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Title: Anarchy Is Order
Author: Jeff Shantz
Date: 2005
Language: en
Topics: anarchy, theory, autonomy, autonomous zones, DIY, Mutual aid
Source: Media/Culture Journal

Jeff Shantz

Anarchy Is Order

The word “anarchy” comes from the ancient Greek word “anarchos” and

means “without a ruler.” While rulers, quite expectedly, claim that the

end of rule will inevitably lead to a descent into chaos and turmoil,

anarchists maintain that rule is unnecessary for the preservation of

order. Rather than a descent into Hobbes’s war of all against all, a

society without government suggests to anarchists the very possibility

for creative and peaceful human relations. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon neatly

summed up the anarchist position in his famous slogan: “Anarchy is

Order.”

Historically, anarchists have sought to create a society without

government or State, free from coercive, hierarchical and authoritarian

relations, in which people associate voluntarily. Anarchists emphasize

freedom from imposed authorities. They envision a society based upon

autonomy, self-organization and voluntary federation which they oppose

to “the State as a particular body intended to maintain a compulsory

scheme of legal order” (Marshall 12). Contemporary anarchists focus much

of their efforts on transforming everyday life through the development

of alternative social arrangements and organizations. Thus, they are not

content to wait either for elite-initiated reforms or for future

“post-revolutionary” utopias. If social and individual freedoms are to

be expanded the time to start is today.

In order to bring their ideas to life, anarchists create working

examples. To borrow the old Wobbly phrase, they are “forming the

structure of the new world in the shell of the old.” These experiments

in living, popularly referred to as “DIY” (Do-It-Yourself), are the

means by which contemporary anarchists withdraw their consent and begin

“contracting” other relationships. DIY releases counter-forces, based

upon notions of autonomy and self-organization as motivating principles,

against the normative political and cultural discourses of

neo-liberalism. Anarchists create autonomous spaces which are not about

access but about refusal of the terms of entry (e.g. nationalism, etc).

The “Do-it-Yourself” ethos has a long and rich association with

anarchism. One sees it as far back as Proudhon’s notions of People’s

Banks and local currencies which have returned in the form of LETS

(Local Exchange and Trade Systems). In North America, 19^(th) Century

anarchist communes, such as those of Benjamin Tucker, find echoes in the

Autonomous Zones and squat communities of the present day.

In the recent past, Situationists, Kabouters, and the British punk

movements have encouraged DIY activities as means to overcome alienating

consumption practices and the authority and control of work. Punks

turned to DIY to record and distribute music outside of the record

industry.

At the forefront of contemporary DIY are the “Autonomous Zones” or more

simply “A-Zones.” “Autonomous Zones” are community centres based upon

anarchist principles, often providing meals, clothing and shelter for

those in need. These sites, sometimes but not always squats, provide

gathering places for exploring and learning about anti-authoritarian

histories and traditions. Self-education is an important aspect of

anarchist politics. A-Zones are important as sites of re-skilling. DIY

and participatory democracy are important precisely because they

encourage the processes of learning and independence necessary for

self-determined communities.

A-Zones are often sites for quite diverse and complex forms of activity.

The “Trumbullplex” in Detroit is an interesting example. Housed,

ironically, in the abandoned home of an early-Century industrialist, the

Trumbell Theatre serves as a co-operative living space, temporary

shelter, food kitchen and lending library. The carriage house has been

converted into a theatre site for touring anarchist and punk bands and

performance troops like the “Bindlestiff Circus.”

Because of their concern with transcending cultural barriers, residents

of A-Zones try to build linkages with residents of the neighbourhoods in

which they were staying. The intention is to create autonomous free

zones that may be extended as resources and conditions permit. These

various practices are all part of complex networks that are

trans-national, trans-boundary and trans-movement. They encourage us to

think about writing against the movement as movement. Movement processes

involve complex networks outside of and alongside of the State

(trans-national and trans-boundary).

These are the building blocks of what Howard Ehrlich refers to as the

anarchist transfer culture, an approximation of the new society within

the context of the old. Within it anarchists try to meet the basic

demands of building sustainable communities.

A transfer culture is that agglomeration of ideas and practices that

guide people in making the trip from the society here to the society

there in the future
.As part of the accepted wisdom of that transfer

culture we understand that we may never achieve anything that goes

beyond the culture itself. It may be, in fact, that it is the very

nature of anarchy that we shall always be building the new society

within whatever society we find ourselves (Ehrlich 329).

