Crisis, Anarchy and Order
What sparks on our mind when we hear of the term Anarchy?
Lawlessness, Disorder, Mayhem, Utter chaos of all kind due to the absence of an overseer, a regulatory body, or to put more generally, an authority.
Despite of the connotation it holds, the word roots back into an 18th century political philosophy, introduced by a man named Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.
Proudhon was the first person in the world to declare himself as an anarchist. In his book, “ The General Idea of the Revolution”, Proudhon says,
To be governed is to be watched over, inspected, spied on, directed, legislated at, regulated, docketed, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, assessed, weighed, censored, ordered about, by men who have neither the right, nor the knowledge, nor the virtue.
This should give an approximate idea of the burgeoning moments of anarchist philosophy. Anarchism is the rejection of all kinds of government or centralized authorities. Proudhon’s version of anarchy is based on mutualist philosophy. Mutualist philosophy is defined by stateless society which functions on the cooperation of people upon voluntary basis. It condones small scale property ownership or concepts like mutual funds but is opposed to large scale property ownership and profit-centered interests system of the banks or lenders. It says that if a society voluntary collaborates, works on contractual basis, for example — producers making contracts on product exchange without the aim of profiteering, or work on social issues, then a state system would be totally redundant. Proudhon endorsed labor remuneration, which means paying a person according to the extent of his invested labor. Proudhon’s version of anarchism is a therefore combination between communism and property. But Proudhon’s property is different from capitalist idea of property in a sense that, this property is only granted to individuals who will use this land personally for production purpose; without leaving any bits of his property untended, and also without exploiting others’ labors. In fact a popular quote by Proudhon was that “ Property is Theft!”. But the property that he condones, is the one which ensures an interference less production system among the producers. Proudhon was against usurers but he advocated for a federal bank system which worked on lending people with the minimal interest so as not to profit but for the organization to be able to run. Proudhon believed that if a political party arises it somehow turns into an absolutist organization. Proudhon was really influential in federalist movements which sparked out in the late 1800’s. He influenced a lot of thinkers that came later him who took communist anarchist philosophies to greater heights like peter kropotkin, karl marx, Mikhail Bakunin, Francesc Pi i Margall etc. But many that he influenced were highly critic of him, notably Marx and Kropotkin. Marx wrote a book specifically as a critic to proudhon’s theories, which is “The poverty of philosophy”, refutation of proudhon’s book “ The philosophy of poverty”. To quote a polemic foreword from the book that marx wrote against proudhon,
M. Proudhon has the misfortune of being particularly misunderstood in Europe. In France, he has the right to be a bad economist, because he is reputed to be a good German philosopher. In Germany, he has the right to be a bad philosopher, because he is reputed to be one of the ablest of French economists. Being both a German and an economist at the same time, we desire to protest against this double error
I haven’t had the opportunity to dive into Proudhon’s world yet, but one person that i did have a chance to dive into was Peter Kropotkin. Peter Kropotkin was a pioneering anarchist philosopher of the nineteenth century Russia. Kropotkin too was, like Marx, a critic of certain aspects of Proudhon’s works, Proudhon, who is called to be “the father of anarchism”
Peter Kropotkin wrote the book the conquest of bread in 1892 just at the climax of the first industrial revolution. Kropotkin based his theories upon observing the exploitation of the bourgeois class to the proletariat, or the working class. He drew inspiration from nature too for legitimizing his theories. Peter Kropotkin was a staunch evolutionist. He was born in an aristocrat family, and was one of the very privileged few to attend St. Petersburg, a military school in Russia for a decent education. But soon, he started to get radicalized by devouring books after books by prominent western thinkers and notable revolutionaries. After graduation, he joined as an officer in the Russian military and soon got himself enrolled into scientific geographic expeditions, which were under the sponsorship of the state. During his expeditions in Siberia and Finland, he observed many animals who thrived in the blistering cold and observing their lifestyles, and how they adapted to the harsh environment. He discovered the one thing that was keeping them alive, was mutual aid. His discovery of such a dominant survival trait in the animal kingdom later on shaped his political and philosophical thinking. Scientific American has an interesting article on Peter Kropotkin’s scientific life.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-prince-of-evolution-peter-kropotkin/
Peter Kropotkin, soon started to write revolutionary books, pamphlets and preach revolutionary propaganda among the peasants and the workers which brought him under the wrath of the Russian authority. His association with revolutionary groups and his propaganda preaching resulted in him getting arrested. Soon, after 4 years he managed to escape from captivity and exiled himself into Switzerland. He was a person who was constantly on the run, from Russia to Switzerland, to England, to France, and to many other places, due to his expeditions and his political movements. But all the while, he constantly preached his political philosophies to whomever he could find.
