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Title: Communities of Egoists
Author: Joseph Parampathu
Date: 2022-02-09
Language: en
Topics: community, egoism, Karl Marx, Mikhail Bakunin, union of egoists
Source: Retrieved 02/10/2022 from https://c4ss.org/content/56033

Joseph Parampathu

Communities of Egoists

Anarchism and egoism have long shared a tension that follows all

anarchist groups: how do we organize in a way that respects individual

autonomy while providing the benefits of collective organization? The

work of organizing is often the constant answering of this question: how

much does this organization benefit me, and why should I provide support

for this organization? This tension has been pointed to as the basis for

many failures in anarchist organizing, generally with leaders of some

sort arguing that their fellows are too unwilling to compromise on

ideals, and egoists decrying the organization’s inability to meet the

needs of its people. Stirner tackled this idea of egoist organization

through his idea of the “union of egoists,” wherein egoists choose to

associate or disassociate based on their desire to organize or not.[1]

Put another way, for the egoist, organization is worthwhile as long as

it is beneficial, and as soon as it is no longer beneficial,

organization should no longer concern the egoist.

Historical anarchist practices such as mutual aid and community

organizing find their strength in approaching this tension as a

necessary feature of proper anarchist organization. This tension between

the organization’s desire to maintain itself, even despite the needs or

will of its members, and the members’ desires to preserve their own

autonomy, even at the expense of their collective material benefit, is

the same tension which the followers of Bakunin and Marx debated

endlessly, resulting in the expulsion of Bakunin from the fifth congress

of the International Workingmen’s Association. Anarchist organizing

should take this split to heart because it was the philosophical dispute

that underlies the tension between anarchists and orthodox Marxist

socialism.

An organization can manifest in forms that are no longer anarchist, or

which threaten the freedom of its members to freely associate with it.

This tendency for organizations to manifest their own structural desires

— which are separate or wholly divorced from the desires of its members

— is the beginning of its devolution into the forms which anarchists

fight against, such as the state or corporate form. The organization

which has subjected its members to its own will beyond the point at

which these members experience a net loss from associating with the

organization, but which nonetheless continues to use their membership as

a lever for its continued existence, is by any anarchist’s measure, no

longer serving the needs of its members. This potential for the

transformation of an organization from a freely associated union into

the state-form or corporation requires that all anarchists resist this

process and fight for the dissolution of such organizations.

If egoists and anarchists recognize this potential for failure in

organization, how do they go about setting up properly anarchist

organizations? Anarchist projects of mutual aid and community organizing

find their strength in exploring the means by which the organization can

serve the individual, even to the expense of the organization’s

existence. The failure of anarchist organizations to survive is not a

failure of organization itself but, in the anarchist sense, a testament

to the transient nature of members’ desires. Calcifying an organization

that does not change to meet its members’ needs, or does not dissolve

when it no longer meets its current members’ needs, is to set forth on

the perilous path towards a “transitional” lifelong Politburo.

Acknowledging the natural lifespan of anarchist organizations is a

necessary fact for anarchist organizers who seek to use mutual aid and

community organization as a means of serving communities, as opposed to

serving organizations for their own sake. There are clear parallels

between this birth and death and rebirth cycle within the collective

needs of organizing peoples and the “creative destruction” that

Schumpeter expanded from Marx’s works. [2]

Anarchist organizing in practice plays out in the forms of interaction

between anarchists (self-identified or otherwise) when they participate

in protests, labor actions, and group decision making of all forms.

Understanding the underlying tensions between anarchist organizing

itself and the various desires of individual anarchist actors is

necessary to navigate the group dynamics of these organizations. While

there may be certain group actions that are so anti-anarchist that no

anarchist would rightly support them, and there may be some decisions of

an individual anarchist that no group could justify allowing on behalf

of the group, there are various penumbra between the black and white of

anarchy in theory and organization in practice. One might say that it is

in these gray areas that the theory becomes practice and anarchy of the

individual meets the anarchy of the group. When we explore these gray

areas we find the limits of non-anarchist methods and the benefits (to

individuals and to groups) of seeking anarchist solutions to a problem

that might otherwise divorce the group’s anarchists from their

affiliation with the group.

In the years following the global financial crisis of the last decade,

the Occupy Wall Street movement attempted to physically occupy the space

of Zuccotti Park outside New York City’s Wall Street in the financial

district. After a few months of severe police action against the

protestors, they were eventually forced out of the physical space at

Zuccotti Park and continued their organizing mostly through online

spaces attempting to target smaller physical spaces at later points.

