You might be an an Anarchist if…

Posted on November 7, 2011

So, as expected, my post last week “To my Fellow Anarchists” drew a lot of flames from the usual suspects – especially after someone decided to go and repost it on AnarchistNews.org, a site I personally tend to avoid due to the overabundance of trolls who haunt its comments section. Chief among the accusations was that I’m “not really an Anarchist” because I dared to suggest that we should think critically about what tactics we use where and consider the impacts that our actions have on our allies.

Bullshit.

An anarchist society is a self-managed society, that is, a society without class where people manage their own labor, time, resources, and communities cooperatively. In fact, it looks a hell of a lot like #Occupy, writ large.

In most models that’s achieved through radical decentralization and democratization of political and economic processes. Businesses become worker-owned collectives where the workers in each shop run the shop themselves and decide all the relevant issues related to the running and day to day functioning of the business democratically. Management, if any exists, is only 1-layer deep and managers are elected and recall-able at any time by their workmates. Executives, middle managers, etc cease to exist. Instead of shareholders, vital interests (stakeholders) such as members of the the local community who are impacted by the businesses function are represented in all decision-making that impacts them. This model can work either with a moneyless (anarchocommunist) economy or a market-based (mutualist) economy. Businesses and land cannot be bought and sold. They belong to the people who work in them and the communities in which they operate.

On the political side, Nation states are dissolved and the primary political unit is the Neighborhood Assembly which every member of a neighborhood or town is entitled to participate in and which runs (not coincidentally) very much like the General Assemblies that #OccupyWallStreet uses. Decision making can be consensus, super-majority-voting, or whatever other mechanism that community decides best suites its needs. Issues that affect multiple communities (ecological issues being a prime example) are addressed through delegation – each community impacted delegates members to work out proposals and those proposals are decided upon by everyone who is impacted by them.

Police forces are either minimized and make accountable directly to the neighborhood assemblies or eliminated and professional standing armies are eliminated entirely. Instead, democratically run militias (such as those fielded by the CNT during the Spanish revolution) provide for defense. Ideally most issues would be resolved peacefully through dialogue but in cases of aggression mutual defense would be coordinated cooperatively.

The end goal of all of this is a world order in which everyone has an equal say in the decisions that affect them, where there is no division between rulers and ruled, and where everyone has a fair shot at a good life for themselves and their children.

If that sounds like a good idea to you, congratulations! You’re an Anarchist! If not well, I don’t know what you are. That’s for you to decide. But if none of the above appeals to you I have to wonder why you’d want to be associated with Anarchism since that vision articulated above has been a common feature (with some variation, of course) of every Anarchist movement in history.

You’ll notice smashing windows is nowhere in that description. That’s because there’s nothing particularly Anarchist about smashing windows. It’s a tactic of intimidation that’s been used by group of armed men (and it virtually always is men) ever since there’ve been windows to smash. It may be a tactic that’s useful for a revolutionary movement at some point but the where’s and when’s of that have less then nothing to do with ideology and everything to do with tactics.

Emma Goldman said in her autobiography during the section on the russian revolution that the critical mistake the Anarchists made there was in kicking off a revolution before they had the capacity to win it, which meant that the Marxists were able to seize control of it and then use State power to crush the popular movements and drown the revolution in bloodshed. She said the more organized a movement is going in to a revolution the less violent that revolution will need to be. And of course the more violent a revolution the less freedom results from it, historically, because organizations that are good at killing lots of people don’t tend to have much respect for human rights or freedoms once in power.

To me that implies that a successful Revolution is going to have to be incredibly well organized and disciplined internally, should use violence against people only as a last resort, and as much as possible its internal decision making structure should mirror the vision for the post-revolutionary society.

I think #OWS is on track to be the seeds for that revolution and the horizontal decision making structure is a great base upon which to build. I’d go so far as to say that #OWS is structurally Anarchist, even if most of the people participating in it wouldn’t use that word. And that’s fine, they don’t have to call themselves Anarchists. Frankly, ideological labels are only really useful as shorthand to refer to a set of principles and core beliefs and I’d rather work with people who don’t call themselves anarchists but respect the same principles of non-hierarchy, accountability, and the means reflecting the goal that have always been at the core of my vision of anarchism then work with people who call themselves anarchists but are more interested in thrillseeking through transgressive actions with no lasting impact then they are in working to build a mass movement that can take on the State and win.

I also think it would be very useful at this point for folks who are willing and capable of using more confrontational and aggressive tactics to begin regular drilling and come to an internal consensus about how we can use those tactics in an accountable way to support the larger movement. One of America’s biggest problems (along with, ya know, Capitalism) is that our military industrial complex is ‘above the law’ and refuses to be held accountable. We cannot afford to replicate that same dysfunction in our movement.

We do not have a military, we have militants (and I’d count myself among them) but the same principle applies. Division of labor only works in an Anarchist model when there is real accountability and that’s something we lack. Want to form a shield wall and charge the riot cops who are beating people to actively resist police brutality? Count me in. Want to organize autonomous actions which respect the St. Paul Principles? Count me in for that too. Want to work on educating our allies (and the people we hope to win as allies) on what Anarchism is really about and how they’re already using our organizational models without even realizing it? Shit, I’m already doing it. Hit me up if you want to help.

The mouth-breathers who think Anarchism is a theme park designed to feed their thrillseeking are going to hate this idea. Fuck them. If we’re not accountable to each other and to our allies we’re just another elitist vanguard group. And there’s nothing Anarchist about that.