Anarchy Is Order
Creating the New World in the Shell of the Old
- Volume 7
- Issue 6
- Jan. 2005
1The word “anarchy” comes from the ancient Greek word “anarchos” and means “without a ruler.” While rulers, quite expectedly, claim that the end of rule will inevitably lead to a descent into chaos and turmoil, anarchists maintain that rule is unnecessary for the preservation of order. Rather than a descent into Hobbes’s war of all against all, a society without government suggests to anarchists the very possibility for creative and peaceful human relations. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon neatly summed up the anarchist position in his famous slogan: “Anarchy is Order.”
2Historically, anarchists have sought to create a society without government or State, free from coercive, hierarchical and authoritarian relations, in which people associate voluntarily. Anarchists emphasize freedom from imposed authorities. They envision a society based upon autonomy, self-organization and voluntary federation which they oppose to “the State as a particular body intended to maintain a compulsory scheme of legal order” (Marshall 12). Contemporary anarchists focus much of their efforts on transforming everyday life through the development of alternative social arrangements and organizations. Thus, they are not content to wait either for elite-initiated reforms or for future “post-revolutionary” utopias. If social and individual freedoms are to be expanded the time to start is today.
3In order to bring their ideas to life, anarchists create working examples. To borrow the old Wobbly phrase, they are “forming the structure of the new world in the shell of the old.” These experiments in living, popularly referred to as “DIY” (Do-It-Yourself), are the means by which contemporary anarchists withdraw their consent and begin “contracting” other relationships. DIY releases counter-forces, based upon notions of autonomy and self-organization as motivating principles, against the normative political and cultural discourses of neo-liberalism. Anarchists create autonomous spaces which are not about access but about refusal of the terms of entry (e.g. nationalism, etc).
4The “Do-it-Yourself” ethos has a long and rich association with anarchism. One sees it as far back as Proudhon’s notions of People’s Banks and local currencies which have returned in the form of LETS (Local Exchange and Trade Systems). In North America, 19th Century anarchist communes, such as those of Benjamin Tucker, find echoes in the Autonomous Zones and squat communities of the present day.
5In the recent past, Situationists, Kabouters, and the British punk movements have encouraged DIY activities as means to overcome alienating consumption practices and the authority and control of work. Punks turned to DIY to record and distribute music outside of the record industry.
6At the forefront of contemporary DIY are the “Autonomous Zones” or more simply “A-Zones.” “Autonomous Zones” are community centres based upon anarchist principles, often providing meals, clothing and shelter for those in need. These sites, sometimes but not always squats, provide gathering places for exploring and learning about anti-authoritarian histories and traditions. Self-education is an important aspect of anarchist politics. A-Zones are important as sites of re-skilling. DIY and participatory democracy are important precisely because they encourage the processes of learning and independence necessary for self-determined communities.
7A-Zones are often sites for quite diverse and complex forms of activity. The “Trumbellplex” in Detroit is an interesting example. Housed, ironically, in the abandoned home of an early-Century industrialist, the Trumbell Theatre serves as a co-operative living space, temporary shelter, food kitchen and lending library. The carriage house has been converted into a theatre site for touring anarchist and punk bands and performance troops like the “Bindlestiff Circus.”
8Because of their concern with transcending cultural barriers, residents of A-Zones try to build linkages with residents of the neighbourhoods in which they were staying. The intention is to create autonomous free zones that may be extended as resources and conditions permit. These various practices are all part of complex networks that are trans-national, trans-boundary and trans-movement. They encourage us to think about writing against the movement as movement. Movement processes involve complex networks outside of and alongside of the State (trans-national and trans-boundary).
9These are the building blocks of what Howard Ehrlich refers to as the anarchist transfer culture, an approximation of the new society within the context of the old. Within it anarchists try to meet the basic demands of building sustainable communities.
10
A transfer culture is that agglomeration of ideas and practices that guide people in making the trip from the society here to the society there in the future….As part of the accepted wisdom of that transfer culture we understand that we may never achieve anything that goes beyond the culture itself. It may be, in fact, that it is the very nature of anarchy that we shall always be building the new society within whatever society we find ourselves (Ehrlich 329).
11In this sense, anarchist autonomous zones are liminal sites, spaces of transformation and passage. As such they are important sites of re-skilling, in which anarchists prepare themselves for the new forms of relationship necessary to break authoritarian and hierarchical structures. Participants also learn the diverse tasks and varied interpersonal skills necessary for collective work and living. This skill sharing serves to discourage the emergence of knowledge elites and to allow for the sharing of all tasks, even the least desirable, necessary for social maintenance.
12For Paul Goodman, an American anarchist whose writings influenced the 1960s New Left and counterculture, anarchist futures-present serve as necessary acts of “drawing the line” against the authoritarian and oppressive forces in society. Anarchism, in Goodman’s view, was never oriented only towards some glorious future; it involved also the preservation of past freedoms and previous libertarian traditions of social interaction. “A free society cannot be the substitution of a ‘new order’ for the old order; it is the extension of spheres of free action until they make up most of the social life” (Goodman quoted in Marshall 598). Utopian thinking will always be important, Goodman argued, in order to open the imagination to new social possibilities, but the contemporary anarchist would also need to be a conservator of society’s benevolent tendencies.
13As many recent anarchist writings suggest, the potential for resistance might be found anywhere in everday life. If power is exercised everywhere, it might give rise to resistance everywhere. Present-day anarchists like to suggest that a glance across the landscape of contemporary society reveals many groupings that are anarchist in practice if not in ideology.
