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Title: Anarchy Not Anarchism Author: Anarqxista Goldman Date: 05/13/2022 Language: en Topics: insurrection; illegalism; mutual aid; cooperation; philosophy of anarchy; voluntary inservitude; free association; Source: Retrieved on 10/13/2022 from https://archive.org/details/anarchy-not-anarchism
The problem is NOT the government. The problem is acquiescent people
schooled into servitude. Governments are a few thousand people [backed
up by some tens of thousands more to carry out their policies in various
official roles]. The people are millions. Governments can therefore do
nothing unless people, as a mass, acquiesce. Society only happens as it
does because people go along with it, participate in it, doing as they
are told, herded as is desired by others. The essential conundrum of
human society is then that millions will sit on sofas or lie in bed
watching essentially frivolous entertainments, domesticated by
capitalist desires as they have been, whilst, outside, people starve at
the government’s behest and because of the way the police are deployed
to deter their assistance in anything other than officially sanctioned
ways. These phenomena, of domesticated populace and poverty-stricken
victims of capital and authority fallen through the cracks, are
connected. The supposedly most “advanced” societies on the planet are
places where you need amounts of money to live [where life was for vast
tracts of time as free — and as cost free — as a bird in the sky]. If
you have no money you are highly likely to die in the street and/or to
attract violent authoritarian attention if you happen to rest anywhere
in particular for too long before that [that hasn’t been desecrated by
capitalist architecture determined to deter people from resting there,
at least]. WTF is “advanced” about that? This is life in economic chains
dressed up as desirable, a turd covered in golden glitter.
But, as I say, the problem is NOT the government. The problem is that
people pay attention to the government and, more particularly, obey the
government [in general, if not in absolutely every particular detail].
Most of these people, of course, have been turned into disingenuous
drones with zero critical faculties or ability to think for themselves.
Now partisan puppets worked from the inside by media demagogues, they
can be reliably expected to cheer for whatever they are told to and to
boo the chosen bad guys in a succession of facile binary choices that
today’s world revolves around. You must be for Ukraine or Russia, for
example. You cannot be more nuanced than that [and if you are it must be
because you’re secretly pro-Russia since they are the designated bad guy
in a simpleton’s version of world politics]. You live in the world of
Robocop and Total Recall and Starship Troopers where corporations run
the show and being seen to be on the side of the fascists is the
political point [whilst simultaneously thinking that this is “normal” or
“common sense” or “decency” and that virulent nationalism is the only
sane opinion and that any anti-nationalists or, god forbid,
internationalists, are filthy scum that must literally be stamped out].
In today’s world people can be, and so are, propagandised 24/7/365.
Capitalism even gave people devices to hold in their hands and never let
go of, devices that are both consistently informing on their users and
indoctrinating them at the same time. No need to have actual fascists
engaging in base violence against the whole population in order to
coerce them to the correct viewpoint when you can just lure them into
incarcerating themselves and turn them into self-incapacitating drones.
And the people just lap this up because authoritarian capitalism and
self-incarceration in a societal prison, with its trinkets as
distractions, is “progress” god dammit!
We live in a world that has got stuck — and smarter more listened to
people than me [such as Professors Graeber and Wengrow of The Dawn of
Everything fame] have also said so. What is “getting stuck”? It is
losing the ability to shape and mould your own future anymore —
politically, socially, economically, for example. It is being dictated
to from above by authoritarian others who insist on fixed human
relationships of their determining. Maybe a few of the names change and
maybe a few people pass between levels of the imposed hierarchy but,
overall, relations are fixed and set systemically. And this must never
change. The problem of “getting stuck” is really, from an anarchist
perspective, the problem of free association — or rather the lack of it.
If we had free association, so the anarchist says, then we would not be
stuck and forced into fixed societal relationships with others. We could
choose who we related to and how and what for. And this would be better
for all of us because we would be free. Authoritarians and capitalists,
however, are completely opposed to the idea of human relationships ever
being freely associative. They want a [literally] captive audience
because a captive audience is so much easier to coerce and exploit.
My recent writing has had common themes. The rejection of the voluntary
servitude diagnosed and identified by Étienne de la Boétie and then
re-emphasised by Max Stirner was one such topic. The likeness of a state
of anarchy to the analogous state of nature was another. Society
imagined as a kind of communal prison was a third. In each example I
have been trying to ask what David Graeber referred to as “the big
questions” from my own position as a particular kind of anarchist in
order to get a handle on the modern human being’s situation in
contemporary society. As part of this I seem to have come to a position,
one that is being fleshed out before your very eyes in this text, that
what we need is a functioning anarchy — which I would call a “not
getting stuck”, a free association — as opposed to the forced [and often
willing if coerced] incarceration that we’ve actually got. This anarchy
is not really, or primarily, a matter of an anarchism — or even types of
anarchism. If you have a functioning anarchy [a network of freely
associative relationships that are actively participated in and carried
out] then you pretty much have all you need anyway since you have then
given naturally intelligent and self-organising people the ability to
create relationships to their mutual benefit. Anarchisms, at their best,
educate towards an anarchy — but the anarchy exists independently, by
itself, outside of human control. That’s why it is anarchy at all.
