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Through the ages, the strive for freedom has tended to be around certain issues and people have been galvanised into action by the force of events. This article aims to show that in anarchistic terms, there is nothing wrong with single issues, but that these cannot, on their own, be the struggle for anarchism. The aim should be for the mutual co-operativeness of the human struggle.
The class issue is an obvious example and one which has often led its adherents to see as the only struggle for anarchism. It is true that the class system exhibits the most blatant and unacceptable aspects of capitalism and that the 'working class' gets the brunt of it: the poverty, the wage slavery, or the debilitating rejection of unemployrnent. however, to see the struggle in terms of redistribution of wealth or destroying the middle and upper classes is merely to change the goalposts of capitalism, by continuing the hierarchical structure. History shows that the reorganisation of any group which is defined by capitalism is merely to give different leaders but not an anarchist society.
If there is any classification of people in terms of struggle, it must be between the controlling and the controlled. The class structure merely highlights the degree of control. To define in any other way is an illusion and leads to the conclusion that if the working class had more access to the same things as the upper classes, then they would be happy. This then marks out human existence only in terms of money and possessions and keeps them within the framework of a capitalist system. Ask why the upper classes keep their control. It is to gain more power and wealth. Ask why so many of the 'lower orders spend their money on the prole tax (or Lottery). It is to gain more pwer and wealth. This is not necessarily overtly over their fellow people, but this is the net result
Similarly, within the class division there are hierarchies. As a one- time employee of a large trade union, I recall the exploitation of the workers by those who were supposedly at the sharp end of working on their behalf The sight of shop stewards piling into their cars for meetings in London, and then each claiming the full cost of the train fare to make a profit, was appalling. They were taking the hard-earned csh out of their fellow workers' pockets. Similarly, the employees of the union had to be members of it. This led to the ludicrous situation where the union leader was also the office boss. Not surprisingly, this meant atrophy of the workers' rights and ability to negotiate.
Part of the difficulty is the brainwashing by the system, where the union representatives reflected the very excesses they challenged in the bosses, but failed to see how they did the same, albeit on a smaller scale. This is because the system has been intemalised and accepted too long by everyone. It is also a truism that, as with the union, the working class are obliged to exploit each other and it is always those the bottom of the heap who are exploited the most. For example, child labour appears to abound in China and the result of that is the cheap imports into this country. Who buys those? Yes, it's the people who are on low incomes who cannot afford the expensive designer products bought by the upper classes. Ironically, it may well be that working conditions for those who make the higher quality products are better than for those who produce the cheaper imports because in the latter case profits are being maximised at the workers' expense. As Emma Goldman wrote, "the people, the people: they conspire with their masters to forge their own chains and crucify their Christs".
The truth is that people of all social hues or classes are expected to see themselves and their fellows in terms of money and possessions and it is the pursuit of that end that government and its acolytes, the multinationals, instils in people forcing them to compete with an exploit each other. We must never forget that we, as anarchists, are also tainted by the brainwashing of the system; we all bear the scars of our personal struggle to get out of the mental mire of government control. On a simple level, remember going to school and learning the national anthem, the Lord's Prayer and how to count? All to bind us to government, church and capitalism: all hemmed in by the view that money and possessions make for a happy life.
However, what we have to remember is that the illusion is fed into everyone, whether at the worst comprehensive or the privileged schools of Eton, the difference being that one group is to control and, the other is to be controlled. The carrot for the latter group is that if it conforms and works hard enough, it might have an opportunity of being a controller or, if not, it's all for the 'common good' anyway. But in human terms, neither group has a monopoly on peace and contentment, of living in harmony with others and their environment. I am not an apologist for the privileged, but we should not get sucked into the idea that they are living anything more than materially comfortable lives. They still bear the same psychological scars of government and capitalism as the rest of us.
