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chapter four strategies for change It is up to each committed person to take responsibility for stopping the exploitation of the natural world … If not you who, if not now when? (Earth Liberation Front, http://earthliberation front.com/about) Do not let anyone tell you that we are only a tiny handful, too weak ever to attain the grand objective at which we aim … All we who suffer and who are outraged, we are an immense crowd; we are an ocean in which all could be submerged. As soon as we have the will, a moment would be enough for justice to be done. (Peter Kropotkin, Words of a Rebel, p. 63) Anarchist violence is the only violence that is justifiable … (Errico Malatesta, The Anarchist Revolution, p. 82) How do anarchists think they will realize anarchy? This chapter considers some of the options. It begins with a discussion of the central tenet of anarchist strategies for change: that oppression can be overcome only by the free action of the oppressed. The main body of the chapter looks at the ways in which anarchists have translated this idea into different strategies, some revolutionary and some dissenting. Notable examples of strategies in the first group are propaganda by the deed, the general strike and guerrilla warfare. In addition, some anarchists – for instance, social anarchists – have adopted an evolutionary view of revolutionary change, to develop a strategy sometimes referred to as practical anarchism. Anarchists have expressed dissent through different forms of protest: from symbolic action, to direct action and civil disobedience. The discussion shows how, in recent years, anarchists have developed new and innovative 125
126 anarchism: a beginner’s guide ways of using these forms of protest in mass anti-globalization actions, moving away from the notion of strategic change to one of tactical reform. Anarchist strategies of change have been the cause of serious dispute in the anarchist movement. Anarchist violence and, in particular, the relationship between anarchism and terrorism has been a subject of intense debate and remains one of the most important cleavages dividing anarchists. This issue is examined at the end of the chapter. emancipation from oppression by the oppressed The idea that oppression can be overcome only by the action of the oppressed is not a specifically anarchist principle. Yet in the late nineteenth century anarchists put their stamp on the idea by saddling it to a principle of direct or economic action. In this period direct action was contrasted with the rejection of (i) electoral strategies designed to sweep socialist parties to legislative power and (ii) vanguardism, the doctrine of revolutionary elitism linked to Lenin and Bolshevism. Proudhon had floated the idea that ‘the proletariat must emancipate itself without the help of the government’ as early as 1848 (though in the same year he also successfully stood for election to the French Constituent Assembly). The principle was enshrined in the preamble to the statutes of the IWMA and was supported by a broad range of socialist opinion. It became a bone of contention only in the early 1870s, at the point when the International disintegrated. Then, laying the foundations of what became the division of socialists into anarchist and non-anarchist groups, Bakunin identified himself with the policy of the IWMA in an effort to discredit Marx. Marx, he argued, did not support emancipation by the action of the workers themselves – on the contrary, he believed that ‘the conquest of political power’ was ‘the first task of the proletariat’. 1 In Bakunin’s mind, these two ideas were incompatible. Others shared his view. In 1872, at a meeting in St Imier, Switzerland, antiauthoritarians reinforced Bakunin’s policy distinction by voicing their disapproval with Marx’s decision of 1871 to support the formation of working-class political parties. They argued that a uniform policy of revolution – that is, of political conquest – must not be imposed on the workers; that liberation could be won only by the spontaneous action of the workers; and that revolutionary action
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contents Acknowledgements vii intro
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acknowledgements A number of people
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chapter two anarchist rejections of
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index Page numbers in italic denote
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index 177 Farrow, Lynne 119 fascism
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index 179 and state 30, 45-6, 50, 5
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