Right, after learning more about him I realized he does fall squarely in the anarchist camp. Haven't updated this post since I published it a while ago to a very small audience, but now might be a good time...
No dictating; these short sketches are descriptive not prescriptive. It’s no presumption to note general patterns in the worldviews of those who claim the label anarchist, no more than for any other belief.
Thanks for the link tho, I always appreciate the chance to learn more about different milieus.
Thank you for this, it was very enlightening. The one thing I can’t understand about anarchy is what happens when one person wants to be in charge (of anything.) Because even if a society wants to be an anarchist society, won’t there always be someone who disturbs that balance? (Say another country that wants to take over, or a person who wants more power, etc.) I’d love to know your thoughts!
Great question! This is definitely something anarchists continue to wrestle with and likely will for always. I have something of an answer in two parts:
1) Yes there will probably always be those people, and certainly always the possibility of change. There’s no guarantee we’ll get anarchy (or anything else) right. Furthermore, every anarchist movement to date has been effectively usurped or betrayed by power-hungry people. So yeah we’ve got our work cut out for us.
Given all this, I think it means we’ll never arrive at a place where this won’t be a danger. We’ll always have to adapt to avoid precisely the pitfall you mentioned. But this isn’t a problem with anarchy so much as the reality that change is constant and we’ll always have to face our shortcomings no matter what system we’re in.
2) I think anarchy is uniquely poised to do this well, because if we ever achieve a state that can roughly be called anarchist, there will exist no institutions of power that a power-hungry person could seize. They could try to build such things from scratch, but they’d meet firm resistance from an anti-authoritarian culture.
What makes it so easy for tyrants to take over today is that our world is already structured to centralize power, with a culture already positioned to accept authority. After the Herculean effort needed to overturn this system in favor of freedom and autonomy, we’ll be much better positioned to handle any would-be rulers.
This is so helpful thank you, and I really appreciate your thoughtful response!
1) I wonder if it would be possible to have some kind of structure in place that would allow people within that structure to enjoy a more anarchal existence? Maybe this wouldn’t be considered a pure anarchism, but it would allow a more day to day expression of it?
For instance, I always think about the Tibetans, who were a passivist community, but because the Chinese weren’t and they wanted Tibet, they took it. I still think passivism is an ideal worth achieving, but maybe to achieve it we need to have a way to protect it?
2) This I struggle with. Because even native cultures that had no hierarchal structure were able to be taken over by other native cultures that did. Even if there isn’t central authority, there are still people that can be taken over.
And I guess all of this is just me wondering whether anarchy can be achieved communally if not entirely? Still thinking this all through of course, but thank you for joining me in the discussion. You’ve given me a lot of food for thought!
Hey Elle, thought I responded and realized I didn’t! My bad.
Anyway yes, your wondering about how to protect pockets of freedom is precisely where the anarchist movement is today. From TAS (temporary autonomous zones) to the territory of Rojava, people the world over are struggling with this question of how do we defend our communities here and now while the empires still stand?
Most of us anticipate a shift towards anarchy on a global scale will be predicated on trans-national coordination of movements; in other words, we can’t just do it one country at a time. But that would necessitate a global anarchist sentiment in a critical mass of people, in which case the revolution would already be well underway.
It’s quite the quandary for sure. More on those timelines in my next post. But I for one am comfortable with contradiction, so long as it’s two truths and a mystery.
I love that you are comfortable with the contradiction. It's a really interesting idea to be pondering and I really appreciate you thinking it through with me!!! Now I have so much more to think about.....
Peter, this correspondence has really helped me a lot. Would you mind if I published a link to your original post, and then included our comments to one another, in a post and then opened it up for discussion?
That would be wonderful! To be honest I’ve wanted to get in on your discussion threads for a while, I’ve just been facing logistical/financial issues. Being platformed on your newsletter to any extent would be an honor.
Great post. One tweak: Noam Chomsky was absolutely an Anarchist, and even wrote a book on Anarchism
Right, after learning more about him I realized he does fall squarely in the anarchist camp. Haven't updated this post since I published it a while ago to a very small audience, but now might be a good time...
