Will you explain anarchism to me?
Letters to an anarchist, part one.
It started when
wrote a piece titled “Anarchy.”I have always struggled to understand the concept and found the post intriguing.
I commented: Thank you for this, it was very enlightening. The one thing I can’t understand about anarchy is what happens when one person wants to be in charge (of anything)? Because even if a society wants to be an anarchist society, won’t there always be someone who disturbs that balance? (Say another country that wants to take over, or a person who wants more power, etc.)? I’d love to know your thoughts!
Peter responded: Great question! This is definitely something anarchists continue to wrestle with and likely always will. I have something of an answer in two parts:
1) Yes there will probably always be those people, and certainly always the possibility of change. There’s no guarantee we’ll get anarchy (or anything else) right. Furthermore, every anarchist movement to date has been effectively usurped or betrayed by power-hungry people. So yeah we’ve got our work cut out for us.
Given all this, I think it means we’ll never arrive at a place where this won’t be a danger. We’ll always have to adapt to avoid precisely the pitfall you mentioned. But this isn’t a problem with anarchy so much as the reality that change is constant and we’ll always have to face our shortcomings no matter what system we’re in.
2) I think anarchy is uniquely poised to do this well, because if we ever achieve a state that can roughly be called anarchist, there will exist no institutions of power that a power-hungry person could seize. They could try to build such things from scratch, but they’d meet firm resistance from an anti-authoritarian culture.
What makes it so easy for tyrants to take over today is that our world is already structured to centralize power, with a culture already positioned to accept authority. After the Herculean effort needed to overturn this system in favor of freedom and autonomy, we’ll be much better positioned to handle any would-be rulers.
I replied: This is so helpful thank you, and I really appreciate your thoughtful response!
1) I wonder if it would be possible to have some kind of structure in place that would allow people within that structure to enjoy a more anarchal existence? Maybe this wouldn’t be considered a pure anarchism, but it would allow a more day to day expression of it?
For instance, I always think about the Tibetans, who were a passivist community but because the Chinese weren’t, they took it. I still think passivism is an ideal worth achieving, but maybe to achieve it we need to have a way to protect it?
2) This I struggle with. Because even native cultures with little hierarchal structure were able to be taken over by other native cultures that did. Even if there isn’t central authority, there are still people that can be taken over. And I guess all of this is just me wondering whether anarchy can be achieved communally if not entirely?
Still thinking this all through of course, but I appreciate you joining me in the discussion. You’ve given me a lot to think about.
Peter replied: Your wondering about how to protect pockets of freedom is precisely where the anarchist movement is today. From TAZ (temporary autonomous zones) to the territory of Rojava, people the world over are struggling with this question of “how do we defend our communities here and now while the empires still stand?”
Most of us anticipate a shift towards anarchy on a global scale will be predicated on transnational coordination of movements; in other words, we can’t just do it one country at a time. But that would necessitate a global anarchist sentiment in a critical mass of people, in which case the revolution would already be well underway.
It’s quite the quandary for sure. More on those timelines in my next post. But I for one am comfortable with contradiction, so long as it’s two truths and a mystery.
After that, I sent Peter an email:
Dear Peter,
Thank you so much for engaging with me in the comments of your post. I was wondering if you'd be willing to continue our discussion through letters on the subject? Specifically, I would love to understand the vision of anarchism.
There are so many socialist thinkers who have illustrated exactly what life could look like under socialism, but I can't for the life of me find an illustration of what life could look like under anarchism? I want that vision for our future so I can understand it!
Maybe I haven't found those examples because I haven't read Ursula Le Guin yet, but anything you can point me to that would help illustrate how anarchism could work would be greatly helpful to me!!!!
Thank you so much for thinking this through with me. I so appreciate it.
Sincerely,
Elle
I sent that email in September of 2023, we’ve now been writing letters back and forth for more than a year. I’ve learned a lot about anarchism in the process, and we’re excited to now publish our correspondence as a series titled “Letters to an Anarchist.”
Over the course of the next three weeks we will publish eight of our letters, starting with this one. My letters to Peter will be published right here in
, his responses to me will be published in his newsletter . We will cross-post one another’s work so that whether you are following me or him you will receive both sets of letters in order.The series will run until the last week of November, then we’ll host a Substack Live discussion the first week of December to talk about our past year of correspondence. Make sure you have the Substack app with notifications turned on!
Comments are open for the series so both of our subscribers can engage in the discussion. His response is coming up next.
JRR Tolkien described himself as an anarchist in a letter to his son. The Hobbits don't have any police, army or other structures of government in that sense they are anarchist. The hobbits can maintain their idyllic lifes because the rangers protect them.
this is super interesting. i've thought about this a lot too, and what i've always come back to (for myself) is that anarchism is primarily a set of ethics, and only a structural model when it agrees with those ethics. i think i might be an anarchist insofar as i fundamentally believe that we need to wipe the slate clean as often as possible: there shouldn't be any permanent ruling class, or any strict hierarchy that can be exploited. how often the slate gets wiped depends on needs and circumstances; i think anarchism should be able to tolerate *temporary* structures that are democratic, or maybe even occasionally authoritarian. there are some forms of crises (armed conflicts, resource shortages, natural disasters) that require decisive leadership without a bunch of procedural wheel-spinning. but as long as those structures are never permanent—as long as the anarchist light is always blinking red on the dashboard, saying THIS IS BAD—and people are willing and able to dissolve the leadership structure as soon as there's no longer an immediate need for it, i think it fits within the ethical philosophy of anarchism.