Submitted by the author.

The dictionary definition of anarchism is useless for understanding a current in the wider radical movement. Rejection of any kind of authority or control for the common good is an extreme form of individualism contrary to the consensus of peoples and to the mind of the Church. Anarchism, something else altogether, developed to resist the rise of the nation state in the seventeenth century, a stream of thought and action aimed at a more just and democratic integration of society. Anarchists took an active role in popular revolutionary struggles in imperial Russia, Italy, Germany, France, Spain and the English speaking countries in the 19th and early 20th centuries. They are not quite dead yet.

No anarchist of sound mind holds either that government does not exist or ought not exist, etymology notwithstanding. Anarchists want more government, if that means the Department of Labor defending the right to organize, the Department of Agriculture helping to initiate producer cooperatives, sponsoring farm support and surplus food distribution programs, and much less government if it means the State Department, and the so-called Defense and Justice departments; more anti-trust legislation and enforcement, more environmental protection, more OSHA; immediate access to federal courts for every labor organizer punished for organizing. But they will hold even the benign organs of government to a most strict accounting, since "power tends to corrupt," and view the state in practice more as a guarantor of privilege than as an organ of its diffusion.

Anarchist thinkers distinguish between society, government and the state. The pertinence of the anarchist tradition today reverts to the criticism of the sovereign national state. Sovereignty entails the ability of a nation state to protect its interests or to project its might with ultimate force. But the whole of humankind will live as long as it lives under the threat of weapons of mass destruction. Weapons of mass destruction can not be allowed to remain in the hands of nation states without a high probability that they will eventually be used. That is morally inadmissible, absolutely. Another principle of governing a world society of peoples has to come into play under the overall principles of the unity of the human family, the universal destination of goods, the integrity of cultures and the sovereignty of God. The sovereign nation state is an idea whose time has passed.

Instead of a political program or ideology, anarchists share a set of attitudes and preferences: the fewer rules, regulations and laws, the better. "All the law necessary, and no more than is necessary," and then they argue over "necessary." They favor spontaneity over predictability, initiative and invention over tried-and-true patterns, and personal responsibility over delegation. Authority is to be won by good work, not by heredity, appointment or even majority vote, and exercised only as long as it is recognized by equals. Anarchists tend to be free-wheeling and egalitarian. They look to horizontal organization before vertical structure, though they do not deny the need for that too. Anarchists temper individualism with a mind toward community and the common good. Catholic anarchists gratefully accept the Magisterium of the Church. Many vote and even hold public office. But the preferred modus operandi is direct action and the formation of small, intimate communities.

Peter Maurin preferred to use the term "personalist." That term has a well developed articulation behind it, from Emmanuel Mounier and Dom Virgil Michel to Pope John Paul II. Dorothy Day liked the shock value of the term "anarchist." It also placed her in the very American tradition of the Industrial Workers of the World, the only union she ever joined. And it had a romantic appeal.

In economics, anarchists call for more capital to more people. The distributists G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, Eric Gill and Fr. Vincent McNabb strongly influenced the Catholic Worker in its formative years. They held that law and government structures should promote crafts, producer and consumer cooperatives, small worker-owned industry and farms and worker participation in management.

Government can advance anarchist principles, first among them the right of peoples to organize for the redress of grievances and for the advancement of their own interests. Since the rich and powerful are already well organized, law and government should make a "preferential option" to extend the same rights to the poor and the marginalized in order to advance justice, promote the general welfare and civil harmony. In the modern state they seldom do. Anarchists are likely to perceive this anomaly, and the deception the powerful employ to justify wars that maintain it.

Confusion over the term "anarchist" has made its use problematic within the Catholic Worker movement. On the one hand, as Robert Ludlow pointed out in the June 1955 CW, the name has a history and is "owned" by others than ourselves. Another problem is the easy identification even Catholic Workers make of "anarchism" with "do your own thing," with lack of discipline and slovenliness.

On the other hand, there is a natural tendency even in a radical movement to grow lazy with the years, to soften, to lose its edge and to accommodate to the "wisdom" of the age. In order not to become conformed to this age, not to be coopted by an effete socialism or, even worse, by decadent bourgeois liberalism, to continue ever to be transformed in the renewal of our understanding, to discern what is truly good and pleasing and perfect, the will of God, and to cultivate the charisms of our founders as well, Catholic Workers should continue to identify as anarchists, and struggle always to understand just what that means.