Pure Anarchism: an Assessment

Abstract

For supporters of capitalism, there is a ready-made conclusion waiting to be drawn from the case-study of pure anarchism. Essentially, the argument is that pure anarchism is a particular manifestation of the strains inevitably induced by the process of economic development. They will argue that during the interwar years Japan was engaged in the further expansion of industry, to the detriment of agriculture; that this imposed burdens on the working population generally and on those in the agricultural sector in particular; and that pure anarchism was an expression of the unrealistic complaints and Utopian yearnings uttered by hard-pressed farmers and first-generation workers as they witnessed the incorporation of their traditional communities into the market economy, with all its attendant, unfamiliar disciplines. As E.P. Thompson might have said, it is a verdict on the pure anarchists which reeks of ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’.¹ It assumes that the very idea of economic development as the pure anarchists envisaged it (without state power, without production for profit and without the wages system) was a Utopian fantasy.