Anarchy may not be the bad thing most people believe it to be. The word has been hijacked as a synomym for chaos, not its original meaning. A Wikipedia article defines anarchy as a “society being freely constituted without authorities or a governing body. It may also refer to a society or group of people that entirely rejects a set hierarchy. Anarchy was first used in English in 1539, meaning "an absence of government".

It is further noted in the same Wikipedia article:

Although most known societies are characterized by the presence of hierarchy or the state, anthropologists have studied many egalitarian stateless societies, including most nomadic hunter-gatherer societies and horticultural societies ... anarchic in the sense that they explicitly reject the idea of centralized political authority.

The egalitarianism typical of human hunter-gatherers is interesting when viewed in an evolutionary context. One of humanity's two closest primate relatives, the chimpanzee, is anything but egalitarian, forming hierarchies that are dominated by alpha males. So great is the contrast with human hunter-gatherers that it is widely argued by palaeoanthropologists that resistance to being dominated was a key factor driving the development of human consciousness, language, kinship and social organization.

Still, there is this constant drive to dominate found in humans. In the 19th century it is well exemplified by the monopolistic tendencies of “industrialists”. There has also been continual effort to resists such monopolies

Jack Kelly, in his book “The Edge of Anarchy: The Railroad Barons, the Gilded Age, and the Greatest Labor Uprising in America”, writes “The Pullman boycott was the most consequential labor conflict of the nineteenth century, the last credible threat of a nationwide general strike, the last time workers seriously imagined overturning the industrial order and establishing a more equitable society.” Kelly does not say so but it seems, at least in the mind of Eugene Debs, a principle protagonist of his book, that an anarchic system would be best.

In seeking some connection between Mark Twain and the Pullman Strike I have, alas, found none. I’m a bit troubled by this, given his famous essay, “To The Person Sitting in Darkness”. I thought that he may have mentioned it in correspondence with H. H. Rogers, but apparently not. Given the circumstances of his life at the time of the strike it becomes understandable.

From correspondence with Taylor Roberts:

Clemens' financial problems and the Pullman Strike were embroiled within the same financial Panic of 1893 and affected many people and industries. Clemens may not have willfully avoided discussing the Pullman Strike with Rogers--though, if he had, it would have been understandable considering that they had only met in Sep 1893, and that Rogers had been rendering crucial business help to Clemens. However, the strike of May–July 1894 also occurred when Clemens and Rogers had some serious problems of their own: Charles L Webster & Co declared bankruptcy in April, and Rogers' wife died in May. Clemens also returned to Europe at that time, where Susy was very ill. To add further distraction, the Clemenses were in France in June when the President was assassinated, which led to mobs of rioters. In these circumstances, I would not be surprised if Clemens had missed the far-away Pullman Strike.

Predating the Panic of 1893, Twain did speak of the type of conditions that created the Pullman strike and the labor uprising. He addressed the Monday Evening Club of Hartford, Connecticut, on March 22, 1886 with his essay “The New Dynasty”.

Power, when lodged in the hands of man, means oppression-insures oppression: it means oppression always: not always consciously, deliberately, purposely; not always severely, or heavily, or cruelly, or sweepingly; but oppression, anyway, and always, in one shape or another. One may say it cannot even lift its hand in kindness but it hurts somebody by the same act whereby it delivers a benevolence to his neighbor. Power cannot be so righteously placed that it will neglect to exercise its great specialty, Oppression. Give it to the King of Dahomey, and he will try his new repeating rifle on the passers-by in the courtyard; and as they fall, one after another, it hardly occurs to him or to his courtiers that he is committing an impropriety; give it to the high priest of the Christian Church in Russia, the Emperor, and with a wave of his hand he will brush a multitude of young men, nursing mothers, gray headed patriarchs, gentle young girls, like so many unconsidered flies, into the unimaginable hells of his Siberia, and go blandly to his breakfast, unconscious that he has committed a barbarity; give it to Constantine, or Edward IV, or Peter the Great, or Richard III, or a hundred other monarchs that might be mentioned, and they slaughter members of their own family, and need no opiates to help them sleep afterward; give it to Richard II, and he will win the grateful tears of a multitude of slaves by setting them free-to gain a vital point-and then laugh in their faces and tear up their emancipation papers, and promise them a bitterer and crueler slavery than ever they imagined before, the moment his point has been gained; give it to the noblesse of the Middle Ages, and they will claim and seize wandering freedmen as their serfs; and with a totally unconscious irony will put upon them the burden of proving that they are freedmen and not serfs; give it to the Church, and she will burn, flay, slay, torture and massacre, ruthlessly-and neither she nor her friends will doubt that she is doing the best she can for man and God; give it suddenly to the ignorant masses of the French monarchy, maddened by a thousand years of unspeakable tyranny, and they will drench the whole land with blood and make massacre a pastime; give power to whomsoever you please, and it will oppress; even the horse-car company will work its men eighteen hours, in Arctic cold or Equatorial heat, and pay them with starvation: and in expanded or in otherwise modified form, let the horse-car company stand for a thousand other corporations and companies and industries which might be named. Yes, you may follow it straight down, step by step, from the Emperor to the horse-car company, and wherever power resides it is used to oppress.

