Imagine you are a person fighting in an anarchist revolt. You have captured a sizeable chunk of land but the front line has grown too large and you canāt progress further. The state that you have been fighting approaches you with an offer: They recognise you as a sovereign (however that would look like) entity but you have to give away most of the land youāve captured. They will leave you with the primary city and enough surrounding land to feed everyone.
What would be your position? Would you be willing to make a deal with the state?
They all are like that. There are no exceptions. I truly hope that the pretentious fakery of these (so-called) āliberal democraciesā has not lulled you into seeing these entities as something which they are definitely not - place the ruling elites of the most āliberalā state in jeapordy, and it wonāt take long for them to reveal what they truly are and always have been.
They donāt. Letās give one of these āliberal democraciesā the benefit of the doubt (rather unrealistic of us, so only for the sake of the argument) Letās say youāre dealing with a regime that has a Bernie Sanders at itās head - they offer the deal in good faith, you take it. In four yearās time, you are now dealing with a regime headed by a Ronald Reagen - voted in literally because of the āweaknessā of the Bernie regime when it comes to dealing with the threat posed by these āanarchist terroristsā - and now suddenly you have well-funded armies of right-wing paramilitaries perpetrating genocide on your enclave while property developers are lining up to sell itās land to the highest bidder. And thatās just the start.
Have you never wondered why liberalism is so much more effective at maintaining imperialism than fascism is? Thatās why - the fascist is our weakest enemy.
That doesnāt matter - an anarchist society (or something close enough) doesnāt require anarchists. It only requires a society that has normalised said society being run from the bottom up - whether the people in such a society call themselves āanarchistsā or not is irrelevant.
That, too, is immaterial because the capitalist status quo will see and treat your revolt no differently. If they can isolate you, they can destroy you. If they can dictate what you can do economically, they can destroy you. If they can control you industrially, they can destroy you. If they can hamper you socially and politically, they can destroy you.
I truly wish anarchists would read about warfare with the same enthusiasm they read political theory - for an anarchist, it comes with the territoryā¦ figuratively as well as literally.
For that to happen there needs to either be majority in the state that think that way or a powerful enough propaganda machine to sway the general public. Not all states have that. If you are dealing with a country that has a well-educated population tactics like that simply wonāt work. This also outlines why itās vital for every anarchist movement to involve themselves with the general population as much as possible. So large portions of the population will think āoh those are the people that organise that game-night/open kitchen/workshop thingā. At this point it becomes a lot more difficult to paint them as violent terrorists because people know them and have had direct interactions with them. It also becomes a lot more difficult to walk back your deal without spreading discontent.
Everyone in that society is by my definition anarchist. When you give up your dependency on authority you become an anarchist. Iām not using the term as they would I am using it as I would. So to specify: Do you think that every single person would be willing to give up their dependence to authority? Because if they wonāt they will form a state, when they do you need to coexist with that state.
The one follows the otherā¦ and a gigantic propaganda machine is no hypothetical. It already exists. And as you can see happening right now in Gaza, they donāt actually even need that propaganda machine working very well to prosecute a war of extermination against you.
I hope you donāt mind me saying thisā¦ but thatās extremely naive. Being āinvolvedā with the general populace didnāt help the anarchists that was so deeply rooted in immigrant populations of the US during WW1. It didnāt help the Black Panthers who were deeply rooted in US urban communities during the Civil Rights movement. The Ukrainians barely remember the Makhnovists - the memory of the Torch Brigade and the SECC has been completely wiped from South Africanās minds. All of them were deeply āinvolvedā in the general populace.
Thatās no different than saying everyone in the USSR was a Marxist, or that everyone in the US is a liberal.
Consider thisā¦ when the Makhnovists decided to replace the civilian section of the Kontrrazvedska (the Makhnovist counter-intelligence network) with the KAD (Commission for Anti-Makhnovist Activity) because the civilian section of the Kontrrazvedska was found to be too heavy-handed, they had to go look far and wide for people that actually understood anarchist political theory well-enough to make it a properly anarchist organ - the vast majority of the people working and bleeding under the Makhnovist flag actually knew very little about anarchism apart from a few slogans.
