* Reflections on the Anarchist Principle
Tom Jennings
1:125/111

The following is the opening essay in "THE BLACK FLAG OF 
ANARCHISM AND OTHER ESSAYS", available from Employee Theft Press,
($2.50 from 1369 Haight St, San Francisco CA 94117) -- all funds 
from the sale of this pamphlet go to "WITHOUT BORDERS ANARCHIST
CONFERENCE & FESTIVAL", to be held in San Francisco this 
July 20 - 25.


Reflections on the Anarchist Principle
by Paul Goodman

"Anarchism is grounded in a rather definite proposition: that
valuable behavior occurs only by the free and direct response of
individuals or voluntary groups to the conditions presented by
the historical environment. It claims that in most human affairs,
whether political, economic, military, religious, moral,
pedagogic, or cultural, more harm than good results from
coercion, top-down direction, central authority, bureaucracy,
jails, conscription, states, pre-ordained standardization,
excessive planning, etc. Anarchists want to increase intrinsic
functioning and diminish extrinsic power. This is a social-
psychological hypothesis with obvious political implications.

"Depending on varying historical conditions that present various
threats to the anarchist principle, anarchists have laid their
emphasis in varying places: sometimes agrarian, sometimes free-
city and guild-oriented; sometimes technological, sometimes anti-
technological; sometimes Communist, sometimes affirming property;
sometimes individual, sometimes collective; sometimes speaking of
Liberty as an almost absolute good, sometimes relying on custom
and 'nature'. Nevertheless, despite these differences, anarchists
seldom fail to recognize each other, and they do not consider the
differences to be incompatibilities. Consider a crucial modern
problem, violence. Guerrilla fighting has been a classical
anarchist technique; yet, especially where, in modern conditions,
*any* violent means tends to reinforce centralism and
authoritarianism, anarchists have tended to see the beauty of
non-violence.

"Now the anarchist principle is by and large true(1). And far
from being 'utopian' or a 'glorious failure', it has proved
itself and won out in many spectacular historical crises. In the
period of mercantilism and patents royal, free enterprise by
joint stock companies were anarchist. The Jeffersonian bill of
rights were anarchist. Progressive education was anarchist. The
free cities and corporate law in the feudal system were
anarchist. At present, the civil rights movement in the United
States has been almost classically decentralist and anarchist.
And so forth, down to details like free access in public
libraries. Of course, to later historians these things do not
seem to be anarchist, but in their own time they were regarded as
such and often literally called such, with the usual dire threats of
chaos. But this relativity of the anarchist principle to the
actual situation is of the essence of anarchism. There *cannot*
be a history of anarchism in the sense of establishing a
permanent state of things 'anarchist'. It is always a continual
coping with the next situation, and a vigilance to make sure that
past freedoms are not lost and do not turn into the opposite, as
free enterprise turned into wage-slavery and monopoly capitalism,
or the independent judiciary turned into a monopoly of courts,
cops, and lawyers, or free education turned into School Systems."



Footnote(1) "I, and Other anarchists, would except certain states 
of temporary emergency, is we can be confident that the emergency 
is *temporary*. We might except certain simplistic logistic
arrangements, like ticketing or metric standards or tax-
collection, if we can be confident that the administration, the
'secretariat', will not begin to run the show. And we might
except certain 'natural monopolies', like epidemic control,
water-supply, etc."

First published in ANARCHY 62 (April 1966)