An Interview with Matthew Wilson
April 3, 2024
Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.
Matthew Wilson teaches at Prifysgol Abertawe (Swansea University) where he lectures on People, Organisation and Business. He is an active participant in the UK cooperative movement and is the author of Rules Without Rulers: The Possibilities and Limits of Anarchism.
The questions were compiled by Mark Evans who is a member of Real Utopia’s Outreach and Events Team. We are also exploring the possibility of organising a live talk with Matt on the topic of anarchism. Feel free to get in touch if you have any question: https://www.realutopia.org/contact
First of all, I want to congratulate you on writing what I think is a very important book. But before getting into the arguments you present in Rules Without Rulers, could you briefly introduce yourself and maybe say something about how you became interested in anarchism?
Thanks Mark, it’s always nice to hear people have got something out of the book. I could spend a long time answering this, so, very briefly: I became very politically active in the mid-nineties, initially within the animal rights movements, and then quickly getting involved in other radical spaces – most of which were either explicitly, or at least substantially, anarchistic in orientation. As a teenager I got to know a bit about anarchism from reading pamphlets that I’d picked up at book fairs, demos and so on when I visited my brother in London, and I suppose it just always made sense to me. I think these things are often beyond (or before?) a clear rational analysis – I didn’t sit down and weigh up different ideological positions; I just always felt that anarchism was the political culture I was most comfortable with.
You are very critical of anarchism. However, you also appear to be very interested in saving anarchism from itself. What is your relationship with anarchism? What motivated you to write on this topic?
Obviously there’s a wide spectrum of thought contained within the basic idea of ‘anarchism’, so I’d say I’m critical of the ways some people interpret anarchism, and, conversely, I’m keen to defend and promote those positions which I think make more sense. Another way to think about that is to consider that our relationship to any ‘ism’ is always fundamentally a relationship with the ‘ists’ who bring it to life: I guess that’s obvious, but it’s somehow maybe important to remind ourselves that any debate we have about an ideological position is really a debate between people, and writing the book was a way for me to have a debate (though mostly indirectly) with some of the people who I felt were approaching anarchism in the wrong way. And by ‘the wrong way’ I don’t mean they were mis-reading Kropotkin; debates that try to get to some inner truth about an ideology are entirely pointless as far as I’m concerned. I just think some anarchists do a better job of explaining how the world works, and how to change it, than others.
Probably the most famous living anarchist – Noam Chomsky – has stated “There have been many styles of thought and action that have been referred to as “anarchist”. It would be hopeless to try to encompass all of these conflicting tendencies in some general theory or ideology.” Nevertheless, you write of an “anarchist common sense”. This seems to be the bedrock of your critique of anarchism. Could you say what you mean by this term and how you arrived at it?
I’ll start by saying that when I wrote the book, I’d never read Gramsci, but now that I have, I think there’s even more value in the idea of common-sense as a sociological concept. But at the time, I used the idea of common-sense for one very simple reason. The idea that there are all these different tendencies within anarchism is true, of course, but it’s equally true that when you look at a certain time and place – say, Europe and the US in the 1990s and 2000s – it’s easy to see a huge amount of commonality amongst the broad cultures and movements that see themselves as somehow connected to anarchism. Ideas around consensus-decision making, for example, were extremely widespread, whereas discussions about syndicalism were barely to be found. So yes, there are degrees of diversity, and even contradiction, but still contained within a wider common-sense. That’s all pretty obvious, and it shouldn’t really need to be said. The reason it was important to make that point was that highlighting the diversity within an ideology is often exploited as a way to deflect criticism. If we think of every anarchist as having their own reading of anarchism – if we dismiss, as Chomsky suggests, a ‘general theory’ of anarchism – then critiquing ‘anarchism’ becomes redundant. So then you criticise an individual anarchist, but then all the other anarchists can just tell themselves the criticism doesn’t apply to them. And so you’re left with having to critique millions of individual anarchists to make your point. Which is ridiculous, but people would pretty much say that to me; what do you mean ‘anarchists’ think this? Don’t you know we’re all different? How can you lump us all together? Rather than engage in the criticism itself, they’d hang everything on this diversity, and insist that I couldn’t possibly make such generalised criticisms. So it was important for me to stress that some of the criticisms I wanted to make did apply to very significant sections of contemporary anarchist culture, despite its diversity regarding certain issues.
By the way, this is common practice; I’m reading a lot of books by capitalists at the moment, and they do exactly the same thing when they discuss criticisms of capitalism – but that was just Milton Friedman, that was the 80s, that’s just one company, that’s not my idea of capitalism.