14
Examples include the leaderless small groups developed by radical feminists, coops, clinics, learning networks, media collectives, direct action organizations; the spontaneous groupings that occur in response to disasters, strikes, revolutions and emergencies; community-controlled day-care centers; neighborhood groups; tenant and workplace organizing; and so on (Ehrlich, Ehrlich, DeLeon and Morris 18).
15While these are obviously not strictly anarchist groups, they often operate to provide examples of mutual aid and non-hierarchical and non-authoritarian modes of living that carry the memory of anarchy within them. It is within these everyday examples that anarchists glimpse the possibilities for a libertarian social order. If, as Colin Ward suggests, anarchy is a seed beneath the snow of authoritarian society, daily expressions of mutual aid are the first blooms from which a new order will grow.
16In viewing the projects that emerge from contemporary anarchist movements, I would suggest that, in the words of Castells, Yazawa and Kiselyova, such projects offer “alternative visions and projects of social transformation that reject the patterns of domination, exploitation and exclusion embedded in the current forms of globalization” (22). Following Leslie Sklair I suggest that autonomist/anarchy movements exemplify a “disruption” model of social movements and resistances to capitalism (as opposed to an “organizational model” or an “integrationist model”). Through their uncompromising rhetoric and immodest strategies they resist attempts to divert their disruptive force into normal politics. Activists attempt to reject the entire context within which they can be either marginalized or assimilated; they occupy their own ground. This “autonomy” must be constantly constructed, reconstructed and defended in the face of powerful foes as events of the last four years have shown.
17Autonomy movements in abandoned or impoverished inner-city areas are movements involving individuals, social groups or territories excluded or made precarious by the “new world order”. This distinguishes them somewhat from institutional global social movements that seek increased participation by members who are not yet rendered irrelevant (and who thus have something with which to bargain). In any event, how does one ask a global (or national) body to grant the “subversion of the dominant paradigm” or the “liberation of desire?”
prefigurative politics, direct action, education
Online networks are increasingly seen as of huge importance for how social movements organise - be it in Wisconsin, Cairo or London. However, what is missing is the recognition that online, commons-based forms of production are methods of political contention and practice in their own right
13 May 2011
It is clear that online networks are increasingly seen as being of huge importance for how social movements organize. It is hard to understate the implications for collective action represented by ubiquitous mobile telephony, the internet and low-cost SMS messaging – be it in Wisconsin, Cairo or London. However, what is missing from much of the commentary regarding the impact of the internet and the ‘network society’ on political contention is the recognition that online, commons-based forms of production and P2P (peer-to-peer) sharing represent highly effective methods of political contention and practice in their own right. That is to say, not only do they help offline protest with reduced costs of co-ordination and information sharing, but they are also a powerful instrument to advance a radical, prefigurative politics.
The term ‘prefigurative politics’ finds its genesis in the work of academic Wini Breines with reference to the social movements of the ‘New Left’ in the 1960s. Breines came to see prefigurative politics as both a process of creation and of fracture with established hierarchy:
“...the term prefigurative politics … may be recognized in counter institutions, demonstrations and the attempt to embody personal and anti-hierarchical values in politics...the crux of prefigurative politics imposed substantial tasks, the central one being to create and sustain within the live practice of the movement, relationships and political forms that “prefigured” and embodied the desired society.”
Anti-authoritarian activists and theorists often refer to prefigurative politics as "building a new world in the shell of the old." If a group is fighting to abolish some or all forms of hierarchy in society, prefigurative politics demands they individually and as a group adhere as closely to that goal as possible in their everyday political practice.
The Bypassing of Protest to Make Change Happen:
Direct action always aims to achieve one of two things. The first can be understood as ‘oppositional’; the second as ‘propositional’. In the first case, direct action seeks to consciously obstruct another political agent or political organization from performing some practice to which those performing the direct action object. In the second case (and this understanding of direct action seems utterly neglected by the commentariat) it can seek to resolve perceived problems that the relevant actors and institutions in ‘authority’ are not addressing to the satisfaction of the direct action participants.
It is this second type of direct action that coheres with the notion of prefigurative politics as a solution to what is perceived as a social or economic injustice. Take the scenario of a village requiring a drinking well to access clean water. Advocates of ‘prefigurative’ direct action would say the villagers should simply dig and build the well themselves rather than appeal to the ‘authorities’ to have one built for them.
We can transfer this logic to the realm of the current debate over reform to higher education. As well as appeal to the authorities to reduce or abolish tuition fees, individuals may choose to act in accordance with how they would wish to see the university in future and start creating it in the present – as an accessible place of learning, open to all and free to engage with literally and intellectually.
File-sharing as Direct Action and Prefigurative Politics:
One example of such a logic, specifically with regards to how forms of networked direct action can oppose the increase in tuition fees, can be found in a recent communique issued by the Luther Blissett Collective at the 10th November protest last year. It has since been posted on the websites of the London-based The Really Free School and Deterritorial Support Group.
Education’s Napster Moment.
“As a result of the emergence of a virtual marketplace that encourages the forming of community and the sharing of ideas, we have inadvertently been equipped with the tools needed to undo the current rules of engagement.
Ours is the first generation to be given the tool set by which to produce, collectively organise and display our message/ideology/product to a global audience; an audience that, like you, has an equal opportunity to subvert the current trajectory of our education system.
Universities are collapsing. Not as a result of dramatic cuts but because they represent an outmoded model for their primary function, the exchange of knowledge and research. The education industry is about to experience the same death blow to its infrastructure and profit model that Napster issued to the music industry back in 1999.
