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anarchism: a beginner’s guide
between anarchist and Marxist notions of post-revolutionary society
and the deficiencies of Marxist an-utopianism. These different
positions are outlined below as a prelude to the consideration of two
utopian schemes.
The clearest statement of the anarchist suspicion of utopianism
appears in Marie Louise Berneri’s Journey Through Utopia, an analysis
of utopian thought from Plato to Huxley. In this book she argued
that the outstanding feature of most utopias is their authoritarianism.
With notable exceptions like William Morris’s News From
Nowhere, utopias promise material and spiritual satisfaction as well
as social and economic equality at the cost of foisting on their ideal
citizens a unifying moral ideal. Typically, utopias fail what Berneri
called the test of art: Herbert Read’s standard of individuality and
social experimentation. 22 Some anarchists have taken the critique
further, rejecting utopianism in principle. It is not so much the
content of utopias that upsets these anarchists but the very idea of
perfection – whether it applies to the social order or to the framing
of personality. As Rudolf Rocker argues, anarchism ‘is no patent
solution for all human problems, no Utopia of a perfect social order
... since, on principle, it rejects all absolute schemes and concepts’. 23
A similar view informs a recent critique of Zerzan. Zerzan’s treatment
of primitive society suggests an ‘idealized, hypostatized vision
of the past’ that is at odds with the critical self-understanding of the
social and natural world that informs primitivist critique. It suggests
a recommendation for preconceived ideals in a way that constrains
free thought. 24
The suggestion that anarchists should consider what postrevolutionary
society might look like does not sit easily with this
view. Nonetheless, some anarchists have argued that outlining the
operation and benefits of anarchy is a necessary part of securing
revolutionary change. Utopias rightly force revolutionaries to consider
what they want to achieve and how they might set about realizing
their aims. This argument was the basis of Kropotkin’s defence of
utopianism, for example. Anarchists in this group are sometimes
prepared to label their plans as utopias, but they consider their
endeavours to be entirely practical. As Bookchin remarks, ‘[t]he
highest realism can be attained only by looking beyond the given
state of affairs to a vision of what should be, not only what is’. 25 Some
cast their visions in literary form, on the model of Ursula LeGuin’s
The Dispossessed, though probably more have a ‘scientific’ feel.
Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread (1906), his outline plan for