Wall Street Journal Gets Anarchism Wrong, Again

It might look like just another violent sci-fi film from the ads, but "V for Vendetta," opening in theaters across the country today, is the first superhero movie that's explicitly anarchist. Larry and Andy Wachowski, the producers, also brought us "The Matrix" -- which ended, as you'll recall, with Neo's memorable anarchic warning to humanity's captors that he was going to "show them...a world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries" and spark a revolution. The Wachowskis are now apparently trying something even more radical in adapting this comic-book story. Wall Street Journal

'A' Is for Anarchy
By TODD SEAVEY
March 17, 2006; Page W17

It might look like just another violent sci-fi film from the ads, but "V for Vendetta," opening in theaters across the country today, is the first superhero movie that's explicitly anarchist. Larry and Andy Wachowski, the producers, also brought us "The Matrix" -- which ended, as you'll recall, with Neo's memorable anarchic warning to humanity's captors that he was going to "show them...a world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries" and spark a revolution. The Wachowskis are now apparently trying something even more radical in adapting this comic-book story.

The "V" film features some delightfully topsy-turvy casting. The man who played the enslaved Winston Smith in "1984" (John Hurt) now plays the fascistic leader of a future London. The man who played authoritarian Agent Smith in "The Matrix" (Hugo Weaving) now portrays a deranged freedom-fighter/terrorist wearing a Guy Fawkes mask (Fawkes being the real-life terrorist who tried to blow up the British Parliament 400 years ago). And the actress who was an elected queen in recent "Star Wars" films (Natalie Portman) now plays an oppressed journalist.
[V]
The anarchist hero in 'V for Vendetta.'



But the greatest turnabout, if it actually occurs, will be audiences cheering for the hero of the film, who is a terrorist. Where did the ideas behind this movie come from, and why would we have any sympathy for them? London audiences may be particularly wary, recalling not only last year's jihadist bombings there but also, from the history books, anarchist bomb attacks on the London Underground in 1883 and 1896. The attacks were part of a campaign across Europe near the turn of the century, the inspiration for anarchist villains in novels by G.K. Chesteron, Joseph Conrad and others.

America's own collective cultural memory of anarchism generally begins with the killing of eight Chicago police officers by anarchists in the 1886 Haymarket Riot, the assassination of President McKinley by an anarchist in 1901 and the murders committed by immigrant Italian anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti in 1920 (they were indeed guilty, as their own lawyer admitted to a sympathetic Upton Sinclair, who kept the knowledge hidden for years).

Anarchism, the idea that society would be better off without the constraints of government, has a long and often sordid history. What is arguably the first book urging the complete abolition of government, "A Vindication of Natural Society," was written 250 years ago by the man usually credited with founding conservatism, Edmund Burke. The British philosopher and politician, who served in the very Parliament building that Fawkes tried to destroy, argued that the same sort of anti-authoritarian reasoning that was being used in the 18th century to dispel religious belief could be used to undermine earthly political leaders.

Scholars long accepted Burke's assurances later in life -- when he had become a conservative member of the (generally liberal) Whig Party -- that "Vindication" was merely satire. But 20th-century "anarcho-capitalist" economist Murray Rothbard argued that Burke's views had simply evolved over time and that Burke was embarrassed by his youthful ideological excesses. Indeed, anarchism has often been an attractive notion for young people. Paul Avrich, a historian of anarchism who died a few weeks ago in New York, suggested that James Joyce, Bernard Shaw and Eugene O'Neill were all anarchists early on in their intellectual development.

Regardless of whether Burke's book was a satire, it was an inspiration to the man who first developed a full anarchist philosophy, William Godwin. He combined conservative religious sensibilities with Whig-inspired political arguments and communist-anarchist solutions to conclude that God-given goodness and the rational nature of human beings meant that the best outcomes would occur in the absence of force, thereby alleviating the need for both government and property. The utopian oddness of this view, whatever the sophistication of its argument, is a hallmark of anarchist reasoning.

In the 19th century, anarchist radicals who, from our perspective, seem to have diametrically opposed views often thought of themselves as a united front, aligned against the political establishment. Many anarchists believed, then as now, that government and the free market should both wither away and allied themselves with Marxists. But there were also ardently capitalist anarchists, such as Lysander Spooner, who started his own profit-making postal service to compete with the U.S. government's lazy monopoly.

Marxists found more in common with French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who famously declared that "property is theft!" Russian anarchists and communists found figures they could both admire in Michael Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin, who praised "mutual aid" as an alternative to top-down government. (One sees hints of Kropotkin's thought in things like the medical center quickly set up in New Orleans by the anarchist group Common Ground while the government floundered in the wake of Katrina.)

Russia's most famous anarchist, though, was Leo Tolstoy, who said: "There are no crimes so revolting that they would not readily be committed by men who form part of a government." But Tolstoy, in stark contrast to the likes of the Haymarket murderers, appealed in the name of Christianity for an end to violence by soldiers and anarchists alike. (His countryman Dostoevsky was unconvinced and depicted anarchists as both dangerous and self-destructive in "The Devils.")

For most of the 20th century, it must be acknowledged, anarchism functioned as little more than an adjunct to other, more popular, political movements: labor in the case of "anarcho-syndicalists" and left-anarchists such as Emma Goldman; capitalism in the case of anarchist libertarians like Rothbard; and hippie culture in the case of prankster chaos-worshippers like authors Robert Anton Wilson and Hakim Bey.

As anarchism has aged and largely eschewed violence (fantasies like "V for Vendetta" notwithstanding), its members seem to have gone one of two routes, either becoming fringe figures who produce manifestoes and performance art of no great political impact or, ironically, choosing to replace the chaotic violence of old with allegiance to the more predictable, systematic coercion of laws and government. The ideal of the ending of all political control has gradually, perhaps inevitably, been pushed aside by the more familiar one of shaping political control to suit one's own agenda.

In fact, modern so-called anarchists are usually working to increase government power. They form an important faction of the antiglobalization movement, agitating for stricter regulations on international trade. To judge by the sometimes violent protests at World Trade Organization conferences, the latest anarchists are usually grungy kids with strange hair and piercings; it is hard to say for certain, but they have probably spent more time listening to Rage Against the Machine and the Clash than reading Godwin or Proudhon.

Perhaps the greatest evidence that there is little intellectual heft left in the anarchist movement is the occasional protests in Albany, N.Y., where self-proclaimed anarchists turn up to protest budget cuts at state-run schools. It's a satire Burke never could have dreamed of.

Mr. Seavey edits HealthFactsAndFears.com1 (now part of the OpinionJournal Federation of sites).