Now so far as we know or may guess, this has been going on for a million years. Who are the oppressors? The few: the king, the capitalist, and a handful of other overseers and superintendents. Who the oppressed? The many: The nations of the earth; the valuable personages; the workers; they that MAKE the bread that the soft-handed and the idle eat. Why is it right that there is not a fairer division of the spoil all around? BECAUSE LAWS AND CONSTITUTIONS HAVE ORDERED OTHERWISE. Then it follows that if the laws and constitutions should change around and say there SHALL be a more nearly equal division, THAT would have to be recognized as right. That is to confess, then, that in POLITICAL SOCIETIES, IT IS THE PREROGATIVE OF MIGHT TO DETERMINE WHAT IS RIGHT; that it is the prerogative of Might to create Right-and uncreate it, at will. It is to confess that if the banded voters among a laboring kinship of 45,000,000 of persons shall speak out to the other 12,000,000 or 15,000,000 of a nation and command that an existing system of rights and laws be reversed, that existing system has in that moment, in an absolutely clear and clean and legal way, become an obsolete and vanished thing-has utterly ceased to exist, and no creature in all the 15,000,000 is in the least degree privileged to find fault with the act.

This recognition of anarchy as a good way for society to operate appears frequently among writers and other artists but this is rarely, if ever mentioned by their publishers. J. R. R. Tolkien, the man behind one of the most lucrative and sought after franchises today was truly an anarchist at heart. He wrote a letter to his son, Christopher, in 1943:

“My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning the abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs) — or to ‘unconstitutional’ Monarchy. I would arrest anybody who uses the word State (in any sense other than the inanimate real of England and its inhabitants, a thing that has neither power, rights nor mind); and after a chance of recantation, execute them if they remained obstinate! If we could go back to personal names, it would do a lot of good.

Government is an abstract noun meaning the art and process of governing and it should be an offence to write it with a capital G or so to refer to people … The most improper job of many, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity…

There is only one bright spot and that is the growing habit of disgruntled men of dynamiting factories and power-stations; I hope that, encouraged now as ‘patriotism’, may remain a habit! But it won’t do any good, if it is not universal.”

It seems to me that selfish motives almost always trump higher ideals. People like Sam Clemens aka Mark Twain write of these higher values but remain trapped by their personal values, leading to allocation of governance to others and soon an unbalanced society. I’m frequently reminded of the fate of Venice, Italy. Twain visited Venice in 1867 as part of his Innocence Abroad travels:

This Venice, which was a haughty, invincible, magnificent Republic for nearly fourteen hundred years; whose armies compelled the world’s applause whenever and wherever they battled; whose navies well nigh held dominion of the seas, and whose merchant fleets whitened the remotest oceans with their sails and loaded these piers with the products of every clime, is fallen a prey to poverty, neglect and melancholy decay. Six hundred years ago, Venice was the Autocrat of Commerce; her mart was the great commercial centre, the distributing-house from whence the enormous trade of the Orient was spread abroad over the Western world. To-day her piers are deserted, her warehouses are empty, her merchant fleets are vanished, her armies and her navies are but memories. Her glory is departed, and with her crumbling grandeur of wharves and palaces about her she sits among her stagnant lagoons, forlorn and beggared, forgotten of the world. She that in her palmy days commanded the commerce of a hemisphere and made the weal or woe of nations with a beck of her puissant finger, is become the humblest among the peoples of the earth,--a peddler of glass beads for women, and trifling toys and trinkets for school-girls and children.

So much for hubris….