An Invitation To Anarchy
By Peter Goodchild
08 April, 2012
Countercurrents.org
Historically democracy has often been combined with capitalism. Perhaps in the eighteenth century a combination of that sort seemed reasonable, but it has become far less so. Capitalism, by its very essence, means that each corporation is dedicated to its own success, no matter what the consequences may be for anyone else. "Free enterprise" is "healthy competition," yes, but only to a certain point.
The problem is that the big fish keep eating the smaller fish. When there is only one fish left, there is no more competition, healthy or otherwise. What is now in place, globally, is not free enterprise but thinly disguised monopolies or oligopolies. If there are only five or six corporations controlling an entire industry, and if those corporations indulge in frequent joint ventures, then it is absurd to be talking of free enterprise. And when monopoly casts its shadow over the land, the worker loses both economic and political freedom.
Five Disasters
As the twenty-first century progresses, urbanization will increase, and most people will live in about 20 or 30 mega-cities, although the very rich will live in fortresses with armed guards (Martin and Schumann, 1997). The world will then succumb to the following five disasters, which have already started:
(1) In much of Africa and Asia, water shortages and famine will kill enormous numbers of people. Fresh water will come to be regarded, rightly, as a precious mineral. Massive airlifts of food will make little difference, and the richer nations will abandon those countries to their fate.
(2) "Oil wars" will devastate the Middle East, Central Asia, the Balkans, Latin America, and Africa as the great powers try to control the oil-producing regions and the pipelines.
(3) In other parts of the world, also, war will be incessant, but its nature will change. Such conflicts will be, not so much between nations, but rather between ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups (Kaplan, 2001). Police will be indistinguishable from armies, armies will be indistinguishable from street gangs. Nuclear weapons may be replaced by even more terrible chemical and biological weapons.
(4) As multinational companies become more powerful than conventional governments, most inhabitants of the highly-developed countries will face, not exactly unemployment, but rather underemployment: a lifetime of low-wage temporary jobs. In other countries, large numbers of people will be reduced to begging, scavenging, prostitution, or stealing.
(5) Because vast amounts of money have been chasing imaginary enterprises, the global stock market and capital market will collapse. With no tangible underpinning, the financial world will not recover. The disintegration is already well on its way, starting at the periphery and working toward the center (Soros, 1998).
There is nothing newsworthy about most of the above; the problems have been described in detail for at least the last few decades. As Schumacher points out (1989), the only problem with The Limits to Growth, first published in 1972, is that the authors should have focused more on the loss of petroleum. However, these five disasters have largely been obliterated from human memory by widespread denial of their existence: a gentle but persistent flurry of skepticism, of not-quite-deliberate disinformation, appears on the back pages of newspapers and magazines. The reports were exaggerated, we are told, or the predictions never came true. Such critics, of course, never bother to read the book they are complaining about: since The Limits to Growth refers to "the next hundred years" (Meadows, 1982), only a critic with a time machine would be in a valid position to make such remarks.
Or these critics remind us obliquely of Adam Smith’s "invisible hand": control of the economy is, in some sense, unnatural, and if we would only allow market forces to have free play, all the temporary anomalies would be sorted out. The economy is something like God, in a Deistic sense, and we should have respect for all those gears and pulleys and levers that are beyond our comprehension.
Humanity’s faith in what I call the Pollyanna Principle -- everything will work out right in the end -- is eternal. After all, it is what gets us through the day. Unfortunately, the same principle applied in the early 1930s allowed Hitler to set the world on fire. A quick glance through any standard textbook on world history would show that the Pollyanna Principle does not apply to the many civilizations that lie buried beneath the mud.
Writers on these issues are so fastidious about statistics and probabilities -- admirably, because of such is the nature of science -- yet they usually fail to pay attention to detail when writing the last chapter of a book, the unit on "what must be done."
In the first place, how likely is it that such massive changes in human behavior will ever take place? It would be necessary for a large percentage of the human race to become literate, to read books, and to understand difficult scientific abstractions, scholarly entanglements which are neither comic nor tragic but simply unpropitious. Yet that is precisely the opposite of how most people behave.
Secondly, the entire political structure of every country would have to be changed almost instantly. The system would have to be utterly transformed so that political representatives were chosen, not from among those who have learned the art of buying votes, but from a group of philosopher-kings like those of Plato’s Republic -- and I’m not sure I would want to trust even those people.
