The other day I had an online interaction in one of the groups I follow: Someone trollishly interjected the opinion “Anarchists should be behind bars. How is that even debatable?” into a completely unrelated discussion of last Saturday’s incident at the Yellow Vests demonstration in Hamilton. The incident in question was a Yellow-Vest “protester” harassing, attacking and assaulting an LGBTQ+ family; including threats of abducting the family’s kids and, it has come to light, spitting on a three-year-old child. (No arrests have been made, by the way, and City Hall’s response was to advise the family not to attend counter-protests at City Hall anymore.)
But it’s the anarchists who should be unilaterally locked up, right.
So I — politely enough — challenged the guy advocating for blanket arrest of an entire ideology, and as the discussion progressed he got more and more trollish, even claiming that he “used to be an anarchist” but that “anarchists that act out their beliefs should be punished” and so forth. It was your basic “I’m a troll and it’s fun to make extreme statements to see how people react” nonsense that I try not to encourage. My primary takeaway from the interaction wasn’t that this guy could be convinced — feeding trolls for the sake of feeding trolls isn’t my bag — it was that a lot of people in the group lacked an understanding of what Anarchism, as a political philosophy, is and isn’t.
What Anarchism isn’t is where we’re going to start. It’s not “chaos”, it’s not “mayhem” and it’s not “mindless destruction.” It’s certainly not nihilism. In the same way that monarchy is a word derived from the ancient Greek monarkhos, the “rule of one”, anarchy is derived from the ancient greek “anarkhos“, meaning the “rule of none”, better translated as “without rulers.” As a political philosophy, anarchism is a rejection of arbitrary authority but it is not the pursuit of disorder.
Anarchism is a political ideology that rejects top-down hierarchical power structures as coercive and seeks to replace them with horizontally-organized cooperative structures of voluntary participation, grassroots community and direct democracy. Anarchism places extreme emphasis on individual rights and responsibilities within the community and requires that all individuals are guaranteed access to communal resources such as food, shelter, education and so forth. Anarchism also rejects the notion of private property (although not necessarily personal property) as conducive to artificial scarcity and economic inequality; therefore Anarchism inevitably exists as a philosophy in opposition to Capitalism, and often to the State as well.
And that’s why the word “anarchy” has become synonymous with chaos and disorder: Because there’s an entire system of coercive, hierarchical power in place that has a vested interest in making sure the population thinks any change in that hierarchy will cause the whole thing to come tumbling down in riot, chaos and despair. Attack or undermine the structure of the system — whether that system is our current post-democratic unfettered capitalism, or 19th century colonial imperialism, or late-medieval monarchism, or whatever the current system may be — and the whole thing will come crashing down and the survivors will fight each other for scraps in the wreckage.
Yeah, that’s not what will happen. It is a false assumption that without hierarchy — whether government, church or corporation — society cannot function beyond the “every man for himself, survival of the fittest” mode. This assumption is what is used to justify governance — domination, in reality, and ultimately enforced by the State monopoly on violence — as though people cannot be trusted to cooperate with each other unless under threat of force. A lot of rich bastards throughout history have pushed a the narrative that you need them to keep order out of greedy self-interest… and the vast majority of their victims have knuckled under, to the degree that many people don’t even realize there might be alternatives to hierarchical polities.
I am an anarchist… although it’s probably more precise to describe myself as an anarcho-syndicalist. Anarcho-syndicalism (sometimes called non-authoritarian communism) differs from other manifestations of socialist philosophy primarily by rejecting central coordination and control; Anarchists believing that authority structures of any kind quickly prioritize the maintenance and expansion of said authority to the detriment of individual liberty. In a polity established on syndicalist lines any centralization of control would ideally kept to an absolute practical minimum and, where unavoidable, viewed with caution and distrust lest “more central” gradually morph into “more important.”
What syndicalism understands is that true equity in organizing society comes from solidarity with our fellows; only by standing together and cooperating from the bottom up can we build a society that truly values and empowers all of its members.
As a quick aside, I try and personally avoid the whole hyphenation thing as regards defining Anarchism. I prefer my anarchy without adjectives. I also refuse to call myself a libertarian, although in the classic, European sense of the term (one who emphasizes personal freedom of choice, voluntary association and individual judgment) I suppose I am. Unfortunately in North America the term “libertarian” has been co-opted by neoliberal laissez-faire capitalists who favour the unrestricted corporate strip-mining of both the natural world and civil rights. (The Tea Party movement, in the US, was originally described as “libertarian”, and look where that ended up.)
I’m not going to get into a lot of elaborate political theory, beyond what I’ve already written. If you’re interested in, oh, the Marxian theory of the alienation of capital — and it’s definitely got it’s place in Anarchist thought — there’s lots of places you can find that sort of thing. (One of my complaints about a lot of Anarchist writing is that it can get very dense with specialist jargon very quickly and that can be a bit off-putting for the casual reader.)
My personal understanding of Anarchism as a political philosophy has developed from two rather unlikely sources: My participation in the Industrial Workers of the World, a syndicalist labour union, and Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel The Dispossessed.
Yeah, I’m a Wobbly and a sci-fi reader. That’s never happened before.