Peter wrote the book “The Conquest of Bread” as a proposal of an anarchist state system which differed from capitalist state system and other conventional communist state systems. Throughout the book he answers all the objections put forward by other political thinkers about the loopholes of anarchist philosophy.
In the first chapters peters argues about the necessity and relevance of anarchism in the context of that time of the world. He says that people think they own the means of production, since they either inherited it or they invented it. Then they take in the workers and exploit them to their lowest. Peter says the premise of the capitalist thinking is faulty. No one can be accredited with inventing anything, because every invention stands upon the tools and the findings of the past, which are the contribution of thousands of millions of workers, thinkers and scientists of the system. The present system is always an extension of the past, and standing on it runs the present. So when a person, or an inventor comes up with a new device or a new theory, he has to rely on the knowledge of the past. He uses mathematics to model his discovery, the basics of those mathematics are the the contributions of hundreds of mathematicians of the past. He uses basic physical science fundamentals, to design his inventions, he fixes the bugs in other scientist’s findings and come up with something of his own, which presents him with a workable productive device. But had his predecessor left nothingn for him to work upon, would he be able to manage to invent such a thing? Many may imply that trying to build something from scratch is possible given a lot of time and energy investment. But is that so? To how far do we need to get back to take off from the zero point? We would go back thousands of years.
When the young instrument maker at the University of Glasgow, James Watt came up with his invention of steam engine, he soon realized the potential of his invention and went on to commercialize it. Watt’s engine is what propelled the industrial revolution. Without the engine of Watt, industries could never have kickstarted. The importance of this engine is what made Watt’s company, “Watt and Boulton” so financially successful.
But, is the invention of Watt solely of his? Can he logically own a copyright and claim this invention of his own, and his own only? Kroptokin argues, the claim is baseless, since the knowledge that James used to think of such an engine doesn’t come up from his own. He had to rely on the knowledge of the past discoveries by other scientists, the mathematical models developed by early and contemporary mathematicians, the chemical knowledge laid out by early chemists and etc. In fact James Watt only made steam engine more efficient and commercially usable with reduced losses. The concept has been thought of and researched way before he came. James watt improved the steam engine of Newcomen, adding just a separate condenser to Newcomen’s engine which made the engines more coal efficient. So is Newcomen the zero point we have been searching for? No, before Newcome came Thomas Savary, who developed a small scale pump using steam. So, is Savery the zero point, no. Long before Savery in earlier times in Italy Giovani Branca, in Ottoman Egypt, Tariq Al Din, and even in more earlier times, in ancient Roman Egypt, traces of steam usage for mechanical power conversion can be found. But searching out for the root inventor is pointless. Since the Roman engineer had prior engineering knowledge too which he or she gathered or borrowed from some other group of scientists or engineers that came before him.
Let us take another example, lets talk about Tesla. Many people credit Tesla to be inventor of AC power, which is absolutely wrong, since long before tesla AC power was already known to engineers and researchers and even among businessman. When Tesla was at his polytechnic university at Graz, around 50 years have already passed by since the demonstration of the first ever recorded alternator by Hippolyte Pixil, based on the findings of Faraday. In between these years a lot of works, mathematics had started to get developed, James Maxwell’s equations regarding electromagnetism for example. Charles Steinmentz developed the phasor mathematics for AC which was one the most vital developments for AC power to move forward. Without phasor transforms, AC calculations would be impossible. Guillame Duchenen was the earliest person to have made practical applications of the AC current. Lucian Paulard demonstrated bipolar power transformers, in 1881 after which a lot of adjustments came along. Otto Blathy made the first commutator free single phase AC induction motor based on the findings of Francois Argo on rotating magnetic fields. Nikola Tesla and Galileo further independently developed the induction motor by developing it for 3 phase systems. So, none of the above actually can be called independent, since they all relied on the knowledge that came prior to them, them only adding some additional parts to it.
