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what is anarchism? 37
Anarchists have continued to develop this interest in political liberty
in the post-war period. British anarchists in the Freedom group
paid particular attention to the issue of censorship, particularly on
the grounds of indecency. Writers for the journal Anarchy opposed
with equal conviction calls to ban works from Mara Bryant’s recording,
Please, Mister, Don’t You Touch My Tomato, to D.H. Lawrence’s
Lady Chatterley’s Lover on the grounds that they supported freedom
of speech and expression. In a similar vein, one of the declared
objectives of the French Fédération Anarchiste is ‘the absolute right
for all individuals to express their opinions’. 68 Recently one antiglobalizer
has offered the memorable definition of anarchism as
‘liberalism on steroids’.
The relationship between anarchism, Marxism and liberalism
helps to contextualize two recent anarchist debates. The first revolves
around the relative importance of individual expression and creative
experimentation, and/or the desirability of bringing individuals
together in community over the need to engage in class struggle to
liberate peoples from exploitation. New anarchists typically
emphasize the importance of the first two whilst ‘old’ anarchists give
greater weight to the last. The second debate reflects a recent shift
amongst primitivists and postmoderns against liberal rationalism
and science. For primitivists, liberal rationality expresses a faulty
approach towards reality: one that asserts the superiority of the
intellect over sense and feeling. For postmoderns it represents a
mistaken idea of truth and reality: neither intellect nor feeling can
capture either, there are only diverse and multiple interpretations.
Yet both groups are hostile to the scientific, rationalist tradition that
has dominated anarchist thought. Lawrence Jarach’s primitivist
critique of Chaz Bufe’s ‘ultra-rationalist and moralist perspective’
and his ‘liberal leftist’ commitment to ‘“civil liberties”’ is one
example of the recent trend. 69 ‘Joff’s’ poststructuralist/postmodern
critique of Bookchin’s developmental, naturalistic science is
another. 70
In addition, the history of the relationship between anarchism
and liberalism places anarchism on a broader spectrum of ideas than
the bi-partite division of Marxism and anarchism allows, fleshing
out anarchism’s ideological content. Drawing on this history Stuart
Christie and Albert Meltzer situated anarchism in a framework that
distinguished between ‘individualistic’ and ‘totalitarian’ ways of life,
and ‘capitalistic’ and ‘socialistic’ forms of work. 71