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anarchism: a beginner’s guide
Syndicate (of which Mollie is a part) and less conventionally, the Toy
and Treats Syndicate and the Sexual Auxiliaries Syndicate, dedicated
to the production of condoms made from ‘an unbelievably thin
material’. All these syndicates have branch organizations in the
different regions, but workers in all syndicates consider themselves to
be part of ‘one big union’.
Like Morris’s News From Nowhere, Purchase’s anarchy is
populated with beautiful, intelligent and happy characters. But his
descriptions of social life in Bear City suggest that the inspiration for
his utopia comes from the 1960s as much as from Morris’s classic. On
his first night in Bear City, Tom drifts off to sleep in a drug-induced
haze, having smoked copious amounts of ‘good’ marijuana with his
hosts. Similarly, Tom is delighted to find that heterosexuality is the
convention of Bear City and that its women are reluctant to wear too
much of the thin, edible clothing available to them. He’s equally
pleased to discover that the first woman he propositions is only too
happy to grapple with his heavy denims and share her productawareness
of the Sexual Auxiliaries Syndicate. Mollie refers to nineteenth-century
anarchism as ‘austere’. Yet for all its hippy overtones
and primitivist leanings, Purchase’s social ecology retains some of the
character of this earlier work. The citizens of Bear City can only
choose to spend their time ‘making love in the forest or ... dedicating
[their] lives to a space program’ because life is governed by the
‘rational organization of things’ – a very nineteenth-century concept.
In a final echo of early anarchist thought, Purchase pins the success of
social anarchism on the operation of a (neutral and non-oppressive)
statistical agency. Though this is computerized, it appears, nevertheless,
to pose the same problems as Maximoff’s Central Bureau.
Like Maximoff’s anarcho-syndicalist model, Purchase’s utopia
emerges from a specific set of debates and it engages with them in
order to show how anarchist theory might be translated into practice.
An alternative way of illustrating the potential for anarchy is to
design forms of action that embrace anarchist principles. This third
approach is discussed in the next section.
experiments in anarchy
Anarchists have attempted to apply their principles of organization
in a number of fields. This section considers two areas of activity:
anarcho-syndicalism and anarchist communitarianism. These two