NEGATIVITY OF ANARCHISM Just this tension between individualism and socialism, experienced by every anarchist movement, might be seen as rendering anarchism indecisive and ineffectual. Looked at from the standpoint of ideas, or of the search for requirements to fulfill a vision of human being, this same tension can be seen as preserving anarchism against that tendency to surrender to sovereignty of the whole, at first disguised and then overt and practically irreversible, that individualists fear in anarchist communism and which Marxist communism has again and again instantiated. (If communism and syndicalism are more than standard procedures, or institutions, in the sense of the preceding section, if they do not allow for effective choice of alternatives, they are incompatible with anarchism.) Malatesta's anarchism, which rejected hyphenation and sectarianism, sought to preserve this tension within an unqualified undivided anarchism. Until and unless the polarity of individual and society is resolved into a world without social power, it would seem important that a movement of people and ideas directed to that end remain acutely conscious of the polarity and by one or another means preserve that tension; for it is, on the anarchist view, only in an anarchical society that individuality and sociality can cease to be in systematic conflict. The individualism of anarchism is no doubt equivocal, especialy because it must be prepared to let go ultimately what it jealously guards. But it is certainly not a bourgeois individualism, as Marxism, beginning with Marx's attack on Stimer, has represented it. In Stirner's philosophy, not called anarchist by him but generally affirmed by individualist anarchists, philosophic egoism is absolute and «others» are merely instruments for «my» satisfactions. But this egoism is precisely philosophic rather than psychological which means that egoism does not bar love of others or voluntary cooperative association («free union»). Although Stimer, a badly misunderstood philosopher if my reading of him is correct, wrote of the selfinterested self and prni::;ed it, he wrote by habit in the first person plural, thus setting the problem of uniqueness as the problem of all persons and not the problem (as posed by Nietzsche later) of an elite or future elite; he called for a general rebellion of the unique ones, all of us, in our own behalf. The question of 'the individual as basic social reality' runs deeper, however, than I have so far pursued it here, deeper indeed than I shall be able to. How this exploration might 49
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