ANARCHY, I am coming to believe, matters a lot more than ANARCHISM. The
latter all too often becomes a dogma or, worse, a party — which is the
opposite of ANARCHY. ANARCHY is nothing to do with organisations,
dogmas, parties, rules, or any of the far too many anarchist cops that
exist in the world today. The danger of any ISM, in fact, is that it
becomes dogma or doctrine or a measure of people’s purity or of their
activity. These are anti-anarchistic endeavours I do not support and, in
fact, condemn. Anarchism is NOT accountability, as some insist, because
in a world of free association, which is very anarchist, you simply
DISASSOCIATE from those you dislike or despise. [Graeber and Wengrow
detail such realities anthropologically and historically, with apparent
favour, in The Dawn of Everything, in fact, and refer to the ability to
simply “leave town” as a freedom which puts the brakes on societies ever
“getting stuck” to begin with.] There is then no need for cops. You just
avoid, or otherwise move away from, those to whom you do not give the
privilege of your company or solidarity. There is also then no need for
dogma or doctrine since all it would be policing is the freely given
association of comrades or associates anyway. If you have the social,
political and economic freedom not to “get stuck”, if you can just move
away or go elsewhere without further consequence, then lots of things
now thought necessary, such as police, punishments, prisons, etc., fall
away as a result. We need to think anarchy through a lot more thoroughly
than almost anybody actually does, it seems to me. Often this thinking
is NOT done exactly because people are too busy conjuring up dogmatic
forms of anarchism, new forms of coercion and control, by which to
gerrymander the whole. No, my friends. We need a functioning anarchy not
dogmatic anarchisms.
So, if we ask the question “Why anarchy not anarchism?” the answer, it
seems to me, is clear: because anarchy is actually the active situation
that anarchists want. Various forms of anarchism are only means to this
end. They are not, and should not, be ends in themselves for that only
suggests a new dogma or a new idol or a new “benevolent coercion” for
the people. The goal is not people all acting in a certain,
pre-determined way; the goal [that is not a goal] is autonomous people
with their own agency freely associating as they wish and so for reasons
they decide in ways devoid of centralised control. This is not a matter
of dogma or doctrine or rules or cops and never could be. This, I take
it, is why Alan Moore labelled anarchy “the land of do as you please” in
V for Vendetta rather than “the land of the anarchists” or “the land
where you behave like this and not like that” or anything else.
Anarchism [ideally] tends towards anarchy and anarchy is freedom to not
be an anarchist as much as it is freedom to be one. So “how people
behave and relate in anarchy” is not something that can ever be defined
for anarchy is the absence of such a definition. “Autonomy” is what it
says it is. “Agency” is what it says it is. “Free association” is what
it says it is. “Direct action” is what it says it is. We either take
them seriously as things from which anarchy may emerge or we don’t.
Primary in the agenda of “how to become unstuck” as a society is
becoming anti-capitalist. [By the way, everything I say in this essay is
going to be based on rejecting the “voluntary servitude” I have been
previously discussing and putting the onus on individual people — you,
me, and everyone else — to take direct control of their own lives in
their own forms of direct action and self-organisation.] It is simply
not possible to engage anarchy and pursue it as a genuine endeavour
whilst still remaining a capitalist — along with whatever excuses you
currently tell yourself about why you simply have to remain being one.
This is one reason why, in former writings, I have emphasised
insurrectionary and even illegalist attitudes and activities. Capitalism
or “carrying on as normal” are not legitimate options — they are
anarchy-denying options, blockages to becoming who we need to become [as
well as activities dooming life on Earth, as is increasingly obvious].
These, in fact, are things to be sabotaged and subverted all the better
to make them increasingly impossible to maintain. This, for a rich
Westerner [and if you have a house, car, mobile phone, TV, online
subscriptions, a wardrobe full of clothes, regular meals, piped
electricity, gas and water, the Internet, etc., then YOU ARE RICH,
RELATIVELY SPEAKING] is likely to be the hardest obstacle to get over —
for such people have become used to a lifestyle authoritarian capitalism
gave them and which they now expect and use as a standard in order to
measure how to live at all.
It can’t be emphasised enough, however, that ANARCHISM IS NOT CAPITALISM
and NEITHER IS IT TO BE JUDGED BY CAPITALISM nor by its claims for what
it can do for you. Anarchism, at least as long as capitalism and its
political partner of authoritarianism hold any sway, must be a mixture
of illegalism, mutual aid, openly pursued insurrection, more mutual aid,
sabotage, and the cooperation — and so solidarity — by which almost any
form of life actually survives in the natural world. Anarchy — real
anarchy — is not compatible with capitalism and neither does it provide
what capitalism provides [and certainly not how it provides it!]. So you
need to put your capitalism away, once and for all, and stop dreaming
the capitalist dreams of life in privatised luxury in which other people
provide everything you want, mostly at their own [if not our collective]
expense. I have nothing to offer you in place of capitalism, however,
except responsibility, struggle, danger, risk, effort, more
responsibility, work, necessary relationships, cooperation, mutuality
and jeopardy. Anarchism, if we are to think of it as a means, is taking
total responsibility for your life, its needs and requirements. It is no
longer relying on a world coerced to service created desires. It removes
all the middle men [and women] and connects you more directly to the
supply and consequences of these things. Being brutally honest, and
anarchism tries to be honest, it is difficult and hard, and as a soft
son or daughter of capitalism you are not prepared for it. The question
is then if you are committed and ethical enough to keep going even if
you might fail. The question is then if you will give up your capitalist
comforts and entertainments for life in the raw and for life of raw
responsibility. The question is then if you will defy capitalism, laws
of property and the government in order to pursue a life based on
different values and for which all three will look to hold you
responsible with their violence in response. Are you an anarchist or are
you a coward?