Your critique of anarchism focuses on three themes; freedom, ethics and power. From this you highlight a number of problems with contemporary anarchism that you describe as “unhelpful assumptions” and “unchallenged ideas”. To begin with, could you summarise what you see as the main problems regarding the anarchist position with freedom?
I think R.H Tawney summed up the fundamental problem with freedom very nicely with the simple maxim – freedom for the pike is death for the minnow. Ultimately, freedoms conflict with other freedoms. Politically, and emotionally, freedom is obviously an extremely powerful word; but analytically, it’s pretty much useless. It’s a classic ‘empty signifier’ which is filled with different meanings, depending on who’s using the term. You only need to look at how commonly freedom is evoked by people with entirely opposing views to anarchists to see it really doesn’t do much work as a concept on its own, and is always filled with other ideas, some of which can be pretty reprehensible. For the most part, making a demand for this or that freedom is really just a way for people to promote their own values whilst appearing to defend some universal and unambiguously positive position. Motorists need to be free from environmental zealots, hard-working people need to be free to get to work without being disrupted by protestors, markets need to be free to harmoniously organise the world, and so on…
Now, there are two ways to respond to this: either you say that certain claims to freedom aren’t legitimate – that they’re not really about freedom. Or you acknowledge that they are claims to freedom, and from there recognise that, as Tawney suggests, you’re often going to have to find a way to decide between competing freedoms. Option one just isn’t really tenable. It’s certainly not going to get us anywhere productive, because we’re just never going to get agreement on what constitutes a legitimate or illegitimate notion of freedom. So we’re left with option two, which is to do the hard work defending certain values, certain practices, certain beliefs, and making the case as to why they should have priority over other values, practices, beliefs. The problem with that, of course, is it offends our anarchist sensibility, because we’re supposed to be the defenders of freedom, not the people who take it away from others. But that’s just fundamentally dishonest and gets us off the hook from having to reflect on which things we would protect and defend, and which things we would somehow prohibit and prevent.
Ultimately, any society needs to make choices about the way it functions, the things it allows and disallows. A society can be more or less open, more or less controlling, and so on, but no society can be based on the simple notion of freedom. We need to be more honest about this, because we can’t avoid making those decisions; we can, however, stick our heads in the sand and pretend we’re not making those value judgements, and convince ourselves that we can just decide between freedom and unfreedom. By the way, this is exactly what liberal capitalism does, allowing the powerful to pass their own value judgements off as though they’re representative of everyone’s freedom. Again – we’re just defending the freedom to drive, the freedom to shop, the freedom to accumulate wealth… It’s pretty depressing to me that anarchists have so often followed the same logic, and if we ever had something approaching an anarchist society, I’d be very worried if we did so without getting a better grasp on what the abstract value of freedom really means in practice.
Next, could you summarise what you see as the main problems regarding the anarchist position with ethics?
The anarchist problem with ethics is really a corollary to its problem with freedom. And again, we see exactly the same problems within liberal capitalism, in theory and in practice. Ultimately, if you have to decide between competing demands for different freedoms than we need to make those value judgements, and if we’re going to do that, we need to think more about those values – in other words, we need to think more about ethics. I won’t go into more detail here about what that would look like, and I don’t really offer my own guidance in the book; I think this needs to be a collective, democratic project where we confront the possibilities of reasonable conflicts of values and find the best way to navigate them.
Finally, could you summarise what you see as the main problems regarding the anarchist position with power?
Anarchist views of power are more complicated, or at least, more diverse; there’s less of a common-sense. That said, the common-sense around freedom and ethics discussed above feed into anarchist understandings of power to a large extent, and the up-shot of that is that power is often seen as a totalising force held by certain elements of society – the state, capitalists, and so on – which is then used by those elements to deny the freedom of others. That’s true, up to a point, but power isn’t something we can get rid of, and if we got rid of the state and capitalism we’d still be left with questions of power. And, remembering that we’d still need to make value judgements about conflicting freedoms, we’d want to use our power to ensure certain decisions are upheld. As with freedom, and ethics, too many anarchists now believe in some possibility of a society where everyone is simply free to live the lives they want, and where power is never used to limit any one’s freedom. It’s a powerful vision which has inspired anarchists for a very long time, but I don’t see any empirical evidence or theoretical argument to suggest that’s a possibility.
Many anarchists propose consensus decision-making as a solution to these problems. You, however, are critical of this position. Could you say why?
