Am I an anarchist?
Letters to an anarchist, part seven.
Last year, I asked Peter Clayborne, author of Anarchy Unfolds, to explain anarchism to me. We spent the past year writing back and forth and are now publishing our letters as a series called “Letters to an Anarchist.” You can catch up here:
This is part seven of eight 👇🏻
Dear Peter,
As always, you've given me so much to think about!
Per shame: I will admit I haven't done a lot of research on sex offender registries and you very well could be right that it's not the way to go—I used it only as an example to try to understand what you meant when you said that shame could be an effective tool against violent behavior more than a prison sentence might be. Can you give me another example that might better express what you mean here? How would you use shame as a deterrent for violence and/or violent crime? Or as an alternative to prison?
And as for Dunbar's number, I'm not tied to this. I'm only using it to express my feeling that small groups of people can effectively self-govern but that larger groups of people need some level of governance. For example, what if one of those small self-governed communities starts behaving badly? You mentioned the Zapotec community that found it culturally acceptable for men to beat their wives and children while the neighboring La Paz community didn't. Similar inequities occurred in Italian and German city states before they centralized. This is why we developed larger federal governments that outlawed that kind of bad behavior.
But then, your vision for smaller but overlapping communities makes a lot of sense to me, and I wonder if your vision aligns with the one I presented in my essay "Decouple federal government from nation-states?" In that essay, I made the case that smaller self-governing communities, a US state that has become its own country perhaps, could still be part of larger layers of federal governance that ensure that country's good behavior. A self-governing Utah, for example, could have its own tax policy and use those tax dollars to provide universal healthcare and education if it chose to. But it might still participate in a larger "Paris Climate Accord" layer that ensures it adheres to emissions guidelines just like every other participating nation-state or a Schengen-like Zone that allows open borders between other US nation-states. It could similarly collaborate with other nation-states for purposes of trade or military protection, just as we currently do with the EU and NATO.
At the time you left a comment that said, "I think the kind of global society I try to imagine is like this, a multi-layered arrangement where individuals and local communities have full autonomy over their lives, while larger organizing bodies help with administrative and coordinating efforts."
If we agree that small communities can self-govern, with larger overlapping layers of governance that can help us ensure the better actions of those self-governments, my question is: Does that still count as anarchist? Because there is still something resembling a state in this case, and there is still something resembling an economy. There is still some sort of coordination effort. It's maybe a more decentralized system than we have now, perhaps a more equitable economic system, but it's still a system. One a lot like ours. Just tweaked to be better.
My perception of anarchy was that it was stateless, government-less, and economy-less, but perhaps that’s naive. In a recent post you said, “Anarchy is seen by many as a purely negative project: The absence of rule, or the dismantling of authority. While those aspects are important, anarchy is also the presence of order, and the establishment of systems—just of another kind. What kind exactly? One that resembles ours if turned upside-down. So we make decisions through affinity groups and federations instead of governments, and we resolve conflicts through practices of transformative justice instead of through courts and prisons.”
Perhaps then, I’ve been thinking about things all wrong. Because what are governments if not “affinity groups and federations?” What is “transformative justice,” when one version we’ve created is “courts and prisons?” Anarchists may want an upside-down version of these things, but if we’re only asking for a better version of something we already have then maybe we’re just using different terminology to describe the same things.
After receiving your letter, I read through some of the other anarchist thinkers and they do have some level of coordination in their thinking. I agree with Peter Kropotkin, for instance, that we could create more decentralized communities. I agree with Emma Goldman that we could have more open borders between them—I even think countries would become more utopian if they had to compete with one another for citizens. I very much agree with David Graeber that we could have a better-focused economy, with jobs that are more directly impactful to our communities—I wrote about what that could look like in my essay, “This could be our economy in 2100.”
At the time you even commented: "I’d love to live in a world like you’ve described."
