The Anarchist Element in

Human Nature
Submitted by ccwright on Tue, 05/12/2015 - 13:32

The power of mainstream indoctrination is shown by the fact that most people dont consider themselves
radical leftists, socialists, or anarchists. The way they act shows that basically they are, only they dont
know it. They think that authority not only isnt self-justifying (to quote Chomskys definition of anarchism)
but is often or usually unjust, and merely has to be tolerated because it cant realistically be dismantled.
Democratic values spontaneously appear whenever people get together: they listen to each other, try to
respect each other as equals, organize democratically to get things done, and resent people who act
autocratically. This is anarchy in the positive sense, or anarchism in action. Grassroots organizing is
anarchy, in that top-down authority or bureaucracy is not the operative principle.
In fact, one can argue that democracy, anarchy, and morality are but different terms for the same
thing, or terms that emphasize different aspects of the same intuition about how humans ought to
behave. Respect and compassion for others, openness to new ideas, the positive valuing of free
communication, resistance to arbitrary authoritythis whole complex of interrelated ideas, which
together are mere common sense, is quintessentially anarchistic.
Nearly every valorized kind of behavior is anarchistic, while authoritarian behavior is maligned. If people
deny that society as a whole ought to be governed from the grassroots up and not from the top down,
theyre contradicting their own more fundamental adherence to democratic, anarchist values.
Or consider the concept of socialism. Centuries of discipline and propaganda have not persuaded most
people that having a boss is a good thing. Far from it. Bosses are frequently detested, and people hate
the boss system itself. They hate having to follow the orders of a superior, and would much rather be in
control of their own economic life. This simple, obvious desire is the intuition behind socialism: workers
controlling their own work, and people democratically deciding how to use resources. The practicability
of such a system is shown by the success of worker cooperatives (typically more successful than
capitalist businesses) and of various large-scale experiments in socialism, such as in Catalonia in 1936
(before being crushed by the forces of reaction).

In any case, whatever people explicitly think about the widely misunderstood concept socialism, their
basic acceptance of its valueswhen not slandered as socialistshould be obvious from their
preferences about how to organize the workplace, viz., democratically.
As for the radical left in general, peoples understanding of social dynamics and consequent disgust
show that at bottom they have a left-wing conception of the world. Judging by public opinion polls, the
large majority of the population understands what intellectuals often dont, that government is largely run
by and for the rich, and that the economy functions to benefit primarily the rich. And they hate this fact.
Okay, theyre leftists, at least on the inchoate level of emotion and barely-articulated understanding of
society.
Moreover, their broadly left-wing, social democratic values are shown by hundreds of polls in the last fifty
years. (See, e.g., Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers, Right Turn: The Decline of the Democrats and the
Future of American Politics (1986).) Incredibly, according to Gallup polls a majority of Americans even
supported labor unions in every single year from the 1930s to 2013, except in 2009, when only 48
percent approved of them. The average rate of approval has been 62 percent. This is despite massive
business propaganda against unions, and a massive disinformation campaign by the media since the
1980s.
It's clear, in short, that the natural, quasi-instinctual, default way for people to think and behave with each
otherand the morally valued wayis the freedom-loving, anti-authoritarian way. Only when
authoritarian institutions muddle thinking and behaving do people get confused and start to malign the
values theyre implicitly most committed to.
The task of the Left is to explain these facts to people, to show them that basically they are already
anarchists, and to convince them of the necessity to act courageously on their implicit anarchist values.

http://anarchistnews.org/content/anarchist-element-human-nature