Been thinking about (and still plan on) writing some stuff on Alan Moore's big three anti-state works from the '80s (Watchmen, V for Vendetta, Miracleman), and while doing some googling, found this essay of his, from Dodgem Logic, a magazine he edited and published in 2010. Moore's arguably the most important modern comics writer (inarguably in the top 3), and I found this intriguing on its own as well as a lens to view his writing through.

One pull quote that intrigued me:

While BTC existed in 2010, Moore may well not have been aware of it, and I'd love to know his thoughts (which googling does not seem to surface).

Everything that follows is his full essay:

*In 1976 Johnny Rotten wanted to be anarchy. He also wanted to get pissed and destroy passers-by. In 2010, when that’s a normal Friday night out in any town centre, should we be taking a closer look at history’s supposedly scariest political movement?

Alan Moore investigates.*

The word anarchy comes with a lot of baggage. It conjures images of men in capes and broad-brimmed hats clutching black bowling balls with fizzing fuses and the helpful legend BOMB scrawled on the side in white emulsion. It’s become a kind of shorthand standing for the breakdown of society and order into screaming chaos; into a Hieronymus Bosch landscape populated by looters, berserkers, giants with leaking boats for feet and eggshells for a body. In the tabloid mass-mind, anarchy has been boiled down into an ultra-violent and demented version of Spy vs. Spy, adapted from a screenplay by Rasputin and the Unabomber. Hardly an attractive proposition, and yet throughout history this is the cause to which some of our greatest and most humane thinkers have subscribed, and to which countless thousands of brave men and women have devoted or indeed have given up their lives. If Darwin in his later years came to see anarchy as the most sensible political position can we casually dismiss it, either as a wild Utopian dream or as a recipe for howling bedlam? Before we toss anarchy onto the scrapheap of discarded ideas alongside the Flat Earth theory and 110% mortgages, perhaps we could make an attempt to find out what the word actually means?

As often proves to be the case with words, the Greeks most definitely had one for it, in this case anarchos, meaning ‘without rulers’. It would seem upon the surface to be a straightforward notion, but its full ramifications and its difficulties only become visible through close examination. For example, if there are no rulers, everyone is free to follow their own judgement in all matters, even in the way they define anarchy itself. As you might well imagine, this has led to a bewildering profusion of of anarchist subdivisions, categories and splinter movements with radically different views and therefore not infrequently at one another’s throats: Communist Anarchists, Free Market Anarchists, Egoist Anarchists, Anarchists Green or Syndicalist, Post-Left or Feminist, Anarchists Insurrectionary or Pacifist. Then there’s Anarchy Without Adjectives which sounds entirely sensible despite the fact that the words ‘Without Adjectives’, used here as a descriptive phrase, are actually performing all the functions of an adjective. Faced with this stupefying undergrowth of different strains of anarchy, we might be better off returning to that first and simplest definition, ‘without rulers’, and see where we go from there.

It could be argued that this state of being without leaders is our natural one, both as a species and as individuals. A new-born infant, child psychologists inform us, can’t at first tell where it ends and where the universe begins. The rattle and the cot bars and its mother are seen as extensions of itself, no different to the baby’s waving arms and legs. When we were fresh out of the womb, then, we were not just rulers in our own domain: we were its pink and wizened deities, were everything we saw or heard or touched, were the whole cosmos. Only later, after we had learned some rudimentary language skills, did we begin to understand the towering hierarchies of authority, the system of command that we were on the lowest rung of, answerable to our parents who were themselves answerable to their bosses and their landlords, their constabulary and their governments. The governments, presumably, were only answerable to the Queen or God or someone inaccessible and probably imaginary like that. We grudgingly accepted that we were not even atoms in the cogs of an immense social machine that neither we nor anybody that our great-grandparents knew had ever been consulted during the construction of. And yet, just for a moment there, our natural assumption in the cradle had been that the bunny-rabbit mobile moved the way we wanted it to move and that we were in charge of our own destinies. We were in charge of everything.

The same is true of our emergence as a species, when we lived as tribal family units in our self-governing huts or caves, not vastly different from the separate herds or flocks of animals around us. And while it may seem as if a tribe of people or a herd of animals inevitably will be dominated by a patriarch, a matriarch, an alpha-male or leader, this is not always the case. Our earliest studies with regards to animal behaviour made truckloads of assumptions that were based upon our own behaviour as humans. We identified the leader of a pack as being the big male who sorted out the territorial disputes and had his pick amongst the choicest females, an unlikely hybrid of John Wayne and Russell Brand that we as humans saw fit to impose on the behavioural quirks of deer or wolves alike. Only more recently have we accepted that while the butch alpha male may well be handling all the punch-ups, other individuals all seem to have their own unique importance to the group’s wellbeing. Perhaps one might be an animal who always seems to find new food or grazing land. Another might be an old female whom the other members of the herd or tribe will gather round protectively in the event of an attack. It would appear that many animal societies involve various roles and numerous components working in cooperation for the greater good, without the need for any one component of the group to be perceived as leader. While Charles Darwin thought that fierce and often bloody competition was the driving force that guided evolution, there is as much evidence suggesting that cooperation plays an equal if not greater part in the survival of the fittest, such as with the sex-crazed and agreeable Bonobo chimps that are amongst our closest primate relatives.

