Anarchy (- no rulers) and capitalism (- you keep the spoils of your own labor) are inextricable. They go hand in hand.
"Communism" is a misnomer, as communes are a perfectly valid and helpful dwelling style. In a healthy world, there would be many, as well as many houses in clusters and many cabins in the deep woods, etc etc. Most people would live in different dwelling formats throughout their lives. Communes are great for those just starting out, which is why the uber-brainwash institution we know as "university" offers commune-style dwellings.
The problem is SOCIALISM, which is antithetical to anarchy. Socialism requires redistribution of wealth (which requires theft) by govt, and that is opposite to the principles of anarchy.
Everyone already does anarchy most of the time. There is no uniformed creep standing over us when we brush our teeth, cook a healthy meal instead of eating just french fries, when we lend the neighbor a leaf blower, when we bring baked goods to work to share, on and on. '
There is only a tiny fraction of human activity on earth that is anti-anarchist. We will now remove it by removing the ruling bloodlines who truly believe their inbred asses to be special. The Gutenberg press is a toy piano compared to the internet, and look at the revolt it catalyzed.
I think we have very different understandings of capitalism and socialism.
Historically, anarchism emerged in response to capitalism, as part of the broader socialist movement. Most agree that anarchism split with communism in the persons of Bakunin and Marx, and their storied relationship. The Marxist version of socialism was obviously successful in many parts of the world, but the river of anarchy has also continued to flow unchecked.
Neither tradition has any love for capitalism. It's only very recently that some American libertarians have tried to call anarchy and capital the same thing, but it doesn't take much observation to see they're quite opposed.
All that said, I can get on board with your vision of a proliferation of free communes, where people keep, use, or share what they make, at no one's behest. I'd argue capital is the biggest obstacle to that end that we now face.
"Different understandings" is irrelevant here. Look at the etymology of the words anarchism and socialism and communism. Not the definitions in Merriam spookfest Webster. The etymologies.
No, personal wealth (capital) is not an obstacle. It's the opposite. And money is not wealth. Dollars are IOUs. Wealth is what you can buy with dollars, or what you can produce for yourself to use and enjoy. It is also your relationships, in each of which both sides should "profit".
Profits ARE people. Profits put food on the table. They pay worker wages. Without any form of profit (if we use it in a general sense and not just a financial one), we die. Nothing is free: if you refuse to do the work of picking fruit from the tree, you starve. Everything takes work, or in place of work, the money you earned.. doing work.
Ofc, the ruling bloodlines - the ultimate socialists - have stolen what they have, so they are not an example of the organic and reasonable life.
This article is encouraging. I've now read two books on anarchy and have an anthology of anarchy to dip into. But I've read a lot of Hannah Arendt; I've read her On Revolution, for instance, four times. I'm wondering if you or any of your readers here would consider her at least partially an anarchist. (Kind of like James C. Scott in Two Cheers for Anarchy--a book I love.) I don't think Arendt anywhere describes herself as an anarchist. But in On Revolution, she describes the self-understanding of ancient Athens not as a democracy (a pejorative) but as isonomy--not in its modern sense but as "no rule." She also frequently cites the "institutions" that spontaneously occur after what she calls every legitimate modern revolution. These institutions are no more than people getting together locally to take care of political business and in the process, discovering and loving public freedom. This happened, she says, during the Parisian Commune, the Russian Revolution, and the Hungarian Revolution. The Army stopped those in Paris, but the revolutionaries themselves stopped them in Russia (but not without coopting the name of the popular institutions--"soviets") and the state in Hungary. (Professional revolutionaries, she complains, frequently replace multi-party systems with one-party systems out of a kind of counter-dependency.) Elsewhere she offers the French Resistance as an example of people self-organizing without rulers as alternative governments within occupied and Vichy France. Arendt celebrates the U.S. Constitution but criticizes it for not institutionalizing the political life of New England's townships. She wants "representative democracy" and the vote replaced by what we pleonastically call "direct democracy."