Everyone within our generation is aware that the construction of ideas and the execution of research has shifted its locality to a sprawling virtual space that is open to collective input.
Let us not draw out the death rattle of our institutions by allowing concessions to be made and minor battles to be fought and ultimately lost – instead let us accelerate the pace of their demise (as profit-making institutions).
Abandon the institution and declare it’s death, the point at which our apathy for the current state of play is declared, the better. With this change we will be able to destabilise the mediated control of our social trajectory, causing a genuine crisis for those that stand to profit both politically and financially from our existing system. It is the institutions and those that control them that need us.
Create a real crisis, torrent your syllabus, duplicate your id cards and give them to strangers, scan your entire library and post it on AAAAARG, distribute maps of your university online, relocate your seminars to a space outside of the institution. Invalidate the universities existence, so that together we can begin to build fresh foundations on its grave.
Invite anyone and everyone to participate, saturate your institutions and make them a true open space. The path to knowledge does not end on the day of graduation.
This document was put together on the spur of the moment as a direct response to this situation, its ideas are not fixed. Instead it seeks to act as a provocation or suggestion that we should consider the complete reformation of what we currently have. More money/Less cuts cannot cure the decline of our institutions. We have now a unique opportunity to create something new, independently and autonomously.”
This communique represents a call to arms of a very radical kind and is in keeping with ‘propositional’ direct action that adopts a prefigurative politics – not solely as a mode of resistance but also a microcosm of the ‘other world we know is possible’. It is knowledge and learning as some would like it to be: freely accessible, publicly available, not subject to the logics of the profit motive.
Changing Technologies and New Modes of Protest:
Despite universities coming to resemble private businesses, distributed online networks now make it possible to render many of their resources increasingly public. As the communique puts it “...torrent your syllabus, duplicate your id cards and give them to strangers, scan your entire library and post it on AAAAARG”.
It is tactics like these that not only ‘protest’ the advance of the university as private enterprise, but indeed help undermine its ability to behave as a profit-making institution at all. Thus we do not just obstruct the university as private enterprise through occupations, strikes and other actions, but simultaneously construct an alternative at its very heart.
What is also clear is that innovations in late-modern capitalism require innovative manifestations of resistance. As Giles Deleuze said in conversation with Antonio Negri:
“...it's true that even before control societies are fully in place, forms of delinquency or resistance are also appearing. Computer piracy and viruses, for example, will replace strikes and what the nineteenth century called "sabotage" ("clogging" the machinery).”
In order to maintain profit under conditions of abundance, capital will often try to create artificial scarcity. Under the conditions of information abundance that are inherent within a network society it seems absurd to pay more then ever for ‘an education’. One form of resistance and prefigurative direct action might be to re-imagine the university, undermine imposed scarcity and render the institution and its content as publicly available and abundant as is possible. Torrent, duplicate, distribute. Such acts might permit counter-institutions such as free schools to flourish like never before. They allow us to re-imagine what the university can be, building the world as we wish to see it, within the very cracks of the university as private, profit-driven enterprise.
How to build a new world in the shell of the old
The Symbiosis Research Collective | 23rd April 2018
Every city has its graveyard of nonprofits, cooperatives, social clubs, and community centers. Without a strategic vision, local projects cannot possibly amount to a systemic alternative to capitalism. The latest contribution from the SYMBIOSIS RESEARCH COLLECTIVE
“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.” - Arundhati Roy
In the first two articles of this series, we alluded to a new strategic vision that is emerging across many different movements, through which we can achieve a genuinely democratic, egalitarian, and ecological society. In this next installment, we sketch this vision of a transition out of capitalism through grassroots organising to build the new world in the shell of the old.
If we want real change, should we draw up a sketch of a just society and then simply march towards it? We think it's better to look around and find the seeds of a better future—perhaps dormant—in the present, and nurture them into a viable alternative that can challenge and transform the world around us.
Even as we carry the dream of ecological utopia in our hearts, our visions of the future cannot be divorced from the process by which they could realistically come about. To bring about lasting change, we need to identify, build up, and bring together existing utopias in the present, creating actual power in the places we live and work.
How power works
To build power, we need to understand how it works. The German-American political philosopher Hannah Arendt argued that intolerable situations such as ours can be cast aside by the public’s withdrawal of support from its governing institutions. While not a leftist, Arendt was a prominent theorist of totalitarianism, political violence, and direct democracy who developed important concepts that can help us chart a path forward.
Power is conventionally understood as the ability to make others do things, often through violence or coercion. In On Violence, however, Arendt argues that power works quite differently. She defines “power” as people’s ability to act in concert—the capacity for collective action, and thus a property of groups, not individuals. Leaders possess their power only because their constituents have empowered them to direct the group’s collective action.
Arendt asserts that all power, in every political system from dictatorships to participatory democracies, emerges from public support. No dictator can carry out his or her will without obedience from subjects; nor can any project requiring collective action be achieved without the support, begrudging or enthusiastic, of the group.
When people begin to withdraw their support and refuse to obey, a government may turn to violence, but even that control lasts only as long as the army or police choose to obey. “Where commands are no longer obeyed,” Arendt writes, “the means of violence are of no use… Everything depends on the power behind the violence.” Power, for the rulers as well as those who would resist them, comes through collective action, rather than force.
As a basis for a revolutionary political strategy, Arendt’s theory of power has several important limitations—limitations which we think can be overcome by focusing our efforts into organising real democratic institutions in communities where we live, in our everyday lives.