Looked at from this perspective, it’s not anarchy that seems unnatural so much as an imposed and non-consensual authority itself. In any normal human group such as a family or set of friends, excluding members of the Cripps or Bloods, do we still think of one specific person as the leader? Has there genuinely been a head of household since Edwardian times? Mostly, in any halfway functional arrangement there is an informal set of checks and balances that can maintain the equilibrium without the need for regulation from an outside party. This cooperation between individuals who may not share the same opinion, this ability to recognise and to respect the fact that others have as much right to determine their own lives as we have is in my opinion necessary for any form of anarchy, with or without an adjective, to have a chance of working in no-frills reality. It also demonstrates the seeming paradox that’s at the subject’s heart: what seems to be a licence to do anything we want without restriction turns out, like Aleister Crowley’s famous ‘Do what thou wilt’ motto, to involve the taking on of ultimate responsibility and the demanding task of governing ourselves.

Ultimately, anarchy begins at home. Life without rulers as a serious proposition will entail self-rule, which cannot come about unless we properly accept and understand that we as individuals and we alone are totally responsible for our own lives and destinies. One of the first things that this understanding brings with it is the unsettling realisation that if we are our own leaders, we now have no one to blame and no excuse for failing at the tasks we set ourselves. We cannot blame our background or our parents or society in general for our limitations because we have taken the responsibility for our existence squarely on ourselves. We can’t say wistfully that we could have been someone special if we hadn’t been held back by our upbringing or our finances; by marrying that man, that woman; having or not having those specific kids. We can’t continue with the role of helpless and beleaguered victim in our own lives if we’ve just decided we are that life’s leader, are its heroines and heroes. If we’re trying to conceal our flaws it must be said that anarchy’s personal freedom offers very little cover. Having lived our lives within the shelter of a rigid and determined social structure, stepping unprotected out into the wind can seem a frightening and chilly proposition. Indeed, many of us make the choice to stay indoors, to put up with the tedium and disappointments that we know rather than risk it all upon a leap into the dark. However much we might wish we were freer in our lives, at heart we have a sense that freedom is a scary if not terrifying thing.

In light of the above, why would anyone take a chance upon self-governance and anarchy? The burden of responsibility may be as great or even greater than if you were governing an actual country… after all, you probably care more about your own well-being than a government cares about the well-being of its people… so where’s the reward? The real reward, it might be said, is in the overwhelming sense of liberation and empowerment that comes with declaring yourself to be an autonomous and self-determined human being, naked underneath the stars and standing fearless at the centre of your unique universe at it rotates about you in its splendour, as it did before you learned the rules, before you even learned the language. In accepting sole responsibility for how your life unfolds you cease to be life’s victim and begin to realise the unexpected power you have over your circumstances, without ever seeking to exert power over others, without fucking anybody over. In the heady rush of the experience you might conclude that everyone should have the right to live like this, and it is here in this shift from a personal code of behaviour to an all-embracing social policy that anarchy’s most serious problems start to manifest themselves, as even a brief look into the subject’s history makes abundantly clear.

Anarchist ideas have been with us since antiquity. We find them in the utterances of Taoist sages from the east and in the works of Greek philosophers such as Diogenes or Zeno from points further west. The word itself, however, doesn’t enter spoken English until 1642 and the upheavals of the Civil War, used as a term of abuse by the Royalists to describe the various factions that made up Cromwell’s New Model Army. It’s not until the French Revolution of a century thereafter that we first find some of the Enragés who opposed the revolutionary government referring to themselves as anarchists and using the expression positively. It was also in the eighteenth century that William Godwin wrote his Political Justice, advocating that the individual act according to his or her individual judgement while allowing every single other individual the same liberty. In 1844 philosopher Max Stirner’s book The Ego and Its Own suggested individuals were free to do anything that was physically within their power to do, without regard for others, up to and including murder. Stirner’s theories later came to be associated with the movement called Egoist Anarchism, although Stirner does not call himself an anarchist. The first writer to do so would be Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865). Proudhon proposed a form of anarchy called mutualism, which although based on the freedom of the individual was more a model for the way in which society might work if governed by anarchist principles, with everybody free to do the work they really wanted to. Proudhon assumed that this would lead to what he called ‘spontaneous order’ once people had realised the many benefits of mutual cooperation and had organised their towns or villages on a communal basis, with each area governed locally and independently. But how was this utopian condition to be brought about?

In the late eighteen-hundreds and the early twentieth century, a great variety of different answers to this question were put forward. Collectivist Anarchism as defined by Mikhail Bakunin opposed private property, with factories and state-owned institutions to be seized by means of violent revolution and collectivised. Bakunin’s followers have probably contributed the most to the traditional depiction of anarchists as bomb-hurling maniacs, but there is no denying the intelligence and shrewdness of the man himself. Bakunin was initially enthusiastic with regard to the aims of the Workingmen’s Association known more commonly as the First International, which at that time had Karl Marx as its leading light. Divisions between the two men became swiftly apparent, though, with Bakunin predicting, accurately as it turned out, that a Marxist party following a revolution would simply replace the ruling classes they had fought against.