Anyway, any thoughts on how much of her thought might be anarchist in nature would be appreciated. No problem, of course, if you or your readers don't have the time to address this!
Thanks for this in depth comment! I confess I haven't read a word of Arendt, altho I've often seen her name come up. You've piqued my interest, so now I'll go check her out!
Ha! I wonder if there are others like Arendt who don't claim to be anarchists but who at least partially fit the mold. Martin Buber and the selfsame James C. Scott come to mind. I just finished a great book on Buber's anarchy: Martin Buber's Theopolitics by Samuel Hayam Brody. Brody seemed to confirm what I suspected: for Buber, biblical theocracy is anarchy.
Oh I love that! Haven't talked about it much here yet, but I spent 25 years of my life in the church, and saw every political persuasion claim the faith as their standard bearer. Personally, I'm convinced the early church was a proto-anarchist experiment. In a nod to Lewis, I'm sure even their barest essentials would boil to rags whatever sad excuse for Christian faith the fascists in the US think they have. Here's to a resurrection of better theologies!
Peter, this warms my heart. I thought I was the only one who sees the early church as an experiment in anarchy. I find close parallels between the Jerusalem "revolution" in Acts and the Solidarity revolution of 1990, e.g., and the Maidan Revolution of 2013-14. I think the early church movement was as much political and economic as it was religious (esp. since they didn't make such fine distinctions back then).
William Blake and Leo Tolstoy are, in my opinion, the quintessential Christian anarchists. Tolstoy of course openly claimed anarchism as a philosophy, while Peter Marshall makes a good case that Blake was a forerunner of anarchism, along with his contemporary William Godwin (and my goodness was that family fascinating!).
I highly recommend Marshall's history of anarchism, Demanding the Impossible. He devotes a whole section to exploring the Christian roots of anarchy, tracing its lineage from the early church through the Ranters and Diggers and Brethren of the Spirit, among others.
He also includes sections on Taoism and Buddhism with the same goal. It's quite the scope, but it sure slaked my thirst when I first started getting into anarchy, and even for the well-read I'm sure he provides new insights and rich details.
I've never heard of Godwin! I recently got Marshall's Demanding the Impossible and Guérin's No Gods No Masters anthology and hope to dive in soon. I look forward particularly to Marshall's sections on Christianity, Taoism and Buddhism.
Very true, the spheres weren't so distinct back then. And when you have so much material in Paul's letters to the churches about property, common ownership, debts, accumulation of wealth, and leadership, it takes some serious mental gymnastics to pretend politics and economics had no place.
There's so much good stuff out in the last 30 years on the theological side attempting to rescue Paul from the "Oh, politics? Paul said to obey Caesar" default. Work by Richard A. Horsley, Neil Elliott, Sylvia C. Keesmaat, and the more recent work on Paul by N.T. Wright kind of headlines this new openness to Paul's economic and political thought. I'd love for their essays to get more attention from political theorists, but academia is still so siloed. Horsley's work in particular provides so much material on economics and politics relative to the early-church-anarchist argument I want to make, but he doesn't cross into political theory. My favorite writers who overlap Christian theology and political theory are William T. Cavanaugh and Luke Bretherton. (Scholars of Judaism seem to have far less trouble integrating Jewish political and religious thought.)
But political theology in general seems to be making a comeback. The term scares the liberals, I guess, but the material, generally speaking, would challenge the conservatives.
Peter. There are so many interesting points in here, I found myself highlighting half of the essay. I'll definitely have to dig back into this and dissect it because you present an ton of interesting arguments and examples that remind me of real world examples which do work and could be scaled, as you say, horizontally.
I find parallels to this in urbanism, where so many city leaders orgasm over the need for high rise development without understanding what they are throwing away in pursuit of this. Meawhile, a city like Paris provides a glorious example of one of the most active, bustling, dynamic, transit-friendly cities ... all without skyscrapers in the city core, and for good reason. For whatever it lacks, Paris is a city built at a human scale, and it shows when you spend some time there. People, movements, and neighborhoods feel far more connected than in cities filled with vertical housing towers.