First, outside of rare moments of political crisis, the public has no way to collectively withdraw its support from governing institutions without preexisting mass organization. Individuals acting alone have no impact on the state’s power—we need the organisational capacity for greater mass action first.
Furthermore, most people will never even consider retracting support for governing institutions if they don’t experience viable alternatives. As Antonio Gramsci explained a century ago, the ruling class’s cultural hegemony—society’s domination by ruling class ideas—can be only undermined by what he called a “war of position”.
This means developing a material and cultural base within the working class to craft an oppositional narrative and to organise oppositional institutions. The organisation of unions, worker-owned firms, and housing cooperatives is what makes socialism a real, lived possibility around which greater movement-building can occur.
Lastly, we cannot assume that overthrow of the current system will bring us a free and democratic new world, not without the preformation of the post-revolutionary society here in the present. We need to actively create the institutions that will replace capitalism so that the transition we want can actually take place.
The transfer of authority to the structures of radical democracy requires the preexistence of such participatory institutions, not a naïve faith that they will be conjured into being out of a general strike, mass retraction of public support, or insurrectionary upheaval.
Incubating new institutions
So what can we do instead? An effective political strategy for the present would combine the best of Arendt’s intuitions about the workings of power in society and possibilities for popular revolution, with an organising vision of community institution-building.
With such dim prospects for sufficient progress through existing institutional channels, new democratic and cooperative institutions must be built from the ground up. These include structures for political democracy, such as neighborhood councils and assemblies, networked into grassroots confederations, and structures for economic democracy, such as housing cooperatives, worker-owned cooperatives, and community land trusts.
These new institutions should serve four fundamental purposes.
First, they can help us meet immediate human needs under conditions of deprivation and alienation. Amid a crumbling safety net and social atomisation in much of the industrialized world, new institutions of a cooperative economy can ensure that people are fed and sheltered, their human potential developed and their minds nourished, all while fostering the spirit of community and solidarity we so sorely need.
By meeting the needs of people in our communities, we can bring them into the movement. This way, we can reach everyone, including those most marginalised, and make it possible for them to participate in political struggle.
Second, such institutions can organize people for oppositional politics within the present system. Channeling popular power takes grassroots organising, which we can use to extract concessions from the state to improve our position for ever more transformative demands.
We can do this, for instance, through institutions like community councils and block associations that organise ordinary people neighborhood by neighborhood. When it is strategic, electoral campaigns may even emerge out of these organized communities. (We’ll discuss the thorny questions of electoralism in a later part of this series.)
Third, we can steadily erode public support for the institutions of the dominant society through the development and proliferation of viable alternatives. By growing a cooperative economy that provides for all, we can weaken our dependence on and steadily displace the capitalist economy.
By networking together institutions of genuinely democratic and participatory community governance, we can assemble a parallel political system that can challenge—and, in time, transform and replace—the various oligarchies of our day.
Fourth, this mosaic of community councils, cooperatives, land trusts, and more will form the institutional foundation of the liberated society. As hierarchical society gives way to genuine democracy, it is the institutions we organise and experiment with today that will become the replacements.
Dual power
What would this look like? We can adopt this four-pronged approach across multiple sites of struggle. In the workplace, workers can organise unions which challenge the absolute authority of the boss, win concessions to improve working conditions, and (more radically) take direct democratic control over the workplace through occupations or buy-outs to transition it to a cooperative.
In housing, tenants can organise tenant unions which can end landlord abuses through rent strikes, move towards tenant management and control over the building, and, with sufficiently resourced support, eventually aim to transition it into cooperatively owned social housing.
Organised workers and tenants can also leverage the power they built fighting bosses and landlords to change the rules of the game in the political arena and direct public resources into upscaling cooperative housing and worker ownership. And we can do this with the political system as a whole, through participatory democracy in our neighborhoods, networking together councils and assemblies as a new foundation of political authority.
This strategy is known as “dual power”. Murray Bookchin posited dual power as the creation of directly democratic and cooperative institutions that fortify each other, eventually challenging and replacing the legitimacy of the capitalist state.
The creation of these dual power institutions must grow out of people's everyday experience and immediate needs—our needs for freedom from domination as well as for essential goods and services.
As Cornelius Castoriadis puts it: “Self-management will only be possible if people's attitudes to social organisation alter radically. This, in turn, will only take place if social institutions become a meaningful part of their real daily life.”
By meeting basic community needs, such institutions rupture capitalism’s control over people’s lives, allowing oppressed people to carve out space within capitalism for economic democracy, defend it, and thus transform the world around them.
Beyond the local
But these initiatives must also be rooted in a strategy that transcends the local. Everywhere you look, there are examples of a different way of doing things: community gardens, food cooperatives, local currencies, strangers helping each other after a disaster.
They stand alone as individual projects, fine-tuned to solve local problems created by the current system’s failures. But when operating alone, they can't create dual power. Without a wider unified base of support to network resources and share knowledge to sustain these alternatives, many just fizzle out over time.
Every city has its graveyard of nonprofits, cooperatives, social clubs, and community centers. Without the more complex infrastructure of a whole solidarity economy ecosystem, our local projects cannot possibly amount to a systemic alternative to capitalism.
Individual cooperatives and mutual aid projects are not a transformative strategy in themselves, but should be understood as components of a larger project to assemble a new municipal commons under participatory democratic control.
