Is anarchy compatible with modern society?

Problems of scale and shape in imagining the futures

I got a thoughtful series of comments from

Stephen Thair

on my recent post May all roads lead to solarpunk, and decided they deserved a whole post or three. He asks:

“the scale issue you mention tangentially in this letter as one of Ellie's issues. Does Anarchy scale beyond Dunbar's Number? Or is Anarchy a state we can only return to once our current technological society collapses due to resource exhaustion?”

I think the answer, like the question, is two-fold. Anarchy has already scaled well beyond Dunbar’s number, in many times and places, but it might be that our society collapses before any meaningful transition away from capitalism occurs this time around. I hope not, but things are moving fast.

To get an accurate picture of what anarchy looks like “at scale,” we need to define what we mean. Scale is partly a problem of aesthetics. When we think of scaling, we often imagine increasing revenue or reach, greater access to resources, more products or content created and distributed. These best describe capitalist and governmental institutions, and they all have to do with growing in size. This vision of growth is perhaps best captured by the skyscraper: a shimmering tower of glass and concrete, showing everyone who and what is important.

But there is more than one way to grow. You can be horizontally huge while remaining vertically miniscule. When imagining how anarchy could scale, don’t think size, think shape. Organizational structures that are egalitarian and decentralized are not tall, they’re wide and deep. The roots remain invisible. Underground networks connect everything. Skyscrapers, while impressively strong, will eventually fall. But a forest can last a thousand years.

Take all the things we consider success in capitalist nation-states — wealth, power, prestige, consumption — and turn those upside-down. That’s your anarchist aesthetic. All these signifiers would be replaced with their counterparts. In the culture, that would mean we change the status games we play, so that people are rewarded for being generous and kind, not for hoarding things or using others. Flaunting wealth as a marker of status would be replaced by signs of generosity.

As an aside, that doesn’t need to mean people dress plainly or have boring things. Beauty could still hold a high value in the culture, but we would not be trained to look at the accumulation of many or large things as beautiful. Does this translate to beauty standards for bodies and sexuality? Absolutely. Sex wouldn’t need to sell; it might even return to being sacred, which also doesn’t have to mean contained inside monogamous marriage.

In the built environment, such an upside-down aesthetic would mean better diffusion of people and resources between urban and rural, resulting in less urban sprawl — in fact, greater density could be supported by urban agriculture, localized manufacturing, and the knowledge and ability to repair things and recycle materials. Extremely tall buildings would not be constructed to show off shiny corporate offices. If necessary, they would feature shared living and working spaces.

I hope this rough sketch shows how anarchy at scale might not seem like it was at scale. It might seem significantly scaled-down, even if, in terms of raw numbers of people and things participating in the system, it were the same or even larger.

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Now in terms of whether anarchist organizing principles can operate outside of limitations such as Dunbar’s number, they already have. It’s questionable whether we can even measure something such as Dunbar proposed to quantify, but regardless, we have plenty of proof that people can live without hierarchy in large numbers.

You might say there have been two kinds of successful anarchy, then and now: organized resistance against capitalist and state systems, and intentional rejection of developing those systems in the first place.

To take the second first, much of what we’re taught about prehistorical societies is a myth. It turns out, many of our ancestors were quite aware of the threat hierarchy posed to their ways of life, and created social structures to prevent it from emerging. This isn’t the myth of the “noble savage,” who is usually considered noble either through blissful ignorance or esoteric wisdom, neither of which does anything for those living in industrial capitalism. This is about anthropology discovering (or rather, helping us remember) that the tapestry of human history is long and varied. That even without knowing what things would be like in the future, many people still chose not to obey leaders or hoard property.

I often feel like reminding folks that humans evolved around 2 million years ago. Our prehistoric ancestors, living tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago, were not dumb. We’ve had a very long time to figure things out. One of Graeber and Wengrow’s main points in Dawn of Everything is that it’s very strange to flatten all those countless thousands of years into generalizations that imply that during that time not much changed. That we moderns are the only ones with cultural, technological, or scientific revolutions. Just because people didn’t write everything down until a few thousand years ago doesn’t mean nothing happened. In fact I think we’re much the poorer for having forgotten so many of our oral and natural traditions.

For specifics, Bob Black’s Anarchy After Leftism includes a whole chapter on primitive affluence, showing evidence that prehistorical people often lived healthier lives than we do by several metrics. He also clarifies that the ecological and health declines we see even in early prehistory were not so much the result of hunting and gathering, but rather their sedentary alternatives. It’s when humans give up a nomadic lifestyle that we start to break down the ecosystems we rely on.

David Graeber, in this Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, tackles these same questions of scale and expectation, showing how many prehistoric societies took great pains to consciously channel the will to power, preventing individuals from accumulating wealth and asserting control, and ensuring basic necessities were available to everyone. He personally spent a number of years in Madagascar, and tells a fascinating story of resistance against state control by a society considered prehistoric that’s still alive today.

For details about contemporary struggles against state and capital, Peter Gelderloos outlines many examples in the exquisitely useful Anarchy Works. In general, anarchist organizing has meant building labor power within already industrialized societies, engaging in offensive strategy to take over the means of production and distribution, then defensive strategy to maintain sovereignty and refuse to go back under rule. So far, all these movements have eventually been crushed by various national militaries working in tandem. Yet they continue to reemerge.

I was particularly moved by stories like the Wapo prison rebellion, where prisoners successfully kicked out their guards and self-organized a peaceful mutual aid network within the prison, which was only crushed with incredible state violence. The Spanish civil war in the 1930s is probably the biggest contemporary example of anarchist organizing. Entire regions of the country, including millions of people, were self-managed and answered to no government. Many places got rid of money entirely. Others reorganized banks and credit. Again, this experiment in freedom was only crushed by the combined military force of several other nations — and betrayal on the part of communist allies.

You might notice a common theme here, namely violence. That’s to be expected, since capitalism is a global system. It wouldn’t make sense for anarchy to work in one area, and for capital to leave it politely alone. Any viable alternative is a threat to the stability of capital, so of course they need to be stamped out. So if anyone asks for anarchy on a scale larger than isolated experiments within a nation state, I’d say more power to you, and I’d also say that of course we’ll never see it happen until capital loses its global reach. This is why the work of anarchy is destructive as well as creative, as long as the whole world remains in the grip of the machine.

But that “until” can be tricky. What I want to stress is that we don’t have to wait — in fact, we can’t wait — until capitalism falls to see if anarchy is possible. Capitalism won’t fall of its own accord, until the crumbling biosphere renders all industry impossible. At that point I doubt any system of organizing human life will work. Instead, we can practice imagining alternatives, by remembering what’s already been done, and implement what we can here and now.

We live and learn by example. We’re incredibly deft apes — monkeys with museums and music. We have more than we need to make it. We just need the political will to forces the changes we need, and the social will to care for each other as we do.

Scaling all our efforts will be much easier when we’re already well practiced at living freely within the restrictions of the world as it is.

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