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Anarchism in 5̶ 1̶5̶ 20 minutes for people who think ‘but we’re bound to have leaders anyway so we oughta do it well’

Among my non-anarchist friends, there’s a common contention that we need to have leaders to get stuff done, so it’s inevitable that we need hierarchies, so anarchism is unrealistic.

This is a misconception. First, most anarchists societies were successful and functional, up until the point when capitalists and/or state communists bombed them; to call this a failure of anarchism is like saying indigenous societies are a failure because colonisers genocided them. (Indeed, most State-refusing indigenous societies share important ethical principles with anarchists, and indigenous folk were, and continue to be, a lot more politically sophisticated than white people give them credit). But even in the strict scope of modern anarchist theory, no one has ever argued that everybody in a group should do the same things. No one thinks that people are identical and interchangeable. If I want to build my own house, and I have a friend who knows about building houses and I don’t, I’ll invite my friend to help, and if they tell me ‘do this part first’ I’ll do that part first, and moreover I’ll do what I can to reciprocate the good they’re doing for me, to give them the gratitude and recognition that their skills deserve. What I won’t do is like, if my friend tells everybody ‘ok so as the Buildmaster I’m giving the orders here, so new rules: everybody who lives in a house anywhere has to pay me 10% of their earnings, also from now on everybody with brown eyes has to serve me sexually, so get a gun cos we’re invading the neighbours next week’. I would say ‘what? no, fuck you.’ This is anarchism.

(Some anarchists call the first type of organisation, with a coördinator figure telling a group what to do consensually, a ‘just hierarchy’, and say that anarchism is about abolishing the unjust, coercive hierarchies only. Other anarchists will furiously reject that any kind of hierarchy can be good, get outta here with that vanguardist bullshit, and the first kind of thing isn’t a hierarchy at all, obviously, it’s consensual recognition of expertise during perfectly non-hierarchial mutual aid. This debate isn’t really about anything cos everybody agrees that the first thing is fine and the second isn’t, but anarchists pick up fights all the time, it kinda comes with the personality type.)

Anarchist are allergic to words like ‘leader’ or ‘commander’, because they usually code for ‘power-grabbing scammer’. But in practice it’s fairly common to spot a clearly identifiable Anarchist King doing planning or coordination in various contexts; that’s also a kind of labour, and in many cases it’s a relief when somebody else is motivated to do this labour if you’re in the mood to just do—or fuck up—stuff with your hands.¹ (Though distributed, spontaneous decisions are underrated in their benefits, not the least of which is to build up autonomy with responsibility). The difference from hierarchies is, the Anarchist Troops follow the Anarchist King because they trust her insight for *this* action, it’s not a special class of people; and we get to tell her no, to revoke consent at any time,² we don’t elect one Anarchist President to decide everything, then regret it quietly for 3.99 years. And like, if my friend tells me ‘put the biggest window in the north side’ I’ll say no, I want it in the south side, even if I’m not an architect I’m a gardener & my plants want the sunlight, is there a reason why you want it north-facing? And my Anarchist King will have to justify their commandments to me; I’ll only respect a decision if I believe each specific decision makes sense. (People who are into anthropology will have noticed this is how so-called ‘chiefs’ usually work in indigenous societies, too.)³

The problem with your boss, and with your government, isn’t that coordinating is inherently evil; it’s that there’s no safeword.

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So far this seems really obvious, and most people in the world would agree that yeah, folks shouldn’t be forced to do stuff without ongoing consent, your liberty should be respected to the extent that it doesn’t infringe on others’. Hot take, I know: freedom and justice are good. What makes anarchism different from other political approaches is how to reach this goal. I sometimes wish we would define it positively, what it _is_ rather than what it’s _against_; in which case my pick would be for ‘unity of means and ends’. A core point of anarchist philosophy is that people are changed by what they do. It follows that you can’t reach a good place by doing bad things; not just ‘can’t’ in the ethical sense, in that it’s wrong to do a massacre, but even in the cold-blooded utilitarian realpolitik sense, if your revolution does guillotine massacres it’s going to become its own counter-revolution, every time, because now the leaders are massacrers, now massacring is a thing you do. If your State controls capital, your newfound interests are going to bounce you right back into capitalism. And if your revolution has a police class, you’re going to be a bastard.

See, the reason all cops are bastards isn’t that you have to be a bastard to want to be a cop. I assume a lot of cop-candidates buy into pop media and want to be heroes, or are just after a job that will hire them, and that they see as a net good for society. The problem is that you can’t stay a cop (or a capital owner, or a government official) without *doing* the daily acts of oppression-building; the position demands that, structurally. Which means that, for as long as you stay in the position, you’re performing actions that are the actions of a bastard. And if you walk like a bastard, talk with bastards, and armlock hungry shoplifters like a bastard, your *emotions* will become the emotions of a bastard.

