Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (77 page)

Things got so bad that Tolstoy finally decided to go and live in a monastery. He left Yasnaya Polyana in the winter of 1910 at the age of eighty-two, accompanied by his doctor and youngest daughter. During the long train journey, he was suddenly taken ill and died in a small railway junction at Astapovo. In keeping with his wishes, he was buried in the forest on his former estate where as boys he and his brother believed a green stick was to be found which would cure the evils of the world.

After his death, Tolstoyan communities were set up throughout Europe. His later works struck a chord with those who were concerned with the survival of the individual in a world which was becoming more authoritarian and materialist In America, his beliefs found an echo in the Christian anarchism of Dorothy Day and Ammon Hennacy and those associated with
The Catholic Worker.

After the Bolshevik seizure of power, he was celebrated in his own country primarily as a literary artist; the authorities either ignored his social philosophy or tried to explain it away. Ironically enough, the property that the great anarchist abandoned at Yasnaya Polyana became a State museum, visited by as many as five thousand people a day. His subversive views on militarism, patriotism and government can be culled from the almost definitive edition of his writings which was published in ninety volumes in the Soviet Union in 1958.

Tolstoy’s greatest indirect influence as a moral and social thinker has probably been in India. Gandhi developed Tolstoy’s doctrine of non-resistance into a highly effective weapon in the campaign to oust the British imperial presence. But Gandhi went beyond Tolstoy to develop collective action and organize campaigns of mass disobedience. While he declared that ‘the ideally non-violent state will be ordered anarchy’, he accepted the need for a limited government and a form of indirect democracy as a step towards the ideal.
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The Gandhian
Sarvodaya
movement, which developed in India after independence under the guidance of Vinoba Bhave, moved closer to Tolstoyan principles. Bhave emphasized the need for positive
satyagraha
, that is, non-violent assistance to others.
⁶⁸

In the West, Tolstoy’s message, especially mediated by Gandhi who gave it a more practical application, found fertile ground in the peace movement after the Second World War when the superpowers used the threat of nuclear annihilation as an excuse to maintain their rule and control their peoples. Tolstoy proved an influential figure in the
rapprochement
at the time between the pacifist and anarchist traditions; his tactics of nonviolent direct action and civil disobedience seemed for a while in the sixties capable of bringing about a peaceful revolution. An increasing number of libertarians have since come to acknowledge Tolstoy’s central insight that violence cannot be used to abolish the violence of government, and that it is impossible to seize power in order to dissolve it.

It is still possible for a biographer like A. N. Wilson to call Tolstoy’s religious anarchism the ‘least Russian’ and the ‘silliest of his teachings’.
⁶⁹
Nothing could be farther from the truth. It is hardly a coincidence that the Russian aristocracy should have produced three of the greatest anarchist thinkers in the nineteenth century in Bakunin, Kropotkin and Tolstoy. They were all able to witness at close quarters the tyranny of the Tsarist regime, and, conversely, the inspiring example of peasant communities living in an orderly and peaceful fashion without a trace of government.

Tolstoy’s religious anarchism represents the fulfilment of a lifetime’s erratic and desperate search for meaning. By stressing the light of reason and the kingdom of God within, he not only echoes the mystical anarchists of the Middle Ages but anticipates the best of modern radical theology.
Because Tolstoy interpreted the teaching of the Gospels in a pacifist and anarchist manner, and had the temerity to practise (if not always with success) what he preached, he will always irritate those who live in comforting churches, cushioned by bureaucracies and cynicism. He will always inspire those who seek a peaceful end to oppression and exploitation and who look forward to a world of creative fellowship.

T
HE
U
NITED
S
TATES
,
WITH
its traditional hostility to central government, has produced many original anarchists. Like their European counterparts, the individualists amongst them drew inspiration from Adam Smith’s confidence in the market’s capacity to bring about economic and social order, and they assumed that a modified form of capitalism would lead to anarchy. But while later in the century they were influenced by Proudhon, their anarchism was largely a home-grown affair.
¹
It developed out of the American sense of independence and individuality which had been forged by the self-reliant settlers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The first real American anarchist was the musician and inventor Josiah Warren.
²
He was first a member of Robert Owen’s utopian colony New Harmony, but left in 1827 because of its communal property arrangements and system of collective authority which he felt prevented initiative and responsibility and suppressed individuality. Warren thought that it had failed to reconcile the need for personal autonomy and the demand for communal conformity; the ‘united interests’ of the members were directly at war with their individual personalities and the circumstances.

The experience did not lead Warren however to reject the principle of co-operative living, but rather made him aware that society should adapt to the needs of the individual and not
vice versa.
He henceforth adopted the principle that:

In his
Equitable Commerce
(1846), Warren further argued that each person should be the final judge of right and wrong. He advocated a society in which every agent is independent from his fellows and unable to suffer the consequences of actions he does not commit. The only way to avoid discord is to avoid all necessity for artificial organizations. ‘The Individual’, Warren insisted ‘“is by nature a law unto himself” or herself, and if we ever attain our objects, this is not to be overlooked or disregarded.’
⁴
It is worthy of note that Warren adds ‘or herself’; unlike most of his contemporaries, he was concerned with the individuality of women as much as men. His radical individualism moreover did not prevent him from trying to establish libertarian communities in which people defined their own wants and received according to their work done.

