When I was twenty, I moved to Montréal & pretty quickly fell into a group of friends who were activists like me. 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.
If I'm reading this correctly, the main reason you left anarchism is that you feel "commitment to structurelessness and an obsession with identity" are counterproductive or worse. Do you think those are inherent in archaism?
I was part of the Guelph queer/sjw/anarchist scene in my 20s (2008-2018). I was part of a community that had been infiltrated by cops for the g20. It was devastating and likely
Made us so much less inclined to create collations and work with people across difference. But Despite also grappling with many of the identitarian issues you name, and the ways we still often used the “masters tools” in our interpersonal relationships, I will forever hold those people, our activism, our adventures, the ideas, the friendships, the learning and growth so tenderly in my heart. We were certainly feeling around in the dark to try to create authentic community and build movements and create change, but I think we were still able to be quite successful in our way way. At least I am forever changed. I still consider myself an anarchist, despite having left that scene to move back to my hometown, and becoming busy with parenting and fighting childism. I also see the ways many activist/anarchist communities seem to be evolving and recovering from those experiences to reject the ways we were so rigid and had absorbed purity and cancel culture. I see more flexibility, more embracing differences, more desire to create a broader movement… or at least that’s what I want to see and so I see it. In solidarity! 🖤
It's an interesting essay, and I always like to get new perspectives. Personally, I'm free market- but I'm quite sympathetic to those who argue for alternatives like worker owner cooperatives. I've done a fair amount of research on companies like Mondragon or Isthmus Engineering.
However, I would like to push back a little. My biggest gripe about the Libertarian Left is that they seem not to apply the same type of thinking to government as they would a large multinational conglomerate. Have you ever read Jerry Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy? I can tell you from decades of experience with friends and associates that this is exactly how government works.
Yes, the public sector is filled with good people. But good people aren't the ones who run the organisations and institutions- or at least if they are good, then their efforts towards goodness are constrained to working a few white elephant projects whilst everything else around them goes to shit.
I said I was free market, but the problem is what we have in the West bears no resemblance to free market. In a truly free market system most people would be employed by small businesses, with perhaps 10% to 15% of the working age population employed by government, and a similar percentage working for large businesses dealing with projects which can only solved by companies of a certain scale.
Here's the thing. A 2018 survey from the UK showed that 75% to 80% of workers who worked for small businesses were either very or extremely happy with their work or workplace. Compare that to the happiness levels of people working for corporations, governments or institutions and I doubt you would find even a third were somewhat happy. I've known plenty of people who have worked for the NHS, for example, but not a single person who has ever claimed the way it was run was anything other than an omnishambles. The closest I've ever seen to happiness in the public sector is my mother's small school (she is a retired senior teacher)- but only during the periods when she and the other teachers had a decent headteacher.
The Right believes government is the problem. The Left believes government is the solution. Both are naive- government can be both, either or neither. The real problem is scale (and systems, but that's another discussion)- because knowing your boss personally and being able to negotiate with them is the best solution to the standard disempowerment and stealing of autonomy which occurs when degrees of separation are introduced between boss and worker.
Instead of thinking big, we should be thinking small. Government should be devolved to the local level. Large corporations, institutions and government agencies should be modularised, so that localised bosses have the power to negotiate with workers and clients/customers- and possess the basic power to overrule the systematised ruling-making agenda of head office or the mandarinate. And if you want a really anarchist approach to power distribution, why not argue for a fundamental shift from representative to a digital participating democracy? We now have the technology to make such a system a reality, but it's funny how one never hears arguments about implementing such a system.
Generally structuralising problems, processes and systems is a good thing- it leads to specialisation (and I don't mean the drone repetitive task type of specialisation) and productivity. But systematising is only good when applied to things- when people are systematised it's an abomination.
Anyway, I hope I've given you some food for thought. And please feel free to argue back. I like a good debate. Merry Christmas.
I was anarchist more in terms of having little respect for the law, because I did not think right and wrong could be properly expressed via law--it would always end up prohibiting some good and allowing some bad. I was a huge pacifist, and never came close to any sort of violent resistance.