When defending the need for the police, liberals often say that anarchists are too naïve about human nature; insert Anakin meme here, from our point of view it’s statism which is naïveté. Granted, people have the potential for terrible evil and abuse; but if so, why would you trust them with exclusive control of violent power? I certainly don’t trust *me* to wield the One Ring. The anarchist contention is that humans will never remain nice ‘on the inside’ while in a social position that incentivises oppressive actions. Just by convincing yourself to perform these actions, however exceptionally at first, your subconscious is already coming up with all sorts of elaborate rationalisations on why this is actually a valid thing for you to do. If you’re doing that alongside a well-defined minority, then your class interests change, and when your class interests change you soon find yourself defending the interests of this new class, rather than the common interests you had set out to defend. It doesn’t matter if the class is ‘landlords’ or ‘People’s Revolutionary Commitee of Land Redistribution’; landlording will, very literally, make a lord out of you.⁴

On the positive side, every time we do things together in a constructive manner, we’re rebuilding ourselves in a positive direction, too. Think of how a couple may do counselling and therapy to develop the skills of consent and emotional awareness and negotiating mutually satisfying decisions etc. These things don’t come out of being born a good person, they’re skills that we build, and that extends politically, too. If everybody is practising how to listen to a whole group, how to decide together which demos are we going to put our energy into, how to resolve bitter conflicts about poster design etc., then when a hurricane hits we have the skills to organise how to get food for the people in the shelter, before the government hierarchies can even reach the neighbourhood. When the police identifies an ‘anarchist leader’ and arrests them, nothing happens, everybody else was getting practice too. This is why anarchist practice focus on ‘societing’, on doing things the good way right now however we can (‘mutual aid’, ‘dual power’, ‘prefiguration’, ‘propaganda of the deed’ and so forth).

Of course, no one maintains that we should *merely* move to a commune in the woods and live in a happy polycule of love while the world burns. (Though building a happy commune of love can be a very valuable insurrectionary act). You can’t have a good society if you close your eyes to injustice elsewhere. And none of us knows what’s the best solution to fix the current society (Gods know none of us agree on that point lmao). We just know what *isn’t* a solution; we know that setting up the Anarchist Party to seize control of the Anarchist Republic and run the Anarchy Police is a fool’s errand; this has not only never worked, but it cannot. Whereas by resisting power with direct action you’re not only helping society right now, you’re also making yourself into the kind of person who won’t stand for injustice, and you’re propaganding the deed to everybody who hears of you, who will feel empowered to embody justice too, ‘wait you mean people break the law around here? :>’, and so on virally. The Zapatista insurrection began with 6 people in the woods, and their first 10 years were spent chatting with the surrounding villages, practicing jungle survival autonomy, and building momentum; they beat the Mexican State in armed struggle and are holding onto a free, autonomous community since 1994. The actions of small groups can feel insignificant compared to the might of the all-powerful State, but the State is rotten and crumbly, and a small light can start a big fire.

Especially when we’re all arsonists.

(in Minecraft).

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Asides:

¹: Because this is the Internet, I want to clarify explicitly that when I say things like ‘Anarchist King’ or ‘The Boss of Anarchism’, I’m being extremely silly for the sake of it’s funny.

However, it is the case that sometimes a coördinator figure gets in over their head and starts acting *actually* like the king of anarchists. When this happens the people in question have to be knocked down their peg, and mockery is an excellent way of doing it (it’s how many indigenous societies guard against hierarchy popping up). Just be sure to mock the hierarchism, not other unrelated attributes like so-called ‘intelligence’ etc.

The difference between anarchists and other socialists isn’t that we’re immune to the allure of power; it’s that, to quote Malatesta, we feel bad when we do it. So if your comrade starts acting like a boss, call them out, and they’ll regret it and take measures.

²: 19th-century theory predates the modern discussion of consent, but anarchists talked about the same principle as ‘free association’, and the problems of consent translate to the political sphere, too (it can be manipulated, it’s sensitive to power dynamics, it must be fully informed and continuously renegotiable etc.).

In the past, the word ‘spontaneous’ in European languages (spontané, spontanea etc.) was often used in its original meaning: ‘voluntary, done without coercion’. Because today the derived meaning ‘impromptu, done without previous planning’ took over, there’s a lot of contemporary misunderstanding that some early anarchists’ insistence on ‘spontaneous action’ was opposing planned action, when what they were opposing is coerced action. (The meaning should be clear from their arguments taken as a whole, it’s just isolated quotes that can be misleading.) (credits to Zoe Baker for this observation.)

³: E.g. the Mayan ‘mandar obedeciendo’, to command by obeying, which the Zapatistas took as their model of bottom-up ‘representation which is not replacement’, in explicit response to white-leftist vanguardism.

⁴: A common trick used by door-to-door salespeople is to get *you* to do a small favour for them (Ma’am, can you help me with my car tire? may I use your telephone, it’s an emergency, etc.). One might expect that the *seller* would do you a favour, to exploit a feeling of indebtedness, but that scam is too easy to spot. If, however, you perform an action to help someone, your subconscious will find it hard to continue to see that person as suspicious. Performing actions will modify your feelings to justify the action retroactively; if you helped this person they must be on your side, because you helped them.

In a positive use, this psychological technique is the ‘behavioral’ part of ‘cognitive-behavioral therapy’. In a terrible use, this was one tool to build consensus for colonialism (‘yes these societies may look free and functional, but have you considered this argument: we’re enslaving and robbing them? they must be terrible, otherwise why would we do that?’).

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Theory implicitly cited here: Malatesta, Kropotkin, Subcomandante Marcos, Graeber.

(People who are not anarchists, was this an easy/fun read?)

(People who are anarchists, any disagreements or thoughts?)