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Title: Post-Anarchist Emancipation Author: Anarqxista Goldman Date: 04/22/2022 Language: en Topics: post-anarchism, egoism, emancipation, Source: Retrieved on 10/06/2022 from https://archive.org/details/post-anarchist-emancipation
Imagine society as a giant open air prison. You shouldn’t find it very
hard to do in a capitalist world that’s been artificially chopped up
into arbitrary territories called “countries” whose borders we may not
legally cross without appropriately administered documentation which
identifies and tracks each one of us. These countries are more than
likely also sub-divided down into states, counties, cities or towns,
each with their own bureaucracies of control. Going even more
microscopic still, many people will work for employers who maintain
their own little kingdoms which observe how much work you do or don’t do
and order and control your movements according to their economic
dictates and advantages. Yes, society, especially in the most
capitalist-controlled parts of it, is a giant open air prison that has
police both official, with badges and probably guns and other weaponry,
and not so official. Society functions based on authority and doing as
you’re told. But more than this, if that wasn’t bad enough, it functions
as a tightly knit system that doesn’t enable you to function in any
other way but by taking part in it. One requires money to buy things,
one must adhere to an idea of property as possession that is ultimately
guaranteed by the force of government, one must accept living in a
society that has been imposed upon you and for which your approval or
agreement was never even sought.
There is more to it than this, of course, but this prison that I am
talking about I often refer to in shorthand as “authoritarian
capitalism”. The term is the confluence of two ideas; the first idea is
that of authoritarianism, primarily a political concept, the idea that
political leaders rule based on an authority they imagine to have, or to
have gained, perhaps by some political process by which they justify it
but perhaps not; the second is capitalism itself, an exploitative
economic set of relationships by which resources are exploited and
coerced for private profit and a few rich are inevitably created to the
detriment of the mass who are also exploited and coerced to create the
wealth of this few. Inevitably the rich few and the politically
authoritative flow together, their interests aligned, and then you have
the reason behind the giant open air prison we are all in because you
best believe that the rich and the powerful don’t want to give such
advantages up [regardless of what happens to you].
Some have noted however, as I have increasingly myself been made aware
of as I learned of the ideas of these people, that this “giant open air
prison” actually relies on the cooperation of the mass to keep it going.
The rich and powerful, after all, are relatively few, tiny even, in
comparison to that mass. Even if you add in their police [for they are
surely not ours or about real public service], they are still a drop in
the ocean compared to that mass. Why, if that mass ever for even a
single second realised the power they had in their united action — let
alone acted upon that power and realisation — then the myth of leaders,
of a powerful few, and of their control, would disappear so quickly that
one would wonder how it could ever have taken hold in the first place.
But how did it take hold in the first place? People, over centuries,
came to accept ideas that were injurious to their interests, they were
lulled into social, political and economic formations which became
viewed as “normal” and which they lazily accepted until they found
themselves trapped. The prison had been built around them and now they
found themselves in it, propagandised into its necessity minute by
minute. No way out. Caged.
As I muse on this metaphor of the prison [which is a material fact of
human relationships nevertheless], it occurs to me it can be fleshed out
somewhat. It is not hard to work out who the warden is or who the guards
are. But what about the prisoners? There are several kinds. There are
those who never think about their situation in the prison and just
accept things and get on with the life that’s been assigned to them.
There are those prisoners who try to get on with the guards and do the
best they can, maybe to their advantage, maybe just to “make the best”
of it. There are those who resent being in prison but don’t really ever
do much about it except occasionally grumble or have a generally grumpy
attitude to their prison life. But then there are the more passionate
and extreme. There are the willing collaborators who get friendly with
the guards, hope to be friends with the warden and willingly inform for
both to enforce the prison regime even among the relationships of the
prisoners themselves. Who knows why they do it? Perhaps they hope for
personal salvation or special favours. Perhaps they are just naturally
vindictive or spineless. Perhaps they don’t know any better and have not
the imagination for anything else. But in this prison there are also the
rebels, the insurrectionists, the people who, seeing themselves in
prison, want to get out. And they make plans to get out. They try to get
out. They can imagine life beyond prison walls and views that are not
framed by prison bars. All these kinds of people and more can be found
in the prison and all these kinds of people [bar one or two] keep that
prison ecosystem going for, of course, if they all just rioted then many
of them would probably escape and the prison would be left a burning
ruin, the warden and his guards decimated. [Which, of course, is also
part of the prison propaganda: if you destroy the prison you’ll be on
your own with nothing! You need us and you need the prison!]
