Anarchic Activism Day by Day
by Mary Leue
 
 
The one thing is necessary, in life as in art, is to tell the truth. …
 
In historical events great men - so-called - are but labels serving to give a name to the event, and like labels they have the least possible connection with the event itself. Every action of theirs, that seems to them an act of their own free will, is in an historical sense not free at all, but in bondage to the whole course of previous history, and predestined from all eternity.

-- Leo Tolstoy

 
I sometimes call myself an anarchist, which is an odd thing to do (labeling myself) - especially for a person who has been an opponent of labels, systems, for many decades! I guess my take on this apparent paradox is that the term anarchist, unlike a lot of other terms, means more to other people than it does to the person referred to by the label. The paradox built into the term, which means "a social structure without government or law and order" is that it describes a state of mind which opposes labeling of any kind, as it opposes any imposed order, system or government!
 
This leaves me free to create my own definition, since it is wholly individual, wholly unsystematic in its significance. For me, then, it's OK to find the origin for my identification with the concept of anarchism wherever it arose! I guess that came first out of the sense of familiarity I felt when I first sat in a Harvard summer school classroom (having flunked my freshman survey history course at my college) and heard this variety of political dissidence being described by the instructor. But the experience that really sank in fully came out of the shock of recognition I felt reading the autobiography of leading nineteenth century Russian anarchist Prince Pyotr Kropotkin, in which he describes his family's long, long annual trek by horses and carriage, a march of more than a hundred miles, followed by a long, long line on foot of their hundreds of servants (some of them newborn babies, others so old and feeble they died en route!), to their estates in the country, which seem to have resembled the King Ranch in south Texas, stretching similarly for hundreds of miles!
 
Immediately on arriving after their journey of several days, the Kropotkin children would kick off their shoes and scamper to the peasant village on the huge estate, where their nurse, now married and with children of her own, lived and worked. Here they felt completely at home, and were welcomed joyously by the entire village, whose life they were then free to join as they wished. It was an ideal kind of summer experience, particularly in contrast with the rigidity and stultification of their life in Moscow, with its demanding social rules and the total domestic tyranny and absolute monarchy of its leader, the old prince Pyotr's father. This was a "brand" of anarchism with which I was totally familiar, having lived during my middle childhood on a hundred-acre estate which was so absorbing in its ambience as to constitute my entire summer life, along with my five siblings! My only friends outside my immediate family were working class kids, whose ease of access to unsupervised activity felt close to my own, as opposed to the fully monitored life of the upper middle class kids who lived close by our place. The nature of this variety of anarchism was &endash; and is &endash; essentially romantic, based as it is on a kind of familiarity with members of the lower class. the special privilege and protection afforded by his own social origin being invisible to the child. In other words, this kind of childhood anarchism is itself an artifact of the class system!
 
Does this then invalidate its significance as an ideal by which to measure one's daily life? I think not. "The child," they say, "Is father to the man." As the child grows, so will he live his values as an adult! Time enough for the necessary corrections to his idealism, in its rosy view of reality, but his basic belief in the goodness of humanity will remain. No, not as a moral principle - at least as morality has been traditionally defined - but as truth, as reality in the truest sense of the word. Kropotkin is very clear about the difference between conventional morality and such truth, and bases it &endash; as I do - on the experience of the child, good or bad, freely chosen or enforced by the adults who surround him! He calls such morality the following of the pleasure principle. Here is an excerpt from his essay, "Anarchist Morality":
 
... A child's spirit is weak. It is so easy to coerce it by fear. This they [the authorities; in particular, the priests] do. They make the child timid, and then they talk to him of the torments of hell. They conjure up before him the sufferings of the condemned, the vengeance of an implacable god. The next minute they will be chattering of the horrors of revolution, and using some excess of the revolutionists to make the child "a friend of order." The priest accustoms the child to the idea of law, to make it obey better what he calls the "divine law," and the lawyer prates of divine law, that the civil law may be the better obeyed.
 
And by that habit of submission, with which we are only too familiar, the thought of the next generation retains this religious twist, which is at once servile and authoritative, for authority and servility walk ever hand in hand.
 
During these slumbrous interludes, morals are rarely discussed. Religious practices and judicial hypocrisy take their place. People do not criticize, they let themselves be drawn by habit, or indifference.They do not put themselves out for or against the established morality. They do their best to make their actions appear to accord with their professions.
 
All that was good, great, generous or independent in man, little by little becomes moss-grown; rusts like a disused knife. A lie becomes a virtue, a platitude a duty. To enrich oneself, to seize one's opportunities, to exhaust one's intelligence, zeal and energy, no matter how, become the watchwords of the comfortable classes, as well as of the crowd of poor folk whose ideal is to appear bourgeois. Then the degradation of the ruler and of the judge, of the clergy and of the more or less comfortable classes becomes so revolting that the pendulum begins to swing the other way.
Both Hegel and Marx saw thought as naturally following a dialectical pattern which moves from thesis to antithesis and finally, to synthesis &endash; which encompasses and goes beyond the opposites, and thereby creates a new thesis!
 