I think there’s a lot to be said for the ideal of reaching a consensus, and I think the work that goes into finding a decision that everyone is happy with can be extremely productive. But the cultures of consensus-decision making which I’ve witnessed a lot are significantly informed by those common-senses we’ve been talking about, and it’s in the practice of consensus decision-making that you start to see how some of those flawed ideas come into play. So, for example, consensus cultures will always have certain ground rules, certain red lines, and so on, which are not covered by the process of consensus itself; too often, these are passed off as obvious, neutral positions which don’t need to be discussed or defended. So you see the parameters of particular values, of particular ideas about freedom, being enforced (implicitly or explicitly) without being open to debate. Now that might work well in a group of people who share those core values – and indeed, it often does work very well; the problem is when anarchists think that this same process will work just as well within a larger, more diverse community. It seems pretty obvious that a bunch of anarchists would struggle to reach consensus with a bunch of racists, or free-market fundamentalists or whatever. Consensus only really works when you exclude certain views from the start; of course, that is precisely what we should be doing, but we need to be honest that we’re doing that. And thinking back to power, we need to be more honest about what happens when consensus isn’t reached; there’s a great deal of depressingly naïve thinking within anarchism which sees consensus as the way to resolve those questions of conflict and power – if we all just agree, then there’s no problem. But it’s just a fantasy to think people will all just start to magically share the same set of core values, and we’re being pretty dishonest by not considering what we would do when people in a community simply can’t agree on some fundamental issues.
You propose a prefigurative approach to organising as a more hopeful way forward for anarchism. Could you say what this entails and what some of the challenges for such an approach to organising might be?
I’ve actually stopped using the term prefiguration, because it’s become so associated with a particular reading of prefigurative praxis – a reading I don’t really have a lot of time for. I’m personally using the term ‘reorganising’, but any way, the basic idea for me is that we need to be developing a counter-power, or counter-hegemony, in the here and now. For me, that means acting within and throughout every level of society, trying to organise according to different social logics; obvious examples are setting up cooperatives, building networks of mutual aid, running people’s assemblies, connecting to more progressive municipal projects like the Preston Model, and so on. None of this is new, and will be very familiar to your readers, but i think prefigurative forms organising too often fall on one side of an unhelpful binary: on one side, you have an overly purist vision where compromise is viewed as unacceptable, so you have these activist silos where people convince themselves they’re acting entirely outside of the system and that they’re not engaging with the corrupt practices of the market, or the state, or whatever. The other side almost flips this, and seems to just ignore the challenges of trying to organise differently within the systemic constraints imposed by the world we currently inhabit. So you end up with what some people call a post-political mindset, where you convince yourself it’s just people’s imagination that’s the limiting factor; inspire enough people to shop locally or whatever, and the job’s done. I think we need to be walking the awkward middle road, pushing as much as we can, recognising that the system will fight us, recognising that we’ll be making compromises. Obviously a lot of this is guided by our vision of a better world; if we want a world without anything resembling the state, or the market, then this form of organising probably feels too compromised from the start. Personally, I don’t see us ever getting rid of the market entirely, or the state for that matter. That doesn’t mean I have to celebrate either of those things, but it makes it easier to engage with them on some level. All of this raises obvious challenges – of that ever-present question of compromise, of being coopted, of fiddling round the edges… but it seems to be the best chance we’ve got.
With regards to prefigurative organising, you make an important distinction between “authoritarian models” and “positive vision”. Could you say a little bit about how you see the difference between these two notions and why you think it is significant for left-libertarian organising?
I have a real problem with the general anarchist refusal to outline elements of a world they’d like to see; it acts as a get out of jail free card, when awkward and difficult questions arise – I don’t know what an anarchist society would do with rapists, that’s for them to decide – but it’s also strategically hopeless; how are we expected to inspire and convince people to fight for change if we refuse to even consider what sort of world they might be fighting for? Arguably capitalism’s greatest weapon is the fact that so many people believe that, no matter how much they might dislike it, there is no viable alternative. We just keep helping capitalism with that, by denying the legitimacy of considering those alternatives in any meaningful level of detail. So yes, I think we absolutely need to develop some clear ideas – about how an economy might work, about how we’d deal with issues of violence, political governance, and so on.
