ANARCHY REVISITED

THE black flag that flew last week above the tumultuous student disorders of Paris stood for a philosophy that the modern world has all but forgotten: anarchy. Few of the students who riot in France, Germany or Italy --or in many another country--would profess outright allegiance to anarchy, but its basic tenets inspire many of their leaders. Germany's "Red Rudi" Dutschke and France's "Red Danny" Cohn-Bendit openly espouse anarchy. "In theory," says West German Political Scientist Wolfgang Abendroth, "the students are a species of Marxists, but in practice they are anarchists." Not since the anarchist surge in the Spanish Civil War has the Western world seen a movement so enthusiastically devoted to the destruction of law, order and society in the name of unlimited individual freedom.

U.S. Historian Max Nomad believes that anarchists follow a "daydream of desperate romantics." Man's urge to do away with the apparatus that governs him is obviously almost as old as government itself. It is, perhaps, the ultimate Utopia--the idea of a community totally without constraint. Zeno, founder of the ancient Greek school of Stoic thought and anarchism's earliest forerunner, opposed Plato's ideal of state communism in favor of his own vision of a free community without government. Medieval Christianity was full of individualist sects that held that man's laws necessarily interfere with God's. One, the Nicolites, believing themselves blessed with the innocence of Paradise, refused to wear clothes; many lived in small, ungoverned communes, preaching love and sharing their goods and wives. These medieval children of love helped implant the seeds of Christianity's Protestant Reformation and set an example for today's hippie communes (not that these are much given to the study of history, medieval or otherwise).

The same strain of anti-authoritarianism ran through the writing of Renaissance and Enlightenment thinkers, eventually leading to a fresh, secular cult among the Romantics, notably in Rousseau, whose "natural man" was supposed to be superior to artificial government. One of the cries of the French Revolution, along with "Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite!", was "Anarchy!" A man who regarded himself as "the most complete expression of the Revolution," a self-educated French printer named Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, became anarchism's most articulate spokesman. With the Revolution ringing in his ears, and using Rousseau's "natural society" for his lamplight, Proudhon wrote in passionate paradoxes. Authority, he said, fosters not order but disorder; laws create injustice; government leads to slavery. To his most famous question, framed in a book called What Is Property?, Proudhon answered in a single word: "Theft." Thus defining man's social institutions in terms of their abuses, he found the new ideal: anarchy, or ungoverned natural order. It was well before Darwin and Freud had drastically changed the sentimental view of nature.

Only when the idyls of Zeno, Rousseau and Proudhon entered the crucible of 19th century revolutionary life, however, did the destructive creed of modern anarchism develop. Its chief advocate turned out to be the unlikely figure of Mikhail Bakunin, a beefy, unkempt refugee from the Russian aristocracy who spent four decades abetting every European insurrection he could find--between jail sentences. For Bakunin, cataclysmic destruction of the status quo was an article of mystical faith. "Let us put our trust," he said in one of his few written statements, "in the eternal spirit that destroys and annihilates only because it is the unsearchable and eternally creative source of all life." His disciple, Pyotr Kropotkin, another of aristocracy's misfits who seemed temperamentally attracted to anarchism, made Bakunin's "propaganda of deed" even plainer. He urged anarchists to make themselves known by "speech and written word, by dagger, gun and dynamite."

The greatest revolutionary of the age, Karl Marx, disdained the anarchists, turning away from Bakunin when he sought to tie up with the Communist movement. Marx considered them hopeless romantics, complained "how the most trivial sentiments of the petty bourgeois can borrow the wings of a high-flown ideology." Later, Lenin went on to describe anarchists as "bourgeoisie turned inside out." Elsewhere, though, anarchists were not dismissed with Marx and Lenin's cavalier contempt; in the U.S., Congress rewrote the immigration laws in 1903 to bar anyone who "is in opposition to all organized government."

Just because they are so antipolitical, the anarchists have placed a poor second to the Communists when it comes to seizing power in a world of governments. In Spain, the only country where it attained the proportions of a popular movement, anarchism made headway only by soliciting the support of one large bloc of organized labor. Even then, the anarchists proved inept in the final test: although Spain's most powerful labor union counted 2,000,000 members during the Spanish Civil War, and enough militia fighters to defeat army forces operating in Catalonia, the anarchists lost out to the Communists in the important day-to-day chores of running town governments.

Their moment in power, if anything, proved once again the inner contradiction of anarchism. To survive, it must organize; when organized, it ceases to be anarchism. By staying disorganized, on the other hand, it soon ceases to exist. These irreconcilables are again apparent in the current wave of youthful unrest, in which students are caught halfway between the two contradictions. For all their talk of unity, they agree on scarcely more than posters and paperback heroes. Yet even the hoarsest student proponents of "savage democracy" fail to approach Bakunin's call for society's total destruction. In the end, the freedom they want must invariably lead the students back to order, whose colors have never been compatible with the black flag of anarchy.

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