Anarchism without Adjectives: National-Anarchism and the Diversity of Communities
Republished from Tribes: National-Anarchist Magazine, No. 1, July 2018
by Sean Jobst
Anarchism accepts the reality that people are not the same. They are as varied as their experiences, knowledge, and abilities. This stands in stark contrast to all other political ideologies, which demand uniformity and conformity behind one system, often dealing with followers of other ideologies with all the zeal of fundamentalist proselytisers, imbued with a missionary quest to convert others to its own version of statist utopia. But there is an alternative, cognizant that human beings express that same multiciplicity that exists within nature.
One idea that overlaps with National-Anarchism is "Anarchism without Adjectives", because it accepts and embraces the plurality of anarchist approaches. This is fully compatible with the National-Anarchist acceptance of human diversity, that tribes and communities will naturally live differently than other communities and tribes. There is no universalist one-size-fits-all solution applicable to everyone. While its natural various statists would advocate mass-conformity, its reprehensible that there are many groups of so-called "anarchists" who demand authoritarian obedience to their own school.
We National-Anarchists are especially attacked because our vision stands in stark contrast to the authoritarian conformity demanded by the loud and vocal group of Marxists masquerading as "anarchists". In the late 19th century, the most numerous group of anarchists were the French communist anarchists, who criticized some of the different anarchist approaches then prevalent in other countries such as Spain. Tired of the polemical infighting, the Spanish anarchist Fernando Tarrida del Mármol (1861-1915) proposed "Anarquismo sin adjetivos" in 1889. He rejected the communist (not to be confused with the statist Communist movement) claim to "purity", since "Anarchy is an axiom and the economic question something secondary". The divergent economic visions are of "secondary importance" to the primacy of uniting around the basics while still allowing for harmonious discussion: "In our conversations, in our conferences and our press, we do discuss economic questions, but these questions should never become the cause of division between anarchists."(1)
Despite his own communist approach, Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta (1853-1932) outreached to other anarchist schools because "it is not right for us, to say the least, to fall into strife over mere hypotheses."(2) The Austrian-German anarchist Max Nettlau (1865-1944) agreed that anarchists should unite around what all of them had in common, since "we cannot foresee the economic development of the future."(3) Nettlau recognized the validity of both communistic and individualist approaches as valid, and affirmed that each has a piece to the larger puzzle, because as paraphrased by Paul Avrich, "economic preferences will vary according to climate, customs, natural resources, and individual tastes, so that no single person or group can possess the correct solution."
Because human beings are both individuals and social beings, Nettlau foresaw the complementary function of communalist and individualist divisions. To only focus on one to the exclusion of the other would actually hinder people's confidence in anarchism, because it would ignore human nature. After all, how can a movement claim to be for freedom and yet deny people's right to their own chosen approach? "The anarchist movement ought to be one, relegating those economic differences as matters of nearest detail," Nettlau proposed. "The purely hypothetical character of these doctrines should prevent exclusionarism from the beginning. Moreover, many misunderstandings are created by discussing the conflicting theories without considering in each case to which epoch of anarchist evolution an author refers. For anarchist society will not be a cast-iron mechanism but necessarily a developing organism to which different means and methods are most conducive at different times."(4) He elaborated further elsewhere:
"Let me imagine myself for a moment living in a free society. I should certainly have different occupations, manual and mental, requiring strength or skill. It would be very monotonous if the three or four groups with whom I would work (for I hope there will be no Syndicates then!) would be organized on exactly the same lines; I rather think that different degrees or forms of Communism will prevail in them. But might I not become tired of this, and wish for a spell of relative isolation, of Individualism? So I might turn to one of the many possible forms of 'equal exchange' Individualism. Perhaps people will do one thing when they are young and another thing when they grow older. Those who are but indifferent workers may continue with their groups; those who are efficient will lose patience at always working with beginners and will go ahead by themselves, unless a very altruist disposition makes it a pleasure to them to act as teachers or advisers to younger people. I also think that at the beginning I should adopt Communism with friends and Individualism with strangers, and shape my future life according to experience. Thus, a free and easy change from one variety of Communism to another, thence to any variety of Individualism, and so on, would be the most obvious and elementary thing in a really free society; and if any group of people tried to check this, to make one system predominant, they would be as bitterly fought as revolutionists fight the present system."(5)
