This isn’t going to be a well researched or thought out post, just really me sorting things out in my head in real time.
These days, I kind of stopped thinking of myself as an anarchist, and i’m wondering if that’s really correct. This is kind of a question of both what do I think and what even is anarchism. I first called myself an anarchist when I was a teenager, as many do. How much of this was because I agreed with the ideology vs because I thought it sounded cool? I’m not sure. My reading at that point included the wikipedia page for anarchism and maybe a couple of reddit posts. Eventually, I ended up reading god and the state (actually I listened to it on audiobook), and the conquest of bread (actually I never finished it). I would probably have called myself anarcho-syndicalist at this point, but I still had a pretty vague idea of what that actually entailed. At some point, the max stirner meme started to grow, so I ended up reading the ego and it’s own, which I found to be really good. This was my introduction to post-left anarchism, and the first theory that actually spoke to me on a deeper level. Like, god and the state isn’t a bad book, but it’s pretty outdated, most of the stuff in there seemed extremely self evident to the point of banality. And also about half of the book is dedicated to critiquing a system of church institutions which doesn’t really exist an more. Stirner’s philosophy contained more “aha” moments for me, and changed my outlook on certain things. It was the first book I’d ever read which dealt with ethics and philosophy beyond or behind the political which I actually cared about. After this, I slowly became more and more invested in reading theory, mostly on the anarchist library. A lot of it was either bad or mid, but some highlights include blessed is the flame, the coming insurection, beyond civilised and primitive, hello from the wired (this was and still is extremely influential on me), desert, revolutionary self-theory, and well yeah. I also read some books, my favourites being the society of the spectacle and debt: the first 5000 years. hello from the wired and reading books in general lead me to reading nick land and mark fisher, which more recently lead me to reading bataille and i’m not going to list every book I’ve ever read.
the point being, I’ve read theory, and thinking about it now listing those texts, I am reminded of how much I agree with them. This often happens. I’ll be in some discussion, or faced with some problem, and out of nowhere my brain will reach back to some anarchist text which gives me some useful framing device or information etc. So clearly, the anarchist framing has been very influential to me. In the past year and half or so, I’ve become more invested in following real world geopolitics. Paying attention to ellections and policy decisions and so on. I’ve also tried to do more research into economics and ok idk where i’m going with this. What I want this to be is, if I agree so much with these texts, what are my qualms with anarchism?
At this point, my faith in the ability of random people to actually do things well has dwindled. I’ve seen so often how “the masses” are tricked by populists into voting so obviously against their own interest. I worry about the lack of regulations and ways to enforce these regulations under anarchism. Say as an example, we want to regulate certain farming practices like limiting use of nitrogen fertalizers for environmental reasons. How would one go about regulating this? There is some idea that everyone would just agree not to use them, but how do you ensure people actually follow this agreement? Under capitalism, you can use government intervention to create incentive structures like, you could subsidise farms which follow better practices, or give them tax breaks, or you could fine farms which break regulations. With no money or authority, how is it even possible to do something like that? If no one has any need for more money, or fear of imprisonment or fining, you basically have 2 options. You’re either threatening them with physical force, which seems authoritarian and at least as bad as what we already have, or you are just rellying on good will and hoping that no one will misbehave. This seems naive to me. I think a sollution to this would probably be a focus on small localised communities where the scale is low enough that everyone is participating in organisation and is invested in the community that there is that level of trust and good will. This provides another question then
Supply chains. Anarchists are infamously bad at economics. There’s a semi meme of an anarchist explaining economics on twitter with an ms paint drawing where they grown beans and someone asks them for beans so they give them beans. This was immediately clowned on. A lot of things are more complicated to produce and distribute than beans. Insulin is a classic example. I’ve never really heard a solid answer from anarchists as to how insulin manufacture and distribution could work in a world of small autonamous anarcist communities. There is a reason why industrialisation and urbanisation arrived hand in hand. If you want to industrially produce stuff, you need a lot of labour in a small area. You need cities. I do not think it is possible to run a city of over a million people directly democratically. You can’t get a million people in a room to debate and sort things out. I think you just end up needing some sort of representative democracy in this case. Like, big cities are already divided into smaller local authorities right now, so you could have a sort of zone system like that. maybe there are many small localities of 100 or so people, who get together and decide on some policy. Most policies only have to be implemented locally, but a large number will need to be coordinated. Once you’re coordinating 300, 500, 1000 people, 10,000 people, it becomes increasingly difficult to do this without representatives. But maybe that’s ok, maybe you can have temporary representatives who are ellected to fulfil one specific task then loose their status. It’s possible. A lot of this is possible. This is kinda my point. maybe you can run a massive city like this, maybe you could coordinate large scale transcontinental supply chains like this, but is it actually more efficent than capitalism? Maybe the workers along the way of this insulin supply chain are treated better, but if it means less insulin can be produced and distributed, and downstream people are dying, is that actually any better? Capitalism is not great at distributing everything people need to everyone who needs it, but also that is arguably the central problem of human existence, honestly capitalism is definitely less bad than it could be. A sollution to this I see being maybe possible is some sort of cybersin-like programme working in a panarchist diversified economy. But this is highly experimental and abstract.
which kind of brings me to my last point, this is all very abstract. Lefties spend a lot of time arguing about completely hypothetical situations in the far distant future, you may as well be writing theory about how goku would beat superman. Honestly, I kind of agree with zizek’s latest article the left should embrace law and order. We are not in a good situation, superpowers are collapsing and the far right is on the rise globally, now is not the time to be talking of revolution, at this point we’re lucky if things stay as they are without descending into genocidal fascism. All the focus on revolutionary politics seems so, almost religious. Almost like we’re talking about the rapture here, like we’re just praying that something will save us. Nothing will save us. The revolution never comes. Even when it does, I can’t express the extent to which the majority of revolutions fail. The roots of left-anarchism, born from the enlightenment are products of a time close to the liberal revolution where these things seems relevant and possible. Remember that we had like a thousand years of feudalism. Capitalism shows no signs of collapsing under it’s own contradictions. “The death of a social machine has never been heralded by a disharmony or a dysfunction; on the contrary, social machines make a habit of feeding on the contradictions they give rise to, on the crises they provoke, on the anxieties they engender, and on the infernal operations they regenerate. Capitalism has learned this, and has ceased doubting itself, while even socialists have abandoned belief in the possibility of capitalism’s natural death by attrition. No one has ever died from contradictions. And the more it breaks down, the more it schizophrenizes, the better it works, the American way.” To me, revolutionary politics is irrelevant, leftism is outdated, and the post-left barely exists in the real world.
so does this mean i am or am not an anarchist. I still don’t know. There’s a book called seeing like a state, which is both extremely boring and extremely informative, in which the author says they’re not an anarchist, but look at the world through an anarchist bent. I think that’s probably pretty close to where I stand, that while I’m not convinced it’s possible to do away with the state, I still will continue to look at it with a large dose of skepticism. I’m not alone in my qualms with anarchism, there are many post lefties who share my thoughts and then some. In the end, what does it matter how I label myself.
nothankyou
nothankyou is an independent musician located in London.
Reprinted from nothankyou’s blog