Overall, I feel that diverse, rooted, horizontal movements not only seem to connect better to and nourish human values, they also tend to be resilient enough to outlast the towering fads.
Absolutely. Since cities are the present, and maybe the future, it's really valuable for me to see examples of urban planning and development that aren't built around cars or corporate offices. I fully agree that when it comes to resilience, less is more. Small is strong.
On pure analysis , Anarchy would face significant challenges in the modern world of complex global systems, interdependent economies, and tech infra that require coordination. While small-scale anarchist communities could exist experimentally, complete absence of hierarchical authority would struggle to address large-scale problems like climate change, pandemic response, and resource management across national boundaries.
I think Patrick makes good points, and also I want to point out that on the contrary, hierarchical leadership of the kind we have now is directly responsible for the global issues you mention, especially climate change.
When both corporate and government decision-makers are unaccountable, disconnected from their constituents and employees, beholden to the billionaire class, and overall composed of the kinds of people least likely to cooperate and compromise, it's hard to imagine them solving anything.
Anarchy doesn't need to mean chaos or confusion. You can create large, complex, multi-layered systems for making decisions, managing things, and distributing resources without unnecessary overhead.
The clearest expression of this today is worker-owned enterprises. It turns out CEOs are not only grossly overvalued, they're also completely unnecessary. Let workers own and run their businesses, and things usually get done better and with higher quality.
Click and drag from the world of labor to every other sphere of society, and you have an idea of what a self-organizing anarchist society might resemble.
I agree that this absolutely holds true when we imagine anarchy in today's social landscape. However, I think we can (and probably should) imagine that it is also highly possible that climate change, pandemics, and international resource management would not be issues (or at least be far less critical) in a world where more local, provincial, vernacular systems of living were the majority.
Experience shows that, at least today, these movements are far more sustainable, less reliant on international movement and trade than what we are accustomed to in contemporary capitalist societies, and thus exert far less pressure on the drivers of these global issues.
Anarchy (- no rulers) and capitalism (- you keep the spoils of your own labor) are inextricable. They go hand in hand.
"Communism" is a misnomer, as communes are a perfectly valid and helpful dwelling style. In a healthy world, there would be many, as well as many houses in clusters and many cabins in the deep woods, etc etc. Most people would live in different dwelling formats throughout their lives. Communes are great for those just starting out, which is why the uber-brainwash institution we know as "university" offers commune-style dwellings.
The problem is SOCIALISM, which is antithetical to anarchy. Socialism requires redistribution of wealth (which requires theft) by govt, and that is opposite to the principles of anarchy.
Everyone already does anarchy most of the time. There is no uniformed creep standing over us when we brush our teeth, cook a healthy meal instead of eating just french fries, when we lend the neighbor a leaf blower, when we bring baked goods to work to share, on and on. '
There is only a tiny fraction of human activity on earth that is anti-anarchist. We will now remove it by removing the ruling bloodlines who truly believe their inbred asses to be special. The Gutenberg press is a toy piano compared to the internet, and look at the revolt it catalyzed.
The time is now.
I think we have very different understandings of capitalism and socialism.
Historically, anarchism emerged in response to capitalism, as part of the broader socialist movement. Most agree that anarchism split with communism in the persons of Bakunin and Marx, and their storied relationship. The Marxist version of socialism was obviously successful in many parts of the world, but the river of anarchy has also continued to flow unchecked.
Neither tradition has any love for capitalism. It's only very recently that some American libertarians have tried to call anarchy and capital the same thing, but it doesn't take much observation to see they're quite opposed.
All that said, I can get on board with your vision of a proliferation of free communes, where people keep, use, or share what they make, at no one's behest. I'd argue capital is the biggest obstacle to that end that we now face.
"Different understandings" is irrelevant here. Look at the etymology of the words anarchism and socialism and communism. Not the definitions in Merriam spookfest Webster. The etymologies.
