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Last week, I was doing a workshop on safety culture in organisations, and was stressing the need for moving from a "bureaucratic" culture where everything was dependent on strict adherence to rules to an "aware" culture where safety was inbuilt into the consciousness of the employees, when I had an epiphany: if we extend the same logic to governments, democracy is needed only as long as people are not enlightened. The moment that happens, we don't need a government, as everyone will take care of everyone else. In fact, the logical form of government in an enlightened culture is anarchy!

Now, most people would get upset at this statement, because anarchism has got horrendously bad press; mainly due to the action of a bunch of anarchists at the turn of the Twentieth Century, who believed that the way to bring in the anarchist revolution was to assassinate monarchs, princes and presidents. Sadly this is only one facet of a serious philosophy which has had its learned adherents and which refuses to die.

The Oxford "Very Short Introduction" series is my go-to resource for first information on any subject that I don't have a clue about - and thankfully, one on Anarchism by Colin Ward was available. This book is a great primer on the subject - though you may need something more substantial if you are already up to date on the subject.

The author says

The word ‘anarchy� comes from the Greek anarkhia, meaning contrary to authority or without a ruler, and was used in a derogatory sense until 1840, when it was adopted by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon to describe his political and social ideology.
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For anarchists the state itself is the enemy, and they have applied the same interpretation to the outcome of every revolution of the 19th and 20th centuries. This is not merely because every state
keeps a watchful and sometimes punitive eye on its dissidents, but because every state protects the privileges of the powerful.

This is a powerful, paradigm-shifting concept. We have been brought up to believe in the sanctity of the nation-state and the government, that we are unable to think of an alternative reality without one - not even as a "what-if" scenario. But is the state something which is so sacrosanct? For the majority of its existence, human civilisation has lived without the nation-state; even now, national borders are continuously in flux. We cannot rule out a future in which it may disappear altogether. That is the anarchist dream.

The main thinkers of the anarchist tradition were:

1. William Godwin (1756�1836), English Philosopher
2. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809�65), French Propagandist
3. Michael Bakunin (1814�76), Russian Revolutionary
4. Peter Kropotkin (1842�1921), Russian Geographer turned Political Philosopher

Even though individual differences existed, all these thinkers were against the idea of the monolithic state and supported independent communes of mutually dependent human beings.

The mainstream of anarchist propaganda for more than a century has been anarchist-communism, which argues that property in land, natural resources, and the means of production should be held in mutual control by local communities, federating for innumerable joint purposes with other communes. It differs from state socialism in opposing the concept of any central authority.

Also part and parcel of anarchism is pacifism - you don't need to go to war with your neighbour if there are no fictitious boundaries to protect: environmentalism - when one lives in a commune, one has to live in harmony with nature, and there is no need for "development"; liberating work from the assembly line; decriminalisation of the populace by replacing punishment with a therapeutic approach to crime; free liberal education instead of state-run schools teaching a common curriculum etc. If one looks at this closely, this resembles the communist utopia without the "proletarian dictatorship" - something Bakunin warned Marx against as it could give rise to totalitarian regimes, a prophecy which was frighteningly fulfilled in all communist countries.

Of course, in the modern world, laissez-faire capitalism and religious fundamentalism are ruling the roost. Man's essential distrust of one another has led to him joining one camp or the other and demonising his rivals - and ironically, the same individualistic ideas which gave rise to anarchism also spawned right-wing libertarianism of the Ayn Rand variety, where the advancement of one's own selfish needs are seen as the ultimate aim of life. However, anarchism has not lost out fully. In our climate change resistance movements, in civil disobedience against right-wing governments across the world, and in tiny local experiments like the women's "Kudumbasree" movement in Kerala, one can still see the flame of the original philosophy burning, albeit stuttering a little.

Is anarchism good? After reading the book, I would reply with a resounding YES!, provided it is implemented as its original advocates wanted. Is anarchism practical? The idealist in me wants to say yes, but the realist responds with a firm no. But hey, I can still dream, can't I?

As John Lennon once said: "Imagine..."