As an anarchist anti-capitalist you are a vagabond, a saboteur and a
thief; you do not recognise laws and neither to do recognise property
beyond its usability and who is using it. These are aspects of the
system constructed to contain us all: you have no duty to respect it or
to respect those who, by participating in it, make it all the more
difficult to escape because it is being reinforced by their very
participation. You set yourself against every single person who plays by
capitalist rules and norms by not respecting it and every single one of
these people is now a potential member of the police, a cop in waiting,
someone who will willingly, and perhaps even happily, inform on you
should you step outside of capitalist formation. If you are an
anarchist, you are an outlaw. Simple as that. In addition, you have
plenty of mental gymnastics to do to get yourself out of all the
capitalist verities that have been programmed into you about buying and
selling, the morality of ownership and what is required in order to
live. [PS This list does not necessarily include Netflix, Twitch and a
games console or any other so-called “consumer goods”.] This is a matter
of liberating yourself, internally and externally, in order to live
without laws or authorities over you. If you are going “full anarchist”
and ceasing to be a sort of anarchist-capitalist hybrid, then you need
to completely rethink everything.
An example is one I have been keen to discuss previously — sexual
liberation. Proper sexual liberation primarily means liberating sex from
capitalism and from domination [actual domination rather than play
domination which is a matter of mutual enjoyment rather than
exploitation based on real power over someone]. It also means
confronting the notion that “sex capitalism” is in any way emancipatory.
A lot of people, for example, deploy the phrase “sex work is work” as a
kind of defence mechanism as if this somehow dignifies or ennobles sex
as work. But it doesn’t. Work — especially capitalist work — is not
noble simply by dint of it being work. Capitalism is the coercion and
exploitation of people for private profit, the usage of the fictional
relationship-creating entity “money” to leverage private gain. If you
take part in capitalism — and sex capitalism is, of course, involved in
that — then similar coercion and exploitation is going on there
somewhere too for it is a part of capitalist economic relationships and
is how they are configured. Selling your panties or your bathwater or
your bodily fluids is not something to be proud of because “its work”. I
say this not from a moral standpoint but from an economic standpoint. It
merely shows the desperation a capitalist world forces people into. It
also shows that those involved in it have been conformed to capitalist
expectations about what “honest” work and “legitimate” economics is and
fully takes part in capitalistic relations which the anarchist is meant
to be opposed to.
I would go further than this, in fact, and argue that it can easily
trivialise sex and make it a simple commodity — like a tin of beans on a
shelf. For that is what capitalism does: it turns everything into
products which can be bought because you have the requisite amount of
credit to purchase it. It sets up a seller-purchaser relationship. Sex,
at least in my estimation, should never be turned into that and the
system which makes it such should be in our sights as a target to be
shot down and not lauded as a means of survival or as normality or as
being “an honest, hard-working capitalist”. A world in which especially
young women are encouraged to package their sexuality as a product and
make themselves a fantasy object or commodity in order to bring them
fame and popularity [and a certain glamorous lifestyle] is simply yet
another capitalist theatre of the absurd, a way to make private
individuals rich at the expense of human relationships of cooperation
and mutuality. It furthers capitalist interests and never those of
anarchy.
Please be clear here that none of this is a moral argument. I don’t
think sex lewd or dirty or disgusting. I don’t think sex acts for money
are improper because they are sex acts. The issue here is the type of
relationships money involves and their effects. In sex capitalism people
become sex objects and sex itself becomes a purchasable product. Yet, of
course, its not a matter of forcing new attitudes onto people about
this. It is a case of education and questioning people about their
motives and the consequences of actions and activities as well as asking
about the kinds of relationships we create by such actions. To my mind,
sexual liberation would be better enhanced by sexual performance or
engagement FOR FREE because only then is your sexuality a matter of
sexuality pure and simple, the satisfaction of, and engagement with,
sexual desires, and yet without being coerced by the need to survive or
the desire to exploit viewers for money by pretending to supply a need.
Sex capitalism in fact only chains people to a need for a product and
the purchasing or supplying of it. [That’s why many “sex entrepreneurs”
are millionaires because of it, that thing which was always their goal
to begin with!]
Thus, if and when you make sex for free you only in fact then show up
that the apparent sexual encounter for money is not really a simple
sexual encounter at all: its a transaction and the performer is doing
what they have to do to apparently fulfil an economic requirement or
assumed economic contract set up between provider and purchaser. A
customer has paid for something and so the performer must fulfil the
relation entered into. Sex capitalism is not then really about sex; its
about capitalism, its about business. Sex is merely what is for sale.