The anarchist society of Annares described in Le Guin’s novel was heavily based on (and ultimately a criticism of) Peter Kropotkin’s work Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, although Le Guin’s novel is a hell of a lot easier to wade through than Kropotkin’s political theory. (I’m not dissing Kropotkin, but it’s a thick, dry book compared to Le Guin’s rich and introspective prose.) The fundamental principal of “Odonian” society is mutual aid and cooperation: the acknowledgement that humans are a social creature and that our ability to cooperate and coordinate is what allowed us to prosper as a species on the evolutionary timescale. Reciprocal altruism, helping others now so that they might have the chance help you in the future, is the cornerstone of solidarity theory and a major theme in the novel. (Another major theme is the tendency of selfish individuals to take advantage of others’ altruism for their own gain: The Dispossessed also serves as a warning against human greed and the tendency of authority to accumulate more authority to itself; thus the book’s subtitle An Ambiguous Utopia.)
There really has only ever been one large-scale anarcho-syndicalist polity established — the short-lived anarchist revolution in Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War. Sadly, undermined by Stalinists from within and overwhelmed by the fascist-backed Francoists from without, it lasted less than three years before its destruction. Current manifestations of anarchism are somewhat less structured and frankly tend to exist on the margins of capitalist society; anarchist collectives, IWW chapters, students and hippies and transgendered people and punks and other “radicals” easily dismissed by the establishment… if not outright vilified, as anti-fascists are currently experiencing. A cross section of current anarchist society can be observed (and interacted with) at any Anarchist Bookfair you care to visit.
As another aside, the phenomenon of the Anarchist Bookfair has always delighted me. I’m a writer, which also means I’m a reader, which in turn means that my home decor largely consists of banks of bookshelves. To be an Anarchist — or any kind of socialist, really — seems to require a lot of books. (To be a fascist, on the other hand, only requires two books: Mein Kampf and the Bible… and most fascist leaders doubtless prefer that you didn’t actually read the Bible.) Anarchist and socialists tend to be readers, in my rather broad experience, because Anarchists tend to be educated and intelligent people. Anarchist bookfairs — and the even rarer permanent Anarchist bookstore — have always been a community touchstone, and it’s almost unheard-of for Anarchist spaces to be without at least a small — or not-so-small — lending library.
In the current public discourse, Anarchism is closely associated with the punk aesthetic which began in the 1980s (a legacy of anti-austerity resistance during the Thatcher years) but anarchism crosses a lot of subcultural divides: I’ve run into anarchists in hippie communes and “tiny home” eco-communities, in punk squats and campus cafes, in bookstores and at historical reenactment events and on one notable occasion in a nursing home (resident, not staff.) Also, if we’re talking aesthetics, most anarchists that I know tend towards worn jeans, sturdy boots, flannel shirts and bandanas; regardless of gender, practical anarchism tends to draw practical people who wear practical clothes. (Anarchist decorative display largely seems to involve pins and buttons with political causes or slogans on them as subtle advertisement and/or boast.)
I once had a friend point out that if you didn’t need a cop to get along with the neighbours and would help out someone in need, you were an anarchist whether you knew it or not. I’m not sure it’s quite so simple as that, but that impulse — that very human impulse — to help others in tough times, whether or not they can help you, is the essence of anarchist organizing. Altruism and solidarity are our watchwords… and ones which are becoming more and more important in the increasingly post-democratic neoliberal/capitalist dystopia where we find ourselves.
Because if there’s one thing that living in the Hamilton/Niagara area has proven in this wretched year 2019, it’s that the cops and the politicians have little interest in helping people. They don’t protect us, we protect us, as the slogan goes. The police, municipal governance — hell, all governance — exists to protect the status quo… even as the world hurtles towards a climate catastrophe that the capitalist system simply isn’t equipped to deal with. There is no structure within the capitalist system to realign our global priorities and shift the global resources towards them in the way that’s going to be necessary to face a societal challenge on par with fighting a world war. Experts agree that some form of socialism is going to be necessary to intervene in the growing crisis; industries will need to be re-worked, others will need to be abandoned. In the space of a generation or two, the way we as humans live is going to be changed dramatically. The million dollar question is… how?
I don’t know the answer to that one. I, personally, would love to see an ecologically and economically sustainable world where gross inequalities of income and resource allocation are a thing of the past; where individual rights are respected, but where responsibility to the community is emphasized; and where authoritarianism, whether on the Left or Right, is something in the history books, not the brutal and rising threat which it is today. I want a world where I know I’m going to be okay, and one where I know my kids will be someday be okay, too. And that’s really not too much to ask for, is it?
Is Anarchism the way to get there? Perhaps. I’d argue that it’s one way to do so, at least. I certainly think that the potential prize makes the effort worthwhile. But do I see a sudden, sweeping revolution taking us there? No. Despite a lot of the writings of the great socialist thinkers, I don’t believe vanguardism is the way to go: If there’s one thing the Soviet experiment very quickly proved, it’s that today’s vanguard is tomorrow’s crop of authoritarians. Any change, I suspect, will start gradually, building by almost-imperceptible degrees until they suddenly snowball.
But if there’s going to be a change to non-authoritarian leftist thought, to a just and equitable society, it’s going to have to be done in the anarcho-syndicalist fashion: from the ground up. That seems like a tall order, and it is, but I try and think of small steps. We must take anarchist theory and principles and apply them as praxis to realize the potential for positive change… but a lot of that is surprisingly small stuff: community organizing, labour organizing, mutual aid societies, anti-fascist resistance, health care, building communities and resisting the efforts of the powers-that-be to tear those communities apart.
Because in the end and despite what the trolls might claim, Anarchism is not an inherently violent system, unlike Capitalism which is dependent on the threat (implied or overt) of violence in order to sustain itself. It’s organic… and like all organic systems it might be messy at times, but in its place, it works.
