* Reflections on the Anarchist Principle Tom Jennings 1:125/111 The following is the opening essay in "THE BLACK FLAG OF ANARCHISM AND OTHER ESSAYS", available from Employee Theft Press, ($2.50 from 1369 Haight St, San Francisco CA 94117) -- all funds from the sale of this pamphlet go to "WITHOUT BORDERS ANARCHIST CONFERENCE & FESTIVAL", to be held in San Francisco this July 20 - 25. Reflections on the Anarchist Principle by Paul Goodman "Anarchism is grounded in a rather definite proposition: that valuable behavior occurs only by the free and direct response of individuals or voluntary groups to the conditions presented by the historical environment. It claims that in most human affairs, whether political, economic, military, religious, moral, pedagogic, or cultural, more harm than good results from coercion, top-down direction, central authority, bureaucracy, jails, conscription, states, pre-ordained standardization, excessive planning, etc. Anarchists want to increase intrinsic functioning and diminish extrinsic power. This is a social- psychological hypothesis with obvious political implications. "Depending on varying historical conditions that present various threats to the anarchist principle, anarchists have laid their emphasis in varying places: sometimes agrarian, sometimes free- city and guild-oriented; sometimes technological, sometimes anti- technological; sometimes Communist, sometimes affirming property; sometimes individual, sometimes collective; sometimes speaking of Liberty as an almost absolute good, sometimes relying on custom and 'nature'. Nevertheless, despite these differences, anarchists seldom fail to recognize each other, and they do not consider the differences to be incompatibilities. Consider a crucial modern problem, violence. Guerrilla fighting has been a classical anarchist technique; yet, especially where, in modern conditions, *any* violent means tends to reinforce centralism and authoritarianism, anarchists have tended to see the beauty of non-violence. "Now the anarchist principle is by and large true(1). And far from being 'utopian' or a 'glorious failure', it has proved itself and won out in many spectacular historical crises. In the period of mercantilism and patents royal, free enterprise by joint stock companies were anarchist. The Jeffersonian bill of rights were anarchist. Progressive education was anarchist. The free cities and corporate law in the feudal system were anarchist. At present, the civil rights movement in the United States has been almost classically decentralist and anarchist. And so forth, down to details like free access in public libraries. Of course, to later historians these things do not seem to be anarchist, but in their own time they were regarded as such and often literally called such, with the usual dire threats of chaos. But this relativity of the anarchist principle to the actual situation is of the essence of anarchism. There *cannot* be a history of anarchism in the sense of establishing a permanent state of things 'anarchist'. It is always a continual coping with the next situation, and a vigilance to make sure that past freedoms are not lost and do not turn into the opposite, as free enterprise turned into wage-slavery and monopoly capitalism, or the independent judiciary turned into a monopoly of courts, cops, and lawyers, or free education turned into School Systems." Footnote(1) "I, and Other anarchists, would except certain states of temporary emergency, is we can be confident that the emergency is *temporary*. We might except certain simplistic logistic arrangements, like ticketing or metric standards or tax- collection, if we can be confident that the administration, the 'secretariat', will not begin to run the show. And we might except certain 'natural monopolies', like epidemic control, water-supply, etc." First published in ANARCHY 62 (April 1966)