When You Can't Use Force, Control Beliefs by Other Means

Alongside the violence there is the rise of massive propaganda, the rise of the public relations industry, to try to control attitudes and beliefs. Apart from that, there is something quite simple: the disciplinary effects of the way life is organized… Part of the reasoning for arranging education so you come out with heavy debt is so you are disciplined. Take the last 20 years – the neo-liberal years roughly – a very striking part of what is called “globalization” is just aimed at discipline. It wants to eliminate freedom of choice and impose discipline. How do you do that? Well, if you are a couple in the U.S. now, each working 50 hours a week to put food on the table, you don’t have time to think about how to become a libertarian socialist. When what you are worried about is “how can I get food on the table?” or “I’ve got kids to take care of, and when they are sick I’ve got to go to work and what’s going to happen to them?” Those are very well-designed techniques of imposing discipline. And there are costs to trying to be independent. Take, say, trying to organize a labor union. If you are the organizer, there are gonna be costs to you. Maybe the work force will gain but there is a cost to you. We know there is, we know what that cost is – not just in energy and effort, but in punishment. People living in fragile circumstances make a reasonable calculation, they say “Why should I take the cost when I can just get by?” So there are many reasons why normal instincts and attitudes don’t come out although over time they often do. After all that’s how we have social change for the better. (pp. 232-233, “Interviews with Barry Pateman (2004),” “Chomsky on Anarchism”)

In theoretical political science we can analytically identify two main conceptions of anarchism – a so-called collective anarchism with Bakunin, Kropotkin and Makhno as main figures and which is limited to Europe, and, on the other hand, so-called individualistic anarchism which is limited to the U.S. Do you agree with this theoretical separation, and in this perspective, where do you see the historical origins of anarchism in the U.S.?

The individualistic anarchism that you are talking about, (Max) Stirner and others, is one of the roots of – among other things – the so-called “libertarian” movement of the U.S. This means dedication to free market capitalism, and has no connection with the rest of the international anarchist movement. In the European tradition, anarchist commonly called themselves libertarian socialists, in a very different sense of the term “libertarian.” As far as I can see, the workers’ movements, which didn’t call themselves anarchist, were closer to the main strain of European anarchism than many of the people in the U.S. who called themselves anarchists. If we go back to the labor activism from the early days of the industrial revolution, to the working class press in 1850s, and so on, it’s got a real anarchist strain to it. They never heard of European anarchism, never heard of Marx, or anything like that. It was spontaneous. They took for granted that wage labor is little different from slavery, that workers should own the mills, that the industrial system is destroying individual initiative, culture, and so on… [The] same is true of other popular movements – let’s take the New Left movements. Some strains related themselves to traditional collectivist anarchism, which always regarded itself as a branch of socialism. But U.S. and to some extent British libertarianism is quite a different thing and different development, in fact has no objection to tyranny as far as it is private tyranny. That is radically different from other forms of anarchism. (pp. 234-235, “Interview with Ziga Vodovnik (2004),” “Chomsky on Anarchism”)