CHAPTER 15
PERSONAL LIBERTY AND CULTURE

 

THE ULTIMATE END of anarchism is the freedom of the individual, and any survey of anarchism must consider this object.

As I have already said, few anarchists contend that absolute individual freedom is possible, or, indeed, desirable.  A solitary life, detached from all contact with his fellows, is the only one in which a man could enjoy such a degree of liberty.  But man is a social being, depending for his well-being on working and living together in society.  And one cannot conceive a society in which man would be devoid of obligations, both of omission and of commission, towards his fellows.

The freedom anarchists seek, then, is a reciprocal freedom, a freedom of men and women recognising each other’s rights, a freedom based on justice.  By justice is meant not the artificial justice of state laws, but the justice that springs naturally from the needs of a society of free men with common and equal rights in the means of production.  Without such justice freedom is impossible.

Political freedom the right to vote, trial by jury, freedom of speech and press - does not constitute real freedom.  Indeed it masks the unfree nature of the society from which it springs.  The right to vote means the right to choose whether one will have a brewer or a lawyer for a master.  It does not mean the right to do without a master.  Trial by jury means the right to be judged by a handful of petty tradesmen, in accordance with the laws of a society based on property and class.  It does not mean the right to be judged by any standard of absolute justice.  Freedom of speech and press as they exist in every so-called democratic country, are so limited by laws against sedition, libel and obscenity, that they are very far from the right of a man to say or write what he considers the truth - especially if that truth is unpleasant to his rulers!

Political freedom in a class society is virtually meaningless.  It may make life slightly easier in some ways than it is under dictatorship.  But it is strictly limited in the interests of the controlling class, and its availability is in relation to the class and economic position of the man concerned.  To have no money is sufficient reason to be imprisoned under the English poor law.  (There could be no better example of the difference between justice and the law).  To obtain even the limited proportion of justice allowed by the law, it is necessary to have money to pay the lawyers, who have a vested interest in litigation.  Similarly, a man cannot stand for parliament unless he has money to pay his deposit and his election expenses.  Thus the majority of candidates are either rich men or representatives of some vested interest in the existing order, whether it is a railway company or a trade union.

Democratic freedoms, then, are relative to wealth.  But this is not the full measure of the relationship.  In reality the rich enjoy a far greater freedom than that conferred by their ability to exploit the existing law to its full extent.  Their money allows them to reach planes of enjoyment that are denied the poor, because poverty as well as the law acts as a bar on freedom.  Legally the poor man is free to possess a Renoir or a Steinway piano or a dozen Sung vases.  Manifestly, his freedom in this respect amounts to nothing.  A poor man is free to play golf or drive his car out in the country on a Sunday.  But this freedom amounts to little when his last sixpence goes to buy shoe leather for the children and his weekend is spent botching their shoes.  A poor man is free to eat lobsters every day, except in the close season when nobody wants to eat them.  He has also the liberty of champagne and caviar, vodka and venison, and a whole list of delectable foods that will never grace his meagre table and hobnob with the meat paste and the margarine.  Nor does the law forbid him to sleep between silken sheets with the dearest tart in London, but reality lays down the veto the law declines.  In a class society the ruling class are always free owing to their control of the means of production, of the money that in an acquisitive society is the way to all enjoyment.  The ruled are not free because lack of control of production, and the benefits of money, liberal education, etc., proceeding there from, cuts them off from all but the most meagre forms of enjoyment.

Moreover, political freedom in a class society (and all political societies are by definition class societies), is relative to the security of that society.  The ruling class give just so much political freedom as it is worthwhile and possible to give to keep the people out of mischief.  Obviously, if people can be kept quiet with a phantom freedom, it is much better to give them this than to maintain a swollen and expensive army and police force.  When, however, the ruling class find it necessary, owing to the financial and economic crises which arise periodically under property societies, to curtail the standard of living of the workers, they must at the same time restrict those liberties, such as freedom of association, of assembly, of the press, of the ballot, which would afford the aggrieved populace a means of voicing their grievances and would favour the growth of a revolutionary movement.  At such times the elements of coercion and brute force that lurk behind the scenes, even in periods of so-called freedom, are brought into the open and government is revealed as no other than tyranny.

Political freedom, at its best, can only be limited, as it maintains the power of property, which, by conferring the right of exploitation, limits the freedom of the exploited, who are the majority of the population.  In peacetime, most of the crimes that appear before the courts are offences against the laws of property.  The rest are against the state, which is the abstraction comprising the concrete forces (army, bureaucracy, courts, police) that protect the ownership or control of property by the ruling class.

The laws protecting the state find their way into every sphere of life, and involve the prohibition of activities that, at first consideration, would appear to have no bearing on the social structure.

