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Anarchism and the American Counter-Culture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Michael Lerner
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Extract

NINE YEARS AGO GEORGE WOOD SURVEYED THE ‘GHOST OF THE historical anarchist movement’ and concluded that there was ‘no reasonable likelihood of a renaissance’. History showed that ‘the movements which fail to take the chances it offers them are never born again’. Seven years later, when identifiably anarchist tendencies re-emerged in the youth movements in England and Holland, Woodcock wondered ‘whether I had been rash in so officiously burying the historic anarchist movement’. He decided. that he had not been rash because of the differences between the new anarchists and the old. The new anarchists represented no ‘knock in the coffin’ but ‘a new manifestation of the [anarchist] idea’.

Woodcock described the new anarchists as ‘militant pacifists’ who had ‘forgotten Spain and had no use for the old romanticism of the dinamitero and the petroleuse’. He pointed to the difference between the old days when one ‘joined’ an anarchist party and the current situation in which the young ‘became’ anarchists. Finally, Woodcock discerned no obvious signs of an anarchist revival in the United States.

Type
Original Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 5 , Issue 4 , 01 October 1970 , pp. 430 - 455
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1970

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References

1 In ‘Anarchism Revisited’, Commentary, August 1968, George Woodcock reviews the analysis he made in his major study, Anarchism, New York, World, 1962; Meridian edition, 1967. Although Woodcock saw no ‘obvious’ anarchist revival in the United States, he agreed with Jack Newfield (A Prophetic Minority, New York. New American Library, 1966) that anarchism was an important influence in the new radical thought of 1966–67. Yet the quiet anarchist influence on intellectual currents that Woodcock had in mind is very different from the explicit and often violent manifestations of the anarchist idea and practice that have emerged in the past two years.

2 Roszak, Theodore, The Making of Counter Culture, New York, Anchor, 1969,Google Scholar has written a pioneering but flawed study of the counter-culture. The problem is that his dislike of drugs, violence and even rock music impinges upon his perspective—he denounces what he does not like often without providing a careful analysis of the phenomena. Thus Ken Kesey and Timothy Leary are blamed for leading young people into drugs, while neither they nor the drug phenomenon are adequately analysed. Violence in the counter-culture is, simillarly, deplored without being examined.

3 Woodcock, Anarchism, p. 151.

4 Ibid., Woodcock suggests that these were important elements in historical anarchism.

5 Ibid., p. 223.

6 Robert Lifton, informal remarks at the Wellfleet Psychohistorical Conference, 1969.

7 The discussion above stressed the positive aspects of personal violence, such as the personal consequences of getting back in touch with anger. The potential danger of personal violence for the polity must be mentioned as well. By readily accessible techniques, the angry anarchist can move from clubs to bombs. There is increasing evidence of a trend in this direction in New York and California. Bombs are, of course, very much in the anarchist tradition. Yet their use allows one to move away from violence as an expression of personal anger towards violence as a dispassionate policy. When violence becomes policy and technology allows physical and emotional remove, the personal values of getting back in touch with the physical expression of hostility are sacrificed.

To understand the bombings it is important to recognize that to bomb buildings may be a sign of the psychological well-being of the bomber as easily as it is a sign of pathological hostility projected into the public sphere. One could suggest, only partly ironically, that the bombers may be young radicals who genuinely discovered ‘the meaning of meaning it’ in their commitment to radical social change. Strong object relationships, the quest for competence, and capacity for realistic appraisal of the situation may have indicated to them that emotionally fulfilling personal violence was an impotent weapon against societal oppression. Though as members of the counter-culture they may have valued the immediate gratification that personal violence brings, they found the gratification lessened by the realization that personal violence became fantasy posturing -what Robert Brustein has called ‘revolution as theatre’. They could not resign themselves to ivory tower dreaming as academics, guerrilla theatre playing at revolution, or retreat into fantasy. Thus they adopt what the main culture always urged - capacity for sublimation and delayed gratification. They become willing to behave ‘appropriately’, to bomb (though they find this behaviour intrinsically less satisfying than regressive personal violence) in the realistic quest for a broader societal good.

And yet they find themselves caught up in the process anarchists have always objected to: techniques of violence - technology - transform not only the weapons but also the fighters. Aggression that once served personal needs is transformed by realistic perception of the impotence of personal violence into a personally unsatisfying, brutalizing and depersonalized activity. This technological violence only brings gratification to the sublimated wish inasmuch as the technique successfully achieves the policy objectives.

Nor can one deny the psychological well-being of bombers on the grounds that they utterly misperceive the effects of bombing in the existing situation. I think they utterly misperceive its effects, which I think may well be disastrous. But though I may fear a right-wing reaction, the terrorists can guess that the Nixon Administration will over-react to a limited number of bombings and that the country will be radicalized by distaste for the Administration response. Though the odds may favour the first scenario, to expect or hope that the second is accurate is not delusional or crazy in any clinical sense.

What the observation that the bombers may not be crazy at all underlines is the fact that what is arguably healthy for some individuals may be disastrous for the society. Bombing may be an ‘appropriate’ extension of their commitment, yet others from no less valid a perspective can judge that it is a terrible error. The bombings fit the anarchist tradition but suggest an anarchist dilemma. For to bomb is to move away from personal towards technological violence; the technological means compromise the anarchist’s personal and societal ends. This dilemma exists whatever one’s view of the bombings may be.

8 Henry David Thoreau, ‘Civil Disobedience’, reprinted in Irving L. Horowitz, (ed.), The Anarchists, New York, Dell, 1964, p. 317.

9 Woodcock, op. cif., p. 63.

10 Ibid., pp. 224–5, the first and second parts of the quotations are from different sources in Tolstoy’s work.

11 David Harris, untitled, Resistance xerox.

12 Quoted in Erikson, Erik, ‘Reflections on the Dissent of Contemporary Youth’, Daedalus, winter 1970, p. 165.Google Scholar

13 Woodcock, op. cit., especially ‘Prologue’.

14 Bertrand de Jouvenel, On Power, Boston, Beacon Press edition, 1962, pp. 7–11.

15 Woodcock, op. cit., p. 231.

16 Ibid., p. 88.

17 Ellul, Jacques, The Technological Society, New York, Knopf, 1964.Google Scholar

18 Woodcock, op. cit., p. 231.

19 Weil, Simone, L’Enracinement, Paris, 1949,Google Scholar see also Davy, M. M., Simone Weil, Paris, 1961, Torganisation du travail-vivant’, pp. 98–103.Google Scholar

20 Woodcock, op. cit., p. 84, draws together Godwin’s observation and Orwell’s comment (in an essay on Swift): ‘When human beings are governed by “thou shalt not,” the individual can practice a certain amount of eccentricity; when they are supposed to be governed by “love” and “reason” he is under continuous pressure to make him behave and think in exactly the same way as everyone does.’

21 Ibid., pp. 83–4.

22 Schaar, John, ‘Notes on Authority’, New American Review, New York, New American Library, 01 1970, No. 8, pp. 44–80.Google Scholar

23 Woodcock, ‘Anarchism Revisited’, op. cit., makes the two points that follow.

24 David Apter suggested this.

25 See Wolfe’s, Tom brilliant recreation of Ken Kesey’s early LSD experiences in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, New York, Bantam edition, 1969.Google Scholar

26 Erik Erikson, op. cit., pp. 162–3.

27 Kenneth Keniston, ‘Psychological Development and Historical Conditions’, 1970 Yale, mimeograph. For the argument that the ‘higher’ psychological development might be socially disastrous, see Lerner, Michael, ‘Respectable Bigotry’, American Scholar, Fall 1969.Google Scholar