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anarchism: a beginner’s guide
culturally feasible. To the contrary, anthropology suggests that statelessness
is only sustainable in certain conditions. Barclay outlines the
possibilities by pinpointing the factors that explain ‘the descent into
the state’. The two most important are the emergence of hierarchy
and the ‘ideology of superiority/inferiority’. These stimulate a further
six socio-economic factors: ‘population, sedentarism, agriculture,
a complex division of labour, a redistribution system and
private property’. Anarchic ways of life are possible only where these
factors do not arise and/or where they are unimportant in social life.
In Barclay’s view, the relevant conditions are ‘most likely to be found
in the acephalous societies of pre-colonial Africa’. 4
Murray Bookchin’s work revives some of Kropotkin’s themes.
John Clark places him in a tradition that extends to Reclus rather
than Kropotkin, but his relationship to the latter is, nonetheless,
strong. Indeed, Bookchin develops Kropotkin’s rejection of Social
Darwinism and his characterization of nature – in his terms, the
ecosystem – by the principle of mutual aid. Like Kropotkin, he associates
the ecosystem with ethics. In particular, Bookchin argues that
the ecosystem demonstrates the absurdity and meaninglessness of
hierarchy and that it operates on a principle of ‘unity in diversity’.
Defining this latter principle, Bookchin argues: ‘the more differentiated
the life-form and the environment in which it exists the more
acute is its overall sensorium, the greater its flexibility, and the more
active its participation in its own environment’. 5
The important difference between Kropotkin and Bookchin is
that whilst Kropotkin suggested that nature was the foundation for
ethics, in Bookchin’s view, it provides only a ‘matrix for an ethics’.
The redefinition of terms is reflected in Bookchin’s attitude toward
progress and in his treatment of stateless societies. On the first point,
Bookchin rejects Kropotkin’s idea that changes in social life can be
mapped onto an evolutionary schema of progressive moral development.
Indeed, he castigates Kropotkin for adopting an overly optimistic
view of progress, even categorizing him as a ‘technological
determinist’. On the second point, when Bookchin, very much in the
spirit of Kropotkin, draws back to the study of preliterate peoples, he
is not so much interested in studying patterns of human behaviour
as he is in highlighting the relationships which preliterate peoples
establish with their environment. For example, in the Ecology of
Freedom Bookchin finds that preliterate peoples do not respect age
hierarchies that treat children as lesser personalities than adults, or
indeed any hierarchy which gives individuals in the community