My Life as an Anarchist

When I was twenty, I moved to Montréal, a city 4500 km from my hometown outside of Vancouver, BC. Pretty quickly I fell into a group of friends who were activists like me, and we biked around the city, attending writers’ talks and documentary screenings, climbing into dumpsters to salvage food, and participating in various protests and demonstrations. I hung from the top of a tripod to block the front doors of a bank that financed Alberta’s tar sands; we blockaded a highway with our bicycles to protest a proposed pipeline; we travelled to Ottawa a couple of times, once to show solidarity with the Barriere Lake Algonquin First Nation and once for a Free Palestine rally. We made shoplifting into a sport, cooked vegan food for homeless people under the banner of Food Not Bombs, and sang labour songs to the thrum of an acoustic guitar. Before long I discovered that my new friends were anarchists, and I started to wonder if I was one, too.

Before leaving Vancouver, I’d found myself disillusioned after my employer, Greenpeace, published a press release congratulating Coca Cola for using green refrigeration technology at the 2010 Olympics. Not only had Greenpeace avoided saying anything about the significant environmental damage caused by the construction of Olympics facilities, but Coca Cola had been embroiled in controversy not too long before that for contaminating drinking water in Kerala, India. In this context, Greenpeace’s endorsement of Coca Cola felt unprincipled, to say the least, and I started to question the merits of the organization and the nonprofit model in general.

This created the perfect context for me to absorb the anarchist argument. I picked up a book called Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism, which defines anarchism thusly:

“‘Anarchism’ is often wrongly identified as chaos, disorganization, and destruction. It is a type of socialism, and is against capitalism and landlordism, but it is also a libertarian type of socialism. For anarchism, individual freedom and individuality are extremely important, and are best developed in a context of democracy and equality. Individuals, however, are divided into classes based on exploitation and power under present-day systems of capitalism and landlordism. To end this situation it is necessary to engage in class struggle and revolution, creating a free socialist society based on common ownership, self-management, democratic planning from below, and production for need, not profit. Only such a social order makes personal freedom possible.”

Right as I started exploring these ideas, activists across the country were preparing to converge on Toronto for the G20, an event hosted by our Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper that would encourage visiting nations to slash public services in the wake of the 2008 Great Recession and the subsequent bailouts of the banks. The air at the Montréal Anarchist Bookfair was buzzing with anticipation less than a month before the summit; I looked around at the sea of black-clothed, pierced, stick-n-poked attendees and felt a warm glow of belonging.

The G20 was unlike anything I’ve experienced before or since: the downtown core was transformed into a militarized zone for the weekend, with droves of police stopping and searching people at random, and dragging anyone they deemed suspicious from public buses and trains. A fleet of burgundy and navy blue mini-vans filled with plainclothes officers roamed in circles, snatching people from the streets and speeding off. On the last day of the weekend summit, I was shot by a police officer with rubber bullets, shoved into the pavement, arrested and charged with obstructing a peace officer (we protestors were in retreat when I was shot, and the charge was later dropped). Nearly every friend who attended the G20 with me was either arrested, injured by police, or both. From threatening rape to groping to executing midnight raids and beating activists in alleyways, the police did not exercise restraint.

This encounter with uni-directional violence targeting not only rioters but also peaceful protestors—and even regular people who had the misfortune of walking down the street at the wrong time—shook me deeply. A hatred for the state and its monopoly on violence was no longer abstract to me. I felt that I’d had my rose-coloured glasses ripped from my face and was finally seeing the world for what it was: a sinister place riddled with violence and injustice. Although my physical wounds healed quickly, my existential wounds did not: I became paranoid, fearful and hostile. I did not conceive of the G20 as a horrible yet anomalous event—rather it revealed deep truths about the government and its armed enforcers.

I came by my paranoia honestly: in the aftermath of the summit, we discovered that police had been staking out activists prior to the G20, and that undercover cops had infiltrated activist groups and lived among its members for over a year prior in some cases. I personally knew someone who was sentenced to 13 months in prison, based on information attained through infiltration and surveillance. The policing apparatus has long been known to be hostile to leftist social movements, but trust me when I say they reserve a heightened level of wrath for anarchists.

My friends and I doubled down on “security culture”, which was meant to minimize the chances of having our communications intercepted by police. It included using an encrypted email service run by an anarchist collective, taking out our cell phone batteries when discussing anything sensitive, covering our faces at protests, and maintaining a code of silence against the police. The most famous and visible expression of anarchist security culture is the Black Bloc, a protest tactic where a group of people wear black clothing head to toe in order to blend in with each other and avoid being personally identified while committing potentially illegal forms of protest.

There were two loose factions of anarchists among the people I knew: insurrectionary anarchists and mass anarchists. Insurrectionary anarchists believed in forming a revolutionary vanguard that would carry out armed actions known as “propaganda of the deed” that would shock the public out of their complacency, and inspire them to join a spontaneous revolution. They rejected all hierarchy and formal organization as authoritarian, and were hostile to reforms, because they believed that reforms decreased the likelihood of total revolution. Insurrectionary anarchists tended to organize within affinity groups, which were small autonomous cells that would carry out clandestine and often anonymous actions. Sabotaging machinery, destroying property, inciting riots, blockading ports and railways, and fighting police in the streets were some of their chosen activities (although I should say that not everyone who participates in these actions is an insurrectionary anarchist).