Although he worked out his principles independently, Warren has been called the ‘American Proudhon’.
⁵
Like Proudhon, he focused on property as the key to human freedom. Each individual has the right to the product of his or her labour, but no one could be entirely self-sufficient. Existing forms of production made a division of labour inevitable. To overcome this contradiction, Warren proposed like Robert Owen an exchange of notes based on labour time, with the additional proviso that the intensity of labour be taken into account in evaluating an individual’s work. He wanted to establish an ‘equitable commerce’ in which all goods are exchanged for their cost of production. He therefore proposed ‘labour notes’ to replace conventional money, assuming that each seller would accurately calculate his or her labour time. In this way profit and interest would be eradicated and a highly egalitarian order would emerge.

On leaving New Harmony, Warren tried out his system in a Time Store which he set up in Cincinatti. It lasted three years and demonstrated the practicality of his ideas. Goods were sold at cost price and customers gave the storekeeper labour notes representing an equivalent time of their own work to recompense his labour. Keen to spread the new gospel, Warren managed to earn enough money from his patents (which included the first design for a rotary press) to bring out a journal called
The Peaceful Revolutionist
in 1833, the first anarchist periodical to appear in America. He also set up a model village based on the equitable exchange of labour which he hoped would be the first of many such communities. In the long run, he thought that two hours’ labour a day would suffice to provide all necessaries.

The next experiment Warren undertook was called the Village of Equity in Ohio. Half a dozen families bought a strip of land, built their own houses, and set up a co-operative sawmill. With relationships based on voluntary
agreements, it proved to be the first anarchist community in any country since the Diggers tried to set up theirs on George’s Hill during the English Revolution. Unfortunately, it collapsed through illness. Warren was not dismayed and immediately founded in 1846 another community called Utopia, mainly with former members of Fourierist communities. Based on stone quarries and sawmills, it attracted about a hundred members and lasted into the 1860s. At the beginning, it was entirely libertarian and voluntary in character. ‘Throughout our operations on the ground’, Warren observed in 1848,

Warren moved on in 1850 to establish a third community called the City of Modern Times on Long Island which survived for more than a decade. True to its individualist principles, the only way of dealing with a recalcitrant member was the boycott: ‘When we wish to rid ourselves of unpleasant persons, we simply let them alone’, a friend of Warren’s recalled. ‘We buy nothing of them, sell them nothing, exchange no words with them — in short, by establishing a complete system of non-interference with them, we show them unmistakably that they are not wanted here, and they usually go away on their own accord.’
⁷
The settlers showed remarkable mutual tolerance, and remained faithful to ‘the great sacred right of Freedom even to do silly things’.
⁸

Warren’s form of individualism did not exclude co-operation for mutual advantage. He argued, for instance, that something like a communal kitchen would be cheap and efficient and would ‘relieve the female of the family from the full, mill-horse drudgery to which they otherwise are irretrievably doomed’.
⁹
He also suggested that individuals could choose to live together, and that there could be ‘hotels for children’, organized according to the peculiarities of their wants and pursuits. Like Utopia, Modern Times did not collapse but rather evolved into a more traditional village with mutualist leanings.

In his theory, Warren remained consistent to the end, calling for complete religious freedom – ‘every man his own church’ – and asserting the absolute sovereignty of the individual – ‘every man his own nation’.
¹⁰
He looked to a classless society of equal opportunity, with all coercive institutions abolished and replaced by a regime of voluntary contract To enforce contracts and to sanction infractions against the ‘law of equal liberty’,
Warren advocated the deployment of rotating, voluntary juries who could shape general rules which would deal with individual cases. He even countenanced the use of public censure, imprisonment and death as possible sanctions, although he recognized that ‘punishment is in itself an objectionable thing, productive of evil even when it prevents greater evil, and therefore it is not wise to resort to it for the redress of trivial wrongs.’
¹¹

The practical success of Warren’s theories made them particularly attractive, and he went on to inspire individual anarchists like Lysander Spooner and Stephen Pearl Andrews. When William B. Greene introduced Proudhon’s mutualism into America, its reception had already been prepared by Warren.

Even John Stuart Mill praised Warren as a ‘remarkable American’. While noting abundant differences in detail, he accepted his general conception of liberalism and admitted that he had borrowed the phrase ‘the sovereignty of the individual’ from the Warrenites. Mill also correctly observed that while Warren’s Village Community had a superficial resemblance to some aspects of socialism, it was opposed to them in principle since ‘it recognizes no authority in Society over the individual, except to enforce equal freedom of development for all individualities’.
¹²