NEGATIVITY OF ANARCHISM effects, the latter unpredictable because they depend on the unpredictable behaviors of persons not known and of nonpersonal historical processes. Nevertheless, anarchism remains extraordinarily difficult to adopt other than «philosophically,» i.e., intellectually, for it makes a severe dialectical demand: that persons envision and find ways to overcome a condition of objective and subjective powerlessness and futil!ty, not by seeking power or planning its seizure, or by pleading with power, and so on, which are the ways of politics and the ways also by which people attempt to cope with everyday oppressions, frustrations, and resentments, but by negating power absolutely and choosing powerlessness. (Choice of powerlessness does not, however, imply passivity or laclc of militancy. Anarchism and T'aoism have much in common - but anarchism is not a way of merely personal ·salvation.) The demand is severe, given, in the U.S.A. for specific example, a society that is barren of public ideas other than the power-oriented; given a prevailing ethics that allows one to do whatever one wants so long as no one is hurt very directly; given that authentic models of liberty, individuality, and free cooperation are scarce; given a superficial but malignant pessimism about human being; given a complex of overlapping hierarchies such that all but a few people are relatively superior others who are institutionally inferior; given a communications technology that provides a year-round circus of politics for the entertainment and mystification of the citizenry; given the rage, hatred, fear, envy that pervade the nation. Although the youth-radical movements of the late '60's in the U.S.A. exhibited so many familiar themes of anarchism that «the Movement'> might be described as protoanarchist, a plausible interpretation of its collapse is that (mainly unacknowledged, often magical) expectations of power, even of instant power, were unfulfilled. Neo-Marxisms that retain a basic affirmation of power and a reassuring vision of power-through-history, while seeking to qualify themselves by incorporating libertarian themes, make lesser psychological and ethical demands. Whether, in a society (and world) in which the reality and ideality of power are ubiquitous, anarchism, in the sense of generic liberation, can have meaning other than to be a way of life for a small number, would seem to depend on the possib111tythat the transcendence of power, i.e., integral freedom, becomes by many persons concretely imaginable, concretely 37
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