Anarchist Studies |
Guest Editorial
RUTH KINNA
Uri Gordon's elegant and impassioned editorial in AS 14.2 is a hard act to follow. In my mind it raised a number of issues about engagement, activism and political circumstance. On reading his piece I thought momentarily of William Morris, who, before the socialist revival in the early 1880s, hankered for a life of revolutionary excitement, and regretted not having been born in a time of dramatic upheaval when it had been possible to live for a cause ('to have drawn the sword with Oliver [Cromwell]: that may well seem to us at times amidst the tangles of to-day a happy fate: for a man to be able to say, I have lived like a fool, but now I will cast all fooling away …'1). My settled response was - sadly - more downbeat. Flipping through a book I've not yet had time to read properly, I found this from Voltaire de Cleyre:
" … I have lost the habit of thinking that I can acquire the power to know what is the trouble. I tell you I feel spiritually, morally, and mentally bankrupt! When I think of anything as a subject to write upon I am immediately smitten with a recognition of my own incompetence. I am as satisfied as ever that society is in bad shape, but I do not know how it should be remedied. The prolific confidence of old years, has died; I am possessed by barren doubts only … It's not that I have the slightest idea that our opponents are right; their statements look just as foolish to me as they ever did; but I have no surety of our opposition.2"
Similar doubts creep in on meeting people who ask 'Are you involved in activism?'. Or, worse, 'What kind of activism are you involved in?'. Such questions fill me with horror and make me want to defend and apologise for my inactivity at one and the same time. (The pejorative 'You're a feminist, aren't you' used to raise similarly conflicting emotions.) Of course there is a lot to oppose. The government is responsible for a catalogue of stupid, short-sighted and disastrous decisions. Everyone has a list of failures, omissions and mistakes. Tony Benn's metamorphosis into Britain's favourite statesman seems a fair indication of how bad politics under New Labour has become. Added to that, I harbour a set of petty resentments about the behaviour and accountability of my local government, stemming from an action of which I was a part, last year. Should I write to my MP, contact my councillor … maybe my counsellor?
In the midst of all this: three conversations. The first with a prospective PhD student, who, it emerged, is convinced that academia is not only a form of activism, but an important one. The idea is comforting, but not convincing - not to me, at least. Naturally, I take seriously both the content and process of what I do - teach - and I'm aware of the central role that education has played in anarchist theory and practice. But universities are not new schools, and the kind of education that they offer hardly matches the integrated schemes proposed by nineteenth and early twentieth-century thinkers. If I can make the best of it and generate some enthusiasm for my fields of interest in the process, that's great - but it doesn't really let me off the hook.
The second conversation was with an ex-student - now doing a PhD. Recalling a class on the alter-globalistion movement in which we discussed the justifiability of property-damage, he tells me: 'it was shocking: you don't look like an anarchist'. How to respond? The sensible route would have been to talk about stereotypes and the ridiculous attempts to define scientifically an anarchist-type. Cesare Lombroso's psychological researches threw up two militant characters. The first had 'a very large forehead, a very bushy beard, and very large and soft eyes'. This 'noble', 'true' revolutionary type was associated with genius, saintliness and - notwithstanding the bushy beard - self-sacrificing nihilists like Vera Zasulich and Sofia Petrovskaya. The second was distinguished by 'facial asymmetry, enormous jaws, developed frontal sinus', and protruding ears without lobes. Militants of this stripe 'possess the degenerative characters common to criminals and to the insane'. The Haymarket anarchists fell into this category.3 Mine was a less sensible path, though on a par with Lombroso's. I imagine being taken before the television fashion-police. 'What do you like least about your appearance?' they ask me. 'I don't look like an anarchist', I confess, weeping. I'm taken to a plastic surgeon to have my forehead reduced, my jaw enlarged and my ears stuck out, and then to a chi-chi boutique for an expensive make-over. After all the magic a random selection of high street shoppers is asked to guess my politics from my now repellent form: 75% say 'anarchist'. Of course, the student is right. I don't have to go far to know the limits of my links with the counterculture (you can almost see people at book fairs and other anarchist events play spot-the-academic). And in any case, I know that the politics of my everyday life is very, very conventional. Bourgeois, perhaps? George Melly once suggested that no-one with a mortgage could call themselves an anarchist, and so described himself as a sympathizer. But that test - right or wrong - seems to be the least of it: many of my aspirations are conventional. Forget the Marvellous, cherish the mundane.
The third conversation, which has been going on some time, had another airing at a recent seminar. The long and short of my critic's position is that most nineteenth-century thought is historically interesting but politically dubious. It suggests a commitment to rigid social schemes (panopticism, more or less), to vanguardism and class-based ideology. Indeed, defending the work of the 'ideologues' on the proscribed list (which includes the big three, Proudhon, Kropotkin and Bakunin, but not Stirner) seems to amount to endorsing these commitments. What's the problem? This classification at least allows me to feel better about my bourgeois tendencies: my experiments in life might not be very adventurous - perhaps I mean they're private - but they're as valid as any one else's and no-one can tell me how I should live. Moreover, it suggests an engagement, a form of activism. Maybe I should take some comfort from this, even if it's not a form of activism with which I identify. I was introduced to anarchism as a graduate student (one course on socialist thought - a critique of Jacobinism - and another on the history of the Spanish Civil War). One of the motivations for my post-graduate work was to challenge what I perceived to be the flawed and inaccurate accounts of anarchism written in the main by Marxist historians. In London in the 1980s, when the British Labour Party was busy doing battle with the Trotskyist Militant tendency, and an aggressive, crude form of Marxism became vogue, this concern was considered reactionary. Bizarrely, fellow-protesters at the demos of the time even accused me of 'social fascism'. Now, equally bizarrely, I'm pigeon-holed and dismissed as part of the old orthodoxy. And what I regard as my meagre engagements in politics - through academia - are directive in a way that I never imagined.
I am empowered!
Notes
1. Morris in Norman Kelvin (ed), Collected Letters, Vol. II, Princeton
University Press: New Jersey, p. 157.
2. Letter to Saul Yanovsky, 1911, in Eugenia C. Delamotte, Gates of
Freedom: Voltairine de Cleyre and the Revolution of the Mind, University
of Michigan Press: Ann Arbor, p. 181.
3. Lombroso, The Monist, Vol. 1, 1890, 336-8.
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