No, personal wealth (capital) is not an obstacle. It's the opposite. And money is not wealth. Dollars are IOUs. Wealth is what you can buy with dollars, or what you can produce for yourself to use and enjoy. It is also your relationships, in each of which both sides should "profit".
Profits ARE people. Profits put food on the table. They pay worker wages. Without any form of profit (if we use it in a general sense and not just a financial one), we die. Nothing is free: if you refuse to do the work of picking fruit from the tree, you starve. Everything takes work, or in place of work, the money you earned.. doing work.
Ofc, the ruling bloodlines - the ultimate socialists - have stolen what they have, so they are not an example of the organic and reasonable life.
Get back to me if you like.
This article is encouraging. I've now read two books on anarchy and have an anthology of anarchy to dip into. But I've read a lot of Hannah Arendt; I've read her On Revolution, for instance, four times. I'm wondering if you or any of your readers here would consider her at least partially an anarchist. (Kind of like James C. Scott in Two Cheers for Anarchy--a book I love.) I don't think Arendt anywhere describes herself as an anarchist. But in On Revolution, she describes the self-understanding of ancient Athens not as a democracy (a pejorative) but as isonomy--not in its modern sense but as "no rule." She also frequently cites the "institutions" that spontaneously occur after what she calls every legitimate modern revolution. These institutions are no more than people getting together locally to take care of political business and in the process, discovering and loving public freedom. This happened, she says, during the Parisian Commune, the Russian Revolution, and the Hungarian Revolution. The Army stopped those in Paris, but the revolutionaries themselves stopped them in Russia (but not without coopting the name of the popular institutions--"soviets") and the state in Hungary. (Professional revolutionaries, she complains, frequently replace multi-party systems with one-party systems out of a kind of counter-dependency.) Elsewhere she offers the French Resistance as an example of people self-organizing without rulers as alternative governments within occupied and Vichy France. Arendt celebrates the U.S. Constitution but criticizes it for not institutionalizing the political life of New England's townships. She wants "representative democracy" and the vote replaced by what we pleonastically call "direct democracy."
Anyway, any thoughts on how much of her thought might be anarchist in nature would be appreciated. No problem, of course, if you or your readers don't have the time to address this!
Thanks for this in depth comment! I confess I haven't read a word of Arendt, altho I've often seen her name come up. You've piqued my interest, so now I'll go check her out!
Ha! I wonder if there are others like Arendt who don't claim to be anarchists but who at least partially fit the mold. Martin Buber and the selfsame James C. Scott come to mind. I just finished a great book on Buber's anarchy: Martin Buber's Theopolitics by Samuel Hayam Brody. Brody seemed to confirm what I suspected: for Buber, biblical theocracy is anarchy.
Oh I love that! Haven't talked about it much here yet, but I spent 25 years of my life in the church, and saw every political persuasion claim the faith as their standard bearer. Personally, I'm convinced the early church was a proto-anarchist experiment. In a nod to Lewis, I'm sure even their barest essentials would boil to rags whatever sad excuse for Christian faith the fascists in the US think they have. Here's to a resurrection of better theologies!
Peter, this warms my heart. I thought I was the only one who sees the early church as an experiment in anarchy. I find close parallels between the Jerusalem "revolution" in Acts and the Solidarity revolution of 1990, e.g., and the Maidan Revolution of 2013-14. I think the early church movement was as much political and economic as it was religious (esp. since they didn't make such fine distinctions back then).
William Blake and Leo Tolstoy are, in my opinion, the quintessential Christian anarchists. Tolstoy of course openly claimed anarchism as a philosophy, while Peter Marshall makes a good case that Blake was a forerunner of anarchism, along with his contemporary William Godwin (and my goodness was that family fascinating!).
I highly recommend Marshall's history of anarchism, Demanding the Impossible. He devotes a whole section to exploring the Christian roots of anarchy, tracing its lineage from the early church through the Ranters and Diggers and Brethren of the Spirit, among others.
He also includes sections on Taoism and Buddhism with the same goal. It's quite the scope, but it sure slaked my thirst when I first started getting into anarchy, and even for the well-read I'm sure he provides new insights and rich details.
