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Dan,
We have a vast area of agreement on this. I appreciate much in the
anarchist tradition and, like many, called myself an anarchist before I
decided that practice mattered more than rhetoric and good intentions. I am
still happy to work with self-described anarchists around environmental
concerns, for example, and see little need to worry about socialists who,
say, pretend that the glaciers aren't melting.
The differences are mostly a question of how far these things can be
precisely nailed down and how far we really should try, given, as you say,
these things never exist in a vacuum.
We can use anarchism as a label meaning "the polar opposite of
'authoritarianism,'" but the concrete, material nature of authoritarianism
varies which leaves us with an anarchism that varies across time and space.
A variant of this problem plagues the effort to define it in the context you
offer ("within the socialist and labour movement"). You offer four
points....
a) anti-capitalism
> b) a society organized "from the bottom up" and truly democratic
> c) an opposition to parliamentarian and representative democracy,
> preferring "emancipation of the workers by the workers themselves". This
> being said, many self-described Anarchists have, at different times,
> called for tactical voting in cases where the immediate choice is
> between dictatorship and bourgeois democracy. . . . .
> d) an opposition to "Sate Socialism" (often referred to as
> "Authoritarian Socialism"), broadly defined as a system in which those
> who control the State in the name of the workers actually exploit and
> oppress the working class.
>
On the surface, the first three overlap with what most people in here would
see as "Marxism," and the fourth would for many, if defined properly. But a
few observations are in order, particularly in light of the US and Canadian
experience...
We need to define "anti-capitalism," because there is a tradition in the
anarchist movement of defending individual property rights to the point
where it smudges into a libertarian hostility to government regulation and
what amounts to the idolatry of the free market...which isn't a state
planned economy. (Maybe this is more a problem among US and Canadian
anarchists, but I doubt it.)
So, also, the idea of "State Socialism" turns entirely on what we mean by a
"state," because some of the anarchist models for self-government look
indistinguishable from some of the socialist models. Perhaps more
fundamentally, though, an overemphasis on this becomes a bit like the
socialist overemphasis on what is said--on rhetoric about the future--rather
than a practice in the present that points towards something concrete about
the future....
The question of present practice brings us face-to-fact with the issue of
parliamentary or representative democracy. Certainly, the seemingly
definitive anarchist break from the socialists turned on the electoral
strategies of the social democracy. Not surprising, I guess, you have
socialists and radicals of various stripes in the US engaged concretely in
independent politics pointing towards self-emancipation, as self-described
abolitionists take a critical rhetorical stance as authoritarian.
Yet, anarchist practice includes "tactical voting" for bourgeois parties
election after election (your example of Chomsky) that control the bourgeois
State anjd use its power ruthlessly against working people at home and
abroad. It seems to me that their material practice puts such anarchists
into the same bed as the CPUSA, even as they rhetorically denounce those
socialists who urge the masses to take independent action for the crimes of
"State Socialism"?
Anarchism would make a a great deal more sense in the American practice
today if it clearly repudiated the authoritarian parties of war, coercion,
etc.
Admittedly, anarchists seem to have no mechanism for addressing or making a
decision on such things.
Solidarity!
ML
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