It can be compared to a building. Bricks after bricks are put one upon another to erect a whole building, by a large number of workers. On worker starts working where the other workers have left off. So for a single worker to claim the whole house to his own would be just utterly laughable.
This was Kropotkin’s claim, that you cannot actually claim an invention to be fully yours and go on capitalizing it, which Edison did, watt did and many other inventors did of that time. Henry Ford did. Kropotkin claims, as society have helped propelling the innovations, society should get the fruits back, not only a single individual. Kropotkin therefore heavily argues against patents too which he sees as a demoralization to the scientist. He says, had the pioneering scientists known that their invention would be prompting worker exploitations, class divisions and things as such, they would roll back on their grave upon hearing them. Kropotkin’s predecessor, Proudhon told of the same,
Talents is a creation of society rather than a gift of nature; it is an accumulated capital of which the recipient is only the guardian
Kropotkin says, like scientific inheritance, property inheritance is similar. Behind a property lies a thousands of workers’ hours and hours of hard labor. To strip workers of their products and assigning an owner over the means of production would be the most heinous thing to do. Thus kropotkin lays out his fundamentals about how private ownership on anything is an elusive idea. an idea which kept generations and generations suffer from exploitations of the rich and the aristocrats.
In the later part of the book, after laying the thesis against the capitalist system, Kropotkin goes on to propose an anarchist revolution across the whole globe. Kropotkin observed that most of the worker revolutions, like the French revolution do not work out at the end, because the revolutionaries are so busy with toppling the system and reorganizing it, that they lose their focus covering the basic and fundamental needs of the people, for example foods, dwellings, clothings etc. Kropotkin provides a solution for all the case in his book along with the answers to the criticisms put forth by his fellow revolutionaries regarding those policies. In fact, Kropotkin puts his fundamental focus here, and hence he named his book, “ The conquest of bread”. Because a hungry revolutionary is a defeated revolutionary. In the later part of the book, he discusses how such society would efficiently divide its work among the people, how leisure times would increase in such a society which can be invested in creative works and lots of other aspects of an anarchist society. I wrote a summary review in goodreads . You may try to check it out if you are more interested about the book.
There is a popular book review by radical revolution youtube which summarizes the book far better. It is 26 minutes but better than most other reviews online.
While Kropotkin’s theories may seem utopian, they surely are very much outdated. Kropotkin was a product of his time, and times have changed, so have the complexities of societies and the world as a whole. But still Kropotkin holds a good lot of relevance in the context of our society. Not Kropotkin, but anarchism as a whole can teach us a good lot of thing in our current circumstances.
The relevance of Anarchism in 21st Century
Anarchism may be a dysfunctional system for a society to function upon, but the idea of mutual aid is definitely not. There are tons of online forums where people voluntarily help each others out by investing a good lot of time there. Thousands of creators are creating instructional and educative contents online for other people to watch for free and learn from them. Many content creators depend on crowdfunding to be able to continue working on their content. The crowd helps aids them financially and they keep on producing their content. There are no corporate hierarchies or anything of that sort running around here. Creation of Patreon played a crucial role in connecting content producers with the crowds directly. Social medias are hubs of content creation most of which are non profit oriented. Deviant Art, Tumblr, Quora, Stackexchange, Youtube, Wattpad, Facebook, Instagram, Fanfiction.net Tiktok etc. social media sites may be for-profit business, but they run on the relation of voluntary content creation by its users. And i forgot to mention Medium too, the very platform you are reading this article on. It took me a whole day to compose this stuff, but i still did it just to let my thoughts out to people.
There are thousands of open access software which are free to the public for usage. thousands of developers voluntarily work on updating those software. One software that deserves mentioning is Avro. Avro is a phonetic Bangla keyboard which was developed as an open access software, by a team of Bangladeshi volunteers. Avro is quite frequently updated by all the volunteer programmers and in fact it serves better utility than paid softwares like Bijoy, in terms of its user convenience. There are thousands of other such examples. Open Source Software Movement is such a movement which accelerated the growth in such open source softwares which rely on voluntary collaboration of programmers. Check the wiki link below to learn about the whole movement.
