Have you ever wondered why a writer like Louis-Ferdinand Celine could write a book like Journey To The End Of The Night, which is so full of damnation and anarchic contempt for all the bogus 'civilised' values which inhibit human freedom and at the same time be a Nazi-sympathiser and endorse the Final Solution? Or perhaps even more pointedly, do not Nietzsche's negative attitudes towards the state and his even more negative attitude towards anarchism, strike you as being somewhat contradictory, since it would seem that anarchists share his negative evaluation of the state and all that it stands for. Well, not exactly. On a closer reading, it is obvious that Nietzsche was not at all against the aggressive instinct of domination which he believed was the original impulse behind state-building. What he was against was the Social-Contract idea of the state as developed by writers like Rousseau and Hobbes, the idea of the state as an ensemble of benign institutions which human-kind needed in order to become social. Nietzsche understood that conquest and force lay at the origin of the state and he glorified in this as an expression of his "Will to Power". Nietzsche is simply being truthful here in the sense that Machiavelli was truthful in recommending ruthlessness to princes who wanted to hold on to power. Alexander Dumas's The Man In The Iron Mask is a Machiavellian parable of a 'bad' king and his 'good' twin with benevolent intentions who temporarily replaces him, but eventually ends up back in the dungeon wearing his iron mask, while his 'bad' ruthless twin takes over the reins of power once again because that, in fact, is the only way rulers can properly rule. Machiavelli was probably not confronted with the question of anarchism, but Nietzsche lived in a time when he could not ignore it. Nietzsche despised anarchism because of the benevolent egalitarian spirit which it had inherited from Christianity. This egalitarian spirit ran counter to the impulses of his Will to Power, which, he believed, lay at the heart of life itself. Christianity, according to Nietzsche, had inverted the natural morality demanded by the uninhibited expression of the Will to Power and replaced it with a plebeian slave-morality which did all it could do to repress it - with dire psychological consequences. He believed that anarchism had inherited this inverted morality and that active aristocratic principles had been replaced by re-active democratic ones and that therefore the motivation for people's actions had ceased to be noble and had become instead base and plebeian.
Personally, I believe that Nietzsche's Will to Power is one of those abstract metaphysical concepts which doesn't correspond to concrete reality. I also believe that his account of the origin of the state is rather simplistic, although refreshingly honest when placed against those of Social Contract theorists like Rousseau and Hobbes. I also find it abstractly more compelling than the Marxist idea which roots the state in class-domination rather than conquest and domination, because that is a theory which puts the cart before the horse in my not so humble opinion. I can't for the life of me see how class-exploitation could have emerged - and more importantly survived and evolved - outside the context of the conquest and subjugation of one group of people by another, because it seems to me that force had to come first and after it class-exploitation regulated by state-institutions and legal arrangements. Surely, the exploited would simply rise up and rebel unless they were held down by superior force from the outset and compelled to accept it. So, in this area, I find Nietzsche much more convincing than Marx. However, I do find his account rather simplistic, because everyone knows that human societies existed long before states. Nietzsche is not very specific regarding how states first emerged and doesn't really go beyond praising the warlike and aggressive traits which the conquerors would have had to possess to bring the first states into being. That's why he can talk of a 'tribal nobility', which is something of an anachronism, since most pre-state societies had no such nobilities. Nobilities only emerged later with the advent of warrior-aristocracies founded on conquest, subjugation and exploitation.
Precisely because he is so honest about the origin and ongoing nature of state-power, I would say that, like Celine, he was a champion of negative anarchy as opposed to positive anarchism, which he clearly detested - just as he detested Christianity, socialism and democracy. He wanted to root social relations in naked power - in the Will to Power - and have done with the idea that the state could or should have benevolent functions working equally on behalf of everyone it supposedly protects. Negative anarchy presupposes the kind of stripped down truthfulness which acts on us like a corrosive, stripping us of our comfortable illusions regarding the nature of the state and its primary function of protection. Positive anarchism seeks to go beyond this and actually posit a stateless society as a realisable aim. The first I would say was rooted in our understanding of the ad hoc and negatively anarchic way 'solid' social and political institutions come into being and maintain themselves in being. A kind of negative energy characterises this negative anarchy in a way that it does not characterise positive anarchism.