Thirdly, the head of each country would have to go on television, disrupt the leading prime-time program, and announce that the driving of automobiles was henceforth largely banned. It would have to be explained that tax incentives would be provided to people who have few or no children. All of that is certainly unlikely in the US, one of the worst at devouring and polluting, and that consistently boycotts all serious international efforts at solving global problems.
Since all of that is highly improbable, it might make more sense to say, "A catastrophe is inevitable. What do we do next?"
All five disasters have one fundamental cause: human overpopulation. In the year 1950 the world’s population was less than 3 billion, and it is now over 7 billion. Even where the rate of growth of the world’s population is declining, growth itself is not; every day we add 200,000 people to this planet.
The authors of The Limits to Growth found that the problems of overpopulation and resource-consumption tend to intensify each other, no matter what future scenario is examined. Or rather, the problems will first be reciprocal and then mutually exclusive: there will be a peak in which the problems reach a cataclysmic maximum, and then there will be a massive die-off.
In various macabre ways, admittedly, perhaps some of the disasters might tend to preclude others. Global war, for example, might somewhat reduce the problem of excess population. Economic collapse would decrease the need for oil. But it will be a long time after the end of automobiles before any benefits are felt from such reciprocity.
The Problems of Democracy
All political systems fall somewhere on the spectrum between absolute dictatorship and absolute democracy, i.e. between rule by one person and rule by all persons. Yet neither extreme has ever been met. No dictator has ever gone far without "legitimacy," without support from a fair number of his fellow citizens. Conversely, there has never been a perfect democracy, since Nature herself imposes too many inequalities for any system of justice to countervail.
Democracy certainly has its problems. From dawn to dusk, humans are obsessed with power, and such an obsession tends to preclude a system of "one person, one vote." In reality, it is "one dollar, one vote." Democracy also has a dozen other nemeses. For example, democracy (rule of the majority) frequently conflicts with another ideal, one with which it is inappropriately paired in idle rhetoric: individual liberty. My freedom to drive a car at top speed may conflict with society’s wish that no one drive so quickly.
At this stage in history, the biggest logistic problem with democracy is that most of the important issues are now beyond the understanding of the average person. Unemployment, inflation, wage-and-price spirals -- how is the average person to comprehend such things? In fact, the truly important economic events do not entail the production and distribution of goods, or even the production of services, but rather the movement of pure money, raw money -- it is the daily shifting of large amounts of money, plain finance capital, that determines whether an individual person has a job tomorrow, and whether that same person can buy what he needs tomorrow.
To the old bromide that "democracy may not be the best form of government, but it’s the best we have," I am inclined to reply, "Well, I’ll wait for something better." Schoolchildren are told that ancient Greece was the founder of democracy, but neither Plato nor Aristotle had anything good to say about democratic government, even if those two differed on almost every other issue. When people lie in bed at night, they may dream of various social matters -- peace, freedom, justice -- but they do not dream of "democracy." The shift from one incumbent party to another makes little difference to the machinery of the civil service, and even less difference to the average person trying to pay for groceries and shelter. From one regime to the next is merely a matter of a few dollars more, a few dollars less, a little more lip service, a little less. People who put on their raincoats to "do their civic duty" by voting are, to a large extent, people who enjoy making fools of themselves.
The general corruption and dishonesty among politicians in modern democracies are so common that the topic can rarely even sell newspapers any more. (But there is no reason to fear the loss of freedom of the press, since the press’s few attempts at truth are largely ignored anyway.) The small voter turnout in any election is a sign of the anger and hopelessness that most people feel toward modern "democratic" government. What is wanted is a new life, a new birth, not the silliness of a false democracy.
The dangers of such a fraudulent political system are obvious. When the Nazis rose to power in the 1920s and 30s, it was not by ignoring "the will of the people." On the contrary, Hitler’s rise was sanctioned by both the government and the populace. Hitler preyed on the nation’s sense of frustration, disappointment, and despair (Hoffer, 1989), and Leni Riefenstahl’s film documentary of Nazism was aptly entitled Triumph of the Will.
