Anarchism vs. Anarchy

 

 

This is a follow-up blog to my last blog on Bret Weinstein and the anarchistic nihilism of the violence and looting in his home city of Portland, Oregon.  I want to elaborate more on the distinctions between anarchistic nihilism and political and philosophical anarchism, or, in other words, the crucial difference between anarchism and anarchy.  Not that I’m particularly sympathetic to either political or philosophical anarchism.  As socialist Hal Draper has pointed out, under anarchism it would be like the Wild West, for there would be no intervening body such as a state to protect the weak and defenseless from the bullying strong.  For to have such would be to restrain the “freedom” of the bully!  Also, I read an account of how anarchism would supposedly work in practice, through a series of interlocking autonomous local communes—where the communes themselves, and their mechanisms of cooperation among themselves would clearly resemble—state mechanisms!  Thus, to me, the state is a tautology:  it exists out of necessity, it has needed functions to fulfill, it is there because needed regulation and management, even repression of evil and malevolence, are called for under human social arrangements; even purely local ones, as there simply is no automatic “invisible hand” to spontaneously regulate, neither in the market, nor in other vital social functions.  When both Marx and Bakunin wrote, in the 19^th Century, one calling for the gradual “withering away of the state,” i.e., gradual anarchism, while the latter wished to abolish the state immediately, the modern welfare state was not only not in existence, it was even unheard of.  It didn’t come about until the 1890s, after the deaths of both Marx and Bakunin, and near the death of Engels (who died in 1895).  In the 1890s, that wily conservative Otto von Bismarck, as leader of a united Germany, passed the Anti-Socialist Laws, which forbade the German Social-Democratic Party from propagandizing the socialist cause, while, simultaneously, providing for workers’ compensation and unemployment insurance—thus appeasing the working class.  Prior to that, the state was neoliberal, if not openly repressive, and carried out no welfare measures.  So, it was thus impossible for either a Marx or a Bakunin, or their followers, to envision a different kind of state, and the states when then existed were hostile not only to the working class, but to ordinary citizens as a whole; and viewed its function as a state in purely negative terms—to restrain in the name of “freedom,” and to control from the top-down.

 

As a socialist I engaged in an anarchist-socialist dialogue through two book reviews for the hard-copy socialist journal New Politics of two books from anarchist publisher AK Press:  the first, from 2010, of Noam Chomsky’s Chomsky on Anarchism, Chomsky, Anarchism, and Socialism - New Politics, the second from 2013, of the anthology The Accumulation of Freedom,  Anarchist Economics and the Socialist-Anarchist Dialogue - New Politics.  The Chomsky review is especially relevant here, for Chomsky, a self-professed anarchist, is often derided by other anarchists as a “reformist.”  For example, while he believes, rightly, that all authority should be questioned, interrogated, he concludes that not all authority is bad; indeed, some is necessary and beneficial.  Similarly, Chomsky holds that a major problem besetting the Third World is too little government, state power and intervention—that too much authority and power there is in private hands, is controlled by neoliberalism in the service of neoliberal capitalist interests against the needs and wishes of the people.  On these, we socialists and political and philosophical anarchists can agree.

What we can’t agree on is the nihilism engendered by anarchist acting out; it’s descent into mere anarchy, not political anarchism in any meaningful or constructive sense.  While I can certainly positively hold with anarchists on the need for individual autonomy, even against the “popular masses,” and the generally beneficial achievement of such anarchism in the arts, where the freewheeling artist creates compelling freewheeling art, beyond that, as a socialist, there’s little in anarchism I can accept; and when it comes to anarchy, there’s nothing I can accept.  As a prime example of both, consider the Sex Pistols’ song, “Anarchy in the U.K.”  I certainly can embrace the opening words of brazen statement in the song, “I am the anti-Christ/I am an anarchist,” but cannot accept, embrace, the later statement in the song, “I want to destroy.”  For the act of revolution, of successful social transformation, is constructive more than it is destructive.  As an example, when we destroy the rotting, decrepit shed on the weed-strewn lawn, we must also construct not only a new edifice on the property, but also cleanse it of its weed-infested, unsightly nature, or else our work will become as naught.  Social change that lasts is constructive, not merely destructive of the old order; and, as Bret Weinstein pointed out, the destruction in rampant anarchy presently going on in Portland, Oregon, is not revolution of a positive sense, but negative, nihilistic anarchy which is only destructive, and alienating of the very people we need to reach.

 

      

A Righteous and Just Excoriation of “Woke Left” Anarchistic Nihilism

 

Bret Weinstein, the egregiously, horribly, railroaded former professor of biology at Evergreen State College, and a Bernie Sanders supporter, who spoke out against an action of de facto segregation promulgated by “woke” black student activists at Evergreen, has just spoken out on the British Unherd (https://unherd.com/2021/04/how-anarchists-captured-portland)  against the “woke” chaos now being perpetrated in his newly-adopted home city of Portland, Oregon, where he and his wife Heather, also ostracized from Evergreen, now reside—and criticizes the “woke” from a standpoint that can only be described as concerned, social-democratic left, not neoliberal right.