Many people of course, mostly men it must be said, get confused about
this and are easily lulled into the falsehood that the performer has
sexual feelings for them which leads to all kinds of problems and
disappointments later. This is my point here: sex capitalism sets up a
business relationship: it does not set up a sexual relationship and, in
fact, many performers would be horrified by the idea that it might set
up a sexual relationship because, in their minds, its merely a matter of
doing something which earns necessary amounts of cash in order to
survive: it literally is the detached, unenthusiastically engaged in,
capitalist “bullshit job” performed merely to survive meaninglessly
whilst standing still. And this leads to me to ask if such a detached
and commercial attitude to sex, something apparently so intimate and
mutual in its engagement, is not just about the saddest thing in the
world?
My ideal, then, is not merely a society where sex capitalism is no
longer regarded with distaste — which is what many today seem happy to
settle for and call “decency” — but a society in which sex is shared
among willing participants as the basis of new, communal loving
relationships, freely shared and entered into. This will not be about
sex as purchasable commodity but sex as the satisfaction and sharing of
desire and sex as the mutual accomplishment of engagement in physical
love and creative play. It will be sex as anarchy and not sex as
product, sex as interpersonal relationship and not sex as distanced
commerce. Sex in anarchy must be liberated from being yet another
product, yet another thing over which ownership rights can be asserted
as we plaster watermarks over photos, gifs and videos, and become the
means to more loving communities of people who share themselves more
openly and freely rather than parcelling out snippets of themselves as
titillations offered for a price. This is a matter of the relationships
we engage in of which sex is a part and the relationships that are
created by how we understand and make use of sexuality. It is a well
known cliché of capitalism, for example, that “sex sells” but it is my
conjecture that this is a damaging and reprobate use of sex, one which
creates a damaging and reprobate world, one where sex becomes something
to be grasped or stolen because it has been turned into something we own
or sell or can possess. I would see sex in anarchy as the basis of love
and mutuality in relationships, as play between creative people who have
formed and forged an affinity, and not as just another tin of beans I
may buy and consume.
The anti-capitalist anarchist, then, does not justify kinds of
capitalism as means of survival because that only instantiates a means
of “getting stuck” called capitalism that works on the basis of systemic
oppression, that works on the basis of doing WHATEVER IT TAKES to keep
people trapped within it. Sex capitalism is often touted as emancipatory
because performers can “express themselves” or because they are
assumedly their own bosses [are they really in the light of all those
“terms of service” which can see anyone lose their content, be
demonetized or even banned from a service for not doing as the ultimate
boss of the site decides?] but these are only illusions of freedom
subsumed under the need to earn money to maintain their own lifestyles
at all. The fact is, you are a sex capitalist because, you imagine, you
need to engage in capitalism to survive — and you are certainly coerced
to need it. Rather than being freedom, then, it is, in fact, only
another kind of constraint, only another metamorphosis of capitalism
that marries commerce with sex explicitly and for the same capitalist
reasons and ends. This is not becoming unstuck, its remaining just as
stuck as we were before but with more naked flesh and bodily fluids to
distract and entice us [both things capitalism is about anyway]. Rather
than being a means to escape the societal prison that has been
constructed around us, its just something designed to keep us occupied
and distracted inside the prison walls, its a cage for performers to
perform in as their fellow prisoners are kept entertained and,
incidentally, imprisoned with them as well.
What is required is then to escape these prison walls and to explore the
lands beyond them. If we want to live as those who have become unstuck
then we must escape being stuck and have the bravery and courage
required for that in a world that will make us criminals and outlaws for
ever having had the nerve to stand up and say “I will no longer live as
a capitalist” or “I want anarchy”. To refute the system in words would
be bad enough but to do it in practice will make you someone marked out
and hunted — AND I WOULD NOT BE SHY IN POINTING THAT OUT TO YOU.
Capitalists and authoritarians, and those indoctrinated into these roles
— which is most of us — will not be shy about deploying their violent
coercions in our direction should we attempt to defy them — for, of
course, they imagine that their “order” must be maintained. [Anything
but the need for genuine self-responsibility and self-organisation, we
may imagine, is the undercurrent to this thought.] What are laws, in
fact, but attempts to frighten people into acquiescence and turn them
into obedient children coerced by their seniors and betters? Isn’t
childhood in many places merely a training in “doing as you are told”
and punishment if you don’t? It certainly seems to be a lesson intended
to pay off in capitalist and authoritarian adulthood. It seems sensible
to then assume that if the mass of us could be replaced with reliable
artificial life forms to carry out the tasks the rich and powerful
needed doing then their consequent attention to our incarcerated
existence would soon enough change into our even more rapid eradication.