There is, for instance, the law of libel, which, while in theory it protects the individual against defamatory or damaging statements, is in fact of great value to the political figures and the ruling class in general in presenting a false face to the people and concealing the true nature of their activities.

The laws against blasphemy, which remain on the statute book, even if they are rarely applied, are retained to preserve the state church which provides a useful myth to gull many of the people into supporting the established regime, and sanctifies with pious phrases all the brutalities involved in internal suppression and external aggression.

The laws against bigamy, abortion, homosexual practices, transvestism, and other sexual deviations, as well as the semi-official persecution of the unmarried mother and the bastard child, protect the institution of the family, which is needed to produce children to become the victims of the next World War.

Thus the state, in its own interests, thrusts the ant-eater proboscis of its legal system into every corner of the national and individual life, in order to discover and curtail any activities that may endanger its own existence.

Political freedom is thus, in fact, an ingenious delusion, by which the governing classes give the people the comforting belief that they themselves have made the chains that bind them and that for this reason the chains are necessary and good.  It gives men certain liberties that the ruling classes find it wise to concede as a cheap way of buying security, but its very retention of a political system, which means government, which means coercion, must in the end destroy political freedom itself.

Anarchists do not advocate political freedom.  What they advocate is freedom from politics, freedom from the institution of government, freedom from coercion, freedom from the law’s interference in the lives of individual men and women, freedom from economic domination and inequality.  The last is perhaps the most important, in that economic freedom, the satisfaction of mans’ physical needs for food, clothing, shelter, and all the other material necessities of a civilized life, is necessary before any man can begin to be free.

By the elimination of property, vested either in individuals or in corporate ruling classes, by the destruction of the state, by the substitution, for a society based on the mechanical and artificial institutions imposed by the dictates of propertied and governing interests, of a society based on institutions rising organically from the needs of men, anarchism will sweep away immediately the need for the suppression of individual freedom.  Only a society based on control from above has need of coercion.  A society based on co-operation can do without oppression and restriction because it is based on the voluntary agreement between its members.  Indeed, it must do without coercion, if it is to retain its co-operative basis, and avoid relapsing into a political institution controlled by a governing cabal.

Freedom is as much a necessity for society as it is for the individual men and women who comprise it.  Restrictions on liberty naturally produce oppositions within a society.  No political unit in the history of so-called civilisation has existed without carrying within itself the disruptive forces of discontent - precisely because no political unit has existed which did not base itself ultimately on the ability to force the individuals within it to obey the will of the controlling elements.  Social units, on the other hand, which were operated by co-operative and voluntary means, have succeeded in surviving over long periods without internal strife.  Their failure has resulted either from the attack of overpoweringly strong external forces or from the co-operative units themselves adopting the authoritarian pattern of external political bodies, which course has invariably ended in their decline as valuable social entities.  (The decline of the English trade unions to subordinate control institutions of the state is a notable example of the decay of an originally co-operative institution that adopted a centralised authoritarian pattern).

An examination of history, the real history of concrete human achievements and institutions as against the semi-mythical history of political institutions, shows that the development of the corporate and individual achievements of men is strongest and assumes its most significant forms in periods and places where political organisation is weakened and least centralised.  The vitality of human culture appears to run in inverse proportion to the strength of the state.  Periods of political stabilisation, when authority is held firmly by an efficient centralised government, when the state is deified and the free action of the individual is impeded, are most often periods of sterility, both in the development of organic institutions and the cultural achievements of individual artists and scientists.  Times of political disintegration, when social forms are in flux, when the power and efficiency of the government are weak, when the state is regarded lightly and the individual finds room and freedom for development, are periods of institutional and cultural growth.

This can be observed by studying the history of every cultural region that has contributed widely to the real social progress of mankind.  Among European regions, Greece was without doubt the most important, and at the climax of its artistic and intellectual achievement Greece did not exist as a united and centralised state.  It was a collection of city territories, all unstably governed (with the exception of Sparta - culturally the most barren) and all sufficiently small for the individual citizen at least to have the opportunity of taking part in the conduct of affairs.  In this society the turbulent city of Athens became the centre of the most fertile culture the world has yet possessed, and we have only to consider the names of Plato and Socrates, Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus, Phidias and Aristophanes, to realise the vitality of the human spirit in that city whose political life was so unsure.  Nor was Athens alone, for many of the other cities and islands produced important groups of philosophers, poets and artists, and centuries after the high days of Attic culture there arose in the decaying kingdom of Egypt the great cultural centre of Alexandria, a Greek colony that was to emulate Athens in its contributions to philosophy and science.