While he calls those promulgating violence, looting and harassment of ordinary citizens in Portland as “anarchists,” he’s not necessarily implying that they are political or philosophical anarchists; merely nihilists of the “woke left” who’ve latched onto the slogans promulgated by Black Lives Matter and concerns over the still-prevalent racism in US society to garner sympathy and support for what he calls only the ceding “by voices of reason on the Left to extremists who deliberately conflate a demand for racial justice with a desire to burn civilisation [British spelling, as Unherd is British—GF] to the ground” and ruefully, ironically, cries out, “Welcome to Portland; the progressive dream that has turned into a nightmare.” 

Weinstein is scathing throughout in his denunciation of these new nihilists:  he pointedly notes of this “movement’s” origins, “suddenly last summer, with the confluence of the George Floyd protests and the Presidential election, Portland came unmoored,” calls these activists, “a small but violent mob of misanthropes” perpetrating a “current wave of terror, and, due to the deliberate inaction against these mobs of “woke” by both Portland’s Mayor and police force, alleges directly, “anarchists have gained a strange kind of control over the city in their fight against Nazis and white supremacists they appear to have conjured in a quest to give their anger meaning.”  (However, Weinstein pointedly notes that, in progressive Portland, these supposedly everywhere hordes of Nazis and white supremacists are, in the famous words of Mark Twain commenting on his supposed death as published in a newspaper’s obituary, “greatly exaggerated.”)

But we of the “voices of reason on the Left” have dealt with this kind of pernicious nonsense before, famously in the case of Weatherman in the late 1960s, early 1970s, a group that, despite its florid adoption of Marxist-Leninist and Maoist rhetoric, were really, just as are the “woke” of Portland, “neo-anarchist terrorists” who only gave grist to the right-wing mill all too eager to silence those “voices of reason on the Left,” and who, under both Nixon and Reagan, succeeded masterfully, and shifted the country not to the left, but to the right (especially in Reagan’s case, to the far right, as this Great Communicator ran successfully for President twice on being against the New Left, and as a bulwark of safety against anarchy, terror, and Weatherman’s random bombings).  Thus, are there enemies of the Left clearly on the supposed left:  the “propaganda of the deed” denizens, the ultraleftists who have no idea of what is actually and actually not feasible, and the Blanquist small coteries of cadres who, by military-minded conspiracy, bring about “socialism by insurrectionary coup.”  [Blanquism is named after Louis Auguste Blanqui (1805-1881), a French revolutionary socialist who called for socialism to be achieved by small, armed groups leading insurrections.  The similarities between the “woke” of today and Blanqui’s small cadres provoking revolutionary violence are obvious—GF] Much the same happened to the Weinsteins at Evergreen State; but it no more ushered in the Olympia, Washington Commune [Olympia is the home of Evergreen State—GF] than it has the Portland Commune.  All it has done is cause fear among small business owners whether their businesses will be trashed by looting, as has happened to so many other Portland businesses; and ushered in anger among ordinary working people, who are awakened from sleep by chanting mobs demanding, “Wake up, motherfuckers, wake up!”  Thus, do ill-conceived tactics, and a general sense of nihilism masquerading as activism directly undermine the cause of the left, not enhance it—and make meaningful and extensive social change that much more difficult to achieve and attain.  

Being an “Essential Worker” Grocery Stocker in Trump Country

 

It was with much interest that I read Hamilton Nolan’s “A Year in the Life of Safeway 1048” on my fellow grocery workers in Arlington, Virginia, in the April 2021 In These Times, a nationwide socialist news magazine.  I can certainly relate as I too am an “essential worker” produce and dairy stocker, in my case at Kroger J-100 on the sprawling East Side of Indianapolis, Indiana, a state that, same as in 2016, went heavily for Trump, though Indianapolis itself did not.  But, unlike the Safeway workers mentioned by Nolan, I’ve done fairly well as an “essential worker” now since mid-March 2020.  Unlike many of my friends and acquaintances who worked prior to COVID-19 as musicians, or in bars and restaurants, or in other occupations in the music/entertainment business, I’ve had steady, full-time work all year round, with added benefits provided by both our union (same as at Safeway 1048, the UFCW; in our case, the Indiana mega-local Local 700) and by Kroger itself, in addition to the union contract’s full-time worker benefit of paid vacation time.  Also, in contradistinction to the Safeway workers, who work a six-day week, I work five days a week, a 40-hour week of working eight hours each, with a half-hour’s unpaid lunch.  But with not much overtime, as Kroger really frowns on paying overtime pay, and the corporate honchos tell the local managers not to schedule or allow overtime unless it can’t be avoided.  In fact, individual workers themselves have been admonished for running up too much overtime!

