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Title: Anarchism Without Adjectives Author: Kevin Carson Date: February 2nd, 2015 Language: en Topics: anarchism without adjectives Source: https://c4ss.org/content/35425
Schematic designs for a new society seem to be really popular among
self-described anarchists of all stripes. On the Right, we have
Rothbard’s model for an entire society modelled whole-cloth on a
“libertarian law code” deduced from axioms like self-ownership and the
non-aggression principle. Within the historic anarchist movement of the
Left, we have uniform templates like syndicalism or Kropotkinist
communism. And the same tendency can be found among quasi-anarchistic
libertarian socialist models like De Leonism and the World Socialist
Movement; the latter assumes the creation of a communist society by
persuading all the countries in the world to vote in their precise model
of social organization through the political process, within a short
time frame. And if all this isn’t bad enough there’s Parecon, for god’s
sake.
The “anarchism without adjectives” position was a reaction to this kind
of doctrinaire model-building, and the resulting conflicts between the
proponents of various totalizing blueprints for society — most notably
the late-19th century conflict between individualists, represented by
Benjamin Tucker, and communists, represented by Johann Most. Although
the term was first used by a couple of Spanish anarchists, Ricardo Mella
and Fernando Terrida del Marmol (whom Voltairine de Cleyre met in London
in 1897). Errico Malatesta and Max Nettlau adopted the position, and de
Cleyre and Dyer Lum became its most visible American proponents. The
basic idea was that anarchists should stop feuding over the specific
economic model of a future anarchist society, and leave that for people
to work out for themselves as they saw fit. Economic ideas like
Proudhon’s mutualism, Tucker’s individualist free enterprise and
Kropotkin’s communism were complementary, and in a post-state society a
hundred flowers would bloom from one locality, one social grouping, to
the next.
David Graeber has argued for something like this. He expresses
skepticism that anything like anarcho-capitalism could exist for very
long on a significant scale, with a large number of people willingly
working as wage laborers for a minority, so long as access to the means
of production is relatively easy and there are no cops to exclude people
from vacant land. After all, Robinson Crusoe’s “master” relationship
over Friday depended on him having already “appropriated” the entire
island and having a gun. But so long as economic arrangements are a
matter of negotiation between equals, and nobody’s in a position to call
in men with guns to enforce their will on others, he’s happy to just
wait and see what happens.
So what can we say about the general outlines of a stateless society?
First, it will emerge as a result of the ongoing exhaustion, hollowing
out and retreat of large hierarchical institutions like state,
corporation, large bureaucratic university, etc. It will generally be
based on some kind of horizontalism (prefigured by movements like the
Arab Spring, M15 and Occupy) combined with self-managed local
institutions. Second, its building blocks will be the
counter-institutions cropping up everywhere even now to fill the void
left as state and corporation erode: Community gardens, permaculture,
squats, hackerspaces, alternative currency systems, commons-based peer
production, the sharing economy, and in general all forms of social
organization based on voluntary cooperation and new ultra-efficient
technologies of small-scale production. And third, to the extent that it
reflects any common ideology at all, it will be an attachment to values
like personal autonomy, freedom, cooperation and social solidarity. But
the specifics will be worked out in a thousand particular ways, far too
diverse to be encompassed by any verbal model like “communism” or
“markets” (in the sense of the cash nexus).
I expect a wide variation in small-scale institutions, both within and
between communities: workers’ collectives, business firms, cooperatives,
p2p networks, etc. Multi-family social units like squats, cohousing
projects and extended family compounds may take practice autarkic
communism internally and take advantage of small-scale machinery to meet
most of their needs through direct production, while obtaining the rest
through exchange on the market. Property rules in land and enterprise
ownership will vary from one community to the next.
Even if we stipulate starting from basic assumptions like the broadest
understanding of self-ownership and the nonaggression principle (not
that even a majority of the anarchist movement actually comes from the
philosophical tradition which regards these as words to conjure with),
that means very little in terms of the practical rules that can be
deduced from them. There is simply no way, starting from basic axioms
like self-ownership and nonaggression, to deduce any particular rules
that are both obvious and necessary on issues like (for example) whether
I have the right to intervene to stop an animal being tortured by its
“owner,” or what the specific rules should be for squatters’ rights and
constructive abandonment of a property long left idle.
Even the definition of physical aggression against an individual is, to
a large extent, culturally defined. The surrounding environment impinges
on the physical body in a million different ways, and the boundary
between those that are considered aggressive and those not (like photons
or sound waves that physically affect the sensory organs and
subsequently the nervous system and internal mental state) is somewhat
arbitrary. The same is true for varying cultural definitions of the
boundary between person and environment, and how much of the surrounding
physical environment not actually part of the human body can be regarded
as an extension of the self or an envelope of “personal space.” Bear in
mind that common law definitions of assault assume such a spatial
envelope, and include actions short of physically touching another
person’s body with one’s own.
Any post-state society will include both individuals and communities
adhering to many conflicting ideas of just what “freedom,” “autonomy”
and “rights” entail. Whatever “law code” communities operate by will be
worked out, not as obvious logical deductions from axioms, but through
constant interaction between individuals and groups asserting their
different understandings of what rights and freedom entail. And it will
be worked out after the fact of such conflicts, through the practical
negotiations of the mediating and adjudicating bodies within
communities.
In other words, we need to spend less time like Thomas More drafting out
all the details of a future libertarian utopia, right down to the food
and architecture, and spend more time talking to our neighbors and
figuring out ways of cooperating and getting along without the state
telling us what to do.