If your anarchist society relies on the ideologically pure, your society is screwed - in fact, if you rely on the ideologically pure it will nnever come into existence in the first place.
I donāt understand what this meansā¦ I donāt go to the doctor to tell them how to be a doctor.
Native reservations are political. They are designed to imprison and contain - and that is exactly what the capitalists are offering you in this hypothetical situation of yours.
No, you are not. If you were isolated, they wouldnāt be negotiating with you because theyād be too busy exterminating you and crushing your revolt. Isolation means inevitable destruction.
Those are states. Top-down civilisations that overwrite peoples wishes. They donāt need everyone to follow their framework to enforce it, thatās what the police is for. Anarchy isnāt like that. You cannot force a person to be anarchist. Any anarchist society that exist must by necessity be populated by people that donāt follow the statist framework. Who donāt follow authority. Who are Anarchist.
The example you gave is perfect. Normal people who did not understand anarchism were too heavy handed with their judgement and thus actual anarchists needed to be found to help manage that society. People who havenāt stop their dependence to authority are a problem to an anarchist society, they donāt conform to our framework, our culture, our decision making process and our way of life.
Anarchism isnāt just a label you put on yourself. Itās a culture you pick up. It is a way to look at situations and people around you. Decide things both internally externally. Itās a way of life. A way of life that opposes authority.
Anarchism is a way of looking at the world. And I cannot see an anarchist society function without most of the people most of the time acting and living anarcicly. Essentially when I say anarchist I mean someone living in a culture of anarchy. And that culture needs to exist for anarchic social structures to exist.
Why would I want to?
You meanā¦ what people were doing for thousands of years before states were invented? None of those people thought of themselves as anarchists, you know.
Anarchists are not āabnormalitiesā - Iām going to assume you donāt have a third arm growing out of the top of your head or anything like that.
And you are not understanding why I used that example - I used it because it was an extraordinary thing for the Makhnovists to do. And, just FYI, the KAD turned out to be pretty heavy-handed too - anarchists are not āabnormalities.ā
Anarchism consists of a critique of hierarchyā¦ and not much else. It is not a way of ālooking at the world,ā it is a way of understanding hierarchy - it has absolutely nothing worthwhile to say about that which isnāt hierarchical. And it is absolutely not anything that can be called āculturalā - no matter how hard you squint.
That was an assertion that needed to be true for the following to work, and another way anarchism differs from āliberalismā and āmarxismā. Because while you cannot force anyone to become those things too you can force them to be faked. You cannot fake being an anarchist.
And there is the fundamental disagreement between our "anarchy"s. For me it is a culture. and not much else. Everything else comes from this cultural root. The critique of hierarchy is just this anarchic culture applied to political science.
When I see the black flag it fills me with a sense of belonging. Seeing a Circled A on a street corner frequently makes me smile. Reading anarchist literature gives me a sense of being a part of something bigger and what word could there be for that other than culture? Shifting through the near incalculable amount of stickers in an anarchist space with all the ACABs, black cats and antifa. What is it if not culture?
Although now thinking about I imagine you could call cultural anarchism āpunkā. I donāt think I can. punk is too different. Itās backed by the music genre which has a very specific sound and perhaps because I doesnāt gel with me I donāt consider it the anarchist sound. Itās punk. It is anarchic, but itās only one side of it.
I wonder what it is that you consider culture, that it doesnāt contain the collective effort needed to build anarchic structures.
The current norm in almost every country is to be a worker in an industry and vote in elections, (even if they donāt matter). Thatās quite far from anarchy.
When I use normal I mean the current mainstream. Or to give more examples: being an artist isnāt normal, being self-employed isnāt normal, not voting isnāt normal (or voting is normal if you remove the double negative). Not working isnāt normal. I could go on but I think you get the idea. Obviously anarchy is natural and exists in society but it certainly isnāt the norm. But I probably should have used āmainstreamā because it seems ānormalā seems to invoke concepts of āacceptedā, āgoodā. not āaverageā
They werenāt. Anarchy is the conscious opposition to archy. If those societies didnāt have any interaction with archic structures then they didnāt know to oppose them therefore they werenāt anarchists, but they did live anarchicly and their culture was anarchic, and through that culture you could call them anarchists, because that culture probably had their own methods of dealing with archic structures that tried to impose themselves, which could be considered opposition, but it wouldnāt be conscious, or would itā¦ And this is getting out of hand, isnāt it.