By linking the local to regional, working together, sharing resources, and mutually reinforcing each other's initiatives, communities can cultivate a creative and communal spirit that would empower them to take control of their lives, connect to one another across cultural and geographic distances, and develop the egalitarian foundations of a new society.
By confederating their local democratic councils into a powerful network, we can qualitatively change the power relations of a city or neighborhood and lay the groundwork for new macro-structures of self-governance and civil society.
In this series, we'll talk in depth about some of these institutions: community land trusts, tenant rights organisations, workers' cooperatives, unions, neighborhood councils, popular education projects.
These are not new inventions; they've been developed through generations of popular struggle all over the world. We’ll discuss how movements past and present have made use of them and what place we see for them within our broader revolutionary vision, to synthesize them into a unified anti-capitalist strategy at every level of society.
The stakes are high: today, we're faced with urgent threats of climate change, rising neo-fascism, and economic turmoil. Our challenge is to collect these quiet seeds of a new world, and plant them with care.
These Authors
The Symbiosis Research Collective is a network of organizers and activist-researchers across North America, assembling a confederation of community organizations that can build a democratic and ecological society from the ground up. We are fighting for a better world by creating institutions of participatory democracy and the solidarity economy through community organizing, neighborhood by neighborhood, city by city. Twitter: @SymbiosisRev
This article was written by Mason Herson-Hord (@mason_h2), Aaron Vansintjan (@a_vansi), Jason Geils, and Katie Horvath (@katesville7).
Kevin Carson on building the new within the shell of the old
How to make sense of the emerging strands of the P2P movement? In my presentations and lectures, I use a threefold typology to explain the major choices.
1) transgressive:
this is what the young filesharers are doing. Based on the most obvious natural use of the technology and the naturalness of sharing, they simply ignore the old laws. Such a behaviour may lead to ignore some of the good qualities of existing legislation (if you believe that copyright does make some sense), but is also an important factor in raising political awareness, as they are then subjected to attempts to protect the old legislation. For the powers that be, wnen transgressions become too massive, it is a sign that the old way of doing things is losing legitimacy. Laws that are constantly transgressed are useless to protect interests of existing stakeholders.
2) constructive.
In this variant, the movement is actively building the new worlds already. Creative Commons and GPL licences are creating such new legal and institutional realities, not by contesting the existing framework, but by starting off in an altogether new direction. Whenever a group of people produce free software or a knowledge commons project, they are actively buidling a new world.
3) reform-oriented.
This approach works directly to change the existing institutions and legal realities, by participating in the existing frameworks, but in order to change them. Such an approach can be radical and revolutionary when it aims at the deep structures of the political economy.
Kevin Carson of Mutualist.org is an advocate of the second option, of vigorously building the new realities, and he explains the strategy in a long essay-posting, of which we are reproducing a rather substantial citation:
“Economic counter-institutions, unfortunately, work within the framework of a larger corporate capitalist economy. They compete in markets in which the institutional culture of the dominant firms is top-down and hierarchical, and are in great danger of absorbing this institutional culture themselves. That’s why you have a non-profit and cooperative sector whose management is indistinguishable from its capitalist counterparts: prestige salaries, middle management featherbedding, bureaucratic irrationality, and slavish adherence to the latest motivational/management theory dogma. The problem is exacerbated by a capitalist financial system, which extends positive reinforcement (in the form of credit) to firms following an orthodox organizational model (even when bottom-up organization is far more efficient). Paul Goodman described it this way, in The Community of Scholars:
In brief, …the inevitability of centralism will be self-proving. A system destroys its competitors by pre-empting the means and channels, and then proves that it is the only conceivable mode of operating.
The solution is to promote as much consolidation as possible within the counter-economy. We need to get back to the job of “building the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.” A great deal of production and consumption already takes place within the social or gift economy, self-employment, barter, etc. The linkages need to be increased and strengthened between those involved in consumers’ and producers’ co-ops, self-employment, LETS systems, home gardening and other household production, informal barter, etc. What economic counter-institutions already exist need to start functioning as a cohesive counter-economy.
As Hernando de Soto has pointed out, the resources already available to us are enormous. If we could leverage and mobilize them suffiiciently, they might be made to function as a counterweight to the capitalist economy. For example: the average residential lot, if subjected to biointensive farming methods, could supply the majority of a family’s vegetable needs. And what’s more important, the total labor involved in doing this would be less than it takes to earn the money to buy equivalent produce from the supermarket. The average person could increase his independence of the wage-system, improve the quality of his food, and reduce his total work hours, all at once. This is an ideal theme for mutualist propaganda.
A key objective should be building the secondary institutions we need to make the resources we already have more usable. Most people engage in a great deal of informal production to meet their own needs, but lack either access or awareness of the institutional framework by which they might cooperate and exchange with others involved in similar activities. Expanding LETS systems and increasing public awareness of them is vital. Every need that can be met by producing for oneself, or exchanging one’s own produce for that of a neighbor, increases the amount of one’s total consumption needs that can be met without depending on employment at someone else’s whim. If an organic gardener lives next door to a plumber and they exchange produce for plumbing work, neither one can provide an outlet for the other’s entire output. But both, at least, will have a secure source of supply for both his vegetables and plumbing needs, and an equally secure market for the portion of his own output consumed by the other. The more different trades come into the system, the larger the proportion of total needs that can be met outside the framework of a job.
Ultimately, we need a cooperative alternative to the capitalists’ banking system, to increase the cooperative economy’s access to its own mutual credit. This is illegal, under the terms of capitalist banking law. The banking system is set up to prevent ordinary people from leveraging their own property for interest-free credit through mutual banking. Gary Elkin has argued that it might be possible to slip mutual banking in through the back door, by piggybacking it on a LETS system. Members of a LETS system might start out by extending store credit against the future labor of other members, and expand from there.