Having moved ideologically among all the leading anarchist schools of thought at one point or another, the American Voltairine de Cleyre (1866-1912) realized that each had some validity but, seeing the contentious debates within America between the mostly native followers of the individualist Benjamin Tucker and the mostly immigrant followers of Wilhelm Most, she had moved towards Anarchism without Adjectives by 1901. She expressed her views in an essay simply named "Anarchism":
"It is not an economic system; it does not come to you with detailed plans of how you, the workers, are to conduct industry; nor systematized methods of exchange; nor careful paper organizations of 'the administration of things.' It simply calls upon the spirit of individuality to rise up from its abasement, and hold itself paramount in no matter what economic reorganization shall come about. Be men first of all, not held in slavery by the things you make; let your gospel be, 'Things for men, not men for things.'"(6)
Her basic principle of "freedom from compulsion" meant the principled de Cleyre found problems with all the various systems. She was a socialist until, as admitted by Emma Goldman, de Cleyre's "inherent love of liberty could not make peace with the state-ridden notions of socialism." She was then an individualist anarchist, but came to disagree with its economic doctrines because the "essential institutions of Commercialism are in themselves good, and are rendered vicious merely by the interference by the State." She was then a Mutualist, but rejected that approach too due to her pacifism. But finally with Anarchism without Adjectives, she found that simply "all methods are to individual capacity and decision". Any particularities are solely up to the free individual. As she writes in her essay "Anarchism":
"Socialism and Communism both demand a degree of joint effort and administration which would beget more regulation than is wholly consistent with ideal Anarchism; Individualism and Mutualism, resting upon property, involve a development of the private policeman not at all compatible with my notion of freedom....There is nothing un-Anarchistic about any of [these] until the element of compulsion enters and obliges unwilling persons to remain in a community whose economic arrangements they do not agree to. (When I say 'do not agree to' I do not mean that they have a mere distaste for....I mean serious differences which in their opinion threaten their essential liberties....) Therefore I say that each group of persons acting socially in freedom may choose any of the proposed systems, and be just as thorough-going Anarchists as those who select another."
Similarly, the French individualist anarchist Émile Armand (1872-1963) called for pluralistic economic structures coexisting within an anarchist society: "Here and there everything happening - here everyone receiving what they need, there each one getting whatever is needed according to their own capacity. Here, gift and barter - one product for another; there, exchange - product for representative value. Here, the producer is the owner of the product; there, the product is put to the possession of the collectivity."(7) Indeed, anyone aware of the intricate control the State has over all sectors of economic and social life (being as it is the convergence of government with banking and corporations) can only conclude that a multi-faceted approach is necessary to counterbalance the State - setting up grassroots institutions of free exchange and cooperation, various alternative currencies and means of exchange, and different non-corporate, non-consumerist economic structures that would help continually erode people's dependence and subservience to the coercive systems of the State.
The problem that I have personally found among all the various libertarian and anarchist schools is their obsession with economics. Only National-Anarchism seems to focus more on the deeper non-economic realities, cutting through to the very heart on what makes individuals, tribes and communities alike what they truly are as living organisms - not reduced to artificial economic whims. We all live on and share this Earth, coming from various tribes and communities; we all have our own unique experiences and talents. Why would one even desire all to be the same and to conform to the same structure? Not only is this unrealistic - indeed a recipe for endless conflict - but it is anti-human: ignoring that even as individuals we can and should evolve based on our experiences, interactions and acquired knowledge. This is why National-Anarchism truly is the best for realizing our potential. Certainly, it manifests the very spirit of Anarchism without Adjectives - carried farther from the economic into the metaphysical.
NOTES:
(1) Fernando Tarrida del Mármol, "Anarchism Without Adjectives," La Révolté, vol. 3 no. 51, Sept. 6-12, 1890.
(2) Quoted in Max Nettlau, A Short History of Anarchism, London: Freedom Press, 1996, pp. 198-199.
(3) ibid., p. 201.
(4) Nettlau, "Some criticism of some current anarchist beliefs," 1901.
(5) Nettlau, "Anarchism: Communist or Individualist? Both," Mother Earth, vol. 9, no. 5, July 1914, pp. 170-175.
(6) Voltairine de Cleyre, "Anarchism," Free Society, 1901.
(7) Émile Armand, "Anarchist Individualism and Amorous Comradeship," 1907.