But how do we then “become unstuck”? I will here forego any classical
anarchist narrative of “revolution” for, frankly speaking, such things
do not impress me. Neither, I may point out, do they often seem to work
if they even ever occur. [I recall David Graeber pointing this out too
in one of his books.] The numbers of genuinely anarchist revolutions are
certainly few and far between — Spain, Chiapas and Rojava being the most
frequently mentioned — but all open to obvious critiques. I would not
necessarily stop anyone who wanted such revolutions and I certainly
believe that people should ORGANISE THEMSELVES as they see fit, seeing
this as a marker of genuine anarchy. But, for me, it just doesn’t work
and so no form of anarchy will ever be “pure”, of course, not least
because, in a world of anarchy, centralised control is removed — thus
freeing people to be what they want to be. One has to accept all the
consequences and corollaries of this, not least that “anarchy” will
likely be compromising and necessarily “dirty” in its operation — after
all, anarchy is taking responsibility FOR YOURSELF and organising
YOURSELF; there’s no one else to do the dirty jobs for you anymore — for
that is what “self-organisation” means. Nature, although chock full of
examples of cooperation and self-organisation, for example, is not noted
for its conscious compassion as it progresses by consuming itself. Life
goes on, we might say, and what it costs is soon forgotten — as is THAT
it cost. In anarchy if you want people to behave in certain ways you
must come, educationally so, to a self-actualised habituation into doing
so: and that means forming positive, constructive, creative
relationships with other people, ones that can be, and perhaps regularly
become, mutually beneficial. Since violent coercion in the service of
authoritarian desire is removed from the anarchist’s toolbox, other
means, cooperative means, must suffice instead.
But what was it I said before? Oh yes: “Anarchism... must be a mixture
of illegalism, mutual aid, openly pursued insurrection, more mutual aid,
sabotage, and the cooperation — and so solidarity — by which almost any
form of life actually survives in the natural world.” I think that’s
pretty much it if one is going to kick capitalism in the nuts, leave a
shit on your boss’s desk as a parting gift, post a dog turd through your
now ex-landlord’s front door, and decide that from now on you will
embrace anarchy. You don’t necessarily need associates to do this [and,
who knows, I hear some of you even have families] but its a lot easier
to do if you’ve got some. Life, for pretty much anything that has it, is
presented as a socialised, self-organising affair and this will
certainly help you anarchise your surroundings and give you living
space. No anarchist I am aware of, not even the “individualist” ones
social and organisationalist anarchists look down on, seem to have
suggested a hermetic anarchist existence. Novatore claimed to need
friends and lovers, Armand theorised and practised amorous camaraderie.
It is very much a case of “find your own way” as you negotiate a path
through the cracks in our prison society.
What forms might this take? Thievery, squatting, robbery, burglary,
scavenging [I did some of that with some of my associates earlier on
today and recovered a usable fridge, some speakers, various kinds of
discarded food and some general medicines such as painkillers], but also
sharing, going without [yes, not everything a capitalist says you need
to have is something you REALLY need to have], borrowing [the kind where
you borrow with permission and the kind where you don’t], growing/making
things yourself, swapping things you have for things you want, and
expropriation. We all should be very well aware that capitalism, in its
rush to coerce and exploit, has made too much of everything and would
rather see it destroyed and going to waste than being put to appropriate
use in the cause of life. Any decent anarchist will see it as their task
to make good use of this fact and fund a lifestyle directly without
buying anything at all as much as this is humanly possible. At any one
time, for example, hundreds of thousands of buildings lay empty and
unvisited and many of them can be put to good use as places to live.
Some may only end up being very temporary but others may afford more
extended stays and can be made quite homely as a result. [Utilities can
be “arranged” if you have a little bit of knowledge and the necessary
courage to do what needs to be done.] Its all a matter of paying
attention, doing your research and observing what goes on around you.
Lots of resources are available which capitalist drones willingly pay
for but which there is absolutely no need to pay for at all. It only
takes the insight and the cojones to make the most of them and to make
things happen.
“This doesn’t sound much like anarchism” — you might now be thinking.
Isn’t anarchism when we bring down the government and everyone
miraculously realises that the values they used to be inhabited by have,
instead, changed into the values of Bakunin or Kropotkin or Goldman — or
maybe even Nestor Makhno? Well, that’s certainly a caricature of the
anarchism seemingly held to by some kinds of people. But its just not
one I find remotely plausible. Do you know how well armed governments
are and what it would take to overthrow them? [Do you know how many
people you’d need to even attempt it either?] And do you not realise
that, even if you did overthrow the government, all the people
roundabout you are programmed TO WANT A GOVERNMENT so that, inevitably,
you’d just get one again? [Think 1776 or 1789 or 1848.] And that, as
Alan Moore knew well when he wrote that “Ideas are bulletproof”, is a
far bigger problem than despatching a few people to the grave [although
that, to be fair, is hardly an easy or consequenceless thing in itself].
The greatest thing that anarchists in Spain or the autonomous peoples of
Chiapas or Rojava have done is take their own government into their own
hands for, in doing that, they have had to go against the broad sweep of
civilisation itself as it now manifests in capitalist and authoritarian
guise. They have managed to raise people educated into different values
and that has both taken some time, in all cases, as well is being an
ongoing process that never ends. This, in fact, is now all I am
recommending in my own way for the path to anarchy is certainly one that
must constantly and consistently be walked as stopping on your journey
is simply “getting stuck” all over again. And we don’t want that, now do
we? We want people who reach the point of no return in their own
self-education and self-organisation that they simply diverge from the
path to which they have been coerced [or any other path which
subsequently becomes a coercion] and defend their ability to go another
way — to the death if necessary. [And if you are genuinely serious about
it then it will always be necessary.]
