ANARCHOSOPHY AND ANARCHISM
The following text was originally a post I made to the email group Anthropos-Views:
As an experinemt of sorts, I would like to approach the delicate subject of anarchosophy and anarchism from a slightly different angle. What has happened in this and related threads is that I have found myself in the position of arguing for anarchism to anthroposophists and how it relates to Steiner and PoF. This is only one side of the picture.
The point is that I started all this from the opposite direction. Since 1991 I had been working as a writer and co-editor for the Norwegian Anarchist magazine Gateavisa (in Norwegian only - sorry):
I found myself surrounded by friends and colleagues who shared a warm appreciation for anarchism. With the sole exception of myself, everybody harbored a marked antipathy against Christianity. I accepted this, except when I found myself in the position of discouraging the publishing of graphic and textual material that I experienced as blasphemy against the Mystery of Golgotha.
But I always thrive best in opposition, and it was under these circumstances that I wrote "Christos Anarchos." (Norwegian). In this long article I succeeded in establishing that the Christ-idea was not incompatible with anarchism and that it was perfectly possible to be a Christian anarchist. Apart from sketches of Tolstoi, Blake and others, and a few borrowings from Peter Marshall's "Demanding the Impossible," most of the deeper material was paraphrazed anthroposophy.
My next step was to write the heavier "Anthropos Anarchos.". My main argument was that Steiner might be as relevant to anarchist literature as Bakunin and Kropotkin. The core of the message was very similar to my post about the tenth chapter of PoF, except that it was approached from the opposite angle: Introducing anthroposophy to anarchists.
The students at the Waldorf teacher academy in Oslo pasted a copy of "Anthropos Anarchos" on the wall after politely asking my permission. Strangely enough, this article hit home among anthroposophists much better than among anarchists, who hardly understood it. In fact, it made me very popular among the anthropops in Norway.
In the same vein, I once made a post to an anarchist newsgroup to explain why I am in disagreement with the liberalists. The crucial point in this message is paraphrazed from Steiner. (I do have all the references on my shelf somewhere this time, in case any of it should be requested.)
The copy I found was sent back to me by an editor who wanted to print it. The following paste starts with his mail.
hi there,
i write an ezine called the Anarchist Tribune, im writing this to you because i saw an article in the anarchy news group that i found to be very interesting and wondered if i could use it in my ezine if i gave you full credit.
thanks in advance
antigov
you wrote:
Libertarians apparently believe that money itself, i.e. the currency or legal tender provided and controlled by the state, will bring forth a perfectly free society like a magician pulling a rabbit from his hat if only taxes and fees be reduced do an absolute minimum.
When I argue that the libertarians are wrong, fatally wrong, it's because I find their level of reasoning terribly superficial - even more superficial than Karl Marx. Marx made an accurate analysis of social conditions that arose from the industrial revolution, but he made a big mistake by projecting those social conditions far into antiquity, claiming that human society has always been economically oriented and involved in a perennial "class struggle" based upon economic inequality and injustice.
Libertarians are making a similar mistake, which means we're headed for trouble. Big trouble. Because just like Marxism in practice has proven disastrous for the world, the libertarian laissez-faire system of values is holding sway today and is about to engulf the entire global society with little or no resistence. And that's trouble - especially, perhaps, for anarchists.
Why? Simply because what is widely ignored today is that the economically oriented structure of society, which has produced such phenomena as Marxism and laissez-faire Libertarianism, did not emerge before the Reformation and the Rennaissance. In antiquity, society was ruled by the pharaos, the high priests, the initiates of the Mysteries, their astrologers etc. Later on, in the Middle Ages, the monarchs and the clergy took over the lead. And then, who took over after the monarchs and the clergy? The answer is: The economists. During the last 300-400 years, the economists gradually transformed society in such a way that every political system, regardless of ideology or color, was controlled by economically oriented individuals. The invention of paper money was of tremendous importance, and this evolution was strenghened considerably in the 19th century when finance and banking emerged in such a way that the economic factor invaded (or infected) practically every imaginable human relationship. More and more, all jurisprudence and all legislation became products of economically oriented social thinkers, and such is reality today.
This is what we are up against: The banks, the stock exchange, the market manipulators. Anarchists who still gripe about the churches and the monarchs are living in the 13th century.
We have now vaguely touched the tip of an iceberg. When I take my argument one step further, it would be polite of me to warn my fellow anarchists that I'm not a regular anarchist but an anarchosophist, i.e. an anthroposophically oriented Christian anarchist. Because the way I see it, the power at work in the modern economically controlled global power structure has its genesis, or at least its roots, in the civilization of the Romans, and this makes certain passages in The New Testament extraordinarily interesting.
Let's start with the well-known episode where the adversaries of Jesus Christ ask him whether or not one should pay taxes. His answer is somewhat enigmatic. Because the coin bears the portrait of Caesar, it belongs to Caesar, according to Jesus. In other words, Christ admits Caesar the right to take any share of people's money he pleases because it's his to begin with.
I won't go further into this here except to mention that "the kingdom not of this world" which Christ represents, is the opposite of the world represented by money. It is obvious that Christ stands forth as a purely spiritual liberator, not as a political or an economic one. (Thus the political and economic liberation becomes the subsidiary and subsequent task of man after liberating himself from within.)
The other passage of great interest is the first temptation of Christ. He is in the desert, having fasted for 40 days. Let's imagine that Christ was a deity, a god - just as a thought experiment here. Let,s also imagine that he did not come into the flesh of Jesus before the baptism by John in the Jordan River. So he runs into the desert, goes without food for over a month, and discovers that a physical human being must eat in order to exist.
Now the temptation: the being which The New Testament calls "the Prince of This World" approaches the hungry Christ with the following proposition: "Because you are the Son of God, why don't you command these stones to become bread?"
I hope we don't get any funny fundies here who insist that Jesus was a circus magician. With stones we make hard currency, coins, and with money we buy food. The temptation is this simple: "Go buy some food."
Christ's response to this is even more intriguing: This is the one temptation he just cannot refute entirely. Everybody must eat to exist, and food is purchased for money. So Christ answers: "Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word from the mouth of God."
Thus the real temptation involved here is to lead Christ and mankind to the illusion that physical nutrition is the only thing necessary for our existence - which is the basic assumption behind materialism and blind hedonism. But as we van see, Christ must admit the World Prince - or Satan if you like - dominance over the economy. It is crystal clear in his answer.
I will only add one more consideration here in order to show that the challenge we're up against today is not only formidable but extremely complicated. Orthodox Christians view Satan, or the World Prince, as some evil creature that one should flee from. But for an anthroposophist, this is the very being who has given man his intellect, and without whom we would have no science and no technology. It is our task to capture the intellect from Ahriman (which he is characteristically called) without falling into his illusory trap.
This was, perhaps, too much to come dragging along with for the sole purpose of explaining why I disagree with the libertarians, but it's very difficult to simplify the complicated.
Tarjei Straume
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