The fear that this would be an authoritarian imposition on future societies is fundamentally flawed. Firstly, future generations will be impacted by our decisions – whatever they are; refusing to outline a blueprint has an impact on the future just as much, if not more, than offering such a blueprint. I doubt those future generations will thank us for refusing to offer people an alternative to capitalism because we didn’t want to limit their own options to decide how their society would function. Secondly, I think it’s quite clear that we can and should be considering multiple visions of a future society, and that actually the more we do that, the less likely we’ll find ourselves all beholden to one authoritarian vision.
It seems to me that the analysis that you present is very in-keeping with that which informs Real Utopia. However, rather than talking about anarchism as a proposed system for a post-state society we talk about participatory politics (parpolity). My feeling is that parpolity is a vision for a non-authoritarian political system that avoids what you refer to as the “simplistic” and “false” “promise of absolute freedom”. In other words, it addresses the authoritarianism that concerns the anarchists whilst also addressing the concerns about anarchism that you raise. Do you have any thoughts on this?
I think there’s a lot to be said for these ideas – and as I said above, I think they can be part of a larger mix of possibilities which we can draw on, now, and in the future. I think the really important question is how we think strategically about how to get to a world where this level of democratic politics is possible. It’s obviously not going to happen overnight, but it makes a difference to how we organise whether we think it’s possible in ten years, or a hundred years; and, of course, it matters how we think we’ll get to such a society. My concern with these sorts of visions is not that they impose something on the future, but that they impose a certain mindset on us now; by that I mean that we fall into that purity trap where we reject anything less than this ideal. So question one – how do we start building towards this vision, especially in terms of transition? (For example, can we work on reforming the system we have – strengthening local councils and weakening national government, or do we need a revolutionary fresh start?).
Anyway, I digress. Yes, I do think this offers a more honest way of thinking about a genuinely democratic politics, and which avoids some of the naïve ideas we see in a lot of anarchist discourse. I’m not sure I’m convinced about the level of engagement expected from people – which is one reason why I’m not convinced by parecon – but I think this provides a good base level, if you like, from where we can think about intermediary steps, and from where we can consider other proposals. It’s certainly doing the necessary work of getting those conversations started, getting the ideas out there that there are other ways to organise the world politically.
Critics of anarchism often associate it with things like being unrealistic, a rejection of organisation and even a celebration of chaos. Obviously anarchists deny all of this. However, given your critique, it might be argued that the critics have a point. If so, wouldn’t it make more sense to drop the label and use an alternative that does not carry the baggage of anarchism? At Real Utopia we use the phrase participatory society, for example. Any thoughts on that?
I agree, and I don’t really call myself an anarchist, or refer to my politics as being reflective of anarchism. That’s partly for the reasons you mention, but also because I’m not sure I really am an anarchist when it comes to rejecting the state out-right. I don’t really know how we would conceive of a strategy to destroy a national government, and I’m not convinced doing so would be a good idea. I don’t think many people who do call themselves anarchists have thought this through either, and for them I suppose the idea is to at least ignore the state and try to organise outside it; that’s fair enough, and has produced a huge world of mutual aid projects and so on, but I’m not convinced we’re getting as far as we might if we could open ourselves up to other strategic options. Like I said earlier, I think we need to be more open to engaging with institutions and political spaces – local councils, etc – which anarchists would often reject.
So yes, I’m not really defending the A-word; the question then becomes, what do we call ourselves, our politics, our vision? This is actually what a lot of my current thinking is focussed on; it’s a really important strategic question which we tend to overlook. But anyone familiar with counter-hegemonic thinking will know that words are of huge importance – regardless of the ideas we place into them. Like you say, words have baggage – sometimes good, sometimes bad – and we need to think carefully about those key terms – what Laclau and Moufee call articulatory principles – which can connect different political movements. I’m not convinced by participatory society, but I wouldn’t reject it out of hand, and I think the real test is how these terms fair in practice. I’m reluctant to open up a can of worms by mentioning this all too briefly, but I’m currently writing a defence of the term fair market socialism. I won’t go into too much detail here, but thinking counter-hegemonically, this is a way to take us from where we are to somewhere else; it connects to the common-sense we have now – that we need the market – to a different reading of that market; and it helps reduce the association between socialism and the horrors of the 20th century.
The last thing I’ll say on terminology; we should be more engaged in how we talk about the system we have, and not just the alternatives we want. I’m really advocating for people to stop referring to our current system as a democracy; every time we use the word, we reenforce its ideological power – and we also rob ourselves of a word we should be claiming for our own politics.
Thank you for your time! Is there anything that you would like to add before we finish?
A millions things, but I’ll leave it at that, otherwise I’ll never end. Maybe there’ll be other opportunities to mull over some of these issues in more detail in the future. Thanks Mark.