Can anyone seriously consider it a humane thing to send small children away from home to boarding school? Someone once remarked to me that the lower classes have social workers; the upper ones nannies. Both are dysfunctional families. I also recall a story of prostitute explaining that not all her clients wanted sex: some just wanted to talk and one in particular was a doyen of industry responsible for a huge workforce. All she had to do for him was to spray herself with a perfume he supplied and put on long evening gloves. He would then lie in bed with the light off and she had to come into the room and stroke his cheek. After knowing him for some time, she got the background story. He had been brought up in a privileged, rich family but all he remembered of his mother was the act recreated by the prostitute - of a woman going off to yet another social function. In human terms, I consider that a pathetic story and, in practical terms I find it disturbing because what sort of controller had he become? Being detached from feelings for our fellow humans is what makes people harsh and cruel. Treating people badly results in bad people
As the Taoist philosopher Chang Tzu wrote in a parable:
Horses live on dry land, eat grass and drink water. When pleased, they rub their necks together. When angry, they turn round and kick up their heels at each other. Thus far only, do their natural dispositions carry them. But bridled and bitted, with a plate of metal on their foreheads, they learn to cast vicious looks, to turn the head to bite, to resist, to get the bit out of the mouth or the bridle into it. And thus their natures become depraved.
William Blake, in the eighteenth century saw the pointlessness of materialism and wrote "for every Pleasure money is useless" and he saw that an excessive concern with money is also disastrous to the soul, turning a person into a miser who would only see a guinea in the setting sun.
The severance from others also gives government its currency. If we do not know what is going on with our neighbours and in our community, then we become easily fed with the tabloid-induced fear of others and retreat further into the illusion of the nuclear family, fed by a diet of MacDonalds and soaps. Mutual aid and co-operation look ever more distant and as people become increasingly dependant on government as the arbiter of human life, then they become willing to sanction without question all its brutalities.
So as people become severed from each other they become severed from their own humanity. A common sight these days is to see drunks or homeless people laid in the underpasses of cities. On one such occasion, a man lay motionless with a beer can at the side of him. Was he dead, or dead drunk? People walked past and ignored him. Many of those people would be concemed for him, but the multiple stories of attackers, of wastrels, of 'it's their own fault' and all the other brainwashed fears instilled in them, found their mark and people carried on, their lack of exercise of their humanity, of their natural need to help, was frozen. And if he was taken away and beaten up by the authorities, would they care or would they believe he 'deserved' it? And if he 'deserved' it, wasn't that because he didn't conform? In freezing their natural human instinct, they exhibit the triumph of government in crushing the individual and the rigid adherence to conformity.
So, if we do not have a class struggle, what do we do? We educate everyone and that includes the controllers. If we accept Colin Ward's view that anarchy lies as a seed beneath the surface, then we must accept it is below the surface of everyone, not just the weakest or less privileged. If we do not, then we cannot account for Peter Kropotkin or the nobleman Lao Tzu. Basically, we are all in chains, it's just that some are gold plated and rattle much louder, but only like Marley's ghost.
Part of the problem is that many people feel comfortable and safe in those chains because they put their trust in government, in the naive belief that govemment knows best. They have to learn that only they know what is best for them and they are not living their lives to the full - they are living their lives as directed by other people whom they will probably never have met. Mostly, they are living in fear of attack from their neighbours, of loss of pension, of war against an unknown enemy, etc. and they look to govemment for the protection they believe they cannot give themselves. They must be made aware that they have no need to control others or be controlled.
Therefore, the struggle must be aimed at everyone. People need to be aware of the illusion of government. Unless we aim to get people to free themselves from their chains, we remain merely pockets of radicals and revolutionaries, reacting accordingly to the excesses of the leaders of the day.
We must recognise that some of us may feel more strongly than others about certain issues such as environment, feminism, class, etc. but we should see them only as the different hues of anarchism and to welcome, support and respect them as a manifestation of the individual free views. We should also help where we can.
But we must recognise that they are all single issue staging posts on the way to anarchism: they are not the foundations of the route itself. The hardcore of that road is the human struggle for freedom from all forms of restraint; the top surface is knowledge and all anarchists should be part of that roadwork.
© Jean Pollard The Raven pp349-354
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