o_195qg5dto17o4rbc85q1ge61i84a.pdf

104
anarchism: a beginner’s guide
of dictatorship by any class, and, consequently, the possibility of
establishing a regime of terror. The basic character of the communal
confederation is such that it need have no fear of the widest freedom
of rights for all men, independent of their social origin, so long as
they work. As a result, true democracy, developed to its logical
extreme, can become a reality only under the conditions of a communal
confederation. This democracy is Anarchy. 32
Graham Purchase presents a very different vision.
eco-anarchy: Purchase 33
Purchase outlines an imaginary society – a vision of a possible world
rather than a plan for organization. He outlines this vision in story
form about Tom, an Australian worker who, in the course of a
miners’ strike is badly beaten up by police, and left for dead. Tom
regains consciousness in a third millennial eco-anarchist world,
brought into being by a second millennium Social-Ecological
Revolution. The state has been destroyed and the new world is
divided into ecological regions, distinguished from each other on
the basis of physiography, climate and culture. Tom’s guide to the
world is Aristotle, an aged wise man (and friend of Plato). Aristotle
does not claim that the future is perfect. Indeed, he does not approve
of all the changes that have been made in the 1000 years between
Tom’s beating and his reawakening. Moreover, he endorses Tom’s
comment that ‘nature and society are always evolving ... [t]here can
be no blue-print or unalterable plan of action ...’. Yet, like Old
Hammond in William Morris’s utopian novel, News From Nowhere,
Aristotle serves as an intellectual conduit between the old and new
worlds and it is principally through him that Tom learns about and
reflects upon the future.
The society in which Tom finds himself is a half-way house
between social ecology and primitivism. The story is set in and
around Bear City. The city dominates the eco-region but from Tom’s
original vantage point on a hillside it looks like a walled medieval
city and is small enough ‘to be taken in in one single view’. Tom
learns that the walls serve only to protect the citizens from the local
wildlife and that they are not fortified to resist attack. The city was
established as part of a ‘Bio-Regional Wilderness Reclamation
Project’ and is set in forest and untamed wilderness. The citizens do
not try to seal themselves off from their environment. Indeed, they