Abstract
Anarchism and Moral Philosophy is a collection of twelve essays introducing the reader to contemporary academic treatments of anarchist philosophy. While the book was released in 2010, it is of special interest now in the wake of the Occupy movement’s elevation of anarchist organising to global prominence. For the casual reader, several of the earlier essays provide an accessible analysis of the varieties of anarchist moral philosophy that is refreshingly light on jargon, and can be understood with very little prior knowledge. For the philosophically inclined, the later essays engage more directly with traditional modes of analysis to illuminate the contours of an academically rigorous anarchism.
The collection ‘deliberately excludes chapters premised on an “anarcho-capitalist”’ (p. 3) philosophy; however, anarcho-capitalist and libertarian narratives have one of the more developed academic bases among anarchist traditions due to the historically practical (as opposed to theoretical) approach of other anarchisms. With their exclusion from the collection, anarchist first principles are occasionally left uninterrogated in an academically rigorous fashion. This, however, does not significantly detract from the coherence of the essays, since their main thrust is not to defend or promote anarchist thought but to clarify it given those underlying values.
Occasionally, however, an essay ruminates excessively on general problems of philosophy, rather than on those relating uniquely to anarchist philosophy. When they do not interest the reader, these digressions can safely be skipped over, since the sectional arrangement of the essays makes core arguments easy to identify and understand in relative independence. That said, the essays compiled here do an excellent job of highlighting the diversity of traditions within anarchist philosophical thought as well as illustrating that anarchism is a richer tradition than ‘an absurd rejection of all authority’ (p. 14).
A common thread of interest across these essays is the idea of anarchism as a process rather than a goal. One essay proposes ‘an ethics with neither origin nor conclusion, ethics which are continually produced in the present’ (p. 187) in reaction to the concern that, in an anarchist Utopia, there might be ‘nothing to practise judgement or resistance on’ (p. 38). Instead, ‘anarchy is defined by the ongoing process of contesting and reducing oppression rather than the utopian ideal’ of society (p. 59). It also includes Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s philosophy, including the related idea that ‘conflict is at the heart of morality … between our innate conscience and our inherited social ideas’(p. 99), as well as the crucial conclusion that ‘without fixed determinate ends, anarchists tend to advocate methods that are consistent with their goals, a process referred to as “prefiguration”’ (p. 141).
This anarchist approach to radical politics stands in sharp contrast to historical examples of Marxist activism, as it apparently gives up any faint dream of the achievement of a final ‘steady state’. This in itself is a serious practical criticism of neoliberal/neoclassical modes of thought, which emphasise the idea of an efficient equilibrium. By forsaking the idea of any such possibility, the anarchist philosophical approach lends itself readily to dynamic disequilibrium economic thought. Here, the dominant school is unprepared to defend itself, as evidenced by its theoretical and practical reactions to the recent local and global crises. The present form of the neoclassical approach fails Keynes’s test by simply repeating its own Utopian ideal: that someday the sea will be flat again. Anarchist ideas in this vein provide a stable philosophical base from which to challenge these assertions.
Another thread that will be of interest to socialist and Marxist dialogues is the discussion around an anarchist philosophy of property. We find that ‘Proudhon, the first thinker to refer to his own political theory as “anarchism”, devotes most of his attention to the abolition of private property’ (p. 53), and comes to the conclusion that ‘an asocial right to exclusive use of the product [of labor] was … immoral’ (p. 101) when considered in a social context. Another essay interrogates the question of how we might ‘derive rights for possessions without deriving them for property (taken to include the means of production)’ (p. 74). This innovation provides a philosophical framework in which collective ownership can coexist with private use. What is especially interesting about such an arrangement is that it can be shown to satisfy marginalist neoclassical conditions for efficiency, meaning that it can challenge the institution of private ownership from within the mainstream system by portraying it as a historical choice rather than as an inevitable or ideal arrangement.
Finally, traditional liberals will also be interested to read anarchist philosophy, as the essays detail a critical perspective on the liberal project. What is immediately clear is that there is a strong perception of the ‘liberal’ project as synonymous with the neoliberal thrust of the late 20th century – that is, a broadly defined ‘classical liberalism’ or ‘republicanism’, as opposed to a true modern progressivism. This is evidenced by suggestions that liberalism sees the role of government as ‘enforc[ing] neutral rules to govern interaction’ (p. 35), that what ‘classical liberals value is negative freedom’ (p. 53), and a general sense that ‘radical social identities formed by long-standing collective activity [are] based on values incompatible … with liberal-capitalist policies’ (p. 147) or the ‘Homo economicus of liberal economics’ (p. 235). Liberals of the anti-capitalist or heterodox variety will find that progressivism as a philosophical approach is roundly ignored, but whether the fault lies with an oversight by the authors or with a failure to provide a coherent whole philosophy by the progressives is unclear.
The analyses advanced through this collection of contemporary anarchist thought are especially intriguing as they relate to Mike Beggs’s (2011) critique of ‘Zombie Marxism’: that the best way to apply Marxist thought is not as the ‘pursuit of a separate system of economics’, but ‘to demonstrate the social preconditions that lie beneath the concepts of political economy … [and] to demonstrate these social relations as historical, not eternal.’ Anarchist thought is indeed engaging mainstream theory head-on, and while not all readers will find anarchist systems or principles convincing as a whole, this collection of essays contains innovative examples of radical thought that will be of interest to all.