Between Anarchism and Socialism

When I became old enough to make my own decisions about life, I was fascinated by how all my important choices would ultimately split in two directions. Should I go to this college or that college? Should I go to graduate school or into the Peace Corps? Should I stay single or get married? Should I marry this woman or that one? Later I discovered that this bifurcation process of development is not unusual, though I thought it was at the time and that it had something to do with my inability to make decisions. I found out later that it is known philosophically as dialectics.

When I apply this concept to my own political development, I see another possible bifurcation developing on the horizon. Ever since graduate school I have considered myself to be an intellectual Marxist. This self identification really took off after my tour in the Peace Corps, when I saw first-hand how the people in the little section of the Third World I was posted to actually lived, and how US Imperialism (my boss then) kept them in a state of enforced backwardness and used their land and resources for its own purposes while claiming to do otherwise.

For the longest time I considered US imperialism to be the major enemy of mankind and have put forth a lot of time and effort over the years to work against some of its worst abuses, such as its current wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and now Yemen--not to mention the domestic abuses of racism, sexism, and species-ism that flow from it. I became a "fellow-traveler" with leftists in the anti-war/anti-imperialist movement and still count many of those people as some of my best friends.

Lately, I've started to wonder, however, if my focus on US imperialism as the major enemy of mankind has been too narrow. Maybe there's something larger at work here than just the functioning of capitalism. Maybe civilization itself is what is holding humanity back and what we need to overcome.

Through my readings in anarchism, as an alternative radical philosophy to Marxism, I've discovered the ideas of the Luddites and other anti-civilization radicals. Both of these groups often adhere to a philosophy known as anarcho-primitivism, which ultimately is a form of radical environmentalism, and I admit that these ideas resonate strongly with me.

Henry David Thoreau was an early pioneer of this philosophy, and he has always been one of my favorite thinkers. His notion of living a simple life free of the entanglements of civil society is very appealing. But I wonder: is his philosophy one that could sustain all of humanity? Wouldn't humans, with their capacity to make symbols and their desire to build institutions, quickly put an end to Thoreau's zen-like existence and the tranquility of his "life in the woods?" For that matter, wouldn't ANY kind of stateless human society be doomed to succumb to "statehood" eventually, even after the so-called Fall that the primitivist folks anticipate, as civilization reasserts itself in one way or another--the arguments of various anarchist thinkers notwithstanding?

If that is the case, that states and/or civilization will reassert themselves no matter what, and conquer or assimilate any so called "free" anarchist societies existing around them, then maybe a form of benign statehood would be better than the total (idealized?) "freedom" that anarchists advocate. Maybe, in fact, that form of statehood would be called--scary as it sounds--the dictatorship of the proletariat, the form of state advocated by communists during the socialist transition from capitalism to communism.

Despite this line of reasoning, however, I still haven't bought into the idea that the state is necessary for higher human social organization. It would certainly be different to live in a condition without a state power hanging over you, and in some ways it would be very appealing (as noted). But again, really, is such a form of human society possible (and sustainable) in today's world? And if that form of society would look like it did in humanity's distant past, as the anarcho-primitivists envision it would (and as I understand their somewhat vague ideas on this), then we would all return to living in small bands of pre-agricultural hunters and gatherers.

But would that be possible without humanity experiencing a huge mass die-off, since many experts believe that the hunter-gatherer lifestyle could not support the entire human population at its current size? And would it be morally acceptable to allow such a die-off to take place because your ideology claims that it would be an inevitable consequence of agriculture and civilization (as the anarcho-primitivists claim)? Wouldn't it be more morally acceptable to work toward a proletarian state and communist future, as advocated by state socialists and communists, to avoid such an "inevitable" die-off? Food for thought, as they say...