Part Four: What is to be done?
Okay so inviting the homeless into book clubs doesn't work and voting for one group of politicians is really more of a gamble that someone else will eventually get around to solving the problem for us, but the odds aren't great.
So what does actually work? well their are things that can be done to address the present effects of state violence and the logic of capitalist economics. I'm going to go ahead and steal this list of potential options written by Ed
For homelessness in particular, the meme mentions Proudhon. Proudhon was a major advocate of workers co-operatives, and a major criticism of Proudhon's economic ideas is that they would not be viable in terms of building a new society that escapes capitalism. But it has had some success in providing relief and a means of support for homeless people and other marginalised populations. For example the Cartoneros of Argentina.
Reddebrek's bowl of Saccharine Grumblings
A Jack of all trades, and Master of none.
Okay so inviting the homeless into book clubs doesn't work and voting for one group of politicians is really more of a gamble that someone else will eventually get around to solving the problem for us, but the odds aren't great.
So what does actually work? well their are things that can be done to address the present effects of state violence and the logic of capitalist economics. I'm going to go ahead and steal this list of potential options written by Ed
This isn't an exhaustive list and not everything on here will be viable for everyone, but they are examples of things that can be done immediately by people without having to wait and trust in groups and institutions to eventually get into power and then eventually look into the issue once they've managed to find a compromise that'll appease the rest of the powerful groups.Workplace organising
It’s still the case that our power as a class is strongest at the point where we produce profit: at work. If there’s a union at your work, join it and get in touch with your rep saying you’d like to help organise. If there’s no rep, get in touch with the branch and offer to take on the role (and check out these tips for being a good union rep).
If there’s no union, consider starting one: you could go with one of the larger TUC unions or smaller member-controlled unions like the UVW, IWGB or IWW. All these unions should be able to train you in the nuts and bolts of workplace organising. TUC rep training often focuses too heavily on recruiting members rather than organising, so we would highly recommend you attend the IWW’s Organiser Training. Unions often aren’t perfect, but the best way to learn how to make the best of them is to get started and get in touch with other militants. However workplace organisation begins with making connections with your co-workers, and beginning to be able to talk about pay and working conditions amongst each other, and this is worthwhile and necessary whether there is a formal workplace organisation in place or not.
Migrant solidarity
There are lots of groups around the country doing migrant solidarity work that will be invaluable in the coming years. The Anti-Raids Network do great work resisting immigration raids (read more here). So start an Anti-Raids group to build resistance to the hostile environment.
Other groups like NELMA in East London, the Unity Centre in Glasgow or Kent Anti-Racism Network all do good work. You can also get in touch to see if there are similar groups nearer to you.
Tenant organising
The Radical Housing Network would be the first port of call to see if there are any groups or campaigns in your area or to help you set one up if there isn’t. Rent Strike have been organising successful rent strikes amongst students since 2015 and have a handy ‘How-to’ section on their website. Brighton Solidarity Federation have been doing great organising for years around housing, organising rent strikes and confronting landlords and estate agents over withheld deposits and repairs. SolFed do not have functioning locals across the UK by any means, but you may be able to join other local renters unions like the London Renters Union.
Defending public services and benefits
The past ten years has seen swinging cuts to public services and benefits: Universal Credit, work capability, PIP and ESA assessments, the benefits cap and bedroom tax, cuts to domestic violence centres, libraries, and social care. Groups like Disabled People Against Cuts[/ur] and [url=http://www.sistersuncut.org/]Sisters Uncut have been fighting these restrictions of provision. There have also been recent successes from local campaigns to prevent service closures such as Essex libraries.
Things will get worse before they get better with a Tory majority, despite promises to 'end austerity' and this means talking about direct community provision too. Foodbanks are often presented as apolitical, but there are examples, like Food Hall Project in Sheffield, of providing social space – as well as food – to talk to each other about shared issues which can (and should) be spread elsewhere.
Climate change
While we have reservations about Extinction Rebellion, chances are there’ll be a group near you and it may be worth getting in touch to meet people who want to take direct action (but please, DO NOT give your info to police or get arrested for the sake of it!), especially in light of important campaigning against Heathrow expansion. The Green Anti-Capitalist Front are a more radical alternative. There are also community groups like HACAN East (against London City Airport) which could do with support/replication while Frack Off have a list of anti-fracking groups (which will no doubt be back on the agenda soon).
Self-defense
When Tommy Robinson endorsed Boris Johnson he showed what all of us knew already: that the British far-right see the Tory leader as ‘their guy’. They will be feeling pretty confident now and that won’t just come about in more far-right marches, but in more violence and aggression in general. At least three Labour canvassers were assaulted over the course of this General Election campaign and anti-Muslim violence rose 375% after Johnson’s 2018 “letterboxes” comment about burqa-wearing women. We will have to oppose this; whether that means setting up local anti-fascist groups like those around the Anti-Fascist Network, starting ‘red gyms’ or something more informal.http://libcom.org/blog/every-challenge-can-be-overcome-6-ideas-getting-started-13122019
For homelessness in particular, the meme mentions Proudhon. Proudhon was a major advocate of workers co-operatives, and a major criticism of Proudhon's economic ideas is that they would not be viable in terms of building a new society that escapes capitalism. But it has had some success in providing relief and a means of support for homeless people and other marginalised populations. For example the Cartoneros of Argentina.