Something that I think needs to be understood, then, is that ANARCHISTS
CAN’T CHANGE EVERYTHING and, in fact, they may only really be able to
change themselves. But, fortunately, it turns out that this is both
necessary and also enough. [Anarchists self-organise; they do not also
organise everybody else.] Anarchists are not expected to be fighters of
what in military circles is called “conventional war” [and they would be
very stupid if they did], the kind of war, known as a pitched battle,
where armies draw up opposite each other and then advance towards the
enemy lines where they proceed to slaughter each other. Anarchists are
much more like guerrillas, saboteurs, insurrectionists. They do what
they do, take what they need, and attack where they have to before
disappearing again back into the shadows. Ideally, you never even know
who they are or where they came from. It has to be that way for we are
few and the incarcerating surveillance state is increasingly ubiquitous
and staffed by many indoctrinated volunteers. This even applies to
apparently less nefarious activities such as mutual aid although you
should not convince yourself the state will also see it this way.
Increasingly, even helping someone with food or shelter is viewed by
state authorities as aiding and abetting an attack on the capitalist
lifestyle. Public space where homeless people gather is regarded as
space to be policed aggressively and in an extremely authoritarian way
reminiscent of claims to ownership of it. The needs of life are put
below the needs of authority to enforce its will and the needs of
capitalistic relations to be maintained [which is why, for example,
taking things that have been discarded in dumpsters is often regarded as
a crime and must be engaged in with appropriate caution]. Anarchists, we
must remember, are against the law and that can often be a reality that
has teeth. You should be ready and prepared to engage such biting jaws.
This, in fact, is the nitty gritty of “becoming unstuck”, an activity I
am convinced is, at a minimum, personal but which does not preclude its
also being necessarily social [although that can itself be expurgated in
several differing ways. I have outlined my theory of “anarchist
relations” in the book Mini-Manual of Anarchist Relations]. One can [and
must] begin to become unstuck personally and, in anarchist terms, what I
have described previously in literature as “egoistically”, but it must
always include operating procedures for interacting with others in
freedom for no one is an island and no one lives alone. This is the
truth behind the social anarchist theory of freedom which is that “no
one is free until everybody is free” or that, differently expressed,
“freedom is a relation”. I personally see no need to hold this over
against a more egoistic expression of freedom as “my own” or as a
characteristic of I myself which I claim and impress upon others by and
through my direct action; rather, it is a valuable [and necessary]
addition to it, one which reminds us that our own freedom is never
enough and that, if others joined us in expressing it, if others became
our associates and even fellow lovers as an expression of our free
association, then it would, in such cooperative expansion of our
relations and their associated interests, make it easier for us all to
live and associate freely, a necessary factor in becoming unstuck. In
this respect, then, “becoming unstuck” is a matter of growing and
spreading certain types of relationships amongst those with whom we have
to do. And this is something we can, and should, be doing right now.
And that is really my point here. Anarchy is not a far off, never-never
land, an apocalyptic event that will take place at some unknown time in
the future when anarchist gods have decreed it shall be so. Anarchy is
an activity of the visceral here and now. And it is always only this. It
is never anything else. I take seriously Alan Moore’s observation in a
2009 interview with Margaret Killjoy that where we live right now “is a
kind of anarchy”. Yes, along with Moore, I really think that this is
true. For what else is a genuine anarchy but this, the activities of
self-determining beings as they act for themselves and upon each other
consequentially? Perhaps this anarchy is not CHRISTIAN enough for you
[many anarchies are not much more than secularised Christianity], not
enough like the heaven or Utopia that you had imagined? BUT WHY SHOULD
IT BE? WHY IS ANARCHY HEAVEN OR UTOPIA? This is childish fiction,
fantasy, it is cuddling your security blanket and hoping things will be
alright. It is doodling wishful thinking in your notebook and then
imagining that — SOMEHOW — wishing it will make it so if you wish for it
hard enough and be a good little boy or girl like pleasing Santa Claus
in order to get the present you wanted. I don’t know how such ideas of
anarchy ever arose for when I read any anarchist writer of historical
vintage they all seem absolutely sure in their knowledge that the
achieval of anarchy is about struggling and fighting and education and
propaganda and all round direct action in pursuance of the lives you
wish to lead. Certainly, many had social and political visions of a
somewhere they wanted to get to — but none thought it would ever be just
handed to you on a plate. It was always about direct physical struggle.
So what I am saying here about “becoming unstuck” is that THIS IS THE
ANARCHY. This is is as anarchistic as it ever gets. There is no other
time to wait for. Its now or never, its here and now. Life, and not even
life as an anarchism, is simply a matter of using today in such a way as
it creates a tomorrow more as you would wish it would be. It is direct
action today which has consequences for tomorrow. It is my autonomy and
agency and free association used in tandem with those with whom we share
an affinity to create social circumstances imbued with freedom, newly
burgeoning emancipations, creativity and play. There is no time to wait
for with anarchy for we have always been in it. It was this, as Graeber
and Wengrow and as Alan Moore in his interview with Margaret Killjoy now
seem to agree, that has GOT STUCK. There was never any guarantee, and
never could be any guarantee, that anarchy would not, or could not, get
stuck, for, in practice, such anarchy is simply consequent on how the
things within it organise and arrange themselves. It could be in ways
all sorts of anarchists have tried to imagine [and continue to imagine].