A Ring of Fire
In order to survive, every empire must have a permanent ring of fire on its perimeter. That has certainly been the case with the US, which began with the devastation of the native people (Zinn, 2003). Then there was the War of Independence against the British. Then the Spanish people were pushed back, along what is now the southwestern border. And so on and so forth, on to two world wars, followed by fifty years of competition against what Reagan called "the Evil Empire," the Soviet Union. American involvement in Central and South America, for example, has been endless and brutal, largely a case of installing dictators who would provide a comfortable environment for American business interests. The classic case is that of Guatemala: in 1954, President Jacobo Arbenz tried to redistribute some of the uncultivated lands of the United Fruit Company, so in retaliation the CIA staged a coup that led to decades of terror. And now it seems there is no part of the world that is untouched by American military intervention.
One’s attitude toward American military ventures depends partly on whether one is "right wing" or "left wing," if there is much to choose from -- communism was a planned mistake, capitalism an unplanned one. The brutality of "democratic" America is easily matched by the horrors of the Soviet Union and communist China: Stalin killed 13 million Ukrainians, but Mao Tse-tung killed at least 30 million Chinese in his Great Leap Forward. Any accusations of "rape, torture, and imprisonment" are bound to be hypocritical, and no soldier carries a gun to create "peace," no matter what mindless rhetoric one may read in the newspaper. But such long hard military struggles cannot be kept up forever.
Forms of Anarchism
What is any government really but a parasitic growth, a group of old men who have set themselves up as a tax-collecting machine and who spend their time finding ways to run other people’s lives? What if I choose not to accept them as my rulers? Is there any rational argument that can be brought to bear against my decision? Ultimately I might decide that submitting to a government is better than living without one, but there is nevertheless something slightly insulting in being told what to do by a group of people with whom I have never even signed a contract. When the economy is running smoothly, our politicians are quick to take the credit. When it is not running smoothly, they are quick to tell us that it is not their affair.
Neither military power nor economic well-being is necessarily correlated with the size of the political unit. Switzerland, for example, can hardly be considered either weak or impoverished. Schumacher (1989) claims that the relationship between the size of a nation and its and well-being is actually an inverse one.
Anarchism has ranged from the gentle syndicalism of Kropotkin (1968 ) to the less patient proposals of Bakunin (1990). Almost any religious group that refuses military conscription and refrains from taking public office (e.g., the Anabaptists) is anarchist in all but name. Yet it is Bakunin’s image that has prevailed -- partly, no doubt, because politicians have wanted it that way, but perhaps also because most people fear that a world without government would be fraught with danger. "Anarchism" and "anarchy" have complex differences in connotation.
What anarchist theories always have in common is the belief that the preponderance of decision-making should remain with the smaller group, not with the larger confederation. The so-called democratic nations of modern times face a self-contradiction: the word democracy means "government by the people," yet the average person has virtually no influence on the legislative, judicial, or administrative processes of the country. The concept of ascending levels of government, of representative government, sounds fine as a general idea, but in practice it resembles homeopathic medicine: the average American's affect on Washington must be measured in parts per trillion.
In any case, governments, in the usual sense of the word, can hardly be said to govern any more. It would be more accurate to say that it is corporations that rule the world, aided by clandestine plutocracies such as the World Trade Organization and the World Bank. The members of those corporations or plutocracies do not obtain their positions by means of a public election.
Another characteristic of anarchism is that it is incompatible with modern industrial society. It would be impossible to run a modern corporation along anarchist guidelines. Anarchism must be based on the assumption that one is removed from the larger society; most anarchist religious groups, for example, have tended to emigrate to the less-populated areas of the globe. A decentralized political structure precludes the extreme division of labor found in modern societies: a large corporation requires a great many separate roles, and such extreme division of labor is not possible for a small number of people. In any practical sense, an anarchist movement intending to operate on a larger scale either advocates the dissolution of large political and corporate groups, or assumes that such dissolution will happen as some sort of historical necessity -- or both.
The tribe is generally more efficient than the empire. Any political party that was at all honest in its dealings would state quite plainly that the human population must drop from 7 billion to several million. What is needed is less Marx and Friedman, and more Schumacher -- neither communism nor capitalism has done the world much good, and it is time to borrow something from the author of Small Is Beautiful. Schumacher’s solutions are couched in patronizing monosyllables about moral reawakening, but he is on the right track. The anarchistic dreams of Kropotkin and the ecological dreams of Schumacher are complementary; they are both visions of a world without a corrupt and inefficient government, a world not covered with concrete and asphalt, a world that leaves room for trees and birds.