But you remind me of a time in college, when I went to a talk given by "anarcho-primitivists" who were preaching the need to give up technology and basically all become communist farmers. During the Q&A, I asked them, "What will you do when me and my anarcho-technologist buddies show up with our war robots to take your food?" Their response,
"Um...please don't..."
As I got older, I came to have more respect for the role that imperfect law plays in the world. The void left when you remove government isn't filled with good people living in solidarity, it's just filled by the usual powermongers, but now unconstrained by any need to respect the rights and freedoms of others. The world as experienced by most North Americans reading this is probably the closest humanity has ever gotten to the ideal of egalitarian consent that all us anarchists were striving for, and it's fundamentally an achievement of those trying to bring order to the world around them.
I still believe there's such thing as Goodness and that it transcends anything that could be captured by the notion of Law. When the law is clearly evil, good people violate it. But anarchy doesn't need our help, it's the default setting of the world we're born into, and it's the propagation of norms, patterns, rules and laws that constitute achieving something better.
From one recovering anarchist to another, best wishes.
I think a lot of people (anarchists not excepted) are extremely prone to or susceptible to black/white thinking, which deeply undermines leftist organizing. The rise of identitarianism and the fetishistic devotion to total horizontalism are both oversimplified misunderstandings in service of a deranged and non-sensical purity culture that has become ubiquitous in queer and leftist discourse and spaces.
Decentralized networks are not totally flat, they are lumpy af, and rejecting entrenched authority doesn't mean we shouldn't have leaders, it means no one gets to wear that hat all the time or indefinitely.
I still consider myself an anarchist, but that operates for me mostly as a statement of and dedication to principles, not some grandiose "theory of change" or idealistic but doomed revolutionary political program.
Historical sidenote: anarchists and socialists in the late 19th and early 20th century did use consensus (they called it unanimity), but only in smaller affinity groups of 3 to 5 people. For larger group decision making they generally used majority vote or 2/3 majority. I wonder why.
Thanks for sharing. I was in lefty groups with many anarchists, never considered myself one but this was really interesting to read. I think I’m still in that disillusioned state, but hopefully/maybe I will get out of it at some point.
I hear that! I hope your burnout eases and that if you find yourself coming back to politics, it's out of hope rather than guilt, but you know what? Politics or no, there are so many beautiful ways to live a life ;)
As someone who’s gone the opposite way, I appreciated reading this. I still believe a municipally focused anarchism is the best solution for simultaneously solving many of the crises we are in, but it will certainly take a cultural and social revolution to bring that about. Best case scenario, the intense material pressures of ecosystem and food system collapse would be the catalyst. Regardless, I think nationalism is our biggest present hurdle, and it’s probably the main reason anarchism didn’t become a mass movement in the 20th century.
You got it! I mean there’s a reason internationalism has been a cornerstone of socialist organizing. I’m also unlikely to tell you something you don’t already know. Nation states and their borders harm the global working class. For example, they keep impoverished people in countries with low wages and poor working conditions, which is, among other things, anti-competitive. Corporations also leverage the nation state against workers by offshoring jobs, for example, to countries with less robust union laws, so as above the jobs become more dangerous for offshore workers and are likely to be replaced domestically by non-union jobs that pay less, if they’re even replaced at all. Lastly, they reinforce ethnic and ideological conflicts and divert attention away from class struggle and toward manufactured wars that maximize profits for a nation’s owning class, whether in the form of arms manufacturing or resource extraction. There’s also the effect on migration, which is disastrous.
That all makes a lot of sense. I think I am an internationalist at heart but it's hard for me to know what that looks like in concrete, material terms, you know?
"... a dedication to autonomy and a healthy skepticism towards authority..." The language and axes we have available to us when trying to talk about politics can be limiting. A sentiment like you express here is surely common ground for multitudes of people, all across the various ways the political pie can be sliced. How do we find each other?
Sounds like you have been through a journey. I can understand how anarchy might appeal to people, but in the end it doesn’t seem like a practical way to create larger scale changes.
If I'm reading this correctly, the main reason you left anarchism is that you feel "commitment to structurelessness and an obsession with identity" are counterproductive or worse. Do you think those are inherent in archaism?
