions of anarchism, which will hopefully be as good a place to start as any.
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It's pretty difficult to pin down a unifying definition of anarchism. But if one must, I'd go with this:
Anarchists oppose hierarchy in all forms.
The most common application of the theory is in opposition to government, whether it invokes the hierarchy of a monarch over a whole populace or the hierarchy of the majority over minority. Anarchism also applies to social hierarchies like racism and sexism, as well as economic hierarchies between classes.
A reason frequently given for this opposition to hierarchy is that all people should have liberty and the freedom to pursue their own creativity to its fullest potential, and hierarchy impedes this freedom. Taking art as an example - a government might censor art, economic necessity may force some people to forgo art in the pursuit of survival, and prejudice might limit access for certain artists to display their art. Such things not only may but have happened, even in such illustrious-yet-still-hierarchal democracies as our own.
Since even webster.com associates anarchists with violence, I guess I'd better address that, too.
There really is such a thing as a pacifist anarchist. Violence is not inherently connected with anarchism, and some even consider the two concepts to be incompatible.
Of course, there are anarchists that aren't opposed to using violence, and there have even been those who have used it. When dealing with governments that use their military against citizens engaged in nonviolent protests or companies that hire security to fire on unarmed strikers, some might consider violent means to be the only affective way to fight back.
There is as much contention among anarchists about the use of violence as there is among Americans about the war with Afghanistan. So violence is as appropriately incorporated in the definition of the word "anarchist" as it is in the definition of the term "U.S. citizen."
But let's get off what anarchism is not and back to what it is. Opposition to hierarchy - contrary to popular misconception - doesn't necessarily mean opposition to organization.
It is the question of how best to organize society that defines most of the divisions in anarchist thought. I'd place most strains of the ideology into two broad subdivisions: social anarchism and individualist anarchism.
Social anarchism is generally based on the idea that people working together in community can help expand the creative potential of each member of that community beyond what each person could do alone. There are a variety of ways proposed for implementing this vision, including the anarcho-syndicalist emphasis on organizing community through the workplace, neighborhood-based communities, regional networks of communities, etc.
Whatever the basis of a community, the first requirement is that membership be voluntary - unlike citizenship, which is most often a matter of the accidents of birth. In addition, most social anarchists support the consensus process as the primary means of decision-making. Other methods have also been proposed and used, generally with the restriction that all members of a community be a direct part of the process.
Individualist anarchism is, well, pretty self-explanatory. I'm not as well-read in this area, but I'll use Benjamin Tucker - a turn of the century individualist anarchist - as a reasonably representative example. He proposed a system in which people could set the boundaries and responsibilities for each relationship by making a contract between each individual in that relationship, rather than setting rules for a community as a whole.
Such a system could apply to both work and personal relationships. For example, Tucker even had a contract - or rather several, since they revised the agreement at need - with his daughter. The thrust of this idea, as far as I can gather, is to allow people to direct their own lives to the greatest extent possible, and to treat each relationship on an individual basis.
Personally, I think there's enough room in the world for us all to organize our lives as we see fit.
Send comments or queries for further reading suggestions to Sari Krosinsky at michal_kro@hotmail.com.
