Anarchaos

IV

On Earth, in the nineteenth century O.T., an obscure Russian nihilist named Mikhail Bakunin wrote in French a book called Dieu et l‘Etat, in which he said such things as:

Bakunin slept several centuries in well-earned oblivion, until resurrected by the founders of Anarchaos, who used his writings as the core of their social philosophy. If such a place as Anarchaos could be said to have a patron saint, Bakunin is it.

This re-emergence of the ancient nay-sayer was the direct, though unexpected, result of Union Commission law, in particular that law relating to the political structure of colonies. According to UC regulations, colonies receiving UC assistance — without which colonization is impossible — have total freedom for self-determination of their own style of government, within the limitations of precedence. That is, colonies are not permitted to invent whole new systems of government out of whole cloth, but are limited to those governments which have existed in the past, of any era, either in fact or in an extensive body of philosophical and socio-political literature. The framers of this regulation hoped thereby to save future colonies from half-digested or harebrained new political theories like those which, in the first wave of stellar colonization, caused such pain and bloodshed. Governmental theories which had never been tested in fact but which did boast a broad body of literature were considered safe because it is a basic tenet of Union Commission faith that sooner or later discussion inevitably leads to reason.

The Commission had apparently never heard of anarchism. But the founders of Anarchaos had, and Bakunin was their chief prophet, assisted by such other anarchist, nihilist or syndicalist writers as William Godwin, Pierre Joseph Proudhon, Benjamin Tucker, Josiah Warren, Max Stirner, Prince Pyotr Kropotkin, Georges Sorel and Sergius Nachaev. The literature of anarchism is extensive and, in its way, distinguished, frequently — as in Turgenev and Tolstoy — calling upon the noblest elements of human nature as the bedrock of society, a call which is itself noble but not entirely realistic.

The UC disapproved, but was powerless to prevent the colony from going its own way. The Union Commission actually has few real teeth, and even those are kept carefully blunted by the member planets, each jealous of its own sovereignty. The Commission is the final — and only — authority in space, and has limited authority and responsibility in colonies. This latter authority the Commission itself has tried to expand from time to time but always without success. The greatest fear of every planetary government, it seems, is that some day the UC will succeed in usurping domestic planetary powers.

Which means there is nothing the UC can do about Anarchaos. The planet remains permanently on colony status, using UC money, with UC embassies in each city, with UC men staffing the spaceport. Only when a colony is ready for self-government does the UC depart, and Anarchaos, having no government and having no desire to form a government, will naturally never be ready.

The UC probably would do something about Anarchaos, even though it would be stretching legality, if there were no other factors to consider, but there is another factor; the businessmen, the corporations, the off-worlders who have money and prestige and political power and who profit hugely from Anarchaos as it now stands.

An adjunct of anarchist theory is syndicalism. Instead of governments, men are to form voluntarily into syndicates which will run the factories and the farms, the schools and the transport systems, and goods and services will move by a barter system between the syndicates. The theory is naive now and must have always been naive, though a number of polysyllabic thinkers gave it weighty discussion in weighty tomes. Whatever its flaws, it was a part of the founding structure of Anarchaos, and for the first few years it apparently worked with some degree of success.

The first generation on Anarchaos, in fact, didn’t do too badly at all, but of course they had been trained on other worlds and understood discipline and group effort, those two hallmarks of government. But the second generation, growing up with no influence but anarchism, followed their natural bent, atomized the society into its individual fragments, and the theoretical structure of Anarchaos collapsed in red dust.

At that point the off-worlders moved in. The syndicates founded by the first colonists were quietly and unofficially taken over by foreign corporations and soon the economic — if not the political — structure of Anarchaos was in the hands of profit-seekers who directed operations from grand offices light years away. Behind the facade of the syndicate towers in Ni, in Moro-Geth, in Ulik and the other cities, sat the corporations, fat and getting fatter.

For Anarchaos is a rich world, a storehouse of valuable minerals and a significant exporter of furs. Trapping and mining are the two primary occupations, the former done by rugged individualists out in the wilds, the latter done by slaves captured by roaming press gangs and sold to the mining syndicates.

Human occupancy of Anarchaos was in its eighty-seventh year when I arrived, making it the longest-running planet-wide madhouse in the history of the human race.