China, with a population of well over a billion, is hoping to develop an automobile industry as big as that of the United States. All over the world, in fact, the "have nots" are planning to join the "haves." The dilemma is that if all other humans live like rich Americans, the Earth’s problems of pollution and resource-consumption will be several times greater than they are already. It is hard to imagine the environmental effects of doubling the present number of automobiles. There is no resolution to the paradox, because it is a matter of mathematics: there is no way for the Earth to support more than a small fraction of the present number of people adequately. The present 7 billion is already so great that terrible famines get little coverage in a newspaper. Without severe population reduction, all talk of "sustainable development" is just fashionable chitchat. Perhaps the reduction in population will never occur without a visit from the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
If there is any hope, it is only that there may be the opposite of "development": the more an "industrialized" society becomes "de-industrialized," the less damage it will cause. Humans were not designed to live in groups of such immense size as we see today, nor were they given the physiological equipment to deal with the over-stimulation of crowded living-spaces. It is also true, for various reasons, that the sight of green trees is more pleasing than that of gray machines. It is not just a platitude to say that we are out of touch with Nature.
Quiet Times
To the extent that empires have formed vast cycles of expansion and decline, one can compare the present-day US to a world of many centuries ago. In the year 731, the Venerable Bede wrote his Ecclesiastical History of the English Church and People, describing the world of the Heptarchy, the Seven Kingdoms of Kent, Wessex, Essex, Northumbria, East Anglia, Mercia, and Sussex. Bede was a monk in the monastery of Jarrow in Northumbria, and his History is dedicated to Ceolwulf, the king of that land. In the final chapter ("Chronological Recapitulation"), Bede tells us that "in the year 409 [actually 410] Rome was brought down of the Goths; from which time the Romans ceased to rule in Britain."
The fall of the Roman Empire has been ascribed to many things -- poor leadership, general laziness, immorality, and so on. The impoverishment of the soil, and the consequent lack of food, may have played a part, as Lucretius suggests in Book 3 of De Rerum Natura (cf. chap. 9 of Carter and Dale, 1974). J. M. Roberts (1992 ) says that it was largely a military problem: the Roman Empire had grown enormous, and there just wasn’t enough gold to pay for all those soldiers. Whatever the reason, in 410 the Goths managed to sack Rome.
Yet the end of one world is the start of another. When Bede was writing, the Roman Empire was still slowly turning to rubble and dust, but England’s "Dark Ages" were filled with light, as the monks scratched away in their scriptoria. In his penultimate chapter, Bede tells us that in that year 731 there was "the pleasantness of peace and quiet times." For the next hundred years, at least, there were no more Viking invasions. On a planet so primitive that even such basic problems as war, overpopulation, and government have not been solved, like Bede we can keep alive the miracle of reading and writing.
REFERENCES:
Bakunin, M. (1990). Statism and anarchy. Trans. and ed. Marshall S. Shatz. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Carter, V. G., and Dale, T. (1974). Topsoil and civilization. Rev. ed. Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press.
Hoffer, E. (1989). The true believer: Thoughts on the nature of mass movements. New York: HarperPerennial.
Kaplan, R. D. (2001). The ends of the Earth: From Togo to Turkmenistan, from Iran to Cambodia. Gloucester, Massachusetts: Peter Smith Publisher.
Kropotkin, P. (1968). Memoirs of a revolutionist. New York: Horizon.
Martin, H.-P., & Schumann, H. (1997). The global trap: Civilization & the assault on democracy & prosperity. Trans. Patrick Camiller. Montreal: Black Rose.
Meadows, D. H. et al. (1982). The limits to growth: A report for the Club of Rome’s project on the predicament of mankind. 2nd ed. New York: Universe.
Roberts, J. M. History of the world. (1992). Rev. ed. Oxford: Helicon.
Schumacher, E. F. (1989). Small is beautiful: Economics as if people mattered. New York: Harper & Row.
Soros, G. (1998). The crisis of global capitalism: Open society endangered. New York: Public Affairs.
Zinn, H. (2003). A people's history of the United States 1492-present. New York: HarperCollins.
Peter Goodchild is the author of Survival Skills of the North American Indians, published by Chicago Review Press. His email address is prjgoodchild{at}gmail.com.
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