What would a perfectly free life look like?
What sort of organizations (matter, technologies) would emerge if free people were unfettered to use their imagination to actually solve collective problems rather than make them worse.
What would it take to allow our political and economic systems to become a mode of collective problem-solving rather than a mode of collective war?
A. Anarchism as a social movement focussed on the self-organization of workers
A Boss in Heaven is the best excuse for a boss on earth, therefore if God did exist, he would have to be abolished. - Bakunin
1. A movement that aims to bring about a genuinely free society where humans only enter those kinds of relations with one another that would not have to be enforced by the constant threat of violence; that is, “they would be limited to ones that could exist without anyone having the ability, at any point, to call on armed men to show up and say ‘I don’t care what you have to say about this, shut up and do what you’re told.’”
2. Works with the basic principles of self-organization, voluntary association, mutual aid, opposition to all forms of coercion, and so is anti-state, anti-authority and anti-capitalist.
3. Mikhail Bakunin (1814 –1876) Russian anarchist, founder of collectivist anarchism. Collectivist anarchists agree with Marxists on the evils of capitalism, both calling for the abolition of social inequality and economic democracy, but critique Marx on the question of the state and the “Dictatorship of the Proletariat.”
4. Instead of a "revolutionary" government ruling the masses from above in a centralised state, an anarchist revolution would be based on a federation of communes and workers' councils. The "federative Alliance of all working men's [sic!] associations . . . [would] constitute the Commune" and so the "future social organisation must be made solely from the bottom upwards, by the free association or federation of workers, firstly in their unions, then in the communes, regions, nations and finally in a great federation, international and universal."
5. “You need to build the new society in the shell of the old.” You will never achieve the ends unless the means are themselves a model for the world you wish to create. (E.g. radical labor unions like the IWW, kibbutz movement in Israel, Gandhi’s non-violence movement, Occupy Wall Street)
B. Anarchism as a non-cynical view of human nature
Sociability is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle. If we resort to an indirect test, and ask Nature: "Who are the fittest: those who are continually at war with each other, or those who support one another?" we at once see that those animals which acquire habits of mutual aid are undoubtedly the fittest. They have more chances to survive, and they attain, in their respective classes, the highest development and bodily organization. - Peter Kopotkin
6. Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921) Challenges the enlightenment view of human beings as self-interested individuals out for themselves; cooperation and “mutual aid’ as illustrated in nature (contrary to cynical readings of Darwin); markets and wage labor as incentivizing selfish behavior - scarce jobs and scare money creates competition where before there was cooperation; governments as pacifying individuals and making them resentful - treat people like children and they will act like children. The liberal social contract tradition as projecting capitalistic selfishness into the interpretation of nature.
C. Anarchism as Direct Democracy (horizontal organization)
“Democracy was never really invented at all. Neither does it emerge from any particular tradition. It’s not even a really a mode of government. In its essence it is just the belief that humans are fundamentally equal and ought to be allowed to manage their collective affairs in an egalitarian fashion using whatever means appear most conducive. In this sense democracy is as old as history, as human intelligence itself.”
David Graeber
8. For the Founding Fathers, ‘democracy’ was synonymous with anarchy. Nowhere in the Constitution or Declaration of Independence is the word ‘democracy’ mentioned, the obvious reason being that the Founding Fathers detested it, following every Greek philosopher in believing that ordinary people are too irrational, selfish, and ignorant, for self-rule. Britain as the model for the American Republic, rulers elected by a vote of property-holding males, to representative assemblies (e.g. the Continental Congress). Voting as an aristocratic way of selecting rulers (from the professional class of superior men), versus rule by lottery (‘sortition’). Mass mobilizations, meetings and popular uprisings before and after the Revolutionary War - often focussed on the issue of debt and land redistribution - kept the Founding Fathers worried of democratic contagion. The word ‘democracy’ starts to have a positive meaning for the first time with Andrew Jackson (POTUS 1829-1837) to designate the electoral regime, a marketing ploy to appeal to the interests of small farmers and laborers against powerful bureaucrats. What the Founding Fathers had understood to be a republic was rebranded a democracy.
9. David Graeber and Occupy Wall Street (2011) Modeling a prefigurative politics: the idea that the organizational form an activist group takes should embody the kind of society we wish to create.
10. The use of the National Assembly model of horizontal organization - building consensus through Anarchist Process: the idea that everyone should be able to weigh in equally on any decision, and no one should be bound by a decision they detest. Occupy Wall Street (OWS) as a movement without leaders or agendas, creates the new language for addressing the problem of government by bribery: “We Are The 99%” Who are the 99%? (http://wearethe99percent.tumblr.com)
D. Anarchism as Defection from All Forms of Oppression
Never before have people been so infantalized, made so dependent on the machine for everything; as the earth rapidly approaches its extinction due to technology, our souls are shrunk and flattened by its pervasive rule. Any sense of wholeness and freedom can only return by the undoing of the massive division of labour at the heart of technological progress. This is the liberatory project in all its depth. - John Zerzan
11. “Anarcho-Primitivism” Return to Gather-Hunter and non-domesticated ways of living. E.g. Separatist Movements: Fleeing from control of violent regimes to set up societies based on the rejection of all oppressive institutions (social conventions, technology), encouraging further masss defection, e.g. School of the Tillers, in China c. 400 BCE.
12. Emma Goldman: Anarchism as Unconditional Love: “Love, the strongest and deepest element in all life, the harbinger of hope, of joy, of ecstasy; love, the defier of all laws, of all conventions; love, the freest, the most powerful moulder of human destiny; how can such an all-compelling force be synonymous with that poor little State and Church-begotten weed, marriage? Free love? As if love is anything but free!”
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