A. J. Baker was a member of the Sydney Libertarians, a group of anti-authoritarians formed in Sydney, Australia during the 1950s, with whom George Molnar and Germaine Greer were also associated. Tl1ey adopted the following quotation from the early Marx as their motto: “Since it is notfor us to create a plan for thejitture that will holdfor all time, all the more surely what we contemporaries have to do is the uncompromising critical evaluation ofall that exists, uncompromising in the sense that our criticism fears neither its own results nor the conflict with the powers that be."’ They distinguished themselves from the ‘“utopian"’ anarchists by abandoning any pretext of ultimately achieving a completely free societyJocusing instead on ‘“being anarchist or libertarian here and now, “ hence their endorsement of an ‘“anarchism without ends. “
The following excerpts are taken from a paper Baker presented to the London Anarchist Group in March 1960, "Sydney Libertarianism."
[T)HE PROBLEM FOR THE UTOPIAN ANARCHIST is to explain how the passage from an unfree to a free society is going to take place. But the solution offered... greatly over-emphasizes the part that can be played by co-operation and rational persuasion. The ideas and practices which prevail in existing society, it is claimed, are so obviously vicious and illogical that they cannot persist. With the spread of education and the growth of a saner attitude to political and social questions we must expect the gradual triumph of the rational and freedom-loving outlook.
The trouble with this belief is that it assumes education and persuasion occur in a social vacuum, when in fact they occur under definite social conditions, and we can by no means alter these conditions at will. It is likewise assumed that the rational decisions of men have an immense influence on the course of events, when the social facts go against this assumption. Thus, take the operation of social institutions like the State, Churches, the army, universities, and so on. These don’t arise because (or just because) certain people get together and decide to create them nor do they continue to exist because certain people have decided to prolong their existence. Institutions are usually there, going on in certain specifiable ways, irrespective of what rational decisions individuals make or fail to make. Anarchists have always been the first to point this out in regard to the State—e. g., that those like the Bolsheviks, who think they capture or control the State are, in fact, captured or controlled by the State; hence the continuity of the State machine and its manner of working from Tsarist to Soviet times... Parts of the State apparatus such as the army and public service are not just instruments ofthe politicians, let alone of“the people”; like newspaper organizations, trade union secretariats, and so on, they have a “life” of their own, and largely shape the outlook of the men who work in them...
To take a concrete case: consider the type of sexually free society Wilhelm Reich advocated [Selection 75|. In existing society we have what Reich called the “authoritarian sexual morality,” i. e., the denial of adolescent sexuality, emphasis on compulsive monogamy, and so on, which means that the great mass of the people, even when they are married, are subject to guilt feelings, possessive jealousy or other disturbances to their sexualities. But, in contrast with this, Reich argued, it is biologically perfectly possible for people to have non-authoritarian, orgiastically much more satisfactory, sexual relationships. Well, then, suppose we want to bring about a society in which this kind of sexual freedom prevails. It is highly utopian to think that people could be rationally educated into this, even if many of them would gain from doing so. For sexual freedom to occur on a large scale, two things would have to be achieved: first, a negative requirement, the power of religious and other moralistic forces in society would have to be destroyed; and, secondly, on the positive side, new social conditions would have to arise or be brought about in which it would be possible for straightforward and non-guilt ridden sexual relationships to become widespread. But a policy of rational argument and good wishes would not achieve these results. Thus, to bring about the second, not only would there need to be such obvious conditions as the availability of contraception and abortion, there would also have to be the absence of neurosis and guilt feelings in the people themselves. But these gUilt feelings—or, as Reich says, the incapacity of people for orgastic satisfaction—are mainly derived from childhood training and from the guilts and prohibitions instilled by the existing educational system. But how do we, the would-be revolutionaries, change the existing educational system? By educating the existing educators? But in that case we should need to be already running the educational system! In other words, it is one thing to know how the prevailing sexual ideology affects the sexual life of most people and a quite different thing to bring about a significant disappearance of that ideology.
For reasons of this kind, then, Sydney libertarians are wary of talking about reforming society or about future freedom. Instead they use such phrases as “anarchism without ends,” “pessimistic anarchism,” “permanent protest.” “Anarchism without ends” indicates that there are anarchist-like activities such as criticizing the views of authoritarians, resisting the pressure towards servility and conformity, having unauthoritarian sexual relationships, which can be carried on for their own sake, here and now, without any reference to supposed future ends. Similarly, the label, “pessimistic anarchism,” indicates that you can expect authoritarian forces in any society whatever, that freedom is something you always have to struggle for, and is not something which can be guaranteed in some future society... Then there is the slogan, “permanent protest," which has been borrowed from Max Nomad [Max Nacht (1881-1973)]. who also refers to “permanent revolution” and “perpetual opposition.” (Compare, e. g., his books, Rebels and Renegades and Apostles of Revolution.) The libertarian use of the phrase, “permanent protest,” has some differences from Nomad’s use, for he has more in mind mass revolutionary movements and argues that the underdog is born to be betrayed by all of his would be emancipators, but that the only thing for the underdog to do is to go on protesting. (Compare Albert Camus in The Rebel: “The historic mission of the proletariat is to be betrayed;” and his distinction between (constant) rebellion which he supports and (final) revolution which he opposes because it merely introduces a new form of tyranny.) But while Nomad refers particularly to protest against the social structure as a whole (the overall distribution of power and privilege), libertarians in speaking of ‘ ‘permanent protest” wish rather to stress the carrying on of particular libertarian activities within existing society...
What are examples of these activities? .. .There are various false theories, metaphysical views, overt and concealed moral and political assumptions that have wide influence in society; the role ofthe critic is to expose these as illusions or ideologies, and this is a permanent job which has to be carried on from generation to generation. Politicians, priests and policemen don’t change just because their justifications of themselves are shown to be illogical or absurd. Similarly, other libertarian activities are carried on here and now and not with an eye to some future state of affairs when they will cease to exist. The utopian picture of a future free society would not even be intelligible to us if we were not already acquainted with examples of unauthoritarian activities in our present society. Contrary to the utopian, the libertarian looks not to some future society in which authoritarianism will have been got rid of and freedom supposedly brought into existence for the first time. Instead, he takes it to be a matter of keeping alive what already exists, of keeping up protest, keeping on struggling to emancipate himself from myths and illusions, and of keeping going his own positive activities. You don’t have to reform or overthrow the State before you can carry on libertarian activities. You don’t have to wait hopefully for the destruction of religion; you can, here and now, with your children and your friends, resistthe pressure fTom Christian forces. You don’t have to tryto make the world safe for sexual freedom of the Reichian kind, but you can here and now fight against guilts and ideology and, at least to some extent, live a straightforward, uncompulsive sexual life. In other words, free or unauthoritarian activities are not future rewards, but are activities carried on by anarchist or libertarian-minded groups, here and now, in spite of authoritarian forces.
World History