I was part of the Guelph queer/sjw/anarchist scene in my 20s (2008-2018). I was part of a community that had been infiltrated by cops for the g20. It was devastating and likely
Made us so much less inclined to create collations and work with people across difference. But Despite also grappling with many of the identitarian issues you name, and the ways we still often used the “masters tools” in our interpersonal relationships, I will forever hold those people, our activism, our adventures, the ideas, the friendships, the learning and growth so tenderly in my heart. We were certainly feeling around in the dark to try to create authentic community and build movements and create change, but I think we were still able to be quite successful in our way way. At least I am forever changed. I still consider myself an anarchist, despite having left that scene to move back to my hometown, and becoming busy with parenting and fighting childism. I also see the ways many activist/anarchist communities seem to be evolving and recovering from those experiences to reject the ways we were so rigid and had absorbed purity and cancel culture. I see more flexibility, more embracing differences, more desire to create a broader movement… or at least that’s what I want to see and so I see it. In solidarity! 🖤
It's an interesting essay, and I always like to get new perspectives. Personally, I'm free market- but I'm quite sympathetic to those who argue for alternatives like worker owner cooperatives. I've done a fair amount of research on companies like Mondragon or Isthmus Engineering.
However, I would like to push back a little. My biggest gripe about the Libertarian Left is that they seem not to apply the same type of thinking to government as they would a large multinational conglomerate. Have you ever read Jerry Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy? I can tell you from decades of experience with friends and associates that this is exactly how government works.
Yes, the public sector is filled with good people. But good people aren't the ones who run the organisations and institutions- or at least if they are good, then their efforts towards goodness are constrained to working a few white elephant projects whilst everything else around them goes to shit.
I said I was free market, but the problem is what we have in the West bears no resemblance to free market. In a truly free market system most people would be employed by small businesses, with perhaps 10% to 15% of the working age population employed by government, and a similar percentage working for large businesses dealing with projects which can only solved by companies of a certain scale.
Here's the thing. A 2018 survey from the UK showed that 75% to 80% of workers who worked for small businesses were either very or extremely happy with their work or workplace. Compare that to the happiness levels of people working for corporations, governments or institutions and I doubt you would find even a third were somewhat happy. I've known plenty of people who have worked for the NHS, for example, but not a single person who has ever claimed the way it was run was anything other than an omnishambles. The closest I've ever seen to happiness in the public sector is my mother's small school (she is a retired senior teacher)- but only during the periods when she and the other teachers had a decent headteacher.
The Right believes government is the problem. The Left believes government is the solution. Both are naive- government can be both, either or neither. The real problem is scale (and systems, but that's another discussion)- because knowing your boss personally and being able to negotiate with them is the best solution to the standard disempowerment and stealing of autonomy which occurs when degrees of separation are introduced between boss and worker.
Instead of thinking big, we should be thinking small. Government should be devolved to the local level. Large corporations, institutions and government agencies should be modularised, so that localised bosses have the power to negotiate with workers and clients/customers- and possess the basic power to overrule the systematised ruling-making agenda of head office or the mandarinate. And if you want a really anarchist approach to power distribution, why not argue for a fundamental shift from representative to a digital participating democracy? We now have the technology to make such a system a reality, but it's funny how one never hears arguments about implementing such a system.
Generally structuralising problems, processes and systems is a good thing- it leads to specialisation (and I don't mean the drone repetitive task type of specialisation) and productivity. But systematising is only good when applied to things- when people are systematised it's an abomination.
Anyway, I hope I've given you some food for thought. And please feel free to argue back. I like a good debate. Merry Christmas.
Late to the party, but maybe you'll see this...
I was anarchist more in terms of having little respect for the law, because I did not think right and wrong could be properly expressed via law--it would always end up prohibiting some good and allowing some bad. I was a huge pacifist, and never came close to any sort of violent resistance.
But you remind me of a time in college, when I went to a talk given by "anarcho-primitivists" who were preaching the need to give up technology and basically all become communist farmers. During the Q&A, I asked them, "What will you do when me and my anarcho-technologist buddies show up with our war robots to take your food?" Their response,
"Um...please don't..."