Kroger employees and customers are required both by city ordinance and Kroger policy to wear masks while working or shopping in the store, and the customers are quite generally compliant, although the mask mandate is not enforced.  And some customers do cheat a little—their masks not covering their nostrils.  But, overwhelmingly, they are fully compliant, although a certain customer of my close acquaintance, an old high school classmate, deliberately flaunts his being “noncompliant” and refuses to wear a mask at all.  Another customer I’ve seen in the store a couple of times, an older man who also doesn’t wear a mask, walks around the store with two six-guns in a shoulder holster.  (Never can tell when some deranged banana is going to attack you!)  But, after all, this is a state that went overwhelmingly for Trump—twice. 

Kroger has done really well during the pandemic, revenues up 30% over 2019, and this despite many product shortages, supply chain bottlenecks, and products unavailable.  Early during the pandemic, in March and April 2020, there were changes in sick pay allowance because of coronavirus, plus a union-negotiated Hero Bonus pay of an extra $2.00 an hour for each hour worked.  However, despite its wish to do so, the union could not get Kroger to agree to extend these; and later on, employees who had to self-quarantine for two weeks due to coronavirus did so without pay.  And, of course, employees did come down with coronavirus, or were exposed to people who had, and were thus required to quarantine.  Also, as a public business with many customers coming and going on a daily basis seven days a week from early morning to late at night, the risk of infection is always there.  I was one of the lucky ones; though I had to be tested three times, all my tests were negative.  Further, although Kroger did not extend the Hero Bonus pay it had negotiated, it did pass out $700 in bonuses to front-line workers late spring and summer of 2020. (But nothing since.)  In addition, as with many other workers, in 2020 I received $1,200 in economic stimulus money from the federal government, and in 2021, $2,000.  As an older worker (I’m now 74, but can’t afford to retire), I also receive Social Security, and also receive a small pension through the UFCW Consolidated Pension Fund—even though I still work full-time, the union wanted to make sure I got at least some pension while I was still alive to collect it!  So, for me personally, one could even say I made out like the proverbial bandit.

Yes, I was one of the luckier ones.  Between my wages and the bonus pay, my Social Security and my pension, and the economic stimulus, I’m making over $40,000/year for both 2020 and 2021.  I’m also single with no dependents, and Indianapolis is a cheap place to live as far as major cities go.  Yet, even at this, I’m still like the typical US worker described in Alan Nasser’s excellent economic tome, Overripe Economy (Pluto Press, 2018; I reviewed the book in MR Online, mronline.org, May 25, 2019), having to leverage credit and amass credit debt to make up for low wages.  For, in addition to credit card debt, I also have to pay a monthly car payment and for full-coverage auto insurance, which comes to a hefty nearly $570 a month just for certain basic transportation needs, but still excluding gas and registration, license plates.  (Indianapolis public mass transit is horrible, one of the worst big-city systems abounding.)  But I feel very lucky indeed to have my Kroger job.  I’ve had it only since August 15, 2015, and had to work temp jobs before then, including at the infamous Amazon warehouses.  But being in a union job has also meant steady pay increases, so that my pay has gone from starting at $10.70 an hour up to its present $15.25 an hour.  I’m “overqualified” for my job at having a Bachelor’s degree in economics, but then, Indiana is a notoriously bad state for college grads to find decent employment.  So, indeed, I do feel lucky, especially to be so employed at my age, despite job duties that require lifting 50-pound sacks of potatoes, 40-pound cases of bananas, and 30-pound bags of onions in produce, and multiple lifting and twisting in dairy filling the shelves with gallon and half-gallon jugs of milk in a hurry

But not all is so wonderful, I have to admit.  My job requires me to work the social life-killing second shift (killing essentially what little social life was possible during the pandemic), as well, since I’m in retail, virtually the whole of every weekend.  Also, there’s little rank-and-file involvement in the union local, as almost all the union work is done by paid professional staff.   However, I’m very impressed with our union’s paid staffers, who are quite on top of things, visit the individual Kroger stores regularly, and are quite solicitous of worker’s concerns and grievances.  Further, the union staff is thoroughly integrated racially, as befits a racially integrated workforce at the Kroger conglomerate.  And which just offered employees a $100 bonus upon proof of full COVID-19 vaccination. (I’ve already received mine.)  But in response to the cities of Long Beach, California and Seattle, Washington mandating an additional $4.00 an hour hazard pay for “essential workers,” Kroger cried “Foul!” and closed two stores in Long Beach and two in Seattle earlier this year—further exacerbating food deserts in those communities.  But Kroger revenues are substantially up due to coronavirus, and Kroger CEO Rodney McMullin gets $21 million a year in salary alone!  Such is now what it’s like being an “essential worker” in Trump Country.