For me, the way of viewing of life and process that most closely follows a dialectical process is, properly defined, radical, because it starts from the root causes of the problem and moves to a method of creating change that has a chance of working because it doesn't arouse negative oppositional thinking and yet is based on clear concepts of what is needed. This is what I call anarchic activism. It is authentic, in that it represents what the person really, truly wants for its own sake, not just as part of a concession to someone else &endash; in other words, to follow Kropotkin, Bentham et al, it accords with the pleasure principle.
 
Moreover, this is not a concept which can be incorporated into the creating of yet another tyrannical control over the minds of man - as the pleasure principle itself has been exploited in the modern world of consumerism. The Industrial Revolution and its elevation into the pseudo-religious status of the capitalist system have involved a gradual perfecting of the worst, the most fiendish trap for the pleasure principle yet devised, based as it is on manufacturing addiction, initially in very young children, to a steady stream of purchased goods to feed their limitless hungers! The result of this system - a culture based almost entirely on on consumerism - is a large class of obese adults whose passivity is redirected away from clarity of thinking and purpose to a perpetual search for distraction, for ephemoral yet ever-renewed pleasure!
 
This is NOT, properly speaking, the pleasure principle as Kropotkin and Bentham conceived it. What they are referring to is an organic need for biological renewal of some sort, whether it be physical or spiritual. Like the wanting of a very young child, it is an integral part of the person who espouses it, with no hidden agenda. And it can be trusted to be what it purports to be, because it comes directly from the values of the person who holds it. I would add that this process follows the dialectic I described above, in appearing to the person as a thesis &endash; what Fritz Perls called a Gestalt &endash; which has its own built-in antithesis, and will lead to the synthesis of the two, given the freedom for such completion to develop. Perls developed a group process for enabling a person who seemed stuck in his inner "thesis or Gestalt," to experience equally the "other side" or antithesis, in order to achieve the inner integration of the two which could emerge from the person's newfound familiarity with both Gestalten!
 
This kind of activism, whether offered to children OR to adults - coming as it does from the heart of the child and the inner mind of the adult - could become a new kind of self-regulating system which grows, by its own nature, increasingly relevant, increasingly valid, able to be recognized and followed by other people of good will. For me it partakes of the quality of the saying of Jesus about goodness being spread everywhere on the earth, yet not perceived by the majority of men. Nothing, then, really needs to be done except to find the inner space for oneself, and to help create the kind of inner space for others &endash; to enable their true seeing to grow naturally from within!
 
Because only the eyes of nature &endash; the eyes of the inner child who has not been prevented from seeing it &endash; can perceive such universal goodness. For me, this is the only valid guiding principle for daily activism! It thus follows for me that activism needs initially to be focused on the life of the young child, in order to help create an environment of authenticity &endash; of freedom, to use a badly over-used word - in thought and behavior that will enable him to perceive clearly where his own inner guidance principle &endash; the pursuit of his pleasure &endash; will take him.
 
As A.S. Neill wrote so truly, "Freedom is not license." Total freedom, properly defined, is total responsibility! But it is also dedication to the pursuit of one's pleasure principle, properly defined, as Kropotkin suggests. Children need a setting in which to discover naturally that one child's pleasure is only as real everyone's pleasure! This is pleasure which does not curtail the equal right to pleasure of his peers, because, as George Dennison described so vividly inThe Lives of Children, what children crave is a kind of ongoing dance &endash; a flow, a melody, as it were, in which each child' has his natural place and makes his individual contribution to the harmony of the whole. The loss of any one dancer in the ring creates a hiatus, a hitch, a dissonant note in the flow of that celestial melody! This is pleasure properly defined &endash; and anarchic activism can find no possible rival to its promotion in the daily miracle afforded to its practitioners in helping to create such a place, such a process, such a flow!
 
From time to time great systems of thought have come up with the same basic blueprint for the universal good for mankind and for the earth which I have tried to describe in the above pages. The Tao Te Ching - the sayings of Lao Tzu - the I Ching, Leviticus and Isaiah in the Torah, Pure Land Buddhism, the sayings of Jesus, the tenets of Sufism and the beliefs of many Native Americans all concur in saying that for mankind to thrive in peace in a world that can nurture his welfare and prosperity, the natural order must prevail.
 
As verse 10 of the Tao Te Ching puts it: "Do that which consists in taking no action, and order will prevail." This is the basic principle of Taoism - that order results from inaction, while disorder results from action! Attempting to control things actually messes them up. Notice that this place of non-action is defined as "doing," not just as passive acceptance! Alas, most adults have been far too heavily indoctrinated as children by the ordinary concept of activism to give this not-action principle much credence beyond mere lip service (including the writer!). Thus, acceptance of a principle as paradoxical and yet as profound as this must be learned as adults so that the habit of natural order may be available to the children! Hanna Greenberg, long-time co-founder and teacher at Sudbury Valley School, expresses this principle most powerfully in her article, "The Art of Doing Nothing!" (reprinted in SKOLE, volume II, #3, Summer, 1986). Its wisdom could be applied equally to parenting. For me, this is the only "daily activism" that makes sense.