This kind of anarchy exists at the point when, to quote Yeats, "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / mere anarchy is loosed upon the world". "Mere anarchy" obviously appalled Yeats, although, without it, it is hard to see where the negative energy would have come from to write such a great poem. Negative anarchy represents the moment of destructiveness, which brings the old order down and makes way for the new which grows from its ruins. Such a moment might lead to precisely the opposite of what positive anarchists might think is desirable - some new Leviathan for instance, as happened in France under Robespierre, in Soviet Russia or, perhaps, Iran after the fall of the Shah. All these things are possible - depending on the balance of forces within society as a whole. There are so many hidden variables in that equation, that no-one can really see what the outcome might be. As they say - Yer pays yer money, yer takes yer chances.
In the course of history, there have been many attempts to create a new social order based on positive anarchist ideals. In the 20th. Century, two major attempts were made. The first in the Ukraine during the Russian Revolution, when Nestor Makhno led a group of anarchist partisans against the White Armies of Denisov and later the Red Army under Trotsky. The doomed 1921 uprising in Kronstadt also had an anarchist content, though it was later crushed by Trotsky. Anarchists were also targeted by Lenin's Cheka secret police in 1921, who shot them as 'gangsters'. The last thing Lenin wanted was for people to be reminded of the fact that the Bolsheviks had usurped and hijacked the revolution. However, anarchists did better in Spain in 1936 after the insurrection of Franco and Barcelona was in a state of revolutionary upheaval as a result of Franco's fascist uprising. Anarcho-Syndacalists held the city for 14 months, during which time the city was under the control of workers' and neighbourhood committees. The experiment in fact worked very well as long as it lasted, but it was destroyed by communist-led Republican forces and, of course, later by Franco. Many of the rural areas of Spain were run by the peasantry under anarchist tutelage. It's all history now, of course. but these experiments did at least reveal the possibilities inherent in positive anarchism where it might grow out of the negative anarchy produced by a revolutionary situation in which suddenly 'everything becomes possible'. Perhaps objective historical circumstances were not propitious, but one can only say that with the advantage of hindsight. Who knows what might happen in a revolution which took root in an advanced capitalist country and spread throughout the rest of the capitalist world? I certainly don't.
Personally, I think Nietzsche was right in his cynicism about the origin and nature of the state, but wrong in his belief that the Will to Power was the basis of life and that this gave the strong natural rights over the weak. It was a metaphysical idea which he couldn't substantiate. Like Hegel before him and Sartre after, Nietzsche rejected Kant's idea of the unknowable 'thing-in-itself' because, like Hegel's Spirit and Sartre's dualistic Being-For-Itself versus Being-In-Itself, his Will to Power was precisely an unknowable 'thing-in-itself' beyond any possibility of being either verified or falsified. Kant was right here and Nietzsche was wrong, I believe. Indeed, the Kantian idea of an unknowable thing-in-itself has a lot in common with Keats's Negative Capability, "that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason" - although, of course, Keats's language is much more succinct than Kant's. Indeed, this is the reason why I will choose negative anarchy over positive anarchism until such a time as the latter proves that it provides some kind of answer to the questions posed by the former. And, until that situation emerges, one can do no more than hope for the best, while somehow expecting the worst.
Personally, I believe that Nietzsche's Will to Power is one of those abstract metaphysical concepts which doesn't correspond to concrete reality. I also believe that his account of the origin of the state is rather simplistic, although refreshingly honest when placed against those of Social Contract theorists like Rousseau and Hobbes. I also find it abstractly more compelling than the Marxist idea which roots the state in class-domination rather than conquest and domination, because that is a theory which puts the cart before the horse in my not so humble opinion. I can't for the life of me see how class-exploitation could have emerged - and more importantly survived and evolved - outside the context of the conquest and subjugation of one group of people by another, because it seems to me that force had to come first and after it class-exploitation regulated by state-institutions and legal arrangements. Surely, the exploited would simply rise up and rebel unless they were held down by superior force from the outset and compelled to accept it. So, in this area, I find Nietzsche much more convincing than Marx. However, I do find his account rather simplistic, because everyone knows that human societies existed long before states. Nietzsche is not very specific regarding how states first emerged and doesn't really go beyond praising the warlike and aggressive traits which the conquerors would have had to possess to bring the first states into being. That's why he can talk of a 'tribal nobility', which is something of an anachronism, since most pre-state societies had no such nobilities. Nobilities only emerged later with the advent of warrior-aristocracies founded on conquest, subjugation and exploitation.