While the original protest lasted, it was both a useful test of

anarchist practices in action as well as an opportunity for individuals

to learn about their own power to influence group actions. In a space

with no centralized authorities and freed from the expectation to do

anything more than provide for the existence of the space and its

members, the protest thrived for a short time. After being forced into

online spaces regulated by the media on which they gathered, the

individuals found a decidedly different space. As they transitioned from

a space that was free because they had liberated it to a space that was

“free” because it sold their data to advertisers, consensus decision

making and the free form flexibility for individual members to form

their own working teams disappeared. Instead, the movement to a

centralized digital space transformed the relation of members to the

movement from one of functional hierarchy, where hierarchies existed in

temporary forms as needed by individuals and the organization and

disappeared when no longer needed by both, to one of anatomical

hierarchy, where the structure represents organizational hierarchy with

the organization above and individuals below serving organizational

needs. [3]

We might further expand this description to encompass both an existing

functional hierarchy between movement supporters as a whole and the

organization (as represented by its various members) and a subgroup

consisting of the members interacting through the online digital

organizing space and the faction of the movement which those members

represent as interacting in an anatomy of hierarchy (existing within the

larger functional hierarchy). Thus, even when the larger movement

retains its horizontal structure, a pocket of anatomical hierarchy may

form and threaten the integrity of the larger movement’s non-domination.

Regardless of whether or not the larger movement is harmed by the

emergence of hierarchical structures within this pocket, anarchist

members within that subgroup will find the subsequent lack of autonomy

stifling and would rightly dissociate.

As egoists attempt to organize in and through mutual aid or community

organizing, they only need to ask the same questions that any egoists

ought to ask of any situation. If the mutual aid action is pleasing or

otherwise beneficial to one’s material or class interests, then an

egoist would rationally participate. When an egoist seeks to formulate

organization in ways that appeal to other egoists, the same question

ought to guide their own thinking. Anarchists form organizations with

the basic understanding that they ought to serve the needs of their

members or the community they exist to serve. This organizational egoism

is necessary to a properly anarchist formulation of organizing and asks

the organization a question analogous to that which each egoist asks

themselves. Does the organization in its present sense meet the needs of

our present community? If this is not the case, the organization must

either be changed or disbanded. The organization that seeks to continue

to exist despite being unable to answer this question affirmatively,

ought to understand that it is continuing for its own sake in spite of

its inability to meet its own stated purpose. It has become a zombie

organization that typifies the “state” structure. That is to say, even

despite failing to meet the needs of its community, it continues to

accost them through its needless continued existence. An egoist

anarchist faced with this organization, would rightly work to end it and

free its members from that yoke, or otherwise, simply remove themselves

from it.

An egoist organization, if it is to use that terminology, has a duty to

its members to ensure that its continued existence is in each of their

best interests, or otherwise remain neutral when those members choose to

leave the organization. While it is certainly likely that the interests

of the organization and the individual may evolve over time and with

changing circumstances, an egoist and an egoist organization ought to be

of the mutual understanding that they associate to fulfill mutual needs,

and dissociate when these needs are no longer properly served. It is in

furtherance of this idea that Malatesta warned of the dangers of

accepting the violence of the state through electoral politics and the

inability of such systems to work against privileged classes. [4] Power

cannot be used to create non-power, because power, in being used,

negates the existence of non-power. Anarchy exists not where power is

taken by anarchists, but where power is erased.

Organizing as unions of egoists and working to provide mutual aid, we

ought to consider the benefits of heeding the complaints of other

egoists. If the organization is in danger of alienating individual

members, through an unsavory insistence on subservience, or some other

reason, then the organization ought to rightly consider its actions and

their consequences. While organizers and “party leaders” have commonly

decried these people as unwilling to compromise or be “practical,” there

is a resilience that the anarchist organization can find in being

willing to consider each of these complaints.

Courtney Morris, in covering the FBI informant Brandon Darby’s rampant

misogyny and alienating aggression towards other members, points out how

continuously vetting ourselves and the organizations with which we work

is necessary for a conscious security culture. [5] For an anarchist

organization to protect itself properly, it should be centered on

supporting its members foremost. Calls to unity that jettison members’

perspectives, however minority, risk removing anarchism from the

organization, leaving nothing worth saving behind.