You lost me at presuming to dictate what an anarchist does or does not believe.
In fact, I’d recommend you check out Gian de Bellis over at panarchy.org here and his position of “anarchism without anarchists.”
http://panarchy.org/debellis/st-imier1.html
No dictating; these short sketches are descriptive not prescriptive. It’s no presumption to note general patterns in the worldviews of those who claim the label anarchist, no more than for any other belief.
Thanks for the link tho, I always appreciate the chance to learn more about different milieus.
Thank you for this, it was very enlightening. The one thing I can’t understand about anarchy is what happens when one person wants to be in charge (of anything.) Because even if a society wants to be an anarchist society, won’t there always be someone who disturbs that balance? (Say another country that wants to take over, or a person who wants more power, etc.) I’d love to know your thoughts!
Great question! This is definitely something anarchists continue to wrestle with and likely will for always. I have something of an answer in two parts:
1) Yes there will probably always be those people, and certainly always the possibility of change. There’s no guarantee we’ll get anarchy (or anything else) right. Furthermore, every anarchist movement to date has been effectively usurped or betrayed by power-hungry people. So yeah we’ve got our work cut out for us.
Given all this, I think it means we’ll never arrive at a place where this won’t be a danger. We’ll always have to adapt to avoid precisely the pitfall you mentioned. But this isn’t a problem with anarchy so much as the reality that change is constant and we’ll always have to face our shortcomings no matter what system we’re in.
2) I think anarchy is uniquely poised to do this well, because if we ever achieve a state that can roughly be called anarchist, there will exist no institutions of power that a power-hungry person could seize. They could try to build such things from scratch, but they’d meet firm resistance from an anti-authoritarian culture.
What makes it so easy for tyrants to take over today is that our world is already structured to centralize power, with a culture already positioned to accept authority. After the Herculean effort needed to overturn this system in favor of freedom and autonomy, we’ll be much better positioned to handle any would-be rulers.
This is so helpful thank you, and I really appreciate your thoughtful response!
1) I wonder if it would be possible to have some kind of structure in place that would allow people within that structure to enjoy a more anarchal existence? Maybe this wouldn’t be considered a pure anarchism, but it would allow a more day to day expression of it?
For instance, I always think about the Tibetans, who were a passivist community, but because the Chinese weren’t and they wanted Tibet, they took it. I still think passivism is an ideal worth achieving, but maybe to achieve it we need to have a way to protect it?
2) This I struggle with. Because even native cultures that had no hierarchal structure were able to be taken over by other native cultures that did. Even if there isn’t central authority, there are still people that can be taken over.
And I guess all of this is just me wondering whether anarchy can be achieved communally if not entirely? Still thinking this all through of course, but thank you for joining me in the discussion. You’ve given me a lot of food for thought!
Hey Elle, thought I responded and realized I didn’t! My bad.
Anyway yes, your wondering about how to protect pockets of freedom is precisely where the anarchist movement is today. From TAS (temporary autonomous zones) to the territory of Rojava, people the world over are struggling with this question of how do we defend our communities here and now while the empires still stand?
Most of us anticipate a shift towards anarchy on a global scale will be predicated on trans-national coordination of movements; in other words, we can’t just do it one country at a time. But that would necessitate a global anarchist sentiment in a critical mass of people, in which case the revolution would already be well underway.
It’s quite the quandary for sure. More on those timelines in my next post. But I for one am comfortable with contradiction, so long as it’s two truths and a mystery.
I love that you are comfortable with the contradiction. It's a really interesting idea to be pondering and I really appreciate you thinking it through with me!!! Now I have so much more to think about.....
Peter, this correspondence has really helped me a lot. Would you mind if I published a link to your original post, and then included our comments to one another, in a post and then opened it up for discussion?
That would be wonderful! To be honest I’ve wanted to get in on your discussion threads for a while, I’ve just been facing logistical/financial issues. Being platformed on your newsletter to any extent would be an honor.