Precisely because he is so honest about the origin and ongoing nature of state-power, I would say that, like Celine, he was a champion of negative anarchy as opposed to positive anarchism, which he clearly detested - just as he detested Christianity, socialism and democracy. He wanted to root social relations in naked power - in the Will to Power - and have done with the idea that the state could or should have benevolent functions working equally on behalf of everyone it supposedly protects. Negative anarchy presupposes the kind of stripped down truthfulness which acts on us like a corrosive, stripping us of our comfortable illusions regarding the nature of the state and its primary function of protection. Positive anarchism seeks to go beyond this and actually posit a stateless society as a realisable aim. The first I would say was rooted in our understanding of the ad hoc and negatively anarchic way 'solid' social and political institutions come into being and maintain themselves in being. A kind of negative energy characterises this negative anarchy in a way that it does not characterise positive anarchism.
This kind of anarchy exists at the point when, to quote Yeats, "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / mere anarchy is loosed upon the world". "Mere anarchy" obviously appalled Yeats, although, without it, it is hard to see where the negative energy would have come from to write such a great poem. Negative anarchy represents the moment of destructiveness, which brings the old order down and makes way for the new which grows from its ruins. Such a moment might lead to precisely the opposite of what positive anarchists might think is desirable - some new Leviathan for instance, as happened in France under Robespierre, in Soviet Russia or, perhaps, Iran after the fall of the Shah. All these things are possible - depending on the balance of forces within society as a whole. There are so many hidden variables in that equation, that no-one can really see what the outcome might be. As they say - Yer pays yer money, yer takes yer chances.
In the course of history, there have been many attempts to create a new social order based on positive anarchist ideals. In the 20th. Century, two major attempts were made. The first in the Ukraine during the Russian Revolution, when Nestor Makhno led a group of anarchist partisans against the White Armies of Denisov and later the Red Army under Trotsky. The doomed 1921 uprising in Kronstadt also had an anarchist content, though it was later crushed by Trotsky. Anarchists were also targeted by Lenin's Cheka secret police in 1921, who shot them as 'gangsters'. The last thing Lenin wanted was for people to be reminded of the fact that the Bolsheviks had usurped and hijacked the revolution. However, anarchists did better in Spain in 1936 after the insurrection of Franco and Barcelona was in a state of revolutionary upheaval as a result of Franco's fascist uprising. Anarcho-Syndacalists held the city for 14 months, during which time the city was under the control of workers' and neighbourhood committees. The experiment in fact worked very well as long as it lasted, but it was destroyed by communist-led Republican forces and, of course, later by Franco. Many of the rural areas of Spain were run by the peasantry under anarchist tutelage. It's all history now, of course. but these experiments did at least reveal the possibilities inherent in positive anarchism where it might grow out of the negative anarchy produced by a revolutionary situation in which suddenly 'everything becomes possible'. Perhaps objective historical circumstances were not propitious, but one can only say that with the advantage of hindsight. Who knows what might happen in a revolution which took root in an advanced capitalist country and spread throughout the rest of the capitalist world? I certainly don't.
Personally, I think Nietzsche was right in his cynicism about the origin and nature of the state, but wrong in his belief that the Will to Power was the basis of life and that this gave the strong natural rights over the weak. It was a metaphysical idea which he couldn't substantiate. Like Hegel before him and Sartre after, Nietzsche rejected Kant's idea of the unknowable 'thing-in-itself' because, like Hegel's Spirit and Sartre's dualistic Being-For-Itself versus Being-In-Itself, his Will to Power was precisely an unknowable 'thing-in-itself' beyond any possibility of being either verified or falsified. Kant was right here and Nietzsche was wrong, I believe. Indeed, the Kantian idea of an unknowable thing-in-itself has a lot in common with Keats's Negative Capability, "that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason" - although, of course, Keats's language is much more succinct than Kant's. Indeed, this is the reason why I will choose negative anarchy over positive anarchism until such a time as the latter proves that it provides some kind of answer to the questions posed by the former. And, until that situation emerges, one can do no more than hope for the best, while somehow expecting the worst.
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