In China, the power of the central government was never ubiquitous, and, in the great periods of Chinese civilisation, what government did exist was localised in a class of scholars, while by far the greater proportion of administration was carried on in voluntary manner by autonomous village and guild units.  The ancient Chinese were never a military nation and often saved their civilisation by accepting the invaders into their midst and so influencing them that they eventually lost their identity in the Chinese race.  Yet this nation, which lacked the common characteristics of nationality as understood by Westerners, produced a mass of art certainly greater than that of any other race, and a body of philosophy and ethical thought as important as that which emanated from Athens.

In contrast with the cultural fertility of politically unstable Greece and China, one can consider the barrenness in achievements of human value of the centralised and highly organised states of ancient Rome and modern Japan.

The only period when there existed a really continent-wide movement of European social and cultural development was that covering the late Middle Ages, and the early Renaissance, when the power of the feudal kings was slight and the almost independent walled cities of Germany and Italy, even of France and England, produced a great development of social institutions, of philosophy, of scientific enquiry, and an artistic revival which gave the greatest architectural style the world has yet seen, in the noble buildings built often by voluntary labour, like the great cathedral of Chartres.

If we consider the nations that arose in Europe after the break-up of the medieval order, we find that their periods of cultural vigour were those when there was no central state government, or when that government was weak and the organisation of life tended to revert to its organic, functional and regional forms.

The Italy of Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and Galileo and the Germany of Beethoven, Goethe and Bach were both split among tiny regional principalities and republics, usually militarily weak, but frequently enjoying more real prosperity and almost always a more intense cultural life than their larger and more highly militarised neighbours.  The great age of French culture, when Paris became the artistic capital of the world and produced its best painting and literature, was that nineteenth-century which was marked by three revolutions.  The climax of Russian cultural achievement, when the great works of Tolstoy, Turgenev and Dostoievsky were being written, when Russian music reached its height and the ballet was developed as it has been developed in no other country, moved at the time when Tsarism was rotting towards the social upheaval that brought its end.

Similarly, the culture we regard as purely English began to emerge in the turmoil of the closing phase of feudalism, and the four other periods at which it displayed outstanding vitality each coincided with a state of political disintegration.  One was the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean period when English tragic drama reached its height in Shakespeare and Webster and English lyric poetry in Donne, while the system of absolute monarchy instituted and maintained by the Tudors was breaking under the impact of the rising bourgeoisie.

Another was the Restoration period when, owing partly to the personal laziness of Charles II and partly to the neat balance of powers and intentions arising out of the hostility between the antipathy of the squirearchy and burgesses for the idea of a despotism and the antipathy of the king for the idea of an oligarchy, the central government became weak, the army and navy declined into preserves for place seekers and the actual administration of the country devolved more and more on regional centres, the local magistrates and the aldermen of the towns.  At this age the comic drama was at its height, the novel and literary criticism appeared in recognisable forms.  Dryden laid the foundations of a clear and simple English prose, Wren and Purcell marked the height of the post-medieval English architecture and music, and science began to advance rapidly, both in theoretical and practical fields, on the empirical lines laid down by the previously unheeded Francis Bacon.

Another was the age of the Romantic revival, when English writing broke away from the mannered sterility of the Hanoverian flays into the exuberance of an age characterised by the social changes and political scares associated with the French Revolution; Napoleon, the rise of industry and the Chartist movement.  A fourth was that period generally known as the ‘Nineties, when a comparatively minor revitalisation of English literature took place, which, as its dominant figures were the Irishmen Wilde, Shaw, Yeats, and Moore, we must correlate not so much with the political state of England as with that of Ireland, where at that time the forces were gathering towards the end of English domination.

It is further significant that since the last years of the nineteenth century those countries that have contributed (considered proportionately) most to European development, particularly in the sense of social development, have been not the great imperialist or military states, like Germany, Russia, England, Italy, France, but the small countries of the western edge of Europe, the Scandinavian countries, Ireland, Holland and Belgium.  It is in these countries, for instance, that intensive agricultural methods have been most highly developed.  In Denmark and Ireland the experiment of producers’ co-operatives has been nurtured, while in Holland there have been great advances in town planning and architecture.

From these examples it is reasonable to contend that, so far as human culture has manifested itself up to the present, it has done so most abundantly in those societies where central authority has been least powerful, least pervasive and least organised.  In all of these societies authority has existed in some degree, but either the decay of state institutions or the lack of military power of the state concerned has made it comparatively ineffective so that even if its manifestations, under such circumstances have occasionally been tyrannical, its attacks on the individual tended to be spasmodic.  In such circumstances the human mind and genius, finding itself at least in some degree free from the restraints of life and manners which characterised periods and places of greater control, has been able to express itself far more fully and adequately in artistic, scientific and social achievements, whether corporate or individual.