Peter Kropotkin, on the other hand, while equally opposed to private property, felt that it should be legally abolished rather than acquired by bloody overthrow, following which society would be reorganised into a federation of self-governed communes. Thus the anarchist debate swung back and forth with further schools of thought or warring subdivisions constantly appearing and no unifying principle save for a dislike of authority. Mind you, this dislike was enough to unite anarchists of every stripe against the rise of fascism in Europe from the 1920s to the 1930s, notably during the Spanish Civil War when anarchist militias fought beneath a black flag against General Franco’s armies. Their eventual defeat in 1939 was partially assisted by the Stalinists who were meant to be helping in the struggle but who instead persecuted both the anarchists and the dissident Marxists who made up a large part of the rebel forces. Russia’s revolution having worked out pretty much as Mikhail Bakunin had predicted around forty years before with Stalin as that nation’s new Red Tsar.

Famous defeats, of course, should not be taken as a proof that anarchy can never work. The Paris Commune, formed during 1789 and run upon anarchist principles was working fine until it was suppressed some five years later by the armed might of the National Convention in a brutal slaughter that killed far more ordinary people than all of the French aristocrats who met their end during the revolution but is for some reason far less talked about. Almost a century earlier, French Huguenots who had established working self-sufficient and self-governing communities in London’s East End were first pushed into staging a protest by the imposition of a crippling tax on their sole means of income and were then mown down by armed troops who were bivouacked in famous Jack the Ripper landmark Christchurch, Spitalfields.

Both these examples seem to indicate that anarchy is workable and viable, but also illustrate the fact that it will usually be crushed out of existence by the forces of authority that it opposes anywhere that it appears. Although anarchist theory has continued to develop and progress until the present day, where we find fascinating theorists such as Temporary Autonomous Zone author Hakim Bey amongst the vanguard, there is still no clear consensus on how any working anarchist society is to be brought about. We can’t realistically expect our rulers to sit by and let a doctrine that gets rid of them establish itself, nor can we suppose that after a few thousand years of having people tell us what to do that many of us would be capable of handling the alternative. Clearly, a large majority of people would would need to be educated to a point where they were able to direct their own lives without interfering in the lives of other people. Just as clearly, it is in the interest of no state to educate its people to the point where they could do without it. In the present day, the Internet potentially provides the means for such an education and even allows for the creation of alternate currencies or barter systems such as the Green Pound movement that’s intermittently at large in deprived areas of Britain, in which people who are mostly unemployed trade hours of their work-time as a method of avoiding the official currency completely. But even if we could take advantage of these useful-seeming possibilities, is there any conceivable kind of society that would permit such forms of self-sufficiency and self-empowerment to come into being or be widely practiced? In short, how do we get there from here? Where is the bridge that’s obviously needed between living under generally useless or oppressive governments and living in the self-determined world that anarchy holds out the hope of? Even if such a benign transitional society could be imagined, how could it be a society that any anarchist would want to be a part of, a society that somehow functioned without rulers?

Given the Greek origins of the word anarchy, we could do worse than to look to ancient Greece for a solution. In the city state of Athens, leadership was managed through a process called sortition, which is basically a type of government by lottery. In all decisions that concerned the state a jury would be randomly appointed from all parts of the community by drawing straws or lots. This jury would then listen carefully to an informed debate presenting both sides of the argument, just as a jury does during a court case. After this a vote is taken on the matter and the jury is dissolved. This system seems to come much closer to fulfilling the conditions of a true democracy, which is to say rule by the people, than our current mode of rule by a sometimes-elected representative can manage. It is also largely corruption-proof. No special interest groups or corporations can buy influence in government if no one knows who government will be until the next time that the straws are drawn. No jury would be likely to vote in a set of special privileges for the jury, such as being able to claim back expenses on the paddocks for their unicorns, when they themselves would no longer be jurors when these perks were ushered in. In fact, it would be in the jury’s interest to vote for those measures that would genuinely most benefit the common multitude that they’ll immediately be returning to after the ballot.

Obviously, it would take a massive constitutional amendment before any such approach could be adopted, but is constitutional reform really unthinkable when the alternatives are pointless, ineffectual and violent revolution or the option of just sitting back and doing nothing as our mostly unappointed leaders waltz us into wars, disastrous recessions and the possible extinction of our species while demanding that we pay them for providing this unasked-for service?

By removing at a stroke the worst excesses and abuse that come with leadership, such an Athenian approach might at least square the circle with regard to anarchy, allowing a society that has coherence and direction without having rulers in any conventional sense of the term. In times that would seem desperate despite our massive technological advances, perhaps we should invite anarchy in from the cold and take a closer look at the ideas and possibilities that our black-hatted bogeyman might offer us.