As I got older, I came to have more respect for the role that imperfect law plays in the world. The void left when you remove government isn't filled with good people living in solidarity, it's just filled by the usual powermongers, but now unconstrained by any need to respect the rights and freedoms of others. The world as experienced by most North Americans reading this is probably the closest humanity has ever gotten to the ideal of egalitarian consent that all us anarchists were striving for, and it's fundamentally an achievement of those trying to bring order to the world around them.
I still believe there's such thing as Goodness and that it transcends anything that could be captured by the notion of Law. When the law is clearly evil, good people violate it. But anarchy doesn't need our help, it's the default setting of the world we're born into, and it's the propagation of norms, patterns, rules and laws that constitute achieving something better.
From one recovering anarchist to another, best wishes.
A very thoughtful comment—thanks for dropping by!
I think a lot of people (anarchists not excepted) are extremely prone to or susceptible to black/white thinking, which deeply undermines leftist organizing. The rise of identitarianism and the fetishistic devotion to total horizontalism are both oversimplified misunderstandings in service of a deranged and non-sensical purity culture that has become ubiquitous in queer and leftist discourse and spaces.
Decentralized networks are not totally flat, they are lumpy af, and rejecting entrenched authority doesn't mean we shouldn't have leaders, it means no one gets to wear that hat all the time or indefinitely.
I still consider myself an anarchist, but that operates for me mostly as a statement of and dedication to principles, not some grandiose "theory of change" or idealistic but doomed revolutionary political program.
Historical sidenote: anarchists and socialists in the late 19th and early 20th century did use consensus (they called it unanimity), but only in smaller affinity groups of 3 to 5 people. For larger group decision making they generally used majority vote or 2/3 majority. I wonder why.
Well said! That's a really interesting tidbit about unanimity and when it was used.
Thanks for sharing. I was in lefty groups with many anarchists, never considered myself one but this was really interesting to read. I think I’m still in that disillusioned state, but hopefully/maybe I will get out of it at some point.
I hear that! I hope your burnout eases and that if you find yourself coming back to politics, it's out of hope rather than guilt, but you know what? Politics or no, there are so many beautiful ways to live a life ;)
As someone who’s gone the opposite way, I appreciated reading this. I still believe a municipally focused anarchism is the best solution for simultaneously solving many of the crises we are in, but it will certainly take a cultural and social revolution to bring that about. Best case scenario, the intense material pressures of ecosystem and food system collapse would be the catalyst. Regardless, I think nationalism is our biggest present hurdle, and it’s probably the main reason anarchism didn’t become a mass movement in the 20th century.
Interesting! Can you say more about the nationalism piece? I'm curious :)
You got it! I mean there’s a reason internationalism has been a cornerstone of socialist organizing. I’m also unlikely to tell you something you don’t already know. Nation states and their borders harm the global working class. For example, they keep impoverished people in countries with low wages and poor working conditions, which is, among other things, anti-competitive. Corporations also leverage the nation state against workers by offshoring jobs, for example, to countries with less robust union laws, so as above the jobs become more dangerous for offshore workers and are likely to be replaced domestically by non-union jobs that pay less, if they’re even replaced at all. Lastly, they reinforce ethnic and ideological conflicts and divert attention away from class struggle and toward manufactured wars that maximize profits for a nation’s owning class, whether in the form of arms manufacturing or resource extraction. There’s also the effect on migration, which is disastrous.
That all makes a lot of sense. I think I am an internationalist at heart but it's hard for me to know what that looks like in concrete, material terms, you know?
"... a dedication to autonomy and a healthy skepticism towards authority..." The language and axes we have available to us when trying to talk about politics can be limiting. A sentiment like you express here is surely common ground for multitudes of people, all across the various ways the political pie can be sliced. How do we find each other?
I really appreciate your reflection, Jim! Such values are not owned by any one political tribe, try as they may to claim them.
Sounds like you have been through a journey. I can understand how anarchy might appeal to people, but in the end it doesn’t seem like a practical way to create larger scale changes.
Hehehe...probably not my most widely relatable essay!