Matthew Wilson teaches at Prifysgol Abertawe (Swansea University) where he lectures on People, Organisation and Business. He is an active participant in the UK cooperative movement and is the author of Rules Without Rulers: The Possibilities and Limits of Anarchism.
The questions were compiled by Mark Evans who is a member of Real Utopia’s Outreach and Events Team. We are also exploring the possibility of organising a live talk with Matt on the topic of anarchism. Feel free to get in touch if you have any question: https://www.realutopia.org/contact
First of all, I want to congratulate you on writing what I think is a very important book. But before getting into the arguments you present in Rules Without Rulers, could you briefly introduce yourself and maybe say something about how you became interested in anarchism?
Thanks Mark, it’s always nice to hear people have got something out of the book. I could spend a long time answering this, so, very briefly: I became very politically active in the mid-nineties, initially within the animal rights movements, and then quickly getting involved in other radical spaces – most of which were either explicitly, or at least substantially, anarchistic in orientation. As a teenager I got to know a bit about anarchism from reading pamphlets that I’d picked up at book fairs, demos and so on when I visited my brother in London, and I suppose it just always made sense to me. I think these things are often beyond (or before?) a clear rational analysis – I didn’t sit down and weigh up different ideological positions; I just always felt that anarchism was the political culture I was most comfortable with.
You are very critical of anarchism. However, you also appear to be very interested in saving anarchism from itself. What is your relationship with anarchism? What motivated you to write on this topic?
Obviously there’s a wide spectrum of thought contained within the basic idea of ‘anarchism’, so I’d say I’m critical of the ways some people interpret anarchism, and, conversely, I’m keen to defend and promote those positions which I think make more sense. Another way to think about that is to consider that our relationship to any ‘ism’ is always fundamentally a relationship with the ‘ists’ who bring it to life: I guess that’s obvious, but it’s somehow maybe important to remind ourselves that any debate we have about an ideological position is really a debate between people, and writing the book was a way for me to have a debate (though mostly indirectly) with some of the people who I felt were approaching anarchism in the wrong way. And by ‘the wrong way’ I don’t mean they were mis-reading Kropotkin; debates that try to get to some inner truth about an ideology are entirely pointless as far as I’m concerned. I just think some anarchists do a better job of explaining how the world works, and how to change it, than others.
Probably the most famous living anarchist – Noam Chomsky – has stated “There have been many styles of thought and action that have been referred to as “anarchist”. It would be hopeless to try to encompass all of these conflicting tendencies in some general theory or ideology.” Nevertheless, you write of an “anarchist common sense”. This seems to be the bedrock of your critique of anarchism. Could you say what you mean by this term and how you arrived at it?
I’ll start by saying that when I wrote the book, I’d never read Gramsci, but now that I have, I think there’s even more value in the idea of common-sense as a sociological concept. But at the time, I used the idea of common-sense for one very simple reason. The idea that there are all these different tendencies within anarchism is true, of course, but it’s equally true that when you look at a certain time and place – say, Europe and the US in the 1990s and 2000s – it’s easy to see a huge amount of commonality amongst the broad cultures and movements that see themselves as somehow connected to anarchism. Ideas around consensus-decision making, for example, were extremely widespread, whereas discussions about syndicalism were barely to be found. So yes, there are degrees of diversity, and even contradiction, but still contained within a wider common-sense. That’s all pretty obvious, and it shouldn’t really need to be said. The reason it was important to make that point was that highlighting the diversity within an ideology is often exploited as a way to deflect criticism. If we think of every anarchist as having their own reading of anarchism – if we dismiss, as Chomsky suggests, a ‘general theory’ of anarchism – then critiquing ‘anarchism’ becomes redundant. So then you criticise an individual anarchist, but then all the other anarchists can just tell themselves the criticism doesn’t apply to them. And so you’re left with having to critique millions of individual anarchists to make your point. Which is ridiculous, but people would pretty much say that to me; what do you mean ‘anarchists’ think this? Don’t you know we’re all different? How can you lump us all together? Rather than engage in the criticism itself, they’d hang everything on this diversity, and insist that I couldn’t possibly make such generalised criticisms. So it was important for me to stress that some of the criticisms I wanted to make did apply to very significant sections of contemporary anarchist culture, despite its diversity regarding certain issues.
By the way, this is common practice; I’m reading a lot of books by capitalists at the moment, and they do exactly the same thing when they discuss criticisms of capitalism – but that was just Milton Friedman, that was the 80s, that’s just one company, that’s not my idea of capitalism.