Richard Stallman is a pioneering person in accelerating the movement further, through his launching of the GNU project, creation of GNU general public license, development of GNU Emacs and GNU compilation codes. In fact, stallman termed it GNU as a response to Unix which was a closed source operating system, which stands for GNU’s not Unix.
Linux, a popular kernel, created by Linus Trovalds is too, a byproduct of the GNU project. Torvalds used GNU’s development tools to develop his kernel linux upon which hundreds of linux distros operate. All Linux Distros have to be licensed under GPL, or GNU Public License, which ensures that the codes of the distros are open sourced, making room for collaboration. There are tons of other examples which would take pages after pages to note down. You can check the wiki to see how big the list can go, and surprisingly its not all, there are much much more.
Although these are good examples of mutual cooperation and collaboration and its solid effects, these are completely akin to anarchist communes, and this is a point i made out clear earlier, which is, anarchy may be irrelevant as a state system but some of its teachings cannot be that easily disregarded. Another interesting fact i would like to bring your attention to is about a concept “Programar Anarchy”. Many programmers are coming out to identify themselves as anarchist programmers. Popularised by Fred George who thinks, programmers are more productive when they are self organised, without any overseer who controls them with a ruling hand. To know more about anarchist programmers and their tenets check Fred’s slides and presentation below:
Slides:
http://gotocon.com/dl/goto-amsterdam-2011/slides/FredGeorge_ProgrammerAnarchy.pdf
As you can see, i have mentioned quite a lot wiki links throughout my article. Wikipedia is the best example for community engagement. Most of the social media sites i have listed above are for profit industries which function upon voluntary content creation by the people, which is not an ideal example for an anarchist commune. But wiki is just the perfect example for this. Wikipedia currently is the largest host of diverse information, more than all the encyclopedia of the world. Wikipedia also works on public contribution. Anyone can write or edit any article with proper references included. If someone does any wrong in any article, others can go on to fix that thing with proper referencing. So a reviewer hierarchy or authority is not needed who can control each article according to their own will, but a handful of authorities for smoothly running the organizations. Wikipedia has been created as a non profit open collaboration project by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger and to this day, it has remained as such. And nothing beats wikipedia when it comes to diverse open information access, only to prove the power of community engagement and mutual contribution.
Speaking of open access information, it would be a grave sin to not name the first martyr in this field, Aaron Swartz. Aaron Swartz was brilliant and a prolific computer programmer. He developed the web feed format RSS, co-founded reddit, created the website framework web.py and was an entrepreneur behind a lot of startups of that time. Aaron was a very active innovator but soon he started to get engaged in political matters. Despite of being a prolific programmer Aaron Swartz was a very prolific writer too. He wrote the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto as a reflection of his views on the accessibility of information. Aaron Swartz believed that scientific, academic, political information should be made publicly available and not locked for few to access, while leaving others in darkness and ignorance. Aaron’s first major hit was at PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records). Pacer was supposed to be public access, but still it charged 8 cents per documents, the justification of which was that the money would be used to develop the court more technologically. Despite channeling the money for development, the court had surplus amounting to 150 million USD. Upon knowing this Carl Malamud asked his fellow activists to collect the data and make them open access. Aaron then jumped off to work, and with the help of a perl script he downloaded 2.7 million federal documents stored in Pacer. After that he made it all open access to the public. The FBI tailed him down but could not press any charges against him, since the data were in fact all public access. His next political movement was SOPA: Stop Online Piracy Act. This bill could allow US govt. to take down websites based on copyright allegations, no matter how minute. This is a restriction to an open internet and a massive burden to internet providers. In the end Aaron and his fellow activists were successful in terminating the bill through senate procedures. Aaron was also engaged with wikipedia for around four years, another open access information website.
But what got to him was a scandal at MIT.