The prison, of course, is the prison of authoritarian capitalism and
many are those within it who apparently see it as so inevitable that
they keep turning up to work in jobs they hate and which help to destroy
this planet, and propagate human misery, a little more each day. They
are the ones who keep authoritarian capitalism going by their obedience,
freely given or coerced doesn’t really matter. If you acquiesce to the
prison guards and their threats of violence [authoritarian capitalism
is, of course, inherently and naturally violent] that’s all they really
care about. We could even say, then, that this prison is both
self-inflicted in its acceptance and self-maintained in the obedience of
those who keep showing up for work. Such, at least, is the theory of
those who, in the past, have talked about “voluntary servitude”. Such
voluntary servitude is not only bad for you of course, in that you
simply give your obedience away, but it is also bad for everybody else
for the more who simply obey, the harder it is for anyone else to
disobey — since they will stand alone. This is exactly what the warden
and the guards want, naturally enough, for isolated refuseniks can
easily be dealt with one by one. The more obedient and subservient the
mass are, the harder it is for anyone to revolt at all. If you’ve seen
any shallow Hollywood film about a rag tag band of rebel heroes you
already know this, right? [And remember, real life ISN’T Hollywood: “the
good guys” — whatever that actually means — don’t inevitably win or
necessarily even win at all.]
The post-anarchist take on all this, coming after an interpretation of
Max Stirner’s idea of “The Unique” and aligned with the core values of
anarchism which eschews [and has always eschewed] the legitimacy of
states and their laws, is that we should not give authoritarian
capitalism our servitude, voluntarily or otherwise, at all. Finding
ourselves in the prison, anarchists should be at the forefront of those
who rebel, make plans, and fully intend to break out, instigating an
insurrection against the guards and the warden as they do. They value
their autonomy and agency almost as the founding ideas of their very
beings and they despise the very idea that they should be living
incarcerated lives of “do as you are told” in forced associations they
have no control over. Rather than inflicting incarceration on themselves
by their voluntary servitude, they insist on forming relationships of
free association in an emancipated outside. This, in fact, is the point
they think every other prisoner has to reach — intellectually, socially,
morally, politically — a point of no return in which only their
emancipation from the prison, only freedom beyond its walls, will ever
do. To get there these people realise they will have to embrace the
illegal, the insurrectionary, the point of a deliberate and purposeful
disrespect for all authority, the very rejection of it as an idea in
itself. They must become those who invent and nurture a habit of civil
and political disobedience all the better to make obedience increasingly
impossible. They must become enthusiastic bandits and willing vagabonds,
saboteurs of the prison system that seeks to keep all within it.
They do this largely from themselves for this is a matter of
self-education, self-actualisation, self-realisation. They do it because
they must, because that “point of no return” is reached as they observe
the conditions under which they are coerced to exist and egoistically
reject them. Yet they also know that, rebelling against the prison
conditions into which they, and everybody else, have been forced, it
will surely benefit more than merely them if the cell doors are opened,
the guards defeated and the walls breached. They welcome this but it
isn’t their motivation. If one must be free, if one must be emancipated
from forced and arbitrary conditions which oppress, exploit and coerce,
then one must be free regardless of if anyone else feels the same way
too. One finds associates and accomplices where one can but one does not
rely on them. One is also concerned not to find false friends, fake
allies and straight up collaborators for the status quo [which will
always be many]. One knows that one must primarily rely on oneself and
that real accomplices will only emerge as they themselves demonstrate
that they too are powered by the eternal flame of emancipation which
serves as fuel for a never-ending rebellion against every authoritarian,
whatever they call themselves and wherever they might be found. Such
people are those who work to banish the very concept of “servitude” from
their vocabulary, replacing it with passion for freedom and love for
those who love it just as much as they do. They want accomplices and
they want lovers in the fight for personal autonomy and free association
but they let these things come to them and they don’t force them.
Anarchy is what happens when you go about your business uncoerced, they
reflect, and so they go about their business which is sabotaging the
prison’s regular functioning and hatching their escape plan to get, and
remain, outside its walls.
Leaving the metaphor behind, what does this mean? It means ACTUALLY
EXITING CAPITALISM if we say we are anarchists. It means an end to
excuses for why we must keep turning up to work. It means if anarchists
won’t show the way to anarchy THEN WHO WILL? It means BEING ILLEGAL if
that’s what we must be. It means BEING AN INSURRECTION, moral, social,
political, economic, intellectual. It means FORGING NEW RELATIONSHIPS
that aren’t merely reproductions of the authoritarian capitalist ones of
the prison but that are ones of emancipated love. It means BEING SERIOUS
about breaking down prison walls and escaping prison confines. But it
doesn’t mean any of this will be easy. Of course it doesn’t. Yet the
ease of our passage from one set of circumstances to another is only a
condition of our activity; it is not a reason to give up everything an
anarchist has ever stood for. It is not a reason to abandon anarchist
values of autonomy, agency, free association or decentralised living. It
is about reaching that point of no return at which the very idea of
SERVITUDE is definitively rejected and, becoming aware of that, setting
course for a place, beyond good and evil, beyond law and state, beyond
coercion and government, where servitude for anyone must be made
absolutely beyond the pail.
ANARQXISTA GOLDMAN X