Your critique of anarchism focuses on three themes; freedom, ethics and power. From this you highlight a number of problems with contemporary anarchism that you describe as “unhelpful assumptions” and “unchallenged ideas”. To begin with, could you summarise what you see as the main problems regarding the anarchist position with freedom?
I think R.H Tawney summed up the fundamental problem with freedom very nicely with the simple maxim – freedom for the pike is death for the minnow. Ultimately, freedoms conflict with other freedoms. Politically, and emotionally, freedom is obviously an extremely powerful word; but analytically, it’s pretty much useless. It’s a classic ‘empty signifier’ which is filled with different meanings, depending on who’s using the term. You only need to look at how commonly freedom is evoked by people with entirely opposing views to anarchists to see it really doesn’t do much work as a concept on its own, and is always filled with other ideas, some of which can be pretty reprehensible. For the most part, making a demand for this or that freedom is really just a way for people to promote their own values whilst appearing to defend some universal and unambiguously positive position. Motorists need to be free from environmental zealots, hard-working people need to be free to get to work without being disrupted by protestors, markets need to be free to harmoniously organise the world, and so on…
Now, there are two ways to respond to this: either you say that certain claims to freedom aren’t legitimate – that they’re not really about freedom. Or you acknowledge that they are claims to freedom, and from there recognise that, as Tawney suggests, you’re often going to have to find a way to decide between competing freedoms. Option one just isn’t really tenable. It’s certainly not going to get us anywhere productive, because we’re just never going to get agreement on what constitutes a legitimate or illegitimate notion of freedom. So we’re left with option two, which is to do the hard work defending certain values, certain practices, certain beliefs, and making the case as to why they should have priority over other values, practices, beliefs. The problem with that, of course, is it offends our anarchist sensibility, because we’re supposed to be the defenders of freedom, not the people who take it away from others. But that’s just fundamentally dishonest and gets us off the hook from having to reflect on which things we would protect and defend, and which things we would somehow prohibit and prevent.
Ultimately, any society needs to make choices about the way it functions, the things it allows and disallows. A society can be more or less open, more or less controlling, and so on, but no society can be based on the simple notion of freedom. We need to be more honest about this, because we can’t avoid making those decisions; we can, however, stick our heads in the sand and pretend we’re not making those value judgements, and convince ourselves that we can just decide between freedom and unfreedom. By the way, this is exactly what liberal capitalism does, allowing the powerful to pass their own value judgements off as though they’re representative of everyone’s freedom. Again – we’re just defending the freedom to drive, the freedom to shop, the freedom to accumulate wealth… It’s pretty depressing to me that anarchists have so often followed the same logic, and if we ever had something approaching an anarchist society, I’d be very worried if we did so without getting a better grasp on what the abstract value of freedom really means in practice.
Next, could you summarise what you see as the main problems regarding the anarchist position with ethics?
The anarchist problem with ethics is really a corollary to its problem with freedom. And again, we see exactly the same problems within liberal capitalism, in theory and in practice. Ultimately, if you have to decide between competing demands for different freedoms than we need to make those value judgements, and if we’re going to do that, we need to think more about those values – in other words, we need to think more about ethics. I won’t go into more detail here about what that would look like, and I don’t really offer my own guidance in the book; I think this needs to be a collective, democratic project where we confront the possibilities of reasonable conflicts of values and find the best way to navigate them.
Finally, could you summarise what you see as the main problems regarding the anarchist position with power?
Anarchist views of power are more complicated, or at least, more diverse; there’s less of a common-sense. That said, the common-sense around freedom and ethics discussed above feed into anarchist understandings of power to a large extent, and the up-shot of that is that power is often seen as a totalising force held by certain elements of society – the state, capitalists, and so on – which is then used by those elements to deny the freedom of others. That’s true, up to a point, but power isn’t something we can get rid of, and if we got rid of the state and capitalism we’d still be left with questions of power. And, remembering that we’d still need to make value judgements about conflicting freedoms, we’d want to use our power to ensure certain decisions are upheld. As with freedom, and ethics, too many anarchists now believe in some possibility of a society where everyone is simply free to live the lives they want, and where power is never used to limit any one’s freedom. It’s a powerful vision which has inspired anarchists for a very long time, but I don’t see any empirical evidence or theoretical argument to suggest that’s a possibility.
Many anarchists propose consensus decision-making as a solution to these problems. You, however, are critical of this position. Could you say why?
