New Forms of Worker Organization: The Syndicalist and Autonomist Restoration of Class-Struggle Unionism

When it was suggested that I write an article on anarchist criticism, my immediate reaction was to remark that there isn't really any such thing as an anarchist criticism, in the way that there is a corpus of Marxist criticism, though there are critics who are anarchists and whose anarchism inevitably influences the way they write about literature and other arts.There could only be an anarchist criticism if there were an anarchist orthodoxy, a body of dogma which we all accepted, and which could serve as the basis for establishing critical rules. This is what happens among the Marxists.But Anarchism has always by its nature been resistant to what George Orwell used to call "the smelly little orthodoxies." It is a way of thinking that rests upon a radical criticism of existing society and a rejection of authority as much as in the artistic as in the political realm. This has always meant that whatever blueprints anarchists may have made for the future have always been tentative. How, we have always asked, can we plan for a future where we hope people will be freer than they are today? We have never created utopias. We have never carpentered party platforms. At most we have said, this is the kind of society at which we should aim, and this is the way it could work, and we have called on people to try for themselves. But we have never closed off the possibility of alternatives, and this flexibility, which puzzles people used to rigid political ways of thinking, is what allows anarchists to offer highly practical provisional or piecemeal proposals at any stage-as Paul Goodman did in the field of education and Colin Ward in town planning-and in that way keep anarchist practice alive even within a non-anarchist society. It is also what has kept anarchism alive as an idea for so many generations: it can always respond in new ways to different circumstances without having to wriggle its way out of a rubble of plans and projects whose relevancy is ended. Politicians are like generals who repeatedly fight the last war: their programmes are always outdated by the time they are applied.Very much the same applies in the field of criticism and the arts. Because the anarchist critic has no set of dogmas or rules relating to writing or painting, he is able to respond directly, and the artist who happens to be an anarchist, because he has no partisan duty laid upon him, is able to express his vision according to the nature of his own mind by following the exhortation of Peter Arshinov, Nestor Makhno's comrade, to "look into the depths of your own being, seek out the truth and realize it yourself: you will find it nowhere else."The well-known anarchists who became critics did not proceed by saying: How does this work fit in with or serve anarchist propaganda? They looked at the work with a clear and open eye, and only at the end, when they had considered it in its own rights, did they relate their critical insight to their anarchist ideas.Peter Kropotkin wrote a fine book of criticism, Russian Literature: Ideals and Realities, in which he showed how, under the tyranny of the Tsars, when open political discussion was suppressed, literature became a vehicle of social criticism and of rebellion. Inevitably, Kropotkin's insight was irradiated by his anarchist attitude, but at no point did he attempt to make partisan propaganda out of his survey of Russian writing, and thus what he had to say became all the more impressive, for the evidence of the works he quoted and summarized showed how intimately the urge to create depended on the liberty of expression, and how, in its turn, the assertion of the liberty of expression became an act of subversion, of rebellion.When Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was moved by the works of his painter friend Gustave Courbet to write his never translated book on art, Du principe de l'Art et sa destination social, he was not concerned to make anarchist propaganda or to fit his view or art into an existing theoretical structure. …