Conflict within an organization necessarily stress-tests it for future

conflicts and ensures that it is resilient to outside pressures while

maintaining a focus on providing for its individual members and service

communities. The anarchist organization that understands the benefits of

healthy conflict as a means of sorting out its organizational structure

and providing an open forum for members and service communities to

provide feedback on organizational decision-making finds a strength in

this conflict which it would otherwise lack. By building conflict into

one’s organizing as a means of facilitating growth and centering the

questions that arise from tensions between individual desires and

organizational choices, anarchist organizations build a resilience that

makes them ready to adapt to change as needed. This readiness to adapt

is necessary for avoiding the calcification which can lead an

organization to lose sight of its purpose and continue to exist without

meeting the needs of its service community or members.

Direct action movements are considered “prefigurative” in that they

prefigure their approaches to current proposed actions based on the

future they hope to engender. By organizing horizontally, allowing

members to associate or dissociate at will, and rejecting anatomical

hierarchies, direct actions can prefigure anarchist ends through the

means they employ. In utilizing an affirmatively feminist,

anti-speciesist, and anti-classist security culture anarchist

organizations protect themselves from state infiltration while providing

the proof of work for their proposed futures. Bakunin’s colleague James

Guillaume considered prefiguration to be the fundamental improvement of

anarchist tactics over Marxism. [6] In understanding this prefiguration

of ends in means, egoists know that if they take part in an organization

that is no longer anarchist, then the end result of that organization’s

actions will also be non-anarchist. Organizations of anarchists must

constantly struggle with this tension between organizational goals and

individual desires. The willingness to engage this tension as a

necessary function of anarchist organizing can separate the fully

calcified anatomy of hierarchy from the anarchist organization. How this

tension is resolved becomes the test of whether its members retain their

autonomy as individuals acting through an organization, or whether they

have become the instruments of the organization’s will.

Radicalized by the poverty of the Great Depression, Ella Baker worked to

empower communities to utilize their own resources, in common, for their

own benefit. In encouraging members of the Black south to protect

themselves through organizing in their own defense for themselves and

for each other, the movement for civil rights kept consensus decision

making at its core, and organized around affinity groups with the

knowledge that individual groups acting in common empower each other

while empowering themselves. [7],[8] Individual groups could retain the

protection from responsibility or blame for the actions of other groups

if they turned out poorly, while ready to provide support in solidarity

with them. In the rhizomatic structure of various anarchisms working

together, determining the origins and overarching strategies of working

towards anarchy is both unimportant and an unnecessary burden.

Anarchisms as a family find strength in this milieu where origins cannot

be neatly divided and responsibility is shared amongst a diversity of

tactics and actors.

It is likely that the differences between Bakunin and Marx’s followers

were too great for the International to remain a cross-factional

organization. Likewise, organizations which are willing to go to the

extreme of pushing out or bulldozing over the perspectives of their

individual members in favor of organizational dominance will find

themselves continuing to alienate egoist members. An egoist in union

with these organizations would be right to dissociate from the

organization if it no longer suited them. The organization that aims to

take an anarchist stance to mutual aid and community organizing ought to

rightly consider whether doing so will allow it to meet its stated

purpose. The organization that throws out its members’ views in the

search of unity may find itself united only through isolation. For

organizations that caution their members to make practical sacrifices in

furtherance of organizational desires, I caution those organizations to

consider taking their own advice and making organizational sacrifices in

furtherance of continuing their mutually beneficial union with egoists.

[1] Stirner, M. (1995). Stirner: the ego and its own. Cambridge

University Press.

[2] Joseph, A. (1942). Schumpeter, Capitalism, socialism, and democracy.

Nueva York.

[3] Swann, T., & Husted, E. (2017). Undermining anarchy: Facebook’s

influence on anarchist principles of organization in Occupy Wall Street.

The Information Society, 33(4), 192–204.

[4] Malatesta, E. (1926). Neither Democrats, nor Dictators: Anarchists.

Pensiero e Volontà.

[5] Morris, C. D. (2018). Why Misogynists Make Great Informants How

Gender Violence on the Left Enables State Violence in Radical Movements.

In J. Hoffman & D. Yudacufksi (Eds.), Feminisms In Motion Voices for

Justice, Liberation, and Transformation (pp. 43–54). Chico, CA: AK

Press.

[6] Franks, B. (2003). Direct action ethic. Anarchist Studies, (1),

13–41.

[7] Crass, C. (2001). Looking to the light of freedom: Lessons from the

Civil Rights Movement and thoughts on anarchist organizing. Collective

liberation on my mind, 43–61.

[8] Mueller, C. (2004). Ella Baker and the origins of “participatory

democracy”. The black studies reader, 1926–1986.