My first thought was, maybe I’m more anarchist than I thought? (And if all of these governments and nations and economies can still exist in an anarchist world, then maybe I am.) But then, I can’t help but think that these ideas are very similar to our existing ones, just tweaked to be better. And would we call any of our current systems anarchist? Or is anarchism just the “more autonomous” version of what we already have?
When you published your anarchic utopian vision, this point was driven home for me. In it, you imagine a world where our newsletters become network states—we gather around ideas at first, and then in person. We begin to help one another out, we start to grow our own food, collect and treat our own water, power our communities with solar energy, build a much better internet, and a system of libraries that function as education centers. We take matters into our own hands and come up with new ways for handling violence and misconduct, better legal systems.
I think that’s a beautiful vision, but also we’ve already done all that. We were small groups of people that gathered and helped each other out. We did come up with ways to grow our food and power our communities. We took matters into our own hands and came up with our own systems for handling violence. We came up with systems that protected us from more violent neighbors. A lot of the anarchist argument seems to be disgruntlement for the way those systems turned out: That we ended up polluting the earth in the process, and creating disproportionate wealth. Our prison systems aren't ideal and the militaries we created wound up having negative effects on the global stage. I think there is a kind of anger that runs through the anarchist genre. And I get it: I'm disgruntled about those things too.
But I think we're better off fixing the things we are disgruntled about than assuming we can dismantle the whole thing and start the process all over again—going back to subsistence farming and then re-creating energy systems and justice systems, hoping they will somehow turn out much better this time. Why do we assume things would go better the second time around when we can see nations around the world struggling to create those better systems? And all while trying to create them with incongruous groups of people who are anarchist, socialist, capitalist, and all the rest?
What we’ve created so far, after all, isn’t an ideology at all. Capitalism is just what naturally occurred when people wanted things they couldn’t make themselves or that others could make better, so they created a monetary system that would allow them to trade for the things they wanted rather than barter with what they had. Governments are just what happened when communities consolidated together against threats or to protect one another as a group. Militaries arose out our need to protect those communities and economies. It makes sense to me to try to improve what has naturally developed from here, but I’m not sure we can create something new based on some kind of ideology.
Maybe we don’t need to. After all, the end result we are hoping for looks eerily similar: A more decentralized and autonomous world that's more conscious of the environment, treats people better, and experiences less violence. We share wealth more equitably, have more authority over our lives and our local communities, and enjoy more leisure time. We want to fix the same problems: Bloated and ineffective governments, wealth disparities, pollution and climate ills, violent militaristic wars.
Whether in your anarchic work, Drew Pendergrass and Troy Vettese’s socialist work, or Jason Crawford’s capitalist work, the pictures used to decorate these ideas are full of greenery and plants, with aesthetically beautiful buildings and car-less streets, with renewable energy and rewilded spaces. Whether anarchist or socialist or capitalist the future always seems to wind up looking solarpunk. Reading the novel A Psalm for the Wild Built I honestly couldn't tell which ideology it adheres to—it looks like all of them. In the classic solarpunk commercial, “Dear Alice,” we see a worldview almost any ideology can claim.
If the visions for what we want to achieve are similar, perhaps the only difference is how we get there. As I understand it now: The anarchists see communities rising up and self-organizing, the socialists see government taking control for the public good, the capitalist sees companies doing it—not because they are doing the best job of it right now but because they are already richer than a lot of governments, more nimble and innovative, and often have more freedom to do the things our governments are too bogged down in bureaucracy and infighting to do.
I tend to lean toward the capitalist side. Companies are already self-organized groups of disparate people who produce something for society and use the money they earn for those things to provide for those who work on it. They are naturally forming the communities anarchists want to rise up and create, and they are providing a lot of the services that socialists think the government should provide, even as they are doing those things through the wealth they generated on the capitalist market rather than through taxes. I think good versions of capitalism—like employee-owned businesses and cooperatives—will achieve a lot of the goals we want to achieve with anarchist or socialist thought, just with business instead.