Mass anarchists (also known as syndicalists) believed in the power of mass movements, and in building them by engaging people around basic material issues such as wages or working conditions. Syndicalists believed their role in such movements was to push them to become more revolutionary in order to create drastic change that could never be achieved through electoral politics. The mass anarchists I knew were involved in grassroots organizations and coalitions. They were often nurses, social workers or frontline staff who worked directly with people experiencing poverty or addiction. Others were involved in arts programming or food security. They valued being approachable, relatable and welcoming to new people who had an interest in community organizing. These were the people who organized a country-wide network of free therapy and legal support for G20 activists who were grappling with its aftermath.

I always considered myself a syndicalist. I dreamt of workplaces that were collectively owned by the workers (I suppose I still do). I enjoyed organizing with groups that were building structures outside of the mainstream. For example, fourteen years before the founding of Substack, a small group of leftist Canadian journalists founded a publication called The Dominion (which later expanded into a network of media co-ops in Vancouver, Toronto, Montréal and Halifax) that was funded directly by readers so reporters would be free of advertiser influence.

Over the years, intersectionality became increasingly important. People’s identities started to carry more weight than their ideas, their dedication or their work ethic. Everyone’s language was under the microscope, as was how loudly or quietly they talked, how often they talked, and how much deference they showed to people who claimed to be more marginalized than them. It almost became a game to shoot down each other’s ideas by finding ever-more obscure reasons to call an idea racist, sexist or ableist. Bringing up class would almost guarantee an accusation of white supremacy or settler-colonial thinking. More and more, I found myself in groups that were unable to accomplish much of anything. The hostility towards hierarchy meant people with zero activist experience held the same sway as seasoned organizers. Since we made decisions through consensus, every single person had to agree on an action before it would be carried out, which proved nearly impossible. Even if we reached internal agreement, a certain flavour of activist would rush to call the event problematic and denounce it as soon as it was announced.

I ended up taking a long break from activism, and I went through a period of time where I wasn’t even sure I wanted to be political anymore. Maybe that part of my life was over. I explored my spiritual side, went back to school, and fell in love with my partner. I felt such dread when I thought about my time as an activist. I even had moments where I wondered if I was drifting to the right.

But eventually, the burnout eased, and my love for politics kicked back in. I spent a couple of years reorienting myself, trying to gain some clarity on where it had all gone sideways. I realized that I still believed in the economic goals of leftist struggle, but I now saw the identity competitions, the fixation on language, and the hostility towards structure as impediments to those goals.

What ultimately caused me to stop considering myself an anarchist was an interview with Amber A’Lee Frost on the Jacobin YouTube channel, where she talked about how the state will always be unmatched in both its resources and its logistical ability to distribute those resources. The biggest anarchist mutual aid project in the world will never come close. So if we truly care about improving the material conditions of people’s lives, our energy is much better spent pushing the government to improve that distribution rather than trying to patch those holes with mutual aid. (I’m paraphrasing—hear Amber for yourself here.)

A switch flipped for me when I heard that. As much as I’d been enamoured with anarchism, its goals always seemed fuzzy. What would happen if we pulled off a revolution, something that seemed impossible in contemporary Canada? What would stop the army from crushing us? How would we implement our vision of decentralized, local power? How would we handle regional power grabs? What economic reforms reflected our vision? Which countries would be willing to do business with us?

Since becoming an anarchist, I’d watched the brutal authoritarian backlash following the Arab Spring, and the failure of the consensus-based Occupy movement to achieve any lasting reforms. I’d become aware of the byzantine Greek debt crisis and the crippling effects of the US embargo against Cuba. No movement happens in a vacuum, and when one is up against something as powerful as a state or a global economic order, the most likely outcome is getting crushed. Particularly in Canada, where our standard of living is quite high, it’s hard to imagine people rolling the dice on an insurgent regime. Anarchism suddenly seemed like a futile approach to social change.

And so I quit. I began to value pragmatic material improvements over revolutionary fomentation. I realized that many of the changes that would most improve people’s lives are rather boring, and that the people on the bullhorns are often missing the point. It became clear that a commitment to structurelessness and an obsession with identity were hindering the left’s ability to organize the masses.

I still hold some ambivalence towards adopting the handle “recovering anarchist” because, even though it describes me accurately, I didn’t want to come across as completely dismissive of the long tradition of anarchist theory and action. It shaped my young adulthood, and it has provided me with a dedication to autonomy and a healthy skepticism towards authority that I will always carry with me. We need anarchists to point out the hypocrisies of the powerful; we need their direct action skills in moments of crisis.

But I’ve hung up my black uniform, and I have no regrets. I don’t want to scuffle with the cops anymore, or carry out secret, illegal actions. My goals today are much less romantic, but they’re also more achievable. I’ve chosen the mundane task of building capacity on the left over waiting for a revolution whose day may never come.

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