But thatās words. imperfect abstractions over infinitely complex ideas. Shame anarchy is one the most complex ones, since itās entire concept defies singular meaning. The only one you can safely ascribe to it is āagainst authorityā, and even thatās only if you have a specific meaning of āauthorityā.
You sure about that? Piggy manages it all the damn time. And if a pig - the worst of the working class - can do it, anyone can.
Counter-culture does not win wars. It sure as hell doesnāt win (or even start) revolutions, either - never mind building workable and sustainable societies afterward.
I see them, too - but it doesnāt make me smile, because I know the teen who made it doesnāt know what it even means.
I live in a country with a 40% unemployment rate - perhaps you should reconsider your conception of ānormalcy.ā There is a big difference between merely rebelling against ānormalityā and posing an existential threat to the status quo - the risk profile of the latter comes with real bullets, real torture and lots and lots of real death.
counter-culture thereās the word I was looking for when describing punk. Thatās what I meant with āonly one side of itā. Counter-culture is only one side of anarchist culture. The side called punk. But there are so many other facets to anarchy that punk doesnāt cover. I agree that counter-culture canāt build up social systems, which is why I donāt call anarchist culture counter-culture. Itās something different. Not simply about opposing what exists but also building and imagining what can.
Are you sure of that? They might not know the theory but just by drawing it they showcase a willingness to act against the established rules. Thatās a good first step towards learning about anarchy, and while they could āgrow out of itā they could also find actual anarchist movement and go deeper into it.
The person who drew it also doesnāt matter. It doesnāt change what I think when I see it. It doesnāt change how much it matters to me. The symbol lives itās own life and even if the person who drew it didnāt know that, the people who see it might. Some more curious might find anarchism because of looking up what the deal with them is.
My ānormalcyā is the direct result of the environment I was raised in and the people I interacted with. It is an idea that changes and evolves constantly as I interact more. I donāt only reconsider my conception of ānormalcyā but of every word I use as I grow and learn. But in the context that I exist in normal people do not act anarchically.
Which is scary, which makes it unappealing, which makes it actively detrimental for outreach. There are many ways to fight battles, many ways to oppose the status quo and culturally is most certainly one of them. Itās not inferior to military action just because people donāt die doing it, but I also know it wont be enough on itās own. Just like militancy wonāt be enough.
One of the joys of anarchism is getting to choose where you belong. Being able to dictate what you do and how you do it. I am a pacifist. My aversion to violence is one of the foundations of my anarchism. I could never be on the front lines. It scares me. But I know I can do other things, help out in other ways, and that me being able to do that is foundational to anarchism.
If youāre going to cast anarchism as āculture,ā I just have to askā¦ what does this ācultureā actually offer the rest of the working class?
Yep. The rebellious teens who drew it everywhere here back in the nineties was doing so because the anarchy symbol was āpopularisedā during the Satanic Panic of the late eighties - and I can assure you that most of the kids who did so are now full-blown fascists.
Neither do anarchists - I have yet to meet an anarchist who has successfully āopted outā of the capitalist mode of production. If they could thereād be no need for anarchism, would there? There may be some extremely privileged ones who gets to do soā¦ but I have no interest in what they have to say. Politics that arenāt rooted in the experience of the working class is less than useless to any leftist.
But do you? Anarchists can pretend that they are āchoosingā this or thatā¦ but their choices are subject to the mathematics of the capitalist mode of production no differently than the (so-called) ānormiesā in the working class. Counter-culture can provide a safe-space socially, but it cannot provide you with an economic one - unless youāre Chumbawumba, I suppose.
Well, neither can Iā¦ my health isnāt what it used to be (and it wasnāt really all that good to start off with), but thatās not what this is about. Itās about understanding the true nature of revolutionā¦ and the inevitable counter-revolution.