What is the goal of anarchism?

Letters to an anarchist, part five.

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:

• Part one by

  Elle Griffin

• Part two by

  Peter Clayborne

• Part three by

  Elle Griffin

• Part four by

  Peter Clayborne

This is part five 👇🏻

Dear Peter,

I tend to agree with Graeber, there is no one way of being. We cannot generalize the past just like we cannot generalize the present. For instance, I think the show “Downton Abbey” did an incredible job depicting the many faces of wealth and poverty in the post-Edwardian era. The wealthier aristocracy were both content with their lives and discontent. The more impoverished domestic servants were both content with their lives and discontent. The classes were both separate and united. It would be very hard to paint over that complexity with one brush and say "life was good for this person and bad for that person."

As for your various examples—the nonviolent Rotuman, La Paz, and Semai peoples—I agree there is a lot we can learn from them. For example, I find shame as a punishment interesting. We used to use stocks and pillories to deter crime—essentially locking someone to a piece of wood in the town square with a depiction of their crime. I'm not suggesting we should bring that back (we shouldn’t), but the sex offender registry is a modern example of public shaming, and it has been shown to reduce crime by 1.21 sex offenses per year per 10,000 people. Is that the kind of thing you are thinking of? I am open to various replacements for some of our nonviolent prison population, and have written about some of them, I just don’t know what those might be.

I think the detriments of those three examples is that they err on the side of simplistic. Of course these tribes can manage without a lot of organization, they are all tiny and isolated. You say Semai is stateless, well they live in groups of 30 to 200 people. You say Rotuma is nonviolent, well the island only had 2,200 people organized into much smaller villages. And, of course, La Paz would be less violent than the neighboring Zapotec community that beats their wives and children. That is true, not just in these tribes, but everywhere where parents don't beat their children.

It was never in question to me whether people could exist peacefully with each other in small groups, of course they can. And there are many more communities than just these tribes that prove that. My argument is that as you increase your sample size, there is more opportunity for conflict and you come against more people who are not in your group and who might not be as peaceful. Robert Dunbar puts that number at 150 people. That's the limit at which, he believes, everyone can maintain social relationships with everyone else and thus self-regulate pretty easily. 

Above that, groups need to organize—to protect themselves from conflicts within their communities and to protect themselves from invaders outside their communities. You bring up Norway as an example of a larger society that has managed to maintain nonviolence, well that's a great example, and many countries around the world should emulate their model. But as you pointed out, they have a state and a government and a prison system. It's a better one than many, and definitely worth copying, but they are decidedly not anarchist. 

My question then, is this: Is your vision for an anarchist society one where the entire world splits into tribes of 150 people? Because in the unlikely event that that vision is somehow possible, sure, those groups could live somewhat peacefully with one another, but only until they come into conflict with less peaceful groups. Just like when the Samoans conquered the Rotuma. Or when the Semai were enslaved by the Malay. The entire history of small communities is one where they either band together against threats and become larger organized groups with governments like the Maya and the Inca and eventually our large nations, or they are taken over and subsumed by those larger groups. 

Basically, we would ultimately recreate what we have now. 

Rather, if the goal is simply to self-govern in a small group, wouldn't you have better luck doing that within a free society? Like the United States, for example? Because there is certainly nothing stopping you from gathering 150 of your best friends and moving into the middle of nowhere and living pretty much however you want. There are communes where people buy land together and live however they want. And best of all, you would be safe from any external conflicts, like if a neighboring country decides to attack us. 

To be clear, I generally agree with you about the value of small communities. I have been making a similar case in a series of essays on smaller governments: That more power should be given to smaller groups, like states or cities. And I very much agree that those systems could figure out to reduce violence and overhaul our police and prison systems to be better. BUT, so long as we need to interact with others, we will still need some system of organization and conflict management. And so long as there are much larger groups (and with weapons of mass destruction), we will still need the even larger governing body that protects us from them.

I suppose what I'm saying is: I can see your point about wanting to live in a smaller peaceful community that autonomously self-governs. I want that too. But doesn't that stand a better chance of working so long as there are states we can do that within? Or economies that can help us trade with one another? Or militaries that can protect us from one another? Rather than hoping we can somehow eradicate them all and return to tribalism?

What is the hope of anarchy at this point?

Thank you so much for thinking this through with me. You've given me many hours of reading and thinking already and I can't wait to read your response!

Sincerely,

Elle