I think there’s a lot to be said for the ideal of reaching a consensus, and I think the work that goes into finding a decision that everyone is happy with can be extremely productive. But the cultures of consensus-decision making which I’ve witnessed a lot are significantly informed by those common-senses we’ve been talking about, and it’s in the practice of consensus decision-making that you start to see how some of those flawed ideas come into play. So, for example, consensus cultures will always have certain ground rules, certain red lines, and so on, which are not covered by the process of consensus itself; too often, these are passed off as obvious, neutral positions which don’t need to be discussed or defended. So you see the parameters of particular values, of particular ideas about freedom, being enforced (implicitly or explicitly) without being open to debate. Now that might work well in a group of people who share those core values – and indeed, it often does work very well; the problem is when anarchists think that this same process will work just as well within a larger, more diverse community. It seems pretty obvious that a bunch of anarchists would struggle to reach consensus with a bunch of racists, or free-market fundamentalists or whatever. Consensus only really works when you exclude certain views from the start; of course, that is precisely what we should be doing, but we need to be honest that we’re doing that. And thinking back to power, we need to be more honest about what happens when consensus isn’t reached; there’s a great deal of depressingly naïve thinking within anarchism which sees consensus as the way to resolve those questions of conflict and power – if we all just agree, then there’s no problem. But it’s just a fantasy to think people will all just start to magically share the same set of core values, and we’re being pretty dishonest by not considering what we would do when people in a community simply can’t agree on some fundamental issues.
You propose a prefigurative approach to organising as a more hopeful way forward for anarchism. Could you say what this entails and what some of the challenges for such an approach to organising might be?
I’ve actually stopped using the term prefiguration, because it’s become so associated with a particular reading of prefigurative praxis – a reading I don’t really have a lot of time for. I’m personally using the term ‘reorganising’, but any way, the basic idea for me is that we need to be developing a counter-power, or counter-hegemony, in the here and now. For me, that means acting within and throughout every level of society, trying to organise according to different social logics; obvious examples are setting up cooperatives, building networks of mutual aid, running people’s assemblies, connecting to more progressive municipal projects like the Preston Model, and so on. None of this is new, and will be very familiar to your readers, but i think prefigurative forms organising too often fall on one side of an unhelpful binary: on one side, you have an overly purist vision where compromise is viewed as unacceptable, so you have these activist silos where people convince themselves they’re acting entirely outside of the system and that they’re not engaging with the corrupt practices of the market, or the state, or whatever. The other side almost flips this, and seems to just ignore the challenges of trying to organise differently within the systemic constraints imposed by the world we currently inhabit. So you end up with what some people call a post-political mindset, where you convince yourself it’s just people’s imagination that’s the limiting factor; inspire enough people to shop locally or whatever, and the job’s done. I think we need to be walking the awkward middle road, pushing as much as we can, recognising that the system will fight us, recognising that we’ll be making compromises. Obviously a lot of this is guided by our vision of a better world; if we want a world without anything resembling the state, or the market, then this form of organising probably feels too compromised from the start. Personally, I don’t see us ever getting rid of the market entirely, or the state for that matter. That doesn’t mean I have to celebrate either of those things, but it makes it easier to engage with them on some level. All of this raises obvious challenges – of that ever-present question of compromise, of being coopted, of fiddling round the edges… but it seems to be the best chance we’ve got.
With regards to prefigurative organising, you make an important distinction between “authoritarian models” and “positive vision”. Could you say a little bit about how you see the difference between these two notions and why you think it is significant for left-libertarian organising?
I have a real problem with the general anarchist refusal to outline elements of a world they’d like to see; it acts as a get out of jail free card, when awkward and difficult questions arise – I don’t know what an anarchist society would do with rapists, that’s for them to decide – but it’s also strategically hopeless; how are we expected to inspire and convince people to fight for change if we refuse to even consider what sort of world they might be fighting for? Arguably capitalism’s greatest weapon is the fact that so many people believe that, no matter how much they might dislike it, there is no viable alternative. We just keep helping capitalism with that, by denying the legitimacy of considering those alternatives in any meaningful level of detail. So yes, I think we absolutely need to develop some clear ideas – about how an economy might work, about how we’d deal with issues of violence, political governance, and so on.
The fear that this would be an authoritarian imposition on future societies is fundamentally flawed. Firstly, future generations will be impacted by our decisions – whatever they are; refusing to outline a blueprint has an impact on the future just as much, if not more, than offering such a blueprint. I doubt those future generations will thank us for refusing to offer people an alternative to capitalism because we didn’t want to limit their own options to decide how their society would function. Secondly, I think it’s quite clear that we can and should be considering multiple visions of a future society, and that actually the more we do that, the less likely we’ll find ourselves all beholden to one authoritarian vision.