But it could also be like this. The anarchy, after all, emerges from the
relations of the things within it. We ended up with this iteration. Yet
the ultimate pay off for it being anarchy at all is that it is not
subject to final and ultimate control. Such a complete and total stasis
of relations would result in anarchy’s immediate collapse for it would
no longer be LIVING anarchy. Anarchy is change, being unstuck, having
the possibility to be other or different or organised in alternative
ways. This is why anarchy and being unstuck are so identified — because
they are really different ways of saying the same thing. And this is
also why “free association” is perhaps its most defining characteristic.
Such change, such alternative organisation and relationships, is defined
by our ability to freely associate and to diversify relations. When we
seek such things [deliberately, purposefully and perhaps even illegally]
we are seeking anarchy in its manner of operation; we are attempting to
let anarchy operate as it will rather than as some group of people wish
to make it become and wish to make it stick at being.
What I am arguing for here, then, is a particular understanding of
anarchy. It is not one that is the embodiment of an anarchism for this
anarchy is not, is never, a dogma or the manifestation of a dogma. This
anarchy is simply possibility and opportunity, the character of
ceaseless change. This anarchy is now and not in some yet to come era. I
think of this analogously to the Christian theological understanding of
eschatology and what is meant in talking about “the last days”. In that
world of thought one is led to ask, for example, what Jesus means when
he talks about “the kingdom of god”. Is this a future place or time that
god himself will induce, invoke and impose on the world, something
nothing to do with us, something we are simply to expectantly and
hopefully wait for, knowing that then everything will be made alright?
Or perhaps “the kingdom of god” is something to do with how we behave
now, something we create when we relate to others in certain ways,
something to do with when, in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus tells people that
“the kingdom of god is among you”? Perhaps, as some others say, it is
also a mixture of these two, something we can participate in here by our
activities but also something that only god can consummate in a future,
imposed utopia? The point is here that there are different ways to
understand how an undesirable or, at least, undesired, way of living
becomes a more desired and assumedly beneficial way of living.
By analogy to all this, I am saying that anarchy — or rather the
character of that anarchy which we have always been a part of and could
never escape — is created in the relationships we make and our approach
to the lives that we live: it is a matter of our direct action. Anarchy,
I am also saying, is not in any way something that is consummated or
created in an impossible future as a generalised and imposed state of
affairs. In the first place, imposition is not anarchy at all and, in
the second, anarchy, so I am maintaining, is only affected [and
effected], characterised, by our own direct actions -from which it
emerges. In other words, we do not, and have never, directly created
anarchy [how could we? It created us!]; rather, and in this subsequent
sense, it emerges from the relationships we create with other people and
the circumstances we create for such relationships. [“Anarchy is a
relation” as Graeber agrees in Direct Action.] It is, in this sense,
much more like “the kingdom of god” we create now in our interactions
with each other [and which Jesus encouraged through practices of mutual
aid for his followers in the Gospels] than it is like the future
creation of god which then gets imposed. Anarchy is then both a natural
state of affairs, the ability to live and organise ourselves as we see
fit, but also a character we inflect this reality with and example in
our actions and our relations, a preference for certain kinds of
relationships and not others.
In neither case, however, is it a dogma. It is much more like the
“letting go” that some Eastern religions have theorised as the basis of
their understandings of the world and the self [i.e. it is the opposite
of acquisition or possession]. Anarchy, in both senses of the word as I
have used it in the previous paragraph, is also itself, in this
understanding, a way to understand the world [and this is perhaps why,
in the past, I have described it in spiritual terms and thought of it
spiritually as well]. But this is just language so there’s no need to
worry. It is simply saying that material reality can be imagined to have
spiritual [and thoroughly metaphorical] dimensions which help us to give
meaning to our lives and to our actions, meaning that authoritarian
capitalism wants to take away from us and make inaccessible to us
because it wants to be the arbiter of what our meaning shall be and it
wants to control and impose this upon us as a prescribed set of meanings
from which we must choose. [Hence why dyed in the wool authoritarian
capitalists are always inventing cultural wars to pursue, entangling all
sorts of people in psyops to their own advantage and the oppression of
us all.] Of course, these meanings that it gives us will never be
meanings that are dangerous to its own prosperous existence. They are
meanings which enable our getting stuck and which keep us stuck and
which reinforce that societal prison which has been constructed for our
purposeful containment and exploitation. They are meanings contrary to
the free-flowing, ever-changing, diverse, emancipatory and associational
anarchy that I have been describing as that which is a matter of our
being unstuck. Life is then really this choice between being stuck or
being unstuck, between fixed and imposed associations or free
associations, between fascist monotony and anarchist diversity, between
authority and autonomy.
That is why this anarchy I describe is, and must be, an illegal,
insurrectionary, outlaw anarchy. It is an anarchy which knows no law,
recognises no authority, refuses the dogmatism and incarceration of ever
“getting stuck” — either for malevolent or benevolent reasons — and
denies the existence of property as a matter of control based in an
arbitrary ownership. This anarchy is a permanent insurrection against
authority and control, against coercion and exploitation, against
domination and centralisation. Its model is nature, naturally occurring
reality, which is self-organising and cooperative, insistent on the need
for mutual aid and springing from its own, naturally-endowed autonomy.
