Anarchy :: essays research papers

Anarchism, more than anything else, is about the efforts of millions of rotary motionaries changing the world in the last ii centuries.Here we will discuss some of the high points of this movement, all of them of a profoundly anti-capitalist nature. Anarchism is about radically changing the world, not just making the symbolize system less inhuman by encouraging the anarchistictendencies within it to grow and develop. While no purely anarchist revolution has taken displace yet, there have been numerous oneswith a highly anarchist character and level of participation. And while these have all been destroyed, in each case it has been atthe hands of outside force brought against them (backed either by Communists or Capitalists), not because of any internalproblems in anarchism itself. These revolutions, despite their failure to survive in the award of overwhelming force, have been bothan inspiration for anarchists and proof that anarchism is a viable social theory and can be practi sed on a hulky scale. What these revolutions sh are is the fact they are, to use Proudhons term, a "revolution from below" -- they were examples of"collective activity, of popular spontaneity." It is only a transformation of society from the bottom up by the action of theoppressed themselves that can create a free society. As Proudhon asked, "what serious and lasting Revolution was notmade from below, by the people?" For this cogitate an anarchist is a "revolutionary from below." Thus the social revolutionsand mass movements we discuss in this section are examples of popular self-activity and self-liberation (as Proudhon put it in1848, "the proletariat must emancipate itself"). quoted by George Woodcock, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon A Biography, p.143 and p. 125 All anarchists echo Proudhons idea of revolutionary change from below, the creation of a new society by theactions of the oppressed themselves. Bakunin, for example, argued that anarchist s are "foes . . . of all State organisations assuch, and believe that the people can only be happy and free, when, organised from below by means of its own free and completely free associations, without the supervision of any guardians, it will create its own life."Marxism, Freedom and the State, p. 63 In section J.7 we discuss what anarchists think a social revolution is and what itinvolves. It is important to point out that these examples are of wide-scale social experiments and do not imply that we ignore theundercurrent of anarchist practice which exists in everyday life, horizontal under capitalism.