Aaron was a research fellow at MIT which had granted him a guest user account to JSTOR. Guests could access JSTOR through its networks, using the guest user accounts. Aaron connected his laptop to a networking switch in MIT’s controlled access wiring closet. Now, being able to access the network through his laptop, Aaron mass downloaded scientific papers from JSTOR for the same reason which he did with Pacer, that is for mass public distribution. But JSTOR soon found out and notified MIT about suspicious activities from a particular IP. Upon investigating, he got tracked down and subsequently, arrested by MIT Police. After his arrest charges were began to set up against Swartz by federal authorities which cumulatively had the possibility for him to serve 50 years in jail along with million dollars of fine. All of these gradually pushed Aaron to commit suicide by hanging in his Brooklyn Apartment. After his death memorials were set up for him, and the open access online movements began to gain more pace and in fact more attention too!
Aaron’s manifesto can be read from here:
https://wiki.lib.sun.ac.za/images/9/93/Goamjuly2008.pdf
What we can learn from this, is that we can surely apply some anarchist philosophies for the better good of humankind as a whole, and it is not a dream nor an impractical ambition of any sort but a viable one. The successes being the noted incidents above among a pool of others. To quote some examples from Kropotkin’s Book, Red Cross and English Lifeboat Association are one of the most successful voluntary organizations which run on the principles of anarchism. Kropotkin says these two organizations were given rise to existence by people who wanted to help others in times of crisis. The response was automatic and people did not need a well organized hierarchical authority to come forward with such an organization. In times of crisis, and in the midst of a problem people will organize themselves naturally and approach towards a solution, kropotkin argues. Hence he says Red Cross and English Lifeboat Association had been so successful compared to the other hierarchical organizations.
To name a recent example, Bidyanondo comes into my mind first. The corona outbreak had showed the world that a global collaboration can be the only solution towards solving the crisis. Each countries are undergoing severe economic crisis. Jobs are getting lost, productions are at a halt, food supplies are becoming more and more scarce. In such dire times, the countries depend upon voluntary activities of the people to tackle the whole situation. It is not possible for a government to expropriate and redistribute wealth at this moment since that would be just impractical . With its limited relief operations, the rest of the scarcity is to be met by the wealthy population of the country, along with the active on-site volunteering of the young. Many voluntary organizations are collecting money and foods as a relief contribution from the rich and distributing them among the poor. Bidyanondo has been a pioneer in bangladesh in leading such activity. They collected a vast some of money from public donation and with that they bought foods for the poor under the banner “এক টাকায় আহার”. There were many other foundations who stretched out their helping hand to save the poor from starving. Many organizations are even trying to help stray animals which are being affected due to the lockdown and shortage of food scraps in the streets. Many students, researchers and even companies are investing their times and funds in producing cheap PPEs to address PPE shortage of doctors, and also ventilators for the hospitals. All of these are being as a community service and without having any profit motive in mind. Many online services are providing free community services in such times of crisis. Many courses have been granted free to the public by places like edX, coursera etc. New york times made many of their articles especially related to COVID-19 related ones free. IEEE also made all their COVID-19 related papers free to read for all. Thus through temporary removal of paywalls many online services are contributing to community services too.
Slavoj Zizek said, in times of crisis such as this, a national and a global collaboration is a must which aims to mitigate the effect of the disaster and looks forward to solution keeping the idea of profits out of the mind completely. According to Slavoj Zizek’s book Pandemic, he says such a global disaster teaches us a valuable thing, which is the power of mutual trust and collaboration, collaboration between the people, collaboration between the government and the people, and collaboration between the government and the government. He predicts a modified communist uprising in the coming years, after the pandemic dies out, if he says, people learn something from this pandemic. If not then, there would be nothing stopping people from repeating the same mistakes again, and nothing to recede the death tolls. or as he says,
Reference to this particualar quote can be found here:
But Zizek’s book Pandemic is a very good lightread. I would urge everyone to read the book. It deals with many practical aspects associated with the pandemic and its overall. The book consists of 128 pages, that too with many blank pages in between, so it shouldn’t take much of your precious time but will give you a whole new perspective to look at the crisis, and make you realize the significance of mutual aid, mutual collaboration. The thing i have been blabbering all about in this article, the partial bit of the anarchist philosophy which can help us in marching in a more efficient way.