The years since the last war, and in a less degree the years before it, have been characterised in the major countries by a barrenness of really important cultural achievement, which can be seen in the way a few individual works of art stand in isolation from a great mass of mediocrity.  If we view with anything approaching sober judgment the cultural record of the major European countries, we cannot fail to be impressed by the poverty of their twentieth century achievements, as compared even with the despised nineteenth century.  This cultural weakness of the twentieth century springs from the change in the social structure, and that change consists in the growing consolidation of the authoritarian form of society into the total state, in which the government supervises every phase of life and the efforts of the individual are continually subjected to a restraint which inevitably frustrates all cultural vigour.  The progress of this intensification of automatic and inorganic organisation in society can be seen reflected in the triviality of our art and the barrenness of our science in all but its destructive aspects.

Culture affects, but is also affected by the society in which it exists.  In the sense of expression it is an individual phenomenon, but no expression is satisfactory unless it also makes communication, and in its function of communication art is essentially a social phenomenon, and as such subject to the influence of social patterns and environments.  A rigid social pattern, a repressive social environment can deprive expression of its main contact with life by restricting the ease of communication.  Whether or not an authoritarian regime deliberately attempts to impose its own pattern on the current art forms, the cultural expression of the artist will inevitably be affected by the surrounding restrictions on life expression.  Art may be a sublimation of the ordinary actions of an unfettered life; it is never a substitute for life, and indeed, can exist only in relation to life itself.  Where, therefore, life is unduly restricted, art will share its barrenness.

Just as life can only become complete in its expression in a society liberated from the economic and political anxieties that menace the modern man, so can art reach its most complete forms only in such a free society.

Anarchist society offers the requisites for a rich cultural development.  Communal consciousness, economic security, a free and adequate education, liberty of expression untrammelled by restrictive law or custom, a pleasant and healthy environment, and a balanced relation between physical and mental occupations, all these will result from the anarchist society, and all are beneficial to the cultural development of society and the individual.

It may be objected that these factors are unnecessary to the true artistic genius, who will produce his great work under whatever circumstances he has to endure.  This is so much moonshine.  Periods of social regimentation produce little in the way of significant culture, as do countries where men have to fight continually against adverse natural or economic conditions.  Classes with more money, leisure and privileges produce more artistic work than depressed classes in the same time and place.  The majority of the great artistic and scientific achievements of the post-mediaeval Americo-European society have been effected by members of the upper and middle classes.  So-called proletarian art is generally trash too pitiable to be worth criticism, and the workers who produce work of real artistic importance are so few as to make them something in the nature of prodigies.  These facts do not mean that more people are born with artistic talents among the middle classes than among the workers.  They mean merely that if a man with an artistic talent is born into the middle classes the circumstances of his formative life are such as to make it much more easy for him to develop his possibilities.  He has usually a better education - not necessarily in the academic sense.  He has more privacy throughout his life.  He starts work some yeas later, and then usually works shorter hours and at less exacting work.  Even if he only lives in an ugly suburb, his home and surroundings are likely to be more pleasant than those of the dweller in an industrial slum.  He can make contact with more people interested in his subject and receive more encouragement from his circle of acquaintances than can the industrial worker who turns to writing or painting.  Even if in later years he may go through hard times, he has almost certainly enjoyed more security and comfort during his formative years, and has at least received an education that gives him some contact with the cultural tradition.

In an Anarchist society the environment into which the artist is born will bring to all men the advantages only the middle classes know today, together with a freedom and a balance of life which no men enjoy in this tyrannical period of history.  The number of artists produced will be proportionately higher, and as weakly governed Athens was culturally far greater than regimented and stultified Sparta, so will the free society of the future be even more rich than the present universal Sparta into which our world has declined.

To prophesy the development of art in a free society would be as pointless as to prophesy the institutional development of that society.  Both will grow from the evolving and changing social patterns of men living free and abundant lives.  To relate the art of the future to any of the schools or classes that exist today would be foolish.  Even today the distinctions are largely meaningless, the arbitrary inventions of literary parasites, and in a society based on other ideas such artificial conventions will inevitably vanish.  On the other hand, the real tradition of art will as certainly persist, for art, like all forms of life and the activities of life, is a continuous though changing organic whole.  The art of the free society will have its roots in the cultures of the past, and its flowers will draw their sap through channels that stretch from Dantesque Florence and Sophoclean Athens, from Dryden’s England and Li Po’s China, to a future whose achievements will be as noble and more abundant than theirs.  The living body of art will survive and grow, but the superficial excrescences of fashion and convention will be purged away as men grow towards balance and completeness.