the activist, the organizer, the temporary roles and identities thrown on in the heat of the moment, they’re all a plague. they stare starry-eyed at the potential for revolution while evading that threshold and invent ways of keeping “the organized” from crossing it themselves. what often holds social eruption at bay isn’t the state per se but the gutlessness of the politically savvy shouting revolutionary slogans from behind megaphones and banners paid for by hedge funds. fraudulent fronts of the university-educated, in fear of their own downward mobility, corral the blossoming anger of The Community and shovel it into campaigns and movements that ultimately lead to polling booths and job opportunities. victory is quantitative, measured by crowds and tempered by funding. these are the essentials of the activist method. direct action, insurrection, social war, these are all questions of method for the anarchist, and what sometimes gets misconstrued as anarchist method is actually easily controllable political activism that cannot, by it’s very nature, deliver us from civil society. the sit-in, the die-in, petitions, phone banks, door knocking, longwinded egomaniacal speeches before the march to nowhere, voting. civil in nature and never threatening to the social order. the activist is always down to plan the next protest without considering the near futility of it all, just to say they’re “doing something”. in attempting to change the world one often neglects to change themselves. *really* change themselves. politics becomes a new wardrobe to try on for a brief period before abandoning it for more familiar clothes: a house, a career, and the nuclear family. the necessary break from “straight life” never happens. and as quiet as it’s kept, many anarchists don’t experience that break, either.
amongst the social anarchists there’s always chatter about the action or the demo, but what largely goes undiscussed are anarchist ideas and anarchist desires, our cosmic make up, what must be understood *first* in order to experiment with truly freeing ways of being in the world. how we get there is a fair but useless question to ask if we can’t talk about where “there” is and what it consists of. while we should be cautious of incessant talk of efficacy and logistics (insurrections aren’t built upon the brains of military commanders nor on the backs of a self-appointed vanguard doing The People’s fighting for them), we should balk at those determined to never even express their ideas. those hungry for armed struggle but tongue tied about their desires are never comrades for long because, eventually, straight life (or marxist-leninism) calls them home.
so let’s actually talk about anarchy, the beautiful idea.
the emancipation of all from the strictures of mass social organization, economy and governance. liberation from total domination. propulsion toward a life without measure.
an almost 231 year old philosophical tradition that’s, for some, just another way to flirt with activism, and for others is what can best be described as a pure yearning for absolute freedom. how any of us arrived to this place is wide and varied and celebrated. the variety of perspectives is what makes the anarchist space so vibrant. 100 definitions per 100 anarchists is vital because it’s how we renew our ideas and avoid becoming staid and conservative. anarchy is not a rigid political program but a lifeway that should be put into practice at every opportunity. anarchism is that practice. the anarchist that practitioner. “nobody is free until we’re all free,” truly but, in the here and now, we must experiment with what our freedom can look like in the event we ever clasp our hands around it, and we cannot begin to experiment until we are able to articulate it.
so then let’s talk about actual anarchy.
this is not about the stone or the bomb. it’s about understanding what total refusal of authority means and how it further shapes our ideas and desires, which should then define our activity. it’s about starving for new ways to relate to one another, ourselves, and the earth; actual affinity. it’s about our principles, no longer the faint glimmers of a mirage racing a setting sun but that which becomes the sun itself. it’s what ushers us out of the shadows of daily life and into direct, meaningful conflict with it’s commodification. to fight against the capture and massification of the individual without sanctifying the hideous, alienated rendering of that individual under capitalism. where ‘we’ and ‘me’ are neither dialectical nor in contradistinction. this is about completely severing the imagined ties between the activist, the organizer, and the politician, and the anarchist. this is lines drawn between the liberal doldrums of the abolitionist and the impatient clamoring of the insurrectionist. it’s about denying the snails pace of the civil and political and embracing a chaotic immediacy lest the sun burn itself out and leave us in the cold grips of an authority we fight tooth and nail to destroy.
the activists will flounder and die when their movements lose steam and they run out of acolytes. in these instances it’s not up to the anarchists to sweep all of their refuse into our camp by smoothing our edges to seem appealing. soon enough, we will meet those that desire a break from the domination of the world we know, and from there we can begin to experiment, not only with what, but with how it means to be free.
– some anarchists
