1 ANARCHISM AND HUMAN RIGHTS By Bob Black INTRODUCTION Anarchism is the only consistent philosophy of freedom. 1 I don’t say that it’s the only one. There’s liberalism, for instance. There’s Buddhism. But liberalism is, as a philosophy of social freedom, a proven failure. So are socialism and communism in their statist versions. Buddhism is not a political philosophy. Probably all modern political ideologies claim to value freedom. 2 In our time, the cause of freedom is widely identified with the cause of democracy. And the ideology of democracy is by now largely blended into the ideology of human rights. Democracy itself is often considered a human right. This would have baffled the ancient Athenians, who practiced direct democracy but who had no concept of rights. 3 The combination still makes no sense. Majority rule and minority rights cannot coexist except at each other’s expense. 4 Democracy isn’t freedom. Indeed, whenever there is rule, or rights – whenever there is a state, any kind of state -- there’s no social freedom. Democracy is a form of state. When the state disappears, so will democracy. 5 Nonetheless, democracy and human rights are nowadays talked up by the same people. The conventional wisdom holds that almost everybody believes in both of them, especially 1 “The Rejection of Politics,” Anarchism and Anarchists: Essays by George Woodcock (Kingston, Ontario, Canada: Quarry Press, 1992), 79. 2 “Liberalism, Conservatism and Socialism in all their variants, and even Fascism and religious fundamentalism, value ‘freedom.’” Uri Gordon, Anarchy Alive! Anti-Authoritarian Politics from Practice to Theory (London & Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2008), 20. 3 H.L.A. Hart, “Legal Rights,” Essays on Bentham: Studies in Jurisprudence and Political Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 163; idem, “Are There Any Human Rights?” Philosophical Rev. 64(2) (April 1955), 176-77 & n. 4. 4 Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), 194 (discussed further below); Michael Ignatieff, “Human Rights as Politics,” in Michael Ignatieff et al., Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry, ed. Amy Gutman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 20, 24. 5 V.I. Lenin, State and Revolution (New York: International Publishers, 1943), 17. Syndicalism is anti-statist and anti-democratic. Earl C. Ford & William Z. Foster, Syndicalism (Chicago, IL: Charles H. Kerr and Company, 1990), 7-8.