I've never heard of Godwin! I recently got Marshall's Demanding the Impossible and Guérin's No Gods No Masters anthology and hope to dive in soon. I look forward particularly to Marshall's sections on Christianity, Taoism and Buddhism.
Very true, the spheres weren't so distinct back then. And when you have so much material in Paul's letters to the churches about property, common ownership, debts, accumulation of wealth, and leadership, it takes some serious mental gymnastics to pretend politics and economics had no place.
There's so much good stuff out in the last 30 years on the theological side attempting to rescue Paul from the "Oh, politics? Paul said to obey Caesar" default. Work by Richard A. Horsley, Neil Elliott, Sylvia C. Keesmaat, and the more recent work on Paul by N.T. Wright kind of headlines this new openness to Paul's economic and political thought. I'd love for their essays to get more attention from political theorists, but academia is still so siloed. Horsley's work in particular provides so much material on economics and politics relative to the early-church-anarchist argument I want to make, but he doesn't cross into political theory. My favorite writers who overlap Christian theology and political theory are William T. Cavanaugh and Luke Bretherton. (Scholars of Judaism seem to have far less trouble integrating Jewish political and religious thought.)
But political theology in general seems to be making a comeback. The term scares the liberals, I guess, but the material, generally speaking, would challenge the conservatives.
Peter. There are so many interesting points in here, I found myself highlighting half of the essay. I'll definitely have to dig back into this and dissect it because you present an ton of interesting arguments and examples that remind me of real world examples which do work and could be scaled, as you say, horizontally.
I find parallels to this in urbanism, where so many city leaders orgasm over the need for high rise development without understanding what they are throwing away in pursuit of this. Meawhile, a city like Paris provides a glorious example of one of the most active, bustling, dynamic, transit-friendly cities ... all without skyscrapers in the city core, and for good reason. For whatever it lacks, Paris is a city built at a human scale, and it shows when you spend some time there. People, movements, and neighborhoods feel far more connected than in cities filled with vertical housing towers.
Overall, I feel that diverse, rooted, horizontal movements not only seem to connect better to and nourish human values, they also tend to be resilient enough to outlast the towering fads.
Absolutely. Since cities are the present, and maybe the future, it's really valuable for me to see examples of urban planning and development that aren't built around cars or corporate offices. I fully agree that when it comes to resilience, less is more. Small is strong.
On pure analysis , Anarchy would face significant challenges in the modern world of complex global systems, interdependent economies, and tech infra that require coordination. While small-scale anarchist communities could exist experimentally, complete absence of hierarchical authority would struggle to address large-scale problems like climate change, pandemic response, and resource management across national boundaries.
I think Patrick makes good points, and also I want to point out that on the contrary, hierarchical leadership of the kind we have now is directly responsible for the global issues you mention, especially climate change.
When both corporate and government decision-makers are unaccountable, disconnected from their constituents and employees, beholden to the billionaire class, and overall composed of the kinds of people least likely to cooperate and compromise, it's hard to imagine them solving anything.
Anarchy doesn't need to mean chaos or confusion. You can create large, complex, multi-layered systems for making decisions, managing things, and distributing resources without unnecessary overhead.
The clearest expression of this today is worker-owned enterprises. It turns out CEOs are not only grossly overvalued, they're also completely unnecessary. Let workers own and run their businesses, and things usually get done better and with higher quality.
Click and drag from the world of labor to every other sphere of society, and you have an idea of what a self-organizing anarchist society might resemble.
I agree that this absolutely holds true when we imagine anarchy in today's social landscape. However, I think we can (and probably should) imagine that it is also highly possible that climate change, pandemics, and international resource management would not be issues (or at least be far less critical) in a world where more local, provincial, vernacular systems of living were the majority.
Experience shows that, at least today, these movements are far more sustainable, less reliant on international movement and trade than what we are accustomed to in contemporary capitalist societies, and thus exert far less pressure on the drivers of these global issues.