This is an anarchy which will always find a way to escape the
imperatives anybody wants to impose upon it; it is itself the imperative
to have its own agency and act in accordance with it. It is cooperation
with others against the common enemy “thou shalt”. It is defiance of
authoritarian violence and courage in the face of the threat and
actuality of draconian punishments that are deployed to keep people
frightened and scared as those who do not make use of the freedoms with
which their birth as human beings endowed them and which would destroy
the power of capital and the coercions of authority if ever they were
widely realised and so employed. This anarchy is self-organisation not
forced organisation; it is free association not forced association; it
is direct action not coerced action. This anarchy is self-directed
interest not capital or authoritarian interest.
This anarchy is, if I may say so, an egoistic awareness, materially and
socially deployed in order to defeat centralising coercions and
accumulations of power [or, in other words, any and all bodies that set
themselves up in order to tell you, or people generally, what to do and
how to think or behave or organise yourselves and your time]. In this,
it does not really matter whether these coercions and accumulations are
imagined as benevolent or not [and so whether they are capitalistic or
even anarchistic — in the sense of being the outworkings of some
organisational anarchism or formation of relationships] — the fact that
they are centralising coercions and accumulations of power at all is
enough. Self-directed, self-organising, activity simply wants to remain
these things and retain these characteristics. Such activity is not
interested in being directed by any outside force or being organised
arbitrarily by others. Anarchy, in other words, simply wishes to retain
the character of anarchy and THIS IS WHAT MUST BE UNDERSTOOD. Free
associations, then, do not wish to become forced associations and the
latter will never be a replacement for the former. Self-organising
people do not then wish to become a people organised from without or
from above: they want to remain those who organise themselves according
to their own will, desires and purposes to their own self-satisfaction.
Such arbitrary changes from free association to forced association and
from self-organisation to forced and arbitrary organisation are,
instead, a way something unstuck becomes something stuck. They are
something which changes the character of the anarchy we exist within.
They are something which forces us to live under authority as
capitalists because authoritarian capitalists have decreed it so [or
under an arbitrary anarchism because arbitrary anarchists have decreed
it so] and have deployed material forces and assets to enforce their
will.
I do, then, have some anarchistic characteristics of anarchy which
enable and activate my own understandings of it — and have discussed
them in my rhetoric concerning anarchy before. They are autonomy,
agency, free association, affinity and a decentralised understanding of
relationships or, if you prefer, human community. These are my attempts
to describe an authentic character of anarchy and ascribe an authentic
character to anarchy. The issue here, for me, is to imagine systems of
relationships with agency, autonomy and free association built into them
[which, as I understand it, nature builds into all life simply by dint
of it being life] but which make control over them as impossible as we
can. What really disturbs the authoritarian, it seems to me [and not
least in the authoritarian’s capitalist era], is that people might act
and relate in ways they have decided we may not act, in ways which deny
and erase their authority — and so, of course, these are ways in which
we absolutely must relate and act if only to show that we can and in
order to highlight the fact that authority can, AND MUST, be defied and
erased if we are to reinforce and enable the character of anarchy that
we want to see [one which amplifies its unstuck nature] as opposed to
the setting it in capitalist amber that the authoritarian capitalist
wants. In one sense, then, our anarchy is simply defiance of authority
as the enforcement of things becoming stuck raised to a general
principle: it is, in fact, none the worse for this for this mirrors a
nature which does what is possible to do without any arbitrating
authority at all. [This is why life is naturally evolutionary and
UNSTUCK: it must be, that is how it works, and so that is what we must
seek to maintain.]
I understand, however, that this may be scary, even terrifying, for
some. One reason authoritarian societies remain is because they offer a
kind of [always already imposed] security or surety in return for their
control. This, in fact, is part of their insidious nature and the
insidiously devious contract they insist their already incarcerated
inhabitants have signed. “Remain in our prison and do as you are told
and we will keep you safe”, they whisper in their sibilant
surreptitiousness. This strikes me as about as genuine and authentic as
the machines in The Matrix telling the humans that, for their own safety
and security, they should stay in the pods where they are held as a
captive power source. Of course, they emphasise the “safety” and
“security” of such an arrangement rather than the necessary
incarceration it also entails. But what is the world like beyond the
machine city and how might I and my fellow humans develop in our own way
if left to decide for ourselves? Who knows or cares? Just do as you are
told, its best for everyone. But it is not best for everyone and neither
is it best for them in equal measure. Its locked in domination,
exploitation, hierarchy, life on somebody else’s terms. That the anarchy
I characterise and describe cannot abide. That it must resist. That it
must raise an insurrection against. That it will become illegal for.
That it will utilise all the cooperation, mutual aid and solidarity that
created it to begin with in order to defeat. To stand for anarchy is to
stand against, and opposed to, any and all kinds of “getting stuck”.
Consequently, I recommend it to you wholeheartedly and without
reservation.
ANARQXISTA GOLDMAN X