The Government of No One: The Theory and Practice of Anarchism
Ruth Kinna, Pelican, 2019.
Most political ideologies have clear theoretical commitments. Liberalism: the individual as the primitive unit of society; his wellbeing subordinate to, or exhausted by, his freedom; doctrines of rights which circumscribe and define that freedom sitting at the base of any institutional arrangements. Socialism: the collective as the primitive; the individual’s wants subordinate to the group’s needs; a commitment to equality expressed in the common ownership of property.
But anarchism doesn’t really seem to fit. Anarchism, it seems to me, isn’t a political ideology at all: it’s more like a family resemblance, each anarchism approximating the others to a greater or lesser degree, but none admitting of a common core or shared basis. A fluid set of concepts aimed at achieving a form of radical egalitarianism rather than a concrete theory. Or perhaps, like conservatism, it’s more of a temperament, an inclination to gesture toward an outcome, rather than an explicit set of instructions to achieve it.
‘Anti-capitalist egalitarianism’ holds the clue to unlocking it, says Kinna. But ‘anti-capitalist egalitarianism’ is hardly a clearer term than ‘anarchism’.
In one direction, it veers into a Kantian metaphysical liberalism of totally self-regulating agents. In another, it seems to collapse into communism. So the exponent of anarchism as a distinctive tradition must not only explain anarchism on its own terms, but also situate it relative to the primitives of both the liberal and communist traditions, without relying on the primitives of either.
It turns out that such a tradition can be cleaved out from between the two extremes. But it’s awfully difficult to do cleanly.
Kinna does well to reveal anarchism’s parallel world of literature, art and debate. And she does a good job at casting the anarchist in a positive light, of repainting the out of the colours of a psychotic lover-of-chaos and into something a little more.
But it’s not a good book.
One problem is Kinna’s bias, and how it can hinder the book’s analytical power. This is advertised as a “sympathetic account”, and, to that extent, it delivers: she clearly has an affinity with the anarchist programme and is deeply immersed in its literature. But that’s also what makes it a tough book to follow: her familiarity means that she never really explains the basics, leaving the rest of us to reconstruct the edifice on which her explanations sit.1
This lack of an accessible introduction means that, to the outsider, it is a book of half-thoughts, non-sequiturs and passages groaning under the weight of technical terminology:
The rejection of domination unifies anarchists in shared struggles against the monopolization of resources and the centralization of power, representation, racism, imperialism and authority, while leaving the institutional and sociological mechanisms that explain it open to discussion.
Passages like the above are littered throughout the book, and yet the core concepts they turn on are never really explained. Is domination just shorthand for the ‘monopolization of resources and the centralization of power’? If not, what is it? And if so, why isn’t that compatible with federalism and some liberal anti-trust laws? Isn’t the point of representation to centralise power? And what does it mean to centralise racism and imperalism? Why is authority a bad thing, its centralisation to be struggled against; doesn’t its goodness follow analytically?
And why couldn’t it be that these institutional and sociological mechanisms justify, not just explain the phenomena? Why accept these normative claims in the first place? Answers are not forthcoming, and so the whole thing feels incoherent, and in-groupy.
It is at its most incoherent and in-groupy in the section on education. Education is an important piece of the anarchist puzzle, since most people are in fact decidedly not anarchists, and the political organisation it proposes requires individuals thinking and acting freely in anarchistic (i.e. egalitarian, ‘non-dominating’) ways. But anarchist thought on education, beyond just rehashing Marxist ideas about power sustaining power through ideology, are deeply unenlightening:
Knowledge is underpinned by linear, instrumental reasoning and this is manipulative and alienating … Education … comes, instead, through re-wilding: reconnecting to undomesticated, genuinely ecological and gentler systems of knowing.
And so it goes on, and on, and on.
Inaccessibility is this book’s original sin, but it also feels like it’s been rushed to print. Structurally, it’s organised thematically (Traditions, Cultures, Practices, Conditions, Prospects; followed by a set of anarchist biographies, which is mostly filler) and yet it focusses much on the historical development of the ideas, with the result that it keeps jolting, restarting; awkwardly lapsing into chronology, bumping against the ostensible thematic structure. Each insight and thinker tumbles into the next, presenting a cacophony of anarchisms, rather than a single unified theory. All of which means there’s little to no sustained argumentation.
The biggest sin, however, is the lack of a genuine multi-sided discussion of political violence. Government actions are described as “horrifying brutality and evident injustice”; anarchist assassinations and violent direct action are described in much cooler, theoretical terms. Her sympathy means we miss any real discussion of these very important questions: the extent to which political violence is legitimate, necessary or just. And while I understand her reluctance to encourage the typical framing of anarchism as chaos, violence and disorder, violence is anarchism’s shibboleth, and any book on the subject ought to address it.
Instead of a subtle, informed, nuanced debate of both why these given thinkers find it legitimate, and under what conditions we might today, we get quiet acquiescence, defensiveness, deflection:
One example of this is the debate about the ‘black bloc’ – the protest tactic associated with politic confrontation. Another is tactical diversity … resonant with the fluidity of historical anarchist activism, [which] encourages activists to ask whether a proposed action is ‘effective at generating power’ rather than ask whether it is ‘peaceful or violent’.
That’s as close as we get to a discussion of this central issue, and it’s a much poorer book because of it.
There’s a lot of content in here. Kinna knows the tradition well. And it may be a valuable reference for somebody already au fait with the anarchist tradition; someone already predisposed to buy what it’s selling. But that’s not me.
Some of the main concepts – domination, power, self-emancipation – echo Marx, but seem to be used in a different way; anarchism doesn’t share Marxism’s explanatory basis of historical materialism. Kinna never really explains what anarchists mean by these concepts, perhaps because they’re used so variously that there isn’t any common definition to give. ↩