Occupy Wall Street's anarchist roots
The 'Occupy' movement is one of several in American history to be based on anarchist principles.
30 Nov 2011
The 'Occupy' movement is 'a genuine attempt to create the institutions of a new society in the shell of the old' [AFP]
New York, NY - Almost every time I'm interviewed by a mainstream journalist about Occupy Wall Street I get some variation of the same lecture:
"How are you going to get anywhere if you refuse to create a leadership structure or make a practical list of demands? And what's with all this anarchist nonsense - the consensus, the sparkly fingers? Don't you realise all this radical language is going to alienate people? You're never going to be able to reach regular, mainstream Americans with this sort of thing!"
If one were compiling a scrapbook of worst advice ever given, this sort of thing might well merit an honourable place. After all, since the financial crash of 2007, there have been dozens of attempts to kick-off a national movement against the depredations of the United States' financial elites taking the approach such journalists recommended. All failed. It was only on August 2, when a small group of anarchists and other anti-authoritarians showed up at a meeting called by one such group and effectively wooed everyone away from the planned march and rally to create a genuine democratic assembly, on basically anarchist principles, that the stage was set for a movement that Americans from Portland to Tuscaloosa were willing to embrace.
I should be clear here what I mean by "anarchist principles". The easiest way to explain anarchism is to say that it is a political movement that aims to bring about a genuinely free society - that is, one where humans only enter those kinds of relations with one another that would not have to be enforced by the constant threat of violence. History has shown that vast inequalities of wealth, institutions like slavery, debt peonage or wage labour, can only exist if backed up by armies, prisons, and police. Anarchists wish to see human relations that would not have to be backed up by armies, prisons and police. Anarchism envisions a society based on equality and solidarity, which could exist solely on the free consent of participants.
Anarchism versus Marxism
Traditional Marxism, of course, aspired to the same ultimate goal but there was a key difference. Most Marxists insisted that it was necessary first to seize state power, and all the mechanisms of bureaucratic violence that come with it, and use them to transform society - to the point where, they argued such mechanisms would, ultimately, become redundant and fade away. Even back in the 19th century, anarchists argued that this was a pipe dream. One cannot, they argued, create peace by training for war, equality by creating top-down chains of command, or, for that matter, human happiness by becoming grim joyless revolutionaries who sacrifice all personal self-realisation or self-fulfillment to the cause.
It's not just that the ends do not justify the means (though they don't), you will never achieve the ends at all unless the means are themselves a model for the world you wish to create. Hence the famous anarchist call to begin "building the new society in the shell of the old" with egalitarian experiments ranging from free schools to radical labour unions to rural communes.
Anarchism was also a revolutionary ideology, and its emphasis on individual conscience and individual initiative meant that during the first heyday of revolutionary anarchism between roughly 1875 and 1914, many took the fight directly to heads of state and capitalists, with bombings and assassinations. Hence the popular image of the anarchist bomb-thrower. It's worthy of note that anarchists were perhaps the first political movement to realise that terrorism, even if not directed at innocents, doesn't work. For nearly a century now, in fact, anarchism has been one of the very few political philosophies whose exponents never blow anyone up (indeed, the 20th-century political leader who drew most from the anarchist tradition was Mohandas K Gandhi.)
Yet for the period of roughly 1914 to 1989, a period during which the world was continually either fighting or preparing for world wars, anarchism went into something of an eclipse for precisely that reason: To seem "realistic", in such violent times, a political movement had to be capable of organising armies, navies and ballistic missile systems, and that was one thing at which Marxists could often excel. But everyone recognised that anarchists - rather to their credit - would never be able to pull it off. It was only after 1989, when the age of great war mobilisations seemed to have ended, that a global revolutionary movement based on anarchist principles - the global justice movement - promptly reappeared.
How, then, did OWS embody anarchist principles? It might be helpful to go over this point by point:
1) The refusal to recognise the legitimacy of existing political institutions.
One reason for the much-discussed refusal to issue demands is because issuing demands means recognising the legitimacy - or at least, the power - of those of whom the demands are made. Anarchists often note that this is the difference between protest and direct action: Protest, however militant, is an appeal to the authorities to behave differently; direct action, whether it's a matter of a community building a well or making salt in defiance of the law (Gandhi's example again), trying to shut down a meeting or occupy a factory, is a matter of acting as if the existing structure of power does not even exist. Direct action is, ultimately, the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free.
2) The refusal to accept the legitimacy of the existing legal order.
The second principle, obviously, follows from the first. From the very beginning, when we first started holding planning meetings in Tompkins Square Park in New York, organisers knowingly ignored local ordinances that insisted that any gathering of more than 12 people in a public park is illegal without police permission - simply on the grounds that such laws should not exist. On the same grounds, of course, we chose to occupy a park, inspired by examples from the Middle East and southern Europe, on the grounds that, as the public, we should not need permission to occupy public space. This might have been a very minor form of civil disobedience but it was crucial that we began with a commitment to answer only to a moral order, not a legal one.
3) The refusal to create an internal hierarchy, but instead to create a form of consensus-based direct democracy.
From the very beginning, too, organisers made the audacious decision to operate not only by direct democracy, without leaders, but by consensus. The first decision ensured that there would be no formal leadership structure that could be co-opted or coerced; the second, that no majority could bend a minority to its will, but that all crucial decisions had to be made by general consent. American anarchists have long considered consensus process (a tradition that has emerged from a confluence of feminism, anarchism and spiritual traditions like the Quakers) crucial for the reason that it is the only form of decision-making that could operate without coercive enforcement - since if a majority does not have the means to compel a minority to obey its dictates, all decisions will, of necessity, have to be made by general consent.