In this sense, anarchist autonomous zones are liminal sites, spaces of

transformation and passage. As such they are important sites of

re-skilling, in which anarchists prepare themselves for the new forms of

relationship necessary to break authoritarian and hierarchical

structures. Participants also learn the diverse tasks and varied

interpersonal skills necessary for collective work and living. This

skill sharing serves to discourage the emergence of knowledge elites and

to allow for the sharing of all tasks, even the least desirable,

necessary for social maintenance.

For Paul Goodman, an American anarchist whose writings influenced the

1960s New Left and counterculture, anarchist futures-present serve as

necessary acts of “drawing the line” against the authoritarian and

oppressive forces in society. Anarchism, in Goodman’s view, was never

oriented only towards some glorious future; it involved also the

preservation of past freedoms and previous libertarian traditions of

social interaction. “A free society cannot be the substitution of a ‘new

order’ for the old order; it is the extension of spheres of free action

until they make up most of the social life” (Goodman quoted in Marshall

598). Utopian thinking will always be important, Goodman argued, in

order to open the imagination to new social possibilities, but the

contemporary anarchist would also need to be a conservator of society’s

benevolent tendencies.

As many recent anarchist writings suggest, the potential for resistance

might be found anywhere in everday life. If power is exercised

everywhere, it might give rise to resistance everywhere. Present-day

anarchists like to suggest that a glance across the landscape of

contemporary society reveals many groupings that are anarchist in

practice if not in ideology.

Examples include the leaderless small groups developed by radical

feminists, coops, clinics, learning networks, media collectives, direct

action organizations; the spontaneous groupings that occur in response

to disasters, strikes, revolutions and emergencies; community-controlled

day-care centers; neighborhood groups; tenant and workplace organizing;

and so on (Ehrlich, Ehrlich, DeLeon and Morris 18).

While these are obviously not strictly anarchist groups, they often

operate to provide examples of mutual aid and non-hierarchical and

non-authoritarian modes of living that carry the memory of anarchy

within them. It is within these everyday examples that anarchists

glimpse the possibilities for a libertarian social order. If, as Colin

Ward suggests, anarchy is a seed beneath the snow of authoritarian

society, daily expressions of mutual aid are the first blooms from which

a new order will grow.

In viewing the projects that emerge from contemporary anarchist

movements, I would suggest that, in the words of Castells, Yazawa and

Kiselyova, such projects offer “alternative visions and projects of

social transformation that reject the patterns of domination,

exploitation and exclusion embedded in the current forms of

globalization” (22). Following Leslie Sklair I suggest that

autonomist/anarchy movements exemplify a “disruption” model of social

movements and resistances to capitalism (as opposed to an

“organizational model” or an “integrationist model”). Through their

uncompromising rhetoric and immodest strategies they resist attempts to

divert their disruptive force into normal politics. Activists attempt to

reject the entire context within which they can be either marginalized

or assimilated; they occupy their own ground. This “autonomy” must be

constantly constructed, reconstructed and defended in the face of

powerful foes as events of the last four years have shown.

Autonomy movements in abandoned or impoverished inner-city areas are

movements involving individuals, social groups or territories excluded

or made precarious by the “new world order”. This distinguishes them

somewhat from institutional global social movements that seek increased

participation by members who are not yet rendered irrelevant (and who

thus have something with which to bargain). In any event, how does one

ask a global (or national) body to grant the “subversion of the dominant

paradigm” or the “liberation of desire?”

References

Reinventing Anarchy, Again. Ed. H. J. Ehrlich. Edinburgh: AK Press,

1996: 329–330.

Culture.” Reinventing Anarchy, Again. Ed. Howard J. Ehrlich. Edinburgh:

AK Press, 1996: 331–349.

“Questions and Answers about Anarchism.” Reinventing Anarchy, Again. Ed.

Howard J. Ehrlich. Edinburgh: AK Press, 1996: 4–18.

London: Verso, 1985.

Western Journal of Speech Communication 54 (1990): 473–94.

London: Fontana Press, 1993.

Garden City: Anchor Books, 1969.

Sociology 29.3 (1995): 495–512.

Movements. New York: World Publishing, 1962.