It seems to me that the analysis that you present is very in-keeping with that which informs Real Utopia. However, rather than talking about anarchism as a proposed system for a post-state society we talk about participatory politics (parpolity). My feeling is that parpolity is a vision for a non-authoritarian political system that avoids what you refer to as the “simplistic” and “false” “promise of absolute freedom”. In other words, it addresses the authoritarianism that concerns the anarchists whilst also addressing the concerns about anarchism that you raise. Do you have any thoughts on this?
I think there’s a lot to be said for these ideas – and as I said above, I think they can be part of a larger mix of possibilities which we can draw on, now, and in the future. I think the really important question is how we think strategically about how to get to a world where this level of democratic politics is possible. It’s obviously not going to happen overnight, but it makes a difference to how we organise whether we think it’s possible in ten years, or a hundred years; and, of course, it matters how we think we’ll get to such a society. My concern with these sorts of visions is not that they impose something on the future, but that they impose a certain mindset on us now; by that I mean that we fall into that purity trap where we reject anything less than this ideal. So question one – how do we start building towards this vision, especially in terms of transition? (For example, can we work on reforming the system we have – strengthening local councils and weakening national government, or do we need a revolutionary fresh start?).
Anyway, I digress. Yes, I do think this offers a more honest way of thinking about a genuinely democratic politics, and which avoids some of the naïve ideas we see in a lot of anarchist discourse. I’m not sure I’m convinced about the level of engagement expected from people – which is one reason why I’m not convinced by parecon – but I think this provides a good base level, if you like, from where we can think about intermediary steps, and from where we can consider other proposals. It’s certainly doing the necessary work of getting those conversations started, getting the ideas out there that there are other ways to organise the world politically.
Critics of anarchism often associate it with things like being unrealistic, a rejection of organisation and even a celebration of chaos. Obviously anarchists deny all of this. However, given your critique, it might be argued that the critics have a point. If so, wouldn’t it make more sense to drop the label and use an alternative that does not carry the baggage of anarchism? At Real Utopia we use the phrase participatory society, for example. Any thoughts on that?
I agree, and I don’t really call myself an anarchist, or refer to my politics as being reflective of anarchism. That’s partly for the reasons you mention, but also because I’m not sure I really am an anarchist when it comes to rejecting the state out-right. I don’t really know how we would conceive of a strategy to destroy a national government, and I’m not convinced doing so would be a good idea. I don’t think many people who do call themselves anarchists have thought this through either, and for them I suppose the idea is to at least ignore the state and try to organise outside it; that’s fair enough, and has produced a huge world of mutual aid projects and so on, but I’m not convinced we’re getting as far as we might if we could open ourselves up to other strategic options. Like I said earlier, I think we need to be more open to engaging with institutions and political spaces – local councils, etc – which anarchists would often reject.
So yes, I’m not really defending the A-word; the question then becomes, what do we call ourselves, our politics, our vision? This is actually what a lot of my current thinking is focussed on; it’s a really important strategic question which we tend to overlook. But anyone familiar with counter-hegemonic thinking will know that words are of huge importance – regardless of the ideas we place into them. Like you say, words have baggage – sometimes good, sometimes bad – and we need to think carefully about those key terms – what Laclau and Moufee call articulatory principles – which can connect different political movements. I’m not convinced by participatory society, but I wouldn’t reject it out of hand, and I think the real test is how these terms fair in practice. I’m reluctant to open up a can of worms by mentioning this all too briefly, but I’m currently writing a defence of the term fair market socialism. I won’t go into too much detail here, but thinking counter-hegemonically, this is a way to take us from where we are to somewhere else; it connects to the common-sense we have now – that we need the market – to a different reading of that market; and it helps reduce the association between socialism and the horrors of the 20th century.
The last thing I’ll say on terminology; we should be more engaged in how we talk about the system we have, and not just the alternatives we want. I’m really advocating for people to stop referring to our current system as a democracy; every time we use the word, we reenforce its ideological power – and we also rob ourselves of a word we should be claiming for our own politics.
Thank you for your time! Is there anything that you would like to add before we finish?
A millions things, but I’ll leave it at that, otherwise I’ll never end. Maybe there’ll be other opportunities to mull over some of these issues in more detail in the future. Thanks Mark.
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