4) The embrace of prefigurative politics.
As a result, Zuccotti Park, and all subsequent encampments, became spaces of experiment with creating the institutions of a new society - not only democratic General Assemblies but kitchens, libraries, clinics, media centres and a host of other institutions, all operating on anarchist principles of mutual aid and self-organisation - a genuine attempt to create the institutions of a new society in the shell of the old.
Why did it work? Why did it catch on? One reason is, clearly, because most Americans are far more willing to embrace radical ideas than anyone in the established media is willing to admit. The basic message - that the American political order is absolutely and irredeemably corrupt, that both parties have been bought and sold by the wealthiest 1 per cent of the population, and that if we are to live in any sort of genuinely democratic society, we're going to have to start from scratch - clearly struck a profound chord in the American psyche.
Perhaps this is not surprising: We are facing conditions that rival those of the 1930s, the main difference being that the media seems stubbornly willing to acknowledge it. It raises intriguing questions about the role of the media itself in American society. Radical critics usually assume the "corporate media", as they call it, mainly exists to convince the public that existing institutions are healthy, legitimate and just. It is becoming increasingly apparent that they do not really see this is possible; rather, their role is simply to convince members of an increasingly angry public that no one else has come to the same conclusions they have. The result is an ideology that no one really believes, but most people at least suspect that everybody else does.
Nowhere is this disjunction between what ordinary Americans really think, and what the media and political establishment tells them they think, more clear than when we talk about democracy.
Democracy in America?
According to the official version, of course, "democracy" is a system created by the Founding Fathers, based on checks and balances between president, congress and judiciary. In fact, nowhere in the Declaration of Independence or Constitution does it say anything about the US being a "democracy". The authors of those documents, almost to a man, defined "democracy" as a matter of collective self-governance by popular assemblies, and as such they were dead-set against it.
Democracy meant the madness of crowds: bloody, tumultuous and untenable. "There was never a democracy that didn't commit suicide," wrote Adams; Hamilton justified the system of checks and balances by insisting that it was necessary to create a permanent body of the "rich and well-born" to check the "imprudence" of democracy, or even that limited form that would be allowed in the lower house of representatives.
The result was a republic - modelled not on Athens, but on Rome. It only came to be redefined as a "democracy" in the early 19th century because ordinary Americans had very different views, and persistently tended to vote - those who were allowed to vote - for candidates who called themselves "democrats". But what did - and what do - ordinary Americans mean by the word? Did they really just mean a system where they get to weigh in on which politicians will run the government? It seems implausible. After all, most Americans loathe politicians, and tend to be skeptical about the very idea of government. If they universally hold out "democracy" as their political ideal, it can only be because they still see it, however vaguely, as self-governance - as what the Founding Fathers tended to denounce as either "democracy" or, as they sometimes also put it, "anarchy".
If nothing else, this would help explain the enthusiasm with which they have embraced a movement based on directly democratic principles, despite the uniformly contemptuous dismissal of the United States' media and political class.
In fact, this is not the first time a movement based on fundamentally anarchist principles - direct action, direct democracy, a rejection of existing political institutions and attempt to create alternative ones - has cropped up in the US. The civil rights movement (at least its more radical branches), the anti-nuclear movement, and the global justice movement all took similar directions. Never, however, has one grown so startlingly quickly. But in part, this is because this time around, the organisers went straight for the central contradiction. They directly challenged the pretenses of the ruling elite that they are presiding over a democracy.
When it comes to their most basic political sensibilities, most Americans are deeply conflicted. Most combine a deep reverence for individual freedom with a near-worshipful identification with institutions like the army and police. Most combine an enthusiasm for markets with a hatred of capitalists. Most are simultaneously profoundly egalitarian, and deeply racist. Few are actual anarchists; few even know what "anarchism" means; it's not clear how many, if they did learn, would ultimately wish to discard the state and capitalism entirely. Anarchism is much more than simply grassroots democracy: It ultimately aims to eliminate all social relations, from wage labour to patriarchy, that can only be maintained by the systematic threat of force.
But one thing overwhelming numbers of Americans do feel is that something is terribly wrong with their country, that its key institutions are controlled by an arrogant elite, that radical change of some kind is long since overdue. They're right. It's hard to imagine a political system so systematically corrupt - one where bribery, on every level, has not only been made legal, but soliciting and dispensing bribes has become the full-time occupation of every American politician. The outrage is appropriate. The problem is that up until September 17, the only side of the spectrum willing to propose radical solutions of any sort was the Right.
As the history of the past movements all make clear, nothing terrifies those running the US more than the danger of democracy breaking out. The immediate response to even a modest spark of democratically organised civil disobedience is a panicked combination of concessions and brutality. How else can one explain the recent national mobilisation of thousands of riot cops, the beatings, chemical attacks, and mass arrests, of citizens engaged in precisely the kind of democratic assemblies the Bill of Rights was designed to protect, and whose only crime - if any - was the violation of local camping regulations?
Our media pundits might insist that if average Americans ever realised the anarchist role in Occupy Wall Street, they would turn away in shock and horror; but our rulers seem, rather, to labour under a lingering fear that if any significant number of Americans do find out what anarchism really is, they might well decide that rulers of any sort are unnecessary.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily represent Al Jazeera's editorial policy.
SOURCE: AL JAZEERA
