This article was written by Episkipos Cain
“Anarchism is Order”
- popular Anarchist saying, often attributed to Mikhail Bakunin
“We simply do not consider it desirable that a realm of justice and harmony should be established on earth”
- Nietzsche, “The Gay Science”
“A state of extreme confusion and disorder”
- The Princeton Dictionary definition of “Chaos”
I’ve been meaning to write this for a long time. On and off for about 4 years, to be perfectly honest. Sometimes I decided it was unnecessary, at other times I didn’t necessarily feel like writing it very much, but now I have both the opportunity and motivation, so I’ve finally done it.
==========================
One of the things which has often caused a good degree of mirth, if some confusion in me, is why so many Discordians consider themselves Anarchists. As the first definition above suggests, Anarchism is based on the idea of spontaneous and natural, yet lasting order. That, if certain impediments to this vision of social organisation were removed, that we could all live in relative peace and harmony with each other.
This has always sounded somewhat suspicious to me, both as a general political sceptic and a Discordian. It doesn’t sound like the kind of comment one would expect to come from people who insist that disagreement, discord, chaos and strife are just as valid and important as order, harmony and cooperation.
The basis of anarchist political and economic thought can be found in the 18th century, and especially in the doctrine of laissez-faire conceived of by Adam Smith, and developed by others. Essentially and very shortened, the argument is that without state control, the individual will act in ways which not only benefit themselves, but community interests as a whole. This is the idea of the harmony of interests, and it is from this much, though not all, anarchist theory stems. In fact, according to Smith, someone doesn’t even need to try and act in the public interest, because his private interest will naturally lead him that way, “as if guided by an invisible hand”.
Now as a factual argument, this had some validity when applied to the 18th century economic structure. However, as society changed with the industrial revolution, so did the social structure and economic systems of production. As such, while the doctrine of the harmony of interests continued, despite a dubious relevance, its new role was to act as a legitimizing tool for dominant group interests, whereby they could identify their interests with those of society as a whole.
An unspoken pillar of the success of laissez-faire was, at the time, that of expanding and new markets. Because of new markets, producers did not compete too strongly in currently existing ones with entrenched companies or individuals, allowing a semblance of harmony to exist. It’s the same sort of harmony that exists when one has very few road users. As the traffic increases, so does the complexity of the system and the possibility of conflict, or at the very least, non-zero sum relationships between road users. The same is true of markets.
However, as we all know, infinitely expanding markets are simply untenable, if not logically impossible. The question of conflict can only be put off for so long.
Somewhat ironically, this adoption of harmony of interest undermines certain Anarchist arguments, since it is possible that the existence state is not opposed to the citizenry, at least theoretically. Running with that, many European liberals and free-marketers that had no problems with the state put forward the opinion that the good of each individual state did not necessarily impact negatively on other states, and that pursuit of self-gratification would benefit the international community as a whole. So would free trade, naturally.
Building on this, 19th century liberals, such as Mazzini, the Italian reformer, argued that nationalism also did not impact negatively on any other nation, and that every nation was suited to a certain part of the division of international labour. At the time, with the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Prussian militarists and the Russian Empire keeping an effective lock-down on the various ethnic groups of Eastern Europe, that certainly seemed true, however anyone who knows the history of conflict in the region knows how short-sighted that viewpoint really is, and how many groups have competing claims on the same patches of land, claims that are now entirely exclusionary thanks to xenophobic nationalism.
As nationalistic claims became more insistent and pronounced certain economists in second-tier economies, like the United States and Germany, began to point out how free trade disproportionately benefitted the major trading power of the time, the United Kingdom. Marxist theories, which denied the harmony of interest and placed class-conflict at the centre of its analysis, were also becoming more popular on the Continent. Laissez-faire came under unprecedented attack, and it was only the appropriation of the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin which helped save them.
Naturally, Darwin himself cannot be blamed for the poor importation of his scientific theories into a pseudoscientific area of study. As smaller companies were put out of business by larger competitors and as new markets shrunk, it was claimed by those who benefitted from these actions that this too was evolution – and as such benefitted the community at large. But of course, there is not a direct match between this vulgar Social Darwinism and the doctrine of the harmony of interests, and so it was the latter who underwent a subtle change. Now the good of the community was redefined as to mean that the community was made up of those who were strong enough to succeed, and those who failed were weaklings, who were holding back society at large. They were the price which had to be paid for progress.
Of course, this Social Darwinism quickly found currency in justifying territorial expansion and conquest by the major world powers, by claiming war as a form of “natural selection” which weeded out the weak nations and races of people. As with weak individuals, so were the weak nations sacrificed for the greater good and harmony of the world at large. And although this laissez-faire liberalism became less popular in the domestic sphere as WWI drew closer, it still remained a very real factor of international politics up until the war.
All of this is a nice history lesson, but you are probably wondering exactly how this impacts on Anarchist arguments, since they deliberately disavow the state, a factor they would most certainly claim separates them from the unfortunate side effects and decay of classical liberalism. The purpose of this was to show that one of the main foundations of Anarchist thought – that we can all get along, productively and without conflict – when actually tried in reality only works when those too weak to fight back or protest effectively are ignored and sacrificed for a nebulous greater good. The claim that conflict can be overcome generally and that everyone can benefit from a single system generally is a lie, and that lie can only ever be enforced through military might.
Anarchism, for all its vaunted “individualism” and talk of freedom, at its core cannot tolerate real difference. It cannot accept actors who do not act in a “rational” manner and do not have aims which coincide with everyone else’s aims. And when people are confronted with those who won’t conform, especially to an ideological system like Anarchism, violence is almost always the response of choice. Equally, those who suffer because of the system are cruelly discarded with contemptuous statements about their lack of “fitness” and utility.
Indeed some of these trends seem to have been picked up on by the “National-Anarchists”, Anarchists coming from an extreme right wing point of view, who denounce the state and everything it does as against the “Natural Order” – a list that also includes multiculturalism, feminism and homosexuality.
As I cannot stress enough, when one “naturalizes” certain attitudes, trends or ideas, and combines the idea of “natural” with “good”, the results are not very pretty. It causes the sort of mentality one frequently finds among fanatics and fundamentalists – because it is precisely the same mentality, only religious bigots replace “natural order” with “natural law” ie; God’s Law. Naturalizing anti-statism and spontaneous order has some very serious implications, ones which I don’t think many Anarchists have clearly thought through.
Now, to clarify, this isn’t a “pro-state” argument, though it will almost certainly be construed and portrayed as such by some people. The state/anti-statist dualism is about as clever, and useful, as calling all Americans on the left “Democrats” and on the right “Republicans”. States have good and bad things about them. So does anti-statism. Treating it as some sort of Manichean struggle between good and evil is another reason why I suspect latent fanaticism and dogmatism in much of the Anarchist movement, because it is incapable of seeing the world in any other way than black and white, where you are either for whichever minor political sect they are a member of, or The Enemy.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, are among the reasons I consider Anarchism…well not exactly incompatible with Discordianism, since conceivably any political position could be taken by a Discordian (though their sincerity and motives for doing so would be quite different to many of their compatriots), but why I find it an unusual choice. This emphasis on harmony and order and naturalism…it has some very sinister undertones when one thinks about them, ones which are not necessarily in agreement with adherents of chaos and disorder.
on 
on