I don’t think capitalism is doing the best job at distributing the wealth it generates (even if I do believe it’s doing a better job of it than anything else we’ve tried) and I think we need to fix the way it affects humans and the environment we live in. And our economy won’t solve problems of war and terrorism. For this reason, I also think governments and communities play an important role in the process, with all three providing important checks and balances to one another. A democratically run company, for example, might be able to provide benefits to workers in a country where the government doesn’t. A government might be able to regulate companies or communities that aren’t acting in our best interest. Groups of people can organize against bad companies or bad governments. In this way, I don’t think we can be purely capitalist or socialist or anarchist. We need every form of coordination we already have, made better and better as we go.
I see this as a more natural evolution of things rather than something that needs to be dismantled or installed via revolution. It was messy to get where we are, it will be messy still to get where we are going. But I don’t think we should start from scratch to do it. As Nick Bostrom says in Deep Utopia: "Sadly, when people have had the opportunity to put governance & culture utopian visions into practice, the endeavors have often fallen short of expectations, with typical outcomes ranging from disappointing to atrocious. But maybe next time? Between the sunshine of hope and the rain of disappointment grows this strange crop that we call humanity (along with fantastic rainbows of excuses and self-justifications)."
And I’d much rather tweak our existing system forever than try to tear them down and build it back up under any kind of ideological pretext. Bostrom again: "Since the harm produced by utopian visionaries seems to correlate with the degree of violence they have been able and willing to wield in their attempt to realize their dreams, it might be best if future experiments of this sort were to be pursued in a more incremental and voluntaristic manner."
I get a lot of hope from the fact that, even with different ideas about how we get there, we ultimately want to achieve a lot of the same things. Whether with your newsletter states or my employee-owned companies, we might create new layers of governance that might one day supersede our current geologic nation-states. We might create better methods of wealth distribution, of governance, of caring for our environment, of enjoying more peace. Maybe the ideology itself is irrelevant to that goal.
One of the things I found incredibly insightful in your last letter was when you said: "We’d be much safer in a world without borders, where communities were so intertwined that invasion and occupation became unthinkable. And that’s the challenge: how can we weave a social fabric that makes war unthinkable? How can we build systems of production and distribution that make exploitation and extraction unnecessary?"
That is a fascinating question. In a world with open borders, where countries have to compete for citizens, maybe we will prevent war. After all, when Russia announced conscription at least 200,000 citizens left. I recently met a family from Israel who is moving to Berlin in disagreement over their country’s military maneuvers. People already flee bad countries for good ones—how much more would that happen if it were legal and easy for them to immigrate elsewhere? And how much power would bad countries lose if their citizens could just leave?
It would certainly be risky to go to war or make otherwise totalitarian maneuvers if your citizens could just move somewhere else. As Parag Khanna says in his book Move, “A hypothetical world in which each person could choose only one citizenship would be deeply embarrassing for the nationalist leaders in Turkey, Russia, and Brazil, given how keen their youth are to abandon ship.”
Bad countries would drastically lose power as they depopulate even as good countries start booming as they grow. We would need to come up with an incremental way to do this so the good places aren’t flooded all at once, but over time countries would have to treat their citizens better if they want to keep them, or risk losing them altogether if they make unpopular decisions. That's not to say we couldn't find reasons to wage war, but nations would have to risk losing citizens if they did. Maybe then war wouldn’t be fought between nations but against bad leadership. That could be a very effective deterrent.
But I appreciate you engaging in this discussion with me, I’ve learned so much about anarchism in the process (and my own thoughts on the matter!), and I so appreciate you being willing to think this through with me.
Sincerely,
Elle
Employee owned businesses and turning every nation into a federation of city states might be the best near term solution. Both of these would decentralise power.
This series of exchanges reminds me very much of the philosophy-related letters which form the core of Jostein Gaarder's book, 'Sophie's World'. They're also just as educational, thoughtful and mind-opening.